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tyrantisterror · 6 months ago

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Yeah shit I took a shower after posting this and immediately thought of some more that I should have mentioned.

Like, the biggest one that I can't believe I didn't include was Hellboy, which not only has MANY arcs that are explicitly about its pulpy cambion hero fighting fairy tale characters (with Baba Yaga being one of his most deadly recurring villains, even!), but ALSO is responsible for introducing me to many of the more obscure fairy tales and, indeed, myths, folk tales, and works of fiction in general. Mike Mignola's notes about his research materials in the trade paperbacks of Hellboy played a big role in teenage me developing a keener interest in researching this stuff in depth, I owe so much to Hellboy.

Coraline is another modern fairy tale that I love, a take on the Disobedient Girl archetype where the girl gets to win in the end (albeit after facing a LOT of peril), which is a rarity. And speaking of Neil Gaiman, I really love Stardust, another movie that hits that Princess Bride snarky romantic fairy tale itch.

You know what fairy tale series I really wish I could get a proper DVD box set of? Ever After High. No, seriously! You might think it's just a giant toy commercial, and yes it definitely is that, but it's also got this meta narrative analysis of fairy tales and their legacies that's really intriguing. See, in Ever After High, every character in fairy tales is basically a part of a legacy, with different iterations of each tale being literal generations of these families. There's a dynasty of Snow Whites, each of whom have a daughter that is then persecuted by an evil queen (who is the daughter of the previous evil queen, who's the daughter of the evil queen before her, and so on and so forth) and ends up in an enchanted sleep that is broken by true love's kiss. Some of the current crop of fairy tale characters think this legacy rocks - the current Snow White's daughter, Apple White, is stoked to be menaced by the hot goth daughter of the current evil queen, and can't wait to fall into that enchanted sleep so she can find true love. The daughter of the evil queen, though, is less enthused, and wonders why they can't break out of their roles - does she HAVE to be an evil queen just because her mother and her grandmother and so on were? That's a really engaging premise, which plays with the fact that fairy tales are told and retold so often yet rarely change the big parts of it (something that Dimension 20's Neverafter also explored, by the bye). Also it's pretty gay - like, after a point it's clear to everyone except Apple White herself that her desire for her destined nemesis to bully her is, uh, not just about fulfilling a story requirement. It's a shame the dolls themselves were ugly pumpkin-headed things that didn't sell for shit, dooming the series to premature cancellation and obscurity.

I want to give honorable mentions to Rango, which while very clearly a Western pastiche rather than a fairy tale is nonetheless an adaptation of the fairy tale "Seven in One Blow, and Strange Magic, which is about fairies but feels less like a fairy tale and more like... I dunno, a weird George Lucas-helmed romantic comedy jukebox musical that I'm nonetheless very endeared to.

Finally (for now), I want to include Tale of Tales, an adaptation of the fairy tale collection of the same name that has a wonderful gothic horror vibe to it, which @bzedan mentioned in the replies of this post while I was in the shower and made me kick myself for forgetting it. And I should put the 2017 movie Erementari, an adaptation of "The Devil and the Blacksmith," here too, especially since you all know how I love Satan.

What are your top favorite fairy tales? Either classic literarily stories, adaptations of literary fairy tales, wholly modern fairy tales, or even just stories that you think are structured like fairy tales. (Roald Dahl books, Studio Ghibli movies, even Shrek and Puss in Boots movies, etc.)

That is an unfathomably vast genre of fiction to try and condense into a ranked numbered list. I think... I think that may be impossible to actually answer as requested. But I can ramble about some of my favorites I suppose.

Let's do this sorta like the Oscars and divide things into categories.

Category 1: The Heavy Hitters

Some fairy tales are significantly more famous than others, so this category is for them: the heavy hitters, the classic fairy tales that are most well known, as defined by my own nebulous perception of which fairy tales are more popular than others.

Of the heavy hitters, my favorites are Little Red Riding Hood and Jack and the Beanstalk. Little Red Riding Hood is such a spooky story no matter which telling you're looking at, and has contributed a lot to both the fantasy and horror genres thanks to its simple yet evocative premise and visuals. Jack and the Beanstalk, meanwhile, is just a really solid story of a trickster fool, which is one of my favorite archetypes in all of fiction. Love a good trickster fool.

Category 2: The Obscurities

As I said, this ask is covering a HUGE amount of fiction in its topic, especially since the border between a fairy tale and, like, ANY folklore isn't really well-defined (not in a way anyone can agree too, anyway). But there are a lot of obscure folktales I love that are at least sometimes lumped in as fairy tales, and I'm gonna list them here:

The Lambton Worm - a classic tale of dragon-slaying and getting fucked over by prophecies

The Lindworm Prince - queen can't concieve and consults a witch, ignores witch's directions, gives birth to human baby and dragon baby. Dragon baby grows up and demands a wife before human baby can get his, and a clever girl decides this is her chance to get rewarded for monster fucking.

Maud and the Dragon of Mordiford - the story of a girl who adopts a dragon only for it to end tragically, which inspired one of the novels I'm gonna write one of these days

Tam Lin - the story of a woman who wanted that elf dick and wasn't afraid to do some weird shit to get it

Biancabella and Samaritana - a story about a girl and her sister who is a snake because her mother had trouble concieving

King Odd - a story about an odd king who's actually an exiled fairy queen in disguise, and the man who wins her heart after surviving her attempt to execute him. It's like a Nordic medieval Tenchi Muyo.

You've probably noticed some themes about my favorites right now - lots of stories with dragons, people being transformed into monsters, and heroes who are into that monster shit.

Category 3: Archetypal Pieces

Ok, so for this I'm going to focus less on individual folktales and more on recurring plotlines, character types, and story beats, which you begin to notice the more you read up on Fairy Tales in part because many of the more obscure ones take beats from ones you're probably more familiar with and mix them together in new ways. So, my favorite plot beats in fairy tales:

Any sort of monster, obviously

The villain who literally removed their heart out of fear of being vulnerable

The baleful polymorph (i.e. a human who inhabits a beast/monster body against their will)

Monsterfucker protagonists

Trickster Fool protagonists

Disobedient Girls (examples: Little Red, Goldilocks), though I don't like how this archetype is treated

You want to have a baby and seek a witch and she gives you VERY SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS which you ignore because you really want this baby and oops you've got twins and one of them is some sort of monster good job asshole

The hero helps three (or more) people/creatures in need, and when shit hits the fan, they return the favor

Category 4: Modern(ish) Adaptations

Our penultimate category focuses on adaptations of fairy tales from, like, the 1900's on - anything made in a century I've lived in part of, basically. These arguably shouldn't be divided from "normal" fairy tales, but my brain regards them differently than, like, Victorian era fairy tale retellings, because hey, I lived in the age of these, more or less. They're "modern" for whatever nebulous definition of that word my brain's decided on.

And there's a lot for me to put in this category. Sleeping Beauty might be my favorite of Disney's fairy tale retellings, though Beauty and the Beast is a strong competitor for that role (and maybe Mulan, if we count its source material as a fairy tale, but I'm not sure we can). I think overall I like Sleeping Beauty's more stylized animation and character designs as well as its less conventional story-telling structure a bit more than B&B's, but Beauty and the Beast is still gorgeous and kind of perfectly scripted, so it's a tough competition.

My alltime favorite adaptation of fairy tales, though, would be Jim Henson's The Storyteller:

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Using the magic of 1980's muppeteering, it adapts several fairy tales, many of which are more on the obscure side, and sometimes mashes a few different ones together to make sure each episode has a good three act structure. It's wonderful and fully captures the weirdness of fairy tales, while also having a lot of heart - The Heartless Giant is my favorite of the whole series.

Category 5: Works Inspired By Fairy Tales

I almost lumped the following stories into the above category, but while the division is, again, purely in my mind, there's something different about modern works that claim to adapt fairy tales 1:1 and ones that take fairy tale characters or concepts and throw them in entirely new tales with different directions, so that's what our final category will be.

I've gushed about Puss In Boots: The Last Wish enough that I don't think it'd surprise anyone that it would end up here - the same goes with the works of Rankin Bass, which is why I doubt anyone is surprised I'd put The Last Unicorn here too (technically based on a book, but it still fits the "has big fairy tale vibes despite not being based on one specific one" that I'm using to justify this category).

Pan's Labyrinth would also go in this category, with a protagonist who's both a trickster fool AND a disobedient girl, as well as a beautifully gothic take on fairy tale motifs. I'd put Company of Wolves here as well, being a very multifaceted riff on the Little Red Riding Hood story and a movie that sets both my analytical and creative parts of my brain on fire each time I want it.

I'd also put The Path, a short video game explicitly inspired by Company of Wolves, on this part of the favorites list. It's a game about, like, a DOZEN or so different takes on Red Riding Hood and her story, all with different flavors and subtext to analyze. It's unsettling but good.

Dimension 20 had a whole season focused on a horror-themed crossover of fairy tale characters called Neverafter that was fantastic, with one of the best riffs on Little Red Riding Hood I've ever seen, Puss in Boots and Pinocchio working together as con artists, and a vampire Snow White, so yeah 10/10 there, no notes.

And while I've only seen scattered bits of it, what I've seen of Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure, a sequel series to Disney's Rapunzel adaptation, is pretty great, though maybe I just think Cass is hot.

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If you put an angry woman with a sword in your work of fiction I will at least stay for a few episodes to see what you do with her.

Given how much it consumed my brain in so little time, Revolutionary Girl Utena has to rank among my favorite Fairy Tale things ever - like, this is too chaotic a list to really rank things, but if I were to try, it'd at least be in the top 10. The same is true for Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods, which in addition to being a big fun crossover between a bunch of the Heavy Hitter fairy tales, is also one of the best musicals ever written - and indeed, one of the best stage shows of all time.

Shit, where do I put A Midsummer Night's Dream? It feels like it should be here, but it predates the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, whose works my brain categorizes as "old fairy tales" rather than "modern fairy tale retellings." Well, it'd be somewhere among these categories, being one of the best tales with fairies in it ever told.

The Princess Bride would be up high like Utena no matter what - it's one of the best works of fiction about love that we've got. Same goes with Galavant, which I consider its spiritual successor, although I think one could argue Galavant isn't specifically a fairy tale pastiche and is more just a lampooning of fantasy in general.

Oh, and The Hazards of Love, a concept album by The Decemberists, should be here too. That's the last one I can think of right now, but I'm sure I'll think of a few others later that I like enough to regret not putting on here.

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ridiasfangirlings · 5 years ago

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Hi Ridia-san! I had a discussion with someone who thought that yata had the tendency to get away with things in canon and didn't have any character depth whatsoever,I'm new in the fandom so I don't have all the material to make an argument,what's your opinion on this topic?(they also think that yata is not good enought for fushimi but i don't know about that)sorry for my engli

….I don't usually answer these out of order but I feel the need to defend my baby whose good name has been besmirched D: Also you’ll see this is why I only did a short answer today, this one took me all evening...long rambly meta under the cut:

To be honest I find it a bit odd to say that Yata 'gets away with things' in canon while also claiming he's not good enough for Fushimi, considering Fushimi arguably gets away with more than nearly anyone else in canon – like, I love him and he has a lot of issues that make his reasoning clear, but it doesn't make the way Fushimi acts okay and one of the unfortunate weaknesses I think in his character arc is that he's never really quite called on it or forced to examine his actions very closely, whereas I would argue that Yata is forced to face the weaknesses in his world view and comes out a better person for it. Same with the argument that Yata has no character depth, his arc is one of the more clearly articulated in the series and I would honestly wonder if someone's been actually paying attention to what's happening in the series if they think Yata has no depth and that the Yata we meet at the beginning of the series is the same as the one that ends the series.

So yeah, Yata. I've got a few more in-depth asks about him here and here that are worth looking at, but just to go over his character beat by beat and why I don't see him as 'getting away' with very much at all. He's definitely a flawed character, but so is everyone in K (as it should be, as they say there's nothing more boring than a perfect hero). The Yata we meet first in LSW is young and probably a bit overbearing for a lot of people, someone who isn't good at reading the emotions of others but who ultimately wants to be a good kid. Like at the beginning of LSW with the Yata Team we can see Yata's good and bad sides: he wants to be part of a group, he wants to go on adventures and do awesome things and maybe be a bit of a delinquent (but, notably, for all Yata wants people to think he's a tough hardcore punk Yata's not the one who was cheating on tests or bullying skinny unhealthy nerds, Yata's form of rebellion actually comes off as a bit more of an outer shell covering the actual inner core of creamy nougat).

At the same time, Yata doesn't realize at all that this isn't what his 'friends' like or what they want to do, he tries to get them to join in with him without seeming to care that they have no interest and he gets annoyed at the school being full of boring stuck up kids. Obviously this is an immature worldview but Yata's immature, he's a kid. And it's worth remembering his back story here, that Yata's a kid who doesn't feel he fits in with his own family, who felt for years that he was the only one who could protect his mom and that he just moved back to Shizume after having lived away in a place where it's pretty clearly implied that he did in fact have his own group of friends – Kamamoto, notably – and where he was popular and looked up to. Now he's in a different school in a different place and he doesn't quite manage to fit in well and it's like here he is again, the only square peg in a place full of round holes.

Even so, Yata still tries to keep strong to his own beliefs. Yata has some notable masculinity issues and I think he has this image in his head of what a 'man' should be, and that image is basically a superhero. Yata just wants to be someone who fights on the side of justice and protects everyone, to the point he takes the fall for his not-friends cheating even though he had nothing to do with it. And as Fushimi somewhat points out to him afterward, some of that may well have been rooted in Yata's own ego – wanting to be acknowledged, to be looked up to as the one who protected his friends – but I think he also sincerely wanted to do what he thought a good leader would do. Then when he sees Fushimi being bullied it's the same – Yata I think wants to be needed and to belong, and just as Fushimi feels outside his family Yata does too, like maybe if he can protect people and maybe if he has someone who needs him then Yata can finally feel like he's found a place where he fits.

Then of course he's blindsided when Fushimi doesn't show any gratitude and it makes him reexamine his own motivations, like did he really want to save Fushimi or did he just want to look good, superficially, be thanked and praised. Yata also realizes what his 'friends' think of him at this point, that they've been mocking him all this time and of course Yata gets mad – as a straightforward kid who wears his heart on his sleeve Yata doesn't get why people would talk behind his back, he wants to be told upfront. But here he's thrown the same words, that he just wanted gratitude and praise, that he made the 'Yata Team' do what he wanted and play the games he wanted, and that they thought he'd get mad if they said anything. The notable thing with Yata here though is when he thinks about it he does get depressed, he feels like a bully and that truly is the last thing he wants. Yata can be overbearing but he's not a bad kid and he's really upset by this. And remember again, we're talking someone whose behavior previously made him popular (in the Unused Tickets comic Yata mentions that at his previous birthday a lot of classmates showed up, so basically Yata went from being part of a huge friend circle to being outside of it, at the same time that he's also started feeling on the outside in his own family). And even though Yata was the one who was badmouthed behind his back, having his 'friends' repeat Fushimi's words about needing gratitude is enough to make him start to examine his own actions at least a little, trying to figure out where he went wrong.

