#anyways i am falling into this rabbit hole that consists in caring about characters nobody gaf abt

[aiodenhunt]

Whenever I try to look for stuff for the Hooklings I always end up stumbling across Claudine frollo, and I think she’s pretty much nice tbh but. As a TWST fan. Whenever I read about her I can’t help but to imagine HIM.

Rollo twst you will always be famous

So when the brainrot lets me work i might make a card edit and turn him into claudine because I cannot keep imagining claudine as him😭

[mysaldate]

About chapter 183...

Manga spoilers for KnY under the cut, just need to rant for a bit.

And so the time has come for KnY to fall down the rabbit hole so many other shonen series did. And it’s a damn shame. Up until the current arc, while there were a few slip-ups, Kimetsu no Yaiba was an amazing series that had cunning and powerful villains, realistic (within limits of man-eating demons and magical fighting styles) obstacles to overcome, one that paid attention to injuries of its characters and made a great deal about showing us the limits to human power.

HOWEVER

Ever since the Infinity train arc, something has been a little... different. The Infinity train arc was what started the very very annoying trend of downplaying a villain that was accidentally made too strong rather than actually dealing with his power and coming up with clever ways to overcome them. Enmu is estabilished early on as an excellent strategist. He came up with a way to use his blood demon art so subtly not even a demon slayer hashira suspected a thing, he made human lackeys since he knew the slayers would never kill a human and he even fused with the train to be  hard to kill. All of this is excellent set-up for what could be an incredibly interesting fight. Except... it was not. Because rather than having to work out his plan, Enmu simply... made a slip of tongue? Let Tanjiro in on his plan? And completely forgot about Nezuko and didn’t notice when the other slayers woke up? A character smart enough to come up with such an amazing and smart plan? Yeah, something is off.

And let me tell you, it did NOT get better overall.

There were minor highlights. The Red-light district arc was beautifully crafted and the fight was won on a relativelly reasonable conditions (except for Uzui being totally overpowered but that’s something less irritating than what they’re doing now). The fight with Hantengu and Gyokko had several Mary-Sue moments but no downplaying on the villains’ side. The Pillar Training arc had no major fight but it was a really good way to show the growth of our characters. Even in the current arc, there were good moments. The fight with Akaza was very satisfying and enjoyable even and the conclusion to it was perfect. Sadly, everything else about this arc is not.

The premise here, again, is outrageously good. Being trapped in the Infinity Fortress with Muzan and all his Upper Moons is a beautiful concept that could’ve made for SO. DAMN. MUCH. of interesting fights, character-building moments and terrifyingly epic power show-downs. And instead, it just rings hollow.

The main issue with this arc is how awfully downplayed Muzan and most of his demons were. The author suddenly decided to ignore a lot of what has been estabilished about Muzan, Nakime and their abilities in particular. Of course, Douma, Kaigaku and Kokushibou also got downplayed horribly but really, what pissed me off the most was Muzan and Nakime suddenly losing or forgetting about their abilities.

Look, I love KnY and I love the good side – or parts of it anyway. Tanjiro is a near perfect character, the first protagonist ever to actually pull me in and get me to cheer for him. Nezuko is, after Makai ouji’s Sitri, first character meant to be cute and actually striking me as such. I even came to like Inosuke to a certain extent. Yushiro and Tamayo were one of my favourites the moment they first walked on screen. The hashiras are a little wacky and I still think some of them are just completely unneccesary or wasted potential and I still find Zenitsu horribly cringy and annoying but if there ever was a series where I wanted the protagonist to achieve their goal, it’s this one. And that’s another reason why I’m so dissatisfied with what I’m getting.

And chapter 183 is exceptionally bad for such a huge multitude of reasons.

First of all, there’s Yushiro making up a plan against Nakime. Nakime, as we’ve been shown multiple times, knows of everything that happens in the Infinity Fortress. She can transfer people she doesn’t even see and she can send multiple people to various locations at once. Yet, Yushiro was somehow able to come up with a plan, share it with Mitsuri and actually go through with it, all without her noticing. At all. Because she suddenly turned blind for that one spot of the Fortress or something. And even if Yushiro used his illussionary ability, he still had to share the plan with Mitsuri. So there should be no way she wasn’t aware.

