#because the narrative is her fault

[stromuprisahat]

Siege and Storm- Chapter 4

I didn't remember Genya disobeyed a direct order. Sure, I knew she didn’t shoot Alina or any of her helpers, but the Darkling ordered her. So I did not-so-quick search for suitable punishment in 1800s:

Figure 1 : Punishments inflicted by British courts-martial 1865-1867 32

... For example, the 1876 version outlined a number of military offences for which the death penalty could be applied. These included mutiny, sedition, desertion, cowardice, sleeping at or leaving a post, striking or using violence towards a superior officer and disobedience 42.

When we’re there, death doesn’t mean a bullet in the head:

In 1800, British Army regulations listed no fewer than 222 offenses that could draw the death penalty, and corporal punishment in the form of flogging was taken to such an extreme that sentences of as many as 500 lashes were regularly ordered. That number of lashes was enough to kill a man, a fact which led several contemporaneous observers to question the ultimate intent of such punishment. ...

There are even mentions of Russia in the first article:

This clinging to flogging and the branding of offenders was not exclusive to the British. Russian courts-martial could order corporal punishments to be administered summarily in the presence of a soldier's company or battalion 38. 

...

Even in Tsarist Russia the death penalty was rarely used in criminal cases – although continued use of the knout resulted in many deaths and little restraint was shown in the army.

It’s also relatively safe to assume Ravka will lean into harsher punishments, since their wars are dragging and defensive, which rarely works for more humanitarian approach. They need to make their soldiers obey, even though their prospects are beyond bleak.

Genya didn’t pay with her life, or deep welts on her back, but magical facial disfigurement. Extensive branding, if you want.

(Btw, huge fan of the choice of words. Mutilated person= WHAT...)

Brutal? Undeniably.

Personal? So was her betrayal and the Darkling is a petty bitch, who rarely does anything for a single reason.

Genya’s disfigurement served as her punishment, vivid reminder he won’t tolerate such behaviour- he needs reliable support, not indecision- and later a weapon against Alina.

Genya’s fate is setting-appropriate, my only objection is possible lack of public trial and perhaps that the Darkling would serve as prosecutor, judge and executor. But then again we don’t know much about the usual inner workings of Second Army, so he might serve as those even in other cases.

[cruelplatonic]

my personal headcanon is the vees were unremarkable nobodies when they were alive. i just love it as a thematic throughline for them. they love to let the public of hell speculate on them being famed and acclaimed since before death, but the the truth is they were a d-list failed influencer that got by on cheap controversey and scamming, a broke junkie who burned every shaky bridge he ever had, and a worn-out broadcast production assistant with more rejected auditions and tossed out script pitches than he could count. nobody missed them when they were gone, nobody cared who they were until they were dead.

[wildflowercryptid]

some silly goofy cavallari siblings memes for your enjoyment! ( jules is so tired. )

[diadoodledump]

I've been beating this drum for a hot minute but I will never not be bothered by the revision of Catharine and Willis Todd's being reframed to just be abusive addicts, which isn't a great thiiing.

but from a writing standpoint, there is the potential for that reframing to have been done by the actual characters, and having the reframing of Jason's death and becoming the red hood as being inevitable because of his background being a form of internalized classism of well, Bruce. there's something very interesting in the idea that in Bruce's grief of Jason's death, and then the grief of his return, he pushes the responsibility onto the thing he couldn't control, Jason's past.

idk obviously dc would never, but it would be fascinating to have the narrative be self aware and make it a shitty thing the writers just kinda did be examined and challenged in-universe.

