#finx does fandom

[aethersea]

A neat thing about The Goblin Emperor is that while it's a classic trope of the lost heir plunged into a morass of courtly intrigue where he has no idea whom he can trust, the very first thing it does is emphasize how much he has to choose to trust anyway. Maia has to trust the head of his household to appoint his body servants, and he has to trust those servants. He has to trust the adremaza to appoint his nohecharei, and he has to trust his nohecharei. Any one of these people could kill him. Any one of them could carry gossip to his enemies, or make him look bad in public and thus weaken him in the eyes of the court. But if he so much as implies a discomfort with these choices, he'll offend powerful people without cause – and anyway, how could he possibly pick better? He has no idea what he's doing. He's forced to rely on people. He's forced to trust. The only person he actually personally chooses is Csevet, and what he chooses to do is essentially hand Csevet the keys to the empire. He got so fucking lucky there, that could have gone so incredibly badly.

But it didn't. Because, as the book emphasizes, trust is the right choice. Even when it does go badly, even when he is betrayed, that doesn't mean the trust was wrong. Because when one person betrays him, every single other person around him shows how truly loyal they are, not only by rushing to his aid, but by caring so deeply and obviously about him.

That's why this book feels so odd for its genre: there's a bunch of complex courtly intrigue going on, but Maia never plays the game. He never schemes, he's never playing 5D chess with his enemies. He has to navigate the factions of the court and try to win them to his side, but he does so by being kind and forthright. He's completely blindsided by the coup attempts, and frankly so are we, because he's just been focusing on other stuff! And he survives them, not through his own cunning, but through the love of those he placed his trust in.

[aethersea]

there’s probably something to be said about the different themes/messages of the two movies. knives out is about people who loudly proclaim themselves one thing or another but are, at heart, just selfish. in contrast benoit blanc proclaims nothing – he’s introduced by others – but his reputation is actually accurate. BUT we as an audience don’t KNOW that on first viewing, so he’s just as suspect as everyone else, especially as his arrival emphasizes the newly formed uncertainty we have about everyone there – it seems like we know what everyone here is like, we have a good read on everyone, but that can’t be true because one of them is a killer!

so benoit blanc shows up just as we’ve started to question everyone’s character, he has vague credentials and is framed by the camera/music/etc as a dangerous person, and he becomes even more dangerous once we find out about martha. but then the family members are revealed to be selfish jerks, while he’s revealed to be a compassionate man.

glass onion is about people who are obsessed with image and happy to ignore the lack of substance. miles is ofc at the heart of this, but every person on that island only really cares about their reputation, not about building it out of anything real. in contrast, benoit blanc has earned his reputation (and we as viewers know this, because we’ve seen knives out), but is completely unconcerned with it. he doesn’t care about being seen as a good detective – he doesn’t even care about being seen as a bumbling little weirdo who can’t read the room!

the twist in glass onion is helen, whose façade is just as much a lie as everyone else’s – more, actually – because she’s literally not who she says she is. only everyone else has a whole lot of nothing under their façades, while what she has is righteous fury powered by grief and love. interestingly, the reveal for benoit blanc is that he’s not there as some funky coincidence, but because he’s already seeking justice – which is also a reveal that much of how he’s been portraying himself has been a deliberate performance. he’s wearing a mask as well. he’s just not weaponizing it for personal gain.

It's funny how in Knives Out they specifically establish why any of the other characters would've heard of Benoit Blanc (someone wrote a New Yorker article about a case he solved) but in Glass Onion it's just taken for granted that of course he's a world-famous celebrity who everyone's heard of. The Knives Out case got a lot of coverage, I guess.

