#i did specifically want to imply the victims are affecting him at least a little (echoey voice + “*we* hate him”)

[stars-obsession-pit]

Hello! Can do a chapter fic off this fic prompt Danny phantom x dc: https://www.tumblr.com/corkinavoid/767516270934556672/dpxdc-legal-power?source=share

This isn’t a one-to-one recreation of that dialogue but it’s based on that as a framework/premise

Batman dropped down into the room behind a pair of figures—a teenage boy and a slumped adult—letting his landing create an audible thump to alert them of his presence.

If the teen noticed, he didn’t react. Even as Bruce approached, he continued to stare impassively at the wheezing figure on the ground, an old wooden bat with flaking green paint on its side loosely held in his right hand. Bruce had already suspected who the figure would be since he arrived, but seeing the Joker so broken was still bizarre. No laughing, no schemes. He didn’t even seem to be attempting to escape his binds, just… lying there, almost as if pinned in place.

Bruce paused a step behind the teen. “I don’t know what the Joker did to you, but this isn’t the right way to go about this.”

The teen scoffed, and Bruce felt a painful lurch in his chest as he was reminded oh so strongly of his son Jason. “And what, let him go kill more people?”

“I know he deserves to face justice, but not like this. Everyone deserves a right to fair trial. No one person should be judge, jury, and executioner.”

The teen turned to look at him with glowing green eyes, and Batman felt himself freeze. He had faced gods before, yet even using that as a comparison felt like an understatement. The boy’s eyes belonged to someone far older than his teenage form implied, and they radiated power. Inevitability.

When the teen—no, the entity—spoke again, his words carried an unearthly echo. “Perhaps, but I’m not acting for just myself.” He paused, glanced down at the Joker, then asked almost conversationally, “Do you know how many people he’s killed?”

Another pause, but before Bruce could even try to answer, the entity continued, “Eight hundred and fifty-six. He’s ended the lives of eight hundred and fifty-six human souls. I can tell you about every single one, if you want. About who they were, what their dreams were before he killed them. About the pain they felt at his hands.”

He punctuated the word ‘pain’ by raising up the wooden bat in his hands and ramming its end down onto the Joker’s arm. He let out a wheeze, muffled by the gag in his mouth.

“I have a duty to my people. I am the King of the In-Between and of all the souls that pass through it—even ones whose stays were as brief as his. I am the rightful arbiter of his fate. And with that power, I sentence him to death.”

He raised the bat again, adjusting his grip so he’d hit with the side rather than the end this time, then paused and let out a chuckle. “Of course, just because it’s based on some justice doesn’t mean I can’t have a bit of fun with it too.” He swung the bat down, slamming it into the Joker’s side, then hooked it under the clown’s torso and flicked him up through the air to slam into the wall. “We all really hate this guy.”

With the entity’s attention fully turned away from him as he sauntered towards the Joker’s slumped figure, Bruce could finally unfreeze himself.

Even if the Ghost King did have the right to pass judgement on Joker, Bruce still couldn’t let torture go on like this. He wouldn’t win a direct fight, but he could hopefully at least grab the Joker and bring him over to the police. Carefully, he reached for some of the smoke bombs and batarangs on his belt and readied his grapple. He’d have to do this very, very fast.

But before he could move, another figure entered the scene. Red Hood, emerging from the shadows on the far side of the room, an unexpected bit of a pep to his step.

“Nice to see someone else who gets that that bastard needs to die. But if I may make a suggestion, how ‘bout you use a crowbar instead of that old bat? It’d be a bit more… fitting.”

[alleanut]

— William Isaac Henderson

TW: Blood ⋆ Implied Trauma ⋆ Death ⋆ Murder

I. INTRO ⋆ II. EXTRA ⋆ III. RELATIONS ⋆ VI. PAST

————————— I. INTRO

AGE: 1249 MENTAL AGE: 27 SPECIES: Vampire GENDER: Male SEXUALITY: Pansexual ETHNICITY: British & Japanese

—————— I.I Powers & Drawbacks

CORRUPTION: A disorder all vampires fall victim to. It affects the soul and mind. The disorder shows up mostly as intrusive thoughts, which the one affected, will act upon, specifically not realizing the wrongness or immorality of it ——— When a vampire has not drunk blood in a week, they become very agitated. If blood is not consumed on the day the agitation starts, they turn into a reckless shadow form with the only goal of soothing their hunger. It will not stop at any means unless they consume at least a drop of blood. After they return to their normal form, their body is extremely exhausted, even sick. Many vampires pass this way Superhuman agility / reflexes: Ability to react faster than a normal human and to possess greater flexibility and with higher / farther jumping capacity Summoning: Ability to summon beings or objects for assistance. This may range from shadow objects to spirits Superhuman strength: Ability to have a level of strength much higher than normally possible given their proportions Superhuman senses: Ability to see, smell, taste, feel and hear more than a normal human ( most hungry vampires under corruption have the same abilities that are listed. )

METAMORPHOSIS / SHAPESHIFTING: Ability to change one's physical, biological form to mimic the appearance, characteristics or power set of other individuals ——— The individual who they want to shapeshift to must be dead. The second he shapeshifts into an individual, they appear to "live" in his head IMMORTALITY: Ability to live forever and also an inability to age normally ——— Takes an absolute toll on your mental health in many different ways INVULNERABILITY: Ability to be immune to any form of physical damage ——— Takes a long time to regenerate

-—————-————— I.II Personality

——— POSITIVE TRAITS Intelligent ⋆ Humorous ⋆ Loyal ⋆ Dedicated ⋆ Tactical ——— NEGATIVE TRAITS Aggressive ⋆ Manipulative ⋆ Argumentative ⋆ Rude ⋆ Obsessive

-—————–———— I.III Appearance

————————— II. EXTRA

PRONOUNS: Any NICKNAMES: Will, The Undead Vermillion BIRTHDAY: September 10th ZODIAC SIGN: Virgo OCCUPATION: CEO of his company LIKES: Wine, Human blood, Getting what he wants DISLIKES: Humans, Food, Talking about his trauma LANGUAGES: Old and Modern English, Japanese ( can't write or read... ), a little Spanish and Chinese

—————— III. RELATIONS

————————————— III.I Family

MOTHER: Kanai Henderson FATHER: James Michael Henderson OLDER BROTHER: Frederick Edgar Henderson OLDER SISTER: Annalina Maria Henderson GRANDFATHERS: Zachary Jace Henderson, Kaede Yoshiyuki GRANDMOTHERS: Tuesday Ivy Henderson, Akemi Yoshiyuki UNCLE: Yoneda Yoshiyuki EXTENDED FAMILY: Kuraisha Wahyuni ( "cousin" ), Zen Luo Yi ( "nephew" )

——————————— III.II Romantic

EX-GIRLFRIEND: Aleta ??? EX-FIANCÉES: Himari Kim, Rina Gaea Junianus EX-WIVES: Kathleen Githa Fraser, Yamina Safiya Bishara, Ethelinda Johanna Peschl EX-HUSBAND: Minsheng Quan UNREQUINTED LOVE: Fabiana Yesenia Soto Ruíz ( he enjoyed her company, but he didn't have feelings for her as she did for him )

——————-————— III.III Platonic

CLOSE FRIENDS: Itachi Kobayashi, Allen Moore, Hansuke Yaoyorozu GOOD FRIENDS: Ousmane Mefine, Amira Kateb FRIENDS: Yulia Golubeva, Markko Rosenberg

——————-————— III.IV Other

( FUTURE ) CO-WORKERS: Leonardo Brando, Cyrene Hecate Chastise, Mikayla ???, Azazel Hera ASSOCIATES: Eustachy Kazimierz Olszewski COMRADES: Jakov Bogović, Nehuen Medina Franco HUMAN FORMS: Naman Jai Gandhi, Hansuke Toudou, Amira Kateb

————————— VI. PAST

——————————— VI.I Childhood

COMING SOON...!!

—————————— VI.II Teenhood

COMING SOON...!!

—————————— VI.III Adulthood

William spends his days pretending to be someone else. His latest human form, Hansuke Toudou is a model. After his work, he either spends his time with his close friends, mainly Itachi, or prepares himself for his next meal. He has no shame when it comes to killing others, as he is a ruthless vampire after all. He has gotten away with years of his killings because he simply has his ways and connections. He is always three steps ahead.

LINKS: Picrew creds to Y_at Superpower Generator

[lilxmoo]

Ok, I must admit, extremely well researched!! This is really well done, and as someone who really likes Tyler, you made some extremely good points!! What I'm curious about is, how does this specifically make Tyler a bad person, when it is a fair argument (in my opinion) to say that in some way, no one in the squad is a good person. I wouldn't necessarily call them bad nor terrible, but as much as I love them, they all show pretty negative traits.

Scarlett leaves a kiss mark on a sleeping mans neck and drapes her bra around a lamp, implying she slept with him while he was unconscious and unable to consent. She didn't, but that's what the man will think. She still actively holds a grudge against her father for not being as present as she liked, (which is fair) but she almost implies that she feels like he didn't love them, despite being an active military leader with little time on his hands, and seems unwilling to want to view him any other way, despite Tyler's love for him. She uses Cat's death as a way to guilt trip Kal after discovering the truth about his father, and when he says, "That is not fair." (Which it isn't, he had no control over her death, and Kal is extremely hurt by this remark), she simply says; "Fair?" [She then continues to say how her situation is not fair, despite Kal having no control over that, again] [Kal says; "if I could trade places with him, I would, Scarlett. I am so sorry."]) "Fuck your sorry. And fuck you, Kal." And then slaps him. In these situations, she shows little empathy for how her actions will affect others, which is ironic given that she is meant to be the most empathetic and caring of the squad. There is a very valid argument that a lot of this did come from empathy, that these actions were results of her love being hurt, but she is still selective with when she views a situation or person worth of being sympathized with.

Cat never once even tries to have empathy for Aurora's extremely difficult situation, and she never does, not until the Ra'haam shows her that Auri is important for the survival of people she deems important (Tyler, etc). She genuinely suggests murdering Aurora by throwing her out of the airlock more than once. She storms out of arguments, and drinks her problems away instead of facing them. She never once tries to mend what's in front of her, and has a strong tendency to run away, or quite simply "delete" her issues, even if this means killing someone. This is an unhealthy coping mechanism which seems to have never ended well for her, but her lack of empathy for anyone's lives other than her own is an insight into her own self-hatred and how she uses it to justify her actions.

Fin is arguably the least "bad", but he has a strong victim complex at the start of the series, assuming that every person who's ever disliked him felt that way because of his disability, rather than his attitude or something he did. When Scarlett says; "Maybe, you got picked last because you spend all your time convincing the galaxy you're an insufferable asshole?" He is shocked and has clearly never even considered the fact he could be at fault for this before. After this, this tendency seems to die, as that moment with Scarlett was a big turning point in his character arc, but he also uses his own self-hatred to form a victim complex at the beginning.

Zila's hard to make a case for, because she is so extremely disconnected from social norms and what is ok to do or say, but she shot multiple people multiple times without consent. Kal says, after she shoots Aurora; "It is as if she Is fundamentally incapable of understanding what should be done and what should not be." It is difficult to figure out if this is a result of her trauma and lack of social understanding, but she shows disregard for multiple structures and situations as the series goes on, so it can be safe to assume that it could also be that she genuinely does not care for the morality of if an action is bad. She disregards people's extreme grief and emotions, such as the squad feeling loss after leaving Tyler behind, because she believes they're "utterly irrelevant". There is no empathy inside of her at all. She feels sorry for people, occasionally, such as when Fin and Scar are upset she chooses to stay in the past, but this is extremely rare. She also never once apologized for any feelings she may have hurt when she lashes out.

And Kal has a straight up violence problem. He doesn't seem to like this part of himself, and actively tries to change it, but that doesn't change the fact that he's still pretty violent at the start of Aurora Rising. When Zila shoots Aurora, his immediate response is to shoot her in return. He punches and injures more than half his squad in the process. He punches an Unbroken Syldrathi "to pulp" at the start of Aurora Burning, and brutally murders an entire squad of Unbroken when saving Aurora from captivity. Again, he doesn't seem to like himself, and his mind-reading mother said "Yes, you do, that's the difference between Caersan and you." When Kal tells her that he doesn't care how his enemy feels. Despite his clear value of people's lives, he still takes them without hesitation when he deems important. He is deeply condescending to other races, such as Terrans at around the start of Aurora Rising, where he generalizes greatly and says; "Humans are such fools." although I believe he grows out of this trait overtime.

Aurora has an addiction to the power of the Eshvaren, but it leads to bloodthirst and selfishness. She's killing people, putting other lives at extreme risk, but she still wants to go against what is good for her health and that of others just so she can feel the adrenaline rush. She causes Kal a lot of mental distress over this, asks a whole planet of people to risk themselves so that she can attempts something that she is addicted to, (the reason why this matters is that other characters are actively trying to find another way around this, without using the weapon, and she never once tries to help with these ideas, despite their use). It is hard to tell if this is a side effect outside of her control, or a hidden personality trait, though.

I agree with your points - but I also believe that Tyler has an extremely strong and commendable moral code, sticks to it no matter what, and the slip ups are what make him much more human and realistic. I don't believe any of the squad are bad, and all of them lean more towards the better side of being a good or bad person, but if anything, does this not make them morally grey? I am extremely curious as to why Tyler is what stands out to you, rather than making a case for the entire squad, (who actively follow his lead).

I also feel like where he he is important for a lot of these. When he appropriates Syldrathi culture, he is desperate to save the galaxy and is doing anything he can to stop the Ra'haam, and is fearing deeply for his life and the lives of his loved ones. He says in said chapter, "I'm not the take it out and whip it kinda guy". His actions in this scene are actively going against what he would normally do, and is a sign of how desperate he's becoming. And in terms of being controlling of his daughter, this is an alternate universe where every single person he loves has died, except for her. I feel like that would be a natural instinct to want to keep her safe, to know where she is and what she's doing. It's not healthy, but it's a trauma result rather than a simple personality trait. Calling each other "captain" and "lieutenant", may also be for professionalism. They are still ultimately crew mates. Now, the points you made about their relationship are extremely well grounded, and make a good point. But you said, "there seems to be no love between the two", but Tyler sacrifices his life for Lae, tells her how proud he is of her with his dying breath (which is usually when you would be most truthful), and Lae is deeply wounded by his death. She also gets extremely angry when Tyler is insulted, and she says; "Do not dare name my father a cur."

These are just some of my opinions, though! I'm curious as to what your takes are!! :)

The Character of Tyler Jones from an academic perspective as someone who has studied human behavior.

Hello everyone, several months ago I made a statement saying that “Tyler Jones is a terrible person”. I know that I offended many people saying that and I am sorry for hurting those who felt offended. I have been weighed down with demanding classes and caring for a family member of mine with a mental health disease. I planned on backing up my claims much sooner with a list of all the reasons Tyler Jones is “bad”. However I regret phrasing it using the word terrible, because whether or not someone is ‘good’ or ‘terrible’ remains solely up to you, the reader. That being said, in this singular post I plan on showing how Tyler Jones shows selfish motivations and borderline egoistic tendencies based on canon events in the Aurora Cycle series. 

DISCLAIMER: I do not mean to hurt anyone, personally. If you love Tyler, this is not an attack on you. It is okay if you disagree with me, but those who send me vulgar or unkind comments will be blocked.  Thank you.

That being said, let’s jump in.

Selfish motivations: In Book 1, page 39, Tyler Jones quotes to Scarlett and Cat: “The Legion stands for something real. There’s people out there who need our help, and we’re not helping any of them by sitting here and feeling sorry for ourselves.” This leads us to believe that Tyler Jones cares about saving other people. And, in Book 1 page 84 he says to Kal: “Is that the kind of person I seem to you? The kind that decides to hate an entire species because one of them killed his old man?” Also leading us to believe that Tyler is a benevolent person. But as we get on in the books, we learn that these are performative traits. In Book 1, page 11, we see that Tyler Jones wants to leave Auri in the cryopod to die. Despite seeing the vital signs that she is in fact alive. It is only after his sense of duty kicks in which makes him rescue her. (I will say, his sense of duty can be a good trait.)

Objectifies women: Book 2, page 328, Tyler Jones is being held by the Unbroken. In this chapter, Tyler sees Saedii clad in her undergarments. And in this we read Tyler’s thoughts: I realize that once again she is trying to get a reaction from me. She knows how beautiful she is. She knows that beauty throws people off if they let it. While this could be mistaken as desire, it is objectification. Sexual desire refers to a natural, innate, and personal attraction to and appreciation of a partner's entire self - body, mind, and spirit. It is an interpersonal connection based on genuine mutual feelings of love, trust, and attraction.

In contrast, sexual objectification involves treating a person solely as an object or means to fulfill sexual desires rather than a whole individual deserving of dignity and respect. It reduces a person to a body part or a sexual stereotype rather than seeing them as fully human. This is a violation of autonomy and an abuse of power when not freely consented to by all involved. It is never acceptable for anyone, including intimate partners, to pressure, coerce or manipulate others into sexual situations.

Sexual objectification is deeply damaging and dehumanizing, while healthy sexual desire celebrates and honors one's partner's whole being. The key distinction is freely given mutual consent and the absence of power imbalances versus the reduction of a person to a mere object of sexual pleasure.

It is apparent from this chapter alone that Tyler Jones views Saedii as only an object to please him. He is under the impression that her beauty is all to be shown off for him. Instead of looking away, he chose to ogle and objectify her. 

