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churbington · 2 years

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fugo mista parallels thing idk

edit 10/24: okay hi i thought id pop in and share that a HUGE addition to this post has been made here and I think people should go give it a read too bc my thoughts are a lot more organized there thank chew ^_^

okay im going crazy i have to post this somewhere but I think the parallels between the fact that fugo and mista are the last surviving original bucci gang members is so deeply fascinating to me because they are like Direct Opposites in like. virtually everything I think. I'm gonna ramble but I'll try and include a tl;dr before the break

tldr; fugo and mista are opposites in a long of aspects including personality, choices, and general appearance and I find it deeply fascinating that the only two original gang members to survive are such polar opposites of each other and its a very unique and interesting dynamic. Fugo's like the first to join, Mista joins last but then fugo is the first to leave and rejoin again after everything and that can be seen as wavering loyalty (depending on who you assign that loyalty to) while mista's been there since the start and the possibly imagery and symbolism with religion (though that's more fanon territory) and with regards to PHF- like its also so. interesting! They've been strangers from the start so watching your friends die and then a stranger be the only one to live is soul crushing... idk its so neat and I think it should be a dynamic that is explored more

okay so the way i see it is that fugo is extremely logical, rational, and very guarded about who he is and refutes his wants over saying what people expect out of him. He's shorter compared to mista (which. btw why the hell is fugo 5'10" I thought he was a chill 5'6" what the fuck), blonde, green/red color palette, (generally accepted that) he was the first to join the bucci gang and the last to leave it and THEN rejoin it if we count PHF, has a very realistic out view of life, etc. etc I could go on.

Mista, on the other hand, is much more laidback and down to earth with a carefree attitude with a sense of optimism and sense of things are not as complex as they ought to be (like a very simplistic way of seeing things I'm bad at explaining this but its a generally agreed trait he has). He's taller, presumed to have darker hair, blue/red color palette (that directly contrasts fugo's), (also generally accepted that) he was the last to join bucci gang and never left it as well as being the only one to survive (ignoring fugo for this), etc.

There's more you can definitely compare between the two like religious imagery (though that's more in fugo anime's case as it's not really there for mista in canon its just more of a general hc the fandom has made around him) but I think it's sooooo interesting how fugo and mista ended up being the ones to survive like. Thinking about it realistically fugo and mista are essentially strangers to each other through the entire thing. Granted yes, they were all sort of strangers to each other even if they were close (like the first thing I wanna think of is that Abbacchio and Fugo trusted each other but were still strangers as said in PHF) but I think it's really apparent in fugo and mista's case. Fugo has essentially been with Bucciarati (and by definition all the other gang members) since the start if we are to assume that fugo joined first. Mista, on the other hand, joined last (as a generally accepted order) so they barely got to know each other before the events of golden wind started.

So imagine being Mista, a guy who just joined a gang and barely just got to know everyone in it, and the one assholey guy who's sort of a dick all the time, ends up being the only one to survive because he was a coward (aka scared for his life and possibly of defying such a high authority due to previous trauma) and just. Augh. augh. that would be so fucked up and then it happens and it IS fucked up.

And also like imagine being fugo, scared out of his god damn mind because everyone he's been able to even remotely trust and care about over the course of him joining 2ish years ago suddenly defecting and risking their lives for some girl, and the only one to survive in the end is the newbie and the 2nd newbie who threatened you with a gun later.

Like god my thoughts are seriously all over the place so it's sorta hard for me to make this coherent but I think it's super interesting that fugo and mista survived while being direct opposites of each other and having to live with that fact and possibly even make a new friendship (or at least professional relationship) out of that like. god! god. what a nightmare! It's like an inverted mirror of each other and watching as the one thing you hated get to live on while the people you cared about are rotting dead in the ground six feet under because they simply wanted to be somewhat good people in the end, even after what they've done is probably significantly worst. Even as horrible as they are and the deeds though do, they have some small kind acts (cough cough bucciarati taking in WAYYY too many teenagers into the mafia cough cough)

Once again i just think its such an interesting dynamic and introspect into their relationship bc. once again I see them as essentially direct oppositions of each other and so knowing that any kind of mediator between the died forces them to reconcile over the fact they are the last surviving members, even if their outlook on the gang are polar opposites. They would definitely fight and bicker over everything like knowing bucciarati and what he wanted, the reason for staying/leaving, narancia. just narancia, like there's SO much there. i would love to see it explored more especially whenever you throw like giorno and trish into the mix bc it just makes it even Weirder for these two and its augughufghu maybe someday ill make a more proper post over this but hopefully you guys like. get the general gist of this because I am losing my mind constantly

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dervampireprince · 10 months

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Hii so after the stream today/yesterday for you I think (congrats again on 10k you deserve every single one💖) I just wanted to pop in and gush about the way you show relationship and character developments through your audios.

(I'll focus mostly on Arden because imo his is the most obvious/explored, but this applies to almost all your ocs with more than one audio lol)

Like, Arden as a character is so fascinating to me because he's just so real? Like all of his actions are so logical for how someone in real life (or as real as vampires and werewolves can get, lol) would be it's amazing. Like the first audio with him where he's wary and skeptical of the listener but also really protective of them because that's just how he is, is so human and well done. And then the next one, where he goes out of his way to answer the listener's questions while also setting realistic and healthy boundaries.

I also really really like how it's implied that Ambrose and Arden talk about the listener to eachother, even Ardens little comment that Ambrose called the listener "Ardens little human", it's those little things that make them seem like they're in an actual world and have interactions outside of the audios to make it feel real, rather than individual scenes floating in a vague story. The love bites audios (and all of yours for that matter, honestly) all read like slice of life stories but in the purest way— it's like a scene opening in the middle of these characters who already live their lives whether we're there to see them or not. Like, knowing that Arden and the listener text a lot but don't talk very much in person at first, knowing that Ambrose asked Arden how much he was comfortable with being shared with the listener, Ambrose keeping first aid supplies for Arden when he shifts, it's these little details that get me.

And gosh, the audio where Arden and the listener properly get together? Chef's kiss. Peak content. The way Arden stumbles his way through like 30 minutes of dancing around the fact that he's poly, that he's a switch, that if the Listener maybe possibly ever wanted something Ambrose couldn't give he's there, its so so so sweet and adorable. and then, when he finally gets enough courage to just kiss the listener instead of dancing around it everything falls into place! It's just. Aaa. It's so real and sweet and I adore this audio fusgau

I started writing this ask because I relistened to the recent wolf audio, where Arden finally feels safe enough with the listener to shift in front of them. I think it hits me so hard because there have been hints about it before— in the sleep aid audio he talks about letting the listener see him shift one day— but he also still sets healthy boundaries!! He's still visibly (or audibly, I guess) nervous about it and getting to see that nervousness fade away is just. So gratifying.

Um. This got long. Tldr, I love Arden SO much and his development as a character has hit me right in the heart. You're amazing prince, please please please keep up this amazing work. You deserve all this good fortune tenfold 💖

- Dahlia 💖

(ps. And this is entirely unrelated to anything, but can Arden eat chocolate? If he can, does he enjoy it?)

aww thank you so much. i always feel a little bad when you guys remember all these moments because i remember.. none of them. i improvise these and then they kinda fly out of my brain. but i do care a lot about making them and about my characters, but the little things i have them say i just forget. but it means a lot that you guys remember that and that you really like amborse and arden, i hope i can

sure arden can eat chocolate, i think he's pretty boring like me when it comes to food, he's not much for fancy food or lots of candy. he'd be fine with chocolate.

#the vampire answers #dahlia anon #i need to start making more notes about my boys huh #arden #love bites series #the vampires ocs

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friendofcars · 1 year

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for the ask game!

"Electric joy surged through Ronan, overpowering the worry."

hi!

my guess: definitely feels like it came from the dream thieves and the word "electric" is making me think it's in chapter 27, which is the substance party chapter (is the worry perhaps about being around gansey and kavinsky simultaneously, or the mitsubishi burning?). i suppose this could also be after ronan dreams the replacement camaro later in the book but i think it's less likely. also as i'm reading my answer back to myself i'm realizing i am biased since i literally just finished re-reading tdt and it might be in greywaren when ronan is sleeping and hears adam talking to declan (chapter 9??? whichever the chapter is when adam tells declan he's deaf in one ear) but ALSO this might be in the sweetmetal sea soul merge chapter. oh wow this is exceedingly difficult but very fun to try to figure out. final answer is the sweetmetal sea "reader, i merged souls with him" sequence. which may or may not be greywaren chapter 25. the "through Ronan" is giving me the sense of not being in a physical body and it would be logical for him to be worried about adam being untethered from his body in such uncharted circumstances.

the answer: it is in fact the sweetmetal sea scene when adam scries and his consciousness finds ronan (although the chapter number is 19, not 25). not sure how i stumbled into the right answer but here we are.

my thoughts on this line: i love how ronan's emotions are described as electric (as things that can surge, like power) given his intrinsic tie to ley energy. and while it was a speculation when i was guessing, i think the fact that ronan (rather than his body) is mentioned emphasizes the fact that he's in his most greywaren-like form, which makes me think back to the dream thieves and how we learn that ronan is both dangerous and beautiful (and manifests both danger and beauty). here, we see him in an otherworldly form but with intense human emotions. the way he swings from worry to joy feels very in character for him, and we learn why his emotions are so intense and all-consuming in the same book. i think it's particularly apt for his feelings regarding adam, specifically, to embody electricity and power given symbols and plot points in trc (the thunder and lightning in the dream thieves, adam essentially rewiring the ley line to give ronan the brief moment of time necessary for ronan to decide to save himself, etc.). the joy is because adam has "come all this way" to find him in the sweetmetal sea, because ronan no longer feels abandoned. he's like a dog with separation anxiety who destroys the house and then jumps for joy when its owner gets home, as if they never left.

i know this chapter gets a lot of criticism for evading what could have been a more satisfying conversation between ronan and adam re: their relationship and i do agree. greywaren could have been 100+ pages longer imo. i think there should have been more writing devoted to better resolution of character arcs and more thorough exploration of interpersonal relationships.

HOWEVER i do really enjoy the chapter itself, even if it's a symptom of greywaren's main weakness as a series finale. i like how adam embraces ronan's eldritch self so readily. i love the refrain of they were wanted, they were wanted, they were wanted. i think it's wild how integral they are to each other's sense of integrated self (this is terribly unhealthy but fascinating to read about). i think due to personal problems the lack of verbal communication is actually kind of appealing in isolation even if i don't condone it. i am thinking about how ecstatic ronan is when adam is with him and how despondent he gets when adam's not and how there's some emotional object permanence issues going on here that i'm a little scared of thinking about. i'm getting off track here but at some point i imagine my focus will shift from trc to td3 and i'll do a much more thorough analysis of the chapter beyond this line/my general opinion.

#rchl #ask #thank you for sending these!!!! i'm having so much fun and this was quite difficult to pin down but once the idea popped into my head i KNE #W #i will try to keep my future responses more concise though #<- i am not capable of doing that #trc

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someinstant · 2 years

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16, 18, and 19 for the A03 wrap asks!

Hello, hello, sorry for being so slow to respond to your ask! I've been meaning to get to this, but it's not the sort of thing I like to do on a phone, and I've been avoiding my computer during this holiday break (except for writing and such) so that I don't do silly things like open my work email or do any lesson plannings while I'm off from school.

But! I have the time and the bandwidth this evening, so I'll go ahead and do this now!

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

I'm really inconsistent with my Additional Tags on AO3, honestly. I tend to be one of those folks who just tags characters and pairings and big genres or tropes, and possibly things like violence or content warnings. Other than that, I don't do a lot of additional tagging? But I think my favorite additional tag I used on AO3 this year was "Rampant backstory speculation that will likely be undone in future episodes but I'm okay with that." Because that is what happens when you're writing during a season of episodic television instead of after the fact.

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

This is going to be so unsatisfactory, but-- none, really? I don't really think of it as having trouble writing a character, honestly. The trouble comes in writing something that isn't true to a character, or doesn't make sense for the character's understanding of a situation. I've definitely had trouble writing scenes before, or figuring out how to resolve a situation, but generally if I just think, "Well, what's the natural way for this person to feel about this situation? What would they say? What would they do? What are they noticing?," I find that I know the answers to those questions. So the issue it's so much having difficulties writing a character-- it's finding that the situation I've written is inconsistent with the honest portrayal of that character and their reality. And so long as I'm willing to delete the stuff that doesn't fit and move with the internal logic of the characters and their world, I can find my way out.

That said, I had such fun writing Clem and Cassian and Maarva. They're probably the easiest, most natural-feeling characters I wrote all year. I think one of my favorite bits of character-building where everything just flowed and felt right was the bit in It's the same old theme where Cass has just gotten into a fight at school. I felt like I understood a hell of a lot about those three characters in that passage, and I'm really proud of it. (And yes, I know it's a controversial take in ANDOR-fandom, but: I find Maarva fascinating, and I am going to write about her a lot, because it's so complicated and dense and I eat that shit up. YUM.)

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?

