#either way i don’t have a lot of faith that this would have fundamentally changed

[j-esbian]

(one of) the most frustrating parts about the portrayal of drow society is that it wants to create Reverse Sexism without uncoupling itself from some. pretty foundational patriarchal ideas. it ascribes to the (tired, essentialist) notion that men are inherently good at certain things, and women are inherently suited for different things

but rather than the basic subversion of “women are warriors and men are the homemakers” or even early feminist thought experiments like “traditionally ‘women’s priorities’ are given importance over ‘men’s’ (ie things are governed by council, importance is placed on childrearing, etc)”, menzoberranzan is “this society still holds to patriarchal values and women are not as good at these things which is why it’s demonstrably worse”.

the biggest tell is that they have to control the male population to maintain female dominance, the implication being that in a fair fight, men would easily overpower them. it assumes the misogynist ideas as fact that “women are inherently weaker” and also “women are duplicitous” so the drow fighting style is based on stealth and sabotage rather than “”honorable”” face- to-face combat (letting lie also the assumption that the only avenue for ambition is through military violence, and therefore still making it so that they are reliant on men, even as disposable shock troops, for their success).

the only things that keep women in charge are by stacking the numbers on a systematic level, and through sexual domination on the individual level (because clearly the only real power a woman can have over men is her sexuality).

it is a society where “men act like men” but women don’t act like women; it is evil because an act of god created an aberration against the “natural order” of things, and there is no one to tend the hearth (because if the women won’t do it, no one will)

[st-whalefall]

I’m taking a big ol’ swing with this one so everyone please keep your limbs inside the vehicle until we reach our destination (let me cook)

So, what happened here? For this to go from-

Goofy ass grin <3

Summer: “Trust me..”

To this-

Raven: “The creatures of Grimm have a master named Salem. She can’t be stopped, she can’t be reasoned with, and she will not rest until humanity crumbles at her feet.”

Raven: To Ruby with disdain, “You sound just like your mother.”

Let me lay some of my cards on the table. I’m in the “Summer is still alive” camp and I got thoughts on: if Summer is still alive, why has she not been in Yang and Ruby’s life?

Not even a peep? For 14 years?

Something BIG had to have happened to her to keep her away from them.

Now, a lot of folks will go straight to where Ruby jumped to: Summer got Grimm hound-ed by Salem

But I think that’s takes a lot of agency away from Summer and the building revelation of her character and the purpose she serves in the narrative.

If Summer has been grimmified, I posit it was by her own doing, by choice. And her choice alone.

Qrow: “You’re special the same way your mom was…The creatures of Grimm were afraid of those silver eyed warriors.”

Salem: “Do you feel it? Don’t fight it girl. It can sense your trepidation. You must make it dread you.”

How does Salem illustrate the melding of Cinders flesh with the Grimm arm and mastery over it?

In the few instances we get, how are silver eyes described in their effect on Grimm? Obliteration, yes. Resistance to their influence? Possibly (see Ruby & the apathy). But command over them? Let’s explore that.

We are working with a pretty small dataset here, so you’ll forgive me for mostly drawing from Cinder for this (separate post I think the hound is a reanimated corpse and so different from true living hybrids like Cinder (& hypothetically Summer)).

Grimm evolve and Grimm hybrids, like Cinder, adapt.

From vol4 to vol8, Cinder’s Grimm arm grows. It spreads. And she becomes more comfortable with it as time progresses.

Cinders Grimm arm has become an integral part of her and, side note, I dislike theories that revolve her hypothetical redemption around her being purified of evil (Grimm) by silver eyes.

[But that’s just me, I want the monstrous to stay monstrous rather than erased or watered down for easy digestion. Let the monster stay a monster in its appearance and still be worthy of love, and so on and so forth.]

So, we come back to Summer Rose.

Summer confronted Salem, learned something earth shattering, destroyed Raven’s faith and trust in her, and did something that prevented her from returning to her daughters for more than a decade.

What did Summer do? Agency, we’re thinking strong choices here.

Choices that are radical but in line for a character with strong convictions, an alluded to pedestal she stands upon and all the complexes that comes with, perhaps a little self destructive, and a big heart. Big enough to sympathize with the devil and do something about it.

The thing that could be preventing Summer from returning home could be as simple as:

After she learned the truth about Oz’s shadow war, she joined Salem’s side, and won’t return until she’s seen it through to the end.

But I want to put some spice on there because what if:

After learning whatever it was Salem told Summer, that turned her world upside down, Summer looked down into the pools of black and took the plunge

To understand Salem on a molecular level

To be Grimm as Salem is Grimm

To be a world changer

In the world of Remnant, that’s what the Grimm are. A force of destructive change, like hurricanes and wildfires, they shape the world through calamity. Disaster doesn’t feel any one way about you, it just is. It is devastating, but it doesn’t hate you. And it doesn’t love you either.

So, what would that make Summer?

How do you think that’s changed her, fundamentally?

Bloody evolution indeed.

And that’s why she stayed away. Summer changed, and now she looks a little more on the outside how she feels on the inside. But to the rest of the world, she is something horrifying. Unspeakable.

She didn’t want to give her girls nightmares.

Yeah, Summer was the inspiration for the Hound, and Cinder’s Grimm arm. But not in the way Ruby thinks.

[revenantghost]

Hey! So i must i adore you analysis on Wolfwood as you compared his story beats to maximum and how they got changed, something that I dont really see people commenting on

I must say however, do you think vash and wolfwood are bound to have the same kind of relationship they had in trimax? I adore stampede like crazy and was enjoying it so much until around ep 10/11 where it got cleared they were very much going a seemingly different route than what we thought. And to be honest the moment i saw they pumped Knives and Vash dynamic like crazy got me thinking tristamp will be completely about them and not also Vash and WW/others (which i think is as important as K and V for trigun to work out) or tristamp will be mostly Vash and Knives and WW and Livio.

You seek to have a super optimistic (lol) look for s2 and beyond so i wonder if you think (either by beats laid out by tristamp, maybe i am too blind or pessimistic to realize them) there may be something similar to vash and wolfwood’s relationship in trimax???

Oh man, thank you so much!!! I’m honestly so happy that people even read that rambling because it’s been driving me absolutely bonkers. (I’m just gonna link that post here in case anyone’s interested)

But tl;dr: I think that it’ll be similar! Honestly, I think the Vash and Wolfwood dynamics have to be similar, because that’s such an integral part of Trimax. I jokingly called it the Vash and Wolfwood show to a friend when I started reading it—and yeah, that sums up a lot. Though I REALLY see your worries about this. I think we got a much heavier dose of Vash and Knives to really make the stakes super personal, but I have a feeling Knives will fall into the more distant role he takes in Trimax because, as he says, Nai is dead. Long live Knives.

Tristamp season one is a prologue, confirmed by the team very purposefully calling the continuing work the final phase despite saying the sky is the limit on future content depending on fan support. It speed ran a lot of stuff, and I think that was knowingly done because the staff has stated multiple times that they needed everything to be as perfect as possible, but they didn’t know how it would do. I don't even know if they thought they could do a second season. Trigun has historically not been popular outside of the cult following ’98 had in the west—Trimax was just an afterthought that many fans hadn’t read before Tristamp grabbed us all by the throats.

To touch on the other relationships, I like that Tristamp is that it's already expanding on characters that I felt could have spent more time in the spotlight. Like, I'm very eager to see where they take the girls! Because Meryl’s falling into the same role but with a vastly different career in this, and she’s already way more present . Why are they following Vash? How present will the girls be? MILLY!!! With Meryl ripping down Vash’s wanted poster at the end of season one, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s her mission to clear Vash’s name, and hijinks ensue. She already has deeper ties to Wolfwood than any other version before, which makes both of them stronger for it. I’m nervous to see how this all plays out because change scares me and I love this story so much lmao, but I do think it’s good! I already went off about how I love how important Meryl already is in the story, she’s a foil to Vash and the faith in himself he never had, and I feel like that only strengthens and reflects against the foils Vash and Wolfwood have going on. And Milly! I’m so excited to see where they go with her.

But this does change everything with Wolfwood. I keep thinking that Tristamp has changed Wolfwood fundamentally and keep needing to go back and rewatch because he is Wolfwood. He’s younger and rougher around the edges, but he’s still that moron I know and love. (Sometimes I’ll be reading fic and I don’t even realize that the person’s only seen Tristamp because they just get him and the dynamic right—Orange is doing a good job even if it scares me deeply lol)

I do have complete faith that they need to and will let Vash and Wolfwood’s dynamic shine just as brightly as it does in Trimax. I think, actually, a lot of that comes from outside of the text, though I could probably do another rewatch to pick up on all the loose threads they’re laying down to grow Wolfwood’s character and his dynamic with Vash in particular.

First, a new bit of info I saw recently is that the director, Kenji Muto? Apparently hasn’t even seen ’98, or at least hadn’t seen it as of making season one. Of course there are other writers on staff, and the crew has admitted to being huge Trigun nerds, but if your only exposure to Trigun is Trimax??? Wolfwood is massively important to Vash. Doing that dirty would be greatest sin you could make against this franchise.

Second, Nightow is so involved in creating this. He was involved way before most manga authors are brought in on anime, and even said that pretty early on he basically gave it his blessing and said that they got Trigun. (Though he still approved everything from then on as well.) And Wolfwood and his story arc in Trimax is so powerful and so moving. Nightow obviously had some significant investment and emotion in it, in Wolfowod and Vash’s relationship and journey. Like, I cry at things sometimes, generally just ooze tears, but Nightow and this damn manga made me sob. I can’t imagine he would tell the crew they understood Trigun without Wolfwood’s character and his ties to Vash being a priority. I know typically Japanese creators won’t throw shade at adaptations like we see in Western realms, but I rarely see the level of enthusiasm Nightow has for this project.

Okay, because this is getting long, and I’m getting into Trimax spoilers next, putting this next bit under a cut, continue at your own risk.

It’s actually funny, because for the end of that Wolfwood post, before I started my rewatch for it, I originally had a pretty specific prediction about what would happen. Then the ‘sky’s the limit’ on future content came out, and idk what to expect. I thought that the next season was going to be the Vash and Wolfwood show ala Trimax, we were going to fall in love with Wolfwood, and we were gonna have him couched at the end of that season. Because the couch is so essential, it’s so critical, but my god do I want this man to survive the narrative, if only once, and have it mean just as much. (Can you tell I’m torn on this every second of every day of my entire life) And after writing up that whole post I’m even more confused because I have no idea where the fuck they’re taking him. But at the same time, we have major plot threads tying us to that scene so much earlier. The vials existing way earlier, Livio and Razlo being introduced, that line about grieving but still deserving to smile and eat that Wolfwood gives Vash in the episode he’s introduced??? We're making everything more coherent and tied together, and fuck, we're screwed.

For now, all I’ve got is that I think some shit is going to happen to Wolfwood during our two-year time skip, maybe something with Chapel, idk how they’re going to inevitably use Livio against us, but we saw a softer Wolfwood in Tristamp. He needs to harden to be who we know. Orange said they’re going to be more like their other selves here, and though Wolfwood already has some faith in Vash, but he does not have faith in humanity. That’s the growth we have yet to see, and that’s what is really at the core of their relationship and development. It’s still there.

Many people who read Trimax are absolutely gutted and wrecked by the couch. That defines a lot of readers’ experiences—Wolfwood’s character arc is an absolute masterclass in writing a satisfying and meaningful conclusion for a character. So for them to change this much about someone who is that important, they have to have a plan, and a damn good one for Nightow to sign off on it. I’ve seen folks talk about how apparently the team spent the most time working on Knives, Vash, and Wolfwood’s characters (this one I haven't seen a source for), but as you said, we can already see it in the brothers’ relationship. They have a plan for Wolfwood. It’s only a matter of time before we’re wrecked by it.

Yeah, they are gonna keep doing stuff that you or I won’t agree with, or that we think could be better. Every version of Trigun is pretty flawed in certain ways imo, even though it might be beautiful or a favorite piece of media. But all of the concerns of mine that Orange could answer in the first season, they did so with flying colors and blew me out of the water. So don’t get me wrong, I’m scared. I’m so fucking terrified. Both Vash and Wolfwood are my favorite characters in Trigun in such different, integral ways to me. I love them deeply. And Orange is changing so much.

