#for this story ultimately i've landed on e. it's just everything

[gideonisms]

Okay question for those of you who have read deepwater bride because I recently listened to a podcast discussion that brought up completely different themes than I'd originally thought about. Did y'all read the end of deepwater bride as:

A) hester's corruption arc BECAUSE she is being seduced to be taken down to her watery grave/sacrificed gideon style

B) the above is what her AUNT thinks is happening + the framing of the whole thing as part of her family's record-keeping tradition only emphasizes the way queer relationships cannot be conceived of under the dominant societal framework and must be considered monstrous

C) hester's corruption arc BECAUSE she is being seduced & manipulated into disregarding other people's lives in order to pursue her own happiness which once again makes her monstrous in the eyes of society

D) a straightforwardly happy ending

E) combo of all or some of the above

[acourtofthought]

Hi!

I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on something I've noticed in the ship war.

The canon tells us that Elain doesn't want a mate or a male, and we know it's because she wants Greyson, and I see some Eluciens wonder if maybe Elain is attracted to/wants Lucien and is in denial and/or fighting against it and we might learn more about when we get her own book/pov

However, I see Elriels claim that when Eluciens say stuff like this, they are ignoring what Elain wants and are forcing her to be with Lucien. Since there is a mating bond between them, isn't it natural to think that Elain might be attracted to Lucien and is just refusing to admit or act on it because she resents it? Isn't that basically what Nesta did? So, with Elain, why is it so crazy to think something similar could be going on?

From what I've seen, many Elriels love to claim the other side is delusional or misogynistic for suggesting Elain feels more Lucien than just revulsion. Yet, do they not also suggest that Azriel feels more for Elain than just lust?

The canon tells us that Azriel has not thought of Elain beyond sexual fantasies, yet I've seen Elriels suggesting that Azriel has only limited himself to those fantasies because dreaming of having more with Elain would be too painful.

However, in my opinion, at least, there is nothing in the text or about the delivery of those thoughts to suggest that. So, are they themselves not also ignoring what Azriel wants and forcing him to be with Elain when he, in canon, only wanted to have sex with her once to satisfy his lust?

I'm in agreement with everything you said and I think it really all boils down to the fact that we're reading books, that this is not real life and does not mimic real life in any true way. We don't have to believe what Elain says when she says she doesn't want a mate, we don't have to believe it's a simple as "she's just not interested" because there is no story there if that's the case. Sarah loves Lucien's character just as she loves Cassian and Az and Feyre and Nesta and so on. I can't think of a single author who has professed adoration for one of her characters, made him a MAJOR part of the series since book 1, only to write him as the "nice guy who isn't taking the hint when his mate clearly isn't interested so he's just a creeper at this point and she's feeling harassed by this male she doesn't want." (E/riel narrative). Someone is trying pretty hard to convince themselves the author hates her own creation if they really believe that. There is no angst or growth in a character saying "I don't want the mate that fate gifted me while I was engaged to someone else so I'm just going to ignore him for the book before my own book and reject him to be with someone else who I don't even try to spend time with even though I'm comfortable with him!" The story has and always will lie in a character trying to turn from their destiny only to realize why that destiny was the key to achieving the ultimate in greatness, the ultimate in happiness. Bilbo Baggins didn't want to go on an adventure. Harry didn't want to fight Voldemort. Feyre didn't want to go to the faerie lands and didn't want to go to the NC with Rhys. Aelin didn't want to train with Rowan or become Queen. Aragorn didn't want to be King. Claire didn't want to travel to the past or to marry Jamie. None of these characters wanted to take the path that fate was sending them down but in the end they did anyway because it's how hero's are made, it's how epic love stories are told. It's ok for us not to want Elain to stay in the NC with friends she made off page with a love interest we've never seen her have a deep conversation with because there is nothing grand about that. I want to see Elain's beliefs challenged. I want to see fate take her by surprise. I want the 24 year old to realize that what she thinks she's fine with isn't actually the thing that will bring her enlightenment, that will open her eyes and her mind to something she never dared to imagine. "Elain should get what she said she wants before her book even starts." So Elain should be serving side character energy for the rest of the series? Because that is the kind of setup reserved for those characters; not main characters, not heroines. Main characters need to realize they were wrong about certain things before they can grow. Main characters need to realize they didn't know what was best for them at the start of their journey. Main characters need their sheltered world shaken up so they can turn around and rattle the stars.

