#i am aware that this is still oversimplifying them but this is also mostly a Joke so

[egophiliac]

Hi!!! I just wanted to say that I really love the way you draw/write Vil in your little comics! I think you do a great job at capturing the more fun side of him in addition to the “pretentious, wine mom” look that’s often portrayed. It just makes the character feel more real.

Also, I was wondering if there was any way you could post that other version of Vil’s unique magic poster to the drive? The one with the full body shot? That’s one of my favorite pieces! (If not it’s totally chill - just figured I’d ask)

Thanks and have a great day!!!

thank you! 💜 and yeah, sure! I popped it in there as "Fairest One of All (Alternate)", and I apologize in advance for your black ink. (secretly though I also love how that one came out, so thank you for the validation. :') sometimes I do good!)

confession: when Twst was still in pre-release, I was not expecting to like any of the pom trio (the website descriptions are kinda terrible for everyone, and especially them). fortunately I was immediately proven wrong when it turned out that they're less ~mysterious aloof beauties~, and more the very weirdly specific dynamic of "Team Rocket except James got all the camp (and also Meowth is their weird little feral child they're trying to pull a pygmalion on against his will)".

(it's a good dynamic)

[ladymorghul]

It's really funny that Helaemond is still so hated by many greens and is often mentioned as a possible reason that could even make them stop watching the show. Ofc, I doubt they would stop watching it, they're mostly being dramatic. But still, making Helaemond canon by the showrunners would be, apparently, the worst thing ever🙄 and would irreparably ruin the greens.

However, these haters almost always ignore the fact that if any ship could ruin or seriously harm not only the greens but the show in general, it's Rh*enicent. And I really have an impression that the showrunners' idea of Rh*enicent is the one most TB fans have: the one where Alicent is constantly apologetic and subservient to Rhaenyra at the expense of her own family. Idk if those leaks are true, but even the possibility of Alicent and Rhaenyra's meeting at Dragonstone in the season finale irritates me. And the funny thing is, it really could happen given the show's nonsensical pushing of the ship that lost any meaning after the time skip. The seeds are unfortunately planted in episodes 8 and 9. But no, Helaemond is the biggest problem for the greens' storylines, according to my fellow greens. Right. Honestly, even though I would really like to see Helaemond happen on screen (in my version of Helaemond the children are still Aegon's, at least the twins), I don't have much hope anymore. I'm almost sure, however, that we'll see a lot of Rh*enicent inspired nonsense. I mean, what indelible harm could Helaemond possibly do to the greens? Imo it could (if done right ofc) only give more depth and complexity to Helaena and Aemond's characters. If the children's paternity and legitimacy is the problem for the antis (since some of green fans desperately want Helaena to be morally superior to Rhaenyra and a good and faithful wife™️ to Aegon no matter what) the children could still be Aegon's because Helaemond doesn't automatically mean that Jaehaerys and Jaehaera are Aemond's bastards. And Rh*enicent? I don't see how it could be good for the show since it would only further ruin Alicent for the reasons I mentioned above and wouldn't be helpful to Rhaenyra's character either. The pushing of that ship will only perpetuate the "evil patriarchy, evil men, poor manipulated women" narrative, which is honestly quite insulting and oversimplified for the story like this. And still, even Rh*enicent is more welcome in green spaces than Helaemond. Why, I'll never understand.

Sorry for this long rant.

hello.

you are so right and i very much agree with everything you said. everyone who follows my blog knows that i talked about this a million times and i did acknowledge and address some of the fears the greens have when it comes to helaemond but it's also hard to ignore the double standard and hypocrisy, just like you point out.

also rhaen*cent isn't just welcomed in green spaces, a huge chunk of the greens fandom ships them which is laughable for them to then turn around and talk about how helaemond would ruin the greens. rhaen*cent, from green fandom pov, doesn't even get 1/10 of the shit helaemond gets.

as for hopes for helaemond... i would write it off completely yet. unlike the fans of one certain ship who always claim they know what will happen, i can't claim the same. i'm not a writer for the show, i don't know what they have planned, but i have a feeling there could be a possibility of more helaemond in season 2. personally i will wait and see, these writers are not exactly consistent so who knows what to expect for them but if anything helaemond in season 1 was written with clear romantic subext and intent.

when it comes to rhaen*cent, we will certainly see more of it. they are very set on focusing on this ship so i fully expected it to be central to the story going forward, regardless of whether i like it or not. it sucks from many povs but i am fully aware that the writers are committed to this.

the claim that they'll stop watching if helaemond is canon... i mean it's their choice and they should do so if they want to but it's amusing because first of all, a lot of them will tune in regardless and this is all bark (remember when people were saying they won't watch hotd because of got s8? right...), but even if they don't, they are a very small portion of hotd audience and it won't really matter.

[merrivia]

your essays of literary analyses for captive Prince  fascinate me, amuse me, entertain me (in the "wow, this is so cool" sort of way and "maybe I'll read this whole thing again"), educate me, and get me thinking harder about my own reactions to the books.  I believe that I do my own level of analysis as I read, seeing many but far from all of the same things, and stopping as I go to say, "hey, waaaait a minute" or go back and reread relevant passages earlier in the book or in earlier books. but I am very far away from being able to put things together the way you do. 

 I do a few simple things, like collecting multiple examples of something (I did that for showing that Damon is the kind of guy who gets "annoyed" about things that might or might not send the rest of us into a rage), and another too-long one why I thought "I speak your language better than you speak mine sweetheart" comment happened.

… I do have a question. Here it is. How much of the content of your essays are you consciously aware of while you're initially reading,? How much prep do you do for your essays – – outline? A few of your own cliff notes😁? Or or do what I mostly do, to the detriment of my material but not yours, and just start writing?

Oh wow, thank you so much that’s such a huge compliment! I’m always so happy to hear people enjoy the metas/essays I write, genuinely. I would love to read the posts you mentioned you wrote! I’ll hop over to your page and find them after I post this.

So I don’t really do any prep at all! No notes, no outlines, no plans. I’ve re-read the books 4 times solidly in a row, and want to do a 5th soon (I’ve given myself a little bit of a break, so I don’t lessen my love of it through overfamiliarity!). I think at this point my mind just picks up on patterns and starts to weave things together, subconsciously? Something will just occur to me and I’ll get the urge to write about it. I’m a big believer in that coming from the texts; I still find lines or paragraphs in the books so interesting and intriguing and the way Pacat writes…it’s so rich that there are many aspects to explore.

I also really believe in the power of reading around and seeing where that takes you too. Originally my essays were completely just what came from my mind, but I’ve started leaning towards letting other ideas shine their light on the books too. With my latest post, I knew that Damen’s trauma was different to Laurent’s but I also knew that I was no expert in trauma responses and wanted to read more about it, happened to stumble on Tick’s work almost immediately which just felt like such a powerful connection as it draws partly on classical traditions and I started to put the essay together.

I always come from a point of ‘things are more complicated than they seem’ about pretty much anything and I’m always very wary about people that try to oversimplify discourse. A simplistic reading of Damen’s character would say ‘he’s not got emotional complexity, he’s just a horny jock dressed up in Akielon clothing’ and honestly that’s just so reductive and not true but also…boring, and is essentially a discredit to Pacat’s intelligence and skills. Once you start thinking there’s more under the surface here, you can start to plumb the depths.

I do follow a rough introduction/main/conclusion structure as per any essay, which helps? I’m pretty much trained mentally in the English way of writing literary essays so I do it automatically. I hadn’t realised this till you asked but because I really enjoyed the books and don’t really see myself negatively critiquing them, my conclusions reflect the happy ending of the books where I tend to see things positively? So the end point is kind of already in place. I think the points I make follow similar essay style patterns; start more broadly, then narrow down like a funnel or start a little more chronologically and then move forward (like establishing who Damen is first, and his warrior status is going back to how he was raised, then we can use that to inform his initial reactions in CP before following that thread all the way to The Summer Palace). I’m fond of what appears to be a tangent but is actually a loop back, that illuminates (like I talked about violence as an intimate act, having read that in Tick’s work, and how Laurent particularly provokes that from Damen but that led me to realise if you do choose violence over love as a form of intimacy, you are going to have to pay a price for that).

Ideas do reveal themselves through the writing. Once I’d read that warriors could heal and reintegrate through society recognising them (Edward Tick actually performs these “Warrior Welcome Home” ceremonies for combat veterans, as part of a healing process) I thought well Damen had that in Akielos, and then it was like a little lightbulb moment of ‘Ah but by being in Vere, and around Laurent, he’s gone from hero to villain’. And Laurent has suffered the anguish of being vilified and having his character destroyed, and actually doesn’t realise he’s doing the same to Damen (I didn’t put that in, as there’s only so much you can write! Sometimes holding back on your ideas is good too, to keep the essay tighter. Incidentally one day I am going to do more metas on Laurent and his feelings towards Damen but I’m so respectful of his labyrinthine mind that I want to be very certain of my ideas before I do!).

I hope that kind of answered your question! If you ever want to chat about CP stuff you can absolutely dm me, I love talking about the books ✨

[girlhorse]

hey! not trying to fight--i scanned ur blog & you are clearly in the same dogwalking/sitting/training business as myself, and your pitbull essay makes some valid points, and what that shelter doing is clearly fucked up--but i just wanted to point out a couple things: you put a heavy emphasis on "statistics" that can't be denied, and they straight up can be--many dog bites are mislabelled as pit bites. because people dont know dog breeds and assume the dog that bit them, since it was aggressive, was a pit. pit bites are also reported more often because they do bite-grab, so their bites often result in worse injuries, which is important to know about them, but does mean that those statistics dont actually show that they bite more, just that they bite worse, and therefore dont correlate with aggression as a trait the way they seem to. also (this is an aside) some studies have shown that dogs are actually often mislabelled as pit mixes at shelters, bc shelters look at any dog with a big boxy head and slap pit mix on them, so this issue works in both directions. another thing--i know you did say you werent that informed on it, so i cant hold it against you, but your paragraph about "people wanting guard dogs in the 80s" does perpetuate some racist myths, and i would suggest reading up on the connection between racism and pitbull stereotypes. but anyway as the owner of the worlds friendliest pitty boy, i will say that even though my dog adores every living creature thats ever crossed his path, i still wouldnt recommend a dog like him be owned by someone without proper dog experience, because he did take a lot of training and is extremely high energy and super strong, and many petowners are just looking for dogs that dont need so much time and attention, and thats okay.

i do appreciate your concern. I am aware that my post oversimplifies the nuance of the issue, and parts of the argument i made aren't quite as strong as others. I didn't speak on the antiblackness in particular about anti-pitbull rhetoric partially because I don't personally feel equipped to do so, but mostly because it felt beyond the scope of the point I was trying to make. I know that those antiblack stereotypes exist and that they are extremely harmful, and while I personally was not intending to reify the existing racism wrt the pit bull debate, i regret that i hadnt written a bit more about it in the post to make that point clearer.

i am also aware about the potential for error in bite statistics - as someone who was very involved with statistics in college i understand that numbers never tell the full picture, and that numbers can be manipulated for any agenda imaginable. I agree that there may be a handful of instances were breed is misidentified by the person reporting the bite, but the reality is that pitbulls are extremely common in the USA, and not particularly difficult to identify, either, so it would be a bit if a stretch IMO to insinuate that the numbers were so bad as to be completely compromised.

I also agree that most non-injury causing dog bites do not get reported, and agree that the reason pits are more often reported is because their bites tend to do more damage. Most people are not going to report air bites, or bites that cause nothing more than a bruise, or really any bite that doesn't need medical attention.