This is the point where he meets Fushimi and everything's great for a while, they become friends and Yata gets clearly attached to this person who he thinks is so amazing. Even with the two of them more in sync at this point though it's clear that there are still things Yata doesn't understand, particularly involving Fushimi's family. He's confused when Fushimi's parents aren't home while Fushimi's sick and he knows that Niki affects Fushimi in bad ways, as he tells Aya, though at the same time he still wonders if Fushimi should visit Niki while he's in the hospital. I think it's clear that Yata knows something is wrong with Fushimi's family – he sees how Fushimi is with Niki and the Mothers short story indicates that Yata did see Niki at least a few other times and that he saw Kisa even less. He also has the whole scene at Fushimi's house when Fushimi's sick, noting how things that everyone should understand, like being taken care of when you're sick, are things that Fushimi doesn't get at all.

I can see there being some argument there that Yata should have known Fushimi was being abused and should have done something but remember, Yata's still a middle schooler at this point and besides, what would he have done? Telling his mom to call Child Services probably wouldn't have gone well, particularly considering that Kisa's super rich and that Fushimi I think wouldn't want to admit that anything's happening there, and making a fuss about it could cause Fushimi to push Yata away. With the circumstances being what they are, Yata does the only thing he can think to do: he asks Fushimi to run away with him move in with him, so that Fushimi can have a 'home.' (And speaking of the Mothers story, a note of development: when Yata meets Kisa post-ROK, he decides not to tell Fushimi and not to force on him the idea of seeing his mother again, because Yata's realized that it's up to Fushimi to bridge that gap and if Fushimi doesn't want to see Kisa he shouldn't have to.)

So a couple points about that previous paragraph, and their relationship this far: first, obviously, there's the idea that the two of them are people who feel they don't fit in anywhere who find themselves fitting in together. However, their ideas really aren't as aligned as they think, even at this point when things are going relatively well: Fushimi is happy with just Yata, Yata is happy with Fushimi but as we see eventually he clearly wants to belong to a larger group. Yata doesn't understand Fushimi's worldview, but the same is true for Fushimi, who doesn't realize that Yata doesn't think the same as he does. Also note that Fushimi at this point tends to categorize Yata's words in terms of 0 or 100 points, basically the idea that if Yata pleases Fushimi it's good but if he doesn't it's bad, and allowing no room for anything in between. Fushimi's upbringing being what it is I think that's understandable – I feel like Fushimi at this point in particular is fundamentally selfish, because he's had to be to survive, he's had to focus on himself and protect himself because no one else will. So it's easier for him to put Yata in the box of the person that pleases him, the person who's here to call Fushimi 'amazing' with shining eyes and to prop up Fushimi's own rock bottom sense of self esteem, rather than admitting that Fushimi's really the one who's clinging to Yata all this time as his only good thing, the only one who's ever cared about him. Yata, for his part, is clearly hugely protective of Fushimi and does plenty of things for Fushimi's sake that may not be the best for Yata himself – when Fushimi decides he isn't going to high school Yata does the same, even though he has way less prospects than Fushimi does.

(An aside, here: despite Fushimi's apathy towards school, he still gets good marks on exams and is noted to have some talent, while Yata is called useless by his teacher and later by Aya. Aya even says that Fushimi's 'merit' drops being near Yata. Basically Yata is being told by all corners that he's no good, he's useless, he's stupid, that even if he didn't drop out he wouldn't be able to go any further than he already has. For him, dropping out has more meaning because he won't be able to become anything with just a middle school education. Even so, Yata does it for Fushimi, because Fushimi's his best friend and because Fushimi wants to take on the world, and Yata believes in him – and Fushimi, for all his 0 or 100 points, doesn't think Yata's useless, or stupid, or without merit.)

On Yata's end, there is probably some selfish desire in his closeness with Fushimi: Yata wants to protect people and in a similar way to how Fushimi feels he must be useful somehow or else he's worthless and easy to abandon, Yata needs to have someone to protect or he feels out of place like he did in his house. Once his mother remarried to Yata it's like he lost his place entirely in a variety of ways: he can't be the one who protects his mom, he's not fully blood related to his siblings, he doesn't have a team of friends who look up to him and follow him. But with Fushimi, Yata's got someone who needs him, a guy who can't take care of himself and needs someone to make sure he eats his meals and has a decent bed to sleep in. Of course there's true affection there as well-- Fushimi is Yata's partner, he's Yata's best friend, he's the guy who Yata truly believes can take on the whole world.

And I think Yata has changed by this point too, that even though he wants to have someone to protect he's not doing this just to get gratitude or to feel better about himself. He's doing it because fundamentally Yata wants to protect people he cares about and Fushimi at this point is the number one person for him (and here's already where the cracks start forming too, because for all Yata thinks Fushimi is amazing I think he's always seen them as partners, whereas Fushimi for his own protection tried to think of Yata as beneath him, as someone who followed him, because he can't trust in Yata's sincere affection for him as friend. There has to be a reason, there has to be something he can quantify so he knows Yata won't leave).

Then Homra happens and this is where I feel like Yata gets some undue shit from fandom because I've seen a lot of people claim that 'Yata ignored Fushimi in favor of Mikoto instead, Yata stopped caring about Fushimi and only cared about Homra, Yata made Fushimi leave, etc. etc.' The thing is, I don't think the text entirely bears this out. Side Red and LSW I think make it clear that it's not that Yata ignored Fushimi, it's that the parts of both of them that the other didn't really understand were exacerbated by joining Homra. Like I said above, Fushimi was happy just with Yata (from LSW: “Why do you want me to be understood by everyone when you yourself don’t? … If YOU understand me, I would be content”) and he assumed Yata felt the same. Yata, meanwhile, has always longed to be part of a group and he assumed that Fushimi, being the lonely kid whose walls are always up, must have felt the same (LSW, again: “You don’t want to keep being misunderstood like this, do you?”). Neither one understands the other. When they join Homra, Yata thinks that it's the most amazing place and that Mikoto is the most amazing hero, and he can't understand why anyone would think otherwise. Side Red:

“I wonder if it’s the same for Saru-kun?”

In response to that unexpected question, Yata blinked once or twice.

“Eh?”

“I wonder if Saru-kun, who felt the same way as you, is also letting himself be saved by us?”

It was a question he’d never even thought of. It wasn’t something he had thought of, but he tried thinking about it and came up with a simple answer.

“I dunno, but isn’t he?”

Being beside Suoh, there wasn’t anyone who wouldn’t have their hearts moved and wouldn’t have their blood boil, Yata thought simply. Totsuka didn’t comment on Yata’s answer, just said ‘I see’, and then put on a face like he was looking somewhere distant again.

Clearly, this shows that Yata assumed that Fushimi was also being 'saved' by Homra, because he can't fathom anything else. On the one hand, here's Yata's flaws in glaring obviousness, he's so blinded by his own hero worship of Mikoto and his own needs that he doesn't realize at all what I think Totsuka is trying to hint to him here. On the other, it's not like Fushimi's doing himself any favors. In Side Red it's also noted by Yata that since he joined Homra he hasn't hung out with Fushimi as much anymore, just the two of them – but earlier in the novel when Yata and Kamamoto are watching over Honami and Anna Yata mentions that the orders were originally for himself and Fushimi, and Fushimi bailed. A mission for the two of them, where they could hang out together, and Fushimi was the one who turned away, likely because it was a Homra mission, and so on Homra's terms and not Fushimi's. But Yata doesn't know that because Fushimi never says so and Fushimi's a hard guy to understand, especially for a straightforward person like Yata. So to Yata this seems more like Fushimi blowing him off when they could have hung out than Fushimi being upset because he doesn't want Yata to look at anyone else with shining eyes, and there's really no way Yata could have known what the reason was when Fushimi won't even give him the smallest crumb of a hint.

We also know from LSW that as much as Yata loves Homra, Fushimi is still important to him even then. In LSW it's noted (emphasis mine) “The position as Homra’s vanguard he held together with Fushimi was Yata’s pride.” For Yata, it's not just that he's trusted by Homra, it's that Fushimi is there with him. Seriously, read this and tell me Yata 'stopped caring about Fushimi':

They constantly had disputes with other groups and had a brush with death on countless occasions. In this one and a half year - as long as Fushimi was at his back, Yata was never afraid. He had not even once regretted that they had thrown themselves into this world. He didn’t think that these satisfying days were lacking anything.

He could feel the heat beneath his left collarbone. As if there was a second heart, throb, power was carried through his whole body with one big beat. If Fushimi was close he could even feel the power of the mark he had in the same spot.

Yata's pride isn't just Homra, it's Fushimi. And this is where their misunderstandings continue, because Fushimi assumes, all on his own, that Yata doesn't care about him anymore, because Yata's looking at someone else with shining eyes. Yata is not obligated to be Fushimi's self esteem crutch, he's allowed to be impressed by other people (and as is clear in the interlude I quoted above, Yata still thinks Fushimi's amazing in his own way). Yata wants Fushimi to be part of Homra, to make friends, and Fushimi doesn't like that because I think he assumes that if there are other people around why would Yata ever choose Fushimi – if Fushimi's not the most amazing, if Fushimi's not the one whose plans never fail, then Fushimi has nothing to offer and why would Yata ever choose him over all these other people. And I think in a way Fushimi almost makes this his own self-fulfilling prophecy: he never tells Yata what he's feeling or what's happening with him, so it seems like Yata doesn't care because Yata doesn't know. An example: in LSW when he sees Niki's 'ghost' in the window of his old house he almost tells Yata, and Yata misunderstands thinking Fushimi's talking about something that happened at Homra. Rather than correcting him or qualifying what he meant, Fushimi sinks back into silence and takes this to mean that because Yata didn't push him – when Yata has no way of knowing what was going on – this means Yata didn't care. Yata may not be listening as hard as he could be, but Fushimi isn't speaking loud enough to be heard anyway.

The betrayal is another point between them, when Fushimi actually leaves. First, obviously, Fushimi never 'betrayed' Homra – he is fully within his rights to leave a clan he didn't feel comfortable in, and Mikoto clearly never thinks of him as a traitor. Yata doesn't see this at all, but there are different reasons for it. First – Fushimi clearly frames all this as a betrayal. He doesn't say the real reason he's leaving, he doesn't approach Yata calmly and explain himself. He mocks Homra, mocks Mikoto, mocks all the things that he knows will make Yata angry, and then he burns his tattoo. To Fushimi, Yata's anger and look of betrayal here is all for Homra, that when Yata says 'did you forget this mark is our pride,' Yata means Homra. But the passage I quoted from LSW a bit ago reveals the misunderstanding: to Yata, that mark isn't Homra's pride, it's his and Fushimi's. To Yata, the Homra tattoo in the same place as Fushimi's symbolizes their bond as partners, that second heartbeat he can feel whenever Saruhiko's near.

And Fushimi burns it in front of his eyes.

So for Yata's feelings: yes, he's angry that Fushimi dared to leave Homra and Mikoto. Yata's always had that blindness, the same one Kusanagi notes in the Shrine Visit short story is common in Homra, that everyone tends to assume it's Homra vs the world, that you're one of us or you're an enemy. That blind hero worship is enough to make him think of Fushimi as an enemy just for leaving Homra...except it's pretty clear throughout the series that Yata doesn't actually feel that way (in fact if there's one weakness in Fushimi's arc I feel it's that we get a lot of how Yata feels about Fushimi but precious little concrete moments showing how Fushimi feels about Yata). Shortly after Fushimi leaves we have Yata talking to Totsuka and Yata's angry, he's upset...but:

He regretted it. Grabbing a pillow and pressing his face into it, clenching his teeth so much he cut his own mouth, even then he couldn’t stop regretting.

“I- if he’d say he changed his mind and wants to apologize and come back, then I’m going to apologize together with him to Mikoto-san. He isn’t the type to apologize by himself so I’ll make him apologize and if Mikoto-san’d say things won’t be settled unless he beats Saruhiko up then I’ll get beat up together with him.”

No one's here to give Yata gratitude for that. Fushimi can't hear Yata saying he would be beaten up for Fushimi's sake, because he can't let Fushimi get beaten alone. But Yata still says it, because he still can't abandon Fushimi. And yes, he still doesn't understand – he still thinks of things in terms of Fushimi coming back, not that Fushimi didn't belong in the first place – but Yata doesn't really hate Fushimi either, as much as he wishes he did. Nor does Yata ever stop trying to understand – in the Cellar chapter of Memory of Red he even asks Fushimi straight out why he left Homra. And even with Fushimi still a member of S4 Yata also clearly seems about to ask Fushimi if they can be friends again at the end of chapter, even though Yata still doesn't know why Fushimi's become this way. It's Fushimi who rebuffs him, who won't take anything less than total understanding, and who can't let himself have a 'half-hearted thing' – he can't trust that he has all Yata's affection, so he'll just have all Yata's hate instead.

Jumping ahead then to S1 and after, the first thing I feel should be said on Yata's behalf for anything that happens during the season and the aftermath: Totsuka fucking died in Yata's arms. This is important, because even though the series only lightly touches on Yata's trauma he is still very clearly traumatized by it and I think that informs a lot of Yata's actions in S1. And honestly if we're going to complain about Yata getting away with things in S1 we have to extend that to all of Homra because yes, they do make what from an objective viewpoint would be some rather poor decisions – in seeking revenge, and helping Mikoto seek revenge, they're basically risking a catastrophe that could kill hundreds of thousands of people if Mikoto's Sword falls.

Now whether anyone in Homra aside from Kusanagi and Anna really understands this is debatable, personally I really don't think Yata does. He even says himself in Countdown that he never thought about what Mikoto was thinking and that he never really understood Mikoto. Yata's giving his best in this space though, even as Kamamoto notes that he hasn't been eating or sleeping well, because Yata is determined to avenge the death of a precious friend who died in his arms. That this feeling could have negative consequences isn't really his to think about and that it puts him on opposite sides from Fushimi isn't a consideration either because they're already on opposite sides (and even so, Yata does try to rein in his temper when he meets Fushimi at Ashinaka in episode 5. It's Fushimi who clearly initiates that fight and who goads Yata into it, because he still needs Misaki's eyes on him, he needs Misaki's hate, and he doesn't want to deal with a Yata who puts things like Mikoto's wishes over hating and fighting Fushimi).

