#fandoms are where nuance goes to die.

[give-me-hohen]

mouthwashing is good but its really not made for fandom culture lmfaoo

[arachnid-party]

“fiction affects reality” and “not everyone who is reading/writing dark things is into it irl” are two phrases that can and should co-exist

[fieldsofview]

The Orphan Story - Baby Steps into Storytelling

I had a realization today because three of my interests (Spider-Man, D&D, and Writing/Storytelling) got their wires crossed - bear with me because this is probably going to be a long-winded post.

Something that's really prevalent in the Spider-Man fandom is the trope of "Dead May Parker" in fic. Usually, it starts with Peter's aunt and primary guardian, May Parker, being killed off-screen to set up the fic, often with just a small blurb about it like it wouldn't completely shatter Peter's world, but ya know.

It can be done in any number of ways (car crashes, cancer, and being caught in a supervillain's crossfire are all pretty typical for this).

There are a myriad of common storylines that build from this choice. IronDad, Homeless!Peter, and Foster!Peter are all really prevalent. Sometimes it's so that characters that people ship with Peter will be pushed together out of a need for Peter to live someplace new and/or needing someone to lean on. (I could go on, but you get the idea).

I could spend a lot of time talking about each of these storylines and the ways they can be done well or poorly, and the greater implications for the fandom as a whole, but that's not what this post is about so I will leave that here.

Peter Parker as a character, despite his many iterations among the various Spider-Man comics and adaptations, has always been a character with tragedy engrained in his story (Richard & Mary Parker, Ben Parker, Gwen Stacy, Harry Osborn, the clones, his marriage, etc., etc., etc.). It's not necessarily out of the norm for more tragedy to occur, and having his only living family and primary guardian for most of his life die would definitely be on par with the rest of his life.

However, I don't think that the instances of the "Dead May Parker" trope in fic are because of this. At least, not when you dig.

I think people do it because it's easy.

I'm not saying that writing grief is easy, but that's part of the problem. Most of the stories using this trope don't bother to show the grief. Her death is just a device used to further other relationships.

Generally speaking, it's easier to write stories with fewer characters. Balancing a large cast with varying points of view, backstories, voices, motivations, etc., is always going to be more complicated. For a writer who's starting out, or perhaps someone who just doesn't want to make things harder on themselves for their hobby-writing, it's easier to do what you can to shrink the relevant cast. And for something like Spider-Man, there are more side characters relevant to his life than I think any person could possibly count - especially when you look across all the versions/adaptations that exist.

(That's part of why I love this fandom, despite its flaws. There are SO MANY stories to be told and so much room to pick apart what's there and transform it into something new. Fandom is transformative in nature, after all, and comics like Spider-Man are a buffet to choose from.)

I also think that it's easier to put a character like Peter Parker (especially if you're writing him as a high schooler as so many adaptations seem to permanently keep him as) into convoluted situations if he doesn't have a primary guardian to keep an eye on him. Especially one who's loving and caring and is actively parenting him. (I would argue that this is the perfect time to write him as an adult with his own autonomy and whatnot, but you know, that's not what the movie makers seem to want so... I digress.)

And lastly, I think someone being young and completely orphaned with no caretaker to look after them is also a sort of trauma that is easy to understand. I'm not saying it's a trauma that's easy to live with, but as an outsider looking in, it's easy to say "Oh, well yeah, of course, that person is struggling. Look at the hand they've been dealt."

A character - just like people - with more complex reasons for 'Why They Are The Way They Are" TM, can be harder to empathize with, especially if those reasons are not something the reader is familiar with. And it's most certainly harder to write, with all the layers, intricacies, imperfections, and generally weird ways that the human experience works. (In the same vein, it's why people with certain traumas, triggers, mental health issues, etc., are often dismissed or harassed, but that's a whole other can of worms that I'm not going to dive into atm.)

"But FOV," you might be wondering, "How does all of this relate to Dungeons & Dragons?"

Well, y'all ever heard of the Orphaned Rogue Trope?

In the greater online D&D community, there are a lot of common tropes and character builds that people are familiar with. They're common enough that you get a lot of memes shared around about them and a lot of people building characters that both lean into the tropes and/or subvert them. (The horny bard, the dumb barbarian, the warlock with daddy issues, etc.)

One of these is the 'Orphaned Rogue'.

(Please keep in mind that I'm referencing 5e specifically. I've played many editions - don't quote the old magic to me, Witch - but 5e is the most common edition to ever be played and has brought a massive influx of people to this game in the last decade, so that's what I'm talking about here.)

A lot of people start out with a Rogue as their first character, I would argue disproportionally so. There are a few reasons for this. 1) Rogues typically (I'm not going to argue over subclasses here, don't come for me) don't have any magic, and magic-using characters are typically more complicated to learn to play than non-mages. 2) For players who aren't as familiar with high fantasy, a thieving, backstabbing character is usually still one that people can recognize. (Similarly, I think this is part of why a lot of people also start by playing Rangers). 3) Especially at low levels, Rogues don't have a whole lot of character abilities. They're really really good at the few things they do, but that's about it, so it's extra easy to step into as a beginner.

So where does the orphan part come in? Well, a lot of beginners to D&D are also beginners to storytelling in general (with exceptions, you'll always have the people who side-stepped over from LARPing, theatre, writing, etc.). This means that they're new to the idea of creating a character that has no reliance on their own personal history. Their character can be literally anyone, and they will be able to interact with the story in whatever way they want to.

Creating a character is one of the most overwhelming things for a new D&D player. It's a boundary to entry that I've seen turns a lot of people away from the game. It's work that has to be done before you even get to roll your first die. It requires math, decision-making, and creativity in a way that not everyone is prepared for right off the bat.

(Yes, I know I might seem to be exaggerating here, but please remember that we live on the hellsite for creatives. This is not the norm for a lot of people. I once invited a co-worker into a game who was an avid non-fiction reader and had never done any theatre, not even drama class. She had genuinely never put herself into a fictional character's shoes since she was last playing Let's Pretend as a small child at recess. It was a hard learning curve for her, but she grew to love the game a lot and now is an avid LARPer as well.)

Your character has to have somewhere that they came from. They are a person, through and through, and should therefore have lived experiences that shape their point of view, their actions, and the way that they interact with other people.

It's not easy to think of an entire history for a person all at once, all while you're just trying to wrap your head around the math and learn the rules required to play this damn game that your friends have been bugging you about for who knows how long.

And so - orphan. No existing family means no extra characters to have to build personalities for or shared experiences between your PC and them that you have to write.

It's easier. It's removing a barrier to entry to the game.

(This is probably also why amnesiac characters are also really common first-time PCs, now that I think about it.)

So what's my point in all of this?

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure.

I think it's really easy for anyone who has been a storyteller of any kind for a while to see the annoying, problematic, or sometimes downright concerning ways these tropes manifest. There are connotations for the stories that use these 'easy' orphan tropes, and these can and should be talked about. As I said above, I could talk about the "Dead May Parker" trope and the problematic themes that regularly exist in these stories until I'm blue in the face.

But, at the same time, I think we should also take these things with a grain of salt. New storytellers of any kind are going to make mistakes. They're going to write imperfect things. Humans never pop into existence with a fully formed skill. These things need to be learned through practice and exposure, and these choices most often aren't made with malicious intent.

Long ago, when I was a wayward young teenager, my first major foray into fanfiction was through an A:TLA fic that I put on ff.net. (No, I will not link it here. No, it was not under any USN I use anymore. Don't ask.) But, looking back, even though I was so immensely proud of that story, it also had a lot of things in it that I wouldn't write today. Things that my gut reaction would be to judge and raise an eyebrow at, if I read them now. But I also learned a lot while writing it, and there was a lot of heart in that story, too. I was just writing from a naivete that made me think I had the know-how to tackle themes that I was too young to fully understand.

In many ways, I am still proud of that fic, not because of the story itself, but because of the effort I put into it and the things it taught me about storytelling and writing as a learned craft.

I think my point is this: everyone has to start somewhere.

Sometimes people need to start off with those easier stories so that they can learn enough and build enough confidence to tackle the bigger ones.

So, do I think we shouldn't critique something when it does have harmful implications? No, we absolutely should. Critique and open discussion are how individuals and communities learn to grow. (No, I am not advocating for you to leave criticism on random people's fics. I mean critique of tropes in general. It's never cool to leave negative comments on people's fic.) Open discussion is good and healthy, and it's part of what makes fan spaces and communities flourish and bond.

But I do think that those critiques can be done from a perspective of learning. I often see people so far split down the middle that it alienates people from each other.

In fan spaces where the content shared is inherently made as an act of love, freely given and freely received, it's easy for people to say that no criticism is ever acceptable. "It's free content, just enjoy it and move on!" & "You're taking it too seriously!" are often phrases I've seen spouted about both these communities. And they are true things to an extent. It is fictional and freely made content. There is a point where it can be taken too seriously. The other side will often say things like, "Enjoying ___ media makes you a ___ supporter!" & "Anyone who writes ___ is a terrible person!" I would argue that these also have some truth to them, but they are also taken too far.

(If you like a fictional trope that has problematic or harmful indications, it's a good idea to unpack why you like that trope. What draws you to it? What enjoyment do you get out of it? A lot of times, the answers to this are not actually harmful, but they can be, and it's always good to self-reflect.)

Fictional stories are a way for us to feel aspects of the human experience that we cannot experience for ourselves. It's also a way for us to find catharsis when a character does experience something similar to our own lives. It's a way to broaden our views and feel our way through the wide range of human emotions. It is not meant to reflect life perfectly, and yet it is often done best when there are still echoes of reality embedded in its soul. (I digress, again.)

Communities - even online ones - thrive when the people in them are doing their best to be open to each other's perspectives.

Nuance is never easy in online spaces. When the person on the other side of a post is an anonymous little picture with no connection to your life, it's easy to take one small piece and blow it up to be your whole picture. They become that one post, that one hot take, or that one fic in your mind. But that's not people.

People are always learning, growing, maturing. Every skill takes time. Everyone has to start at their first step - even if it's the orphan story.

So keep talking about those tropes. Keep discussing the harmful trends that crop up across fandoms. Keep breaking down the root of the problem and sharing ways to build better ones.

But if you see someone in their 'orphan story' phase, understand that they are new and learning. They might need a push in the right direction or a friend to guide them for the better.

