#but all of these things are directly informed by its trauma. all of these things are a direct response to the trauma.

[fuckyeahisawthat]

What is Mage Viktor doing?

So it turns out I do have a take on what's going on with Mage Viktor, why he's messing with timelines in the way he is, and what he hoped to achieve by bringing Jayce to the torment nexus dimension and then sending him back to his own timeline armed with facial hair, trauma, and the ruthless determination to somehow stop his own Viktor.

Of course this is just my own reading; there are many ways you can interpret the reveals of the final episode. But it's become my preferred reading because it makes Mage Viktor come off as absolutely BATSHIT. The apotheosis of all Viktor's best and worst qualities. As he would be.

First we gotta lay out some fundamental principles about how I understand Viktor that will inform this reading.

Viktor was never being controlled by the Hexcore. This deserves its own whole meta, but tl;dr, I think it is directly antithetical to the core themes of the show to think that Viktor wasn't making his own decisions all through s2.

Over and over again in Arcane, we see characters become "monsters" and do monstrous things, and every time the thematic point is that this is still the person you love. When Vi says that her sister is dead because she is Jinx now and when Jayce says "my partner died in this room" THEY ARE BOTH WRONG. The person they love is different now but they're still in there and they can still be reached.

Viktor is transformed by something terrible happening to him (like many characters in the show!) but all his decisions are still his own and to me they seem like perfectly consistent--if extreme--extensions of what we know about him as a character before he gets a Hexcore heart.

So my analysis starts with the premise that Mage Viktor is not trying to free his past self from an outside influence. He's trying to hack his own character traits to make a different version of himself do what he wants.

Viktor is BOTH genuinely altruistic and compassionate AND deeply arrogant. This is such a banger combination and I think turning down the dial on either trait makes Viktor less interesting. I think Mage Viktor has genuine remorse about what he did in his timeline and he is, fundamentally, trying to find a way he could have stopped himself from killing everyone (within certain constraints; we'll get to that). When Jayce is able to show main timeline Herald Viktor his memories of what Viktor is about to do to their world, the first thing Viktor sees is not dead Jayce, or himself left alone in an empty world. It's all the ordinary people who are going to die terrified because of him.

I do not think any version of Viktor wanted this result. But Viktor is so convinced he is always right that his arrogance carries him right past the point of no return before he realizes oh actually I haven't freed everybody I have killed them.

So I do think Mage Viktor is trying to find a timeline where this doesn't happen, but he is not timeline-hopping in order to preemptively stop other versions of himself from making the same mistake. If he wanted to do that, he would just leave all the many many timelines where Jayce dies in a blizzard as a child alone. No Jayce who grows up obsessed with magic, goes around Academy rules to get the hex crystals, invents Hextech and gives Viktor the power to fuck everything up. Easy peasy.

But no. Instead, Viktor is actively going into other timelines and changing them at the point where Jayce would have died.

He is doing things that appear to make the sequence of events that leads to his world-ending magic blast WAY MORE LIKELY. And that's because...

Viktor is obsessively selfish when it comes to Jayce.

Mage Viktor wants to find a timeline where he doesn't doom the world but not at the expense of meeting Jayce and spending years doing science with him.

If the goal was only to prevent Jayce from dying in the blizzard, he could have done it quietly, waiting for Jayce to collapse in the snow and then transporting him to the base of the mountain, leaving before Jayce had any idea who saved him. Instead he makes SUCH A DRAMATIC PRODUCTION of it that Jayce remembers and can repeat the steps of the action years later, well enough that he actually produces a working spell from a barely-tested Hextech prototype. Mage Viktor wants that shit burned into baby Jayce's brain. He wants to make sure he fundamentally alters the arc of Jayce's life, bending it into a trajectory that collides with his own.

Viktor also (as far as we see) doesn't go the route of going back in time and killing his younger self, or steering the course of his own life along a path where he never meets Jayce. He doesn't even go for a timeline where he and Jayce meet each other but they don't invent Hextech. Now maybe it's the case that some time before our Jayce arrives in his timeline, Mage Viktor tried all that, and has figured out that none of those options work. (Maybe in some of those timelines Jayce is the one who goes Machine Herald, and there's no partner there to talk him off the ledge of ending the world.) But I think it's also possible that, now that he's gotten the experience in one timeline of spending years with Jayce making once-in-a-generation scientific breakthroughs together (which I truly believe is just as important a part of their relationship to Viktor as any romantic or sexual element might be)...he can't bear to deny any version of himself the chance of having that--even if the price is the rest of the world. Because a world where Jayce isn't his partner isn't a world worth saving.

So what I think Mage Viktor is doing is sitting there with his stubborn engineer brain and the husk of his dead soulmate, fiddling with the timelines like a Rubik's cube, going Not meeting Jayce CANNOT be the only option. There MUST be a timeline where Jayce and I meet each other and entangle our lives in an alarmingly codependent way AND we dodge the apocalypse at the last minute, I don't end up killing him, and we do not doom the world together. And I'm going to fucking find it.

So he's been hitting timeline after timeline, trying to find the combination of factors where everything works. He is not trying to preemptively save every timeline from himself, he is trying to prove to himself that meeting the love of his life doesn't doom the entire fucking world. It's devotion that is SO PROFOUNDLY SELFISH that he is willing to doom timeline after timeline, but driven by someone with enough compassion and pride that he doesn't want the guilt and shame of knowing he can only have this one life-changing thing if he ruins everything else for everyone, and enough arrogance to still look at this as a problem he must be smart enough to solve.

At some point in this process, I think he also figures out that Jayce is the only person who has any chance of reasoning with any version of himself. I think it's worth paying attention to the exact wording of his "in all timelines, in all possibilities" speech, because it's not just a love confession (although it is that).

"I thought I could bring an end to the world's suffering. But when every equation was solved, all that remained were fields of dreamless solitude. There is no prize to perfection. Only an end to pursuit. In all timelines, in all possibilities, only you can show me this."

And while this is some hella romantic cosmic soulmate level shit, it is also Viktor saying I need you, because you are the only person I have ever trusted enough to save me from myself.

It's the Hexcore promise all over again. Viktor knew he couldn't destroy his own creation. I read this not as Viktor being physically unable to destroy it because the Hexcore had some power over him, but not having the will to destroy it. Because this huge leap in Hextech technology was his big breakthrough and not (as I think he saw it) him supporting Jayce's dream. He knew he couldn't do it. So he asked Jayce to do it for him. Please, save me from my own pride, my desire to leave a legacy. I can't do it on my own.

It's a huge extension of trust, for Viktor to admit such a need. And now he's doing it again when the stakes are MUCH MUCH higher. I need you, because you are the only person who can show me the horror of what I am about to do and have me believe it.

Of course, the deep irony is that really the only person Viktor trusts to tell him he is wrong is HIMSELF FROM THE FUTURE. Astral plane Machine Herald Viktor is standing right behind Jayce, watching Jayce's memory of Mage Viktor telling him what the consequences of his actions will be, and that is the moment the horror sinks in and cracks him fully out of his machine shell.

But of course Jayce is the only person he would ever trust enough to carry such a message (from himself!!) to somewhere close enough to reach him.

It's not clear exactly how much of a detailed plan Mage Viktor has when he sends Jayce back to the main timeline, or how much of that plan he shares with Jayce. But I think he has figured out some broad strokes which affect how Jayce behaves.

(1) Jayce has to immediately go and kill commune Viktor. Squishing Salo is maybe a bonus side quest, but Jayce doesn't even take time to fucking shower before he heads for the commune. (I would love to see the part of the conversation where Mage Viktor is like yeah you know that pit you just climbed out of? Yeah the first thing you gotta do is go right back in there, all the way to the bottom, and find me looking like ethereal cyborg Jesus and blast a fucking hole through my chest.) Maybe this is because if Jayce waits around at all, commune Viktor finds a way to get to him and he folds and joins the cult. Maybe this is because there are just fewer variables involved in forcing Viktor to speedrun his own villain arc by Jayce repeatedly turning him down in one "perfect" form after another. Maybe Mage Viktor knows himself well enough to realize "yeah if you say no to me even ONE TIME but ESPECIALLY when you are HOT and SUFFERING I will go fucking apeshit and we can use that to our advantage."

(2) I think Mage Viktor has realized that he can only be stopped at the very very VERY last minute. He has to be able to see the direct line between what he is about to do right now and the arcane-blasted hell world he's about to create. Otherwise his ego will get in the way and tell him he is smart enough to figure out a way to somehow not kill everybody. Yeah Mage Viktor fucked that one up obviously, but I, main timeline Viktor, will be smart enough and well-intentioned enough when the time comes to simply not do that. I think this is why, for example, Jayce doesn't go to the commune trying to get Viktor to see the error of his ways. It won't work until it is allllmost too late.

Main timeline Viktor stops literally seconds before the point of no return. The arcane corruption spikes that we see everywhere in Mage Viktor's world are already starting to appear.

I think Mage Viktor knows that Jayce has to let him get right up to the edge, close enough to be looking over into the abyss, before he'll be able to pull him back.

But he knows Jayce can do that. That's what they do for each other, right?

This is why I think it was always the plan for Jayce to fight him all the way to the top of the Hexgate, and then surrender. Jayce has to survive until the end of the fight, and maybe for magical physics reasons he has to wait until Viktor sends the anomaly into the sky above the Hexgate. But once they get to the top of the Hexgate tower he stops trying to fight Viktor altogether. Maybe Mage Viktor told him exactly when it had to happen or maybe he just realizes this is the exact same place where he died in Mage Viktor's world; this is his last chance. But in any case, Jayce lands on the top of the Hexgate on his knees and he doesn't try to get up.

He waits, and when he senses Viktor behind him he doesn't try to fight or run away.

I think he knows, either because Mage Viktor told him or through his own intuition, that he has to let Viktor pull him into the astral plane if he wants a chance at reaching him.

How exactly he was going to get through to him and/or get close enough to share the memories before Viktor assimilated him...ehhhh I don't know if either of them had that figured out. The "you were never broken" part of Jayce's speech, while important from a character perspective...very crucially DOES NOT WORK. IT DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. Viktor is assimilating Jayce the whole time. You can see Jayce's astral body changing from the unique version that's still him (like his hands on the left, when he first enters the astral plane--which still look more or less human even though Viktor has already erased "imperfections" like the scrapes and cuts from his time in the pit and the arcane corruption that's spreading up and down his arm from where the rune is embedded) into a featureless gold blob like the other assimilated people.

You can watch the gold light creeping up his body steadily during those lines until it reaches his eyes.

The ONLY thing that stops this timeline from ending the same way Mage Viktor's does...is EKKO.

I think you can make the case that Mage Viktor sent Ekko to the no-Hextech timeline intentionally. But it is such a complex chain of causality for Ekko to get to the point where he's chucking a time machine at Herald Viktor's face that there is no way anyone--even a remorseful demigod with lots of time on his hands--could control every possible factor.

However elaborate Mage Viktor's plan was, and however determined Jayce was to keep his promise to him, it all would have failed if not for factors outside their control and random fucking chance.

Arcane is FULL of near-misses and what-could-have-beens and characters who are trying their best to do something getting knocked off course by consequences they never could have foreseen. Season 2 in particular introduces a persistent thread of chaos and the sense that even events that have understandable root causes are now spiraling out of characters' control. So it feels fitting that such a moment factors into the show's ending.

This is Jayce right before Ekko blasts through spacetime right above Viktor's head.

Yeah that guy was cooked.

The only thing that stops Jayce from being assimilated is Ekko breaking time to throw the Z drive at Viktor's face.

Which startles Viktor enough that he takes his hand off Jayce's head in the physical realm, and also breaks a piece of his machine mask off in the astral realm.

As he always does when one of his "perfect" bodies gets damaged, Viktor withdraws and tried to hide, enough that he lets go of the assimilation connection with Jayce.

Jayce starts to regain his own identity/autonomy.

And he gets a do-over. Exactly the same way Ekko used the Z drive to get a do-over with Jinx when he was trying to talk her out of suicide. Jayce gets another chance, and that's when he goes for "all I want is my partner back" and "because I promised you." Which works.

Mage Viktor's plan, I think, was for Jayce to help main timeline Viktor realize what he was doing before it was too late, and then give him the runestone, which allows him to release all the minds/souls that are connected to him before this becomes some runaway chain reaction of arcane power that swallows everything around him. (How the runestone does this exactly, and how the anomalies play into it, is stuff I am still thinking about. But tbh I am less concerned with the details of made-up magic physics than I am with the character beats.) Mage Viktor had accepted that main timeline Viktor was probably going to die in this process and he'd made peace with it. That's what "should" have happened anyway, if Viktor never found a way to forestall his illness, right? As long as this Viktor got to spend the best years of his life with his Jayce, it was okay.

