#bit of a followup to their personal arcs

[duckapus]

One day, when Abyssal happens to be in the SM64 universe, Emulator notices something very obviously off with her. So, of course, she approaches with all the subtlety she's capable of.

"Hey Abby, how's it hangin'?"

The Admin is understandably startled by the somehow-still-slightly-taller woman suddenly appearing next to her, and -with her balance rather understandably being off in her current state- she nearly falls over before Emmy puts a hand on her back to support her.

Which shouldn't have been possible, considering what's supposed to be back there.

"Whoops. Sorry about that."

"I-it's fine," she gets her feet back under her and brushes herself off, then smiles at her friend, "I should really be used to that by now, anyway."

"Still," she shrugs, then steps back a bit and makes a small show of briefly looking Abyssal over, "So, that's a new look. You just trying something new, or..."

Abyssal's smile becomes a bit forced as her shoulders twitch, instincts trying to flex muscles that should be there but aren't, and her hand goes up to her chest to fiddle with an edge that doesn't currently exist, "You, ah... noticed that, huh?"

Emmy's face twists into some cross between a grin and a wince, "bit hard not to. I mean the cloak is one thing but you're missing limbs here."

Indeed, Abyssal's wings are completely absent, and her cloak has gone from being open at the front if not for the clasp and belt to only having openings at the top, bottom and sleeves. It's a massive change, and not one she looks even remotely comfortable with.

She keeps fiddling with the front of her...well it's more of a robe now, really, "Well, uh, you know my model's been changing a little ever since the incident."

A nod, "Yeah, I noticed the growth spurt."

"Well, recently I got something a little more...drastic than that. I'm not sure if it's a side-effect from Sora breaking my connection to... It, or if it's just me being more comfortable with myself, but I'm starting to get...uh...an accent color, I guess?"

"You saw black and backslid a little, didn't you?" it's clear from her tone, that it's not an accusation, though it is mostly rhetorical.

Abyssal groans in frustration and leans heavily on Emmy's shoulder, "God I hate this. I'm free now, I'm supposed to be getting better, but I still feel like I have to hide even though everyone already knows!" she doesn't stop the (mostly angry) tears from falling as she's pulled into a hug, "I hate that that thing still has so much power over me..."

"Hun, you had to deal with that for almost a decade and a half. Nobody's gonna judge you for needing time, or for stumbling a few times as you go," a certain stick figure comes to mind, and she adds, "well, nobody who matters at least."

"I know that, I just..." she huffs in annoyance, either at the situation or herself, and gently pulls herself out of the hug, "My wings just got back to full strength and now-" her arms wave out before flopping down to her sides, "I just...I know pushing myself before I'm ready is usually a bad idea, but maybe I need just a little push this time? Maybe if one other person saw them?"

Emulator gives it some serious thought...for a few moments, then shrugs, "Well, if you're up for it. Let's see 'em!"

Abyssal blinks, a bit startled, and suddenly looks apprehensive, "Wait, like right now? With you?"

"Of course! Better to do it now while you've still got the nerve worked up, right?"

"Well, yeah, that makes sense, but uh...are you sure? 'Cause we're dealing with, you know, pink and black here. And you've kind of got a pretty good reason for... possibly not reacting well to that combo?"

Emmy shrugs, "True, but that's still an 'if.' And if I do turn out to have that kind of hangup, it'll be my problem for me to work through. You shouldn't have to keep hurting yourself just to accommodate an issue I might not even have."

When she still doesn't look fully convinced, Emmy sighs, switching to her rarely used full-voice-acting mode, "Abyssal, do you remember when we first met?"

Abyssal nods hesitantly, not sure where this is going.

"It was the day this place got activated, and just about everything that could go wrong, had. And then, when they saw me, every single Admin, even Domain and Forum when they finally woke up, wrote me off as just one more point on their long list of problems -and some of them kept thinking that for a long time. I know even CPU thought of me as an occasional headache at best as recently as a little over a year ago.

"Every one of them, except you. You looked at me and you saw another person, one who'd been thrown into an impossible situation and had no idea what was going on, and you walked right up and introduced yourself and asked me if I was okay. You were the first person to ever decide I was actually worth the effort, and that meant everything to me. It still does.

"That's why I want to do this with you. That's why, even if this does turn out to hit one of my trauma buttons (still an 'if' there, by the way), I'm still going to be as supportive as possible. You're worth the effort too, and if you'll let me I'll do whatever I can to make you believe that because I know you probably don't yet."

"I-" Abyssal chokes on her words, not knowing what to say to all that, then swallows and shakes her head, getting a determined gleam in her eye, "Okay. Let's do this."

There's a brief moment of hesitation, and then her form shimmers, her usual model's details slowly overriding the current one. When it's over her cloak is back to normal (though the belt is loose, revealing a small glimpse of whatever outfit she wears underneath, her top noticeably darker than the last time Emmy got a peek of it), and her wings arc gracefully over her shoulders, seeming a little larger than they'd been before, and Emulator gasps when she sees the new pattern that had caused so much grief.

"Oh, Abby, they're beautiful."

Huh. That definitely wasn't the reaction she'd been expecting, "They- really?"

She pulls one of them forward, trying to see whatever it is her friend is seeing, and blinks in surprise. What had looked like black in her peripheral vision back then is actually a very dark purple which seems to glisten in the midday sun, at certain angles even seeming to sparkle like there are little flecks of starlight caught in it. The new color is mainly on her primary flight feathers, going almost halfway down each one on the topside and only forming a narrow chevron at the tip on the bottom, with an irregular scattering of small splotches on the rest of the wing. The more she looks at it, the more she comes to agree with Emulator's assessment.

She lets out a huff that's almost a laugh, grinning, "Got all worked up for nothing, huh?"

"Not nothing. You saw something that reminded you of a time you were hurt, you're allowed to be upset about that."

"Yeah, I know. Just hard to remember that sometimes," now she really does laugh a little, "I feel like it should be weird that you're mothering me when I'm older than you."

Emmy smirks, "You know as well as I do that that doesn't mean shit in this group."

"Fair enough."

There's a comfortable silence for a little while, until Abyssal finds herself staring wistfully up at the sky. Her wingtips twitch almost imperceptibly, but Emulator still takes notice.

"How long?"

"...A few weeks, I think," she looks over, clearly yearning but not wanting to just leave her friend behind.

Emmy shoots her back an understanding smile, "You're not made to be stuck on the ground, Abby. You know what you need."

There's another hug, thanking her for things words simply can't express, and then in a few wingbeats she's off, soon becoming nothing but a pink speck swooping around among the clouds, reveling in her rediscovered freedom.

[thenationaltreasuregazette]

I'm In: An Analysis of Abigail's Arc (ft. Elizabeth Swann)

So, the character arcs in National Treasure are kinda weird. Or, weird is not the right word. They are a bit unconventional.

Ben doesn't change, because he's a paragon. Riley doesn't change because he's the comic relief. The characters who move from one clear worldview to another are Abigail, Patrick, and arguably Sadusky.

That means of our core trio, Abigail is the only one moving through an honest to god character arc.

And it's awesome.

Am I really contending that Abigail's arc in National Treasure rivals the exquisite coming-into-one's-own arc of Elizabeth Swann in the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies? No, of course not.

Except for the ways that I am.

Let's go ↓

First, let's define what Abigail's arc actually is. What worldview does she come into the story with, and how is it forced to change?

Part One: The Status Quo

When we first meet her, Abigail makes her position on treasure hunting pretty clear. The disdain and/or skepticism is apparent in the way she asks

ABIGAIL You're treasure-hunters, aren't you?

While she is curious enough to indulge Ben's story with a few followup questions, when he isn't able to produce any proof, she dismisses him pretty harshly.

ABIGAIL Did Bigfoot take it?

She thinks the idea that there's an invisible treasure map on the Declaration of Independence is absurd, and although she collects antiques herself (the George Washington campaign buttons) she gives no impression that she does the actual finding of these objects. The Abigail Chase of the beginning of the movie doesn't get her hands dirty that way. She is not a treasure hunter.

Abigail's position is one of impressive status. She's the freaking Custodian of the Charters of Freedom, if you take the 2003 script at its word. At the very least, from what we see in the film she has a high enough position within the National Archives to both have an assistant, and to be the person who gets called when the Declaration's case malfunctions.

She is the voice of the historical establishment, and she has the degree and position to prove it. She plays by the rules. Treasure hunting is, honestly, beneath her.

In Curse of the Black Pearl, when we first meet Elizabeth Swann as an adult, she is likewise a woman of status and prestige. Though her circumstances are quite different, she is also the most high-ranking woman we meet in her story and, at least for the moment, she is following society's expectations for who she's supposed to be and what she's supposed to be interested in.

Part 2: The Call

And yet. There is something about the darker, more adventurous world outside their walls that calls to both women.

For Abigail it's Ben's story about the map and the pipe. She's still thinking about it days later when she sees Ben at the gala, enough to ask him about it in a room full of respected colleagues and wealthy donors. That's not the kind of thing you want people to overhear. And yet she can't help herself. The way she asks about it is even a bit sheepish, like she knows she's flirting with some kind of professional line.

For Elizabeth, this is her ongoing barely-secret fixation on pirates, represented by the medallion she keeps hidden in her bedside table. Like Abigail, when prompted (in her case by her dream about seeing the Black Pearl as a child) she also indulges her interest by doing something slightly taboo—putting the medallion on.

However, both women come short of actually entering this other world themselves. They'll continue to toe the line of propriety and expectation, even if a part of them is curious about what else is out there.

That is, until that other world comes calling.

Part 3: Kidnapped

I mean they're both literally kidnapped into the rest of their stories!

Importantly, they're both kidnapped because of a choice that they make that puts them in the crosshairs of the plot.

Abigail realizes something is up with Ben, follows him outside, and confronts a man she suspects of committing some kind shady business alone, in a ballgown, in the dark. She goes so far as to (as far as she knows) take the Declaration back from him and go to bring it to security inside. That's what makes her a target of Ian's.

Elizabeth, still wearing the medallion after being rescued by Jack, fights back against Pintel and Ragetti and nearly outsmarts them. When she's caught, she invokes parlay as a way to save herself, which is what gets her taken onto Barbossa's ship.

Part 4: Taking Agency

However, neither one of our heroines stay victims for long. Both insert themselves into the narrative, taking control of their fate through their intimate knowledge of the subject at hand.

For Abigail, it is her expertise with antique documents. She has the opportunity to leave when Ben lets her go in the park, but refuses, demanding to stay with the Declaration instead. Then she truly joins the hunt when she insists on being the one to apply the lemon juice. She becomes an accomplice to Ben's search, even if her initial motivation is to prove to him that he's wrong about the map in the first place. She knows where to look for the masonic symbol, gets excited about revealing the cypher, and even recognizes what kind of cypher it is. Perhaps there's a little more treasure hunter in her than she, or we, realized.

And over in POTC, Elizabeth's knowledge of pirate history and lore got her taken onto the Black Pearl, where she swiftly attempts to negotiate a ceasefire on behalf of the whole port. When she isn't taken seriously, Elizabeth threatens to drop the medallion into the water. She's figured out how important it is to the pirates, and even arranges a little trick where she looks like she's dropping it to prove her suspicions. It's also Elizabeth's decision to give Will's surname as her own that gets her taken on the crew's mission instead of being returned/killed/thrown overboard.

Part 5: The Second Act

Granted, Elizabeth has been kidnapped by the antagonists of her story, whereas Abigail has already been rescued by the good guys.

Abigail's arc is also going to be complete by the close of National Treasure, but Elizabeth's won't be until she becomes the Pirate King in At World's End.

But in any case, both ladies travel through their respective plots while being pulled closer and closer to the thing they've always pushed away but secretly been intrigued by.

Part 6: Becoming the Thing

I'm far from the first person to suggest that it's Elizabeth, not Will, who is truly on the becoming-a-pirate journey in Pirates of the Caribbean.

As Will and Jack prepare to infiltrate the gathering on Isla de Muerta, Jack lists several reasons why he thinks Will is well on his way to becoming a pirate in his own right.

JACK SPARROW For having such a bleak outlook on pirates, you're well on your way to becoming one. Sprung a man from jail , commandeered a ship of the fleet, sailed with a buccaneer crew out of Tortuga. And you're completely obsessed with treasure.

And for treasure, he clarifies, "not all treasure is silver and gold"—meaning Elizabeth.

But all of these qualifications are true of Elizabeth as well. She is also lying, tricking, and outsmarting her way through this adventure, and is in turn obsessed with Will.

Jack also famously says that "what a ship is, what the Black Pearl really is, is freedom." And nobody craves that freedom more than Elizabeth, who is being literally suffocated by her life at the beginning of the story.

Elizabeth Swann not only falls for a pirate, she becomes one herself.

In National Treasure we witness a similar shift in Abigail. Once the cypher is revealed and the hunt becomes real to her, she gets more and more into it. She could be dragging her feet through the Philadelphia sequence and griping about the tough spot that the guys have put her in, but instead she dives in.

Like, you can argue that Abigail is only willing to apply the lemon juice to prevent Ben from damaging the Declaration more than she, a trained professional, will. And that is absolutely true. But not thirty seconds later, when they see the masonic symbol, she's matching Ben's enthusiastic

BEN We need more juice ABIGAIL We need more heat

with literally just as much barely restrained excitement. In Urban Outfitters she's again matching Ben's frequency as they decipher the riddle Riley brings them. She doesn't miss beat as she and Ben riff off of each other, and she's the one to decode the fact that the clue points to a specific time.

All of this builds up to what might actually be one of the most fascinating lines in the whole movie:

PATRICK Then we just keep looking for it. ABIGAIL I'm in.

→ Part 2?