Then Mikoto dies and this is another point where I think Yata gets some undeserved flack, for the way he acts in the aftermath. So keep in mind Yata has just lost two people who are very important to him (as have Kusanagi and Anna and all the others, and that's why I personally give them all some leeway in their respective reactions at this point because you can't always control grief). Yata's also lost the place he belongs – to Yata, Homra was the thing he always wished for, a space where he really fits, where he's one of the group and not that kid on the outside. Even when Fushimi is gone, Homra is Yata's rock. When Mikoto dies I think part of Yata knows that Homra's not going to be the same and that it's likely to break apart but he doesn't want to believe it, doesn't want to see his precious place crumble, and so he reacts poorly when Kusanagi says he's closing the bar down.

Obviously Yata's not considering Kusanagi's feelings in this, and he's running a little roughshod over everyone else, trying to keep the mood up by suggesting a trip to the sea even though it's clear that no one is interested. It's like he's regressed a little to the middle school kid with the Yata Team, deciding what they should do for them, but in this case it's not because he wants to be someone looked up to but more that he's trying to hold onto his past because the idea of a future without Homra scares him. Again, Yata's someone who is pretty constantly told he's an idiot and has no other prospects (and he's internalized that too, in Countdown 1 he even says right out “Because I'm stupid I fail even though I give my best”). I think even though Yata hasn't got the same level of issues that Fushimi does he's still someone who feels like maybe he can't belong anywhere – he wants to try, which Fushimi doesn't because Fushimi assumes he'll fail which I think is where their difference lies – and I think for him seeing Homra crack is like suddenly not belonging anywhere at all, like when the Yata Team told him they didn't like him, except this time there's no Fushimi there by his side (and it is notable that while Kamamoto, good guy that he is, tries to cheer Yata up and be there for him Kamamoto's also busy with his own stuff and that really leaves Yata as the only 'main' member of Homra with no partner to help him get through this. The Homra alphabet pairs have each other, Kamamoto's taking care of Anna, but Yata has no one because his 'person' left long ago).

This sends Yata into a pretty long period of depression, which we see in MK and throughout the pre-MK side materials. Obviously Yata's not the only one hurting (Anna and Kusanagi have a lot of pain too, though most of Kusanagi's is offscreen), but I don't think it's fair to fault him for being selfish in his own pain. Yata sits at the bar and stares at old videos of when everyone was happy and for him this is just the lowest point, where he feels like he has nobody who cares and no place to belong. It's indicated that Kamamoto has tried a little to keep an eye on Yata and he does try to call Yata in MK when Anna's in danger (and is ignored), but I think it's understandable that Yata would feel so down and abandoned. He says in Countdown that he hates when people leave him without explaining themselves, the scars of Fushimi's betrayal still strongly there, and I think it's understandable at this point that he feels as if he's been left by everyone.

(Though also worth noting: even though Yata was so angry at Fushimi, in the LSW novel epilogue the one thing that Yata has to cling to, that he doesn't have to regret, is that Fushimi is still alive. “That guy was alive. They would collide again endless times after this, let out anger and questions, and they could try to talk.” Yata can't speak to Totsuka or Mikoto anymore to find out what they were thinking or why they chose the paths they did, but he can still one day reach out to Fushimi and that's important to him.)

And then in MK when he hears that Anna's in trouble Yata does pull himself out of his funk and goes to help her. Even if he doesn't answer his phone for Kamamoto right away due his depression and the general lethargy brought out by it, now that he's needed, now that there's someone who needs protecting, Yata's up and ready. It isn't because he wants gratitude, it's not because he wants to be a hero, it's because Anna's in danger and he cares about her. Yata also swallows his pride and calls Fushimi for help and I think it's clear that this isn't Yata just using Fushimi when it's convenient or anything like that. Yata initially is against calling Fushimi when Kamamoto suggests it because Yata has all this resentment and anger still built up about the betrayal, but even so he knows that Kamamoto's right that Fushimi might be the only person who can help them and so he makes the call. Fushimi of course mocks him for it (I wrote a bit about the call in general here way back), probably feeling like Yata's only calling him because now Fushimi's needed, but that isn't really the case and even if it was, this is still something Fushimi broke himself.

When we get to the back half of MK I think Yata shows a lot of growth actually – even though he does rush in like an idiot, because rushing in is really all Yata knows how to do, he still doesn't completely blow off help from the Silvers, not treating this like a 'you're in Homra or you're against Homra' situation like he might once have. He also clearly tries to thank Fushimi for his help after everything's gone down, which to me shows some definite growth again on Yata's part – Fushimi is still unable to accept that gratitude, but Yata tries. And he keeps trying even into ROK, where his first non-flashback scene with Fushimi is once again Yata trying to thank Fushimi for his help and I think at this point Yata really doesn't want to treat Fushimi like an enemy anymore. Countdown 1 gives us a lot of character growth for Yata, where he really recognizes that he's never quite understood the people he loves and where he makes the decision not to make that mistake again. He wants to support Anna, so he asks her what she wants from him instead of assuming. He wants to understand Fushimi, so he tries to find a way to mend fences (and then Fushimi hits all the buttons he know will hurt in order to make Yata lose his temper again, because Fushimi is nothing if not a master of sabotaging his own happiness).

Continuing from there too, we see a lot of growth in Yata's mindset and his way of dealing with Fushimi and with other clans from this point out. Where Fushimi is clearly displeased about the alliance from the beginning, Yata seems to accept it fairly quickly and he appears to be on pretty good terms with the Silvers, treating them as Anna's friends rather than outsiders who aren't part of Homra – he's graduated from the narrow viewpoint that Kusanagi describes in the Shrine Visit story, he's willing to see people now as more than with us or against us. And even though he may not like Munakata Yata is very clearly trying to understand why Fushimi does – during the Mihashira attack we see him wondering why someone would follow a person like the Blue King and it's blindingly obvious that he's meaning Fushimi here. Yata is trying to understand, because he clearly has decided he wants to fix what's broken between him and Fushimi. Saying Yata 'gets away with a lot' or 'doesn't deserve Fushimi' seems particularly unfair to me in this context, especially seeing as Fushimi shows no real signs of trying to understand Yata at all. Fushimi's still trapped in his own little mess of issues and the closest he lets himself open up is to tell Yata to come and chase him right before the fake betrayal, which is a fairly obtuse way of putting it (and yes you could argue that Munakata understands Fushimi a bit more than Yata does, but I don’t think ‘less perceptive than Munakata Reisi’ is grounds for saying a person doesn’t ‘deserve’ someone else).

Of course for all that Yata does still come to save Fushimi, and I think his reaction to Fushimi's 'second betrayal' shows a lot of how he's grown too. First we do know from the short story 'The Eldest Son and His Mate' that Yata keeps trying to call Fushimi even though he's angry that Fushimi 'betrayed' his clan for a second time. Yata's still a bit immature here, still thinking of it as betrayal, but then when he talks to his mother and she mentions that “My son isn’t somebody who gets wrong what he should do for his best friend” Yata decides to reach out one more time, to search one more place. He's angry, but he also wants to find Fushimi, to ask him why, to understand him. Yata's not looking for Fushimi just to beat him up, he's grown from that.

And even though Yata thinks he's an idiot, even though he gets so many things wrong, in the end Yata comes to a conclusion even Fushimi couldn't manage: “To you, the Blue King was your King all along.” Yata's the one who tells Fushimi that he isn't a traitor, when prior to this Yata was always more than happy to yell that word back at him – because Fushimi wanted him to, because Fushimi wanted to paint himself in those colors. Yata has no way of knowing the real reason why Fushimi broke off their friendship the way he did – Yata doesn't know about the anthill, after all, and there's no way he could – but he tells Fushimi straight out: “Say it in a way I understand. Keep saying it until I do understand.” He's not saying that all the onus is on Fushimi to communicate in their relationship, because Yata himself always communicates everything he feels loudly. What he's saying is that Fushimi can't keep hiding all his emotions and pain and forcing them down into nothing, and then feel upset when Yata doesn't read his mind. It's like with the hallucinations in LSW, when Fushimi finally leaves Homra. He tries to tell Yata only once about anything related to them (the bit I mentioned earlier, where he sees 'Niki' in the house), and clams up as soon as he's misunderstood. Fushimi doesn't say anything and Yata knows it, and he's putting it to Fushimi plain: I want to understand, so don't stop talking until I do. Don't give up on me. Don't carry it all alone.

So basically with all this above, I find it really strange for someone to say that Yata 'gets away with things' or that he 'has no depth.' The after story with him and Fushimi also makes this clear:

'Homra might not be able to exist the way it was now. When Suoh had died Yata was the the only one who couldn’t accept that until the end. He resented his comrades for leaving the bar and labeled them as coldhearted. He had stubbornly persisted to protect Homra and the bar the way it had been when Suoh was around. Now he understood that Homra was changing its form from a ‘street gang’, also for Anna’s sake. They had to change to be able to properly deliver to the future what the now deceased had treasured. And because of that there was no guarantee that all the comrades who respected Suoh wouldn’t walk down a different path now.

When Yata had accepted that, and even though it was strange, the day where he could walk side by side with his once lost best friend had come at the end of the way he had started to move on.'

I don't think you could see that as anything but Yata acknowledging his own faults, acknowledging that he can't hold onto the past forever and that trying to do so was wrong, while also expressing a desire to move forward, and a happiness that he can do so with Fushimi back by his side. Yata worked fucking hard to get Fushimi back. He grew, he changed, he questioned his old outlook on things, he did his best to understand something that he really never would have been able to understand entirely by himself. From the Mothers short story: 'Trying to understand Fushimi based on his own assumption was not the way to go. Because he assumed this way back then, they had missed one another for so many years. Guess that guy would still need some time.'

Yata's been through some shit and he lost a friend, and he matured and worked to win that friend back. He's got plenty of depth to spare for a guy who thinks he's an idiot (yet still can make insightful comments on his own, who still does understand Fushimi a lot more than I think Fushimi himself realized despite what happened between them) and he definitely doesn't 'get away' with anything, especially when by contrast we never see Fushimi so much as apologize for his part in the betrayal (and while Fushimi has all his myriad of issues and mental and emotional struggles that make forgiveness possible, it doesn't give him carte blanche for everything he did to Yata either, that's not how a relationship works. I love Fushimi, but he owes Yata a damn apology). I think the reason the two of them do deserve each other is because they've both gone through the fire together, broken apart, and still found their way back together. They're both reaching for an understanding, even if it's hard to grasp, and there's no shame in a few missteps along the way.

#Yata Misaki #K project #Talking K #K Meta #giant meta post of doom #the second #yeah this got away from me I hope everyone enjoys it #also I should note that again I do love Fushimi and don't think that all of the things between him and Yata were 'his fault'#or that he 'doesn't deserve' Yata #basically Fushimi is an absolute disaster child who has reasons for why he is the way he is #but at the same time I don't think that should mean that Yata has to take on all the blame and heavy lifting in their relationship #honestly if someone told me they didn't think Yata had any depth I'd wonder if we watched the same series #I personally wish the end of Fushimi's arc had gotten more depth myself #but Yata gets plenty he has one of the clearer arcs out of the whole cast

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sheikah-simp · 2 years ago

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So Exile//Vilify is complete, what comes next?

(The following is a really long post both on my thoughts on the end of the novel and what it means to me personally, as well as my plans looking into the future and where you’ll be able to find me from here.)

First of all, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading and coming to the end of this fic. It was a monster of a project and I’m both sad and relieved to see it come to an end. It started out just as an idea that would not leave my mind, inspired by a song I somehow came to associate with him, playing on repeat over and over again the same way I pictured him brooding over his fate and exile.

Images of him staring out over the canyon and thinking on the castle, a place he might have once loved and lived in, as he watched the king raise armies and the Divine Beasts that would only serve to seal his doom. How Astor, knowing this, simply watched it all happen, beholden to his own part in the prophecy, destined to take his part against him, like something on a giant chess board the two of them were forced to play out.

Ever since December of 2020, I have wanted to do that picture of him justice, and while the story evolved to put much less focus on the mental chessboard between Astor the king - the makers and defiers of prophecy - I found that truly a lot of set-up and explanation was needed in order to build a world in which Astor would inhabit, love, and be doomed to destroy. A man who is destined to have everything stripped away from him in the name of Ganon must have something to strip away in the first place.

It also started from a point of observation for me, something about the world in BOTW and the Legend of Zelda franchise as a whole I had been mulling over long before we met Astor. And that is, in their world: it seems like there is no free will. Zelda must awaken her power despite her own desire to focus on Sheikah tech, Link is chosen by the King, and then the sword, and simply must fight because he is destined to be a hero, and that is what heroes do. There is so much focus on fate and prophecy in the LOZ series as a whole, and the more you think about it, if prophecies are always meant to be true, and some people have no choice in being heroes, others must then have no choice in being villains. People in prophecies are “chosen,” they do not choose, and even on a meta level, as this is a video game franchise, the player is literally controlling every aspect of the character and their movements. Their actions are not their own. They are being puppeteered.

I played through BOTW the first time and progressively thought about how unfair it all seemed - the very same thing had happened 10,000 years ago, and how it was rearing its ugly head again. Did Rhoam, like many a tragic Greek figure, actually fulfill and exacerbate his doom by trying so desperately to work against it? These are the very same questions that plagued my mind when I began the fic, posed by Thelem at the end of the book. I use my writing to explore concepts, ask questions and discover the answers for myself through the process of writing a book. And in the almost two years I spent to write Exile//Vilify, I found myself ending with just as many questions as I had at the start, with not a single one of them answered. No knowledge gained, nothing completely worked through. The same doomed prophecy as it was at the start, and nothing anyone could do about it.

But by the end, I realized that it didn’t matter. I wrote 150k words about a life to be stripped from - a life we all knew the ending of from the beginning - and just like many of the characters kept repeating, it was about the moment. The process. Loving and fully living in each moment even if you fail, even if you know where it will end. Failure is something I fear desperately in my own life. I have great anxiety about putting so much time and effort and love into making my dreams come true, only to have them fizzle out and stripped away from me in the end. What if I fail despite how hard I try? What if I am destined to fail, what if I have no say in whether I fail or not? And while this book by no means made me overcome that fear, it did draw my attention to it, which I should have recognized from the beginning when I joked about Astor being such a failure as a villain. Unlike Astor though, I am happy I get to live in a world with free will, where even if I do fail, I can try again, and make choices on how to respond, and know my life is mine to do my own with.

Astor is not as fortunate.

I know I’m not alone when I say that I felt robbed of Astor as a villain. He seemed so interesting, to have such great potential, and yet he was hollow and near pointless in his existence. I wanted so badly to fill the gaps, to do justice to an otherwise eschewed character. I love doing that in my work - focusing on the stories that lie between, that other people may write off or ignore. My writing of this fic was an act of appreciation, in a way, or a proposal for something that could have been, something we - all of us - had the freedom to create after being given such a one-note villain who will be nothing but thrown away and forgotten in a spinoff game. It doesn’t matter, because he matters to us, and that is what makes the difference.