In book 3, page 38, Tyler fantasizes about Saedii and says: “I can still feel her body pressed against mine if I try. We both knew my line about bed was halfway true…” The implication of him saying ‘we both knew’ is implying that Tyler thinks Saedii wants him just as much as he wants her. Note: Simply fantasizing about another character and thinking they share romantic interest doesn't inherently make someone a narcissist. However, it’s the way his pride leads him to assume that Saedii wants to jump into bed with him at any moment that leads to sexual objectification. Tyler's perspective on Saedii is profoundly objectifying. His egotistical assumption that she wants the same, without caring what she wants, shows he does not treat her as an equal, but rather an extension of himself to fulfill his own desires. This unhealthy mentality is textbook sexual objectification.

(Also yes, I do know that Saedii and Tyler do ‘fall in love’ in the series, but their relationship has proven to be very back-and-forth, as opposed to Kal and Aurora’s constant and steady progression. Saedii and Tyler can’t seem to decide if they hate one another or love one another.)

Overly Controlling to his daughter: In the future chapters of Aurora’s End, Tyler has a daughter named Lae. We see in these chapters just how he chooses to treat her and talk to her. In book 3 chapter 14, the situation is not ideal and one could argue Tyler is  under a lot of stress, which he is. When Lae speaks up to share her perspective: (“We cannot aid the Starslayer, nor his son, nor the fool who binds herself to him. We must kill him to avenge our loss-”) Lae is ultimately cut off by Tyler. The exchange goes: “That’s enough, Lae.” Tyler says. “No!” She shouts. “Commander, the blood of billions is on his hands. Honor demands his death! We cannot possibly-” “I said that’s ENOUGH lieutenant!” Tyler roars. (Book 3, page 175.)

The fact that Tyler doesn’t hear her out and listen to her is bad enough, but what this exchange tells me is that Tyler doesn’t value Lae’s input as valuable. Their relationship is extremely strained, from Lae only referring to him as commander while Tyler refers to her as lieutenant. There seems to be no love between the two. I have studied family crisis cases in psychology classes. And this is a clear case of father not respecting daughter, and daughter harboring intense resentment and reluctant submission. Tyler has this ultimate need to be in control at all times and it is hurting his relationship with his daughter. 

Appropriates and uses Syldrathi culture to his advantage despite knowing very little about the Syldrathi: After Tyler learns of his half-Syldrathi heritage, he is quick to use it as a way to sway others into doing this his way. This is a form of cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption without understanding the historical and cultural context. As Tyler has stated many times in the series, he knows little about Syldrathi culture and knows a few words in the Syldrathi language. In book 3, page 38, Tyler says: “I’m half-Syldrathi myself. And I know more about the true enemy than anyone.” Say what you will, but that is pretty ballsy to say in front of a group of Unbroken Syldrathi who have quite literally worked with the Starslayer. Saedii even being the daughter of the Starslayer. In theory, would not she know the tactics her own father would use? Tyler is using his newly found Syldrathi heritage as a way to get them to go with his idea, despite knowing little about the Syldrathi. I wonder, if Tyler had never learned about his half-Syldrathi heritage, what would he have resorted to get the others to listen to him? And why does he think he knows the ‘true enemy’ (the Starslayer) better than all of these Syldrathi warriors? Another note: The way the Syldrathi make prejudiced remarks to Tyler about being a “half breed” is not acceptable either. But this does not excuse Tyler from his actions. 

Conclusion: This took me a long time to write in a way that was informative and filled with facts based off of canon events. Throughout the story, despite showing some good traits, Tyler cannot seem to let his poor traits get the better of him. Despite thinking of himself as the “golden boy” that he refers to himself as in Book 1.

I hope that this does not offend you personally if you like this character. I just needed to share my academic insight on this character. 

Book 1, page 39: (Kaufman, 2019, p. 39)

Book 1, page 84: (Kaufman, 2019, p. 84)

Book 1, page 11: (Kaufman, 2019, p. 11)

Book 2, page 328: (Kaufman, 2020, p. 328) 

Book 3, page 38: (Kaufman, 2021, p. 38) 

Book 3, page 175: (Kaufman, 2021, p. 175)

[wheeler-things]

Henry Creel, Vampires, the Consumption of the Soul, and Will Byers with Powers

Oh look it’s time for yet another longwinded s5 Thinking Thoughts post with an off the rails ending. I feel like I’m getting predictable.

Well, anyway, I talked about this in the tags of a post that I reblogged at one point, but it's currently 20 minutes to midnight and I should either be sleeping or working on writing for the campaign I'm DMing in the new year, but instead all I can think about is Henry Creel and Will having powers and the way that Henry talks about his victims/how they appear in his mindscape. And, you know, also the fact that I've read all the currently available The Locked Tomb books and they left me scarred, and also altered my brain chemistry in such a way that once I thought about this possibility I couldn't stop thinking about it..

So, yeah. Time for me to talk about Henry Creel, and the way he talks about his victims, and I know I put this in the Byler tag, and I promise that's not just because of the target demo. I will eventually circle around to talking about Mike and Will in the context of this post in an unnecessarily angsty way.

But for now... Henry.

In s4e7, Henry tells El: "I could not do that. I could not close off my mind and join in the madness. I could not pretend. And I realized, I didn't have to. I could make my own rules. I could restore balance to a broken world. A predator... but for good. […] With each life I took, I grew stronger. More powerful. They were becoming a part of me. But I was still a child, and I did not yet know my limits. And it nearly killed me."

This monologue is, honestly, full of a bunch of really interesting things, and I'm can think of at least three posts that I currently have on the brain that I'm going to pick it apart for, but in terms of this specific post, I've bolded the bits I'll be focused on, and I'll be back to it in a bit.

Later in that scene, El looks to the dead bodies of the other lab kids, and Henry says: "They're not gone, Eleven. They're still with me. In here."

What I think is really important about this whole scene, right off the bat, is that Henry is not immediately hostile upon realizing that El has disobeyed him and left the closet. Regardless of whether you believe he had any amount of genuine affection for her or not, I think it's really important to note that the way in which Henry bonds with El/gains her trust is through teaching her things. He teaches her how to use her emotions in order to harness her powers more effectively. He teaches her to start questioning Brenner's motives. He teaches her about Sotaria (which also ties in with the previous thing). He teaches her how to escape the lab through the sewers (which I believe it's implied is how she got out of the lab in s1, though I'm not going back to check because I'm rewatching s1 for a different analysis and I don't want to lose my place). So the fact that he's still using his gentle voice with El here, and the fact that he's stopping to explain not only his motivations, but the fact that the people he kills are "not gone" and are "in here" [gestures to his head], suggests to me that he's attempting to teach her one last thing. Something that might make her okay with the fact that he just murdered a whole lab full of literally every person she's ever known save Kali and Brenner.

And this is so easy to dismiss as the ramblings of a mad man, or as him saying something to the effect of "I never forget any of the people that I kill". But I think it's a little dismissive to ignore what Henry says as simply the words of someone entirely disconnected from reality. Obviously, he is deluded. He talks about himself as though he is not also human, and he actively seems to want to kill everyone except possibly El and Will? But having delusions about his importance and identity and ideology is not the same thing as being deluded into believing something untrue about his powers/into falsely believing that his victims are kept alive inside him somehow. Moreover, although this last line in isolation could make sense in the context that he keeps the memories of his victims alive in his own mind, the rest of what he says does not line up with that. Nor does the fact that we see Chrissy's mangled body (and possibly some of the other victims, I'm so sorry I cannot remember-- but definitely at least one of the victims is seen in the mindscape) twisted into his mindscape.

So... now I'm going to go back to the earlier part of his speech and pick apart the bolded parts.

"I could make my own rules." The last time we heard that, it was El was saying it to Mike, in a misquote of Max's "we make our own rules". When Max was saying it, she was reassuring El that respinning the bottle was fine because, as the only two playing the game, they could make their own rules about what to do. However, when El uses it, it's because Mike has realized that she spied on him without his consent, and his offended response is to that "that's against the rules" (from context, it's difficult to know if this is a reference to rules that Hopper set out for her, or rules that she and Mike established together for their relationship-- the former isn't a great look for Mike, and the latter isn't a great look for El). El bites back, saying, "I make my own rules". When she says that, she is essentially saying "I have the ability to spy on you, so if I choose to do so, that's my prerogative" (let me just say: Mike did a lot of things wrong in s3, and he absolutely started the fight between him and El, but this specific action was not great of her). This parallels with Henry saying that he made his own rules, because when he says that, he seems to mean that he had the ability to read peoples' minds (and possibly more than that), and as such, it was his prerogative to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted, at any time. El is not the same as Henry (by any stretch of the imagination)... I just think this parallel is interesting (and also the contrast-- ultimately, El did what she did because she was having fun with a friend, which still isn't great because spying on people when they're supposed to be in private is not a good thing to do, but it's in an entirely different league from what Henry has done with similar power).

"A predator... but for good". So... the word "predator" has a lot of meanings, and I don't want to get too deeply into the conversations about whether Henry is or is not worthy of that title in the entirely too human sense, because it's far outside the scope of this post. However, we do know from the context of his monologue that when Henry talks about predators/apex predators, he's talking about spiders. That gives us context to know that when he calls himself a predator, it's likely that he means in the same way that a spider is a predator. Why are spiders predators? Because they hunt and kill other animals for food. The "for food" part of that is really important, because it's a key, defining factor in whether an animal is acting in a predatory way. However, predators are not inherently good or inherently evil. They are, by their nature as animals, inherently neutral. So, when Henry says that he could be "a predator... but for good", we know that he is essentially saying "a predator, like a spider... but with the human capacity to use that predatory status in order to enact what I believe to be good [which, in the context of Henry, means a complete disruption of "normal" human society] in the world".

"With each life I took, I grew stronger. More powerful. They were becoming a part of me." So... this is the line. This is the line that, to me, solidifies the idea that Henry's power grows specifically through the murders that he enacts. And that the people he kills in some way become part of him after death. It's exactly what he says and, although we have reason to doubt some of the other things that he says, this would be a very weird thing for him to lie about from an in-character POV, because it was never brought up as a possibility by anyone else, and weird for him to lie about from a narrative standpoint, because the characters don’t seem to really do anything with that information in s4 (nobody even suggests that Max could be inside Henry’s mind), so if it’s not literally true… why have him say that at all? Because if it isn’t meant literally… it’s a really odd line, and there would be other ways to phrase it if the implication was supposed to be “killing people made me feel stronger/improved my skills, and I metaphorically hold those I kill with me because remembering them gives me perverse glee”. Like, is it possible that’s what he means? Maybe. But personally I think the literal read makes more sense, because the metaphorical read doesn’t make sense in context of him trying to convince El to understand his perspective. Also, just, from a narrative standpoint, if it’s literally true, that opens up avenues to allow previously killed characters to make a re-appearance and, possibly puppeted or twisted by Henry’s mind, screw with the protagonists. Via the UD, Henry killed/directed to be killed: Barb (Nancy), Bob (Joyce or Will… lord if I have to watch Will face down Bob telling him that he killed him, I don’t know what I’ll do), possibly Max (Lucas and/or El), Eddie (Dustin), and technically also Will in s1 if they want to turn the Harry Potter allusions on their head and do a reverse horcrux situation where a sliver of Will’s soul is still in Henry and that’s what’s keeping them connected in which case hhhhhhh (Jonathan, Joyce, and Will could all have interesting reactions to this, but dear god if I have to watch Mike Wheeler face down a twisted, puppeted fragment of Will’s soul and suffer all the abuse Henry can use it to throw at him, and still look at it like s2 Mike looked at Will in the shed? I don’t even know what to say I’ll simply collapse I think??), and then obv if he kills anyone else that would add to the possible haunts. Like. You’ve got a character who can dip into people’s heads and the implication that he literally keeps his victims souls in his mind in some way… you could totally do some interesting stuff with having people meet their tortured and twisted dead loved ones is all I’m saying. Anyway, that’s a tangent. I just think it’s interesting.

So... anyway, in short, we know that Henry is willing to do whatever he wants in service of his own interests, just because he can, regardless of how others feel about it. We know that he considers himself a predator in the animal way (which implies the use of whatever you kill as food or at least a source of energy in some direct way), and that he believes he can specifically harness this predatory nature for his idea of "good". And we know that the people that Henry kills are, in some way, "part of" him, and that taking their lives makes him somehow "stronger" (presumably in his powers).

And... we also know that Henry has been compared to Dracula (or, more broadly, vampires in general via arguably the most famous vampire).

So... the connections to Dracula are pretty obvious on the surface. Scary undead/less dead than originally anticipated dude who was once human but now very much is not lives far away in a spooky old house, surrounded by spooky animals that Aren't Quite Right. And then there are all of the OTHER connections-- a protagonist named Jonathan who is very far away from the woman he loves, SO many letters (I say, thinking about Max's letters and El and Mike's letters and Mike and Will's copious lack of letters, and.... hhh), and a large group going to kill Dracula, including a young woman/girl who has been "marked" by him and, though they have found a rather simple way to keep him at bay from her, if he gets his way she will be killed and will join him forever... I'm just saying. The parallels are there.

But, also, I want to think about vampire myths more generally. Because vampires have a history which dates back at least as far as Mesopotamia (in various forms/in root forms, not necessarily by the name "vampire"/in any forms that are particularly similar to modern interpretations— being clear because I think vampire history/mythology through time is legitimately interesting and many cultures have vampire-like creatures but very few of them are literally called ‘vampires’ and… ugh I’m sorry I’ll get off topic if I let myself rant about this but these myths are so cool!!), so vampires have been a lot of things over time. But at least today, they're very associated with blood in popular culture (nosebleeds), they don't show up in mirrors (traditionally this was because mirrors had silver in them but something something the UD or at least the Mind Flayer doesn't like water, Henry says he holds up a mirror to everyone else... I don't know just interesting), they're associated with bats and wolves (demobats and demodogs), sometimes they're said to be able to turn into mist (the shadow monster?), and there are potential ties to the more general anxieties about blood born or sexually transmitted diseases/to incubus/succubus mythology (a little more abstract here, but this may tie into the way that Henry often appears in dreams/visions which prey on his victims' anxieties-- not to mention, for a show set in the 80s with a gay teen at the forefront, there are copiously no allusions to the AIDS crisis, despite the fact that we see Will being violently bullied for being gay, so, you know, if you take the UD as a metaphor for that reality— a topic so wildly outside the scope of this post that I cannot say more about it even though I actually think it’s a really interesting metaphor that seems to exist in the show— then, yeah, that's another metaphorical tie to blood born/sexually transmitted disease).

But there is also a potential connection between vampires as blood drinkers and the concept of blood as some sort of physical representation of life force/soul. They're not necessarily 1:1 on a spiritual/religious level, depending on your tradition, but it's pretty common to associate blood in some way with the soul. So, when a vampire drinks the blood of their victim, they are, on at least a metaphorical level, essentially consuming the soul of their victims (which gets into some interesting stuff with the common idea that a vampire does not have a soul, or that to become a vampire, one must not only have their blood consumed by a vampire, but must also consume that vampire's blood as well). So, if Henry is allegorically a vampire, and vampires drink something that is metaphorically like soul, and Henry's a predator whose victims make him stronger... hm.

All of which is to say, I think the show is telling us, through the vampire allusions and through the implications of everything he's said, that Henry in some way consumes the souls (or minds or life forces or potential futures or whatever) of his victims (thus making him a true predator who not only kills but also eats what he kills).

This seems to be what he's trying to teach El in that final conversation before she banishes him to the Upside Down, and the fact that she could not (or would not) understand what he was saying seems to have been the thing that turned him from trying to keep her on his side to deciding to attempt to kill her (or to simply make her watch as he kills and presumably consumes Max). And we know that El doesn't learn it, because we can clearly see that killing doesn't make her stronger, so she's clearly not consuming any of the people she's killing. She can mimic Henry's methods of killing people physically (we see this in s1, and that's highlighted when the military suspects that El's doing the murders in s4 because Henry's style is so similar to her own), but she can't or won't do whatever it is that he does to consume souls.

But this poses a problem, though.

Because, El's already had her training montage. She became stronger and went off to face the big bad, and she lost. Max died and Hawkins fell. That's a failure of the "love confession saves the world" trope, as people have discussed, but it's also a failure of the training montage trope! El is at her strongest, and she still cannot defeat Henry alone.

Which brings me to Will. I'm not going to get into all of the details which suggest that Will has powers of some sort, beyond his Henry-sensing abilities. Other people have done that, and there really isn't room for it here. However, what I would wonder is, even if Will discovers his powers at some point before the potential time skip... how is he going to be strong enough to (in tandem with El) defeat Henry, when an entire lab full of trained and superpowered kids weren't able to? Because Will is still a child, himself, and at best, he won't even know about his powers for more than about three years, presumably WITHOUT the intense level of training that El received from birth?

And... here's where I'm going to bring things back to something I've said in another post which is... this late in the game, if they're going to introduce any established protagonists besides El having powers, those powers are going to have to feel like a loss when they first appear/quickly after they appear. The character who has them has to be hurt by them, so they don't feel like a cheap win for the characters. Would it be sudden for Will to develop powers? No, not really. The clues have been there from s1. But they're also subtle enough that if you're not into ST analysis or prone to regularly rewatching the show, they're easy to miss, so a fair bit of s5 would have to be devoted to showing Will realizing that he has them and growing into using them in order for any use of them against Henry to feel earned. Incidentally, these are all the same things which are equally true for the establishment/on-screen development of Byler, so I wouldn’t be shocked if there was a connection there.

And this is where I'm about to go wildly off the rails, but... what if Will has powers and gets a power boost in the absolute worst way possible? Because, depending on how Henry consumes his victims (obviously just killing them isn't it, because that does nothing for El)... I mean. Mike has all those death flags going on (even though I highly doubt he'll end the show dead). I don't know.

