#anyways I can’t deny the fact that it’s explicitly canon

[youarejustintime]

the fact that alex watched everyone fight about billford’s crackship status for over a decade and then said “……alright time to wreck a lot of people’s day” with one book and a code website is hilarious

[ceo-of-sloppy-men]

One of my buddies sent me this video just lying about the drifter so let’s break it down. Points 2,3&4 are explicitly wrong. I don’t deny the drifter is a morally grey character but you don’t have to fish far to find interesting facts about him. Let alone lie.

2) you can’t destroy a ghost and revive it. So automatically not canon, and it’s how you can tell the rest are lies.

3) he didn’t give Orin over to the 9, she gave herself over and it has left a sour taste in his mouth about the 9 ever since because he was deeply in love with her. She betrayed him, not the other way around.

4) All we do know is he associated with them until he had a falling out with Callum Sol. But drifters own philosophy states he doesn’t kill anyone unless they give him no other option. We see that in THE CURRENT SEASON (I am less confident on this, for all we know he did kill people).

(Here’s a direct quote from the wiki)

I blocked the person before making this post but I also remember him saying he lobotomized his ghost. Also untrue. His ghost ‘snapped’ and gave him specific info to escape the Ice planet when it was clear there was no other hope for survival. This info was how to build a “super ghost” from the parts of other ghosts and his own. The reason people may assume his ghost is lobotomized is because he refers to his ghost as it, because he hates being a guardian.

Here are 3 new fun facts that are completely true:

1) drifter is classless. According to Shin Malphur, the Drifter doesn’t belong to any class in the game “not by common understanding anyway”

2) drifter hated being a guardian so much that he decided to hide as a normal citizen at the start of his revival. This worked until the Iron Lords made a deal with the town to use it as bate for the Warlords, but their plan went sideways and the whole town was slaughtered in the battle. Or at least enough for drifter to be stated to have buried the bones. Bones. Not bodies.

3) he’s a man with many connections but perhaps the most infamous is Shin Malphur. The two have met, the later seeking to hunt the shadows of yor, and that it was Shin’s approval that let him dock at the Last City. During this conversation, Drifter mentioned he’s been to several places, amongst them being the fourth tomb of nezerac, the luvial crux, and the shift chasms below elios.

There.

[bigskydreaming]

So I was just over here thinking - as I do once a week or so - about how Robert Tanaka Jr. is OBVIOUSLY Bobby Drake’s kid, and Opal lied about lying about Bobby being his dad. You will never ever ever convince me otherwise so Marvel should just not try and go ahead and canonize it instead. Duh.

Anyway, so I was combining this thought with the fact that we’ve gotten ZERO follow-up yet to Bobby’s dad dying, and like....the way that has to be fucking with Bobby given their long, contentious history and how much Bobby’s struggled with seeking his father’s approval his whole life only to be denied it in the most epic ‘fuck you’ fashion on his dad’s literal deathbed.

And see, personally, I’ve always thought that more than longing to be in an actual long-lasting relationship, Bobby’s big want has always been a family, so to speak. This is a man who has been auditioning for World’s Corniest Dad Jokes since he was in college. He dotes on kids. He loves being a role model while being deeply insecure that he’s bad at it. He gravitates towards every kid his friends or family has like a heat-seeking missile, like when Scott and Jean were dealing with their whole ‘omg I can’t believe you married another me and had a baby while I was dead’ and ‘but you were DEAD and she was basically you doesn’t that make it better’ and ‘no that makes it worse! I think. No yeah that’s worse!’ thing....there was fun Uncle Bobby eager to swoop in and scoop baby Christopher up in a stroller for a hijinks filled afternoon about town.

I mean, its no coincidence that even back when Bobby first found out about RJ and thought he wasn’t his dad, he very explicitly said he never cared and would have stayed with him and Opal anyway.

So I’m just saying, what better way to finally break Bobby out of the trap of desperately seeking to conform to his dad’s confining expectations for him and what his life should look like.....than to have Bobby embark on a new chapter of his life that’s about him having and building the kind of family he’s always yearned to have....while giving zero fucks about it looking anything like what his father would have approved of or signed off on as acceptably ‘normal’?

Sometimes a family can be a dorky gay dad, his ex-girlfriend and co-parent, and their precocious son and all his assorted X-Men aunts and uncles (and time-traveling cousins like Nate and Rachel, lol).

I just think there’s really interesting stories that could be told about Robert Tanaka-Drake, if he were to manifest his father’s powers and be raised with one foot firmly in both his parents’ worlds, both on Krakoa and off it, equally entrenched in his human and mutant heritages, his father’s Jewish heritage and his mother’s Japanese heritage, shared custody made all the easier and more seamless thanks to the ease of gate travel between both his parents’ homes....let Bobby and Opal be partners in this on good terms, so that RJ spends his birthdays with both sides of his families, his parents and their respective boyfriends all gathered to celebrate together instead of him having to alternate, etc, etc.

Plus, if you have RJ inherit Bobby’s powers there’s REALLY interesting explorations you can do of what a difference parenting makes in how comfortable young mutants are with their powers and the things they can do. There’s a definite case to be made that Bobby - famously ‘stunted’ in his power development according to pretty much every single one of his stories - like, realistically, there’s a very strong argument that Bobby was hindered from day one by the fact that both his parents and his surrogate father figure Xavier, like, ALL actively encouraged him to doubt himself rather than to push forward with his development. 

Xavier’s explicitly stated in notes about Bobby as a teenager that he didn’t think Bobby was mature or capable enough to handle the responsibility of the vast power at his disposal, with the clear implication always being that he actually discouraged Bobby from pushing his limits. Its not a coincidence IMO that all the major developments Bobby’s made with his powers over the years....all of them came AFTER he stopped being the Professor’s student, or when Xavier was nowhere around. Xavier never did crap to actually help Bobby push himself or see what he was capable of. And of course, we know his parents wanted him to never ever use his powers and pretend he didn’t even have them, for their own comfort.

All of this lends itself really well to stories about the capacity older generations have to not just help younger generations improve on what they’ve already done and do better than them....but to stand in their way and hamper their attempts to be their best selves, if they feel threatened by said younger generations or fear being replaced or rendered obsolete by them.

Soooo...with that in mind....how interesting could it be to see this long-established element of Bobby’s character arc juxtaposed with his son’s comparative speedrun through power development milestones? If Bobby and Opal - determined not to stand in RJ’s way the way adults got in Bobby’s - are nothing but supportive and encouraging of RJ’s exploration of his powers, imagine if this kid with Bobby’s abilities just.....fucking...leapfrogs past all his father’s achievements and is ten years old and doing things that have his father desperately trying to figure out how he did that just so he can keep up.....

And Bobby couldn’t be prouder!

I mean, because we’re talking about Bobby Drake here, its important to note the huuuuuuge comedic potential here. Let this newly minted father be frazzled and going out of his fucking mind trying to keep a suitably responsible and parental eye on his prodigious progeny.....like let’s take a second to review Bobby’s actual abilities and what weapons for mass chaos they could be in the hands of say, an eight year old who’s high on parental love, approval and affirmation, and not to mention the proud inheritor of his father’s tendencies towards mischief as well as his powerset:

There’s the teleportation for one....Bobby doesn’t LIKE teleporting. Turning to vapor makes him feel weird and gives him existential crises about disappearing and fading away to nothing, like all his fears of being unimportant given actionable form. RJ however? Just thinks its neat being able to pop over to the other side of the world at any given moment. Who needs to use gates when you can just wisp away to nothingness and recreate yourself from scratch on Arakko any time you want to go visit your Auntie O?

Cue Bobby frantically practicing his teleporting all hours of the night, just so he can keep up with his giggling menace of a son every time he decides to play an impromptu game of teleport tag with his father, where the playing field is limited only by the scope and range of their omega level powers....oh wait, what’s that pesky little detail about omegas not having limits? Ooops.

Then there are the ice golems. Imagine Bobby trying to make sure he’s always got a golem around to keep an eye on RJ....which works great until the day RJ figures out how to make his own, and suddenly its like wait, does Bobby’s golem have eyes on RJ...or just on one of RJ’s own golems? Next thing the X-Men know, there are twenty different Icemen running around chasing after twenty different Iceboys and none of them have any clue which are the ‘real’ Bobby and RJ, but then again, neither does Bobby at this point.

Imagine Bobby and Opal getting called into the principal’s office at RJ’s school where they’re informed that while the school doesn’t want to suggest that mutant students be prohibited from harmlessly using their powers, and if RJ is most comfortable in his ice form he should certainly be allowed to stay in it.....they do have to insist that RJ actually be PRESENT in his ice form, and not just sit one of his golems in class while the real RJ is off playing hooky.

Bobby: I know I’m supposed to be upset but I can still be a little bit proud of him for pulling that off, can’t I?

Not to mention that little tidbit brought up in Battle for the Atom, where its revealed that in the future Bobby figures out how to create golems that have their own innate sentience that’s completely separate from his own, rather than just being extensions of himself.....

Cut to RJ making his imaginary friends be not so imaginary after all, just housed in various elemental ‘bodies’ made of ice and snow, water and vapor, etc.

And just imagine the epic face palming - and farewell to ever getting another restful night of sleep - once RJ figures out that as his father’s son, he is basically just as indestructible as his dad is. The heart attacks this kid would give his parents once he decides well its not like he even needs to be THAT careful on his grand misadventures, cuz worst case scenario he just makes himself a new body if his gets messed up at all.

Bobby: No, buddy, that is a terrible train of thought, please let’s sit down and unpack that before you go and....no, don’t you dare teleport away, RJ, you get your butt back here right now! And no, a golem doesn’t count, I want your REAL tushie in this seat within the next ten seconds or so help me, I will....

Opal: You’ll what, Bobby? No, by all means, please continue. I’m really curious what card we actually have available to play here.

Bobby: Why do I get the feeling you think this is all my fault somehow? What happened to ‘we’re a team’?

Opal: I’m just saying, our eight year old didn’t get the god-tier powers from me.

Bobby, banging his head softly against the table: Ugh who knew that encouraging your kid to be his best self could have consequences. 

[meeko-mar]

The more I think about it, the more I might be signing on to the theory that Izuku KNOWS his trigger is Kacchan, and he just hasn't admitted/confronted it yet...At least, that we have yet seen.

Hold my non-alcoholic beverage.

Once again, let's preface with the fact that we have SEEN with our own eyes, that Kacchan has been the trigger of two specific incidents, being Monoma insulting Kacchan and Izuku becoming angry enough to manifest Black Whip.

And second, Kacchan following him into danger, and then getting impaled and nearly dying to protect him, which then triggered possibly the most RAGE we have ever seen Izuku possess, AND the manifestation of Danger Sense, AND caused him to literally throw himself at AFO/Shigaraki which put him immediately under threat of having OFA stolen. Obviously, the vestiges protected the Quirk, but the fact still stands that the rage the a Izuku felt was enough to drive him LITERALLY into Shigaraki's hands, despite how very very dangerous that was. Izuku LOST HIMSELF so badly that he could have lost the entire war right there, if The Vestiges hadn't protected him and the Quirk.

The moment when All Might and Kacchan are trying to coach him and find the connection that brought about Black Whip. The mention of an external factor, and Izuku's avoidance of saying what that factor was(Kacchan being insulted, as we ALL know and explicitly saw), and arguably his words of "It's not something I can handle right now" seem a bit suspicious.

