#hey what if I spent my entire evening writing a meta about soup

[chaotic-neutral-knitter]

Let's do soup.

A lot of people have been talking about how soup is doing some symbolic lifting in this season, but I've gotten really stuck on this scene in particular. Ed doesn't know that Hornigold is his own subconscious yet, but he confronts him about a time that Hornigold killed a member of his own crew (hey Ed are you maybe feeling bad about something?) and Hornigold gives him three options for dealing with all the horrible shit he's seen, done, or been unable to stop.

The first option is just "move on, you gotta move on." Or, in other words "toughen up, who cares that you feel bad about it, just lock that shit up and get over it." Ed got this advice a lot in season one. Izzy told him "the love of a pet makes a man weak" and Calico Jack told him "what kind of pirate has a friend, we're all in various stages of fucking each other over." It seems like this is just what pirates do. Frenchie starts out this season talking about how he bottles it all up. It's a stand in for all the toxic masculinity and repression that the show enjoys unpacking - in Hornigold's mind, if feelings can't rebuild an abdominal wall, they're useless.

The second option is "blow your brains out." It's become pretty clear at this point that Ed is trying his best to get someone angry enough to kill him. In season one, Ed is told repeatedly that dying is what happens when you fail to do option one. When Izzy says, "the only retirement we get is death," that's what he means. Ed can't retire, can't stop being a pirate, can't do things differently. He has to tread water until he drowns. When Izzy says "Blackbeard is my captain. I serve Blackbeard, not Edward. Edward better watch his fucking step," he is telling Ed to toughen up or die. At this point Ed, unimpressed, asks "Those are the options?" Hornigold does his little bup-bup-bup thing where he weighs them in his hands and says "Or, we could just make some soup."

Ed says "Yeah, soup. Let's do soup."

The third option is "soup." Soup can mean a lot of things - it's warm, it's nourishing, it's what you eat when you're sick. The show has been tying it to the crew of the Revenge by having them continually eat soup and talk about how great it is (Notably, in the scene above, Olu asks Yi Sao if she's really a soup seller and she says "Not exactly.")

What does "make some soup" mean for Ed? I think, above all, it's a third option in what has been an inescapable dichotomy of "be tough or die." The first person to break this dichotomy in the show is Stede, when he refers to piracy's culture of abuse and says "And my thought is, 'Why? And also, what if it weren't like that?'" before encouraging his crew to talk through their feelings. To the surprise of literally everyone, that works. The crew of The Revenge took the space that Stede gave them and built a family inside of it. They gave Ed the idea that maybe "tough it out or die" aren't the only two options, and he's still thinking about it even now.

Making soup is also work - Ed's going to have to deal with the fact that he tried to torture his crew into killing him - but it's good, useful work. It could be a metaphor for the kind of work you have to do to repair relationships with people you've hurt. The first thing Ed does in this episode is refuse the soup that Hornigold is giving him. It's poison, he doesn't want it.

So, I'm wondering if there's going to be a moment later in the season where Ed either literally makes soup or accepts it from someone else, and whether that will be Important To His Arc in some way.

Also, I'm really craving soup, so.

[utilitycaster]

Hello I am here to encourage you, please talk about fanfic culture and practices and relationship to canon all day long.

Thank you for encouraging my procrastination and love of hearing my own voice on the internet (also people who asked about expertise...I got you, that one is very near and dear to both my bard-player and DM heart and so I am using “hey, you can write this” as motivation to get some work done earlier today. Anyway, on fanfic and meta and them being different things: something that is almost entirely a matter of opinion but also I am right.

So just as background: I am a grown-ass adult, and despite having internet access from childhood (and, iirc, cable internet by the time I was in high school yes I do remember dial-up vividly) I just never really spent much time in fandom spaces until now, and similarly I didn’t read that much fanfiction so this does come with that perspective.

Anyway, the emphasis I see on fanfiction’s validity in some circles, the whole “um actually The Inferno/Paradise Lost are fanfic” attitudes just...never made sense to me? Like, are you enjoying writing it and reading it? Then why the fuck do you care if it’s valid literature in the eyes of, idk, society or whatever. It’s sort of like that super old tumblr post that’s like Potterheads grab your wands; why do you care if other people don’t like the things you like? Why do you want them in your spaces? So the question of whether fanfiction is Valid and Good Art is just null at that point. And thank fuck because people still argue that genre fiction isn’t literature sometimes, and instead of wasting your energy on that argument you could just read more fantasy and sci-fi novels.

