#does any of this ultimately matter? no

[nexusvcrti]

TVDU TIMELINE IN MY CANON

This tends to be one of the most controversial topics out there, but since canon has confirmed that season 4 of Legacies takes place 3 years after season 5 of The Originals, I'm going to map out what that means in the timeline of what we see on the show with my personal canon. The timeline on the show (particularly Legacies) is just… super compacted, so if anyone hasn’t watched Legacies or actually cares about spoilers… beware. (note: This is revised based off the original meta I posted here.)

If you pay attention to the words and the dialogue in the show, they actually drop a fair number of hints as to the passage of time during the episodes. In the past, I always assumed that it followed the same timeline as most shows, where each season is roughly equivalent to one year, and with episode air dates matching with what’s happening canonically on the show, but it’s actually not the case in Legacies. Between the pandemic and general wonky primetime airing schedules, the timeline is a little more difficult to follow and not spelled out so neatly. 

Examples of the above include early S1 where the first few episodes are literally happening over the course of several days, maybe two weeks. There’s a few times the characters say things like “yesterday” or “a few days ago” or “last week” in their dialogue which I use to track the timeline.

Starting from the top, S5 tells us that Hope is 15 at the time that all of that plays out, and there’s an unknown time jump between the end of TO and the beginning of Legacies. In my canon, she is 15, almost 16 when the end of TO occurs and she loses her father and uncle. She takes the summer off from the school to grieve, while also learning to control her wolf side, and she is 16 when she rejoins the school, but she also spends half a year being a loner and watching Cutthroat Kitchen in her room. S1 begins while Hope is a few months shy of her 17th birthday on May 2.

Like I mentioned above, the first few episodes of S1 happen very quickly (going to find Raf and Landon, Landon stealing the knife, the dragon, the football game, the discovery of the monsters, the twins’ birthday). These all happen in a matter of days, maybe two weeks at the most. When the Honor Council stuff is happening, Lizzie asks Raf to the twins’ birthday “on Friday”, so we know it’s coming up quick. And the twins’ birthday is the first real date that we have confirmed on the show. So 1x06 is occurring on March 15. The next real “date” we have is in 1x12, where we know the school is on spring break. Now idk about y’all but in the States and when I was in school, the latest spring break ever seemed to be was like early/mid-April? So it sounds like the gap between 1x06 and 1x12 is a handful of weeks at most, which makes sense. During this time is the whole part where Hope goes and gets Landon back, the djinni episode, and the slug debacle. As far as the passage of time goes, there isn’t a lot of it during these plot points. S1 plays out over the course of like... three months, and Hope throws herself into Malivore right before her 17th birthday.

S2 picks back up at the beginning of the next school year and Hope crawls out of Malivore probably in August? Since it's after the Fourth of July but before the school year starts. Unfortunately, events like the Miss Mystic Falls Pageant and Founders Day don’t actually have set dates in canon so it’s difficult to tell what the passage of time is supposed to be like. However, we do know that 2x08 (the Santa episode) occurs in October. So the first half of S2 takes place over the course of a month or so? After that, the next hint of time that we get is the culmination of the season, where Dark Josie intends to push up the Merge timeline and do it on the twins’ birthday of that year. So we’re back to March 15 of the next year, and two seasons have passed in the span of one in-canon year. 

Now this is where the timeline gets even MORE messed up because of the pandemic and the weird airing schedules. But 3x01-3x04 were always supposed to be part of S2, so that’s where I’m putting it. Given the reactions by Alyssa and the rest of the witches in 3x01, not that much time has passed since Dark Josie was banished, there is again urgency with Raf’s problem, the musical, and then the final confrontation with the Necromancer where she loses Landon. 

