#cass ft. vex

[stubborngods]

"I only drink to get drunk." ( vex @ cass! )

" yes, " cass responded drly, slowly sipping from her own tankard as she peered over the rim of it at her sister-in-law. cassandra didn't actually particularly want the drink she was holding, to be perfectly honest. but holding it was much better than doing nothing with themself as they sat next to vex, attempting to figure out how they were supposed to help. this truly wasn't their area of expertise (being raised for a number of her formative years by vampires didn't really help her emotional capabilities very much). " that is usually the point of drinking, i've found. but i've not known you to only drink to get drunk, vex. so, how long are we going to sit here before you tell me what's really wrong? "

[troubledconstellations]

@lavendaers for vex / she was pretty sure she was dreaming. cassandra had just briefly glanced up from her laptop, considering ordering another coffee - as though the two they'd already finished weren't enough (they weren't, if she planned on finishing this chapter today) - when she spotted vex'ahlia. the blond nearly tripped in her rush to get up, moving across the coffee shop to reach over and tap vex on the shoulder. " vex'ahlia? " it occurred to them maybe a moment too late that perhaps vex'ahlia was not one of those whose memories had returned yet.

[blorbologist]

Realized I'm 3 weeks from a Big chapter going up and im not ok

In completely unrelated news does anyone want a Cass and Vex bonding scene that happens a few chapters from now? Ft. lotsa angst :)

[littlebosslady7]

Do you think Percy and Vex would have more than one nanny? Can you describe your original character from perc'ahlia week?

Miss Wicks pops up in most of my fics. She started out as a halfling. I knew I wanted to write a character that could be almost be on the kids' level stature wise. So, even as a tiefling, I picture her just under 5 ft./1.3m.

I wanted to have her be a tiefling as another person to share in Gwen's culture. She can be a little Mary Poppins, but isn't one for overstepping her bounds. Once the de Rolos are outnumbered by Wolfe and Leona, they bring on Miss Wicks. That said, they're still very hands on parents. They just need an extra set of eyes.

I drew the line at multiple nannies because they frequently have Vox Machina, Cass, Kash, and Zahra (their godparents) around for certain events. They also have a staff, who have occasional eyes on the bustling castle when they're able.

Miss Wicks is pinkish red, short and curvy like Veth Brennato. She has a different pair of round glasses with an array of colors for whichever holiday or de Rolo family ball. She has previous nanny experience as Kash and Zahra's nanny. She's also Zahra's distant cousin

[bestworstcase]

farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 3-4

- a shot-put ball, according to my cursory research, weighs in the neighborhood of 6-16 pounds. leila howland expects me to believe that princess “hoisted an adult woman 70 ft into the air on the daily with nothing but a pulley and raw upper body strength” rapunzel has a hard time picking up a shot.

anyways

- rapunzel thinks about how she used to talk to herself in her tower when she was isolated (and lonely) but stopped once she came to corona, and this girl looked like she was talking to herself, and it gave rapunzel this weird sense of familiarity! now what in the world could that mean? its so subtle i can’t quite put my finger on it.

again, romance novel.

less sardonically - i will say that tts cass has never struck me as an especially lonely person. yes, rapunzel is quite possibly her first ever close friend, but cass also appears to be on pleasant terms with her coworkers and has at least one or two friendships or mentor-type relationships among the guards (stan and pete). animals in tts are anthropomorphized enough to qualify as humans, and cassandra is unequivocally friends with owl and fidella. she is friendly if not friends with at least one coronan citizen (monty). she’s utterly unfazed by crowley’s crabbiness. she’s able to get along with the pub thugs. in vardaros she befriends vex with ease and makes herself right at home among the citizenry at large. there is zero friction between her and lance - at most she rolls her eyes when he’s being ridiculous. and out of the main cast, cassandra is the one who seems closest to varian in s1 - like, she has actual bonding moments with him. 

THE POINT BEING, cassandra may not have a lot of close friends, but she is nevertheless personable and demonstrates the ability to adapt herself to suit a variety of social environments. maybe i’m projecting here - i have very few close offline friends because my preference for in-person socialization is for it to be very casual - but taken together this doesn’t scream ‘lonely person’ to me. it instead says ‘person who finds social fulfillment in a wide net of friendly acquaintanceships’ and possibly also ‘person who finds close, emotionally intimate relationships worthwhile but very demanding to maintain, and so seldom or never seeks them out.’

this, absolutely, a very subjective reading of her character - it is just as plausible for cass to be someone who is socially competent but feels inwardly unfulfilled until rapunzel comes along. but even in that reading, this implication that cassandra is as deeply lonely, as thoroughly isolated in corona as rapunzel was in her tower is baldly absurd.