I'm just saying... Mike's prone to self-sacrifice, if he thinks it will help the people he loves. I'm just saying, if he were already dying, and if they already knew that Henry has the advantage because he's consuming the souls of the people he kills(/absorbing them into his mindscape in some capacity that allows him to use them to fuel his own abilities), and if they knew that Will had similar powers but with less strength because he only had his own self to draw upon... I'm just saying, would Mike Wheeler do anything else, except beg Will to make his death mean something? Would he honestly trust anyone else enough to literally give everything that he is to them?

I'm just saying, it would be an absolute gut punch of a scene, it would tie back into Mike's s1 character issues of self-sacrifice, it would give narrative weight to what seems to be the fact that Henry in some way keeps or draws power from the people that he's killed. And it would be incredibly easy to write it in such a way that there's more power in a willing sacrifice/in a soul that is willingly with you/willing to work with your own than in a plethora of souls that you have trapped in your mental "web" in order to feast on. Something something gay love saves the day (plus, El's almost certainly going to figure out a way to put Max back into her own body at some point in s5, so it's not even like there wouldn't be a way for Mike to come back to life, as long as they managed to keep his body alive-- also because, as I said in the notes of the post where I first commented on this concept, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that they're ending the show with Will as Mike's devastated living mausoleum, like, it's just not happening that way).

So, uh. Yeah, that’s the thought that keeps spinning in circles around my head, and I hate it so much. I’m aware that this is an out there idea and almost certainly won’t come to pass, and frankly, I’m glad for that.

But the fact that it’s far fetched doesn’t mean that I can unsee the mental image of Mike/Will in a HtN Gideon/Harrow style situation where Mike and Will are both in Will’s head, and Mike, whenever he’s lucid, is begging Will to just finish the job, to consume him properly so Will and El/the Party can be even a step closer to defeating Henry, and meanwhile Will’s doing everything he can to avoid dousing the last bit of Mike he has left, especially when he still hopes to put Mike back in his body. Like. I know this won’t happen, but even the thought that there’s a 0.01% chance that it could has me shaking in my boots.

[miraculouscontent]

Alright, so apparently certain love square shippers felt the need to go into the Lukanette tag to celebrate/mock that Lukanette is “over” (Marinette broke up with him to keep him safe but go off I guess) and that officially crosses all my lines of not dealing with the fandom’s garbage.

The sheer pettiness is astounding to me, to take joy in the end of what was a lot of people’s comfort ship (people don’t choose comfort ships, by the way) because of “toxic Luka/Lukanette stans,” essentially lumping chunks of the fandom together and letting the opinion of those fans shape their own opinion on a character/ship. The sheer sensitivity on display to have so much spite and disdain for a ship that appeared in less than 10% of all episodes in the show. The sheer vindictiveness to feel smug and self-righteous while also being panicked over a non-endgame ship that’s as temporary as their claim of positivity and condemning of salt until they’re presented with something they don’t like.

Goliath really be beating up on David over here because he's bigger and thinks his opinion is more valid. For the record, no, opinions are not more valid due to shipping an endgame ship or presenting oneself as a beacon of positivity.

And it just goes to show how ship-blind these people are, to care about nothing more than the fact that Lukanette has broken up. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve seen people who openly admit to caring more about the love square’s security than Marinette’s happiness, which is just part of the issue here.

These people did not care how Lukanette broke up, only that it happened. Marinette’s crush backpedaling (because of the show feeling the need to cater to these exact people, who are so worried about their obviously endgame ship being “in danger”) and Marinette ending the episode in literal tears because she wanted to date Luka but couldn’t are both things that didn’t matter to them because it’s all about their ship in the end. Marinette’s life has been made more and more miserable due to her crush on Adrien while straining her relationships with various characters (see: Alya’s claim of jealousy as a reason for why Marinette “must be lying” about Lila), but so long as these people feel secure in their endgame ship, that’s all that matters.

They didn’t care if it was a clean break where both sides came out satisfied (or at least content). If anything, they wanted Lukanette to end as shoddily/dirtily as possible with zero care into how it affected Marinette, whether because they just don’t like the ship or because they actively desire for the suffering of the people who found comfort/happiness in the ship. Adrien had literally nothing to do with the break-up itself and him being mentioned served nothing for the story, but it’ll be completely overlooked or outright praised because god forbid Marinette spend an episode not talking about Adrien since that would imply that her life doesn’t revolve around him and that would be an apparent detriment to the love square.

By the way, newsflash: Luka was not an obstacle to the love square. He sent Marinette away in “Frozer” to go talk to Adrien. He told her that there was no pressure and that he’d be happy for her no matter what. Had Luka not existed, the love square would still be as stagnant as it is now, and it’s pathetic to complain about Marinette liking/dating another boy when she’s not only allowed to do so, but when “Oblivio” and “Chat Blanc” both exist as little more than tools to hold the supposedly “starved” love square shippers over.

These are the same people who will say they dislike/hate Luka, then do a 180 and claim that they “just feel so bad for him” and how he “deserves better than Marinette” (the sudden sympathy of which conveniently serves to hate on a ship that interferes with their own, further proven by equally convenient and appreciation/liking of Luka when he’s not a “threat” to the love square) while simultaneously shipping her with their sunshine boy because Ladybug is who Adrien wants and what Adrien wants is what matters.

These are the same people who will say that Luka is unnecessary and unneeded, then use him as a prop and stepping stone for love square fanfics and fanart, or suggest that Kagami is fine because she makes Adrien feel good about himself (when Luka does the same for Marinette but sure).

These are the same people who say that “Marinette can’t date Luka because she’s busy with hero stuff” while making fics about the love square getting together mid-”hero stuff” and then giving complete radio silence during “Chat Blanc” outside of how good they thought the episode was.

These are the same people who will tell others not to denounce Adrien for “a few mistakes” and then preemptively denounce Luka’s behavior based on a written synopsis for an episode that hadn’t even come out yet (and also after complaining that Luka was “too perfect,” I might add).

These are the same people who will say that Luka/Lukanette makes them feel “uncomfortable” (usually without offering any tangible reasons or being vague about Luka giving off “bad vibes” when he’s done nothing less than support and respect Marinette's agency) while the show’s endgame ship features the “m’lady” hand kissing Chat Noir who Ladybug has pulled away from multiple times yet he keeps persisting (which is apparently considered okay because Adrien is Chat Noir as if that discredits her discomfort/disdain for the gestures).

These are the same people who will say that Luka is “barely there” or “hardly exists” and then complain about how much screentime is dedicated to Lukanette, the utter greed on display going right over their heads when they have the actual endgame ship.

These are the same people who will absolutely reach for anything about Luka to complain about (again, after saying that he’s “too perfect,” then claiming he “tricked” Marinette into kissing him, claiming that he tried to force her into telling him her secret, or criticizing him for teasing her for her stuttering despite him immediately apologizing) and then either defend or turn a blind eye to Chat Noir (who tried to kiss her mid-battle instead of helping, made Ladybug feel bad for keeping secrets that weren’t hers to tell plus threatening his kwami that he’d quit if he didn’t get let in on said secrets, and mocked her instead of apologizing when she told him to stop calling her by a nickname she doesn’t like and has told him before to stop calling her) at every opportunity.

These are the same people who will say that Lukanette is “forced,” then proceed to ship Luka (regardless of if they like him or not) with literally anyone else for the sake of taking him out of the romance equation (because he has to be taken out via already dating as they couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason for Marinette to not want him otherwise), and the only requirement for this person he’s shipped with is that they breathe and aren’t Marinette.

These are the same people who act bothered by Marinette “””treating Luka poorly””” because of her crush on Adrien (by the by, Adrien’s crush on Ladybug has hurt Kagami as well), inadvertently admitting that Marinette’s crush is a problem, then continue shipping her with Adrien in its canon form anyway.

These are the same people who will say that they hate salt fics (specifically ones that target Adrien) and how they “bash characters,” then write fanfics or draw fanart that intentionally make Luka out of character for the sake of having him look bad or giving Marinette an excuse to run to Adrien (because Luka apparently needs to be made worse so that Adrien can look good instead of Adrien being able to stand on his own merits as a good love interest for Marinette).

These are the same people who will slam Luka when he’s Marinette’s support, then go off and ship him with other characters so that he can support them instead (fun fact that this is usually either Adrien - thus leaving Marinette completely alone and miserable when Luka canonically likes her - or characters that Marinette is actively against, such as Chloe or Lila).

These are the same people who will complain about how salty the fandom is (even when the salt is for catharsis/getting out anger from an episode in a productive way) and then laugh when a simple side ship ends because they’ve been letting said ship live rent free in their heads and couldn’t stop anticipating the episode that declares them “over.”

These are the same people who tell or suggest that people should “just leave” if they don’t like the main ship, unapologetically implying that the main ship is either all the show is about, all that they personally care about (bringing us right back to that little “not caring how torn apart Marinette is about the break-up” thing), or that people aren’t allowed to watch/like the show for other reasons (like Marinette herself, the miraculouses, other characters who may appear intermittently but nevertheless bring them joy to see, etcetera).

These are the same people who get on other people’s case for being spiteful while they themselves ride their high horse into the sunset, playing victim when people call them out for intentionally provoking others or purposefully mistagging to avoid people’s blacklist (tagging is not for the comfort of the tagger so they can “””avoid the toxic stans,””” for the record; it’s for the comfort of the people who don’t want to see that content).

And these are the same people who will go on and on about the toxicity of the stans who ship something they don’t like and then either ignore or downplay the stans who ship what they do like because they personally don’t have to experience it. This isn’t even about ship wars, it’s about the hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness.

I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear about how cruel the Luka fans or Lukanette shippers are when these people are celebrating Marinette’s misery because it means the end of a ship that they don’t like and certain people find comfort in. I don’t want to hear about people cross-tagging/mistagging when the Luka/Lukanette tag has been flooded with people who talk trash about the ship without any additional tags to filter it away, getting so bad to the point where some Luka/Lukanette fans had to find workarounds and/or avoid the tag entirely. I don’t want to hear about how certain shippers are worse because [x] [y] [z] when everyone has different experiences, showing a severe case of close-mindedness or at least ignorance on these people’s parts.

And, with how this season is heading, if something bad happens to the love square by the end of Season 4, I most definitely do not want to hear these same people decry the people who will do the exact thing that they’re doing now.

[ectonurites]

hey! how knowledgeable are you on stephanie brown? because i got in a bit of an argument with a dc fan on reddit who claims she's all these awful things, but im still relatively new to steph and i want to see what was true and what wasn't. link to screenie right here: https://ibb.co/vh6CYCJ

these may be matters of opinion, but even then, i'd like to know your take. i haven't read her firsthand often enough and i trust your judgement over this random redditor who seems to have some sort of blonde-woman related trauma left untapped.

I'm not necessarily the most knowledgable on her in the world, but I do know a decent amount because she's one of my absolute faves and I love her

But ohhhh boy that screenshot is a lot.

I will say that several of the things this person brings up are based in canon but are taken in the worst faith and framed in the way that makes her look as bad as possible, if that makes sense? It’s ripping things away from any context, because there's a very clear bias against her here.

I'll go through it point by point under the cut

First of all though before digging into this, I want to make it clear she was a 15 year old for the majority of the things this person is talking about. Like just pause for a second and remember she’s a 15 year old victim of abuse. That is something that I think factors into a lot of her behavior! Anyways, I kinda while doing this got into a ranty 'talking at you' format in response to the person who wrote all that, so don't take any of this as me yelling at you who asked the question/you anyone reading this.

"She always acted entitled" - Saying Steph is entitled is absolutely ridiculous to me. Stephanie grew up with a very unstable childhood due to her dad frequently being in prison and her mom dealing with a drug addiction, living in a lower class part of the city. Tim is entitled. I don’t mean that as like a bad thing about him, but he is based on his living situation, she is not. She has wanted life to be better for herself and her mom, and is determined about that, but she is not and does not act entitled.

(Secret Origins 80 Page Giant)

"and stubborn" - I will give you stubborn though, that one is true. She’s stubborn as hell! I don’t really see that as a bad thing though, pretty much every bat is stubborn?

"demanding that Batman and Robin accept her untrained ass" - Steph may have been untrained in fighting but she's shown to have exceptional gymnastics skills from the start, and at one point Bruce even says that with the right training she could be as good if not better than Tim (in Robin #88)! So like... her realizing she enjoys trying to be a hero after she tried it out to deal with her personal business, so she looks to the local experts… and is determined about it… how is that a bad thing? It’s also not like she walked up to them and said ‘im perfect as i am let me in’ what she wanted was a chance to be a hero. But she also wasn't even really looking for approval, either, not having Batman's blessing was never going to stop her. ("So excuse me if I don't jump when you bark, Batman." in Robin #16) Later when Bruce does bring her in to train (and she also gets to train with the BoP) she's excited! She’s stubborn about wanting to be in the hero business, but it’s not like she’s unwilling to work for it.

"advocating leaving criminals to die because they 'deserve it'" - She’s a 15 year old who grew up knowing firsthand how dangerous Gotham criminals can be because of her dad, of course off the bat when they’re in a dangerous situation where any of them could die (because that’s the context here, this is in Robin #35 where they’re trapped in some super dangerous snow) she thinks they shouldn’t go back for another criminal who just tried to kill them and should instead save themselves. But she also literally WITHIN THAT SAME ISSUE then says she realized she learned something after listening to Tim and trying to save the guy! In the same issue! Characters in a story aren’t supposed to be perfect from the start… they learn things along the way???

(Robin #35)

"trying to steal from the shops they just stopped from being burglarized" - She’s 15 and doesn’t have a ton of money. She was gonna take two sodas, and when Tim said not to do it she paid with very little fuss. They stopped people who were robbing the place at gunpoint for prescription drugs. If you can’t understand the difference in severity between those things like… I do not even know where to start. (this situation is in Robin #56 btw)

"forcing physical affection onto Tim despite his visible discomfort and repeated objections (not even stopping when he told her he had a girlfriend)" - This one I will give you because she did cross boundaries with all that! But I do also want to clarify that she didn't start coming onto him until after Tim kissed her first (in Robin #5) while not telling her he had a girlfriend. That doesn’t excuse her later actions but for the first issue that she’s coming onto him from her perspective he expressed interest and she was just returning it! She even specifically says 'Maybe I should pay you back for saving my life the same way you paid me' (in Robin #16) before kissing him. That first time she kissed him unprompted was under essentially the same circumstances he kissed her unprompted, and she literally did not know about Ariana until after the fact. From that point once she knew about Ari she definitely should have backed off and she didn’t, that’s a very fair thing to criticize about her as a character. But Tim lead her on first, and I feel a lot of people like to casually forget that when talking about this situation. The way this is phrased of ‘not even stopping when he told her-‘ implies she was repeatedly doing the bad behavior before he told her, which is not the case. She still did bad things here but don’t misrepresent the situation.

"And lashing out at Tim, her mother, and her classmates in violent fits of anger" - Every comic book character lashes out at other people for the sake of drama like, I dare you to come up with a well-known superhero character who hasn’t done shit like that to a partner/family/friends in a moment of high tension/stress?

"She treated the girls around her like they were stupid bitches" - frankly this ones a little too vague like, I'm not sure off the top of my head exactly what they're talking about? in that era right around her pregnancy and stuff I really don't recall her being mean with other girls? I could be forgetting something I guess but the closest I can think of is a bit after this period of time when she has the confrontation with Greta in Young Justice but that was Greta attacking her first, not the other way around.

"got insanely jealous if Tim so much as expressed concern about another girl" - Steph getting jealous and thinking Tim was cheating isn’t that crazy when STEPHANIE BASICALLY WAS THE OTHER GIRL DURING TIM’S LAST RELATIONSHIP? Tim has cheated a little bit before! Tim cheated on Ari with both Jubilee from Marvel (during a crossover thing where he even mentions Ari specifically so it’s not like this was out of continuity/a setting she wasn't an issue or something) and also with Steph. While most of the kissing between them was Steph coming onto Tim which I wouldn’t count as cheating on his end, he did still kiss her which I would count. Not to mention that the jealousy thing (I imagine they’re talking about the instance with Star, the girl who taught Tim to skateboard, this arc of stuff starts in Robin #80 and continues for a few issues) is happening during the time she’s dating him while she still doesn’t even know his real name. He literally has a whole other life she doesn’t know about, and is someone who has initiated romantic moments with other girls while in a relationship multiple times before! With that in mind I don’t think a 16 (she's def 16 by this point) year old girl being kinda paranoid about how he interacts with girls he might know in his civilian life is that unreasonable? The later big instance with jealousy is the Darla situation- where Steph sees Darla kiss him and gets mad about it (and doesn’t talk to him about it) and thats what prompts her to become Robin. The important thing to remember about Steph in this time frame is that DC decided she had to die and they wanted to make her Robin first to drum up more attention for that death. They were doing ooc things with her to set those pieces in motion, and that needs to be taken into account. I think her getting upset about seeing something like that isn’t even ooc, but her using it as motivation to become Robin and not even saying anything to him about it is. In the earlier instance where she’s upset/jealous about Star, she does communicate to him what’s going on at least a little bit on the rooftop after they’d saved her. She makes it clear the thing she was upset about is that she feels like she can’t trust him because she doesn’t really know him while he knows everything about her, and that’s why she thinks he’s cheating. Her reaction to the Darla thing is not in line with how earlier in canon Steph would have handled the same situation, because they wanted her to die and needed a way to explain her becoming Robin.