There is likely another time jump after 3x04, because Kaleb references Sheriff Mac moving to Savannah with Maya, and Josie is working on her transfer over to MFHS. I’m guessing that most public schools aren’t going to handle transfer requests at the end of the school year, so it sounds like we’re back to the end of the summer again by the time 3x05 happens. This also makes sense in context of what’s happening in the A plot, where Hope is losing herself in her search for Landon, which probably would actually take months. However, once she finds the Monkey’s Paw and Cleo enters the picture, things begin to pick up again. Hope has also turned 18 during this period.

Now I’ll be perfectly frank, I only sat through S3 once and I still haven't fully watched the back half of S4 so I’m not as in tune with those episodes as much as I am with the others, but again, it does feel like time moves quickly in S3. With the monsters constantly coming and the appearance of golem Landon to push along the narrative, I can believe that this happens over the course of a few months, taking us to maybe November or December of that year, approximately a year and a half since S1 began. And of course, once Mali-Landon leaves, everything kicks up a notch. Like with S2, 4x01-4x04 were meant to be part of S3, and that’s where it makes sense narratively. 

Hope makes the realization that she needs to become the tribrid in the Star Wars episode, and everything from that point on shoehorns her into that plot. Again, we don’t have direct dates or events to mark the passage of time, but just going off what happens in canon, from the time they wake up from the vision quest to the end of 4x04, I don’t think there are any days where the Squad is just taking a break and lounging around (with the exception of 4x03, but I wouldn’t call that lounging around). 

Now we know that there is no timeskip between 4x04 and 4x05 because Lizzie directly alludes to the night before in her opener, so everything that’s happened since the beginning of the show has now occurred within something like two years (not the four I was assuming up until now). Again, with the urgency of the plot, Hope is not just sitting around and twiddling her fingers once the threat of Triad comes up, and the Squad is not waiting for Hope to come back. Hope’s actions include learning about Triad, having her misadventures with Clarke, Salvatore Idol at the school, her confrontation with actual Triad and Aurora, and her confrontations with Lizzie. Similarly, there is no time jump between 4x09 and 4x10, as the episode tells us. All of this is happening in a span of weeks, not months. 

All that said, by the time she has gone through the events of Legacies and is struggling with her humanity, about three years have passed since Hayley, Klaus and Elijah died, and about two years have passed since S1 starts. Hope was 16 at the time S1 begins (having turned 16 a little while after the S5 finale of TO, and taking the summer off to grieve, and mostly spending the first half of the year in her room watching Cutthroat Kitchen by herself or recruiting with Alaric. She is just about to turn 17 by the time she jumps into Malivore, actually turns 17 while in Malivore, and a few months shy of her 19th, when she has her first death in 4x03. 

This functionally doesn't change much of how I was playing Hope before. I've always played that she is 18 when she fully activates her tribrid side, permanently sealing her at that age. The only real difference is that she doesn't take a gap year between her parents' death / the new school year, just probably the last month of school and summer break. She returns that fall, but remains a recluse until February or March of the following year, which is when S1 of Legacies begins. It does mean she's only had her wolf for a handful of months, so her control is not nearly as stable as what we see in the pilot (aka easily shifting back and forth at will) and will likely play a role in her early characterization.

[hedgehogcryptid]

One of the things that get me about the ending of utrh is that it shakes the very foundations of what Batman was supposed to be. The fact that he choses to attack Jason, save Joker, and leave Jason for dead goes all the way back to once upon a time to make it so that little eight year old Bruce is standing in an alley seeing his father get shot and deciding to protect Joe Chill once his mother starts screaming. It doesn't matter what version of him you go with, if the gritty "I Am The Night", or the more compassionate version of him who wants to prevent what happened to him from happening to anyone else:

He had a miraculous second chance to redo one of the tragedies that marked him and he fails to either avenge the wrong done against his family or prevent any sort of future harm from befalling the innocent.

At that point it's made clear that whatever Batman was supposed to be, he's failed at it

[gingermintpepper]

hi I love your tags so so much! they were so sweet and so interesting and creative and the whole Aphrodite type of beauty thing sounds really interesting do you have any articles and recommendations to read further into it??

