#going from being a fucking cartoon character - like he was drawn by wb in the 50s and lives by the Bugs Bunny laws of physics

[bottombaron]

I think that Guillermo, at the end of Laszlo's 'Roast' party in episode 7, will reveal his secret.

The party will most certainly devolve into a roast of him instead, because of course it will. Because Nandor won't be able to make clever jokes or get anyone to laugh and in order to save his ego he'll do what he always does in those situations and sacrifice Guillermo in its place. He'll say unnecessarily cruel things because he thinks no one person can be more important to him than the fear of his own weakness. He'll pile it on too. One thing after the other. Maybe the other vampires invited to the roast will laugh along because familiars are easy marks. And the heat will build. There's only so many lashes Guillermo can take on behalf of Nandor's pride. And Laszlo, Nadja, and Colin are starting to grimace and wince.

And that's when Guillermo will do it.

He will stand up, with the chair he was sitting in making a horrible noise across the wood floor like a record scratch. To let you know that the party has been violently cut short.

And Laszlo will do a panicked head shake, maybe try to salvage the situation from the precipice that Nandor has unknowingly brought them to. That Guillermo is about to jump off of. With all of them helplessly attached.

Guillermo was put in the audience on the other side of the room. Already segregated from the rest of the group. He's in a room filled with vampires who were just laughing at him but now look. Nandor's peers. The whole vampire community is here, watching him.

Guillermo's vampires sit across from him at a long table with a podium, like a panel of judges. Like he's a prisoner standing before the pulpit awaiting a verdict. He's got one last moment to either swallow the pride he just started to embrace on a float earlier that year and sit back down, let himself be ridiculed like always but live to see another day ... or burn it all down like it deserves to be, with his plea of guilt.

Holding a struck match, Guillermo will finally speak the truth to Nandor. To everyone. The real truth. The one he hasn't spoken out loud yet. The one nobody knows.

He will say, "I have a joke." And everyone will listen.

"I paid to have some barely-turned, low-rank, nothing of a vampire. Who hasn't even been one longer than I have been a familiar…to bite me. And turn me. In the back room of a gas station where he works. And he did it."

"I've been turned by a vampire that wasn't my master. That wasn't you."

Guillermo's jittered, bitchy energy tapers. He no longer fidgets or looks around at the faces slack-jawed at him. He's gone cold.

Like a killer, he delivers the next blow straight at his master's heart, sitting across the room at the podium, similarly frozen in place.

"But that's not the joke."

"The joke is, I may not have known how taboo it was…that it would be such a big deal to everyone else…but I did know…" (he licks his lips and despite his unshakable intent the uncontrollable emotion he always carries inside him threatens to undo his composure. Still, he keeps his voice loud and steady. Mostly. His attention is focused. His eyes start getting a little wet, but he hardly notices. He's going to follow through.)

"I didn't even really do it because I wanted to. Not then, or like that. (Not with him). Not for the same reason I had wanted to do it before. Or the reason I told Laszlo and Nadja I did it."

"See…the joke is…"

(His voice has become softer. It still carries across the room easily. There is no one else in the whole house but Guillermo and Nandor.)

"I did it because I knew how it would make you feel."

"I did it because I wanted to hurt you."

[cynical-librarian-watches-anime]

Yu-Gi-Oh: Final Thoughts

I used to watch Yugioh when I was much younger. Honestly, it was one of my first obsessions. I watched it religiously on the WB every chance I got. It was on directly after Pokémon, which was interesting. I always felt like I was just watching Pokémon because it was on, but I was actually there just waiting for Yugioh. Why I never caught on with Pokémon, I couldn’t tell you. But there you go. It just wasn’t for me. Once Pokémon was over, I could feel the excitement. What episode of Yugioh would it be today? Duelist Kingdom? Marik being his creepy self? The Orichalcos arch? It didn’t matter. I was ready to watch it, even if I had already seen it. And if it was a new episode I hadn’t seen, even better. No one could talk to me while I was watching it. I was zeroed in. Nothing else existed.

I had Yugioh cards, and I forced my younger brother to have some too, so we could “duel” to a degree. It was really just playing random cards until one of us played a Blue Eyes, which basically meant the duel was over. Neither of us liked math, so we didn’t keep track of life points. My dad went on a business trip to Japan during this time, and he brought back Japanese Yugioh cards for both of us. They were the coolest thing I owned for a good long while, even if I had no idea how to use them.

Then I got older, and I moved on to different obsessions. My cards got buried under the detritus of a messy life, until they fell into some kind of crack in the universe, and I lost them. I’ve moved quite a few times since then, including to a different state, so I’m guessing they got left behind somewhere, perhaps in the few boxes that always seem to go missing in a move. I hope they were found by someone who knew how to use them.