[smallblueandloud]

wow, i have so many thoughts about so many fandoms right now that it is inevitable that i will forget all of them before i can write them down.

anyway, let’s do jenkins immortality headcanons!

i haven’t actually read any arthuriana and i MEANT to but like. who the heck cares. not me. we’re going OFF THE RAILS of canon right now.

okay so finx @aethersea suggested that camelot was a magical kingdom and has lost its tether to reality in the same way that the library lost its tether to reality (...frequently) and i LOVE that so we’re going with that.

camelot was a kingdom of magic, one of the only of its kind, and then it fell. her king was wounded and sent off onto the lake and her knights stayed behind to guard her and she was broken from the world until the day when her king returned (in england’s hour of greatest need) and summoned it back.

the three left outside were: galahad, morgan le fay, and the exiled lancelot. they three are immortal. don’t ask me why. i GUESS the holy grail is supposed to make people immortal, but lancelot never got ahold of it, so like, don’t ask me. maybe they’re immortal since they’re of the magical isle and therefore they’re inherently magic. whatever.

galahad (i’m gonna call him jenkins now for the sake of clarity) sees that magic is running rampant without camelot to organize it, direct it. he watches the rise of the library. when the first librarian starts to collect artifacts, he offers his services. who better to deal with artifacts than a knight of the round table? besides, he is noble, and good, and full of justice, and this is something he can do to help.

lancelot watches the library grow, too. but he craves the power for himself and bides his time, growing his resources. jenkins tries not to think about him too much. this is his wisest decision and his biggest regret.

(morgan le fay, of course, entertains herself. jenkins runs across her about once a century. his reaction depends entirely on his loneliness at the time. he knows she’s evil, he knows, and he hates her for it, but he just... he can’t shake the comfort of being with someone who knows him and knows who he is and has seen the magic isle. the years that he tries to kill her, he fails. he can’t forgive himself for the years when he doesn’t try at all.)

here’s my biggest headcanon: jenkins isn’t a fictional, sure, but it’s a similar process. the stories of camelot live and grow and flourish and jenkins feels it. at first, it’s minor - the styles of clothing he remembers change with the fashions of the time. but then it gets more extreme. he can’t remember how formally his king spoke. he wakes up one morning feeling the clank of spurs on his horse’s side, despite spurs not having been invented for another four hundred years. and one day he realizes that he’s unsure what lancelot looked like.

here is how jenkins is similar to a fictional. jenkins belongs to a place that is more myth than fact, and its image changes to fit the times and the popular versions. jenkins’ memories are changed with them. he gets into the habit of writing down every change he experiences. those records are the only things he keeps, throughout his very (very very) long life. books and books’ worth, crammed into his desk in the library and spilling over into the shelves. his favorite versions - the ones that feel closest to the fact he can no longer reliably identify - are sometimes ones that have been lost to history.

(“in no version!” he hears jake insisting angrily one day, “in no version was the outcast knight kind! that never happens, it ruins the- the- the INTEGRITY of it, and the STRUCTURE of it, and NO one’s EVER argued-”

“actually, mr. stone,” says jenkins as mildly as he can. “actually, there was a mildly popular version in the early 1400s that said something similar. it never got out of germany, or well, it wasn’t germany at the time, but they didn’t like writing things down much. i’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it before.”)

yes, jenkins has annotated copies of every version he can find, and yes he DOES have strong opinions about adaptations. isn’t it hilarious? enjoy it for the moment, because--

it’s not just the facts of the story itself that changes in his mind. the faces shift, too. guinevere always matches the beauty standard of the time, or later the most famous actress to play her. while dulaque’s face doesn’t change, jenkins’ memory of it does, depending on who’s been illustrating him recently.

(most of why he is so grumpy in the early 21st century is because he keeps seeing merlin as this skinny child. he doesn’t know who’s in charge of bbc casting but he is SICK and TIRED of visualizing this MORGAN person every time he thinks back to the great and terrible wizard that introduced him to court.)

arthur, though. arthur’s face changes the most. sometimes he resembles the best and most beloved leader of the time. sometimes he is from a painting, or he looks like jesus, or he is simply a famous actor. whatever it is, his face has changed in jenkins’ mind more times that he can count, and jenkins knows in his heart that he has absolutely no recollection of his king’s true face.

he worries, sometimes, that arthur will return to save england - and he won’t recognize him at all.

