#hello this hurts a lot

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

willingly unloved

[pussydestroyer1856]

arc 3. That’s it that’s the caption.

[autistichedgehogs]

did you know that when shadow the hedgehog said “if the world chooses to become my enemy, i will fight like i always have,” it was about him having a tummy ache (he was being very brave about it)

[bellshazes]

the only person who understands joel/etho/bdubs/impulse is me. cos i hate it. and i comprehend who's the dog needing kicked so bad. and it's several of them in the stupidest ways

[bestworstcase]

your point about team rwby being the maidens’ liberators made me think - do you think blake is going to have a special connection to the summer maiden? I noticed that she’s the only one who hasn’t been close to a maiden yet

i think gillian asturias is the summer maiden (and this post is hysterical in hindsight. at the time i wrote it, the full-length v9 epilogue hadn’t been released yet so we’d only seen qrow’s section and about half of winter’s – hence my pausing to lay out the argument for salem going to vale next and making a pretense of hedging my bets on the crown being narratively central in v10. lol)

now! with regard to blake and the summer maiden, the common thinking here seems to mostly run along the lines of “…and that’s why summer maiden ilia,” or the more general speculation that the summer maiden will be a faunus character.

to this i say:

it’s a fallacy to conflate “blake will probably have a strong narrative connection to the summer maiden” with “the summer maiden necessarily is or will be blake’s old friend,” and the argument for ilia being due for maidenhood is quite thin otherwise, and

blake can and does have important narrative connections to characters who aren’t faunus, and it’s a weird to presume that in order for the summer maiden to have a meaningful tie to blake, she must be a faunus herself.

to expand on that first point, let’s consider the personal relationships between each of the maidens so far and ruby / weiss / yang:

pyrrha -> ruby’s friend

cinder -> ruby’s personal enemy

raven -> yang’s estranged mother

penny -> ruby’s friend

winter -> weiss’s beloved sister

the takeaway here – other than that if you’re ruby’s friend and someone offers you to become a maiden you should refuse – is half the relations between maidens and members of team rwby are antagonistic. (raven seems likely to at least try making amends with yang in v10, but as it stands in the narrative right now things between them are very fraught.)

it is just as likely that blake’s narrative connection to the summer maiden might develop through a personal conflict between them, rather than friendship. yes?

and, if i’m right about gill being the summer maiden, well—stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl with a driving, passionate ambition to uplift her people from the ashes of centuries of conquest and subjugation is radicalized by a boy she loves who pulls them both deeper and deeper into violent, spiteful extremism that ultimately harms the very people they claim to fight for, until he finally crosses a line she can’t accept and she says no i will not.

that’s blake and adam but it’s also gillian and her brother. the difference between them is that blake’s red line was adam glibly revealing that the train heist was actually intended to be a massacre whereas gillian’s was jax stating his intention to commit suicide rather than retreat and live to fight another day; she helped yatsu subdue him specifically to save jax’s life, not because she had a crisis of conscience about their movement.

(there is a certain—really irritating—contingent of CFVY novel readers who project their own dislike of jax onto gill and insist that she turned against him because he demanded she ‘sacrifice her life’ to save him, which 1. he didn’t, he asked her to give him all her aura and then bodily shielded her because he’s physically bigger than she is so this was at worst a “if we’re going down together, i’ll make them go through me first,” 2. if gill only wanted to save her own neck all she had to do was rip her aura out of him and bounce, and 3. she explicitly says that the reason she did what she did is because he’s her brother, she loves him, and she couldn’t let him die.)

the point being, gill is still a radical; her soft betrayal of jax revealed her priorities in that she loves her brother more than The Cause, but in no way did it represent a break from her belief in the cause. if the epilogue is any indication, she’s just as committed to overthrowing shade academy as before. (and i think there’s a real chance that her actions will have improved her relationship with jax to some degree, because he believed she didn’t care about him at all! he thought she only stuck with him because his semblance compelled her to do so! and then gillian exploded his mind by revealing that his semblance straight up doesn’t work on her and she just loves him. which, if the twins are on the same page now, cuts down on the internal tension and likely makes them more dangerous adversaries to the coalition.)

