#he doesn't want to get executed

[itssowholsomicoulddie]

More Merlin Crossover 2

Takes place at a dinner after Jane foiled an attempted assassination. They wound up talking about how often it happens in Camelot and poisonings and such.

“Wha- Merlin! Do you mean to tell me-” “That I check all your meals for poison before they get to you? Yes. That’s part of my job.” “It most certainly is not!” “Is so. If there isn’t a personal manservant then that duty falls to the court fool but we can’t have you checking your own food now can we?” Gwendylin gasped and Merlin winced, sure that his accidental slip of the tongue in front of foreign royalty would impede Arthur’s alliance negotiations somehow. But no one from Kippernium was looking at him. They were looking at the bell studded boy playing his lute in the corner for ambiance music. Sensing their eyes he looked up and paused. Beaming he said, “I am proud to report that no one has ever dared try to harm our most beloved King and Queen, nor our precious Prince and Princess.”

Of course Pepper would never but the table is set before the royal family enters and anything could happen to it then.

Also, Jane is so put out about how easy it was to catch the assassin. In her words he was, "Utterly incompetent." The guy was claiming to be a new servant and her father is the steward for crying out loud. She walked away from the whole thing with nothing more than a small cut on her cheek. What kind of scar story would that make for? I hit an assassin over the head with a wall sconce and got this scar in the process. Whole thing took like, forty seconds. No grand battle. Just a dumb intruder. Never mind that Jane was actually super impressive and stopped a well known professional ASSASSIN by herself in under a minute.

[feroluce]

This was all the way back from the end of 2.3.

Hey Sparkle what the fuck.

[rythyme]

really not a fan of boston very explicitly saying "I want to be exclusive romantically but not sexually" only to be told "You're lying to yourself. I think you should be alone."

[omuricebreakfast]

La Creatura

I doodled with pen a few days ago and one of my results was this!

[blaithnne]

my timephoon hot take is that the episode was literally fine, it's the episodes that came AFTER it that fucked things up

[dazais-guardian-angel]

I'm finding it difficult to reconcile the fact that what I've always wanted and envisioned for Nikolai and his relationship with Fyodor based on fanworks and the very very little canon information we've had to go off of so far, will very likely be very different from what we actually get.

While I understand the appeal of Fyodor taking over Nikolai's body via his blood ability, and the inherent, romantic, ironic tragedy of that — for Nikolai, the person who yearned for freedom, to meet an end by having his soul eternally trapped in the body of the person he loved the most, while Fyodor lives on in his body, never truly knowing how much he was adored by him — I would just hate the idea of that happening now? It just feels far, far too soon for Nikolai to be dead, for his character to no longer have a role or a purpose; his mind and behavior is so utterly fascinating in all its bizarre contradictions, there's so much more to explore and discover with him, he's one of BSD's most complex characters, or at least he's set up to be, and I really hope Asagiri wouldn't throw him away this soon without doing anything more with him.

I never really thought that Nikolai would be the one to end Fyodor for good, way down the line (that can only ever be Dazai's job, to me, since he's his foil), but I always imagined he'd at least have some kind of role in attempting to kill him, since that's his ultimate wish. I imagined that it would be ugly, frenzied, unhinged, desperate, Nikolai finally being forced to acknowledge the horrible truth that's always been buried within his subconscious but he's never wanted to accept: that going against all human reason and killing someone he cares so deeply for will not, in fact, simply make those feelings go away, and will instead make them unable to ignore in his despair. The realization that he'll always be chained to human emotions, to love, no matter how much he thinks he can be free of them. And then, the ensuing breakdown from that. Yes, it's extremely fanficky lmao, but that kind of drama makes sense to me for him and them. It's interesting.

There was also the angst angle of Fyodor being immortal, and Nikolai's agenda perhaps stemming from wanting to save him from that, and being able to finally free him from it in the same way he himself wants to be freed. Killing being the ultimate expression of love, not too dissimilar to Mushitarou killing Yokomizo, both putting on an act of being hateful/vengeful/hostile towards the other in order to cope with the fact that deep down they can't bear the thought of them being gone.

