#i hate both characterisations but i understand why they do that when i look at his lines in hpcc

[rewritingcanon]

did you know you can tell if someone is not a nextgen-predominant fan just from the way they characterise and write james sirius potter? did you also know you can tell which among those people like snape and which like the marauders more? just from the way they write james sirius potter.

[alicentflorent]

I have had to unfollow so many supposed Alicent fans because of their support for the bastardisation of her character. I didn't mind that they were Rhaenicent shippers but the way they're jumping through hoops to justify Alicent choosing Rhaenyra over her own family is making me want to pull my hair out!

What do they like about Alicent exactly? That she's a pathetic hypocrite who will happily side with the woman who slaughtered her grandson? Don't give me the whole "but Nyra didn't know!" bs. Did she punish Daemon? Did she show any remorse? Did she apologise for what happened? No, instead she demands Alicent accept the deaths of her sons to avenge Luke.

The fact of the matter is show!Alicent doesn't exist for Alicent/Team Green/HotD fans, she exists only for Rhaenicents/Rhaenyra stans who want to see everyone fall at the Dragon Queen's feet in worship of her.

You're absolutely right, she only exists for Rhaenicent and not even in a good way because Rhaenyra (understandably) looks down on her and Alicent's characterisation has to be thrown out and she has to make herself worthy of Rhaenyra by going against herself and what she fought for and they dress it up as her finally "doing something for herself" (which is what giving in to some kind of degradation kink?)

Realistically Alicent should have gone feral the moment Rhaenyra said "a son for a son" those were the words daemon used when instructing two assassins to kill one of the Hightower boys. Those are the words Heleana heard before being forced to point to her son who was then beheaded.

In the books Alicent says something like "how many must die for your thirst for vengeance?" why couldn't the show give her this line? why is Rhaenyra the only one allowed to want revenge? why is she allowed to call out alicent/the greens actions but Alicent isn't allowed to be angry and call out Rhaenyra/the blacks? Why is she going to Rhaenyra and debasing herself by confessing her sins and asking Rhaenyra to come with her? Her priority is helaena so why is she making a deal that isn't well thought out that will kill the father of Helaena's child and then going as far as to invite Rhaenyra knowing that Helaena's son was killed in Rhaenyra's name and Rhaenyra never apologised for it? She isn't liberating herself, she's betraying herself before becoming the queen in chains along with Helaena. As much as they defend it alicent choosing Helaena, this plan does not help Helaena.

Mind you, I've also had to unfollow or block certain "team green" stans who fell for the anti alicent agenda. Stans who will write meta's on how Alicent's sons have been done dirty by the writers while also hating on alicent for being so evil and horrible to her sons. Alicent has been rage bait for both sides of the fandom ever since 2x01, she has been humiliated sexually and politically for daring to choose the wrong side. I hate how she's been written but I can acknowledge that this is a clear attempt by the writers to punish alicent and reduce her to her relationship with Rhaenyra. I can also acknowledge that the most of team green have been treated similarly by the writers. In season one they made it clear that while she wasn't a good mother, she loved her kids fiercely and protected them and what have given her life for them. in season two we are constantly being hit over the head with the alicent is a hypocrite and a bad mother narrative and in almost every episode there is a scene of Alicent's bad mothering paralleling Rhae Rhee's good, loving mothering.

[v-arbellanaris]

i think positing loghain's patriotism over everything else actually directly ignores loghain's characterisation in both tst and the calling. as far back as tst, loghain's goal was never the liberation of ferelden from orlais. i do think & agree that he hates orlais, and he's furious about the occupation, but he also doesn't rly seem to think there's any way to oust them. he doesn't see the point in trying & he doesn't understand his father's sudden loyalty to a "king", to maric. he looks out for maric, not out of a sense of patriotism or duty to his country, but because it was the last wishes of his father - something maric himself makes explicit when loghain attempts to abandon him. loghain sacrifices hundreds of soldiers to save maric - to maric's fury. it's maric who is patriotic. loghain takes over maric's job in the calling not because of ferelden but out of love and concern for maric. he tries to talk to maric about his depression several times and he comes back to denerim specifically & explicitly to support maric after rowan dies. he does the same after celia dies, to support anora and cailan.

i don't think patriotism is really what drives loghain. it's loyalty, it's love. loyalty to his father, because he loves him, leads him to protect maric and act in (what he thinks is) maric's best interests. loyalty to maric, because he loves him, is what leads him to protect ferelden and act in (what he thinks is) ferelden's best interests. protecting maric - who his father sacrificed everything to keep safe - kept his father's principles alive and, in that way, he honours his father. protecting ferelden - which maric sacrificed everything for - keeps maric alive and honours maric. and if the warden wins his loyalty, he's willing to follow the warden's lead on whatever they think is best - whether that's the dark ritual, or for either of them to take the sacrifice, or anything else.

to me, it seems like his patriotism is a symptom, not a cause. i don't think it's as clear cut as loghain makes it in his dialogue in dao, but i do think he's self-aware enough to accurately gauge his motivations here. he says that he didn't do any of this because he hated orlais, he did it because of maric. and when the warden comments that maric is dead, loghain's response is telling.

why should that matter?

[blorger]

the Great Longbottom Bully Chronicles: Snape edition

We conclude our four-part investigation into Neville's canon bullies (pt.1, pt. 2 and pt.3) with none other than his most well-established tormentor, the big kahuna himself: Severus Snape.

Snape's mistreatment of Neville is undeniable but does our view of it change if we take into account not only the context in which the bullying happens but also Snape's personality (does not suffer fools), preferences (hates children) and situation (probably overworked to the max from all the extracurriculars assigned by Dumbledore, also the whole spy thing)?

I'm not looking to excuse Snape's bullying, mind you, what I am seeking to do is to understand it. Why does Snape do what he does? How much of his behaviour towards Neville is intentional? Also, how seriously are we supposed to take said bullying?

Answering these questions is not as easy as it may seem and it's only made more difficult by the fact that (as seen in part 3) the narration itself is often unkind to Neville. The fact that books 1 through 4 Neville is little more than comic relief affects directly how we feel about his mistreatment.

In the first books, Neville is a cartoonish character: he doesn't speak, he "squeaks" or "quavers". If something delicate is around, Neville is bound to either sit on it or send it flying. Neville spends the majority of the first 4 books in a constant state of fear: he gets descriptors like anxious, fearful, tremulous; he acts sadly, miserably, shakily; he cries, he moans, he whimpers, he stammers. All of this happens independently from Snape's bullying, though it must be assumed that said bullying contributes negatively to Neville's self image (which in turn guides his actions and mannerisms).

It's not until Goblet of Fire that we see a distinct shift in the way Neville is portrayed, with Barty Crouch jr (cosplaying as Alastor Moody) holding the honor of being the first adult in Neville's life to step up and offer him guidance (but only after intentionally traumatising him by showing him the curse that he used to ruin the minds of his parents, he's a multi-faceted guy that Barty).

This coincides with something I've already talked about: as the story's tone shifts, so does Neville's characterisation. From GoF on, we see a sharp decrease in both Snape's targeted bullying and Neville's fear of it, and they both come to an end in OotP once Neville's chrysalis is ready to hatch and he can become Neville 2.0, the Ultimate Hero.

Taking all of this into account, let's look at Snape and Neville's interactions in canon:

PS

(Neville manages to melt a cauldron during his first ever lesson: this is Snape's introduction to him.)

You can see from Snape's tone that he's immediately short with Neville (because he's a bad teacher) but this is also Harry's first lesson and Snape immediately redirects his frustration towards him instead. I give this a 4/10 on the bully scale since he's admonishing a student for a mistake, it's how bad he is at it that moves it into bully territory. He gets a 7/10 on the bad teacher scale, though, because an atmosphere of fear is not conductive to learning.

CoS

(Lockhart is trying to select students for the duelling club, Snape has opinions)

At this point in the story Neville DOES cause devastation wherever he goes, we know this from non-evil sources (Harry). This gets 3/10 on the bully scale because there's merit in what Snape says but 8/10 on the bad teacher scale because Nev is at an impressionable age and needs constructive criticism, not public humiliation.

Is Snape attempting to bully Neville when he says this? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no. We know that Snape speaks to most people in a direct and often insensitive manner and he does not seem to be actively targeting Neville in this scene. Snape, it seems, merely makes a throwaway comment and immediately goes back to his real objective: needling Harry.

(Harry observes Snape in class)

Harry considers Snape's actions to be bullying, and we know that Neville feels victimised by them but what are Snape's intentions? At this point in the story I feel like Snape is not seeking to intimidate or otherwise harm Neville, it's just that the intimidation is a byproduct of the way he teaches. 5/10 on the bully scale but 7/10 on the bad teacher scale.

PoA

and

and

(Neville has a terrible time in potions)

This is perhaps the most egregious case of mistreatment Neville faces in the books. We start with Neville already worked up and anxious and his state of mind (and potion) is only made worse by Snape's attitude. The final threat of toad annihilation and Snape's refusal to let Hermione assist Neville are what really escalates an otherwise ordinary situation (ordinary for a potion class containing Neville) into nightmare territory.

This gets a 9/10 on the bully scale because the toad threat is both unnecessary and cruel and a 8/10 on the bad teacher scale. Snape does try to impart information but the tone he uses is clearly inappropriate (as are the threats of animal cruelty). Snape does not seem to be able to teach effectively when it comes to his problem students, which results in his frustration and eventual descent into maliciousness.

(Just some friendly advice to the werewolf professor you hate, completely normal behaviour from Snape)

Here Snape is undeniably acting out of malice: there's zero pretence that this conversation is for Neville's scholastic benefit. It must be noted that this scene happens right on the tail end of the potion disaster described above so Snape is most likely still worked up from that. 8/10 on the bully scale because this is said in front of Neville, Neville's class and the New Teacher for maximum embarrassment and 10/10 on the bad teacher scale since there's no possible pedagogic reason for this exchange.

(Snape has found out about Neville's boggart)

We are not shown the resulting bullying directly so we have to take Harry at his word. We do not know what Snape actually does, only the impression it leaves on someone who already doesn't like him. I give this 6/10 on the bully scale because of vagueness but a solid 9/10 on the bad teacher scale, because Snape has just found out that his teaching style is terrifying enough for Neville to make him his literal greatest fear and yet he seems more preoccupied with the slight to his ego.

