#concrete rules and explanations as to why the universe is the way it is

[king-dra]

theres something very charming to me about super early sci-fi stories, stuff from a time before we had any idea as to what could possibly be out in space, so people were just making shit up

[7association-was-here]

I've been meaning to ask, how exactly do we have three– er... two Heathcliffs in the city? Is it just an unknown/yet-to-be-known phenomenon that we all accept or do we have a concrete explanation as to why the Head isn't gunning down doors for defying the 2 clones(?) can only coexist for 7 days rule?

We suppose the reason why the Head hasn’t been involved is because they aren’t truly clones. Not the traditional kind of clones anyway.

What this is exactly and why this has been occurring recently is still unclear but we do believe it has something to do with alternate realities known as “the mirror worlds” produced by… Yep, “the mirror”. Although of course those two things are still unclear as well, an alternate version of yourself could not be considered a clone, can they? As in their own universe you are the clone and so there is no true way to determine which is the “original” you. Are they the mirror identity in your universe or are you the mirror identity in their universe?

So because they aren’t artificial robots or freaky flesh mutant clones the Head couldn’t care to put this properly on their radar it seems. Unless things truly escalate, that is. But who knows? Perhaps the Head is already aware of this but have yet to take action for their own reasons.

[headingalaxys-spicy]

Imagine a situation in which a regular reader was thrown into the Omegaverse-

Like, they have no “scents”, no “heats”, no “instincts” of any kind relating to Omegaverse inhabitants. So they just kinda stumble around for a bit and are like “why is everyone a furry? Why are people looking at me like they should either be hungry or scared? What’s A/B/O? Who the hell are the Peacekeepers??”

Queue some Peacekeeper going all yandere over how “different” the reader is. They have no skill, instincts, nor are they even registered in government databases. Do you think poor reader has a chance of survival here? Especially with yanderes like America, England, Germany, and Japan…?

Short Answer: Hell no, and you’re smart enough to know that. But this page is dedicated to chaos and bad statistical odds.

Once the reader has been found out in the extremely short 60 seconds it took for the Peacekeepers to find them they’re taken to one of the commanding generals that uphold the rules in the Omegaverse. 

America: When you’re brought in for interrogation he’s intrigued by your lack of everything. No scent, no markings that indicate that you have an alpha. Nothing. You are an enigma. You don’t fit into one of the designed roles within the setup society. 

For hours on end, he will be circling you like a hungry wolf that is hungry for knowledge. The click of his suede oxfords taps against the concrete floor as he tries to grapple with your mere existence that doesn’t fit the realm that you’ve been unfortunate enough to fall into. His shaded blues will hover over you for countless hours as he asks you the same question over and over in a different way. 

��What are you?” America will not relent until he can obtain your loyalty. Or at least a piece of it. He’ll have you sign a contract that allows you… barley any freedom. But you take what you can get considering you have no way to get back to the alternate universe that you came from. So you have no choice but to be under the cover of the American Alpha. Who’s going to train you to be the perfect subservient Omega to him. 

(He’s also going to take a vial of your blood so he can figure out where in the hell you came from. So don’t expect him to not be curious.) 

England: When you’re brought to him he’s intrigued by you. Since he’s deeply embedded within the occult he thinks that he’s struck gold. One of his long rituals has finally worked and his family’s dark magic can have a public reputation and he can be feared in the eyes of all of the modern Alpha’s, Omega’s, Beta’s, and every other classification in between. 

“So tell me. Did some sort of demon, fae, or any other type of being, send you here?” He will question you in a mocking tone that you don’t miss but are annoyed by. He’s really sure of himself and his abilities to control any situation. Even one that involves inter-dimensional hopping. After all, he was the great British Empire. He has an unspoken need to dominate when and where ever he can. 

He’s an asshole. So he will torment you. I hope you like being electrocuted and well other standard and non-standard ways of being tortured. *cough* He puts fae curses on you. Along with other rituals, you will roll your eyes at. 

Watch me die tonight for writing that. Hahahah. 

“Where is it that you say you’re form dear? (country/ city you are from) difficult to say but that place ceased to exist years ago.” His green eyes glower with excitement and another emotion you couldn’t quite place. 

Germany: Irritated beyond belief. He’s looked through every database, library, and scoured every social media platform and still, he ended up empty-handed. He hated the feeling of having no tangible explanation for your existence. Since you:  the badass reader that you are you tell him point-blank. 

“Not from this world dude. Or dimension. Or universe. Whatever the fuck. Just untie me. Your ropes hurt like hell and I don’t intend on being there anytime soon.” You have a bored look on your face. He reminds you of another irritable German you’ve met back in your dimension. 

Germany has never once in his life heard someone speak to him like that so he freezes as the words slam through his brain. Not even America or Russia talk to him like that. And they’re equals. 

Congratulations you broke the German. XD

Flustered he will continue with his diplomatic/ commanding routine while his face is red and steam is coming out of his ears. While he also tries not to laugh at how ludicrous and unreal the situation is.

“Y/N resistance won’t save you in the Omegaverse. If you’ve truly hopped from one dimension to ze other…” 

The reality and weight of his words will settle in as he talks to you and he’s … well going to be out of commission for a little bit. You defy his logic and Germany doesn’t deal well with things that are not confined to his specific standard of rules and laws of physics. 

Japan: Much like Germany he’s not going to like the lack of explanation of your existence. You will 100% have a katana in your face within the first 30 seconds of being in a room with him. He will demand politely that you tell him how in the hell you got there. And he won’t entirely believe you when you utter the sentence: 

“Yeah, I kinda just fell from this random-ass portal that brought me here.” And considering your tone is none too pleased and comes off as extremely rude to him you’re still going to end up tied to a metal chair with a Japanese man or Alpha as he calls himself that is barely taller than you. You’re doing your best not to laugh at him and his ‘superiority’ over you. 

However to your advantage you have an ethereal beauty that Japan can not bear to part with. So he will tolerate your lack of manners. His mind, heart, body, and soul are enraptured by you. You don’t know this because he has an excellent poker face game but you get the feeling that he’s hot for you when he begins to treat you like a frail doll and prevents you from being able to have any form of freedom. Right down to the way you dress. Nothing but cute Kimonos, Hanabi, and yukata’s for you. 

“y/n I don’t think it’s possible for you to go home anymore.”

[skyabove]

Sky Headcanons: PART 1 - Skykid Anatomy

I personally find the premise of Sky fascinating and it is one of those topics I can overthink for ages. The game itself already has a fantastic player-base that makes the world feel like a real community, but I love trying to work out ways to expand the existing information we have even more to make the world feel even more real and tangible.

I can (and probably will) go on about this forever, so for the sake of everyone's sanity I’m going to break it up into sections. I'll put it under a ‘read more’ because it will get long. I’m not good at keeping things short.

As with most of my stuff so far I try to keep my ideas as canon compliant as possible? Sky doesn’t have a very concrete set of rules or lore but I’d like to keep it relatively similar to the base game’s portrayal because there's so many possibilities already. I also just like trying to apply real world stuff to fictional worlds, and find an in universe explanation for gameplay mechanics, because why not. I guess my theories and mini comments like the firework staff thing can be seen as part of this too (I have some ideas for a more separate AU but that's for later)

Skykids have three “layers”. Layer one is their Core - you can see this on their arms, legs and face under the mask. It is hard (but flexible)  with a texture like a smooth stone, not shiny but you know, like those rocks on a pebble beach, there's a bit of texture but you wouldn't call it bumpy. This layer is not malleable other than under specific circumstances*. It is very strong, they can fly into the cliffs on the way to Valley and not damage anything, but can be weakened by exposure to darkstone/corruption. So if a Skykid sat in the Wasteland oil for ages and then crashed into a hard surface really hard, or got hit by a Krill, they might crack or break something - more on this later.

The “Core Layer” is very warm in the centre, although it is impossible to tough the centre anyway as it is never exposed. The body gradually gets cooler further away from the centre, so the hands, feet, and face feel cool or only slightly warm, but the neck, upper arms, and upper legs would feel noticeably warmer. In the centre of their chest is a gem-like oval - this is smooth, and contains their flame/light. It is warm when their flame is inside, gets cooler if their flame has been outside the body for a while (holding out candle), and goes cold if the flame is extinguished.

The inside of the Skykids body is sort of an all purpose magical golden goop. This goop keeps them alive and is just sort of there. When they absorb light/wax it passes through their flame oval (core? Flame core? Flame gem? It needs a name) since that is incontact with the outside environment and their insides. This means that picking up light while extinguished will reignite their Flame. Skykids get all their survival energy needs from absorbing light, which just sort of replenishes/stokes/adds to the gold goop insides.

This “magical golden goop” is what makes a skykid warm, gives their bodies their glow, and can be seen when they open their eyes. It is also very very warm, this is how they mimic emotes such as the shiver emote with the visible breath - while they dont breathe themselves they can suck air into their mouths/noses** which heats it up, and then release.

The second layer of a Skykid is the “Clothing Layer”. This is made up of a sort of soft physical light. It's not like any material we know of but it can have different surface densities depending on what it is made to resemble, although it lacks surface texture - the gold bits on the Rhythm boots would feel the same as the surface of the Dreams red and black suit, rather than distinctly metal or fabric. It is part of the Skykid’s body and cant be removed, only retracted or extended. Also on this layer is the Skykids hair and mask. The hair is again, a part of the Skykid’s body, although with a lot of practice could be retracted fully to give the appearance of no hair, but it is a lot of effort it can't just be taken off. Like with the clothes they can re shape this however they like, either by thought or just squashing it into a shape with their hands (although over time this would naturally return to the last “thought of” form) It is more blue than most of the light emitted from them, and has a smooth shiny texture. It is also cool to touch as there is not much heat in that region of the body.

The mask is also in this category. Every Skykid is “born” with a mask of their own which will be a very personal item to them even if they decide to use a different one later on. The masks are not part of the body, they can be removed whenever they want to and are held onto their faces by the power of plot convenience. Skykids can learn to craft new masks by gaining information from Spirits. If a Skykid decides to wear a mask other than their default one, they can store that in their Pocket-Dimension-For-Items that I haven't quite worked out yet.

The reason these aspects are grouped together is that besides from being the softer, malleable parts of the body, they are also the primary methods of expressing individuality, and also disappear when their Flame is extinguished. Therefore their Flame is in some way responsible for changing and maintaining colour and form, representative of their individuality, and somehow linked with keeping their masks on.

The third layer is the cape. This is an interesting part as it is not completely theirs but at the same time is integral to their survival. The cape itself is made up of Winged Light. When the first Winged Light is absorbed the body creates a sort capsule to contain the energy, and it is fused to the back of the shoulders and neck. The cape’s shape can be manipulated and its colour changed the same way as the clothing and it has an odd almost gel-like texture. It's not completely solid but doesn't easily pass through everything either. The closest thing I can think of is wet cornflour, the stuff that is basically a liquid but if you hit it hard it acts like a solid. So with the capes if you were to push your hand through it slowly, it would go through with no damage to the cape, but if you were to slap the cape against a wall it would just hit it and not pass through. Touching the cape would feel slightly staticy and sort of like a warm fuzzy feeling, but not touching something tangible. The capes act as a third set of limbs and can be moved and stretched, and twist etc. The number of splits in the edge corresponds to the number of “wedges” the Skykid has, so new baby moths would only have a complete smooth edge for a while, and older Skykids would have more. It has its own storage of light separate from the rest of the body, so it can run out of light while the body’s flame is still lit, it needs this light to keep the semi solid state needed to create enough lift to fly.

Like with the “Core Layer” it is sturdy and doesn't rip under normal conditions, the closest you could get is a piece is pulled away and dissipates as soon as it disconnects, while the main piece just reforms. After significant exposure to darkstone/corruption it will start to fray around the edges, more so if the Skykid has lost their light. Capes can be strengthened by blessings from Spirits as well as holding more Winged Light. 

The Winged Light inside the capes is a Skykids last lifeline, even if their own light is out they will survive until the last Winged Light is lost which results in the body being devoid of all light and therefore unable to sustain itself. Because of Megabird Light Magic™ when all the light is gone the body turns into a brittle stone which crumbles away, leaving just the chest orb gem behind.

Props! They can learn to make them from Spirits, or just find them in the world. They all get stored in the previously mentioned magical storage space that I don't have an explanation for yet.

Other non specific stuff:

Skykids have a weird type of sight which I'm still working out. They do use their eyes, hence the eye holes in the masks, but they can also “see” without them.

Since they don't have skin the way they feel things is different to us. It's less about pressure receptors and more about vibrations and understanding what that translates too. This will sound very strange to 90% of people reading this but basically, if you have long nails and you run them gently along a surface you can tell what kind of texture it has. Obviously you're not feeling with the nail itself but the texture of the surface vibrates it which you then feel via the skin underneath. I don’t know how well this works with short nails or stick on nails, maybe you could get a similar effect by holding a coffee stirrer and running it along something. It sounds odd but the size of the vibration very easily distinguishes a smooth surface from a rough surface from a shiny surface. It's surprisingly detailed too, sometimes it's more accurate than using your fingertips. 

Another way to think of it is rubbing two smooth rocks together and feeling the vibration/noise it makes. Or I suppose sometimes with converse shoes, if you pass your foot over longish grass you can “feel” that it's soft without actually touching it with your skin. The more you think about how alien the Skykid’s experiences would be and how they perceive the world the more exciting it gets.

Masks are important and personal, you don't share. Trying on another person's mask is a massive act of trust and closeness. More on mask views later

Also touching another person's cape without permission is a big no. Younger moths get a bit more of a pass especially in dangerous or scary situations but otherwise it is seen as rude and invasive.

Skykids constantly have a thin cloud of light particles around them. When they deep call these particles get blown away from the body, and either gravitate back, or if there is another Skykid with less light go over to them instead.

When a Skykid loses their light they enter a sort of heightened survival mode although with some limitations due to running on fumes. Their senses get prioritised to locate a light source, their hearing ends up muffled and their sight is reduced to a sort of greyscale blur of rough objects with light sources appearing as bright patches of varying intensity depending on the size. Once re-lit things return to normal.

* Special circumstances being spells such as size changes, the magic in the Chibi mask, or them creating mouths which I will talk about in the next part.

**Mouth creation ^^

Thank you, and I’m sorry, to anyone who made it though all that. The next part I’ll write up will probably be about behaviour and communication which is a bit less technical I guess.

[outercrasis]

Sessions

Pairing: College!Din Djarin x F!Reader

Word Count: 2.6k

Warnings: None (let me know if I missed something!)

Summary: Everyone is talking about the mysterious new guy on campus

A/N: I had a ton of fun writing this extremely self-indulgent AU and I have plans to keep writing more about these two. It won’t be an actual chaptered fic, but at some point I’ll throw together a masterlist with a chronological order to things.

Series Masterlist // Main Masterlist

Introductions

The semester had only started four weeks ago and he was already a legend around campus. Almost everywhere someone could be found whispering about him. You'd even heard faculty speculating, wondering about the rumors they overheard their students sharing.

You first heard of him in your literature seminar, some of your fellow classmates discussing a recent rumor about the now fabled man. Something about a motorcycle and a child caught your ear, prompting you to interrupt and the girls in front of you who they were talking about. 

The looks you received from the pair were incredulous at best. “You mean you haven’t heard about him?”

“Heard about who?” you asked, genuinely confused. It had only been the first week of class at the time and you were too caught up with your own busy start to check in on the rumor mill.

“Mando, obviously. He’s all anyone is talking about.” From there the girls had happily filled you in on all the latest sightings and rumors. 

Mando, as they called him, was shrouded in mystery. He'd popped up on Corellia University's campus when the semester began and no one knew a thing about him. He hadn't gone to Corellia before, internet searches turned up nothing, and even the skull-like symbol on the back of his leather jacket wasn't familiar to anyone. Any information on him was conjecture at best and there was plenty to go around. Once the rest of the class caught onto what you three were discussing, theories began to fly.

People discussed how he’d been spotted downtown, beating on some guys in a back alley. He’d also been seen uptown the same night though, strolling through Basalt Park. One girl was nearly certain that she’d gone to elementary school with Mando, but he’d mysteriously disappeared one day without explanation. Someone else was confident he was just a cop trying some weird shtick to go undercover. Then one person insisted he had a kid with him sometimes while another was trying to explain that he was actually a murderer. The rumors only became more ludicrous from there.

By the end of the discussion you only ascertained two things for certain. He went by the name Mando and he wore some kind of special helmet. Information you could have gotten by watching him pick up a drink at the Java Hut. Not nearly enough to warrant this level of fervor in your opinion.

From there, hearing about Mando was inescapable. You got home that night only to have your roommate and best friend, Layla, launch into theories about him. Within the week someone set up a social media page to try and track his location around campus via DMs fellow students sent in. That had struck you as invasive and unsettling, but the messages about him kept flooding in.

By pure chance, you had yet to actually see him for yourself. There weren't even any creep shots for you to look at. People had been trying to take photos of him, but he was like a ghost. In the time it took them to pull up their cameras he'd disappear. 

There wasn't even more concrete information about him beyond what you'd learned that first day. Just more and more speculation, a good amount of it made up purely for the shock factor. Another week slipped by, the semester picking up, and Mando news became standard in your day. There was always something new going around about him and as much as you tried to avoid it and focus on your studies, you couldn’t help but wonder about him yourself.

Who was this guy? Was this all some stunt or ‘social experiment’ that would be revealed by a sociology student at the end of the semester? Or was he a legitimate peculiarity, doomed to stick out like a sore thumb? You weren’t sure if you should hate him for making a big deal out of himself or pity him for all the unwarranted attention. Either way, you were sure that whenever you met this enigmatic Mando, you’d know.

×××××

You grumble looking at the submission form. The name and student ID information is blank again. You told Todd last week those fields needed to be made mandatory. How else were you supposed to know who to email when you end up with a no-show for the hour?