But Orange adores Trimax as much as I do. Nightow is 500% on board. So I’m biting my nails about it, but I choose to have faith. We’ll get wrecked by this adaptation, and I’d bet money on it if I had any lol

OOF, THAT WAS LONG. I hope this was actually helpful/useful and not just incoherent feral rambling!

[boypussydilf]

I think maybe the cause, or at least some of the cause, of the Sgt Frog Tonal Weirdness is, like… Let’s say you take any random episodical, status-quo, kids/family comedy cartoon. It’s not impossible for there to be Serious Episodes in there, happens all the time, but a lot of the time the Serious Things are things that, by nature, cannot affect the status quo. They don’t change anything, they don’t impart any new information - the Seriousness is caused by either decisions made by the characters during the episode, or by some external force that has never been a problem before - including off-screen - and will not be a problem again. Do you follow me or am I being too vague? I don’t even know if this is accurate. And yet still, regardless, point is: in this situation, you want the cause of your Serious Episode to be either the characters as they are now, or something that can be contained to one episode and doesn’t have any bearing on anything else.

This is because if you Get Serious, and then, while in Serious Mode, impart new information about the characters or the world, it changes things, on a more fundamental level. If you share New Character Information while being silly, it can be ignored at will, used exclusively for jokes, overwritten… doesn’t matter. If you share New Character Information while being serious, that information seems important.

Sgt Frog has had some changes that technically affect the status quo - mainly, or perhaps exclusively, the introductions of new recurring characters - but overall, it relies very heavily on everything being the same. Keroro will always be trying and failing to invade and the Hinata kids will always be in middle school and no one will ever learn from their mistakes, because the status quo presented from the outset is where the jokes come from. You can’t change it, because where would we be without the faithful gags of terrible invasion plans and middle school crushes to return to?

So you would expect it to follow the same general formula of comedy series that cannot under any circumstances alter what the normal everyday lives of the characters are like. It can get serious sometimes, but not in a way that gives the impression that anything has changed.

Except! It! Doesn’t! Well, sometimes it does. Sometimes we get episodes with Serious Tones that don’t have any consequences outside of the episode (like the one where Keroro runs away with his new motorcycle, or, I THINK, the season 1 finale where they think their mission has been completely called off but ‘Twas All A Misunderstanding.) But there’s also a lot of instances where the series Gets Serious, and then, while Serious, imparts new information about the characters or the world that affects how we see them! We learn backstory that gives important context on why the characters are the way they are and who they used to be, we get important lore on the Keron army and their methods, we… I don’t know… See them… committing war crimes? Meet… ninjas trying to kill the platoon who don’t know they’re actually run by a Keronian- I don’t know what the fuck was happening in that manga chapter I’m still trying to work it out.

Anyway, basically, Sgt Frog is a series where nothing in the day-to-day can ever change but then they drop information that feels both tonally and in subject matter like it should change things or at least open a gateway for things being able to change in the future but it can’t happen and then the tone is a little weird and inconsistent sometimes. That’s all.

[doctor-peggy]

Perhaps it is unclear to me what you mean by this post… I agree with the ideas you have expressed, but I’m having trouble with putting them in context.

I think for a long time art and writing felt complicated to me… it doesn’t feel like that anymore. I don’t know that art comes down to anything, in the end, except our need to express something outside of ourselves.

A lot of what I make is either out of a love for the subject or out of a need for self-expression. I want to show how amazing something that I love can be… or I want to say something as best as I can. But sometimes I also just… want to have fun. Or spend more time examining a thing or idea. Create feelings, remember feelings, understand feelings. Sometimes I just want to provide myself comfort. Sometimes I need something to do with myself and I want it to be visually pleasing. Sometimes I really just want to make something beautiful for myself or for someone else.

Art and suffering only seem related to me in that art is a way to express ourselves complexly, and often strongly. Art helps us condense our ideas and emotions, right? When there is a lot that we maybe cannot express in our daily lives, it is possible that it ends up surfacing in a different aspect of ourselves.

Which, I would like to clarify, is not me disagreeing with any of your points, or even responding directly to them. This just seemed like something I wanted to say after reading your post.

I do sometimes think people create art to be like other art, or to make a point that i would fundamentally disagree with, or just out of a bad faith take on something. Sometimes people might make art to prove that they can… or to please someone else. Or because it’s a good look on them to be able to do it. I don’t know how that works… and honestly I have often had trouble figuring out other people’s reasons to make art. I’m not very good at guessing what’s in anyone else’s head. Or heart. Or whatever.

Art is often built on other art. Convention, culture, and existing notions based on other popular artwork are all powerful things. It’s hard to say that this does not change the nature of art, or that it changes how we engage with it, especially in the context of mental illness. I’m still figuring it out… and honestly I haven’t gotten very far trying.

The complexity of art and the simplicity of it both seem overwhelming in equal parts to me. I dunno… your post wasn’t necessarily trying to address these points. I don’t know that I am, either. But I do want to say that maybe it doesn’t have to be complicated all the time. Maybe it doesn’t make sense to ignore the nuances of other people’s art, but your art doesn’t need to have any more nuance than you want it to.

…probably.

i have to unfuck my relationship to art and writing somehow

[senadimell]

It’s been several weeks since I started watching Nosferatu, and I finally picked it up last night since I now have a knitting project suitably mindless that I can do without having to look at it and can watch the movie in peace. I’ve finished the third act, and I have to say, this is honestly really faithful to Dracula. Since it’s never been a secret that Nosferatu is heavily inspired by Dracula (read: an unauthorized adaption), I’m going to assign Dracula names to the roles characters play in the story rather than use their actual names most of the time.

The character combinations are interesting, but make a lot of sense given the large cast of characters in the book. I haven’t gotten far enough for most of the secondary characters to be a major presence, but I’ve read that they’re mostly absent, so the focus remains mostly on the Jonathan and Mina figures.

One of the biggest changes so far is that Mr. Hawkins and Renfield are combined into Knock, a now-malicious solicitor secretly in kahoots with the Count.

Narratively speaking, this actually makes a more of sense than it might sound at first. Mr. Hawkins is mostly a plot device in the original story, not really a character, and given the restraints of a silent film, it would be rather challenging to establish why and how the Count wants to visit England. When you strip down the conversations from the captivity portion of the novel, you’re left with the challenge of how to convey the Count’s desire or to establish how exactly he made arrangements with a foreign solicitor, so giving him an agent abroad is a pretty economical way to convey that. Then, when the Count is travelling, using Knock as a Renfield-figure and thrall of the Count serves to heighten the tension, and while the “the life is in the blood” speeches are a little less mysterious, they do pair very well with the back-and-forth between the not-Demeter and not-Van Helsing teaching a botany class about carnivorous plants. 

The major downside of that choice is that it removes much of the nuance present in the books regarding the characters under the Count’s sway. Renfield and Seward’s back and forth about the nature of sanity is so far completely absent, and I expect this will be the case through the movie, going off of the visual language’s cartoonishly malicious depiction of Knock. Renfield’s humanity is really just not shown, and while Knock’s gleeful manner while eating bugs is quite similar to Renfield’s manner in the book, I highly doubt the element of resistance will show up.

Still, overall, this feels like a simplification rather than a warping of the story. Unfortunately, it’s a simplification that results in a caricature of mental illness, and yet I don’t think it’s a fundamental misreading of the story, unlike Drac/Mina pairings.

The second major change so far is that Mina and Lucy’s role have been combined into one, and given their similar narrative roles as vulnerable and beloved targets, this makes a lot of sense. Now, the Mina-figure is the sleepwalker. There is a slight change in that the prophetic dreams start earlier, but it also serves to emphasize her connection with Jonathan without the letter and journal devices. It also establishes her vulnerability early on, pretty much as soon as we realize that Jonathan is in peril, which is an effective way to convey the peril of Lucy-Mina without diary entries and serves to jump-start the middle act of the story (which I admittedly found rather slow during Dracula Daily)

In a related vein, there’s another convenience change that’s either big or small depending on what you view as an important theme. In Dracula, the Count seems primarily interested in England, and his later vendetta is the result of his predatory nature, not the driving motivation. In Nosferatu, that’s flipped, and his primary motivation to leave his castle is to track down not-Mina. He presumably did first send for a solicitor, though, so the motivation isn’t absent, it’s just less developed.

Apart from character changes, the biggest other change is that the Count spreads plague rather than just killing or turning characters. So far, it doesn’t feel fundamentally different from the book, but I don’t know yet if it will have larger plot implications down the line.

I will say, though, that the time period is always waiting a little bit uncomfortably at the back of my mind. It came out in 1922, and there’s just so much going on in the Weimar Republic at this time. It’s a culturally wild time. I don’t know a lot about this film, or its make, or how it was received, so I’m just left with vague implications about the various changes and how they would be received. What does it suggest that he spreads a plague? What does his increased focus on preying on Mina mean? What are the implications of the fact that he has an apparently willing agent abroad, or that Renfield is only a slavish caricature, totally devoted to the count?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they’re always looming somewhere as I watch.

[dameronology]

natasha romanoff relationship alphabet

requested by anon!

a - actions. what sort of things do they do to show they love their s.o?

for nat, her main love language is protecting you. you're literally the most important thing in her life and given how dangerous her job is, ensuring you're safe is her main priority. expect her to steal you some hella cool weapons and teach you basic (or even advanced) self defence. she'll also text you to make sure you're okay during the day and she'll never go to sleep until you've texted to say you're home safe.

b - beginnings. how did the relationship begin? how has it changed?

s l o w l y. this is the black widow we're talking about, so she would have spent a very long time trying to deny her feelings for you. once she's admitted them to herself, admitting them to you doesn't seem so hard, but it probably would have taken a lot of advice from more reasonable minds - i.e sam & steve - to guide her. the thing about natasha is that once you've got her, you've got her, so it's changed in the sense that she's gone from hiding her feelings for you to laying herself bare. no buts, no coconuts. she's yours.

c - comfortable. how comfy are they with each other? peeing with the door open close, or would they rather keep the mystery?

nat probably tried to keep the mystery at first, but it's so much energy. she's happy to just live as her true self in front of you so don't be surprised if you start most your days complaining to her about the ginger hair she's left all over the shower.

d - dates. do they consider dates to be important? what kind do they prefer?

dates aren't the most important thing for nat -- she loves spending time with you on the daily but designated date nights aren't her priority. with that said, if she does do them, they'll be super lowkey. it'll either be a movie night in with takeout, or she'll surprise you on your lunch break.

e - engagement. how would they propose? who would even pop the question?

i don't get the vibes that nat would want to get married - if anything, she's more likely to go into a long ass speech about how relationships don't need to be legally binding to mean something, and it's all just a capitalist lie and...yeah, you stopped listening at that point. but the main take away is, it's not essential to her. but if you really, really wanted to get married, and if it was a very significant thing to you? she'd do it in a heartbeat.

f - fundamental. for them, what is the most fundamental part of a relationship?

trust. natasha has gone her whole life not knowing who to trust and without anyone to turn to. she's naturally suspicious of everyone around her so she would need absolute and complete faith in her s.o, because you are the one person she never wants to question.

g - gratitude. how do they show their appreciation for you?

by opening up to you. it's something that nat rarely does, but it shows how must love and trust she has for you.

h - home. a random domestic headcanon.

everyone pictured natasha's apartment being like...a concrete box, but it's actually amazing. everything is colour co-ordinated and aesthetic and it's cluttered, but in the best way.

i - infinite. do they believe their love is endless, or is there something that could break it?

if you went behind her back or betrayed her, that would be it. the minute she stops trusting you is the minute it's over - and while she could never fully stop loving you, nothing in the world could fix it.

j - jokes. who’s the funny one?

it's a tie. nat has a more deadpan sense of humour, but she always makes you laugh.

k - kiss. how do they kiss? favourite type?

nat does this thing when she kisses you where she puts a hand on the back of your neck and gives it a light squeeze when she wants to make it deeper, and she loves biting on your lower lip to tease you before quickly pulling away - especially if you're about to go and meet the others or go to a meeting - because she knows it'll be on your mind for the rest of the day

l - longing. who’s the clingy one? how are they with long distance?

nat can deal with long distance, and she has to, because of her job, and she can absolutely be the clingy one when she's in the right mood.

m - marriage. do they wanna get married?

see engagement! i accidentally covered it there

n - nicknames. what ones do they like?