GoF

(Neville starts the school year strong but so does Snape)

I am of two minds on this: on the one hand there comes a point in a teacher's life when nothing you do seems to work so you resort to handing out detentions, on the other hand a more competent teacher would actually use said detentions to attempt to do some teaching. Snape chooses to use his time in a decidedly less productive way, that is to say by terrorising noted toad owner Neville Longbottom with toad dissection. this gets 6.5/10 on the bully scale, because toad parts are actually used as potion ingredients so it's a somewhat constructive detention but 8/10 on the bad teacher scale, because Snape does not use the the detention as a teaching opportunity and opts instead for some petty revenge.

OotP

(Snape describes what his advanced potions class will entail and also his expectations regarding his pupils' O.W.L.s)

This is positively benign coming from Snape, also Neville should be nowhere close to an advanced potions classroom. 1/10 on the bully scale and also 2/10 on the bad teacher scale.

(Neville just received some unintentionally super-effective psychic Damage from Draco. Harry and Ron try to hold him back and Snape takes notice)

Who is this New and Improved Severus Snape who behaves like an actual teacher (albeit a somewhat biased one)? 0/10 on the bully scale and a mere 1/10 on the bad teacher scale.

I want to take this moment to note that Neville's character makeover happens in tandem with Snape's. Just as Neville becomes less cartoonish as the books progress so does Snape's character acquire nuance and depth. Also, since the situation in the wizarding world is escalating rapidly, Snape is now quite busy with his second job (triple agent). The time for comical takedowns form the witty teacher is over, we need to get ready to sympathize with Snape's upcoming martyrdom.

(Snape is called to Umbridge's office, where the DA has been caught red-handed)

We have finally reached the very last interaction between Neville and Snape. We join them at a particularly sensitive time, as Snape cannot reveal he's a double-triple-super secret-gold star agent and therefore has to keep Umbridge appeased in order to quickly GTFO and investigate Harry's claims of Sirius's capture. In a way, this is Snape cosplaying as himself in the earlier books. This gets a mere 1/10 on the bully and the bad teacher scale because he's just trying to keep up appearances.

And finally: the long-awaited conclusion

So, what did we learn kids? First of all, that Snape is a terrible teacher shoved into a position he's ill-suited for, and it shows. He does not have the patience nor the tact required for his position and furthermore he cannot keep his emotions separate from his job.

Even if we take into account the fact that that potions is clearly a subject in which not following instructions properly can have dangerous consequences - which gives Snape some leeway to act more strictly than other teachers - we cannot help but come to the conclusion that he should not have been put anywhere close to children (which calls into question Dumbledore's judgement but I digress).

We also learn, though, that Snape's treatment of Neville is at its peak when Neville is still being used as comedic relief and the bullying is scaled back as both of their characters undergo metamorphosis in order to reach their Ultimate Form. By the end of the books, we need to see Neville as Brave and Snape as a multi-layered, morally grey character and as such the bullying comes to an end rather abruptly (and anti-climatically). It's difficult to treat Neville's mistreatment with the gravity it deserves when the book themselves care so little for him as a character. Neville 2.0 is treated as important, yes, but in order to do so the author glosses over many formative moments in his life.

That said, it is an undeniable fact that Snape's actions have an enormous impact on Neville's self-worth. This, together with his grandma's awful parenting and the dismissive way he's treated by his peers, contributes to perhaps one of the saddest self-assessments in the books, as seen at the very beginning of OotP:

This is not a moment of introspection from Neville, it's merely a throwaway comment used to get out of a conversation, yet it's telling that his first instinct is to put himself down.

Also kudos to Ginny for never being a Neville hater and being probably his first genuine friend. You go girl.

When it comes to Snape's side of the equation, though, I'm left with more questions than answers. Can he tell that what he's doing to Neville is perpetuating the cycle of abuse he's part of (see: Sirius and James but also his father)? No matter how much I think about it I can't seem to come to a solid conclusion.

Snape is capable of extreme levels of compartmentalisation; this is what allows him to be such an effective spy but at the same time it's what keeps him from looking inward (and perhaps recognising the root of some of his actions). That said, Snape is also very astute and observant: he of all people should be able to tell what his actions are doing to Neville. I feel like Snape is able to rationalise his behaviour towards Harry quite well but Neville is not someone he holds rancour towards, so how does he justify his mistreatment?

I imagine Snape is under immense stress for all of Harry's (and Neville's) time at Hogwarts and the situation only worsens as the years go on so I can see him releasing steam with some recreational bullying. Is this all there is to it when push comes to shove? Was Neville simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

[soopsiesdaisies]

i mean, technically, (y)our marriage is saved - 8

Chapter summary:

Feyre has Emotions and hates them. And Rhys sure has a mouth on him… sure has…

Read on AO3 + Tumblr Chapters Overview

General warnings: Rhys' mouth, 9k

~*~

We took refuge from the harsh morning sunlight in the library soon after finishing up breakfast. The sprawling chamber with built-in bookcases at least thrice my height laid on the other side of the palace, with the large, open windows that characterised the building’s architecture facing the west. As it was early still, the horizon was painted a dark blue; Rhys had flicked his fingers after we entered and put up a myriad of tiny, flickering stars to offer additional lighting. One floated near each of our faces, bathing the papers and books in a silvery glow. 

Though I’d expected to fall back into the familiar, trusted bickering that Rhys and I had cultivated during our brief altercations the previous week, Mor’s presence ensured that we both remained relatively amicable with one another. My temper was tempered, and Rhys’ ferocious appetite for being as annoying as he possibly could be to coax reactions out of me was relaxed. How she did it, I wasn’t sure. Perhaps Mor’s general air was just strong and cheery enough to cut through my irritation like a knife through butter. Perhaps she just urged Rhys to be less of a prick by way of existing in the general vicinity of him. Whatever it was, I found myself less snarky; Rhys held his tongue and reworded whatever he drivel he emitted more often than not. Both helped immensely to keep the atmosphere somewhat pleasant.

My progress in reading, writing, and mind-shielding was the subject of our discussion. As Rhys could check the latter at any time, we’d inevitably latched onto my swiftly improving literacy: Mor, at least, seemed utterly delighted at how well I was doing. 

“It’s like you did nothing but practise,” she said cheerily, shoving the marked paper my way. I had to write the words Rhys and her dictated down and had made an almost negligible amount of mistakes. “Were your weeks in Spring that boring?” 

Not boring, per se—but I wasn’t going to tell them that. “I just found myself with a surplus of free time.” 

“Well, it paid off.” Mor grinned at me. “Leaps and bounds, Feyre. Really.” 

“Yes,” Rhys drawled. “Remarkable. I’d imagined you’d have been far too busy accepting your fiancé’s enthusiastic welcome to occupy yourself with writing lines.”

“Imagined me accepting an enthusiastic welcome often, did you?” I shot back, tone frosty. Rhys sat back with a smirk, though he did seem a touch flustered. “But no. I just had nothing better to do.”

“Nothing?” Rhys asked, at the same time that Mor said, “Ah.”

“Why on earth wouldn’t you be busy with other things?” Rhys continued, before Mor could say anything else. He ignored the sharp look she sent him with ease. “I would’ve thought you’d be swamped with doing all kinds of Lady things.” 

“Like what?” 

“Like,” he flapped a hand, “managing the household, picking out dresses, having tea parties, starting up embroidery. Those things. Ladies do those, don’t they?” 

“You sound like someone we both despise,” Mor muttered. He shoved her chair and she stuck her tongue out at him. “Just saying…”

I punched out a sigh through my nose, mouth tight and shoulders pulled up to my ears, it felt like. “Yeah, no.” 

“No?” 

“No,” I confirmed, and then I said, before I could calculate whether it was a good idea to tell them, “the wedding’s off indefinitely, so I’d wager I won’t become the Lady of Spring any time soon.” 

Mor’s mouth fell open. Rhys, for his part, didn’t show more shock than a small jump of his eyebrows. 

“I’ve decided it’s best to wait until we’ve both healed,” I said stiffly, “before we make any hasty and relatively permanent decisions like marriage.” 

“Ah,” Mor repeated. When I looked her way, her face was tight but, I thought, vaguely approving. “I understand.” 

She reached over and patted my wrist, and I pressed my mouth into a thin line and nodded. Rhys chewed absently on his lip and refrained from doing much of anything but stare at me—I personally refused to look at him directly. To an almost irrational degree, I felt frightened that he might be able to see what had occurred prior to my refusal to marry Tamlin. I didn’t know how he’d react, what he’d think; though I suspected he’d be angry for me, I had a nagging, anxious suspicion that he’d think I’d pushed Tamlin too far too soon. 

“My life so far is just a small blip for the rest of my immortality, as someone kindly reminded me,” I said regardless. “And I fear that if we were to marry now—”

I halted. Too much. Too much information. They didn’t need to know about the ins and outs of my relationship with Tamlin, all the grievances and frustrations that came with it. My intermittent coldness towards him. The bouts of apathy and compulsion for cruelty I’d feel when he was near. 

If anything, Rhys, upon realising I’d been unhappy lately, would find a loophole to keep me here. That seemed just like the kind of thing he’d do. 

“Yes?” Mor prompted. 

I cleared my throat and played with the edge of the marked sheet. “He’s a choice. We’re not—fated. I don’t want to forget that.” 

Right after I said it I bit down on my cheeks so hard that my mouth flooded with something wet and warm that had to be blood. It was odd—faerie blood didn’t taste like slightly salted copper. It tasted sweet and cloying. More like lead. 

My hands clenched and unclenched repetitively. 

None of us said anything for a moment, though Mor seemed to be searching for words. Rhys didn’t; he just stared at me with those star-flecked eyes of his, almost calculating but with a hint of vulnerability. 

He’d caused it. The revelation he’d admitted to, the gift the cauldron had offered us and he’d deemed proper to share in a drunken stupor, had made me realise I had a choice. I didn’t need to be with Tamlin just like I didn’t need to be with Rhys. 

It was like he’d yanked the wool off my eyes. 

“You know,” Mor said then, “I once—was engaged to be married.” 

I stared at her. 

