#i can’t help it i like when characters are a little bit evil and unreliable

[watcherglowcloud]

okay “fuck me? fuck your eyes” was objectively horrifying but i think “oh, fuck my eyes? how’s a murder-suicide sound, bitch?” was the funniest possible way to regain control of the situation

[writingwithfolklore]

When your Antagonist is Also your Protagonist

                If there’s one thing humans are all really good at, it’s getting in our own way. Most stories have at least some element of protagonist against themselves—we create this block between our protagonist and what they want when we create their flaw.

                However, stories that rely on this conflict with self have to do a bit extra work. Internal motivations and antagonists are a bit more challenging, but still a valid way to introduce conflict into a story. Here’s three considerations for when your antagonist is also your protagonist:

1. What is preventing them from what they want?

This is the same question we ask ourselves when creating character flaws, but I think it deserves repeating here. There has to be something you can name that is standing in the way of your character, or this won’t work. It must be deeply ingrained, difficult to overcome, and effective in preventing them from getting what they want.

Maybe what they want is to ask out their crush, but they’re horribly shy. Or they want to take down their evil ruler, but they’re secretly in love with them. It’s important these are traits they can’t just snap their fingers and fix. Like, if your character really wants to win a weightlifting contest, the thing standing in their way can’t be that they’re just too weak, because people can work out and become stronger—that doesn’t make for a very compelling story, and it also doesn’t explain why they couldn’t have just done that sooner.

There’s a reason your character doesn’t already have what they want.

2. How will you use that to introduce conflict?

In order to be effective, this trait has to act as the antagonist, which means at every turn, they have to be thwarted by themselves. Maybe your character comes face to face with their crush and physically can’t talk and it comes off as awkward and weird. Or they’re approaching their evil ruler and can’t seem to pull the trigger.

Their inability to get over their trait should be frustrating and challenging for them. If it helps, think of it like a little invisible guy hovering over their shoulder and forcing them to do the opposite of what they want to do.

3. Other ways of standing in their own way

Characters can also be thwarted by their own minds in other ways. Some stories take the route of reality being unreliable, whether through drugs, mental illness, or a magical/fictional reason. Memento, the movie, is sort of an example of this, where because of Leonard’s memory condition, he’s unable to know who to trust or what the truth is, and what's a lie.

One of my favourite video games is Fran Bow, where the distorting of reality is both the problem and sometimes the answer.

                What are some other ways the protagonist can act as their own antagonist?

[beelspillowpet]

A Lesson in Love - A “Character Analysis” on Asmodeus

I had to come for the tracks, wigs, and weaves of bitches when Pomade dropped because I saw people talking shit about my boy. This was a milestone “project” or “reward” I guess?

I hit 400 followers today while I was out running errands!!! Thank you guys SO SO MUCH for the love and support! I can’t WAIT to produce more content for everyone!!!

Below the cut there WILL BE talk of season 3, as well as some talk of chapter 16. There’s a healthy amount of theorizing on his personality as well, I hope you don’t mind! This came out more like a plea to get people to change their minds about how Asmo really is, rather than a comprehensive essay of sorts. So here we go!

There’s something we apparently still need to talk about in this fanbase. The unrealistic idea of Asmodeus being a sex freak, and an unreliable person in general despite there being little proof of it. We need to set a few things straight about Asmo moving forward.

December 25th rolled around and Asmo’s audio drama and song were released. I take it everyone enjoyed both parts, as well as I did. My timeline both on twitter and tumblr were filled with Asmodeus content, as well as the other brothers and such. But I mostly got Asmo content. However, in peeks and cracks, if I looked hard enough, I still saw people who absolutely loathed Asmo or who were indifferent to him. Keep in mind; I think it’s okay. You don’t have to like everyone.

I’ve only joined the fanbase in September, but even I could tell some of these takes were old fashioned. I downloaded the game on October 17th, a very important anniversary for me, while I 

was still in bed in the morning. I blazed through the entire story of season 1 and now I am stuck in season 2, specifically in Chapter 24. I obviously don’t have every card of Asmodeus with his Devilgrams, but I have been analyzing his character over the past few days for this.

So needless to say, I have a considerable amount of information on him, as well as personal thoughts that may help some learn to love him. Or at the very least, from spreading a negative idea of him around as if it were true. Enough that should help clear his name, so to speak.

Let’s look at his title; Avatar of Lust. Now naturally the thoughts that come to your head are sex and other sexual bits. So I can understand how some people would come to the conclusion that he’s just a sex freak. But if you look under the surface of his title, like I’m sure you’ve had to for your own personal favorites (*cough* Lucifer, Belphie, and Satan ESPECIALLY) you would discover that Asmodeus is more than just about sex. In fact, sex takes up very little of his pass time, if you were to believe it!

In recent chapters, as I’ve been told, Asmodeus doesn’t really get around much anyways:

Granted, this was said while in Celestia, but I imagine not much has changed for him since his fall, as well as his brothers.

Not really comfortable being with just anyone, huh…? Sounds like someone who doesn’t have sex so warily often as you’d think!

Being lustful can come in many shapes and forms. It can be merely in appearance, which Asmo is not afraid of doing. He’s very comfortable about skinship and it’s very apparent in how he dresses and acts that he wants you to adore his body. To worship it! Maybe not sexually, but aesthetically! Being lustful can mean just thinking about sex or sexual scenarios often, which if you take a peek at Asmo’s chat’s either with you or his brothers, is very apparent too.

Personally, I believe that people would assume he is not good in a relationship because he would have a “cheating problem”. I don’t think Asmo is a monster, just like I don’t think any of the brothers are monsters. They may be demons (technically fallen angels) now but they used to be angels too. Their falling out with their Father doesn’t mean they’ve completely abandoned morality, it was a rebellion for Lilith’s right to live. Not for them to sin as they pleased. For all we know they might have been fine in Heaven otherwise! (with the exception of Lucifer.)

A monster knows right from wrong and chooses evil anyways. An ignorant person doesn’t know right from wrong. Asmodeus is not a monster, nor is he ignorant.

When Asmo genuinely loves you, I think he would take steps to calm down that side of him, if it were to exist. Lust is fairly limited, but it is a part of love to some extent. LOVE is vastly different. Love has many languages, and they aren’t all spoken either. For me, personally, I found that Lucifer’s love language can be either very direct, or roundabout so as to not let it go to your head, for an example. Asmo is just far more direct about his care for you.

I feel as though Asmo gets a lot of crap constantly for his presumed nature and because we don’t get to see much else of him at first, especially in season 1, his impression on us sort of stays. With most of the fanbase either somewhat new to the game or somewhere lost in the sea of the difficulty curve that is season 2, we can only assume based on what we’ve seen, and what others have headcanoned about him.

Let’s break and talk about Satan for a moment; this is going somewhere.

I’m led to believe that Satan can control his sin fairly well. He’s easy to get irritated, sure, but he isn’t as much of a walking ball of rage as I suspected. I would argue that, aside from Leviathan, Satan can handle his sin the best out of the brothers. But again, we’re forgetting about Asmo. The Avatar of “Lust”. Like I’ve shown before, he doesn’t really sleep around a lot, according to anon.

At worst, Asmo being flirty is through text and he’s not actively trying to sleep with you. It can be interpreted that way, but for me personally, it comes down to having a friend that is very up close and in your personal space.

(I myself am one of these types of people. Having ADHD, my social cues are always sort of off, and I’ve struggled with coping with it for years. With my best friend, we have seen each other naked countless times and have slept in the same bed as well. We were never romantic with each other. We were just very comfortable being close and personal with each other.)

I’d like to point out also that Asmo isn’t even there for most of season 1 too. Which can give you the idea that maybe he just was out sleeping around a lot, but to me he probably just went out partying a lot. You don’t get known that fast for sleeping around. Maybe in 5,000 years, sure, but I’d imagine being a party boy, as his Devilgram “Guided by Desire” suggests.

So the idea that Asmo isn’t in the house a lot because he’s out having sex all the time isn’t true is it? He’s probably just out partying, which can LEAD to sex with someone sure, but again, Asmo doesn’t feel comfortable doing that, now does he?

I feel like of all the boys, Asmo is the one who radiates with everyone else the most. Most people will never realize how surreal it is that Asmo is faking it until he makes it. He doesn’t always think he’s beautiful, or that he’s worth all the love he’s striving and straining to get. Something that is extremely relatable for a lot of people with self-worth issues. Asmo is just like that, but instead being sarcastic and self-deprecating, he simply works to make himself look as beautiful as possible, so that in his eyes, his beauty matches the affection he gets.

Which is why, when he falls in love with you, it’s strange. You are constantly telling him he’s nice and pretty, but you aren’t lusting after him. You’re just being nice. It may just be me, but when people are overly nice just for the sake of being nice, I’m very attracted to that. That is Asmo, to some extent. The fact that he reflects the insecurities and habits of others so clearly may make others uncomfortable, but that brutal honesty veiled behind insecurity is what a lot of people with self-image issues deal with.

Now for me to share my favorite personal idea for Asmo that completely changed how I saw him in season 1 onwards; Asmodeus is an empath. Now let me explain:

First, what is an Empath?

The term empath comes from empathy, which is the ability to understand the experiences and feelings of others outside of your own perspective. Seems simple, right? Everyone can do this to some extent. However, what makes you an empath is the fact that empaths genuinely feel the same pain as you do. So much so your experience becomes a very personal part of their own. They are capable of being able to feel other people’s emotions without them speaking, or even showing signs of it through their body language.

This would explain, for me personally, why there’s so little of him in season 1. The intensity of what goes on in the house, his sensitive soft-spoken mannerisms, the only time he truly gets mad is when he’s childishly arguing with Mammon? Asmo is afraid of true conflict, he’s afraid of violence and negative emotions. Let’s face it; everyone is indifferent or hates you at the start of the game.

While this changes fairly quickly, all the intense feelings come to a head in chapter 16. All those negative emotions swirling around, of course Asmo isn’t going to want to be in the house when it’s that intense. The attic didn’t just disappear completely, too. Belphie was still in the attic hating humans. That negative emotion could be affecting Asmo and he didn’t know why, so he could have been out of the house more.

Where Asmo can feel the emotions of others, it may mostly be the negative ones because they fill him with anxiety and panic if it persists. Which can be helpful in making him so urgent to want to make others smile and feel better, right?

Imagine being intimate with Asmodeus, and suddenly you aren’t in the mood for it anymore but don’t want to make things awkward. He could pick up on it in an instant and wouldn’t get mad because he understands how you feel completely.

Now to close this out about something that genuinely hurts me; Asmodeus is a narcissist.

I mean, the wiki says that he is, but personally? No, no he isn’t. Since when is loving yourself a bad thing? Sure he may go a bit far sometimes, but people with self-image issues need to go a little harder than the rest to make sure they're getting the love they need.

(Talking about myself AGAIN, but I do this a lot. At random, I will look up in my own mirror in front of my desk that I sit in front of all day and tell myself I am a cute bitch. I am VERY VERY cute and anyone would be lucky to have someone as drop dead gorgeous as myself. I say that a few times a day. In reality, I am very insecure about my looks. I do believe I’m cute, but sometimes it’s hard to say it. Which is why I force myself. Why wouldn’t Asmo do the same?)

Talking yourself up to be as beautiful as a sex god is no easy task, but Asmo isn’t the Avatar of “Lust” for no reason. When an insecure girl talks up her beauty, it’s her being strong and independent. When Asmo does it, its narcissism… it doesn’t really seem fair, now does it? Maybe he’s just an insecure person who needs to tell himself ALL THE TIME that he’s beautiful. That if he stares at his reflection long enough, he may see it too.

(Also, Simeon literally calls him out on being insecure. Insecure people tend to try and overcompensate where they feel they’re lacking.)

”Asmodeus is hinted to be insecure and seeking for love and attention. When Simeon was asked about what he thought of Asmodeus, he says that Asmodeus is still trying to fulfill the role of the angel he used to be; an angel that was adored and loved by many. Asmodeus laughs at Simeon's remark and brushes it off by saying that he is only jealous.” - A section from said Asmodeus Wiki.

People can choose to love or hate Asmo, obviously. Making things up about his character without having anything but speculation and having that dictate how he acts is plain silly. This entire “essay” if you can call it that, comes from the heart. I love Asmo as a character, and in the beginning he did make me uncomfortable, I didn’t like him that much. But I learned to look past that and figure out why he acts the way he does. Something didn’t sit right with me about him for a while, and it was that air of insecurity that I didn’t see at first.

All I can really ask for, is giving Asmo another chance as a character. He’s not as wild and wacky as Mammon, or as cool and sexy as Lucifer, or as edgy and precious as Belphie, but he matters in this story too. He fell from grace with his brothers for Lilith. Give him another chance, and let him show you that he is the Avatar of Love.

[the-east-art]

Digimon 101

A while back I wrote a post explaining the basics of the Legend of Zelda, so I thought why not do one on Digimon since it's not widely popular but is sure a staple of my blog!

Let's start by clearing some air - Pokemon vs Digimon : For some reason a lot of people seem to think that it has to be one or the other, but in my experience most people who like Digimon also really enjoy Pokemon - as I explain Digimon I will at times compare it to Pokemon to show off some of the differences of the two. Both franchises are actually very distinct in their mechanics and I enjoy both of them for different reasons :)

Okay, that said, let's start getting into the basics of Digimon under the cut!

I lied, one more boring tid bit as I talk about the canons/seasons. Almost every season of Digimon is a standalone series with it's own take on the mechanics of the digital world. For the sake of keeping this (relatively) concise and to the point I will be speaking about Digimon in broad strokes that can apply to most of the canons as I understand them. This guide is largely to help with understanding my au's and such on my blog, so if there's something I tend to use often from a specific canon I will make note of that.

The Digital World - unlike Pokemon, the human characters in the digimon series come from 'our' world. Digimon are NOT integrated into society like in Pokemon, instead Digimon is more of an isekai story, or a story where the main characters fall from the real world into a fantasy one. The Digital world is one that was either created or discovered by humans through the creation of technology and the internet and such. In many iterations to the internet itself is a place between the digital world and earth.

The Digital World often is like a bent version of the real world. The explanation varies from canon to canon but relatively speaking much of the make up of the digital world is like a half remembered real world with things like an entire field full of non functioning vending machines or a line of telephone booths on a beach. Much of the digital world is like a dream.

In some telling you can spend a year in the digital world while only an hour has passed in the real world, and in some the time between the two is the same. It really depends on what you prefer. Likewise, sometimes Digimon can and sometimes they can't be in the human world, or can only be in the human world for a little while.

Digimon : While Pokemon are animals, Digimon are fully autonomous beings. They are the 'people' of their world. A simple example for this is simply speech - while (most) Pokemon don't actually speak, all Digimon speak complete sentences all of the time. When people go to the digital world they find entire villages of Digimon and cities and such.

Digimon can evolve like Pokemon, however it'd called digivolution and works differently. While a Pokemon can only go up on the evolution ladder, Digmon can go up AND down. The higher on the ladder they are, the more work it is to maintain that form and the farther down on the ladder they fall when they release the form. For instance - during a big battle a Digimon may become an Ultimate level, but then after the battle they will transform into their in training form.

The ladder of digimon forms:

Mega

Ultimate

Champion

Rookie

In Training

Baby

Tbh I have a really hard time keeping them all straight and I think in some instances specific Digimon can go above Mega? They also don't always evolve along the same routes, things such as emotion, specific items, or just circumstances can make Digimon take different forms as they evolve which lets you play around a lot with them in concept, such as...

Dark Digivolution - A noteworthy digivolution as it's produced under very negative circumstances (different than just Digimon who are virus' by nature which I'll talk about in a bit). For instance if a Digimon isn't capable of digivolving but their partner is pushing or forcing them to they may dark digivolve and become an uncontrollable monster often without much of a consciousness, just pure anger.

I will briefly talk about the 'types' of Digimon, but I won't go super into it cuz it's kind of deep lore and not super relevant to what I do. A Digimon is data, and data has certain properties. They can be either just data, vaccine, virus, free, or variable. Mostly I just know that evil looking digimon are usually Virus' and angelic or 'good' looking digimon are usually vaccine. This sometimes factors into their default nature, but I find that concept boring so I ignore it lol. It mostly explains why some Digimon end up looking like a literal devil.