[voiddemon]

damn girl im for real gonna have to just. make a voiddemon 'here's why everything is this way and here's my bullshit' post. anyway here's every au ever made by MY ASS explained poorly

older orbs: everyone is older, maybe by like 10/20 years. sometimes when i post under older orbs it's like between them being proper adults and them transitioning into being adults. mostly do this with my gay shit because it's fun for me. :) This thing is very very old and has changed a lot as my headcanons have

streamer au: joke au where everyone streams and like every game is just a crazy livestream. most of the time it means the games actually happen and it's livestreamed, but also they just livestream on the side. idk it was fun to draw and think about

LM au: little mermaid skirfluff i've written like. a lot for this shockingly. i lied actually it was only 7k ish words but i've drawn a LOT for it. the whole thing is a lot. go through the lm au tag if you're really interested but tldr mermaids, homosexuals, shadow kirby makes one really stupid decision and it pays the fuck off, dmk is homophobic and got a divorce, prince fluff goes through way too much for a happy ending for real. yin and yarn go through a lot too but they're ultimately good guys. also kin-yarn is canon and somewhat plot relevant, as during the climax they figure out what skirby really is since KINE fuck you. hate and war.

FLIPPEd LM au: very different and not explored super in depth. it's not actually based off the little mermaid really. just makes prince fluff a mermaid who is really homosexual and shadow kirby some guy. yin and yarn are bad guys in this one, since fluff leaves them in charge of everything while he turns himself human to convince skirby to be homogay with him. they then take over but things get better.

western: it's this whole thing and one of those big aus that basically change the whole story and it's like go write a book but no i don't. i haven't posted about it enough to talk about it actually. tldr the mirror world is a physical place, and the mirror worlders start essentially a tiny war with their counterparts. dmk steals galaxia and then gets chased into the fairy lands (k64 land, which hasn't really happened yet), shadow kirby takes a lot of L's then wow what a surprise prince fluff is here, shadow dedede gets his house blown up because dmk and skirby blew up Chateau Dedede (to get galaxia).

anime skirby: Shadow kirby either voluntarily or involuntarily is sent to the animeverse during star allies and grows as a person. he and anime kirby bond and have a cute adoptive brother thing going on and it's the best part of the whole thing. skirby being sent there ultimately puts the world in danger because of how nightmare from the anime works but it all turns out okay in the end'

the unnamed au in which KATAM is delayed until after star allies, but around the time when KATAM should have happened dark mind still appears and takes full control of the mirror world: read the title. uhhh shadow kirby got split into 4 different dudes, shadow dedede is possessed forever and is reduced to a mindless pawn to keep all four of them in check, dark meta knight is girlbossing and thriving and driven by his own ego. the mirror worlders kidnap meta knight to provoke everyone and also for the lols. everyone gets their ass thoroughly kicked. all of the star allies go home happy. prince fluff is a star ally in dmk's place which really isn't relevant but i think it's fun.