she likes babe, sweetheart and darling

o - over the top. are they ever ott? or are they more low-key?

definitely more low-key. everything about natasha is on the down low and super sly, so her love is no different. she doesn't really do grand displays of affection but she absolutely does show her love for you through more intimate and personal actions.

p - picture. what’s their favourite picture of them and their s.o?

it's actually one of just you; one halloween, the team decided they all had to go as a respective avenger and you ended up going as steve. there's a picture of you holding his shield and drinking pimms from his helmet and it's been her phone background ever since.

q - quintessential. what is one they would refuse to compromise in their relationship? what’s a deal-breaker for them?

mutual respect. you respect her and she respects you. if she ever had to deal with anything that even slightly compromised her respect for you or for herself, that would be it.

t - tattoo. would they ever get matching tattoos with their s.o, or a tattoo for them?

she's vehemently against matching tattoos, but she would definitely get a small one for you - maybe something on one of her fingers, or her ankle

u - understanding. how understanding are they? or are they a little difficult?

nat is the least difficult person ever. she's so understanding of you & your feelings and she will always respect them and go out her way to help you if you need it.

v - vases. do they buy flowers?

always!! at least once a week.

w - wandering. do they wanna travel? or immediately settle down?

nat has travelled a fair amount because of her job, but it was always for the wrong reasons. she would absolutely love to go on actual vacations/holidays with you - for example, it's her dream to go to the south of france to sun bathe, and not to chase an international criminal. as for settling down, she absolutely would. it might take a while for her to feel like she's ready to retire, but once she has, your her whole future.

x - ex. how many exes do they have? any horror stories?

no actual legit exes, but definitely a couple one night stands that became obsessed with her.

y - you. favourite thing about their partner?

the fact you feel like home. nat's life was so uncertain for so long that the stability you bring is beyond anything she could have ever imagined.

z - zeal. how excitable are they? who’s the calm one?

nat is absolutely the calm one (she's literally been trained to be). she is a rock. she is an i-i-island.

[oumakokichi]

So what do you think of Kaede and Kokichi's relationship? And if Kaede remained the protagonist how do you think it would change?

Considering it’s Kaede’s birthday today I think this is a really fun question to come back to!

Kaede is an absolutely amazing character, and I love how different her relationships with the rest of the cast feel from Saihara’s. She and Ouma have an especially interesting friendship in their FTEs together (one of Kaede’s FTEs with Ouma might be one of my favorite FTEs ever, really), so I don’t mind going a little more in-depth on my thoughts about their dynamic, as well as about how that dynamic and the story itself might’ve changed if Kaede had remained the protagonist!

Warning for spoilers as always, though I’m pretty sure most people know about the chapter 1 twist by now.

I think one of my absolute favorite things about Kaede is just how easy it is to get attached to her in such a short amount of time. She’s only around for the prologue and a single chapter, but despite that (or rather, because of the sheer length of the chapters in ndrv3, which tend to be much longer than dr1 or sdr2’s chapters), we still get to see so many different sides of her and just how complex of a character she really is. And I think that’s largely the reason for her continued popularity to this day: Kaede might not stay around for long, but we still really feel like we know her by the end of it.

And really, I think that’s pretty similar to how the actual characters feel about Kaede themselves. Despite how short her time is with all of them, she leaves such a powerful, lasting impression, even after her death. This is a pretty big change from previous DR games, where the chapter 1 culprits especially tend to suffer a pretty big lack of relevance or relationship to other characters in later chapters. Often times the victims are at least somewhat memorable (Maizono and the Impostor both at least come up a few times in their respective games), but characters like Leon or Teruteru just don’t feel like they have much of an impact on the other characters or the plot itself after their trials are finished.

This is totally different from Kaede, whose positive outlook and outgoing attitude already makes her fairly likable to most of the others, but who also openly invites the others to rely on her once she establishes herself as a leader figure fairly quickly in chapter 1. Most of the other characters latch onto her almost immediately, either because she seems so reliable and helpful (Saihara and Tenko in particular seem to like this about her), or because they can’t help but respect her and what she’s trying to do for the group (characters like Momota, who really values group cooperation, come to mind).

Personally, I think Ouma fell into the latter category. He and Kaede have something of a complicated relationship almost right from the get-go in chapter 1, but it’s still pretty clear that Ouma did respect Kaede a lot and recognized that she had the group’s best interests at heart, even if he didn’t always agree with her methods.

Likewise, I think Kaede was somewhat curious about Ouma and really wanted to get along with him, despite how difficult he could be. We see in Ouma’s introduction, both in the demo and the actual game, that Kaede clearly recognizes on some level that part of his annoying attitude is really just his way of teasing others, and that he doesn’t seem particularly malicious. More specifically, she describes him as “having a childish streak that makes him hard to hate,” which is a pretty spot-on description of Ouma in a nutshell. In short, she knew he was annoying and childish (on purpose, most of the time) but she definitely didn’t think of him as evil or cruel. This may in part also be because she didn’t live long enough to see him embrace the fake villain routine by the end of chapter 4, of course.

Ouma has a few teasing remarks throughout most of the game, but it’s not really until the death road of despair is discovered that he and Kaede butt heads for the very first time. This is because of a big, fundamental difference between their ideologies: while both of them very much have the group’s best interests at heart, they completely disagree when it comes to whether it’s worth it to cooperate as a team or not.

By the end of the game, Ouma is extremely paranoid, refusing to cooperate with absolutely anyone unless it’s out of some mixture of chance and necessity (such as working with Momota in chapter 5). He keeps all his cards close to the chest, and refuses to confide in or trust any of his remaining classmates, believing it’s fully possible any of them could be the ringleader.

But before the events of chapter 4, we see that he’s actually not opposed to the idea of selective cooperation. He strikes up a tentative collaboration with Miu early on, commissioning her to create some extremely useful inventions with the intent of using them to try and end the killing game. He also extends an invitation of cooperation to both Kaede (in one of her FTEs) and Saihara (in chapter 4, in the parlor of the VR world), though he goes about this in such a sly, underhanded, and off-putting way that both of them shoot his offer down flat. Even he’s not beyond the idea of teaming up with people he perceives as “useful” or “smart,” as long as it’s a much smaller, one-on-one effort rather than trusting or working with the entire group.

By contrast, Kaede is someone who believes that group unity is almost a necessity if they want to escape the killing game. This is very much in line with the role she establishes for herself as a leader. Unlike characters like Momota, who has always sort of longed to embrace a “hero” role, or Saihara, who is considerably more awkward and unwilling to be a leader because of how guilty he feels, Kaede’s role is much more about boosting and maintaining the group’s morale.

This is lampshaded several times by the classical music pieces that she references, often in an attempt to either clam the others down or fire them up at the idea of working together and escaping. It’s also a fantastic little clue that her own positive outlook is something a bit more crafted than it seems on the surface; she always tries to be optimistic about things and face her problems head-on, but that’s in large part because she tries to energize herself and present that reliable, dependable persona to the rest of the group. In short, she believes that if she reveals her own uncertainty or lack of faith in her plans, the rest of the group’s trust and morale will fall too.

Like I mentioned, this difference in their outlook is really what begins to cause problems for them once they discover the death road of despair in chapter 1. Kaede sees the tunnel as their one opportunity to escape without having to rely on the killing game itself; even if it’s extremely difficult and damn near impossible to get through it, the chance of injury is a risk she’s willing to take, no matter how many times they have to start over. But Ouma disagrees with this mindset and criticizes her in front of the entire group, pointing out how everyone else is already exhausted and even injured, and saying that she has no right to make that decision for the rest of them.

He even goes a step further and accuses her of strong-arming the rest of them by “denying them the right to give up in an impossible situation.” He claims that by positing herself as an inspirational figure, she has the “moral high-ground” no matter what the rest of them do or say, and clearly doesn’t think it’s possible for them to continue down the death road without someone getting seriously injured, or worse.

These harsh words really take Kaede aback, especially since most of the rest of the group seems to more or less agree with Ouma. She’s extremely hurt—not just by the fact that no one seems to really want to keep going with her plan, but also, I think, because she felt as if Ouma was right on some level. In my opinion, this is why she cries once she’s alone in her room later: because she did feel as though she’d forced everyone else to go along with an unreasonable plan. It’s the first time that we really see the cracks in her leader persona beginning to show, as well as the self-doubt that she carries.

I honestly think many people who dislike Ouma on their first playthrough of the game may have started here, right at this moment. Because so much of this seems to be fairly black-or-white initially—Kaede is presented as the unequivocally good heroine, trying to get everyone to work together and escape, and Ouma by contrast seems mean and unreasonable for arguing with her in front of everyone. We’re not supposed to linger on the fact that he makes several good points about everyone else’s safety and exhaustion because how he goes about it is off-putting and unlikable.

Not only that, but we as first-time players aren’t supposed to know about all the similarities that Ouma and Kaede actually have in common, despite their differences on the matter of group cooperation. We’re not supposed to know just yet that they both want to save the group, no matter what it takes, or that both of them are willing to go to extreme, sometimes morally grey measures in order to try and stop the killing game. We’re not supposed to know right away that Ouma can be every bit as self-sacrificing as Kaede, despite the selfish things that he says in front of the others, or that when push comes to shove, Kaede is willing to lie almost as much as he is.

We don’t know any of that, initially—which is why that scene hits so hard and sets Ouma up to be so unpleasant. But I think going back on a replay and evaluating it again is pretty interesting specifically because of all these similarities that I’ve listed. The fact that they clash here is especially interesting, given the sort of roles they embody to the rest of the group, with Kaede deliberately choosing to be someone that the entire group relies on and finds trustworthy, while Ouma later sets himself up to become a villain who’s hated by everyone. And despite this, their goals are largely one and the same: expose the ringleader and end the killing game.

I think it’s specifically because Kaede realized she couldn’t continue pushing everyone to do the things she wanted them to, no matter how badly she wanted everyone to cooperate and escape together, and that’s ultimately why she turns to Plan B when she hears from Saihara about the bookshelf hiding the ringleader’s lair in the library. And for all that she does want to trust and cooperate with everyone else, she actually goes about this plan in the most Ouma-like way possible: by doing everything herself and without telling anyone her real intentions, not even Saihara.

Something I especially like about Kaede as a character is just how nuanced she is. Because she is simultaneously the brave, trustworthy, outgoing protagonist that we see her as, but she’s also so, so much more than that. She’s fiercely determined and cares about everyone else, yes, but it’s also because she cares so much that she’s willing to do things like lie and attempt murder behind everyone else’s back.

If we look at the audition videos as any sort of clue as to what the characters might’ve been like before the start of the game, I do think there was a somewhat more skeptical, cynical side of Kaede deep down that didn’t quite trust other people—and that’s all the more reason she wanted to trust them and work together with all of them, because she knew exactly how hard it was to do so. It’s such an interesting contrast from Ouma, who could easily have used all his lies and charm to cooperate with people if he wanted to, but who instead continually pushes people away because of his skepticism, all the while pretending to act completely arrogant and self-assured in his plans. Deep down, I think both of them were much more vulnerable than they were ever willing to show in front of other people.

And I think by the end of chapter 1, Ouma became more or less aware of that side of Kaede, once she confesses everything she tried to do to end the killing game. Prior to this, I personally think Ouma still very much liked and respected her guts and her attempts at leading the group, but that he ultimately thought she was doomed by her reliance on trust and cooperation when they didn’t even know who the ringleader was within their group. But I think that after hearing just how far she was willing to go to stop the killing game, including but not limited to lying to everyone else and going behind their backs with her own plan, he couldn’t help but respect her even more. Despite his accusations that she was too soft or naïve for trusting everyone else, her actual attempted solution was far closer to his own outlook than he initially gave her credit for.

This is why, just before Kaede is about to be executed, Ouma drops all of his usual acts and facades with her and gives her a sincere goodbye, telling her that she “wasn’t boring.” And this is really the highest compliment someone like Ouma can give: she did take him by surprise and surpass all his expectations from her, and I do believe he was genuinely sad to see her go when she attempted such a huge sacrifice for everyone else’s sakes.

