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batsplat · 6 months ago

Note

do you have any more thoughts on sete&vale rivalry? ps. love your blog!

I ALWAYS have more thoughts about the sete/valentino rivalry and if there is one person on this website who wants to read them then let's fucking go. so my issue is that when I looked at this ask the first time I thought I could maybe give like. a few thoughts. just some casual fun takes. the problem is I've been doing that anyway in my other posts, but there's really only so much point in doing that if I'm not providing any context on events that are by this point two decades old. so. time for some actual context

this isn't going to be exhaustive by any stretch of the imagination. what I'm covering here is two/three incredibly interesting years of motogp that deserve to be experienced and studied in their entirety, but alas I am but one poster on one microblogging website. so this is very much going to be the whistle-stop tour of explaining feuds, before a little bit of analysis to cap things off. (would like to state for the record that I called it 'whistle-stop' when this post was a lot shorter than it is now, but I'm leaving this paragraph in because it'll get funnier the longer you scroll. it's still not exhaustive but it's a lot more exhaustive than I thought it'd be when I wrote those sentences)

this rivalry began in an odd, uncertain period of valentino's career, at a time when valentino had essentially won motogp. he had just concluded his 2002 season and sealed his second premier class title in the process, with his results that year consisting of eleven wins, four second places and a single retirement. it was more or less as good as it gets, crushingly dominant, the undisputed lord and master of all he surveyed etc etc etc. and yet it was also a time where he was ill at ease with his role within the sport and was struggling with motivation, so much so that he increasingly found himself no longer taking joy in his racing. he ended up being so disillusioned with the existing state of affairs that he decided to make a radical move to redefine himself, to control his own destiny, to take the step from a great to a legend

which is all very abstract, in a way, removed from the realities of racing or indeed competition. this was a time in which no other rider could come close to matching valentino as a competitor and everyone basically knew as much. it adds an odd flavour to the challenges an athlete faces, where the success is such that it warps everyone's understanding of what success even looks like (not helped by how the last dominant athlete in the sport, mick doohan, also had a silly good track record in his prime). you could say, if you want, that 2002 is all about sowing, all about vale having so much success that it's started to feel a bit too easy, where he was just coasting on a wave of his own brilliance. 2003? well, now we've gotten to the reaping stage, where he's suffering under the expectations he himself has created, and all this winning is maybe already getting kind of boring

the first task in sports is not to be better than everyone else - it is to win. being better helps, but it has never been strictly necessary. there was no serious question at any point during his rivalry with gibernau who the better rider was between the pair of them. perhaps even more importantly, there was no question who the stronger between the two of them should be. over the years, valentino would have to deal with more than his fair share of young talent who proved they could match him in ability, the riders who had already long been marked for greatness and had the potential to be valentino's successors to the throne. gibernau was not that man - he was older, he was less accomplished, he was a revelation rather than anointed. it's one thing to be challenged by an alien, quite the other to be beaten by a bog standard human. especially if the bar for what constitutes being 'beaten' is set pretty low - never mind full seasons, should you even be losing individual races to this new challenger?

the rivalry between valentino and sete is not one of two equals, neither in ability nor in how their success was measured. but it became one that spawned a close title fight, courtesy of valentino unexpectedly wrestling the yamaha into title contention against his former employers at the first time of asking. valentino's main pressures in those years did not come because of any other rider, including sete - they stemmed from external forces such as honda or the press, from his internal struggles, and eventually were self-imposed in his decision to take a step into the unknown and join yamaha. the shape that this rivalry took reflected the disparity between the pair of them at every stage. valentino's biggest enemy during those years only ever could have been himself - so could sete exert himself upon this narrative at all? was he only relevant as long as valentino let him be? has he been so conclusively beaten that he has allowed valentino to erase him from his story entirely?

the first task in sports isn't to be better than everyone else... but it usually isn't quite this low down on the order of priorities. when 'being better than everyone else' is taken as read, then where does the narrative tension come from? usually, this is the kind of issue that commercial stakeholders and broadcasters and journalists and fans care about - not the dominant athlete of the time. but valentino is a storyteller and he does care. he can't handle stagnation. he can't handle being bored. he needs something to fight for and someone to fight and he needs all of it to happen on his own terms. the rivalry between valentino and sete becomes about everything except who the better rider is - and they happen to be perfectly suited characters for a rivalry such as this. for something that feels a little removed from the typical pressures of competition, of simply doing all you can to win, to beat the other guy, in whatever way you can, to rack up one victory after the other... but what we're primarily talking about here isn't numbers, it's theatre. it's show. and it's about two men who are particularly in tune with the artifice of it all, who are particularly concerned with how the world perceives them. valentino always knows where the camera is, always knows to play to it - and sete knows where it is too, which is what valentino uses to unsettle him to the point of despair

so, that's the set-up. let's bring in the context. what I'll cover here is mostly limited to what transpires during the years in which the rivalry is at its most prominent, aka 2003-05-ish, and mostly stays away from its legacy or repercussions. the first bit covers sete's emergence as valentino's rival, then how he becomes honda's best hope of stopping valentino, then the controversy that ruined their relationship, and finally how sete falls apart. after that, I'll give some of my thoughts about the rivalry and how it functions as a narrative. but again, there's a lot that's being left out here - like the bits of my notes that are just a tally of every misfortune that befalls sete gibernau post-qatar 2004. remember, kids: curses are a nasty nasty business and should be wielded with care

becoming the challenger

sete's rise to becoming a legitimate title contender was in some ways as unlikely as the manner of his downfall. born in december of 1972, so six-and-a-bit years older than valentino, his grandfather was a titan in the motorcycling industry and he grew up both affluent and surrounded by bikes. he's unusually well-educated for a rider, proficient in languages even by paddock standards - and, like valentino, a bit of an aberration from the mould of the stereotypical nineties bike racer. the reputation he had was for being a bit too vain, a bit too metropolitan, too self-absorbed to be suited to the rough-and-tumble of elite motorcycle racing

by the time he signed with the gresini honda team in 2003, his track record was very far from that of a title contender. after various wildcards in the mid-nineties, he'd finally managed to get a permanent seat first in 250cc and then in 500cc. eventually racing for repsol honda and taking doohan's bike when he was injured badly enough to force his retirement, sete's initial promise remained largely unfulfilled and he was dropped by honda after the 2000 season. he joined suzuki, who were struggling immensely in the aftermath of their title courtesy of kenny roberts jr. sete did get his first premier class win in valencia in 2001 in mixed conditions - a rare race that year valentino did not win after making a conservative tyre choice at a track he's in any case always been dreadful at. in 2002, suzuki was still struggling, though the wet conditions in estoril gave sete a chance for an early duel with valentino until he crashed. valentino said afterwards he felt sorry for sete (in a nice way not a condescending way)

^sete's first ever win came in valencia far far ahead of valentino in a lowly eleventh place. incidentally, it was there that a year prior vale's late charge to an increasingly plausible rookie 500cc title came unstuck. it's fair to say it's not exactly his favourite circuit on the calendar, which some might call a sign of good taste

and then, the move to gresini honda in 2003 - to which he also brought his sponsor telefonica, who became the team's title sponsor for the next few years. as I'm sure fans of the current era are able to appreciate, while it might have been a step from a factory to a satellite squad it was a very obvious competitive upgrade. he may not have had the newest spec of honda, unlike his teammate, but he was still satisfied with his machinery and his new team

sete and valentino had already had a good relationship at this point, a friendship that extended beyond paddock walls. they'd get drunk together after races, party together on ibiza over the summer holidays - and of course there's the story of sete giving valentino advice upon his transition to 500cc. previously, valentino's most notable rivals had come from other factories, whether kenny roberts jr on the suzuki or max biaggi on the yamaha. but honda had poached biaggi for the 2003 season and - after a brief blip in 2000 -were establishing themselves once again as the overwhelmingly dominant force of the sport, boasting an embarrassment of riches both in the engineering department and in their formidable host of riders. they were the undisputed kings of motogp and were comfortable in knowing that their bikes were so good that the riders were far from essential, all easy enough to replace if they had to be. all of which meant valentino knew going into that year that his most significant challenges were likely to come from within his own house, though he would hardly have expected sete to lead the charge

but then, a tragedy in the very first race of 2003 changed things. in suzuka, gresini honda rider daijiro kato crashed and hit one of the walls, later succumbing to his injuries. kato had been a 250cc champion and was widely tipped as a future premier class champion, japan's best hope for a first in that category. even though gibernau and kato had only been teammates for a short time, sete had immediately felt welcomed within the team and had worked together closely with kato over winter testing, including helping him out in the wet conditions in which kato had long struggled

the brutality of racing is such that two weeks later, the grid were to line up again at welkom. and it was there that gibernau secured an unlikely, fantastical win from pole position holding off valentino along the way. he dedicated his victory to his fallen teammate - who he said had been with him when he was riding. he wore kato's #74 on his leathers for the rest of his career. whether rightly or wrongly, paddock consensus was that the events had transformed gibernau, had made him into someone who took his racing more seriously, had made him finally commit all his mind and body and soul to riding, to fighting, to winning

^pointing up to the sky at welkom 2003. the number 74 is prominently placed on his upper chest to the right

it also had another effect. kato's death sparked controversy due to the layout of the suzuka track, the decision of the officials not to halt the race, and the rescue workers who had failed to follow proper medical procedure in moving him. both sete and valentino reportedly said they would not race there again, and it did end up being the last year grand prix motorcycle racing came to that track. it also prompted conversations about what could be done to better protect riders - and sete was one of the main figures behind the idea that riders themselves should have more of a say in safety standards. this led to the establishment of the safety commission, which back then included fewer riders but both valentino and especially sete involved themselves in

^sete at a safety commission meeting

did the tragedy really transform sete's fortunes as a racer? perhaps, though the switch to honda and a team he grew so fond of surely would have helped in any case. still, the contrast in his results and how he went about achieving them is stark; we'll never know for certain, but it's understandable why it's such a popular interpretation. another factor, too - despite some initial resistance, sete ended up inheriting kato's factory-spec machinery and was now riding the same bike as the other primary contenders of that season. the first half of his 2003 quickly cemented his new status within the factory, winning again in le mans, and then in assen. by the time they reached the halfway point of the season after donington park, sete was in second place in the standings, just clear of biaggi and only 34 points behind valentino

which is where we get back to valentino and ask ourselves what the hell that man thought he was playing at. did he really believe that it was all right to sit on a mere 34-point lead halfway through the season? was valentino, at the tender age of twenty four, already washed? was he finished? was this the beginning of the end? had he already peaked? did he just not have it in him any more?

obviously the answer to all of those things is 'no' and also 'what?' - but these were questions that many, most notably in the italian press, were in all seriousness asking anyone who would listen. now, valentino had theoretically just won in donington, except en route he had overtaken under a yellow flag and was controversially stripped of that victory after the fact. which meant that - you may want to hold onto something here - valentino had gone for a whole three races without winning. that's right. three races. granted, he'd already secured three victories that season and had been on the podium every single race, but the pressure was beginning to mount on valentino to deliver. it wasn't just the three race losing streak, but also the emergence of sete as a serious rival and how he had gotten the better of valentino - first at welkom by holding him off, then at le mans by beating him on the very last lap. valentino had also separately fucked up in a duel against capirossi for the victory in catalunya (funnily enough not one of the valentino duels there everyone remembers), eventually making a big enough mistake he had to spend the rest of the race recovering to second. honda had expectations, the italian press had standards, and the sheer dominance of his 2002 campaign meant that even the slightest dips in form translated into criticism of valentino and speculation on the state of his mettle or lack thereof. and things were about to get even worse

last race before the summer break and they're headed to the sachsenring - and here we were provided with a classic valentino performance right until the very moment where it wasn't. when sete caught up with him, valentino let him go ahead to study him from behind and crack him at the very end. he made his move on the penultimate corner of the race and successfully got ahead - but made a mistake in picking a very tight line into the final corner and lost too much speed, allowing sete to beat him to the line by a mere 0.06s. the general perception was that this had been a winnable race, and that it had been lost, more than anything else, out of arrogance. he could have attacked earlier - and if he didn't, then at the very least he should have been smarter about the final corner. he had allowed sete to beat him in a straight fight for the third time that year, who was now on four wins that season to valentino's three. all this meant that valentino's winless streak had been extended to four. that's right. you heard me. valentino rossi, the man they call the goat, had the audacity to go a whole. four. races. without. winning. the italian press had a field day and were calling for blood, and who could blame them?

^sete gibernau posing for a photo with a washed-up loser

luckily, valentino had the summer break to go off and clear his head and think about what he'd done. it was a good chance to get away from the constant scrutiny and criticism that had come during a year in which he'd already been feeling discontent with honda from the very beginning. the perception was that valentino had had it too easy and was resting on his laurels, no longer taking racing seriously enough, coasting on past successes that he was finding it hard to replicate - never mind his 29-point lead in the championship standings. so valentino ends up doing what is sensible in that situation. has a hot girl crisis. goes to ibiza. gets his hair dyed red. rocks up at the paddock for brno with his cool new hair as a bit of a throwback - he's still that guy who knows to have fun, he won't let any of this get to him, he's not going to take any of this too seriously

here's a more in-depth post on brno 2003 including, of course, his celebrations. to summarise - he won a tight thriller of a race and this time beat sete to the line, just about. then he celebrated by having a bunch of his fans dress up as convicts and donning his own cap and ball and chain - a 'prisoner of his own success', if you will. another step was taken that weekend on the road that would eventually lead him to abandoning honda and signing with yamaha. and here he is in his autobiography talking about his disillusionment with honda. he's not the first athlete to feel unhappy within his team, not the first dominant sportsperson to struggle to find motivation. still, when you consider how long his career ended up lasting, there's something remarkable to how quickly it threatened to turn joyless to him. if he were one of those athletes who just needed to win to be happy, he would have been fine within honda

but that's what valentino's all about, isn't it. within honda, under the ferocious glare of the italian press, he felt trapped. he felt imprisoned. he felt burdened by the expectations that his own victories had placed on his shoulders. it isn't enough for him simply to win. not if the winning isn't happening on his own terms. not if it's just another way in which honda can show off how superior their bike is. just another means for the italian press to ramp up pressure on him in the future. if valentino doesn't win, then well, it'll be gibernau. it'll be biaggi. who cares? valentino isn't essential to honda's success - the bike is. and vale decided he could no longer accept that. he returned to his roots in brno with the haircut and the celebrations and the candlelight meetings with yamaha that demonstrated his determination to forge his own path. winning is a part of him; when he wins he uses it to express himself, to define both who he is and who he is not - which is where, of course, the rivals enter the picture. valentino delineates his self against the other as much as anyone does, expressing his identity both as a racer and as a person by drawing the line between himself and his enemy and making a spectacle of what separates them. you can only win when you beat someone else, and valentino has always understood that the vanquished is very nearly as big a part of the show as the vanquisher

but here, the relationship between valentino and sete was at the very least outwardly still warm. they were both as gracious in defeat as they were in victory - helped along by the awareness that whatever the frothing italian press might pretend, valentino was unlikely to lose that year's title. still, were tensions beginning to creep in, given how valentino retrospectively speaks in his autobiography about how both biaggi and gibernau complained he had superior machinery? how about when rumours began to fly about valentino's impending move to yamaha and sete supposedly said valentino won't have so much to laugh about the next year? or the glee valentino read on sete's face at the thought of valentino's departure from honda? another point, on the ibiza trips - it's unclear when and how many times they happened, but one source suggests they had stopped in 2003. on the other hand, the brno 2003 race commentary makes multiple references to how they'd been partying together on ibiza during the summer break (which you'd have to say is pretty remarkable in itself after a race like sachsenring), and I'm inclined to trust the race commentary on this one. so maybe it's 2004 the trips tail off... at what point then did the relationship between the two of them begin to transform from friends to true rivals, however genial to begin with? how wary had valentino already grown of sete by the end of 2003?

^age old tradition. sete buddy that kid is going to ruin you

in any case, the remainder of valentino's season was close to flawless, winning five of the six remaining races. in sepang, having already decided he was going to sign with yamaha come what may, he sealed the title with a dominant win over sete - and brought back the convict celebrations, except this time he had a big novelty key to open the big novelty lock, presumably to signify how he could finally escape. which is charmingly on the nose, yes, but there's something enjoyable about an athlete who is so very committed to making the subtext text. how better to conclude his time with honda, who he had grown so very disillusioned with? tell them how you really feel and all that

^after vale has sealed the title at sepang. sete gives him a nice little kiss before assaulting him with champagne on the podium

or - not quite to a conclusion, not yet. after all, there were still two more races to go in 2003. in phillip island, he secured one of the more spectacular victories of his career when he once again fell foul of the 'could you please stop overtaking under yellow flags' thing - but this time, was informed of the situation and his ten second time penalty during rather than after the race. furious at the penalty, he flew off, setting a blistering pace that not only gave him the requisite ten second margin over his closest challenger capirossi, but eventually meant he crossed the line fifteen seconds ahead of his countryman. he had a point to prove that day, and proved it. he might have been on the best bike, yes - but he was laughably better than anyone else riding it, and the world still hadn't seen yet all that he was capable of

then came the last race of the season and the announcement honda and valentino would be holding a press conference together afterwards, widely expected to be announcing a split that for much of the year the paddock refused to believe might actually happen. one more ride on the honda that valentino must say farewell to and will dearly miss - that unfortunately took place at valencia, an ugly bore of a track that valentino has always been awful at, the only one on the calendar he had not yet conquered. but he needed to say goodbye to his beloved bike (decked in an austin powers-themed special livery) in style, and he went on to win the race before telling the world that him and honda were parting ways. time to go to yamaha and prove the haters and losers wrong - including one sete gibernau

^honda or yamaha, friendship can survive anything <3 quite like valentino's unorthodox spraying technique in the photo on the right - sete was admirably determined to drench vale at welkom

honda's next champion?

the thing about 2004, right, is that the dominant rider in motogp had very nicely taken himself out of the picture for at least a year to try and turn that useless pile of junk into title-contending machinery. maybe rossi would start turning things around in the second half of the year and snatch an occasional win. maybe he'd put together a title charge in 2005, though that was by no means guaranteed - it was entirely plausible that his failure would be as complete as it would be spectacular. what this meant for everyone else was that they'd basically been given a freebie. a clear run at the title, as long as they could beat all the other non-rossi challengers. for a number of blokes at honda, this was the big year. biaggi, gibernau, anyone else who was feeling brave - this was the time. and honda, right, were going all in on this. rossi had the audacity, the nerve, the sheer disrespect to turn his back on them and imagine he could win without them. every rider dreamt of being decked in their colours, and valentino had walked away. they were going to throw all the considerable money and resources at their disposal behind a small army of riders, tasked not only with beating rossi but humiliating him

this is all a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much of one. as then-yamaha rider and then-valentino friend marco melandri put it in 2003, "if valentino did come to yamaha at least he would be able to give them direction with development, but he would not have a chance of winning". the best-placed yamaha rider in the 2003 championship standings had been carlos checa in seventh, and all yamaha riders combined had achieved a grand total of one podium finish that whole year. generally speaking, however, once this kind of idle speculation of 'oh imagine if he moved' actually becomes reality, the conversation does shift accordingly, and so the initial consensus of 'surely he can't win on a yamaha' of much of 2003 was already beginning to crack by the time they actually arrived at welkom. and the relationship with honda really did end on a pretty sour note, not least because valentino's former employers refused to let vale test the yamaha before his contract expired at the end of 2003 - which is generally a pretty decent barometer of whether a rider and team are parting on good terms. as valentino put it: "their attitude pissed me off. it will cost me four races, but I always knew things would be like that". in the end, obviously he was still able to make good use of the pre-season testing he did have and he was not cost "four races" - and at the very latest people had to reassess their outlook on the season when he hit the track at welkom. if anything, his immediate pace that weekend was distinctly un-valentino-like - who needs to already be fast on a friday? - and he led every session and qualified on pole. and then, he went and achieved what still remains possibly the greatest victory of his career after a thrilling battle with old foe biaggi right to the very end. sete was a very distant third

^sete drenching vale at welkom. I am once again going to do 2004 prop and let you know that some of the best races are available free online: welkom, mugello, catalunya, assen and qatar are all on youtube (they should upload phillip island but ah well ed.: for some reason phillip island has been uploaded to facebook)

of course, valentino did not have it all his own way that year. of course, sete was not suddenly replaced by biaggi as vale's prime challenger. but yes, sete will have had to readjust his expectations of valentino's season the same as everyone else. after welkom, the conversation shifted definitively from 'surely not' to 'could he really...?' - and all other contenders were informed in no uncertain terms that they were not to be granted a rossi-free season. that being said, of course this still very much looked like sete's best chance. of course this wasn't going to be as straightforward as valentino's past titles. perhaps, even, welkom had provided a somewhat illusory picture of what the competitive landscape actually looked like that season. perhaps people had been too hasty to hand the title to valentino again after welkom. a wet weather specialist, sete secured victory in a rainy jerez, while valentino struggled to get his yamaha to work in the wet and finished fourth - his first time off the podium in twenty four races. at le mans, another race in tricky conditions, sete won once again and extended his championship lead while valentino took another fourth place. the spectacle of welkom might have been a flash in the pan; it might be time to reassess the kinds of results valentino could achieve on a regular basis with that machinery

^left: valentino having fun in the wet of jerez; right: valentino's wood-themed helmet for mugello, because if you finish fourth you get a wooden medal

what followed was a pivotal stretch of three races that turned valentino's 2004 title bid from a dream to something that felt increasingly plausible, even likely. all three of these races were extremely closely fought. all three of them are very enjoyable to watch. all three of them are freely available on youtube dot com. first, they headed to mugello, a big one for both sete and valentino. valentino had won the last two races at mugello and it was the race that was more important to him than any other - so if you're sete, where better to stamp your authority on the season? the race ended up having a little bit of everything: a ferocious multi-rider scrap, a duel between the two main title contenders, a red flag and a restart due to the worsening meteorological situation that resulted in another multi-rider scrap. valentino had to make full use of his skills as well as his composure to go out and in essence win two entirely different races. after the second start he fell back as far as seventh as he figured out the grip conditions, taking his time to fuck around before eventually fucking off (or as much as you can fuck off when you only have two and a half laps left). still, sete managed to salvage a second place result and limited the points damage

^2004 is as close to a perfect season as you can get, but there is one major factor that holds it back: the colour schemes of the title contenders. extremely similar combinations of blue with a little yellow from guys who aren't even in the same factory, let alone teammates - and jorge was always way easier to distinguish from valentino than this mess. what makes this extra stupid is that valentino's actual teammate that year, carlos checa, had a RED livery and RED leathers so. okay. great job guys. anyway, cracking race, split into two halves (or well. four fifths and a fifth). apparently, sete overtook valentino at some point under a yellow flag - or, at least, valentino says he did, which is something he remembers just in time for that year's sepang press conference

so a home victory secured and a hat trick of mugello wins - time to head back to sete land and fight it out in catalunya. top five valentino catalunya duel for sure, a pretty crowded category. sete had led every single session going into the race, but in the end he came out second best in a fight that went on until the very last lap. no longer was valentino willing to let sete get the better of him in head-to-head combat, and the victory was even sweeter coming as it did on sete's home turf - and indeed valentino would establish a bit of a tradition of beating spaniards at that track. the tide was turning and increasingly it did look like valentino might actually achieve the impossible

"One hundred and five thousand screaming Spaniards roar on their hero Sete Gibernau. He's something of an unexpected hero really. After so many years in grand prix, he lived in the shadow of Alex Criville. Criville's retired, Gibernau is on the Honda, and Gibernau is leading the world championship."