[mbg159]

What Your Favorite Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds Girl Says About You

[Main Girls Only][DM][GX]

Aki Izayoi/Akiza Izinski (likes the second half of the series): You are pretty chill, and almost definitely a Faithshipper. You’re very fond of doing all kinds of scenarios of their first meeting. You write at least one thing per day appreciating her development. You really, really like the rollerskates episode. Even if it could have been better, you still love Yusei giving her Stardust. You get really sad during the ending, but you know in your heart of hearts that they definitely kissed offscreen.

Aki Izayoi/Akiza Izinski (dislikes the second half of the series): You got the taste of a girl who was straight-up unhinged, and you've been chasing that high ever since. You find bondage jokes incredibly funny. You have at least one very strong opinion about Crow. Despite your feelings on the second half (most of which can be described as "seething"), you have a soft spot for Sherry. To this day, her battle theme still generates a Pavlovian response of swooning tears in you.

Ruka/Luna: Your soul aches every day for her wasted potential. You started reading the manga the moment you saw scans of how it did her. You were very surprised when Ancient Fairy Dragon got banned. You have edited characters to be wearing flower crowns at least once. You’re still not quite sure what to think about her brother, but you definitely wish Life Stream had showed up earlier. You spent eighty episodes waiting for a followup for the end of Ep. 67, and are still waiting.

Carly Nagisa/Carly Carmine: You are a Scoopshipper, with no questions asked. You were utterly horrified when you found out about the cult thing (even if your source may have been somewhat inaccurate). You refuse to rewatch the second half of the series, and have devoted lengthy fanfics to what really happened afterward. You aren’t sure if you like nerds or goths, and you’re glad you don’t have to choose. You have tried to do Fortune Fairy-based readings in real life.

Misty Lola/Misty Tredwell: You may be into Isolationshipping or you may be into Omenshipping, but regardless of where you fall, you are certain she loves women. You saw that bit where she cradles Carly’s face and went “god, that girl is lucky.” Your favorite part of the whole DS arc was when she has Ccaryhua swallow Divine whole. You are very, very angry she’s not in Duel Links yet. (Like, I wrote this in 2021 originally, and she's still not in it? What?)

Sherry LeBlanc: You actually don’t hate the second half, but it’s largely due to her. You have either watched Revolutionary Girl Utena, or have been told several times that you should watch it. You may not be a Roseknightshipper, but you definitely have an LGBT headcanon. You have mixed feelings about how her arc ended, and would have preferred if the entire season was just her running around kicking stuff.

Martha: You hate every single other parent in every other series because you have seen her episodes and beheld a standard none have yet lived up to. She takes no shit, she's a rain of sunlight in a land of misery, she sacrifices herself tragically. Why the fuck did she barely appear after Dark Signers? You just want to talk to the person who made that decision, you say while loading a shotgun.

Mikage Sagiri/Mina Simington: You may be a Careshipper whose favorite arc is Fortune Cup, or an Ushio/Mikage shipper whose favorite arc is Dark Signers. Either way, you just really, really like office ladies, okay? You either think she's cute, relate to her beleaguered nature, or both. Also, did you know there's no ship name for Ushio/Mikage? I didn't until recently, but you definitely do.

Stephanie: Man, you picked the biggest third wheel in the entire franchise and a woman who only appears in the second half to be your fave, huh? That takes a lot of guts. And to my immense surprise, despite her entire existence being "waitress" and "one-note obsession with Jack Atlas", you have decided your OTP with her is Carly. Rock on, Stephanie fans, you make the world brighter.

Misaki: You decided to go dumpster-diving in the video games and found a gem. You understand that the only thing that could have made Bruno's arc better is if he was also Rei Ayanami. The bit at the end where she finally smiles melted your heart like butter in the sunrise. You insist Watts are underrated. You sadly know deep down that there's a reason the only female Yliaster member is non-canon.

[sparksly-mage-of-light]

Some of my thoughts about a specific detail in Loki s2e5

So B-15 is Verity Willis. I had considered that possibility, especially when she kept getting so many impactful emotional beats.

I love B-15. I love Verity. But now that it's been confirmed that their the same, I'm concerned because I'm worried that it won't be anything more than an easter egg.

I know there's only one episode left with more important things to focus on, but if there are future seasons or any kind of followup that includes B-15, I want that to have some consequences. She's the only member of the group whose real identity is a comic book character, and while Verity isn't a big important character, using her name should have some significance. Her comic book counterpart is Loki's best friend, the one who inspired him to be the God of Stories, and the one person Loki saved from the end of the universe. She might not matter to Marvel as a whole, but she matters to Loki.

And it worries me that the character named after comic Loki's best friend has arguably the weakest relationship with this show's Loki. B-15 has been operating mostly independently from Loki, and her arc has had almost nothing to do with him. Like I said, I love B-15 and her arc throughout the show, but the lack of Loki in it feels weird when you attach Verity's name to her.

And it also feels odd that we only find out her real name from a bit in the credits when she's know her real identity for so long. If I were her, I'd want to at least start going by my name instead of the number assigned to me.

I know this is really small and kinda nitpicky, but I really care about these characters.

[underratedandoverit]

The Simplest Of Things

~1,9k words orangekip (orange cassidy/kip sabian), can be read as gen

takes place in immortal fears/belt corruption au. this will most likely end up being canon at some point, but for now have it as a separate piece. apparently i originally wrote this like a month and a half ago, but just didnt like it enough so i never bothered with it, tho reading through it now its not so bad so.. you can finally have it

theres a lot of thoughts between these two about one another pre-relationship especially during the healing arcs that i'd like to explore a lot more, the problem being its so far into the story its gonna take a while for me to actually get there so. thats why this exist. first of probably many like this

its fluffy, maybe tad angsty cause kip is just like that, but yeah. a little bit of insight on the feelings he has in immortal fears, especially at the beginning of the healing arc. yay (i also wanted to write a followup to this, sssooo maybe that'll happen somewhere down the line? who knows, i just know kip has a lot of feelings already lmao)

@midnightpretenders0 @stormbornpirate @ss-trashboat

---------------------------

Kip slowly came to, becoming aware of his surroundings little by little. The surprisingly soft pillow under his head felt odd, him having no memory when he had actually fallen asleep in the bed last time, let alone seemingly having slept like this. He could feel the blanket wrapped around him and the mattress beneath him, definitely confirming that Kip was in bed, not on the couch or the floor or wherever he ended up passing out for the night when the exhaustion became too much for him to bear.

Kip really couldn’t point out the last time it felt like he had slept the whole night. The past few weeks, maybe months at this point, had been almost like a coin flip on how his nights would go when he got to bed, and most often he had flipped tails on that bet. Tossing and turning through the darkness, if he managed to get some shuteye it was very fast replaced with nightmares that kept plaguing him until he was forcefully pulled back into the real world, leaving Kip restless night after night.

The rare times he had managed to actually sleep, it had still been restless, thankfully often without terrifying nightmares at least, but it still wasn’t much, and definitely not enough like he needed. Most often Kip just passed out somewhere during the day for small power naps, although that habit was also definitely having an effect on his already faltering health, that only good, regular, full nights sleep would really be able to fix.

Kip sighed quietly, burying his head deeper into the pillow. If he was already this comfortable, he was definitely able to fall back asleep and get some more rest now that it seemed like he was actually able to do it, right? Who cared what time of the day it was, he didn’t have anything to do or anywhere to go to. He was on a medical leave and uncleared for work for an undecided amount of time right now, or at least so he had been told, so as far as Kip was concerned, he could just sleep the day away now that he could and not worry about it at the moment.

And then he felt the arm draped over his midsection, underneath the blanket.

As he became aware of the odd sensation of someone invading his personal space, Kip finally opened his eyes, taking a moment to adjust to the surprisingly bright room. He couldn’t tell what time it was, the darkened curtains always made that part very difficult for him when he woke up in this particular room that had been designated as his bedroom, but it was probably a safe bet to say they were somewhere in the morning hours. Not that it really mattered, as Kip’s attention was immediately on the familiar blond fast asleep on the other side of the bed.

Frozen in place Kip’s eyes widened at the sight of Cassidy, trying to find a logical explanation for all of this. Kip didn’t remember how they ended up here, he didn’t even remember how he had gotten to bed if he was being honest. The part that made sense was the one that Cassidy lived with him now so it wasn’t odd to find him in the same space as him, the other man having taken it into his own hands to make sure Kip was making it out alive and in one piece in his current state that he had explained was the aftermath of being the International champion.

Kip wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but everything he had gone through the past few weeks since losing the title – the nightmares, the dark thoughts, the hazy days, the sleepless nights and everything in between – were as Cassidy described to him, giving some sort of believable foundation to what he was talking about. He didn’t have all the pieces of the puzzle together to make everything make sense, and to be honest Cassidy hadn’t pushed it on him either, just giving Kip a little to work with when he needed explanations why things hurt. Why he couldn’t sleep. Why he was exhausted. Why he had energy one day but couldn’t get himself to even sit up without help the other.

The help… That was the big thing for him. Kip, wanting to be the independent one he had been as a champion, had none of that anymore. Everything was a chore, he could barely stand by himself on some days. During the times he had held the title, things out of his control had happened and people that he had once been close with were gone. He had no one left.

Except for the one man he didn’t want in his life, that had ruined all this for him, but who was also the one that was making the most sense out of everyone around him in Kip’s current state of being. The man he had self-appointed as his arch nemesis.

Orange Cassidy.

And now he was there. Fast asleep next to him in bed, one arm lazily thrown over him. Without any explanation in Kip’s mind how they had gotten there, or what had happened the night before.

The questions and the panic was so obvious in him, and yet… He couldn’t do anything about the situation. He couldn’t move, or more accurately, he didn’t want to.

Kip was afraid that him trying to get away from this position was going to disrupt the clearly peaceful sleep that Cassidy was getting.

Before this moment Kip hadn’t really thought about it, being way more in his own dark mind than anything else, but this had to have some kind of effect on Cassidy as well. He was the only one always around to take care of Kip, he was the one always there making sure he had something to eat, to drink, and got at least some rest when it was possible. Cassidy was surprisingly patient with him, something Kip hadn’t expected after everything they had gone through in the past. They were supposed to be enemies, and yet the blond was treating him like an equal, if not more, since he was basically a sole caretaker of Kip’s at this point.

Biting his lip, Kip carefully slid his arm out from under the blanket, without thinking much reaching for Cassidy’s face, gently brushing a coil of his hair away from his face, running a hand through his hair a little. There was something mesmerizing to see him this peaceful, as Kip hadn’t really had a chance to witness that between either rivaling him, him being a champion while Cassidy disappeared from television, and then all of this which left Kip far less aware of his surroundings most of the time. To be honest, he was kind of surprised he even understood that it was Cassidy that was here for him, out of all the possible people. How he hadn’t stopped to even think about it before, Kip really had no idea.

He was so deep in his own thoughts that Kip didn’t notice the results of his actions, only after a groggy Cassidy took a hold of his hand that was still gently tugging on his hair and Kip got face to face with a soft pair of blue eyes, he realized where they were at.

“Morning.”

His voice was so quiet Kip barely registered it, he wasn’t sure if Cassidy was just hoarse from the sleep or if he wanted to avoid loud noises in his presence, knowing them to sometimes be triggers for headaches or anxiety or what have you when Kip wasn’t in his best condition. Kip just blinked at him a few times, feeling the words stuck in his throat. He desperately wanted, he needed, to ask what had happened that led them here, face to face in bed like this, when he couldn’t remember a damn thing from last night.

As Kip didn’t reply to him, Cassidy stirred a little bit more on his spot, the arm disappearing from Kip’s hip as he retreated it away, Cassidy using it to prop himself up and into a sitting position on the bed. Kip breath in a quiet sigh of relief noticing the blond was at least fully clothed, this ruling out at least one option about last night, and then Kip pushed that thought away from his mind as fast as it had appeared, without wanting to even question it why he had thought about it in the first place.

The blush making its way on his face at the thought though was probably very obvious as Cassidy raised a brow at him, rubbing his eyes a little to wake himself up.

“You okay? You don’t look well.”

Kip wasn’t sure if Cassidy was genuinely worried and asking or if he was just teasing him, so Kip shook his head quickly, tossing over in the bed so he could hide his face from the blond better. “I’m fine!”

He could hear a soft snort from Cassidy. “Good to hear. You passed out on the couch last night so I thought you might be catching something. Did you at least sleep well?”

Kip shrugged his shoulders before he could stop himself, but he sighed. “…Yeah. Thanks.”

He didn’t want to talk about it, he didn’t want to hear any further explanations, this was all Kip needed at the moment. Whatever had happened after he had passed out downstairs was irrelevant, the key part was that he slept in his own bed and actually got enough rest to feel well rested for once after who knows how long of a time. How Cassidy fit into everything was not what he wanted to hear right now, probably not ever if he was being honest.

Kip could feel the bed move underneath him a little, before a soft hand ran through his hair quickly. He didn’t resist, but something about the touch felt comforting, as much as he hated it at the same time, knowing exactly who it was coming from. He just buried his head deeper onto the pillow again, feeling the bed shift a little again as Cassidy stood up.

As he walked to the door, the blond stopped, looking back at Kip who was peering at him just barely with half of his face buried into the pillow.

“I’m glad you were able to sleep. It’s been… A while since you got a full night's sleep last, I think.” Cassidy offered him a smile as he ran a hand through his hair. “I’ll make breakfast. Just come downstairs if you want any.”

As he opened the bedroom door and left the room, Kip had no intentions of following him. All of this was already so much to him, having to endure all of this first thing in the morning had thrown his brain into a loop that he didn’t want to start untangling right now by going downstairs to have breakfast with Cassidy after everything.

What he hated the most though, Kip thought as he pulled the blanket over his face with an annoyed groan as he was trying to shake the thought out of his head, was that the good night's sleep last night was most likely because of Cassidy.