(If I were to answer it anyway, which I am, as a person who is not a writer by trade in any capacity...fanfiction is a fantastic place to hone certain skills. You can skip past the worldbuilding and characterization - all the groundwork-laying and exposition - and focus on plot and dialogue and your general voice. It’s sort of the opposite of DM-ing, in that way, which is primarily worldbuilding and exposition. Original fiction is harder because you have to make people care about your characters and world, whereas in fanfic they already do, and denying that fact is silly; good professional writers who credit fanfiction still have to have good original ideas too. But fanfiction does require its own skills, and denying that is equally silly.)

One argument I recently saw was that fanfiction was literary criticism, instead, and that doesn’t sit quite right. Meta is literary criticism: it is an analysis of the work, supported by textual evidence of the work, but ultimately one interpretation.  It is possible to use fanfiction to explore the ideas of literary criticism-you can write out, essentially, the simulation of your theory-but it’s not limited to that. Fanfiction in my opinion should be generally supported by the text up to some divergence point (again, do what you want if you’re enjoying it but I do not understand the point of OOC fanfiction; you’re just taking the names of characters and plastering them on OCs, which, just write original fiction at that point) but it’s explicitly a place where you can explore things that did not and often will not happen. I’m usually not hugely into the fix-it fic in that I’m more interested in understanding why the creators took an unpopular turn, I have no taste for pretending that everything is fine when it’s not, and also, like, the finale of Battlestar Galactica still made me cry very hard even if it didn’t make much sense...but this is perhaps the best example of fanfiction reaching the potential I think it was intended to. It’s a place where you can play out a scenario that could have happened had things been a little different, whether it’s what you want to see but ultimately didn’t, or just an interesting idea you had.

Fanfiction also has other wish-fulfillment properties, namely, the emotional one. There’s a reason there are words for things like “fluff” or “hurt/comfort” or “angst”; sometimes you want these things in your fiction, and you want a character to which you relate to experience them. Again, it’s my personal taste that this be consistent with the narrative up to some divergence point, but I definitely enjoy things from these categories. This is also a strong argument against fanfiction as literary criticism, at least exclusively as such. Sometimes you write fanfiction to answer the question “What if this well-supported by canon, but as of yet unconfirmed fandom theory is correct?” Sometimes you write fanfiction to answer the question “What if we kissed in the fictional setting I like. What if that kiss happened after one of us knocked on the door of the other in the middle of the night, hand over a profusely bleeding wound in the lower abdomen, and collapsed shortly after the other opened the door, and this was neither in conflict with nor explicitly in support of the current canon.” And you know what, for all that I said validity doesn’t matter...that’s valid.

And I don’t want to say meta isn’t capable of being tied to some degree to wish fulfillment, because it is. There is (usually) textual support for multiple potential outcomes in a story because otherwise it would be very, very boring and linear and for toddlers (not a knock on toddlers, who are just doing their best with the cognitive development they’ve got); an opinion, in meta, is often stating the meta-writer’s preference of how the story may go. However, I think there is a point where the meta stops being “of the many potential textually-supported paths out there this is one I think the story will follow and also I like this” and turns into “this is what I want and I will cherry-pick the evidence I need even if it requires ignoring more recent developments or an understanding of such fourth wall concepts as author’s intent, narrative structure, etc.”

This comes up both for scenarios that go differently from how people want them (eg: death of a character, relationship not happening) and for the emotional wish fulfillment side of things (eg: injection of angst where it does not, textually, exist). And when that happens my attitude is almost always “why are you trying to make this meta when it’s fanfiction, especially since it could be pretty good fanfiction!” A really terrible fan theory or piece of meta can often make a really good fanfic story, because a theory is based in the reality of where the (fictional) story might go, whereas fanfiction allows for that divergence point.