“After I’d bled for the first time and my powers awakened, I was to be married off to a male I didn’t know well and into a family that would treat me as a broodmare.” Mor didn’t smile, didn’t soften. “My virginity was the highest asset in this. And because I wanted to have a choice, I lost it to a male who would become a friend.” 

I knew virginity was important in the human world. I didn’t realise it was here as well, within the faerie realms of Prythian; it seemed like such a small, dismissible thing in comparison to immortality. 

“The reaction was violent,” she said. “Rhys and his family, of course, weren’t happy about the political implications, but they all understood why I did it. My family, however,” and then she swallowed, the only tell of her discomfort, “was so furious that they tortured me when they found out. I was dumped into the Court of my betrothed with a note nailed to my stomach that I was his problem from that point onwards. A—another friend rescued me and brought me to Rhys, where he and his family nursed me back to health and allowed me to stay if I so wished.” 

“Who was your fiancé?” I asked in a whisper. 

“Eris Vanserra,” she said. “You probably saw him in that bitch’ Court. He’s the firstborn.” 

Eris. I’d seen him, yes; only shared the smallest resemblance with Lucien, but that may have been because of their hair colour alone. He was the one who’d snarled at me when I told Amarantha my name. 

My warning to Nesta before Tamlin took me away rang through my head in a dizzying echo. His father beats his wife and the sons do nothing to stop it. The Lady of Autumn seemed regal but drawn; I would’ve assumed that that came from being imprisoned under the mountain, had I not known that Beron was a horrific piece of work. 

“Good that you got away and avoided… what could’ve happened,” I said. 

“Yes.” Mor’s smile was tentative and brief. “We always have a choice, Feyre. Even when it doesn’t look like we do.” 

We continued our work after that. Rhys hadn’t spoken up to add anything to Mor’s story, nor did he pipe up with additional information afterwards. The only thing he did was go back to helping me work through difficult words with many syllables, much like Mor did as well. He did seem a bit more subdued somehow, however—like something had left him reeling. 

They coaxed me through my stumbling over difficult and long words before slowly and carefully moving on to intertextuality and the effects of word choice. I knew much of it already — I was an adult, after all, and was rather fluent in our language — but the underlying meaning woven into sentences and their structures was quite different from regular speaking language. Rhys explained how words and phrasing could affect the meaning of a text or speech, used to strengthen or weaken arguments; Mor explained the more exact examples of it, like rhetorical questions and unreliable narrators, metaphors and motifs. 

Knowing these, recognising these, was key to navigating the world of the Courts, Rhys told me. Faeries spoke in riddles and the courtly fae even more so, for their entire life was bathed in political games—I needed to be able to move past them in order to survive, or they’d eat me alive. 

“Of course,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind eating you, if you catch my drift.” 

I threw a balled-up piece of paper at his head, nailing him between the eyebrows. As he spluttered — for show, I suspected; he would’ve been able to mist it if he so wished — and Mor giggled obnoxiously, I demanded we just continue with my lesson.

As was par for the course for Rhys, he wrote down ridiculous sentences for me to read out loud before I was tasked with copying it down and explaining the word choice. Mor let him do so if only because I did a lot of eye-rolling and sighing as I completed my little tasks and continued to throw little balls of paper at his stupidly perfect face. Rhysand is in possession of a wingspan that pales all others, Rhysand will sweep you off your feet without warning, Rhysand shan’t hold back and will break Tamlin’s nose the next time that welp puts his paws anywhere near Rhysand’s person, et cetera; I could tell the self-centred nature of the sentences originated largely from his mission to annoy me as much as humanly — well, faely — possible, but that didn’t make me any less annoyed. 

If I was being honest, it was brainless work: simplicity woven with increasing difficulty in an attempt to keep me on my toes. It’s why I didn’t feel my brain make a connection until I’d copied half of the sentence ‘Rhysand shall obliterate all the pathetic enemies he will come across on the immortal battlefields spread across Prythian’—a realisation that felt so sudden I nearly broke my pen. 

“Tamlin doesn’t believe there will be a war, by the way.” 

There was an elongated beat of silence before either of the cousins blinked. 

“What,” said Mor, without any inflection. 

“I suggested I would start training,” I said, “but Tamlin vetoed it, as he believes it’ll put a target on my back and there won’t be a war for me to fight in anyway.” 

To my horror, my tone was irritable. The idea that Tamlin thought he could order me around like I was his subject, like he had any right to tell me what to do, did still annoy me. It was actually so immensely frustrating that I still saw red when I thought about it for too long. 

“I thought him being allowed to remove the masquerade mask Amarantha cursed him to wear would have made him less blind,” Rhys said sharply, “but it appears I was wrong.” 

“Rhys,” Mor chided, but it didn’t have a lot of heart behind it. “He genuinely doesn’t believe war will come, Feyre?” 

“I thought he did,” I said honestly. “He’s been pacing the perimeter of the house and often gets called out to the border. There’s been an increase in sentries too. But I think—the danger he’s seeing is in his head.” 

Mor’s stare was hard, calculating, and appallingly neutral. For a moment I felt laid bare, like she could see right down to my bones, to what I hid there and refused to say. I shifted and looked away. 

“Feyre,” she said slowly, “when you said you had time to study—”

“I had time to study,” I intoned. 

“Right.” Mor paused. “But did you have time because—”

“Mor,” Rhys snapped. 

“I’m worried,” Mor cried instantly, turning to face her cousin. “Can’t I be worried? Feyre is one of the first friends I’ve made in centuries and I want to make sure she’s—”

“She can tell you whether she is on her own time,” said Rhys, sparing me a brief, apologetic glance, “not during a round of questioning she’s not comfortable with.” 

“Like you haven’t done the exact same thing,” Mor replied. “I know you, Rhys, and I can tell when you’re brooding…”

“I’ve never brooded a day in all five hundred and thirty-six years of my life—”

“By the Gods, you’re old,” I blurted, “that’s like, twenty-one human generations.” 

Silence fell almost instantly. Against my better judgement I sank a touch the moment both immortal gazes fell upon me, fiddling with my pen. And then, after what felt like an age of tension-riddled quiet, Mor burst into loud, witch-like cackles. 

“Well,” said Rhys, tone about as dry as high land during a drought, “I can confirm you’ve managed to land a solid kick against the royal plums of my ego, Feyre, darling. Thank you.”

Mor collapsed onto the table. “Old—”

“It’s true, though,” I defended weakly. “Humans can barely reach eighty years before they die of old age—sometimes a hundred, if they’re lucky and have good teeth. Rhys, you were born when humans still practised the old religion en masse.” 

“Twenty-one generations—” Mor hiccupped. 

“Tarquin, Summer’s High Lord, is eighty,” Rhys said, “and he’s like a teenager. I’m quite certain he hasn’t even started growing pubic hair yet.” 

“How the hell would you know that?” 

“OLD!” Mor yelled, face having turned red. “Rhys—Rhys, you’re geriatric…”

“Frame of reference,” Rhys said, before he told Mor in a tight voice, “you are a year older than me, Morrigan.” 

Mor sobered within seconds and bared her teeth. I turned my lips inward and bit down on them to keep from smiling or, worse, gaping. 

“It’s impolite to reveal a lady’s age,” she snapped.  

Rhys grinned. “It’s a good thing you’re not a lady then, but a horrific harpy instead—”

He flattened himself on the table in the next moment, so quickly it would’ve been a blur for human eyes, as Mor went to whack him with a rolled up sheet of paper. What happened next was just as swift: Rhys twisted, reached up, and grabbed Mor’s wrist to prevent further whacking. Mor retaliated by bringing her leg up and kicking so hard at his chair he went sprawling with a yelped curse. 

I pressed both of my hands against my mouth, but it did very little to muffle the snort that escaped me. And as Rhys climbed back upright, frazzled, head popping up from under the table with his mouth open like a fish, the chuckles that fled my mouth could no longer be corralled and brought back. My hands fell, and I was smiling, and Rhys’ expression became laced with wonder. 

Mor snickered along in merriment, though I barely registered it. The sudden burst of laughter, a kind of mind-blowing amusement that flooded all throughout my body, was as unnerving as it was relieving; I couldn’t genuinely remember the last time I’d laughed, let alone at others. I thought my time under the mountain and my brief death had sucked that ability out of me. 

But it was here now. I shook with the force of it, the twinge in my cheeks and the pressure on my stomach stark reminders of how long it’d been. 

“I’m—I’m sorry,” I stuttered, gasping, and I felt a spark of panic at how difficult it was to stop and calm down. “I haven’t—I—”

“Don’t say sorry,” Rhys said quietly. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile before.” 

He hadn’t. I’d never smiled in front of him, at least—as far as I could remember, though perhaps my nights drugged with faerie wine had urged me to. But maybe he’d thought it wasn’t real then. Ingenuine. 

As sudden as the unignorable amusement had been, it got replaced by something heavier and more painful, and the tears of joy morphed, very suddenly, in tears of grief. 

“Oh, fuck,” I choked out, and the amazed expressions on the faeries’ faces made place for concern. I took a shuddering breath. “Sorry, sorry, I—”

“It’s okay,” Mor whispered. She was beside me in a blink, hands hovering before resting loosely atop mine. “It’s… been a while, hasn’t it?”

I nodded, staring resolutely at the blurred table. Tears dripped from my lashes at a frankly impressive pace, some falling on my lap but most trailing down my cheeks to my jaw, then down my neck and collarbones to be absorbed by the collar of my tunic. Every breath stuttered on both the inhale and the exhale; I couldn’t close my mouth, lest my bottom lip trembled so much it would fall open anyway. 

“This is ridiculous,” I breathed, choking on a sob. “I was just—laughing, it’s not—”

“The first time I laughed after I was tortured, I had a panic attack,” Mor said gently. “When Rhys came back after you freed him…” she paused, head twisting to look at him, before she swallowed, “—and he laughed at something one of our friends said, he threw up so violently he spat blood. It’s… normal, and understandable, to be shocked when you do something you haven’t done in a while. And it’s normal—”

I sobbed louder. Mor tucked some hair behind my ear and squeezed my hand. And then Rhys said, hoarse and quiet yet perfectly audible:

“It’s normal to grieve the person you were, and what you could do.” 

I jerked and looked at him. His jaw was tight, eyes intense, brow low. 