"and expressed that jealousy by accusing him of cheating and throwing things at him" - I just addressed the cheating stuff but the throwing things was fucking slapstick oh my god this is a comic book for kids/teens like. ah yes this is horrible abuse in this little funny montage of how Steph wants him to leave her alone because she’s mad at him and he refuses to give her space

(Robin #82)

I don’t think anyone at DC or even in fandom would/should try to argue she’s perfect, because she’s not! And I don’t want her to be because perfect characters are boring. Steph is flawed, Steph has been compared in canon to Robin-era Jason by Cass & Bruce

(Detective Comics #790)

And I think these highlight some of her very real flaws that are an interesting part of her character. These plus her stubbornness and determination are part of what makes her her.

And for fuck's sake the world was mean to her, and to act like it wasn’t is just blatantly ignoring a lot. A criminal father who made her life really difficult (‘when my dad was mad at me he’d lock me in the closet!’), that time she got kidnapped for two weeks and her mom had left her (a 15 year old) alone at home so long she didn't even find out it happened (in text Steph says Crystal was visiting friends, a lot of people interpret that as her mom possibly being in rehab for her addictions again), that whole thing about how one of her dad’s friends tried to sexually assault her as a child, also just how due to her dad's work sometimes criminals would be living in their house (Literally the fucking Riddler at one point!), the fact that we as an audience watched her get tortured for several days because a plan she tried to enact to prove herself backfired since Batman didn’t trust her with important information (something Selina even calls him out on in her internal narration), like… sorry but in what way is all that not the world being mean to her?

She was Robin, she dated Robin, she likes Eggplant (because purple would've looked stupid), and makes jokes. She’s also impulsive, headstrong and determined, and wants to prove to herself and others that she can be more than just the daughter of a shitty criminal, that she can actually be a force to do good in the world.

She’s a complex character, and nobody is required to like her, but to act like she doesn’t have a single redeeming trait is ridiculous. You could write a paragraph like that with the worst moments of basically any character and make them look like shit if that's what you were setting out to do.

[sou-ver-2-0]

What “things” did Shin learn at Sou’s house?

There are scenes in YTTD that are explicitly gruesome and violent, but the scene in Chapter 3 where Shin AI describes his abusive relationship with Original Sou is disturbing in its subtlety. Shin AI seems aware that their relationship has problems, but he still calls Sou a friend, much to the distress of either Kanna or the living Shin. One of the lines that has haunted me since I first heard it was Shin AI’s enigmatic statement, “Who he really is… I really, truly know nothing… Though I learned a lot of things at his house.”

I wanted to write a piece analyzing Shin and Sou’s relationship based on this line. In this post, I’ll make references to different types of abusive relationships, but I won’t claim anything specific for them since the nature of their friendship is deliberately open-ended. I think this line is vague enough to both mean everything and nothing. Perhaps we aren’t meant to read too deeply into it, but…It was a line that affected me deeply, so I wanted to share my own views.

Keiji makes a neutral observation after hearing this statement: “You had a long acquaintance, huh?” He deduces that if Shin frequently visited Sou’s house, they must have known each other for a long time. That’s the only concrete information we can gather from this line. However, Shin AI’s emphasis on “learning things” is intriguing; it implies that Shin gained some knowledge or wisdom from visiting Sou. It implies that this relationship changed Shin somehow. But Shin AI won’t elaborate on what he learned; he probably presumes that his lessons are irrelevant to the Death Game.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized you could interpret this statement innocuously. For example, perhaps Sou had special Asu-Naro technology at his house, which could have inspired Shin’s interest in computers. That would be a positive takeaway for Shin from his relationship with Sou. I think that’s an entirely reasonable theory, and I’m sorry for not realizing that sooner, because it led to me misunderstanding a well-meaning Anon.

For me… This line has always felt sinister. It’s situated in the middle of a disturbing scene. We’re finally learning about the pivotal abusive relationship of Shin’s past, even if only sketched in the vaguest details. I assumed that the “things” Shin learned were specifically related to Sou’s abuse of him.

When I discussed this line with my sister, she said that the line reminded her of Little Red Riding Hood’s song, “I Know Things Now,” from the musical Into the Woods. I thought that was an excellent reference, and it dovetails with my thought process about the line, so I’ll share the most relevant lyrics:

“And he showed me things

Many beautiful things,

That I hadn't thought to explore.

They were off my path,

So I never had dared.

I had been so careful,

I never had cared.

And he made me feel excited-

Well, excited and scared.”

[Image description: Shin AI says, “He’s…a scary friend of mine…”]

“When he said, "Come in!"

With that sickening grin,

How could I know what was in store?

Once his teeth were bared,

Though, I really got scared-

Well, excited and scared-”

[Image description: The Living Shin says, “Dammit, how sickening… Seriously…” when he sees the Shin AI in Midori’s office.]

“And I know things now,

Many valuable things,

That I hadn't known before:

Do not put your faith

In a cape and a hood,

They will not protect you

The way that they should.”

[Image description: Shin still clings to his brightly colored scarf, as if it can protect him.]

“And take extra care with strangers,

Even flowers have their dangers.

And though scary is exciting,

Nice is different than good.”

[Image Description: Shin in the First Main Game asks the group, “Don’t you doubt when others are kind?”]

Little Red Riding Hood’s song parallels Shin’s dialogue in revealing ways. The lyrics’ repetition of the vague word “things” hammers it in how difficult it is for a victim to describe their abuse. “Things” can cover all manner of sins, can’t it? The song itself has a subtext of sexual abuse, while the fairytale literally tells a story about a wolf who manipulates and eats a little girl. Meanwhile, we still don’t know exactly how Sou harmed Shin, beyond that Sou enjoyed provoking fearful reactions in him. I think the vagueness of their relationship makes it easy for the player to project their own fearful nightmares onto Sou. In a similar way, the player can relate to Sara’s love for Joe by projecting their feelings for their own loved ones onto him. This is especially true after Joe’s death, since his presence becomes fuzzier. Even though I’m interested in learning more details about Sou and Shin’s relationship, I appreciate how the word “things” is horrifying by leaving the worst to your imagination.

Little Red Riding Hood’s description of the Wolf as “scary and exciting” also parallels Shin’s description of Sou as “a scary friend of mine.” If Shin believed that Sou was “exciting,” that would help explain why Shin was still drawn to this person who wanted to hurt him.

The phrase “sickening grin” also stood out to me. Not only does Living Shin use the word “sickening” to describe Midori’s behavior, but “sickening grin” is an appropriate descriptor of Midori’s constant smiles. He is someone who puts on a friendly face to hide malicious intent.

I also liked the song’s reference to “putting your faith in a cape and hood” as if those clothes could “protect” you. Little Red Riding Hood learned that that her brightly colored clothes could not protect her when it really mattered. It reminded me of how Shin in the game is always clinging to his brightly colored scarf, as if it can protect him from the Death Game. Shin ought to know better as the song lyrics say, but he clings to the scarf anyway like a security blanket.

Finally, I wanted to discuss the song’s parting lesson, “Nice is different than good.” This moral reminded me of the lessons Shin continually imparts to the group throughout the story. Shin warns you not to trust people just because they’re nice. “Nice” people have the potential to be the most dangerous once they’ve gained your trust. Shin gives two dramatic speeches on this topic; the first quote comes from the First Main Game, and the second quote comes from the Massacre Ending.

“Ahahahaha! Amazing, miss Sara. You're a prodigy at seizing people's hearts! Shameful, the rest of you. The riffraff. Don't you value your lives? Don't you doubt when others are kind? Do you not even have brains to think for yourself? Death is just a matter of time for you! That's the way weaklings live! Hahahaha!”

“This is... reality, Keiji. The strong will tell you... "I'm your ally"... "Don't be afraid, trust me"... And in the end, they'll betray you!! At the convenience and whims of the strong...! The weak will die!! Well? Learned a little something about how uneasy a weakling always feels...?”

It’s easy to apply these quotes to Shin’s own experiences as a “weakling” who was betrayed by a “strong” friend.

When the Shin AI said that he “learned a lot of things” from Sou, I assumed that the “things” were these painful lessons Shin references throughout the story. Even without knowing the full details about Shin’s experiences, we understand the wounds Sou’s abuse left on his heart. We already know what the relationship taught him. It taught him to not trust others. It taught him that strong people will act “kind” until protecting weaklings becomes “inconvenient,” and there is nothing that weaklings can do about that. That’s “reality.”

As I’ve said, I’m not sure how deeply we’re meant to read into this line. And perhaps Shin learned plot-relevant things at Sou’s house too. (Personally, I’m betting that he at least got his key necklace there, but that’s just a theory.) But it was still a line that moved my heart for how these vague “things” could refer to the very lessons Shin has been trying to impart from the beginning.

[cybernaght]

Guardian rewatch: Episode 3

First of all, wow. When I decided to post those online, I was expecting that they would be read by two people, both of whom I personally know. It was in equal part surprising and terrifying that so many of you ventured here. Thank you for reading, I really appreciate it. 

Episode 3 is probably my favourite case. It’s not perfectly strung together, there is little actual investigative work in it, but it’s a beautiful story of boundless love and devotion, which echoes through the relationship between our protagonists

Professor Shen is looking at some materials that are looking suspiciously like research into something supernatural, when Zhang Ruonan makes an appearance at his office, claiming that she is absolutely fine, while clearly being very far away from fine. This is something Shen Wei can certainly relate to, because he is the king of hiding his ailments from others. 

Zhu Hong’s one-sided affection for Zhao Yunlan starts to show already in this episode:  while he has the cold, she nags him to take care of himself, shoves tissues into his hands, and presses him to drink his meds. It’s easy to imagine even this early on that she will be the woman drunk dialling him one day. 

I know this could be seen as straightbaiting, but I honestly thing that the actual purpose it serves in the show is the opposite; I’ll talk more about it when we get there.

Zhao Yunlan spends a lot of this episode in Shen Wei’s office, starting with this scene, in which is obviously flexing. Not only does he sneeze all over the office, he goes to eat Shen Wei’s cake after specifically being told not to eat it.  He also takes his opportunity to mix questioning with flirting, as is his usual way. He keeps eye contact while spooning cake into his mouth, as he explains, jovially, that another mysterious death on his campus cannot possibly be a coincidence. And, to be fair, he is not really wrong. We are meant to believe that this is all set in motion by Zhu Jiu, aka the least scary villain in the history of villainy, and an owner of your staple baby goth wig. I will not mention him again until the plot makes it impossible for me not to do so. 

Zhang Ruonan comes in, and Zhao Yunlan introduces himself as Shen Wei’s good friend. Which is half-way between a flex and an act of kindness. On one hand, he could have said he was from the police - which would be absolutely true - and risk tarnishing the professor’s good name. On the other hand, he could probably look less pleased with himself. Shen Wei, at the very least, looks neither grateful, nor amused. 

Zhao Yunlan asks her if she new the victim and she looks incredibly shifty as she flees. He is right to think that something is up, and he correctly assumes trauma, rather than guilt. We can now start to see that he is very very good at reading people. It must be equal parts thrilling and disconcerting for him to have met something who he decisively cannot read. Shen Wei vouches for the woman, partly, surely, because his Hei Pao Shi sense is tingling, letting him know that someone is eavesdropping. 

Despite feeling uneasy, Shen Wei still offers Guo Changcheng, who is left to collect various paperwork from his desk, a little smile. He has a reason to like Xiao Guo, of course: he was the one to see the young man’s kindness and understanding, and he is already growing protective of him, way before he will start seeing members of the special unit as his people. This reminds me of how many months later, he will subtly, but decisively stop a barrage of verbal abuse against Xiao Guo by dropping a pair of chopsticks. 

Zhao Yunlan is taking Xiao Guo with him on the case rather than anyone else, partly, supposedly, because of Guo Changcheng’s familial connections. The young man looks more sure of himself, asking correct questions, dutifully records answers. He also tries to look after his Chief by asking him to go home and rest. He does phrase it badly, but Zhao Yunlan has a thing against his own health and well-being, so he reacts extra poorly.

Soon after, Zhao Yunlan’s at Shen Wei’s office yet again, as Shen Wei tries his best to ignore him, in the hope that he… well, maybe not goes away, but does not ask him anything that will require him lying. Instead, Zhao Yunlan is asking Shen Wei why he is bad at reading people, which is a very strange thing to ask. Shen Wei answers his question with a question, “Will seeing through people really lessen the hurt and disappointment?” Adding, “Many tragedies were destined from the beginning”. He looks well.. like this as he says it. 

This is loaded. On first glance, it’s a pretty good set-up to the way this story will unfold, as a tragedy of two individuals who let their devotion to each other nearly ruin each other’s life. A fragile human and a dangerous powered Undergroundian: what else is that, but a tragedy, waiting to happen? But this story - this one right in front of us - will not end tragically, at least not for the two people it enters around. It could do so, but it will not. Maybe, this truly is the first hint that this entire narrative, so carefully set up from the very first time Zhao Yunlan and Shen Wei meet, is destined to be a tragedy. Moreover, that it must be one, for some cosmic reason. 

(… I apologise while I go have a little cry in the corner. Damn you, Guardian, why do you make me hurt so much?)

Da Qing inexplicably morphs from black cat to a human in white t-shirt while doing night shadowing, and promptly falls asleep on patrol. Why is he being sent to stake anyone out? He is least suitable for it.  He is literally a cat. He sleeps 16 hours a day. 

Surprisingly, when pressed, Zhang Ruonan comes clean very easily, revealing that she was a victim of the three students she failed (two of which are already dead and one one standing right next to them), who lured her out at night, which left her vulnerable to be attacked. Zhao Yunlan listens to this story, and instead of… oh I don’t know, perhaps asking her the identity of the third student, leaves to go find that out for himself. It is heavily implied that he does it on purpose, which is definitely not okay.  

Moreover, he goes and... asks Shen Wei. This makes me suspect that he’s not really thinking with his head at this point. As he does so, he is brandishing a letter opener. 

Shen Wei is looking even less impressed with him than he did during their last few conversations. 

Zhao Yunlan is a little bit flippant when it comes to students’ lives this episode. And yes, they have done something really quite horrible to another human being, but that's not a very good excuse to let the last of them just die. As it happens, the situation Yunlan created - perhaps on purpose - did lure out Zhao Ruonan’s murder girlfriend, but it also cost a student his life. Which is far from ideal, but is somehow never even mentioned. Instead of being aghast, he sits on the table as he goes into full interrogation mode. (As he will continue to do a lot. Sometimes he crouches on tables instead. There is no further point here, apart from: I like this character quirk. It’s a nice character quirk.)

He brings some of his team in at this point, and asks Zhu Hong to continue interrogation. It would be a nice gesture is he did not interject two questions in. 

“How do you regard your relationship with Wang Yike?”

“We are family.”

They are definitely, decisively not going for sisterly bond here. Which is kind of incredible. This is one of the moments the amorphous being that show is looks at the censors, wiggles its battered low budget eyebrows at them, and then proceeds to flip them off. Well done, Guardian. 

Wang Yike calls Zhang Ruonan, saying there is one more victim she needs to take care of, and Lin Jing traces the call back to campus. Zhao Yunlan, who did not even bat an eyelid at a dead student earlier, now looks decisively worried  

“Oh no. Professor Shen.” 

The only reason Shen Wei is attacked is jealousy. Wang Yike does not know this of course, but trying to kill him is a bad move, because a) he has long ago given his heart away, and is definitely not interested; b) this is probably the only thing she could do to make the man on the case very very upset; c) Shen Wei’s immune to her powers. 

“Someone like you will never understand what she means to me!” Wang Yike shouts eventually. “As long as I can protect her, my life has worth!” And, even as Wang Yike has no way of knowing it, these are the words that ultimately save both her and her loved one. Because Shen Wei does in fact understand what Zhang Ruonan means to her. His own endless and ultimately self-destructive devotion is his main driving force.

Shen Wei pretends to be hurt, again, which earns him a half-hug from the object of his devotion. If Zhao Yunlan does notice that Shen Wei should really come out of this attack grey haired and dead, and not just mildly inconvenienced, he chooses not to say anything. 

Worried about her murder girlfriend, Zhang Ruonan rushes in and accidentally touches her. Zhao Yunlan Freaks The Hell Out. Shen Wei does, too, but in his own, reserved, way. They are both emotionally invested in those two people, although for very different reasons: Shen Wei is acutely feeling resonance of his own past in their story, and Zhao Yunlan, I think, wants to fix it, he wants to be able to make it better. Instead, Shen Wei fixes it for him, turning the tide on this tragedy, and giving it a happy ending. He heals Zhang Ruonan right in front of the officers of SID, albeit with much subtlety. (“Have someone saved her right under our noses?” Zhu Hong will snort the very same evening, and she will be 100% correct.)

Shen Wei also lets Wang Yike go despite the undeniable fact that she did kill three people. Here, he is looking at the picture of this human/Undergroundian couple, surviving despite all odds, and touches his only reminder that Kunlun really was in his life. 

He then burns the picture as the only evidence that Wang Yike was not punished by him for her crimes. 

In the end, Guo Chengcheng is making first of his many diary notes about the events, recounting a conversation between Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan we had not witnessed, in which Shen Wei mentioned a relationship based on devotion that can last a thousand years, and Zhao Yunlan called such a relationship “guarding”. Finally, Guo Changcheng hopes that he can become a guardian of all. 

And this is making me think that this absolutely should be a set-up for him becoming a wick of the guardian lantern, as per every single other decision that was made prior to the last two episodes. Right? This is a perfect foreshadowing, and mentioning it here, so early in the show would not make any sense if it were a deliberate subversion. So, was Guo Changcheng meant to become the wick after all before... what, some rewrites happened? What made the final episode be what it was in the end?

(This is a genuine question by that way, if anyone has any insight on the matter.)