[aethersea]

fun little linguistic detail in the goblin emperor I don't know what to do with: the Great Avar's family symbol, the sea serpent that becomes part of first Chenelo's and then Maia's personal sigil, is called the Corat' Arhos, the Cruelty of Water. the Avar's home, implied to be his palace and thus the Barizheise equivalent of the Untheleneise Court, is called the Corat' Dav Arhos.

we know dav is the household, presumably meaning both all the people that comprise it and the place itself, much like 'house' in English. so he lives in the...Cruel House of Water? Water House of Cruelty? interesting name for a capital.

[aethersea]

The thing about the Joker is that he sees himself as The Only One Who Understands That Nothing Matters. Life’s a joke and all that's real is the punchline, and he’s always the one with the last laugh. And this lends itself really well to a fourth-wall-breaking character who winks at the audience like Bugs Bunny, because he KNOWS nothing is real and no consequences can truly touch him!

But, and this is the Key Thing about the Joker, that never happens. He never winks at the audience. He’s never actually in on the joke. And that’s because he’s not funny lying to himself. Things matter to him all the time actually! Everything matters SO MUCH, because the Joker thinks he’s the center of the whole entire universe and when people aren’t paying attention to him, he doesn’t laugh about it, he throws a massive temper tantrum.

And it’s not that he wants the spotlight, exactly. It’s that he wants to be vindicated. He wants to prove that his worldview is the correct one. He wants to prove that he’s right, and always was and always will be. Because he really does believe that he’s infallible.

But you can’t tell a good joke if you don’t know how to laugh at yourself.

[aethersea]

you know, it’s been a long time since I read animorphs and I’ve forgotten more than I remember, but somehow I find that I’ve never forgotten the end of that book where they get a time machine and have to chase a yeerk through history as it tries to ruin the world. and in every era, someone has to do something terrible – I don’t remember what the terrible things were, but like, murder of innocents, letting people die, that sort of thing, it’s animorphs you know how it is – to try to stop, like, nazis from winning and so on.

and then at the very end of the book, they realize – they failed. they lost. they did their best, they did their worst, and it wasn’t enough.

but they have the yeerk’s host in front of them, yeerkless, and there’s one last thing they can do. in some ways, the worst thing they’ve done yet. we see it from Cassie’s eyes, and she’s managed to keep her hands mostly clean this whole book long, but as she looks around at everyone she realizes that they’re all thinking it, but she’s got to be the one to say it. to verbalize out loud what they’re going to do, to take responsibility for it, to make the terrible choice. it’s her turn.

and Cassie, who is sweet and compassionate and gentle, steps forward and does.

and I don’t know, that just stuck with me. that she doesn’t get to keep her hands clean, not because the narrative forced some horrible violation on her, but because she realized that it was her burden to bear as much as everyone else’s, that burden of responsibility and guilt. that she can’t leave it to the others to carry the weight of their sins, and tell herself that she’s better than them because she doesn’t make the choices, she just follows orders.

and again: it’s important that she chooses. no one forces her to make this choice; if she’d waited, silent, for another few minutes, someone else would have stepped forward. but she chose. even gentle, compassionate Cassie has to do terrible things to win this war, and she chooses to do them, on purpose, in full understanding of how terrible they are.

it’s something about taking responsibility, I think. Cassie could have stayed silent, and never been the one to make the terrible choice out loud. she could have fooled herself into thinking that she wasn’t at fault for going along with those choices, or that she would have made kinder choices if she’d been the one to choose. but that would have been cowardly, and it would have been a betrayal of her friends, to let herself think of them as worse than her.

so in the end, when everyone else has had to shoulder the burden of choosing a terrible thing in the hope that it will avert a worse one, Cassie takes her turn and shoulders that burden too. she saves the world. she makes the terrible choice. in war, no one’s hands stay clean, no matter how gentle those hands may be.