I’ve been told multiple times this fic has been viewed as “the bible” in our small but mighty Astor community, and I can’t tell you what this means to me. It means a lot for me to be viewed as someone who had that kind of influence on our collective idea of this character. I’m certainly not claiming to be an authority, but I’m glad my fic has come to have its place in our literature and that so many people have come to recognize and enjoy it. It’s a gen fic with no major romance about a side character in a side game, there’s no way it was ever going to reach the levels of big mainstream loz fics out there, but that doesn’t matter, because Astor matters to me, and he matters to us, and the nearly 4k hits and 150 kudos the fic has at the time of writing this - along with all the comments - are more than enough for me.

But now that the fic is over, what do we do?

I’ll admit I’m still going through the writer’s mourning period/withdrawal after finishing a book, but I can feel the recovery coming on soon. I have a few smaller ideas already on the table (along with Trouble Will Find Me), one regarding an alternate route I almost took for Astor in Exile//Vilify (more explicitly as a reincarnation of Ganon’s seer). That would be a very small one-shot fic. I do still have Stories from Exile for you to read and will occasionally update (have a lot of ideas still on my list there). However, that said, these are no longer my top priority in the same way Exile//Vilify was. Because until I started writing Exile//Vilify, I hadn’t really considered myself part of the loz community at all. I was a Pokémon writer, and I have a trilogy that I took a detour from in order to get this fic out of my mind. I’m going to set my focus on returning to that series now, although like I’ve said, I do still plan on popping into this community. I’m not going to ghost you all, I’ll still answer asks, stay active, and post every now and then. You, and this fic, have meant too much to me over the course of this journey for me to go away like that.

So please, don’t be a stranger! Your thoughts and asks and messages are always welcome. If you want to make art or other fics inspired by my worldbuilding, please do. I thought this was clear, but I’ve never explicitly stated it. You’re fully welcome to use my ideas as long as I get a shoutout - mostly just because I also want to see it :). I worked too hard on this for too long for other people not to use it for ideas. Please do. Show me your art. Show me your things. I want to love them.

So where can you find me now? Here on this blog, of course, although tumblr seems to have not necessarily “shadowbanned,” but blocked some of its functionality after the ios ban. So if you’re not checking here, you can reach me on my main @silverjirachi.

If you are interested in my pokemon series (focusing on the hoenn region and hardenshipping, Archie and Maxie) you can follow @the-dead-sea-trilogy and @hoenn-pride, my pokemon side blogs, the first of course for my fic related things and the other for general pokemon things.

And of course, you can still find the rest of my work by browsing my author page on AO3. I’ve posted WIP wednesdays and previews of my coming fics there.

Also-

In the coming weeks or a few months into the future, I may be making a special offer regarding a physical release of this book. I get all my fics hard-cover bound for my own personal collection, but I’ve already had a few people ask me about having copies of their own. Keep your eyes open for an update on when/how this will happen if you are interested. It will be a very small, one-time thing to friends and close fans as, naturally, it’s going to be a gift coming from mostly my own wallet.

I’m going to conclude by dropping a bit of music here. (Slight Exile//Vilify spoilers, so if you haven’t read the ending yet, please do). But, as you might have figured out by the ending, Thelem is somewhat of a narrator character. He was my way to ask questions of the fic - the questions he asks at the end - and acted as a guardian angel of sorts of the book. He is my representation of my love for the story, and of the story of Astor as a whole. It was very, very early on in my writing process when I realized what would have to happen to him by the end, and I cried and was frustrated about it when I realized, but somehow that made me grow to appreciate and love him even more, strengthening his role in the novel as a whole. There was one song by The National - who also wrote the song Exile Vilify (The National, weirdly, has inspired all my fics thus far) that I came across around this same time that somehow I came to associate with Thelem.

The lyrics, though indirect, speak to me of a man resigned to yet content with his place in life, and how that place is flooded with this melancholy sort of love informed by the pain of the reality around him. This is in such stark contrast to the way we see Astor throughout his life - who knows no peace with the weight of prophecy that weighs over his head. I kept turning the lyrics, “Sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue, don’t they?” over in my mind, like this man knew how things would end and let it happen anyway - out of love. He knows what he has to do is painful, but he does it because love - devotion - is a virtuous thing that is not always happy. And so as much as the song Exile Vilify is the namesake and first inspiration for the fic, Sea of Love has been its secret, underlying theme. It followed shortly after, and has always informed my perspective in writing it, knowing where it all would end, and I’m glad I can finally share that with you.

Because while I thought I was writing a book about prophecy, about the inherent “fucked-up”ness of being a chosen one, in a weird way, the fic was written about, and at its heart, is about love. Love of the character, love of the process, love of the story, and the twisted, distorted love of prophecy. It’s about how all those things affected the courses each of their lives - both for better and for the worse - at the time of Astor’s demise. It’s not the ending, it’s the moments shaped by love in between. Because, as Thelem says at the end of the book - love, while painful, still lessens the fall of everything.

And so that is how I will choose to end. Once again, thank you so much for all the support, for making me feel like I was part of a community, and for reading my story of Astor to its ending. It made such a difference to me, and I’m looking forward to the next things on the horizon.

#sappy love letter is sappy and love #current mood #exile vilify #exile vilify updates #the final update #thelem #trouble will find me #sentimental author is feeling sentimental #thank you i love you all #Spotify

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keeper-not-hero · 3 years ago

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Long post ahead!

Connections I can loosely draw between Destiny and Homestuck:

(All versions of ) Clovis Bray = (All versions of) Dirk Strider - Clovis Bray, a magnificent inventor, was contacted by an evil force that spurred him on to create magnificently terrible things, and lives on due to said creations, splintered in multiple ways. Dirk, who we know to have made some funky robots, was contacted by Caliborn, who helped force him to get into the game, and lives splintered in multiple versions of himself caused by his insecurity, same as Clovis’ obsession with not being forgotten.

Similarities go as far down as to having a version of themselves stuck in the past and a “Current” version of themselves, brandishing really cool fucking swords, having haunted/posessed simulacrum (Lil’ Cal - Lord English, Clarity - The Voice In The Dark) and an unhealthy obsession with a specific animal and media associated with it (DAITO and rabits for Clovis, MLP and ponies for Dirk.) Also, their older versions are incredibly abusive to the ones they take care of (Beta Kids! Dirk with Dave, Giant Head / Non-Exo Clovis and literally all of his descendants.)

Elsie Bray / Exo Stranger = Davesprite - Time powers, come from a doomed timeline to offer knowledge of why they failed to their peers, had to let go of someone they were extremely dear to (leaving Rose behind to sleep into the next incarnation, killing Ana because evil darkness powers) before moving on, serve as a tutorial guide on mechanics previously unmentioned, cool. Sadly Elsie doesn’t have a “her” of this world to bounce off from, but this list isn’t a 1-to-1, it’s just a silly little thing to point things out, damnit. Hell, technically speaking, you could say *we’re* the Dave of this timeline? Although The Guardian / Us is probably more of a John Egbert, considering our whole canon-shattering, meta powers.

Shin Malphur = Jade Harley - Had their home destroyed, uses their father figure’s gun and got an awesome protector with superpowers to take care of them (Bec for Jade, Jaren’s Ghost for Shin), both of them have -sonas (Troll! Jade and Furry! Jade, Dredgen Vale), both of them are renowed for their prowess with guns, both of them lived in relatively isolated places before a world-shattering event (Sburb launch, Dredgen Yor’s Massacre), both of them are trans, autistic and gay I don’t make the rules I’m just right. <3

Dredgen Yor = Bec Noir - Both of them became incredibly powerful by stealing and then killing from high-ranking nobility, mostly for the reason they were really bored and unhappy. Got god-like powers, butchered hundreds with their signature weapons (Beta Kids! Dirk’s Katana I believe for Bec? And The Thorn for Dredgen Yor), are incredibly related and even somewhat feel for their sworn enemy (Noir feels Bec’s love for Jade, Dredgen Yor came to see Shin’s potential as an Acolyte of Light and Dark), both of them had cool otherwordly powers, both of them are edgy as FUCK and turned into things they technically weren’t supposed to (Bec Noir became a fucking dog, The Dredgen hid as a Hunter despite originally being a Titan).

The Drifter = Sollux - Like Sollux, The Drifter is haunted by visions of Doom (LITERALLY SEES A PALE HORSE IN A VISION COMMANDED BY THE IX), is blessed by otherwodly powers, is incredibly depressed and snarky. Known for making weird shit which end up horribly (Drifter made Gambit and learned how to use motes of Dark, Sollux used ~ath and triggered the death of all lusii.) They both see the game they play as futile (Life and the fight between Light and Dark, literally Sburb), but keep playing. Both have really cute girlfriends who are obsesed with death, murder, kill, gore, maim, kill murder grrr (Eris Morn, Aradia Megido.) Both are DONE with this shit and just want to sleep, vibe, and cry.

Eris Morn = Aradia Megido - Oh boy guess which two people had their whole friend group murdered by a sassy egomaniacal hopeless bitch with magic powers? These gals. Both are fiendishly obsessed with death and despite their spooky behavior, they are probably some of the nicest people you’ll meet. Bad bitches to the bone that are related to a funky glowing green thing (Eris’... ahamkara bone? Ghost shard? Idk we never got a true answer to what it is, so I’ll just call it what cayde called it, “rock”, and Aradia with the Green Sun), assisted in the murder of a bunch of people both directly and indirectly (Lord English, empowering Jack - Literally like 95% of Oryx’s relatives and Oryx Himself, the Pyramids and The Nightmares), both of them uncovered ancient artifacts that are Really Fucking Important to the plot (Frog Temple, The Pyramid On The Mood), and generally having funky outfits that are really cool.

Eridan = Toland - Sad little bitches with an interest in magic and genocide who killed their entire friend group with the very powers they so desperately craved (Eridan directly with his Hope beam, Toland indirectly by leading them to their deaths at the hands of the Hive.) And yeah, they’re both genocidal freaks, with Toland’s belief on the Sword Logic, and with Ampora’s belief on the hemospectrum.

The Gardener / Traveler = Calliope - Both of them were too gentle to stop their bitter, murderous counterparts, and cheated death in one way or another to escape their pursuer who they now eternally evade (Calliope in the spiral, The Gardener by solar system-hopping.). Both of them help and empower their friends (Guardians, the Trolls + Kids), and both of them have funky little godlike powers, and in the alternate universe where they won, things aren’t much better. Or, good. At all. (The “World of Pure Light” lines by Orin in Prophecy, Alt! Calliope) Both of them are also incredibly powerful in their own right but mostly refuse to fight bar a few extreme exceptions. Also, both turn magic into guns, which is a thing Guardians love doing, and Guardians being those blessed by the Traveler, well. It just works.

Also, as a bonus, you could technically call the Traveler the Green Sun, since it empowers the... Guardians. And it’s spherical. And it emmits light. Ehehehehehehehehehe. That or Doc Scratch, because cue balls. But, those are WAY more surface level than the rest.

The Winnower / The Voice In The Dark = Lord English - Hoo boy. Monstrous, genocidal, powerful enough to shatter part of reality with a motion, rely on someone else to “herald” them (Clarity and Anomalies for Winnower, Doc Scratch and Lil’ Cal for L.E.), killed so many people it’s uncountable, EXTREMELY homosexual, still want to kill the main cast, unapologetically evil and 100% believing themselves right in their existance, have minions with incredible powers (Eramis, the rain earth smell creatures in the Collapse, many other Darkness followers - L.E.’s Leprechauns.)

Jaren Ward = Grandpa Jake - Killed by a bullet fairly ripped from a toddler, and from the equivalent of a toddler having a temper tantrum. Kind, explorative, raised Jade/Shin as if it was his own before their premature demise, still live through their descendants (The Last Word - Grandpa Jake’s manequim), both left their descendants with a protector (Bec - Jaren’s Ghost)

Calus = Caliborn...? - Ok so this is even more of a stretch than literally everything else in this list but. Both of them are gay as fuck, incredibly fucking teathrical, LITERALLY had us participate in a bunch of things for their amusement, have fanfic about how things will end, believe that the end of all things with them being the last one standing is correct, and ship themselves with someone from the main cast (Dirk for Cal, us for Calus) and have powerful minions (psions are nowhere as powerful as some of the Leprechauns but they still do the job.) I honestly just wanted to put that out there, heehoo. Oh yeah and they’re both fucking DEAD

Felwinter = Vriska - Ok look. Look. Look. Ok, Look. Look. Ok, ok, just, like, look. Ok look. Look. Ok. Look, ok? Look. Look. Look, look. Ok. Ok, just. Look ok? Look. Like, look. Ok? Look.

Both of them are extremely complex and violent characters with abusive parents that pretty much railroaded them into being distrustful, bitter and conniving, embodying their parents to maybe an unhealthy degree (Felwinter IS The Warmind as a Guardian, Vriska is a manipulative bitch just like her Spidermom), believed themselves a leader until prover otherwise but were still necessary for the survival of the group... until they accidentally led their group to an early fucking grave by flying too close to the sun and ignoring all good reasoning. Extremely violent, brutal and cruel for no particular reason.

Shaxx = Karkat - They both talk in uppercase only. Sluts.

Oryx = The Black King - Fucking dead, LMAO. Also, carapacians with transmasc swag.

Orin = The Peregrine Mendicant - Cool ladies who have went through hell and high water to do their jobs only to go on thankless and forgotten. Lost good friends among the way (Orin lost her boyfirend, TPM lost AR) and went through many transformations before this final shape (

Engrams and Glimmer = Build Grist and Captchalogue Cards - I mean, look, this is just facts. Engrams are a means of storing physical objects as data, same as captcha cards, build grist is used to make pretty much everything, same as glimmer, and engrams are hexagonal and come in white, blue, and yellow - HELL they can even be used as build material. It’s just. It’s too perfect. Fuck you, I’m right.

Dream Bubbles = Throne World - Ok the similarities are a big fucking stretch but “means of escaping death in another dimension” fit. Just. Really well?

Red Miles = SIVA - Red cancerous veins that nearly destroyed everything our heroes fought for. SIVA is more man-made than cosmic like Red Miles, but I’d like to think it still conts.

Ok I’ll stop here. I’ll RB or Edit and leave a timestamp if more jump to my head, for now I’m running out of creative and literary juice and I need to rest.

Prophecy, anyone? :3

#homestuck #destiny #long post

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orionsangel86 · 4 years ago

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I just read your post in which you said that Misha confirmed in January that he will be in 15x20. You have no idea how much you made my day with that. I was really crushed after Mishas panel today because he seems so sincere and honest in the clip I saw, but on the other side I haven’t a lot of his Interviews in the last few years, so I’m not good at reading him. Do you think that that would be a typical thing for him to do, trolling like this?