evil prince fluff aus: this has so many like offshoots but the main two are: he's gay and evil AND he's just evil. in the gay ones he's usually snapped and lost his shit and decided if he can't be homosexual he's just going to take over the world. in the non-gay ones he's probably possessed by one of the uhh jamba heart things that showed up during star allies. usually yin-yarn is involved regardless of the variant, and he eggs fluff on and works with him (planning to just take over and use him as a puppet eventually)

nightmare scenario: the most out there shit ever actually. nightmare has feelings and is more of a person beyond being a being that only exists to cause nightmares and be bad and stinky and evil. he finds patchland and sets up camp there since it has a dream fountain hidden away from everyone on that planet, and dreamland is close enough on a planetary level that he can hop to the dream fountain there. he creates prince fluff for fun and accidentally brings him to life by dropping him in the dream fountain. Nightmare proceeds to have a custody battle with some fucking guy, he then goes off to be evil and is killed by kirby, then everything else happens as normal and Prince Fluff generally grows up to be haunted by who his father is. nightmare is actually for real dead so over time the universe is shifting the burden of existing as a manifestation of nightmares onto him, which sucks because he's trying to be a good person despite his instincts to do crime. for gay purposes this makes everything SUPER FUCKING COMPLICATED. also prince fluff is hiding who made him from everyone and acting like he doesn't know.

kin-yarn tnt wizards: tjhey have sex on poinjt beta

there's more but like those are the ones i remember/have revealed to the world. you have no idea how much gay shit i have inside my silly brain.

[staringdownabarrel]

I've just finished The King's Buccaneer by Raymond E. Feist, and by now, people should know what the drill is with this shit.

Truth be told, this is a pretty good representation of what I wish Prince of the Blood had been like. Yes, it's very much still a side story in the greater scheme of the series, but it also manages to effectively set up a lot of what happens in the Serpentwar saga. It also avoids being a laundry list of everything I've ever taken issue with in regards to Feist's writing.

I think the big reason why The King's Buccaneer works and Prince of the Blood didn't ultimately boils down to two things. One is the aforementioned thing: it sets up a lot of what's to come over the next few books. Some of this is stuff that was initially introduced in A Darkness at Sethanon (Pantathians were at the battles at Armengar and Sethanon), but some of it is stuff that's been building up in the background since Magician (Amos initially saw the map of Novindus at Macros the Black's island).

The other thing is that it manages to keep the more swashbuckling elements in play. Raymond E. Feist tends to be at his best when he focuses on that, and this book is basically 620 pages of it. Yeah, Prince of the Blood had some of that too, but it wasn't really as interesting and I think it got brought down by everything it did wrong.

Plus, I think it's more noticeable here because The King's Buccaneer easily could have succumbed to middle book syndrome. While it was setting up stuff for the next book and it acknowledged that's what it was doing, it also wasn't solely focused on that. It didn't allow the fact that it was setting the stage for what come next to override the story it was telling. This is notable because this is a problem Feist has in some of his other books.

I think this book is also better at setting up stuff later on. Admittedly, this is the first time I've read these books in ~10 years so there is a lot of stuff I've straight up forgotten, but I don't really remember Borric and Erland being characterised as troublemakers having that much of a bearing on their later appearances. Even the goodwill they earn from the monarchy in the Empire of Great Kesh ends up being walked back at the end of the Serpentwar saga.

What comes up in The King's Buccaneer does have that lasting impact, however. Being able to sail to Novindus becomes a cornerstone going forward. Even Nicholas' appointment as a naval officer has an impact, because the next time he appears, he's an admiral.

My only major gripe with this book (aside from the usual Feist problems outlined in my previous posts) is that this one points an arrow at some of the issues with his worldbuilding abilities. When he conceptualises a foreign culture that's meant to be very different from the Kingdom, they're either a warrior culture (the Tsurani, some of the Keshian cultures) or they're a hunter culture (true-blood Keshians). The people of Novindus continue this pattern.

In this case, it does sorta have to be that way for narrative purposes. There has to be some cultural reason why so many of them would be willing to go to war against a people in a land they're barely aware of. I still feel like this is reflective of a broader issue with Feist's writing though, and that's that he struggles to conceptualise a lot of the cultures in his world beyond these very broad strokes.

Still, overall, this one was decent. It's not the best book he's written, but it's still the best of the two Krondor's Sons books.