The episode would end here, if this was a western show, with a familiar monster of the week structure, but it does not. At least, the way it ends is reminiscent of a cliffhanger, with Zhao Yunlan catching Shen Wei in a middle of a crime scene, and looking betrayed. 

Next episode: Lynchian Nightmare, aka people without faces. 

PS.

I did not have a seamless way to stick this in anywhere but... Shen Wei’s technological ineptness at the max: he does not know how to use a Polaroid camera. Help him, he is so lost.

——

Second point of housekeeping to say a few things: 

I don’t think I will be consistent with certain things being transliterated versus translated. I am more likely to use Hei Pao Shi rather than Black Cloak Envoy (because the later reminds me of Tuxedo Mask, which makes me inwardly giggle every time) but at the same time I am also more likely to use Underground/Undergroundian rather than Dixing/Dixingren. I am more likely to use Xiao rather than Little, but have called Chu Old rather than Lao before. I hope that’s not grating, but do tell me if it is

My recaps are Shen Wei-heavy. I have no real explanation for this, apart from.. I like Shen Wei. 

I realise that there will definitely be things here that are head canon and speculation rather than flat observations; this show is a work of fiction and a work of art, which cannot be interpreted objectively. If you have alternate takes on anything I write in the future, let me know! 

[think-thonkin]

Different kind of grief

Have you ever experienced a friendship or relationship breaking apart so terribly and irreparably that you grieve it like you'd grieve for a recently deceased loved one?

Like you don't even grieve the person, but the companionship, the late night talks that exposed questions about existence and deeply hidden feelings coming into star-brightened darkness, the occasional laughing fits, the warm smiles, the content silences...

She was the last one I had. In person I mean. I cherish and appreciate my online friends with a soul-crushing passion, but the in-person companionship I crave is a kind of void that they just cannot fulfill, not anytime soon at least.

We were unhappy even before our relationship changed labels, I think. We didn't have much in common anymore, after (then) 15 years of having been friends, our interests and expectations in life and romance had drifted apart instead of closer together and it should have been the first sign that turning our relationship into a romantic one was a terrible idea.

I was unhappy, I ended up being the initiator of practically everything, be it touch or conversation or addressing problems. It was always me that stepped forward, and the lines between platonic and romantic felt like a blurry and dangerous path to tread on without her telling me what is too far and what isn't, so sticking to small displays of affection like occasionally holding hands and a few gentle kisses to the cheek or forehead were the most bravery I could muster and the most I received in turn. I was touchstarved and desperately craving physical proximity, in part to battle my internalized self hatred that told me I was undesirable and only her last resort choice after 3 failed relationships of her own.

One time she exploded on me, her years worth of bottled up frustration and anger at the world bubbling up over a relatively small situation via text, intentionally twisting my words to be angry with me and vent more of her tension. She apologized later, but the panic attack I had that day would stick with me for far longer still.

I would start noticing when she lied about her feelings.

The way I recognized her typing style shift, her voice grow meek, the sudden increase of time required to form responses. Seeing the signs was easy, but discerning the cause was always about as clear to me as milk.

I was taught that honesty and communication were key in maintaining healthy relationships, so I would ask her if I did something wrong or if we needed to talk something out in any way, because I had noticed her tone change mid-conversation.

She would always insist that everything was fine, maintaining her facade of the perfectly composed adult.

I believed her and reinforced the chains that bound me to her.

We would start writing less, seeing each other less, despite only living two blocks apart. It was more and more difficult to get any mutually beneficial conversation going and we'd get frustrated being around each other in person after as little as 3 hours too. She at some point insulted my interests and got angry at me for struggling to share hers. I've tried to bring our lack of intimacy and unclear boundaries to attention too one day, only to have her shake her head and tell me that she's fine with whatever, that she doesn't need much to be happy. What we had didn't cut it for me and it had hurt, having my feelings ignored like this, so I refrained from trying again.

I thought it better to not poke the sleeping bear anyways.

Then, someone new tumbled into my life, someone with a passion as sparkling and intense as my own, a lonely soul masked in a charmingly awkward, ironic bravado and bluntly thrown quips. It didn't take long for us to click and converse on the daily. The more we learned of each other, the more similarities we found.

He lives several hundred kilometers away, but it still took only two months of daily texting and several hours of voice and videochat for me to fall head over heels.

I felt so unbelievably guilty.

I couldn't sever the chains that tied me to her out of fear of playing into her insecurities, but by the time I met him I had already been feeling like a bird stuck in a cage - solely there for her comfort, putting her feelings before my own, always. I was unhappy, we weren't working. But I cared more about her than myself, so I told myself I wouldn't break up with her.

And yet she’d deserved to know the truth, so as soon as I realized my feelings I confessed about it to her.

Things got messy from there, too much back and forth with me desperately clawing for any bit of selfish compromise I could get my hands on.

She eventually had enough of it and broke up with me, but we promised we'd stay friends.

She put on her porcelain mask of careful indifference and things went smoothly for a while.

It didn't take long for the mask to crack though. It was too frail to withstand her jealousy, her heartache, and eventually it fell apart.

She came to me with misinterpreted situations and long ago wrongdoings I've comitted, in her mind to intentionally cross her, talking over me when I attempted to correct her or defend myself, accusing me of being a lying, backstabbing bitch who was not an ounce better than the grovelling, attention-starved crybabies that play the victim card at and every opportinity. Then she insulted me and my loved ones up and down.

Then she left.

And I wailed as my shaking fingers blocked her on every site I could think of, terrified of her wrath and scared of more to come.

And then I hated her, for her hypocrisy and the hurt she's inflicted on me, as the realization of her small manipulative tactics to keep me bound to her slowly sunk in (for the sake of maintaining her anonymity I will not go into detail about how specifically she manipulated me, but know that there was what I now understand to have been some gaslighting involved).

Now, over a year after she confronted me, all I have left are the glowing embers of grief replacing my rage, and the understanding that I too have made more mistakes than I can count and had originally realized.

Now it doesn't matter who had ultimately been at fault, or whether or not her behavior was hypocritical or just.

All I know is that now I am lonely and tired.

Tired of being angry and hurt.

Tired of remembering her in all those little, painful ways that have shaped my life over the 16 years I've known her.

I still have him and my online friends and feel more balanced and supported than I've ever been, but in losing her I have also lost my only remaining real life friend and along with it, the kind of companionship my online friends cannot give.

She's written me a letter together with some old art of mine since that last fateful conflict, actually.

It made all of my emotions flare up again.

On the first read it had felt sincere, she was apologizing for not letting me defend myself in our last conversation all those months ago, that she's doing better now, especially in handling her emotions more openly and hasn't had any outbursts since. She also said she'd send me the art pieces and gifts I've given her over the years back if she found more of them.

On the second read it felt like salt in an open wound, an attempt to rub in that she is over me, better off without me while I was still stuck in my grief and hurt. I've written countless drafts of response letters, ranging from long and infuriated, to brief and sorrowful, to sarcastically apologetic until eventually I gave up trying altogether. Too stricken with negative emotions to think clearly.

I'm still unsure which outcome would be pettier of me, trying to get the last word in, or deciding she doesn't deserve an answer? Would sending her a response incite an attempt to mend our lost friendship and rekindle it, or would not answering imply my agreement to have her send back more items in the future?

It made me realize that I don't actually want her back in my life.

That it's not her that I miss, but rather the easy in-person companionship I've had with her, the happiness and comfort that comes with it.

By writing this post I was kind of hoping to find a different kind of closure, by getting my thoughts and feelings out about it all without actually writing her back.

I'm still hurting and lonely, but it's gotten better, continues to get better.

If you've read this far - and really, I don't think there's much of a reason you would, you don't know me after all, so why should you care - thank you for lending a patient ear to a grieving stranger.

If you think that you are who this whole post is centered around:

I genuinely do hope you are doing well. That you will find happiness, comfort, genuine companionship and a warm meal and bed to return to every day.

I just wish for it to be far away from my own.

[artsy-hobbitses]

ok. i’m sure you’re getting a lot of asks right now. if you get the time/patience to answer this, i’m trying to educate myself on this whole IDW thing. for context, i’ve never read it all the way through, i’m currently only aware of the general plot line and specific events. and when i did read it, i was an ignorant teen that came from a place of privilege and saw hardly anything wrong with the (painfully obvious) fascist/problematic themes in the comics; other than of course, they were shitty things the characters had done in their past — now as an ameteur writer that doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing in terms of character flaws and backstory, im trying to learn what is ok to place into one’s content to create those dimensions and morally gray areas many of us love, and what is not. — my question, albeit stupid and deserving of many o’ eye roll, is this: where does the line stand? what could have been done differently in the comics to keep that dimension but not create something so poorly handled as Coptimus, the tangled mess that is the autobot faction, or otherwise? ~thank you for your time.

Oh man, uh, this is definitely quite a heavy ask! To be honest I’m roughly in the same boat as you ie. I haven’t read the this series all the way through and mainly know of the setting/worldbuilding and pre-war shenanigans. 

I feel like I might not be the right person to give you a concrete answer on this but I can try and explain what I think went wrong at least in the very early stages of trying to build the entire Autobot/Decepticon societal dynamic, at least from what I know. Like a very basic explanation, I’m gonna keep it under this cut cause I might get long winded. 

IDW 2005 introduced some key concepts I think? That sort of set everything in motion as to why the war started: Cold Construction, Functionism, Beast-mode transformers being seen as a pariah class and the idea of a disposable class.  None of it is good, all of it is clearly made out to be horribly oppressively on multiple levels.

So you’ve got two sides, you want to portray the good guys as good guys BUT you also want to give your bad guys more depth/make them more human or relatable which is a good thing! 

So how do you do that? All the oppressive stuff I stated above which plagued IDW’s Cybertronan society is like, I’d say the morality baseline. Your readers know This Is Bad. People are suffering. That’s how you’ve written it

You make your Big Bad a member of the underclass who undergoes multiple challenges due to his station in life, things about himself he cannot change---he’s beaten down, persecuted, he’s empathetic to every one else’s suffering, he’s angry and wants to do something about it. He’s proactive about it. 

LOGICALLY, because your future bad guy is all these things any sane person would be ROOTING for, you want your future good guy to actually be starting from somewhere of the same point; a good guy who also suffers, goes through major challenges and sees these injustices and wants to do something about it. 

Like Magneto and Charles Xavier are generally good examples---they’re both persecuted against in a way we can all emphasize with, they’re not blind to these issues, and they both want to make things better. The biggest divide between them is that they’re going around it in very different ways. 

In trying to keep both sides starting from the same morality baseline, imho IDW failed horribly;  The major Autobots are not shown, pre-war, to care about what’s going on. Ratchet and Nightbeat seem to be the closest it comes to barely questioning the system (excluding Prime who is implied only got it after reading Megatron’s writings, and even then is too trusting of a system the reader and many others in-story can see is not working). They’re not shown proactively taking steps to fix issues that are affecting everyone who isn’t above a certain class. Most of them   come from relatively middle to high stations in life ie. scientists and doctors, who we are told will always have more rights than manual workers, miners, etc, even in life and death situations. More so, the underclass (beast mode transformers, cold constructs, victims of Empurata, the working class in general) is woefully underrepresented in their ranks. They’re very, very clearly privileged and nearly all of them have some degree of power/social standing that the Bad Guys do not. This is, somehow, the group we’re suppose to identify with. 

Instead, it’s the Decepticons who are shown to have to fight to get basic rights. It’s Megatron starving himself when he has so little already to save Terminus whose rations have been cut because they can’t work anymore and are seen as worthless. It’s Laserbeak (or Buzzsaw? It wasn’t clear) telling Ravage to not anger a Senator by refusing to serve them their Energon, because “They’d remove your spark for that!!”. Their ranks are made up of people who would be killed for simply questioning their station in life or forcefully ‘rewired’ to conform with the status quo. Their ranks are made up of people we have been told are suffering the worst underneath all these injustices---Megatron and Starscream are Cold Constructs (as are Prowl and Blaster but we don’t see Blaster’s side of things and Prowl is accepting of what he is because he was made in a higher station in life---a cop), Shockwave is an Empurata and Shadowplay survivor, Ravage/Laserbeak/Buzzsaw are Beast Modes (Autobots Steeljaw and Ramhorn also are of course, but they don’t have major roles pre-war and we do not see how they’re affected by all this).  This is, pre-war, the group we’re told are suppose to be the Bad Guys. 

Orion Pax is portrayed as a cop, one we’re told is very dutiful but also one who rushes to fill jail cells and is clearly more preoccupied with order than anything else. He’s, as good as he likes to try to be, is a cog of the system and he doesn’t do anything proactive to really fix it earlier on outside of shouting in the Senate. If he had been proactive after reading Megatron’s writings ie.a cop fighting the system, tried to be more empathetic to the people in his district? If he had left the police force and tried to make changes by himself? Maybe readers would have accepted him better. All I keep asking is “Why the hell didn’t you do something sooner? Why did you, as a good man, let it get this far even when you knew it was wrong?”  Megatron is portrayed as a working man who suffered police brutality for speaking out in his writings and he keeps writing, keeps fostering a revolution to fight the oppressive system. Megatron is the fire, the lead figure here early on who has actual chartable growth, the one who wants to change things even if it it meant violence because that was how the system dealt with him---maybe readers don’t agree with how he goes around things, but who else was really challenging or doing anything to fix it?  Why would anyone want to root for Orion Pax over Megatron in this situation?

TLDR: The morality baseline in this entire backstory pre-war was “Fight against societal oppression” which should have been really easy to get behind. Both sides should have started from that baseline.  The Decepticons did. The Autobots did not. 

[stargazersastronomy]

Social Change & Protest Astrology

“I can't get it out of my mind how you were left to bleed Was it how you dressed? Or how you act? I can't believe how they could act so violently, without regret. Well, we will not forget”

-- ‘We are the Others‘ by Delain

I normally don’t make posts like this, posts that deal with violence or politics. These subjects are similar to religion and sexuality, etc. There are so many different perspectives that you can never know what backlash, if any, will happen because of your words. However, people George Floyd’s murder, the protests, everything has effected the world. I haven’t felt this affected by murders since Brian Deneke’s and Sophie Lancaster’s deaths. Like Deneke and Lancaster, I still hear Floyd’s pleas for  his life, for his mother, for mercy echoing in my mind. My imagination could never do his suffering justice; I keep imagining the pain Floyd suffered as his neck was crushed by Derek Chauvin’s knee.  I’m someone who believes that Hell is impermanent – and that humans’ depictions of Hell originate from our artists and poets than our holy books – but I hope Chauvin burns in whatever Hell he’s sent to. Even if that hell is life imprisonment.

Similar to Deneke and Lancaster, we’ve heard the same statements: that Floyd was killed for his differences. While that is partially correct, killed because he was different, shifts blame from the murderers to the victim. Statements like these imply that if Deneke hadn’t be Punk, Lancaster hadn’t been Goth, and Floyd hadn’t been Black, they would not have been killed. Yes, the fact that they were all minorities in some way is part of our discourse of it; their attackers – and society’s intolerance – of them was the cause of their deaths. Dustin, the jock, mowed Deneke down with his car. The five boys who pummels Lancaster and her boyfriend killed Lancaster. And it was Chauvin that suffocated Floyd to death. These seven would have gone after anyone different and weaker from them, they chose the easiest targets.

In each case the murders were unplanned, random, that the victims happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But with the violent acts that happened before then – Deneke and his friends beaten by the Jocks, there were beatings against others before Lancaster was killed, and racial deaths have only been increasing here in the States. Signs were there and without intervention of some kind, Floyd’s, Deneke’s, and Lancaster’s deaths were inevitable. No one knew when or to whom these tragedies would happen to, but something like this would.

Anyway, this has been a very long prelude to introduce my point to all this. When these things happen I like to do a horoscope on the event in order to understand it, aka electional/event astrology. Last time I looked up this chart I was reading an event horoscope about the Port Arthur Massacre, so I decided to try my hand at this type of astrology. Now, I’ll probably cast a horoscope for Sohpie Lancaster and Brian Deneke, but for know this chart will focus on George Floyd’s Death, its impact, and the Lafayette Square Protest earlier this week. Before I start this reading, just know I use the Whole Sign house system and not Placidus. Lastly, Floyd was a person and astrology can’t explain away everything, so I’m going to treat him with the dignity he deserves.

Whenever one sees horrific violence and mass uproars in astrology, Mars and Pluto are the prominent players in the horoscope. This isn’t surprising because Pluto is a higher octave of Mars (like Neptune is to Venus, and Uranus to Saturn) and they’re dignified in Aries and Scorpio. Mars is Ares, it is raw masculinity, sexuality, conquest, war, anger, passion. Pluto, aka Hades, Greek God of the Dead, is all that Mars is with one difference. Pluto bides its time waiting for the opportune moment unlike Mars that is impatient and impulsive. In these charts we expect Gemini to be one the dominant signs because it’s Gemini season, Sagittarius because that’s Floyd’s death ascendant (rising sign), and Scorpio because that the protest’s ascendant. However, I did not expect Hades Moon[*1] to be so important here. More on that later.

Gemini Sun (7/Descendant) squared Pisces Mars (4/IC)

Sun is the ego, who we are as an individual. Mars is our drive, its our fighting words. Harsh aspects like oppositions and squares are blessings in disguises because if one can work through the initial turbulence, this person is unstoppable. How this power is often abused. Floyd begs Chauvin for mercy but his words (Gemini/third house) are going unheard. Witnesses are telling Chauvin to stop but they’re ignored and Chauvin’s fellow coworkers are silent.

