#but ‘sacrifices self for the sake of literally everyone else’ is a pretty big point in Matoro’s favour

[7thbutterflyofspring]

Huh. So you’re telling me that the guy often referred to as “the Embodiment of Evil” is actually just the leader of an order of evil beings who were originally created to assist God w/ His divine duties, but rebelled in an attempt to gain power?

Also there’s this other dude who originates from among the ordinary beings that the evil guy tries to lord over, who obtains powers that are diametrically opposite to the evil dude, which the good dude turns out to have kinda been born with? And then the good dude gets put through a bunch of trials & temptations by the evil guy & his order, but inevitably resists them?

Had not realised Bionicle was *this* Christian, but ok then

[schafpudel]

The thing is that when you're a kid, the part of Princess Tutu's ending that is most disappointing is Duck turning back into a duck. Like Uzura points out, it's sad that Duck won't be able to talk to people ever again or interact with them like a person can. Furthermore, if you like the romance aspect of shoujo, it’s... a pretty big obstacle to not just Fakiru, but literally any other ship imaginable.

But as I get older, the part that frustrates me the most is Mytho and Rue.

(Dead Dove, Do Not Eat if you don’t wanna read criticism of the ending of Princess Tutu. I’m placing this in the main tag for my own blog’s organizational purposes; if you have tips for how to prevent it from showing up in tag search, let me know.)

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Rue... has been told all her life that Mytho is the only person capable of loving her, and we are SHOWN that's not true. Duck loves her. Malen was attracted to her, even if the intensity of that feeling was exacerbated by a heart shard. But she struggles to accept this. The failure to take Femio’s heart, after all, was used by the Raven to prove that ”you will never be loved by anyone but me and the prince in the story” was an ironclad rule of her existence.

Autor being able to love her at all, enough to die for her, even if it was infatuation brought about by raven-blood magic and the machinations of The Story, was yet another slap in the face after learning she was human, and not a deformed crow. Confronted with another fact of her existence being a lie, she laughed at the absurdity and horror of it all, and told him to go home.

Rue is a deeply traumatized and abused young woman, who has been told she’s unlovable her entire life. She’s deeply afraid of losing even the facsimile of love, and without anyone to turn to, she acted on those fears in ways that were harmful to both herself and others. She has difficulty trusting that other people, such as Duck, genuinely care about her, even when they go out of her way to talk to her.

She needs space and time to grow emotionally healthy. She needs a support network, a multiplicity of relationships to fall back on when she struggles, more than she needs to rely entirely on the love on a single romantic partner. Who will she turn to, if their relationship ever struggles? Even the happiest couples argue sometimes, and her and Mytho’s relationship has a lot of baggage attached to it.

Everyone else goes back to their "true selves", but Rue becomes a fairytale princess, and retreats deeper into The Story. On one level, it’s wish fulfillment and escapism for a girl who's known nothing but misery - her very own Cinderella story. Thematically, next to everyone else, it's just a little strange. She was born a normal girl, before the Raven stole her. She was *happiest* when she was a normal girl. Could she not also be happy in “reality,” with the petty stakes and mundane pleasures of a commoner's existence?

I wonder if her birth parents are alive. I wonder what it would be like, for her to meet them. Not even to necessarily move in with them, just... getting to know where she really came from. Her ties to humanity.

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Mytho, unlike everyone else, isn't allowed to question his role by the anime. He is not a "real person" thrust into a role, but rather a being created from the role, and that sets him apart. But the entire inciting incident of The Prince and The Raven is that Mytho's selfless love causes others to fight over him, and that his attempts to rescue them simply escalate the conflict and the raven's predation.

Mytho was born to be selfless to the point of self-destruction, because he was created by Drosselmyer to suffer and die. When heartless, he sacrifices his own wellbeing for the sake of the innocent with the same thoughtless, primal instinct as  a salmon returning to its river, a moth flying towards a flame. His entire concept of love, when he regains it, revolves around sacrificing himself for others' sake.

(When the raven's blood corrupts him it simply inverts this. Demanding that other people sacrifice themselves for him, that they love only him. Is this not, in a way, a reflection of what the people inside in the story demanded of him?)

Mr. Cat tells Mytho that you can't marry on the feeling of wanting to die for someone alone, but we have no evidence he ever learns this, really. To the very end, he was going to do something very dramatic, passionate, romantic, self destructive, and utterly pointless -- shatter his heart again (in the hopes that maybe he would regain it), kill the Raven (and Rue with him), and then kill himself. Thankfully, Duck stopped him.

Princess Tutu is less inherently critical of the idea of princes and princesses than Utena, but here’s something that feels relevant to Mytho. In RGU.... the life of a prince, lived up to its hypothetical chivalrous ideals, is not sustainable. Dios ran himself ragged, until he became ill, and the world was enraged that he did not continue his princely duties. Anthy "sealed him away", to protect him, and took the brunt of their hatred. Now, as Akio, he lives freely... by letting her suffer the swords of humanity's hatred in his place, every single day, and attempts to cheat his way back to princehood by the most manipulative, abusive means possible.

(I don’t think Mytho is doomed to become an abusive monster like Akio, even taking account how he conducted himself under Raven’s blood. But I wonder if he can maintain the lifestyle forever. He was created to subject himself to a Sisyphean task, where his own attempts to stop it merely exacerbated the disaster he was fighting. He was created to suffer, and die.)

I don’t know if he can ever be free of his... “programming,“ his “instincts,“ his pre-written nature. But I would like him to be free of the responsibility to always follow them. To not have the world on his shoulders. To be able to be a little selfish, without going full heart-eating corvid.

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I can't help but feel, sometimes, like Rue and Mytho simply retreated deeper into the coffin that Drosselmyer created, thinking it to be freedom.

I’d kind of like a season 3, whether to change this ending... or to reassure me of the ending we have.

[linkspooky]

Gojo and Sukuna: The Strongest vs The Strongest

Gojou and Sukuna are both pictured lounging on top of a pile of skulls: the people they’ve climbed over to reach the top of their respective worlds. Gojou is the strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer, and Sukuna is the strongest cursed spirit. As they both carry the title of the strongest they actually have a lot in common, and are destined to duke it out one day - more details UNDER THE CUT.

1. Individualism

Gojo and Sukuna are both characters who base their entire identity around their individual strength. Their number one priority is the development of themselves. They need to stand out. They need to stand out on top. That’s why they share the phrase: “Throughout the heaven and earth, he alone is the honored one.”

Selfish and self-centered is a personality trait that typically has negative connotations, but being a selfish person is not necessarily a good or bad thing. All it means is you prioritize yourself first, your own thoughts, your own world view, your own sense of self. 

“I alone am the honored one” is actually a phrase of self enlightenment. It’s said that after the Budha Sakayuni was born he took seven steps from his mother and said that while pointing to the heaven and earth [x]. 

Gege has confirmed in his author comments he uses it to confirm the arrogance of the characters, and in doing so he portrays both the good and the bad of having such a sense of arrogance. See, selfishness is considered a bad quality, but what about self-confidence? Self-esteem? Believing in yourself can lead you to good things. Doubting yourself may seem humble, but it can lead you to making mistakes, or even lashing out at others. These aren’t necessarily good or bad they’re just qualities that people have. Personal enlightenment means becoming the best version of yourself that you can possibly be (if I’m WAYYY SIMPLIFYING). Gojou and Sukuna know themselves, and what they desire better than any other characters in the series. 

Gojo and Sukuna have such high confidence in themselves that they believe they can do pretty much anything, and usually they can. In their world view if you have the strength to do it, then anything is possible. 

Gojo calls this philosophy swinging for the fences. They are both like star players on the team, who do everything they can to stand out and be the best. Their are two competing needs in the story, the individual good, and the collective good. Gojo insists you don’t have to sacrifice yourself and put yourself down for the good of others, which is why he tries to assert his individual will on the world. He wants to make the world better how he sees fit. He generally thinks he’s right, and more right than others. Sukuna is the same way to a more extreme extent. 

The flaw of this thinking is that eventually they both tend to see themselves as above other people. When they stop seeing other people and cut themselves off like this, they start to believe they have to do every single thing alone. Instead of asserting their own will over others, it becomes more and more like their own will, their own ideas, their own thoughts and feelings become all that exists to them. That’s when their thinking starts becoming warped. 

Collectivism and Individualism are ideas that seem to contradict each other but that’s wrong, they’re actually complementary ideas that coexist. People are individuals. People are a collective group. Both of these ideas exist at the same time. 

Gojo’s self confidence, his selfless fighting for others always using his strength for the sake of others, trying to make a better world as he sees fit are all good things, but the fact that he believes no matter how strong he becomes no matter how hard he fights he’ll always die alone because it’s not worth becoming close to others in the Jujutsu World is just... sad. It means ever since Geto left, Gojo has trouble accepting other people and becoming close to them. Whereas Sukuna just doesn’t care. The flaw of doing everything alone is exactly that, you’re eventually alone, you become the only person on earth. 

2. Collectivism

Gojo and Sukuna both have an individual mindset, but where they differ is how they use their massive strength. Gojo believes in himself above all else but, he uses his strength for the collective good of the jujutsu world, whereas Sukuna only ever uses it for himself. Gojo parallels Yuji’s grandfather’s advice at the beginning of the manga pretty much exactly. He’s strong, so he’s obligated to help people. 

Gojo and Sukuna believes their strength makes them capable of anything, but Sukuna takes that one step further. Sukuna’s strength means he can do whatever he wants to others. Whereas, Gojo holds himself back. It’s why Sukuna is the king of curses, but Gojo isn’t the king of sorcerers. 

Gojo is at least capable of acknowledging other people in a way that Sukuna isn’t. Sukuna believes that the world should be run on strength alone. Gojo acknowledges that he’s perfectly capble of slaughtering everyone at the top and declaring himself king, but that he doesn’t really think that will change things ultimately. 

The thing is other people exist, even if Sukuna wants to ignore this inconvenient reality. No man is an island, yadda yadda. More importantly though, other people play a big role in individual identity too. If you were a person who never interacted with other people in your life, you’d just be insane. You’d be feral like an animal. You wouldn’t even have a sense of individuality. The individual ego is shaped just as much by our interactions with other people, seeing how we’re similiar and different to others than it is by how we view ourselves. Gojo and Sukuna both grapple with this idea. One thing they have in common is they both have awful peresonalities.

They’re not even lousy, they’re childish. They play games with other people. Gojo makes constant references to video games and pop culture like he’s a really hip teenager. Sukuna makes every fight into a game where he viciously mocks his opponent because he’s just so bored. The reason is because as individuals they’re also stunted, specifically because they have such trouble acknowledging other people and other people have such an influence on our peresonalities. Gojo doesn’t really need to grow up because he’s always been stronger and smarter than all the adults. Sukuna is a thousand year old spirit who acts like he’s thirteen. 

This longing to understand other people exists in both of them. Sukuna’s one redeeming feature is that when people are strong he will acknowledge them. He reaches out and connects to Jogo before his death. The problem is if you don’t meet his own personal definition of strength, then by his rules you’re basically nothing. 

Gojo seems much more aware of the fact that he’s not good enough to change things alone. What he wants is allies who are just as strong as he is, people he can rely on, people he can stand together and fight with. 

Sukuna genuinely doesn’t care about others. In fact, he views the desire to have companions, equals as a weakness. If you accept other people in any other regard, it weakens you and your individual will + desires as a person. 

But as I said, acknowledging other people is just as formative in your identity in ackonwledging yourself. Sukuna is just flat out wrong here. He’s the extreme result of Gojo’s tendency to do everything himself. For Sukuna other people just straight up don’t exist. The only people he acknowledges are the ones who meet his standards, his servants like Ura-Ume, and the one he plans on using like Megumi and that itself is a weakness. An oversight. 

3. Gojou vs. Sukuna

Sukuna has been planning, since literally the introduction chapters and the very first arc of the manga how he’s going to take Gojo down when he eventually claims Yuji’s body as his own. 

However, even if Sukuna were at full strength in Yuji’s body, Gojo would still win. I don’t think Gojo’s being cocky here it’s a genuine assessment of his strength. Which is why Sukuna has gotten crafty. We saw a long, long time ago he took an interest in Megumi the moment he learned he was a shikigami user. 

Sukuna notices that Megumi a shadow based shikigami user should have been easily able to beat a one finger curse, and asks why he didn’t. It’s after this point he takes a special interest in Megumi. He sees much more potential in Megumi, then Megumi even sees in himself. 

He places his bets in the personal development of Megumi Fushigoro. Over time, we’re reminded again and again the itnerest Sukuna has only in Megumi, and it’s slowly revealed why piece by piece. 

We learn two things about Megumi over time, that he intentionally holds himself back all the time, even though among the first years he’s the closest so far to developing a domain expansion. Number two is what we’ve learned in the last chapter.

Megumi actually has an insanely strong Jujutsu ability that he was born with. Among the Zen’in family it’s the only one that could ever possibly equal the six eyes. In the past it was a six-eyes user and a ten shadows user who fought to the death as equals. Megumi is someone who has had the capability to surpass Gojo all along, he just doesn’t believe himself capable and inententionally holds himself back. 

Which is why we learn this chapter, the insanely strong spirits that Megumi can summon with his ability we finally get a clue as to why Sukuna has taken an interset in him. Even if everything goes swimmingly and he takes over Yuji’s body, he still has to fight Gojo. 

Sukuna is keeping Megumi alive because from the beginning, being a thousand years old he knows this ancient history between the Zen’in and the Gojo families, and he knows that Megumi being a ten shadows user has the potential to be an equal, or even stronger than Gojo. 

The Gojo and Sukuna fight is going to happen eventually in the manga and when it does, Sukuna’s planning on using Megumi as a tool against Gojo. That’s what we’ve been building to all this time. That’s Sukuna’s plans for Megumi. 

[panharmonium]

you know what?

no.  absolutely not.

i already did part 1 of this post here.  i’m back again with part 2, because unfortunately the awfulness factor doesn’t stop with arthur, and as much as i adore hunith generally, this entire sequence is a MESS.

and yes, i am aware that pretty much nobody else thinks so.  every time i see this scene referenced in fandom, it is always framed as a fun, cutesy, sing-songy moment of “oooo, hunith ships merthur!”  literally every time.  

which, you know, like i always say about everything fandom-related - that’s fine.  everybody is going to enjoy things differently; you do you, and keep on having fun!  but here on my own blog, in my own space, i am gonna do me, and in this case ‘me’ involves yelling about how much i can’t stand that particular read, and how angry the end of 1.10 makes me.

disclaimer, to help folks curate their own fandom experiences: i am going to be Very Cranky for the rest of this post.  if you love this particular scene in the way i just mentioned, you will probably want to scroll on by, because this piece of meta most likely won’t be your jam.  as always, these are my personal thoughts and nobody is obligated to share them, so please do not hesitate to simply skip this post if we are on different wavelengths - instead, keep enjoying fandom in whatever way is most fun for you!

fair warning now given, off i go on a long, frustrated tirade.

i already wrote about the first half of this scene, where arthur decides that the appropriate thing to do at this particular moment is to give merlin a scolding about the evils of sorcery, despite the fact that the only reason arthur is even alive to deliver this lecture in the first place is because merlin’s ‘sorcerer’ best friend just DIED saving arthur’s life.  but sure, you know what, let’s use said best friend’s funeral to chastise merlin about how “dangerous” sorcerers are.  let’s just make that completely dickheaded decision.  

and, moving on to the second half of this scene - here’s the thing.  hunith overhears this entire conversation.  she overhears arthur telling merlin off about sorcery, in front of the burning corpse of merlin’s best friend, who is, as far as arthur knows, the ‘sorcerer’ who died saving arthur’s life.  

and yet, for some inexplicable reason, hunith still cannot get off the arthur pendragon train for two damn seconds.  

she has known arthur for less than a week.  by contrast, she has known will for his entire life.  but the instant arthur walks away, hunith sidles up next to merlin and says, “you’d better be going” - like.  okay, my god, can you try to hustle him away from his best friend’s in-progress funeral any faster?????  how about we maybe give him a second?  the pyre hasn’t even burnt down yet, and merlin hasn’t had a single second to himself since this sequence started.  he’s had to stand there and listen to arthur insult the dude who everyone is supposed to be memorializing, and then hunith - who overheard the entire thing - zips right over and tries to chivvy merlin on his way.  you’d better be going.

