#because you can’t write a story if you aren’t willing to commit to your characters doing whatever it is to make the story go

[vacantgodling]

on that post cy made in regards to problematic characters… tbh i don’t think i make problematic characters. not because they don’t do bad things but just the words “problematic” and “characters” do not exist in my mind or vocabulary in conjunction**. i have multifaceted fucks that make a variety of decisions that make sense for their arc and their story. they are also fictional people. yes they can kill people and be manipulative idc they’re not real lmao

[pedroscurls]

Dirty Little Secret (Part 5).

Character(s): no-outbreak, age-gap!Joel Miller x fem!Reader Summary: You and Joel finally have a serious conversation during Drew and Sarah’s rehearsal dinner.  Word count: 3.1k  A/N: You know, this story was supposed to just be purely smut (minimal plot), but I've fallen in love with this pairing so much and have enjoyed writing Joel's POV. We're in for an emotional ride with this one, so enjoy! Warning: age-gap (Joel is in his 50s, reader is in her early-30s), sneaking around, things get emotional!!! SERIES MASTERLIST - ultimate masterlist

“Rehearsal dinner is tonight,” Joel says quietly, lips pressed lightly against the back of your bare shoulder. He’s been spending more and more time here with you, in your apartment. It’s starting to become a bit domesticated because he comes by once he’s finished with work, you cook dinner (sometimes even together), and then you spend the rest of the night in each other’s arms, falling asleep and waking up the next morning by each other’s side. 

The fear that lingered in the back of your mind begins to take a more prominent role the more time he spends with you. You aren’t sure if this is something you want, but you can’t deny the fact that there is something that you can’t explain when it comes to Joel. He makes you feel safe, makes you feel seen and heard, and it’s something that you never experienced from a partner. Partner? Lover? You’re not quite sure what to call him, what to label your relationship with him as, but a part of you can’t ignore the pull and tug you feel in your heart whenever he’s near. 

“I know Sarah and Drew are both ready to just get this whole thing over with and be married already,” you respond, turning on your back and looking over in his direction. His hair has gotten a bit longer, still messy, curling at the nape of his neck and at his ears. It’s something that you’re beginning to like more and more, especially when you get to run your fingers through it. Joel’s staring at you with a look in his eyes that you haven’t seen before. He’s looking at you with pure admiration and it makes you blush. 

No one’s ever looked at you the way Joel is doing right now.

“Oh, I reckon it’s a lot of work,” Joel chuckles. “All these parties… M’surprised Drew’s keeping up with it.” 

“Well, he likes to keep your girl happy,” you smile. “Drew loves Sarah so much. He’d do anything for her.” 

Joel smiles. “They’re a good fit. Tried to intimidate him the first time I met him, but when I saw the way he was looking at my babygirl, I knew it was serious. I knew that she’d be in good hands.” 

“It must be nice to be loved like that,” you blurt out. You’re not sure why you said it, but you can’t help but feel a pang of envy to be loved the way Drew and Sarah love each other. They walk into a room and you can just feel the love they share, the way they look at each other seems like they just fall in love all over again… It’s a love that you’ve heard countless stories of, seen movies about, but never got to experience yourself. You try to tell yourself that it’s not something you want - commitment - but you would be lying if you said you never thought about it. 

And you’d certainly be lying if you said you never thought about it with Joel. 

Joel looks at you and his smile falters. He feels his heart break just a tiny bit at your admission. He wants to say that the feelings he has for you are so serious that he’s finding himself falling for you. He wants to tell you that you’re so deserving of all the love and that he’s the one willing to give it. He wants to tell you that since you came into his life, it’s changed for the better. 

But he doesn’t. 

Instead, he just reaches up to cup your cheek and places a light kiss on your lips. 

“Maybe you just haven’t found the right guy, darlin’,” he finally says. 

You look at him and bite the inside of your cheek. He’s no longer looking at you with admiration and you can see the walls he’s building around himself because now he looks closed off. It hurts to know that the one person you might be falling in love with isn’t someone that you’re meant to be with. 

“Maybe,” you force a smile and sit up from bed. You turn your back to him and bite your lower lip, dressed only in his t-shirt and a pair of panties. You stand up from bed and glance over your shoulder at him and you swear that you could see his brows furrow in confusion, his lips in a small pout, but the wedding is near, which also means the end of your relationship with Joel is just right around the corner. “I’m gonna shower.”

“Need company?” Joel asks.

You shake your head. Maybe it’s best to start pulling away, put some distance between the both of you. “As much as I’d love that, I have a few things planned today.” 

“Oh,” Joel replies. “Should I get goin’ then?” 

You nod. “Yeah, think that’s best.” 

Joel bites his lower lip and stands from bed. He pulls on his jeans and takes note of the shirt that you’re wearing. He doesn’t want to leave. He doesn’t like that the energy has shifted, but he knows that this is for the best. He knows you’re pulling away and as much as it hurts him, he knows this is the only way this is going to go. 

“Keep the shirt,” Joel says. “I’ve got a sweater in the truck.” 

“You sure?” 

Joel nods. He walks over to you and places a soft kiss on your forehead and wraps his arms around you. He feels you lean into him, tighten your arms around him, and let out a quiet, but shaky sigh. He wants to tell you that he’s falling so hard for you, but he has to remind himself that you deserve someone better than him. 

“See you tonight, baby.” Joel says, pulling away from you to look down into your eyes. 

You nod, not meeting his eyes or holding eye contact like you usually would. You kiss his cheek and turn on your heel to walk to the bathroom. When Joel sees the door shut, he lets out a sigh and begins to leave once he hears the water run. He feels his heart breaking a little bit when he leaves your apartment because part of him already knows that this is the beginning of the end. 

Joel had tried to prepare himself, but he didn’t expect the sudden rush of emotions and feelings that came with it. That came with you. 

He doesn’t want this to end, he doesn’t want to let you go, but he’s heard from Sarah and Drew that settling down and commitment isn’t something that ever interests you. Joel remembers the way you had told him how rough your childhood was and how Drew and his family had kept you afloat. He remembers the way his heart tugs and how he had wrapped his arms around you, silently telling you that you deserved the world. 

—

Tommy is leaning against the kitchen counter, dressed in black slacks and a black cable knit polo shirt that hugs his frame. His hair is pulled back into a small bun as he runs his hand over his short beard. Joel’s descending the stairs dressed in a black pants and a dark green button-down shirt with his sleeves folded to his elbows. His hair is neat, slicked back, and his beard is trimmed and clean-cut. 

Tommy notices the way his older brother continues to check his phone and he has to wonder if it’s because he’s texting to Sarah, but something in the way his jaw ticks tells Tommy it’s something - someone - else. 

“Y’okay?” Tommy asks, pulling Joel from his thoughts.

“M’fine. Ya ready to go?” 

“Ready whenever you are.” 

Joel nods, pockets his phone and grabs his keys. The wedding rehearsal is to be held at the wedding venue followed by a rehearsal dinner. All he can think about on the ride to the outdoor venue, though, is you. He didn’t like the way he left your apartment - it wasn’t even a proper goodbye. You had left him standing in the middle of your bedroom while you walked away to your bathroom. Since coming home, Joel begins to imagine what life would be like if he continued this, if he decides to give this a chance. He knows he’d be happy with you, but he also knows that if this were to become something more, he’d have to talk with Sarah. With Drew.

“D’ya hear me?” Tommy asks, snapping his fingers in Joel’s direction.

“Sorry. What?” 

“Where’s ya mind at? You’re lookin’ like–” 

“M’fine,” Joel repeats. “Just a lot of mingling and all’a that.” 

Tommy narrows his eyes. Technically, it isn’t a lie, but Tommy knows that Joel’s hiding something. He’s just not sure what. “Okay, well, at least we’ll have alcohol at dinner.” 

“Just gotta get through rehearsal first.” 

“‘Course,” Tommy says. He then spots you climbing out of your car and quickly lets his eyes take you in. You’re a dream, absolutely gorgeous, and a kind heart to go with it. But Tommy remembers the first time he met you and how Joel’s eyes never left you. 

Just like it was now. 

Joel pulls into a parking spot and turns off the truck. He watches you flatten the wrinkles of your dress and he can’t help but bite his lower lip at the sight of you. You’re wearing a light blue dress that reaches past your knees, stopping just at your shin with a trumpet hem. The straps of your dress are neatly tied atop your shoulders and your hair is tucked behind your ears, cascading down the middle of your back. 

Then, Joel meets your eye. He sees you give him a curt nod with a soft smile before you disappear inside. He lets out a sigh and unbuckles his seatbelt, climbing out of the truck and running a hand through his hair. It’s Tommy that pulls him from his thoughts again.

“Okay, so what’s goin’ on?”

“Nothin’.” 

“You’ve always been a bad liar, y’know that?” Tommy chuckles. “Have you two–”

“No,” Joel interrupts. “Now, leave it, Tommy.” 

“Okay, okay,” Tommy shrugs. “No need to get all bent out of shape. I was just–”

“It’s nothin’,” Joel repeats. “Let’s head inside.” 

It’s a small group of people, only the ones involved in the wedding itself are here for rehearsal. Drew’s already standing at the end of the aisle, dressed in navy blue slacks and a white button-down shirt. It’s semi-formal, but Joel can see how anxious the young man is getting. It’s only rehearsal, but Joel notices how Drew keeps looking down towards the end of the aisle, almost like he’s waiting for Sarah to appear. 

The wedding planner speaks with Joel and Tommy, instructing them of where to stand, who will be coming out in order, and as she continues to speak, Joel sees you at the corner of his eye. You’re by yourself, the wind blowing in your direction with the sun shining down on you and Joel feels his heart tug at the sight of you. He wants to come up behind you, wrap his arms around you, and tell you how beautiful you look, how happy that you’re his. 

But he doesn’t. He can’t. 

In the next thirty minutes, you and the rest of the bridal party and groomsmen get ready to walk down the aisle. You’re walking alone, being Drew’s best woman means you’re standing next to him. So the music begins and the wedding planner signals for you to begin walking. You try to focus, try to just get through today, but all you can think about is Joel. 

You actually love him and it scares you because you were sure that love wasn’t something you were ever going to get to experience. It was something that you had come to terms with early on in your childhood. It was something that you decided when your parents divorced that relationships - and men - wasn’t worth the trouble if it meant having your heart broken. 

But Joel…

Joel’s different. 

And you don’t know what to make of it, what to think, or even how to move forward. This wasn’t meant to be something more than just a fling. This wasn’t meant to be something more than just a fuck buddy. 

You weren’t meant to fall in love. 

As you get closer to Drew, you give him a wink and stand next to him. He reaches for your hand and you squeeze it reassuringly. The rest of the groomsmen and bridal party walk in pairs until it’s time for the bride - for Sarah - to walk down. 

And you know that you’re going to see Joel. 

And you try hard to keep your expression neutral. 

But when you see him and Sarah begin to walk in your direction, where everyone was already standing, you feel your heart tug towards him, almost like it’s yearning for him. Sarah’s arm is hooked around his and Joel holds onto her tightly, leaning over to give her a gentle kiss on her temple. 

Then, he sees you. His eyes soften. The corner of his lips lift slightly. To anyone, it would seem like an innocent gesture, a polite hello, but to you, he’s looking at you like you’re the most beautiful person he’s ever seen. He’s looking at you like he always does. 

Joel hands Sarah off to Drew and he spares one more glance in your direction before he steps away to take his seat in the front. He’s glad that this is about Sarah, about Drew, because it distracts him enough that he doesn’t look in your direction until rehearsal is over. Everyone then begins to congregate inside for dinner and Joel sees you trail behind, opting to stay outside to watch the sunset. 

Joel bites his lower lip, steps inside to grab a beer for himself and a glass of wine for you before he meets you outside. Gently, he nudges you with his shoulder and you stare up at him with a look of surprise. 

“Hey,” Joel says, holding out the glass of wine in your direction. 

“Thank you,” you respond, taking the glass from him and your fingers brush against his. You hear him let out a breath before he turns his attention to the sunset. 

“Y’okay?” Joel asks. 

“Just thinking.” 

“Care to share?” 

You shrug. “Not sure there’s anything to share.” 

Joel sighs and steps closer to you. He needs to feel you, needs to know that you’re okay, that this is okay. His arm brushes against yours and Joel lets out a sigh of relief when he feels you lean against him. 

“Wedding’s in a few days.” You say. 

“It is,” Joel replies. 

“What happens then?” 

“D’ya mean…” Joel trails off, pointing between the both of you.

“Yes.” 

“What do you want to happen?” Joel asks. He can’t help but look down at you. You’re not even looking at him and despite the close proximity with you, you’ve never felt further away from him than you do now. 

“This wasn’t meant to be serious,” you whisper. “We were supposed to just have fun, keep each other company.” 

“I know,” Joel responds. 

“We got distracted. We never set any rules.” 

“Should we have?” 

“Yes,” you sigh. Joel notices the way your voice cracks and he could see tears building at the corner of your eyes. 

“Baby–”

“After the wedding, it’s done. This– We can’t.” 

Joel tightens his jaw, feels his heart break. He knows you’re not telling the truth, he can see that you’re holding back and so, he turns you around to face him. He can hear the laughter and chatter from inside the dinner, but that’s the least of his worries. 

“Why not?” 

“Joel,” you shake your head. Still, you’re not meeting his eyes because you’re sure that if you look up at him, you’d tell him everything. At least right now, you have a bit of courage to hold back, to pull away from him, even if it’s breaking your heart. “I don’t– Relationships aren’t for me.”

“How d’ya know?” Joel sighs. 

“I just do.”

“How?” He presses. 

“I can’t–” you feel your breath catch in your throat. “Joel…”

“Tell me,” he whispers quietly. “Tell me again that this is done and I’ll leave you alone.” 

“It’s done,” you reply weakly.

“No, look me in the eye and tell me.”

“Joel…” Your lower lip juts out, quivering slightly as a tear slips. Joel instinctively reaches out to wipe your tear away, his body closer to you now. He knows anyone can just walk in on the both of you, but he doesn’t care. He needs to hear you say it, needs to see you look him in the eye and tell him to leave you alone. Only then can Joel let you go. 

“Look me in my eyes and tell me this ain’t somethin’ you want.” 

“I can’t.” You shake your head, lean into his touch, and you feel your resolve lose quickly. You always thought that commitment wasn’t something you ever wanted; it stemmed from your parents’ failed marriage followed by plenty of toxic relationships your mother got herself into, which you followed her footsteps in. 

But Joel… 

Joel gives you hope. 

He makes you feel safe. 

He makes you feel loved. 

“Look me in the eye and–”

“I’ve fallen in love with you!” You blurt out, finally looking up at him and into his dark brown eyes. “Is that what you want to hear? How this fling turned into something so much more to me? How whenever I’m with you, I’m the safest I’ve ever felt? How you look at me and everything just seems to be okay? How being in your arms just–” your breath catches. 

“Baby–”

“Just,” you sigh, wiping your tears away. “Give me some space, please.” 

“Darlin’,” Joel pleads. “Just let me–”

“I need some space, Joel.” 

He doesn’t press any further and lets you go inside. Joel feels hopeful now that he knows how you feel, but there's something inside of him that scares him. He doesn’t want to let you down, doesn’t ever want to disappoint you, and he still believes that you deserve someone better than him, but Joel doesn’t want to let you go. 

He doesn’t want you to be with anyone else. 

“At least tell me you love her too,” someone says, pulling Joel from his thoughts. 

Eyes wide, Joel turns his head and sees Drew standing there with his arms crossed over his chest. 

“Drew, it isn’t–”

“Do you love her, Joel?” Drew interrupts. Joel can see the protectiveness in his features, can see it in the way he stands, but still, Drew is showing respect. 

“Drew, I–” 

“She deserves the world,” Drew sighs. “So, tell me… Do you love her?

—

taglist: @she-could-never | @joeldjarin | @janaispunk | @jessie8605 | @untamedheart81 | @paleidiot | @vickie5446 | @casa-boiardi

—

prev. - next.

[thebaldursmouthgazette]

First of all, this is about an active refusal by some people to acknowledge that solas has done some really bad things, in favour of pretending he’s a good person who just made some “mistakes” (genocide), and the way that effects their ability to engage with a plot that is about the character as written, and their subsequent insistence that it must be bad writing because it doesn’t work with the version of Solas that never existed in the story. I am not, as you are saying on your blog, saying everyone else is incapable of understanding. Not only have most people got this, I’m sure those who haven’t are completely capable of doing so, if they were willing to admit that Solas isn’t a good person and was never intended to be.

This post is also directed at the people who are so insistent in their belief that this is a terrible game and Solas is a wonderful person who’s done nothing wrong except a “few mistakes” that they come into my ask box and notes calling me homophobic slurs and sending me sexually graphic hate mail for seeing solas through the lens of not being a good person (he has committed genocide) and thinking the game is well written.

If you aren’t part of one of those groups, the post isn’t directed at you.

Onto Solas, I have a couple of points. First, human morality is the only lens we can interpret this through, because spirits don’t exist. This game was written by humans and for humans, and Solas is a constructed character, not a guy who actually exists and is beholden to a spirit nature. This means that being the embodiment of egotistical pride doesn’t absolve him of his actions stemming from pride, they make him a metaphor for being consumed by egotistical pride and how that’s not great. He is not an actual guy who actually can’t help himself, he’s a character who serves a purpose.

As for him being a mirror, I don’t think it’s to the extent that his nature fundamentally changes. Regardless of how nice you are to him in either game he still: sundered the titans, murdered Felassan, was directly involved in murdering everyone at the conclave, is racist to dwarves and qunari (to dwarves for the effects of HIS crime against them), planned to kill literally everyone who currently exists, blocked Briala from her efforts to improve the lives of elves in orlais, killed a BUNCH of people in his preparations for killing everyone else, murdered Varric, used blood magic on rook to gaslight them into thinking he was still alive, trapped rook in a fade prison for the crime of literally just being in his way, and tried to manipulate rook into being complicit in his second genocide by misleading them about the veil.

All of these things are bad and they all happen regardless of your attitude or actions towards him. In fact, the only two things about him you can actually change through your actions are:

1) If you have high enough approval in inquisition he starts to realise that actually the people of thedas might be real people who’s lives have value, but that doesn’t even stop him planning to murder you all and destroy the world, and it makes his choice to isolate himself for the next decade while he continues his plans seem, if anything, more insidious because now he knows it is wrong.

2) If you get the essence of Mythal and choose to convince him he’s wrong after the final battle, he will realise that he is wrong. But that doesn’t make him not wrong throughout the rest of the games, it’s literally an admission that he was.

If he mirrors your demeanour to him it’s very surface level. You exchange niceties, and he’ll be polite as he plans the mass murder of all of your people and manipulates your mind with blood magic to make you hallucinate your friend that he murdered still being alive. He is still the embodiment of egotistical pride, regardless of how you act towards him, and he still behaves accordingly.

His overall actions do not change, and these actions are not ones that can be separated from the person doing them. It’s not that he’s had a bad day and he’s been a little rude but that doesn’t say anything about him really, he’s committed genocide. He’s committed multiple murders in addition to that. He’s planning another genocide. That makes him a person who is willing to do that. You cannot hand wave away crimes of this magnitude.

I also quite strongly believe that when someone has committed crimes of that magnitude, and has treated people with that amount of disdain and dehumanisation (I know they’re not all human because fantasy setting, but you get what I mean), people are under no obligation to be nice to them. If you want to be nice, fine. But this is a guy who, regardless of how you as a player treat him, has committed multiple atrocities, used every chance he is given to commit more, and denies personhood to those who don’t meet his personal definition and then treats those people like their lives have less value. I don’t care if being rude to him makes him rude back. People should not feel obligated to bend over backwards to pander to and be nice to a person who thinks their lives are less valuable than a minor convenience for his own people and therefore murdering them all for it is justified. And they certainly shouldn’t when the reason is “he’s a little bit less of a dick if you’re nice to him. No he doesn’t stop trying to destroy the world and kill everyone in it, but he’s a little less rude about it”. His surface level demeanour doesn’t change my opinion on the atrocities he’s committed and is planning to commit.

Solas is not a mirror in the sense that he’ll act to you as you act towards him, because no matter how nice you are to him he is still actively gaslighting you by using blood magic to alter your senses, planning to imprison you, and planning to kill you and all of your people. Which even at your absolute meanest to him you can get, you are not even approaching. The characters in this game are all reflected against each other, but to compare and contrast, not because Solas fundamentally changes based on your approach.

You mentioned coercion vs free will in your tags and I think that brings us nicely back to the point I was making in my post. Because Cyrian is being coerced by Anaris, but that doesn’t change the fact that if he goes through with Anaris’ plans, that is a horrific crime he will be responsible for. Coercion doesn’t absolve you of responsibility, and on crimes of this scale if you decide to help them you are complicit, even if being coerced.

That’s partly what this post was pointing out, that every debate you could have about Solas is played out at some other point of the game. Cyrian ultimately does not help Anaris, he chooses to stop him. Solas could have chosen this too. He didn’t, and chose of his own free will to sunder the titans, and is therefore responsible for it. Following orders does not mean you aren’t responsible for your own actions.

These themes run deeply through the game, and what this post is about is that if you refuse to acknowledge that Solas has done wrong and try to force the game through the lens of Solas being a misunderstood pookie who’s done no wrong (again, if this is not your opinion of Solas then this post isn’t directed at you. Because it’s directed at the people who are like that) then no, none of these themes will make sense and none of the game will make sense, but that’s on the person actively refusing to acknowledge that Solas has done wrong, it’s not the game not making sense.

I think a huge factor in people not being able to understand this game is that the game as a whole relies on understanding Solas’ character as written, and people are refusing to understand it

Solas is, and has been since his first appearance, an egotistical, hubristic, racist, manipulative, abusive and condescending asshole who regularly commits atrocities and pretends that being sad about them is enough penance. He is a terrible person who insists he’s actually the hero of the story. He is a liar and a manipulator, and he lies to himself as well. He uses other people like chess pieces and sacrifices them for his cause without much of a thought, and without them even knowing they are being used.