-hogoflight

Hello my fine feathered (I am assuming possession of feathers if you are, indeed, capable of flight) @hogoflight! I'm always always happy to hear that people appreciate my frenzied rambling in the tags :D! I have a lot of articles and recommendations :D!! Ancient Greek notions of beauty and representations of it in their art and sculptures is a pretty well studied topic! There isn't any way for us now to know definitively what the beauty standard was (it varied widely from region to region and culture to culture after all) but here are a couple of my favourite reads about Aphrodite and what her representations tell us about idealised beauty!

Probably the most empirically extensive one I can list is Krönström's thesis which compares statues of Aphrodite and literary text referring to both the goddess and mortal women to determine physical ideals for women in five specific eras of Grecian antiquity. Including measurements of the statues there are many descriptions of Aphrodite as 'curvy' with a 'voluptuous figure' and with 'ample buttocks and bosom'.

"When the beauty traits are described in the texts, they are never extreme or anything that could not be found in normal people just that they are more beautiful in every aspect. Furthermore, the sculptures’ physical forms look healthy, they are tall and have distinct curves. Great examples of this are the Knida sculpture and de Milo (the Melian) sculpture."

Of course, these images are still idealised, and there was still a concept such as 'too fat' or 'too skinny' found in written records (and this thesis even includes analysis of pornographic writings and descriptions of the fashion and stylings of pubic hair of women from different regions!!) but from an interpretational standpoint? There is absolutely no reason why these can't refer to a fuller figure. Height was also a very important factor after all and over the course of many eras, it seems like being well proportioned in addition to the length and appearance of one's hair were the most important factors (and, like Apollo, greater beauty was given to those with curlier hair)

Mireille M. Lee's 'Other Ways of Seeing' essay which talks about the forgotten female viewers of Knidian Aphrodite which is also extremely illuminating on how Aphroditic sexuality and sensuality was perceived totally differently from the well documented male voyeuristic gaze (which was overly preoccupied with the statue's nakedness and therefore over-sensationalised the statue's physical appearance) vs women's perspective on the statue which is more centered on the beauty of simplicity in Aphrodite's garment and decoration and in her power and ability to captivate both in her finery and without it. I think it's especially useful in exploring the importance of finery, jewellry and adornment in representations of Aphroditic beauty.

"Some of the small-scale copies are heavily jeweled, especially those from the eastern Mediterranean, for example the Hellenistic gilded terracotta statuette in the Çanakkale Museum (Fig. 5) in which the goddess wears, in addition to the armband on her (right) arm, the following: a necklace with multiple pendants; cross-bands extending over both shoulders and hips, with a cascading pendant in the center; a coiled snake armband on the left arm and another snake on her left thigh, and a twisted anklet on her right leg. (The left leg has been restored, and might also have featured an anklet.)"

"Jewelry is especially associated with Aphrodite in Greek literature. As seen above, in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess adorns herself with gold jewelry, dress-pins, and earrings in the shape of flowers (162–3)..."

Finally, and to me, the most important one in the argument for an interpretation of Hyacinthus as fat, beautiful and fundamentally Aphroditic comes from Brilmayer's brilliant brilliant thesis done on Aphrodite's work and influence in Archaic Greek Poetry which does away with all of that masculine preoccupation with physical proportion, measurement and bodily ideals for a focus on a Sapphic Aphroditic ideal centered in clothing, ornamentation and, most importantly cunning as symbols of Aphrodite and ultimately a feminine idealised form of beauty. This paper also discusses Pandora and Helen in these terms and it is just kind of a wonderful read tbh.

"Combining Homeric and Hesiodic elements with her own ideas, she [Sappho] alters the way female beauty is viewed. For example, the Homeric war chariot – a symbol of male, military prowess - comes to symbolise the totality of Aphrodite’s power uniting in itself male and female qualities. Having addressed the concept of beauty directly, Sappho then concludes that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. With the help of Helen of Troy and her beloved Anaktoria, Sappho sets out to reinvent the concept of female beauty as a godlike, subjective quality that may be expressed in many ways, yet remains inspired by Aphrodite."