HELLO?!  the pyre is still roaring.  how about, instead of hassling merlin and hustling him offstage, everybody just sits down and waits for a minute.  how about they all just leave merlin alone for three everloving seconds.  

honestly, just - every time i think about this scene i get angrier.

i love hunith, and i know she’s well-intentioned.  but everything she gives merlin in this scene is the exact opposite of what he needs.  he doesn’t need to be hurried off the village green like there’s some reason he can’t stay there for the entirety of his friend’s funeral.  he doesn’t need to be pushed into going back to camelot when he is clearly struggling with the idea of leaving ealdor again.  and he absolutely does not need to be told how much someone else “needs” him right now, when he himself is the one who is having a fucking crisis and who needs someone to take care of him.

i cannot emphasize that last point enough.  it is just - beyond upsetting to me that hunith literally watches arthur shitting on merlin’s dead best friend (and, by proxy, merlin himself, since merlin is the actual sorcerer) and she still somehow thinks the right thing to do is walk over and start telling merlin how great arthur is and how arthur “needs” him and how merlin “belongs at arthur’s side.”  

i can’t stand that.  it makes me so angry.  it’s not right.  it’s not fair.  it’s damaging.  it’s the same shitty messaging that destroys merlin’s life in later seasons, this idea that he exists for someone else’s sake, the complete disregard for what he himself might want at any given moment, for what he himself might need, for the reservations he might have about this plan that other people have formulated for his life.

he is UNCOMFORTABLE when she says these things to him!  he doesn’t look at her; he shifts his gaze to arthur and the camelot squad with this grim, unconvinced expression on his face, and then he averts his eyes from her.

everything hunith tells merlin in this scene is the exact opposite of what he needs to hear.  he does not need someone to tell him how badly his services are “needed” by a man who hates the person merlin truly is, not when the only friend who ever accepted merlin’s true self has just been killed.  he does not need to be told that arthur, who is alive solely because will is dead and who only seconds ago expressed exactly zero gratitude for that sacrifice, is the person to whom merlin owes his undying loyalty.  he does not need to be shuffled off to camelot as quickly as possible, as if it would be better for him to just rush forward and forget what happened here, as if what happened here didn’t matter.  

because what happened here did matter, whether hunith and arthur find it convenient to acknowledge or not.  i have to lay this out again, because what happened to merlin in ealdor is so much more important than anybody ever seems to realize - and i do understand that, i really do (because yes, it was just one episode for us) - but we have to look at it from merlin’s perspective, not the audience’s.

will wasn’t ‘one episode’ for merlin.  

i can’t say this enough times.  i cannot say this loudly enough.

merlin, at the beginning of this show, has only ever had ONE FRIEND.

most of us can’t even imagine something like that.  

but try.  TRY.  

merlin has only ever had one friend.  he’s only ever had one friend to love him.  he only had one friend for the first two decades of his life.  he’s only been in camelot for a couple of months; he’s only known these camelot people for a couple of months, and they don’t know his real self anyhow.  and now his ONLY FRIEND, the person he’s known all his life, the only friend he ever had who knew him for who he truly was, was just violently cut down before his very eyes, whilst saving a guy who can legally have merlin murdered for just existing.  and even though merlin and will spend the entirety of 1.10 having a painful, complicated argument, will still uses his last moments on earth to tell the biggest fucking whopper of his life, in order to shield merlin from harm, taking all of the danger and infamy and condemnation upon himself.  he dies with a lie on his lips.  he dies with merlin’s hand in his hair.  

and all the while, merlin knows that this would not have happened if he had just been willing to use his magic in the first place, instead of letting his fear of discovery prompt him into allowing his neighbors to offer themselves up for the slaughter in his place.

the avalanching double-whammy of grief and guilt that merlin is suddenly slammed with at the end of this episode is almost incomprehensible in scale.

i’ve talked about this before, but again, i think it’s something we don’t generally remember: losing will is the first time merlin has ever experienced personal bereavement.  and he doesn’t get to start out with a warm-up; he goes straight to the big leagues.  this is not some trifling thing.  this is a total implosion of merlin’s world as he knows it.  

when we think about the mark this episode leaves on merlin’s life, i don’t think most of us consider the magnitude of this event deeply enough.  losing will in this way is not some one-off thing that merlin just...gets over.  this is the most earth-shattering thing that has ever happened to him, at this point in time.  it is still one of the worst things that has ever happened to him, period, even years later.  the guilt never goes away.  

and the thing that’s unique about this particular trauma is that merlin has to manage it alone.  there are other tragedies in his life where we witness him receiving support/comfort from others - freya, lancelot, balinor (though of course there are aspects to these miseries that merlin has to keep secret from other people, as well) - but with will, merlin has to do everything on his own.  he can’t get one single moment of peace at will’s funeral.  his own mother, the only person who knows what really happened, can’t help him without making everything about arthur.  and merlin can’t tell anyone else what happened, not the truth of it, because doing so would squander the gift he’s been given - will’s lie is still protecting him, years later, from arthur and morgana both.  

merlin, at the end of 1.10, is forced to navigate this grief completely alone, in the silent secrecy of his own heart.  arthur is actively making it worse.  hunith is out here singing arthur’s praises.  and will is just like - he’s suddenly not part of the conversation anymore.  he doesn’t even register on anyone’s radar.

it truly is...incredible, for me, to watch hunith overhear arthur being legitimately terrible to both merlin and the guy who just died saving merlin AND arthur’s lives, and then to see her come over and start talking about how merlin belongs at arthur’s side, how much merlin needs to be there for him, how they’re two sides of the same coin.  meanwhile, the guy who literally just lied his life away to protect merlin’s secret and who NEVER made merlin feel like he had to hide who he was and who never had any problem with magic in the first place and never made merlin feel unsafe and never treated merlin like he was less of a human being just for existing -

- he’s just burning to ash there, and hunith doesn’t even acknowledge that, despite the fact that merlin is so visibly, intently, single-mindedly focused on that funeral pyre, and so clearly in distress and in pain and NEEDING somebody.  all she can talk about is merlin’s responsibility to arthur.  

the dissonance here is baffling.  hunith has known will forever.  she met arthur less than a week ago.  she barely knows him, and what she does know is that he thinks magic-users are dangerous/evil.  she saw him being a dick to her kid.  she knows her son is having the worst day of his life.  and she still doesn’t offer a single comforting word in reference to the person who just died protecting merlin’s secret, instead choosing to wax poetic about a man whose bigotry is what merlin needed protecting from in the first place.

that...is a hot mess.  the merlin-hunith-will dynamic is one of the few things in this show that reflects less-than-stellarly on hunith’s character, however much i love her.  and even though it all stems from an overwhelming desire to keep her son safe, it doesn’t make her choices any less damaging.  she sends merlin away specifically because she finds out that will knows about his secret.  she spends 1.10 analyzing and encouraging and dissecting merlin’s relationship with arthur, when merlin’s relationship with will is the one that desperately needs attention.  she’s proven wrong about will’s trustworthiness in the most stunning, powerful way possible, and then she never even acknowledges him, instead choosing to laud the dude who literally forces merlin to live in fear of execution.

she’s merlin’s mother.  she’s the only person in his life who knows anything about what will actually meant to him.  she is his only possible resource as he tries to weather a kind of devastation that defies description.  

and she, like arthur, just barrels right on ahead and makes everything about someone else.

the cinematography choices in this scene matter.  whenever arthur or hunith tries to talk to merlin, the camera is placed on the opposite side of the fire from them, meaning the flames are always in the foreground of the frame.  they are something we are required to see and look past before we can get to anything else in the scene.  and in terms of directorial/acting decisions - merlin doesn’t take his eyes off the pyre until the end of his conversation with hunith.  not once while talking to arthur does he look away from it.

the funeral pyre is always in the foreground of the shot, because it’s in the forefront of merlin’s mind.  that is where his focus is right now.  that is what is taking up all of his attention.  that is what is edging into the frame, eating up our entire field of view.  that is what he needs help with.

but he doesn’t get any such support.  the entire sequence ends up revolving around arthur.  will’s entire funeral is about arthur fucking pendragon.  arthur inserts himself so he can talk to merlin about how evil magic is, and then hunith inserts herself so she can talk to merlin about how great arthur is.  nobody ever stops to think that maybe merlin doesn’t want to talk to anybody right this second.  merlin’s entire ‘farewell’ to the only true friend he ever had in his life is completely swallowed up by the prince of camelot, and if that isn’t a metaphor for the rest of merlin’s life, then i don’t know what is.  

i know nobody needs to hear this, because very few people are invested in this kid at the same level of embarrassing detail as me, but here it is, anyway.  

yes, will is prickly.  he’s hard to get on with.  he’s angry.  he’s bitter and snappy and uncharitable, sometimes.

but you know what?  he has every reason to be like that.  

this kid has nobody.  his own best friend’s mother - who has known him all his life - doesn’t trust him and doesn’t respect him.  she is too afraid for her own son’s safety to give will any credit.  she sends merlin away to camelot, the most violently anti-magic place in the world, because apparently, will knowing about merlin’s secret would be even more dangerous than uther pendragon’s genocidal reign.

think about how that would feel.  to hear something like that about yourself.  to be somebody who is already so goddamn alone in the world, and to have your only friend vanish without so much as a ‘see you later,’ and then to be made to feel, however indirectly, like this is somehow your fault, like you’re the liability, like you’re the untrustworthy element here.  as if you, somehow, are more dangerous than a king who literally pays to have sorcerers trafficked to him in cages.

will has every right to be upset, all the time.  he has every reason to be angry, and bitter, and hurt, all the time.  to be thought so poorly of - to be held in such low esteem - when he hasn’t done anything wrong, when he hasn’t ever done anything to earn that kind of mistrust - and to have that same misplaced suspicion used to justify separating him from the only person in the world who gives a damn about him - if it were me, i would be constantly on the verge of screaming, all the time.

will has always been on merlin’s side, and he has never done anything to endanger him, and in the end he gives up everything to make sure merlin can stay safe and hidden and unhunted.  he shouldn’t have needed to prove his goodness, his constancy, his worth; not when he’s already kept merlin’s secret for who knows how many years, but even after he does do so, it doesn’t even matter.  arthur acknowledges him only to disparage sorcery.  hunith passes him over completely in favor of praising arthur, with no acknowledgment of the misjudgment she made.

i have said before that merlin tends to befriend people who have nobody, people who’ve been left behind by the rest of the world, people who’ve been made to feel that they aren’t worthy of love.  and will, merlin’s oldest friend, was the first of those many characters, and it is so heartbreaking to me that in this instance, the same kind of disinterested and careless attitude towards his worth that dogged him all his life is perpetuated and affirmed after his death.  ‘people are used to ignoring him,’ merlin tells arthur, and merlin is right - even when will is dead and burning, arthur only sees sorcery.  hunith, who we would expect to be more sympathetic, only sees arthur.

merlin is the only one who knows better.  merlin has always known better, and he loves will so much, but he is the only one, apparently, and honestly, after will dies?  nobody else even tries to understand.

to sum up:

hunith and arthur, for all that i love them, are both way out of line at the end of this episode.  

the legacy of this experience, for merlin, is that he spends the rest of his life processing this particular trauma alone.  and that is why i always, always have to keep will and ealdor in the back of my mind when i write for merlin in any capacity - because this event isn’t some simple stumbling block for him; it changes him forever.  it teaches him what he can and can’t expect from the people around him, and it solidifies how irrelevant his own needs are when viewed in comparison with arthur���s, even to people who barely even KNOW arthur; people who are supposed to put merlin first over everything.  it teaches merlin to bury his sorrow, and to wrestle with personal suffering in secret, because if things aren’t ultimately about arthur, then they aren’t important enough to be granted any significant amount of time for merlin to deal with.  merlin’s own grief, even at his best friend’s funeral, takes too long to resolve.  arthur walks away from the pyre, and it’s time for merlin to leave, too.  you’d better be going.

bottom line: i don’t care if other people think this whole ‘ooo, everybody wants merlin to be with arthur’ thing is wonderful or beautiful or dreamily romantic.  it isn’t.  it’s ugly, and it’s cruel, and it stripped merlin of his present identity and his future potential, one stolen moment at a time.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Rhythm of War Review

PART 1

It feels a little separate from the rest of the book to me at the moment because I read it pre-release, but I think it did a good job setting up the rest of the plot. I greatly enjoyed Navani’s perspective and ideas throughout the book, and the first section established her much more firmly as a character than any of the previous books; her couple of chapters in Oathbringer were more focused on politics and her relationship with Dalinar, so it was great yo see much more of her scientific side.

When I first read Part 1 it felt very Kaladin-heavy, but after completing the book I see how it was necessary to establish his burnout in order to set up the rest of the plot. And Chapter 12 (A Way to Help), in addition to being our only chance in the book to see our trio together, did a great job setting up Kaladin’s later work with mentally ill people, both by establishing the need and showing what kind of help was needed. I was nonetheless quite frustrated by Kaladin reacting to Shallan’s DID with “that would be nice...”. She’s having serious problems, Kal! She’s your friend and could use support, not you regarding her issues as a neat way to take a holiday from one’s own brain! Kaladin’s very kind and caring with those he chooses to protect, as we see with Bridge 4 in TWOK and the mentally ill people in Chapter 25, but sometimes I think he’s not a very good friend. I know he was not in a good place, but in Oathbringer when they were in Shadesmar Shallan had just had a complete breakdown and she still went out of her way to emotionally support Kal, so it would be nice to see his friendships become a bit more two-way. (For similar reasons, I liked seeing the moments of Shallan-to-Adolin emotional support in Shadesmar in ROW, because a lot of their relationship in OB was her relying on him; it felt balanced in ROW as both supported each other.)

PART 2

I loved the Shadesmar arc! The emotional arcs for both main characters were very strong - I had been looking forward to seeing Adolin’s reaction to (in-universe) Oathbringer, and it did not disappoint; the conflict between genuinely loving Dalinar and being unable to forgive what he’d done was well-drawn. I was so pissed off at Dalinar in that last conversation! You burned his mom to death, you do not get to take the moral high ground and lecture him. And I do see a difference between killing innocents, as Taravangian does, and killing someone who’s effectively declared war on you and has a history of treason.

I also liked Adolin’s sense of being generally at sea with his purpose in the world. He’s been trained primarily as a warrior and general, and his combat skills have been made virtually obsolete by the Radiants. And at the same time, the reader can see what makes Adolin special, and it’s not combat skills - though those do give him a big heroic moment in a pinch - it’s his care and compassion for others. The way he interacts with Maya and slowly brings her life is absolutely beautiful. Chapter 35 was such a wonderful Shadolin moment (and starspren are amazing!); he really gets her and understands what she needs. Chapter 24 was sweet too, though super cheesy.

I spent the entire Shadesmar arc side-eying Veil and Radiant, especially with Veil’s takeover stunt at the start, but in the end they genuinely were supporting and helping Shallan. So in retrospect I do like scenes like the one with Veil trying to draw Shallan out by drawing Adolin badly.

Spoeking of drawing, I love the spren art, it’s some of the best art so far, and fascianting to see how they all look!

Kaladin finding non-violent ways to protect, culminating in pioneering Rosharan therapy - and Teft insisting on staying to support him - was everything I wanted for him. His arc could have just been that, and I’d have been perfectly happy. Chapter 25 (Devotary of Mercy) is still my favourite in the entire book.

Unfortunately, then Odium’s forces had to show up and SPOIL EVERYTHING. I’m rather appalled by how quickly Urithiru fell - the enemy forces were literally in the pillar room by the time anyone noticed them.

PART 3

Part 3 was a real slog for me, partly because it is a slog and partly because I hit it at the height of my sleep deptivation. (It’s really...not a good thing to be reading on zero sleep at the literal darkest-hour-before-dawn.) Kaladin’s arc in Urithiru is just so exhausting; he’s so clearly worn to the boneand everything feels so hopeless. Kaladin’s had bad times before - Bridge 4 in TWOK, for example - but then the reader could see progress even if Kaladin couldn’t. (Kaladin: I’m getting nowhere and failing at everything! Everyone else: Kaladin, you were literally just miraculously resurrected.) Here, though - well, I genuinely spent the whole book from Part 3 through to the climax thinking that they would lose Urithiru.

Navani’s arc, and Venli’s, I did enjoy.

The other section of Part 3, in Emul, just felt rather disjointed. It had some interesting moments, but it didn’t have a sense of cohesion or of where it was going. I was entertained by Dalinar’s musings on the merits of despositism and the need to free Queen Fen from having - horrors! - a parliament. (I wonder if the Fourth Ideal will be something like “I will recognize that it can sometimes be beneficial to have people oppose my decisions.”)

PART 4

Again, adored the Shadesmar arc. Really strong character arcs for both Adolin and Shallan, combined with excellent plots and a strong sense of momentum. I was pretty sure Maya would be crucial in the trial, but that didn’t make the moment any less powerful (though Sanders probably shouldn’t have tried quite as hard to replicate his “You. Cannot. Have. My. Pain.” moment from Oathbringer). I need to put together a proper post on the theme of choice in Oathbringer, because that moment - combined with Kaladin’s fourth ideal and the conflict with Lirin over the way he’s inspiring the resistance - really crystallized it for me. To treat a person’s choice and sacrifices as something done to them is to devalue their volition, their agency. Maya is put in the horrifying situation of being used as a prop and treated as evidence of a point that she is diametrically opposed to and turned into a weapon against someone she loves, and it’s enough to drive her to regain her voice and speak for herself. I am very curious to know what specifically led the spren to agree to the Recreance!

I did not remotely guess what Shallan’s secret was, even though in retrospect the Cryptic deadeye should have made it incredibly obvious. I think her fear that she’d lose Adolin if it came out was overblown - he already knows she killed both her parents, he’s not going to be fazed by “I was so distraught over having to kill my own mother in self-defence at age ten that I broke my Radiant oaths”. But obviously it’s not something Shalkan would be able to consider duspassionately. Her arc was rather terrifying once I realized that Formless was, well, basically her, but more specifically, Shallan’s idea of the monster that she was, and her breakdown was driving her to “accept who she was” as being that monster. I like Shallan and was never that into Veil - though she was fairly good in this book and went out well - so I’m not sad to see the back of her.

I haven’t managed to work through all the espionage/mole elements. Yes, Pattern used the box to talk to Wit, and Radiant killed Ialai so Shallan wouldn’t, but who’s Mraize’s spy close to Dalinar?

This arc ended too abruptly. I think Sanderson could easily have traded a Kaladin chapter in Part 3 for an extra chapter wrapping up events in Shadesmar; maybe one where Shallan first goes to see Testament.

I enjoyed the Urithiru arc in Part 4 as well. Switching to Bridge 4 points of view other than Kaladin was a good move - we already know he’s worn to ribbons, so we don’t need to be inside his head to see it. “The Dog and the Dragon” was amazing, and the most appropriate story ever for Kaladin. (I get how Wit’s schtick of telling incredibly topical stories and then saying “no, I don’t have a point, what point?” would be really aggravating in person.) It was nice to see him be gentle with Kaladin for a change, the way he is with Shallan - his two previous encounters with Kaladin read as rather baiting, which annoyed me.

Dabbid was - I don’t know quite how to say this, but his inclusion struck an amazing balance in this book. Navani’s arc is all about two amazingly smart people doing science and making incredible breakthroughs, and that is sincerely valued and given importance by the narrative, and then you get chapters like Dabbid’s and one of Taravangian’s emphasizing that a person’s value and ability to contribute is not determined by their intelligence.

Navani’s arc continued to be excellent. All of her research, and the way the story took you through the process, and her complex relationship with Raboniel, was great.

I loved Venli’s character development, and growing willingness to take risks for the sake of others. To me, her arc parallels Dalinar’s in the last book in some ways. If we can love the story of a bloodthirsty conqueror growing to become a good person, why can’t we equally love the story of a coward coming to become a good person? There seems to be a tendency to be more drawn to strength, even in its most terrible forms, than to weakness. To me, Venli’s confession to Rlain and acceptance of his disgust at her was one of the book’s great moments. (And I can’t understand people saying her arc took up two much space. She had 5 chapters in Part 3, and 4 in Part 4. That’s not very many! I’ll grant that the flasbacks packed less punch than some earlier flashback sequences because we already knew the main events - Brandon acknowledged that even before the book came out - but I still liked them well enough, and Venli’s present-day arc was excellent.)

