#but her story is pretty easy to translate into its own original universe

[hexdsl]

Deaths End (by Lui Cixin)

Does it ever end?

Death's End is the third instalment of 'The Three Body Problem' trilogy. The trilogy is not an easy read, its at times an oppressive slog. It's not cheerful. Its not bright and its not optimistic. But it is wonderfully well written. Obviously the credit for this goes to the writer, Liu Cixin but we have to have to send quite a lot of thanks to Ken Liu who translated this work from its original Chinese into English. The translation is naturalistic and flowing. Honestly it did not at all read like it was a translated text. Great work my dudes!

I am not a smart man. This was made more obvious than ever when, 200 pages into Death's End, I realised that I was not reading the first book in the Trilogy, I was reading The last. Not my finest moment. I know, 'How does that even happen?' I hear you scream. Well, the trilogy was recommended to me by a friend in a voice chat. It sounded good but, as always I try to avoid too much 'exposure' to stories before I read them. If you own a Kindle (which I do) and you search for 'The Three Body Problem' it will by default sort it in order of recency/popularity. So the book in the series that get displayed to you are in the reverse order. Being lazy I clicked on the first one that was on the Kindle, titled in the store as 'Deaths End: The Three Body Problem.'

I honestly thought it was written somewhat cryptically on purpose and by the time I realised my mistake, I was 200 pages into the 595 page slog. So screw it, I went 'ride or die' on it and slogged on.

As it turns out this book isn't a direct continuation of a story its more a third part in the sense that it is influenced by the events of the earlier portions and takes place in the same universe. I was able to decipher most if the events through the exceptionally well written flow of the work. I honestly think that by the end I had pretty much got it all. History and outcome, political motivations and people. It's all subtly re-capped through events.

It takes actual effort to read and you will not be dipping in for a few pages. This work will demand your attention. It's a slow and surgical read that expects you to keep up. Also, in case you are bored of reading already, it's bloody good!

The premise.

Now, I'm not someone who cares about spoilers in the traditional sense, I try to go into books 'untouched' but I don't obsess about not known things. That said, this entire post will be as spoiler free as possible because this work is dense and I honestly can't break it down in a way that will be useful.

Its the future, humans are in a state of war with some aliens called Trisolaran's and our 'hero' Cheng Xin spends her time being a mild mannered aerospace engineer. Things happen and she has to work on a planetary defence project. The aliens are on their way and they know EVERYTHING because they have invisible spies on earth who can instantly transmit our plans home. The spies are called Sophons and they are cool AI things that the writer makes an effort not to explain in too much detail.

Eventually she sends a man's brain into space, in hopes of getting some intel! - That actually makes sense when explained in the book.

Some other things happen and Cheng Xin has an adventure in time and space via the power of Cryo sleep.

And that's all the plot you are going to get out of me.

The execution.

Fuck. Just... Fuck... This thing is a real, proper science fiction novel the likes of which I haven't seen since the 60's. It respects its reader enough to not spoon feed and it respects its science enough to explain the principals on which its based and does so in a naturalistic way that doesn't feel forced.

The characters are rigid and dedicated but not in a badly written way. They are wooden in a quite direct and intended delivery all the way through. Each person we encounter in the entire novel is dedicated to the goal of saving the human race and that is a motivating fire that pushed them to be all business, all the time.

There was a moment early on when I thought it was a result of cultural differences between Chinese and English story telling styles, or just the writers individual style. Then I met the character "Sophon" (Not the previously mentioned Sophon spies that we can't see but an individual woman) She was an tornado on unpredictability. Her demeanour never matches her goal and her methods are borderline insane. I loved this character, she is the perfect woman, while also being deeply disturbing. Honestly a wonderful antagonist (for a bit.)

Another character I enjoyed was Ai (艾AA) a warm young woman who becomes cold at times because thats whats required of her, some times coldness being the only choice a person could make in times of struggle. She is both the soul of the work (at times) as well as being the eyes voice of our species (as Cheng Xin seems to hear it.)

Structurally the story reminded me of the classic 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' but was a stronger narrative because the lead character is with you from start to finish.

While the work is oppressive (and it really it) the overall experience as you read seems worthwhile and feel like its going somewhere. It has a point and its makes it elegantly. This point is that we need to work together and humans are idiots who's self interest is destroying us as a planet. But it doesnt reach out slapping up with this point. It illustrates it through story. Ironically there is a portion of the book dedicated to a fiarly tale that has hidden meaning. Deaths End its self is somewhat like that. Its a parellell that a lesser writer would congratulate them selves for right away but this novel lets you unravel this your self and is all the more wonderful because of it.

The one thing that put a big downer on the whole thing, for me at least is that it didn't really nail the ending. I won't spoil it, obviously. I would have liked to see more of a pay off to the events. It's almost like the writer went "yeah, that'll do" and just stopped. There were at least two other places it could have ended that would actually have made it more emotional and poignant.

Also there is an event in the last act of the book that I'm fairly sure was supposed to shock and delight me. I saw it coming miles away. Not sure if I was alone there. I'll have to talk to some other people who have read it.

The Post book cool down.

The moment I finished the last page of this book, I felt like a weight had been lifted from me. Finishing this book is like ending a hard day of work. You feel better for it and you need a little time to recover. That said, I picked up the first book and started slogging through it the very next day. I feel like its a book that rewards you for sticking with it and I owe it to the characters to see exactly how we got to the point we did at the start.

Do you recommend it?

I loved it, but not until it was over. I felt like it was something I needed to get through and at one point regretted ever starting it. But over all it is something that I won't soon forget. It really is the best example of "hard" science fiction I have read recently. My love of harder edged science fiction is the main reason I mostly read older books. The main difference is that the older books have a pretty real vein of optimism and hope going through them that this work was missing by design.

This story would not have worked with a super hopeful lead character and thats its main defining feature. Oppression is a features of the style of this work, in a way that is integral to its gravitas. When most book are all down in the dumps to seem cool and Emo its a thing I hate but Death's End would not have been the same work if it were anything else. Partly because its not trying to be cool and Emo. Its honestly a reflection of its self, it would have been vastly different if you felt like it was a throw away romp.

If you think you will make it through the Three Body Problem, don't start with this book. But when you get here, you won't be let down.

[an-unraveling-unknown]

OH OH I HAVE A WHOLE NOTES APP NOTE FOR THIS I CAN COPY PASTE HANG ON;

(stuff below the cut!! this post is long, and would be longer if i kept going with other character names, but I unfortunately require sleep)

[thus far Untitled]

Locke: Locke's had a bunch of names over the countless millennia they've lived, usually dubbed by folks they unintentionally meet on their travels.* 'Locke' is just the latest one, the in-universe explanation being that it was originally coined as "Lock' by Deimos's second-to-youngest acquired child, Ithas, due to the rusted fence wire peppered with love-locks they have wound around their arm, and was furthermore slightly modified with his permission.

Outside-of-universe, I picked it blindly because it sounded cool, but its definition - 'fortified place' or something along those lines - is coincidentally really fitting for xim as a character, xer entire existence dedicated to being a fortified place because its deeply ingrained in xis code.

Deimos: Deimos has also taken a bunch of names throughout the passage of time, mainly based on the big societal fears of the place and era - just to switch things up - and thus his appearance and gender presentation will also change with it as he pleases.** He never took on Deimos's form though, even in the era of Greece where those stories would have been passed around like wildfire, because people were a little too busy being terrified of death - hence, Thanatos. Locke (then 'Rue') poked fun at him a little and nicknamed him Deimos anyway, and it's the first name he thinks of now when introducing himself.

Outside-of-Universe, Deimos (brother to Phobos) has very little written on him and Phobos that we know of, but he is noted as the personification of fear. I got really into greek mythology around the time I kicked this whole thing off, he is but one casualty

[BG3 (ish)]

Aeonian: Aeonian's name isn't really what they'd call themselves, nor is it what their sister Monad calls them - the two of them have their own language of what we would probably define as 'sounds,' (still workin on that bit). 'Aeonian' is just what they chose for themselves because it applied well to what they are, both as a construct and their actual nature.*** Their actual name roughly translates to 'Mini-' small, or precious, dubbed during a time where they were in fact smaller than Monad.

Outside-of-Universe, the whole thing kind of went like 'hey, this sounds cool and sea-related, I can change it later :DD' and then I didn't change it later because I got attached BUT IT WORKED OUT OKAY

Monad: Monad was the first to venture up to the surface after she and Aeonian had been mostly oblivious to the life happenings for most of their lives, living in the ocean in decidedly not-human forms and all that, and spent a little while observing customs and learning language from the shadows before going for it - charisma helps of course. The name 'Monad' itself came by chance, as someone she was small-talking with asked for her name and she had to frantically flick through the book she was gesturing with at the time and improv with the first word she saw. Her name with Aeonian translates to akin to 'comfort', safe and to remain safe in all sense of the word.

Outside-of-Universe, I am a Big Fan of evolutionary history so Monad's name was pretty easy to come up with when I figured that I wanted to play around with the idea of life and death at sea or otherwise - single celled organisms, the basis of life and all that.

--

*generally because they give the option to. they couldn't stand their old name, and they've learnt that humans find naming things an enjoyable activity (that they've participated in)

**Because Locke and Deimos would have different names each time they met up, (there were decades between meetups at the very least,) and Deimos a different appearence, the two of them would goof around a bit and act as if they haven't met before now, before falling into the usual easy-enough conversation.

***'Aeonian' means 'lasting for an immeasurable period of time,' which selects both what they embody (death [at sea]) and their foreseeable lifespan, at least in comparison to Monad, who actively needs living sea life and such other to exist healthily and at all.

Why are your OC's named what they are? is there any significance to their names?? (doesn't have to be but I always find it interesting)

It's almost entirely a combination of puns, name generators, and things I thought sounded right. I guess the most interesting one is Theta, wich in addition to sounding sci-fi-y, is the 6th letter of the Greek alphabet to fit their 6 motif

[sarcasticgaypotato]

2 for random oc?

2: Cooking headcanon - Featuring Valra ‘Shrike’ Locke, the elven bounty hunter.

Valra was born into a middle class family, but her childhood friendship with a noble girl gave her a taste- quite literally- of fine living. As much as you might not be able to tell from her at times crude and harsh exterior as an adult, her appetite for high-quality cigars, liquor, and spices hint at her more expensive tastes.

Valra’s mother, Illia, is a hunter, and thus Valra has had the most experience cooking game. 

The life of a bounty hunter isn’t often conducive to having access to a full kitchen, so Valra is most adept at roasting her food simply over an open fire. However, despite its simplicity, her food is always well-seasoned, and never overdone.

[crispy-ghee]

In your Mas y Manos-universe, does Shepard exist there with Solomon or is he still together with Pasensya? :)

So, Shepard was originally going to be in the story and end up with Solomon, but over the past year or so of writing that's changed.

Part of it is that personally I started to feel like Mas y Manos sort of became its own thing, largely divorced from the original AU apart from the occasional reference. Pretty much all the characters are original, the world is original, and as a story it's become pretty personal (for me at least, I can't speak for Isei here), an exploration and celebration of old family ties and culture that we grew up with.

Anyway, another part of it is just that I grew very attached to the relationship that Solomon and Pasensya had. The two of them loved each other deeply and complemented each other well, and they built a life together. The translation from "Cousin" to "Solomon" isn't as easy as a one-to-one, either, as the cultural and social shifts are huge. The would approach love and relationships very differently. Solomon's loyalty to Pasensya is intense.

That being said, unfortunately, Pasensya has passed away by the time the main Mas y Manos story starts, probably about 7 years before Mas and JT meet, 3 years after JT runs away from home. They work hard to keep her memory alive, however, and Solomon still has a deep, ongoing loyalty to his late wife and is unlikely to ever pursue another romantic relationship.

If and where Shepard would slot into the story, I'm not sure, as she's not come up in the writing and it would feel a bit weird to just slide her in to some of the already-established plot. Maybe a future storyline, and maybe not called Shepard. There's a character that was once "Garrus" that's still in there, so why not.

[beevean]

SEGA and its most recent Sonamy side – more canon than ever

[Translator’s note: this article was originally written in Spanish by @latin-dr-robotnik​]

Hello again! Today we’d like to discuss about something that’s been happening recently, and probably taking Sonic fans by surprise: what is going on with SEGA and its stance about Sonamy?

At the beginning of this year, to celebrate the 200 articles on Seaside Hill Paradise, I finished what I call “the Sonamy trilogy” of articles that I started in 2018 and which cover different themes, such as:

SEGA and the eternal issue of the Sonic-Amy dynamic

“I love you” – Forbidden words in Sonic

SEGA and the eternal issue of “Sonic’s girlfriend”

The idea was to offer a more-or-less complete analysis about the many facets of their dynamic in the last 27 years; a dynamic that, you may have noticed, is not that easy to pin down, and that we’ve been updating almost regularly (although I also intended to investigate on other dynamics, like Knuckles and Rouge’s for example, and write about them). Generally speaking, in these articles I don’t draw objective conclusions about the status of the ship in canon (despite the fact that the available information tends to confirm it in various occasions). I also like to repeat myself and say that shipping is supposed to be for fun, not for tearing each other’s hair in that black hole of misery that is Twitter, but recent events left us slightly perplexed, and this is why we’re here once again.

We left the status of the Sonamy canonicity with these two peculiar instances back in August: Sonic mentioning his “girlfriend” in the Japanese version of Sonic Battle, and the Twitter account of SEGA of Europe saying Sonamy is their “favorite videogame romance”. Now, let’s recap a bit…

Sonamy in Sonic IDW... Round 3

[SPOILERS ALERT FOR IDW SONIC #14-#35]

In 2018, when IDW just started, I decided to study a little how the Sonamy dynamic worked in this new universe. To our surprise, the comic didn’t waste time in dropping its biggest bomb, in one of the cutest scenes we had seen in ages. Since the very beginning, IDW proved that it didn’t intend to deceive those fans that looked for a bit of development of both characters.

I wrote an article about it in June 2019, and it coincided with the beginning of one of the most infamous arc I’ve seen in a Sonic comic for a long time: the Metal Virus Saga. The question is, what has happened since then?

Well, in 2019, with the same accuracy of an aimbot, I said “We’ll probably see some new interactions between Sonic and Amy sometime around IDW #20”. And wouldn’t you know, as misery and tragedy settled in that arc, it was exactly around IDW #20 that we saw some Sonamy interactions: both exhausted, to their limit, with a Sonic that couldn’t even touch Amy to soothe her pain, due to him being infected with the virus.

The arc developed like this in what felt like an eternity, to finally conclude in one the most absurd ways in Sonic history. But it wasn’t a complete disappointment, as, after months and months of asking and discussing on the internet about how much Sonic and Amy deserved a hug at the end of the arc… it actually happened.