This is who he is. This is who he was always written to be. And veilguard is almost entirely about deconstructing that. Every member of the veilguard is a foil to solas. They are all who he pretends he is, and his false hero fantasy falls apart when you put them next to him.

Every single companion storyline is about that character successfully doing something that Solas is incapable of, but would be capable of if he wasn’t such a terrible person. And they all face a dark reflection of themselves and come out the other side mostly unscathed by that, aware that this dark reflection is not them because they are not actually like that.

Solas faces many of the same challenges the companions do, and fails each and every one of them, because, unlike them, he is not actually a hero. He is not a good person. He does not learn to accept that just because something is broken doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of it worth saving. He does not learn to accept the harsh truths and move forward. He does not accept that he is responsible for his own actions, even if someone else orders them. He fails every time.

Solas faces not one but two dark reflections of himself, Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, the prideful god who always thinks he’s right no matter the consequences, and the servant and lover of another god whose atrocities are not justified by having been pushed by their lover and mistress, but does not come out the other side unscathed because it turns out he IS actually like them. His reflections are accurate, they’re real parts of himself that he pretends don’t exist, not just twisted versions of their fears like they are for the companions. At the end of the game he even admits that yes, he is very similar to Elgar’nan.

Pretty much the entirety of veilguard is a very careful and deliberate deconstruction of Solas’ character and self image. We go through, in elaborate detail, all of his crimes, all of his mistakes, all of the reasons why he is wrong, why his actions are unjustifiable, why his regret doesn’t absolve him of responsibility, how he thinks it does anyway.

We completely tear down every single aspect of the image he has constructed for himself. We destroy every single excuse with clear examples showing that that was not how things had to go. Every justification. Every insistence it’s okay because he’s sorry. Every time he insists he knows best and we should leave him to it. Every single illusion that he is a good person is shattered. By the end of it there is absolutely nothing left, and his repeated attempts to keep up the facade come off as pathetic and ridiculous. In all his banters with companions he tries to use his usual tricks, pretty excuses, belittling comments, fake niceties and every time he’s completely shut down.

He tries to imply Davrin has a biased view of him from stories about the dread wolf, Davrin responds with evidence the truth is even worse. He tries to apologise to Harding, she comes back with a list of all the terrible things he’s done that an apology can’t cover. He tries to appeal to spite, spite points out he hurt Rook so why should he trust him. He comes up with excuses for killing Varric and Neve points out that there’s no pretty excuse for using blood magic on Rook in such a cruel way afterwards. The illusion is shattered. That’s what the entire game has been building up to. And it makes his last attempt at betrayal seem embarrassing, because we now see through the facade and know that he was too obsessed with himself to even consider we’d see it coming.

But the thing is a lot of people refuse to see this. This is where his characters been heading since the beginning. This is who he’s always been. But a lot of people ignore any and every negative thing about him, and then complain the game doesn’t make sense. Of course it doesn’t make sense. You’ve ignored every single theme, plot point, and piece of characterisation to make up a version of Solas in your head and that’s not the Solas the game is about. It makes complete sense when you see Solas as he truly is, as he was written to be. It’s such a good bit of writing when you actually let yourself experience it as it is and allow yourself to be open to the idea that the guy who is trying to commit his second genocide might be a bad person.

[ooops-i-arted]

Rant incoming bc I’m mad about this, again (specific BoBF details under a cut):

I KNEW FILONI WOULD FUCK UP THE JEDI + ATTACHMENTS AGAIN.  Filoni needs to be banned from writing Jedi and anything about attachments until he figures out what it actually means for the Jedi.  Jedi are allowed to have love and compassion and attachments and connections to their homeworld and families.  Jedi just aren’t allowed to let those things rule them, BECAUSE THEY HAVE SUPER POWERFUL MIND POWERS and need to maintain control of them so they don’t hurt people!!  Just because Anakin was a selfish twat who committed genocide doesn’t mean other Jedi can’t handle managing their attachments.

LOOK.  LOOK AT WHAT GEORGE LUCAS HIMSELF SAID, SINCE FILONI DOESN’T WANT TO:

“If attachment and love were the same thing, then he would be saying, ��They should love their enemies, they should love the Sith.  But they can’t love.”  The way George makes the distinction shows that, no, attachment and love aren’t the same thing at all, attachment is not caring. Further, there’s another instance of him showing there’s an important distinction between relationships and attachment and the association of attachments with possession:  "Jedi Knights aren’t celibate - the thing that is forbidden is attachments - and possessive relationships.” –George Lucas, BBC News interview (via this post which is a whole great analysis of the Jedi)

We’ve already seen this in The Mandalorian.  Grogu acts out of love for Din multiple times in moments of great danger:  the mudhorn, the flametrooper.  But he always tries to attack Cara just over an arm wrestling match.  That’s why it’s so important for Jedi not to let attachments rule them - they have great power and with it comes great responsibility.

If you don’t agree with my interpretation of how the arm wrestling match went down, then look at Anakin.  In AOTC he’s willing to risk losing Dooku (which could’ve stopped the war at that time) just because Padme fell off the ship.  Obi-Wan brings him to his senses that time (pointing out that Padme would want him to leave her if she was there, to stop Dooku instead), but in the next movie he's committing genocide to save her (without any consideration for how Padme might feel about this, only considering his own feelings of "I can’t lose her”).  Hell, set aside all that and pretend Anakin is supposed to be a normal peacekeeper Jedi for a moment.  Do you think for a second he wouldn’t favor Naboo in a diplomatic situation just because he likes Padme?  It would interfere with his job as a peacekeeper and diplomat!  We follow characters like Anakin and Revan because they make good stories, and part of a good story is conflict (such as these characters conflicting with Jedi ways).  But overall the Jedi’s policy of “don’t get dangerously obsessed with people and use your mind powers to fuck up the galaxy as part of that” is there for a good reason and works.  It literally just boils down to “control your emotions, don’t let them control you.”

Also, Jedi are allowed connections to their homeworld/home culture.  Yarael Poof, Adi Gallia, Shaak Ti, Depa Billaba - all these characters wear items from their home cultures.  Barriss Offee and Luminara Unduli have traditional Mirialan tattoos.  Hell, Filoni, did you forgot YOUR OWN DAMN OC is wearing an akul-tooth headdress and Togruta sash?  (The headdress is also worn by Togruta who had slain an akul themselves, implying Ahsoka went back to Shili to complete a traditional custom from her homeworld.)  Hell, Ki-Adi-Mundi has a whole-ass family (in Legends, I think it’s been retconned) because of Cerean population issues, and he was a Council member able to balance his duties to being a Jedi and being a father (and never committed genocide for his family either, Anakin).  You can also get married as a Jedi in SWTOR if you play a Jedi Consular and romance Felix Iresso.  There’s noise about the Council monitoring what’s going on, but the Consular is a Jedi Council member and can still marry and no one throws a fit about it.

And now to get specific:

IT MAKES NO DAMN SENSE LUKE IS FORCING GROGU TO CHOOSE BETWEEN BEING A JEDI AND DIN AND IT’S DUMB FOR MULTIPLE REASONS

Grogu has been there what, a few months?  It’s too soon to make a real choice when he hasn’t truly experienced a Jedi lifestyle.

He is shown to be intelligent and aware of his decisions, but again, he’s still too young to truly be making a permanent choice like this.

“ThE jEdI kIdNaP bAbIeS” shut up they take children from parents who are willing to give them up.  This is clearly shown in TCW and was the same in Legends.  In The Jedi Apprentice series, Obi-Wan even mentions a memory of his visit to his family and seeing his brother Owen!  (Although this was apparently later retconned into being a vision of Owen Lars.  It still remains that Obi-Wan didn’t see anything odd about a visit home, implying it wasn’t something that didn’t happen.)  In the season 2 finale it was crystal clear Grogu was okay with going, he’s the one who urges Din to open the doors and let Luke in and Luke and Din both value and respect his choice.  No one hands Grogu off; he freely walks over to Luke and holds out his arms for him.

Why the fuck are you offering a little kid a lightsaber.  And that’s only the most major offense of “things that were developmentally inappropriate.”

See above about multiple Jedi, INCLUDING’S FILONI’S OWN DARLING, wearing items from their home culture.  There is absolutely no reason Grogu can’t wear Mandalorian armor while he trains as a Jedi.  (Doesn’t he still have the necklace anyway as far as we know?)

Side note but “Are you doing this for Grogu or are you doing this for you?” is a great thing to examine from Din’s side of things.  Shame we just got Ahsoka manipulating him since Filoni’s darling is always right and always the center of things when she appears, and no actual reflection on it from Din.  (Seriously though, FUCK HER for just having R2 drag Din aside to his own personal hell a glade full of droids instead of allowing Din or Grogu any agency in the situation.)

Another side note, does it occur to anyone it would hurt Grogu MORE to know Din came and CHOSE to not see him?

WHY IS LUKE OF ALL PEOPLE BUYING INTO THIS???  LUKE, WHO KNOWS MORE THAN ANYONE ABOUT LOVING YOUR FATHER.  LUKE, WHOSE LOVE FOR HIS SISTER AND HIS FRIENDS IS A KEY COMPONENT OF HIS CHARACTER AND HIS EMOTIONAL STRENGTH???  LUKE, WHO SHOULD TOTALLY EMPATHIZE WITH GROGU IN THIS SITUATION.  LUKE, INCREDIBLY KIND LUKE, WHO SHOULD HAVE AT BARE MINIMUM FACED DIN, EXPLAINED THE CONCERNS, AND THEN LET DIN AND GROGU MAKE THEIR OWN CHOICE FREE OF PRESSURE INSTEAD OF THE SMUG ORANGE BITCH TELLING DIN WHAT HE SHOULD DO, JUST LIKE LUKE LET DIN AND GROGU MAKE THEIR OWN CHOICE IN THE SEASON 2 FINALE.

Also this is just stupid from a writing position, Grogu already joined the Jedi as a kid (which we don’t know the full circumstances of) and chose the Jedi again by going with Luke, why are we rehashing this?  And if Grogu does go back, then what was even the point of the dramatic separation/season 2 finale?

Yoda’s lightsaber isn’t even the right size for Grogu right now and the chainmail is, how is this even a choice.  Luke don’t you want your first student protected anyway?

Jedi have always been able to leave the Order and it’s not a problem.  The Jedi Order even had busts of them in the library because they respected and honored their choice!!

It’s just another aspect of Luke trying to directly copy the old Jedi Order, which is incredibly boring when compared to Legends, where Luke made a New Jedi Order with its own strengths and flaws.  But because of his own experience, he chose to allow marriage and families and it was a new and interesting take - and it still boiled down to “we have super powers, so use them responsibly and control your emotions, don’t let you emotions control you.”

In conclusion, Filoni, when it comes to the Jedi:  just stop.

(Also, again, wasn’t this BOBA FETT’S show?)

[blindbeta]

hello, i found your account a while back when i was searching for ways to write a blind character and yours have been helpful! i just want to ask something, better safe than sorry: the mc in my story is blind yet goes on to commit murder, i was wondering if by any chance it might come across offensive??? like their blindness wont be the attraction or the focus, just that the character has gone through so much trauma that they're willing to kill ppl. they just happen to be blind. i just wanted to know that. sorry if this is too long. any other tips would also be helpful.

have a good day!

Blind Character Who Is Also a Killer

Don’t worry about the length of the ask, as it helps me to have more detail.

This question was challenging to answer. I initially focused more on the blindness aspect before adding more about trauma and mental health in general. I would appreciate additional thoughts readers would like to share. If the trauma bit is not useful to the asker, it may benefit other readers.

In my opinion, your blind character can commit murder without it necessarily being a problem. If you are careful. It is less about avoiding offensive ideas and more about being intentional with the choices you make as a writer. Here are some things to look out for:

-committing murder out of jealousy or anger at sighted characters for being able to see

-targeting other blind or otherwise disabled characters

-the motive for the murder having anything to do with blindness or regaining vision

-the murderer causing eye trauma to the victim, removing eyes, etc

It would also be helpful to have more blind characters who aren’t murderers or violent. Additionally, it may help to consider if your character is a villain or an anti-hero. Having blind heroes, or at least people the audience should root for, also avoids any ideas that blindness is inherently bad in some way. In this case, the message behind the story is very important. What happens to your blind characters will be tracked by disabled audiences.

When it comes to having multiple blind characters, I suggest being more intentional with how much vision each character has. If the killer MC is totally blind, make sure to have another totally blind character who isn’t a killer. This helps avoid the implication that having less vision equates to less morality.

I think we need a variety of blind characters and so I am fine with characters like the one you are describing, provided they are not the only blind character in the story.

Because trauma was mentioned in the question, I wanted to suggest reading more about trauma’s influence on survivors if you haven’t already. People who have suffered trauma are often portrayed negatively and given little understanding. It is important to research mental health issues as much as possible as well as understand tropes surrounding trauma. Without making this answer too long, my suggestion is start with free videos, podcasts, and articles by survivors, mental health professionals, and those who are both. While this question was sent to a blog about blindness to get input on a specific topic, the focus should be more on the mental health aspect and why trauma is a focus for this particular character. I would emphasize handling this topic with care if you are not already familiar with it. Trauma, especially in relation to murder, deserves a post all its own. Looking up tropes about mental illness online might also be useful if you have not already done so. Consider why the character having trauma and killing because of it makes sense to you. I don’t know your story nor do I have much information here, so I can’t give you more advice than that. This is for you to think about as a writer, just as you might examine the blindness tropes I discuss on this blog.

Disability can lead to or be caused by trauma, so be careful with that in relation to your character. Blind people in particular have higher rates of mental illness for a variety of reasons.

I can’t really say if anything about a blind character committing murder would be offensive or not without reading the actual material, and even then it would only be my opinion. However, keeping some of my suggestions in mind could make this easier to write because you have things to consider. My concern is more with the mental health side of the question, especially as it relates to blindness and murder. These factors are a lot for a writer to consider at once.

Hopefully this is a good starting point.

An addition to this post by @ask-jeff-and-the-lads reads:

I will say that "so much trauma that they're willing to kill people" gave me pause, as though, like, that's a logical sequence of events 😒

This has been cross-posted on WordPress.

[artbyblastweave]

BLASTWEAVE what does steven universe have in common with watchmen?

Both Steven Universe and Watchmen are groundbreaking entries in their respective genres that demonstrate a deep understanding of the appeal of the genre they’re working in, and engage with their ideas on a previously unheard-of level for the medium. That breaks ground and clears the way for what other works in the genre can get away with. 

Steven Universe showed that, well, first of all that you can make a cartoon that’s fundamentally ideologically queer beyond a few side characters, but also that you can have an emotionally intelligent and mature children's cartoon where the character nuance and depth and development are all taken very seriously. Watchmen showed that you could write serious and interesting narratives about superheroes if you were willing to roll with the crazy. (Neither of them was the first to do the things I’m ascribing to them, but I do think that they’re what made it stick for their respective fields.)

In doing so, though, both works create/created a catch 22 for all future works in their genre. Part of what made both of them so good is that they were willing to critically unpack and air out the ugly implications of their format that usually get chalked up to suspension of disbelief, and now that that’s out in the open it becomes very difficult not to think about how any other given work is or isn’t addressing those issues- even if they aren’t equipped to address those issues in the scope of the story they’re trying to tell. Watchmen asked questions about who sanctions superheroes, what qualifies you to do that work, where the line is between heroism and fascism or if there even is one, whether the agency to act means you have a right or a duty to act, whether anyone who seriously bought into the superhero thing could possibly be doing it for good reasons, and, if they somehow were, how long you can care with the intensity necessary to be an effective hero without suffering burnout (not long.) I literally can’t think of a single superhero thing worth reading that isn’t in some way in conversation with Watchmen - you now kind of have to answer those questions, explicitly or implicitly, even if your books thesis is “Alan Moore sucks eggs and being a superhero is very sustainable and fantastic.” If you just leave the question of whether your superheroes are justified completely unaddressed, there’s an uncomfortable discordance there, because we’ve seen the extreme end of that sliding scale in the form of the Comedian and if the narrative doesn’t engage with what makes the protagonist not Edward Blake, it can feel worrisome. If they try and then botch it it can feel alarming.

Steven Universe has a similar thing going on, at least for me. It’s the only unironic, non-parodic children’s series that’s really, seriously unpacked how fucked up and traumatic it would be to grow up as the archetypical All-loving Spirited Saturday Morning Cartoon Protagonist, how warped and dysfunctional a household that enabled that lifestyle could be at its worst, and what the future looks like when your whole childhood was centered on a now-ended conflict. ( a lot of cartoons flirt with that last one but don’t commit.) I’ve seen jokes and intended-as-cracky fan theories about this for years, surrounding lots of other cartoons (Ben 10, Pokemon, Powerpuff Girls) but almost never with the assumption that the creators are on the same page as them. I’ve seen stories that are post-modern reimaginings using the same general archetypes or whatever (Venture Brothers) but that’s not this! SU told an entertaining story earnestly, and then engaged with the emotional fallout of the story it told, with an unheard-of breadth and depth. A whole season of unpacking! No other show has ever been allowed to sink that much effort into closure. That’s usually what Fanfic is for.

I think it’s great, and that shows like Infinity Train and The Owl House are able to go as hard as they do largely because of Steven Universe’s precedent- but no matter how good a cartoon is, I can’t watch them without having this voice in the back of my head going “Oh, these children are going to grow up to be broken wrecks, bar an extensive and harsh healing process that kinda hurts to watch, huh.”

The issue is that not every cartoon can be Steven Universe, where the project was to thoughtfully and sensitively unpack this stuff. It’s a fair bet that we’ll probably never see a show with that exact project again (not least because of the loss of novelty value.) You’ve got your own stories you wanna tell that’ll run their own course, mostly aimed at children, there objectively isn’t narrative or financial room for most stories to unpack these assumptions if that wasn’t the goal going in. For example, Gravity Falls had pretty tight storytelling and a narrative that absolutely had room for a post-script "where-do-we-go-from-here” plot- it sped-run the “oh no, childhood’s ending” thing- and it’s pretty telling that the aftermath, healing process, interpersonal relationships and so forth are one of the things that that fandom heavily fixates on. The narrative had such a clean ending that it made people go looking for the mess. That’s not bad! It’s how most storytelling works! But now I look at any cartoon with kid heroes that’s meant to be taken even marginally seriously and go, Oh. Win the battle, lose the war. Then I feel sad. The contrast, of course, is that most superhero works actually can be, and in fact benefit from trying to be like Watchmen, because all the questions Watchmen raises about the ethics of power are also just.... like.... the most interesting storytelling hooks if you want to write a cape thing with real themes. They’re the kind of stories we’d have gotten years prior naturally if not for the CCA boondoggle. Admittedly it kinda creates a different problem where most “good” cape media is inescapably self-referential and draws on picking apart the conventions of a 60-70-year old canon that hasn’t been in wide circulation in years. But! I also think there’s a stronger obligation there to keep superhero fans in check- if your superhero thing isn’t making the reader question the ethics of violence and individual heroism in the face of systemic injustice, you wind up with people who unironically think Frank Castle is a role model to be emulated. We all know that guy. Children’s media doesn’t really produce that guy the same way, although it can draw them in from other corners. Superhero media often needs to be self-critical in a way children’s cartoons don’t always have to be.

[primergon]

Hello i was wondering if i can request an TFP match up! ☺️

Im a ENFP, female, 5’5 and a scorpio

i go by she/her they/them im very talkative and interactive with people even with people i don’t really know im very good at starting conversations.

personality wise, i’m very kind and caring but i get irritated/angry very easily if poked the wrong way, i’m very ditsy and say stuff i never meant to say which cause issues, also very dramatic at certain stuff like shows and things i enjoy, im also very curious about things and i’m always try to learn more about people.

things i love are; cats and dogs, Drawing, doing makeup, drawing and writing for my friends, i also love coffee.

i get very clingy with my friends i enjoy hugging and hand holding (platonically). i also curse a lot when i don’t mean to. i try my best and help people around me but never really take care of my own mental health issues.

A/N: Hello anon, hope you are well! Thanks for sending your ask <3 I am indecisive so I think I'll pair you up with TFP Ratchet and Shockwave!

TFP RATCHET

01| Although Ratchet is more quiet and reserved personality-wise, he is attracted to your playful and lively nature. You insisted on befriending him, your outgoing nature leading you to start conversations with Ratchet. Even if he initially showed no interest in returning the gesture, he started to warm up to you. The doctor finds himself missing you, catching himself disturbed by the silence. Your chatter would usually keep him occupied, a background noise he enjoys to listen and engage with during work. Ratchet would nag you whenever you don't visit often ( he says he's worried that the location of this base may be compromised but everyone knows it's because he wants you to keep him company. )

02| Ratchet likes how curious you are at everything, he is inquisitive by nature. It warms his heart to see you playing with the children and the animals you pass by on patrol. Your genuine curiosity towards Ratchet's past made him open up to you. He's touched that you were willing to listen to him the same way he listens to you. As much as Ratchet scoffs at your dramatic retelling of the most recent episode of your favorite show, he's actually interested. You were surprised that he remembers every detail. " Don't just end the story there, what happened to your favorite character ?" " Wait, you were listening? So you do care !"

03| Arguments were inevitable, yet they don't happen often. You may share playful banter a handful of times, but serious disagreements were usually avoided through open communication. Both you and Ratchet are more emotionally attuned than others, and you both tend to say things you don't mean in an argument. No one likes to fight with their partners, so you both always make sure to find a solution to it. While Ratchet brings creative solutions and commitment to fixing problems, you offer a more flexible attitude that helps dissolve tension. Ratchet likes how you can make him smile whenever he's in a bad mood.

04| Both you and Ratchet can often forget to take care of yourselves. So you both take it upon yourselves to look out for another. He's not exactly clingy, but he will return gestures of affection when you're both alone. While your cursing may bother Ultra Magnus, Ratchet isn't phased, not when he likes to mutter curses under his breath on a particularly rough day too.