Eh, I dunno! For all that I've read a ton of it, I really haven't written much in the way of direct Jyn/Cassian romance-- my only other ROGUE ONE fic previous to this year alluded to a Jyn/Cassian relationship, but it was in the past and never onscreen, as it were-- and I think I'd like to see if I can find my way into writing something that lets me dig into that in a way that feels earned and meaningful enough for me to be content. And while I am MASSIVELY uninterested in paying any attention to ship wars or any of that nonsense, I could definitely see myself writing about Cassian's relationship with Melshi, or another male character-- because he does read as bi to me, and I'm interested in how he relates to men vs. women in the show, and what that means in terms of desire and its expression.* Honestly, my feelings about pairings (or moresomes! let's not be limiting!) is: whatever, man. I like what I like, I write what I want, and y'all should do the same. This is how we build a fandom that is low drama, which is all that I want.

*Okay, I'm going to ramble a bit here about something that I've been considering wrt Cassian and desire, okay? Okay. So: has anyone really grappled with what it means that Cassian was a thirteen-year-old boy who was incarcerated for most of his mid-teens? Prisons aren't exactly known as locations with a great deal of respect for bodily autonomy, and the Empire and most of the Core worlds seems to have a strong heteronormative traditionalism to them-- so it seems to me that if you were a boy who might be discovering that you're attracted sometimes to other boys, Sipo would not have been a kind place. And if you take that into consideration with how aggressive Cassian can get when some men get into his physical space (think about Taramyn, and Cassian's sharp, "Don't touch me"), versus how willing he is to be in close physical proximity to women-- I dunno, man. Something happened there, and it wasn't good. What I'm wondering is if Cassian desires both men and women (and all the spectrums beyond, perhaps), but feels less safe with men unless he really knows them. Because the way Cass relates to that unwelcome touch doesn't seem to be an expression of performative hypermasculinity, or anything like it-- Cass is more than willing to touch men, to hug them deeply, and let himself receive physical affection from them. Brasso and Pegla and Melshi all hug him, and he lets himself be vulnerable in all of those circumstances. But I think it happens less often with men for Cassian, because he feels at far greater risk.

#ao3 wrapped #my asks #all about eve #back on my writing bullshit #cassian andor #my beloved space disaster #headcanons #rampant backstory speculation

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iremelwrites · 2 years

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Loved your take on Alois! I dislike the second season because of how it handled it's characters, but your study does it so much justice. Do you have any further thoughts on Hannah and why she behaves the way she does?

Thank you so much! I'm glad you enjoyed the analysis I haven't really thought into Hannah's character (not in the same depth as Alois at least), but I do think that fandom sometimes undermines her to this "abused maid who did nothing wrong" trope.

The demon realm seems genuinely boring if one is just sitting around and looking for souls to eat, over many centuries, so my take is that when she encountered Luka, Hannah was suddenly introduced to the concept of feelings, and I think that is what relieved her boredom (I think she even stated that in canon, I'm not sure though). Alois made a contract with Claude only at first, and it's unknown why and how exactly Hannah and the triplets ended up there. Demons eat hundreds of souls over their lifetime but I doubt that the souls they consume can actually influence how they themselves behave, so the idea that Hannah acted the way she did simply because she consumed Luka's soul (that is implied in the show) isn't really logical. She had to consciously allow that to happen, and I think the main reason for this initially was because she enjoyed the world of intense emotions that she was suddenly introduced to. She found Luka intriguing because he was a pure child, and by allowing his soul more freedom within her own mind (do demons have a soul?) she felt his feelings, which were probably drug-like to someone who's never experienced them before. So she did what Luka's soul wanted her to do: found his brother and stayed close to him.

I've wondered a lot about this myself, actually. If there are several souls within one body, especially in the case of Luka, who probably had something of a special position, can they all see and feel what the physical form is experiencing? And, if yes, this is a whole new level of S2 analysis because what are Luka's thoughts on how his brother grew up, and how he treats the demon that his soul is in? What does he think about the fact that Alois also made a contract with a demon, what is Luka's opinion of Claude? A lot to think about.

It's interesting whether Hannah began masking herself as a maid when Alois became earl or when the old Trancy earl was still alive. The latter makes sense because that way she could keep Luka near his brother. (Did she maybe also keep an eye on him when he was surviving for several years on his own?) Her being physically present during the worst years of Alois's life also adds another very very heavy degree to the story, one that's unfortunately not explored in canon. I don't think that Hannah felt a particular guilt about consuming Luka's soul and, essentially, becoming what ruined Alois's life. Not at the outset, at least. It was probably something like a game to her. She admitted in the OVA that she loves how unstable Alois's soul is, so despite the fact that she's not deliberately malicious towards Alois the way Claude is, she's still a demon who is still quite predatory in nature. She's physically incapable of feeling and generating genuine human emotions, since the first reaction of a human to Alois's mental condition would be to get him help ASAP. Even though she might have inherited Luka's sentiments on making his brother happy, her execution of that idea, in the long term, is objectively poor.

Demons aren't averse to death, since they're hard to kill and have lived for hundreds of years I think most of them have a fatalistic outlook on it (if they're not actively pursuing a goal like Sebastian, that is), and that's why I think Hannah accepted death so easily. The ending of her arc makes no sense though, she had an intense rivalry with Claude, why was she cuddling up to him in their final moments? Though she might have developed a fascination with the human world and its concepts, and may have modeled their household to a family dynamic in her mind, it's still kind of weird honestly.

In short, what we know about Hannah and her relationships with the other characters in canon is sadly crumbs of information which are difficult to analyze because there's so little to work with. Which is, again, very unfortunate because she seems like a potentially incredible character who could've been portrayed a lot better

#iremel answers #black butler #hannah annafellows #black butler analysis #black butler 2 #kuroshitsuji #kuroshitsuji 2 #black butler headcanons #alois trancy #i think i also want to explore the relationship between alois and hannah one day #because i have like five theories on why he treats her the way he does

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sock-ness-monster · 3 years

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Excuse is granted. Please. I beg of you. Infodump away

Thank you so much I love telling people about this guy

So, to preface this, I'll be telling this story exactly how it was told to me by our camp counselor at a Caveing camp I went to, so it's very much an oral history that maybe can't be fact checked but the broad strokes are genuinely 100% true

TRIGGER WARNINGS: DEATH, DARKNESS, CLAUSTROPHOBIA, GRAVE DESECRATION, CRICKETS

Now that that's out of the way (and please mention if there's any other TW's I should add) the story of

Floyd Collins, The Man Who Was Buried Six Times

This story begins in Kentucky in 19very early, a young Floyd was plowing his family's field when he suddenly dropped through the ground and discovered an unknown cave system. Super cool! Now, people back then did not have television, keep in mind, so caves were really big deals and they were a brand new and lucrative tourist escapade. Floyd's family seized the idea and quickly made a little tourist attraction out of it and started raking in the dough. But they weren't the only ones who had a cave you could tour, Kentucky's geology is super unique in that it has tons of limestone and sandstone which is perfect for underground rivers to carve cool caves out of. They are everywhere in Kentucky and the surrounding area, there was a lot of competition for who had the best, the biggest, the longest cave. And Floyd and his brothers were seized by cave fever and were exploring all around looking for new tunnels and chambers. A large part of this business, unfortunately, was not just walking people through the caves but was letting them take home souvenirs. People could carve their names in the wall, take a stalagmite or stalactite or whatever cool rock they found. Destroying the sensitive ecosystem of the caves. Floyd, the cool dude that he was, was one of the only people who was against this at the time. Good for him! Salamanders are important!

Anyway, Floyd and his brothers are always on the lookout for new opportunities, and there were tons in that area. But, not all of them would pan out. Floyd had heard rumblings about a new cave system called Sand Cave that wasn't far from his family's original cave, which by now had been dubbed Crystal Cave. It didn't seem that promising to most, but Floyd was hoping it actually connected to Crystal cave, and they could tack on so many feet to how big their cave was. So he set off to see if he could find a connection.

He had been surveying the cave for a few hours, and decided to call it quits. He was crawling through a tight tunnel upwards toward the opening of the cave when a rock slide pinned his ankle down tight. He was laying flat with his hands reaching upwards, and there was no way for him to reach back behind him to free his ankle.

He had gone on this expedition without telling anyone.

This was the first time he got buried.

Three days pass, and his brother Homer finally finds him. He tries everything he can think of to free floyd, to no effect. Realizing that this may be a bigger endeavor than he can pull off, he crawls back out to go and find help. It is January of 1925, what else is there to do but go to the newspaper? They publish the story of the man trapped in a crawl way, and it's a huge hit!? People are fascinated by Floyds predicament. They want to help, they want to see, they want to know more. It even makes it on the radio! The three biggest news stories of the time were

1) the war (oof)

2)Charles Lindbergh (will come up again later)

And 3) Floyd in the hole

Everyone in America is anxious to find out how they rescue Floyd. "They" being everyone from the local cave experts to the military corps of engineers to the freakin freemasons, they're all trying to figure out how to free Floyd. Who, ya know, is just chillin in the cave, because caves stay at a constant temperature of ~54° , not too bad for January. His brothers and a reporter take turns crawling down to deliver him the three essentials; food, whiskey, and news. The reporter, "Skeets" Miller, would later win a Pulitzer Prize for his correspondence with floyd in the shaft. Now, as mentioned before, it is a cold and snowy January, but people (nearly 10,000 according to some reports) are so fascinated by the goings on at Sand Cave that they travel from far and wide to be there at the triumphant moment when Floyd emerges. Weeks have gone by at this point. Radio stations are reporting every day, Charles Lindbergh is hired to take photographs of the terrain from above. It's like a big party up top.

They camp out around the cave mouth.

They build fires for food and warmth.

The snow melts.

The cold water trickles down into the cave.

Floyd....... starts to cough.

The cave's already sketchy structure is further compromised.

There's another rock slide.

Floyd is now cut off from contact with the up side world, and the engineers panic and go with a last ditch effort they had been debating beforehand. They can't go around they can't go behind, the only path left was straight down. They drill a hole that reaches the 150 feet from daylight to Floyd's prison. They are too late. He was estimated to have died three to four days before they reached him. His leg is still stuck, and half his face has been consumed by cave crickets. And they just.....leave him there. Whatreyagonnado they shrug, he's already gone we can stop now. They fill in the shaft again.

This is the second time Floyd is buried.

Homer, his closest brother, can't accept this as his final resting place. A few weeks later, they un block the hole and carry Floyd to their family's funeral plot and have a small service with just his closest friends and family present.

This is the third time Floyd Collins is buried.

A few years go by, and the Collins family sells their farm and cave. Unfortunately, they did not see the part of the deed that entitled the new owners to everything in and under the property. Floyd's body is now legally theirs. He is exhumed and placed on display in a glass coffin in Crystal Cave (which years and years later would eventually be proven to connect to Sand Cave).

This is the fourth time Floyd is buried.

If you haven't pieced it together yet, caves were a pretty big deal. We now enter a time in Kentucky history known as the Cave Wars, and they are brutal. How brutal, you ask? Well, to answer with one scenario that happens to be related to this story, the owners of nearby cave were jealous of the attention Crystal Cave was getting from their cool exhibit of Floyd's body, against his family's wishes. Why, the only logical thing to do is steal the man's body and throw it off a cliff. Crystal Cave's new owners would recover it, though minus the left leg. And the next logical thing of course is to put him back on display but this time with a bunch more chains.

This is the fifth time Floyd Collins is buried.

Then, the 60s roll around and Crystal Cave and Floyd are purchased by the National Parks Service on the grounds of being connected to the Mammoth Cave System (the longest cave system in the entire world now). Floyds family is still fighting for his body, and in the 80s they finally get their wish. Floyd is removed from the cave in a 15 day trip and buried at a real cemetery again.

This, is the sixth time he is buried.

A pillar is constructed in honor and perhaps in reparations to all he's gone through, but it is struck by a semi truck and demolished less than a week after its unveiling.

Floyd.......went through a lot. All he ever wanted to do was see some cool rocks and support his family. And to this day, cavers do their best to do right by him. When entering Mammoth Cave, they often ask the darkness to look after them. They aren't talking to the darkness, of course, that darkness that can never be described properly. They are talking to Floyd. Asking him to watch over them as they wish he had someone to watch over him. In the caves everyone is above you, but that's not what they mean. And when they hear a whistle through the tunnels, they like to imagine it's Floyd. Floyd, who was right. The cave was so much more than people thought, in so many different ways. To this day, there's a saying in the caveing community.

"Floyd Lives"

It's like the geology version of "Eddie Would Go". As long as we carry on his legacy of exploring bravely, daring to go where noone has gone before, and do our best to preserve the natural beauty and habitat of the caves, floyd will live on. Floyd lives in our memories and hearts and the drips of water that will one day be pillars.