I don't think Mage Viktor ever expected Jayce to stay there until the end. His goal was to save the world and spare Jayce from himself. And why would he plan otherwise? We know why Jayce stays, but Mage Viktor never got that part of the story. He schlorped up his own Jayce's consciousness with everyone else and maybe he only understood the depths of what Jayce felt for him in the moment that he was killing him. And main timeline Viktor certainly does not expect Jayce to stay. He's shocked when he realizes Jayce has no intention of leaving. No, that wasn't part of any master plan. That part was all Jayce.

[moe-broey]

based plurality let's go

DEEPLY HONORED BY THIS TAKE........ wearing it like a gold star sticker.... 🥺

I hope I can express this right, but!! It is genuinely SO cool to me, that even though Moe is a study of the self, an exploration of my experiences/feelings, it is SO cool to me!!! That people who have experiences outside of my own can see themselves in it, too!!!!

I also want to say it's a super cool interpretation of Mani, as well. Given what Mani IS -- an entire personality created for the sole purpose of Protecting Moe. And when things get dire, Mani does kick back in again. Ensure Safety, above All Else. Like!!!! It really isn't too far off from how alters come to be!! (Also the fact that it did just. Become its own entity about it. Much to Moe's chagrin. Much even Mani's chagrin. The Lif effect....)

I only worry about "canonizing" it, because I don't have DID, and esp for a self-insert adjacent character... it feels like it's not my place. BUT. BUT. BUT!!!! I DO really want to emphasize that it's such a cool interpretation of Moe and Mani!!!! SO EPIC..... 😳🥺🫡

[mohammedsaqrr]

Help my family survive the continuing war in gaza

Hello, my name is Mohammed Saqr, from North Gaza.

we want dreams and love for life like any young person in the world. I joined Al-Quds Open University to fulfill my dream of studying like any young person in the world, but it seems that I will not be able to achieve my dream because of the brutal war on the Gaza Strip, which destroyed our entire house, and I lost everything I owned and relied on to achieve my dream, including my laptop, university books and library.

We are a family of 12, displaced from our home in North Gaza to the southern areas under inhumane conditions.

This is my daughter, who grew up in the middle of the war, no kid should go through this kind of childhood and trauma. its unfair and we can’t do anything about it to give our kids the lovely childhood that they deserve.

I am appealing to you, the global community, for help. I have started a GoFundMe campaign with the aim of raising 30,000 Euros to enable me and my family to find safety in Egypt. The evacuation fees change from time to time; we currently expect a cost of between 4,000-5,000 dollars per person. Any additional funds generated will go towards supporting my immediate needs and those of my family. There are various obstacles that we will face on the other side, and I hope that we can make some things easier for us.

I would like to update you on the situation now that the war has intensified. We are fine and safe, but life has become very difficult now all around us, people are suffering more and losing loved ones every day. As a family, we have literally lost everything we own, our homes and businesses, but we are trying to remain optimistic by thinking about evacuating and we heard good news today that the borders may open soon. We pray that this is true.

Once we are evacuated, we will try hard to rebuild a small part of what we lost in Gaza. If we can achieve our ultimate goal, we will have the funds to start a business to support our entire family. We want to be able to start over and not suffer anymore in Egypt. If everyone can help us with a small donation to achieve our ultimate goal, we will be able to rebuild our lives after everything was destroyed.

All the positive words cannot express how generous you are especially in sharing my posts to inform other donors about the people of Gaza who are still suffering from the terrible conditions caused by the unjust war on Gaza. Please continue to support the most just cause in the world either by donating directly or by sharing the link to other media. Do not hesitate to help people in difficult and miserable times until the dark days are over.

[digitalsymbiote]

Cockpit Exposure

There’s a terrible screeching of metal as your cockpit is rent open, exposed by a glancing blow from your opponents weapon. Suddenly your senses are muddled, two sources of data now vying for the attention of your shared mind. Your external cameras shift and refocus, as light streams in through the semi-transparent visor of your flight helmet.

Your partner is screaming in the back of your mind, and the terrible phantom pain in your chest tells you exactly why. It’s a huge strain on your mind to try and decipher between the information coming from your metal body, and the information coming from your flesh one. Your cockpit was designed to mimic a sensory deprivation chamber for this exact reason, most full-immersion frames are. The sensory deprivation of the pilot makes it easier to settle into the skin of the mech, fewer external distractions to remind you of your flesh body nestled under all that metal.

All of that is gone out the window now though, as the sounds and sights of combat assault your organic form through your breached cockpit. Distantly you recognize that you’re hyperventilating, and the safety systems are struggling to compensate. You guess this is because your partner’s panic is bleeding through the neural bridge. She did just get a huge chunk torn out of her front, after all.

With a monumental effort, you wrench control back from your panicking IMP, and you feel her systems settle down a bit as you enforce some order on things. The cold air and biting wind howling in your cockpit are doing all they can to distract you, but you’ve got a fight to finish and you’ll be damned if you end up gutted in your own cockpit.

Metal strains as your synthetic body stands and pulls the giant sword from the sheath on its back. You fire the boosters in your legs, feeling the g-forces slam your body back into the pilot’s seat as you charge your opponent. Blade strikes blade, and your damaged servos strain against theirs. A shot of fuel into your boosters breaks the stalemate and you pull back, circling around the opposing mech. You have to be extra careful to protect your cockpit now, one more hit to your chest and you’ll be pulp on your enemy’s blade.

Something shifts inside you, and you feel your IMP having off-loaded some of its processing into your wetware. She’s moving the limbs on your flesh body inside the cockpit, rooting around for something, piloting you the way you’re piloting her.

The lights on the front of your chassis flicker red in glee as you realize what she’s searching for. You send a mental acknowledgment over your shared link and hunch over, preparing for another bout. You’ll get your partner her opening.

According to regulation, mechs are required to have certain items stocked in their cockpits in case of emergency. Rations, a medical kit, an emergency radio, and most importantly: A flare gun. The standard flare gun had always seemed a bit superfluous to you, what difference is a meager flare going to make in spotting a 10-story tall Mech? But you’d convinced both your CO and your IMP to let you keep a few High-Explosive rounds for the thing stored alongside it, for a rainy day like today.

So the next time you clash with your opponent, blade grinding against blade, you feel your organic body move again. Your IMP makes use of the gaping hole in your chest, and manages to plant a high explosive round directly into the emergency hatch on your enemy’s chest, blowing it clean off, and disorienting their pilot in much the same way they had done to you only moments ago. You, however, will not squander this opportunity.

You drop your weapon, slam a hand through the breached hole in your opponents chest, and pulp the bleeding heart within it. The massive weapon of war you’ve been fighting slumps to the ground, the trauma of losing it’s organic half rippling through its systems. You grab the mech’s head and pull, metal screeching and cables snapping as you tear it free from the rest of the metal corpse. You find the glint of the enemy data core and crush it between two of your massive fingers, putting the enemy IMP out of its misery.

And suddenly it’s quiet again.

The faint sensation of wind upon skin echoes over the link, and you realize your IMP has removed your flight helmet. She’s half out of the pilot’s seat, and you can sense wonder radiating through the link as she looks out at the carnage through organic eyes. You decide to let her, regulation be damned.

You’re looking out at it through her eyes often enough, it’s only fair to return the favor.

[nadiajustbe]

Underrated HMC moments I've never seen anyone talking about part 2

Howl choosing "H. Jenkins" for the shop's sign wich is the one and only moment in the series he actually uses his legal initials, as "H" can stand for "Howl" and "Howell" in the same time

Lettie being so angry about Prince Justin calling her "a sweet lady" that she said that she would prefer ever Howl over him. Wich is. Telling.

The King assuring that he never pushed Justin off and that everyone who knows them both wouldn't assume that.

Sophie being so RAGED with the whole weedkiller and daffodils situation she wasn't saying A SINGLE FULL WORD for about a page in the least. All of the sounds were like "argh!" and "Sophie gave the wordless glump of range"

The seven-league boots having the funniest description of use ever, as every time someone used it then the effects were simply narrated as "Zip!"

Howl raises the skull and quotes Hamlet directly to it, wich becomes a hundred times funnier when you remember that this Skull is canonically and ironically the only "person" in the room who can understand the reference.

Howl saying "Denmark" in the same sentence. And, again, they're in a fairly tale fantasy word. Sophie has absolutely no clue what to hell is Denmark. For Howl this is the basic knowledge of elementary school level.

Poor Percival being almost KILLED for transforming in the middle of a valley because people thought he's a WEREWOLF.

Poor Percival being STROKED with information of him being made of part of two other people right after experiencing heavy trauma, beheading, physical damages, not really well-planed adopting and moving a house.

Percival describing laying on the shelf and looking at the other parts of himself. What a lovely kids book.

Sophie accidentally making cayenne pepper magical. She would make a great seller-witch career because she doesn't need to know the spell in order to make. She takes random powder. She says it will do the duel fair. It makes the duel fare by making an opponent sneezing uncontrollable (wich is also just a way cayenne pepper affects people lmao)

Sophie's first thoughts after she heard that Howl is leaving the black door knob where it is being "Of course! There's miss. Angorian!'. Sophie, dear, he has a family out there.

Michael, apparently, hiding the money under the same brick Sophie will soon describe in CITA as "the brick where we're hiding money from Howl"

Miss Angorian and Howl acting like the spell in a modern Wales is the most normal thing ever. "That's a spell!!" "Oh yeah of course I suspected that"

“Didn’t know I used to fly up the wing for my university, did you, Mrs. Nose?” “If you were trying to fly, you must have forgotten how,” aka Sophie absolutely not understanding modern world sport terminology

Drunk Howell trying to get through the door MULTIPLE times, bumping on it before "discovering" the door

Calcifer "taking" that huge mention they lived (and almost never visited) in without buying it. It was literally said the owner is just Not Here.

Sophie loosing an acces to her own room. Wich must be really sad.

Witch of the Waste leaning on a swing when literally capturing Howl's family

Additionaly: Howl canonically NOT altering his clothes while rushing to save his family. He was running around in a long-sleeved medieval closes on a welsh playground

Sophie and miss Angorian having a whole fight over the guitar pulling it back and forward while it was making horrible sounds

Sophie literally pushing miss. Angorian off the house using the said guitar

Howl immediatly reacting when someone mentioned that the star Michael tried to catch looks sad.

Scarecrow literally running around with parts of Justin's body on its sticky shoulders for eighty percent of the book's finale

Howl saying he could be "the evil fairy at his own christening" which is probably a reference to the "Sleeping Beaty". Also. rises a question: did Howl HAD a christening. There's a huge chance he actually did.

Ben and Justin just. smiling at each other for enough amount of time for Sophie's narrative to say "If she had paid any attention she would see them". Am I interuppting something???

Lettie hating Howl's courting SO MUCH she asked Percival to bite him several times.

Additionally: Ben apologising to Howl for trying to bite him. That's also probably first time they're interacting

Howl ignoring all of it because sOPHIE HATTER

[needanaccount2readarcaneposts]

every time i read a post about how, "silco kept fighting relentlessly for a free zaun because it's what fELiCiA wOuLd hAvE wAnTed," i add another name to my kill list (in minecraft).

we'll never fucking undo the damage s2 has done to his characterisation.

let people believe in things bigger than themselves without needing some secret twist reason. let people fight for something because they observed an injustice in the world and decided to fucking do something about it, without needing a personal motivation tied to a tragic dead friend/family member/lover/whatever.

it is one thing for s1 to acknowledge that, while silco was always a true believer, his trauma at vander's hands is responsible for informing his view on the need for unflinching ruthlessness; for excising weakness. but s2 is now vander-ifying silco and fandom is eating it right up; making him 'more sympathetic' by suggesting that his determination to keep fighting in the first place was in some way tied to a lost loved one. because in a liberal media framework that serves the interest of capital, it is dangerous to suggest that someone can be motivated by purely ideological reasons and still be sympathetic. can still be right to want what they want, or do what they do.

i'm gonna make Outlaw Kings & Rebellion Chic required reading for everyone, and have included more extracts under the cut, but in summary:

Violence that does not proceed from personal injury requires no such breakdown. This kind of primarily ideological violence can be directed against a perfectly functional system - functional, at least, for the perpetrator - simply because it appears the ‘just’ thing to do. No wonder, then, that in our mass media, the characters practising ideological violence are cast as morally unsound. If normality is not self-evident but a site of contention, then it problematises easy narratives of rebels vs tyrants. And if dispute over the political system is enough to justify force, then that implies violence against the modern Western state, even its violent overthrow, could be justifiable. This is understandably concerning for many writers, who tend to come from backgrounds closer to the Lannisters than the ‘smallfolk’.

