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pizzazz-party · 4 years ago

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Ring Analysis Part 1: Synchronizing— How It Works and What It Tells Us About Ring

...As well as the world he lives in. Our buddy Ring may explain very little about himself, but he doesn’t need to if you’re paying—obsessive—attention to detail.

(Gameplay spoilers up to World 20 under the cut.)

For a mechanic that’s important enough to merit a cutscene, and then goes on to envelop every part of the game, “synchronizing” gets a handful of lines before it’s never explicitly brought up again.

So let’s go over this scene.

“Synchronizing” is, at first glance, a simple exchange of traits. That’s not entirely wrong. Trainee does physically take on characteristics specific to Ring, like the flaming hair, and Ring does gain access to her heartbeat reading, sort of like a living stethoscope.

But what syncing actually is, is a symbiotic relationship. It’s both participants “recalibrating” themselves to the other as best as each of them are able. For a flesh-and-blood partner that’s not built for syncing, this means physically changing to become something a little closer to Ring. (More on that later.) For Ring, a magical being designed with the extra sensory input in mind, it invisibly grants him access to the other’s most invaluable resource: their exercise energy.

Like synchronizing, “exercise energy” is another lovely concept that was mentioned once and then never again. So much so that I’ve been accidentally calling it “fitness energy” for weeks and am still trying to correct my reflexes.

But exercise energy is everything. If all it takes is a simple read of a heartbeat to jumpstart a sync bond, exercise energy is the glue that cements it together. Because Ring and Trainee don’t stop being synced whenever they’re not physically touching. They separate all the time. They can put a little distance between themselves and still be at the height of synchronization, even. But let’s take a step back for a moment, and talk about that “physically changing to become something a little closer to Ring” aspect.

Say that Trainee is doing a leg move at peak performance. Her hair is flaring up. Her legs are glowing that same yellowish hue—because they’re full of exercise energy. That’s what that is. That’s what it must be. It’s what Ring himself is partially made of, seeing as the same stuff flows through his veinlike tubes. Seriously. Look at this. It’s the same goddamn color.

I can’t understate how incredibly important exercise energy is. To synchronizing, to Ring, and to literally everything else. Exercise energy is a type of life energy. In the world of Ring Fit, it’s in everything, everywhere—in varying levels of purity and concentration. When Trainee is performing a fit skill, she almost seems to absorb a mystical...something... from the open air around her, as she charges up a skill. Thin lines of light streak towards her as she lights up, not away. See for yourself.

Trainee isn’t a normal inhabitant of “Planet Fitness.” She doesn’t know how to manipulate exercise energy very well on her own. It looks like being synced with Ring has made her somewhat biologically closer to being made of exercise energy herself, and with that? The slight ability to absorb it from the air around her. It’s a really small thing, likely just a tiny boost of power she’s drawing in from her surroundings (and returning right back after a move is complete). But it’s there. It’s visibly happening. With one exception, this doesn’t occur outside of a fit battle. And that makes sense. A fit skill taking more energy than an air blast is very reasonable. Those crates littering the place are a lot less hardy than...whatever you would classify Monsters as.

I mentioned an exception. Here it is:

Victory posing is such an odd little tradition, isn’t it? It’s unskippable; Ring always insists on it. And at first glance, his instructions are weird. “Pull in energy from the ground” sounds a bit like nonsense...except in this shot, Trainee is actually standing on a glowing platform full of Exercise Energy. (Yes, that’s what that is.) The moment she’s done charging her squat power, thin lines of light streak upwards— some into Trainee. And when she raises her arms, she expels all that excess energy into the open air. You can watch the process here.

And that’s where most of the EXP from victory posing comes from—from the well of exercise energy humming beneath her feet.

Exercise energy is life energy in constant motion. It’s created (for a lack of a better word) constantly as the body moves and burns calories. It’s also expelled constantly, and this is most visible when Trainee works out. It is not, under any circumstances, meant to be trapped in the body forever. But the act of having possessed any of it at all gives Trainee EXP, a byproduct, which can be kept forever.

———

Ring says in the initial cutscene, “The more you exercise, the more synchronized we’ll be!” The more Trainee exercises, the more exercise energy her body holds at time. The more exercise energy she holds, the more alike she and Ring are in that very moment. The more alike they are—the more in sync they are.

———

The two way connection created by synchronizing is closer to a metaphysical fusion of both participants than a simple trade off. Ring’s powers are (almost but not quite) Trainee’s powers. Trainee’s body is (almost but not quite) Ring’s body. It’s both easy and hard to see where one’s work stops and the other’s begins. So let’s lay down some quick facts.

One! In terms of powers—everything Ring and Trainee can do together, Ring can do alone. It’ll be weaker. But he can do it. He’s got his own supply of exercise energy and he’s a master at manipulating it. Ring is not helpless; you are.

Two! The glowing limbs you fight with in a fit battle belong to Ring—not Trainee. Here are even some screen caps of Ring vaguely referring to them both. (It’s even in all-important blue text.)

Three! Ring is always actively contributing to your fit battles. He is never just counting reps or giving tips. As Trainee charges up a fit skill, Ring is constantly channeling the resulting energy into powering up his battle constructs. He is actively aiming said constructs for you, always.

In the case of specific fit skills, where Ring’s battle constructs immediately appear as buff as can be—it’s because Trainee is helping. A lot of what these instances have in common is the fact that the fit skills in question are less... involved?

Imagine being Trainee, and trying to keep a good aim on the enemy as you do the Mountain Climber move. (Or even squats. I do too many of those and I start disconnecting from reality.) The Ring Raise move, on the other hand, is gentler and gives Trainee a clear, unobstructed view of the enemy throughout the whole exercise. It gives her the wiggle room to try her hand at manipulating her own exercise energy directly.

With Ring and Trainee working together, the charge-up effect is therefore instantaneous.

Four! Canonically, despite the two of them being synced, Ring can shut off Trainee’s access to his powers at any time. That’s because, for them to work in the first place, Ring must be consciously activating them. In some animations at the start of a course, Trainee stretches by pulling on him at both ends. This should summon a suction vortex. But it doesn’t. Because Ring knows Trainee is just doing a pre-run stretch.

It explains why you can’t summon a Mega Ab Guard whenever you feel like it; only when Ring suggests it. Or why you can’t just suck up tokens in mini games like Dreadmill (Ring is too honest to help you cheat). Yes, it’s a game mechanic thing. But it’s a mechanic that Ring canonically controls. Trainee absolutely cannot use any of his abilities without his explicit consent. And that’s probably why she hasn’t accidentally killed somebody in combat yet—Ring is super careful. (He’s a professional, you know.)

———

Now that we have a better understanding of what exercise energy is and a better grasp on how Ring works—let’s circle back one more time to that “physically changing to become something a little closer to Ring” aspect. Because there’s one last insane thing we skipped over.

Trainee is initially the baseline in our understanding of what exercise energy looks like in a human being. Her yellow-orange flames are our constant companion—and therefore we get misled, because Trainee is an outlier. She is synced to Ring, and Ring is extraordinary. So she’s not a good example of the average person.

But in this case, despite being a literal master, Guru Andma is.

Guru Andma, “the balance master,” is the only other human character we see using attacks consisting of all three muscle groups. Her fight is a wealth of knowledge in of itself. When she flexes her arms, they fill with RED energy. When she flexes her abdomen, it fills with YELLOW energy. When she flexes her leg, it fills with BLUE energy. This is the standard for human beings. This is normal.

What this implies then, is that synchronizing with Ring has overwritten Trainee’s original energy signature. Ring’s energy is decidedly NOT human. It’s not even fit-skill yellow; it looks close, but it’s really something else entirely. Ring of course can convert Trainee’s energy into traditional reds, yellows, and blues for a fight. (Or at least, he can fake it if he doesn’t have his Color Coding ability. He once mimicked the flames of Dark Influence early on in the game; some superficial color editing is not above him.)

But yeah. Trainee’s energy is now definitely abnormal.

And yet the process didn’t seem to put her in any physical pain? I really doubt Ring would have sprung that on her if it did. (I mean, he still should have asked for permission first.) I’d wager the effects of syncing, as deep as are, aren’t permanent once the bond is dissolved. What Ring is doing—“synchronizing”—is somehow, simultaneously, extremely mystical and yet completely natural.

———

Last segment, before I let you go.

For a long time, I wondered: what are the prerequisites, that denote syncing potential? Not impressive muscles, I’m sure; it’s heavily implied Dragaux once synced with Ring, and he was infamously skinny. Could the general attitude of a person play a role, if Ring’s energy is pure positive exercise energy? Or could it be genetic? Maybe even entirely random?

I wasn’t sure until I fought the four masters, and especially after fighting Guru Andma.

I’ll bet you anything that there’s something inherently flexible about Trainee, for a human. Something more malleable, and therefore more amenable to undergoing the dramatic changes of a sync bond. And I’ll bet you further that it has something to do with the fact that Trainee had zero previous experience wielding exercise energy at the start of the game.

Because Ring tells Trainee she has potential right after identifying that she’s new.

(The less developed a person is initially, the easier it could be to sync with Ring. Whereas a person with more intensive training would be incompatible.)

And if you’re still convinced that Ring was just impressed with her muscles—please remember that Ring is not human, and does not experience life through the same lens. It’s implied he can “see” energy with more than just his eyes. It’s how you can drop him in a new temple in an unfamiliar land and he’ll still be able to tell Trainee when she’s close to the finish line. (He forgot what static stretching was that one time. He does not have these floor plans memorized.) To him, those glowing wells at the end are like straight up beacons.

He was absolutely examining her energy.

———

To Ring, syncing probably isn’t worth writing an entire essay about. It’s natural to him, instinctive. It’s Ring making a promise to watch over someone, and to have their back as they will have his. And I think that’s beautiful. Frustrating to my curiosity, but beautiful.

———

TLDR; Synchronizing is a metaphysical bond sustained through Exercise Energy, a substance mentioned once in World 1 that encompasses the whole game. It exists everywhere in everything, in different variations of intensity and purity. Ring especially is partially made of exercise energy. It’s the glowing stuff in his tubes. There’s more, but that’s the gist of it. DISCLAIMER: This is for fun! I just wanted to try my hand at explaining how the magical sentient Pilates ring works. I feel pretty strongly about my conclusions, but I’ll go back and edit this if/when/where applicable. Thank you for reading.

———

EDIT (June 20, 2021): Updated header image. Also added a link to Ring mimicking DI.

EDIT (August 12, 2021): Added links to part 2 and 3.

———

RING ANALYSIS

Part 1: Synchronizing— How it Works and What It Tells Us About Ring

Part 2: Ring’s Powers—And What They All Have In Common

Part 3: Ring’s Biology and Possible Origins

#ring fit adventure #ring fit adventure spoilers #ring #ring fit trainee #pizzazz post #pizzazz meta #also some outfit spoilers I guess beyond world 20? idk. if it bugs you.#honestly still don’t regret giving myself a deadline. Bc yeesh if I didn’t get this out now I’ll never be free of it #if ring were real I probably would strangle him #this is basically me answering some questions that I’ve always had

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localbizlift · 3 years ago

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Crawl Budget

In today’s episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom covers a more advanced SEO concept: crawl budget. Google has a finite amount of time it's willing to spend crawling your site, so if you’re having issues with indexation, this is a topic you should care about.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is crawl budget. I think it's worth saying right off the bat that this is somewhat of a more advanced topic or one that applies primarily to larger websites. I think even if that's not you, there is still a lot you can learn from this in terms of SEO theory that comes about when you're looking at some of the tactics you might employ or some of the diagnostics you might employ for a crawl budget.

But in Google's own documentation they suggest that you should care about crawl budget if you have more than a million pages or more than 10,000 pages that are updated on a daily basis. I think those are obviously kind of hard or arbitrary thresholds. I would say that if you have issues with your site getting indexed and you have pages deep on your site that are just not getting into the index that you want to, or if you have issues with pages not getting indexed quickly enough, then in either of those cases crawl budget is an issue that you should care about.

What is crawl budget?

So what actually is crawl budget? Crawl budget refers to the amount of time that Google is willing to spend crawling a given site. Although it seems like Google is sort of all-powerful, they have finite resources and the web is vast. So they have to prioritize somehow and allocate a certain amount of time or resource to crawl a given website.

Now they prioritize based on — or so they say they prioritize based on the popularity of sites with their users and based on the freshness of content, because Googlebot sort of has a thirst for new, never-before-seen URLs.

We're not really going to talk in this video about how to increase your crawl budget. We're going to focus on how to make the best use of the crawl budget you have, which is generally an easier lever to pull in any case.

Causes of crawl budget issues

So how do issues with crawl budget actually come about?

Facets

Now I think the main sort of issues on sites that can lead to crawl budget problems are firstly facets.

So you can imagine on an e-comm site, imagine we've got a laptops page. We might be able to filter that by size. You have a 15-inch screen and 16 gigabytes of RAM. There might be a lot of different permutations there that could lead to a very large number of URLs when actually we've only got one page or one category as we think about it — the laptops page.

Similarly, those could then be reordered to create other URLs that do the exact same thing but have to be separately crawled. Similarly they might be sorted differently. There might be pagination and so on and so forth. So you could have one category page generating a vast number of URLs.

Search results pages

A few other things that often come about are search results pages from an internal site search can often, especially if they're paginated, they can have a lot of different URLs generated.

Listings pages

Listings pages. If you allow users to upload their own listings or content, then that can over time build up to be an enormous number of URLs if you think about a job board or something like eBay and it probably has a huge number of pages.

Fixing crawl budget issues

So what are some of the tools that you can use to address these issues and to get the most out of your crawl budget?

So as a baseline, if we think about how a normal URL behaves with Googlebot, we say, yes, it can be crawled, yes, it can be indexed, and yes, it passes PageRank. So a URL like these, if I link to these somewhere on my site and then Google follows that link and indexes these pages, these probably still have the top nav and the site-wide navigation on them. So the link actually that's passed through to these pages will be sort of recycled round. There will be some losses due to dilution when we're linking through so many different pages and so many different filters. But ultimately, we are recycling this. There's no sort of black hole loss of leaky PageRank.

Robots.txt

Now at the opposite extreme, the most extreme sort of solution to crawl budget you can employ is the robots.txt file.

So if you block a page in robots.txt, then it can't be crawled. So great, problem solved. Well, no, because there are some compromises here. Technically, sites and pages blocked in robots.txt can be indexed. You sometimes see sites showing up or pages showing up in the SERPs with this meta description cannot be shown because the page is blocked in robots.txt or this kind of message.

So technically, they can be indexed, but functionally they're not going to rank for anything or at least anything effective. So yeah, well, sort of technically. They do not pass PageRank. We're still passing PageRank through when we link into a page like this. But if it's then blocked in robots.txt, the PageRank goes no further.

So we've sort of created a leak and a black hole. So this is quite a heavy-handed solution, although it is easy to implement.

Link-level nofollow

Link-level nofollow, so by this I mean if we took our links on the main laptops category page, that were pointing to these facets, and we put a nofollow attribute internally on those links, that would have some advantages and disadvantages.

I think a better use case for this would actually be more in the listings case. So imagine if we run a used car website, where we have millions of different used car individual sort of product listings. Now we don't really want Google to be wasting its time on these individual listings, depending on the scale of our site perhaps.

But occasionally a celebrity might upload their car or something like that, or a very rare car might be uploaded and that will start to get media links. So we don't want to block that page in robots.txt because that's external links that we would be squandering in that case. So what we might do is on our internal links to that page we might internally nofollow the link. So that would mean that it can be crawled, but only if it's found, only if Google finds it in some other way, so through an external link or something like that.

So we sort of have a halfway house here. Now technically nofollow these days is a hint. In my experience, Google will not crawl pages that are only linked to through an internal nofollow. If it finds the page in some other way, obviously it will still crawl it. But generally speaking, this can be effective as a way of restricting crawl budget or I should say more efficiently using crawl budget. The page can still be indexed.

That's what we were trying to achieve in that example. It can still pass PageRank. That's the other thing we were trying to achieve. Although you are still losing some PageRank through this nofollow link. That still counts as a link, and so you're losing some PageRank that would otherwise have been piped into that follow link.

Noindex, nofollow

Noindex and nofollow, so this is obviously a very common solution for pages like these on ecomm sites.

Now, in this case, the page can be crawled. But once Google gets to that page, it will discover it's noindex, and it will crawl it much less over time because there is sort of less point in crawling a noindex page. So again, we have sort of a halfway house here.

Obviously, it can't be indexed. It's noindex. It doesn't pass PageRank outwards. PageRank is still passed into this page, but because it's got a nofollow in the head section, it doesn't pass PageRank outwards. This isn't a great solution. We've got some compromises that we've had to achieve here to economize on crawl budget.

Noindex, follow

So a lot of people used to think, oh, well, the solution to that would be to use a noindex follow as a sort of best of both. So you put a noindex follow tag in the head section of one of these pages, and oh, yeah, everyone is a winner because we still get the same sort of crawling benefit. We're still not indexing this sort of new duplicate page, which we don't want to index, but the PageRank solution is fixed.

Well, a few years ago, Google came out and said, "Oh, we didn't realize this ourselves, but actually as we crawl this page less and less over time, we will stop seeing the link and then it kind of won't count." So they sort of implied that this no longer worked as a way of still passing PageRank, and eventually it would come to be treated as noindex and nofollow. So again, we have a sort of slightly compromised solution there.

Canonical

Now the true best of all worlds might then be canonical. With the canonical tag, it's still going to get crawled a bit less over time, the canonicalized version, great. It's still not going to be indexed, the canonicalized version, great, and it still passes PageRank.

So that seems great. That seems perfect in a lot of cases. But this only works if the pages are near enough duplicates that Google is willing to consider them a duplicate and respect the canonical. If they're not willing to consider them a duplicate, then you might have to go back to using the noindex. Or if you think actually there's no reason for this URL to even exist, I don't know how this wrong order combination came about, but it seems pretty pointless.

301

I'm not going to link to it anymore. But in case some people still find the URL somehow, we could use a 301 as a sort of economy that is going to perform pretty well eventually for... I'd say even better than canonical and noindex for saving crawl budget because Google doesn't even have to look at the page on the rare occasion it does check it because it just follows the 301.

It's going to solve our indexing issue, and it's going to pass PageRank. But obviously, the tradeoff here is users also can't access this URL, so we have to be okay with that.

Implementing crawl budget tactics

So sort of rounding all this up, how would we actually employ these tactics? So what are the activities that I would recommend if you want to have a crawl budget project?

One of the less intuitive ones is speed. Like I said earlier, Google is sort of allocating an amount of time or amount of resource to crawl a given site. So if your site is very fast, if you have low server response times, if you have lightweight HTML, they will simply get through more pages in the same amount of time.

So this counterintuitively is a great way to approach this. Log analysis, this is sort of more traditional. Often it's quite unintuitive which pages on your site or which parameters are actually sapping all of your crawl budget. Log analysis on large sites often yields surprising results, so that's something you might consider. Then actually employing some of these tools.

So redundant URLs that we don't think users even need to look at, we can 301. Variants that users do need to look at, we could look at a canonical or a noindex tag. But we also might want to avoid linking to them in the first place so that we're not sort of losing some degree of PageRank into those canonicalized or noindex variants through dilution or through a dead end.

Robots.txt and nofollow, as I sort of implied as I was going through it, these are tactics that you would want to use very sparingly because they do create these PageRank dead ends. Then lastly, a sort of recent or more interesting tip that I got a while back from an Ollie H.G. Mason blog post, which I'll probably link to below, it turns out that if you have a sitemap on your site that you only use for fresh or recent URLs, your recently changed URLS, then because Googlebot has such a thirst, like I said, for fresh content, they will start crawling this sitemap very often. So you can sort of use this tactic to direct crawl budget towards the new URLs, which sort of everyone wins.

Googlebot only wants to see the fresh URLs. You perhaps only want Googlebot to see the fresh URLs. So if you have a sitemap that only serves that purpose, then everyone wins, and that can be quite a nice and sort of easy tip to implement. So that's all. I hope you found that useful. If not, feel free to let me know your tips or challenges on Twitter. I'm curious to see how other people approach this topic.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com.

#marketing

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bronyinabottle · 4 years ago

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Starlight Glimmer/Post-Secrets Of The Dragon’s Tear Thoughts

So now that Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear is finished. I can now sort of put some reflections on some of the things that I did. I did a lot to expand the lore of I Dream of Twilight Sparkle and/or give my sort of interpretation of where some characters could go after the final two-parter and tried my darndest to fit it in a way that wouldn’t be too farfetched if some details were actually canon. From Scootaloo helping out the Wonderbolts expand, Sweetie starting her music career, Dragons not having marriages, Moondancer having had a crush on Twilight, Where Spike’s egg was found and who his dragon mother was and what happened to her along with how his egg ended up in Equestria and get linked with Twilight in such a way given there was not any other Pony/Dragon companionship in the show ever. And of course all of the lore expansions that was revealed with Twilight speaking to Jennesis and Jinn, plus Applejack and family reuniting with her deceased parents (Obviously FiM is the kind of show that doesn’t let you say death. But there’s absolutely no way they’re alive judging from some of the faces and even a few subtle lines in the episode The Perfect Pear.)

But funnily enough, one huge part of the story that I didn’t quite expect to have. Was the entirety of Starlight’s part of the story. You see, Starlight Glimmer was a character I was always… kind of lukewarm towards. I could never quite get past how quick her redemption was plus from what we are told… she almost rebooted the timeline… just because her friend got a cutie mark and left (Which by that logic, Moondancer should have become a villain too. She’d probably have even connected more as a villain since at least she had a connection to Twilight. I’m not saying I would of preferred Moondancer be a villain as I like how she actually is. But having her episode where she only become a shut-in after Twilight didn’t show up at her party and moved to Ponyville sort of become detrimental to Starlight’s story that she went as far as she did after Sunburst moved). We never got any more details about that other then Starlight felt sad about that and it was somehow enough to start her turn to darkness not to mention never got an explanation for why she was so magically powerful. Even besides ridiculous stuff like turning kitchen utensils into a cake, she’s able to levitate herself without wings which we can assume is something Twilight can’t even do.