I don't really know how to end this. Here's a picture of the man himself;

(the picture above is not the tunnel he was trapped in, to be clear)

#cave camp had just such a peofimf impact on me omg #the best week of my whole life #and to think i almost chickened out the night before leaving #i still keep in contact with those guys #we all have tshirts with you guessed it floyd on them #floyd collins #caves #geology #stories #humanity #infodump #*profound i meant #claustrophobia tw #buried alive tw #darkness tw #longish post

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hunxi-after-hours · 3 years

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slapdash thoughts after finishing 《七爷》

head empty, no thoughts, spoilers in bullet-point form below the cut

interestingly enough I feel like the book to read in conversation with 《七爷》 should be 《琅琊榜》 Lang Ya Bang / The Rankings of Langya / Nirvana in Fire, because both revolve around the themes of morality and personhood amidst political intrigue and sabotage, and while 《琅琊榜》 is much more optimistic about the ability of good to triumph over evil/corruption, I do think that 《七爷》 offers its readers a cast of characters with grayer morality and bloodier hands, and challenges us to believe that, despite the atrocities they’ve committed, they are still the best people for the job

I just think that Helian Yi is such a fascinating case study and argument of a person; the way his character interacts with themes of morality and leadership, rulership and fealty, love and sacrifice is so delightfully complex

because at the end of the day, Helian Yi is a great ruler. and in a weird inverse of that Black Panther quote (“you are a good man, and it is hard for a good man to be king”), Helian Yi is not necessarily pure of heart and method, but he is a damn good ruler

at least, a damn sight better than his brothers

and how the author sends all of that up in smoke, because by the end of the book, Helian Yi, and Zhou Zishu, and Jing Beiyuan all find that their petty stratagems and flashes of cunning and devious little plans are nothing in the face of actual enemies at their gates

so you’ve thrown away your humanity for power, the book says by the final battle. so what? does that make you any more capable of defending your kingdom, when the enemy you must confront is no longer your brother’s smiling face, but literal armies camped on your doorstep, and no reinforcements on the horizon?

and what wins the day in the end? humanity. not even love, because saying that Wu Xi’s love for Jing Beiyuan secured the survival of Da Qing cheapens the immensity of the sacrifice and the depth of the thought involved in the decision

it’s desire mixed with profit mixed with pride mixed with strategy mixed with faith mixed with devotion mixed with furious, bloody-minded violence, that primal logic of fear and hatred and superstition and belief and terror and stubbornness and a healthy dose of “well, fuck it”

likewise, mapping the relationships of knowing between the characters is a fascinating exploration of character dynamics: again and again, we have characters look at each other and, with a start, realize that they never knew the other at all

Jing Beiyuan remarks to Wu Xi at some point that he’s afraid of Helian Yi because he cannot understand the depths of Helian Yi’s thoughts and suspicions, cannot see through Helian Yi and map his motivations and reactions

there’s an extended sequence near the end of the book where Jing Beiyuan and Helian Yi profoundly misunderstand each other: Helian Yi keeps staring at Jing Beiyuan because 1) he’s in love with Jing Beiyuan (awkward) and 2) he is trying to figure out if Jing Beiyuan is secretly his half-brother, and while Jing Beiyuan notices (and keeps his noticing under wraps), he thinks that Helian Yi is suspicious of him, might think that Jing Beiyuan himself is interested in that dragon throne when Jing Beiyuan most profoundly is not

and this confusion never gets resolved, just pushed aside when war comes to their doorstep, and then Jing Beiyuan leaves the capitol without saying goodbye, without even letting Helian Yi know that he’s still alive

there is something so profoundly and quietly heartbreaking about the fact that Jing Beiyuan would rather Helian Yi think that he’s dead than say goodbye

first life!Helian Yi, in the third fanwai, also notes that he doesn’t think he truly understood Jing Beiyuan either, which was actually a reason why first life!Helian Yi was afraid of Jing Beiyuan--here was a man who’d grown up with him since childhood, who could read his slightest glance, a wordless command in the twist of his voice, and yet Helian Yi looked at Jing Beiyuan and could not see beyond the bland smile and its deep shadows

likewise, Wu Xi never truly understands Jing Beiyuan--Jing Beiyuan never ends up telling anyone about the reincarnation business, and the number of times Wu Xi is caught totally flat-footed by Jing Beiyuan’s unexpected laughter, or anger, or actions, far outnumbers the times that they’ve been able to look at each other wordlessly, nod, and move in synchronicity

does that even happen? I actually think it’s quite remarkable that the two of them don’t necessarily get each other; their relationship seems founded, instead, on novelty

Jing Beiyuan, to Wu Xi, blends perfectly that mix of known and unknown, friendly and strange, familiar and foreign. Jing Beiyuan is Wu Xi’s first and only crush, first and only infatuation, first and only love, which speaks more to Wu Xi’s character than to anything about Jing Beiyuan himself

meanwhile, for Jing Beiyuan, who’s been around the block more times than he cares for and is 300 years into this life, literally gives no more fucks about relationships and love, doesn’t care to look for it, doesn’t feel it missing from his life, doesn’t place his hopes and happiness in other people because other people never place his hopes and happiness before their own, so for Wu Xi to surprise him (already quite a feat in and of itself, because again, Jing Beiyuan is 300 years old), for Wu Xi to move Jing Beiyuan with the strength of his passion and the purity of his emotions, is actually incredible

hilariously enough, the one (1) relationship of True Knowing (TM) in this book is actually Zhou Zishu and Jing Beiyuan, as 酒中知己. where is my 30k fanwai of wacky hijinks of these two being dumbasses together. I want it

okay but I’m still thinking about Helian Yi, because the more I think about it, the more I’m coming down on the side of “《山河令》did Helian Yi dirty,” and/or 晋王 in 《山河令》 simply wasn’t Helian Yi at all

I think I prefer the latter, because there are aspects of worldbuilding and characterization in 《山河令》 that suggest that the events of 《七爷》 didn’t occur, or didn’t occur in the same way

look I’m just saying that 《山河令》!Zhou Zishu does not read as someone who has fought in a literal war

not that 《山河令》！Zhou Zishu isn’t familiar with death, and destruction, and carnage

but you really have to read 《七爷》 to get a feel for the vastness of war, the bleakness of long, hopeless months, the yawning maw of defeat and everything they’ve fought for going up in smoke

I’m sure I will have more thoughts (and more well-founded thoughts) on this after finishing 《天涯客》, but for now I think I’m going to walk away from 《七爷》 with many more Helian Yi thoughts and feelings than I expected

#seventh time lucky #and just a little #zero braincell jianghu

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fructidor · 3 years

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Random amrev figures and their MBTI types!

Overview of the MBTI theory & Cognitive Stack

MBTI Theory

I vs. E = Introvert vs. Extravert. Introverts tend to be more shy and work independently, while Extraverts are more social and like working & interacting with others.

N vs. S = Intuitive vs. Sensor. Intuitives are people who always think ahead and are tired idealists. Sensors spend more time focusing on the now than the future, and take their information through their senses.

T vs. F = Thinker vs. Feeler. Thinkers tend to use their head rather than their heart to make important decisions in their lives, while Feelers use their emotions more to make decisions than their heads.

J vs. P = Judger vs. Perceiver. Judgers tend to follow a set structure when it comes to subjects, while Perceivers tend to go more with the flow, going where life takes them.

Cognitive Functions

Cognitive functions are the way you process the world around you and make decisions. Cognitive functions ultimately determine your type. They are scales of Intuition vs Sensing and Thinking vs Feeling. Then there is this thing called a cognitive stack. The way you order this is very important because it shows which cognitive function is the most dominant and least dominant.

Primary → Most natural (and comfortable) function; the internal “mother tongue”

Auxiliary → Supporting function, usually connected with creation and job choice

Tertiary → Function where individual often takes action steps to improve upon

Inferior → Activates under extreme stress, generally avoided out of self-protection

Extraverted Sensing (Se)

Taking action, using all five senses, going forward. Se takes in the present moment in its entirety, and makes rapid decisions on the fly. During times of crisis and emergencies, individuals with primary or auxiliary Se can make the best out of the situation.

Introverted Sensing (Si)

Associations, metaphors, nostalgia. Si can travel back to any point in time through a single scent or sound. Important information (and sometimes interesting trivia) is stored in filing cabinets, where it can be retrieved at any later time.

Extraverted Intuition (Ne)

Brainstorming, thinking outside the box, idea generation. Ne easily hops from idea to idea, while making abstract connections. Many artists—especially poets—use significant Ne in their work. To the outside, Ne seems quick, random, and extremely “jumpy.”

Introverted Intuition (Ni)

Time-space awareness, predicting the future, hunches. Ni is a far-reaching, visionary function—and can picture the future, sometimes with scary-accurate results.

Extraverted Feeling (Fe)

Expressive emotions, social norms, etiquette. Fe respects the consensus of the group, and puts harmony above personal desires. The function often acts as a mediator between groups, as it naturally puts others’ needs above its own.

Introverted Feeling (Fi)

Values, notions of “right” and “wrong,” likes and dislikes. Fi is a deeply personal and intense function that digs to the core of the human condition. Convictions, morals, and strong beliefs all fall under the Fi umbrella.

Extraverted Thinking (Te)

Facts, pros and cons, methodological step-by-step strategies. Te respects rules and regulations—and takes great pride in a job well done. Checklists and clear-cut meeting agendas get Te’s gears going—a top-down approach floats its boat.

Introverted Thinking (Ti)

Iterations, holistic reasoning, agile strategies. Ti takes a bottom-up approach to problem-solving, and fixates on information management. When new data comes in that contradicts old beliefs, Ti will shift like a fluid crystalline framework.

We'll start off very simply, with George Washington.

Washington = ISTJ.

Cognitive Stack: SiTeFiNe

I = Introverted

S = Sensor

T = Thinker

J = Judger

Type Description: ISTJs are responsible organizers, driven to create and enforce order within systems and institutions. They are neat and orderly, inside and out, and tend to have a procedure for everything they do. Reliable and dutiful, ISTJs want to uphold tradition and follow regulations.

ISTJs are steady, productive contributors. Although they are Introverted, ISTJs are rarely isolated; typical ISTJs know just where they belong in life, and want to understand how they can participate in established organizations and systems. They concern themselves with maintaining the social order and making sure that standards are met.

Additional Notes: Washington is the stereotypical ISTJ. He fits all the criteria and it honestly just matches up the best.

John Adams = INTJ

Cognitive Stack: NiTeFiSe

I = Introverted

N = Intuitive

T = Thinker

J = Judger

Type Description: INTJs are analytical problem-solvers, eager to improve systems and processes with their innovative ideas. They have a talent for seeing possibilities for improvement, whether at work, at home, or in themselves.

Often intellectual, INTJs enjoy logical reasoning and complex problem-solving. They approach life by analyzing the theory behind what they see, and are typically focused inward, on their own thoughtful study of the world around them. INTJs are drawn to logical systems and are much less comfortable with the unpredictable nature of other people and their emotions. They are typically independent and selective about their relationships, preferring to associate with people who they find intellectually stimulating.

Additional Notes: I mean, John Adams could go several ways with me, but INTJ seems to work out the most fine. I don't have an objection to it.

Thomas Jefferson: INFJ

Cognitive Stack: NiFeTiSe

I = Introverted

N = Intuitive

F = Feeler

J = Judger

Type Description: INFJs are creative nurturers with a strong sense of personal integrity and a drive to help others realize their potential. Creative and dedicated, they have a talent for helping others with original solutions to their personal challenges.

The Counselor has a unique ability to intuit others' emotions and motivations, and will often know how someone else is feeling before that person knows it themself. They trust their insights about others and have strong faith in their ability to read people. Although they are sensitive, they are also reserved; the INFJ is a private sort, and is selective about sharing intimate thoughts and feelings.

Additional Notes: This doesn't seem overly like Jefferson at first, but overall the cognitive function stack matches up the most. You could make the case that he is an INTJ, but honestly I feel that Te would not be his auxiliary function. Fe would be a much better type.

James Madison: INTP

Cognitive Stack: TiNeSiFe

I = Introverted

N = Intuitive

T = Thinker

P = Perceiver

Type Description: INTPs are philosophical innovators, fascinated by logical analysis, systems, and design. They are preoccupied with theory, and search for the universal law behind everything they see. They want to understand the unifying themes of life, in all their complexity.

INTPs are detached, analytical observers who can seem oblivious to the world around them because they are so deeply absorbed in thought. They spend much of their time in their own heads: exploring concepts, making connections, and seeking understanding of how things work. To the Architect, life is an ongoing inquiry into the mysteries of the universe.

Additional Notes: Another ✨ Stereotype ✨. I just feel that whenever I think of INTPs, I think of Madison. He just fits, again, all the criteria and makes the most sense.

Alexander Hamilton: ENTJ

Cognitive Stack: TeNiSeFi

E = Extravert

N = Intuitive

T = Thinker

J = Judger

Type Description: ENTJs are strategic leaders, motivated to organize change. They are quick to see inefficiency and conceptualize new solutions, and enjoy developing long-range plans to accomplish their vision. They excel at logical reasoning and are usually articulate and quick-witted.

ENTJs are analytical and objective, and like bringing order to the world around them. When there are flaws in a system, the ENTJ sees them, and enjoys the process of discovering and implementing a better way. ENTJs are assertive and enjoy taking charge; they see their role as that of leader and manager, organizing people and processes to achieve their goals.

Additional Notes: I'm actually a ENTJ, so I had a lot of this stuff in my head. I mean, I could kind of see Hamilton being an ENTJ, but I'm still pretty mad that he is, considering I hate him. But, it kind of makes sense, and it’s to the point that I can’t ignore it and just have to accept the fact.

