the mystery portal is living in my head rent-free.
for years i've been aimlessly speculating about the possibility that raven has a bond to someone unexpected, simply because they established that she has bonds with qrow, tai, and yang, but logically she needs to have one with someone else to leave. and the obvious answer to that is vernal, but 1. they never mention it anywhere, not even as an 'used to have', 2. there's no way to know if vernal was already with the tribe during the flashbacks (she doesn't look to be much older than yang, at most i'd say she's about the same age as cinder), and 3. we don't even know if raven had gone back to the tribe at this point in time.
and it's not like i ever really thought it would actually go anywhere—i was fully prepared to have been overthinking things like usual lol—but to be here now is like... they're feeding into my bad habits... and i don't know what to think ಠ╭╮ಠ
I don’t know how to explain it entirely but I think if I could soak somebody in gasoline then make them fear for their life for a while playing with a pack of matches & possibly putting on a bit of a clown show like “what’s behind your ear” oh who would’ve guessed, a match!
Like I really think, I honestly might feel like okay for a while
That in using 'Mall Goth Sauron' as the take on Dark Willow over 'misogynist has character randomly killed for LULZ' it also allows for greater accountability on the one hand and for Season 7 to thematically focus on repairing all this damage in the midst of facing an enemy of shadows reliant on lies to further itself. The only way to break the Druj is the absolute Truth in a very Zoroastrian sense. Characters don't get to neatly skip past accountability for their actions, and this would spiral over into further later seasons with the essential reality that in an otherwise lower-level setting this one random girl from California is a Dark Phoenix-tier reality warper and the most powerful person on the planet, or the universe.
And the questions of how that power could and should be employed on the one hand and that Willow is essentially a Doctor Strange type who beats up Gods and Eldritch Abominations for her regular line of work where her counterparts deal with the more 'street level' crises would in turn be the logical conclusion of where the show ends. She doesn't do as much physical fighting for the same reason that Stephen Strange never uses magic to go punch the Hulk in the face, her narrative role is ultimately that of Sorceress Supreme of Earth, with literally nobody in an ancient established war anticipating that this one random ginger from California was and is the new Sorceress Supreme and that if they had had such awareness the realities are that this power would and could have taken worse forms.
Unfortunately for the world, the reality too is that it is a shy computer geek who has a not at all subtle dark side and the usual teenage anxieties and insecurities given the equivalent of being able to reliably actually do things other people might dream of but can never do.
But again as long as Dawn Summers being a good thing is a narrative convention that's established memory magic is a poor choice to show the corrupting effects of reality-warping. It's a case of 'yes as established in canon all of this is true for that one season but then they decided to retcon it, so the fans are not obligated to care about it any more than the canon does about this itself.'