My point is not to slander pit bulls or to insinuate that they are more aggressive or more dangerous than any other breed. They're not even the breed with the strongest bite force! There are also dog breeds that were bred specifically to attack human invaders, and they are absolutely going to be much more aggressive and dangerous than any pit bull. those breeds, though, are extremely rare, and are usually not owned by anyone but fanciers or working dog owners. Pit bulls are everywhere in the south, on the other hand.

there is still a point to be made about the fact that there are so many pitbulls in inappropriate homes and so many that do end up hurting someone, or someone's pet, or getting hurt themselves, because of their breed-specific traits that their owners are woefully unprepared for.

[mapsontheweb]

Electoral Systems used for the Lower House of National Legislatures.

by u/Dry_Paramedic_9578

There are some places where I had to end up sorting them into a specific category, and this is fairly simplified, so Just an FYI that I know what the deal is with most of them. If I was dramatically wrong though on something please lmk, just so I could know for future knowledge because Knowledge = Cool.

Also yes I do in fact know Westminister elections include Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and that this is a double standard because I used Congressional election method for U.S. States. I just decided to use the devolved parliament's electoral systems because they've been gaining more devolved power and in general shows you more of what that country's "system" is, rather than just showing Westminster. I put england as the system that westminster used because it's used in all elections there, and they don't have a Devolved parliament.

Somalia has a Parliament but it is elected in a very odd way due to the Civil War mostly consisting of a hierarchy of electoral colleges of village chiefs, etc.

The Sahwari Arab Democratic Republic elects its Legislative Council, but it's a one party state and it's mostly not realistically democratically elected and is mostly just a vehicle for the Polisario Front.

In nations like Israel or the Netherlands I considered the entire nation a multi-member district on the same level as Ireland or Poland has multi-member proportional districts, I am aware of that but to be fair it's still a multi-member electorate doing the election process.

I classified Nonpartisan Blanket primaries in several U.S. States such as Washington or California as runoff, or two round systems, because even though they aren't called "First Round" or "Second Round" and instead are called "Primary" and "General election", and even if you receive a majority in the primary you still go onto a general election, it's effectively a Two-Round system.

Puerto rico appears yellow but that's because it's a Diagonal Stripe that covered the whole island, it's a Mixed-member plurality system (except main difference is that it uses SNTV instead of PR).

I tried to make the legend and the names of the systems as clean and straightforward as possible, even if those names aren't what are commonly used to describe the system. Most people would probably describe STV as a Proportional system, and many countries simply just call it "Proportional Representation", such as Ireland, the USA, or Australia, but I called it Multi-member preferential as opposed to Multi-member proportional because I already differentiated Single-member preferential.

I classified General Ticket like Chad systems under Block voting, despite the fact that you're voting or a party and not candidates, just because it's effectively block voting through the process of parties, and it would be disingenuous to call it Party List PR.

It sorta get messy when it came to Mixed-member systems besides MMP or AMS, just because there's so many combos you can do, so that was mostly oversimplified, and the share of the body elected by each system is very different in each place.

Anyways, that's the map

[oldwriters-blog]

Why do I write?

A writer has a great deal of sleepless nights. At least the ones I heard and read about. In one of those nights, as Leonard Cohen somber voice is singing in the background, I started to write these words. A question was on my mind all day long. Why do I write? It’s a simple question. Direct. Very honest. But I am afraid my answer is going to be rather complex.

I don’t really remember a time where I didn’t want to write. As long as I remember, I wanted to become a writer. It was a long journey, of about 30 years, which finally brought me there. But why do I need to write. Quite honestly, I don’t really know why. It is something deep inside of me, something that was always there. No matter what else I did in my life. And I tried to avoid it for a very long time. I always seem to come to the same point. So I asked myself that question today. I’ve been writing on and off for about over 30 years now. Mostly poems and stories. Still struggling with the „big one“, my first novel, my first book. But that’s another story.

Anyway, I tried to get tothe bottom of this, to the essence of my writing. I always liked words, and admired a simple but well crafted use of them, in almost every shape or form. I also absolutely love stories. Before I even was a writer I was a reader first. Reading was my first love, I always did pretty well in school, so reading was my guilty pleasure. A way of procrastinating, and avoiding school tasks I didn’t like. I still love the feeling when you are able to lose yourself in a story, forget about time and place. And just be in this one moment. So I think this is also my main reason why I write. To try to create this one beautiful moment. The perfect connection, between a sheet of paper, the pen and myself. Sounds a bit oversimplified. And that’s where the words come in play.

It’s hard to describe what actually happens. I don’t think any writer fully understands how he/she does it. Maybe we are also afraid, the magic will disappear, if we call its name out loud. For me it feels like a connection to something bigger, deeper, then myself, my consciousness or even the world itself. When I was younger it felt like something, or somebody putting their hand on my shoulder. And the words just started to flow. A muse, or maybe something more divine? I really couldn’t tell you. As I grew older, I learned to appreciate the control over my own words. I still feel conected, but I am aware that I write the words. Even when sometimes it really feels like they are writing me.

I enjoy putting them together often enough surprised what comes out when I am finished. And maybe that is my most important reason, I am a reader. I want to know what happens next. I want to enjoy the words. Not in an arrogant way, running around full of my own importance. If ever, I always was a humble writer, secretly hoping somebody will like my words, but never sure. I want to read the story, see where it will take me. Look at, and touch the words. I always read the entire work imediately after I am done. I want to get a feeling for the words. Sometimes if I feel the words are really good, and I like them, it feels like a ping. A small vibration in my soul, my gut. Like a sonar of a ship. Then I know that it’s really good. It’s a rare moment, but it happens. Then I lean back, and I am satisfied. I don’t feel tired or worried. After the writing is done I always feel great. Full of energy, like after a good night of sleep. A great feeling. But that’s not why I write.

In the end, I think iz comes to a very basic human need. Need for stories. Need to feel something. The good and the ugly.

As David Memet once said, „…we were sitting around the fire, in a cave. Then somebody started to tell a story, and suddenly we weren’t afraid of the dark anymore…“ I am paraphrasing here. But it is evident troughout our history, that there is a human need for stories. Stories which makes us feel something, reminding us that we are alive. And not afraid of the dark and unknown night for a moment. Because we have our storytellers.

I am always deeply honored if those words I wrote, touch a reader. Make them feel that we are not alone. That somebody walked the same paths before us, and will continue to do so long after we are gone. So as another great storyteller once said: „…let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes…“

Did you ever ask yourself why do you write? What are your reasons? Happy to hear about it and if you reach out.

This blogpost was typewritten on a SHARP PA-1050 typewriter.

[remythologise]

Hello! I found your blog via you amazingly summarizing all that's going on with the spn drama. Due to my schedules, rl stuff, some of the arcs that didn't vibe with me, my availability to find a place to watch...the rollercoaster I was used to with this fandom was more me binging it in a weekend to going months to over a year without watching it. I still haven't watched the last season(but with a fandom this big it's pretty impossible not be spoiled so I more or less know what happened) BUT oh great one I ask of thee for more information if you have it...other than being busy and whatnot, I'm not really one to keep up with the actors as well. So could you also maybe do a summary of all the stans? I'im seeing terms I haven't seen before. Who is Kelios(sp?)? Hellions?? probably messed it up but like...I guess what are the name of each legion? Who do they have alliance towards? What was their desires? Que paso?!?!?!?

Hi there! 'Some of the arcs that didn't vibe with me' me emotionally quitting Supernatural in Season 7 after they killed Castiel 😂 Anyway I totally get it, I went through the same culture shock mid-last year when I got back into SPN and tried to find where fandom was at! There's really a LOT of lore and content after 15 years though so I'll just do the broad brushstrokes based on my impressions and personal stereotypes PLEASE remember this is oversimplifying groups and individuals to tendencies and I'm very biased! Also important that there are sub-factions within sub-factions - again, I'm simplifying here!

I've also linked to the 'Super-wiki' in terms of some definitions because the Super-wiki has pages for them where the Fandom-wiki does not. Great introduction actually - only in the Supernatural fandom. There are two Supernatural wikis. One, through curation and twitter activity, supports BiBro/Wincest factions and does not support Destiel users. One is more neutral or Destiel-friendly (I don't know that the Fandom wiki has a personality/social media presence per se). You cannot make this up. There is a factional war... within use of fandom wikis.

Destiel faction

People who primarily ship Dean/Cas, love Castiel and (often, although not always) Jack, and the 'found family' of Supernatural as well as the brothers, and like the post s3 seasons too. Hated 15.19 and 15.20 for killing Dean and ignoring the other characters/narrative arc of the show. Nicknamed 'Destihellers' by the Wincest faction as a derogatory term, 'reclaimed' and shortened as 'Hellers', a nickname they use affectionately to describe each other. See more info on nicknames here.

Sometimes also ship ‘Cockles’ (the ship between Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles) although generally speaking they're more respectful of the wives of the actors than J2 shippers, who are notoriously responsible for... a vast series of insane-fan misdemeanours. Historically most were also good at keeping RPF to themselves and not harassing celebrities with it directly, although recently, particularly with younger twitter fans, that has not been the case.

Sub-factions:

The ‘Desticule’ or ‘Destiel tumblr’ - general grouping of Destiel-shipping tumblr users around 20-30 years old, usually LGBT+, most who came back to the show post-15.18 after leaving it for various reasons including getting sick of the queerbaiting. Funniest bitches alive etc. and responsible for the best text posts you’ve ever seen. Can also start stupid discourse and in-group drama when they’re bored.

'POLOL' - People of Lots of Letters, a discord group (of tumblr and twitter users) that ran on the assumption Andrew Dabb was playing a hugely intricate game of 3D chess to do with gnostic symbolism among other things, and would make Destiel canon. Have since had their own factional sub-wars and fallen apart a bit. Some of their meta was and is good and interesting! Some of it was wildly off the mark. Now generally insist that Dabb/the writers were all pushing for Destiel canon and the network is entirely to blame.

Twitter fans (TikTok edition) - younger fans around 18 and younger who (FOR REASONS BEYOND ME) started watching the show around 2018-2020. Definition of 'stans'. Tend to be very loud and aggressive on twitter when Events Happen, which like. I do get, because they've grown up in a completely different media environment and this kind of Dinosaur Politicking around LGBT+ issues is beyond them. Fancam central. Anyway stream #CASTIEL for clear skin!

Twitter fans (AO3 edition) - older fans around 30+ who kept going with the show but either don't have a large tumblr presence or just prefer twitter. A lot of fic writers, GISH-ers, and BNFs in this group. Some of them are very cool and reasonable in their opinions, some of them act like the younger stans. Some of them too accepting of what happened wrt 15.19-20 in my opinion, because, in contrast to the younger twitter stans, they grew up expecting Destiel to NEVER be canon or respected. 'Can't believe we got this far' etc.

Multiship faction

Multishippers or shippers of things not as large as the two main behemoths . Sub-factions based on shipping, e.g. Megstiel and Sastiel. I don't think these groups are very large though, and seem to have very little influence in the Discourse.

Wincest faction

LARGE overlap with the 'BiBro' faction and their opinions, which I'll get to. Ship Sam and Dean romantically. Often pretend to be BiBros on places like twitter and reddit in order for outside groups to take their opinions more seriously. 'Wincesties' etc. are derogatory nicknames given by the Destiel faction.

Sub-factions:

Multiship fans - ship Sam and Dean but respect Castiel/the 'found family'. Politically overlap with the faction of multishippers, I think. I don't have a lot of insight on this group of people honestly, but I know they exist.