And it was a thought he absolutely loathed with his entire being.

[mermaidsirennikita]

ARC Review: The Nobleman's Guide to Seducing a Scoundrel by KJ Charles

4.25/5. Releases 9/19/2023.

Vibes: boss/employee, an Heir Hunt, a hero whose love language is hypercompetence, soft romanticism with just the right amount of angst.

After inheriting an earldom, Rufus finds himself in a dispute with his uncle--who brings up another snag in Rufus' inheritance, one Luke Doomsday. Rather than fight Luke, Rufus decides to hire him as his secretary and make him his ally. The allyship thing becomes rather complicated, however--not only because Luke is a part of a famous smuggling family, but because Rufus actually super wants to bone him. And Luke might be up to more than Rufus realizes...

KJ Charles is one of those authors with such a strong, distinct voice. That's consistent here, as is the rich setting and sense of subculture inherent in her Doomsday books. I think I might still prefer The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen, but that's pure taste (and me being in love with Joss Doomsday). This was a more than worthy followup, and the boss/employee romance that everyone who's uncertain about boss/employee romances should read.

Quick Takes:

--Yes yes Rufus is Luke's boss, and this is something they actually talk about (and, in a very consensual and flirty and normal way) fetishize together. But rest assured, the power dynamics are fully acknowledged and confronted. Like, Rufus initially does feel a bit bad about lusting after his secretary, and he does make it very clear that Luke does not have to do anything he doesn't want to do. (Luke is... significantly less concerned.) I appreciated that.

I also appreciated that Luke points out that an official legal title does not necessarily... peak power... make? Which is a theme throughout this book. Yes, Rufus is an earl, but so many people look down on him despite his title because he is an ex-soldier and isn't able to read very easily, among other things. Yes, Luke is this lower-class guy who's risen up to become a secretary (in part because his cousin Joss Doomsday is absolutely railing a local baronet, bless) but the Doomsdays are also quite powerful in the era. Their power may not be "official", but it has a lot of reach that Rufus and his family can't quite grasp. So that does give Luke a bit more leverage in the relationship, and I found that so different from a lot of historicals that worship the title.

--Going back to reading being a struggle for Rufus... I loved how this was approached by the book. I never got the sense that Rufus needed to learn how to read more easily in order to be seen as a valuable person by anyone who mattered. Anyone who got on Rufus about this issue was an asshole. The main reason why he really "needed" to do anything was because he needed to know what he was looking at re: certain documents related to his responsibilities as earl. The problem was practical, versus being connected to Rufus's intellect in any sense; and it wasn't presented as him being this poor little lost boy, either. It wasn't condescending.

It did give Charles a great opportunity to weave in one of the most touching parts of the novel, however. So much of Rufus and Luke's romance is about the little things that they say and do for each other.

--There's a lot of cozy domesticity in this book? Much of it takes place on this estate that Luke and Rufus are trying to whip back into shape, and they spend so much time working together. You really get this lived in sense of their relationship, despite the fact that they haven't been together all that long.

--In a similar sense, this is one of those books where you just kind of feel like love creeps up on the leads in this very normal way. Like, there aren't a lot of BIG ROMANTICALLY CODED EVENTS (though there are a couple). Luke and Rufus falling in love is woven in throughout the story and in their everyday lives. Like, there isn't some big "omg I love him" moment; you just know that they have truly slipped into love together. It's really lovely and really quietly romantic, and I loved that.

The Sex Stuff:

KJ Charles writes sex in a way that is explicit, sexy, and like... often kind of funny? The sex in this one starts fairly early, which is something I appreciated about Country Gentleman and something I appreciated here. Like, they're definitely into each other by the time they start hooking up, but... they also just really want to throw down, you know? I loved that Rufus and Luke falling in love was aided by this sexual relationship between adults. This is very much one of those books where they're like "OH DON'T WORRY, IT'S JUST SEX, WE WON'T FALL IN LOVE!!!" Which I am trash for.

I really had a good time with this one. KJ Charles is just one of those undeniably strong writers, and I have to just give a blanket recommendation for her books.

Thanks to Netgalley and Sourcebooks Casablanca for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[penultimate-step]

Cliffhangers: when do they help?

There's a reductive negative stereotype of cliffhangers that comes to mind when people complain about them: with neither planning nor setup, a dramatic situation occurs to the characters. "how will the characters get out of this one?," asks a dramatic voiceover, as the show cuts to credits. Then, next episode, the whole thing is resolved immediately in two seconds, so the series can go back to focusing on the actual plot.

Now, as I said, this is something of a stereotype, not something that often happens - most writers know better than to do something so blatant. It does sometimes happen, but usually the situation has more nuance to it than that.

The cliffhanger that inspired this, the recent Oshi no Ko 158-9, has very little of those mitigating factors. It is almost entirely the negative stereotype, a cliffhanger that adds very little to the story and detracts much. Which got me thinking a bit on cliffhangers in general - what separates a good one from a bad one?

The same week OnK gave us that disappointing cliffhanger, another weekly manga I follow, Chainsaw Man, had a cliffhanger that felt much more interesting. (Though perhaps given we haven't had the followup chapter, this is premature...nonetheless, it is an easy at hand example.) Looking at the chapters preceding them, we can see a difference in pacing and buildup.

OnK 158 comes after a few chapters of winding down and calmer pacing - the cliffhanger, in this case, doubles as a spike in tension, intended to kickstart the next bit of serious plot, coming as a surprise and shock to the readers. This is already something of a problem, as it doesn't have anything to build on; but arcs have to start somewhere, this isn't in itself a problem. but by framing it a sudden jump, it puts all the true requirements for execution on the followup, where it's leading to. Which is why when the next chapter immediately follows up with a "just kidding, teehee uwu" it kills the whole momentum.

CSM 176 goes for the more conservative approach - while it does still end on a shocking twist, this comes in the middle of an already intense fight scene. It forms one brick in a larger rising action, supported by previous scenes, so even if the followup doesn't land it doesn't kill the whole momentum. It's not trying to establish it's own setup - where OnK ended one chapter with a sharp shock and then tried to offramp into character revelations, CSM dual purposes them - Yoru's revelation about the Gun (and Tank) as well as her own personal actions are twist, cliffhanger, and plot development all in one. So it works as a story beat regardless of where the chapter leaves off.

But that feels a little too hostile to cliffhangers, right? Like am I just saying that cliffhangers are an artifact of the serial storytelling format, and could basically be excised? Is a "good cliffhanger," one that integrates itself with the story beats, basically indistinguishable from a non-cliffhanger? that can't be true, right?

Anyway while rolling this around in my head I tried to think about some memorable and positive cliffhangers that I've read in the past. And one that came to mind was from about halfway through the webnovel Pact. So, spoilers for that.

So at the end of Arc 7, the protagonist gets into a fight with a demon. He loses. Chapter cuts, we start arc 8 - from a completely different perspective. What happened to our previous protag is left up in the air for a whole arc, with hints slowly trickling in - but it is only when the arc ends that we get a more complete picture, that he had lost his connections, been removed from all the memories of others, and fallen into a place outside conventional reality.

In this case, the cliffhanger, I would argue, helps the narrative significantly - in separating the event from the resolution, forcing readers to stew on it while other plot threads go on, it made the eventual revelations more satisfying, not less.

I don't think that quite helps my point though. "Cliffhangers are good when planned and executed into the story and bad when they aren't" seems like 2 steps away from saying "its good when its good and bad when its bad," that doesn't much clarify things for me.

That might just be what it boils down to, though - cliffhangers are just one of many ways to control the pacing and tension in a story, with no special negative or beneficial properties, and are good when used in cases where an upswing in those things are good, or the author otherwise wants to direct focus and attention to an element. The negative stereotype, with examples like OnK's, are a result of pursuing those in the short term while sacrificing longer-term story stability - a misstep many longer stories make, not anything tied to cliffhangers inherently.

I still feel like there's something important I'm missing that separates the bad example from the good. But I think I've lost the train of thought here, and this has gone on far too long for what was originally intended to me just me musing to myself about why recent developments in my favorite ongoing manga aren't hitting as well as they should.

[moonlit-tulip]

Thank you for making that one ask about Madoka and Homura, it felt very cathartic. Bavitz' take on the Madoka Magica always came across as somewhat bad faith in regards to Homura, so it's nice to see someone else agrees on this.

And while I'm at it, would you consider it disingenuous to describe the Madoka Magica cast as being selfish? Like, I suppose they are, but that also feels like a gross oversimplification.

(Context) (Context for context)

I'm glad you got catharsis out it, I suppose? Although I don't think I actually agree with your feelings as stated; his opinions on Homura don't come across as particularly bad-faith-ish to me, just as emphasizing different bits of her character and her narrative role (and in particular extrapolating her flaws in a different direction) than most of the more-popular interpretations (and my own) do.

As for the followup question: I am probably the wrong person to ask that; I get as far as "well, they do some selfish things and some unselfish things", and then at that point lose momentum and fail to figure out whether they do or don't count as selfish-on-net given that. First because what makes an action count as 'selfish' is ill-defined (is it selfish, or selfless, for Homura to prioritize Madoka's well-being over both her own and that of everyone else around them?), and second because a given action can have multiple motivations (Sayaka healing Kyousuke is motivated both by desire-for-him-to-be-able-to-play-for-people-again and by desire-for-him-to-like-her), and third because there's no obvious well-defined cutoff-point for what rate of selfish actions relative to unselfish ones makes a person count as selfish or unselfish.

If I were to ignore all of that and place the main characters in a continuum from most to least selfish based on pure fuzzy vibes, my first pass at it probably look something like "pre-character-development Kyouko > Homura > post-character-development Kyouko > Sayaka > Mami > Madoka"; but there's some argument for switching Mami and Madoka (Mami seems not to actually hugely like her magical-girling, unlike Madoka who seems to find it very personally rewarding, but does it (in extra-strenuous heroism-optimized familiar-killing fashion) nonetheless), and Homura could be argued to fit practically anywhere on the continuum, and this list doesn't include Kyubey and his motivations are sufficiently up-to-interpretation that he could be argued to fit practically anywhere on the continuum, and overall I feel no particular sense of conviction around the correctness of the list's ordering. Because selfishness is just sort of fundamentally a squishy and imprecise category.

(For certain more-rigorously-defined selfishness-related categories, I could speak more confidently. Kyouko is the most philosophically in favor of people being concerned only for themselves, at least until right near the end of her character arc; Mami is the most self-sacrificing in the name of helping strangers; et cetera. But none of that actually answers the question as asked.)

[doubleddenden]

This took longer than I thought it would. This is a list of all the Pokemon I've used throughout my entire Insurgence run. I tried to prioritize new forms over older Pokemon, but jesus this might just be the most I've rotated over a single game. Minus Mew- but he's our buddy so I feel like he has to be included.

Sort of a mini review under the cut- I enjoyed it, but I do feel like there's places where improvements could be made.

Insurgence feels like a classic "try-hard" edgy fan game, but in reality it hasn't been out for too long, at least since XY and ORAS though. Its a bit "3 Edgy 5 me" with all the cults and stuff, but I respect it for a very passion filled story, maps to explore (including mode7 for a soaring map, WOW, that's very cool), character customization, but probably my main draw was the Delta Pokemon- which were regional variants BEFORE regional variants came out, and are basically mutated or experimented Pokemon. Lots of creativity goes into each and every design, and the fakemon quality is immense. The designs are edgy, but I LOVE edgy designs.

The gameplay is very hard, even on easy mode, and you'll probably be doing a LOT of grinding- but its kind of rewarding when you either figure out a good strategy to beat an opponent or go through an anime training arc in a secret base with a guy with a bunch of masochistic Audino to gain some serious levels and steam roll the team that gave you trouble before.

The game has some neat options, including a difficulty level setting (mind you, again, easy is still hard but closer to a traditional Pokemon game for the most part. I played Normal until the Elite 4), and surprisingly an option to keep the story dark or to cut it back a tad. There's also character customization if you're into that- personally i liked most of the beginning options best, so I just kept my guy as is.

I have a few gripes- mainly that Delta Pokemon are so few and far between in comparison to the older Pokemon, or there's a bunch that are only available AFTER you've beaten the main game. Unlike variants, Deltas are usually one encounter captures- which don't get me wrong, most of the encounters all have some pretty great stories attached, but I would have enjoyed being able to build a team with more variety earlier on.

Still, what's here is great- In particularly I LOVE my Mega Delta Charizard and my Mega Delta Typhlosion- MDTy in particular feels like it gets a mega on top of its mega due to a form change it gets in darkness or rain. I also love all of the story rich post game content and new areas to explore, and being able to fight certain characters as well.

I know Azurite has kinda gone... Ghost? I guess? But apparently it's going to be a mostly fakemon focused followup made by a similar team. I wanna play it!

Overall a 7/10 experience.

Now... For the "Cool Club" Army- or the team.

No blurb about each team member because that'd take forever, but I'll go down in order of Hall of Fame, new species, then older ones

HOF- All Deltas

Mega Charizard/Ghoulzard, Ghost/Dragon

Mega Typhlosion/Sparky, Electric/Steel

Scizor/Sickle, Ice/Fighting

Crustle/Cake c:, Fairy/Normal

Haxorus/Anchor, Water/Steel

Metagross/Aureliag, Bug/Ground

Other important Members, all Deltas

Quagsire/Jacky, Grass/Fire

Muk/Crusty, Ground (Horsea minion form)

Hydreigon/N*Sync, Ground/Poison

Gallade/Electra, Electric/Ice

Ambipom/Tricky, Ghost/Normal

Non Deltas, in no particular order

Mew/MewMew

Lucario/Kyago

Feraligatr/Dundee

Typhlosion/Tindr

Butterfree/CantBelieve

Golem/Geoffany

Persian/Pen

Shiny Hydreigon/Da'Bee'Uls (pronounced "The Beetles" in a stereotypical Bri'ish accent)

Electivire/Thundervolt

Nidoking/Buddy

Anyways, I edited my sprite using official sprites to sort of match the MC (hence the purple hair).