For now, I’ll give the other cops the benefit of the doubt. Bystanders tend to fall under three camps: one, the bystanders that side with the aggressor, two, the bystanders that sympathize with the victim but are too frightened to confront the bully. Three, perhaps the most insidious, the bystanders that are apathetic to both sides. No matter which camp they fall into they’re cowards and unfortunately the law doesn’t punish inaction.

Pisces is exalted in Venus (Aphrodite) and while it rather not be situated in Mars, Pisces realizes Mars (Ares) is the gender-flipped equivalent of Venus.  Pisces Mars is the seafarer, it is Captain Ishamal, Captain Nemo, the old man from The Old Man and the Sea. And Mars in conflict with the sun is causing a storm.  Instead of noble victory, Mars uses its strength to dominate. Look at the videos, Chauvin’s photo during the scene. His semi-slouched posture indicates nonchalance and with his hands stuffed in his pockets say that he has nothing to hide. How he eyes the spectators is that of confusing and superiority. They’re saying, “Yeah, I’m boring my knee into this innocent man. And? You guys can’t do anything.” He’s also forcing his will on Floyd. Aphrodite is definitely not happy being thrust into war.

Gemini Venus (7th House) squared Pisces Neptune (4th House)

I mentioned how the generational planets are the higher octaves of the primar planets. Venus is the Greek love Eros while Neptune is Agape, or universal love. Neptune is also illusion. American cops are often placed on pedestals and absolved of their actions, but Venus here is breaking the American people’s disillusions of that. Chauvin is abusing his authority murdering an innocent man in public, no one can ignore this power imbalance now.  The crowd that witnessed this atrocity, the millions more worldwide that saw this televised and online can’t erase this from their minds. We’re seeing that the Other (7th House) has no differences from us, that Floyd is not different from us. Pisces Neptune is communicating to us to show love and compassion to our fellow man. Later, in Washington DC Rahul Dubey offered his home to approximately 60 protesters overnight, so they’d remain safe from the police. When interviewed Dubey said what he did wasn’t a choice, it was the right thing to do.

Chauvin showed no kindness, and people are calling him out on this. None of the people in the crowd can do anything, all they can do is beg and shout from the sidelines to help Floyd. This didn’t help Floyd, and this is of little consolation because he died, but people cared enough to record the cops’ crime. They cared enough to demand the cops help Floyd. It feels inadequate at the time, it won’t resurrect him. At least he heard some kindness and concern in the voices of others.  

Cancer Moon (8th House) squared Taurus Uranus (6th House)

A Hades Moon is any moon connection to Pluto and/or the eighth house. Whenever the moon is connected to the generational planets – specifically Saturn and Pluto – there’s a war between feminine, nurturing energy and masculine, destroying energy. Saturn freezes emotions whether it’s trined or opposed the Moon. Pluto when aspected to the moon gives the moon psychic, explosive energy. Moon is dignified in Cancer which gives it added strength, however, it’s in the eighth house of death weakening it. “From tomb of the womb, to womb of the tomb.” (Hero of a Thousand Faces) Women give life and we live with the knowledge that life will be taken away. With Floyd’s last breaths he says that he “can’t breathe” and calls out “mama.” How many heartstrings were tugged at? How many mothers, girlfriends, daughters, embraced their children and significant others when they heard this?

Taurus is Eve from the Garden of Eden. Taurus craves stability and sensuality which is why it is fallen in Uranus. Uranus uproots Taurus’ stability to initiate change but note where Uranus; it’s in the house of work and health (6th house). Floyd’s life was taken by men who swore oaths to serve and protect. Chauvin’s coworkers should have done their duty (Virgo/6th house) and protected Floyd from one of their own. Instead they lazily stand aside and let a man die. They ignore his health when Floyd informed them earlier that he was claustrophobic.

Yet the civilians around them did their duty. They videotaped these cops so they’d be held accountable and couldn’t lie about their actions. Women and men called out to the cops demanding the Chauvin get off of Floyd and for the others to call an ambulance. Granted, Floyd still died. His daughters and wife weren’t there to hold his hand in his final moments. He was denied a good death, a death where he’s an old man surrounded by family who loves him. He’ll never see his daughters, graduate, marry, and bear children of their own. The only solace is that his memory has become immortal, no one will forget him now. I doubt he wanted to be a symbol in death, but now we can ensure that his death isn’t in vain. We can make sure we can bring change to the States. We can make sure that these cops are forced to take responsibility for their crimes. That’s our duty in remembrance to Floyd.

“One day we won't slay our brothers One day we won't hate each other One day we'll help one another But that day is not today”

-- ‘The Pallbearer Walks Alone’, The Dark Element

Lafayette Square Protests

For the most part the placements of the Lafayette Square Protests stay the same as Floyd’s death horoscope. The differences are:

Scorpio Ascendant, meaning Mars & Pluto rule the chart

Scorpio Moon (first house/ascendant)

Cancer Mercury (Eighth House)

Mercury trined Uranus

and Moon trined Saturn

Ultimately, the astrology placements I discussed earlier apply here. But for the protests I just want to focus on the 9th House and 10th House/Midheaven.

Cancer Ninth House & Leo Midheaven

Each country has its own natal chart, for the States, this nation was founded during Cancer season. Many people consider America to be their motherland (Cancer), even people who emigrate here. Personally, I think the States have 2 main lessons to learn: One not to be the savior and think itself the hero of other countries, and two, learn that how it’s governed affects the world (ninth house). In my opening paragraphs I mentioned that Sophie and Brian’s deaths impacted the world as does George’s. That’s exactly what happened. As a nation we have daily protests since Floyd’s death. We’re using emotionally charged language to to force Trump, our legislators, police officials for equal rights for black minorities. Saturn is in Aquarius – and we’re about to enter Pluto in Aquarius in the next few years – we’re finally heeding Saturn’s lesson. That everyone should be treated the same, that we must collaborate to enact change.

Whenever there are empty houses, that house is still important but the lessons and symbols that house represents aren’t important at the moment. Trump used his authority, military, police loyal to him to force them out of the square. Why? For a photo-op. Leo long to be center stage and calling attention to itself; the midheaven makes and ideal home for Leo. But this empty house shows Trump’s failure here. It shows no one will allow him to dominate them anymore. I’m not saying astrology can explain all of Trump’s behaviour, but his incessant need for admiration and attention backfired. Now, I never expected much from him, but if he had the ability to think through his actions and consider anothers’ perspective, I would have tolerated him. (The 2020 elections will not be kind to him.) More importantly Floyd’s death and the proceeding protests have effected the world. And if we as American citizens don’t change, the entire world will be affected. (Pluto and Uranus). The United  States are considered a superpower with Russia and China close behind as world powers. I’m not psychic nor have a crystal ball, but how this nation handles these conflicts will make or break 7 billion + people in this world. I didn’t intend for this astrology post to sound political. I just wanted to explain this through astrology.  

“There will come a day not so far away When the hunter becomes the prey (and you will pay).

Its a hellish inferno This is war eternal.”

-- ‘War Eternal‘, Arch Enemy

[skvaderarts]

Hiraeth Chapter 34: Atelier

Masterlist can be found Here!

Chapter Thirty-Four: Atelier

Notes: Ah, it is so good to be back writing this fic! I have some important info at the end of this chapter, so please check it out! I hope I haven’t lost any of you due to the pc issues I’ve been having! So sorry that I had to delay some chapters! GAH!

(-~-)

Heels clicked loudly, echoing through the sprawling open halls of the manor as Willow vacated the lounge and headed back towards the main hall, the rest of the group in tow behind her. She made her way over to the large staircase that filled the center of the room, a destination already in mind. She glanced back over her shoulder for a moment before stopping, her attention seemingly drawn to something that she hadn’t noticed before. She started up the stairs again for a moment, placing one foot on the first step, before stopping yet again. It seemed that whatever had been on her mind had been sufficient to stop her in her tracks for the time being.

“... Sirrus. I genuinely hadn’t noticed your presence until just now. Somehow I managed to look right past you. I’m sure that’s not something you experience very often.”

The Adjudicator stopped for a moment, pondering what to say next. There seemed to be something more that she wasn’t saying, and everyone in the room had picked up on that. A blanket of discomfort fell over the group as several sets of eyes glanced between the lady of the house and Sirrus, settling on the man with the red hair after a moment due to the unmistakable amount of discomfort that he radiated. It was abnormal for him. He was normally so relaxed and put together.

“Did you happen to be in town when that attack occurred about two months back? The one where the city east of here nearly burned to the ground? Or when that store was leveled by dark magic just a week or so ago?” Willow said, still not turning to face him. There was a knowing tinge to her voice that required little explanation. “I’ve not seen you in these parts for at least a decade. Curious that you should return so suddenly and during such an inopportune time.”

A subtle but unmistakably displeased expression slowly made its way onto Sirrus’s face as he seemed to register the implications of what she was trying to say to him. He folded his arms across his chest, tilting his head slightly to the side as he seemed to stare through her as opposed to actually looking at her. Magnolia seemed to go on high alert, her eyes widening slightly and her face turning noticeably red. She was clearly uncomfortable, but neither Nero nor V really knew what had caused this situation to escalate in the way that it just had, or what it might have to do with her. They were seemingly the only two who noticed her sudden shift in mood. What was going on here?

Vergil looked over at her a moment later, quietly taking note of how displeased and anxious she looked. There was clearly history between the three of them, and he didn’t care to get involved with it, but he would be lying if he said that he wasn’t somewhat curious. That being said, he had no tolerance for wasting time, especially given the circumstances. Sitting through a more than likely chaotic fight between the two of them wasn’t in the cards right now, as far as he was concerned. He would probably intervene if the situation called for it, if only to keep from having to actually sit through it or see them destroy the entire house. He had no desire to be rained on.

“If you're going to insinuate something, Willow, I’d appreciate it if you were less passive-aggressive about it and you actually said it to my face,” Sirrus said flatly, clearly unamused in regards to what she was trying to imply. He hadn’t come here to be insulted, and he had no plans to be. There was no reason that he should just stand here and allow her to accuse him of anything. He’d done nothing to earn that kind of response from her.

“Sirrus has done nothing wrong, and you know it. He’s not the only one in these parts with such power. Do not be so quick to jump to unjust conclusions based solely on what he is and not who you very much know he is. You and I both know he isn’t involved in those attacks.” Magnolia said, stepping forward and standing between her sister and her nephew. She was clearly just as unamused as her red-haired relative was, and she didn’t like where this was going.

“Rather ironically, I was actually present for the second attack. He and I were nearly killed. That’s why we're here today.” Sirrus said as he gestured towards V calmly, still very irritated, but more composed than he had been a moment ago. He couldn’t give her what she probably wanted that easily. He didn’t want to, nor did he need to, explain himself to her, but for the sake of keeping things cordial between them, he would do so. “As for the second attack, I wasn’t in the region yet. I arrived about an hour later. After the second attack, the decision was made for me to come and sort things out.”

Willow turned and looked at Sirrus, a cold, almost fearful look on her face. She seemed unsettled by the revelation that he was here on business. A moment of silence fell over the room as they locked eyes, intense but otherwise lacking hostility. Finally, she turned and looked up the stairs before speaking again. “Adjudication, then? That’s what brought you to town after all this time? And then you simply stumbled your way into… whatever this is? Once again you find yourself a victim of happenstance, caught up in the middle of something larger than yourself.”

Sirrus nodded in agreement despite the fact that he knew she couldn’t see him. He was fine with going with that assessment of the situation. It wasn’t inaccurate, and it kept him from having to say or do anything further. “For the most part, yes. That is correct.”

Nodding in acceptance, Willow quieted down before continuing up the stairs, saying nothing as she went. Hydrangea sighed quietly and shook her head, looking at the rest of the group. She then looked at her aunt and cousin before looking over at her mother again. She had continued down the hallway and into a room they couldn’t see, but they got the impression that they were probably still supposed to be following her in spite of it all. Hydrangea walked over to Sirrus and gave him a sympathetic look, allowing her regret in regards to the current situation to be seen easily on her face.

“Please forgive my mother’s less than hospitable personality. I believe she is intimidated by the presence of so many powerful beings in her home.” She said softly, clearly thoroughly embarrassed in regards to her mother’s behavior. Hydrangea knew full well that Sirrus wasn’t a threat to any of them. She had spent plenty of time around her older cousin during her lifetime. It was just her mother who didn’t. The young teen got the impression that her mother would do a massive double take if she realized how many times her daughter hadn’t been forthcoming about going somewhere or simply spending time with him. She enjoyed their conversations, and she didn’t want her mother to ruin that for her.

“Don’t apologize on her behalf. Please. It’s your home, too. Your mother is an adult. She has a responsibility to carry herself with the behavior expected of one. That is not your burden to bear. Trust me, I have experience with this.” He said, matching her tone as he took a mental note of the fact that Willow was ushering them up the stairs now, seemingly tired of waiting for them. Magnolia nodded in agreement in regards to Sirrus’s statement before heading up the steps. It seemed that she wanted to put space between her sister and everyone else present.

He closed his eyes for a moment and nodded once, slowly. After he had composed himself, he cleared his throat and patted Hydrangea gently on the shoulder. There was no need for him to make her worry. There was no way that he would dare to do anything to her mother, especially with her standing right here. He didn’t get along with Willow very well at times, but it wasn’t a killing offence, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to do that to his little cousin. Her wellbeing was important to him.

Sirrus had grown tired of the atmosphere in the room. He decided to change the subject.

“Where are we headed, then?” He said, starting up the steps as the group migrated towards whatever place they were being brought to. Willow had failed to actually explain what she had planned to do after Vergil had informed her that they were there because they needed assistance with something demonic in nature. There had been no time to truly explain the depths of the issue they had been presented with.

Glancing over her shoulder at him, Willow gave him a look that seemed to indicate that she didn’t understand why he had asked her that. “Why, to the Atelier, of course. Ours is a bit unconventional, but it’s still not nearly as opulent as the one at your mother’s estate. Something we have to fix in the near future.

“You’ve been there recently, then?” Sirrus asked, seemingly surprised by the fact that she had brought it up. It was rare that people visited his old home. His mother was not very accommodating to outsiders of any sort, so the idea that she had allowed anyone to come and visit her home was news to him. It didn’t affect him in any way, but it was indeed a fascinating turn of events.

“I just returned from there, actually. Aluta was requested specifically, but she’s been indisposed recently. And I don’t think she’d go even if she wasn’t. To my understanding, your mother makes her extraordinarily uncomfortable, and that place she calls home has much the same effect on her. She thinks it’s thoroughly cursed.” Willow rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, funneling them towards the door at the end of the hall that she had disappeared near just a short while ago.

Magnolia shook her head in distaste as they fell behind her sister and Sirrus slightly, allowing them to make idle chit-chat in the hopes that things would stay calm for now. The eyes of everyone besides Sirrus and her sister fell upon her for a moment as though to ask her what in the world had just happened. She sighed softly as she continued forward. “It would appear that there is still a bit of bad blood between our two families. None of that has to do with Sirrus, however. My sister needs to remember that. Sirrus is simply a child unlucky enough to be caught up in a double divorce.”

Nero piped up that time. “You mentioned something about that before. Or was that Sirrus? Anyway… What happened again? The details are kinda fuzzy. I was only half-listening at the time. Sorry.”

“There is no need to apologize, young one. Although it is a rather unpleasant story…”

Sirrus stopped as Willow unlocked the door again and entered, leaving it open behind her. He seemed to consider something as they entered the room, clearly displeased but otherwise fine. He had obviously overheard their conversation, though he didn’t seem to mind the fact that they had been having it in the first place. They weren’t exactly talking about him behind his back. 

“After my mother and father split up, he married Aluta. And then they divorced a short while later. Things have been… tumultuous since then. Despite the fact that my allegiances lie with house Ludwig in regards to what transpired, I don’t think that everyone here wishes me well.” He shifted slightly as he said this, clearly recalling something that he would have preferred to forget before continuing onward. “The very nature of who and what I am gives her reason enough to be wary of me. I can only imagine that you all have experienced something similar. Perhaps it is difficult for her to believe a son would go against his father’s wishes, but he was never much of a father to me. But then again, neither was my mother…”

Discomfort became evident in his demeanor for a moment before he simply stopped talking and made his way into the room, clearly unwilling to say anything more. Dante and Vergil exchanged a curious look for a moment, the eldest of the two then giving his two sons a lingering look that was hard to decipher. He said nothing, but something about what Sirrus had said had clearly piqued his curiosity. There was clearly more going on with him than what was immediately apparent, and he couldn’t help but wonder if that would become a problem going forward. While Sirrus seemed to have everything under control, the fact that this could introduce unknown variables into the equation was enough for Vergil to be somewhat uncomfortable with it.

Entering the room, V was immediately taken back by the sheer number of books on display. A two-story room with a balcony on either side greeted them from where they stood, tempting them with access to books that they otherwise wouldn’t have. A large window spanning both stories of the room and the vault in the ceiling above them would probably have let in ample light if not for the fact that the storm still raged just beyond the glass. It was the kind of space that V could get lost in and never leave, forever indulging in the vast variety of literary works that stretched out in front of him like an endless sea.

“I trust you remember this place, Vergil? There have been a few additions since your last visit, but even so, I can’t say that much has changed.” Willow said as she took a seat in the middle of the room, pulling her dress around in front of her. She seemed lost in thought for a moment, her gaze drifting lazily over towards the window. For a moment she looked over at Sirrus before turning back towards the window, a more sympathetic look on her face. It seemed that she didn’t know what to say to him. Or more likely that she knew what she needed to say to him, but just hadn’t yet. She had miscalculated, and she seemed to understand that.