That’s another thing as well. As far as we are aware, it was Nakime’s job to keep the slayers separated. Again, she knows of everything happening in there. She knew about the other Upper Moons getting to a disadvantage. She knew about them being close to dying. And yet, she did nothing to get them away or to move the slayers out of their presence, she couldn’t move her hand and play a note on her biwa and just send them all anywhere else? Anyone else feeling cheated yet? Well buckle up because it gets even worse.

Because now we get to Muzan. And, yeah, remember the Demon Moons meetings? Remember that he can just snatch anyone’s head off, both lethally and non-lethally? Yeah, good thing you do because he doesn’t! Does this affect only demons? He still could’ve killed Yushiro ON THE SPOT. Does it only affect demons created by him? Still cool, he could’ve snatched Nakime’s head off without killing her and take Yushiro’s seal off her eye. But no, instead he’s not gonna do anything of that. He’s gonna mind-fight Yushiro inside her head and then he’s gonna kill her. And not even immediatelly kill like he killed Mukago or Kamanue or Rokuro, no, he will let her die slowly so Yushiro can keep using her power.

Remember when he pumped his blood into people by shoving a finger or a hand through their head? Well, good thing you do, because, yes you guessed it, HE DOESN’T. He scratched Tanjiro’s eye out and he that’s it. This is the demon who’s supposedly the most powerful demon EVER. And the most damage he’s done so far is scratch Tanjiro’s eye.

Remember when he could grab anyone from anywhere in the Fortress like he did with Wakuraba? Well, he doesn’t remember that either. He doesn’t NEED Nakime to access any place in the Fortress. He can get in and out as he pleases without needing her biwa AT ALL. He has more control over the place than Nakime herself. But guess what, we’re going to ignore all of that because if we actually stuck with the abilities estabilished for him, our heroes might need to think before they act and come up with clever plans and maybe there might even be some ACTUAL loss!

You know, not just a supporting character-type of loss! You know, like a loss of a character we really, whole-heartedly care about! A character we were given enough time to come to like and enjoy and support! A character we saw grow and get developed! How horrible!

Let it be known now that while the Infinity Fortress arc blessed me with countless (actually there’s somewhere below 500, I counted) pictures of my sweetheart Douma and gave me the TamaYushi angst I longed for, I still find it to be the worst arc KnY has had so far.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe all of this is a part of Muzan’s masterplan. Maybe he’s actually far more cunning and terrifying that we thought and we’re yet to see his true potential. But I seriously doubt that.

If anything like this is revealed, if we get to see any sort of reasoning for why nobody seems to have a brain anymore, I will gladly take this rant back and apologize but I kind of don’t feel like that will happen. This whole arc feels incredibly rushed and like the author just wants to be done with this series. It’s no longer the gem it was when it started and you can’t feel the love poured into every frame like it used to be. It’s just meeting the similar end as DGM.

How ironic that when I saw the first episode, my first initial thought was “Oh, this is just DGM for the new generation!” Now it seems KnY will meet the same fate, downplaying its villains, disregarding the rules it estabilished in its own universe, boring its creator and disappointing the more demanding parts of its audience.

To put it as simply as possible, there is no way the Demon Slayer Corps should be getting off this easily and there is no way Muzan and all his demons would be this stupid if they have already survived for long long centuries. Muzan doesn’t need Nakime and he doesn’t need his twelve demon Moons, he did just fine before he got them. So him suddenly forgetting about his powers and options is especially disheartening and irritating. At this point, we can only hope the creator realizes this and makes SOME effort to fix these mistakes otherwise, well, there goes another great series, ruined and corrupted by nothing but the bad writing and the author not knowing how to (or not bothering to, pick your favourite) make smart plans without disregarding their own characters’ abilities and parts of what makes them what they are. Muzan was written as an extremely powerful enemy, a cunning master of all things evil, a nightmare in human (or demon) form, something ancient and terrifying and able to spawn centuries of troubles for everyone around without ever – except for the one time – losing the upper hand. And that one time, he was STILL able to make it out alive and well.