(NOTE: I've said before, that I had slight skepticism that this line about not being able to handle it and putting a lock on something, was meant to refer to the power he unlocked, however, watching season 5 has made me remember that, after the chaotic manifestation, and talking to Lariat, and realizing that Black Whip was part of his Quirk and therefore there to HELP him, and he had successfully used it without losing control because he ACCEPTED that it was a power that was there to help, not hurt him. I am not so sure that Izuku's "lock" is referring to the power anymore, but rather, his feelings for Kacchan.

But, I have new perspective that maybe, like others were pointing out, maybe it IS referring to the actual TRIGGER. IE, his feelings for Kacchan/his anger on his behalf.

I could be wrong, of course? But stay with me because this is a part of a larger context)

So, after the War arc, after Kacchan got gravely injured on his behalf, after hospitalization, we are given one thing before Izuku suddenly leaves. But it was KACCHAN's perspective, Kacchan waking up and being desperate to get to Izuku, and getting DENIED at the door. We are shown Kacchan's desperation to make sure Izuku's ok, but so far, even well after waking up, we are NOT SHOWN Izuku's worry over Kacchan's condition. We are suddenly FLUNG into a brand new world where Izuku is a drop-out "vigilante" working on the villain activity outside of school, cleaning up villains and questing to find out how villains come to be in their own minds.

We've seen him talk to his mom before he leaves. We've seen him talk to Gran Torino.

But we haven't seen him talk to ANY of his friends yet, ESPECIALLY KACCHAN. When there has been such a fantastic amount of tension placed on that particular relationship, after not only the sacrifice Kacchan made, but also, and particularly, the FOCUS that was placed on Kacchan trying to REACH HIM and FAILING.

We've all been forced to inhale a deep breath as Kacchan charged down that hallway yelling for Deku, and we are STILL HOLDING THAT BREATH. There is a huge, poignant LOOSE END there that is hanging over our head. We are still waiting for the payoff.

So like that scene, in theory, Izuku is still avoiding how he feels so strongly about Kacchan that he can be triggered into rage over him being hurt?

Actually, no, I think this sudden change to Izuku is very much him finally acknowledging it and acting on it.

The reason we have so much unresolved tension still hanging over Kacchan and Izuku's non-reunion, the reason Hori set up this big conflict that hasn't been resolved yet, why he showed us Kacchan trying to see Deku and not an ounce of Izuku wanting to see Kacchan before he leaves,

is that Izuku is actively trying to distance himself from Kacchan.

He did say that the reason he won't be returning to UA is of course because AFO could find him at any time and he would place everyone around him in danger.

But Kacchan? I think Izuku is still very much traumatized by the fact that he witnessed Kacchan taking a would-be fatal blow for him and falling out of the sky, drenched in blood.

I think he probably realizes that if Kacchan follows him into battle again, there's a real chance it could happen again... Or worse, AFO/Shigaraki, now knowing what a touchy button that is for Izuku, could actively target Kacchan on the battlefield, kill him, and/or use him against Izuku.

And Izuku is in the literary stage where the protagonist thinks that the love they have for someone else is a weak point and a danger/liability to those he loves, and so tries to shoulder all the burden themselves an shut the other out. He doesn't want his friends involved, he doesn't want Kacchan involved.

Because he knows that his love for Kacchan is his weakness. He's finally acknowledging that when Kacchan is hurt or slighted, he tends to lose himself. He loses control of his heart, and this is not something they can afford at this point in the game. Defeating AFO is now or never. (and he just desperately doesn't want Kacchan to be hurt for him anymore.)

He is going to have to learn, however, that, like Kacchan says to him, he can't keep playing the Hero on his own. And that their love can be their greatest strength, instead of a weakness.

So he's left, probably without a conversation with Kacchan. Hori is holding out on showing us this, building onto that tension, and I feel like he has some very significant pay off coming up. We haven't been shown any such conversation because he wants us to keep holding that breath for a little longer.

And if I'm right, it's gonna be dramatic when Izuku breaks down about this to Kacchan, finally. There was also some theories that Kacchan v. Deku 3 is going to follow the progression of their relationship and have this one center around Izuku's feelings being laid bare and Kacchan "accepting his feelings" as Izuku had done for him in KvD2, I think I'm a fan of this theory.

So yeah, Izuku knows that Kacchan is his trigger and purposely left without him for that reason.

That's basically my theory. Probably not the first one to think this, but I thought I'd write about it anyway. to get it outta my head, lmao.

Alsooo, yeah this is tagged for my Bakudeku peeps, and I use the word "love" in this, but you can read that as you will, either platonic or possibly romantic, not here to say this theory calls for canon romantic feelings between BKDK because that's not really my point, but at this point denying that they love each other in SOME capacity is being blind.

Ship or don't ship, but I legitimately think this is the psychology of Izuku's decision right now.

[canonlgbtcharacters]

ok, after some thinking, i decided to remove spongebob and post another character for today. while he is canonically asexual and not gay, hillenburg didn’t exactly confirm the asexuality with good intentions. 

firstly, keep in mind that people can be both gay and asexual. acting otherwise is ignorant at best. i’m all for spongebob being ace, but hillenburg said it in a way that was meant to dismiss the claims of spongebob being gay, instead of coming from a place of wanting to give representation. of course, he doesn’t HAVE to make spongebob gay. if he made the character and always thought of him as just ace, that’s fine. he’s not obligated to say he’s gay because that’s how others interpreted him. however, in the same breath of denying the claims, he also said he didn’t care about gay activism, and that he has more important things to worry about. so yeah, i hope you guys can understand why i am uncomfortable with that.

however, the people who insist spongebob is gay instead of ace are annoying lol. the comments i was already getting on the post were almost definitely because of aphobia. nowhere in my post did i say “spongebob is asexual and there’s no way he’s gay!” but people automatically assume that people can’t be both gay and ace, and take being asexual as an affront or opposition to gayness.

the nick twitter posted fanart of him with a rainbow during pride month is not proof of him being gay, when the creator of the character and show said he wasn’t gay (and that he was asexual) all the way back in 2002. as much as i hate the way he said it, you can’t just override his word to say something is canon because you personally want it to be. it’s like saying timmy turner and danny phantom are trans. totally awesome theories that are even somewhat supported by things in the shows, but you also cannot deny that butch hartman is an awful conservative who definitely did not mean for it to be canon. if the nick twitter posted fanart of these characters with the trans flag, it’d be a nice gesture sure. but i’m sorry, the fact of the matter is that that was not the creator’s intention - and he’s also a bad person, so i don’t understand why people would want him to be creating trans rep anyways. this isn’t me siding with hillenburg (or hartman for that matter) at all. it’s just a fact that he has said his character, canonically, is not gay. of course spongebob can still be interpreted as gay, but he is NOT canonically gay. same goes for timmy and danny being trans.

i only post characters that are actually, canonically LGBT+. yes i posted characters that are only LGBT+ in subtext sometimes. it depends on the subtext and how strong it is. however, that doesn’t mean i’m going to accept something as hinting towards a character being gay when the creator has explicitly said he isn’t. 

so, yeah. because of all the controversy and the homophobia of the creator, i just removed the post.

[qqueenofhades]

Keeping my fingers crossed for that Black Widow meta

Aha, okay. As usual, I am ludicrously easy to enable, so let's take a crack at this. The ask obviously contains SPOILERS for the Black Widow film (and is also tagged "black widow spoilers" if you're planning to filter), and discussion/reference to other films/properties in the MCU, though I don't feel like any of those are still a secret.

Anyway, as I said in my earlier post, I can't believe I am actually still trying to critically analyse a Marvel production in the year of our Lord 2021, but then, I feel like we all have a complicated relationship with it. Likewise, the feeling of "oh wow NOW you're giving Natasha a solo movie after you killed her off in a cheap and fairly sexist way in Endgame?" If this film had come out ten or even five years ago, it would have been major, but holding it off until now seems to have left most of us justifiably unimpressed. Plus, as I am absolutely not the first person to point out, it renders Natasha's sacrifice in Endgame "because I don't have a family" even more narratively incoherent. I realize that this film was written after that one by totally different people, there's no point in expecting the MCU to make consistent canonical sense throughout its eighty billion different films/series, we were all stuck with a mess after the Whedonified Age of Ultron Nat, and so forth, but still. Natasha explicitly SAYS that she has two families (her wacky Russian found family of spies and the Avengers) and her decision to leap off the cliff in Endgame to save Clint and his retconned perfect white heterosexual nuclear family.... Hmmmm. To which I say to you, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I do bite my thumb at Male Writers, sir.

Likewise, while I am wildly attracted to Florence Pugh as Yelena and deeply desire to be wrapped between her thighs, the movie felt more like her story than Nat's. Yelena drove most of the plot and the action, while Nat was just kind of along for the ride. As a solo piece, we really didn't learn that much about Natasha aside from the opening scene (which felt like it was straight out of The Americans and probably worked the best of the whole film for the reason) with her childhood in America. But even the infamous "what happened in Budapest" backstory with her and Clint was quickly info-dumped rather than shown, and they could have taken more narrative risks or included more flashbacks or otherwise given us more NATASHA, y'know??? Instead of cramming the film into the small space between Civil War and Infinity War and making it even weirder that Nat seemingly has no memory or reference to these events when she returns to the team at that time. Why not show her looking for Yelena or her actual defection to the Avengers or anything else we might want from a film that purportedly exists entirely to provide backstory for a now-dead character? It felt like even in the film universe, the main quest was being repeated -- she tried to kill Baddie McSoviet once before and it didn't work out, so she has to do it again, something something. Okay.

As for that, good ol' Marvel and its American Superiority TM. The only actual Eastern European actress in this film about Eastern Europeans was Antonia/Taskmaster, played by the Ukrainian Olga Kurylenko (and I was very interested in her?? If she's supposed to be a narrative foil and a ghost of Nat's past and mark of her former sins, etc., why not develop her as an actual character?) Everyone else were Brits and Americans hamming it up with even more chew-the-scenery fake Russian accents than Elizabeth Olsen's "Sokovian" accent as Scarlet Witch. If it's established that they all have perfect American accents at the start of the movie, why is Nat the only American-accented character in the modern day if she had presumably the exact same childhood as Yelena? I know it's another way to set her apart, but that and Baddie McSoviet (the Russians are finding a way to steal free will from people's brains! Zomgz!!! Is this 2021 or 1981?) were straight out of the Cold War in terms of its not-so-veiled American Supremacy Message. Likewise, making modern!Natasha a former KGB agent never really made sense, since she says in Winter Soldier that she was born in 1984, and we see her in this film as an 11-year-old in 1995. But the USSR collapsed in 1991, when she was seven, and the Red Room appears to be an entirely unrelated flying....lab....thingy run by a generic evil Russian (Ray Winstone, likewise Hamming Up Accent). So like. What is she, guys?? Make up your minds!!!