but her history, the way she became like this, is eerily similar to blake’s radicalization in the white fang, and i think blake would certainly be able to piece that together. she’s also by far the member of team rwby i would say is most likely to recognize and relate to the genuine pain at the heart of the crown’s movement—vacuo has suffered.

vacuo wasn’t even a state until the end of the great war. it was a mistrali territory. its people were enslaved and worked to death in a systematic and horrifyingly effective project to extract every last speck of valuable resources from the region, and then even statehood was a slap in the face because they were left to fend for themselves in a barren wasteland whose ecosystem had been completely and utterly destroyed.

the crown is a mirror held up to the white fang; blake is insightful and empathetic enough to realize these similarities and see herself and her past mistakes reflected in gillian, but this time she’s an outsider to the movement—she can’t effect change from within or reclaim the true, important work from the vengeful extremists. so she’s limited in what she can do, practically, even as it’s going to be painfully clear to her that the crown is falling into the same trap adam did.

and at the same time, the new white fang will in all likelihood either be in vacuo or show up to join the coalition in v10, so blake’s part in her own movement, her place in her community, can be directly juxtaposed with her opposition to/empathy for the crown.

v9 sets up for this with blake’s advocacy for the afterans—v7-8 do as well to a lesser extent, because blake is still dealing with the personal fallout of v4-6 and thus is quieter about mantle than say, nora is, but like. blake draws a comparison between her experiences in the white fang and with adam and the moral compromises ironwood starts making after the election. it just seems… pretty clear to me that the narrative has been setting up blake to play a pivotal role in relation to the crown since at least v4 if not earlier, depending on how granular the vacuo outline was during v1-3.

so this is a narrative connection i very much expect blake to have with gillian regardless, but… if gill is the maiden…

well, she’s certainly not trapped inside ozpin’s vault/key maiden paradigm! so in that case what does it look like for a member of team rwby to fulfill this narrative role of liberation? probably something like de-radicalizing her and her brother by convincing them there is a better way forward than their divisive, violent, paranoid ideology. and blake is unquestionably the member of team rwby best equipped to get the ball rolling there.

further, blake’s semblance is a really strong counter to gill’s – that’s true of ruby and weiss as well, because gillian has to touch a person in order to steal aura and so agile, fast opponents are going to be tougher for her in general. but blake has two more things going for her beyond the basic mobility advantage, vis-a-vis making it personal:

the illusionary aspect of blake’s semblance will allow her to create decoys, which is a very powerful tactical advantage against an opponent who really wants to grab her, and

blake’s girlfriend is a hand-to-hand fighter, and an incredibly brave one with an intense protective instinct at that.

clears throat. we all remember yang getting possessed in rwby x jl part 2, yes? and blake clocking it instantly? well.

if blake and gillian are meant to be not just foils but personal adversaries in the vein of ruby and cinder—yang’s gonna get got. agile though she is, as a hand-to-hand combatant yang is unavoidably much more vulnerable to the twins’ contact-based semblances than the rest of her team, her personality will make it very hard for her to play it safe and stay back if it comes to an open fight, and there is nothing the narrative could do to lock in that personal enmity that would be punchier than yang being compromised.

even if gill as a personal adversary to blake isn’t in the cards i expect yang to get got anyway because, let’s be honest: do we really expect crwby to set themselves up with a golden opportunity to do a climactic love-overcomes-mind-control scene with the bees in v10 and then not take it? with how nuts the entire creative team goes for these two? after the climactic battle in ice queendom hingeing on yang being able to free blake from a nightmare with the mere lesser power of unrealized lesbianism? do we reeeally believe they would pass that up? lol.

[moeblob]

Shavuli !