^excerpt from the catalunya 2004 commentary

and then, the next race: time for assen

^still friendly and chatting before the first real trial their relationship faces. by the by, the commentary for this race references a cartoon proposing that all that valentino needs to do to keep sete behind him is to attach a mirror to the back of his bike - because sete would be too busy posing. which gives you a general sense of the tone people used to discuss sete with

coming into this race, sete had gotten two consecutive second places to valentino. his championship lead had shrunk to five points. valentino had already gotten the yamaha into race-winning shape sooner than anyone had expected, and now it increasingly looked like he might be able to achieve the week-to-week results that won championships. it also did not help that sete's defeats had come in direct duels with valentino - in the early days of that rivalry, this exact type of duel had been how sete had announced himself as a serious threat. if it came down to another direct fight between the two of them, sete badly wanted to get a win over his rival, not just for points but for pride. and valentino, conversely, wanted to press home the advantage, to bite harder when his opponent was already bleeding. if you will

this turned into a bit of a three-way tussle between those two and barros, but then barros crashed out and it was just the two of them - going into the very last lap with sete ahead. valentino, who was having to risk far more on the yamaha than he ever did on the honda, made a lunge up the inside of turn 12 and almost binned it in the following corner. nearly losing the front resulted in contact with sete, where sete's front wheel hit the rear of vale's bike and damaged the front mudguard - and in the end sete backed off just a touch, allowing vale to cross the line with almost half a second in hand

valentino was enthusiastic in his celebrations, shall we say, whereas sete... well. sete did not look thrilled. gone were the usual parc fermé exchanges, no more hugs or friendly handshakes or kisses. sete suffered his way through the podium celebrations as the wettest of wet blankets, popping the champagne for about half a second and staying rooted in place while valentino carried on doing his thing. the natural assumption would be that sete was furious not just at losing but at the manner in which the pass for the victory was executed, out of control and in a way that could have easily resulted in a crash for both of them. valentino certainly assumed as much, saying that sete was "for sure a little bit angry" (clip here, also includes sete's statement). but when it was sete's turn to speak... he just said he was frustrated at losing, as anyone would be in his situation. which, well, doesn't quite fit in with his reaction, and also doesn't entirely match up with other statements he made at the time. there are two more sets of quotes from the protagonists of the race, though I can't determine with absolute certainty in which order these things were said. here's the first (article dated day of the race):

Gibernau lost vital time in that clash and was not able to challenge on the remainder of the lap but Rossi insists he did not deliberately block the Telefonica Movistar Honda rider. "I came into the bend a little too quickly and I slightly lost control of the front of my Yamaha, which explains why I touched him, but it wasn't intentional," he said. Gibernau did not use the incident as an excuse for his defeat. "To be overtaken in the final meters after dominating the race, it's obviously gutting," said the Spaniard. "I was angry about the way he overtook me. His manoeuvre really was risky. He said he didn't do it on purpose, but it doesn't take away my disappointment."

and here's the second (article dated the day after the race):

"I made a mistake and had to brake early or I would have crashed," said Rossi, explaining why he slowed so suddenly in front of the Spaniard. "I did not even feel Sete touch me. He was very angry, but I explained what happened." For his part, and after having chance to cool down, Gibernau appeared to accept that the contact hadn't been deliberate. "I had a good chance right until the end but we touched on the last lap - Valentino explained that he almost fell and, if that's the case, then there's nothing for me to say," shrugged Sete. "These things happen in racing. We had a good battle in another great race."

if that indeed is the order in which their statements were delivered, this whole episode feels like an interesting exercise in passive aggressive feuding - sete could have of course simply gone up to valentino, supposedly his friend, and asked for an explanation, or stated his objections openly when asked about them in the presser. instead, it seems to have been valentino who offered his explanations after sete had denied even having any issue with the overtake, with sete contradicting himself later by saying he had been angry. even then, sete said it didn't "take away my disappointment", which suggests not all was forgiven. from parc fermé to the podium to the press conference, he'd used every part of his body with full effect to express his displeasure with the notable exception of his mouth. this incident hasn't really been brought up by either party since, but as far as the eye test goes the relationship sure seemed like it was pretty strained by this. with the benefit of hindsight, it stands out as a turning point in their rivalry, the first time the veneer of the gracious loser was well and truly discarded and a sour note was added to the relationship. this was also the race where the championship lead was taken away from gibernau on countback, which incidentally was the last time an independent rider led the world championship standings until... uh... *squints at notes* argentina 2018

^already post-assen - but no reason not to be civil, right? what's a little last lap assen controversy between friends. scholars will note that this is the race after which valentino engaged in some unsavoury parc fermé activities with sete's then-teammate colin edwards

for the sake of brevity, the next part of the season is mostly going to be skipped over, but to give you the sparknotes version: sete's results grew more inconsistent, and valentino gained more of an advantage, despite still having to over-ride the bike in a way that helped cause his dnf in rio (his first dnf since brno 2002 and his first non-mechanical dnf since mugello 2001). apart from a brief period where biaggi seemed like he was going to reinsert himself in the title fight, plus a sete win in brno, for the most part the tide had clearly turned in valentino's favour and that yamaha title was looking more and more like a certainty. so let's pick up the narrative at the next major flashpoint between the pair of them, at motogp's first visit to qatar

I've already written up a post that gives more information on that race and the specifics of the controversy, so I'll forgo another detailed summary of events here. the basic facts we have at our disposal are that valentino's team, whether to his knowledge or not, rubbered up his spot of the grid, and he was then penalised for it. he worked his way up from the back of the grid before crashing out of fourth place. sete won, reducing the gap separating the two riders at the top of the standings to a mere fourteen points with three rounds to go. valentino was furious at sete, at honda, at the stewards, at pretty much everyone. here are some of his remarks:

"Gibernau's victory is not real. They stole the match from us with the shameful farce of the penalty. A truly incredible situation occurred. Everyone cleans the starting 'box'. Is there a written rule? In Rio we all went to wash the track, which was dirty. The same thing happened here. In F1 the cars skid, the asphalt is cleaned with the motorbikes. After Friday's practice [before the Saturday race] we saw Biaggi's mechanics cleaning the track and we thought it was a good idea. We cleaned the track and Honda screwed up. The others have to attach themselves to something. Gibernau and his chief suspension mechanic didn't hesitate to snitch like kids. Something ridiculous. I didn't expect to get to this point. In the race I gave a lot in the early stages, after two corners I was eighth and after four laps I was already in fourth position. I spent a lot and relaxed for a moment. Unfortunately I went wide and couldn't find the curb anymore. I made a mistake, but I wouldn't have made such a mistake if I had started from the front. I hope to make up for it in Malaysia, fortunately I didn't get hurt in the crash. It went well for the finger, when I saw the blood I was scared. But the finger didn't explode."

^some of these websites have a habit of collating a bunch of different answers into one paragraph of remarks but personally I am choosing to believe he did actually deliver this as a single monologue

valentino also said he had been looking for an excuse not to speak to sete, called him a child, saying sete had essentially stabbed him in the back. and of course, so the legend goes, he infamously vowed that sete would never win another race again

who snitched?

everything up until now has been more or less just summarising events as they happened - but now we enter considerably murkier waters. we do not definitively know one way or another what happened in qatar, who said what, who was responsible for what. let's get the less important mystery out of the way first: did valentino really curse sete?

no, not in the sense of 'did valentino rossi really perform black magic' - more the question of if he ever really said it. a lot of journalists who are otherwise at least mildly reputable seem to take it as read, but also a lot of journalists are motivated to believe he said it because it makes for a fantastic story. when did he say it? to whom? one source talks about it being at the press conference of the following race, which I know for a fact is not the case. here's a source that is one of the ones to have swayed me more to the side of 'yeah maybe he did say it':

Rossi then did an interview with Italian TV. He’d hurt his little finger, really mashed it up, in the crash. And he famously said “I will make sure Gibernau will never win another race because of this”. We’ve all got a soft spot for Valentino, and I can remember thinking ‘oh God, I wouldn’t have said that if I were you. I really wouldn’t have said that…’

I know this is objectively not a lot to go on, but at least it's a commentator/journalist who was there at the time, claiming they remember finding out about it, giving a little detail about to whom it supposedly was said ('italian tv') and having an immediate response to it that they are also remembering. obviously, this too could be bogus. but, well, at the end of the day I'm with the journalists here: I too want it to be true because it is indeed a fantastic story. there has also been the suggestion, again poorly sourced, that valentino has denied saying this - or, and this genuinely would be my favourite option of them all, that he said he only meant it for that year. hate it when I place a curse on someone and it accidentally lasts too long

now that I've done my due diligence, here's the good bit: beyond a certain point, it does not matter whether valentino actually said it or not. what mattered is that everyone thought he said it - and, crucially, as 2005 wore on, it became ever more part of the discourse. it was part of the reporting of races: could gibernau finally break the curse? it was discussed extensively in the commentary: we're back in qatar, do curses have an expiration date of a year or not? there is no way that within the claustrophobic world of the motogp paddock sete would have been been able to avoid it, let alone be unaware of it entirely. (incidentally, the fact that this is the case and I've not been able to find a better source of valentino denying it makes me again feel like he did actually say it - though I suppose it'd also be pretty funny if he hadn't said it but was like. actually this is working out quite nicely for me.) assuming for a moment that valentino is not capable of literally cursing people, the 'real effect' the curse can have is only in tormenting its victim through the mere knowledge of its supposed existence

but we're getting ahead of ourselves here. whether the curse existed or not, it could only have the effect it had if valentino fulfilled its initial promise - by denying sete another win that season while securing the title for himself. so let's just quickly recap where we're at: three rounds to go, fourteen points between the two contenders. valentino went back to italy to try and fix the fucked up finger and presumably to cool off a bit. the motogp media did what it does best and spent the entire week hyping up the drama. and there was, of course, another mystery everyone was still trying to get to the bottom of: was sete really involved in valentino's penalty?

let's first tack on another question: does it even matter? of course, the truth has never been established with 100% certainty either way, and all it does is give the two parties a reason to blow up a friendship that was already getting a little bit strained. either way, the relationship between them was ruined; either way, valentino crushed sete. not just that - whether it really happened or not is one thing, but I feel just a touch more confident in asserting that valentino believed it happened, just from my extreme vibes-based analysis of how genuinely furious he seemed and how he was still referring to sete's dirty games a whole eleven years later. which, of course, doesn't in itself really tell us one way or another what actually happened. valentino can convince himself of all manner of things. if anything, his track record as well as how ruthlessly he exploited the situation to his own advantage count against believing his version of events. and, at the end of the day, only one of valentino and sete can speak to sete's involvement in the protest that caused the penalty with complete certainty. it's not valentino

and in a way, it doesn't really matter. sete is unsettled either way - because even if he did have some hand in the penalty, this is the kind of low level petty snitching athletes and their teams constantly engage in. I cannot imagine he would have thought valentino would react as he did. quite honestly, I'm not sure sete could have conceived of a rival reacting like that to anything. if sete was responsible, then valentino still managed to escalate to a level of hostility sete would never have been able to match, let alone be comfortable with. obviously, it would not be in his interest to retroactively admit any involvement in the matter, not least because he saw how valentino responded to the mere assumption of sete's guilt. it does, however, still matter in evaluating sete's assertions that the relationship between them changed more or less from one day to the next (which *gestures at the above wall of text* I'm not entirely convinced by), and in judging whether this is a feud that's entirely built on the back of valentino's delusions. was sete really completely unaware and, a separate question - was it an unreasonable assumption from valentino that he was involved? if both of those questions are answered in the affirmative, then you do have to say what follows must have been absolutely bonkers from sete's perspective. I mean, it's kind of bonkers anyway, but. y'know. even more so

the problem with actually evaluating the claims are that basically every source about it frames the whole thing differently and often in contradictory ways, to the point where even valentino's actual allegation has been shrouded in the mists of time. different journalists and commentators and authors after the fact have confidently asserted that either hrc or sete's gresini team lodged the protest - some seem to take it as read that sete did indeed have some kind of role in it, and there is no indication whether they have some kind of privileged information that backs this up or whether this is simply valentino's influence making itself felt. hrc is obviously a likely suspect, given they canonically hate valentino and are praying for his downfall and have invested a whole lot already to bring it about. then again, gresini are the ones who are actually in this championship battle - and, of course, there's the distinct possibility that all parts of honda were involved in this together. other figures that have been brought up are gresini team principal fausto gresini who it has been claimed was personally involved in making the protest - this from the stuart barker biography, which treats it essentially as established fact. the barker biography also says that yamaha was not found to be breaking any specific rules, but race direction said it was against the 'spirit' of the sport, which... okay, I'd also be pretty annoyed to be penalised for that, especially at that stage of the season. while it is of course possible that sete was not involved in his own team's actions, it does seem a little less likely that he would not have at the very least been informed. to add another twist, one version of the story that has cropped up more than once is that valentino's allegation was that sete and his crew chief juan martinez went to hrc to get them to go to race direction. also, it may be that ducati protested both valentino and biaggi (who was definitely breaking the rules). which, good on them

unfortunately this is pretty inconclusive stuff and at a certain point it feels like you have nothing better than gut feeling to rely on to choose which narrative is more convincing to you. which is annoying! where's the substantial evidence! nowhere, it appears, not that I've been able to find it - but there is one more tangible source that I haven't brought up until now. you see, dorna, in their infinite commitment to the bit, have been kind enough to make the thursday press conference at the very next race one of the very few of that era that they have uploaded in its entirety. I am talking, of course, of the pre-event press conference at sepang

^posing for a friendly post-presser photo <3 two guys just chillin' having fun having a laff

if you are an aficionado of awkward and tense and kind of awful press conferences, then you will have an excellent time with this one. I've uploaded pretty much all of the relevant bits that I'll link to as I go; they're not obligatory watching to understand the rest of the post as I will be covering them here anyway, but they sure are interesting (and funny, which is really the most important thing)

first, let's set the scene: four blokes sitting at a table. the seat at its centre sits empty. the championship leader has not yet arrived when the press conference starts, removing the opportunity for one of the most sacred rituals that preempts any motogp press conference: the vibe check. a lot has happened and a lot has been said since the relevant parties last saw each other face to face and it is unclear where the vibes will be at when the reunion happens. will they acknowledge each other? make eye contact? shake hands? speak to each other? the journalists have not had a chance to find out. and one of the two involved parties has not either

after some softball questions relevant to 'racing' and 'points' in 'motogp' and its 'title fight', the moderator finally gets to the bit everyone's actually here for: the drama [1]. at this point, sete dates both the presser and himself by saying he's been trying to block everything out with his "mp3", before expressing his sympathy for valentino and saying he doesn't hold any of valentino's words spoken in the heat of the moment against him. at some point, he delivers a couple of lines that possess the kind of concentrated narrative juice you get a sugar high from, saying "we all know valentino. I know how he really is, he's a good guy". just as he finishes answering the question, his eyes flick over to the side - and the camera pans over to valentino entering the room with a slight smirk and of course his big ass sunglasses still very much adorning his face

nicky hayden sits to valentino's left and is interviewed before valentino is - while valentino does not acknowledge sete, who is sitting to his right. when he is questioned [2], valentino initially sounds like he is intending to turn the page on the whole affair and if anything doesn't particularly want to comment any further on what has happened. he also manages to deliver a truly classic motogp rider line, saying "I have a hole in the finger, but I think it is not a big problem for ride this weekend". right! but already here, it becomes swiftly clear that he is still furious at what happened and aggrieved by the penalty. he caps things off with a nice line saying that at least he wasn't actually slower than 'gibernau' in qatar, before turning around and shaking hayden's hand and chatting to him

it immediately becomes clear that all the questions from the floor are going to be about the same thing [3], and sete looks miserably uncomfortable while valentino just comes across as incredibly surly, his smile at times taking on a mildly murderous quality. one journalist fires off an all time classic presser question with "in qatar you say you were searching for an excuse to not talk any more with sete" and again valentino side steps, half-making it sound like he's willing to move on - while sete continues to strike a conciliatory note, continues to stress how it was all just the heat of the moment. but a follow-up question to valentino gives the journalists and sete the clearest indication that this, in fact, is really happening. valentino says this is not in the past, that he'd already said what he thinks last week and is standing by it. sete looks over at him - with disbelief, with incredulity, with the air of a man who really can't quite believe the turn this has taken

if there had been any lingering doubt at how unfairly treated valentino feels, he dispels it in his answer about stewarding decisions [4]. at the end of his exchange with the reporter about it, he brings up an incident where sete overtook under a yellow flag in mugello - which, quite honestly, I had not known about and I haven't found any reference to, so maybe nobody did spot it at the time if it indeed happened. remember, valentino had gone through not one but two bad run-ins with the yellow flag situation the year before, costing him a win at donington and making him ride at his limit to reclaim the win at phillip island. did he speak about this mugello situation at the time, or has he really just carried it around with him silently for months? a professional grudge-carrier, you have to say, a true master at the art. at the next question, valentino continues putting space between himself and sete [5], saying they have been rivals for a long time and that "it's the same condition" (i.e. situation). the friendship isn't just gone, it's so gone it might as well have never existed. if you really want to read more into this than the short response deserves, you could argue he's saying the facade has been lifted, that the true nature of the rivalry has been revealed at last

and now, we get to the critical part: sete is invited to explain himself and tell the press whether he had any involvement in the penalty or not [6]. he's clearly put a lot of thought into this in the past week and decided what he should focus on is that he wanted all the grid slots to be cleaned in the interest of safety. interestingly, he says "they" blocked him from doing that, but it's unclear whether he means gresini or someone else within honda. (presumably honda couldn't have known valentino's team would fuck about with a scooter, and remember camel honda rider biaggi also got a penalty so probably not some kind of company-wide internal memo.) (I mean I guess it'd also be funny if there had been a company-wide internal memo but nobody had thought to send it to biaggi.) sete's argument is basically that he'd be a hypocrite if he'd helped lodge a protest after he himself wanted the grid slots cleaned up - but given that valentino is quite literally calling him a backstabbing bastard, I imagine he wouldn't consider adding the hypocrite tag a bridge too far. the safety commission element of it all is kind of interesting, given as we've established valentino will likely have attended too. if sete raised this at the meeting and valentino did end up discussing it with his team, did vale end up feeling suckered into making a bad choice? probably not, just a thought

anyway, back to gibernau's response. as the journalist who asked the initial question notes, this is all a lot of waffling without a clear, firm denial (I'm paraphrasing) - and a clear, firm denial would generally be a good way to go about these things. in his next answer, sete again fails to just keep things simple, though again he denies any personal involvement. and then, the journalist asks sete to account for his team, including the fact that apparently one of sete's mechanics gave evidence to race direction... and sete says he can only speak for himself

so there we have it. that's the best singular piece of actual evidence I've got for sete's involvement, and at least comes close to confirming that somebody in gresini was involved in the protest, however tangentially. obviously, this in no way confirms sete was himself involved. at least it does give valentino an ever so slightly more reasonable basis of suspicion, though obviously it all just raises more questions like 'why was a gresini mechanic even giving evidence and what about'. that bit is then of course immediately followed by an exchange that's as good a confirmation as we're going to get that it was hrc not gresini who made the protest. so. yeah. I've got nothing. we don't know. draw your own conclusions. the presser ends with another question for good measure about the relationship between the two riders. sete first tells them, more or less, that it's none of their business before sharing a nice laugh with valentino about how valentino is never going to talk to him again

cursed

the thing about that press conference is that it's all well and good and fun to use it to try and piece together what really happened at qatar, but there are more interesting things to say about it. it is in that press conference that valentino well and truly begun the process of breaking sete, and he did so completely deliberately. it's quite the little show featuring two guys who are entirely aware that they are surrounded by cameras and reporters and are reacting accordingly. sete is committed to being dignified, to being unflappable, to being magnanimous: whatever valentino said, he will forgive him. he is happy to move on. but as the press conference progresses, he is slowly made to realise that his opponent is the one who is not ready to forgive and is not ready to play nice - not even for the cameras. especially not in front of the cameras

^his poor pinkie finger :(

sete must have felt on top of the world after qatar. he had clawed back 25 points. a championship that had already seemed lost suddenly felt like it might be in his grasp once again. valentino could complain and whine and be furious for italian television, but surely this is the kind of thing that blows over. for too long, sete is under the mistaken impression that they will move on from this. for too long in that presser, sete is playing at respectability while valentino has already progressed to open hostility. it's unnerving, of course it is, to suddenly be completely cold-shouldered and ignored by a man you had thought you were on reasonably good terms with a week ago. it's unnerving for it all to happen in front of cameras, when for so long you have been striving to present a cordial, friendly, civilised image of a rivalry. him and valentino don't do all that nasty business, not like valentino and biaggi. sete's better than that and valentino has grown up a bit - this is one of those ideal rivalries people are always going on about, the ones that are ferocious on-track but respectful and even warm off it. and so, despite everything valentino had said to the press over the past week, he still manages to completely blindside sete in the moment. he still manages to leave him unsettled, and even disoriented

and so we get to the race itself, pivotal for sete and his championship hopes. to still have a chance at clinching the title, he really needs to be fighting at the sharp end of all three of the remaining races. alas, it is not to be. valentino is reinvigorated after the humiliation of qatar and coasts through the weekend on a wave of irreverent indignation - telling reporters after qualifying on pole that this result had been important "especially since it means we know which part of the grid to clean tonight". he thrives in the chaos and the frenzied speculation and the seething tension - whereas sete is nowhere to be found all weekend. valentino wins with a comfortable margin while sete finishes a lowly seventh place. a healthy thirty point lead in the championship has been restored. now, then, in victory valentino has been provided with the opportunity to really twist in the knife. sete comes up alongside him on the cooldown lap, clearly wanting to shake hands - and valentino completely ignores him, does not as much as glance in his direction. then, he stops for one of those whimsical planned celebrations that he's ever so fond of, and he cleans his grid slot with a helpfully provided broom. as valentino says afterwards, "this time I wanted to destroy the morale of everybody". and if that wasn't enough, he adds in the post-race press conference "for me, sete did the best race of the season. he has given me a lot of points, which is like a big present. I am really grateful". charming as ever

^he also came up with his own cleaning crew founded with his trusty crew chief jerry burgess, 'la rapida', and had shirts mocked up - to 'eliminate dirt from motogp'. so nice to have a supportive crew chief, isn't it? from valentino after the race: "I've been working with jeremy for four years, together we've seen all sorts of things and when I arrived here I saw him with an incredible face, disgusted, saddened. he and the team said we had to react and so we did". and as jb put it, "valentino is the sort of rider I wouldn't want to get angry. he can take you apart on the track". the text on the shirt: "we clear out rats. we disinfect, clear drains and clean starting grids. we also do night jobs - all done in six seconds [aka the qualifying penalty he'd received]"

two races to go, and it's match point rossi. he finishes first or second at phillip island and the championship is his for certain - if he doesn't do so and sete wins the race, it's hello title decider. there is barely any doubt left in people's minds, then, about who the 2004 champion will be... but it's not a done deal. in the very worst case scenario, valentino enters the final round with a slender six point advantage. he's not safe yet. he's not safe yet on the very first lap, which, it has to be said, is a lot of fun. vale gets a better start than sete does from pole, but sete overtakes him around the outside and vale is quickly pushed to third - then fourth, at which point he runs off track and makes a risky excursion into the dirt. at the very next corner, he makes a downhill overtake on two ducatis at once, and sets about hunting down sete who has built up an advantage of over a second

so, in fittingly dramatic fashion, the race comes down to a duel between the two of them, valentino stalking sete around the track lap after lap. if valentino holds his ground, the championship is his - but sete takes the win and can go into the next season with new confidence and self-belief and hope for something better. valentino does not just want to avenge the injustice of qatar; this is an investment for the future. a way of telling sete that he has not just lost this season but that he will always lose, when fighting valentino. there is a promise to be kept, after all - whether it was only supposed to apply to that season or not, valentino refuses to let sete win another race. they exchange overtakes but sete is still just about in the lead when they enter the final lap. it is here that valentino makes his move, not once but twice to make it stick. his riding in that last lap isn't egregiously reckless but certainly not risk-free, and could have ended with him in the gravel and the championship still undecided in valencia. but he's not and it isn't - and just like his first premier class title (a comparison valentino himself makes in his autobiography), his first title with yamaha is sealed on the last lap of phillip island. his championship-winning shirt is uncharacteristically stark, reading simply 'che spettacolo' ('what a spectacle/show') - and he's not wrong. this has been a show, it's been a miracle, and in the end it's been theatre. he's sealed the title in style while also getting his revenge. it's winning in the most satisfying manner you can win anything: by beating somebody you loathe. celebrations are nice, but isn't there just something special about seeing the person you despise look so wholly miserable?

sete puts on a brave face, determined to be above valentino's pettiness. he goes over, shakes valentino's hand. valentino accepts. of course he does - he's won. sete was a few corners away from denying valentino's curse before it had ever really sunk its claws in. would it have changed things, if he could simply have regained a little confidence and found his bearings again after the psychological onslaught of the sepang weekend? maybe, maybe not. of course, looking at valentino's 2005 season, you have to say valentino was almost certainly operating on a level no version of sete would have been able to match. but there's still a lot of room between 'fighting for a championship' and 'becoming a shell of the rider you once were' - and if things had gone a little differently, you do also have to say that a championship as open as 2006 was could have represented opportunity for all manner of rider. if only he'd been able to cauterise the wound in phillip island, rather than letting valentino dig his teeth in even further

^at least capirossi's having a good time :D

the championship sealed and there's but one round to go. once again the paddock must regrettably visit a track that some critics have described as 'drab' and 'soulless' and 'the enemy of good racing', and one at which valentino has only won once before. but the way to tease out a special performance from valentino is generally to give him a point to prove, add in a little spite to get the fires spitting, and he wins at the circuit for the second (and last) time of his career. in front of the spanish fans too, which must have felt particularly satisfying - and the race itself isn't all too bad in the first half (the way valentino gets past gibernau/biaggi is quite funny). home hero sete takes fourth, and that's a wrap on the 2004 championship

there's something deceptively comfortable about the final numbers: 304 points to 257. 47 points. no problem. but sports isn't just numbers; it's the story those numbers tell. valentino was furious in qatar and he made a mistake and he ended up in a position where things don't have to go all that differently for him to lose the title. the momentum was on the side of his enemy, whose confidence and morale had been given a much-needed boost. the genius of the entire sepang weekend, from the press conference to his jibes in interviews to his dominance performance-wise to the cold shoulder to the pointed celebrations, was that they all worked together to stop that momentum cold

maybe it didn't make much of a difference - valentino was always in the stronger position given he both had a points advantage and was the faster man. but faster men have lost championships before. ignore raw pace and performance edge and all of that: valentino wrested control of the intangibles - momentum, self-belief, all of those abstract things that defy rational analysis - and brought them firmly back onto his side. sete spent the entire weekend off balance, unsettled, forced to discuss things that made him uncomfortable, engulfed in a media storm he was ill-suited to coping with. all the while, valentino relished it and used it to spur himself on. by the time sete had regrouped in phillip island and was far cooler - if still respectful - towards valentino, it was already too late

in the interest of eventually finishing this post, we're not going to cover sete's downfall in that much depth. but there is still one last critical blow that valentino has to inflict to truly bring an end to the gibernau experiment. the very first race of 2005 was one that valentino particularly wanted to win - not just to inform his competitors that this year would be more of the same, but also because they were once again on sete's home soil. time for jerez