So Starlight kind of became a rather frustrating character. I never hated her per se, but it’s easy to see why she was sort of a divisive character when she’s sort of shoehorned as a recurring character with a rather weak turn-to-villainy story combined with a magic power that without the proper explanation I’m sure got her cursed out as a Mary Sue. And some of those actually had a point, unlike the people who thought Twilight getting her wings would instantly make her a Mary Sue. And even with some episodes coming up that might of promised some more Starlight backstory, it never exactly went that way. I am sort of thankful for that now, given it gave me free reign to do what I did for Starlight in the story. But stuff like Parent Map certainly only gave really small details like Starlight had a goth phase and didn’t even show a mother for her (Again thankful for that now since one of the big plot twists of the story depends on almost no one knowing who Starlight’s mother is aside from obviously her father who had a reason to keep her a secret)

When Starlight was dropped from being Twilight’s student in Season 7. That was something of a relief because the fear was that Starlight was going to become an Alicorn and she still wouldn’t enough backing to really support making her a Princess. Even if you weren’t a fan of Twilight becoming an Alicorn, there’s no denying that prior to Magical Mystery Cure we didn’t really know the ultimate goal of Celestia mentoring Twilight for. It didn’t seem right that she mentored her just to free her sister, save the world some more on occasion before, as she just spends her life with her friends. Even Lauren Faust’s vision was Twilight to succeed Celestia at some point, and in that context seems like it makes sense that Twilight became an Alicorn. Starlight becoming an Alicorn however risked being everything people feared about Magical Mystery Cure but worse since with how quick and with lack of explantation they did with adding Starlight as a recurring character that even has two-parters that star her instead of the Mane 6, that Starlight’s ascension was going to be when Twilight feels she is ready despite having never given the audience everything we should want to know about Starlight, not to mention many of us still not quite forgiving her for nearly rebooting the timeline over… and I’ll repeat… a friend moving away.

So then, Starlight become a counselor in the school and had a few episodes involving that. And later, she is promoted to be Twilight’s successor to be Principal of the school. Which currently is how the show decided to keep as her canon role even up the more then a decade long timeskip in The Last Problem. Being a Principal of the School of Friendship is still a rather big deal. Though with the school only having been around for two seasons before the series ended it never really felt like it had too much of an impact so it kind of seemed like it gave Starlight a pretty mundane role that cools the fears of those who were afraid they were going to give a role to Starlight she doesn’t feel like she deserves without enough information about her. Though I imagine it may have been somewhat of an underwhelming choice for anybody who did like Starlight.

So Starlight’s legacy as a character goes like this: She’s Season 5’s seasonal villain that got quickly reformed in that season’s finale. Got important episodes in Season 6 and even gets to save Equestria alongside Trixie and Discord in Season 6’s finale. In Season 7 she’s stripped of being Twilight’s student to do whatever she wants. Though it was generally just slice of life with her own batch of friends whether it was Trixie, Sunburst, or Maud. And then she becomes a counselor in Season 8, promoted to Principal near the end of nine. Throughout her time on the show she’s sort of both an important protagonist throughout Seasons 6 and 7, but she never reaches quite Mane 6 or even CMC level in terms of working towards a clear goal or occupation. Other then I guess being tutored on the values of Friendship by Twilight we have no clear direction on where Starlight was supposed to go. So upon the School of Friendship, she’s free to essentially get employed under Twilight again but as a counselor throughout all of Season 8 and some of 9 until she’s given the reigns of the school after Twilight’s own promotion to sole ruler in Canterlot. So we’re left with a divisive character in the show that was never given enough to really tackle doubters, and perhaps underwhelming to her fans. So now the question becomes, is there perhaps a direction that could of been taken where Starlight could of possibly been fixed to a point where she may have worked into a more important role then she actually got that satisfies her fans that also at the same time has the backstory/information necessary to placate those skeptical of Starlight after her fast reformation?

As someone who just wrote Secret’s of the Dragon Tear where at least 7 of 32 chapters are centered around exploring something in regards to Starlight’s character and/or her family. I think I can say firmly: Yes. After writing this story, Starlight’s no longer a character I feel lukewarm/don’t care for. She quickly became… perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities of the show. I believe now that Starlight could have been a great portion even if her turnaround was rather quick. What I did in the story I feel like provides a good baseline for not just making Starlight more sympathetic/understandable. But maybe even have it make sense that she perhaps eventually reaches an important role… even possibly becoming an Alicorn Princess in the future. Which is something of a turnaround for myself, since I would of groaned if she had been put on a path to possibly become a Princess in the show… but with what I came up with this story…. I couldn’t find it myself to stick with the idea that she only decided to stay a Principal and that’s it. Now, I’m not going to say that everything I did in the story would of had to been followed to make it work. Even just the concepts being similar or at least only a few of these being applied in some fashion could of worked to make Starlight better. So I’m going to sort of bullet point some things that come up in the story in order of which we first learn about them. Starting with…

I. Starlight’s relationship with her father/Firelight

Now obviously, Firelight is a father that loves Starlight very much. That’s obvious in the episode The Parent Map. Perhaps to the point where it’s overbearing, still calling her childish nicknames despite being grown-up. But nonetheless we can plainly see Firelight is a loving father… that said a loving father doesn’t necessarily always mean a good father. You can still have a complicated relationship with a parent that loves you. They treat you as well as you can, but perhaps they keep secrets from you. Or they’re naive to your intentions and/or what you’re doing. Even putting aside Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear for a moment, despite Firelight being so loving Starlight still became that vengeful pony that took over a town with a cult and would reboot the timeline just to get revenge on ponies for foiling her plan that she concocted all because of Sunburst’s moving away. Obviously, something went wrong if her father couldn’t have told her daughter what was right or wrong. It’s likely Firelight was just too naive to even see what his daughter was planning. Firelight should have been the first one to at least try to help Starlight out before she did anything related to that cult. But unless he was utterly complicit in Starlight’s plan, which we’re given no evidence that he was… clearly Starlight was able to hide much of her turn to darkness to her father. I have to imagine that at the very least Firelight may have had to at least see a hint of Starlight’s disgust with cutie marks, (More on that soon) But either Firelight perhaps just naively thought Starlight would eventually understand cutie marks on her own, or something about her cutie mark he knew about but he decided to attempt hiding Starlight from it as what happens in Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear.

But once again putting aside the story for a moment, it might of been interesting to learn what was Firelight’s role in Starlight’s past. Exploring that would have been an interesting direction for the show to take to give a little more depth to her backstory. Now it isn’t just that she turned to darkness because of Sunburst getting her cutie mark, but also she had a father that while he still loves her, didn’t quite inquire enough to try to stop her early on. Obviously the danger in that is telling to keep too much of a watch on your daughter to the point you helicopter them over all the time. But also it is imperative for a father to help out if their children are feeling some sort of resentment about something before it snowballs into something later. And without a mother (More on this soon as well), it’s possible to get to maybe Firelight’s side of the story in that being a single father was hard for him. On a side note we’re not even sure if Firelight is even aware of what Starlight did with the town or the time travel. That could of been an interesting thing alone to explore.

II. Starlight’s Cutie Mark

Seriously, we never got Starlight’s cutie mark story ever. That felt like one of the most important things to learn even if it was understandable why the staff didn’t want deal too much with family issues for Starlight (After all it took 7 seasons before we saw Applejack’s deceased parents, and even then they still had to go for a “Do not say death” sort of thing). It even seemed like Season 5 had like THE perfect set up for Season 6 once there was more Starlight episodes: Having the CMC who had just gotten a group talent of helping others with marks including Troubleshoes potentially being the big foreshadowing episode that would indicate the CMC would be capable of helping adults too with this seasonal villain who’s motivations were cutie marks.

But… we just never got it. It might be perhaps the biggest reason Season 6 mostly fell flat for me. Some say Season 8 is the worst season of the show and I can kind of understand why, but it feels like the School of Friendship actually does something by the end of the series that’s sort of worth it and the Student 6 were generally fun characters. While Season 6 fails at what should of been easy lay-ups from what Season 5 seemed to be setting up. It’s probably fair to say Season 6 had more interesting/quality episodes perhaps, but in terms of the general over-arching part of the series. Season 8 felt like it had a purpose while Season 6’s job was to endear Starlight to us after the Season 5 finale… and it feels like it failed at that for the most part. At least in my opinion, I know obviously Starlight had fans and still has them now and I don’t mean to stomp on any valid reasons for liking Starlight even back then for one reason or another. I just felt like I needed more to really understand Starlight’s role. And it took until writing this story and filling many of the holes left by Starlight’s part of the show to understand that Starlight had potential, she just never quite reached it I feel. And even fans of her I feel like may feel underwhelmed with what they overall did with her. Starlight telling how she got her cutie mark should of been the priority of the first two-parter if not the next Starlight episode after or at least near the end or even the Season 6 finale. But instead we never get it despite how relevant it feels like it would of been to find out.

The first priority of whenever the writer’s meeting were when they started pitching ideas for Season 6 should have made showing how Starlight got her cutie mark as the #1 priority. They reformed a villain who’s entire motivation for villainy was a friend who moved away because they got their mark. It’s almost hard to believe that the writer’s chose to ignore the entire time to the point that maybe behind closed doors for some reason Hasbro didn’t want Starlight’s cutie mark story for one reason or another. It should have been as clear as day that the next course of action was to share that story cause the idea of a pony who does’t like cutie mark but getting a make that perhaps refers to their high talent would have been interesting to be explored into. And potentially gives the CMC after getting their Cutie Marks their most important scene in the show in letting us understand Starlight’s motivations and/or how she felt about getting her cutie mark and even a better understanding of what she thinks it means and whether it’s dissonant from what it actually means or not. I hate to sound like the demanding fan, but it just should of came up before stuff like Starlight meeting Trixie, saving the world herself, all her new friendshipping episodes in Season 7, and her counseling/school episodes in 8 and 9. Those stuff had a right to happen but for some reason we just never got the single thing that felt like that was important to know.

So I definitely went to rectify it even if it’s rather simple and a little bit of a copycat since it’s similar to how Twilight got hers and kind of too convenient that the thing that would give her cutie mark was also with the book that would introduce Starlight down the path of her ideology on Cutie Marks. Though coincidental timing of Cutie Marks happen quite a bit so it wouldn’t be farfetched. But I understand if perhaps I have it a little too simple for someone who complains about the show never getting to it. But even if you feel I did Starlight’s cutie mark story wrongly. I wanted to at least give a good try at it that the show never took the steps to.

III. Starlight’s missing Mother / Sunset Shimmer’s role in Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear

Now, obviously the show would of never gone with the direction my story went with Sunset Shimmer being Starlight’s missing mother. Sunset had been already established in Equestria Girls, and even though arguably Sunset should be quite a bit older then Twilight if say she had went through the mirror sometime before Celestia discovered Twilight. Her being in high school would of made the issue of Sunset being Starlight’s mother… VERY, VERY, Awkward without having to explain complicated time discrepancies between portals to kids or more likely parents who may think the show is promoting teen motherhood. Luckily, the events of the Equestria Girls movies have never been canon to Genie Twilight’s universe outside of Genie Sci-Twi in a blog entirely about genie MLP characters in different universes meeting up. So it entirely freed up not just to give Sunset a role in this story, but plausibly old enough to be Starlight’s mother. I think of the Mane 6 of at least around 25 or so by the end of the series. So keeping in mind that in Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear. Sunset disappeared about 8 or so years before Celestia discovered Twilight and how Sunset was about Twilight’s current age at the time. If Sunset had been still alive in my story, she’d have been at least close to her 40’s. Plenty old enough to have been Starlight’s mother.

It really felt like an eureka moment in about October when I found out I could possibly link Sunset and Starlight in a way that’s feasible enough to make her Starlight’s mother. Cause it’s an entirely unique relation between the two. When Sunset and Starlight are in the same conversation or sentence. It’s often about which character is better in fan arguments (With Sunset generally being more popular since she’s probably the most well-liked thing about Equestria Girls where as Starlight has always been a source of divisiveness in the main show), the one time that Starlight appeared in an Equestria girls special, or… shipping… (Which I know anybody who reads my story is about to make every single art and/or fan fiction about Starlight and Sunset hooking up very, very, very, very, VERY, awkward). But Sunset being Starlight’s mother would at least give a plausible explanation for why Starlight’s so good at magic since she likely inherited the strong magic genes from one of the few other ponies to catch Celestia’s attention enough to make them her protege. Plus, it’s fun to think of a family that decided to rhyme their last name, I naturally wrote that as something that Firelight proposed to Sunset. So that’s why at least in Genie Twi’s universe, you have Shimmer and Glimmer. In most Alt. universe fics involving Sunset being a family member of another known canon character it’s usually either she’s Celestia’s daughter, or Sunburst’s sister. I did have to make it so she is related to Sunburst, but she’s far too old to be a sibling to him in the story. And that’s when I decided to connect Sunset to Sunburst’s father… Sunspot… who was also coincidentally missing from The Parent Map. Though apologies to any Starburst shipping fans for sinking your ship in my story by making Starlight and Sunburst cousins all along.

But anyway, I’d even say if you look at Sunset and Firelight together you could kinda see why they could of made Starlight. I guess to be fair, it doesn’t really look like Starlight got any of Sunset’s physical traits. As appearance wise it definitely looks like she got a lot of her father, though maybe at the very least Sunset’s genes lightening up the purple into the pink/light-purple Starlight is. But I think at the very least there’s some similarities personality wise that worked such as their temper. Now, the Sunset in Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear was never a villain so they can’t relate in terms of feeling guilt for what they’ve done. But perhaps another trait they share is empathy, in that Starlight’s past experience allows her to personally talk to others as a sort of comfort that someone once felt like them about some things, which is probably at least part of the reason she’d made counselor. And as for Sunset, her whole flashback power from Legend of Everfree and onward is how she finds out motivations and is able to talk to them to understand them. And the EQG staff have even said that if Sunset had an element, it’d be the Element of Empathy. Obviously part of that is Sunset having her own experiences as a villain, but I still kind of applied it to SOTDT’s Sunset when she hears Starlight admit everything about her time travel incident where she’s at first quite disturbed that her daughter would do such an act, but hearing how the fact her death had such an impact on Starlight where there were quite a few things outside of Starlight’s hooves that if even one thing changed might of made it less likely she did what she did. And the cult thing is partly Sunset’s fault for leaving the cult book in the house (Even if she did kind of do good at hiding it by having it randomly behind a wall she couldn’t have known was ever going to be broken into) allowed her to understand the circumstances of Starlight’s life to get to that point of desperation.

As she says, it didn’t make what Starlight did justified but thanks to Starlight being able to come clean and willing to become a better pony is enough to get empathy, especially from a perspective of a mother to a child who would of likely been able to stop Starlight if she had been around. Everything Starlight did is now found out as an unfortunate circumstance from the rather bad luck she had in life in things she could not control. She couldn’t have prevented her mother’s death, her father refused to tell her who her mother was that would of probably gotten her to go to Celestia’s school had she known at the time she got her cutie mark thus reunited with Sunburst and having less of an issue with cutie marks when it would of turned out it was indicative of her potential in magic skill, but instead without a single mother figure and boredom of being alone in the house she accidentally discovers both the book that would indoctrinate her for years to eventually starting the Our Town cult and her mother’s spell book that would give her the cutie mark she received, thus begrudging her own moment of gaining her mark when it should of been a good day for her and with an overprotective father afraid of Starlight following a path he doesn’t want her to go on, for fear of Starlight going missing at some point too. It just deepens Starlight’s road to darkness. So instead Starlight’s raw power was set on a path to endanger Equestria, rather then potentially becoming at least a powerful ally if her father had allowed her to go to the school. Again, doesn’t make almost rebooting the timeline justified but at least made it more understandable why she fell so far to almost do it rather then it seemingly only be about the fact a friend moved away.

But anyway, ignoring Sunset in the story for a moment. If there was an interesting idea for Starlight’s mother it certainly would of possibly been a very interesting episode of the show. If Starlight’s mother is dead, then you have kind of have a way for Starlight to bond with Applejack over. I naturally had to have them talk about it even at the point of the story where it was still unknown who her mother was. Cause whether it was a missing or a dead mother, they both don’t have a part of their lives that their friends do. So having Starlight bond with a part of the Mane 6 other then Twilight would of certainly been interesting. Of course, if Starlight’s mother is still around. Perhaps part of Starlight’s story could of been about a messy divorce, and/or even a rather rough relationship with her mother akin to Diamond Tiara and her mother. This is of course assuming that Starlight wouldn’t have just had a normal mother that just happened to not be there for the Parent Map which might of been the way they went if they went ahead with showing who her mother was. But yes, Starlight’s mother is another part of Starlight that could of had plenty of potential to help endear her to fans. As for me… I just ended up making myself if not anybody else look awkwardly if I ever see shipping stuff between Starlight and Sunset in the future knowing that in my AU, that would be incest. Oof.

IV. Starlight as Twilight’s Student / Starlight’s Future

Now after talking about Starlight’s cutie mark and family issues. Kind of going back a little in Starlight’s first role after being reformed in becoming Twilight’s student. Naturally, this is the thing that got people worried that they were going to put Starlight on a path to become an Alicorn because naturally Twilight picking a student would have you believe that’s where things are going since that’s where Twilight ended up. Though once Season 7 rolled around, Starlight actually graduates in some fashion and is just no longer Twilight’s student. Which while it came as a relief personally, it also kind of makes the whole thing weird to just cut out Starlight’s role as Twi’s student after she was for literally only one entire season. Without the proper backstory, it just became a lose/lose situation. Either Starlight gets a role she doesn’t feel like she’s earned or her role as Student just underwhelms in comparison to the other two times we’ve seen an Alicorn teacher and a unicorn student (Whether that was Sunset which ran away from Celestia’s guidance started a spin-off series and became a well-liked character in her own right from Rainbow Rocks and onwards or Twilight naturally having earned her status over saving the world a few times and getting better at magic.) Though the former also has other problems like it’s just hard to think of how to fit Starlight in with the Princesses on her own without the proper history to back it up.

But that’s where I get back into my story, where in the epilogue. And also the post this thoughts is being linked, after having met her mother which has helped made her realize who she is. She realizes that she may have been in fact destined to be in some sort of duo with Twilight. Cause going by the timeline of events: Sunset wasn’t too far from possibly one day ascending to Princesshood, however she stepped down before then, and thus Celestia had to look elsewhere. Before she found Twilight, she concluded that perhaps Sunset’s foal (Which she noticed Sunset was probably pregnant) might inherit Sunset’s power and she can begin anew from there as it would be when that foal is grown up when her sister’s banishment would end. But in a twist, Celestia goes to Saddle Arabia and gets a dream of getting the right pony to hatch Spike’s egg. Leaving it as an exam at the school first in case there were students there that could hatch it, but if they all failed she would seek out Sunset and hope she’s willing to let whoever her child would be to try hatching the egg. But instead, Celestia discovers Twilight first. But with Starlight receiving a mark that recognizes her raw power similar to Twilight from her mother’s spell book. If she had known about her mother and/or didn’t have a grudge against cutie marks to understand what her mark means, she might have gone to the school where waiting for her would be Celestia who already had Twilight. Perhaps leading to an intense magic duel between two gifted fillies, before ultimately it’s broken up to where Celestia can’t let go of Twilight because of the dream she had. But if Celestia is aware of Starlight’s history, she would of been nice enough to keep Starlight around in respect for her former Protege, especially if Celestia had known that she was deceased or even still just missing. Thus sort of having Twilight and Starlight grow up as co-proteges under Celestia. Now from there, it’d be hard to really figure all the what ifs of Twilight and Starlight being co-students from the very beginning and whether it’d change up the whole Elements of Harmony deal. Perhaps similar to how Celestia and Luna were able to harness the Elements just being two ponies. Maybe there wouldn’t be a Mane 6 at all and Twilight & Starlight would each carry 3 of the elements. Or the Mane 6 still happen, but Starlight being the sort of junior student is not one of the Elements though she still helps however she can when Nightmare Moon returns.

But of course this is a hypothetical situation that doesn’t happen at all with many things getting in the way, but kind of thanks to the idea that Luna is retiring at the end of Season 9 too it offers a sort of opening where it seems weird that Celestia and Luna is just dropping both the Sun and Moon on Twilight’s shoulders as a sole ruler. There’s no doubt Twilight would be capable, as the Last Problem shows. But nonetheless while there was a period of 1000 years of Celestia being sole ruler after Luna was banished. It wasn’t the norm, so to go from the beginning of the sisters reign with 2, down to 1 because of banishment, back to 2, but then 1 again since both sisters were retiring may seem a bit odd. So in a scenario where perhaps Starlight feels compelled to use her strong magic for the good of Equestria alongside being able to follow in her mother’s footsteps she’d want to be the student of who’s ever going to be the reigning monarch for a long while, and while she certainly doesn’t want to force it and let Twilight decide, whether she’s a student for life or eventually is chosen to sort of be Luna’s successor in terms of being the younger Alicorn. And with Celestia and Luna both retiiring, that means falling under Twilight’s tutelage once again but a bigger scope then the one throughout Season 6. She could still be Principal even as she has the status of Twilight’s student, as we saw Twilight did plenty of things, while known as Celestia’s student. And like is pointed out, being a Principal in a school where non-ponies are allowed to attend is actually somewhat the perfect warm-up for if Starlight eventually becomes a co-ruler with Twilight. She would have basically seen what are multiple ambassadors in terms of students from other nations, their parents, or whatever guardians brings them along to attend the school.

So, it gives a legitimate reason for Starlight to perhaps become Twilight’s student once again. There’s still going to be a due diligence in Starlight learning from Twilight for a good amount of years. In fact it’s likely I won’t explicitly share the result of going back to being Twilight’s student until whenever I decide I feel it’s time for me to close down I Dream of Twilight Sparkle (I don’t know when that will be, it will probably at least go until the end of 2022 Where perhaps I’ll end it officially after what will be 10 years since the blog began. Though also may depend how G5 is). Likely for the rest of the time until then Starlight will only be a student again. I don’t think I plan on showing Starlight’s moment of ascension if it happens as I’d like to think that Twilight and Starlight both mutually agree to make sure enough time has passed and Starlight has the experience after years of being the Principal of Friendship and/or enough missions that Twilight might send her on. And while Starlight hints she’s likely not to, it’s also Twilight giving time for Starlight in case she wants to back out if say she finds herself with a feeling like her mother to instead raise a family.

Basically after going through the effort to give Starlight such a role she has in the story. It didn’t feel right to leave her as just the Principal of the School of Friendship and that’s it. Another shot at being Twilight’s student I feel makes sense in a scenario where to honor her mother’s legacy and use the magic she inherited to it’s fullest potential is to once again be a faithful student to the ruling Alicorn.

And this is a rather huge step for me since I used to just not care too much for Starlight. And some of her episodes kind of made it harder since for one or another they were sort of problematic from No Second Prances where I feel Twilight probably should of been more lenient with Trixie, To Change a Changeling where Starlight messes up but it somehow works out anyway, and then there was A Matter of Principals where Discord might have been at his most infuriating yet Starlight actually forgives him near the end. With episodes like those and with the lack of more details about Starlight’s past it’s easy to see why Starlight was divisive. Though with this story, Starlight seems to me now like a pretty mishandled character that could have worked with the right direction, but just could never meet the potential that she could of had. Obviously maybe part of it was that the staff maybe knew Starlight was sort of shoehorned so they wanted to make sure there was still plenty of space for episodes about the Mane 6 or other characters that the fans have watched since the first season, as well as whatever ideas they wanted to do for each season until they got the word that Season 9 would be the last. But even considering that it feels like it could of been plausible to replace the more slice-of-life Starlight episodes with something that explains her a little more then we got. As besides from the Season 5 finale the only things we learn about Starlight’s past is a little more of her friendship with Sunburst, where she grew up, who her father was, and she had a goth phase as a teen. If I’m missing anything else they hinted or shared about Starlight’s past let me know, but there just wasn’t a lot for a character that feels like she needed it.