Well, this was one extremely long rant and if you’ve read this far, kudos and a cookie to you. I may be expecting too much of a shonen series but am I really? Is it too much to ask for keeping some damn consistency at least in your characters if you can’t even be bothered to research for your timeline properly? The more I look into the Infinity Fortress arc, the more sudden plotholes and mistakes I find and the sadder it all gets. It’s like the author no longer has the strength to keep up the high quality series they started and if that’s actually the case, maybe a hiatus would be a better option than forcing themselves to continue and possibly ruin their entire franchise with a rushed and plothole-filled event.

On a slightly related note, you know what would be the one thing that would make me drop my jaw to the floor? A plottwist of unseen scale. Something on par with literally everything since the Infinity Train arc being STILL just a dream. Something on par with “Muzan” as he is now being actually the new Upper Five while the real Muzan stands back and enjoys the show. Something on par with this “Muzan” being just an illussion or a projection of something, or someone, who’s been in the Fortress this whole time while the real Muzan heads over to Urokodaki’s place to devour Nezuko. Or something even crazier. If you have any ideas, damn hit me with them, I want to hear all you have to say and feed this little flame of hope that this series is not yet entirely lost!

[lawyernovelist]

Legolas’ Mother

So I was fighting with a big post on Legolas in the Hobbit Movies when I started down a rabbit hole. After an hour or so, I decided that this rabbit hole was seriously drifting off the main topic, but it was interesting and something I'd not really looked hard at, so I decided to give it its own post.

Let's talk about Legolas' mother.

Spoilers for the Hobbit movies.

Now, in the books we don't know what happened to the queen of Mirkwood. She must have existed because elves don't reproduce by budding, but we don't know her name, where she came from, or even whether she's alive, Sailed, or dead. As a result, I don't mind the movies deciding that she's dead. There's a lot I do mind about how they handled it, some of which I already went into in other places, but I don't mind the fact that she's dead provided nobody uses it as a Tolkien canon fact, because it ain't.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about some of the ways her death was handled in the movies, beginning with how and when she's talked about.

I would love to see the stuff that was cut from Legolas' plotline. And I don't mean "I should watch the Extended Edition", I mean "I want to see the shooting scripts". Plural, because these movies are such a mess that I bet there was more than one. In fact, I know there was more than one because of this:

Sorry about the weird colour balance in a few places; I wanted to make the details clear. The yellow bars show changes in costume; as you can see Tauriel sometimes changes costume between shots within the same scene.

Add this:

And you've got yourself the ragged edges where two shoots were mashed together.

My point, though, is about Legolas' mother, the Legolas-Thranduil Denouement scene, and Legolas' arc.

See, the Gundabad scene and the Denouement both have a few things in common. First, they're the only times in the movies that what Legolas is doing isn't about Tauriel. She's still involved in the Gundabad scene, but as I've mentioned before her role is as follows:

Enrapture me with your words, my darling!

Because, you know, strong, independent, and empowering. Anyway, my point isn't to criticise Tauriel. Gundabad is the only time that Legolas actually goes off to do his own thing rather than just following, sniffing after, and defending Tauriel, and as such I think might bear some closer examination in this context, especially given the second thing the Gundabad scene and the Denouement have in common: Legolas' mother.

Those are the only times Legolas' mother is definitely mentioned. There's one other possible reference - the High Treason scene - and I'll get back to that, but she is definitely mentioned in those two scenes.

Now, the Gundabad scene is and remains pointless in the final theatrical cut of the movie. There are theories that it's meant to tie in the White Council subplot, but I think that's kind of a reach. What I think is far more likely is that the centrepiece of the Gundabad scene is this line:

Legolas: My mother died there. My father does not speak of it. There is no grave, no memory, nothing.