She's just. Into rocks. It's fine. She likes to collect shiny rocks. (this is dice related and I am not apologizing for giving her this trait)

[mushramoo]

so Batman and Superman are like. super gay right

[beanghostprincess]

Sabo still struggles with memory loss. He had his childhood back, of course, he remembers Ace and Luffy and everything they did together. But he doesn't remember some stuff. Some anecdotes Luffy tells oh so excitedly? He can't recall that those happened. And if he does, it's all blurry and never at all like Luffy says. But he never says anything because that would break his brother's heart, to know his older brother isn't fully back with him, so he nods and smiles and pretends he knows what Luffy is talking about every time.

His room is filled with Post-it notes. Stupid, really. Dumb stuff. But he has all the meetings he needs to remember and the missions he has to do, along with everything he wants to write down at some point properly. The walls are covered in pictures of the people he loves (Luffy, Ace, Koala, Robin... All the others that have ever meant something to him because he refuses to forget somebody again).

He keeps writing dumb stuff down. Anything. He refuses to forget. He denies the possibility of doing it again.

But he forgets. Sabo keeps forgetting important dates. Important parts of his life, like his past with his brothers (he forgets a random adventure they had that he swore he had talked about the day prior) and crucial things he has to do. He has a hard time picturing his memories. Putting them in his brain. Turning them into images. Saying it's frustrating is a huge understatement.

Koala helps him out, of course. She's hard on him so he finishes his paperwork, but she knows it's difficult sometimes. She's his personal calendar and diary. She informs him of what he has to do during the week and always tries to talk and talk about anecdotes that she knows he still remembers but knows he loves to hear again.

His mental health isn't the best either, but he refuses to acknowledge it. There's a revolution at hand, he can't stop working. And fighting. And doing more and more and more. But sometimes it's just too much. Sometimes he goes into depressive episodes he can't control, and the medication is either addicting or the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Sometimes he's a bit too intense. Koala says he needs to calm down, that he has a problem with his fixation on the revolution and his past. Sabo keeps saying that it's fine. But he sometimes forgets or has blurry images of the fights and the people he has killed, filled with energy and excitement and like he has the power of a God. He doesn't like those. Enjoys the moment. Hates to forget it. Hates to know what he did during it too, even if it was for a good cause. Despises the look Koala gives him, also. Makes her promise not to tell Luffy about all of this.

But it's fine, he keeps saying. Sabo will keep trying to never forget anything ever again.

[a-roguish-gambit]

Do have any headcannons about rosemary being in the turn of the century au?

I do!

So these will just be for early life stuff.

Rosemary would be a Greatest generation kid, born early 1920s.

I would not be surprised if she was a result of a last call drinking binge between Gambit and rogue (rogue has gotten control of her powers at this point) before prohibition went into effect. Either that or a result of them taste testing some strong yet safe still whiskey.

Gambit fell back into his their ways and got into bootlegging a little bit, but stops when he finds out rogue is pregnant. Spite, money, and alcohol isn't worth potentially putting another stain on his future child’s life.

Rogue is excited to be pregnant but is ducking suffering. She cannot stand how pregnant people are treated at this time. If another man makes a comment about her being visibly pregnant without her husband around she will be breaking noses. And she does.

With greater control of her powers she's gone full flapper. Very vamp aethstetic. She will make custom fitting dresses if she has to so she can keep up her aesthetic. The loose short dresses are just very freeing.

She's enjoying the dance crazes of the time and so the other x men are having to give her a gentle Inthervention that fast dancing probably isn't the best to do later on in the pregnancy. This only goes so well but after a talk from Gambit she caves.

Magneto has caused mutants to be outed to the world at this time some time around 1917. Trask debuted his metal man powered sentinels in New York built from Great war scrap he imported from all sides and they were caught on film fighting it The world is not super accepting. Logan managed to pull some strings and got an endorsement of the x men and mutants from former president Teddy Roosevelt (they had been friends via a few hunting trips. Probably one of the few men who could keep up with Logan) so thankfully mutants are not public enemy number one, but the discrimination is there and not great. So Gambit and rogue are worried about how their kid will be treated.

They consider homeschooling her but she really really wants to be in public school with other kids. Gambit and rogue are not about to challenge her moxie.