Since that moment in IDW #32, we shippers thought that it was what both of them deserved after so much time spent separated and pushed to their limit to survive, but also that after the end of the arc everything would go back to normal. However, what we didn’t know was that the Sonamy train had no intention of stopping, not in IDW, nor anywhere else.

A recurring detail in IDW Sonic is that Amy’s tail starts wagging every time she sees Sonic, as if she was a happy dog. I swear, it happens every time.

Come IDW #35, once again we have some hugs and bits of dialogue between our hedgehogs. For sure, the question here isn’t their relationship itself, as it was for IDW #2, but rather the issues this arc is slowly dealing with. But it’s really nice to see them again, sharing that closeness that they’ve had in the comic since the beginning– be it with some gestures of affection, a wink, a gesture, a private joke.

My favorite image is the first one, Belle’s reaction to seeing Amy hugging Sonic. It’s like she’s thinking “oh, is she his girlfriend?”, and she wouldn’t even be wrong in thinking that.

It can’t be denied that IDW Sonic provided us the conversations and the emotions that the games seldom do. Certainly, the comic has its share of issues and it’s not really a story that I personally follow for its own merits (it’s more because it’s still Sonic, for my interest for things like this, and Belle’s existence… whom I already ship with Tails, sorry not sorry), but what it does well it does really well.

For now, we have to see how IDW Sonic will follow the development of the characters, especially in view of the closure of the current story and beyond. And we may be done with this part of the article, but there is still a lot left.

Sonamy in merchandise

Taking us completely by surprise, recently SEGA launched, in collaboration with Hot Topic, a series of Sonamy-themed t-shirts. No, seriously.

So many people told me this as soon as the voice spread (you know who you are, thank you guys for thinking about me <3), and I can’t help being still surprised that this is actually a thing. T-shirts with lines like “You’re my favorite”, “Love in the fast lane”, and my personal favorite, “S&A Forever”, with drawings of Classic Sonic and Amy… in SEGA-approved products. I don’t know if you realize how much of a big deal this is, even more than “Celebrate the 25 years of Sonic’s girlfriend” from 2018.

One of the things that surprised me the most (aside from how explicit they are in officializing the relationship, and the fact that there are still 2 months left before Valentine’s Day 2021), was the decision to use Classic Sonic and Classic Amy. I tried to understand this decision by analyzing the simplicity and easiness with which the Classic designs convey a message (let’s not forget that Classic Sonic was so iconic because it was specifically designed to convey his expressions without words), besides the fact that they’re inherently cuter than their modern designs. There’s also the controversial aspect of post-Adventure Sonamy, with all the dubbing and weird interpretations that the fandom made over the years… By comparison, the Classic design are a much simpler choice.

What is actually going on?

Well, let’s take a step back and think about what we just saw. The way SEGA has been recently trying to push Sonic and Amy in front view (and for the entirety of 2020, based on the articles I mentioned in the beginning) tells us the harsh truth we all have to accept sooner or later: Sonamy sells, and it sells a lot.

From a strictly business point of view, the ship is so iconic and popular, with fans and detractors alike, that it would be absurd for SEGA to ignore the chance to print these two characters and get a load of money. As I said in my 2018 article, despite the fact that in Japan Sonic isn’t as big of an icon as it is elsewhere, they know pretty well that Sonic + Amy = love, and they have huge amounts of merchandise to back it up. It’s in the West that because of different cultural values, of which we’ve already talked about, along with some internal resistance, left this aspect of the franchise a little on the side. But they’ve been trying to fix it… and how…

Let’s not forget that a decade and a half ago Sonic Team seriously favored Sonamy. They officially said it, Sonic X was their purest view of Sonic they had at the time.

Outside of the business perspective, I believe we’re facing the moment that we’ve been waiting for: it’s time they’ll establish once and for all the dynamic of these two characters, following more closely the original Japanese vision of Sonic. I said many times that, in trying to change canon, the West, especially SEGA of America, did nothing but confuse fans and generate more discussions than needed, by introducing different data and portrayals that contradict the canon established by Sonic Team.

We’ve talked about Unleashed and emotional support, about Sonic X, about the major moments that opened the door to interpreting this dynamic as something more. We don’t threaten at gunpoint those who would rather stay away, but we respond to those declarations that still try to violently discredit the simple fact that Sonic and Amy, who are most of all close friends, form in some measure a couple that, even with its imposed limitations, manages to captivate fans and not fans everywhere in the world. Even the Simpsons used it as a joke, and that says a lot.

What the future has in store for us.

Unless something else happens in this last month of 2020, this is the most complete compilation I can offer at the moment about the status of Sonamy in the fandom and in the official canon. Yes, canon.

It’s impossible to ignore the signals. As you may have noticed, I’ve been considering Sonic and Amy as an official couple, with its clarifications (for example, that at the end it’s more of a friendship, that it’s not a romantic relationship in the most explicit way, that it’s more of a personal perspective to justify a more mature vision of the relationship in the future, not right now), but nowadays I think that SEGA has spoken loud and clear. I think canon is ready to negotiate the idea that Sonic and Amy, apart from being excellent friends who would risk their lives for each other in a heartbeat, have something else on their hands (probably the other’s hand). This won’t automatically translate into a kiss, or a complete love declaration (although Sonic X came close…), or a commitment to a formal relationship like we know them in real life. SEGA canon affirms that Amy is “Sonic’s girlfriend” and nothing more. Outside of that detail, they still pretty much function as friends interacting with a little flirting here, and a little Sonic running away there. It’s the basis of their dynamic, now enhanced by the fact that SEGA is giving us a clearer message.

I think that this all may culminate in a game or an animated series, but I wouldn’t completely count on that. It is good to recognize how far the official position goes on this issue, but at the same time I want to reaffirm that there are things that are better left in the hands of the fandom, and in the meantime that IDW or any other continuity gives us hugs, winks, gestures and words of encouragement, we as the fandom will take care of exploring other avenues and hypothetical scenarios.

This is all I have to say on the matter for now, and I hope you’re happy with this wonderful Sonamy experience we’re going through – I certainly am. See you next time!

[theparanormalperiodical]

The REAL Story Behind The Crooked Man And The 7 Other Fairy Tales & Nursery Rhymes With *Even More* Disturbing Backstories

It was 4 years ago that we first met the Crooked Man.

With a *sickening* reveal via rottweiler fit for the latest season of Rupaul’s Drag Race, the suited gentleman staggered his way from The Conjuring 2 (2016) into our nightmares.

But his ashy undertones, gnashing teeth, and general aura of “I’m a demon, or something, which means I have no real motive apart from wanting to kill you” isn’t the only thing that fits the film far too well.

The Conjuring universe is the definition of ‘based on a true story’. And the Crooked Man fits the brief.

In the opening scenes of the film we see lovable and bulliable Billy stutter through a nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile, He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile; He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, And they all liv'd together in a little crooked house.

Accompanied by a totally-cursed-i-mean-just-look-at-it zoetrope (it’s a bit like a mini projector that shows you a moving cartoon), Billy introduces us to one of the handful of extra entities terrorising London’s most haunted house. You can discover more about the true story of 284 Green Street which inspired The Conjuring 2 here. 

But Billy also introduces us to a real nursery rhyme inherent in British culture - and British history.

Yes, the nursery rhyme, like many, is based on dark and twisted reality softened for a bedtime story. And amongst this history was a real person. Unfortunately, the Crooked Man is not the only fairy tale monster or nursery rhyme entity that will be haunting your dreams.

Are y’all tucked in?

The Crooked Man

The nursery rhyme was first told sometime in the 17th century during the reign of King Charles I. But the Crooked Man was not the Stuart King - it was allegedly inspired by Scottish general Sir Alexander Leslie and the covenant he signed.

The covenant secured religious and political freedom for Scotland despite prevailing animosity between the English and the Scottish.

The crooked stile is the awkward alliance between the two parliaments and the crooked house refers to the collective union the Scottish and English lived together in. But the ‘crooked’ part works on another level, too.

The great recoinage of late 17th century meant sixpences - which feature in the rhyme - were made of very thin silver and thus easy to bend.

An alternative origins story links it back to Lavenham, a village in Suffolk (England). The half-timbered houses leaned at off angles as if supporting each other, creating a crooked aesthetic that matches the nursery rhyme.

The Pied Piper Of Hamelin

I distinctly remember hearing the story of the Pied Piper when I was about 7 years old. I was there, sat crossed-legged on the wooden floor in assembly and listening to the headteacher tell us the tale of the musical maverick with an overhead projector.

I remember it being far more nostalgic and not so traumatising.

The story goes that sometime in the 13th century a peculiar man dressed in brightly-coloured clothes (pied clothing) was hired by the town to rid them of the rats with his pipe-playing abilities. Hamelin had been suffering from an infestation that would threaten the locals with the plague. The piper was to play his pipe, entice the rats with his magical music, and lead them to a river where they would promptly drown.

He was hired and he did the job - but they didn’t pay up.

The piper couldn’t exactly refund his services. Instead, he sought vengeance, luring away the children of the town with his magical pipe. He waited until Saint John and Paul’s day where the adults would be in the church, dressed in green like a hunter, and played his pipe. The children of the village swarmed to him, all 130 of them, following him out of the town and into a cave. Three were unable to follow due to being blind and deaf and thus told the villagers what had happened.

The real story:

Some versions of the story claimed he made them walk into a river, others claim he returned them after payment. But what we do know for sure is that there is a street in Hamelin called Bungelosenstrasse. On this street - ‘the street without drums’ according to translation - the children were seen last. No music and no dancing is allowed on this road.

Bluebeard

We open on a typical Medieval scene: a powerful and wealthy man is looking for a young wife to replace the last one who mysteriously went missing. Bluebeard’s been through quite a few women, actually, but it’s his latest bae that stars in this story. Bluebeard marries his neighbour’s daughter and goes on a business trip.

He tells her he can stay alone in their house but she cannot open a certain door.

Of course, she opens the door and finds the corpses of his ex-wives. Her and her sisters band together to kill Bluebeard, showering themselves with a wealthy inheritance.

The real story:

This tragic tale of murder and mystery is unfortunately all too true.

There are many alleged origins of the folktale. Let’s start with the Medieval ruler of Brittany, Conomor the Cursed: his new wife agreed to marry him to prevent him from invading her father’s lands but accidentally walked in on a room full of his dead, old wives. She was visited by their ghosts who warn him if she falls pregnant, he will kill her, preventing a prophecy that claims he will be killed by his own son.

She gets knocked up, gives birth, and then she gets her block knocked off.

An alternative inspiration could be a similarly brutal figure: Gilles de Rais (15th century). He was accused of murdering approximately 140 children who suddenly went missing in the Nantes countryside. He was condemned to death and executed in 1440.

Snow White

It’s one of the most popular fairytales of all time.

The story goes that a queen gives birth to a baby girl but dies in childbirth. The king’s new wife is wicked and vain, asking her magic mirror ‘who is the fairest one of all?’ on a daily basis. When the child turns seven, the mirror changes its answer from the queen to the child, Snow White (yeah, that’s weird). The queen hires a huntsman to kill Snow White, but she begs for mercy and says she will live in the woods and he can pretend he killed her.

She finds shelter in a cottage belonging to seven dwarfs who agree to let her stay as a maid until the evil queen asks the mirror her favourite question. It claims Snow White is still alive and the fairest of them all. She goes through several methods of attempting to kill Snow until she falls into a deep coma. The dwarfs host a funeral, a prince comes along, and he, uhhh, kisses what he assumed to be a corpse and she is awakened.

They then get hitched but don’t invite the queen to the wedding. The queen asks the mirror yet again the identity of the fairest, assuming Snow is well and truly deceased but the mirror breaks the bad news to her again. The queen tries to kill her once more but Snow’s hubby forces her to wear red-hot iron slippers and dance in them until she dies.

There’s a lot going on here.

But rather than unpacking everything that's wrong with all of this *gestures to everything*, let’s just get to the dark reality beneath it all.

The real story:

The inspiration is generally deemed to be Margaretha von Walbeck, a young woman who had a terrible relationship with her stepmother. She was forced to move to Brussels and fell in love with Phillip II of Spain, a romance not popular with her parents.

Suddenly, however, Margaretha died. Rumour has it she was poisoned.

Another detail of her life also links her to Snow White: her father’s copper mines were often filled with child labourers whose growth was stunted by working in them, mirroring the ‘dwarves’ in the story.

But Margaretha is not the only contender: Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina Freifräulein von Erthal *inhale* also hated her stepmother. This - and the fact that her stepmother was given a mirror as a gift by her husband - also ties her to Snow White.

Hansel And Gretel

It’s possibly the most simple fairy tale up for discussion: a brother and sister are sent out to the woods by their father. The mother asked for him to send them away so they can survive a famine. But Hansel uses stones to trace their steps back home. One day, however, he uses crumbs. They get eaten by the local wildlife, so the kids get lost.

They then discover a witch's house, a gingerbread cottage. She lures ‘em in, fattens up Hansel, and prepares to feast on his flesh. The kids plot against her, throw her in the oven, and steal her stuff before heading back to live with their father.

Okay, so maybe this one isn’t based on a true story. It’s based on true stories. Yep - plural.

The real story:

Child abandonment and infanticide was pretty common during plagues, famines, and all other circumstances of poverty. In fact, this particular tale is believed to come from the Great Famine which stretched across Europe from 1315 to 1317. Child abandonment surged during this time.

Rapunzel

Turns out Disney lopped off a lot of Rapunzel’s real story to make it a family friendly movie. Yep, this is a weird one.

A pregnant woman begins to crave a kind of salad leaf (Campanula rapunculus, also called rapunzel) in the garden of the house next door. He goes out to nick it but is caught by the homeowner - a witch. She says he can take the rapunzel, but in return he must give her the child once it is born.

The witch raises Rapunzel as her own but locks her away in a tower when she is 12 to protect her from the outside world.

A prince eventually rocks up and decides to climb her immensely long hair. Unknown, probably PG-13 and probably not consensual acts happen. Still, given it's the medieval era they agree to get hitched after escaping.

The witch discovers her plan, cuts off her hair, exiles Rapunzel, and uses the locks as bait for the prince before throwing him to the briar roses below where he is promptly blinded. Rapunzel gives birth to twins and the prince finds her, identifying her only by her voice. Her tears restore his voice.

The real story:

Being kidnapped or being kept hidden away from the rest of the world is pretty common, well, all of the time. But Saint Barabara, a Greek saint, was the main inspiration for the tale.

She was locked away in a tower in Turkey in the third century by her father in an attempt to protect her Christianity. But her Pagan father’s efforts did not succeed and she discovered the ways of Jesus. She escaped but she was eventually caught by her father who then tortured and beheaded her.

Religious intolerance, y’all.