That's brand new information. For a long time I thought it was the writers throwing a bone to the many fangirls Thranduil had picked up by making him a bit more sympathetic. "I know every other appearance and mention of this guy says that he's an unredeemable asshole, but hey, he's in mourning for his dead wife, so you can tell he's wearing leather pants under that robe." (Warning: TVTropes link). That would, after all, explain why this scene had absolutely nothing to do with anything and was never mentioned again: last-minute, they pulled Bloom and Lilly onto a greenscreen set and got Bloom to read a speech off a teleprompter, then spliced it into the movie.

Recently, I looked again at the dialogue in the scene and realised that at no point does Legolas actually say that Thranduil is in mourning for his dead wife. He just baldly states the fact that she's dead and never talked about. So what is going on here?

Now, I have a low opinion of Bloom's acting skills and of the competence of the scriptwriters, so this could be nothing more than that it was supposed to be telling us that Thranduil is handling his grief badly and that's why he's acting the way he is, but it didn't come across in the scene. That could be all it is, but I'd like to take this opportunity to go back to my favourite scene in Battle of the Five Armies: the High Treason scene. Specifically, this line:

Tauriel: You think your life is worth more than theirs when there is no love in it? There is no love in you!

I hate this scene so much.

Anyway, that's weird in conjunction with the Gundabad scene. This one I did for a long time blame on incompetence, because surely they didn't mean for Tauriel to say something so monstrously hurtful when she just heard all about how Thranduil is deeply in mourning for his wife, right? She's not supposed to be evil! So I chalked it up, again, to the Gundabad scene and its accompanying characterisation being added at the last minute in a hurry, and nobody was paying enough attention to catch this.

But if this revelation isn't supposed to make Thranduil sympathetic, we can look at those lines together and consider that maybe this is intentional: that the takeaway is supposed to be that Thranduil didn't love his wife and/or doesn't love her memory.

At no point in either of the two movies she's in is Tauriel allowed to misjudge a situation or be unreasonable. She's always presented as right and all her choices work out for the best regardless of her knowledge or motivations. There's no way she was supposed to be in the wrong here, especially given that her main informed attribute is compassion. We're supposed to agree with her.

And that's consistent with what we're told about Thranduil's motivations: that he's obsessed with getting this necklace but never seems to have any emotional connection to his son and never brings up his wife himself, even when talking to Legolas... until the Denouement.

The Denouement is the scene in which the movie gives Thranduil a final good kick by having Legolas cut ties with him, but it's also one of the few really heartfelt emotional moments it allows him. And I mean moments that the movie actually cares to show us, as opposed to here:

In which Pace is acting his heart out but we're clearly not meant to be focussed on it.

The Denouement is also the scene after Kili's Deathbed, in which we see that the purity of Tauriel and Kili's true love has brought cruel, selfish, and heartless Thranduil round to the side of the righteous. And it's only after that that he actually talks to Legolas and for the first time mentions his wife.

Remember how much I like the rule of three? Once is chance, twice is coincidence, and thrice is a pattern. Setup, reminder, payoff; this is a recurring thing in filmmaking structure (Spoilers for Suicide Squad, less in the second video than the first). In this case, the Gundabad scene sets up that there's something weird going on with Thranduil's relationship to his dead wife: one way or the other, he's not processing grief in a particularly healthy way, whether we're supposed to sympathise with him or not. The question of Thranduil's relationship to the memory of his wife is then mentioned again when Tauriel says there is no love in him: the reminder. Then, in the Denouement, it finally pays off as Thranduil actually talks about his wife for the first time in the trilogy and, it's implied from the Gundabad scene, possibly for the first time since she died...

And what he says is that she loved Legolas.

Look, this isn't a big thing. In the grand scheme of things it doesn't especially matter. However, it kind of annoys me nonetheless because you're not answering the question you asked. You set up "did/does Thranduil love his wife?" and your answer was "Thranduil's wife loved Legolas". That's nice, but not what you set up.