^new year, new sete! this time he's going to show that italian upstart what's what

as ever, the media had done its best to hype up this new season. sete would be getting full support from the factory (which, yes, feels like maybe they should have considered providing a touch earlier) and he made it clear he was ready for the challenges ahead, ready to get revenge and all that. the spanish had grown fonder of their unexpected challenger too, and showed up in full force to support their man in the opening race. of course, a lot of people quietly agreed that realistically speaking, the competitive picture was looking pretty ominous. 2004 should have been the season in which valentino got the yamaha project up and running, setting up a title challenge in 2005. but he was ahead of schedule and surely the yamaha would only get stronger. still, you never know, right? that's why we line up on sunday etc etc

valentino stole pole position from sete right at the end of qualifying, but crashed in warm-up and ended up using his second bike, which is never ideal. the start was already feisty from both parties, and for a while valentino was relegated back to third. but sooner rather than later, he assumed his familiar position sitting right on sete's rear tyre, showing sete his wheel here and there just to remind him where he was. remember the whole sachsenring debacle after which valentino told himself that he wasn't going to leave it that late again? well, he was actually nice and sensible here, and made a move with two laps to go, successfully passing sete for the lead

which should have been the end of it. nice and clinical, a lovely relatively stress-free culmination of a whole race's work where valentino had diligently studied his opponent's strengths and weaknesses and had formulated his plan accordingly. job done, another win on the board to start the season. except then valentino decided to make things interesting again on the very last lap by out-braking himself on the back straight and running it wide into turn 6, allowing sete back through. there's a slightly frenetic energy with which valentino immediately hops back onto sete's rear wheel, already a touch of desperation about his lunge on the inside of turn 11 where he briefly goes past - but he's in too hot and sete's back in front

what all this means is that valentino really only has one opportunity left at turn 13 and barely any time to conceive of it. there's no planning or calculation or strategy here. valentino has one option to attack if he wants to win this race. it's a dive that is instinctive rather than planned - the only calculation here is that he would rather crash them both out than let sete win the race. back then (and a bit ironic from a modern point of view), valentino's infamous dangled leg was seen as evidence that he was out of control, doing anything he could to get the bike stopped while going for a gap that wasn't really there to be gone for. they make contact, valentino manages to get the bike turned and sete goes off into the gravel, but can get the bike back on track to finish second. valentino does a wheelie over the line. sete makes a thumbs down gesture

the spanish fans decide pretty quickly whose side they're taking in this. there's booing, whistling as valentino completes his victory lap, going full ham as he pumps his fists and claps at them and does a thumbs up and waves and puts his hand on his hip and all the rest of it as they scream at him. parc fermé is tense, the eye of the storm in the midst of the deafening roars of the crowd, with sete giving vale a couple of long looks as he gets off the bike. it's all big drama, everyone consulting their teams, talks of appeals to race direction, valentino grimly satisfied while sete is aggrieved, furious - stretching out his arm, clutching it, shaking his head while shaking teammate melandri's hand. he approaches valentino, says a few words to him as he walks past - valentino is not particularly interested in engaging in conversation. the crowd demands valentino's disqualification, and also call him a son of a whore. they're also obviously still booing. and whistling. lots of noise

on their way to the podium, sete is making tortured progress, pausing for a moment in the stairwell to clutch at his arm. at this point, valentino takes a moment to take the piss out of his rival, turning to the camera with a big smile and gesturing at sete. eventually they make it to the podium and vale laps up the displeasure of the spanish crowd. valentino smirks while sete goes for a sort of pained dignity, thanking the spanish crowd for their support, claiming the moral victory and all that. the italian anthem is almost inaudible

^sete always tried to go for a kind of stoically disapproving vibe, helped along this time by his pain in the shoulder. unfortunately for him, he does just come across as thoroughly defeated. which he was

the problem that sete faces here is that, while valentino is obviously more accustomed to a rather friendlier reception, it's also not like he particularly minds the spaniards giving him a hard time. valentino has claimed his fourth victory in succession, and has done so by once again denying sete on the very last lap. he has sent a message that this new season will be exactly the same as the last and that he remains exactly as determined to make sete's life miserable. while he does seem to think sete is playing up the shoulder injury, in general sete's solemn grimaces are like catnip to him. just before the anthem, he reaches out to shake first melandri's hand and then sete's - and sete hesitates, before extending his arm to the fullest extent to shake valentino's hand with about as little proximity as is physically possible. it's good sportsmanship, but it does also as good as tell valentino he's not going to kick up too big a fuss. in a way, whatever choice he made would have played into valentino's hands. even though this time sete may have directly confronted valentino, he's still not prepared to escalate things beyond that... and valentino knows it

^one of the classic rancid vibes podiums. the hands on hips at the ceaseless spanish booing is a nice touch

this choice to avoid further escalation is one sete continues to abide by in the press conference, echoing the assen presser from the year before beat for beat. again, valentino comments that it was a great battle, that sete is surely angry but, essentially, it is what it is ("this is the racing"). again, sete congratulates valentino for the win, but refrains from complaining about valentino's actions during the race. he has since said that he talked to race direction about it and was incredibly disillusioned about their choice not to penalise valentino - but again, not a whisper of it to the media with valentino sitting next to him

the one thing he did say was that he hoped he'd be fit to race in estoril because of his shoulder. remember the whole clutching at his arm routine where valentino (and the commentators) were kinda taking the mickey out of sete's comically pained expressions? well, um, turns out he did have a lot of pre-existing shoulder problems, and indeed that was the bit of his body that caused him considerable problems for the rest of his motogp career:

Gibernau dislocated his collarbone when he crashed out of the lead of the 2002 Portuguese Grand Prix on a Suzuki GSV-R, suffered a left shoulder tendon injury during his last turn clash with Valentino Rossi at Jerez 2005, then damaged the same shoulder further when he fell in practice for the following Estoril round. At the 2006 Catalan Grand Prix, Gibernau broke his left collarbone after spectacularly tangling with Ducati team-mate Loris Capirossi at the start of the race. Gibernau required a further operation shortly after when the titanium plate inserted to help his collarbone heal was found to have weakened. The new plate was in turn damaged when Gibernau hit Casey Stoner's fallen Honda in the penultimate round of the season, again at Estoril, marking the end of Gibernau's factory Ducati - and, it seemed - MotoGP career. Before making his 2009 MotoGP comeback, Gibernau had the metal plate removed from his collarbone, only to suffer shoulder ligament damage during training - forcing him to miss the final pre-season test.

well, anyway, after the controversy has had two weeks to continue on full steam, valentino does strike a somewhat more contrite note in the estoril pre-event press conference. he says he hadn't been aware of the whole shoulder situation and that sete had been unlucky given it had been a light touch in a slow corner... but having rewatched the footage he can see how, yes, maybe the contact could have hurt sete. these things happen, right? and at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter for valentino, because the controversy blows over. what remains is the blow (psychological rather than physical) he dealt sete. what remains is that he won and sete lost, again, and sete has still failed to win since qatar

"And I really think that as long as he wins this race, even if he only takes five points back off Valentino Rossi, he will be happy with that, because it's all about getting back to winning ways. He hasn't won since Qatar last October. He's got to take a victory, just to get his season back on course. Valentino Rossi is going to take a lot of stopping, and really all he can do is try and win this race in front of his home crowd." [...] "That race in Qatar, and the problems they had in that race with Valentino Rossi crashing out after having to start from the back of the grid was really when all the problems started, didn't it, for Sete Gibernau. [...] But really that's where his problems started, both on and off the track for Sete Gibernau after that race victory in Qatar. I really can't believe he would've believed that was going to happen. He was so, so pleased to win that race." [...] "This is a big big thirteen laps for Sete Gibernau, isn't it. If he can hold off Valentino Rossi, psychologically, it would be a very very big victory for him."

^excerpts from the catalunya 2005 commentary, the sixth round of the season. valentino had said in the presser after the preceding race that he expected biaggi and melandri to be his main rivals that season. sete leads for almost the entire race before valentino makes his race-winning overtake with three laps to go and smashes the previous circuit record on that lap

what remains is one failure after another. an important thing to stress when we talk about a 'curse' is that sete gibernau did not suddenly stop being a frontrunner after qatar 2004. he qualified on pole five times in 2005 (same as valentino, funnily enough - his average grid position was actually better than vale's, 2.82 v 4.12). even so, things go from bad to worse for sete. often valentino does his own dirty work in stopping sete when he's getting a bit too close to that elusive victory, winning a close duel in catalunya, pressuring sete into a mistake at the sachsenring, that kind of thing. often, he does not even have to. sometimes he took himself out, like crashing out of the lead in the wet conditions he was once so very skilled at in estoril (not helping his injured shoulder) or in donington park, where valentino went on to deliver perhaps the finest wet weather performance of his career to take the win

"I don't think anyone can be to blame for crashing out in these conditions, can they. [...] It really is at that stage of the season for Sete Gibernau where it's all or nothing, really just got to try and win races. We're now twelve races since his last victory at Qatar. Valentino Rossi promised after that race that Gibernau would never win another race and well it seems to be coming true so far."

^excerpt from the donington park 2005 commentary, the ninth race of the season, where sete crashed out of the lead in horrendous wet conditions

valentino's favoured way of winning races played into his hands here. pressure, pressure, pressure - preferably exerted from right behind his victim, with the knowledge that valentino is waiting and studying and ready to pounce on any mistake. even if you don't make any, he'll probably get you anyway. the effect of these defeats becomes nicely cumulative, where even the knowledge that valentino will be coming (even if he isn't there yet), that eventually he will try and pass you (even if he hasn't done so yet), is enough to make his opponents self-destruct before he even has to lift a finger. what he does to sete is the most extreme version of how that tactic typically works, by slowly eating away at sete's confidence and composure and self-belief until the eventual error feels increasingly inevitable. valentino knows it is coming, sete knows it is coming, and they both play their parts accordingly

"But Rossi straight after Gibernau, now he'll start those pressure games. Pressure is on Sete Gibernau. He has not won a race for a year; the last race win was here. And the man he doesn't speak to, he doesn't speak back to him either, Valentino Rossi, behind him, and Rossi will start exerting the pressure Rossi-style as we know." [...] "A year ago, wasn't it, it doesn't seem that long ago, doesn't it, that Sete Gibernau was so delighted to win the race here. And Valentino Rossi really left in a strop, didn't he. But there we are, Sete Gibernau - but we've seen it before, and Rossi seems so have this ability to faze him, out at the front, put pressure on him." [...] "Well, Nick, you said at the start of this race that Valentino Rossi has plenty of motivation to win this race here. He wants to take ten wins for Yamaha, it would be the first Yamaha rider ever to do that in the premier class. He wants to end a drought almost in his terms, certainly since he became a Yamaha rider - he's never gone three races without winning a race before, but that could happen today if Gibernau holds this out. And of course the one thing he really wants to stop is Sete Gibernau from winning a race one year on from the day that Rossi said he would never win another one for the rest of his career." "How long does a g-'s curse take, I mean, is it just a year, the g-'s curse and then does it come off? Because if it is then he's just about right, isn't he? [...] Perhaps the curse is gone; perhaps this is just what Sete Gibernau needed."

^excerpts from the qatar 2005 commentary, the fourteenth round of the season. sete looked like he was making a break for it ahead of valentino and then melandri. six laps to go melandri almost causes valentino to crash and costs valentino over a second, but it doesn't matter. this time it's melandri who has the honours of coaxing a mistake out of sete, who goes off into the gravel as melandri passes him. valentino overtakes melandri for the victory

sometimes, he did just seem cursed in the truest sense of the word. his bike running out of fuel on the last lap while he's still fighting valentino for the victory. mechanical dnf's. other riders barging him out of the way before valentino even has the chance to. he switched manufacturers for 2006, getting a spot on the ducati factory team: his last race with honda was ended by an engine failure and his first race with ducati was ended by an electronics failure. a freak boot protector malfunction that left his foot bleeding halfway through the race. a nasty crash in catalunya, followed by his ambulance crashing into a bus fifty metres in front of the hospital entrance. in the end, it was probably the injury caused by casey stoner bringing him down in estoril that pushed him definitively into retiring - after he was dropped by ducati in favour of casey. so it goes

obviously, valentino cannot be held responsible for anything in that last paragraph. you can't mind game your opponent into having their engine blow up, at least I don't think you can. the stuff before that is fair game. what valentino did in jerez essentially stopped the title fight before it could even get started. it was ruthlessly effective in removing sete as a significant player at the top of the sport. sure, it's always hard to attribute a competitive decline such as this one to any single factor. but if ever there was a time to maybe just blame one person...

sete more often than not has kept his silence about the rivalry. in 2005, he generally did not go much further than saying that the whole thing was one-sided and started by valentino, see this (from one of oxley's books):

But don't ask me about him as a person, I'll only speak about him from a professional point of view, that's about it. I don't know why he's got a problem with me because I've never had a problem with him. I've always had a lot of respect for everyone on the grid, I just wish everyone shared that respect, because once you lose respect you lose everything.

on a similar topic, at some point he has also spoken about the qatar controversy again, saying the following:

He blamed me but it was nothing I did. Of course I didn't report him - I didn't even see what happened. I'd had a very good relationship with Valentino for many years but after that it just came around.

in 2009, at the time of sete's ultimately short-lived motogp comeback, he went along with the slight farce of a reconciliation, shaking valentino's hand and talking to him with cameras watching - the season after valentino had regained his crown in '08. but it is fair to say not all is forgotten. at times, he has done his best to draw a line under jerez and continues to refrain from criticising valentino publicly, like this from 2017:

The Catalan avoids criticizing the Italian for any controversial maneuver, such as that of Jerez 2005. "At the time I was living, based on my values, principles and education, I tried to do things as well as I knew how. And I am very proud of what I did ." Sete explains what it means to battle Vale. "We did very nice things fighting against a phenomenon, he may be the best in the history of motorcycling. I am proud to have fought face to face with a guy who is a phenomenon," he explains.

(obviously, you can read this as valentino not following whatever values, principles or education he might have possessed.) at other times, he's been a little more openly critical. in 2020, he still did not criticise valentino as much as he did the response to the overtake, which he felt set a bad precedent and has contributed to the normalisation of a more aggressive style of racing in the years since:

I don't know how many times we've talked about that corner, but the more time goes by the more I understand after that, things change. Many people were seeing that move, and from that moment on it opened the door for it to happen many more times. At the end of the race, both of us did what we thought was best for the championship, and my opinion can be whatever. But since then things have changed in MotoGP and racing is understood, which I don't agree [with].

he also adds this:

When asked if race direction would have looked into that incident had it happened today, Gibernau responded: "To tell you the truth, no. I don't think so. "I've got different thoughts on that side, which are mine, and like I said I don't need to be right or wrong. Everyone has his own thoughts, and if I put myself now in a situation where I was watching a race and I saw what happened there [at Jerez] where two guys risking their own lives touched each other in a difficult last corner, and I was looking at it with my son who would like to become a road racer, and everyone would give the victory to a guy that has touched another one, I wouldn't be wanting that to happen. "I don't want anyone to get hurt. It's one of my priorities and it's how I understand sport and racing. MotoGP is already so dangerous that in my opinion we should all put together our know how to avoid these type of situations. Is it difficult to do? Yes. Is it impossible to do? I don't think so. It's responsibility to whoever is in charge of the championship and to put the rules where we need to stay away from this type of situation because, like I say, we're risking more than just a crash."

and even more recently, in 2023, he's spoken about the jerez race being the source of his disillusionment:

If I'm telling the truth, Jerez 2005 made me lose my enthusiasm for being in the races. I tried to maintain it until the beginning of 2006, with Ducati, and when we could have won, a mechanic left a gear screw unadjusted and the gear lever fell off. That day, in Jerez 2005, I mentally retired. Valentino went inside and took me out. They didn't penalize him. It's my personal opinion, everyone will have their own opinion and it must be respected, but I think that this is not a contact sport.

also in 2023, in a separate interview, he said this:

But he didn't get a punishment or anything, and then I started to lose my faith in the sport. [...] I couldn't understand how, y'know this was not a contact sport, I couldn't understand... things happen in the championship and things had been going on inside and everything and I just lost my - started to lose my illusion in the racing.

which is later in the same interview followed by this (which is partly about his woes in 2006 - he also talked about the moment with the gear screw, but I think pinpoints that rather than jerez as the day he mentally retired):

I had done such a big effort to put myself to a position to where, I was fighting against my own demons, I was fighting against the championship, I thought no one's helping here. I was fighting against one of the top guys in the history of racing, which was Valentino, and I just thought, but, Valentino doesn't even need to do what he's doing to win, and no one is saying nothing. There was many things there and I just couldn't understand... I'm fighting against everything, you know, and I was expecting the championship to just be a little more neutral on that side, just to say, if someone does something wrong you've got to say, in my opinion, it's not a contact sport; it's already dangerous enough to being able to say you can hit someone and say, wow, that was a great move. [...] Everyone is brave on a MotoGP bike. Moto3, Moto2, MotoGP, from the first guy to the last guy, you cannot pinpoint on TV and say how brave this guy was by hitting another guy. Because if I'm a dad watching that I would not want my son to be in a championship like this. Because it's not bravery, it's not about hitting another guy - if you want to do that, go boxing. [...] And from a guy like Valentino, which is, a superstar, why accept that? I think it was wrong, in my opinion, he didn't need to do that. Since then, many things have been happening because of that movement. Because kids saw that and said that's the way to do it. And then Marquez is doing it to this guy, and the other guy is doing it to the other guy, and you get killed in racing. It's already dangerous. We should stay away from that. That's why I never understood - it got to a point where I just - oh man. It's nothing to do with me here any more, you know, and I just left racing and I retired.

for the most part, then, sete is still quite contained in his criticisms of valentino, focusing on the jerez incident and not really delving into what happened the year prior to that. he mainly questions why valentino even felt the need to do what he did to sete, and suggests valentino set a bad example to others - especially kids watching, especially future riders. his criticisms also concern motogp as a sport, those who set the rules and those who regulate them, in not doing anything to stamp down on this kind of racing. he says he felt like he lacked support from the entirety of the sport and eventually decided that he'd had enough

I haven't added this block of text just because I enjoy transcribing large portions of three hour long podcast interviews that didn't really need to be three hours long (apparently the most tried and tested method of getting riders to share their more candid thoughts about anything) - but because this, uh, average-length tumblr post wouldn't really feel complete without it. it's all very well and good to talk about how sete was mentally 'broken' by what valentino did to him. you can have whatever opinion you want about the thoughts sete expresses here on riding standards and acceptable levels of aggression. you can also maybe doubt whether it really was just 'disillusionment' with race direction's approach to valentino's jerez pass that caused his competitive decline - obviously, three hour confessional podcast interview or not, this is a narrative he's still chosen for a reason and it sells himself and his career in a certain way. but - but - especially given the exact circumstances in which his rise to title challenger status occurred and how heavily he involved himself in the safety commission... well, at the very least I'm not going to leave it out. should he have made his complaints publicly known at the time, if this is something he felt so strongly about? is this level of criticism warranted by that specific jerez move? it's tough, because from the modern perspective of course I too have gotten used to a kind of racing where that level of contact is fairly normalised - which two riders this century have played a disproportionate role in bringing about. on the one hand, valentino is right in his defence that relatively speaking, this is far from the fastest or hardest contact out there. on the other hand, it's a move that was made with the knowledge it would result in contact. and in doing so, he injured sete, because that's what can happen even as a result of relatively 'light' touches. make up your own mind! it's not an easy topic to address, and I most certainly wouldn't be able to do it justice here. let's wrap this up

of delusion and despair

valentino has always been intensely aware of the power of narratives and takes care in how he tells his own story. the most literal version in which anyone can tell their own story is, obviously, by publishing an autobiography - which he did in 2005, covering everything up until his first title with yamaha at the end of 2004. it is not presented in chronological order and is instead organised in a far more loose thematic manner, with valentino not feeling any compulsion to give all parts of his life anywhere close to equal attention. still, when you read it, certain omissions do jump out at you - and the exclusion of gibernau is perhaps the most remarkable. you could say it's because he doesn't want to speak ill of his rivals, but he has no problem going into a fair bit of detail about his feud with biaggi. you could say it's because the gibernau rivalry was still going on at time of writing, but the same is more or less true about biaggi who placed third in the 2004 championship. there is not a single paragraph in his autobiography devoted to the relationship with gibernau. every mention of him is just that: a mention. a name thrown in without care when discussing something else entirely. you are told vale passed gibernau to win the 2004 championship - but if you read the autobiography without any other knowledge of valentino, you'd be forgiven for not realising gibernau had been his title rival at all

yes, within the grand context of his career, biaggi does have to be seen as a more significant rival... but this narrative was still being written in late 2004, at a time in which valentino had committed himself to destroying sete. maybe valentino doesn't want to comment on controversies that are still bubbling along, but the sheer extent of the erasure feels far more deliberate than that. this is somebody who had been valentino's friend for years, enough so that they spent time with each other outside of work, went on holidays together, blokes who for all intents and purposes truly liked each other's company. somebody who had been his closest rival for two years, who had pushed him closer than anyone else had in his title runs, who he had experienced some of his greatest career defeats and victories against. according to the narrative presented by the autobiography, he might as well be just any other rider. it's worse than fury, worse than loathing: it's disinterest

(it has to be said, quite possibly the funniest omission is when he's talking about how "angry and disappointed" he was after qatar because of, and I quote, "honda having lodged an appeal". ... anyone else you thought was involved, valentino? .....?)

which is quite the punishment to enact. one reason why this rivalry is so tricky to analyse is, yes, it's one that's quite old by now, but also because we are drawing from a far smaller sample size of valentino comments - almost all of which were provided at the time - when you compare it to any of his other major rivalries. sure, he still talks about jerez 2005, when he's asked about it - though it might as well just have been another fun race, another dramatic victory, another controversial overtake, rather than anything that had any greater significance. (of course, there is also a clip of him forgetting about the race entirely when thinking about last corner overtakes in the premier class with sete in the room - which you can read into if you so choose.) he's talked plenty over the years about his first yamaha title in 2004, but not about the man he beat to secure it. this was his closest title battle of the ones he won (just pipping 2009), but he might as well have won it against a faceless amalgamation of the honda corporation rather than an actual living breathing rival. it's as if that title battle started and ended in welkom, where it was biaggi not gibernau who valentino had to best. even though publicly the two of them set aside their feud in 2009 and valentino even said then that they could be friends again, this feels like lip service more than anything else. in 2015 at jerez, valentino was questioned about the parallels to his relationship with a certain other rival, who was friendly with valentino at the time but had crashed out while battling vale in the previous race. valentino in response acknowledged his past good friendship with sete, but said it was different: after qatar his relationship with sete had gotten worse as a result of how sete had "played a dirty game". if he had not changed his mind about sete's character eleven years after the fact, why would he have reevaluated in the years since?

it is fair to say that gibernau was the least talented of valentino's major rivals, the least substantial figure in terms of his accomplishments in grand prix racing. biaggi is a four time 250cc champion; nobody needs to be reminded of the achievements of stoner, lorenzo or marquez. sete is the rival who wasn't even supposed to exist; he was catapulted into the position essentially overnight by tragedy. and yet, even acknowledging that, it feels like he is under-discussed in the canon of valentino feuds given the sheer quality of their on-track output (let's face it, there are more great vale/sete battles than there are for say vale/casey) and the high drama of their closest title fight. yes, you can say that's because it is one of the older and less well-remembered rivalries, because it is not quite as dramatic and significant as the biaggi feud... but still, it's quite the disparity. given the power valentino holds in writing the stories within the sport, how can you not conclude that he has played a helping hand in this erasure? being ignored is a far greater indignity than being despised - and after 2004 valentino has barely even offered sete the honour of his hatred