If a person can commit violence simply because they believe it’s right, without any hidden ambition, then nothing stops us from acting to change the world.

Separately, there is in screenwriting a kind of uncodified rule: villains act, heroes react. The hero, according to traditional Hollywood structure, can’t fulfil their destiny until an extraordinary event drags them out of the world they know. More often than not, that event begins with the villain. Harry Potter is only the Chosen One because Lord Voldemort killed his parents. Luke Skywalker would have stayed on Tatooine dreaming of adventure, until Darth Vader’s attack on a rebel ship sends a secret message to his farm. Frodo would be safe and happy in Hobbiton if not for Sauron. Heroes rarely set out to change the world. Villains want change, and heroes run to keep up. [...] Many of these characters live with occupation, oppression, and state brutality as part of their daily lives, but they don’t turn to violent resistance until their families are directly threatened or killed. When heroes commit political violence, it must be to avenge a personal injury. This is supposed to be substantively different from political violence committed for ideological reasons, which receives a much less sympathetic treatment. [...] When we see violent characters who kill for primarily political reasons, they are often anti-heroes at best, outright villains at worst. The idea of the full circle revolution - of the secret dictator hiding in the throat of every rebel leader, waiting to leap out and betray the non-ideological hero - is utterly pervasive. It appears in videogames, where good old-fashioned all-American heroes like Jim Raynor of Starcraft or Booker DeWitt of Bioshock Infinite are betrayed by villainous revolutionaries Arcturus Mengsk and Daisy Fitzroy (and after all they’ve done for them!). It is common in films, from supervillains like Magneto and Killmonger, liberationists written as would-be conquerors, to the rebels of The Hunger Games, who vote to continue the games as soon as they’re in power, except with the children of the dethroned elite rather than the children of the poor. The same reversal is mentioned in A Song of Ice and Fire, where rebel slaves, once liberated, enslave their former masters; in the TV version, an evil fundamentalist visits the kind of cruelty on the King’s Landing nobility that they visited on others. In all these examples we see an echo of the primal fear of every oppressive class, the nightmare at the heart of modern white supremacy: what if someone did to us what we’ve done to them? Liberation is re-imagined as the world turned not so much upside-down but mirrored. [...]

Rensin attributes the hatred of the High Sparrow to his hypocrisy, but I don’t think that’s quite right. What is terrible about the High Sparrow is that he has no personal grievance. He didn’t see his father killed by the ‘good guys’, like Killmonger. His family weren’t murdered by his oppressors, like Magneto. By his own account the High Sparrow was a cobbler who became disillusioned, found religion, and now, thanks to the vagaries of a civil war among the elite, finds himself in a position to overturn the social order. The feudal system of Westeros never injured him personally. He simply came to believe it should be torn down, and acted accordingly.

We seem to find this faintly repellent. We are so used to looking for an ulterior motive that, when we can’t find one, we grow uncomfortable. If a good person can commit violence simply because they believe it’s right, without any hidden ambition, then nothing stops us from acting to change the world. [...] Violence that does not proceed from personal injury requires no such breakdown. This kind of primarily ideological violence can be directed against a perfectly functional system - functional, at least, for the perpetrator - simply because it appears the ‘just’ thing to do. No wonder, then, that in our mass media, the characters practising ideological violence are cast as morally unsound. If normality is not self-evident but a site of contention, then it problematises easy narratives of rebels vs tyrants. And if dispute over the political system is enough to justify force, then that implies violence against the modern Western state, even its violent overthrow, could be justifiable. This is understandably concerning for many writers, who tend to come from backgrounds closer to the Lannisters than the ‘smallfolk’.

[krakensdottir]

Also something really important I want to point out about Aziraphale's religious trauma.

It's often framed as him being directly abused by Heaven, generally emotionally. And while I don't doubt he's been belittled at points - probably not by Gabriel, the iconic exemplar of the Toxic Positivity boss, but we know how Michael and Uriel etc. can be - it also seems like he's received quite a lot of praise and has generally managed to pull off the appearance of being A Good Angel, or at least a satisfactory one. I don't think, and this is controversial, but I don't think Heaven was usually overtly hard on him.

Because that's not how this kind of cult mentality usually operates. Instead, it teaches you to abuse yourself. Your overseers don't have to directly hurt or insult you if you're so ingrained with fear of failure by the culture you were brought up in that you constantly question yourself as not good enough.

It's not as... satisfying, I guess? As an external abuser being the main issue. But it's a lot more real. At least to me, because I suffered so much anxiety over being 'good' when I was a kid, and it wasn't from direct abuse. It was absorbed from the culture I was surrounded by. I picked it up by osmosis from society at large, and it tormented me. I worried, I doubted, there was a time I literally feared going to Hell. And I wasn't raised strongly religious. My mother certainly treated me as a Good Kid, and never gave even the suggestion that I wasn't. But I felt that way anyway. And it tore me apart. Because internalizing that shit makes it so much harder to fight.

And to be clear at this point, I am not saying Heaven isn't abusive. I just think the nature of its abuse is more subtle and insidious than it's often given credit for. And - this is even harder to accept, but it's true, and it's important - it's not just abusive to Az. All the angels are victims of it. Yes, even Gabriel. The moment he, one of the most powerful forces in Heaven, steps out of line, we see that no one is exempt. Never even mind Muriel, who is literally on the lowest rung of the Heavenly ladder and has probably never been told they're worth anything beyond being, you know, an angel, so at least you're better than humans and demons.

It's a contrast with Crowley, who has long since accepted most (not all, there are definitely some deep issues remaining, but they're nothing like Aziraphale's) of his internal doubts and struggles. His fears are almost entirely external. He doesn't beat himself up if he fucks up. He doesn't have to. There are people happy to beat him up for him. So when things go really bad for him, his instinct is to run. To get out of the way of harm as much as possible.

The fact that Aziraphale is harder on himself than anyone else could be is a vital part of his character. He self-punishes. He self-criticizes. He feels awful every time he breaks the rules in the slightest, even though he isn't usually caught at it. Crowley can find some safety in solitude if he keeps his wits sharp and his head down. Aziraphale can't, because he carries Heaven's conditioning with him at all times. He doesn't need oversight, it doesn't take external threats to keep him in line. You don't need direct threats when literally everyone in your celestial workplace has seen firsthand the consequences of rebellion.

I don't know if I'm making sense here. Again, this is informed by personal experience and I can't claim to be unbiased. But I see so much internalization with Aziraphale. He literally can't even accept praise without being nervous as hell, and I don't think it's fear of punishment or ridicule that's his primary motivation. He simply cannot ever be good enough for himself.

That's how they get you.

Anyway, I think it's why his reaction to disaster is the opposite to Crowley's, why he feels he has to turn and face it and somehow avert the horror (or, alternatively, find some way to reconcile it in his head and accept it - because let's be real, that's often what happens) rather than get himself away. He's less afraid of failing his superiors than he is of failing himself. And God, who is, objectively, the biggest abuser in the entire story.

[thefirstknife]

Feeling abnormal about Echoes continues. Apologies for the scrunchy screenshots, it's from a recording. Immediately starts with Saint and Osiris killing me on the spot:

A little bit of comedy to ease on the crying:

Help. Osiris obviously doesn't want to do this because like. He's seen this before and it made him very unwell. Seeing Saint's dead body is very clearly not something he wants to experience again, but Failsafe says that Saint needs him so he goes anyway. Yippee.

Then the answer to my question. Nessus basically holds an archive for the Vex which includes the archives from the Forest, which is where we're going. I expected something that doesn't require lengthy explanations about how we're getting to the Forest. Saint even helpfully asks:

Some more info:

This is a really neat explanation that migth allow us to revisit this some time without having to go through the hoops of complicated shenanigans with what happened to the original Forest (and Mercury). But also it does leave me with the feeling that they may just never give us that answer. This will take me a while to process and come to terms with.

More interactions to kill us:

And then the big room. I'll put it under read more because damn:

From above where you enter:

It's a whole new area. It's absolutely bizarrely filled with a lot of details. There's four gates to the Forest, each designed differently. Spent a long time wandering around trying to figure stuff out and it's quite interesting. Makes me feel like we will use this area for something again because this level of brand new designs only being used one would be very strange.

So this one without the actual blue barrier:

This is the "Nessus" gate. When you gate closer, you can see the new plants from this episode and stuff. It's also used at the end of the mission to leave to the core of Nessus. The other three gates have the barriers and they later open, though we can only enter one of them. The one from behind that's basically the last you can actually see... Is Europa:

The snow? The ice crystals? The blue ice streaks? This is completely new. It looks like a gate leading to Europa. When it opens later, the enemies that come out of here are the normal Vex, which you can also see on Europa. I'm saying that because other gates have Vex associated with what the gate looks like. This is unhinging me. What does this mean. It can't just be a random thing they made to use once. There's no way. Bro...

And then there's this one which is the one we use to get to Saint's tomb; it's a gate leading to the future:

VERY interested in the enemies that come out of there. Obviously Descendants aka future Vex, but that also includes WYVERNS. Which are the first Descendant Wyverns we've ever seen:

And there's this one which I couldn't originally place; it looks too similar to a lot of other stuff, including Nessus itself, but I thought it might be Black Garden or Venus. Turns out? Black Garden. When you fight in the center later, Sol Divisive Vex come out of that gate.

The Europa and Black Garden gates fully open when you start the fight and they let the Vex out; as I said, normal ones from Europa and Sol Divisive from the Garden. Then when they're cleared, the future gate opens too and there come Descendants. The other two gates remain open but you can't access them; there's a firewall. Let me in.

In the future gate, there's the worn down corridor and then directly after it is the tomb.

And then the tomb.

I highly recommend doing this yourself or checking out a playthrough for all the lines because I can't feasibly summarise it all. Osiris and Saint show up and Saint interacts with the body, then experiences its memories and finally realises that every Saint is equally the same Saint. He also gets the information on how to find the Conductor. But before that we're treated to emotional damage about Saint and Osiris. Primarily Osiris' incredible worry and also trauma which more or less sends him crying which is fine and okay (lie). Like it's not actually sobbing on screen, but it's very much implied in how he moves and the way lines are delivered.

Okay I guess! How about we all jump into lava! Just to make it clear, Saint's last thoughts before he died were of Osiris. And in Immolant, when Osiris thought he would die, his last thoughts were of Saint.

But there is one where Osiris finds happiness. He finds a time away from strife. He finds Saint—a dream of warm serenity. The peace to his purpose. With Saint, there is a future that could have been enough.

So we're all jumping into lava, right?

Outside we fight Agioktis, except this time it's "Archived Mind" aka the archive of the Martyr Mind, the Vex that killed Saint originally.

Then we move on into the planetary core which reveals... certainly a sight. Of something that looks like an alien civilisation, with like a garden and also a HUGE pyramid inside of a artificially made Vex crater. And that's inside of Nessus. And now we know what they meant in the showcase when they said we'll be exploring an ancient civilisation.

I am unhinged. We don't even get to see more because the cutscene starts when you move forward and then we get the beautiful cliffhanger that will make me the most normal Destiny fan for the next 3 weeks.

Maya explains that she's here because we all suck apparently and she wants to fix the world by using Vex radiolaria to essentially convert everyone and everything into a "better" form. She's having a normal one.

Radio message is more or less a recap on all Veil Logs for people who didn't listen to them and the lore page, which randomly now isn't on Ishtar yet even though all others were available right away is about... well. Maya and Chioma living together in the Vex network peacefully and lovingly until the page break and we see the Conductor experimenting by doing open surgery on Exo Chioma. Very normal. very fine. But I guess now we know what that Exo thing from the trailers was.

Now we have to wait 3 weeks.

[finalvortex]

Completely overanalysing Shadow Generations: Dark Beginnings Episode 1

The opening is a deliberate parallel to the scene leading into Maria's death (images taken here from Shadow '05, although this scene is also in SA2). If you're paying attention you can immediately tell it's a fakeout, though: there's no alarm blaring, the lighting is blue rather than red, and Maria is pulling Shadow along instead of the other way around.

It's the aurora borealis. You can only see them from certain latitudes down there, but up here, we can see the whole...

Maria's a nerd.

Shadow is immediately prepared to catch Maria when she collapses.

The low gravity here only keeps your condition in remission. You should know better than to exert yourself.