Beauty And The Beast

Time for another Disney classic with a heavily edited plotline.

The father of a family seeks shelter in a grand palace during a storm. In the morning before he leaves he takes a rose from the garden but is caught by a beast who threatens to kill him for nicking a flower. But the beast agrees not to kill him if his daughter takes his place instead.

The daughter moves to the palace but asks to go see her family for a week. She is then convinced by her sisters to stay at home. A magic mirror then reveals the beast is dying because she isn’t with him. She returns to him and her love breaks the curse that makes him appear so monstrous.

The real story:

Petrus Gonsalvus (1637-1618) was born with hypertrichosis. This meant he had a thick layer of hair all over his body - his physical difference didn’t go down very well. He was kept as a ‘wild man’ in a cage and fed raw meat.

When he was 10 years old he was gifted to the king of france. But he wasn’t kept as a ‘beast’. He was educated like a nobleman and was taught to read, write, and speak three different languages. He was then married off to the daughter of a court servant.

He was married to her for over 40 years and they had seven children together.

(Aww.)

Three Blind Mice

Three blind mice, three blind mice, See how they run, see how they run, They all ran after the farmer’s wife, Who cut off their tails with a carving knife, Did you ever see such a thing in your life, As three blind mice?

The real story:

It's one of those nursery rhymes you grow up with - and 17 years later you realise how traumatic it actually is.

This nursery rhyme can be traced back to the reign of Bloody Mary (16th century) who had a tricky relationship with Protestants. And by that I mean she burnt them alive, hence the nickname.

The three blind mice represented three Protestant bishops who may have been blinded before their execution or spiritually blind for following Catholicism. Another reference to Queen Mary was her as a farmer’s wife.

Her husband, Philip of Spain, owned several estates and thus was technically a farmer.

Welp, there goes your childhood.

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See you next week, kiddos. Sleep tight.

[tomakeitbeautifultolive]

Defending Jon Snow’s Honor

Re: "Jon Snow is Trash": Because if you accept the season eight depiction of Jon Snow as credible, then you might as well admit that Daenerys was mad all along.

Disclaimer: This is not a defense of Jon Snow's actions in season eight, but a refutation of his portrayal.

To begin, we must confront the elephant in the room: In season eight, the character of Daenerys Targaryen was butchered both literally and figuratively. It was such a brutal and heinous maiming of her character that by the end of the series, it was impossible to suspend disbelief and accept the inane and illogical choices of the writers.

But when you then turn around and insist that Jon Snow has always been "trash"—it's no different than the people who insist Daenerys has always been mad. The hit job on Jon Snow was, admittedly, a bit more subtle. But it was a hit job nonetheless. Do not let two talentless writers convince you that Jon Snow, at any point in season eight, acted within the bounds of his established character or even within in-universe show logic.

Because he didn't.

And no, I won't put any of this under a cut. Let the sheer length of this post serve as proof, itself, of just how dirty David Benioff and D.B. Weiss did Jon Snow.

The Real Jon Snow

While the writing on Game of Thrones suffered the further the story strayed from the books and from its original creator, George R.R. Martin, season seven—for all its faults and imperfections—still seemed to follow the natural progression of the story. Everyone still felt more or less in-character, particularly Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen.

So, that's where we'll start. To me, season seven Jon Snow is the rough culmination of exactly where I believe his story arc will lead—and it's a great season to help showcase his qualities.

Regardless of any personal preference for characters, in season seven, Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen are equals. She is a queen and he is a king.

When they meet, she appeals to her power and her claim by inheritance in order to convince Jon to bend the knee. Of course, it was never going to be that easy. Jon's a stubborn man and he has no reason to put his blind faith into well, anyone.

It is only upon revealing her true nature—her selflessness and willingness to use her power to help others—that Daenerys earns not only his respect, but his heart.

To say that "Jon Snow was always trash" is an insult to Daenerys and her judgment.

Dany's love for Khal Drogo was born of adaptation, to make the best of a situation she never asked for. Unlike Jorah Mormont, Jon's devotion to Daenerys had nothing to do with her looks. Unlike Daario Naharis, Jon's devotion to Daenerys had nothing to do with her power or status... and everything to do with who she is fundamentally. Jon Snow pledged to fight for Daenerys based on the content of her character rather than her beauty.

Further, Daario Naharis really stood face to face with Daenerys Targaryen, the Mhysa, and said "fuck the people". Meanwhile, it is Jon Snow's mysterious scars that prove he and Daenerys harbor similar ideologies—demonstrating that Jon is willing to stop at nothing for his people—even if it requires giving his own life.

Many have called Jon Snow "stupid" for exactly this, completely missing the point that there are qualities that deserve to be held in higher esteem than self-preservation or cleverness.

Compassion.

Self-sacrifice.

Humility.

Dignity.

Honesty.

When Jon Snow declares his loyalty to Daenerys in the Dragonpit in front of everyone—this is yet another moment people like to point to as "stupid", yet...

"I'm not going to swear an oath I can't uphold. When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies."

Jon Snow's integrity is more important to him than lying just to save his own hide. After all, he tried that once before, and the only thing it resulted in was heartache and regret. Jon Snow more or less asserts that a life wherein he must pretend to be something he isn't—isn't a life worth living.

This is as profound a revelation as it is bold.

Whether or not you agree with his convictions... Jon Snow's moral foundation is as unyielding as Valyrian steel. It is no wonder that this was the man who ultimately won the heart of Daenerys Targaryen. A man whose favor cannot be bought or exploited.

One fundamental change in Jon Snow's character from page to screen, however, is his ambition. This emphasis on his reluctance in ruling becomes an unfortunate cornerstone of season eight. But if Jon Snow's book counterpart—the one who dreamt of becoming Lord of Winterfell, of conquering and leading men into glory—lacks this hesitation, and instead, takes leadership so seriously that he only celebrates becoming Lord Commander with one gulp of alcohol... then what impact could his ambition have on the story?

Upon learning that Jon is Rhaegar's son, it's easy to jump to the conclusion that he'll suddenly start vying for the Iron Throne. But if Jon Snow pledges himself to Queen Daenerys in the books, then we have every reason to believe his word is as good as gold. Jon is not a man who takes his oaths lightly. Nor is he a man who is easily manipulated.

Jon Snow deciding to swear fealty to anyone is momentous.

Take, for instance, Stannis Baratheon. Jon's 'father', Ned, pretty much died in support of Stannis' claim to the throne, so he approaches the boy and appeals to Jon's deepest desire—the first thing he can remember wanting—to become a Stark.

All he had to do was say the word, and he would be Jon Stark, and nevermore a Snow. All he had to do was pledge this king his fealty, and Winterfell was his. All he had to do ... was forswear his vows again. And this time it would not be a ruse. To claim his father's castle, he must turn against his father's gods.

This is not an easy decision for Jon Snow. He spends a great deal of time considering the offer from just about every angle one can. Admittedly, it's hard to showcase deep internal reflection on a television show, so we didn't really get to see that process for Jon on screen. But it's always been apparent that two men of privilege—David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—struggle in writing from the perspective of a bastard. Fundamentally, they cannot fully inhabit Jon as a result, because they've never experienced a lifetime of unprovoked contempt, resulting in an unfortunate lack of depth in Jon's translation from page to screen.

Even so, we do get some insight into the depth of Jon's character in season seven when Theon Greyjoy says to Jon:

"You've always known what was right. Even when we were all young and stupid, you always knew. Every step you take, it's always the right step."

In turn, Jon replies:

"It's not. It may seem that way from the outside, but I promise you, it's not true. I've done plenty of things that I regret."

So, by the time that Jon must decide whether or not to accept Stannis Baratheon's offer, he does so with the consideration of future regret. It is in a reflective moment that Jon decides that his greatest desires are not worth the moral expense.

And so, Jon refuses to betray his father's gods, and remains a Snow.

The Kinslaying Problem

Speaking of gods... Way back in his wildling heyday, Ygritte recounts the tale of Bael the Bard to Jon Snow, in which she reveals a curious detail:

"The gods hate kinslayers, even when they kill unknowing."

While you could make the case that this foreshadows Jon as a kinslayer regarding Daenerys... considering it was their kinship that drove a wedge right through their relationship in show canon, it's safe to say season eight Jon knew full well he was kin to Daenerys when he killed her. So what else could this quote mean?

The "kinslayer who kills unknowing" probably won't refer to Daenerys at all—but the mysterious figure known in the books as the Night's King, of whom all records have been destroyed, his very name forbidden.

But... Old Nan insists we do know his name. At least one of them:

"He was a Stark, the brother of the man who brought him down."

Keep in mind that it's Bran she tells, not Jon. And her words even echo the kinslaying element between these mysterious and legendary figures in and around the North.

Interestingly, one of the most prominent kinslayers in the story is the one who, in season eight, ultimately convinces Jon Snow to murder his queen. And somehow, it takes virtually no effort on Tyrion's part to persuade Jon Snow to commit not only regicide, but kinslaying (whatever happened to "The man that passes the sentence should swing the sword"?)

This may mean nothing in the show, but in the books it's reiterated over and over again we're told how accursed such an act is. And we have a pretty good example that it might be true. Rickard Karstark warned Robb Stark prior to his execution by the Young Wolf's hand:

"We are kin, Stark and Karstark. Old gods or new, it makes no matter. No man is so accursed as the kinslayer."

And we all know the fate that befell Robb Stark.

The Incest Problem

Speaking of kin... let's talk incest! While there's no question that on earth, discovering you've been copulating with your aunt might be a cause for surprise... In Westeros? It's not even considered incest. No, not even in the North, where we're given two examples of uncle-to-niece pairings:

"In Westeros incest is only applied if father lays with daughter, mother lays with son, or brother to sister, and the children of such unions are considered abominations. The views regarding marriages between an uncle and a niece (or an aunt to a nephew) might differ between the Faith and the old gods. In the north, Serena Stark had been wed to her half-uncle, Edric, while her sister Sansa Stark had been wed to her half-uncle Jonnel Stark."

In the original draft of the story, Jon was supposed to have a romantic relationship with Arya Stark—his cousin by blood, but who, for all he knows, is his sister. Seeds of this are still scattered in early chapters of ASOIAF, as illustrated by the sheer tenderness of their relationship in A Game of Thrones.

For years, Arya Stark was the only woman who treated Jon with respect. It's no wonder that his feelings for her have always bordered on romantic (and let me make a clear distinction here—I said romantic, not sexual). Considering that it was George's original plan, it's pretty safe to guess that being a willing participant in an incestuous relationship is not necessarily out of character for Jon Snow, as was predetermined by the man who created him.

Jon Snow is a polarizing character for people who love Targaryens and hate Starks—and vice versa. Whether or not you like it, Jon Snow is a Targaryen. And thus, the Doctrine of Exceptionalism applies to him, which states:

"The Targaryens wed brother to sister as the Valyrians had always done, and as the gods had made them this way, it was not for men to judge." 

While the show canon did next to nothing with Jon Snow's true Targaryen lineage—never forget that the entire reason David Benioff and D.B. Weiss were given the rights to Game of Thrones was that they could correctly answer the question "Who is Jon Snow's mother?"

An incestuous scandal was the best that the lackluster show writers could come up with. And to then accept that the only reason George R.R. Martin penned this central plot twist in his medieval fantasy story exclusively to create some modern-era incest drama is, frankly, insulting.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are creatively barren. As barren as... um, Daenerys apparently?

To further exploit the show's lack of logical reasoning—it turns out that, yes, according to show canon, Daenerys was barren the whole time. While Jon doubted the validity of Mirri Maz Duur's claims... he was wrong. And Daenerys was straightforward with him that their union would produce no offspring. And apparently, despite all the wasted dialogue used to foreshadow, she was right.

This means that even within the boundaries of the show's broken logic, the anti-incest angle never held water.

So... if season eight Jon Snow's rejection of Daenerys is what ultimately causes her to "snap", yet it's unlikely that book Jon Snow will feel the same strong aversion about their relation... will she "snap" at all?

The Execution Problem

When it comes to the 'old way', Ned Stark has taught his sons well, Jon Snow among them:

"We hold to the belief that the man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die."

When Jon encounters Ygritte, he can't bring himself to kill her despite the command to. She reminds him of his sister, Arya—the girl he loves the most in all the world. And so, he asks Ygritte to yield. Jon Snow, simply reminded of a girl he loves, cannot bring himself to kill Ygritte.

Later, we directly witness Jon applying Ned's logic to his execution of Janos Slynt. After advising Janos on how best to achieve a quick death, he says:

"If you have any last words, now is the time to speak them."

"Please, my lord. Mercy. I'll … I'll go, I will, I …"

No, thought Jon. You closed that door. Longclaw descended.

Like his father before him, Jon advised Janos to speak his last words. And upon hearing them, deemed him fit to die.

This is Jon Snow's execution style.

We see it repeated even in season six when he executes his murderers:

"If you have any last words, now is the time."

Patiently, he waits for each of his four murderers to speak before letting them hang.

This is Jon Snow's execution style.

Alternatively, we see another style of execution when it comes to Jon Snow's own murder, as carried out by Alliser Thorne. Let's just go ahead and refer to this style as dishonorable and cowardly (two qualities that we've now established that Jon Snow does not possess).

Jon Snow was led, unarmed, into a false sense of security—where he was then cornered and stabbed in the heart by his enemies, left lying in a pool of his own blood.

The change in Jon Snow's execution style to suddenly emulate the way in which he was murdered is a cold-blooded betrayal of Jon's character.

But back to Janos.

On the surface, Jon Snow made a snap decision to execute Janos Slynt for disobeying a command—though if we're being honest, it was more-so because Janos was an entitled and sniveling Lannister loyalist that couldn't be trusted, or, a clever political move to ensure Jon’s future safety as Lord Commander.

Jon then severed the man's head as he cried and begged for his life.

You expect us to believe that this man...

...would be bothered by the execution of attempted murderer and traitor, Varys? A man who openly suggested they collude and commit treason?

While the above gif looks a little more like the Jon Snow we know, it’s not. Especially considering the writers tried their hardest to make us believe Jon Snow is incapable of dishonesty and lying, even by omission, he neglects to tell Daenerys of Varys’ treasonous ways. He cannot lie to his siblings or to Daenerys about his Targaryen identity, yet he can omit a very troubling piece of information regarding one of the allies of the woman he loves and is pledged to. What?

Further, compare the execution below with the above gifs of Jon Snow's two executions. He even shows more satisfaction in the deaths of the lives he’s taken than Daenerys did. Varys surviving means Dany’s life will forever be at risk. Not only is Varys an oathbreaker, but he attempted regicide by poison. Having Jon Snow judge Daenerys for this action is a blatant double standard that makes zero logical sense.

And speaking of attempted murderers... Let's discuss Randyll Tarly.