[qwanderer]

Loki in the Hall of Mirrors

This story is complicated. Not, like, as a plot, not particularly, but philosophically and thematically. It's got that great play of hero against villain that I love about the Loki story in general and that makes it all so divisive and messy. And I love it even more than I did on first watch.

The first time I watched the desert landing scene, I was like, "Wait? What happened to Allspeak?" because the people who live there don't seem to understand him. But on the second watch, I realized it could be a lack of context, rather than a break in translation. These people probably have an even chance of knowing nothing about Norse myth. Like, what if an alien came up to you and said "I am Boogle of Bofgar, I carry a burden"? You would still have questions like "What the hell is a boogle and why are you carrying your shit here?" So the basic dynamic of Allspeak is probably still functioning, and Loki probably understood their questions, but he was still trying to figure out how to answer when he got distracted by the TVA people.

It could even be an innate psychic ability rather than a magical one, as he seems to understand everyone in the TVA, including the man who can't be fluent in all languages like the field agents because he has never heard of a fish and the seemingly nonverbal robot. (Which of course makes me want Loki talking with Dum-E and the other shop bots! But I digress.)

Okay. I want to start talking about the next-level manipulation shit the TVA are pulling on Loki here. Time, as they say, moves differently in the TVA, and one might even assume that they can avoid having to deal with more variants at once than they can handle. And yet we see them dealing with exactly two other troublemakers during Loki's onboarding.

The first, I'm going to call little echo man.

Little echo man is incredibly annoying to Loki, because he does and says everything Loki might find himself inclined to do and say if he wanted to be difficult. Little echo man does these things in little annoying undignified ways, making them look silly and petulant. Little echo man protests and questions and pushes back, in his business suit and his long dark hair and pale skin, and clearly thinks everyone should treat him as important even though every indication is that he is an annoyance and an afterthought.

Perhaps he's a plant, and perhaps he's just a variant of an annoying but predictable regular they see who they lined up at the same time on purpose. But he is on purpose. Everything he does screams directly at Loki, "Don't do this."

We'll get to the second convenient intersection later.

The most obvious layer of manipulation is simply the beraucracy. They put him up against a series of obstacles which he needs to deal with to get anywhere else, and nothing he does can get him past those obstacles except compliance. All of these obstacles have personality, but they are not personable. They treat Loki like a bag of trash they have been tasked with taking to the curb. Annoying, distasteful, but ultimately routine. His silver tongue isn't going to get him anywhere because these people simply don't care.

I think a lot of these he just goes along with to see where it gets him, since at this point he still believes he has his magic in reserve. But the fact that he steps through the robot fryer even though he thinks he might be a robot without knowing (as others have pointed out, he spent thousands of years as a frost giant without knowing it, and he's recently spent time in the control of the being who shaped Nebula) is a testament to how deep they've already got their hooks in him.

They treat the robot fryer like it's routine, but come the next obstacle, they kill little echo man like it's routine, too. Because he didn't comply.

Loki is slowly being ironed flat to thread into their compliance mill.

And then - I love this, because it reminds me of one of my favorites among the multiplicity of Lokis, GoS!Loki - they put this line in as punctuation between the impersonal, compliance, don't phase of their manipulation and everything that comes after it.

When he's set before the judge, someone actually paying some attention to him, this is his chance to use his silver tongue on someone who will listen. But, although the judge listens, she treats him the same as all the other obstacles have - like listening is a distasteful chore she would like to be done with.

So it seems like the perfect moment for a dramatic escape. Except his magic is gone.

"It's not your story," the judge says. "It never was."

That hammers in all the worst things Loki has ever believed about himself - that he stands in the shadows of others, that he will never have the central place he was raised to desire, that he is, and always will be, a villain to be vanquished rather than a person with choices and agency.

Enter Mobius.

Mobius is a big echo.