But then we got Fyodor's "death" here, and Nikolai's reaction to it was so unbelievably underwhelming and calm that it made me question everything I thought I knew about Asagiri's writing skills him, and what the story is going for with him. And combined with this revelation now that Fyodor is (unsurprisingly!) immortal, but specifically in the way that he can be killed but supposedly resurrects endlessly (which I really like in of itself, don't get me wrong)... it makes me question what exactly Nikolai knows, or will know, and it somewhat destroys the potential angst we could get with them in the end, or at least drastically changes it.

If Nikolai already knows Fyodor can't be killed, that means we'll never get a moment where he tries to kill him and then has to face the fact that he did the deed and it didn't make him feel freed, and he instantly regrets it. It also means we'd never get a moment where he tries to kill him and then discovers he can't truly die, and the ensuing insanity that would occur from that. It also makes me even question the legitimacy of his reaction to Fyodor's "death" here... was it so damn apathetic and lukewarm because he already knows it wasn't permanent? I mean, I'd like an explanation for it feeling so ooc, it would make me feel better about that, but I can't deny that it would be disappointing to have yet another part of this arc that was just an act and not genuine feelings....

Now, that isn't to say that it's impossible to do anything interesting with Nikolai already knowing the truth. He could be wishing to try to attain free will through the illogical pursuit of an impossible task: in this case, killing Fyodor. There's a beautiful, tragic paradox in him wishing to attempt something to gain his freedom that he and we know is impossible, especially if subconsciously he takes solace in the fact that he'd be able to kill Fyodor without actually losing him for good. If Nikolai doesn't already know, assuming he's not dead he's likely going to find out the truth soon when he next sees Fyodor alive and kicking — I can't imagine a way he wouldn't find out. In that case, we wouldn't get the aforementioned scenario where he tries to kill him and discovers it's futile, which is the most juicy to me I won't lie, but I am still fascinated by the idea of how Nikolai will respond just seeing him suddenly alive again and having to process this after having just mourned him. It's interesting to imagine how he might respond to and treat Fyodor after at last knowing how it truly felt to lose him, and realizing how much he didn't want that, and then suddenly having him back. It might cause him to finally understand that his desire for freedom is unobtainable, and cause him to spiral, and fundamentally change their relationship going forward. An eventual tragic end for him such as Fyodor taking over his body would not feel out of place to me in that case, perhaps, but still not until we've had more time to see Nikolai reflect and see his possible change in perspectives.

I don't know, I'm just rambling at this point lmao. I know very well that so much of my expectations and desires for Nikolai and Fyolai are built up from fan content over the years just because there's been nothing else to work with, and that it's unfair to judge what Asagiri decides to do with him/them based on preconceived notions. Whatever he does could still be interesting in the end, even if it's not what I initially wanted or expected, and being open to being surprised is always a good thing. At the end of the day we still know barely anything about Nikolai, so it's not completely fair for me to judge something as ooc for a character we still know so little about.

But... it's because we know so little about him and have gotten so little of him, that at the very least, I'm gonna be really upset if he does die here from being possessed by Fyodor like people are worrying about. I really don't think he will, because I'm pretty confident the helicopter pilot is the one Fyodor swapped with/resurrected in the body of as per soup's theory, and again I'm not saying it wouldn't be fitting eventually... but I really don't want it to happen now. :/ I just think Nikolai still has so much potential as a character and so much more we need to see of him before his likely inevitable and tragic demise (however it happens), so whatever Asagiri decides to do with him I just really, really hope we don't lose him so prematurely; it would honestly be such a tremendous waste imo.

[perelka-l]

tug tug

idk why tracksuit I just didn't want to make him wear usual stuff (and there is a crop top version so)

[silusvesuius]

n*loth is literally a demon i mean iHold on YAAASSSSS!

i mean it 😒😒😒

[longagoitwastuesday]

I actually like the last chapter. I think the ideas are very good. I have my qualms on how some things were managed, as I always do, but I think shonen authors get tangled in the expectations of a shonen to the point it jeopardises their writing, often even when they're not lacking in skills

[stillfruit]

"jjk ending sucks because gojo's ending is sad why didn't people acknowledge him" have you considered what you are observing are themes and an integral point of his story and character

[monty-glasses-roxy]

Ah fuck it whatever

There's something I love about the new Consequences AU and how it compares to the AUs and music it's come from.