[aethersea]

absolutely losing it trying to figure out the economic situation in Camelot in BBC Merlin. Arthur says that “the people” make just enough to subsist, and the taxes are already as high as they can bear to afford (s2e6 “Beauty and the Beast pt 2”). he says he knows this because he’s the one who goes out among them, unlike his dad who just sits at home all the time. but do we ever see Arthur interact with someone outside the city proper? we do not. are the people in this city really living hand to mouth? they sure don’t look like it – there are taverns, businesses, we never see a single homeless person, and the one Ordinary City-Dweller whose house we do see (Gwen) lives alone, with no apparent financial difficulty, on just one person’s salary. this is never framed as unusual. 

but then again, Arthur did sound like he was talking about farmers producing just enough crop to feed themselves. so maybe this new tax is just punitive for people in the countryside, not in the city, and Arthur hangs out there between episodes. 

but then two scenes later we see tax collectors taking All An Old Man Has in the heart of the city itself. okay, I guess this means the city is not an economic center? for a slight tax increase to have such a devastating impact? 

but if everyone’s so desperately poor, how do they pay for so many guards? they literally just stand around in various palace corridors and city streets, every day, wearing their expensive chain mail and holding their expensive weapons. clearly Uther is taxing the populace blind to maintain his standing army. but honestly where are all these guards even coming from? Camelot is not that large! they never mention ANY population centers other than the city proper and “the outlying villages,” where they’re always sending riders whenever there’s some emergency. other than that it’s all cursed forests and meadowed hills for Arthur and Merlin to ride through dramatically. 

and on TOP of the regular guards, Arthur has a good 15-20 knights who work directly under him as an elite force – way more than that if you count all the ones who die and have to be replaced every few episodes – and every last one of them is a youngish man of noble birth. where are their families? do they have no sisters? cousins? baby brothers? parents?? Uther’s said to have “established” the knights as a way to solidify his rule, by binding the noble families together in a common covenant (s1e5 “Lancelot”), which suggests he brought a bunch of feuding families together under his reign. but then where are they now? it’s been like 30 years tops since Uther became king, they can’t have died out. actually we KNOW they haven’t died out because they keep sending able-bodied young men to be knights in Camelot! but WHERE ARE THEY????

[aethersea]

so since we’re all Supernatural blogs now, here’s my decade-old hot take:

When Crowley takes over Hell, we are eventually shown a glimpse of what eternal damnation looks like in his kingdom: standing in line for an important but boring task, forever. While this is indeed hellish, and Hell-as-endless-bureaucracy is a valid take that can lead to cool stories, it doesn't fit the choices that Supernatural had previously made about demons & demon culture, which, although it was never delved into with any skill, consistently had a hard-on for physical torture.

No demons had ever displayed an interest in psychological torment, unless it was bound up in a lot of run-of-the-mill physical torment, to the point that when it came out that they'd gotten Dean to become a torturer in Hell, I was shocked and impressed by this unprecedented level of subtlety. Whenever demons had cared about the inner workings of any specific human's mind, it was always just so they could manipulate that human into doing what the demon wanted (e.g. sign a crossroads contract, or whatever Ruby was up to), not so they could find more personalized ways of torturing them.

You could argue, as I am sure many did at the time, that Crowley is just Not Like Other Demons, and finds dismemberment distasteful. I honestly don't remember enough about his characterization to have a stance on that, but you could counterargue that there is no way that this upstart crossroads demon is going to overhaul the entire system two weeks after claiming the throne just because entrails make him squeamish. His grip on that crown has to be tenuous enough as it is.