Special Digimon: In the digital world there are certain important Digimon. The one's I know the most about are the Core three (used as a major plot point in Frontier) which are Cherubimon, Seraphimon, and Ophanimon. They're all angelic like Digimon who try to keep the peace and usually I use them to represent a Digimon that is very powerful, or someone who tries to use this fact for clout. There's also the Knights (specific digimon who are part of a squad or whatever) I don't know much about them so I won't go into them but they're there too and I believe serve a similar purpose although more morally grey and with more in fighting.

But East, what about the humans????

glad you asked.

So in the digital world it is very hard to digivolve on your own - it takes a lot of work and time. Unless you have.... a partner!

Partners/Tamers/Digidestined - called many names these are the people that are bonded to a specific digimon. They often have what's called a digivice to help connect with their digimon and depending on the strength of the bond between the partner and the digimon the digimon can attain greater and higher evolutions. This is the aspect that is the most interesting as Digimon and their partners can either be alive or very different and how they deal with one another as well as the world and situations around them determine how they need to grow. Not just the partner either! In the best telling of Digimon the digimon themselves also have narrative arcs they have to go through. A digimon au is in many ways like a Daemon au - a version of yourself refracted through glass.

Okay we're almost done, I will end with talking about crests

Crests are only in the first and second iteration of the series. Each Digidestined have a specific crest, which is an attribute that is where their power comes from and has the most potential within them. Sometimes it's something a character always has, but often times it's something that they need to work on, and their relationship with their crest, while seemingly easy as first, is often much more complex than it may seem and they may have to re-analyze their relationship with the attribute in order to grow. For instance - a character with reliability may need to learn that sometimes they have to let certain people down to prioritize circumstances, in a way being unreliable to someone. The opposite of the crests is also considered their weakness and something they must resist - such as someone who's crest is friendship purposefully pushing away their friends.

Losing touch with their crests can prevent digivolutions or cause dark digivolutions.

(There's also armor which can create special digivolutions, the ability to merge digimon, the ability for the partner and digimon to fuse into an evolution - there are a lot of possibilities in the digimon series! That's why it's so fun to play with!)

Sorry this is so long! If you got this far thanks of reading and let me know if you have any questions!!!

[itsclydebitches]

Was planning on making this my own post, but I thought you would be more suited to discussing this sort of topic. Something I've noticed when it comes to the more prominent/important/strong female characters (Nora, Pyrrha, Penny, Robyn, Emerald, Sienna) is that RT often has the tendency of giving them masculine allusions (Thor, Achilles, Pinocchio, Robin Hood, Aladdin, Shere Khan) as if they are unable to stand on their own as characters unless they have that connection to a male character. 1/3

It is worth discussing! Yeah, I hesitate to call it a pattern just because, as you say, Team RWBY themselves are an exception to the rule  — and as the title characters of the story, they’re a pretty big exception. We also have good women allusions turned into good women characters (Glynda with The Good Witch, May with Maid Marian) and bad women allusions turned into good women characters (Winter with The Snow Queen — I don’t think she was ever meant to enter full antagonist territory, but that’s another post). So it’s not just a matter of saying, “RWBY models their strong women after male inspirations and turns all female inspirations into male characters.” It’s not that simple. But the fact that it’s not simple doesn’t mean there’s nothing there to unpack because I definitely understand the feeling you’re pointing to, anon. Team RWBY feels like it has the most thought put into it in terms of changing up these allusions, specifically when it comes to subversion: the little girl in a red hood who previously needed a hunter’s protection has become the hunter herself, Belle overcomes both her Gaston and the now evil Beast, Snow White extracts herself from her own abusive situation (with a little help from the Dwarves still), and Goldilocks is no longer lost and in need of basic necessities, but can rather punch her way out of any establishment  — like, say, a club. The execution of these themes aside (how Adam was handled, turning Jacques’ arrest into a joke, etc.), there’s a commonality here that works. Or at least, it works for me. Yet when we expand the allusions past our title team, things get... very messy. That’s when we start to hit on these concerns. 

I’d say the problem stems primarily from that lack of thought, not the act itself of turning women characters into men or vice versa. Meaning, as I’ve said in the past, RWBY’s use of allusions is terribly unreliable nowadays, and that’s not just in terms of plot expectations like, “Why did Penny have to become a flesh girl because Pinocchio, but Ironwood didn’t stay good because Tin Man?” It also includes these questions of why these changes were made and what sort of messages they send. As you lay out, why are so many of our heavy hitters  — the most talented huntress, the lightning-immune smasher, the Maiden android, etc.  — based on men? Why are many of the effeminate and “weaker” men  — Jaune the untrained, Ren the emotional councilor, Oscar the kid who wants to talk it all out  — based on women? Again, I don’t intend to sling any hard accusations, but rather to point out what’s likely a subtle, unconscious bias. To provide another example, I’ve seen talk recently about how RT (again, unconsciously) depicts the faunus, where all the good characters have culturally established “good” animal features and all the bad character have culturally established “bad” features. It’s cat ears, rabbit ears, sheep ears, monkey tails, dog tails, and beautifully changing skin color vs. scorpion tails, spiderwebs, bull horns, tiger ears, bat wings, and crocodile scales. Is it a perfect 1:1 divide? No, Ghira has panther claws and Fennec has fox ears, but there’s enough there for us to go, “RT tends to give the good guys cute features and/or features we associate with safe animals, whereas the bad guys tend to get ugly features and/or features we associate with dangerous animals.” I feel the same way here, that there’s a bit of a trend at play, with the caveat that there are more complications simply by virtue of these allusions being, well, complicated. But there’s enough there to make us stop and think, “What were RT’s intentions with this? If they just chose something based on the rule of cool, what might those inclinations tell us about gender norms in America?” Meaning, when someone goes, “Idk, we just thought it would be cool to change this up” there’s a lifetime of media consumption driving that choice. It’s not actually random, but based on whatever has been normalized  — unless you actively counteract that by thinking through what you want the change to do. 

Unconscious biases are always at work. When we analyze something like this it’s often not a matter of saying, “The author is [insert accusatory term here]” but rather just, “The author is falling into expectations, patterns, and normalized decisions based on the culture they’ve grown up in.” Which includes things like thinking, “Well, if this character is based on a male god, she must be crazy strong. If this character is based on a woman fighter, he’s probably more emotional.” Such biases may be driving a lot of decisions because, as said in the past, I really don’t think RT is putting much thought into these allusions, if any at this point. For me, Penny was proof of that  — the inability to see how following her allusion utterly destroyed her character growth  — but even if we don’t agree about Penny, what about Salem? Far from just using her name, this volume gave us a blatant reference to the events of Salem Trails in the 1690s. Namely, the burning of the witch. 

Except references like this can’t just look cool. This isn’t a video game Easter egg with no real connection to the story, it’s a cinematography/plot choice that carries meaning. So what is that meaning? Well, the thing about the women on trail at Salem is that they were innocent. This is what that reference says: “Hey, remember that real life event where women who weren’t witches were horrifically killed because others thought they were evil? None were actually burned, but culturally we tend to think they were. So that’s the image in our collective mind: innocent women on fire.” Except... Salem is actually a witch. Salem is evil. Salem is guilty. Or at least, the questions surrounding the extent of her guilt  — How much responsibility does she hold in comparison to the Gods? How much agency does she still have after the grimm pool?  — has not been acknowledged by the text. Yang just yelled at Salem for killing her mom and Oscar is about to blow her up. This is not a “Question Salem’s humanity” scene, it’s a “Kill the witch” scene... yet it uses an allusion that is contrary to what the moment is trying to achieve. So what are we supposed to take away from this? Do we adhere to the subtext and believe that Salem is innocent somehow, ignoring what the actual text says, or do we uphold the text and in doing so undermine the reliability of every other allusion in the show? If we can’t trust Salem’s, why would we trust, say, Penny’s? 

RWBY’s allusions are all over the place and yes, I think that lack of consideration extends to who they randomly decided to genderbend. There’s no acknowledgment of  — let alone engagement with  — how many of these characters and historical figures were trying to pass themselves off as another gender, nor does RWBY acknowledge how the need to do so feeds into our current and historic assumptions about gender as a whole. Why does the man dress as a woman? To keep himself safe and seen as a non-threat. Why does the woman dress as a man? To gain access to places previously barred from her and to gain the respect she otherwise wouldn’t be afforded. And, of course, in 2021 there’s the expectation that media will include trans characters, GNC characters, non-binary characters, cis characters uninterested in practicing traditional femininity/masculinity, etc. None of which RWBY tackles outside of May, a woman who references a systematic transphobia we otherwise never see in the show. May, as a minor character, is great and I am in all honesty thrilled that she exists in the RWBY canon. However, the rest of the show is built on an anime conception of gender  — combat skirts and bare midriffs in the snow  — while nevertheless engaging with the very complicated question of how you re-imagine canonically/historically gendered people. As a “girl power” show, RWBY has opened itself up to questions like, “Okay, it’s great that you made these four fairy tale girls kickass, but can we talk about making Joan of Arc into a bumbling guy whose presence as a blonde, blue-eyed, sword-wielding man taking up lots of important screen time has generated accusations about this being a male-centered show?” It’s not a “RWBY is horrible for doing this!” issue, but a “RWBY is deliberately playing with gender and marketing itself as a progressive show, so... let’s figure out what these individual choices are actually implying and whether or not we consider that progressive.” 

[dangermousie]

Heelo mousie! Love your blog! Do you mind recommending some of your favourite Chinese BL novels or shows?

I've seen the untamed and read it. I'm currently reading heaven's official blessing and I saw the donghua. Anything other than these two?

Awww, thank you!

Novels: I am gonna be lazy and literally copy/paste the entire danmei section of my top 10 web novels post (except MXTX’s stuff since you are already reading it.) Let me know if you need help finding any of these.

Lord Seventh - I am only partway through this so far, but it’s already on the list because it’s smart and somehow intense AND laid-back (not sure how this works, but it does) and is honestly just a really really solid and smart period novel, with the OTP a cherry on top of a narrative sundae. Plus, I love the concept of MC deciding he is not going for his supposedly fated love - he’s tried for six lifetimes, always with disaster, and he’s just plain done and tired. When he opens his life in his seventh reincarnation and sees the person he would have given up the world for, he genuinely feels nothing at all. (Spoiler - his OTP is actually a barbarian shaman this time around, thank you Lord!)

Golden Stage - my perfect comfort novel. Probably the least angsty of any danmei novel on this list (which still means plenty angsty :P) It also has a dedicated, smart OTP that is an OTP for the bulk of the book - I think you will notice that in most of the novels in this list, I go for “OTP against the world” trope - I can’t stand love triangles and the same. Anyway, Fu Shen, is a famous general whose fame is making the emperor   antsy. When he gets injured and can’t walk any more, the emperor gladly recalls him and marries him off to his most faithful court lackey, the head of sort of secret police, Yan Xiaohan. The emperor intends it both  as a check on the general and a general spite move since the two men   always clash in court whenever they meet. But not all is at is seems. They used to be  friends a long time ago, had a falling out, and one of the loveliest  parts of the novel is them finding their way to each other, but there is  also finding the middle path between their two very different  philosophies and ways of being, not to mention solving a conspiracy or  dozen, and putting a new dynasty on the throne, among other things. It always makes me think, a little, of “if Mei Changsu x Jingyan were canon.”

Sha Po Lang - if you like a lot of fantasy politics and world-building and steampunk with your novels, this one is for you. This one is VERY plot-heavy with smart, dedicated characters and a deconstruction of many traditional virtues - our protagonist Chang Geng, a long-lost son of the Emperor, is someone who wants to modernize the country but also take down the current emperor his brother for progress’ sake and the person he’s in love with is the general who saved him when he was a kid who is nominally his foster father. Anyway, the romance is mainly a garnish in this one, not even a big side dish, but the relationship between two smart, dedicated, deadly individuals with very different concepts of duty is fascinating long before it turns romantic. And if you like angst, while overall it’s not as angsty as e.g., Meatbun stuff, Chang Geng’s childhood is the stuff of nightmares and probably freaks me out more than anything else in any novel on this list, 2ha included.

To Rule In a Turbulent World (LSWW) - gay Minglan. No seriously. This is how I think of it. it’s a slice of life period novel with fascinating characters and  setting that happens to have a gay OTP, not a romance in a period  setting per se and I always prefer stories where the romance is not the only thing that is going on. It’s meticulously written and smart and deals with  character development and somehow makes daily minutia fascinating. Our   protagonist, You Miao, is the son of a fabulously wealthy merchant,   sent to the capital to make connections and study. As the story starts, he sees his friend’s  servants beating someone to death, feels bad, and buys him because, as  we discover gradually and organically, You Miao may be wealthy and  occasionally immature but he is a genuinely good person. The person he buys is a barbarian from beyond the wall, named   Li Zhifeng. It’s touch and go if the man will survive but eventually he does and You Miao, who by then has to return home, gives him his papers  and lets him go. However, LZF decides to stick with You Miao instead, both  out of sense of debt for YM saving his life and because he genuinely  likes him (and yet, there is no instalove on either of their parts, their bodies have fun a lot quicker than their souls.) Anyway, the two  take up farming, get involved in  the imperial exams and it’s the life of prosperity and peace, until an invasion happens and things go rapidly to hell. This is so nuanced, so smart (smart people in this actually ARE!) and has secondary characters who are just as complex as the mains (for example, I ended up adoring YM’s friend, the one who starts the plot by almost beating LZF to death for no reason) because the novel never forgets that few people are all villain. There is a lovely character arc or two - watching YM grow up and LZF thaw - there is the fact that You Miao is a unicorn in web novels being laid back and calm. This whole thing is a masterpiece.

Stains of Filth (Yuwu) - want the emotional hit of 2ha but want to read something half its length? Well, the author of 2ha is here to eviscerate you in a shorter amount of time. This has the beautiful world-building, plot twists that all make sense and, at the center of it all, an intense and all-consuming and gloriously painful relationship between two generals - one aristocratic loner Mo Xi, and the other gregarious former slave general Gu Mang. Once they were best friends and lovers, but when the novel starts, Gu Mang has long turned traitor and went to serve the enemy kingdom and has now been returned and Mo Xi, who now commands the remnants of his slave army, has to cope with the fact that he has never been able to get over the man who stabbed him through the heart. Literally. This novel has a gorgeously looping structure, with flashbacks interwoven into present storyline. There is so much love and longing and sacrifice in this that I am tearing up a bit just thinking of it. If you don’t love Mo Xi and Gu Mang, separately and together, by the end of it, you have no soul.

The Dumb Husky and His White Cat Shizun (2ha/erha) - if you’ve been following my tumblr for more than a hot second, you know my obsession with this novel. Honestly, even if I were to make a list of my top 10 novels of any kind, not just webnovels, this would be on the list. It has everything I want - a complicated, intricate plot with an insane amount of plot twists, all of which are both unexpected and make total sense, a rich and large cast of characters, a truly epic OTP that makes me bawl, emotional intensity that sometimes maxes even me out and so much character nuance and growth. Also, Moran is my favorite web novel character ever, hands down.

Anyway, the plot (or at least the way it first appears) is that the evil emperor of the cultivation world, Taxian Jun, kills himself at 32 and wakes up in the body of his 16 year old self, birth name Moran. Excited to get a redo, Moran wants to save his supposed true love Shimei, whose death the last go-around pushed him towards evil. He also wants to avoid entanglement with Chu Wanning, his shizun and sworn enemy in past life. And that’s all you are best off knowing, trust me. The only hint I am going to give is oooh boy the mother of all unreliable narrators has arrived!

The novel starts light and funny on boil the frog principle - if someone told me I would be full bawling multiple times with this novel, I’d have thought they were insane, but i swear my eyes hurt by the end of it. I started out being amused and/or disliking the mains and by the end I would die for either of them.

The Wife is First - OK, this one did not make my top 10 web novels but it’s a sweet, fun gay cottagecore fest. Our ML, a royal prince, and his spouse, a smart if delicate aristocrat, keep house, eat noodles, play with their pet tiger, make out and spoil each other rotten, while occasionally fighting battles and outwitting their court enemies. It’s so very mellow. That couple redefines low drama - they are both nice and functional and use their brains. It’s as if a nice jock and a nice nerd got together and then proceeded to be wholesome all over the place.