Where things like Roxy's old kingdom being destroyed and her being almost drowned as a baby are metaphorical, there's a lot of things that strangely aren't. Roxy specifically denying the gods and the powers that be is something she does in most of my interpretations of her. The gods in most situations, isn't a spooky green rabbit, it's the people in the Fazbear boardroom making the world's worst decisions ever. To the animatronics, they are the gods. There's no higher authority than them, and they can have them destroyed without ever having met them, at just a moment's notice, for seemingly no reason.

Bonnie once believing in the gods and turning against them works like it does for most of the animatronics too. Even just questioning Fazbear isn't something many of them have been able to do, but all of them will eventually learn to. The more they learn through Roxy, despite what they might have known before, the more they realise what kind of company they've been forced to be a part of.

And Roxy's attitude towards these gods is always the same. She won't pretend to be nice to people she knows don't care about her. She won't put any extra effort into maintaining social etiquette if there's no point, if there's nothing for her to gain from it. Fazbear CEOs and board members have hurt her so much already, she doesn't give a flying shit about them, she's not wasting her time on them unless she absolutely has to. In this universe, the same can be said about the gods. She doesn't care for them and they don't care about her, so why bother? They've told like six people to assassinate her already, why would she choose to listen to them?

Roxy's relationship with the Minis and DJ? That's the same as it is across the board with most of the AUs I have. The attempt on Roxy's life when she's barely been born is shown differently in the new AU, but is still the same concept. Some things have been shifted around, such as the specific motivations, but not by a lot. I suppose Bonnie's dad in this fills the roll of Vanessa if Vanessa was also actually Mimic? He doesn't have an exact match here in terms of scale, but the comparisons are there.

The whole kingdom being destroyed, Roxy finding out that that's where she originally came from, that she was the newborn prince with a wholeass family she's never known, all lines up so well with everything else too. The pizzeria, scrapped storage, the old attractions there before her racetrack, it's all gone and she knew nothing about it. She's once again found out the truth in possibly the worst way imagineable, and she doesn't know what to do with this information, but honestly, who would?

The biggest difference there is that in this new AU, Roxy has the choice of what to do. In what's basically canon to the game, Roxy doesn't have that choice and likely never will. Where she's had to sacrifice her Raceway and Salon, sacrifice the vast majority of her life and her purpose for the safety of everyone around her, in this universe, she can choose not to. She sacrifices certainty this time, something she can regain as time goes on but in any other universe, there is never any certainty to get back. There will always be a Mimic threat and she can't get any of her old life back until it's dead and gone. She has to pay a price to keep Mimic contained, and while the Afton/Glitchtrap gods scramble to convince her otherwise, the Roxy in this new AU does have the choice whether she pays it or not.

But she will always still have to deal with the consequences of those with power. Every single time. And every single time so far, her entire existence is the consequence for them. Her life overall has not been the result of her own choices, but rather, the choices of people that never cared about her to begin with...

At least in this new universe she has a good childhood to fall back on and a cool ass horsie. And can actually do something about this shit. She can't normally do that :(

[childofaura]

All right, it seems like I’ve got a lot of understanding and rational people who responded to my earlier inquiry about making a Claire criticism post. So I’m gonna go ahead and do it, since this is something that’s sat in my mind every time a new installment of the ToA series came out.

SO BIG DISCLAIMER BECAUSE I WANT EVERYONE TO READ THIS BEFORE ANYONE GETS MAD AT ME:

THIS IS ALL MY SUBJECTIVE OPINION. I MIGHT BE PHRASING THIS POST LIKE IT’S AN ABSOLUTE, BUT IT’S NOT, IT’S ALL ISSUES I PERSONALLY FEEL WITH CLAIRE’S CHARACTER. SO IF YOU LIKE CLAIRE, THIS IS NOT A PERSONAL ATTACK OR ME TELLING YOU YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT SOMETHING/CAN’T LIKE CLAIRE.

Now that I think I’ve got that out of the way, I wanna jump into the actual post of why I’ve never really liked Claire’s character.

If we’re being really really REALLY honest... I think the issue is mostly based off of “The writers didn’t know how to write Claire”. I’ve felt like every character in Trollhunters (specifically Trollhunters, we don’t talk about 3Below and while Wizards was pretty positive overall, that was also a lot of hit or miss, and that series plays even more into why I don’t like Claire) was executed pretty well to fulfill their roles as characters or to be compelling and pretty easy to grasp their personalities.

Except Claire.