Randyll Tarly is no stranger to Jon Snow. Sam told him all about his father way back in episode four of season one:

"You're almost a man now, but you're not worthy of my land and title. Tomorrow, you're going to take the black, forsake all claim to your inheritance and start north. If you do not, then we'll have a hunt, and somewhere in these woods your horse will stumble, and you'll be thrown from your saddle to die. Or so I'll tell your mother. Nothing would please me more."

So, you're going to tell me that Jon Snow is suddenly perturbed by the execution of a man who both threatened to murder his own son and who betrayed his liege lord?

To fight alongside the Lannisters, no less?

According to the books, this is what Jon Snow thinks of the Lannisters:

"It's death and destruction I want to bring down upon House Lannister, not scorn."

And in case you missed it, this is how Jon Snow punishes those who betray their liege lords:

Maybe you’re itching to argue that it’s Dany’s execution style that is the problem. That perhaps, 'death by fire is heinous and cruel! Beheading and hanging and punching someone to death are all "merciful" deaths!' Because, stupefyingly, that's a popular argument for those that (also stupefyingly) defend Randyll Tarly.

That argument might work if not for the fact that Jon instructed his men to launch flaming arrows at the Battle of Castle Black, thus using fire as a means to kill.

The Arya Stark Problem

We've already discussed Arya Stark a little bit in terms of her deep bond with Jon Snow... but in order to truly show how out-of-character their reunion was, we need to backtrack a little bit.

Upon gifting her Needle, Jon and Arya have this exchange in the books:

"And whatever you do..."

Arya knew what was coming next. They said it together.

"...don't ... tell ... Sansa!"

Not only do the pair have an understanding which excludes their sister or trusting her with sensitive information... when Arya is caught with Needle later on, this happens:

Arya chewed her lip and said nothing. She would not betray Jon, not even to their father.

And when Arya attempts to shed her identity at the House of Black and White, she can't bring herself to part with Needle, because:

Needle was Jon Snow's smile. The Many-Faced God can have the rest, she thought, but he can't have this.

Arya Stark refuses to part with the physical representation of Jon Snow's smile.

For the most anticipated reunion in the entire show, it fell flat. Don't get me wrong, it was exhilarating to see Jon Snow and Arya Stark embracing after being apart for a decade—and Kit Harington and Maisie Williams did their absolute best with the poor dialogue they were given.

But this was not the reunion of two characters who survived some of their toughest challenges by merely recalling the memory of the other. Jon and Arya shared a bond that nothing could tarnish—not even time. A bond that no one—not even their fellow family members—could penetrate.

The nerve of the writers making Arya Stark, one of the cleverest characters in the books despite her age, say that Sansa Stark is the smartest person she's ever met? No. For one, Arya Stark did not need to live as a bastard in order to empathize with them—which means that even as a little girl, she possessed wisdom that is years ahead of her elder sister's.

Much like Jon Snow, Arya Stark is not a character who is easily persuaded by the opinions of others. Which is why she and Jon are close at all—she never once believes the stigma attached to his bastardy, because it's so blatantly obvious to her that his character simply doesn't fit the rhetoric.

I'd be willing to bet that Jon's incredibly loyal sister would trust his judgment in pledging himself to Daenerys. And I won't for a minute believe that the girl who said to Gendry...

"I can be your family."

...would suddenly regress into intolerance, particularly not at someone else's behest.

I won't believe for a minute that the girl who said...

"The woman is important too!"

...would turn around and suggest that the woman who provided her armies, dragons, and resources to save the North should then be discarded afterward.

I won't believe for a minute that the girl who makes allies and friends everywhere she goes would turn around and argue that allies aren't important.

I won't believe for a minute that the girl who named her direwolf after the warrior queen Nymeria, the girl who said...

"He killed the slave?" That did not sound right. "He should have killed the masters!"

...wouldn't at least give the person she loves the most in all the world, Jon Snow, a few minutes to explain why he supports and believes in Daenerys.

Lastly, there is absolutely no reason to believe that Arya Stark would ever betray Jon Snow. It is an insult to one of the purest and tenderest relationships in the entire series to suggest otherwise.

The Winterfell Problem

Even on Jon Snow's AWOIAF Wiki page, he is described as "quick to sense a slight", as well as observant, "a trait he developed on account of being a bastard".

Yet, during the feast following the Night King's death... Jon Snow is suddenly portrayed as oblivious all in service to the plot to alienate Daenerys. Jon Snow's sudden disinterest in the woman he spent season seven so intently studying was both frustrating and compromising to his character traits.

After all, the most impressive leader Jon Snow has ever witnessed followed him into his homeland to save his men for nothing to gain (and in fact, to sacrifice her own men and resources), not just for the man she loves—but because it's the right thing to do.

The writers really expect us to believe that this man, who turned Janos Slynt's insubordination into an example of what happens to men who openly disrespect him and his orders...

...is going to suddenly sit idly by while his own people make a fool of him by disrespecting his chosen queen, and by extension, him.

Don't let the writers believe for an instant that he would stand for it.

Taking a step further back, what in seven hells was going on during that battle?

The betrayal to Jon Snow's character is the most glaring during episode three of season eight, in which the writers really decided to sideline the most talented and quick-thinking swordsman in their cast (next to Furdik—who, by the way, was also sidelined).

Jon Snow conveniently forgets virtually everything he learned from defending the Wall in season four and reclaiming Winterfell in season six. The King in the North who travels all the way to Dragonstone for not only dragonglass, but in hopes of gaining the help of the queen and her armies is really going to let one of those armies gallop head-first into the army of the undead with metal weapons? Jon Snow is the first character in the show to learn that regular weapons don't work against wights!

And while it may not be Jon Snow's fault that the trebuchets managed to make it to the front line of all places, he certainly would've pointed out the flaw in that decision. As well as the placement of the trenches—which physically severed the troops from the safety of the castle upon retreat. Retreat, if necessary, would be a priority for Jon Snow especially, as he, above everyone else, knows that every fallen man means one more undead soldier they must deal with.

And speaking of the trenches...

To add insult to injury, the writers really decided to add a shot of Jon Snow sitting idly next to the trenches on top of Rhaegal, a dragon that he was just using to light the dead on fire, as Melisandre struggled to light them with magic:

What? You mean this Jon Snow?

The Jon Snow that once used his quick-thinking to discover that fire kills wights... doesn't think to use dragonfire to light a trench on fire? Come on.

And since when has Jon Snow ever balked during battle? Of all the characters, he's one of the few who actually understands what the Night King is, how big his army is, what the odds are, and what it's like to be in the midst of not only battles—but ones that are going really poorly.

Yet at Winterfell—the place he fought so hard to reclaim and that he reluctantly went south to rally support for in order to protect it—he suddenly has no idea what to do? He's historically one of the most quick-witted and innovative fighters in the entire show, if not the most.

And speaking of battles...

"We find our true friends on the battlefield"

Whether or not you agree with the writers' choice to have Sam attempt to persuade Jon to commit treason against his queen... I just cannot accept that Jon Snow willingly turns away from his oldest friend in a moment like this:

Even in the most hopeless of situations, Jon Snow won't hesitate to save someone he loves. Like when he tried, against all odds, to save Rickon.

Even with complete strangers, Jon Snow has shown his gallantry.

As well as his aptitude for forgiveness.

Whether or not Samwell Tarly offended Jon, he would never leave him to die. Their principals may no longer converge the way they once did... but never forget that when, in the books, Chett suggests Thorne should kill Sam for being weak, Jon speaks up on Sam's behalf:

"Lords are gold and knights steel, but two links can't make a chain. You also need silver and iron and lead, tin and copper and bronze and all the rest, and those are farmers and smiths and merchants and the like. A chain needs all sorts of metals, and a land needs all sorts of people. You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean tin is useless."

The Night King Problem

Speaking of the battle for Winterfell... By denying Jon Snow the climax to his story arc—squaring off with the Night King—and instead, granting that honor to Arya Stark (who has no relation to anything happening north of the Wall in either book or show...) it disrupts the natural conclusions for both characters.

Jon Snow and the Night King had unfinished business—at least, that's what all those long and intense stare-downs seemed to indicate. Even in the books, the only POV chapters that mention the Night's King are Jon, Bran, and Sam.

Kit Harington was very gracious when trying to explain why he would've liked to get the killing blow:

"I was a bit pissed off, only because I wanted to kill the Night King! I think I felt like everyone else did, in that it had been set up for a long time, and then I didn't get to do it."

But even in all his graciousness, Kit points out that it's been set up for a long time. And you know what George R.R. Martin has to say about changing your plan mid-stream:

"If you planned your book that the butler did it and then you read on the internet that someone has figured out that the butler did it and then you suddenly change in mid-stream and it was the chambermaid who did it? Then you screw up the whole book because you've got this foreshadowing early on and you've got these little clues you've planted and now they're dead ends... and you have to introduce other clues and you're retconning. It's a mess."

Yet... The fact that Jon Snow vs. the Night King made sense was exactly why the writers chose not to do it!

"We hope to kind of avoid the expected and Jon Snow has always been the hero, the one who's been the savior. But it just didn't seem right to us for this moment." 

Sure, Arya Stark killing the Night King "subverted expectations" (I'm so sick of typing those two words together at this point, but it's impossible not to do when trying to discuss season eight)... but at what cost? The cost of any emotional impact.

Just like virtually everything else in the last season. 

(As an aside, if the writers really felt Arya Stark was the right person to land the killing blow, they should've had Jon lose the swordfight and before the Night King is able to finish him, his ride-or-die sister comes flying out of the darkness to save his life. The audience gets what they were promised and Arya still gets to be the hero in a way that not only makes sense, but fits her character…)

Of course, the showdown with the Night King was not the first major plot point that was teased over the course of the series to be ultimately robbed from Jon Snow.

Nor would it be the last...

The Prophecy Problem

To claim that Jon piercing Dany's heart with a quick sneak attack has any resemblance to the legend of Azor Ahai is a gross oversimplification. Let's take a look at what the legend actually says:

"He summoned his wife. 'Nissa Nissa,' he said to her, for that was her name, 'bare your breast, and know that I love you best of all that is in this world.' She did this thing, why I cannot say, and Azor Ahai thrust the smoking sword through her living heart. It is said that her cry of anguish and ecstasy left a crack across the face of the moon, but her blood and her soul and her strength and her courage all went into the steel."

Yes. Daenerys was stabbed in the heart. That is the only similarity her season eight murder bears to the above legend.

Where was the declaration of love? Where was the permission asked? Where was the consent given? There was no cry of anguish and ecstasy—there was a gasp and a gurgle. Dany's life was not given in exchange for anything, it was simply taken. There was no transference of courage or strength—just a quick and (troublingly) unimpactful "shock" death.

Of course, it's important to point out that Azor Ahai is never even mentioned in the show. And while The Prince that was Promised was mentioned (as late as season seven)... So far as show canon goes, this prophecy meant absolutely nothing in the end.

That makes two of us, Kit.

Jon Snow (and Kit Harington) Also Deserved Better

Aside from George R.R. Martin, the man who knows Jon Snow best, Kit Harington, was overcome with heartache, disbelief...

...and frustration upon reading the treacherous turn his character took in the season eight script.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss completely neutered Jon Snow's character.

Figuratively and well, maybe literally? Year after year, they have shown themselves to be petty and spiteful with various cast and crew—from Kit Harington to Ian McElhinney to Alexander Siddig to George R.R. Martin, himself.

Remember that stupid dig at Jon Snow's penis size upon his resurrection? Just a dumb joke, right?

Or was it?

It was sure important enough for them to go on record with major publications and clarify that, no, it wasn't just a joke, but canon! Pay very close attention to how it's worded:

"He just had the look. The brooding intensity; the physical grace; the chip-on-the-shoulder quality that we always associate with extraordinarily short people.

There has to be some downside to being Kit Harington, right? It's impossible not to like him. Maddening. The one thing we can do is saddle his character with a tiny pecker."

This isn't about Jon Snow's penis. It's about taking Kit Harington down a peg. Not only did they give Jon Snow a canonically "small penis", they had to give Daenerys lines about how he's "too little for her", to poke fun at Kit's height. You know, because he's apparently "extraordinarily short".

Utterly juvenile.

Much like with Tyrion Lannister, Jon Snow's cleverness far exceeded that of the men who were in charge of writing him—and they failed to replicate it. And so, the further Jon Snow strayed from his creator, George R.R. Martin, the further his IQ dropped until, by season eight, he was reduced to a bumbling idiot shouting at dragons and saying little more than "muh queen". Why? Because if you're actually an idiot, you cannot write a clever person.

As for the books, Jon Snow's true fate remains to be seen. And for as much as I don't want to get my hopes up for a better ending, I cannot ignore that Jon Snow's foreshadowing just doesn't point to futility, and that if it does—George R.R. Martin sure put in a lot of work to convince us otherwise.

As the man, himself, recently said:

"People know an ending—but not the ending."

It is as much an insult to Jon Snow to have Daenerys descend into spontaneous madness as it was for the fans who loved her. Over the years, Jon has proven himself to be a great judge of character—and this was the man who assured Daenerys, in her most vulnerable moment, that she does deserve to be the queen of the Seven Kingdoms.

After all, there’s just no denying their similarities as characters:

"From the very beginning, Jon and Daenerys' stories have paralleled and contrasted each other, with both starting from a position of weakness and insubordination before ascending into leadership roles. Both had to maneuver their way through the difficulties of power while maintaining their sense of justice, and in doing so, had to face many hard decisions along the way. Both were mocked, attacked, and betrayed for doing the right thing. Both reached their low points and were figuratively reborn at the same time, both coming out stronger as a result." -Brandon Jacobs

If you loved Jon Snow prior to season eight, you were never wrong or misled, nor was your judgment unsound. I hope that, somewhere in this post, there was at least one example that reminded you of why Jon Snow was able to win your heart in the first place. Writers who don't understand the most fundamental qualities of a character should not be given the power to rob you of your love for them.

I am willing to bet that like me, and like all of Jon Snow's fans... you know him better than the two men who were granted the honor of writing his television canon. An honor they proved in season eight that they never deserved.

Please do not grant these two incompetent writers and poor storytellers the power to turn you against one character while praising the other, especially when both were ruined beyond repair or recognition.

Forgiving Jon Snow as a character ≠ condoning what he did in season eight, just as forgiving Daenerys Targaryen ≠ condoning mass genocide.

Like Daenerys, Jon Snow deserved better.

[howlingmoonrise]

Thoughts on Petshop of Horrors: Wandering Ark volumes 1 & 2

(also on dreamwidth)

HOW did I manage to miss the translation of my long-awaited Papa D PSOH series?? I've been stalking it ever since I found the announcement and somehow the fact that @ruthlessnightsscans​ already put out the first two volumes completely went past my head.