I mean, the set up could be dramatic - our ML the prince, lost his fight for the throne and is about to be killed. The only person who stayed loyal to him is his arranged husband the aristocrat guy who ML never treated nicely since he resented marrying him (marrying a man in that world is done to remove someone from the ability to inherit the throne.) And yet the husband stood by him not out of love but beliefs in loyalty blah blah. Anyway, he transmigrates back into the past right after their wedding night and is all “I got a second chance OMG! I don’t want the throne what is even the point? I want to live a good long life and treat the only person who stood by me really well!” And he proceeds to do so to the shock of the aristocrat who had a very unpleasant wedding night and generally can tell the man he just married would rather eat nails than be married to him. But soon enough (no seriously, it’s not many chapters at all) he believes the prince is sincere blah blah and then  they get together and they pretty much become cottagecore goals.

In terms of dramas, I only do period dramas (or novels) so I am not the person to be able to recommend any modern BLs. There is a flood of upcoming (hopefully) period BL dramas but it’s relatively thin on the ground now. The two I will recommend is Word of Honor (which is AMAZING) and Winter Begonia (which I just started watching but which owns me already.) I have a tag for both - the one for the former is huge and I cannot recommend either strongly enough. I’ve heard good things about The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty, but I am not big on mysteries so haven’t watched it for myself.

In terms of the upcoming BLs, the ones I am most looking forward to are Immortality and Winner Is King, but The Society of the Four Leaves also looks promising.

[bosspigeon]

Adam versus that most evil of foes...the office printer?

two glass houses, twenty stones

Pairing: M!Detective/Adam du Mortain Word Count: 1711 Summary: Having recently learned that he is the target of a power-hungry vampire who wants to experiment on him because of his “special blood” (oh, yeah, and vampires are real, apparently), Detective Arlo Priestley deals with the aftermath. The aftermath, of course, including one Adam du Mortain and his sparkling personality.

So... I don’t even know what to say anymore. I get completely innocuous prompts and they become something COMPLETELY different than what i had in mind. so, uh, hope you enjoy an Arlo Character Study with a side of Printer Shenanigans! This takes place in Book 1, shortly after the detective finds out about, uh, everything. I had fun playing the unreliable narrator with Arlo! And I have a fun idea for a sequel that’s Adam’s POV! Title is from Type O Negative’s “I Don’t Wanna Be Me.”

“You can, uh, sit down if you’d like,” Arlo offers, picking at the chipped polish on his thumb.

Adam hardly glances at him, keeping his attention on the window that overlooks the rest of the police department. “I am fine standing,” he says shortly. It almost seems like he’s determined to not look directly at the detective at all.

Arlo winces a bit, blowing a loose strand of hair out of his face. “Yeah, sure. That’s fine too,” he mumbles, looking down at his pile of reports. He brushes the accumulated black paint chips he’s shed in his anxious fidgeting aside. He’ll have to paint his nails again soon, they’re looking rather ragged, almost to the point he can bite them again. He’s been trying to stop, he knows it’s sort of gross, but still…

He furrows his brow and starts thumbing through reports, absently flicking through his color-coded tabs that help keep him marginally organized even when his “system” doesn’t really work for anyone but him. He calls it improvisational. Verda calls it “slapdash.”

 He frowns, chewing on his lower lip and clicking his tongue when he notes his color system is out of order, and that one of the red tabs is missing. His eyes flicker up when he hears Adam shift slightly, but the vampire still isn’t looking at him, so he focuses back in, counting through reports again. He sighs and rolls his eyes, turning to his computer and pulling up his group chat with Tina and Verda.

big-depeche-mood: Tina, did you take my copy of Mrs. Holt’s police report?

big-depeche-mood:  And why did you change my display name again?

BubblegumB!tch: how do u know i did it? why do u always blame me? 😥

big-depeche-mood: Because Verda has no reason to care about Mrs. Holt claiming her ex kidnapped the dog when they separated.

big-depeche-mood: And if you mean the display name, you’re the only one with admin privilege, because you made this chat.

BubblegumB!tch: i am being unfairly targeted 😭😭😭

BubblegumB!tch: im taking this to HR

DoctorDILF: HR has found no evidence to support this claim.

DoctorDILF: Really, Tina?

big-depeche-mood: Just tell me if I need to print another copy, please.

BubblegumB!tch: 👉👈

Arlo rolls his eyes and minimizes the window so he can start the task of going through his backlog to find the digital copy of the original report. Once he’s found it and sent it to the printer, he pushes himself upright, groaning as his spine pops in several places

Adam finally, finally turns to look at him. “Where are you going?” he snaps.

Arlo flinches, clenching his jaw to bite back the nasty retort burning on his tongue like acid. “To the printer,” he grits out, jerking his hand towards the window. “Literally twenty feet away. So unless you plan to go get that report for me, let’s just hope the megalomaniacal vampire that wants to use me as a lab rat doesn’t decide to snatch me from a police station in broad daylight.”

Seems he didn’t bite it back hard enough after all.

Adam recoils, like he always seems to when he realizes he's stepped directly on Arlo's nerves. He feels a little guilty for snapping, but he’s had more than enough of being treated like an unruly toddler. He wants to snidely suggest Adam see about requisitioning a bloody leash for him, but he snatches up a pen and starts furiously clicking it until he can calm himself down instead. Adam’s lip twitches, and Arlo clicks faster.

Adam turns sharply on heel and stalks out the door, slamming it behind him so hard the window rattles. Arlo is just grateful it hasn’t broken.

He sinks back into his chair and rolls his eyes skyward, dragging his hands down his face and wondering what the hell he’s done to deserve this whole situation. It’s bad enough he knows there’s some mad scientist vampire wanting to experiment with his freakish blood, but being shut in the same room as Adam for multiple hours a day when the man won’t even look at him, much less talk to him, makes nerves squirm under his skin and sets his whole body on edge. Unfortunately for the both of them, when Arlo gets nervy, it gets much harder for him to temper what comes out of his mouth.

He melts into his chair a little more, ignoring the pings from his computer that are probably Verda trying to convince Tina to change his display name back, and Tina reacting by changing it to increasingly ridiculous things. He just closes his eyes and focuses on breathing for a bit, trying to remember a single thing from his anger management classes from years ago when his brain is still buzzing with a squirming twist of irritation and guilt, a desperate need to apologize warring with the urge to snap and unload every frustration this whole thing has got knotted up inside him.

It's some sort of cosmic joke that Adam occupies so much of his attention, when Adam seems like he can't wait until he can get as far away from Arlo as possible.

He's just pretty, Arlo tells himself. Remember the last time you let someone pretty get you all stupid? Maybe remember what you learned from that.

He almost falls out of his chair when he opens his eyes to see Adam in the doorway, his shoulders so taut they're making Arlo's hurt just looking at them.

Maybe stop looking at them, idiot.

He forces his eyes up and is confronted with perhaps one of the most bewildering things he's ever seen.

Adam du Mortain, stoic, no-nonsense, terminally brooding Adam du Mortain, is standing just outside Arlo’s office, looking almost... sheepish. Arlo has to blink a few times to make sure he’s not seeing things. He’d almost say he’s imagining things, but at this point he’s so familiar with Adam’s general stone-faced demeanor that any sort of change to it is almost glaringly obvious. The scrunch of his eyebrows, the twist of his mouth, the almost painful stiffness of his posture, as if he’s pointedly trying to look as unaffected as possible and failing spectacularly. Arlo’s a detective, and while he doesn’t consider himself an expert at reading people, he’s still fairly decent at it. Adam, from time to time, can be pretty easy to read, but especially when he’s trying not to be.

Maybe Arlo’s been watching him a bit too closely.

“Uh,” he starts, already cringing internally at himself, “what’s up?”

Adam is silent for a moment, and then he exhales sharply through his nose, as if he is trying to calm himself down. Arlo’s nerves immediately ratchet up a few notches. “There is an issue with your printer,” he says.

Arlo blinks. “Oh. Um, I didn’t think you’d actually—” He bites his tongue when Adam’s brows furrow harder. “Let’s go have a look, shall we?” he offers instead, standing up. He hesitates to approach the door until Adam takes a step back to allow him through unimpeded. He lets Arlo lead the way and Arlo tugs his braid over his shoulder so he can twist it between his hands, because there is something a bit unnerving about Adam behind him, silent but radiating a tension Arlo can almost feel. It’s likely his imagination, considering his annoying awareness of the man, but still.

Arlo sees the problem almost immediately upon arriving at the little alcove that houses the station’s printer. The top cover for the document feeder seems to have been pulled off entirely. He turns to give Adam a bewildered look.

“The paper jammed,” Adam says stiffly.

“Yeah,” Arlo replies, “it does that sometimes.” He lifts the cover and turns it over in his hands, to see that, yes, the little plastic hinges that attach the feeder to the tray are entirely broken off. He frowns a little. Adam is so tense next to him, so still, Arlo wonders if he’s even breathing. “I can just ask Verda if I can send it to his, then see about calling someone for repairs.” He snags a sharpie from Tina’s desk and pops open one of the other trays to pull out a blank sheet of paper so he can write a quick “Out of Order” sign and slap it on top.

Adam still hasn’t moved, staring at the printer as if it has somehow personally offended him.

“It’s fine, Adam,” Arlo insists quietly, stepping a bit closer with his hands raised, though he doesn’t dare to touch. “Really. It’s a shitty old printer. I bet the second I let Tina know, she’ll go pester Doug until he calls his dad about it. We’ll have a shiny new one in no time.” He offers a wry little smile. “Say what you like about nepotism, but it has its perks.”

That doesn’t seem to help in the way Arlo hoped it would, because Adam raises an eyebrow and gives him a sharp look that has him shrinking back. “I am surprised you have that attitude, Detective.” He doesn’t have to say he’s disappointed, Arlo can hear it loud and clear and hates that it bothers him so much.

He steps back and turns away so Adam doesn’t see the look on his face before he can smooth it over. “Well, it’s the reason I’m here, isn’t it?” he can’t help but snark. “And it’s the only reason you’re here too. Explains a lot about your attitude, I suppose.” No wonder Adam’s been so bloody sour about all this. Must be a pain to have to babysit your boss’s kid because she said so. His silence on the subject speaks more than he could hope to.

More than anything Arlo wishes Rebecca could just go back to ignoring him. Things were a lot less complicated then.

Shoulders tight enough to rival Adam’s, Arlo heads towards the stairs to the basement. “I’m going to get that report,” he tosses over his shoulder, trying and failing to sound casual as Adam’s eerily quiet footsteps begin to follow him. “I’ll try not to get kidnapped on the way,” he adds under his breath.

The way Adam’s footsteps falter tell him he wasn’t quiet enough.

[codevassie]

Superpower TS Fic Recs

[***Let me know if I’ve missed anything on the Content Warnings!]

[**Do Not Ask Authors for Updates!]

[*Leave these authors Comments, please and thank you!]

What You Can Stand by manyfandomsonelog

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary:  Virgil tried so, so hard to avoid becoming a supervillain. He really did. But when your superpower is literally manifesting a person's worst fears, it's a hard thing to avoid. Still, he really, really tried. Even when his own parents feared him. Even when the whole school feared him. Even when he hated himself and his Propensity so much that he wanted to give in. He might've succeeded, if he hadn't met him- Roman Reyes, AKA Roman Spectacular, AKA The Prince, AKA the worst thing that has ever happened to him (which is saying something).

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality 

CW: Psychological stuff, nightmares, bullying, physical harm, spiders, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, brief discussion of racism, self-hatred,  bomb, explosion, blood, injury, bad/abusive parenting, imprisonment, fire,  homophobia, pedophilia mention, discussion of child abuse, evidence of physical abuse, sexual innuendo, anxious thoughts, death, funeral, flashback, reference to sex, fairly aggressive arguing and yelling, public speaking, secondhand embarrassment

My thoughts: My quarantine savior!!! I started the fic like a week into quarantine, so I really mean that literally. The characterization is absolutely fantastic--I love seeing all of them interact. It’s so natural and fun and interesting. The plot is also just wonderful--one thing keeps happening after another and these guys just cannot seem to get a break. The pacing is awesome, and whether it’s a character or plot chapter, you just can’t look away. Log is such a fantastic writer and a wonderful person, so if you like awesome prinxiety, superpowers and secret identities, trust and betrayal, humor and angst, you really need to read this one! 

Rewind by ravenclawicecream 

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: When a group of superheroes show up to kill him, it's just another Wednesday for Virgil Messana. After five years of being on the run, he's used to the idea people want him dead. That fact is just an unfortunate side effect of having the power to destroy everything you touch. What does surprise him, however, is when he finds himself agreeing to join those superheros and become part of the team. It's not long until Virgil learns that all the heroes have chapters of their lives they'd rather keep unpublished, along with events they'd rather not relive. And, as he spends more time with the team, he realizes that he may know certain members much better than he'd originally thought. Virgil longs for a moment to figure everything out but by then it's too late. He's already caught up in a bigger scheme; one where they no longer have the power to control their own destinies. With every movement monitored and every action proven to be calculated, the lines between allies and enemies blur, leaving Virgil caught in between. When the stakes are inevitably raised, the remaining heroes must do all they can to change the future of the world. But time has always been a cruel master, and sometimes the only answer is to rewind.

Relationships: Loceit, Logicality, Prinxiety, Remile

CW: Major Character Death, Murder

My thoughts: Gosh, I wish this one got more love. It’s probably the MCD tag, so understandable, but also take into consideration the time travel tag and perhaps give it a chance? I feel like this fic is setting up for so much, and I cannot wait to see how it all goes down. I have so many questions for this fic which is always a good sign (so many that I may have freaked the author out with my WALL of questions on chapter three don’t worry about it /j). Please. Read. This. 

Powerless by patentpending 

Status: Complete

Summary: “People like us,” Logan had once remarked to Virgil. “Are statistical anomalies.”(Almost) Everyone in the world has powers. As for those who don’t, well, they’re such a small part of the population - only 0.04% - why would anyone care about them?Ever since he realized what people mean when they call him Powerless, Virgil Sanders has tried to fight back against the system that oppresses people like him, Patton, and Logan. When Patton’s bakery is targeted in a hate crime, he finally snaps. With the help of a mysterious sponsor, Virgil becomes a villain, ready to remake a broken society. The only thing standing in his way is the world’s most Powerful (and infuriatingly charming) superhero: The Prince, who is hiding the fact that his gilded life isn’t as perfect as it may seem.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality, Roman/Female Fanon Character 

CW: Classism, Unreliable Narrator, Thinly Veiled Criticism of Society,  emetophobia, violence, gun mention,  implied suicide attempt, dub-con, mentions of blood, graphic depictions of a riot, non-graphic description of a wound, possessive and abusive behavior, kid being kicked out of the house by parent, kidnapping, kinda torture (?), body horror, gore, graphic descriptions of injuries, emotional abuse, police brutality, pain and injury, burning building, swearing, vomiting, murder, panic attack, dysphoria, misgendering, minor character death, major character death, self deprecating talk, mentions of suicide

My thoughts: Well, doing a TS superhero rec without Powerless is just treason. I don’t know--I’m trying to figure out a way to describe it and instead launching up to pace around the room with an instant replay of different scenes in my head. I mean, the grocery store chapter?!?! This stuff lives in my head rent free. The characterization, the banter, the tension, the motives--I can’t describe it y’all. Just, if you love yourselves (love yourselves, please <3) then just go read it. Or reread it. Do that for yourselves. 

Waterspout by Greenninjagal

Status: Complete

Summary: "Hail!” The boy says all smug smiles that Virgil immediately hates. “You’re Recluse aren’t you?”As if there was some other spider themed weirdo who clung to buildings in their free time.“No,” Virgil says, because he can. *** Virgil finds himself stuck on the side of a building in a rainstorm and is helped by an annoying-admittedly attractive-guy.

Relationships: Prinxiety

CW: Mild cursing, storms

My thoughts: This one is very cute. Virgil is a spiderman-like hero who went up a waterspout, and down comes some rain trying to wash him out. Roman comes to help, they banter a bit, and, maybe, there’s a little surprise at the end. I would not mind more of this AU. In fact, I would love it. But that should not discount how wonderfully made a oneshot it is either. The author wrote it perfectly for the length it is, presenting the charm of the characters, great plot and symbolism, and left me wanting more at the same time. Definitely go check this one out. 

Technically. It’s A Secret by supervillain 

Status: Incomplete, Work In Progress

Summary: Virgil Storm, the adopted son of a reality TV star with telekinesis was born without a power. That's been a problem for him all his life. His only friend is Patton Vega, his only chance at romance the irritating Cros Corson--until he gets a job at a top-secret facility, playing babysitter to a bunch of kids with dangerous powers and even more dangerous minds. Kids who happen to be exactly his age.Yeah, this is going to be a piece of cake, especially when the enigmatic villain Believe (aka Roman Torres) takes a liking to Virgil. And even worse, when Virgil starts to more than like him back. Pull in some evil mad scientists, a plague created to decimate the world, a murderous villain, an obnoxious stalker, and the greatest Kinetic the world has ever known, and you're in for a hell of a ride.