This is why I want the shooting scripts, because there's the ghost of at least one plot here. Are we seeing what's left of an arc in which Thranduil learns the value of love, having reacted to heartbreak in the past by rejecting love and declaring it to have no value or that as an entity it's not real? Are we seeing what's left of a story about Legolas finally learning more about his mother than the bald fact of where and when she died (in which case I hope there was more to it than him just learning how she felt about him specifically and nothing about her as a person and her place in the world, but I digress)? Are we seeing what's left of a subplot in which after years of emotional distance Thranduil and Legolas finally find that they share grief for a dead loved one, just as their relationship falls apart entirely? What is this?

Did a setup of Legolas doubting his mother's love hit the cutting-room floor? Was there a last-minute change to the Denouement scene because Legolas' development was considered more important than Thranduil's and nobody realised that Legolas has no relationship with his mother that might make this meaningful?

OK, I know, I'm obsessing. It's just that I am actually kind of annoyed that they killed off this female character for manpain without even giving her the dignity of a name, and if you're going to do that then at least do it well.

So much for what actually talking about Thranduil's wife could have done for the stories of the men in her life. Let's talk about what it could have done for the story of a woman who judging by what we can make out about these stupid stories ought to have been in her life.

Yeah, so it seems reasonable to assume that Legolas and Tauriel are at least a similar age. Thranduil has favoured and generally looked after Tauriel for 600 years, which given that she's apparently supposed to be very young would be a good chunk of her life. We also know from behind-the-scenes stuff that the intention was for that necklace to have been commissioned by Thranduil for his wife, definitely less than 600 years ago because Thorin was an adult. All of that builds a strong case that Tauriel was an adult and at least close to the royal family when the necklace was commissioned, and Thranduil's wife was presumably still alive at that time. If these timelines make sense, Tauriel knew Legolas' mother.

OK, I'm breaking my own rule by bringing in behind-the-scenes stuff. From the movies, all we know is that Tauriel's been a member of the family for 600 years, because nothing about the necklace is ever mentioned in the movies except that Thranduil wants it and Thror withheld it. This is another great example of how everything to do with Legolas' mother was kind of last minute and extremely poorly integrated, which makes it even more obnoxious that grief for her death was supposed to be a major portion of the motivation of one of the main antagonists.

Anyway, let's assume that we don't know any of the behind-the-scenes stuff. All we know is that Tauriel has been closely involved with Thranduil for 600 years. Even so, why doesn't she know anything about Thranduil's wife? I know Thranduil never talks about her (yeah, nice get-out there, movie), but is the Day Trip to Gundabad really the first time Legolas has ever felt the need to raise the subject? I assume these two are friends otherwise their interaction makes no sense, so why had Legolas apparently never discussed his mother with the woman he's sufficiently fond of that he's prepared to go into exile with her? Did Thranduil not only decide never to talk about his wife again himself but also make it an offence punishable by death for anyone else to talk about her?

This is another thing that continues to suggest that everything about the Gundabad scene and Legolas' mother was added at the last minute and without much thought. Why isn't the memory of Legolas' mother a presence in Tauriel's life? Even if we assume she never met her, which is possible based on the theatrical editions - say, she died when Legolas was a baby and Legolas is a few years older than Tauriel - why wasn't she presented as a role model? Or a cautionary tale? Why doesn't Tauriel comment that Thranduil himself married a "lowly Silvan elf"? Why doesn't Legolas see similarities between Tauriel and his mother and thus worry about Tauriel because he doesn't want her to go the same way? Why doesn't Tauriel pass an image of Legolas' mother holding a bow and hold her own a little more proudly at the reminder of another powerful female warrior?

Well, because all of those things would require the movie to have put any thought at all into Legolas' mother as a character beyond "she's dead and Thranduil's maybe sad about that".

Jeez, at least when they unnecessarily killed Bard's wife in his backstory they knew what effect it had had on him.