Likewise, Baddie McSoviet/Dreykov as a villain obviously plays into the hoary old Hollywood "All Bad People Are Recognizable As Being Terrible Sexists and Also Probably Russians" trope, but aside from that, he doesn't make sense. He has this entire army of basically unstoppable Widows and he has just been.... waiting around and causing random explosions? Or was just waiting for Nat and company to return so he could Put His Evil Plan Into Motion? Are we really supposed to believe that this guy has just been sitting up in his flying saucer and essentially never doing anything this whole time? He had about a million chances to launch this take-over-the-world plan long before Natasha ever got there. Plus, I.... am.... not sure what to think (aside from /deep sigh/ MARVEL) about the fact that all the Widows we see dying/getting killed on screen are women of color. (Then the Black surgeon who was about to remove Yelena's brain in the Red Room and the only other Black guy being Natasha's errand boy, which just... in context... YIKES.) I think the fact that there are random Black background Widows are supposed to mean that they're inclusive and badass or something? Scarlett Johansson also has her own issues with White Feminism and all the other things we've critiqued her for before, so after TFATWS and the Flag Smashers, Marvel clearly has found its subtly racist sweet spot. As usual?

The end of the film also just basically turns into the standard Marvel empty-spectacle/cool-looking fights/people flying through the air thing, and I wanted a lot more focus on the wacky found-family Russian-spy hijinks (I did love them, for reasons) and character dynamics, rather than all of them separately fighting baddies in different places. I did obviously have feelings about Natasha putting the parachute on Yelena to save her life. But why were we then denied Nat/Gamora parallels/relationships/any character development or interaction at all in Infinity War/Endgame? Both of them are trained assassins adopted into a non-biological family that they have a complicated relationship with, but end up forging a strong bond with their sister (Yelena/Nebula) nonetheless. Of course, that would have required Endgame to put more effort into its female characters than what it did, which was one (1) Epic CGI Charge Scene at the very end, and literally nothing else. Not that I am still salty about this or anything.

Anyway. The movie was genuinely fun in places. The wacky Russian found family of spies was definitely the best part, even if it made Endgame even more nonsensical as a result. But I wanted this movie to be a lot better than it was overall, though I probably would have liked it more if it had actually come out in a timely fashion and wasn't only released after they killed her off. It just feels like there were so many possible threads of potential that could have been done with Natasha if they were actually interested in experimenting and exploring the character and not just coming up with new baddies and ways to go boom, and it unfortunately missed the mark with that.

[kae-karo]

Kae kae! I wanna hear about your thoughts: what is your headcanon for what happened during that night between Kaeya and Diluc? So many people have different thoughts About what happened and I want to hear yours!

hi hi hello dear!!! oof okay okay well for me i do a lot of speculating based on fic and like. i'll write different things depending on what i want to do with a story, BUT here are my thoughts on what may have happened in canon:

first, the basics/what we know based on character stories - kaeya's vision story (x) is long as hell but worth a refresher read, cause it talks about kaeya's internal struggle between his duty to khaenri'ah and his loyalty to diluc and crepus, and how crepus' death upset the balance. while it doesn't explicitly state a resolution to his struggle, it does go on to talk about how guilt consumed him over the fact that he didn't share in crepus' final moments nor in diluc's grieving - he'd instead stayed back, reminded of 'that ancient plot' (which i think we can safely assume to mean his supposed purpose in mondstadt, in service of khaenri'ah)

the vision story goes into the bare bones version of what happened that night - kaeya admitted the truth of who he was, he expected diluc's anger, diluc and kaeya crossed blades only for a rush of elemental power to overcome kaeya as he received his vision

what i find particularly interesting here is this line about kaeya receiving his vision: "But now, for the first time ever, he was facing his brother as his true self."

vision lore speculation incoming, because i think that it helps us better understand kaeya's situation

we've since learned (thanks inazuma) that a vision responds to (and is inextricably tied to) a person's ambition - i know i've talked before about theories with regards to why certain people receive certain elements, since i believe (someone correct me if i'm wrong) we know now for certain that visions are handed out by the archon of that element

i've speculated in the past that the motivator for a cryo vision was the fear of losing someone or something dear to them (this works well for a few chars: kaeya - diluc, diona - her father, qiqi - her life) but starts to get a little forced if it's applied to other cryo chars

but with a bigger pool of chars and a canon explanation for why one might receive a cryo vision, i think my revised assessment works better: the ambition that a cryo vision responds to is a relinquishing of a past self in pursuit of one's true self. or, perhaps a less optimistic take, the relinquishing of a fantasy life for a more complex but truer one

ganyu, setting aside her life as solely qilin and accepting both halves of herself when she took up her position among the liyue qixing. rosaria, choosing to fight for her life against those who would use and control her. eula, setting down her learned grievances in pursuit of a life and a 'vengeance' that felt right to her. chongyun's persistent desire to become a true exorcist. ayaka's acceptance of her leadership role and diligence in her study of skills (that did not come naturally to her) in order to represent her clan. diona's eschewing of her childish desire for her father to be the man she wanted him to be in favor of attempting to accept her father for who he is (she offers to mix him a drink once she knows that he's safe). for qiqi i think it could easily be taken in a literal sense - her past life ended, a new, more complicated one began

for kaeya, his vision story says it all: he gave up his idyllic life of a pretty lie in favor of being honest with diluc in who he truly is, even though that only makes his life more complicated. as was stated in his story, he feels "he must live the rest of his life under the heavy burden of lies"

[unrelated kaeya aside: in his story 2, it says "On the contrary, he actually enjoys putting people into the difficult position of making tough decisions." perhaps you're projecting a bit there, hm kaeya?]

ANYWAY all of this was basically to say that i think kaeya admitted the truth of who he was and why he was in mond, and 'expected diluc's anger' because he'd kept it secret this the whole time. had lived a whole life growing up with diluc and chose to stay silent. and diluc just lost his father for fuck's sake lmao so he's definitely emotionally overwhelmed

bc in kaeya's character story 5, he and diluc are described as "knowing each other's thoughts and intentions without a word", which says to me that they...basically told each other everything? knew each other too well, but kaeya had still chosen to hide this from diluc. of course diluc would feel betrayed, and of course kaeya would expect him to - he knows him well, after all

but he saw this fight as his punishment, or perhaps losing diluc as his punishment, or (if you want to be especially grim about it) maybe even losing his own life as a punishment for his secrecy - ultimately, though, i can't quite bring myself to believe that diluc cares necessarily about kaeya's actual ancestry (or like...even his supposed duty to khaenri'ah), more just...that he hid this from diluc

and i think that kaeya receiving his cryo vision, the perfect combatant to diluc's fire (well, sort of lmao) wasn't necessarily what stopped their fight - i think it gave diluc the chance to step back and breathe and see kaeya for a moment, outside of his own anger and hurt, and recognize that he didn't want to fight. he just didn't want to like. process his emotions either lmao (diluc bb u have some issues)

and so kaeya left, burdened with this vision (he describes it as the 'stern reminder' that he must live a life of lies), and he and diluc never really...figured their shit out. diluc ran away, kaeya learned to live without him

and kaeya, to me, seems to have developed that mindset of like...'diluc is exactly as he was that night and has not changed'. ie he seems to act as though diluc is still secretly angry with him, in spite of the evidence that shows that...well, he's probably still not processing those emotions BUT it does show that he cares still, somewhere in there (in his vision story, it says "He did not discuss the past. But he did not deny his past, either." and i wonder if he has his ways of showing that he did care, and probably still does - like the vase, like his continued choice to remain in kaeya's presence when there seems to be no need in the 'a child's secret' quest)

askldfjklsdfj i hope this wasn't too excruciating to get through, i know i rambled quite a lot on some tangentially related theories but ty for the ask dear!!!

[freckleddoll]

Reasons why Doll could still be alive

1. I’m still in denial

I compiled a list of reasons why I think that there is a possibility of Doll coming back in the future! Although I do think the chances are slim, given the fact that she hasn’t appeared in the Manga since 2009, which was 12 years ago. However, there is a handful of reasons from a story telling perspective of why it’s possible, and also a handful of inconsistencies between Doll’s death and all of the other Noah’s Ark Circus deaths. Very long post under the cut.

Starting with the most obvious, we never see Doll’s death actually happened, it’s ever only implied.

We don’t hear a direct command, it’s only implied that she died. This is “affirmed” a second later by Undertaker.

He laughs about how Ciel is hastily, and that he can not take back what he’s done, even if he regrets it later. However, this isn’t explicitly about Doll. We as the audience are made to believe that this is about her because we just saw the frame before, of Doll’s signature lollipop falling.

We have seen every other death on screen. We are certain to see each of their corpses, except for Joker, who’s death is confirmed by William T Spears earlier in the chapter.

This is placed conveniently, or dare I say, deliberately before Doll’s death. We see William and Ronald collecting souls only before Doll shows up. The only other Reaper we see in this chapter afterwards is Undertaker.

This is of course speculation, but I don’t believe that the death Undertaker is referring to here is Doll’s death. I think he might be referring to the massacre Ciel and Sebastian have basically just committed after being employed for this mission to save the children. This is something Ciel can not take back. But Undertaker never explicitly said Doll, in fact, he specifically chose the phrase “to hold each and every soul dear” which implies that multiple souls were lost. I don’t think he is actually talking about the Circus Troupe, Doll or Joker.

What could this mean?

I think we are purposefully being misdirected as an audience member here, and I believe that the decision to withhold the details of Doll’s death was deliberate. I believe that the narrative is purposefully withholding information that will much later in the story become important.

Another thing I’d like to point out is, why on earth is Undertaker here? His presence isn’t explained, other than to “affirm” Doll’s death. He is seen with a carriage, along with Charles Grey and Charles Phipps. Well this could tie back to R!Ciel, I think that it’s also possible that:

Doll is actually dead and the information being withheld from us is that Undertaker took her body to later use as a Bizarre Doll to mess with Ciel later in the series.

Doll was disarmed by Sebastian, and once they left, perhaps even believing Doll was dead, Doll was taken in by Undertaker and R!Ciel for revenge or something. I know this one is a lot more dodgy, but it’s the one I believe makes more narrative sense.

Now let’s move on to how this makes sense from a narrative perspective.

Obviously, Snake is still alive, and believes that his family is alive. He goes to Ciel’s manor looking for them.

Ciel offers Snake a position at the Phantomhive manor, under the guise that they are looking for Snake’s family. Snake joins him because Ciel is manipulating him here, telling him that Snake can essentially have a new family at the manor while looking for his old family.

I believe Doll is a big influence as to why Ciel makes this decision. 

Ciel sees Doll when he looks at Snake, which seems to be painful for Ciel. He then goes out of his way to affirm that they were, in fact, bad people (perhaps to justify his own actions in his mind) but then goes back on this and claims that he believes they were good people as to manipulate Snake.

He wants to help them achieve happiness and give them the chance to atone for their sins. The question is, is Ciel taking Snake in to atone for his own sins or to manipulate Snake?

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. A crucial character that is being played in this scene is of course, Doll. In every single memory that Snake shares, Doll is center frame, or the person who was closest to him.

Doll is either takes up the most space in the frame, or she’s the one who is standing closest to Snake. Not even Joker is this present in all of the images, but she is in all of them. While we didn’t see this much play out in the actual Book of Circus arc (given that Snake had very little screentime in that arc anyway), we can infer from these images that Snake felt the closest to Doll out of everyone at the Circus.

We also aren’t just seeing his actual memories normally, we are seeing his memories in an emotionally charged state. While he is feeling highly emotional, the person he thinks of the most is Doll. This is not just him remembering her as being the friendliest or most open person to him, this is who he was actually closest with within the Circus.

Doll’s relationship with both Snake and Ciel are very important parts of both of these characters. We see Ciel soften and feel guilt when he is reminded of Doll, and we see that Snake and Doll were presumably very close because of this scene.