Relationships: Prinxiety, Logicality 

CW:  Anxiety attacks, arson, murder, minor character death, blood, spiders, being eaten alive, falling, death, sleeping, fighting, cop mention 

My thoughts: I’m behind on this one, and I wanted to catch up on it before I posted this rec list. Today is the last Friday of the year though, so I decided to just go ahead and do it. I love this fic a ton so far, and I can’t wait to read more. I can tell the author put a lot of thought into writing the world and characters, and that the plot is interesting and deliberate. There’s mysteries unfolding which intrigues me So Bad. It’s a super interesting one, so I’d say go read it!

[fischerfrey]

HPHM APRIL PROMPTS 2021 - DAY 2

Prompt # 2 - We all know that MC is the hero of Hogwarts. But what if they weren't? What if MC was evil? Illustrate or write a paragraph about your MC, except they're evil.

I missed the first day but I’m here to offer you a very, very heavily canon-divergent au in which Verna has lost just a little bit of too much. These prompts are the courtesy of the awesome @stupendousbookworm

HPHM fic: One May Smile, and Smile, and Be a Villain

Summary: Verna has lost her friends, her brother, and her touch on reality.

Characters: MC, Merula Snyde, Wormtail, several random Ministry workers.

Pairing: OC/Merula Snyde

Warnings: Murder, violence, blood, arguing, unreliable narrator.

1994:

"We're done here," said the tall, dark-haired woman and stepped over a shape lying on the ground. The man with her flinched out of her way, as if the mere air around her was painful to stand in. The woman scoffed. "Pathetic, Wormtail. Clean up this mess," she said and with a loud pop, disapparated.

The man called Wormtail was left behind in a vast room, but he was not alone. Three shapes were laid out on the floor. Two of them unmoving. One was trying to reach out a hand, plead for help. Wormtail didn’t have a wand so he stepped closer and loomed over the man. "Please, please don't-" the man began, but speaking was clearly painful after what the Lady did to him. Wormtail wrapped his hands around the man's throat and squeezed.

After the deed was done, he set the place on fire. It was an old mansion, belonging to an esteemed wizarding family, with a long history of holding important Ministry offices. Wormtail watched as the flames engulfed the house and hoped that the Lady would be pleased. ~ The dark-haired woman apparated into a beautiful room, decorated with paintings and flowers, and Victorian furniture.

She set down her cloak on the back of an armchair and called: "Merula? I'm home!"

Not a hint of the previous malice was detectable in her voice. She smiled, as another woman entered the room, shorter, and somehow timid-looking next to the first woman. Her hair had outgrown its intended shape and her eyes looked tired. "Rough day at work?" Merula asked. The first woman nodded, and her smile didn’t falter even for a fraction of a second. "A lot of cases, I don't know what's gotten all these dark wizards on the move..." "Come here," said Merula and the woman walked into her open arms, embracing her. Later, when they were lying in their bed, Merula wanted to ask about the blood splatter on her lover's shirt sleeve. Or the way she cringed away when Merula touched her right shoulder. But she'd always been a coward so she said nothing. ~ The Ministry was trying to hide the murders. It didn’t matter. She didn’t care about causing hysteria. She only cared about revenge. Everyone she loved was gone. Everyone but Merula. And she’d do anything to keep her safe. Anything. Up to and including working with that wretch Wormtail. She had found him wondering Knockturn Alley, delirious and lost. At first she had felt sorry for him. Now she didn’t feel anything. Every kill became easier than the last. Initially, the killing curse hadn't obeyed her and so she had had to resort to more creative methods. But the longer she hunted for the people on her list, the easier it became. Still, she preferred to switch it up sometimes. She liked to see them realize that death was coming. They deserved to realize it. Avada Kedavra was too easy. Too painless. These people were the reason her friends were dead. These people were the reason Jacob would never get out of Azkaban. These people were the reason Merula was being hunted every single day of her life. They deserved to suffer. ~ The woman was terrified. Her wand gone, she was trembling but refused to stand down. "You killed all the others?" she asked, tears welling in her eyes. The woman with the dark hair stepped closer and pulled her hood down. "You're.. you're Verna Malinda? No- no there must be some mistake-" "You put my brother to Azkaban for killing Rakepick." Verna said, voice steady, cold even. She was holding her wand loosely in her hand, as if this was all just a bit of fun. "I was just doing my job!" the woman sobbed. "Yes, well... that's too bad." "Please, please don't do this! I can help you! I can help you get him out!" "No, you can't." "Yes I can! I can, I swear-" "You can't because you'll be too dead to do anything." Verna sliced her wand through the air in a swift, brutal motion. Seconds later, the Ministry official was lying on the ground, her throat slit. "Disgusting," Verna muttered and turned to leave but instead of an empty alleyway, she saw someone standing there, at the entrance to the alley. "Who's there?" she asked, pointing her wand towards the figure. It moved from the shadows, inching towards her. It was Merula. She looked shocked. But also furious. "What the fuck have you done? What was she talking about?? Who have you killed?" she demanded, face twisted in an expression of betrayal. "I..." "Don't fucking lie to me." Verna sighed. She didn’t have time for lies.

"I killed everyone who covered up the murders of our friends. And everyone who put Jacob to Azkaban." "You're insane." "You're telling me?" Verna asked, not moved by Merula's anger. "You tried to kill me multiple times at school, I don't think you have the moral highground here." "Fuck you! I changed! I worked to be a better person and I did all of it for you!" Verna shifted her weight around and crossed her arms. This was becoming complicated. "Merula, let's talk about this back home," she suggested. The dead woman's blood was beginning to seep through her boots. "What's your grand plan, huh? What's your endgame?" "I'm going to kill Dumbledore,” Verna said, simply. Merula stared at her in disbelief. "What? You'll get yourself killed!" "Maybe. But I can rage against the Ministry all I want, nothing’s going to change as long as that man keeps putting children at risk." "Fuck! You gotta be kidding me!" Merula cried out, frustrated, disbelieving, furious. She ran a hand through her hair and she looked beautiful. Beautiful but tired. Verna raised her wand and stupefied her. She didn’t have time for this, she had a plan to follow.

[hypexion]

The Doctor’s Wife is a bit of a weird episode. I feel like you could construct a decent argument against it, but I liked it so instead I will do the opposite.

The basic premise of The Doctor’s Wife is that it takes the TARDIS, the “get to the plot“ machine, and gives them an actual character. In the form of a pretty lady, because the TARDIS must be a pretty lady. This all takes place in the whimsically dark setting of House, a living planetoid that eats TARDISes. It’s a fairly streamlined episode, but with scenes for all the characters.

So let’s cut right to the chase - the characterisation of the TARDIS. How do you portray one of the oldest entities in Doctor Who when it has never been done before? Neil Gaiman decided to solve this by given the TARDIS the primary character trait of omniscience. The TARDIS knows everything that’s going to happen, before it happens. But being compressed down into a human body means she can’t actually communicate it very well. This leads to an interesting progression over the episode. The TARDIS starts as completely eccentric, but later rounds out to be a mix of curious, adventurous and just a little stern towards the Doctor and his gimmicks. The TARDIS also has a different perspective on their relationship - insisting that she stole him just as much as he stole her. Also, the TARDIS’s much maligned “unreliability“ is revealed to be a sham, with the TARDIS sending the Doctor not where he wants to go, but where he needs to go. Truly, a partnership written across time and space.

The Doctor, meanwhile, gets put through the wringer in this episode. Not only has his time machine suddenly gained a voice and opinions, the chance of another Time Lord surviving is dangled in front of him before being snatched away. He comes in search for survivors and perhaps forgiveness, and leaves alone. Or at least, he almost does. In the end, he will always have the TARDIS, ready to take him where ever he needs to go.

The Doctor’s Wife also brings us House, the deeply evil villain of this episode. Having spend millenia devouring TARDISes and using their pilots as spare parts for his playthings, House finds himself out of options when the Doctor annouces that he is the last Time Lord. So he hopes in the TARDIS to go find more snacks. House is so blatently sadistic that Rory is easily able to convince House not to kill by saying how great torture is. This leads to a deeply dark sequence of scenes as Amy is picked out for torment, based around Rory being trapped in the corridors of the TARDIS for the rest of his life. Rory himself, meanwhile, seems to be mostly unfazed, presumably due to his big Roman memorys.

There’s also Auntie and Uncle, who are less characters and more weirdos for the Doctor to shout at because Matt Smith acting at a rock would be pretty weird even for Doctor Who. They do help carry the twisted nature of this episode, being patchwork people Frankenstein’d together for House’s amusement, but beyond that they don’t really do much.

Overall, The Doctor’s Wife manages to take a premise that’s pretty dubious on it’s face, and execute it in a way that comes off well. While the core of the episode is very much “the TARDIS is a person“, there’s a very unique style going on, that blends horror and fantastic elements that works surprisingly well. This is a concept you really only get one shot at, and The Doctor’s Wife manages to hit the mark pretty well.

[disownedbytiime]

I’ll write my opinions in the order the novels came out (even though I read them the other way around). It’s a mess and honestly I’m forgetting a lot of things I want to say.

SV/SSS:

It’s the shortest of the three stories, yet it doesn’t feel like you’re robbed of stuff. Mostly everything gets resolved. The plot is interesting and the characters are two dimensional (as opposed to the original novel). One of the complaints about the original novel written by Airplane [...] is that the villains are dumb and don’t have depth, they just are evil. But thanks to plot filling, you’re able to see that they in fact are all complicated and you can’t even manage to hate the original scum villain or protagonist.

The extras are my favorite of the three novels. Since the novel by itself doesn’t focus on other characters too much, they get some character development in them. It would have been nice if they were included in the main story, but I can see why they aren’t. The story would deviate and then with so many extra plots you’d get lost, so I think they work great as extras.

Romance wise is okay. You’ll see Luo Bing//He’s feelings since almost the beginning but as for Shen Qing//Qiu.... it’s not too obvious. I mean you can definitely see when he starts worrying about him and when he accepts the other’s love, but because he is a tsundere it can be a bit hard to believe he’s actually in love with him (a lot of times it looks more like he just loves him as a disciple.) So while the romance is there since early on, it’s not too overbearing and you can definitely overlook it on one side. Also let’s not talk about how it can definitely be problematic (master-disciple, a forceful top with anger issues, etc), but overall I do like the ship. Also this is the only novel that has a second canon ship, isn’t it? That’s nice.

MD/ZS:

The plot captivated me immediately when I read the synopsis, yet I felt it didn’t live up to its name. I felt like it was too much of a simplistic plot, and it’s so early when you find out who’s the boss and the reasons, I kept thinking it was too easy and there was going to be a twist. And.... it was definitely too easy, there’s not even a final confrontation or anything. And sure, there is a twist that I loved so much, but it was only in passing. It was like just explained as; ‘oh wait, isn’t this what happened?’ So it left me a bit disappointed. Also.... it had a lot of flashbacks, like half of the story were flashbacks and the other half was in the present. It could be fine, but it just happened whenever and sometimes there were even flashbacks in the flashbacks so I think it was a bit messy.

What I did love a lot about it is the main topic of “not everything is white and black” because if you think about it there was no character that solely did evil things, they all had reasons (not to say they were justified of course). The side characters were more developed than in the previous novel too. Also ngl the SiZhui story plot is what basically made the story for me.

The extras were okay, but they feel like all of them are just about the main couple having sex, which I guess it’s okay for some people but they disappointed me slightly.

Romance wise, I think this is the one with the least romance. The three novels are told by the ‘bottoms’ and the three of them are quite oblivious at first, yet you can infer the ‘tops’ are super dedicated to them. But because of Lan Wang//Ji personality you barely see he’s in love with him until it’s basically spelt out. I guess this is more the fault of an unreliable narrator, but in this case I felt the romance was barely there. In the other two stories the romance is basically part of the main plot, yet here is more on the side, more like a support (which is nothing bad! It’s nice that it wasn’t thrown in your face all the time), so that’s the reason why I felt like the sex scenes were kinda needed here, to make up for the lacking romance.

TG/CF:

In general this is my favorite novel for many reasons. At first it seems like it doesn’t have a plot in concrete and it’s just Xie L/ian going around resolving cases, so I can see why people say it’s just “filler”, but in my case that’s one of the reasons why I love it. It starts slow but little by little the world unravels, you’re able to see how heaven and the ghost realm works, how heavenly officials can be corrupt too and how ghosts can do good deeds. Same as in the other two, not everything is black and white. Since it’s a long novel you’re able to learn a lot about side characters and see their reasonings and everything. Honestly there’s no character I don’t like, they’re all complex. (The other two novels have certain characters that are a bit hard to like). Also while it’s long and has many side plots it never feels like a drag, yet you can definitely get a bit lost with so many things going out. The reason why it doesn’t feel like an arc starts and then ends and another starts is because not everything gets resolved right away, and while that helps the story to keep cohesion sometimes you end up forgetting what was the issue in the first place or overlook certain things. This book has a lot of flashbacks too but in this case I thought they were better presented. I remember that when I was in book 2 I realized the whole book was going to be flashbacks and I felt a bit disappointed and tried to read faster so I could go back to the present, but by the end of the book I didn’t even care about that, I was too immersed in the story that it didn’t feel like a whole book had passed. (Plus both book 2 and 4 are actually short). Out of the three novels I cried the most with this one, yet the three are tragic enough.

The relationship between the characters (barring the main couple bc that comes later) is also really nice and complex. Honestly all these characters are so well developed.

The extras are good too, but it’s a shame there are so little, however I understand. Since the story is already long and basically includes the backstories of many characters there’s not much that could be added, and it was cute to see the main couple being a couple. However wouldn’t it have been nice to have a side story about SQX and his current fate?? Let me dream

Romance wise, oh boy. One of the first things I read about this novel was that people kept saying that ‘Hua//Lian invented love’ and it’s definitely not an overreaction. The romance is amazing. It’s there since they met and I’m sure there’s no scene where Hua Ch//eng is not flirting with Xie L//ian. Of course because it’s from XL’s pov it’s not super obvious, but then you realize that everybody else sees it like this. In any case, the whole novel is oozing with flirting and cute scenes but it’s not overbearing. This is the only novel to not include sex scenes and, while I would have welcomed them, the story definitely doesn’t need them. It’s so obvious the main characters are in love even before their first kiss. (Though okay, XL realizes he likes HC while they’re making out.) anyway!!! While I read a lot of romance and I love shipping, I’m super picky with it too. I hate romance when it comes out of nothing and it’s thrown in your face and when it’s super forced, but here??? Not at all. Here I love it so so so much. HC’s devotion really makes this story.

In conclusion, I loved the three novels for different reasons though I do have favorites. I recommend them 100%. Watching/reading the other adaptations is nice too, but the novels are superior.

[inknose]

mdzs read diary part IV, the end

It’s inspiring how much self care wwx is gonna finally get now that his husband will go along with whatever he does, so he’s gotta look out for lwj’s well being if not his own. that is emphatically the STUFF

dragging my hands down I face as I read this, after all these chapters of getting up close and personal with ghouls bleeding from every orifice, slaying ancient beasts, rebelling against the entire cultivation world, the two of them are absolutely paralyzed by middle school crush sleepover math

chicken

he actually drew kissy doodles .... he....

IDK I THINK I JUST DOCUMENTED THIS PART CUZ I WAS STILL SCREAMING you cant expect me to have very useful things to say at this point

this is torture you are both so mushy you are so GONE

This part really stood out to me, it’s an attitude I feel like wwx implies with his inner narration a few times but most clearly says here: he’s not one for allowing himself to exaggerate how bad his circumstances are/could be even a little bit - he’s already lived through some extreme low points and found a way to keep going, so he never makes sweeping statements about what he couldn’t live without (Inner JingYi: you’re supposed to say you’d be lost without him here!!!) Instead he seems to accept as a given that being alive doesn’t guarantee him any pleasantness or joy at all, and as a result his feelings toward being in TRUE LOVE are surprisingly pragmatic, but also colored with such gratitude. There are a lot of things in the novel that struck me, like this, as being just a little to the left of familiar tropes/sentiments, and were more touching for it. Whether it be the influence of culture difference as opposed to what I’m used to reading in most western romance stories, or MXTX’s unique outlook, or a combination of both, it was really refreshing and made me pause over it. Not “I can’t imagine living without you” but “I could be living without you, but instead I get to be with you and I think that’s the best thing that could happen.”

