most islanders think Foolish is entirely pro Federation, either because he wants the power they give him or because he doesn’t truly understand what he’s doing or what’s at stake, and is just having fun. even to Cucurucho, he’s a bit of a fool - an overambitious one sure, but a fool nonetheless - who’s irritating and asks too many questions, not quite in a concerning way, but in the way a kid might bother you asking for more ice cream. a newbie on the job who wants the world and is trying to find his place in all of this - any digging for information surely isn’t malicious, because he’s obvious and ignorant about it!
it’s always so exciting when they talk about him, when they say such things to his face - it means it’s working. he tells Cellbit that he’s genuinely infiltrating and he’s not believed. Bad straight up says Foolish’s plans to a Federation worker, and if anything it does more to legitimize him further in the eyes of the Federation.
because he’s silly, and overeager, he can play dumb and his true intentions fly right over everyone’s heads. they only see him for whatever singular facet of his personality that he chooses to present, and it works so well because he can be all those things, he just overplays it to his benefit. Bad is one of the very few who can see his tricks for what they are, who doesn’t underestimate him - because hes right, Foolish does have this way of slipping past peoples defenses to get the info he wants without them even knowing they needed defenses in the first place.
idk this latest stream was just full of these little moments. acting silly when Etoiles asked him why he’s working for the Feds, and grinning when Etoiles says he’s basically a clapping monkey who doesn’t know what he’s doing, calling him naïve. asking Cucurucho a million questions and overwhelming him, acting suspicious and curious around the black concrete nonsense - allowing him to easily get away with presenting exaggerated, biased, and some even fabricated, evidence for his investigation, controlling the narrative entirely, because that part of the convo was made insignificant. (and through those questions, possibly even getting more bonuses for his office and fellow workers - he’s gotten the break room so far, and coffee machines, and another level for investigations, which has swayed workplace opinion towards him heavily.)
then with the AI, Cucuruchito, engaging in banter, then sharing a secret, which seems like a big deal - but everything he told the AI is just what he himself was told by Cucurucho, it was no secret to the Feds at all. then flirting with it for a long time before leaving - which is a tactic he outright explained to chat. to get what you want, information, loyalty, etc, you have to build a good repoire. if it takes flirting, and charm, if it takes a date or two, he’s more than willing to play the part to get what he wants. he’ll pretend to eat up their bullshit about him being special, and let them think he’s charmed instead of the opposite.
Foolish is good at what he does because he catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, and the flies never realize their caught - he’s patient enough to play the long con. and really, could someone as naïve, as foolish as him, be able to do such a thing?
he isn’t taken seriously. and it won’t be their final mistake, but it will certainly be the one that damns them.
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While talking to @menciemeer, something came up re: Jack’s motivations for being in Italy in season 3 that I haven’t seen discussed much - and that is that he’s explicitly there not to catch Hannibal, but to save Will. Here’s his dialogue with Pazzi in Secondo:
Jack: If he hasn’t already, Il Mostro will return to Florence.
Pazzi: Come back with me. We have a chance to regain our reputations and enjoy the honours of our trade by capturing the monster.
Jack: I’m not here for the monster. Not my house, not my fire. I’m here for Will Graham.
This is even more striking in light of the context for his character that the very next episode gives us - his conversation with Chilton in Aperitivo establishes that he’s been forced into retirement with the FBI, but he’s not interested in regaining his standing or reputation. (Very odd in light of the fact that come the Red Dragon plot, he seems to still have his old job in Behavioral Science). Chilton tries to get him to use Will as bait to find Hannibal:
Chilton: Will is going to lead you right to him.
Jack: Oh, no, he’s not. Not to me. I’ve let them both go. I’ve let it all go.
Chilton: You dangle Will Graham and now you cut bait? You’re letting Hannibal have him hook, line, and sinker.
Jack: You’ll excuse me, Dr. Chilton. I like to be home in the evenings when my wife wakes.