Obviously I had to read it right away, sleep be damned.

this is the edited version of my brain thoughts after i managed to get two sleeps and calm down a bit or it would be a lot more incoherent

The art: the initial pages really remind me of the old art! Unfortunately it goes back to the roundness prevalent since the Shin series (which has only become even rounder with time) not long after. That art style is also a lot less dynamic than the original, I find. It's a bit of a problem on scenes that are supposed to have some tension caused by movement. This is nothing new since, like I said, Sensei has been using this art style since a good while ago. I really miss the original art though. It had a major nostalgia punch to it and a lot more feeling as well.

-- First chapter: "I am on a journey with no destination in mind" just say you're on vacation and go off I guess. 

Papa is... weirdly easy-going. I want to say it's because he's not yet mad with grief and his son being taken away and so on, but the glimpses we saw at his time in university definitely didn't paint him this soft. There's no edge to him, on this volume or the next. 

Regarding the story itself, I can't say I loved it but it’s not the worst out of all of them (there are four in total between these two volumes, and a third volume is on the way). I liked Koushun's character, but Seiyou annoyed me, especially when he presumed to know what she wanted (or perhaps he didn't presume, but decided for her what was better anyway) - something like I Shall Revive This Species So Breed In My Name Okay Bye. Note also that while Koushun was willing enough to marry (thinking she was marrying someone else but that's another point entirely), the groom himself came in chains. And then Seiyou... locks them in together? Great. Just great. Very conducive to a loving mood indeed, locking a woman with a potentially dangerous stranger who might cause her harm and telling them both to fuck (note. the. chains. you don’t put chains on someone you think is harmless; they never put any on Koushun even when she attacked Seiyou). I was afraid for her when it cut to another scene here, with the last we saw of her being pushed against a wall and being told by the groom that it seemed that he would have to make a child with her. "Rather than hate each other, I want to break that curse"? Seiyou, sweetie, that is NOT the way to make them not hate you. ((The reveal that Koushou is some sort of creature - very PSOH-y - does not help, since putting two wild animals together without them being used to each other is perhaps even more likely to them killing/harming one another.))

MAJOR little mermaid vibes on Koushun standing over a sleeping Seiyou with a knife. 

There are quite some parallels with the D species on this tale of bloodshed and revenge. The Ds could stand to learn from this, though historically they don't. "Even if you kill the third prince, the Kagetsu people are already gone. They won't return." Papa himself says that 'winning on the last available tile' is a waste of time, which really resonates with his research into reviving lost species and the issues of his own kind. A reference to the health of descendants when no new blood is introduced is also made here, which might or might not point to our D depending on where in time this Papa is from.

--

Second chapter: it's... frankly, super choppy. The story is all over the place. On the author's note, Akino herself says that it's a challenge to put the whole life of that empress in 57 pages, and I have to agree. Either it should have been cut to the REALLY relevant parts and worked on them some more, or be discarded in its entirety. It's too rushed. The whole first part was unnecessary: it could have started with her already working at the palace or being chosen as a concubine, and then made references to her previous life in her thoughts instead of wasting several pages on it when that backstory won't be going anywhere (except for some references to Hakubun whom she sees on that other actor - who dies like, two or three pages later, so that's that on that). I do like Ranji herself as a character: she's clever and quick to pick up on things. Her life is just a series of tragedies one after the other, unfortunately. 

Papa D is some sort of benevolent helper in this chapter for some reason - this pattern repeats somewhat on the next chapters, but on this one there isn't really anything to gain for him at all, other than perhaps his dubious acquaintance with one of the concubines/future empress, which wouldn't really hold much weight since he met her ?once? apart from near her death.

And then, somehow, the initial Papa D in this chapter was actually Sofu?

Sofu???? I'm calling bullshit. As far as we know - going back to Sofu's own series and flashbacks on the original PSOH, even - Sofu never had a hairstyle of that length, and out of our three known Ds (new!D excluded) he's the one least likely to help a human just because. The ark is also said to travel through space and time, so I'm saying that's Papa D and that's it. Fun aside: on this chapter, Papa says he's the "third generation", meaning that on this series he's probably the youngest existing D (and by inference our D does not exist yet).

Also, some issues with in-story continuity here: when the last emperor dies Ranji still looks fairly young and the emperor-to-be is three years old, a couple pages later she looks a lot more aged but the new emperor is still three years old. To be honest, I think the story would have been tied off much better if A-chan had some connection with Hakubun or the eunuch instead of each having their very brief, individual emotional connections to her - which, in turn, doesn't really make them memorable. The "wishes" thing was interesting, really called back to the old PSOH tradition with the mystical pets and bittersweet be-careful-what-you-wish-for endings.

--

Third chapter: I think, overall, this was probably the one I liked the best. Can't really bring myself to call it my favourite though, since none of them even begin to compare to the original PSOH chapters. I cackled at the "jawline is too sharp" dialogues and thoughts: with this art style EVERYONE has the same round jaw as every other character, and it's the furthest thing from "sharp" possible.

With this series it really seems like Sensei is giving more focus to trying to tell historically-accurate stories rather than focusing on the stories themselves, as there is a huge amount of superfluous historical information to be found in these volumes. 

The empress Elizabeth reminds me of Sofu, in truth. She won't "mind" affairs and the like (read: she will hate it but ignore them) as long as it works towards her ends. Her taking away the newly-born child is a huge parallel to Sofu regarding both Papa and D, and D and new!D. Child-snatching FTW! That being said, I actually kind of liked her, ruthless as she was: the whole reason why Sophie made it as far as crown princess was because Elizabeth valued her hard work. You don't get to hold an empire together without having a steel spine and a cunning mind (or people to do the work for you I guess, but here it doesn’t seem to be the case).

I hate that Sophie had to change even her name and religion to fit her new reality, accurate as it is to history. That sort of thing always messes me up (throwback to the Nazi/teddy bear chapter of the original PSOH series, where there was also a name/religion change for the sake of survival). Not a reflection on the author in any way, I just hate that this is something people had to go through. As something I hated that kinda does reflect on the author, though, was the ugly = terrible association with Pyotr and the maid. Sophie/Catherine is initially said to not be beautiful but she's not depicted in the same way those two are at all. 

Papa's benevolence is thankfully offset this chapter by the fact that he does have something to gain here. For some reason Ds doing things merely for the goodness of their hearts kind of rubs me the wrong way unless it's D during or post-Leon. 

Most PSOH victims clients: oh a pretty person! WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S AN ANIMAL Sophie/Catherine: a dog you say? sounds kinda hot ngl

Gotta respect how she just jumps straight into the dog affairs. The take-back of the empire was also nicely executed, and I'm always here for ladies in traditionally male clothing. 

--

Fourth chapter:

This is linked semi-directly to the third chapter by virtue of the amber room Papa D craved. Marks also the second time that Papa takes a human on board of the ark.

D, circa end of original PSOH, a single tear rolling down his cheek as he watches Leon plummet towards the earth: Humans have not earned the right to board this ark. Papa D: I'm gonna go for a joyride and take along this human and this human and this human and this human and--

Papa really gives Doctor Who vibes on the ark matter. Travelling through space and time, occasionally taking human companions? The one for this chapter - who I'm guessing might be a cameo from one of Sensei's other series, since I didn't recognize him and there was no backstory for him on the chapter - even has era-appropriate wardrobe changes (at least assuming it's the same person and not just someone who looks similar scratch that they have eyes of different colours so I guess Papa has been giving rides to delivery men now), the second of which leaving me very ??? as to WHEN he is from. 

That last Look(TM) reminds me a of Leon Orcot, between the long ponytail and the clothes resembling the ones Leon wore on the last chapter of Shin PSOH (in PSOH time, that would have happened approximately 15 years after the end of the original series, meaning that Papa was already long dead then. Unless Leon's style was just stuck in time, which is also very possible). 

It might or might not have endeared him to me for that exact reason. What can I say? I'm a sucker for Leon Orcot, and apparently also for characters that visually remind me of him. ANYWAY.

Why another Nazi-era chapter??? Sensei plz. One was already enough on the original PSOH - it wasn't anywhere near my favourites back then, either - and the fact that this one mostly followed a Nazi colonel didn't help either. Here we witness them tearing down the amber room, "reclaiming" art from all over the world, a father's heartbreaking sacrifice to “save” his daughter’s dog, and Papa D coming to meet the Nazi dude. One would expect the Ds to avoid genocidal racists given the fate of their own species, but apparently the Nazis were relevant enough for not one but TWO Ds to interact with them. Oh well. Either way, I really don't like how Papa appears to not care one way or another - when the D for the original series interacted with people he didn't like, his mask was really fairly obvious (at least for the reader). Perhaps Papa simply has a better mask. Perhaps those nuances were lost to time and round art styles. Perhaps Papa or Sensei just don't give two shits. Guess we'll never know.

EVERYONE seems to comment on the flavour of Papa's tea: it's 4 out of 4 so far for these two volumes, and in this chapter in particular it seems as if it's laced with some kind of truth serum - it seems to be Papa's version of D's (and possibly Sofu's?) incense from the original PSOH. A reference to the original PSOH's Nazi chapter is also made here, with Papa mentioning that Sofu was on friendly terms with Eva Braun: this implicates that in this time they were in closer contact (not surprising since Sofu probably hasn't stolen his still-non-existent kid yet).

The colonel seems to value art over human life - surprise surprise! - so he kills his own comrades to keep the art "safe". A stomach-turning moment comes where they find human golden teeth being kept as treasure, which Papa mentions remelting to turn into golden nuggets. Why, Papa/Sensei, why? It's in poor taste, even if you're testing the colonel the way D did with some of his clients on original PSOH.

At the very least an eerie moment comes next where Papa explains that dead creatures can be revived using DNA. "Even dead people?" Cue Papa's all-seeing stare directly into the reader's eyes (and presumably the colonel's as well) with a backdrop of an inverted black-and-white multitude of graves as he says that future is not very far. Colonel almost shits his pants, with reason when you consider the amount of people the Nazis killed off that would presumably come after them. This almost forgives the teeth comment, and it's probably the first moment in these two volumes when we see some genuine emotion on Papa's face (on this page and the next), creepy and maniac as it might be.

Colonel dude has spent the whole chapter justifying everything under "orders of the fuhrer" so far. Then comes the moment that Papa calls him out by saying that the orders were to burn his sweet dear art so that it wouldn't fall into enemy's hands, and it's here that we see how much of an hypocrite the colonel is when he doesn't want to follow those orders. Suddenly it's "treasures of mankind" (even though he's been stealing them left and right) and the fuhrer is "a fool" (even though he's been using his orders and his "greatness" as justification for everything). 

Suddenly, Papa's companion! Who the heck is that! Shoots him! This is someone whose family was killed by the colonel (directly or under his orders) or so he says; he's gripping a piece of art we don't get to see, which is presumably the reason for those deaths. Now in the future! A guy who looks a bit like that other man who shot the colonel, but who I'm not 100% sure if it is or is not the same person because the round art style makes everyone look alike Someone who is definitely not the same guy because his eye colour is different (and who's dressed in a sporty outfit with a long ponytail, which I've mentioned kinda reminds me of Leon) looks for the amber in the place the art was stored, alongside Papa. He flies on the ark (all these humans on the ark, Sofu would have a conniption!) and reminds me of Leon once more while being shouty and holding on to the main mast for dear life.

The sacrificial father mini-plot also gets resolved with the dog returning (but not the father himself) along with a picture with that family. Which is presumably the picture the other dude who shot the colonel was holding, which begs the question: how is he related to them? He doesn't look like any of them, but he did say the colonel killed his family while (presumably) holding that same picture, so hmmm. Maybe he's the dog, colour-scheme aside? But apart from the father, the rest of the family seems to have survived, so it's kind of a strange thing to say since that sort of wording usually means more than one person. Even if he is the dog (my money is on that option), it's not exactly obvious to a reader who's not looking very closely. Some loose ends there, or at least ends that don't really look like they're tied together at all.

"No matter how long winter is, spring will come." Fairly hopeful final words there, Papa D. These echo similar ones spoken by D at the end of Shin PSOH, after running from Leon once more ("someday, the season for returning will come"): perhaps both these Ds are not as pessimistic as to their future, at least at this point? Poor Papa definitely had a change of heart between his series and the ending of original PSOH, unfortunately.

--

General thoughts: Sensei hasn't quite managed to replicate the feeling of the original PSOH just yet. The storytelling feels a bit shallow and rushed, though the pacing improved from the first volume to the second. There's also very little focus on Papa himself for some reason: he's more of a background character on his own series except for the fourth chapter, which is a very strange narrative choice. In part this might also be because he doesn’t have a permanent companion to discuss/argue with like in previous iterations of the PSOH series. I wonder if the third volume will continue on this trend? I wish it’d delve a bit more into Papa, but either way it’s still nice to get some more PSOH content.

I've heard Vesca will make an appearance next volume, I'm so excited!! Out of Shin PSOH, my favourite chapters were Leon's (surprise surprise!) and the ones with Papa and Vesca on their university days. Papa definitely seemed a lot sharper there, which I miss here - I feel like Sensei has been smoothing out all their edges like with the art style lmao, and in turn it makes them feel a bit lacking since the Ds are not meant to be bland and forgiving and easy-going, at least as per their original portrayal. I've also seen sneak-peaks of Leon and D from author notes of the next volume so I can't wait at the chance to weep at the slightest panel of my son Leon.

A final shoutout to RNS for continuing the PSOH translations! I really can't thank them enough!!

[natsunoomoi]

Holy crap. So like with the previous post I was thinking about Fushigi Yuugi again and kind of checking up on what was up with Byakko Senki cuz I haven’t checked on it in awhile and it looks like it’s on hiatus right now and she’s working more on Arata Kangatari, which is cool cuz I thought she finished that, but I guess not and she just took a break to like finish Genbu and do Byakko or something.

But also I was scrolling through her Twitter to find that she is really into this Chinese movie “Legend of Luo Xiaohei” and so I was checking that out cuz so ironic that Japanese mangaka that got her big break writing manga about an ancient China setting is interested in a Chinese movie. So just looking through her Twitter thread and apparently she found out about Luo Xiaohei from watching a CM while watching Modao Zushi. LMAO It’s amazing, but this situation just feels like an ouroboros eating itself because I have a high suspicion that her work on Fushigi Yuugi imported into China back in the 90s was probably a huge influence on Chinese creators and artists to write their own stories about their culture and helped to popularize the xianxia and wuxia novel movements in more modern times. On top of that MXTX said she was inspired by a D. Gray-man fanfic and while she mentioned that title specifically, I think in the periphery Fushigi Yuugi itself and more recently Arata were probably an influence too. Growing up a number of my Chinese friends also said they got into anime overall because of Fushigi Yuugi because it was an anime and work from Japan about their culture and arguably done pretty damn well. 