I’m not saying my story is the only way for Starlight to have been fixed. But just at least mentioning some key elements that would have helped. Change a few things around of the keys I laid out even if it of course it wouldn’t be the exact same or couldn’t be the exact same for obvious reasons (Most big of all Sunset who once again despite it probably making sense that she’d be old enough in the pony world if she was grown up when she went across the mirror the first time, is still a high schooler in Equestria Girls) and either way it certain would of helped. While I’m sure there’s probably many fanfics about it already, even something as simple as turning Starlight and Sunburst’s relationship into a shipping story (Obviously not in Genie Twi’s AU though, since they’re cousins) where Starlight reuniting with Sunburst makes her rekindle a little more then just their friendship. Where it shows that perhaps Sunburst leaving was secretly a little more then just Starlight being heartbroken about her only friend leaving. Even if that’s the only change it would of helped. So in a way, I’ve come to like Starlight Glimmer much more then I used to but kind of in a way that she’s now a disappointing character if you don’t have anything to fill in the gaps and only go by what’s shown about Starlight in the show. But when those gaps ARE filled by some sort of fanon, suddenly she can actually be quite interesting and now I have a Starlight that I feel like I can get to like and shape for myself where even if she did all the same things the show Starlight did, it at least feels to me I thought of a satisfying enough reason for why it all happened. She doesn’t have to be completely forgiven about the Time Travel thing as that’s probably her biggest sin, but the important part was that Starlight could feel shame and remorse… which gets into my last category

V. Contrasting Starlight with the Villains Post-Reformation

With Starlight no longer a villain after Season 5 and on the side of good, it will come time for her to face some villains of her own. Though the first thing she faced wasn’t exactly a villain but just some dangerous winter storm that would envelop the Crystal Empire if the Crystal Heart isn’t fixed in time. Which is understandable since that episode is generally about Starlight reuniting with Sunburst after having been told him leaving was Starlight’s motivation. They again unfortunately go too deep on that, though still least shows Starlight has some kind of almost PTSD-like feeling prior to seeing him again. It wouldn’t be until the Season 6 finale before Starlight faces her first true villain with Queen Chrysalis on a revenge plan after Canterlot Wedding. I think generally Chrysalis and Starlight was a pretty good rivalry, that lasts for the entire rest of the series even after Starlight tried to have her own moment of reforming a villain in a similar reaching-out-the-hoof fashion to her own. Only for Chrysalis to just slap it away.

Though Chrysalis is actually the only one Starlight ever gets to directly fight besides of course the big final fight where there is an entire army of ponies who attack the trio of Cozy, Chrysalis, and Tirek. Starlight only gets manipulated and trapped in the ball of magic by Cozy, Starlight is one of Sombra’s hypnotized army and in the final two-parter she gets a brief fight with Chrysalis where she’s defeated by the much more powered-up Chrysalis before she’s the first one Discord tricks Tirek into freeing to help the Mane 6 escape. Perhaps it’s another disappointment in that while it was kind of still interesting to have Starlight have this rivalry with Chrysalis. Starlight didn’t have much of a connection to the others.

And this is the point I again get to a part of my story, where I actually made Cozy Glow perhaps one of the central figures of Starlight’s past being a part of the family that are responsible for the death of her mother (Even though of course they didn’t come out unscathed since Cozy’s parents both died in that confrontation too, and Cozy was sent to the future by the unpredictable effects of Sunset firing magic with a broken horn). I’ll kind of admit it is sort of stretching things to just try to tie things together as much as possible, but Cozy Glow is a character we know even less about then Starlight. And despite being a little filly, she’s treated like this ultimate evil on the level of Tirek since she’s sent to Tartaurus. Which confuses a lot of fans who are used to this show usually reforming the villains. Which is probably why it was a good idea to actually sort of make it so that she definitely did deserve the fate she got by revealing her upbringing would make it impossible for her to be reformed. Just outing her as a complete psychopath that no friendship lessons were going to change her, as unfortunately there are people in real life that just can’t be changed and the only proper answer is some kind of justice for them that discourages others from following their path. Cozy’s just a filly, but when she’s indoctrinated by those just as psychopathic, at least in the Genie Twi AU it would take outright brainwashing.

Having Cozy have a role with Starlight’s Mother’s death also sort of makes the moment Cozy seeks counsel from Starlight with more hidden sinister background to it all. It’s partly Cozy’s fault Starlight ended up doing what she did since after manipulating Sunset into believing she’s not like her parents, she drops a rock that breaks Sunset’s horn, nerfing Sunset’s ability to do much against Cozy and her mother. Cozy gets some form of comeuppance in that she gets the ultimate bad luck in being sent through time by Sunset’s blast, but injuring Sunset’s horn allows Cozy’s mother to grab Sunset and put them in a suicidal free-fall that’ll kill them both since she doesn’t have the wing power to save herself and Sunset would have to hope she’s lucky enough with her injured horn. Resulting instead of both getting exploded after Cozy’s mother tries covering the hole of Sunset’s broken horn before they even hit the water. Though Cozy is likely sent conveniently at around Season 8’s time chronologically where she probably somewhere caught wind of the School of Friendship and started her manipulation on the CMC and of course Starlight. We’re also never given an explanation for how Cozy knew what she would do would happen in the Season 8 finale except I guess we have to assume that in canon it was something she learned from Tirek. But in the Genie Twi AU, it’s also a plan that her parents wanted to do and what Sunset aimed to stop before she retired for good. As we shouldn’t forget that removing the magic from Equestria is still a devastating move, we can debate that Starlight’s time travel is arguably worse and in some ways I’d even agree with that but nonetheless has a huge impact. And in a story where it’s states that all life is Magic too through their souls, that doesn’t just make Cozy a power-crazy psychopath but a GENOCIDAL psychopath.

Cozy’s magic sucking thing can’t actually suck in soul magic since otherwise Cozy herself would fall under her own plan most likely, but without usable magic the world would quickly become unhappy and dark magic would spread everywhere. I even made it so it’s particularly related to Starlight by implying that the wasteland we saw in the Season 5 finale was if Cozy succeeded. Obviously Cozy hadn’t been met at the time of that but given we saw the futures where Chrysalis, and Tirek won. Even if at the time Cozy didn’t exist conceptually, it was the perfect thing to apply to tie Cozy into the overall arch of the series. And while Sunset sending Cozy to the future just before Season 8 may be a little forceful in trying to tie things together it does result in the idea that time travel really messes up Starlight’s life in how it brings her unknowingly face to face with one of her mother’s murderers and how she’d end up using it in her most infamous scheme. I doubt Cozy in the Genie Twi AU knew for sure that Starlight was Sunset’s daughter but it does still sort of retroactively make any meeting between Starlight and Cozy in Season 8 more sinister and/or tragic with Cozy almost sending Starlight away with wherever all that magic was going to go in the Season 8 Finale. But if Cozy were to ever escape from being in stone and found out, she’d no doubt flaunt her role in ruining Starlight’s early life. The lengths of which psychopathic people go to torture the people who get in their way knows no bounds. Cozy’s effect on Starlight’s life implied in Secrets of Dragon’s Tear making her overall the central figure responsible for what Starlight ended up doing. Cozy and her parents confrontation with Starlight’s mother caused her death and in a fashion where no pony would know what happened thus causing the domino effect of Starlight’s fall into darkness and delaying her finding her destiny of being in a duo with Twilight.

Thus many of the events of Seasons 5-7 in the Genie Twi AU are now retroactively because of Cozy’s actions, giving her a much broader effect and really outs her as actually among the most evil the ponies have ever come across even though (Alicorn ascension aside in the final two-parter) she’s really not that strong herself compared to the likes of Chrysalis and Tirek. It’s even implied that if the trio had won, there would of likely been a situation eventually where Tirek and Chrysalis would have to team-up together to fight Cozy. In a bleak situation where any remaining ponies would likely have to side with Tirek and Chrysalis for the best shot at taking Cozy down. These revelations bubble up the anger in Starlight so much, she almost decides to kill Cozy despite having been told that killing the villains is a bad idea. As for at least a brief moment, she falls under a little more darkness just because it was Cozy’s fault she fell into darkness in the first place. Twilight and Sunset manage to prevent her from doing so, but it makes Cozy more central to Starlight’s life then Chrysalis. With the benefit of both Starlight and Cozy getting an upgrade of the overall part of the timeline then they ever had in the show.

VI. Conclusion

If I may to back a bit to the teacher/student thing with Twilight. It sort of makes it that Seasons 1 through Season 4 is the tale of Twilight’s rise to becoming the Princess of Friendship. Season 5 is this transition period where it gives some of the aftermath of Twilight’s rise while introducing Starlight who does some awful things for a seemingly weak reason but actually hid something a bit deeper. While Seasons 6 through 9 if you include the events of Secrets of the Dragon’s Tear into the timeline into Starlight’s portion of her own even if that includes a few oddities related to the show’s handling of Starlight having to return to being Twilight’s student, and nothing much of importance happening aside from becoming Principal of the School of Friendship with Starlight until after the events depicted in the show. I would say that if much of the stuff that is revealed in the story was at all canon it probably would of come up sooner then they actually did so I understand that if there’s any criticism’s of the story in trying to tie things together too much is including stuff that perhaps characters would of certainly talked about them sooner then they actually did. Though to be fair much of the subject matter is something a little too dark for the show after all again it took 7 seasons before we got to see who Applejack’s deceased parents were and even then they had to kind of skate around the fact by not saying how they died, they still did a masterful way of sort of implying they were deceased without telling us how in The Perfect Pear. I’m sure that if some of my stuff hypothetically was vetted by Hasbro execs they would outright reject the whole part of Cozy Glow role in the death of Starlight’s Mother (Whether it was or was not Sunset). But as is I feel like I did a decent job at fitting in much of the lore previously established that’s exclusive to the blog with answerig many questions that were left unanswered after the show. Starlight in particular I’m glad I was sort of able to turn into a character I previously didn’t care too much about, into a pony I could root for even if that’s kind of cheating since I wrote her myself in the new direction I had many reasons for wanting to write this story, bud I was just super surprised at just how invested I got into expanding Starlight’s part when I was steadily always having concepts thinking about when I’d eventually write in this story expecting to be mainly finally giving the Dragon’s Tear more of a purpose then just the miracle item that saves Spike and the others in Return to Saddle Arabia. I really went ambitious with this story to include as many characters as I wanted including each of the Mane 6, Starlight, and the Saddle Arabian OCs each having their own chapters that provide a direction I think they could go for after the events of the final two-parter.

Obviously Twilight and Spike still generally have the biggest portion of the story especially after the Spirit summoning gets introduced since it couldn’t happen without Spike at that current moment but Applejack also has a pretty large role in the story in that she has that heartbreaking meeting with Grand Pear at the end of Chapter 2, invites 2 of the 5 performances at the ball, somewhat debates with Twilight about the dream, bonds with Starlight over having no representation in the club of mothers meeting at the ball, and then finally having a dramatic moment to seeing her parents again and introducing her friends to them. Which then sets up a more quick way of convincing others that this spirit summoning stuff is real being she’s the element of Honesty. Twilight and Spike learning about how their paths became entwined, Starlight finding her mother who’s very identity also held the keys to her destiny, and Applejack’s lamenting the lack of her parents but eventually seeing them are perhaps the big 3 parts of the story and I’ve sort of proud of the way I sort of entwined them all together with the Spirit Summoning part which could potentially have some interesting ideas that could be explored upon with enough asks afterward. With the show over, there’s no more main source to respond to at least until G5 starts but this certainly could help not just bridge the gap till’ then but have a sort of interpretation of the events of Friendship is Magic in a unique way that I hope others enjoy. I certainly had fun writing it, and there’s enough left open to still continue on as the sprite comics return. I even went ahead on improving the Starlight sprite that I admit I sort of half-assed before, along with sprites for Sunset along with Pear Butter & Bright Mac. Jinn as well too! Thanks to anyone who read the story and/or read my thoughts out here. Seeya!

#Starlight Glimmer #My Little Pony #secrets of the dragon's tear #My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

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sunshinexlollipops · 4 years ago

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Hello! Just wanted to stop by (hopefully not being a bother) and say I have recently just went through all of your red dead fics on ao3 and wow. I've gotten into a/b/o fics more after reading yours! But also your amidst fic made me feel all types of things, and I know however it ends will leave me messy with f e e l i n g s. And I want to prematurely thank you for those feelings xP. I was also wondering, if that's alright, how your writing process is like? You put in a lot of words in amidst and some of your other fics. Do you make outlines? Do you first write down ideas for a chapter/fic and then draft it out? Are there scenes you add/take out? Is there a length goal you usually set for yourself? You don't have to answer, but I wish you well and thank you for fics that brightened my life a little!

LONG POST!

omg, hello anon! your ask 100% got lost in my notifs, so I just wanna start this off by saying you aren't a bother whatsoever!

in fact: I love receiving asks about my fics, as well as opening up about the writing that takes to get them to you guys!

so I'm gonna start this reply off with a quick thank you about my works! I'm so happy you're enjoying or have enjoyed what I've written.

RDR2/Arthur Morgan is a pleasure to write about, but I've also really enjoyed the fandom. it's been one of the sweetest and most supportive, and I've found one of my best literary periods with you guys! so thank you! :>

but enough pitter patter about that-- let's get to the fun stuff!

since you had a few questions, I'm gonna answer these in a separated list so it'll be easy to follow along! :)

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What is your writing process like?

well, in truth anon, I don't exactly have much of one.

that may surprise some, and others not. in truth, I think that sometimes the idea or concept of a "writing process" kind of scares anyone trying to get into writing.

I'm not sure if you are, anon, but your questions just make me want to cover this, just in case.

writing should come to you how it comes. I'm definitely NOT a textbook writer. I don't have a method where I have cardinal rules and a set up I have to have.

I simply embrace when inspiration strikes. usually while listening to music or absorbing some other media. frankly, if you treat writing like a science, you're gonna get stuck. it isn't an issue you have to fix, or a challenge you have to tackle.

allow yourself to get comfortable and just think whatever comes your way mentally. even if you think an idea is bad, encourage it! you can't write if you don't let yourself think.

so for me, I suppose my "process" is just encouraging my writing and for my brain to pop out ideas or scenes. just write away and see where it takes you!

You use a lot of words-- do you outline by chance?

ah yes. I am a wordy potato, frankly. albeit ACW is an overall outlier at being ALMOST A MILLION WORDS. even then, I don't think any of my over fics have ever really gotten past 150k, and I believe only ONE had done so.

this was... not by design.

believe it or not, I intended ACW to actually be short. 6 chapters like the game and boom, done. I thought I could summarize everything and just show snippets of a growing relationship between Arthur and my unintentional OC, Wolf. it almost would've been like a one-shot just broken up into chapters for homage sake.

but then I overplotted the prologue and next thing I knew, ACW had become this massive, sprawling monster of a slow-burn.

as for outlines... I don't necessarily outline. I'll explain this more in my next response. :)

Do you write a summary of a chapter or fic down, then draft afterward?

so in terms of summary, no. these stories live in my head, and I tend to feel that writing things down is more of a waste of time for me.

my brain flies through stories at such quick speeds I feel like I will lose my spark or my ideas if I take a second to write things down.

I am known to do audio recordings where I talk about my writing though. this is an amazing way to brainstorm on the fly, and some of my best ideas have come from just voicing what I'd like to see happen aloud. additionally: the recordings are a good way to keep track of what I've said and want, just like an outline!

otherwise I don't outline. I'm not sure what the terminology is, but I apparently go after my stories a lot like Stephen King does.

write first, worry about the rest later. I'm very much a "swim and swim even if you're sinking" because I would rather put the work in than fool with floaties to keep myself up.

personally this works wonders for me, as I don't like restraining myself or my head once I'm in motion. it doesn't end well if I do-- like snuffing a candle. I just go for it and I will make sense of it later.

even so, I have general ideas for what I want to happen, and I remember my basic outlines. the details come later, as long as the big picture is visible to me.

as for ACW: the only "outlines" I did was timing of the game missions. just to make sure I didn't miss major happenings, and that I had the timing in a way that flowed for what I wanted both logically and narratively.

as for drafts, I also don't draft. again, I go for it. that being said, I have restarted updates a couple of times, or have deleted entire scenes out of dissatisfaction. most of the time though, it's one and done for me! and it's all done on the fly. :)

Are there scenes you add/remove?

as mentioned above, yes. I have deleted a lot of content from ACW. some ideas never came to, but more often than not, it was repackaged in a way I liked better. so if anything, content was recycled and you all still got to see it in some way.

but there are some things that I want to do that just aren't possible. like many stranger missions. there's no good way to include certain events or characters in ACW without derailing what is going on. so alas: aberdeen pig farm is not a stop on Arthur and Wolf's itinerary.

but for another example, I wanted to showcase more of Wolf's past with her father (specifically her shut in life before his death), and I wanted scenes and more examples of her being disconnected unlike everyone else as a result.

these will come as flashbacks or other scenes in the upcoming chapters, but I intend to add these changes or additions during my revisions! :>

Is there usually a length goal you set?

as for word goals, I never quite had any apart from "at least 20k words" just because that was usually my average, I noticed.

additionally, this made sure I didn't end chapters without putting the bare minimum of content in them, and to have solid continuity. can you imagine have a 20k update and then a 3k one? no thanks!

20k just became my running baseline, after that. otherwise, my limit is when AO3 reaches theirs for the character limit (fence why some updates were split into multiple pieces).

with my other stories, I simply write until the story is properly paced or finished: however long it takes!

---------

whew! what a post!

but I hoped that gave you some more insight, anon.

writing is crazy, and I'm always learning something new. more now than ever, since I'm looking into actually getting something original submitted for publication.

if you (or anyone reading this) are inspired to write yourself, don't be discouraged! writing is one of the most intensive forms of creation. it's not easy. it's not instant. it's a lot of passion and time, let alone a utilization of language and grammar fluency!

it's easy to feel overwhelmed or lost, or feel like it's better to not try than struggle to start. but I can assure, writing is such a splendid thing to do. write for enjoyment, or pleasure, or simply because you want to.

as long as your story isn't intended to be hateful, is your own work, and is fun for you to create... what else matters?

if you want some additional inspiration, just know that I started writing fic in 2012/2013 and have gone through so much in my near TEN YEARS of fic writing. I've learned a lot, and I've grown so much!

be proud of yourself no matter where you are at and start from, and pride yourself in your progress or beginnings.

just go for it! you may surprise yourself!

hope you're having a good one, anon. and thanks for the ask! :)

#luffy asks #anon #fic writing #writing advice #acw #amidst a clash of worlds #luffy posts #long post

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elyvorg · 4 years ago

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Still a Hero - author’s commentary (part 2)

I spent almost all my time for two months planning and writing this fic of mine centred around Kaito’s issues, and that amount of thinking-about-something doesn’t just go away once the thing is finished. This is the second of two posts (the first being here) giving a kind of author’s commentary on the fic. For this one, I’ll be (mostly) taking off my Kaito-analyst hat and putting on my author hat, talking about the writing process and how I came up with the ideas for each chapter given how I knew Kaito’s character arc needed to go.

I say I spent two months “planning and writing” this fic, because the first month of that really was all planning. At first this was figuring out the broad strokes of how Kaito’s character arc should work, while also entirely separately imagining him going through various different kinds of torture that seemed like fun. Then I began to slot these torture methods that I’d already decided I liked the idea of into whichever points in his character arc they fit best for, resulting in me beginning to get a coherent set of scenes together.

As my ideas for the story solidified more in my head and grew more elaborate, I began to get them down on paper (well, virtual paper) to help me keep it all straight. I could remember the broad strokes of each scene well enough, but smaller details of ideas I had for the little things Kaito would be doing to indicate his mental state at any point were nice to get down. That way, I didn’t have to try and keep all of that in my head at once and inevitably forget a whole bunch of it when I started actually writing and was using most of my headspace on coming up with good prose. I could craft the progression of Kaito’s mental deterioration more carefully like this, rather than just winging it as I went along, which I think helped a lot considering that said progression was so vital to get right.

Plus, it was nice to be able to have a phase to the writing process where I didn’t let myself worry about wording and just got down all my raw ideas for the… okay, look, I’d call them “beats” of the story, and also possibly use the term “blow-by-blow” to describe how detailed this plan was, but in this particular context those words can be taken very literally. It wasn’t quite that literal. You know what I mean. And that way, when I actually was doing proper prose writing, it was easier to get started in each writing session (something I often have problems with), since the idea for what needs to happen next is already there and all I need to do is think of a good way to word it. Splitting the writing process into separate idea-splurging and prose-writing periods is a really productive way of doing it, at least for how my mind works, and I’ll probably do it again whenever I next write a fic.

While the plan was so detailed that I probably could have done the actual writing in a haphazard order, jumping all over the place just like I did while doing the plan, I wrote everything linearly from the beginning (with one exception that I’ll mention later). It still helped me be able to keep myself in the right headspace for Kaito’s mental deterioration to have gone through that progression with him, at least while actually writing it. Especially since Kaito’s mindset did still do a few unexpected things that I hadn’t quite anticipated in the plan.

Also, geez, did you notice how I called the chapters “scenes” up there? Yeah, once upon a time I thought this’d just be a longish one-shot fic, so in my head, they were scenes and not chapters for a good while. I did not realise quite how long things would turn out. Which is perhaps a good thing, since if I’d known that this would end up 64 freaking pages long, maybe that’d have made me think twice about actually writing it. And I’m really glad I actually wrote this.

The realisation that this was being so ridiculously long that it really needed to be chaptered happened some way into chapter 6, which at least meant that I got to come up with all the chapter titles all at once. I had fun making them all work together; I knew chapter 6 shouldn’t be titled anything but “Hero”, so I made the rest all fit around that to describe the hero. Kaito is a Vulnerable posturing helpless unimportant losing deluded HERO With Friends; the capitalisation or lack thereof is very deliberately meaningful. The non-capitalised titles are meant to give a sense that Kaito is sort of subconsciously beginning to feel these things are true about him by the end of each respective chapter while not wanting to admit it, and then the all-caps “HERO” is him shouting down those self-deprecating intrusive thoughts once he realises he really is a hero after all. The “Vulnerable” is capitalised not because it’s the beginning of a sentence, since “With Friends” is, too, but rather because those two are the only descriptors being applied to the “hero” that are actually true about Kaito. Really, he’s just a vulnerable hero with friends, which is something I think we can all agree on.

Now to go chapter-by-chapter for some more specific thoughts about my ideas behind each one.

Chapter 0

This chapter isn’t strictly necessary since it’s not part of Kaito’s character arc, but I felt it’d be useful to include to help establish the stakes, in terms of why it makes sense that Kaito needs to hold on for quite a while to protect his sidekicks from being killed, and yet his sidekicks can also be the ones to come and save him without being killed once enough time has passed. (I really love how my cult-takedown AU just naturally lent itself to me getting the best of both worlds here. I didn’t think of the torture scenario until after solidifying this AU in my head, so this was just a lucky coincidence.)