[camelpimp]

Maybe I just spend too much time in fandom spaces (I do), but I feel like there needs to be a name for this phenomenon I see all the time. So what it is sometimes there are dad characters (or father figure characters) who are flawed, and the narrative treats as good-but-flawed, but the fandom treats them like they're the worst human beings you could ever imagine. And, yeah, a lot of narratives really sandpaper over the wrongs flawed father figures do, and that is worth acknowledging. But, man, some people waaaay in the other direction and decide that flawed people who nonetheless have good intentions are actually the worst, most abusive assholes ever

[epiphainie]

Also while Chris and Eddie are extremely important to Buck, Chris is not Buck's child. I think one's child is the closest thing to one single person getting the priority over everyone else almost all the time but Buck is simply not Chris' parent. Buck does not carry the responsibility of a parent, he's not the one who needs to deal with Chris's lashing outs when he's feeling sad over his mom, or make long-term career decisions with his wellbeing in mind, or talk off at his teacher when harm comes his way at school, or try to navigate  complex conversations over his bodily limitations etc. Eddie certainly trusts that if it comes to that that he's not around anymore, Buck could step up and fill that role but the dynamic between the three of them for the time being is not that - they're not co-parenting. Co-parenting with someone would require a different discussion for a new couple to have, but this is not the case for Buck and Tommy as it hasn't been the case for Buck and Taylor.

This is not to say Chris is not one of the most important people to Buck, and in some parts, this is unrelated to Eddie. Buck loves Hen as much as he does Eddie but you're not seeing him filling the same role with Denny. Buck is the close adult in Chris's life who's not his primary caregiver and this is such a significant role in a kid's development but the whole point is that - he's not his parent. He's the adult Chris can trust to be there for him in a context different than Eddie. He's the adult he can talk with about things that he can't talk with Eddie. He's the adult Chris runs to when he's sad/mad at Eddie precisely because Buck is not Eddie or his parent. He's his family but not his parent.

I think the notion of family gets flattened a lot in fandom spaces and it frustrates me a little. The thing about "found family" is that it's not a mold where you fit the characters in these heteronormative nuclear family roles. I know we all do this to a certain degree in the fandom but once you start to take it as this rigid 2 parents 2.5 kids family formula, you miss so much of the nuance of these dynamics. Buck and Bobby is another example, for example, and god knows how many times I said "that's his dad fr" but it's different in Chris and Buck's case because 1) Chris is a child who does need a parent, 2) Chris already has a parent who's there for him thru and thru, 3) The show doesn't poke fun at or become meta about Chris and Buck being son and dad like it does with Buck and Bobby.

I understand how we reach this point in fandoms - especially fandoms of long-running media where we have 34 weeks without a new season and 6 days between each episode - that we start to fill in the blanks with fics and discussions in our own echo chambers but it's getting really tiring.

can people please act like they've been in adult relationships "tommy needs to learn that buck will always prioritize eddie and chris or they'll never work as a couple" no. sometimes buck will need to prioritize eddie and/or chris and sometimes he'll need to prioritize tommy, and sometimes he'll need to prioritize maddie or bobby or someone. that's how adults work. you understand that you can't be number 1 at all times. just like tommy won't always be able to prioritize buck (like, idk, the bachelor party, but y'all can't even understand that 😒)

[weemietime]

https://www.tumblr.com/weemietime/767670429687152640?source=share

I suppose it was easy for me to fall into the Hamasnik trap due to my habit of black and white thinking, which I wish I could blame on my autism, my ocd, or my horrible mental state, but I’m just incredibly stupid lol. But yeah, I was very much a hamasnik myself.

For some reason my mind refused to accept or recognise the nuance of a history that I wasn't even well versed on in the first place. I also think that the constant reductionism presented to me played a part. There’s a lot of reductionism that goes on within the Hamasnik circles, and it goes hand in hand with anti intellectualism. Statements like “this isn’t complex! How can you see these videos of these Palestinian children (videos that I later found out were actually from Syria, but I couldn’t tell, I just ate it up) and think that Israel/Palestine is complex!”

The whole thing of blocking everyone who has a different opinion or ideology (the ideology in question being Zionism, or at least what hamasniks consider to be Zionism) from you and refusing to follow certain news channels because they’ve shown sympathy for those who have a different ideology from you, refusing to read certain books from authors who have expressed empathy for those same people, all of this together effectively creates an echo chamber of the same opinions and views being regurgitated over and over and over again constantly.

Then sprinkle in constant videos of people dying and blood everywhere, videos that you don’t even know where the people are from, whether they be from Gaza, from Syria, Lebanon, or Yemen, but it doesn’t matter because they speak Arabic so it MUST be about the Gazans specifically according to the Hamasnik group you’re apart of, all of these videos you’re being told to constantly watch over and over again because according to the Hamasnik cult you’re in, “if you look away from the violence even ONCE, you’re complicit in genocide! You’re personally responsible for genocide if you look away! The people in Gaza never get a mental health break or comfort so why should you?”

That very same rhetoric is the reason why a lot of you Jewish people can’t find yourself able to escape on fandom spaces and shit like that, the antisemitism you encounter in spaces you thought you were safe in? Yeah it’s because these people are being told that they have to constantly talk about what’s going on in every single space they’re in and that they can’t look away because if they do, they’re considered complicit in the killing of Gazans so they have to let everyone else know the same.

There are a lot of people who are purposefully antisemitic, don’t get me wrong, this isn’t me excusing anyone. I’m just saying that a number of these people genuinely believe that they’re doing something for the greater good by constantly being antisemitic. They don’t consider themselves antisemitic because the echo chamber they’re in has convinced them that Jewish people aren’t experiencing anything, that Jewish people are fine. That it’s the “big bad” that they’re hurting, not the Jews. It’s the “big and scary Zionists!” At least that’s what happened in my case. Constantly told that if I took a break even once, the blood of the Gazans, the blood of every. single. person in Gaza, would be on my own two hands.

You might not believe me, but when you’ve trapped a person in an echo chamber like that, it’s very easy to convince them that an entire country is evil, that every single Israeli is wicked and corrupt and should die and that anyone who expresses an ounce of empathy for them is a “Zionist” and should die as well.

You could’ve told me anything a few months ago. Absolutely anything bad about Israelis and I would’ve believed you. Because I’d scroll social media and see videos of children dying, people being beaten, buildings being destroyed, everything. Then I’d scroll some more and see videos of Israelis doing everyday things, videos of people having fun, videos of people eating, etc, and I found it so unfair that they (according to hamasnik rhetoric) were living in absolute peace while Palestinians are dying right next to them. Then I’d scroll some more and see videos of the IDF (I actually don’t even know if the videos were even of the IDF or not, but as I said, you could’ve told me anything and I’d have believed you. I genuinely believed that it was the IDF) shooting people, beating people, etc. And I was told to look at these videos everyday, every hour, every minute, every second. A lot of the Hamasnik mouthpieces take advantage of the average westerner’s inability to understand Arabic or Hebrew, so there’s a lot of mistranslated videos of Israelis saying they want every Arab dead, a lot of mistranslated Al Jazeera videos of people in Amsterdam for example, saying “يهودي قذر" (dirty Jew) with the wrong captions on and then us non Arabic speaking cult trapped people are none the wiser to what that means because we refuse to engage with any sources that won’t fit our narrative, because we’re complicit in death if we step outside the narrative.

I don’t believe that Zionists should die, but I did. I don’t believe that the hostages should suffer, but I did. I truly believed the worst of things, and perpetuated horrible antisemitism, because I genuinely believed that I was doing good. I found myself justifying unspeakable acts, and saying unspeakable things, things that I would have whole heartedly condemned prior, because I genuinely thought I was doing something right. For example, prior to me falling into that cultish trap, I would’ve wholeheartedly condemned saying a slur coined by David fucking Duke. But after? As I said, I was doing and saying unspeakable things.

I would watch videos from Hamasniks everyday, perpetuate antisemitism everyday, go to sleep and dream about that stuff, and wake up and do it all again, first thing in the morning. A vicious cycle.

And unknowingly somewhere else around the world, some Jewish or Israeli person would wake up, witness antisemitism everyday, witness people wishing the worst upon the hostages, the Jews, the Israelis, the Zionists, everyday, go to sleep terrified for what’s happening to their people, and wake up and see it all again first thing in the morning. Another vicious cycle.

I wish I had a better answer for you, I do. An answer that’s more digestible and less disturbing. I wish I could undo everything that I’ve said and done to the people I’ve hurt whether that be in real life or online. I truly am sorry, and I wish that an apology would fix everything, but it won’t. I wish that all the pain I inflicted on all the Jewish people and Israeli people could be taken away and that I would feel that pain tenfold.

If it’s any consolation or solace, I hate myself more than any of you combined. There is nobody who hates me more than me at this current moment in time and I absolutely do deserve every ounce of pain inflicted upon me, whether it be mental or physical. If you wish death upon me, just know that I do agree with you, but unfortunately previous attempts have failed.

I deleted all of my old posts from that period of time to avoid people getting hurt by them anymore, but I think I’ve done too much damage for me to be a good ally, so I just say nothing now, but I truly do wish the best for all of you and I wish that all of this would stop and that the hostages will be found, hopefully alive.

My apologies for writing a whole Bible in your asks, I truly didn’t mean to.

TLDR - reductionism and anti-intellectualism combined with trapping yourself in an echo chamber of regurgitated rhetoric and constantly regurgitating said rhetoric is a quick way to find yourself dabbling in extremism.

To avoid falling into a trap such as this, avoid generalisations of races, ethnic groups, and the like, look for nuance, try hear people out even when you don’t understand them, instead of blocking them (this is in reference to me blocking every single person who opposed my hamasnik ideology at the time. You should probably block hamasniks, they tend to harass Jewish people a lot), and remember that if someone tells you that a whole war isn’t complex, they’re lying. It absolutely is.

I hope you've been able to see the other responses your other ask has gotten as well! Truly, you aren't someone who I hate. Personally, I do forgive you. Other people may not, and that's their right. But I know first-hand what it's like to be radicalized and to not only commit to extreme rhetoric but also extreme actions. I've learned to have compassion for myself, and I hope that with time you will undergo a similar process.