Looking further down you're pleased to note that they're at least a grad student. Despite the unfinished form, graduates almost never skip sessions like these. You're thrilled to have the opportunity to discuss something other than freshman composition for once. It's fun helping the wide-eyed freshies, but you can only go over basic comma rules so many times before you start to lose it a little.

There's a knock at the study room door and you look up only to be rendered speechless. It's him. Mando. With a kid on his hip. So Alissandra hadn’t been lying when she told you about the toddler she saw with him. Interesting. Continuing to take him in, you can’t help but focus on the obvious - the only thing you knew about him other than his supposed name, the helmet. 

It’s unlike anything you've seen before. You're fairly certain it's a motorcycle helmet, but it's been modified. Rather than the typical rounded shape, his is all sharp angles and flat at the front. It’s colored a sleek, shining chrome that gleams under the washed out fluorescent lighting. Most arresting is the way he's changed the face of the helmet. The cheeks dip inward at a sharp angle, creating deep, curved contours. His visor is a T of black glass in the center, entirely impossible to see through. It's intimidating and… kinda hot?

The little boy he's holding starts to wiggle in his grasp, physically demanding to be set down in the study room. Once his feet touch the floor, he immediately runs over and climbs into the chair next to you. He's a welcome distraction from his father’s? brother's? guardian's? commanding presence in the room.

The boy can't be older than three, smiling up at you with a wide toothy grin. His hair is covered by a green beanie with large floppy ears sewn onto it and he's wearing a little brown jacket with a sherpa collar. Maybe a bit too heavy for the early autumnal weather, but if the rumor that the kid rides on a motorcycle with Mando is true, it’s perfect. His eyes are large and brown, shining up at you with a slightly mischievous glint.

"Hello, what's your name?" you ask, smiling back at the child.

"Grogu," comes the reply, not from the kid, but from Mando.

You arch an eyebrow at him. He can't be serious with that name. "Grogu?" you ask.

He shrugs, placing his bag on the table. "I came home one day and he told his babysitter that was his name now. He won't respond to anything else. So, Grogu."

You look back to the bouncing toddler. He's still grinning, nodding along with what's been said about his name. They must not be lying then. Either that, or it was some elaborate prank between them and you would never be in on the joke. 

"Well okay, Grogu it is." 

You extend your hand out to Mando, offering your name alongside it. He offers a leather clad hand in return, giving you a firm handshake. You're pleased when he only gives your hand a gentle squeeze, not crushing it like so many other students have done. His gloves are unique as well, black with orange fingers, the leather well worn in. It's warm to the touch, his body heat radiating through the thick fabric. 

"Mando," he says, officially introducing himself as he takes the seat on your other side, across from Grogu.

"Mando," you repeat, cementing it as a truth from the rumor mill. "Got any other names?" You hope that comes across as casual and not intrusive. He hasn't even gone to remove his helmet, telling you he isn't a man who cares much for people prying into his business.

"No. Why?" Mando cocks his head slightly as he asks, the helmet adding an exaggerated look to the movement. He reaches into his bag, pulls out some crayons and a pad of paper, pushing them over to Grogu.

You shrug, trying not to think about how you heard his name might be David from someone in your composition course. "Just thought I'd ask. One hears many things around campus and it's hard to tell what's true or not."

"What do you mean?"

That question makes you pause. Surely he knows. Part of you is still convinced he’s doing this act on purpose, trying to gain notoriety for some reason. The way he asked though, something about it tells you that the poor man is clueless about the buzz he's caused.

"Mando, you're like the talk of the town right now. We only just met but I've heard plenty about you," you explain. It's hard to tell with the helmet on, but you're fairly sure he's shocked underneath. Grogu ignores you both, excitedly scribbling away on his paper.

"I'm fairly sure most of it's just rumor and speculation, but still. You're like a thing around campus," you add.

He's quiet for a moment, his laptop only half out of his bag. "Oh," he finally says. "I didn't know."

Grogu gives a happy shriek not a second later, breaking the awkward tension that had begun to creep into the room. He's beaming, holding up his crayola masterpiece. On the paper there is what appears to be a hastily drawn frog using every color in the box.

Mando returns to himself, pulling his laptop the rest of the way and continues to get set up. "Great job, kid. It looks good."

Most people would have said that dismissively, a platitude to get their child to stop bothering them. When Mando says it though, the authenticity is palpable. He said six words and you can hear the pride lacing them all together. It’s sweet, the obvious affection this clearly private man has for the toddler. 

You can’t help but wonder what his connection to Grogu actually is. The way he spoke just then, if you had to put your money on it, you’d say father. The kicker then though is if he’s biological or not. And if not, then how else does a grad student get strapped with a three year old? Thinking about all the potential scenarios is enough to make your head hurt.

You’re also left wondering where all the more violent rumors about him are coming from. His tenderness is so readily on display that it’s hard to imagine the man before you choking someone because they cut him in line at the local froyo shop. He’s mysterious and gives off a vaguely dangerous vibe, sure, but less than five minutes around him and the kid and it’s obvious he’s no threat to you. He’s just a guy trying to get his assignments done for class, same as everyone else.

Your stomach still catches in your throat as Mando starts unexpectedly tugging off his gloves. From what you’d heard, he never takes anything off: not his jacket, not his gloves, and certainly not his helmet. All anyone knows of his true appearance on campus is that he’s obviously male with rumors flying around about everything else including simple attributes, like the color of his skin. Now, here he is, casually revealing this groundbreaking information to you.

His hands move fluidly, pulling off each glove in just a few easy tugs. His skin matches the heat you felt from them just minutes ago, a warm golden tan, with a few faded lines of scars worn in. Watching him type, pulling his paper up for you to discuss, you feel a deep and sudden ache to have his hands touch you again. A simple handshake is no longer enough. Every stroke of the keys is measured, deliberate, and leaves you wondering how he would use those fingers on you.

“This is what I have so far.”

His voice snaps you back to reality, a quick wave of shame washing over you. Where did all of that come from? It was just a man’s hands for heaven’s sake, certainly not something you should be horny about at two in the afternoon. Not to mention that he came in here looking for your help, not wanting you to start fantasizing about his hands expertly working you over.

You clear your throat and tear your eyes away from the offending appendages. “Great, let me just read the introduction here so I can get an idea for what you’re writing about.”

You settle into working with him easily. His paper is already well-written, just needing tweaks here and there to bring it to the next level. It’s nice working with him. He’s attentive, clearly listening to everything you have to say and taking it into account. He doesn’t even try to challenge you as some of the more macho male students are wont to do. By the end of the session, you can’t help but wish all of your time as a tutor was that easy.

“Thank you,” he says sincerely, tucking his laptop away. “You really helped.”

You smile at him, thrilled with his genuine complement. “Of course, that’s what I’m here for.”

He finishes packing up his and Grogu’s things, with you silently lamenting as his gloves slide back on. It still feels like a ridiculous thought, but he really does have beautiful hands. There’s a small tap on your arm and you look to your left to see Grogu patiently waiting. He’s offering something to you, paper outstretched in his little hands.

“Thank you,” you say, taking the sheet from him. You look at it to see a frog carefully drawn on the page. It’s not the same as the first one he showed you and Mando, this one more deliberate and thoughtful. The colors are still just as varied, but it’s obvious he took more time to think about where he was using each one. You can’t help but smile at his small masterpiece.

“It looks great, buddy. I’ll keep it forever,” you tell him. Grogu beams at your praise, excitedly looking over to Mando. 

Mando nods at the kid. “Yeah kid, I heard her too.” He turns his head towards you. “Thank you again. I’d take good care of that drawing. He’ll never forgive you if he finds out you got rid of it.”

“Does that mean I’ll be seeing you again?” Your own boldness takes you by surprise. You have no idea where that came from, how those words spilled without a second thought. Part of you is already cringing at Mando’s potential reaction.

He surprises you once again though, holding a hand out for Grogu to take. Shouldering his backpack, you hear an amused huff of air from under the helmet. “Yeah, mesh’la, I’ll see you around.”

There isn’t a chance to reply as Mando turns, escorting his tiny charge out of the room with him. You’re a little dumbstruck, now equally surprised with him as you had been with yourself. 

And what was that name he just called you? Mesh’la? You don’t even know what language that could have been, much less the meaning. Something about his tone when he said it tells you it’s a good thing though, that he’s not secretly calling you rude names in some unknown language. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll ever get to find out.

.

.

.

taglist: @honestly-shite

[duchess-of-mandalore]

Bo-Katan Kryze’s Age

Or rather, it’s not polite to talk about a lady’s age, except in this Lady’s case

How old is Lady Bo-Katan Kryze by the time she appears in The Mandalorian? 

We don’t have a canon answer, but we can get pretty close. And yeah . . . it’s a weird answer. But it’s not without reasoning.

Though Bo’s exact age has not been explicitly confirmed, Bo-Katan is in her mid-60s by Mando S2.

How did I get to that conclusion?

1. Dave Filoni has implied that Bo-Katan and Satine are twins, or at least very close in age.

At least twice, Dave, who has said that he has an “extensive genealogy of Clan Kryze,” has referred to a formative event that happened in the Kryze family when "[Bo-Katan] and Satine are six.”

The first is in a YouTube video (source listed in reblog, or search YouTube for the title listed below)

You ask yourself why is [Bo] acting one way & why was [Satine] a pacifist? I have a theoretical backstory that outlines them even at six years old—the two of them—& what transpired to make them who they are today.

- Dave Filoni, The Clone Wars Hangout - February 2, 2013, start at 28:15

The second is in an interview with IGN (source listed in reblog)

I have a rather lengthy backstory that even explains how [Bo] became a Death Watch soldier that goes all the way back to the time she and Satine are six. Because to figure out how she got to that point, and yet Satine is a duchess… I have a whole story about who their father was and what their relationships were and everything with Vizsla, going back for a very long time and how that intersects with Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

- Dave FIloni, IGN Interview, 2013

Both of these sources come from shortly after The Lawless aired in 2013. Yes, it is possible that Dave has since backtracked on this idea, however, until we know more, that’s unwarranted speculation (however, we’ll speculate on whether or not Bo could be younger than her mid-60s by the time of The Mandalorian later).

-

2. Bo-Katan (and Satine) are close in age to Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Even establishing that Bo and Satine are probably twins or close in age, we don’t have a canonical age for Satine in order to solidify how old they are. However, we do know that Satine is close in age to Obi-Wan Kenobi. They fell in love together while they were on the run together during the time that he was a padawan. 

Because this is all we know, the reasoning behind Bo’s age has to rely on Obi-Wan birth (57 BBY). I’m willing to allow for a slight difference between Obi-Wan and Satine & Bo, but it can’t be much (especially since we know that Satine begins ruling Mandlore immediately afterwards). Thus, we’ll consider the difference basically negligible at this point, and just assume that Obi-Wan, Satine, and Bo were all born in 57 BBY.

That makes them 38 years old at the time of Satine’s death in The Clone Wars (19 BBY). Bo and Obi-Wan are about 56 when they appear in Rebels (1 BBY), and Bo is about 67 years old by the time of The Mandalorian Season 2 (~10 BBY).

So yeah. That’s definitely different from how Bo looks in Mando S2. Katee Sackhoff is 40 years old (about the same age as Bo in The Clone Wars), but they really did not try to age her up at all.

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Could Bo be younger?

So, just for the sake of argument, could I be wrong about all this? Let’s say that Dave has backtracked on his original plan to have Bo and Satine be twins. Could Bo be younger? And by how much?

If Dave backtracks on them being twins, he’ll probably have to backtrack on the story that he had about something happening to Satine and Bo when they were six that had a formative effect on why Satine became a pacifist and Bo a warrior. 

(Though it’s only speculation, I’ve always assumed that event was the death of their mother, so in my mind, Bo can’t be more than six years younger than Satine, but I could be totally wrong about that headcanon)

But let’s say that just for the sake of argument, Bo is quite a bit younger. Let’s say she’s 15 years younger than Satine, and that would make her a little older than 50 in The Mandalorian Season 2 (still over 10 years older than Katee). That means that she would have been about 23 years old at the end of The Clone Wars. 

There’s nothing that concretely denies this, but we do know that Bo’s nephew, Korkie is about 18 at that same time (he’s listed as being in his “late teens” in Season 5, in the original novelization of The Lawless), and it’s just hard for me to believe that Bo is only five years older than him. She’s clearly much closer to Satine’s age.

Plus, making her that much younger robs Bo and Satine of a connection that they clearly had at one point. In The Lawless, Satine says that it’s been a long time since they’ve seen each other and that there was a time when the two of them weren’t enemies. Again, there’s nothing concrete here, but I’d have a hard time buying an actual enemies-life feud between them when, for example, Satine is 25 and Bo is 10. 

Impossible? No. But personally, I just don’t think that’s what Dave is thinking about.

-

Was her appearance in Mando S2 intentional, or was Bo’s age simply forgotten/ignored?

As I mentioned, Katee Sackhoff is 40 years old, but they really did not try to age her up in The Mandalorian, even though Bo likely is in her mid-60s.

While this is strange, I do not believe that this is an oversight. Dave Filoni loves timelines, and Katee has said that between takes all they would do is sit together and Dave would tell her everything about Bo’s backstory and work through all the timelines with her. 

So what could the explanation be? Well ... it could be an out-of-universe explanation. It could have been decided not to age Katee at all in order to make her as instantly recognizable as possible in live-action for those who already knew her from the animated shows (I struggle with this though, because some streaks of grey in her hair would not make her less recognizable, especially with that iconic armor).

However, there could be an in-universe explanation. Instead of having Katee play someone who looks like she’s in her mid-60s, Dave may have decided to have her play someone who doesn’t look like she’s in her mid-60s (but still is).

Some options include: 1. Canonizing the idea that was present in the EU that Star Wars humans simply live longer than regular humans (personally, I’m not a fan of this because we’ve never seen characters aging in a way different from Earth humans before, so I think it would set an awkward precedence).

2. Giving Bo herself a reason for why she looks much younger than her age. The one I’m most fond of is the idea that maybe for most of the time between TCW and Rebels, Bo was stuck in carbonite (perhaps by the Empire for some reason). 15 years in carbonite would allow her to be 65 but act as if she’s 50.

3. Hanging a lantern on the whole situation by saying that “wearing a helmet in the sun really keeps the wrinkles away!” or something like that. Bo’s in great shape. She’s led a healthy (if dangerous) life, but it’s not unheard of for people in their mid-60s to be very athletic. However, I do think that if that’s the fact, it still needs to be explicitly referred to.

-

Will we learn more in the future?

I sure hope so. Katee has basically confirmed that Bo’s story will be ongoing and she expects/hopes to be in The Mandalorian Season 3. It’s possible we’ll learn more about Bo’s backstory (including how old she is), and hopefully we’ll get an explanation for her appearance. 

Katee has said that she desperately wants to know more about the story of Bo and Satine, and how Obi-Wan/Satine’s relationship affected Bo as well. Those are all things that Dave has expressed interest in exploring:

I’d give you more detail [about Bo and Satine’s backstory] except I’d like to tell that story at some point in some form of Star Wars media in the future. I’ve discussed it with a couple people, and we’ve started to architect it into the timeline of Star Wars somewhat, just to see where these things fit.

- Dave FIloni, IGN interview (2013)

So I’m just clinging to the idea that perhaps some day, we’ll be getting more answers. Bo’s appearance in The Mandalorian and bringing her story to a more general Star Wars audience certainly bodes well for more details on the Kryze family story in the future.

[lucemferto]

You know, I've been reading a lot of discourse on the Dream SMP's failures and I want to throw some thoughts at a bigger brain than my own to see if they're any good.

I think the SMP's main issue, the fundamental flaw which has caused the downward spiral of narrative quality is not actually anything to do with the narrative - it's that the narrative is suffering from poor world building and conveyance, which is in some way endemic to the medium of minecraft streams.

See, the problem is that unlike some other video-game based story, like Red VS Blue*, the DSMP doesn't have much of an assumed lore that can be taken from the game medium. RvB is essentially a Halo AU, so stuff like the Aliens showing up is explained by the intertextual knowledge the viewer can apply from the Halo games. But that doesn't exist for Minecraft, so the CC's have to put in the work themselves and they didn't.

*I know RVB is very different to DSMP (although I'd argue Quackity's lore streams are getting close to it) but ignore that.

So because there's little to no base lore, and the CCs didn't expand upon the worldbuilding early on, it means HUGE parts of the world have no concrete truth in the Dream SMP. Take Death for example. The idea of permanent death was just... not a thing. Not until Schlatt died. At Tubbo's execution, sure it was shocking, but it wasn't like he'd actually die - there was no understanding it was possible! Same for the independence war, Eret's betrayal, Tommy and Dream's duel, etc. Permanent Death only comes when Schlatt, and subsequently Wilbur, kick the bucket.

So Wilbur and Schlatt are DEAD dead. Okay, that's something that apparently can happen. But then Wilbur goes on reddit and responds to a question about 3 canon lives, says he likes it, and BAM! Now the SMP has an official canon, and death has stakes! But it retroactively gives much more narrative weight that didn't exist and wasn't intended to so many events!

Not to mention, there's still no concrete basis for what makes a death "canon". Why you get three. There's an afterlife and a goddess of death and totems of undying and immortals, not to mention minecraft's default Zombies, Skeletons, and oh what's that? Ghostbur? Cool, what the fuck is this worlds metaphysics anyway. Coherent worldbuilding? Nah, who needs it.

Death is one huge, glaring example. But the DSMP crew hasn't given enough thought to so MANY aspects of the world these characters are in and it kneecaps the narrative. You can't tell a good story in a setting that doesn't have established rules because how do we have anything resembling reasonable cause and effect if the rules of the universe are basically set out on a whim.

We don't understand their economy - businesses exist and presumably generate profit somehow? See: BigInnit Hotel, Tommy monetising Church Prime. But how does this mesh with villagers and stuff?