TFP SHOCKWAVE

01| Shockwave isn't completely detached from his emotions as everyone says. Cybetronians aren't robots, they can't just turn off their feelings and conscience. He has only suppressed them to the point of numbness. Yet, this doesn't mean he doesn't feel. He's curious about this growing attraction he has towards you. As cruel as it sounds he initially saw you as an experiment and he didn't notice your presence much. Until he starts hearing laughter from the corridors. He'd catch you chatting with the Vehicons and sharing quips with Knockout. He finds you strange. He finds you intriguing.

02| Shockwave is a logical thinker and prefers to discuss issues by addressing facts; while you generally prefer to address the emotional aspects of an issue. As much as he didn't want to admit it, you complete one another. There is balance in your work, and that is more than enough for Shockwave to start valuing you. Eventually, he doesn't only see you as an equal, but he sees you as someone special to him. It's been a while since he explored anything romantic towards anyone. At times you'd argue because of his bluntness, it would lead to a lot of miscommunication. However, you were more than happy to take the lead. Even if the gesture isn't outwardly noticeable, our scientist is also making efforts.

03| He likes to stare. At first, you think it's creepy, but then you realize he was admiring you. It took you a while to catch on when he doesn't have a face. His glowing red eye may be intimidating, but you don't miss the subtle show of love he has towards you whenever you pick up a stray cat to cuddle it. You weren't allowed to reveal your location to anyone but you were allowed to write letters to your loved ones ( after much convincing on your part. ) So he watches you neatly fold the paper into an envelop to be shipped back home. Shockwave says he's watching to supervise you so you won't compromise the Decepticon cause or reveal any sensitive information on your letters, but you once had caught him longingly hold the paper across his fingers.

04| He doesn't understand why you like to drink so much coffee when it tastes bitter. Yet he knows it makes you productive, so he would ask several Vehicons to fetch you some lattes. It was a funny sight, yet you are always thankful for the delivery after a long day in the lab. Shockwave would hold it out to you gently, making sure that your order is right every time. Your fingers would brush and he'd cradle your palm tenderly. It may be subtle, but coming from Shockwave, it was more than enough.

I hope you enjoy this Anon ! xx

[ilikekidsshows]

One thing that pisses me off not just about the miraculous fandom but modern fandoms is fans inability to consume long overarching stories.

Like so many people are complaining about how long the reveal is taking or why haven't certain characters outgrown this trait yet or why is this character arc botched or abandoned. Like guys we just got the confirmation this show will be 7 seasons long PLUS like 3 tv specials. We're only roughly halfway through the series.

Once the reveal happens half the tension in the show is gone! I'm not saying leave the reveal till season 7 and make us wait 9 years this isn't HIMYM but miraculous is not a fast paced story. It's a long haul story. I just wish more fans would be patient. Miraculous is in the extremely fortunate and rare position that it will have a conclusive end and not be suddenly cancelled. That was and still is a huge problem for shows and cartoons with dedicated fans but networks pull the plug for stupid ass reasons.

So miraculous fans please chill the fuck out on things not resolving right away. We still have 78+ episodes plus the tv specials. If we get the end to certain things now it'll be so boring.

I think the concept of Instant Gratification describes the issue with many modern fandoms today. I hate to sound like I'm anti-technology, but the constant stream of quick and short bursts of entertainment allowed by the information age has made people more impatient. It's not about waiting for the climax to get a deeper sense of satisfaction, it's about getting that instant gratification right this instant. It's why one-shot fanfics are all over the place, when multi-chapter stories used to be just as common and popular, if not even more so, and it’s also why people are less willing to read a fic that’s still a work in progress. It's why people refuse to watch Youtube video essays even as they leave comments on the topic based on the title and thumbnail alone because, while they couldn't be assed to watch a 20-minute video (let alone an hour long one), they sure can spend that time calling the Youtuber names and making arguments the video actually already refutes. It's why a lot of online arguments happen only because one party read nothing but the first and maybe the last paragraph of someone's post and skipped all the explanation for their point of view (if I've ignored an counter argument for one of my posts, it was either because I missed it or because said counter argument did this. I have attention deficit issues so I do genuinely forget responses sometimes, but I'm also not writing a second essay for someone who's proven to me they won't read it).

Of course, it's only by constantly consuming only fast-paced content that you can become this impatient. People have different ideas about stories based on what stories they have encountered in the past.

Another thing that influences the Miraculous fandom in particular is that, while I love to show off exactly how much Miraculous has done to build up the overarching plotlines, Miraculous isn't really a show that's about a single story. It's easy to understand why people think it is one though: there's one main villain, we keep discovering more about the mythology, one of the main plot threads is the romantic relationship between the leads and singular episodes and plot elements tend to get payoff later. What is the purpose of a show if not to progress the story? Because the heroes aren't getting closer to defeating Gabriel or getting together, people think that the story isn't accomplishing anything.

I'll do a comparison to illustrate why these things aren't as clear-cut signs of a continuous storyline as people think. In the Spider-Man comics, you can pick any issue up and the chances are that the villain will be a part of Spider-Man's already established Rogues Gallery, who's back for more after who knows how many defeats, and those past defeats might even get referenced in callbacks to previous issues. It's also very possible that Peter and Mary Jane's relationship is the central focus with them not being together yet, having relationship problems or even having broken up (in really old issues the girl might be Gwen Stacy and short-term options have also always been available for romantic entanglements). Does this mean Spider-Man is a continuous story where the only point is that all the villains get put away for good and Peter and MJ live happily ever after? No, it doesn't. Spider-Man is designed to go on indefinitely, so there's no clear ending point. So, what is the point of Spider-Man then, if there is no Ending?

It used to be the single issue, because comic books used to have every issue be a stand-alone story about the hero and their supportive cast. These days it's more every three-to-six issues, because superhero comics are written to have short story arcs that can then be collected into trade paperbacks. A superhero series is not a single story; it's a series that functions as a story engine, meaning the series can generate several shorter stories where the hero helps fix a problem or solve a mystery.

In the superhero genre a villain will never get killed off or removed from stories permanently as long as the writers think they can still come up with stories to tell about them. The hero's romantic life will never be completely smooth sailing unless the writer is using other things to ramp up the stakes. Everything always allows for there to be another adventure.

I think the huge success of Avatar: the Last Airbender made people think that a series that is a single story is always superior to a series with multiple shorter plots. When I was liveblogging Sailor Moon, a viewer offered to give me a list of all the non-filler episodes because they genuinely thought I'd feel like I was wasting time on the show otherwise. This attitude is simply not based on fact. It's not fair to compare Miraculous Ladybug to Avatar, because they're both setting up to do completely different things. Miraculous Ladybug is trying to become a brand, like Batman or Spider-Man. It is part of the "Zag Heroes" lineup, a series of French-created superhero franchises to compete in the America-centric superhero market. This challenge is good for the genre, because Marvel and DC have started resembling each other more and more as these companies stew in their old ideas and copy everything that worked for the other one. The superhero genre needs new blood.

Also, Avatar: the Last Airbender first became popular by doing episodic plots for almost the entirety of the first season because it's actually not a wise choice to expect the audience to be willing to commit to a story that'll only give payoff later when working with an untested IP. Very often shows with longer story arcs start with the episodic format to hook people first, and sometimes the more linear plot is introduced specifically because the audience for the show is now expected to be both dedicated enough and older and capable of keeping up. Because, here's the thing: you can't expect little kids to remember every episode or even every character you've introduced in your show. I'm not sure if people are ready to hear that but I'm throwing it out there anyway. Kids are not dumb, they can understand more complex storylines, but many kids are still training their memory, so they might not remember the details of complex storylines that go on for too long.

This is why the news that Miraculous Ladybug's fourth season was going to have a recommended viewing order originally had me concerned. Miraculous is being branded for kids. The plot requiring too much skill in memorizing story details will make it less accessible to kids and might put those two additional seasons at risk. However, it seems that the "constantly changing status quo" concept of Truth, Lies and Gang of Secrets was a fluke and the evolution of the show is more subtle, so they might not be cutting the amount of episodes for those final seasons because the show is getting too complicated for kids to follow all the important details.

Regardless, Miraculous Ladybug being an adventure cartoon TV show instead of a comic book or a more cheaper-to-produce TV drama does mean that Miraculous Ladybug isn’t expected to go on for decades like a superhero comic or a soap opera. Because of this, it can have evolution and changes and even a planned ending. The show is expected to end at some point, even by the people making money off of it, mostly because making a cartoon like this indefinitely costs a lot of money, and kids’ adventure shows tend to see a decrease in returns if they go on for too long.

[maliciouslycreative]

How I played damage control to an anti in a small anime fandom and may have led to her ultimate downfall

I know I had a really nice write up of this at one point but oh well. I’ll spill more of the tea in this one because honestly the tea was so hot.

There are a few things that I have to give context to first. Gaia online was like THE mega forum of the 2000s, you made a little avatar and through posting and doing other activities on the forum you made money to buy clothes for your avatar. There were forums for everything but the fannish portions were really what drew in most of the people. The anime I was into was Beyblade. It was a shonen anime about fighting with tops that were possessed by the spirits of magical creatures. The story was honestly pretty average but the characters were fantastic and the fandom is to this day still one of my favourites. The series had a primarily male cast and didn’t even have a female lead until the second season. This led to the fanfic for the English fandom being about 70% canon/OC, 10 % canon m/f, and 20% slash. The most popular character in the English fandom was by far Kai Hiwatari, the loner badboy of the team.

Also before we get started I would like to add that one of my best friends was neck deep in this and the two of us were more or less fandom married. This is the same friend that I fake dated, had feelings for, and she nearly got me into kpop in 2011 so like if you haven’t read that story please read it too because it will give you a good idea of how stupid I am and how much of a fanfic I have truly lived. 

To set the stage I was 16, soon to be 17 when I joined the fandom and it was 2004. In September of that year I wrote a humour longfic that became an absolute smash hit and I found myself somehow fandom famous. It was around this time that I joined Gaia online. I made my little avatar and immediately went looking for the beyblade thread so that I could make new friends. I found the main thread, made my little introduction and at the end of it mentioned that I was a slash writer but I supported all ships. This is where I met C. She had declared herself the authority on Beyblade in these parts and I had just committed the crime of mentioning slash which was very obviously not canon and we did not discuss in this thread because we only discussed canon things. I was like well that’s a bit severe but like sure whatever I just want to hang out and have fun. 

Oh boy did I have no idea what I was in for. 

C was a year older than me and unfortunately that made her older than the majority of the fans at the time. Her favourite character was Kai, and she was not shy about talking about this fact. She stanned Kai above all other characters, and often at their expense. She was also a fanfic writer of a popular canon/OC series. Actually, she was so full of herself that she didn’t even call herself a fanfic writer, no her stories were in fact novels and were apparently very good. I never read them. But more on that later. 

Eventually the slash fans got tired of her being rude to us in the general thread so we made a Beyblade slash thread. There was a core of like 8 or so of us and we honestly had sooo much fun. When C would be too unbearable in the main thread the people from there used to come over to our thread and we’d chat with them about non slash stuff because we were honestly all multishippers and just wanted to have fun. We’d get comments like “wow, I’ve had more pleasant canon het ship discussions in the slash thread than the regular thread”. We never worried about C coming over and getting upset about comments like this because she refused to be associated with anything related with slash lmao. 

I tried my best to keep the peace between C, myself, and the rest of the fandom because ultimately I hate being in fandom drama. I just want everyone to have a good time. I’m a people pleaser. Unfortunately my newfound fame put me in the awkward position of being the most fandom popular person in our small community aside from C. Virtually every fan that read fanfics that came into our thread knew one of us or the other by reputation and C HATED this. Especially because people would come in to the thread, recognise me and go “oh my goodness I love your fanfics!” and I’d be super sweet with them and it’d lead into “I can’t believe how nice you are, I love you” which would lead to us crying at each other. This was not the kind of fan interaction that C got, no her fans were more kind that were there to praise her and worship her like a deity that had blessed them with some gift. Rarely did they tell her how kind she was. 

Back in the mid 2000s there were really commonly those commercials (usually by Christian organisations) asking people to sponsor say children in Africa or to help build schools or provide drinking water. You all probably know the ones; know the language that they used in those commercials. My fandom wife, who I suppose I shall call wifey because yes we were THAT couple back then, once said that C described her fics like those people described donating money to save the lives of Children in Africa. So we used to joke that her fics were so good they’d save lives in Africa. Looking back at it all, she almost had a very fundamentalist Christian approach to bringing people into her fanfics. She of course tried to get all the slash people into reading it. None of us read canon/oc fic mostly due to our poor treatment at the hands of their fans and creators. Getting fed up I one day told her that if she would read any one of my fanfics that I would read the entirety of her novels. Yes, I was willing to commit to read a couple 100k of canon/oc fanfic that I’d never touch normally if she would even read one of my 1k 1 shots. Heck, I had a fic even that shipped 2 minor characters so she didn’t even have to sully herself reading about one of the main characters. It was honestly a good deal in her favour. I kept this up until the day we all left the fandom. Sometimes I do wonder if her fics were even ¼ as good as she claimed, but I will never know because she refused to read my fics. 

She wasn’t all bad and a tyrant all the time. As long as people kept the conversations on track and didn’t come in to the thread saying things like “KAI IS SO HOT ND T3H BEST N I AM GUN 2 MARRY HIM” she stayed mostly civil. It was always hilarious watching InuYahsa or Naruto fans try to come in and bad mouth Beyblade because they’d unleash the dragon and C was great at chasing off undesirables in the thread. 

The real apex of goings on though on Gaia was the guild drama. So guilds were like exclusive themed mini forums within Gaia. Anyone could buy one and run it however they want, as long as it still adhered to Gaia’s ToS. C of course was the owner of the only Beyblade guild. The fandom wasn’t really big enough to support 2 guilds so we just kind of let it go. Technically she allowed people to post slash fanfics but like everything had to be explicitly tagged and there was absolutely no slash RP. Wifey and I controlled a handful of minor characters together in the forum RP and definitely used to try to push the boundaries a little bit. Some ambiguous flirting here, a stray comment there. It was such a fragile balance though because C was heavy on the ban button. The active portion of the guild was just people that were in the cult of C and worshipped her writing. 

Understandably the other slash fans and myself were getting disheartened by this. So we pooled our funds together and decided that we’d open a second guild that though it was run by slash fans we would welcome anyone into our ranks. We just wanted to have a fun place for everyone to hang out, and to hopefully run a few events out of. In hindsight, we should have seen what would happen. When we opened the guild, with me as the guild leader, it was like somebody blew up the whole dam protecting the delicate ecosystem we had cultivated. Every single person in the Gaia fandom that was not a zealous follower of C applied to be in our guild and left her guild. We of course figured that we’d attract some of the gen population but we did not expect to accidentally poach all of it. All of the moderators were getting messages from people thanking us for giving them a place where they could say whatever they wanted without fear of getting their faces ripped off or banned. 

C lost her shit. She was so mad that we went behind her back to ruin her guild. We literally had to show her posts in the very public slash thread that we had been planning this in public and that it was not to ruin her life. We just wanted a place where we could freely post slash. The two of us had some spicy comments back and forth and then she dropped an absolute bombshell on me. Since Gaia’s mail system is terrible I unfortunately no longer have exactly what she said but it was something along the lines of “Ok, you win. I’m going to close my guild.”. Us slash fans had never been doing this to win anything. We had never been competing. We just wanted a safe space to be ourselves. 

C never joined our guild. The fandom slowly faded out within the next year anyway. We weren’t getting new content so naturally people just drifted into other fandoms. C kept up with the main Beyblade thread for a lot longer than most of us but eventually that eventually faded into obscurity too. 

I learned a lot about fandom bullies from those days. But honestly the thing that stuck with me the most out of everything was that if you provide a positive safe space for people they will flock to it. It may seem like there are so many hostile people out there, but there really aren't. They're the minority but they just make sure that their voice is the loudest. The best way is to ignore them and just do your own thing. The bullies just want attention and if you don’t give it to them and prove to them that their opinion doesn’t matter to you then they’ll move in and find something else to yell at. 

[sapphire-innit]

DRISTAAAAA TIMEEE

VOD: TommyInnit Speaks To Dream’s Sister AGAIN

(rp): Drista!! I love this chaotic child and am looking forward to seeing the children bully each other lmao. I especially love the mythos around Creative mode, and that the most benevolent god on the Dream SMP is just as likely to ban you as hand you a shulker box lol.

I do wonder how in character cc!Tommy is going to be able to stay during this stream: on one hand he’s a master at staying in character even during lh moments, and on the other Exile arc is some Dark Shit and Dristas like what, 14?? Overall I expect this to be one of the lighter streams, with a smattering of moments where we remember that, oh right, Tommy’s pretty actively suicidal at this point and he sees this as one of his last hurrahs.

Speaking of our boy Tommy: it's very clear we are getting closer and closer to the infamous pillar. He switches rapidly between Fight and Fawn reflexes and has mostly internalized Dream’s treatment and conditions at this point. The one stand out moment being him calling out Dream killing Mexican Dream last stream, and pointing out he was changing his story even when Dream tried to lie and say he died of “a drug overdose [...] or natural causes”. I’m curious if Tommy is going to bring it up again, and even more curious if he eventually believes Dream about it; something to watch out for, for sure. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this moment of rebellion happened right after he had someone both stand up for him and spend time with him that wasn’t actively hostile or going to end (supposedly, at least by intention)

Hey we didn’t start off drowning for once!! cc!Tommy was also singing, though that could have been mostly out of character as well. Still, remarkably in a better mood, he even mentions having an appetite! You love to see it, and it's clearly because he’s looking forward to Drista’s visit

He’s building a log tower and on one hand, Tommy building Towers is a natural state of being, and on the other…. I know the pillar is coming and I am scared

A mention of the Anti-Dream hole… I still worry about when exactly and how Dream is going to find it. Still, I’m glad it exists, both for Tommy having a space for things important to him, as well as what it represents about his mental state re:not giving over completely to Dream

DRISTA!!!! LOL she was already online we didn't even see her join LOL. CHAOS GREMLIN she just flew over in creative mode and started wrecking shit, as is her right lmaoooo

“You massive jer--, (quieter) whats a nicer way…, YOU MASSIVE DICKHEAD” oh, Tommy..

I like how he tries to punch her even when shes CLEARLY IN CREATIVE MODE ADSADASD

The violence inherent in fourteen year olds,,,, adsfsadfsdfds

I hate this conversation why is this the conversation asdffdsfsd TEENAGERS

DREAM YOUR NOT EVEN A TEENAGER WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING THE SAME LOGIC

Well SHE can destroy the obsidian asdfsdfds She just Spleefs

“What would Dream do” Probably worse lets be honest

Is he actually gonna go back to L’manburg?? I don’t believe it but I also want :(

Again with the stabbing

AND DOWN HE GOEEEESSSS

“I have the fork, but I'm also killing you” afsafsdfdsf Tommy why are you wearing your good shit omg

Lol cc!Dream trying to defend his character for mocking Tommy’s accent adsfsdfds “I would NEVER” in the totally not believable tone lmaoooo

DID SHE REALLY GO AT HIM WITH A FORK I'M FUCKING DYING DSAFDADSFDS

“I will take it from you and I’ll kill him”... I have so many thoughts about how this works in lore. Is Drista possessing Dream? He can kick her out clearly, but she still has God Powers…

Lol and now SHES mocking his accent lmaoooo (... is it bad she sounded pretty close to me? lol)

Adsfdsfswd casual chaos Drista just broke the Nether Portal

Asking Drista to stop destroying things is a big ask to be honest lmaoo. Also she seems to be at least somewhat informed that ‘Dream is not supposed to be nice to Tommy’ or at least seemed hesitant to do /weather clear

GOD THE LAVA BUCKETS AND THE POTION OF HARMING adsfsdfsdf

“Tommy [beheaded him] actually… and killed Mexican Dream” Dream you motherfucker

“How to Sex 3” THE PANIK!!!!!! From Both cc!Dream and Tommy!!! This server is Not Child Friendly lol (Doesn’t…. That not even include sex things…. afasfsd)

Honestly I can’t stop smiling this is so wholesome somehow even with all the cursing and violence

Pigstep IS a bop, Tommy is right

“Just let him, just let him this one time” :(

“Tommy I still have the Fork” Drista totally willing to stab her brother to visit L’manburg

HE TOOK THE FORK ASDASDAS

Yes, closing your eyes will totally protect you from Forks lol

“I don’t need school, I dropped out” Is this Lore Crumbs, is this Lore

HEYYYY ITS THE BEDROCK, the one piece of bedrock he has lol, I think he still has that in current day right?

Drista is writing her name in BEDROCK adsfsdfds “I’m not going to be able to get rid of that actually” “That's the Point”

LOL SHe also recognized the burrito as from Mos lmaooo

Somehow “I really want to go to the other place.. I don’t know why he won’t let you” hit hard… it was def ooc, and she doesn’t have the full context, but still… its just someone else wanting and asking for Tommy to be able see L’manburg…

Afsdfsd the Small Gasp when she spleefs herself omgg

HES THERE!!! HES THERE!!!!!! L’MANBURG!!!!!!

Punz!!! WHY!!!! Were you there bc Drista might let Tommy through, was this a safeguard for the LORE. Also he’s currently working for Dream directly right, as a merc?

Drista trying to save Tommy!!!! Punz why are you winning a fight with someone in creative adfsadfsd He’s too good lol

They have negotiated a visit… I’m so emotional I wasn’t expecting this…. No one told me we got a real L’manburg visit !

BIG Q SHES FOURTEEN!!! Omg they didn’t tell him it was Drista. BIG Q!!! BIG Q DON’T SELL HER DRUGS

“He was Naked” good for you Drista, good for you. There’s something so hilarious about Drista just stabbing Quackity over and over again cause she’s uncomfortable lol (as is her right)

LOL THE FINAL KILL WITH MAGIC WHEN HE’S ALREADY DROWNING IM

Wha --- what video was it????? What is this Tommy picture on the Technoganda???