Bronlies - the typical BiBro and 'Wincest' shippers most people think of, twitter user 'Kelios' is one of the would-be ringleaders of this faction - typically tend to be older white midwestern women. Historically have been pretty nasty on twitter (leading to Robert Berens, writer who made Destiel canon, occasionally subtweeting Kelios). Also tend to ship 'J2' - and take it very seriously as a legitimate thing that is really real. This is called 'tinhatting'.

BiBro faction

People who think the show should JUST be about the brothers, love Supernatural s1-3 and everything after it should have been just like Supernatural s1-3. Hate Castiel, Jack, and the 'found family'. Largely loved 15.20. Go to literally any comments section on any Supernatural article and You Will Find Them complaining about how the show should just be about the Brothers. Tend to be older, straighter, and more conservative/Republican (and male) fans. (I am aware that the definition of 'BiBro' used to refer to people who just liked the brothers but there's no definitional difference now in the discourse.) The Wincest and BiBro faction are generally much more wealthy than the Destiel faction (they being younger and more diverse/queer/left-leaning in general) and would be the biggest revenue generators at conventions etc.

Sub-factions:

Reddit bros - literally anyone who visits r/supernatural. Well, that's not fair - there are people who post reasonable opinions on there, but it's pretty rare and they get downvoted a lot. Like to talk about 'toxic Destiel fans' 'ruining the show' and how Dean is a straight man who is straight and could never possibly be gay. Might even think the confession was platonic despite all evidence to the contrary. I'm Not Homophobic I Have Gay Friends, But No Gays on MY Show!

Old Guard - group of older fans who overlap strongly with the Wincest faction, but might not necessarily ship Wincest.

GA faction

'General Audience' - These are the group of audience members that aren't 'online' so to speak; most watch the show on TV as a Casual Viewing Experience (are therefore also sometimes referred to as 'casuals'. Mostly their opinions tend towards BiBros, but they have a vast range of baffling views thanks to being Not Online and usually Not caring about Supernatural that much or thinking that deeply about it.

Sub-factions:

People who simply watch Supernatural on TV and then don't think about it very much after that.

I said they weren't 'online' but that's not entirely true; I'd probably classify people on Supernatural Facebook Groups as GA, along with friends of friends who post statuses about how 15.20 was a neat finale that wrapped up the series.

Conclusion

Supernatural is famously the show that appeals to both Republicans and Democrats, literally All Orientations, so there's a WIDE range of factions. However, most warring online boils down to Destiel vs. Wincest/BiBro - the war that started in Season 4 and has simply never ended. In terms of the 'actors' and their stans, in general, Wincest/BiBro fans love Jared, like Jensen, and dislike Misha. Destiel fans love Misha, like Jensen, and dislike Jared. Of course as with everything, there are variations and this is just a generalisation. But that's the summary of it, from my perspective!

This didn't even get into Sam girls, Dean girls and Cas girls. God. Anyway.

Hope that answered your question, anon!

[ljf613]

Colonization & Imperialism in ATLA

One of the things I’ve noticed in fandom complaints about the ATLA comics-- namely, “The Promise”-- and subsequently, LOK’s worldbuilding, is the way the narrative handles colonization. 

I see a lot about how what the Earth Kingdom chose to do with the former colonies is “none of Zuko’s (or Aang’s) business.” (I also see people talking about how Katara would never support colonialism, in any shape or form, no matter the circumstances.) 

And I just.... don’t vibe with those ideas? At all? 

Like, I definitely have problems with the comics-- especially “The Promise,” where all the drama centers around Miscommunications of Epic Proportions and could have been resolved in Part One if all the characters just sat down and listened to each other (not to mention that Aang would never have agreed to make that promise, nor would Zuko have asked it of him (Sokka would be a more obvious choice, but that’s a different discussion))-- but I never had any issues with their worldbuilding. 

I love the idea of Yu Dao, and the fact that the narrative acknowledges that a new kind of world has new kinds of problems. It makes sense to me that we can’t always just “give back the land we took.” And I found the idea of the end solution being  “give the people who live there their own country” really cool and empowering. 

So I want to talk about why I feel this way. About what kind of real-world parallels can be made here. About some little-known bits of world-history that compare. 

(Please note that for this meta I am only going to be discussing the relationship between Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom. As far as I am aware-- and I could be wrong-- there is no real-world genocide quite comparible to what Sozin did to the Air Nomads, and most of the people alive in ATLA were not actually around for or involved in that. And the relationship the Fire Nation has with the Water Tribes-- and that the North and South have with each other-- is worth a whole separate analysis, and doesn’t deserve to just be shoved into this one.)

(Disclaimer: While this is in response to some of the interpretations I’ve seen on this site, it is not meant to discount or invalidate those fans’ views-- I’m just trying to show my take on it. I am a firm believer in the power of active discourse, and the value of looking at the same scenes through different lenses, rather than just getting one opinion and accepting it as Absolute Truth.) 

The main thing I notice in general ATLA discourse-- and not just on this topic, but in any sort of meta about the Fire Nation, colonization, and global impact-- is that the fandom mostly compares the war and its after-affects to real-world Imperialism, the Age of Imperialism, New Imperialism, and Colonization. 

And I understand why that is. In the grand scheme of world history, that era is still fairly recent, and we are still dealing with the afteraffects from it. It has shaped the Western World’s worldview on every level. (Not to mention that the Euro-centric way we’re taught history means that this piece of world history is the one we’re most exposed to, and so have the most understanding of and room to analyze/criticize.) 

However, there are a few issues with sticking only to this perspective. 

First off, the Age of Imperialism was a direct response to the Age of Exploration. This was the period of time when white Europeans sailed around the world acting as though they were discovering new places and pretending that there weren’t already existing civilizations there. 

[ID: Two dots meme, edited so that Guy A says “i’ve discovered a NEW WORLD,” Guy B replies “you didn’t discover ****,” and Guy A insists “i’ve discovered it” / End ID.] 

Now, I’ve mentioned this in passing, but the world of ATLA doesn’t appear to have had an Age of Exploration. There’s no vast “undiscovered” land masses, the four nations have always known about each other, and they all have a shared language. 

The whole foundation for the Age of Imperialism was “oh, look, there are all these ‘unexplored’ lands with resources ripe for the picking (who cares about the indigenous people, they’re just simplistic savages who don’t know what’s best for them), let’s see which European country can grab the most land first.” 

This was a race. This was sudden. This was Europeans coming in and taking over while viewing the natives as bothersome pests. This was about multiple major world powers competing over resources. 

This was not 100 years of active warfare between a single conquering country and the very people they were trying to conquer. 

The parallels don’t hold up. 

Secondly, by focussing only on this one kind of historical narrative, we ignore any others. 

I will admit that I have used the word “imperialism” in reference to the Fire Nation a time or two. However, upon further reflection, I realize I didn’t really mean imperialism, which is actually a fairly modern concept. What I feel the Fire Nation is really an example of is centralism and expansionism-- two ideaologies that have been a way of life for conquering empires throughout history. 

(I am in no way qualified to explain the differences between these concepts-- I recommend doing your own research if you’re curious.) 

The Persian Empire. The Greek Empire. The Roman Empire. The Byzantine Empire. The Mongolian Empire. The Russian Empire. The First French Empire. 

You could take any of these (or numerous others) and make an interesting analysis between the similarities and differences between their behaviors and that of the Fire Nation. And maybe I’ll do that someday. 

However, I started this to talk about Yu Dao and all of the other so-called colonies (I really feel like territories would be a better word, but, again, that’s a whole ’nother discussion), and I’d like to focus on that. 

FYI, here’s a basic history refresher: If two countries are at war, and then they decide to end the war, neither country is required to return captured territories. They can make a treaty and agree to do so, but there is no obligation to. The Fire Nation didn’t just march in and say, “this is our land now”-- they fought for it. They captured that land. Just because the war is over doesn’t mean they need to just give it back. 

Like it or not, that is the way the world operated for thousands of years, and so that is the interpretation I’m working with here. 

In any case, “The Promise” actually presents this as a three-way conversation. There’s Zuko (and, by default, the Fire Nation), Kuei (and, by default, Ba Sing Se and the Earth Kingdom), and the people of Yu Dao themselves. 

(My understanding of the Earth Kingdom’s style of government is that it’s made up of a large collection of different ethno-cultural regions who all answer to Ba Sing Se.) 

I’ll let Sokka explain it: 

[ID: Comic panel from Part Three of “The Promise.” Sokka and Katara are talking, both in obvious states of agitation, while Suki and Toph are looking at something in the background. Sokka is saying, “Let me see if I got this. The protestors and the Earth Kingdom Army want the colonials to go, the Fire Nation Army wants the colonials to stay, and the Yu Dao Resistance just want their city to be left alone?” Katara responds, “Yes!” / End ID.] 

The people of Yu Dao don’t care about the war. They don’t even really care who’s in charge. They just want to be left alone. 

This speaks to me on a very personal level, so I’m going to make another real-world comparison here: 

My ancestors first came to America to escape from the poverty and opression they were experiencing in a place known as “White Russia”-- that is, Belarus. To be clear, I am not talking about the country “Belarus,” but the region, which includes the modern-day countries of Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia and Moldova, as well as parts of Poland and Russia. 

I looked up White Russia, trying to find out how much information someone who didn’t grow up hearing stories about what it was like (that is, most of the people reading this,) might have. I didn’t find much. Most of what I found talked about political ideologies and such-- things that your average poor peasant, struggling just eke out a living, didn’t have much energy to care about. So let me paint a(n oversimplified) picture for you. 

Imagine you’re a poor shoemaker in a small town on the Russian border. You spend your days hard at work, trying to earn a living to support your wife and nine children. You’ve never left the town you were born in. One day you get the news: Russia and Poland are fighting again. Your two oldest sons (ages 15 and 17) are forcibly drafted off to fight in the Russian army; you never see them again and have no way of knowing if they’re dead or alive (they’re probably dead). Poland wins-- this time. Congratulations, your town is now part of Poland. 

Does suddenly being Polish make a difference to your life? Not in the slightest. Two or three years down the line, you’ll go back to being part of Russia again. This is the third or fourth time you’ve seen your town switch hands, and you can’t say you prefer one government over the other. It doesn’t really matter who’s in charge-- you’re still faced with crippling taxes, forced drafts, and various other forms of oppression. (It doesn’t help that you happen to be part of a persecuted minority.) 

(This is why I have many ancestors who may never have left the town they were born in, and yet records show that they were born in one country, got married in another, and died in a third.) 

This is the kind of worldview through which I am looking at Yu Dao. (Obviously, it’s not an exact parallel, but neither is the standard “colonizers vs oppressed natives” lens.) 

My ancestors eventually got fed up with the treatment they were receiving from their respective governments, and left to build a new life, in a new place. But the citizens of Yu Dao don’t have anywhere to go. The only two real world powers in this story are the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom, neither of which has ever before expressed any true interest or concern in the actual people of Yu Dao. 

The Earth Kingdom didn’t really care about the city before the war-- they were just another poor, struggling town, whose citizens were barely able to make ends meet. And while the Fire Nation may have helped the place grow into a bustling town, they also established a hierarchy that did not serve in the citizens’ best interests. 

And so, in “The Promise,” these citizens’ frustrations come to a head. “Enough,” they say, “we don’t want to be used as a pawn in your games anymore.” 

And Zuko and Kuei (and Aang) actually listen. They say “we need to start thinking about these people as people, not as symbols of one side or the other. It’s time to give them a say in their future.” 

And a new country-- a new way of life-- is born. 

(Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But it is constantly evolving and changing, trying to do better, be better. And that’s more than you can say about most of the other countries in this world.)

