#despite being called ‘avatar universe’ this account does this a lot

[wall-maria-around-ba-sing-se]

Love the part where they not only reposted art without attribution (here is the artist, btw) but also conspicuously left out Korra in favor of Szeto, even though this series of works not only does have a Korra entry but has multiple Korra entries

[y-so-hungry]

Midnight Food For Thought

Beelzebub x MC

Ok I wasn't sure whether to write it as "MC did this, they did that" or "you did this, you did that" or even "I did this, I did that" for this fic, so I went with the first option, lemme know if you guys prefer it a different style (I don't mind any way) and I'll keep that in mind for if/when I write another one of these!

This wasn’t the first time MC had gone downstairs for a midnight snack and found Beel already in the kitchen, but this was the first time they’d seen him in demon form at this hour. They supposed that’s why they lingered just by the steps, watching rather than going in. Not that he was scary in this form, but they worried he was upset, and would rather not be bothered. Beel didn’t have his head in the fridge like usual, oddly enough he seemed to be making something. Usually he was too hungry and tired at night to cook, so it was rather odd to see him kneading dough.

What was odder than that was it seemed he didn’t actually have any other ingredients out, just flour and a cup of water next to him. MC watched for a couple more minutes as he continued making more and more of this dough, adding flour and water and flour and water over and over again until the ball of dough was as wide as a dinner plate. That seems to be when he ran out of flour.

He sighed an oddly miserable sigh, and MC watched in confusion as he took a handful of dough and started… eating it. And it was only when he sat down a second later that they actually caught sight of his face.

There were tears running down his cheeks.

“Beel?�� they said, finally calling attention to themself. Beel snapped up, fear flashing through his violet eyes before he saw them. After that, all that showed on his face was a mixture of guilt and embarrassment, his face turning as red as his hair and eyes filling with even more tears.

“Beel?” MC repeated, making their way into the kitchen. “What’s wrong, why are you crying? And why are you just eating dough? I’m sure there’s something a lot better than that to eat.”

Beel looked down and took another bite of his pitiful midnight snack.

“There wasn’t,” he muttered.

“What? What do you mean?”

“There wasn’t anything else to eat,” he said, louder this time. “It was all gone, there was only a little bit of flour left. I-I didn’t know what else to do. I’m s-so hungry, I-I didn’t think I’d make it to Hell’s Kitchen before I passed out o-or something so I-I just--” he cut off with a tiny sob, raising a wrist to scrub at his eye.

“Oh Beel, I’m so sorry,” MC said, wrapping their arms around his shoulders and pulling his head to rest against them. His horns didn’t feel exactly comfortable against their ribcage, but they didn’t really care at the moment. “I could’ve sworn there was plenty of food earlier today--jeez I don’t know what happened to it all.” They gazed around at the now completely bare cupboards, feeling almost angry at them for being empty despite the fact it’s not actually their fault.

“There was food! I saw it! We must’ve eaten it all at dinner, I didn’t even go in the kitchen to make sure I’d have something for tonight,” Beel said. His stomach snarled right then, and he quickly shoved another handful of dough in his mouth, grimacing at the taste.

“There should be more, Lucifer always takes into account how much you need to eat--wait, who went shopping this week?” MC asked.

“Mammon,” Beel growled. “He probably spent half the money on some sale and didn’t get enough food.”

“Goddammit Mammon,” MC said, pinching their brow and squeezing their eyes shut. I’ll have to beat him up later, they thought. Snag his credit card, buy poor Beel all the cheeseburgers he wants. They opened their eyes to see the hungry demon was already halfway through his tiny meal, more tears coursing down his face as he watched his food disappear.

“Hey,” they said softly, cupping his cheek and tilting his head up so he could meet their eyes. “We’re gonna go get you something to eat, okay? Something real, not just sticky dough. We’re gonna go to Hell’s Kitchen and you’ll end up so full your shirt doesn’t fit right, how does that sound?”

The rumble that sounded from Beel’s stomach at the suggestion seemed to be rather painful; he wrapped both his arms tightly around his belly, curling in on himself with gritted teeth and a small whimper.