Looking around the room, Vergil seemed to take in the space spread out in front of him. Yes, Willow was correct in that regard. Things had changed substantially since his last visit. This library hadn’t possessed that much of a second-story back then. Just a sitting area where at least 10 new bookcases now stood, filled to the brim with vintage books, journals, and artifacts. There was even a section for scrolls now. A work area took up the middle of the floor on the lower level where they currently were, a painting easel and several pieces of half-finished art and a stack of blank canvas sitting next to it. It seemed that someone had started painting something, but stopped abruptly, leaving their work just unfinished enough to be difficult to discern.

“Yes… that is clear to me now. You seem to have added a few new shelves during my time away.”

“Personally, I know very little about the Devil Prince Belial, but you may be able to find something of use in this room. There are texts detailing things from the underworld that pertain to those sorts of matters on the second floor next to the painting of the fountain. The Demonology section is a bit lacking, unfortunately.” Willow continued, standing up and heading towards the door. It seemed that she had somewhere else to be, and had simply intended to set them on the right path. “Otherwise, you're going to have to wait until Aluta returns. I would be willing to believe that she knows more about the subject than I do. Keeping tabs on his actions hasn’t been of much concern to me until recently. He was largely dormant for countless years. I believe that something disturbed him.”

Nero couldn’t help but think about the library in Fortuna as he took a seat at the table that sat in the center of the vast home study. There were so many priceless books that probably had tons of important information in them and they had just been abandoned and left to the elements… Maybe he should see if there was something he could do about that. He got the feeling that the Ludwig family (or V, for that matter) would take much better care of the books than they were currently experiencing. This place was immaculate. A great deal of time and effort had clearly been put into making sure that everything in this room had been treated with care. Maybe he’d mention something about it if he got the change. “You said he’s be “dormant” for a long time, hu? How long do you think? What, was he just gone the rest of the time?”

Magnolia sat down next to Nero, shrugging nebulously. “For the most part, yes. Belial just sort of didn’t do anything noticeable for the better part of about a century. Probably a little bit longer. I have no doubt that he was up to something, but demons that are this primordial tend to take breaks for hundreds of years at a time before becoming active again. Mundus did much the same after he lost to your Grandfather. Resurrections take time, and he bided his time for well over a thousand years until he felt that he was ready.” She looked over at V, taking note of the fact that he was listening intently to what she was saying. “He’s become increasingly active in the last few years. We were under the impression that he was after something, but now we know what that something is. And we can’t let him succeed. Not for our sakes, and especially not for V’s.”

Willow stopped dead in her tracks, turning around and allowing her eyes to follow her sister’s gaze. She stood quiet for a moment before speaking, seemingly taking in the fact that it was V who her sister had insinuated was the object of the Prince of Darkness’s fascination. To think that Belial wanted this child… it made her blood run cold. “Before you leave here… come see me. There may be something I can do. Trust me, it shall be worth your time. And if Belial is indeed after you, it may very well save your life. Nothing good has ever come from being the object of a devil princes’ obsession. The least I can do is slow him down.”

(-~-)

For next week I can unfortunately only do a chapter for Friday because I’m still recovering from the issues my pc had and just now catching up, but from there forward, I’m happy to announce that I’m back! I’m also working on something cool for you all, so I hope you like it! I’d love to see you all in the comments! Take care! I hope you're having a wonderful week, and I’m so sorry for all the delays I’ve had for the last couple of weeks! I seriously love writing this story, and I’m not going anywhere, but my pc just loves to hate me sometimes lol!

[tonyglowheart]

This entire thing is a rant, feel free to ignore it, but I saw your post about how destiel fans can’t win in this context, and yeah. So have some rambles.

I’ve been thinking about the fact we (current spn/destiel fans) can’t win all night... I’ve seen so many people talking about how homophobic it is - and while I would very much like to argue, as every point I’ve seen made by a non-spn fan has been wrong so far, if I did everyone inside the fandom would agree and everyone outside would either call me straight or pity me for believing it’s okay.

(Cas wasn’t even sent to hell lmao. He was sent to angel death (the empty), a place he has escaped in the past. Other points, like that meta about spn has been predicting exactly this for months, that Dean ended up sobbing on the floor because he was so upset, like that death means next to nothing on spn, like that there is two episodes left, etc etc. you feel me right? I just don’t want to post wank to other spn blogs atm, we’re getting enough frustration as it is, no need to add to it.

It’s also worth pointing out that the bar is very, very low. Spn is a prominent TV show - not a Netflix show, or indie, or whatever - and it just said “main character in gay love saved the world”. [insert gif of ghostfacers dude saying that gay love can pierce through the veil of death and save the day here]

I just saw someone saying that spn having Naomi try to brainwash Cas out of loving dean makes spn homophobic (it is a conversion therapy parallel). My first response to that is that Naomi was the villain lmao? I guess we can’t write villains doing anything homophobic because having villains do homophobic things makes, uh - checks notes - villains look homophobic, and clearly we can’t have that.

There certainly are legitimate things to criticise spn about, but this isn’t it lol.

Also now some people are unironically trying to cancel Jensen because “his acting was homophobic, and so he’s clearly homophobic”, nevermind that he’s an actor and his character struggles with understanding his emotions (which I think he played excellently, myself. That scene had a very Dean delayed emotional response), nevermind the support he’s given to us queers in the past. Like. Idek man.

We would have been laughed at if we got no destiel, too.

It would have been worse, had the writers pulled a dumbledore. At this point I also trust the writers not to pull a GoT - they have explicitly criticised that ending in spn’s canon.

Spn’s writers did that by making the main villain of this season, Chuck / God, say GoT had a good ending. To reiterate a previous point I had: villains do bad things because they’re bad. And the bad things they do make them bad. For the people out there not still following, if someone does something in a story and it makes them a villain, that is explicitly telling you the story (and probably the writers) thinks that thing is bad. In this case, Chuck likes to write things for him, and we the audience have been shown and told that is bad.

Apparently thinking a gay confession is good in 2020 makes me straight. Seems unlikely, but whatever. Sorry for the length, I guess I went overboard, I’ve been holding it in lol. Anyway, DESTIEL IS CANON 💚💙 hope you have a good night

Helloo supernatural anon I hope you are living your best life right now. Yeah I’m like..... skeptical and leery myself but having lived through some absolute garbage discourse that is general purity wank, as well as the C/QL greater fandom here and on Twitter I find myself... much more wanting to question the “general wisdom” of things esp in terms of negativity, bc a lot of the time I find.... it’s wrong? Like so wrong. Or at least presents such an incomplete picture of the whole situation and also presents it in such a removed context that words that have meaning and are operationalized in a certain way for a reason, no longer have meaningful usage.

Anyway I don’t... know too much about the specifics of Spn but someone I follow is into it and talks a lot about the Gnostic stuff and that all was very fascinating to me, and I also have been grappling a lot with cultural Christianity bc of cmedia and the way ppl just *clenches fist* unthinkingly or uncritically slap some Christian norms on it and call it a day 😩 help I’m Tired. My thing here being... I actually got tired of the uncritical “superhell”s at some pt bc I am, in fact, incredibly exhausted with cultural Christianity, and because it does seem like, even possibly(?) without the Gnostic stuff it’s different from a “hell” or other Protestant-derived afterlife concept, and also yeah that it wasn’t seeded out of nowhere, it was set up to happen, which then... lends credence to the idea that whatever the current era of Spn is doing, the current showrunners are doing it with purpose.

And idk I just... refuse to believe the concept that ALL of the fans of Spn - esp the ones who have been following it still, or got back into it and are following it currently, are acting under delusion or are fooling themselves into liking it or thinking it’s good or whatever. I personally find that kinda infantilizing and patronizing and playing into issues of dismissing things women and/or other marginalized identities like.

Plus I find the concept that (from what I think I’ve been seeing Spn fans say) that the current era of the show is quite actively grappling with itself, its past, its legacy. to be very interesting and compelling; it hearkens back to like an old lore kind of feeling, of a thing that has grown into a nigh undefeatable monster and realizing that, also realizing that the only way to defeat itself is through grappling with its own nature and transforming and transmuting itself into something else. I personally find that more plausible and compelling than “Supernatural has been actively and continuously queerbaiting for 15 homophobic homophobic years., so right now we’re all very sorry for you because this maybe is no longer queerbaiting but it’s still homophobic and it can never be anything different ever.” I’ve been sort of tangentially aware of Spn thru the years and didn’t we agree, around the time of that in-universe play about Spn and with the lil Destiel shoutout, that Spn has come a ways as far as coming to terms with its fandom and working to treat its fans better? Why the sudden regression into “oh no, Supernatural is and forever will be homophobic and a hate crime”? 🤔 

The rest under a cut bc the ask is already long and then my rambling will get longer-

But yeah I mean..... I get that the legacy of Supernatural has been certifiably Rough, but I think people also forget how different of a time 2005 was? Hell, how different of a time 2015 was, even, prior to, say, Obergefell v. Hodges. Now I’m not saying that to blanket-excuse Supernatural, but like, you look at mainstream shows from the era and... there’s a lot of shit lmao. The fact that Supernatural has existed this long seems to me like.... maybe we CAN look at how it’s developed through the years vs just insisting it is what it was 15, 10, hell, 5 years ago. Especially since, to my knowledge, there’s been showrunner changes? Which seems to me like it would... affect things? I mean honestly, I remember back when I got into Spn for a hot second because of Castiel, I remember watching panel, Q&A, etc vids thru the years, and like... I thought we agreed that... it was the fans who were going a bit far pushing the shipping question like literally ALL the time to the actors, who are not in control of the show and.... like at the time.... that could have had personal implications for them? And yes homophobia bad, and people can still be allies despite that, but again like.... I do feel like - from what I’ve seen - that these guys were NOT ready to deal with a lot of that but they’ve (okay Jensen I’m talking about Jensen here) genuinely grown and learned? Also how many years ago was the essay autograph thing that people keep trotting out, like what year was it in and what year of spn was it, and what were the prevailing opinions on LGBT issues and bisexuality then.

I’ve been seeing some murmurings of identity politicsing surrounding ppl who enjoy Supernatural, and I’m sorry that that’s happening to you, it really fucking sucks and it’s also the dumbest way to “make” or “win” an argument because it shouldn’t ever be a final determiner, just factors to consider when considering what life experiences might have informed someone else’s PoV and views as well as maybe how you can better communicate with them. Instead of it being a “weapon” or “tool” to either dismiss someone or de facto validate an argument.

Also yeah I get it that you don’t want to send discourse to spn blogs bc I imagine you guys ARE actively grappling with all the bs rn and it’s a lot. Even just from like, the stuff I see around, I’m like tired of it. I’m genuinely having more fun with ppl who are having a good time with Supernatural than the ppl who are hating on it, even in this sort of backhanded “oh we’re not clowning YOU we’re clowning the writers and showrunners who think you should be satisfied with this,” when... yeah? the people who HAVE been watching the show and therefore... know what’s up.. DO seem to be? And all this based on *fake gasp* context. And that’s where the backhandedness becomes kind of poisonous to me, because it implies that it IS bad, and that you SHOULDN’T be satisfied, but poor little you are but don’t worry, we’re not making fun of YOU for liking garbage, you’re just the hapless victim who is consuming the garbage bc... idk, whatever reasons ppl are coming up with ig.

idk man it’s 2020. Fandom isn’t activism, performative or otherwise, it’s okay to let people enjoy things even if you think they’re “objectively” bad, and like... I don’t know if people can call something bad when they’re not even working with the whole context and instead are dealing with rumor and reputation. 

[chrisodonline]

In which I unwrap a little from “Mother” and also tie in past seasons’ of G Callen character development AND character insight shown and implied...

This episode was all about parallels -- and they were well done. Parallels in TV episodes are nothing new, and you see them as handy ways to tie storylines and characters together, either from within the show itself or with references and homages to past literature and media.  They are a great tool for new writers, and for good reason. People expect themes to episodic and serial presentations, and they help keep formulae from being just straight formulae. ECO and Babar definitely leaned into them, but with a lot of thought. 

I do think the parallels between Akhos and G were supposed to make us think as well as make G think.  Akhos definitely thought they were two sides to the same coin. Hetty had concerns they were, in a way, as well. It was setup to put Hetty in continued crisis thought and self-reflection that has started recently -- but you saw seeds in past seasons.  It’s still very in character.  The beauty of the ep was that it didn’t actually lean all the way into the parallel. It was more explicit in noting the parallel of Akhos and G, but mainly because the dialogue was coming through to display the aforementioned mentalities of our Baddie of the Week and Mother Hetty. (Mother was also the very specific nickname/codename given to the CIA during the Cold War, and I just kept thinking about that. I’m sure that was no coincidence.)  Sam also had a little dialogue that floated this -- in this ep and in recent ones.  

Anyway, what the episode demonstrated was a reinforcement that G and Akhos? Actually two very different people. And it’s not that they ended up on two different sides of a forked path after Hetty’s modus operandi of intervening with lost souls. It wasn’t even anything about what Hetty planted. G was never going to be Akhos, Hetty or no Hetty.

Before I get into the ending parts with G and his fantastic dialogue, we’ll look at the speakers of lines that contributed to the “Akhos = what G could have ended up as.” Akhos himself belabors the point. Akhos is extremely misguided, and approaches things from an embittered POV. He has also lied to someone who is loyal enough to him to go to the HQ of a government agency.  There’s an entitlement aspect to him, and also someone who refuses to accept any of his actions or mistakes as completely of his own doing. It was all “nurture” to him. He wasn’t a full-grown adult or anything at some point capable of making his own decisions.  If anything, saying he was ruined and fallen shows that he has a pretty darn clear understanding of morality.  You can’t fault a person for not being mentally healthy or having emotional issues. But he knows right from wrong. He did wrong. He’s not the voice of reason in all this. He has a skewed view of things, and we’re not supposed to walk away thinking, “Man, Akhos was a deep guy. He’s super smart. He had it all figured out.” He tried to kill Hetty, then G, and tried to blow up Deeks and Kensi. He’s not...a good guy. He’s not on the side of right nor is he right about things. He ends up killed by Hetty.  If this were a novel, well, a traditional novel -- let’s say -- Akhos’ ending up killed in a very bloody fashion and coming out the loser -- big time -- with his men taken out and plots being foiled all over the place pretty much enforces his worldview and ways of life are not ones the author subscribes to nor are they trying to get the audience/reader to subscribe to them. 

Hetty is another person who muses this, and she does it not from her usual confident stance.  She isn’t Hetty the Purveyor of Wisdom.  She is Hetty the Mother, specifically Hetty the Mother, who is going through common paternal guilt mode. She’s questioning her decisions, how it’s affected her children, etc. She isn’t Hetty the Orator. She is Hetty the Doubter. Sage!Hetty is a voice we’re supposed to listen to.  Confused, guilt-ridden, confidence-bruised is not the Hetty we’re supposed to listen to. It’s her at her most human, not her most all-knowing. 

Sam? Sam is your favorite aunt. He meddles at times, but he always cares. He might get a little personal, but you know you can go to him with whatever horrible thing you think you did, and he’d give you a look before helping you out and guiding you back and giving you the best hug you’ve ever gotten. He’s also a worrier. Sam’s just worried about his friend, and this is probably his gateway into deeper discussions because he knows G isn’t up for the really, really deep ones.

So, we’ve established that these aren’t necessarily the voices we need to put full faith in -- for the ep that is.  (Hetty and Sam know what’s what very often.)

The episode is smart enough to let G speak for himself. He doesn’t do it often, and that’s been a big point in some of his plots. He gets deep here, and he drops his guard. It’s Hetty, and he’s often done it with her. However, he also knows she needs to hear what he has to say. It’s all true, so he’s not lying out of kindness. He’s being honest. He doesn’t do this because Hetty showed him a magic, fun path. He may have ended up on this super specific path because of Hetty, but he was always going to help people. He doesn’t do this because he feels like he has no choice. He does it because he sees the good it does. It allows people to live their lives. That’s all he wants. He wants people to live outside of violence. He has every reason to doubt the good in people. He’s seen the worst in this job, and he saw it before the job. He had abandonment issues not knowing who he was and if he was ever wanted. He had to live with that on top of not only encountering horrible, cruel people, but being left in their charge. Time and time again. His childhood was full of horrible things and horrible people. But he also saw good, innocent people -- his fellow foster kids. 

Sam, Kensi, and Deeks usually mention at least one personal relationship when talking about doing the job, though they also love helping others and explicitly note. In the 11th season, with G’s acknowledging he is no longer a lone wolf, that he does have people close to him, and seeming to be okay with, he still talks with distance about the people he saves. He’s tried the “normal” things beyond the found family: girlfriends, a niece and nephews, steady dwelling places, staying in a job for a while, etc.  He still sees himself as separate from the “normal life.” From the world he saves. The world is full of other people living their lives, not him. He’s not bitter about that. In fact, he kind of misses the aspects to being fully solo. (See? Already very different Akhos. Not bitter. Not feeling entitled to something better or throwing blame around.)

G Callen has had emotional growth in being able to trust more people and let them in. He’s allowed himself to make connections.  Morally, though? He’s still the same person. Because he was never evil. And he never would be. Don’t get me wrong. He’s no saint, and he’d be the first to tell you that. He lives in the gray, though. Always has, and always will. He might have ended up in a different system if he stayed in juvie or kept going back. Even if he never went and ended up in organized crime or on the “wrong” side of the law because that was sort of his only options, or seemed like it, he’d be a total Arkady. (Maybe more...understated, shall we say?) He has the natural skill set and aptitude for organized crime, but you know he’d be helping people one way or another. Probably even be a CI.  He’s clever, and always has been. But he’s never been evil. He might go dark at times, but all these characters have. 