What stands out about this exchange is Chilton’s “letting Hannibal have him” phrasing. It foregrounds not subduing Hannibal, but preventing Will from succumbing to his worst impulses, as a central motivation for Jack in 3A. It’s also significant that it’s his need to care for Bella that leads him to defer pursuing anything relating to Hannibal or Will, because her death is framed within the episode as the impetus for his investment in following Will to Europe - as he tells Will in the funeral scene, “you don’t have to die on me, too.”
So much of Jack’s character arc in the first two seasons is juggling his repeated sacrifice of others for the greater good. His guilt over what befalls both Will and Miriam features prominently in season 2, and during Will’s trial, he’s already prepared to put his career and reputation on the line to stand up for Will and atone for what he feels is his role in Will’s downfall. Both the traumatic events of Mizumono and Bella’s death bring about more of a full turnaround in that direction - Jack becomes less invested in apprehending killers in service of public safety, and more invested in saving the specific person who’s been harmed by that project.
I think this motivation doesn’t always stick in people’s minds because these exchanges get eclipsed by Jack beating Hannibal to a bloody pulp a couple episodes later, as well as his inexplicable return to working for the FBI in 3B. But even in the former altercation, his fight with Hannibal feels personal, more about venting anger and grief than actually apprehending Hannibal. In Dolce, when Will asks why Jack didn’t kill Hannibal, Jack responds “maybe I need you to” (in the same exchange, of course, as “you need to cut that part out”). That scene also establishes clearly that Will and Jack are, like Pazzi, “outside the law and alone.” As in Mizumono, they’re effectively vigilantes - and Jack’s mission is not serving justice for the FBI, but in saving Will from Hannibal’s influence.
This is why, despite the fact that Jack is once again embroiled in FBI business in season 3B, I always envision his role post-canon as being a continuation of what haunts him in the first half of the season - less about catching or killing Hannibal than about rescuing Will. It’s a lot more compelling to me, at least, than him simply continuing to be the face of law enforcement.
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Camilla Hect's sworddaggerknives: an exhaustingly comprehensive weapons inventory
(alternate title: "In Which Tamsyn Muir Tries to Kill Cosplayers with Imaginary Weapons", or "How to Consult a Swordfighter for the Fight Scenes but Not Give Nearly As Much of a Fuck About the Implements Used")
Written in hopes that this will either spare other Cam cosplayers some misery, or bring them to the commiseration station --
Gideon The Ninth - Canaan House Cam: In Which We Meet the Weapons Nerd of the Sixth
When we first encounter Camilla Hect, she's using a somewhat traditional sword + offhand combo against Gideon:
Gideon The Ninth, chapter 12, bold emphasis mine, italics canon -
She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced. Gideon, neurons blaring, drew her own. She slid her hand into her ebon gauntlet—the grey-cloaked girl let the flashlight fall, drew a knife with a liquid whisper from a holder across one shoulder—and their blades met high above their heads as the cavalier leapt, metal on metal ringing all around the chamber.
... Blow after lightning blow rattled her defences, each one coming down like an industrial crush press, the short offhand knife targeting the guard of Gideon’s blade.
... her opponent dropped as though shot, crouched, kicked her dagger up into her hand, and did a handspring backward down the stairs.
Anime physics aside, we have also immediately established Tamsyn Muir's love of using "dagger" and "knife" interchangeably. The sword is described as a rapier a paragraph later, at least:
Gideon was stronger; the girl’s arm was buckling—she brought up her rapier to harass Gideon’s blocking arm ...
We get a closer look at it in the duel against the Second:
Gideon The Ninth, chapter 23, emphasis mine -
The rapier looked, like Gideon’s, maybe a million years old. It was the first time she had seen it in a good light, and here it looked as though it had never been designed to take an edge blow; the blade was light and delicate as a cobweb. The offhand looked like Camilla’s whole House had gone searching down the back of the sofa for weapons. They had come up with what looked more like a long hunting or hacking knife than a duelling dagger: thick, meaty, cross-guarded, with a single sharpened edge. The whole effect was sadly amateurish.