“Oh Beel,” MC murmured, running a hand through his flaming hair. They gently pulled his arms until he stood up, still clutching his grumbling belly. They quickly grabbed his glob of dough still on the table and handed it to him, hoping it would be enough to tide him over until they both got to Hell’s Kitchen.

~~~

MC called the restaurant on the way, letting them know the situation, so despite the fact that it was a rather busy night at Hell’s Kitchen, they were seated quickly, and in a quiet, secluded area of the restaurant. Beel asked for his usual, a large plate of burgers, and said he’d give MC a few. He always seemed to forget that MC didn’t need ten whole burgers to feel full, but they appreciated the thought nonetheless.

Beel’s dough was long gone now, and he kept pressing his fingers deep into his stomach, it’s rumbles only growing louder with time. Besides his belly though, Beel himself was rather quiet, staring down at the empty table with his eyes unfocused and far away.

“You okay, Beel?” MC asked. They felt a little stupid as soon as they said it; it’s quite clear that he’s not okay. But he blinked and glanced at them, seeming to understand what they meant.

“I just… really hate when this happens,” he muttered. “I get all wound up and upset, and now everyone gets to see the Avatar of Gluttony being an idiot and crying because he didn’t have enough of his stupid snacks.”

His face was screwed up now, anger and disgust warping his features into an expression MC wasn’t sure they’d ever seen on him before. They’d never seen him so repulsed, not even when he found out about Lucifer trapping Belphie in the attic.

“Beel, you shouldn’t say such mean things about yourself. You’re not being an idiot, and your snacks aren’t stupid, you need them, and that’s okay. You shouldn’t beat yourself up about this, it’s not your fault,” MC said, putting a hand on his shoulder and squeezing it gently. But his words were still bitter when he answered.

“I bet none of my brothers ever cry about their sins. Why can’t I just be like that? Why do I have to burst into tears if I miss breakfast in the morning, or if someone eats the rest of something I saved for later? Why can’t I just calm down?” Beel muttered, wrapping his arms more protectively over his belly. His shoulders and legs were tensed up so hard MC wondered if it hurt, he looked like he was trying to curl in on himself. Even his wings were wrapped around him, all in an attempt to protect his middle. His muscles bunched even tighter as his stomach gave another pitiful grumble, and he squeezed his eyes shut.

MC sighed and reached over, pulling at one of his arms curled around him until he moved it away with a questioning glance at them. They moved their own hand in to replace his, pressing their palm to his belly. They could feel it rumbling continuously against their hand, and they began rubbing gentle circles into his middle, loosening the knots of pain as best they could. Beel almost instantly relaxed, melting against the cushions of the booth. The grumblings of his belly didn’t stop, but they didn’t seem to be as painful as before.

“Your brothers do cry, you know,” MC said. “Sometimes about their sins, sometimes about other things, just like you.” Beel looked up at them, his eyebrows raised.

“Really?” he said. MC nodded, shifting closer to massage deeper into his middle. He relaxed further, leaning his head back with a small sigh.

“They do,” they said. “Yours I think is the worst of them to be honest. It causes you physical pain, and affects you more often and worse I think than the others. But that doesn’t mean their sins don’t hurt them.”

Beel scoffed, looking away from MC and down at the empty table again.

“What could Mammon possibly be crying about?” Beel snarled. “Getting his credit card taken away?”

“Well… yeah,” MC said. “Mammon can’t control his want for things. It’s a bit like if someone took food away from you. Not quite the same since that would actually hurt you, but it still upsets him. And I mean… He doesn’t actually like how greedy he is. He knows it can hurt people, he just can’t really stop. And that makes him sad.”

“…He actually feels bad about that stuff? I always thought he didn’t care,” Beel said.

“He does,” MC said. “It’s the same with your other brothers. Lucifer is so prideful that when he messes up even a little it can send him spiralling. Levi, his envy can get so intense he feels like he’s all alone in the universe. He gets so jealous of other people that it can blind him to what he has. Satan gets so angry sometimes that he starts crying out of rage. Asmo cries because he feels so much love for people that it hurts to see them in pain. That and of course he gets angry at himself for being so vain. And I’m sure you’ve seen how upset Belphie can get when he hasn’t slept. I've seen him go to bed with tears running down his face after a whole day with no rest.”

“I have too,” Beel said solemnly. “I used to hug him when he couldn’t sleep after Lilith died. Even when I got hungry in the middle of the night, I’d hold him until he fell asleep. …Though I think sometimes he’d pretend to be asleep when he heard my stomach, that way I would go downstairs to get something. He always worried that I didn’t eat enough.”

His stomach growled pointedly right then, loud enough that Beel actually looked down at his belly in surprise before wincing in pain. Those chefs are really taking their sweet time getting his food here.

“Well he had reason to,” MC said, rubbing deep, soothing circles into the place where it seemed to hurt most. “Basically my point is that you’re not the only one who struggles with their sin. I think you struggle the most, but you’re not an idiot for crying over something that hurts.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I never knew my brothers got upset about that kinda stuff,” Beel said, and he shifted closer to them, laying his cheek on their head for a moment and careful to avoid hitting them with his horns. “Thanks for coming with me, MC. You’re the best.”

His words were simple but they made MC’s heart swell with happiness. They were so happy actually, that they may have lost focus and pressed a little too deep into Beel’s stomach. MC only realized this after he grimaced and stiffened up, a loud growl erupting from his middle, the hungry rumbles shaking their fingers before tapering off.

MC opened their mouth to apologize, but Beel was already waving it off with a miserable glance at his stomach.

“Don’t even, it’s not your fault,” he said. “I’m starving. It’s just so empty now, it feels like it’s trying to eat itself. The chefs must be really understaffed today or something, they usually have my food out by now.”

Not a second after he said that though, the rich, thick smell of a variety of foods suddenly got a lot stronger as several people made their way to MC and Beel’s booth. They were waiters, about ten in all, each carrying at least two platters piled high with food, if not more. MC could see burgers, fries, pizza, sushi, and then it seems for dessert they had platters full of Wicked Cupcakes and apple pie.

At the sight of the food MC was reminded that the whole reason they even found Beel eating dough in the kitchen was because they’d been craving a midnight snack, and their own middle shifted hungrily as they gazed at the platters. Their stomach had nothing on Beel’s though, which gave a long, desperate rumble under MC’s hand. He even put his hand over theirs, pressing it deeper into his belly in an attempt to soothe his hunger.

“Sorry for the wait,” one of the waiters said, giving a small chuckle at the look of surprise and desire on Beel’s face. “We wanted to bring it out all at once as a surprise!”

“Well you definitely surprised me,” Beel said, eyes wide as they set down the food in front of him, swallowing thickly at the scent of the burgers only a foot away. But suddenly he got a rather sad look on his face, and he squeezed his eyes closed. “I-I’m sorry, I can’t take all this, Lucifer would kill me if I bought this much food at once--”

“Beel, you misunderstand, it’s on the house!” a curly haired waiter said, giving him a quick pat on the shoulder after setting down a platter of apple pie.

“What?” Beel said, his eyes flicking open again, but staring at the waiter instead this time. “Why?”

“MC told us what happened,” the waiter answered. “And when you came in here you looked so upset, we wanted to do something special for you. You’re our oldest customer here, you were here buying food back when Hell’s Kitchen was small and struggling to stay open.”

“I remember when you found out we were on the edge of going out of business you bought all your meals here for weeks until business picked up again so we could keep everything afloat,” another waiter chimed in.

“And you’ve brought your brothers here for every birthday you’ve had since we opened,” said someone else.

“You’ve been here for us for years, Beel,” the curly haired waiter said. “We figured it was time we tried to pay you back.”

Beel stared at the waiters gathered around him for a moment, his mouth open but with no sound coming out.

“Thank you,” he said eventually. “Thank you, that… that means a lot.” He looked down, his face turning red as his voice cracked with emotion. Several waiters made noises of sympathy or an understanding chuckle, before they all suddenly gathered around the back of the booth, reaching forward to wrap their arms around Beel. MC laughed at the awkwardness of everyone pressed around them, but they could tell Beel was enjoying the affection immensely, a small smile widening on his face, a soft blush in his cheeks.

However, his belly had other plans.

A loud rumble suddenly sounded from Beel’s stomach, sounding quite empty, and desperate for the food in front of it. MC could feel his stomach shaking under their hand, and it was certain that anyone who’s arms or hands were near his belly could feel it too.

“Aww, Beel!”

“Your poor belly!”

“Jeez, you’re really empty aren’t you?”

“Poor thing!”

If it was possible Beel turned even redder, laughing a little nervously as MC patted his belly sympathetically.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I’m starving.”

“No shit,” said the curly haired waiter with a laugh. “We’ll leave you and MC to your food. You fill up, let us know if you need anything, alright?” Beel nodded, waving goodbye to the waiters as they returned to their jobs.

“Wow,” he whispered, staring at all the food. “I… fuck, I don’t even know where to start.” He sounded overwhelmed, but in a delighted, eager way. His belly gurgled excitedly, and he quickly reached out, grabbing the first thing his fingers touched, which happened to be a burger. He ate half of it in one bite.

“Mmmmf,” he said, letting his head fall back against the cushion as he chewed. When he swallowed MC could feel his stomach immediately start to churn and contract, breaking down the food rapidly. It seemed quite happy to finally have something to digest.

“Feel better?” they said with a small laugh as he shoved the rest of the burger in his mouth. Beel just nodded, a deep sigh escaping him after he swallowed. It was in that relaxed, blissful moment that Beel’s form changed, his horns and wings retracting, his clothes shifting from the leather of his demon form back to his soft pajamas he’d gone to bed in.

“Much better,” he said. He reached for a slice of pizza next, folding it in his fingers so the whole thing would fit in his mouth easier. He looked a bit like a chipmunk now, and MC laughed at the way his cheeks puffed out.

“How the hell do you fit all that in your mouth?” they said. Beel swallowed, with a bit of difficulty it seems, but his eyes were bright when he answered.

“Lots of practice,” he said. “Chubby Bunny was my favorite game when I was little. I always won, even with Mammon stuffing bunnies in his mouth like a maniac.”

“…Human world Chubby Bunny is very different from Devildom Chubby Bunny.”

Beel laughed, grabbing a plate of sushi and ignoring the chopsticks, instead just picking it up with his fingers and popping the roll in his mouth. Then he suddenly looked down at MC, glancing from their eyes to their hand still rubbing his stomach, and back.

“Do… you want me to stop?” they asked, a little confused.

“Huh? Oh, no, well, I mean--Weren’t you hungry?” he said, pushing another roll of sushi in his mouth. “You came to the kitchen because you were hungry, right? Here, you like apple pie, right?” Beel pushed the large platter of pie slices over to them, looking expectantly from MC to the pie and back. They smiled and thanked him, transferring a slice to their plate and starting to eat. When MC took the first bite he beamed in approval before continuing to eat his own food.

For a while there was silence, each of them too focused on their food to talk much, but after finishing their second slice of pie MC was starting to feel a bit sleepy again. They turned to Beel, wondering if he wanted to box up the rest of his food and eat it at home, but when they actually saw him, that was no longer at the forefront of their mind.

Beel had actually stopped eating, though not because he’d run out of food, in fact there were a few platters still untouched. No, Beel had stopped eating because there was a significant swell in his middle that definitely hadn’t been there before. His stomach was so full it had begun to press against his shirt, making it look a bit smaller than it was supposed to. He looked up at MC after a moment, hands over his stomach, and a sleepy little smile on his face.

“Think ‘m full now,” he said. “You weren’t lying when you said I’d be so full my shirt doesn’t fit right.” MC laughed, reaching over to press their hand into his belly again. It was still grumbling, but it was in a muffled, happy way now. They weren’t sharp noises, more soft and low, almost like the sound of a kitten purring.

“You sure sound full,” they said, massaging slow circles into his stomach. “You wanna head home? We can get boxes for the rest of your food, we can eat it for breakfast tomorrow.”

Beel nodded, but suddenly leaned over, pressing his cheek to the top of their head.

“Thanks for coming here with me. An’ for rubbing m’ tummy. That felt really nice, even when I was hungry,” he mumbled into their hair. MC laughed and patted his swollen middle.

“Well tell you what, when we get home I’ll rub your tummy all you want, how bout that?” they said. Beel made a small noise of delight and wrapped his arms around them in a tight hug.

It was the best hug they’d ever gotten in their life.

[hello-nichya-here]

Why Ozula Makes Sense & Why It Should Be Canonized

Note: Massive Trigger Warning

Note: Yes, I already know's Nichya's opinion on Ozula. But I want to see her specific thoughts in regards to my post.

In a fan base filled with split opinions, two of the few universally held truths are that Ozai is a horrible parent and that Azula has a lot of issues. But there is a lack of consensus on whether Ozai even abused Azula and even more of a lack of consensus on the nature of his abuse if he did abuse her.

  And for the record, I personally believe that at bare minimum Ozai did emotionally abuse Azula (“Trust is for fools, fear is the only reliable way” did not come out of nowhere). Not to mention turning Azula into a child soldier is obviously abuse.

  But is what we see, or what is heavily implied, enough to explain everything about the Ozai-Azula relationship? 

  In other words, does the abuse we see, or is heavily implied, enough to explain why Azula was utterly loyal to Ozai to the point she would gleefully risk her life for him while he sat in a bunk, despite Azula being utterly pragmatic in the other aspects of her life? 

  Does it truly explain why Azula utterly broke after he left to burn the Earth Kingdom despite being made Fire Lord and becoming the presumptive heir to the Phoenix throne?

  Moreover, where did Azula learn to flirt and/or why does she come off as sexually charged with nearly everyone she encounters (ex. Ty Lee, Sokka, Zuko) when it is canon that she has no life experience outside of being a soldier or a princess in court?

  Other people have come up with headcanons and theories involving, among other things, historical context and meta-textual evidence to explain the questions that I brought up, but what if there was a more sinister answer to all of them?

  What if Ozula was a thing?

  Yes, I know, there is very little evidence or subtext to support this but I think that if it did occur in canon, it would not only explain a lot about Azula’s character and/or issues, but also shed some much needed light on the Ozai-Azula relationship and even Ozai himself. Especially since, despite all the extended universe material we have gotten in the decade plus since ATLA the show ended, we still don’t know that much about their relationship, or Ozai himself.

  So, what is my personal take on how a canon version of Ozula? 

  I think that Ozai sexually abused Azula in part to replace Ursa once he “had” to banish Ursa and also in part to prepare her to produce super powerful heirs like herself in addition to using as a tool to keep her under his thumb by making her more attached to him than before he started coming on to her.