[theangryjikooker]

Been reading your blog for a while now bc, even if I disagree with you on some of the basics (I do think JK and JM have something exclusive going on, whatever the label), I like your reasoning, and I much prefer your diffident approach to Jikook to the one of crazy shippers that cannot seem to discern fiction from reality.

Anyways. You brought up an interesting point when you spoke about 'self inserting' in shipping.

BTS are hot. All of them, but the maknae line especially seems to have a crowd of fans that are into the band only bc they consider them attractive.

Self inserting IS common in any fandom. It's not even a thing that only applies to 'shippers' ('shippers' merely believe they are doing it in a more subtle way); i.e g. I don't now if you ever had the (dis)pleasure of stumbling into a solo Stan blog, but their fantasies and comments honestly give me the chills (JK AND V's solo stans are usually especially obnoxious and vulgar and inappropriate, yuck).

I am not sure weather self inserting is especially related to a certain demographic (although I would guess it's more common among very young females, which is a good chunk of BTS army), but with the maknae line I feel like most of the time hardcore shippers are doing exactly that.

And I don't mean those shippers who create fanart or write fanfictions - those are healthy, because they are aware of the separation between reality and fiction (hopefully).

I especially refer to crazy shippers who go around blogs attacking other ships, hating on a certain member or on certain people bc they deem them 'too close' to somebody from their favorite couple, lashing out on people who try to make them reason logically.

Why would they even bother or get this angry if not because they are secretly self inserting? It is not their relationship. It's not even about people they personally know. They have exactly zero sayings on BTS' life . But still they get mad when their favorite couple doesn't abide to their 'couple standards', because it's a confirmation that they can't control them. It's a confirmation that those people might actually have feelings for somebody (behind the crazy self insert's back).

It's obviously easier for self insert fans to create an imaginary relationship for the guys, rather than accept they might have a real one going on out of their control (and this applies to any toxic shipper from any ship, Jikook included).

So yeah, about this issue I think you hit the nail spot on.

Hope my rambling makes sense - and thanks for using your brain and bringing positive discourse in the tag, it's appreciated!

Hey, anon!

Thank you for sharing this submission! I'm also thankful that people who don't agree with me can comfortably say so here.

I think your ask mostly speaks for itself. I don't really have anything meaningful to contribute, but yes, you're right: self-insert isn't a behavior that's limited to shippers. I actually think it's funny that it was originally a practice indulged by authors who self-inserted themselves into their writing (subtly or not), so it might be neat (?) for people to know that was the origin of it, but it's certainly bled out into a fandom-wide practice.

Why would they even bother or get this angry if not because they are secretly self inserting?

I know I had some people disagree with this, and that the reasons for the hostile nature of shippers were much more simple, but the way you pose this question is precisely the point I was getting at. I've seen it on Twitter already where people are genuinely acting like they're the jilted lovers. I'm oversimplifying what's actually going on, but it's still food for thought.

Thanks again, anon! Your rambling made perfect sense, and it's refreshing to have such a discussion with someone. 💜

[rotationalsymmetry]

I do stan Marie Kondo though.

I recognize that her approach works best for people who can afford all of what they need and most of what they want; if you can’t just afford to replace a thing you don’t like with a thing you do, the approach doesn’t work so well, and there are potentially some problems with assuming you can just buy whatever you want whenever you need (even for people who can afford the money), especially right now. It is also intrinsically individualistic.

That out of the way though, for people who are within the class bracket she aims at it’s a good approach.

People who have more money than space and more money than time. People who have more stuff (often entire rooms full of stuff) than they need. Because:

Her approach values stuff appropriately. You thank your possessions. You care for the possessions you keep and showcase the possessions you appreciate the most. But you don’t keep stuff just because you feel obligated to — the stuff is there for you, you do not exist for it. (Either extreme is bad: a logical extension of valuing sustainability is taking care of your stuff so you don’t have to replace it as often; but valuing stuff over how well your life is going is backwards. Oddly enough people can fall into both extremes at the same time.)

Her method emphasizes getting in touch with your feelings and desires. This is good. Likewise it emphasized having a vision of how you, personally, want your life to be. This is also good.

A lot of us inherited attitudes toward keeping all the things that made sense in situations of scarcity but don’t make sense any more. It’s necessary to directly confront and challenge those attitudes that make sense in some contexts but not the present context.

A lot of us also inherited attitudes that housework is beneath us, through whatever mix of sexism/classism/whatever. So having some push back against that (for instance, holding up folding clothes as a thing worth doing, and not just a thing that has to be done by someone) is good.

I’ve seen some criticisms that may well hold for distorted/oversimplified understandings of her approach (but every idea can be distorted) but which I don’t think hold for the method as understood correctly. One such critique is the idea that it encourages people to just throw things out and replace them, and therefor is less sustainable. I think this is a distortion. She doesn’t really give examples of people tossing stuff that they need but use infrequently. It’s stuff like clothes that you never wear because you don’t like them. And goodness knows people who have disorganized homes buy duplicates of things they already own all the time. I’ve done that. Who hasn’t? Not being able to find a thing is fundamentally the same as having thrown it out…except it’s still taking up space.

Another critique is the book thing. This is not accurate. Kondo personally doesn’t own a lot of books. But she doesn’t assign people arbitrary maximums either. The person using the method is always in charge of what they keep, and sometimes they end up keeping some extremely arbitrarily things; certainly someone who’s an avid bookworm isn’t going to be giving up cherished books that they love rereading or love just being reminded they exist. On the other hand, I like many people have books I’ve bought but never read on my bookshelf, and sometimes people should be given explicit permission to let those go.

Which gets me back around to one of the main benefits of the method, albeit one that’s underemphasized both in the books and in the TV show: holding onto that mentality when deciding whether to buy something new can really help clarify things. For instance, if I’m considering buying new brush pens, I don’t just think “do I want these?” but also “am I willing to commit to spending time doing a thing that will use them?” Same for books. Not just “am I intrigued?” but also “realistically am I going to read this and when?”

Some people might also think “do I have a good place for this to go”, especially with larger purchases. I’d love a beanbag chair, but I don’t know where I’d put it.

And on the flip side, with things I tend to underbuy (I tend to barely buy enough clothes to keep me covered, and I tend to be at a loss when events requiring nicer clothes come up) I have more confidence in spending money on things knowing that I do in fact need them. (And sometimes am willing to spend more on a higher quality item that will last longer.) Years ago I intended to buy a meditation cushion, when I was meditating regularly, but never did. This past year I finally did it (a bench actually, but same idea) and it’s … appropriate. Sure, I was making do without it before, by sitting on a yoga block instead. (My yoga gear is probably the soundest purchase I’ve ever made. Next to “oh shit my last pair of jeans has a hole in the inner thigh, time to get a new pair right now.”) But it is reasonable for me to have a piece of specialized equipment for a thing that I do every day, and which is designed exactly for that purpose.

Also having encountered the method years ago…I’ve become aware of what sorts of things (mostly art supplies) I will go for years without touching, only to suddenly want them on a moment’s notice years down the line. Useful information. So any time I’m deciding what to keep and what to let go, moving forward, I can do it with that information about myself.

Sometimes people go overboard when getting rid of stuff, and get rid of things they regret later. This is always a risk; change is always a risk. I do think the “spark joy” approach minimizes that risk while still promoting the benefits of a more organized, less cluttered home. There are also risks to not changing, and specifically risks to not dealing with disorganized conglomerations of stuff.

(And in some ways the risks are higher for people with less money. When I have too much stuff I can store it at my parents’. I’m not paying storage fees on stuff that I might never use again. But yeah, it would be nice if Kondo spent some time addressing the issue of “mostly my clients can afford to hire me; let’s talk about tidying up when you can’t afford to buy everything you need.”)

[commissioningcolor]

Commissioning Color

Part two available here!

I walked swiftly through near-empty halls approaching the murmurs of the crowd before me. My heels lightly clack against the tile as you hurry, not wanting to miss a single word and hanging on to every detail that you can glean from your coworkers' hushed whispers. They have gathered by the stairwell. We have all been reluctant to inhabit these halls for too long, ever since The Handler made her proclamation of war. Was this about a new board member? Has this timeline been severely compromised? ‘Are we facing layoffs? Hmm… Maybe someone broke the coffee pot in the break room again.’ 

Hovering near the edge of the crowd I peered forward trying to search for a familiar presence. Someone grabbed my arm lightly and pulled me deeper into the crowd 

"It took you long enough! I asked Nathan to get you like 12 minutes ago!" Naomi's warm yet agitated voice welcomed me 

"I got held up wrapping up my last report." 

Naomi rolled her eyes tracing the outline of her glasses "paperwork can wait, you know this."

 "I know, I know. I just worry I'd forget" I said in a soft tone, slightly embarrassed as hushed echos reverberated through the stairwell. 

Dot emerged from the crowd straightening her light blue dress as she climbed the first few steps with Herb only a few moments behind

" I am so excited to address you all here today! As you all are aware we are currently under new leadership! Our first steps are to rebuild the commission after the havoc wrought by The Handler.  ." As Dot takes a moment to look over the crowd I join with the others as they clap and cheer. 

I notice a hint of unease in Dots expression as she continues.

"That being said, we have found ourselves understaffed and have  decided to welcome in a new era at The Commission!" 

I glanced over to Naomi who grimaced slightly as I frowned a bit in concern. 

Herb interrupted in excitement, "And with this new era we would like to extend to all of you the opportunity to explore new departments!" 

Dot nodded in excitement as she continued  “At this time we are currently requesting volunteers to assist in fieldwork as we search for and recruit new agents."

The room grew silent as the only sounds to be heard were a few soft groans and the shifting of clothes as a few people started to fidget anxiously. 

"We believe doing this shall bring more valuable insights into all aspects of our operations and open up the chance to improve interdepartmental relations with this collaboration. We also have more positions available in supervisory roles as well as maintenance and security! If you have any interest in these positions we highly encourage you to fill out one of  the forms waiting for you all in the foyer." She gestured past us with an uneasy smile.

As Herb and Dot finished their closing remarks and the stairwell began to empty I looked towards Naomi She, like several others, had just pulled a cigarette out of a small case and was just lighting it I furrow my brows in concern as I watch  Herb and Dot converse quietly as they start making their way to the chairman's office. 

"We're desk jockeys, not the fricking A team!" Naomi grumbled, turning to walk away unintentionally leaving me behind. I bit my lip as I began to step forward taking a slow breath as I approached Dot and Herb.

Herb perked up noticing me approaching from a rather stressful conversation I couldn't quite hear. "Bea! It's always nice to see you!" 

I smiled sweetly hoping they won’t sense my stress "Likewise Herb! Dot your announcement was wonderful!" I retorted as my hands pressed lightly together. 

"Thank you, though I don't believe everyone was as relax as you were to hear it!" Dot she smiled with a hint of somberness in her tone.

 "Don't be too hard on yourself Dot, change puts everyone on edge when it's not followed with immediate ease after everything we went through" Herb spoke as he patted her arm.

"I was actually hoping to talk to you about that" I spoke up as Dot's back straightened inattentiveness 

"I would like to volunteer for fieldwork. I understand it's difficult and that missions may not always end in my return but I want to give it my best to be able to help the commission develop as much as possible until we get more permanent field agents."

Dot smiled as Herb looked concerned at me "I really appreciate your eagerness but don't you want to think this over a bit?" 

Dot tilted her head back a little in contemplation as I spoke up "I understand that I may not be the best option for a one-man cavalry but I know I am more capable than others when we're talking survival. I know I can handle myself."I grimaced slightly thinking back to stumbling upon Harvy's blood pooling onto the control panel floor days before. "We don't need to lose more in house employees to needless violence." 