Now that I’ve reached a certain point in my life, I’ve started feeling very nostalgic. So, one night, as I was surfing through Netflix, I saw the first season of Yugioh appear in my recommendations. Instantly, I was transported back to simpler times, when weekday afternoons were filled with anticipation for a few episodes of a cartoon, and having my now lost deck of cards.

Watching this silly cartoon about the threat of ancient and dark forces being resolved by a trading card game was truly a wonderful experience. I remembered why I loved this show, why I was strangely into reading about ancient Egyptian history when other kids were more interested in gossip, why I constantly rented the Yugioh movie at Hollywood Video.

One character who surprised me this time around was Seto Kaiba. In the past, I was always obsessed with Atem, and I still very much am. But I found myself getting drawn towards this snarky billionaire, where previously I barely paid him any attention at all. This is probably because, as a young and optimistic child, I couldn’t understand him. But as an embittered and negative adult, I could finally SEE him. So I started paying attention, and I was not disappointed. He’s a character that seems to have been gift wrapped for us to come back to as adults, so we can better appreciate his sense of humor and negative worldview as we grow up and understand just how right he was about a lot of things.

Another surprise for me was… Yugi. This is going to be a hot take, so apologies in advance. I didn’t like Yugi when I was younger. I was just always hoping for the pharaoh to come out, because I thought he was badass, and Yugi was just weak. Now, this very much could be the result of my consuming this show out of order when I was younger. I can now say, proudly, that I have revised this error in judgment on a rewatch as an adult. Yugi is a treasure. He’s my precious cinnamon roll. His growth throughout this series was phenomenal, and I truly felt glad to have been able to witness it. His relationship with Atem was beautiful. A bond for the ages. A reciprocal relationship which allowed BOTH OF THEM, regardless of their level of dueling expertise, to learn from one another. It was a lot of fun to watch play out.

This brings me to Atem himself. Wow. My dude is still definitely a badass, but now I can really understand why he’s a badass. This might sound weird, but bear with me. Atem is almost like John Wick. He is a man of focus, commitment, and sheer fucking will. But, while John Wick is a badass for personal reasons, and because he was a major player in a criminal underworld, Atem is a badass for the right reasons. Imagine having a John Wick fighting to save the world, rather than just for righteous vengeance. That’s Atem. He was determined to be victorious, BECAUSE he knew the fate of the world depended on him, and also because saving the world meant protecting Yugi. To have someone like that on the good side meant I could gladly watch him be the best at defeating other people just as determined as him.

Anyways, this is a very long post, but Yugioh deserves it. It was special to me back then, and it’s still precious to me now. Sure, it’s a little weird, but that was fine with me. The story underneath all that marketing was fun to watch, so it was all more than worth it.

[whumpster-fire]

More on Redemption Arcs

So, there’s something else I want to say about Enemies to Lovers / Enemies to Friends / in general redemption arcs, and in particular those where a character who’s previously been hurt by a villain or their associates is now in a caretaking role for that villain.

Obligatory no one is obligated to forgive someone who’s caused them trauma, or go through the emotional labor of supporting them, or ever interact with them again. But, IMO, it works better if you approach it from the perspective of: “Okay, so why would the traumatized character want to interact with the source of that trauma?” Think about something positive they’re getting from this relationship, from the character’s perspective, and/or think about it in terms of what would establish a bond between them that would cause character A to not want to say: “Okay I don’t care if they’re reformed / reformable, they’re someone else’s problem.”

And obviously there’s better and worse, or at least healthier and less healthy reasons for this. One good one is to have circumstances / the plot force them to grit their teeth and work together, causing bonding through alliance (I dunno the actual term), and at some point during or after this they go “Oh shit we’re actually friends now” (CoughZukoCough). Another of my favorites is to have characters bonding through a shared trauma. This could be a “we’re all in the same boat” situation like I mentioned above but instead of succeeding together they suffer together, or it could be through similar circumstances but not actually the same event, or it could be they’re both abused and traumatized by the same Even Worse Villain and the subordinate villain ends up standing up to their abuser and helping the hero. (E.g. @wildfaewhump’s Iesin and Talvos storyline here on Tumblr, go check it out).

Here’s a couple of case studies of this with redemption arcs I’ve written avoided writing like 90% of the actual recovery phase of, which I’m putting below a Keep Reading both because we’re several paragraphs in now and because one of them spoils the canon material, and also yeah I’m being obnoxious writing long-winded essays about my own fics even if it is my blog. Fics are linked to Ao3, check the tags and summaries on there for trigger warnings and read at your own risk.