- i think i will have more thoughts about how arianna is characterized and the relationship she and rapunzel have with each other later in the story. for now it feels rather mechanical, and like arianna exists in the story to facilitate cassunzel happening.

- cassandra comes across to me like she has an anxiety disorder written by someone who doesn’t quite know how to convey how that feels? she catastrophizes: what if rapunzel thinks cass attacked her? will she get in trouble? but then she stops to make snide comments about rapunzel’s security detail ‘[falling] down on the job’ and concludes with an impressive amount of certainty that rapunzel isn’t going to make a big deal of it, after all. that… isn’t how anxiety works?

then, immediately, she finds a note from her father scolding her for slacking off—making it clear that she is indeed in trouble, like she feared—and her response is to scoff and throw it away. zero concern about being in trouble. zero worry about the consequences she might face for refusing the pointed “offer” of being rapunzel’s lady-in-waiting. like… this isn’t anxiety. i’m positive it’s meant to convey anxiety, but it comes across as cassandra just being… melodramatic and rude and grumpy. like a teenager. it’s unpleasant. and it bears very little resemblance to tts cass, who expresses a clear and consistent anxiety regarding the security of her job and the looming threat of a convent.

- secondly: “Friedborg reported that you missed your afternoon duties AGAIN. Please be advised that this is unacceptable. The queen is looking for a lady-in-waiting to serve Princess Rapunzel. It would be a great opportunity for you, and you must show the queen how prepared you are to train her in the ways of the court.” i am 100% convinced that howland thought cass was rapunzel’s age or younger. if friedborg is effectively cassandra’s direct supervisor, and she is reporting absences to cassandra’s father instead of addressing this with cassandra directly, the only explanation that makes sense is that cassandra is not of legal age.

- “Ladies don’t wield weapons, lead military strategy meetings, or race on horseback. Ladies do needlework, flower arranging, and hairstyling.”

sighs.

i am not going to argue that corona, in any incarnation, isn’t culturally sexist. it is. there are no women in the guard, no women in trades, no female business owners in the vein of monty or xavier or feldspar. besides rapunzel and arianna - who as the monarch’s spouse has very little in the way of actual political power - there are no women in the upper echelons of the government. besides cassandra, the only gnc women around are criminals. cass is denied even a chance to join the guard for no evident reason, even though her father allows eugene - a man he openly despises - to take the tests and then begrudgingly hires him when he passes. no one sees an issue with this, even though cassandra is demonstrably overqualified.

however.

howland makes this cultural sexism explicit text, and she does so in such a way that it implies something pretty horrifying about the already pretty horrifying corona-saporia unification backstory.

i am talking, of course, about general shampanier. you know, the female saporian general whom herz der sonne married when the two kingdoms were unified. the female saporian general who personally dueled der sonne for hours, according to under raps. the female saporian general who, forget military strategy meetings, led an entire goddamn army. i will accept the possibility that shampanier did not ride horses, because rapunzel’s return suggests that saporians have some sort of cultural objection to that. but this book predates rapunzel’s return by a large margin, and it isn’t canon anyway, so odds are the general shampanier of this story rode a warhorse at some point or another in her illustrious career of being the general of an army!!!

this woman - general shampanier - became the queen, the wife of arguably corona’s most historically important king, at a defining moment in coronan political and cultural history. tts and lost lagoon would both have us believe that this was a romantic, peaceful union between two people and two nations, but a few hundred years later - this. ladies don’t fight. ladies don’t belong in the war tent. ladies don’t ride horses. cass takes these things for granted as facts of life. but general shampanier did all of those things, and she did them extremely well, and she became corona’s queen.