He draws all the attention in a room. He is everything that Loki wishes to be - he is powerful, informed, prepared, in control. Capable of charming the judge. And most importantly, he is actively interested in Loki.

At this point in Loki's journey - both in the show and in his life - that has to be irresistible.

So Mobius is in a perfect position to wrap Loki right around his pinky finger.

He listens to Loki without shutting him down, the way all the obstacles have. When Loki tells Mobius he's going to burn down the TVA, Mobius suggests a couple of places he might want to start. One concrete, small, mischievous. One an indication that he's open to Loki doing larger, more significant things here in the future.

He shows Loki his own past and future - but carefully edited, to paint a particular picture.

So many echoes, so many reflections - Loki is in a house of mirrors. Lost, disoriented. Distorted one way, then the other. Magnified and examined.

Loki snarks, and Mobius comments, "Makes you sound smart." Affirms Loki for that little mischievous bit of personality.

Mobius shows Loki some of the most terrible things he's done, and questions them. Pushes Loki away from them. Then changes direction before he can get too heavy-handed, to basically fangirl over the DB Cooper adventure. That's mischief. That's good. I like that.

Punishes him for a small infraction, just to remind him who is in control and that even looking threatening could be seen as a problem.

I think it was at about this point that I got hard reminded of the dynamics of the show White Collar. It's a buddy cop show on a basic level and sometimes the relationship can be very sweet, but sometimes Peter spends one too many times reminding Neal that he can send him back to prison any time he wants and the power dynamic shows its messed up edges.

Mobius is part of the machine, and the machine is doing terrible things to Loki, but I have at least a sliver of hope that the relationship could gain more balance - more genuine balance, not based on the faux freedom that Loki has gained by the end of the episode. There's something to be said for making changes to a system from within that system, but for that to be meaningful change, Mobius would have to change as a person.

Anyway, this current nastily powerful Mobius pushes Loki as hard as he can, and then is conveniently interrupted by the actions of another variant, leaving Loki alone with his remote.

It could easily have been on purpose. The only thing Loki learns by escaping that room is that the TVA is more powerful than any force in the universe, in his experience.

Let's talk about the other Loki variant for a minute. It took me until the second viewing to realize the symbolism of leaving a small child the only survivor in a place of worship, then giving her something to turn her blue.

Odin said he found Loki in a temple, in the aftermath of a battle.

It's actually frighteningly easy to imagine how a distraught Loki could get to a place where he feels the need to genuinely burn down the TVA, and kill every agent in it. Because the TVA put certain clips in his little future show, focusing on the death of his mother, the way his own actions affected it, and the futility and brutality of his own death at the hands of Thanos.

They don't show him the destruction of Asgard, his own role in helping save the evacuees, and the way Thanos decimated the population of that transport before it could even reach Earth. They don't show him the devastation of his home or his capacity to do good.

A Loki who knows that the power of the TVA exists and that he has the capacity to be Asgard's heroic savior would do anything to get that power and save his people.

But we haven't met that Loki yet. I'm sure we will, and it's going to be exhilarating.

This Loki is being taught the importance of control over little things, and so when he gets his collar off and onto that guard, he toys with her, just to see that he can. They have been toying with him and it's oh so satisfying to turn the tables. But it's still compliance in its own way, the petty little mischief that Mobius has been steering him towards.

Loki has been given just enough freedom, just enough choices, that it seems like his own choice to watch the rest of the slide show and come to the obvious conclusion - there's no "out" to go to. His life has gone on without him, and ended. And there's really no point in his trying to fix it. No putting things back the way they were.

So he admits to Mobius - the person who has listened hardest, probably, besides his mother - he admits that he is small and scared and lashing out. That he doesn't know what to do.

Of course, this is when Mobius introduces the task the TVA has for Loki - to take down his other self.

Oh, I can't wait for the next episode! I want to know where this is going.

(I've popped in some panels from Loki: Agent of Asgard because it's my favorite and the show is giving me feelings about it.)