Also just some fun images that I felt like pointing out:

Doll is featured in this image with one of Snake’s snakes. There isn’t much of a reason to feature one of these Snake’s snakes, unless we’re meant to infer a connection between these two.

I’m not quite sure where this image came from, but look! Doll and Snake are sitting next to each other, and Snake has a little smile on his face, which as we know isn’t very common for Snake in this series. There are very few instances of him smiling. However, this is obvious in the anime style so it likely isn’t manga compliant it’s cute though.

They’re featured together in another image!

Now for Doll and Ciel of course:

Doll and Ciel are seen here lying together.

These two images are very important to me and I feel they both hold a deeper meaning. Now it’s time to talk about Ciel and Doll.

Of course, there is the eye symbolism. Both of them keep an eye covered up, because both are hiding secrets that they need to keep covered up. Both wear a costume and live under a persona (Doll’s Circus persona that hides her identity of someone who kidnaps children and Ciel’s Smile persona where he is hiding his identity of the Queen’s watchdog). Yet, both of them are drawn to each other despite their secrets and form lasting connections.

We also see Ciel reaching out to Doll, and Sebastian taking the lollipop out of his hand. He is literally taking her away from him and blinding him from finding her. He is concealing the truth?

Despite what her family says, Doll refuses to believe that Ciel is with the yard.

She draws the parallels between herself and Ciel right here! She literally said it herself! Both of them are capable of holding secrets, and despite what appearances may suggest, people are still capable of hiding things. When she says “but we” she is acknowledging that appearances don’t always match expectations.

However, she still believes in him, up until the very end.

Even up until this point, she was still willing to listen to Ciel, and denies it until she can’t anymore. She reflects on their time together, having believed that their friendship was real.

Doll finally accepts it and feels hurt, betrayed and angry. She tries to kill him after this. Instead of anger, fear or hatred, this is the face we see Ciel make.

He looks sad and tired. This isn’t the face of someone who takes pleasure in the idea of killing her. We see him feel remorse for Doll even earlier, like I pointed out earlier in this scene

This scene is what compels him to take Snake in, being reminded of Doll. He looks sad here, he looks remorseful.

But most importantly, there is this image.

This takes place in the Green Witch arc, meaning that he is still thinking about Doll, she is still relevant up until this point in the story.

This image isn’t necessarily him leaving behind those who impacted his life who have since died, though that is certainly part of it. As we know, R!Ciel is still alive which O!Ciel at this point was not aware of. This picture does not reflect the complete truth.

His last obstacle could be interpreted as the Circus itself, but Doll and Joker aren’t positioned together like Rachel and Vincent are. Doll is a distance away from Joker in this image, and her image is a different size than Joker’s, implying that they are two completely different obstacles. In my opinion, Joker represents the Circus as a whole and himself. He represents all the sacrifices he had to make in Baron Kelvin’s manor. He could even represent his trauma while inside the cult.

But Doll is a completely different obstacle. She represents a personal obstacle. She seems to have impacted him greatly, being an influence in what compelled him to take Snake in. She is also one of the only people in this series we see Ciel feel remorse for. She is important.

At this point, this is supposed to give us the conclusion to all of these stories and ideas. But as highly speculated by the fandom (and practically canon) the first Ciel we see in the image is actually R!Ciel who O!Ciel left behind at the cult, who we know is still alive. The first greatest obstacle and his last greatest obstacle. That’s symbolism right there, right?

But I don’t believe that Snake’s story has concluded just yet. His family should still be a huge part of his character and his motivations. If his story isn’t leading up to something, than I think it’s going to be a rather poor choice on Yana Toboso’s part. But as we know, she doesn’t just do things for no reason, I believe that a lot of this was intentional.

TL;DR: Because Doll’s death is never specifically seen on screen, because Undertaker seems to purposefully mislead us after Doll’s death (and because of Undertaker’s presence in the first place), because the promise of looking for Snake’s family who is pivotal to Snake’s character, and because of the importance of Doll’s relationships with both O!Ciel and Snake, I believe that there is a chance that Yana Toboso is planning on bringing Doll back into the story.

This is all speculation, of course. I’d love for it to be true, but it is still rather dodgy given the fact that Doll hasn’t appeared in the Manga in twelve years. I could definitely just suffering from hopeful thinking, but I would love to see our girly make a return. Perhaps with R!Ciel? But the idea of her returning with R!Ciel is an idea for another day and I might make a separate post about it sometime! Thanks a bunch if you made it this far!

[sunset-bobby]

hello lovely ppl because i have more followers now we are redoing the Sunset Curve and Birthday fiasco

inspired by @yellow-roseman post

Bobby is born March 16th 1978 this is a fact

obviously we are all aware that in order for them to be 17+ by July 22 1995 and be younger than Bobby they have to be born between End of march/April-July 1978

but Luke’s birthday is canonically in August because Julie is american and in america that’s when we start school...before it was changed the Netflix wiki had Luke’s birthday as August 13th which if you see by this post i made matches up with the story line

Now obviously you’re like Syd he can be born in August and it not be the 13th which is tru and the JATP official Instagram said that he was a Leo and the leo cut off date is August 22nd so like luke August older than Bobby cause he’s 17

Now you’re like Syd Luke can’t be the oldest have you met him, which brings me to Alex. The JATP insta said he was a cancer which fits and before it was changed the netflix wiki said July 7 1977 so your like that’s not right he’d be 18 and they were all 17

we’re they though....did they explicitly say they were ALL 17 technically speaking alex’s would have only been 18 for 2 weeks before he died, why wouldn’t they still say 17 if the rest of them were 17 just saying hollywood articles are not always factual but he could also be born 1978 but Alex as the youngest makes me feel weird idk maybe it’s the energy of the situation but it’s possible so believe as you wish

SO THEN THERE’S REGGIE

Everyone considered he was the Baby of the group and even I didn’t know his birthday

but the JATP instagram said he was a...Sagittarius?? which you know also actually fits

well if he’s a Sag he has to be older than Bobby

then someone told me his b-day was Dec 21st he is the cusp of Sag and Capricorn (which if Carrie is capricorn lol what if they share a birthday lol jk...imagine the trauma) anyway

Soooo while it’s not confirmed confirmed this is the logic i go off of cause while they deleted the birthdays (besides Bobby’s) there’s no way all of them were born april may june and july and i’ll take lenience on Alex cause the Cancer cusp is in fact July 22nd (dying on ur 18th birthday? i’m giving u fic ideas honestly guys lol) but Alex is the oldest or youngest depending on ur preference

this is my logic and i love March pisces (biased) and Bobby is my baby even

but i spent a lot of time and research coming up with this accurate time line and as much as i love and condone projection babes you can’t deny these zodiac signs are heavily accurate (especially luke...he’s little too confident little too cocky no offense Leos...love you Savannah)

If you do not believe this the only reason I would let it slide is because technically speaking Alex and Luke’s birth months are Owen and Charlie’s (but Jer is a January baby however he is the 21st of Jan sooo)

[elyvorg]

So… I was talking about aspec V3 headcanons? Well then, let me lay down the facts.

Maki Harukawa is on the aromantic spectrum. Yes, even though she explicitly develops a crush on Kaito, and no, I’m not trying to dispute that part.

This is basically canon. Let me tell you why.

Maki is aro

For this, we need to consider the conversation Maki has with Shuichi in the first training session in chapter 4, while Kaito has temporarily disappeared to the bathroom. On one level, this conversation exists to be the only actual meaningful indication* that Maki has romantic feelings for Kaito until she goes and confesses them. Someone like Maki wouldn’t care about asking Shuichi if he “liked” Kaede (in that annoying loaded meaning of the word “like” that specifically refers to romantic attraction) unless she was trying to come to terms with the idea that she also “likes” someone else in the same way, and the only plausible candidate for that is Kaito.

But even more striking about this conversation, far more so than the general implication that Maki would only bother asking this if she happened to be crushing on a certain spiky-haired space dork, is the way Maki approaches and thinks about this whole topic in general. Take a look:

Maki:  “Well… I assumed you didn’t, because that would be weird. […] Liking someone you just met… especially in a situation like this…”

Shuichi:  “… Then tell me… under what circumstances is liking someone *not* weird?”

Maki:  “…Huh? I… don’t know. I don’t… really understand what that is.”

I, as an aromantic person myself, fully agree with Maki that it just seems weird to start romantically liking someone you’ve only just met, especially in a life-or-death situation where surely there’s way more important things to be focusing on. But apparently, most people do not find this thought weird at all – love at first sight is supposedly a real thing that can happen, and something something dangerous situations can bring out more hormones and passion???? sounds fake but okay – and so opinions like mine and Maki’s here are very much outliers.

And not only that, not only does the thought of crushing on near-strangers bewilder Maki to the point of disbelief, but she also can’t even come up with an answer to when crushing on someone would ever not be strange and bizarre. Like the whole concept is just alien to her. She can barely even wrap her head around how “liking” someone in that way even works. The very reason she’s even asking Shuichi about this is because she doesn’t understand why she’s feeling this way about Kaito.

This is how an aromantic person would view this kind of thing. It doesn’t sound even slightly like something an alloromantic person would say in this situation. That’s not up for interpretation – that’s just the truth about these views that Maki is expressing. Again: I’m aromantic. I would know.

Even from a character who then does turn out to nonetheless have a crush on someone, these statements are pretty much as canonically confirmed arospec as you can get short of them straight up using the word "aromantic" or a variant.** And, well, obviously Maki isn't about to go calling herself that. From the way she’s questioning this, she clearly doesn’t realise that her perspective is the outlier, so she’s probably never even heard of the term. Besides, she most definitely has way bigger hurdles to be getting over first in terms of her self-acceptance before she's ever going to particularly care about figuring out labels for her orientation of all things.

Aros with trauma are still aros

Now, granted, I severely doubt that Maki being arospec is what the writers intended to convey. Haha, deliberate aro representation in mainstream Japanese media, especially something more complex than vanilla aro, that's a funny joke. What the writers probably meant by writing this conversation I just discussed is to suggest that Maki is viewing things this way a result of her trauma.

But hey, guess what? Even if it is because of her trauma - and I'm not denying that it probably is - that doesn't make Maki any less aro. Some people are arospec because of trauma, and that's equally as valid a reason to be arospec as without. Maybe Maki would have grown up alloromantic if she hadn't been scouted as an assassin, but that's irrelevant, because that's not the Maki who exists now.

In writing this conversation, the writers were presumably attempting to communicate that Maki is so messed up by having been manipulated and abused and moulded into a soulless killing machine that she can no longer comprehend the idea of how or why anybody (especially not herself) would fall in love with someone when they'd only just met, or even really in any circumstances at all. …And in doing that, the writers unintentionally wrote a character who, as a result of her trauma, is aro(-spec). This is an objective fact about the canon story that does not change just because the writers probably weren’t aware enough about aromanticism to actually realise this.