  In regards to the first reason, Azula is a dead ringer for Ursa and most people would agree Ursa is one of the attractive women in the ATLA-verse. Thus, considering Ozai’s canonical entitlement issues, it must have been hard to no longer rape have sex with Ursa...that is unless he copulates with Ursa’s mini-me. 

  This ties into the second reason, which is the desire to produce more superpowered heirs. 

  Thanks to The Search, we know that Ozai married Ursa in order to fulfill a prophecy that said would have produced exceptionally powerful benders. And that prophecy was mostly proven right since Azula is the GOAT Firebender as of current canon and Zuko has surpassed, or is close to surpassing, his father while still in his late teens or very early twenties.   

  For most people, being the father to such prodigies would make them content in life, proud that they could call themselves father to such talented people. 

  But Ozai isn’t like most people for, as Ursa aptly put it, Ozai is a small man trying to appear bigger than he is, which is obviously proven by Ozai’s ambitions and desires over the years.

  It was not enough that he was a prince of the most powerful nation in the world, so he must become Fire Lord at all costs. And once he achieves that by ripping his family apart and traumatizing the remaining members was enough that he was Firelord? 

  No! He must become the Phoenix King and build his new empire on the ashes of The Earth Kingdom despite already having it under his rule. 

  And it was not enough that he had a cult of personality, for Ozai commissioned larger than life statues with his package being accentuated to the point of absurdity. 

  So is it crazy to believe that he believes that not only is he entitled to the most beautiful woman he knows of (and if he can’t have her then he’ll have the closest thing to her even if it is his own daughter) but the most powerful heirs he could possibly have? Especially considering Ozai is a narcissist who made Azula his golden child because of his daddy issues caused by being the unfavored son of Azulon. 

  In other words, would it have been out of character for Ozai to fuck "himself" aka the person he thinks he would have been if Azulon recognized his “superiority” over Iroh? Especially when he can make more prodigies like himself Azula?

  And in regards to the third reason, did you see how needy Azula was in regards to Ozai when they had their short little talk before Ozai crowned him as the Phoenix King?

  I think Ozai, more than anyone, realized that Azula would soon quickly surpass everyone who was not a fully realized Avatar and wanted to ensure that Azula wouldn’t do the pragmatic thing and off him once she realized that she didn’t need daddy anymore. Especially after he offered his own father and betrayed his brother to take the throne. 

  For if he was paranoid enough to banish Ursa for her ability to make that OP poison, what makes you think he never had similar paranoid thoughts about either of his children? Especially Azula considering how strongly she takes after him and how he has been molding her in his image and ideologies ever since it was apparent she was a prodigy?

  So by sleeping with her, and therefore bonding with her, he would ensure that Azula would have no motive to ever overthrow him. 

  And how would this work in practice? 

  The same way he praised her for her firebending and ruthlessness. He would likely tell that he needed her; that she was a much better (pseudo) Fire Lady than Ursa could ever be (the old nick site said Azula was renowned in court and it is plausible that she did the duties that Ursa would have done as Fire Lady); that it was one more thing that Zuko could never do better than Azula and more proof that she deserved to be his perfect tool by his side; etc.

  And for the most part I think that Azula “responded” really well to Ozai’s false praise by further latching on to him, convinced more than ever that Ozai does love her and would never leave her. Especially since Ursa is gone, Iroh and Zuko are both gone at this point due to Zuko’s banishment, and Mai and Ty Lee are also already gone, or going to leave soon, leaving Azula with only Ozai as the only family and/or friend who hasn’t “abandoned” her.

  Ok, so I know what you guys are going to ask next; “cool theory but how does it explain anything other than your sick fetish?”

  Well, I think canon Ozula would explain a lot of things about Azula’s and Ozai’s behavior that really isn’t explained by canon or is, currently, only lightly implied. 

  For example, why did Ozai never remarry or produce more heirs in the five years he ruled despite putting his real heir, Azula, in constant mortal danger and spending most of that time either disowning Zuko or hunting him down as a traitor? Especially considering that he was only able to ascend since his brother was a dumbass and only had one kid himself? Not to mention the fact that Ozai is likely has a very high sex drive (have you seen his body?) yet we never see any concubines in the palace.

  Well because he wanted to produce heirs with Azula and so waited until she was of age to marry her and then have his new heirs.  

  Why did Azula collapsed after being told to say behind despite getting the title she always desired, Ozai having a logical reason to leave her behind (people would try to invade the Fire Nation..which is what happened with Zuko and Katara), and Azula eventually getting to inherit the Phoenix Empire? 

  Well, Ozai leaving her behind shows that Ozai thinks all Azula is worth after her numerous failures is producing heirs, making Azula realize that his bedroom talk was all lies and that he never loved her, only saw her as a tool. Moreover, all his words about her being a better Fire Lady than Ursa are lies since they both ended up in the same spot in life; only existing as Ozai’s (unwilling) broodmares. 

  Why does Azula hate and hallucinate Ursa despite Ursa being by all accounts a loving mother? And why does Azula avoid and hate reflective surfaces? 

  Well, because Azula’s subconscious wishes that Ursa was there to protect her from the abuse and also subconsciously reckoning with the long buried knowledge that part of the reason why Ozai came onto her is because she looks like a clone of her very beautiful mother. 

  Moreover, it would explain why Azula thinks Ursa thought of Azula as a monster when Ursa never said anything like that or gave any indications of seeing Azula like that. 

  For Azula would likely think, subconsciously, why would my mother leave me with a monster unless I am a monster?

  It would also explain, partially, why Azula goes from someone who is a bully, but loves & plays with her bro at 8, to someone who smiles when Zuko is burned at 13. 

  This is because Azula would think that all Zuko has to do to be in Ozai’s good graces is be a good firebender, a ruthless leader, and follow Ozai commands perfectly & without any hesitation. 

  Yet Zuko can’t even do any of that while she, in addition to previous requirements, has to give her mind, body, and soul to Ozai.

  It would also explain why Azula is so frantically loyal to Ozai (and even loves him) even when it is obvious to everyone that Ozai only cares for himself (he literally groomed her); why someone could be so fucked up and go insane at the age of 14 (victims of child sex abuse end up suffering from mental illness thanks to their trauma; and also explain why Azula has such sexual mannerisms (ex. her interaction with Sokka on DoBs) and voice acting while also being the only main female character to constantly wear makeup that is quite similar to her mother’s (she is trying to appear much older than she is while also trying to “replace” her mother for her father’s sake and maybe even for her own sake as well).

  Finally, it would contextualize that infamous bedroom scene, or more generally the subtle incest vibe between her and Zuko, by explaining her behavior towards him as attempt to unnerve him and/or an attempt to pass on her abuse to another person (which is very common).

  So the next thing you guys are likely going to say,” Ok then. Maybe Ozula might explain a lot of things but how would you explain the fact that Azula has never shown any indication that her father touched her like that? Moreover, what would be the benefit of introducing such a dark topic into the franchise.”

  Well to the first question, Azula would never bring it up because of some combo of: it is shameful as hell, she doesn't think it is wrong because it is all she knows, she still loves Ozai deep down, and/or thinks it her fault just like it was Zuko's fault for getting burned by Ozai and banished for talking out in the war council and/or not fighting back at the Agni Kai.

  And as to the second question, well there would be a lot of benefits. 

  For example, imagine the lore/story potential we could get out of a canon Ozula, as outlined in the headcanon down below?

One of the reasons why the places like Yu Duo became quickly filled with mixed families was due to a mix of sex slaves and families selling their daughters to their wealthy colonziers. 

  Also the Fire Nation had an extensive sex trackiffing network to service wealthy nobles and the Firelord; Ozai was in charge of this network and was able to blackmail people like Mai's father into supporting him in court and eventually his regime, especially in the early days when it looked like Iroh might challenge Ozai. 

  The reason why Zhao kept getting promotions despite his incompetence was because he was the best at capturing girls/women to keep the supply running high and Ozai had to keep him happy or else Zhao would spill the beans. 

  The reason why Ukano supported the NOS despite Zuko offering him a job and most likely becoming his father-in-law is because he was part of the network and it was a matter of time before Zuko found out and exposed him. 

  Azula helped procure women for Ozai during the 3 years Zuko/Iroh were away and this is part of the reason why Ty Lee and Mai distanced themselves from her (they thought they were next even though Azula would never do that to them) & why they followed her despite loathing her until someone they cared about was going to die (they thought Azula would punish them by making them into sex slaves though Azula “cares” about them too much to ever do that to them). 

  Azula was also abused by Ozai in those 3 years as raping women and girls weren't enough for him anymore and needed a new kink, incest, especially since Azula looks like her mom, who is one of the most attractive women in ATLA and Ursa was long gone.

And even disregarding the lore potential, there is the potential (positive) real world impact a seriously written Ozula could have.

  For it one of the best things about the Avatar franchise is its ability to deal with complex & sensitive topics such as child & spousal abuse (The Fire Nation Royal Family; Yakone’s family; Toph’s family), abusive/toxic friendships (The Dangerous Ladies), sexism (S1 Sokka & Pakku), PTSD (Korra), genocide (Airbender genocide & Southern Water Bender Genocide), propaganda/brainwashing (The Fire Nation schools & the Dai Li), and imperialism (Post-Sozin to the start of FL Zuko’s reign Fire Nation) with the respect they deserve while making it palpable to kids. 

  And considering the post-MeToo world we live in, what better dark and taboo topic to tackle than sexual abuse?

  Especially considering that most people aren’t really aware that most victims of sexual abuse where abused by someone close to them, that most people don’t seem to recognize when such grooming occurs or that it is a bad thing until it is too late (ex. Drake Bell, Kyle Massey, Drake (The Rapper), R. Kelly, etc.), and most victims don’t react to their abuse the way most people think they should (ex. Fight back or tell others). 

  Thus, couldn’t Ozula be used to educate people on the signs of such grooming and/or abuse and how to properly help such victims?

  I also think that seeing Azula overcome the effects of a canon Ozula could also provide healing for someone who played a pivotal role in bringing Azula to life: Grey DeLise.

  It was a shock for me to find out, but Grey DeLise has repeatedly said that she got abused by people her mother let into their home and that her mother did nothing despite obviously knowing what was going on. 

  Considering that DeLise heavily projects onto Azula (including Azula’s relationship with Ursa), has a history of sexualizing Azula (she explicitly said she voiced the bedroom scene with Zucest in mind), and went to really dark place to record Azula’s breakdown, is it crazy to say that DeLise had Ozula as her one of personal headcanons and that it affected her Azula performance?

  That is why, in combination with everything else I have said, I think Ozula has the potential to have a real impact how sexual abuse victims are treated and viewed.

  Imagine Ozai plotting to remove Ursa, Azulon, Iroh, and Zuko from the palace so he could "play" with Azula unimpeded after almost being caught several different times while also taking things to the next “level”? 

  Imagine the goading of Azulon/Ursa's banishment and Zuko's burning/banishment all part of this plot?

  Imagine Azula making inappropriate jokes about fathers breaking in their daughters to Mai & Ty Lee, causing them to be unnerved while Azula wonders what was wrong with her apt description of father-daughter relationships?

  Imagine Ozai spending the next three years molding Azula to not only be his perfect pet weapon but also his future consort once she is of age.?

  Imagine his anger when Azula comes home with her childhood friends and Zuko, cutting down on their alone time?

  Imagine his horror when he finds out that Azula non-ironically enjoys her time with them more than him despite the fact Ozai had groomed her from a young age to only love him? 

  Imagine his happiness when Zuko leaves and Mai and Ty Lee are later jailed, allowing him unlimited time with Azula again, despite the hardships Azula’s lapses in judgment regarding her friends & brother. Not to mention Ozai thinking that he once again gets to be the sole attention of Azula's affections? 

  Imagine Ozai finding out Azula non-ironically misses her brother and friends and so he leaves her behind during Sozin's Comet as punishment for her conflicted emotions & past failures?

  Imagine Ozai defeated coming home to see Azula chained, physically and mentally broken, screaming for her bitch of a mother. Only then realizing, for a fleeting moment, the damage he did to his daughter, only to go back to feeling rage at her humiliating loss & even more humiliating loss of sanity?

  Imagine Ozai patiently waiting to be reunited with his pet heir and once they meet in his jail cell, convincing Azula that they can be together again if Azula can get a hold of that accursed letter and kill Ursa, the only person who could possibly refute it?

  Imagine Ozai hearing that Azula failed in her mission due to being unable to kill her mother despite having Ursa literally in her hands, marking the first time Azula ever disobeyed him? Moreover, imagine his rage once he hears how she disowned him and basically dismantled from within an organization trying to reinstate him on the throne?

  Imagine Ozai confronting Ursa, Iroh, and Zuko once they find out about his abuse of Azula, thinking he has once again found a way to manipulate them? Only to find out that they are through with him for good and that they will help Azula heal from his abuse.

  Imagine Azula finally going through a healing arc, where with the help of well-trained healers and her mother (who she bonds with over both being victims of Ozai), she learns that what Ozai did to her was wrong, how healthy relationships actually work, & how her abuse never justified her abuse of others?

  Imagine Azula then undergoing an atonement arc, where, among other things, she becomes a leading advocate for mental health issues and sexual abuse victims, eventually working with Zuko & Aang to to create shelters & a proto-CPS in addition to radically changing the Fire Nations views on sex & consent?

  Imagine Azula eventually finding a loving partner and engaging in a mutually loving relationship, eventually having her own child who she raises in the exact opposite fashion that Ozai raised her while also being a loving aunt to Izumi?

  Imagine Ozai thinking that Azula will one day return to him, thinking that he has irreversibly molded her to need him the same way a baby needs its pacifier. Only for him to die never being visited by Azula again, who has long stopped caring for Ozai and hasn’t spared him a thought for a long time & will never do so again?

  Therefore, in sum, Ozula has the potential to do to victims of sexual abuse what the depiction of the Ozai-Zuko relationship, and Zuko eventually realizing his father is abusive & disowning, did for victims of abuse while also maybe giving DeLise some form of catharsis.

Thus, in the long list of bad things Ozai did (abuse his wife/son/daughter, kill his father/ruler, illegally urusp his bro, attempt a genocide of a continent, attempt to kill a 12 year old, turn Azula into a child solider/general, etc.) is molesting Azula the worst thing he could have done? 

  Or I am crazy with a need to go to a therapist for my many unresolved issues?

More Notes:

https://youtu.be/UjLzX1xPW1U?t=316