The rest were pulled directly from the game files. Massive kudos to each and every artist involved in the fakemon production. I'd love to see these fakemon in a future project so I can use them some more.

[freelancewitchvt]

im gonna respond to criticisms about adventure time that i saw in a twitter thread bc im bored and have feelings and thoughts

the most frequent reply to the thread was that people believe finn’s breakup with flame princess was stupid and, at worst, was an attempt by the female writers to make the male protagonist Finn as dislikeable as possible.

i don’t think i’ve ever met a single fan of adventure time who thinks “yeah that finn the human guy? he sucks. totally dislikeable protagonist.” i have to believe these people simply watched up to this episode and then quit the show. they didn’t see any of the followup. they didn’t watch finn grow up. they didn’t see the episode where finn acknowledges specifically what he did wrong and makes amends with flame princess. i just simply do not understand this criticism.

WHAT SHOW ARE U WATCHING? GO WATCH THE SHOW CALLED “ADVENTURE TIME” AVAILABLE ON MAX AND HULU

ppl won’t shut the fuck up about rebecca sugar even when she’s NOT a show runner

moving onto princess bubblegum. now call me crazy but i’ve always liked princess bubblegum as a character. i also understand where a lot of this criticism comes from and im able to qualify that my affinity towards her character comes with a fair bit of nuance as well as coming from a place of bias via naivete

the idea that the show turns a blind eye to her abuses is absurd to me. the show explicitly shows her hurting characters that we care about, and it in no way is framed as good. it acknowledges her flaws, which is why we the audience are aware of them. and in-universe I think she is quite literally called out by almost every major character lmao does the show punish her enough? well that’s like, an interesting question to ask and a fun way to think about the show and her character. what does princess bubblegum deserve? well we know she got usurped and exiled for some time. that gave her some time to reflect a bit.

now you don’t necessarily have to think of that as a redemption arc. at the very least the show took the opportunity to show us other facets of her character. she can be vulnerable, she can be kind, she can feel remorseful. and she does, like, improve in my opinion. in “The Thin Yellow Line” princess bubblegum has a whole speech condemning her idolization, saying she’s “just a person, like all of you” it’s quite wholesome. It’s further reinforced in “High Strangeness” when she apologizes to tree trunks for trying to colonize space and inadvertently infecting her alien children with candy goo (lmao i know it sounds ridiculous but watch the episode lol) obviously i’m not gonna sit here and be like “princess bubblegum is great and was  completely redeemed and a morally exemplary paragon to be revered by all” but like, come on twitter. you’re not at all convincing me here

now im gonna talk about his one!! the animation!! i have a lot of ways i like to think about how the style/animation/tone/format of this show changes over time. the central pillar of these is exactly in line with the shows most prominent theme: growing up. finn ages from 12 to 17 and a lot of what the show explores is the transition from “boyhood” to “manhood” and how it’s messy, nonlinear, painful, joyful, and rich with new experiences. i think the stylistic changes, even if they can also be explained by ward stepping down as showrunner, also reinforce this theme fantastically. if we’re seeing the world through finn’s eyes, of course in his early years things are much more colorful, fantastical, and whimsical. and as he ages, we see the world more clearly, things seem more grounded, more mature.  that’s why i can’t really take any criticism in line with this seriously because it’s just too well done it works too dang well.  and don’t get me started on how this theme extends to all the other characters. i could literally go on but i’ve already made my point hehe.

i dont have anything to say about this one it’s just funny hehe okay im gonna go now

[unrivalling]

Hello there! Thank you so much for adding your thoughts to this post. I appreciate the additional context for me as again, I'm playing catch up on many years of content and meta, so it's very appreciated!!

A more thorough reply to all this under the cut. Not contrary to anything you said here, just attempting to build on it/share where I'm coming from a bit more.

Re: the different canons and the OVAs SO this is a really interesting thing that I'd like to write a different meta for at some point, but it was actually interesting to me coming into Kuro fandom and seeing people talking about "non-canon" vs "canon" (usually referring to the first anime and especially S2 as "non-canon" and the manga as "canon"). Which to be clear, I very much respect! I know there are a lot of strong feelings especially around some of the Bigger Creative Choices in S2, and don't want to step on that at all, but it is interesting for me. Context: I was in Marvel/MCU fandom for about 8 years. And in that fandom there was a really clear distinction between the comics and the movies produced by Marvel Studios. So for instance, in that fandom, folks generally saw them as two different canons rather than there being One Truth, but the two also regularly informed each other, both in fandom and as the films and comic arcs were released by Marvel. So to me I kind of think of Kuro as having between 2 and 4 different canons. I, like many folks, it seems, prefer the manga as a primary source of truth, but I see the first anime canon as a work in and of itself. (I recognize this may not be revolutionary and folks are just using different terms than I'm used to!)

However, in Marvel, the comics and the movies were constantly feeding off of each other, even if they weren't entirely predictive. However, they were often both useful for pulling together a complete picture (or pictures) of a character or plot thread over time, so I'm very open to using S1-S2 and the OVAs as supplements to possibly help fill some gaps in the manga for things Toboso hasn't gotten to there yet. This is particularly helpful with Grell I think, because she just didn't...show up for so long after her first appearance in the manga, but I totally think you can trace some interesting reveals for possible insight or answers. Things I like thinking about wrt Grell's life from S1-S2 + the OVAs

I badly want to get more into my feelings on Grell and attraction in a second, followup meta (I'm a little stuck on it) but I think a Lot about Grell in Ciel in Wonderland. It feels like the first instance of her becoming a (slightly) more thoughtful character, and it is fairly contemporaneous with her return in the manga. If this is correct, Ciel in Wonderland Part 2 looks like it was released in February 2011, and Chapter 55, where Grell reappears, was released in March 2011, about a month later.

It's the first time we see Grell thoughtfully comment on how she thinks her gender is perceived by others, talk about her feelings about romance (always being the lover but never the loved), and make a comment about having lost her friend. Now, we haven't seen the first two happen in the manga yet, but in the Campania arc we DO get the first indication that she either regrets or is still thinking about what happened with Madam Red (the shot of the messily sewn up coat while Undertaker tells her she's "been seduced by the lives of humans too"). SO in lieu of better information about her in the manga, I'm very very willing to use the OVAs and S2 to supplement where they seem to provide something we don't already know. Toboso may have changed over time or they may have been ideas that she was just in the process of exploring, but there are key moments from the first anime canon that I think can be really enlightening. In fact a meta I want to write in followup to this, about how Grell as a character actually makes a lot of sense for me when I think of her as a queer transfeminine person (as I read her) who would have lived under the buggery laws, and I think a lot about her "always the lover but never the loved" line in light of how most of the relationships she pursues are with men who don't seem interested in her. Quick note on the reapers remembering their past lives: There is a line from Sascha in vol 22 that was translated as "I enjoy every day much more than when I was alive", which implies to me that they remember some, if not all of their human lives (-slides Toboso a $20 across the table for all the Reaper Secrets-) Possible tragic backstories I love (and am often in pain 🥲) thinking about all the possibilities for her life...The idea of her having had a star crossed relationship is so good (and I feel is potentially supported by her replaying it with men who aren't interested in her). Thank you for replying! I've been microwaving a lot of this in my head and I uhhh very much am excited to talk about Grell literally any time!! 😁

"Just When Was Grell Sutcliff Alive?" Part 1: Establishing a Timeline

So as many of you know, I recently got into Black Butler (I know, about 17 years too late), and I'm almost caught up. However, I want to talk about how I'm still thinking about Vol 29 and some of the lore dropping Othello does at the beginning there.

Namely I'm fixated on possibly having a timeline for Grell's human life and death.

This wasn't intended to be a proper meta. It's been too long since I've written one, and there's probably important stuff I'm forgetting or don't know. But I wanted to write all of this down to get it out on the page, for posterity. Then it accidentally became a meta. Oops. Mild BB spoilers up to Vol 29, and heads up for some discussion of historical homophobia, transphobia, and state violence at the end. As well as a canon-typical suicide mention. I use she/her pronouns for Grell, but broadly interpret her as queer and transfeminine given the complexity of talking about identity in the time periods I'll be referencing (I use "queer" as a reclaimed, academic, blanket term). I'm also largely taking a Watsonian approach (Grell's experiences from her perspective), although a Doylist approach to Grell (as in relating to the author's intent and cultural context rather than the character's) is also really interesting one, but feels like more well trodden territory. With that out of the way, let's begin.

The info we have So. Something really interesting happened in Vol 29. We got a lot of great Undertaker backstory, but Othello said something relating to Grell that made me eyes emoji.

"Weren't you around 70 years ago?"

So, she never replies to this. But it seems highly plausible this means Grell was not a reaper 70 years before the current date in the manga. We don't quite know what the lag time is between someone dying and becoming a reaper, but I'm taking this to mean she had not died yet, as I assume she would have remembered an event like the one Othello describes. I believe this is the implication. Now, I am making some assumptions:

- To clarify, I know this is all guesswork. I'm just having fun with different possibilities. - Like I said, we don't know what the lag time is between someone dying and becoming a reaper (as in, the new state of being, not the job), and we don't know how long it takes to go from trainee to collections to senior. - That Grell was around 25 when she died. It's hard to tell anime character ages from 20-40 at a glance, but her design seems similar to me to characters that are in their 20s in other series. She could be older or younger, but I'm using that in lieu of a better option. It's not precise, but it'll get us in the ballpark anyway - Black Butler has a lot of anachronisms. However, Toboso is known to research things heavily and her changes are typically very purposeful (the purpose is usually "Rule of cool" and that's why we stan). I'm assuming historical events happening in BB to mirror the real world except where indicated otherwise. - I'm also assuming she's English. The names Grell and Grelle are both German in origin, but there are a lot of Germanic names in English and Sutcliff as a surname originated in Yorkshire. This is only based on a quick Google search--I could do more later, but this seems in line with Grell not being presented as "foreign" to England in any way in the series making her stand out in the same way her flamboyance or flirtation with men does. Establishing a range

The series takes place in 1888 and 1889. 70 years ago would put Undertaker's defection at 1818. If what Othello says is true, this means Grell became a reaper sometime after that date.

Let's establish the outlier possibilities first (again, assuming a pretty rapid transition from human death to becoming a reaper).

The earliest possible date Grell could have become a reaper: sometime in the following year, around 1819. This would put her birth at around 1794, and her death that year in 1819. This feels unlikely because it seems like she would have been exposed to people talking about Undertaker defecting since it was such a catastrophe, but who knows.

The latest possible date Grell could have become a reaper is 1887, which would place her birth at around 1862. This is massively improbable to the point of being impossible since she's a senior in collections and I assume that didn't happen in a year, but again, it's important for establishing a range. Basically, tldr, according to this framework, Grell became a reaper sometime between 1819 and 1887, which puts her human life (and death) in that timeframe as well. This would place her in the Georgian-Victorian eras, or possibly even the 8 year Regency period.

Will the Reaper OVA I've only talked about the manga so far since the 1st anime canon is wildly divergent in a number of ways, but if we include the Will the Reaper OVA, this would push things towards the earlier end of that timeline. I don't know much about the history of fashion (especially not middle and lower class dress), but it seems distinctly late 1700s/maybe early 1800s to me. Which if I'm reading right, would actually push Grell becoming a reaper back as far as the 1790s or 1810s, and would dispute the 1819 date implied by Vol 29. IF ANYONE KNOWS MORE ABOUT THE FASHION REFERENCES HERE, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO TELL ME. I WANT TO KNOW.

(Baby....Grell...furious and stark raving mad recently dead stray cat making it everyone's problem. I'm fine) This is subverted a little bit by the reaper outfits appearing more like Victorian businesswear, but Reapers always seem to be a few decades ahead of the world in terms of fashion and technology. My personal assessment is that the fashion in this is to make it immediately, visually clear that the OVA takes place in the Georgian rather than Victorian period, however that forces me to break my largely Watsonian approach for a Doylist one ("the animators perhaps decided it was necessary to show that time had passed since the events of the OVA"), but considering it came out so long before the lore drop in Vol 29, who knows.

I'm not inclined to take it as gospel truth for the manga canon, but considering Toboso did collaborate on that one, I think it at least worth talking about and considering as supplemental information.

I personally take this to support (but not solely uphold) the idea that "Grell became a reaper sometime during the Georgian period (1713-1837)", but again, grain of salt.

What would it mean for Grell to be a queer person in England in the 1700s and 1800s?

As far as I'm aware, we don't know anything about what Grell's life might have been like before becoming a reaper. Unless I'm missing something, that's a black box until Toboso reveals more.

But establishing this timeline gives us a great opportunity to consider the circumstances she would have lived under.