[sainteda]

hotd finale spoilers

i think the core issue w the finale scene isn't alicent's willingness to cleave to rhaenyra for mercy as otto once warned her she would or even to recognize that to finally choose a life for herself her sons will likely die (although an 8ep season missing integral scenes like a confrontation w aemond immediately post-s1 or more impact from b&c [given instead to a mishandled alicole plot] is also a big problem), it's the viserys worship ingrained in his every mention or lack thereof. alicent has to recycle an arc of powerlessness she's already endured her entire life, as if to drill into the minds of an audience that was already unwilling to sympathize with her that — actually — she's powerless! who would have thought! because the show refuses to recognize viserys for what he was, or at the VERY LEAST what he did to her, alicent's journey to rhaenyra (and more importantly, away from court) has to be borne of a million new heavy-handed methods the writers have concocted to hit her while she's down, and then hit her again. and again. and again.

alicent can't come to rhaenyra and plead her case while simultaneously reckoning with her anger that this is not new! this is not just her sons or the green council! she was sold off by her only family to the father of the only person she ever chose and it caused her to lose her and she was a child! she never wanted to marry viserys. she never wanted her children. he forced her to have them and then he discarded them and he's lauded even in death for his consideration and judiciousness when he never considered her. why can't she be angry at him!! why bother writing her grief over who she could have been without acknowledging one of the two people who took that version of her away? it's so hollow. the alicent who seeks out rhaenyra on dragonstone is needlessly humbled, lobotomized, and her lines read almost as if she's pleading her case to the audience instead of rhaenyra herself. why can she not be desperate to be heard while the epiphany of not only her lack of autonomy but of personhood itself fights not to bubble over the surface? shouldn't her grief be heaviest now, for not even knowing herself but coming to rhaenyra anyway? rhaenyra who might be the only choice she can remember making? isn't there an inherent anger in that? she could have taken helena and jaehera and gone as far as possible but she's here, before her opposition, grasping at an olive branch she knows is broken, because it's what she would have done the last time she was a person who could choose. it's what she wanted twenty years ago, and what else is there. there's been no alicent since but whoever she had to be to keep herself and her children alive. isn't that fucked up??? hello???

i understand it's a reversal of the scene in the sept so rhaenyra is shutting alicent down but it just makes alicent's path to freedom to look more like a new form of submission. as if her fears weren’t justified. as if her anger in season 1 was petty jealousy rectified once she Saw The Light (rhaenyra). anyways. regardless of hes that she's talking about her and rhaenyra through viserys and aemma, i really don't think i can overstate the wrongness of alicent speaking fondly of him in a scene that's supposed to be about her coming to terms with a lifetime of being used particularly by men — and still continuing to extol a man who quite literally raped her in a scene that is In the show. am i supposed to forget the marital rape of a child bride? the one that they put in the show. on purpose. ??? how am i supposed to view that as anything but disingenuous?

[starry-eyer]

question: how can you adore elia when she’s barely a character?

we do not know enough about this character for her to even have stans.

stanning elia is illogical at best, completely delusional and very concerning at worst.

because what even is it that is being stanned and adored? your self insert?

[devondespresso]

writing my silly little fic and again im struck with how much opportunities they missed by pretending the s2 stancy breakup wasn't messy, specifically for Nancy's guilt about barb and forcing herself to grow up too fast

like s1 Nancy spends one night being a stupid teenager goofing off at her boyfriend's party and staying over to get spicy while Barb goes home. then she later realizes Barb disappeared and died that one night she was letting go and having fun. this is widely recognized trauma for her and informs a lot if not most of her actions through the rest of the show

in season 2 she's feeling the weight of it more around the first year anniversary. steve trys to help by taking her to a party to forget for a little while and 'be stupid teenagers' for a night. a perfectly set up parallel already

the way the show wants it to go, we get the bullshit argument, they fight, allegedly break up at some point, and nancy sleeps with Jonathan. later steve tells her to go with him and we're supposed to read it as Steve stepping back so jancy can happen. we're supposed to be seeing this as a happy ending.