Grey: they're like 'why are you sexualizing everything?" because i do that in my whole life, my whole life is sexualized Olivia: same. that’s why Grey and I get along Grey: we've... got... abusive childhoods Olivia: uhhh Grey: uh... well I do Olivia: I don't, I just like sex! Grey: depending on who i'm doing it with... then yeah. Olivia: visibly uncomfortable Grey: I've not liked it a lot as much as I've liked it. Olivia: 0_0 Brad is like what... the hell.. is happening

Grey also talks about her abuse in an interview with Mental Illness Happy Hour where she details how her mother abandoned her to people she knew were raping her. And Grey has repeated her story in multiple interviews over the years.

----

Looooong-ass post ahead! You're not crazy, and there is subtext for Ozula... just like there is for Maizula, something I actually like but that I personally believe didn't happen - and if anyone reading this has not yet seen my first answer to why I don't think Ozai sexually abused Azula, I recommend you do so: https://hello-nichya-here.tumblr.com/post/650918965929000960/trigger-warning-i-know-you-talk-a-lot-about-how

While I see the merit of any good story, and I have read good stories that interpret Ozai and Azula's relationship as having involved sexual assault at some point, it is far more likely that in the actual canon (be it just in the show or also taking into account the comics) that simply neved happened, and I'll explain why.

About Ozai never remarrying

It would be very strange for Ozai to never try to have more heirs, and constantly endanger the ones he does have... until we remember that the only noble family in Avatar that has more than two kids is Ty Lee's, and that there are people like Kyoshi who literally over two centuries old when she died. Avatar is a very mature kid's show, but it is still a kid's show, with characters who control the elements and don't get a single scratch on them in situations that would severely injure or kill a normal human being, and the writers likely didn't want to add more characters to an already complicated, political plot like the Fire Nation Royal Family - which is why Iroh never remarried, Azulon's wife was already dead, there were no Lu Ten flashbacks, etc. If they went to such lengths to avoid creating too many characters, it makes sense that Zuko and Azula have no step-mother and no half-siblings in the show. Furthermore, the show clearly wanted to push Azula and Zuko's rivalry - adding another sibling would force their attention (and ours) to shift to said sibling, which is why Kiyi only was created in the comics that were focusing on the royal family, after Zuko became Fire Lord, and even then she is Ursa's daughter but not Ozai's, meaning Azula is still the only real "rival" Zuko has.

Ozai's supposed obsession with Ursa

Despite the radical change in the story of their marriage, I'd say that Ozai was NOT obsessed with Ursa, be it in the show where she consented to marry him, or in the comics where she kidnapped and raped. Princes were expected to marry and have heirs, and the war meant they'd need to have powerful heirs. He married Ursa (against her will or otherwise depending on the version of the story), had two kids with her (the standard in their universe), and encouraged said kids to be ruthless, punishing them when didn't meet his expectations (the Agni Kai and Zuko's banishment were cruel, but they were the type of behavior the Fire Nation rewarded). We need to remember that Ozai's only real problem with the hierarchy and expectations of his nation was when he had to see his brother be Fire Lord instead of him, because Ozai's only real obsession was the crown.

Yet he didn't kill his father until Ursa came up with a plan to do it so she could save Zuko, didn't kill Iroh, smiled in disdain when Zuko said he would help the Avatar defeat him, and constantly endangered Zuko and Azula despite having no other heirs. That behavior might seem strange, until you realize Ozai did truly respect the autority of Fire Lord at one point, but after he managed to steal the crown, he felt like he won absolutely everything - and to prove that he became the Phoenix King, showing he was above even that. He didn't need Ursa, Azula, or any other woman to give strong heirs, because Azula was already filling that role. There is no evidence he was obsessed with Ursa because he only married her because it was the norm (same logic applies to the possible sexual abuse she suffered - she was supposed to give her husband heirs, so Ozai forcing himself on her could easily just be him doing what was expected of him), and then once she was no longer needed and he would actually be in a more favorable position if she disappeared he CHOSE to banish her - the law said he had to punish her for killing Azulon, but the law also said he shouldn't have let her kill his father in the first place. And in the comics he threated to kill both their kids if she came back. If he was obsessed with her, he would have used their kid's lives to force her to stay and never say a word about what happened to his father. But didn't do that, because he didn't want Ursa around.

Could he be obsessed with Azula herself instead of thinking of her as a replacement for Ursa?

I personally don't think so, mostly because of his actions towards both his kids and because of the intentions the writers had. During The Beach, Ozai sends Azula away for a little while with Zuko, Mai and Ty Lee. On the meeting before the eclipse, he had Zuko at his right hand. On their last scene together, Ozai looks annoyed that Azula is around, stabs her in the back, lies to her face, and then leaves her. Finally, when he is last seen on screen, he doesn't ask Zuko what happened to her, if she is in prison, if she lost her bending too, if she is dead... nothing.

Ozai's behavior towards Azula is much more similar to his treatment of Zuko than most people realize. He shuts them both down when try to be anything other useful weapons - be it when they are showing "weakness", failing on their missions, trying to betray him, or trying to be equals to him. His reaction to Zuko's "All I ever wanted was for you to love me" was basically the same he had to Azula's "I thought we were going to do this together/This was my idea/I deserve to be by your side/You can't treat me like Zuko". He instantly told them both to shut the fuck up. He has no affection for them - for Azula - be it a normal one or a twisted one. They might as well not exist when they're not winning him battles.

On top of all that, comics!Ozai full on said he'd kill Zuko and Azula if Ursa didn't stay away, and considering how little regard he showed to anyone and how easy it would be for him to find a new wife if he had to, it is very clear he meant it. And a plot-line that was originally going to happen in book 3 but was cut (likely due to there not being enough time to explore it) had Ozai planning an arranged marriage for Azula - if he wanted her for himself, why was he more than ready to give her away to some rando the second she was old enough to marry?

Intention of the writers VS Intention of the actors

Assuming Grey did want there to have, at the very least, subtext for Ozula, we still run into a different problem: her intention goes against what is presented in canon. With something like Zucest or Tyzula, it is easier to make it work despite the pairings not being canon - they are meant to be complicated, unhealthy dynamics in which the characters involved have both negative and positive feelings for each other. So you could say Zuko and Azula were attracted to each other AND were still rivals. You could say Azula was in love with Ty Lee, and the feeling was mutual, but Ty Lee still chose to save Mai at the boiling rock regardless because it was the right thing to do for her friend.

With Ozula, however, it'd lead to a Zutara-esque situation (again, assuming Grey really did want that subtext to exist, since she didn't specify if that was what she meant when she said she went into a dark place while acting Azula's scenes in the finale). Dante Basco, aka Zuko, is the capitain of the Zutara ship, so any scene between Zuko and Katara gets at least a bit of subtext (and Zutara actually had full on ship-bait moments)... but the show also made it clear that the characters were NOT interested in each other like that, and they both ended up with different people. That means Zutara has some base for it, but it is still NOT CANON. Ozula is on even less solid ground since the overwhelming majority of the text activelly goes against it - again, Ozai seemed uniterested in both his wife and his daugheter, and activelly tried to distance himself from them.

How Azula flirts VS how she acts around Ozai

If we assume all of Azula's behaviors towards people like Zuko and Sokka was indeed intentional, we need to ask ourselves: was it really flirting or an attempt to unnerve them?

With that assumption in mind, I mostly see her actions towards Sokka as having been based on a display of power instead of flirting, but I can understand if people disagree. I fully believe she was attracted to Zuko and wanted both to intimidate him and flirt with him, and even discussed it at length on the link bellow (and offered another possible explanation of why she might not have been interested in Sokka after all) https://hello-nichya-here.tumblr.com/post/654197363889635328/zucest-is-it-really-flirting

When we take that behavior into account, regardless of motivation, and then compare it to her actually trying to flirt with Chan, we see that Azula has different styles of flirting, both of which are based on warpped perceptions of how normal interactions work - one having a predator/prey vibe with open ridicule, and the other with awkward/false flattery that is accidentally insulting and/or scary.

However, if we look at how she acts with Ozai, we see that she acts like a completely different person. She is very respectful and very distant - sort of how servants and guards act around her. That shows that despite her love for her father being actual canon (unlike any attraction she possibly felt for any character) their relationship is VERY formal. Azula doesn't take any liberties with her father, making it very unlikely that she learned her more "inapropriate" behaviors from him.

Azula's trauma

Azula was neglected by her mother and turned into a child soldier by her father. In Zuko Alone, we see Ursa spending a lot of time with Zuko but not with Azula, harshly reprimanding her without trying to understand her motives (like when she asked Zuko why he hurt the turtle-ducks), and even asking "What is wrong with that child?". Add in the over the top neglect she faced in the comics, the obvious guilt Azula was starting to feel for her actions in book 3, as well as the fact that a parent suddenly leaving like Ursa did can severely affect their child's mental health (which was likely to have been fragile in the first place considering Azula's more distressing behavior as a kid, as well as the psychological torment and hallucinations she dealt with in the finale) it makes perfect sense for Azula to believe her mother saw her as monster. Her claim that their mother liked Zuko more and her reaction to Mai's "I love Zuko more than I fear you" shows that her problems with her mother come believing she was not loved while her brother was - could she have also wanted Ursa to be there to protect her from sexual abuse? Sure. She could have simply wanted her mother to procted her from literally anything, or just be by her side and be proud of her.

This trauma also explains her freaking out as Ozai left her in the finale. She had recently lost Zuko, Ty Lee and Mai - the later of the three having accidentally touched an old, open wound of hers. Ozai was all she had left, and he turned his back on her after all she did for him. That was the last straw, and finally broke. You can add sexual assault or literally any kind of abuse to the story to explore a new theme/possibility, but it not existing in canon is not a plot-hole because the story works perfectly without it.

Imagine...

"Imagine Ozai killed Azulon and banished Ursa and Zuko so he could have Azula to himself, abused her, and then was mad when she brought Zuko home, with Mai and Ty Lee coming along"

I can imagine it. What I cannot is remember it. It can be a good, important, cathartic story, but is not the story we saw in the show. In the show we saw Ursa planning Azulon's death, not Ozai. We saw how his abuse was 99% purely psychological. We saw Ozai banish Zuko years after he supposedly got rid of the other two impediments of his abuse to Azula. We saw him not giving a damn about Mai and Ty Lee being around, welcoming Zuko home and rewarding him for "killing the Avatar", and then making Azula leave with them. And above all, we saw him shut Azula down the second she tried to have any kind of relationship with him that involved being anything more than a killing-machine.

Ozula can be an interesting plot, but said plot exists solely in theory and fanfics, not in the actual canon.

[deltaengineering]

What remains of Fall Anime 2020

You might have noticed that I haven’t been keeping up with my season impressions, mostly (but not exclusively) because it’s really boring to come up with new ways to say “it’s isekai, which means it’s garbage for stupids”. So here’s what I ended up finishing, in ascending order of goodinosity.

Hypnosis Mic -Division Rap Battle- Rhyme Anima

Ostentatious rap battles in an insanely stupid universe are very fun. The thing is that this doesn’t want to be a good anime, it wants to sell us on these characters, and the characters are pretty terrible on account of all of them being one-word gimmicks. So, let’s give them three rounds of introductions and have them solve lame, generic crimes for 8 episodes instead of setting up the rivalries that everyone suddenly has later, when the show gets good - because it does start delivering towards the end, and becomes really all I wanted. So I can’t even say I’m disappointed, but the first half of the show is almost entirely worthless. 4/10

Assault Lily Bouquet

I don’t want to be the guy that’s all “I’m mad at this show not catering to what I want”, but I do have to say that Salt Bucket is much better at being a goofy, lighthearted yuri comedy than it is at action (though there are a few choice cuts) and at having an engaging storyline. This is again just an ad for some game or other, so it’s no surprise it has about two dozen characters too many, but it also has quite a lot of superfluous plot - so much so that I suspect it was initially planned to be twice as long. Apart from that, it’s cool and all that some Gainax old hand got to make his own Gunbuster-like, but it’s just not very good at that and all I wanted was Kaede antics and bath scenes, of which 1 per episode is clearly too few. 5/10

The King's Avatar 2

King’s Avatar got a sequel and overall I have to say, I kinda like it more than the first season even though it looks much less ambitious and even the character designs were changed towards the bland. But I honestly don’t care much about the esports aspect of this and much of S2, especially in the back half, is more about schemes and social engineering - as close to an Eve Online anime as we’re ever going to get, I guess. It’s still very chinajank (why the hell does every episode come with a redundant chibi summary of itself, etc), and while I can’t call that “good” it does remind me of a time when I wasn’t filled with useless knowledge of anime tropes and was just enjoying the weirdness. Also, Ye God’s antics is as close to “looking for anime with OP MC” as I’m comfortable with getting. 6/10

Heaven Official's Blessing

Now how about some Chinimation that isn’t very janky? I only became aware of Heaven Official’s Blessing when it suddenly rocketed to the top of the MAL charts, so I gave it a looksie and oh boy. The first few episodes of this show are flat out gorgeous, quite funny and very very gay. So I was ready to agree with MAL for once, except it then launches into an arc that mostly consists of our dudes sitting in a dark pit telling each other stories that aren’t very interesting and seem barely related to the setup. Yeah, the back half of this just isn’t very good at all. And the subs are hot garbage. Still, the beginning is so impressive that I would recommend this show despite the middling rating it’s about to get. 6/10

Ochikobore Fruit Tart

You know the problem that these 5girls4koma stories have, where one of the characters is an annoying pervert, yeah? Well, in Fruit Tart every character is that character, and they’re rather cultured as well. Yes, it’s often of questionable taste and it has a terminal case of 4koma storytelling but dammit if I didn’t enjoy it. It certainly helps that this show’s greatest asset by far is Broko and it seems to be aware of this, because there’s a lot of Broko material. It would have probably have gotten a 6 but the last episode is just so... maximum Fruit Tart. I’m down for some trash if it’s as well made as this, and I do like my kiraralikes spicy, so thumbs up over here. YMM definitely V on this one. 7/10

Majo no Tabitabi