WHAT HAPPENED?! WHAT HAPPENED TO SHAMPANIER’S LEGACY?

how did corona go from a warrior-queen to this, in just a few hundred years? the most plausible answer is that the background radiation of sexism and, perhaps, anti-saporian bias was powerful enough to unravel any cultural impact she may have otherwise had, deep enough to render her an outlier, an aberration, an exception to the rule that women do not act like that.

even arguing here that ‘lady’ specifically means ‘noblewoman’ doesn’t add up - because, again, general shampanier became THE QUEEN. you don’t get more noblewoman than that!

it feels unfair to judge this book with details added in season 3—such as the fact that shampanier is evidently not buried with herz der sonne—but this total lack of a cultural impact from general shampanier, queen of corona, feels very telling even without taking those tidbits of extra-textual information into consideration.

and good god, saporia hasn’t even properly entered the narrative yet! this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg!

*deep breath*

moving. on.

- continuing the theme of cass being a child larping as a guard recruit: she has a closetful of weapons which she maintains to the exacting standards of the handbook, but skips out on her job to “train” in secret because evidently she’ll do ANYTHING to get on the guard except, you know, demonstrate a modicum of responsibility with the job she has now.

- moreover while i think cartography is a neat hobby for cassandra to have, it… doesn’t make a lot of sense if it’s part of some nebulous plan to ~prove herself worthy~ of being on the guard. like, cartography straight up isn’t a relevant skill, and while knowing the countryside could certainly be helpful for guard work in the event a criminal goes to ground in the wilderness, it’s like… it’s like if i applied for my current job, which is in software/tech support, by focusing an intensive amount of energy on teaching myself spanish. fluency in spanish is a useful skill and one that i could turn into an asset within the bounds of my current job, and it might be the deciding factor in me getting hired over someone else with equivalent experience and skill in computing and tech support (which is what the job involves) because, yes, some of our clients are ESL spanish-speakers. but it’s—there’s a disconnect. if i were in a tight competition to get this job i would be pouring my time into sharpening my programming skill and polishing up a portfolio of relevant work. i wouldn’t be devoting hours upon hours to learning spanish. right?

on the other hand—if cartography is a hobby cassandra is passionate about, and she’s 16 or 17 or 18 and she really likes the idea of being on the guard and really feels like she can do it and is bored with her dumb teenager job and desperate to get her dad to make her a guard without actually grasping what being a guard entails or the kind of work it involves or what she actually, realistically needs to do to have a shot, then… yeah, skipping work to play pretend with her weapons and convincing herself that her favorite hobby is totally going to prove to her dad that she’s ready to be a guard!!! makes perfect sense. it’s no different from tts varian tunnel visioning so hard on this fantasy of ‘i’ll surprise my whole village with hot running water and then my dad will be proud of me!!!’ that he neglects basic safety measures and accidentally blows the whole system up. it’s not realistic. it’s a fantasy. it’s play.

- the only time cassandra brings up eugene’s criminal past in tts is to mock him for being a loser. like. literally. the plot of fitzherbert pi kicks off when she calls him a “two-bit hood” and then when he fires back that flynn rider was a LEGEND!!! she fires back “key word being was. and… what is it you do now?” and that’s the only time she brings it up. granted this is 6-7 months into their relationship but… still, frankly i never got the impression that “former thief” was anywhere close to the top of cassandra’s list of reasons for hating eugene. he’s just a dick. she doesn’t like him because he’s a huge selfish jerk and she warms up to him after her starts behaving better.

- rapunzel goes to the ty lee school of flirting. just… laugh really hard at everything your crush says even if it’s not funny.

- despite my… intense and rapidly growing dislike for how cassandra is characterized in this book, her experiencing an actual physical reaction when rapunzel enters her space without permission is good. it’s about the boundaries. it has always been about the boundaries, and rapunzel crossing them, and the intractable messiness that arises from that.

- in fact: how many times does rapunzel cross boundaries in just this one little scene? oh, let me count the ways!

1 - when cassandra goes to shut the door, rapunzel ducks under her arm to enter the room. (eugene attempts to enter as well, but cass succeeds in blocking him.)

2 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s first “go away” hint about only playing individual sports.

3 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s second “go away” hint (“I let the silence get awkward.”)

4 - arranging cassandra’s invitation to the feast of elodie the great with the captain beforehand, so cass can’t use him as an excuse to decline.

5 - missing or ignoring cassandra’s obvious discomfort with this news, taking cassandra’s attendance at the feast as a done deal, and skipping straight to asking cassandra to sit next to her.