Truly, the only part of her plan that I think he disagreed with was the act of (attempted) murder in and of itself. He felt that despite her good intentions, she had “crossed a line” that shouldn’t be crossed, and that she fell into the ringleader’s trap the moment the idea of murder crossed her mind. Considering how much DICE’s “no murder” taboo guided Ouma throughout the game, it’s not surprising at all that this is where he disagreed with Kaede. Though ironically, he himself crosses the same line in chapter 4 when he decides the only possible solution to Miu’s attempt on his life is to kill her himself, and therefore winds up getting his hands dirty without ever directly committing murder, much like Kaede herself.

Questioning how they might’ve gotten along if Kaede had actually lived past chapter 1 and continued being the game’s protagonist is interesting, mainly because so many factors would change as a result. Kaede and Saihara are so fundamentally different as protagonists, and Kaede herself is much more in line with what we would expect from a Hope’s Peak protagonist instead. Kodaka himself has described her in an interview as being extremely similar to Asahina, and I personally think she’s something of a combination between Asahina’s outgoing attitude and Maizono’s carefully crafted façade (not to mention moral ambiguity). So it stands to reason that the game and its themes wouldn’t quite be the same if Kaede were still the protagonist.

On the one hand, I do think there would be interesting potential for a possible alliance between her and Ouma, especially given how similar they could both be. Ouma himself proposes such an alliance to her in one of his FTEs, though she does get angry and shoots him down, as I mentioned earlier. But it’s interesting to consider if Kaede might’ve been more willing to cooperate in smaller, one-on-one alliances if she had attempted her plan in chapter 1 and failed without getting executed for it.

There’s also the fact that Ouma claims to remember her and everyone else adamantly in his FTEs with her, even going so far as to claim that she and everyone else forgot about him, even though he never forgot about them. It’s unclear whether he’s referring to his memories from before the game still being intact (which is likely, since he’s pretty skeptical of the flashback lights right away), or if there’s some other explanation for it, but personally, I don’t think it can be dismissed as a complete lie. Even if Kaede herself accuses him of lying and making it all up, he goes uncharacteristically blank and claims that “even he’s not that good at lying.”

This adds huge potential to Kaede sticking around, as there could easily be an underlying mystery element. In addition to the trials themselves and the mystery of the outside world, it’d be very possible to explore their dynamic further, as well as why Ouma said the things he did and if he was actually telling the truth about knowing her and everyone else from before. Kaede is absolutely persistent enough that I feel like she would’ve pressed him for details about this, especially once it became clear in the main plot that their memories were unreliable.

On the other hand, it’s really unclear if Ouma would’ve still been willing to offer that alliance to Kaede once she had attempted to commit murder. Assuming the events of chapter 1 stay more or less the same and the only difference is that Kaede survives instead of getting executed, this raises some potential problems with Ouma actually working together with her or trusting her. She did, as he puts it, “cross the line”—even if her murder attempt wasn’t successful, Ouma claims that she was already too far gone the moment she even considered murder as a possible solution. This could definitely cause another clash of opinions between them, especially as Ouma is much too paranoid to work directly with anyone who he thinks might kill him.

Another potential source of conflict in my opinion is the Hope’s Peak flashback light in chapter 5. Unlike Saihara, who deals primarily with questions of “truth or lies” and is ultimately able to see through Tsumugi’s false ultimatum in chapter 6 with the choice of either the “hope ending” or “despair ending,” Kaede is, as I mentioned, much more in line with what you’d expect from a Hope’s Peak protagonist. She’s extremely smart of course, but she has a bit of a reckless, headstrong streak where she tends to act based on emotion rather than reason, and this could get her into quite a lot of trouble once Tsumugi started rewriting everyone’s memories in chapter 5.

Saihara was able to see that both of the choices Tsumugi presented in the final trial were bullshit and would ultimately keep the cycle of Danganronpa ongoing, but I’m not entirely sure if Kaede would realize the same thing, or even if she did eventually realize it, I’m not sure it would’ve been in time to stop it. Because of her self-sacrificing nature, I personally think she would’ve chosen to be one of the sacrifices for the sake of “hope,” much like Amami presumably did in season 52. This ultimately means that Kaede sticking around might have ultimately led to a “bad end” of sorts, where even if the rest of the group went free aside from her and one other sacrifice, Danganronpa itself never gets dismantled and lives to see another season.

The only possible way I see for Kaede to avoid falling into this trap and making this choice is if enough of her classmates rubbed off on her or helped her see things in less black-or-white terms like “hope” or “despair,” and in more nuanced shades of grey instead. But considering how completely fooled almost everyone was in the actual events of the game, it’s difficult to say if this would happen. She would definitely need to talk and debate with someone who viewed the flashback lights a lot more skeptically, whether it was Saihara or Ouma (or maybe even Angie), before she could reach the truth about what Tsumugi and Team Danganronpa were really after.

This analysis has gotten pretty long by this point, so I’ll just wrap things up by saying that I really do love Kaede and Ouma’s friendship, and I think they had more potential of getting along than either of them might’ve realized in canon. Despite their fundamental differences, both of them were two characters who went farther than almost anyone else in trying to stop the killing game, and both of them weren’t afraid of getting their hands dirty if necessary. I think the fact that Ouma claims to remember Kaede and everyone else from before the killing game is super interesting, and I would’ve absolutely loved to see it touched on more if Ouma had lived longer.

All in all, Kaede is such an amazing, morally grey character who really helps to establish what we can expect from the rest of the game, and I think that’s part of what makes her so memorable. Maybe one day we’ll get some sort of DR:IF equivalent where we get a semi-canon look into a scenario where everyone lives, and hopefully there we could see not only more of Kaede being a protagonist figure, but also more of her interactions with Ouma and everyone else.

[mogsk]

This kinda shit pisses me off so much, like, I’ve been engaged in anarchism scenes for the last decade and I have never once seen someone just say “oh well disabled people already die so w/e” especially since how do we provide functional medical care outside of private industries and a state apparatus which can revoke or deny it at any moment is a foundational question of anarchist praxis.

What I have seen is dipshits who will randomly bombard anarchists with questions like these completely in bad faith with the sole intention of trying to score a gotcha in whatever holes they perceive in the answer they’re given such to the point that many no longer take answering such questions seriously.

In an ideal anarchist society, a doctor who wants to provide care or a chemist who wants to synthesize medicines would do so because a society founded on anarchist principals would have gone through unforeseeable changes which would eliminate things like profit motive behind why a person would do the work of a doctor or chemist.

But this is a dream of the distant future which is not the core of anarchist praxis, despite it being the only thing people who ask these sorts of questions seem to care about. In the here and now, anarchists are concerned with how disabled and chronically ill people can survive when the state fails them — which it often does!

For example, among other things, I’m diabetic and I have to cope with watching the price of insulin climb higher and higher and the possibility my medical insurance will be taken away by my government.

The anarchist way to confront this (and how many of us are trying to engage with it) is to try to find ways to source insulin outside of commercial lines of production. This may take the form of either finding some illicit way to acquire it from its producers (which would take inside cooperation or infiltration, very tough on either front) or finding some way to synthesize insulin using consumer-available supplies (afaik no one’s figured this one out yet) but the important thing is we’re trying to figure the problem out, even if the possibility of us succeeding is remote, the need for these solutions does not go away.

We don’t ideate around these things out of some purely moral stance against the state, but from the very practical position that the state is failing people and we need to find ways outside of its mechanisms of control to provide for these needs. Granted, this might mean I may one day need to survive off of anarchist bathtub insulin, but it’s a hell of a lot better than none at all!

My suspicion here is that anon heard someone respond to the accusation that anarchists don’t care about the disabled with a response about how disabled people are left to die in this society too. What this is saying is that “the disabled need the ongoing existence of the state to survive” is false because the state still systematically kills the disabled, not out of a lack of means to help them, but because of profit motives and bureaucratic nonsense.

An anarchist society would absolutely care for the sick and disabled, that’s fundamental to anarchism, and we know it is somehow possible because the state does it, but restricts people’s access to it which is why we oppose the state.

I feel like if anon is really anticipating such a terse response to this question, maybe they need to consider whether they are coming across as asking in bad faith and no one wants to entertain them.

So is there anything that could actually help disabled people in an anarchist society or are all the answers "Well disabled people die no matter what even in the current system soooo" because that's a throwaway answer

personally as a disabled person who struggles to work and cannot financially support myself, I think that a society that provides food and shelter and care for everyone,, regardless of their ability to pay for it or work to "earn" it,, and where there was no profit motive to gatekeep access to medicines and assistive devices,, would be tremendously incredibly helpful

[padfootastic]

I am HERE for talking about the ways that Jegulus and Wolfstar stans regularly diminish J and S’s bond… James would NEVER externally or internally trash S in comparison to R OR scorn S for leaving his family. And I really dislike a common WS trope of Remus being the only one who can “understand” Sirius and be there for him… like if Sirius is gonna show vulnerability to anyone or have anyone fundamentally accept who he is it’s gonna be to James!!!

oh no we’re really kicking all the nests today aren’t we 💀 *war flashbacks to my first month here*

under a cut because, well, slightly incoherent rant alert lol

but i cannot even—like okay, i get it, anyone can write what & how they want, i would never presume to tell them what to do but at the same time, i just wanna scream all day long when i see certain characterisations lol

i firmly believe that james was super emotionally sensitive when it came to sirius—knew right from the beginning how to tread around him and part of that came from him not being afraid of him, not wanting to change him. bc let’s be real, sirius has so many rough edges, he can be cruel and vindictive and uncaring and perhaps only someone as privileged and confident as james can handle that but that’s how it is. james will never withdraw his love from sirius, no matter what happens (and yes i’m looking at some of the prank writers who keep them separated for weeks/months, esp while sirius is visibly suffering) and to make him do that feels like such a disservice to his character. hell, one of his definitive traits is faith in his friends, no man left behind. (i also just wonder, sometimes, the strength with which single, pampered child, james latched on to sirius and shares his home, heart, and family with him—)

i wrote this dark sirius oneshot a while ago, and honestly, the entire thing stemmed from my hardcore belief that james would not judge any part of him (or well, maybe a better way to put it is, wouldn’t suppress any part of him. will accept sirius for who he is) and while everyone else looks at him as sirius Black, part of a super dark, DE sympathetic family—james gives him a clean slate. there’s no baggage with him. and that means so much to sirius who’s always felt the weight of his name pulling him down. (but like also, it’s such a complicated love-hate relationship because he can’t entirely give up on his family either and again, james doesn’t force him to)

as for remus being the only one to understand sirius,,,the dude was unwilling to examine even his own self and motivations, you think he’s got the patience for anyone else? i think a lot of remus stans like to construct this super pitying backstory for him to make his actions look better (and that’s always confused me because i always thought/hc’d he had a fairly decent family life before hogwarts but hey, i don’t have to be correct) and the seemingly natural conclusion of that rough living arc is understanding towards sirius’ souped up trauma too. because remus has been through *so much* shit whereas james is just a privileged little kid, so only he can understand sirius who has his own demons, it’s the shared darkness in them, you see.

which i mean, look, i totally see where that’s coming from. but like u said!!! the undermining of james in this scenario!!! every single account we have of the marauders portrays a very clear dynamic- j&s in the centre, and peter and remus in the somewhat periphery. (now, i don’t believe either of them were pity friends like a lot of people but that’s a topic for another day, but there was definitely some lines drawn). the fact that sirius runs away to james is such a clear show of trust, james making him godfather in the middle of a war?? fuck. these two were so intertwined in each other’s lives.

i actually think remus’ trauma and character would make him more blind to sirius, controversial as that is. the man clearly loves his self pity, is a bit of a coward (self admitted), and has a confrontation-avoidant nature. that’s so far apart from sirius as a person, who prefers initiative, isn’t afraid to introspect, and doesn’t shy away from the ugly parts of life. remus focuses so much on his werewolf identity that it’s entirely likely he’d be ignorant to others. and sirius, who needs steady, stable support, won’t find it there.

but that’s just me.

[raxistaicho]

Replying to weeefe3h‘s response.

A while back, @weeefe3h replied to my post, “Why Edelgard didn’t JUST reform the Empire,” with a few issues, which I will be attempting to address in this post. I refrained from reposting with a reply because... the post would be mega-long, lol.

Original reply here.

I hope you don’t mind me coming in, because I don’t really agree with what you’re saying here but I don’t want to come off rude.

So first off, I welcome all those who have issues with my posts :) I’m not trying to run an echo chamber, just don’t be rude is all, which weeefe3h was not. I appreciate their pleasantness and will strive to act in kind.

weeefe’s first point mostly contends with the fact that Edelgard forced change, and did so through a method that involved a lot of innocent people dying.