^sete tried to breathe new life into his motogp career by switching to ducati, but his campaign was derailed by injuries. it was probably scant consolation in his miserable 2006 season, but valentino himself was pretty cursed that year. their last on-track battle came at phillip island, in the series' first bike swap race while valentino was fighting tooth and nail to save his doomed title defence. it's admittedly one of like twenty things that happen in that race, but it is quite funny how sete really came back to life just in time to make valentino's life harder when he really didn't need him to. valentino overtook sete on the final corner of the race for the final podium spot

of course, it is a hell of a lot easier to erase a rivalry when you win it so conclusively. in truth, as an opponent, valentino got the measure of sete fairly quickly. he never lost another direct duel against sete after sachsenring 2003, having essentially vowed as much to himself even when they were nominally still on good terms. the 2004 championship was as close as it was because of valentino's unequivocally inferior machinery and the somewhat less consistent results he achieved as a consequence - but even there, when they fought directly for the win in mugello, catalunya, assen and phillip island, each time valentino came out on top. (you can argue about brno '04 - I'd say it doesn't really count since sete ended up running away with the race with a massive tyre advantage.) still, you don't have to be winning all your direct duels with your opponents to be winning the championship - and at the end of the day, sete did come tantalisingly close to a title, or at the very least forcing a title decider. whatever it is that differentiates 'very good riders' from 'champions' is what sete is lacking. he has something in him... a self consciousness, a self awareness even, that is lethal to professional athletes. he was stuck trying to manage the image of his rivalry with valentino, when valentino was moving in for the kill. valentino too is heavily aware of image, is heavily invested in how he tells his own story - but more often than not, he manages to use it as a weapon to spur himself onwards to further success. when valentino did so once again in late 2004, sete stumbled

it is not novel to suggest that valentino needs enemies to motivate himself. plenty of people within the sport have said it, including his fellow riders. that's what's always worth remembering about the 'mind games' - sure, it's great if he unnerves his opponents, but often it is about providing himself with someone to hate though there are exceptions to this, which I have a lot of thoughts about relating to one casey stoner. valentino needs to have a reason to do what he does; it's not enough to win for the sake of winning if there's no story. in 2003, he had more or less won motogp and was finding it harder and harder to motivate himself, admitting repeatedly that he was losing his joy and passion for racing. yes, this was one of the main factors that led to the move to yamaha: to give himself a reason to keep going. but it was also just the right moment for another rival to emerge from nowhere and give valentino somebody new to focus his attentions on. when you read the limited autobiography mentions of sete and his interactions with valentino in 2003, it seems hard not to conclude valentino was already feeling a little less kindly towards sete by the end of that year. the relationship did not survive contact with a true title fight, where valentino found himself pushed closer to the limit than he ever had before. the moment he was in real danger, he blew up the relationship and walked away with literal full points for the remainder of the season. at the very next race to start off the new season, he made sure sete would never be a threat to him again

it's natural to conclude from all of this that the feud was built entirely on the back of valentino's delusions, of valentino inventing a concrete reason to despise sete that was based on his mental list of sete's past transgressions, imagined or otherwise. and maybe it was. did sete really snitch? did valentino really think he did? what was it that convinced valentino of sete's guilt? and even if sete was involved, was this really a proportionate response? this is where a lack of evidence and both parties' reticence to discuss the incident in the years since works against us. but - looking beyond the specifics of what happened in qatar, it does feel likely that the relationship would have deteriorated beyond what we saw in assen anyway. that's what a close title fight tends to do to the people involved. isn't it?

sete makes for a suitable foil to valentino because he too intensely concerns himself with how he is perceived. when vale takes on sete, one pretty boy to another, they are both a little too aware of the artifice of what they are doing, a little too concerned with the optics, the image, the spectacle. rivals, friends, enemies - how far apart are any of those things, really? can we be friends if you desperately covet what I have? if you take pleasure at the thought of my downfall? is this oft-touted ideal of a 'respectful' rivalry inevitably nothing but a facade for the ugly reality that lies beneath? 2004 is what happens when their relationship is actually tested - because now they are finally fighting for something real and they both know it. this is what happens in assen, when valentino decides he needs to win at any cost, when sete realises they are not playing the game by the same rules. sete had been performing graciousness and valentino calls him on his bluff

the best rivalries transform both parties; neither side should be allowed to emerge unchanged from the battle they share. sete entered valentino's life as a competitor at a time when everything was a little too easy and as a result a little too hard for valentino. at a time when valentino felt dissatisfied, underappreciated, judged harshly from all sides and pinned down by the weight of the world's glares. the blows sete inflicted on valentino were primarily symbolic, hurting valentino's pride and reputation rather than his title bid in 2003, which was never under any realistic threat. when valentino was at his lowest that season, he responded by bringing the joy back, reverting to type, with a new haircut and an ironic gag of a celebration and a daring victory to boot. in 2004, however, valentino changed. he had to - he was on a worse bike than his opponents that he was wrestling towards a title it had no right to be winning that year. he didn't have the kind of margin for error any more that he could afford in his honda years, no more foolishness like at the sachsenring. so he became a little tougher and a little meaner and a lot more aggressive in his racing. he shed some of the insouciance that both him and sete have at times been accused of and got down to the serious business of winning. not joylessly - after all there are few things more enjoyable than crushing the enemy. still, it's fine to be a clown prince in your downtime, not when you're barging title rivals aside in assen

it is here, then, at assen, that sete makes a critical, fatal mistake. because sete is torn in two: he wants to be the gracious rival, but he also thinks what valentino did is wrong and wants to communicate as much to the world. maybe it's because it clashes with sete's understanding of racing, maybe it's simply because sete is bitter that he lost - who's to say. except sete can't bring himself to actually say any of this. he chooses the worst possible strategy against valentino: silent disapproval and annoyance and frustration, played up for the television cameras, but without offering a single word of actual complaint until later, when valentino had already offered his explanations and half-apologies. so what valentino takes away from this is twofold. for one, he comes to believe that sete has a problem with his racing and cannot graciously accept his defeat, entirely failing to match valentino's magnanimity on the (rare) occasions when he loses. but unfortunately for sete, what valentino also learns is that - when it comes down to it - sete will not stand up for himself. valentino knows he can do this again

in sepang sete attempts to take the high ground once more, to allow valentino his transgressions and foibles and temper, to be calm in the face of vale's fury, to be the better man. in australia sete pulls himself together to shake hands with valentino, to be respectful of his rival's accomplishments and graceful in defeat, to be the better man. in jerez sete is beyond angry, furious enough to actually approach valentino in parc fermé and say a few words to him, but he still shakes valentino's hand on the podium and refuses to complain directly about him in the press conference - because he is determined to be the better man. does he think he can shame valentino into being different from what he is? if so, it is an unfortunate miscalculation. you cannot claim a moral victory against somebody who does not give a shit

for valentino, at least half the joy of racing has always been about beating the opposition. a new rival is presented to him out of nowhere - and out of him valentino fashions himself an enemy. sete was one of the first people to offer valentino advice when vale entered the premier class, but this was not the last thing valentino learned from him. because what valentino did to gibernau was different than what he did to biaggi. this was not just trying to get a rise out of a bloke he disliked every time he got half a chance. this was not valentino slowly chipping away at his victim's patience and self-control and sanity. what valentino does to gibernau is far more sudden and far more targeted and gets a far more immediate effect. he emerges from qatar weakened and on the back foot and within eight days flips the situation so that he is once again the one in command. sete, who had very much exerted himself in presenting the relationship in a certain way to the world, who wanted so badly for this to be a certain kind of rivalry, ever so respectful - well, valentino found out just where to hurt him. he did it with his sudden public coldness towards sete, with carefully chosen remarks to the press to make clear that nothing had been forgiven, with the jibes and the taunts at each and every stage of his victory. he married the off-track theatre with on-track strategy as well as pure performance, directly disrupting and disturbing sete whenever necessary - the kind of combination he would later find so useful in fending off first casey then lorenzo. it's no coincidence that his three most famous career overtakes are ones that are also so significant in how they affected valentino's fortunes in the aftermath of his victory. laguna 2008 and catalunya 2009 represent complete shifts in momentum within their respective seasons that his rivals never quite recovered from. jerez 2005 ends the title battle at the very first race. and it's not just sete's season that didn't recover - it's his career

of course, it's easier to mess with someone when you have the measure of them in performance. that's always something to keep in mind when talking about mental resilience: it's easier to bounce back from your rival being an asshole to you if you're just really, really good at what you do. valentino always understood himself that any 'mind games' had to be backed up by on-track performance; he's openly stated that all of his off-track "work" on his opponents only gets results if it's paired with being strong on the bike. and he himself lost his cool in qatar - but it helped that he knew he had what it took to bounce back. this was never a rivalry of equals; there was never any question between the two of them who the better rider was. all that being said: it's a really good rivalry! guys, there's some really great races. sete was a serious challenger and he did pose a serious threat to valentino, which you can tell because otherwise valentino never would have needed to do any of this. he made valentino grow as a rider and... do you make someone 'grow as a person' if you make them better at psychological warfare? yes, I think so. actually

valentino became a more accomplished rider for having experienced the sachsenring debacle, and he became a more accomplished rider as a result of the qatar fiasco. he motivated himself to become better because he wanted to defeat sete so badly, and isn't there something compelling about that? valentino was willing to take risks at phillip island that could have resulted in a title decider, was willing to make himself extremely unpopular with the spanish crowd at jerez (not something he has typically had much experience with) - all because he needed to crush sete, to destroy him so completely he could erase him entirely. at the end of the day, there's a bunch of reasons why this rivalry doesn't get the attention it deserve. one of them, however, is that valentino seems to be pretty happy with this state of affairs, and has spent the better part of two decades deeply disinterested in paying sete his dues. don't let him have his way

#sete gibernau #brr brr #//#sg15 #sete ask yay #right I'm aware this is a topic nobody else actually cares about That Much but I had fun and that's what matters #you'd never believe this but there's quite a lot of this I ended up cutting. like I do have More Thoughts I fear #I don't love this as a piece of writing and it runs into some major tonal issues at some stages but well! post like nobody's reading etc #I feel like every time I try and add a read more it fucks the formatting of the pictures but I'm gonna trust it's. Fine #batsplat responds #curse tag

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artbyblastweave · 11 months ago

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I interpret the first two Bioshock games as a cosmic horror story that the protagonists are just glancing off the outer edges of. Slugs don't do that to your genetic code, for one thing, and genetic code has very little bearing on pyrokinesis or teleportation or the ability to grow swarms of bees inside yourself. It's also mighty convenient that Ryan happened to have picked the one spot in the ocean that happens to have The Slugs That Can't Do That- it's obviously part of the mythmaking of Ryan Amusements that they put such a fine point on where he abruptly stopped the boat and declared that he was going to put down the foundations of Rapture, and there's a dash of narrative anthropic principle on top of that, but it's still very convenient. And In terms of aesthetic and narrative outcome Rapture from 1960 onward is certainly checking all the boxes; madness, mutation, moisture. Impossibly grandiose societies brought down by hubris, science run amok, "look upon my works ye mighty", horrible familial truths, the whole shebang. And of course you have that brilliant light below Persephone.

The story doesn't necessarily parse as cosmic horror immediately because it fronts the impression that there's a grounded explanation for every insane thing that happens. You're supposed to just take it as part of the premise that they can build something like Rapture with human technology in 1945. You mostly hear about plasmids from professionals doing practical research and development with them, so you get the impression that there's a well-understood body of science here that just happens to be outside of your personal understanding. But for every Professor Armitage who understands the whole shape of the Dunwich Horror, there are a hundred Massholes who just saw a barn explode for no reason and now have to cope with the very real invisible something laying waste to the countryside regardless of the full truth of the matter. And from within the exploding barn of Rapture it doesn't matter to Jack or Delta whether the foundations were laid down atop Rl'yeh or whether ADAM is actually the extracted blood of a Great Old One or whatever the fuck. Maybe there's someone down there who understands the deep lore and went mad from the revelation in the genre typical way. But nothing about the situation requires you that you dig that deep to develop a working understanding of what's going on. Rapture's downfall is totally legible as a mundane death spiral of bad leadership, shoddy ideology, economic pressures and bog-standard human greed. Impossible weapons swung in careless arcs by human hands.

#bioshock #thoughts #meta

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ot3 · 10 months ago

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The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: Poignant, Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Yuri at its Finest

I went and wrote a review for the Flower that Bloomed Nowhere covering the 5 categories Royal Road requires for it's advanced reviews: Overall, Story, Style, Character, and Grammar. I figured I would crosspost it here as a sort of companion piece to my Flower rec post. If you haven't read Flower, give this a once-over and see if it might interest you. If you have, please consider leaving your own review over on Royal Road to help give the story the glowing reputation it deserves.

This review contains no spoilers.

Overall:

Flower accomplishes what I believe is necessary for all great sci fi to accomplish; it provides a world that feels real and prescient enough for its political and philosophical questions to be meaningful and compelling, without just being a futuristic re-skin of contemporary conflicts. Additionally, it manages for its character-driven storytelling and its complex worldbuilding to compliment and reinforce each other. The character writing feels deeply informed and enriched by the story's political context, and the political context is woven in to the story in this matter rather than running parallel to the murder mystery. It's all inseparable. Additionally, Flower wears its influences on its sleeve without sacrificing any of its unique identity. It skillfully pulls from its sources without being derivative of them, and truly synthesizes the ideas its working with into something new and bold. It is an unflinching work, that categorically refuses settling on any easy answers to its own questions.

Story:

Flower is a mystery story, and it is exacting and thorough about providing a breadcrumb trail for the more theory-minded red string Pepe Silvia types among its reader base. If you, like me, aren't much of a mystery buff and have no interest in solving the mystery yourself, there's still more than enough compelling stuff happening in the story outside of that context that you can enjoy letting Flower take you on its ride. To me, Flower is about getting to watch the complexities of Su and Ran's relationship unfold alongside the political and philosophical complexities of the world they live in. It weaves a compelling yarn about mortality, and what the consequences are of a desire to live without the corresponding means. Its ruminations on death run the gauntlet from brutally cavalier depictions of suicide to existential machinations that attempt to claw all of mankind away from the inevitability of an end.

Flower is slow. This may be a turnoff for some people, but the time it takes is clearly deliberate and does not feel wasted. The parts where I was least engrossed were the parts that were more bogged down in the murder details, but considering this is a murder mystery that sells itself as such, it would be insane of me to criticize it for including genre conventions I'm just not personally fond of. Fork spotted in kitchen, etc. Despite being slow, it is not poorly paced. New revelations about the characters, setting, and underlying mystery are drip-fed to the readership consistently enough that reading feels rewarding. You're not left with the impression that the narrative is detrimentally withholding information in order to artificially encourage continued readership.

Style:

We spend the vast majority of Flower on the receiving end of first-person narration from our protagonist Su. First person can be difficult to pull off, but Lurina nails it here. There's an intimacy and vulnerability to Su's narration as we see all of her worst traits on full display, with the truth of her actions and their motivation trickling in as we begin to peel back the layers of her character. But there's still room for deception, if not dishonesty, in Su's narrative. Very in line with the way Flower questions our ability to ever know another person. It reminds me a lot of how the same subject is explored in Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint which has similarly effective use of first person albeit in a strikingly different context.

This all to say that the style is perfectly fitted to what the narrative is trying to accomplish. Su's narration is suitably pessimistic, deeply prone to navel-gazing, and often judgemental. The biggest stylistic issue I tend to see with first person is when the more descriptive parts stop feeling like a character's own observation and analyses, really jarring you out of their headspace, but every bit of exposition we get throughout the course of the story is so painfully Su. It's a delight to read.

Character:

Oh man is the character stuff here fantastic. Su is Harry DuBois for girls who realized they were lesbians in middle school. No, but seriously Flower is definitely up there alongside Disco Elysium in terms of portrayal of mental illness that have personally resonated with me. On top of Su herself being a peak insane woman in fiction, Ran, Su's best friend by circumstance and right hand man in their personal quest is a fascinating character in her own right. Slowly peeling back the layers of their relationship and beginning to understand what the dynamic between the two actually is has been my favorite part of reading Flower and it's definitely some of my favorite character writing of all time. Flower's supporting cast is an absolute blast as well. Lurina does a great job of writing characters who I almost definitely would not want to hang out with but nonetheless love reading about. The characters don't fall into stale archetypes and instead have enough little details and quirks that make them feel plenty human.

Grammar:

The finicky technical bits of writing rank really low on what I care about in a story unless there's a particularly egregious amount of errors. Flower has some typos and grammatical issues, but with a work of this size that updates regularly and doesn't have the privilege of professional editing services, I think it'd be pretty unrealistic and unfair to expect it to be typo free. None of it has ever impeded my ability to understand or enjoy what's happening in the text, which is really the only standard I hold self-published/ongoing works to in this regard.

TL;DR:

Flower is good and you should read it if you like insane women or when characters take a break in the middle of someone trying to murder them so they can have an impromptu political debate.

#the flower that bloomed nowhere #flower

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moonmacabre01 · 8 months ago

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You know what would be a banger story?

Bandee getting amnesia and his friends falling over their feet to try and get him back to normal.

No, don't look at me like that. I promise my idea's at least kind of good. I think.

I'm not sure my idea really counts as "amnesia" since Bandee hasn't really lost his memory so much as it got sealed off by the villain, who's using Bandee as a distraction so he can take over Popstar(bog standard motive, I know. Least his method's creative . . ?). But anyways.

Bandee get hits by the sealing spell, and regresses HARD. Back to pre RTDL, where he really started to come into his own as a hero. Obviously, the rest of the Dream Team(plus Elfilin and Magolor) freak out. No one knows about the villain, so they're all frantically trying to figure out WHAT happened and HOW do we reverse/fix it. Magolor's flipping through spellbook after spellbook, and everyone else is carrying Bandee from place to place trying to jog his memory. Meta Knight takes him for a flight(you were so scared the first time . . ), Dedede asks him to help with a mechanical project(how many late nights have we spent like this?), Kirby takes him apple picking(you taught me how to get them without hurting the tree!), and Elfilin brings him to Waddle Dee town(I thought it was amazing, the way you kept everyone together). And slowly, Bandee starts to feel he's been here before . . . that's he's something more than he thinks.

(One of the few actual scenes in my head involves Elfilin and Bandee watching the sunset in Waddle Dee town, and Elfilin admitting that while Kirby's his hero and friend, Bandee's the one he really looks up to. [In my headcanon, Elfilin met Bandee before Kirby arrived, and watched him organize construction efforts, keep up morals, and really be a leader. And after the events, Bandee was one of the most encouraging in helping Elfilin learn to handle his power, always patient and understanding. Safe to say, Bandee really means a lot to Elfilin, just as much as Kirby] Bandee is really touched by this confession, and the sealing spell, already weakening, starts to crack ever so slightly.)

While Elfilin is taking Bandee back to Castle Dedede, they come across the villain, who's begun their attack, in combat with Kirby and the others, and things aren't looking too great for the Dream Team. This causes something to click in Bandee's head. These people are his FRIENDS, and he has to help them, he can't let them lose. This revelation is the final straw for the seal, which breaks and causes the sealed memories to flood back. With the memories comes new resolve, and he manages to turn the tide of the battle, and is, fittingly, the one to defeat the villain.

All in all, everything turns out okay. Everyone's relieved that Bandee is back to normal, and Bandee has a new understanding just how much he means to the people around him. The final scene in a way mirrors the scene in WDT, with everyone watching the sunrise together.

#if you read the whole thing thank you ^^#I'm still fuzzy on a lot of things #but once I iron a few things out I might try and make a proper fanfic out of this #kirby #bandee #magolor #elfilin #kirby character #king dedede #meta knight #text post #long post #moonmacabre01

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into-september · 1 year ago

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"Destruction" is the worst episode of Miraculous Ladybug

Oh hey guys, remember way back in April or something when I said I was doing this? Well, the one year anniversary of its premiere is a suitable time to post this, particularly since yesterday saw the airing of the last piece of canon to come out in a while, which happened to be set immediately after these events.

With the always obligatory reminder in place that I generally think that “Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir” is in fact a good TV show whose appeal potentially reaches beyond its merchandise-mandated target group, it has an unflattering pattern of introducing the juiciest story threads and then just… do nothing about them.

The topic of today’s sermon isn't in isolation the worst offender. But it is thanks to this that the worst offender happens at all, so I'm not gonna be nice about it.

Scroll past to skip the negativity.

So, “Destruction”, possibly the most eagerly awaited episodes of out S5 if you don’t count all the false advertisement that was “Revelation”. I remember finding this episode uncharacteristically charmless for this show when I first watched it. They've been onto heavy topics before, but those episodes still had that je ne sais quoi that gives this show such heart. But re-watching "Destruction" I found it lacking already from the first scene, and felt it only in glimpses. It's just not fun.

The episode is also poorly paced, no way around it. It is inexplicably a flashback to two episodes ago which is not evident from the start. More than half the runtime technically consists of Marinette and Alya having a sleepover. The battle and its game-changing outcome is over at 12 minutes into the episode, which is barely past the halfway point. After that, we spend five minutes - a quarter of the episode's full runtime - on a flashback re-playing the same battle but now with verbal exposition explaining Marinette's clever plan. Mind that the confrontation between Marinette and Gabriel lasts for all of seven minutes, meaning that the flashback is nearing the length of the battle itself.

To top it of, it's bogged down with lengthy exchange between Gabriel and the kwamis just to make clear that the haters on the twitter were totally wrong when they bitched about Orikko being OP because actually its powers were something else than we established last season. Here's a bonus plot hole which has nothing to do with everything else I'm going to nag about: Orikko allegedly can't give out the powers of time-travel because no kwami can replicate another kwami's powers. Except for Nooroo and Duusu, I guess, who have done so on several occasions. One of the more remarkable being the episode which first heralded the event that "Destruction" set in motion: "Timetagger".

And who can forget that this was the second time in three episodes where Ladybug and Cat Noir had Monarch at their mercy but spent so much time giving triumphant speeches that he gets away.

Or that that in fact was the second time on the same night.

But while those things certainly make the episode poor, they are not what makes it the worst.

What makes this episode the worst isn't its technical failures, but about the way it leaves its feces all over the themes and the character arcs it seemed like the show had been building up until this point. Moreover: in the role it plays in S5 and the Agreste storyline, and how the show's refusal to touch it again creates a black hole in the season at large, and arguably in the show as a whole.

I. THE INESCAPABLE CONTEXT OF WHAT CAME BEFORE IT

The art of telling a story is the art of highlighting what matters and leaving out what doesn’t. In a well-crafted story, no matter the medium, no detail is insignificant. Every word is carefully chosen, every line or hue made with intention. The curtains aren’t blue just because, and Miraculous Ladybug has made too many meta jokes to hide behind the claim that it’s just a silly rom-com for kids. It has trained its older audience into looking for context and connections; after “Mr. Pigeon 72”, you can’t insist that nothing that happened earlier in this show matters for what happens later. Titles matter a lot in a show where episodes are titled after the villain-of-the-week who usually is the thematic mirror to what our heroes are going through.

“Destruction” is the fourth episode somehow named after Adrien, and the third somehow named after Plagg. You bet this matters.

As some might know, "Kuro Neko" is not my favourite episode. That's not to say I don't like it! It's cute! It's playing a really interesting scenario! We get Plagg hanging out at chez Marinette! But to enjoy it, I have to willfully ignore the storytelling incompetence it flagrantly displays. Because the moment you peek beneath the surface of the events happening to consider theme, motifs, and narrative parallels, it's just

"Kuro Neko" is the second episode that is named after Cat Noir. The first one was "Cat Blanc". There is a thematic connection between the two; not a very clear one and probably not an intentional one, but all the same: both episodes are about an alternative to Cat Noir. One is the result of his father's violence; the other is Adrien's own attempt to become more like the person he presents around his father. They also both show us Plagg and Adrien negotiation Adrien's relationship to Ladybug, and how Ladybug and Cat Noir negotiate that same thing.

"Cat Blanc", for all its apocalyptic visions, starts and ends with hope. It starts with Marinette’s hope at confessing to Adrien, to Adrien’s hope in finally knowing Ladybug’s identity and knowing her like he’s yearned for for three seasons. Those hopes lead to disaster, but the episode ends with Ladybug finding Cat Noir on the Montparnasse Tower, where he is singing his lullaby about the kitty being "all alone without his Lady". As is fitting, Marinette breaks the pattern: after having just witnessed a world turned to destruction because the two of them loved each other, she leans her head on his shoulder in perhaps the most romantic gesture she's ever given him.

"Kuro Neko", in contrast, starts with Adrien resigning the job when he realises that Ladybug no longer needs him and that makes him feel bad. It ends with him coming back and verbally accepting that Ladybug doesn't owe him any exclusive treatment; he isn't her unique partner, just one of many. Where the final scene of "Cat Blanc" seemed to confirm that Ladybug is indeed the answer to Adrien's solitude, the final scene of "Kuro Neko" and its continuation in the first scene in "Risk" both make clear that the opposite is now status: Adrien has to accept the painful fact that as much as Ladybug might be the most important person in his life, Cat Noir does not hold a similar space in Ladybug's.

(The end of “Strike Back” of course claims to remedy this, but those words don’t ring very true when to Marinette’s knowledge, nothing of what went wrong today had anything to do with her keeping secrets from Cat Noir. More damning: Marinette never follows up on her purported regret. In all of S5, she never once sits down to share all those secrets with Cat Noir. Status from "Kuro Neko" still stands, and Adrien is fine with that now. This has nothing to do with the many problems “Destruction” creates, but talking about “Kuro Neko” by necessity means talking about how it wasn’t fixed even if they put the words in Marinette’s mouth. And now back to our scheduled programming)

"Cat Blanc" and "Kuro Neko" by their very existence bring up a thorny topic: That Adrien being Cat Noir isn't wholly unproblematic, and that both Adrien as an individual and Ladybug as the Guardian might have legitimate reasons to question that choice. This has always been obvious to the viewer who knows Hawkmoth’s identity, but the show itself eventually starts calling attention to that from an entirely different angle - namely that of his powers.

Lest we forget: The first episode of S4 that aired wasn't the first episode chronologically: It was "Furious Fu", wherein we learn that The Order of the Guardians has it out for Plagg specifically, and where Ladybug's status as The Guardian is almost revoked on the grounds that she's letting him run around unsupervised. This question of Plagg's whereabouts comes up again in the only episode that is named after Adrien sans Plagg: "Ephemeral", a re-play of “Cat Blanc” except not good. This whole subplot is quickly forgotten, though it being the only one of Su-Han's complaints that weren't about him being a boomer, it's also worth remember that "Destruction" technically happens a couple of hours after he made his last appearance. One might expect that his one consistent lesson would be important enough to echo a bit in the episode where it’s proven to be justified.