ADJFDKFJ THE UST BEING SO STRONG THAT EVEN THE VILLAIN COMMENTS ON IT IN THE MIDDLE OF EXECUTING HIS EVIL PLANS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS THAT WILL NEVER FAIL TO MAKE ME LAUGH MY ASS OFF. hes like god damn! here I thought I had problems

it was at this moment that I realized we were doing this Now... I’m still recovering. What a scene. I am so glad I saw the most incredible fanart soon afterwards, bc the fact that someone has already drawn a perfect comic of this part means I don’t have to

I love you so much, you are so annoying, you are perfect... I like how he’s been experiencing openly requited love for all of ten minutes but he’s already figured out how to weaponize it to piss people off

doing!!! his!!! job!!!!!

ahh... it’s a really good story. JGY is a great character. One of the most interesting differences for me between drama watching vs. novel reading experience is that without an actor to bat his vulnerable doe eyes at you and smile faintly with his cute dimples, the book does not go much out of its way to try to lull the reader into a false sense of security around him or *endear* him to you the way the show does. But just by seeing events through wei wuxian’s POV, its still enough to evoke pity or understanding towards him. The overall impression is a bit more detached though, there’s less emphasis on the spectacle of how he could manipulate everyone closest to him and more of a general feeling of resigned tragedy that everyones the worst on this bitch of an earth.

I CANNOT DEAL WITH YOU FOR EVEN ONE MORE SECOND!!!!

I clearly paused to take note of less and less parts at the end & the extras due to: a) too excited to reach the end b) too spicy to photograph and c) too sleepy cuz I kept reading in the middle of the night. but I absolutely took the time for Bro We Are Teens appreciation corner:

I’d absolutely read 40 more extra chapters of their monster-of-the-week field trip antics.

god... poor Jin Ling now basically has to deal with divorced parents that talk shit about each other to him whenever he is saying with one of them. except they are both his uncles. just a disasterhood of all uncles from start to finish. AUUUGH wei wuxian and jiang cheng have fucked me up completely, I dream of them reconciling but I also REFUSE to believe it would ever be easy. let me know if theres a fanfic that absolutely tortures you for decades before they hug

HAHAHA oh no this man ain’t making it to immortality thats for damn sure. HE’S JUST GONNA TRY AS HARD AS HE CAN HIS WHOLE LIFE NOT TO LOOK AT HIM BUT THEYRE *MARRIED* SDLKFJSF ohhhh it’s too funny, like... the mundane domestic family drama IN the fantastical swords and sorcery setting is what really ratchets up these things from amusing to fucking hilarious I think

aaaa the end... final random thoughts? No not final, I would like to please keep discussing at length and exhaustively, all the time please - CQL has gotta be one of the best TV adaptations I’ve seen. ANY adaptation of anything would be lucky to be so good!! reading the novel has just made me appreciate it even more.

- I don’t think I can do justice to what I find most fascinating about comparing the two versions briefly, to do that I need to get drunk and ramble at my friends for hours but... the condensed version is something like this. Really all the significant differences between the two versions (besides the ones which can be attributed to censorship and therefore aren’t worth discussing) are a side effect of the structure of how the story is told - there’s barely anything changed arbitrarily. Aside from having a cold opening, the drama sticks to a very linear version of the story, and I think for a TV show or film, that’s probably the best way to do it. We see everything, we get shocked and tricked and betrayed and surprised along with the characters, we feel the biggest impact at the climactic scenes having experienced all the build-up. The novel on the other hand is not only much more non-linear in WHEN we learn bits and pieces of information, but that information is also obfuscated under wei wuxian’s multiple layers of Unreliable Narratoritis, which are as follows: 1) difficulty remembering things because of personality/avoiding painful memories/actual memory loss, 2) No Homo Goggles still on, and 3) a wry sense of humor that makes the reader unsure of how much they can trust his attitude toward things, especially near the beginning. The experience of reading is a puzzle the reader has to mentally piece together through all of the above listed camouflage, and the puzzle itself is a three-sided mystery: One - How Bad of a guy was Wei WuXian really, and how exactly did all the bad stuff in his life go down; Two - wangxian epic pride & prejudice gambits; Three - political murder mystery. (I love stories like this btw... though I fully admit I’m glad I watched first this time bc it might have taken me a long time to tackle otherwise.) Because of this, where the drama wants to pull you in and submerge you in all the most potent emotional parts, the novel in direct contrast deliberately side-steps around these things and asks that you hurt yourself by filling in the blanks. In fact the more intense emotions and painful memories involved, whether it be his relationship with jiang yanli, his DEATH, the darkest days of war times etc, the more the novel evasively withholds details. I actually really like both styles of storytelling but each one is obviously way better suited to its medium. ANYWAY.... THATS BASICALLY WHERE MY BRAINS AT WHILE IM READING GAY SWORD WIZARD BOOKS

- The extras are so saturated with domestic married bliss that it’s a good thing I stopped taking pictures because I’d just take a picture of every page. this is too much for me to take... I did jump the gun a few times and read a few fanfics while I was still mid-read of the book (I tried to hold out but alas I am mortal) and at one point after finishing I was like “wow what fic was it in where lwj says something cute and wwx kisses him in public but they’re in the corner of the restaurant so no one really sees... OH NO WAIT that was actually in there.” and ... and that’s the LEAST OF IT... *stares into the distance* theyre married wow

- I ofc couldn’t help but see a few vague blogs beforehand so honestly I was braced for something like, wildly ooc for the sake of porn to happen in the extras... I definitely appreciate how the incense burner porn interludes could be uhhh a lot for many people and not my personal cup of tea in terms of smut however [here follows the words of a poisonous frog who has dwelt her whole life in the rainforests of BL] the concept is also surprisingly SWEET SDFLKJF like wwx sees lan wangji’s darkest mixed-up violent teenage fantasies and he’s just like aww babe you had a crush on me!! just... good for them

- I swear I’m not gonna rehash every cute married thing they do but wei wuxian grading papers in the tub........................rEALLY GOT ME

- I want to Draw - ok thats enough if I keep going I’ll just write “wei wuxian grading papers in the tub” seven more times probably

[sciencelings-ocs]

Gold and Silver

This is an oc fic featuring my ocs Rosalia and Artemis who are sisters, Rose has powers. Artie does not. They both work for SHIELD.

Rose was just barely used to her job at SHIELD when Hydra destroyed everything. She was happy with what she was doing. She was helping people and with all of SHEILD’s reach, she could help the people who needed her most. She had the resources to do all the research she desired and was allowed to see classified information from scientists just like her. It was a dream until it wasn’t. 

She was in her lab when it happened. She was studying an Asgardian blood sample and comparing it to a human one. She should’ve been using her time more wisely… Why look at alien blood when the silent clock was counting down. 

She heard the gunfire before she knew what was going on. She grabbed her emergency pistol from under her main desk, she was still a trained SHIELD agent after all. She wasn’t a field agent but she knew the basics and could defend herself if she needed to. It was something her powers wouldn’t help her with. They were useless in this kind of situation. What good was glowy healing hands when she was being shot at. 

Footsteps were getting closer. There was muffled yelling beyond her walls. She didn’t have much time. There was one door, it led to the main hallway where the attackers were coming through. Her best chance was to hide. 

She ran as quietly as she could to the back of the room where some mostly empty cabinets were. She hoped that she was small enough to squeeze inside. Sure, it wasn’t a good vantage point but she was on the index and they would know that she was there and that she could be a target. She didn’t want to go out fighting, there was still so much she could do. She doubted that they would take their time searching every crevice for her, she was still just a healer. It didn’t feel like that was part of Hydra’s gig. 

She had just gotten into position when the main door was kicked in rather violently. There was a main man in the front who ordered the others to search the room. Rose’s heart sank. She cocked her gun in the chaos and prepared to fire and get out of there as swiftly as possible. Her chances of escaping were low. She didn’t have enough ammo to take out the whole room and she wasn’t a perfect shot. Her chances of survival were dwindling. 

The footsteps were getting closer, one by one cabinet doors were being haphazardly ripped open, each getting nearer to her hiding place. She did her best to control her breathing but there was a reason that she didn’t want to be a field agent, she was not good in absolutely terrifying situations. She hated how much her hands shook on her gun. She had to keep her finger off of the trigger to prevent an accidental misfire. 

She took a few deep breaths as the banging of wooden doors got nearer. Time felt like it was going so slowly, though the nearest baddie was only a few cabinets away, it felt like an eternity before they got to hers. She gently rested her finger on the trigger and let herself take a second to see who was going to be on the other side. All she saw was a familiar red badge depicting a skull on top of several tentacles and she knew exactly what was going on. 

After she pulled the trigger, things seemed to get a little crazy. She slid out from her hiding place and used the man she had shot in the shoulder as a kind of human shield. She threw the poor nazi into the closest of his colleagues and shot at the Hydra agents closest to her. 

It didn’t take long for them to react. The room erupted in deafening bangs and yells. Rose rolled behind a metal column and vaguely recognized a painful burning in her thigh. 

“You’re not a fighter Doctor Dawn, this isn’t a fight you can win.” The main guy bellowed from behind her. 

“And what do you expect me to do,” Rose hissed, “Praise the name of hydra and surrender my rights to fascist ideals?” 

“Oh of course not. I just thought I’d try to make it easier. You’re coming with us, whether you’re full of holes or not. You know you’re potential has been wasted here, imagine what you could do without SHIELD’s limitations.” The man purred creepily.

“You don’t know me, I’m not going to do things just because I can. Some people have a hint of moral obligations.” Rose looked around her half of the room, she only had a few bullets left and Hydra wanted her alive, otherwise, they would’ve taken her down easily. She was astoundingly outnumbered. 

“This is your last chance to give yourself up, all in one piece. You know that you have no choice, don’t you have any sense of self-preservation?” 

“Self-preservation isn’t my strong suit…” Rose muttered as she placed her hand on her wound, it had stopped bleeding and was already closing. Soon, standing should be only a little bit painful rather than impossible. She just needed to keep him talking for a tiny bit longer. 

“Why,” She asked, “Why do you guys want me? There are people who can cause natural disasters and turn into any material they touch. I’m just a doctor. Wouldn’t you want to use your evil resources to get them rather than waste a good team getting a defenseless healer? That is if this is a good team and not just a bunch of cowards who were given guns.” 

“You underestimate your value to us. Imagine an unkillable army, soldiers who cannot be damaged by bullets, no need for armor or shields… it’s beautiful isn’t it.” 

Rose laughed. She laughed as she carefully got to her feet, leaning heavily on the metal pillar shielding her. 

“I can’t do that? What do you think I am? A god?” 

“You could be.” 

“There aren’t meant to be gods in this world. Even if it was possible, I don’t want to make an unkillable army, and if you think me a god, you can’t bend a god to you’re twisted will. I think that’s part of the whole omnipotent being bit.” Rose tested a lean on her injured leg and readied her gun.

“You won’t get the luxury of a choice.” the man said grimly. 

Rose stepped out of her hiding place and pointed her gun at the main military man. Before she could let out another word, she was hit with a tiny pinprick, to small to be a bullet. She only had enough time to look at the projectile before all her strength was seeping out of her. Seemed to be an enhanced tranquilizer. She collapsed to the ground and felt a massive collar be locked around her throat before her vision completely blacked out.  

Just like that, it was over. Her freedom was gone in the blink of an eye. She didn’t know if anyone would be willing or even left to attempt to save her. 

***

Artemis was undercover when Hydra made their move. She had just dyed her short hair brown and curled it, painted on more freckles on her cheeks, and hidden several types of weapons in her casual clothes. It was honestly one of her favorite parts of her job. Creating a character, pretending to be someone else, blending in, she liked it more than the whole fighting part. Even if she was pretty damn good at the fighting part. 

When Hydra emerged from their wretched ashes, Artemis was alone. She started the day on a mission but it didn’t take her long to realize that she was being hunted. 

It started with a strange flash from a window from the apartment building across the street. Call her paranoid but she immediately left eyeshot of the window. She took out her own sniper rifle and took off the specialized scope. She used it as a kind of telescope and turned on its x-ray feature and adjustable zoom to identify if someone was after her or if she was just imagining it. 

She was not imagining it. There was a person in a high window with a gun, trying their best to conceal themselves. Artemis put the scope back on her rifle and took out an acid green colored tube of lipstick, of course, it wasn’t actually lipstick. She was a spy. She uncapped it and used it to trace around the concrete on a nearby brick. There was a minute of soft sizzling before she slid out the brick as if it had just been laid. 

She pointed the barrel out of the new hole in the wall and wasted no time as she aimed and fired. The loud streets dampened the sound of the bang and she replaced the brick before getting out of there before anyone had a chance to figure out that something was up. 

It was on the news all day, SHIELD had fallen, they’re secrets exposed, and Hydra was back. Of course, some of that information was passed to her by an old friend but most of it was very much public. 

But Artemis didn’t care about her job, her livelihood, her kill count being on display for anyone to look up on google, no. Her sister was right at the heart of it, and due to her status as a glowy super-human, she was very much in trouble, if not dead. Sure it would be stupid to not keep her alive, but Hydra wasn’t known for their mercy. 

Artemis could disappear, she could get away from Hydra easily, but she wasn’t going to. Not while her sister was in their clutches. 

It took a few Hydra agents but eventually, Artemis found one that knew something that she cared about. Where they were keeping the important prisoners. Their enhanced prisoners. It turned out that they had a prison boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. One heavily equipped to deal with even the Avengers. Bingo. 

Artemis was ready for a rescue mission. 

***

Time was odd in her cell. The lights were always on, there was always a guard outside of the glass, Roses internal clock was the only thing hinting at the time and that had always been a little unreliable. They give her food once a day, if it could be called food, and it’s time always seemed to fluctuate. Every once in a while they would try to convince her to join them. They spoke of a perfect life, of power, of wealth but she would always say no. And she would pay for it. Usually, they would fill her body with voltage or try to brand her, but she would heal before the next day. Rarely even leaving a mark. At most a gunshot would become a scar no larger than the size of a freckle. 

The bulky shock collar had started to become normal. Her hair, which was normally held in a tight bun or a professional ponytail, was wild and untamed falling down her shoulders, some in front of her face. She couldn’t move it, her wrists were cuffed together, only uncuffed for meals or occasional trips to shower. 

Every moment alone, she spent inside her own head. Every moment wasted in a bright blank room when she could be helping people or not being in a cell. She thought about her sister, whose whole life was uprooted at the fall of SHIELD, but Rose was sure she could handle herself, she had never known anyone more capable. Still, she was worried. Their family had been complicated, and accidentally working for the same secret organization had been the most perfect coincidence. It took a few years but they got close again, rejecting childish resentment and competition. 

But Artemis wouldn’t come for her, she had never made a decision based on feelings before and was very unlikely to do so. If she came, it would take weeks at least and a well thought out attack or something of that nature. 

Although since she couldn’t use her powers, they were just building up inside her. Her own healing factor had sped up just by not healing people constantly. Her power had nowhere to go after she had gotten used to using it so much during the day. 

She was filled with energy that had nowhere to go. She was trapped in several ways, none of them very fun. She had to get out, no one was going to save her, they would be stupid to try. 

It turned out someone was stupid enough to try. Someone so wonderfully stupid to care about her. 

Against the odds, her sister was there, silently taking out a guard with ease. Her cheek was bleeding and bruised and she had the most feral look in her eyes, it was kind of scary. Artemis, who was calculating and calm at all times, who put so much thought into every decision she made, had left everything she had left to find her. Rose couldn’t help but smile. 

Artemis took the shock collar remote from the guard and unlocked the cell door with a stollen key card. 

“Hey Rosie, You’ve looked better…” She quipped while taking a moment to figure out which button on the remote took off the collar. 

“And you’ve never looked better. I’ve never been so happy to see you come in and knock someone out.” Rose grinned. 

“Yeah, yeah…” Artemis rolled her eyes and pressed a button that made the collar release a bunch of air. She gently took it off of her sister to see the deep indents that it made around her neck including the two electricity input and output spikes on each side of her throat. “Jesus… that does not look very comfortable.” 