Someone else said it, "you can't hate yourself into being a better person." All of us, as beings, grow with love and kindness. War is hard it's horrific, and hellish. You're constantly exposed to this violent imagery, this extreme rhetoric, and your whole friend groups are getting in on it. I understand exactly how it happens, and I do have sympathy for it.

To me, the most important part of your story isn't the worst shit you've ever done. It's this part. The part where you learn how to be better, and so you do better, and reach out across the divides and bridge those gaps that have formed. That is a very human story.

[firelxdykatara]

Dragon Age 4 looks amazing, that gameplay trailer had me on the edge of my seat and I cannot fucking wait for the game to drop. Somewhat less enthused for the inevitable wave of fandom discourse that's gonna rear it's ugly head, especially given how BG3 went over, but whatever. (Also I hate that the name changed to 'The Veilguard', not just because 'Dreadwolf' was cool as fuck but the 'the' throws things off. DAV looks better as an acronym than DATV. But whatever whatever no one consulted ME on this, it's fine, I'm fine.)

It did make me start thinking about Solas again and how little nuance the fandom approached him with last time, and it's just funny because like... it's very easy to understand where Solas is coming from. How he sees what he is planning as necessary, as fixing an ancient wrong that he has always meant to put right.

Will people die? Yes, and he thinks that's unfortunate--and, according to him in the trailer, he took the precautions he could to minimize that loss of life as much as possible. But he's not doing any of this with the specific aim to kill people or 'do genocide'--that was never his goal.

He is trying to fix something that he broke countless ages ago.

As he says, 'the veil is a wound'--a wound that he ripped open in the very fabric of space and time, and which he is trying now to heal.

And the thing is, he is ancient. He does not conceive of time the way mortals do, nor the importance and significance of mortal lives. I would like to think that romanced solas vs unromanced will have some affect on the way he goes about things, because falling in love was entirely unexpected and had to alter his views at least a little. Not enough to sway him from his course, but perhaps enough to make him feel the coming losses more keenly than he otherwise would. But even failing that, the connections he made during Inquisition are clearly not nothing to him--Varric is able to draw his attention, keep him distracted, might even have been on the verge of talking him down, we don't know. But as easily as he shattered Bianca, he could've killed Varric to end the threat he posed, and he didn't.

Mortal lives mean something to him now that they didn't when he set out at the beginning of Inquisition to tear down the veil with no regard for the mortal lives he would destroy in the process. And I'm wondering if those very safeguards are what release the big bads when Rook fucks up his ritual and that leads into the rest of the game. But anyway, my point is this: Solas does not look at life the way someone with a mortal lifespan does. He can't! Modern Thedas is the burned out shell of a building that he once set fire to without realizing what the consequences would be--and he is determined to rebuild it, because no matter what life has sprung up in the cracks of the burned out husk, his original fault was destroying the life that had been there to begin with.

People don't tend to overly worry about the insects and birds nests and whatever else they might have to bulldoze through when it comes to tearing down some condemned structure and rebuilding in its place, and that's how Solas views the modern world of Thedas and the lives within it. And I get disagreeing with him and wanting to stop him at any cost, but I don't get assigning maliciousness or bloodthirst to his motivations when there's no reason to believe he sees this as anything less than a tragic necessity.

Then again, I think Anders was right too so, y'know. But one bomb lobbed into the fandom commonroom at a time lmao.

[toffeeanddragons]

10 Fandoms, 10 Characters, 10 Tags

Thank you so much @idle-brit for tagging me!This was lots of fun :) 💖

My tags: @delyth88, @elymusplant, @galaxythreads, @chemical-processes. No pressure to answer, of course :)

1. Loki (MCU)

As much as I love everyone on this list, there is absolutely no competition for number 1. Loki has been my favourite character of all time for nearly 6 years now (because clearly the best time to join someone's fandom is after they've just been murdered), and is showing absolutely no signs of being replaced anytime soon. I have a Loki blog, for god's sake. The brodinsons are my favourite relationship in any kind of media, ever. I love them so, so much. Loki's a million different things and feelings, all at the same time, all fighting with each other, which makes for a wonderfully complex and nuanced character. Also, he's hilarious. Look at that eye roll. This is a man who hates his life, which makes me feel better about mine. Thanks, Loki.

2. Klaus Hargreeves (The Umbrella Academy)

As will become obvious throughout this list, I love me an emotionally traumatised crazy person. Klaus is that. One of the characters who makes me laugh the most, ever, show-stopping dress sense, and a bucketload of unresolved trauma which goes largely ignored by Klaus, the other characters and the narrative itself? It was love at first sight. Their banter with the other characters, especially Ghost Ben (rip) is one of my favourite aspects of the show. Here's to hoping that Klaus won't be getting the Allison treatment in season 4!

3. Pippa Fitz-Amobi (A Good Girl's Guide to Murder)

I binge-read the entire AGGTM series earlier this year, and instantly fell in love with it. Pip is one of my favourite protagonists ever. Impossibly clever, compassionate, obsessive, badass, and a teensy bit unhinged. What's not to love? I would die for her. I'd say that I'd kill for her, but I think she's got that covered. I think she's written in a very realistic way, firstly as a genius 17 year old girl who doesn't really know what she's getting into, and later as a haunted individual who wants to stop investigating but can't. The way she politely knocks on people's front doors to dig up their traumas, accuse them of murder and all-round ruin their lives is everything to me. She is my blorbo. I am so, so excited for the show to come out, and I'm sure that Emma Myers will do a wonderful job as Pip!

4. Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games)

One of the best-written characters, in one of the best-written series ever. Reading from her perspective is such a delight- she's endlessly suspicious of everyone around her, constantly on survival mode, trusting very few people and relying on exactly no one (to begin with, at least). She's a random teenage girl, from the poorest district, and she wins the Hunger Games. She's so mentally unstable that she has to be sedated, and still she's made to be the face of a rebellion. She's rude, and kind of unlikeable. She adopts all the weakest tributes, at risk to herself, knowing that they won't win. She's doomed to fail by the narrative. She's the it girl of 2010s dystopian YA fiction. Jennifer Lawrence is an amazing actress, who does a beautiful job portraying the depth and conflict of Katniss in the films. The themes and social commentary of the Hunger Games is one of its (many) strong points, and I am so so glad that people are talking about it again, because it is my favourite book series out there.

5. Mitchell Pritchett (Modern Family)

I have no idea what to say about this man, I just love him. He just like me fr. What an icon. Impeccable music taste. I've started saying, "no my god" now, and nobody understands what I'm talking about. Even in a sitcom, my favourite is the one with issues that he refuses to talk about or fix. The episode where he's trying to hide that he dressed up as spiderman makes me cry-laugh. Claire's speech at his wedding makes me just cry. He's not a perfect man, but he's certainly better than everyone else.

6. Shin Tsukimi (Your Turn to Die)

My favourite cringefail loser! I said Katniss was doomed by the narrative in a metaphorical way. This idiot is actually doomed.

No but in all seriousness, I do really love him. Before the beginning of the game, he was just a relatively normal young man- but, when confronted with the inevitability of his own death, he made himself into a monster to survive. He has a violent vendetta against the local badass teenage girl, who is traumatised as hell already and does not need Shin chipping in as well, thank you very much. I love his relationship with Kanna, his biological sister; how he uses her, manipulates her, and still cares for her so much that he dies for her with a smile on his face in the Emotion route. Conversely, in the Logic route, his actions are a direct cause of her death, and I just love how much YTTD hates siblings. I hope that his past with Midori is explored more in either a mini-episode or the final part of the game, because I find it sooo interesting. I'm super excited to see whether he actually has no chance of survival, or whether he makes it out, against the odds, on one of the routes. He's a bit useless, so I won't get my hopes up.

7. Rue Bennett (Euphoria)

I think it goes without saying that Euphoria has its issues, lol. Sam Levinson is an idiot. While a lot of the show (especially season 2) feels shallow and like it doesn't care about its characters, Rue's storylines always have heart and depth and I am so invested in her arc. It's no wonder that Zendaya won 2 Emmys for this role, because her acting is phenomenal! Rue feels so real to me, in the way that she's trying so hard to stay sober but she falls down and relapses time and time again. Recovery isn't linear, but she's getting there, and I adore her with all my heart. Her relationships with Lexi, her mother, her sister, and her sponsor, Ali, are my favourites, and the healthiest for her, in my opinion. Her brief friendship/ romance with Jules may have kept her more solidly sober than anything else in the show, but Jules (understandably) cracks under the pressure of Rue's mental health, and can't be there for her. Rue needs to heal for herself, which she appears to be doing at the end of S2.

8. Max Mayfield (Stranger Things)

Duffer brothers, please just let her be happy.

Despite only being introduced in Season 2, Max has, in my opinion, had the best character development out of everyone on the show. Her growth from someone standoffish, rude, and uninterested in the group (maybe I'm being a bit harsh. She was, like, 12) to someone who is willing to risk her life to help her friends and Hawkins means so much to me. The scene in "Dear Billy" (S4, Ep4) where she escapes from Vecna remains my favourite in the whole show and will probably be burned into my brain forever. Her relationships with Lucas and El are very sweet, and some of my favourites in Stranger Things. Her final line in S4, after all her struggles over the season, being that she doesn't want to die literally breaks my heart. I hope she gets some degree of a happy ending in the final season. She was my first profile picture when I joined this hellsite, and I love her a lot.

9. Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables)

The shenanigans that this girl gets up to never fail to make me laugh. The bit where she accidentally dyes her hair green and then has to hack it all off makes me feel awful for her, but. it's hilarious. Sorry, Anne. Her friendship with Diana is so sweet but also so funny to me because they really are the most chaotic duo of the 1880s. The scene where Anne accidentally gives her alcohol instead of fruit juice is so mortifying but so, so funny. Amidst all of the insane situations that Anne gets into are a lot of really heartwarming moments and relationships. Matthew and Marilla adopting Anne, even though they wanted a boy, because she's so endearing and alone in the world is probably what made me who I am today. I still haven't gotten around to watching Anne with an E, but I've heard it's amazing. I look forward to watching it when I have the time :).

10. Daphne Blake (Scooby Doo)

My first ever favourite character! Another one who I don't have a tonne to say about. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. She has done nothing wrong, ever. She knows martial arts, so watch out.