Dot hummed slightly before speaking up and pointing forward slightly "You know, she has a point. We also don't have any advanced missions at this time so it would be a perfect introductory point." Dot looked to Herb who shrugged reluctantly agreeing with a sigh

"Okay, you do have a poin..t. Fine, we can start filling out the forms tomorrow but Bea, I need you to know that this isn't going to be a cakewalk. Your life is going to be on the line along with the timeline. If you feel like you've ch-" 

"I'm not going to change my mind." I interrupted with fierce determination clenching my fists. 

Herb chuckled as he waved his hands at his side before reaching out for a handshake "Then we'll make it official tomorrow" 

I shook his hand confidently extending goodbyes whilst holding back the anxiety building up in the back of my mind. Walking steadily down the hallways rounding a secluded corner. My shoes squeaked harshly against the tile as I abruptly stopped and leaned against the wall harshly whispering "Holy fuck what did I just do," as my hands gripped at the back of my head.

-----

The last few weeks haven't been kind to me in the least. As things progressed, my coworkers seemed reluctant to speak to me when I occasionally am in the office aside from a select few. 

Iif anything on Naomi and Nathan have been more curious about what fieldwork was like, trying to find details upon how a temp would even manage to screw up so many recon and relocation missions.

“Just moving things to the right position to trigger events, not so hard is it?”  Nathan caught me in a train of thought, from a mission where I had to ensure that the right bra was in just the right place to be discovered. Staying undiscovered in a housewife’s domain was more difficult than imagined. 

"I think you're oversimplifying things a bit" I sighed as I sipped my coffee leaning against the counter.

"It’s just we give them such easy missions and these idiots don't even read them! They just get caught up in the whole ‘time traveler hero idea’" Nathan groaned as he ran his hands through his hair frustrated.

"At least you actually know what you're doing.”  Naomi chirped with a slight sway as she drank some of her coffee. “You've managed to get every task I send through completed so far!" Granted most of them were simple tasks "Now if only they trained the rest of them the way they trained you" she retorted in a monotone frustration.

"To be fair, I haven't been sent in to actually kill anyone yet. It's mostly been recon, replace, and recruitment." I raised an eyebrow to Nathan while debating if I wanted more coffee.

"But you at least get everything done!" Nathan smiled with a clear underline of stress and frustration. "Having to clean up after all of these fuck ups is more effort than just sending them in in the first place!" He stated frowning as he leaned back against the table.

Light footsteps that had echoed through halls halted for a brief moment as a light-haired agent walked past us in an anxious hurry. Avoiding eye contact as they grabbed their coffee and left while Nathan and Naomi conversed. 

Frowning, my eyebrows scrunched together with the framed masking frustration for sadness. I pushed myself off of the counter and stormed out while Naomi glanced at me concerned.

I walked swiftly to one of the control panel rooms I was assigned to for the evening. It wasn't often I was working this shift but it was enough where a  little rust had developed.  I tried to get familiar with the panels and screens again. I know what they were for, what to do, but the instinct of fluid movement had deteriorated. As I analyzed the screens. Glancing between the CR TVs writing down anything of note I notice something. A man with white slicked back hair sitting onto of a colorful bus with a melancholy look in his eyes. 

'That.. looks familiar. Where have I seen this face before?' I glanced over to the control board biting my lip trying to keep my curiosity at bay. Debating internally if I really should be doing personal research right now. My attention is captured by a light buzzing light below the screen with the white-haired man turned orange. 

I grinned as I swiftly scooted my chair to the control panel pulling plugs and replacing them with new ones while paying attention to the screens, all of them transitioned to different points in the recent timeline focusing around him. I squinted slightly trying to focus my eyes 'I swear I've seen this man before' when It finally hit me as I saw the man followed by two others with white hair. 

'Oh shit!' I slumped back down in my chair gripping my mouth as I stared at the screens. I didn't know them well, but they were the first contact I had with the commission. Bringing me here nearly 5 years ago.

I could still remember the smoke billowing within the office halls building accompanied by fierce crackling flames as my vision was clouded. Being bearly able to breathe as one of their rough hands gripped my arm pulling me into them with an odd sense of warmth before teleporting me with Naomi to the commission. I grabbed my forms and set to work Immediately.

Hours passed as I analyzed the timeline playing before me on the screens trying to see where and what went wrong. A muted explosion erupted from one of the TVs as I looked overseeing one of the brothers nearly disintegrated in a matter of seconds. No orange light, I look over to another screen as one of the brothers retrieves a canister from the fireplace with confusion as it didn't have a return slot. 

'Wait. No return slot?' I jot down more notes, trying to pay attention to the scene, there were a photo and coordinates I was going to have to search for later in the mission orders. 

I glance over another screen before the familiar buzzing and orange light popped up once more. "Was that.. One of the Hargreaves? What the hell" I whispered more confused than before as the scene played out before me, grimacing with a wince of mimicked pain as the taller brother was stabbed in the eye. Clearly there was outside interference with the commission's orders. 

 This is going to take more time to analyze. 

------

Hours later after finally returning home after some accidental overtime I nearly tore off my heels to relieve my sore feet. I laid on the stiff leather couch in my apartment covering myself in the crochet quilt I made last summer. I was barely able to stay awake. Grabbing one of the cheesy romance novels I picked up at in the check out line on my last grocery run I attempted to fight off my drowsiness. Trying to reread the same page for the 3rd time I groaned and rubbed my eyes. An abrupt hiss from the kitchen startled me causing me to nearly fall of the couch in surprise. I sat down the book on my coffee table as I swiftly jogged over to the canister rattled in the sink. 

I reached down and examined the new silver canister and opened it to examine the newest assignment. "1985, protect Martha Ross" A photo of a smiling woman with big curly hair and a heart tattoo on her neck was attached. I examined it for a moment before setting it down and starting to prepare for my mission, finally removing my wig and letting my real hair down and the side of my head breathe.

[littlestsnicket]

the witcher: betrayer moon

The beginning of this episode seems to draw so much more on horror tropes than other episodes. Not that I watch a lot of horror to actually know that. This bit isn’t actually that gory, but there’s something about the slow painful dying that’s really ick. 

The random ass Witcher is smoking a fucking pipe! I missed that the first time around. It seems like he dies a lot too easy for someone with heightened Witcher senses. I guess there just narratively isn’t time for that to take longer but it feels a bit sloppy in a way this show usually isn’t. 

Two funny things about the scene with the prostitute: (1) we immediately establish that they’ve been at it long enough to run out of refreshments which is great, and (2) she’s singing Jaskier’s songs and using them to identify Geralt’s scars. That comes up in shippy stuff a lot but let's assume that is not what they’re going for. The best thing about it is that Geralt is annoyed at the singing and scar identification but also 100% willing to ignore all that if it means a pretty lady is touching his chest like that. I’m amused.

Oh hey, organized labor!

‘You can’t kill the vukodlak so you decide to kill your king?” — that’s a real odd take on the situation, but I suppose it’s not an unreasonable take on what Geralt knows of the situation. Maybe. And he’s so derisive about it. Geralt’s political views are complicated and warrant more thought than I am willing to give them right now to unpick. 

“And if you can’t kill it?” “Then I die.” ICONIC. 

It’s an interesting touch that the guard captain knows people by name. He seems very engaged on a personal level. It gives you a feeling of how small Temaria is. 

I’m not going to look at this in terms of adaptation (that would be a separate thing if I even get around to it) but I think it’s a really interesting choice to pull Triss into this story. 

This has been going on for 6 years?!? No wonder people are close to revolt. 

Oh Geralt’s angry face when he finds out that Triss lied about the other Witcher fleeing. Like don’t undermine his professional honor. 

I’m really glad they didn’t give Geralt cat eyes. I found it really distracting in Good Omens when Crowley wasn’t wearing his glasses. It’s just an odd thing to see on an otherwise human passing creature. 

Yenn? Why are there illusions of people you conjured watching you have sex? Why is that something you thought to do? The way they are smiling and the just like... warm applause is so odd. What is the kink you’re exploring there? I want to understand, Yennefer.

“You are a first draft of what nature intended.” The delivery of that line is so funny. (Also, I imagine that is how book!Dandelion’s hair looks.)

“We remake ourselves on our terms. The world has no say in it.” There’s a lot to unpack there. Especially with how Tissaia explains it in terms of power. 

“Call her a unicorn if you like.” Fanon is wrong about how much Geralt talks in the show. It’s not all just hmm. Relative to all of his dialog there’s not actually that much of that. 

I very much enjoy the way Geralt’s deduction skills are shown here. And also how he confronts royalty as someone who is both not a subject and has very little to lose in terms of social standing.

Stregobor!! AAAAAGH! He’s so awful 

“The all powerful sorceress Tissaia de Viress is knocked down from her glass pedestal.” Teenage rebellion Yenn (although that does oversimplify their relationship.)

Geralt just like... ignoring Triss’s questions is really good. There’s not nothing to the fanon characterization of Geralt.

Sniffing! Sniffing years old scents! How does Geralt function out in the world with all of that input? I guess he’s used to it. 

“Kings have done more for less.” “True.”

Istredd calls her Yenna!

“I will not be schooled by some man that pimps the world as some romantic adventure. My world is cruel. Unpredictable. You enter, you survive, you die.”

“You’re just angry because you lost your chance to be beautiful.” “I want to be powerful.” “Seen and adored with everyone watching.” “It is what I’m owed.” “No amount of power or beauty will ever make you feel worthy of either.” This whole exchange is so good. Yennefer and Istredd are young and flailing about but know each other to hit the mark a few times. 

The aesthetic of this ball is so confusing. What is that music? Maybe Yenn’s dress as “what a early 2000s teen thinks a witch should dress like” was more intentional than I thought. That’s what this party is too. It’s got a strong, for lack of a better word, fanon Harry Potter vibe. 

Angry Yenn! She has got to be so used to being able to emotionally beat down people by the time she meets Geralt. 

“This isn’t my first time trying to save a princess who others see as a monster.” “What happened to that princess?” “I killed her.” Geralt is fucking impeccably honest. That is a huge part of who he is as a person. What a thing to say to a king.  

The prostitute assumes Geralt was in love with the princess and Foltest assumes he is incapable of it. And Geralt does not correct him. 

“She was hiding from the brotherhood...” Wait!!! Did Yenn give the guard captain the curse?!? I think she could have timeline wise. 

Yenn chooses to keep her eyes and her scars. She also very explicitly knows what she is giving up. Which she, importantly, never puts up for debate. But this really isn’t informed consent. That is the life path she was, essentially, sold into. She also doesn’t get what she was promised in a court appointment. The thing that stands out to me on this watch is how little real power and influence Triss has in Temeria. I think it’s easy to suspect that Yenn didn’t put in her all at court, because by the time we see her next it’s been such a long time and she is so jaded. But I don’t think that’s the case at all. There is something going on here with women needing to be beautiful to exercise power and it also, simultaneously, undermining them. It’s a complex thing.

Geralt can be pretty fucking ruthless when he lets himself. Just abandoning captain dude to die. Not that he’s a good person or whatnot, but still. 

The snow particles add a lot to the aesthetic of the fight sequence with the striga. And the noises the striga makes are truly horrifying. 

Yennefer is insane to do this without any kind of pain relief. I read some very good meta about Yennefer believing it should hurt. I don’t have anything insightful to say about it. 

The little moments of Geralt being clever while fighting! I’m trapped so let me aard through the floor to escape. That is next level situational awareness! 

Yenn’s transformation intercut with Geralt fighting to break the striga curse. What does that imply? Lots but I’m really not sure exactly what. 