In terms of the danmei movement as well, I’m pretty sure Fushigi Yuugi was included in what started the movement as the movement was influenced by Japanese BL that came in via Taiwan, and the beginning of Fushigi Yuugi had the whole thing between Nuriko and Hotohori even though that kind of went nowhere, Nuriko dies to everyone’s depression (I have several friends who refuse to watch the rest of the series after Nuriko dies because it’s not the same), and that whole ship goes off a weird deep end with Hotohori marrying a woman that looks like Nuriko. Also, the exact reasons for Nuriko being in the harem and all that. There was a whole lot of shipping in the 90s from Fushigi Yuugi and it was one of the first series that had a male cast that was almost entirely ikemen and I think the actual first reverse harem. A number of shows probably simultaneously popularized the female gaze in mainstream anime, but Fushigi Yuugi was definitely one of them. Like literally one or two years before there was a lot of manly men and guy’s guys kind of anime characters, but beautiful ikemen, no, not really. In 2021, there are some things about the series that are a bit problematic, but it’s influence on the world is pretty significant. It was one of the first shows I’d seen that had any kind of reference to homosexuality or transgender in it and although it’s not necessarily portrayed well, the fact that it was there and that Nuriko was such a beloved character it started a conversation and helped us to get to a time where the topics she represents can be more discussed. I’m actually not even sure what pronouns would be appropriate for Nuriko because of her reasons for what she did and in Japanese the pronoun problem is actually really easy to get around because you just don’t have a subject or speaking in 3rd person is totally normal. But still, without her the minds of thousands or even millions of fans around the world would not have been opened as early to LGBT topics. Her existence, even problematic as it might be, allowed people to consider and love a character of a different sexual orientation or gender identity than their own and just open their minds to just not being a homophobic, biphobic (cuz relationship with Miaka?), or transphobic piece of shit.

Then also Genbu Kaiden and Uruki’s powers. Yeah.... I mean, also kind of with the earlier discussion, the idea of dual cultivation I don’t recall even being brought up much before in most media, but such ideas were also banned and repressed in China at a certain point. Documentation shows it was more of an ancient practice that suddenly became known about again. The book I was talking about that has it more explicitly written is banned in China has its only original surviving copy in the Japanese National Library as it was one of the books brought to Japan by scholars escaping persecution in China and bringing with them books to escape one of the many episodes of mass book burning. According to my Chinese lit professor who had us read an English translation of that book as a part of our curriculum anyway. Supposedly the translator of said book had to go to Japan to read the original in order to write the translation. There’s apparently a number of ancient Chinese texts like that because book burnings were a thing at different points in Chinese history, so if you are a scholar of Chinese lit if you want a complete picture of your field for some texts you do actually have to come to Japan to do your research. But yeah, that power mentioned in that very book Watase-sensei gave to Soi, and also the story of Fushigi Yuugi takes place in that very library that contains that ancient copy of a banned and would have been lost to the world book. If you’re asking why a “dirty” book would be something a scholar would grab to save, ancient lit scholars do regard it as a rather well-written piece of literature even though the content of it is basically taboo.

But also the Fushigi Yuugi Suzaku Ibun game is a hot mess when it comes to this same issue because if you romance Nuriko you can save her from death and my friend Hikari said she wasn’t sure if she was happy about fucking with the universe like that. (I’m not either.) Nuriko’s death was such a huge impact on the story and everything. Also, notably, most of the Suzaku Shichiseishi died, but Nuriko had the LONGEST tribute. Like Chiriko and Mitsukake’s was like a tag on of a few minutes. Hotohori’s was too even, but it was addressed more in the later manga chapters the publisher pressured her to write and in the OVA series afterward.

Also, like Fushigi Yuugi other than the Neverending Story was one of the original sucked into a book holy shit how do I survive stories. Idk if SVSSS is influenced by it in that way, but it’s fair to draw the parallels because of the similar theme. It’s just canonically Taiitsu Shinjin is not behind the the system in the book and in a number of ways Shen Yuan is more competent than Miaka. Miaka gets a lot of shit though and when I re-watched FY a second time I actually found the gripes people generally have about it make up only a small part of the series. People just talk it up so much that it seems like a huge thing when it’s not. Plus the technical canon is only the original TV series because that’s where Watase wanted to end the story and that is an emotional rollercoaster that makes you cry so good. But like there’s some other kinds of parallels as well like how toward the end and like the last two episodes you hate Nakago up until the exact moment you find out why he’s an absolute asshole, and characters straight up criticizing him about how he’s an asshole the whole damn series just gives the same kind of feels that SY gave criticizing the original throughout SVSSS. Can’t say for sure, but Fushigi Yuugi has a lot of clout in a general sense.

But yeah, Watase-sensei said that she was really surprised by the animation quality of Chinese animation these days and she thought Japanese anime was going down in comparison. Same, yo. Same. But still, her work was probably a huge contributor to the movement that allowed MDZS to exist because her art is damn beautiful, Chinese influenced, and she had one of the first works in Asia to like bring the subject of LGBT issues into the mainstream after years of oppression from mostly Western influence because in pre-modern Asia no one gave a shit before and there’s a significant amount of classical novels that address some form of LGBT issues at least in Japanese lit and like even academic documentation that notes Confucius saying that doing it with a guy was better than with a woman. And the author of the work that probably was very influential to BL back in the 90s watches MDZS. She noted that there wasn’t any in the actual anime, which is true, but I think she helped that series to exist and she watches the anime so it’s kind of exciting.

I hope it influences her to go finish Byakko, but OMG I want her to finish Arata too because I like Arata. I should try to find time to read more of it because the anime is too short and the wiki descriptions of what’s happening are so damn confusing and incomplete.

[elcorhamletlive]

@bulkyphrase said: I personally think the extended editions of the movies are optional. It’s nice to see the extra material, and they feel a little more fleshed out, but they’re so long. The shorter versions are still great movies. Like, I’m glad that I’ve seen the extended edition, but I usually watch the theatrical cut when I actually watch the movies. There are people that would disagree with me on that one, though. I don’t think it makes much difference if you read the Hobbit before or after the Silmarillion. If anything, reading the Silmarillion first might help give some historical context for things that are mentioned in the Hobbit. But nothing essential.

-> Thank you! I'm going to watch the theatrical cut first and then rewatch everything with the extended editions, because why not. As for Silmarillion and the Hobbit, I might go for Silmarillion first then!

@caffeespresso said: I also think the extended is optional, and the extra content is nice but I personally think some of it may detract too much and drag the movie.

-> I can definitely see that. Having watched the theatrical cut of Fellowship today, I feel like it goes by really fast, which is great because I was afraid of being unable to focus since it's pretty long. It made me interested in seeing the extended version later, though!

@everymanwillbeaking said: the hobbit is fairly self-contained as a book, imo, so the order doesn’t matter much. in any case you’ll probably be “oooooooh there goes x” when you spot a name here and there. as for the movies, the extended versions are mostly a bonus, for whenever you think ‘but what if there was MORE of this?“. the theatrical cut gets the story across just fine on its own

-> This seems to be the general opinion on the movies! And, yeah, that's the vibe I got from the Hobbit as well.

@dirigibleplumbing said: The extra content in the extended versions is mostly good, and some of it is excellent, but narratively speaking it’s easy to see why it was cut. I think I wouldn’t have enjoyed them as much had I not seen the theatrical releases in theaters first. If you read the Hobbit in hard copy, a fun thing about it is that JRRT wrote and published it before LOTR and at the time, the ring wasn’t going to be The Ring. So in earlier editions, Gullom gives it to Bilbo. In newer editions, Bilbo steals it. The in-universe explanation is that Bilbo wrote the book now known as the Hobbit (as, I think, the Red Book?) and JRRT just “translated” it. So the version with the stealing is the one that Frodo later corrected for accuracy. I didn’t explain that well, I meant since it wasn’t originally planned to be the One Ring but just a magic ring, it didn’t have the same hold on Gollum that it does in LOTR, so JRRT had to retcon it. And iirc the concept that he translated real books from Middle Earth is true for LOTR as well. Some of this is discussed in the appendices, which shows the Hobbits’ *real* names and then how JRRT anglicized them for his “translation”. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, I knew this stuff by heart approximately 20 years ago 😅

-> I think you're completely correct! Now I'm curious about which one is the version I have at home (my mom is a fan so I'm reading her books). But yeah, the concept of the translated books is my edition of LOTR, and it's in the appendices as well. It's such a sweet touch, imo!

[aegon]

Can I ask why you dislike Kylo as a character? I'm ambivalent on him and trying to form an opinion, but all I've seen is either "he's such a tortured, misunderstood baby who just needs love uwu" or "he's an emo, boring, whiny man-child and a waste of space", neither of which sounds very insightful or properly analytical of him as a character.

He’s pretty divisive in fandom, so I’ll try and be as objective as I can (obv still my opinion tho). For the sake of simplicity, I’m sticking to the film canon and won’t be straying anywhere near the comics because most of the SW audience haven’t read them. If you can’t explain your villain in your primary films and need the extended literature to do it for you, then you haven’t done a very good job at making a character.

My biggest issue with Kylo is that I don’t find him to be a very well-developed character. There are so many gaps in his development, it’s easy to project (good and bad) opinions on him. It’s probably why metas range from making him the worst person ever to the poor misunderstood baby.

Weak origin story

As far as what the films have shown us, Kylo came from a loving home and was training with the one of the greatest Jedi heroes ever. And then...uh, Snoke got to him. Unless there’s an explanation somewhere else, this ‘darkness’ in Kylo just manifested itself even before Luke tried to kill him (completely OOC but ok).

We saw Darth Vader fall. We saw Palpatine get to Anakin and manipulate him, saw the Jedi Order turn its back on him, and saw why he fell from grace. But there’s never any of that with Kylo, so I find his background very flat. Darkness just popping up like an unwanted pimple isn’t really convincing.

He’s conflicted but we never see it

TLJ was all about Kylo apparently being caught between the light and dark, but that’s never physically manifested. Snoke tells him his loyalty is wavering (but where) and Rey asks him to join the Resistence because she sees him wavering (but where). Despite not killing Leia, one moment where he showed his only hesitation, it’s not enough to counter the decisively wrong actions he’s committed throughout the two films, like killing Han and trying to kill Luke.

I’ve seen people say that killing Snoke was his moment of goodness, but I have an issue with that. He doesn’t kill Snoke for Rey. Kylo kills Snoke for power. He sees Rey’s potential in context of his own ambition, not for her good heart - and Snoke threatened that. To Kylo, Snoke became a dead-end where Rey was his key to becoming Supreme. That’s not someone conflicted between light and dark, that’s someone who wants power and is willing to murder and manipulate his way to get to it. It’s very Cersei-esque. But Cersei’s descent into such a person has a backstory and an explanation, Kylo does not.

My point is that for a conflicted, complex villain, there isn’t much conflict at all. Kylo seems rather set in his dark ways, and he’s rarely shown any indication of otherwise. He’s loyal to no one and nothing but his own self-serving interest. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - in a villain. He’s just a bad guy with bad intentions who happens to not hate his mother as much as everyone else, but making him into anything more was never translated on screen.

Intimidation Factor: 0

To give him credit, when we first saw Kylo, he looked impressive. The Knights of Ren could have been totally cool and if he’d stayed as the calm but deadly traitor son of Han and Leia, I could roll with it.

But he didn’t. Vader and Palpatine had the gravitas to intimidate and strike fear in everyone around them. You could see why they were the big baddies on top, they were so powerful and unyielding - and they rarely lost their temper, which made them more in control. Terrifying stuff. Kylo’s own men show such disrespect towards him, I’m not sure why we, as the audience, should show him otherwise. His volatile nature isn’t befitting that of one who’s looking to be powerful. If he can’t control his own temper or his actions, how does he expect to control the universe? Or anything, really?

oOo

I could go on about disliking character traits but that’s becoming a little too subjective and I said I’d try to be a little objective. Not sure if I succeeded lol as I’m sure others will disagree, but these are my main issues with Kylo and why I’m not impressed that he’s become one of the main characters of the new trilogy. Granted, these are issues that affect the protagonists, but unfortunately, Kylo Ren has Darth Vader as his predecessor. And compared to Darth Vader, he’s not even half as impressive or iconic.

[thebiasrekkers]

Fragmentation 0.7 - KSJ

Plot: How does one measure freedom? Are our choices truly our own, or are they part of a preset design outside of our control? We all have a question burning inside of us, though few speak it out. It is the question that drives us forward, seeking purpose in our lives. What is The Matrix?

Rating: NC-17 // NSFW

Genre: Series | The Matrix!AU | angst | sci-fi | action | drama

Pairing: N/A

Warnings: Strong language, allusions to suicide, extreme angst, graphic violence

Links: FAQ || BTS Masterlist || Admin E’s AO3 || [ REQUESTS ARE OPEN ]

Word Count: 2,096

AN: On to Seokjin’s origin story of how he left The Matrix. I actually took inspiration from the animated short, Beyond, from The Animatrix. I always found it super fascinating that certain parts of The Matrix, much like a computer, experiences “glitches” from time to time. Especially in the earlier incarnations of it.  All information in the universe can be found on the official Matrix Wiki so please use that as a reference guide if you ever get confused!

Tag List: @aroseforyoongi​, @prisczero​, @pinkpjmin​, @btsaudge​, @flowerwrites06​, @unoriginal-username15432​

© thebiasrekkers (Admin E). All rights reserved. Reposting/modifying our work is prohibited. Translations are not allowed. Plagiarism/stealing is not tolerated by any means. Legal action will be taken in instances of theft.

Seokjin tossed the apple in his hand lazily, lagging behind his friends as they chattered on about some “cool thing” they found. He didn’t understand why they were so adamant in dragging him out there, but it wasn’t like he had anything better to do. Martin called and told him he didn’t need to come in for his shift today if he was fine with trading with him for that Sunday. As a teenage senior, he didn’t have much to really worry about as far as money. His parents were loaded. The only reason he had a job in the first place was his father wanted to teach him the “fundamental building blocks of living in society” and how to acclimate to said societal norms.

The truth? Seokjin was lazy at times and didn’t much care for responsibility on that level. With a successful chain of restaurants, stocks and bonds piling up in the bank, Seokjin didn’t have a care in the world. He could flit around and do as he pleased. The caveat? He had to maintain his grade point average and have a part-time job. If he couldn’t balance both his schoolwork and his actual job, then he didn’t deserve to inherit everything his father managed to build in his lifetime.

Easy money. Too easy. One day off on a said day when he didn’t feel like working, replacing said workday with a Sunday? The choice was obvious.

“Yo, Jin,” called Abbey, causing his mind to focus back on the current conversation he hadn’t been listening to in the first place, “it’s this way.”