Benjamin Franklin: ENTP

Cognitive Stack: NeTiFeSi

E = Extravert

N = Intuitive

T = Thinker

P = Perceiver

Type Description: ENTPs are energized by challenge and are often inspired by a problem that others perceive as impossible to solve. They are confident in their ability to think creatively, and may assume that others are too tied to tradition to see a new way. ENTPs rely on their ingenuity to deal with the world around them, and rarely find preparation necessary. They will often jump into a new situation and trust themselves to adapt as they go.

ENTPs are masters of re-inventing the wheel and often refuse to do a task the same way twice. They question norms and often ignore them altogether. Established procedures are uninspiring to the Visionary, who would much rather try a new method (or two) than go along with the standard.

Additional Notes: I just feel that in general, Franklin is the stereotype of the ENTP type too. They are honestly all inventors, and out of the box thinkers? Who do I think of when I hear this personality trope? Franklin.

James Monroe: ESTJ

Cognitive Functions: TeSiNeFi

E = Extravert

S = Sensor

T = Thinker

J = Judger

Type Description: ESTJs are hardworking traditionalists, eager to take charge in organizing projects and people. Orderly, rule-abiding, and conscientious, ESTJs like to get things done, and tend to go about projects in a systematic, methodical way.

ESTJs are the consummate organizers, and want to bring structure to their surroundings. They value predictability and prefer things to proceed in a logical order. When they see a lack of organization, the ESTJ often takes the initiative to establish processes and guidelines, so that everyone knows what's expected.

Additional Notes: Monroe is definitely not the founder that I focus the most on, but the criteria for the ESTJ type fits him really well from what I’ve read and heard. Don’t really have an objection to this, and I support it enough to place it in this document.

John Jay: INTP

Cognitive Stack: TiNeSiFe

I = Introverted

N = Intuitive

T = Thinker

P = Perceiver

Additional Notes: Wow, another INTP? Yes. Again, Jay isn’t the founder that I spend the most time with, but the INTP type fits him the most. Funny how a diplomat has Fe as an inferior function...it doesn’t matter much here though, as what matters is the fact that all the other functions match up the most. And, I guess Hamilton was thinking of INTPs when he wanted to write the Federalist Papers, huh?

Aaron Burr: INFJ?

Cognitive Stack: NiFeTiSe

I = Introverted

N = Intuitive

F = Feeler

J = Judger

The Counselor has a unique ability to intuit others' emotions and motivations, and will often know how someone else is feeling before that person knows it himself. They trust their insights about others and have strong faith in their ability to read people. Although they are sensitive, they are also reserved; the INFJ is a private sort, and is selective about sharing intimate thoughts and feelings.

Additional Notes: I can’t ever decide with this man. Before I found out cognitive functions existed, I had my heart set on him being an INTJ. Now I know that cognitive functions do exist, however, I find that he fits more of an INFJ function set. I still can see him as an INTJ, no doubt about that, but I’ll settle for the other Ni dom for now.

John Laurens: ENFP

Cognitive Stack: NeFiTeSi

E = Extravert

N = Intuitive

F = Feeler

P = Perceiver

Type Description: ENFPs are people-centered creators with a focus on possibilities and a contagious enthusiasm for new ideas, people and activities. Energetic, warm, and passionate, ENFPs love to help other people explore their creative potential.

ENFPs are typically agile and expressive communicators, using their wit, humor, and mastery of language to create engaging stories. Imaginative and original, ENFPs often have a strong artistic side. They are drawn to art because of its ability to express inventive ideas and create a deeper understanding of human experience.

Additional Notes: In general, I feel that Laurens just matches up the ENFP stereotype really well and all the cognitive functions. I mean, NeFi is pretty accurate for him, and I think at this point it’s self explanatory. Not to mention the fact that ENTJ & ENFP are, arguably, the most compatible personality types of the whole entire MBTI system.

Marquis de Lafayette: ENFJ

Cognitive Stack: FeNiSeTi

E = Extravert

N = Intuitive

F = Feeler

J = Judger

Type Description: ENFJs are idealist organizers, driven to implement their vision of what is best for humanity. They often act as catalysts for human growth because of their ability to see potential in other people and their charisma in persuading others to their ideas. They are focused on values and vision, and are passionate about the possibilities for people.

ENFJs are typically energetic and driven, and often have a lot on their plates. They are tuned into the needs of others and acutely aware of human suffering; however, they also tend to be optimistic and forward-thinking, intuitively seeing opportunity for improvement. The ENFJ is ambitious, but their ambition is not self-serving: rather, they feel personally responsible for making the world a better place.

Additional Notes: I feel that Lafayette could also match up with the ENFP personality type easily, but I decided not to fully go for it. Why, I don’t know. I feel the ENFP stereotype I have fully reserved for Laurens, and that Lafayette has taken my ENFJ stereotype as a substitute. I also used to think of Lafayette being an ENFJ highly before I learned about cognitive functions; once I did learn about them I started debating his type. In the end, I’ve just decided on him being an ENFX (x being a variable for either j or p), albeit with a ENFJ lean.

Elizabeth Schuyler-Hamilton: INFP

Cognitive Functions: FiNeSiTe

I = Introvert

N = Intuitive

F = Feeler

P = Perceiver

Type Description: INFPs are imaginative idealists, guided by their own core values and beliefs. To an INFP, possibilities are paramount; the realism of the moment is only of passing concern. They see potential for a better future, and pursue truth and meaning with their own individual flair.

INFPs are sensitive, caring, and compassionate, and are deeply concerned with the personal growth of themselves and others. Individualistic and nonjudgmental, INFPs believe that each person must find their own path. They enjoy spending time exploring their own ideas and values, and are gently encouraging to others to do the same. INFPs are creative and often artistic; they enjoy finding new outlets for self-expression.

Additional Notes: INFPs are often seen as the “cinnamon roll” of the MBTI types (their dominant Fi and auxiliary Ne playing a big part in this) and who is more of a cinnamon roll than Eliza. I know this is honestly more of a Hamilton thing than an Amrev one, but I felt like I wanted to include her, as she was really the person I spent the most time focusing on, MBTI wise, before I encountered Amrev and everything that was left of my Hamilton infatuation dissipated.

#i wrote this a month ago but i’m posting it now #i think it’s also on ao3?#amrev #alexander hamilton #john laurens #george washington #john adams #thomas jefferson #james madison #john jay #james monroe #marquis de lafayette #elizabeth schuyler #benjamin franklin

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why-this-kolaveri-machi · 3 years

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it’s a fucking metaphor!

Titans 3.08

i’ve finally gathered the mental and emotional resources to do this thing, so let’s go! as always, i’m typing this up as i see the episode.

SPOILERS AHEAD

1. on watching this opening scene, i was thinking back to how gar was in s1, or even the early bits of s2. the way he idolised the others, particularly dick, and his readiness to go along with whatever they said, and the way he practically bled the need for acceptance. and here he is now, openly defying dick, fully open to and aware of the flaws of the people he loves and admires, knowing he is accepted no matter what and extending that generosity elsewhere. it’s a remarkable bit of character growth that’s... sort of blossomed in the background and so rewarding to see and acknowledge.

1.25. i guess what i really love about this conflict over how to respond to jason--as clumsily as it is sometimes written--is how their histories and individual traumas inform each character’s reaction. dick is torn between his guilt over what’s become of jason and his drive to do what batman had essentially given up on doing: he is motivated to track down red hood at all costs but there’s a sense that he’s not completely sold on the idea that the only way to stop him is to kill him. (he might go the comics route and try to put him in arkham? god, imagine if the season ended with jason in arkham.) kory’s never had much of a connection with jason in the first place, and jason has done one of the worst things he could do in her book: track and kill a member of her newfound family and is threatening to kill more.

and gar... sure. look. the idea of jason and red hood as separate entities appeals to him; that red hood emerged when jason was drugged to the gills by scarecrow and lost his usual inhibitions. gar’s struggled with what he becomes when he’s pushed to his limits, too--he did rip open that experimenting scientist with his teeth way back in 1.07, after all, and he was brainwashed by cadmus in s2 into becoming a literal monster. he needs to think, to know, there’s a dichotomy, a line that can only be crossed under extreme duress or by outside influence.

and he says--and we say--that he was accepted back into the titans in spite of what he’d done, but was he really? gar’s always struggled with his footing in this group; relegated to the caretaker, the tech guy, the gatekeeper, and sometimes punching bag even though everybody’s paying lip service to how much of a family they all are. perhaps gar reaching out to jason and offering acceptance is aspirational on his part: perhaps this is the effort he hoped the titans put/or will put into getting gar back, even when it would seem like he’s too far gone.

1.5. anyway my point is that i don’t think it’s worth discussing this in terms of right/wrong decisions because all of their reactions make a lot of sense given their backgrounds/personalities. gar is doing a fine job here of tracking down jason’s friends and trying to find him that way, but we the audience know that jason is ultimately going to end up an anti-hero/eventually-hero character, so with that knowledge in mind we know that gar’s reaction is the right one. it’s knowledge that the other characters don’t have, so to judge them on it is... uh, unfair.

1.8. also, molly is awesome, yay!

2. dick and barbara flirting over the phone is so cute! i love to see this side of dick: lighter, peppier, willing (even if somewhat reluctantly) to put his mission aside to go out on a date with his girlfriend. and i love how easy this makes his dynamic with kory too: it’s all very domestic and utterly delightful.

(also, re: the water leak in barbara’s office--you’re saying GCPD could afford fancy-schmancy table-wide touch screen computers and evil-lair lighting but needs its frickin’ commissioner to catch leaking water from above her desk with mugs and fishbowls????)

2.2225. this is probably a teeny tiny thing and i’m not sure i want to bring it up at all BUT. the fact that dick feels compelled to lie to barbara about not liking fancy gala food and eating something more substantial before the date? not a terribly great sign, though i wouldn’t call it a red flag per se.

“this from a man who forced his students to eat cauliflower crust pizza...”

3. so.... conner and kom are a Thing. huh.

in theory i really like the idea of them bonding over an innate alien-ness and longing for a place they could really belong. both of them are alien twice-over: conner a mix of kryptonian and human, practically generated in a test tube, and kom being somebody that was born different and rejected by her own people, now stuck on a planet dominated by an entirely different species. i even like them exploring this bond physically. i guess it’s the sense of... uneasiness around what we do and don’t know about kom that makes this scene land slightly left of centre to me. i think titans, especially through s2, has cultivated in its audience a sense of distrust even until the final episode, just in case somebody vital to the season is suddenly revealed to have had ulterior motives (i’m even low-key suspicious of leslie). i really want to see this kom-conner dynamic play out but the anticipation of watching the other shoe drop is sucking out the enjoyment.

4. for fuck’s sake dick, gar’s not your gatekeeper.

TIIIIIIIIMMMMM \O/

4.5. i love this nod to tim’s origins in the comics, the way he just comes in and lays out all his evidence and makes it clear to dick that he needs tim’s help as robin. the fact that he was there at the flying graysons’ last performance, he was obsessed with their acrobatic moves, and was observant enough to connect those moves with that of robin and later nightwing... all of this came together to put him where he is right now.

(i also love how he can’t contain his giddy excitement when talking about the day dick grayson’s parents died... to dick grayson. even if dick weren’t nightwing, that would be a deeply uncomfortable thing! yet tim can’t help himself, and i love him for it.)

4.8. it’s a testament to how much dick’s caught off-guard that he can’t come up with a better response to tim’s allegations other than “uh... he stole my moves! as you know, no two gymnasts in the world are allowed to do the same moves. now, let me escort you out while pretending poorly that i’m not at all shaken by this...”

4.9. i’ve talked about this before, but i find the logic around secret identities in this universe utterly fascinating. the titans don’t make much effort in keeping their identities secret: everybody seems to know that kory is starfire for instance, or that gar is beast boy. dick grayson is seen hanging out with kory a lot, especially at crime scenes. it won’t take a lot of sleuthing to find out that the titans are currently camped out at wayne manor, and to put two and two together.

my theory was that superheroes and villains have become such an integral part of daily society that it’s almost not worth it to seek out their secret identities, or that it’s just not a big deal anymore. like politicians or diplomats, not everybody bothers to look into who exactly their local politician is, but the people who know just... know. it’s a sort of unspoken social contract.

tim’s broken this contract by confronting dick about his identity, and dick’s not ready to deal with it. not entirely.

look at him! *pinches his cheeks*

5. ngl, it was quite satisfying to see jason knock the scarecrow out like that.

5.5. i guess... the question of jason’s culpability is always going to be a thorny one and would make for a great courtroom drama spinoff. there are a number of factors to consider: jason’s personality, the rough circumstances under which he grew up, his undoubtedly stressful transition to being robin, bruce wayne being... well, bruce wayne, never feeling accepted by the titans and having most of them turn on him, being roundly defeated and almost killed by deathstroke, alfred’s death, a fuckload of ptsd, his violent death, crane’s manipulations, coming back to life, crane plying him with a drug. but there is no easy line to draw between any of these factors to his actions. i think it would be a disservice to jason’s character to attribute his actions entirely to these things and rather irresponsible to do so. i think jason has to reckon with the fact that when he took crane’s drug, he wasn’t reckless and chaotic like the thugs he gave it to; the planning that went into hank’s death was meticulous and the way hank died--dawn essentially tricked into pulling the trigger that blew her lover into bits--is so drawn out and cruel.