Speaking of things that are hard to recommend despite me liking them a lot, Elaina here challenges the very notion of what a TV show even is supposed to be. I assume most people tune in every week expecting to get something roughly similar. Not so with this one, you could get everything from slice of life antics to Higurashi-style gore, or reasonably deep character study to pervert comedy. I would say that the only unifying thread is the presence of Elaina, who is a very fun character, but there’s an episode she’s not in, so there you go. But I’m a connoisseur of the weird and I also have to say that I enjoyed every episode in its own way. Also, each episode stays remarkably consistent by itself, and in the end it wraps it all up with a sort of neat “life is like a box of chocolates” thematic bow, which isn’t earthshatteringly profound but hey, it’s there. Just don’t go in with expectations, especially not expectations based on the first episode. 7/10

Love Live! Nijigasaki

It’s Love Live. Good old reliable Love Live. Really not much to say about this one, any discussion of what makes this different from previous iterations is going to end up in minutiae only people who already watched this could possibly care about. I do have to say that while the musical numbers are as good as Sunshine’s were towards the end and there’s also a lot more of them, “looking budget deficient outside the CG” is the one thing I didn’t expect from something that’s ostensibly a Sunrise premium product. So boo on that one, apart from that it’s idols (an anagram of solid). 7/10

Garupa Pico Oomori

The chibi SD shorts based off Bang Dream are still better than the main show. Even if S3 was actually quite good, this is just the best thing you can do with 30+ characters that aren’t that deep. Garupa Pico specializes in absurd humor setpieces that at points is better at being Pop Team Epic than Pop Team Epic itself was. Take that, memelords. 7/10

Fire Force S2

Fire Force is just weird, man, and it’s sort of great. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a property of this magnitude show this much of the ol idgaf spirit. How about an episode where the A plot is the most evenhanded exploration of religion i’ve seen in anime, and the B plot is about blowing up a tryhard edgelord by exposing him to panties? How about a subplot where Batman and Thor infiltrate the vatican to kill the pope, only for that to lead into a gay rape backstory, only for that to be resolved by dank weed and dismemberment? It really is quite a thing, as they say. Now, Fire Force certainly delivers hard at points, but it’s also very scattershot, even if S2 is somewhat more consistent than S1. The weakest parts are unsurprisingly still the ones where it’s remembering its fighting shounen template, and that’s not only because I don’t like that, it’s also because it’s particularly and consistently bad at scheduling these huge, simultaneous multifight setpieces it often crescendoes with. But hey, at least these tend to look super cool. In short, Fire Force is a land of contrasts and still the only fighting shounen I give a damn about. 7/10

IDOLiSH7 Second Beat

Did you know that I think Idolshi7 is the best one of all of these huge-ass commercial idol franchises? Yeah, I think it’s better than Love Live, and as of Fall 2020 also the better looking one because Troyca still delivers where Sunrise apparently can’t. I guess still don’t like the music much, thankfully there isn’t a lot of that. It also still specializes in gigantic drama, and to its credit S2 is now much better at either getting to the point or at least making it silly and fun. You show that door who’s boss, Sou. Still fantastic Tsumugis all over the place as well, in fact I think I like all the characters now. Even Banri gets his big moment in this season! Yeah, this stuff is pretty cool. 8/10

Adachi and Shimamura

So here’s the AOTS, and it’s the lovechild of Bloom Into You and Tsuki ga Kirei. While it definitely isn’t as good as either of these two, because it lacks the “about more than just teenagers being hyperbolic about a crush” part from Bloom and the part where it has an actual ending from TgK, it carves out its own niche with its loopy, almost stoned tone that’s full of side weirdos and yuri hyperspace. It’s also uniquely focused, with a tiny core cast and even Shimamura doesn’t really matter all that much. This is all about Adachi, and thankfully Adachi is amazing. Amazingly awkward, that is. It’s very cute. So yeah, this is a bit too lacking in substance to aspire to classic status, but it’s a great time nonetheless. 8/10

[azdoine]

So let’s talk about them cherubs.

I think it’s no secret that Calliope and Caliborn have always been deeply gendered characters in Homestuck, but (beyond fanart and enthusiastic headcanons) I personally haven’t seen a lot of engagement with their characters on that level. The most comprehensive readings of Calliope and Caliborn that I’ve seen have always been through the lens of metatext (Calliope and Caliborn as fandom avatars) or religion (Calliope and Caliborn as Gnostic figures).

With that in mind, I want to talk about the ways in which Calliope and Caliborn are gendered in Homestuck, and offer my own amateur reading of Calliope as a trans allegory.

Full disclosure, I love the epilogues, but I won’t be engaging with them here -- I view them as extracanonical, which is to say, I’d like to talk about them and their own presentation of Calliope’s story in another post.

Also, it’s Homestuck, so, you know. Sex, death, violence, and bigotry under the cut:

If we’re to read Calliope as a trans allegory, then we don’t need to look very far for evidence, because the text is very straightforward in suggesting it.

Almost as soon as we meet Calliope in the flesh for the first time, we’re confronted with the bleak reality of her desire for a more feminine embodiment:

'Callie Ohpeee’ serves as an aspirational figure for Calliope on multiple levels. Most obviously, she’s a vehicle for Calliope’s self-insertion into the wider world of paradox space and the alpha timeline (i.e. her self-insertion into the story of Homestuck); Callie Ohpeee is able to freely and directly interact with the elements and characters of the story that Calliope adores, while Calliope cannot. Somewhat less obviously, Calliope’s trollsona also serves as a way for her to imagine herself in non-caliginous relationships (which she desires on some level, but she feels she has been denied by her biology).

However, Calliope’s trollsona isn’t just a vehicle for her relationships and engagement with other people. Calliope’s trollsona is also key to the way in which Calliope desires to relate to herself.

Calliope desires to be attractive and feminine for her own sake: she desires to be beautiful and pretty, and her trollsona serves as the vehicle by which she satisfies this desire.

Calliope’s trollsona is quite literally her idealized feminine self, and so her relaxing “solo cosplay” sessions bring nothing more to mind than a trans woman privately enjoying a feminine presentation in the closet, as many trans women have. Her costumery and face paint imply clothes and makeup, and Caliborn takes on the role of a patriarch or patriarchy that tries to control her.

Ultimately, though, Calliope’s embodiment desires are cosmically validated by the unfolding drama of paradox space. Calliope is tormented by the apparent fact that she isn’t and can’t be Callie Ohpeee, but nevertheless, she successfully inserts herself into the lives of the alpha kids and the unfolding of the alpha timeline, forms the kinds of relationships that she wants, and receives the regard that she wants. She dies and takes on the form of her trollsona in the dream bubbles, and even when she’s physically reborn as her cherub self, she’s still “Callie” to Roxy, a meaningful nickname that goes basically unspoken.

Pretty straightforward, right? A trans girl learns that she and her body aren’t unlovable, makes friends and forms bonds as her true self, and escapes the reach of the forces that once abused her.

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

Before we can close the door on a trans reading of Calliope, we also have to consider Calliope and Caliborn as a pair, and not least because the two of them literally share the same body. Fair warning, we’re only going to get more speculative (and more indulgent) going forward.

Calliope and Caliborn are presented, at least superficially, as absolute and dichotomous opposites. They are two spirits that cannot coexist at once within the same body; their respective attitudes and temperaments couldn’t be any more different, and they are, of course, Muse and Lord: quintessentially passive and quintessentially active.

However, Calliope and Caliborn aren’t so different as one might think. Despite Caliborn’s violent protestations to the contrary, they share key characterizing interests in the likes of shipping...

...and art:

Caliborn is infamous for his disgust and anger with the absurdity of paradox space (i.e. his anger with the text of Homestuck itself), but Calliope is easily provoked into displaying the exact same petulant frustration with the direction of the story and the unfolding of events around her.

Calliope and Caliborn are consistently unified within the text -- not as incompatible opposites, but as two sides of the same coin. In Complacency of the Learned, Calliope and Caliborn are personified in the singular, androgynous Calmasis. In his chess match with Calliope, Caliborn disguises his king as his queen, and vice versa, signifying a mutual transgression and inversion of gender; Caliborn steals Calliope’s hemotyping and typing quirk, just as alternate!Calliope does the same to him, in a mutual appropriation not just of quirk (i.e. voice and presentation), but of blood, or life. On the level of the body, Caliborn’s skin is inextricably marked by the green that signifies Calliope, and Calliope is inextricably marked by Caliborn’s skull: the deaths-head he would inflict upon all life (and a hyperrealization of the masculine or unfeminine bone structure that troubles many trans women).

Most significantly, Aranea indicates to us that Calliope and Caliborn actually began as one being, which then went on to fracture into a male and female aspect, striving with and against each other -- a creation myth for gender and sexuality itself, in the vein of Plato’s Symposium, Rabbinic lore on Adam and Eve, and (rather topically) Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

With their fundamental unity in mind, we can read Calliope and Caliborn not just as ‘brother and sister’, but rather as two identities, personas, or aspects of one person. This is why, for example, calling a cherub by one of their two names brings that personality to the surface -- because, on a literal or symbolic level, it constitutes the active validation of that personality and identity, and the abject denial of the other.

Does all of this suggest a bigender, genderfluid, or otherwise non-binary reading of Calliope and Caliborn? Maybe, but let’s keep going, first.

Aranea’s exposition tells us that even adult, mature, ‘binary’ cherubs are still figures of gender duality, inversion, and transgression. Mating cherubs take on the forms of dueling cosmic serpents -- the sex act occurs between two hyperreal phallic symbols, suggesting male homosexuality in specific and queerness more broadly. It was Calliope’s biological father who ultimately submitted to their biological mother, and thus it was Calliope’s biological father who laid their egg, while their biological mother was the one to fertilize it, revealing the separation of sexual anatomy and power relations from gender among cherubs.

The gender dualities, inversions, and transgressions at play can still exist within cherubs who are, by all accounts, decisively male or female in gender identity -- despite the lack of of any way to assign them a sex or gender from the outside. 

The dueling personalities within each young cherub are siblings to each other, but they are also different possible selves that the cosmically-transgender cherub might become as they grow to adulthood -- just as the dueling alternate selves of so many other characters can illuminate their own internal conflicts. In Homestuck, the inner life is always prone to manifest in the outer life, again and again.

I TRAGICALLY LOST A SISTER TO MURDER

Having established a reading of Calliope and Caliborn as two identities within one person -- as ‘Calmasis’ at odds with themself, containing multitudes and torn between them -- we can move on to look at the way Calliope and Caliborn relate to each other, and to gender, in order to get the bigger picture.

Caliborn introduces himself to us as undyingUmbrage, a username of largely straightforward meaning. His umbrage -- his anger, irritation, annoyance, or offense in the face of the world -- is neverending, everlasting, and eternal, and so too is his own life. Caliborn is immortal, allowing him to carry his rage forward forever.

If Caliborn’s username is simple, then Calliope’s is more sophisticated, which fits their characters. As uranianUmbra, her title invokes most obviously Uranus the planet and Urania the heavenly muse, but also the ‘uranian’, Karl Ulrichs’ antiquated title for gay men and trans women: those with an anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa, “a woman’s soul enclosed in a man’s body.” As the umbra, or darkest shadow, she invokes the Jungian shadow archetype, the suppressed, unconscious, or rejected aspect of the self.

As such, Calliope identifies and codes herself both as transfeminine and as Caliborn’s allegorical shadow archetype -- a part of himself that he can neither accept, acknowledge, or escape, perpetually haunting him. In-universe, Calliope names herself after Uranus’ topspin, and the ‘English’ of a cue-ball that it echoes -- thus, she implicitly identifies herself and the trans feminine uranian with the cue-ball that threatens Caliborn and Lord English. She symbolically establishes herself and the trans feminine as Caliborn’s only intrinsic vulnerabilities!

And on some level, Calliope tells us all of this! Because while Caliborn wants to destroy Calliope, she hopes to make him like her:

Calliope manifests a sincere investment in so many of the things that Caliborn orbits at a distance. Thus, to Caliborn, she represents a threat from within to his ability to maintain distance, because on some level, she serves as a manifestation of his own desire to draw closer. She confronts him with the reality of his own desire, or at least, with the latent possibility of his own sincere investment -- she serves to remind him that anyone who can waste as much time on creating Homosuck as he does is both an invested creative and sincerely invested in Homestuck on some level.

And it’s much the same on the level of gender, too. Calliope serves as a sincere reflection of the gender identity that Caliborn can only orbit at a distance. It was, after all, Caliborn’s idea to swap the king and queen chess pieces, and to disguise them as each other. Calliope lashes out at him because he cannot do so earnestly: because Caliborn makes a shitty twist out of his insincere production, because he can’t commit to swapping the places of the king and queen, and because he abuses Calliope’s willingness to swap the pieces (because he abuses and misdirects her inclination to gender transgression, and by extension, betrays the premises of his own idea).

This is why Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself instead of predominating over her in the conventional way -- not just because it’s easier and more convenient for him, but because his predomination would mean “consuming” her personality and “integrating” with it. It would constitute an integration with his shadow archetype, and thus, on some level, a partial destruction of the persona and ego he has established for himself. To Caliborn, as pathological as he has become, any level of integration with Calliope represents an existential threat, and so he has to cut her out of himself like a cancer.

But even having cut Calliope out of himself, Caliborn cannot escape her. By cutting her out of himself, he has defined himself around the hole she has left in him -- he has permanently divorced himself of the opportunity to integrate with her or accept what she represents. While both Caliborn and alt!Calliope take up each other’s typing quirks as a sign of victory, Caliborn takes Calliope’s quirk as a way by which he can signal his ‘wholeness’:

And this is, of course, complete bullshit and posturing of the highest order. Andrew Hussie not only directly characterizes the conflict between Caliborn and Calliope as an inner conflict within him, but he also tells him that his only path to maturity and personal growth was through integration with Calliope.

Not to be denied, Caliborn continues to constantly assert the self-justifying completion and authority of his masculinity, for himself and for others...

...but even so, he still can’t help but betray himself and his own idealized masculinity:

Masc4masc, Caliborn certainly isn’t! In his creative endeavors, he telegraphs his ultimate disgust for masculinity. He needs to draw out the femininity he wants to see in men -- he acts out gruesome, hateful misogyny against women, but even as he murders so many of the women of his manga or otherwise ejects them from his story, he’s still compelled to recreate femininity and symbolically recreate womanhood within the male cast he has left behind.