Countries can exist, sure, but none of them seem to have concrete laws or anything that actually... makes them countries. Your anarchist syndicate doesn't work as a plot line when there's functionally zero difference between "guys being dudes" and a country except what they call themselves. L'manberg had no clear legal system, no currency, no actual mechanism for the president to exert power - the entire reason Wilbur called the election is no one doing what he said!

Which brings me to L'manberg's elections... over 200 thousand people voted. Who are they, canonically? Citizens of L'manberg who have no representation on the server? Are they the fucking mobs? Is the Canon explanation that L'manberg's elections were online and people in a far off continent voted?

I can't wait to see how they handle the End. It will most likely be a train wreck.

My ultimate point is that the narrative would benefit an awful lot if the creators sat down and hashed out the details of their world. It might even let them weave some themes and story elements into the world, which they can later pull from instead of their asses.

Yeah, the problem is that the Dream SMP is kinda at a crossroads in terms of what it wants to be.

Does it want to tell a serious (or, rather, non-farcical) story within this Minecraft-world they created or do they want to do more casual rp? Because with casual rp that does not necessarily care about story consistency or prioritizes the viewing experience over the playing experience a world with consistent rules and traditional storytelling and worldbuilding might seem too restrictive.

Back in Season 1 that wasn't too much of a problem, because - in spite of how well told it all was - they still had a fairly simple story and skewed pretty heavily and obviously towards the casual rp, "this isn't a serious story we're trying to tell"-vibe.

Even Wilbur's descent - probably the darkest part of the story - carried itself with much more grandeur and theatricality when compared to Tommy's exile and Dream's torture.

But the fact of the matter is that Dream SMP-content has attracted a considerable number of fans specifically interested in the storytelling and narrative. People like Quackity, Karl and Dream play to those preferences by dialing up the sincerity of their storytelling, by reducing the metafiction, just generally treating the story more like a story being told to an audience and less like friends having fun.

If they want to push the storytelling of the Dream SMP, I definitely think that heeding what you said would probably be a good call. Because now they're in this weird twilight zone, where it's not casual enough to succeed with wacky improv-bits, but also not consistent and intentional enough to tell a story that matches their aspirations.

[sevenkittensinatrenchcoat]

The Broadway Revival Doesn’t Get Comedy

Here’s another long essay hating on the Broadway Revival. I promise that this will be the last one of these, because I think I’ve summed up all the problems I have with it by this point.

The title of this essay isn’t universally true. There is good comedy in the Broadway Revival. But, most of it comes from the actors improvising. When it comes to the comic relief numbers of the show, the changes in choreography and staging, and even in plot in one case, generally fail to understand how the jokes in the numbers work.

Now, I know that explaining the joke makes it less funny, but in order to explain why the 2016 comedy doesn’t work, I’ll have to explain why older versions do. Why is the 1998 film funny, and why are bootlegs/pro-shots of earlier productions funny, in places where 2016 falls flat?

To begin with, you might be wondering, “in a show full of strange nonsense and little concrete plot, what would you call a comic relief number?”. There are plenty of numbers in the show that have a comedic tone to them that I don’t consider comic relief numbers. The Rum Tum Tugger is usually full of comedic bits, for example, but it’s not a comic relief number. Why? Because it does something other than be funny and lighten the mood. It’s a song all about a major character who’s just appeared. Apart form Chorus Tugger in the opening, who usually doesn’t stand out much, we haven’t seen Tugger yet. After the cats leave after The Naming of Cats, we don’t see him again until his own number, where he interrupts the party to tell us what he’s all about. Tugger, as a character, is introduced as high-energy and a troublemaker, which leads to comedy, so the song has comedic moments, but it’s not purely a comic relief number.

Most songs in Cats are like this. They’re songs about what makes a character tick, and because these characters are onstage for most of the show, it’s good to let the audience get to know them. But, there are a few numbers in the show that don’t introduce characters and don’t advance the plot. They’re just entertaining little skits that don’t fit anywhere else. These are the comic relief numbers.

In a full production of Cats, in which no songs are cut, there are three comic relief numbers: Bustopher Jones, The Pekes and the Pollicles, and Growltiger’s Last Stand. The first one might be confusing. Bustopher Jones introduces a character. Shouldn’t it count as one of the character songs like The Rum Tum Tugger? The difference is that, while Tugger sticks around and plays a role in other events of the show, Bustopher is only present for his number. He shows up, there’s a song, and then he leaves and is never seen again. This makes the number into something of a non-sequiter.

Gus the Theatre Cat also revolves around a character who’s really only there for his own song. In productions that cut Growltiger, this is all you see of him. But, Gus the Theatre Cat isn’t a comic relief number because it’s one of the few songs that doesn’t have a comedic tone. There are jokes here and there, and in most stage productions the character of Gus is more comedic than he is in the 1998 film, but the song has a softer tone, no dancing, and Gus eventually leaves in tears. Though the 1998 film stands out in this regard, even in other productions, this is not a comic relief number.

Another thing you’ll notice is that Bustopher Jones, The Pekes and the Pollicles, and Growltiger all come after more serious, less energetic numbers. Grizabella the Glamor Cat and Gus the Theatre Cat are both quite sad, and the play basically changes the subject to lighten the mood. Old Deuteronomy isn’t sad, but it’s slow and more serious. When the tone of the show starts to get serious, a comic relief number is added to lighten the mood. The pattern breaks with Macavity, with the song followed by a fight, to show that the stakes have been raised and things are getting serious. Mister Mistoffelees comes along as a more upbeat number, but the change in tone here is pretty much a plot point. Everything seems bleak and then Tugger starts this number to give everyone hope. Mistoffelees restores power after the light goes out as part of this shift. We were at our literal darkest moment and now there’s a spark of hope.

So, now that we know what numbers are comic relief numbers, it’s time to go into how and why they work, or how and why they don’t when things go wrong. Since the Broadway Revival cuts Growltiger, I’ll focus more on the other two, but the new version of The Pekes and the Pollicles borrows from Growltiger, so the stuff that was borrowed will also have to be discussed. But, before we get into all that messy business, let’s take a look at Bustopher Jones:

Bustopher Jones:

Most of the comedy in Bustopher Jones, though there are a few simple fat jokes in there, comes from how other characters react to Bustopher. Bustopher keeps an air of dignity about him as he formally greets everyone and discusses his clubs. He’s not the joke here. This is a song of Amusing Background Events. With the queens, you have Jenny’s crush on Bustopher and Bombalurina clearly not getting it but trying to be polite about it and not kinkshame Jenny over it. With the toms, you have the kittens getting over-excited and the older cats, desperate to impress Bustopher, rushing to stop them from making a scene, making a scene themselves in the process.

In particular, there are three characters to watch in this number who provide the best comedy: Mistoffelees, Skimbleshanks, and Munkustrap. Two out of the three of them, which two depends on the production, will go into fanboy mode, often competing for Bustopher’s attention. Broadway-based productions tend to have Misto and Skimble compete for Bustopher’s attention, while London-based productions, such as the 1998 film, tend to put more focus on Munkustrap. He barely contains his excitement and is shown to be Not So Above It All, though he’s usually more level-headed than whichever cat, Misto or Skimble, he’s being contrasted with.

Basically, the joke is that Bustopher is considered super-important, despite not having a clear place in the tribe’s hierarchy, and everyone goes nuts trying to impress him, get his attention, and make sure that everything is perfect and nothing goes wrong. This joke works best when Bustopher is actually pretty laid-back and everyone’s freaking out over nothing.

The 2016 version doesn’t get this. You do see characters scrambling around, trying to make sure everything’s perfect, and get Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer as far away from Bustopher as possible, but, at the moment when it’s the most important to get this right, it fails.

The biggest problem with the number is Bustopher’s solo. It’s performed well enough, like most of this production. That’s not the problem. There are two main problems: a staging problem and a writing problem. The staging problem is where the above explanation comes in: When Bustopher sings his solo, no one gathers near him. In other productions, a group of toms gather around Bustopher where they hang on his every word, try to get his attention, and try to look important in front of the others. There’s always one, Misto, Skimble, or, more rarely, Munkustrap, who tries to stand way too close. But, 2016 Bustopher is given plenty of room to just stand there and face the audience. No one seems to be paying that much attention to what he’s saying.

There’s also a problem with how the solo is edited and the break that follows it. The problem isn’t that Bustopher’s solo is shortened. Lots of productions do that. The problem is in what’s cut.

The full solo consists of four quatrains: sets of four lines. The second and fourth lines rhyme with each other, so each quatrain ends on a rhyme: rules and Schools, Blimp’s and shrimps, bones and Drones, Glutton and mutton.

The original Broadway run of the show, and many other productions copying it, the second and third quatrains are cut. You go from Joint Superior Schools to “If I’m seen in a hurry”. The 2016 version cuts the first and second quatrains, only including the second half of the solo. The problem with this is that it cuts the first quatrain.

Cutting directly to the third quatrain is musically awkward, because there’s no build-up to this point in the song that’s song loudly with a choir backing it up. But, when it comes to the joke that’s being told in the solo, cutting the first quatrain removes the set-up and changes what the joke is. With the first quatrain, the solo is about the various clubs Bustopher goes to. Starting at the third quatrain, the joke is mainly a list of foods that Bustopher likes, even though the clubs are mentioned.

The first quatrain is the only portion of the solo to not mention food at all. It’s all about the social etiquette of gentlemens clubs. A gentleman in the early 20th century wasn’t supposed to belong to more than one club. So, in order to go to eight or nine, as Bustopher does, one would have to make sure that the clubs didn’t meet too close together, so that someone from one club might see them at another. It’s part of his strategy in going from club to club: he imitates the etiquette of the humans on the surface, while actually breaking all the rules behind their backs.

But, the point is, Bustopher is listing the various clubs he’s managed to get food from. He’s sort of cheating them all, though I doubt they’d care that a cat was frequenting more than one club. Going to different clubs that are located far enough apart that people from club A are unlikely to walk past the meeting place of club B is quite a feat and it takes a lot of skill to pull off. Bustopher knows what clubs he can do this with and what food he can get from them. If he wants seafood, he goes to the Stage and Screen. If he wants curry, he can go to the Siamese or the Glutton. Foxes is too close to one of his other clubs for him to go there, but he can get fresh meat of the same quality at Blimp’s.

The first quatrain sets up and explains the joke. Without this set-up, the joke becomes one about gluttony, making it more of a fat joke than it is when the first quatrain is included. To make matters even worse, the 2016 choreography adds this instrumental break where the cats put together a restaurant for Bustopher and give him various foods, doubling down on the joke being purely about Bustopher’s gluttony, not how he messes with high society. It’s still a joke and people might still find it funny, but it’s not the same joke and comes very close to being “it’s funny cuz he fat”.

The entire point of the number is that Bustopher’s weight is part of why he’s celebrated. He’s fat because he’s clever, managing to trick a bunch of rich humans into giving him fancy food off of their own plates. Because he looks like he’s wearing a tuxedo and spats at all times, the gentlemen at the clubs see him as fitting in, even though he’s most likely a stray. If he had an owner who was feeding him, he wouldn’t have developed this whole routine for getting food. The people who probably wouldn’t give food to a homeless human, seeing it as “feeding strays”, will literally feed a stray just for looking like he belongs. It combines two things that cats tend to love: food and messing with stupid humans.

So, the lack of emphasis on how other characters react to Bustopher and the reason why they react that way weakens the joke. But, to give credit where credit is due, I do like how they double down on Bustopher being Tugger for older women but have Jellylorum seem to be just as into him as Jenny is.

The Pekes and the Pollicles:

Here’s where the Broadway Revival goes completely off the rails. Both The Pekes and the Pollicles and Growltiger are often cut from productions to save time. They’re both “play within a play” scenes, which can be a bit confusing in a show that rarely ever uses dialogue to introduce the numbers. The Pekes and the Pollicles in particular seems to come out of nowhere. “Yay! Old Deuteronomy is here! Now let’s make fun of dogs!”

So, the Broadway Revival, like every production, had to decide what to do with these numbers. Would it keep them? Cut one of them? Cut both of them? But, for some reason, they invented a new option: Combine the two.

2016 Pekes and Pollicles isn’t The Pekes and the Pollicles. It’s a combination of The Pekes and the Pollicles and Growltiger’s Last Stand. The song is moved to where Growltiger is normally done and parts of the melody are mixed in. The Rumpus Cat, as a character, is equated to Growltiger as a character Gus played back in the day. This is where the trouble starts.

Now, I’ll once again stop to give credit where credit is due: The 2016 opening to The Pekes and the Pollicles is really sweet, with Old Deuteronomy encouraging Gus to play the Rumpus Cat one more time. Growltiger is basically a dream sequence of Gus flashing back to when he played Growltiger. Getting to see him actually relive his glory days one last time is nice. If they used this opening for Growltiger instead of The Pekes and the Pollicles, it would’ve been a good addition to the number.

So, Growltiger and The Pekes and the Pollicles are both plays within a play. Why not combine them? Well, the main problem is that The Rumpus Cat is not Growltiger.

Now, a lot of people hate Growltiger’s Last Stand and I’m not going to act like it’s some kind of masterpiece. I personally find the number to be sort of middle-of-the-road. If you see it more than once, the shock value of the cringey Asian stereotypes starts to wear off and, with a few exceptions, the number feels kind of dull. Andrew Lloyd Webber himself said that he was never really pleased with how Growltiger turned out and the London Revival rewrite might be worse than the original, at least musically. But, I’ve seen a few productions of Growltiger that I thought were kind of funny, usually by taking the racial stuff and sort of saying, “We know it’s bad and we can’t make it better, so we’ll just make it worse” and playing it up to the point of absurdity, like a parody of the sort of Yellow Peril stereotypes the song includes. I’ll also give credit to the Tecklenburg non-replica keeping the Siamese in silhouette behind a sheet.

When I say “The Rumpus Cat is not Growltiger”, I mean that how the two characters work comedically is completely different. You can’t just swap one for the other without rewriting the comedy of the entire number to match.

You’ll notice that Growltiger is in the title of Growltiger’s Last Stand. The song centers around Growltiger as the main character. The Pekes and the Pollicles includes the Rumpus Cat in the full title, but said title is so long that you rarely ever hear the song called that. The Rumpus Cat plays a key role in the story, but he shows up later on. The song isn’t about him. He’s not onstage for most of it.

This means that the comedy surrounding Growltiger and the comedy surrounding the Rumpus Cat work completely differently. The comedy of Growltiger is the comedy of Growltiger’s Last Stand. It all revolves around him. This is a joke based on a wacky character. The joke in The Pekes and the Pollicles isn’t about a single wacky character. It’s about a play where everything that could go wrong does with Munkustrap acting as the straight man. He’s the only one taking this seriously, perhaps a bit too seriously. The Rumpus Cat is just another thing that goes wrong. He’s funny, but so is everyone else who calls attention to themselves throughout the number.

Putting Gus as the Rumpus Cat into the Pekes and Pollicles is performing the number but with the joke from Growltiger. The Rumpus Cat enters the story too late for this to work, so Gus spends most of the number onstage, sharing the narrator role with Munkustrap. Furthermore, in order to include Rumpus Catified versions of Growltiger’s jokes, pretty much every memorable joke from The Pekes and the Pollicles is cut. Nothing goes wrong with the rest of the cast. The first Peke and Pollicle say their lines correctly. The March of the Pollicles and the Scottish Pollicles are cut, removing all the gags there, including Tugger playing the bagpipes at such a fitting moment that only Munkustrap is upset at first.

The fact that nobody messes up is especially weird in this version, because it’s spontaneous. Old Deuteronomy decides that Gus should get to play the Rumpus Cat again and everyone just automatically knows their role in the play. The Pekes and the Pollicles is a show Munkustrap put together for Old Deuteronomy. He had everything planned out. There were rehearsals. But, nobody showed up to rehearsals and nothing goes according to plan. If the play were spontaneous and everyone messed up, it wouldn’t be as funny, because that’s what you’d expect. Nobody had time to learn what to do, so they don’t do it right.

Instead of having the comedy come from the cast of the play messing up, the comedy is about how over-the-top Gus is. He’s narrating now, so why is Munkustrap even there? He does sort of play the straight man to Gus’ antics, but, because Munkustrap isn’t in charge here, he can’t show as much frustration. He can only awkwardly question things and be ignored. The worst case of this is with the “heathen Chinese” line. Most modern productions replace “heathen” with a less offensive word. It almost always feels a bit forced, but it works well enough. Some productions just leave the line as is, which makes it seem like they don’t care, but it doesn’t make the problem any worse. 2016 instead decides to call attention to how bad the line is by having Munkustrap question it, with the line being the older Gus’ fault. Not only does this make Gus less likable, it doesn’t actually solve the problem. The song can’t stop to acknowledge it, so, even though Munkustrap questions it, he still says the line anyway, making the whole thing a waste of time. They should’ve either changed the line or left it alone. But, they basically tried to have it both ways.

Trying to have it both ways is the fatal flaw of the number. They could’ve cut Growltiger like the 1998 film did. If you hadn’t seen any production of the show before seeing the 1998 film, you’d never guess that there was supposed to be a song between Gus and Skimbleshanks. It can be easily edited out. They also could’ve kept Growltiger and used redesigned, less stereotypical costumes for the Siamese, like the Vienna Revival did. It wouldn’t solve everything, but an effort would’ve been made. But, by combining Growltiger with another number, they both did and didn’t cut the number. Instead, the messed with and weakened The Pekes and the Pollicles so they could reference Growltiger without actually performing it.

The places were Growltiger’s melody is used for lines in The Pekes and the Pollicles feel forced, because those words weren’t written for that tune. That basically sums up the whole problem. One song was combined with another in a way that felt forced and awkward, because the elements of the two numbers weren’t meant to go together.