Aros who feel romantic attraction are still aros

So, of course, Maki does in fact come to romantically love Kaito despite this. That fact becomes very important to her, and me lengthily explaining here that she’s actually arospec is not remotely trying to diminish that. But it’s also very important to me that people realise that Maki’s romantic love for Kaito comes from an aromantic perspective. She eventually chooses to embrace those feelings not remotely because it just feels to her like the natural way things should go, but despite every single conscious part of her insisting that this is weird and illogical and doesn’t make any goddamn sense to even be happening at all. She is not going to suddenly fall into all the boring romantic cliches and stereotypical alloromantic approaches to love just because she does in fact happen to be experiencing romantic attraction. There’s nothing alloromantic about Maki’s crush on Kaito.***

As for the specific flavour of arospec that allowed Maki to fall in love with Kaito anyway? This part is somewhat more up for interpretation because there’s no real explicit indication of this in particular, but I personally like to go with the idea that Maki is demiromantic. It feels appropriate for Maki’s character and trauma to imagine that she can only begin to potentially feel romantic things towards a person when she has an emotional connection with them – when she trusts them and knows that they trust her. It doesn’t necessarily have to take very long – she’d only been friends with Kaito for a handful of days before that telling conversation with Shuichi – and she may not even have to have consciously admitted to herself that she trusts them, but she needs to have that bond. She’s normally so guarded and has such strong automatic barriers up during her interpersonal interactions that seeing most people in a romantic light literally isn’t even an option in her brain.

Maki’s confession of her feelings for Kaito does read as rather strongly demiromantic, I think. She makes a point that this is about who Kaito is and what he’s done for her, before even getting to the part where she admits to having fallen for him. And she says she “fell for” him, not that she was always in love with him or anything to that effect. This happened somewhere along the way during their friendship, because of their friendship, and because of Kaito being his incredible trusting supportive self towards her when she needed it most.

Maki Harukawa is demiromantic, and she’s wonderful.

  ---

[some grumpy Amatonormativity and Aro Erasure 101 footnotes, can you tell I am bitter about this kind of thing]

(* When I say “actual meaningful indication” of romantic feelings, I mean something that isn't just the narrative infuriatingly pointing at things that are actually perfectly platonic in nature and going “ooh look how romantic~!”. Newsflash: worrying about somebody and wanting to rescue them when they're sick and injured and have been kidnapped by someone you think is an evil sadistic mastermind is not somehow proof of romantic feelings. That is a thing that friends do. And on the same note, teaching somebody how to build a crossbow is not some kind of deep metaphor for romance; it is literally just a lesson in how to build a goddamn crossbow. Maki would have done both of these things in exactly the same way if her crush on Kaito didn’t exist.)

(** It's exactly like how characters can be considered canonically confirmed same-gender-attracted when all they've done is show attraction to the same gender****, without them actually needing to explicitly refer to themselves with the word “gay”, or “lesbian”, or “bi” or whatever else. Anyone who tried to insist that was necessary in order for it to “count” would instantly be written off as homophobic. So if that’s the case, then a character explicitly saying something such as “I don’t understand what it means to like someone that way” equally constitutes them being confirmed aro, and trying to argue that it doesn’t “count” without outright hearing the word itself is, guess what…?)

(*** This also inherently means that there’s nothing straight about Maki’s crush on Kaito either, since societally-expected “straight” attraction is allo as well as hetero. I gather that some people in this fandom like to devalue and erase Maki’s crush (and potentially also Maki herself) because they feel that it’s an Obligatory Forced Straight Romance and don’t like that, or something along those lines. Well, good news! It’s literally not that, actually, because Maki isn’t straight.)

(**** …This only applies so long as it actually is very clearly romantic or sexual attraction and not just people deciding platonic affection is totally romantic thanks to the disease that is amatonormativity. Because, you know. That happens. Literally all the time. (Even from V3’s narrative itself; see footnote 1.))

[giggles-and-freckles]

i don't know if any of you are familiar with the concept of 'enneagram types.' if you're not, you can check it out here. lots of fun stuff to click around and read about if you're interested in what this even is. but i've been thinking about it in reference to some of our fave sw pals and have decided to do some character study via enneagram. first up: anakin skywalker in all his angsty glory.

Anakin Skywalker

Eight--The Challenger

Basic fear: of being hurt or controlled by others

Basic desire: to protect themselves and their loved ones

Anakin is an eight. Everything for him comes down to power and control. I believe his childhood as a slave is what really impacts this. He lived his entire childhood under the control of another and wanting to get out. Then, he found that freedom and essentially came under the control of something else (this is not to say that the Jedi Order actually functions as a slaver...but I think Anakin perceives it as that on several occasions). After the fall of the Republic, he becomes a slave to Sidious and the Dark Side. I would argue that the only time Anakin is every truly free is in his death, when he makes the completely independent decision to kill the Emperor. That dialogue between Luke and Ani is really telling, in my opinion.

“I’ll not leave you here. I’ve got to save you.”

“You already have, Luke.”

Because that’s all Anakin ever wants, really. He wants to be saved. And he never quite understands that only he can save himself. This power complex is very aligned with an eight. He so desperately wants control...but so easily falls into bondage over and over again.

Eights commonly have a childhood trauma or Moment that “flips a switch” for them. It takes their innocence once and for all and replaces it with a hardness that wasn’t there before. I think a lot of arguments can be made for this. Perhaps it was some unseen moment offscreen prior to The Phantom Menace. Maybe he watched a fellow slave die. Maybe he watched his mother suffer in some tangible way. Maybe it happened between TPM and Attack of the Clones. But for the sake of this analysis, I’ll use the Tusken Raiders as the Moment. We see it affect him in all the ways one of these “loss of innocence” moments for an eight normally does. It’s a game-changer. In canon, it’s Anakin’s first touch of darkness. In the real world, it’s him dealing with insurmountable pain and suffering. Interestingly, we see that this “loss of innocence” directly counters the basic desire of an Eight, as well. Protecting self and loved ones. He fails to do that. He watches the one he loves the MOST die in his arms. Which--for an eight--is the ultimate form of pain. To lose a loved one feels like personal failure. You LET them die. You LET them suffer You could have SAVED them. But you failed. We see Anakin deal with this onslaught of emotions and then...we see him take action.

Eights are a part of the gut triad. This means before they think with their head or feel with their heart, they act with their gut. Their impulse. I don’t think anyone would dare to make the argument that Anakin leads with his head (sorry buddy...but you are Himbo Certified), but I can see arguments for Heart. My only real counter here is that the two greatly influence each other. And we see him ACT in tandem with his feelings. He doesn’t just sit in his emotions and mope. I’ll continue to use the Tusken incident. Immediately, without any hesitation, he acts on his anger. Anger is not a primary emotion, it’s secondary. I’m not in Anakin Skywalker’s head, but as an eight...I feel like I almost see where he’s coming from, even in his worst moments. Doesn’t mean I agree or that I would partake. But I understand (and it hurts me). I see so much fear for him. Fear that he’s not as strong as he wants to be, fear that he wouldn’t be able to protect other loved ones if something like this happened again, fear that he’s weak when it really matters. Like when the time comes to protecting loved ones. That’s why everything spirals so fast with Padmé. He immediately gets put into that fear mindset. That “weak” feeling of “I can’t do it, I can’t save her…..but I have to.” That conversation between the two of them on Mustafar is evident of this. “Love can’t save you, Padmé. Only my new powers can do that.” Because that’s what it comes down to for Anakin. His worth lies on his ability to save himself and the people he loves. That’s why his perception of love becomes very selfish. He begins to care about the act of salvation more than the person them self.

One of my favourite moments is the classic “this is where the fun begins.” It’s such a silly quick moment but it’s so revealing of Anakin’s character. Eights feel adrenaline like no other number. Their vitality is completely based in their ability to turn their raw energy into something GOOD. For example, doing dangerous dives and spinning (because it really is a good trick) for the sake of the Republic. It gives Anakin a sense of “YES! See how good I am? See how I’m using my aggression and strength for good?” Especially important for someone who has committed atrocities and inspired destruction. To turn around and use that energy and skill for good? That’s invaluable. I think that’s a reason Anakin fails to see the hypocrisy of the Republic.

“What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?”

“I don’t believe that. And you’re sounding like a separatist.”

When Padmé merely questions the point of the war he so immediately snaps back and makes it a personal betrayal. He’s so quick to turn down the slight implication that he’s fighting for the wrong side. Eights are all about sides. All about choosing. Anakin can’t begin to consider that maybe his Side isn’t so altruistic. It would crumble at his very core. This is where the Challenger (the moniker of an eight) comes in. They love to challenge the world around them but absolutely cannot handle when someone else is challenging it in contrast to them. Well...an unhealthy eight anyway. Healthy eights see the importance of contrasting beliefs and the power of refining conversations.

Eights want to ‘leave their mark’ on the world.

“I’m not the Jedi I should be. I want more. And I know I shouldn’t.”

This plays into the ‘deadly sin’ of an eight. Lust. This isn’t explicitly sexual (though I guess it can be, at times). It’s more of a desire for MORE. A need for more. It’s all about that power and control. An eight never quite feels satiated...at least not in their unhealthy state. Which Anakin invariably is in. An eight is always seeking things to satisfy them. Through people and power.They’re not concerned with the actual accomplishment, in the societal standard. Before Anakin is granted a seat on the council, we never see him express a desire to even have it. It seems like that’s completely a Palpatine thing. I can’t help but put myself in Obi-Wan’s shoes there. Seeing Anakin’s overreaction and wondering where it’s coming from. Because Anakin has never seemed like he wants to be on the council. Quite the opposite in fact. His tantrum about being denied the rank of master is really evident of the stake Palpatine has already dug into Anakin’s mind. Ann eight’s desire is personal. They don’t care if they have the top title or the most power from the POV of the world. They worry about their own standards. Which is difficult because we never quite manage to meet our own standards and end up in a lot of disappointment. Anakin holds himself to a hard standard. Obi-Wan, Padmé, and Ahsoka all seem to recognise that in him.

“But be patient, Anakin. It won’t be long before the COuncil makes you a Jedi Master.”

“To be angry is to be human.”

“Maybe, but I have to sort this out on my own. Without the Council and without you.”

These encouragements are so unique because they ground Anakin in a very human way. They hit at his insecurities and remind him it’s okay. He doesn’t have to be all-powerful or perfect. Which they know he needs to hear because he can’t quite recognise these truths on his own. He needs the emotional coddling. Unfortunately, in these moments their words aren’t enough. Each of these conversations is characterised by impending sadness.

Eights are seen as the bravest people. I think this aligns well with what we know of Anakin. He has little to no hesitation when putting his life on the line. He volunteers for the most dangerous missions. Doesn’t bat an eye at horrific scenes. He’s willing to do the hardest and scariest things. He’s brave. He’s determined. When talking about Ahsoka, he says “no one has her kind of determination” to which Plo Koon immediately responds, “Except for you.” But this is such an interesting part of an eight to me because I believe eights are actually the most fearful of any number. Because what they fear is fear itself. They are so horrified at the prospect of being afraid it becomes almost dangerous. They will do whatever they can to mask that fear. Which is what puts a lot of eights into that anger reactionary position. A sort of ‘people can’t know I’m scared if I’m the one scaring others’ sort of mentality. The bravado, the courage–it’s all a facade to hide the fear that eights very uniquely do not feel qualified to experience on even the micro-level. It leads many eights to become dictatorial in the way they love others (which isn’t really love at all in the end). Pushes eights to commit atrocities in word or deed all for what they consider to be the ‘greater good.’ They push and prod at the lines a normal person knows not to cross. Not only do they cross them–they plow through them, hoping that it causes enough of a scene to distract from the fact that they’re just like everyone else. In fact, they’re even more vulnerable because no one has taught them how to exist in a state of need. No one has showed them how to ask for and accept help. Instead, they bottle it all up over long periods of times, releasing small bits in dramatic bursts of energy...until that line is crossed and all bets are off.