5.75. it’s occurring to me that crane might have given jason a placebo. maybe jason’s dependence is psychological, and he’s externalised his fears in such a way that he believes crane’s drugs literally wipe them out, however temporarily.

in any case, the boy needs (more) therapy.

6. “he walked like robin...” fuck, tim

“gait recognition sweep” god, this show. i don’t know whether to laugh or cry. hey, once we’re done doing this gait recognition thingy, can we get a goddamn plumber in the house??? or move the commissioner’s desk so that sewage water isn’t dripping on her head or the million dollar touchscreen desk???????

6.5. oh no dick!!!!!! i am delighted that you got hurt but i feel ashamed about it! that looked like it really hurt!

he’s really not having a good time of it, is he. from being shot by a sniper to slamming at full speed into an suv, he’s got to be really fucking battered by now. and that’s just the physical side of it.

“can you believe that just over a week ago i was sitting in san francisco eating cauliflower crust pizza and feeling good about myself for the first time in five years...”

7. kory’s having visions again! now that she’s figured what they are, do you think the show’s just dropped justin? it’s curious that HPG hasn’t been brought up in a while after featuring relatively heavily in the beginning. hmmm.

8. dick’s in hospital but... he looks remarkably whole for someone who took a spill like that. you’d think he’d at least have a bruise to show for it. on the other hand, i love that the first thing he says is ‘i need to call home’. reminds me of season 1 dick and his clumsy attempts to explain away his found family as an ‘alliance of necessity’ or some bullshit. what a long way he’s come!

*gasp* dick’s hallucinating again!!!!!!!!!!!! i’m doing the dick’s hallucinating dance! can you believe that we’re carrying over these huge honking issues unearthed in season 2 onto season 3? can you believe?!!! all that time and effort i spent talking about dick’s mental health from last season has not gone in vain!!

... ahem. anyway. more on this later.

“hold on barbara, i think kory gave me the number to this therapist that she kept calling Hot Psychiatrist Guy...”

9. just an interlude to say that i’m barely halfway through the episode and i’ve already written 2k+ words... ugh. i’m going to try and be more concise.

10. man i fuckin love it when titans goes all out with its weird mindscapes and i’m extra glad that kory’s the focus this time. is that baby kom or maybe a secret sibling that neither of them knew about? was that lady luand’r? and is this place where kory was circling where the secret sibling is? it’s all very intriguing.

(if justin turned out to be that sibling... we’ve a real luke/leia situation on our hands.)

11. aw, i knew that nice security guard was going to die, but it still hurt to see him go :(

12. this show is so bizarre. like i get the mindscape as a narrative device, but jason using sex workers to try and vocalise his guilt about killing hank was just weird. like. i have to use tamil, sorry: idhulaan yaaru pa room pottu yosikara??? some things just can’t be translated into a second language.

i guess one way to interpret jason’s reckoning with what he did to the titans as a sign of him coming off crane’s drug, but i think it’s more to do with the disillusionment of realising that he was a mere pawn in a more sinister plan, and not, as he thought, a player in control of his destiny, rising to the purpose of liberating gotham of its fears in a way batman never could. along the way, he’s done some truly irreversible damage. it’s a bitter pill to swallow.

13. another hallucination! it’s really intriguing that it’s a young dick(?), younger than we’ve ever seen him, wearing an early-era robin costume from way before he even became robin. (this is also interesting in that it gives credence to the idea that ‘robin’ is an identity that dick created entirely on his own, and as a possible homage to his family.)

“old road, old house... it’s all gone.” i wonder what it all means.

13.5. it’s entirely likely dick’s hallucinating because of a brain injury from the accident, though just hallucinations without any other focal neurological deficit is unusual. he might’ve been microdosed with fear toxin at some point, though i wonder when... did jason do so after dick’s accident? did he get dosed at the factory from last episode?

it’s also possible it’s a continuing manifestation of dick’s issues from last season--which, if you remember, he never told anyone about and therefore never properly addressed. maybe he was hallucinating bruce wayne in a psychotic episode accompanying an acute stress reaction and maybe that’s what’s happening now. nobody’s denying that he’s under an extraordinary amount of stress right now. another way to look at it is that this is how he externalises conflict that he can’t bear to suppress anymore; if in s2 halluci!bruce manifested his insecurities and self-loathing, then these hallucinations... something to do with his fears, no doubt.

yet ANOTHER way to look at it might be: rachel is reaching out to him through their, well, psychic bond. after all, they were able to use that bond unconsciously last season to get the titans back together; maybe rachel has learned to gain a degree of control over it in themyscira and is sending across warnings? it’s all very intriguing.

anyway:

“i hear you skipped over the discowing suit in your evolution to nightwing... how could you??”

14. can you imagine, gar did all the work of reaching out to jason via molly and jason wants to meet dick? smh.

14.5. “i’m just a regular guy doing regular things” he says, standing at the opening of a secret old tunnel, like a secret person doing secret things, confronting someone who can now officially be called his stalker. neither of you guys are ‘regular’

14.8. ‘my dad was a cop and he taught me how to investigate’ - hmmm. i guess they’re trying to Explain Tim but i don’t think that’s really necessary. so he’s smart and he’s obsessed with batman and robin--that should be enough, imo.

15. that scene with scarecrow and his mother was... wow. i’m just laughing here helplessly, because what the hell? for a while i thought it was an extended dream sequence and i’m still not entirely sure that it isn’t...

anyway. i still love that titans is happy to throw out its plot in favour of extended character-exploration sessions.

15.5. it seems to me that this scene with crane and his mother (i have no idea if there’s anything in the comics similar to this) serves to move forward this season’s theme of harmful legacies and how parents can damage their children in the name of their mission. in a way it’s been the underlying message of the entire show but we’re really seeing it being reinforced this season. the titans, serving as a foil to scarecrow, are using the damage to rebuild themselves and actually work through their issues together, instead of spiralling further and further into the morass of their issues.

other than that... god, that scene was painful to watch. i can’t say i like this version of scarecrow or how this actor plays him at all.

16. i wonder what’s jason’s play here. i think he’s smart enough to realise that the titans aren’t going to just forgive him and let him be a titan again after what he did, and that dick agreeing to it is just a bid to pin both him and crane down. maybe it’s a ploy to trap them, get back on scarecrow’s good books so that he can have the drug again. who knows.

17. i absolutely felt dick when he said “we’ll bring him in and then re-assess the situation.” what the fuck else is he going to say? the priority is to get him.

so kory and dick are both hallucinating while potentially trying to rehabilitate their murderous siblings. CONFIDE IN EACH OTHER ALREADY

18. TIM NOOOO! you beautiful, reckless fool!

18.25. just to quickly address it here because i know it’s been brought up before: i think it’s perfectly justified to not have conner take tim to the hospital via superspeed because a) i don’t think we’ve seen conner do that with anybody so far and b) it’s probably not a good idea to submit tim’s body to that kind of stress without knowing what it would do to him. the paramedics with actual equipment and experience would be there in a few minutes, so on a risk assessment, i would say dick and conner absolutely made the right call.

18.5. i guess we won’t know what jason really intended to when the titans came to the pump to see him, but this is definitely going to set a big wedge in his relationship with crane. then again, crane got what he wanted--using starfire’s powers to blast through to the underground pipes--so jason can argue that this is exactly what he was working towards, too.

anyway, mortal peril, hallucinations, murderous family members, creepy visions and robins sprouting left and right. time to get rachel and donna on the scene, i think.

#titans #titans spoilers #meta #garfield logan #dick grayson #koriand'r #jason todd #tim drake #jonathan crane #conner kent #komand'r #aaaaah this is 3k+#*collapses in a heap*

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maddie-grove · 3 years

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Little Book Review: Spinning Silver

Author: Naomi Novik.

Publication Date: 2018.

Genre: Fantasy YA.

Premise: After her family is driven to the brink of poverty, young Miryem Mandelstam takes over her father's moneylending business and makes a success of it. Unfortunately, the Staryk, a parallel civilization of wintry fae folk, are listening when she tells her mom that she can turn silver into gold...and they are a literal bunch. Now Miryem's on the hook to turn their large quantities of silver into gold, and that's just the beginning. Can Miryem deal with these difficult ice people, garden-variety bigots, and a complicated political situation involving a fire demon?

Thoughts: I went into this book more or less cold (pun intended). I knew that it was inspired by "Rumpelstiltskin," that the heroine was Jewish, and that @forthegothicheroine liked it. The first two elements intrigued me, but, more important, I'd already discovered two terrific books in 2021 because @forthegothicheroine spoke well of them. As a result, I wasn't prepared for just how much great stuff is packed into this novel.

Most notably, it's a fascinating exploration of economics; that is, the complex web of resources, transactions, favors, and debts that exist in a society. Miryem has multiple irons in the fire even before she finds herself making high-stakes deals with the Staryks: lending money, taking the villagers' goods to the city to sell, and bringing back goods to sell in the village. (The gentile villagers, of course, see their own role in this economy as necessary and natural, yet resent the Mandlestams' participation regardless of their financial status; such is the nature of scapegoating.) The two secondary heroines make their own deals; Wanda, the Mandlestams' stoic hired girl, always arranges her affairs to avoid financial exploitation by her drunken father, while mousy boyar's daughter Irina must navigate the ever-shifting ways in which she's used as a marriage pawn. Everyone trades: peasant girls and tsars, ice kings and fire demons. I often thought of Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth while I was reading.

I also really loved the novel as a riff on "Rumpelstiltskin," one of the more peculiar well-known fairy tales. Like the excellent A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce, the novel takes bargains and debts more seriously than the original. (I don't think that Rumpelstiltskin should've gotten that baby--enforcing such a contract would be unconscionable--but he kind of gets jerked around.) While A Curse Dark as Gold concentrates on righting past wrongs, though, Spinning Silver focuses on the important of integrity. Miryem can look after herself, but she doesn't leave others behind. In this way, she gets to know the Staryk world, an icy, alien realm that still has its own complex needs and values, and grows to care about its people. Something similar happens to Irina; initially a scared girl whose only obligations are to herself and to her old nursemaid, she ends up saving countless people, including one who seems beyond all help. The story is full of fairy tale logic of the best kind: reversals and renewals everywhere.

Hot Goodreads Take: "If you are a part of the [J]ewish faith who understood the holidays the main character was celebrating, or the prayers she was saying, the power to you! I was reading this book for fun, and, therefore, didn't want to run to my phone to figure out what exactly was happening every time an instance like this occurred." I'm also not Jewish, but I'd be ashamed of myself if I whined about having to learn some basic facts about another religion, culture, country, etc., to understand a YA book.

#little book review #spinning silver #naomi novik #i have seen more intellectually curious mushrooms

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noethicalconsumptionunderdisney · 4 years

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Hogwarts Sorting Profile: Max Russo

So, confession time: Initially, I wasn’t actually planning on writing one of these for him. I’m sorry! I love Max, but he’s often in the background of Wizards of Waverly Place and just has these really random plots thrown in his direction, rather than interesting character-exploration-type shit like the main sibs. (Which, to be fair, is probably why some of y’all might be curious what I’m going to say about him.)

But I was thinking about what makes Max so odd as a character, and specifically I was thinking about him in comparison to other characters of his archetype in the Disney Channel-verse. Because we’ve seen the messy, funny, underachieving brother character a lot, but they come in very different flavors. Part of that for Max is that he shares some of those traits with Alex in contrast to the overachieving, overly serious Justin, but part of that is… Max often seems to be in his own little world, incomprehensible to mortals and wizards alike, and generally takes in the “real-world” around him with a shrug. He still cares about the “real-world” when it suits him, but he’s often kind of divorced from it, and that discovery fascinated me. Furthermore, it made his Sorting “click.”

We’ll start off easy: what does Max do? The answer is… he’ll do pretty much anything. He’s not a Burned Secondary, though, he just doesn’t give a fuck. Max is every bit the Slytherin Secondary that Alex is, we just don’t usually notice because he spends most of his time in his Neutral State.

The Slytherin Secondary’s Neutral State is blunt, rough, and often unphased by stepping on people’s toes. It’s easy to mistake this for a Gryffindor Secondary’s honesty, but it comes from a different place: comfort, relaxation, and/or apathy. It doesn’t inspire or motivate so much as sit back and do as it pleases, and the Neutral State’s honesty is there for convenience rather than necessity— if a different tactic will work better, a Slytherin Secondary can ditch their honesty and change direction far more easily than a Gryffindor Secondary.

Max isn’t exactly shy about saying what’s on his mind, even if it’s usually dismissed as nonsense. He also does seem to charge into situations without a care sometimes, but that’s the thing: he’s able to charge into those situations because he doesn’t care. When he tests out the zombies’ No-Fear Ring, it doesn’t work on him because he’s already fearless. So while some Slytherin Secondaries are nervous about showing their honesty to others and only show their Neutral State when they’re home safe with people they’re comfortable with, Max lives in his honest Neutral State because he feels comfortable and safe most of the time… even in situations where he really, really shouldn’t.