Despite a lot of hardships at first, she manages to put down bullies and make friends. It's not perfect but she's carving out her own niche in her own way. Her parents couldn't be prouder of her.

She does also have a support network through the x men too which helps A LOT. And despite being not the best moms, Irene and mystique are more than happy to help keep their grandaughter safe.

[surrealsunset]

the sun always shines on TV

[bleue-flora]

no becuz ur right how do people see the genuine finale as a full on c!Dream redemption and forgiveness when at no point was his behavior forgiven or justified, simply understood. But then again the people saying this didn’t watch it

Yup. No idea. I suspect you are right people didn’t watch it and also perhaps a lack of experience with more complex forgiveness and such.

But yea on either side there was no forgiveness, no apology, no remorse, redemption, it was for the first time understanding eachother or more so, Tommy understanding Dream. That’s it, a oh- I see that I’ve hurt you not a I’m sorry I did, or you’re right for hurting me , reconciliation or whatever just oh - you’re a person, not a monster out for blood, but a person with feelings and emotions and pain and motivations and reasons. And it’s groundbreaking for sure but step 1 of many steps to heal their relationship if that could even be possible at that point.

But even if it was forgiveness, that doesn’t mean you are saying the person was right for hurting you or that you deserved it or that it didn’t hurt you, no it is about moving on. About recognizing that you hurt me but I don’t want to hold on to vengeance and anger for the rest of my life. If he apologized, it’s not to say that he is the only one that should or about whether Dream deserves it or whatever, it’s about moving on, to say ya know it takes two to tango and I’m sorry for whatever part I played to hurt you. Whether intentional or not or right or wrong, or who’s justified, it doesn’t matter. And if he had apologized and forgiven it also doesn’t mean he has to go back to being Dream’s friend. If someone hurt you, no one’s saying you should run back to them and continue to be hurt…. Hopefully that makes sense. I’d be curious if Tommy’s behavior would have changed if not for the nuke or not, reaching an understanding isn’t the same as remorse or regret after all…

[annabelle--cane]

hurting me. hurting me. toby whithouse showrunner of being human uk and sarah dollard writer of episode 5.05 "no care all responsibility" you are hurting me. why did you do this to me personally.

[lloydfrontera]

@togrieve4 put the idea in my head and now i can't stop thinking of theo being there when rakiel meets king harnant. of theo seeing how this man, proud and dignified the way a monarch has to be, cracks the moment his son's illness comes into play. how he broke down a door to see his child and how he has been counting the days since he last saw him. how it breaks his heart to have his kid hide away in his room but cannot bear to be cruel enough to force him out of it.

theo who went to beg his father to not humiliate his brother in front of thousands of people, to not be so cruel as to make his defeat a public affair to be gossiped about only to be immediately dismissed. theo who basically gave up on life and spent a year hidden away in his palace with an eating disorder that would've probably killed him if rakiel hadn't intervened. theo who must've known his father kept tabs on him,,, and that he never bothered to do anything about it.

i'm just. i'm thinking thoughts.

[b-blushes]

monday quest is to order the couple of supplies i need for a project. this is challenging to me because it combines 2 things that melt my brain: 'online shopping' and 'deciding between similar but subtly different things'. HOWEVER i can do it!!! and it will be fun to make things when they arrive >:) side quest make a different dinner, i have got some fresh fish to try and i have never cooked with it before due to we always bought it frozen. worst thing that can happen is it doesn't agree with my health stuff and i do not cook it again 👍 i'm making it so basic style for this reason. i feel like it could be delicious!

[yyoon5]

not my birthday by any means, but look what I got...😳

Also I think it's really funny that there's a sticker in the left bottom hand cover that says "OF" and is a doughnut with pink icing...if you're an Odd Future fan, you get it. 👀

[moeblob]

Anyway they can change between being tiny and human sized. And when they're tinier they can only be seen by the other fae or their selected humans. So if you just passed Noll on the street while Shavuli was perched on his shoulder chatting away you wouldn't see or hear her.