Do I think it would be a typical thing for Misha to be a giant troll? Lol. How long have you been going here? :P

Misha is the biggest troll around. He isn’t gonna reveal the ending. He put himself in Cas’s shoes when answering those questions, as he very often does. He revealled he has known about Cas being in love with Dean for A YEAR. yet not ONCE has he given anything away. Misha may be a sneaky bastard when answering questions, but he has an impressive tally when it comes to revealling spoilers, in that he never does...

Now Jared on the other hand... has been making Destiel jokes all year, and teasing Jensen whenever he can about Dean and Cas.

Jensen also, in the heat of the moment, on stage at a convention, made a joke which basically confirmed that Dean is attracted to Cas.

Misha is surprisingly the one person in the trio who hasn’t revealled anything in terms of Destiel at all this year. He has been 100% focused on this narrative of doom and gloom which lead me to quitting the show and fandom earlier this year. I think he turns to doom and gloom as his own way of avoiding any slip ups. J2 make jokes and end up revealling big spoilers - luckily for them even though their jokes basically confirmed Destiel, no one really took any notice because, well, no one REALLY thought the show would go there with Destiel (outside of the meta writers).

Misha has indeed backtracked on the fact he is in episode 20. Its been common knowledge among certain corners of Tumblr all year. None of us, myself included, had any concerns or doubts that he wouldn’t be in the finale. It’s a plain fact that he is. However, I think it is entirely plausible that everyone involved was sat down at some point shortly before covid hit, and told to absolutely under no circumstances give away anything about the finale ESPECIALLY involving Castiel and his return. Because since covid hit, everyone has been silent on Cas and the finale.

They just didn’t want another slip up a la Jared post 12x23.

Take a breath fandom. It’s not over yet.

#castiel #destiel #supernatural #supernatural endgame #misha collins #asks #Anonymous

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esther-dot · 3 years ago

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There is a passage in dany chapter where she dream about being rhaegar and killing usurpers in black ice armour at trident. She felt that this what it should have been. Jon had dream in ADWD about him wearing black ice armour and killing Robb and others. With Dany it's more about taking revenge from usurper not fighting WW. As for Jon maybe it points to kinslaying. I think @trinuviel had meta on jon's dream.

I'm not sure which of @trinuviel's posts you're referencing, but here's a quote from the one I found:

"There’s an interesting connection made here between Black Ice - Treachery - the Wall - Jon. May interpret Jon’s nightmare as a hint that he is AA. I think that unlikely but I’m going to deal with that in another meta. Considering the association between “black ice” and treachery as well as a similar association of “Boom Doom Boom” with treachery, Jon’s dream can also be interpreted as foreshadowing of the treachery of the NW that ends in Jon’s death." (link)

I think that’s definitely better analysis than you’ll get from me about Jon’s dream! But, here are the two pertinent Dany quotes:

And saw her brother Rhaegar, mounted on a stallion as black as his armor. Fire glimmered red through the narrow eye slit of his helm. "The last dragon," Ser Jorah's voice whispered faintly. "The last, the last." Dany lifted his polished black visor. The face within was her own. After that, for a long time, there was only the pain, the fire within her, and the whisperings of stars. (AGOT, Daenerys IX)

and

That night she dreamt that she was Rhaegar, riding to the Trident. But she was mounted on a dragon, not a horse. When she saw the Usurper's rebel host across the river they were armored all in ice, but she bathed them in dragonfire and they melted away like dew and turned the Trident into a torrent. Some small part of her knew that she was dreaming, but another part exulted. This is how it was meant to be. The other was a nightmare, and I have only now awakened.

She woke suddenly in the darkness of her cabin, still flush with triumph. Balerion seemed to wake with her, and she heard the faint creak of wood, water lapping against the hull, a football on the deck above her head. And something else. (ASOS, Daenerys III)

I agree with you that imagining herself as Rhaegar isn't a good sign. He fought to maintain the Targ grip on Westeros even though he knew what his father was. Dany glorifying him and Aegon, wanting to reinstate Targ rule even though she knows what Viserys was and learned who her father was...well, it means that her innocence via ignorance is limited now. I'm going to assume that line about Balerion awakening is actually meant to tie into idea that she is Aegon the conqueror 2.0 so imo, all of this is negative, and undermining the justness of her cause.

I believe her dream is usually interpreted to say she will fight the Others, but knowing that she consider's Ned the usurper's dog and then with the revelation that Jon is Rhaegar's son (which might make him a potential usurper in her eyes, regardless of his intentions), I think it makes a lot more sense to view this as a showdown with what she views as a threat to her reign than a fight for the good of humanity.

And then we have the Jon quote:

They are all gone. They have abandoned me.

Burning shafts hissed upward, trailing tongues of fire. Scarecrow brothers tumbled down, black cloaks ablaze. "Snow," an eagle cried, as foemen scuttled up the ice like spiders. Jon was armored in black ice, but his blade burned red in his fist. As the dead men reached the top of the Wall he sent them down to die again. He slew a greybeard and a beardless boy, a giant, a gaunt man with filed teeth, a girl with thick red hair. Too late he recognized Ygritte. She was gone as quick as she'd appeared.

The world dissolved into a red mist. Jon stabbed and slashed and cut. He hacked down Donal Noye and gutted Deaf Dick Follard. Qhorin Halfhand stumbled to his knees, trying in vain to staunch the flow of blood from his neck. "I am the Lord of Winterfell," Jon screamed. It was Robb before him now, his hair wet with melting snow. Longclaw took his head off. Then a gnarled hand seized Jon roughly by the shoulder. He whirled … (ADWD, Jon XII)

There is so much in this dream. Jon has his shame over his desires (Winterfell) which has been emphasized more and more as the series progressed indicating, the kid may take the Winterfell/kingship when offered and hate himself. IMO, killing Ygritte and Robb, that's about his guilt he feels for their deaths, his inability to save his family, and that has to feed into his decision to rescue Ary@ later.

As for foreshadowing of kinslaying, I haven’t gone back in to specifically look for that although I definitely think it is more likely than not Jon will have to do it in the end. I don’t really interpret this dream as foreshadowing for it, but it isn’t unreasonable to because Tyrion introduces the idea of wanting to kill family to Jon in AGOT, and then he eventually kills his father. SO, Martin's decision to have Dany see herself as Jon's father takes on a lot of significance. Obviously, this can be a metaphorical killing the father by fighting against Dany, but if we’re looking, Jon’s dream involves the death of a family member whose claim Jon was envious of (thereby bringing the idea of usurping into his dream), and of course, that’s just after he kills his lover. 👀 Shit.

There is a lot here that points to things none of us want, so thank you for that, anon. 😂

#ask dot #< tag to filter if y'all don't want to see this stuff #dark dany

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fermented-writers-block · 3 years ago

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Submitted by @sepublic:

So a while back, my pal @fermented-writers-block aired a theory. To sum up the abridged version, they suggested that if the Boiling Isles was allegorical to an Underworld, and the Human World to… Well, itself, then what of a third realm above? What if there was a parallel to an angelic realm, one populated by the show’s equivalent to a race of angels/Valkyries? They speculated that Emperor Belos himself may have been one of them, cast out… And he desires the portal and access to the Human World, in order to access this hypothetical Angel Realm!

In our discussions, we came across the idea that the Human World functions like neutral territory. It is the realm between realms, the buffer/barrier between the Angel Realm and the Demon Realm. It is where the two come together, and where influences from both have leaked in, to inspire real-world myths; A callback to Eda’s line in the first episode! The Portal, as speculated by my pal, potentially is rooted in the Human World, giving it equal access to the Angel and Demon Realms respectively- As a result of the Human World being between both of them respectively!

If the three realms were bus seats, the Angel Realm might be the Window Seat, while the Demon Realm is the set right next to the aisle where people walk up and down across the bus… And the Human World is sandwiched right between! This of course means that in order for either the Demon or Angel Realm to access one another, it would be through the Human World… With only the Human World maintaining access to BOTH realms, instead of just the one!

Ergo… Given the theory that Belos intends to reconnect to this Angel Realm, it makes sense that he wants to access the Human World! To him, it’s merely a stepping stone, not his destination… The ladder he needs to reach the top, it’s his stopping point before he can progress on to the end! He has no interest in the Human World, as he claims, beyond utilizing it as a passageway to something far grander and more interesting.

But now… onto a certain idea behind Belos.

To put it simply; Fermented Writer’s Block and I think that Belos could potentially be a Satanic/Lucifer allegory. A Fallen Angel, in a sense. From a Doylist perspective, this would settle Disney’s concerns over depicting Heavenly characters as negative, as the only truly negative Angel in this sense would be a literal Satanic allegory. It’d be like Doom, in a sense!

I’ve discussed… a LOT in the past, the idea of Luz and Belos being counterparts. Even if we don’t have much within canon, there IS the association with Light, as well as the ability to communicate with the Titan to some degree. Luz’s name literally means Light… And Lucifer means Light Bringer! It’s in the name, Luz-ifer! If Belos is a twisted counterpart to Luz’s guiding light, then perhaps he’s a more literal take on the Satanic allegory…

Specifically, the idea of an Angel who was cast out of their world and fell, plummeting into a realm beneath that of the Human World! We’re already making allusions with Lilith’s name, after all. And I’d LOVE to see The Owl House tackle some more classic, eldritch takes on the Angels of old and their original interpretations, such as the Seraphs!

After all, people have noted the similarities between Belos and the idea of Christian Imperialism. If Belos were a literal ‘angel’, or the show’s equivalent, this would be a fitting twist! Fermented Writer’s Block also observed that on one page of the Unauthorized History of the Boiling Isles, Belos is depicted with almost mechanical wings, in addition to the book being somewhat burnt. What if this could imply burnt wings on Belos’ part? Especially given Belos’ mechanical, industrial motifs and deteriorated nature...

If Belos WERE a Fallen Angel, then perhaps his Wings motif amidst the Emperor’s Coven imagery is intentional. Not only does it hearken back to his true origins and identity… But it could also allude to him having burnt wings, which in itself is symbolic of a Fallen Angel, as someone who was outcast and can no longer fly! The dude IS associated with Fire, to a degree… His throne room is lit by blazing braziers. Amity and Boscha are associated with his Coven System, in a sense… Amity is indoctrinated into its values and wants to join the Emperor’s Coven, while Boscha’s ideas of hierarchy and elitism reflect Belos’ values rather well. Both characters are associated with Fire… Which, helps to serve as a unifying motif among them- Especially with Lilith, who has blue fire and was leader of the Emperor’s Coven!

It’s a contrast to Luz and her Ice, and what she stands for… Her Light is reflective, while the Light of characters like Belos is harsh, dangerous, and off-putting. If Luz were more comparable to a night star, shining amidst the darkness and providing guidance- Then Belos is like the Sun, harsh, bright, demanding attention from all… But also too powerful to be personal with, something to be regarded from a distance, and never closely looked at. This would fit into Belos’ enigmatic nature, and the idea of him heralding Day, while Luz is Night… After all, Owls are nocturnal! And if Belos is a coming dawn, then that could tie into Angelic motifs… Amidst Luz’s Night bringing an end to his Light! It’s a take on that age-old term, about the Sun never setting on the British Empire… And THAT empire is emblematic of colonialism and imperialism as a whole!

It could also allude to the myth of Icarus- A mortal who flew too close to the sun! Of course in this scenario, Belos was in fact an Angel… But there’s still the recurring theme of wanting more, of one’s circumstances not being enough, of being guided by arrogance- It’s shared between Lucifer and Icarus both, to varying degrees. Perhaps Belos tried to lead a revolt in the Angel Realm, or got too arrogant… Either way, he was cast out- He flew too close to the Sun he wished to embody, and so his wings were burnt. Clipped of the thing most emblematic of his identity, no longer able to fly and ascend… Belos fell to the Earth, and then even deeper.

It’d tie into Belos having earthen motifs, as someone who can no longer fly. Him having angelic aesthetics, underscored by demonic motifs and growls, fits into the idea of Lucifer having been a beautiful angel, only to become the literal Devil and leader of Hell and all of its horrific demons! Belos already has a decayed, deteriorated condition to him that implies he’s not in the best health. Perhaps his burnt wings are the cause of this- Or at least another symptom of whatever injuries he suffered in the past? Not only that, but returning to the Icarus motifs… If we want to get meta, we can ascertain that Dana Terrace has read Fullmetal Alchemist. She knows of Hiromu Arakawa’s artstyle, citing it as something Luz would emulate back home- And there’s that other post comparing Father and Belos!

If Belos is like Father, then there’s once again that idea of using a portal to access a heavenly ‘realm’, through the Sun, in order to access a ‘God’ figure, or beings around that level. Not only that, but Fullmetal Alchemist, from its very beginning, made a very pointed reference to the myth of Icarus, likening its main protagonist Edward Elric to him! If Father is in some ways a foil to Ed, just as Belos could be to Luz… Then it makes sense for Dana to have been inspired by Icarus by virtue of his tale being important to the themes of Fullmetal Alchemist! And if Belos IS a Satanic allegory… Well, Lucifer’s name literally means Morning Star. As Belos’ antithesis, Luz brings the sunset to his Day of Unity. They’re both outcasts to the Demon Realm, but from different worlds respectively.

Now, there’s a question- Who are the Angels? What do they look like? And where does the Owl Deity factor into all of this? Well, this gets me onto my NEXT part;

I think the Owl Deity could be the closest thing to ‘God’ in this universe, AKA an all-powerful deity who reigns above all! A while back, a background artist for the show released some art he did, depicting Luz and King resting beneath a spire. If one looks closely at the top, they can see a depiction of Belos himself! And right above it is candles, surrounding an Owl… An Owl above all. Perhaps we’re looking too deeply into this. But it brings to mind a pun, about the God of All Things… Also being the God of ‘Owl’ Things!

If the candles are lit, then this suggests fire’s association with the heavens, which fits into biblical depictions of Angels! Not only that, but Belos is right beneath the Owl… And right beneath him is a fleshy stump, indicative of his own motifs… And it’s connected to what appears to be a giant eye right beneath him! Eyes are a big motif in the Boiling Isles –and amongst biblical angels- so perhaps the fleshy stump, akin to Belos’ constructs, is symbolic? That he’s bridging the gap between the demonic world below, and the heavenly world above?

Regardless, the next portion of this theory suggests that the Owl Deity is a supreme being. Perhaps a neutral mediator between both the Angel and Demon Realms, with the Human World as neutral ground. Perhaps a weapon, utilized by the Angels? Or a powerful deity they managed to sway… More on that later. Regardless, it DOES make one consider the Clawthornes’ connection to the Owl Deity, specifically Eda’s. Her house DOES have the only known depictions of this enigmatic being, after all.