In conclusion, I think the Broadway Revival’s comedic downfall came from a sort of indecisiveness. They wanted to keep things the same but also change them, possibly not even knowing what they wanted to change them into, only that they wanted to change them. They wanted to shorten Bustopher’s solo, but not the way it’d been done before. They wanted to cut Growltiger, but not in the way it’d been done before. They wanted to do Cats, but not in the way it’d been done before. 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to try new things. This could’ve been the template for an interesting non-replica if they really committed to doing things in a different way. But, they got stuck in between, wanting to be different, but not wanting to be too different. So, they tried to fix what wasn’t broken and sell it as New and Improved. This paved the way for the 2019 film to do the same, but with even worse comedy and without the advantage of the numbers being performed well by a devoted cast who knew what they were doing.

TLDR: 2016 messes with comedic numbers in ways that weaken them. It makes Bustopher Jones more completely about gluttony and tries to combine The Pekes and the Pollicles with Growltiger, failing both.

[thewritingof-therose]

Hi! Last week, with the publishing of the 20th chapter of Hasard, I reached the 100 kudos on the fic, so to celebrate it, here’s some kind of bonus chapter where I talk a little about the conception of the story, along with comments about each chapters. 

Enjoy!

----

So… 20 chapters and 100 kudos already. To be honest, by the time I started imagining this story, I wasn’t really expecting to be able to celebrate that milestone of kudo on a single fic and even if I already celebrated the 2000 kudos in general this year, if we make a quick calcul based on the numbers of kudos and all the fics I’ve published, at the time I’m writing those words, it’s the same that if each one of my fic had only 20 kudos… So yeah, finally reaching the hundred on a single one makes me so happy \o/

Anyway, here’s some trivia and fun facts about Hasard and the first twenty chapters of the story.

First of all, some history:

I had the idea for Hasard in May 2018 as I was watching the tv show Lucifer (I am not up to date with it, please don’t try to spoil me this show ^^’) and I imagined one scene that just… shaped the entire story and it took me less than a few hours to know that I would write it. Even if I wasn’t sure how long it would be and that there had been some changes. And no, I won’t tell what scene kickstarted it all because she still has to come and it could be quite a huge spoiler. 

Following it, my brain quickly went into developing the full story and a few things changed. On the top of my head, I can say that Maiev was meant to be more on her own, almost a complete independent Hunter that would have also been resented by the other Hunters, along with a way more black and white view of the demons. She was meant to be more aggressive against all demons and really thinking that they all deserved to die, but I softened that side of her as I shifted the world building with the presence of hybrids. 

At first, the hybrids were meant to be a really rare kind and I wanted to keep that status for a few select characters because it could have brought some really good story for them. Then, as I kept working on the worldbuilding, I came to the idea that actually, hybrids were extremely common, but at the same time, the demon’s presence was still a secret from most of the world because most hybrids started centuries ago and their blood and physical attributions were weakening the more they were reproducing. So, about 80% of the world is made of hybrids of all kinds of generation (who is my way of scaling the demonic influence on their life) and the 20% left is shared with the full demons and full humans. 

Full demons are simply people who don't have a single drop of human blood in them. Usually, they are born from two other full demon parents or they just appeared like that (that’s the mytho). They are extremely powerful and good magic users, but now, they are rare. It was easier to be a full demon millenia ago when they ruled over the world and the few that are left in the current world of Hasard, survived either by hiding really well, manipulating their way to stay alive, or simply because they accepted to work with the humans and they went on. 

My best example of a full demon is Velen. 

The full humans, are the humans who either had never gotten a single drop of demon’s blood in their bloodlines, either they purged the bloodline after making sure that there had been at least 10 generations since the last time a hybrid was born (technically, every child following it would be considered as an hybrid, but the other parent would be a full human to weaken the demon’s blood which each new generation). Full humans are rarer than full demons and they tend to be bad news as almost all of them are associated with the Priesthood (who’ll get some more explanation later.)

I haven’t presented yet one of them to give an example, but one is ready to show up in the Second arc of the story. Won’t say who to not spoil the surprise x)

As for hybrids, there are two kinds. The one born from a demon and a human, and or hybrids (two hybrids will keep creating hybrids and technically, as long as one of the parents has human blood, the bloodline will stay a hybrid one). And the second one hadn’t been introduced yet. We have characters that are that kind, but it’s some worldbuilding elements that will show up later and so, I'll keep it to myself for now. Feel free to theorize though! And usually, most hybrids will simply call themselves demons instead of showing signs of weaknesses by not being a full one.

For the title of the story, it had been extremely hard for me to find one. Ever since I started preparing everything, it had a codename and it was “Modern AU” and it stayed like that until the very minute of the publishing of the first chapter. I was already going towards “Le Hasard Fait Bien Les Choses” but I was bothered because it was French, and no matter what, I couldn’t find a good English idiom that would have all the nuances of the French one. The only thing that comes close to it would be “Fate is a funny thing” and yet, I’m not entirely satisfied with it. So, after a long debate with myself and help from other people, I came to the conclusion that I had to keep the French title if I wanted to be happy with it. 

It might not help much to get people interested, and I’m considering adding “Fate is a Funny Thing” after it but I’m debating it.

I think that's already a lot, so let's move to the trivia per chapters:

A Muffled Shout In The Night

Oh boy, first chapter! I was so excited to finally start the story but I was also really stressed. I tried to give away a quick summary of how the universe was working, along with my two main characters + showing up the first supportive characters towards Maiev. Trying to present all the cast (so adding Illidari and more about Illidan) right in that chapter wouldn't have really worked so, instead, I went to show that a more "Legion-y" timeline could be expected thanks to Khadgar and Velen's presence in the chapter. 

I kinda hope that I succeeded to already show Maiev's obsession towards the Betrayer through her first lines.

Though I will be one hundred percent honest with you. The end of the chapter with Illidan running away, don't expect much from that interaction. I kind of always forget about it unless I'm reading back the chapter… I only needed a reason for them to stop fighting and the chapter to carry on.

But who knows, maybe I'll tie it to something one day.

Two Black Coffees And A Meeting, Please

When writing it, I always knew that Drelanim was on the other side of the call (or at least another Hunter) but as I read the moment a few times, I realized that I could have gone for a completely different way. One that would have probably surprised everyone.

But yeah, in another universe, it's Illidan who calls Maiev because he's in front of her place as they decided to meet for breakfast there. It would have been quite nice and unexpected for the story, especially that Illidan would have gotten right away the reveal that Maiev was actually the Warden as she would have complained about the wounds of the night. 

In the end, I went on with my first idea and made them meet for good in the chapter.

And, like with the first chapter… the "current problem" that he talks about to Kor'vas went nowhere… I'll more than probably get him to acknowledge some uninteresting side story for it at some point.

Memories Of A Rainy Day That Will Never Be Forgotten

For that one, one word: Ouch.

By the time I started to write this chapter, I was also preparing the Advent Calendar of 2019 and I had decided on telling Naisha's story, and I had to realize that I still had to foreshadow some elements from it to make it work. Of course, the title is fully referencing the day she died and the demon that Maiev killed right at the beginning of the chapter was similar to Naisha, putting Maiev in a stabbing mood. And it led us to another necessary addition for the Calendar's chapter: Malfurion.

(I'm also wondering how many people guessed right away that Malfurion was the one Illidan was calling…)

Brother, My Brother, Tell Me What We're Fighting For? 

Even if Malfurion had more of a cameo than anything in the Calendar's story, I felt the need to introduce him to put the bases of the twins' relationship. I always knew that he was a doctor and that he was mostly helping Illidan when he was getting in trouble, and as their backstory is different from WoW and that they are both demons, I didn't want to go on the canon path for them. 

I cannot tell much about it because we'll get fast to their backstory (Second arc) but here, Illidan and Malfurion mostly grew up in a world where it was them against the rest of the world. They were born during the glorious days when demons ruled the world and they saw it change through the millennia that followed. After everything, they would be devastated to lose the other and suddenly be the only one left. This is why they are way closer than they could ever be in canon (and also Tyrande isn't part of their backstory so it helped them keep a good relationship). Sometimes, they part ways for a few decades. Malfurion goes back to medical school somewhere and makes sure that he's up to date for it, or Illidan just moves with his clan to experience new things. But they stay in contact and always come back in proximity of one another.

The end of the chapter was my obligatory "shock reveal/cliffhangers" before a break. But well, I wanted to keep the Legion's existence in my sleeve for a little longer, but I realized that it would allow me to make them into a concrete threat as the story will progress + allowing Illidan and, mostly, the Illidari to be a little more presents into the story.

Actually, the chapter's name comes from a song from the occidental version of the first Pokemon movie. It's a line from the song that plays when the Pokemon and their clone fights, and i used it mostly for the brother's mentions and because it would totally be a thing said by one of the twins in their past…

A Flower Arrangement Made With Your Face In Mind

At that time, I wanted to make a chapter to develop a little more the supporting characters of the cast, and as I was taking back the writing of the fic after a four or five months break, I thought it would be nice. 

So, we got a little side dish of Illidari for it and that’s pretty much the only chapter (until now) where Illidan or Maiev barely appears in it. Yet, I threw some worldbuilding and foreshadowing in it and I still like it, so it isn’t really a filler.

I’ll probably do more chapters like that in the future, but I’ll see with the pacing of the story.

Willingly Accepting Your Death Isn't As Easy As I Thought

I don’t have much to say about this chapter. I still really like it and especially Maiev and Velen’s interaction. 

Along with showing that we were far from a potential romantic relationship, at least on Maiev’s side x)

A Laugh That Will Echo Through The Ages

Oh my God, that chapter! I could probably talk about it for hours but we would quickly reach the spoiler territory so I’ll see what I can tell without shooting myself in the foot.

I loved giving Khadgar some more identity and I like his relationship with Maiev. In the story, they are around 10 years apart, with Khadgar being the youngest. He’s like an honorary younger brother to every Hunter and even if Maiev won’t admit it, she’s kinda thinking the same. 

If he had been in the spotlight for this chapter, it was actually because I was thinking of writing his backstory for the Calendar of 2020 but in the end, I scrapped the idea and wrote something else. But It’ll happen at some point.

You Were In My Dream Last Night, And I Found You That Morning

A simple and nice chapter to calm down from the action heavy that was the precedent. I do throw some crumbs of foreshadowing and backstory, mostly for Maiev, but we will have to wait quite some time for the full one. Even if to be honest, before I release it fully, there will probably be some people that will stitch everything from my crumbs.

Illidan’s dreams are meant to be a plot point all through the story, and I decided to start them with this chapter. And of course, we can see that it’s the first chapter where Illidan, even if he isn’t conscious of it, starts to like Maiev more than he should have at that point.

A Red Dress And Heels To Hide The Knife In Plainsight

I loved writing that one. Showing that Maiev had more hobbies than hunting demons, along with showing how you had to act to get her to do things that she would refuse to do otherwise. Most of the time, if Sira gently asks if she wants to go do some shopping, Maiev always has something else to do. Not that she hates shopping, just that she thinks there’s better things to do. 

I could probably go more about Worgens and their existence, but it would spoil some part of the story :/ 

And honestly, I had an alternate version of this chapter where Illidan saw Maiev and Sira hurrying in the streets, followed them and he would have eavesdropped on the conversation about him. It was obviously bad because it was confirming that Maiev was at least a Hunter (which he won’t know until a while by that time) and it would have been totally an excuse for smut x)

A Warning Falling In Deaf Ears

With this chapter, I’ve been working on mixing the idea of chapters 5 (to concentrate on rest of the cast) with more of the main story. Like that, I show that there’s more than Illidan and Maiev in this universe, but at the same time, I’m still progressing their story by sharing the chapter between the two. I really liked writing Kayn like that and I think that one of my favorite things to write in this story, it’s Illidan and Malfurion interacting.

A Touch So Familiar, Yet So Strangely Threatening

I remember writing that chapter and suddenly realizing that it was going to be longer than the precedent, and i thought for a moment that I had to cut it in half, but I couldn’t find a satisfying way to do it, and it would have fucked up my outline, so I just carried on with it until I had told everything that I had to. 

With that chapter, I’m trying to show that Maiev can be really crazy when it comes to the Betrayer and his followers, but I can assure that she wouldn’t wound any of the Hunters, even if they cannot really be sure about it. And the little dialogue with the B-word made me laugh and yes, Maiev already called the Betrayer a bitch to his face. In 13 years, it would have been weird that she didn’t think of it at least once.

For the rest of the chapter, I just wanted to show that Maiev and Illidan were becoming comfortable with each other + setting up a reason for her to be worried about Illidan to show him her good side.

Screaming Under The Full Moon Won't Change Your Fate

The one thing I keep from this chapter, is that I can’t wait to dive more into Velen and Maiev's relationship.

Otherwise, yeah, if Illidan were to go into a fight only wanting to use magic, he could kill Maiev without breaking a sweat. But he likes the challenge and feels like it wouldn’t be satisfying to annihilate her with just a spell, so he’s fighting blade against blades, unless Maiev is really close to kill him.

A Fateful Call That Only You Can Be Blamed For

I have nothing much to say about it. It was one chapter that I really wanted to write and publish, because it’s the one where Illidan just let his guard down around Maiev for good, and now that he won’t try to trap her into admitting that she is the Warden, it allows him to see Maiev in another light.

That anyone can guess what it is.

Oh yeah, just that I threw some good crumbs of the fact that Illidan is a self-loathing addict in my fics and that it’s one of the reasons he falls so hard for Maiev after this chapter. But it’ll be a good talk for either another chapter, or later.

Going Separate Ways For A Night But Not The Life

Nothing to say, it was a transitional chapter to show that Illidan really believes that Maiev isn’t the Warden, and that there’s more than the fight to them.

Stab Me Once, Shame On You. Stab Me More Than Twice...

A fun little chapter. Velen is more modern than most people can believe and once again, I like writing about the interactions between Illidan and Malfurion. Of course, if you go back to read this one after chapter 20, you might see that I already knew how it was going to happen from this chapter, as the 20th got his title in this one.

I just hope that people read the story from the Advent Calendar 2020 to know what happened in the middle of it.

And From There, Fate Laughed At Them

I could talk for hours about Cordana in my AU. I just love what I’m going to do with her characters and I hope that my readers will like it too. 

But to give some crumbs, Maiev and Cordana have been best friends since high school and she’s the first long-time friend that Maiev had made in her life and thanks to Cordana, she met with Sira and the group, but most importantly Velen. Cordana is a hybrid of sixth generation, so her demonic attributes are almost non-existent, but she kept some supernatural ability from her legacy. She knew from a very young age that she wanted to hunt demons and protect people, and met with Velen early to prepare her future job. Once she discovered that Maiev had some natural abilities to hunt demons, she saw them as the future “Best Best Friend and Hunters” and convinced Maiev to give a go to the hunt. She was forced to move out in another city but she kept contact with Maiev and the rest of the group. In terms of strength, abilities and hunting score, she is right behind Maiev.

Otherwise, I will add that I had a lot of fun writing the conversation between them about Illidan and how he would be better than the Betrayer *winkwink*.

I didn’t make it clear in that chapter and it won’t be important, but Khadgar has a crush on Cordana.

Cordana meant well with the message, and even if in real life, I would condone such action, here, I needed it to move things around because yes, neither Illidan nor Maiev would make the first step if it wasn’t for Cordana.

During the fight, at the beginning of the scene, Illidan totally complimented the Warden on her abilities but don’t try to make him admit it.

Last thing: my nickname is Fate. I’m the one laughing.

Games, Games, All Is Games

I don’t really have anything to say about this chapter.

Sometimes, Cowardice Allows The Survival Of The Smartest

To be perfectly honest, I regret how I handled Cordana’s week in the story because I’ve barely done anything with her but I can explain where the problem is. I knew that I wanted Illidan to discover the warden’s identity on chapter 20, and I planned all my updates around that one fact, but when it came to the outline, I wasn’t sure what to tell between the chapter 13 and 20 to reach that point and thanks to the Calendar, I moved things around that one and I ended up having the idea of making Cordana appears (She should have come in person in the story much, much later). And as I needed chapters 18 and 19 to build up to the reveal, I ended up completely stuck and making her appearance too fast and if it wasn’t for the message, she would have been useless to the story. But I realized it too late and I couldn’t rework my outline in time.

But well, i’ll give her a better mini-arc in the second arc of the story to atone for it.

Otherwise, I hope that the feel of the countdown to the reveal starting by the end of the chapter had been caught by some people x) It’s obvious to me, but well, i’m the writer.

Step By Step, Tick Tock Said The Clock

Just a build up chapter for the 20th. Even if I really like it and that I’m preparing the ground for future plotlines but I’ll let you guess which one it could be x) 

I know I haven’t make it clear in the chapter, but Malfurion knew that Illidan was lying when he pretended that his problem was the Warden “may-be-may-be-not-a-hybrid/demon” but as he also know that his brother is a “stubborn motherfucker” he let it slid. 

And yes, somewhere in my mind, there’s an alternate universe where Maiev accepted Illidan’s invitation and that they would spend the evening at her place. Without a reveal first.

Any Last Wish?

I don’t really have something to add to this chapter. I succeeded to write it just as I wanted.

I just had a long debate with myself as to how I wanted it to end, as I had the choice between cutting it right as Illidan is saved by the Warden (maybe not revealing her identity before the next chapter, or it would have been the last line) or just as I did, by them reaching her place first. I chose the latter because I want Chapter 21 to start with a really specific scene and I thought that it was better than a cheap cliffhanger. 

The last thing I'll add, is that for the story to go well, I had to make Illidan be the first to be aware of the identity of the other, mostly because he can be the one to change his mind more easily about wanting to kill the Warden. If it had been Maiev discovering that Illidan was the Betrayer at this moment of the story, he would have died.

And now, because I'm not done yet, here’s some info about the bonus chapters that were published independently from the main story!

AC Day 8: A Morning

First calendar, in 2018, and I already knew that I was going to write Hasard. It had no name by this time, but I had written that small scene to try out a few things and see how it’ll work.

There’s a really high chance that I end up rewriting it for the main story, but I think that a few elements will change. We’ll see.

AC19 Day 24: Hasard: Naisha

Probably the worst (in terms of feels) chapter of the story yet.