“We’re made up out of our experiences. Those experiences all change us, just slightly. What you went through…” he swallowed, “…is more than enough to change someone nearly beyond recognition. But when you get a sliver of your old self back it’s a shock to your system.” 

I bit down on my cheeks again, so hard my mouth flooded once more with my sweet, cloying faerie blood. 

“Don’t apologise for something you can’t help, Feyre,” Mor said firmly. “Don’t ever.” 

“Especially not,” Rhys added in a murmur, “when it’s a step towards helping you breathe.” 

~*~

It was safe to say the lesson didn’t continue after that. 

It could’ve. Rhys called for tea as I was making significant progress in calming myself down with the help of Mor, and after the teapot had been emptied, the only evidence of my sudden tears were my swollen eyes, the itching tear tracks, and that wrung-out kind of exhaustion that only followed a bout of intense emotion. 

I asked to go to my room, however, for a bath and a nap. The cousins acquiesced. Mor said that I could ask for her whenever I was ready, and she’d be there; Rhys merely guided me to my room with a steadying hand between my shoulder blades and nodded as I entered, disappearing into a far less extravagant swirl of shadow than usual. 

I could call for him whenever I wanted, I knew. He’d come. I figured it was the bond that tethered him to me so much that he couldn’t ignore my requests, which didn’t do much more than make me feel miserable—especially now that Mor had hammered down on the concept of choice so much. 

Perhaps it was different for male faeries. Or perhaps it was because the bond hadn’t snapped for me yet — I figured the word ‘snapped’ felt like a literal snap somewhere in your chest, rather than the mild, dismissible pull I usually felt around him — that I was able to ignore him, but as it had snapped for him he couldn’t ignore me. 

I was too tired to commend him for his self-control though, even to myself, and simply slunk into the bathroom to soak for a while, undoing my braid before slipping out of my clothes. The water, as always, was the perfect temperature; I shivered at the feeling. After a few seconds of letting the heat wash over me, my body relaxed carefully, in increments, lessening the ache that accompanied loosening back. 

I groaned and sunk under, scrubbed at my face to rid myself of the tears, then went back up for a breath. Poured soap into my hand and scrubbed at my hair. It smelled like bergamot and cedar this time, warm and soothing. 

Confusion and warring emotions were a constant in the Night Court, I decided. In Spring, my emotions had recently been limited to anger, sadness, numbness, and terror, but Night only made me feel confused with the comfort it brought me. And yes, of course I felt annoyance, strong and firm; I felt anger and frustration; I felt that bone-deep longing for something I wasn’t sure of as keenly as I usually did. 

But my moping was different. My emotions felt heightened, less subdued. I had a feeling I could rage as much as I wished and nobody would judge me for it. I could hurl shoes and pieces of paper at its High Lord’s head and all he would do was laugh, rather than yell. 

And, Gods—I’d called Rhys old to his face and in front of the overseer of the Court of Nightmares, and all that happened was a sulk and a cackle. I’d burst into tears and there was no panic from them. I could probably tell Rhysand I found him unappealing, and scary, and oblivious as to understanding me… and he’d probably just grin tightly, jest a little before nodding, before moving on. 

It’s like a part of me knew for certain, doubtless in its confidence, that if I asked Rhys to be better, to improve—he would do it without whining. He’d work on himself. He would give me the results I wanted to see. 

It was terrifying. 

It felt like a betrayal of the highest calibre. 

I rinsed my hair and climbed out of the bath, exhausted but head whirring. I didn’t want to think and compare and do all those things that made me feel like a horrible person, but it’s like I couldn’t stop it—the way Mor, as a friend of Rhys’, pushed back and ridiculed him at every available opportunity, but how Lucien bit his tongue more often than not, disinclined to trigger the beast that lurked below Tamlin’s skin. 

I was still dripping water as I rummaged through the armoire — my dress was still in there — for underwear and a comfortable nightshirt. When I pulled both on, the fabric darkened where the droplets still stuck to my skin; my back felt sticky where the ends of my hair dribbled moisture. 

Then I crawled into the bed, that massive, fluffy nest of a bed, kicked off a variety of decorative pillows, and curled beneath the duvet. Closed my eyes. Gripped at the pillow. Buried my nose into the fabric and inhaled the scent of the detergent, cold mountain air. 

My eyes were leaking again. I gritted my teeth against it, wanting to scream; because why was I sad, now? Why did I need to cry? 

It was fine. Everything was fine. The Spring Court was stifling and though I’d anticipated the Night Court to be worse, it was not. Nobody pressured me to act like everything was okay. Nobody told me I didn’t need to do anything because I’d already done so much. Nobody said I couldn’t leave the palace because it was unsafe to do so. I could wander wherever I wished without encountering even a single faerie; no sentries at my back, no expectations to dress a certain way.

The day was still so long, so bright. My eyelids were orange. But I burrowed deeper into the blankets and drifted away, stomach coiled into a knotted mass of writhing serpents. 

~*~

The most quizzical thing happened then, because I woke up that evening and could barely move.

It was a momentous struggle to climb out of bed and dress myself into something more appropriate for dinner; every single step I had to take up to the large, open space felt heavy and laborious, like I was walking through syrup. I could barely pay attention to Rhys’ and Mor’s light-hearted bickering during dinner either, too focused on making sure I chewed and swallowed—and I had to beg off Mor’s offer to have a glass of wine and some cheese as dessert, because I was so tired I felt like I’d fall where I stood. 

Sleeping that night didn’t help me, even with the peace and calm that the moonstone palace emanated. My energy remained low, as if sapped. The apathy was lingering on the edges of my consciousness, ready to take over. And most tellingly, I completely stopped rising to Rhys’ taunts. 

It worried him. It worried Mor too, because I ceased to react the way I’d had to her too. It was plain on their faces. I couldn’t tell them that my guilt for—for feeling relief here, that it ate away at my ability to act like myself, so drained that I could barely lift my hands to wash myself, could barely climb out of bed, could barely dress myself. I could read though, and write, even if the lessons didn’t truly register; my wall of adamant remained firm in spite of my exhaustion. 

No matter what those two threw at me — Mor’s gentle kindnesses and Rhys’ teasing flirtations, their shared banter in attempts to make me smile, the outrageously absurd sentences Rhys had me write — I was almost too weak to even speak. 

On the second day, I didn’t join them for breakfast. On the third, I only joined them for dinner. The fourth, I ceased leaving my room at all; and though they visited, together at first and then alone, I remained in the solitude of my bedroom. 

I slept a lot, of course. Better than in Spring. The architecture of the palace gave me comfort unlike anything I’d ever felt—so open, so wide; the scent of jasmine that permeated every room, the scent of snow on the breeze fluttering past the gossamer curtains, the endless sights of mountains and sky. My nightmares were easier to struggle out of, and the aftershocks had lessened in intensity. I actually slept. I slept, and I ate, and I kept things down. I breathed in fresh air and read in the sunlight and took baths that lasted hours. 

But I was still exhausted beyond belief. It shocked me, frustrated me, in spite of the apathy that had taken up residence inside of my chest. The sedentary and lonely hours prompted a discomfort that I could only equate to terrible nerves: my muscles were always a little bit tense, my heart always felt a bit constricted, and my stomach was always tight. As was my chest, for I felt some subtle kind of additional guilt whenever I hid myself away again. 

I read a lot, now. Folktales and history, and one book on mates that’d snagged my attention and I was slowly parsing through. Then, on the fifth day, or sixth, I hadn’t been counting—but at the tail-end of the week, I exited the bathroom to find Rhys on my bed once more. 

“Hi,” I greeted, and I turned to dress myself, but mainly not to see the disappointment flitting over his face at my lack of reaction. 

“I thought we could just relax today,” he said. “Mor has business in Hewn City to take care of, so we could just read. Or do other things, with this new privacy she’s so kindly afforded us.”

His tone was teasing, sounded like an insistence—play with me, come on, do it. But I just shrugged, tugging on my underwear under my towel before letting it drop.

I could hear him swallow.

Not paying him any mind, I slipped into small bodice and a sweater, then some loose, billowing trousers I remembered seeing Mor in before. The clothing, at least—getting out of the clothes I slept in helped me stay awake during the day, rather than just letting myself rot. 

I turned, blindly twisting my hair into a knot resting at the back of my head. Rhys sat staring up at me like I was some sort of apparition. 

“So you want to just sit and read?” I asked. 

He blinked, shrugged. “Like you’ve been doing anything else? Do you want to paint instead, Feyre?” 

My mouth flattened. “You’re not funny.”

“I never claimed to be,” he replied. “I’ve just been taking note of your hobbies.” 

“My hobbies,” I repeated flatly. 

“Yes, your hobbies.” He rose to his full height in one smooth moved, stuffing his hands in his pockets and sauntering closer. “The ones you’ve been so diligently performing here. Reading, sitting, sulking…”

My jaw clenched. 

“You can’t be bothered to climb a set of stairs, so you take all your meals here,” he said. “You can’t be bothered to talk to anyone, so you don’t leave this room. All you do, I’m assuming, is sit, stare out of windows, and read. Why can’t I join you in such ambitious endeavours? Hard work is always better done together.” 

His voice dripped with a mixture of vitriol and teasing. He was grasping at straws to get me to react to him the way he wanted me to. 

“Sure,” I said, tonelessly. “Okay.”

Rhys’ chin tilted up, eyes slightly wider than usual. “Okay?” 

“Okay,” I repeated, brushing past him to pick up the book I’d been working my way through. “Go ahead. Do whatever you wish.” 

He stood frozen, even when I made my way to the room’s balcony to take a seat on one of the chairs there. It was a good place to zone out and stew, I’d found. Much better than under the cover of the building. 

It took a few seconds, but eventually Rhys stalked out into the sunlight to join me. 

“You’re not even going to protest?” 

I didn’t look up from the book, despite the fact that the words on the page didn’t even register. “Should I?” 

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, you should. You ought to—I don’t know, complain that I’ve entered your room without your permission? Tell me to fuck off, maybe? Call me a prick with a bloated ego the size of Prythian?” 

“How dare you enter my room without my permission,” I intoned. “Fuck off, Rhys. You’re a prick with an ego about as big as Prythian itself.” 

Rhys snapped his teeth in frustration. “That’s not what I meant and you know it.” 