“Imagine having to sleep in it.” Rose ripped her hands from the handcuffs behind her back and gently rubbed the sore parts on her neck. Once the pressure was removed, the bruises started to heal. She raised her hand to her sister’s bloodstained face and had a record-breaking healing session. Even small wounds would take a minute or two but this time it took seconds and it was kind of mesmerizing to see the process. 

“Thanks.” Artemis’ face relaxed as the pain eased. 

“It’s genuinely the least I can do. I’m guessing that if you haven’t been noticed, you just got noticed so uh, can we get out of here?” Rose left the cell and took a gun from the fallen guard. 

“No, I was planning on staying here forever…” Artemis grumbled. “Follow me, we have to get to the top deck.”

They almost made it up two floors before the first group of baddies came running towards them. Rose heard the frantic heavy footsteps on the metal floor before anything else and she cocked her gun. Her sister put her arm in front of her signalling for her to stop and let her deal with the problem. Rose nodded but stayed close anyway, partially because if her sister got hurt she would need to fix it and partially because she didn’t want to feel useless. 

Artemis caught the group by surprise and shot the front few guys before using one of them as a shield to defend herself from the other ones. She pushed them into the chaos and rammed her knee in the crotch of the closest guy. She wasn’t superhuman like her sister but she worked hard and was pretty damn strong. She kicked the gun out the hand of the guy whose nuts she just crushed and shot the hand of the guy who was moments away from shooting her. The fight kept going like that, her being too fast to shoot at and at some point pulling out a knife. 

Rose stayed out of sight and felt her blood run cold when she heard more footsteps. A lot more footsteps. They were going to get overwhelmed very soon. Even Artemis couldn’t take out so many people. 

The noise in the hallway stopped, Artemis finished the fight and looked a little winded. She walked back to her sister. 

“Don’t get tired yet. I heard more coming. I don’t think we can fight our way out.” She said grimly as she waved her glowing hand over the injured parts of her sister. She had taken a few heavy hits. 

“How do you feel about elevators?”   

***

When Artemis mentioned elevators, Rose thought about riding the actual elevator. Not climbing up the shaft with an endless drop at any slight mistake. She guessed that this was why she wasn’t a spy, it would’ve been too nice to just ride the elevator. Everything just had to be hard. 

They froze every time there was a noise and spoke in frustrated hushed tones whenever they had something to say. Like how not fun climbing up an elevator shaft in a massive prison ship was. 

The grumbling stopped when the elevators started to move and the elevator shaft became less of a death pit and more of a death trap. Rose had managed to get on top of one of the moving elevators and kept trying to get Artemis to come with her before it was too late. She was perched on a slight ledge far enough away from the momentarily stopping elevator that it would take a miracle to jump the gap and make it. The window of opportunity was closing fast. 

“Just jump! I’ll catch you!” Rose said frantically as she reached her hand out as far as it could go. 

“The fuck do you think I am? Captain America? Just go without me! I’ll catch up!” 

“I can literally catch you asshole, we don’t have time for you to whine about it!” Rose hissed. Artemis wasted precious moments to roll her eyes and carefully maneuver her body to the adequate leverage to maximize her jumping range. 

Then was the moment of truth. Artemis used all of her strength and flung her body at her sister as best as she could. 

It was so close. For a moment, their fingers just barely touched, enough to grab at the ends. Enough to delay the inevitable for a moment. 

“Go… I’ll meet you upstairs… okay?” 

“No… I can get you up… just hold on…” She said desperately. Artemis was already slipping one finger at a time. Rose had to keep her other hand on the elevator, any moment it would start moving again. 

“It’s okay, let me go.” Rose wouldn’t get the chance. Artemis slipped through her fingers. 

Then she fell. She didn’t even scream, but Rose did. In that moment, something flickered. For the briefest of moments, in the height of pure emotion, something within Rose changed. Her eyes glowed gold, her hair defied gravity and reflected light that wasn’t there, and then it stopped. And she was left alone. She didn’t even notice the moment of glowing potential. 

She was going back for her sister. The long way. 

***

It didn’t take long for Rose to get caught, but that was kind of part of the plan. Kind of. She didn’t have a fully fleshed out plan but she thought she had something at least. It was kind of hard to think after what happened. Artemis could be dead… no it would take more to kill her sister. She had never known anyone more resilient and with more pure will. She was like the John Wick of spies. Someone could break both of her legs and arms and she would still find a way to stand back up and wreck shit. A stupid elevator shaft wouldn’t take her out. Hopefully. 

Rose wandered around the halls. It wasn’t like there was a map of the place. She felt like she was in a daze, time was slow and blurry. Every sound felt far away… in fact… everything felt far away. She couldn’t focus. It could be the lack of food and water catching up to her but she doubted it. 

She was surprised that she managed not to bump into any hydra agents, she had noticed that a bunch of the cameras in the halls had been broken or even completely ripped off. There were still bullet holes and subtle bloodstains on the walls telling her this ship used to be SHIELDs and it was part of the hydra resurgence. Right at the front lines. They didn’t have enough time to fix everything and it was unlikely that some cameras on a prison ship would be a major priority for a reborn nazi organization. They were probably still getting rid of the bodies of the SHIELD agents they murdered. 

Like Artemis, sure it was a little more distantly but if hydra hadn’t emerged from the dark damp hell they came from then none of this would have happened. 

The last thought made her growl audibly, which is not something she just did normally. She doesn’t usually growl like a dog. She tightly balled her fists and decided that she couldn’t just stand there to absorb what just happened, she was still in the nest of the people hunting her. She was likely moments away from being found out and captured or worse. She had to get her shit together before there was a gun to her head. 

“You seem a little lost Rosie.” A deep voice came from somewhere ahead of her, it sounded like it was coming from an old intercom, it echoed eerily in the empty halls. The lights flickered a bit before blotting out sequentially, adding to the horror movie atmosphere. 

“Did you really think that we’d just let you go? No… no. You’re much too useful for us.” The voice continued. Rose didn’t say anything. She followed the voice to a touchscreen lock pad in front of a metal door and she didn’t hesitate to slam her already tight fist into it. It shattered on impact and pieces of plastic and glass littered the floor. 

“Well, someone’s grumpy! At least let me finish my monologue! I worked too hard on it!” The voice continued further away. Rose didn’t like being taunted. She was having a bad enough day as it was. She went to the next touchscreen pad and punched it. She just wanted the voice to stop. 

“We can keep doing this but property damage won’t fix your situation.” The voice grumbled from another further away speaker. 

“What do you want from me!” Rose yelled into the empty halls. 

“We want everything you can give. But we are willing to negotiate. We’ll let your sister go if you  surrender yourself to us.” 

“I thought negotiations required both parties to agree.” She said before she fully realized what had been offered. Her sister was alive, for now. That fact was both incredibly relieving and overwhelmingly anxiety-inducing. 

“That is our offer. Either she dies and we take you the hard way, or she lives and we get what we want. Simple.”

“Where is she!” Rose demanded. 

“Do you accept the deal or not?” 

“Yes, just let me see her, please,” Rose said desperately. 

“Good choice. There are people on their way to escort you to your sister. Thanks for doing business with us.” 

***

Rose was not glad to be back in cuffs and a godforsaken shock collar, but her sister was alive and would stay that way. That had to be something. 

She could feel the cold metal barrels of guns at her back and neck, she was surrounded by heavily armored Hydra agents who had no qualms about handling her roughly. She tried to appear strong and defiant but she was sure that they could see her tremble. One twitch if the trigger finger and she would be dead. Probably, she didn’t quite know the limits of her healing factor and she wasn’t keen on finding out. 

They turned a corner and there she was. Artemis was covered in blood and her left foot was pointing completely the wrong direction, but she was breathing and still had the sharp rage in her eyes. Right next to her was a stereotypical military man with a scar through his eyebrow and piercing his salt and pepper hairline. 

“Artie! You have to let me help her.” Rose ordered at the man who she assumed had been the voice she had heard earlier. 

“That wasn’t part of the deal. We let her go. That’s it. You should be thankful that we brought you to see her at all.” 

“If you don’t let me heal her, you’re going to regret it.” She snarled. The man laughed, it was harsh and mocking and going on for way too long. It made Rose even angrier. 

“What are you going to do? Heal my arthritis? You’re no fighter doc. She’ll be dead before you even lift a finger.” The man spat in Rose’s face, she didn’t wince and most of her energy went to keeping herself from ripping off the handcuffs and throttling the man until he turned blue. Although no one would see, a glow started to grow from the bones inside of her hands, illuminating her veins in a strange golden light. 

“Underestimating me isn’t good for your health, I should know. I’m a doctor.” 

“You know what, I’m sick of your attitude,” The man turned to the agents holding Artemis up, “Kill the sister. Maybe that will make this easier.” There was a click of a gun cocking before Rose reacted.

“No!” She yelled, but it was too late, the gunshot rang out and echoed among the silence and Artemis collapsed in a rapidly growing pool of blood. Rose felt like her bones were on fire, there was a blistering heat that encompassed every cell in her body. She could only hold it in for a couple seconds more. Just long enough for the man to look back at her and react in horror. 

Her bones glowed like they encapsulated all the light from the sun and her eyes glowed with the same light. Her skull and veins were visible through her skin and her messy hair started to defy gravity and reflect the light coming from her skin. The supernova of rage would explode any moment, there was nothing she could do to hold it back, but she didn’t really want to hold it back. 

It was like an explosion was continually off and Rose was in the center of it. There was a blast of bright golden light that blasted the hydra bastards around her to the ground. There were screams, but Rose didn’t hear them. 

There’s that saying of “too much of a good thing” that could apply. Too much healing meant bone where it shouldn’t be, skin where it shouldn’t grow, holes that shouldn’t be cut off. That’s what happened to anyone in the blast zone. The agents around her had shards of bone growing together, winding and twisting as if making an intricate Celtic knot. The bone grew from ribs, skulls, femurs, any large bone grew grotesquely beyond its limits and the small connective bones grew together making a terrifying group of intertwining statues. And that was just the agents around her. 

It took no effort for her to rip the handcuffs off, the shock collar was just as easy. She turned her head towards the uniformed man on the ground, trying to stumble away as his own body attacked him just by being in Roses presence. 

All she could feel was rage towards this man. She was so tired of being restrained. By chains or by her own need to keep her feelings from impacting her work. She was so so tired of it. Her power was connected to her emotions and she had always had to keep them in check, but not now. 

She walked steadily to the man trying to scramble away. His little rectangular glasses were broken and tilted on his nose. There was so much fear in his eyes. It made a strange scary little part of her happy. 

“Just a healer, no good for fighting…” She said, her voice was different, slightly non-human sounding. As if she was speaking as some ancient god, the kind whose voice could make an entire civilization fall to their knees. 

“You are right, this isn’t much of a fight.” She knelt down to look the man in the eyes. “If it was a fight, you would stand a chance.” 

“Stop this!” The man yelled shakily, “I’ll do anything!” He almost sobbed.

“You will not speak,” Rose said as the skin around the man’s mouth began to close in, “You will not see.” She whispered as she made his eyelids grow together. “You will not hear.” She hissed quietly. His ears slowly grew together as she said her last words to him. “You will be lucky to be saved, but you will not know. Actually, you would be lucky to die here. I’m sure you’d never want to run into me again. You should be glad that I didn’t just kill you for what you did to my sister. If anything, be fucking grateful.” 

She stood up, leaving the man on the cold ground. The room was quiet. No more screams. Only heartbeats. She didn’t kill a single person. With enough skill and time, they could all be saved. She planned to send out a distress signal, they would be found. But that was all she could ensure. 

The light faded. The flaming rage began to be replaced with empty sorrow and horror. She observed the room post-rage-explosion. She had never thought she was capable of anything like this. She had never thought that she could cause such… destruction. She breathed in a shaky breath and made herself look at her sister’s body. She gasped when she saw the rise and fall of her sister’s chest. She was breathing. She was still alive. 

 “Artie? Artie!” Rose ran to her sister and looked over her. There was no gunshot wound. Roses blast had healed her completely. Her eyes fluttered open when her sister reached her. 

“Hey… what…” Artemis wheezed, but Rose was already holding her in her arms and sobbing uncontrollably. For a while, they just held each other. Eventually, they were ready to leave. 

Rose was sure that hydra agents were still crawling in the ship but they stayed away from the sisters. There must’ve been some kind of surveillance of the event. They must know what happened somehow. Rose had no idea how but she was too tired, physically and emotionally, to care. 

They left the ship with no problems. They boarded Artemis’ hidden ship, perfect stealth tech that could change from a boat to a fighter jet, only big enough for three people at most if they really squeezed in. 

Rose sat in the co-pilot’s seat, though she wouldn’t be any help. Her sister would be doing all the work. It was silent as they shot off into the sky and hovered above the clouds for seemingly hours. She was using the holoscreen to look at her emails and had just switched to her super-secret SHIELD account. A certain email caught her eye. Its subject line was “Job Opportunity for Former SHIELD Agents” and it was from Stark Industries. Rose smiled a little. Maybe her life wasn’t over after all. 

[meta-squash]

Les Miserables and Internal Narrative

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Hugo’s way of focusing on his characters, specifically which ones he actually chooses to focus on and get inside the head of, and which ones he doesn’t bother narrating or narrates only a certain way.

(For the purpose of what I want to meta about, I’m gonna use “internal narrative” to mean Hugo telling us exactly what a character is thinking and feeling at that moment, rather than his usual distant omniscient narration or any “I” statements from the characters. It’s Hugo “zooming in” and getting in the character’s head and narrating it for us.)

So, something that I’ve really been pondering over is a) which characters Hugo chooses to “zoom in” on and which characters narrate their own thoughts aloud, and b) how much Hugo allows himself to zoom in.

For that first one I just keep coming back to Eponine.

So Hugo mostly just does his usual third person omniscient narrative, but at times he focuses in on a character at a given moment and tells us exactly what that character is thinking about and feeling. A good example of this would be the way he focuses in on Enjolras as he imagines all his friends drumming up support for the rebellion. He jumps suddenly from a broad picture into a tight view of Enjolras’ internal monologue.

And Hugo does this for a lot of his characters. Valjean, Marius, Cosette, Gavroche, Enjolras, Grantaire, Gillenormand, to name a few.

What I find interesting is the fact that there are (arguably) main or at least significant secondary characters that he doesn’t zoom in on. The biggest example being Eponine.

We do get to know and see a lot of Eponine’s thoughts and feelings. But Hugo never zooms in and tells us “Eponine thought this and felt this.” Nearly all of Eponine’s narration of her feelings is either said aloud by her either as awkward, rambling monologues or as muttered asides, or it’s sort of narrated to us at a distance, through describing her actions and body language rather than her actual thoughts and feelings.

Eponine isn’t the only one. In fact most of the characters that belong to that “substrate,” the sort of “underbelly” of Paris get no or almost no internal narrative. Thenardier only gets an internal narrative once: when he’s trapped on the top of the wall outside the prison and is terrified he’ll be found. Montparnasse doesn’t even get one after his lecturing from Valjean, sadly. Also, interestingly, despite narrating a lot of Mabeuf’s strife, like Eponine, he never actually zooms in to narrate Mabeuf’s thoughts; it’s all narrated from a distance.

Some I can understand: secondary characters like Montparnasse don’t necessarily need internal narration for us to figure out who they are. Mabeuf as an elderly parallel to Marius is obvious enough that we can kind of fill in the blanks with what we get from Marius’ narrative.

But Eponine interests me because she is an important enough character to the plot to probably be considered a main character, or maybe a very very high up there secondary character, and yet we don’t actually get her internality. The narrative we do get from her is quite literally spoken aloud, either to Marius or as a weird sort of verbal internal conversation.

The verbal self-narrative is another one of Hugo’s tools, but Eponine is also very different in that respect. Most of Hugo’s other characters only talk aloud to themselves when they are overexcited or upset. See: Fantine in the police station and hospital, Cosette when seeing Marius, Fauchelevent when he thinks he has killed Valjean, etc. They speak their thoughts out loud because they are so overwhelmed that it just kind of spills out. But Eponine just rambles, upset or not. She talks to herself in long paragraphs or in almost Shakespearean-style asides.

The only other character who monologues the way she does, as frequently as she does, is Gillenormand, but we also get his internality.

So that’s weird. And I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I kind of wonder whether it’s the “morality” of the characters that decides whether Hugo focuses on them or just relegates them to talking to themselves. The “good” characters get an internality, and the “bad” ones don’t, or at least don’t really (Thenardier as a brief exception).