And THAT house was likely fashioned, at least partly, from a tower! Towers are known for their reach towards the skies… Could a Clawthorne Ancestor have been connected to the Owl Deity as a worshipper? A follower? Maybe they were ALSO an Angel, like Belos, albeit not fallen… Or at least, much more well-intentioned! It could bring a dark twist to Lilith’s line about Eda being with her ‘real’ family… Unbeknownst to her, Belos, being a fallen Angel, is arguably ‘family’ in the sense that the hypothetical Clawthorne Ancestor was ALSO an Angel! After all, it might better explain how Eda has access to the Portal. Not to mention that golden, blazing Owl Wraith she summons during her final battle with Lilith… Birds ARE a Clawthorne Motif, after all! And Angels have bird wings.

If Belos IS similar to Father from Fullmetal Alchemist, then it makes sense that there’s a ‘God’ he plans to usurp as a Lucifer allegory. The Owl Deity could be this god, or at least associated with the Heavens that Belos seeks to conquer and return to. That of course gets us into the symbolism behind the angelic motifs of the Emperor’s Coven. Now, when Belos first arrived in the Demon Realm, he would have been acting VERY contrary to the Boiling Isles’ values about magic at the time, and he clearly had to utilize plenty of force and genocide to make people comply. In other words, this is a dude who cares not about conforming to others, but making others conform to him…

So it doesn’t make as much sense for Belos to change his aesthetics to an Angelic one, to appease the Boiling Isles residents if he’s clearly averse to everything else they do! Especially if Angels, or what lingering memory of them there is, is seen as negative by the Boiling Isles… The point being, this alludes to Belos being genuine about his Angelic motifs, and not adopting them to appear more palatable to others; Because all of his behavior suggests otherwise, that he forces others to adapt to him, rather than the other way around!

Not only that, but if the Emperor’s Coven is Belos’ attempt at reinstating his ideal form of heavenly rule/environment on the Boiling Isles… And if the Owl Deity is a god to be conquered, then how fitting is it that his subordinate wears an Owl Mask? Perhaps it’s meant to arrogantly symbolic… That the Owl figure that Belos once looked up to, now serves him! Of course it’s only in symbols; But the idea is there, that the image and motif of Owls has been appropriated, not as a holy being above Belos, but instead as an image belonging to a subservient minion.

Now, this all leads into another question- What about the Titan? What does the Titan have to do with this? And for that matter, what of the giant Titan remains, scattered across the Boiling Seas- We know others exist, but OUR Titan is the only known intact corpse! Well…

In Understanding Willow, Hooty briefly mentions his backstory. It’s hard to discern, but he mentions how it all began with a hunt, and how there were blood-red skies before Eda and King’s dialogue cuts him off and drowns out the noise. There IS the idea of Hooty being a lobotomized and weakened reincarnation of the Owl Deity, or at least a spawn of it… Or having SOME association with it, moreso than most characters! We don’t know what killed the Titans, or why OUR Titan’s corpse is intact. There could be Doylist answers to this, maybe it’s meant to be a mystery that’s never explored, but left to a sublime imagination…

But if not, then this is where I get into a crazy idea here;

Angels are depicted as adversarial with Demons. The Titans would’ve been the first Demons, of the Demon Realm. We know one of them had Magic... And if Belos is any indication as a fallen angel, there may be a heavenly aversion to magic. Hooty recalls it all beginning with a hunt…

What if the Angels hunted down the Titans? It’d explain their sudden extinction… As for why our Boiling Isles (BI) Titan is still intact, well. Perhaps it was a lone survivor! Perhaps its Magical ability permitted it to last longer than others, before it too succumbed to death after the genocide. For all we know, its Magical ability was what drove the Angels to commit genocide upon the Titans, for fear of an uprising! Either they failed to target the Titan actually responsible for finding magic, or they kept them from spreading their craft to others by killing off anyone else who would be willing to learn.

If Hooty has a connection to the Owl Deity… Well, remember when he mentioned being haunted by his actions forever, in Adventures in the Elements? What if the Owl Deity led this ‘hunt’ against the Titans… Either as a creation of the Angels, or as a neutral mediator who was swayed to their ideas of magic being dangerous! Either way, there seems to be a recurring theme of regret and remorse… Perhaps when all was said and done, the Owl Deity rejected its actions, and banished itself to the Boiling Isles? Maybe the Clawthorne Ancestor was connected to/IS the Owl Deity… As for how the Owl Deity died, maybe it simply willed itself out of existence in shame. Maybe it succumbed to injuries from the water. Either way, the Titan didn’t erase all traces of it, which could imply some forgiveness on its part… That, or the Titan was too dead to act in outright vengeance, who knows?

Regardless, the story goes- A Titan discovers Magic, is deemed a threat by the Angels. The Angels lead a mass extermination of its kind, with the Titan the sole survivor. The Owl Deity helps lead the hunt, but comes to regret its war crimes, and dies amidst the BI Titan’s corpse, laying the foundations for the Owl House. As I said, the BI Titan also eventually dies, alone and traumatized, as the Angels head back home.

Owl Deity culls rest of titans, is about to finish the Titan when it realizes the horror of what it did

Either the Titan took it out in a pyrrhic victory, or - more likely - the Owl Deity, being an entity focused on balance and neutrality, allowed itself to be killed/seriously wounded as way to “rebalance” things as much as it can for its nigh complete genocide

We know that Belos claims to enforce the will of the Titan. Well, if he’s a fallen angel… What if he’s persuading the Titan to help it get revenge? What if as a fallen angel, he arrived on the Boiling Isles and approached the Titan’s spirit, proclaiming himself as trustworthy, in an Enemy of my Enemy situation? Belos would point to him and the Titan as being wounded and rejected by the angels to some extent. Belos would have insider knowledge on his kind. If the Angels swayed the Owl Deity, what if Belos swayed the Titan to his side by offering it the chance to strike back at the Heavens for its crimes, and avenge its fallen brethren?

When Belos claims to enforce the Titan’s will, he’s not completely wrong- It DOES feel justifiable anger, though clearly Belos is capitalizing and manipulating this anger, and then passing off the Titan’s actions as solely its own, and not at all a product of Belos’ own manipulations in any shape or form. You know how I likened Belos to Father… And my past theories about Belos resurrecting the Titan, on the Day of Unity?

Hooty mentions it all began with a hunt, with blood-red skies. What if the skies are blood-red once more, on the Day of Unity? As the realms converge or whatnot… What if Belos’ weapon to defeat his Angelic brethren is none other than the resurrected Titan, wielding full access to the powers of Magic, and with vengeance in its heart? What if Belos resurrects the Titan on the Day of Unity, possibly with its body underneath HIS control as a parasite… We could have a scene mirroring that iconic moment from Fullmetal Alchemist, where a continent-sized Father rises from the ground and reaches out to the Heavens, accessing them with the Portal! Just replace Father’s gigantic form with the Titan’s resurrected, magic-fueled body!

Now, this does lead into the idea of settling the Angels as antagonists, once Belos is done and over with. Perhaps a resurrected Owl Deity will be instrumental, with the help of Luz and the others? If she’s the Night to Belos’ Day, then perhaps she needs to set the sun on Belos’ reign, on his Day of Unity! It all begins and ends with blood-red skies, after all. Perhaps with the help of a resurrected Owl Deity, Luz can appease the Titan, or at least sway it to not turn to vengeance and jeopardize the Boiling Isles inhabitants in the process. She has experience with calming down vengeful entities in the past, as seen with Inner Willow… And Luz CAN communicate with the Titan!

Especially if the Angels have grown to also regret their actions, as a parallel to characters like Lilith! Or at least, the Angels can be held in line and prevented from further massacres, with the resurrected Owl Deity. If the Owl Deity is regretful of its actions, then perhaps we could get a scene calling back to Understanding Willow… Where Belos, at the last second, sways the Owl Deity to his logic, and suggests vengeance and annihilation of the Angels! The Owl Deity, frighteningly, agrees for a moment, reminding the Angels that its genocide of them is merely finishing what THEY started, after all…!

But then Luz steps in. Alongside the others, such as Amity and Willow, Lilith and King, Eda, and so forth… She persuades the Owl Deity to have forgiveness in its heart, especially if the Angels show remorse and a desire to fix mistakes! It’d hearken back to the theme of having justified anger, but otherwise channeling it productively into fixing mistakes, rather than simply harming the one responsible for them! It’s about a productive way of tackling issues, rather than focused on punishment; Again, a theme as far back as the first scene, when Luz is punished with the Summer Camp, VS actually having her emotional issues properly addressed, and being given the chance to fix the damage.

Our protagonists could all call back to similar incidents, with Lilith citing how Eda sparing her gave her the chance to fix the damage, or at least remedy it… Instead of JUST dying as retribution! How Willow chose to still retain her feelings, but also spared Amity so the girl could change and improve as a person, instead of just killing her off and calling it a day. It’s about not only recognizing damage, but working to properly fix and recover from it- Recovery is the key word! Fixing the damage together, as Luz said- Productively fixing what was caused, instead of beating oneself over it, the way Amity and Lilith initially did!

This could lead to the Owl Deity, especially if it has Hooty’s memories, being swayed back to a good stance. It’d contrast Belos and his inability to grow, heal, and recover from his emotional and physical wounds! Either way, perhaps the Owl Deity could make peace with the Angels, or at least ensure they genuinely change their attitudes and behaviors. Belos is stopped, and the Titan can finally be laid to rest, its spirit perhaps still communicating with whoever is willing and eager to learn Magic, the same way it did!

Now, this does leave the question- Who was Belos during the Titan Genocide, if he was an Angel? Was he even alive back then? This gets me into the speculation that Fermented Writers Block made, of Private New Guy being an allegory to Belos… If Hooty was haunted by his actions that night, well. Perhaps Belos was just another young recruit, another generic Angel in the hunt- But he was inspired by the Owl Deity, maybe even saw it as someone to emulate? And that’s part of why he’s so power-hungry and bloodthirsty, because of his ‘idol’…

Yet ironically, Belos is merely projecting his idea and desire for what he wants the Owl Deity to be, VS what it actually is- A repentant, remorseful entity with a lot of guilt! Tying into the idea of characters projecting ideas/expectations onto others that just don’t exist, confusing fantasy with reality… Maybe like Private New Guy, Belos tried to seize power in the Angel Realm, and it’s why he was banished? And hey, going into even MORE mindless speculation- What if Owl Mask was MORE than symbolic of the Owl Deity, but outright the same kind of being? Perhaps they’re Belos’ attempt at recreating the Owl Deity albeit young and/or imperfect, an additional asset to conquer the Angel Realm, in addition to a resurrected Titan. Who knows?

Mind you… ALL OF THIS is one hell of a stretch. It’s an incredibly unlikely theory, that hinges on a LOT of factors… But it’s fun food for thought, is it not? And hey, if you never pick up a shovel, one will never find gold even if it IS there! It’s an extension of the Angel Realm theory, while tying together a bunch of other details here or there, and hearkening to past themes, morals, and lessons. I’m sure that even if this isn’t what Dana and the others have planned, what we WILL get will certainly be just as enjoyable- But until then, it can’t hurt too much to guess a bit, and maybe have some outlandish fun or there, right?

#the owl house #TOH #the owl house theory #toh theory #the owl house speculation #the owl house meta #emperor belos

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sirenalpha · 3 years ago

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I posted 323 times in 2021

53 posts created (16%)

270 posts reblogged (84%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 5.1 posts.

I added 44 tags in 2021

#atla - 16 posts

#zuko - 6 posts

#aang - 5 posts

#azula - 3 posts

#bnha - 3 posts

#writing - 3 posts

#yeah i hate this - 2 posts

#ao3 - 2 posts

#star wars - 2 posts

#and by that i mean when i have to deal with it when writing - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#and with star wars i feel like with kylo ren they were like i like him so he must get redemption and i must justify and excuse anything bad

My Top Posts in 2021

guys come on the Fire Nation is a monarchy

Zuko was born first

he doesn’t have to take the title of crown prince and heir to the throne from anyone

everyone has to be taking it from him aka banishing him, naming him traitor, trying to kill him etc

that’s the whole point of him being born first and Iroh calling him his son

it’s all for the Rightful King Returns trope after Ozai stole the throne from Iroh

8 notes • Posted 2021-01-24 05:31:16 GMT

This is my simplified version of a more historically accurate Assassin uniform for Ezio to go along with my fic Stories Lived just so I and any readers who want it can have a reference for what it looks like

it’s just more historically accurate rather than perfectly historically accurate, like I kept the colors close to the original, and mimicked the cut of the skirts of the original, and kept the wideness of the original belt, but I did make them belts that went entirely around the waist rather than just securing the giant metal Assassin symbol, and I left the hood, but just made it more like Altaïr’s in that it is a separate item rather than connected to anything like it looks in Ezio’s original uniform

but I gave him a doublet which he doesn’t seem to be wearing at all in the original which you can only see the red sleeves of, but it has a high neck and no collar which was the fashion in 1470s Florence, I also gave the overgown which I think is the layer Ezio is wearing in the original over his shirt is supposed to be, but overgowns weren’t open or tied at the front at the time, they were open on the sides and belted closed which is what I did here though it’s not obvious from the front, I put in pleating that was popular with overgowns at the time, and I changed the sleeves to ones that were in some of the paintings of young Italian men in the 1470s rather than just capped sleeves, I also changed him from brown pants and boots with greaves to the hose that would have been worn during the period and thigh high riding boots

14 notes • Posted 2021-06-06 19:55:55 GMT

Azula right from season 2 episode 1 is established as a perfectionist, someone conceited and disconnected enough to ignore natural limits such as the tides, and a lying manipulator

Atla is extremely effective at establishing characters, these three things are all fundamental to her as a character and her negative character arc that culminates in her break down

Azula loses some of her power when she can no longer use lies and manipulations on Zuko after he gains confidence and perspective from being with the gaang

it’s thematically significant to their final Agni Kai that she can’t say anything to throw Zuko off his game and he is in fact goading her rather than the other way around

you can’t cherry pick the times she happens to tell the truth because the truth is more hurtful to ignore this fundamental aspect of her characterization

14 notes • Posted 2021-01-01 20:59:30 GMT

Ok here’s the thing, if you think Anakin by himself is solely responsible for the fall of the Jedi due to a fatal character flaw of selfishness so he is always doomed to fall to the dark side and bring the Jedi down with him even if he never gets properly trained as a Jedi

you have a complete misread of the character and why he fell and took the Jedi with him both as a matter of characterization and on meta level regarding the entire narrative of PT and OT

first of all, if Anakin never became a Jedi he’d never come into contact Palpatine you know the man who ordered him to sack the temple, Anakin did not come up with this plan independently

and the reason Anakin went along with it was because a) Mace Windu proved that the Jedi no longer followed their own code so what differentiates them from the Sith and b) the Jedi definitely don’t allow you to come back from one wrong move, Anakin cuts off Mace Windu’s arm for threatening his chance to save his wife and child which allows Palpatine to kill him, yes it’s bad but it’s not sacking the temple bad and Anakin already knows he can’t go back from it

because that’s the point of the whole prequel trilogy

Anakin isn’t the problem

it’s the Jedi

that’s why they’re all destroyed, Anakin is just the systemic issues reduced to an individual for narrative convenience because the Jedi could not help this one person he became exactly the person the Sith could use to destroy them, it’s absolutely poetic

the Jedi left themselves and Anakin in particular vulnerable to Palpatine because they were a stagnant, corrupt, and misguided organization not because Anakin was greedy

this is also why Luke is a hero because he doesn’t do what Obi-Wan and Yoda tell him to do, he has enough life experience outside of being a Jedi to choose to do something different which is what allows him to surpass them as a new and better type of Jedi and save Anakin/return him to the light side

19 notes • Posted 2021-01-10 21:33:12 GMT

does Zuko have to say Azula always manipulates for people to get what and why he is saying when he says she always lies?

saying manipulates would technically be more accurate but he clearly came up with it as a child, she did it frequently enough when they were young he didn’t have sophisticated enough vocabulary to use the most accurate term to describe what she’s doing

it’s obviously about her manipulation not whether or not she’s telling the truth or a lie at any one particular moment because either way there is always, always an ulterior motive that is typically not in Zuko’s interest that he can tell is there but just doesn’t always know exactly what it is

56 notes • Posted 2021-01-01 21:08:31 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

#my 2021 tumblr year in review #what a weird collection #3 atla with assassin's creed and star wars thrown in #I don't really post a lot do I

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eirenical · 3 years ago

Note

1 and 2 for the writing meta prompt please!