“Sounded like it.”

“No,” he snapped. “No, it’s—Cauldron, Feyre, this is the problem. You laugh once and shut down? Did it shock you thatmuch? Don’t you ever laugh in Spring?” 

“What’s the Spring Court got to do with it?” I asked, heart kicking up in speed. I squeezed the book tight. “I just don’t want to do things, Rhys.”

“Like smile?” he retorted, barking out a sharp, mean laugh. “Like talk to people who care?” 

I squeezed the book harder. 

“I—Mor and I waited for you,” he said. “Every single morning, we wait for you until Nuala or Cerridwen announces you won’t be joining us. Then we wait for you to join us for lunch. Then for dinner. Feyre,” he said, insistent, “you can go anywhere you’d like in my Court, but you’ve just been staying holed up in your room—”

“I thought I was only supposed to learn how to read, write, and shield my mind,” I said quietly. 

The sound of chair legs screeching across stone told me he’d collapsed in one of the chairs. “That doesn’t mean it’s all you need to do.” 

I chewed on my lip, nostrils flared and staring resolutely, unseeingly, at the book. The upper edge of my nails had gone a pale yellow with pressure. 

“Is that it?” Rhys asked, tone awfully close to begging. “Do I need to take you somewhere? To a—to a town? Or the woods? To a peak of one of the mountains, or an Illyrian encampment, or a frozen lake?” 

I sighed harshly through my nose. “Why do you care what I want, Rhys?” 

He froze in my peripheral vision. I lifted my head, looked at him: his eyes were wide and bright, jaw tense and jutted slightly forward. Did I have him there? His frustration with my indifference had to be nothing more than the mating bond rearing its head—it was in the book I was reading, that a mated faerie felt an almost impossibly strong urge to protect and cherish. Though it was about a mutually accepted bond, I figured it wasn’t that different.

“It’s not just the bond,” he said. “Feyre, I—”

“Get out of my head,” I bit out.

“I’m not.” Rhys bared his teeth and looked away. “I just know that damned book.” 

Oh. Without bothering to mark the page, I snapped it shut. 

“So what’s it then?” I asked. “Pity for the once-human? Afraid your little toy has broken beyond repair?”

He laughed without humour, a quick, hiccupping expulsion of breath. “I just like you.” 

I felt my mouth pull into a scowl. 

“You glowered at me, and sneered, and glared,” he said. “You were scared of me but you taunted me despite it. You threw the bone that killed the Wyrm at Amarantha and walked away, even with your arm broken, even while covered head to toe in excrement and mud. You were a fox in a Court of wolves and won—”

“So I was just intriguing, then,” I concluded, oddly disappointed. I wanted to accuse him of masochism but didn’t have the energy to. “A fun little jester—”

“You reminded me of my friends.” 

My mouth closed. 

“You reminded me of Mor, and Azriel, and Cassian, and Amren,” he told me, voice hard and slowly rising in volume. He didn’t seem to have realised that I had no idea who three of those people were. “You ensnared the Middengard Wyrm like a fucking rabbit, you flipped me off, and I could see people I hadn’t seen in nearly fifty years, whose voices I’d almost forgotten, who I tucked away to protect—I could see them, standing right alongside you, throwing that bone. I like you, Feyre, as a human and as a faerie, and—”

“You liked the idea of me,” I said, mouth dry. “I’m not the idea, Rhys. I’m the whole person. And I’m not the girl I was who went under that mountain—”

“You’re being smothered,” he hissed. “Can’t you see it? The human you were, the faerie you are—by… by just letting time pass, by refusing to let yourself breathe, you’re allowing her to win.” 

The fire inside of me was cold. Freezing.

“I’ve done enough,” I breathed, though it didn’t feel true. “I’ve died.” 

“And you were granted life,” he said. “You were Made. You’re immortal—you can do anything you fucking wish, but decide to waste the days away sitting idle?” 

I stood. “I don’t need to hear this.” 

“Yes you fucking do.” Rhys stood too, footsteps announcing he was following me inside. “Do you want to give up? Feel nothing? Do nothing? Tell me you do, truthfully, and I’ll leave you alone.” 

I breathed. My grip on the book was so tight the hardcover edges were cutting into my palms. I felt cold all over. 

“I want to do nothing,” I said.

He laughed again. “That’s a lie.”

And I didn’t know what happened exactly, but all I remembered later was a surge of emotion, high and hot and cold, and me whirling around to launch the book at his awful, beautiful, infuriating face. 

He caught it, hissed, and peeled his fingers off the cover with a grimace. “Ice. Winter Court. Good job, Feyre darling.” 

“Leave,” I murmured, eyes wide. “Get out of my room.”

“No,” he replied, arching a brow. “No, I don’t think I will. Not when we’re finally having a riveting conversation again.”

“It’s one-sided,” I said, taking a few steps back. 

His smile was fanged. “You’re still replying to me.” 

“I’ve been trying to shut you down.” 

“Doing a bang-on job at that, my love,” he crooned. “Not feeling very ‘shut down’ here, actually. No, I think you do want to talk to me, but you simply think you don’t.” 

My heart was stuttering, and I briefly thought he’d gone mad with resisting the pull—or I was dreaming. And if I was dreaming, then I was lucky it wasn’t a nightmare, because it meant I was in control here. 

Wasn’t I?

“Just get out,” I whispered. “Just listen to me for once—”

“I’ve always listened,” he said. “I keep listening to you. Every emotion, every want, every fucking thought you allow to filter through your shield—I watch, and I listen. Did you know your nightmares still reach me?” 

My breath caught. 

“I can see them, I can feel them…” he snarled at nothing in particular, “so much so, so vibrantly, that I can’t tell whether it’s your nightmare or mine. Of course I fucking listen—”

“You took me away from my wedding against my will,” I whispered. 

“You asked,” he hissed. “You demanded it. You said no, three times, and you stepped back so I came and took you so I had an excuse to be there!” 

“You still took me,” I continued stubbornly, like I hadn’t been insurmountably thankful for it in the days after. “You took me when I didn’t want to go. And before—before, you twisted my broken arm to get me to agree to the bargain, you dressed me up in a dress that was more like a cobweb, you drugged me—”

“I twisted your arm,” he said heatedly, “to set the open fracture. You recall the bone was sticking out of your arm, don’t you? And the dress, the faerie wine… I explained why, because Amarantha would have simply killed you if she figured out you were more to me than just a human toy, and I was terrified the debauchery of the revels would break—if you saw what she made me do—”

“You could’ve explained it,” I snapped, anger, familiar and hot and sudden, sparking through my veins. “You could’ve been nice! You could’ve—could’ve grabbed me a day before the wedding, or a month, not as I was about to walk down the aisle!”

“Cauldron, Feyre,” he groaned, “you’re saying it as if I didn’t do you a damned favour—”

“I can’t exactly see you jumping at the chance to ‘save’ me as a favour.” My voice dripped with derision. “Weren’t you waiting for it? You said so, didn’t you? You may have tried to ignore it, but you still listened…”

Rhys stared at me, chest heaving, and he laughed incredulously for a third time. Threw out his hands, shook his head.

“All of Prythian was aware of the wedding,” he said. “Everyone—even those in—High Lord Tamlin of the Spring Court and Feyre Cursebreaker, saviours of the High Lords,” he spat, “united at long last; love that conquers all. And all I could think about was the inevitable happiness and pleasure that I’d feel because you’d feel it. I was prepared to numb myself into incoherency just for the chance I would only remember the barest hints of it the next day.”

I set my jaw and tried to glower, because I shouldn’t care. His happiness was not my responsibility. But he advanced, face dark and eyes bright, like smouldering purple coals in the remains of a hearth fire, and I forced myself to stumble back, back, back—pressed myself against the door so as to not meet him halfway. 

“Imagine my surprise,” he said quietly, “when I, having gone through fucking bottle of liquor already, barely able to stand upright, didn’t feel happiness or joy, didn’t feel pleasure, but earth-shattering terror instead.”

“The rose petals frightened me,” I replied, cursing myself when my voice didn’t come out even, but instead breathless and shaking. “I was remembering blood—”

“Yes,” said Rhys, “blood. You were getting married in the court of thorns and roses but you can’t even stand the sight of the colour red. Can’t look at a rose, can’t prick yourself on a torn. I’d wake up most nights to the feeling of you hurling your guts out after a harrowing dream of pure terror that would leave me fucking paralysed, and I couldn’t even pinpoint whether someone managed to comfort you from the horror and the pain. 

“And then I took you, and you were angry, and I thought—” he blinked rapidly, scowled, “—I thought, thank the Cauldron she’s still feeling things. Thank the Cauldron she can still be angry with me, or furious, or just frustrated. That she can talk back and slap back if she deems it necessary. Because I know,” he said, “what it’s like to freeze when the rest of the world needs you to keep moving, and I wouldn’t have put it past you to have gone numb with it all. I wouldn’t have been surprised if you were so exhausted you couldn’t even tell me to fuck off.” 

“Then why are you so angry now?” I asked, almost whispering. “Why is it—”

“Because I don’t want you to!” he hissed. “Because freezing and rotting only makes you feel even worse. I need you to feel, Feyre. Be deliriously happy, be incandescently furious, be achingly sad—Amarantha wanted to break you, so you can’t break. She wanted to break all of us, so we mustn’t. Not now that the bitch is finally dead.”

I closed my eyes and willed the tears to remain behind my lids. There was—a point, to what he was saying. I knew that. A part of me knew that like it knew the sky was blue and leaves dropped in autumn. Amarantha had wanted to break me and I couldn’t, shouldn’t let her, like I hadn’t allowed her to when she was still alive.

But I was just—

“I’m so tired of holding myself together,” I breathed, chest shuddering. My hands went up, covered my eyes. “I’m just—I don’t know what to do, what to think, who to please, and I—”

I thought that he was a good distance away from me. A few steps, enough for me to shape a gaping chasm between us that made me feel saner—like it was supposed to be, so I wouldn’t have to resist the urge to burrow myself into him while I was too exhausted to prevent that from happening. 

But then he was close. 

So close I could smell him, feel the warmth of him. His hands encircled my wrists and he pulled, gentle, until I listened; tilted my head back and swallowed through all the thick saliva gathering at the back of my throat, blinked, squinted at his face through the blur of moisture. 