Anyway I think trying to make fanfiction more valid and equating it to literary criticism, or worse, treating it as truer indicator of the story’s intent, in turn makes meta worse because it takes away that need for consistent textual support. Particularly in the case where fanfic is held as being a better indicator of the creator’s intent, which also throws actual canon into the mix, everything all blurs into a bland, dumb soup of “what I want is going to happen because it’s what I want and if it doesn’t the creator is wrong, and moreover, a bad person.” I think keeping these concepts separate while acknowledging the connections they have is good and makes for better everything - better theories and better fanfic. The meta that tends to make me roll my eyes isn’t the stuff arguing for an outcome I don’t want; it’s the stuff arguing for an outcome that doesn’t make narrative sense, the stuff that makes me go “man, you could have written a really good fanfic about this.”

[pumpkinpaix]

Hello! and PSA

*waves* hi everyone! so uh, I’ve kind of had a bit of a surge in followers recently, and I thought I would make a bit of a PSA/intro post with a bit more targeted info than my about page.

anyways, I’m cyan! statistically speaking, you are probably here for one of the following reasons:

my fic

my meta

my gifs

my translation

all of the above

this is pretty much an mdzs blog on main these days, but I also rb a lot of other misc things because I have never been good at keeping my interests separate. it’s also my personal blog, so expect some of that? i am very all or nothing ahaha. my opinions change very quickly as I process new information, so like, something I said last week or yesterday might be different now! I’ve seen several people going through some of my older posts, and I’m just like oh dear, I said a lot of things six months ago that I no longer vibe with. /o\ please keep that in mind as you go diving in my blog!

i don’t have a BYF or DNI policy, but I reserve the right to block anyone for any reason because this is a personal blog first and foremost, and I do need to be better about setting my boundaries and curating my own online space! on that same token, you are free to follow, unfollow, block, whatever, even if we’re mutuals. <3

you’re free to come talk to me in my inbox or dms, but please be aware that there’s a very high chance I will never get back to you /o\ it isn’t personal!! I am just very mentally ill and have many difficulties with keeping up social interactions or talking to people.

in the interest of trying to be more open about myself, my brain, and what that means for me in an online/fandom space, I’m gonna do a boatload of mental health talk under the cut (or, if you’re looking at this on my blog proper or somewhere where the cut doesn’t display, it starts right after this paragraph), including mentions of self-harm/thoughts of specific self-harm etc, just so you are warned! I’ve been thinking recently that it’s good to try and take steps towards being more open about my issues, both for my own sake and others’. It’s long, because one of the fun things about my mental illness is that I am hyperverbal ahahaha (if that... wasn’t already obvious orz)

so if you’ve read pfmmpd, you can kind of get a sense of what I’m working with. a lot of how i wrote lwj was drawn directly from shit happening in my own brain, but like? dial that up from the specific issues that lwj had in that fic and apply it unilaterally across the board to almost anything you can think of.

I hesitate to describe my OCD as debilitating, but only because my specific cocktail of compulsions and anxieties and triggers push me to be hyperachieving and hyperfunctional. I consider myself pretty fortunate (?) in that regard. on paper, you could never tell how absolutely batshit my internal landscape is! which is very good for me practically in that I can hold down a job, keep scholarships, graduate with honors, have good prospects for my future, hold onto relationships (usually yikes) etc. but the fact of the matter is, I’m like. oh boy.

to give you a peek, here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that have triggered me to varying degrees of severity within the last like, week or so:

my dog

a chinese folk song

my mother reading a chinese haiku to me written by a young gay man

a chinese reader of my fic lovingly and gently giving me a history lesson on china and on mdzs while praising me

stepping on a piece of snow that didn’t collapse in the precise way i expected it to

writing meta

reading meta

ruminating on my triggers (honestly, I played myself)

seeing a twitter thread going around tumblr with decent information but the OP is someone who was exceedingly cruel to a good friend of mine

visiting my grandmother’s grave

deciding to visit my grandmother’s grave

discussing the concept of cuddling my partner whom i love and have been with for four years

self-harming (truly the height of irony, being triggered into self-harm and then getting triggered by the result of the self-harm hahahahahaha)

dropping off a package

trying to explain queer-coding to my parents

talking about stressors in my life related to covid19

having a very pleasant conversation with a person i admire

editing my translation

the fact that the “close” button on my accessibility sidebar on the translation website is the wrong color

choosing between eating all the shiitake mushrooms in my soup and purposefully giving myself a bad reaction or throwing one out and wasting food