But that’s all just deck chairs on the Titanic, because the real reason Crowley’s Hell is a bureaucracy is that the writers (and/or execs) are rank cowards. They wanted Crowley to become a more sympathetic character, and they didn't have the guts to do that without flinching from the fact that he is a literal fiend from Hell. Psychological torture is more palatable at a glance than physical torture, just from the lack of viscera, and the showrunners wanted to make Hell palatable.

I mean COME ON, Crowley was only ever likable because he's played by Mark Sheppard! He's a bad person who does bad things, and does them so well and so cleverly that he's in charge of Hell now. Put up or shut up! If you want to make the demon sympathetic just do it! It’s okay if sympathetic characters do torture sometimes, it really is, especially if your show’s already pretty dark. You don’t have to be a big weenie about it.

[aethersea]

somebody do cool analysis off of how Breq learns non-Radchaai songs, sings them as a way of expressing her emotional state, doesn’t notice she’s singing half the time, and can only give us imperfect translations of the lyrics,

and Breq wears a non-Radchaai face, which often displays her emotional state, but she doesn’t notice it’s moving at all half the time, and can only give us imperfect impressions of what her face reveals.

[aethersea]

hey has anyone talked about how Ben felt, when Klaus came back from Vietnam? I hadn’t noticed it before, Ben’s so quiet, but I’m rewatching with my family and when Klaus tells Diego about Dave...Ben leaves. he walks away and vanishes, out of Klaus’ sight, to wherever it is ghosts go when they’re nowhere.

because for the first time since Ben died, Klaus was alone. Klaus did things without him. Klaus was in a war, Klaus got clean, Klaus fell in love. without him.

[aethersea]

Actually you know what, I stand by what I said, and here is the evidence, aka a thinly veiled excuse to write up plot summaries for these books I wish I could read:

(spoilers, obviously, all the way through Sea of Time)

The Kencyrath Chronicles: Nightshade Edition

Setting

Knorth may be the Great and Fallen house, the house of power and madness, betrayal and prophecy, but Randir is the house of magic and misery, where even your shadow isn’t safe from the night. The Witch of Wilden stalks through her people’s dreams, spies on them from within their own heads, violates their very souls to suit her whims. The Priest’s College beats underground like a drum, a sickly heart, that spiral pull of power feeding on the nightmares of its inmates and their hopeless faith, poisoning the earth beneath the Randir’s feet. A changeling sits upon their throne while their natural lord ghosts through the Riverland’s treacherous forests surrounded by his flight of jewel-jaws, and they have orders to kill him on sight. Allegiances within the house are shifting and uncertain, impenetrable to those outside the house and deadly to those within. The safest position is at the Witch’s hand, Rawneth being the eventual victor of nearly every inter-house feud so far – yet those who serve her are those most likely to crumble to dust, hag-ridden; or become the shadow-fueled demons that guard her tower and hunt her enemies, reduced to teeth and rage and pain; or fade away, bereft of their souls.

Dramatic Backstory

Shade, unusual among the Randir Kendar, is bound to no one. She grows up ignored by her lord father, wishing her grandmother would ignore her in kind. The Kendar flatter her and revile her in turns, Shanir daughter of their lord that she is. She’s been fielding attempts on her life since she was just a child. Sometimes people step in and save her, not for her own sake but for her bloodlines. Her father did, once, the only proof she’s had that he knows who she is. Her grandmother never has. Her grandmother despises weakness, even as she gleefully exploits it, even as she tears at her people’s very souls and treads carelessly upon the tatters. Shade grows up wishing she dared to be weak, just so her grandmother would stop watching her.

It is not true that Shade has never had friends. It is true that she has none left by the time she goes to Tentir. Some have died; some have simply turned away from her. Some she remembers only faintly, when she remembers them at all, for the Witch has taken their names. This, Shade thinks, was nothing personal - it happens, at Wilden, and every Randir has those flickers of uncertainty when they stumble on a memory that’s not quite there. Probably Rawneth took their names for some unrelated reason, nothing to do with Shade at all, but of course she can’t know for sure. After all, she can’t remember.