6 - in response to cassandra’s very diplomatic signal of not wanting to do that (“I sit wherever I’m assigned”), she declares that she’ll make sure cassandra is assigned to sit next to her.

7 - touching without permission, which makes cassandra flinch.

all of which results in cassandra making what she considers to be a “tactical surrender.” and then shutting and locking her door, because she feels so rattled. as i recall, lagoon is actually a lot mellower on the boundary violations front - and rapunzel actually learns better over the course of the story, which is probably the biggest reason that lost lagoon is not canon and cannot be canon to tts - but it feels worth writing this sort of thing out because, well. it is one of the dead horses i keep clobbering.

[trickrydomain]

5 moments drabble — kynan leore ft. jarett howarth ( @adveanture​ )

tw for ; self hatred, depression, brief mentions of self harm (starvation)

o n e   )      It’s hate that he feels, when he’s turned away from Greyskull keep. It’s a childish hatred, one a teenager feels when they don’t get what they want. He refused to leave, camping right in front of the doors in an effort to see Vox Machina. When the wall’s door opened, instead of his heroes he was greeted by the captain of the guard. Unlike the other guards he’d spoken to previously, this man listened to his story, of why he wanted to meet the fabled heroes. Later, Kynan would look back and see that Jarett was trying to humanize Vox Machina to him, to lower his expectations that, in hindsight, might have saved him a lot of grief if he had listened.

t w o   )      The travel between Glintshore to Whitestone is a blank memory, the boy having stayed in a corner barely accepting food or water, his face in his hands. He followed Vax until they arrived at their destination after disembarking, staying in his room he was given. He wouldn’t speak, even to those he once revered. He was set to let himself waste away — it was only what he deserved — when Jarett once again came to speak to him. The man wasn’t deterred by his silence, by his unfriendly expressions. Instead of pity, again Kynan was given what he truly needed; a strength he could lean on, and an objective unconnected to his past. Told to report to training in the morning, though not unkindly or through the threat of force. Later, Kynan would look back and see concern that no one else had had for him.

t h r e e   )      Making friends wasn’t easy for Kynan. He didn’t have a lot of experiences to talk about from his youth, and he refused to talk about his year before Whitestone. Sitting alone outside of training would have brought down his mood, had Jarett not made time for him. For perhaps the first week, it was just the two of them, going over the day and staying away from taboo topics. Others would sit with them and converse with older of the two, including Kynan when Jarret pulled him in to the conversation. Soon he was a natural part of the group, eventually choosing to approach first and join the group willingly. Later, Kynan would look back and see that not everyone would bring him harm.

f o u r   )    He wasn’t gone for more than a moment, going to the kitchens to get them some food to share when Cassandra had disappeared. The world around him slowed, panic gripping his body and nearly forcing the air from his lungs. She wouldn’t have gone off with all the work she’d wanted to complete, at least not without anyone else seeing her. Composing himself, his mind raced and struggled to think of who he could go to without raising too much of an alarm. Percy and Vex were gone, the only other person he could trust being his captain. Burying his nerves for Cass’ sake, he sought Jarett out and relayed what had happened. Only once it was all out could he calm himself, the other talking him through the panic and giving him work while a silent alarm was sent out to search for Cassandra. Later, Kynan would look back and realize Jarett had once again pulled him out of his own head, redirecting his focus as nothing could be done about where his charge had gone. 

f i v e   )     His path had changed, quite a lot since Vecna had fallen and Percival had returned home for good. It took a long time, but Kynan slowly stopped believing Cass was in immediate danger, that something would happen if he rested. He’d learned to sleep, learned things beyond the use of guns and daggers that had been passed to him. He’d learned the healing ways of a cleric, had stepped beyond being a guard or soldier to another thing entirely. He had a talent for getting in to things he shouldn’t, earning connections and doing jobs no one else could have. Returning from a mission he’d been assigned, he sought out his former mentor to catch up. This was what a parent should be, shouldn’t it? Someone one looked up to, that they shared their achievements and failures with. He was hard pressed to remember a time without Jarett, without understanding and strength where it was needed. 

[blorbologist]

For context, I've done this and this before - comics i'm referencing under the cut!

Bigger Numbers mean Bigger Interest means Bigger Incentive to Draw These Sooner Despite Gradschool, if that impacts your desire to RB?

All art here by Bill Watterson