Understand that I'm not speaking in absolutes here, more "here are some interesting things I like to think about when considering why this character might be the way she is". I'm also not saying Toboso intended any of this to be read into Grell, but as readers I believe it's reasonable to assume Grell may have encountered these events or they might have impacted her unless stated otherwise. A brief list of things Grell would have been living under or around or could have been aware of. I want to do a part 2 talking about how these things might relate to someone like Grell, as well as talking about other major historical events not directly related to queer people (like, you know, the Napoleonic Wars), but this post is already feeling long enough: - The Buggery Act and the Offenses Against the Person Act, which made a variety of sexual acts punishable by death, including acts like anal sex. These laws were used to persecute people, usually queer men (although people who would today be called trans women and nonbinary people were also certainly prosecuted as well*), particularly in the 1700s and 1800s. I believe as of 1862 it was no longer punishable by death, but people still lived in fear of prison and hard labor (Oscar Wilde going to prison in 1895 being a famous later example). Here's an article about the men killed under the Buggery Act. *Trans men were not exempt from this, even if the specific legal and social threat was likely different. If memory serves, Dr. James Barry was jeopardized by rumors that he may have been Too Close to one of his cis male friends. - Molly houses. Generally considered places in the 1700s and 1800s where queer men gathered to socialize and find sexual partners. There was a lot of gender divergence in these spaces, and it's widely believed they were frequented by people who, again, today, could have a variety of gender identities. This article about molly houses and gender is really interesting. This article specifically talks about one in Whitechapel. - The Chevalier d'Eon. This one is just really interesting. While the Chevalier d'Eon was likely one of the first examples of legally recognized gender transition, this person was very famous and wealthy and the circumstances are buckwild. This video is highly watchable and informative. Grell

As a queer person and someone who likes history (I don't have any specific training, I just like learning about it), I already think a lot about what it must have been like to live during this specific time period, and Grell slots into that pretty well as a character to fixate on, since she dovetails with the other existing hyperfixation. By extension, I like using this information to think about what Grell's human life might have been like, and how those experiences could be aligned to explain a lot of her behavior, and seems especially poignant to me in light of all reapers having been people who committed suicide, another recent lore reveal in the manga. Maybe she lived closeted and lived in fear of discovery. Maybe she wasn't afraid! Maybe she was impulsive and endangered herself and others! Maybe she got blackmailed. What if she experienced her first taste of femininity at a molly house? Does she only go after men who reject her because she lived during a time where her affections being returned was intensely dangerous? Did she care about anyone? Is anyone she knew still alive? Thank you so much to everyone who read to the end! If I'm able to rally, I do want there to be a part 2 to this going more into detail about how it makes sense to me that these homophobic and transphobic societal pressures could have created a character like Grell.

[hms-no-fun]

I guess this is less a question than it is a critique?

I love godfeels in general and I do realise that it was a story about more than just being trans - it was a brilliant dissection of just how little thought Hussie actually put into how fucked up the powers he was giving to literal children and the things he wrote them as doing were, but there was one point that kind of irked me.

Specifically it was the bit where Dirk, who is (at least in as much as godfeels is concerned) kind of a metaphor for transphobia actually sort of has a point? Because there was that whole thing where June actually did kill most of her friends, topple a building and massacre a bunch of innocent people. Dirk's point that "John Egbert never did anything like this, it's only June that did something like this" is... irritatingly valid?

Once it's revealed that Dirk can somehow remember retconned timelines, his initial actions become irritatingly justifiable? At first his actions have less to do with transphobia and more with the "holy shit this previously quiet, agreeable person suddenly KILLED ALL HER FRIENDS."

Yes, Dirk's manner of confronting June about it is creepy as hell. Yes, Dirk's core motivation is incredibly egotistical and shitty - she's incredibly powerful and these recent changes in her life put that power even further outside Dirk's ability to control it. But a timeline verifiably exists wherein, under the influence of Trickster Mode, she kills a bunch of people including some of their mutual friends. Dirk, as much as I despise him, had a right to be concerned about that.

Real transphobia doesn't have a justification like that? And yes, eventually Dirk does slip into the standard transphobia motivation of "you are not the person I need you to be for my world to make sense in my head." Eventually it's all just trying to beat the world into the shape he wants it to be. But it didn't start that way, it started with June actually posing a threat to people he cared about, and it feels... unpleasant? To have some avenue for "well, actually, he had a point" like that.

you’ve got some real chutzpuh bringing this to me, kid. i respect that!

this is a quagmire i was very aware of while writing gf2 and that i’ve gotten some pushback for in the past, and i’ve always tried to respond to it earnestly and in good faith. but this is a really complicated question to get into for me, more complicated than you might realize, so there’s gonna be a lot of stuff here that might seem irrelevant or dismissive and i’m definitely gonna repeat myself more than once. just try to walk with me here and if you’re still unsatisfied by the end, my askbox remains open. just know in advance that this is a LONG one.

so, to start, a couple quibbles:

first, i don’t agree at all with the idea that andrew didn’t put much thought into how fucked up it was for baby teenagers to have godtier powers. i cannot think of a single arc in the main cast that doesn’t, on some level, involve the character in question realizing how traumatized they are by the heights of power and corruption they ascended to before even being old enough to vote. act 6 is fully half the comic and it’s practically an academic exegesis on just how fucked up it is for teens to have godtier powers. how else would you describe the post-juju quadruple dialogue between the Alphas on their death slabs but as an exhaustive deconstruction of the aftermath of sburb-related godtier trauma? you’ve got Dave’s decision to stop using time travel, Rose’s whole thing about communing with the horrorterrors, i mean shit Alternia as a whole is just “what if kids had superpowers and could kill each other would that be fucked up or what,” not to mention two of the most important conversations in homestuck proper (at least for me) are Jade’s discussion with alt-Calliope about the crushing loneliness of being a Space player, and its immediate followup in Jade’s conversation with Davepeta about the unmitigated freedom of being an anything player. that’s a lot of tension for one dog to process! just because characters never come out and explicitly say “wow, isn’t this fucked up” doesn’t mean the author is unaware of how fucked up it is. but also isn’t that literally Dave and Dirk’s last conversation before the end of act 6?

second, i want to challenge your read on where Dirk in gf2 started. yes, there’s an element of his attack on June that is “you are a danger to my friends,” but it cannot go unstated in any discussion of this work that at this point in the narrative Dirk is explicitly preparing for the events of the meat-timeline of the homestuck epilogues. which, you know, involved more than his fair share of below-board friend torture. this isn’t a trivial fact, as much of what occurs in gf3 is a result of godfeels not being the epilogues (hence the subtitle Divergence Syndrome). so we need to understand that, like June, his decisions are never motivated purely by altruism. yes, he’s worried about his friends, but specifically what he’s worried about is that they won’t experience the specific series of traumas that he thinks will make for a better story. just because WE don’t know that for sure until a bit later doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.

but these quibbles are largely surface-level and don’t, i think, get to the core of your criticism. what we’re really talking about here is interpretation, and i think more broadly we’re talking about media literacy-- which is NOT me suggesting that YOU SPECIFICALLY are in any sense illiterate! but rather that this particular line of criticism, i must admit, always comes across to me as woefully shortsighted. it’s a criticism filtered heavily through a post-tumblr lens, and i promise i don’t mean that entirely dismissively. it’s a lens i used for a very long time myself, and it still colors a lot of my approach (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse). so i’m coming to you now as someone who has grown out of that approach, and who genuinely wants to suggest an alternative. but i’m getting ahead of myself.

the chief disagreement i have with your criticism begins when you say that Dirk “is kind of a metaphor for transphobia.” you’re not wrong here, of course, but i think you’ve stopped at one circle inside a much larger venn diagram. Dirk is only kind of a metaphor for transphobia insofar as the entire cast of godfeels 2 is kind of a metaphor for transphobia. including the people who aren’t violently retaliatory!

what really motivated me to write gf2 in the first place was my dissatisfaction with the black & white morality tale quality of most conventionally popular transgender narratives. i identified with John Egbert the most of all the cast of homestuck, but when June hit critical mass in 2019 i really felt that a lot of the depictions i was seeing just... weren’t all that genuine to my experience. and look, i’m not saying there’s anything wrong with a “June comes out and is accepted by her friends and gets to have a nice time” fic. i’m glad they exist and i’ve read & enjoyed a fair few in my time! but that wasn’t the kind of story i wanted to write, because as a trans woman that just wasn’t my experience of coming out.

my experience of coming out was that no one was ever outright transphobic to me. my friends were initially very encouraging! but as time wore on it became clear to me that their surface level acceptance belied a deep almost metaphysical rift between us, an inability or unwillingness to understand what was actually going on with me. by the time a year had passed, we weren’t on speaking terms anymore and i blamed myself for all of it because those were the terms they couched our conversations in. they saw me as mentally unwell in ways that they insisted had nothing to do with my gender, and they said i needed to “get help” for reasons that had nothing to do with my gender. gender never even came up.

and the thing is, i have no doubt that’s what they genuinely believed. but the fact that it only came to a head the way it did after i came out is really hard for me to ignore, you know? this is why Rose’s “I just have some concerns” comes up over and over again-- a lot of trans people aren’t in the best place when they come out, so it’s easy for well-meaning friends to question whether this is genuine or if it’s just another part of their mental illness. i sometimes wonder how much my friends actually believed me when i told them i was trans, because i was so goddamn depressed and i’d had so many supposedly life-changing revelations in the past that led to absolutely fuckall. from their perspective, how was this different from any other time i swore up and down that i was on A Better Path?

now, obviously they were WRONG, and i wish they’d supported me better. but they also had full-time jobs, they had their own lives and mental health struggles to deal with. so i understand, you know? i’m still mad about it, and i can’t ever really forgive them for how much it hurt me, but i don’t hate them. and i certainly don’t think they’re transphobes. it’s just that most day-to-day transphobia isn’t a conservative saying “you’re not a real [gendered noun],” it’s little shit that no one but you even notices and if you try to bring it up, nine times out of ten you get told you’re just reading too much into things, you’re making everything about gender when it has nothing to do with gender, etcetera etcetera. but it all adds up for us, you know? that’s microaggressions innit

but this gets us to the real sticky part, the part you’ve probably been silently saying muttering “this is a copout you’re not ACTUALLY addressing my question” over: retaliatory violence. and here’s as good a place as any to say that if you haven’t watched my video about writing everything before gf2.3, i suggest giving it a watch as i discuss this topic pretty thoroughly there. i imagine i’ll be saying many of the same things now, just with a bit more perspective.

let’s start with mental illness.

i’m on medications for bipolar and adhd. i wasn’t always. in the years before i came out, i was a bitter, lonely, confused mess of a person. as a child and teen i had anger problems, i had violent fantasies, i felt a really deep desire to react to the smallest injustices delivered onto me by my bullies with cartoonishly over-the-top violence. not all or even most of these fantasies were justified. i was an edgelord teen who loved quentin tarantino movies, of course i was shitty. the friends i mentioned above, like i said, i do understand where they were coming from. they didn’t have access to my mind, they had their own lives to live, and just as they weren’t communicating with me, i wasn’t communicating with them. at the time i blamed myself for everything that was turning sour in our relationships, but i still had nightmares and fantasies where i’d scream in their faces for some kind of recognition or acknowledgement only to become outrageously violent when they failed to do so. i felt guilty for those fantasies, they reminded me of being 17 thinking to myself “man if i weren’t so anti-gun i’d make a really good school shooter.”

that’s a vile thought, right? that’s the kind of thing if someone said it to you out loud, you’d probably have a few concerns.

but i didn’t say it out loud. it was just a thought that popped into my head from time to time. what matters, what really matters in any material sense, is that i never even came close to acting on it. a thought isn’t real, an image of fake violence isn’t real, an unacted-upon desire to inflict violence isn’t real. fiction, too, is not real. and through my entire adult life, the only consistent outlet of any worth i’ve had has been fiction.

the question of how “acceptable” it is for traumatized people to process their trauma in fiction is, i must admit, rather obnoxiously contentious. i’ve seen ostensible leftists genuinely say without a hint of irony, “yeah, okay, fine, you have every right to explore your complicated feelings about [traumatic event] in fiction, but you shouldn’t post it anywhere.” so, what, people who have flawless, frictionless transitions are allowed good representation, but when a messy transition is depicted that’s just universally bad representation? if a queer character isn’t shown to be unambiguously good and correct, then that’s... that’s bad? why doesn’t it count when i say that i feel better when i read a story that reflects how fucked up my life is? why’s it gotta be that every story needs to be for everyone? why’s it gotta be that my story that i started writing for my own reasons with no expectation of getting paid for it, no expectation of any kind of substantial audience, ought to stand as an unimpeachable argument in favor of trans women’s infallibility? trans women aren’t infallible. charlotte clymer exists. caitlyn jenner exists. it flattens and diminishes the humanity of marginalized people to insist that it’s a flaw when a story doesn’t make it unambiguously clear that not all marginalized people are bad. it’s not my job as a trans woman to make sure you, the reader, know that not all trans women are bad. i assume that you know this. i assume that you can look at the circumstances of the narrative and understand that this has always been a speculative scifi story about a world that operates on very different rules than our world, about people who are capable of things that no one in our world is capable of.

you know how sometimes you’ll have a conversation with someone and they’ll say just the most catastrophically stupid shit, but as much as you WANT to roast them for it you know it’d be rude and unproductive? well what if you could roast that person, get it out of your system, and then retcon the whole exchange out of existence? as i’ve said in other answers, the horror of retcon is that it puts you in the driver’s seat of your own personal groundhog day, unlimited and consequence-free throughout time and space. i know this probably seems utterly irrelevant to the substance of your criticism, but to me it’s everything. the feels in godfeels have always been rooted in the dreadful existential weight of knowing that you could get away with doing absolutely anything you wanted with terrifying ease.

homestuck is a violent story. how many times do we see those teens get stabbed to death? so for me, as gf2 soared out of my hands and grew in scope, it felt obvious and natural to take that premise and combine it with the messiness of my own coming out. to explore gender and violence together. when i wrote the scene where Callie gives June her juju, i knew that i was stepping into REALLY dangerous territory, because June is transgender, and a trans person who kills her other queer friends for being above-average in their transphobia is bad transgender representation.

right?

i think that’s the core of what you’re driving at with your criticism-- that Dirk, the emergent antagonist of godfeels 2, the guy who’s essentially demanding that June detransition Or Else, has a point when he says that June is dangerous and can’t be trusted to have anyone else’s best interests at heart. you point out that, in real life, transphobes don’t have a point when they attack trans people, and that’s true. i agree with you.