Just before she goes to Tentir, Shade is summoned to Rawneth’s chambers. Her legs shake as she walks steadily up the stairs. She’s pretty sure her grandmother isn’t going to kill her. She tries not to speculate on what she’ll do instead, which will undoubtedly be much worse. When Rawneth hands her a coiled yellow adder, Shade assumes for several minutes that it’s going to bite her, and then she’ll find out what it’s like to feel your self dissolve while your body keeps going without you.

Book 1: Adder’s Bite

It’s not true that Shade has never had ambitions. It is true that by the time she goes to Tentir, she has only one: survive. Tentir is a shock in many ways, but the biggest is the revelation that the other houses don’t live in a sick mire of fear and darkness every day of their lives. Or no – not quite. Most shocking of all is the day when Shade, walking alone through the meadows outside the college on a free day, realizes that she isn’t afraid. It lasts for just a few minutes before wary anxieties creep back in, but something breaks, that day. Shade remembers her childhood determination to leave Wilden one day and never look back, how it burned within her hotter than any nightmare the Witch could concoct. She’d buried that determination so deep that no dream could find it, and in the process even she had forgotten it, but now she rekindles it.

When Shade leaves Tentir, she has proven herself the equal of every challenge the college and her people could throw at her. She has chased Rawneth from behind Addy’s eyes, and the Witch’s voice no longer whispers through her dreams. She has helped save the life of her true lord and befriended the Highlord’s mad sister. She has felt her body change, skin melting like candle wax over muscles that knot and twist over grinding bones, and she has pulled herself back into herself. Shade is still afraid, constantly – she is a Randir, after all, and to be Randir is to know fear – but she has learned her own strength. She carries that like a secret in her soul, keeping her warm, keeping her going.

Book 2: Under the Witch’s Eye

Shade returns to Wilden. What happens there? We don’t know, but I’m betting it could fill a book. Perhaps she grows close with Ran Awl, who is implied to be secretly sympathetic to the banished Randir Heir, and the two of them very quietly work toward a future that they dare not name, one without the Witch’s magics spilling out of her tower to poison Wilden’s breath. Perhaps Shade looks up to Awl as a role model, an example of how to maintain your honor in this snakepit of a house. Shade has never had much cause to think of honor before – like all Kencyr, she preserves hers as best she can, but she was a child in a house of darkness, powerless. Now she is a warrior, a randon cadet, and she has more power than she knows.

Shade is only half Highborn, (or perhaps three quarters or so – we don’t know who her mother was, after all). Yet the Shanir magic is strong in her, and perhaps other Highborn aspects are strong as well. She doesn’t have Jame’s raw strength, but people look to her, even people many times her own age. She finds she can break up fights just by strolling up to them; the squabblers will stop, and either run away like children or demand arbitration from her. Ran Awl and other seasoned warriors will listen to her, and she’d like to believe it’s because they trust her good sense, but in truth she knows better. She is Kenan’s daughter, after all, Rawneth’s granddaughter, and she may not have been born of any sanctioned, contracted match but she is of Randir blood, and blood will tell.

Or at least, that’s what the other Kendar think, and Shade doesn’t contradict them. But she knows what even the Witch of Wilden does not: her grandfather was a darkling changer, a creature of shadows, glutted on unclean souls. Does her power come from Shanir strength and Highborn authority, or from that darker legacy? After all, blood will tell.

That’s the true conflict at the heart of this novel, whatever tangled web of allegiances and loyalty may or may not be the foreground of the plot: what will Shade do with this power? The Highlord’s mad sister called Shade an unfallen darkling, but Shade wonders if it’s even possible to be a Randir and unfallen. Does it matter, really, how Shade fights against the Witch’s reign, so long as she wins in the end? Her grandfather’s power sings in her, promising victories the likes of which she dares not dream. What harm, really, if she gives in?