This is certainly true, and it’s a truth Edelgard herself admits to both in Azure Moon and Crimson Flower.  She’s well aware that her war is causing widespread death and suffering, but she believes a relatively brief period of intense pain for the people of Fodlan is a worthwhile trade to avoid another millenia of the slow rot it has suffered since the fall of Nemesis.

This issue mostly contends with whether you think the war was a necessary thing to improve Fodlan. Edelgard did, and I believe she was right; Fodlan in White Clouds is a powder keg. Faerghus is on the verge of collapse and had just inflicted an actual genocide against the people of Duscur, Faerghan and Adrestian nobles are resorting to eugenics (and in the case of the Empire, actual human experimentation) to sustain the failing Crest bloodlines, the alliance is a squabbling mess, and at least two of its lords are engaging in naked territory grabs from the others or killing civilians for associating with their political rivals. Banditry is so rampant that Jeralt’s company can keep steady work, and Rhea is chiefly concerned with suppressing insurrection against the Church rather than safeguarding the people of Fodlan.

Regardless of whether she was “actually right” in going to war, that she never even attempted talking to Dimitri or Claude at any point in the game beforehand says a lot about her. There’s a reason why only Dimitri and Claude can team up during the war, and why Claude doesn’t team up with Edelgard even if he’s spared and supposedly shares the same ideals as her - it’s because her ways of going about change are fundamentally more destructive than they are able to reconcile with. Edelgard isn’t inherently wrong for wanting to enact change beyond her own borders, she’s wrong because of the means she chose to actually enact said change. Edelgard is wrong for “wanting to make change” for the same reason Rhea is wrong for “wanting to bring back Sothis” - the act itself isn’t inherently bad, but her means of trying to take Byleth’s life are what make her wrong.

Edelgard has no reason to trust either Dimitri or Claude, and too openly revealing her hand would be disastrous for her.

Claude came from absolutely nowhere, is very cagey with his background, and spends copious amounts of time with Tomas in the library. He very much has the mark of being an Agarthan plant. Even so, Edelgard actually does attempt to speak, cautiously, with Claude in the Verdant Wind story, but he rebuffs her due to his untrusting nature.

Edelgard doesn’t know Dimitri, and given the inordinate emphasis Faerghus places on Crests and the bloodlines, she has no reason to believe he sees any problem with them (indeed, he owes his claim to the throne on the fact that his uncle was born Crestless. In any case, Edelgard and Dimitri would never see eye to eye, and their parley at the end of Azure Moon demonstrates this.

Edelgard believes that obsession with Crests, bloodlines, and faith in the goddess are limiting the potential of the people of Fodlan and keeping the underprivileged in a suppressed state. She believes that people have an inherent strength to them that needs to be nurtured and given a chance to grow.

Dimitri believes that people are inherently weak and that the downtrodden must be protected by those born with power. While he sees issues with the focus on Crests, he also thinks they’re a necessary thing;

Still, there is always a reason for why such customs stand the test of time. Imagine what this world would be like if no one placed any stock in Crests... Bloodlines that carry Crests would dwindle. The metaphorical blade used to oppose threats would eventually rust. This same argument has been made time and time again across the years. Both sides are at once right and wrong.

Indeed, he seems downright unnerved at the notion of an uncertain future, and holds fast to the present.

Dimitri’s belief that some must be born above to protect those below is antithetical to Edelgard’s belief that those below must be allowed to rise up. Edelgard has sufficient cause to believe Dimitri would not agree with her reforms, and she is correct in doubting him.

As a final note, Dimitri and Claude “teaming up” is greatly overblown. Dimitri never provides any assistance to Claude during Verdant Wind or Silver Snow, and Claude requesting Dimitri’s assistance in Azure Moon was, if anything, just a cop-out by the writers to neatly tie off the Alliance as a faction given every route has to end with Fodlan reunified, Dimitri has no cause to attack the Alliance anymore, and the Alliance isn’t in the same terrible shape the Kingdom is in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow.

…Not really? The Kingdom had Ashe and Yuri be adopted into nobles families. In the Alliance there’s Margrave Edmund who rose to power through trade routes and good speech skills. Lambert was going to do apparently “radical” reforms to the Kingdom before he was killed. None of this is denounced by the church or is looked on poorly by the church.

Although we’re never given the details on how and why Yuri is adopted into House Rowe, he has a Crest, so that’s a poor example. Ashe was a clear charity case by a minor Kingdom Lord subservient to Count Rowe, and in any case, Lonato already had a biological heir in the form of Christophe. He wasn’t so much bringing Ashe into legitimate noble status as he was giving him a new home to live in. Note that Ashe is still classed and treated as a commoner despite his adopted status, and only inherits House Gaspard in his endings.

Margrave Edmund is an exception to the rule, but it’s worth noting that he got into the Round Table partly because House Daphnel lost prominence, and they lost prominence because their Crest bloodline and Relic went over to the Kingdom;

Descendants of one of the 10 Elites and formerly among the Five Great Lords of the Alliance, it lost much power due to internal discord. For the last several generations, no head of House Daphnel has born a Crest. In spite of this, it still maintains its status as a noble family.

Indeed, the library book even has to emphasize that it would seem to be expected House Daphnel might lose their noble status due to their dearth of Crested heirs.

By contrast, House Galatea was granted land in the Kingdom (it can be safely assumed House Galatea did not originally own their lands, given that it would stand to reason that the mountain range which marks the modern border between the Kingdom and the Alliance also did so at the time of the Galatean branch family’s defection from House Daphnel) just for bringing over a new Crest and a Relic. Granted, the land turned out to be shitty, but still.

Additionally, part of House Galatea’s modern issues stem from the fact that Ingrid is the only heir to carry a Crest in some time.

All this is to say that exceptions to the rule do not unmake the rule.

And the church itself doesn’t like that Crests are used to gain power. From the Book of Seiros, Part II: “The descendants of the Heroes sought their ancestor’s power, and thusly their blood. In time, they amassed Crests, Relics, land, and wealth, using all to set the land aflame with war. The goddess’s power, intended to stem the flow of evil, became a tool of destruction, all because of the greed of humanity. The goddess grieved and, heartbroken, hid herself in the heavens from whence she came…”

And from the Book of Seiros, Part V: “  Dare not abuse the power gifted to you by the goddess.  “

That excerpt is just Rhea covering her ass, plain and simple. The Ten Commandments urge not to kill, and yet that’s never really stopped Christians from killing. We never see the Church actually enforce this rule or even chastise the noble class, even as the Kingdom and Empire institute actual eugenics programs to keep the Crested bloodlines alive. The only time Rhea moves to suppress instability in Fodlan is when it directly threatens the Church or the stability of the Crest System;

-Kostas’s gang were causing trouble on holy ground.

-Lonato was rising up against the Church.

-Miklan chanced exposing the dark secret of the Relics (note that Miklan was stirring up trouble in Rodrigue’s territory, and yet the Church prevented him from moving to defend his own people)

-Naturally, the Flame Emperor was acting against the Church.

-Remire village was very close to Garreg Mach and harboring a strange contagion during a year of great turmoil.

Where was the Church when Faerghus committed a genocide against the people of Duscur? It’s even worth bringing up that this incident made the Central Church look really bad; the Western Church was convinced the shadow order of the Knights of Seiros had Lambert assassinated and then executed Christophe to cover it up. Where was the Church when the Galatean split threatened upheaval within the Alliance and Kingdom?

The Church is granting divine legitimacy to Crested bloodlines while not acting to stop the worst excesses of them. The Church’s hypocritical standing in relation to the nobility is part of why Fodlan is in a rotten state.

There’s only ever any Crest-based nobility because of humans, not because Rhea or anyone from the church made it so - they explicitly denounce the idea of using Crests for such means, but the nobility ignore that and do it anyway.

By giving a theological background to the existence of Crests, Rhea turned them from inherited superpowers to a mark of the Goddess’s favor. She provided legitimacy to the Crested bloodlines just as she provided legitimacy to Loog’s rebellion when she crowned him. She might not have started either, but she provided them the theological support they needed to win the acceptance of the people.

So Edelgard doing all of what you said either wouldn’t be criticized by the church or would in all likelihoods be praised by the church for finally stemming the use of the Goddess’ power as a tool of destruction and greed (which made the goddess weep and leave Fodlan, according to the doctrine). Rhea is only worried about what the people would do without the nobility, but if Edelgard’s reforms prove to not sow discord Rhea would be more relieved than anything - after all, it’s a sign that humans are finally trying to stop benefiting from her family’s massacre. If anything, Edelgard, if this idea is followed, knocks down two birds with one stone - she proves the people don’t need nobility to stay orderly and gets rid of the notion of Crests being viable tools for garnering power.

Edelgard’s not just saying, “Don’t abuse Crests anymore,” she’s saying, “Crests are an unjust system that unfairly brings up a few at the expense of the many.” She’s outright calling the influence of the Goddess a detrimental thing to the people of Fodlan.

But as seen from the actual doctrine, Edelgard denouncing Crests is pretty well in-line with what the church actually wants. Nobles were the ones to make Crests as they are now; the church never wanted them to be used as tools of greed in the first place, only to help stop evil. Edelgard delegitimizing Crests and the Church of Seiros still standing are two things that could very easily coexist with each other.

Edelgard delegitimizing Crests would delegitimize the Church of Seiros. Again, Crests are the mark of the Goddess’s influence and her favor in a select few in Fodlan. Denying Crests would mean spitting in the hand of the Goddess. It would be the ultimate insult.

Why would those of the Alliance do so? They may not have had hired ministers, but they did already have the idea of nobles who started off as commoners rule over them be a familiar one (Edmund) so Edelgard doing the same for Adrestia wouldn’t be anything new to them.

Again, Edmund is an exception to the rule, and we don’t know the backstory of House Edmund. Realistically, it probably began as a cadet branch to a Crested noble house. Edelgard wants to eliminate the concept of nobility and inherited power. Some who are confident in their ability to succeed without the guarantee of succession at birth, such as Constance or Lorenz, would find no issue with this, but others would rise up against her or try to denounce her.

And on top of that, Edelgard taking Adrestia’s throne comes with Dimitri taking Faerghus’ throne and Claude inheriting the title of duke soon afterwards, so if Edelgard bided her time to wait for at least Dimitri to ascend to the throne she could talk with him about reforms. And them teaming up (while waiting for Oswald to either die or hand over the title of duke to Claude) would give both Edelgard and Dimitri a strong international ally to work with in helping the people, something that wasn’t true for Lambert or Ionius and could help immensely in warding off things like a Tragedy or Insurrection from happening again.

This really demands a post all its own to explain in detail, but I don’t believe Dimitri or Claude would have much luck wielding the kind of power you think they would in their respective lands.

Plus, Dimitri and Edelgard are able to use the experience of having a Tragedy and Insurrection happen to them to be able to watch for warning signs or to ready themselves against any plots against them, and Claude already has experience with people trying to assassinate him specifically. They’d be more prepared than Lambert or Ionius (or Godfrey) were in protecting themselves from nobles plotting their deaths/downfall.

The issue here is that Dimitri is not particularly good at learning from the past. Having seen his father assassinated for trying to reform relations with the people of Duscur, he would inevitably draw ire from those same nobles who committed the Tragedy (it wasn’t all JUST Agarthans) when he investigated it.

Claude’s ability to smell an assassination coming is not much help if he lacks the power to stop it in its tracks, and given Gloucestor can just outright send monsters at his victims, he’s got a lot of power.

That’s only if Edelgard is incredibly rash and started immediately enacting her reforms without waiting for Dimitri and Claude to gain their positions as king and duke. They would have not only each other as allies, but whatever allies they’d already have teaming up together as well (such as Fraldarius and Gautier for Dimitri and Goneril and Daphnel for Claude, for example).

At this point, your argument rests upon a foundation that I’ve already chipped away at, but in the case of Daphnel and Goneril specifically, Daphnel is a house in decline while Gloucestor’s star is on the rise in the Alliance. Meanwhile, Goneril is generally busy holding the border against Almyra.

The commoners “rising against their noble master and the church” seems unlikely to happen in either the Alliance (with its precedence of having commoners rise to high positions of nobility)

There is no precedent. House Edmund didn’t rise from a family of commoners to nobility, they simply gained “great clout” in recent generations that coincided with House Daphnael losing influence when their lose their Crest and Relic. Edmund didn’t boot out a Crested house, they simply took the place of one that had already effectively lost their Crested status through internal upheaval.