"Destruction", as not only one very early episode of the season promising to finally bring about some significant and not the least permanent changes to their lives, but indeed an episode happening on the same night as Ladybug's declaration of regret and Cat Noir's renewed declaration to be her partner, would by its title and its topic seem like the obvious place to finally resolve what "Cat Blanc" and "Kuro Neko" both asked us to question: The existential terror of Plagg's powers, why it is that Adrien is uniquely chosen to temper them at Ladybug’s side, and how Adrien feels about being the one to carry that responsibility.

Yeah. Well.

II. ADRIEN'S PRESENCE IN "DESTRUCTION"

Where "Kuro Neko" and "Cat Blanc" place significant focus on Adrien Agreste in his civillian life, in "Destruction" he appears on screen for a total of 25 seconds - most of which are another flashback to a previous episode, and whose purpose is to highlight Gabriel's hurt from the cataclysm, not Adrien's thoughts about what is happening.

Cat Noir's presence is also marginal. Three minutes of screentime pass from his first appearance until the battle is over. Said battle is the turning point in the war between the heroes and Monarch, thanks to neither Ladybug's powers nor Monarch and all the kwamis, but Monarch using Cat Noir's powers for an impulsive act of self-mutilation. Cat Noir is distraught over this, turning desperate when Monarch first start toying with the idea and being near tears after he carries it out.

I'll get back to the impact of this event, but for now I'll point out that the aftermath is brief: After Monarch escapes, our heroes have this exchange:

LB: We had him, we almost had him! The kwamis were safe, they were right here! CN: I cataclysmed him! I can't believe this, I just cataclysmed someone! Granted it was Monarch, but - there was a real person behind that mask, and it must have hurt him terribly! Milady, you gotta fix this! LB: Cat Noir, Monarch just ran away with my lucky charm! Without it, I can't fix anything. I can't call on my powers and undo the effect of the cataclysm. There's nothing I can do...

We then cut to the slumber party, where Marinette tells Alya that she and Cat Noir "split up" immediately after, and Alya comforts her. From this point in the episode, Cat Noir and Adrien only appear in flashbacks. First a fifty-second flashback wherein Marinette sets up her convoluted plans, then a few seconds of him moving his statue in the wax museum before Monarch appears.

In the episode that more than anything should thematise Adrien, Plagg's powers, and his relationship to his father, Adrien is on screen for a whooping four minutes and twenty seconds.

And because I am that devoted to proving my point, I went and timed all of Alya's on-and-off appearances, which clocked in at a total of five minutes and six seconds.

Alya is of course core to the slumber party which frames the setting of the entire episodes. Moreover, it is with Alya that the emotional arc of the episode ends: it starts with Marinette tormenting hersef watching a Ladyblog report about Monarch's recent win, for which Alya chastises her. The last scene (before Gabriel pulverises the miraculous) has Alya reassure Marinette that she will get the kwamis back. When she regrets her lack of superpowers, Marinette in turn reassures her that Alyas true superpower is being her friend. The journey of the episode was for Marinette to stop blaming herself for messing up, and learning to rely on Alya's support in the new turn the war has taken.

...

IN THE EPISODE WHERE ADRIEN KILLS HIS FATHER.

III. SIR NOT-APPEARING-IN-THIS-FILM

In the episode where Gabriel commits suicide on his son's miraculous, here are some things that got more screentime than the son forced into using his only source of liberation to kill his father:

Flashbacks to past events (four minutes and fourty-five seconds)

Alya (five minutes six seconds)

The kwamis (six minutes and nine seconds)

Bet you can't guess which one is the only kwami who doesn't appear in this episode!

...okay, and Duusu, but you get the point. In the episode detonating the nuke that is the gruesome potential of Plagg's powers, and the potential damage Adrien might deal with them, Plagg never appears on screen.

In the episode highlighting the presence of the kwamis and their importance to their holders, the kwami whose presence is the most thematically tied to his holder's character arc is completely absent.

In the episode irreparably going into the only kwami whose powers is straight up murder, the kwami who The Guardians have singled out specifically as particularly dangerous, the kwami whose irresponsible nature has previously caused problems both to Adrien privately and Cat Noir professionally, said kwami is never even mentioned.

It's almost as if we're not supposed to remember that it is because of his presence that this whole tragedy was possible.

IV. THE EXISTENCE-DEFINING HORROR OF A CATACLYSM GONE WRONG

And ain’t that a funny one, when the gruesome potential in Plagg’s powers was the driving factor in Adrien’s first true crisis as a hero?

Marinette faced her moment in "Origins", where she gave up on her miraculous after the first disastrous attempt. She knows that she is the only one who can do something about the situation, but refuses out of her own lacking courage. She only becomes Ladybug of her own choice when she realises that she can save Alya's life. After this, Marinette never again questioned her place. She would grieve the burden on occasion, but she never once thought anyone else could do better.

Adrien, as we all know, was the polar opposite: he jumped right into it without reading the manual, had to have Ladybug pick up the pieces after a rash cataclysm, and never doubted his calling again until he realised what Plagg’s powers could do when used on a living being.

The NYC special has Adrien quit for reasons that had nothing to do with being unsatisfied with Ladybug's HR policies. It is in part because he effed up his duty as Paris' substitute guardian, but it's certainly also because of the recent horror he just witnessed: his hand forced by someone else nearly killed Ladybug, and killed Uncanny Valley instead as she stepped between them. Adrien just saw a mother weeping over her daughter's corpse, and how only the lucky presence of Ladybug's powers could undo the damage caused by his, unintentional thought it might have been. Adrien would of course never kill anyone on purpose, but Uncanny Valley’s temporary malfunction was a brutal display of what would happen if he stumbled the wrong direction with the gun loaded. Ladybug might have the duty to protect Paris, but Cat Noir has the duty to not to disintegrate people on touch.

The show never before discussed the weight of this burden in Adrien’s presence. “Cat Blanc” did it from Marinette’s side, but this never was a consistent story thread, only briefly brought up as her remembering why his knowing her identity is a bad idea. The sabbatical in “Kuro Neko” has nothing to do with Plagg or with Adrien’s sense of duty, and where you’d think this would be where Marinette finally brings up the issue bridging the NYC special and “Cat Blanc”, neither of the two are as much as alluded to. That Adrien has the power of murder has yet to be explicitly discussed in the show proper, but in combination with his personal relationship to Hawkmoth being a ticking irony bomb, the question of can he even bear it is inevitable.

That Adrien’s post as Cat Noir wasn’t as given as Marinette’s as Ladybug is echoed in the amount of times that Adrien has either quit or at least contemplated doing so (“Syren”, NYC special, “Wishmaker”, “Kuro Neko”). He likes being Cat Noir more than Marinette likes being Ladybug, but he lacks her iron certainty in the role. It is notable, then, that THE ONE TIME where Marinette questions her part, it is after Cat Noir has quit. She says this, out loud, in words. When Cat Noir’s powers become too heavy for Adrien to carry, then Ladybug, too, disappears.

So surely "Destruction" must be the point where this is finally comes together - where Adrien's history of quitting meets his ultimate crisis, where his powers abused on a human being of flesh and blood forces him into confronting the potential cost of being this particular hero, which will foreshadow the ultimate choice he’ll have to take: between being Cat Noir and being his father’s son. And where his choice, in turn, will define whether Ladybug can exist.

Or not.

Maybe we'll never again have Adrien think about how he probably murdered a man. Maybe we'll just - oh I don't know.

Have him start trying to cataclysm people?

Repeatedly?

While showing none of the horror at himself which he clearly had in the aftermath of accidentally cataclysming the villain responsible for his later victims’ possession?

And in the end, after never calling attention to Adrien’s new and trigger happy ways, we’ll have him give in to his fear, claim that he isn’t strong enough to responsibly use Plagg’s powers, and send his miraculous away for Ladybug to use alone, because it turns out that “Kuro Neko” was right and the NYC special was wrong: she can be Ladybug without him.

Growth, amirite.

V. IN THIS HOUSE WE DON’T TALK ABOUT PATRICIDE

Dramatic irony was the main engine driving "Miraculous Ladybug" from the start, and it was Adrien who bore the brunt of it. Not only did he spend four and a half seasons in unrequited love with a girl who rejected him for himself; he spent five seasons doing weekly battle against his own father.

The superpower war between father and son isn't just a source of story tension, however: it is inextricably mirrored in their relationship as family, where the father is openly abusive and the son is magically incapable of protesting. The show repeatedly makes A Point about how the freedom Adrien so wants, is one that he only gets through being Cat Noir, and the only way Adrien is capable of fighting his father - albeit ignorant of it - is with Plagg's powers.

Cat Noir defeating Hawkmoth was necessary not just for his story as a superhero, but as his character arc as a normal boy.

And in "Destruction", this is exactly what happens. Thanks to Plagg's powers, the path to Adrien's freedom is finally paved, in the most gruesome and unwanted manner possible. Adrien might not get the big cathartic show-down with his evil father, but technically he was the one to bring him down.

But we don't talk about that. Except for his one (1) line after Monarch escapes with Ladybug's lucky charm, Adrien never again brings up the fact that his being careless with a cataclysm certainly maimed a man, by precedent (Aeon) possibly killed him. Rather than a story arc about Adrien being afraid of his own powers, it’s only now that he starts aiming it at people when he’s under emotional duress. This could of course have been one hell of a story point if it was intentional, but by all accounts, it wasn’t. When Adrien never again reflects on his having probably murdered a man, or reasons that Monarch is probably fine since he’s clearly still around so maybe a cataclysm isn’t so bad, and he never dwells on his nearly murdering two of his friends, there can’t have been any connection intended here. Moreover: when Adrien is scared of his miraculous towards the end, it’s not about its capacity for normal murder when he’s having a bad day, but its capacity of ending the world if he happens to be akumatised.

Gabriel is likewise disinterested in the cause of his impending disintegration. You’d think the man would feel some kind of special resentment towards Cat Noir and his powers, you could think this was where he’d get to re-thinking his relationship to the two people who are sitting on the keys to solving all his problems. Maybe he’d start doubting himself now, bearing the ultimate testament to his magical hubris. But no. The cataclysm wound is there and it’s a problem, but the reason it happened is completely irrelevant to the man who did this to himself and unknowingly, to his son.

That is almost as mind-blowing as the fact that they really had a straight up patricide happen on screen. Sure, death was never the intention of either of the two parties, and Adrien certainly holds no blame for what happened. But Gabriel must have at least known what he was risking, and even if the soft-hearted Adrien would somehow reason away the gravity, Plagg would certainly now. By its very nature, this one cataclysm drags out and distils a plethora of questions about both Adrien’s role as Cat Noir, about Gabriel’s vision of himself and his goals, and about their relationship not as father and son, but as villain and hero. The gruesome narrative irony looming over all this is in that regard just the icing on the cake.

There is certainly an Oedipal layer to the drama of Gabriel and Adrien, though the often more scandalous incestuous angle is considerably downplayed here. Even so: By the denouement of S5, Adrien has successfully killed his father and set up a home with his mother. That really happened, but we’re sure not going to investigate how this influenced the relationship between two nemesis, between father and son, between Adrien and his kwami.

The cataclysm in “Destruction” turned Adrien from anguished shoujo love interest to the hero of a greek tragedy, but the show is dead set on pretending that it didn’t.

VI. SO THEN WHAT WAS THE POINT

In isolation, "Destruction" comes across as weird more than anything. It's named after Adrien's kwami, it spends an inordinate amount of screentime on Adrien's father, it reaches back to Adrien's perhaps most defining moment as Cat Noir as it fundamentally changes the game between our heroes and our villains as one of them is finally dealt a damaging blow - which in turn sets Adrien's life down a path towards tragedy that must be interfered with for him to have a happy ending by the end of the season.

And yet, Adrien is a peripheral presence in it. Marinette and Gabriel dominate the screentime, Alya and the kwamis are consistently present as the thematic chorus at their respective sides throughout, the episode plays its events twice in order to make it clear that Ladybug is too clever for Monarch's miraculous, the emotional arcs that are followed are the follow-up on where Marinette and Alya stand after the disaster in "Strike Back" as well as Gabriel's renewed vigour. Adrien's only contribution to the episode is to follow Ladybug's instructions and to make clear that his relationship with his father is still awkward. The episode depicts probably THE most important event of the show, but this event is treated almost as an afterthought, and the horrors of it are confined to one (1) line of dialogue from Cat Noir.

The only thing in “Destruction” that is brought up in later episodes is that Gabriel is now actively dying. If they wanted for Gabriel to live on a countdown for his date with the grim reaper, there were countless other ways about it: Have it be his use of too many miraculous which backfires, have him having used the peacock before it was fixed, have it be too much evil on the hands of Nooroo, have him get a serious call from his doctor, have him screw up Tomoe's machinery, have him develop a drug problem. This is a fictional narrative; its twists and turns are absolutely in the hands of the writers, teenage girls being irredeemable or not. It was never vital that this happened by cataclysm specifically.

So what was the point, then? Did we truly turn our magical girl show into a Greek tragedy for the shocked pikachu faces only?

The one thing I somehow haven't seen people bring up, is that "Destruction" makes it impossible for Adrien to learn Monarch's identity. According to the writers themselves, the reason lies in two of the other episodes named after him: "Cat Blanc" and "Ephemeral", wherein he learns his father's identity and is promptly akumatised. This is of course bullshit: both these cases relied not on Adrien learning his father's identity, but on Gabriel specifically scheming to traumatise Adrien with both the Hawkmoth reveal AND the fact that he's been living in the same house as his mother's dead body for the last year or two (timeline here is spectacularly contradictory). There was anothing inevitable about this. You're the writers. You could've set up a scenario where Adrien didn't learn about his father's crimes as an act of psychological warfare, and where he'd have the time to absorb it, to grieve and to find support by the time he'd confront him with it. Having every person close to Adrien keep life-defining secrets from him “for his own good” is, by god, not a good look on anyone involved here. Still it’s understanable, at least for those who aren't either adults or gods of destruction.

"Destruction", however, serves as an explanation for the gaping plot hole in the epilogue: Marinette tells Alya, she tells Su-Han. The one she doesn't tell, though?

The partner who was at her side before Alya or Su-Han ever appeared, and stood by her in far worse storms. Because telling Cat Noir the truth would mean telling Cat Noir that he dealt Gabriel Agreste the killing blow, and ain't that a nifty way to ensure that Marinette won't. Because if Adrien does learn Monarch's identity and the truth about his fall in future seasons, Emilie better hide those garment pins.

The truly damning part of "Destruction" isn't so much what the episode itself does. It's what it doesn't do. It's the storylines it cuts short and leaves behind, and it is the storyline it by its very existence introduces, but which the show refuses to touch.

Per title and content both, "Destruction" should be the culmination of thematic storylines from "Cat Blanc", the NYC special and "Kuro Neko". It’s not; it’s not even about Adrien, and Plagg isn’t even present in it. Moreover: its lacking presence on future episodes make it painfully evident that ambitions, there were none. Those storylines were either aborted like Adrien picking up Felix's spyglass in the S4 finale, or the show never did mean for there to be such a thing as "layers" to this story about a boy who becomes a hero to unknowingly break free from his superhero father.

The real reason why "Destruction" is the worst episode of Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is that it obliterates the most cohesive character arc this show had going for it, and that this was done on purpose.

#miraculous ladybug #ml criticism #mlb meta #blah #adrien agreste #gabriel agreste #storytelling #mira

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charlottesbookclub · 8 months ago

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which plants each of the greens would get from the plant shop where i work 🪴🌱🌿🍃

y'all i am so sorry for my sporadic activity on this blog and also for the chaotic jumble of fandoms i keep posting about with no warning 😭

so i was kinda into hotd last season, and with the new trailers coming out i was thinking about it again and this idea came to me like a revelation from on high so i decided to curse you all with these headcanons as well

for context, i work at a houseplant shop and was watering my own plants today when i was seized by the vision of which plant(s) each of the greens would get from the shop

i guess this is kind of modern au but not really?? like i guess i sort of envisioned it as the characters walking out of the world/canon of the show and into the plant store and so that's the characterization i went with idk

anyway sorry this is so chaotic – here are the headcanons:

alicent – def something pretty basic but classic like a pothos or a philodendron. a marble queen pothos would be especially appropriate, so honestly that's what i would probably recommend if she asked. is able to keep it alive just fine but i'm just not sure i would recommend anything too much more demanding – i just feel like losing a plant would be too demoralizing for her. also i feel like she would be one of those people who would come in and be like "i need a plant that filters air bc i need clean air in my living space" and i'd have to put on my best customer service voice/smile and be like "well actually ma'am that's all of them – that's kind of like one of their main things" lmaoooo

criston – i truly do not believe that this man could keep a plant alive; i'm just not convinced of it. i think he'd get a funky spiky little succulent or cactus and it would be dead within a week and he'd come back in and i'd recommend a snake plant (very hard to kill) and then he'd kill that too 💀 but also i think he'd be sooooooooo in denial about it and always come up with a bunch of other things that must've happened to it

aegon – also cannot keep a plant alive but is painfully self-aware about this fact. would def be one of those people who comes in, walks right up to the counter and instantly says "i need a plant i can't kill." so i'd point him to the snakes and zz's and he'd get either a nice black coral or golden hahnii snake plant. the funniest thing about this is that i'm convinced that aegon's snake plant would actually survive and criston would be sooooo pissed about it. like he wouldn't water it for weeks, and then when he finally remembered to, he accidentally (drunkenly) watered it with wine and it still lived and criston was fucking livid about it

aemond – would for sure have more success keeping plants alive than aegon or criston. i feel like he'd try to start with something cool but tricky, like a complicated carnivorous plant, and after excruciating months of going back and forth with it, it kinda just gives up because he tries to do everything precisely by the book rather than reading the signs of the actual living plant in front of him. he admits defeat only personally – he tells everyone else that he gave to plant to helaena. he comes back for something a little easier and goes for a nice dracaena marginata (yes, he did buy it mostly because the name sounds like "dragon" and also because it was spiky and cool). he's definitely able to keep that one alive and it lives in the corner of his chambers and he's secretly very proud of his success with it. also he does not even let criston or aegon so much as look at it lmao

helaena – my girl could buy anything in the whole store and keep it alive 😌😌 she for sure likes the "weirder" plants and has a whole bog garden situation of carnivorous plants aemond is insanely jealous of this but never admits it out loud. she's very drawn to strange-looking cacti and succulents, and also fun little novelty plants like goldfish plants, string of turtles/bananas/hearts/pearls, starfish snake plants, etc. also, whenever she comes in she always buys all of the scraggly discount plants because she feels bad for them and nurses them all back to health. she has not lost a single plant yet regardless of the state it was in when she got it, and she doesn't intend to start any time soon 😌

#please excuse the absolute chaos of whatever these are 😅#charlotte rambles #house of the dragon #hotd #house of the dragon headcanon #hotd headcanon #alicent hightower #alicent hightower headcanon #criston cole #criston cole headcanon #aegon ii targaryen #aegon ii targaryen headcanon #aemond targaryen #aemond targaryen headcanon #helaena targaryen #helaena targaryen headcanon

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duhragonball · 1 year ago

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Dragon Ball Super Movie 2: Super Hero (3/5)

"What are any of us doing here? We're not even in this movie!"

So the Red Ribbon Army is trying to stage a comeback with a fresh crop of new androids, and Goku isn't around to stop them, because he's on Beerus' planet training with Vegeta and Broly. While Piccolo figures out what to do without them, the movie just goes ahead and shows us what Goku is up to. For about ten minutes.

I'm pretty sure this part of the movie is a concession to Goku's fans. Let's face it, the people love Goku, and to do a Dragon Ball movie with no Goku at all would be a risky proposition, no matter how good that movie is. Looking back at the old DBZ films, Movies 9, 10, and 11 were mostly Goku-free, but he still put in a brief appearance in each one. But those are also regarded as some of the worst entries in the series, and I don't think that's a coincidence.

Now, I'm a fan of Dragon Ball in general, so the idea of a Piccolo and Gohan movie is not only appealing to me, but I'd say it's long overdue. I'd take a Yamcha/Tien movie any day. Or a Launch standalone film. I sat through GT, so it'd take a lot to keep me out of the theater. But Toei's trying to run a business here, and they can't just depend on die-hards like me to bring in the ticket revenue. So I'm sure the decision to focus on Piccolo was a controversial one in the home office. But they probably reached a compromise by giving Goku a decent chunk of screentime as a make-good.

One thing that makes this movie so good is that they don't just toss out a character for the sake of having them in the movie. They actually take a moment to show what that character is doing these days, even if it doesn't affect the plot that much. That's important, because it lets the viewer come away feeling like they got something out of the cameo they just saw. For example, we've seen Goku and Vegeta on Beerus' planet before. This is nothing new, but this time Goku's trying to help Broly control his power. And Vegeta's trying to meditate so he can learn how to imitate Jiren's power. Goku doesn't really understand his approach, which goes to show that Vegeta's trying to push beyond the scope of the training they've done on Beerus's planet before now. Gohan is studying ants, Videl has her combat sports class, Piccolo's a homeowner, etc.

Compare this to Battle of Gods, for example. Now BoG's a good movie, don't get me wrong, but a lot of the characters who appear in the film are utterly wasted. Tien shows up but he looks and acts exactly the same as he did the last several times we've seen him. Then he shows up in Resurrection F and nothing's changed either. He says he left Chiaotzu and Yamcha behind for the big fight, but would it matter either way? If they showed up, they wouldn't do anything new with those guys either.

The trick is to not just put Ox King in your movie, but to have him mention something that he's gotten up to lately, something Ox King fans can mull over later. "Oh, hey, remember how Ox King said he was going back to school to get a sociology degree?" You can sink your teeth into that, even if that's the only thing that you find out about from him. It's a lot better than "It's Bulma's birthday, and one of the guests is Ox King, a character who certainly exists."

Let's talk about Vegeta's revelation in this movie, since it caused some commotion among the fans. Goku complains that Vegeta had just been sitting still lately, which he thinks is a waste of time. Vegeta explains that he's been studying the way Jiren fought during the Tournament of Power. While he dominated Goku and Vegeta--sometimes both at once-- Vegeta is certain that Jiren isn't that much stronger than they are. What made Jiren so tough to deal with was that he was completely relaxed until the very moment he chose to strike, which allowed him to put all of his power into those brief offensive moments. But since Vegeta can't do that himself, he's trying to train his mind to conceptualize it before he tries to make his body learn how.

So a lot of fans saw this and concluded that the studio hates Goku, or they think Goku's an idiot, or that the studio is stupid for failing to remember that Goku has meditated before in the past. There has always been a subset of the fanbase that tries to turn everything into a Manichean conflict between Goku and Vegeta. In this case, if Vegeta figures something out before Goku does, then it means that Toei or Shueisha or Akira Toriyama himself must hate Goku.

This is stupid on the face of it, because Akira Toriyama literally created the character and he's credited with the screenplay for this movie. If he truly despised Goku, why would he even have Goku in the movie at all? He could have killed him off a long time ago. Why even make a Dragon Ball movie when he could have been working on some Dr. Slump project instead?

All this scene is... and I promise you, it's nothing more to it..., is a exploration of what the boys are doing on Beerus' planet. They train here, of course. We've seen that before, but why are they training here? Well, they need to receive instructions and guidance from Whis, and this is where Whis lives. Okay, and why is Whis so important to the process? Why can't they just stay on Earth and spar like they used to do? Because that only gets them so far. They need to learn new ways of thinking in order to surpass the level they're already at.

And what does that mean exactly? Well, they can't just do a million pushups. It doesn't work that way. There's other things they have to figure out, and that requires them to think of things they hadn't thought of before. And Whis is already beyond them in terms of power, so he knows things that they're still struggling to grasp. But Whis can't just spell it out for them. He can describe what they need to do, but it's still up to Goku and Vegeta to understand and internalize it.

And that's what they're doing here. They're basically brainstorming ways to get stronger. This time, Vegeta had an idea, and he's following it to see where it leads. Whis approves, so he seems to be on the right track. Tomorrow, maybe Goku will have another good idea, and so on.

But it's not always going to be one or the other who has the breakthrough. And it would be stupid for them both to have the same idea at the same time, just so the partisan fans won't feel slighted. Goku seems to think he can get a lot out of working with Broly, but that hasn't paid off just yet. It might prove more productive than what Vegeta is working on at the moment, but there's only one way to find out.

As far as Goku failing to recognize the value of meditation, well, he's had to re-learn that lesson several times. People will point to the time he meditated in Otherworld, or the time he meditated during his training with Mr. Popo, but they forget that this sort of focus and concentration was part of his training with Master Roshi as well. Whis scolded both Goku and Vegeta on this point when they first trained with him in Resurrection F. We can draw one of two conclusions here.

Goku's quest for greater strength is a flat circle. He just keeps re-discovering the same fundamentals, making a big gain in power, and then forgetting how he achieved that improvement.

Akira Toriyama is recycling the same martial arts hokum over and over again, because he only needs to show the characters working for greater strength. He does not need to design a genuine and internally consistent system for fantasy martial arts, any more than the writers of Star Trek need to explain how dilithium crystals make the ship go.