He watched as Abbey, James and Elena motioned for him to follow through a narrow alleyway. The sun was bright and he couldn’t help but wonder why they were even doing this in the middle of the day. When it came to those three, they were always trying to get into some kind of mischief. Seokjin didn’t really think too much of it. Even if he got in trouble, he knew his mother would find a way to get him out of it. 

What slivers of light existed quickly vanished within the dark shadows of the alley. They couldn’t enter in pairs - all trailing behind the other like little worker ants. Seokjin crunched into his apple, the sound bouncing off the walls of the small enclosure. They continued to chatter amongst each other, but Seokjin followed behind silently. He hadn’t been asked anything worth responding to and nothing of interest forced him to comment on it.

They were used to his lackluster attitude though.

As they breached the other side of the alley, he squinted from the sudden flood of light nearly blinding him. Abbey’s high-pitched giggle caught his interest. He shielded his face with his forearm, catching the image of James and Elena jumping into the air just in time. He didn’t quite understand what was so amusing…

...until he looked up and saw that Abbey was floating in the air.

“Whoa,” Seokjin murmured just as James did a somersault in the air - his motions slowed as if he were suspended in zero gravity, “what the hell?”

Elena laughed, her hair fanning out in the air as she hung upside down. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Seokjin nodded slowly, almost dropping the apple in his hand. “Yeah…”

“C’mon, Jin!” Abbey waved emphatically to him, spinning to the ground like a dancer from a dream. “You try it out!”

His eyes lingered around, spying all the various things in that section of the abandoned playground; a piece of a seemingly abandoned district. Rocks floated around, bouncing up and down in soft motions as if they were situated on an invisible river. Little bugs that attempted to fly off were slowed by whatever encompassed the space they were currently standing in. Seokjin could count the number of wings and how many times they flapped.

“What is this?” he asked, unsure of what this was and why he was even asking in the first place.

“We don’t know,” James answered with a shrug as he perched on the metal jungle gym, “but we figured it might have something to do with why this district got abandoned.”

He picked up one of the floating rocks, studied it, and then tossed it off to the side. The sound of it hitting the pavement caused him to turn and glance over his shoulder. The rock skittered off behind a barrel, hidden in its shadows where he wouldn’t bother looking. Canting his head slightly, he picked up another one of the floating rocks and threw it into the space where it occupied. For half a second, it zipped in at normal speed before slowing to a halt just inches away from James’ face.

“Hey!” he yelled, but Seokjin continued to look at the other rocks scattered along on the ground, “You could have hit me!”

Seokjin scoffed. “I doubt it.” 

He tossed the apple into the air, watching it float along in the space - suspended in the air just outside of his reach. 

Suddenly, there was a harsh sound resembling a record scratch that caught his attention. When he turned to face it, he saw that an old soda can seemed to be glitching in and out of focus. Seokjin’s eyes narrowed slowly, his feet moving toward it. 

“Jin?” Abbey’s voice sounded concerned. “What is it?”

“You guys didn’t hear that?” He turned away from the can to look at his friends. “You guys didn’t hear that?”

All three of them shook their heads simultaneously. Had he been the only one to see it? To hear it?

But that’s crazy, he thought, his eyes moving back to the can, it was so loud and the fracture across the can is so obvious.

Or was it?

“Jin, you’re scaring us, dude,” chimed Elena, but he couldn’t be bothered with that. Not if they couldn’t see it.

But why could he see?

Like a bolt of lightning, the wails of sirens pierced through their tranquil setting. Flashes of red and blue illuminated their world. Seokjin looked around, his eyes widening as he quickly turned on his heels and scrambled a few steps back. His gaze shifted to the sky and he balked, seeing that it was suddenly dusk. When had it gotten that dark? They couldn’t have been there for more than an hour. Maybe less.

“We gotta go!” yelled Abbey, grabbing onto Seokjin’s wrist and pulling him away from the miniature wonderland. 

Their sneakers pounded the pavement, kicking up dirt and scattered newspapers around them. James scrambled up a dumpster and grabbed for the handrailing of a fire escape. The girls followed suit and Seokjin knelt down to give Abbey a boost. Just as he was about to reach for her outstretched hand, flashlight beams all shined on him at once. Seokjin did his best to shield his eyes, backing away from where his friends were. Climbing up was too risky. He had to leave them and go off on his own.

“Look, I’ll catch up with you guys later!” he called up to them, pivoting on his heels and tearing off down the alleyway. 

As his world got darker, Seokjin thought the alley was getting smaller and smaller. His breath came in quick intervals and he blinked rapidly against the sweat threatening to seep into his eyes. Just as he was about to reach the edge of the alley, an arm suddenly flung itself out of a window and grabbed him by his shoulders. He tried to scream, but all he could taste was leather as a hand covered his mouth - the rest of his body being dragged into the building through the opening.

Fear clutched at his chest, squeezing it slowly. Darkness flooded his vision, rendering him unable to see as the rushed sound of footsteps thundered passed. When the noise faded away, Seokjin’s heart finally began to ease up. The owner of the hand and arm that dragged him into the building finally stood up, giving him room to finally breathe comfortably. 

“That was close,” said the person, her voice distinctly feminine. 

Seokjin took a moment to get a good look at her, her dirty blonde hair framing her face while the rest of it was pulled back through the hole in the back of her ball cap. A cheeky grin etched her features. Her shorts were provocatively short, muscled legs covered in thigh high stockings that disappeared into a pair of combat boots. Her upper body showed off her toned midriff, the rest covered in a denim jacket and black tank top. She didn’t look much older than him, from what he could tell.

He frowned. “Who the hell are you?”

“Does it matter?” She scoffed, folding her arms across her chest. “Even if I told you, you wouldn’t know anyway, would you?”

Well, she certainly wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t make it any less irritating. It was clear that she knew something that he didn’t and considering the situation he just barely escaped from (barring her help), that was something that didn’t sit well with him. Not by a long shot. 

“Why’d you help me?”

If he didn’t know better, he swore he saw her grin get just a little bit bigger. 

“You saw it, didn’t you?”

A cold sweat prickled along the back of his neck. Instead of answering, he chose to swallow the lump in his throat. Apparently, that was all the response she needed. Chuckling more to herself than to the information he’d unintentionally given away, she shook her head slightly. 

“Well, it’s a good thing I swung by when I did.”

Seokjin’s frown deepened, if possible, and he took a step toward her. “Just what in the hell is going on?”

She unfolded her arms, stuffing her hands into her pockets. She fished around in both until one came out. She held her fist out to him, urging him to come forward. When he did, she lofted a brow, waiting for him to do something else. Not sure what she was wanting, Seokjin held out his palm.

Opening her fist, she dropped a small, silver case into his hand. Curious, he popped open the box and inside were two pills. One blue, the other red. Was she trying to drug him?

Just as he opened his mouth to question her, he saw the girl holding a cell phone up to her ear. 

“Stand by for pickup.”

Seokjin had about as much as he could stand. “Hey! What’s the big idea? You tryna kidnap me or some shit?”

The girl frowned, craning her neck slowly to glare at him. “You’re the idiot that doesn’t even realize he’s already trapped.”

He blinked, not sure why hearing that struck a nerve. What did that even mean?

“If you want to know the answer behind that little gravity show you and your friends were messin’ with, take the red pill. You wanna forget about it and go back to your normal boring life, then take the blue pill. Choice is yours, Buttercup.”

Seokjin’s eyes lingered back to the pills. He couldn’t forget what he’d experienced. His friends thought it was just some weird phenomenon and, honestly, if he hadn’t seen the can glitch out, he might have chalked it up to that as well. But too many things didn’t add up. How had the police shown up so quickly and when had time shifted that fast in a space where it only felt like he’d been there for no more than an hour?

Grasping the red pill between his thumb and forefinger, he popped it into his mouth and swallowed. The girl’s grin returned and he watched her hang up the phone and slip it back into her pocket. In the dark and dusty building they were in, the walls inked over in black as flickers of green numbers seemed to explode along the walls. Seokjin’s ears started ringing to the point where they hurt and he clutched at them with both hands, dropping the case and the remaining blue pill. He felt a hand on his shoulder as it squeezed it gently.

“You gotta breathe,” she said, her voice a distant whisper against the roaring sound of his blood rushing through his ears, “just take a deep breath. It’ll be over quick.”

And as he took a breath, everything blurred over in a haze of green, black and gray. Until there was nothing left. It was quiet; peaceful. But somehow he knew that this was only the beginning.

“Welcome to the Real World.”

[jmyamigliore]

How To Do Reiki Massage Fabulous Useful Tips

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[parasiticghostwasps]

@echotheloser said: Yeah… I love the game but I have some issues with how disabled characters are portrayed. I definitely prefer to think about it like this.

@ask-kazushuu said: This blog’s Shrine AU’s Hitori has some sleeping problems, but I haven’t thought about actually giving him narcolepsy. Maybe he has sleep paralysis and hallucinations, trauma regarding all the orphanage kids, but he’s doing about as well as Nageki. (So somewhat?). It’s sad to give Hitori narcolepsy regardless, but I do like the idea…

(replies to this post)

Putting most of this under a cut because I accidentally wrote a lot in trying to consolidate my thoughts. Which are complicated and kinda all over the place. And then I tacked some headcanons on at the end because why not do that while we’re here.

Warning that there’s brief discussion of Hitori being a murderer in here.

I’ve just been thinking about it after I read a translation of the guidebook story in which narcolepsy is specifically name-dropped. I already knew hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep paralysis as symptoms of narcolepsy before getting into Hatoful and had independently associated Kageki with that even before the guidebook affirmed that line of thought to me. At the same time, Kageki is there to externalize “Nanaki’s” warped perspective for the audience and present the story in an interesting way. Why Kageki exists in-universe is superseded by the way in which he’s used in telling the story.

Part of what I like about Hatoful is the way that things are exaggerated and not firmly grounded in reality. I like the way that kind of storytelling can focus on honesty of feelings and relationships and express those things in creative and artful ways. So like. I don’t expect realism from Moa and that’s not what I want from her. I might even prefer if no real-world labels were attached to “Nanaki’s” disorder, I’m not really sure. 

Still, I think there can be value in using Hitori as a path to exploring a more grounded approach to writing a character with narcolepsy. I would like to try that, writing him using the real-world experiences of people with narcolepsy as a reference point and see where it takes me.

And I definitely understand if other people don’t want to lean into reading Hitori and “Nanaki” as a disabled character. He is a murderer in the main storyline. And the world does not need any more reinforcement of the ableist stereotype that people with hallucinations and/or delusions are violent killers. “Nanaki” is framed with more sympathy than many characters that are comparable in that sense, but it’s something that sticks to him nonetheless. My personal impulse to address this is to make him similarly disabled regardless of the universe, which is where I was coming from in my original post. But if other people feel like “I wouldn’t want to touch that issue even with a 10-foot-pole,” I completely understand.

One thing I thought was interesting is if we assume he’s being honest (which is a big “if”) about how much he sleeps outside of work when he’s talking about what he did over break and what he said on the drama CD, “Nanaki’s” disorder seems more like idiopathic hypersomnia, with the tendency to sleep for long, unbroken periods of time. (In contrast, narcolepsy involves both falling asleep in the middle of the day and waking up a bunch at night.) He also is never clearly depicted as experiencing anything like cataplexy (involuntary loss of muscle tone, often associated with intense emotions) as far as I remember, which isn’t associated with hypersomnia. Hypersomnia isn’t associated with hallucinations in the same way narcolepsy is, either, though. Still, that’s another direction he could be taken in.

Anyway, with all that out of the way, here’s some assorted thoughts on how writing Hitori with narcolepsy could work in an AU where both Nageki and Kazuaki are alive.

I imagine that the onset would be gradual enough that it would take a while for anyone to notice that there’s been a change. It takes quite a few months of “Sorry about that, I guess I’ve been pretty tired/haven’t been sleeping well lately” and “I don’t know why I’m so clumsy all of a sudden” before he or anyone comes to the conclusion that whatever’s going on isn’t going to just resolve on its own.

I trust that Shuu is the first person to suspect narcolepsy and wants to run tests and maybe even do a case study. He approaches it in a suitably weird and ominous way like “I have my suspicions about what’s going on, but I’d like to perform a lumbar puncture to be sure.”

Hitori eventually ends up on assorted medications that make things smoother, but he still needs to take naps throughout the day and has to be especially careful about his diet and sleep hygiene.

One might think that having a serious disability could help him to be more understanding of Kazuaki, but no. Having to work harder to just live his life only makes Hitori more resentful of what he perceives as Kazuaki not trying very hard. This is super unfair of him. He even kinda has a slightly guilty feeling like it’s unfair of him, but he wouldn’t attempt to change his thinking unless someone called him out on it.

I think it’s super funny when “Nanaki” just shows up to the infirmary to nap and I want to continue this proud tradition. Hitori might be marginally more tactful about it, but he still basically imposes himself. And once he has a diagnosis he’s like “You can’t turn me away, this is necessary for my healthy functioning.” Shuu’s just like “please set up a bed elsewhere”

Without any event (or combination of events) that is socially isolating in the way Nageki’s death was, I don’t think Hitori would buy into any hallucinations anywhere near as strongly as he does in BBL. Even if the massacre at Hatoful House still happens, I think he trusts Nageki enough (and would hopefully eventually trust other people, too, relying on only one other person isn’t healthy, Hitori, you dumb bitch) that even the voices of the dead wouldn’t be more convincing than Nageki’s assurance that they’re just vivid nightmares. It would still be deeply upsetting to be hearing from false ghosts voicing his greatest fears, though.

It’s usually fairly easy for him to recognize what’s real and what isn’t after the fact using context. Occasionally he’ll swear something happened that no one else remembers and it’s frustrating, but he can begrudgingly accept that.

Hitori avoids bringing up narcolepsy to people who don’t already know he has it. He doesn’t want to deal with people getting weird ideas about him or have to explain himself too much. And mostly people don’t think about it aside from thinking he’s a bit weird. It isn’t the most ideal impression people could have of him, but it is more convenient.

[thehanniecorner]

Yes, I realize that this post is coming out nowhere near January, but I have been finding it difficult to keep up with blogging lately, so it is what it is, right?  Hopefully, things have calmed down enough in my life that I can get back to writing semi-regularly, but no promises yet!  Regardless, I read a lot in January and am eager to share my thoughts with you.  Let’s get started!

I hope this reaches her in time – r.h. Sin

Rating – 1 Star

Unfortunately, I started off my year with what may turn out to be my least favorite title of 2020.  I hope this reaches her in time is a poetry collection, and while I like to pick up poetry once in a while, I didn’t connect with this collection at all.  First of all, it felt like there should have been a little more editing, as I found a number of sentences and word choices that I think might have just been typos.  Beyond that, the poetry itself reminded me of the “Tumblr style” where poets just break a normal sentence into multiple lines to make the words feel deeper than they really are, which is not a style I enjoy at all.  The good news is, however, that my reading can only get better from here, right?