The goal of a healthy eight is to find a way to channel the aggression and drive into being the ultimate helper and advocate. Unfortunately, Anakin doesn’t get to this until the very end of his life. His fears guide him down a path of darkness. And we see him mask that fear with anger and hatred over and over again. That’s the way of the Dark Side so it’s no wonder it was so appealing to someone who had already been doing that without proper teachings. Anakin Skywalker had the potential to be one of the greatest forces for good in the galaxy. And for a split second at the end of his life, we see him do just that. It’s all the moments before, though; when he chose fear and anger and lust over and over again. Shoving strength and bravery into the vacancies of emotional competency. Until it all became too much.

[ignitification]

Oh god sorry my phone just cut out anyways you know what I can’t get about some people who like E, is the fact that some of them say they love that he’s apologised or that he’s facing his actions against his family head on, that they loved his atonement arc, and then proceed to excuse, condone, justify or hell even full on deny his abuse and actions against him family like what the hell?! It makes no sense to say you like his character because of his atonement arc and that he’s facing his actions only to deny, excuse or condone him!

Hi anon, do not worry hahaha, I thought it might just be one of those weird messages that we receive sometimes, but glad it wasn’t!

That is one of the things that honestly baffles me - what is the point of saying that he is a changed man, when it is clear that you are denying the existence of his mistakes? It is contradictory and it is ridiculous. There is, of course, a whole range of victim blaming, abuse excusing and generally just a hypocritical sort of personal view when it comes to E. And it is exactly because people cannot conciliate his past actions with the reason they like his character that a vacuum in between these two phases is created: if they acknowledge his actions, that implies that they recognize that he is an abuser; and, further than that, if they like E because he showed that he is a changed man, and is trying his best to atone for his actions - they are admitting he is an abuser and that he needs to apologize for what he has done (and which, once again, he has not done yet). If instead, they entirely ignore the abuse and start of victim blaming by accusing Rei of being as bad as him, that Touya was absolutely batshit crazy since he was young and worsened Rei’s condition, and that generally we never explicitly see him beating up his wife or kids (which we do not need to, in order for E to be called an abuser - but that is for another time) except for a SFX, which clearly says ‘slap’ - it makes sense that they would just ignore his atonement arc, and yet, somehow that one is always present as an argument when it comes to reasons why one likes E. As you see, there is no win-win situation for E stans (UNLESS they do own up to his abuse, say that he has not atoned yet but they like his effort, that has nothing to do with E stans who push the good guy!E agenda) and sometimes, that is the reason why their argumentation is poor or rather based on speculation which then has really little possibility to be real in canon (and as for people who condone E’s actions: I hope that you learned how to read, but if you didn’t what are you doing on here?).

This said, people can like whichever character they feel like, but that does not excuse them from a behavior where the abuser gets away unscathed and the victim are being pinned as the perpetrators. That is not the way to solve things.

I do wonder why E stans reason they way they do, and I probably still do not understand them either as I don’t want to assume anything, but that is my take on what exactly is going on. Hopefully, we can figure it out together at some point and if not, I guess we’ll never know. I hope you have a great day anon, and thank you for the ask!

[slugtranslation-hypmic]

same anon as the headcanons one! maybe some “this is something I think would be nice but has nothing to do with canon” and “this has absolutely no relation to canon and doesn’t make sense within the Hypmic universe but I have fun thinking about it anyway" ones? 👀👀

I swear, I have tons of them, but the moment someone asks... Poof, they’re all gone.

Put under a cut because I suddenly got embarrassed and also wrote way too much again.

This is something I think would be nice but has nothing to do with canon

I feel like Hifumi and Doppo enjoy gossiping with one another. Doppo probably denies it, but he’s actually really invested when it includes someone he knows. Considering how persistent Hifumi is in asking Jakurai about Ramuda, I have a feeling they spend a lot of time speculating about what went down with TDD. Hifumi probably suggests really wild ideas like, “Ramuda is secretly an alien!” and consequently has probably hit upon the truth at this point.

I think Hitoya wants his team to be better than Matenrou so he can show Jakurai who’s boss. Juushi, being Juushi, supports Hitoya in this 100% and tries his hardest. Kuukou, being Kuukou, just wants an excuse to throw down at the slightest provocation, so he’s really enthusiastic about it too.

This is so far out of left-field, but for some reason, I imagine Sasara’s apartment smells like cigarette smoke.

I am convinced - and will be unless canon says otherwise - that Hitoya was Jakurai’s gay awakening circa eighth grade or thereabouts. There is nothing anyone can do to change my mind. The only way Evil Line Records can possibly invalidate this if they explicitly say, “No, Jakurai’s gay awakening was [insert a different scenario here]” but will they ever do so? Nah. (Note the “explicitly” because a few of the mangakas appear to have much to implicitly say on this subject.)

I think Hifumi probably didn’t do very well in school.

I think Saburou is probably a little bit jealous of how easily Jirou gets along with people.

I think Gentarou’s editors must actually all hate him because he handwrites his manuscripts.

This has absolutely no relation to canon and doesn’t make sense within the Hypmic universe but I have fun thinking about it anyway

Okay, I was really thinking of one thing when I wrote this, and I guess it’s a little bit personal but oh well. I have an AU where everything is the same but everyone in Fling Posse has psychosis of some kind.

This is probably not going to make sense to most people, but there’s a special feeling you find in a psychotic community you don’t find anywhere else. A lot of people with psychosis who are aware that they have psychosis feel a need to hide it for lots and lots of reasons - shame, concern of being judged, fear of losing their job or loved ones if their illness is discovered, etc. Psychosis is also really embarrassing. You don’t want to be doing what you’re doing, you’re often aware that what you’re doing or what you’re thinking is irrational, but you have no control over it anyway. Even around very close non-psychotic friends, I feel ashamed whenever I exhibit too irrational behavior. They’re all used to it, and I know they don’t particularly care (outside of concern for my well-being), but I resent the fact that I can’t act the way they do at all times.

However, when you’re within a psychotic community, there’s none of that. Everyone in the group has the understanding that at some point, everyone’s going to be off the shits, and that’s okay. We’ve literally all been there. Even though psychosis manifests differently in different people, large enough groups make it so that everyone can find someone else who understands them and has been through a similar experience. This is everything. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Psychosis is by nature alienating because it gives you a different reality than everyone else around you. Having someone else say, “My reality is similar to your reality” and offer genuine understanding and empathy means the world. Psychotic communities also tend to be more understanding of trauma (because psychosis itself is traumatic and can manifest in absolutely horrifying ways that the average person will fortunately never experience. Additionally, psychosis can manifest because of trauma, and people with psychosis tend to be preyed on more because we’re often more emotionally vulnerable. So we’ve all been there) and can have free discussions about it without feeling the need to shelter others from it. You can also discuss very real problems that are utterly foreign to the rest of the world, like the issue of falling in love with a hallucination and dealing with the grief of its passing. It’s freeing. It’s freeing and accepting on an unreal level. I’m a member of a community for people with schizophrenia which is somehow the kindest, most well-behaved community of people I’ve ever met. The rest of the Internet could learn a thing or two from that.

I think Fling Posse has that same general feeling, especially post-DRB Fling Posse. They all have the understanding that they have shit going on, really serious shit, and they’re accepting of one another even though their serious shit may not be the same as anyone else’s. They have all seen each other blow up and act weirdly, but their concern is less about “Whoah, you’re being weird” and more “Hey, you’re not feeling well. Let’s get you away from other people and take care of you.” (I’m thinking in particular of the Gentarou and Dice bit in Chapter 10 of FP/M, although there are other examples of this elsewhere.)

I’d like to write a fanfic about this someday, although it’s probably just going to devolve into shameful amounts of projecting. Oh well. I think it’s important to talk about these things anyway, even if they do necessitate shameful amounts of projection. There needs to be a lot less “shame” in the statement of, “My life is different than yours, and I want you to be able to understand it.”

If anyone out there reading this has psychosis or one of the many disorders that manifests with this particular symptom, know that you are important and that I love you.

[xiyao-feels]

Part Three: Claims about JGY

Intro - Pt 1 - Pt 2 - Pt 3 - Pt 4

JGY

1) JGY has the authority to teach NHS the SoC

He does teach him, and there's no suggestion from anyone involved that he didn't.

In MDZS, the SoC is explicitly one of the Lan's exclusive teachings, and NMJ objects to LXC teaching it to JGY on those grounds; LXC's response to this includes the fact that it can't be leaking it since JGY is their sworn brother, a consideration which would not extend to NHS. I'm not saying that LXC would necessarily deny NHS the chance to learn it (if he were in fact capable of playing it; it's noted as very difficult), but there is no way that JGY has the authority to teach it to NHS without LXC's permission. Nor does NHS seem to be making any efforts to hide what he's playing (in front of both NMJ and some of the Nie men JGY was just playing in front of), so it doesn't seem as though JGY was playing on that to get NHS to keep in a secret. I grant you the plan is stupid enough as it is, but if he'd obtained permission from LXC to teach NHS that would elevate it to new heights of idiocy.

In CQL, the guqin conversation is missing a great deal of what we see in MDZS, and that includes the exchange about it being a Lan exclusive teaching. Nevertheless, we're not given any reason to suppose it's not—and all later discussion of it pretty much follows on MDZS, where it is.

2) JGY involves NHS in his killing of NMJ

He teaches him the corrupted SoC. Now, as in part one, I think MDZS canon suggests this would result in NHS actually helping NMJ, but that's clearly not what the movie is going for.

In MDZS, JGY consistently defends NHS from and to NMJ, as you've seen in some of the quotes in the previous sections. Moreover, after NHS burns his hands when NMJ burns NHS' things, he's the one who orders medicine prepared and comforts him, advises him to go back to his room and rest, and tries to keep him from provoking NMJ; and then, after NHS has run off and locked himself in his room, refusing to open it to anyone to allow them to deliver the medicine, and while NMJ is still furious about NHS' defiance, accepts the medicine and plans to take it to NHS' rooms after he's finished with NMJ (ch 49-50). He does not involve NHS in his plan to kill NMJ.

In CQL, again, we see rather fewer of JGY and NHS' interactions during this time period—which doesn't mean that they don't happen, just that we don't see it. Again, when CQL doesn't say something, I tend to assume it matches MDZS unless I have a specific reason to believe otherwise—CQL kind of relies on this, in fact, otherwise you have questions like "wait what the heck was JGY trying to dig up in the temple". Regardless of whether you agree with that argument, JGY does hold NHS back and prevent him from running towards a qi-deviating NMJ. Although I've seen it interpreted as cruel, he likely prevents NHS from getting himself killed or injured (as happens in MDZS, where NMJ wounds NHS (ch 50)). And this is of course not strictly part of the text, but I'll observe that ZZJ has said that he thinks JGY would regret allowing NHS to witness NMJ's qi-deviation. There is, regardless, no evidence in CQL that JGY used NHS in his plan to kill NMJ.

3) JGY can straightforwardly prevent NMJ's violence via the SoC

We see him do this when NMJ is about to punch NHS; he's obviously hurrying a little, but the SoC works clearly and quickly.