We quickly learn that she can still deliver a drubbing with this combo. However, it is not clear whether her offhand in this duel is the same knife as the one she fought Gideon with - which is described as a "short offhand knife" compared to the "long" knife against Marta - and we can call that into question more confidently once we learn that Cam is PACKING LOTS OF STEEL:
Gideon The Ninth, chapter 27, emphasis mine -
There was no question about whether or not Camilla inhabited the horrible cot attached to the end, cavalier-style. It sagged beneath assorted weapons and tins of metal polish.
Gideon, being a weapons nerd herself, calls Cam on her setup bluff partly by elaborating on Cam's pile o' pointies:
“So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?”
Her keen eyes narrowed into black-lined slits. “How did I mess up?” she asked, eventually.
“You drew your rapier and your dagger at the same time. And you’re ambidextrous. You keep cutting like both your blades are curved. Also, there’s six swords and a nightstick on your bed.”
“Should’ve tidied my mess,” admitted Camilla. “Two blades. Double-edged.”
Gideon refers to Cam's offhand in the duel with the Second as a dagger here, too, despite having previously observed that it looked more like a knife. She also refers to all the blades on Cam's bed as "swords", but it's clearly a mix of blade types. Gideon is only as consistent or reliable a narrator as Tamsyn is; her terminology is equally laissez-faire.
Cam, meanwhile, is not more specific when she describes her main wields: they're just "blades." We finally meet them when shit hits the fan later on, but they are confounding:
Gideon The Ninth, chapter 32, emphasis mine -
With only the faintest liquid whisper of metal on sheath, Camilla drew her swords. Gideon had never had the opportunity to study Camilla’s two short swords before: they were more like very long daggers, slightly curved at each end, wholly utilitarian.
So Gideon's observation that Cam cuts as if the blades are curved seems to hold water, but Cam specifically only identifies her blades as double-edged - which is much less common on curved blades longer than a few inches. In the same breath, they're implied to be shorter than short swords, but remarkable enough to call "very long" for daggers, which also means they're longer than the "knife" length in which having double edges is relatively common without making tradeoffs in durability/blade structure.
(This is where my brain broke.)
To add insult to injury, for the rest of the chapter, Tamsyn calls them knives:
Gideon The Ninth, chapter 36, emphasis mine -
She crashed into her from the side, her two knives flashing like signal lamps in the sunlit hall.
... Camilla Hect off the leash was like light moving across water. She punched her knives into the Lyctor’s guard over and over and over.
Well, mostly. That would be too easy. Here's the lone exception:
Camilla slumped next to her, swords crossed over her knees.
SWORDS AGAIN?
We also see Cam with a single knife. It's unclear if it's one of her main dual wields or another one she had stashed:
Camilla, as she’d seen from above, had caught up with Cytherea the First. She had one hand in the Lyctor’s singed curls, dragging her head back. The other hand pressed a knife against the smaller woman’s throat.
Whatever it is also is well-balanced enough to throw -
Her good arm was up behind her head, holding the blade of her knife. Gideon ducked. The knife whistled over the top of Gideon’s head in a flashing blur and buried itself in Cytherea’s upper back.
- which usually implies something shorter and less medieval dagger-y. Different knife? or more Anime Physics? We don't know.
In conclusion: Canaan House establishes Cam as Very Hot and Good At Pointy Objects. Who the fuck knows what they are, though.
---
Harrow the Ninth - Random Planet Encounter Cam: Still Kickin'
At this point, Cam has been chugging along under the tender mercies of BoE, hauling her pulverised necro around, and comes face to face with a delightfully lobotomized Harrow. She's still dual wielding, although whether they're her Canaan House blades is doubtful, and they're described as knives all the way through:
Harrow The Ninth, chapter 32, emphasis mine -
... you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash.
...
Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”
Still a badass, obviously. And "big" knives seems to imply they're still of a long-dagger/short-short-sword length as Gideon described. "Butt" instead of "hilt" or similar terminology seems to imply they're more pedestrian than daggers. What the hell does Harrow mean by calling them "balanced", though?