It’s debatable that even the Kingdom commoners would care that much, as people didn’t seem to care when Ashe and Yuri, two street rats, were adopted by well-respected families. On top of that, the church likely wouldn’t interfere with Edelgard as she would be doing what they want (stopping people from misusing Crests for greed and power).

These last two points I’ve already addressed. Yuri and Ashe are not strong exceptions (especially because Yuri has a Crest), and Edelgard decrying Crests would be an insult to the church.

Again, I hope I don’t come off as rude or anything, but I just don’t understand how Edelgard is against the world when she is doing things neither the commoners, Dimitri and Claude, or the church would hold anything against, nor do I agree with the idea that the “only” difference between her and (at least) Dimitri and Claude is so minimal and easily dismissible.

Not at all, you were perfectly respectful and I appreciate it :) I hope I didn’t come across as rude, myself. As a last note, while I agree that Edelgard and Claude might see eye-to-eye a little better, I don’t believe she and Dimitri would come to any kind of accord, and the game itself bears this out.

[ot3]

i watched red vs blue: zero with my dear friends today and i was asked to “post” my “thoughts” on the subject. Please do not click this readmore unless, for some reason, you want to read three thousand words on the subject of red vs blue: zero critical analysis. i highly doubt that’s the reason anyone is following me, but hey. 

anyway. here you have it. 

Here are my opinions on RVB0 as someone who has quite literally no nostalgia for any older RVB content. I’ve seen seasons 1-13 once and bits and pieces of it more than once here and there, but I only saw it for the first time within the past couple of months. I’ve literally never seen any other RT/AH content. I can name a few people who worked on OG Red vs. Blue but other than Mounty Oum I have NO idea who is responsible for what, really, or what anything else they’ve ever worked on is, or whether or not they’re awful people. I know even less about the people making RVB0 - All I know is that the main writer is named Torrian but I honestly don’t even know if that’s a first name, a last name, or a moniker. All this to say; nothing about my criticism is rooted in any perceived slight against the franchise or branding by the new staff members, because I don’t know or care about any of it. In fact, I’m going to try and avoid any direct comparison between RVB0 and earlier seasons of RVB as a means of critique until the very end, where I’ll look at that relationship specifically.

So here is my opinion of RVB0 as it stands right now:

1. The Writing

Everything about RVB0 feels as if it was written by a first-time writer who hasn’t learned to kill his darlings. The narrative is both simultaneously far too full, leaving very little breathing room for character interaction, and oddly sparse, with a story that lacks any meaningful takeaway, interesting ideas, or genuine emotional connection. It also feels like it’s for a very much younger audience - I don’t mean this as a negative at all. I love tv for kids. I watch more TV for kids than I do for adults, mostly, but I think it’s important to address this because a lot of the time ‘this is for kids’ is used to act like you’re not allowed to critique a narrative thoroughly. It definitely changes the way you critique it, but the critique can still be in good faith.  I watched the entirety of RVB0 only after it was finished, in one sitting, and I was giving it my full attention, essentially like it was a movie. I’m going to assume it was much better to watch in chunks, because as it stood, there was literally no time built into the narrative to process the events that had just transpired, or try and predict what events might be coming in the future. When there’s no time to think about the narrative as you’re watching it, the narrative ends up as being something that happens to the audience, not something they engage with. It’s like the difference between taking notes during a lecture or just sitting and listening. If you’re making no attempt to actively process what’s happening, it doesn’t stick in your mind well. I found myself struggling to recall the events and explanations that had immediately transpired because as soon as one thing had happened, another thing was already happening, and it was like a mental juggling act to try and figure out which information was important enough to dwell on in the time we were given to dwell on it.

Which brings me to another point - pacing. Every event in the show, whether a character moment, a plot moment, or a fight scene, felt like it was supposed to land with almost the exact same amount of emotional weight. It all felt like The Most Important Thing that had Yet Happened. And I understand that this is done as an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of a rather short runtime, but it fundamentally fails. When everything is the most important thing happening, it all fades into static. That’s what most of 0’s narrative was to me: static. It’s only been a few hours since I watched it but I had to go step by step and type out all of the story beats I could remember and run it by my friends who are much more enthusiastic RVB fans than I am to make sure I hadn’t missed or forgotten anything. I hadn’t, apparently, but the fact that my takeaway from the show was pretty accurate and also disappointingly lackluster says a lot. Strangely enough, the most interesting thing the show alluded to - a holo echo, or whatever the term they used was - was one of the things least extrapolated upon in the show’s incredibly bulky exposition. Benefit of the doubt says that’s something they’ll explore in future seasons (are they getting more? Is that planned? I just realized I don’t actually know.)

And bulky it was! I have quite honestly never seen such flagrant disregard for the rule of “show, don’t tell.” There was not a single ounce of subtlety or implication involved in the storytelling of RVB0. Something was either told to you explicitly, or almost entirely absent from the narrative. Essentially zilch in between. We are told the dynamic the characters have with each other, and their personality pros and cons are listed for us conveniently by Carolina. The plot develops in exposition dumps. This is partially due to the series’ short runtime, but is also very much a result of how that runtime was then used by the writers. They sacrificed a massive chunk of their show for the sake of cramming in a ton of fight scenes, and if they wanted to keep all of those fight scenes, it would have been necessary to pare down their story and characters proportionally in comparison, but they didn’t do that either. They wanted to have it both ways and there simply wasn’t enough time for it. 

The story itself is… uninteresting. It plays out more like the flimsy premise of a video game quest rather than a piece of media to be meaningfully engaged with. RVB0 is I think something I would be pitched by a guy who thinks the MCU and BNHA are the best storytelling to come out of the past decade. It is nothing but tropes. And I hate having to use this as an insult! I love tropes. The worst thing about RVB0 is that nothing it does is wholly unforgivable in its own right. Hunter x Hunter, a phenomenal shonen, is notoriously filled with pages upon pages of detailed exposition and explanations of things, and I absolutely love it. Leverage, my favorite TV show of all time, is literally nothing but a five man band who has to learn to work as a team while seemingly systematically hitting a checklist of every relevant trope in the book. Pacific Rim is an incredibly straightforward good guys vs giant monsters blockbuster to show off some cool fight scenes such as a big robot cutting an alien in half with a giant sword, and it’s some of the most fun I ever have watching a movie. Something being derivative, clunky, poorly executed in some specific areas, narratively weak, or any single one of these flaws, is perfectly fine assuming it’s done with the intention and care that’s necessary to make the good parts shine more. I’ll forgive literally any crime a piece of media commits as long as it’s interesting and/or enjoyable to consume. RVB0 is not that. I’m not sure what the main point of RVB0 was supposed to be, because it seemingly succeeds at nothing. It has absolutely nothing new or innovative to justify its lack of concern for traditional storytelling conventions. Based solely on the amount of screentime things were given, I’d be inclined to say the narrative existed mostly to give flimsy pretense for the fight scenes, but that’s an entire other can of worms.

2. The Visuals + Fights

I have no qualms with things that are all style and no substance. Sometimes you just want to see pretty colors moving on the screen for a while or watch some cool bad guys and monsters or whatever get punched. RVB0 was not this either. The show fundamentally lacked a coherent aesthetic vision. Much of the show had a rather generic sci-fi feel to it with the biggest standouts to this being the very noir looking cityscape, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like something from a batman game, or the temple, which my friends and I all immediately joked looked like a world of warcraft raid. They were obviously attempting to get variety in their environment design, which I appreciate, but they did this without having a coherent enough visual language to feel like it was all part of the same world. In general, there was also just a lack of visual clarity or strong shots. The value range in any given scene was poor, the compositions and framing were functional at best, and the character animation was unpleasantly exaggerated. It just doesn’t really look that good beyond fancy rendering techniques.

The fight scenes are their entire own beast. Since ‘FIGHT SCENE’ is the largest single category of scenes in the show, they definitely feel worth looking at with a genuine critical eye. Or, at least, I’d like to, but honestly half the time I found myself almost unable to look at them. The camera is rarely still long enough to really enjoy what you’re watching - tracking the motion of the character AND the camera at such constant breakneck high speeds left little time to appreciate any nuances that might have been present in the choreography or character animation. I tried, believe me, I really did, but the fight scenes leave one with the same sort of dizzy convoluted spectacle as a Michael Bay transformers movie. They also really lacked the impact fight scenes are supposed to have.

It’s hard to have a good, memorable fight scene without it doing one of three things: 1. Showing off innovative or creative fighting styles and choreography 2. Making use of the fight’s setting or environment in an engaging and visually interesting way or 3. Further exploring a character’s personality or actions by the way they fight. It’s also hard to do one of these things on its own without at least touching a bit on the other two. For the most part, I find RVB0’s fight scenes fail to do this. Other than rather surface level insubstantial factors, there was little to visually distinguish any of RVB0’s fight scenes from each other. Not only did I find a lot of them difficult to watch and unappealing, I found them all difficult to watch and unappealing in an almost identical way. They felt incredibly interchangeable and very generic. If you could take a fight scene and change the location it was set and also change which characters were participating and have very little change, it’s probably not a good fight scene. 

I think “generic” is really just the defining word of RVB0 and I think that’s also why it falls short in the humor department  as well.

3. The Comedy

Funny shit is hard to write and humor is also incredibly subjective but I definitely got almost no laughs out of RVB0. I think a total of three. By far the best joke was Carolina having a cast on top of her armor, which, I must stress, is an incredibly funny gag and I love it. But overall I think the humor fell short because it felt like it was tacked on more than a natural and intentional part of this world and these characters. A lot of the jokes felt like they were just thrown in wherever they’d fit, without any build up to punchlines and with little regard for what sort of joke each character would make. Like, there was some, obviously Raymond’s sense of humor had the most character to it, but the character-oriented humor still felt very weak. When focusing on character-driven humor, there’s a LOT you can establish about characters based on what sort of jokes they choose to make, who they’re picking as the punchlines of these jokes, and who their in-universe audience for the jokes is. In RVB0, the jokes all felt very immersion-breaking and self aware, directed wholly towards the audience rather than occurring as a natural result of interplay between the characters. This is partially due to how lackluster the character writing was overall, and the previously stated tight timing, but also definitely due to a lack of a real understanding about what makes a joke land. 

A rule of thumb I personally hold for comedy is that, when push comes to shove, more specific is always going to be more funny. The example I gave when trying to explain this was this:

saying two characters had awkward sex in a movie theater: funny

saying two characters had an awkward handjob in a cinemark: even funnier

saying two characters spent 54 minutes of 11:14's 1:26 runtime trying out some uncomfortably-angled hand stuff in the back of a dilapidated cinemark that lost funding halfway through retrofitting into a dinner theater: the funniest

The more specific a joke is, the more it relies on an in-depth understanding of the characters and world you’re dealing with and the more ‘realistic’ it feels within the context of your media. Especially with this kind of humor. When you’re joking with your friends, you don’t go for stock-humor that could be pulled out of a joke book, you go for the specific. You aim for the weak spots. If a set of jokes could be blindly transplanted into another world, onto another cast of characters, then it’s far too generic to be truly funny or memorable. I don’t think there’s a single joke in RVB0 where the humor of it hinged upon the characters or the setting.

Then there’s the issue of situational comedy and physical comedy. This is really where the humor being ‘tacked on’ shows the most. Once again, part of what makes actually solid comedy land properly is it feeling like a natural result of the world you have established. Real life is absurd and comical situations can be found even in the midst of some pretty grim context, and that’s why black comedy is successful, and why comedy shows are allowed to dip into heavier subject matter from time to time, or why dramas often search for levity in humor. It’s a natural part of being human to find humor in almost any situation. The key thing, though, once again, is finding it in the situation. Many of RVB0’s attempts at humor, once again, feel like they would be the exact same jokes when stripped from their context, and that’s almost never good. A pretty fundamental concept in both storytelling in general but particularly comedy writing is ‘setup and payoff’. No joke in RVB0 is a reward for a seemingly innocuous event in an earlier scene or for an overlooked piece of environmental design. The jokes pop in when there’s time for them in between all the exposition and fighting, and are gone as soon as they’re done. There’s no long term, underlying comedic throughline to give any sense of coherence or intent to the sense of humor the show is trying to establish. Every joke is an isolated one-off quip or one-liner, and it fails to engage the audience in a meaningful way.