but with the material we're given this would have been the perfect place for an emotional repeat of season 1 for nancy. she and steve go to the party and pretend to be stupid teenagers for the night. but oh no! nancy lets lose too much, lets herself relax and drink and dance, and the next day her boyfriend's pissed. hes saying she said things she never remembered saying and its hurt him and she doesn't know what to do. and kids around school are talking about them breaking up at the party, and that fits with Steve's anger she saw, so they must've broken up right? it sucks, even if she wasn't in love with him, that'd be the worst way to break up with someone (especially if she's confusing platonic and romantic feelings or convincing herself it has to be romantic when she really just values him as a friend)

and then she doesn't have time to work it out, she needs to go with Jonathan to avenge barbs 'disappearance' to give her family closure. She's got a lot of conspiracy shit to do and its stressful. so when murray starts going off about how she's not really in love with steve, how she actually likes Jonathan and he seems to like her back. they finished a lot of the hard work with the conspiracy stuff, she can let her guard down and have a quick good night.

then the next day is chaos. demodogs and labs and will being possessed. It a rough fucking day. Steve tells her to go with Jonathan while they get the mindflayer out of Will, civil like they're on good terms so she does (and thank god she did because that was rough and they needed all the help they could get)

and then everything's fine again, with the upside down. and it looks like she handled things better this time, was about to relax occasionally and still made it through.

except apparently she and steve didn't break up. he thought it was just a few fights, that they put their shit aside for the apocalypse and now they can work things out.

and it could ruin nancy. a year later and she's still hasn't learned her lesson, that letting her guard down hurts the people she cares about, that relaxing and having fun makes her lose people. its her fault for the messy breakup with Steve and its her fault that barb is gone. she's the reason she's lost friends close to her, 2 for 2, and now she only has Jonathan left (and what do you know, season 3 has her conflict with Jonathan and in season 4 she's not let anyone else get truly close to her and fred still dies)

you see what i mean?? by having conflict magical resolve itself in the background we loose so much powerful, painful character drama for her. our girl who thinks she has to keep the world around her up solely on her shoulders because she can't handle the loss of her best friend in season 1. Nancy who desperately wants to be normal and have people she loves but keeps losing them, through factors both in and out of her control, but feels like everything has to be her fault just because some things were.

and to be fair, that story is still present in the show. its there and definitely compelling, but it could've been even more so. i feel like if maybe there was less 'nancy has to be a strong independent girlboss' in there (abd it's definitely there, they want to make a point of making her a Strong Woman Character so bad) and she was allowed to have mistakes acknowledged by the narrative, this is the direction it would've gone. She could've been an excellent example of well written women who are strong and awesome through their own right instead of the narrative trying to make us like her

[winepresswrath]

Oh so you are one of the jiang' soupbot' yanli who will throw jiang cheng under the bus for little xianxian. Cool

this like the time someone accused me of only caring about Wei Wuxian's feelings. thank you for the laugh anon but also are you lost.

[fate-defiant]

Duck hits different when you're no longer thirteen and in the throes of navigating friendships for the very first time and defining yourself by your social ineptitude.

[my-elder-scrolls-shit]

I've been replaying skyrim and- "Uh oh, Aph! Are you getting philosophical about a mid game that you've played 80 billion times now?" Yes, of course I am. Now, my take of the day is Astrid gets a bad rap in the fandom

If you have personal qualms for whatever reason with her (Cicero fan, upset she got everyone killed, her voice, whatever it may be), that's totally fine! However! I just finished the dbh quest line again, and she's honestly not as terrible as we've been painting her, I feel.

When you first join, she's pretty attentive - clearly keeping an eye on you because you're new, but as you prove yourself and she can worry less, she seems to almost losen up. I do think she asks you to do things that she wouldn't ask anyone else because she's testing you or because you're new and she's not as attached yet, but its clear she has some kind if concern for you and your safety. Especially when the Nightmother incident happens, and she thinks Cicero might have attempted to hurt you. Then shit hits the fan (in her eyes)

Now, here's something that might sound strange - I don't think she decides to sell you out until the last possible minute. Why would she ask you to find her husband otherwise? Why would she keep sending you out to further the plot against the emperor and keep rewarding you? These are shows of trust- and while maybe some could be seen as implicating you further as the sole thorn in the side of the emperor, again, why send you to kill Cicero- to help Abjorn? Someone she loves and cares for deeply? Why not send someone more experienced?