Anyway, the amount of space I’ve spent on this section relative to Part 3 is another strong inducation of the differences in how I feel about them!

PART 5

I should probably start this section with a discussion of Moash. I’ll try to keep it summarized. here - I could, and may, write a short essay on his development through The Stormlight Archive. The first thing that jumps out about Moash’s arc in this book is his reaction to Renarin’s vision in Part 1. I think that vision is showing Moash who he could still be, in a similar way to Shallan’s inspirational drawings of people - both use the Surge of Illumination. So it’s not that Moash is irredeemable; Renarin is specifucally holding out to him the possibility of redemption.

And Moash’s reaction is to run away in terror. Because he desperately wants his decision to be irrevocable. He desperately wants there to only be one possible path forward for him. Because if there are alternative paths, it means he can choose them, and that would mean facing guilt, facing the fact that his past choices were wrong, and his current choices are wrong. And that is exactly what Moash sought to avoid by giving up his pain and sense of guilt to Odium.

Moash is, nonetheless, very much Moash and not Vyre, as evidenced by his continuing obsession with Kaladin. As with his above need to not be wrong, here he needs to feel that he’s right, and the only way he can feel that he’s right is if Kaladin - whom he still deeply admires - makes the same decision as him, and if Moash can convince himself that he’s doing Kaladin a favour in driving him to that point. It’s ironic that he’s given up almost all feeling abd become almost enturely detached, but his worst actions are driven by his attitude towards the one person in the world who he still does have very strong feelings about. By the end of the book, he’s comprehensively broken, to the point that even when his ability to feel is restored he’s unable to even feel genuine remose over the cold-blooded murder of a friend. I don’t know where he’ll go from here - it would be ironic if he was only ever really appealing to Rayse-Odium, and Taravangian-Odium found Moash too much of a flat villain for his purposes and cast him off.

As the plot climaxes go, I thought the ones for Navani and Venli were excellent and very satisfying. I enjoyed Kaladin’s as well and found it cathartic, but it a was moment we all knew had to come, so it didn’t have quite the kick of some of Kaladin’s other big moments. I did love his reconciliation with Lirin. One of the themes of the book was finding common ground despite deeply felt disagreements - with Navani and Raboniel, with Navani and the Sibling, and with humans and singers/Fused more generally - and Kaladin and Lirin’s reconciliation fit well with that. I am far more favourable to Lirin than most people - if you’ve lived as a pacifist in storming Alethkar, which values the lives of its people slightly more than it does crem, you’re going to have been right a solid 95% of the time, where everyone else was wrong. I can make allowances for the other five percent, especially when Lirin’s life lesson from the last five or so years has been “resisting oppression and standing up for what you believe in will destroy everyone you love”.

And on the topic of finding common ground, Leshwi’s reaction to the revelation that Venli was a Radiant was one of the single most beautiful moments of the book, and one of my absolute favourites. It’s gorgeous and moving, and at the same time rather tragic, because - what might have bern different if Venli had revealed herself to Leshwi at the start of the book? How much of the conflict could have been avoided. Singers don’t appear to attract spren as strongly as humans do, which makes Leshwi drawing joyspren particularly powerful. And then the bittersweet note from “My soul is too long owned by someone else”. (Come to think of it, this is another inverted paralell to Moash. This is someone realizing “I was wrong about everything and I’m so glad about that because it means I have a chance to be someone better than I was.”) Oh my goodness, I would love a Leshwi chapter in a later book, just to check in on her and see how she’s doing in her new life with the Singers.

I also loved the climax of Navani’s arc, and was so relieved, because up until that very moment I wasn’t sure if the Sibling would survuve uncorrupted. I know that some people weren’t pleased because the Sibling didn’t even like her, but to me that became a core part of the story, like I said above - people who deeply disagree finding common ground and common cause. That is a key element of being a Bondsmith - the process of bringing people together in spite of their differences - and something that fits Navani so well given the rapport she found with Raboniel. (Though I was conflicted about the latter. On the one hand, she made amazing discoveries that enabled her to save Urithiru. One the other hand, she...kind of collaborated with the enemy and gave them terrible weapons out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to prove herself?) I will grant that it makes the series, and the characters with the most crucial importance to Roshar, rather Kholin-heavy.

For Taravodium, all I can say is - YIPES. I have no idea how to process the implications of that, but I feel like it will be bad. Really really bad. (Taravangian is probably my least favourite character in the entire Stormlight Archive. The attitude of “I am so brave and selfless for doing evil things and look at how wonderful I am for sacrificing my own morality for the benefit of all, you petty selfish people wanting to be good could never make such a grand sacrifice” drives me absolutely nuts. It’s a complete inversion and twisting of morality, and intensely arrogant.)

Dalinar’s encounter with Ishar was fascinating, and I’m very curious to see where this goes. The spren experiments were deeply creepy! And the way Radiant Oaths can temporarily restore a Herald’s sanity was fascinating - I’m very eager to see where this goes in the next book. I suspect that Dalinar may have made a very serious mistake with regards to this trial my combat, and I have no idea how/if they’re going to fit Szeth’s whole arc into the ten days before the duel. I’ve been eagerly anticipating Szeth’s arc ever since The Way of Kings!

[twinfoxtails]

Touhou Arcana write-up

((So... my internet was out for a few days, and I have been playing Persona 4 Golden for a while, so I decided to do a write up for all the major arcana.

Everyone’s list is very different, SO THERE’S DEFINITELY GOING TO BE DISAGREEMENTS, but if you have any, let me know what you think!

Note: This is strictly going through Arcana descriptions and meanings!

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0: Fool - Cirno, The Three Fairies The Fool represents innocence, divine inspiration, madness, freedom, spontaneity, inexperience, chaos and creativity.

Aside from the memes of Cirno being an idiot, I couldn’t think of a better tie than these two. (four?) All of them are leaders of their own right, they’re pretty much free to do what they please, and most importantly, creative and inexperienced.

I: Magician - Marisa Kirisame The Magician Arcana is commonly associated with action, initiative, self-confidence, immaturity, manipulation, and power.

THE STAPLE GIRL OF THE MAGICIAN ARCANA, MARISA HERSELF-... She’s the self confident one, immature to a fault, and her whole stick is ‘DANMAKU IS POWER’. So yep, this fits her extremely well!

II: Priestess - Rinnosuke Morichika The Priestess Arcana is a symbol of hidden knowledge or other untapped power, wisdom, mystery and patience when it appears in tarot readings.

Can’t get better than Rinnosuke himself, IMO. Father figure of both Reimu and Marisa, people approach him for wisdom at times and he’s also shrouded in mystery, and not to mention a really patient person.

III: Empress - Hong Meiling, Shinki The Empress represents mothers, prosperity, creativity, sexuality, abundance, fertility, protection, and comfort.

I really don’t have to explaint his one! Meiling is the bind which ties everyone together, as well as Shinki does, not to mention the bit about protection and comfort. There’s no better arcana for a motherly figure.

IV: Emperor - Remilia Scarlet, Toyosatomimi no Miko The Emperor symbolizes the desire to control one's surroundings, and its appearance could suggest that one is trying too hard to achieve this, possibly causing trouble for others; some elements in life are just not controllable.

‘BUT REMILIA IS BEST FIT FOR DEVIL’ you say! Devil’s more of temptation, and Remilia’s more controlling than being the symbol of temptation, and not to mention that she isn’t entirely selfish, actually caring for the residents of the Scarlet Devil Mansion.

Either way, both Miko and Remilia do sometimes cause trouble around them (Remilia especially), and not to mention really ambitous.

V: Hierophant - Keine Kamishirasawa, Byakuren Hijiri The Hierophant is a symbol of education, authority, conservatism, obedience to rules and relationship with the divine.

Keine and Byakuren being both teachers in their own right, and also quite lawful as well. Byakuren also gets the extra point of being in a relationship with the divine, being head monk and all.

VI: Lovers - Alice Margatroid, Sakuya Izayoi The Lovers Arcana initially represented two paths life could lead to, and thus a symbol of standing at a crossroad and needing to make a decision.

Between Alice being in Hell with Shinki and choosing her life to be in the forest, as well as Sakuya either being a vampire killer and serving one, I think this fits pretty well!

VII: Chariot - Chen, Yuugi Hoshiguma The Chariot Arcana is a symbol of victory, conquest, self-assertion, self-confidence, control, war, and command.

Ah yes, the arcana usually tied with war gods. Both are self-confident, and these usually have a goal they wish to attain at any cost. In this case, I’d put Chen and Yuugi!

VIII: Justice - Shiki Eiki The Justice Arcana symbolizes a strict allegory of justice, objectivity, rationality and analysis. In tarot readings, it means that one will have to face a trial of their justice.

OKAY I’M SURE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DISAGREE WITH ME ON THIS BECAUSE SHE’S NOT JUDGEMENT-... But Justice is very different from Judgement, which I’ll explain below. But I feel Justice fits Eiki more, as she is the pinacle of rationality and objectivity.

IX: Hermit - Satori Komeiji, Patchouli Knowledge The Hermit is associated with wisdom, introspection, solitude, retreat and philosophical searches.

With Satori being the philosophical mind reader she is, along with Patchouli being the moving library, this is pretty much a big given.

X: Fortune - Tewi, Joon Yorigami The Fortune Arcana is portrayed by the Wheel of Fortune and symbolizes fate, luck, fortune and opportunity.

Can’t get any better than these two, for self-explained reasons!

XI: Strength - Momiji Inubashiri The Strength Arcana is associated with the morality about the stronger power of self-control, gentleness, courage and virtue over brute force. It can also represent creative or physical energy that needs to be or is about to be unleashed, sometimes out of desire to be recognized.

This is not physical strength, but inner strength, and IMO, Momiji is the most self-controlled yet also desires to be recognized by the higher ups for PUTTING UP WITH TENGUS-

XII: Hanged Man - Hina Kagiyama, Medicine Melancholy The Hanged Man Arcana is associated with self-sacrifice for the sake of enlightenment, the bindings that makes one free, paradoxes and hanging between heaven and earth.

Can’t think of anyone else but these two in this category. People in this Arcana are really self-sacrificial, and both of them fit the bill .

XIII: Death - Yuyuko Saigyouji The Death Arcana symbolizes metamorphosis and deep change, regeneration and cycles.

Do I need to explain this :D

XIV: Temperance - Reimu Hakurei, Konpaku Youmu The Temperance Arcana is a symbol of synthesis, prudence, harmony, and the merging of opposites.

No better person than Reimu herself. She’s the Hakurei Shrine maiden, mediator of both humans and youkai, going out to restore order after every incident and to keep the balance in check. Depressing job 10/10.

XV: Devil - Seiga Kaku, Kanako Yasaka The Devil Arcana represents the urge to do selfish, impulsive, violent things, and being a slave to ones' own impulse and feelings. Occasionally, it is also portrayed as a symbol of temptation.

I don’t think I need to explain Seiga, but Kanako literally tempted Okuu with the power of the Yatagarasu so SHE FITS HERE VERY WELL. MORIYA SHRINE CONSPIRACY.

XVI: Tower - Junko, Tenshi Hinanawi The Tower Arcana is commonly associated to overly arrogant, prejudiced and authoritarian organizations, which walk to their own ironic demise. Furthermore, it is also more generically used as an omen of doom and disaster.

The worst card in the deck. This card barely means anything good at all. Both are somewhat prejudiced, and Tenshi fits this arcana like A SHOE.

XVII: Star - Sanae Kochiya The Star Arcana is also commonly associated with hope, self-confidence, faith, altruism, luck, generosity, peace and joy.

Miracles. Faith. Joy. I don’t think I need to explain much about this one!

XVIII: Moon - Reisen Udongein Inaba, Flandre Scarlet, Koishi Komeiji The Moon Arcana is associated with creativity, inspiration, dreams, madness, illusions, fear, fantasy, the subconscious and trickery.

Three of them are quite creative people, with Flandre leaning quite alot into the ‘madness’ part of it. They can also sense things around them without being told, and these three are usually quite in touch with their senses.

XIX: Sun - Utsuho Reiuji, Aya Shameimaru The Sun symbolizes happiness, joy, energy, optimism, and accomplishment. Occasionally, it is also associated with one's initial happiness.

Both of them are just the biggest optimistic and energetic ball of fun you’ll ever meet, and Okuu does her job quite well! Aya... not so much, since her newspaper isn’t very popular-

XX: Judgement - Kasen Ibaraki, Hata no Kokoro The Judgement Arcana is associated with realizing one's calling, gaining a deep understanding of life and a feeling of acceptance and absolution.

You’d expect Eiki here, but Judgement is the reflection of one-self, and accepting who you are. They view the world with infinite possibilities, and I believe Kasen and Kokoro fits this out to the letter.

XXI: The World - Yakumo Yukari, Okina Matara The World Arcana is a representation of the world's totality, the symbol of fulfillment, wholeness and harmony. 

Don’t need to explain this, really! Gensokyo is primarily their creation, after all!

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Anyways, if you made it this far, thank you very much!))

[crossdressingdeath]

1/9 - So I’m going to go on a bit of a tangent here, so let me know if any of this doesn’t send thanks to tumblr haha. in reference to your comments about the Guanyin Temple core transfer convo...we’ve got to talk about that scene. Because seriously when JC and WWX discuss the golden core reveal in the temple, JC’s behaviour is actually appalling. He openly mocks WWX, to the point where WWX is actually

2/9 shocked because while he knew JC wouldn’t just forgive him if he knew the truth, he was shocked by how “unkind” he was being. It was so bad that WWX, who has grown up with JC’s immature tantrums, felt like this was way too harsh. And then without ANY prompting - literally all WWX says is “I never asked you to thank me” - JC of course takes that as an insult to him. Starts acting like WWX is bragging and saying that JC isn’t as good as him - and in this scene he is so much like his mother

3/9 it’s creepy. He sounds irrational, insane even. Twisting everyone’s words. He starts screaming about how WWX thinks he’s better than him, tries to PHYSICALLY ATTACK WWX - seriously how anyone thinks that you can sympathise with this guy is beyond me. The guy is literally just creating problems for himself.

4/9 But then of course we get the part that you were talking about - when WWX says “take it as my repayment to the Jiang sect” and JC - JC OF COURSE feels the need to say “repayment for my father, my mother, my sister.” DAMMIT MAN WWX DID NOT CAUSE THEIR DEATHS. For gods sake, I feel no pity for JC here because he has had YEARS to come to terms with it. WWX did not kill his parents, the wens did. They would have used any excuse to attack - are we seriously going to blame the victim instead of

5/9 the instigators? For example - JYL told Jin ZiXun off for being rude to WWX. At that stage the Jins were probably stronger than the Jiangs, who were still rebuilding. You’re telling me if the Jins retaliated and hurt the Jiang sect, JC would’ve even thought to blame his sister? Or does he ever mention the fact that his mother was insulting the Wens to, regardless of the fact that they were attacking? Like...if you want to talk about bad decisions, at least WWX didn’t know that his actions

6/9 would lead to the Wen sect attacking - YZY could have at least tried to negotiate that situation, she’s an adult and in charge of the sect for Christ’s sake. But nope, she’s allowed to be angry, and it’s totally the teenagers fault. And JYL? Like god, it sucks that she died, and maybe wwx did contribute to that situation, but he did not kill her! JC needs to stop telling everyone, including her son, that he did, because it’s an insult to JYL and the choices she made. Just...JC is ridiculous.

7/9 Wwx gave up everything for him because he loved him that much. His whole life - everything he had worked for - and he asked for nothing in return. He would’ve happily become the villain if only to protect JC’s reputation and peace of mind. And JC is seriously going to twist this situation to make it look like WWX did this to try and be better than him? Like, how badly did your mother mess you up that you think anyone would go through torturous pain,

8/9 and destroy their life’s achievement just to have one up on you? And if WWX really was some kind of power hungry show off, why the hell would he give away the very thing that supposedly makes him better than you, TO YOU, and then NOT TELL YOU ABOUT IT??? Like, what sort of attention seeking narcissist, what JC apparently views WWX as, would do all of that, supposedly for the attention, and then not tell anyone? Where’s the logic????

I’m missing part 9, but yeah. WWX all but outright says “I did this because I wanted to help you, because I care about you, because I didn’t want to see you suffer” and JC twists it into some hero complex bullshit where WWX only did it to one-up him and just... what the fuck? How do people look at this and insist JC was in the right? And even after basically saying that WWX only gave JC his golden core for attention, after thirteen years in which he could’ve looked back and considered what happened, JC still goes for “Well, actually, you were obligated to give up your golden core because you killed my family and that was definitely your fault”. I mean, that’s pretty much what he’s saying! WWX is basically saying “I did this because I love your family and owe them” and JC’s response is “You killed them and you have to pay for that”. I mean... thirteen years. He’s had thirteen years as a sect leader to realize that the Wens would have attacked anyway, that JYL chose to save WWX even at the cost of her own life, and he’s still spewing this “It’s all your fault” bullshit.

And if the Jins had retaliated against the Jiangs for fighting with JZXun it would, of course, be all WWX’s fault for refusing to sit quietly and let himself be insulted. Just like it’s all his fault Lotus Pier fell, and YZY antagonizing the Wens had nothing to do with it. WWX is an easy target for JC to blame things on; his rank is entirely reliant on JC and he won’t argue if the blame is coming from a Jiang. He’s not going to disagree or lash out. If JC comes up with a reason, he can do anything he likes to WWX and WWX won’t do anything about it. It takes WWX dying, coming back, and spending a lot of time with LWJ (who treats him like a person worthy of love and respect and not a convenient scapegoat even when using him as such would save LWJ a lot of trouble) before he even begins to acknowledge that the way JC treats him isn’t okay. JC has spent his entire life blaming WWX from everything from his dogs being taken away to his father not loving him enough to him not being an extraordinary cultivator to the Wens attacking because WWX won’t fight it. 