thinking about playing a fun game with my partner and a mutual friend

my mom asking me to take a photo of some tea for her

my mom asking my opinion on a photo she was photoshopping

animal crossing

writing this fucking post HAHAHAHA

like!! it goes on!! endlessly! obviously, these triggers are not simply “bad” things. the chinese folk song and the haiku were both really beautiful and i love them! but I did spend a good amount of time curled up on my floor in the dark sobbing as i played the song on repeat. the haiku was one of the last straws that ended up with me screaming and crying and hurting myself. the snow??? like wtf the snow thing. I stepped on the snow and it felt wrong and my brain just started screaming SMASH YOUR KNEECAP. ???? (I didn’t, for the record, and I would never.) I love my partner very much! I love my friends very much, and my mother, and my grandmother etc. my triggers are infinite, unpredictable, and bizarre.

I’m saying all of this because I want to be clear that MDZS/CQL fandom specifically triggers me on a daily basis, sometimes very very badly. this is just a fact! it is no one’s fault! I have decided it is worth it for me to stay anyways. it is impossible for me to request people tag for certain things because I myself have no idea what my triggers are until I encounter them. It’s like a fun mystery boss encounter! sometimes it’s low level and i’m well-equipped to handle it. other times it’s a one-hit KO. We just don’t know! there are lots of very cool content creators in this fandom that I can’t follow because it would make my dash that much more high stakes. the original source canon material triggers me! all the events leading up to Lotus Cove massacre? I was shaking at work for three hours after consuming it for the first time.

Meta specifically is something I know a lot of people like me for, but it’s 100% the most triggering activity I participate in for this fandom. like, that suibian meta post I wrote that’s currently going around? Probably took me four or five hours of concentrated effort to write because I was compulsively panicking and rewriting and editing and panicking more and qualifying and editing and qualifying some more and then debating whether I should post it or not and then fighting with myself about my wording and then immediately regretting it and then every time someone commented on it (regardless of positive or negative!) my anxiety spiked. I started a reply to a response on that post and had to stop after a few minutes because I was already starting to trigger myself over it.

this is actually a pretty good outcome when it comes to meta! I recognized that I was hurting myself before I got any further, and I only spent like, five hours on it! it was good exposure therapy for me! the bad outcome is. well. bad, as you might imagine lmao.

I like writing meta. I like talking to people about it too! I like participating in fandom, I like writing, I like translating, I like all of these things. they’re just also really hard for me! there’s a couple meta requests sitting in my inbox right now that I want to get to, but it might take me like. a long time because of. you know! *gestures* Everything takes me a long time. that first chapter of the translation took me literally five months from beginning the project to posting a final edited version. It’s just over 1k words. D8

I try really hard to be chill and kind in public and I largely think I succeed on the kind part (I hope!). If you thought I had even an ounce of chill before this, perhaps I have disabused of that notion entirely now lmao. I’m not saying this for pity, but like? just so we all know what we’re dealing with here. I don’t want anyone to get hurt when I don’t engage with them or feel snubbed if I never reply to them. and also like, hey, if someone relates it’s like hooray, high fave, solidarity! we’re not alone in this world! or maybe this will help someone understand OCD a little better! I don’t know. I hope this post is a positive thing. BUT! I’ve spent three hours on it already, and i’m definitely starting to compulsively spiral, so instead of going back and editing it over and over, I’m just going to post it. thank you everyone for your understanding! I hope you enjoy your time on my blog! (*´▽`*)

[radramblog]

Every Mono-Black Commander Part 1: Oh right, old magic design

A while back, I did a couple of articles regarding every single (at the time) Boros legend available to helm one’s commander deck. It was a long, slow process, but it’s a color combination I care about a lot, so I think it was worth the while.

I kinda felt like doing this again, so I was wondering what colours would be best to do this about. And it turns out the colour combo I care about the most after Boros is…mono-black. I mean, I have 2 mono-black decks at time of writing with a third half-built, so it stands to reason that I’m clearly an expert in this field.

Now…this might be a mistake. This might take a while. Because as it turns out, there are almost 3 times as many B commanders as RW ones. But, we’ll figure it out as we go. This is: Every Mono Black Commander. Part one. Of I don’t know how many. Once again I’m not including the partners because that’ll take too long, but to be fair, it’ll be a hot minute until we get there.