And he’s not just motivated by homophobia and a disgust for men who are intimate with other men! Nor is he just motivated by a desire to place these feminized characters below him. Just as Calliope does sincerely with her Callie Ohpeee trollsona, Caliborn is compelled to feminize his own self-insert, the crude rendition of Lord English he creates for his own satisfaction. Given free reign to depict himself and insert himself into his story however he likes, Caliborn opts to turn away from the full thrust of hypermasculinity, and he makes himself beautiful and gorgeous.

And as soon as he does so, Caliborn’s repressed attraction to Calliope erupts again:

This isn’t just the matter of blackrom incest that the text superficially suggests; even on a purely textual level, due to the alien nature of their relationship, Caliborn only barely regards Calliope as a sister, and he certainly has no problem with objectifying and sexualizing all of the other women he hates.

No, Caliborn has to repress his attraction to Calliope because, given their shared form, his attraction to her as a woman necessarily constitutes an implicit recognition that he could be attractive as a woman, and his body could be attractive as a woman’s body.

Caliborn can never accept that, and he’ll never directly address it or engage with it. He’ll never think about what all of this means for him, or act on his idle fantasies. The time for turning back is well behind him.

He is, now and forever, exactly the kind of angry and disaffected chud who will never unplug from 4chan or stop masturbating to awful trap hentai. He has deliberately imprisoned himself within the teleology of his own self-confirming hegemonic masculinity, and he thinks it is glorious.

THE DEMON IS ALREADY HERE

To fully understand Caliborn, of course, we need to understand Lord English.

If Caliborn has imprisoned himself within his own assertions, then Lord English is the embodiment of those assertions, and Caliborn’s transformation into Lord English is his ultimate apotheosis: having murdered his shadow and excised her spirit from within himself, his transformation enables him to excise her from without. His ascension allows him not only to purge Calliope’s visage from his body, closing off the possibilities once implied and allowed by his youthful and androgynous form, but also to recreate, reconfirm, and relive his victory over Calliope at every turn.

To understand what I mean by that, let’s look at the characters and components who go into Lord English, starting with Equius.

Equius, is, of course, a long-form joke character about the pathetic contradictions of hegemonic masculinity. In his pesterlogs, he opens every line with blatantly phallic imagery...

But when he actually tries to handle said phallus in real life, his titanic strength prevents him from doing anything but destroying it:

And the same goes for one of his horns, which he has apparently broken off. The autocastration symbolism is not subtle, and about the mildest thing we can conclude is that he’s a chronic, addicted masturbator who has compromised his own sexual performance.

He’s also textually obsessed with upholding the racial hegemony of the Alternian civilization...

...but his obsession with hierarchy and dominance quickly collapses into a thin pretext for his barely-suppressed desire to submit to those who are higher than him on the hemospectrum...

...and to those who are lower than him!

Equius is a character intrinsically lined to the collapse and self-destruction of masculinity and male sexuality, which is topical enough that we might end there. However -- and there’s no nice way for me to say this -- we also need to establish that Equius is a necrophile and a sexual predator, too.

@mmmmalo and others have written intriguingly and at length about reading “blue beauties” as a cipher for “sexualized corpses” in Homestuck, but for Equius, it’s about as textual as it gets. Equius is explicitly sexually and romantically interested in Aradia even after her death, and his necrophillic attraction is only reinforced by the symbolism: he constructs an unliving replacement body for her, which parses most obviously as a symbolic embalming and restoration of her corpse, and he treats it like a love doll even as it’s uninhabited and lifeless. He seeks to literally transform her body into a “blue beauty” by the transfusion of his own blood, which (given the color-coding of troll body fluids) parses as a clear insemination joke about his genetic material.

We might excuse his attraction for various fantastic mitigating factors -- Aradia is, after all, still ‘alive’ in a kind of undead state -- but Equius’ more general sexual predation cannot be so easily ignored. Aradia is chronically depressed and in absolute need of the service that Equius can provide, which he uses to take advantage of her and to compromise her bodily autonomy and judgement with the device he covertly implants inside of her.

Equius is undeniably a sexual predator who constructs women’s bodies in order to further his own domination, and his own motif of sexual self-destruction and inversion puts the final dark twist on his story. He is brutally dominated by Gamzee, suffocated to death until his corpse is blue in the face, and ultimately prototyped together with AR. He finds a unique fulfillment as he becomes the object of his own desire, when he is transformed into his own cybernetic “blue beauty”.

It’s not hard for me as a trans woman to see certain tropes at play, but for those of us who aren’t up to date on foundational transmisogynistic screeds...

Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example of male surgical siring which invades the female world with substitutes... The projected manufacture by men of artificial wombs, of cyborgs which will be part flesh, part robot, of clones – all are manifestations of phallocratic boundary violation. So also the behaviorism of B.F. Skinner and “physical control of the mind” through the use of implanted electrodes by such scientists as Delgado, are variations of monstrous male “motherhood”.

-Gyn/Ecology

Blanchard believes that autogynephilia is best conceived as misdirected heterosexuality. These men are heterosexual, but due to an error in the development of normal heterosexual preference, the erotic target (a woman) gets located on the inside (the self) rather than the outside...

Autogynephiles are men who have created their image of attractive women in their own bodies, an image that coexists with their original, male selves. The female self is a man-made creation. They visit the female image when they want to have sex, and some became so attached to the female image that they want it to become their one, true self...

-The Man Who Would Be Queen

But hey, does anyone else remember that time when ARquius got upset and envious because he couldn’t lactate like a mother would?

EXTREMELY SUBTLE.

As for Equius’ fusion with the AR, or Auto-Responder, we come to Dirk Strider.

Dirk Strider is, if anything, the furthest thing imaginable from the autoerotic subject that Equius presents: he is not so much attracted to another self as he is utterly repulsed by himself in his own totality.

Dirk Strider is a self-loathing, self-destructive, self-mutilating gay man, caught in the grips of a kind of hateful narcissism. He is not overtly trans-coded, or related to the trans feminine, but his male homosexuality ties into another, subtler form of trans feminine horror, one which Jake suggests in aside:

Dirk Strider presents the horror of the destruction of the self and the destruction of manhood more generally, both in the service of the satisfaction of others and in the fulfillment of self-hatred. He creates and destroys himself with abandon. In Unite/Synchronize, it’s Dirk who willingly decapitates himself to cross the gulf of space and time between him and Jake, and he allows Dave to decapitate him and destroy his ‘unbreakable’ katana with Caledfwlch -- the uranian cue-ball sword that destroys masculinity -- in Collide.

And keep in mind that when Dirk decapitates himself, it’s Lil’ Hal who looks out from his severed head:

Holy castration symbolism, batman! Remember that Hal’s shades are a part of ARquius’ own phallic imagery:

Lil’ Hal is a phallic specter that terrorizes both Dirk and Jake on the individual level, as well as in their relationship with each other. He drives Dirk’s Brobot-self to greater aggression, he’s aggressive, condescending, and cruel with Jake in general, and he apparently manipulates events to force Jake to kiss Dirk’s severed head -- which, if we’re taking the castration metaphor seriously, basically means he forced Jake to give Dirk head. Classy.

Is it any wonder that Dirk is so compelled to lop Lil’ Hal off of himself and out of his life, no matter the ethics or implications for himself? Hal is the perfect storm and culmination of all of the worst things Dirk sees in himself, and the omniscient apotheosis of his own detatched, ultramasculine, hypercompetent, ironic persona -- all despite being treated as a 13-year-old by the text, an immature and incomplete version of Dirk.

Remind you of anyone else?

Dirk and Lil Hal are in this respect a brighter mirror of Calliope and Caliborn: they are a self divided for whom the better half has softly predominated.

Dirk probably hasn’t literally castrated himself to destroy his masculinity in the way that Caliborn has literally destroyed his own femininity; Dirk and Hal certainly aren’t so explicitly gendered or trans-coded as Calliope and Caliborn are, so it’s more difficult to read them and their relationship as trans-coded. (Unless you want to read Dirk and Hal that way, in which case, hell yeah, go forth and be valid, and link me your fanfiction, please.)

Nevertheless, Dirk’s symbolic castration and literal rejection of lil Hal represents, if nothing else, a rejection of and predomination over his most toxic aspect (and his most toxically masculine aspect), and the gruesome excision of such from his life.

But while Dirk has left his worst half behind, his worst half has gone on to supercede him: entering into union with Equius, and by extension, Caliborn.

And what of Gamzee, the most important character in the entire comic?

Well, Gamzee is, of course, another mirror to Calliope and Caliborn. Like Calliope and Caliborn -- our allegorical Calmasis -- Gamzee is caught in an erratic duality between two possibilties.

Just like our Calmasis, Gamzee vacillates almost all through life between two fundamentally different personas. At the time of his introduction, he was someone basically passive, agreeable, and kindly -- even lovable, to the point that he still has his fans and stans to this day.

Of course, as time went on, he became more and more aggressive. Even against the backdrop of his largely passive behavior, his increasing aggression culminated in his many infamously depraved and murderously violent outbursts: a transition not incidentally marked (among other things) by his rejection of the green (and Calliope-coded) sopor slime that once helped to pacify him, and his radicalization at the hands of his future self (in Lil’ Cal).

In his typing quirk, Gamzee likewise alternates between Calliope’s lowercase and Caliborn’s uppercase:

Definitely no themes of duality here, nope!

Most tellingly, even in his ascension to Lord English, Gamzee is also halved, just like Calliope & Caliborn: Gamzee is bisected such that only half of him enters Lil’ Cal, while half of him is left behind, utterly broken and irrelevant.

But if Gamzee is a reflection of Calliope and Caliborn, then what else does this piece of shit clown have to say about them?

Well, like Calliope, Gamzee is quite involved in his own constructed persona -- but unlike Calliope, he’s almost never regarded as anything but disgusting and pathetic.

No amount of face paint can cover the scars across his face, and instead of covering himself up, his costume only accentuates his own body, exposing himself in the most pornographically aggressive and perverse way possible.

Even in making himself into a clown he reaches towards something inherently absurd; something that has no existence in itself save for how comical and disgusting it is to others. His aspirations and imitations render him a walking joke and a figure of corrupt terror.

And most horribly and grotesquely, if Calliope and Caliborn are a trans allegory, and Gamzee is any kind of reflection of them, we know exactly what kind of warped and fictitious trans archetype Gamzee is:

Gamzee suggests himself as a serial killer, and he’s one who hordes corpses and steals trophies from his victims, at that.

But there’s one more person we need to look at in this gruesome sequence: Doc Scratch, another parallel to Calliope in this incestuous slurry of signifiers. In Doc Scratch, the man with the uranian cue-ball head, we see even Calliope’s most harmless, silly traits taken to their most nightmarish and oppressive conclusions.

It’s Doc Scratch who selectively warps troll culture in order to create the world and the culture that Calliope loved so, and who meddles in the alpha timeline as he so desires; it’s he who shows just how perverse and oppressive omniscience can be, transforming all her scrapbooks and her labors of love into his own exhaustive account of the cosmos, turning her love of her favorite characters into his own callous disregard for objects to be manipulated. When he uses her own thoughtful tone, it only telegraphs menace.

And, most darkly for our own analysis, Doc Scratch is a sexual predator and a pedophile.

Almost from the start, he’s undeniably sexualized as a threat in his conversations with Vriska:

Even his omniscience is sexualized by his own words, casting the light of his awareness as a phallic presence invading and penetrating the unknown:

Vriska is an unreliable narrator, of course, and we might not want to read too deeply into Doc Scratch’s words. Scratch is certainly quick to assure Rose that he’s not a predator in his conversations with her...

...but as always, the gulf between what Doc Scratch says and what he means is almost insurmountable. Doc Scratch tells Rose that he has no biological means of reproduction, but he is a conglomerate of and a vessel for multiple sexual beings, and even the castrated may experience sexual pleasure and pursue sexual ends.

Most tellingly, Doc Scratch only tells Rose that he isn’t attracted to her “in the way she means”. From an entity known for wordplay and lies of omission, this constitutes a tacit admission that he IS attracted to her in some way that she isn’t asking about.

Aradia explicitly characterizes his interference in her and Kanaya’s lives as ‘grooming’...

And he does much the same to Damara:

Doc Scratch is an undeniably sexual and sexualized threat.

We might ask how, exactly, he’s supposed to be attracted to Rose and the other young girls he victimizes -- and certainly I think he’s a sexual voyeur in the general case, but I think he’s also an even more abstract and pedophillic threat.

Doc Scratch is a copy of Lil’ Cal, given life and omniscience as a First Guardian; he is the child’s toy which was once fawned over by a puppet pornographer, and he is a child-sized man. He titles himself after the Scratch process which allows children the chance to grow up, but which also transforms adults into children; he presents the absolute perverse sentimentality of all adult transgressions into the realm of childish things.

This alludes to Caliborn, of course, as the boy who cannot escape his childhood, but it’s also sexologically linked to toxic trans feminine archetypes...

Blanchard (1991) started with the idea that some cases of male-to-female gender dysphoria and transsexualism are fundamentally motivated by an ETII, in which natal males who are otherwise sexually attracted to women eroticize the idea of being women to such an extent that they want to become a woman themselves. Freund and Blanchard (1993) later extended this idea to an analogous ETII that might motivate some pedophilic men to impersonate or fantasize about being children.

It is fitting that the most compelling finding of our study—that autopedophilic men sexually attracted to girls tend to find it sexually arousing to imagine themselves as a girl—reflects the likely confluence of the two ETIIs that had been proposed many years ago: one that involves locating an individual of a different gender within one’s own body, and the other that involves locating an individual of a different age within one’s own body.

...and it’s also a searing indictment of Calliope.

To cosmic entities such as her and Scratch, how can other people be anything but objects, tools, and characters to be abused? Before the power and knowledge they might come to command, how can other people be anything but insects?

To Scratch and Calliope, how can other people be anything but children?

Even as Calliope becomes a mere player within the story of paradox space,  Doc Scratch accuses her of a fundamental and unwholesome transgression. She lets go of the condescending oversight she used to hold over the alpha timeline, no matter how kindly and well-meaning she was, and she descends from the omniscient authority of her lonesome ivory tower, but Doc Scratch still names her as an offense to herself and to others. Her desire to be a person is cast as a perversion, a deviance, and a sickness.