“You don’t need to please anyone but yourself,” he said, voice suddenly small and emotional and desperate. “You have eternity; all I ask is that you won’t spend eternity pleasing those who don’t deserve it. All I ask is that you don’t break.” His mouth set into a thin line, and he squeezed my wrists, shook them lightly as if to hammer his point home the kindest way he knew how. “Do not break, Feyre. You’re no toy, no trophy, and you cannot shatter the way objects are wont to do.”

I wished to sway forwards and rest myself against his chest. He was solid, steady, like we were moments away from winnowing—but it wasn’t time yet, so it couldn’t be. 

“No toy,” I heard myself whisper. “No toy, no trophy, no object—” my throat bobbed, “—no subject.” 

“No-one’s subject.” He shook my wrists again, gently. “You don’t bow to anyone. Least of all those who demand it of you.” 

And I knew, actively, that this could be a manipulation. That this was a way to alienate me from Tamlin, who demanded things and commanded me like I was below him, so Rhys himself could swoop in and save me once more. A favour; there was no such concept as a faerie gifting you something. A favour to have me help the way he wanted me to. 

But if it was a manipulation—if it was, why were his words for my strength? Why did he not want me to take a knee? 

“I’m a selfish male, Feyre,” he said, as if he’d read my mind—but he couldn’t have, for my walls were still strong and glinting, impenetrable. 

He released my hands and they automatically came to rest against his chest, almost against my will but not wholly. I wanted to touch him, feel him. Something inside of me eased. 

“I’m a very selfish male,” he repeated. “I’ll be honest, I want to keep you with me forever—though I can’t, couldn’t, do that to you. But know,” he said fiercely, “please know that I’d never, ever, want you to bow for me. You are my equal in every way that matters.”

He was so close my senses were utterly overwhelmed. Nothing but sea salt, and citrus, and petrichor—the intensity of his star-flecked eyes was keeping me frozen, caught. I was caged in but nothing in me wished to rebel. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave. 

“Rhys,” I whispered. I didn’t know why. My hands were against his chest but they wouldn’t push him away. “Rhys, I—”

“Tell me to stop,” he said. He leaned closer, chest heaving. “You can tell me to stop. I will. I promise.” 

My traitorous hand slid up to his neck. 

One moment, we were making nothing but eye-contact, wide and so still it was as if the air itself had stopped moving. The next, his mouth was on mine. 

He tasted like tea. Not the faerie kind, with its unplaceable flavours and intoxicating smells, but simpler: human tea, the way I remembered it. Hot and earthy, bright and bold, the slightest tang of something like citrus but mostly smoked malt, caramel made on a fire. Comforting. 

Home, my mind told me. Rhys tasted like home.

My fingers tangled in his hair and my biceps curled until he was pressed against me, one hand slipping to rest on the small of my back and the other skittering, hesitant and desperate, to find the place where it belonged. It belonged on me, I knew. Somewhere.

He groaned in the back of his throat as I went up to the tips of my toes, pressing hard. I couldn’t get enough of him, of his mouth, of the taste of it. His teeth clacked against mine as I sucked at his tongue until it curled around my own. The hand that had been wandering came up to cup the back of my head with heart-stuttering softness and desperation. It was like there was nothing to it, this kiss, as natural and normal like two magnets colliding and refusing to let go. 

No sparks. No incomprehensible heat. Just comfort and warmth, Rhys’ hair between my fingers and his scent in my nose and his body against mine. I never wanted to let go again. 

And as his pinkie finger brushed the nape of my neck with a soothing press, I felt it. 

A snap. 

Like a string had been strung and strummed, I felt my side of the preliminary mating bond lock into place with a resounding twang. My heart constricted, my stomach burnt, my breathing hitched; I lost my balance and we went stumbling back against the door. He licked into my mouth with an almost reckless sort of abandon and I wanted to swallow him whole, consume him, keep him in a spot in my chest that had been carved out just for him. 

My leg lifted and curled around the back of his. Rhys lifted his mouth from mine with a rattling keen, took a steadying, gasping breath, and descended once more.

I wasn’t sure if I’d breathed in the brief time our lips had been apart, but my lungs were burning, so I inhaled sharply through my nose so as to not dislodge myself from him. He was so warm and cool at the same time, hair strong yet soft like a rabbit’s pelt. I hadn’t wanted to keep much of the prey I’d caught, but sometimes I had wanted to, when the days and nights were equally as freezing, when my fingers had gone stiff with cold. 

Just a pelt. Just one. 

I’d never kept any of them. None of us knew how to sew a coat or scarf. Nesta and Elain had only ever learnt how to embroider, and later, how to darn socks and stitch up worn fabric gone ragged with wear to reinforce it; I’d never been taught how to hold a pen, let alone a needle. 

But his hair was soft and strong, like a rabbit’s fur, and I wanted to keep him. Perhaps I could. 

He moaned as my fingers tightened their grip, pressed against me so firmly it was impossible for us to get even closer to one another. I wondered when he went to cut his hair, because even the back of it, where it was the shortest, was easy to take hold of. I wondered if he’d consider growing it out, if I asked. I wondered if he’d still be so damn irresistible with dorkily grown out hair—he probably would be. 

Then he nipped my bottom lip with sharp teeth, and my mind went blissfully blank.

I couldn’t remember if kissing Tamlin had ever felt like this. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever been kissed like this in general. All I knew was Rhys, and his mouth, and the taste of him and the smell of him and the feel of him. It swelled up inside of me and pressed against my skin, bloated and almost painful. My heart thudded and jumped.

Rhys retreated with a harsh intake of breath, clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut, swayed back to press his forehead against mine. My head spun; the sudden burst of oxygen and distance was so violent, so much, that I felt dizzy—every breath was seeped with his scent, his taste. I was shaking. 

“Sorry,” he whispered, frantic, “sorry, Feyre, I’m—”

I tilted my head up and kissed him again, relishing how he groaned and slumped back onto me, pressing me against the door. We both panted with every spit-slick slide, every short time we came up for air. 

Gods. Mother. Cauldron—

Blessed, blessed contact. The barest hints of his stubble scraped against my chin, beneath my thumbs and pointer finger when the kiss he gave me was closed-mouthed and I needed to open his jaw with a simple press. And then he slipped away, kissed his way down my jaw and towards my neck. Latched on, right where the tendons began to strain as I tilted my head to the side. 

“Feyre,” he murmured, voice hoarse and trembling. “Feyre. Feyre, Feyre, Feyre—”

Like a prayer. 

Like how Tamlin had sounded—

“Rhys,” I answered him, “Rhys.”

He groaned again, shivered as I stroked my hand down the broad, clothed planes of his back. My other tightened in his hair; my eyes fell closed, head thudding against the door as I dropped it. 

I didn’t feel guilty. For once, for this brief moment, I simply didn’t. Not apathy—no, not that, not now, because I felt warm and safe, comfort zapping through me with every press of Rhys’ mouth against my neck, every scrape of his teeth. Because I knew that with one kiss, one snap inside my chest, there was no possible way I’d ever be able to let him go. 

No, I didn’t feel guilty for granting the person who was made for me a kiss. I didn’t feel apathy for Tamlin either, even if I was certain with every fibre of my being that I’d never be able to give myself to him again. It was near indifference. 

One kiss. Just the one, and I felt indifferent to the future of the male I’d died for, in favour of the touch of the male who’d crawled over broken bones to defend me as I lay dying. 

But I’d died for Tamlin—and he loved me, even now that I’d hardened for him. Even if his love was suffocating. 

He deserved closure. 

“This isn’t a good idea yet,” I whispered. 

Rhys froze. His head lifted from my neck, but not much further—merely rested against mine, cheek to cheek. 

“No?”

“Not yet,” I repeated, clutching at him so hard it would hurt when I let go. “Not now.”

Rhys said nothing at first. And I thought—I thought I’d hurt him, again. Broke something between us instead of just myself. But then his head rested heavier, and so did his body, and his forehead dropped against my shoulder; and I relaxed, because that meant he’d understood.

“The five hundred years I’ve been waiting for you felt like nothing but a single breath the first time I saw you,” he whispered thickly. I felt his eyes close, lashes tickling my skin, and I breathed him in like I’d never be able to smell him again. “If you’d ask it of me, Feyre, I’d wait for you until the sun burns out.”

[alicentsgf]

ok so fans who hate alicent LOVE to say shit like "book alicent was beefing with a child lol" totally unironically. and it just confuses me. like Bro... all f&b tells us is she Stopped Being Nice to rhaenyra after aegon was born (when viserys showed no sign of naming him heir). because, reportedly, she was originally kind to rhaenyra. apparently kind enough for at least one or two people to note a sudden change in demeanor.

and like im sorry. is it that crazy that when alicent began to understand rhaenyra and her own son were going to be pitted against each other in the future she chose aegon and distanced herself from rhaenyra? she wasnt "beefing with a child" like i feel thats so clearly just a little joke someone made thats been taken at face value and regurgitated. because its not true. or at least f&b gives us no indication of it - we're never told about her acting maliciously toward a young rhaenyra. in fact i dont think we're given much indication they really interacted at all. and anyway, wouldnt it have been worse for her to continue to keep rhaenyra close ? so she could try and manipulate her?? people make book alicent into this great seductress and manipulator and theres basically no textual evidence to support it. if anything i feel like alicent distancing herself shows she very possibly DID genuinely care about rhaenyra once, perhaps enough to worry her attachment might undermine her cause to prioritise aegon in some way. and this is only further supported by rhaenyra's decision to spare alicents life later when the rest of the greens became dragon snacks.

then theres the fact book alicent was the one who asked viserys to betroth aegon to rhaenyra. why would she do that? a woman from a house with such close ties to the faith no less. she asked when aegon was 6 and she must have known by that point viserys was likely never going to name aegon heir - imo she was exhausting options to try and protect her children. no matter what choices aegon made he had every chance of becoming a symbol others would use, forcing rhaenyra to make an example of him to maintain control. marrying them to each other would do a lot to avoid that eventuality. it was both a smart political match and what Targaryen tradition demanded. viserys was convinced alicent was only acting out of ambition which is why he rebuffed her, but we're repeatedly shown viserys is kind of an idiot. especially politically.

theres this Obsession with the idea alicents characterisation was changed so dramatically for the show. 'i wish they'd made her like book alicent' they did...? they made her a victim who is scared and anxious and bitter. theres nothing to suggest that wasnt who book alicent was. everything we know of her is filtered through layers of bias - her story told by men who dont give a shit what she felt or desired. and what? you dont like it because you wanted her to be some one dimensional villian? because doubling down of f&bs oft misogynistic, cardboard cutout representation of her would have been So great. like please, i get that so much of f&b can be interpreted a whole bunch of ways but 'alicent the evil step mother' is the most basic, boring interpretation. it shows no depth of thought at all. theres at least a few clues in there as to who she Actually might have been, if you bother to look.

its just insane to me honestly. you read that book and thought she was pure evil? this woman who doted on her daughter and grandchildren so completely that her grandson's murderers knew to find them in her rooms. this woman who spent her last moments embracing death, pining for her dead children and speaking fondly of the old man she used read to as a girl. its really not that hard to percieve book alicent as a trapped and embittered woman desperately scared for the lives of her children. seriously. where is the critical thought? the empathy?? im so tired.