Naisha is probably the character who had a story and fate the closest to canon and I wanted to keep it like that, as it allowed to shape even more the hate between the Warden and the Betrayer. Honestly, she wasn’t deserving of a death like that, especially that if the Betrayer hadn’t intervened that day by trying to kill Maiev, Naisha would have survived.

Actually, in any other universes/storylines possible, she would have survived. Unfortunately for her, she fell right into the feud and became a victim of it.

At this point of the story, Illidan isn’t even completely aware of what happened that day, and he has no idea who Naisha was. All that he knows is that he thought to have killed the Warden, only to find her, even more angry in the following week. He just knows that he had killed the wrong person, but he had no idea who. Maiev herself doesn’t know for sure that it was the Betrayer the culprit, as she couldn’t see clearly in the rain.

Of course, it’ll end up being brought up in the story :)

AC20 Day 8: Hasard: Malfurion’s Hellish Day

It should have been Khadgar's backstory actually for that Calendar. But even if I have a good idea about it, I realized that I wasn’t completely inspired and that I was missing a few details to be able to write it. So, in the end, I went desperately after another idea and thanks to Melowen, I think, she got me on the idea of writing about Malfurion.

In the end, this chapter, meant to be a funny one with Illidan and Maiev forced to be in the same place for the same job, with Malfurion, aware that it would be a catastrophe to let them discover the truth, ended up shaping the last chapters currently published.

And if you are wondering, no, Illidan wasn’t trying to trick his brother in giving him the secret identity of Maiev. He was just trying to get his brother approbation about the woman he was starting to crush on.

The line: ‘“Yeah, everyone tells me that I look like a famous actor,” Malfurion faked a chuckle, glancing at the woman.’ is a reference to my Bodyguard AU where Illidan is an actor. 

Alright, that’s all for the trivia! Thanks for reading this bonus chapter, and the main story until now, and I hope you’ll keep enjoying reading Hasard!

Rose

[chasingthebizarrepodcast]

Are Ghosts Possible? Maybe.

By H Flores

Sightings of ghosts has been an ancient and just as shocking phenomenon, that it has been recorded by whatever means people had available to them at the time. There are legends that have been passed through time, that are well known and then there are new stories told by people that experience something unexplainable to them. Usually, the person's credibility is limited to people that know them and people that are sure ghosts exists. Outside of that circle, there are hundreds of millions of skeptics waiting to question everything about the sighting and assuming that every sighting is a hoax.

Questioning things you're told is great! As the matter of fact, it's encouraged for everything else in life, not just when you talk about ghosts! However, just like a person can fall into the side of the spectrum where they believe anything without a doubt, people can also fall to the other side of the spectrum where you're too skeptical that all the explanations you come up with are just as easily impossible as the sighting is to you.

The first issue that everybody seems to have regarding ghosts is that there are hardly any pictures of ghosts or evidence that backs up a witness's story. Or is there? There's actually a handful of pictures and videos of ghosts out there. Are they blurry? Sometimes. Can they be hoaxes? Yes, of course. We have photo shop these days. You know what else we do have? CCTV. People also have ring cameras. People install cameras inside their homes for security reasons. People put security cameras and lights outside of their homes that are triggered by movement. We have pictures from smart phones too and more importantly, we have picture from big chain stores parking lots and in-store after hours where security guards have caught apparitions and activity from shopping carts moving by themselves to well-placed items falling off of shelves. There's more and more CCTV cameras in schools, churches, businesses, etc.. that have caught sounds and images. There's even videos and pictures taken from hunting cameras in the woods! There's ghost hunting TV shows and when a show is created for public viewing, you better believe that it will be edited to make it look more interesting. Outside of that, very few-- probably a handful of people since the 1920's-- have gotten any attention from creating hoax pictures to circulate in the media. As the matter of fact, there's way too many people who lose all their credibility, gain public ridicule, and have lost their jobs because they have reported a sighting. The more prestigious your occupation is, the more hesitant you are to come forward with your story of a ghost sighting or anything weird for that matter.

But let's focus more on the issue that there's more access to smart phone cameras and the pictures uploaded from apparition sightings are as blurry. Why would that be? Again, yes, it could still be a hoax or a failed attempt at photo shop-- we will always keep this in mind throughout this blog. However, when people get shocked and witness the unexpected they can get excited or shocked in most cases. You can try to take a picture of anything, but more than likely you'll have more blurry pictures than sharp, focused ones. Also, if you are witnessing an apparition, it's usually very random and completely unexpected. A handful of people have been lucky to have a camera at hand to take a picture of an apparition. If they think about drawing out their camera at the time they're looking at something shocking and unexpected, or something that their brain hasn't even had time to register yet because it's that weird, then they're probably going to try to take a picture as fast as they can before the sighting disappears. Sometimes, all you can really do is look at the weird thing you are looking at in awe.

If the scientists who are curious about what ghosts are could freely study this phenomenon to find out what it is, they probably wouldn't be able to create a reliable experiment where they can have the variables and controls, and it would be difficult finding a unit of measurement to conduct the experiment. What can be done is to rule out all other factors in a person who is experiencing hauntings to be ruled out. Some paranormal investigators who follow a scientific process try to rule out issues with the building, like checking for noisy or leaky pipes, and other factors. They try to rule out any problems surrounding the neighborhood, like leaked gas pipes, problems with the water supply, or any problems that could be affecting a family physically. There have been scientists, like electric engineers, who have been able to make their own measuring instruments that have helped them find a way to measure activity in a house hold. Nintendo Wii has been a great tool to be able to detect invisible anthropomorphic forms lingering in people's living quarters. These methods still don't take into account the unreliability of an appearance or activity by an apparition.

People that have tried explaining this phenomenon, is that ghosts are mostly energy. There are some articles (more of this on a future show) that propose that the brain is like a radio receiver (Radboud University Nijmegen, 2014). This leads to a fringe idea that consciousness is separate from the brain and that our brain is picking it up the way a radio picks up a signal (University of Surrey, 2020). While the articles that I retrieved these ideas from are questionable sources and the ideas might seem strange, we don't understand the brain enough to cross this out and as far as this opinion piece goes, there have not been any studies to dig further into this phenomenon on humans. However, knowing what we know about electricity, it has a hint of possibility (Davis, 2018). It would explain why some people could see apparitions and other people can't. If we look at other species, like birds for instance, we know that an organic brain is able to pick up magnetic fields to help them navigate (Roach, 20017). Some fish species are able to communicate via the release of chemicals or even light electrical discharges. This idea is not as esoteric as it sounds.

Overall, anything we conclude from ghost sightings is inconclusive because there are no real studies being conducted to understand this phenomenon. Can we attribute ghost sightings to mass hysteria? It could be. In most of the ghost sighting cases there's no stimulants to cause such behavior. The one recurring pattern of ghost activity are old buildings or old artifacts; places where people have died; recent renovations on an old building; people tampering with the occult; and a recent death of a family member. Usually people that are affected are people that live in those buildings or the people and relatives of the people that tampered with said occult activity. There's hardly any stories of a ghost haunting a neighborhood or an entire community.

Believing in ghosts is a subjective experience for now until proper studies can be made that make a concrete conclusion. Experiencing a ghost sighting or having enough unexplained phenomenon experiences is what usually changes a skeptical person's mind. There could be a lot of benefits from figuring out exactly what the ghost phenomenon is. Whether it's a psychological glitch that makes people sensitive and tuned to another reality; whether it's a physical issue that comes with the option of medication; whether we could learn something about what's out there on the other side-- Either way, it's worth exploring to see what we find in my opinion.

Sources:

Davis, Dunavin. (2018, Mar 12). Yale Scientists: Human Consciousness Seen As A Wave Of Electricity. WSHU Public Radio: NPR News and Classical Music. Retrieved October 3, 2021 from https://www.wshu.org/post/yale-scientists-human-consciousness-seen-wave-electricity#stream/0

Radboud University Nijmegen. (2014, January 22). Brain works like a radio receiver. ScienceDaily. Retrieved October 3, 2021 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140122133713.htm

Roach, John. (2007, Sep 27). Birds Can "See Earth's Magnetic Field. National Geographic. Retrieved October 3, 2021 from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/birds-can-see-earths-magnetic-field

University of Surrey. (2020, October 20). Researcher Proposes New Theory of Consciousness. NeuroscienceNews.com. Retrieved October 3, 2021 from https://neurosciencenews.com/electromagnetic-consciousness-17191/https://www.wshu.org/post/yale-scientists-human-consciousness-seen-wave-electricity#stream/0

[atxlxs]

Beyond The Veil: Chapter 12

Eras was in the middle of waking up that morning with her smoothie, Muska had left 30 minutes ago to head to UA, and she was zoning out the window next to the dining table.

The pungent scent of week old blood wasn’t the best of scents, yet Eras refused to obtain blood any other way except through blood banks. Most Vampires had donors or they just asked politely for consent (When the veil was made there were rules put in place to prevent vampires from extorting humans or keeping them as glorified blood bags for their whims, a lot of rules-)

A soft chime from her phone brought her attention back to the dining room table where her phone laid face up, the words ‘Message From Unknown’ were bold and sat at the top of her notifications. With a confused tilt to the head, despite no one being around to see it, Eras opened the notification.

Unknown

123-xxx-xxx: This is Aizawa Shouta, your ward's homeroom teacher. I believe I promised to keep you updated so I recommend watching the video file I’ve sent below.

123-xxx-xxx: *Video File ‘punishment.vid’ Attachment*

Tapping on the file, Eras watched with mild skepticism as it downloaded, hoping that this isn’t some weird scam text message even if logic dictates it isn’t. Once it finished, Eras felt her lips twitch as she saw a bundle of cloth being hung from the ceiling, suspiciously familiar blond hair sticking out of the bottom.

The video did not disappoint.

The camera shook slightly, as if whoever was holding it was holding back giggles as the familiar rugged man rolled in one of those ancient box T.V’s that schools used to keep for educational videos in elementary school. The cloth bundle swaying fruitlessly in the wind as whoever, most definitely All Might, was in it struggled. After stopping the table roller with the T.V in front of the bundle, Aizawa walked over to the cloth and with a few quick movements, uncovered All Might's eyes and spun him to be stuck facing the T.V. Pulling out a cassette tape of all things, those were impossibly older than the T.V itself was, Aizawa loaded the T.V after turning on the power.

Eras choked on her smoothie when a Nedzu mascot appeared on the screen with cartoonish glee to its expression as it gestured animatedly at the title on the screen.

‘Teaching For Dummies! Vol:1 of 126: Safety 101’

Aizawa then pulled out a second roller cart that was filled with cassette tapes, most likely the other 125 volumes of the Teaching For Dummies series, as his grin bordered on maniacal.

“You’ll be hanged for your crimes as you watch Nedzu’s Hell Course videos on teaching. You will then be assigned a 5 thousand word essay on how you could improve based on what you learn. Good Luck”

Aizawa then turned towards the exit and power walked out of the room as muffled screeches came from the restrained All Might, the person holding the phone started guffawing and ended the video abruptly. The now black screen reflected Eras’s face as it was stuck in a sadistic grin.

Eras cackled.

*Eras changed Unknown’s name to AizawaShouta*

Eras: Appreciated, shall I send you a gif of him struggling like a worm on dry concrete?

AizawaShouta: yes

Eras: *wormwiggle.gif*

Eras: will you be getting an after shot of the torture?

AizawaShouta: Oh definitely, I assume you’ll want that as well?

Eras: it’ll be a good reaction image to use

AizawaShouta: …

AizawaShouta: i’m going to torment the teachers group chat with it

Eras: as you should

Chuckling to herself in the dining room, Eras sipped on her smoothie as she sent messages back and forth with Aizawa. The tension easing in her shoulders as time passed. She was still tired, exhausted really, but the air seemed a little lighter each time she breathed.

AizawaShouta: I do still wish to apologize myself though, I don’t exactly know how the blond buffoon had managed to get battle trials accepted but normally I have them learn safety and test out costumes on the first day.

Eras: unnecessary but accepted. Really Aizawa-san it was just as you said, the quote “blond buffoon” unquote is at fault for this so no harm no foul.

Eras: Though if you did happen to do something yourself that warrants my visit you’d be lucky to still walk the next day.

AizawaShouta: ….

AizawaShouta: mildly terrified

Eras: only mildly? I’ve lost my touch

AizawaShouta: No, no I would be more affected if it weren’t for my policy to not harm students or allow them to get hurt by being overly cautious about what they do.

Eras: Ah, I feel a bit better than.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Shouta laid on his side, wrapped up in his obnoxiously colored sleeping bag, with his phone resting between his hands in front of his face.

After Eras had left the meeting yesterday, Shouta had been stuck there for another 3 hours as Nedzu let them know that Bakugo would be pulled in for his own meeting with the principal this morning to discuss his previous schooling as well as his punishment. If he said anything concerning, which was definite at this point, then Nedzu would launch an investigation into Aldera. Currently the walking bomb was going to be in ISS as well as attending a counselling session. (Since mandatory therapy wasn’t an option without further evidence to prove their theories about his mental health) If Hound Dog says it’s necessary, then anger management will be added.

That had drained him in more ways than one. Though the universe did decide to give him a break in the form of free reign of All Might’s punishment. Which was carefully planned. When the meeting had ended, and the parents had left the premises, Aizawa had wrapped All Might in his capture scarf and dragged him back to the faculty lounge. The remaining teachers watched on in amusement as he hooked the weapon around a support beam on the ceiling and left the blond hanging from the ceiling.

Before he could leave to grab the… videos, Shouta tossed his phone to Hizashi.

“Record this.” He simply stated and walked towards the storage closet in the lounge.

He could tell Hizashi knew what he was grabbing because as the cockatoo caught the phone, his eyes widened before he slapped a hand over his mouth to stop the laugh he wanted to spill and immediately flipped on his phone; swiping for the camera.

Once he had finished setting up the torture, he left. He would not stay around to hear Nedzu’s hell videos. The cheery animated mascot talked condescendingly the whole time and seemed to read your mind as it tore down your thought process to the simplest of structures before ripping into your teaching style.

Each of the staff have had to sit through all 126 volumes at least once and each and every single one swore to never need to again. It was cursed in all the wrong ways.

It was around 7 in the morning when Shouta had remembered a particular part of the meeting from yesterday, turning on his side he whipped out his phone and pulled up the newest contact he had added in his phone for this exact reason. Sending a quick explanation of who he was, he sent the video Hizashi had taken for him to her.

He was not at all expecting to actually enjoy the conversation that followed.

He could admit with little fanfare that he was not the most conventional person to talk to. He was gruff, sarcastic, logical to a fault, and used dry humor that bordered on morbid some days. This is why he was genuinely surprised to see Eras not only take his humor in stride, but to respond in the same way.

Now at 8 o’clock in the morning, 25 minutes away from the start of homeroom, Shouta was actually going to miss talking to someone. Hizashi could never know.

With a sigh, he sent a quick goodbye and snorted when he received a picture of a cat with a face of disgust in response, he got off the couch and headed to his classroom. God it was the USJ field trip today too, grumbling he slid open the faculty door and left.

Completely missing the looks of horrified bewilderment on his colleagues' faces.

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Tags:

@baguettehead

[itsclydebitches]

Hello, everyone! I come bearing a new recap series to fill the void until Volume 8. This came about because a bunch of friends went, “Hey, this book is really bad” and I responded with, “Really? I should check it out!” Now here we are. 

Thrilling tale, I know. 

The rules for this project are simple: 

Each recap will cover a single chapter

Each chapter will be read as time and energy permit 

Each chapter will contain typos because such is life

Recaps are a general response to anything and everything I notice about the text. This includes positives, negatives, and the wishy-washy stuff in between. Despite the summarized conversation above, I’m not going into this with the intention of ripping BtD to shreds, nor am I looking to absolve it simply because it’s ~RWBY~. I’m attempting to be as objective as one human individual can be

However, given that there will be criticisms (a lot of them so far)... any rude messages taking issue with that will unceremoniously be deleted :) 

Onward! 

We open with Sun’s point of view as he wanders the streets of Vacuo in the very late night/early morning. We learn that he’s been back for a month, but it’s “only now that he felt like he was truly home.” Why that is isn’t made clear. There are two actions connected to this thought: getting into a dangerous battle and helping out a stranger. It’s up to the reader to decide which (or both) is what makes Vacuo feel like home to Sun, but either is going to say a lot about his characterization. Is he a Yang, only feeling like things are normal when there’s something exciting going on? Or a Ruby, attaching feelings of self-worth and belonging to his ability to help others? As said, it’s arguably both. 

To clarify this situation: Sun is following a group of three who in turn are following a woman. He says that they were “three goons who were up to no good. At least he’d assumed they were up to no good when he spotted them stalking a woman out of some new nightclub downtown.” Which begs the question, which is it? Do you actually know the three are “stalking” her or is this another “assumption”? Are they up to no good or not? Retroactively, their fight with Sun and the narrative connections to the rest of the plot seem to prove that they are indeed baddies... but Sun didn’t know this at the time. By his own admission he’s drawing very firm conclusions (they’re “goons”) based on circumstantial evidence. I’m torn between praising him for taking action - that woman is presumably safe now thanks to him - and acknowledging that this is a problem with our whole cast. All our heroes jump to conclusions like this and have very confident ideas about who is “good” and who is “bad” based on little to no evidence. Really, I take far less issue with this particular situation and its context (Huntsmen in training sees a woman potentially in danger and takes non-disruptive action to try and prevent a tragedy. That’s good) than I do this trend of characters “assuming” things about others across the series. 