Geralt trapping himself in the crypt. It’s so clever but also feels like an act of desperation. And he’s relatively unscathed until the mostly uncursed but totally feral princess tries to eat him. 

Yenn and feral princess are in very similar fetal positions post transformation. 

Yenn’s face when she walks into the ball! It’s a really complicated face. Something about her ever so slightly vague open mouthed expression reminds me of Steve Rogers post Captain America transformation. It’s a similar “I have just undergone something incredibly painful and now am different” thing. 

So what would have happened if Yennefer ended up in Nilfgaard? Would it have made any difference?

“Anyone else would have killed the princess. You chose not to.” “I’ll take my coin now. I need to get back to my horse.” yeah sure Geralt. Triss knows you’re not in this just for the money. 

Vortex of Fate!!! This is not one of the episodes where they say destiny an unreasonable number of times, but Triss does say it there at the end. (And also the bit about destiny being related to choices.)

“I feel something waits out there for you. Something more.” CUT TO CIRI! There are a lot of really clever things with how these storylines are woven together. 

You know what? I did not miss Ciri at all this episode. Freya’s performance is good and there’s nothing wrong with the writing, but she is definitely the character and storyline I am least engaged with. 

[thelastjaedi]

TROS Rant

This post will contain spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker, so below the cut is spoilers.

The Palpatines Ultimately Win

Rey, a palpatine, ends up taking everything that belong to the skywalker family: the legacy saber, the millennium falcon, Han’s blaster, leia’s ex machina saber, the chosen one prophecy, the last skywalker’s life force, and their name/legacy. And her first act as a skywalker is to bury their sabers on the planet they all hated. The planet where Anakin was enslaved and where his mother’s life was stolen from him. The planet Luke could not wait to get off of and where his aunt and uncle were murdered. The planet where Leia was enslaved by a crime lord.

And the worst part is that Palptine gets what he always wanted: the lifeforce of a skywalker is used to keep a palpatine alive.

It Makes Everything the Skywalker Family Went Through so Pointless

If they were going to undo RotJ’s happy ending, they should have made the ending of the sequels even happier and more triumphant.

But instead, Anakin’s sacrifice amounted to nothing because Palpatine just lives on to completely wreck his family. Luke was a complete failure when it came to rebuilding the Jedi order. Palpatine manipulated/groomed Ben Solo since infancy, turning him against his family. Leia‘s wish was to create something better than the Republic and the Empire, but the New Republic was destroyed by the First Order. She wanted her son back, and Han sacrificed his life to try and bring their son back. Luke did too in TLJ. He gave his life to manufacture a situation where he could apologize and acknowledge what he did to his nephew, and in such a way to where Ben could not act out without ending up with another family member’s death on his hands. And then with the whole “salt purifying wounds” symbolism of the planet in general, it felt like the first steps to repairing this family. This story’s trajectory seemed to be about saving the last skywalker from the mistakes of the previous generation and in doing so, allowing the new generation to learn from those mistakes and build something new. Han, Luke, and Leia gave their lives to try and right that wrong and bring the last scion of this bloodline home. And when Ben FINALLY makes the right choice, he is excluded from the final fight against Palpatine via yeet pit, and then dies 2 seconds after finding the happiness and acceptance he was never allowed to have with Rey. 

They Did The Character of Ben Solo So Dirty

They took a huge retconnish step back after TLJ paved the way for something really cool in TROS. He was finally free to be his own person, out from under the thumb of an abusive master, leader of his faction, and resolved rather than conflicted. Resolved to do what, we will never know—would he have acted as an anti hero against palpatine’s sith army? Would he have been dethroned by Hux/Pryde and have to operate independently? WHO KNOWS. But instead of exploring anything NEW with him, TROS has him reforge that mask (for no given reason), still be conflicted about everything, and have to plot with Rey to overthrow yet another abusive master. He just repeated his arc in TLJ, but with prequel-level dialogue with Rey and a RotJ-Vader ending. Except he gets NO LINES in the last act beyond “ow”. After his scene with Leia-induced-memory!Han, he essentially becomes a mute. Also that scene where Luke gives Rey Leia’s lightsaber, saying that she always knew Ben would fall so she gave it up and wanted Luke to pass it on to someone worthy? What? Give up on your son I guess. Way to destroy Leia’s character and make her look like a terrible mother.

And because of how exhaustingly how contrived the whole reylo angle was presented in general, the kiss scene probably felt REALLY forced for the general audience. Like the actors played the scene well—Adam’s facial expressions of utter hopelessness and regret upon finding her dead was absolutely gut wrenching. But his death happens SO fast: he meditates, she wakes up, they kiss, the music swells and you think everything is going to be ok—then he drops dead 2 seconds later and neither the audience nor Rey are given enough time to process that. It moves on to the celebration montage ripped straight from RotJ’s remastered version—AND HE IS NEVER SEEN OR MENTIONED AGAIN! Not even as a force ghost on Tatooine with Luke and Leia when she proclaims herself a Skywalker. Are they going to edit his force ghost into the scene 20 years later when they remaster this film? Or are we just going to pretend this character never existed and he was not the hero--because he really was the hero of this film.

Balance is Never Restored

Did that “Journal of the Whills” passage in the TFA book even matter? In the end, balance was never reached. The light won the day and the darkness perished. Again. History literally repeated itself. So what’s the next fascist regime or sith zombie that’s going to sprout up in 30 years? There was no resolution or catharsis between the two aspects of the force. It was just “Sith avatar Sideous bad, Rey jedi avatar good, don’t think too hard, enjoy the holidays and see you in 30 years when we want to see what Rey Skywalker is up to!” And you know that’s coming — they did not even give us closure to the Skywalker saga because they can always make movies about her and any of her false-Skywalker decedents! It’s SO UPSETTING. 

I’m mostly disappointed because it would have been nice to see a resolved view of the force that is not so black and white. Like maybe the Sith were a perversion of what the dark side is: a cancer or parasite that has corrupted it. TLJ opened the door for so many nuanced and honestly really intelligent concepts that TROS just threw out the window for “cool force powers”.  There is absolutely no “peace” in the force, it’s used with straight up aggression constantly save for the force healing/life transferring, which is overused in this film and has therefore lost any substantial weight in the story because of it.

Rey Repeats the Mistakes of a Past Generation

She literally repeats Leia’s mistakes. She is a Palpatine, but in choosing to hide that from everyone (besides Finn, I guess) by taking another family’s last name, she is essentially lying. That did not work out so well with Leia, who hid the fact she was Vader’s daughter from everyone besides Luke and Han. It got out, her political career was tanked, she lost the trust of a lot of her friends, and it helped alienated her son from their family. 

And what is this nonsense about Luke and Leia having always known she was a Palpatine all along, but never said anything? Even though she was aware of Rey’s desperation to know where she came from and why her family left her behind? Did she just omit the truth from Rey just like she did Ben? WHAT? THIS IS SO HORRIBLE.

If they had to make her a Palpatine, why not have her own it and be like “it is not my bloodline that defines who I am, but the choices I make.” Which is a nicer message and juxtaposes with Kylo who accepted his dark legacy because he felt like he had no other choice—especially when everyone who was suppose to help him thought he is another Vader/a lost cause anyway. 

I personally really like the message that she was no one, and you did not have to be anyone special to be a hero. I also hate how her bloodline diminishes her struggle with her affinity for the dark side. Her backstory as an abandoned orphan provided enough reason for her to struggle with the pull to the dark side. But this reveal oversimplified that and just chalked it up to her genes. And to say that her power was a result of her heritage, and not because she was a chosen vessel of the cosmic force is a mistake. 

Rey and Kylo’s Force Bond is Terribly Misused

Their force bond (which was arguably the most compelling part of TLJ) was turned it into exposition fodder and weaponized. It was originally created for the purpose of allowing these two opposing forces to TALK to each other rather than fight. TLJ established that they could not use the force on each other OR harm each other through the bond for a reason: so they could communicate and learn from each other. It really felt like foreshadowing for some sort of catharsis or resolution between the light and dark aspects of the force. Especially with the whole spiel about balance, and how the light and the dark are both natural parts of life and the force (warmth, cold, peace, violence, death and decay that brings forth new life ect). That was such a lovely and spiritual interpretation. 

But instead of expanding on that idea, TROS not only made them able to fight each other through it, but he took it to video-game-super-power level extremes. And it was just plain absurd. Were some scenes cool? Yeah, I thought him pulling the legacy saber out from behind his back to fight the knights was great, and the teleportation was hinted at in TLJ, but I hated their lightsaber fights. It was too over the top with the flipping and such. I really liked TLJ’s message that the force is not a super power, but rather a mystical force that guides you if you are open to letting it work through you. This movie just spat in the face of that idea. 

And it’s so annoying that they described their bond as this mystical “dyad” that occurred because of who their famous grandparents were—THAT IS SO INFURIATING! It’s not the will of the force that these two people on opposing sides were linked so deeply, but because of their family legacy. Bloodlines are all that matter apparently—not that the force is working through these two similarly broken people in an effort to fix and balance itself. And ultimately refine the incomplete view of the force that the Jedi and Sith tore the galaxy apart over. 

I also hated how the bond is described “two as one”, but then one dies without the other (twice!) and Rey can wound him without so much as a flinch. If the bond is really one life force/spirit inhabiting two bodies, shouldn’t they have to die at the same time? Or at least be able to feel each other’s pain? Or be able to share this life force they supposedly already share and both survive? Like you can’t kill one without killing the other, sort of deal? It just feels like it was hyped up to be this immensely powerful thing, and that in order to defeat Palpatine, they would have to do so together. But all that exposition seems pointless after one half of the dyad survives without its counterpart. And it is never addressed after. Like what even is the point of any of this yin yang stuff if yin can just die off with no consequences? Was the entire point of that plot thread meaningless exposition? And if the explanation is that Palpatine stole their force bond to revive himself, that’s straight up stupid. TROS will have wasted this unique connection that had so much potential for good and for meaningful resolution and fabricated yet another way to empower the already OP villain. 

But if you pretend none of that dumb dyad shit happened, Ben Solo’s death is one of the ONLY things about this movie that makes sense thematically. I’m not happy that he died. I do not think it was necessary. But I am trying to make peace with the fact that it is a beautiful sacrifice. I always felt like their arc was reverse Padme x Anakin, and Anakin’s entire fall to the dark side was because he wanted to become powerful enough to save the person he loved from death. He never achieved that because his love for Padme and his motivations were inherently selfish. He wanted her save her so he could keep her beside him. Ben, however, rights that wrong and selflessly gives his life for the one he loves. He does so knowing that he will die, and does not even hesitate, because he wants her to live even if he can’t be with her. So in that way, and excluding the dyad stuff that makes his death confusing and nonsensical, I actually felt like it was fulfilling. Sort of. One of the only things that came close to feeling well thought out in that movie, I suppose. But it still did not land quite right because of how poorly it was orchestrated. I genuinely do not think people picked up on the subtle romance hints they dropped around those two. Like the tropes are there, but it’s almost entirely subtext and not something the general audience picked up on until the shirtless scene and even then it was more of a meme. But regardless of whatever romance was set up in the previous films, I felt like their entire arc in this film was dysfunctional as fuck and not cathartic at all. It was very juvenile and reduced to a series of “join me! No! —sword fight— Join me! No! —sword fight—” Did I enjoy some of their banter, yes. But it was not nearly as satisfying as their exchanges in TLJ. 