Honourable mentions: Thor (MCU), Finnick Odair (The Hunger Games), Gretchen Weiners (Mean Girls), Jake Peralta (Brooklyn 99), Maurice Moss (The IT Crowd), The Eleventh Doctor (Doctor Who), James (The End of the F***ing World), Ali Abdul (Squid Game).

If you read all of this then thanks, and have a great day!

[youhideastar]

I want to hop in here to draw a distinction between:

(a) stuff like people unthinkingly drawing/writing danmei characters celebrating Christmas or wearing crosses because they just assume their Christian-dominant context is universal, which is, hm, worthy of critique, to put it nicely, and

(b) stuff like people intentionally writing meta analyzing a danmei canon through a Christian lens or making art intentionally drawing on Christian tropes like the Pieta because that's a way for them to connect with or express their faith, which is totally fine.

(there's also (c) they just like the aesthetics of Christian symbols etc., which I'm not going to get into b/c there is sooooo much to unpack there)

Tl;dr: people of faith--any faith--should feel welcome to bring their faith to their fandom life just as people should feel welcome to bring their particular experience of gender, or sexuality, or ability/disability, to their fandom life.

Sometimes I wish I could explain to Christian danmei fans just how desperately I wish they'd stop forcing Christian themes onto danmei characters. Of course there is Christianity in China, and of course the authors of these works are familiar with Christian stuff, fuck knows yall have made it impossible not to be. But as a non-Christian in the US I have had to live in a Christianized society my entire fucking life and its so refreshing to be in fandoms where that's. Not the case. At least for canon. And then I'm in fandom and I can hardly go a day without "here's angel/demon art" "here's my fic where they celebrate christmas" "here's how this is an allegory about Jesus" "here's something pieta inspired" "here's a character wearing a cross" on and on and on don't yall ever get exhausted making everything about yourselves and your damn religion???

(And no I'm not making up examples I've seen all the above in the last week alone. The wearing a cross thing happened twice and is what got me wanting to rant, though angel/demon art is what triggered me actually writing the post. Can't folks just stop already??)

[highfantasy-soul]

I think people need to get better at separating 'I love X character and want to see a bunch of story with them' and 'If a story takes X character in a direction that's not putting them in the spotlight/ is killing them, then it's bad writing'.

As a writer myself, I don't change the story I'm telling because someone really loved a character. If that character dies or goes through shit or makes bad decisions or is just a minor character that isn't going to get a lot of focus, that's just the story I'm writing. It doesn't mean I did something wrong with the story because I didn't cater specifically to you.

I've missed Isildur in this season of ROP and I really wish Bronwyn's story had been able to continue. BUT I don't think the writing of this season was BAD because Isildur was barely in it and Bronwyn was killed off due to her actress not returning. The story that they HAVE told this season has been really really good and we would have missed aspects of it if they had cut some of it to give more time to Isildur and a re-cast Bronwyn.

I love Adar's character, but I can 100% see a satisfying story with him ending this season with the orcs turning on him like he had them turn on Sauron in the opening of the season. That would be a very satisfying and theme-centric story to tell with the character despite how much I like him and would like to see him stick around. Based on the established lore, I think it makes story-sense to have Adar die and Sauron fully subjugate the orcs like we see them in the main trilogy.

Characters serve the story. I'm sorry to break it to you, but that's what writing is. They are not real people - they are creations of the author to say something, which means that while they speak to real and true parts of humanity, it's not 'morally bad/bad writing' to have them be a cautionary tale or have a tragic ending.

Stories can take characters in an infinite amount of directions, and just because they don't take a character in the single direction YOU wanted them taken in, doesn't mean it was the wrong decision. That's what fanfic is for. If you wanted Valandil to live, you can write a fanfic where he does (which, coincidentally, I did just that). But you can both do that AND acknowledge that the story they told with the character's death is worth telling.

I think most people do understand that, but I know there are a lot of people (maybe young) who are just getting into the media analysis sphere and with a large emphasis now being placed on pointing out bigotry in stories (ie torture porn/sexual assault all day every day for women, poc being killed off without meaningful characterization, gay tokenism, mistreatment of other cultures in the story, etc) that can quickly be misconstrued and fall into 'purity culture' media analysis where if a woman character makes bad decisions, then all of a sudden the media in question is sexist or if a gay character dies, it's 'bury your gays' or if a poc character is a bad guy, it's 'demonizing poc'. It's good to look at that media and analyze it to see if it IS those things, but just because certain bullet points happen, doesn't mean it's automatically the worst-case scenario.

So back to my original point - saying 'I wish they had focused more on x,y, z' or 'I wish they had made this character decision' is different from saying 'it's bad writing to not focus on x,y,z' or 'making this character decision was bad writing'.

Idk, just something I think will make fandom conversations more productive and able to be more nuanced.

[ghoultyrant]

Ocarina of Time: The War a Decade Ago

One aspect of Ocarina of Time was always pretty neat to me, but also something I didn't feel a need to bring up in fandom circles for decades because I thought it was so obvious there was no point to discussion because obviously everybody had already noticed it themselves, right?

But over the years evidence accumulated that it... wasn't actually Something Everyone Knew? I'd see videos or posts talking about 'secret' aspects of Ocarina of Time's writing that didn't mention it at all, people praising the writing's maturity and nuance that never addressed the topic, and of course Ocarina of Time fanfic conspicuously didn't mention it, even though fandom is often fond of filling in this kind of implication with a detailed story imagining what precisely might have happened.

So then I spent several years trying to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like I think everyone is dumb for not noticing this thing I found extremely obvious, gave up because a lot of crap was going on with my life anyway, and then finally recently arrived at giving the backstory I just wrote out for context.

So what's this Weird Secret Nobody Talks About?

Well, it's right there in the title of course: that Ocarina of Time tells us a war happened about a decade ago, and actually has a lot of clues as to the nature of that war if you pay attention, even though we only get a handful of bits directly addressing said war.

The most direct bit is why I spent decades assuming Everyone Knew: if you've beaten Ocarina of Time -if you got even around halfway through it- you have in fact definitely seen the most explicit reference to this war: when you clear the Forest Temple and the Great Deku Tree Sprout goes 'yeah, you're not a Kokiri', he explains that Link's mother fled soldiers chasing her into the Lost Woods and asked the Great Deku Tree to take her child as she was dying. (Presumably from injuries the soldiers inflicted on her in the pursuit)

(I've always wondered how other people 'fill in' for this that it apparently doesn't get other people assuming a war was happening)

This then connects to a lot of other bits to imply things: for example, Darunia mentions that the King of Hyrule is his Sworn Brother. He doesn't say why this is so, what the King of Hyrule did to earn this honor, but you might notice that Darunia declares Link to be a Sworn Brother upon killing the Dodongo King and so making Dodongo Cavern safe for Gorons to get food from: this suggests that Sworn Brother is earned for doing something greatly beneficial to a Goron, very possibly specifically in a martial capacity.

Which kind of suggests that the King of Hyrule and Darunia had battlefield experiences where the King of Hyrule saved Darunia's life or some such. And Link's backstory seems to indicate there was a war ten-ish years ago... hmm.

Also notable is that there's a number of allusions to the idea that the Gorons and Zora weren't always allies to Hylians, and in fact even to this day they're pretty reclusive: Zora's Domain is designed to only be accessible to Zora, Hyrule's royal family, and people who can prove a connection to the royal family. Death Mountain is locked off to the general public, with Link having to use Zelda's letter to get permission to go up it ie he needs royal authority to get through. (And Darunia hiding in his room is refusing to open the door until a royal messenger of Hyrule shows up) It seems like both peoples only recently got on good terms with Hylians, and are mostly trusting the royal family in specific.

Then there's the state of Hyrule Field itself. When Link is a child, the land is haunted by the restless dead: Stalchildren come out to attack relentlessly when the sun is down. Ocarina of Time (and indeed the Zelda series more broadly) pretty clearly ascribes to the 'the dead do not rest easy when they die having been wronged or having died brutally' model of the undead, with ghosts haunting graveyards, Adult Link's version of Hyrule Castle Town being a scorched wreck filled with zombies, the Shadow Temple being literally haunted and presented as being where all the royal family's metaphorical skeletons are stuffed into the metaphorical closet, etc, so this infinite legion of nighttime Stalchildren seems to imply a lot of people died horrifically in Hyrule Field not terribly long ago.

Conspicuously, 7 years later, the Stalchildren are gone. There's Big Poes and intermittently a smaller Poe will pop out of nowhere to attack Link, and Hyrule Castle Town is a zombie-infested wreck, but in spite of Gannondorf's reign being very explicitly very brutal the Stalchildren haven't stuck around. This is itself consistent with the restless dead model, where generally the dead do eventually rest easy without necessarily needing an exorcism or some such.

So there's an implication here that not too long ago -ten years ago, say- a cataclysmic war occurred that got a lot of people killed very brutally.

In turn, it seems like the current King of Hyrule probably was a big driver of the war ending in a peaceful manner: the Zora trust him, Darunia trusts him, and his key failing within Ocarina of Time is trying to make nice with another population that the Hylians have bad blood with (The Gerudo) and blowing off his daughter when she says the current Gerudo leader is a very bad man who shouldn't be trusted. It's easy to draw a throughline here, where Zelda's father tried to make nice with the Goron and Zora even though they were ancestral enemies, and it worked so well that of course he's repeating this tactic with the Gerudo.

The fact that the Shadow Temple shows us that the Hyrule royal family has a lot of skeletons in its closet also gives obvious possible reasons for Hyrule's neighbors mistrusting them. It's easy to imagine that Zelda's grandfather, and that man's father, and so on, were probably warmongers or otherwise not particularly pleasant rulers, with a history of waging war on their neighbors or otherwise being pretty awful to them, and the Zora and Gorons and Gerudo are wary of the possibility of this happening again.

The fact that Link's mother was probably on the run from Hylian soldiers (We don't get told their species, but if they weren't Hylians the usual thing would be to explicitly say they were Goron soldiers or whoever) is also suggestive of the nature of the war of ten years ago: it probably wasn't a war fought firmly on the lines of species. Probably Hylians were fighting among themselves, a civil war of some kind! Maybe Zelda's father couped his own father precisely over the man's aforementioned probable habits as a ruler, or maybe it was a 'grassroots' rebellion of peasants against the king's oppressive rule; I'm not aware of any particularly strong hints as to the likely details of this piece. But a civil war of some kind seems very likely.