It was also nice to get Shuichi and Maki’s perspective on things to help establish the basic principles of the fic that it’s going to take Kaito six chapters of torture to figure out himself. Is Kaito invincible? Of course not. If he’s not, does that mean he can’t protect his sidekicks? Of course not. I figured it might help readers who aren’t familiar with all of my analysis about Kaito’s hero issues to be given a sense that that’s the angle I’m taking here.

Plus it was neat to show Shuichi and Maki both having their own much faster shift in perspective on this. Shuichi would have answered yes to that first question and Maki to the second question before this scene happened. But they each had one piece of the puzzle from the beginning, which is more than can be said for Kaito.

Not that they knew how much of an idiot Kaito was about this, mind you. They assumed he was perfectly healthily aware of these concepts himself, because they had no reason to believe he wouldn’t be. They knew he’d be suffering, but it didn’t even cross their minds that the worst part of it for him would be the near-destruction of his self-esteem. In chapter 7, when Shuichi hears Kaito say “I didn’t let you down,” and “I’m still a hero,” he’s bewildered and concerned by the implication that Kaito had ever thought those things might not be true. (It’s okay, though; Kaito will be willing to actually talk about it to them at some point during his recovery, so they’ll come to understand.)

This is chapter 0 and not chapter 1 because it felt right to have the real “start” of the fic be with Kaito himself. This fic is after all entirely about his character arc, and the Shuichi and Maki bit is more just a bonus. Unfortunately, AO3 apparently cannot comprehend the concept of prologues (I don’t understand why they’ve never accounted for this; prologues are a perfectly common thing in fic-writing as far as I’m aware), so this makes the chapter numbering kind of awkward on there. I could have just thrown up my hands and accepted the numbers AO3 wanted to give my chapters, but no, screw that, I spent two months thinking of the chapters by my numbers and I refuse to stop doing that just because some silly website hasn’t heard of the number zero.

(If anyone knows how to get this to work properly on AO3, please tell me. I did try manually messing with the “chapter number” field in the chapter-submission page, but that ended up screwing up the order in which the chapters were displayed, which, nope, that’s even worse.)

Chapter 1

I chose a relatively straightforward torture method to start things off with, because this scene was less about pushing Kaito’s mental deterioration and more about just establishing the baseline of his stubborn posturing and insistence that he’s an invincible hero in its purest form before there begin to be many cracks in it. That said, there’s still some psychological stuff getting to Kaito a bit here, aside from the generally terrifying (nope, not terrifying at all, what are you talking about, Kaito is a hero) realisation that he’s about to be tortured.

It may seem like an odd choice that I let Kaito wake up unrestrained, and I must admit that the idea of him waking up and panicking as he finds himself already tied up did seem fun in some ways. But it was very on purpose that I left him free to start out with, because that gave Kaito the sense that he should have been able to escape and not let any of this happen at all. If only he’d been stronger and more of an action hero, he totally could have taken out all five cultists and made a break for it, couldn’t he? Not managing to do that is Kaito’s first small sign in here that he’s not that good of a hero, actually. Sure, he knows that he’s massively outnumbered and the chances were really slim, so he’s not really that consciously upset with himself about it, but the subconscious sense of failure is still there. If he’d been tied up from the start, there’d have been none of that, and it’d have been much more obvious that it’s not his fault and he simply couldn’t do anything.

The kickings were also very much a part of this. Those aren’t a proper structured part of the torture, the kind of thing Kaito can basically expect from this situation; they’re just casual cruelty from his captors, hurting him not even because they need to but simply because they can. The first one wasn’t quite so bad because at the time Kaito felt like it was a retaliation to his attempt to escape, as if he was just paying the natural price for his recklessness not succeeding. But the second one, which came out of nowhere just to make a point, really drove home the horrible sense that they can do anything they want to him in here and there is nothing he can do to stop it. It’s not like these kickings physically hurt any more than the upcoming beating was going to, but they got under Kaito’s skin a lot more than the beating did, and far more than he’d ever admit this early on. (Though he does finally briefly allude to it in the depths of chapter 6.)

Like I said in part 1 of this, I was on a mission to make Kaito feel helpless in every way I could think of. He’s not really consciously thinking about it or tearing himself down that much yet, but this is already beginning to wear at him beneath the surface.

Chapter 2

Somewhat inspired by some articles I’d read about the phenomenon of learned helplessness (hence me referencing that in this chapter), I had the basic idea of some kind of restraints that inflict more pain on the captive the harder they struggle to escape from them, with the intent of eventually making them give up trying. Put Kaito in something like that and he would absolutely stubbornly torture himself with it for hours without his captors even having to lift a finger. I just had to; it was too perfect for the kind of person he is, and so good for creating the first big dent in his confidence when he fails to escape it and inevitably starts to feel more and more hesitant to even try.

I was originally envisaging it taking two or three “rest” chapters of Kaito fully throwing himself at this contraption and getting noticeably more tired and hesitant to do so each time until he gives up. But as I streamlined the plan (in an attempt to not make this any more ridiculously drawn-out or repetitive than it needed to be), this got cut down to basically just this chapter, with him barely even trying at all in chapter 4.

Good thing, then, that Kaito is so counterproductively overly-stubborn that it really only did take one spectacularly self-destructive session for him to be traumatised enough to never want to do that to himself again. (And, again, that’s less from just the pain alone – this probably didn’t hurt any significantly more than the beatings before or after it – and more from the horrible sense of helplessness it gave him along with that.) If he’d been more accepting of the idea that this is obviously going to take him a while and he needed to pace himself, maybe this would have needed multiple sessions to wear him down into giving up.

But nope, no way Kaito’s going to accept any kind of compromise like that. It’s never going to occur to him that stopping before he reaches his limit rather than pushing himself way too far past it, or, god forbid, not even taking the bait at all, is by far the better option. A more sensible person would be able to see that that’s strategically saving his strength for when he knows he’s going to need it, and it’s not even giving up when he knows his sidekicks are coming for him in the end. But Kaito’s definition of a hero can’t afford to do any of those things. Heroes have unlimited strength, and they certainly don’t need anyone else to save them.

Kaito feeling this way about this is just putting himself in a horrendous lose-lose situation: even if he somehow happened to choose not to torture himself pointlessly (or rather, when he does that in chapter 4), he’ll instead be taking the psychological hit of feeling like he’s lost. There is no winning here, not if you’re Kaito. Which, again, is why a contraption like this was perfect and I just had to do this to him.

Shout-outs to a scene in the Breaking Bad movie El Camino for inspiring this contraption, by the way – I edited it significantly to better suit my purposes, but that gave me a foundation to start from. I liked this idea more than just some sort of basic electroshock-triggered-by-pulling-against-chains mechanism that I’d been vaguely envisaging at first, because being physically dragged across the floor gives far more of that visceral sense of helplessness that I needed to inflict so much of on Kaito.

…And, uh, thankfully, it also made sense that the child-slave assassin cult might already have a contraption like this for other reasons, because it would have been a bit much to buy that they built something that elaborate just for Kaito. My original plan for this scene mentioned the device being used on the kids but otherwise didn’t have that big of a focus on Kaito initially trying to escape it on their behalf – he was mostly supposed to throw himself into it on his own behalf. I guess I just hadn’t properly thought about that enough during planning, since the kids weren’t the reason I created the contraption. Thankfully, when I was actually writing the scene, my mental simulation of Kaito became exactly as horrified and furious about what’d been done to those kids as Kaito should, and I let him run with that, because that was far more fun and far more Kaito than him only really thinking about himself.

(This never happened to Maki in particular, though. The fact that she “willingly” volunteered herself meant she was never desperate enough to escape that they needed to do this to her.)

Chapter 3

At one point while brainstorming possible ideas, I was hit with the thought of Kaito finding out that his lead torturer was the same person who trained and tortured Maki. I had some fun imagining Kaito’s reaction to that and a hypothetical back-and-forth exchange between him and the torturer about the awful things he’d put Maki through. Except then I realised that having this conversation, fiercely standing up for Maki and calling out her abuser’s awfulness, was giving Kaito way too much emotional strength – and as fun as that was, I couldn’t let him have that, not when I was trying to erode that emotional strength of his as fast as possible.

So then it occurred to me: maybe his torturer could also realise that having this hero-versus-villain confrontation would give Kaito strength, and so he deliberately completely blanks Kaito’s attempts at this, entirely refusing to engage with him and give him what he wants. That’d deflate the strength Kaito was trying to get from it and result in him feeling even more powerless and useless, excellent!

This incidentally meant that Kaito needed to realise that his torturer was Maki’s trainer by chance, without the torturer actually being the one to bring it up and tell him. This was when I realised that I’d need to give this guy a name, even if it was just an alias. It needed to be a Japanese name, and I’m not familiar enough with Japanese names to be comfortable just picking a random surname in case it had a meaning or connotation that didn’t fit at all. Therefore, I figured (especially since it’s an alias and not his real name), screw it, why not deliberately make it meaningful – and the best way I could think to do that was through the kabuki theme.

I’d already looked into the significance of the kabuki pattern on Kaito’s shirt and the meaning of red (hero) versus blue (villain) a while back, upon realising thanks to this post that that was why that pattern was there. I could not believe that I’d been fixating on Kaito for like a year and a half at the time while being completely unaware of such a delightful detail about his character design – so I guess I wanted to make up for lost time or something by making such a point of it in this fic. That’s why I went and had Kaito’s torturers be thematically-conveniently wearing kabuki-villain-makeup masks to contrast his shirt, giving Kaito an extra excuse to think of this as an overly-simplistic Hero Versus Villain thing that he is therefore totally going to win because heroes always do.

So in order to come up with a name for the “villain” here, I looked into that a bit more. I spent a while looking up famous kabuki plays on Wikipedia, and after a false start in which I was looking at totally the wrong style of kabuki theatre – turns out it’s only a certain style that even uses that makeup – I found a famous play in the overexaggerated-makeup-style called “Shibaraku!”, which turned out to be hilariously appropriate. The hero of the play is apparently the “stereotypical bombastic hero” of kabuki theatre, who shows up in the nick of time to stop a prince and a princess from being wrongfully executed (cough cough, he’s saving two people, a guy and a girl, from an undeserved certain death, how very fitting). He monologues lengthily about his supernatural powers that he just randomly has because of course he’s that cool, proves that the villain has unlawfully usurped the throne and gets him to back down just by using words, and then there’s a gratuitous fight scene at the end in which he effortlessly takes out all the villain’s henchmen anyway, solely to show off his awesome superpowers. I absolutely could not with how perfect a match this was to the kind of over-the-top invincible hero Kaito thinks he needs to be, and so I just had to name Takehira after the villain from that play.

And ultimately, the fact that I’d given him a name that Kaito could think of him by for the rest of the fic meant that this was kind of the point at which Takehira started to take shape in my head as an actual character, rather than just an empty placeholder inflicting this torture on Kaito because someone had to do it. I think that was definitely a good thing for the fic… though I can’t believe that as a result I now technically have a Danganronpa OC who is a manipulative child-torturing asshole. How. How did it come to this.

The actual torture method for this chapter wasn’t inspired by anything in particular; I just used my imagination to add some variations to the regular beating that’d give Kaito more of that all-important visceral sense of helplessness. Again, this was conveniently something the cult might be used to doing, since it happened to fit Maki’s description of what’d been done to her quite well. I guess I also now have a very weirdly specific headcanon of exactly what Maki is talking about in her third FTE.

Chapters 1 and 3 both fade to black in the middle of the torture sessions, and then the next chapters cut back in once it’s over and Kaito’s resting. This was mostly just a decision I made early on out of what was essentially writerly laziness. I knew things were going to go on for long enough that it wasn’t remotely reasonable to cover all of it directly, but my writing style focuses so much on just writing things directly as they happen that I find it difficult to get less direct and more summary-ish in order to imply things happening while a large amount of time passes. I managed it in chapters 2 and 5 and kind of 6 here, so apparently I can do it when I need to, but in the planning stages, the thought of doing that was daunting enough that I just tried to avoid it whenever possible by taking the lazy way out and using a scene break.

I lamented later, after I’d started writing and my scene plans were too finalised to change, that it could have been fun to write Kaito’s physical and emotional reactions to the end of these beatings: after the pain had built up so much and become more and more overwhelmingly hard to bear, his desperate relief at realising that it’s finally over (for now) and he’s going to be able to just rest. There’d have been a lot of weakness and vulnerability from him in those moments that he’d have had a difficult time hiding.

But then again, while this was completely unintentional of me and just born from my hang-ups as a writer, maybe there’s also something fun about the fact that I never showed that vulnerability. As soon as he could once he was resting, Kaito would have mentally pulled himself back together and convinced himself that he never really felt that weak and vulnerable towards the end of the beatings, nope, that just didn’t happen at all. So not showing that vulnerability and only jumping back into Kaito’s inner monologue after he’s managed to paper over it is perhaps an appropriate way to go about this, given the way I’d been pointedly having the narration only directly mention things that Kaito was letting himself think about in general. It really didn’t ever happen, see!? Kaito is still basically fine!

Chapter 4

My idea for this chapter was for it to appear to be setting itself up to be another chapter in which Kaito tortures himself trying to escape the contraption – and then he just… doesn’t, because he’s too hurt and exhausted, not to mention legitimately traumatised from how awful an ordeal it ended up being the last time he tried. And because he’s telling himself that he should be trying to escape, expecting himself to go at it again, he ends up feeling like he’s failing, even though all he’s really doing is making the sensible decision to take the chance to rest and not torture himself unnecessarily. He knows his sidekicks are coming for him, so he’s not really giving up at all, but he feels like he is.

I therefore originally thought of this as actually being just a rest chapter that pushes Kaito’s mental deterioration along a bit more, but in which he isn’t actually being tortured for once (aside from the one time he triggers the contraption). However, as I was writing it, I realised how awful it is to not be able to sleep properly when you’re exhausted and desperately need to (which is precisely why the cable was left higher this time so he couldn’t even sit down), and that that’s definitely a type of torture too. So, whoops, guess this is still a chapter in which Kaito is being tortured after all. He gets absolutely no real chances to rest here. (He would have done if he hadn’t taken the bait in chapter 2, but.)

This was also supposed to be the halfway point of the fic, and it still kind of is in a narrative sense, but in terms of length? Ahaha, not quite.

Chapter 5

My general brainstorming had already given me the idea of Kaito stubbornly declaring that his sidekicks are on a lengthy series of different planets upon being repeatedly asked where they are, as both a coping mechanism and a fuck-you to his torturers. This idea also included the notion of him eventually running out of planets not because he didn’t know any more, but just because the pain got too overwhelmingly much for him to think straight, leading him to be unable to deny that this was getting to him and beat himself up about that, spurring his transition into phase 2 of his character arc. At first I was just vaguely imagining this happening without a specific torture method to go with it, but I decided on the water torture for it in the end. This particular method gives convenient regular intervals in which Kaito can give his series of planets and long periods in between in which he can be stubbornly distracting himself with space facts. But most importantly, it’s a torture method which is less about pain and more about fear, aka the exact thing I needed to force Kaito into finally acknowledging he was feeling.

Another shout-out goes to a scene from the How to Train Your Dragon book series (a series I highly recommend in general) for making me realise the potential inherent in water torture. I knew “water torture” was a thing but had never quite understood how you could torture someone with water or why it was awful and terrifying until reading that scene. If it wasn’t for that, this chapter would have been something entirely different and probably less fun.

Also, can you believe that the mirror wasn’t even a part of this scene until quite late into the planning? I’d pictured Kaito being able to look straight at Takehira while above water in order to stubbornly yell at him about space, except I realised that wouldn’t work when, whoops, sinks are generally against walls. Then I realised that sinks often come with mirrors on said wall and that would work. Then I realised that Kaito would also be able to see far more interesting and relevant things in a mirror than just Takehira’s mask, and that this would also be perfect for pushing Kaito into admitting how weak he (supposedly) is. So that part happened kind of completely by accident.

Because of the fact that I’d been picturing Takehira as standing opposite Kaito until I realised the sink would be against the wall, he also wasn’t originally the one holding Kaito underwater. It was only after I’d written the scene without it that I realised, wait a minute, of course Takehira should be the one doing that to Kaito personally; it’s way better that way (he’s the one Kaito is specifically thinking about trying to win against, after all) than if it’s just one of the random mooks. The one stepping on Kaito’s face at the beginning of the chapter also wasn’t originally Takehira until I realised that that obviously made the most sense and had the most impact. Can’t believe I missed both of those obvious choices in the planning. I guess I was still figuring out Takehira’s character as I went along.

Since Kaito ended up so viscerally traumatised in particular by Takehira grabbing his hair, and since that’d have been a lot less possible if Kaito had still had the hairstyle, can we talk about how I completely accidentally foreshadowed this in my original cult takedown AU post? Maki told Kaito to ditch the hairstyle, so he… stuck his head under some water for a couple of minutes. That time it was a shower and he could breathe just fine, but still. (I edited in the interjection about how there must be a downside to it later, after having written enough of the fic to have decided it was canon that he ironically said that in mock-indignation while never genuinely believing there would be one. But everything else about that bullet point was written before I’d even remotely started wanting to write this fic and conceiving this chapter’s events.)

Obviously I had to do some research about SPACE for this chapter, because Kaito would definitely be reciting accurate Space Facts. Originally he was only going to be listing planets, starting with the solar system and then moving onto exoplanets. Except, just like Kaito awkwardly remembered once he got to Proxima Centauri b, I learned during my research that actually there aren’t really any other exoplanets with unique names, so that option was kind of a bust. Then I remembered that there’s a ton of moons in the solar system with unique names, so I figured Kaito would go for those too and started looking those up. (Takehira wasn’t surprised when Kaito moved onto Phobos and Deimos because he’d read Kaito’s public Hope’s Peak file and knew he was the Ultimate Astronaut, so he was expecting Kaito to do something like that. But the henchmen hadn’t been told that fact, hence why they were surprised. Still, this was probably not the weirdest impromptu coping mechanism they’d seen from one of their torture victims.)

Then I saw during my research that Saturn’s moons included Atlas and Prometheus, and I just couldn’t resist the gratuitous-self-referencing potential. See an ask reply from earlier for more of my thought process with this bit. This was also the moment I realised that Pandora was such a great fit for Maki – I basically just looked at all the feminine-named moons of Saturn in the hope that one of them would fit her because I really wanted to do this shameless-symbolism thing and didn’t want to leave Maki out of it, and luckily I found one. (The reason I brought this up kind of out of nowhere when a slightly less recent ask related to my P4 AU gave me an excuse to do so was very much because it was going to be in the fic and I wanted people to potentially be able to get the reference if they cared.)

Knowing the well-known moons for each planet makes it possible to count just how many times Kaito would have been forced to the brink of drowning here. It was three times before he started the space thing, then he did space, the moon, Mercury to Pluto (minus Earth), Phobos, Deimos, Europa, Io, Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus, Titania, Oberon, Triton, Charon, Proxima Centauri b, the Andromeda Galaxy, like four other galaxies, Kerberos, Styx, Nix, Hydra, Pandora, Prometheus, Atlas, then five or so more times before Takehira realises he still isn’t breaking and gives up. That all adds up to something a little over forty times Kaito had to endure that. He is so strong, and his space-facts coping mechanism genuinely helped so much in that it meant he was only consciously terrified for a small fraction of it all.

I also did a little bit of rather more hands-on research for this chapter, namely holding my breath for as long as I could to get an idea of how to describe what it feels like when it seems as if you can’t possibly hold it any more, since I had to describe that quite a lot. And I may have also filled a sink with water and stuck my face in it a few times to get a sense of the physical sensations one would be most immediately conscious of when that happens. (Don’t worry; this was emphatically not done at the same time as holding my breath for as long as I absolutely could. In fact, I found my brain automatically making me surface much sooner than I’d expected to need to, leading to the conclusion that, damn, water torture must be even more horrendously awful than I’d imagined and Kaito is amazing for being able to endure it for so long.)

So if I ever get asked, as an author, “what’s the weirdest research you’ve ever done for a story?” – well, now I have a very good answer.

Chapter 6

There was also some hands-on research done for this one, involving lying on the floor, folding my arms behind my back, trying to keep my ankles together and then seeing how easy it was to move around in that position. Answer: it’s really difficult and awkward even when you’re not horribly injured and in a lot of pain, so Kaito must have had a great time.

And my final shout-out for torture method inspiration goes to Danganronpa V3 itself, of course. There’s canonically a poison that inflicts horrible pain and is explicitly used to torture people for information? Excellent. All I needed was a quick handwave as to why it won’t kill Kaito here despite being explicitly lethal in canon – which really is just a bonus because that means that the pain can get even worse and last even longer than it would normally – and I was good to go. You may have noticed that I had Kaito be injected with Strike-9 in his left arm, aka exactly where Maki’s poisoned arrow hit him in another universe. …Honestly it’s kind of impractical for them to have injected him in the arm when the ropes would have made the poison’s circulation from there way slower (though I guess we could pretend that was meant to be the point). I might have otherwise gone for Kaito being injected in the neck – easier to access and much more viscerally unpleasant – but screw it, I wanted the parallel to how he was poisoned by Strike-9 in canon, sue me.

For this chapter, I needed a torture method that’d really push Kaito into being convinced that he absolutely couldn’t take it, and that’d let him see just how amazing he was being when he realised that he still could. So it seemed appropriate to use this one, in which the only real limit to how painful it could get was my imagination – and I like to think I’ve got a pretty good one of those. (And, for that matter, Kaito’s imagination let him become incredibly scared of it before it’d even remotely reached its full effects on him. Because he’s so scared already, he’s imagining the absolute worst, which he’d never have done until he was in phase 2. That helped, too.)

Although, I say I could just use my imagination here, but I actually based this quite a bit on some more research I did. (This fic required more research than probably every other fic I’ve ever written combined; I guess I just don’t usually write about stuff that requires particularly specialist knowledge.) I looked into the effects of strychnine, the real-life horribly painful poison that Strike-9 is named after and loosely based on. …Well, technically it’s only named after it in the game’s localisation – in Japanese it’s just called “lethal torture poison”, a fact I also referenced in-fic – but it does still seem to be based on strychnine either way based on a comment Kokichi makes about finding it harder to breathe, which is indeed the usual way that strychnine kills somebody.

Since fictional Strike-9 is not exactly the same anyway (real strychnine does not have an antidote), I knew I could take some liberties, such as with the non-lethality handwave drug, but I still got inspiration for quite a few of its effects on Kaito from things I’d read about strychnine. One of the biggest effects of strychnine appears to be painful muscle spasms, which admittedly doesn’t seem to fit with canon Strike-9 based on the fact that neither Kaito nor Kokichi are ever shown spasming while under its effects. I dealt with that minor detail by deciding it was possible to consciously hold down the spasms up to a certain point – but also that doing so still hurts anyway, of course, because what would be the point if it didn’t.