The Retconning of TLJ and Extended Material 

It felt like TROS was trying so hard to pacify everyone who hated the direction TLJ took the narrative. And so much of the movie’s run time is spent retconning what was revealed in that movie, with no explanation other than “from a certain point of view” loopholes. And there were so many tasteless digs at TLJ. The comment about the Holdo maneuver. Luke catching the lightsaber and raising that ancient, sea-corroded x wing from the water on Ach-to. Rey’s parents becoming nobodies to protect her from Grandpappy Palps. Leia unable to get a single ship to answer her distress calls at the end of TLJ, but Lando can fetch the whole damn galaxy in an End Game like fashion.

Poe is randomly a drug smuggler despite his backstory already being established as being a part of the New Republic’s Navy and having Rebel Heroes for parents. 

Chewbacca already got a medal in the comics, so that scene was so redundant. Did the writers even consult with the Lucasfilm’s story team?

Leia was trained as a Jedi and only gave it up because she knew her son was going to turn to the dark side. It was already established in Bloodlines that Leia chose to be a senator because the galaxy needed her in politics more than it needed her with a laser sword. That was where she could do the most good. And she sacrifices everything--even her family--for the sake of building something better and new. But that sacrifice is reduced to her giving it up because she essentially has given up on her son before he is even born? I just do not understand why that flashback was necessary. Or why she needed a lightsaber. It is like it was included to pacify people who were upset with Leia using the force to save herself in TLJ, but an explanation is not needed because we have already established in the films and in extended material that she is force sensitive.

I don’t even want to talk about the vats full of Snokes.

Finn being force sensitive is cool, and I could totally see the potential in that from TFA, but it goes absolutely nowhere and his character is back to being Poe’s sidekick and Rey’s lost puppy. Rose gets absolutely NO screen time, and is sidelined the entire film to pacify people who hated her character in TLJ. I do not need FinnRose to be canon, either. I loved their development in TLJ because Rose challenged and progressed Finn as a character. And even though I always thought FinnPoe was going to be endgame, I never thought they would sweep her under the rug. Speaking of Finn and Poe, they queer-baited everyone with Stormpilot, only to give both of them hetero love interests. Finn and Poe have so much natural chemistry and meaningful interaction, especially in the last resistance novel that came out, that it was a slap to the face to see Finn psuedo-paired with Jannah/Rey and Poe paired with Zori.

Hux was set up to have all this ambition and a tense rivalry with Kylo Ren. But he gets shot by a random new character for helping the Resistance he hates so much-- that is incredibly nonsensical. There was so much potential for a First Order civil war between Kylo Ren and Hux, and he was hyped up in the comics to be a very dangerous adversary. What a waste. 

Were there moments in the film that were fun and enjoyable, sure, but I find that all of the problems eclipse those moments. It’s really hard to find stuff I actually liked about it. C3PO was great, but I felt like him getting his memories restored removed the weight of his sacrifice. Much like everything else in this film. There were way too many fake out deaths for anything to be meaningful. The movie itself was, admittedly, gorgeous. The Death Star ruins was such a magical set. The soundtrack was beautiful as ever. But I just feel so depressed and sorry for the tragedy that was the Skywalker family after watching it, that I cannot even enjoy the parts that were enjoyable.

[geejaysmith]

Wolf 359 Classpects, pt. 1

Soooo, while I was still busy with the last few weeks of my summer internship, I did keep thinking about classpecting the Wolf 359 cast. Possibly too much, because it wouldn't leave me alone until I'd solved my own God Tier riddle. Unfortunately, it got really long in the solving because I have many Thoughts and want to share all of them, always, so uh, a complete Classpect Analysis of Wolf 359 will be in parts? This first one covers Eiffel's, Hera's, Lovelace's and Minkowski's aspects.

DOUG EIFFEL: An utter no-brainer; ya boi Dougie Fresh is a Breath player if I ever saw one. For Chrissakes, he's the communications officer, and the first one to start complaining about the monotony of being stuck in a deep space sardine can. Breath is associated with communication, freedom, openness, and change - "free as the breeze", you might think of it, but that also leads to Breath players having trouble pinning themselves down to anything. They get skittish if they feel pinned down, and frustrated when stuck in place. Doug's noncommittal aloofness, the way he's off in his own little world (partially to hide from the fact he really does not like himself very much at all), and the way he's incorporated media into his self-perception all match pretty well with John and the Nitrams. But at the same time, he's the one playing mediator even as early as The Sound And The Fury. Being largely outside of the War Industrial Complex the other characters are so familiar with and thus mostly free from its dogmatic worldview of hierarchy and order, he's becomes the One Sane Man when he's the one to shout "what is WRONG with you people?" when "murder" shows up in the top 3 potential solutions to a problem, and he has no hesitation in saying what's on his mind. And it's not all complaints and bad ideas, either; he's got whole speeches telling the others how amazing he thinks they are and how in awe he is of their skills. A key catalyst in the plot of Wolf 359 is the reaching effects of his radio broadcasts. Also, there's something hilarious to the fact that for the aspect associated with communication, Doug *literally* cannot lie to save his life. I kept my ears open for the infamous Breath Hex on my second listen - that is, the strange little way in which things Breath players say tend to come to pass in reality. Cigarette Candy is basically 20 straight minutes of the Decima virus being Breath Hexed into existence, and he guessed Lovelace's situation in one - "Maybe she's a clone, or like a *really* good robot replica."

HERA: Another easy one. Although Hera is resistant to splintering as we've come to recognize it, Heart players are nothing if not determined to be an individual. They have a firm idea of themselves as a person and defend it fiercely, including compartmentalizing away pieces that don't fit their self-image. Maybe less actively putting them down like Jade Harley did to Jadesprite (the manifestation of the negative feelings she repressed out of fear they'd make her less useful) - that would mean attacking or denying a part of themselves - and more... "why yes, I put this part of myself in this box, and I may look at the box on occasion, the box definitely exists, but I don't go near the box and I definitely do not touch or open or interact with the box. And then one day, I will die." So that piece finds other avenues to express itself because it can't not do that. Hera's programming dictates she be "chipper and non-confrontational and always ready to help", but she actively resists being a mere utility and always has - her earliest know action was to attempt a jailbreak of the manufacturing facility she was made in, born rebel that she is. She will insist upon her name over her serial number unless you force her not to, and gets passive-aggressive at people treating her like a machine. And yet, even as she teaches herself to ignore commands literally written into the base of her personality, she doesn't reject her directive to be helpful, nor does she express a wish to be a flesh-and-blood human, or even really to have a physical form? She has a human self-image in mental spaces (we presume, I will semi-seriously point out there's nothing definitively stating she doesn't see herself as like, her fursona or something), but when she has to limit herself to a human-like view of the ship, her immediate reaction is "this is weird, I don't like it."  This is honestly something about Hera that I think may be unique among non-villainous AI characters; she seems to be content with being what she is in general, and she just wishes for people to treat her as a person and not a piece of equipment they can do with as they please.  

ISABEL LOVELACE: Arm-wrestled Hera for the Heart aspect and lost, despite Hera not actually having any arms, but that's okay because there's two aspects that fit her much better: Blood and Time. I ultimately went with Blood.

This is the part where you notice I'm onto the third of four characters in an aspects-only meta post, yet there is still a lot of post to go. This is because These Kinds Of Characters, the sort that're constantly on emotional lockdown, are a Challenge Mode, and for me to truly be satisfied with my classification I have to start drilling into the bedrock of what it even means to have an aspect in general, what it means to have a specific aspect, and what each aspect is really about. When you're on that level you tend to find yourself throwing out explicit expositional statements as incomplete, oversimplified, or unreliable, and looking at the text directly with a subtextual electron microscope. Brace yourselves. I have thrown the author out of the airlock, and I am about to get verbose.  

Lovelace's character sheet describes her in contradictions, and we get to see two different sides to her that resolve into the complete picture by the time Lovelace Mk. III wakes up. There's Captain Isabel Lovelace, goofing around in her earlier logs, and The Terminator. She does things Her Way and is very much prepared to fight you if you object - the whole reason she was picked for the Hephaestus mission was her willingness to go against (in her words) "stupid orders" and do what she thought was right. She's also fiercely loyal; The Terminator is the end result of her anger and grief for her lost crew and at her failure to get them home alive. Her backstory episode has her summing up her complicated relationship to the Air Force with "I owe a lot of who I am to them." And even before she and Minkowski have completely stopped butting heads, Lovelace shoves her out of the way of an exploding wall panel that would've killed her, and takes a near-fatal bit of shrapnel to the gut in the process. At her best, Lovelace is a fearless, boundlessly determined, dedicated firebrand of a leader. At worst, she can be impatient, stubborn, shortsighted, and ruthless. I dunno about you but that reminds me of a certain... angry crab that I know.

"Time" was what a few people chimed in with for Lovelace and while I see some of the connections (her awareness of the time loop, "Variations on a Theme", her multiple selves and multiple deaths, the repeated motif of clocks and pocketwatches) I don't think she quite fits in with the other Time players. Unlike most Time players, she doesn't have a fixation with historic context, the "Why Things Are The Way That They Are." This manifests in Dave's paleontology and his taking of source material for ironic twisting, Aradia's archaeology and knowledge of The Nature Of The Game, Damara's... /noises and vague gestures bc I don't want to go back through Meenahbound but her role as The Handmaid fits the pattern, and Caliborn's own warped, thoughtless replication of narrative archetypes. Context. Decisions. What came before and how it shapes the now, where your decisions will take it from here. The consequences those decisions will have. The details versus the larger picture. Even failure has its place in that scheme - that's the Time aspect. Lovelace doesn't like to dwell, she's a very "barrelling forward momentum" kind of person.

Side note: Aradia, Dave, and Damara all face hesitation to take action they had to learn to overcome. Also, all of them had to be pushed to use violence except in self-defense; Aradia let Vriska cross a series of lines before beating the everloving shit out of her, and Damara snapped after what, years? Of Meenah's abuse. Dave, on the other hand, never raises a hand to another person except as a complete necessity. Caliborn is, if anything, an aberration here in that he's outright homocidal and self-doubt is something that happens to other people. Caliborn is an outright aberration to a lot of Time player patterns, and to SBURB in general, because it's SBURB, so the rules are made up and the points don't fucking matter, except when they do, because Fuck You, The Author Said So.

No, Lovelace's approach to decision-making is that regrets are for afterwards, and "if I fail I deserve to be out of this picture; also, this situation has gone entirely pear-shaped, time to fling myself into the sun." (and that sounds an awful lot like someone that I know very well, but I'll deal with that royal mess when I get to the crazy whamma-jamma that is Classes). Impatience and railroading of other people can be her undoing just the same as assertiveness and decisiveness are her gifts.

...aaand then I went ahead and watched the live episode and yeah, major Karkat vibes there. However, I note that I don't believe we have ever hit hard evidence in Homestuck that Blood players are capable of Chilling The Fuck Out - this is part of the limitations of classpecting characters who weren't made for this system, you really have to dig into how much of their behavior is situational and where you see the kernel of individual perception shine through, the Rosetta Stone by which you begin to see the constants. "Where the object becomes the subject", to quote Memoria.

Finally, I think it's also worth noting that while Lovelace has a lot of connections to Time motifs, she also has connections to a lot of Blood motifs that arguably become more important to her story. Personal bonds and social justice are two of the Blood aspects strongest associations - see Lovelace's loyalty to her crew, and extending her desire to avenge them out to everyone Goddard Futuristics has ever used and tossed aside. The physical body and literal blood are other strong associations, and gee, how many times does the O-negative Cure-All Alien Juice in Lovelace's veins become a critical plot point? Not to mention the implication that her new friends all pulled through the finale because all of them now have her blood in their system. I'll accept that she's closer to the line between Blood and Time than some, but I'm holding by ground here: 

(Also, here's some irony for you, she may share an aspect with the Cancer trolls, but her birthday is August 11th, making her a Leo.)