Again, Akhos feels like so many things forged him.  He takes no responsibility for the forging he did of himself. Trauma and horrible experiences do not forge us. That’s a misconception. It permanently affects you, in ways you sometimes don’t understand. It can affect your physical health. It can dig into your DNA. It’s not what makes you you, though. Survival is not a creator of bravery, it is a product of it. (I do want to note here, that the lack of survival does not mean there is an absence of bravery. There is no victim-blaming here.) 

G Callen was impacted by cruelty and tragedy. He got scars from them in various ways. He may have not wanted to get close to people or let them get close to him as a result. However, that doesn’t mean he didn’t care about them. G Callen didn’t go into this life because Hetty told him to or offered it to him, and made it sound like a trip to Disney World every day or like constant 80s training montages. The G Callen who went from agency to agency because, even though he hated the structure, he wanted to do the job. (He also says he left the CIA because the thought they were too shady.) He could have been a private investigator. Or just left and did something less kickass-y.  Something without any rules or bosses.  But he stayed. He didn’t stay because of Hetty. He’s super loyal to Hetty, but he’s also super stubborn.

G Callen sat there tonight and told Hetty that she didn’t fail him, that she didn’t fail any of them, that he does this because he wants people to be able to live their lives and that the world is worth saving. That’s why G Callen has always done this. That’s why when he sees kids in trouble, he doesn’t do what Akhos does and go “Oh, woe is me! You think you have it bad! Look at what life and the people in it have done to me! Aren’t you lucky to still have a parent who might be upset you die in a bomb blast!” G Callen has the opposite of the crab mentality.  He wants to make sure everyone else makes it out of the bucket, usually feeling like he has to stay in it himself -- no matter how often Sam tells him he can come out of the bucket. 

G Callen will always live in the gray, but never the dark.  He knows he’s not meant for a life in the “light.” He’s okay with that. He doesn’t double-down and go and live in the dark, taking down everyone with him. He wants to save people from the dark, no matter what it means for him. 

G Callen is still very often that hurt, little lonely boy who just wanted a family and to be loved and know who he was. To be safe. He was well into adulthood before he knew any of that, really.  He even says as much to Nadir back in “The Seventh Child.”  You find people who make you feel safe. He has talked about the team being family, and he said it tonight. He’s gotten all of that. That stuff is newer; however, he has always wanted other people to be safe, too. His hands are far from clean, and he can be extremely lethal and detached due to his training -- as seen tonight, as well.  But he’ll always help people. It’s who he is. It’s why he does what he does. In the “Matroyshka” episode (another nice maternal name, there), he reacts very strongly to his father calling him a good man. He doesn’t feel like he is, but he wants to be. 

G Callen lived through horror after horror, and he was still never going to approach Akhos-level evil. That’s not how it works. I realize the episode itself seemed to be pushing that more than it didn’t, but it was just having a discourse and exploring things through dialogue and plot -- as good TV does. G Callen would’ve said in his moment of deep honesty with Hetty if she did anything that might have led him to be Akhos.  I know there’s an argument to be made about whether or not Callen is self-aware, but what this ep and the ones before it have shown us is that he so very much is self-aware.  He’s more self-aware than he gets credit for because people mistake behavior changes as a guaranteed result of self-awareness.  (Behavior changes are soooo ingrained. They are nearly impossible to change permanently. It is very serious work and doesn’t signal a lack of attempts to make those changes.)

Anyway, that went even longer than I intended. I could go on and on. Clearly. I just wanted to put it out there that G Callen was never at real risk for becoming an Akhos, and the episode didn’t end with that notion, either. At least not to me.  

[fandomele]

abuse Emma received at the hands of people who weren’t her enemies anymore/at the moment, nor high on dark magic/other mind-controlling forces

because after years I can at least vent a bit.

(Added a correction at the end)

Emma was victim of:  -implied physical and emotional abuse in many foster homes even just in terms of negligence (the whole thing about how people foster kids just for the money they get, the way she talked about it ,seeing the all too aggressive mr. Raskind in the orphanage where she and Pinocchio landed first and where her first family sent her back) 

-statutory rape** (correction at the end) & being framed for a crime she didn’t commit: regardless of the fact that this 16-17 homeless orphans who had just run away once again from a home because her last foster mother tried to push her in front of a car to prove to her that she had magic did steal food and such to survive, she had no part in the much bigger crime Neal committed stealing the watches. He, a much older man, had sex with her, promised her a new home, chose to run away because he didn’t want to be a part of how she’d fulfill her savior destiny since it meant meeting his abusive father again, and agreed that the best way to deal with it (aka make sure Emma wouldn’t find him) would be to make her take the fall for his crime and end up in prison. A great plan. (if ignoring someone’s pain and wishes and laughing it off while completely refusing to believe in someone else was considered abuse and not just being a toxic presence, that would be here too)

-at the very least emotional and verbal abuse from Regina, her step-grandmother, AFTER she stopped being the enemy, so after s2. It’s different when two are meant to be enemies, but once she was supposed to be part of her life, and Emma gave Regina a bit more power in how she(Regina)’d be able to affect her, the constant insults, lack of faith, blame for everything bad that happened to her (comes to mind how Regina reacted to Marian not being dead, even though Robin might and did still choose her, and even though Emma had basically saved a victim and now Regina was supposedly on the path of redemption and should be happy to have one less murder on her shoulders), as well as physical when Regina used the dagger to make Dark One Emma answer her questions, absolutely not necessary to do since Emma did open with Killian later. But Regina also showed and said to enjoy having that kind of power on Emma. 

-attempted murder among other things? Gold, after supposedly joining the good guys for 4-5 times, Henry’s grandfather, tried to kill Emma, and Killian, and threats were made as well, while also were implied some pretty insulting things: like when he spoke to Milah and made it look as if Emma was jumping from her son to her ex like that, no mention of how young Emma had been with Neal or what else happened in there. 

-at the very least manipulation, as a kid, by her friend Lily, which got her kicked her out of another house. I refused to write best friend since they barely knew each other one day and the show likes to exaggerate Emma’s relationships with others to justify her forgiving everything.

bonus because he was an enemy but she didn’t know:

-rape by deception/manipulation/violence at the hands of her fiance: Walsh knowing damn well who she was, that she had had her memories changed, and pretended to be a human being in love with her, dating her, asking her to marry him, all to keep her busy and away from Zelena’s plans. He then tried to kill her when she found out. It was all a gross criminal plan. 

And what happened to them?

-Walsh: became a running joke for an episode or two. Unclear if he survived. Nobody took it seriously. -Gold: became part of the family, all forgotten, shows up for dinners and birthdays, Emma and Killian are supposed to be okay with that because? he’s her son’s grandfather I guess? -Regina is basically crowned queen of everything, more part of the family than ever, received more attention from Emma’s mother than Emma, never really had to pay for anything she did, Emma had to crawl to be forgiven for saving Marian  -Neal is framed a hero EVEN IN THE WISHWORLD AU where she wasn’t supposed to meet him (an excuse to have Henry born so his attempt to murder Regina could wake her?), and kept being mentioned as a hero after his death. Her own little brother is named after him without consulting Emma. Apparently everybody just loved him because his reason to do what he did was.. just that good.   -Lily is... a friend apparently, thankfully there wasn’t too much interaction there, so Emma didn’t have to be super nice to her for weeks too.  -Her foster families can’t really pay for anything. But given that she had to be sent to this world because Regina intended to kill her, it’s all part of how Emma never really attacked Regina over it, never really got to yell at her and have Regina genuinely apologize for it.  Bonus: When she’s the Dark One, and her actions have actually been tamer than any other Dark One’s and than the Evil Queen because she clearly wasn’t out for blood, and her sentiments were twisted by the darkness but she still held back on being cruel to her family the way she could have been, everyone united against her once they found out the truth about Killian, and Henry was the loudest about how she was worse than Regina and Gold because they were... trying to redeem themselves. Plus he barely tried to get through her, certainly less than he did with Regina when she refused to talk to him because upset about Robin. Her parents were busy in Camelot with Regina and knights, and only Killian was really there for her, Regina’s presence actively pushed her into using magic and losing control, and no one tries to understand what Dark Emma has done, why, and to comfort her.

** as @romanartemis​ pointed out, the age of consent is 16 in Oregon so while the show contradicts itself when it comes to Emma’s age and we don’t know the specifics, there is no evidence that Neal committed statutory rape. What he did in that area was legal. 

[enigmari]

Oh my GOD Please infodump abt hatoful.... ive repeatedly tried to get into it but have no idea how/how to connect any of the lore. Thanos !

I SAW THE TYPO TOO LATE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO END WITH “THANKS”,

SKDFSKJSLKDFJ no worries anon, it happens to the best of us. Anyways, how should I start this…

So, if you’re totally new here, Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel dating sim whose basic premise is “what if cliched boyfriend archetypes… but birds?” And it takes this premise completely wholeheartedly, while still maintaining a comedic tone. You pick classes and club activities each in-game day to increase your skill points, and depending on your levels (and a few dialogue options) you’ll either successfully romance your birdie of choice or get a Bad End. Most of the birds make their interests/level requirements obvious from the start, and you have a bunch of save slots to work with if you wanna go the scum route. Pretty simple and straightforward.

(Actually, that’s a lie, it gets much more complicated later. Don’t worry about that right now.)

Most of HBF is framed through the perspective of the protagonist (I’m gonna use her canon name for convenience) Hiyoko, and she is… not the brightest bulb in the box. Especially in the first game, when events in one character’s route will be foreshadowed in other routes, she will rarely call them out or make note of them. Naturally, this also means some reveals will be spoiled depending on which order you do the routes in. You also unlock documents in the Archive section after completing each route, which adds another level of puzzle piecing to the mix. 

(No, this is not the complicated part I was talking about earlier. Sorry.)

In this next bit, I’m going to briefly run through the routes of the first game from least to most complex in terms of lore, as well as what things are foreshadowed when. I’ll also toss in the archive documents when I feel they’re most relevant to the information you have. We ready?

Okosan’s routes: Mostly joke endings, unless there is some greater plot significance to pudding that I’ve missed for all these years.

Ryouta’s route: Mostly about character building, the only real hint you get is that his mother is sickly and it’s implied he inherited this from her.

Azami’s routes: You could get here with the same stats as Ryouta’s route, but then you fuck it up by taking this job opportunity away from him. How rude, Hiyoko.

Sakuya’s first route: He opens up to you about his abusive and bigoted dad, and with some encouragement you encourage him to run away and become a musician like he always wanted. Mr. Le Bel is very important to multiple other characters in this game.

Sakuya’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same conversation about his dad, but he chooses to live with you instead. Your big hint is at the end, when Yuuya sends you a letter saying there’s “something he’s wanted to tell [Sakuya] for a long time. Something important.” 

Yuuya’s route: You don’t actually get to find out what the "important thing" is, whoops. You do find out that Yuuya’s a spy for the Dove Party, Shuu is one for the Hawk Party, and the school has been increasingly influenced by the Hawk Party as of late. 

BAD END: You may have gotten it earlier, but now you have context as to who’s killing you when you fail a route- it’s the Hawk Party. The reason why is still unclear.

[CW for gore, child death, medical abuse, suicide, and attempted genocide from here on! This game is a trip!]

Shuu’s first route: Absolutely not a romance route and if you ship Shuu/Hiyoko please block me and tab out immediately thank you very much. You learn that Shuu has been killing students for medical experimentation, confirming Yuuya’s suspicions about the quills in the student store and the food in the cafeteria.

Shuu’s second route (needs perfect stats/dialogue choices): Same ending where Hiyoko dies, but he’s attached enough to her that he takes her head in a jar when he goes on the run. You do learn that Shuu doesn’t care about the Hawk Party’s politics, just that they can enable his personal experiments.

Archive Note 11: Someone (Shuu) knew that Yuuya was a Dove Party agent from the start. He also notes that some of the students are “fascinating”, which you know from his route means they’re good experiment fodder. You learn that he has reason to believe his victims won’t oppose the experimentation, but not the details.

Archive Note 10: Shuu makes notes about human “adaptability measures.” Given that Hiyoko is the only human at the school, you can guess that this will involve her in some way.

Archive Note 06: Notes about the Spanish Flu, how deadly it was to humans, and the connection to an “Avian Influenza.”

Archive Note 04: Notes about a “Goodwill Ambassador” for humanity, who needs a strong natural immunity to Avian Influenza. Hiyoko’s stats show that she has a base level of 800 Vitality, so you can guess that she’s the ambassador. This is why she dies when you fail a route- the Hawk Party saw she didn’t build a good enough connection to the birds, so they take her as a lost cause.

Archive Note 07: Shuu makes notes about “carrier capacity” in the student body, inducing it in some way in a “normal” individual. You can guess this is the details of his medical experimentation, but not who the victim is. You can also guess that the disease to be carried is Avian Influenza.

Anghel’s route: It’s not actually that complicated, but I think you need to complete Shuu’s route before the “mad love of a fallen angel” option is available. (EDIT: you actually just need to complete one playthrough to unlock this option. Even the Azami solo ending will unlock it.)  This ending seemingly undermines all the things we learned about Shuu right before, but this is just Hiyoko’s perspective.

Archive Note 01: A certain student (Anghel) has hallucinogenic properties that can affect bystanders, putting them in a trance-like state. This explains why everything went totally off the rails in his route.

Kazuaki’s route: Again not a romance route (no matter what he says about “waiting”, ew) because the whole point is that Kazuaki is afraid to open himself up to love of any kind. You learn he had someone he cared deeply about in the past but lost, and now he’s been soured from the experience. You also learn that he smells like bleach.

Nageki’s route: You learn that he’s a ghost, that he killed himself in the school some years ago, and that he doesn’t have all his memories. He disappears before you learn anything more, but he’s happy so it’s okay and why am I crying agai-

Archive Note 02: Someone (Nageki) writes about how they are trapped, and can’t remember what happened to them.

Archive Note 05: Nageki remembers he made a promise to someone very important, but he can’t remember who or what it was.

Archive Note 03: Nageki once woke up in a place that wasn’t the library- somewhere with bright lights and a white ceiling. He’s not as trapped as he first thought.

Archive Note 14: Nageki notes that he can move between floors, going from the library to the chemistry lab below. You can guess that the place with the bright lights is somewhere below these two rooms. This also reveals that Nageki knew the layout of the school when he was alive.

Archive Note 12: Nageki notes that after meeting Hiyoko, he feels fulfilled “just as he did back then.” He still can’t remember everything, though.

Archive Note 08: Notes about an underground facility, a fire, and a Subject 00 whose remains are in storage. You can guess that the facility is the place with the bright lights, and Nageki is Subject 00. You can also guess that Nageki set the fire, since he said that he killed himself.

Archive Note 09: Notes about Subject 00′s relative, whose remains are also in storage. You can guess that this is the “important person” that Nageki made a promise to a long time ago.

At this point, the only documents left are Note 13, which is about a terrorist incident at the Heartful House orphanage in which only two birds survived, and Note 15, which is about another terrorist incident some years ago in which the Ave’s High City building was bombed. Nothing in the main routes hints at these notes, so it’s a good time to move to…

Bad Boys Love route: This route is literally the length of the rest of the routes combined, so we’re doin’ more sections, baby!

Kazuaki’s lost loved one and Nageki’s important person turn out to be each other. They were the survivors of the Heartful House incident, and Kazuaki (real name Hitori) took care of his little brother by himself. Nageki was sickly, so he volunteered himself for a medical experiment at the school that could potentially cure him to take the burden off of Hitori. 

Unbeknownst to them, the Hawk Party was already in control of the school and their real motive was to investigate the disease Nageki was carrying- Avian Influenza. Shuu was specifically the lead for this project, and he also witnessed the Heartful House incident when it happened. At the time, he went by the name Isa Souma and was a medical researcher. He worked with Ryuuji Kawara, Ryouta’s dad, until Ryuuji’s death from disease.

Ryouta and Hiyoko were also there, because her parents were former human ambassadors too. Unfortunately, they became some of the casualties, which left the two kids heartbroken. Shuu, seeing them and recognizing Ryouta, offered to grant them a wish. They both wished for a world where humans and birds would never fight anymore, which Shuu took to mean “kill all the remaining humans so they can’t fight the birds” because… he’s like that. 

Shuu decided that the easiest way to kill all the humans would be to spread the Avian Influenza, and this is why he sought out Nageki. Nageki was forced to kill humans as part of the experiments, and this traumatized him so much that he set the lab on fire to stop it, trapping himself inside. Hitori witnessed this too, and swore to get revenge despite Nageki asking him to destroy his remains and live a happy life. He bleached his feathers and swapped identities with another bird to fake his death, and applied to the school as a teacher under his new name. 

Nageki’s plan didn’t entirely work, and the Hawk Party was able to store some of his remains for future experiments with Avian Influenza. This brings us to the timeline of the main routes, where Shuu took advantage of Ryouta’s sickly constitution to make him a new carrier for Avian Influenza. Yuuya tried to interfere on behalf of the Dove Party, but Shuu blackmailed him with the knowledge that he killed his real half-brother because he hated Mr. Le Bel and wanted Sakuya to live instead. 

The new strain of Avian Influenza that Ryouta carried was enough to make Hiyoko sick and kill her. The death of the Human Ambassador kickstarts the beginning of this route, and Shuu planned for the humans who would retaliate to also be infected. It doesn’t go as he planned, of course, but that’s laid out pretty well in the rest of the route so I won’t re-summarize it here. 

Aaaand that’s about everything for the first Hatoful Boyfriend game! I’ll gladly do infodumps/lore summaries for Holiday Star or the other side materials if anyone wants, but this took almost three hours to write as is so I’m going to give myself a break.