The conclusion to all of this of course is that Aphroditic ideal beauty is much more fluid compared to its stricter Apolline masculine standard. The nuances and understandings of both are of course, constantly being studied, analysed and scrutinised but really, if Dionysus who was both bearded and clean shorn, effeminate, birthed and rebirthed (and twice gestated!) and strongly associated with vegetation can be popularly portrayed as fat and handsome, why can't Hyacinthus?!

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

i hate doing laundry ough it's The Worst

[chaos-potat]

Why does this keep happening?

Me: ew kisses?? <-I'm joking, I say that a lot

Someone: Are you aroace????

Me: I'm not aroace

Someone: You sound aroace to me, I think you are actually

Chat, I'm not aroace, I have no problem with aroace as a whole, I have made so many aroace characters, it's my go to for characters at this point. I am not aromantic or asexual, I thought I was for a while, but I am not, telling people their romantic/sexual orientation and insisting is really weird and uncomfortable to hear. It's not your journey, not your self discovery, not your business, don't be like this

[mortimer]

if youre wondering what criteria i use to decide to tag/categorize something as either painting or illustration, the answer is that it's almost completely arbitrary

[phagodyke]

the masculine urge to take a saucepan off thr draining board and bash myself repeatedly over the head with it until I pass out and no longer have to experience feeling Bad 😍

[ohitslen]

*taps mic*

Princess Tutu

*gets off stage*

[bunabi]

no because why are people acting like saying "hey don't say that about a white guy" is a dismissal of the entire Palestinian cause? I've not seen a single person say like, ok i'm not gonna support Palestine because of this, or that it takes away from aaron bushnell's message. just asking people not to say that. and i saw a whole page long post about how that's like a psyop. ??? people can care about multiple things.????

Well now I've definitely seen some people say/suggest well if you guys don't care about us why should we care about you both online and in person

But when you're told your words have no purpose and their meaning doesn't matter, when your allies dismiss your perspective the moment its inconvenient, of course you'd lose belief in solidarity

That feeling of disappointment and abandonment did not appear from thin air, and maybe one day we'll reckon with that

Not in my lifetime and definitely not tonight though so in the meantime my advice is everybody do this

[butwhatifidothis]

Ultimately, I think one of the worst things Hopes does wrt its writing of Claude is take out all of the complexities and contradictions that had made him so interesting to begin with.

OG Claude lies and manipulates people and closes himself off while still searching for the truth and wanting people to come together and be open with each other, because of how his traumas meld together with his dreams. He says that he'll do whatever it takes to get what he wants and shows off opportunistic tendencies and then buckles at the first sight of innocents getting hurt, because no matter how much he wants what he wants he still prioritizes the lives of the people around him over anything else. He knows of people's capacity to hurt others for petty or illogical reasons - was raised with that knowledge beating its existence into him - and yet still dreams of a world where people of different lands and cultures can still be friends, because that is how tightly he holds onto his dreams. He's a kind person with the capacity for being a dick, and his contradictions add on so much to his character; they in large part are his character.

Hopes Claude? He lies and manipulates people and closes himself off... and that's it. He says he'll do whatever it takes to get what he wants... and he does. He knows of people's capacity to hurt others for petty or illogical reasons... and has no real dreams of stopping it (or dreams of anything in the future really, by his own admission) and he indulges in that very behavior himself, seemingly without any awareness. He is untrustworthy, and manipulative, and opportunist... and that's it. What you see is what you get. And if this were a character unto themselves, if we're kind and we ignore all of the other issues with Hopes!Claude's writing, that would be a fun enough villain to follow around.