Thank you, @flamingwell

[If anyone else would like to send questions, here is the list. ^_^]

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Oooooooh boy. Well, I have quite a few. XD So, how about we just go through the ones I have actively open in Word right now?

Legacies Found: The Untamed, sequel to Legacies Lost. This is a giant canon divergent AU that I've been working on for well over a year at this point. There is one key thing that I changed (and in the interest of spoilers, I'm not going to say what, but if you're curious and don't mind spoilers then, by all means, come ask and I'll tell you all about it. ;D) and it affected everything in-universe, some for the better, some for the worse. Here's the AO3 summary:

Sixteen years ago, the Yiling Patriarch died, a victim to his own hubris and the Yin Tiger Seal. Hundreds of cultivators from many different sects died with him that day, their souls forever doomed to find no rest, even in death. On this, the 16th anniversary of the battle of Qiongqi Pass, Jin Ling is determined to make pilgrimage, to try to put the spirit of his long-lost father to rest. He finds much more than he bargained for, and what he finds… will change everything.

And in the sequel, things have progressed significantly from this point, but the people involved are still broken in various ways, not quite at the point of healing yet, but getting there. The plot is opening up to the wider world and new characters are going to be introduced, and I'm having a lot of fun writing it, but it is SO MUCH SLOWER GOING. OTZ

Mirror, Mirror: I talked about this one extensively in this post, and it hasn't really progressed any further from there. XD This is a Guardian AU based on a short film that Zhu Yilong did with Li Bingbing called "Into the Mirror" (there's a link in the other post).

Reclamation: *eg* For anyone who's been following my Whumptober series (yes, I know we're WELL past October OTZ) of fics that I've been writing for Granting You a Dreamlike Life, this is the latest in the series. This monster is already almost 18K words and it's... it's a LOT. The story is a canon-divergent AU that starts out mostly overlapping canon during episode 35 and begins to diverge somewhere between there and episode 36. I leaned REALLY hard into the whump on this one, went really self-indulgent and wrote the fic that I would most want to read for this fandom, because I was pretty damned sure that no one else would write it or would take it as far and as dark as I wanted it to go if they did. And this particular story is the darkest of the bunch so far. ^_~ I'm not going to link directly to this one, because this is definitely a HEED THE TAGS situation, but if anyone's interested in some really, REALLY dark GYADL fic... hit me up and I'll be happy to tell you more. ^_^ (And for those who just want to look for themselves, you can find it under #eirenical does whumptober or on my AO3 where the series name is "Indefinitely." ^_^)

2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

I think I've talked enough about my current projects, so how about some future projects for this one? ^_^

(...and how about under a cut because this is getting kind of long...)

The Lost Tomb Reboot

I have... several fic at the plotty stage for TLTR, and I just added a new one to the list this morning. XD

Ershu fic: So, for anyone who's been following my TLTR journey, you know I'm obsessed with Ershu. I LOVE HIM. I LOVE HIM SO MUCH. And you know what happens when I love a character, right? Right? I WANT TO BREAK THEM. *coughs* Anyway, something happens to Ershu in S2 of TLTR that I won't go into detail about because spoilers, but essentially, he's betrayed and ends up in the hands of the person who betrayed him with no one else being the wiser and with him helpless and unable to tell anyone. And there are just... all KINDS of dark, fucked up possibilities there, and just like the Whumptober series, I AM going to write that fic, even if no one but me ends up reading it. ;D

Probably post-canon domestic bliss fic: For those of you who enjoy WHIPLASH ;D, I just honestly want ALL THE SOFT DOMESTIC IRON TRIANGLE. ALL OF IT. And I want Wu Xie and Ershu to have an opportunity to sit down and actually TALK about things (e.g., their need for a family heir), instead of trying to one-up each other. Special appearances by all the ducklings, Xiao Bai's girlfriend, and Lia Jiale and Jia Kezi (...my fic, my rules, we ignore canon when we want to ^_^) having an ...oh moment, and sweet, soft cuddles for Liu Sang and Kan Jian because they're adorable and I love them, too. (I have no idea if this is all going in one fic or if it will be a series of slice of life things, but I just want everyone to get their happily ever after IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK???)

Post-canon Huo Daofu and Xiao Ge... time-sharing Wu Xie?: IDEK what to call what's going on here, but... yeah. XD (See, @elenothar, I haven't forgotten! ;D) To crib from another post... I really do think that Xiao ge loves Wu Xie and loves being with him and all that that entails, but that he gets… restless. A little feral cat, if you will. And he just needs to wander off and be on his own for a while sometimes. And I would love to see a permutation where it’s just kind of understood that he and Huo Daofu just kind of… share Wu Xie. ^_^ Not in a threesome way, but in a way that they both understand each other’s claim on Wu Xie and neither of them wants him to be alone, so they just kind of… work that out between them. Like he's a time share. (OMG, I have to be careful of how often I use that phrase for this fic or I'm going to end up calling it that as a title. XD)

DMBJ x Highlander xover that I just came up with literally this morning: No, seriously, this LITERALLY just popped into my head as I was waking up this morning. It was a wild fucking ride, too. O_o;;; ANYWAY, I'm probably going to make a separate headcanon/plotty post for this one, but basically I just randomly woke up thinking... Duncan was an antique dealer in the late 80s/early 90s in the US. Wu Xie is an antique dealer in China, now, and his family has been involved in the antique trade for a... VERY long time. Maybe Duncan did some business with the Wu family. Maybe he met Wu Xie as a kid. Maybe he knew Xiao ge even EARLIER than that (like 100 years earlier). Maybe post-canon Highlander, Duncan starts getting back into the antique trade by helping to quietly repatriate artifacts and comes to China to deal with the Wu family to do that, and meets Wu Xie again... and Xiao ge. And has a WTF moment because Xiao ge ISN'T an Immortal like he is, but he doesn't look a day older than when they met 100 years ago and just... WTF?? And Wu Xie is looking at Duncan and looking at Xiao ge and having a WTF moment of his own because is EVERYONE immortal except him and Pangzi?? And... I just think that would be a lot of fun to play with. ;D

Guardian:

The Care and Training of a Former Megalomaniac V and VI, maybe?: OK, so this idea isn't really concrete, but I still want to play with it. I want to do something to tackle Ye Zun's past with the Rebel Leader and the trauma that that left behind, and I'm thinking he'll end up having a good (...drunk) talk with Da Qing about it.

Another idea I had (MUCH more concrete) was based off my own poor lazy bb. He LOVES to catch bugs. LOVES IT. He gets SO EXCITED and SO into it... but sometimes the bugs fly up to the ceiling. And Gabriel is comfy in my lap and doesn't want to move. So he will swat at the bug... halfheartedly. And then he will turn around and complain to me when it won't come down to be swatted at again. Like I can somehow make it come down so he can play with it? IDEK. XD ANYWAY. I had a vivid mental image of Da Qing doing this to Ye Zun and somehow convincing him to actually... bring the bug down. Using his powers. And someone at the SID detects Ye Zun using his powers so ZYL and SW race home... to find Ye Zun... using his powers... to tether bugs for Da Qing to play with. And I just think that would be hilarious. XD

...I think that's everything in the mental kiddy right now? XD

#ask meme answers #meta asks for writers meme #flamingwell #eirenical writes things #plot bunnies #guardian #the lost tomb reboot #dmbj x highlander au #i should start tagging that #granting you a dreamlike life #eirenical does whumptober #notes: legacies found #notes: legacies lost #eirenical does whumptober 2020

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libralita · 4 years ago

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The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Suzanne Collins

Summary: Ambition will fuel him. Competition will drive him. But power has its price. It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute. The odds are against him. He’s been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined—every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute . . . and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.

Rating: ★★★★★

Review:

So, this is a bit of a “disclaimer” or more of an interesting fact: I’ve technically never read The Hunger Games Trilogy. I had to read the first book for my English class, and it was a time where I hated being told what to read so I used SparkNotes. We also watched the first film in that class but that doesn’t really matter because A) that was like 8 or 9 years ago and B) it was for my class so you can bet I wasn’t playing attention. So, for all intents and purposes, I have not read the Hunger Games. Now you may be asking why I decided read this…seemingly controversial book rather than the much beloved original trilogy. Cuz my friend said I should, the audiobook sample intrigued me, and when are you going to see a review of this book from someone who hasn’t read the original trilogy?

Before I go into spoilers with this book, I just want to say as someone who has at best a surface level understanding of the Hunger Games trilogy, I think people are being a little bit harsh about this book. This book made me completely understand why Coriolanus Snow went down the path that he did while also not glamourizing it or making excuses for it. I genuinely felt bad for this young man who has delt with so many hardship that no one would should suffer through. However, he still does horrible things and the book recognizes that he does horrible things. It is a fascinating character study with a bit of background on how the Hunger Games came to be. Perhaps my opinion will change once I read The Hunger Games trilogy (which I intend to do) however at this point I think this was an amazing book and you should give it a fair shake. Now, onto spoilers.

The only flaw I found with this book was it was a bit too on the nose with a couple of things. First some of the names. Gaul. Satyria. Highbottom. I know that Collins started off as a middle grade writer and these feel like very middle grade character names. They just describe the characters a little too perfectly. In YA, it’s more popular to make characters where their names’ meanings give an insight into their character. Not a huge problem but a bit silly.

Second, I’m a little conflicted on the political talk. On the one hand, holy shit a YA book that talks about political theory? In an intelligent way? That’s not just screaming about real world politics? Oh my! On the other hand, it’s a little too on the nose. Gaul having Coryo write about the Social Contract and then this conversation:

“‘I do. Unless there’s law, someone enforcing it, I think we might as well be animals,’ he said with more assurance. ‘Like it or not, the Capitol is the only thing keeping anyone safe.’ ‘Hm. So they keep me safe. And what do I give up for that?’ she asked.”—Page 434

Hobbes would swoon over Coryo. It wasn’t bad just on the nose. And to a degree, I get it, I’m working on getting my masters in political science and I’ve read Hobbes and Rousseau whereas most the intended audience probably hasn’t. So, I call this a nitpick for me

Other than this book being a little too on the nose, I found very little fault in this. Maybe the Post-Games story line was a little less interesting but it still wasn’t bad by any means. This book is a character study of Coriolanus Snow, so I’d like to talk about him and his dissent. While reading this, my friend asked me if I hadn’t known that Coryo would one day become President Snow, if I could see it coming. And, while it’s hard to tell exactly, I think Collins manages to balance both Coryo being sympathetic and showing how he could become the person that he is in the trilogy. There are three…phases or Coryo’s life that really illustrate how he becomes President Snow. First is his life during the War. Second, is his life During the 10th Hunger Games. Then his life Post-Games. Collins does a wonderful job of portraying what it was like for Coryo during the war. The horrors he had witness of enjoying the life of luxury at an early age and then his world crashing around him. Of his family dying. Of the struggles to survive. Of him witnessing his friends’ parents restore to something horrible like cannibalism. It’s brought up a lot because it’s something that scarred him.

Now his During-Games life/the first half of this book. Coryo and the people around him are clearly dealing with the PTSD of growing up in a war zone. He’s essentially starving through most of this section during the book and on the verge of losing of what little he’s held onto since the War ended. I feel really bad for him. There was a part of me during this section where I hoped along side him that Lucy Gray would win the Hunger Games, he could go to University and continue his relationship with her. Maybe they could have changed Panem for the better. And while in this section he was no pure angel, you could see Gaul and Highbottom pushing him to become a worse person. You could also see the red flags that become worse in the Post-Games section.

There are two major red flags I picked up on during this read through. First, is his relationship with Lucy Gray. He’s very possessive of her and he gets very jealous when she sings about another guy during The Hunger Games. This made the relationship slightly uncomfortable for me…though let’s be honest if Sejanus was pining after Lucy Gray he would be acting no different from any other YA love interest (shots fired.) He actually reminded me a lot of Jace from The Mortal Instruments. The second red flag is his treatment of Sejanus. In a meta sense Sejanus is your typical hero and the fact that Coryo is using him (and really anyone besides maybe his family?) is a giant red flag to me as a reader. He doesn’t like Sejanus or Mrs. Plinth. He just wants to use them. Which is really sad but shows that is eventually dissent into Post-Hunger Games Coryo is foreshadowed.

Now, let’s talk about Post-Games. I took a break once the Games ended because I was a little unmotivated to keep reading. I didn’t know if I would like Coryo leaving the Capital. I liked seeing the political maneuvering of the Games and his dynamics with his classmates. However, watching his dissent was great. His relationship with Lucy Gray went from slightly concerning to full blown toxic. His possessiveness of her really amped up. Coryo also isn’t really happy to see Sejanus because it’s a friendly face, it’s because there’s someone to recognize his status and for someone he can use. Again, another moment of possibility of where Coryo could have let Sejanus and maybe Lucy Gray escape and he could have gone off to become an officer. Work his way up and become the President. However, he didn’t take that path.