It was also appropriate, given that this was when Kaito’s self-loathing was at its absolute peak, that this was a kind of torture that essentially felt to Kaito like it wasn’t even being inflicted on him by the torturers (even though he knew it was) and was just coming from inside him. So it was almost as if everything making Kaito suffer here was all from himself. Having him not be distracted by what the torturers were doing to him from the outside here also made it easy for him to get as introspective as I wanted him to. These aspects were actually unplanned; it was just a happy coincidence that the torture method I’d already chosen for this happened to work so well in these ways, too.

My friend antialiasis deserves credit for the part later in the chapter where Kaito’s realisation that he’s still a hero sends him into a weird triumphant euphoria that actually makes the pain go away for a bit. She proposed that while we were throwing ideas around in the conversation that sparked off me realising this’d be a really fun fic to write. Or, well, most of the conversation was me throwing ideas at her and her going “yes good” – but this one was hers, and I liked it a lot so I included it. It seemed so right that, upon Kaito finally realising how proud he deserved to be of himself, that feeling should have a real tangible impact on him despite all the pain.

Chapter 7

At first, my ideas of how Kaito would eventually be rescued were rather vague and… sort of unsatisfying? Not that Kaito didn’t absolutely need to be reunited with his friends, of course, both for the cathartic relief of everything finally being over, and to explore how he was now comfortable showing vulnerability in front of them. But it seemed kind of narratively awkward that he’d gone through so much hell to finally learn how being a hero really worked, only for his friends to then come along and end things in a way that was completely unrelated to the psychological conflict and character arc that he’d been having.

My original vague scenario for the rescue was something like Maki bursting into the room where Kaito’s being held and taking out his torturers to free him. Then I considered that if Maki and Shuichi were coming as part of a big government raid, the torturers might have already rushed out to try and deal with that as soon as it got there, leaving Kaito tied up and alone and hoping for someone to find him (especially if he’s still in need of an antidote, which I’m pretty sure was one of my ideas at that point). But then it occurred to me that, wait, if they were going to deal with the raid, then wouldn’t it make the most sense for the cultists to want to use Kaito as a hostage, knowing he’s important to Shuichi and Maki?

Which at first was a big problem, because I couldn’t quite see a way for Kaito to get out of that situation alive, and yet I refused to imagine an end to this story in which he didn’t. I came up with the way he got out of it purely in a desperate attempt to let him survive somehow (having concluded that the hostage situation really was the most likely way for events to unfold and it’d be kinda contrived for it to not happen at all). And it just so happened, purely by accident, that this escape method I’d come up with involved Kaito feigning weakness, something he’d never have dreamed of doing at the beginning before his character development – which suddenly made the rescue finally feel narratively satisfying. Kaito was saved not just by unrelated outside factors that would have happened anyway, but because of something he did thanks to what he’d learned from his character arc (while still not having been able to do it without his friends’ help, which he’d also learned to be okay with!).

And it was around this point that I started to seriously decide I was going to write this fic. It was finally starting to come together and feel like more than just some fun hypotheticals that were interesting to self-indulgently think about, but also an actual satisfying story that really deserved to be written.

Since I had a detailed outline and could start the actual writing from pretty much any point, the first part I fully wrote was in fact the hug in chapter 7. This was, after all, the Most Important Part that deserved the most passive editing time to give it as much polish as possible. By that, I mean that I’ll often reread bits I wrote just for fun and make small tweaks without consciously thinking of it as an Editing Session – which would usually mean, if I wrote in order, that the end of a thing naturally winds up a bit less polished than the beginning. I didn’t want that for the Very Important Hug, so I wrote it first on purpose to avoid that.

And while I was never not having immense fun writing this, sometimes it would also get a bit emotionally exhausting to write the more brutal torture parts while so deep in Kaito’s head. So it was nice to be able to wind down from a writing session like that by reading over the hug scene and having the catharsis of knowing that Kaito was going to be okay in the end.

Fun with Ctrl+F

The types of words Kaito was willing to use in his inner monologue to describe what he was going through underwent some pretty big shifts as things deteriorated, some of them deliberate on my part and some just unconscious. And, thanks to AO3’s feature of loading all chapters of the fic on one page, and my browser’s word-search feature putting a marker on the scroll bar at each instance of the searched word, I can get some data that actually visualises the distribution of certain key words throughout the fic.

So what the hey, let’s take a look at some of this. You want graphs? I have graphs. Sort of.

The grey bars are a screenshot of my scroll bar, with the yellow markers on them being instances of that word. Also with indicators to separate the chapters, and to mark where I consider each of the three key phases in Kaito’s character arc (discussed in the previous post) to shift into the next. (Daaaaamn though how did chapters 5 and 6 end up so long. Also I told you phase 1 was the longest one; it’s about as long as phases 2 and 3 combined.)

Pain: 110 words Hurt: 54 words

As you can see, Kaito spends the first chapter and a half – more like chapter and two-thirds, really – definitely not being in any pain at all (or at least, if he is, it’s totally irrelevant and not worthy of mention). But when the pain finally does show up, it’s suddenly all pain all the time with no gradual build-up. Funny, that – almost like it was really all pain all the time from the beginning, too.

It was very freeing once I got past that point in chapter 2 and could finally just have Kaito’s inner monologue say that it hurt whenever I wanted to communicate that fact. Getting that across without directly acknowledging it had been kind of fun, but it’d have driven me mad if it’d gone on for much longer than this.

Chapter 5 is a somewhat less pain-filled chapter than the rest, for obvious reasons. There’s also this interesting patch in the depths of chapter 6 where “hurt” became more common than “pain” for a little while. This wasn’t at all conscious of me, but it might be because “pain” is a slightly more detached way to think about it than an immediate, reactionary “it hurts” – and in the desperate, near-broken state that Kaito was in at that point, he was more likely to be doing the latter.

Agony: 26 words

It was very deliberate of me that the first use of this word was during the hellish near-drowning ordeal that caused Kaito to completely forget Atlas and “lose” his Very Important Space Competition. And then after that point I just let myself use it whenever it felt appropriate, so naturally there’s a lot of it in chapter 6. There were definitely some points earlier than this in which the average person would have described what Kaito was feeling as “agony” – heck, that probably happened as early as chapter 2 – but Kaito was not willing to admit so early on that he was hurting that much. It was only once his mental state had grown weaker that he began to actually describe it that way to himself.

Scream: 33 words

Kaito was a little more willing to admit this one earlier on (though not quite as early as this makes it look – that first one was a scream of rage, which is way more acceptable than a scream of pain, and the second is just his shoulders “screaming” at him in protest and not a sound Kaito made). Actual noises that he physically makes do, after all, have a lot less plausible deniability to them. That said, he had some “piercing yell”s in chapter 2 that most people would have called screams, but nope, they definitely weren’t that, not when he’s totally not even in any remotely significant amount of pain yet.

Scared: 33 words Weak: 32 words

“Scared” isn’t the only fear-related word, but it’s the most common one. And yep, of course this one doesn’t show up until phase 2. (That one in chapter 3 is an outlier; he’s talking about how the cult is scared of Shuichi taking them down.)

It was also deliberate of me to not have Kaito use the word “weak” until phase 2 (the chapter 1 instance is another outlier, talking about the kids and not himself). In fact, I consider the moment he calls himself weak for the first time to be the moment phase 2 begins. Up until then, he’d been doing a lot of questioning how strong he is and worrying he might not be strong enough, but once he starts to outright think of himself as possibly being weak, that’s something that’s him actively failing at being a hero and is a lot harder for him to take back and deny.

But though these two words both show up at around the same time, look at how “scared” is then still used a lot in phase 3 (some of those are about the cultists being scared of him, but plenty are still Kaito’s own fear), whereas “weak” is used a lot less from then on, and never to describe Kaito as actually being weak. While him being scared was always true, him being weak never was, at least not in the sense of weakness that really matters.

Pathetic: 28 words

There are various ways in which Kaito expresses his self-loathing, but this is probably the most common single word that’s always used in that way, so it’s the best way to get us a measure of this. It first appears near the end of chapter 2 but is more scattered earlier on, disappears in chapter 5 while he is in SPACE and obviously Totally Handling It, and then reappears with vicious abandon as he tumbles into phase 2 of his arc. I remember thinking to myself at one point while writing around then, “Kaito, you did not need to call yourself pathetic three times in the same page, calm down.” Turns out it was definitely more than one particular page he was being like that for.

Interestingly, this kind of lessens itself out around when he’s finished his uncontrollable sobbing fit over getting his friends killed. I guess at that point he just couldn’t possibly drag himself any deeper than he already was, and so there was no need for him to be quite so vicious to himself? I’m not sure; this part wasn’t on purpose.

Helpless: 30 words

This one’s honestly kind of less about Kaito’s mental deterioration and opinion of himself. A lot of the time it’s more about the fact that he’s just being externally rendered helpless whether he likes it and would want to agree with it or not. But I was curious as to how many times I used that word: quite a few, it turns out. Still in a somewhat higher concentration during chapter 6, too, as you’d expect.

Tortur: 26 words

(Without the “e” so that the search also catches “torturing”.)

You might expect this one to be used a lot more, since the entire fic is almost nothing but Kaito being tortured. But… most of the time, he doesn’t really like to think about that fact. He’s not precisely lying to himself about it and trying to tell himself he’s not being tortured or anything because that’d be a bit too obviously untrue, so it’ll come up occasionally whenever it’s necessary for him to think that word. But still, he’s trying not to dwell on it.

(Also, fun fact, “waterboarding” is, as antialiasis informed me when she read the fic, a term for a very specific kind of water torture that is not actually what was done to Kaito in chapter 5. However, since it seems that’s a fairly common misconception, I let Kaito have that misconception too and left his line about that as-is, mostly because I didn’t want to change it to “water torture” and have him use the word “torture” again when he didn’t have to.)

The exception here is chapter 6, where that word’s a little bit more frequent than in the other chapters, now that Kaito is openly terrified and can no longer stop himself from freaking out about the fact that he’s being tortured and it’s awful and he doesn’t want any of this. As phase 2 set in, I deliberately had Kaito quietly switch his mental terms for the cultists from “henchmen” or “captors”, to “torturers”. They were his torturers the entire time, obviously, but he only began to actively think of them that way when he could no longer hide from how nightmarish this whole thing was.

Hero: 85 words

Man, Kaito uses that word a lot in this fic. Honestly, this is way more than he’d usually use it – normally it’s a lot more frequent to hear “sidekick” from him than “hero” – but in this instance he is fervently clinging to that concept as the thing that he needs to be, or else. Which is really incredibly unhealthy of him, considering what his standards for living up to that are, up until he figures out what it really means.

There’s considerably less “hero”ing in chapter 5 despite him being very stubbornly Totally Fine for most of that chapter. I mentioned that and the reason for it in part 1 of this author’s commentary, and it’s only because of these Ctrl+F-ing shenanigans of mine that I’d even noticed that.

Sidekick: 34 words

The use of this one has less to do with Kaito’s mental state – except when it vanishes for most of chapter 6 – and is more just because this really is how Kaito will naturally refer to Shuichi and Maki together when not using their names. It still shows up at a lot of the same points that “hero” does, for obvious reasons. And then also in chapter 5 when his sidekicks are in SPACE, even though his mental jury is out at that point on whether or not he’s really a hero.

Friend: 29 words

This word only shows up once Kaito breaks down upon thinking he’s getting his friends killed. Impressively, he then manages to use it almost as many times as he used “sidekick” throughout the entire thing. Which is good. They are his friends and that is Important.

Having him not use the word for most of the fic was deliberate. I’ve talked in one of my commentary posts about the kind-of-heartbreaking fact that Kaito almost never refers to his sidekicks as “friends” and might not even quite realise that’s what they are. So at some point during this fic, along with getting Kaito to realise it’s okay for heroes to be vulnerable, I also wanted him to figure this one out, too. I wasn’t sure exactly when that’d happen, mind you, and just kind of winged it when I saw the best opportunity during the actual writing process. Being broken into believing that he doesn’t even deserve to call them his sidekicks any more and that he’s going to get them killed is, uh, not exactly the happiest way for Kaito to finally realise and fully accept that they’ve always been his best friends, but, well, it got him there.

And most importantly, he kept thinking of them that way even after regaining the ability to think of them as his sidekicks, too. They can be his heroes, sidekicks and best friends all in one.

#danganronpa v3 #kaito momota #kaito whump #ramble #kaito's hero issues #writing #torture #and now to finally move on to something that isn't about this fic! probably #that said i still have plenty more Thoughts about this fic #so still totally open for asks regarding it

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merrysithmas · 5 years ago

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you may have talked about this before but do you believe boris already knew he was queer and first approached theo bc he liked him or that he started crushing after they developed a close friendship and theo was what made him question his sexuality? i think theres reasons to believe either side- boris being bold enough to cuddle him in bed seems like he was making a move but him suddenly “loving” kotku seems like an impulsive move out of fear bc he realized he might like a boy. oof idk

I think Boris knew he was attracted to boys — which is evident by his playful, charming, almost teenaged-desperate pursuit of Theo. I think he probably inherently knew this about himself for a long time. I think Boris has always been physically attracted to boys since he’s entered puberty and since he’s still a young teen it is kind of a fun, funny, interesting, enlivening thing for him.

He’s never had a stable life and despite being all over the world he’s led an extremely sheltered existence in a certain way with only one terrible person as his constant (Vladimir). Boris lets it slip to Theo that everywhere the miners go they are hated — this includes Boris. Boris is hated by the public everywhere they go. So long as he is part of their unit, he is hated. That is mortifying to intelligent good-natured Boris. That is why he learns to slip out and around, to be so personable and friendly. His world travels have not been so glorious but probably rather extremely lonely and isolating (as with Judy in Canada), hurtful, and damaging. That is why Bami and Judy (and eventually, Theo) stand out to him so much — people who were kind to him in a childhood of isolated misery and directionlessness. Boris has no moral hang ups about his same-sex attraction - why should he? This directionlessness in his key developmental years is also a good thing: He never grew up around any sort of organized belief systems or stayed bound within an orthodox culture for too long for it to indoctrinate him as its own.

I think people really underestimate how incredibly remote and friendless Boris’ life must have been. Boris is a cheerful boy who Theo says is often plagued by black moods and sullen attitudes. He is an abused and secluded child dragged from location to location with literally no love or stability and constantly brutally beaten to the point where it does not even phase him. Boris actually equates love with that abuse — and nonchalantly claims his father loves him. That is painful to read, that amount of damage.

Living with a bunch of derelict miners whose leader was HIS FATHER (so surely then mostly assholes) and who are “hated everywhere they go” Boris has probably seen any NUMBER of things a conservative-minded person would (likely often erroneously) see as “morally unacceptable” — it’s like Boris is traveling the world with a crew of pirates. He’s probably seen drinking, all kinds of drugs commonly used in front of his face. He has esoteric knowledge about drug use that a child of his age should not — so he was taught by the miners: roll like this, dont include the stems, never mix this, tuck snuff like this, you can get this kind of drug here here and here, it isn’t safe if it doesn’t look like this. His young child’s mind eager to learn sucked up this black information from men who probably didn’t have a second thought to a child or what his developmental needs were. He’s probably first hand witnessed sex workers copulating with his father’s crew (how else would be have learned about the opportunity to lose his virginity in an Alaskan parking lot to a sex worker?), definitely thievery, and said he saw his father murder a man in the mine once and cover it up. Boris’ mind is full of a lifetime of this morally shadowed behavior being presented as normal, or at least secret but common.

I think he understands his attraction to boys in this same way. I think he feels it isn’t “appropriate” to share with Outsiders but it is something that Happens, something that is no one’s business but his own, and something that brings him pleasure and happiness and therefore something he will look for. However he knows it isn’t common or visible or “appropriate” to be showy about it in front of others — especially not people who could judge him (kids at school), kick him out (society), or hurt him (his father). Boris treats his attraction to Theo like his other vices and “bad” habits - barrels head first — but secret: deep dive into happy drug use (but don’t show his dad), steals everything he ever needs (but don’t let them see, put it in my coat), lies when it suits him (lies to Xandra and Larry and his father and Theo too), happily sleeps with Theo and has sex with him (but this is between you-and-me).

He knows other people might have a problem with his actions — but he does not. So that’s his hangup there. He is aware of and ever-vigilant of his surroundings. School: a safe place isolated from his father. He is free and happy to do what he wants at school — including crush on and go after Theo who he clearly likes. He thinks Theo is cute, flirts with him, tries to get him to notice him, talks to him after class, sits next to him on the bus, begs him to come over his house, tries to impress him with far-flung stories, gives him alcohol because it’s what he’s seen his father’s men do in pursuit of romantic partners or as a bonding ritual with one another.

Theo’s house is also a safe place. So safe in fact that Boris starts to leave behind some of the maladjusted development of his childhood and become more of a happy, clear-minded person. Boris and Theo suffer from arrested development and one of themes of the book is childhood lost. They are forced to mimic adults either knowingly or unknowingly, and act in ways that children should not have to in order to survive this Adult World alone. With one another they begin to heal from their traumas, their affection for one another the catalyst. Theo cooks for him, talks to a babbling eager-to-talk Boris (imagine how few people have listened to or understood the ideas of a smart boy like Boris, often surrounded by oafish alcoholics, his violent father where he is expected to keep quiet, or cultures where he does not speak the language), Theo sleeps next to him willingly, he likes Boris, a boy from New York (the top of the world!) he think Boris is funny and smart and worldly, shares his dog with him, hangs on his words, becomes his companion, cares for him if he drinks too much, tried to tend his wounds, welcomes him gratefully into his broken family, watches his favorite movies with him, celebrates holidays with him, inherently values him — and so starts to mend Boris’ broken heart.

A lot of things and viewpoints Boris has are clearly repetitions of things he has heard his father or the miners say — “Christmas is for children” (of course they’d say that to a tiny Boris longing for the magic of Christmas as a child stuck in a mining camp watching the peripheral joy of children around him and coming back to bleak hunger and a dark home), or “god yes I loved having sex with her” (about his hooker in the parking lot — Boris then says he knew she didn’t enjoy it and never shows enjoyment but rather avoidance towards women and girls in any genuine way afterwards, yet covets Theo’s physical company).

Theo on the other hand, who for a short while and then so painfully ripped from him, grew up with love. His natural disposition in Vegas comes from a place of being so recently loved and cherished by his mother and he here, in this lonely place, turns the focus of this disposition onto the one person who is kind and protective towards him: Boris — his one light in a life that has turned very dark. This is like an alien world to Boris. Lonesome and neglected Boris is touched and startled and soon changed by this kindness. So much so that Theo, unknowingly, alters the rest of Boris’ life (Boris feels Theo saved his life).

So that is why I believe the Kotku Gay Panic came about. After their climactic Vegas pool scene where their abuse and trauma is opened to one another (their wounds from their fathers, from fire, literally pouring into the purifying chlorine of the watery womb - mother - pool as they try to drown one another, angry at their attraction to one another, but then cling to and save one another instead) Boris begins to not just have fun and have sex and have freedom with Theo (all okay things by Boris’ standards as long as it is secret) — after that scene and they sleep together and Boris satisfies that teenaged human sexual need... they continue to hookup and be at bliss for a very long, happy time where they both begin to psychologically heal— Boris doesn’t just have sex and fun with Theo, he realizes he starts to love Theo.

Love - an extremely foreign concept to Boris who literally freaks the fuck out because he has no baseline for it. It isn’t the type of “love” that his father gives him (violent, untrustworthy), it isn’t the type of “love” the men who grew up around valued (cheap parking lot sex), it isn’t the kind of “love” his idol Larry has with Xandra (Larry lies to Xandra all the time), it isn’t the kind of “love” Boris has seen in his favorite movies (men and women over and over). No, this love with Theo is very very scary to him. Very perhaps dangerous. He doesn’t know.

I think Boris accepts his physical attraction to men as nbd. I think he probably feels most people feel such attractions or some other harmless private desires that certain people may see as an aberrant from “normal” for whatever reason (either typical kinks and silly hush hush sex shop porno stuff - or other far more despicable things he’s witnessed his father’s men do) and so thinks nothing of his own innocent, consensual goodtime-centered desires. Boris, who likely grew up with little exposure to healthy LGBTQ representation and has a very isolated POV in some ways, likely to some degree at the Vegas point in his life (however casually self-accepting he is) equates same-sex attraction with hush hush taboo sex activities — nothing to be ashamed of, but you’re not going to tell your dad.

As long as it is a personal thing, for him only, Boris embraces it. But it is the emotionality, the healing, the care, the love that freaks Boris out and makes him make a run for it to Kotku — only to recede to what he knows and repeat the exact kind of fake “love” he was taught by his father: unbelievable exclamations of devotion (Boris’ dad sobbing and telling him he loves him + “I love her I love her! She’s beautiful and perfect!”) coupled with the black truth (Boris’ dad beating the shit out of him + Boris beating Kotku).

Boris knows he likes boys but when he starts to love one — that’s when he runs away. Because that means something totally different: societally and personally.

#ask #anon #the goldfinch #boreo

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harryweaver · 4 years ago

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Baseline

Individual Point of Perception is Dependent on Conditioned Mode of Thought.

Our conditioned mode of thought is determined by a number of aspects including:

our formal educational conditioning;

our cultural background;

the perceived power personalities that influence our sociological conditioning;

...to name a few.

I originally began this article with a view to confining it within the first classification of educational conditioning, but by way of natural process all seemed to apply.

Then, as it felt presumptuous and unwieldy to force a subject scope worthy of a treatise into a blog format, I have had to restrict the situation to how science has influenced and placed limits on our thinking.

Very much in shorthand....

All of science is based on direction defined by philosophy and Rene Descartes appears to have been the pivotal point in this instance. He introduced a way of perceiving things that took an observable entity and broke it down, analytically, into its individual unit parts. Dualism and other aspects, illuminating then, seem second nature to us now.

The evolution of this form of thinking was passed on into the capable hands of Francis Bacon who, in turn, hand balled it to Isaac Newton, both of whom provided substantial modifications to advance this concept of fragmentation. What we have inherited is what might be termed the 'Doctrine of Direction' for the entire westernised civilisation.

What these theorists neglected to consider and what Quantum theory is in the process of giving back, to those of us who care to take note, is an appreciation of the 'links' or aspects of interrelationship between these basic building blocks of fragmented, alienated entities. An aspect every bit as important as the 'units' themselves, as it is only by way of these continuously, communicating interfaces that we arrive at wholistic entities that are greater than the sum of their individual parts.

Unfortunately, we still model our mode of individual and collective advancement on the thought structures that built Empires that have long ago ceased to exist. Momentum, obviously, is capable of carrying us too far in the wrong direction.

I don't wish to appear to be a detractor of the theories of these giants of our past, or even of the ones who 'stood on their shoulders', who took those theories and gave them application within the sociological framework. What I am attempting is to show how the limited style of scientific mindset, that is drilled into us by way of our current educational process, has engendered our individual and therefore collective point of perception. This in turn has determined our current life situation. Man is a reflection of his environment, yes, but the opposite is every bit as true.