As a kid, I found it fascinating how this game heavily implied a horrifically brutal war and a complex and un-'nice' history between all the current Good Buddy species, all without ever directly depicting it and doing so in a way where an adult watching their kid play would probably never pick up this info being communicated.

As an adult, I'm confused as to why I can't find evidence of other people picking up on these implications.

[nny11writes]

I got a long ass analysis or whatever on how Shadow Weaver is nuanced and underappreciated that I lost the thread on multiple times. Don't even know it this'll fit in a tumblr post but below the cut if it does.

Shadow Weaver’s story is about many things, but I think the one most often misunderstood is her addiction. A lot of fandom recognizes that she has an addiction, but not what that actually means, not what that entails. Weaver is one of the show’s antagonists, no bones about that, but she is also a complex, nuanced, morally grey character and people tend to forget that to the disservice of her as a character.

I’m tired of that, so let’s get into this.

First off, Light Spinner was not an abuser or horrible person, I’m sorry y’all I think she was probably in her early to mid-20’s, a social idiot, and felt like Micah’s older sister. I think she was too young and inexperienced for the position she held at Mystacor, but that she could’ve grown into it beautifully if not for the war.

Light Spinner was self centered, she’s selfish. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, although Shadow Weaver certainly takes that into the next level being an ego maniac later on. She was self centered and obsessed with the idea that is she was powerful and strong, she could stop this war. She single handedly could do it with the right help and, as such, she felt responsible for ending the war too. That made her obsession grow wildly and Light Spinner then made a mistake in good faith.

I think when she touched that unbridled magical power without the safeties she needed, that Weaver got her first taste of what would become her drug.

But first, let’s touch on a few things.

Tell me, when you read that paragraph about Spinner’s obsession… did that ring any bells? Remind you of anyone? Because I’ll tell you who Light Spinner reminded me of. A combination of Glimmer, Catra, and Adora. Gosh, I do love me a good book end and parallel, and Light Spinner is one that we often overlook.

Now we’re heading into a bit of headcanon territory here, so stick with me for a moment.

HC1: Every creature and person on Etheria has a baseline level of magic, and without that magic they will die.

HC2: The failed spell of obtainment drained Light Spinner of all her magic, and in a desperate attempt to survive she was able to turn it on other powerful magic users. Low level demonic pact, she sacrificed them to have enough magic left in her to survive.

Light Spinner is riding a manic euphoria from her first hit of a strong drug, which just happens to be some of the purest most mind meltingly power drug to ever exist, and is absolutely on a power trip at this point. She SURVIVED dying! She has the power, so much power! She was only ever held back here, people here didn’t understand, and neither did she but she does now! She understands now that THIS FEELING, oh this feeling!! She is like a god, she can do anything ANYTHING- but not if she stays here. Oh no, no, no, not by staying here. She’s killed people to survive, terrible but necessary, but no one will accept her now because they barely tolerated her before. So she’ll go somewhere where her power- her VISIONS are appreciated, are more than tolerated- she will be a fucking QUEEN and if they won’t join her they will suffer the consequences. God damn she is HIGH AS FUCK!

And she’s, like, halfish right? She did survive death, she does have an ungodly amount of power but it’s very temporary and also killing her. She was held back but for good reason, there were people who loved her, cared about her, valued her, understood her who she is abandoning now. She’s not a god, again, temporary cosmic powers with a very itty bitty living space. She did kill to survive, and the debate on the ethics of that will go round and round. Light Spinner had a power fantasy and she thinks it’s become reality, so she’s a bit off the deep end.

Shadow Weaver goes to the Horde. I like to envision that wherever she went, the natural flora around her died, it’s magic sucked up into the endless black hole inside her. She gets there, shows what she has done, promises things she cannot fully keep, and asks Hordak to give her the Black Garnet. Something that he has to know by now he cannot control or trust the princess family with, so it’s basically an annoying stone to him, sure ya weirdo you can have it. Fuck up and I’ll kill you though.

Shadow Weaver, probably: Ah hell yeah!

She gets a runestone and as the magic she absorbed starts to really fade- so does the euphoric high. She is feeling more and more depressed, hazy, numb, bad… guilty. Ashamed. But Shadow Weaver is powerful and she doesn’t want to feel bad, she doesn’t want to look at what she’s done to survive, she doesn’t want to confront what she’s done wrong. (Remind you of anyone, yet again?) So she doesn’t. She convinces herself that’s weak Light Spinner thinking and talk. She’s Shadow Weaver, she’s been reborn, she’s a totally different person now!! (She’s pulling an Anakin Skywalker/Vader right now) So those guilt and shame feelings are because of who she was, not what she’s done! What she did made her stronger, more powerful, made her second in command of the Horde! 

And I think in that moment of, “Fuck you universe, I played your game and won and I won’t be denied again!” she manages to chip part of the garnet off. And that little chip radiates magical power. She makes her mask and uses it up, the hit of her drug feels good in comparison to how bad she felt, and once again she’s racing against the clock to magical death. But the chip of the runestone resonates with itself, she can re-charge it. She can now get an undiluted source of magic, take a good hard hit of her drug, whenever she wants. 

As the years go on she learns how to control that recharging to some degree, but mostly she’s stuck either drained of her power or brimming with it. (Remind you or anyone again again?) So she yo-yo’s with it. And the more she uses, the more she NEEDS to feel that sense of power and euphoria again. And the more she uses, the less good she feels but it’s still better to have than not. By the time we see her in the show I think Weaver is genuinely unable to reach that euphoria anymore. The Black Garnet is a lifeline now, charging up feels good but only to a baseline okay. She’s a functional addict now, but she’s miserable most of the time.

And to cap it all off, what did her ultimate cosmic power get her?

A position in the Horde where she’s the paper pusher for Hordak and also teaches young children. 

Hang on that sounds familiar… aw, shit, this is Mystacor 2.0 now! The only difference is she has two aces in the hole in the form of two abused and manipulated children instead of one shitty “little brother” (some friend he was!) and actually holds the respect (the fear) of those around her.

I think Weaver, to some extent, has accepted and loathes the mediocrity her life has become. She was once a god, but nothing can get her there again.

Let’s briefly talk about her relationship to Catra and Adora. First of all, yes, 100% she was their abuser. Like, that’s just straight up text, in the show, no duh. The controversial thing (bewilderingly) is that I think Shadow Weaver came to genuinely care for them. Like, in the most fucked up way possible, I think she cared for them. She projected onto them (both herself, Norwyn, Micah, Hordak, anyone who’s been important in her life she projected alternatingly on them) and she used them to stay emotionally balanced because the drugs just aren’t cutting it anymore fam. Likewise, I think to some extent she genuinely thought she was doing right by them.

Look, you need to accept that most people don’t think they’re wrong. They don’t think they’re monsters. They believe they are doing the right thing for themselves and usually everyone else too. Child abusers especially don’t see themselves as monsters, they are more likely to see themselves as victims fighting back than as a monster. It’s fucked up, it’s not okay, but that’s the way it goes. And I know that especially right now that might be cutting a little close to home, but it’s important to remember when it comes to Shadow Weaver and her story.

Weaver really thinks she’s helping these two little freaks she cares about out by making them “harder” (because Light Spinner was made weaker for being emotional), “stronger” (because Light Spinner was hurt and held back by not being stronger), and “powerful” (because doing drugs made her a fucking god-queen and got her everything she thinks is good in her life). So she has to be a little harsh (torturing children) at times, they’ll thank me later! Besides look at them, they love me (you’re basically their mom), they’re loyal to me (because they are desperate for parental approval), they respect me (they are terrified of you)! I’m raising them up so well :) (Madam, they are heavily traumatized!)

Weaver ALSO is still using them to regulate her own emotions. So when she has a good day, she can reward them within reason. If she had a bad day, all she has to do is be firm (torture children), and like magic she feels better! She can’t punch Hordak but she can electrocute and terrorize small children, and that’s almost the same thing.

So what if she’s drawing more and more power and burning through it faster and faster? So what that she’s started drinking to help ease the edges magic doesn’t? Life is pain and sucks, why can’t she do a few things to make it nicer? Does Shadow Weaver, too, not deserve a little treat in the face of the unending horrors?

And, god someone will want to kill me for this I’m sure, to some extent she isn’t wrong.

Shadow Weaver is a (fictional) person too. Everyone deserves to have some nice things. No one deserves to be in pain all the time, no one deserves to be scared all the time- and Weaver is in pain and scared all the time. Without her drug, she is weak and powerless and will die. That’s a horrifying and awful way to live your life. She doesn’t deserve that because no one does.

However, I think classifying picking up a second addiction and abusing children is, not, a little treat in the face of the unending horrors.

Weaver and me will just have to disagree on that point.

ANYHOW

Let’s jump forward a bit in time. Weaver gets in more dire straits, her life is more miserable, she’s at risk of dying from magic, magic withdrawal, and Hordak. Life’s a bitch and then you die. (Please picture modern AU Shadow Weaver as owning at least one throw pillow with “Life’s a Beach” on it, probably on her designer couch under the live, laugh, love wall art)

And all the sudden what she thought was solid ground just fucking vanishes under her feet.

Adora leaves???? Hordak is paying attention to her again and expecting shit????? CATRA IS IN CHARGE, WHAT!?!?!?!?!?

So Shadow Weaver is now powerless and locked up in her cell. Barely soaking up enough ambient magic to make her death particularly and excruciatingly slow. If she got sent to Beast Island it would either be quick or Micah could be her battery if he’s alive (and we’ll talk about Micah later, don’t worry). Once on Hordak’s shit list you are on it forever, so no getting her life back.

But she does have an option. It requires using up the last of Catra’s good will and loyalty (so she thinks) but it means she can get more drugs- I mean, uh, turn over a new leaf? Yeah, sure, we’ll go with that. Adora was always easier to manipulate without magic anyways, and now that she’s a literal princess she can do some magic charging too. Hell to the yeah- Shadow Weaver can never really lose baby!

First though I need to emphasize that when Shadow Weaver talks to Catra in the cell, she doesn’t full out lie. Maybe a half truth or lie of omission, but she uses the truth to get what she wants. And what she wants isn’t: to fuck Catra over (although that will be the consequence, too bad about that), to be explicitly cruel and traumatize Catra (although that will be the consequence, whaaaatever about that, poor little freak I care about), or really have anything to do with Catra.