Curiously, one situation where he doesn’t feel comfortable or safe has very little to do with actual danger, but about personal identity: when he’s turned into Maxine. And in Maxine’s body, he’s a lot more manipulative.

“You know, I can’t help it if people think I’m cute. Watch how I make it work for me.”

As Maxine, he uses his cuteness to get out of chores, to get revenge on Alex and Justin in karate, to guilt dishonest customers out of cheating his parents, and comes up with a plan to talk his “boy self” up to a girl he likes as Maxine so that she’ll like him when he changes back. Yeah, can’t imagine why Maxine reminded Jerry and Theresa so much of Alex…

But there are Slytherin Secondary indications from Max in his usual form as well.

He has no qualms about outright lying — inventing a fake illness to get out of P.E., pretending to be “Tom Sawyer” so he wouldn’t be embarrassed by/compared to his family — but he prefers obfuscation, aka confusing people with his “Max-ness.”

“How do you get your brother to say what’s really on his mind?”

“Oh, I use randomness.”

“What?”

“Well, I just say random things and while people are trying to figure it out, they say stuff that’s on their mind.”

One example of this tactic being employed successfully is with the Genie. While Alex fails to outsmart the Genie using her quick wits, as the Genie is every bit as cunning as her, Max figures out a way to piss off the Genie enough to blackmail her, then talks circles around her and confuses her until she reveals a way for them to undo her wishes. Alex calls it “outdumbing” her, but in any case, he succeeded where she failed, and showed that he’s more capable than often assumed.

We get another rare moment of clarity from Max during “Alex Tells The World.”

“Alex, you know you can’t reveal magic!”

“Oh, even I know that. That’s why I just make people think I’m dumb so if I slip up, ehh, they figure, the kid’s an idiot. And I slip up all the time, so. Who’s dumb now?”

Max’s admission that he “slips up all the time” isn’t exactly reassuring, but it is telling that he’s the only one who doesn’t reveal magic during both the Season 4 Premiere and the Season 3 Finale. Perhaps it was dumb luck that got him there, but I think there’s more to it than that. There’s a method to his madness. There’s a logic to it, even if Max’s logic often doesn’t follow all the way through.

Which leads me to his Primary— Ravenclaw. (LOOK I KNOW. HEAR ME OUT.)

Yes, Max is often seen as “the dumb one.” Yes, Ravenclaws are perceived as “the smart house.” And while I’ve just demonstrated that there’s a brain under all the Max weirdness, I’m not about to argue that he’s secretly a genius. He misses the mark more often than he hits it, and oftentimes when he hits it, it’s through coincidence or dumb luck or Insane Troll Logic that’s impossible for anyone but Max to follow. But I do believe he operates on logic, just his own wacky version of it.

The thing about Max is that he’s neither as dumb as most people think he is, nor is he as smart as he thinks he is. He’s somewhere in between, and the fact that people never quite know where exactly he falls on that scale is kind of the point.

In fact, part of the reason I struggled with Max was because I was trying to figure out where exactly he did fit in:

He can be selfish enough at times to argue Slytherin Primary, the stereotypically “selfish” House, but he’s missing Justin’s protective streak. He doesn’t feel that same sense of duty towards his family that Justin does; when Mason breaks Alex’s heart in “Wizards vs. Werewolves,” Justin turns on him instantly because he Hurt His Little Sister And Is Therefore Bad, while Max is the one most willing to give Mason a chance, because he has his own reasons for wanting Mason in his life. Yet, he still clearly cares enough about his family to rule out the possibility that they don’t factor into his morality at all, not to mention how easy it is for them to influence him.

His more humble ending of inheriting his father’s sub shop might make people think Hufflepuff Primary, but there’s even less justification for such a sorting upon scrutiny. As I’ve touched on above, the staunch loyalty to community isn’t all that important to him, and he’s also not all that into traditions. There’s no compulsion to help strangers, he doesn’t really make enemies but he kind of just ignores people he doesn’t like (or shatters them in a million pieces on accident), and let’s not forget that he unleashed countless monsters in New York City that killed all the Monster Hunters just to win the competition… even if he did do it when his Conscience was separate from the rest of him. Not exactly behavior you’d expect from the morality system of “a person’s a person no matter how small.”

Speaking of Conscience, it’s notable that he argues with it, rather than accepting his advice. I’m still a little unclear as to how much this matters (there’s definitely room to argue that most of his brain went into Conscience as well, and that whole plotline was… weird), but even with his Conscience inside his body, he seems to lack that moral drive Alex has. Gryffindor Primaries have this embedded sense of justice deep within their characters. Even when it’s hidden most of the time, like in Alex’s case, or when it becomes twisted into something dark and dangerous, or becomes Stripped of its certainty, there’s still this sense that there is Right and Wrong in this world, that trusting your gut should lead you to the right conclusion, and that it’s wrong to ignore it. I have a hard time remembering if there’s really any situation where Max gets that gut feeling of Something Being Wrong at all, much less acting on it with a Heroic Plan… at least, not without convincing.

But Max can be convinced, and that’s key. Alex often takes advantage of this to manipulate him for her own selfish ends, such as talking him into paying her for handing out fliers to her zombie prom, but more often it’s his parents that act as his voice of reason, whether it’s convincing him to go after the “deli robber,” convincing him to give his siblings a fair shot at the Wizard Competition, or convincing him to tell his girlfriend the truth… and then unconvincing him of that when he takes it too literally and tells her he’s a wizard.

Actually, Max is prone to misinterpreting advice in this way while trying to follow it to the letter— he does this when he tries to sell fountain water with a puppy, as well, because his mom told him to “add something to it.” I think he is, to an extent, aware of his own intellectual limits. He knows he misses the mark a lot of the time, so he’s often willing to trust other people’s judgment over his own, so long as they can get it through to him in a way that he thinks makes sense.

But beyond that, he’s often willing to question “common knowledge” in a way the other characters don’t. When Justin tries to tell him he can’t make life out of the stuff from his room, he simply replies, “Where’s it say that?” In season 4, when there’s a distinct possibility that he’ll win the competition, he expands the sub shop business by making the Wizard Portal into a Drive-Thru, which genuinely worked as a business plan until Jerry took it too far. Later that season, he saves his siblings by creating a black hole and then jumping through it to pull them to safety from the black hole in Alex’s apartment. Like, that was his idea. He came up with that. It was weird, it was risky, it was unconventional, it could’ve been incredibly stupid… and it worked.

And that’s what I keep coming back to with this Ravenclaw Primary sorting— that sense of ingenuity, curiosity, and the willingness to experiment. On one hand, you have your System Claws, who are dedicated to The Rules because they’ve been convinced that living by them is The Best Way To Live, and on the other hand, you have those that are willing to challenge conventional wisdom and try new things. It’s this willingness to question that I personally attribute to a Ravenclaw mentality, rather than inherent intellectual ability or a large knowledgebase. While Max may not have the latter, he has the former in spades, and that, more than anything, is really what told me that he truly belongs here.

Conclusion:

Max Russo is a Ravenclaw Primary and a Slytherin Secondary.

As a Slytherin Secondary, Max often likes to confuse and obfuscate to get what he wants, is flexible in his methods, and can even be manipulative when he wants to be. He’s also relatively comfortable with himself, thus he often lives in a Neutral State where he says whatever’s on his mind without thinking much about danger or whether he’ll be understood.

His Ravenclaw Primary is as curious as it is undefined, and operates on a logic that only Max truly understands. While this leads him astray more often than not, this also allows him to break from tradition and try new things, and this unconventional thinking can sometimes lead to better solutions than anyone else could’ve come up with. However, it also comes with a set of brakes in the form of taking input from others. It’s not always easy to get through to Max, but he can be reasoned with, which in his case, is probably for the best.

In this combination, we find a character who truly dances to the beat of his own drum. As the most flexible Secondary and Primary, respectively, Max is a conundrum to most who meet him, confusing even to those who know him best. That said, being the Russo who “goes with the flow” the most often, he’s also probably the Russo that has the most fun. He’s certainly more fun to write about than I was expecting him to be! I’m glad I did, and it’s good to be back.

#sortinghatchats #max russo #wizards of waverly place #house sorting #hogwarts houses #wowp analysis #character analysis #sorting profiles #this one's kinda long but i think it might actually be a little shorter than the alex one #so not too bad #might be about the same; not sure #in any case:#long post #(very very)#harry potter #(sorta)

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pleaseshutupaboutsatou · 4 years

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Before and After Ajin Volume 1

Part Three

[Part One] [Part Two]

This was supposed to be the last part but I had a lot to say on this one particular subject.

Ajin: Human or Demi-Human

Spoilers ahead and I will refer to Tsuina Miura as TM.

Before V2 - Ajin: Human or Demi-Human

Okay, so it’s always kind of perplexed me that Ajin are so objectified. They look like any other person but in the world of Ajin, they’re referred to as ‘another species’, a ‘life-form’, and sometimes even ‘it’. When someone finds out they’re Ajin, it’s not readily apparent and can easily be hidden. Probably the most conspicuous aspect of an Ajin is their IBM if anything -- especially if they can’t control it.

Anyway, the way I’ve really looked at it, I’ve always kinda assumed that the objectification of Ajin was a purposeful and systemic way of othering people with immortal abilities so that they can be more easily taken advantage of.

I forget that this thought is just pure speculation and not actually explicitly said in canon. (TBH, I would really like to know the origins of why people see Ajin as non-human.)

This aspect is just part of the unique takes Ajin has on immortality. Immortals can age. To be an Ajin is not seen as a cool or fun but something terrifying and unknown. You don’t want to be an Ajin. In fact, in the first chapter of the manga, when the teacher suggests the possibility that someone in the class might be one, it immediately makes everyone uneasy.

In TM’s part of the manga, there’s a strong emphasis on the idea of Ajin not being seen as human. It’s repeated a lot in Kei’s dialogue with Kai and in the pilot chapter with Shinya. In fact, the opening line in the pilot chapter is ‘Those life forms do not die... They are know as demi-humans’.

The language in the Wikipedia article about Ajin that Shinya reads uses dry language when discussing the relationship between Ajin and human experimentation. It seems like there’s no hint of controversy!

If you’ve read Tenkuu Shinpan, this cynical worldview will probably be very familiar. Miura’s writing has this sort of color.

Anyway, in volume one, the humanity of Ajin is constantly questioned and touched upon in the dialogue.

What a bizarre question for Izumi to ask, of all people... Izumi could be playing detective a detective role here, but knowing that she’s an Ajin, this almost comes across as self-loathing. Perhaps Izumi might have gone down that path if Miura stayed on?

This bit of dialogue from Tanaka, shortly after the former scene, feels more consistent with the story thus far. Satou made being a demi-human a point of pride for Tanaka and for Izumi to pretend to be one definitely made her less in his eyes. Actually, he was pretty cruel to everyone in that room in this scene, but if you take into consideration Izumi’s anti-Ajin-like dialogue and her explicitly saying she’s from the Demi-Human Control Commission (the ones responsible for his imprisonment), I can see where it comes from.

Anyway, much of the compelling dialogue on an Ajin’s humanity is between Kei and Kai. On the run after being outed as an Ajin, Kei is constantly questioning his own humanity.

And, as long as Kai is around Kei, he constantly reassures Kei that he is indeed human and even if he isn’t, he can be human if he wants to be.

Now that I think about it, perhaps the idea of demi-humans not being human comes from the human fear of death and the loss of its universal certainty. Death is scary, unpredictable, unavoidable and not really something a lot of people like to dwell on. However, despite those feelings, it’s ubiquitous and maybe some comfort comes from that - that it will happen to everyone. Not to Ajin though (as far as the public knows, they don’t really know about aging or natural-death Ajin). In fact Ajin can tiptoe between death and life. Perhaps that comes across as grotesque and maybe that’s a reason why they’re feared? A scene that exemplifies this is Kei’s first suicide - or reset, as it’s later called.

Kai’s expression is of sadness, worry, and terror because he just witnessed Kei, someone he’s trying to protect, harm himself. He obviously knows that Kei will likely be fine but you can’t really logic away the visceral reaction to seeing such a thing. Meanwhile Kei, is excited, almost ecstatic, because he sees he’s able to walk on his own two legs again and not be such a burden to Kai. His relationship to death has totally changed. Does the lack of ability to die correlate with a loss of humanity?

Perhaps, TM wanted that to be constant question in their story. Are Ajin really human? Or maybe TM wanted Ajin to actually not really be human and for us to mistakenly think they are? TBH though, it doesn’t really seem like TM’s fast-paced action writing style... but maybe those kinds of questions piqued Sakurai’s interest.

After V2 - Ajin: Human or Demi-Human

I think Sakurai is interested in exploring the theme of humanity and human experience in general through these immortal characters.

As the story progresses, he seems to go with the notion that Ajin are just people who can’t die. I think this is emphasized with Tanaka’s increasing mundaneness. His very first appearance is incredibly striking. He looks diabolical.