Honestly? Even the fact that JC thinks WWX would do anything for the sake of showing JC up shows that JC never actually bothered to get to know WWX. Like, he seriously thinks WWX wants to show him up, make him look bad. Even if we set aside the fact that no one would go through that much pain and suffering and keep quiet about it for so long just to get one over on someone else, what the actual fuck JC, we’re talking about WWX here. The guy who slacked off on training and held himself back right up until war broke out because he didn’t want JC to feel like he was overshadowed. The guy who was always the one to start fights before JC got a chance to so that JC wouldn’t get in trouble. The guy who spent over a decade taking the blame for everything they did wrong and praising JC at every opportunity even when it wasn’t deserved to make JC’s parents proud of him. And JC is saying that guy would have given up his incredibly powerful golden core, crippling himself at the beginning of a war, losing huge amounts of power and drastically shortening his lifespan... just to make JC look bad. He thinks WWX would go out of his way and hurt himself that much to make JC look weaker.

Of course, the reasoning is, I think, fairly obvious: JC would never sacrifice his golden core if he didn’t get something from it so clearly WWX must have an ulterior motive! Except there’s no ulterior motive big enough to make giving up your golden core worth it, so he has to come up with some bullshit about hero complexes and showing off to justify it. He’s just falling into the same pit as so many other jackasses: not realizing that not everyone operates solely based on self-interest.

[land-of-classpects-and-analysis]

i hope this isn't a bother or a distraction to you right now, but could i get a little taste of an heir of life? i'm pretty sure i've seen you do other heirs and i really wanna see what amazing analysis you might have in store for the future when you do heirs!!

Of course you can have a small preview of, arguably, possibly one of my favorite Classpects! I can also promise you are most definitely not bothering nor distracting me from things, either!

For the sake of time and my wrists, I’ll drop in here what I’ve already said about the overall Heir Class!:

Heirs are those who subconsciously, almost instinctively, drift towards any and all instances of their Aspect. Whether it is always finding themself taking charge and being the leader, having a life of misery, suffering and pain with no real comfort to speak of, or fading into the shadows and remaining ignorant to the truths of a flawed system. The Heir is one who both gravitates towards their Aspect, but it is one that rarely often helps them - at least in the beginning.

It is because of this subconscious gravitation that the Heir is at risk of becoming fully submissive to the whims of their Aspect, losing every other sense of who they are in the process. While some Heirs may not see any problems with this, it is a thought that may startle and even turn Heirs into those who try to fight back against the strings their Aspect has tied to them. They are the only ones who can control their fates, whether it is by fighting back against and taking full control of their Aspect or allowing for it to fully overtake and override who they are, leaving them to be an unfortunate husk of who they once were.

Heirs are those who usually passively Manipulate their Aspect, or Manipulate through it. Their powers come to them naturally, after all, but their main problem is having to learn how to use their powers to benefit the team rather than only themselves. Overall, their personalities are often ones filled with passion and loyalty, especially when it comes to their opinions, values, and beliefs. Changing an Heir’s mind on something they enjoy can be difficult, sometimes even to the point where it feels like you are talking more to a wall than an actual person.

Now, as for the Heir of Life themself, they are simply someone who often tries to give too much of themself at once - they seek to heal and mend and fix what has been broken, wash away the scorched scars that cover those they love and the planet they love on, but they can’t. They are only human, and they can’t fix all that is wrong in the world. The Heir of Life does not care, though, as they will continue to try over, and over, and over again to fix as much as they can, to help as many people as they can at once, always taking on more weight of people’s issues all while trying to juggle their own. Although some of the Heir’s own friends may try and tell them to take a break, take care of themself, make boundaries, practice what they preach, and more, the Heir of Life may smile back at them oh-so-sweetly while promising that they will try, that they will do better about taking care of themself. Everyone knows, though, for they have all had this conversation one too many times, that the Heir of Life will always find a way to once again stretch themself too thin, set themself ablaze to keep others warm, sacrifice their own health so as to give more kindness and prosperity to the people in their lives who would not even think twice of returning the favor. The Heir of Life does not mind, though, because knowing they have made others happy is all they need. Right? Right?

The Heir of Life is someone who may naturally gravitate towards Life, the Aspect of growth, happiness, life itself, positivity, healing, and more. Because of this, they are someone who will often be the first responder to when someone asks for a shoulder to lean on, or a soul to listen to them vent. They are the person - the friend - who will drop everything they are doing and try to help someone find their way through the darkness of negativity they are experiencing. While they may have extensive knowledge of how to fix things, how to make things better, oftentimes the Heir of Life will find that their good-hearted actions will go to the people and places filled with selfishness. People who, admittedly, do not want to be fixed, or healed, or mended, but rather just want someone to coddle and enable their self-destructive behaviors while also leeching off of their loving ways. Yet they have so much love to give, so much empathy, sympathy, and compassion in their heart, that to even say no to giving love and healing to even the most rotten soul is something the Heir of Life can’t even bear to think about, even if it means continuing to hurt themself in the process.

However, while the Heir of Life may be able to ignore their own pain and suffering as they continue to coddle and enable the toxic, leeching behavior of others, as well as healing their own friends of their worries and problems. Except, there is one worry the Heir of Life will never be able to truly heal away from their true friends - and that is the worry that the Heir of Life may fully lose themself in the ways of healing, mending, and sewing things back together. Their friends - their true friends - are the ones who must sit and watch as the Heir continues to scratch themself out too thin until, finally, something snaps and the Heir of Life is sent spiraling into a mental state of pure and utter despair and anger. An Heir of Life at their worst can be a truly vicious and venomous person to be around, as they spare no expense as to who will be met with a snap and a bite from the Heir themself. Someone so sweet and unassuming becoming a force of overall destructive, for the self or otherwise, behavior, and who will take down anyone they deem to be worthy of experiencing the same despair as them is often a trademark trait of the Heir of Life.

It is a vicious and ever-spinning cycle for the Heir of Life; being an unrelenting healer, offering their help to all who will take it, falling prey to those who only seek to use and abuse the Heir, leaving their true friends to become bystander witnesses to the Heir’s suffering and grievances, and finally, the Heir having enough and reclaiming their right for self-care and self-love, all the while hurting many other people, good and bad, along the way. While it may be a cycle, much like of life and death, it is a cycle that can be broken. For as much as the Heir of Life loves to help as many as they can, once they come to realize how much their self-destructive ways harms not only themself, but also the friends who love and care for the Heir, they will discover that this isn’t who they truly want to be - they don’t want to give away all of their help to those who don’t deserve it, especially when they have people who are far more deserving of such tender-love-and-care. As such, the Heir of Life would have to find a way to break away from the strings of their Aspect, while also continuing to be the healer they so deeply desire to be.

For the powers, they are rather interesting when one takes a moment to contemplate them. After all, what does it mean to manipulate Life or even manipulate through it? Well, let’s try - keyword being try - to go over both options very, very briefly, so as to avoid any big spoilers before the time comes for the Heir of Life to fully shine! To start off, let’s go with the far more simple option of manipulating Life - though, as easy as it may sound, the fact that Life can stand for so many different things can put quite an interesting twist on this power. For now, let’s look towards the more literal version of Life, primarily with people’s life force as well as that of plant-life. An Heir of Life could come along and manipulate the life force of anyone they wanted to, whether it is by expanding a mortal’s lifespan by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of years, or doing the exact opposite - manipulating someone’s life to become far more disheveled and closer to death. Of course, they could also manipulate someone’s Life in the form of aging certain parts of that person, while leaving everything else relatively untouched. If the Heir of Life so wanted, they could turn their enemy’s skeleton and/or insides into dust, leaving them hollow on the inside and, of course, dead. Then there is the manipulation of Life in the form of plants - which could become more akin to that of, perhaps, a type of Cleric or Warlock who has a domain or pact that allows for them to bring about a horrific army of plants. While they can’t exactly create these plants from thin air, so long as there is any sign of plant-life in the immediate area, the Heir of Life could so easily take it and turn it into something as simple as an ocean or mass of thorned tendrils, or give far more sentient life to the plants, making them an entire plant-based animal to do the Heir’s bidding more than anything.

As for the ability to manipulate through Life, this power is one that could take a far darker turn, especially if the Heir of Life using it has simply had enough of feeling like some old, beat-up, and thrown away doll. They would still be a healer, oh most certainly, but there would always be a small price for their helpful services. Heirs may be somewhat awkward individuals, but they still are people who attract others to them, one way or another. Because of this, if the Heir of Life truly wanted to play a little dirty, then they could use their Life powers as a means to twist the arms of those that have wronged them. After all, wouldn’t it be just a shame if people were to find out the star of a show was secretly some criminal, or that the person with a tragic home-life is just simply spoiled and not getting their way? Wouldn’t it just be a shame if all of these deep, deep dark secrets were to get out? The Heir of Life thinks so, and since people just love to come to them and talk about all of their problems, then the Heir believes their enemies would also agree how truly devastating it would be for the harsh truths to come out. If the Heir of Life wants to get something, then they know exactly how to get it.

Hopefully this helps to give you a little taste as to what the Heir of Life has to offer for when Month of the Heir comes rolling around!

[tsushimanoonryo]

Character Solidifying pt. 2

The second half of this.

26. What does your character’s home look like? Personal taste? Clothing? Hair? Appearance?

The Dawn Refuge is pretty run-down. It’s a shack that Jin has repurposed into a safe house. However, he does his best to keep it liveable. He keeps a number of sentimental items there, and each item has its own place. As for his personal appearance, he tries to maintain a certain level of cleanliness. He’s always going to be covered in mud, sweat, and blood, but he does his best to bathe as often as he can. Whenever his clothing starts to get frayed, he’ll patronize someone at a local village to mend it. He always keeps his armored oiled, lacquered, and ready for battle. He’ll try to shave when he can and he keeps his hair pulled back in a haphazard bun so it isn’t in his face. He certainly doesn’t look like a lord anymore, but he maintains a sense of nobility in his demeanor and personal hygiene.

27. How do they relate to their appearance? How do they wear their clothing? Style? Quality?

He prizes functionality over form these days. He will try to personalize when he can, but it is never as ostentatious as it was when he was Lord Sakai. What he wears is very similar to the peasants of Tsushima because he needs to blend in with them to a point. Can’t have the Shogun’s men or the Khan’s stragglers recognizing him on sight.

28. Who is your character’s mate? How do they relate to him or her? How did they make their choice?

Canonically, no one. In my heart (and Jin’s), it’s Yuna. He literally would not be alive because of her. She saved his life on three separate occasions and is responsible for the legend of The Ghost. She is a thief, true, but she’s a survivor. Jin respects her so much and has learned a great deal from her. He would give his life for the people of Tsushima, and he would give his life for her especially. Neither has blood relations any more, but Jin considers Yuna to be closer than family. He would do anything she asked of him, including running away from all this. All she has to do is ask. She won’t, though, which is why he loves her so much. She understands and accepts his drive to protect his people. He trusts her with everything and would die for her sake.

29. What is your character’s weaknesses? Hubris? Pride? Controlling?

His weakness is also his strength: Jin feels everything. He is ruled by his emotions. This is a good and bad thing. He cares very deeply and will fight hard because of it. But he also can sometimes let his emotions overwhelm him. This leads to stupid things like trying to fight the Khan alone on a bridge with broken armor. He’s getting better at using his emotions as a tool, but he still can sometimes let them overwhelm him.

30. Are they holding on to something in the past? Can he or she forgive?

He’s holding on to a lot of guilt and regret. Pretty much everyone he loves died. Some by his own hand, some because of mistakes he’s made. He will always feel like he could have done more for his father, even though logically he knows he was still a child and probably would have died had he tried to come to his aide. Killing Ryuzo was a result of Ryuzo’s pride and unwillingness to work with Jin, but he still hates that he had to do it. And his uncle asked to be killed, and honoring that wish was the hardest thing he ever had to do in his life. In idle moments, Jin replays these scenes and scans his memory for anything he might have done for these outcomes to have ended differently. He’s yet to come up with anything.

31. Does your character have children? How do they feel about their parental role? About the children? How do the children relate?

He does not. He’s never had a strong desire to be a parent. Rather, he wanted to pass on his family name (through either the Sakai or Shimura line) and ensure the survival of his clan. However, that is no longer an option. Sometimes, in his weaker moments, he imagines running off with Yuna to the mainland to start a family and disappear into anonymity, but he would never actually do it. The guilt for abandoning his people would nag at him for the rest of his life. So he probably won’t ever have children of his own. The closest he will get to ever being a parent is being a role model for aimless young men who want to join in The Ghost’s fight. He wouldn’t quite be comfortable with it, but he would do his best to guide them when the time comes.

32. How does your character react to stress situations? Defensively? Aggressively? Evasively?

He tries to remain stoic outwardly, but inwardly he is a storm of emotions. Worry, anger, fear, regret… Just a big mess. However, he will try to channel these emotions into finding a solution to the cause of his stress. He will try to face everything head-on and, failing that, will come at it from a different angle. Anything to find a solution and return to inner peace. If it doesn’t work out, he’ll doggedly try again until he either solves the problem or runs out of options.

33. Do they drink? Take drugs? What about their health? 

He doesn’t drink heavily, but one of his close friends is a sake merchant who has no problem letting him sample his wares for free. Aside from regularly taking a beating and getting hurt with swords, arrows, and bombs, his health is relatively okay. He’s survived multiple situations that should have killed him, so his constitution is pretty strong.

34. Does your character feel self-righteous? Revengeful? Contemptuous?

He’s basically a medieval Japanese Batman. He knows what he is doing is right, but he’s frustrated at the powers that be for not listening to him in regards to fighting the Mongols. He’s also got a (not so) healthy dose of vengeance making up his driving force. He tries to keep it in check, but a part of him does enjoy being The Ghost.

35. Do they always rationalize errors? How do they accept disasters and failures?

Jin does not handle his own failure well at all. He’ll silently agonize over it and keep himself up with guilt and regret. He’s much better at dealing with the failure of others. In that case, he’ll just get extremely annoyed and fix it himself. He holds himself to a much higher standard than everyone else.

36. Do they like to suffer? Like to see other people suffering?

Absolutely not. Jin can’t abide anyone suffering. Unless they’re a Mongol. Even then, he wants to know they suffered, but doesn’t want to watch it.

37. How is your character’s imagination? Daydreaming a lot? Worried most of the time? Living in memories?

Jin spends a lot of time in his own memories. He is constantly reliving his past to see if there’s anything at all he could have done to change the outcome or learn from his mistakes. He is constantly trying to glean any insights from the lessons of his past.

38. Are they basically negative when facing new things? Suspicious? Hostile? Scared? Enthusiastic?

Jin tries to keep an open mind when facing new things. He is guarded until he sees how things are going to turn out, but he isn’t going to be afraid to try a new way of doing things. Jin’s not so arrogant that he doesn’t realize someone else’s way of doing things might not be better than his.

39. What do they like to ridicule? What do they find stupid?

He doesn’t like to ridicule anyone or anything. However, he does find a lot of things stupid. He hates when people are so blinded by tradition or their own sense of self-importance that they won’t even consider that they might be wrong. He thinks that is the most ignorant, foolish way to live.

40. How is their sense of humor? Do they have one?

Jin has a great sense of humor under the right circumstances. When he doesn’t have the weight of saving all of Japan from the Mongols on his shoulders, he likes to cut loose. He does know how to have a good time. It’s just that he hasn’t been having a very good time as of late.

41. Is your character aware of who they are? Strengths? Weaknesses? Idiosyncrasies? Capable of self-irony?

He is very aware of who he is. Growing up, no one ever let him forget he was the jito’s nephew. Now that he’s distanced himself from that, no one lets him forget that he is The Ghost. However, he does still feel some insecurities over how well suited he is to these different mantles. He knows his own strengths, but he is hyper aware of his weaknesses too. He will sometimes try to joke about them, but it belies a very real sense of disappointment in himself.

42. What does your character want most? What do they need really badly, compulsively? What are they willing to do, to sacrifice, to obtain?

A god damn nap. But on a more serious note, he mostly wants a family and sense of belonging. He also wants very badly to not disappoint the people he loves best. They all want different things from him and he wants to be able to deliver on all fronts. He will run himself ragged trying to do so, sacrificing his own happiness at times so that his loved ones can be happy. 

43. Does your character have any secrets? If so, are they holding them back?

Jin is sort of bad at keeping secrets. For example: everyone fucking knows he’s The Ghost. He tends to wear his heart on his sleeve and is a bad liar, so he doesn’t keep a lot of secrets.

44. How badly do they want to obtain their life objectives? How do they pursue them?

Badly enough to be declared a traitor to the Shogun. He wants to live by his own personal code of honor, helping those who cannot help themselves, so he’ll do whatever it takes to achieve this. Even if it means going against hundreds of years of tradition or using underhanded tactics. If it means more people will survive and be safe, Jin will do it.

45. Is your character pragmatic? Think first? Responsible? All action? A visionary? Passionate? Quixotic?

Jin feels responsible for everyone and everything. He is extremely reliable. If there’s even the tiniest chance he can take care of something, he’ll promise to do it and he’ll get it done. He would like to think that he is pragmatic, as that is how his uncle raised him to be, but Jin is quite emotional. He just hides it very well. He is a man of action, but he doesn’t rush into things half-cocked anymore. He’ll sit and strategize, trying to find the best plan of attack that will have the least amount of fallout damage.

46. Is your character tall? Short? What about size? Weight? Posture? How do they feel about their physical body?

Jin is short by modern standards, standing at only 5’2’’. However, that was on the tallish side for men in feudal Japan. He has a lithe, muscular build and he carries himself with the poise and dignity required of a samurai. He is quite proud of his body, less for how it looks and more for how powerful it is. He’s accomplished numerous feats of physical prowess, including surviving things that should have killed him. So yes. He’s proud of what his body has been through and what it can do. It just also happens to look nice.

47. Do they want to project an image of a younger, older, more important person? Do they want to be visible or invisible?

When he was younger, he wanted people to notice him. He wanted them to see him as a brave warrior because he thought that might make him feel less guilt about watching his father die and doing nothing. However, he’s done a complete 180. He wants to blend in and remain unseen. This way, he can work more efficiently. Of course, everyone knows he’s The Ghost, but it’s the principle of the matter. He’s not going to draw any extra attention to himself if he doesn’t have to.

48. How are your character’s gestures? Vigorous? Weak? Controlled? Compulsive? Energetic? Sluggish?

Very restrained. He generally does not use his hands when he talks and he tries to keep his face neutral save for when he is out carousing. But he rarely ever does that anymore.