Personality issues:

Her character’s inconsistent and flip-flops. To start off, her intro in the series is just “pretty girl that Jim likes”. We get the promising sense that she has some non-conforming interests at first, as she’s advertising try-outs for the play, but that’s just lifted from the Trollhunters book and we never see any interest in theater arts from Claire ever again after that. Her hair (and I’m sorry but I hate her hair with all the stupid hairclips in the front, it’s so distracting and it looks dumb) with the streak in it and the skull shirt she wears makes you assume she’s somewhat rebellious, maybe kind of punk, but she’s a straight-A trouble-free student who’s apparently popular with everyone, and helps her mom out with campaigning for her political career. There’s really nothing to her personality that shows itself consistently, besides the Papa Skull interest.

And then there’s how badly her character and personality was executed at first; When Steve’s about to beat up Jim, she tries to step in but gets shoved back. Great! She has a sense of right and wrong and she’ll stand up for others. But then later on, she scolds Jim for the crime of... standing up for himself? Which sends a really bad message that she’d have rather had Jim publicly humiliate himself and/or possibly get beat up. Then later she’s willing to go to a Papa Skull concert with the same guy who shoved her. That’s incredibly weak character right there.

She starts to show some more positive character when after getting mad at Jim for trashing the house, she puts two and two together and realizes something’s off, but then she just... sneaks into his house like a weirdo, even though nothing about her character suggests that she’d do something like that and she has no real reason besides “Jim wasn’t straightforward about the party”; it’s not something a normal person would do or what SHE would do given her current character development. And then this one’s a smaller gripe, but I hated her scoff in Wizards when the tournament was going on and the guards didn’t let her in, she goes “Ugh, boys’ club!”. UH HELLO, YOU IDIOT. THERE WERE FEMALE GUARDS CLEARLY EMPLOYED IN ARTHUR’S SERVICE. HELL, THE GUARD THAT BULLAR ATE WAS A FEMALE GUARD. GET OFF YOUR HIGH HORSE AND STOP PRETENDING LIKE YOU’RE BEING SLIGHTED BECAUSE YOU’RE A GIRL. YOU WERE CONSIDERED A CIVILIAN TRYING TO ENTER A TOURNAMENT FOR TRAINED KNIGHTS.

Now past all the character inconsistencies in those first thirteen-ish episodes, the second issue I have with Claire’s character is that she teeters pretty dangerously into Mary Sue territory. Everyone (I was almost gonna say “who isn’t a major villain” but EVEN MORGANA ends up liking her. So MOSTLY everyone) who isn’t a main antagonist ends up liking Claire in some way. Steve the bully? Tries to date her. Mary, whom she said she wasn’t really close friends with? Is friends with her and even has her number. Freaking VENDEL, the grumpiest character in the show, only has to hear her talk in Troll and he immediately likes her without her having to earn his trust (which also she just... never uses Troll again. Sure is convenient that she learned to speak fluent Troll just for one scene and one character to like her). Morgana takes a liking to her. Compare that to how hard Jim had to work to gain the trust of others: His bond with Draal, learning to prove himself to Vendel, engaging with Nomura in prison and befriending her. She too easily assimilates with other characters; I’d have less issues if she had to work like Jim did, but the only time she does is with NotEnrique.

Skills and abilities don’t feel earned or consistent:

And then the whole thing with her powers and her physical abilities. It was never explained in the show how she actually obtained innate magic powers not connected to the Shadow Staff itself (And no, if you have to explain it on Twitter as a writer, that’s not good writing, that’s forcing your audience to play detective). She’s just all of a sudden doing awfully-convenient high-level magic in the first two episodes (or maybe three, whenever she created that shadow-cover for Jim and the others to escape.) without explaining HOW she had got those powers, and then she performs it perfectly whenever the plot needs it (She’s literally shown to be more powerful than Merlin, how stupid is that?). Remember in the movie where everyone was like “Oh no Claire, don’t use your powers because it could hurt you!” and she does anyways and she faints for like three seconds and then has no other physical repercussions? Or how she’s somehow MORE capable than Jim when it comes to fighting, like how in the Chinese Trollmarket she manages to swipe one of the other troll’s weapons, which has an entirely different weight and size to her shadow staff and probably required extensive training, and she just uses it flawlessly to fight? The only times Claire really fails are when the plot calls for it.