We have made fantastic advances with our 'scientific' thinking. We can gauge, almost to the centimetre, where we can land a rocket on the moon, over an almost unimaginable distance, with a mind numbing number of variables all taken into account. And after that, bring it back again. We are communicating concepts through mediums such as we are employing at this very moment, as you read this, and there are a myriad of other examples.

But, there is a dark side.

Having adopted, through conditioning, this mode of perception, we have alienated ourselves from our environment, from each other and even created alienation within our very selves. Our 'self' from this viewpoint, by way of illustration, does not include our body. 'I' am a separate entity and my body is a mere physical, mechanical housing, when in fact our bodies are a fully incorporated aspect of our 'selves'.

'Us and Them' is destroying 'Us'.

Take a look at what our alienating point of perception is doing:

(1) to our shared environment. We consider our 'selves' to be a separate entity to our environment, rather than an integral, interacting aspect of it, so any harm we inflict on the environment has no real effect on our situation, we surmise. (The comparative example of this would be that of a race of people, traveling through endless space, systematically destroying the space ship they are traveling in.) There have been highly qualified, dissenting voices to this supposition. Even economists, like E.F. Schumacher, who advise that, "If we ever find ourselves in the position of winning our battle with nature, we will automatically find ourselves on the losing side". Conditioned thought structure, however, pays little heed to logic, unless it is incorporated into an 'approved' educational process and therefore transposed into the paradigm;

(2) to our estranged sense of interrelationships. By over emphasising the self concept, to compensate for a social structure that appears intent on drowning the individual in a sea of homogenised anonymity, we automatically place almost insurmountable barriers to interpersonal integration;

(3) within our fragmented personal selves. In this context, the major effort appears to be the creation and continuous maintenance of a self image rather than the cultivation of the actual personality. A self image that bears little relation to the real person hiding within, who sadly perceives the camouflage to be more socially acceptable than him 'self'. Applied to extreme, the individual places so much personal energy into the maintenance of this persona, that he 'starves' himself. A major cause of mental dis-ease and what can amount to total breakdown of the individual existence.

Relationships can only exist between personalities. Relationships are not possible between facades, which are essentially illusions, so the illusion that they do doesn't exist for any length of time. This somewhat pointless exercise only exists because many believe that it's all they have to offer, as the real entity is seen as being insufficient to the situation.

One of the many sociological phenomena that appears to endorse all this is the fact that, in all westernised countries, divorce statistics come close to equaling marriage statistics and quite commonly surpass them.

It's a little unfair, however, to endow philosophers and scientists with the full responsibility of our present life situation. There are other buttressing influences. Sir Isaac Newton's writings within other fields were for all intents and purposes totally ignored, as they still are. The bias of thought at that time was all for the new clockwork bent that held so much potential for industrial advancement, as it still does. An illustration as to how long the industrial lobby, by way of political sway, has been placing paradigms on the full spectrum potential of our advancement as a species.

So, just while we are in the vicinity:

A corporate entity doesn't have a personality, other than the one on loan and frequently patched from the public relations departments, so don't look for human qualities;

The corporate ideal is to be in the position of dictating to the marketplace (yes, that's you!) and they never sleep in the pursuit of this goal;

Corporate entities see themselves as being subject to only one law and that's the law of economics. When economic precept shows any potential to limit short term profit, they're not above bending that out of shape either.

This latter point requires a little expansion, I feel.

Feel free to disagree.

According to the science of economics, there are two varieties of resource: rivalrous and non-rivalrous. A rivalrous resource is one that can be used up faster than it can be replaced, if it can be replaced at all, e.g., fossil fuels and the natural environment. A non-rivalrous resource, on the other hand, is a resource that is inexhaustible, i.e., it can't be exhausted as it is continuously replacing itself at a rate faster than it can be employed.

Now, considering the fact that human beings breed their own replacements, in the sort of volumes commonly described as 'population explosions', which of these two categories do you imagine employees slot into, within the corporate mindset, in these days of outsourcing?

`Safety before Production’, is the corporate catchphrase, but it will never be the reality because it doesn't need to be. An appearance is put up in order to establish a good 'Employer Brand Name', yes, but mostly because other powerful economic entities like insurance companies 'persuade' them to do so. And insurance companies are only prepared to do that because it has direct bearing on their own economic status.

This automatically creates another translation of the 'Us and Them' syndrome, the 'Divide and Rule' format. Musashi's 'The Book of Five Rings' and Sun Tzu's 'The Art of War', amongst other treatise on war strategy, make their way into every board room these days under the arms of those who would subordinate their productive work force to their will. Strategies that work within one set of environmental circumstances don't necessarily translate well into others, however, and 'Divide and Rule' is a classic example. When looking at a combined productive exercise, it simply isn't profitable to view and treat your production sector as though they are the enemy. This will automatically cost you money and the longer you persist with a faulty strategy, the more it will cost you. The variety of tactics employed, to gain the 'ascendency', are far from what is required to assist in establishing a sense of cooperation and self worth within the individuals that make up the bulk of westernised populations. And a sense of self worth is the foundation stone of a happy individual. A happy employee is more productive and produces a better quality product, so the strategy is obviously flawed.

Our mode of technological advancement has cost us dear, obvious in the stultified mental and spiritually bereft realms we have allocated to ourselves, from a set of values that is blinkered to the full spectrum definition of wealth. I have met people who, having worked continuously for, say, $500.00/week for a number of years, don't even consider pressing for more when their mode of employment changes, because they have been conditioned, over time, into believing that $500.00/week is their sum total worth as a human being. The comprehensive definitions of degradation and defeat are achieved when the victim is persuaded.

If western civilisation (sic), would just halt its frenetic, lemming-like race to the cliff edge long enough to look at the life philosophies of the various indigenous cultures on this planet, we would be in a position to provide ourselves with the requisite wholistic life perception required to save ourselves, and those same indigenous communities, from that inevitable extinction that we are imposing on other species at this very moment.

A different way of seeing is there, for our adoption, any time we want it. We find it not just in the wholistic, indigenous community and environmental Gaia mindsets, but in the most obscure of niches as well as the most obvious of places.

By way of an 'obscure' example, I recall reading Aleister Crowley's 'Magick' in the dawning of my adolescent rebellion, somewhere between Enid Blyton and 'The Russians'.

Wholly from memory:

`The practitioner of Black Magic employs his art to raise his level of existence above that of his environment’ - which doesn't sound so bad really, does it? Just looking round, it appears to be what everybody is doing, or attempting to do. Yes/No?

But then he goes on to say:

`Whereas the practitioner of White Magic employs his talent to raise the level of his environment, and in so doing raises his own level of existence’.

A totally different translation of existence, richer by far, achieved by a mere shift in perception.

As a natural extension of our adopting this different definition of existence, the changes within our culture would be dynamic to say the least. Mental health institutions would almost cease to exist, as the dysfunctional personality is no more than a symptom of the dysfunctional group. The dysfunctional group, no more than a symptom of a dysfunctional social order. Primary catalysts of physical ill health, such as stress, would almost cease to exist also, along with associated overloaded hospital systems and massive requirement for, along with associated abuse of, medication.

Street people would not feel a need to retreat to the streets anymore, but would see a form of society that they would want to be a part of. A form of society that they could see themselves as being a part of, alienated no longer.

Dare I mention prisons?

I could continue, but I'm sure you get the gist.

All aspects of our social and personal direction are compromised when we operate from a biased or false premise. Our proud, emphatic (dare I say, arrogant?) denunciations of 'this is wrong', or 'that's not right' appear as shallow as mainstream media. Any observation from a false premise can only produce an inaccurate end assessment. A silk purse don't come from no sows ear, boy!

Therefore it naturally follows that judging others, or even ourselves, by our own standards is automatically a travesty of natural justice and nothing more than a gross, if unintended, hypocrisy. Because we, unquestioningly, inherit standards of judgment also.

It is possible to establish valid existence only by exploring the depths of established standards, understand where they stem from and, by doing so, determine as to whether they still have relevance in regard to personal existence, now, in our current environment. Retain the standards that do have relevance, rid ourselves of false standards that represent the crippling detritus in our lives, and adopt any new standards that are seen to promote required existential standing.

This is normally considered to be the philosophers function, yes, but a little philosophy won't hurt any of us if it results in our finally reaping the substantial rewards of a valid sense of social responsibility. We have that duty to ourselves, each other and toward our shared environment. Wholistically.

The answer to all the worlds' problems lie in the future within our children, but we need people qualified to teach them how to move the world, through a paradigm shift, from here to there. There's only one way to achieve that, so we need to get to work on ourselves, individually, very quickly.

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the-real-xmonster · 6 years ago

Text

What’s Next for Yuzu?

Hello girls/guys, apologize for suddenly going MIA this past weekend - I was out of town and didn’t bring my laptop with me. I’ve got tons of questions sitting in my inbox about the men’s event (as well as leftovers about the ladies’), which I’ll try to get to in the next couple of days. First, though, in this post I’d like to put together some general thoughts regarding our beloved Yuzu.

What Happened

The margin of 22.45 points between Nathan and Yuzu sounds awful on paper, but it could be accounted for in a fairly straightforward manner using the 2 jumping mistakes that Yuzu had: the popped 4S in the SP and the UR 4S in the LP. If Yuzu had landed those 2 Salchows properly, all else being equal, he could have won. That’s not my crazy Hanyu fan persona talking, it’s math.

His (relatively) clean Otonal SP was awarded 110.53 at Rostelecom Cup so that mistake in the SP in Saitama cost him upward of 15 points - 14 of which was because of the missing element itself, and the rest because of the reduction in PCS it induced (and I’d be the first to admit that it should’ve cost him even more had the judges strictly followed the ISU recommendation on PCS for programs containing a serious error).

His clean 4S in the LP at GP Helsinki was awarded 13.44 points, so the UR in Saitama cost him about 7.5 points.

(at least) 15.00 + 7.5 = 22.5, which is enough to cover the margin and allow Yuzu to win, and that’s before we account for the fact that a cleaner LP would’ve easily netted him more than 95.84 in PCS.

I’m not throwing these numbers out here to kick off a game of what-ifs. I’m doing this only to show you that the hot take of “Yuzu couldn’t have won even if he had skated cleanly” is bullshit. You don’t have to swallow it from anyone, not even Yuzu himself.

Do I think that the margin of victory should’ve been narrower than 22.45? Yes, I unequivocally do, not because I think Yuzu was underscored (I do not think so) but because I can poke a bunch of holes in the scores Nathan got. +4/+5 for his quads/3As were excessive, mainly because he didn’t have much in the way of creative entries, his landings were still a pain point because of the lack of flow, and while the size of his jumps on average was acceptable, it wasn’t outstanding. His LP ChSq was still blink-and-you-miss-it. His edgework and control have improved this past year, but were still not enough to justify +4/+5 on his StSq and +9 for his SS. His transition or lack thereof (and that’s not only my opinion but reportedly his coach’s too) should’ve resulted in a TR score well below 9. The list goes on.

What We Can Do

Trigger Warning: the stuff you’re about to read is not rosy.

A few people have been asking me what we, as fans, could do to let the ISU know what we think of their arbitrary judging practice. My answer is: we can make as much noise as we have time for on social media and we can reach out to them directly. For the latter purpose, yes, they have a Contact Us page on their official website. Select Figure Skating from the dropdown list and unleash on them your choice message. Only remember, if you will, to keep your arguments logical and your tone civilized. Much more likely than not, they'd go silent for weeks before replying to you with a polite little piece of mail saying your concern has been duly noted and will be looked into. (Why do I know that? Because I sent them just such a message after the disaster that was the score Mao received for her free skate at Sochi 5 years ago.)

I would advise you to keep trying and at the same time I would advise you not to have your hope up that it will do much good. Sporting governing bodies for the most part are not known for either their responsiveness or their tendency to eventually honoring fans’ wishes. Accountability and transparency are concepts as foreign to them as a double Axel is to Yuzuru Hanyu. It took, for example, an FBI investigation and brazen corruption in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars for some changes to be done to FIFA. Considering the scale of the ISU and its weight on the public’s mind relative to FIFA, I can’t imagine any such drastic thing is going to happen to it anytime soon. In fact, the last time a major change was introduced to figure skating was 15 years ago with the establishment of the Code of Points, and back then it took an Olympic-scale scandal involving blatant misconduct to bring about the changes. What happened in Saitama last week was nowhere near as grave (at least I haven’t seen any evidence of anything more nefarious than your garden variety judging biases / irrationality) so to hope that we could leverage it to change the ISU’s way forward is close to magical thinking.

So let me tell you what will, in all likelihood, happen next season. Provided that he continues landing his quads regularly enough, Nathan’s PCS is not going to go down from 94-95, on the contrary it will go on to increase since he’s now a 2-time World champion and generally speaking the number or World titles one has tend to correlate positively with one’s PCS. He has no reason to regress on the base value of his layout either, so a back-to-back clean Nathan is going to score in the 320+ range. You don’t have to like it and it’s completely within your rights to be mad about it / keep writing to the ISU about it, but unless and until any material change is forthcoming, you’ve got to accept that as the baseline of your expectation.

Which brings me to the next and last section of this wall of text:

What Yuzu Can Do

If there’s anything I’m sure of about Yuzu’s personality, it’s that he is not prone to mere wishfulness, he’s a man of action and he loves to win. I’m also 100% certain that he is capable of logically coming to terms with the reality of the competitive landscape as I’ve described above and of figuring out an action plan for next season.

So if I were Yuzu, I’d reckon that I cannot rely on my PCS alone to carry me to titles so in order to stay ahead of the field I’d need to up my TES. Now, if the last week in Saitama has taught me anything, it’s that I can’t rely on getting decisively higher GOEs either. So what do I do? The natural conclusion is that I need to increase my BV, which means adding more quads, which, under the revised Zayak rule, means adding more variety of quads (with the way the new SOV scales according to an element’s BV, doing this would help maximizing my GOE potential too). Hence, you heard Yuzu’s take that next season he needs to aim for 4A, 4Lz, and possibly 4F. Some people have asked if I thought Yuzu was just being reckless when he stated that - I don’t think so, I believe he’s smart enough to have thought about it and arrived at the logical conclusion.

As a side note, I also believe Yuzu is smart and self-aware enough to, once the disappointment has cooled off, understand that it’s not because he’s lacking something or he didn’t work hard enough or his skating somehow had gotten worse, it’s just, matter-of-factly, how the system currently works and thus there are extra steps involved in regaining his World title.

I guess what I’m trying to say with this extremely very long note is, yes, it was disappointing, yes, the magnitude of the loss, on paper at least, was hard to swallow, and yes, things could have turned out differently had Yuzu been injury-free and able to compete in his top form, but don’t let all that frustration make you forget to appreciate the miracle he conjured (normal people don’t just take half a season off because of a serious injury and then come back to win a Silver medal at Worlds) or to celebrate the fact that he’s staying and he’s still hungry for success. If Yuzu himself can continue loving this sport enough and being hopeful enough to stay, you should be able to do the same without giving way to bitterness - that, I think, is the least of what we can do for him. After all, if, as Yuzu said, he is coming home, we’d need to be there to warmly welcome him back, right?

#yuzuru hanyu #figure skating #massive wall of text

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bogprincess-kira · 5 years ago

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Skekso!

Most of these are gonna be old news for you, but I haven’t shared p much anything on this blog yet, so I’m just gonna go over the basics if that’s cool. Anyway,

SkekSo the Emperor

Why I like them

Honestly, a lot of my opinion of him is based on headcanon and rewrites, as with most TDC characters. Canonically, he's supposed to be an old coward who thinks of nobody but himself and doesn't care about his Court, much less the Gelfling... And that feels kinda bland to me. A good baseline, yes, but that can't be all there is to it - which is why I liked him a lot more after we learned about how strong his fear of mortality is, even compared to the other Skeksis.

I like seeing the personal side of villains, probably for the same reason I like redemption arcs. I know the Emperor and the rest of his Court are doomed, and with their track record, there's nothing personal stopping them from scorching every last inch of the continent - but knowing that there's something else fueling their actions gives that little bit of hope. People learn to face fear every day... Which only makes seeing how badly they've fucked up even worse.

He's the Emperor, the leader, the head honcho, all that stuff. It makes sense that he'd play a narrative role as the perfect example of why the Skeksis are dangerous as their echo chamber stands. I'm definitely in the camp of "they could try to be better", but they're not going to, and skekSo shows us exactly why... Not to mention, all the conquest they've already wrought.

Why I don’t

Same reason as all the evil Skeksis: we already know how this ends, and there's no chance for them to turn back now. Even if they did, it wouldn't save the Gruenaks, or protect the Makrak, or free the Podlings.

In some ways, that's a positive, because it gives us a clear villain and an obvious theme of tragedy and inevitably, but... I dunno, I just wish there was more variation in the Lord-Mystic dynamic. Even if things continue along their path to the movie, it would still make things a lot more interesting in the meantime, and give the Twice-Nine more of a chance to clean up the mess they've made.

Favorite episode (scene if movie)

The moment during the Battle for Stone-In-The-Wood, when he tries to use the Darkening to strike down the Resistance, only for Deet to lightning-bend it back and unleash hell on the Lords. (RIP Lach though ;-; )

Favorite season/movie

... Season 1 of AoR, I guess? There's not much else he's appeared in for big chunks of time that I've already seen... Or read, I suppose.

Favorite line

"We know the torments that lie behind us, but what torment awaits beyond this existence? All the more reason to hold onto life, with all claws... No matter the cost."

Favorite outfit

... I would just say his usual outfit, but the deathbed scene in the movie had some beautiful set design, so I'm gonna count that whole situation as skekSo.

OTP

SoVarZok, with Var as his and Zok's partner, and Zok as the Emperor's closest friend. It's not terribly popular, sure, but I talk a lot about it on Discord. (You already knew that though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

I imagine that he and Var's relationship was a lot healthier before Essence, but that's mostly AU territory.

Brotp

Again, Zok's definitely the Skeksis I would interpret as skekSo's greatest ally.

Head Canon

SkekSo was, by far, one of the weakest Skeksis, long before the Darkening came into play. He has almost no physical strength or above-average intelligence to speak of, nor does he have much beyond his status as Emperor to leverage against others; SoSu became a de facto leader because of his looks, emotional "control", and ability to act like he knows what he's doing.

All three of those, uh... "Positive" traits were caused by his lack of strength, in some way, shape, or form. Urskek society places a ridiculous amount of weight on beauty and conformity, often to the detriment of health, both physical and psychological; SoSu was born "blessed" with good looks, and was trained for most of his life to embody that belief system. It certainly didn't help that he, like most Urskeks, was desperate for attention and validation.

He learned leadership on Thra, but before he figured it out, he relied entirely on keeping up an attentive, calm persona. Even after the Split, both the Emperor and Master have held onto this, for the most part.

Unpopular opinion

This isn’t quite an “opinion”, but... Still.

He didn't know how disturbing it would be for Seladon, to be "exiled" the same way a Skeksis would be.

Doesn't make it okay, and definitely doesn't mean he wouldn't be fine with her suffering if he did know, at least in this stage of Essence addiction, but he legitimately has no concept of... What that looks like. She wanted them to think of her like a peer to the Skeksis, so he punished her like one. That’s all there was to it in his mind. Honestly, I feel like that makes it a lot more unnerving, but that’s just me.

A wish

I want him to get sober at some point and acknowledge what he’s done. I want to see him mourn his Empire, especially in regards to the Gelfling.

An oh-god-please-don’t-ever-happen

Don't. Hit. Shod. Again. Or I will hurt YOU, Bird Palpatine.

And also, don't be quite as much of an ableist piece of shit when he comes back to the castle, you genocidal jackass. Just do one acceptable thing. Please.

5 words to best describe them

Regal / Frightened / Destructive / Pitiful / Draconian

My nickname for them

... So? Yeah, I pretty much just use So. Does Emperor on its own count?

#ask meme #bog answers

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unbidden-yidden-deactivated20240 · 5 years ago

Note

I saw your post about how Xianity is not essential to Judaism and and I don't want to derail it it but one particular thing really struck me while reading it; the concept of teshuva compared to Xian forgiveness, particularly how those differences really reflect how I've seen both religious cultures (???) handle person-to-person forgiveness. Judaism (at least from what I've seen) has actual steps for apologising, and they're all really good common-sense rules like 'don't do it again'. (1/3)

(cont.) The burden is on the offender to make things right, they’re the active party. In contrast, in Xianity you don’t have to do anything to make it up to the person you hurt. In fact, in Xian communities there’s usually a burden on the /hurt/ party to forgive and it’s seen as really cruel and a sign of moral weakness that you won’t let them feel better about what they did, even (sometimes /especially/) when they’re not sorry and intend to keep hurting you. (2/3)

(cont.) To me these two things feel like extensions of the attitude towards divine forgiveness and repentance. In Xianity receiving forgiveness feels like a very passive thing that’s all centred on your own guilt, your own inherent sin, and an attitude of ‘I said sorry so my hands are clean and now you have to make it up to me for making me feel bad for what I did’, etc. Judaism, on the other hand, seems to take a very pro-active, balanced approach of doing better for yourself and others. (3/3)

Hi Sarahsyna,

The differences between xian and Jewish understandings of what forgiveness is and how we should go about it are interesting, no?

I would say this is a pretty accurate analysis of the differences and where they come from. However, I would like to expand on this and add a bit of nuance to it, if I may.

There are different levels and types of wrongs to be forgiven, and the responses to them should be different.

Wrongs that are relatively minor, are fixable, and/or that are relatively common amongst otherwise decent people;

Wrongs that major, unfixable, and/or that are criminal/violent in nature;

Wrongs committed against oneself

Wrongs committed against others (usually in your sphere of influence, such as to your family members, but not necessarily)

In my experience, Judaism does a much better job of making these distinctions than xianity.

Minor Wrongs vs. Major Wrongs

Xian forgiveness is really appropriate for minor wrongs (with proportionately minor consequences.) Things like: someone took your lunch once, which creates an annoying but temporary problem. We shouldn’t sweat the small stuff, and as frustrating as that situation is, it’s not worth holding a grudge against someone forever because of a dumb prank.

Judaism similarly holds that we shouldn’t hang onto a grudge over this, and encourages people to let it go. Give the offender ample chance to apologize, but if they don’t, don’t waste your energy being mad at them. (Have you forgiven them? No. Should you still move on with your life? Yes.)

Of course, if by taking your lunch, they caused you to be unable to take a vital medicine, which consequently put you in the hospital, it should change the equation, no?

In xianity as I experienced it (**please insert that caveat throughout this discussion), it actually doesn’t change the equation. The intent of the offender was a dumb prank and so the forgiveness should be equally straightforward, even if the consequences to you are more severe than that person realized they would be when they did it. You should try to put yourself in the prankster’s shoes and imagine how awful you’d feel and how badly you’d want to be forgiven if it were you.

In Judaism, that person would need to do a lot more to make it right before asking for forgiveness. That might involve helping you pay your hospital bills, picking up your slack at work and/or otherwise trying to help in concrete ways because while their intent was minor, the effect on you was major. They must cope with that reality in the same way that you must. Might their intent factor into how inclined you are to forgive them afterwards? Sure! But they need to show that they realize how serious the consequences of their actions are and seek to remedy it first.