….”are you sure I’m allowed here” Dream’s conditioning is strong :(

“At many minute I could get mugged” To be Fair Tommy, that was true before

Did Tommy just suggest spawning in a Wither asdfsdfds

DRISTA DOG ARMY!!!! Aww and Tommy has one too~

THE BENCH!! THE HOUSE!!! Aaaaaaaaa He’s sitting on the bench nature is HEALING

AAAAAAAA A BLAZE!!!! Pfffft

…. Who destroyed the front of Tommys house?

,,,,Drista what are you doing with that soULSAND

“OK we'll turn on him” adsfsdfsd

OH HEY TECHNO!!! Lol “Oh god he meant me” fucking mood big man

……. Tubbo hallucination……… fuck

LOL HE COMBAT LOGGED “YOU CALL THAT COMBAT” I'M

To be fair, logging against a /kill is probably the only way to get away lmao

…...F

“Getting thrown off a cliff is literally how Theseus died!!” lol its also hilarious to me that Tommy def does not remember being called that. Personally I don't think it fits him super well anyway, but I do like it as something Techno calls Tommy, that shows how much he misjudges Tommy's character and intentions. No heroes here, just a kid trying to do good by their friends and what they care about

Techno actually looking up how to kill someone in creative mode

…. :( I just want my actual clingyduo content this is meeeeannn

OH HEY TECHNO …. You fucker he would and it would be HILARIOUS (get mad if Drista opped Techno that is lol)

….

….

IS THIS WHY THEY’RE BEDROCK BROS????? BECAUSE THEY BOTH HAVE DRISTA BEDROCK??????????????????????????

HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS ???

LOL TRUE DUO SUPREMACY TUBBO’S GOT TECHNO'S BEDROCK

Oh F Techno got him with the Obliterator lmaoooo

“I have 114 levels PLEASE” asdfdasfsdf

LOL Tubbo with the TNT there's our nuke boy, I'll take my crumbs where I can get them

THE SHULKER HOLY SHIT

“Don't let someone get it!!”” ADSFDSAFSDFDS they all tuRN CC REAL QUICK WHEN THE SHULKER BOXES COME OUT

Awesamdudes like: MORE PLEASE AFDASFDSF

Techno immediately snitching about Elytra and dRISTA GETTING THE ACHIEVEMENT

EVERYONE SNITCHING IN CHAT I'M!!!! DREAMS REACTION ASDFSDFDSF

Drista being the chaotic giver of illegal gifts is so fucking good I'M THRIVING

THE RUN ON PUNZ !!!! omg

Also can we just take a minute to appreciate Tommy being allowed around people <3 <3 This is so wholesome and good and chaotic as all hell

“I thought I was Tom Cruz for like a whole week” ...TOMMY??

LOL SHE BANNED TECHNO OMG

Dristas on a banning Rampage afsdfsdf

BAN GOGGY OMGGG

Omg shes actually making a wITHER DASDASDFAS

Oh no poor Tubbo I didn’t know he was liVE

319k viewers jeezus

Awwwww Techno hyping up Wilbur's song :) that's so sweet actually

…………….Fuck you Dream :( saw the chance to Twist the Knife in c! And TOOK IT

LOL THE FUCKING FORK IS THE BEST BIT LOLLLL

Lol ironically the Bedrock bros song is the oNE COPYRIGHTED ONE, god why did Minecraft ever copyright Pigstep what a shit move honestlyyy

Pigstep fucking goING TO TECHNO LOLLLLLL “this is the most powerful item on the server since it DMCA’s people”

LOL PUNZ TRYING TO STEAL ANOTHER SHULKER

Poor Sam he actually has to BUILD give this man a SHULKER

Lol Everyone wants a shulker so much

….aww he tried to toss the pigstep disc lmaooo DRISTAS LITERALLY HOLDING IT Scaaaaaammmmed

Drista “I NEED IT ON HAND” So committed to violence !!!

The fucking creepers on the way out omg fuckign PERFECT

LOL TOMMY WASN’T READY FOR THE TURN AROUND ON CURSING LMAO You can tell he's always been the youngest who people aren't sure how much they can curse around lmao He's so soft honestly he talks such a big game and then CRUMBLES when called on it lol

Asfdsfs she fell through the same hole again afsdfsdfsd

Drista has been introduced to a Weapon and she’s gotten ATTACHED lmaooo

Wait HOLD THE PHONE Dream has multiple sisters??? Lol

“Yeah I like Shit” Dream: “whAT???”

Bye Drista it’s been nice!!! I hope she had a good time, she seems like a good kid (who is definitely not a content creator lol though she keeps up admirably)

Drista’s one of the few people who can make Tommy speechless lmaooo he looks actually shocked lol

Also first mention of GhostInnit…. cc!Tommy…..

Keep preparing…. Was his original plan to rush Dream even if (maybe especially if…) he died? Fuck man

Also holy shit was this stream right before Quackitys? ? amazing

This was honestly such a BLAST and a really good time, and I can see why its viewed as one of the few breaks we get during Exile :) I feel so refreshed and it was so so nice to have Tommy hanging out in L’manburg having fun with his friends (even if Tubbo was stuck being a Hallucination and Also Banned lol) No deeper insight, I just haven’t stopped smiling for an hour and a half <3

[thevalleyisjolly]

Thinking about alternate character classes lately, and I’m always thinking about A Crown of Candy at any given point in time, so without further ado, for your consideration:

Wizard!Theo, except that he’s the only wizard ever with a positive Strength modifier because that would be hilarious.  Wizard!Theo, who learned more from Lazuli than anyone knew, whose magic isn’t loud or flashy but spell notes hidden in a false prayer book, a soft glow on the tips of his paws and a muttered breath as one of the princesses falls from the top of the staircase again only to land on their feet, as softly as a feather.  In this world, he’s officially the royal tutor, because there are things that Caramelinda doesn’t know, but she does know what Lazuli taught him and she knows where his loyalties lie and she knows that one day, one day the spark she can see in Ruby’s eyes will need a teacher but will more importantly need a protector.  And to the princesses, to the rest of the court, to the world, he’s a slightly gullible, rather awkward tutor who stands on ceremony far too much, and they laugh at him and his silly little sprinkle pet and isn’t he a bit of a large goon?  Even Amethar forgets, every now and then, what he’s seen Theo do on a battlefield, to a battlefield, because as awkward as his social skills may be, Theo is committed to the part and he plays it well.  In any lifetime, in any world, Theo loves his people and he’ll do what he has to for them.

Bonus subclass: School of Abjuration obviously, this squishy gummy bear has one mission, and that’s to protect people.

Rogue!Lapin, because obviously.  Rogue!Lapin, who never summoned the Sugar Plum Fairy, who smiled and charmed and lied his way from the street to the service of a minor but respectable lord, and from there up and up the social strata until he is chamberlain to House Jawbreaker.  Duke Jawbreaker doesn’t bother much with him, but Spearia Mentha takes one look at Lapin, standing too straight and tall, the accent of the common mountain folk still seeping out at his edges, his eyes sharp and clever even when bowing and murmuring obedience, and she thinks “Hmm.”  And when her sweet baby has to go to Castle Candy as hostage, a safe and willing hostage, but a hostage nonetheless, she writes to dear sister Caramelinda and asks would it be alright if she sent someone from her own household, just to keep an eye on the boy, for her peace of mind as a mother?  Liam arrives at Castle Candy, sans pig, plus one very stuffy guardian, and Lapin Cadbury looks up at the towering spires and parapets of the castle, and a small, rare smile flashes across his face for just a second.

Bonus subclass: Mastermind is really the only way to go, isn’t it?

Sorcerer!Amethar, but listen, alright, my kingdom for Sorceror!Amethar who grows up with magic as rage flowing through his veins, whose wrath manifests not as bursts of concentrated battle fury, but in wild surges of strange and powerful magic.  There is magic in the blood and bones of House Rocks, an old and willful magic.  His sisters protected him, as much as they could, but still, there are whispers, more so once the young prince becomes the grieving king with the eyes of the world on him.  People mutter about the witch king of Candia, they say that he’s levelled armies with his sorcery, that he’s bewitched the Emperor Gustavo into friendship, that he’s dangerous and brings only death and destruction.  And it hurts, it does, not because he cares what other people think, but because they aren’t all wrong.  Look at him, the Unfallen, alive when so many have died.  It hurts that he has so much power singing in his blood, and he’s the one who’s powerless, who can’t be the protector, who must be the protected.  Why him?  Why not strong Rococoa, or brilliant Lazuli, or kind Citrina, or cunning Sapphria?  Why is he alive and not them, when he is the wildcard, the dangerous one, the last person who should be king?

Bonus subclass: I mean, it’s gotta be Wild Magic, no doubt about it.

Druid!Cumulous is another story that writes itself.  Druid!Cumulous still swears the same vows of dedication and protection to Candia’s magic, Candia’s secrets, and so Candia itself rises to acknowledge that.  It isn’t the red glow of the Hungry One that surrounds him when he fights, but the bright pink of the frosting sprites, the warm chocolate of the fudge brownies, the brilliant lemon-yellow of the river dragon’s scales, the slightest tint of sugar plum purple.  All spirits are fickle and unpredictable and dangerous, but they can recognize faith and they can appreciate service and they can reward what is freely given.  The Sugar Plum Fairy considers this one for a while.  She has no little pet bunny in this world, no servant to demand wishes from.  But fairies are jealous, too jealous.  Hearts and minds and souls, of course they should be hers, wholly hers, why wouldn’t they be, and for all the vastness of her realm, all her secrets and all her magic, there is something more to Candia than what is just in her.  So she lets this one be, and lays her trap for another prize, a bigger prize…

Bonus subclass: You could honestly make a good argument for Circle of the Shepherd or Circle of the Land, although Circle of the Moon is pretty great for more combat-focused war guys druids.

Warlock!Saccharina’s life is still a tragedy, because magic was only the most obvious thing that the nuns tried to beat out of her.  Warlock!Saccharina is not born with lightning in her fingers and a storm in her heart, but she is born with a strength and a will that the nuns despise.  In this world, Saccharina looks in the window, in the mirror, and she still sees a blue woman, a kind woman with a kind face, reaching out to her, comforting her when the nuns mistreat her, telling her wondrous stories and magical secrets.  In this world, the Rocks sisters, held in a false afterlife, stage a jailbreak.  Rococoa raises herself back to the living, cold with vengeance against the man who murdered her.  Citrina hitches up her skirts and hikes off to Vegetania, prepared to visit as many dreams and instigate as many supernatural miracles as she needs in order to reform the Church.  Sapphria laughs and winks and goes off to do something mysterious and terribly complex and probably very clever.  And Lazuli?  Lazuli goes to find her eldest niece, and to help her do something about the frankly terrible situation she’s in.  She is no spirit of the dead that a small exorcism by a provincial abbess can banish, but something new, something more.  And when Saccharina finally drowns the monastery, a grim smile on her face, it is with eyes and fingers that glow a brilliant, sharp blue.

Bonus subclass: Either Great Old One or Celestial, depending on how Lazuli fights her way back to the waking world.  Reaching out to the mortal world from the afterlife?  Probably Celestial.  Something strange and mysterious that’s never happened before in all of creation, and isn’t entirely comprehensible even to her?  Great Old One.

Barbarian!Jet grows up with so much rage inside her, but a rage for others, a fire for others.  It’s a rage that goes bone-deep, born of so much love and fear, because Jet Rocks may be sheltered and immature and naive, but one thing she does know, one of the earliest things she knows, is that the world is dangerous for people like Ruby, people like Pops, the world does not like people like Ruby and Pops, and as young as she is, she’s already heard how people whisper and seen how they point at Pops when his back is turned.  And if they found out about Ruby-  It’s a different rage that drives Barbarian!Jet, not a mindless battle frenzy, but love sharpened to the keenest focus, to protect, to guard.  In this world, and in every world, Jet Rocks loves her sister above all else, and will do anything to make sure she is safe.  Her parents worry, of course.  Caramelinda looks into her daughter’s eyes, sees hard steel and the heart of sacrifice, and she weeps when she looks into the mirror and sees the same, this is not the life she wanted for her.  Amethar understands.  He knows.  He knew the minute his daughters were placed into his arms for the first time, and the instinct to protect something so precious, precious beyond measure.  He just didn’t want his daughter to understand as well, not so soon, not so young.

Bonus subclass: Path of the Ancestral Guardian, I think, because Jet’s rage is rooted in and for her family.  Also, imagine the confusion and the angst the first time Jet summons past ancestors to fight with her in battle, and none of them include her aunts because they’re too busy raising hell elsewhere.

Bard!Ruby tumbles out of the cradle with a cheerful tongue and a clever mind, and Amethar has to stop himself from calling after Sapphria, because Ruby is so much like her, so nimble on her feet, so clever with her words.  But it’s Caramelinda that sees it first, how Ruby’s leaps and cartwheels hang just a little too long in the air, how Jet brightens and sharpens too fast after just a word from her.  And it’s Theo, of course it’s Theo, who catches Ruby and Jet trying to rob the cookie jar with a spectral, definitely magic, definitely arcane hand floating in the air, where did she even learn that, he doesn’t have that spell, this is bad, this is very, very bad.  Ruby’s more careful after that, after Mom’s lecture about how dangerous it is, and Pops just standing there, looking stern, nodding along to everything that Mom’s saying, not saying a word to the contrary.  Her magic is just for Jet now, her and Jet and nobody else, and she does a very good job of pretending she doesn’t know anything else, pretending like she doesn’t feel the thrum inside of her, pretending like something isn’t singing in her blood with every leap and twirl and handstand.  

Bonus subclass: College of Valour?  It gets that combat flavouring without being as specific as College of Swords, but I’m open to suggestions.

Warlock!Liam, and he is so young, so lonely, roaming the forests around Castle Manylicks, when he finds her or maybe she finds him.  Just a sweet little fairy who knows where to find the best seeds, the ones that have a little bit of magic in them, and here’s a lonely little boy who’s so interested in what she can show him!  And then of course, this isn’t just any lonely little boy, this is the son of Duke Jawbreaker, someone royal, someone important.  I’ll be your friend, she says, coy and sweet, a nice friend, not like your brothers.  I know lots of things, secret things, magic things, that I can show you.  Come with me, do you want to see something really neat?  Her magic is almost golden, almost Bulbian, with the slightest whiff of something rich and sticky and sweet and purple, and Liam’s only glad that he has a friend now, someone who’s nice to him, who’s interested in the same things, who remembers his name and doesn’t pick on him because he likes seeds more than swords.  Lonely children don’t need to be threatened or coerced, lonely children don’t need deals with the devil.  Lonely children just need a kind voice and warm approval and someone to show them affection, and the Sugar Plum Fairy knows just how to work with that.

Bonus subclass: Gonna diverge from Lapin here and go with Archfey as the warlock/patron relationship, because Liam isn’t in a position where he has to pretend that his powers come from the Bulb, so the SPF can lean into her feyness more.

[erazonpo3]

(This is a written collaboration between myself and Hemlock/pathygen in the ‘Cassandra’s Tangled Adventure’ AU verse, featuring our characters Alphecca and Violante. This was just a fun little back-and-forth with our two villains set in the period in which Violante has possession of Alphecca’s phylactery.  

The formatting is based on our replies, it was really fun to get to write together and watch Violante flex on Alphecca. I’d recommend reading it on my blog’s desktop page for the formatting) 

The Eagle and The Mole

Ever since her rebirth in flame and ash, Alphecca hasn’t known the icy grip of cold; yet Countess Violante’s chateau inspires it in her bones. It’s a monument of stone, glass, and drapery, and at this time of night the torchlight in the hallways are extinguished; malingerers are unwelcome. Even the ever-present ache in her chest takes its leave here, something she would have been thankful for if it weren’t Violante’s doing. Her soul burned like a dying star, but since her phylactery fell into Violante’s hands all she has known is its absence— numb apathy— the closest thing she knows to cold. 

She’s sure to school her features before entering Violante’s parlour, smoothing out the notch between her eyebrows and the curl of her lips that may as well have been sculpted into her flesh these days. Trinket shrieks at her as she walks past, aggrieved that her delicious bones are today wrapped in the illusion of skin and, on top of that, a stupid uniform. It’s stiff and it pinches in ways she can’t feel but is nonetheless frustrated by, and whenever she catches her reflection in the silverware she can’t help but grimace at the militant emblems and pageantry she advertises. All that’s missing from her marionette costume is the strings. 

The Countess is waiting for her as expected, perched perfectly poised on the gaudy piece of furniture she likes to pretend is a throne. She resists the urge to sneer at the pretentious display, if only because Violante would find it so amusing. 

“I’m back,” she announces flatly, absently picking at the cuff of her jacket. 

“Yes, I noticed.” Violante replies, crystal and calm as a winter morning. 

The countess has a quill pinched between her fingers; sharp motions carry the crimson plume across the page laid out in front of her, scratching. The chamber swallows sound and bounces it back. Dim moonlight ekes through tall, arched windows of blue stained glass, and casts a watery pattern against the polished floor. 

Violante does not look up at the dead woman. 

A minute and a half passes before she finally caps the tiny, neat scrawl on the parchment with a looping signature, rolls it into a neat cylinder, and sets it aside. The feathered end of the quill finds its way between her lips, ponderously. She tilts her head up and her smile is delicate. There’s something of a spider in it. 

“That certainly took you long enough. One little village could hardly have been all the effort.” The Countess of Solanales stands with a fluid motion, and folds her arms loosely across her chest. A cigarette smolders in it’s holder on the edge of the desk, filling the room with an oily, herbal smell. She inspects Alpchecca like one might a mannequin stuck in a display, lips pursed.

“Well, at least you kept everything in order this time. See? You can look nice. I knew the collar would be a nice touch. The color accents your eyes, now that you have them in.” 

Trinket croaks from her perch. The monochrome vulture returns to preening, bored now that the arguably edible bits of the lich aren’t on display. Violante leans back against the edge of her gilded seat. “So how did it go? Did you make any friends?”

This time Alphecca doesn’t withhold the grimace that curls back her lip to expose a yellowed canine. She’s aware of the way the moonlight makes her pale skin seem especially waxy and sallow, which typically serves to unnerve humans- all save the Countess. Violante’s  eyes glitter like a cut diamond as she appraises her, and Alphecca forces her gaze away in a show of deliberate disregard. She stares through the blue washed windowpane to speak to the waxing moon, but keeps an eye on Violante’s figure in her periphery. 

“I was just being thorough, I’m sure you can appreciate that. No stone left unturned, no building left standing, everything razed just right, just for you,” she says, flashing Violante a quick, sardonic smirk before returning her gaze to the window. “I don’t imagine you’ll have much of a problem marching your people down there and claiming a new pile of dirt, or whatever it is you do with the ashes. There’s nothing left.” 

The moon’s bright glow begins to burn a spot into her vision, but facing the window makes it easier for her to keep her face blank. Her excursion today would be considered a success by Violante’s standards, but she had been sure to cause enough of a racket as she tore through the streets that most villagers had ample time to flee before she tore into the place. If they couldn’t escape even after all the time she gave them, well, Cassandra can’t say she didn’t try. 

Under the scrutiny she can’t help but scratch at the briarthorn collar, and she chances another glance back at Violante. 

“Thoughtful. I can’t say I have much use for more dirt than I already seem to own, but,” Violante gestures and Trinket stretches her neck. The vulture flaps off the stand and onto the desk with a crooked hop, and remains still while the countess fastens the scroll to her leg. “I’m sure whoever is left will be happy to accept all the aid Solanales is willing to provide, in the wake of their unfortunate devastation.” 

Eyes glittering, she crooks a gloved finger under the large bird’s beak and hums. “The world is lousy with monsters, after all.”

And in the end, it was only a barrier town. But every little bit counts, every scrap of seizure. Scraps still. But these were things that couldn’t be rushed. Or shouldn’t have been, if she had been able to stick to her original schedule. Plans were important, but the ability to adapt to a situation was worth even more. Put attention in the right places, stress on the right joints, poison in the right tea. 

Or get creative, and toss a skeleton into a henhouse. Ho hum. 

“Go on.” Violante says to the bird. Trinket makes a clicking noise low in her throat, and takes off without a backwards glance at Alphecca, winging towards some high and hidden exit. Violante watches her go in silence. She doesn’t expect it will take long for a response, in some capacity, but she doesn’t really plan to wait for one either. Aldara is out in the field somewhere, hopefully stalking her other quarry, but there’s a decent chance both situations will muddle together eventually. 

“Now, what to do with you?” Violante turns back to face the dead woman, who looks hilariously unsure. It’s already late, and she needs to keep some space between the raids, as she creeps them closer to the borders of the Iron Kingdom. 

Alphecca scowls at the vulture’s retreating form, however glad she’d normally be to see it leave. With Trinket gone, only the two of them remain. It didn’t exactly make for a good buffer, yet in the leering bird’s absence the room tightens with intimacy. Violante and intimacy are her two least favourite things, and combined they manifest as the bane of her existence. The only thing that can make it worse is Violante’s voyeuristic shadow who is thankfully out on her master’s orders tonight, likely committing her own fill of atrocities. 

The Countess’ icy veneer betrays nothing of her intentions. In a game where information is everything, Alphecca knows she’s at a woeful disadvantage. If she tries fishing, Violante will know what she’s doing the minute she speaks, no matter how vague or disinterested she comes across— but she might be indulged. It begs the question of whether it’s better to stumble around blindly or sniff out a trail she can’t trust. Either way, she needs to say something- the longer she concedes to silence, the further the scales tip in Violante’s favour. 

“How about giving these old bones a rest? You’ll find a siesta does wonderful things for the constitution,” she quips. “I’m assuming you don’t want to cause too much of a stir, anyhow,” she adds, unable to deny the temptation of the gamble. Now she forces herself to keep her eyes trained on the Countess, and settles into a smirk. 

“You’re dead, you don’t have a constitution,” Violante drawls.