Of all the characters, Eponine is the one most trapped between or within everyone else’s lives/agendas/morality, and she as a character is very grey. She wants to help, but often that help comes with an ulterior motive (ex. watering Mabeuf’s plants to get Marius’ address). She has this unrequited love for Marius; it means she finds Cosette’s address and later protects him and Cosette from Patron-Minette at Rue Plumet, but it also means she essentially dies with the thought that Marius should also die at the barricade so no one else can have him. She sacrifices herself to save Marius, but with an ulterior motive. She escapes Javert, not because she’s good, but because she’s not as bad as Patron-Minette. Her feelings and decisions are consistently impacted by either Marius’ actions or her father’s; she’s either trying to help Marius/get his attention or she’s trying to do what she can to avoid her father’s cronies to some extent. She stands up to Patron-Minette outside the Rue Plumet, but she can’t use argot anymore because of the effect Marius has had on her. She doesn’t really get to have her own path. In order for Eponine to act upon or satisfy her own feelings and thoughts, she has to navigate between everyone else’s agendas.

So we never get a moment of Hugo focusing in on her. Instead, she rambles and sings and leaps from subject to subject. She’s weird and erratic, compared even to Marius’ dreaminess or any of Hugo’s other odd characters. She does at one point tell Marius that “everything’s in a whirl” and “very queer” when she hasn’t eaten in three days, and I wonder if Hugo avoids her internality in order preserve that weirdness. Marius’ oddness is attributed to his dreaminess; Cosette’s is kind of explained by, like, hormones and puberty and all that (not in so many words, but y’know). But Eponine is just strange, and to go into that is a bit like trying to go into the Mardi Gras fete that Hugo describes the wedding party passing later on in the novel: wild, fluctuating, lots of hidden pockets of darkness and strangeness. Eponine is the greyest character; unlike Montparnasse, her intentions aren’t fully evil, but also, unlike Gavroche, they’re not entirely selfless either. She is able to hold conversations with both Patron-Minette and Marius, but can’t break free from her connection with one or the other. Eponine is there to be a different sort of bridge between the light and the dark from Gavroche. But her grey-ness also means she’s unfocused, and Hugo doesn’t seem to want to narrate that.

And the second narration issue I keep coming back to is Valjean.

I think certain aspects of Hugo’s internal narration is fairly unreliable. Sometimes he tells us everything a character is thinking, but I think sometimes he stays a little distant, or picks and chooses what he wants to say. He’s not always willing to expose all of a character’s thoughts in the moment.

Mostly I see this unreliability when Hugo is focusing in on Valjean’s thoughts. To some extent, I think Hugo really venerates Hugo and remains very respectful to his inner thoughts and feelings. This means he tells the reader about Valjean’s thoughts and feelings to some extent, but actually doesn’t dare to go as deep as he could.

Throughout the novel, we get moments of Hugo focusing in and telling us how Valjean feels. Aside from Valjean’s moments of indecision and confusion (Petit Gervais, Champmathieu, his thoughts on leaving Petit Picpus, etc), we also get a lot of focus on Valjean’s feelings and thoughts about himself, about his own worth or his own goodness. However, it seems to me that even though Hugo does focus in on these sorts of thoughts in Valjean’s head, he always stays respectfully distant. He sometimes tells us rather than shows us how Valjean feels. We get all of Gillenormand’s flawed thoughts and feelings. We get all of Marius’ flawed thoughts and feelings. We get Enjolras’ moments of confidence and his moments of doubt. We even (sort of) get the Bishop’s close up thoughts during his conversation with G---. And we do get many moments where Hugo zooms in and tells us Valjean’s thoughts and feelings in a specific moment.

A few examples of those focused moments: Valjean’s first thoughts after Petite Gervais disappears, as he realizes he’s no longer the same man and questions his own actions, and ultimately realizes he must change; his thoughts regarding telling Cosette about Fantine, and the barrier of religious horror at the idea of it; the moment he finds Cosette’s letter to Marius and is overcome with grief and hatred and must fight to overcome it; Valjean wondering how to interact with Cosette once she and Marius are married.

All of these scenes are moments where Hugo focuses in specifically on Valjean’s immediate thoughts and feelings, narrating them complexly and in full rather than an overview or more distant description the way he often does. And yet, he still maintains a sort of respectful distance. We see Valjean battling with his thoughts and feelings, examining them, etc. We get to see Valjean’s heart under a microscope.

We often get to see how Valjean feels about others, or about his situation. However, it’s not until Valjean is speaking to Marius about his true identity that we really understand how Valjean thinks of himself. Until this moment, we continually see his feelings, but not always his thoughts.

It’s not until Valjean’s confession to Marius, and later his confession to Marius and Cosette both, that we really understand how wretched and horrible Valjean thinks himself to be. Hugo over and over assured us that Valjean was devoted to Cosette, that they were both a benefit to each other, and that Valjean saw her as an angel and himself as a creature who could “do no better than creep,” but he tempers all this with a sort of veneration, a reassurance that Valjean is the way he is because he is Good despite not really realizing it. But it’s only when Valjean talks about himself that it’s really emphasized how much Valjean doesn’t believe he’s good; it’s not that he doesn’t realize or notice, it’s that he completely rejects the idea that he could be a good person without total self-sacrifice. He calls himself a “passerby” in Cosette’s life, that he cannot call his raising her a good deed, that he is “not part of the family of men” and “in order to respect himself, he must be despised”. On his deathbed, he calls himself “good for nothing” and tells Cosette she’s better off with Marius than with him.

All of this is very different from the feeling of quiet respect with which his inner feelings are narrated, as opposed to the thoughts he voices allowed. Hugo even uses Marius’ general political ignorance to mention that Valjean deserves far more respect, but Marius still hasn’t learned “to distinguish between what is written by man and what is written by God, between law and right”.

So despite being the main character, Valjean remains an odd sort of enigma not because he doesn’t know himself or because he doesn’t have moments of introspection, but because Hugo’s respect and veneration for him means he remains at a sort of polite distance even when getting into Valjean’s head, something he doesn’t do with Marius or Gillenormand or even Enjolras. It’s only when Valjean is given the chance to quite literally speak for himself that you see that while his self-deprecation and/or emotional self-flagellation is partly moral, it seems like it goes to an almost unnecessary extreme that narration isn’t willing to point out.

This is very long and I kind of had two vaguely similar thoughts that I tried to put together in a post but I’m not sure if it worked. I just think that Eponine’s lack of internality and the odd sort of distance in Valjean’s internality compared to his verbalized thoughts are both very interesting. Eponine, as the greyest of characters, lacks the moral solidity or direction that would make her internality something that could come into focus and be explored. Hugo focuses in on so many characters, getting into their heads and giving us their thoughts and feelings. It’s interesting that Eponine gets none of that, and even more interesting that Valjean, despite all the focus, is filtered through Hugo’s respect and only really reveals his thoughts and feelings fully when he’s verbalizing them.

TL;DR We don’t hear Eponine’s thoughts and feelings because she’s the most morally grey, and Valjean’s internal thoughts and feelings aren’t fully revealed to us except when Valjean is speaking because Hugo venerates him too much to get fully into his head.

[coredrill]

alright, here are my thoughts on the unstoppable wasp novel! i’ve put the majority of my thoughts, and LOTS of spoilers, below the cut. short summary is that . . . i didn’t really like it at all :/

so, i’m gonna preface this by saying that i wanted to absolutely LOVE this book. it’s all about nadia and she is one of my all-time favorite characters and it’s so great that she got the spotlight in this way! i just really really wish i could, in good faith, say that the book was good, but i just can’t. and admittedly, i consider the unstoppable wasp comics to be nearly perfect, which is a high bar to hit, but there was just so much about this book that left a bad taste in my mouth.

first thing i want to mention is the role of the rest of the g.i.r.l.s. and when i say that, i mean that they had virtually no role. i genuinely wasn’t sure if i (the reader) was expected to have read the comics before the novel. on one hand, the first few chapters were spent pretty much summing up the comics, which is fine, especially because some readers may not have read the comics. on the other hand, if i hadn’t read the comics, there’s NO WAY i would’ve known anything about the other g.i.r.l.s!! they’re barely present in the plot of the book! they are present in one scene in the beginning, taina has a few lines throughout, and they’re more involved at the end, but a lot of the times they seemed more like wallpaper than actual characters. especially because of the frequency with which the author would throw in lines such as “that ethiopian place that shay likes” or “priya’s on-trend jeans” and just name-drop them without really giving them any substance. since i know the comics, i already know these characters--but if i was just reading the novel with no background? there’s no way i’d be able to keep them straight.

building off of what i said in that last point, i also wanted to mention that i listened to the women of marvel podcast interview with the author. something that i noticed is that she would always refer to the g.i.r.l.s as the “g.i.r.l. squad.” and that, i think, is the root of why i didn’t like how they were handled. it’s obviously pretty simple to explain their absence in the story by just noting that the whole point was that nadia was feeling alone and isolated from them. HOWEVER, in my opinion as a woman who has been in engineering . . . that doesn’t happen? nadia and the g.i.r.l.s are labmates--it’s right there in the title. they ARE the genius in action research labs. the “lab” isn’t just the location, it’s the people who make it up. by referring to them as “g.i.r.l. squad” instead of just “g.i.r.l.,” the author is changing the dynamics from “being a cohesive unit of girls who make up this incredible group and support each other in their science and goals” to “friend group who all happen to do science.” and as i mentioned, the random falling-out that happens in the book doesn’t happen to groups of the first type. being a girl in stem SUCKS. being in a stem class means that you’re automatically friends with the 1-2 other girls in there with you. and the people you work on projects with in a lab? the other girls who take the time to support you and have your back even though the odds are stacked against you? those are a whole different kind of friendships and i PROMISE they’re not wrecked by just forgetting to talk to each other. the girls that i worked with in college--the girls that i worked with now--it’s for survival. you don’t just fall apart like nadia apparently did from the g.i.r.l.s in this book.

okay. final bullet point on this topic. but in the women of marvel interview, the author said that she wanted to explore what could break apart the bonds that the g.i.r.l.s had formed. but on page 263, there’s the line “and if they had all just been a little better at communicating, maybe it wouldn’t have been so long before one of them realized that nadia was relying a little too closely on that little gold device.” so this deep dive into splitting the g.i.r.l.s apart, and barely giving shay, taina, ying, and priya a role in the story--was caused by MISCOMMUNICATION??? no freaking thanks LMAO. even without everything i’ve already mentioned, that trope is so lazy.

the writing style kinda bothered me at some points--i remember the discharge being described as “carbon dioxide” at one point, but like, just call it white foam. it’s so much easier and saying carbon dioxide pulled me out of what was happening. obviously this is a personal thing, not something objectively bad, but i still thought i’d mention it.

there seemed to be this point, around page 260, where it seems like the book flipped a switch. obviously, this is where the climax hit, but so many other things seemed to just randomly get pushed into place because the plot necessitated it? like, for example, nadia and the g.i.r.l.s are suddenly bffs again. even though, in nadia’s interior monologue, we’ve been hearing her resentment for them, it seemed like once the plot needed them to work together that they were able to do so without problem. and not only that, but it didn’t even feel earned? the book NEVER showed nadia and the g.i.r.l.s as actually like. being friends. (as i mentioned, not a choice i agree with, but still a fact.) so to have them all suddenly team up for the Big Boss Battle just felt weird and disengenuous to all of them. additionally, nadia went from defending margaret at all costs to suddenly thinking “oh yeah, she’s probably super evil. no big deal.” like WHAT??? the whole point of the first 250 pages was to show that nadia feels like margaret is the only person she can trust. all of a sudden she’s cool with her being evil??? make it make sense! you could see throughout the rest of the book that nadia was building up her Wrong Thoughts. sooooo much time was spent on it and we actually saw the development of how nadia felt. but to have her switch all that on a dime so that she can have her Right Thoughts now??? just in time for the Boss Battle? it just feels so unearned, since there’s nothing building to it. she just . . . changes her mind.

i also feel like writing a book where the protagonist, where the person whose perspective we’re following, is being MIND-CONTROLLED, but not revealing that mind control until the 11th hour (to validate the sudden switch from Wrong Thoughts to Right Thoughts) was just. a bit weird. i’m 22, but if i was reading this as a teenager, i’m not sure i would’ve quite gotten that the WHOLE BOOK was now being told by an unreliable narrator, with absolutely zero reliable information as a base (except the comics, of course).

ON PAGE 274. THERE IS ONE MENTION OF SHAY MAKING HER TELEPORTER PORTABLE. THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE FEAT OF SCIENCE AND SO GREAT FOR SHAY WHY WAS THIS NOT EXPANDED ON IN THE SLIGHTEST????

alright, time to talk about the nadia-being-ace thing. so, ever since i started reading unstoppable wasp, i’ve interpreted nadia as aroace. her version of friendships, her attempts to change the topic when romance for herself is brought up--these are all very authentically ace experiences. and that was okay for me to just have her coded that way! the writer of the comics, jeremy whitley, has included TWO (2!!!) ace characters in his raven pirate princess series so i definitely allowed myself to entertain the idea that the ace aspects of nadia were intentional. i was also okay with it not being explicitly mentioned in the comics--sure it would’ve been cool, but i understand that there are 18 issues TOTAL and it would be hard to fit the entirety of nadia’s story in there. BUT, when the author of this book mentioned that nadia was ace, and jeremy whitley confirmed that he’d been writing her as ace, it was awesome and super validating!! first of all, nadia being the first canonically ace marvel character--even just by word of god--is so freaking incredible and just adds to my enjoyment of the story. i’m very glad that we got confirmation and that i can continue reading the comics knowing, at the very least, that my ace reading of them is backed up by the canon (!!!!!). however, the author of this novel 100% used it as a marketing tactic which is super shitty. i was obviously going to read it anyway, since it was about nadia, but i do know people who bought it specifically because the author mentioned nadia being ace. and there was maybe one throwaway line in the novel about how nadia was only interested in romance ~theoretically.~ that’s not rep. in fact, it’s even less rep than the comics, which represented nadia being ace (at least in my opinion) far more authentically than this novel did. i’d honestly even go so far as to say it was riiiight up against the line of queerbaiting--yes nadia is canonically queer, but only by word of mouth, and it’s not mentioned even once in the story. that’s bad. using ace people for marketing--baiting them into buying your book on the promise of rep which we already have so little of--is so so shitty. yes, i am glad that we got that confirmation from jeremy whitley who never used this to promote the comics and didn’t even mention it until now, but i genuinely cannot believe that this author (who is bi! i checked her twitter!) effectively used it to market her awful book. honestly if the book weren’t bad enough already, to add this on top of it is even WORSE.

in the same vein, the author mentioned ying and shay being in a wlw relationship in the same interview where she mentioned nadia being ace. ying and shay are barely in the novel and EVEN WORSE, their relationship is kind of treated as an “obstacle” that nadia and the other g.i.r.l.s have to overcome in order to start working as a unit again. also bad!!!!!

okay. i think i’ve got this and one more bullet point, so we’ll see how it goes. but the way that the science in this book was handled was atrocious. sure, we had the cute science facts, but there is one (1) paragraph on page 311 about the g.i.r.l.s doing science for the sake of doing science and helping their community. IN THE WHOLE BOOK. you know a great way to demonstrate to women that they shouldn’t go into stem fields? write a cautionary book about the ~dangers of ai and data collection~ AS IF ANYONE LIVING IN THE WORLD RIGHT NOW DOESN’T KNOW THAT SHIT. jesus fucking christ. the comics showed all of this great science by the way of the g.i.r.l.s papers, shay making her teleporter at home, defusing the bomb in ying’s head, recreating the vision gloves, tai’s sports robots . . . this book had NONE of that. it literally just had the evils that we see in the news EVERY DAY. that’s not what you show people to get them excited, and i find it really fucking weird that ANYONE greenlit a book about characters who support and encourage women to go into stem fields with the overall message of “science bad!” like. how the fuck was this plot approved. in the women of marvel interview, the author claims that she’s written about women in science before--and i believe her. i just don’t think that she’s ever actually spoken to a woman in science.

and lastly, i have a huge issue with the role of hope in the book. by that, i mean that the novel is called “built on hope” but hope is literally never a theme throughout the book? so yet another instance of the book building off the comics without any form of payoff. the unstoppable wasp comics are kind, and loving, and hopeful. this book is callous and condescending and seems more concerned with its sassy one-liners about white dudes and ham-fisted pop culture references than LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, including hope. nadia claims to love her friends but spends the majority of the book shitting on them. nadia lies to janet to “avoid hurting her” but the end of unstoppable wasp 10 showed the flip side of the situation where nadia and jan realize that although janet was hiding the truth about hank from nadia, nadia wanted to hear the information anyway!! and i just--WHY would you take a character who has been explicitly used in the past to introduce girls to women in stem (the interviews with real people in the back of the comics!) AND THEN WRITE HER INTO A FUCKING CAUTIONARY “TECHNOLOGY BAD” STORY??? it’s SO discordant with the comics and i genuinely hope that anyone reading this book goes and read the comics themselves, which are incredible and a bajillion times better than this book in all aspects. i’m finishing this “review” a lot more fired up then when i started typing it but i honestly can’t believe that marvel greenlit THIS and not like. 2 more comics.

so, yeah, those are my thoughts. kudos to anyone who actually made it through the whole thing (if anyone does), it’s egregiously long but i needed to put my thoughts somewhere! tldr: i will not be recommending this to my mom.