Plot can’t happen without her:

And finally, she hijacks the plot constantly, more than her character should, and has more importance placed on her role in the story than anyone else. Even Blinky. She even took over the plot for Wizards, which was supposed to be Douxie’s story and Douxie’s character-focus. The poor guy took a backseat to his own story because the plot relied on Claire to move forward, literally nothing could be done without her. And I mentioned it before but even though Douxie’s character still managed to get enough development, it was hardly enough because Claire hogged up so much screen-time focusing on HER and HER magic development and HER relationship with Morgana over Douxie and HIS magic development and HIS relationship with Merlin.

And also the fact that it’s Claire who ends up either saving the day or taking priority over the others. Who was the one who defeated Morgana in Trollhunters? Claire. Who brought Jim back to life as a human, despite the fact that even Merlin stated it was impossible for him to make Jim a human again? Claire. Who was it that Jim made sure to establish his relationship with, but not anyone else? CLAIRE. That ending in the movie where he doesn’t seem to care about his relationship with Blinky, Draal, Strickler, etc, but oh we’ve GOTTA have his girlfriend!

Overall, even typing this, I don’t think it’s her fault even though I hate her character; it’s the writers’ fault for doing such a sloppy and inconsistent job because she’s boiled down to just a “girl empowerment”. Because in the book, Claire Fontaine is AWESOME. She’s a Scot descended from a warrior lineage which actually explains why she has weapon capabilities, she’s explained that she’s not really a “popular girl” but she’s super confident in herself and doesn’t really care what others think, and that’s what Jim finds charming about her, and she rips Steve a new one after hearing that he’s just trying to charm her to piss off Jim.

But Claire Nunez is a mess of a poorly executed character. And again, I blame the writers because I think Claire could have been great if they knew what they were doing with her and made her balanced.

[fideidefenswhore]

philip making mary happy like she was 10 is a line i remember from her Children of England bio. so "for the first time since she was ten, when her father's eye had first lighted upon anne boleyn, she was truly happy." it's anne's fault again! so i guess weir wrote this novel from reading all her old books again, and not updating it with modern theories. which is kind of like endorsing herself.

also, she says mary had "dreams" about philip, "reliving the delights" iykwim. weird she changed that part.

the boleyn years are actually the only section of the book where weir imagined and wrote out long, extended, creatively reimagined scenes and conversations between characters; pretty much everything else, up till her marriage with philip, reads like a summary of events, either paraphrases or literal verbatim excerpts from her previous works. but, as she herself said in the author's note, the only piece of her life weir sympathizes for was her 'victimization' by anne boleyn; after that she says her sympathy for her is over (an objectively wild thing to say...no sympathy for the execution of her maternal surrogate in 1541? fr?). one gets the sense that the dialogue she gives mary concerning this is 100% what weir wishes she had said to her own father's 'other woman', that she never got the chance to say (tl; dr, revenge fantasy...i still have so many questions about that a/n...her mother was threatened with jail??)

she repeats the line about dreams; ('she was tormented by sensual dreams, in which [they were] making love'), however the actual portrayal of their sex scenes makes it explicit that she doesn't experience orgasm with her husband:

"this time she began to feel, in the core of her body, some tingle of response [...] but he was pressing on heedlessly to his climax and the moment was lost anyway."

and that is...the closest she ever gets.

she does this with her AB novel as well, which i just attributed to her hating her, because she portrays that in such a roundabout way...there's 'no alchemy' between her and henry (of like, all historical couples, this seems like a reach), and the evidence she could've used to support the choice (although, i think it's pretty clear now, especially from this A/N, where she says her own mother = coa, and this other woman in her own past = anne, that it was because she found it gratifying to write about anne suffering and unhappy and lacking pleasure in her life, again...revenge fantasy/transference) she dismisses (the 'vigor nor virtue' quote is a 'lie' from jane boleyn out of spite, anne even has the thought that it's 'not true'...?).

[bi-mirandalawson]

usonami. is it platonic ? is it romantic ? they dont even know.

[wreckedhoney]

uuuug every so often i see writing tips passed around and i want to make a post but i can't find the right words to convey "aaaauuggh don't do what The r/se of sk/walk3r did"

(long tags warning bc i haven't learned how not to type like i'm not popping off yet)

[kazumahashimoto]

I'M. SO. SICK.