Book 3: Through the Fires of Urakarn

A few months later Shade is at Kothifir, special aide to Ran Awl as the latter investigates the mysterious disappearances of Randir not sworn to Rawneth. The Witch of Wilden may ally herself with the alien magics of Rathillien, but it’s still a shock when Shade discovers that the missing Randir are being kidnapped by spies from Urakarn. For the first time in her life, Shade deliberately (rather than impulsively) puts her life in danger to save another, and goes undercover with the Urakarn. It’s also the first time she’s changed her shape so deliberately, and for so long. Shade sits by the firelight in the Urakarn camps watching the flicker of her shadow on the desert sands, and wonders whether her soul can change as easily as her silhouette. Perhaps it already has. Can she embrace her darkling power so willingly and still remain unfallen? Then, too, there is the knife’s edge she must walk on to be undercover without dishonoring herself. If she must lie to save the missing Randir, is it worth the price? Does she have the strength to choose the White Knife if it means Ran Awl can go back to Wilden and continue to fight Rawneth’s rule?

Then, the Prophet: Shade hears him speak and something within her wakens, something within her yearns to bask in his glory and do his bidding forever. Perhaps he recognizes her, recognizes her blood, and smiles to see her. He doesn’t blow her cover, for whatever reason, just croons something cryptic in her ear, perhaps an order that he doesn’t doubt she’ll obey. Jame would fight him, but Shade grew up under the Witch’s eye. She keeps her gaze downcast and her movements meek, signaling obedience without actually giving her word, and he withdraws, satisfied, never dreaming that she might defy him. Shade will have nightmares about that smile for the rest of her life.

Then: the Master’s House. Endless halls wreathed in shadows, and the shadows have golden eyes and whispering voices that watch Shade pass and laugh behind her back. Jame doesn’t seem to hear the voices, nor see the eyes, nor feel the way they pull at Shade’s very being like the sweetest music. Perhaps they’re just echoes of the past, like the Dream-weaver who ghosts past and nearly takes Shade’s breath with her. Perhaps she’s imagining them. Perhaps she’s spent too long embracing her darkling nature, and the House is calling her home.

As for what happens next…well. Talk about the weight of honor. The curse of bloodlines. The unbearable pressure of being at the nexus of all that accumulated history.

Major protagonist energies.

[aethersea]

Jame: Will you please! stop! trying to die for me!

Marc: [read at 12:32]

[aethersea]

ok I was ready to have great respect for Tori - Highlord at such a young age, and that after dragging himself out of the Haunted Lands and his father’s shadow; weighed down by the burden of responsibility to his people, but rising to the occasion with aplomb; undaunted and unimpressed by the trappings his own power, or that of the other lords; level-headed and clever enough to manage the twisted tangle of politics and jealousy that rules the Riverlands. it’s an impressive resumé. 

but guys.

really.

Times Tori Has Carelessly Wandered Into Danger Without Care Or Exit Strategy (so far):

1. His first goddamn appearance sees him deciding that a nighttime jaunt to a probably-not-haunted castle, without taking any guards or anything, is Just The Thing to help cope with the pesky nightmares that have had him pulling literally three all-nighters in a row. 

2. The man who’s been indiscreetly trying to assassinate him for months now, and whom he’s just challenged openly to a duel, taunts him across the still-warm bodies of two young soldiers in what should be a safe keep. Tori follows, alone, and nearly gets murdered by a shapeshifter, then nearly gets framed for murder himself. Serve him right too.

3. Hey, it looks like the local bandits have murdered our priests and overrun the messenger outpost they swore to protect! Time to ride straight up to their front door! I know I’ll be safe because of a guess I made five minutes ago about a bit of history I only just heard about for the first time, which is only probably true and definitely not up-to-date.