That’s part of what makes her actions so painful. For Catra this felt targeted, it WAS a betrayal. Shadow Weaver is gone knowing what will happen to her instead of just letting Catra help. Catra genuinely thought she could flip their dynamic to some degree (she could help Weaver and then be the one in charge and then once mom sees how good I am at her job she’ll be all, “Oh I was so wrong about you! Let me apologize and grovel at your feet! You’re so amazing and cool and I will help you the way I said I’d help Adora because I love you and care so, so, so much about you!”) and that Shadow Weaver didn’t have a choice. But even when Weaver shouldn’t have had another choice she STILL CHOSE ANYTHING ELSE OVER CATRA.

From Shadow Weaver’s perspective it was very much more: I have nothing to give and don’t wanna die, survive at any cost. Catra is gonna probably be punished and/or die, which sucks, but not more than me dying. So Imma head out.

Catra was collateral damage, not the target.

Anyhow-

Weaver escapes and is booking it to her newest candy (drug) machine, she is already feeling a little better because, weirdly enough, it turns out isolating yourself away from free flora magics to maintain a baseline amount of your own magic is not a good thing. Weirdly enough taking hard drugs does not mean that you can stop taking your multi-vitamin and eating a balanced diet. She makes it to Brightmoon and quickly realizes her plan won’t work.

Adora is… mad at her? For some reason? Is she really holding onto those little hurts? Please! She was raised better than that, it’s war, she’ll get over it.

Someday.

But until that day Weaver needs another plan.

Good news, She-Ra magic did heal her. It gave Weaver her own source of magic again. Huzzah for not dying and being on a constant timer for death! Okay news, Brightmoon has so much more ambient magic it’s kinda wild and the forced withdrawal is not longer a cold turkey quit like the Horde was. Bad news, Weaver still doesn’t have a new source for her drug and she wants one- needs one!

And then Glimmer arrives.

Yeah, Shadow Weaver can work with that.

Teleporting to the Fright Zone and using Glimmer as a literal battery pack is the first real high Shadow Weaver has had in a long time. She had been drug free for quite a while, so having access to runestone magic again feels so much better than it did by the end of her time with the Horde. She is strong! She is powerful! She is on another euphoric ride! When Catra shows up, Weaver has no problem attacking her and torturing her for two reasons: 

Catra’s loyalty and love are gone because Weaver used it up to escape prison (so she thinks)

GOD THIS MAGIC FEELS SO GOOD, HOT DAMN!

Man this is going so well! Everyone is going to realize they were wrong about her. Once Weaver decides to change sides, she means it, all or nothing! She totally isn’t still struggling with the same insecurities she’s always had because she’s never addressed them or worked on them and fuck you for suggesting otherwise. She just likes being right, has nothing to do with having others see her as worthy and cool! They’ll get back and Glimmer will tell her mom, “And Shadow Weaver was instrumental in this victory, in fact, Shadow Weaver was key to it! She is a good guy now!” And Queen Angella will be like, “Wow, that is so great, thank you for saving and protecting my daughter! Would you like access to the moonstone? Perhaps a position of great power?” Maybe she’ll get another statue of herself, that would be neat!

(Shadow Weaver is high as balls folks, the thinking is not gonna be realistic here lol)

And then Queen Angella is dead.

Well…

Fuck.

Weaver’s high runs out long before things are settled and Glimmer crowned queen, but she already knows her game plan now. People still think she’s a bad guy, which is CRAZY TALK! So she’s going to prove them wrong, get in good with the queen (like a second mother perhaps?), get access to her drug, be powerful, and live the good life again. So there will be more work and manipulation to get there, it’s fine, Shadow Weaver is no stranger to hard work and a shitty life. She will make it happen.

And it kinda does. She gets in good with Glimmer. Teaching magic means accessing some magic, even if it’s not the good shit that gets you high. She’s proving how smart and talented she is, and also that she’s a good guy now and should be trusted with more delicious She-Ra healing magic.

Slight problem though.

Glimmer isn’t stupid.

If there’s one major critique I have for how fandom characterizes Glimmer in season 4, it’s that she’s treated like she’s either super naive or stupid.

Glimmer and Adora are, in some ways, having the same feelings about Shadow Weaver but just at different times. Adora sentiment of, “I won’t be tricked by you, trust me that I understand who and what you are. I need my friends to trust me.” is echoed by Glimmer in season 4. I think part of Glimmer’s frustration with Adora stems from the way that when Adora stood in this position, Glimmer did eventually trust her and let Adora do what needed to be done, but now that she’s here Adora won’t do the same? (It’s part of the larger, Adora thinks she’s better than me, Adora thinks she’s smarter than me, Adora is trying to undermine me, Adora doesn’t trust me- which is all actually Adora trying to show her love and respect while protecting someone in her very unhealthy traumatized way)

Glimmer’s fight with Adora and isolation in general in season 4 actually allows Shadow Weaver further in than she would’ve before (So everything is coming up Shadow Weaver!). But she takes it too far, Glimmer cottons on to what’s happening. And unlike Adora and Catra, Glimmer has had more support and love in her life. Weaver is not the be all end all, Weaver is not her mother, Weaver is a poker chip that Glimmer is trying to use. Glimmer also has more self awareness and coping skills. 

So Weaver doesn’t fully get her hooks in. She still does damage, she still uses Glimmer, it’s still skeevy as fucking hell. But it’s not the same and Weaver is locked out in the cold.

So what’s a powerful sorceress to do? She’s been off her drug of choice again for so long that I think she’s thinking of it as more of an abstract concept and following old bad habits because what else is she supposed to do? Reflect on herself, get therapy, and become a better person? That requires her admitting to doing wrong and dealing with all the guilt and shame- hard pass!

(Quick aside, Shadow Weaver is prideful. Very prideful. And do you know what that also entails? A lot of shame. So, so much shame.)

Then Glimmer vanishes and Micah returns.

Let’s finally talk about Micah and Shadow Weaver. Or, more accurately, let’s talk about Micah and Light Spinner to start.

I don’t actually agree with the take that she abused Micah. I think she did mistreat him, she was an adult and treated him like an adult colleague when he was a child she should have been protecting. Light Spinner had no right to expect a literal child who was under her care and purview to take care of her in any way shape or form, but she did. She went to him to vent and blow off steam which made him feel important and mature and grown up. Her childishness matched his actual childishness. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, but that doesn’t mean it was abuse. I genuinely get the sense that Light Spinner thought of Micah as her equal, that he was perhaps her only friend at that point. There’s nothing wrong with a friendship between an adult and a child, but there are boundaries that the adult is responsible for maintaining and Light Spinner did not. They cared for each other, platonically loved each other, considered themselves good friends to one another- and they were also too co-dependent and unhealthily attached in largest part because Light Spinner did not behave appropriately with him.

And I don’t think those feelings just vanished after the spell failed from Micah bailing on a shit situation.

This is headcanon territory again, so hold on tight please.

I think King Micah was captured by the Horde and spent time in a cell. In fact, I like to imagine it was the cell Weaver was thrown into because Hordak is a petty bitch like that. Shadow Weaver would go and visit him, maybe even personally delivered food to have the excuse to visit him. Show off a little, see how good I’m doing now! And look, Micah, if you just give me something, tell me some information, pledge a little loyalty, I can help you! Hordak wants you dead, but I care about you. So help me to help you!

(Sound familiar? I think this is a large part of why Weaver didn’t give Catra anything she could use, she’d been on the other side too and already knew what was actually at the end of that offer.)

Micah, meanwhile, hasn’t given up on her. He knows his good friend and mentor is still in there, and he believes firmly that he can bring Light Spinner back. He can convince her to stop this! She never even liked the Horde anyways, and now that she knows how evil they are, how could she possibly be okay with it? She could just leave and join him in Brightmoon instead! (Sound familiar????)

And Shadow Weaver is aghast that Micah doesn’t understand how mistreated she was, how hurt she was back on that side. In fact, he doesn’t seem to even think he BETRAYED HER by bailing on the evil spell! What the FUCK Micah, I thought you cared about me? I thought you were my friend!? But you don’t understand and you never will! (SOUND FA- *I am dragged offstage by a comically oversized hook)

The difference between Catra and Weaver in this situation is that Catra never stopped believing she could save Weaver. But Weaver used her hurt and hate to go to Hordak and tell him, “There’s nothing he will reveal.” She possibly even escorted Micah to the pod to send him to Beast Island.

Shadow Weaver saw this as tit for tat. Micah had betrayed her first, she was just returning the favor. See how he liked being left to die!

For Micah this is what broke the good will.

So, season 5. Glimmer is gone, She-Ra is gone, but Micah is back. Shadow Weaver thinks because she was advising the queen that she has a position to bargain from. To be fair, she has a better position than most people but it’s nothing special or powerful or even official. She is shunned, she is isolated, she is mistrusted, and she is hated. It validates everything Weaver believes about how the world works. She tries to ingrain with Micah a bit, I bet anything that she asked him for just a little drug because then she could fight more out on the field of battle. 

Micah is also not stupid. He blocks her every chance, they argue and bicker and Weaver realizes pretty quick that it isn’t gonna work.

So she focuses on her last chance for magical drug abuse- Castaspella.

We don’t know much about her and Light Spinner’s relationship in Mystacor. It comes across as very dismissive. That Light Spinner did not see Castaspella as an equal worthy of her time and, therefore, she didn’t get any of it. Casta seems like she was a little jealous of Micah’s treatment and special access, but never to an extreme amount. But Casta knows what Weaver did to Micah, she knows what Weaver did in the Horde, and she does not trust the woman at all.

Castaspella is also not stupid, it’s a family trait I think.

She is willing to partner up with Weaver and explore their options because this is literally the apocalypse and end of the world. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Casta (unlike her brother) is willing to make a deal with the devil to make it happen.

Weaver returns and boom, Glimmer is back, She-Ra is back, Catra is back. Three potential aces in the hole and two potential power sources! Except Adora is spotty on the She-Ra stuff and Glimmer ain’t sharing. Fine, she has a plan anyways.

And this is an important moment for Weaver, I think she gets excited and then lets it go. She’s no longer locked into addiction. She’s still an addict, but she’s now been clean long enough that craving a hit doesn’t mean going half insane in the pursuit of it. But she’s still thinking and acting in a way that will lead her towards that drug, more habit than anything else. I don’t think she’s even aware at this point that raw magical highs are no longer the be all end all. It’s the power and respect she felt that gave her, it’s the euphoria and confidence it gave her that matters.