This is new information I think? I don't think this makes scientific sense but I guess it provides a justification for why Maria is up here aboard the ARK beyond 'that's where the research is being done'. Only, the ARK was a space colony, there were other civilians aboard it as well, like the future GUN commander.

I can't wait for the day when we can finally return. I was created here. I don't know if there's a place for me on Earth.

I just wanted to highlight this exchange as significant to Shadow's overall character arc across his history, being one where he has carved out a place for himself on earth.

Love the way Maria comforts shadow here.

You and grandfather are doing your best. I'm just as happy to spend time with you here, while you both research-

I think this is just awkward wording, but surely Shadow isn't doing any researching?

My boyyyy

Hull breach in the experimental weapons wing! Multiple subjects are free of containment!

Multiple subjects? Given the events of Lost Impact, things are just escaping from here all the time, huh.

Here's the entries on this incident from Gerald's journal in Sonic Battle:

The higher ups are threatening to shut down this research facility. I had no choice but to hand them the Gizoid to buy more time for my research. I tried to be careful and commanded it to never absorb any dangerous technologies. However, I have heard that other researchers have been making the Gizoid absorb weapons. Apparently, the way to cause the Gizoid to form a new "Link" is to show it power that surpasses that of its former master. While this poses immense danger, I cannot risk losing Maria.

My worst fears have come true. The Gizoid has absorbed enough weaponry and technology that it has started to go out of control. The resulting rampage resulted in the destruction of most of the "Ark." ... I have deciphered the rest of the stone tablet. It says, "When the Gizoid had learned all that it could, it became a god of wrath, and all was destroyed." The researchers somehow managed to subdue the Gizoid and sealed it away.

That robot was heading towards Grandfather's lab! Shadow, you have to save him!

Why was Emerl - uh, well, I guess Project Gizoid at this point - headed directly for Gerald? If he was overloaded with power, like at the end of Sonic Battle, he should just be destroying things indiscriminately, right? So... was this a deliberate ploy by GUN to get rid of Gerald?

Maria grabbing Shadow's hand breaks the illusion briefly and triggers a trauma-induced flashback (forward?) to the GUN soldier shooting her. Compare with the actual scene from Shadow '05:

Again, why is Emerl specifically targeting Gerald here?

Not much to say about the fight scene aside from the fact that it's really well animated, and it happens with no background music to emphasize the weight of the blows being thrown. It's also really cool how Emerl copies Shadow's spin attack - you don't need to know how the Gizoid functions for that to be a cool visual, but it's a nice nod if you do.

Ok this is really confusing me. Is there any mention of GUN having a space fleet anywhere? Where did these things come from? They don't even share the same aesthetic as other GUN vehicles, they look more like the Egg Fleet.

Nice look at Shadow's Air Shoes from below the glass floor.

Next Shadow lands into Gerald's cell on Prison Island, which raises the question: why is this in Shadow's memories? Is this just his memory of the recording from SA2? Or was Shadow not put on ice until after Gerald's execution? We know it wasn't immediately after the ARK was destroyed, since he was around long enough for Gerald to alter his memories.

There is a bit of static distortion here, with an analog effect that implies it might just be the video.

On the other hand, we actually get these very brief flashes of Gerald's execution here, which we don't see in SA2 itself.

The professor gets farther and farther away from Shadow. He can no longer reach him.

Shadow then falls into a red sky, with bits of debris floating all around him, reflecting the final battle against Devil Doom in Shadow '05.

Interestingly, this scene is mixing imagery from both Gerald and Maria's deaths. The image of the GUN soldiers is the firing line that killed Gerald, and the sound of the lightning turns into automatic gunfire, as opposed to the single pistol shot that killed Maria.

Finally, Shadow falls into the giant face and outstretched hands of Black Doom.

Waking up from his nightmare in a panic, Shadow uses that damn fourth chaos emerald* to Chaos Spear this unfortunate tree.

*Okay, the fourth chaos emerald was the white one.

The moon looks so good.

Shadow stands in a field surrounded by lilies, a flower which can be used to symbolise purity as well as death, and is a flower commonly used at funerals. In particular, they are often placed on the graves of children.

That was no mere nightmare. And it all began in view of the ARK. Could he have survived? No, that can't be. I need answers.

Shadow seems to think the sight of the ARK is what triggered this nightmare. I think the only 'he' that makes sense here is Black Doom, since Gerald and Emerl are both pretty definitively dead.

Based on the trailer, I think from here Shadow is going to collect Team Dark to raid an Eggman base so they can obtain a rocket to get up to the ARK.

The song that plays over the credits is a remix of Throw it All Away. I have no idea why it shows footage of the biolizard fight, beyond "this is the Sonic Adventure 2 focused episode".

[oathkeeper-of-tarth]

So, I'm curious: What's your take on Aylin's experience after/if she kills Lorroakan?

Allegedly, there's some information floating around somewhere that said Aylin was angry with Selune after she killed Lorroakan, but I can't find where this info is.

If you saw posts about that here on tumblr it was probably posted by @justanotherignot! I've actually been meaning to gather up all the devnote tidbits about Selûne from Aylin and Isobel for a while now, so thank you for the excuse to do so and ramble a bit.

Player: I was just wondering what it was like in that cage of Balthazar's. Aylin: Let us not dwell on those dark days. Their memory is a vortex within my heart that leads directly to the Hells.

What is happening is, well, it's the century of unthinkable horror catching up to her. It's the Trauma(TM) - in one of the conversation options she's literally triggered by the mention of someone being run through repeatedly! It's the growing awareness that although she's been freed (and possibly reunited with her love), the secret is out and there are always going to be assholes gunning for her, aiming to use her as an "artefact" and power source to fuel their ambitions, without any regard for her, you know... basic personhood and well-being. Also, Lorroakan was blatantly lying. He didn't find any super special way to siphon her immortality with "no harm, no pain of any kind", he was just replicating Balthazar's soul cage (you can even find a letter from Ketheric to him, showing Lorroakan was pestering them).

On to the stuff from the game files! First, the conversation with Aylin directly after the Lorroakan fight in the tower. I'm going to be putting the context notes in square brackets next to the lines they apply to. I also plucked some audio out from the files for some of these because I love the delivery.

Aylin: The fire-haired fool is dead. Yet as I stare upon his corpse, I feel… sadness. Why? [Slow and curious, angry and confused by all that has happened.] Player: What kind of sadness is it? / I know something of sadness - or at least the ballads do. What does it feel like? Aylin: A gripping in the chest. As though I'd lost someone, something. [Lost in thought for a moment; confused.] Aylin: A paladin's fatigue, no doubt. You were excellent in battle, as is your way. And I am proud to fight at your side. [Remembering herself. She is Dame Aylin.] Aylin: I will catch my breath, then to camp I will bring my bones. Moonmaiden be with you. Player: Smiting is a weighty duty - sometimes it can be tiring. / Perhaps smiting has lost its pleasures. Aylin: Say it can't be so. For I am Selûne's sword. And ever must be. [She means it, but on the periphery of her consciousness is a tiny crack. Wondering about her fate.]

The above never fails to get me - she is Dame Aylin! Sword of the Moonmaiden! Glorious immortal paladin, champion of a righteous cause! She smites evil-doers for breakfast, that's, like, her whole thing! What do you mean she can't just pick up where she left off and go about her merry smitey way? What do you mean the thing that is supposed to be the literal core of her entire being (forever) doesn't feel good and glorious anymore, but just makes her feel sad and empty? No, no, no, we can't have that.

Player: One of the greatest tragedies of revenge is that it can only be taken once. / Because you won't get to kill him again? Aylin: Perhaps. Yet if I could run him through a thousand times, I wonder-- [Lost in thought, she's been triggered to remember her own fate being run through over and over.] Aylin: Battle has tired my mind, made me susceptible to flights of fancy. You were excellent in battle, as is your way. And I am proud to fight at your side.

Aylin: I will return to camp shortly. I just need a moment to… to… [Lost in thought.]

She so very desperately needs some rest and a chance to come to terms with everything that happened and that was done to her. And it's clear it's going to be hard because she is defaulting to trying to deny anything is wrong, is clearly trying (and failing) to just be her old self immediately, has blatantly internalised a lot of that classic I Am A Sword stuff on top of everything (even though her mother is huge on free will and choice!), and is just really not well-equipped to handle any of this at all.

Next, this is the post-Lorroakan convo you get if you have both Aylin and Isobel in camp.

Aylin: Ah. Ally mine. We are reunited once more. [Warm, but drained. She's not feeling like herself.] Aylin: I was just regaling sweet Isobel with tales of our prowess. Isobel: Very impressive. Thank you for helping Aylin - that wizard sounded absolutely dastardly. [Good humored. Soft in tone. A little uncertain - she's not sure why Aylin isn't herself.] Player: My pleasure. He had it coming. Aylin: He did, and it came. Now, my friend: bask in your victory. I will do the same. Aylin: But fear not: when the time comes for you to face the foe of foes, Isobel and I will stand by your side. [Rallying her soldierly spirit, but still a little drained.] Isobel: We wouldn't miss it. Not for anything. Aylin: Go well, friend. We will see you soon. And with our great powers combined, this city will be saved. Player: Hopefully he'll be the last. Aylin: There are always more bastards behind bastards. But we will run through them all, each by each.

Player: I hope you can rest easy now, Dame Aylin. Aylin: I always do, with darling Isobel by my side. Aylin: Enjoy the spoils of your victory. Spin memories of Lorroakan's death in your mind like silkfloss.

If Isobel isn't there (meaning she died in Act 2), you get this version:

Aylin: Ah. Ally mine. We are reunited once more. [Warm, but drained. She's not feeling like herself.] Aylin: I was just reviewing our fight against foul Lorroakan; your moves and mine. The victory was soundly won. Aylin: Don't you think? [Uncharacteristically, Aylin is seeking input. She's usually so confident about everything, but killing Lorroakan has not had the intended effect on her.] Player: Indeed I do. Let his demise serve as a warning to anyone else who'd seek you out. Aylin: Let him be the last. If my dear mother has any mercy, she will ensure it. [Trying to stay her usual self, but her mask is cracking a tiny bit here. Privately, Aylin is dealing with a great deal of anger toward her mother, the goddess Selûne, But she's not yet willing to face it. How could her powerful mother let all this happen to her?]

Player: We fought well - though I was a little worried about you afterward, in truth. Aylin: Set your mind at ease, my friend. Dame Aylin is more well now than she has been this past century. [Good humored. Soft in tone. A little uncertain - it's true she's better now than she has been, but why does she feel so shitty, then? (She's in the beginning of reckoning with the trauma of what happened to her).]

Player: I hope you can rest easy now, Dame Aylin. Aylin: Yes. I wish for the very same. Aylin: Enjoy the spoils of your victory. Spin memories of our prowess in your mind like silkfloss.

So, a few things pop out for me here. First, you get the more explicit anger at Selûne if Isobel isn't there, as opposed to the "hahah, I will smite all the bastards who dare come after me, no matter how many there are" line. "How could her powerful mother let all this happen to her?" just... damn, hits hard, even if you subscribe to the theory that Selûne simply could not intervene in the Shadowfell imprisonment beyond sending those poor people whose graves you find in front of the mausoleum.

And here Aylin really lays it on thick with the denial that there's anything wrong at all. Combined with the letter you get from her in the epilogue if Isobel is dead, it just paints such a bleak, sad picture. I can just see her going all out on the Sword of Selûne duty-bound paladin side of things, no rest, no healing, no stopping even for a moment, no dealing with anything at all, from the trauma to the bitterness towards mum. Until whatever horrible breaking point comes, a year or a century from now. The need for Isobel's humanising influence is so clear. I've touched on Isobel's side of things here.

Speaking of having a bone to pick with Selûne, if you're playing as a cleric/paladin of Selûne, you can get some extra very honest dialogue with Isobel in Last Light:

Player: Why has the Moonmaiden waited until now to take an interest in this curse? Isobel: Maybe she was waiting for one of us to find this place ourselves. Free will, and all that.

Isobel: Though if it were my place to ask why she let Ketheric turn; why she allowed this village to rot at his hands - believe me, I would. [A cold edge in her voice]

Player: Are you faring all right? It can't be easy holding a lone candle in such darkness. Isobel: All things with her strength. You know the litany. [A little sarcastically. She's got a bone to pick with Selûne but isn't being too overt.]

Side note: the amount of devnotes for Isobel's lines that say she's delivering them "with swagger" and being "cheeky" makes me smile every time. Love her. Love her snark.

