#dizegamble

[utilitycaster]

Hey! Because I have seen various, various, various takes on Ashton’s actions in ep77– both on twitter (whew) and on here— and I am loving all of the different perspectives on it, I was wondering what your opinion was on the take that Ashton may have manipulated Fearne in the conversation they both had right before absorbing the shard.

Personally, I feel like it may be a bit more complicated than that, but I still don’t know.

Hey!

I think this post I made sums it up. It's not. Ashton tells Fearne precisely what they intend to do. He then does it. Fearne has the opportunity to refuse this request, or to tell the rest of Bells Hells, and she chooses not to. Yes, he compliments her and tells her that he trusts her to do the right thing when most wouldn't. Laudna asks Imogen to kill her if Delilah takes over in virtually the same exact language earlier than episode, and I don't think that's manipulative either:

Laudna to Imogen: And if anything happens and I become her little puppet, I trust you to make the right choice. (Implication this is a request for a mercy killing in the context of Delilah and Laudna's lives being inseparable; is understood as such by Imogen as demonstrated from her response and her later scene in the temple)

Ashton to Fearne: Things are going to happen, and I trust you to help me make the right decision, and I hope you trust me to help make the right decision.

The fact one is being brought up and not the other really points out that the Twitter talks out their collective ass ten times more often than they do their collective mouth; and the fact that they cannot distinguish "put Fearne in a somewhat uncomfortable position" from manipulation really points out that touching grass is not enough; they need to develop meaningful relationships with a wide variety of people in the real world.

Going along with a friend's stupid-ass decision that they encouraged you to join in and immediately regretting it is not, in fact, manipulation; it's your friend at most being kind of a dick and you exercising your agency to make your own stupid-ass decisions. It would have been wiser and nicer of Ashton to ask the party who wanted to take the shard, sure, but Fearne actively agrees with them that they should get it, and Ashton is not really defined by wisdom and being nice, and also, the above would be way more boring.

I don't want to go into this because it's a massive out-of-scope rant not limited to this particular situation, and I'd like to drag my sleep schedule back into a reasonable place tonight, but I think a lot of the more rancid discourse, whatever it may be but especially about interpersonal relationships between characters, arises for the following reasons, and I have little patience for any of them.

Thinking the only way to be a Good Person is to use 2023-approved therapy speak (and, frankly, frequently 2023 Rando on Tiktok claiming expertise who is actually a freshman psych students with no friends and a D average approved "therapy speak")

Relatedly, an all-consuming fear of any conflict, fictional, real, or otherwise, and the accompanying lack of any conflict resolution skills; this is also why they think this is manipulative, because if Fearne said no, that would be Conflict which is bad so positioning someone where conflict might be required for them to express themselves must be evil.

The genuine belief that you can only understand someone if you get everything right on the first try; either you read their mind perfectly or you have failed and are probably a manipulator or abuser for potentially leading to misunderstandings which lead to conflict which, as we see from the above point, is evil.

A refusal to admit that sometimes people are merely 1. assholes or 2. stupid. I frequently talk about opinions I cannot stand, and I almost as frequently get questions about how this opinion is problematic, and the vast majority of the time? It's not. I think it says something quite worrying, actually, that people are more comfortable and even eager to assume that a stranger is hateful or bigoted rather than merely inconsiderate or not that bright. Ashton made a poorly informed decision and made Fearne party to it. It was dumb and it wasn't really nice. That's literally it.

Anyway here's the five geek social fallacies; I recommend reading any Twitter Take(TM) and deciding how many of them they are applying to the narrative, cast, and fandom. See if you can get a full house.

(also upon re-reading this I'm pretty brusque and I promise it's not directed at you; I just genuinely think that the majority of the Twitter fandom, and certainly the loudest voices thereof, are so stupid a Detect Thoughts spell on them would fail on the basis of intelligence alone and the fact that their takes gain traction baffles and infuriates me)

[utilitycaster]

How about Fearne? For how the cr fandom treats her own trauma, because I’ve noticed a lot of people slowly getting rid of her agency for the sake of infantilizing her or only paying attention to her for shipping purposes……

So this one is interesting because Fearne's backstory does not specifically strike me as capital T Traumatic, but obviously that's subjective. Obviously I think she is deeply affected by her parents and the realizations she was lied to by everyone, but she didn't come in with that damage, and I think any trauma she has accumulated has been in-game (especially since that's when those familial realizations happened, with another one being set up). The deaths of Orym and Laudna and what just happened with Ashton feel more traumatizing to me. Or in other words, when I had a mental list of "characters with trauma" in mind, Fearne wasn't really part of that consideration, which could perhaps be a commentary on how I am myself minimizing her experience.

Reduction of agency for shipping purposes is a whole different thing. I don't think people tend to infantilize as an end goal - usually that's for shipping purposes too, ie, reduction of agency and infantilization go hand in hand - and I also don't feel Fearne is per se infantilized so much as made into an agency-less shipping doll by some. I think earlier it was people who shipped her with Ashton (the Fandom wiki article for their relationship is...bad, and that's with the knowledge that she does have a crush) but also it feels like Fearne is often used by people as a cudgel against other characters they don't like. Like, again, part of why despite their fantastic chemistry Ashton/Fearne didn't grab me until episode 77 is because in addition to them only having one real conversation prior to that (which was intriguing but not quite enough as a hook), so much of the fanon surrounding it felt either cribbed from some manic pixie dream girl narrative or else truly mean-spirited towards Chetney (to the point that a hate of Chetney felt more the point of these people's shipping than a desire to see Fearne and Ashton together). Meanwhile, right now, I think a lot of people leaping to the "Fearne did nothing wrong and was manipulated" assumption are just people who fucking hate Ashton (and in some cases, Taliesin) and see Fearne as a convenient figure to hide what is ultimately just straight-up bad faith.

Writing it out, I actually am coming around to the idea that Fearne fits a model more like Caduceus, in which there is a relatively quiet trauma that translates mostly to not stating one's own needs, and that tends to fit the second model in my previous ask, of the specific subtype "why isn't anyone asking them what they want? Why isn't anyone talking to Fearne?" and ignoring the fact that Fearne is a grown-ass adult and voicing her needs is something that she needs to do for herself, ie, this could have been prevented if she told Bells Hells "I don't want the shard, at all, do not make me take it." So: secret new option of type 2 for her defenders, type 1 for her detractors.