All together, each individual component of RVB0 feels like it was conjured up independently, without any concern to how it interacted with the larger product they were creating. And I think this is really where it all falls apart. RVB0 feels criminally generic in a way reminiscent of mass-market media which at least has the luxury of attributing these flaws, this complete and total watering down of anything unique, to heavy oversight and large teams with competing visions. But I don’t think that’s the case for RVB0. I don’t know much about what the pipeline is like for this show, but I feel like the fundamental problem it suffers from is a lack of heart.

In comparison to Red vs. Blue

Let's face it. This is a terrible successor to Red vs. Blue. I wouldn’t care if NONE of the old characters were in it - that’s not my problem. I haven’t seen past season 13 because from what I heard the show already jumped the shark a bit and then some. That’s not what makes it a poor follow up. What makes it a bad successor is that it fundamentally lacks any of the aspects of the OG RVB that made it unique or appealing at all. I find myself wondering what Torrian is trying to say with RVB0 and quite literally the only answer I find myself falling back onto is that he isn’t trying to say anything at all. Regardless of what you feel about the original RVB, it undeniably had things to say. The opening “why are we here” speech does an excellent job at establishing that this is a show intended to poke fun at the misery of bureaucracy and subservience to nonsensical systems, not just in the context of military life, but in a very broad-strokes way almost any middle-class worker can relate to. At the end of the day, fiction is at its best when it resonates with some aspect of its audience’s life. I know instantly which parts of the original Red vs Blue I’m supposed to relate to. I can’t say anything even close to that about 0.

RVB is an absurdist parody that heavily satirizes aspects of the military and life as a low-on-the-food-chain worker in general that almost it’s entire target audience will be familiar with. The most significant draw of the show to me was how the dialogue felt like listening to my friends bicker with each other in our group chats. It required no effort for me to connect with and although the narrative never outright looked to the camera and explained ‘we are critiquing the military’s stupid red tape and self-fullfilling eternal conflict’ they didn’t need to, because the writing trusted itself and its audience enough to believe this could be conveyed. It is, in a way, the complete antithesis to the badass superhero macho military man protagonist that we all know so well. RVB was saying something, and it was saying it in a rather novel format.

Nothing about RVB0 is novel. Nothing about RVB0 says anything. Nothing about it compels me to relate to any of these characters or their situations. RVB0 doesn’t feel like absurdism, or satire. RVB0 feels like it is, completely uncritically, the exact media that RVB itself was riffing off of. Both RVB0 and RVB when you watch them give you the feeling that what you’re seeing here is kids on a playground larping with toy soldiers. It’s all ridiculous and over the top cliche stupid garbage where each side is trying to one-up the other. The critical difference is, in RVB, we’re supposed to look at this and laugh at how ridiculous this is. In RVB0 we’re supposed to unironically think this is all pretty badass. 

The PFL arc of the original RVB existed to show us that setting up an elite team of supersoldiers with special powers was something done in bad faith, with poor outcomes, that left everyone involved either cruel, damaged, or dead. It was a bad thing. And what we’re seeing in RVB0 is the same premise, except, this time it’s good. We’re supposed to root for this format. RVB0 feels much more like a demo reel, cutscenes from a video game that doesn’t exist, or a shonen anime fanboy’s journal scribbling than it feels like a piece of media with any objective value in any area.  In every area that RVB was anti-establishment, RVB0 is pure undiluted establishment through and through.  

[edenfenixblogs]

I see what you’re saying and am choosing to interpret this in good faith, so I want to very kindly and genuinely say that this is a false equivalence and a misinterpretation of what I said.

First of all, I very explicitly and purposefully DID NOT ONLY police Palestinian speech (caps for emphasis not aggression).

Jews do actively use the term Zionism in a self-defined way not in line with the way that anti-Zionists use it for us and in a way that is not reflected in Zionist/anti-Zionist activist discourse. In an ideal world, Jews should be the only ones using the word at all. It’s our word. We decided what it meant and we decide how it EVOLVES and CHANGES with regard to OUR culture. If your argument is that most people use it differently, you are both right and also ignoring Jewish cultural needs. There will always be more of you—whether you are Christian or Muslim or something else—than there are of Jews. The majority will ALWAYS outnumber us.

Does that mean that we have no right to self determined language? Of course not. Many Jews have evolved their understanding of Zionism in highly personal ways that reflect their indigeneity to the Levant WITHOUT that meaning anything negative for any other group present there. Just that we deserve to be there; we were historically there; and we deserve safety there. Nothing about that is inherently aggressive toward other groups.

We don’t have a lot of words even used in public discourse that come from our culture, because we’re a closed religion. For that reason, I proposed Jews forgoing the use of the word Zionist in public discourse because of how it seems to be received by Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim affected groups.

That would be a SACRIFICE by Jews to abandon that word in public discourse. In the same way many Palestinians view it as a SACRIFICE to avoid saying “from the river to the sea.” But I think a worthwhile one for both sides to lower the temperature in discussions about the issues we are facing together.

I would also respectfully ask you to not bring Nazis or The Holocaust into this discussion. When I speak about Nazis I am not talking about ethnocentric ultranationalist extremists. I am talking about Nazis. I am talking about people who fought for and alongside Hitler and worked to exterminate Jews from the entire planet. I suspect that is what you are trying to say about Zionists, and that is Holocaust inversion and revisionism with which I will not engage.

This situation is not analogous to the Holocaust in any meaningful way. That doesn’t mean it’s ok. That doesn’t mean it’s not genocidal. But not all genocides are the Holocaust either. The Holocaust is a singular event unique in several ways from any other event people compare it to. And before you disagree with me, I urge you to look into Jewish history in and out of diaspora as well as the origins of Hitler’s rhetoric. Invoking the Holocaust as a point of comparison to anything is unfounded and (even if you didn’t mean for it to be) disrespectful. I cannot be more clear. There are no good faith discussions where this compares to The Holocaust. We can discuss genocide, ethnic cleansing, colonialism—the terms of which may be inflammatory enough on their own but are worth hashing out to a mutually agreeable definition that we can use. But we cannot and will not ever agree to use the Holocaust as an equivalency here. They are fundamentally different. And most importantly, that experience and its impact are Jewish cultural property. It’s simply not your experience to use as your reference point.

Finally, yeah. Of course we should all agree that the Israeli government shouldn’t use that term loosely. I think they should absolutely apply it to people operating for Hamas or using Hamas’ ideology. Because Hamas is a terrorist organization. And terrorist is a term that is widely used outside of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and can be applied widely to a variety of groups and countries where other terrorist grupos operate.

Zionism and Anti-Zionism are specific to Jews and the I/P conflict. “From the river to the sea” is specific to Palestinians and the I/P conflict. So those are the terms we should focus on either defining with a mutually agreeable definition or leaving out of the discourse entirely.

Additionally, Nazis and The Holocaust are not specific to the I/P conflict. These and any related conflict are specific to Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish experience only. To the degree that factors into I/P discourse, that is for Jews and Jews alone to bring up. I would be open to agreeing to the same terms about the Nakba. It is relevant to discuss in certain situations, but it is not the cultural property of Jews to bring up.

Compromise is necessary on all sides in order for us all to reach a shared peace. But so is respect. Ideally, both sides must engage in both things.

I don’t think “Zionist is often used as a by word for Jewish conspiracy in white supremacist circles so call out Israel by name” is that unreasonable a request actually.

[ziracona]

T2 was okay and it could have been really good—had some real moments. But it needed more script iterations, and it was too goofy. Goofy is fine in general, but Terminator works best as a sci-fi action-drama-horror mesh. That’s the peak atmosphere. Also just, they gave their new Terminator scary powers to keep him relevant, but there’s just...no way to really make anyone on screen look like a threat to Arnold Schwarzenegger you know? And they never overcame that and it throws off the whole underdog atmosphere. He just. Wasn’t scary. Not when he was trying to kill heckin Arnold the brick house.

I’m not gonna talk about T3 bc I feel like I don’t need to and I think I have a lot of support for that in the fandom, and I’m not gonna talk any Genysis bc no one ever should, and I know I have support there.

Dark Fate was fine, but I felt like they really didn’t have to kill off their Kyle expy like at this point the surprising thing and interesting one would be /not/ to kill him. That role has died in /every/ other film. Like we get it. But plot rehashes are only good if you have some kind of spin. Mostly though I just...would have liked T800 man’s personality in another context but you couldn’t ever sell me on him after watching him gun down a 10 year old in the open. Like what, he found a soul by being...bored? If you want to convince me of fundamental change in a person, you /gotta/ motivate it better. Show me. Don’t tell me and expect me to take your word. And there just wasn’t enough meet in some spots. I wanted more firm lore and a little less action. Like I’m not even a science-heavy leaning sci-fi fan but it still wasn’t enough. I liked it more than most of the others but it just wasn’t quite...meaty enough. Sarah still a queen. But T800 man didn’t sell and that was a real weak spot, and so was expecting us and Sarah to just...like and forgive him bc he had accrued a family. But also like. I enjoyed having a new protag, but feeling like so much, no, /all/ of the work and suffering of everyone in other Terminator films was for nothing bc it’s not even Skynet anymore it’s some other robots?? It kind just...didn’t really work. It makes everything more hollow like it’s not even Terminator anymore there’s no more Terminators. They should have just had it be Skynet but a different rebel leader, or more. Sarah goes on to mentor Dani instead since John is dead, /something/ to make it more the same franchise and not so hollow. Or if it’s gonna be gutted, go all the way and let us feel that, don’t blip it as a plot point once and keep rolling. There’s decades of character attachment for fans; either make that matter, or make it mourned because it’s dead. Don’t skim it and make it cheap. Also on a meta level it was kind of weird how they handled time travel compared to the norm for the franchise but I’m not going into that.

BUT. The Terminator? A cinematic classic. It’s just...such a good film. The characters work is solid the whole movie, and Reese and Sarah are both truly excellent protagonists also given ample time to explore and exhibit that. There’s so much you get in moments that show tiny things about them. The way Sarah handles getting canceled on and goofing with Ginger, her having a pet iguana she loves to cuddle, talking to the statue at work? And she’s smart and normal (I mean normal in a very complimentary way). Kyle is introduced almost immediately running from the cops, but even in the middle of a chase scene, he’s stealing clothes in a mall while evading flashlights, and little things like hopping while he runs to check shoe sizes give you so much right away. He’s clearly out of his depth but he’s smart and methodical and he holes up in a car he hotwires and has a ptsd moment waking up from a dream because of some heavy construction machinery. You don’t have him say much about himself at all but you get him taking a second to be nice to the kids and guard dog on his way back before a T800 attacks. Even though if you’re watching it classic, you have no spoken goal for Reese and all you know is he’s armed and /also/ looking for Sarah, like the man who has killed three people already is, you kind of aren’t very scared of him by the time he’s creepily following her into a night club. That scene is iconic too damn. Anyway. Her reactions to everything are so great. Only film I ever saw where I 100% felt the person on screen was reacting like anyone would to almost being killed and then getting kidnap-saved by some other guy claiming to be from the future like I’d bite him too, but you know, I’d also be pretty happy he saved me and also decide he was crazy and not like, dangerous, and try to keep the cops from killing him. It’s so cute he thinks anyone is going to believe him like hang in there Kyle baby, king. Love as soon as the Terminator hits the police station, he breaks out and goes to find Sarah, and she’s immediately like ‘so fuck this actually’ and looking for him too. The deleted scene in the motel woods. The slow character build. Him falling in love with her because of the picture where she always looked a little sad and he wondered what she was thinking about and you don’t find out till the last scene it’s him she was thinking about in that picture. A family can be two complete trauma disasters making pipe bombs in a motel. The top 5 cinema shots moment where you think they won and they think they won and they’re both injured and stagger to each other and collapse laughing and crying and hugging and it holds for like ten seconds before that fucking thing gets up and you see the rubble in the fire shift and Kyle sees it first. And the hopelessness and despair. Sarah just screaming no in rage because it’s so unfair. The little scaffolding fight?? Kyle doing what he does? Sarah winning with a broken leg? The picture? The heartbreak? A work of art.