I think maybe her paranoia ramps up after the Cicero incident for sure- she gets more flighty and decides right around when you are going to kill the emperor, when things are seriously about to change, does she panic. I mean, imagine you've led a group for years and some stranger you brought into your family like last week, and a jester who brought a sacred corpse with him is claiming the stranger is supposed to be the faction leader and the only one who can hear the dead lady's voice! That's a shit deal! What the fuck!

If something goes wrong, everything will go wrong. She's probably not had a lot of control in her life previously (note: her story about her uncle making "unwanted advances" makes me think maybe it's something that had been happening and she finally decided to kill him after snapping but she definitely glosses over it very quickly in favor of being murder happy which is understandable) and now that control is once again slipping and everyone else can see she's paranoid (multiple members comment on it if you talk to them before hopping in the Nightmothers coffin the first time) so it's not a big surprise that you, the threat to her status quo and control, seem like the one to take out

And it all goes to shit! And she seems so desperately and genuinely sorry on her death bed - everyone she loved and cared for is dead, mind you. This is a woman who has lost everything and is now begging to die for a greater good and a desperate apology to you and to the people she's hurt. The game clearly doesn't want you to forgive her (based on the dialog options it presents), but i wish we could at least say something kind. But I that might just be me

[anakinh]

finally watching arcane for obvious reasons (and also mel is so beautiful) and here's my review of season 1 episode 3:

powder, that was the least effective bombing ever. one (1) good guy left standing. one (1) bad guy dead. okay to be fair two (2) good guys left standing and one (1) bad guy dead and then one of the good guys killed one of the bad guys so now it's one (1) good guy left standing and two (2) bad guys dead. anyway. main boss? alive. his case of evil hulk drug? still standing. truly, uh, well, jinxed.

[dollypopup]

I think it's real obvious that if you actually like Colin you don't belong in the Polin fandom. y'all are all so ableist about him and think the absolute worst of him and a huge number of the posts and fics are romanticizing Penelope straight up abusing him

we should make a new tag because this one is NOT it

[greensaplinggrace]

hate it when people say alina didn’t choose anything in the series as if she wasn’t out here making choices based directly on her own wants and as if she wasn’t out here wanting so many things and as if she wasn’t out here pushing towards a destination she was determined to reach.

she’s forced into many situations but she finds her way out of them, she acts with her own intentions, and she isn’t some wallflower poor helpless victim you can claim is blameless in her own actions. throughout the books, she suffers from writing choices that constantly have her reacting to things instead of taking the initiative. but that doesn’t mean she never does, and that doesn’t mean that when she does, her actions aren’t her own. stop erasing her character to make her more of a helpless victim. 

this is the girl who used the cut on the skiff and abandoned people to die. this is the girl who brought a chapel down on the darkling’s head. this is the girl who looked the apparat in the face and turned the tables of power on him in an instant. why is everyone in this fandom obsessed with making the female characters one dimensional victims whose only character trait is that they’ve been hurt?! it’s obscene.

one of the only things she didn’t choose was having her powers stripped from her in the end. but the people who are ready to strip her of all agency throughout the narrative are suddenly ready to claim this was her intentional sacrifice all along when it textually wasn’t just because it serves their ‘pure victim’ image of her in their minds. please.