[starlene]

Under the cut, I've written about my thoughts re: the Finnish production of Moulin Rouge! the musical.

Moulin Rouge! Helsinki is a replica of Moulin Rouge! Stockholm – a production I loved enough to see it five times. I guess you've been able to tell from my recent posts that I absolutely did not love the Helsinki production. In this post, I try to explain why by going through the Finnish cast and also discussing the direction and the physical production a bit.

I won't be putting any names in this so my hate won't pop up in anyone's news alerts or wherever.

Let's start with the cast overview.

Satine: she's fine. Sings fine, acts fine, but lacks that little bit of extra something that would truly make her the sparkling diamond, at least in my eyes. But maybe that's just personal preference! Anyway, as far as characterisation goes, I've heard criticisms about her being too cold, and I do think it is a rather cold/reserved portrayal – but I think that makes complete sense. In my opinion, the vibes are right and the interpretation is 100% valid. Satine would be like that. The problem is, I think, that Christian burns so very bright and passionate, he almost completely overshadows her icier performance. While they're both good on their own, and they have their nice moments together too, maybe they would both work even better alongside someone else?

Christian: the real star and mvp of the show. I understand why the character has so many fangirls now. He is super passionate here. Naïve, in love, won't listen to any sense, tears up about it. Also, he sings so powerfully and beautifully, you really believe Santiago and Toulouse-Lautrec when they go WOW after he starts singing (quite unlike the same scene with his Stockholm counterpart, bless his heart, where it was painfully obvious Toulouse was the actual strongest singer of the trio.) 10/10. Wonderful performance. The actor really carries about two thirds of the whole production on his shoulders, and I was delighted every time he stepped onstage in a way I never felt in Stockholm. Shame that I still dislike the character (at heart, he's just a super toxic dude), but I don't think that can be helped.

Zidler: I knew I was going to hate him from the moment he was cast, but knowing that didn't make it any more pleasant to actually watch him. I knew Mr. Super Annoying Mannerisms was going to crank his usual shtick up to eleven in this role, and oh boy, was I right. He doesn't really play a character here. Instead, he just does all of his annoying funnyman tricks in a row and looks rather smarmy and slimy while doing them. I kept wishing I could get up and kick him in the shins just to get him off the stage faster. And all this pains me more than a generic bad performance in a musical would because Stockholm!Zidler is one of my top five theatrical performances after the pandemic lockdowns. Maybe ever. In Stockholm, Zidler had such a charming, kind, warm aura – you could easily believe people would come to the Moulin Rouge just because they have such a charming master of ceremonies over there (...or at least that was a big part of why I saw the show five times.) In other words, Stockholm!Zidler was everything Helsinki!Zidler is not, and every time I was forced to see and hear the latter, I missed the former more. It may be the same production with the same director, but those two are not the same character. I hated, hated, hated this performance.

Toulouse-Lautrec: I'm saddened to tell you I hated, hated, hated this performance too. I didn't think I was going to especially like him, especially when compared to the brilliant Stockholm!Toulouse... but man, this performance really felt like staring into a charmless, joyless black hole. Go girl, give us nothing!! It felt like the actor (who I honestly believe was cast mainly because he's shorter than average, like the irl Toulouse-Lautrec was) was channeling some old, cynical, alcoholic communist who's forgotten why he's a communist to begin with. I mean, yeah, the character is supposed to be a bit sad – but I think he's also supposed to genuinely believe in the Bohemian Ideals despite everything, which I had an extremely hard time believing while watching this charmless, passionless performance. Furthermore, Helsinki!Toulouse's voice is unimpressive when compared to his OBC and Stockholm counterparts, and his hideous wig is like an unpleasant cherry on top of it all. I guess it's also noteworthy that Helsinki!Toulouse performed the physical disability in a lot subtler manner than Stockholm!Toulouse – which is a valid take, I guess, though it does seem to imply that Helsinki!Toulouse feels like a tragic failure and never shot his shot with Satine mainly because he's short, not because he's disabled. Oh well, with so many girls today swiping left when a guy is shorter than 180 cm, I guess that's fair. Personally, I prefer a less subtle take when it comes to the character's disability, but I suppose that's neither here or there.

The Duke: he's so unremarkably okay I almost forgot to include him in this cast list. He plays the part as a complete cartoon villain, which is fair, and seems to be having at least some amount of fun with it. Lots of sinister laughing. He doesn't really have truly scary moments like his Stockholm counterpart did, he's just nasty. All in all, I think the actor understood the assignment 100% – but unfortunately, that's not enough to make the character interesting, he's just written that badly. In any case, the scene with him, Satine and Christian was one of my personal highlights of this production, they just made it work exactly like it should.

Santiago: he's all right, though I don't think I believe them when they say he wants to be the greatest gigolo in all of Paris. He's a bit too gentleman-like for my tastes. His Stockholm counterpart had a seedier, rougher, overall more annoying vibe that I think suits the character a lot better, but that's just personal preference.

Nini: she was good, one of those performances you want to watch whenever they're onstage. If I were to see this production again, I would pay her even more attention than I did now – not that I'm ever going to do that, but you know. In any case, my headcanon is that the day after Satine's tragic demise, Nini is chosen as the new lead and as the CEO of the Moulin Rouge, and she solves all their financial trouble within three months.

La Chocolat, Arabia & Baby Doll: I'm grouping these three just to say that though there is nothing wrong with the Helsinki trio, I preferred the Stockholm trio by far – I liked that they had a wider variety of body types over there, and overall, the Stockholm characters felt more like individual personalities. Here, they felt a bit more like generic ensemble people. But of course, it's still somewhat early in the run. I believe that as time goes by, the Helsinki ladies will also develop stronger personalities of their own – it's just that I won't be there to see it.

Direction: I wonder how much of the mess that is this mishmash of performances can be blamed on the director. Everyone who has seen replica productions knows that it doesn't usually turn out great when an actor and/or a director try to make a performance fit a mold created by some previous performer... but I wonder if in Helsinki, they took it too far the other direction. As far as I'm aware, prior to the Helsinki production, the director of the Nordic Moulin Rouges focused his personal attention to the Stockholm production while assistant directors mainly handled Oslo and Copenhagen. I wonder if he was so wary of forcing the Stockholm mold onto the Finnish cast, he just let them do whatever instead? In any case, it feels like the main cast isn't quite working towards same goal, which was never the case in Stockholm.

Finally, some thoughts about the Helsinki production in general:

The first thing that comes to mind is that the sound mixing sucked, just like it did in Stockholm, especially late in the run. This never used to be an issue when I started watching musicals in Finland, so heaven knows why it seems to be so impossible these days.

Other than that... It's not bad, but I feel like this production doesn't look quite right in Helsinki. Of course, the whole idea of a replica production is that you don't design anything from scratch when going to a new theatre – but I think here, with a production designed with Stockholm's smallest musical stage in mind transferring to the biggest stage in all of Finland, it feels a bit too obvious that this show is not designed with the Helsinki theatre in mind. The choreography is still fantastic, but the stage is so big, it doesn't feel full and busy like it did in Stockholm, no matter that they have more dancers. The video projections are still mainly cringeworthy (Elephant Love Medley being the brilliant exception.) The sets that looked grand enough in the tiny Stockholm theatre look rather small and flimsy here. The costumes also seem a bit cheaper, especially Satine's. The tailoring and colour scheme were both off; they suited the Stockholm actress beautifully, but the Finnish actress... not so much. The pink dress she wears when they rehearse their show is an atrocity.

And then there are the small but charming Stockholm details that didn't make it to Helsinki at all – some theatre smoke here, a bunch of golden glitter there, the cute/creepy handpainted smiling moon that references the real Moulin Rouge facade... I dunno, you just miss this kind of go-the-extra-mile stuff when you notice it's gone, you know?

The Finnish translation is a terribly mixed bag. The lyrics are mostly in Finnish but switch to English at random points – I suppose mainly because the translator couldn't come up with anything. You get used to it, but it's not great. I'm sure it wasn't an easy task, some of the lyrics seem genuinely impossible to translate – but even so, I would have liked having some in-universe kind of logic to the points where the language changes. As far as the songs go, there was one brilliant moment (the beginning of Elephant Love Medley references a bunch of Finnish songs), a handful of clever rhymes, and a bunch of really clunky ones. The clunkiest of all, however, was the spoken dialogue. Of course, spoken Finnish is very different from standard Finnish, and theatrical dialogue is usually in standard Finnish, so it always sounds a bit unnatural, and in this case, the original English dialogue is not very good either. But even so... it just sounded so painfully stilted and awkward all the time, almost like they're in a The Play That Goes Wrong style play-within-a-play all the way through. Maybe they should have hired someone else to do the dialogue and let the translator focus on the lyrics.

Bleh! I definitely won't be seeing this production again, no matter if it runs for fifty years (unless maybe there's a performance where both u/s Zidler and u/s Toulouse-Lautrec are scheduled to be on, but even then, I dunno.) I don't regret seeing this, it would have bothered me for the rest of my life if I hadn't, but I did not have fun and would not recommend this particular production to anyone. Save your money and, if the Stockholm cast returns to the upcoming Göteborg production, just go see them instead.