Case One: Resurrection x And x Reconciliation

This is in the Hunter X Hunter fandom, and it’s a Gon & Neferpitou friendship, which if you’re familiar with the canon material sounds like the worst fucking idea ever for an enemies to friends arc. Long story short Pitou killed (and also reanimated as a corpse puppet) someone close to Gon, and the trauma of this utterly broke him, to the point of being so obsessed with revenge that he pushed away and hurt his closest friend, took an innocent person hostage for leverage, and basically snapped and went to utterly insane lengths to kill Pitou that it would have caused him a slow, horribly painful death if it weren’t for circumstances.

Okay, but long story short, the person whose death set this all off later turned out to have somehow reincarnated himself into another body, and Gon already processes stuff in really weird ways, so he was now left struggling to process the delayed realization of all the fuckups and reckless and harmful things he’d done, and the trauma of the actual “fight” against Pitou, and meanwhile Pitou got the fun experience of experiencing grief and loss and a near-death (technically actual death) experience for the first time and starting to process that she’d caused that kind of trauma for hundreds of thousands of fully sentient people. And also it turned out that they both sacrificed their lives to kill each other and accomplished absolutely nothing in the process, because the person Gon was trying to avenge turned out to be still alive, and the person Pitou was trying to protected turned out to already be fatally injured.

So this is kind of the exception that proves the rule because Gon and Pitou’s friendship is absolutely 100% born of shared trauma, it’s just that a major part of said trauma was mutually inflicted on each other, and supporting each other kind of helps them heal. This isn’t necessarily actually psychologically healthy or a good idea, but it’s pretty well established in canon that the only thing worse than every single adult in the setting’s track record at supporting people during mental health crises is their track record at stopping Gon from doing whatever the fuck he decides to do, and no one wants to deal with Pitou either.

Case Two: La Resistance / Fresh Ink

This is in, uhh, the Warner Bros Cartoon Universe fandom / Who Framed Roger Rabbit fandom, but by nature the canon material doesn’t have much of a plot for the former and the later is really just the setting. Lemme try and summarize this: in the final battle against the terrorist group that was creating Toons (living cartoon characters with reality warping powers) as living weapons in an attempted genocide against other Toons, the only two surviving toons on the villain’s side, Wendy Weasel and Riley Raccoon, were semi-adopted by some of the protagonists: Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner, and Slappy Squirrel. At first mostly Wendy because in the immediate aftermath of the battle Riley was in the ICU.

Okay, why did they spend their time dealing with her? This one’s different because Wendy herself didn’t really cause that much in the way of direct trauma to the characters who ended up supporting her - the ones she really hurt didn’t have much to do with her - however she’s just a fucking chore to try to get along with because she’s passive-aggressive, aggressive-aggressive, destructive-aggressive, and her main defense mechanism is to intensify these traits even further so she was just a hostile brat most of the time.

Well, this starts as a “Forced together by external circumstances” plot, of a sort: Wendy ended up as a prisoner after the battle - she defected, but never actually surrendered because she knocked herself unconscious while killing the main villain. The FBI did not want to have to deal with a prisoner who could teleport through walls, pull weapons and tools out of thin air, Jedi Mind Trick guards, etc. etc. etc, and the Warner Siblings just happened to be in a possession of a tailor-made prison designed to hold creatures like her (originally meant to contain them, they broke out but refused to move out) and were among the like 5-10 people on the planet who could actually fight her, so the Feds basically went: “Your problem now,” or just as accurately, the Warners and Slappy were not letting what was obviously an indoctrinated child soldier who defected and helped them get deemed “Too dangerous to let live since we can’t keep her contained long enough to have a trial” as a matter of principle.

But reason B, especially as they interacted with Wendy, is that the Warners and to a lesser extent Slappy knew what it was like to be drawn into existence and surrounded by people who hated them, feared them, or at least didn’t respect them. Again there was an attempt to seal the Warners permanently in an inescapable prison, and this was before a method of actually killing Toons was invented so they’re pretty sure the humans would have preferred to straight-up murder them for being too powerful and out of control... which was also the exact same ideology held by Wendy’s creators. And they also really empathized with the strong “sibling” bond she had with Riley (not actually supposed to be siblings but drawn by the same animator so sort of siblings and they just kinda decided they were) because it reminded them of themselves as well. This is self-explanatory with the Warners, with Slappy, in the fic she and Screwy Squirrel were siblings, and “Gee wouldn’t it be terrifying if a character as chaotic and sadistic as Screwy Squirrel was a villain was literally the starting point for Wendy’s character concept.

Also reason C is “Obnoxious child using passive-aggressiveness to mask trauma, anger, and need for love and attention” fit right in in the WB Studio Water Tower.

Anyway tl;dr that’s another example of a potential motive behind the caretakers in a redemption arc: if the characters sort of identify with the villain due to similar backgrounds to the point where they sort of go: “That could’ve been me in different circumstances.”