It was so heartbreaking to see Sejanus die, there was still a glimmer of Coryo’s humanity where he genuinely felt guilty but you could see his self-preserving nature showing its ugly head. And then his journey is cemented when he can’t handle being out with Lucy Gray so he may or may not have killed her, then he goes back where his family pictures are ruined and his mother’s powder is mush. The only thing left his is father’s compass.

Speaking of his father, one final character I’ll mention is Dean Highbottom. I wish we got a little bit more of him because his view of Coryo is interesting. It seemed like Collins gave a very subtle story about how Highbottom was worried that Coryo would turn out like his father. But Highbottom ended up created the monster he wanted to prevent. If he had shown Coryo compassion and understanding, he might have turned out differently. This ended up getting Highbottom killed which was a great way to end the book. Sad but great.

Overall, I think this is a great story. I loved seeing all the different roads Coryo could have taken and how things could have turned out differently. I am planning on buying the Hunger Games trilogy so it’ll be interesting to see how this changes things for me.

#the ballad of songbirds and snakes #the hunger games #suzanne collins #reviewsdaytuesday #ballad of songbirds and snakes #hunger games

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prairiedust · 4 years ago

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The Further Folklore of Supernatural

Here’s a little more folklore meta in light of how season 15 has been playing out if anyone is game. I genuinely thought that Moriah would be the end of the folklore stuff and tossed out “Folk the Author” as an “epilogue,” so this is probably less of an addendum than it is a waymarker as I try to continue to parse these themes into the last seven episodes.

Welp. *waves hands at everything* THIS is not how anyone expected 2020 to go. Things got a little bit big and I stopped thinking about Spn in light of needing that energy elsewhere. But I also don’t want this crapfest to ruin how I fan my favorite show, so here I go again. I will attempt a TL;DR, too!

If you’ve read my old “folklore” analysis here about how I think fairy tales and all their baggage fit into Supernatural season 14, you know that I believe Castiel has stepped into a Sleeping Beauty type story, and that coincidentally a few themes and symbolism from Snow White kept popping up around Dean. (I hold Sam to be a Protagonist in the modern “literary fiction” sense of the word, but emotionally, thematically, and narratively he’s always been a little inaccessible to me. I finally understood him when the death-of-the-author plot surfaced, and I’ll get to Sam eventually here. And Jack, there’s a little Jack in here, too.)

If you would rather have the TL;DR than read several thousands of words about how folklore and myth *might* be abstractly connected to an American genre show, all I can say is that I tried. The textual support is all in the folklore posts. This is as succinct a summary as I could fabricate. At least I’m not gonna talk about Sam and bricolage and freeplay! This is an almost completely theory-free post! If you don’t want to read or don’t need a refresher and just want to know how this has been working in 15, you can scroll down to “END OF TL;DR”.

So, to catch up, I’m not talking about the folklore and mythology that this show has always relied on for plot and MOTWs. I wasn’t drilling down into urban legends like Hook Man or world folk monsters like shtrigas or pishtacos. By “folklore” I mean the study of storytelling tropes and tale types that have been with us for ages. One of the many subtexts of the end of the series. I’ve been tracking this because I think it’s fun to see how fairy tale imagery and mythology might layer preconscious suggestions into the text of the show. I personally think it was loud enough to be seen easily, but more than likely viewers felt unsettled, felt cheered, or felt like they knew what was coming? I’m curious to know. Anyway.

When we found out that Kelly Kline was going to name her baby “Jack” waaaaay back in season 12, things started chiming. Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack the Giant Killer. Jack Tales. Jack is a powerful Western character, sort of a cross between a noble hero and a trickster, featuring in stories that often blur lines and boundaries. He is both the poor man’s youngest son and the equal to King Arthur’s heir. Jack is both everyman and extraordinary. Jack is so cool, I wish I had more time to parse that but his qualities are not subtle in the text/subtext, anyway.

But back to my half-crack reading of seasons 14 and 15.

Once upon a time in Supernatural, there were two fairy tales being told. Both fairy tales are found all over the world and in many forms, but they all can be grouped together because they all contain shared elements of the same basic plot or shared themes, and these two in particular are sister stories. So when I mention “Sleeping Beauty,” I’m talking about lots of different versions of the folk tale, and the same for “Snow White,” which can be found in one form or another in storytelling traditions all over the place. It is both helpful and irritating that these are both Disney movies, too.

Jack makes an allusion to Sleeping Beauty in 14x03 The Scar while talking to Castiel-- it’s the kind of subtextual flash that in and of itself means little and proves nothing, but then beginning with The Scar we got three stories in a row that dealt with “sleepers” of some sort-- Lora in 14x03 doomed to die because of a witch’s spell, Stuart in 14x04 Mint Condition in a coma because of a ghost attack, and Sasha’s father in 14x05 Nightmare Logic under the spell of a clever djinn. It’s powerful subtext, like a soft light that bathes these episodes in the color of fairy tale and makes Jack’s Dramatic Swoon at the end of Optimism all the more Dramatic-- subtext amplifying the plot. Jack goes to Heaven, but is eventually cornered by the Shadow, who wants him in the Empty where he will sleep forever-- the Shadow being an entity who has claimed the husks of dead angels since their inception and thus implies a “curse” laid on Jack from the moment he came into being-- but Castiel, who is ever a thief in oh so many ways, makes a bargain with the Shadow and essentially takes over the consequences of Jack’s Sleeping Beauty story (hence my rarely used but hilarious tag “Castiel Thief of Endings.”)

Now that we know from 14x20 Moriah that the Shadow and Billie the Reaper are, if not allies, at least working together when Jack is awakened in the Empty, does that mean that Castiel’s deal is still on the table, or has that fate been thwarted? *pounds table* Was Jack’s death and Chuck’s rise as a “greater threat” in 14x20 enough to shift Castiel’s ending? It’s the kind of subtextual question that lends tension to the narrative and it’s what I am here for.

Well, speaking of thwarted expectations, Dean’s arc was being shadowed by a Snow White tale type. We all know Snow White but why don’t I sum it up anyway, since Disney messed up the folktale ending lol. Snow White is cast out of her home by her jealous stepmother (and echoes of the stepmother’s magic mirror show up in 15x02 Gods and Monsters) who sends her huntsman to kill her; the dude can’t do it and turns the girl loose in the forest instead. Snow White joins a band of outsiders who live in the forest-- in the Disney movie and the Grimms’ tale they are dwarfs, in some versions she happens upon a band of robbers-- and they love her very much and we presume she’s safe for the rest of her life; Michael mysteriously turns Dean loose to join Sam’s gathering of hunters, however we know, like Stepmom, Michael is still out there. The stepmother finds out that Snow White is actually alive and contrives to kill her herself. Eventually succeeding, Snow White appears to die and is usually laid to rest in a crystal casket/glass coffin. Her stepmother’s machinations have _stolen her agency_ (further paralleling Dean’s possession by AU!Michael.) A Handsome Prince stumbles upon Snow White, is besmitten with her, and he asks her protectors if he can have her, as one does. Leaving the Disney adaptation aside, Snow White awakens when whatever item that has caused her death-like state is dislodged (piece of apple in her throat) or removed (magic corset) or withdrawn (poisoned hairpin) by her protectors. Snow White is a story about the community of the dwarves of band of robbers or adopted family caring deeply for her, and when Dean starts making his own crystal casket, the ma’lak box, in which he will ride out eternity in tormented symbiosis with Apocalypse Michael, he has to rely on his family to help him see the plan through. However, here’s where Jack-- who is as much a chaos engine as his surrogate father Castiel if not more so-- steps in and ruins the ending. Jack smites Michael. Dean Winchester is saved. Again. To put the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, Jack later destroys the ma’lek box entirely.

That was quite the surprise ending… for one of the stories.

Was the end of season 14 the end of the Sleeping Beauty theme, also?

END OF TL;DR

I quit writing about “folklore” for a while, but that doesn’t mean it stopped being a theme. It just stopped being fun to write about as the story got more and more dark, and when it transmuted into two parallel themes of “folklore” or storytelling by the people versus Death of the Author--or storytelling by a lauded authority-- and there was so much angst about the boundaries of Chuck’s powers, I just wanted to sit back and enjoy that. I did distill my thoughts about Sam’s new arc in the DotA plot, which I thought would subsume the folktale themes but hey, we still have folktales around, too. I mean, we have Sam and we have Dean, and we have two “literary” subtexts, or maybe rather two subjects about the nature of story, something that I thought was a little bit of a surprise.

Storytelling was a Feature of 15x07 Last Call, both in the sense that Lee and Dean swap new stories and tell old tales of their adventures together as they catch up, but also in the sense that we got additional “text”-- hints of a backstory where John and Dean hunted with Lee in that swampy long-ago “Stanford era,” and again we get storytelling when _Lee recounts how he ended up keeping a marid in his basement_. There is also an allusion to the Thousand and One Arabian Nights in that episode that I yelled about in a meta that I never put on the interwebs, but the “marid” is in a specific tale in many editions of that collection, and thus calls in not only a different folktale tradition but the concept of a framed/nested narrative, which I believe will be important to understanding the last episodes of the series, but that’s an aside. In 15x08 Our Father Who Aren’t In Heaven, Castiel _tells Michael the story_ of how everyone ended up where they are now to convince him to help. And Michael and Adam’s allyship, if not friendship, was probably the best subversion of any “storytelling” expectation we’ve ever had on this show. Belphagor set us up for “room full of crazy” or something, but, no. We got symbiosis.

That almost sums up how I’ve been viewing the last “era” of spn. This wasn’t in the master post, but I shouted a lot about underworlds before 15x09 Purgatory 2: Return to Purgatory, and then stopped shouting because I had to ferment for a while. Also, as has been mentioned, the world turned to crap. But talking to other meta writers during the ramp up to the resumption of the season helped me realize just why this reading of myth to folktales to literature feels so right.

Underworlds and Otherworlds…. Everybody has crossed into an “underworld” or three in Supernatural, it’s really nbd. It was actually surface-level plot in season 13. By the time 15x09 rolled around, our heroes are just, like, strolling in and out of “sealed off” Hell after doing a level one spell and chilling with Billie in the Empty and even that Purgatory trip didn’t have the same feeling of danger that, say, crossing into the AU did. But also, we’re at the point where subtext is leading us to a _satisfactory_ ending. Where before we had serial text, like a cumulative tale type-- “The House that Jack Built”-- which just kept adding more and more plot, we’re hurtling o’er the apex of Freytag’s pyramid now and things are getting loud.

But they’re also getting very shifty.

I wrote a little bit about Sam Winchester successfully reviving Eileen in 15x06 Golden Time and the “Orpheus and Eurydice” symbolism of him keeping his back to her. (I’m not linking it because it’s so, so rough.) But because Sam is not an underworld hero, not completely-- I see him as a modern Protagonist coming to terms in a psychoanalytical model with things like mortality, fallibility, and mastery-- maybe bildungsroman, even -- he was able to subvert the tragic ending of the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice because it is not “his” story. But if I were pressed to find a mythic or folk tale type to measure Sam against, I could. I would probably sideye “the sorcerer’s apprentice” trope (ATU 325-The Magician and his Pupil :D ) which began as a poem that entered European folklore on different fronts. (and weirdly, that story was also Disnified in Fantasia. That’s probably more my own limitation as a gen x american lol than anything coming from the writer’s room.)

Dean got his moment in Purgatory where he was able to finally come to grips with his anger and heal the rift between himself and Castiel because Purgatory is a different kind of underworld. Dean is a successful threshold-crosser, having crossed that boundary out of Purgatory before, but in 15x09, his prayer to Castiel is all a subtextual evocation of doing the emotional and mental work of therapy, which Sam, as a modern protagonist, is usually caught up in. The mythic hero also deals with mortality, failibilty, and mastery, but in different terms. I hope I’m doing an okay job peeling apart these nuances that I’m seeing.

Since Castiel accompanied Dean to Purgatory, and in the past made his own wildly successful incursion into and out of Hell with Dean’s soul, and was the one in The Trap who actually retrieved the Leviathan blossom, Castiel counts as an underworld hero, too, but you can pull the lever and send the tumblers spinning again and make him a fairy tale character in that he has made this Bargain with the Empty which is both in the “modern” tradition of subverting a fairy tale, and the tale type “deal with the devil.” Or he could be seen as a modern protagonist in that he’s lowkey grappling with questions of selfhood and identification. “I am an angel of the lord.” “I am no one.” “It’s Steve, now.” “You are nothing.” “I am an angel.”

We even got an episode that playfully explored the concept of “hero” by subverting our expectations (Sam and Dean were rescued by, of all people, an upgraded Garth.) It was called The Hero’s Journey, after the Joseph Campbell book about mythic heroes.... !!! Like, what??? !!!! I didn’t even have anything to say about that episode, it just rocked. The “meta” was just all out there in plot, like the olives and boiled eggs in a 1950’s gelatin recipe.

Some of this slipperiness in the subtext points right at the study of folklore and the (admittedly Eurocentric at first) efforts to transform a “soft science” into something approaching scientific rigor. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale index is today a codifying or cataloguing tool, with which anthropologists and literature scholars can line up stories based on the motifs found within them-- it is useful for cataloguing tales, making comparative studies, and for trying to trace these stories back through human history to find the One First Story of that type, for instance the ur-story that led to Snow White. When did people first start telling that tale, where, how did it spread, and why are we still telling it today? The danger in using the ATU index is that by stripping a story down to it’s bones, we lose the story, if that makes sense. The beauty of using the ATU index is that you find many, many more interconnected stories. It’s sort of a paradox. Some scholars criticize the ATU, claiming that one could take a random selection of these motifs and shuffle them to create a story and, you sort of could? That’s the beauty of the system.

So that brings us to Jack. I feel like Jack, as in Jack of all Trades, is anything that the narrative needs him to be. As far as I can find, “Jack” is not a “tale type.” He shows up alongside any number of them-- sometimes as a trickster, sometimes as a hero, almost always as a kind of slippery character. In the first folklore post, I invested many words in exploring Dabb’s obsession with threes-- AU Michael asks three beings what they desire, asks his human victim to guess his name three times, then we follow three sleeper stories, and so on. The original TFW was three people. But Jack makes four.

What is Jack’s story going to be?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And speaking for a sec about the origins of myth and folklore-- what about ALL OF THE OTHER PEOPLE in the world? Are they lowkey churning the matrix of reality on their own and generating their own content, like Becky and her AO3 stories and mackettes?

*¯\_(ツ)_/¯ intensifies*

It all just feels so good at this point, even the peril that I feel surrounding Castiel.

I *think* this will be the last of the longform metas before the end of the series. I mean, I can only hope so. I’ll drop some stuff about individual episodes that might be applicable as I rewatch, and I might clean up my post about Last Call and drop it on here, but I just wanted to kind of hold this up as a mile marker before the Final Seven air.

#the folklore of supernatural #idk even what to tag this

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