Fixable vs. Unfixable Wrongs

The consequences of some wrongs are fixable to varying degrees; others are not. If you take five dollars from my bag and then feel bad about it an hour later and put the money back? You’ve totally rectified the situation.

On the other extreme? While I have put in many, many hours of therapy and self-reflection and healing and therefore have gotten it under control, I will never not have trauma from having been raped and abused. Even if the perps spent the rest of their lives truly regretting what they did and doing hard work on behalf of survivors, they could never undo the damage they caused, even if they subsequently changed their behavior 180 degrees. (Editorial note: unsurprisingly, none of them have actually done any of that.)

Growing up, I felt an unbearable need to magnanimously forgive the perp despite his refusal to admit to what he did or apologize, and even as a culturally xian adult, I still felt a compulsory need to forgive subsequent offenders at least for my own sake in order to move on.

Judaism relieved me of any responsibility to forgive any of them, ever, because they have never apologized. I’m not even allowed to forgive them since they’ve never asked for it, but I don’t have to do so in order to heal because nothing they could do could heal me anyway. Them apologizing wouldn’t change the reality of their acts and me forgiving them wouldn’t change their future behavior. My healing is (for better or worse) my problem, and their becoming better people is their problem.

In a better world where they did hold themselves accountable? That would be stellar, but even in that world my remedy comes from the peace of mind in knowing that they aren’t hurting other people, from them still staying the hell away from me, and the justice in knowing that they have to live with what they did and are truly reckoning with it.

As a side note, it’s worth noting that this is why lashon hara is compared to murder by the rabbis. Lashon hara literally means “evil speech,” but refers to true statements that did not need to be made for any serious purpose and are malicious in nature. As an example, “Alex has gotten really overweight this year, huh?” might strictly speaking be true, but is nevertheless clearly intended to be mean and gossipy. Why is lashon hara taken so seriously? Because you can’t put that toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t unring that bell. Once those words have left your lips, they’re out there, forever. You can apologize, but you can’t unsay what you already said.

Grace vs. Accountability

Ultimately, I believe that the foundational difference between how xianity approaches forgiveness and how Judaism approaches forgiveness are how it is defined in each.

In xianity, forgiveness flows, as you said from the idea that humans were forgiven for our sins by Jesus on his own initiative, and therefore we should replicate that kind of forgiveness in our own lives. Sin is inevitable, and the work of repairing it can be done by the person who was wronged, the same way that Jesus repaired humanity’s relationship with God through his sacrifice. This creates a model that centers grace given by the wronged person. Deservingness on the part of the wrongdoer does not factor into the equation.

At its best, this gives the person who was wronged the agency to address the problem themselves without waiting around for the wrongdoer to get it together. It has the potential to allow people with pain to let go of that pain. At its worst, it creates a system where victims are pressured (by their communities, spiritual leaders, and/or themselves) to forgive at great cost to themselves with zero accountability on the part of the offender.

However.

That assumes, as a baseline, that forgiveness is a prerequisite to moving on with your life. In the same way that forgiveness by God/salvation is a prerequisite to eternal life in xianity, so too is forgiveness between individuals a prerequisite to living the rest of your life without that baggage.

Judaism makes no such assumption. In fact, it comes to rather the opposite conclusion: forgiveness may be necessary for the wrongdoer to move on, but you, the wronged person, should feel no need to provide it unless and until the person has actually rectified the situation and asked for forgiveness. (And even under those circumstances, while forgiving is the morally correct thing to do, you aren’t always actually obligated to do so.)

Judaism operates on an accountability model that says that if you harm another person, it’s on you to fix it to that person’s satisfaction. If you are harmed by another person, you should do whatever you need to in order to move forward, but you don’t have to say that they’ve met their burden unless and until they actually do. In this view, forgiveness is not defined as grace, but rather as recognition that the person has actually held themselves accountable for their actions.

This, too, flows from a theological perspective: G-d expects us to constantly be striving to better ourselves, which we can only do by holding ourselves fully accountable for our actions. We are moral creatures, capable of making an active choice between good and evil. While mistakes are inevitable, we elevate ourselves spiritually, not by the grace of G-d or others, but by evaluating and reflecting on our own behavior and then taking active steps towards long-lasting change.

All of that, however, refers to direct wrongs between the wrongdoer and the wronged. I would be extremely remiss if I didn’t address … …

Wrongs Committed Against You vs. Wrongs Committed Against Others in Your Vicinity

One of the most serious problems I have with xian theology is the fact that the concept of grace doesn’t just apply between the wrongdoer and the wronged. It also applies between bystanders and the wronged.

Here is a great example of this:

Many of you may not know that one of my four children has Down syndrome. Her name is Bekah, and today she is 25. Bekah went to public school in elementary and middle school and was in normal classes and had lots of friends. Later, she attended college.

Many years ago, Bekah wanted to try out for cheer leading. My wife and I were amazed at how she learned the routines – jumping in the air, doing splits, and yelling out the cheers. Unfortunately, she did not make the team which was very disappointing for her and us. She had a really hard time understanding that she could no longer cheer with the other girls.

Soon afterwards, we received a letter from the coach explaining Bekah was not cut from the team because of her disability but because…she kicked, hit, yelled and cussed while in line with the other girls. We were stunned, no shocked, because Bekah had never exhibited any of those behaviors ever in any situation.

At a sleepover a few weeks later, which Bekah hosted in our home, several of the girls who had made the team asked my wife why Bekah had not made the team. My wife gently told them about the letter. They all immediately cried out, “Ms. Ellen, that’s not true at all. Bekah didn’t do any of those things. In fact, she did great in the tryouts.” Ellen called for me and asked me to come hear what the girls were saying. They repeated it all again.

This person had not only lied but had impugned Bekah’s character and we were angry! What had been done to our daughter was dastardly. The question afterwards was, “What are we going to do about this?” We knew we could not pull these girls into a dispute with this coach. So, we had no recourse. This coach had hurt a person who could not speak up for herself due to her disability and there was nothing we could do about it…except forgive.

Did this person deserve to be forgiven? Absolutely not. But we were not going to allow a root of bitterness to grow within us that Hebrews 12:15 warns about. We were not about to give this person power over our lives. We were not about to give Satan power over us. Was it easy? No! Everything in us cried out for justice but there was none to be had.

So, we trusted Christ in us, the greatest “forgiver” of all time, to live through us so we could forgive. We wanted to live like who we are in Christ, “forgivers”, in obedience from the love in our hearts for our Father. We wanted to “forgive one another just as God had forgiven us in Christ” (Ephesians 4:32) So, we sat before the Lord and poured out to Him our anger, our hurt, and our desire for justice. Then, because God had forgiven us for all our sins we did not deserve to be forgiven for, we forgave this person; meaning, we released the person from the debt we believe they owed us. In this case, the debt would have been an admission to us and especially to Bekah of the wrong they had done.

A few weeks later, would you believe that we saw this person at a church we were visiting? We were both so glad we had been honest with God about the hurts we received from the offense and then chose to forgive. We live free today from bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness. Praise God!

[Source: x]

Okay, so we don’t have time to unpack all of that, but just… sit with the fact, for a moment, that Bekah is utterly silenced by this approach. Did her parents have any right to forgive the coach? No, no they did not. That was Bekah’s right, and Bekah’s alone.

Compare that to what Rabbi Telushkin relays in his Code of Jewish Ethics:

”The differing attitudes of Jews and Christians on granting forgiveness for serious, particularly violent, crimes is reflected in an incident that Dr. Solomon Schimmel, a psychologist and a religious Jew, relates in his book, Wounds Not Healed, concerning a Christian woman who nursed back to life a man who had murdered her parents and raped her. The man, shocked by her behavior, asked the woman, “Why didn’t you kill me?” She replied, “I am a follower of him [i.e., Jesus] who says, ‘Love your enemy.’ “A remarkable story, but as Schimmel, writing from a Jewish perspective, asks, “Why, however, is it noble to love and take care of evil people?”

“In contrast to this woman’s attitude, when the Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick was asked if it was morally appropriate to forgive a penitent Nazi SS officer who had participated in the murder of a Jewish community in Poland, she responded: “‘I forgive you,’ we say to the child who has muddied the carpet, ‘but next time don’t do it again.’ Next time, she will leave the muddy boots outside the door; forgiveness, with its enlarging capacity, will have taught her. Forgiveness is an effective teacher. Meanwhile, the spots can be washed away. But murder is irrevocable. Murder is irreversible…. Even if forgiveness restrains one from perpetrating a new batch of corpses, will the last batch come alive again?…Forgiveness is pitiless. It forgets the victim. It cultivates sensitiveness toward the murderer at the price of insensitiveness toward the victim.”

“And what of the penitent SS officer? “Let the SS man die unshriven. Let him go to hell.”

“The Jewish view can be summed up as follows: Forgiveness is almost always a virtue, but the taking of an innocent life is an unforgivable offense.”

[Source: x]

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gloamingroamingfish · 5 years ago

Text

I’ve got nowhere else to ramble about this really, so here, have my opinions and predictions about all the The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance characters revealed in this article from Newsweek., under a cut because it’ll be long. Uh, possible spoilers for a 40 year old movie? Or the series itself, on the off chance my theories are right? All photos can be seen in the article itself, this post is already long enough. Here we go.

Aughra

Can’t say I won’t miss her original voice, but Aughra’s new VA sounds like she’s going to do just as well, and might even be better suited to the miniseries than the voice from the original movie would be-- a short 80s fantasy flick is a different animal after all. This Aughra has a more complicated costume, which I like, she looks very scholarly, and she also a bit taller, or least less stooped. Yellow’s a good color for her. I just hope her trusty eye’s still removable.

Rian

I remember this character from back when the Henson Company threw a contest to find the author of a new Dark Crystal novel. He was the suggested protagonist, and it was around this time they fleshed out some things about the matriarchal Gelfling society, too. It looks like in this series he keeps his role as a Crystal Castle guard who discovers the Skeksis’ horrid secret and kicks off everything that happens next. He does resemble Jen a lot, which I think is a good thing. The designers knew their baseline. That is a quintessential Gelfling right there.

Gurjin

But of course with a whole Gelfling society to focus on instead of just two of them, they have to decide what variation in Gelflings looks like. This is a great start. I trust this guy. He looks level headed and capable. Probably lets Rian do most of the talking.

Maudra Fara

She looks kind of young for a Gelfling clan matriarch, but maybe there’s a reason for that. There will be a war in this show (that the Gelflings have to lose in order for the movie to happen). Maybe her mother was killed in battle. Fara gives me a “lost one or both parents” vibe.

Naia

Only says that she is Gurjin’s twin. Her name is ringing a bell, was she in another spinoff thing? TDC’s had a surprising amount of those.

Brea

I think I’ve seen her described as a “princess”. But one who can read, based on a photo that’s out! I can’t wait to see Gelfling books. I don’t have many solid impressions of her right now.

Deet

I can’t. She’s. Too cute. My gosh. She is just the right amount of fey and mop-topped and probably psychic. I love her and she reminds me of Kira, who was arguably a better Gelfling hero than Jen was (much love to Jen though).

I also appreciated hearing her speak in the trailer, because she used the same cadence as from the original film, same rhythms and word choices. It sounds like that’s a choice that’s been made across the script, which is a relief because it would have been really jarring to hear these characters speak the way modern screenwriters would make other fantasy tv characters speak, instead of that 80s puppet accent they need.

Tavra

Another weirdly familiar name. I don’t have any ideas about her role, really. I will say that on certain Gelfling ladies, you can see where the designers let the Gelfling baseline slip a bit. Some of them are just a bit too elfin and pretty for my tastes, I like them better when they sit further back in comfortably uncanny territory.

All-Maudra

Yes, this looks exactly like the Gelfing you’d expect Helena Bonham Carter to voice (I did think she was doing a Skeksis though!). Kind of puts me in the mind of a medieval noblewoman; from the info, it’s not clear if she’s literally the queen of all the clans, or just a figurehead, but she does function as a sort of diplomat to the Castle who specializes in dealing with the Skeksis... and from her clothes I’d say they’re rubbing off a little bit. (Is it just me, or does her crown sort of mirror the decorative spikes on the Emperor’s carapace?)

Oh no, what if she’s in cahoots? I can’t imagine consorting with Skeksis all the time is healthy for one’s morals...

Onica

Weirdly tricky to wrap my head around the idea of a Gelfling with curly hair and freckles, but Onica’s cute. Are they one of the sea sailing Gelflings?

Cadia

Gelfling with a beard. Alright. I guess that’s possible. I’ll bet he’s Onica’s uncle or dad or something. I like his face, I hope I like him. He looks like comic relief.

Rek’yr

No idea what to make of this guy. Why is his name different than the others? Is he a leader of an army or some kind of lone wolf?

You know, there are likely going to be Gelflings on both sides of this conflict. the Skeksan status quo is bound to be seductive to at least some of them. Because why not make this story crueler by letting some Gelfling be complicit in their own kind’s destruction?

Librarian

Ha. Nerd. I like his big hat. Which library are we visiting? The Scroll-Keeper’s? Or someone else’s?

Kylan

Okay, this one’s just straight inscrutable. What is that expression? Why are their clothes weirdly plain and red compared to everyone else’s? Red’s not really a Gelfling color. Am I just being paranoid or is there something up with this one?

They remind me of the Chamberlain and I have no idea why???

Seladon

No info here, either. Not listed as a Maudra, but is probably still powerful as Gelflings go. Perhaps connected to the All-Maudra? They seem related.

Ordon

Think I saw this guy in the trailer wielding a weapon. He has the look of an army man out to prove himself in battle only to valiantly sacrifice his life later. Suspiciously specific theory? Yeah, probably.

Mira

Another slightly too pretty Gelfling lady. I’m sure she’s fine. Next.

Maudra Argot

Utterly delightful grandma Gelf. This must be Deet’s Maudra; I adore her floppy hat and classy silver embroidery. She looks like she would offer her loved ones milk and cookies one second and kick Garthim beetle butt the next. I’m sure she speaks her mind, look at that defiant little chin jut. I love.

Hup

Podling!!! Yes I am most pleased this show will feature Potato People. Nothing bad had better happen to Hup.

Baffi

Dave Goelz returns to play a shrieking fluffball! We can’t not have a fizzgig. Fizzgigs all look the same so naturally the crew could only think to give Baffi here a sick eyepatch to set him apart. I approve!

Okay, here’s what I know you scrolled all the way down for! It’s time for our favorite decrepit decadent dinosaurs, starting with...

skekUng, the General

I almost hope this is not in fact skekUng, because this is frankly disappointing. Who is this??? It doesn’t resemble the guy from the original movie even a little bit. I know he would have lost weight in some places and gained it in others, I know it might just be a bad angle, but I can’t find anything in common between the two faces. His teeth are in the wrong place, his beak is the wrong shape, that’s not what his smug expression looks like--I remember him being slightly desperate even when he was winning--he doesn’t have his grizzled hair, or, more importantly, his expressive bushy eyebrows-- I refuse to accept that this is “just what he looked like when he was younger”. This is a totally different Skeksis! Who are you and what have you done with the General!

Even the armor is wrong! It’s supposed to be all bulky and beetle-like, like the Garthim, even with liftable wing-like parts, here it looks loosely ‘inspired’ but still flat and nondescript. Everyone else looks so good and almost just like themselves, crew, what went wrong here? Am I missing something?

Maybe I’m just upset because Ung’s the only one I’ve ever encountered in person. This isn’t even a bad Skeksis design, I’d actually like it quite a bit if it weren’t for the fact that it’s not him.

The Collector

Hello, who is this! I’d almost mistake this charming forest ogre for one of the “good guys” if their Skeksis-ness wasn’t so obvious. I love the silver and grey fabrics, the beaded hood and the mossy necklace of bottles, filled with...herbs? Did some kind of incident with forest plants cause that fungus-like growth/scarring on their face? It adds so much to their facial silhouette.

There was a character in the spinoff manga called skekLach the Collector, but he looked completely different from this Skeksis, much meaner and more imposing. I doubt this one is the same character or even that they have the same name; it would seem that the Henson Company has declared the manga Collector an AU version and retooled the character concept into someone different. I see this Collector as being like a sort of deadly apothecary, brewing potions and poisons from specimens they collect beyond the castle. 10/10 wicked-witchy birb.

skekAyuk, the Gourmand

Still the same old palace chef, sitting there looking like a Renaissance still life gone wrong; his clothes are in much, much better condition though, and you can see his quite unsettling lower teeth which remind me of a pig’s teeth, thanks a lot Henson Co. I know there’s no way you could have know I have a fear of pigs but now I’m all caught up in what I used to be scared the hog in the backyard would do if it caught me and moving on before I freak myself out, okay, very nice teeth there yes--

skekTek, the Scientist

Minus a few blood tubes, plus a few fangs, it’s nothing but a pleasure to see this guy back from his, uh... fate, in the movie. And given that the Skeksis’ precious vliya life fluid is looking like a huge plot point in the series, skekTek here is probably going to figure in the plot quite a lot himself, hooray! He’s going to be played by the inimitable Mark Hamill, who is probably enjoying getting to play slightly against type by being a subdued, schemy, sciencey villain rather than a loud hammy one, and it is going to be amazing.

The Hunter

Heard of this guy! skekMal, I think it was. Dresses in masks designed to frighten and confuse his prey--often Gelflings--during night hunting trips. The deep blue mixes well with the red to keep even his hunting outfit appropriately regal looking. The way I hear it, they have no idea he is in fact a Skeksis, and he has become the subject of terrifying stories told around the fire. Would not want to see this monster bearing down on me in the middle of the night, hellbent on claiming my skull as a hunting trophy.

skekSo, the Emperor

That is the most punchable face I have ever seen on a bird in my life.

But seriously, it’s great to see old skekSo somewhere other than his deathbed. Can’t wait to see what despicable things he gets up to in his prime. He kind of reminds me of a knight, the same way the All-Maudra reminds me of a medieval lady.

(That is totally the face of someone who scarred a generation of children for life by graphically crumbling into dust, and knows it.)

skekZok, the Ritual-Master

Well done resurrecting this particular design, this one’s not easy! I always liked how his head looked almost disembodied in the red velvet cupola of his carapace, and they nailed that penetrating icy blue stare of his, too. They even added to the skull-like effect by giving him a handful of brown, skeletal teeth. Brr.

Base on what I remember of skekZok’s voice, I wish Keegan-Michael Key good luck in reproducing it, although I trust him to bring his own flair to the character like Donna Kimball does with Aughra, too.

skekSil, the Chamberlain

Poor Chamberlain! You look as old and worn as you ever did, just slightly less bald. Oh, well, you’ll survive. You always do.

He’s got a specific vulture hook to his beak that I hope they remade accurately, I can’t tell at this angle, but he looks pretty much just like himself so far, almost like he wandered off the 1981 set and onto the 2019 one. The most important part of his face is his eyes, so I desperately hope the crew put in extra effort where it counts for him, expressionistically. I think we can expect to see plenty of this slimy, conniving old bureaucrat bird in the series, and his trademark skin-crawling whimper too, which it sounds like Simon Pegg’s been practicing in a mirror. I’ve seen Pegg voice act before, so I’m confident he’ll do a good job here. Have fun, Mr. Pegg!

The Heretic

Is that a huge nail through their...

...hey, wait a minute, I recognize this one!

They’re from an old piece of Froud concept art from early in production, when they were still nailing down a species look for Skeksis. It kind of puts me in the mind of a tropical fish. On the real puppet, though, it looks less like natural markings and more like face paint. Their clothes look un-Skeksis-like, too, more like urRu Mystic clothes than anything, although I doubt a Mystic would wear fur. That’s the sign of the Great Conjunction hanging on their chest. What is the source of this one’s heresy? Did they go try to live in the Valley of the Stones after rejecting the Emperor’s dominion over the Dark Crystal? Does it have anything to do with the nail in their head?

skekEkt, the Ornamentalist

And here’s the Castle’s resident fashionista and interior designer, looking pretty well, considering. Better kept clothes and better done makeup, at any rate. I kind of miss the caked on powder, the slathered on gold foil on his beak, and the awful and ashy clumped mascara. But I’m sure he appreciates knowing this prequel’s been very kind to him in the costuming department. Looking good, skekEkt.

skekOk, the Scroll-Keeper

skekOk didn’t have much to do or say in the movie, being just a shorter-than-average Skeksis who kept the records, when he remembered to. I’m glad to see they’ve updated his crocodilian face to be more expressive this time around, he was always one of my favorite designs.

Supposedly, Jim Henson once saw a children’s book in which a crocodile was taking a bath in an ornate bathtub. Something about seeing a hulking reptile in such fancy surroundings made the wheels in his head turn, and the earliest concepts for what would eventually become the Dark Crystal were born. skekOk in particular brings that story to mind.

(I love his sardonic “oh really?” expression in the article I’m looking at. These birds are going to have so much more room for their personalities.)

And then the article shows one single urRu Mystic:

The Archer

I believe their name is urVa. The Mystics tend to defend their Valley through song, but an extra line of defense can’t hurt, and archery can be a very meditative art. The Archer almost looks too active for a Mystic, his eyes just too wide and his fingers too nimble, but there must have been a time when the Mystics weren’t so ponderously slow and forgetful. Seeing the clear eyes and nostrils in their own beak (or beak-like mouth) really makes plain the connection between Skeksis and Mystics, when in the movie it came almost by surprise (but still made sense.) It will be interesting to meet a Mystic like this.

And that’s everyone in the revealed cast, leaving skekNa the Slave-Master and skekShod the Treasurer out of the original Skeksis, and all of the original Mystics, all un-accounted for in the article I read. The show will come out on August 30th. Fingers crossed it’ll be a unique but great experience!

#the dark crystal #age of resistance #dark crystal age of resistance #tdc aor theories

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seenashwrite · 6 years ago

Text

Walkthrough for “There But For The Grace”.

If interested - Go read it first before continuing on. This is about the plot point stuff (i/e - hints for the end, amongst other things) and the theological drops I sprinkled throughout.

I genuinely did not intend for this to cause brain freeze. Hoo-boy. Many sorry. There’s about a 40/60 split at this point of the “got its” vs. “didn’t quite got its”, so that’s on me. Not that it was incredibly necessary to catch the loop-di-loop in order to like it, though you might like it more once you know.

So I'll walk you through my thought process in the least disjointed manner I can manage. Which... hoo-boy, part deux. Tagging folks who commented on the story/to me directly, certainly no expectation on my part for you to read and/or reply. Seriously. Legit. Etc. And stuff.

This took longer to write than the story. #no lie

Okay, lotsa screencaps, so I don’t (a) end up c-p’ing the whole damn thing, and more the reason (b) so can underline.

And for ALL our brains’ sakes, I’ll call our dude Michael, and other world’s dude Mike from here on. Plotting stuff in red, theological stuff in blue, randoms (Nash Be Nashin’ and SPN canon stuff) in green.