the first thing i’ll say here that i think will drive you up the wall is that tried and true age-old canard: depiction isn’t endorsement. June Egbert is a character making choices; Dirk Strider is a character making choices. they have their reasons, some good, some bad, but i tried very hard not to make it so the narrative took a side as such. obviously to an extent that’s impossible when our perspective is so thoroughly fixed through June’s eyes, but i tried to show in Dirk’s narration (especially in his fight with Roxy) that he’s not a mustache-twirling villain over this. he’s a guy with a plan who doesn’t know how not to have that plan anymore when something essential to the plan changes. he has his own doubts about what he’s doing. in fact i think you could make a very compelling case that, from Dirk’s perspective, June and Terezi systematically turned all his friends against him for their own diabolical ends. and like, hey! arguably the realityquake is a direct result of June refusing to do what Dirk told her to do. that’s kind of fucked up, right? to which i say that nowhere did i ever promise that June would be The Good Guy of this story. no one who has that kind of power over others is ever ever ever simply The Good Guy.

the second thing i’ll say to this point is that growing up queer in this world is messy. i’ve already enumerated my mental unwellness, now let me add that many of my trans friends share a similar spread of ailments as well as a similarly messy upbringing. something we never really talk about, for i think pretty obvious reasons, is the fact that just by virtue of how awfully closeted queer people in general are treated, a lot of us do have really checkered pasts. to be clear this is by absolutely NO means a universal generalization, i’m not saying all or even most trans people are like this. but a number of us are. and i’ve gotten so many messages from trans people who read godfeels and felt seen by it, felt seen by the very problem you’ve astutely identified. what’s to be done with their testimony in this conversation? is it irrelevant? are they wrong? would you go to them and tell them, well, sure, i guess you can say that, but it’s still problematic and needs to be...

needs to be what? that’s what i’m really trying to understand now. what is it, exactly, that you want from me. if you’re saying the moral quandaries of gf2 need to be interrogated, yeah, i agree. you see something problematic in godfeels 2, and i agree with you that it’s problematic. i put it there on purpose. i thought a lot about that choice. i did it because my life has often been problematic, in ways both fair and unfair, and because most of those problems just don’t have easy answers. sometimes there are good guys and bad guys, sometimes someone is absolutely in the wrong. but a lot of times the reality is a lot greyer than that. and just because we’re seeing painful pushback against even the meagerist of trans rights on a global scale doesn’t mean that my depiction of a problematic trans woman is somehow immoral or counterproductive for “the trans community.” which i know is not what you said, but it’s hard for me not to jump to this conclusion when this is always where it leads. if i seem overly defensive it’s because i’ve had to field a version of this question SO many times over the years, and while you may think yourself disconnected from any wider critical perspective (i have no way of knowing this, obviously), i see an undeniable continuity in terms.

i put scare quotes around “the trans community” because there are plenty of trans communities where i have never felt particularly welcome. as a non-passing trans woman who leans butch, there are so many pillars of the lgbt spectrum that’d criticize or disavow me it makes my head spin. generally i’m okay with that. not every space is or should be for everyone, just the same as not every work of fiction is or should be for everyone. and i don’t want a fucking thing to do with transmed gender essentialist circles anyway.

godfeels is not for everyone. it is a story about violence, ignorance, trauma, guilt, and a whole charcuterie board of other messy emotions besides. i have never been interested in looking at a fictional character and saying “this is a purely bad thing in a cosmic sense that they’re doing,” because i just don’t find that interesting to write about. someone can choose to hurt a lot of people in an act of what could be accurately described as evil, but that person still CHOSE to do what they did. their actions made sense to them, even if they don’t make sense to us. even if they scare us. and i think it’s important to decry the actions of real people in the real world when innocent people get hurt. but fiction is not the real world. yes, obviously fiction effects reality in some ways- it shapes how we view the world, how we view each other. but so often in these conversations, there’s simply no sense of scale or severity. what negative social affect can be attributed to a homestuck fanfic written by a trans woman when huge swathes of the american populace are using fuckin marvel movies to justify escalating the war in ukraine? what about jk rowling weaponizing her gargantuan fanbase against trans people? i cannot fathom holding up even the truly vilest of fanfic as representative of some grave social ill or as setting back perception of a marginalized group with any kind of longterm conviction when we are surrounded on all sides by corporate propaganda that cynically puppets the corpse of the liberal lgbt movement to lend their worthless backwards trash an air of Progressive Clout. like i’m supposed to be impressed that there’s a trans person in the background of an otherwise pro-imperialist nightmare of bad CGI and rampant labor exploitation. did they employ trans people? did they get a trans person’s perspective on that character or on the narrative as a whole? did they even talk to any trans people? who gives a shit about depiction or representation, we could have a million trans characters in cinema and still be completely fucked as a demographic if those characters were all written by cis white men who think the feminine essence theory is good feminism. what i care about is whether or not trans people can stay fed and pay rent, and that includes trans people whose lives and stories don’t mesh with the popular narratives about trans people. if your politics involve telling problematic trans women to shut up, to hide their trauma, to get out of the limelight lest our enemies use us as ammunition in their war against all of us, then i’m sorry but you’re just a conservative censor doing the job of a GOP politician for free at absolutely no one’s behest and to everyone’s detriment including your own. when the conservatives come for queer people, they won’t care who among us is “respectable.” queerness itself is their enemy, and they’ll kill the based just as surely as they’ll kill the problematic.

and that’s where it really comes down for me, you understand? i’m totally aware of how soupy this moral dilemma is. i fucking wrote it! i think it’s an interesting tension to have to sit with a character who knows that even though they had (what at least felt like) a good reason, even though it literally hasn’t happened anymore, they still did something terrible that they regret and that they’ll remember for the rest of their life. the flashbacks we see in 2.3 of June going door to door to get folks on her side are explicitly framed by a recurring guilt and doubt that June feels at every step of the process. she knows that she fucked up with the retcon, and she knows she made everything worse by dangling Dirk over a volcano, but she doesn’t know how to talk this out, and Terezi just sort of assumes that their only option is a full-on combat scenario. also, man, once again no one questions Terezi’s role in this! the eponymous “good plan” of 2.3 is HERS. the only part of that plan that’s genuinely June’s is her choice to take Jade to fight Lord English, and it’s the part that ultimately saves the day.

Jade, of course, having had her own past meddled with retcon-ways by June’s own admission in gf1. so we have a June who in the past tried to intervene in someone else’s life to make it “better” from her perspective, now turning around and intervening in that same life for essentially the same reason. only this time she’s giving Jade a choice. or is she? does Jade have a choice? did I as the writer give her a choice?

again, you’re seeing the same thing i’m seeing. you’re seeing that June and Dirk both Made Some Points. you’re seeing that June is not a paragon of virtue even though she’s transgender. the difference is that you think your reaction is not the intended experience. yes, i say, it is problematic, it is uncomfortable, it is unpleasant. but problems exist to be solved, and i’m not the person who can give you the answers. if June isn’t a perfect trans woman, if she did in fact Do Some Things Wrong, then that just makes her human (which, as you’ll recall, was a question very much on June’s mind in gf1). i’m not interested in saying whether or not any of these events are Good or Bad in a cosmic or moral sense because, yet again, that’s just not interesting to me as a writer.

and this is what i mean when i say that you’re coming at this from a decidedly post-tumblr perspective, because again, you’re seeing what i’m seeing, but you’ve stopped at a smaller circle inside a larger venn diagram. this is not a story about how trans women are unambiguously good and correct at all times, it’s a story about lateral violence among queer friends who also happen to be unfathomably powerful gods. these are not normal 23 year olds! if we are to tell a story that even remotely attempts to explore the minutiae and consequence of what these characters are capable of, we simply cannot relegate ourselves to the realm of what is possible and/or acceptable in our reality. the whole point is that it’s not possible in our reality! it’s fiction! and the circumstance that June and Dirk find themselves in in gf2 does not resemble any real life circumstance that exists in the material world. yeah, transphobes in real life don’t have a point and they can get fucked. but if Dirk was like a texas neocon, if Rose was more explicitly TERFy, or if June hadn’t literally murdered her friends and then retconned it, would that be better for the story? like yeah, sure, a TERF would be an obvious villain, a texas neocon would be an obvious villain. despite all appearances i do in fact know how to write a trans character who is not hashtag problematic, i just don’t want to do that. i don’t want to write obvious villains. i don’t want to write obvious conflicts.

all of my favorite art sits balanced on a razor’s edge of some taboo or other, and stares you directly in the eyes and demands that you reckon with it for what it is. i like art that makes me uncomfortable, that pushes into weird difficult messy philosophical territory, because at least when it happens in fiction it doesn’t result in me becoming homeless. that’s the kind of fiction i want to write. and i know full well that we don’t live in an environment that is particularly friendly to that kind of fiction. right now everything in life feels like a mortal peril, all our rights as queer & working people are being slowly pulled back, our very bodies demonized, our youths tormented by cruel governments, so it’s natural i think to react to fiction flirting with this difficult territory in ambiguous terms the same way you would to this shit in real life. that’s the smaller circle in the bigger circle, get it? you’re correct in your acknowledgement of a problem, but the tumblr lens is one aggressively opposed to reading that problem in any terms other than outright dismissal and condemnation.

it’s a binaristic lens, you understand? it’s checking a work of art against an abstract scorecard on a pass-fail basis. and it leads to the elevation primarily of children’s media, which tends to be binaristic in its morals. and that’s not strictly bad! i love steven universe as much as the next gal. and it’s fine if someone doesn’t want to engage with more difficult media, i totally get it! sometimes i’m in the mood for garbage. i talk all kinds of shit about marvel movies but i fucking LOVE thor ragnarok. the thing is that when i talk shit about marvel movies i KNOW who i’m pushing back against and i know why. i can have my annoyances with writers, directors, actors, etc, but the real problem of the mcu is its ideology & its status as above all else a product for mass consumption, which is the problem of hollywood and the problem of america. virtually all american media is produced by a small handful of corporations who have unilateral control over what gets made and what doesn’t. the result is a media culture built around an ideology that TRIES SO HARD to make itself invisible because of course americans don’t want politics in their media. but the politics are there, because everything is political. and when every movie, tv show, and news broadcast tells you to be afraid of black people, to be afraid of trans women, to be afraid of russians, to be afraid of chinese, that gets us to now, that gets us to a culture that simply has not been given the tools to analyze media in any terms other than those dictated by the selfsame corporations that produce that media. so the tumblr lens, the social justice lens, it can identify a problem in a text but it always falls short when it tries to find a solution. and it falls short because it’s not materialist, it’s not based in any kind of class awareness or political dialectics. it’s not even really based in a particularly feminist politics! hell, the sjw keystone that is the bechdel test originates from a comic and artist that absolutely refuses the binaristic ideology that has led to its popularity.

a truly materialist critical analytic lens would understand that, like in activism, a diversity of tactics must be supported. you do not have to like the art made by every trans woman to understand that you have more in common with the most loathesome working class trans woman you’ve heard of than you do with anyone who has ever sat in a position of real political power in your lifetime. a materialist lens would understand that selling out the problematic in favor of the acceptable is the cutting off of one’s nose to spite their face. when you create an environment where the first thing an artist must consider is whether or not it tics all the right representational boxes, all you really do is put a chilling effect on subversive, difficult art. you don’t have to like subversive, difficult art. you don’t have to like that Dirk kind of has a point about June’s actions. but when you come to me with this criticism as though there’s anything i can do about it, as though i’ve somehow messed up, that doesn’t feel the same as other criticism to me. if you say “parts of chapter 8 are too long,” i can take that and use it as feedback in the future. if you say “i don’t like how little agency June had in gf3.1,” i can disagree and present my own case as to why lack of agency is such a persistent theme in godfeels, but i also understand that it’s a difficult story and that one can certainly get The Point while also not necessarily enjoying the experience. but when you say “this is bad because it looks bad in a real world political context,” i mean, god, what do i even DO with that? again, for the millionth time, you’re not telling me anything i don’t already know. i wrote it. i made you feel these emotions. i wanted you to feel these emotions. there is a reason i wanted you to feel these emotions. but they are, fundamentally, YOUR emotions, not mine. only you can understand them.

so sit with them. reflect on them. ask yourself why this part of the story makes you uncomfortable, why you feel compelled to read it the way you do. don’t worry, no one can read your mind. i mean it, anon. there’s no wrong answers here. what’s beautiful about fiction is that it lets us sit in uncomfortable, taboo emotions and events and situations without fear of retribution or judgment... unless, of course, you problematize the very existence of difficult art. unless you create an environment in which everyone is afraid to tell ambiguous stories of any stripe lest they be subject to a vicious harassment campaign. that’s the environment that ruthlessly attacked Isabel Fall over ‘i sexually identify as an attack helicopter.’ that’s an environment so shortsightedly, bloodthirstily fixated on whatever problematic thing they notice first that it is practically designed from the ground up to annihilate all outsider art and leave only the most corporate friendly pro-empire propaganda in its place.

to close out here (fucking finally lmao), you might say i’m putting words in your mouth here, but i’m just trying to follow your logic to its conclusion. if it is a strictly negative problem, a pure flaw in the work, that June can in some sense at least be partially blamed for the violence done to her, what do you suggest is the solution? in the event of a rewrite, what would you suggest i change? are you looking for an apology? an admission of guilt? maybe it’s something else, i don’t know. maybe you haven’t even thought that far ahead. i’m just asking you to understand that your criticism exists in a context that, whether you meant it this way or not, has a demonstrable chilling effect on the very art you claim to love. i get scared when i get criticism like this because it’s framed like an accusation. it’s framed like i did a crime, which implies the specter of punishment.

and trans women, as we know, are the favored whipping girls of social media harassment campaigns.

anyway, i hope that gives you a thing or two to chew on

[pridepages]

Tangled Web: The Atlas Paradox

I just finished The Atlas Paradox by Olivie Blake. I have some thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

Poet Walter Scott was the first to write “Oh what a tangled web we weave / when first we practice to deceive.”