Anyway, Whis proposes a Goku/Broly/Vegeta three-way match, but no one wants Broly to fight in case he flips out and wrecks the entire planet. Then Beerus wakes up and finds out he has new houseguests. Goku explains that this is a good place to hide Broly from Frieza, and before Beerus can object, he meets Lemo and samples his cooking. It's good, so Beerus decides he can stay. Then Cheelai walks by with a bag full of loot she stole from Beerus' home. But Beerus decides he likes Cheelai's looks, so he agrees to let her stay too. So that's decided.

I've also seen some fans gripe about how Cheelai didn't spend much time with Broly in this movie, and Beerus' crush on Cheelai muddies the waters further. Look, none of these characters got a lot of screen time in this movie. This scene could be cut entirely and you wouldn't miss a thing. Half of it is Goku sparring with Vegeta, so of course Broly and Cheelai weren't going to have a whirlwind romance in this thing.

All I know for certain is that Cheelai walked by Broly and went out of her way to say he was "looking good", which is a lot more than she complimented anyone else on this planet. I mean, she's stealing Beerus' stuff, which ought to tell you how much she's into his lanky purple ass.

Moving on, Whis still wants to do that sparring match, if only so Broly can learn to appreciate a high-level battle with the fighters maintaining control of their powers. But Goku wants to eat first and so they stop for lunch.

And yeah, then this movie up and decides to give us Goku/Vegeta III, just like that. I don't want to oversell it, but it's an excellent fight. Whis sets the ground rules to that transformations and ki blasts are forbidden, so in a lot of ways this looks a lot like the kind of battle they might have had at the 25th Budokai before Babidi's henchmen got involved. We only get to see a few minutes of it, but they're so evenly matched that the fight takes a really long time to settle, so maybe it's just as well.

Beerus notes that Vegeta's moves have changed in an almost imperceptible way, due to his recent meditation training. Still, he loses interest in the fight and decides to get ice cream while the boys slug it out. I'm pretty sure Cheelai never cared in the first place, but Broly is enthralled with this action. He's getting to watch two of the greatest Saiyans ever put on a clinic, and he's soaking it up like a sponge.

But the important thing, at least as far as this movie goes, is that Beerus tosses an empty ice cream carton onto Whis' staff, so no one notice it flashing when Bulma tries to call him.

Which means Piccolo's on his own, at least for the time being. He gets the news from Bulma while he's picking up some senzu beans from Korin. The situation looks pretty bad, since Piccolo estimates that the Gammas' power is roughly on par with Goku and Vegeta's. And Dr. Hedo might know 17 and 18's weak spots, so they might not be able to help either. There is Majin Buu, though...

.... ha ha ha! No, did you think this one was going to be any different? Buu's sleeping through this crisis too. Seriously, why did they keep him alive at the end of the Buu Saga if no one had any plans to use him for anything?

So what about Gohan? That's what Korin asks, but Piccolo just says they can't count on Gohan right now, which... ouch.

But Piccolo does have one other idea, and so he flies up to see Dende on the Lookout and asks him to draw out his hidden power. See, the Kami of Planet Namek, Grand Elder Guru, was able to power up Krillin and Gohan way back in the day. Now, Dende is the Kami of Earth, so Piccolo figures Dende could do the same for him.

Only, no, it doesn't work that way. Turns out a Dragon-Type Namekian has to reach a certain age before they can use that sort of ability, and Dende's too young. On the other hand, Dende suggests using the Dragon Balls to solve the problem. They could simply wish away the Red Ribbon Army, but Piccolo doesn't care for that idea. Okay, well what about using Shenron to draw out Piccolo's hidden power? Can Shenron do that? Dende's like "gimme a minute."

So Dende wheels out the cart with the model of Shenron on it, and he powers a flask of water on the model. This makes it glow, and somehow upgrades Shenron so that he can grant a wish to draw out a person's hidden powers. Piccolo remarks that he had no idea any of this was possible when he was Kami. To be fair, when Piccolo was Kami, he didn't even know he was a Namekian, so there's a lot of stuff he was out of the loop for.

Now all Piccolo needs is the Dragon Balls, but Dende tells him that Bulma probably has them already. Ever since Frieza came back, Bulma's been gathering up the Dragon Balls every year, using the wishes up so that they'll be inactive in case any bad guys try to use them. Piccolo calls to ask her and yes, she has the whole set. In the dub, he asks her how many she has and she's like "Oh, uh.... All of them?!" I can't be sure, but I think that's a reference to the "All of them?" line from the dub of Dragon Ball, when Piccolo tried to zap Goku, but he missed all his vital organs. Anyway, Piccolo tells her to hang on to the balls until he gets there.

So they summon Shenron and it works. Piccolo gets stronger, and the Dragon promises that he threw in "a little extra".

That still leaves two wishes to use, so Bulma asks for a nicer ass and slightly longer eyelashes. Then she realizes -- too late-- that they could have wished to bring Goku and Vegeta back to Earth. Whoops.

"Shenron, I wish for you to bring Goku and Vegeta to Earth, so that they might bear witness to all this junk within my trunk."

So Piccolo returns to the Red Ribbon base and just walks right back to the line of soldiers there in Magenta's command room. They're still talking, and Piccolo tells the other soldiers he had to go potty. No one suspects a thing.

Magenta's trying to figure out what to do next. He'd like to target Goku and Vegeta, but no one knows where they are. Mr. Satan is too risky, since no one seems to know what his powers are, exactly. Then Carmine suggests Gohan be the next target. His intel says that it was Gohan who defeated Cell, and he has lots of spy footage of Piccolo going to his house to visit, which suggests that Gohan is a "shadow boss" in Bulma's organization. Magenta likes the idea of taking Gohan out, but he doesn't want Red Ribbon guys operating in the city, since it's too soon to reveal their presence to the wider public.

But if they could kidnap Gohan's daughter and lure him to the Red Ribbon base, then they could fight him on their own turf. Carmine finds that to be a good idea, as it would improve troop morale. Magenta orders a two-man team go to fetch Pan, and Piccolo volunteers, saying that he lives in the same neighborhood and knows Pan's face, because she's the granddaughter of Mr. Satan.

Dr. Hedo objects to the kidnapping angle, but Magenta tells him to mind his own business. Hmmm...

So Piccolo will be picking up Pan from preschool after all, just a bit later than planned. I don't know why Pan can't just run home by herself. She made it all the way here from Piccolo's house, didn't she?

One thing I like about this scene is how there's one other kid here who gets picked up, and that kid's mom apologizes for being late, so it's pretty clear that it's well after 1pm. Pan's been here a while. Her teacher assures here that someone will show up soon, but Pan's still kind of disappointed.

The other Red Ribbon soldier sent to do the kidnapping thinks this will be easy, so he just walks right up to Pan and tells her his mom sent him, but she demolishes him with a single blow.

Then Piccolo reveals himself and Pan recognizes him by his ki and calms down. The teacher already knows Piccolo, so she's cool with him, and Piccolo explains that this was all a security drill arranged by Mr. Satan. Now, in the dub, Piccolo addresses the teacher as "Janet", implying that he knows her as well as she knows him, and I think this is what led to the genesis of the Piccolo/Janet ship. I don't have a lot to say about it that hasn't already been said, but I'm all for Piccolo and Janet getting together. Janet's a fine foxy lady, and Piccolo's reputation speaks for itself.

Of course, Piccolo now has to fly the Red Ribbon airship back to base. He's a pretty crappy pilot, but he manages. I like to think Janet is still impressed, though. "Wow," she thinks as he flies away, crashing into a billboard. "Is there anything he can't do?"

Piccolo's plan is pretty simple. He explains the situation to Pan, and convinces her to play along with the kidnapping. When Gohan shows up to rescue her, he'll kick everyone's ass and that'll take care of everything. Actually, that sounds a little half-baked to me. Piccolo got a power up from Shenron, but is that enough? Anyway, they bring Pan to the base and take a video of her acting scared, then Magenta sends Piccolo and the other guy back to the city to show it to Gohan. Wait, why is that Namekian chair back there? What's that about.

Well, it doesn't matter because Pan sees some cookies and she's like "Don't mind if I do!" but then...

Carmine takes the plate away! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

You suck, Carmine!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Pan would probably attack him right there, except Piccolo's behind him trying to calm her down.

So Piccolo and 15 go to Gohan's house, and Piccolo takes him to the window since he knows Gohan won't answer the door. Notably, Gohan doesn't recognize Piccolo through his disguise, even though Pan saw through it immediately. Also, Gohan hasn't bothered to change out of the clothes Piccolo put him in this morning. Those must be fascinating ants he's working on.

15 shows Gohan the video of Pan and RIP the windowsill.

He turns Super Saiyan and scares the shit out of 15, who promises Pan will be fine if he just returns with him to the base. Gohan gets so mad he makes a crater in the ground...

... and the house starts to list down into the hole. But Piccolo doesn't mind because his plan is working. Gohan's back in a fighting mood and he can clobber the Gammas!

Or can he...?

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fangbangerghoul · 7 months ago

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It's *drum rolls* WIP WEDNESDAY! (I made a new banner that is Ghoul-coded...because it is Ghoul)

Where I dig out things to share that are a 'work in progress' and it has to be on a Wednesday because I was told I would be exiled if I tried this on a Friday.

I also include small updates like the fact that I got a 92 on my research paper! (which I would have cried if I got under a 90 because I gave her more than what the professor asked for and THEN SOME) Another update is I only have a week and a half left of my spring semester!

I have several WIPS in the works. Now that I don't have to constantly write academic papers for class, I actually want to write for myself. Also! My 100 Follower Celebration prompts really have helped me get back into the groove. I am doing them until tomorrow so please feel free to submit a prompt in my ask box to get a snippet in return!

My current list of WIPS: (doc names not work titles)

Great Fireballs of Faerun

Bog Witch Trials

Delghoul

GhoulxHalsinxAstarion

Thorny Feelings

Cup Runneth Over

AND NOW

to the fun part! The current snippet of wip is under the cut! (it's a continuation of the last snippet sunday)

The hissing river helped drown out some of her worries along with the symphony of sounds of the creatures that roamed the forest. It was like its own pocket of time, maybe its own dimension. She was used to the smells of leaves, mud, and pollen that floated around and it felt like home to her. Ghoul was so entranced by nature in front of her she did not notice with her vampire spawn companion sat beside her. He moved so silently that when she did notice she felt her body go on guard, ready for a battle. It took a lot of focus within her to calm her pulse and her body’s knee jerk reaction to fight.

“I didn’t come to bite, unless that’s what you want.” Astarion said with a toothy grin and his smooth voice rung with a coyness that was almost luring. His red eyes examined her with curiosity as if he was waiting for a particular reaction when she did not give it, he looked ahead to the forest across the stream.

“What did you want?” She said pointedly. Ghoul was not trying to be rude but she could tell on his face that question was not said as smoothly as she intended.

“I am just trying to enjoy the companion of my favorite companion and maybe bask in,” He paused for a moment clearly looking for the right word within his mind, “the beautiful nature.”

Ghoul gave a light huff of a laugh she was not born yesterday even if compared to the longevity of life Astarion lived made it feel that way.

“Sounds like Halsin is rubbing off on you, perhaps that’s a good thing.” She gave him a subtle smirk to tease him a bit more.

“There are others ways I’d like him to rub off on me.” His voice was low and Ghoul noticed the excitement in his eyes from the thought. She rolled her eyes at him and waved her hand to signal a whatever. “What? I know I am not the only one whose eyes catch the giant elf. Don’t act so prudish now.”

“I didn’t object, did I?”

“Not with your words, no.” Astarion was now sitting beside Ghoul on the sandy bank with her. She had slowly dipped her bare feet into the cool water and it stung at first before slowly relaxing her muscles. He had followed suit though it was clear he was not enjoying the cool water as much as her.

“Tell me,” She begun as she leaned back onto the palms of her hands to get a better look at the stars. “What are you going to do after all of this is over?”

“My, my, what a question, dear.” His index finger rested on his lip as he pondered Ghoul’s question. The silence from it was starting to make it feel like he would never answer but she remained patient.

“Live freely, revel in debauchery, continue my existence for as long as I can.” He finally answered not looking directly at her. His eyes seemed wistful, yearning perhaps. Ghoul nodded softly taking in his answer. It sounded honest enough for him and she was not going to claim he was lying to her outright. She never knew where she stood with the vampire so on occasion when he seemed to bare himself to her, she was cautious of what he was telling her. She was no saint by any means and she also never spoke the full truth. There were just some things better left in the past of unsaid.

“You?” He leaned in a little closer now, his eyes fixed on her neck and she had a feeling she knew what he was thinking.

“Assuming I don’t die.” She started bluntly and there was a spilt second where a flash of concern or maybe fear appeared on Astarion’s face but she continued. “Perhaps if enough gold were to be made on this journey I can attempt to live in the city, properly this time.”

“Properly?” His eyebrow raised at her statement and she could hear in his voice that he was both dumbfounded and skeptical of what she was saying.

“Not living on the streets again.” She answered to alleviate some of the confusion. “Maybe I’ll just travel as a sword for hire.”

“Isn’t that what you are basically doing now?” Astarion sounded unamused by her answer and a tad disappointed, which now had her raising an eyebrow.

“I suppose.” She leaned up to straighten her back in hopes it would help her think better but in a quick movement she felt Astarion’s arm pull her closer.

“Don’t you ever dream of bigger things?” His voice was smooth, and his eyes pierced hers. Astarion's free hand lightly traced the line of her jaw and for a moment he looked enamored.

“Bigger things than Halsin?” She asked with a devilish smile. Ghoul knew what he was really asking but she was not ready to admit to herself or to him that she never thinks too far ahead. There were always consequences when she did. He snorted at her after she killed the moment and released her from his grasp. She gave him a look that was not necessarily disapproving but perhaps mixed with a disappointment. Ghoul realized she had enjoyed the close contact, but her pride would not allow her to give in to reach for more.

Tagging: @bearlytolerant @ellstersmash @staticpallour @spookyspecterino @lisa-and-shadow @therealgchu @the-californicationist

#wip wednesday #fang writes #bg3 fic #bg3 astarion #ghoul vibes only #bg3 character

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grandmother-goblin · 11 months ago

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Field Study - Chapter 4

Ao3 - Masterlist

Chapter Summary: In an attempt to fight off the feelings that stir within him whenever he was around Cas, Astarion wanders off into Ethel's swamp alone and nearly loses his newfound freedom.

Relationships: Astarion x Female!Tav

Rating: Explicit (18+) for eventual smut.

Word Count: 5.1k

Chapter Tags: Canon-typical violence, Astarion has something like a panic attack, hand holding, kissing.

Mercifully, mosquitoes seemed to have little interest in vampire blood. They were far more interested in Wyll than anyone one else, which eventually resulted in the warlock simply applying frost armor to himself and watching the bloodsuckers fly happily to their icy graves. Astarion wished he could do the same, given how the tiny pests kept buzzing around his ears like a jewelry merchant working on commission, their sales pitch to those with sensitive ears was almost as bad as their bite.

They weren’t even in Auntie Ethel’s magically beautified swamp anymore; the illusion wore off the second Shadowheart took one look at those bloody sheep. Perhaps if the illusion had stayed, the mosquitos would stop harassing them. Leave it to a hag to disguise a fetid bog as some idyllic wetland.

Oh. That was another fun revelation: Auntie Ethel was a hag.

Not in the withered-old-crone-who-fights-pigeons-over-breadcrumbs way (though that may have been true as well), but in the way she was a dangerous Fey creature that no one in their right mind should mess with. Especially not on the hag’s own turf.

Apparently, Cas did not get that memo.

Either that or she was quite out of her mind.

The discovery of Ethel’s true nature did not seem to bother Cas even the slightest. It was almost like she already knew. Just like she did when Astarion confirmed her suspicions about his condition those nights ago. Suspicions even the Blade of Frontiers did not voice aloud. Though no one said a word, Astarion knew Shadowheart and Wyll thinking the same thing he was: Cas was hiding something.

As for what that something was, he had no idea. Whatever it was, Astarion became more and more convinced that Cas was not just some ranger from Neverwinter like she had claimed. Even if the others thought she was lacking in general intelligence, there was an undeniable, quiet wisdom in which she carried herself. Calm and experienced. The kind of knowledge that couldn’t come from books or a classroom.

An hour had passed since Astarion and Cas took over night watch. In order to keep two people on guard in their temporary camp, Astarion and Cas took their meditation early so Shadowheart and Wyll could get at least six hours of uninterrupted sleep. It was a long night shift, but it seemed like the best option. They all needed to be well rested in case their meeting with Auntie Ethel went sideways.

Plus, it meant Astarion got some alone time with Cas.

Moonlight seeped through the canopy of leaves above where they rested, providing their sole source of light. A campfire was too risky. Although they chose their temporary camping ground wisely, they simply did not know the area well enough to forgo any extra precautions. Hence the double guard duty.

Though it would have been far more effective for Cas and Astarion to stand watch on opposite ends of the camp, they found themselves drawn together before long. Long conversations under the moon and stars had started to become their thing. They did not have any wine with them, but he could think of more than a few ways to make up for that.

With his chin resting on her shoulder, he wrapped an arm around her and traced tantalizing circles around her hip with his thumb, watching with quiet fascination as she worked on her field journal. A pencil drawing of the tadpole, almost exactly as he remembered it, emerged from the page with all its horrifying glory. By all accounts, it was beautiful artwork despite the subject matter. The colors she chose were ones he wouldn’t have expected, but they worked in harmony to bring out a lifelike quality in the work. Each line was precise, purposeful, and Astarion found himself deeply enthralled in the process.

Astarion brought a finger to the corner of the page, far from the bulk of the artwork. “You draw stuff like this for a living, right?” he asked. “For your vampire friend’s research.”

Cas gave an affirmative hum. “Whenever Eroc or my brother need illustrations for their work.”

“And their work involves creatures like this?” He tapped the drawing of the tadpole in the center of its razorsharp maw.

A shiver went down his spine. That thing, and its teeth, still lurked in his skull. Waiting. If it could see the drawing, perhaps it would be flattered enough to let them live. Unlikely, but the idea of the tadpole having a thimble of vanity almost made him smile.

“This is the sort of stuff they’d be interested in.” Cas swiped her palm lightly over the page, dusting away any debris her pencils might have left behind. “But no. Not this specifically.”

Deciding he no longer wanted to dwell on the beast, Astarion averted his gaze to Cas’s neck where his twin puncture wounds were still proudly on display. All purple and red against her rich copper skin. The sight of it filled him with a surge of primitive pride. Marking his territory, as it were. Any man, woman, or vampire would think twice before encroaching on her.

His lips skated carefully over the bruise, earning a soft but surprised gasp and a trail of goosebumps in his wake. The hand on her hip slipped just beneath her tunic, where soft skin pressed into his touch. With a rakish grin he asked, “Do you ever draw nudes?”

A puff of laughter escaped her lips. A delightful sound that made his stomach flutter for reasons he did not want to think about. “Are you volunteering?” She set the journal aside and leaned further into his touch. Their bodies melded together from shoulder to thigh like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Only if you’re naked too, my dear,” he teased, his lips brushing against her ear as he spoke.

Cas smiled as she let her head rest against his shoulder and he could smell the faintest hint of lavender in her hair. Quietly, she picked up his hand in hers, her thumb tickling the center of his palm as she studied it.

Astarion furrowed his brow. “What are you doing?”

“You have nice hands,” she said and then she laughed. “Is it terribly dull of me that I would rather draw your hands than a nude?”

No. Not at all. He actually found himself rather curious about what those drawings would look like. Not that he would admit it. “You know, there are plenty of people who’d die for the opportunity to get me naked,” he said instead.

In fact, plenty of people had. Gods. He didn’t even want to think about it more than he had to.

She bumped him good-naturedly and said with a little laugh, “I’m not that desperate.”

Part of him thought to bring up how eager she had been the other night in his tent, but he didn’t want to risk embarrassing her. Not only that, but he had just realized something: he and Cas had been sitting together for almost an hour. Touching. Yet she didn’t make any move on him save for touching his hand.

In fact, when he listened for her heartbeat he found that it was calm. Cas was entirely relaxed sitting next to him. No flutters of anticipation, no changes to her breathing. Hells, she barely reacted when he had kissed her neck.

Most people he seduced would have taken that opportunity and run with it.

But Cas seemed perfectly happy just chatting with him.

He swallowed as a pang of something rattled in his chest. Something warm, pleasant, and safe that his body desperately tried to shut down with every bit of coldness it could muster. When the warmth dissipated, so did the icy fear, leaving behind that comfortable and familiar numbness.

Perhaps he needed a bit of space. Just a bit of time to himself so the feeling didn’t threaten to come back.

Astarion cleared his throat and sat Cas upright so he didn’t topple her over when he stood. “It’s been a while since we last did a patrol,” he said, just to give himself an excuse. “I’ll be back shortly.”

“Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, no,” he said before she could get to her feet. “You did the last one. It’s my turn.”

Cas frowned, a mixture of confusion and concern on her face. “Okay.” She drew out the word and averted her gaze, seeming almost embarrassed. “Just don’t stray too far. There might be worse than redcaps out there.”

He brushed off her concern and excused himself, leaving her looking a bit like a kicked puppy, but he couldn’t bring himself to dwell on it. He had to get a bit of air. Just a moment to himself to get his emotions under control.

What in the Hells was wrong with him? Cas was nothing more than a pretty face. He had spent time with hundreds of beautiful people over the centuries. Those people, however, did not cause damn butterflies in his stomach.

It almost felt like he had an actual friend in Cas. Like she didn’t see him as something to be used. But he knew better than to get his hopes up. Chances were that Cas was just like everyone else. She just hadn’t revealed her true colors yet.

He needed to get a grip and focus on the task at hand: patrolling the outskirts of their secluded campsite.

Before they went to sleep, Shadowheart and Wyll mentioned that the campground seemed quiet and secure. So far, nothing proved them wrong. Crickets chirped and an owl hooted somewhere in the distance. Active animals were always a good sign. It was when things got quiet that there was reason to worry. About a hundred meters away from the campsite he started again on the path he walked at the beginning of his shift, listening for any suspicious noises and watching for shadows. The night was blissfully calm and gave him some space to think.

Astarion ran his hands through his hair and laced them behind his neck, releasing a long breath between his lips. From the first time he laid eyes on Cas, he was physically attracted to her. That much was undeniable. He’d been with plenty of gorgeous people. Most of which he never had the luxury of getting to know. The chance of any of his relationships (if one could even call them that) turning into something more was always an impossibility.

Cazador would end it, one way or another.

With a grimace, Astarion recalled a sweet young man he had tried to spare and how Cazador punished him for it. Any sort of attachment always came at a cost higher than Astarion was willing to pay.

It simply wasn’t worth the risk.

But for the first time in centuries, Astarion had the chance at something real. An actual relationship that meant something more than a meal for his master. A relationship he could damage so easily if he wasn’t careful.

Astarion didn’t want to lose Cas’s trust or, dare he say, friendship. He didn’t want to hurt the first person in centuries who actually seemed to give a damn about him. Who asked about his day, who cared about his thoughts, wanted to know his feelings, and took extra steps to ensure he was okay. He liked having someone care about him. But it scared the shit out of him. It was only a matter of time before Cazador ripped it away just like he did everything else.

Dousing the fire that ignited in the pit of his stomach whenever he saw Cas was the smart thing to do. But as much as he tried, he didn’t think he could do that. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to. After tasting her blood, tasting her lips and the salt of her skin, he was fairly certain that fire in him would implode before burning out.

Astarion stuffed his hands in his pockets and tried to focus on his surroundings, but that focus quickly returned to the muddled mess in his mind. Cas was supposed to be just like any other target he had seduced. She just had to fall for him, and he had to somehow stop whatever feelings she stirred within him.

Had he not been so caught up in his own head, he might have heard it. The whisper of a spell, or the shuffling of dirt beneath the caster’s feet. A chilling sensation struck him in the middle of his chest, spreading through each and every vein from the tops of his ears to the tips of his toes.

The ice in his stomach wasn’t just the result of magic. It was from the cold realization that he could not move.

Fear crept and coiled around him like a venomous snake. With every ounce of willpower he had, he begged his body to move, to do something, before it could strike. But it was as if his body had betrayed him, under the command of another. Panic seized his heart.

No.

No, it couldn’t be Cazador. Cazador would never trek so far from Baldur’s Gate. And his control felt nothing like the magic that enveloped him now.

Footsteps approached from his right and a stocky, disheveled, man appeared in his periphery.

A Gur.

Of course it was a fucking Gur.

“With how smoothly that went, you’d think I was the Huntsman of Neverwinter,” the Gur said, his voice deep and jovial. “Old man Gandrel could take a few pointers, eh?”

If Astarion could use his tongue, he’d make some comment about how adorable it was that the Gur thought he was even a speck of dirt compared to the greatest monster hunter in recent history. Still, he tucked the nugget of knowledge away. The Gur was overconfident, that much was clear, and overconfident people tended to make mistakes.

The Gur pulled out a length of rope and manipulated Astarion’s hands behind his back. “Holding spell always makes this part a bit easier,” he said conversationally as the rough rope bit into Astarion’s skin. “Unfortunately, it won’t hold long enough to get you back to Baldur’s Gate, but that’s what old fashioned rope is for.” With a grunt, the Gur tied off the rope and somehow made the binding impossibly tighter.

The feeling in Astarion’s fingers was already fading when the Gur came around to his front, finally looking his prey in the eyes. Astarion willed his body to do something, to spit in his face or throw a punch. The holding spell held firm. Heat built behind his eyes and white-hot rage dripped from his throat to his stomach.