And he doesn’t seem that way to just the audience but to Kei as well, who sees Tanaka with a mean face and a knife in their first encounter and is instantly scared. In Kei’s dreams, Tanaka becomes a symbol of aggressive masculinity.

It’s all a front though, and through Tanaka’s flashback a handful of chapters later, it becomes clear that, like Kei, he’s an ordinary person put through extraordinary circumstances.

Satou, however, comes across as a force of nature and inhuman. Physical obliteration and philosophical ideas of death do not phase him at all. His flesh body is a tool that he takes apart and puts back together with casual indifference. In the end, though, he is a human being, though, damn, does he make it difficult for other people, ourselves included, to believe that.

Last, but not least, Sakurai spends a great deal of care on Kei’s transition from teen to young adult throughout the story with all the self-doubt, risk-taking and awkwardness that comes with it. What kind of person will he become? What does he really want?

He puts on a front as a disinterested, self-serving person whose no-nonsense, but, actually he does care and maybe he likes a little of nonsense (but not too much). As for the person he might become, it’s interesting that Kei has two older, contrasting figures in his life who serve as influences: Hirasawa and Satou. Hirasawa says he’s fine the way he is and that it’s okay to run away; he kind of indulges Kei and tells him what he wants to hear - maybe he sees himself in Kei and tells him what he wish he could have heard. Meanwhile, Satou wants to challenge Kei, though, for entirely selfish reasons and maybe, he too, saw some of himself in Kei. Though, lmao, he got bored with that towards the end.

A big part of Kei’s journey is self-acceptance. Self-acceptance as a person coming-of-age and as a person whose an Ajin. To a person like Kou, he probably seems like he has a concrete idea of who he is, but that’s not the case at all.

Kei starts out as an incredibly reluctant hero. In fact, he only came into the role out of necessity as Satou grew to be a bigger and bigger problem that could no longer be ignored. In the period between the attack on Grant Pharmaceuticals and the attack on Forge Security, his lack of enthusiasm is very explicit; he even dreams of being whisked away. Nevertheless, he begrudgingly concocts a plan for defending Forge Security.

It’s in the aftermath of Forge Security that he starts to change and aggressively pursue Satou. However, this change of heart will be repeatedly tested as Satou continues to evade him.

Sakurai has also had some things to say about the question of a demi-human’s humanity on a grander scale, particularly, through a character like Ogura. When you first meet him, he’s very blunt and sarcastic and seems to have little value in his own life. To Ogura, life has lost its meaning. It’s heavily implied that this is in large part due to the death of his 8-year-old son.

The only thing that he really talks about with any kind of enthusiasm are Ajin and his FK cigarettes.

His fascination with Ajin could be, in part, a way to cope with his grief. Ajin defy death and the human spirit seems to play a large role in how they function. IBMs are invisible but can be seen if a strong emotion is present. Floods of IBMs are triggered by death along with an accompanying strong emotion. He states outright that life is meaningless, but his obsession with Ajin seems to come from a part of himself that doesn’t want to believe that.

Whether or not what Ogura says is true or not, it’s undoubtedly true that Ajin are inextricably linked with their own humanity. This is where Sakurai arrives at with the question of a demi-human’s humanity.

This ended up being wayyyy longer then intended but thoughts kept coming and coming. Hope I didn’t go off on too much of a tangent here. I will make another part with Kai, Tanaka and talk briefly about gore before and after volume 2.

I think Miura is really good with coming up with concepts, but I think, personally, I’m glad that Sakurai was able to take those ideas and make them into what we have today.

#ajin #death talk #mentions of suicide #analysis #sorry this is so long...........#i may bump this later actually

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red-hood-vigilante · 4 years

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hbo spn storylines, drabbles, ideas, thoughts, wishlist, whatever you may call it. it’s messy, nothing makes sense and pretty sure a lot of these contradict each other

more of sam at stanford with jessica/flashbacks. jessica potentially lives but is revealed to be a demon (but she developed actual feelings for sam and really did come to care for him because a demon falling in love with a human would be SO interesting) OR she lives but her memory gets wiped like dean did to lisa OR she dies like she did but she is a ghost that haunts sam (he welcomes it but eventually he lets her go -> character arc). he still dreams about her though and he has her keepsakes with him wherever he goes, her rings, her favourite book, anything that was left of her from the fire

you have to be extremely careful when making deals with demons because they are cunning and evil creatures. they will follow the rules of the deal but will find loopholes to put some sadistic twist on the terms. you want money? of course, too bad you’ll be arrested for fraud before you can use any of it and spend the next ten years in jail before i drag you to hell. you want a perfect husband? sure he’ll love you. in fact, he’ll love you so much he’ll keep you locked up in the basement to keep you safe etc etc. saving a person often becomes the person that causes or leads to your death.

the creation of jack: after s5, when lucifer is trapped in the cage again lucifer fuses his own soul with a human soul to create jack, who escapes to earth to find sam and castiel. i have a longer post about this saved in my drafts

lucifer is trapped for good in the cage after s5 but if he was to return again, dean would kill him while sam would kill michael - this would be nice parallels and a sort of fulfillment of the “one brother must kill the other” prophecy because one brother DO kill another brother, just not their own

more azazel and how he came to the plan of how to free lucifer; opening a hell gate earlier, more experimentations with the demon blood etc

mary was infected with the blood when she was a baby, sam is the first and only second generation special child (longer post about that here)

personally, i want to see more and know more about john and mary’s relationship. when mary died, john and mary had fulfilled their destiny (having sam and dean) so does that mean that his love and dedication to mary post her death was falsely fabricated by the angels to ensure sam and dean would grow up in ideal conditions to become hunters? or maybe, after mary’s death, john wakes up from the spell with two kids he doesn’t recognize and a wife he thinks he loved, but the memories of the past years of his life are like a fever dream; he never wanted to live in a town like this nor was he interested in having kids? but here the house is, and here are his kids, but now he’s alone and empty and with no answers. (idk i just find john and mary and their relationship very fascinating) if the latter, if john and mary see each other again it’s like the spell activates again and they become blindly in love with each other, but once gone, they return to their confused and hazey state of mind, like just woken up from a coma

i do like mary coming back but i love how in s5 when she wasn’t found in heaven it was hinted that she was just discarded because she had fulfilled her “purpose” and i think this adds to the whole notion of how heaven and angels can be really cruel AND how mary is this mythical, religious figure to both sam and dean and we only get to know her through their lenses, like religion and faith

ruby is present for a longer amount of time to make the reveal even more shocking. at one point or another, dean does actually trust her and they all work together on cases for a while. ruby’s backstory as a witch is more explored. i like her death in s4 because she’s in this total state of euphoria and has achieved a goal only she was entrusted with, and she is so convinced sam will understand, until sam holds her down while dean carves her heart out. so we either keep that or she serves lucifer for a while (until he kills her which she is happy about because of her blind loyalty to him, could again mirror dean and john/castiel and heaven) or she serves lucifer and like crowley she realizes lucifer will kill demons after humans (redemption arc, but i don’t really like that, let her be evil!!)

dean and sam helps bela out of her deal and she becomes their go-to person when they need a magic item or book. she doesn’t like it but she owes them. regularly hooks up with jo.

angels are really hollow soldiers - they only follow orders and don’t understand the concept free will or choice or individuality at all. they are extremely righteous and strike without warning often on a whim, often very bloody (explosions a la castiel in swan song). if something fall into what they consider justice they will kill it. no concept of love, attraction or gender. real form can’t be perceived by humans unless they want them to, which leads to eyes melting (pamela) or breaking a person’s mind (in 5.16 zachariah actually says that sam and dean sees him in his vessel bc they’re ‘limited’. so.)

castiel, anna, maybe uriel and some others are exceptions to this, but only becomes so after longer exposure to human’s world. even then, they don’t change their violent whims, just the reasoning and where their loyalty lies

hbo spn is s1-5 stretched out for 8-10 seasons with the aesthetics of s1-2. i’m cutting out demon dean, purgatory, the mark of cain, the men of letters, the alphas, leviathatan, god being the real villain all along and the other worlds because it was just too much and far remived from the roadtrip aesthetic. keeping kevin, charlie (she is introduced via ash bc they’re hacker friends), the trials, rowena, uuuh the angels falling is such an interesting concept but idk if it would fit. maybe metatron? but his motivations are different. soullessness + the concept of souls might be kept if it’s explained better. i’m torn on whether or not to include the campbells

hell, heaven and purgatory are explained but only seen in glimpses, keep these ideas ambiguous and up to interpretation outside of what we hear. remember the line ‘hell is...well, it’s like hell. even for demons’? leave it at that. the exception is 5.16 bc that episode fucks so hard

if we end on swan song and let the show be the tragedy it is, i want to keep the ambiguous ending. is that sam or lucifer? if it’s sam, will he contact dean or walk away? we will never know! there is also no ‘the world is ending’ more than once, it really lost its impact after the second or third time.

idk how i feel about the men of letters - it is logical that there would be organized hunting and an established network and system on how to do things, but for the sake of keeping it hbo-style and grounded, there are no networks beyond the roadhouse and singer’s salvage yard.

i want sam and dean not have a permanent home except the impala, motels and impala ONLY. the bunker had potential but it was just for the sake of convenience it was there with all the lore and answers they needed when it was necessary. maybe eventually they do stop travelling so much when it becomes more about the Big Stuff instead of the episodic cases that requires driving all the time but it will be like an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere. i want sam and dean to never have a physical house as a home but they scrape together whatever they have make something similar to a show

as the show progresses, sam and dean become pretty hated by other hunters because they’ve started apocalypse and have an increasingly shitty reputation. and john was an infamous good hunter but also a dick. everybody knows that people who work with the winchesters often end up dead, that one brother will sacrifice anything and anyone to save the other and that they frequently work alongside demons. even the ones they DO work with (jo, ellen, bobby, rufus, bela) are hesitant to be involved with them

sam’s powers are strong but after killing lilith and the truth revealed to him, he represses the powers in shock and fear of how blinded he was by them and the rush of power they gave him. a little more about how sam fears what the lust for power and strength did to him. he continues to repress his powers, often to a dangerous point where he will be on death’s door as a result of not using them. when meeting jack and mentoring him in using his powers, jack asks him about sam’s powers after sensing them. sam eventually decides to lead by example and embraces his powers again, but remains extremely careful about using them (this also fulfills dean’s arc of having to let go of the holy-innocent-pure-ideal-not a person but an idealized version of sam-little brother sam he has put on a pedestal for so long)

bobby is viewed as a father figure by sam and dean but bobby makes it clear he doesn’t want that burden or relationship in his life after his wife died. he makes this clear to them too, but sam and dean have fucked up perceptions of parental figures so they don’t think bobby means it (they just latch on to whatever parental figures they can find)

we see more of sam’s relationship with the side characters; sam and jo hunt together on occasion, he hangs out with ash and talks hacking when visiting the roadhouse. he and ellen loves playing poker together. if anything, dean is the one who’s isolated - he only ever really cared about mary, john, sam and cassie, and never really had any friends. sam is way more well adjusted and sociable after spending time at stanford where he’s had conversations that didn’t only revolve around dead bodies and lore.

this could also feed into dean’s extreme abandonment issues and isolation he feels and how this would affect his psyche

sam and dean are both unknowingly prepared to become the perfect vessels; sam loses his humanity by becoming more and more like lucifer (defying his father and his will) while dean becomes prepared by doing what michael did; casting his brother away in his time of need (blindly following his father and his will). very much like in s4 but even more intense and brutal (i love angst :))

we see different hybrids; demon/human (antichrist), human/(arch)angel (nephilim) and demon/angel (???), but none of them are all powerful bc narratively that’s really boring. they’re strong but have very specific powers that affects them and/or their surroundings in catastrophic ways (but no other worlds bs, we stick to the road trip aesthetic, keep it grounded). i want the only all powerful character to be god but he doesn’t show up at all, he’s the ultimate absent father. is it chuck? we never find out!

powers would for example include giving people diseases, force anyone close to them to tell the truth (not consciously, it’s just the air around them), read minds, create storms, light things on fire when they’re angry, make people hallucinate etc. like fucked up shit but not things that are too grande because again - that’s really boring

abbadon, the princes of hell and the four horsemen are more fleshed out villains instead of the one season reign the each had.

being a prince of hell is a title that is inherited - after azazel dies, sam gets the title because he is the one with azazel’s blood in him OR meg does, but idk if that would be as interesting (if she actually was his daughter)

it remains a horror show throughout, lots of gore and blood

the moral code and ethics of the brothers are the opposite of the beginning; dean thinks in black and white, sam sees shades of grey and individuals instead of what they are. however, as the show progresses, their train of thought becomes opposites; dean becomes more open to how people are true evil and how monsters are often victims of their circumstance while sam becomes harsher and less forgiving after ruby’s betrayal along with finding out the truth of his existence and how there’s been demons around his entire life. eventually they’re on the same page and they see the circumstances.