49. What about voice? Pitch? Strength? Tempo and rhythm of speech? Pronunciation? Accent?

He’s got a soft, gentle voice. Most people don’t expect that from The Ghost. It’s smooth, like brandy. He was schooled in proper speech and grammar ever since he was a child, so you wouldn’t notice anything other than eloquence from him. When he’s speaking English in the yakuza verse, he speaks with a Japanese accent. It isn’t heavily accented, English, however; you’re not going to have trouble understanding him.

50. What are the prevailing facial expressions? Sour? Cheerful? Dominating?

Jin has trained himself to keep a neutral face for most of the time. However, he isn’t always great at hiding his emotions. He’ll frown and furrow his brow quite a bit when he’s unhappy. He rarely smiles with his teeth, but he does smile. It’s just very restrained. My boy needs to loosen up.

[duelposting]

i have been obsessing over the headcanon that seto has bpd almost all day god i feel so blessed to have seen it I LOVE MY BOY

I apologize for taking my time responding to this. I wanted to convey my thoughts on the matter properly, so here we go.

Let’s start with the big one:

Identity: Markedly impoverished, poorly developed, or unstable self-image, often associated with excessive self-criticism; chronic feelings of emptiness; dissociative states under stress.

We all know who Kaiba is, right? Except… We don’t, really. We know he had a traumatic childhood. We know he is a rich CEO. We know of his accomplishments in Duel Monsters. It is almost impossible to divorce him of these aspects. We know that Tea likes dancing and Yugi likes puzzles. What are things Kaiba enjoys? At best we could say he likes dragons.

And you can’t say Duel Monsters. It is a painstaking labor for him. It keeps him up for hours doing research into the night. Not as a hobby, but through compulsion. Though there might be momentary satisfaction to gain from it, I’d be hard-pressed to say it’s for fun. During their second duel he even tells Joey “I don’t have fun.” He struggles with the concept as nothing is ever fulfilling.

You take Joey away from the card game and you still have a funloving, loud-mouthed, knucklehead …But what is Kaiba? He’s probably unsure of the answer himself.

“Dissociative states under stress”

He actually calls himself “nothing.” He is his own worst critic. He determines his worth by how well he can play Duel Monsters because that’s his thing.™ It’s my whole identity, my whole life is based around this so if I can’t be good at it then what’s the point.

“Suicidal threats, self-destructive or risk taking behaviors.”

This speaks for itself. Also, [spoilers] in DSOD Kaiba sacrifices himself so that Yugi may call forth the Pharaoh and then fades, for all we know, from existence forever without so much a goodbye, and consistently rushes headlong into danger for Mokuba. Almost as though he doesn’t care much for his own wellbeing or realizes he’ll be missed at all.

“Feeling fearful, apprehensive, or threatened by uncertainty; fears of falling apart or losing control.”

Do I even need to mention how many times the duel with Ishizu had him freeze up in abject horror? He was utterly shaken. Not only if he lost would he lose humiliatingly in his own tournament, but it’d be a grander reminder he has no control over his destiny after all and that absolutely terrifies him.

Empathy: Compromised ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others, or hypersensitivity.

Remember that time Joey literally died and two other people got sent to the infirmary which Kaiba casually disregarded for the sake of completing his tournament? But, Pegasus summons a toon Blue-Eyes and suddenly he’s highly upset like it burned all his crops, specifically, to slight him?

While that may not seem like a big deal to us, he actually says “you know how much I hate that thing!” In such a frustrated and hurt tone that it’s clearly very offsetting to him. He’s demonstrably apathetic yet pretty sensitive. Certain things seem to trigger explosive fits.

“Pattern of unstable and instense relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.”

He’s always touting Yugi’s skills as a duelist and 100% sure Yugi can beat whoever he’s up against! Except for when he isn’t. Yugi’s losing? Disgraceful. Pathetic. I misjud– oh, Yugi’s winning? I knew it!! Yugi is the best!

This black and white thought process is often referred to as “splitting.” It can occur with anyone, (or anything) but in relation to an FP (favorite person); someone you’ve imprinted on and have a large attachment to, it’s the most drastic.

These can be people you’re so consumed with you don’t bother acknowledging anyone else which, Kaiba has a tendency of doing.

“Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger.”

Recall this outburst from season 4. He’s visibly distressed. And notice just how freaked out everyone is by this reaction. This isn’t usual Kaiba anger.™ He genuinely feels betrayed. He’s so disconsolate he doesn’t even give Yugi a chance to explain himself. If Yugi had unknowingly become his FP, this extreme reaction would make sense.

Hostility: Antagonism. Persistent or frequent angry feelings; irritability in response to minor slightly and insults.

I don’t even have to explain this one. [Insert any given interaction between him and Joey or the gang ever.]

“Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.”

*GESTURES WILDLY AT THE ENTIRETY OF DSOD*

Anyway, I don’t really know how to wrap all this up but, it’s worth noting somewhere that people with BPD struggle with interpersonal relationships and making friends as they have issues with emotional permanence. Meaning, they’re constantly needing to “prove” a feeling, or person is really there. They have trouble believing anyone will stay or are really there for them and tend to isolate.

This could explain Kaiba’s standoffish attitude and why he constantly wants to challenge Yugi to prove he is the best. He may also be seeking validation from Yugi that he is a good duelist. Because there is only now to him. The present defines him. “If I’m not the best at this very moment,™ was I ever the best?”

People with BPD constantly feel that they have to earn the right to exist, and constantly wage battle with themselves to be their version of what’s useful or the “best” so they can feel they’ve made their steak. Kaiba’s narcissism is a defense mechanism. He seems to fluctuate between overzealous manic episodes, and crushing, despairing, depressive ones.

At his core, he is insecure and attempts to fill the void with winning tournaments, or building an amusement park– any project or interest to keep him busy. However, he tends to hyperfixate to the point of obsession. All of which are symptomatic of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Tl;dr: Kaiba’s character perfectly reflects and aligns with a plethora of diagnostic criteria listed for BPD in the DSM.

[muwi-translates]

why u should love sanada fucking yukimura

man, this character... is one of the most lovable otome bois i have encountered in a long time,,, because he’s such a loser.

i wouldn’t even call this a character analysis anymore i just spilled all my feels and love for this stupid wholesome boy. thank you to my two biggest sandman supporters, this is all yuu’s fault. @sea-reiusly @snow--blanket

LET’S START. so,,, aside from the fact that he’s cute-dumb; you should love him because he loves you a lot and he deserves love too.

he is the literal embodiment of boyish selfless love.

if iI had to describe him I would describe him as a big red blanket you can wrap around yourself and make you feel safe and warm. or a big spoon of honey; slightly bitter but also sweet.

1) he is mega Friend for Life

first things first; he would be, and is, a good friend - if not to you then to the people he cares about. his whole concept is ‘boy next door’. he is soft, he won’t disappoint you because he cares about you as a person and he worries sometimes even if he doesn’t show it. for example in Shingen’s route he plays messenger for you - he thinks you’re ‘cool’, you’re his pal. he seems like the type who could develop feelings for you but is content just being close to you as your friend and see you happy. despite being told that he’s ‘tactless’, Yukimura actually, not surprisingly, has the ability to read other people, but just sucks at expressing it to you. so occasionally, he ends up proper advice to other suitors if you’re not on his route:

like the time Kenshin was excited to bring you home with him to Kasugayama and you were torn about leaving the home you’ve come to love and your warlord family. to Yukimura, family and friends are important, that is what one of his 'wants' are, after all. he does it for shingen, he does it for his men and the men in the Takeda army.

in a way he’s a bit like your brother too. except Hideyoshi is the clearly caring, wise older brother and Yukimura is your bratty younger brother who would throw a banana at your face, and pretends he doesn’t give a shit about you but that one time he sees you carrying heavy stuff down the hall he takes it from you and calls you ‘weak’ but he just doesn’t want to see you hurt.

if he's not established to be quite as close to you in other routes (Ieyasu/Masamune), he continues to help you on behalf of sasuke. even though you’re a complete stranger to him and he barely knows anything about you background - especially considering sasuke gave him a coverup story and not what or who you actually are. it's moments like these where he is willing and able to separate 'his job' and 'enemy' and do things that would otherwise produce results the opposite of what he’s supposed to be doing (which is actually a point of conflict in his OWN route, which will I will talk about later uwu)

2) ultimate Fam man

Yukimura is inherently a selfless character. he doesn’t care about himself, he only cares about the people around him and what he can do for them. he overworks himself and shoulders all the stress by himself, to take weight off shingen (it's always 'leave it to me, lord shingen!!' from him). 

I believe he has a mild form of ptsd as well; he mentally and emotionally cuts himself away from feeling anything in battle to perform his best, he has trouble sleeping at night, and he ends up holding things he’s sleeping with very tightly (eg. you). we also learn from Shingen that:

he was raised to be strong and upstanding, but has problems with adapting, so he puts all he has into what he does, meaning he gets hurt more (EN)

when he has his heart set on things, his conviction lasts for a long, long time (CN)

so, he likes it a lot when he gets to surround himself with people he cares about. he comes off as an ambivert leaning on extrovert, based off how he seems to like hanging out with his men not just as their field commander but as their friend, he enjoys parties and even entertains Kenshin. it’s been noted that he is visibly more relaxed and laughs often around his soldiers - so it’s safe to assume he gets energy by being around the people he cares about, because at least he knows that they’re alive.

in fact, the idea of people around him dying makes him angry. he’s willing to put aside his hatred of Nobunaga to ensure that no unnecessary lives are lost, even if he’s sacrificing himself in the process. they all share the simple dream of one day being able to return to their homeland, and Yukimura expects almost all of them to be able to fulfill that dream together.

so when Shingen insinuates that he won’t be able to be there for that, Yukimura gets understandably worried and angry.

okay, so now we know that he's a selfless iron woobie. what else? as stated above we know that he is actually a closet Sensitive Guy(TM). Yukimura is sensitive to his own feelings, at least. he's a Thinker, he thinks a lot and even overthinks. he is a tsundere to himself - because he's hardwired himself to sacrifice other needs and wants aside from the goals he's set for himself. if it’s not something for the benefit of his dream or Shingen or Sasuke - does he really need it?

he clings onto all the light he can hold onto no matter how small for the sake of his dream - it’s literally defined his life, he’s somewhat dependant on using his body to fight for something or someone and that’s why he’s always moving around doing something. Yukimura also respects other people who have a similar mindset (also his highest criteria when it comes to women; he gotta have something to respecc). 

if he didn’t have anything to fight for what do you think would happen? :thinking:,,,, check out chapter 13 of his dramatic route for the answer,,,, it is not pretty :( 

3. 95% giver 5% taker (and only after some self-deprecation)

of course his selflessness also applies to his love interest?? 

even as a lover he's such an adorable loser that makes me want to cry. he is selfless love in the form of a man. he is basically a dog boi. he only wants to take care of you, your happiness is his happiness. he always offers to make YOU happy and not himself first- it's like as long as you're smiling he can keep going, even if he's tired or if he worked all day, he always has time to spoil and coddle you-- if you want all his attention he'll give it to you, no matter how tired or busy he is. in fact, he thinks that its part of the job description, that its his duty to indulge in your desires. even on his birthday, you know the day where HE'S supposed to get something, he goes out of his way to get YOU a present.

the conflict in his route is literally him coming to terms that he wants something for himself, denying himself from his own goddamn happiness. he finds out that you are on the side of his enemies, yet he still wants you because he’s fallen for you - but he tells/forces himself to think that he doesn’t need you after all, because “it wasn’t meant to be” and that he doesn’t deserve you because he brought you to the battlefield. even though he can do exactly what he needs to if you were simply just ‘friends’ or ‘acquaintances’ - the idea of giving himself true happiness by being with the person he loves? nah, fam.

literally the only time he wanted to be selfish for once he slapped himself and said ‘no’. if you didn’t chase after him, the regret would eat at him for a long time, regret that he’ll eventually learn to squash down inside himself and only add to fuel of performing only for others - and not himself.

👏 👏  related analysis: why does he come off as insensitive when it comes to his route? why has he demonstrated that he is actually not Stupid but is also a butthead to you?

answer: defence mechanism - he thinks women are bothersome because they cry. and when women cry he lacks the confidence(?) to use words to comfort them. they embarrass him, he’s a tsundere, he only says things truly from his heart under Very Specific Circumstances where he is completely vulnearable and open (like pre-spice or... some angst situation).

so instead he just falls back to being selfless like he normally is. all he knows is how to care about other people, carry their burdens and wanting them to rely on him. that's why when you're upset at the festival, he just keeps shoving food at you instead of asking 'what's wrong' and going off on that. because his mind is literally just thinking food = good = makes people happy = ok, let's do that then. that's also why he'd rather you be angry than sad. sad is bad because he doesn’t know how to deal with bad except being physically intimate - pretty sure Yukimura would rather die if he had to hug every crying woman he ever encountered.

conclusion: he’s just a lost, lost boi who doesn’t know how to comfort people so he sacrifices himself and puts others ahead of him using actions - he pampers, he lets people vent out on him, the works. what a fucking wholesome loser who needs to love himself for once.

👏 👏 end of insensitive boi in love analysis

there’s a part of Yukimura that is actually a bit insecure. it's odd because he’s usually so confident in himself, and so proud, but he’s also so self-deprecating? under that tough boy exterior is just a boi who wants to be loved. he wants someone who will be there for him and support his stupid ass. he uses himself to hold up everyone else's burdens, but sometimes there's nobody that might be able to do the same to him. he wants someone to come home to, when he's stressed and wants some loving because otherwise he'd hole up his emotions and explode-- if he didn't have Shingen and Sasuke there with him.

his route sort of expresses the fact that Yukimura has never experienced a ‘mature love’ before, or a love where he imagines a life together with them. crushes, probably at some point in his life. sexual experience? how can he not have any??? but mature love? questionable.

these moments are few and far between because its not explored quite as much, but when they do...

he says things like "don't leave me, i'll prove that i'm the man for you." (bitch doesn't have to prove jack shit, he literally radiates with Care and Love) and “I need you”. he just doesn't want you to disappear on him. 

why’d you think you decided to leave without telling him? bitch would fucking fight the sky to keep you with him.

he's scared to lose you because he's finally found someone who is willing to accept him and taught him that its ok for him to be selfish for once and do things for his own sake and his own happiness. what he wants most is to just come home and eat food with you together. every encounter with you is precious to him because you rarely see each other. he wants to spend time with you. he doesn't like it when things cut into plans that seperate the two of you- but he doesn't mind it if plans didn't run as expected as long as he still got to spend the day with you. even if he's busy, he lies to go out with you to do things that YOU want. 

he’s finally come to find some happiness outside of work and outside of how he already copes - that alone is special to him, whether you end up as his friend or as his lover.

so basically:

you should love this guy bc he is mega Lovable and radiates warm Energy,,, he will always care about ur dumb ass one way or another.

[alkja]

Well, here we come: Endgame review (spoilers galore)

Endgame is essentially two different movies for me: the one up until the last three minutes and the one that includes those last three minutes.

The first is a decent movie – riddled with stupid crap, plot holes and the occasional nonsense, but on the whole acceptable.

The second is a waterfall of crap that makes me seethe in anger.

If you liked that ending, I seriously discourage you from keeping on reading. Otherwise, let us discuss the good, the bad, the wtf and the “How dare you?”

THE “DID YOU EVEN TRY THINKING ABOUT THIS” DIVISION

 Let’s start with the inevitable: time shenanigans equal inevitable fuckery. That is known.

The most egregious example being: Nebula kills her younger self and is apparently fine and dandy. What the shit? I don’t care if you killed her in 2023 (or whenever Endgame happens, I’m going with Infinity War happening in 2018 as released), if Nebula 2014 dies there is no Nebula 2015 and so on to eventually become Nebula 2023. Ergo, she should absolutely have died. Same with Thanos & Co. No matter where you do it, if you kill a past version of someone, there is no one to do the things they would have done in the future. Thanos 2014 dies, so there cannot be a Thanos from after that to do the Snap.

Which is not bad, go ahead and kill past versions of evil shits, but doing so changes the timeline. Period. Rodhey even proposed that and they had a long nerd out about why that would not be possible... and then they went and did that and pretended it didn’t count. That is so goddamn stupid.

Same with all the time travel.

I don’t care if you go and put the Infinity Stones back, because those stupid McGuffins are not the only thing that can mess the timeline. First of all, there is no one to use them anyway since Thanos died before he did the Snap, but we’re supposed to ignore that.

More to the point, in order to put the timeline to right, you have to put the Stones back after the future Avengers have stolen them. Fine, that puts them back in the timeline. However, that doesn’t erase the actions your slightly-past selves have taken trying to grab them. Which means, for example, that Loki fucking escaped with the Tesseract after Avengers 1, which is a MAJOR change.

Or, it should be. But apparently we’re supposed to ignore that because in the Dark World time Loki is in his cell, and wow. NO. If he escapes in Avengers 1 (with the Tesseract to boot), that leads to massive changes in Dark World and Ragnarok. For one thing, without the Tesseract, the Bifrost cannot be repaired. More essential to those plots, Loki should plainly not be there.

Putting the sceptre back also doesn’t erase the fact that Captain America said “Heil Hydra” to a Hydra agent (oh oh oh, such canny comic references!), who apparently never mentioned it again to anyone ever? Not even to his goddamn boss? So, did Sitwell legitimately think Steve was Hydra up until Winter Soldier? And yet come Winter Soldier he never thought to ask Steve “Wait, even if you’re not actually Hydra, you clearly knew about us for years, so why are you now so outraged like this is brand new information for you? Why did it take you this long to move against us and why are you doing it without much in the way of planning or allies? The hell did you do these past years?”

Hell, why did Sitwell – a prominent Hydra agent in SHIELD who would not raise any flags doing so – never approach Steve, Hydra agent to Hydra agent? No, he discovers that Captain America is apparently Hydra and just rolls with it. No “What the hell, sir?” call to Pierce, no secret handshake to Steve. For years. I can handwave him not saying anything to Rumlow and the rest of Strike, because if Steve is Hydra maintaining his deep cover with everyone is more important than anything (even if they were right there when he gave him the scepter, so what did he say to them?), but not mentioning it to Pierce? Cannot buy that. And not having any mention of that in Winter Soldier is pretty damn unbelievable.

The timeline was also changed by having future!Steve fight past!Steve. And no, it doesn’t matter that past!Steve thought it was Loki. It was still a change.