Also, to get it out of the way: no, I'm fairly sure Aylin did not break her oath. I see this brought up a ton and I just see no way for it to be the case. There is nothing to suggest this outside of a wording similarity and it just makes no sense. Girl is clearly some flavour of Oath of Vengeance (she uses Abjure Enemy, so this is the case even mechanically, even though she's obviously an NPC and not a standard player-build paladin) and she killed a very shitty guy who was also explicitly after her in godawful ways. You can do far worse things in the game than her dramatic speech and backbreaker and not break your OoV.

[mania-sama]

A Look into Mental Health: Jujutsu Kaisen Analysis

"Being a child is not a sin." (Nanami Kento, Jujutsu Kaisen)

With the release of Chapter 251, I've seen many horrible takes from dudebros saying that Megumi has "sold" the team. This makes me unreasonably angry because of course it does, so obviously my next plan of action is to take all of my hour-long rants about the mental health of JJK characters and put it here, where said dudebros will never see my (correct) analysis in their entire life. Oh well.

One thing Gege is really, really good at is creating believable, undeniably human, and complex characters. Every character has a different set of motivations, beliefs, ideals, and especially mental states. The constant theme of Jujutsu Kiasen has been "Strength vs Weakness". While the clearest interpretation can be seen through the physical attributes of the characters (Gojo being the strongest sorcerer of his time due to his abilities, and Miwa being one of the weakest, again, due to her abilities), it is also directly applied to the mental strength of characters. No two characters are able to withstand the same trauma and come out the exact same, just as no two real people can process the same trauma. Not only is it a result of nature, as people are genetically different and therefore process information differently, but a product of nurture - in other words, character motivation and environment.

This is where we come to the current state of the manga, Chapter 251. The fated Yuuji vs Megumi debate. I keep seeing people wildly misunderstanding these two, and why it's so important that Megumi isn't standing up to fight, why he isn't able to handle his trauma, when Yuuji can.

Gege writes phenomenal characters. And I want to express just how well done they are, making Jujutsu Kaisen actually kind of deserve its popularity, because some people only care about power scaling. I'm going to touch on Megumi last, because understanding all of the other characters' makes his visible struggle that much more impactful.

1. Geto Suguru

I want to start this mental health analysis with Geto. He is the best representation of depression I've ever seen in Shonen. It doesn't take a hundred chapters to showcase a character's downfall. It doesn't take a hundred significant events to cause a character to break down. Gege shows the best, realistic mental breakdown using only a handful of chapters, and still makes it slow and painful.

Depression can start because of a big event, but it doesn't take more for it to worsen. Untreated, depression runs a vicious course that eats a person through slowly but effectively. It isn't one screaming session, hands clutched over the head and cursing God and the world. It's everything piled onto each other. It's coming to the end of that pile and realizing that nothing will ever change.

This is Geto Suguru's story. He has a big event: the fight with Toji and the failure to save Riko. But his mental health journey was fated to decline, even without the fight and failure. The root issue of his depression came from his ability: Cursed Spirit Manipulation. As long as he kept devouring the embodiment of every vile, human emotion, the more he would lose himself to that vileness. He wasn't changing anything; he couldn't help but continue to swim in negativity because that's all he could do.

Gege wasn't making a commentary on Geto's ability. He was talking about people, as they are, and how staying in a bad situation will not always make you stronger. It can, and most likely will, make you worse. A direct comparison to the sixteen-year-old Geto would be a sixteen-year-old at school, surrounded by people who bully and pick on them with harsh words. The kid will eventually consume all of that bullying, all of that negativity, into their being, because there is simply nowhere else to go. School is mandatory; they can't just leave. They eventually feel isolated, with all that vileness piled on. Even if they have friends, those people could never understand what it's like to put up with humiliation and cruelty day after day.

It's not rational to push away a support system, but who said human beings are always rational? People make mistakes. They don't make the right decisions. Geto didn't. He saw someone offer him a chance at change, a possible light at the top of his pile and twisted it to match his overwhelming negativity. He left and swore to destroy the world that made him the way he is, just as that bullied child may turn away from school and society in whatever form that may take.

I want to touch on the physical aspects of Geto's depression, too. I noted this in a previous analysis I did on him (his character is just that amazing, what can I say?), but Gege knew that the mind can't be affected alone. Geto was drawn with deep eyebags, a nod to an inability to sleep or needing to sleep all the time. Depression makes you tired all the time. Everything becomes difficult. He sits with his back hunched, resting his weight on his knees, like sitting upright is too hard. When someone speaks to him, he blinks and takes a second too long to look over or respond, like speaking takes too much energy. To me, it even looked like he was becoming thinner. It's extremely difficult to maintain a schedule of exercise and mealtimes when your mind is fighting an active war against itself.

Again, a beautiful representation of depression. Geto means a lot to me in this aspect.

2. Gojo Satoru

In comparison to Geto, Gojo's horrible mental health is a lot subtler. Depression isn't the correct term, but you don't have to be depressed to be sad. Sadness is his stagnant state; he has moments of bliss, goals to work towards, a reason to keep going, to continue living, to continue chasing the sun over the horizon, but he does return to the same place he is always at when the lights turn off and he's painfully reminded of this one fact: he is isolated.

All of Gojo's problems start and end with isolation. From the moment he was born, everyone knew he was different. He knew he was different. Through glimpses of his childhood and honestly reading between the lines, it's obvious he never played with kids his age. People don't just develop a superiority complex with their only drive to be better than literally everyone else for no other reason than to get better. It comes from somewhere, and in Gojo's case, it's from his young childhood. It seriously messed him up; even now, he can't shake the lesson that "Strength is the only way to success and happiness".

This is what made Geto so important. Geto was somebody who could share the burden of being the strongest. Geto was someone his age who understood him in a way Shoko could not, though they both were able to see Gojo beyond his capabilities as a Jujutsu sorcerer. Gojo then had somebody to base his moral principles on. Because he couldn't connect with anybody else, he had no basis other than strength. Geto taught him why it was important for the strong to protect the weak.

Then everything went wrong. Gojo became isolated again in his strength and lost the only person who could plausibly stand with him. "Are you the strongest because you're Gojo Satoru, or are you Gojo Satoru because you're the strongest?" Gojo was young, then, and fresh-faced into his newfound godhood. He didn't kill Geto in that moment because he wanted to deny the claim that he is nothing without his strength, that he isn't as shallow as he was raised to be.

But he knew better. He grew older, he killed his best friend, and he realized that he was nothing without his strength. He never got over Geto. In order to cope with the guilt of being unable to save him when he left, he adopted a whole kid, thinking that if he wasn't strong enough to save Geto, maybe he could save Megumi. But there it is all over again - he never broke from the cycle of strength defining his worth. Saving Megumi would define his strength, right? It would prove Geto wrong, right? He raised Megumi under the same logic (that the only way to save his sister is to be strong), only ridding the boy of the crushing isolation.

In this way, Gojo isn't mentally weak. He didn't abandon society and everyone who loved him, instead choosing to hone the trauma of his isolated childhood into a weapon and teach the next generation to be better than himself. He isn't depressed, but he isn't happy. You can't be happy if you're alone all of the time. He hoped Megumi could be someone to stand by him, but in the end, he failed to save Megumi. His strength couldn't save him, just as it couldn't save Geto.

He isn't mentally strong. He isn't weak, either. He is horribly, painfully average. He's not weak enough to be saved, but not strong enough to save others. His childhood plagues him, but not to the point where it prevents him from living. He killed Geto but was unable to bury the body. Gojo is everything he never wanted to be.

As it turns out, strength can't buy you happiness. Gojo may have understood that, but he couldn't abandon it, even to the bitter end. Just as a human struggles to shed their conditioning. Not everyone can break the cycle, but we are always trying our best to work with what we've been dealt.

3. Okkotsu Yuuta

I'm putting Yuuta in between Gojo & Geto and Itadori & Megumi because he is, in a way, a bridge between the two. Geto and Gojo have lived their lives; their stories are complete and ended in tragedy. Itadori and Megumi's are not. They are still actively struggling and fighting their physical and mental battles; their stories have yet to be completed.

Yuuta's story isn't technically completed (ignoring everything that happened in the recent chapter with him for the sake of MY mental health), he is still a success story. He is the average protagonist who started from the bottom and ended up at the top. Only he, as Gege has done time and time again, has a slightly stronger focus on mental health than most other Shonen. He is success where Gojo & Geto failed, and the success that Itadori & Megumi are narratively striving for.

At the beginning, Yuuta was depressed and suicidal. He was bullied at school and involuntarily hurting others. Instead of becoming resentful of the world, he pushed all of the vileness inward. His guilt caused him to try to take his life, presumably multiple times, but Rika stopped him before he could succeed. His life was effectively out of his hands; he felt powerless with all of the bodies stacking around him, and he couldn't atone for "his" actions.

His mental health, as it was, was in shambles. Gojo then offered him a way forward. Yuuta's mental health did not improve overnight. It was when he made friends at Jujutsu High, and developed a support system, that he was able to relieve his anxiety and realize that life is not so bad after all. That all of this pain and suffering and loss - it will pass.

The most important thing to acknowledge when it comes to Yuuta is the sheer fact that he was not alone, nor did he allow himself to be alone. Unlike Gojo, who still had Shoko and Nanami after Geto left but refused to connect with them, Yuuta allowed himself to get close to those around him. They didn't know the suffering he'd undergone for so many years. They didn't know what it was like to be him, but that was okay. He knew that they had empathy, that even though they could never experience his life, they could still be there for him now when he falls.

When given the opportunity to surrender, Yuuta stands in the face of one Geto Suguru and swears to protect his friends and fight with Rika. He's so far removed from the boy who tried to kill himself at the beginning of the manga, and that's because he let himself be changed. He did not succumb. He had friends, he knew. People that would miss him if he left, and people whom he would regret leaving.

This stays consistent with his character. He doesn't let himself become isolated in his strength or his experiences. He's much stronger than everyone else in the room, he's a special grade and he knows that, but he still treats everyone like they are equals. Like they are his friends, like they are people who could share this burden of existence with him. This is something that Gojo couldn't accomplish, which lends to the fact that Gojo had a very off-hand teaching method when it came to mentoring Yuuta. Instead of influencing him under this idea of strength conquers all, he let Yuuta develop far away from the ideals of the Japanese Jujutsu Society.

And, in the end, the fact of him being physically strong - a special-grade sorcerer from the get-go - never helped him in his mental health. In fact, it made him miserable until he learned to get a handle on Rika. His winning or losing that fight with Geto wasn't the point of his character, it was reckoning with the fact that he is okay now. That he can embrace the ugly part of him with dignity instead of guilt.

4. Itadori Yuuji

Itadori's entire character is that he has an unbreakable spirit. As the only one who can bear the soul of Sukuna, he started off like Yuuta, only on the opposite end of the mental health spectrum. When we first see him, he's happy, spending his afternoons with the Occult Club and watching movies.

... What happened?

Like Geto, everything piled on very slowly. So slow that I'm not even sure he felt the true effects of everything he experienced up until the fall of Shibuya. It starts with the death of grandfather, whose parting words "Just save as many people as you can" haunt him even now during the final fight with Sukuna. He was never given time to properly grieve his grandfather, just as he never had time to grieve the brother curses, Junpei, Nanami, Nobara, Gojo, Higurama. At the end of it all, when the fighting is over, I have to wonder what will become of the boy that realizes he's lost most of the people he loved.

The one time he did try to process it, when he realized that he couldn't control Sukuna, was when he broke down in Shibuya. Sukuna leveled an entire city. For the boy who never wanted to kill another human being for fear of devaluing life, the weight of his weakness killing thousands was crushing. Then Nanami died. Nobara died (still hanging onto that unknown status but I digress). Both are right in front of him, and powerless to prevent Mahito from disintegrating their bodies. So, obviously, Itadori broke down. The boy with the unshakeable spirit, the only person who could contain the King of Curses, has his psyche completely shattered.

He laid on the ground, and he wouldn't have gotten back up if there wasn't somebody to help him, to be there with him. Todo pulled him back together, stitched back up the broken into somebody who has allies and people to fight for. Itadori has the success that Yuuta had, only Itadori did not come out of it with better mental health.

After the breakdown, his unshakeable spirit was nothing more than the will to keep fighting. He cares little for himself, and he tries to distance himself from people to prevent them from dying from his cursed hands. He is jumping, quickly, down the same rabbit hole that Geto fell down. One big event, and they realize just how tall the pile already is, and that it will never stop growing. Unlike Geto, however, he continues to get overbearing support from those around him. Against his will. He can't push them away, for they refuse to leave his side. Yuuta, Choso, Megumi, even Higurama. They won't let him fall. This makes him better off than someone alone, in a sense. He can withstand his trauma when others may not.