[ms-all-sunday]

curious about your thoughts on eugenics re:wci

i think you were opening something bigger than you realized because the way eugenics is treated in wci is why i think wci is objectively the weakest part of op. i have gone on record saying i dont like how judge is handled but i would like how judge is handled significantly better if the way the narrative about the eugenics wasn't so contradictory.

as it stands now i think the fact nobody aknowledges as i put it "the fact going against eugenics isnt determined by the way that you were born" in regards to the poison narrative (as i mentioned before, the fact sora takes poison to stop eugenics from happening but it's used later to justify why sanji is nice, leading the audience to believe that was biologically determined. which is eugenics) means that the logic behind eugenics but not the appearance of eugenics gets validated.

it's a really shallow narrative in a way that reads as out of character for oda a guy who can generally handle nuance incredibly well. as to why this is i have no idea the mystery of wci will remain unsolved until the end of time i think.

this logic negatively affects everything in wci in regards to the vinsmokes because I'm assuming here, the intent is that the vinsmokes arent emotionless and judge is a bad scientist (men when you tell them anger is an emotion🤬) but absolutely none of that is acknowledged within the actual narrative to detrimental affects to everybody involved but most egregiously reiju and sanjis relationship and them individually.

wci makes me feel like im going insane in this regard because lets start out with the obvious. reiju should've left and not sanji, by her own logic that should be true. reiju decided sanji had emotions and therefore he should leave, but crucially, she had emotions. she should leave.

"oh but reiju wasnt abused and favoured because she had powers" alright lets accept that that's true.

is reiju even supposed to be an abuse victim?

because she is and i dont think anybody would deny that. she consistently favours men in her life over herself despite being more capable and intelligent than sanji is. she thinks she's a worthless monster because of how men have treated her in her life. her narrative is almost exclusively a tragedy of how she consistently favours most notably sanji over herself. and if she favours men over herself and they dont care about her why would they care if she left?

maybe because shes an abuse victim and percieves it like she's crucial to them because of conditioning, if she was really an objective logic monster by her own reasoning she would've left with sanji because she would've realized they dont give a damn about her.

and oda knows what sexism is. he's familiar. i can't imagine he'd write something like this on accident.

the only logic in which the narrative presented works is if you take everything at face value, which as we've discussed isn't even right- it's like an ouroboros of not making any damn sense on so many layers its so fucking frustrating and i have no idea what oda is doing with any of it

and dont even get me started on the "evil sanji is a switch you can get flipped on" stuff. thats so fucking painfully stupid, that's not how eugenics work, that's not how anything works. that's not how the experience of being an abuse victim works (sanji very obviously has internalized judges ideology and the idea theres a switch you can flip on to turn him evil is so stupid sanji is already "evil" in this exact way to some degree. hes got internalized bullshit he externalizes constantly) none of that is grounded in reality and it's not even a coherent argument even related to eugenics anymore it might as well be magic, because it's nothing.

if i had to guess what went wrong here is that judge and the concept of eugenics got wapoled (protraying something as bad but not having any coherent argument against it, something in earlier chapters oda does quite often. wapol a prime example) but oda had more or less grown out of that since post timeskip so what the fuck!

thesis: reiju is the first badly written woman oda has ever put to page and abuse victim switch you can flip on is so comically terrible it makes me want to put my head in a meat grinder.

[youngpettyqueen]

I wish we got more episodes that explored Margaret and the nurses and their relationships that were like. written well

[todusts]

also re:pyrrha and her death this is so autistic of me but i enjoy the way she haunts the narrative, haunts each character's every choice, in the same way adam haunts the narrative in the saw movies. her death propels the plot, yes, but it also provides strength to (and, generally, shows vulnerability in) the characters. ruby unlocks her silver eyes because of pyrrha, and uses her death (and summer's) to stand firm on her choices. jaune is shown affected by pyrrha most, and honestly, for good reason. she was his friend and teammate and realizing that she loved him the whole time and in a sense also died for him is hard. very hard! from her death onwards, he is always thinking about her. and it's not just her- nora and ren lost her too, after all. she was their friend too, she was loved by them too. it's even more personal for ren, however, because he's lost everything before. losing pyrrha is a stinging reminder of that but also another new wave of grief. he's lost his family but the universe didn't stop there; it took pyrrha from him too. who else is next? this is something that i think nora is also keenly aware of- it's why she's constantly trying to bring him to the present.