Not like this.

Not again.

With a sympathetic tilt of his head, the Gur produced a wooden dowel with leather straps on either side. A bit. To keep him from screaming. “It’s nothing personal, Astarion. Almost feel bad taking you away from your friends because you won’t find such pleasant company where we—”

An arrow ripped away the rest of the sentence as it tore through the Gur’s cheeks clear to the other side. Then a second arrow pierced the man’s skull in silent fury.

The holding spell released so suddenly that Astarion fell to his knees like a child’s discarded rag doll. Mere feet away from him, the Gur collapsed, eyes open and unblinking as blood dripped from the metal arrowheads.

Cas called his name breathlessly. Her bow clacked against the arrows in her hands as she rushed to his side, practically skidding to a stop in front of him. She pulled the dagger from her hip and sliced through the rope like she had done it a dozen times before. When the ropes fell away, she checked him over with careful yet efficient hands, feeling for injuries in his vital areas. Then she knelt in front of him with her eyes wide and wet.

Words were tumbling out of her mouth, question after question, but Astarion could not bring himself to focus on them. Nor could he bring himself to answer.

Just like that, he was almost captured. No warning, no time to prepare. His freedom, gone in the blink of an eye. Not just a reminder but a remembrance of his past life, like his mortality stolen once more with false promises. Images of blood, the face of a wicked devil…

No, things were different from before.

Cas had come to his rescue. And she was the furthest thing from a devil.

There was a ringing somewhere in the depths of his ears so loud it was nauseating. The cruel smiles from his longtime sadistic master did not rule over him at this very moment, though the scars from years of abuse and neglect screamed as if ripped anew.

The worry in Cas’s deep brown eyes quieted his internal storm. He began to take calming breaths, trying to make sense of these swirling emotions that felt vaster than any damnable ocean. He couldn’t make sense of the movement of her mouth as he focused on the light freckles dusting her cheeks.

Like the blood spattered across the ground, small specks of himself were all that were left from his last encounter with a Gur. Nothing could truly compare to the night Cazador “rescued” him. Yet it was the only comparison he had to draw from. For better or worse, the only reason Astarion walked the mortal planes was due to Cazador.

Cazador was the only person who had ever tried to “save” him.

Until Cas.

He felt her trembling fingers, ghosting over his cheekbones, as the warmth from her palms settled into either side of his face. Gentle. Caring. Greater concern welled in the depths of her pupils as she brushed the pad of her thumb across his clammy skin.

“What can I do to help?” Cas asked, the stark calm in her voice reducing the deafening alarm in his ear to a niggling warble. She repeated the question but her words drowned in the torrent of emotions cascading through his mind.

If Cas hadn’t shown up when she had… Astarion pushed the bombardment of dark memories aside that had tormented him for decades, drowning them out with Cas’s light. Based on what the Gur had confided, bringing him back to Baldur’s Gate alive meant the only thing awaiting him was a fate worse than death. Numbly, Astarion wrapped his fingers around Cas’s wrist, feeling her steady pulse beneath his fingertips, willing his own heart to fall in beat with her metronome.

“Please say something?” Cas laced her fingers with his. “Just so I know that whatever spell he used is completely worn off.”

Closing his eyes, he took another deep breath. “Thank you,” he said. And for the first time in centuries, he truly meant it. Words would never be enough for what she just did for him, but at the moment, they were the only thing he could give.

A small smile spread across her pretty lips and she threw her arms around him. The scent of her leathers couldn’t completely mask the metallic smell of blood, but it helped ground him. With Cas’s arms around him, he felt… almost safe. But feeling something and knowing something were different things entirely.

As long as Cazador was around, he would never be safe. And neither would she.

“I’m so happy you’re okay,” she said, her voice muffled in the fabric of his shirt. “If you had just disappeared like that I— I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

“Look for me, I hope.” He tried to make the words sound lighthearted, like the past ten minutes were nothing more than dust in the wind, but his voice betrayed him with a crack.

Damn it.

Without even thinking, Astarion wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into the crook of her neck. The warmth of her body and her even breaths provided comfort he never would admit to needing.

Astarion wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that. It could have been a few seconds or maybe even a minute before he forced himself to let go. Hugging wasn’t something he normally did. At least, not without a goal in mind. Certainly never for comfort.

A bloom of unfamiliar warmth grew in his chest. It felt… nice to be cared for. It wasn’t a feeling he could ever allow himself to get used to. It was temporary. Just like Cas.

He had to remember that.

Cas gave his shoulders a friendly squeeze before she let him go and said, “We should search the body and head back to camp.”

Instead of saying anything, he just nodded numbly.

They didn’t find much on the body besides hunting supplies. No note. Nothing to identify the man by and nothing to give them any clue who had sent him after Astarion. Though deep in his gut, Astarion suspected he knew exactly who would have sent a Gur after him. Cazador probably found the idea hilarious, given his history.

He and Cas patrolled the remainder of the perimeter together in silence. Astarion simply didn’t know what to say. What words could possibly suffice for what Cas did for him that night? Protecting him without a hint of hesitation, killing a man for him. It wasn’t something anyone had done for him before.

Even with a bit of time and distance from his encounter with the Gur, adrenaline pounded in his veins with nowhere to go. Fight or flight, he did not get either option. However, his body did not seem to get the memo. It was as if it was still waiting for something else to happen. Another monster hunter, a mind flayer, some threat bigger than an owl hooting away in a nearby tree. But the night was calm once again, even if Astarion wasn’t.

When Cas turned to go back to the campsite, he found himself reaching for her hand. For whatever reason, he wasn’t ready to go back. Wasn’t ready to sit at camp with nothing but his thoughts and quiet conversation. Not when everything in his head was still so loud. Not when his body still did not feel like his own. He didn’t want to be around people who were just waiting for a reason to turn on him just for what he was.

Cas raised a brow at him, but did not retreat from his touch. “Is everything okay?”

He owed her. He owed her more than she could ever possibly comprehend. And he didn’t like to be indebted to people. Especially when he didn’t know what the payment would be when it came due.

Yet the last time he had offered to repay her, she told him that he didn’t owe her anything. Past experiences told him not to believe her, but he certainly couldn’t let her know that. He also knew better than to put the offer out there again. It would not do him any good considering how she had rebuffed the suggestion of a quid pro quo before. In fact, she might even find the idea insulting.

Most polite people didn’t like the idea of exchanging favors for sex. Or at the very least, they didn’t like it when it was stated so plainly.

Astarion placed his hands on her hips and turned her towards him. “I don’t want to go back to camp just yet, darling,” he said and stepped in close to her, forcing her to tilt her head back to look up at him. “I just want to be alone with you for a little while longer.”

Cas rolled her lips and glanced towards the tents in the distance. “We’d be alone at camp,” she said. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

The response was so innocent, it almost made him laugh. “No, my sweet.” His hand drifted from her hip down to the swell of her backside and his lips brushed over hers when he spoke. “I just want a moment with you.”

Just with Cas. Cas had somehow become a calming presence in his life. Someone who accepted him completely for what he was. Maybe even for who he was.

Whatever he had with Cas wasn’t something he wanted to just let slip away. He wanted her reasons that went beyond wanting to pay a debt, perhaps even beyond the protection she could provide him.

He was actually kind of fond of her.

And he was beginning to believe that she might be fond of him as well.

He tucked a finger under her chin and tilted her face close to his, her breath was warm against his lips and the inches between their mouths was reduced to a paper-thin sliver. “Stay with me.”

Just a moment for the two of them. With the woman who stirred some long dormant feelings back to life. With the woman who saved him. The woman he couldn’t dare let himself fall for; no matter how she made his heart pound against its cage.

Slowly, he closed the distance between them as he covered her lips with his own. A soft groan filled the air as her hands fisted the fabric of his shirt, her smaller frame pressed tightly along his front. Each breath they shared quieted the mess within his mind, and he found himself lost in the sweetness of her mouth.

Overcome with the need to get closer, to feel more of her, he lifted her against him just long enough to walk her backwards to a nearby tree. The sounds of night that enveloped them, crickets chirping and the cool breeze rustling leaves, faded as he claimed her mouth with his.

Kissing her was as sinful as it was saccharine. Her lips were lush, indulgent, and demanding all at once. His fingers tightened in her hair as her tongue licked into his mouth, igniting a fire low in his belly. A fire that had been present ever since their first kiss but laid waiting to be coaxed to a blaze.

More than anything, the kiss was pure. Honest. Like nothing he had experienced before, yet the solace brought by her lips overpowered the fear that accompanied every good feeling he had. Her arms wrapped around him, pressing their bodies so close he could feel her pulse, her every breath, the swell of her breasts and the sensual heat gathering between their bodies.

The need to get closer turned desperate, but the comfort she provided never abated. His teeth, his fangs, grazed her lower lip, careful enough not to break the skin but by no means gentle. The soft moan in her throat told him all he needed to know. She trusted him. Even with his fangs against her skin, playing on the edge of biting her, she trusted him.

It was too much.

Cas rolled her hips, the delicious friction against his hardened length teasing him. Just a few layers of clothing were all that stood between him pressing inside her, and she knew it. Her slender, demanding, fingers slipped into the waistband of his trousers and tried to pull him impossibly closer. Like being pressed up against a tree beneath him didn’t quite satisfy her.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough and it was too much all at once. The pounding of that pesky organ in his chest, the hot flush on his cheeks, the fire in his belly… he actually wanted this.

When was the last time he had wanted to take someone to bed? He had been on his back thousands of times, faces and names a blur, just forcing himself to get the job done. To do Cazador’s bidding in whatever way the bastard wanted.

His own wants, his enjoyment, never even factored into it. Sex was just one of the few weapons he had at his disposal. It was about doing what he had to to survive.

But with Cas, it wasn’t about survival. It was something else entirely.

“What’s wrong?” Cas’s voice broke through his thoughts and her hand cupped his face. “Do you want to stop?”

It was only then he realized that his hands had frozen where they had gripped her thighs. In fact, he didn’t even remember wrapping her legs around his hips. Or did she do that?

Normally when his mind drifted off someplace else similar situations, he body went on autopilot. It was all muscle memory. But he never froze.

What in the Hells was wrong with him?

Astarion shook his head. Under most circumstances, he would have been relieved to stop. But at that moment, stopping was the very last thing he wanted to do. Instead, his traitorous mouth said, “We probably should.”

Not because of her, yet it was completely because of her. Out of all the people he had been with over the centuries, none brought anything other than a sense of self-loathing and disgust. But it was different with Cas and it scared the shit out of him.

Of course, he would never tell her that.

“If we continue, I’ll have a hard time stopping myself from getting another taste,” he mumbled the lie into the crook of her neck, inhaling that scent that was uniquely Cas. Like leather and lavender, feral and feminine. He covered a pulse point on her neck with his lips and nipped the skin. Just hard enough that it would leave a little bruise and he couldn’t help but laugh when she returned the favor.

With one more kiss, she detached herself from him. No insistence to continue. No shame. No insults to his masculinity. “I understand,” she said with a sweet and sincere smile. “You do what you need to do.”

Astarion took a step back lest he act on his sudden impulse to kiss her again. It wasn’t the right time. As much as his body craved to feel every last inch of her, he couldn’t with his current state of mind.

Stopping was the right thing to do.

“I should probably find something to sink my fangs into,” he said as he shoved his hands into his pockets so he wouldn’t be tempted to reach out to her again. “Will you be alright watching the camp while I hunt? It shouldn’t take long.”

The idea of going off by himself after everything that happened that night didn’t appeal to him, but being alone was far less frightening than confronting whatever feelings being around Cas stirred up.

Cas didn’t seem to like the idea either judging by the crease that appeared between her brows. But she nodded. “Be careful,” she said. “I’ll be waiting for you back at camp.”

Resisting the urge to pull her into another kiss, Astarion stalked off into the woods, halfway convinced the only way he could get Cas off his mind was to do something reckless.

Fighting a bear would likely do the trick.

---

Beginning

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#astarion #astarion x tav #astarion x female tav #astarion fanfic #astarion smut #field study bg3 fanfic #bg3 #baldur's gale 3

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irish-dress-history · 5 months ago

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English grammar rant

Although I am not a fan of prescriptive linguistics, I generally try to follow the rules of English grammar, because people tend to take your writing more seriously if you use "correct grammar." There is, however, one English grammar rule which has been a thorn in my side for years. This rule is a nuisance to anyone who works in history, archaeology, paleontology, or any other field where they are writing in the present about things that happened in the past. I am talking about the rule that you are not supposed to change verb tense in a sentence. If part of your sentence is in past tense, the whole thing has to be in past tense. If part of your sentence is in present tense, the whole thing has to be in present tense.

I have recently come to the realization that this rule isn't just annoying. It is inherently bad and needs to be eliminated. This revelation came to me a few days ago while I was editing a Wikipedia page about bog bodies. I came across a sentence which in grammatically correct form read:

The woman was believed to have been around 25-30 years old when she died.

Let me explain the problem with this. Because the woman under discussion (Meenybradden) died 400+ years ago, the whole sentence had to be in past tense. However, the phase "was believed" implies that the scientists studying her no longer believe that. It implies that they now think she was a different age when she died, but neither the original author of the description nor I had any sources stating that the age at death estimate of 25-30 years had changed. So, although it's grammatically incorrect, it is more accurate in terms of content to say:

The woman is believed to have been around 25-30 years old when she died.

The purpose of language is to communicate. I believe grammar should exist to aid in the communication of information, not to hinder it. Starting with this post, I am disregarding this grammar rule, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. Grammar rules cease to be rules when no one follows them.

#writing about the past #english grammar #personal

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munchkinmarauder · 6 months ago

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My review of Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver #4

I would give it 4/5 stars - lots to like but not without its problems - probably could have used another issue to flesh it out. Spoilers below the cut

I enjoyed it a lot more on my second reading than my first! However I would say this is one of the weaker of the 4 Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver issues. Stronger than the first one but #2 and #3 were better.

Firstly the art and the colours are killing it. I am going to miss Tammetta's work going into the next series. Williams also does a great job with his bold colours.

The summary of this issue following the announcement of the scarlet witch book did get this on the wrong foot for me because it is all about Wanda which I felt was disrespectful for a co-lead 60th anniversary series for both characters. While the last book itself is a little more Wanda heavy it has a much better balance than issue 1 did and Pietro walks away from this book with his head held high in my opinion (and if the Q&A at the end is to be believed he will have more regular appearances in the Sclaret Witch solo as the Giver is still after him as well - good he brings the missing piece to Orlando's books - a lot of fun and someone Wanda can genuinely emote off of and who matches her beat for beat)

How Orlando would write Pietro was one of my biggest worries going in but I have been really happy with his portrayal so far and wouldn't mind him writing Pietro more. We see a good exploration of his powers and his emotional maturity after his growth in Quicksilver no surrender is on full display! He shrugs off the reveal from Magneto's letter to give his sister the pep talk she needed to control her full power, takes out the frightful 400, lands a solid blow on the Wizard and his confrontation at the end with Magneto was a good one - hes so done with his fathers BS and shrugs it off, tells his sister how much he loves her and leaves. I like that his relationship with Monet St Croix has not been forgotten - Orlando and Tammetta were really like - we're going to have a parent say one of the worst things they can to a child so we're gonna get this man laid (Pietro and Monet messy sex marathons was not something I thought would become cannon but I'm happy it did - I hope the comics keep this couple around for a while and explore them - I hope Monet appears in Wanda's next solo cause I want to see her interact with Wanda).

Cthon Wanda was very very cool. I am excited to see what is coming up with the Giver plot however I do feel this mini could have benefitted from an extra issue, cause having to set up the next Scarlet Witch solo does bog things down a bit. The twins don't actually interact much this series, for something that was advertised as being about their relationship I think it really needed a lot more of that - they spend nearly two issues separated so I think we needed more of a moment between them to resolve their fight. Unfortunately my fear that Magneto would overshadow everything sort of happened with his small appearance at the end immediately making it all about Magneto.

Speaking of Magneto the revelation in the letter is one I liked the more I thought about it. It's not a big reveal but it is Magnetos abusive tactics on display at his finest- a clear setting up of a narcissist parent creating a golden child and Scapegoat dynamic. I know a lot of people are taking what he says as him being right at face value and crying about Magneto being character assassinated or this being an affront to Pietro and I disagree. Yes it's a bit over the top considering what we saw in RoM and Krakoa but it is not out of character. Magneto has always been a dick to his children, Pietro in particular - I could go on for days but this review is long enough - but let's not be surprised that the man that murdered his son and was willing to let his daughter be murdered for mutant kind is a good father in any sense of the world. I think the story itself and Wanda and Pietro saying so to Magneto's face that he is wrong about the twins is very apparent. Tammetta emphasises the physical resemblance between Pietro and Magneto to make it clear that Magneto is projecting onto his son and to a degree wants to seperate the twins. A tactic he also used when the twins were under his "care" in the brotherhood.

Pietro and Magneto were done well in that scene, however, Wanda's response is what is off and I believe that is what does Wanda disservice as a character. She sent the Wizard to a hell dimension for hurting her brother but only gently tells Magneto he is wrong when he tells his only son that he should have stayed dead and calls him poison to Wanda. Orlando's finally calling out Magneto for what he is but the way he won't let Wanda herself go at Magneto or yell at him feels out of character for Wanda. Also the fact she agreed with Magneto initially pissed me off (though maybe this was her self blaming) Is this building up to something more? Will we get and explanation for it? I hope so but until then I am not happy with how Orlando writes Wanda around Magneto. She did overall take a back seat to the men in this series a bit, Magneto infantalise her and she takes it, vision talks down to her and is the kne figuring everything out for Wanda (I'm glad the vibe seems to be they're friendly ex's with no intention of getting back together and it shohld stay that way- though we got a forced cheek kiss - two series now which forces a Wandavision kiss but not Wanda giving her brother a hug when he's emotionally vulnerable - all for a racist MCU show it's very dissapointing) and a lot of the really good moments are taken up by Pietro until she has her main moment at the end - however twins dynamic is even,their partners, Wanda has a solo coming up so I think this last point can be forgiven.

Overall to wrap up this long review I have enjoyed and had fun with this series overall but it has it's flaws - the Wanda/Magneto dynamic being a big one and sometimes Orlando gets a bit too wordy (maybe a bit rich coming from me) which derails the pace a bit and makes my eyes glaze over - but I'm really happy with this series and hope it's success means we get more co-lead series with the twins or more Pietro in comics in general (and Wanda to keep being as prominent as she is)

#scarlet witch and quicksilver #pietro maximoff #quicksilver #wanda maximoff #maximoff twins #magnet family #monet st croix #magneto #quicksilver and the scarlet witch #Scarlet Witch #Vision #erik lensherr #This is a long one #Steve Orlando #lorenzo tammetta #Frank Williams #Quick Money

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trials-of-apollo-my-beloved · 2 years ago

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Door Three-Thirty-Six

These are the first three chapters of my Apollo gets therapy fic

Apollo finds his way into a therapy session. And despite telling himself not to, keeps showing up.

Chapter 1

There hadn't been a specific moment that led me to seek out therapy. I hadn't had some revelation, I didn't realize my need for help in a moment of desperation. Honestly calling it a need is a bit of stretch. I knew plenty of people that needed therapy. Nico D'angelo for example, or really just about every demigod I’ve ever met.

Honestly , I tapped my foot at a nervous six eight tempo on the waiting room floor, I probably shouldn't have come at all. Healthcare professionals are already so bogged down with work nowadays. All I'm probably going to accomplish by doing this is take up the space of someone more deserving of the help. I narrowed my eyes at the door number. I swore the email had said I was supposed to go to room three-thirty-six by 9:30 AM! It was at least 9:45 now, shouldn't the door have opened at some point?

Maybe I had gotten mixed up and it was actually 9:30 PM instead. Maybe I should have chosen a therapist in Europe instead. Their measurements of time are so much more manageable. I speak enough European languages that I could have pulled that off.

A creak emitted from door three-thirty-six and for some unknown reason, my breath caught in my throat. Whoever was on the other side seemed to have stopped in their tracks right before they opened the door. I could see the bottoms of the shoes. They looked fancy, but worn. The owner was probably middle class if the generic store brand tag sticking up from the back of their shoes was anything to go by.

The door opened and I yelped. A middle aged woman looked at me questioningly. Mayhaps wondering what I was doing hovering outside her door. A sentiment that the longer I forced myself to see this through, the more I sympathized with.

"Uhm, hello!" I attempted a polite wave.

The woman blinked at me. "Hi there. Are you Apollo?" She had a wonderful voice, deep for a woman and undeniably pleasant. I could see how she had become a healthcare professional. A soothing voice has always helped me with bedside manner.

"Yes, that's me! Apollo..." I stuttered trying to remember the alias I had created for this. Yes, I had to create an alias entirely for going to therapy. Apparently mortals need to exist before they're allowed to sign up, and I couldn't just get this service on Olympus. The closest thing Olympus had to mental health services was some Dionysus enchanted ambrosia. Also called alcohol in some circles.

"Apollo John Smith." I don't know what you're talking about, I very much did not google the most common last name in *insert place here* to come up with my alias! That'd be stupid and incredibly transparent.

"Right, Apollo." The woman, who I assumed was Delilah Burch, my therapist to be, smiled inexplicably at me. She couldn't have possibly already realized I was lying about my name could she?

"Sorry for the wait. I had a client online that needed some extra time. Please come in." Burch's office wasn't decorated like most medical facilities I have been in. In fact, with the couch in the center of the room laden with handmade quilts, it reminded most of the infirmary at camp half blood. The room looked designed to have a homely feel. Even the dents in the wall next to the couch, told a story of perseverance. I don't know why, it was completely ridiculous, but I felt like the hole was taunting me.

Like it was saying, "I've withstood too much to be felled by you." Wow, I was in a weird mood today.

“May I?” I gestured to the couch. Delilah smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling in a way that reminded me fondly of my son Austin.

“Of course. Please.” I practically sunk into the couch. Even if I got nothing out of this visit, like I suspected would be the case, the journey would be worth it for this wonderful couch.

“What is this made of?”

Delilah chuckled, “I don’t know, but I’ve been told it’s something that starts with a p.”

“Well I’m going to have to look this couch up.” I didn’t say it outloud, but this couch had to be better than even Hephaestus’s laboratory couch. While my half brother was quite the inventor he was very facetious with comfort.

“If you find it, let me know. There’s quite a few people who have been asking me for it.” Delilah sat in a swivel chair across from, her long dark hair disappearing into black chair.

“Now,” she trailed a digit down her clipboard, “Since this is our first session, Apollo, it’s always good to start with an introduction.”

I nodded. Being a medical professional myself I was familiar with the more routine aspects of psychological treatment. Beyond the rubric though, I will admit I am rather clueless.

Delilah set the clipboard down on her lap, and I had to constrain myself from peering down at it. “I’ll go first. My name’s Delilah Burch, as you know. I am thirty-six years old. I have two siblings and I live with my dog bailey.” She pointed her pen at me, probably indicating it was my turn.

“Hello…” I trailed off, suddenly realizing I had no clue how to introduce myself. Usually I just say, “Hi I’m Apollo,” and people fill in the rest. I couldn’t do that now, obviously.

It wasn’t the best idea to start therapy based on a lie, but Olympus already had enough blackmail on me without finding my therapist.

I’ll just follow the template Delilah had laid out for me, “My name’s Apollo. I have…” My plan to follow her template fell apart as I realized I had no clue how many siblings I had.

“Well depending on how you define siblings I have a sister. I am…” Oh goodness. Another roadblock. How old was my identity again. I think I went with forty. Purely on the fact that I couldn’t gush about my teenage kids without getting weird questions.

I am not very familiar with the topics that come up in therapy, but if I had chosen my age simply off of how I appeared to mortals, I feel that being a teenage father would surely come up.

“Forty, I am forty-years-old. And I live alone. With my horses if we’re counting pets.” Delilah’s eyebrows lifted at my age, but hopefully that wasn’t because she had caught onto my lies. She was hopefully just contemplating how amazing I looked for my age. I get that a lot. Even in Olympus, which is always slightly less flattering because the people complimenting my looks there are mostly just trying to call me old without getting vaporized. (Ahem, Hermes and Dionysus.)

Delilah looked at me contemplatively. “If you don’t mind me asking, how do you define your siblings Apollo?”

Well that wasn’t what I was expecting. She had deviated from the first day rubric. I was lost. I opened my mouth, but I had no idea how to answer that question. I could go with full, biological siblings. That generally is the definition for siblings in my family, though even then that familial bond was sometimes ignored when my father, well…

My father’s… everything, probably wasn’t the topic to bring up on my first session with a new therapist. I didn’t know much about Delilah, but she didn’t seem like the type who was seeking a challenge. I guess I’d just stick with Artemis, even if I did consider a certain McCaffrey a little sister as well.

“I was counting full siblings. Of which I only have one.” Delilah leaned in like she was genuinely interested in what I had to say. I admired her for that. I for one was never able to pull off, “genuinely interested” when my patients told me about their personal lives. I’m sorry, but I do not care about your new shrine on Crete! I just don’t.

“That’s nice. Could you tell me her name?” She flashed her clipboard at me, “I like to make a diagram of relationships patients have so I have something to look at incase I forget.”

I blinked. A diagram. Well that was fancy. I knew that mental health practice had improved quite a bit over time, but a diagram was a stroke of ingenious. Back in medieval Europe Dionysus used to tell me stories about forgetting the names of people seeking his aid and how he would just cut a hole in their skull to get out of admitting he had forgotten. Which yes, was standard mental health treatment at the time.