But enough on that. Sun’s plan to keep an eye on the situation fails as they “somehow noticed him” despite taking extra precautions to keep out of sight. From this he deduces that at least one member, Brown, is a faunus because the faunus are much more attuned to their environment. Both due to biology and growing up trying to keep safe from humans. I find the bigotry part of that explanation to be odd. I’ll admit that I might be reading way too much into this. So far there’s a lot in this novel that’s not obviously bad but did make me pause and go, “Ehhh...” Just because this moment draws a line between the racism allegory and (literal) animal traits. Take a second to swap out the fantasy term of “faunus”: Character, as a black man, is more attuned to his environment because he’s learned to protect himself from white people.” There is something to be said for minority groups being more cautious in specific situations, or being wary of how they present themselves to new people, etc. But in this case faunus are supposed to just be more attuned to things 24/7 because of fantasy-racism, which sounds a lot like an evolutionary, animalistic trait that they... already have? Saying that the character with animal eyes and ears can more easily pick up on someone tracking him is one thing. Saying that the discriminated against character can more easily pick up on someone tracking him because he’s just hyper-aware at all times very much like an animal...that’s “Ehhh.” It’s one of those things I doubt I’d be paying any attention to if RWBY had given us better representation overall. It’s reached a point where the way the faunus are handled is so messy that any statement like this invites at least a dollop of suspicion. But I’ll leave that to others to cry “Yea” or “Nay.” 

So Sun is forced to confront these three. They wear masks and “matching silver armbands around their right biceps.” Sun thinks that they’re “just average gas masks” and thus way less scary than the grimm masks the White Fang prefers. All I could think was: 

Gas masks are plenty scary, Sun, you’re just watching the wrong TV shows.

These four start the obligatory pre-fight chit-chat which includes Pink calling Sun “kid.” Every time this happens I feel a tiny bit of my soul wither and die. The protagonists’ ages and the implications attached to them have been a thorn in my side since Volume 5. I mean, heaven forbid we acknowledge that these are teenagers often making immature decisions when the text itself keeps reminding us of how young they are. 

But I digress. 

As the fight begins Sun concentrates to activate his semblance and we’re given a rather strange flashback. Sun, along with his older cousin Starr Sanzang, are moving with their clan after their “previous settlement had become too attractive to Grimm.” Which is its own, massive can of worms labeled with the question “What suddenly makes a home ‘too attractive’?” But we have nothing else to work with there so I’m leaving it alone. The primary takeaway is Sun’s reaction to the move itself. He wants to know why they don’t fight and despite being told that a) not everyone in the clan is as strong as him and b) he has a tendency to be hotheaded (even though that’s presented as familial teasing), he’s not happy with those answers. It’s amazing how much of this characterization makes it feel like Meyers barely read the RWBY wiki, yet he’s simultaneously managing to hit on a lot of the series’ major themes - including the idea that heroes must never, ever retreat. We could easily take Sun’s thoughts and chuck them into any of Team RWBY’s heads during Volume 7 and you’d be good to go. Not standing and fighting when that would likely mean your death? The horror! 

This perspective also (for me) says a lot about his semblance itself. This is the moment where he starts working towards it, so given what we know about semblances, souls, and the circumstances in which they’re developed, I’d say his emotional state is pretty important. Sun wants to stay and fight. He’s told that not everyone is powerful like him. He’d need more people in order to defend his home. Then he literally creates more of himself to help him in battle. Problem solved. 

The strange part is what kick-starts this development. Sun sees a magical (???) tree that appears to him and him alone. It’s “a desert willow, green and flourishing with white, rose, and violet flowers” and it’s what he focuses on whenever he needs to draw on his semblance. It’s unclear what, if anything, this tree is meant to represent. There’s obvious symbolism regarding a “flourishing” plant in an otherwise desolate wasteland, but we are not (as of yet) privy to whether this tree is a real thing with a real, tangible connection to Sun. It would be easy to conclude that Sun just imagined it despite his own insistence otherwise, but in a story where semblances, magic, and gods do exist? Who knows. I hope this is going somewhere because it’s frustrating to drop something ~symbolic~ into a universe that’s supposed to be governed by concrete, magical rules and leave the reader floundering over how to categorize that.  

We come back to the fight where Sun decides that Brown was “both the leader of the group and the most dangerous. Why? Because he was hiding the most.”

Hold up. 

How do you know he’s “hiding the most” when they’re all wearing identical masks and doing the same, shady stuff? 

Why in the world is the concept of hiding things connected to leadership? 

Not going to lie, it feels like a dig at Ozpin. “Oh yes, the most secretive one must be the leader because we all know leaders do nothing but hide things. The two are so intimately linked that I can look at three people who are all acting suspicious, single out the guy who I’m assuming is a faunus based on no evidence, and thus further conclude - since he’s totally hiding that part of his identity - that he’s the leader here. Simple deduction.” 

Sherlock Holmes would be ashamed. 

More importantly, you know who’s also a dangerous leader who hides things? 

Oh, also this guy. 

But instead of acknowledging this we’re offered the simplistic explanation that this is the leader of the bad guys because only bad guys hide stuff. Right. 

I’m already getting the sense that Sun’s characterization - like Ruby’s - is going to suffer in this book. They should absolutely be written better given who they were when we first met them, but both end up being mouth pieces for the weird themes the story keeps insisting on including. To be clear, I’ve got a lot of issues with Sun in this story so far, but they’re issues that I don’t think should exist. It’s not “I dislike this character” but much more “I dislike this character but that’s only because you’re making them do and say really OOC things. Give me back the version of this character we had before.” There are characters I don’t vibe with and then there are characters who should be on my wavelength but the creators went and changed course somewhere. That’s always disappointing. 

(Aside #1: Can we just take a moment to acknowledge how awkward posing and answering your own question is when we’re supposed to be the PoV? That “Why? Because...” is incredibly jarring. I’m focusing on content over prose here, but the prose needs a whole lot of work in places.)

So Brown is apparently a faunus, and the leader, and hiding extra stuff because Sun says so. The two begin fighting in earnest (with Sun’s clones taking on the other two), but don’t worry, Sun has enough confidence to spare: 

“Brown had some kind of martial arts training similar to Sun’s – but he wasn’t nearly as good.” 

Brown proceeds to knock Sun down and disarm him. Easily. 

The fact that Sun can’t land a hit on this guy then causes him legitimate shock.  “‘Oh crap’, Sun thought. ‘I’m losing. How am I actually losing?’” I don’t know, maybe because you’re a second year student going up against an adversary of unknown age, origin, and skill? The confidence of all our characters is astounding to me. Doesn’t anyone ever question whether they can win a fight? Or acknowledge that losing one is expected? Both Sun and RWBYJNR seem to have come out of the Battle of Beacon thinking, “We have survived one (1) battle and therefore we are the best ever. Losing? Never heard of her.” There’s a difference between writing a confident character and writing a deluded one. Sun should not be blindsided by the fact that someone else in the world is more powerful than him. 

(For the record, the eternal exception to this is Toph Beifong. They really let a tiny blind girl say, “I’m the goddamn best” and made it fact. I am, and will always, be here for that.) 

Amidst this shock Sun thinks about Beacon and immediately shies away from those memories. I quite liked that. I wish the web-series did more to acknowledge how traumatizing that battle was (akin to what we got with Yang’s PTSD and Ruby’s nightmares before both were dropped), so I’m pleased to see nods to it here. 

Sun is just acknowledging how he probably should have brought some friends along when a copy of Tri-Hard lands nearby. Huzzah! Velvet is here! Sun should be pleased right, especially since he was just thinking about how much he needs help? 

“Great. Team CFVY (coffee) was here.” 

Ugh. Well this is frustrating to read. What precisely is going on here? Sun is the guy defined by “You should always get friends involved!” Then he ditches said friends to chase after Blake. While working through this decision he finds himself in a situation where he’s alone again largely because his team is mad at him. So he’s coming to terms with how much he misses and needs those friends... only to think a sarcastic “great” when someone actually show up to help him? 

He’s written as an asshole here. Velvet and Yatsuhashi save him - the three baddies use a smoke semblance to run off - but “Sun bristled at the implication that Velvet and Yatsuhashi had rescued him.” Can’t we have one character with a bit of humility? The writing attributes Sun’s attitude to a competitive school where prestige is everything. Team CFVY’s unexpected arrival and their subsequent fame seems to rankle... but we’re really going to ignore that they’re here because, you know, their school was destroyed and their headmaster murdered? I know that people think stupid, selfish things all the time (god knows I do), but it’s a bit much to have Sun be so over confident that he gets himself into serious trouble, get annoyed when he’s offered help, and then insist that he never needed that help in the first place. That kind of behavior rankles and for good reason. It’s fine as a flaw for one or two characters, but we’re seeing this across most of the main cast. Is no one able to look at someone outside their team and just go, “Thanks for the assist”? 

The one redeeming part of this scene is Velvet practicing her quips. I support her attempts to sound like a cheesy action hero. 

(Aside #2: There had to be a better way to deal with the team names other than writing “CFVY (coffee)”...)

As the three chat we learn that the rogue huntsmen Carmine and Bertilak may be involved with these shady characters, the missing people with powerful semblances, and I, who has not read the first book, learns about Gus, someone capable of amplifying negative emotions. There’s... a lot attached to that reveal, but I’ll leave it alone for now. It’s not fair to drag it when I’ve only gotten a passing mention. 

Alongside discussing Very Important Plot Points, the group dives into Sun’s difficulties with his team: 

“Besides, the guys are still a little annoyed with me for ditching them.”

“To chase a girl,” Yatsuhashi added.

“It wasn’t like that.” Not entirely. “Blake needed a friend.”

“And your team needed you,” Velvet said firmly. “After everything we saw at Beacon, with everything going on in Mistral—”

“They were fine.”

“But you’re their leader,” Yatsuhashi said.

“They’ll come around.”

“Maybe you would be able to regain their trust if you didn’t keep running off without them,” Yatsuhashi added, sheathing his great sword.

Sun narrowed his eyes. “I liked you better when you didn’t say much.”

Sun is, again, written as an asshole! It might be understandable that he wants to ignore all his mistakes, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating for those around him - or the reader. Like admitting that he needs help and then getting annoyed when he gets it, here Sun refuses to engage with the actual problems in his behavior. He won’t admit those mistakes. You ditched your team to chase after a girl. No, no, it wasn’t just about chasing her... Your team needed you. No they didn’t! You’re their leader. Pff what does that have to do with anything? It’s deny, deny, deny. On top of a mean quip at Yatsuhashi. I’m just reading this train-wreck like

I want to re-emphasize here (because I keep getting asks with the accusation) that yes, I do understand that stories need conflict and yes, I do want characters to have flaws. It’s just that lately RWBY feels like all flaws all the time, most of which are never even acknowledged as flaws. Which mean the characters aren’t improving. There are very few moments lately where I feel like our heroes are legitimately kind, or wise, or intelligent, or compassionate, and that’s making it hard to connect with them. Knowing what I do of the fountain scene with Yatsuhashi, Fox, and Neptune makes things even worse. Would it be so horrible for Sun to be happy that his friends came to help? Or not sneer at Team CFVY so much? Or admit that he messed up? It’s the amount we’re getting across the whole cast that’s a problem, alongside rejecting other conflicts that would be much more logical for the story and much more emotionally fulfilling (such as Team RWBYJNR disagreeing about anything). I find it exhausting to watch. And now read. 

I did, however, like Sun calling Yatsuhashi out on his own insults: 

“Besides, people have attempted [invading] before,” Sun said. 

“Back when Vacuo had something valuable, like Dust,” Yatsuhashi said. 

Sun whistled low. “Spoken like a true outsider. If you don’t want to turn Vacuans against you, you’ll stop making comments like that.” 

Yatsuhashi looked away. 

It’s a legit thing to call out. Please don’t imply that our city has no value now that we’re not producing this specific commodity. Sun expressed those feelings in a way that didn’t crucify Yatsuhashi, but let him know he’d spoken out of turn and helped him understand why he, as an individual, should care about changing his perspective (“If you don’t want to turn Vacuans against you...”). I’d say this is one of the better exchanges in the prologue, showing us unexpected sides to each character (Sun isn’t just a laughing goof, Yatsuhashi isn’t the wise Asian stereotype) without them feeling OOC. 

We then end the prologue with Sun promising to help CFVY with these investigations. Offering on behalf of his team without asking, that is. I’m sure that will go over splendidly. 

As a final note before I sign off, I apologize if these recaps are... bad? Lol. Yeah, we’ll be blunt and straightforward in that description. While working through this I found myself reiterating so much of what I say in the regular recaps + asks, just because these problems seem to be creeping their way into RWBY’s supplemental material too. Doesn’t mean it makes for engaging reading though. In addition, I found myself struggling to articulate thoughts on this prologue simply because I didn’t know what to make of these writing choices. What’s up with that tree? Why are Sun’s thoughts going around in a contradictory circle? What am I supposed to do with all these lines that grind the story to a halt because my brain goes, “Wait what?” The easy answer to all this is, “It’s not a well written book, Clyde” and yeah. From what I’ve read for myself and heard from others, fair enough. But I feel like there’s just enough here - that potential RWBY is known for - that I want to try and clearly lay out as much as I can... even if it still comes out a bit muddled. 

It’s summer. I just finished another massive project. There’s a pandemic on. My brain is as fried as my eggs this morning. If you’re okay with the outcome of all that, stick around :D

[renaerys]

20. “Have you slept?” (Brick/Blossom)

{{Original posting unfortunately deleted. Reposted here.}}

February Fic Prompt #20 originally requested by the lovely philosophicwax. 

Summary: It's finals week at college, and Brick has hardly slept in two days while studying. A weird monster attacks because of course it does, and he has to team up with Blossom to bring it down while all he really wants to do is take a nap. 

xxx

The great thing about college was that Brick was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year completely on his terms. No brothers nagging him for shit, no cleaning up after anyone but himself, and no disruptions during study time. His life, his rules, quiet and tranquil.

Except for the giant, sentient hairball currently terrorizing north campus that some poor asshole (Brick) would have to deal with.

Because the worst thing about college was that he was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year without his brothers around to follow his lead without question.

“Evacuate to Prospect Avenue!” Blossom’s clear, commanding voice rang out over the shouts and screams of fleeing students.

Which, cool. Drunk, sleep-deprived twenty-year-olds in their pajamas at three in the morning were totally going to listen to the imperious Super flying above them in her pink camisole and Ivy University logo sweatpants.

Spoiler: they didn’t, and Brick was forced to abandon his warm, solitary room and his physics textbook in only a pair of old basketball shorts and his favorite red T-shirt in favor of saving a hysterical Freshman from split ends that would have literally split her end to end.

Crimson afterglow marked Brick’s path and singed the sentient tresses that crawled like tentacles after the panicking Freshman. Pudgy and cute and in the throes of a panic attack, she clung to Brick’s shirt even after he set her down a safe distance from the monstrous hairball.

“Please don’t leave me!” she sobbed.

Brick pushed her off him. “Get a grip, you’re not dead.”

She reached for him again, frightened and unable to defend herself against the supernatural monster and yes, okay, logically he knew it wasn’t her fault but fuuuuuuuuck what a pain in the ass this was.

He sidestepped her and she stumbled, almost falling, until he caught her by the elbow so she wouldn’t break her nose on the concrete. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

“Please,” she sobbed, genuinely frightened.

Brick winced. “Just get to Prospect Avenue. It’s that way.”

And with that, he left her to follow the screams of her fellow fleeing students because she was not his problem. If Blossom had already decided on a proper evacuation plan, then that meant less work for him. Lord knew he was too tired for this shit running on three hours of sleep in the last 50 hours courtesy of two finals in as many days back to back. He had four left. He did not have time for whatever the hell was going on tonight.

Crack!

Blossom crash-landed in the green not four feet from where Brick stood. Her sweatpants were streaked in grass stains and her mane of wild, red hair was swept up in a very messy bun.

“Brick,” she said, a bit breathless, a bit pissed off.

“Blossom,” he returned.

Their passive-aggressive greeting was cut short when a lash of prehensile hair came slamming down on top of them. They bolted in opposite directions, nothing but pink and red vapor, and reconvened high up in the air. Brick got an eyeful of the creature steamrolling through campus and wondered why, even so far from Townsville, he still had to deal with this weird crap.

Talk about a bad hair day, Boomer would have said if he was here. He wasn’t, and Brick just scowled.

“It’s growing,” Blossom said grimly.

Son of a bitch, she was right. The thing was sprouting more arms to help it crawl overland and tangling around the gothic architecture like the ivy this elite college was named for. It slithered through windows and drain pipes, as though searching for life hiding inside.

“Cool,” Brick said.

He was so tired.

“Can you try—”

“Not unless you want me to burn down all of Balin Hall in the process,” he interrupted her, already knowing what she’d ask. Ignoring her frown he said, “What about your—”

“Same problem, opposite outcome. These old buildings will crumble if I freeze them,” she said.

Brick matched her frown. “Fine. Then we split up.”

She looked at him far too gravely for three in the goddamn morning. “That’s not a plan.”

“It’s the best you’re getting from me right now, so stop complaining.”

That earned him a scathing glare. “Brick—”

But she didn’t get her chance to chastise him because a massive hair tentacle shot toward them with deadly accuracy and exploded into nine smaller tentacles when it was upon them. Brick darted away from the mutant tresses, but he wasn’t quick enough. Thick, black hair wrapped around his ankle and yanked him down hard enough to send his jaw rattling.

The stone shingles of a Sophomore dorm building came rushing close. He twisted, tried to get away before impact, but the thing was fast and strong and those shingles couldn’t break him but hell if they didn’t hurt on impact. Brick grunted as he gasped for breath. His back roared with pain, but the Chemical X bonded to his bones was quick to mitigate the damage, leaving him breathless with the brief, phantom memory of it. He gathered scarlet energy in his palms and blasted the hair tentacle shackling him, but the damn thing only quivered like water wherever his energy blasts hit it.

He felt it before he saw it, a cold so unnatural it grabbed him like a vice and squeezed until he nearly choked. Ice crystals bloomed upon the hair, slowing and freezing it until it lost all sentience and cracked like dry pasta under Brick’s immense strength. He blasted out of there and pulled up alongside his savior.

“You said you weren’t going to use your ice breath,” he snapped.

“Thanks for your help, Blossom, I really appreciate it,” she said, flying alongside him in a swoop back around toward north campus.