on the other hand; i also really fuck with the idea of dean maintaining his black and white morals on that all monsters=inherently evil, humans=inherently pure and good, but he is the only human on team free will. sam is half demon, castiel is an angel, jack is a nephilim, rowena is a witch, garth is a werewolf, mary is a zombie etc

demons become demons in hell by agreeing to become the torturer and thus giving up their humanity to be free of pain, does that mean they could become humans again by regaining some humanity? by doing good deeds? (potentially this is confirmed with jessica and how she came to love sam; genuine love and care for a human could reverse the demon process?) this also means dean was a demon in hell but was purified/turned back again when castiel raised him. this also plays into dean becoming like michael; in trying to absolve himself from what he did in hell he becomes ruthless, unforgiving and righteous to evil, much like the angels, regardless of his personal connection to a person and what he would consider “evil”

dean and pacifisim: after dean is cured from being a demon/the mark of cain/is made aware of his blind righteousness that he used as an excuse to kill, he becomes firmly determined to reign in his anger and violent tendencies by becoming a pacifist (like sam in s11) as a way to redeem all the blood he’s spilled. of course in his profession and true dean fashion he won’t be able to do it 100% so he decides to only act in self defense, and he only goes batshit violent on the offense when it’s about protecting sam

OR. dean’s self righteousness becomes his own downfall; the belief that all evil must be eradicated, refusal to see the circumstances and the shades of grey is what pushes him to lose his humanity and become a demon and therefore, in a potential ending the ruler of hell, because i think it would such an interesting journey from a to b, that dean starts out human, revels in his holiness, executes and kills in the name of his own holiness in the belief that he’s becoming the ultimate angel, the ultimate hero when it’s doing the opposite. if this happened then sam would take the opposite route; starts as a human, becomes more and more demonic, stops himself and returns to his hopeful and optimistic self, has faith and humility and that is what makes him ascend from abomination to purified and holy (trials).

this could be a perfect 10 season structure as well: s1-5 are when sam and dean start off humans; dean becomes holy and as close to an angel a human can be, while sam drinks the demon blood and almost becomes one to gain the freedom and power he wants, but begins to turn it around to send lucifer back to hell. s6-10 is when dean becomes the unholy and sam becomes the holy even though neither realize because now there’s no grand master plan - this is who they are, who they choose themselves. don’t know how this ould end though; either as normal humans again (but there wouldn’t really be a ”normal” after everything) or they really go off the rails with sam like ruling heaven (not as god though, just as a good and just man) and dean ruling hell. castiel is human and stays on earth with jack.

the gothic americana aesthetic is kept throughout the entire show and is only shot on film

after s5 castiel returns to heaven to help restore order, and he takes charge for a little while, but eventually returns to earth after trying to introduce democracy to angels who didn’t get it. in his place, anna takes over and she rules heaven well (after trying to kill mary when going back in time she isn’t killed by michael, but narrowly escapes and remains in hiding to heal until castiel reaches out and finds her)

when finding out they are The Vessels and will be brought back regardless of what they try, sam and dean explore what this means more. dean throws himself into dangers and to protect others. he is burned, blown up, stabbed, electrocuted, beheaded and eaten, but wakes up the next morning in his bed without a scratch, without any pain and memories of his deaths. he revels in this untouchability. sam kills himself over and over only to be resurrected again and again by lucifer. he remembers the pain and blood.

that being said, while dean is like angel royalty, sam is demon royalty. the demons don’t go after him, they don’t hurt him. some even offer up themselves to be drained of blood, even after lilith’s death. it makes it really difficult to stay clean but he pulls through with dean and castiel actually supporting him. to help sam get through his addiction, dean stops drinking alcohol and they go through their withdrawal together

the angels almost worship dean as the michael sword and have an open disgust towards sam for being lucifer’s vessel - they always answer dean’s prayers and calls for help, they follow his orders if need be and don’t hesitate to heal him if he needs it. sam could pray until his vocal chords bleed or call out for help while holding his guts in his hands; none of the angels would come to his aid. the only one who answers sam’s prayers is lucifer as a voice in sam’s head or a hallucination. sam could call demons to help him out but he refuses

sam isn’t the first hunter to drink demon blood, to try to enhance his own abilities using the supernatural as a means to get there - there are hunters who have altered themselves with parts from werewolves and vampires to become better hunters, like the styne family (the guys from s10), blurring the lines again of what’s good and human vs what is evil and inhumane

if angels can’t find a vessel to volunteer, they will force them to say yes - the how is not important, only that the ‘yes’ is said, whether its meant or not, any verbal yes will do. the angels never sleep and they never eat, which is disturbing to sam and dean who are exhausted all the time and eat scraps whenever they can

castiel, like all other angels, is taught to despise and not care about sam winchester at all, but the more castiel gets to know sam, he becomes fascinated with him, how lucifer’s ultimate vessel, starter of the apocalypse and destroyer of god’s creation can be so kind and gentle, so full of faith, acceptance, optimism and hope. in dean castiel sees a good man, yes, but also a man who’s bloodthirsty, rages, revels in war, resorts all problems with violence, loves conditionally and expects unquestioned loyalty. sam too, has a darkness and bloodthirst in him, but it only comes out in glimpses. castiel thinks it’s funny, how sam turns out to be the opposite of lucifer while dean is so alike michael

#hbo spn #supernatural #sam winchester #dean winchester #iben spoke #girl help this makes no sense #these are just things i want to see plot-wise and character arc-wise

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it-sy-bit-sy · 3 years

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The ending of Attack on Titan: a shallow analysis

(I don't think I should have to put a spoilers alert on a blog about the ENDING OF AOT, but in general if you mind being spoiled on a series, I advise you to refrain from attending discussions about the body of work until you've finished it in its entirety/come up to speed on the current chapter/episode. Screw hype dude, do you like being hurt? Also for the TLDR, it’s that Attack on Titan explores the cycle of hatred (Eren’s journey) AND love which is why Mikasa and Ymir become relevant at the end of the story.)

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PREFACE

Since the newly added panels of AOT’s ending have been likened by some to the ending of Naruto, I'd like to say that Naruto's end truly hurt me; the way it flows into Boruto is so contrived it burns. A story that's always centered around powerful ninja bloodlines fighting political wars suddenly introduced aliens that harvest planets for energy as the super antagonist, and additionally they're the source of all our characters' powers as well as the jinchuriki and tailed beasts themselves. Then when you look at the plot of Boruto which heavily relies on the Otsutsuki clan as an antagonistic force, their whole existence feels like the transition from Dragon Ball straight into the first DBZ arc with Goku learning he’s really part of an alien race that was meant to destroy Earth.

I didn't detect so forced a role in the ending of AOT, but it's absolutely plausible to speculate that the alternate ending was influenced for this reason, as we know Attack on Titan wasn't produced through Isayama's involvement alone. Certain compromises are made when operating as a team, though it would be wonderful if the original intent of authors were more absolute in the world of production than they are known to be.

And as much as I don't enjoy half-hearted continuations of series for a royalty check, I ALMOST can't blame them for doing it...it creates (many) happy fans, more jobs, and Isayama gets his royalty check. The rest of us suffer but hey, artists need money I guess... 🥀 Moving on. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#1. Eren's development as a character

I never saw Eren's goal steered in the direction of breaking the cycle of revenge or hatred. He was acting wholly in his own interests. He's intensely selfish, doesn't want to change his views, and exists in the story to further the cycle itself. According to me, Chapters 129 and 131 perfectly explain his motivations for the rumbling.

Now before I go on, I'd like to bring a particular scene to mind. I do remember him saying this once (to Historia who had just told him killing the rest of the world is unjustifiable and wrong):

Yes, he said that, but I don't think that is what he ever intended the rumbling to be used for.

After he stated that 80% of humanity was wiped out so Paradis will be safe for the time being, he neglected to answer Armin's questions in 139: "Did you really need to go that far? Are you sure you did all of this for our sakes?" We may also consider the thoughts he chose NOT to share in chapter 131:

That combined with this excerpt from 129 is pretty much all there is to Eren's convictions.

Those are the same words he said in Chapter 2 after his mother died.

So despite his brief period of self-loathing when considering 1) the countless lives in survey corps sacrificed for his sake, 2) being confronted with his and his father's involvement in the Reiss family, 3) everything he learned about his enemy--that all titans are formerly human, that the titan shifters were just children deceived by their world--he even admits to Reiner during Tyburn's speech (Chapter 100) that they are indeed in the same boat--and on top of that, admitting that the rumbling will do nothing to fix the course of history, he settled with the same conviction he held the moment he decided to do something to change the world.

Again, here's his words from 139 showing us just how angry a boi Eren was.

This was Eren Jaeger...he didn't even really know what he was doing.

As a human being, Eren was very much in the cycle of revenge as much as everyone else was. His course of action never deviated too far from that path. He knew better, but he lashed out at the world to protect the few people he cared about anyway. He took freedom away from the ones who threatened him. He was a mass murderer, and so were the other soldiers in this series fighting for their own reasons, since titans were people. Survey corps were always slaughtering these people whom they saw as monsters. Marley viewed Eldians as monstrously and with as much hatred as Eldians viewed the titans. Eren did not try to justify his actions to everyone. He simply stopped seeing the value of life in others not important to him, as humans often do.

So what did he sacrifice 80% of humanity for? From 129 again:

Them meaning his immediate friends.

No, he didn't care about their children's children and beyond because there's no way to control what happens when you're gone from this world. It wasn't his problem. Eren had 4 years at most left to live, and he wanted to do what he could to ensure his friends were happy before he left.

And as jarring as it was to see Eren become undone in the last chapter, I didn't find it completely out of character, because for one he was talking to his closest friend moments before his own death, and secondly, Eren was just a stupid human like the rest of the people in this series. Obviously, most people just want a normal life that they can spend with people whom they love. Eren was the same way, but was denied that future (and happened to be able to do something about it). Very selfish goals, but those chosen few were his world. Along with a general distaste for humanity, that's how I understand his character motivations.

*Which is to say in relation to the extra pages, Ymir's curse returning a generation or two after the events of AOT doesn't entirely void his actions. I’m assuming the power of Ymir apparently exists as a force of nature on this version of Earth period, so I suppose this points us to an endless cycle of humans eventually finding the power and using it as they see fit *

#2 Why is Romance Relevant to Attack on Titan?

I wasn't expecting a romance factor to be relevant at the end of the story, however considering that Mikasa's affection for Eren WAS her most prominent personality trait as a character, then the events that followed, I was forced to look back to a few moments in the series that could lend light to why, in the end, a romantic subplot ended the curse of Ymir. My conclusions are as follows:

1. Quite literally, the cycle of hatred never ends. Humans will always have a reason to be unkind to one another. We are animals after all; this trait cannot be reasoned through with logic, bred out, or defeated. We are a self-aware species (Eren's even aware of his own hypocrisy in Chapter 131). There will always arise those who take what they want for themselves because they decide in the end they don't care about others as much as they care about their own interests.

2. To make this second point, I'm stealing these words out of a certain machine lifeform's mouth, but bear with me here:

"But the humans...? Now THEY are interesting. Because they are an enigma! They killed uncountable numbers of their own kind, yet loved in equal measure! It's fascinating, don't you think? What could possibly drive such behavior? We have dedicated ourselves to unraveling this riddle of humanity..."

--Adam from NieR:Automata

AOT uses Eren and Mikasa as a case study of humanity. Humans hate and love in equal measure.

In Ch. 129, Zeke's piece here foreshadows the significance of those two for the story, I guess?

Now everyone reading this series as well as the characters in it had noticed how much fondness Mikasa always had for Eren, and how aloof he always was towards her in return...that's something for them to work out.

Despite never really reciprocating Mikasa's feelings, Eren told Armin at the end of the series that yes, he enjoyed receiving her attention; he would have liked to live a happy life with her. So, Mikasa just liked Eren, Eren liked her... And similar to Mikasa, Ymir just liked King Fritz. It doesn't matter whether we think these feelings were sound or not; they did what they wanted with themselves. I suppose that explains the reason she was a mega simp for Eren in the whole story. Yes, this turn in the story reads like a different plot now, not one about war and killing monsters, but I'm pleasantly surprised that this trait taken as a flaw of Mikasa’s actually served as a necessary condition to end the conflict of the titans.

Eren wouldn't let go of his hatred of the world for his own satisfaction, Ymir wouldn't let go of her love of King Fritz for her own satisfaction, and Mikasa is the only one who decided to let go of her convictions in the interest of someone other than herself. That's what moved the curse.

I think Isayama used the characters of Ymir and Mikasa to demonstrate that while there is a cycle of hatred and revenge running rampant in humanity, the cycle of love doesn't stop either.

In closing, and I truly apologize for such a lengthy post; I hope I didn’t reiterate my point too often here...I didn't think about any of this until I heard so many readers upset with the way AOT ended. I'm not personally left with any disappointment in where the story went. I didn't know where it was going to go in the first place, and I think it could have been much worse for us in different hands.

*shrugs*

AOT is a story about the nature of humanity.

*And in regards to Jean, if that is supposed to be him with Mikasa in the new panels, all I can say is dude likes his girl. He was a simp for her and she was a simp for Eren, but the fact that they shared their lives together means a lot even if Eren was never completely buried in her heart. He meant a lot to her man, idk...

#aot #attack on titan #eren jaeger #end of aot #boruto #adam nier automata #nier automata #mikasa ackerman #ymir fritz

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