Now the failsafe, 100% if Weaver knew she could take it and get to the heart and survive she would’ve taken it as a “selfless good guy” act. But Weaver values survival almost above everything else, and she knows the odds are very, very against her. Whereas Adora has a good chance to survive, if she can focus and be She-Ra. If she does, then great, Weaver proves she’s a good guy (again, the ungrateful ingrates!) and proves she can be trusted with raw magic so maybe can they pwetty pwease let her get high on just an itty bitty bit of magic? As a little treat, perhaps? And if Adora fails and dies, well the heart fires and if they survive, Weaver proves she was a good guy who can be trusted around magic, and gets sympathy points for losing her pseudo-daughter. Maybe enough that Glimmer will trust her more again and moonstone power is hers to feed on like a fat happy house cat. Maybe she’ll even get Micah to see reason. And if Adora fails and dies and the heart fires and they die, well, she certainly won’t be around to notice, will she?

Shadow Weaver still cares for Adora, in her supremely fucked up way, but by now she is seeing Adora as the one who turned her back on Weaver. Everyone always “betrays” Weaver first (stop pointing at Catra, stop it, Weaver didn’t betray her and if she did then Catra betrayed Weaver by taking over and throwing her in jail so there for infinity) after all. Otherwise Weaver might have to think about all the bad things she’s done in her life, justified and not- and we all know Shadow Weaver has never done anything wrong ever and if she did, well now she’s a good guy so you HAVE to forgive and forget.

Then Catra has to be dramatic and run away (which Shadow Weaver wanted so Adora could focus only to realize that whoops, Catra was what helped Adora focus enough to transform) so now there’s no She-Ra so Adora is totes dead. Can Shadow Weaver get an f in the chat for Adora, everyone?

Also, Shadow Weaver can either celebrate surviving by being drunk off her ass or she can die happily sedated. If no one wants to give her hard drugs she’ll just have to settle for a good red!

And then Catra comes back and Weaver, drunk, is like, “Yer show BAHD for her! Dun tryin stopper. She’s gotta do it man.” Because, again, drunk, cynical, and falling into old habits. Catra, however, has been doing some of that self reflection and growing thing and doesn’t fall with her. Sobering up because, wait what the fuck, but my abuse script- I can’t abuse without my abuse script, she listens and thinks and remembers: Catra is the key to She-Ra.

Also the little ego stroke of “I know you’ve got more power than you’re letting on” (IE: you are so smart and cunning and strong!) which I don’t think Catra meant but I think a drunk Shadow Weaver who’s always had insecurity over not being enough and translated that into a lifetime of needing to get gassed up with drugs and false praise probably takes it that way, definitely helps with that.

Called out on the tracking (devices? Magic?) Weaver decides, fuck it. I am a good guy after all, let’s go get the failsafe to the heart and then I can leech some drugs off that as a side benny.

Pretty sure the teleportation drains Weaver heavily and sobers her up, the nausea is probably killer tho. That’s fine, the on screen action where she basically fades into the background is a great time to control that desire to vomit. Then it’s off to be a hero or something.

Except Catra goes hero mode and Weaver thinks, “I can work with this. Nice nice nice.” So she helps Adora limp to the heart, but of course Adora is distracted by Catra AGAIN. Messy ass lesbian love! Weaver tries to make Adora focus the way that used to work, but whoops everyone else has been learning to connect with their emotions and desires so it doesn’t work. Weaver gets a contact high that police have developed mass hysteria into believing fentanyl gives, and Adora books it. 

And this is one of the most pivotal moments in Shadow Weaver’s story and it happens entirely off screen.

Weaver has been left alone with the ultimate pure, raw, unadulterated magic for thousands of years. It’s so strong, so powerful, that she gets a fucking charge just from being NEAR it. She looks back at it, and she considers her choices.

Weaver can try taking that power for herself. If it works it’ll be better than the failed spell of obtainment. A better high, more power, more respect, she’ll finally single handedly be able to end this war. If it fails she at minimum kills herself but maybe everyone.

And unlike before where the idea that dying as collateral is 100% okay to her, Weaver decides that it isn’t worth it this time. The chance of getting the high, getting the power is not worth it. She will never have this chance again in her life. Shadow Weaver has made a lot of “good choices” for “bad reasons” up to this point. And whatever her reasons were, I think this is the moment where Shadow Weaver makes her first good choice for a good reason. It’s the most Light Spinner-esque choice she’s made in a long time.

Shadow Weaver takes the contact high she has and leaves with a plan to fight for a free Etheria.

It’s full circle, she’s finally back to her original goal, her original purpose. She can’t save the planet on her own. She’s not a god. She’s not a princess. But she’s a powerful sorcerer with full power banks, and she can use that.

When she gets to the creature Shadow Weaver has one singular mission. Get Adora to the heart to free magic and save the planet. That’s it. That’s the mission. No ulterior secondary plans. Perhaps a faint hope that she’ll survive this, but I doubt it. She’s too cynical and jaded to believe that, her actions don’t align with her desire to survive.

As much as people hate to admit it, Shadow Weaver genuinely does have a big damn hero moment here. She comes in, she saves Catra and Adora because she knows what they mean to each other, she knows Adora needs Catra for She-Ra, and that Adora needs She-Ra to survive the heart. Shadow Weaver is doing her one good thing, she is sacrificing herself knowingly to save her two pseudo-daughters and the planet. She is being, genuinely, one of the good guys in this moment.

I think that Weaver is riding the high a little, riding that euphoria one last time the way she originally meant to. She creates that nice little book end I love so much. Shadow Weaver is selfish, self center, power hungry, and craves authority. She is that way because of her own fears, insecurities, and traumas. 

Dying does not redeem Shadow Weaver. Redemption is not a gift, it is a life long act of compassion.

Dying does not forgive Shadow Weaver for what she’s done. Forgiveness is also a lifelong action of compassion which can only be given by willing individuals. Weaver does not survive long enough to be given forgiveness and then keep earning it afterwards.

But Shadow Weaver’s story is a very human story. It’s a tragedy in many ways. She is an antagonist in this show, and it does show! She was a good person with good intentions who made the wrong choice. 

The biggest difference between her and Glimmer is that as soon as Glimmer realized it was a mistake, she went to try and fix it, she apologized for it, she put in the work to put things to right. The biggest difference between her and Catra is that Catra was willing (eventually!) to actually look her behavior in the eyes and refuse to be that way anymore, she was willing to work on her insecurities to be a better person, she was willing to work for forgiveness and redemption. The biggest difference between her and Adora is that Weaver bought into her savior complex, she truly believed she was that powerful and strong and that that was the only way to do what she saw as the right thing.

So Shadow Weaver is here, riding the wave, doing the right thing and for those of you who have swooped in to save the day (big or small) you probably know the feel good feeling that comes as part of that. She has magic and adrenaline and endorphins pumping around her system- and Shadow Weaver is an all or nothing person. She dedicated to being good, finally, so she is going to be good damn it all!

I think when she tells the girls that it’s too late for her, but it’s the beginning for them she means it. It’s admitting she’s planning to die, it’s admitting she was wrong.

I think when she tells Catra she’s proud of her, that she also means it. Catra has become who Light Spinner wanted to be. Strong, powerful, loved, respected. 

I think when she tells them, “You’re welcome.�� She means it. I think she also knows it’s the last thing she can really say, the last words of the condemned that will be remembered.

I think she wants to be a good guy and be redeemed and be forgiven.

And I think that despite all of this, she isn’t.

Shadow Weaver made bad choices and was held at gun point by addiction, and as a consequence she became a bad person because she was unwilling to work on the ugly, nasty parts of herself. She was a bad person not because she was an addict, not because she was naive, but because each time the opportunity to change for the better came- each time she actually had the ability to change her heading… she didn’t. Not until the very, very end. And one brave, heroic act does not make someone a brave hero. 

It makes her a bad person who did a good thing.

I feel like the Crew-Ra talked a lot about that idea. That good people can do bad things, and bad people good things, and that the real divide in the grey area between good and bad people are the choices we make. And I feel like in some ways the fandom has selective amnesia about that. We like to remember it for Catra. We like to remember it for Hordak. It’s easier to do for them, they did (at minimum) start turning themselves around more fully. It’s easier to remember for them because they had that time on screen for us to go with it.

Shadow Weaver didn’t, and honestly that is for the best. She is a great antagonist and I think her complex and nuanced ending is perfect for her BECAUSE it doesn’t just hand wave anything with her. We saw her evil, we saw her neutral, we saw her final attempt at good. More than enough for the message that bad people can do good things.

It’s part of why Catra and Adora wouldn’t dance on Weaver’s grave. They had complex relationships with her, more bad than good, but there was good and they did love and care about her in some fashion. That’s why Catra doesn’t say “good riddance!” when Weaver dies. She begs Shadow Weaver to not do this because she’ll die. It’s why both of them cry as they watch.

I know the joke, and I love the joke, that Shadow Weaver died doing what she loved. Traumatizing children.

Because, yeah, she did traumatize them one last time with her death! It’s part of what makes this heroic sacrifice a bit ironic to me. Even trying her hardest, even doing her one good thing, Shadow Weaver still hurts people. But it’s also trauma because Catra and Adora cared about her.

I’m not saying everything was hunky dorey between Weaver and the people/children she manipulated, mistreated, and abused and we should remember her as a hero. Not even close.

But I am saying that all these years later…

I’m tired of watching such a brilliantly written, designed, animated, and acted character be flattened out into a caricature. Shadow Weaver is not a cardboard cutout villain, there is a lot of genuine depth and nuance to her character. She has a character arc, and I believe she does grow as a character too!

I personally think Shadow Weaver is the best written character on the show. She’s probably legit one of my favorite characters (not just villains, characters) of all time! I’m never going to write a soft Shadow Weaver story where her heart grows three sizes blah blah blah. But I want to see takes about her and works about her that aren’t boiled down to: abused Catra, or abused Adora, or child abuser general ™.

She did and she was. She was also a lot more and if you wanna give her that full depth that she was so lovingly crafted and presented with, you have to start acknowledging that Shadow Weaver had good traits too, at one point was a good person, and died doing a genuinely brave and heroic deed. Same as you have to recognize that someone genuinely loving her deeply (romantic or otherwise) would not be enough to help her insecurities and fears. Same as we have to remember what redemption and forgiveness are.