Not to mention, Loki could not have had a Peggy compass or known shit about Bucky, so it stands to reason it’s not Loki. So, what gives? What did past!Steve think it happened? Hell, come Winter Soldier what did he think about that time some guy who looked and fought like himself told him that Bucky was alive and lo and behold, here comes Buckaroo?

  In essence, the Avengers fucked the timeline without lube but we’re supposed to pretend they didn’t.

To me, that is shit.

Mess with time all you like, but acknowledge you’re doing so. Either your plan goes off without a hitch (as if!), or the moment where everything goes inevitably to hell and there are changes - and here we are talking about major changes - you say fuck it, pull out all the stops and change away.

[Ok, I admit it, by that I mostly mean: pull out all the stops, take 5 minutes to explain to your past self you come from the future and tell him to get his ass in gear because Hydra is literally running the government and SHIELD and most importantly Bucky has been frozen, tortured and brainwashed for about 70 years, so get to it, save Bucky Bear save the world, and smash Nazis like the fucking Hulk. May the fic gods, as ever, be kinder to me than the canon ones.]

This “pretend nothing has changed even while we change important stuff that should logically have repercussions” approach only works if you think your audience has the reasoning capabilities of concussed goldfishes. Tony’s last bout of genius solving time travel on the fly deserved better than this.

(Also, good luck trying to sell me on any future conflict stakes when our heroes now have the capabilities of fucking going back in time and change things, even if you don’t want to admit it.)

In the “this is so dumb and nonsensical and wow look at those strings” camp, we also have the two Nebulas being connected. That is so stupid and clearly only there for the sake of plot you can literally see the writers going “Uhm... how can we make it so past!Thanos knows what the heroes are doing? What if we make it so past!Nebula gets the memories of future!Nebula from a galaxy away? How? Why? Because!”

Riveting.

About as riveting as the Thor stuff. Here you can see the writers desperately wracking their brain wondering “But how are we gonna have dumb jokes in a serious movies? Where will we go for cheap, juvenile humor? I know! Let’s make Thor a drunk idiot with a beer belly! Oh oh oh, what could be more funny than a parade of fat jokes, we’re comedic geniuses!”

Yawn. Also, offensive much? But really, everything about Thor spits in the face of his three movies long character arc (which was all about responsibility): dudes, do you even know the characters you’re writing about?

Speaking of desperation: no Steve and Bucky reunion post UnSnapping? Seriously? We have Tony and Peter - who have known each other for 5 minutes - tearfully embrace but no scene between two characters who have known each other all their lives and have been through massive shit in those lives? Marvel execs, we know that every time Steve and Bucky shared a scene The Dreadful Spectre of The GAY appeared and made your blood pressure rise but this is ridiculous.

Which is also why you get no cookie for The First Gay Character in the franchise: an unnamed character in a single blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene, truly stellar representation. What made you believe this was a smart move?

  That said, there are some good things in this movie.

  THE “I DIDN’T NECESSARILY WANT THIS BUT I CAN ACCEPT YOU DID IT. ALSO, OUCH: MY HEART” DIVISION

First of all, Tony Stark.

Never thought I’d say that, because I’m the furthest thing from a Tony fan and spent all of Ultron and Civil War wanting to punch him. And Infinity War being indifferent to him.

But goddamn if I didn’t feel how goddamn much he adored Pepper and their daughter. Goddamn if I didn’t tear up at his heroic sacrifice, going out with the line that started it all (“I am Iron Man”- my heart), goddamn if I didn’t tear up at his goodbye with Pepper and then at his funeral.

For all his many, many faults – which I’m not gonna forget for a second – Tony went out exactly as he should be: a goddamn hero. With a heart big enough, strong enough to give himself up for everyone else even at the moment where he had everything he ever wished to have.

My hat’s off to him.

Never thought I’d ever say this, but I will miss him.

 Other MVPs of Endgame: Clint Motherfucking Barton and Natasha “Love is NOT for Children” Romanoff. I know: Natasha, sure, but who would ever have guessed that about Clint? Prior to Endgame, he was just sort of there, not helped by Ultron and his sudden family in a farm.

Endgame managed to make me care about the family I loathed. How? I don’t know, but I am totally down for a Clint + Kate Bishop + Lila show, where everyone is a badass archer and they are all codenamed Hawkeye just because! I am also totally down for Clint’s badass reinvention (after, I’m guessing, mainlining all 7 seasons of Arrow), no matter how heartbreaking the reason or questionable the style choices.

And that Clintasha scene was pretty much worth the whole movie to me.

Because, first of all, that’s how you solve a problem like the Soul Stone: a willing sacrifice. (Which, btw, makes even more disgusting the fact that we are supposed to see this as equally worthy to Thanos murdering his daughter).

Second, because I am a total sucker for characters fighting about who gets to sacrifice themselves. Clint and Natasha beating the crap out of each other just like in Avengers 1 (just one of many delightful callbacks that pepper the movie), this time because they love each other too much to let the other be the one to die is everything.

Third, because it’s just a really good scene, based on one of the better relationships in the MCU. Even those not shipping Clintasha have no doubt that those two are extremely important to one another, and Renner and Johannson acted the hell out of it - just as they did every scene together, from their reunion post-yakuza slaughter, to the giddiness of flying a spaceship. I teared up like a baby at Nat’s sacrifice and I was right there with Clint hoping for a loophole that made it so we could get Nat back and was heartbroken anew when that did not come to pass.

But, again, the Black Widow went out just like she should have: a true hero, loving, strong and unafraid. The red in her ledger was wiped out once and for all.

  The “Feels” subdivision

 Scott Lang was an integral part of the solution. I mean, never before have we heard about time passing differently in the quantum realm – and in fact Janet Van Dyne aged the 30 years she spent in it, so more plot service crap – but who cares! Still, his desperate checking to see if his daughter was among the Snapped only to find his own name and running like hell to get to Cassie only to be suddenly confronted with a teenager and realizing he missed those 5 years with her and not caring because she was still there was absolutely perfect.

Speaking of families: I have already said it but Tony and Pepper and little Morgan were amazing.

Also, Thor and Frigga! Frigga was an egregious fridging to start with, so it was lovely seeing her again, but especially giving her a wonderful scene with her son that shows her intelligence and strength and exactly why she was Queen of Asgard. Not to mention being the one to restore Thor’s confidence and absolving him of his failures. Sometimes you just really, really need your mom. (Too bad about that stupid salad joke.)

Natasha and Steve. Just... Natasha and Steve being badly messed up by those 5 years post-Snap and yet being so supportive and understanding of each other. Really, after Winter Soldier, this was the best Natasha movie. And rightly so.

In general, the Avengers being not just a team but also friends, fucking finally. Sure, there is the whole “found family-baited” post going around, but memes aside, it is true that we never got to see those people acting like friends and not merely co-workers. Was that so difficult to do before the very last moment?

  THE “IN HERE FOR THE HOLY SHIT QUOTIENT” DIVISION

 A small but admirable moment for a villain that was otherwise pretty underwhelming no matter how much they tried passing him off as deep: Thanos having the smarts and the metaphorical stones to goddamn destroy the Infinity Stones. Better to accept never using them himself again than run the risk of someone stealing them and undo his work. He may be evil and incapable of properly understanding the concept of proportions (that whole: if you destroy half of the resources along with half of the people using said resources, you are just as screwed as before), but the guy is smart.

Carol was as amazing as she could be in a movie that by design could not be about her kicking Thanos’s ass up and down the whole galaxy but was necessarily the Last Hooray  of the Old Guard. Her face seeing Fury among the Snapped, her entrance and towing a fucking spaceship, her pointing out that while the Avengers have been watching (with mixed results) over a single planet she was watching over a lot of them (likely with better results), her second entrance, her goddamn everything. Not as good as her solo movie but what could ever be?

Speaking of ladies, Valkyrie becoming a Literal Queen warms my heart. I have some doubts about Thor just up and leaving what remains of his people, even after everything (read: I don’t buy it, just like I don’t buy anything about Thor in this movie), but considering Heimdall is not around anymore, we can all agree he left them in excellent, badass hands. I want more.

Switching to metaphorical Valkyries... It was a fanservice-y, mostly unearned scene in a series that has historically been pretty low in female friendships or relationships, but goddamn if the optics of all the badass ladies of the MCU banding together weren’t made of FUCKYEAH! Give us a ladies-led movie, Marvel, you fucking cowards: DC is giving us the Birds of Prey (and Harley Quinn), what’s your excuse?

In that vein: Pepper donning an Iron Man armor! Basically everything I ever hoped for, so much so that for a moment I legitimately thought I had imagined it. Now that Tony is gone, let Pepper step up as Rescue or Iron Maiden or whatever, get her to mentor a bright intern named Riri Williams and we’re set to go for maximum awesomeness.

Still, when talking about maximum awesomeness: CAP. WIELDING. MJOLNIR. We Italians don’t have the habit of reacting to movies out loud at the theatre, but you could hear the current of FUCKYEAH!!! coming from all the nerds in the room, and rightly so. Cap fighting with the shield in one hand and Mjolnir in the other was everything every superhero fan could ever have wished for in a movie distilled into the Crowning Moment of Awesome to top all CMOAs. (Too bad this gets incredibly undermined by that ending beacuse I refuse to believe that that guy could be worthy of a fucking shoehorn, much less Mjolnir.)

Thor dual-wielding Mjolnir and Stormbreaker deserves a mention too.

(This as long as we forget Mjolnir being taken away to the future at the start of Dark World makes gaping holes in Ultron e Ragnarok, because past!Thor wouldn’t have it anymore, but whatever LALALALALA what time logic?)

But the moment that threatened to bring down the house in cheers was the sight of all the Unsnapped returning followed by - finally - the call: AVENGERS ASSEMBLE! Every single person visibly restrained themselves from punching the air and shouting along. I think we all regret not doing so, dignity be damned.

   So, leaving aside the truck-sized plot holes that are practically a given once you decide to muck around with time travel and the occasional plot-over-character-or-sense stupidity, all in all we have a rather solid movie full of badass moments and with occasionally meaningful emotional beats.

Not my favorite by a long shot, but a mostly fitting end to an insane project no one ever thought could possibly be achieved that ended up sweeping the world and fandom.

Too bad those last five minutes arrive to shit all over that, and incidentally all over a beloved character.

   THE “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU GODDAMNED HACKS” DIVISION

 Steve – I must suppose SERIOUSLY concussed during the battle to the point of brain damage beyond the repairing capabilities of the superserum – returns the Infinity Stones to the past and, while he’s at it, decides to abscond in the same past to live his life with Peggy, only returning as an old man to pass the shield to Sam.

Awwwwwwwwww... Steve and Peggy living their life together, so heartwarming...

Yeah, except once you think about it, then you want to use that shield to fucking brain the skrull that must be impersonating Steve Rogers.

Because, in order to buy this story, we have to believe that Steve “I don’t like bullies” Rogers, Steve “If I see a situation pointed south, I can't ignore it” Rogers, Steve “On va voir” Rogers, Steve “I can do this all day” Rogers deliberately chose to spend the rest of his fucking life doing exactly nothing, otherwise the timeline would have been SERIOUSLY rebooted.

A life of inaction, hiding the fact of his existence.

Sure, that totally sounds like the Steve Rogers we have been watching up until this point.

Instead of an ending about moving forward no matter what life throws at you, we got one about happiness being literally going backwards.

Because that’s a totally healthy message.

Hell, you decide to go the retirement route, I don’t even necessarily disagree with it. If, after all the trauma of Infinity War + the five years interlude + the shitstorm of Endgame, Steve decided to lay aside the shield for a while and try to make an actual, functional life for himself I would have been all for it. If nothing else, the guy could make do with a lot of therapy. Most crucially, not being Captain America would not mean quitting the fight: he could do just as much good as an artist, a politician, an opinion leader, an activist or what have you. All that is not gonna be possible in the past, because to mantain the timeline he cannot become anyone relevant in any way. Especially since he knows Hydra is still around and attracting notice would mean risking some of that attention coming from them. So no, absconding to the past means by necessity a life not fighting in any way, not doing anything of any particular importance whatsoever.

This is completely antithetical to everything that Steve Rogers, as he was shown up until now, stands for.

And we have yet to touch the morality of it all, or the lack thereof.

Lest I get accused of being a bitter Stucky shipper whose slash goggles cannot make her appreciate a Steggy ending, let me point out that I ship Steggy as much as Stucky and if anything I am a bitter Peggy Carter fangirl: Our Kick-Ass Lady of the No Holds Barred Beatdown unquestionably deserves better than this crap.

By which, I’m not even talking about how this ending shits all over the closure we got before and the entirety of the Agent Carter run, which both show that while Peggy unquestionably loved Steve, she mourned him for a while and then, as healthy people do, moved on to have a perfectly fulfilling life with a rewarding job and eventually a new love and family. I’m not even talking about how this takes her back the “Steve Rogers’ Love Interest” route, Betty Carver-style, instead of letting her be her own woman with her own story that may have started alongside Steve Rogers but then developed on her own terms. I’m not talking about how she was rewinded from a character in her own right to a “hero’s” prize.

I’m talking about how this supposed happy ending to slow dancing and snuggling is based on either Peggy being apparently also brain damaged to the point that, upon hearing that the organization she’s busting her ass to run is a Nazi cesspool, just rolls with it - which, I think we can all agree, is definitely not something our Agent Carter would ever in a million years do -  or Steve merrily electing to spend something like 50 years lying like a motherfucker to the supposed love of his life about how the organization she’s busting her ass to run is a Nazi cesspool. True love, everyone!

Fuck you: Peggy Carter fucking deserved better than this.

This also leaving aside the fact that, in this happy ending, Steve knows that while he’s squirreled away in the woods dancing and doing decoupage, his supposed best friend is getting tortured to the point of complete dehumanization. But whatever, he’ll eventually be fine, no use doing anything about it. Oh, JFK got murdered? Nice shot, Buck! Oh, there goes Howard, a smooth operation, buddy: hope the brain-frying won’t be too bad, just hang on until 2014.

End of the line my goddamn ass.

Oh, and since no-one’s memories are rewritten, Bucky also conceivably knows all this. He knows that his supposed best friend voluntarily spent his life doing squat to save him.

Fuck you: Bucky Barnes fucking deserved better than this.

SO, TO RECAP: Steve Rogers is a selfish ass who chose a life of inaction, Peggy Carter is either his accomplice or a dupe and Bucky Barnes lost his best friend all over again. Coherent characterization got sacrificed for a theoretical feel-good moment that doesn’t stand up to the most cursory examination before being revealed as sheer horrifying fuckery.

Sure, Sam gets to be the new Captain America (which, don’t get me wrong: he totally deserves it and at this point he’s more worthy of it than the original), but that’s literally the only good thing in a mountain of shit dumped over characters that deserved much better.

I get that Evans wanted out, but there are ways to do it and then there are ways. Tony went out like a goddamn hero. So did Natasha.

Steve went out quitting - aka the one and only thing Steve Rogers would never ever do - and in addition what can only be called a bastard who shrugged off his best friend’s decades-long torture and quite likely spent his life lying to the woman he loves.

Fuck you: Steve Rogers fucking deserved better than this.

If there could be a worse impression to leave bowing out than this one, I’m honestly unable to imagine it (Well, beside making Steve Hydra for real: but considering that he spent his live blithely pretending they were not still around murdering, torturing and so on, that makes him a collaborationist at best and WOW, at this point it’s kinda splitting hairs, isn’t it?).

Coming into Endgame, I knew this was gonna be Cap’s last waltz and after spending years as a Steve Rogers fan I was dreading watching him die. Now, I wish he could have gone out with the heroism and dignity of Tony or Natasha instead of... whatever this was. I could have mourned him while celebrating him, instead of mourning what he used to be while despising what he was made to become.

This Steve Rogers fan, who spent years loving him while being annoyed and occasionally enraged by Tony Stark, left the theatre feeling deeply moved by Tony and quite honestly hating the guts of whatever was left of Steve. If someone told me this would happen I wouldn’t have believed them and yet here we are.

 Personally, in order to actually enjoy the movie and especially to be able to retain any fondness whatsoever for one of my most beloved characters, those last five minutes are gonna join the entirety of Age of Ultron in the realm of “I recognise Marvel Studios have made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it”.

As far as I’m concerned, Endgame ended with Tony Stark’s funeral. A fitting tribute to the fallen hero who started it all, to the road that took us to this moment and all those characters who travelled it with us.

To the end of an era and hope for the next one.

[what-is-canon]

How Jon and Daenerys will both defeat the Night King

Here’s my two cents on how it should go down:

Both Jon and Daenerys need to defeat the Night King side-by-side, dying together while doing so, for a myriad of reasons. 

Firstly, the Targaryens are rumoured to be a cursed bloodline, dating back to the Doom of Valyria. 

Daena Targaryen’s vision allowed the family to cheat death and in doing so essentially doomed the bloodline. I imagine this only accounts for full/half-blood Targaryens though; anyone else with Targaryen ancestry is pretty much safe because their blood has been diluted down so much (i.e. the Baratheons- they do still have an awful stream of bad luck now and again, they’re literally teetering on extinction as it is, but they always seem to fight their way back). 

It could also be a case that anyone who has the Targaryen name is cursed- Jon Snow falls into this bracket considering he was born ‘Aegon Targaryen’.

Secondly, Daenerys’ death seems inevitable at this point, and would also bring her character arc full-circle.

While I do appreciate Daenerys’ character and understand how complex she is (who isn’t complex in GOT?), it’s pretty obvious at this point that she’s become quite self-entitled and arrogant. Regardless of that, though, the soft-hearted Daenerys, who only ever wanted a home and a family, is still in there.

I definitely wouldn’t like to see Daenerys go full-on villain and be taken out because of that (that role belongs to Cersei). 

Daenerys needs to teeter on the edge of falling into darkness, on the brink of becoming just like her father- and then realize what she’s becoming.

Maybe she acts out in a moment of madness and causes the death of someone close to her, be it one of her companions, advisers or one of her two remaining dragons. 

And with that, she has her moment of self-realization. 

She sees how close she’s come to losing herself in her quest for the throne, and does not want to become that person, does not want to become like her father. She realises that this country she wants to rule over isn’t her home and never has been, and that she could never rule these people she believes to be her own because she doesn’t know them. But there is one thing she can do for them now, and that’s save them, so that someone else may lead them, someone who does know them and what they truly need. 