Baron Sengir (12 decks, 88th most played)

Oh right. Homelands. Part of the upside with doing Boros last was that I got to skip this entire phase of Magic’s design, since Enemy colour pairs weren’t allowed to have cards until, like, Apocalypse. There wasn’t a Boros commander until Ravnica, so the cards I was talking about were at least functional.

Baron Sengir is an old, old classic at this point. The original Vampire tribal commander, it’s an 8-mana flyer with two basically shite abilities and has been pretty heavily outdone by, among other things, himself. But, he’s still Baron fucking Sengir, so you can’t help but appreciate him. Just read that flavour text, it’s so unbelievably edgy but still so cool.

 Grandmother Sengir (4 decks, N/A)

For some reason, EDHREC doesn’t list anything below a card we’ll get to later on the list, so I don’t know how Grandmother Sengir stacks up against such powerful competition. Look, she’s an overcosted creature with a bad ability, I know I love jank but this is just uninteresting. Next.

(Also if she’s part of the Sengir family why is she a Human not a Vampire?)

 Ihsan’s Shade (32 decks, 69th most played)

If I had to guess, Ihsan’s Shade has such a nice position on account of its reprint at Uncommon in Masters 25, letting it be one of the 15 commanders available for the colour identity in Pauper commander- though most of those are fairly new cards, so for a while the Shade was probably one of the better options. And that’s just sad. But hey, still dodges White removal and most of Red’s, so eh. He’s the only Legendary Shade (barring changelings), so I guess he’s got that going for him if you want to build that deck.

 Irini Sengir (6 decks, 102nd most played)

Legendary Creature- Vampire Dwarf is a fun typeline, but that’s about the best Irini has going for her. I guess she’s a Black card that messes with Enchantress, so if you’re really struggling with like, 4 Estrid decks in your meta, why not. Or just play a deck with Fracturing Gust.

 Veldrane of Sengir (9 decks, 94th most played)

…holy shit this card is just awful, isn’t it? Looking at what’s below it on the decks list, some of these cards are a lot more interesting and I have no idea why you’d play this idiot over any of those. I’d rather build Irini, man.

Aight are there any other Sengirs I should know about? No? Good, thank fuck.

 Purraj of Urborg (3 decks, N/A)

Well we’re through Homelands, but it’s still early Magic design. Purraj at least does A Thing, where she gets bigger if you cast black spells. I can actually envision a decklist built around Purraj in a way that I couldn’t with half of these Sengir dorks. She’s still comically underpowered, and I of course understand why people wouldn’t build her, but you could do something here.

 Shauku, Endbringer (16 decks, 83rd most played)

Shauku is the first of these cards that is like, actually kickass. It’s kind of unfortunate that she’s been overshadowed somewhat by similar murder commanders, but she’s still the original. Not only that, but she exiles things too, which is honestly a pretty decent effect in the zone. Shame about that drawback, though, because you’d love to attack with your big flier. Oh well, guess you have to keep exiling things.

Oh right, 7 mana. Yeah ok fair enough moving on.

Spirit of the Night (16 decks, 82nd most played)

Spirit of the Night has the same number of decks as commander as Shauku, but I assume its slightly higher because more people are playing it in the 99? Either way, here’s your first Big Daddy Demon to ramp out. 9 mana, huh? It’s one of the first Keyword Soup cards, and it’s art is absolutely phenomenal- gotta be one of the genuinely scariest pieces of art from that era of Magic, maybe all eras- but it is kinda let down a bit by the statline. Legitimately, if this card had 1 more power (and therefore could 3HKO people with commander damage) it would see so much more play.

 Gallowbraid (5 decks, 106th most played, the bottom of the list)

This is the card I mentioned earlier, the lowest thing that EDHREC has deigned to put on its list. I can see why people wouldn’t want to run it, though. Not only is it basically a French vanilla creature, it also actively hurts you for playing it. No one likes cumulative upkeep, and I cannot imagine wanting it on your Commander. This thing isn’t worth the skin it’s made of, apparently.

 Morinfen (11 decks, 92nd most played)

It’s Gallowbraid but it traded the Trample and a point of toughness for Flying, making it substantially better and yet still completely useless. Next.