In both MDZS and CQL, he shows no sign of an ability to do this. Instead he just has to deal with NMJ attacking him. When he can prevent NMJ's violence towards him, it's literally just that he manages to talk him down; JGY is, in fact, incredibly vulnerable to NMJ's violence.

We see more of NMJ targeting JGY in MDZS (see next point), but in neither MDZS nor CQL does JGY show any sign of being able to stop NMJ's violence by playing a few quick measures.

Granted, this is mostly a replay about the SoC being able to stop NMJ's violence quickly even when used by someone with weak cultivation. But it's a very important point.

4) Someone other than JGY is the main target of NMJ's violence.

This isn't an explicit claim, but while NMJ is violent on more than one occasion, at no point is JGY his target, nor (from what I can tell) is it suggested he usually is. Rather, NHS and the Nie men are made to stand out as NMJ's victims.

In MDZS, JGY is absolutely the main target of NMJ's violence;* although he does burn NHS' things, leading to NHS' hands being burnt when he tries to save them, and later injures various people (including NHS!) when he qi-deviates, he does this latter /because he is hallucinating they are JGY/. He calls JGY out at the stairs and /publically/—in front of various Jin disciples!—and not only humiliates him but also kicks him down the stairs then draws his sabre on him with intent to kill him (all this after trying to hit him very first thing after they go outside). Earlier, of course, we see him try to kill MY after MY has just killed WRH and saved his life, and his final qi-deviation is immediately preceded by him kicking open a door to slaughter JGY on the spot for the crime of being upset to LXC about how NMJ treats him…ostensibly combined with him being polite and friendly to NMJ's face, but the last time JGY was anything but, NMJ tried to kill him, and indeed LXC is advising JGY against "provok[ing]" NMJ "again," presumably by talking back to him as he did at the stairs (ch 50).

In ch 118—before the stairs incident, and I think it must have been before the Chang clan are killed too—XY asks if JGY's bruise is from NMJ. Although in fact it is not (and observe JGY's response: “If he were the one who did it, do you think I could still be standing here and talking to you?”), the possibility of NMJ's violence towards JGY is clearly present. In ch 32, when WWX sees some kids playing, although we're told that LFZ is the most popular character and although the text is replete with indications that at this point in time he is both powerful and well-respected, there is /still/ the general knowledge that NMJ is going to threaten JGY and JGY is going to flee:

“Nie MingJue” raised swung his fist, “So what if you’re the Chief Cultivator. You’re still my youngest brother. You’ll have to run away whenever you see me anyways.”

“Jin GuangYao” did indeed cooperate and maintain his character. Flinching his shoulders, he quickly ran away.

See also WWX's comment in the first Empathy chapter, when he's surprised at watching NMJ and MY get along: 'Wei WuXian had heard too much of those jokes of how “LianFang-Zun fled whenever he heard that ChiFeng-Zun arrived”.'

We're even told that the brotherhood oath they swore was unusually violent!

NMJ's determination to kill JGY lasts even into his own death—that's /why/ JGY dismembers him and sets such strong seals on him, so that NMJ's fierce corpse won't kill him. NMJ's violence towards JGY is a central part of both of their narratives, and shows up all throughout the text.

*Well, NMJ is also very pro-Wen-killing, but on an individual level.

In CQL this is a little more complicated. NMJ seems perhaps generally less violent? Certainly we are shown less of his violence, and in e.g. the confrontation in Sun Palace he is not constantly attempting to get to JGY while LXC blocks his blows and explains things. In episode 36, although we still see the children playing, the exchange is a little modified; we're still told JGY is scared of NMJ, but the NMJ kid doesn't raise a fist or anything like that, and the JGY child doesn't run away. Nevertheless, NMJ is clearly hostile to JGY, and his violence at the stairs is the same: attempting to hit him the moment they arrive outside, kicking him down the stairs, and then drawing his sabre on him to try and kill him. The difference is that in CQL, JGY survives because NMJ qi-deviates, whereas in MDZS he would likely have died had LXC not intervened. The emphasis on NMJ's violence towards JGY is much less present in CQL; nevertheless, JGY is still the primary target of what violence we do see.

5) JGY is easily replaceable, indeed at all replaceable, as a subordinate

FJ does not explicitly say this, but NZH seems to be very well-integrated and to have been there a while, and there's no suggestion he is in any way less than a perfect subordinate, or that JGY was better. As though to emphasize this, we see him dive in front of NMJ to take a blow (as with MY in CQL)—and, of course, he has the good grace to die when NMJ tries to kill him. One of the rather underspecified Nie cultivators also flings himself in front of NMJ, taking a blow to save his life (although, to be entirely fair, willingness to take a blow for NMJ is probably the way in which MY /is/ most easily replaceable).

In MDZS, MY's competence as NMJ's subordinate, and indeed the extraordinary level of his competence, are fundamental to his and NMJ's relationship. Consider these quotes from ch. 49:

After he left, Nie MingJue switched to another deputy. Wei WuXian, however, felt that the new one was always a few beats slower. Meng Yao was an unusually clever talent. He could understand what wasn’t said, and perform to the best with the simplest orders. He was efficient and never slacked. Anyone used to him wouldn’t be able to refrain from comparing him with others.

and

Nie MingJue was never close to people. He rarely opened up to anyone. Though he finally managed to obtain a competent, trustworthy subordinate, whose character and capabilities he approved, he found that the subordinate’s true colors were nothing like what he had thought they were. It was only natural that his reaction was so extreme.

Moreover, it's WWX's conclusion in ch 49 that part of the reason NMJ agrees to swear brotherhood with JGY is JGY's extraordinary talent:

From [WWX's] observations, aside from how Lan XiChen brought it up, having always hoped that the two would reconcile, the most important factor was probably the gratitude of saving his life and writing the letters. To be precise, in his past battles, he had more-or-less depended on the information that Meng Yao sent over through Lan XiChen. He still thought that Jin GuangYao was a talented person whom one would rarely come upon, and intended on leading him back onto the right path. However, Jin GuangYao wasn’t his subordinate anymore. Only after they became sworn brothers would he have the status and the position to urge Jin GuangYao, like how he disciplined his younger brother, Nie HuaiSang.

This is also part of LXC's attempt to reassure JGY that NMJ has not entirely turned against him, in ch 50:

Lan XiChen, “He has always cherished your talent, hoping that you would choose the right path.

JGY's extraordinary competence is very much central to their relationship, and the /fact/ that he has to be so extraordinarily competent to achieve any recognition is central to the themes of the text.

In CQL, again, this is less explicit. However, in episode 10 NHS praises him and WWX and JC are impressed by his talent; the captain, the only other high-up Nie man we get an individual sense of, seems rather less impressive. Moreover, at the stairs, when confronting JGY about XY's imprisonment, NMJ says what did I tell you back in Qinghe (about wanting XY dead), i.e. when JGY was his servant, suggesting he still views JGY in the framework of that relationship and at least possibly suggesting that he still misses JGY in that position.

In the interests of justice I will also bring up the important claims about the characters I noticed that /do/ have significant textual support: first, that NMJ is very good at fighting; second, that NHS and NMJ are each other's most important people. (It technically also gets that NHS hates practicing the sabre, but given the way it contextualizes this I'm not giving them any points for that one.) FJ also claims that lying to someone to keep them from knowing something that would hurt them is an expression of love—although in MDZS this goes rather the other way around, with NMJ keeping things from NHS, considered in isolation it does fit in with similar expressions of love in CQL/MDZS.

Now, I want to be clear, I'm not actually being as thorough as I possibly could. To do that, I would have to watch it multiple times and think things over for at /least/ a month, and even aside from the poor anon who's waiting on the answer to the question "what do they erase about NHS and JGY," I have absolutely no desire to spend that kind of time with the film.

Previous | Next

[qqueenofhades]

The photo set you reblogged of Yusuf and Niccolo helping throughout time just filled me with so many happy feels and it made me realize that it seems so common in media with immortal couples that they take breaks from each other and reconnect after a few decades. Which is a great trope but seeing these two that seems to have been attached at the hip since the day they met just fills me with all the heart eyes.

(I haven't read your fanfics for them yet. I know I'm a bad fan but if it helps I havent been able to read anything since all this started but while writing this ask I got the feeling that all this rambling I spewed out is a big theme)

Hush. Bad fan nothing. We all are coping with this stupid, awful year in different ways, some of us by escaping into fandom and some of us being unable to engage with it and some of us doing both or anything else. You certainly don’t owe me or anyone any obligation to interact with our content, fic or otherwise. So just to have that there on the top. You’re good, hun. :)

ANYWAY, thank you for giving me a chance to meta a bit on the boys and their relationship and to have a window into what my brain looks like pretty much 24/7 these days. (I blame them.) I keep thinking about all the ways this couple is depicted in the TOG film and how lovely it was and how unusual it is for me to have an OTP where I actually love them in canon and don’t need to violently disavow it in order to create AU fan content with just the characters. (See: Timeless, Game of Thrones, pretty much any show I’ve hyperfixated on at some point.) I love AUs anyway, because that’s the way my brain works, but the fact that I can also enjoy canon just as much is rare for me and for a lot of us. I saw a post somewhere remarking on how the fanfic for Joe/Nicky isn’t fixing anything, which is usually the point of transformative fanworks: we take something that canon atrociously fucked up and fix it. But in this case, all our interpretations are based on actually appreciating the way they’re presented in canon and wanting to enjoy that and uphold it, and that -- especially with a couple like this one -- is shocking??

Like. Despite my historian gripes about the occasionally incongruous details for their graphic-novel backstories (which are the only things I HAVE fixed in my fics), I’m just... deeply appreciative of the care which everyone, writers and actors and all else, put into depicting Joe and Nicky and their relationship. And god YES, one of the things I love the absolute MOST is that they’re a loving, faithful, committed, happy married queer couple over centuries, and that seems to be the case for as long as they’ve known each other/ever since they got together. (See Booker’s “you and Nicky always had each other.”) These fools can’t sleep apart from each other even when they’re stuck on a freight train in the middle of nowhere, they flirt like teenagers at dinnertime and even when they’re strapped to gurneys in a mad-scientist laboratory, they make out to enrage bad guys and also because they’re just still that goddamn into each other after all this time.

I think it was Marwan Kenzari who pointed out that there’s simply no way to truly state the depth of their knowledge and devotion and commitment to each other. They’re 950 years old. They have known each other since they were in their thirties; they’ve been husbands for literal centuries. There is no way anyone else in the world could possibly come close to replicating the kind of bond they have with each other, and neither of them have ever had any inclination to look, because why would they? Especially with the fact that queer couples in media, even otherwise sympathetically portrayed ones, often have Drama and Third Parties and Promiscuity and whatever else (because of the tiresome old canard that Gays Equal Hypersexualized!), and Joe and Nicky don’t need or want ANY of that. There’s no urge to make their relationship a cheap source of soap-opera conflict. It’s the rock and the center and the core of both of their lives, and everything they do stems from that.

There have been some great metas/comments on how neither Joe and Nicky are sexualized, they dress like stay-at-home dads during quarantine (Marwan Kenzari and Luca Marinelli are both objectively gorgeous men, and they’re out there looking like that, god bless), and the viewer is never invited to goggle at or fetishize their relationship. There are no leering or exploitative camera angles on anyone, and their expressions of love aren’t posed or intended to titillate the audience, they’re just solidly embodied and natural and lived in. It’s never bothered to be stated clunkily in dialogue that they’re a couple; we just see them exchanging looks and smiles in the early part of the film, and then we see them spooning on the train after the mission in Sudan, which confirms it.