Daenerys suddenly becomes the story’s tragic hero, and the tragic hero’s moment of self-sacrifice arrives not long after. 

Although a part of me thinks it could be too predictable, at the same time the Azor Ahai-Nissa Nissa-Lightbrighter moment would serve as a complete sucker-punch to the gut. The audience suspects it’s going to happen, some are dead certain, but when the moment actually arrives, everyone gasps in collective horror, because it’s actually happening.

I would imagine that both Jon and Daenerys had been previously told, by Bran most likely, of this method of defeating the Night King, but neither had wanted to do it; Jon because he couldn’t bring himself to kill the woman he loves, and Daenerys because she doesn’t want to give up her life and her quest for the throne; she would believe in finding another way. A flashback format of the scene where they’re told prior to the actual moment it happens would probably be the most effective way of conveying what’s about to happen. 

So yeah, it would come down to Daenery’s baring her breast for Jon, a moment’s hesitation on his part because how can he kill her, followed by Daenery tearfully urging him to do so. And the audience can see the fear in her eyes because she doesn’t want to die but she knows she has to for the sake of her people. And Jon does the deed, running his lover through with Longclaw, the blade bursting into flame as it’s drawn from Daenerys’ heart, and she falls into the snow. 

In a call-back to her vision in the House of the Undying, I think Daenerys should see Drogo and her son in her last moments. The vision began with her approaching the Iron Throne and rejecting it, which she has now done in life. She then moves beyond the Wall and out into a snow storm; it’s likely that there’ll be a snow storm during her death scene, or perhaps the vision’s snow storm was a metaphor for Jon Snow or the Night King being the end of her. In this snow storm, she finds a tent, and inside are her late husband and child. Before, she was called away from them by the cries of her dragons. By the end of the war I imagine all three of the dragons will be dead and gone, so she won’t be hearing any cries from them beckoning her to come back this time around. She chooses to stay with Drogo and Rhaego, and in real-time Daenerys breathes her last. 

Before anyone begins thinking “oh of course Jon Snow would get to be the big hero in the end”, think for a second, without Daenerys’ sacrifice, would Jon ever have been able to overcome the Night King? No, he wouldn’t. 

It was Daenerys’ moment of self-realization and her self-sacrifice that allows Jon to bring forth Lightbringer, so in fact, for the most part, it is actually Daenerys and her choice that saves Westeros. 

Thirdly, self-sacrifice is integral to Jon Snow’s character. 

Yes, he was brought back from the dead and some may think a second death is a bit of a cop-out. 

But then again, bringing someone back from the dead only to win it all and live a long, somewhat-happy life (this is still Westeros after all) is just as much a cop-out. It’s not Game of Thrones. 

Jon Snow dying a second, final time, would definitely tie in with the bittersweet ending. He was given a chance at life again, but only so he could die when he was originally destined to. The ‘Lord of Light’ brought him back for what has always been his destiny, to defeat the Night King, and after that his time is up again.

While Jon would undoubtedly lay down his life for his people, there would also be a part of him that didn’t want to die again. He’d be leaving behind his siblings again, and having died already he believes that there is nothing after you die. 

(I’d be hoping though that they would hint at an afterlife in Jon’s final moments, maybe Ned’s voice calling out to him, so the viewers would leave off with the knowledge that Jon is at peace now; the only reason he saw nothing the first time was because he was in limbo, his soul waiting to be brought back.)

That brings me to the manner of Jon’s final death. 

He has just run Daenerys through with Longclaw and the sword has become Lightbringer. He grapples with the Night King for a few moments, but it’s pretty obvious that he’s going to overpower him. For the first time, the Night King actually looks fearful. 

So he runs the Night King through, there’s a massive blast, and the Night King dissipates along with the rest of his army. There’s a moment of silence, of peace, and Jon falls to his knees. It’s finally done, it’s finally over. 

He looks to Daenerys’ body, overcome with emotion. Maybe he cradles her and cries, devastated by the sacrifice she made, and of the burden that was thrust upon him with that sacrifice. He lays her back down in the snow, inhales deeply, and looks to where the Night King had stood. All that’s left is a shard of dragonglass, the one that originally created the White Walkers. 

And that’s when there’s another flashback, to the moment Bran spoke with both Jon and Daenerys. 

Bran tells them that after Daenerys has died and the Night King has been vanquished, the shard of dragonglass from his heart must be completely destroyed, to break the magic of the White Walkers completely, so that they may never return. If someone were to be stabbed in the heart with this shard of dragonglass again, the Night King would be reborn, and the White Walkers would rise once more. 

But there is one way of neutralizing this magic. Dragonglass, or obsidian, is ‘frozen fire’, fire in ice-form. It must be run through the heart of someone in whose blood runs both ice and fire. 

Lyanna was a pure-blooded Stark, her parents being first cousins. Rhaegar was, obviously enough, a pure-blooded Targaryen, his parents being siblings. 

(It suddenly becomes obvious as well why Daenerys was so against this course of action; she had her own reasons, but she also didn’t want Jon Snow to die, even if he would be following her in death, because she truly loved him). 

Jon Snow is the human embodiment of ice and fire, and if he were to be stabbed in the heart with this shard of obsidian, it would have no effect bar one- death. He wouldn’t rise again as the Night King; the dragonglass would likely dissolve in his heart, breaking the magic of the White Walkers completely, so that they may never returns.

And so that is what Jon Snow does; he runs himself through with the dragonglass, because he is the story’s self-sacrificing hero. 

Daenerys dies to save Westeros, and Jon’s death completes what her death accomplished. 

So at the end of it all, both of them are heroes, neither outshines the other, because without the other, neither would have been able to win and save everyone. 

It would be an ironic way for the last Targaryens to go, too: as it is, the family is mostly remembered for their madness and blood lust, the name being almost completely tarnished. 

But if Jon and Daenerys sacrificed themselves like this, they’d be remembered as the bloodline that saved Westeros and its people from a horrible fate.

[popculturespiritwow]

THE WICKED + THE DIVINE #33: YOUR DERIVATIVE SHIT (AKA TWIST AND SHOUT)

This cover. Black to me signals death, or something awful. And I was certain that we get all-black pages somewhat regularly in WicDiv, but you know, it’s not true. Both when Luci gets “killed” and Laura herself “dies”, we get pages that are black but for two tiny almost exactly duplicated comments.

The Underworld is obviously a land of darkness, and there are two moments – during Laura’s first trip down there and then when Persephone first gets her hands on Woden – where we get a splash page of endless black into which the character is falling.

But the only time in WicDiv that we’re given a non-dialogue-y black page is when Sakhmet takes out her dad in issue 17, and again in issue 28 when she massacres her party people after coming to believe they’re all laughing at her. That last one does give one tiny little glimpse of her, though.

So if there is a “language” to the all-blacks (non haka version) (love you Kiwis), it would seem to be something to do with violence and lost time.

But we’ve already done all the blood and nightmares in this arc, and this issue is instead filled with twists and reveals and honest soul-rending conversation and reunions and new friends and overall kind of a lot of reader satisfaction.  So a very different thing.

Another take on the all-black is this is what you put on your cover when you’re terrified anything else will give something away. But for as much anxiety as Kieron talks about in his notes about “keeping the secrets” of this issue (and also his sense of what nonsense that fear is), he and Jamie have never had any trouble obscuring  reveals before.

So here’s my thought: Maybe it’s like Disneyland. Disney theme parks are built in such a way that on the way in you have to go through a tunnel of some kind, and before you do you can’t really see inside to all the happy happy joy joy good stuff.

The idea is, Disney wants you to feel like you’re entering into a whole different world than the one you left behind, a better world where you can be happy and spend money and want to take the same picture in front of the castle that everyone else does and still feel like it’s special.  And part of that is creating a clear sense of boundary; there was where you were and there’s where you’re going, and the tunnel stands as passage in between.

Maybe that’s why you do a black cover: Not to hide anything or signal violence but to create a boundary, a sense of a passage into something new. 

PHALLUCIES

So we begin with the Vibrator as key. I want to say it might be the perfect Gillen/McKelvie image – it’s naughty and seems like a joke and has been sitting there for so long that we no longer think much of it when in fact it is absolutely essential.

Nothing in WicDiv is superfluous, minor or irrelevant. Everything is trying to express something important. (TELL US ABOUT THE VEILS KIERON.)

A bigger question: does the fact that Jon (and not only Jon but the truth about Laura) is released into the story via a phallic device that vibrates have even more to say? Is pleasure or self-care in a sense the key in WicDiv, a path to freedom and life?

Have I not mentioned already I was an English major?

READ ONLY MIMIRY (#SorryNotSorry)

After an arc that seems very caught up in how the characters are all caught up in/pinned down by stories, suddenly out of nowhere we have Jon, this breath of fresh air who sees that path for the garbage it is and refuses it. He will not fit the options Ananke poses, or any duality, thanks very much.

He is the one who builds.

Of course he is then force-wrapped into stories – the Pantheon (I love the horror of his reaction to his ascent), this weird Odin/Thor thing (complete with the nod to Thor’s alter ego Donald Blake) and also the biblical Abraham and Isaac story, the father sacrificing his son to God (now comes with beheading!).

And if I understand the father/son dynamic, as much as Jon sees the Mimir thing for the lie or trap it is, he still can’t quite help himself from being a builder. There are rules he can bend (see: vibrator) but he can’t quite enact a full break.

His call is really quite beautiful. “You walked among your foes for the sake of love,” the spooky Ananke heads say. “Struck down you are raised up, the Sky King’s grandest treasure.” It’s pretty much the absolute opposite of his Dad’s call.

How crazy is it that we’re 2/3rds done with the series, we’ve just been introduced to a major new character (okay we saw him once before but still), and he fits in so well?

Probably we’re being set up for betrayal and heartbreak, but for now I love it with all the loves. 

MACK THAT KNIFE

Can we just talk about the knife for a second? Like, how exactly does it work? Clearly it somehow enables the user to disengage the head from the body while keeping the head alive. But whereas with Jon that might have happened literally – put your elbow into it, David! – in the case of Luci, Tara and Inanna Ananke used her signature head pop. So what’s the deal? It’s enough to have the knife in your possession when doing with the murdering, or something else?

Also, post-beheading, we see Ananke referring to Jon as “it”.

Is this because he’s now “just” a living head? Or is this how she actually honestly sees all the gods?  It’s um, upsetting to say the least. 

Of course so is Woden’s take on things: Jon stole my life (by being born, you horrible human looking meat puppet), so now I get to steal his.

I don’t know how it would have been possible Woden could sink lower in my estimation than he has (#Dio4Vr), but in fact it is and he has.

CASSANDRA VS. THE DESTROYER ROUND II

As much as I love the Jon reveal, the thing that really rocked my world was actually not that but Laura explaining what she’s been going through. I just – this poor girl. And though we still have two arcs to go, in a way this moment is the heart of the series. Kieron seems to say as much in the notes, talking about how the artist lives in this awful reality of getting what they dreamed of, but it involves awful stuff happening to oneself and others. 

“I’ve talked about having mixed feelings about WicDiv’s success. Laura’s arc is it writ large. I hate that the definitive work of my career is this. If my Dad was not dead I would not have written this book. There is a guilt and anger that is hard to articulate directly there, and is the material I was mining for this.”

Art is built on suffering and loss—and that means on the back of horror done to others. To wish to be an artist is in a sense to sacrifice those relationships in a fundamental and sometimes literal way, in fact that seems a necessity to one’s success. Being a storyteller may be incredibly nourishing for others, but it’s built on harm done to those you love.

Jesus Christ this is dark. And we haven’t even gotten to the point yet of facing the question that society’s survival is supposedly built on those artists’, those children’s destruction. We love you so much, you inspire us, but what cements that for the century is your deaths.

What do you make of this follow-up moment where Laura suddenly turns it to 11 with Cass?

It only happens after Cassandra calls Laura Persephone for the first time, which seems like it’s meant as a kind of respect. Knowing what she’s been through, she is now worthy of her name in Cassandra’s eyes. She is an equal.

Except it seems to set Laura on the path of what – connection, for sure. But through sex, which is actually more escape than intimacy.

What is “The Destroyer”, in the end? Less a malevolence associated with Laura, it seems to me, than the character of all the gods when they get lost in their stories about themselves.  

(More to the point: What the heck is the Machine? Jon says it does nothing. Whuhhh?)

A STEP A HEAD/STOP MAKING SENSE

So, after quite some issues away from it, in the end we return to the heads. Lots and lots of heads. Jon’s head (god that’s a delightful reveal), then Sakhmet’s slice of head – and Minerva – and then finally, the big finish.

I would say my head exploded except I feel like that gag has already been played.

As he has mentioned often in his notes, Kieron loves to hide much bigger reveals within the reveal we know that’s coming. In this case, we knew there was this other Daft Punk member hiding in the darkness somewhere, and we knew there was something up with Laura we needed to hear about.

So we get that and say thank you, and then there’s still four incredible jaw dropping can we please do a happy dance for Luci pages.

Kieron goes into a ton more detail on this writing strategy here, and the particular nightmare challenges posed by this issue. I’ll post excerpts below, but you should read them in full. They are fantastic.

But if I can just ask one question: What the hell happened with Minerva? Am I to believe she did not feel bad about Sakhmet, that she’s that good an actor? Je refuse! And also isn’t the point of the Sakhead reveal that still-Minerva blew it with her fearfulness and lack of skill?

#CRAFTSERVICE: ON TWISTS

Okay… twists.

In reality, for me, it’s a case of once you’ve decided that this is the plot, the only way to do it is dovetail towards an issue like this. Any of these individual beats provide too much connective tissue to the other ones, meaning all must be revealed or none.

(You could argue about Minerva, I suspect. Maybe.)

It’s been strange writing a book like this – when so much is there early on. Seeing who got what and who didn’t, and how people reinforced people has been interesting. That the core WicDiv tumblr community has never really suspected Minerva was off is in some way a surprise – though I’ve had people talk about that directly and personally. Blake/Jon and Minerva-is-Off-In-Some-Way were the two twists I would guard, but their primary importance was in how they led to the Heads.

When Ray Fawkes told me “There’s a reason you’re doing all the decapitations, right?” circa issue 2, I suspected that I’d overplayed the hand by having a literal talking head in issue 3… but it turned out fine.

“Played the hand” is interesting phrasing, and telling. Writing something as intricate as this is like doing a slow-motion card trick, in public, constantly. It is a form of constant stress. I have been paranoid of fucking it up in stupid ways, and it’s impacted every single conversation I’ve ever had about WicDiv. Like just writing one name when I mean another or something. There was a hilarious panic when I added ‘Killer Queen’ to the playlist, just thinking of it as a quite funny Ananke song… and then realised there was only one character in the cast with a connection to the band Queen, and that was Minerva. Should I take it off the playlist? No, someone may notice that, and it’s against my rules anyway. I quickly added a few other things to camouflage it.

As if anyone is watching that closely, y'know?

That’s an extreme example, but an entirely characteristic one. I have lost sleep over it. Even a year ago, I wished I could just get to 33 and not worry about it. When 33 dropped, it was simultaneously excellent (the response was basically what we expected) and an anticlimax (The amount of emotional and intellectual effort you put into doing this is not worth it. It could never be worth it.) I’ve been telling friends that I’ll never write a story that operates like this again. Partially that is because I wouldn’t want to repeat myself, and partially because – as I said above – I think twists are less effective in long-form serialised work in 2017, but mainly as I don’t think I want to do this to myself again. I’ll find some other way to torture myself.

 So apparently Mini has been off all this time. I’m stunned by that.

#CRAFTSERVICE: MORE ON TWISTS!

I’d note that setting up twists that *are* easily guessable by the hardcore is part of the methodology. Having a nice big twist foreshadowed heavily is a good way to hide another twist behind it. “Hey – pay attention to this less subtle sleight of hand while I perform the actual sleight of hand over here.”

Oh you’re expecting a big reveal are you, cool cool cool here it is and also SURPRISE.

He talks about this again later, in response to the reveal that Mimir is just a talking head.

When thinking of plot structure, I talk about a few ways to disguise twists. Earlier, I mentioned a Big Twist can make people suspect the twists are over. This is something I tend to think of as a revealed move. As in, you create a machine of logic with a missing part. You add the missing part as late as possible, and then immediately move to what has been concealed before the audience is able to process the new information.

Oh you’re blown away by Mimir are you? SURPRISE, there are three other heads.  And also Minerva is not Minerva.

It’s a great insight, too – if you fear one bit of new information is going to naturally lead to others, drop it all right now before they even have time to think about it.

#CRAFTSERVICE: ON WHAT WRITING IS FOR

I know this is a lot of quoting the author, but hey it’s a big issue and the author has some great stuff to say and it is helping me. 

How do I actually feel when someone guesses something that’s going to happen? Well, this is long enough already. Let’s put the personal stuff beneath a cut…

I’d say you sigh “Oh, poop” and shrug.

And then you get over your ass, because you know all the above is true. Writers are often megalomaniacs who think they can control everyone’s response to their work. We don’t. We can’t control everything. We can barely control anything. We really have to let go. I’ve said WicDiv is a device to help me improve as a person, yes? It would include in this area. I have to learn to let it go, and internalise all of the above. If I can make most of my readership have the vague emotional response I’m looking for, I’m winning.

Certainly I’ve heard many writers talk about their writing as coming from a personal place. And as a writer myself I’ve had to learn (again and again) that having a sparkly fun idea is not going to be enough to get me up and writing every day, even if people like it. That I need what I’m writing to come from something more specific in me.

But I don’t know that I’ve ever heard an artist talk about their work as well, their work. The journey they’re taking to try and deal with something or figure something out or to let go and get free and be a better version of them. It makes so much sense, and man does it challenge me to have another think about my own work. Because I think most of the time I almost think of the journey as the thing that has to come before the work, the thing that prevents the work – Ima just get my act together and then write this script in fifteen years or so. And reading this it strikes me  oh wait, that’s just the thing I tell myself so I don’t have to do the work.

 There’s so much more to say about this issue. But it’s taken me the better part of a week to say this much already so maybe I’ll just leave it there. Suffice to say, it’s a giant of story.

(And yes, that’s my exhausted end of words attempt at a Mimir pun.)