SBURB is a game her kind was never meant to play, after all. It’s a coming-of-age narrative not meant for her.

Ultimately, Doc Scratch himself is a fundamental accusation against Calliope: he is a grail of the souls who signify some of the most horrible gendered narratives and trans feminine narratives we can imagine, animated in mockery of Calliope as if to say: “this is you”. Equius, an autoerotic, necrophillic predator, and Hal, an aggressive, intellectualist meddler; even Gamzee, who is both a murderous pervert and her own adoptive father, a normative role model who is anything but.

And when Caliborn rises to prominence and Lord English births himself from the corpse of Doc Scratch, it’s nothing less a recreation of the traditional predomination that Caliborn has denied himself. To Caliborn, Lord English is the sign of his own victory: he may see the souls within Lil’ Cal as like-minded role models to emulate and assimilate, or as hateful and loathesome symbols of Calliope to be crushed under his will, but his predomination allows him to take both options without interrogating himself, just as he’s gone without interrogating everything else he wants. 

And to Calliope, well, if Doc Scratch was an accusation against her, then what could be more horrible to her than Lord English? He has destroyed Doc Scratch and symbolically ended her own perversions, but only through the act of being born.

The only alternative to the horror of being Doc Scratch is the terror of being Lord English; the only alternative to the horror of being Calliope is the terror of being Caliborn.

ISOLATION

I could navel-gaze for hours about the potential symbolism of Lord English, but I think it’s time to return full circle to a somewhat more grounded look at Calliope.

If Calliope, Caliborn, and Lord English cast light upon each other, then what does alternate!Calliope have to say about them?

Having naturally predominated and standing as a singular figure in the furthest ring, Alt!Calliope serves to illuminate the alternatives to Caliborn’s false victory: in all the alternate possibilities illuminated by the dream bubbles, we see that Calliope can naturally predominate over Caliborn, but not vice versa.

Alternate!Calliope strongly suggests to us that Calliope is inherently stronger than Caliborn, and she tells us that Calliope and Caliborn share the same strength: she tells us yet again that Calliope and Caliborn are two sides of the same coin.

She suggests to us that, in a sense, Calliope and Caliborn are just Calliope -- that Calmasis, upon achieving integration, will simply view herself as Calliope, and Caliborn will lose because he was never the true self.

So why, then, does Caliborn win in the alpha timeline? Is it just an arbitrary time loop, a timeline plucked from the frothing sea of paradox space and arbitrarily validated by the happenstance of the immature Caliborn’s power over time?

No, I certainly don’t think so; I’d like to think that the principle of AURYN applies even here. Caliborn wins out over Calliope because they’re Doing As They Will -- because, even on the level of our trans allegory, they both have reason to want Caliborn’s victory. Even on the level of our trans allegory, Calmasis needs to be Caliborn.

Alternate!Calliope tells us that she had to become strong because she had no-one else to comfort her, and I think suggests two important points of interest:

Firstly, that alt!Calliope serves to reflect Calliope’s inner drama, just as Calliope serves to reflect Caliborn’s inner drama. Caliborn fears and loathes the possibility of being like Calliope, the sentimental degenerate and weakling that she is, and Calliope fears and dreads the possibility of becoming alt!Calliope. Calliope fears that even if she rejects the hateful accusations that are Doc Scratch, and rejects the teleological future of Lord English, her only alternative is to be like alt!Calliope: someone who has won, and who has become herself, but at the cost of isolation, distance, and loneliness, without humanity, connection, or kindness.

In other words, Calliope fears her victory would mean her little green skull is always going to be a miserable Federal Fucking Issue, for herself and for others.

Secondly, that Calliope’s relationships with humans are in some sense the vector by which Caliborn came to dominate. Alt!Calliope won because she had no-one to take comfort in, and thus she had to be strong on her own, but I think the flip side of that is that alt!Calliope was able to be strong, because she had no relationships that could weaken her -- she was more insulated from the toxic ideas of the cultures that came before her. No one could so much as accidentally insinuate to her that she wasn’t good enough or pretty enough as she was, save perhaps for Caliborn -- and certainly Caliborn would have been malevolent, but he would have had less in the way of the language and systematic ideas to be the hateful and cultivated misogynist that he became in the alpha timeline.

In other words, alt!Calliope doesn’t have any reason whatsoever to worry about her little green skull in the first place.

But there’s another much more straightforward reason why Caliborn had to win, too:

If we’re supposed to take Calliope and Calliborn as two facets of a whole more generally, let alone as a specific trans allegory, well... they may have been two personas, or even two people, but they are confined to an existence as a single player. The cherub session likely never could been anything but a single player session; the cherub session was always going to be a dead session.

And whether it’s a fundamental fact of SBURB or just an idea in Calliope’s head -- one of the ideas she’s likely constructed with the human cultural biases she’s obtained by osmosis -- Caliborn is someone who can win a dead session, and Calliope isn’t. How could a Space player, a patient creative, succeed in a test of frantic, timed destruction? How could a passive Muse succeed where even an active Lord would struggle -- how could a woman succeed where even a man would struggle?

Only someone like Caliborn could ever possibly win. Perhaps Calliope reflects Caliborn as the person he desperately wishes he wasn’t, and she is the shadow that lies outside of his hateful and constructed self, but as a precarious supergiant hangs overhead and the light of Skaia gutters out, Caliborn reflects Calliope as the person she desperately needs to be, and he is the self she has to construct for herself.

Caliborn kills Calliope’s dreamself not just because he desperately hates her, but also because she has to allow him to supercede her, and he is the kind of person she needs to be: because SBURB is unfair, Skaia is unfair, and he can escape the desolate waste of her life, while she cannot.

And so it happens that Calliope is exiled from the real and cast to the unreality of the dream bubbles, while Caliborn grows monstrously beyond himself, self-mutilated and cancerous.

People have commented on the obvious romantic symbolism at play in Calliope’s return to life in the real...

...but it’s not just the power of a love that saves Calliope. Love is powerful and transformative, but love alone isn’t magical. It isn’t even the power of a magical macguffin ring that saves Calliope, either, because a ring is never just a ring, even when it is magical.

What redeems the possibility of Calliope’s existence is recognition and freedom.

TL;DR: ‘Caliborn’ is Calliope’s deadname.

[thebibliosphere]

can you talk some more about Dishonoured? (is that the game?) I'm so confused but everyone seems very excited(?) about something? Sorry, my autistic ass is so confused lmao

Oh boy can I. 

Hello friend, welcome to the collective freakout that is the Dishonored fandom going “wait WHAT, OH MY GOD YES!!”

Dishonored is a stealth sneaky sneaky magic/stabby game which came out back in 2012. The premise is, without giving too much away, thatyou are the personal bodyguard to Empress Jessamine who is murdered in front of you by a man named Daud. Princess Emily is also kidnapped and they vanish into literal thin air, and you’re left behind to hold Jessamine in your arms as she dies. You are then framed for her murder and spend the rest of game trying to regain your honor, find Emily and restore balance to the Empire. How you do that is all on you. 

You can either ghost through the world on silent sneaky feet without shedding a single drop of blood and show mercy (sort of) to those who have wronged you, or you can finish what others have started and watch the world burn.

The Outsider everyone is talking about, is an ancient god entity from the Void who chooses to give you supernatural powers to aide you in your endeavors, how much you use them or how little, is up to you. It’s sort of like the immortal eldritch equivalent of binge watching a new show on Netflix. Everyone else he previously Marked is boring and predictable, but you, oh you with grief and murder and love in your heart, you could be fun. 

If you do the predicted “kill everything in your path” outcome, he’s unsurprised but still moderately entertained and thanks you for the show. If you opt not to kill anyone, he’s somewhat wryly amused that you proved him wrong, and tells you he’s enjoyed watching, and I cannot stress enough how much I LOVE the moral functioning code in Dishonored (the Chaos ranking). It is to my mind one of the only few games that boasts a truly nuanced approach to morality and how we interact with the world around us by showing us the subtle and not to subtle ways in which our actions affect the world we live in. The literal difference between a childs drawings and the fall of an Empire.

It is worth pointing out that Corvo’s actions, despite non chaotic, are not always good. He is adhering to a personal code of morality which is acted out by you the player. Mercy and honor are not synonymous with Good, just like revenge and justice are not the same thing but often mistaken for two sides of the same coin. 

There is instead a kind of poetic justice to a lot of the things he does, making them satisfying to watch, but without actually crossing the line into being “just as bad as them”. You can of course also be, just as bad as them. There are a million and one ways to make someone die in this game, and you can do it with as much or as little finesse as you like. 

If you are low chaos, ie you sneak around and find ways to complete your goals without killing anyone, the world will be…it will still be bad, but things will be a little kinder. People will be softer, they will strive to do better. More people will survive. There is less fear in the streets, people will know about a masked man, but they’ll hear the stories, yea, the whole garrison, the whole garrison put to sleep with some kind of dart—and did you hear about what the High Overseer was actually doing though??? What a monster…

If however you opt for stabby stabby murder central, the game becomes collectively harder. There will be more rats, there will be more guards who are more hostile and alert. But the good people in the game, the people who are truly good, will become afraid of you, will become twisted and cynical. And it’s fucking chilling. Like, it’s just…hhnnngh, it’s so subtle right up until it’s not it’s like a punch to the gut. I love it.

I still remember the first time I played the game and Samuel called me a bad person and that he hated me, I was like “but, but…I didn’t…I chose to be merciful! those people did awful things and I was merciful!” and then it hit me…I wasn’t. I wasn’t merciful, I wasn’t good. I still stood on the precipice over Hell and I chose to spare some people under the guise of morality and my own righteousness, while slaughtering countless others who got in my path. What made those people any less important to me than a main NPC? They weren’t. They were still People in the world I was in. And I killed them. I didn’t even try to find a way not to. I just treated them like the result of a world gone mad around me and waded through blood, like my survival meant the inevitability of their death. I treated them with the same non-thought with which the blatantly morally corrupt NPcharacters had treated me and countless others like me.

And that is some Avatar The Last Airbender shit right there. That’s Aang on the mountain and giant lion sea turtles right there. It’s Pratchett with Sam Vimes in the deep down dark holding and axe and Granny Weatherwax who stares into the depths of her soul and comes up swinging for the light. It’s wonderful and it gives me chills just remembering the first time it happened and I had paused the game to go “what…no!” and the enormity of it hit me. It completely changed the way I play the game, most games, actually. And I get frustrated with other sneaky games with supposed moral coding that don’t hold me to that same level of accountability, or don’t even allow me to try.

And then the DLC comes out and you’re playing as Daud, the assassin who killed the empress and he’s having a fucking moral melt down. He’s having nightmares about it, battling against the clock to make amends and set things right before Corvo catches up with him and kills him, and you can either play with the same ruthless disregard for life that lead you to these circumstances or…or you can tread a little lighter, a little softer. All the while knowing your life ultimately hangs in the balance. And as you the player, knowing how his fate ends depending on how you played as Corvo.

Dishonored 2 operates on the same pretenses, except it’s some years later, and you have the choice to play as either Corvo or Emily. Ousted from your home, you have to make your way to Karnaca to restore order, and defeat the people who planned the coup before returning home to reclaim the throne. How you do that? Again, that’s up to you. You can either rage and lash out in a world where cruelty thrives—you can be ruthless and merciless—or you can find another way.

I’ll be really interested to see what goes on with this new Daud and Billie (Daud’s right hand in the first game) expansion of the universe. What choices are canon and which ones are not, and how they will affect the world of Dunwall as we know it. I already have a theory about why they want to kill the Outsider, but I wont say just yet. All I know is it looks like we get to play as Billie, and I am 100% here for That.

[republicstandard]

9 Top Tips For Surviving Twitter As A Right Wing Thought Criminal

Should you decide to enlist in the culture war hosted on the Twitter-dot-com hellscape (where every day is Hamburger Hill), there are some things that you need to learn and apply in order to survive to tweet another day. Welcome to boot camp, you scrubs and noobs.

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1. Choose Your Fighter

You, dear-never-ever-before-user of Twitter should take the time to read the Terms of Service. There are a plethora of words and behaviors that can get you booted from the platform and all of them are vaguely explained with the broadest interpretation possible. Once you've read Twitters soul sucking list of obligatory rules that severely limit your speech while protecting it for the people you cross intellectual swords with in the idea war, you are ready to build your player.

As Twitter is becoming pretty censorious, I'm also on: Gab: https://t.co/TrQ2JW4sAI YouTube: https://t.co/1NfMOYwkbF FB: https://t.co/zeAtcHTDcf WT: https://t.co/xs18l5Tpkc pic.twitter.com/EkVtklMN10

— Orwell & Goode 🇨🇱 (@OrwellNGoode) May 14, 2018

The limits are on the far end of infinity. You may choose to be a cute doggo, or perhaps an ms-paint frog or toad, an oft overlooked historical figure, a painting, or a parody of a living or dead celebrity with a morbidly hilarious twist. Your creativity in creating your avatar and name has a moment to really shine here but whatever you do, don't choose your own face and name because some of the people you talk to want to kill you. Or, at least completely ruin your life so that you will do it yourself. This is not an exaggeration. Rest in peace, Andrew.

2. Your first tweet

Oh good. You decided to stick around.

For the love all that is holy do not tweet using the hashtag #MyFirstTweet. It's very tempting, I know, but as it's your very first tweet, everyone you run across will already know it's your very first ever tweet on account of there being no previous tweets preceding it. The new friends that you make today will use this tweet to let their friends know that you have taken the monumental step of becoming a brand new Twitter user; so do make it snappy and full of wit, let your personality shine. For goodness sake understand that the monsters that want you dead use the search feature and the hashtag #MyFirstTweet to hunt down brand new baby right wing accounts to have them aborted. Much like they screech about needing the "freedom" to do to actual humans in the streets, wearing nothing but pink knit double peak hats and their own undercoat of rapist-repellent blubber.

Yeah. I went there. Bring it.

3. Follow carefully