4. Oh hey those hills look weirdly familiar, that’s not supposed to happen, this is some freaky supernatural shit. I know! I should go look into it alone and tell no one where I’m going. What Could Go Wrong.

[aethersea]

BNHA Teen Wolf au

pls consider:

[aethersea]

One thing I quite like about FMA is that the Elrics are, without a shadow of a doubt, seeking out the Philosopher’s Stone for selfish reasons. Yes, it’s tragic what happened to them, but they brought it on themselves, and they never pretend otherwise. They never act like they have any sort of right to the Stone – they just want it, for the simple and selfish purpose of getting their bodies back.

Sure, this is a way more sympathetic reason than the lust for power that you find in so many of the villains, especially the plot-of-the-week villains in the beginning. But the difference between the Elrics and the villains isn’t the reason they want the Stone – it’s how far they’re willing to go in pursuit of it.

And yeah, that’s pretty obvious, they’re the good guys because they’re not willing to step all over other people to attain their goal. But it would have been so, so easy for their goal itself to have been framed as pure and worthy. All you’d have to do is declare that they’re doing this for each other, not themselves. They even are, to an extent – I doubt Ed would become a dog of the military if his brother wasn’t an empty suit of armor. It’d be so easy for them to be the good guys because their cause is good.

But they aren’t. It’s not enough to want things for the right reasons. You have to go about getting them in the right way, too.

[aethersea]

There’s something really beautiful about the way Griffin set up the planar system – about where he put us. Bear with me here as I try to articulate it, because—

See, the story takes place on the Prime Material Plane. This plane has magic, because there’s a Plane of Magic that influences the Prime Material Plane. This plane has divine power coursing through it, because there’s a Plane of Gods that influences the Prime Material Plane. It’s got elemental powers in nature and stuff, because there’s an Elemental Plane sending out its energy into the void between planes, influencing the Prime Material Plane. You get the gist.

The Prime Material Plane is at the center, it’s the focus, and so in a way the point of the Plane of Magic is to provide magic, to be magical, to send its magical energy down to the Prime Material. The point of the Elemental Plane is to provide… strength to the elemental forces on the Prime Material, or whatever it is DnD has to say about elemental stuff. The Plane of Gods has actual people living there who are cognizant of the whole system, and from what we’re given to understand, their point is also to influence, by divine intervention, the Prime Material Plane.

I’m sure the gods have their own lives going on in their plane, just as I’m sure the elemental spirits have their own stuff happening and the beings of pure magic or whatever there is on the Plane of Magic have lives of their own. It’s even quite plausible that, other than the gods, they’re generally unaware of the Prime Material Plane – that these elemental beings live their rich and complex lives without ever once being aware that their existence, that the bonds of elemental energy that they create just by being, is what’s powering the elemental forces on the Prime Material Plane.

And that brings us to our plane. Because Griffin put us in there, our world with its elevators and internet, with its complete lack of magic missiles or gods that grant you blossoming wooden arms. Our plane is the Plane of Reason, which is the plane of rational thought and creativity. Our influence, our contribution, is the power of the mind: logic and imagination. 

It’s implied (or stated? I don’t remember for sure) that most of the impressive technological advancements we see in the show are from the Millers, who got their ideas from watching our world. It’s implied, too, that just as the existence and influence of the Plane of Magic is what makes it possible to do magic on the Prime Material, the influence of the Plane of Reason is what makes it possible for people on the Prime Material to use logic and imagination.

So what that boils down to is this: The purpose of our world, the whole point of our world, is creation. Our ability to make technological marvels and incredible works of art, our ability to constantly be thinking up new things – that’s what makes us special, that’s our distinguishing feature, that’s what we contribute. We imagine, we invent, we bring ever more new wonders into the world. Every single thing we make, from rocket ships to symphonies to the jokes we come up with to tell our friends – that’s what we’re here to do. That’s the gift we bear, and it’s on a level with magic and nature and the gods themselves. We’re here to create.