She glances away towards the window, the picture of disinterest, thinking. Ghostly evening light blankets the room, and flows over the silent collection of statues and armor bordering the walls, the curtained archways. Rooting out the location of the lich’s phylactery had been more of an effort of time and money than anything else. She had a number of contacts stretched over the continent, from tomb takers to Morcant to disgruntled former servants who had once swept the halls of the Spire. The crumbling little ruin of a shrine had seemed like a forgotten afterthought, nestled on the edge of an icy valley north of Ingvarr. The pendant had been wrapped in hay and rue. The plain little goat skull carved into the stone that boxed it had worn smooth with time. It was imagery that had become much more frequent among the information she lately received. So many old stories seemed to be pulling themselves up out of the grave these days. Even keeping the new ones in the ground was proving to be a challenge.

 No one died like they used to. The lich had certainly been involved in that most recent of frustrations.

Although, maybe, her decision to poison Cassandra had been a little hasty. She had maybe been a little angry. A little perturbed. Corpses and memories were generally less useful than breathing attendants, even if they were less trouble. People were so stubborn. Still, even there the lich might prove..useful. If that was the way things shook out in the end.

“Besides, we both know rest isn’t really in your cards.” The countess says, stepping down away from the desk, towards Alphecca. Reaching up, she adjusts the collar the lich keeps fiddling with, smooths down the epaulettes on her shoulders. The illusion of flesh truly was impressive. Almost as much as the facade of confidence. “You know, I once heard that a long life eventually deprives you of optimism. They also say that time heals all wounds. People never seem to be able to make up their minds about just how sad they think they’re supposed to be.”

Alphecca wraps her grimace up into a wry grin, though the fury in her eyes burns a palpable heat in the gelid room. Violante ignores said look as she smooths out the creases in her uniform, abusing all sentiment of personal space. The woman isn’t physically intimidating in the slightest; even wearing stilettos Alphecca has to look down her nose at her. But the proximity is unnerving. If her physical body is merely an extension of her soul, then Violante owns both, and she isn’t shy about making it known— so Alphecca does her best to ignore it, training her eyes on the wall in front of her instead of the head of perfectly coiffed curls only a breath away and the nails that cross her clavicle to smooth over her shoulders. 

“In my experience, more time is just an avenue for more procrastination,” she admits. It’s the truth, or at least it’s her truth, and there’s no harm in admitting it- the information has no value to Violante. If the Countess got her claws on immortality, the last thing anyone should be concerned with is if she were happy or sad. 

“People also say that destroying people’s lives and livelihoods won’t make you happy, but we both know that’s not true,” she adds. She hasn’t actually heard anyone say that, but it’s one of those unspoken things- and it’s wrong. Schadenfreude and victory are one hell of a cocktail. 

“A common adage, is that?” Violante hums, stepping back. “Stagnation is hideous. And regret is a waste of energy. If you’ve really wasted all this time waiting for a death that’s never going to come, then it’s fortunate I came along to make better use of your… afterlife.” She tilts her head. “Especially considering that I found you rooting around in a cave, talking to bones. I can’t imagine skeletons make for very good conversation.”

For once, Alphecca isn’t bothered by the barb. She wastes her time however she pleases, spending her years harassing new villages until she gets bored and moves on, or searching for new fossils to reanimate, playing in the dirt. She knows she’s a disappointment but that’s how she’s come to like it— fuelled by the spite of those more ambitious than her who have to watch her gnaw on the unending life they can’t have. That is, until Violante took it from her. 

With more distance between them now, Alphecca releases a breath; it’s unnecessary, but calming all the same. 

“They make better company than your pets, at least,” she says. They don’t talk back, for one thing, but she’ll keep that part to herself. All the bones she finds have very interesting stories to tell, but unfortunately Violante’s dreadful companions only find them useful for teething. 

“Tsk. Oh, kettle.” Violante says, sotto voce. She has very little interest in making any argument about the quality of company Aldara or anyone else brings to her circle. She doesn’t keep them around for their people skills. Mostly. The countess reaches out to tap the bottom of her jaw. “You’re so uncertain for a corpse. You chatter so much for a tool. But if that’s the way you feel…” A thoughtful pause, wintry silence. Violante steps past her, the dark pool of her gown trailing on the floor. ��Come.” 

“What, you’re not a fan of our stimulating discussions?” Alphecca jeers, cocking her head. Blunt as they are, words are the last weapons she has in this fight, but she turns to follow her nonetheless. She kicks her feet up off the ground to hang a foot in the air to let the click of Violante’s heels echo down the hollow hallways alone, creeping behind her like a spectre. 

She’s hesitates, trailing behind at a healthy distance, but she can’t deny her curiosity is piqued. 

“I think your talents lie elsewhere.” Violante answers without turning around, wry. The castle is large and cold and strikingly empty of people. There are servants, courtiers, of course, but this late at night the work has gone to ground. Most of them, having been around this long, have learned to work out of sight, or in silence. Violante lifts a low burning candelabra from a table in the tapestried hall, wax dripping into the filagree crevices that tomorrow will be picked clean again before she wakes. The halls stretch on, half covered portraits lining the walls, tall arched windows that continue to leak in cool evening light. Violante takes them down, towards the ground floor, and eventually comes to rest in front of a heavy, ornate door set back far from the main vestibule. 

“Wait here.” she commands, and without stopping, the countess takes off down another hall and vanishes around the corner. She returns about ten minutes later, unchanged and smiling. In her hand is a small pouch, dangling with a loop of cord that she drapes around her neck. She nods at the door. “Shall we?”

Alphecca lingers back as she follows Violante through the chateau. She’s no stranger to silence, and she can even appreciate the servants’ scarce presence; humans can be such annoying creatures. However, there’s a hostility that comes with the quiet— an unspoken threat that has butlers and maids scurrying away like rats in the corner of her eye, only daring to move when the Countess strides past.  

She halts when instructed, taking the time to inspect the portraits of Violante’s ancestors while she waits. The dim light is no obstacle as she takes in the details, sneering at the pompous Lords and Ladies that line the walls. The different fashion styles over the centuries blend together in her mind, but she recognises the distinct ruffles that predate the Shampanier Era crossing over to the more modern style of headdress, evolving across the row of portraits. They have matching brutal, patrician features and cold eyes, and their arrogance is palpable even through the oils. She wonders if Violante sees them as an inspiration or an embarrassment. 

Alphecca drops to her feet when Violante arrives, eyeing the new fashion accessory. 

“Ladies first,” she gestures in a parody of an usher, trying to avoid the sense of dread that accompanies the sight of the heavy wooden door. 

“True.” Violante says agreeably, placing her gloved hand on the door. In the other she still clutches the flickering candelabra, and the light plays shadows against its surface. The front of it is carved with vines and flowers, mountains and snowflakes. It opens with a heavy grinding sound when she tries the handles, with some effort. Cobwebs stick and pull between the gap, and Violante sneers a little at the dust that collects on her fingertips. A staircase leads down into darkness. It reeks of earth, dry and undisturbed. 

Violante’s face remains impassive as she starts down the steps, the click of her heels ringing against the stone. The walls are featureless rock, and roots start to press through the gaps the farther down they travel. Eventually the stairs level out onto a narrow, dark, landing. Violante moves with a caution in the dark that relaxes when she finds the torches set into thick pillars that frame the entrance, and she lights them with the candle flame. Orange light fills the cavern.

“Homey, I imagine.” she says. “But still better than what you were used to.”

It is a tomb, of course. More a mausoleum, seemingly built into the naturally limestone cavern underneath the castle. The roof of the crypt rises up high above the chamber, arched ribs and all angles like the inside of a cathedral. Violante doesn’t pause in her intrusion, gliding down the center aisle with a curious fervor, idly stroking the covered parcel around her neck. She finally stops as they near the back of the chamber, in front of a stone dais that elevates two, long, solid coffins. Side by side, in their lofty place of honor. Violante sets the candles down. She looks back at the lich. 

She says, “You’re going to wake them up.”

Violante isn’t wrong to assume that the cavernous underbelly of the castle is more comforting to Alphecca than the bleak architecture and furnishing upstairs, but it’s still far from homely. The crypt is stale and azoic, lacking the warm smell of rot and soil that accompanies her usual hovels. Nonetheless she does feel more at ease here, and it takes the tension out of her shoulders.

“Is this mum and dad? I didn’t really take you for the mournful orphan type,” Alphecca says, her smirk eking into her voice. She approaches the left coffin and slides a hand over the lacquered wood, which is stained with black and ornately carved. The golden filigree is finely engraved and the craftsmanship of the coffin itself is masterful. A thrill runs through her bones; as disinterested as she is in the coffin’s inhabitants, she’s eager to see what bijous and tchotchkes she’ll find inside. 

It takes her mind off of Violante’s request. Resurrecting one body, one soul, takes more effort than she is usually willing to expend. Two isn’t out of the question, but it’s going to take time. There are shortcuts she could take- 

No. She’ll take all the time she needs. 

“I can do it for you, but it’s not going to be quick or easy. I’m assuming you want more than just a couple of braindead puppets, after all,” Alphecca states, glancing carefully at Violante. 

Violante watches the dead mingle, the old and the ancient. There’s a stone bench opposite the dais, maybe long ago a place meant for prayer or meeting. The back of it curves up into a chiseled swan’s head, with the beak broken off. She sits, and crosses her legs, eyes lidded, observing Alphecca as she circles the caskets. The lich’s interest is evident, undisguised. She’s being so nice.

“Mmm.” she confirms, very calm. “Lady Fiore and Count Viator. I poisoned them when I was seventeen.”

She draws a finger across the jagged beak of the swan and rubs the grit between her thumb and forefinger. The black fabric of her gloves are already powdered with dust. Idly, she pinches one finger and slips it the long glove off, stretching her hand in the cool, dry air of the crypt. The tips of her fingers are stained purplish-black, even deep under her nails. 

“They need to be able to speak, and answer questions truthfully. I’m not especially worried about mobility, but memory is important.” She tilts her head, dark eyes focused on the bone witch. “How long? Describe the process for me.”

Alphecca’s lips twist as Violante confesses to her parents’ murder, but continues to investigate the coffins. 

“Well, the process involves bartering with Death, binding the soul to an anchor and then binding said anchor to your will- it’s something that can take months, depending on how long it takes to get the reagents, and that’s just for one soul. Doubling up will save time, but even you don’t have infinite resources,” she explains.

Without asking Alphecca lifts the nearest coffin lid, and lets out an involuntary whoop at the burst of pungent aroma. There’s not much left of the carcass itself, despite what she’s sure was a vigorous embalming. Corpses are meant to return to the earth, and the ones buried above ground have a messier time of trying to find it. Lady Fiore’s robes are completely soiled with corpse juice, but she’s surrounded by a few glinting baubles that could still be disinfected- although she’s sure Violante won’t let her play with them. 

“A fresh corpse is always easier to work with, but it’s just as well you kept the remains at all- souls will anchor to their own bodies with less of a fuss,” she says, disregarding all the loopholes that come to mind. With a snap of her fingers Fiore’s bones glow a pale blue, battling the orange torchlight for a moment before it subsides. It’s a basic preservation spell that she uses on all her creatures to protect their bones from the elements, which she hopes Violante will take as a sign of her veracity. 

“You’ll find my resources will more than suffice.” Violanate says. “Considering the state of your previous arrangement, and what you’re used to.” Scrounging around in the shadows and the muck couldn’t have been all that profitable for the lich. Procuring things, especially things of an elusive nature, is not usually a problem for her.

The stench that emanates from her mother’s coffin is certainly vile enough. Violante’s nose wrinkles, and she nearly rolls her eyes at the bone witch’s obvious enthusiasm for it. For a moment she has to tilt her head to the side, and she brings the pouch around her neck closer to her face. There’s baby’s breath and rosemary inside: a good dampener, or so she’s been told. The Countess is not unfamiliar with corpses, but they’re usually less decayed, and less in her face. She could have used a stronger perfume. 

“Useful little spell.” She says, turning back to face the dais. 

And then, “..bartering with death.” Violante drawls, stretching the words out slowly. That has her curiosity piqued. Something about it, a string to tug. “Like it’s a person.”

Alphecca hums absently, neither in agreement or disagreement. 

“I suppose we’ll see,” she says. She swipes a thumb over Lady Fiore’s cheekbone, imagining how the muscle would have wrapped across it and how the skin might have sat on top. Her sharp jawline mirrors Violante’s, and she’s willing to bet they shared the same nose. She was no doubt a very attractive woman in her prime, and Alphecca finds herself almost frustrated that she’ll be deliberately prolonging the reconstruction process. 

She crosses over to the coffin on the left but her fingers tapdance across the lid, and her head perks up at the mention of Death. 

“Well, yeah- okay, she’s not really a person, but she’s the shepherd between this realm and the realm where lost souls are... supposed to go, and you’re not going to get a soul back from the realm of the dead without her noticing,” she explains, smiling at the memory of the spectre. Absently she traces shapes in the dust of the coffin lid as she continues. 

“It’s far simpler to make a trade with her than to try and steal one, but that’s still easier said than done.” 

Having to watch the lich inspect and handle her parents' remains doesn’t seem to phase the Countess very much. Legs crossed, she sits back on the mourning bench, and rests her chin on the back of her fingers. 

“‘She’. You make a trade with death.” Violante repeats, not a question. “What could..death-the-entity possibly want in exchange for a soul?”

There’s a visible sneer on her face at the word soul. It’s not that she doesn’t believe in spectres or spirits: she’s essentially speaking to one, even if it’s trapped in a bone. The concept of anything trying to tell her what to do, even after death, dissatisfies. Even at a young age, playing with her first herbs and poisons and staining her skin, Violante knew that she wasn’t going to go until she was good and ready. 

She can guess what the lich might think of her. The many things, every terrible notion. Most she’s probably right about. But Violante has no interest in living forever. Cavorting around for centuries as a moldering corpse isn’t an appealing notion, and it obviously hasn’t done the witch any favours. No. She is going to build something great. Something right, something hers.

In the end, if it is really worthy, it will outlast her. 

And if it’s not...well. 

Violante hums, “Longing for death is a bit of a cliche, even for you.”

“Depends,” Alphecca shrugs. “Sometimes she asks for help wrangling the ghosts that refuse to let go, or she has a specific soul in mind, or sometimes she just wants a favour to keep in her pocket. There’s always some kind of catch though, because she’s hardly going to ask for something she can get herself.” 

Even if she weren’t already planning on delaying the process, she anticipates bargaining for two souls will be the most difficult part. Bartering with Death isn’t exactly something she makes a habit of; she can count on one hand the amount of times she’s made the deal, and every time had brought its own headache. Just the memory of it is enough to make her head hurt, so she turns her attention back to Violante.

“Yeah, well. Even you’d be begging her to come take you after long enough. You and I both know Death can be a mercy,” she says with a smirk, and cracks open dear father’s casket.  

Help, promises, wayward souls. “That’s a lot out of death’s reach.” More than one would think, for such a definite force. Violante listens to the dead woman without looking up, thinking, rubbing the pad of her thumb across the velvet pouch dangling from her neck. There is another wave of foul scent, all earth and rot. The sound of heavy stone dragging on stone. Her father had been a count of some notable prowess. He had been good at getting people to listen, and always spoke with confidence. Curt at times, but he shared a warmth with her mother that would have seemed anathema to the traditional Solanales chill, to anyone outside of their family. They were a private people. Violante had loved her parents. She had loved them even when she was putting them in the ground. 

 “Who said anything about mercy?” The countess murmurs, tilting her head, a silver-dark curl of hair sliding over one side of her face. Wintry, she says, “How long is this going to take you? Approximately, for one body?”

Alphecca rakes a finger down Count Viator’s sternum, making a mental note of his measurements. She’s sure there’s a portrait somewhere in the castle she can look to as a reference for their bodies, which are clearly tall but perhaps wider than their frames let on. Violante’s voice echoes in the cavernous room, yet the words themselves float around in the air. There’s a few trinkets scattered in the coffin, rings and jewels and heirlooms; they’re gaudy and expensive, but far from valuable to the dead. The sudden change in the intonation of Violante’s voice catches her attention, and she only catches the tail end of her question. 

“Hm? Oh- well, for one? It’d normally take around a month or so to source all the reagents- meat, ivory, rare herbs and spices and whathaveyou- then somewhere between one to two weeks to build the body itself. After that it really depends on what I need to do to recover the soul,” Alphecca explains, finally dragging her eyes away from the remains. 

“And of course, I wouldn’t want to rush perfection.” 

“How thoughtful,” Violante drawls. “But they don’t need to be perfect, just functional. Enough to answer what I want to ask of them. You fare well enough without lungs. Or gray matter.” The countess tilts her head again. “They’re going right back in the ground after I’m finished with them.”

Pushing away from the bench, Violante stands with fluid, gossamer grace. Holding one arm loosely tucked around her waist, she climbs the steps and despite the reek, peers slowly into each of the caskets, expression unreadable. Swipes one stained fingers against the dust collected on the stone lip, rubbing. 

Almost conversationally, she looks back and says, “Tell me what you need, and you’ll have it within a week. If not sooner. We have the merits of civilization here.” With a surprising amount of ease, Violante leans back against her mother’s grave and lifts herself into a sitting position on the skewed cover, ankles crossed. She smiles, her mouth a sharp, dark slash. “Three weeks, I think, is more than enough time for you to finish the work.” 

Very slowly, she lifts the velvet pouch and threads it open. The amulet is heavy, and Violante curls it’s chain delicately around her fingers, thumb hooked under one of the horns. Scarlet light suffuses her from below. 

Coy, Violante hums, “If you put your mind to it.”

Alphecca scowls at Count Viator, cursing him for ever procreating. 

“If you want a botched job, then fine,” she sneers, bristling at the intrusion on her oasis. The presence of the phylactery is like a sneeze sitting at the back of her nose, painless and yet impossible to ignore. However, the Countess has extended her a favour in the same token, providing her the irritation necessary to redirect her attention elsewhere. 

“The souls of the dead don’t tend to like being torn from their peace and shoved back inside their corpses, and the further the vessel is from their actual flesh and blood, the harder it is to attach them. And if a soul doesn’t attach properly, then you’re going to have a very uncooperative, likely half-braindead, pale imitation of your dearly departed loved one. So it’s your call,” Alphecca explains, drumming her fingers on the coffin lid. 

It’s a gambit for more time, but the phenomenon of corrupted souls isn’t unheard of. And it’s not exactly something she’s keen on dealing with. 

And then there was silence. It was followed by the shrill whistle of a lofty wind, swiftly swallowed by the cavern, sucked down. Above, a jagged crack in the apex of the cave opened up to mountain air and evening sky. Snow-melt had formed thin icicles which dripped with languid precision onto the old stone. There were some places within the cavern where if you listened close enough you could hear the sounds of running water; more runoff that was kept flowing by the warm channels that ran all underneath Solanales. The recessed thermal rivers: mineral rich, were responsible for the health and diversity of the medicinal herbs the county was able to cultivate. Her father had shown her maps, long ago.

Violante regards the lich cooly. The sneer; the constant flow of excuses, the obstinance. There is a moment before she speaks, where the slick consideration in her dark eyes slides towards bored. Just as quickly, the flat stare is replaced with a knifelike flash of malice, penetrative and acute—then a return to hawkish study.

“You’re right,” The countess says smoothly, examining the blemished fingers of her free hand, “it is my call.” She tilts her head, and wrly continues, “..and if I cared about what they liked, I wouldn’t have killed them in the first place.”

The glow from the amulet gives her skin a rosy tincture it doesn’t usually possess. Violante places her empty hand back on the coffin lid behind her, relaxing back into a lounge.

“Alphecca…” her voice is deadly soft. She rarely uses the corpse’s name. She’s never seen much point. The countess peers down at the phylactery, slim fingers curled under the horns and through the chains.

“You know, this really was remarkably easy to find. Time; a few simple exchanges of gold, a barter with a like-minded contact—who will no doubt realise, eventually, the true cost of that information, and likewise, the great loss she would accrue attempting to take it back.”

Calm, easy, her posture is that of a woman relaxing in a parlor; not an arm's reach away from her mother’s seeping skeleton. Violante runs her thumb up the side of the crystal. It’s warm, with a steady, pulse-like thrum. 

“That is a part of what it means to have dominion—to have dominance. Laying the foundation. Control over people and their emotions, so that they don’t go spinning them out into actions they haven’t thought over properly. Something always there, in the back of their minds.” 

With a sly smile, Violante tilts the amulet. “Like this.” Her fingers tighten, squeeze around the pulse. 

“Come here.” she commands.

The Countess’ silence brings the familiar weight of dread, the coils of her contemplation winding and tensing before their inevitable release. The use of her name, soft as it is, is like the snap of a twig; the arrow is coming next, but she has nowhere to run. When Violante speaks, her words are dripping with nightshade, and Alphecca pays less attention to the words as she does those eyes and the way they peel back the illusion of her flesh. How long ago was it that Zhan Tiri had stood in her place, holding the phylactery that they’d created together, swinging it before her like an aberrant hypnotist? The image lingers in her mind, branded into her being, and it burns again now. Violante holds her ransom with equal avarice and even more capriciousness. 

She doesn’t fight the command.

One foot drags after the other, pulling her away from Viator’s putrid remains towards his fetid offspring. The ends of her hair dance in the waves of heat that surge from her body, casting her pallid skin in the same glow mirrored in her bottled soul, and her sclera seeps with augural ink. She looks down her nose at the Countess, but stays mute; her glare speaks for itself. 

“Oh, that face again,” Violante smiles slyly as the lich draws near. “You looked at me like that the last time you tried to get me to break this. For all that trite dribble about souls, they pack rather nicely into tight spots, hm?” She lifts the phylactery and lets it dangle from her fingers again. The carved crystal twists, shedding ruby light. 

Tilting her head, the countess adds, “..though honestly the sheep-theme is a little provincial for my taste.” 

From her perch on the coffin lid, she and the lich are almost at eye level. Idly, she taps the curled horns of the amulet against her lips, and  takes a moment to inspect the flickering hair, warmed by the unnatural heat in the cold center of the crypt. She’s seen the witch dressed in bone before, skeletal, human then very much not. She hasn’t yet been able to divine whether the flesh is an illusion, or a simulacrum. 