I’ll be back next week with the two specials. And then, Mothering Invention!

[terramythos]

My reread commentary on October Daye #8, "The Winter Long" or "more shit goes down in this book than the first 7 combined, holy shit".

I apologize to anyone who reads these cause I literally hit the length limit on this post and had to pare it down lmao 

-Good start: Under the Acknowledgements section: "Everything I have done with October's world to this point has been for the sake of getting here". Sooo basically the first 7 books? Setup for this one. We're in for a Ride.

I want to emphasize some of the best meta foreshadowing I've seen:

FOR REFERENCE, Rosemary and Rue is the title of book 1. It's also the only book whose opening Shakespeare quote (from Hamlet) doesn't really match the title. If you know your Shakespeare, you probably would have caught that and figured out that it was from The Winter's Tale instead. Plenty of conclusions you can draw just from that. Since then the series has been chock full of hidden identities, and this book has two BIG ones coming into play. Foreshadowing was here from the very fucking beginning, and it is some next level shit. Very well done.

-If you skipped book 1 you are SO fucked, btw.

- we're going to great lengths to describe Sylvester's physical appearance. Gee I wonder why. I'm sure it's not relevant

- yes Sylvester has FOX COLORED HAIR and YELLOW EYES and his magic smells like DAFFODILS and DOGWOOD FLOWERS. He is Toby's LEIGE and FATHER FIGURE.

Me on a first read: oh it's just beginning book exposition, they all do this

Me on a second read: god fucking damn it

- toby: I should have known Sylvester would never disappoint me.

Me: oh sweetie. Oh honey.

- "He smelled like smoke and rotten oranges.

This man wasn't Sylvester Torquill."

Anyone who read book 1: OHSHIT.AVI

Welcome back, Simon! You know, Sylvester's evil twin? You know, the big bad (so far) of the series? The the one responsible for turning Toby into a fish for 14 years?

-Yet he seems kinda... off, huh? Comments about how he didnt know the spell would last 14 years, how he hates to upset October's mom, of all people? Whatever could he mean? :)))

-New toby power: spell reflection? Hell yeah? Also spell BREAKING, but to be fair she did do that one other time. In, you guessed it, book 1.

- "When I tried to picture Sylvester's face, I kept seeing Simon's instead" ow oof

- Simon calling Amandine "Amy", which we've established is an affectionate nickname (it being what, you know, THE LUIDAEG calls her). Why would Simon, of all people, call her that?

... oh.

-That sure explains a LOT, huh? That sure was set up... this whole time, huh?

-Little "fuck you" lines like "I didn't know Sylvester had a niece" in book 2. Talking about January. Well, uh, he has several actually! You're one of them!

-Explanation for why Sylvester had any inclination to be October's mentor... eventually becoming her liege and father figure... even giving her the Changeling's Choice (something family is supposed to do). It seems mighty convenient that a random noble was involved in the life of a changeling to such an extent. BUT, if he was her uncle, and knew his brother wouldn't step up? Well...

-This isn't even the biggest reveal of the book. Like, we're only a handful of chapters in and this bomb gets dropped.

-Sylvester, every 10 minutes: oh boy I cant wait to see my brother so I can like, completely eviscerate him!

Everyone else: uh,

- Tybalt: and here I thought I was going to have to ask Sylvester for his blessing. Now I technically have to ask SIMON?

Toby: uwotm8

Tybalt: oh god uhh I'm joking yeah uhh I'm just trying to distract you from all this stress :)) yeah (nailed it!)!

-And now we begin the "wow Sylvester is actually not a great person" slide. It's been hinted at that he's pretty unstable and has shitty priorities regarding people he cares about. But Toby glossed over a lot of it because she adored him. Welp.

- It's also an interesting aside that Etienne was kind of a dick to Toby for a reason in the earlier books. He legit thought she had been knighted because she was family, not that she had earned the post. And after the last few books he clearly knows now that that's not the case and they've actually become friends. That's interesting hidden character development.

- ok so The Gang finds out that Simon was telling the truth when he said turning Toby into a fish for 14 years was to save her. Because he had actually been hired to KILL her and didn't want to do it. So it was a loophole-- everyone thought she was dead, and then (as established in book 1) pretty much everyone forgot she existed until the spell broke.

-BUT Simon is bound by a geas (where have we seen that before) and cannot divulge his employer's name. But who had such a grudge against Toby and/or her mom to order a hit on her AND forcibly bind everyone to secrecy?

-who knows? Not toby. So they go to The Luidaeg to maybe get a lead, and she establishes right away that she is ALSO bound under a geas and can't say who did it. So we play some 20 questions, and then...

ULTRA DISTRESSING LUIDAEG LORE :((((

-additional: another month name just came into play. August. Toby's half sister, missing for a century. WHAT IS WITH THE MONTH NAMES

- "please don't mistake villainy for evil." That's an.. interesting quote re:Simon.

- Simon's way of protecting toby from the impending threat is "well maybe you turn into a tree for a few centuries but like. You're safe, right? Why are you mad?"

- The Luidaeg: *is straight up dead*

Toby: hey tybalt remember that time in book 2 when I Resurrected the Dead

Tybalt: yeah, it was fucking terrifying and I didnt speak to you for 6 months

Toby: *finger guns* guess whaaaaaat

-The Luidaeg: *says just. A bunch of Lore*

Toby: Luidaeg dont you dare drop that cryptic shit on me then pass out

Luidaeg: nap time

-"If you so much as whisper the first word of a transformation spell, I'll have your larynx in my hand before the second word can form." DAMN, Tybalt.

-Simon: I am VERY sorry for my bullshit earlier. I can't tell you who my employer is, but I CAN give you this BOUQUET of ICE COLD ROSES. Ice cold, like winter. Winter Roses, if you will. Yeah. Uh have a nice life, bye!

Everyone: well this sure is a mystery

-Simon is definitely a morally grey character. Has done really awful shit, is built up as a major villain... but turns out he had relatively little control over his actions. He does the wrong thing a lot but it's usually not for a truly evil end? If the context is to be believed he got stuck in the geas contract with Unnamed Employer to save his daughter, which explains the bad shit he did that we know of. Which then inadvertently kicked off like the whole series. He seems to genuinely care about Toby in a warped way? It would be so easy to write him off as an evil stepdad or whatever and there's plenty of canon to support that stance (she's an illegitimate CHANGELING child) but he seems like he wants to just be her dad. I hope we explore his character more, is what I'm saying.

-And not to keep rambling about it but Toby is an established unreliable narrator and a horrible (initial) judge of character. So it's not like this is an asspull or off base at all.

Twist of the fucking century here.

-You know... the character who set off the events of the series? The character who was murdered in book 1 and bound October to a geas forcing her to find the culprit or die? Evening fucking Winterrose?

-There were hints, most very subtle unlike the other big twists, but probably the biggest one is SHE NEVER SHOWS UP AS A NIGHT HAUNT. And they're in the story quite a bit, and they ALWAYS feature killed off characters. Except Evening.

-My favorite hints were the ones just piled in book 1. Comments like "no one knows who Evening really is" said with zero self awareness. Because we are actually about to find out who she is... 7 goddamn books later.

-dead meme but "surprise, bitch. Bet you thought you saw the last of me."

-God she's so awful lol

-Toby thinking Quentin died then calling him THE SON SHE NEVER HAD is a BIG OOF right to the HEART. ;-;

-The book also points out that The Luidaeg through the series has ALWAYS referred to Evening in present tense. Even though she "died" in book 1.

-The Luidaeg ALSO never refers to her as Evening. It's always "The Winterrose". You know, a title. Which we have heavily emphasized is something the Firstborn use in place of their true names.

*jazz hands* Surprise!

-We also (finally) have a canon explanation for the... rather remarkable coincidence that Quentin, the fucking Crown Prince (from TORONTO), is in San Francisco at all. It was always weird he got sent to Shadowed Hills, and it's been commented on multiple times... Evening arranged it, of course! For reasons we don't quite know. But as the Daoine Sidhe Firstborn, her descendants couldn't exactly say no. Even though they didn't know who she really was.

-We really are falling all over Firstborn in this series? It sure is.. an odd coincidence, huh?

We got:

The Luidaeg: Roane/Selkie

Amandine: Dochas Sidhe

Acacia: Blodynbryd

Evening: Daoine Sidhe

Blind Michael: ... uh actually I don't think we ever learn what race he's Firstborn of. All his "children" are kidnapping victims forcibly twisted into monsters. Well, except for Luna, but we only know the Blodynbryd side.

But it's weird that for being so rare that we've run into 5 of them in 8 books. There's gotta be a reason for it.. but what?

-Luna starts the series as Toby's Surrogate Mom and is now just straight up an enemy huh

-I made this observation in my book 1 notes, but I find it very interesting that all of Toby's initial friends and allies... aren't by this point. Whereas her current allies are either former enemies or people she initially disliked or distrusted.

Starter allies: Sylvester? Was lying to her the whole time. Luna? Pretty much tried to sacrifice her (+above). Evening? Uhh this whole damn book. Devin? Tried to kill her for personal gain. Lily/Connor? Both killed off for real.

Current allies: Tybalt? Literal former enemy turned lover. Quentin? Kind of a snotty, vaguely racist kid she whips into shape. The Luidaeg? Extremely powerful witch who Toby assumes is True Neutral and wouldn't hesitate to kill her. May? Literal personal walking death omen.

It's just a cool reversal. There's so much really excellent character development in this series and I love it.

-Simon still is a pretty major bastard but.. less outright mustache twirling evil than we were led to believe up to this book. You learn his Backstory and while it really doesn't justify his actions it does...explain them.

-Blink and you miss it Lore: August is missing because she entered a contract with the Luidaeg. She's holding the candle from book 3 :)))

I'm starting to realize I stan The Luidaeg so hard I just have to take a picture every time she shows up and does stuff lmfao. (Best character).

-But... nothing like your inconceivably ancient and powerful aunt suddenly owing you a life debt, I guess???

-Toby. You know, just an ordinary weak changeling who has somehow managed to KILL A FIRSTBORN and RAISE THE DEAD. yikes.

I'm just putting this here cause it's funny as shit. Tybalt really is just... a cat

This book: I heard you like distressing Luidaeg lore??

Me: oh thanks I don't need to feel things

-God Evening is awful. Like, if you didn't know that already, see above.

-It says something about The Luidaeg that despite all that shit their Firstborn did to her she ends up becoming such good friends with Quentin, a Daoine Sidhe?

-BIG LORE with The Luidaeg talking to Maeve??? And Maeve "responding" kind of? This series damn well better explore what the fuck happened to those three it's been built up all series

-Omg the showdown with Evening and The Luidaeg. And Toby managing to break free and realize she deserves so much more than Evening-- all without magic. And Simon showing up for a last minute redemption trying to hit Evening with elf shot? I mean he gets shot in the process, but...

-We now have like, 3 or 4 characters just... asleep indefinitely thanks to elf shot. that's gonna be a Thing isnt it. Rayseline, Evening, Simon, Arden's brother...

WE DID IT BOYS

-This is the last full one I've already read. Most of my reactions in 9-12 are gonna be new. So.

[lightsandlostbells]

Skam France 2.5 reaction

I got really heated about that auction, apologies

Episode 5

Clip 1 - Giving away Manon’s clothes

Ohhh my God. Even though this is one of the crappier things Eskild/Mickael does in the series, he is hilarious here. This actor is killing it. 

“What did you say?” “That you look great sweetie.” A+ timing and delivery.

He’s even more dickish and terrible than Eskild was in this situation, but not gonna lie, I’m enjoying every second of his screen time

So Manon is organizing the collection herself? I feel like that provides a somewhat different context. Noora was very much motivated by Eskild’s words to her to start caring about refugees, not that she didn’t care about them at all but she felt guilty about not doing enough. Noora also had some ignorant spots, she thought Lito must be a Syrian refugee when he’s the son of a Turkish ambassador. Of course Eskild was in the wrong in the way he went about taking her clothes, especially since it was motivated by getting laid, but Noora had her own hypocrisy. Manon seems quite genuine about helping the migrants.

Clip 2 - Fuckweasel auction imminent

 It would be nice if we had heard about Manon’s involvement with the clothes drive earlier, but that’s good of her and that’s a very different take because I think Noora wasn’t as proactive.

The amount of sympathy I have for a bunch of spoiled dudes trashing a hotel room and having to pay for it … zero.

Wait, so not only are they having a fundraiser to cover for their destruction, they’ve put it on the same night as an already scheduled event for migrants? Man, fuck them. How did they manage to be worse than the original?

I mean depending on the school, it’s common for multiple events to happen at that same time, that’s not unusual. But lol, some dudes holding a fundraiser to cover for their terrible behavior at the same time other people have arranged a fundraiser for people in genuine need … not a good look.

The Norwegian version of this scene was way more personal, which makes sense since it was a bedroom scene and it was less hurried.

Clip 3 - Manon is mad

I don’t have much to say about this scene except Manon is completely justified in being pissed. The guy who professes to have feelings for her and wants a relationship with her scheduled a fundraiser to cover his and his friends’ property damage on the same night she is working an event for people in need. Like I guess he could just not know about the other fundraiser, but he’s doing something that’s going to actively take away from her charity event. 

The saving grace is that Charles doesn’t try to justify this and he looks somewhat humbled/upset by her telling him off.

Clip 4 - Daphne please get a grip

“We were talking about what happened with Charles and his crew and it’s really horrible what happened” yeah it’s really horrible that some teenage assholes destroyed a hotel room. Daphne is talking about it like a rival team paid to have their kneecaps broken and now they can’t play basketball anymore.

Call me humorless but Manon is completely right and even more justified in being angry than Noora was, like Vilde was suggesting they give up some of their bus money - unfair and it was their own earned funds, but at least it was going to something that’s fun/frivolous, not a necessity. Why the fuck would you give time you meant for a charity event to some shitheads who wrecked property?!?!?!

I mean it’s not even like “their bus broke down and they can’t get to games and they’re having a fundraiser to buy a new one” or “there was a fire in the gym and now they can’t practice so they’re raising money to rent a new space.” Buying new uniforms or equipment for their team or something. They CAUSED their own problem.

“Since it’s so important to you I’ll give 10% of the night’s benefits to migrants.”

Hey, you know what would be a really impressive thing for Charles to do? Call off the fundraiser to cover the asses of his crew and direct everyone’s attention to the clothing distribution event for migrants. That would be a humble, selfless action where he actually makes a sacrifice.

Does that sound too extreme? Am I being too hard on him? Maybe, but why is Charles/William consistently doing the minimum decent thing, often for self-serving reasons, and yet we’re supposed to buy into his character development and think he’s a great guy?  

What if Charles got his guys to give everything to the migrants regardless of whether Manon attended? What if Charles went to help Manon out instead of going to his own fundraiser? Doesn’t that seem like an obvious storytelling decision in terms of showing us he’s a good guy? Wouldn’t that be something Manon could respect and we could see why she starts to like him as a person and had to reconsider her opinion of him?

This is just such a deeply strange storyline to me! Charles and his friends act like assholes. They try to raise money to recoup the losses from when they were assholes inconveniencing other people. There is another event for a much better cause, for people genuinely in need. Charles offers a smallish percentage of the profits from his fundraiser to the people in need, but only if the girl he likes comes to the event. How … in the world … why am I supposed to like this character?

This is annoying me even more than the original, maybe because the Penetrators were not directly competing against a charity event. 

Imane has a nice line about showing solidarity to human beings, not a religion (because not all the migrants are Muslim).

Clip 5 - Help the spoiled brats and some other people, IDK

Wow they really underplayed this Emma/Yann storyline. I’m not sure they built up to Emma’s drunken meltdown enough.

Daphne is so embarrassing about Charles, please put this one-sided relationship out of its misery.

Soooo is Lucas already flirting with guys, kind of?  At least they got in a nice shocked moment for Lucas when Emma says he likes boys.

Drunk Emma interrupts Alex talking to a guy … poor form, Emma, poor form.

I did laugh at how Daphne being like “I’ve known you for a while and we have this special relationship” meant boy Alex started to close in. Yeah, that’s more or less what I expect of him.

Emma telling boy Alex “I like you, you’re my friend, but Daphne, I love you so much” - when will one of these goddamn adaptations take this further than some drunken makeouts?? When?? I don’t even ship them as much as the Noora/Eva combination but this is ridiculous.

This is a not as bad as a situation than the date, because she had less pressure to come to this party than to go on the date for Daphne’s sake, but like … he did tell her he’d only donate the money if she came. Why does he act like it was a given that he would donate the money.

Daphne looks less into kissing Emma than Vilde did kissing Eva. Vilde was having the time of her life, Daphne’s like ... tolerating it. Or maybe I can’t tell because the lighting isn’t as bright.

They did the same tune-out music effect when Manon tells Charles she doesn’t like him as in the original.

Kinda think we should have seen Manon reconsider more before running after him since it’s a big turning point for her character.

I wasn’t totally impressed with her last season, but Manon’s actress has been doing much better. She did a good job in the last scene.

“The only thing that interests you is getting what you want.” I mean, yeah, that’s true.

I saw some people didn’t like this scene compared to the original, but I think their first kiss was pretty good, I liked it just as much. Lots of passion, very cinematic. Since I’m not a big Noorhelm fan their first kiss isn’t sacred to me or anything, but I also think it’s because of Coldplay being the song selection. (I don’t hate Coldplay, tbh, but my dad has very very limited taste in music and for a long time literally the only thing he would listen to was Coldplay. For months, he would listen to Viva la Vida in the car. Just that song. On repeat. Like the middle-aged man version of John Mulaney’s Salt and Pepper Diner bit. So I have, ehhh, complicated feelings about Coldplay, and “Paradise” is one of my least favorite songs from them.)

I was super afraid Emma would fall in the water as she puked but at least Daphne kept a hand on her even after she saw Manon and Charles kissing.

General Comments:

Sorry that 90% of this reaction was me being grumpy about the Raptors’ auction. That was the main focus of this episode, not a lot else to talk about. The next few episodes have more subplots and varied scenes to discuss.

I’m a Daphne fan but damn did I hit my limit with her Charles obsession in this episode, even more than with Vilde. 

I don’t speak French so if I misunderstood something or missed context, feel free to correct me.

If you got through all this cranky ranting, thank you for reading! ❤️ Here’s a video of a golden conure dancing to the Beach Boys.