Brick rolled his eyes and immediately regretted it. Exhausted and severely sleep-deprived, he briefly saw double and faltered. A warm hand steadied his arm.

“Hey, are you okay?” Her voice lacked the smarmy edge this time and she looked at him with a measure of concern.

Brick was about to tell her to focus on the monster instead of him, but he didn’t get the chance when more hair lashes shot after them with the persistence and speed of homing missiles. Brick grabbed Blossom and flew, but he didn’t make it ten feet with her in his arms before a mass of writhing hair surrounded them and constricted.

Blossom gasped for air as she tried in vain to extricate herself, but between Brick’s ironclad hold around her and the hair shackling them together, neither of them could move. The hair squeezed tighter, and Brick gagged.

“B-Brick,” she said, her voice raspy against his neck. Her hands were flat against his chest and they were pressed so tightly together that he could hear his own heartbeat thundering under her fingertips. Even now, he could feel her trembling as they slowly, painfully suffocated.

And now he was good and furious.

Acrid, black smoke swirled in his lungs, hot and building. As little as he could move, he fisted the back of Blossom’s camisole in a silent plea. But three months and change here without either of their siblings around gave them ample time to learn each other free of distraction, and words were hardly necessary anymore. She ducked her head against his shoulder as close as she could get, and he turned his head as far from hers as he could manage before opening his mouth and releasing a concentrated inferno upon the hair binding them.

The effects were instantaneous. The fire gorged on the evil strands with abandon and drew a chilling scream from deep within them. Soon Brick and Blossom were suffocating from the smoke and heat rather than constriction. But it lasted only a moment; the second he felt the pressure around them slacken, he took off as fast as he could before the fire could consume them too.

So much for not burning down north campus, he thought, resigned.

Blossom coughed against him, and he realized he was still holding on to her. Rose met red as she looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said.

He as so tired that all he could do was stare at her for a minute. He was pretty sure she’d never looked at him like that before, without a trace of suspicion or superiority, genuinely happy to have him there.

The hair shrieked again, and both of them looked down on the burning mass below. Except, it wasn’t burning much anymore. The hairball somehow managed to sever the huge chunk lost to Brick’s fire and save itself from burning up entirely. The melted mass stank and smoked and made Brick’s bloodshot eyes water as he watched it turn to ash in mere seconds. Unfortunately, the rest of the hair that had escaped the conflagration was resilient and began to gather and engorge as it angled for Brick and Blossom, like it knew they were a threat it needed to eliminate.

“That hair is psychotic,” Blossom said with such gravitas that under different circumstances, he probably would have laughed at the lunacy of it all.

“Yeah,” he said. There wasn’t much else to say.

She’d pulled away as they hovered, sharp eyes narrowed in thought. Brick, head buzzing with adrenaline keeping him excruciatingly awake, also racked his brain for something that might help him. It came to him like lightning, and Blossom glanced at him in the same moment with the same conclusion.

“What if we led it—” she began.

“—to Tower Lake?” he finished.

She smirked. “Genius.”

“Efficient,” he agreed, managing a tired but determined grin of his own.

The great thing about college was that Brick was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year with the only person on the planet who was sharp enough to understand him and his thought processes without the added annoyance of explanation.

She took off in a burst of pink, and he flew in the opposite direction, knowing he could trust her to move and adapt with him without the extra guidance their siblings often required.

Her laser eye beams drew the hair monster’s attention eastward, and it roiled like a thundercloud as it scrambled up the side of Balin Hall and launched into the air after her. But Brick was there and ready to blast it with his own laser eye beams, enabling Blossom to slip away from the grabby tentacles. Something within the tangled mass roared, animalistic, and soon it was tearing after him.

Just as it was about to grab him, there was Blossom with a burst of icy wind. They tag teamed the monster, leading it ever closer to the lake where the rowing team practiced, remote and clear of students at this hour. Enraged, the hairball clambered after them, determined to swat them out of the sky until they rebuffed it with fire or ice, only to draw it in again with their lasers.

The giant hairball was not smart, to the surprise of absolutely no one, and when it reached the shore it went tumbling into the dark water, unable to slow its momentum. Screeching, the mass writhed and tried to backtrack to save itself, but the water sapped it of its supernatural strength and the tentacles fell limp and lifeless the wetter they got, until it was nothing but a normal, extremely disgusting hairball.

Brick and Blossom stood an arm’s length apart on the shore watching the mass slowly sink to the bottom. It was an oddly hypnotic sight, and he couldn’t look away even as his eyes began to droop.

“Well. We’re going to need a lot of Draino to clear this out,” Blossom quipped.

Brick, half aware of his bare toes sinking into the damp soft sand, laughed at that one. And then he fell.

“Brick!” she shouted, far away.

He blacked out for all of three seconds, just long enough for her to grab him before he could lose what was left of his dignity by falling flat on his ass. Sluggish, he was slow to react to her looping his arm over her shoulders so she could bear his weight and fly them back toward campus.

“Have you slept?” she demanded in that snobbish way she had.

“Think I just did,” he said, barely able to stay awake despite the ignominy of being half carried like an invalid. That thought ignited something in him and he jerked, making them swerve.

“Watch it! Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

He rubbed his stinging eyes and didn’t really fight her as she led him back through the window to his single dorm room. Luckily, the hair monster hadn’t infiltrated his building, so his room was in the same state as he’d left it.

She let go of him and he landed on his twin bed against the wall. And then he realized what had just happened.

“What the fuck, Blossom?” he growled and staggered to his feet.

He didn’t take even a step from his bed before she pushed him back down with her strength.

“Have you slept?” she asked him again, but it came out sounding more like a threat this time.

“I’m vaguely familiar with the concept,” he snapped and tried to get up again.

She pushed him down again and pressed her hands down on his shoulder so he couldn’t get up again. Red eyes glared up at her, seething, but she matched his venom with her own, and the sight made him falter.

“They say sarcasm is the lowest form of humor. You need to sleep.”

“I need to study.”

Her hands squeezed his shoulders, and her expression softened. “Is that why you’re so tired?”

“No, I’m always tired after dealing with you.” Absurd, every minute of this. He couldn’t even stand up with her weighing him down and blocking him.

Her hands sparked with her power, pissed off at him as usual. Brick wasn’t one to believe in fate or some higher plan, but it was times like this that he seriously suspected the universe was fucking with him by giving him a literal perfect match with the most annoying personality he had ever encountered.

He sighed and rested his weight on his hands on the bed. The power she channeled to her fingers had a lovely, soporific effect as it danced over his neck and shoulders, though he would never, ever admit this to her. “What are you even doing here?”

Her fingers clenched and slackened, like she couldn’t decide, and he bit his lip to stifle a groan. God, that felt good.

“Rest,” she said, much closer than she’d been before.

Her tempting fingers moved from his shoulders along his neck and threaded through his short, red hair. Her nails were clipped but not so short that he couldn’t feel them scrape pleasantly along his scalp.

Sleep-deprived going on his third all-nighter and utterly drained after the adrenaline burst of having to fight a monster tonight in the midst of finals season, Brick finally gave up and leaned into her touch with a needy sigh.

“Blossom,” he mumbled. She smelled faintly of smoke and of him, and the heady scent made him smile to himself. His hand found the hem of her camisole and clenched it gently, a silent, delirious plea to bring her closer.

So smoothly he barely even realized it was happening, she laid him down on the bed, her hands heavy on his chest as if to push him down deep enough for the covers to swallow him whole. Her hair fell around his face, slipped free from its precarious bun, and he breathed her in.

“Rest now,” she whispered, those magical hands still dowsing him in her cool, calming power like waves over his skin.

Unable to resist her, he finally nodded off into a deep, dreamless slumber and didn’t wake again for another twelve hours.

The worst thing about college was that he was on his own, living his life, nine months out of the year with the one girl he could never seem to escape, and whom he’d never managed to keep.

xxx

Blossom gently played with his hair as he lulled to sleep at last, the last vestiges of his controlled resistance finally spent. His fingers remained curled around the hem of her shirt, warm against her waist. Sitting next to him on his bed, she watched his face slacken, at peace as his breathing evened out.

“Why are you so stubborn?” she murmured, running her fingers over his freckled cheek.

He had the determination and purpose of an avalanche, inevitable and absolutely crushing. It had given him the power to catch up to her in school as kids, to challenge her at every turn like no one else could, and to motivate her to try harder, to be better, to give him a challenge worth rising to. She couldn’t say when her feelings had changed. There was not a day, or a moment, or even a sudden epiphany that revealed her deep and tranquil affection for him.

It was as gradual as the changing tides, deep waters hiding truths that had always been there, quietly waiting. She’d been accepted Early Admission to Ivy University, the culmination of her high school efforts, and he wasn’t even sold on college when they went their separate ways for the holiday break. And then, in passing, he mentioned the pre-Frosh weekend in April for new admits; he’d be going, and could he borrow her notes for missed classes since she probably wasn’t?

She couldn’t pinpoint when or how, but maybe that was why. As much as he preferred to remain ineffable and unknowable, he had failed with her. Rather spectacularly, though she would never expose him like that. Not until he was ready.

Carefully so as not to disturb him, Blossom leaned close and kissed his forehead. Ice crystals melted upon his skin, and his fingers unconsciously closed tighter around her shirt.

Stupid, stubborn boy.

But there was time.

The best thing about college was that she was on her own, living her life, nine months out of the year with the boy she’d never been able to leave behind, and never would.

[kendrixtermina]

An Alternate Take on The Prologue

It seems to have been almost universally accepted that the events in the prologue were an assassination attempt meant to remove Dimitri and Claude so that the war would go smoother later on. I’d like to present an alternative possibility. 

I have no solid 100% certain proof I’m not even going to pretend that this is anything other than my own interpretation that’s no more valid than the other one. It’s just a possibility. 

Thus it is ultimately an opinion that I wouldn’t base further conclusions on. We don’t know for a fact that her goal wasn’t, in fact, assassination. 

Still I think because there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff going on in that scene that ppl seem to miss, that I want to dissect here regardless of wether you agree with my thesis or not

Significant Clues: 

The Actual Motive

I’m not sure if it was Seteth or a random Monk, but I think more than one character goes on about how the Church’s reputation that they worked for so many years would have been tarnished if anything happened to the heirs.  Especially when you consider there aren’t that many Blaiddyds left and even less Riegans and that both are expected to solve/end the dire chaos in their respective factions.

Now who would benefit from making the Church look bad? Someone who plans to declare war on them maybe? 

They wouldn’t put that sort of dialogue there if we weren’t supposed to conclude something from it.

This might be less obvious if you haven’t played her route (though even then, you still get her speech in all of them don’t you?) but her declaration of war was strictly against the Church and their allies. She hands out papers everywhere, exposing the Church’s wrongdoings and asking all the rulers to choose sides. Petra mentions getting one such letter. 

She knew full well that most of the Kingdom and Alliance would side with the Church (and keep fighting even after Rhea’s taken out) and that there would probably be calvacades of collateral damage,  after all the Church indoctrinates the ruling elites at the Academy and thanks to the phony “crests are divine gifts” story the nobles depend on the Church for legitimacy as rulers - but every lord who doesn’t support the Church is one whose army she doesn’t have to fight. 

When she declares war, she wants as many people as possible to either stand down or join her. Painting the church as incompetent (or, in her mind, “highlighting” their incompetence) to safeguard the precious heirs might have increased that number, if Byleth’s heroic intervention and subsequent appointment as a professor hadn’t overshadowed the whole thing. 

Also note that for this to cause a scandal, Dimitri and Claude don’t need to be dead. 

Essentially ordering a hit on herself is certainly in line with Edelgard’s other... as Claude put it, “gutsy moves” (Such as not evacuating Enbarr in GD knowing full well that Claude was not going to tear through the civilians, effectively restricting his movements) but looking at literally any other action she’s ever taken, she always goes out of her way to give people the option to surrender., consistently, all the time, all throughout her route (and even many of her engage quotes in the other routes - She offers to let Claude and Byleth go at Gronder, for example) 

She even gets this whole rant before you go to fight Claude about how she wishes people would just stand down peacefully instead of starting fights they can’t win. (which is perhaps why she tells Byleth to just go ahead and finish her once she realizes that she’s beaten in the other routes)

She’ll mow you down if you oppose her alright but first she’ll make sure that both you (and her allies all of whom get the chance to opt out) are all there because you want to be/ are actually choosing to oppose her. It’s not like her to just kill people without giving them an explanation or a choice. 

But smears and coverups? That’s another matter. There’s her whole secret identity/secret faustian Bargain thing, that time only Hubert, Byleth and Lysithea knew which fortress they’d be attacking, and how she pinned the Javelins of light on the church. That’s totally something she’d do, (which might’ve backfired on the credibility of her pamphlets; PR and negotiation are simply not her greatest strengths)

Which makes her less truthful than, say, Dimitri (I think the only time he ever remotely lied to an ally was to hide his investigations of Arundel from Dedue), but overall still not as deceptive as Claude or the Church , since these are all “tactical” lies for concrete short-term goals, nothing relating to their goals. 

Everyone on Edelgard’s side knows that she wants to abolish hereditary rule and create an equal society, even if that means making enemies; Claude tells no one what he’s planning until the very end even though the knights might not follow him if he’d told them that he means to diminish the Church’s influence on society, kinda hoping that everyone will come around on their own - He does this even with Byleth to an extent. 

(Though when it comes to the Church we must really differentiate between the Chuch as a whole established by Rhea and Seteth individually, who I’d rate as significantly more truthful than Edelgard since he only lies out of very justified self-protection and loyalty to Rhea (who is his sister, and about whose wrongdoings he only knows the tip of the iceberg), and even urges her to come clean in the end.)

Ferdinand finds it strange that they just so ran into a bunch of mercenaries and wonders if one of the house leaders knew that there were mercenaries. 

As before, that Dialogue is there for a reason. One of them probably did know. 

So who is it? Probably not Dimitri he can’t pokerface worth a damn. 

That leaves Edelgard or Claude. 

Edelgard might’ve know that there were mercenaries nearby and expected them to intervene if things went south. Or it could be Claude, and that’s why he ran off.

We know that he’s got great survival instincts, grew up in a warrior culture of sorts, and makes a habit of carefully observing his surroundings. Perhaps he just spotted a large amount of hoofprints or beaten muddy footpaths, and deduced that there might be help to be had in that direction.  

For now I’ll say that Claude is the most likely option. 

I mean it’s really like him to be a spanner in the works before he even known anything is up - also, he’s the one who ran. It’s because of HIM that the trio went that direction, not because of anything Edelgard did. 

Leave it to Claude to look like he’s bailing when he’s actually looking for help. (but also taking a bit of a risk since he didn’t know for certain that he would find help).  Also he says something like “Ain’t it great the gods of fortune sent us your way?” which is something Claude would only say ironically. 

Kostas didn’t know there would be knights

As far as he knew he was just supposed to “kill some noble pipsqueaks”

But actually, our trio wasn’t supposed to be alone - it was an exercise with Alois and bunch of knights, the elite knights of Seiros, mind you, who are renowed throughout the land. (as Edelgard herself tells you after the fight)

Meaning that Edelgard probably didn’t expect them to be beaten by a bunch of bandits.

Of course beating Claude and Dimitri themselves on their own might be another matter, at least if they’re outnumbered. Still, she must’ve known that Dimitri had seen actual war before and was aware of Claude’s suspicious arrival. 

Since she was with them one could think that she maybe lured them away from the group... except that the situation ultimately depended on at least two unpredictable factors:

- The guy who was supposed to get Byleth’s job bolted. He was supposed to be with the trio and presumably semi-competent. 

I’m surprised that he didn’t show up as an antagonist afterwards or something. We never find out anything about this guy or why he ran though it coulve been simple cowardice. 

Well, unless he too was a plant who meant to run off so Jeritza (who definitely was an imperial plant) could take his job - Didn’t someone say something about expecting Jeritza to get the job Byleth got? I think it was Felix. 

- Claude ran for it, and Dimitri chased after him

Now that’s something that Edelgard really couldn’t have predicted. It’s just Claude being Claude, and Dimitri being Dimitri and hence, heroically charging after him to help him out. 

If Claude hadn’t run off, the trio would have stayed with the knights who could presumably handle a bunch of bandits. If Dimitri hadn’t charged after him to save him, Claude’s plan would have worked without a hitch and he would have returned with allies - he was just one person, he’s the fastest/stealthiest and the least valuable target so he might’ve escaped by himself. 

But Dimitri and Claude running off? Let alone all three? That’s all the most valuable targets on a platter so the thieves went after them. Dimitri, bless his heart,  of course thought that Claude was acting as a decoy and counting on himto come after him.  (consider how he eventually really DOES expect Dimitri to bail him out at the end of Dimitri’s route)

I’d like to stress that Dimitri’s genuine, unpremeditated and unplanned action with no ulterior motive besides helping out proved to be as much of a spanner here as Claude’s clever foresight and chaotic action, and that neither of the other two had been expecting it.  

Dimitri and Claude explicitly tell us that the other two got separated from the group because they chased after Claude. (Again, if she just wanted to kill them, why not just stick with the knights and let them run to their deaths? She’d get a bonus alibi. Indeed she might’ve gone after them because she hadn’t meant for this to end lethally - though it’s fully possible that she just followed without thinking and didn’t intend to get separated)

Something to appreciate here is that while Edelgard is competent and had been planning this for a while, she’s still relatively young and inexperienced and she can only defy or constrain TWSITD so much until she gets the throne.

She has clearly been amassing allies of her own (she marches in with a bunch of relatively young, handpicked generals such as Randolph, Jeritza and Ladislava, and cuts a deal with some from the old regime such as Caspar’s and Linhardt’s dads... though how he goes out in the Church and Alliance routes suggests that Caspar’s dad had some redeeming qualities) , but even with all this and some tentative assent from Arundel and co. she still needed to make an unnanounced surprise visit to actually get her hands on the crown.