 Commander Greven il-Vec (4 decks, N/A)

I’m… actually surprised to see Greven below Gallowbraid, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case a couple years ago. Don’t ask me why I remember these things. Considering, however, that his only real claim to fame is his story presence, and people who like him now have a better card with his face on it, I guess it isn’t much surprise his numbers would drop off a bit. He’s at least got some flavour, I guess, considering he’s apparently a very outlived-your-usefulness kinda leader, but that’s not going to make up for being yet another overpriced card with a downside and a mediocre evasive ability.

 Crovax the Cursed (7 decks, 97th most played)

Hey look, they spent an entire line of text on this guy making sure you know he’s a Vampire because Summon Legend Vampire was to complex a technology for 1998. Wait, 1998? I thought Stronghold was way older than that, huh. Regardless, like a bunch of these cards so far, Crovax pretty much just a dude, except he has to eat other dudes to stay relevant. Can’t relate, frankly.

 Cao Cao, Lord of Wei (33 decks, 66th most played)

Oh fuck, we left the Homelands zone and ended up in the Portal: 3 Kingdoms zone. For the unaware, P3K was the third “starter” set Magic released, this time targeted towards the Asian market- hence the whole set is a reference to the famous historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  Considering the book in question, a lot of these cards were probably real people at some point, which just makes me feel weird.

Anyway, Cao Cao is actually one of the more interesting ones. He’s the first Discard commander on this list so far, and tapping to Mind Rot is actually pretty solid. Cao Cao walked so Tinybones could run. He’s also one of the less expensive ones, owing to having been reprinted in From the Vault: Legends, but the price tag he commands is still comical for the card you’re getting. It’s fine.

 Cao Ren, Wei Commander (5 decks, 105th most played)

Oh horsemanship. Literally just flying but for the historical fiction set where things aren’t allowed to fly. Cao Ren is literally just a draft common, man. I’m not paying $200 to put a draft common in my deck.

 Sima Yi, Wei Field Marshal (5 decks, 104th most played)

Sigh. Wait, this might have been the biggest Human creature in Magic for a while, that it’s this random old strategist is kinda hilarious.

 Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed (77 decks, 53rd most played)

Wait, this guy is the most played so far? Xiahou Dun? I mean, I know he was in the MTGO cube for a bit, but really?

Ok alright fine. He’s probably the least bad of the P3K commanders (at least in black) because he can replace himself with a card or just swing in, his stats aren’t completely unreasonable. But still, this is silly, there are some genuinely bonkers cards that are seeing less play than Xiahou. What am I missing here? I just don’t know.

 Xun Yu, Wei Advisor (2 decks, N/A)

I distinctly remember once looking at the total commanders on EDHREC with no decks. I don’t remember if I saw this guy. I do remember actually being able to see the bottom of the list, so what the hell man maybe I want to build Zuo Ci.

…someone has actually built Zuo Ci, now, huh. Anyway point is Xun Yu is both bad and boring so next.

 Zhang He, Wei General (3 decks, N/A)

…he’s better than Xun Yu, at least? He’s still a hundred-ish dollar bad card, but you know. Technically speaking, you could do worse.

 Zhang Liao, Hero of Hefei (1 deck, N/A)

While a lot of P3K cards are just reflavoured vanilla magic cards, in this case they decided to just take flying off Abyssal Specter and…not put Horsemanship back on it. Shoutout to the one guy apparently playing this deck, but I’ve got to ask why.

I don’t know if there even are any 0-deck commanders left at this point. I should look into that…

 Ascendant Evincar (34 decks, 65th most played)

Finally free of P3K, we’re closing off today with yet another meh card that has been overshadowed by newer ones, great. Shrinking your opponents stuff down one is a super good effect in limited, not so much in Commander- two, of course, is nuts, Elesh Norn is a very good card, but -1/-1 just isn’t worth your time most of the time. And you can’t even really abuse it on your own stuff. I guess he’s aight with Heartless Summoning? I’m really grasping at straws here!

 Okay, so, that’s the first 20. Sick. Now at this pace, I’ll be done after another….5 articles? Holy shit, I forgot how many bad magic cards WOTC has put out, didn’t I…

Next time (whenever I continue this series), we enter a substantially more interesting, if longer, zone- the Kamigawa Zone. Ta-ta for now.