“Well, that is handy.”

Delilah smirked, “Definitely. So what’s your sister’s name?”

“Oh, right.” I paled, realizing I hadn’t come up with aliases for any of my siblings. That was maybe something I should have considered before coming here.

“Artemis.”

“Oh I see.” Delilah scribbled on her diagram. “Apollo and Artemis, like the Greek gods! Are you two twins?”

I laughed nervously, “Very much like that. Yes we are twins. By the way, your last name, Burch. Are you perhaps related to Caroline Burch?” Confused Delilah looked at me. “The poet. And an excellent one at that.” I hinted at her, but Delilah’s face remained foggy.

“Well that’s disappointing.” I’d been a fan of Caroline Burch’s work for a long while and her stellar portfolio of poetry. Honestly her works deserved to be put in schools. I curse the person who somewhere along the line decided that Bill and Dante were the only poets doomed to be taught in American highschools.

“Sorry to disappoint. I’d say I’m about as related to her as you are to the real Apollo, but you know, you never know.” She said. I contained a laugh, you never did know.

“So do you have any other people in your life that I should know of? A parent? Friends? Kids?” Oh dear, I would have to come up with some aliases on the spot, wouldn’t I?

Start with the easy one, “I have a friend named Meg. She’s a little like my younger sister.” There, no harm in that. There’s plenty of Megs walking around. Her name wouldn’t incriminate me as one of the twelve olympians.

Now, onto my other relations. My mind raced through all my father’s titles. I would rather not discuss him ever, but considering this was therapy, and he was my abuser, if I did continue on with this charade he would no doubt come up.

“My father’s name is Bob and my mother’s name is Leto. I also have a lot of half siblings since my father’s a doner.” I winced as my poetic sense came up with a more truthful rhyme to that cover. Sometimes my talent is a curse.

Delilah’s smile had slipped at some point and she was writing so intently that I wondered how all those words could fit onto the diagram.

I felt awkward just sitting there and watching her so I continued. “I also do have other friends, but I don’t think you could fit them on your diagram.”

Delilah looked up at me, a challenge in her eyes, “Give me enough time, I could do it.”

“Okay. I also have four daughters, Kayla, Gracie, Emma, and Urania. Four sons, Austin, Will, Jerry, Raphael, and Yan who prefers no labels.” Delilah’s face remained mostly impartial, but her brow did furrow slightly.

“So your kids don’t live with you?”

“Eh heh, no, not typically. I mostly come to stay with them than the other way around.”

Delilah hummed, “Are they from one partner, no partner, multiple?” I leaned back in my chair. This was the trouble with choosing a mortal physiatrist. While the anonymity it allowed was convenient, it also had the downside of coming with mortal judgments on morality and this country's strangely christian prejudices. I hoped Delilah wasn’t the type to slut shame, but well, that’s never something you can tell from looking at a person.

For example; you would think Janus, the god of doorways would be totally down and cool with people having multiple partners over their lifetime, but no, he was a total stickler for ‘one true loves’.

“Multiple partners.” I meant to say it as a statement, but it came out more like a question.

“Alright.” She said, I let out a sigh of relief. This session had already been so awkward without the added tension of conflicting views on monogamy.

“Are you uncomfortable right now Apollo?” Delilah asked me. I froze up, which must’ve answered her question better than even I, with all my poetic wisdom could have done verbally.

“You really don’t have to be. I know all therapists say this, but trust me this is a safe space. Unless you are planning to harm yourself or others everything said in this room is entirely confidential. There is no judgment. Promise.” Her words were kind, and settled my nerves slightly. Though I knew she could not uphold that promise.

In my experience nothing I did was beyond scrutiny. Perhaps the only time in my life where my actions hadn’t been observable by Olympus was when I was hanging off the edge of chaos.

“No judgment? Well that does sound nice.” I smiled weakly. Delilah locked eyes with me, looking almost concerned for my well being. An idea that was completely absurd considering we’d only met around forty minutes ago.

“Yes. I find it quite nice. Once we look at things objectively it tends to shine a light on things we didn’t even try to look at before.” I nodded. Remembering when I sacrificed to my sister Diana at her temple at Camp Jupiter. Looking at mortals making sacrifices to me from above I had always thought they’d see it as an honor. Doing it myself had revealed the menial reality.

I was going to respond -with some mortal friendly revisions of course- my anecdote, but a piercing beeping erupted from Delilah’s pants.

She patted her lap like a dad recovering from a particularly funny joke. She pulled out her phone. “I’m sorry Apollo. It seems like our time together has come to an end.” She adjusted on her chair and pulled out her business card. “When would you be free for another session?”

I tapped my fingers considering. For all my worries today hadn’t been a total disaster. I looked at Delilah, she didn’t appear to be in a hurry to throw me out. Maybe the troubles of Noca county weren’t so terrible that I was taking up the spot of someone who needed more desperately than I?

“Any time is good for me. Most days after the sun sets I’m free.”

“So around eight?”

“Yeah, that, that works.” Delilah scribbled that down on her business card.

“Is next Thursday good for you?”

I mentally sorted through my to-do list for this month. It was depressingly short. One of the downsides of avoiding my godly family is the loss of, “Never a dull moment”.

“Yeah.” I stood up. Mourning the feel of comfortable couch on my tuchus.

Delilah held out her hand. “See you soon Apollo.” I took and we shook.

I found myself smiling, “You too.”

Well, I thought, that went surprisingly alright.

Chapter 2

I grabbed Dr. Burch’s knocker and swung it against her door. I winced. These doors were solid wood alright.

I looked around me subconsciously, hoping I hadn’t accidentally summoned Janus with my doorway abuse. In my defense, I would tell him, Dr. Burch is the one who hung the metal thing on the door in the first place! It’s basically asking me to hit the door!

I considered the simple wall hanging, the black seemed to clash with the yellow-esk wood, which shouldn’t have been possible because every fashion magazine I’ve read has told me that nothing clashes with black. I might have to go back and reconcile some of my style choices from the 1980’s…

The knocker was quite wide as well. Aren’t therapist’s offices not supposed to have things you could hang yourself from? Or are those psych wards? I realize I’m showing my ass on my knowledge of mental health treatment facilities.

I stepped back from my doorknob ogling when I heard voices on the other side of the door. I quickly retreated.

A teenager emerged from the room, looking like they were holding back tears. I tried to look away -I know teenagers can get touchy about getting stared at- but this particular teen reminded me eerily of my Lester Popadopalous form if he'd gotten, well, more sun.

Dr. Burch followed behind them, giving me a side eye that didn’t seem to fit well with her dogma of, “no judgment”. Maybe I shouldn’t have knocked, but then why have the knocker to begin with? Did it just come with the door?

Dr. Burch turned the teen towards them and patted their shoulder. “I can’t promise you everything will be alright Clifton, but remember that while you can’t change the situation you can change-”

“How I react to it? Yeah I heard you and mom the first ten-thousand times thanks.” Clifton shrugged Dr. Burch’s hand off, she dropped her hand and gave them a Chiron quality smile. The type of smile that seemed to be both comforting and condescending in equal measure.

“Have a nice day Clifton.” Clifton did a weak wave and walked off. Glaring at everything that came into their view, including me.

If the passive aggressiveness kept up I might decide that this therapy thing wasn’t worth risking my reputation.

Once Clifton was beyond the corridor Dr. Burch turned to me, suddenly all smiles. “Hello Apollo. It’s good to see you.”

I fought the urge to nervously twirl my hair, “Yes, good to see you too.”

“I must admit after our last meeting I was worried you wouldn’t be coming back.” I was suprised. I thought our last meeting had gone relatively well! At least amongst first impressions with mortals. Was it the last name Smith? I knew that was going to be a give away!

“Really,” I chuckled in a very, totally casual way, “What made you think that?”

Dr. Burch tilted her head, “You just had a very nervous energy. You seemed very uncomfortable here to me. I’m glad you came back.” She held open the door.

Curse this woman and her Sally Jackson perceptiveness! I was nervous. Gods, maybe I should just give up the charade and tell her I’m a god. I feel like that could help me avoid a lot of problems. But, I spotted a photo on the window sill of Delilah, another woman that looked like her, and a small child, it would likely cause more problems than it’d be worth.

I sat down on Delilah’s ungodly comfy couch (as a god I’m aloud to say that) and tried not to give it a Chrissy Amphlet feel up.

“You get the name?”

“What?” I looked up at Dr. Burch sitting across from me. “What name?”

She picked up her clipboard and clicked her pen, “The name of the couch. You said you would look it up?”

I didn’t remember that. Had I said that? To be frank I didn’t remember much of our last encounter. I hadn’t felt like I’d needed to, with how wonderfully mundane things had turned out.

“I’m sorry, I forgot.”

Delilah waved off my apology, “That’s fine. You didn’t have to.” She adjusted in her swivel chair and took a long sip of a large water bottle on her right. “So Apollo, now that it’s your second session I think we can get into the more fun part of this relationship hmm?”

I blinked, not knowing what, “the more fun part” meant in this context. In my experience the more fun part of relationships wasn’t exactly safe for work. I doubted Delilah, with her professional wardrobe and this being her work place meant that .

“What do you mean?”

She smiled warmly, perhaps sensing my discomfort again. “Could you tell me Apollo, why you decided to come here?”

I looked around her office and raised an eyebrow, “Well you let me in so…”

Dr. Burch chuckled like I’d made a particularly funny joke. “No, I meant why did you decide to seek help, Apollo?”

My cheeks went gold. (A wonderful side effect of having ichor instead of blood is that people can’t tell when you’re blushing.) I didn’t know what to say. As I told you at the beginning of this tale dear reader there was no specific reason I decided to seek help. Nope, no reason at all. In fact one could say I had the opposite of a reason, an anti-reason? Yeah, I like how that sounds. I could totally sell that to my buddies at Websters. Good word for poetry, anti-reason.

“Uhm, I guess I just felt like it.” I meant to say it like a statement, but the ‘uhm’ and the way my voice increased in pitch at the end of my sentence pretty thoroughly sabotaged the attempt.

Dr.Burch, bless her heart, -no not literally godly power, you’ve messed up blessings too much for me to use you right now- made no comment on my voice crack but to scribble on her notepad.

“Therapy is all about feelings, so, you’ve got the right idea there. Is there anything else? Anything you’d like to work on?”

I grimaced. There were many things I’d like to work on. My hair, my parenting skills, the sun chariot stereo, but the worry I had held signing up for therapy in the first place held me at bay from saying any of that.

“I… I think that everyone has things they can work on. Ways to be better.” I thought of Reyna’s words after our meeting with Harpocrates. To be a better person I had to change, to work on things and be better .

Delilah gave me an evaluating look and- wow, I was really uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than that time when I’d gone to that modern rap convention and over half the free styles had included the word, “bitch” five times plus. Some of the freestylers had even gone on to rhyme the word with itself. Which, as the expert on rhyming I was fairly certain didn’t count as actually rhyming. The rappers and their possies hadn’t too seemed inclined to take my advice though.

Honestly that’s my issue with modern rap, too many yes men. Sure it feels good to have people patting you on the back for everything you do, but it stifles creativity, and creativity is especially what modern MCs need- what was I talking about again?

“I think that’s a wonderful philosophy.” Dr. Burch cut into my musings, “And, I know I’m supposed to be impartial here, but one I quite agree with. I wish all my patients had that mindset going into therapy. It would be very beneficial for them and me.”

I nodded, the wisdom of Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano was something to behold. “The thing with therapy is that it’s a partnership. It doesn’t work unless both parties are cooperating and willing to work together.”

I nodded again, mentally sliding that information into my lexicon. I would have to speak with Dionysus about that particular piece of information because if he was helping Nico D’angelo with his mental health, and knowing my brother he would need a bit of push to really contribute to a partnership. Or anything really, with all he stalled doing anything you would think he was the god of dragging his heels not wine.

"So is there anything specific you would like to work on Apollo?” Oh goodness, we were back to this question. You know I've never related so much to Meg’s refusal to form coherent sentences before.

I gripped the couch cushion, trying my best to figure out how to proceed without giving the game away, so to speak. What part of my life could I talk about that wouldn’t get me immediately labeled an immortal being?

My kids? I suppose that could work. I did want to become a better person for them as well as myself, so it was even true! Though based on my appearance the fact that I have teenaged children might actually give me away. I suppose I’ll have to look into those ridiculous, mortal, “anti-aging creams” (which, as a doctor I must tell you mortals to stop buying. Truly most of them do more harm than good.) to use as an excuse in case someone Dr. Burch starts asking any questions.

“I would like to learn how to be a better father. I know that’s very broad but,” I trailed off, unsure what to say.

Dr. Burch nodded sympathetically, “It’s fine Apollo. That’s a wonderful goal to have and we have a lot of time to work on it. Though as you said that kind of goal can sound incredibly daunting, so how do you feel-” She clicked her pen and brandished it at me, “about breaking it down with me?”

How I feel, well in general slightly terrified that one of my siblings or shudder my father would burst through the window behind you and start streaming my embarrassment to all of Olympus. How I felt about breaking down a goal, “That sounds fine to me.”

I brought up how I felt that I didn’t spend enough time with my kids. (Leaping and bounding over the topic of the ancient laws) We then discussed my profession and creating slots of time for my kids and by the end of the session Delilah had me sending an email to camp half blood stating I’d be over to take cabin seven to the latest performance at the Sydney opera house.

By the end of the session I felt quite content. I’ve been told that therapy is supposed to make you uncomfortable, but I was starting to feel quite at home in Dr. Burch’s office. Returning to the Sun Palace I quite happily marked down our next meeting in my calendar.

I found I was actually looking forward to my next hour at door three-thirty-six.

Chapter 3

This might be strange to say, but I was having a magnificent day. I’d hung out with Meg at Aeithales and there wasn’t a single monster attack, I spent the previous night on a joyous outing with my kids, and I do believe I finally managed to shed that awkward, “you’re our dad, but we never used to see you so we’re always very mindful of how we act next to you” mindset from Kayla and Austin.

Not to mention the performance itself was outstanding. That drummer, why she was something else. Both in stamina and style. The two S’s of how to be a good performer, and the way she complimented the singer’s sporadic tempo, her technical chops were nothing to scoff at either. I digress, all I’m trying to say is I walked out of the concert with an amazing sense of fulfillment and an amazing musician's number in my back pocket.

And before you get all, “Oh Apollo, but wasn’t this trip about your kids? Why were you flirting?” First off, I can flirt and shower my kids with affection at the same time! That’s not weird! Also my plans with Anastasia aren’t going to be anything like a date. They are going to purely be two musicians with mutual admiration for each other having hour long rockin jam sessions. Nothing romantic about that.

Currently I was flying through the sky in the form of a peregrine falcon, the fastest bird in the world, wind rushing through my fathers, brushing against my skin, the world passing down in sweeping arcs and blurred river roads. No matter how many times I did this, flying free was alway exhilarating.

I regretted many things about accepting my godhood back from my father, regaining the ability to fly was never one of them.

I swung into a dive plunging down at the speed of one of my arrows. My wings were tucked close to my body and my feathers deflected dust particles like a windshield, air moving out of the way of my descent.

It was glorious. Approaching the ground I pushed out my wings and crashed into a wall of air like a spaceship hitting Earth’s atmosphere. Then I was soaring, flapping my wings to pull me above the ground so I could glide to a stop at my destination.

I drifted to a wire and landed, gently descending onto the ground. I started to waddle through the streets to an alley where I could transform into a more suitable form for counseling. If the residents of Saint Paul Minnesota were at all confused to see a peregrine falcon wadling through their streets like a lost pigeon, none of them took up their grievances with me.

Last second before exiting the alley way I realized that I forgot to put on clothes, and quickly equipped the first thing that came to mind. Which was a chiton, then to be replaced by my usual Lester Papadopoulous mom jeans and T-shirt for modesty reasons.

While my chiton was down right modest back in ancient times nowadays it would be quite a scandalous thing to show up to a mental health facility in. Or at least when you weren’t in LA. Depending on what part of that city you were in, my chiton could still, probably, be considered modest.

It occurred to me as I progressed through Dr. Burch’s building that I looked like father. Of course I always look like a dad in the fact that I am, by a broad definition of the word, a father. But with my worn and aged Lester jeans, the pockets sagging from use- and for some reason I couldn’t fathom my form appeared older than I usually went with- I truly did look like someone’s pops.

I had faint smile lines around my eyes, my posture was laid back, and casual. I looked like a man who was just a day away from going out with his teenage kids to a concert. I felt a weird kind of content, like I had everything in the world right in front of me but was in no hurry to do anything with it.

It was a feeling that was almost entirely foreign. Though I suppose there was no mystery in what spurred on the mood. I’d simply had a good week. Hmm, another foreign thing.

I melted out of my reverie when I met Dr. Burch’s door. Closed again. I suppose I should have expected that. Us physicians were never quite punctual either.

Huh, maybe that’s why there are chairs in this hallway?

I took a seat when I didn’t hear the conversation going on in room three thirty six winding down. I was mentally playing my favorite songs off of Madonna's album, Madonna when I heard a thump.

I looked around me and saw something had fallen out of my pocket. There was a makeshift doll lying on the floor, its head twisted at an odd angle and droplets of red coating it. That was- that was the doll my maybe-daughter Georgina had made for me. I was sure I lost that ages ago, yet it had just fallen out of my jeans pocket.

My jeans pocket that wasn’t even on the trousers I was really wearing when I first got it. While these jeans appeared like the variety of ones I wore on my trials they were simply a replica. I never would have been able to fit in Lesters' actual trousers. At least not remotely comfortably for me or anyone in my line of sight.

I picked the broken thing up from the synthetic wood floors and turned it in my hand. Now how did you get here my friend? I felt bad for the little doll. I’d completely forgotten about it and now it was all covered in Lester fluids.

A fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy- mostly for my own sake.

I looked at the clock, it was getting pretty late. I wondered if I would get punched if I tried knocking again… Whether by Janus or Dr. Bruch I did not know.

As if hearing my slander, the door next to me slammed open, I jumped in my seat, the chair scraping a piercing note into the synthetic wood. Another teenager stormed out of it, not even giving me a second glance.

I smoothed out my t-shirt trying to reassemble my composure. There sure were a lot of angry teenagers here. This is the second one in a row. The youth of today seems to be struggling quite a bit. I should probably do something about that, being the god of youth and all, but I didn’t suppose tracking down teens already getting help and asking what’s wrong would help much.

“Hi Apollo!” Delilah Burch’s lovely contralto met my ears and I looked up to see her smiling broadly at me.

“Oh hello there! Good morning!”

“Yes, it is. Nice and cool. Much better than the summer heat if you ask me.” Dr. Burch chuckled lightly and held open her door for me. I would have disagreed with her and perhaps offered to message her my forty slides long powerpoint on why, actually, summer was the season superior to all others, but I was in such a good mood I didn’t bother. We entered and took our seats.

I cracked a joke about the quality of the couch again, Delilah laughed and then something in the atmosphere shifted. I’m not sure how I could tell something was coming, perhaps it was simple intuition, perhaps it was my on and off buddy Delphi warning me to get out now, while I still could.

The feeling was strange, but I didn’t heed it. I was an Olympian god and Dr. Burch was about as mortal as one could be. Even if a monster were to suddenly burst through a window and destroy the whole building I had full faith in my ability to neutralize it and protect Delilah Burch along with everyone else.

I suppose that was a bit of hubris on my part. Figures what occurred next I must have committed some sort of sin against the fates just wonderful sensibilities.

“You know Apollo, we've had fun our last few meetings.” I narrowed my eyes. If that wasn’t ominous I wasn’t the god of music.

“Yes?”

“And while that’s all well and good, speaking with you has been a delight, I think we’ve come to a point in our relationship where we can start to get into more personal topics. Perhaps dig further into certain issues you think might require immediate attention?”

I blinked, immediate attention wasn’t really how I would describe any of my issues. I was an immortal, when it came to self progression “immediate” was something entirely up to me to decide. Or at least that’s how I used to think. That mentality has acquired some qualifiers recently. For example if one of my friends were in danger, or gods forbid I was the one endangering them, that would require immediate attention.

To my knowledge I wasn’t endangering anyone right now, but… In the past I certainly had. So the first place to start would be there? But how would I discuss that with a mortal? How would I admit to any of my previous behaviors without collapsing in a ball of guilt and having Delilah running out of the room and trying to break her strange knocker off her door and use it to lock me in?

Would all that be worth the chance to be better? Better than I already am trying to be, good enough to deserve those that I wished to protect? I stared at Delilah then turned to look closer at the photo of her sister and that young child on the window cill.

While I wanted desperately to expedite my process towards being a better person, it wasn’t worth the risk. Revealing my status as a god, or even dropping subtle hints in my story could lead to Delilah discovering the truth of the immortal world, which could risk destroying her mind. I couldn’t do that to her. That would make me as bad as I was before. Tossing mortal lives out like candy wrappers.

So where to start, was the question? What about me personally did I not like? Thinking about it, I leaned back on the couch and Dr. Burch graced me with a patient smile.

There was quite a lot about me that I wished I could fix. I wanted to be better in more ways than one, I wanted to be moral yes, I wanted to be strong and resilient, I wanted be clever like Athena so I could wriggle my way out of trouble, I wanted to be free like my sister, I wanted to be brave enough to do more than sit in the golden cage that was Olympus and break out and create change like Meg.

I wasn’t any of those things, especially not brave, but I didn’t know how to ask. Bravery had always been something I envied; seeing it all my life. In Meg, my sister, Don the faun, I watched them stand strong with intention while I fumbled through my decisions like a one hit wonder trying to recreate the success of their first hit.

I looked at Dr. Burch, really looked at her. I tried to see not just her physically but the room she inhabited, the job she took, and the questions she asked.

Despite her middling age she had the enthusiasm of a young child running into every situation expecting the best. She dealt with children everyday like the young Clifton. Children marching through their existence on this rock in space unsure of how they got here, or how they remain, and she tried to help them make sense of it all.

I only knew Dr. Burch for not even a full four hours, but I could already tell she had faced more trials and come out on top than I ever have.

How to sit in front such a person and ask, answer, with my own flaws pleading for their guidance?

What would they think of me? And would it hurt more if they dismissed me, or if they held a hand?

I found myself staring at the hole in the wall I noticed on my first visit here. There was already spackle filling the cracks surrounding the fist shaped hole.

“I want to be better than who I was, and I want the courage to push through to that.”

Delilah simply marked something down on her clipboard. She looked to me, her eyes were polite, but I felt a pressure to speak nonetheless.

“I want to be brave enough to stay away from my father,” like Meg and my sister Artemis, “I want the courage to look those I have wronged in the eye and promise them that they will be the last to experience the pain I caused them. I want a way to look at my children without all their kindness being unbalanced. I want-” I trailed off.

I broke eye contact with the hole in the wall and hung my head. I didn’t continue. There wasn’t enough time to go on and spill the whole truth of my pitiful existence.

Wow, I’m starting to sound like an edgy teen. It seemed running into that teen earlier was some sort of foreshadowing.

I remained still in the couch seat, frozen, waiting for Dr. Burch to make the first move. The anticipation of seeing her reaction to my confession was killing me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look up and confirm my worst fears.

The silence hung in the air like rain clouds. Condensing dark in the sky, lightning sparking through them and my muscles instinctively tensing.

“Are you feeling good Apollo?” Dr. Burch spoke and I raised my head, her eyes crinkled at the corners with concern, and her lovely mahogany eyes were bearing into me.

I was taken aback. She didn’t hate me! Though I suspected that was probably because I spared her all the gory details of my moral failings.

Also, of course I felt good? I was the god of youth and healing, I was likely the healthiest person on the planet! I quickly checked my form for any blemishes, briefly fearing that my acne had returned; that somehow my emotional vulnerability had registered as wrong to my godly body and it decided to course correct by slowly transforming into Lester Papadopoulos.

To my luck that didn’t seem to be the case.

“I didn’t mean physically.” Dr. Burch interjected. I quickly stopped my personal pat down and did my best not to look embarrassed. Curse me and my presumptuousness. I really need to work on my self esteem, this imposter syndrome is starting to leak into my good looks. If my brain kept this up I might accidentally manifest flab onto my perfect form in my sleep.

I don’t hate Lester’s form anymore, but being shoved into it without my waking consent was not an experience I wished to repeat.

“I mean emotionally Apollo. It is truly wonderful that you’re opening up. Truly, but you don’t have to force yourself. We can take things one at a time. I wrote down what you said. Which do you want to talk about?”

She flipped over her clipboard. I rubbed my eyes and squinted to read the sheet. When had it gotten so dark? In an instant the room lightened and illuminated the list.

The words fell from my lips as I read them, “My father…” I stopped. I had mentioned my father? That seemed like an oversight. I had already resolved to keep my godly side as far away from Dr. Burch as I could, discussing my father wouldn’t bring anything but destruction. I would have to-

“So you want to talk about your father?”

My panic must have been visible. Dr. Burch pursed her lips.

“Is everything alright at home Apollo?” She asked.

I didn’t have an answer.

Chapters will be updated individually from now on. This was just to get the back log of the fic on tumblr!

#Trials of apollo #Trials of Apollo fanfiction #mine #Door three-thirty-six #therapy fic #pjo Apollo #lester papadopoulos #my fanfic

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