But it's not; this is supposed to be Claude. This is a character who has so much of his foundations be built on the idea that what he presents on the surface isn't all that he seems. That he's more than a character who is just "tee hee I'm only pretending to be nice but I'm actually eeeeevil evil evil evil evil evil evil," but someone who both uses kindness as a means to an end and embodies it genuinely. Warm yet calculated, a good man with real flaws - THAT is who Claude is. Hopes Claude is who Claude is if you strip him of any complexity - He Is Only Pretending To Be Good, But Actually He Is Bad.

He's just... easier to swallow, in a sense. Claude is a good person who is willing and able to do bad things, but only up to a very specific, very clear point, all for a good dream he's held onto for years and plans extensively to make a reality in the future; Clyde is a shit person who's willing to do everything short of bombing specifically whatever land he himself is ruling, all for what essentially amounts to no concrete purpose. There's no need to think about Clyde as hard, since he just does what he does because he's doing it and that's enough.

It's why I'm glad I am Dev-Approved to just fuckin' ignore Hopes entirely as a horrific fever dream, because Hopes does not understand what made Claude so lovable at all

[wonder-worker]

"...Walsingham, the monastic author of the St. Albans Chronicle, was by far [Alice Perrers'] harshest contemporary critic, who in his venom has (somewhat ironically) left us with the longest and most detailed account of her background and personality, her influence as Edward’s mistress, and her subsequent trial. He describes Alice as a shameless lowborn meretrix (a word variously translated as mistress, whore, or harlot), who “brought almost universal dishonour upon the king’s reputation […] and defiled virtually the whole kingdom of England with her disgraceful insolence.” Although Walsingham was not always accurate and, specifically in this case, clearly heavily biased against Alice, he nevertheless provides a truly contemporary account, and his importance as a source should not be underestimated. Likewise, the anonymous monk of St. Mary’s York recorded that in the Good Parliament the Commons (represented by their speaker, Sir Peter de la Mare) stated that it “would be of great gain to the kingdom to remove the said dame [Alice] from the presence of the king both as a matter of conscious and of the ill prosecution of the war.” During the same assembly, the bishop of Rochester, Thomas Brinton, preached from St. Paul’s Cross that “it is not fitting nor safe for all the keys of the kingdom to hang from the belt of one wife.” Although the word wife (uxoris) is used, it is widely accepted that this is a reference to Alice.”

-Laura Tompkins, '"Edward III's Gold-Digging Mistress": Alice Perrers, Gender, and Financial Power at the English Royal Court, 1360-1377", "Women and Economic Power in Premodern Courts" (edited by Cathleen Sarti). Italics by me.

[ghosttrolls]

HI I Love your Posts about trollhunters and Danny Phantom.

they are things i gad trollhunters is different form Danny Phantom

Jim only date one girl and everyone agrees that she is the best Choice for him.

and the main creator isn't a Dick.

but my Question for is if Dash were to become Like Steve was Expose the Ghost world Just Like him how do you think would've involved and this Time his memory stays Like Jez did.

Hi, thank you! Before I say anything else I would like to clarify that while I spend a lot of time comparing themes between the two shows, I don't really feel like one could replace the other - they're both so unique in their execution! Honestly, all the characters in both shows have personalities that couldn't be copied over between the two without the status quo of each show drastically changing. I don't really think of Danny Phantom and Trollhunters in terms of "Danny and Jim are the same person," but more like "Danny and Jim experience things that are interesting parallels of each other and I like to explore those narrative parallels," which I can understand being a kind of complicated distinction.