She’s not exactly in over her head, but she’s attempting to control a very volatile situation while essentially making a deal with a loose-canon devil she can just barely keep in check. 

A microcosm of what’s to come

The central tragedy of the game is that though the faction leaders were ultimately good people who had the same enemies, they wind up fighting each other before they get at the real bad guys because they’re all acting on information that other other’s don’t have and hence don’t know the other’s situation. 

In a way the introduction scene is kinda like a miniature version of that. 

Each of their individual plans/decisions might have worked, but not all three at once. 

If you think about it the way they would’ve died without Byleth’s intervention foreshadows each of their “bad” endings - Edelgard finds herself surrounded and outnumbered after he plans backfire and goes down fighting as no one else has a clue what she’s really doing, Dimitri rushes head-first into an unwinnable fight because he puts honor before reason,  misjudged someone’s intentions and doesn’t consider his own role, and Claude would’ve either bailed, or gotten himself killed when one of his plans didn’t quite turn out like he wanted. 

Too bad you can only pick one :( 

The other two stay that way. 

[prometheanvisions]

RM: Immediately in The Drowned World, you have the fictional theory of ‘neuronics’ playing a really important role. You have to buy into that theoretical position to be compelled by the story. This is what theory fiction means to me. It’s not a genre but more a question, or even a problem: in what different ways can the two cross over, and in what ways to they need each other?[1]

Two questions come to mind when discussing the above quote by Robin Mackay, itself a response to Simon Sellars’s Applied Ballardianism (which has dethroned Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia as the archetypal “theory-fiction” text). 1) What is Ballard’s role in the development of this “question” of theory-fiction? And 2) What does theory-fiction mean in relation to this text?

First of all, Ballard is responsible (directly and indirectly) for many of the concepts that were incorporated and built upon in the earliest ruminations on theory-fiction. I am here thinking of Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs, which places Ballard in a rhizome connecting him to Baudrillard, McLuhan, Freud, William Gibson, “Deleuze-Guattari” and others. Central to both Fisher and Sellars’s understandings of theory-fiction is Ballard’s characterisation of inner space, as a Spinozistic interpretation of bodies as capable of both affecting and being affected. As sites of pure Event, bodies are inseparable from the landscapes they inhabit, and so Ballard’s “inner” is in fact a folding-out onto “outer” ground; a cybernetics, or, more precisely, a geo-traumatics.  In The Drowned World, we see the submerged landscape producing psychological and physiological symptoms within the bodies it contains; in The Atrocity Exhibition, the same kinds of changes are apparent, though this time, they are brought about via immersion within the “media landscape”. Ballard conceives of mediatization as a  generalisation of trauma, evoked through the repetition of violent and unprecedented images, and for which the body experiences schizophrenic breakdown and overspill of affect. Ballard’s T- character(s) in The Atrocity Exhibition attempt a form of “catastrophe management” through repetition and re-enactment of televised events: the Kennedy assassination, the Monroe car crash, and so on. These rituals are simultaneously themselves responses to the traumas brought on through mediatization, attempts (by Ballard and his characters) to represent these events and their associated affects as the only legitimate and rational response, and a continuation of the logic of breakdown – a positive experiencing of the trauma mode as a deterriorialization, leading to inorganic breakthrough.[2]

These ideas are what make Ballard’s key works (The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Crash) theory-fiction: the texts cannot be approached without engaging with them on these terms. Sellars would concur. His explanation for the experimental form adopted by Applied Ballardianism is that it is the result of trying to faithfully capture and respond to a particular Ballard quote: “The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.”[3] The book – and perhaps by extension, Ballard himself – also interpret theory-fiction in another way. “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind”, says Ballard.[4] Our thoughts and perceptions are always-already pervaded by the fictional “mode”, including any “theory” we might derive from or within it. Given this, the role of effective writing is to “invent the reality.”[5] Hence the shift from Ballard’s earliest fictions – the ones that fabulate an extraordinary natural event (The Drowned World, The Crystal World, et al) – to the immediate (or im-mediate) traumas of unnatural (sub)urban life (Crash, High-Rise).

Sellars’s book reads as an account of trying to “invent the reality” of its writer’s psychic life in the most authentic conceivable manner – as a “memoir from a parallel universe”. But it succeeds as theory-fiction in a third sense, not directly related to the two outlined above. The novel’s (?) parallel narrator begins by attempting to render Ballard as a latent philosopher, who uses the shell of fiction in order to disseminate deep-seated “truths” about the real world (Def. 1). Yet – and it’s no spoiler to reveal this, all fiction requires dramatic tension after all – this task does not play out as the narrator expects. The planned exercise quickly becomes a living-out of Ballard’s “extreme metaphors”, an experiencing and intensifying of psychic traumas across the fault lines of the narrator’s entire life. “Why did I always shove aside the positive implications of Ballard’s work, the message of resistance it carried, in favour of the dark desires that had driven his characters to reach that point? I suppose it reflected my own cynical worldview, my own fatal inwardness that ensured I found little joy in anything.”[6] Ballard’s own moralistic framework guaranteed that he himself, when faced with a precarious juncture, would always take the blue pill: “Dangerous bends ahead. Slow down.” Sellars’s doppelganger, without the framework, the grounding of thought and desire, is free to take the path to psychosis. “Dangerous bends ahead. Speed up.”[7]

It is this exposure of a lack of grounding in the narrator’s interpretation of his deep assignment that,  perversely, re-inverts Applied Ballardianism into a cautionary tale. In every interview, Sellars is adamant: “It’s a mistake to read a political agenda into Ballard – or Applied Ballardianism. I don’t advise it.”[8] But the book, and it’s author’s message, Negarestani shows, are hardly apolitical; instead, their engagements with politics demonstrate a

playing precisely [of] the multi-level game with different political resolutions at different levels. […] Depending on the resolution at which the game is played, the book is replete with fundamentally different sociopolitical visions of our world. There is no contradiction here, only competing actual worlds which – and perhaps it is simply a bad habit – we are accustomed to calling the world. It is the conflict between world versions and their respective visions that is, in fact, the very constitutive element of what we name ‘reality’.[9]

Sellars has characterised the book as an exercise in failure, failure of the very idea of applying Ballardianism – at least in the sense his narrator attempts, as an ideal for living. As his life becomes mediatized by the very media warning him against its dangers, the narrator’s journey amounts to an exploration of inner space in the term’s most restricted sense: as a solipsism, or phenomenology. Now the character sees orbs in the sky, ghosts on airfields, Ballardian ley lines, everywhere. Cast adrift from the media Events central to Ballard’s texts, the narrator’s theory-fiction has folded back in on itself, as conspiracy theory. It’s no wonder that he briefly turns to the Mandela Effect as a potential re-grounding agent, for unifying his cognitively dissonant memories.

To recapitulate, we see Applied Ballardianism as theory-fiction in a threefold sense. Firstly, it is a theoretical exploration of the ideas of Ballard’s fiction, conveyed in the “truly authentic” form of (quasi-)Ballardian fiction. Secondly, it is an extension and  critique of these Ballardian concepts (his original theory-fiction): specifically, of the traumas brought about by the ungrounding and deterritorializing effects of immersion within the media landscape. Thirdly, and finally, it is an expression of the traumatic effects of Ballard’s theory-fiction on the individual, and a warning against untethered free-falls through inner space. I believe that Sellars is saying, in effect, that dissociation must bottom out somewhere. The ground awaits any such schizoid free-fall, and this ground may resemble any number of things: conspiracist paranoia, hard concrete, hikikomori, windshield glass… Yet, I don’t see all theory-fiction as bad religion. If we can keep our grounding in sight, we might be able to foresee and avoid what lurks behind the cracks in reality, and at the same time, produce the condition for original thought and expression.

Notes

[1] Simon Sellars & Robin Mackay, “So Many Unrealities”, Urbanomic (10th December 2018), available online at https://www.urbanomic.com/document/so-many-unrealities/.

[2] Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (New York: Exmilitary Press, 2018 [1999]), pp. 84-96.

[3] J.G. Ballard, from the 1995 introduction to Crash. Cf. Sellars & Mackay. The quote appears in Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2018), pp. 39-40.

[4] Ballard, introduction to Crash.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Applied Ballardianism, p. 239.

[7] Ibid, p. 223.

[8] Sellars, “Simon Sellars on Applied Ballardianism”, interviewed by Tadas Vinokur for Aleatory Books (17th December 2018), available online at https://www.aleatorybooks.com/simonsellarsinterview.

[9] Reza Negarestani, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin (Reading Applied Ballardianism)”, Toy Philosophy (9th August 2018), available online at https://toyphilosophy.com/2018/08/09/mene-mene-tekel-upharsin-reading-applied-ballardianism/.

Source:

[mage-cat]

First Steps Home - Plan? What Plan?

The Rebellion sends a team to rescue Glimmer only for the team to discover that they are now part of an escape plan already in motion.

Part 2 of the Mending Bridges series. Start from the beginning here.

Story under the cut. ~1900 words. Link to AO3 through here.

Mara’s ship wasn’t designed to carry a large crew. That meant to when the Rebellion went to rescue Glimmer, it had to be a bare-bones strike team. Bow and Entrapta were the only ones who had any confidence with new tech on the fly, something Prime’s ship was sure to have in abundance, and Adora would be there to lead them.

Bow, who had taken up piloting duties, had been waiting for Adora to let him in on the details of the plan, figuring that something in Adora’s training--either with the Horde or Light Hope--had given her insight into what they needed to do to at least begin the rescue. He began to feel uneasy as the ship announced that they had left Etheria’s atmosphere and he still had no idea what the next step would be after finding Horde Prime’s ship.

“Um, Adora? How does a spaceship sneak up on another spaceship?”

“How much different can it be to little boat sneaking up on a big boat?”

Bow gestured at a relevant display. “We’re using tech to find Horde Prime’s ship. Isn’t it likely that he has tech that can see us the same way?”

A voice came from somewhere embedded in the ship’s controls. “Message incoming. Would you care to answer?”

Adora froze for a moment before responding, “I guess, yes.”

The ship’s largest screen was filled with a pale face, the eyes green from edge to edge. “You must be the delegation we were told to expect. Please, proceed to the docking bay. We will inform Queen Glimmer to meet you. Please, leave all weapons on your ship.” The voice was bland and clearly assumed there could be no other explanation for who they were as the face disappeared from the screen as soon as the last word was uttered.

“Was that Hordak?” Bow asked.

“No,” said Entrapta with certainty. “Hordak’s a clone, but one Horde Prime considered... nonstandard. At a guess, I would say that was an example of a more typical result of the cloning process.”

“I wonder how many of those Prime keeps around,” Adora said.

The com screen began to display a map directing their ship to the mentioned docking bay. As they flew closer, the view of the ever-growing ship began to be overwhelming. Only in space could something be so big and still move.

“I don’t like the idea of leaving our weapons behind,” Bow said.

“They said Glimmer would be there to meet us,” Adora replied. “I’m hoping our luck improves and we’ll be able to just grab her and leave.”

“I don’t think the odds of that are very good,” said Entrapta.

---

Whatever hope they had of the mission being simple died when they saw exactly who was meeting them when they got off the ship. Glimmer was there, and she was standing, back straight in her most regal posture, at Horde Prime’s right hand.

He addressed her while never looking away from the new arrivals. “Queen Glimmer, would you inform me of who I will be dealing with?”

Glimmer’s voice was nearly as bland as the earlier clone’s had been as she said, “Horde Prime, these are Adora, She-Ra of Etheria and Administrator of the technical systems that run throughout the planet, Bow of the Makers’ Guild, and Entrapta of Dryl, two the Etheria’s brightest technical minds. Entrapta is also the eldest of the Etherian royals whose realms have had dealings with the Horde. All of them have held leadership positions equal to my own in the Rebellion.”

He focused on the purple-haired woman. “Would this be the same Entrapta that my wayward clone was so intrigued by?”

“Yes, Horde Prime, the same,” Glimmer answered. Adora motioned towards the ship. Glimmer gave a tiny shake of her head and spoke again. “Sire, I would not presume to tell you what to do, but I will vouch for Entrapta’s good behavior while she is here and advise you that treating her differently from the rest of the delegation might prolong the process they are here for. Might I take them to my quarters for a briefing before we discuss negotiations?”

“You may.”

Glimmer approached the three and held her arms out in front of her. “I suggest we go the quick way.” They all knew what that was a cue for.

---

One teleport later Glimmer’s face broke into a grin. “How was my performance?”

Bow hugged her. “Unnerving!”

“I’ve been getting tutoring in placating megalomaniacs.” After returning the hug for a moment, she stepped back. “He thinks you’re here to negotiate surrender by the way.”

Before any of them could properly react to that, a delighted version of Hordak’s voice came from a gray blur descending from somewhere near the ceiling. “Entrapta!”

“Imp!” Entrapta cried as she caught the creature.

He opened his mouth, releasing a gentle female voice. “You’re safe here.” The voice twisted into sarcasm, causing the faces of the three to shift in recognition. “Prime’s been magnanimous and promised us our privacy”

“Hey, Adora.” The same voice came from a previously unnoticed corner of the room, now attached to its original source. “Bow.” Catra hesitated. “Entrapta.”

Adora began to launch herself at her, but Glimmer’s arm across her chest brought her up short.

“Stop. We would all be dead right now if it wasn’t for Catra.”

“You trust people too easily when you think they’re useful.”

“I trust my truth spells.”

“After everything she’s done?”

“She can help get my mother back. The way things went down with the portal, she knows things no one else does.” Glimmer paused as if considering if she should say the next thing. “While under the truth spell, she also said my dad’s alive.”

Bow and Adora exchanged a meaningful look, and he said, “He was on Beast Island. He’s holding down the fort at Bright Moon now. He and Shadow Weaver have a history, so he’s confined her to her room unless she’s being supervised by at least one person capable of magic.”

“Thank goodness. It saves me the trouble.”

Adora’s face hardened again. “I thought you were enjoying being Shadow Weaver’s new favorite.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten so cozy with her if, instead of vaguely talking about how evil she was, you had given me some concrete examples. You know, like the fact that she had tortured children in front of you!”

“She had tortured you!”

“She didn’t do it for over a decade starting from when I was six!”

“Sparkles,” Catra broke in. “I appreciate what you’re doing, but is this the time?”

Glimmer took a steadying breath. “No, it’s not.” She turned to face Catra properly. “Think we can get the plan to work now?”

“Best chance we’re ever going to get. Entrapta, I am so glad you are alive.”

Entrapta clutched Imp closer. “No thanks to you.”

Catra bit her lip. “I thought you were turning into my enemy, and I panicked. Only an idiot would underestimate you and the damage you could do to someone if you thought you had to. I’m sorry. It would have been smarter for me to try to stay on your good side. I want to hear your theories on some things.”

Her grip on Imp relaxed a fraction. “Your potential data on the portal tech is intriguing...”

“Portal later. I promise. We need your theories on something more pressing.” Catra held out her hand, and a glowing amber orb the size of her fist began to hover above it. “How am I suddenly doing this? Could the Heart be drawing energy from more than just the planet? Could it be pulling magic from the people?”

Entrapta leaned toward the light. “Fascinating. That would explain the metric I couldn’t make sense of.” She looked up at Catra’s face “On Beast Island, there was a First Ones database, including a bunch of profiles for potential colonist species. Biological requirements, potential for dissent against imperial rule if allowed to remain on their home planets, and this one calculation that could have been how effectively they could power the Heart.”

“We know releasing all of the Heart’s energy the way it was designed would be bad, but could we return that energy back to the people?”

“I would have to take a closer look at the Heart, or at least its schematics.”

“Wait,” Adora said. “The Heart is doing what?”

Catra turned to her, the sphere of light disappearing.“Short version. Best that we can tell? Magic should be way more common in the Etherian population than it is. Anyone on the surface gets drained of their power the same way the magic of the planet itself gets collected.”

Glimmer continued. “That’s probably why Mystacor is airborne. The Princesses still have some of our magic because we are connected to the Heart through the Runestones.”

“Just some of your magic?” Entrapta asked.

“Oh yeah.” Glimmer moved her cape to one side. Her wings--which, like Queen Angella’s, were always more like solid energy that matter--still didn’t match the majestic sweep of her mother’s, but she wouldn’t be readily hiding them under a shirt again either. “I have definitely been running at a lower charge than I should have been.”

Catra spoke again. “Alright. We have a plan of action once we get back to the planet. Now to get out of here and over there.”

“Right,” said Glimmer. “Bow, Entrapta, Catra will lead you to do some industrial sabotage and, if we’re lucky, a little theft. Adora, you and I are going to go hit some things very hard. We can talk on the way.”

“Why can’t we just teleport to the ship and leave?” Adora asked.

Catra answered, “We try that and Prime will just use his transporter tech to beam us back here, and he won’t be near as polite afterwards. Hence the sabotage.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t trust any authority higher than my own, and Horde Prime thinks he is the highest authority in the universe.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Entrapta.

Adora glared at the person she had once called her best friend. “I’ll be watching you.”

“Not until Sparkles takes you to the rendezvous point.”

As the shimmer of Glimmer and Adora teleporting away faded, Catra turned to her new teammates. “Alright, first step is to see if we can steal ourselves a clone. Hordak thought conquering a planet would impress Horde Prime, but the only thing Prime is ever impressed with is himself. He doesn’t like his clones being people. As soon as we were on the ship he put Hordak under… I don’t think it was a mindwipe. I think it was a personality suppressor or something. If anyone can wake him up,” she pulled something out of a pocket and pressed it into Entrapta’s hand, “it’s you.” It was the crystal Entrapta had used to power the armor she had made for Hordak. “He was really broken up about it when he thought you had betrayed him. When he found out I had lied about that, he tried very hard to kill me for it. I may not understand what you two have going on, but I understand that it’s important to you two.”

Bow said, “So step one of your plan is...”

The look on Catra’s face said she couldn’t quite believe what she was about to say either. “To save Hordak.”

Next Chapter: Saving Who? >