The residents of the Alexandrian Society manor house spent all of their first year together weaving their deceptions. Now, in Olivie Blake’s followup The Atlas Paradox, all six initiates must face the reckoning of their choices--and find themselves and their affections more deeply entangled than ever.

Many fantasy trilogies tend to suffer from sophomore slump. Often, the second book is the weakest of the lineup. Fair dues to Blake: Paradox is in many ways a stronger novel than The Atlas Six. Firstly, the world-building is much more clearly shaped. Why did our wizards have to murder one of their own to join this academic cult? Because, apparently, the library is a malevolent, sentient force that thirsts for blood. Better still, the disappearance of Libby Rhodes will not suffice. The archives are wise to such cheats. In fact, when Atlas Blakely’s class tried the same thing by disappearing Ezra Fowler, the archives took vengeance: each of the remaining members of the class were eventually killed except for Ezra (bouncing around the timeline) and Atlas (remaining to be fed upon by the murder books). Similarly, we watch as the remaining members of Atlas’s Six begin to fall apart in different ways: Nico sickens, Reina obsesses, Parisa sours, Tristan sulks, and Callum drinks. All of them are still being puppeteered by Atlas, who reveals that his Master Plan appears to be to use the collective gifts of the Six to find a door to a wider multiverse. Meanwhile, Libby has been stranded in 1989. To get home, she will be confronted with the ultimate moral choice and will face her own fall from grace.

Blake has described this book as the characters experiencing their quarter-life crisis. And it shows. Admittedly, it’s a bit aggravating to hear almost all of them repeatedly telling the reader about how life and the world are pointless because Alexandrians all have power and can effectively do nothing to change the world, their individual fates, or otherwise find happiness. But, much like the grating nobody-understands-me adolescent phase, it is a stage that any thinking young adult has to go through. And the characters are charismatic enough that you want to stick with them.

As in the first book, the Six find themselves navigating tangled relationships. Initial attractions are complicated by the choices that each has made and the ways they have hurt each other. The question posed to all of them is: Where do we go from here?

An early question answered (yay for being right!) was about Reina: “she never thought of anyone sexually.” So her arc is all about her friendships. “She developed a talent for isolation,” Reina reminds us early. But the problem with that is that she resents being overlooked. And although she can identify moments when she’s being unfair--expecting other people to reach out to her or praise her or admire her despite the hostile demeanor she radiates--she can never quite get over her own pride enough to try to reach out for the closeness she wants.

Meanwhile, we rejoin some of the couples facing the immediate consequences of their actions. Callum knows that Tristan tried to kill him at the suggestion of Libby Rhodes. Callum also knows that Tristan and Libby slept together. Therefore, Callum concludes, “This was who Tristan had chosen over Callum...He hoped it would pain Tristan for the rest of his life.” A vengeful Callum is perfectly in line with the person we know. Most of book one we were exposed to Callum’s vanity to the point where whether he was interested in other people beyond manipulating them was debatable. But here we see a softer, truly wounded Callum: “Tristan might have betrayed Callum, but he wasn’t the bad guy...This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.” 

And then there’s Tristan, who shows perhaps the most maturity out of any of the characters in this book when he finally says to Callum: “This--between us--it was real for me. You can pretend that it didn’t matter. That I was the one who wronged you. That you had no hand in how things happened. That I made a choice based on nothing, based on my own insecurities and flaws. But I am not such an idiot--I’m not so devoid of feeling to not be perfectly aware that you and I had something rare and difficult and fucking significant, and in the end it only broke because I broke it.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t make things right between them. Callum is still in deep pain and lashing out because of it. He cannot see that there is a way through the mess between them: forgiveness. But forgiveness takes courage, and more than just recognizing your flaws. It takes accountability for your own imperfections, taking responsibility for your actions both in the past and in the future. Tristan, by actually putting out there that he wronged Callum, was building a bridge that Callum has refused to cross. For all its failure, Tristan’s maturity in trying deserves a gold star.

Another way Tristan has changed is leaning into his affection for Libby. For most of the first book, Tristan was cold, reserved, apparently off-put by Libby’s earnestness and sensitivity. But secretly, he seems to have found it rather attractive. He sets Libby up in his mind as a kind of hero archetype, a contrast to how much he hates himself. But Parisa cautions him: “You like her because she’s innocent...because she’s moral. Because she’s good. Because she represents something to you that the rest of us no longer have, because we came here. And because we made choices. But she made a choice too, Tristan. She knew what the consequences were. Libby Rhodes is not your goodness, Tristan. She’s her own open flame.” Tristan is certainly in danger of idealizing Libby out of existence, fictionalizing her in his head--which is easy to do since she is absent from his life for most of the book. But, in the end, Tristan determines he’d “rather have whatever version of Libby she had become than face the prospect of having no Libby at all.” Whether he will be able to live with the reality of that choice will remain to be seen in the next installment.

Similarly, Parisa’s journey is one of identity. Parisa has been repeatedly accused of being unable to love. Parisa finally refutes this misconception: “Of course she loved...to her, sex and love and desire and affection were different things--some of which she needed or wanted, and some she firmly did not.” Parisa knows who she is. However, Parisa learns that book one paramour Dalton Ellery is not who she thought he was. She was previously aware that Dalton’s consciousness had been split. She now learns that Dalton split off a part of himself that he did not like--his ambition--in order to both make himself safer to handle his power in the world and because it would allow the archives to trust him with more information for his research. Parisa ultimately contributes to reuniting Dalton’s consciousness, but a ‘healed’ Dalton is a new Dalton: “She realized that without the entirety of himself--with no ambition, and indeed, no formulation of the future, which was a thing she thought they had in common until she realized that, actually, his version of a blank page was wildly different from hers--she had never seen the other intricacies of him. His dreams. His longings. His fears.” Their arc is particularly fascinating because it invites the discussion: would you change what you perceive to be your worst qualities? If you did, you would be a different person. If you were, would you still be right for the people who love you now as you are? Perhaps it is different when life changes who we are gradually, as it inevitably does. But neatly removing one element entirely does not make you a ‘better’ version of yourself. It just makes you different.

Speaking of differences: wow, Libby Rhodes! I admit, I had a pet theory about Libby Rhodes. Part of it arose from the kind of way she spoke about Ezra (like he was a box she was ticking off, like she was acting in ways a good girlfriend should, the way she seemed to easily resent and want to ditch him). I was just getting big closeted sapphic vibes off her. Then, of course, she had threesome with Tristan and Parisa in book one. This at least suggested queerness to me, but still felt unconfirmed...until we get this gem in Paradox: “I’m a time traveler from the future...who maybe kind of slept with one or two of my coworkers, whom I would also (maybe) like to sleep with again.” Them, plural, as in she was into Parisa. But, then again, who isn’t? Firmly orienting Libby with the sapphics is that she gets a crush on a fellow medeian academic during her sojourn into 1989: “a cautious kiss from Belen’s careful mouth, was riotous with sensation. The hint of pressure was like a spark to Libby’s imagination, igniting something dormant in her chest as a purr of satisfaction slipped from her parted lips into Belen’s smiling mouth.” Libby is at first her typical unsure self in this moment, feeling “the kind of weird that preceded a cliff’s edge, a sharp drop. A sip of absinthe and a first kiss.” A sip of absinthe. The drink she shared with Parisa before their tryst. Not to put to fine a point on it, “Libby reached for her...and heard the vestiges of Parisa’s voice in her head: Have what you want, Rhodes. Take it.” Big. Gay. Vibes. We love to see it. But it’s unclear whether Libby is meant to end up with Parisa, Tristan, or anyone else. All we know is that “All this time she’d been desperate for help, for someone else to reassure her, for some form of comfort, or anything that could make her feel she wasn’t alone--but she was alone.” Being cast out on her own forces Libby into a reckoning. Because, for her, companionship has always been about tacit acceptance or approval. Libby has needed to be constantly reassured of her own worth. But now she’s growing beyond that. “She was no longer desperate for the crutch of someone else’s faith. For the first time...she would not presume herself to be deficient. She would not doubt the power in her body. She would not question what was earned. She would do this, and she would do it alone.” If we’re heading toward a Libby who needs to forge a future standing completely alone, uncoupled to signify that she is finally emotionally self-sufficient, wouldn’t hate it. But it would be better if it were gay.

So, thank goodness for my absolute favorite arc in the novel. In book one, an obvious romantic connection to me from the beginning was Nico and his friend Gideon, the one who he claimed to come to the Society to help. The one who he does so much to protect. The one he worries about constantly. It could not be clearer as their interactions pile up in Paradox that it’s two-sided: these idiot boys are so in love. And just when you think they’re never going to do anything about it, Gideo takes the leap: “Relief, that no one had put a stop to that arrogant laugh...some madness in Gideon’s chest made up his mind for him. He leaned forward and caught Nico’s mouth with his in something of a punitive force, a captive blow. More of a gasp that anything else, really. Although technically, it was a kiss.”

Thank you, God. Finally. But these characters are unpredictable. Nico has shown attraction to women before (well, Parisa, but again--who hasn’t?) and maybe we were heading for another heartbreaking twist:

“Gideon felt Nico’s breath catch on his tongue, an audible hitch of surprise, and then Nico pulled away and Gideon thought no, no, no-- ‘Oh, so it’s like that?’ Nico said. His eyes were searching and bewilderingly, confusingly bright. In response Gideon felt unopened and raw, like he’d cracked his chest in two and presented the evidence for Nico’s evaluation... ‘Yeah, it’s like that.’ Nico’s smile broadened. ‘Good.’ Nico caught him by a fistful of his t-shirt, tugging him in again.”

Good. Just good. For so long they struggled with their words, struggled to articulate even to themselves what they are. But at last, they chose to take a risk: no more deceptions. No more tangled thoughts, fears, self-consciousness, or denial. Instead of deciding to stay caught in the web, they tore themselves free. 

I think we all have a tendency to overcomplicate our relationships. It’s easy to pull strands of negative thought. We tease out all the reasons that we can’t be happy with someone else: our sense of our inadequacies, our obligations, our histories, our resentments, our fear of risk--and we weave them into nets that keep us trapped. But we have the ability to make new and different choices. In the grand scheme of things, maybe choosing to pull ourselves out of our misery webs may seem like so much wasted or pointless effort. But if this life is all we get, and all we can control is ourselves, then maybe there is something worthy and heroic in setting ourselves free.

[popculturebuffet]

Amphibia Season 1 Reviews!: Anne Or Beast?/Best Fronds: Spriganne Begins (Patreon Stretch Goal)

Hello all you happy people! So if you’ll endulge me, it’s time for a bit of a story:  Back in 2020, I started covering animation on this blog with some simple reviews of Ducktales Season 3 that quickly snowballed into a career with three patrons, a regular schedule and a much more fufilled me. And since covering Ducktales regularly got me going and was a runaway success, I decided to cover another Disney show as it came out that i’d happily binged the previous year while watching my youngest nephew: Amphibia. So I covered ALL of season 2 as it came out (still need to put that in one post), and have worked my way through season 3. While regular coverage CAN be exausting I do love the conversations it leads to, how many of you found this blog through it and just getting to cover a whole show. 

But as a result of starting in the middle of the show, and having not started this blog when season one aired in one large mishapen pile, that leaves season 1 as a large gap. So I put it up as a patreon stretch goal figuring it wouldn’t take long for just ONE more person to join, as my goals are on a per person basis: everytime someone joins, a new project is added to the to do list and I get to it as soon as possible. Long story short.. took about a year. Still better late than never as i’m finally jumping into the first season of Amphibia. If you want the same treatment for the owl house, hop on over to my patreon, apt choice of words, and sign up. Just a buck a month (though more is appreicated) gets you a review  of a half hour tv episode of your choice (a little over is fine), a seat at the table when selecting things for my monthly polls, and hits my next stretch goal. Owl House season 1, just like this , once a month, come rain, shine or swamp snake. To sweeten the pot i’ll also review that spider-man two parter where a homeless doctor octopus was haunted by hammerhead’s atomic ghost. I’m not making any of that up. 

PATREON IS HERE

So now here we are, back at the starting line with the finish line looming in the distance. It is fun to go back, and not the first time I have either as I helped @jess-the-vampire​ binge the show months ago. But it’s a great time to go back: see what’s changed, reflect on how far everyone’s come etc. I won’t be doing JUST one episode a month, i’ll be doubling up after this, but you’ll still get the same amount of content, wit and shenanigans from me.

For now though we’re back at the start and it’s a weird sort of whiplash. By season 3 the show is gearing up for it’s end, with the arcs having a very crisp pace and a nice ballance between character based slice of life eps and plot advancement. 

Season 1 though? While it’s not bad by any means the larger arc is on the back burner: The Calamity Box is only adressed in three episodes, and the arc involving Toad Tower only factors into about 4 episodes. There’s a strong continuity, including a smaller arc about Hop Pop loosing the stand, as always, but it’s really more about the journey than the destination. Season 1 is more about Anne’s growth as a person and slow acceptance by the town as she adapts to this brave new world, than it is about the larger picture. And honestly whie it could be mildly frustrating when watching season 1 as it came out, even if season 1 again came out in one big ole pile, in hindsight.. it works. Anne’s growth as a person is VITAL to the show as it goes as is the town’s utter love and loyalty to her that’s carefully grown over the season. Seeing her go from selfish, reckless lazy teen to a mildly responsible town protector is wonderful to see and nicely contrasts how Sasha outright refuses to change for most of the series and Marcy SEEMINGLY has changed.. but at her core is still the same person. It also provides a lot of the thrust for Season 3 as seeing how much Amphibia changed her for the better helps her parents accept the whole experince faster. So while Season 1 dosent, for the most part, reach the highs of it’s followups, it’s got tons of charm, character, and worldbuilding to make up for it so let’s hop right to it under the cut!