[realityhelixcreates]

Lasabrjotr Chapter 35: Planecdote

Chapters: 35/? Fandom: Thor (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe Rating: Teen And Up Warnings: None Relationships: Loki x Reader (Someday) Characters: Loki (Marvel), Reader,  Additional Tags: Post-Endgame: Best Possible Ending (Canon-Divergent), Reader Has Some Insight, Loki Tries To Explain Himself, But May Still Be An Unreliable Narrator Summary:   In which Loki explains exactly what he was up to during the New York Attack. It's up to you whether you believe him or not .

It was nice that you had made some friends, Loki thought, slightly annoyed at the continued presence of your little group of human followers. They had followed you around all day while you explained-surprisingly patiently-the abridged version of what had happened to you. They were fascinated by your potential with magic, by Asgard, and, much to his surprise, by him. He had tailed you, of course, in multiple human guises. He had to make sure you were safe, but he understood the need to be on your own. He didn't like it, but he understood.

They wanted to know everything, and for the most part, you didn't have any problems telling them. When some of the questions got a little sensitive, you just laughed softly and told them it was a 'political secret'-no matter what the subject was. They seemed to appreciate the joke.

“But what about when he attacked us?” One piped up. “Is that a political secret too?”

“No,” You sighed. “It's no secret, it's just something I don't know. We haven't exactly discussed it.”

Of course. The crux of every matter involving him, at least from the Earth's standpoint. It would always come up, in every conversation about him. He lounged against a wall, not so far away, only gaining notice because of the impeccably dressed and handsome shape he had taken. Otherwise, none of your little squad was paying him any attention, and he could eavesdrop with ease.

“I can tell you though, that it wasn't exactly his idea.” You said conspiratorially. “He was under someone else's control.��

Oh damn. You were talking about it. Well, he hadn't asked you not to, but it wasn't a subject he wanted to dwell on.

“Someone else was pulling the strings? Who?”

“His name was Thanos, and he was some kinda alien or something. But it's okay, he's dead now. Can't cause any more trouble.”

“Okay, but did he just tell you that? Do you have any proof he wasn't just making it up?”

“Thor corroborated.” You said. “In fact, Thor was the one who told me in the first place. I don't think Loki would have even mentioned it.”

“Why not?” A young man asked. “You'd think that would be the first thing he brought up. Get the blame off of him.”

It's shame.” You said so quietly that he barely heard you. “You gotta understand, Loki is royalty, and not just any royalty; his planet used to rule lots of other planets. He's a prince of whole worlds. He's a god. Like, actually a god, of the old kind that were way more like people, but still gods. For him to have been used like that, to be brought low like that...he'd probably rather we all think he's just evil, rather than have us entertain the possibility for one second that he might have ever been weak enough to allow anyone else to control his actions.”

Loki was boiling inside, but it wasn't with anger. The stew of emotions stuck in his throat like bile. One would think you'd been given Heimdalls eyes, to see through him so. Unsettled, Loki dug his fingers into the wall beside him.

“He actually takes his job really seriously.” You continued. “And his people seem to like him a lot, so he must be good at it. I mean, even the maids speak highly of him, and if he's nice to the servants, he must be pretty decent overall. And so far, he has been really good to me.”

“Are you dating?”

You had Loki's full attention.

You twiddled your fingers nervously. “Is this about all those so-called 'news' articles? We're friends. I think. I'm pretty sure. But I've only known him for a little while, you know?”

“Girl, it's been the whole summer! The sun's just weird here.”

“Wow, has it really been that long? I've just had so much on my plate, and I haven't thought about dating anyone in a long time now. Besides, he's an immortal god-prince, and I'm...I don't know what I am really anymore. Like, I'm working class, but I've been promoted? I dunno, I'm not royalty, so it's probably not even allowed.”

It was. Women in Asgard tended to marry 'up', so to speak. He could marry a peasant if he wanted to. Not without pushback from every noble who wanted to put forth their own daughters, and there weren't many strengthening family alliances that could be made with the lower classes. Not to mention, he simply didn't know many individual peasants, probably for those very reasons. But theoretically, it wasn't forbidden.

But it was something he shouldn't be contemplating right now. He had no time. No inclination. And there was no one of interest to him. No one...

“And anyway, I've got a lot going on, you know?” You were saying. “Gotta learn magic, Asgardian history, and language, and culture, court manners. You know, all that stuff. I can't think about romance right now. Maybe not ever again.”

Your new posse was quick to coo, and protest, and reassure you that that wasn't so, that you'd find someone. Loki wanted to agree. It wasn't as if he wanted you to remain celibate or anything, it was just that he didn't think you had many options. There weren't many humans for you to interact with, and fewer Asgardians who could be considered worthy of you. He supposed that was his fault. Appointing you as his personal seidkona had shot you up through social ranks in a way he didn't think you understood just yet. There were very few people on your level.

“It's not so bad though.” You continued. “I've got more than enough to occupy my time, and if I haven't run him off, Loki is almost always there. I'm not lonely or anything, so I don't necessarily need romance. Don't worry about it. I'm not.”

“Um, sir? Are you aware that you are damaging the wall?” A passerby asked quietly. Loki drew his hands away from where he'd been digging his fingers in, only then realizing that he had left dents in the plaster.

“I see.” He answered, just as quietly. “Thank you for informing me.”

The person moved on swiftly, a concerned expression on their face.

“There's always Thor.” Someone suggested. “We know for sure he's into humans, even if Loki isn't.”

Suddenly Loki was boiling again.

You laughed. “No way! He's not my type. Don't get me wrong, he's great, but just not my kind of guy.”

The bubbling inferno subsided to be replaced by a strange nervy, buoyant feeling. He'd never before heard a woman be so dismissive of the possibility of his brother's affections. From Midgard to Vanaheim, Thor was considered the pinnacle of masculine perfection, everyone knew that. To hear you so quickly declare him to be uninteresting to you was deeply satisfying.

He wanted to wade in among this little group of humans, to scatter them, and take you away. Yes, you needed interaction with other people, but this was all time you could be spending with him. Without any duties, without any danger, just being. You could be exploring the museums, or watching the great whale behemoths swim and blow water into the air, or sampling delicious dishes, which you so loved to do, or just walking the town, holding hands...

No wait, he wasn't doing that anymore. He was going to be more professional, more magisterial. More royal.

You stayed there talking until evening, when hunger presumably overtook you, and your new friends saw you back to your hotel in a tight, protective little group. Loki, of course, managed to get back into your shared room before you, and composed himself as if he had just been waiting for your to return.

“Pleasant afternoon?” He asked innocently.

“Yeah, actually.” You said. “Lotta good conversation, and I think I convinced them that I was fine. They might even hate you a bit less now too.”

“I am not concerned with their opinions.” Loki scoffed. You called that good conversation? Inane questions and senseless suggestions? You were better than that.

“Well, maybe I am. Loki, nobody knows anything about you except for what you did five years ago. Why haven't you done anything to defend yourself? If you just told people what really happened-”

“Would that make it better?” Loki interjected. “Would that gain me forgiveness? Would they even believe me, were I to apologize?”

Well...some would. Especially if you didn't do any other bad things, or did good things instead. Like the nature reserves...”

Loki stepped close and took your hands in his. He would stop tomorrow.

“_____ you know it wouldn't go that smoothly. There is a limit on what I can say. If I told people I was being influenced, they would want to know by whom. And if I spoke about Thanos, they would want to know more about him, his goals, and especially his methods. They would start looking for more answers, and we don't want that. Someone would stumble across information about the Stones, and go looking for them, and it would all start over again. I am pleased that you care about my reputation, but if I want to keep the universe safe, there is little I can do to clear my name.”

You hung your head, refusing to meet his gaze. “ I just thought maybe you could get people to like you, and then you wouldn't have so many enemies.”

Loki laughed. “I'm royalty; I'll always have enemies. I welcome them. They help keep me sharp. Now I need your help with a very important matter.”

“Yes?” You asked, looking back up.

“Where shall we go for dinner?”

                                                                         *****

You ended up in an old, wooden building with a quaint, timber-framed interior, that was far too casual for the effort he had put into his impeccable suit and clean ponytail. He'd thought that you might appreciate seeing him in fine human style, after your day among your own kind, and indeed, it seemed to affect you. In fact, you'd had a hard time taking your eyes off him.

It was pleasant, noticing others staring at you in your beautiful Asgardian dress, and seeing that you were only looking at him. Perhaps he was a finer specimen than he had given himself credit for. But you both stuck out like jewels in a goat's ear, in this tavern-like establishment.

You had insisted though, as soon as you found out they served American food. It seemed your nostalgia was high.

“Pizza, Loki.” You had said. “I haven't had pizza in like, four months, and I just gotta have a pizza!”

So he had caved in, and brought you to this rustic restaurant, where you had ordered a pizza and a soda, and exclaimed about how it had been so long, and laughed at him when he tried to eat his slice of the messy Midgardian concoction with a fork, as was clearly proper. Somehow, you were balancing a floppy slice of the mess in one hand, and just eating it like that. Loki sighed and shook his head. Someday he would cure you of those peasant manners.

“Say, Loki...” You said between bites. “Am I allowed to ask you kinda personal questions?”

When have you ever held back? “To be honest, as my seidkona, you are not only allowed, but expected to question me. Just be mindful of the context, and the situation, and the nature of the question itself. I, on the other hand, need not answer if I do not wish to.”

You nodded slowly. “I want to ask you about the dream we shared.”

“Which one?” They were both unpleasant.

“The more recent one.”

“Ah. Well, if you will but indulge me...” He made a flourishing gesture, and the sound of the wait staff and the other patrons dulled and slowed. “We will go unheard now. It is as safe to ask as it can be.”

Your eyes flicked around the restaurant, taking in the altered noise. “Wow...That's really handy!”

“Your question?” He prompted.

“Oh right. Um. Were you really going to let them kill three and a half billion people?”

Yes that would be an important question to you. There was a fifty percent chance you would have been one of them.

“No.” He said frankly. “There's a reason that was a nightmare. That was the worst case scenario; what was likely to happen if all my planning went awry.”

“I mean, you could have died.”

“Unlikely. But it was something I included in my plans. That was the second worst case scenario.”

“Wait, wait. There was a scenario where winning was worse than death?”

“Yes, of course. Conquering your realm, but remaining under Thanos' boot would mean that all of my plans had failed, and I would never be free.”

“What exactly was the plan, anyway?”

“It's moot now.” He shrugged. “But a lot of it came down to control of the Mind Stone. It was caged within my scepter, and was what I used to control the Chitauri troops, as well as the handful of people I touched with it. I...was also being controlled, as Thanos exerted his influence over me through the stone. I was, on some level, aware of it, and everything I did on your realm was part of my plot to flout him. Defeat was acceptable to me, death was acceptable, but ideally, I would triumph.

I would have taken the realm with as little damage as possible. It was important to keep as much as I could intact, especially your weapons, your warriors, your resources. If everything had gone absolutely flawlessly, I would have defeated your Avengers, and added them to my army with the power of the Stone. With their power, their minds, their funds, I would have built defenses for the Earth, especially enhancing you space travel capabilities. I would have pulled hundreds of thousands of Chitauri troops in, and then cut them off from their mothership, leaving them solely under my control.

The Chitauri would then go into space, to patrol. This is when we would have begun building bases on your moon, and mining operations across your planetary system. All humans who were capable of it would be given basic military training, as everyone would have to be mobilized against outside threats, especially from Thanos. And he would have tried. Three of the Stones were here on Earth at that time; there is no way he would have let up.

Of course, I would have also gathered up all magically talented individuals for training, once I realized they existed. So I would have found you either way, my dear, even without this binding rune. And while I was raising your planet out of the galactic mud, I would have sent my brother to Asgard to take his place as king. Once enthroned, he would have allied Asgard, and the rest of the realms to Midgard, and under my banner, we would have purged the universe of Thanos, and all his allies. After that, I would have ruled your planet as a benevolent god. I would not have tolerated defiance, but I would have rewarded those who deserved it. No divisions by race or religion, or culture, or wealth. Merit would be all that mattered.

Ah, but that would have interfered with your precious 'freedoms', so it could not be allowed.” He sighed. “You throw celebrations for a royal wedding in a country you don't even live in, but you hate the idea of kings. Hypocritical nonsense. And more, you weren't even allowed to make your own decision about it. Some man in an underground bunker decided I could not be king, and so war was declared against me before I could even present my case.”

“You did murder a bunch of guys.” You pointed out.

“I did murder a bunch of guys.” Loki admitted. “Almost entirely combatants.”

“Almost?”

“The museum curator in Stuttgart was not technically a combatant. He was working for my enemies however so he was fair game.”

“Okay, gotta admit, you are sounding distressingly villainous right now.” You said it almost jokingly, but your soda glass shook a little in your hand.

“I did tell you I still had it in me, did I not? And you did ask. This is all just hypothetical of course, In reality, my neutral plan is the one that panned out. I was defeated, but not killed, and eventually, Thanos was overcome. And you and I met anyway, just a little later we might have, so perhaps the Norns interwove our strings in all their tapestries. We were always going to meet. So I will try to be less villainous, as I already was, but you will have to confront the fact that I have been truly nefarious, especially if you ask me about the times when I was.”

He cupped your shaking hand as you put your drink down.

“Yeah I guess if I'm gonna pry, I'd better be ready for what I find, huh? So you believe in fate, Loki?”

“The Norns weave the threads of each life into a vast work that forms the universe, and we can travel those threads in whatever way we see fit. But some knots they tie very tight, and those are hard to wiggle around. Most people can't, and even those who can, cannot escape them all. Some things simply must happen. I suppose that's...as close to a religion as Asgardians get.”

“Do the Norns really exist?” You asked. “Like, are they people you could meet? I mean, we used to think gods weren't real, solid people that you could meet, and yet, here you are.” You brushed your knuckles against his palm, sending little jolts of electric warmth down his spine. “Very solid.”

Loki cleared his throat. He wasn't supposed to be holding your hand. He would stop tomorrow.

“Uh, well, I've never seen them, but that does not mean they don't exist. As you've learned, a great deal of things that weren't supposed to exist actually do. Just as there is a great, wide universe beyond your Earth, There may be even more outside of that which is beyond even we Aesir.”

“Wow. Something beyond even you? I never thought you would admit such a thing!” Your voice was laced with sarcasm.

“I am clearly among the greatest men you have ever been privileged to meet, but yes. There are forces greater even than I.” Perhaps he was laying it on a bit thick, but it was better that you snorted at the pretentiousness, and turned your interest to the mysteries of the universe, rather than the things he had done. Or rather, would have done.

What would he have done, if things had gone entirely his way? Would he have found you after all? Certainly, once he'd found out there were humans that could use magic, he'd have had them all rounded up for training. But if there were very many, would he have noticed you?

Probably. You had such a knack for getting yourself in trouble. For curiosity. For poking at the core of him. Oh, he would have hated it. For he would have seen that you were a valuable asset and would not have brought you to harm, but you would have frustrated him greatly. You weren't disobedient exactly, just...mouthy.

It was a trait he simultaneously valued as a person, but despised as a ruler. He had liked it in his mother, he had liked it in Sif, he had even liked it in Jane Foster, and he...he liked it in you.

Yes, he likely would have kept you very close. Perhaps he would have made it his personal responsibility to correct you.

Oh, but he should definitely not be allowing his thoughts to wander down such a path.

He would stop tomorrow.