Who the fuck knows. That's all we get. Onward to:
---
Nona the Ninth - New Rho Cam: More Badass & More Bonkers Than Ever
Cam is living her best worst best-given-the-circumstances guerrilla fighter rebel operative life. This means she's just...armed to the teeth all the goddamn time, and it's knives all the way down:
Nona The Ninth, chapter 2 -
... Camilla looked the person deep in their eyes and casually touched the hilt of the knife she kept down the waistband of her trousers, and then the person moved to the back of the queue.
Nona The Ninth, chapter 9 -
Camilla had been crouched down, wiping her knives on one of their jackets.
...
Then she had equally normally set to putting her knives away – sticking them in the bands down her thighs, inside her trousers –
Nona The Ninth, chapter 12 -
Almost all of the knives Camilla had strapped to her got taken away, but not the very hidden knife, or at least the one hidden knife Nona knew about. There were probably more.
This could be because they're actually knives, or because Nona's vocabulary only goes so far, and her narration - backed by Tamsyn's established lackadaisical approach to pointy objects - is too simple for disambiguation.
To hint at this: when upon prepping for the final mission(s) of the book, Cam empties out the hidden armory, and Nona goes so far as to compare two of her blades to kitchen or filleting knives:
Nona The Ninth, chapter 22, emphasis mine -
Pash said, “Your people... that obsession with swords.”
“We are our swords,” said Camilla. She shrugged on a criss-cross halter of black plastic straps and clipped it tight across the front of her chest, and then she opened a box and took out two long, plain knives, the type of thing they used to chop up fish at the market. All of Cam’s secret knife stash, Nona thought, numb with anticipation.
Cam seems to only say "swords" to mirror Pash philosophically, not to describe her weapons, but it's worth noting.
A detail that is mentioned once and then never brought up again, though, is that she's carrying at least four blades into the fight. Earlier in that chapter:
Camilla flipped open boxes and took out a belt, which she tied around her waist, and she secured a hook to the side of the belt. To this hook she reverently attached a long plain black scabbard, then a shorter plain black scabbard, and she tested the hilts in her hands.
So: two unseen blades of possibly different lengths - described only by the hilts, but stored in scabbards of two different lengths - in addition to "two long, plain knives" that are presumably stashed in the shoulder? back? chest? "criss-cross halter" holster situation. Or something.
Say it with me: WHO THE ACTUAL FUCK KNOWS.
Nona The Ninth, chapter 23, emphasis mine -
Just for shits and giggles, Tamsyn throws in the only use of "daggers" to describe Cam's weapons in the whole goddamn book right before the final duel with Ianthe:
The two uniformed soldier zombies knelt Camilla, roughly. They squeezed her wrists until, with an agonised hiss of breath, she dropped her daggers. They clattered softly on the carpet.
Her main dual wields of choice, this time, seem to be single-edged, likely the "fish knife" pair:
She mopped a little at her chest... she was bleeding freely and messily... and she picked up, from where they had fallen, her two long, plain, one-sided knives.
Even Ianthe agrees that they're knives:
“I didn’t mean to take anything to this planet I couldn’t replace,” said the Prince. “I shouldn’t have bothered. Why two knives?”
“Shock and awe,” said Camilla.
And then Paul happens and my heart broke forever that brings us to the end of Camilla Hect As We Knew Her x Bladed Weapons OTP For Life is too short and love is too long.
So what's our takeaway on accurately portraying Camilla Hect, you might ask?
tl;dr: use whatever the fuck you want. go loud, Cams.
do not be like me and spend a cumulative 15-20 hours spread out over three weeks debating how to accurately portray her weapon shape because fanart seems to mostly depict her with daggers.
---
as for me? I've finally gone with utilitarian but elegant hunting daggers (long, cross-guarded, single-edged, curved at the end) for Canaan House Cam and a scrappy pair of Bowie knives for New Rho Cam, after polling a bunch of Cam fans; votes were overwhelmingly in favor of curved blades being more important than double edges. THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN.
with the utmost thanks and apologies to the patient & best beloved folks in the Library for responding to my Cam poll, and for emphasizing & reassuring me that cosplaying On Vibes is kosher and encouraged in this fandom
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