Despite the disgusting urchins that lurk about bandying their rotund degeneracy on #findom, the mountain of actual pedophiles that will try to convince you they are the good guys, and the entirety of #blacktwitter, Twitter is actually a very friendly place and you are bound to make lots of wholesome friends fast; especially if you have never ever been on the platform before, not even once.

Exercise restraint in your tender first few days and resist following back your new friends too quickly as this will result in a “shadowban" or will prompt Big Brother to underhandedly investigate your phone number under the guise of checking to see if you're human, as if robots can't be programmed to use a phone. I suggest just a few follows per hour- keeping it under 100 for the first day. Apparently, according to Ze Bluebird Gestapo, having like minded friends is the same thing as terrorism and you will be gulaged for it. Yes, I'm mixing up Nazi and Communist metaphors in the same sentence. Don't @ me.

4. Personal Security

You need to download and use a VPN. The animals you will run across will pull cute little stunts, like e-drag you into an argument by calling you completely true things as if they are an insult, and acting as if per capita is a flavor of snow cone only people who hate communism can taste. and then drop a link as if they are proving a point, but in reality is an IP address snatcher which is used to find out who and where you are, instead of just answering the question about why 13% of the population commits over 54% of all violent crime.

Next you will want to turn on the double authentication feature, because as soon as you say something true, some cyber-SJW is going to start jaw-jacking from the monumental sugar rush from powdered donuts and 17 cases of orange flavored Mountain Dew and try to hack your account. In the same vein, make certain your email address is hidden and that you aren't using @YourRealEmailAddress as your handle. For your password, use a ridiculous combination of letters and numbers that have no connection to your actual life- which the hideous banshees and their he-minions are trying to end. Am I hammering that point home enough?

Remember to self care today. And be kind. And always punch Nazis.

— Emma Evans (@TrancewithMe) June 28, 2018

Finally, delete the phone number you used to set up your account. You may need it later and it would be sad if it were already occupied.

5. Get a Thesaurus

I've said it before but it bears repeating; get a thesaurus. Contrary to popular belief, you are in fact allowed to talk about objective biological realities, religion, the various systems of government in the world, criticize certain groups of rootless manipulative cabals of wandering tribal people without getting suspended if you follow three simple rules.

Frame and maintain the conversation.

Use uncommon synonyms.

Subtlety can be volatile.

It goes without saying that a debate isn't won until it changes someone's mind. Minds can't be won if the conversation gets deleted. Since mein feind maintains control of the flow of information via control of the media, what you say on twitter could be the final straw that bends the balance of someone's mind to the right. We want that, we need that, especially as the left gets more unhinged.

Understand that the globo-tech complex is happy to assist in the restriction of speech through the creation of algorithms and databases in which words are input and some alert dings off in some rainbow diversity cheeto cheese powder crusted dungeon sticky with sips drips where some slack eyed Gollum pushes the ban button; and you're suddenly on the other side of a suspension. One such word is “retard” and there are many more. Aside from minority reporting, there are particular words and phrases searched just to report wrong-thinking accounts. A small price to pay to cleanse the universe of criticism that may mean people have to self-reflect and experience personal growth and take responsibility for their lives, the horror.

Take what you want to say, leave off the slurs, play around with synonyms and you can take a blatant violation of ToS and turn it into poetic philosophy. If you're intent on low brow trolling, I don't blame you, but I'll miss you when you're gone.

6. Engaging the Enemy

Never engage a hostile. There I said it, my legal obligations have been met. You cannot blame me for what you do with the following entirely hypothetical thought experiment. This article is satire and not for use by anyone, ever. I warned you.

If have attracted a swarm of busy-body detractors through the use of hashtags, do yourself a solid and check their bio and follower count. If their bio contains and reference to #resist just block them, they are there for one purpose and it's to bait you into a violation of ToS. Similarly, if they have 0 or 1 followers it is a sock account of a #resist account. If they have less than 50 followers they have nothing to say, no one likes them anyway, and they just want your attention.

Doxxxing is officially endorsed by Twitter dot comhttps://t.co/aPr8KZAO65

— These tweets are endorsed by this site. (@EndorsedTweets) June 21, 2018

To engage a hostile blue check mark I recommend to avoid placing your extra-spicy tweet on the thread under their tweet. Instead, drop a teaser; then quote tweet the azure-ticked parasite and drop your main show, curtain call, and encore onto your own wall. Most of the people who sit around deriving sexual pleasure from the fantasy of Nazi scalp-hunting haunt the timelines of these verified whine bags, just waiting for you to show up to report your ‘spouts of hate’. Or, as I like to call them, incontrovertible but inconvenient truths.

7. Types of bans and what to do

You are going to get banned at some point. Deal with it.

Shadowban: this is triggered by following too fast, liking too much, retweeting too often, being too active when new, using too many hashtags, using popular hashtags in multiple tweets, and just for the random inconvenience because you're found to be guilty by association. Your options are to take a break, or power through it. There is some theory that these shadowbans are on timers of 1, 3, 5, 12, and 24 hours and that tweeting resets the timer and extends the discomfort. If you have triggered one you will experience a sudden drop in interaction and may think that your friends are ignoring you. They likely just aren't getting your notifications. If you want to check, DM a friend and ask them to tell you if your notifications are coming through. DO NOT use a shadowban checker website, it's believed that these are run by la resistance, and may put your account at risk; or at least in a database to be watched closely. In any case, shadowbans are usually temporary and you'll be back to normal before you know it. It's worth noting that more shadowbanning occurs during certain news cycles like mass casualty events, terror attacks, and when the President does something noteworthy.

Permanent Shadowban: On rare occasions the shadowban never goes away. I don't know what to do about it but if you have some verifiable information regarding this, please contact me or Republic Standard.

12 hour, 24 hour, and 7 day temporary restrictions: Oooh you bad bad boy! Looks like you broke ToS and had to delete some tweets. You should have followed my advice. Tsk tsk. You can DM your mutual followers, participate in DM groups and you can share tweets from the timeline to the DMs, and block accounts. You cannot like, retweet, or share pictures nor can you follow anyone. There's nothing you can do about this; you're stuck like Chuck, whoever he is. There's no use getting your panties in a twist over it though, it's a good time to get to know your friends a little better one on one and perhaps even explore the possibility of meeting in person. It's an isolating online experience but you do have a little time to reflect on what you can do to refine your technique.

Suspension: Sadly, anything after 7 days and you're gone. Finished. Never to be seen from ever again. No coming back from this, George. It's over. Finito. Buh bye. Later gator. Basically dead. Sayonara. Ciao.

Aren't you glad you remembered to delete your phone number?

8. Opsec

I wish I didn't have to go there, but I have to go there. Even if you have a pure, hate-free, friendly account that never runs the risk of crossing ToS, you still aren't out of the frying pan.

Being right wing has painted a big old target on your back and some of the people aiming arrows at you are going to look a lot like friends, and potential lovers.

Infiltration isn't a new tactic. On anonymous Twitter it's not even particularly hard. Despite the fact that most people who try are hilariously bad at it, some aren't. Despite all the accurate memes about the left being dumb and useless, when it comes to operational security the left is a decade ahead of the right. Whether you agree with the ideas of real-world rallies or not, we have to come to the understanding that social media platforms are not secure places to organize such things. Unite the Right organizers just managed to doxx themselves because they could not get this very simple idea into their skulls. If it isn't on a website you control from the code up and you are operating military grade hardware, it's not even remotely close to secret. Stop thinking that it is.

Hey hey hey time to get doxxed by antifa from using discord YEEEEAAAA BOIIIII https://t.co/zZ3kO54Wmg

— Pikawubz (@pikawubz) May 8, 2018

Don't share your photos, too much detail about your location, or too much detail about your life. If you choose to trust someone, make sure it's mutual. As difficult as it is to imagine loyalties do change. Ideological commitment under certain conditions like bribery, threats of doxxing, or a broken heart, can be overcome. Don't forget that this is an ideological war and the stakes are high.

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9. You are not alone

You've made it this far, and this following section truly is the most important part. You have found a warm community of the brightest minds, kindest hearts and most determined people I have ever known to exist. Yeah, we have our in-fights and squabbles; what family doesn't? Helping one another to discover truths that have been hidden from us, fight for a future we want and need, through tough times, and sharing laughter, anger, fears and frustrations bonds us together. If you are ever in a situation where you feel isolated, reach out. If you feel despondent, reach out. If you are being threatened, reach out. We are here for each other. You never have to be alone again.

Happy tweeting. See you in the trenches.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2lK24gP via IFTTT

[petelanemoviereviews-blog1]

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) Review

“Time has not dimmed the memories of our loss but, but it has allowed us to let go of our anger toward those responsible.” In this incredibly detailed and beautiful universe, you’d assume the characters and plot would be as well. In the short, they’re not. Premise: In the 28th century, the International Space Station has grown into a vast megapolis. Now called ‘Alpha’, it is home to thousands of different alien species from all over the universe and other dimensions. Special Agents Valerian and Laureline are the best in their field. When Valerian has a strange vision of a beautiful ocean world being destroyed, it is up to he and Laureline to delve into a conspiracy that could put Alpha and possibly the whole universe at risk. Directed by Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, The Fifth Element) and based on the French comic book series ‘Valerian and Laureline’ by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières, Besson has adapted a stunning comic into an dazzling and extremely detailed universe with planets rival the beauty of Pandora from Avatar. Bad character introduction. When we first meet our main characters, they list things about their personalities. I’ve seen this done in a lot of movies lately and it’s just downright lazy. Our title character is probably the least interesting and under-developed thing in this. He’s obviously more developed in the comics. I assume that because I only briefly brushed up on them. From what I gather, he’s made to be the James Bond of space. Why aren’t we seeing that side of him? You’d think with the amount of source material he’d at least be a decent character. Many of the side characters are more interesting than he is and most of these don’t get enough screen time. This movie should have been called Laureline and the City of a Thousand Planets, as she’s a far more interesting character than her partner. She’s the one saving his ass about 75% of the time. Don’t get me wrong, there are parts where he does feel like an actual person, but these are few and far between. I like Dean Dehaan but I think he was wrong for this role. I got the sense that Dehaan was channeling Keanu Reeves. Heck, if Besson had made this 20 years ago, Reeves would have had the part. It is confusing to me that Besson couldn’t make the characters and plot more interesting, especially since these things are what he’s the best at. Let’s go back to La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional, which are two of his best films in my opinion. These are fantastic crime/espionage thrillers. You had characters that grew and plots that kept you interested. Why are these traits absent from Valerian’s plot? The Fifth Element is probably more in line with this than the other two as it shares the same tone. We liked Corban Dallas and rooted for him. Sure, he was the typical average Joe turned savior of the universe that we’ve seen many times. We liked him because he was charming and witty. You’d think with all the source material and how detailed everything is, Besson would have come up with a better plot as well. It’s just a simple mystery with a more than obvious antagonist. We’ve seen this plot a thousand times before. It slugs along, often stopping dead in its tracks or takes detours to showcase the unique inhabitants and aspects of Alpha and the rest of universe. This is one of the rare times when it isn’t annoying. In the comics, Laureline is a peasant from 11th century France brought to the future to become Valerian’s partner. That would have been an interesting tidbit to put in the film. Perhaps you could write this off as it and many other things being saved for future sequels. As of now, sequels are up in the air as the film is considered a flop despite making a total $225 million. Besson needs to take into account that just because he thinks his movie has everything, doesn’t mean it actually does. Of all the negative things I could say about this, those don’t necessarily make it a bad film. As said before, this is a visually stunning film. The amount of detail put into every scene is staggering. You’re going to miss a lot with the first viewing. The costumes are colorful and overly extravagant. The aliens are well designed. They feel like living, breathing creatures with their own set of goals. Many of these are beautiful and far more interesting than the human characters.

Aside from DeHaan, the acting is pretty solid. Cara Delevingne is fantastic as Laureline and like I said before, I think the movie would have been better if it focused more on her. Clive Owen and a few French actors that I’m not too familiar with make up a decent supporting cast. There are also some great cameos by a number of French directors Rhianna and John Goodman play aliens and they just don’t get enough screen-time. If you didn’t find Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod character in The Fifth Element funny (probably the only time I’ve ever found him funny), you’re in for a disappointment as there are quite a few eccentric/over the top ones in this. In one sequence we meet a pimp played by Ethan Hawk. Apparently, Besson said; “Be as crazy as you possibly can.” The level of craziness that comes from Hawk is surprising for him but relatively normal in this type of atmosphere. The same level of zaniness that made The Fifth Element so great is present here. The dialogue is corny but not necessarily bad. It seems to hark back to the old science fiction TV Shows. It does get quite amusing at times and it fits perfectly. As with his previous films and those he’s written such as The Transporter series, the Taken series, Kiss of the Dragon, and Columbiana, Besson delivers on the action sequences. They’re extremely well-choreographed and despite all of the lasers flying around, you still have a clear idea of what’s going on. There’s a long take with the camera behind Valerian as he races through the different environments of Alpha. You see a bit of it in the trailers, but it’s absolutely jaw-dropping in full. Despite all of the things I found wrong with it, I still want a sequel. I want to see more of Alpha and I want to see more of Valerian and Laureline’s adventures depicted on-screen. Like Avatar, I felt myself wanting to back to Alpha when the movie was over. What we see is only a small part of Alpha and even smaller in terms of the universe. This is one of those ‘turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy-the-ride’ movies. I enjoyed the ride, but the thing is I know Besson is way better than this. Score: 6.7/10