Anne or Beast? Our series begins in Wartood as we quickly get a sense of things: populated by frogs, swampy townscape, rural area. All neat stuff that’s set up by visual alone.  We also meet our boy Wally who wonders home from Stumpy’s, a nice bit of establishing the place now for when it has an ep later in the season.. and finds a hideous creature in the darkness! Another nice touch I really like I didn’t notice the first two times I watched this one: the fact Anne is absent for the first act. By doing this we’re put in the frog’s perspective and thus eased into the world more gently than anne, getting a sense of the kind of place wartwood is, what amphibia is like and why they’d be so afraid of her

And the answers are just as cleverly laid out the next day: we see a bustling small close knit town that’s charming and clearly still at most fantasy rpg levels of technlogy, but happy and close knit. And we also see a guy casually taken away from his wife or girlfriend by a bug, highlighting this world is dangerous as hell, anything can and will kill you so of course they’d be suspcious of a human. To us we’re just another monster and the town reaction to Wally’s story is to form up a mob. It’s not RIGHT they treat Anne like this, but it’s understandable given how isolated they are and how everything ELSE that’s out in the unknown of the forests and swamps tries to muder them on a daily basis. 

We also meet the rest of the main cast.. and an adorable slug we never see again. 

Yeah for some reason despite Bessie being established as a long time part of the family and their only snail not long after this, we have this slug they changed their mind abouts. I call him jeremy

No not you Jeremy, my hellish source of entertainment. He gets shockingly good bandwith on streaming i’ll tell you. My best guess canon wise is Bessie was sick and one of the neighbors let them borrow their slug. I’m going with Chuck. He grows tulips. 

Anyways we get a good sense of the Plantars from the get go: Hop Pop is strict , protective and responsible, Sprig is a little scamp, and Polly is agressive especially for a baby. Hop Pop also dosen’t find Sprig responsible after a string of incidents that not only set up the worlds danger even more but SPrig’s impulsivness. The punchilne is also great “So yesterday was a bad day”. 

Sprig decides to prove he’s responsible by hunting the monster himself and bribes Polly with candy to keep her tiny mouth shut (”Bribe accepted!”). He goes out into the woods, finds himself caught in a snare and meets the most fearsome creature of all: A Teen-Ager!

And so we’re finally properly introduced to Anne, who just wants Sprig to leave her alone and wasn’t trying to eat Wally so much as get some help. She plans to just leave the child dangling in the woods, but an oncoming giant mantis gets her to change her mind kid and she saves him, leading to one of my faviorite lines of the ep. Seriously as always for the show the jokes are on point “Your a hero, an ugly ugly ugly hero!” this also shows Sprig ALWAYS lacked Tact, he’s just gotten worse with time. Then better: So far he hasn’t brought up any underlying emotoinal issues casually and made everything worse. So far. 

Anyways the two then Bond, with Anne explaning she’s trapped in a world she never made, she has no idea how to get home or where she is and she’s been living in this cave. So that’s pretty neat. Sprig offers to get her something to eat after she turns down bugs, which creates a nice runner: Anne absolutely refuses to eat them at first and is horrified when she does, but slowly grows to like them the longer she’s there. It’s really neat. 

The Angry Mob heads to get her, with hop Pop and polly tagging along and once they catch Anne she thinks Sprig set her up. But this misunderstanding gets cleared like most too: by an even bigger mantis showing up and trying ot eat her. Sprig saves her, a friendship is properly forged and the two fight the mantis off together using the ropes anne was bound with. 

Mayor Toadstool decides to get rid of Anne anyway because safety. Honestly it’s shit like this why all the frog mutants packed up and left for an island I tell ya. Damn shame that giant tortise ate it in this timeline. Damn shame. Anyways Sprig stands up for Anne and while that dosen’t move him because when has an honest heartflet plea ever moved the cold mechanical heart of a politican, Hop Pop taking responsiblity for her does. He also expresses pride in his grand son for doing the right thing.

Anne is greatful but understandbly plans to ease on down the road since you know, trapped in another world. But conviently for the plot Anne can’t leave the Valley for 2 months, as it’s blocked and has to just roll with it, though HOp Pop kindly offers her home and the basement and Sprig sweetly offers his plushies and kind words, forging a friendship that crosses dimensonal barriers and some emotional boundry lines. Once alone Anne tries simply opening the box in private.. but it dosen’t work. As we know now it needs a fresh charge. But she promises to find her friends and a way home. 

Anne Or Beast? is a stellar start to the series setting up the tone , the plot and the main cast beautifully. It’s truly great stuff and shows why the series got a fanbase so quick. WHile Disney has a lot of issues as a company.. a lot a lot.. like way more than they resonably should, they know how to make a first episode truly spectacular. 

Best Fronds:

So first up is some backstory: We see Anne stealing the music box and being peer pressured into it, but neatly we don’t get a sense of who Sasha and Marcy are just yet, instead just getting the short version so we see them open it and wind up here. Anne thinks it was all just a dream only to find out nope, she really is stuck with a bunch of frogs in a death world for two months. Sprig is jealous, Polly wants to kill her before she can eat them, and Hop Pop is worried she sprays acid. Which to be fair when encountering a creture I dont’ know tha’ts my go too. Anne confirms she’s not going to eat a creature that clearly dosen’t bathe (Hop Pop: Fair point) I’d also like to point out some early bumps in the voice acting from these eps: Brenda dosen’t quite pitch her voice up as much in the first ep to sound younger like she does later and Justin is still sorting out his delivery. Though the real noticable ones are Bill and Amanda: Hop Pop sounds MUCH older and croakier, heh, and Polly sounds more nasly. Both things wouldn’t LEAVE, old man and baby respectively, but they’d be more ballanced as the show went on, with hop pop sounding more like a person and polly sounding less like she’s showing the first signs of having been bit by a were urkel. 

Anne is bummed though missing her friends, so Sprig offers to be her friend and while most of the things she lists just have him go

With his face, the mention of a beach has him decide to take her to the lake. Hop Pop vetos this as he wants them safe and her to ease into the town.. despite the flaw in that that if the town dosen’t see her often they won’t get used to her. Anne simply opts to steal the key rather than try some of hop pop’s plot convience peppers like Sprig does. Thankfully turns out Hop Pop sleeps with both eyes open and as much as a regular old man: 86 years, often while yelling at a cloud or writing about hearing the word bra on tv. 

So our heroes go out, though Sprig notices a forboding sign of doom and wants to bounce. We then get our first taste that Anne’s friendships.. are not healthy, though this mostly sounds like Sasha. One weird quirk of season one is I ge tthe feelign they didn’t know QUITE what they were doing with marcy, so most of the bad elements in Anne’s relationship clearly come from Sasha in hindsight, but are directed at both. It’s weird. Anyways Sprig leaves but comes back , the two have a fun montage. But then a dripping wet giant snake rams itself into their day

Our heroes try not to get eaten by the snake, I try not to have to use the Goodnight Everybody gag twice, and Anne apologizes, realizing she was selfish. It’s a nice bit of character shwoing sh’es starting ot realize Sasha really is a terrible role model.. she just hasn’t realized Sasha herslef is terrible. Which agian comes off weird given Marcy ISN’T expotiative or anything, but whatever. Sprig nearly dies but uses the peppers to queel the girthy thing, our heroes head home and succesfully duck hop pop and confirm their bond and Polly is bummed she dosen’t get to put anne in a chokehold for trying to eat them. I mean she coudln’t with those arms but let her dream. Let. Her. Dream. 

But we get another Sprig of plot, sans the actual sprig as we meet grime being all intimdating as he found anne’s shoe and knows Sasha was lying about others, confriming to us that Anne wasn’t the only one stranded here. I also find this endlessly hilarous now he’s basically her dad and now I have images like this

Of who I rightfully assumed was going to be the big bad of the entire series. Time makes fools of us all.

Next Month: A two fer as we go striaght from a menacing teaser of what’s to come to sitcom hyjinks: Anne breaks a cane, we get your standard feud episode, Sprig gets sold into marriage and Anne and Hop Pop trip balls together like any good grandaughter and grandpa. See ya real soon. 

[hawkinsschoolcounselor]

(followup) I also agree on the whole single steve thing as well! honestly i dont really like any of the romance in this show so far all of it has felt a bit forced

Agreed! We can forgive the kids for doing what kids do when they rush into shallow relationships. Their relationships are based on crushes. They create idealized versions of their crush that they fall for because they don't know them well enough yet. These relationships fail when the real person fails to match up to the idealized version.

With the older characters, we like to see more deliberate romance that shows they've danced this dance before. Joyce and Hopper not getting together in season 3 was great because neither of them were ready for it, yet. They do know each other, as well as themselves, and Joyce, at least, seems to know it wouldn't work, at least at that time. I do think Hopper truly likes her, but he's not in a good place, either. They end up treating each other poorly because of this, mostly on Hoppers part, though Joyce did mess up by standing him up on their "totally not a date" date. I do hope they can both work past their respective issues because I do think they both really like each other.

Steve was in a sort of in-between area at the start of season 3, but he seemed to be progressing past it by the time it was over. Dustin's advice of getting over "primitive social constructs like popularity" seemed to be a hint as to his overall character arc. He won't be dating based on appearance or status anymore. He ended up liking Robin even though she was not popular or like most girls. He liked Robin for who she was, not how other people saw her.

If Steve finds someone he really clicks with, as he felt he did with Robin, then I hope he can make it work. I want to think he's matured past just trying to date any pretty face that walks into the ice cream shop or video store. The basis for all good relationship should be indistinguishable from a good friendship. The elements are essentially the same (commitment, trust, closeness, openness), but with an added layer of physical intimacy and passion. This is why Steve and Robin could get past her having to reject him. They already had that friendship built, or, at least, in progress.

Still, I don't think there'd be anything wrong with him remaining single. Besides, he's got a family to think about. How many people his age want a guy with that many kids, anyway?

[the-nysh]

"Personally, I feel Hori making it a public apology was a little disproportionate" - you are not alone in this. personally i am wondering in how far the fandom - very likely the japanese fandom, i doubt hori keeps up with western fandom discurs (hopefully not) - influenced hori's writing here. he did react in interviews to fandom's view on the bakudeku relationship and mentioned a planned apology. it could also explain why bkdk use different words when describing middle school!bkg's misdeeds...

Thankfully Hori is completely uninvolved with the western fandom to have any of their takes influence his writing (whew~), nor is he the type to let fandom dictate his story (unless there's urgent concerns to fix like the Dr's name change) but he did address several eastern fandom questions in interviews, hinting/promising that he'd planned to address certain topics -like the apology- someday. Only there was no telling when, or how.

But seeing how he's approached it now, it gives the impression he was going for clarity, to particularly handhold things for the set of readers who were still on the fence about Kacchan's character, to let them know with flashing marquees that this is it. Only, by making it public, to me that feels slightly uncomfortably catered to the crowd who still specifically wanted to see him scorned and punished. (You know the type: the ones who wanted to see Kacchan suffer, grovel, humiliated, or 'folded' by Deku in completely ooc ways, vindictive and disproportionate to what's actually constructive for the story. 8'D)

So I'm relieved nothing like that happened, and instead Hori chose to cover it in a way that Kacchan's public apology can be read as one of his strongest moments of bravery - that this is his important truth (and most vulnerable/shameful wounds, both figurative and literal) he's openly bearing, stepping forth & firmly owning up to, where it doesn't matter to him one bit what anyone else thinks about it. Characteristically putting his all into it when it matters. Because this is for Deku's sake; his (and their) highest priority right now to save.

To which the entire rest of the class, as their witness, is deathly silent. Understanding they have no grounds to speak or trespass upon what's privately between them. (Except for those who're silently empathetic, like Shouto for ex.) And for some of their classmates -the ones who manhandled Kacchan away from talking to Deku in the hospital before- now they finally realize the context and full gravity of just what they had once misjugdged and dismissed too. :3 (I wonder if they feel particularly guilty about their mistake now, because as funny as it is, I agree that so much of this arc could have been prevented or mitigated had Kacchan been allowed to talk to Deku in the first place~) Therefore, Hori's decision to make it public now checks off all these birds with one stone. While leaving it open-ended for what’s left hanging: receiving a followup response from the one who matters: Deku.

I wonder if the reason why the apology was public- besides being part of the class plan- is because of JP's view on being considerate. Everytime Bakugou was difficult in class by yelling at Deku (and sometimes Shoto), it was being inconsiderate to them so while the business was private Bakugou acted out on it in public, not unlike how uncomfortable the Todoroki's were to act like that in front guests, so the apology works to the class as well. As a European it is a strange thought.

That could also be part of it - that whenever Kacchan's irate behavior made it everyone else's business, they somewhat deserve an explanation (ie an indirect apology of sorts) for what they had to go thru too by proxy. Likewise, Kacchan doesn't really directly owe the class anything - only towards the person he wronged (Deku), that I wonder if this will be enough for the rest of the class to get it now too (without any further prying questions). The Japanese angle is another thing - because when Hawks made a public apology for his family, that was also a very Japanese thing to do. (And then of course, there's how the Japanese audience viewed Dabi publically airing his family's dirty laundry to be repulsive, and how it's considered rude to talk about private family matters in front of guests for that Todoroki household moment...)

Above all, even though Hori’s not one to be specifically influenced by the fans (despite whatever the western rumors say) he does write for a Japanese audience first & foremost. :O So naturally their reception and comprehension on what he deems important takes precedence. And regardless of his various reasons for making Kacchan's apology public, seeing it as a selfless, responsible moment of bravery -as a huge milestone for his character, both as a person and as a hero- is definitely noteworthy.