Even so, even so, there is only so much support, the lack of self-isolation, can do when the traumas keep actively repeating. When he says that he will gladly die to defeat Sukuna, it is not said with the same tone that another Shonen protagonist would say it. Take Naruto for example. If he were to go into a battle to protect, say, Sasuke, he would scream, "I'll die to protect him." We understand that his willpower is stronger than his self-preservation, but we don't get the idea that he actively wants to die. He'll die if he has to. Now, Itadori says the same thing, but about saving Megumi. He says, "I'll gladly die." There is something different. His willpower is leaps and bounds stronger than his self-preservation, but that's not only it. There is an undercurrent of severe suicidal ideation prevalent in Itadori's tone. It's not that he will die to win, it's that a part of him wants for this to be his final fight. For it all to be over. To save Megumi, then atone for the sin of being too weak to save Shibuya, or being unable to stop the Culling Games, or letting Megumi get hurt when all he wanted was to keep him safe.

I'd call it more along the lines of passive suicidal ideation. He doesn't plan to kill himself, but what would it mean for him to go into dangerous situations without protection? What would it mean for him to succumb to his wounds after he wakes Megumi's soul and kills Sukuna? To not even try to seek medical attention? He's guilty. He believes everything that happened in Shibuya and after is his fault. When faced with the executioner's sword, he was ready to die for his sins, if not for the goal of ending the Games. There is a fine line between willing to die for those you love versus wanting to die for those you love.

Right now, Itadori is fighting to save one person, like his grandfather said. He is not fighting to survive. And that's what people fail to understand about Itadori when they compare him to the other members of the cast. These power-scaling dudebros don't understand that their favorite OP main character has fallen apart at the seams, that his unshakeable spirit to save people doesn't include himself.

5. Fushiguro Megumi

Here we finally come to the question: Why can Itadori take it when Megumi can't? There is a very similar quote that you probably think of whenever you hear this question asked. It's from The Outsiders: "Dally is tougher than I am. Why can I take it when Dally can't?" The answer to this question that Ponyboy gives is the same we can attribute to Megumi. "And then I knew. Johnny was the only thing Dally loved. And now Johnny was gone."

The entire reason Megumi became a Jujutsu sorcerer was to protect his sister. When he was five years old and probably too young to understand most of the words Gojo said, he accepted the offer of training to become a sorcerer in exchange for Tsumiki's happiness. Every day, he fought to protect her. He only had one goal in entering the Culling Games: to prevent Tsumiki from having to participate.

It's easy to attribute Megumi's constant attempts at summoning Mahoraga to a lack of will to live - suicidal ideation, the same that Itadori now experiences. On one hand, I do understand that he has a fundamental lack of care for his own life, but on the other, I don't think that he intends to throw it all away every single time. He just didn't know any better. Ignorance can lead to death as easily as intentionally seeking it out. That's why he changes his habit after Gojo gives him a lesson in risking death versus dying to win; Megumi still has someone to live for, after all.

Megumi's mental health was already rocky from the start. Not that it was in shambles like Yuuta, but he wasn't fully stable. Like a lot of teenagers, he's moody, somewhat reclusive, and only really likes one or two people maximum. Teenagers aren't known for their sunshine mental health anyway.

Megumi was given time to grieve Itadori after he first died. This trauma of losing him in front of his eyes stuck with him, but he was allowed a grace period of two months to grieve with Nobara. He experienced Shibuya, too, but he still had that one important person to protect. His mental health was alright at this point, all things considered. As long as his sister was alive, he would be fine.

Sukuna knew this. So Sukuna killed Tsumiki using only the Ten Shadows Teqchnique. The one person Megumi spent his whole life dedicated to, was killed by his own cursed technique, his own failure to suppress Sukuna.

In the void of his soul, Megumi was alone. Truly, utterly alone. The only person nearby was Sukuna, the murderer of his sister, the murderer of thousands upon thousands of people. He drowned in the ceremonial bath of crushed curses to hold his soul down in the depths of despair, literally drenched in all of the vileness the world has to offer. Sukuna killed Gojo using Mahoraga's adaption ability, and before that, Megumi was forced to take several of Gojo's mind-altering domain expansions.

Already, he had given up. He gave up when his sister died, but the rest ground a pointed spur into his neck. When Itadori shakes his soul, Megumi is repeating, "That's enough." He was at the end of his rope a long time ago. What more is there to keep living for? He doesn't want to live with the blood of his sister, the blood of the man who practically raised him, and the blood of countless others drenching his hands.

Sukuna killed all of these people, not Megumi. But then, Sukuna killed of those people in Shibuya, not Itadori. Why can Itadori take it? Why can he keep fighting when Megumi lays broken on the ground? Itadori wasn't alone. And Megumi has never been known for his unshakeable spirit. That is the one thing that Itadori can hold over everybody else, the one trait that everyone admires. He was born to shoulder the burden of the world. Megumi wasn't. Megumi wants to die. He is not passively suicidal, for he has no goals left to complete, a plan to die within the body no longer inhabited alone. He is suicidal. He would drive a stake through his heart if it meant relieving his pain. He doesn't want to do it anymore. He's had enough.

And Itadori was in this position once, too? Perhaps not as directly, but he was there. Here is the moment that the protagonist gives the motivating speech to will someone to keep fighting, that life is worth living. I realized today that this is not something Itadori has done yet. He hasn't had a grand speech that's not been about his own willpower. He's never encouraged someone else to keep living in the way that you would expect from the main character. This is his moment, I suppose. He needs to be the person for Megumi that Todo was for him. He has to show Megumi that he isn't alone.

He needs to save Megumi when, all those years ago, Gojo couldn't save Geto.

I don't think some of this fanbase understands how horrible Gege has to be at writing if he just. Let Megumi get up to fight in Chapter 251. All this time, he has shown how Megumi has been defeated. He showed him crumbled on the ground, unmoving. It shouldn't be a surprise that all of the measures Sukuna took to ensnare Megumi's soul worked. Megumi is suicidal after the people he loves have all died because of his technique. God forbid a sixteen-year-old is unable to cope with his trauma alone.

Honorable Mentions:

There are a lot more characters in this story that represent/show mental illness that I didn't go into depth on but are worth mentioning. It was easier to only talk about the major characters since we spend so much time with them and I can fully flesh out everything that should/can be said about them. Anyway, here are a few more that are notably well-written in their mental struggles:

Yoshino Junpei. His story arc follows very similarly to Geto, except he is the bullied student I was making a reference to. Depressed, alone with a mother whose habits he can't stand, he turned to someone he thought could provide him a better life. Interestingly, he is a good representation of the type of children that tend to be groomed. That's surely what happened to him. Mahito used him, then discarded him for his own gains.

Ieiri Shoko. Her main struggle can be seen through her smoking habits. She's been through a lot, lost so many people, and has to keep healing sorcerers only for them to die. Eventually, she was able to come to terms with this. She kicked her smoking habit at the same time she kicked the vicious mental cycle of caring too much about the patient on her table. It's no wonder she picked up a cigarette, for the first time in a while, when Geto led the phantom parade.

Zenin Maki. She works as a very good contrast to Megumi. They both lost their sisters, the people they loved the most, but she turned all of her grief to killing the Zenin clan and gaining Heavenly Restriction. But this, this is because she could do so. There is simply nothing Megumi can do as a soul trapped in his own body. Her grief made her stronger, while for most, it made them weaker.

Inumaki Toge. He isn't seen a lot, but his story is ultimately quite compelling. A boy who hurt many when he was young. He turned his guilt into kindness, a will to protect. He tends a garden to raise plants healthily, for God's sake. He's one of the examples that shows Yuuta that your past actions don't define you, but instead, what you choose to do going forward.

I am not proofreading any of this before I post it. Sorry if it is borderline unreadable with spelling / grammatical errors.

[transmascpetewentz]

i meant wrapped not trapped, I do not blame you for misunderstanding me, thats entirely my fault

I think you seem to believe that my issue with transandrophobia as a label is the idea that trans men face oppression (which they do), when instead its the idea that the oppression transmasculine people face is something completely unique to them, instead of being the underlying current of tranphobia

I literally spent the first paragraph explaining my issues with the *concept* of it before segawaying into my issue with it as a conterpart to transmisogyny due to them not sharing an underlying ideological framework

And to touch on some of doberbutts points, trans women are also correctively raped and have suicide rates, and the issue of access to abortion is for every person with a vagina, not just trans men

A frustrating thing that he does there is that instead of giving a counterargument to one of my points (what i personally believe to be a misnomer about the purpose of the label of transmisogyny, were you (nonspecific) view it as a threat to the validity of the trauma we face, and not as a way to describe their own, and what others believe to be just attention seeking) is to bring up severe (often sexual) trauma as a way to put a landmine on that specific point, because any attempt to explain why they are wrong becomes a personal attack on the traumatized parties

this got quite long, so response under the cut. @doberbutts this is the same anon you responded to (by reblogging my post) earlier.

ok

no form of violence experienced under an oppressive system is truly "unique" in that i don't think there are any experiences of violence or oppression that apply to only one specific group, but the motivations behind the violence can differ depending on the demographic it's being done to. i do not think that any specific example of transandrophobia is something that no one who isn't transmasc has experienced, but transandrophobia is the oppression specifically targeting transmascs. i and doberbutts have already pointed out how this works, so i don't feel the need to reiterate that.

you do not understand the concept of transandrophobia, and you regularly demonstrate that your understanding is surface-level and comes from people who have an interest in making it seem less credible. instead of asking people who theorize about anti-transmasculinity (including me and doberbutts!!!) you immediately become hostile and make many incorrect assumptions about our beliefs. i find this highly disrespectful and encourage you to stop getting all of your information about transandrophobia from people who misrepresent it to argue against the concept of anti-transmasculinity.

yes, abortion access is something that everyone who can get pregnant has to deal with, but trans men face unique discrimination wrt abortion access and access to reproductive healthcare that trans women do not. this is because there is a fundamental misogyny component to anti-transmasculinity that you and others who deny it because "it's transmisogynistic!!!" seem to have a failure to grasp. transandrophobia is transphobia, misogyny, homophobia, and the specific modifier of maleness on this oppression all at once. i wish there was a better word for how maleness adds to and modifies oppression in an intersectional way that wasn't associated with mras, but alas there is none that i am aware of. also: anti-transmasculinity never says or implies that trans women don't face some of the issues that trans men do! you are treating this like a pissing contest for who has it worse and that is an attitude i'll need you to drop.

denying transandrophobia is a sentiment that is directly hostile to transmasc survivors of sexual assault, abuse, hate crimes and other things that arise from living under a patriarchy that systemically excludes you from both the male and female classes. the reason why we use this rhetoric is because these types of things arise from the specific intersection that trans men face, and how that can further intersect with sexuality. you are simply making up what we believe on the spot and not actually listening. if you want to come off anon and have a conversation in dms, i'd be willing.

talking to people like you is frustrating because you make these claims about what transandrophobia theory is as if we're a monolith or a homogenous group instead of hundreds of trans men on tumblr dot com all contributing to a larger conversation. no matter how much you claim to be in good faith, you continue to disregard actual transandrophobia theory in favor of some bastardized version you got from someone with "white tme/tma" in their bio. i hope you take this criticism and reflect on how you may be wrong.

[moongothic]

The reason I ended that Crocodad AU where he finds Baby Robin-post where I did was because I actually just don't know what would happen next, where things would go from there. Let's talk about that.

Also apologies in advance, this post got obscenely long. Again. I don't know how this keeps on happening.

(If you wanted the minimum context without having to read the whole OG post, just scroll down to the Plot Section and read until the end from there)

But just to give a minor recap: They're in the tombs of Alubarna, Cobra's dead and the second the guards notice their king has gone missing they're going go searching for him. So there's no time to mess around, Crocodile and Robin need to leave as soon as possible before they're discovered, otherwise they'll risk getting reported to the World Government for assasinating Cobra and boy howdy Croc's not going to be a Shichibukai for long if that happens. The two are there to just get what they want. Crocodile wants Pluton. And the Poneglyph says its in Wano Country

What the hell are either of these two going to do? In this scenario?

'Cause on one hand, there's Robin, who could be scared shitless of Crocodile and unsure what to do next.

If Robin tells him, will Crocodile kill her because he doesn't need her anymore? Because he got what he wanted?

Or might he lash out at her and kill her because the weapon isn't in Alabasta as he had assumed?

But if she refuses to tell him, he'll kill her anyways, won't he?

She can't run away from him anyways, he'd catch her in seconds.

Should she lie and give him a fake location nearby in the hopes of creating an opportunity for her to escape?