RENEE MINKOWSKI: Minkowski was the hardest of these 4 to come to a decision on. My first inclination was Mind. Her general disposition put me in mind of a Life player. But then, I sat down and thought my way past the Commander's layers of emotional armor and ultimately settled on Light.

First off, by being a stickler for protocol and procedure as well as an Actual Responsible Adult, Minkowski is a kind of character that Homestuck straight-up just does not have, so snap judgements aren't gonna cut it here.  This is, again, another limitation of the classpecting system - all the examples we have to draw from are teenage disasters stuck in a lawless hellscape of some description or another, and written by an author allergic to boxing himself in with hard conclusions. But I digress.

Commander Minkowski is also stubborn. When she sets her mind to something, she digs in her heels, cranks the dial to 11, and then breaks off the knob and pockets it so you can't turn it back down. We see this as soon as episode 2, and at it's most hyperbolic when she Captain Ahabs the plant monster. Her's is iron-willed, bloody-minded, unstoppable, Determi-fucking-nation - when she sets her mind to it.

The submarine thought exercise is what had me initially lock her down as a hero of Mind before I mulled it over. The exercise is meant to provoke thought about priorities - what you think your role's purpose is in that situation will determine your priorities, and thus, your decisions. Mind heroes' most prominent skills are in riding the flow of causality, watching decisions, their causes and their consequences, and directing that path. They know people, and how to direct people. But the need for this means that they can get a little co-dependent. Other people are understandable - it's themselves that Mind heroes have the greatest struggle with. Without that vehicle of another person, Mind heroes may find themselves adrift and struggling to define themselves. This is fitting, given Mind is the most direct counterpart to the Heart aspect.

However, upon further examination, I found that this framework of priorities setting your decisions can also be extended to the Light aspect. What is "lucky" in a given situation? What do you define as a fortunate outcome? Rose arguably gets Grimdark'd by something like this, she asks the cue ball "are the horrorterrors evil?" and in doing so attempts to pry into the motivations and intent of *indescribable eldritch beings existing on a nigh-incomprehensible plane* and wedge it down into a relative human understanding of morality, which is sort of like trying to fit the Pacific Ocean into a water bottle. She was trying to deduce what impact the horrorterrors would have upon her and her friends, but asked the wrong question and got an answer she couldn't handle. She didn't recognize Doc Scratch was baiting her into this by leading her into a specific framework through which to ask the question. Vriska died because of her failure to recognize she was in a situation where luck didn't matter. Aranea got trounced because of her inability to recognize that reshuffling reality to prioritize herself and her preferred outcomes still didn't overcome the fundamental nature of timelines - you try to take over the alpha timeline with an insubordinate branch? That's a doomed timeline no matter how you slice it, and we know what happens to those. Luck and knowledge are both used by the Light-bound to give themselves power, whether in showing themselves off as The Smart One or the The Helpful One or The Unstoppable One, but their limited viewpoint often leads them to overlook the limitations of their own framework, or in other words, missing the bigger picture. I'll point out here also how Minkowski has the entire DSSPPM memorized and is the one who wants to get to the bottom of whatever the hell is really going on up at Wolf 359. Additionally, one of her other ambitions, at least once upon a time, was writing musicals. The verbal arts are one of the domains of Light players.

So while on the surface, Minkowski bears the most resemblance to a Life player, Life players tend to have an element of conformity to them. Unquestioned assumptions they've internalized have about the context in which they exist. Light heroes, on the other hand, need conformity so they have something to defy when they jump up and down screaming LOOK AT ME!  

So after much pontificating, I came to a decision. In the end, what Minkowski wanted more than anything else was a stage. Maybe to direct rather than hold the spotlight, but still; that's a Light hero if ever I saw one.

[feynavaley]

Thank you for answering my last question! I was the anon who asked if there was a difference in names in North and South Italy. I was also wondering if there are any strong cultural differences? I'm making an Italian character who has a father from Piedmont and a mother from Apulia. Do the differences depend on the specific region? Thank you for being so patient!

Thanks for the question! This is going to be a bit hard to answer because the matter is quite complex, haha.

The thing is, we’re all Italians. So, we definitely share a lot of key cultural and historical heritage. However, Italy has been a single country only since 1861. From the fall of the Roman Empire to that date, Italy has been divided into different parts, each under different dominations that changed during the course of history. From this brief piece alone you can understand that there are lot of cultural differences between each different regions – and there are also a lot of differences between the North and South Italy (that is usually identified as the regions formerly belonging to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies – Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, Molise, Apulia, and Sicily). I apologize for this, but I don’t feel comfortable with delving further into historical and economic issues as it’s a very complex and sensitive matter, unsuited for a simple Tumblr post. I would only risk oversimplifying the issue.

That said, I can offer you my own perspective on some differences I have noticed, as a person who lives in a region of the Centre-North but has friends and acquaintances from all over Italy. (Mostly met at university, when people tend to move away from their birthplace.) It goes without saying that anything I will write is going to be an overgeneralization; every person is different and the birthplace doesn’t determinate the personality – yet, there are some behavioural patterns I have noticed and I think can be ascribed to cultural differences.

A general stereotype about Italians is that we’re warm and friendly. This probably true for most Italians (after spending some time in Switzerland, I would be inclined to say it is), but even more so from people coming from the South. Many people from North Italy are friendly, but in a more detached manner. We still keep our distances. I’m not trying to imply it’s fake but – we have some clear boundaries with people we don’t know well. People from the South, instead, tend to be immediately much warmer. Hospitality is sacred, they go extreme lengths to put you at ease. I don’t know how to explain it properly because it’s something you have to experience, but – you get invited to somebody’s place, and you feel like you have been genuinely adopted into the family. People from the North are perfectly nice and welcoming as well, but generally, it’s not the same feeling.

On the flip side, people from the South tend to take much more liberties. Even if you aren’t particularly close, they can ask for pretty big favours – stuff I would hesitate asking even to my family, to make it clearer. Sometimes, this can get perceived as rude from people who aren’t used to it. In truth, it’s more of a cultural misunderstanding: they ask big favours, that much is true, but they expect you to count on them in the same way. Most people would do for you what they’re asking you to do for them, if you were to need it.

As far as the general attitude goes, people from the South tend to be a bit louder and lively. Things are also a bit more disorganized in the South – but this is more about infrastructures than people.

Sadly, people from the North also have a lot of prejudices against people from the South. They’ll say they are lazy and not trustworthy, some people in the North will discriminate against them when it comes to, for example, renting apartments or even hiring for a job. I won’t say anything more because I don’t think I am the person most suited to discuss this, but I think it’s something you have to be aware of, if you want to portray the divide between South and North.

Going back to lighter matters, South Italy cuisine involves a lot of frying and oil, while in plates from the North a lot of butter is used.

And, obviously, people from different regions may speak, aside from standard Italian, regional dialects that are in no way mutually intelligible, haha. They are completely different languages. 

About the specific regions, I am sorry to say I cannot say much about Piedmont. I’ve been there just a few brief times, not long enough to discern the specific differences between Piedmont and the rest of North Italy. I also don’t know many people coming from Piedmont. I can only tell you that it’s amongst the richest regions of Italy (although not to the levels of, say, Lombardy) and with strong industrialization, but the agriculture is prevalent as well. I can also tell you that it’s one of the few land-locked regions of Italy, but it has, instead, part of the Alps. If your main character’s father comes from there, he’s likely to be used to mountains – if he doesn’t live nearby, as a touristic destination, at least. Hicking in the summer and skying or other winter sports in the winter.

I can be more useful about Apulia, instead. In general, it’s a region in the South and surrounded by a gorgeous sea, so your MC’s mother will probably be more used to that. She’ll know how to swim and complain about seas that are not as beautiful, haha. Being in the South, Apulia is also quite warm. Your character might have never seen snow before moving away – I know some people who didn’t. I could be even more useful, though. My mother spent her childhood in Apulia in the 70s – that, if your story is set in contemporary years and your main character is an adult, might be the same time his/her mother was a child as well. If this might be useful, I can give you more details specifically tied to that period, let me know! 😊

Just one last thing: moving between Piedmont and Apulia is going to take forever, lol (especially if you have to get to the bottom of Apulia). Even now, there aren’t fast trains that connect the two regions, it will take at least 9 hours just to go from Turin to Bari – and that’s the easiest thing I could think of, haha. By car, it’s at least 10 hours. And, it used to be much worse in the past. It’s not an easy connection.

I hope this has been useful, don’t hesitate to ask if you need clarifications/anything more!

[fedonciadale]

I agree he's not a Gary Stu! But I don't think calling him a cinnamon roll implies that he is. In the show, Jon is softer, more heroic and self sacrificing than in the books. He really IS too good for this world. In the books he's more crafty. If anything he's more of a Gary Stu in the books, since he's so clever he's able to advise kings on military strategy at 15/16, and he can also warg. Is there anything book Jon isn't good at, come to think of it? It's been a while since I read them!

Dear nonny,

in the books he is more crafty, but he makes plenty of mistakes. And there are some things he is not good at, so I beg to differ.

Jon mostly advises Stannis about who to approach in the North - and Jon should be knowledgable in this regard. He was raised at Winterfell, got the same teachers as Robb, so why wouldn’t he know some things about a) military strategy and b) the alliances of the Northern Lords. And an intelligent 15/16 year old should be able to do that. He simply knows the North far better than Stannis does.

As for warging, he is not yet even aware, that he does it and he is not very good at it. Bran and especially Arya are better at warging.

Also, in the books he is not a great swordsman, not at all. He trains and trains because he wants to be worthy of the Valyrian blade he carries.

Do you know what he is also not good at? Seeing through intrigues and machinations. He is not a good politician in that regard. Although repeatedly warned about his enemies, he is simply to arrogant to appease some of the older Nightwatch man.

You could also question his emotional intelligence. The baby switch was a cruel thing to do and he alienated Gilly for ever, I think. He still has to learn that he also needs the emotional support of his people - and I think he might never learn that, but will need Sansa for that.

So, no, Jon is not a Gary Stue.

I don’t really think that Jon in the show is more self-sacrificing, because I do believe that Jon in the books will make the same decisions. In the books he prepares to be hated and reviled for being the bastard who let the wildlings through the wall. He hopes there is some kind of honour in this “bastard’s honour.” So there’s that.

Like many of the males (Tyrion, Varys) ShowJon is a better person than his book version. I wouldn’t mind that much, but what bugs me most is how much they dumbed him down. And it bugs me that they have done the same disservice to Catelyn, whose bookversion is also smarter and that they have in turn darkened some of the female characters especially Sansa and Arya. It is misbalanced.

And sry, not sry, call Jon a cinnamon roll in crack post as much as you like, but there is a difference in saying: “Look at this adorkable cinnamon roll” in a fangirl voice - which I am o.k. with and

“Jon would never do this and that, because he is a cinnamon roll.” That is simply oversimplifying his character, and I’m so over it. He is not too good for this world. I mean even in the show, you cannot really come to that conclusion if you look at his whole arc, and not just  from season 5 onward. He betrayed and left the Freefolk for the greater good of the watch despite the fact that he liked them and loved Ygritte. From their point of view that was simply mean. If you take the time he spent with the Freefolk into your consideration, Jon simply is not a cinnomon roll. Full stop. Neither is he a Gary Stue. Again full stop.

Thanks for the ask, and apologies for going a bit on a rant. That the fandom makes Jon to be this dumb dork really chafes at my nerves.