I’m not asking you to love Weaver because she was a misunderstood little meow meow. Mischaracterized, yes, misunderstood? Oh god no.

I’m asking you to love Shadow Weaver because she’s a fucking cool and amazingly done character, and she deserves a bit of in depth love beyond love to hate.

[lorata]

I’m loving the “outsider/insider perspective” fic that’s going on re: the Games. Your Rowan and Blake, @cloversworldsblog’s bit about the outlier Victors and Alec, it’s so good and it helps add so many layers to the worldbuilding! The idea of the people who “know” (or think they do) the Games, and yet, they really don’t know everything.

For Rowan, the thing that caught me was the whole attitude about the 74th being a love story-how clearly the Centre sees that it’s just that, a story, how the rules change wasn’t ever going to last, even how Katniss was fully prepared to shoot Peeta in the end (a kind of ruthlessness Two would begrudgingly approve of). But even though they *know* it’s just an angle, the word comes down from the Capitol, and Two falls in line, parrots the storyline even though they don’t believe it.

Also, I’d love to see a story with Two’s Mentors (it would have to be Two, One is too resentful and Four is in that odd space) dealing with the outlier Districts, and just flat out telling them, “You would have done the exact same thing if you had the chance. To save your children, you would make the same choice we did, and if you deny it you’re lying.”

"You would have done the exact same thing if you had the chance" is exactly the undercurrent and the tension that plays in a lot of the mentor interactions, and I swore I wrote that precise line in a Ronan scene somewhere but I can't find it so maybe I imagined it? or maybe it's just like ............ so steeped in all the unsaid even though he's never actually said it aloud, haha

I'm really loving the discussions and interplay that's coming out of things lately as well! Chaff's "I'm nothing like him" (Alec) is incredibly damning but it IS the mystique that the Capitol -- and the Centre machine itself -- work so very hard to maintain on many different levels. D2 kids die, yes, but choose to be there. D2 victor prostitution is "different" because they choose their targets; they aren't sold, they're selling themselves. D2 victors might be disfigured or traumatized but they wanted this so they can't complain.

as someone who was around in the early 2010s and saw how the prevailing fandom attitudes were basically ... well, the above, it's really gratifying to see such rich, nuanced conversations happening around all the districts and the propaganda that goes into keeping the people divided. partly due to people growing up but even new & young fans are having these discussions, partly, i think, due to like ... world events that have happened since. a 14yo in 2012 has had a very, very different life experience than a 14yo in 2022

also just as an aside since you mentioned it, Katniss and Peeta have very different skillsets as far as the Centre is concerned and it makes for fascinating watching. Peeta has the crowd work while Katniss does not -- they point this out, that he's the one who's been giving her audience appeal, he's the one who (if he weren't bleeding to death) could have walked out with sympathy by throwing the knife away at the same time Katniss pointed the arrow, but he lacks survival skills. Katniss has a singleminded ruthlessness (in the Marco Animorphs sense, where she can see the bright, clear line from A to B) that makes survival possible, but the audience doesn't like her and she makes very little effort to do so until forced. they need each other and it was a fascinating game to analyze, from a strategy standpoint.

the trainers always assumed the rule change would be revoked at an appropriately dramatic point, but they also thought that whoever won would be a disappointment without the other as complement. a weird game to play and no clear resolution, until the kids blew the whole thing up

not one that would work for any of you, indeed

[whiplashisthinkingaboutbakugan]

I both am and am not a ShunDan guy. I flip flop so hard and it changes between seasons. Like Gundalian Invaders and so far Mechtanium Surge I’m like oh so Shun’s his boyfriend this season. At the beginning of the first season too tbh.

What doesn’t help is that Shun is the most consistent cast member other than Marucho. It’s really easy to be like BAKUGAY y’know? Their dynamic is nuanced in a way that not every dynamic is in this show is, it’s interesting. Especially the way they take care of each other. They aren’t even really rivals anymore, that’s his best friend. The break to his gas pedal. Shun’s always giving him the disapproving wife ass looks and I love it soooo much. Their dynamic is pointedly significant given their status as equals in brawling and aforementioned importance to one another in S1 (hey if I’m wrong I’m wrong it’s been a minute.) I do like the their dynamic no matter the way it leans.

Generally Dan’s got special relationships with a lot of the cast as MC. The same can’t be said for Shun. I stg he either likes that boy or he’s living the aspec life of barely/never being attracted to anyone. He’s either having his demiromantic moment or not. This is not counting the original Brawlers he’s got a dynamic with each of them. Shun’s got good relations to a chunk of the new cast but I cannot think of a single unique thing about his dynamic with Jake, y’know what I mean? But I know he was friends with Ace. It’s different than Dan.

I think if Runo was actually there more I could be about them being together idk. I like her and honestly her dynamic with Dan goes hard but that’s if they let her be around more.

In New Vestroia I felt no ShunDan in the studio. New Vestroia and Gundalian Invaders is less about the Brawlers and more about the people they’re involved with. Maybe that’s why I feel this way? The ShunDan is never strong in this series because it isn’t about their relationship. So you either gotta interpret or die. Which is perfect and lends to multishipling. Major plus! I feel this way about most ships in this fandom other than Spectra and Gus cause like….what did you think was happening there. They were together the whole time dude.

What’s epic about writing this all down is that I realized the Bakugan writers succeeded at making everyone such realistic friends that no dynamic feels like it’s that much more important than the others. This isn’t Sasunaru where like…your only option is to call them gay cause otherwise what was that. I think Shun and Dan’s dynamic is a bit more pronounced than most but not by a lot.

Does any of this matter? No I just love interpreting queer dynamics in my media.

What’s really funny is in every Bakugan intro Dan goes ✨Shun✨ no matter the context mf OK GIRL WE SEE HIM.

[princessfbi]

Tumblr Fandom: A Year in Review 2023

Tagged by @mistmarauder and @letmetellyouaboutmyfeels which is both thrilling and terrifying...

Top Five Blorbos: Evan Buckley, Eddie Diaz, Maddie Buckley, Clint Barton, and Carter Bennett

Top Five Fandoms: 9-1-1, RWRB, A Discovery of Witches, does hockey count? idk it's been a strike year, and Green Creek Series

Top Five OTPs: Buddie, WinterHawk, Matthew/Diana, Grantaire/Enjolras, FirstPrince

Shoutout to Some New Friends: @letmetellyouaboutmyfeels sorry you're stuck with me now. I'm going to shower you in so much love and support and affection and there's nothing you can do to stop me BROHAHAHAHAHA. @skyhighrollins911 you're so talented it's ridiculous. @mistmarauder I feel like we've past the new friends stage but I also feel like we've gotten so much closer this year and I'm forever grateful for it. You're brighten my day every time I hear from you even when you're bullying me. Also I hate to break it to you but you do so much for this fandom it's insane.

Shoutout to Some Old Friends: @homerforsure and @mellaithwen you guys have picked me up so many times. I don't know where I'd be without you. @buddie-buddie you are my ride or die. I'm sorry to say this but not even a divorce attorney could get rid of me now. @lovebuck you were one of my first friends in this whole crazy internet world I found and look at us! @bigfootsmom you are a beacon of joy every message I get from you. Thanks for letting me talk kinky with you 😜 @like-the-rest-of-la I'm obsessed with you. I'm sorry I don't make the rules. @djdangerlove you are the light of my life you ridiculous person. You bring so much joy and laughter to every corner you grace with your presence and I'm gonna move into your apartment one day when you're at work and you won't be able to get rid of me. Sorry not sorry.

Favorite Creation You Posted This Year: Ohhhhhh maybe my fic I wrote for @buddie-buddie's birthday. Also Kink Club AU because it's one of my most nuanced pieces and Traded for being a new type of fic for me with the multimedia parts.

Favorite Creation Posted by Someone Else This Year: @like-the-rest-of-la amazes me every day as does @mistmarauder and while I have your attention have you gotten a chance to see/listen to the podfic they collaborated together to bring you [Podfic] If I Risk It All (Could You Break My Fall?) because not a day goes by that I don't listen to it/look at the cover. Also @skyhighrollins911 destroys me with all their new edits. we will find a way (through the dark) by @buddie-buddie nearly drove me insane and had me running out to the yard to scream like a banshee.

People Who Brightened Your Year: @buddie-buddie and @homerforsure know exactly how to make me smile when I need it. I still fangirl about @mistmarauder but the fact that she picked my fic to podfic? With @like-the-rest-of-la who I still cannot believe just casually drew Spiderman!Eddie kissing Hawkeye!Buck? Fainted. I fainted. @djdangerlove you are ridiculous and I love you. @mandzuking17 and @thebestbooksaround and @fleurdebeton thank you for sending me so many wonderful asks. @firemedicdiaz thank you for getting me through that rough patch I had this spring and constantly being so supportive! @letmetellyouaboutmyfeels thank you for putting up with me being such a goof. @barbiediaz Thank you for agreeing with me that we have the most correct opinions.

Anyone Else You'd Like to Mention: Thank you to everyone who comes to my inbox with their love and enthusiasm! Thank you to all my readers! Thank you everyone who has welcomed me and embraced me and supported me as I work myself into knots while trying to do something I love (write).

Five of Your Favorite Authors This Year: @buddie-buddie @homerforsure @devirnis @bigfootsmom @letmetellyouaboutmyfeels @mellaithwen @barbiediaz

Five of Your Favorite Artists/Gifmakers/Podficcers/Etc. This Year: @mistmarauder @like-the-rest-of-la @bucksketch @djdangerlove @skyhighrollins911 @ronordmann @bilosan @housewifebuck @captain-hen @baneme-art @kaciart @iinryer @paxdracona @bigfootsmom @starbuckley @mellaithwen

Three Things You're Looking Forward to in 2024: Season 7 of 911!!!!! Jean's book from AFTG! Anddddd.... getting back in the querying trenches.

I'm going to tag everyone I've mentioned above who hasn't done it yet!

[hp-confessions]

The Marauders fandom is where media literacy goes to die.

They are so smug about how progressive they are when they replicate hackneyed stereotypes and can’t acknowledge nuance if it danced naked in front of them wearing Dobby’s hat.

~