So let's talk about that necklace, shall we?

In my mind the question of why the necklace is so under-used is kind of like the dress, to use an ancient meme, only instead of blue or white it's incompetent or lazy. Did they not realise that it might be a good idea to explain the significance of the necklace in the theatrical releases of the films, or did they just come up with it at the last minute and not bother to include it properly?

There's evidence for both, you see: we see from the Arkenstone that they're perfectly capable of completely dropping an artefact that's been the centre of large chunks of plot, so it could be incompetence, but then again we have the Gundabad scene, which continues to be last-minute, irrelevant to the plot, and completely perfunctory.

Look, movie, I'm going to have words about villains in some later post - villains in general, not just in The Hobbit, since I talked about that already - but preview: you've set up Thranduil as the kind of villain who actually needs to be a character. That means that he needs motivation. You kind of tried to make it as that he has some kind of grudge with Thorin and that maybe he wants treasure, but to be honest "he wants treasure so he's bad" is not a great route to take with this given what your heroes are there to do.

I'm really not sure what the story was supposed to be behind the necklace. My first assumption is that they never even intended the necklace to be anything other than a sparkly thing that Thranduil wants, and the idea that it's a memento of his wife came later. However, I happen to know that in the deleted scenes (I don't know if this scene made it back into the extended edition and frankly I don't care) the necklace and its significance actually are raised:

(Source)

First: Gandalf, you're an asshole.

Second: Why was this scene cut? No, really. I mean, I know it presents Gandalf as an asshole, but they left in plenty of other scenes that also did that. It's seconds long, so surely length wasn't a consideration. I really don't know why it was cut, and I actually think it would have improved things if left in.

Gandalf's reputation isn't salvageable at this point; however you feel about Movie!Gandalf it's probably not going to be changed by this. This scene does, however, explain basically everything about Thranduil. It explains what the deal is with him and the necklace. It demonstrates that his distant attitude to Legolas is actually deliberate on the part of the film-makers. It answers the question of how he's handling his grief. It could set up him trying one last time to connect with Legolas, making the Denouement scene an actual attempt at payoff. It even, as a special gift to you, movie, does all those things while telling us he's a dick!

Sometimes I wonder if they were actively trying to be inept at this point. Was this some deliberate decision to not explain Thranduil's motivations at all because that might make us question the heroes' behaviour towards him? Or was it, like everything else to do with the necklace, just something tossed together in reshoots at the last minute and they decided not to include this one?

The necklace is another demonstration of how pointless the "Thranduil's wife is dead" backstory element really was just because it never plays into the narrative of the theatrical editions of the movies. It doesn't matter that the necklace belonged to Thranduil's dead wife. Whatever might be said in behind-the-scenes stuff or deleted scenes, it remains a sparkly piece of jewellery that he considers to be his property. The fact that he considers it his never even matters beyond that one line about "I came to reclaim something of mine" that appeared in all the trailers and pissed off everyone who liked him in the book.

Honestly I think that was a last-minute addition as well; the fact that the "white gems" Thranduil mentions in Desolation of Smaug are his doesn't come up before or after that one line, and honestly I think that conversation with Thorin would have been the place: "white gems that I too desire" changes to "white gems whose return I desire" or something.

This has been a bit of a ramble, but I just wanted to do a whirlwind tour of how badly these movies handled Thranduil's wife. A lot of people have accused them of fridging her, but to be honest this is worse than fridging; at least fridging has a point. At least fridging means that the character affects the narrative, even just by her death motivating her menfolk to take action. All Thranduil's wife gets is a few throwaway lines that mean nothing. As far as the actual narrative of these movies and the motivation and emotions of the other characters are concerned, she never even existed. Tauriel apparently thought Legolas was produced by budding and as such has never even been curious about his mother. Thranduil is motivated by sparkly. Legolas has no emotional connection to her and his arc and relationship with Thranduil are predicated on Tauriel.

That is worse than if they'd killed her to motivate Thranduil and give Legolas an arc.