Emergency Skin – N.K. Jemisin

Rating – 5 Stars

After reading an incredibly underwhelming title, I decided to give N.K. Jemisin’s Emergency Skin from Amazon’s Forward collection a try, figuring that an author this popular couldn’t possibly let me down.  Thankfully, my instincts were right and I loved this short story so much.  Given how short this experience is, I don’t want to give too much away, but I will say that this is a phenomenal science fiction story with the best usage of second person narration that I have ever seen in literature.  This was my first title by Jemisin and I can’t wait to read more of her work in the future.

Randomize – Andy Weir

Rating – 3 Stars

Since I loved Emergency Skin so much, I wanted to give another short story from the same collection a try, which led me to Andy Weir’s Randomize.  This wasn’t bad at all, but I didn’t love it to nearly the same degree as Jemisin’s work.  The hardest part for me is that the central premise, involving the security of gambling machines and whether they can be hacked or not, felt both flimsy and info-dumping in its setup.  The ending was pretty satisfying and I had fun reading this, but I came away from the story feeling like not enough had really been done with the universe.  I’m hoping to get to more of the Forward short story collection a try in the coming months, so I hope I enjoy the others more than I enjoyed this one.

Interview with the Robot – Lee Bacon

Rating – 4 Stars

I decided to pick up an Audible subscription recently in order to read more audiobooks, and Interview with the Robot was one of the Audible Original productions available one month, so I decided to pick it up.  This short audiobook with a full cast follows a robot who looks like a young child.  She gets apprehended by the police and has to tell her strange life story to a social worker in charge of her case.

While listening to this story, I had a smile on my face from beginning to end because it was just so charming and adorable.  That said, however, there were a few pretty good twists and turns that I didn’t see coming and definitely made me feel a lot of empathy towards the protagonist.  Overall, my main complaint is that it was just too short, at around three hours of listening.  I want more from this world in the future, so I hope some sort of sequel comes out eventually.

The Last Wish – Andrzej Sapkowski

Rating – 3 Stars

2020 is the year that I work my way into adult fantasy, and other than reading Game of Thrones last year, reading The Last Wish is one of the first titles that I have ever picked up in the genre.  This series follows Geralt, a witcher, which is a type of mutated human that fights monsters, as well as the many people that surround him.  This specific book is a short story collection that follows, for the most part, Geralt as he goes from contract to contract, killing monsters.

I love the lore and world of the Witcher universe, but I’m not totally convinced that I appreciate the writing style.  It’s hard to tell if this is because of the translation or this is the intention of the original author, but there was a lot of distance between the narrator and the events happening, which made me feel disconnected from the story.  I still intend to continue on, especially after I completely fell in love with the TV series, so I hope that I will connect more with future books and get used to the writing style.

The Outsider – Stephen King

Rating – 4 Stars

Stephen King is an author that I should read way more than I do, because I only pick up one or two of his books in a year, but I almost always enjoy them.  As it turns out, The Outsider is no exception.  This horror novel follows a group of detectives as they investigate the death of a young boy in a small town.  The obvious suspect is the town’s little league coach, as the evidence is quickly mounting up against him.  As the case opens up, however, conflicting details emerge and the truth becomes more difficult to grasp.

Overall, I really enjoyed the mystery and couldn’t stop reading for the entirety of this 600-page tome.  Stephen King has a way of making long books feel like they go by in an instant.  Unsurprisingly, however, the ending was incredibly underwhelming.  Additionally, The Outsider is connected to the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, which I didn’t know, and I got pretty spoiled for the events of that series, which is unfortunate.  On top of all of this, I would like to take a moment and point out that the graphic depictions of the child’s death did not really need to be so detailed, much less have those horrific details brought up at least a dozen more times over the course of the book.  It just felt gratuitous after a while.  I enjoyed this book immensely, but the details I mentioned above kept it just barely out of five-star territory.

Every Heart a Doorway – Seanan McGuire

Rating – 4 Stars

Since The Outsider was quite a lengthy read, I wanted to pick up some shorter titles again, leading me to finally pick up the start to a fantasy series that has been on my radar for a long time:  Every Heart a Doorway.  This series follows a group of children that found doorways to their own personal versions of Narnia and Wonderland.  At some point, however, their newfound homes kicked them back into the normal world and they have to learn how to cope with returning to their own life.  A halfway home of sorts was founded for children struggling with this task, and as it turns out, bringing a bunch of children together who have all gone to vastly different worlds can cause some pretty crazy antics and disagreements.

I love the characters, but didn’t find the plot of this overly engaging.  Given that my rating is still high, it’s clear that my disinterest in the plot wasn’t a deal-breaker by any means, but I just struggled to stay interested, especially given that I guessed the big plot twist almost immediately.  Since these books are so short, I will definitely be reading the sequels.  In fact, given how late this wrap-up is, I can say with great certainty that my February wrap-up will have a lot of news regarding my progress on this series.

Outer Order, Inner Calm – Gretchen Rubin

Rating – 3 Stars

I like to try reading books that push me out of my comfort zone, and it has been a long time since I read anything that might be considered a part of the self-improvement genre.  Therefore, as a chronically messy person, I thought reading Outer Order, Inner Calm might be an interesting adventure, given that the whole book is dedicated to getting rid of unwanted junk to keep life peaceful.

This was an incredibly easy read.  The writing style was simple and easy to digest.  Reading it was actually a pretty pleasant and relaxing experience.  That said, however, I’m not sure how useful I actually found the book, as the advice felt like it was playing it pretty safe.  For the most part, the tips went like “Get rid of things you don’t use anymore” and “Clean your house” with about 75 different variations, each.  I’m glad I read it, but I don’t think I got much out of it.

Everything My Mother Taught Me – Alice Hoffman

Rating – 4 Stars

My final read for the month of January was another short story from an Amazon collection like the Forward collection.  This is Everything My Mother Taught Me, and it’s my first attempt at reading Alice Hoffman.  This follows a young girl who is living at a lighthouse and trying to navigate coming of age with her dysfunctional mother around her.  I can’t say much more than that given how short the story is, but I did really enjoy this.  This is a common complaint for me with short stories, but the main reason it didn’t get five stars is because it just didn’t feel fully fleshed out.  When I read Emergency Skin, I felt like Jemisin did a phenomenal job of packing a full story into a short amount of pages, and Everything My Mother Taught Me didn’t manage this as successfully.  I’m still quite eager to pick up more books by Hoffman, however, as I enjoyed her writing style.

Well, now that it’s almost March, I have finally shared what I read in January.  What did you read in the first month of the year?  Let me know in the comments below!

  January 2020 Reading Wrap-Up! Yes, I realize that this post is coming out nowhere near January, but I have been finding it difficult to keep up with blogging lately, so it is what it is, right? 

[margridarnauds]

2, 8, 9, 20, 30, 31, 32, 40, 51 (for the abominaton)

Thanks!

2. Favorite part of writing.

I love the feeling that comes with putting the thoughts that I’ve been visualizing in my mind on the page, I love getting to work with characters that I love dearly and putting them where normal circumstances wouldn’t, I love dealing with a wide cast of characters that help me learn more about myself.

8. Favorite trope to write.

In general, I like to write emotionally constipated characters dealing with their gay emotions for the first time. Also, I tend to work with straight-up fix-its or dealing with post-canon events (and, when I say “post canon” I mean “post my very, very specific version of canon).

9. Least favorite trope to write.

This is probably surprising, but I tend to not be fond of actually writing depressing endings. Like, even in the universes where I kill characters off, I like to at least give them some closure, even if it’s an afterlife AU. (Which…the Afterlife AU for Pour la Peine is going to be fun if I ever get around to it).

Also, I don’t like Modern AUs all that much, even though I have numerous ones for 1789. It’s probably mostly a matter of translating 18th century politics to the modern age. That and I hate writing anything set in the modern age on principle.

20. Post a snippet of a WIP you’re working on.

Tw: References to animal abuse, bullying, and Lazare being a 13 year old with slightly homicidal tendencies (BUT HE’S STILL VALID)

Lazare didn’t know how he got involved. One moment he was gritting his teeth in anger at them, his rage reaching a boiling point after one of the punches caused Ronan to cry out, the next one of the bullies was on the ground crying, Ronan was putting another one on the ground nearby him, and he had his hand wrapped around  Denis’ throat, feeling his fingernails tighten around skin that had never been bruised before. All those military exercises his grandfather had made him run had their uses, he thought, as a strange thrill ran through him. Thibault Denis couldn’t do anything now, couldn’t hurt anyone; he was completely under his control. No matter how much he tried, flailed, choked, the little pretend tyrant was weak. So this was what authority meant. All that time when his grandfather had tried to explain it to him, and he’d never fully understood it.

“Lazare!” He was vaguely aware of Ronan shouting, and that was enough for him to release his grip. The boy fell to the ground, looking at him like he was Death incarnate, all widened eyes and quick breathing before he ran as fast as he could, his legs barely supporting him. The others followed suit, and it was just him, Ronan, and the cat. He flexed his hands, remembering the touch, looking at Ronan, wondering how he would look at him now that Lazare had hurt one of his own, but if he’d seen anything unusual, he hadn’t noticed, lavishing attention to the cat instead.

“Why would someone do something like that, huh? It’s just a cat, it wasn’t harming anybody.” Ronan held the wretched thing in his arms, petting it, with its torn ear and matted, faded fur and bony spine. “It probably just wanted to make friends.”

“The world can be cruel.” It had been the first thing he’d been told, when he was left on the steps of the Chateau de Peyrol and greeted by a stern, sharp man who introduced himself as his grandfather, and it had been something that he’d made sure he’d remember. The world had been cruel since time began, it would remain cruel. All that was important was ensuring that he himself did the best he could in the role he was given and to support the Crown in its efforts to keep order amidst the destructive forces that would bathe the world in fire otherwise.

Ronan shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be.” He held the cat a little closer, letting it burrow its face into his chest weakly, its pink tongue flicking over his fingers slowly. “It doesn’t have to be.”

30. Favorite line you’ve ever written.

There was a sadness in du Puget’s eyes, and Peyrol felt like he was a schoolboy again, missing some obvious point that he had just explained to him in vivid detail. Only instead of the immediate reprisals, he got this. A beating he could deal with, scorn he could deal with, pity he could not. “We are all human beings, Monsieur de Peyrol. We are all human beings with a child’s longing for the companionship and love of our fellow man. If you cannot do that basic amount for him, then you will never deserve his trust or his love, no matter how many livres you pour into it.” 

31. Hardest character to write.

In general, any of the kid characters. I HATE writing children in general, and in the first part of the Abomination in particular SO MUCH rests on selling the kid versions of Ronan and Lazare and their relationship because literally the rest of this universe depends on them. I consider having to type “How do children make friends” and “What do children do with friends” to be on par with me trying to think about how long it’d take me to bang the man who (hypothetically) killed my father as far as Signature Abomination Moments.

For the non-historical characters of 1789, I’ve talked repeatedly how hard Solene is to write because of how little we get on her and how downright contradictory a lot of it is (see: her talking about how ambition and bloodlust have blinded Ronan…while she and the girls lynch a baker and march to Versailles. You go girl?) And you want to do a solid job with her, especially since her storyline touches on subjects that are STILL pretty damn sensitive, but you also don’t want to accidentally put her into any of the contemporary stereotypes of The Fallen Woman, The Victim, The Fury, etc, or any of our modern stereotypes when it comes to what a sex worker should look like and behave. That and trying to develop her relationship with Olympe is going to be slightly harder than usual, given that I still…need to figure out how they’re going to meet. With Pour la Peine, it was easier, since they had an easy way to meet up (Ronan’s funeral, RIP bro), but here, this is taking place in the canon era.

On a larger level, writing ANY of the historical figures that we have a decent amount of documentation for is hard, since these are people who are still highly controversial to this day and who can kind of….shift between different sources. Not necessarily the ones they wrote themselves, but, like, if you ask ten different people about Robespierre, you’ll get ten different responses. You’ll think you’ve caught onto him, and then he slips away. Likewise for Antoinette or Fersen or De Launay. Even Papa du Puget is rather hard for me to grasp, not the least because I know that the sources I need are locked behind an archive in France, untranslated and mostly obscure. (Funnily enough, the easiest for me to grasp is the Marquis de Sade, because the man’s just a dick. I will proudly proclaim the man’s a dick. He deserved to spend the rest of his life rotting away and I consider it an eternal tragedy that far better men than him in every way died during the course of the Frev while he managed, despite himself, to survive.) With some characters, like Danton and Desmoulins, I sense that my interpretation of them is going to be much different than the normal interpretation of them.

Basically, there’s a lot of pressure with them that isn’t necessarily there with the canon OCs, I don’t have as much freedom, and it can be damn hard to put them into a given situation to see how they’d react. (Incidentally, I’m going to put a tentative guess that they won’t react well to L/R. Just a guess. Though I’m sure Lazare can win them over with his A+ social skills, charm, and tact.) 

32. Easiest character to write.

Laz and I get along very well at this point, even as I torture him.

40. Original Fiction or Fanfiction, and why?

Fanfiction, actually.

With original fiction, there’s a lot of pressure when it comes to constructing the world you’re working with and the characters and how they interact with it. And, believe me, it’s a lot of fun, but it’s also damned hard to visualize it. Like, I fucking specialize in Early Irish Lit, and yet my retelling of CMT is hard to write 90% of the time because I have a hard time working with this world and how it works (which…given that the rules themselves weren’t concrete in the original lit, I don’t feel all that bad, but still). To tell you the truth, even after looking at tons of pictures of longhouses and hillforts and costumes from the Book of Kells, I still can’t get a decent idea for this stuff. It’s even harder for the main WIP, where I have to do a lot more construction, working with inspirations from multiple time periods, and it’s a real mess because I’ve never entirely gotten those inspirations under control and the characters keep shifting out from under me.

With fanfic, on the other hand, you have characters, you have a setting, and you have a decent idea with how the world works. Now, you can always do what I do and completely throw canon out anyway, BUT you still have some basics. No matter what, I have some baseline for the characters and some baseline for how the world works and I can build my research off of that.

51. Describe the aesthetic of your story _______ in 5 sentences or words.

Doing this for the first part because it’d be literally impossible to do it otherwise.

A gloved hand on a black walking stick, a slightly bent, silver wolf’s head gleaming from the top.

A sea of golden wheat over flat land as far as the eye can see, a sharp blue sky hanging over it.

An old, faded book with a decrepit spine.

A blue parrot locked in a gilded cage.

Two boys against a tree on a slightly chilly summer night, looking at the stars, unaware of what they hold for them.