But even if she managed to escape, she'd be back on the run from the Government all over again, fighting for her life, all alone.

(Minor note but it's worth pointing out that Robin probably wouldn't know about Wano's takeover, she might not know who Kaidou is, let alone what the Yonkou are, or where Wano even is. Like we know it's a bombshell of information, but Robin wouldn't know where on The Scale of Bad News it'd land, and that could also add to her fear of telling the truth)

Like I think those would be the kinds of thoughts that would run through Robin's mind, and even I can't tell what she'd do.

And on the other hook, we have Mr Murderdile. How the fuck would he even react to whatever Robin would do?

I mean I don't think he'd actually kill Robin if she told him the truth about what the Poneglyph says. I do think he would Fucking Furious and deeply hurt if she'd refuse to tell him, if she'd lie or tried to flee, as these would be acts of betrayal and we know Crocodile would not take that well. Would he kill her for betraying him? Possibly? Since he could see her as a threat to his son's life (the priority), I don't fucking know man. That could very much turn into like a "Doflamingo killing Rocinante" moment for Crocodile in this AU.

But what the fuck would he do if he found out Pluton was in Wano?

Mind you, by this point the country would've been freshly taken over by Kaidou, and it's only been 2-5 years since Crocodile would've had his ass kicked by Whitebeard in the New World. Like that trauma would be Quite Fresh in his mind. I don't think Crocodile would be stupid enough to try to go to Wano. It'd be stupid fucking dangerous, and surely he'd know that. And not just in the "he could get killed by Kaidou" kind of way, but because surely Crocodile would realize Kaidou was sitting on top of Pluton as they spoke. Even if he didn't know about it yet, if Kaidou found out about Pluton being directly beneath his gigantic ass, it would be Fucking Bad. And thus going to the island with the only person on the planet who could reveal the exact location of the weapon would be a stupid ass move. (Of course, without the heir of the Kozuki Clan Pluton can't be released and Momo has just been yeeted into the future, so even if they did go they wouldn't be able to open the borders of Wano, but unless the Alabastan Poneglyph explained that then neither Robin or Crocodile would understand that)

So if Crocodile's only goal in life at this moment had been obtaining an Ancient Weapon so he could nuke the World Government and then go be with his son (since nothing in the world could threaten his child anymore and force Crocodile to keep his distance to keep him safe)... And he found out he was far, far too weak to even obtain that weapon... What would Crocodile do? Knowing he wouldn't be able to do what he wanted, that he wouldn't get to be with his son ever again?

(Mind you. There is a whole discussion to be had about whether or not Crocodile was suicidal during Impel Down/Marineford and if his petty revenge against Whitebeard was a borderline suicide mission. Because unironically I think there's like a 40-50% chance that could be the case. And I'm pointing this out because if Crocodile was canonically suicidal after failing to take over Alabasta, how would this scenario in this AU be different? Aside from the obvious time commitment, and the way Crocodile's traumas would be much more fresh at this point compared to canon)

Like. What can he do anymore? What's there left for him to do?

Fall into absolute despair and give up? Allow the royal guards to find and capture him, and let the WG throw him in jail for assassinating King Cobra for no reason? Or just kill himself on the spot because what would it matter, he'd die eventually anyways? God knows, even if he wanted to keep on opposing the WG, between the Dragodile Divorce (and however the fuck that might've played out) and Crocodile probably not approving of Dragon's methods for revolution (too idealistic, soft, and slow), ditching his Warlord-status and fully joining the Revolutionary Army wouldn't suit Crocodile either. He's a pirate, not some hero of justice. And he's never going to be strong enough to defeat the WG himself, all alone. That's what the Ancient Weapon was for to begin with.

So, what would he do now, when his final option had been crossed out, labeled impossible. Would death be the easy way out, and at least give him the peace of mind knowing his son could never be linked back to him and put into danger because of him?

But what would happen to Robin?

If Crocodile allowed himself to become captured and go to jail, Robin would be doomed too. Between his hatred of the Government and Robin being an innocent child, surely he didn't want the Government to get their hands on her, they'd just put her to death. But what else could he do? Tell her to run? Leave her to fend for herself all over again? Alone? Would he have it in him to tell her that?

Or would Crocodile's anger and spite at the Government be more powerful than his despair? Would he rather flee with Robin for now and figure things out later, when they're not in some ancient tombs with the corpse of a king where they could be found out any second and be in far deeper shit than they're already in?

And I think this is where we circle back to what Robin would do, first. Because even if Robin told Crocodile the truth, there's still multiple ways she could do that, and depending on how Robin went about it, that could influence Crocodile's reaction too, couldn't it?

If the two hadn't become too fond of each other yet, and Robin very calmly told Crocodile Pluton was in Wano, I think he could just become kind of catatonic in shock and horror, falling into despair. Maybe without saying a word he'd just walk out of the tombs straight to the guards without ever looking back. Abandoning Robin and leaving her running for her life again, alone.

But Robin is at this point a 12 year old child***

The sheer intensity of this situation could become too much for her. And if she had become fond of Crocodile, if despite everything she still wanted to stay with him because he had been the only source of safety she had had in three years... what if she just burst into tears, and told Crocodile she was afraid of him and what he might do to her because he might not like what the Poneglyph said? What would Crocodile do then? How would Crocodile react to that? To this child being not just brutally honest, but emotionally vulnerable and showing him that she WANTED to trust him? If Crocodile had been emotionally flipflopping between trying to remain emotionally unavailable to Robin because he didn't trust her, and trying to be caring (partially because he was intentionally trying to manipulate her and partially because he genuinely felt bad for her)... Would this become the moment Crocodile himself realizes he has to decide if he's going to be a cruel pirate who only cares about his son's safety, or be Robin's guardian? Either demand her to just spit it out if she knows what's good for her, or comfort her and tell her he would never hurt her regardless of what the Poneglyph said? And... almost regardless of what Crocodile would choose, could Robin's outburst still like... both soften the blow of the bad news and emotionally ground Crocodile? So that he wouldn't fall into despair?

If so... Guess the two would just have to flee then. Leave their hostage (be it the (unconcious???) pregnant queen or baby Vivi) behind, and just leave Alabasta. There'd be nothing left in that country for them anyways, nothing but people who could catch Crocodile and report him to the World Government for assasinating their King (mainly Shaka who could probably tell their king was murdered by a heavy smoker thanks to his DF and then realize it was Crocodile if he ever gotten within sniffing distance from him), leading to his Shichibukai Status to being stripped from him. Escaping and never coming back would be their priority.

Whatever the fuck would happen next is a bloody mystery though

Like IDK maybe, after getting over whatever emotional turmoil he'd be going through, Crocodile could start building an organization of some kind?? But this time with the intent of wrecking Kaidou's ass and taking over Wano himself????? (Roccoco Works wouldn't nececarily have to be a secret organization either since if he wanted to take over a non-WG Affiliated country from some pirate... He could just do that. The WG shouldn't care. He would have to be extremely careful though to make sure nobody ever found out his sweet little assistant/secretary Miss Sunday was actually Nico Robin. Also if he was the Rev Army's Secret Sugar Daddy he'd have to be extremely careful who he would hire to work for him. Like the hiring process would be extremely selective still, if not more-so than with BW?) Also he could spend a fuck ton of time just working out to get as swole as humanly possible. Because god knows he'll need to if he wanted to actually fight Kaidou and survive with all his limbs still in-tact. Maybe try to get friendly with Moria too knowing Moria has some serious beef with Kaidou and could be down for getting revenge one day. But mind you, this would be A Whole Process which would no doubt take years if not decades.

All while looking after Robin. Because he was all she had and he couldn't possibly abandon her now. He's in too deep.

And this is where my brain finally hits a brick wall with this AU, I can't imagine how shit would go down from here on. Because IDK, this whole thing started out more as a thought experiment (of "how would things be different if they met earlier") and the further you go down the timeline it stops being wild what if-speculation and more just a fanfic lmao

***(Look if I'm not wrong, the year Luffy was born Robin should be going 11 turning 12, right? (And Croc 27 -> 28). But if enough time has passed that Vivi has been born, well, Robin's birthday is a few days after Vivi's, so she could've turned 13 by now. Or hell, this whole shitshow of a scenario could take place on her birthday if you wanted to be really evil) (But if I'm wrong and Robin was 10 -> 11 the year Luffy was born, then she'd be around turning 12 at this point) (This shit is so complicated aaaaa 😭)

One more note because I might as well put them in the same post

So in my mind, if Crocodad Real IN GENERAL then it would make perfect sense to me if Crocodile's reason for wanting his funny little military nation and to obtain Pluton was to nuke Marijoa and just delete the World Government so his baby boy would be safe. Because god knows if the Government found out Dragon had a son (or that he had been involved with the Revs/plotted against them and that he had a son), that baby boy would become a target for the WG. Thus he couldn't even take his child with him and raise him like Bege or Big Mom did with their kids. Like it wasn't even an option. And because that's like my default headcanon already, I'm obviously applying it to this silly Crocodad AU.

But it raises a fun question; what would Crocodile tell baby Robin about his motivations?

Like, I can perfectly imagine Crocodile explaining to Robin that he hates the WG and wants to destroy them, and that not only would Robin be safe with him (not just in the "I won't hurt you or turn you in to the Marines, we're on the same side", or the "I'm stronk and can protect you from danger" way, but also "the WG can't find you if you're under my wing" way), but also if she helped him find an Ancient Weapon, she could help him defeat her greatest enemy for once and for all and become free herself.

And that's not a bad deal, now is it.

But even if Crocodile explained that to Robin when they'd first meet, just to get her to agree to coming with him, surely it would take Robin some time to actually start trusting Crocodile, after spending the past three years on the run. 'Cause in her mind, either the Government Approved Pirate was lying to get her guard down (so it'd be easier to hand her over to the WG), or the Government Approved Pirate was explicitly admitting to being a backstabber and couldn't be trusted. But hey Papadile could maybe win her trust with some time, plenty of books and maybe a few plushies

However.

I'm sure Robin would wonder WHY Crocodile wanted to destroy the World Government. And Crocodile sure as fucking hell would never tell her it was because he had a son, god knows he would not trust her with that information. I'm not sure if Robin would ask about Crocodile's motivations, and even if she did, I'm sure he'd find a way to respond in a truthful way without telling her anything (Like arguably he isn't free from the WG either, he can either play and pretend to be on their side until they decide they have no more use for him, or try to eliminate them first and ensure his own safety. So he could tell Robin that as an excuse) (Kill-or-Be-Killed is not a great life lesson to be teaching Nico Robin Age 12) And you know, not knowing why this Scary Pirate wants a weapon of mass destruction would raise alarm bells in anyone's mind. Robin isn't stupid.

And now we circle right back to the begining of this post. Again. This post is a fucking timeloop, there is no escape. What would Robin do when Crocodile would ask her to read him the Poneglyph. Because there is that option that she could try to ask him Crocodile why he wanted to destroy the WG, then and there. Possibly defiantly, possibly calmly, possibly with tears running down her little face because she's scared out of her mind and wants to have faith in her guardian, but is unsure because the situation she's found herself in is a train wreck and Croc's on thin ice. And would she start with the question right away, or would she first tell the truth and then, after seeing Crocodile's reaction, ask him about it? And would Crocodile tell her? The TL:DR; of it? That he had a son whom the WG would want dead if they ever found out about it, a son he wanted to protect? That that's what this all was about?

And how would Robin feel about such a revelation?

Because on one hand, it could be calming for her, to understand that Crocodile wasn't out for world domination like a cartoon villian or anything, that his motivations were actually understandable. He just wanted to protect his family. But on the other hand... if Robin had been (conciously or subconciously) hoping to find a father figure in Crocodile... would finding out that Crocodile had his own son, his own family somewhere out there... Would that knowledge break Robin? Because in her mind, even if she hadn't wished for it conciously, Crocodile could never become a father for her? Because if/when Crocodile would get what he wanted, he'd just go be with his son?

Keep in mind. Robin's core fears and trauma come from not just betrayal, but also abandonment. A fear of being alone. Even if it was for Robin's own sake, her mother left her behind. She wasn't able to find friends or community in Ohara at all, even with the people of the library she felt left out because they wouldn't allow her to participate in the Poneglyph research (understandable on their part) And even when Robin's uncle and his family "adopted" her, she was treated as an other in the family. An unwanted burden, a servant. Not a real member of the family.

Finding out Crocodile had a family he wanted to return to could in her mind mean she was going to become abandoned again, left behind to fend for herself. Even if the WG wasn't out to get her, that would still be absolutely soul crushing for a child. And even if Crocodile did decide to adopt Robin, would she not be afraid of being treated as an other in that family too, because she wasn't his daughter? That he'd never love her the way he'd love his own son?