“...you know, it’s almost funny,” she says after another moment, musing. Gently, Violante reaches up to take Alphecca’s chin between her fingers, feeling for bone or for the presence of a seam. Without much force, she tilts her face left, then right. “The creature that made you this way got to die before you, didn’t it? Whether it wanted to or not. And even though it’s gone, you’re still here. That’s an impressive act of malice I’m not even sure I could aspire to.”

She brushes a strand of winding hair behind the dead woman’s ear, the fingers of her other hand wrapped around the amulet. They rest there, lingering.

 “Mercy,” she hums, “Death. Do you really think that force regards you as anything more than a vague afterthought? Do you know why?”

Close, her eyes are dark and flat. When she smirks, her lips part, and there’s something of a serpent in it. The fingers set behind the corpse's ear hook suddenly, sharply. “It’s because you’re a commodity.” Softly, “A body. It was a waste having you be as you were before: running loose, childish and deranged. Whatever worth you had was decided on ages ago by something greater, and then discarded in one instant, only to be defined again, now, by me. That’s the only thing that matters here.”

Drawing her hand back, Violante twines another piece of fiery hair around her stained, lacy fingers. The amulet beats a rhythm against her palm. “Like that little village you destroyed. Garbage, right? But now, it’ll be built up again into something useful—desirable. Not only as a consequence of my birthright, but because I have the power to make that happen, and the will to speak through it. Because that’s the zeal the world recognizes. In the end, it doesn’t matter who you are or who you’re trying to be. Whether you’re a shambling monster… or a wayward sword, I’ll use the power I have; my proof of conquest, to assert my will—” a rough tug on the strand of hair, closer “—and change the meaning of value.”

Silence, and the drip of distant water. Violante lets the strand slide free from her hair, and inspects her hand with distant disinterest.

“Three weeks,” she says cooly. The phylactery thrums in her grip. “Don’t ever try to argue with me again.”

Alphecca’s phantom heart thumps in her hollow chest. Words intended to cut to the quick come close to their mark, but nothing Violante says can slice deeper than the futility of her situation. She can’t remember needing to gasp for air like this, not for a long time. And yet for all her vast networks of contacts and flies on the walls, Violante doesn’t know everything. She clutches that thought like a final matchstick in the dark, for all its limited warmth. The Countess doesn’t know Death; not like she does. And she’ll get those souls that she wants, and she’ll do her finest job— but Violante’s not the only one that has strings worth pulling. 

For as tainted as Violante’s hands are, they’re still warm. Blood pulses right to the tips of her fingers and beats against her false skin, and she feels its absence when her hand draws away. Alphecca responds with a cock of the head, and a sneer.

“I’d better get going, then.”

[indigosprite]

Chrome Callout post.

relax this is just my love hate relationship with chromes writing and potential. spoiler, it ends with all the love... hate is only in the middle. 

My absolute favorite thing in fanfics is Chromes characterization. Like we all know Chrome is completely aware that Mukuro and co need a reoccurring dose of Valium and a therapist willing to do illegal things in order to lower their sadistic points to ”kind of disturbing but tolerable”. Or at least we hope she does even though she proves to us again and again that she’s not phased by it in the slightest and might actually be just as bad. TYL and she’s still running around helping them do god knows what. She follows them on this massacre pridefully, she “believes in” them ( its sweet actually. They’re what she thinks of when Mukuro asks what she believes in and makes a young kokuyo gang.)

In fanfics when people write her to be a double edge sword it’s hilarious, and it should’ve been the character depicted in the Anime and manga instead. But I guess if she hadn’t been the quiet, breathy & compliant 14 year old people wouldn’t have morphed her into the fanon I enjoy now. Here’s some stuff i love and HC abt Chrome  and the things I absolutely hated.  

1. When she actually speaks not just when spoken to. She voices her concerns although she has no intent of not doing what’s asked of her. Who knew she could speak and still be the obedient gang member Mukuro trusts her to be. And when she does this it’s funny. She is the conscience he buries underneath disgust and amusement for chaos, but that’s not her entire character. She’s not reduced to the mom friend either because of this, she’s too passive on the matter. She indulges/Enables it just the same as Chikusa or Ken, although she knows better meanwhile the thought never occurs to them. To summarize :

she’s Brian

2. She’s unhinged and the best part is nobody knows even though it’s blatantly obvious. She may not have the same bloodlust or violent disposition as her peers but there are other ways to showcase this. To Allow Mukuro the leader of this little fearsome Five-some to possess you whenever he feels like and witness whatever horrors he decides to inflict upon someone that day means she’s accepting of literally everything he does. She never resists or expresses distaste/fear for him or anything he does. We assume she would in some capacity because she was depicted as this wide eyed innocent girl trying her best to repay the man that got her to join a gang under the guise of a found family. She quite literally signed up for guts n glory. She knew this and never had second thoughts. Mind you she doesn’t share the same hatred for the mafia as the boys, theirs is blind hatred regardless of who you are. Hers is through them, they are her looking glass rightfully so, so if they say it then their word is law. I’m not sure about you but I would definitely be mindful of the girl who was raised semi normal and willingly turned into a killer for Mukuro of all people. They’re killing adults not shaking them up, they aren’t Tsuna and his friends they finish the job when necessary. The body count is unimaginable. She is just as loyal as Ken and Chikusa and would probably strike you where you stand for speaking ill of him. (She wouldn’t but would definitely be opposed to whatever you’re saying, unless it’s name calling. He takes no offense to that and welcomes it in fact.)

3. The fact that she’s a person apart from Mukuro (physically speaking.) and the Vongola team at all is a blessing in few fics. Although she was made to stand in for Mukuro, when he is released it’s not necessary hence him pushing her to be apart from him and his duties. He did this in the future as well when he possessed Guidio Greco no longer using chrome which lets us know she was successful in becoming a useful comrade and not just a vessel and vongola stand in. She had to otherwise he would’ve left her alone whether she was keeping his Vongola ring warm or not. She is just as aloof as Hibari, always off with her own people only engaging when it’s asked of her. I adore when people keep that in mind and don’t lump her with following behind the vongola as if she were one of them. She shows up for them when asked but her main focus is ultimately committing felonies with Ken and Chikusa per Mukuro’s orders. let her be with the kokuyo gang and let her contribute in the way she’s meant to as a fighter. figure her out give her something cool 

 ik that’s hard considering what we got in the manga. warning things i hate ahead 

what we got in the Anime and Manga: 

so we know Chromes entire purpose was to be Rokudo Mukuro’s stand in, while holding the Vongola ring he soon takes back she is just the girl that is able to get him to come fight their battles when necessary. The Anime and Manga rarely let Chrome fend for herself. We all knew he was coming the second it got serious. By giving chrome that ring she ended up being the one thing to keep him loyal to his contract with being their guardian. If she’s in danger he comes and saves her, the Vongola put her in danger because he will show up and do his job it’s like a rat trap. She is not meant to be a Vongola guardian but more like a Mukuro whistle. They never openly admit it but in the show they will expect/ask her to do things that her track record doesn’t imply she can do and just silently expect Mukuro to show up like always. SKSJDWDN they’ll be like “oh yeah call the girl who passed out and all her organs disappeared I believe in her to do this job even though i’ve never seen her make it to the end of a fight ever not worried at all” sksksjjd They never actually expect chrome to do a job they expect her to go there and manage to get Mukuro to come out and play and we should acknowledge it was just an unspoken thing.  Now I know that despite what I just implied about her not being that great a fighter but just good enough there are two comments made in all 400 chapters that are supposed to negate this.  

Mammon says her illusions are powerful just not enough to fool him , and reborn says she could turn the tide if she were to fight against Mukuro but with confidence, these mean nothing to me because amano throws in so many useless comments like this and then fails to develop it further to make it believable.  and she made powerful characters make note of this so it would be non negotiable and we would just take it at face value because its them but hello ?? ofc we want to see it just like we had to see Tsuna grow before we even considered taking him seriously. hell Dino got a quicker rise to his title than chrome bc its that easy to say oh he can come into his own when needed they just never meant to do it for chrome. 

it’s so irritating when they try to say she’s powerful or could be but give no actual footing for anyone to take those comments seriously when they make her pass out for thirty chapters after doing the bare minimum.

let chrome win on her own not just start strong then step out of the way then have some character say “no really she could be powerful we aren’t going to show you though” .  

when she helped them sneak in the base on her own and even makes those illusions of them fighting we should have gotten more of that!!! 

literally every character is fighting the funeral wreaths and chrome is running in the woods out of breath...even Lambo got to fight. 

you made her sit out of the rep battle to focus on making organs like that wasn’t something she already accomplished in the future and suddenly can’t do anymore ?.....

Chrome finally makes one fighting decision and its to make a mist forcefield that’s dangerous but hell yeah we think she will finally pull through with something powerful and prove herself and then they have mukuro come in a panel later saying “your flames are far too weak to do that I will make it better and help you not die” BYE  that was a perfect time to have her come in to her own seeing as she was powerful and confident enough to initiate it in the first place. 

breaking the barrier daemon spade makes * chefs kiss * give me more 

 when they’re not blindly robbing chrome of character development  she’s just getting kidnapped, passing out  or helping them with small things like making a fake Yamamoto for a party or sneaking in the base with illusions to disguise them. Hello she’s training under mukuro right ??? why did we ever get to see her get stronger each fight and have them say ‘she’s learning quick” instead. 

enough abt what we got, back to what I’ve managed to make out of the scraps we were given..

4. Mukuro is the only one who reassures that she actually is a fighter and she eventually grows to be a good one bc of this and you should write about that dynamic and why it exists more. this one is long.

 the whole dynamic I was referring to exploring is the one where Mukuro and chrome are meant to be equals. He meets this girl whose been neglected and left for dead, another kid messed up by adults neglectful selfish behavior. she willingly follows the boy who is plagued by the same demons and made a small group dedicated to getting revenge for it.  Mukuro & Chrome know they’re two sides of the same coin. he is anger and she is acceptance. He probably finds it amusing she isn’t as angry as them wants to draw it out of her  where as chrome wants to pull out the peace that comes with moving on once you’re in a better place. the girl is so happy to not be near her mom and grateful for this little family while the boys are quite literally holding a grudge against the world.  and like none of them even see it the way she does but she wants them to.  Mukuro and chrome didn’t go through the same things but it doesn’t matter to either of them because its the same story, nobody loved or valued them enough to protect them. In the end chrome will learn to be angry abt things that happen and use that to find a will to fight for something and Mukuro will learn to be at peace because they’re not in that lab anymore and those people are gone from their life. as fighters they’re so important to each others balance Mukuro’s rage cannot be left to be so blind and hers unattended and i know it’s supposed to be Tsuna that cleans his soul but i think chrome definitely plays a more active role in that.  I think he sees a better him in her, he makes her his second gives her his name because she’s the good he knows he can never fully be. she posses a peace he’s not hopeful enough to believe he can achieve or want and ultimately it will make her far more capable of the change he wants. in believing this it means he also believes she will be just as powerful as him with the right training. he’s literally training his demise and her name is Chrome. he wont take over a (mafia) world he wants her to save.  we all know he’s like annoyingly stupid when it comes to showing his emotions, he rather pretend he’s sending you to die when he’s quite literally ushering you to what he thinks is safe and sacrificing himself. so I can totally see him being like  “okay Tsuna might really change the mafia and I want to see that but I've already dug my own grave here's a better newer me that will be way easier to accept than me turning over a new leaf 40 dead families later.” 

5. in the future Hibari is much more happy to help and be around because he knows what a powerful fighter Tsuna turns out to be, i think this is the exact same reason why he goes and helps chrome save herself. Kyoya knows and possibly even respects future chrome enough to save her when she’s at her weakest which he usually detests. Chrome grows to be much more in the future and that’s exactly why he even gives this sick chrome a push. everyone likes to think it’s a Mukuro thing for him but what if it actually is a chrome thing. in the show he’s never been present to witness her show any kind of power so we can only assume that at some point he saw her in action. 

  6. it’s implied in the future that Mukuro fights alongside her, he views her as more than just a vessel and doesn’t baby her in the slightest when he pushes her to become her own being. I won’t call it respect per say but he doesn’t look at her as a doll even though that’s the part she played for him. He still trains her the way he eventually does Fran. We all know he just wants Mini Mukuros to aid him in his endeavors but the fact that he chooses her says a lot about how she’s meant to be viewed. He also chooses a nine year old brat with an apple hat but hey he must see something everyone else doesn’t until he’s done with them seeing as Fran was kidnapped by the freaking Varia once Mukuro’s teachings were for the most part implemented. “Oh you learned under Mukuro ? We can’t have Mukuro you need to join us immediately” (I’ve just realized Mukuro gave the vongola their strongest mist guardians all while claiming to hate them. Funny man). imagine how powerful Chrome gets, even better when Mukuro is actually there in the flesh to teach her where as Fran got some illusionary version of him. WRITE ABOUT IT. 

7. for the love of god give that girl her own fighting style. yamamoto has his sword gokudera is literally baby genius ryohei is a boxer and hibari has like the most random weapon ever. go crazy. i love it when chrome isn’t pulling a trident from her bag. because she’s not mukuro anymore. she’s a reticent mist guardian, compliment that.  Mukuros trident has his own history with him. give her some history of her own.    

in my fic Chrome uses a scythe and tears through reality with it. 

reason:  because she is a grim reaper in her own right. she rose from the dead and is showing up to collect the souls of the wicked. a silent but fearsome person. 

her style ? :  personally I like to believe chrome dabbles in profiling, hear me out. Her parents were neglectful and in turn she really has little experience with relationships in general, i think her curiosity would lead her to constantly study peoples relationships and behaviors and see how they affect her target. aka she fights by showing up getting in your head and haunting you with your own past because even if they see through it damn what a nasty wound or insecurity to bring up in the form of a hell loop illusion. this also ties into her being Mukuro 2.0 he’s known to just be eerily in the know of everything going on even when he’s not there. this would be a great way of her matching that aspect of him and possibly surpassing it.  

[stillness-in-green]

The MLA(/PLF) Headcanon Post (1/2)

In response to this nice ask about whether I have any headcanon or thoughts about the current members of the MLA/PLF, I spent two weeks blithering 16.5K words of exactly that into a Word file, because when it comes to underappreciated characters I love, I do not understand restraint.  This post and its follow-up will cover all ranked ex-MLA members of the PLF, as well as Original Flavor Destro and Curious, since I wasn't going to leave them out of a project like this even if they aren't "current."

The ask only mentioned having previously read The Lore Post, the last exercise in ridiculousness that I wrote at the tail end of MLA Week, so I wrote this to summarize everything that doesn't appear there—which is to say that a lot of the material in these two posts will look familiar to anyone who's read my fanfic about the MLA cast.  There’s still plenty of new material to go around too, though!

So, I don't have much in the vein of askblog-style headcanons where I can randomly tell you stray trivia about a character’s favorite foods or their love languages or what have you; that stuff either comes up when I'm writing fanfic or it doesn't.  That said, below, please find a mix of thoughts I keep in mind when writing characters, facts that have only turned up in my fanfic/notes so far and not the Lore Post meta, and a selection of lightning round headcanon provided by cross-referencing a random number generator with some old questionnaires I keep around for OCs and tabletop characters.

In this post: Destro, Re-Destro and his advisors, and Geten.

Destro— 

General Thoughts The whole "revolutionary leader" thing came very naturally to him. He was committed, charismatic, very willing to risk his life and safety for the cause, and he cared about his people. All that said, he absolutely had a pompous, prideful streak, especially where it came to his justification for terrorism.  You only have to read his own words to see that.  Still, he was in large part reacting to the world he lived in, one of greater violence and danger than the current day. 

I like to think that—because he was genuine in wanting freedom for all—he would not approve of what became of his Army.  He'd be able to see how they got there, and he would probably have made much the same choices if he'd been there with them, but while he would have agreed that his role should be remembered—that's just Due Credit—he would never have wanted to become the nigh-on religious figure his followers turned him into. Continuing to fight the good fight for his ideals is one thing, but secret salutes and isolated villages and being raised from infancy to know your life has only as much worth as it can contribute to Liberation…  Well, it's just not what he would have wanted for his people, much less his descendants. 

Family Situation Chikara was only around 7 when his mother was killed, the event that would shape the rest of his life.  He wasn't hiding in the closet from the mob, either; he was kicking and punching and biting, his motivation to save her overflowing—but he was still only 7, and eventually overwhelmed.  His own life might well have ended there with hers, but for a group of neighborhood vigilante types (at least one of whom probably went on to a career as a hero, after legalization).

He went most of his adolescence without getting involved with anything more sinister than student newspapers, founding a secret meta-rights "club," and attending the odd larger protest, but when the government started talking about passing laws restricting the use of meta-abilities, he started getting very radical very quickly, and when some absolute snake started to use his martyred mother's words to bang the drum for banning quirk use outside the home outright, he went off the deep end.

Lightning Round (Randomly Selected Headcanons)

Favorite book genre?  Memoirs and biographies—he wouldn't have written his own if he didn't appreciate their value.  The intimacy of the personal juxtaposed against the broad scope of history appeals to both his regard for individuality and his revolutionary mindset.

Most prized possession?  Thoughts on material possessions in general?   He doesn’t generally prize material possessions—in fact, he’s something of a skinflint.  His most prized possession is an old pair of gloves that belonged to his mother, which he'd been wearing at the time of her murder.  He didn't come from money to begin with, but his mother’s story made enough of a splash that his financial situation was improved by well-meaning sorts sending along donations and contributions and the like, as well as government officials knowing they needed to be sure that he wound up somewhere at least semi-reasonable lest they court further outrage by mishandling the son of a martyred woman.  The money all went towards school and living expenses, though, leaving him quite experienced at balancing a budget, which would come in handy for that whole ‘leading a violent uprising against the state’ thing later on.

Academic Background: Got all the way through college!  Was involved in student groups as far back as middle school, and only got moreso the further in school he got.  Majored in Human Development; he was intending to go into the public health and policy sphere before the appropriation of his mother's language pissed him off so much he got into terrorism instead.

THE MODERN MLA

Re-Destro—

General Thoughts A huge amount of the way I write him is influenced by one single thing—his characterization as described in the second data book.  His personality is summed up there as "sokoshirenai yami"—bottomless darkness, or, as a friend translated it for me, "unfathomable gloominess."  That really, really stuck with me, because on the one hand, it's so opposed to virtually all of what we see of him on the page, where he's being cheerful or scornful or sycophantic; the closest he ever gets are his brief tears for Miyashita, Curious, and his other followers.

On the other hand, it makes so much sense that the man we see—the man who talks about the heavy burdens of his legacy, who was handed that legacy when he couldn't possibly have been any older than 6 or so, who willingly straps on a self-designed torture device to wring out more power, who all but worships the ground Shigaraki walks on even though Shigaraki is the reason Re-Destro no longer has legs to walk that same ground with—should be "unfathomably gloomy."  Of course he's gloomy!  He was never allowed to be his own person!  He has never in his life known true freedom, only existed as a vessel to bring that freedom to others!  And he can't really even talk to his closest friends about it, because his closest friends are still his followers, and he wouldn't want to weigh them down!

With that context, it makes all the sense in the world that he'd be so devoted to the man who relieved him of that burden.

Family Situation He loved his mother Yukie a great deal, despite knowing from early on that he was carrying the weight of the title because she believed she couldn’t.  (Perhaps growing up hearing about the martyrdom of Destro’s mother left him wanting to ensure the happiness of his own, for her happiness was very rare.)  He was 10 when she was killed in a Villain attack; she’d been on a daytrip over to a neighboring city to visit some of her erstwhile school friends.  The requisite mourning period was 49 days, and as the only surviving family member, quite a lot fell to him even before considerations of his role as Re-Destro.  it was perceived as better—for both the Army’s morale and for his own stability—for him to be involved with as much of the work of transition as possible, but obviously he couldn’t do it completely alone, nor should he.  Thus, for two months after Yukie’s death, the previous generation's Sanctum[i] stayed with him in his family home. Afterward, he moved in with Anchor (one of his grandfather's advisors), where he would spend the rest of his young adulthood until moving away for college.

Claustrophobia The name of that literal-iron-maiden deathtrap he brings to bear against Shigaraki is no coincidence: Rikiya developed claustrophobia over the course of a stint of abusive training when he was thirteen. He generally has a pretty good handle on disguising it, thanks to a combination of people being unwilling to ask him questions they don’t actually want the answers to and the fact that he had to learn how to operate through it in order to complete the training at all. He has never told anyone, largely because he’s never been able to recognize that it was abuse, and so his abuser remains a figure of some influence.

Education He was largely taught by private tutors, in his home and in theirs, rather than attending school, but I think he probably wasn't completely home-schooled.  Particularly once he'd decided that he did want to attend university—and not just some little local technical program, but a major school in a proper city—he probably attended classes a few times a week at his local high school just to get a feel for being around other people his own age. He'd been friends with Koku for several years by that point, otherwise he probably would have been pretty hopeless, but he was still a pretty odd duck by the time he got to university.

This, incidentally, is why he never pushed Geten too hard about school—his own experience of it was so weird and piecemeal that he mostly thinks of school as relevant only for the education it provides, and less so the crash course in social dynamics.  Since Geten doesn't care about getting an education (nor, indeed, about learning how not to be a rude little troll), and has a strong enough quirk that he'll never lack for a position in the Army even without a formal education, Rikiya is perfectly happy to let Geten have his way and just be minimally learnèd.

Stress His powers operate by infusing his body with the characteristic black matter of his manifested stress; he can increase his size with this (his so-called Liberated Form isn't just armored up; he becomes physically taller and bulkier), as well as throw handfuls of the materialized power.  A side effect of this is that his stress can also infuse itself into his bodily fluids. The stress matter is a highly dense particulate, so if Rikiya is not in proper control of himself, his proverbial blood, sweat and tears can be literally heavy with the weight of his power.