Also just. They’re both attractive but like, they are not remotely airbrushed Hollywood pretty. Kyle’s got that big scar on his lip and they’re both sweaty and bloody and dirty and gross the whole film??? God yeah.

Terminator Salvation? Also a classic. You have a film not about the core cast exactly, but it’s very ensemble. You get early days war. And it’s from the very open a solid narrative about second chances and what it means to be human and they really do explore that the whole runtime. Markus dies and comes back more confused than you are in the apocalypse. Baby Reese is absolutely perfect. You get formerly executed for murder Markus somehow adopting like 20 year old Reese and 13 year old kid Star and they’re amazing. Rebellion drama, lore reveals. Reese’s devout faith in the cause and how fast he looks up to Markus and starts learning and Markus is like :[ but then he’s like ... :] because he god assigned two family members now. The tag team fights—how incredibly talented Star is. Guilt trip on a look to dropping cars, she’s super effective. Tbh Markus is just O_O to >:-[ the whole movie as soon as Reese and Star are taken and I feel it. You’ve got a guy who was killed for straying too far from human, come back as a machine, but he doesn’t know it, wondering if he deserves another chance and if he can change, and it’s really neat the way it unfolds. Even after losing so many friends to Terminators that look human, Blair refuses to believe he isn’t a human even if he’s also a machine and risks her life to save him, when they barely know each other. Markus getting like, tortured by the rebels, and still choosing to help them and be who he has decided he wants to be this time, even towards John. Even with better alternatives. And you have Star never having a moment of doubt, or Reese, and him getting to save them both, and them trying to help the other humans in line for extermination before he arrives. The hand hold with Star when his hands just metal. And he decides to die for someone he doesn’t even /like/ and who has personally hurt him a lot of times, because he knows the rebels need him to win. Anyway death row to death row but completely different people in the same body facing that same death differently are amazing if done well (see TWDG I mean ow) and it was a very simple core theme to latch to and very enjoyable executed and it got snubbed by fans when it’s the best sequel Terminator ever had.

[marshmallowprotection]

Do you think Saeran would ever have actually gone through with any of his threats towards MC? Or do you think it would always be all talk even if MC started pushing back and intentionally trying to anger him?

I have talked about this many times because a lot of people seem to really truly misunderstand his character to a degree that it is kind of sad. It just really hurts me to see people limit him to being someone who is angry.

He is an angry person, it isn't wrong to say that he's mad, but if you only think of him as his anger than you're discounting everything that he's been through.

If you're playing through the route, you actually have to use language when you speak to him about everything to say that you understand that he is more than his anger. You don't have to outright forgive him for his actions. He actually would prefer if you didn't forgive him right away because he surely does not forgive himself.

But, if you look beyond his anger, then you'll see who he actually is. Someone that uses anger as a sword and a shield. He uses it to protect himself and Ray. If he is the biggest monster than the monsters that haunted him cannot get him.

The problem with that is that he cannot have any meaningful relationships because he stops everything. He may stop the bad things, but he stops the good things too.

The major thing that he struggles with during his experience with you is that he does not know what he wants. Ray knows what he wants. It may be a contrived fantasy to some people but it was still a tangible dream.

He knew what he wanted.

Saeran can't say that. He's not allowed to do that. He's supposed to be stronger. He's supposed to be better than that. He's supposed to have a better understanding of how to be strong. So, what happens when he realizes that he has more feelings than anger?

His entire existence is supposed to be about revenge and feeling that anger inside of him. It's just anger, right? But, when he feels more than that anger, it's dangerous and it's not okay by the eyes of his savior.

He and Ray fundamentally understand that the cult is not a tangible place to survive. It's the only place that they have. They just accept it because she did not abandon them like the other two seemingly did. He gives his whole life to that because they feel like they have to do it to make up for her "sacrificing" herself for them. Both he and Ray.

Saeran says big things. He always says that he's going to do something but he never goes through with it. He keeps pushing off the idea of hurting you in such a way, but he does not exactly realize why he's doing that at first. He laughs it off and says that it's not worth wasting on you. But is that really truth?

He does not realize that he's pushing it away more and more until it occurs to him that he wants you in the way that Ray wants you.

In the way that you want Ray.

But you don't see him as Ray. Ray was the only one that was allowed to feel those emotions. That's why he tries to pretend to be Ray. That's the only way that he can be vulnerable. It doesn't come out the right way and it's not the right thing to do but it's the only thing that he knows to do. He's trying to make sense of what's happening to him but everything that he tries just makes it worse.

And as everything starts to get worse and worse, you can see him try to protect you from his savior. In the same way that Ray tried to protect you. In their own way, the two of them really try to make sure that you were safe in the realm of what they were capable of. Despite the fact that they knew what would happen.

I sincerely don't think that he actually would have gone through with hurting you. Not in the ways that he threatens. I suppose if we were to speak about the context of the second bad ending, I can talk about that a little bit. That ending of the situation of too little, too late.

His tormenting you to try to remain in control of himself goes too far in that ending. You wind up breaking and there's no way to put you back together again. You wind up breaking and there's no way to put you back together again.

You're like Humpty Dumpty.

He can't fix you.

If you can be broken, then what's the point? If he has no feeling anymore when he's with you, what's the point? Is there any hope in this life when all he has is this numb feeling in the anger inside of him? What's the point?

When he tries to torment you in that specific ending, what he's actually trying to do is to get you to respond again. He's desperately trying to get the real you back. But he's not going to get you back because you've given up on everything and there's nothing left but a dull void in your eyes.

That's a broken ending for the both of you. Too little, too late. There's no hope in that ending. It's not torture for the sake of torture in that ending. He's torturing himself and you're being tortured. It's just hell in a handbasket.

I've talked about What If the Savior let him give you the elixir. That has a similar outcome to the second bad ending. It would be hopeless. And I have to post that you can read here about these feelings that he's going through:

Anon covered his desperation here pretty good on his threats. This Post in comparison is me talking about how people misconstrue both Ray and Suit Saeran.

Now, I don't think I've ever really elaborated on the idea of what if the MC fed back into what he wanted. You see, part of what he wants is that someone tangibly and realistically tell him that what he's doing is the right thing.

What that means is that the theory of darkness and anger that he has, is that anyone can be broken and can become a devil. It's what his savior has instilled into him and to some degree, his own mother.

If you were to angrily lash back out at him and act in such a way that you show violence, it just proves the theory that you don't really care. It just proves that even someone that has kindness like you can be broken and twisted up inside.

It's simply proof that it's only an inevitability that people are going to be broken and realize that the only way to live is the way that is what his savior wants. It's going to make matters worse and it's not going to fix anything.

You cannot respond to his outbursts by using anger. It's understandable to want to, but it's not going to change the situation and it's not going to make it better.

Because the lesson here to learn is that kindness is not a weakness and that compassion can go a long way when you see someone struggling and wants desperately to help themselves.

That's a major difference between Rika and Ray and Saeran. She does not want to acknowledge that she needs help and she buries herself into her ways and hurts other people. But there is a part of Ray and Saeran that clings to the idea of kindness and Hope. They are both willing to go against what they have been utterly coerced and brainwashed into believing. Even when they're scared.

The willingness to have faith and to want better for yourself is kind of crucial here. So, I don't think it's the best idea for an MC to lash out at him. That I don't think it's the end of the world if it happens. It all depends on context. I have done a few things where he's had arguments with his MC, but never anything like lashing out, throwing things at him, or getting angry with him like that.

But, that just depends.

Either way, I hope this somehow answers your question a long-winded way.

[awed-frog]

Hey, I saw your post about unschooling and have a question. I'm training to be a teacher and enjoy it an awful lot. I have a great deal of respect for the profession and think it's an important job but have seen a number of Americans share horror stories about school- how they wake up in cold sweat in the middle of the summer holidays 17 years after leaving school thinking they'd forgotten to do their homework, talking about how school has no merits but to prepare children for a life of /1

work under capitalism and that fear is the underlying mechanism which makes the whole operation work and the school to prison pipeline. Now, I don't dispute that there are things we could do differently. (I also have no affiliation to the US and think of it mostly as a failed state but that's a separate issue.) But? am I insane to think that free and compulsory schooling is a good thing? Cause it's the only way to get mass literacy and therefore... access to art, critical thinking, history....

Hi, first of all kudos for training as a teacher! What a great job, congrats!

As for your question, yeah - it’s a complicated issue, and the one system I know well is my own, so I can only offer a half-assed opinion here, but if you’re insane, then so am I, because compulsory education for a number of years (ideally up to sixteen)? Yeah, that’s definitely the way forward.

Now, obviously there are some parents out there who want to (or need to) homeschool and do a great job, but I believe that’s a very small minority, and that homeschooling should still be monitored in some way to check that kids are okay and are actually learning something.

Beyond the obvious, which is access to basic literacy, I believe there are two big reasons why good, free and compulsory education is absolutely fundamental:

It shows kids their family is not the entire world and the way they do things at home is not universal. For lucky kids, this ‘simply’ means learning more about others, discovering other point of views, and learning to relate to different people; but for unlucky kids, it’s 100% necessary to get them in contact with the outside world so they can see what their parents do is not normal and hopefully teachers can also realize those kids need help. The idea a random adult (because if you have biological children, you’re literally that: a random adult, nobody ever checked to see if you’re fit to raise kids, and in some countries nobody asks if you need help either) can keep a child at home for eighteen years or more, strictly control their access to the outside world, and tell them whatever about anything...that’s terrifying, tbh, and 99% of the time people who actively want to do this do not have their child’s wellbeing in mind.

Another thing is that even in superficially non-abusive situations, the decision not to follow a normal curriculum can have devastating consequences. As flawed as it can be, school is meant to give you an idea of all the things you can possibly learn and help you understand what it is you’re good at and interested in. But as an unsupervised parent/teacher, or - even worse - an unsupervised faith-based school, you get to decide from the start what matters and what doesn’t, what a kid should be learning and what should be ignored. In the long run, what this means is that you’re making it more difficult for your child to leave you - and I mean, this is difficult for any parent but something every child must at some point do. So a homeschooled kid, or someone who grew up in a strict religious or ideological web, ends up being 100% dependent on his family or community for a job. If you’re taught no literature, no math, no basic science (and if you’re told universities are sinful, or government propaganda, or not for the likes of you) - how the hell are you going to survive in the world without your family? So this is a subtler form of abuse, but abuse nonetheless. And public school, for all its faults, gives a fighting chance to every kid to have the life he actually wants, and not the one his parents chose for him. 

So, yeah, I would change a lot about schools and as a hormonal new mom I’m daydreaming about homeschooling my kid in a darling little home-made classroom full of kittens and terraria (and hopefully move to the country and raise goats and forget about society entirely, because look at this mess), but I still believe compulsory education protects children and helps children to develop their full potential. This is why it’s so infuriating to see American Manichaeism at work on this issue - how the reaction to a bad system is homeschooling, unschooling, religious schools, and not teaching kids at all (I know I mention this, like, once a week, but I’m still shocked by this new idea Black kids shouldn’t learn math because math is now violence or something). Bad systems need fixing, but the very opposite of a bad system is not necessarily a good system. And what’s dangerous rn is that social media are connecting all sort of extremists to one another, so a common response to those unschooling problems I keep seeing are more insane parents chirping ‘Oh, don’t worry, my son is 14 and doesn’t know the days of the week! Just plays COD 24/7, but it’s fine! He will learn the alphabet when he’s ready!’ and that’s terrifying, it’s honestly so easy to fall into a hole these days and just keep falling, I was talking about this the other day with my partner and how I truly miss the days we had facts, you know?, real facts you could base an opinion on and have an argument about, whereas now 90% of the heated discussions I have with people is just us throwing links at each other and if you want to believe kids are better off living upside down inside a giant teacup, I’m sure you can find an ‘expert’ who’ll support that view and statistics you can use and entire communities offering tips on how to build giant teacups and ‘My toddler loves his teacup! Here is how to customize it so it won’t look girly!’ and my God. 

(Man I hope we’ll all be alright, what a dystopic timeline this is turning out to be.)

Anyway never mind all this noise, you’re doing the Lord’s work doing something you’re passionate about and helps people to boot - my only advice would be, remember to listen to kids who have trouble with school because very often teachers are people who loved school, so it’s important to understand what ‘bad students’ go through and take the time to help them as much as possible. But really, that’s it. Getting rid of formal education helps no one but billionaires and profiteers and bad, bad people.