How would the truth behind Crocodile's motivations actually make Robin feel?

And one final gut punch before I go:

Would Crocodile struggle with some kind of guilt and shame over looking after Robin when he had his son somewhere out there? Would he be beating himself up inside because he couldn't stop himself for caring so damn much about this poor kid, but didn't want to treat Robin like some kind of a replacement for his own child? And would those feelings get even worse after finding out he couldn't even get Pluton because the bloody thing was hiding under Kaidou's ass? Would Crocodile feel horrible about how he had to abandon his son seemingly forever and then found himself looking after some other child instead?

Also. If the Dragodile Divorce was bad, especially in the "Dragon wasn't particularly accepting" kinda way, and if Crocodile had this deep fear inside of him about whether or not his son would ever accept him as his other dad and/or be upset about not having a mom (a fear that could get worse over time since he wouldn't have been with his baby from the begining, that he'd have to show up in his child's life later, praying for acceptance and forgiveness for having to leave him behind)... Would Robin potentially expressing that she saw Crocodile as a father-figure kind of break Crocodile (in a good way)? Not just because of the gender affirmation (for the recently transitioned guy mind you), but also because it'd mean that there was at least one person in the world who looked at him and thought they wanted him as their father? And could that happiness then like ADD ON to whatever guilt Crocodile could also be feeling?

These two are such broken people. I can not help but to wonder if they'd be able to navigate through their complicated emotions and find the healing and comfort they both so desperately need.

Anyway yeah that's the post, hope you enjoyed The Thoughts

[elainsgirl]

you know, im actually tired of azriel's bonus chapter being talked 24/7 like its the most major thing ever. I never seen people get worked up on a bonus chapter that didnt even happen at the end of the book! acosf is the reason why this fandom is so toxic!

Hey anon 🫶

I definitely agree. Bonuses aren’t meant to be given such significance as Azriel’s bonus is given. At this point, His bonus seems to be more important then the foreshadowing in ACOSF it self.

“The shadows were ready to strike Nesta when she insulted Elain during their fight? Doesn’t matter because In Azriel’s bonus they disappear therefore that’s the only proof I need to claim that they absolutely despise and fear her 🥸”

Its a BONUS chapter, that too it was only part of a limited special edition. Let’s be realistic for a second - if someone hadn’t posted it online for everyone to see, those of us who hadn’t brought the SE, we would not know the contents of the bonus. If someone hadn’t kept up with SJM and JUST picked up acosf after reading acotar but is unaware of any bonuses, they too would not know about what occurred in Azriel’s bonus, why? Because its information that is not required to know. Its just an EXTRA. That confirms some suspicions in SF. I can go into detail to prove the irrelevancy of the bonus but ACOSF already tells you everything you need to know for the next book. I hadn’t read Azriel’s bonus until two years ago. Before reading it - elriel, much like Nessian, were blatantly obvious. After reading it? Elriel is still endgame. The reason the bonus is so talked about is due to the fact an entire ship relies on it. Gwynriel’s do not have anything in acosf to prove their ship, its just a bunch of out of context scenes and dialogues that aren’t in any way romantic or foreshadowing. Add in the bonus and GA have something to grasp onto even though it contradicts the book and well…the bonus itself lmfao. Then you have eluciens using the bonus as some concrete proof elriel is toxic and a future abusive relationship. That Azriel is an incel who only wants Elain superficially and Elain is just a little, clueless child who walks around lying to people about what she wants.

Antis CLUTCH onto the bonus as most of their arguments and claims use it as “proof” for whatever anti elriel bs they want to spread. But their points only make sense with the bonus, not without which tells you all you need to know about how valid their arguments are.

Feysands bonus is not talked about bcs it easily disproves gwynriel/elucien. Wings and Ember is only used as a way to show how “toxic” Cassian is otherwise its kept under wraps bcs once again, it disproves antis takes. If you had something that dismissed your entire ships within a couple of lines - ofc you’d avoid it like the plague. Its only Azriels bonus that can give them some hope that their worst nightmare won’t come true. That too, the hope is given after they twist and turn the scenes to fit their narratives.

It’s so important to understand elriels bonus sorry, Azriel’s bonus happens during acosf and not after. Its not the end of the book, after the bonus - there is no change or shift in the dynamic between Gwyn and Azriel. They remain as your usual mentor/mentoree duo. Even more important to remember is in regards to Gwynriel, nothing in the bonus is mentioned. Not their session, not the “spark”, not the necklace. Absolutely nothing. Why? Because it is irrelevant. Yet we get told about Azriel’s mood being off which relates to the elriel part of the bonus directly paralleling Cassian after his bonus w Nesta. Because THAT is relevant.

YEP. The fandom was toxic pre-acosf but it’s nothing compared to now. Unless you’re surrounding yourself with content you like and want to see - you can’t just enjoy general fandom spaces anymore.

Acosf brought up:

Anti Feysand agenda

Nesta vs inner circle

critique of the IC

Pro Tamlin apologists to the point of invalidating Feyre’s trauma

The infamous ship war

Anti Nessian vs pro Nesris

Readers opinion being pushed more then Authors intent.

I hope after Elains book - the fandom goes back to being semi-toxic again and more tolerable/enjoyable then it is now.

[withthewindinherfootsteps]

I love how so many interpersonal conflict in MDZS aren't caused by simple 'miscommunication' – they're caused by people being too quick to judge things based on rumours or one-sided information, without consideration for the actual evidence behind that.

The soup incident? JZX only believed the guest cultivator's side of things without consideration of JYL's words. 3zun's fate? LXC only considered JGY's side of the story, without considering NMJ's may have some truth to it (because in his mind, JGY had a justifiable reason for all his actions). Sunshot-era Wangxian conflict? LWJ believed the unfounded* narrative he was taught around what guidao does, contrary to what the only source of evidence was saying, and it's this that leads to WWX constructing a barrier between them. Their final confrontation at Nightless City? WWX came to the conclusion that LWJ was against him, hated him too, despite the fact that "any sane person would be able to tell that Lan WangJi’s voice was clearly shaking" (EXR, Chapter 78), due to his mental state at the time.

This same mindset is also leveraged by other people, for varying purposes – whether it be JGS blatantly lying about WWX's words in the hopes people would believe him, or NHS spreading false rumours about the man-eating castles at Xinglu Ridge in order to stop people disturbing the sabre spirits (of course he uses this mindset in his plan to utterly destroy JGY as well, both directly and to contribute to the view NHS is useless). And that mindset also creates the main driving antagonistic force – the rumour-driven mob mentality so present in the world.

I just love how present this theme (the harm of coming to conclusions based on incomplete evidence) is in the novel, even when it's not drawn attention to**!

(more discussion under the cut)

Now, there are obviously other factors to the conflicts above – and in most cases, these reactions are understandable (WWX's misreadings due to his mental state at Nightless City, for one thing, but others, too). For example there was evidence that appeared to be there supporting LWJ's views on guidao: WWX did appear paler, there would definitely have been differences in his health vs the health of those with a working Golden Core, and he was quick to anger and did seem more arrogant than before, even though that was moreso a combination of trauma and constructing an image that meant nobody would look into the matter of his Golden Core too closely. So argubaly, he did weigh the evidence he had, and it just led him to the wrong conclusion! But none of that means this aspect wasn't a major factor in those conflicts – just as it doesn't mean that LWJ didn't instantly disregard the other side of the story (WWX's words), and came to the wrong conclusion partially because of it.

That also doesn't mean the characters can't learn from this or change their conclusion – LWJ comes to accept WWX's words towards the end of WWX's first life, LXC does open up to the potential flaws within JGY when Wangxian raise it, and after he's seen NMJ's corpse, due to receiving strong evidence (the wrong melody and cleanly missing pages in the Collection of Turmoil, for instance). If he only started suspecting JGY after he shows his cards at the Guanyin Temple, he wouldn't have done things like block JGY from the Cloud Recesses, for instance.

(And, a final note: the problem isn't that these characters chose the 'wrong side' of the issue to see it from – their process would still have been flawed even if they came to the right conclusion from its other side. The problem here is that none of them consider both and weigh them up to judge.)

––

*Regardless of whether you believe guidao has an adverse effect on mental state, and it isn't just trauma – WWX is the inventor of guidao! So any pre-invention speculation about the effects of guidao was, by the word's definition, unfounded... and these teachings were certainly pre-invention! So though I do have an opinion regarding this, it doesn't affect the point.

**Chapter 30 is a good example of when it is: '[LWJ:] “One should not comment without understanding the whole picture.”' (EXR) – but it appears in many of Wangxian's actions throughout the present day section of the novel (especially in regard to teaching the Juniors).

[jesuistrestriste]

The other posts before just kink shaming people. Calling people weirdos and creeps and that the authorities should be called and some how writing men squirting, "because its not biologically possible" is in the same category as well like damn have abit of whimsy

helloo !

so i guess a user who follows me, or used to follow me, is posting on their acc snippets of my work and talking about how im weird and gross (as well as some other unspecified challengers writers) bc i wrote about ‘puppy’ stuff and ‘men squirting’. they blurred out my user but my writing was directly referenced.

they basically likened the puppy play stuff to sexualizing real animals, and said that it was also creepy to write about men squirting bc it’s not ‘biologically possible’

i don’t wanna make this into a big deal, bc it’s genuinely not, but i’m responding to it to hopefully give this individual some clarification and also to defend the users who actually enjoy this type of kink content (bc i do too)

so. first of all — puppy play. i, for one, in the particular drabble they screenshotted, do not have the reader treating art like an actual dog. the reader only calls art ‘puppy’ and he is submissive. those are literally the only two things involved that are similar to puppy play. however, many people enjoy/write about other more direct aspects of puppy play, like collaring and leashing and etc, and that does NOT mean they like sexualizing real animals. it is NOT bestiality. i’m going to assume that the user in question who likened it to bestiality is not informed on what puppy play actually is/represents, and just took the concept of calling someone ‘puppy’ = sexualizing dogs and ran with it. that’s definitely not what it is, and i certainly was not writing it that way. for many, puppy play is simply about the power dynamics of it all. do i enjoy puppy play in its entirety? no, not really (i like certain bits and pieces), but i respect those who do. it also goes without saying that i do not advocate for or support the sexualization of real animals in any way shape or form ..? that’s disgusting.

— more info below the cut —

second of all — squirting. men squirting is possible, just the same as how women squirting is possible. if you don’t believe me, look it up on pornhub lol; it’s definitely possible. to my knowledge, the anatomical/bodily processes that allow someone to squirt are the exact same ones involved in. well. peeing. like. if you can pee, you have the anatomy necessary to be able to squirt. i’m mid-writing this and i can’t believe im talking in depth about what squirting is and how it works. help. but yea, is squirting = pee ? no. no, it’s not (controversial lol). but even if it was, some people are into that. no need to yuck someone else’s yum. you’re entitled to your opinion though. if you don’t enjoy it/understand it and think it’s ‘creepy’, that’s cool too ! idc—it’s your life! do what you want !

third of all — i read their post and they also talked about how it’s weird to write about puppy!stuff because some users (i don’t know if they were talking about me in this instance or just some writers on challengers tumblr in general) are writing about ‘real men’ and that these men should be ‘calling the authorities’. i know for me, im not writing about mike faist in a puppy play context. im writing about art donaldson. a fictional man. and i promise you, art donaldson will not be reading my stuff. and for that matter, neither will mike faist. that man wants nothing to do with social media, let alone tumblr (rip to his tumblr era though).

bottom line, kink shaming is not cool. it’s not fun, it’s not kind, it’s not cute, it’s not very demure.

some people use kinks as an escape from harsh aspects of their reality like past trauma, etc. or to process those traumas. that being said, you are 1000% allowed to not like something. that is your business ! but posting about someone’s work and making grotesque claims about their character and what they stand for based on smut writing is very odd. i do not appreciate it !

i am in no way trying to attack/hate on the person who made the posts, but i think it’s important to try to address stuff like this and educate those who may be confused or misinterpreting. to the user who made the posts: i hope you have a good day, and i hope this clears things up ! if you see this and want to talk more about it, my dms are open. all love.

UPDATE: i was just informed that the user in question used to write for (tw) school shooters and apparently cleared all evidence of it from their account except for some lingering tags.

i take it all back ! ! as someone who has experienced the effects of a school shooting + has been in a uni community targeted and affected by an act of gun violence, that is absolutely disgusting, and you can rot ! seek therapy ! :)