The title is from that proverb “There but for the grace of God go I”, and as ye olde wiki explains....

....and then, there’s this:

Hopefully you picked up on something being “off” with how I was writing ol’ Mike as the story went on. I got slightly tricksy in some places on purpose regarding characterization, but hey - Mike and Michael are essentially the same angel in concept, just on different planes, right? And stuff apparently took a left turn when the apocalypse went through over yonder. So while they didn’t really re-tell the history of Apocaland beat-by-beat (thank Chuck), the inference I got is that the basic shit went down - he boots Luci after he rebels, etc. Blah blah blah, y’all know this.

Quote from Michael:

So maybe Mike came at it from the same angle when he killed his Luci. Who knows. Though I will say - if it was some sort of duty for him and not pleasure, I wouldn’t think there’d be boasting about pulling Luci apart, nor would the knee-jerk be to string him up and torture him, at least, if he’d suddenly re-appeared before me one day. YMMV.

This is good summary from the wiki, whoever wrote it did a bang up job:

Michael is meticulous. He slow-plays things. It’s not about being power-hungry; he had power. He was essentially God. For him, this is tied up in honor and loyalty and righting wrongs and all that jazz.

Again - that hesitation. He never stopped loving Lucifer - and Lucifer never stopped loving any of them, we see this big time in the Elysium ep when he “killed” Gabriel. Much internal conflict with these folks. And then there’s Mike, who iced (our) Gabriel and tortured (our) Lucifer in the blink of an eye.

There’s my characterization base of operations.

---> Could be interpreted as Michael or Mike - applies to both. Mike would find pleasure in taking inventory of what he planned to rule, how we aren’t worthy of anything but being subjects; Michael is perhaps glad to see plenty of justifications for what he feels he’s still destined to do.

---> “Learned” for Mike = the observing we saw in the finale, comparing-and-contrasting to his world; “learned” for Michael could be (a) via Dean’s mind, and / or (b) what he could’ve seen from Mike’s mind when he whooped his ass, a.k.a. Nash’s Sneaky Twisty Thing, re: Michael is now in Dean’s body.

So, how is that, Nash? you may ask.

Dunno.

Perhaps the distraction of Mike getting wailed on by Michael allowed Dean the opportunity to eject him, maybe Dean’s been wearing Mike down mentally. And though Dean/Sam - being the ideal hosts - have greater tolerance than us regulars, it’s gonna leave them weakened, it’s just got to. Hell, just being possessed by fill-in-the-blank leaves ya with the weeble-wobbles for a bit. Primo chance for Michael to set up shop in Dean.

Then, Nash, since angels need permission, how’d Michael do that? you may ask.

Occam’s razor --> Dean gave Michael “the soul”/”the entity”/whatever permission, and that goes across the realm, alt timelines/dimensions/whatnots. Or, maybe Dean chose the lesser of the two evils, so to speak - he’s boned at this interval anyhow, so if the opportunity arose, if it’s me, I’m choosing the frying pan over the fire - at least I’ve bought myself (and my loved ones, and the world) some time. Either of those work for what I intimated in the story.

Bottom line: however it went down, that’s for your imagination to choose.

A point that’s called back to later, as well as Nash Be Nashin’, RE: I’ve no idea why they opted to dress him in that style. There’s other stylings that are stark contrasts to Dean’s without going full-court-press cosplay, but whatevs. In any event, assuming my premise is taken - that the worlds played out the same for the most part and the ‘20s were a fave and would explain the wardrobe - this can apply to both Mike and Michael.

For those of you fortunate enough to have missed slogging through Sunday school, allow me: S&G was apparently a hotbed of sin, and they were gonna get the fire-and-brimstone treatment. Abraham asked angels who visited him if they’d spare the righteous, because there was at least one group there who was: his nephew Lot’s family. Two more angels were sent to investigate, Lot was awesome to them, welcomed them in without knowing they were angels, etc. So when time came to fire things up, the angels fessed up about who they were and why they were there, and told them (Lot and his crew) that they needed to just leave and not look back. And whoopsie, Lot’s wife found out that wasn’t metaphorical, as when she turned to get one last look at her home going up in flames, wha-BAM! She got turned into a pillar of salt.

So here might be the first subconscious “Hmmm” from your mind - that doesn’t really sync up with what we know of Mike. I don’t think he gives a shit about how much he sins to get what he wants. I bet he can’t even spell benevolence. Read this in Michael’s voice, though, and I hear that whole justifying thing again, the “don’t really want to, but got to” mindset.

See above, RE: “...but I labored more abundantly than them all”. Plus, speaks to arrogance, applicable to both Michael and Mike.

---> “The” earth, eh? ;)

---> Theology-wise, Michael’s only named a couple times, if memory serves... actually most of them are name dropped just a handful of times... did they namedrop Gabe as the one who told Mary she was preggers? I’m not looking it up.

Anyway, theologians have assigned certain “messages” delivered and punishments as being enacted by specific angels, I won’t go down that road here, I’ve no clue how they managed to arrive at those conclusions. Point is that Michael was a guardian, of heaven and of certain places/people on earth, depending on where God assigned. I wanna say Daniel and the lion’s den was one of them. Not looking that up, either.

---> "Temporarily”, hmmm.... that other world looked plenty definitively apoca-sized to me. In any event, floods is a ref to the Noah story, and if memory serves, Michael is thought by some to have been the “angel of death” that struck down the firstborn sons during the plagues of Egypt.

Also also - I’d speculate he’s taken on some self-imposed blame for Lucifer sneaking into the garden and tempting Adam & Eve, as he is so convicted in SPN land about righting the wrongs Lucifer brought upon the world, and that’s the event that kicked shit off.

---> O.T. (old testament) God took no shit, got smitey on a dime. New Testament God (a.k.a. - post-Jesus time) flipped a switch to a more fatherly figure.

---> The absence thing is SPN canon.

---> The differing legends is me thumbing my nose at their neglect of both their own canon and theology. #dammit Dabb

---> So, again, choose your poison - Luci getting into the garden, then Michael having to wage battle in heaven to boot him (and, let’s be real, he likely had followers that got nailed, too), etc. etc. etc.

---> The plans refer to the stuff up there from the wiki - that was an intricate damn plan. Deceptive, sure, but again that whole “bigger picture” mentality.

---> RE: beloved - yeah, that’s not sounding like the Mike we’ve been presented with.

Now that’s a pretty detailed thing to know about a random coffee joint in a random town in a random state in a strange world, wouldn’t you say? ;)

---> Trinities, trifectas, triples - threes are trendy numbers in stories and legends and oral tradition, so it comes up here multiple times, as well. And he’s talking about Jesus, of course, and the green Nashy line is me thinking “Wonder what he thought about Amara?”

(’Cause I’m of the thought that Amara + Chuck = God, yin-yang and all, but from the very black-and-white Michael’s perspective, I could see him playing nice but not buying into it, and I mean, he was part of the crew that banished her on Chuck’s orders, so there you go. He may not have even been privy to the scoop that they were the corporeal forms of light/dark, maybe just of the understanding that she was his meddling aunt, and of course he was gonna do whatever his dad told him to do. Anyhow, I think that adds additional texture to why it frustrates him so much that Luci couldn’t fall in line, why Luci always had to ask questions. ---> and that’s just me, there’s no way y’all could’ve inferred it from just that, you’re not psychic, I’m just sharing. I digress. I’m good for some heavy digressin’.)

There is a specific things-come-in-threes story that’s my baseline, but I’ll tell you further down after #3 hits.

On we go...

The chick we come to know as Grace does not catch his eye because she is pretty or sweet or in need of assistance or pouty or flirty or super-smart, or even beautiful or too shy and bookish, but if she’d just take off those damn glasses and let her hair out of that ponytail she might be, whatever trope you wanna throw on her - she’s a sinner, another hopeless sinner in a long line of humans who were/are fucking this joint up.

---> There’s several feet-washing stories in the Bible. I hate feet. That’s not in the Bible, and has no bearing here. Add it to your Nash factoids. Moving on.

The one I had in mind is below, and Imma c/p the pertinent parts because lazy. Bolding is mine, natch. In Luke 7....

36 One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to eat with him, so Jesus went into the Pharisee’s house and sat at the table. 37 A sinful woman in the town learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house. So she brought an alabaster jar of perfume 38 and stood behind Jesus at his feet, crying. She began to wash his feet with her tears, and she dried them with her hair, kissing them many times and rubbing them with the perfume. 39 When the Pharisee who asked Jesus to come to his house saw this, he thought to himself, “If Jesus were a prophet, he would know that the woman touching him is a sinner!”

40 Jesus said to the Pharisee, “Simon, I have something to say to you.”

Simon said, “Teacher, tell me.”

[parable]

44 Then Jesus turned toward the woman and said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? When I came into your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she washed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. 45 You gave me no kiss of greeting, but she has been kissing my feet since I came in. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she poured perfume on my feet. 47 I tell you that her many sins are forgiven, so she showed great love. But the person who is forgiven only a little will love only a little.”

48 Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” [...] “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace.”

The other 4 gospels - Matthew, Mark & John - tell a similar story. (But in John’s the woman isn’t a random - it’s one of the sisters of Lazarus, the guy Jesus raised from the dead. #cool trivia digression)

--> “Hot as hell” and “thank God” is just Nash Be Nashin’.

--> Start of the main trinity (1A)

--> Again, he’s not digging on her because she’s so awesomesauce in some typical way; she’s a dichotomy to him, sin with sweet. He’s a black-and-white kind of guy (and pretty much every angel we’ve met). It’s interesting to him, that seeming heel-turn. We’ll call back to those verses above here in a bit, with respect to how he feels about her as he spends more time with her.

Quickie trinity.

Nash Be Nashin’.

Recurring theme, forgiveness; also - that sound like Mike to you? At least, at this point? Eh. Maybe. If he’s trying to manipulate. But on the other hand - if this were Mike - has she got something he wants/needs? Manipulate Dean, sure; manipulate rando server chick? Possible. But nah.

---> Would Mike ask that? Why would he care? But Michael might, trying to get a bead on this human. ‘Cause remember, this is an angel who has had sparing contact with humans since he’s been in charge, he’s been dispatching angels for the heavy lifting, he’s not been boots on the ground takin’ care of business for quite awhile. His only in-depth contact has been the Winchesters, and that was only when he had to step in.

---> Also, close siblings recurring theme (close because able to joke around as well as later, when she mentions he’d vent to her about his time in war but not to the same degree as he did the rest of their family)

---> the main trinity of this story, part deux (and don’t get ahead of me; fine, I’ll do it for you: no, Michael having the nickname I mention later isn’t Biblical)

---> Lucifer was called The Morning Star (see also dictionary, re: “luciferous”)

---> Now that would be a really pretty damn specific thing for Mike to know.

---> The keep an eye out - again, reinforcing the theme that Michael whiffed not seeing the Lucifer thing coming; also lawbreakers looking out for the authorities, a contrast with an authority - God/Michael/et al - looking out for wrongdoers.

---> Park with a sandbox, Nash Be Nashin’

---> Bit tricksy; could go to Mike coming from his world to here, could be Michael feeling like this is a world he doesn’t know anymore after all his time in the cage; regardless, sets a tone of “She gets me”

Whether you cotton to my assertion that Michael may feel guilt for not seeing the Lucifer stuff coming and preventing his initial ingress (Eden), it’s theology 101 that Lucifer brought all things evil and sin and demon and hell and blah blah blah to humankind. And Michael beat him in heaven, but it’s been less offense and more defense ever since; reacting to Luci vs. bringing the game to him. Which is what Michael was finally doing, when the Winchesters didn’t agree to be vessels and let it play out like he’d planned.

So, Saint Michael on the theology end, ruling heaven in Chuck’s absence on the SPN canon end, and Michael’s arrogant, to be sure. He assumed his plan would go off without a hitch, and maybe if it’d been the Hardy Boys instead of the Winchesters, it would’ve [shrugs]

---> Nash Be Nashin’ - trying to poke your subconscious to think about that shot of them falling into the hole, to the cage

---> Could we describe Mike as “broken”? I couldn’t. More to the point, does he behave as if he might consider himself “broken”? Hmmm.

---> I guess that last bit could go either way; for me, I’m thinking of how Lucifer must’ve behaved in the cage, which we got a taste of via Sam’s hallucinations, and perhaps it being too quiet once he was gone. Sometimes being left alone with your thoughts is a bad time.

Again, canon - Lucifer never met a quiet moment he didn’t wanna fill.

So this is just me doing a second sin in the sin trilogy for Michael, as well as adding another piece of common ground between him and Grace with the nickname thing. The only Biblical truth there is the whole “Mark of the Beast” thing. Next time you get drunk or lit on whatever, read you some Revelations, it’ll either knock you out the rest of the way or give you fantastic nightmares.

What I just said, RE: second part of the Michael Lies Super Easy When It Comes To This Chick trilogy. I mean, not really - it’s coming from a good place, he doesn’t want to scare her, and if he told her the truth, where would he even start? Especially with her not being religious. He’s so far behind the eight ball, he’s under the pool table.

---> So here’s the trinity tale that’s the base for why I put this in the story. It’s in all four gospels (Matthew/Mark/Luke/John), and it’s about how at the Last Supper (which happens right before the crucifixion of Jesus goes down), they’re talking about how one of them would betray Jesus (re: Judas), and an apostle named Peter speaks up.

(Oh! Speaking of, there’s another triple play for ya - Jesus ends up on a cross between two criminals. Okay, back to the passages)

Matthew:

Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

Mark:

Peter declared, “Even if all fall away, I will not.”

“Truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “today—yes, tonight—before the rooster crows twice you yourself will disown me three times.”

But Peter insisted emphatically, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.”

Luke:

But he replied, “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.”

Jesus answered, “I tell you, Peter, before the rooster crows today, you will deny three times that you know me.”

John:

Peter asked him, “Lord, where are you going?”

Jesus replied, “Where I am going, you cannot follow now, but you will follow later.”

Peter asked, “Lord, why can’t I follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”

Then Jesus answered, “Will you really lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

---> Grace be shinin’, Nash Be Nashin’

---> What made him kiss her / risk the “sin”? She walked with him. (”Lord I am ready to go with you...”). She listened. She comforted him. She forgave him when he asked for it (re: for scaring her). She believed he wasn’t a horrible “person”. Prompted him to consider there might be a place/time where he wasn’t (see below, RE: “perhaps”).

A la....

But the person who is forgiven only a little will love only a little.” Then Jesus said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” [...] “Because you believed, you are saved from your sins. Go in peace.”

---> You may’ve noticed I didn’t call him Michael until Dean was gone during the kiss - that was on purpose. Because that was him making that decision, no (potential) Dean influence on board. And I didn’t have him call Dean by his name, being very distant throughout, until they talked about brothers, their common ground. He’s finding common ground with humans - a new kind of hallowed ground - versus being solely their guardian or their punisher, depending. This is (likely, hopefully) a good thing.

---> RE: sin - see below

---> This is your call to make - was it actually apple-flavored lip balm? Or was it strawberry/random fruity-flavored lip balm like Dean thought, and it just tasted like apples to Michael?

In any event, RE: “tasted like sin” - apples have been commonly used in art/stories as representing the fruit Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil back in the garden, a.k.a. - the original sin

HOME STRETCH!

[Full disclosure: based on early feedback, from here on out - if you were an early reader - you may notice there’s been a few tweaked lines since original publish, so I may be about to clarify things that are now - with the tweaks - obvious to you. I’m just sayin’.]

By this point, I’d hope you’d been kinda thinking, “I appreciate Nash’s effort to make Mike be not a complete asshole, but holy moly I have been suspending my disbelief like a mo-fo as this went on, why does he give a shit about this chick or about chatting with Dean all friendly, etc.”

---> That “Why didn’t we....” part should scream “THIS ISN’T MIKE”. I hope.

---> It’s been about 10 yrs. since Stull / when Michael took the dive

---> “Is there...” / “Perhaps” -- and maybe it’s this one. Maybe it’s the world he’s always known, but not been part of; remains to be seen. He’s a different dude. This ain’t the same angel that went into that cage. Like Chuck said - he’s a mess. Or maybe, now, could we say... was a mess? Hmmm. Different, though. Definitely different. Not terribly un-canon, not a huge jump to make, in my mind.

And, you know, The Cage was Luci’s big punishment, right? And he’s fine. Anytime we saw him, in the caboose version or just-been-sprung, he’s been same-ol’, same-ol’. So maybe it’s simply an isolation room, and it’s only been BAD-bad for Sam and Adam and Michael, because Luci was there messing with them, because he’s bored off his ass. That’s why I posit The Cage may not be anything beyond blank space, as it were, if Luci’s not present.

What Mike would “likely” bring? Nah. Mike’s on the express train to domination. He’s not messing around.

Nash Be Nashin’. I am, on occasion, poetic. “His” is a callback to “my Michael”, and the “g” in “grace” is lower case on purpose. [clears throat, c/ps from up yonder....]

Grace don’t come in just one form, yo. There’s lots floating out there. Just gotta pay attention. Know what to watch for.

And here’s the hammer:

Hmmmm....

---> Dean knows Mike’s been thinking of it; to quote Black Widow, that’s not a question that needs answering.

---> “Still”? “Do-over?” - Mike’s had his apocalypse. Do-over of what? That implies Mike’s tried to pull off Apocaworld, Part Deux here, and... he hasn’t tried at this point. He’d said they were already looking into what all other worlds they could get to before Jack’s birth caused our rift and they saw an opportunity for a better way, but Mike’s not taken a run at our world; Michael has. (Bit of a misleading, open-to-interpretation / could apply to Mike line, though, I grant you.)

---> “over there” - already mentioned “head to the cage”, ergo “there” is “cage”

---> “act” / “figure it out” - thaaaat’s nooot Miiiike, your subconscious sings!

---> Say I’m Mike.

I’m a tactical mofo. I know how to spot an enemy, it’s why I was gonna take out Jack emotionally if I couldn’t cripple him or kill him. I hit this new world. I’m inside a very handsome I MEAN powerful bod. I am locked and loaded. What’s first on the agenda now that I’ve got the ammo?

I take out potential threats. Dean’s an obstacle, true, but he’ll be tucked away going night-night for at least a bit, and I can likely wash-rinse-repeat as needed. Obstacle, though - he’s not an inherent threat to me. Lucifer’s out of the way. Raphael’s out of the way. Gabriel’s out of the way.

Oh. Oh noooes, FML: I’m not out of the way.

And holy shit - the holiest of all the shits - I could take myself out. Isn’t he in the Fort Knox of binding-thingy-traps-whatever?

But wait. Waaaaait, wait - that cage must be made of aluminum foil, I can see Dean’s memories. Some tacky decoder rings opened it up, his brother Sam got pulled from it, then the angel of death got Sam’s soul out of it, rando witch called up the caboose of it like it was Uber, Lucifer popped Dean and his crew in-and-out of it, and didn’t that demon Crowley use parts of it for some ill-explained ingredient to hold Lucifer hostage like it was melty MacGuffin cheese? Is there not a doorman or something?! Can they get pizza delivered down there, too, I mean TF?

Ooooh, now this is interesting. Chuckie told Dean Michael’s beyond his repair. Lucifer said Michael’s a mess... well. Consider that source. But still. Risk not too high, reward could be very high.

Yeah. I’m totes arrogant enough. This is gonna be a cake-walk.

---> Except... time moves differently in the cage, we know that. So Lucifer’s been gone for... hell, who knows how long. What state Michael might be in now is a mystery. He’s had time to regroup, at the very least, without his chief antagonist lording over him. So is it implausible that Michael could be the key to nailing Mike’s ass to the wall? Might it even be probable?

The board of directors at NashHole, Inc. voted “Yeeeeessss”.

Again, bro-love, evergreen recurring theme. So, here it is:

If I’m Michael, my perspective would be that Mike can handle his world how he pleases, and he did. But now he’s on my turf. I’m taking great umbrage with this power-hungry twin of mine coming over here and having the audacity to make decisions, take over my destiny, etc.

And then another part of it - Michael’s not only had a lot of time in the cage to get his mojo back, he’s also had time to process the whole situation, what led him to this place, the part he played. I’d imagine a part of him is still gripping onto his convictions, while on the other hand starting to realize that there are parts of this world - and people in this world - that already make it a paradise despite all that Lucifer/demons/the supernaturals have done.

Maybe an apocalypse isn’t the answer. Maybe Lucifer doesn’t have to die. Bottom line, that ain’t Mike’s call to make; it’s Michael’s.

Last thing!

Handful of you asked about how Mike would’ve opened the cage, how a fight would’ve gone down if Michael’s still in Adam, what about Adam, and my answer is - does it matter? I know, I know, that sounds snotty; it matters in the sense that you asked, so it matters to you. Where I’m coming from is that this isn’t what the story is about, not for me. But hey - you fill in those blanks however your heart desires, truly. Or pretend that twist at the end never happened, and think of this as Mike the whole way through. :)

.....

That cage is made of chewed gum and pipe cleaners, a hamster could get in there, I’m done, I’m DONE, okay bye.

@ellen-reincarnated1967 @waywardjoy @copperseraphim @bumbleball13 @inlovewith2dcharacters @impandagrl @theoriginalvicki @mrswhozeewhatsis @littlegreenplasticsoldier @butiaintgonnaloveem @salt-n-burn-em-all @sixtysevenandwhiskey @anticipate1003 @juppschmitz @smi727 @casismybae @jalove-wecallhimdean @salvachester

#Nash Responds #Nash Elaborates #and all over your faces #it's long #but interesting I hope #on god I didn't mean to make this complex #I wrote it over a few days #like maybe three hours #quick for me is my point #the graphic was more time consuming #so I assure you #'twas not intended #as a deep dive #oof #I'm so apologizing #Queueby Dooby Doo #Dad's on a blog post and #he hasn't been queued in a few days

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gamebazu · 3 years ago

Text

Crawl Budget

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a larger version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

What is crawl budget?

Causes of crawl budget issues

So how do issues with crawl budget actually come about?

Facets

Now I think the main sort of issues on sites that can lead to crawl budget problems are firstly facets.

Search results pages

A few other things that often come about are search results pages from an internal site search can often, especially if they're paginated, they can have a lot of different URLs generated.

Listings pages

Fixing crawl budget issues

So what are some of the tools that you can use to address these issues and to get the most out of your crawl budget?

Robots.txt

Now at the opposite extreme, the most extreme sort of solution to crawl budget you can employ is the robots.txt file.

So we've sort of created a leak and a black hole. So this is quite a heavy-handed solution, although it is easy to implement.

Link-level nofollow

Noindex, nofollow

Noindex and nofollow, so this is obviously a very common solution for pages like these on ecomm sites.

Noindex, follow

Canonical

301

It's going to solve our indexing issue, and it's going to pass PageRank. But obviously, the tradeoff here is users also can't access this URL, so we have to be okay with that.

Implementing crawl budget tactics

So sort of rounding all this up, how would we actually employ these tactics? So what are the activities that I would recommend if you want to have a crawl budget project?

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