At every turn, the narrative celebrates the kindness and love shared by the Immortal Family, the individual characters, and Joe and Nicky, especially and explicitly in queer form. The villains of the film are also defined by how they react negatively to that love. @viridianpanther​ had a great meta on how Keane as a villain is especially set up to menace Joe and Nicky as the narrative representation of toxic masculinity, aggressive heterosexuality, and the usual “Kill Your Gays” trope that we’ve all come to wearily expect. But instead, after that scene where Joe and Nicky fight Keane, Nicky is shot and comes back to life in Joe’s arms rather than dying permanently like we probably all momentarily expected, and then Joe gets to FUCKIN’ BREAK THE NECK of the guy who enacted that violence.... good GOD. The first time I watched it, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. (This goes for the whole film, but especially that scene.) Like... when do we get that?? When do we EVER get that???

Obviously, there are so many stereotypes, whether visually or in behavior or character traits, that could have been assigned to a gay Italian character (excessively dramatic, effeminate, fashionable, etc) or a gay Arabic/Muslim character (explicitly announcing He’s Not Like Those Muslims, having to actively reject his heritage to make him more palatable to westerners, being tormented over being gay, etc) and Joe and Nicky subscribe to none of those. I get very emotional about Joe referring to Nicky as the moon when he is lost during the truck scene partly because it’s SUCH a common motif in Arabic love poetry. To call someone your “moon” is a beautiful way to say they’re the light of your life, and since the Islamic calendar is obviously lunar and the holidays, months, and observances, are set by the phases of the moon, this also has a deeper religious significance.

I don’t know for sure if they did that on purpose, but it it’s a lovely and subtle way of showing us how Joe clearly doesn’t have an issue with being both queer AND Muslim, and is able to draw on both facets of that identity in a way that a lesser narrative would have denied him. And that is just really wonderful. Yes, we’re seeing these characters when they’ve had centuries to settle into themselves, but there are plenty of writers who would have forced those conflicts artificially to the surface, rather than letting them be long in the past. It’s the same way when you watch a film set in the medieval era, it wants you to know that it Is Set In The Medieval Era. Cue the filth, misogyny, racism, violence, etc! Rather than it being a lived-in reality, it has to be jarringly drawn attention to, and I’m just so glad they didn’t do that with Joe and Nicky. And for them to have met in the crusades and fallen in love??! Come on. That’s just rude. Rude to me, personally.

Anyway, this was a rather long-winded and feelsy way of saying that these characters are constructed, acted, and written organically in such a way that you hate to even THINK of them being separated, and it’s not because they can’t function without each other, but because they are two halves of a whole. We also see that the characters themselves can’t stand being forced apart: Joe’s freakout in the truck scene when Nicky briefly won’t wake up, Nicky making sure to tell Joe that he’s glad he’s awake in the lab, the whole post-Keane fight scene that I talked about above, the way Nicky fights ferociously to get to Joe when Merrick’s stabbing him, etc. For that to be given to the queer couple, where the strength of their love and devotion is reinforced as one of the emotional goals of the story, and for that queer couple to be written in the way that Joe and Nicky are, both individually and as a unit, is just so very rare.

Because yes, there’s plenty of drama and angst and pain in their lives, but there’s none at all in their relationship, and that’s what fans keep telling TV writers the whole time: they WANT to see the couple confront things as a unit, rather than being kept on tenterhooks the whole time and forced to go through manufactured or artificial drama. It would feel especially wrong for Joe and Nicky, who have known and loved each other for 900 years. The fact that their respective actors also put so much care and love into them is very obvious, and makes me feel even luckier that they’re played by people who clearly get them and honor them and know what they’re doing.

Basically: of course Joe and Nicky have been with each other the whole time, and of course we’re all drowning in feelings over it, and I feel very blessed that this ship exists, and I very much need the sequel ASAP. Thanks.

[buddiewho]

What’s it to you?

*Long post ahead

There is something on my mind. It’s called Occam’s Razor. The definition I know is, or rather the interpretation in my head is, it’s a gray area, a fine line. So for example, when it comes to Buck and Eddie, I do believe they play right on the Occam’s Razor. The fact that they could be this or they could be that, riding that fine line, which one is true? 

Picture this and imagine you’re seeing jealous Buck:

Option 1: Jealous Buck idea pushes the razor to the more romantic, buried feelings thing we Buddie clowns are thinking about. 

Option 2: If you don't view it that way, you could then simply see Buck maybe panicking because of his abandonment issues. For example, Buck’s reaction face becomes more like heyo Eddie doesn’t just get to so easily partner off with another firefighter outside the 118 like that [in this case being him or Hen as Eddie’s only option Buck accepts] until they finally ease into helping the 126 with these fires, Buck himself even. 

Option 3: We’re speculating our asses off no matter if you believe in option 1 and/or 2, and we do not yet know what’s going on in this scene...

Therefore we’re split down the razor’s edge. Then I also think of this video. The fact that Buck and Eddie fall under the “just let the bromos be homos?” category. They have the cooked up potential for something more and not to just remain a “healthy male friendship.” When we have proper queer representation in combination with “healthy male friendship” then we can talk about the latter. I’m trying to rack my brain for healthy male friendships, but I come back to that video and the laundry list of mlm couples in the just let the bromos be homos category. My brain wanted to say FinnPoe from Star Wars as a healthy male friendship, but then that’s still part of the same category and all I can hear is Oscar Isaac praising the notion that these two characters could be falling in love during wartime...but apparently Disney/the world isn’t ready for that...? 

The problem is I cannot think of any representation for healthy male friendships. I keep thinking Shawn Spencer and Burton “Gus” Guster from Psych, but even then there were definite issues surrounding their friendship...if you watched that show. Now, with that show I did believe that Shawn Spencer is bisexual, but I don't headcanon that his awakening happened with Gus. It just happened and he’s known about it for most of his life (like since 18 probably) and Gus knows it too. But again it’s never explicitly made so, it’s always hinted at though. Also, don't get started on Teen Wolf if you’re thinking about that one. I don't pay any attention and maybe it’s because I may not be seeking it out...but I cannot think of a single thing I’ve watched with healthy friendships, save for perhaps in Thor Ragnarok the trio that is Hulk/Banner, Thor and Valkyrie when they’re not fighting each other. Though, there is the case of Gary and Miranda in the BBC show called Miranda. They could’ve had a good run as just friends, but clearly it wasn’t unheard of to think of a hetero pairing starting off as just friends to become more, obvi. Back to 911...

As we teeter this Occam’s Razor, all I ask for is explicit admittance from Buck that he is bisexual. Just for him to say it to close friends and family.  For him to feel okay with the fact that he likes boys too. So yes, he has little or no experience, but he can’t help but feel attracted to men as well. Banking on the South America exploration/runaway to expound on this some more. That yes, Buck has known about his bisexuality and does know how he truly feels, but for whatever reasons he’s not ready to show/tell those true feelings to anyone else. For whatever reasons he had to build/hide behind the chaotic sex addicted punk persona that he named Buck 1.0. 

I also don't believe that everything needs to be boxed into a corner. 911 was the show that sparked a procedural TV drama to life and thus it created 911 Lonestar as a way to probably showcase a different state and how they handle these emergencies/fires. Who the hell knows, perhaps it’s just for more money? It’s just I don't think it’s a matter of 911 is the mostly “hetero show” whereas 911 Lonestar is “the show for the gays” because it has the canon gay couple. Well, for the record 911 also has a canon lesbian/gay couple; Hen and Karen. What I mean to say is that irl there are LGBT+ folk everywhere, therefore more of them can appear as characters in 911, or even in Lonestar as well. LGBT+ people live in CA and TX; sometimes 911 did the peripheral gay couples who found themselves caught in an emergency situation (the boy with the crush outside the coffee shop, that couple in which one of them had tapeworm and Buck nonchalantly just yanked that thing out...and then of course the older couple who were so graciously paralleled to Buck…). Oh, you can’t forget Josh in 911, who also seemingly thought Maddie was once setting him up with Buck. Also note it wasn’t written as Buck denying Josh on that thought. He just ran with it, no qualms, and we didn’t have some unnecessary “no homo” backlash which leaves room for us to say wait, a gosh darn minute? Are we still leaving room for Buck figuring something out and/or coming closer to accepting himself? Ps. It also wasn’t written for Maddie to decline the notion either. She of course jokingly said her brother wasn’t good enough for Josh and honestly, I think we got {Oliver playing} Buck as a bit offended by Maddie doing that. 

Buck is also a double edged sword. So is Eddie. You have two men presented as so strong, so masculine that the instant it’s thought they might like men, it’s damaging to their masculinity somehow. That’s called toxic masculinity which is something Buck and even Eddie occasionally fall into. I think they’ve definitely grown out of that with the help of others and each other even, but I think this is why us crazy shippers wanting Buddie and/or Buck revealed as bisexual is so jarring to others- Toxic masculinity? Fragility? The fact that if men like Buck and Eddie are viewed to be gay/bi then it hurts this notion of what it means to be a strong man. But let’s box it into a corner because 911 Lonestar is the gay show and thus we think less of the characters TK and Carlos because they are gay- not all equivalent in strength to the “healthy male friendship” that is Buck and Eddie? When in fact the four of these characters have similarities? TK and Buck are so very reckless, dive in no questions asked kind of thing and it seems to me that Eddie and Carlos would be the take orders kind of men. They will fall in line with the occasional reckless decision...so therefore they have more similarities than just the four of them belonging to the LGBT+ community...or regardless of if they do all belong in that community together- the whole point is that in real life the Buck and Eddie dynamic of a friendship (or the possibility of something more, as one or both characters coming to terms with their sexuality) exists in the same world with relationships that are similar to TK and Carlos’. So the two supposed bromos (just friends) exist in the same world as the homos...therefore unboxing the shows from their corners entirely.

Another thing that I think this thing around Buck is falling prey to, is that bi guys are just faking it. It’s one stop on the way to figuring out that “they’re actually just gay.” Except no that’s not the case with bisexuality. For some people, it could be, but from what I see with Buck it’s not that at all. He’s bisexual, that’s that. 

Also, most everyone thinks those who ship Buddie want Buck revealed as bisexual to only be with Eddie and to see two sexy men get it on. Honestly, 911 Lonestar did provide sufficiently with that, because them TK and Carlos scenes are downright drool worthy, but that’s not all I came for. Anyway, I clocked Buck as possibly bi in season 1- the full moon ep, where yes he’s getting closer to Abby, but damn does he get on well with that gay guy who had tapeworm. Well, shit. Then after Eddie’s introduction they go on to parallel Buck to that older gay couple...anyhow, it’s just why keep putting Buck in a queer space and then not run with that? Yes, sure there are strong straight allies to the LGBT+ community, but Buck doesn’t read heterosexual ally to me, it feels more like the LGBT+ community is where he belongs. I’d say Eddie Diaz belongs there too, but he’s like a mystery on this front. I think he understands his feelings/attractions towards men and he’d respond like yeah, sure, they’ve been there, but I haven’t done shit about them and I haven’t labelled them [gay/bi]. What’s it to you? And if eventually this involved Buck, he’d be like yeah, so I’m head over heels for that smart and lovable reckless idiot, what else do you want me to say?