There definitely is a thing with both of these shows where they pick sort of Traditional Character Roles to some extent, like The Bully, The Hero, The Best Friend, The Romantic Interest, etc. So thinking in terms like that, Dash and Steve do fill kind of similar roles in their shows. I am pretty sure that Dash knows ghosts exist by the end of the show, even if you're writing off Phantom Planet (the final episode that people like to ignore happened). There's an episode where all the adults in Amity Park are brainwashed to go on a "cruise" which ends up just being a way for some ghosts to use them as a power source - but because the adults are brainwashed, the kids are the ones that have to save them, and Danny uses his parents' ghost tech to work together with all the other kids to fight the ghosts. This includes Dash. They all fight ghosts on the deck of a pirate ship, and Dash and Danny stand back to back as Dash says, "When I wail on you tomorrow, I'll be wailing on a hero. But I will be wailing on you." At this point in the show, Dash and other people know about and are fans of Danny Phantom... I don't think his memory gets wiped of the incident, but Danny does get in trouble for using the tech without asking and that makes him "lame" again in the eyes of the other high schoolers. I think that's meant to be the show's explanation for why it doesn't get brought up again later.

I'd love to consider what would happen if Dash had actually been more active within the ghost fighting community - I'm pretty sure he's one of those people who thinks it's "weird," so he'd probably need some convincing. But it would be super interesting if he learned that Danny was Phantom and joined the team! I'm not the first person to say this, but still. It would be cool. I did really enjoy in Trollhunters when Steve and Eli had just formed Creepslayerz but they were trying to keep it on the down low, and acted comically to cover their tracks. I imagine Dash would have to do something similar to keep his jock friends in the dark about Danny's secret... In general, DP never really gave us that big of a look into what Dash's life is like outside of school, other than throwing a party when his parents aren't around. If he joined the team in some way we'd be able to see more of his backstory and he'd become a much more fleshed out character!

And I know you didn't ask for my opinion on this, but I do wish that Steve had more development after the end of Trollhunters and 3Below. Like, he stopped bullying Jim and Eli, he got a girlfriend - and now we learn he's really scared all the time! And they make him kind of like a knight in Wizards but he's still like, terrified of everything, and bad at very simple tasks to an almost annoying extent. It makes me wonder if the trio really explained very much to him, because we didn't see any explaining happen on screen... and then it felt like they were hinting that Steve would learn some cool stuff from Lancelot, but that never happened. And WHY didn't Aja WARN HIM that he could become pregnant like that! That was so out of the blue too. I really liked how they had Steve develop as a character over the course of Trollhunters, so when he kind of stopped changing for most of the other TOA content, I was a little sad.

I guess this is just an appreciation post for bully characters that decide to become nicer. They deserve more love, for sure.

[smile-files]

this might be a hot take... but if you care about disavowing media made by bad people out of fear of looking like a bad person yourself more than you care about actually doing good things... you might have your priorities (and your morals) screwed up a bit :/

(see my tags for more of my thoughts on this topic! please try to avoid making make bad-faith assumptions about what i mean!)

[bbeelzemon]

lately ive trying to teach myself that i dont have to follow the stupid and arbitrary rules that i set for myself as a child. im an adult living on my own, thousands of miles away from where i grew up. i literally dont have to eat the crusts off my sandwich if i dont want to. who give a shit

[the-manderville-mambo]

Personally I think that, out of all the relic weapon questlines so far, the one that has the best ratio of effort to reward is the HW relics. There's some grinding, yes, but it's far easier to bear than having to do the same exact thing 9 or 12 times (Zodiac weapons), or having to level up an entire separate thing just to progress a story in an entire separate area in order to unlock more weapon stages (Eureka and Resistance weapons), or just doing a bunch of roulettes to buy some rocks (Manderville weapons). And it has far more reward for that level of effort than any ARR, StB, or ShB relic while not being as ridiculously easy as the EW ones

[filthyjanuary]

i'm so sick of my fellow iranians being cringe as fuck on social media and simping for the state of israel out of some insane the enemy of my enemy is my friend mentality like i know this is crazy but you can hate the iranian government without deciding to go full monarchist and act like israelis are liberators of literally anything or anyone

like i'm sorry if the best you can envision for iran is trading one authoritarian for the son of the previous authoritarian (who was literally overthrown bc he was an authoritarian puppet of the united states) solely bc of his name then you hate the iranian people more than i can image