The Value of Life He cares very much about the lives of his followers, but those genuine feelings are filtered through both the mental compartmentalization required by an emotion-based quirk, and an upbringing that taught him to care about his underlings in the same way one would rare goods.  Valuable goods, certainly, goods worth being proud of, goods to be maintained with care, but still, ultimately, things that can be sold or traded or bartered off as necessary to further one's goals.  Even his own life, while "objectively" the most valuable of them all, isn't an exception to that policy—the Great Cause is more important than any individual life, up to and including his own.

On a Personal Note He’s something of an obvious weirdo to outsiders—his enthusiasm comes off as strident, his smiles overly polished—but despite that, he's bizarrely hard to dislike once they start spending real time with him.  He's not anywhere near as prideful about himself as he is the legacy of the MLA, for a start; he's actually pretty self-deprecating when he's not performing the whole Heir of Destro's Great Bloodline routine at people.  He's also happy to go along with other people sharing their hobbies (because he doesn't have any of his own).  The more you get to know him, the more obvious it becomes that he's a total basket case, but “total basket case” is still an improvement over “self-absorbed 1%-er CEO” that people like Spinner come in expecting.

What Are Boundaries? He has very little understanding of how to enforce boundaries around his private life, or, indeed, of why such boundaries might ever be necessary.  Oh, he can do the double life thing, keep the CEO of Detnerat separate from the Grand Commander of the Metahuman Liberation Army, but when it comes to the MLA itself, he's so groomed to devote himself to the cause that he doesn't really distinguish between the responsibilities of Re-Destro and the needs of Yotsubashi Rikiya.  Rather than being the egomaniac you might expect of a man with the absolute power over others he has, he instead struggles to assert himself as his own person at all.

Issues with boundaries are not uncommon with the MLA—they're all raised to see themselves as warriors to advance the cause before they are, like, “human beings”—but Rikiya’s are particularly exacerbated because he was raised by adults who were getting pretty paranoid about his bloodline's tendency to die young, and thus were always checking in on how he was doing, dictating his schedule, weighing in on his plans, and so on.  He just wasn’t raised with reasonable expectations for privacy.  Even as an adult, he'll give his apartment door code to pretty much anyone in the MLA who has even a semi-plausible reason to want it—certainly quite a few of the elders know it!  And it isn’t only the elders, either; Rikiya's phone and several of his accessories carry tracking chips courtesy of Skeptic, which Rikiya knows about and doesn't think is at all untoward.

While his experience dating Koku definitely taught him some hard lessons about how much he could allow himself to ask of people who would obey him without question (they broke up over Rikiya’s realization that Koku would never deny him anything, thanks to a cracked rib Koku didn’t see fit to tell Rikiya about until Rikiya hugged him a little too hard), he never learned how to value his own autonomy in turn.  Oh, he's the Grand Commander, and everyone around him has been raised to venerate his bloodline, so most of them would never even think about trying to take advantage of him as such, but it's absolutely the case that people who are bold or familiar enough to try can basically run right over him with minimal efforts made at obscuring the fact.  His life is full of people who do and have done exactly that, some to a net positive effect, and some—well.  See again the entry about his claustrophobia.

The abjectly terrible state of his sense of self-worth is also the reason the Claustro exists.  While he was relatively capable of trying to work around his phobia when he was younger, the older he got, the more it started to feel like leaving doors cracked behind him or only working in offices with big spacious floor plans and oversized windows was, in some way, Letting Down The Cause by allowing his fear to control him, rather than embracing it so he could properly stockpile it for later use.  A dinnertime chat with Curious about turning one’s trauma into a weapon for the good of others catalyzed this, leading to the development of the “burden-enhancing steel pressure mechanism,” Claustro. 

(It also means the clone of him made by Twice to handle Detnerat after Deika is bizarrely okay with its circumstances, which I will almost certainly write more about one of these days, but I’m still kind of reeling from that reveal, so more on that another time.)

Lightning Round

Religion?   He doesn't identify as being of a religious faith, but he was brought up in the same peaceful marriage of Shinto and Buddhism that the majority of Japanese people are, and like many, he adheres to a number of traditional practices more out of habit than devout faith.  There are two celebrations that demand significant emotional investment from him.  First comes the New Year's celebrations, important because the MLA prides itself on looking to a brighter, freer future, and it's a period when he can let himself think that maybe he'll be just that little bit closer to Liberation by the end of the year than he was at the start.  Second is Obon, a summer festival for honoring one's departed ancestors. Since his authority and his life's work derive entirely from his bloodline, he's obligated to care about this one, though in practice, he tends to shy away from thinking much about Destro (who he has very twisted-up feelings about indeed) in favor of less emotionally fraught waters.

What did he dream of being or doing as a child? Did that dream come true?   He never really had a significant period where he thought about being e.g. an astronaut or a doctor or a hero; in fact, it came as something of a surprise to him the first time Koku asked him what he was planning to do when he grew up.  He always just had the nebulous expectation of, "Be the Grand Commander," and the elders were happy to leave it at that until he brought it up on his own.[ii]  

How does he behave around children? He likes kids!  He’s wistful about the freedom enjoyed by happy children while also being sympathetic to ones that seem overly burdened.  He’s not the most natural person in the world with them, but most of them can tell that the awkwardness comes from a well-intentioned place, and will treat him as a funny-looking man who’ll let them bother him at length without getting mean.  It turns out he’s actually pretty good with them, then, if only by virtue of being easily bullied.  (This, notably, goes for non-MLA-affiliated children.  Everything’s much more formal within the cult, though it didn’t Geten long to suss out the “easily-bullied” part, either.)

Trumpet—

General Thoughts The largest factor in how I write Koku is, of course, the headcanon that he and Rikiya are ex-lovers, and neither of them is 100% over it even all these years later.  Beyond that, though, Koku is the most temperate of the group, the one with the most easy charisma (MLA members are more swayed by Re-Destro, but Koku does better with outsiders who aren't predisposed to hanging on Rikiya's every word).  He strives to come off as The Sensible One, and given the extremes the rest of the inner circle are capable of, it's not hard for him to maintain that title.  He's as messed up as any of them, though, second only to Rikiya in levels of childhood grooming.  He thinks of himself as a practical man, but he is deeply indoctrinated, the boundaries of his expectations very much defined by his upbringing, so he never really sees it coming when he gets clobbered by something from out of left field.

Family Situation: Koku has the largest family of the identified members.  Aside from his grandfather (called Old Man Hanabata, the founder of the Hearts & Minds Party, and passed away by the canon era), Koku has cousins, nieces, nephews and more, courtesy of his uncle, his older sister and her husband, and other extended family.

He’s also the member most accustomed to wealth, power and influence.  He's from a rural area, certainly, but being in a family of hereditary politicians (and with that family not suffering a string of untimely deaths and disappearances like Rikiya's did), he was raised from the start with ready access to money and nice things.  Still, for all his family's sway in a major branch of the MLA's operations, they're not First Families, and thus don't have any elders in their ranks, making them still somewhat subordinate to said elders when it comes to orders about the Great Cause.  (He’s working on it.)

Meeting Re-Destro Koku and Rikiya met at 12 and 10 respectively, when Koku tagged along with Old Man Hanabata for a meeting RD was likewise accompanying Anchor for.  It had been the better part of a year since Rikiya's mother passed away, but he was still strikingly melancholy for a boy that age, which—along with all the weight given to the importance of the meeting—left quite an impression on Koku.  Koku thus became Rikiya's first real friend in his own age group, a friendship heartily encouraged by everyone around them.  Koku was well-behaved, intelligent, a little older but not too much so, and set to become influential without a danger of becoming too influential; he was seen as a good choice for a friend.[iii]

The Break-Up Painful as it was at the time, there was a silver lining to his and RD's post-college break-up: it got Koku out of the elders' pocket.  He’s been groomed for one thing or another all his life, but after he became friends with Rikiya, he was always getting leaned on to report back to the First Families about how Re-Destro was doing, and to try to influence him towards actions the First Families approved of.  In a very real sense, Koku was part of the apparatus keeping Rikiya from any real freedom.  Their break-up and subsequent estrangement meant that the elders had far less to breathe down Koku's neck about, and by the time they reconciled, Trumpet had gotten his feet under him, as had Re-Destro, and they were both better able to fend off such background meddling.

This doesn't mean Trumpet's not still carrying a torch, however.  He thought he was handling his long-banked feelings pretty well—being Professional, being the advisor Re-Destro needed and as much a friend as Rikiya would allow—right up until Rikiya scared the life out of him by nearly dying in Deika.  He's all but glued himself to Rikiya since, as much as he can get away with given their respective responsibilities.

As an Advisor Other than leading the HMP, he does some work with internal politics and reputation. It's not, strictly speaking, his actual job as advisor—Re-Destro or the elders would probably be sought for more formal or critical mediations—but he and the people who report directly to him do enough travelling around to see constituents that they're often in a position to field those tensions before they get big enough to require attention from higher up.  Koku's happy to do so, in fact—not because he just loves handling petty arguments about resources, but because the HMP is a faction of the MLA in and of itself, and mediating is a boost to that faction's standing and autonomy.  (Also, it's that much less on Rikiya's ever-overburdened plate.)

Lightning Round

What would he do if he needed to make dinner but the kitchen was busy?Ahahahahaha, “make dinner but the kitchen was busy,” please.  Any time there could feasibly be someone else occupying a kitchen he has any business being in himself, it would be a housekeeper, and s/he would be making food for him/his family.  It’s not as though Trumpet has never cooked—he did live alone for some years after school—but outside of a scant few years in university, there’s never really been a time that kitchen use overlap would have been a problem for him. 

Favorite indulgence and feelings surrounding indulging. Probably gourmet cuisine, especially imported stuff. He’s had tailored clothes all his life; they’re just part of the job.  Expensive alcohol also doesn’t wow him; it wouldn’t be strange to find some sake maker whose family has been doing it for sixteen generations in the village he grew up in.  It’s a lot harder to cultivate a true gourmand’s palate out in the sticks, though, no matter how rich your family is.  Living in actual civilization affords a great deal more variety—and anyway, nice dinners are one of the few things he can reliably tempt Rikiya into accepting.  As to his feelings about indulging in general, he’s broadly For It.  He works very hard, he seldom gets real time off, and it doesn’t help the Great Cause for him to deny himself nice things, unlike some people.  (He’s maybe a bit bitter.)

Does he like to be the center of attention all of the time? Not especially.  Oh, he’s very good at it, certainly, and he doesn’t dislike it, but being the center of attention is practically always going to be tied up in The Great Work, so he desperately needs to get out of the spotlight from time to time, if only to be able to turn off the persona.

Curious—

General Thoughts There are two main factors in how I write Chitose: her practicality and her rapaciousness.  I write her as having an appreciation for good moral character in other people, especially when it makes a good story, but not considering herself particularly bound by conventional morality: her moral compass is Liberation, and she follows it unswervingly.  I also write her as predatory, lusty about a lot of things, often to the point of overstepping.  It doesn't hurt anyone that she likes hearty foods and strong alcohol, but she also doesn't have much regard for peoples' boundaries, and even less so when she thinks they have something to offer the Great Cause.

While that trait isn't without its benefits, it can get pretty ugly, too, as we see in how she treats, and talks to, Toga.  Even with Rikiya, the only person she thinks of as 'above' her in any meaningful sense, she's not at all above manipulation.  She's respectful of him, but knows him too well to always take him at his word.  He plainly can't always see what's best for him, but what's best for him is best for Liberation, and therefore, as a Liberation warrior, it's her responsibility to sometimes make decisions for him.  He'll appreciate it in the long run—he always does.  (Skeptic and Geten have similar views—Rikiya makes it easy.)

Family Situation She probably has the best actual relationship with her family of the group—her mothers are removed enough from the heart of MLA politics that her relationship with Rikiya doesn't color her family life the way Koku's does his, and she's much more sociable than Skeptic or Geten.  She doesn't get home much—just the major holidays, work permitting—but she's in frequent enough communication for a grown woman, and chats with her younger sister more often than that.

Meeting Re-Destro She met Rikiya properly when they were 21 and 27 respectively.  They were living in the same city at the time (him running Detnerat, her in university), so of course she'd seen him at the odd MLA event he turned up at, but when she landed an internship in her junior year, she cheekily turned up one day in her reporter capacity to interview him as “a local rising star of industry.”  It was the first chance they'd had to talk one-on-one, and would not be the last, as she frankly elbowed her way into his life and gradually sussed out that here was a man with Problems.  He and Koku were still in a distant patch at the time; she is largely responsible for getting them back on friendly terms as a way of showing her Pure Intentions.

The fact that her Pure Intentions both land her a square position as one of RD's advisors herself and get Rikiya to a better place emotionally is calculated, but not, therefore, untrue.  Ironically, while she was concerned about looking like a gold-digger, the MLA elders were probably thrilled and relieved to hear rumors that Rikiya was getting romantically involved again.  And with a lovely young MLA woman!  They wouldn't even need to worry about surrogacy arrangements!  (Not having grown up around the Yotsubashis, Chitose is unaware of exactly how pointed an interest the elders take in the matter of securing that bloodline.)

Feelings Today She loves Rikiya dearly, and prizes his regard more highly than anything in her life, but has not devoted much thought to the idea of being in love with him. She's married to her work, as they say, but she's also keenly aware that Rikiya would, for a great many reasons, be a lot of work to be in love with.  She's decided it's generally better for his mental well-being, and therefore also better for the Great Cause (she’s much more capable of reading that relationship reciprocally than Rikiya is), to make sure he's eating at least one good meal a week and getting some proper socialization in outside of MLA meet-and-greets.

As an Advisor She handles external politics and reputation--it's her job to prime Japan culturally for the Liberation agenda in ways more wide-reaching than Trumpet (he's head of a political party, and that's not nothing, but that party is still a small minority on the floor of the Diet).  She pulls attention to stories that benefit the MLA, and diverts attention from stories that don't.  This is far broader than just publishing Destro's memoir; it also means poking holes in the broader Hero Society narrative.  She does this by providing as broad a platform possible for stories about the tragedies of excessive regulation, the evils of quirk-related bias, the abuses of power heroes are capable of, and so on.

Lightning Round

Does she remember names or faces easier? She’s quite good with both, actually, but I’d give names the advantage because she works primarily with written rather than visual mediums.  (Also, BNHA names being the ridiculous puns that they are, you can probably tell more about a person in HeroAca Land by analyzing their name than their face anyway.) 

Is she more concerned with defending her honor, or protecting her status? Her status, absolutely.  Impugning her honor hurts no one but her; she can laugh that off because honor is a silly social construct anyway.  Threatening her status is a much more dangerous prospect—her status is long-cultivated to enable the advancement of Liberation ideology; it lets her keep an eye on Re-Destro, who needs as many people looking out for him as he can get; it’s what she’s worked for all her life. Curious will fuck you up if you threaten her status.

In what situation was she the most afraid she’d ever been? The time she got in trouble for nearly exploding some dude’s face off for stealing her purse.  She was 17, had spent very little time in non-Liberated territory before, and was not raised to wait on heroes to solve her problems.  She wasn’t afraid of the thief or the hero, really, but she was completely terrified that she might have just blown over half a century of secrecy by not performing Helpless Civilian well enough. The terror was pretty convincing to the police interviewing her about it, anyway.  On the whole, it was a very valuable learning experience!  

Skeptic—

General Thoughts Tomoyasu is a character I haven't written extensively yet, but what I think is most interesting about him so far is the contrast of his hyper-modern methods with the bone-deep zealotry for the cause.  See, Rikiya, Koku and Chitose all grew up in the sticks; Rikiya and Koku had money from a young age, but it was old money, tied up in trusts.  (Geten didn't have any of those, but Geten's a different story for other reasons.)  Tomoyasu grew up in a major city from the start; he was a technological prodigy from practically as soon as he could hold a tablet.  He has very little respect for the old ways of doing things when he knows there are newer, better ways of advancing the Cause. However, none of that makes him more likely to break from the MLA's ranks—if anything, his idiosyncratic approach just causes him to approach Liberation in really weird ways, ways no one else would ever come up with.

Pressganging Bubaigawara Jin based on a plan to clone Re-Destro?  Who else would that ever even occur to, much less such that it became the basis for an elaborate psychological assault?  But that's Skeptic in a nutshell—respect the old for what it did at the time, but don't think that means you have to use the same methods they did forever as you pick up the torch to carry it forward.

Family Situation He has an amicable but not intimate relationship with his family.  His parents are very proud of what he's done for the cause and how he won the confidence of Re-Destro, but they don't make much claim to understand how his mind works.  In turn, he recognizes the value of their support over the years—he certainly made a lot of waves with his unabashed venom for the MLA leadership's hidebound traditionalism, and his parents' staunch backing meant a lot for him being able to take the stands he did—but is not very emotionally close with them.  Might find himself with an older brother, if I ever occasion to write about his family situation in more depth.

Education He graduated a four-year university program for getting his computer science degree in two very intense years, during which he did virtually nothing for the Great Cause, his intention being to better position himself for maximum ability to advance Liberation afterward.  See above re: battles his parents fought for him while he was busy modernizing.

Meeting Re-Destro He met Re-Destro via Curious.  He was 22, just a year out of university and already climbing the chain of command at a young telecommunications company.  Rikiya was 33, working on the Claustro, and needed proprietary comms built to a higher standard of security than Detnerat was focused on.  Curious, who was always better positioned to be keeping up with the local personalities, introduced them.

Tomoyasu attempted to keep a civil tongue in his head the first few times he and RD met, but he'd been running on bile and energy drinks for years by that point and was hard-pressed to stop just because he was meeting his Grand Commander.  If anything, finding out that Rikiya was okay with his direction and his mouth eventually helped him chill the fuck out, marginally.

On that note, Skeptic is absolutely the advisor most willing to backtalk Rikiya right to his face.  (Rikiya loves him for it.)  Oh, he'll still accede to Rikiya's wishes, and Re-Destro's orders are his highest priority, but that doesn't mean he feels obligated to be diffident about it.  Like Curious, he has a highly developed sense of, "It's fine if it's for the greater good," which will and has led to him taking things into his own hands when he thinks he knows best (which is always).  He's not going to explicitly disobey orders, but he will creatively interpret them if he feels strongly about them, and he will try to "anticipate" orders before anyone has time to give him specific ones, the better to tailor his efforts towards proving his methods and goals correct rather than being stuck with orders he hates.

On Names I’ve definitely evolved some in my approach on this since I started writing the MLA cast, but at current, Skeptic and Geten are the only ones I consistently write as using and thinking mainly in terms of code names rather than given names.  Trumpet is too familiar with the public/private divide, and has too much intimate history with Rikya-the-person, to default to Re-Destro; Curious is too trained to look for The Human Heart of the Story.  Re-Destro himself, ever since breaking up with Koku, has always tried to use code names for people (himself excluded, because he has enormous self-confidence issues about measuring himself up to the original Destro), but can slip into given names when he’s vulnerable.  To Skeptic and Geten, though, the code name is the real name, for all intents and purposes.  The cover identity is a fake; the whole point of the code name is that you’re proving yourself worthy of taking up your proper place in the Army.  Of course the name you win for yourself is the name that counts.

Lightning Round

Given a blank piece of paper, a pencil, and nothing to do, what would happen? You’d pretty much have to lock him in a room with nothing but paper and pencil in it for that to be his first resort rather than whatever item of personal electronics he’d otherwise have on his person.  But assuming some actual plausible scenario—couldn’t bring his electronics into a government building, let’s say—he would find trying to do something productive on paper and pencil rather beneath him, and he’s an inveterate fidgeter.  I mostly see him folding that ludicrously tall frame of his into a chair and setting to using the pencil to poke about three hundred holes in the sheet of paper, meticulous and orderly, while muttering complaints to himself the whole time until something annoys him a bit too much and he jabs the whole pencil through the page. 

Who does he see as his best friend?  His worst enemy? I headcanon him having a very reasonable, functional, productive relationship with his No. 1 advisor, Red, and being reasonable, functional, and productive probably goes a lot farther on making you Skeptic’s “friend” than any amount of emotional intimacy.  But “best friend” is not really the kind of language Skeptic uses for his relationships; if you were to ask him who his best friend is, he’d probably tell you, “Iced coffee.”  As to his worst enemy, that’s just whoever is annoying him most on any given day, from difficult clients, to people annoying Re-Destro, stodgy elders, that hero grinning like a tool, that couple walking too slow in front of him on the sidewalk, etc. And Skeptic is pretty proactive about dealing with enemies, as much as he can be.

Has he ever been bitten by an animal? How was he affected (or unaffected)? lol he is a city boy and always has been.  He probably tried to pet a stray cat once out of curiosity, and because it seemed like the sort of thing people did, and then has never forgiven Animals In General when it bit him and then ran off. 

Geten—

General Thoughts Another one I haven’t written a great deal about yet, particularly in the present day, though I’m looking for that to change soonish.  One thing I’d like to explore is Geten when he’s not seething with rage and shame because he failed to bring Re-Destro a victory in Deika. The fandom tends to write Geten as an always-angry attack dog barely contained beneath a chilly veneer, and that’s fair—ever since we got the face reveal, ever since the MLA’s defeat at Shigaraki’s hands, Geten has been an always-angry attack dog barely contained beneath a chilly veneer.

But if you look at Geten from before we knew what was under the hood, you find a different story.  “Chilly and angry all the time” is not at all how he acted when he was fighting Dabi!  At that point, he was talkative, even chatty.  He engaged in a lot of snide smack-talk; he was obviously confident in himself and he spoke very proudly of the MLA as a collective.

He was still quiet at the dinner he attended with Rikiya and his advisors, yes, so I don’t think Geten’s done some kind of full 180 on characterization.  I do, however, think that Geten has a sense of humor in there, has a sense of camaraderie with the MLA rooted in more than just his relationship with Re-Destro, even if Re-Destro is obviously his most important person.  I don’t know if we’ll ever see that in the manga proper, given everything that’s happened, but it’s worth remembering in terms of what Geten is like when he’s solely among allies.

Family Situation Orphaned at a young age, and a problem child from then on.  He passed through a series of foster parents and state facilities before eventually crossing paths with the leader of the local MLA branch in Kesseru, Beacon (more on him next time).  This encounter would lead to him being sent to a group home with a reputation for being good with such difficult cases, giving them Structure and Companionship and Meaningful Work.  (Spoilers: It’s Liberation.)

Despite evening out considerably after a significant meeting with Re-Destro when he was 7[iv], Geten never got particularly close to his adopted family/the other kids at the group home.  He's very favored by the Grand Commander, for one thing, and he has the strongest quirk in the home for another—and since he learned the quirk supremacist stuff from them, that’s a pretty significant part of the dynamic!  Both of these factors mean there's some distance between him and the rest. Still, he's not on bad terms with them—indeed, his foster parents are quite proud of him—and he would probably tear out someone's throat with his teeth for threatening them, if only as a matter of pride.  

There are 4-6 other kids there at any given time; for the bulk of his young adulthood, there were two older than him, the others younger.  He doesn't have much time for Big Brother Pastimes, but is not completely immune to them, either, particularly where the youngest kids are concerned.  His tolerance for Little Brother Antics, however, is nonexistent—if the older kids think they can ruffle his hair and treat him like a kid, they can square the fuck up; he is Number One around here and don’t forget it.

Education Geten never went to school, but he's not completely uneducated.  He had some tutoring in the group home, some more from Re-Destro personally, and has a pile of books he keeps at his bedside, mostly strategic in nature.  He finds them vexing at times, but is slowly reading through them anyway because Re-Destro asked him to.  He’s been a bit more diligent about it since he was made a regiment leader, because lord knows Dabi isn't contributing much.

On Re-Destro Re-Destro became fond of Geten for the same reason he became fond of Skeptic and Curious—Geten was willing to push back.  He really did make some attempts early on to keep Geten at a proper distance, mindful of anything that would look too much like favoritism.  And Geten knew, in the hard-headed way of a child, that Re-Destro was being a grown-up about things, trying to be mature, trying to be impartial.  Geten just didn’t care about any of those things.  Every time, he would listen very seriously to the things Rikiya told him, nod attentively, repeat back what he’d been told, and then go on about doing his own thing anyway.  And his own thing was, typically, to keep coming back.

Of course, if there’s anything we can tell about Re-Destro from the way he treats Shigaraki, it’s that Re-Destro loves people who take the choice away from him.

Eventually, of course, Geten grew up (mostly; I peg him at 19 now), joined the MLA officially, and had to settle into the structure of the Army.  It began to lead to trouble for Re-Destro, when Geten blatantly disobeyed him; it stopped being cute.  Still, the sense that he Knows What’s Best lingers, so Geten works himself very, very hard to be everything Re-Destro needs him to be and more, so that maybe Re-Destro’s burden will be just that little bit lighter.

On Quirk Supremacy (and Re-Destro, still) Here’s the thing about Geten and the whole, “A life without a strong meta-ability has no value,” line, and this continues to drive me mad because of how people getting it wrong influences the bad takes on the MLA in this fandom: Geten is not a reliable witness.  He is not one of the leaders of the MLA, nor does he speak for its rank and file. Even if you assume the absolute worst about his implications there, far worse than is justified by the text, Geten’s very name, Apocrypha, means that he cannot be presumed to be aligned with MLA orthodoxy.

The only one of the people close to Re-Destro who wasn't born and raised MLA, he still manages to come off, in some ways, as the most zealous of the lot of them.  But really, it’s very noticeable that Geten—unlike Re-Destro himself, and unlike even Re-Destro’s close cohort—never talks about the original Destro, never even mentions him.  When he thinks about his leader, he only ever thinks about Rikiya.  Geten doesn’t follow Re-Destro because of his bloodline, because of the tenets; he follows Re-Destro because of personal loyalty.[v]

So how best to do that?  Well, think about it: Geten is not terribly intelligent, nor wealthy, nor well-connected. He and Trumpet are the ones most influenced by the quirk supremacist line of thought, Trumpet because his relatively weak quirk comes off as exponentially stronger the more he can surround himself in people it works on, and Geten because his strong quirk lets him mentally justify Re-Destro's investment in him despite his other insufficiencies.

Compare this with Re-Destro, who only ever talks about quirks in terms of freedom. Even more prominently, look at Skeptic and Curious, who are not at all defined by their quirks and how strong or weak said quirks may be.  Indeed, those two devote scarcely a thought to the matter because they contribute to the cause in much more important ways and seem to be perfectly comfortable with where that leaves them.

Geten may not be very smart or influential, but he’s very capable of looking at what strengths he does have and focusing hard on those.  That, I think, is what really lead to his embracing quirk supremacy, even in the face of evidence that he doesn’t have the whole picture: the search for a way to measure himself up to the movers and shakers Rikiya is otherwise surrounded with, and not come up drastically wanting.  

“Apocrypha” Geten has been Geten for a long time, since long before the MLA types usually take up their code names. He’s also an outlier in the MLA for having a name in Japanese instead of in English—the only one who does!  My headcanon, unless and until we get some other members with Japanese code names, is that he got the name directly from Re-Destro—possibly even in the conversation that lead to him imprinting so hard on the man when he was 7—and insisted on keeping it before any other code name that was suggested to him in later years.

But yes, he does have a normal Japanese name on file at the group home, which he’s obligated to answer to on the rare occasions that someone from Child Services is checking in or he and Re-Destro are out in public.  I don’t plan to bother coming up with it unless I need to, as I expect we’ll get it in a character profile one of these days.

His Quirk While a lot of people like the vibe of Geten and Dabi being somewhat equivalently vulnerable to their own quirks, and I agree it makes for good fanart, in truth, Geten is only as vulnerable to his ice as Endeavor is his flames.  Which is to say, he isn't immune, but he's certainly more resistant to it than the average person would be!  There’s already plenty of good material to contrast Dabi and Geten without pretending their quirks are more mirrored than is actually the case.

Lightning Round

How does he treat people in service jobs? He doesn’t, because he’s never in a position to interact with people in service jobs.  There have been times he’s gone out with Re-Destro, but in those cases he’s mostly let Re-Destro handle the human interaction.

What does he dislike in other people? Laziness; the lack of a higher purpose of some kind.  (It’s possible he’d thaw out on his disdain for Dabi considerably if he knew more about Dabi’s plans to undermine the whole of the Hero System than Dabi is inclined to tell him.)

Is he always there for a friend in need? Sure, as long as by “friend” you mean “fellow Liberation warrior” and by “need” you mean “in need of an icicle punched through one of someone else’s desperately fleshy body parts.”

Footnotes

[i]  Sanctum II's tastes being what they are, this probably means Rikiya is the MLA member most likely to be able to perform traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

[ii]  And there were elders who would have been happy to leave it at that permanently, I'm sure.  There are always going to be those regents who have trouble relinquishing power back to the boy prince when he grows up and becomes king, you know?

[iii]  And, when it eventually got out that they were dating, a relatively solid match, give or take the surrogacy arrangements that would eventually need to be made.

[iv]  I’m hoping canon gives us some details on this eventually, so I’m not planning to iron out more headcanon on the matter unless I absolutely have to.

[v]  This, incidentally, is a large part of why Rikiya does keep him around—it’s soothing to have someone around who never brings up his ancestor.  Anyway, after Geten evolved his quirk, people stopped complaining so much, even though RD never did get around to, like, giving Geten any formal responsibilities.  Geten, who knows very well that Re-Destro’s real advisors have real jobs, mostly took this as reason to be all the stronger, in hopes that he’d eventually be given one.

[oumakokichi]

How do you feel about the line where Saihara says that Kokichi is the embodiment of lies? Personally I dont like it very much.

Hello anon! That’s actually a pretty fun question, in my opinion! It’s interesting that you don’t particularly like the line; I actually like it quite a bit, but I think this is because I didn’t personally interpret it as negatively as some people might have.

There are a few reasons as to why I think it’s actually a pretty fitting note to end on chapter 5, and most of them involve touching on Ouma’s actions throughout the game, as well as what Kodaka had in store for him, so as per usual I’ll put the rest of this under a read-more. Watch out for spoilers when reading!

I think perhaps the biggest reason I didn’t feel like Saihara’s line about Ouma embodying the concept of lies was meant to be negative or harsh is because this is the exact same thing Kodaka himself has been saying about Ouma the whole time. I recently re-reblogged Comun’s (@kaibutsushidousha) translation of Ouma’s official art book pages, and it’s stated pretty word for word there: Ouma is the single character who personifies ndrv3’s themes of lying, and for this reason, Kodaka put a lot of thought and effort into writing him.

It’s not like lying itself was an entirely new mechanic to Danganronpa; it is, after all, a murder mystery game about finding culprits and exposing lies and inconsistencies in trials. However, ndrv3 is the first game in the series to actually flesh out the mechanic of lying, even going so far as to allow you, the player, to commit perjury during the trial—not even allowing, really, but adding at least one mandatory perjury per trial, because even Saihara cannot get by in this game without lying.

Where dr1 and sdr2 were much more focused on a very different narrative involving the ideas of natural talent, usefulness to society, and cycles of hope and despair, ndrv3’s themes instead shift to focus on truth, lies, and the all-too-blurry line between them. Where the previous two games usually presented lies in a fairly straightforward manner (usually limited to lies told by culprits during trials, or by the mastermind directly), ndrv3’s entire focus is on lies from the very start.

The game lies to you about who your main protagonist is going to be, it lies to you about how trustworthy the flashback lights are—it even plays on the your expectations directly in later chapters, by suddenly seeing to tie directly in with the Hope’s Peak arc despite Kodaka saying that it wouldn’t, only to subvert those expectations again and reveal that it was all another lie. Everything, from the truth of the outside world, to whether the characters’ talents and memories are real at all, is called into question, and I absolutely love it, personally.

This level of open-ended speculation is something I believe Kodaka wanted to preserve with Ouma’s character. Because in the end, the point of ndrv3 isn’t to say “lies bad, truth good.” Like Ouma himself, it’s all a bit more complicated than that. Because lies themselves aren’t inherently negative, or harmful, I don’t think Kodaka wanted to give too much away about Ouma’s own lies. Doing so would erase some of the mystery surrounding his character, and would present the facts in a way that was much too straightforward compared to the rest of the game.

This is why most of the clues we do get about his real intentions and motivations are limited to a few definitive facts: that Ouma and DICE were pacifists with a very strong moral taboo against murder, that he wasn’t a Remnant of Despair, and that he loved games and pranks. Almost everything else about him is something we have to guess, evaluating his earlier quotes and weighing it against the information we have by the end of chapter 6, and trying to decide if we believe him or not. Essentially, Ouma is a puzzle and we’re trying to guess what the full picture looks like with only half the pieces.

From a writing standpoint, I think this decision makes sense, especially considering how badly Ouma himself wanted to remain a mystery. So many of his lines throughout the game put emphasis on how much he values lies as a form of free will; it’s clear that he found the ability to choose whether to tell the truth or not extremely important. Presenting us with too many clear-cut facts about him, or having every single character arrive at the same, definitive conclusion about how they felt towards him, would have been dragging the cat out of Schrodinger’s catbox, so to speak.

When Saihara describes Ouma as someone who truly embodied the concept of lies at the end of the trial in chapter 5, I personally felt that this was a great way to summarize Saihara’s own conflicting feelings towards Ouma at that point in time. We know, for a fact, that Saihara didn’t hate him, even despite the things he did. As I mentioned, the localization changed this line, but in the original dialogue of the game, Saihara explicitly refers to Ouma as a “friend” (“nakama”).

Clearly, he never wanted to see Ouma die—but at the same time, he still doesn’t exactly know how to feel about Ouma. Ouma presented a very contradictory picture to the rest of his classmates, particularly if we only look at the end of chapter 5, without any of the subsequent reveals in chapter 6.

He was extremely childish and playful, yet cold and calculating at times. He was willing to sacrifice two people in order to keep himself alive in chapter 4, yet willingly let Momota take the antidote and chose to die under the press in chapter 5, even though he easily could have let Momota and Maki die instead. He often pretended to enjoy the killing game and take pleasure in his classmates’ suffering, yet at the end claimed that he hated it all along.

In my opinion, pretty much anyone would be confused and conflicted in Saihara’s situation. In the time that they knew each other, Ouma followed up nearly every word out of his mouth with, “but that’s a lie though!”, regardless of whether he was telling the truth or not. Considering how little they actually knew about Ouma at this point in time, it’s understandable that Saihara and most of the others would feel as though he remained an incomprehensible liar even in death.

Keep in mind too, that by the end of chapter 5, Saihara and everyone else was still very much under the impression that Ouma was still a Remnant of Despair and Junko’s personal successor. They already realized that he wasn’t the real ringleader of the game, but it wasn’t until discovering his motive video in chapter 6 that Saihara started to reevaluate more of his assumptions about Ouma. Meanwhile Himiko, Maki, and Kiibo don’t discover that Ouma wasn’t actually a Remnant until nearly halfway through the chapter 6 trial, when Saihara puts forth his discoveries.

Considering the fact that they still believed him to be a Remnant of Despair and essentially “Junko 2.0,” Saihara’s conclusion that Ouma was someone he couldn’t fully understand while he was alive, who truly seemed to represent the idea of “lying” itself, feels rather lenient. He could have written him off as a horrible person for his actions and refused to refer to him as a friend… but instead his words sound more curious than anything else, and just a little bit sad.

A huge reason that Saihara, and for that matter all of the other characters, could never fully understand Ouma or his motives is simply because Ouma wouldn’t let them. Due to paranoia and mistrust, Ouma refused to let anyone else in or open up to others, and this is the biggest reason for his downfall in chapters 4 and 5. I can’t help but remember the end of Saihara’s FTEs with Ouma, where he muses that even if he reaches out his hand, Ouma still won’t actually take it—and that’s exactly what happens in the main story, too. It’s downright impossible to help or understand someone who won’t accept your help or let you in.

All in all, I think Kodaka wanted players to feel extremely conflicted at this point in the story. We do, of course, get a few bits and pieces of information about Ouma later on in chapter 6 that help shed a much clearer light on some of his actions, but that’s only if we take that information and go back through the story with it in mind. At the time of Ouma’s death, I think Kodaka really wanted to capture the feeling of someone who remained so mysterious and told so many lies that it was just downright  frustrating, trying to figure out how much of what he said was true or not.

Considering Saihara himself goes on to adopt a very similar opinion towards lies to Ouma’s, I can’t help but think that his comparison of Ouma to the concept of “lies” was never inherently a bad thing. Lies are, after all, meaningful. They’re a morally grey area, absolutely capable of being twisted and used to hurt others, but also just as capable of comforting others, and influencing the world in very powerful ways. By the end of the game, Saihara’s opinion on lies isn’t a black-or-white outlook of “they’re always bad,” or “they’re always good.” Instead, he recognizes that lies are much more complicated than that—much like his opinion towards Ouma himself.

In any case, this was a very fun question to discuss anon! I find it interesting how people’s opinions towards Saihara’s narration at the end of chapter 5 really differs, and I still wonder if part of it has to do with how much harsher the localization made him seem by cutting out the part about him considering Ouma a friend. It’s really interesting how much people’s opinions on this part also tend to tie in with their feelings towards ndrv3’s ending in general, considering the theme of “truth and lies” really kicks up a notch from this point on in the story. Thank you for leaving such a fun question!

[kitkatopinions]

LyricAnon🎶

Look I am forever going to love “Hero” even with its problems. But my newest on (well actually an old on I’m just bringing it up now) is the reference to Ironwood’s semblance.

In the song we get this line “Mettle I'll deploy”

Mettle holds the championship belt for worst semblance ever but it shouldn’t be in this song.

The way it’s stated makes it sound we should know what his semblance is and be excited that he’s going to use like if Yang or Ruby’s semblance is mentioned in song. In this sounds like the actual definition for mettle: a person's ability to cope well with difficulties or to face a demanding situation in a spirited and resilient way. Which, btw CRWBY, doesn’t sound as negative as they want it to sound

They mess up or rather fail to describe Mettle’s presence in correctly (shocker). Ironwood doesn’t have a willing option in regard to his semblance and it’s such a damaging one in its execution. It’s passive and questionably more dangerous than Qrow’s. But we wouldn’t know because it goes 100% unaddressed in universe. One reason...the main reason being are the writers being lazy hacks; and two it would make Ironwood look more sympathetic (to in bias viewers) cause his semblance is basically invisible background brainwashing and would call fault into how he is treated.

Last; and this is more of a...low defense of the Mettle ordeal. Given how semblances occurs I can kinda get that Ironwood got his late in life. Like probably after the Fall of Beacon giving the conversation the inner circle where having during volumes 2 and 3

 Agfdeheafh the semblance that the show writers wrote for James is the worst one in the show to date and that’s not to say that it was a horrible idea, but rather that it was a horrible idea for what they did with it. Which is nothing.

Ironwood’s semblance has some strong elements of horror in it, and could leave James with a sort of imposter syndrome. The semblance could launch very interesting narratives and continue on with the (horribly bungled imo) themes of choice, redemption, autonomy, trust, love, bravery, hope, not letting a part of you control you, the importance of a support system and sharing the load and relying on others... Honestly, the fact that James had this semblance and it wasn’t used to redeem him is so so so weird based on the groundwork they did give James and their own freaking morals we were supposed to get out of the story!

You’re right about how weird that song’s framing is. The wide disconnect and miscommunication between all players is just... At this point, it’s kind of destructive towards them. ‘The songs aren’t canon, we didn’t make Jeff Williams write that’ is what they said when fans thought the BMBLB song was queer baiting. So we know already that the song isn’t canon to James, but that’s an excuse imo. They clearly didn’t properly explain Ironwood’s semblance to Jeff Williams if that’s how he uses it in the song, like something Ironwood can turn on at will and is going to use, when it’s passive. And side note, you’re totally right that the CRWBY writers villainizing traits like ‘the ability to cope’ and ‘being resilient’ is really strange. It reminds me of how they’re villainizing feeling fear and taking precautions and then praising recklessness and being brash.

But, back on track, now we have things like the voice actor for James not knowing about Ironwood’s semblance until a fan told him. Extra communication could go a long way. I mean, that would be like Alan Rickman not knowing that Snape was meant to be a spy until someone told him during the filming of the Half-Blood Prince. This is something so freaking important to the character of Ironwood and they just forgot to mention it to the man supposed to bring life to the role. That is beyond weird.

Honestly, I think there are three reasons why Ironwood’s semblance was invented, but not put into practice in the actual show.

A. The first one you mentioned. I think the writers made ‘Mettle’ as a lazy excuse to rush ahead his ‘fall to villainy’ and using it to insist that they didn’t make an inconsistent character, they didn’t make a non convincing arc, fans just needed to do the extra homework and hear about Ironwood’s semblance that explains the whole thing. Them assassinating Ironwood’s character is easily hand waved now as the affects of his passive semblance at work, that the audience was supposed to view as some sort of easter egg that they can use to justify the story, and fill in the blanks the writers seemingly purposefully just left.

B. The second one you mentioned. They wanted Ironwood to be viewed as evil by the general fandom (and, well, they succeeded,) and knew that putting the semblance in the actual show would make him much much more sympathetic. You know, since he was at least partially seemingly mind controlled into his actions. Honestly, the way they just made Ironwood’s entire personality ‘evil for the sake of evil stupid manipulator who will bomb for no reason’ seems... Vindictive. It feels like they finished volume 7, started hearing fans complain that Ironwood shooting Oscar was out of character, took that as a personal insult, and then decided to get back at their critics by turning their favorite character into a monster. That’s just how it feels, though. There’s always a strong possibility that the writers just liked the idea in the moment, and didn’t care about the previous character, just wanted ‘Ironwood opposes Team RWBY,’ and plowed through it whether or not it made sense. I mean, that’s what they did when they gave lines originally meant for Nora to Yang when she argued with Ren, that’s what they did when they changed the focus of the Nora-Ren conflict from ‘Nora is trying to force a relationship that Ren isn’t currently ready for’ into ‘Nora is getting swallowed by a relationship she isn’t currently ready for,’ and that’s what they did when they had Cinder act like she’d never worked with a team before during the Cindy-Neo-Watts team up, and that’s what they did when they had Winter spout lines that misrepresented her character and stances during V7 and the first half of V8. Ironwood is just this on a larger scale imo. It didn’t matter at all what Ironwood was even up to last season, the writers were writing him in a bubble, based on whatever the hell happened to sound big and sort of cool in the moment. And they wanted us to see him as evil this season, so they couldn’t put his semblance into the narrative.

C. I honestly think it’s a partially a commitment issue. Currently, I can’t get this out of my head.

This is Ironwood’s VA, teasing a possible V9 return for Ironwood. They left his death open ended and ambiguous and they’ve done ‘oh they’re definitely dead’ things at the end of a season only to reveal in the next season that the villain we all thought had died was actually still alive and kicking before.

There’s every possibility that Ironwood will return, and I think it’s possible that they specifically left his semblance out of V8 not only because they wanted Ironwood to be evil this season and wanted Ruby to be an indisputable hero (failed but I think that was their intention) but also because they wanted to one hundred percent convince their audience that he is fully evil... Even if they don’t want him to be. If they want to, they can use his semblance to ‘redeem’ him and subvert expectations in V9. Or they might want to keep him a villain. So they couldn’t bring up his semblance in V8 at all if they didn’t know where they were going with this character. Is he dead? Will they redeem him? Will they keep him a villain? All of those three are options and it’s very possible that they specifically kept any mention of his semblance from the season so they could have the possibility of doing any of the above options if they wanted to. This is obviously really frustrating to me and I already am itching to get to V9 because I just have to see if they bring James back and if they actually do go into his semblance and try to redeem him and if that could maybe lead to Ironqrow moments. But yeah, this wound up being yet another long reply because I am so long winded, but I just wanted to hit on your last note there...

It is possible that Ironwood’s semblance was one he got in V3. That’s interesting and I never heard that theory before. It makes sense, but it does just make me want to groan, just because if Ironwood had gotten a semblance during that time of trauma, why didn’t so many other characters? My dislike for soft magic systems, my dislike for ill defined magic systems, and my dislike for sporadically used magic systems all come together to make RWBY my ultimate foil. XD