[penguinkyun]

chapter 154 review (and 153 and 152)

due to the nature of these chapters this review will contain references to canonical csa, abuse and suicidal ideation along with references to canon one sided incest. if this affects any of you please click off and I'll see you next time! your mental health matters

before i say absolutely anything else: hoshino ai get behind me

while i did want to make a review for each chapter individually but since i couldn't, I decided to combine 152, 153 and 154 in this one because they're all a continuation of the same scene anyway. this will be primarily 154 though since the other two supplement it.

anyways. aughaughauhasufghauighasugh- *continued noises of agony* i want to eat this chapter. holy shit.

i had so many questions answered with this chapter (and like. got several more LMAO) and this was so so good to read

i have to comment on hikaru's characterisation because he's so utterly resigned to being unloved like all the light left his life the moment ai did. its sort of a mirror to how ai considers herself entirely unlovable too and it just hammers in the fact that they really some part of the understanding and acceptance both of them were seeking but unfortunately the factors weren't in the cards for them.

what does this chapter breakup do to the already established timeline of the uehara-himekawa suicide taking place in the year of dome preparations and 153-154 seemingly confirming that said murder-suicide takes place wayy before the twins are even born? i am not looking at it. i do not see it. i am absolutely not thinking of what this changes about aqua's no hoshigan arc. nope. not seeing it. timeline doesnt exist to me.

sorry to hikaru, but ai immediately going “teehee! no ^V^ <3” at his marriage proposal was incredibly funny. girl there are so many things wrong with you (affectionate)

anyways when i was reading this i was actually struck by how i could just. tell ai was lying during this whole breakup. its really remniscent of her fight with nino, because ai's defense mechanism is to fawn and find the right thing to say to fix the situation to try and descalate it and she does not like confrontation. and here its like...shes trying to break it off as clean as possible, throwing out every reason because she doesn't want to but she knows she has to both because she is utterly right that the type of relationship they have is not healthy for hikaru and that adding marriage + kids to that would be incredibly difficult and would just be Bad for the both of them.

it was just so bad in the delivery ai please oh my god. its actually a little bit funny if you ignore the. the breakdowns.

and its. just really really sad that both hikaru and ai blame themselves and hate themselves for things entirely out of their control, which hikaru thinking airis abuse of him was something he did and ai filled with so much regret even when she knew she was trying to make the best decision for the both of them.

anyways. also ignoring how the movie arc kinda fails in delivering the set up that wouldve made this chapter hit much harder than it already does. moving on!

i just really really enjoy how this hammers in the fact that ai really was just. an ordinary girl. she was a lonely girl trying her hardest to be able to love and give the best possible lives to the people she cares about and even her dvd is still just trying to do that. to give herself accountability in the future so that she can't back out of it by giving the DVDs to gotanda that maybe, she along with her kids can try for a family again. it is just so ai in a way that is utterly heartbreaking to read.

also uh. kamiki's assertion he did infact give ai's address to ryousuke would be a kinda a confirmation he wasn't entirely responsible if not for the huge sixteen year old corpse of amamiya goro in the room. wonder why the two of them were there at the hospital that night. wonder how hikaru got said hospital address when ai broke it off because she considered herself the burden rather than hikaru and thus wouldnt have given the hospital address to hikaru. wonder about all of that. also wonder about miss fuyuko niinos role in all of this. so many questions really.

(also justice for katayose yura. is she STILL in those mountains.)

as for this being aqua’s revenge plan, its exactly what i expected actually! we've been told over and over that aqua would not be able to kill kamiki, not without extreme damage to himself both mentally and probably physical if he went through with his suicidal plan. this revenge is as gentle as it is cruel. it thoroughly breaks apart hikaru's world — striking directly at his heart past every single denial he has offered himself for 15 years to slam him with the plain truth: ai loved him and he killed her. And he now has to sit with that regret of time lost for the rest of his life. but it's also so gentle as it offers everyone a release from the chokehold ai’s death has had on them. it offers everyone a chance to let go of those regrets and move on with their lives in freedom. even for hikaru, he is finally given the full truth and learned that he was infact loved

but as much as i like this revenge it feels…i don't know how to say it but its sort of a disservice to the struggles aqua has faced till now because this revenge is the conclusion without the necessary setup. ever since c.10, aqua has expressed intense suicidal ideation and has been incredibly depressed and that ideation got horrifically worse during the movie arc.

there has been no resolution to this intense downslide of his mental health with basically just ruby’s “You're my oshi and I depend on you”, Kana asking him not to die (framed comedically) and Akane trying to use kana and aquas crushes to fix him. none of this is a refutation of the core issue of his suicidal ideation: that he feels such immense guilt at having failed ai, to the point he believed he had to commit murder and die, for him to atone completely. none of that refutes his belief that he is worth less than everyone around him. So him reaching this revenge without any of the emotional healing required feels a bit jarring and there's no catharsis. after over 140 chapters of aqua feeling heavily suicidal to see him looking forward to his future is nice, but i'd have liked to see his healing yknow? to have him say point blank he wants to live

SHOUTOUT TO MENGO FOR DELIVERING IN FANTASTIC ART YET AGAIN....! HAPPY HOSHINO FAMILY PANEL MENGO ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME. AUGH. AUAHG I AM IN PAIN. AUGH. That page of Hikaru absolutely breaking down at the news Ai really, truly loved him, with no lie and just the desperation with which he presses his hand, his entire self as if he could just reach across the screen and hold Ai’s hand again. laughs in agony

although theres been a recent trend of ai's importance being downplayed to roid up grsr and this chapter feels sort of...the opposite? like the twins importance to ai was being downplayed in favour of intensifying the hkai relationship (but since this dvd is aimed at asking her kids if they want to be a family with hikaru 15 years in the future i guess...?)

oh hello ruby there you are i thought you had no idea about the revenge plan. her presence is interesting because im tentatively hoping we'll finally get a resolution to the AquaRuby debacle due to the way theyre paralleled to hkai. fingers crossed.

anyways ending on aqua literally sobbing as he delivers the final sentence to hikaru - that his understanding of ai was fundamentally wrong and because of his desire to have her for himself he lost both her and any possible chance he had of a happy ending.

fuck. break next week welcome to our favourite biweekly manga

[edwardseymour]

15,16,17,18,25

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

15. that one thing you see in fanart all the time

the ariana grande-ification of anne boleyn in fanart is truly something. and as an olive skinned white woman, i don’t think white tudor fans know what olive skin looks like. also i think there is a frankly bizarre relationship certain tudor fans have with race (ab as an Other™️ because she was supposedly swarthy, trends surrounding coa being fair and spanish, jane seymour being ‘so fair that one would call her rather pale than otherwise’).

16. you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

i truly do not understand the appeal of characterising female historical figures (largely royal, aristocratic) as powerless victims — with no thought to their complicity in an inherently unjust institution. catherine of aragon (as one example) was immensely privileged to the detriment of the majority of people: she believed in this superiority as morally just and fought for it. remembering what her queenship meant should colour how we talk about her: lauding her as brave for fighting for her status can and should coexist with acknowledging what she was ultimately fighting for.

17. there should be more of this type of fic/art

i myself am guilty of this, but we absolutely need more content about non-courtiers (and content in general that is active and honest about acknowledging the fundamental value of those outside of the aristocratic sphere). wolf hall came close but veers into trying to have it both ways; ‘she [Mantel] wants to relish the bejewelled surfaces, the highly wrought fabrics, the flashing beauties of the Henrician age, while also having a go at the people and the institutions which enabled that agglomeration of riches. The aesthetic delight and the political outrage are on a collision course’. becoming elizabeth’s take on kett’s rebellion was hateful. one of the best jobs i ever had was transcribing local court records for an archive, and getting to meet dozens and dozens of men and women, and hear them talk about their lives.

18. it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

critical thinking skills 🥴

i would be remiss if i didn’t plead katherine howard’s case yet again. she’s such a force of personality — charming and delightful and ‘fired with ambition’, when i think her ability to be as successful as she was as queen, given her lack of experience and the brevity of her reign, is nothing short of remarkable. i think people are genuinely missing out on someone so engaging when they dismiss her as either whore or victim. it’s a constant frustration, for me, that the way we talk about her remains so superficial.

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

god, i have so many of these; you could just send me 25s repeatedly atp haha. i think the most annoying thing though is the people who get weirdly offended by the insinuation that this fandom is, indeed, a fandom. there is this hypocrisy over how legitimate engagement can be — but ofc., certain people can be called ‘stans’ (indeed, ab fans can invent terms like ‘heneven eleven stans’ and ‘seyhive’, because people are just that painfully uncreative) but god forbid somebody, in turn, calls them ab stans. ‘i’m not a stan, i have a BA/BS/BE/LLB’; you write fanfiction — you are not serious people lol. it’s not an academic conference… nobody cares about you. you can leave if you’re not having fun, nobody is forcing you to be here.

[zeethecatlady]

pjo tv show spoilers!!!

ahhhhh i just finished ep 8 and i have so many thoughts so be ready.

of course across the tv show there are things i love and things i dont necessary agree with but thats lofe and personal opinion so no hate from me here. cause if i too were rick and staftung reading through and adapting something i wrote about what 20 years ago i would change up plot holes and things that i thought would work better too.

i think all the actors were very talented and perfect for there roles.

i love the change of sally teaching percy mythology from a young age thats something i always thought that should of happened to begin with.

i didnt like the characterisation of gabe when watching the show if i hadnt read the books he was almost likeable i thought he was mildly funny i feel like they didnt make him cruel enough to justify the whole medusa thing.

loved the interactions between percy and grover before camp the lighting of percy in school without grover (blue toned) and percy in school with grover (warm toned) really showed how good of a friend he was. grover was so sweet and funny and had great lines cant wait to see him in a wedding dress.

loved percys interaction with mr d i thought it was totally in character and really was quite funny, mr d is just dying for that bottle of wine.

i didnt love the fact that everyone kinda avoided the topic that the gods igbored there children and arw pretty shitty for the majority of the tv show percy kept asking questions like the gods were like the average parent of anyone and no one thought to tell him 'hey percy the gods dont actually talk to their kids so thats why everyone gives you looks when you talk about there parents'.

thalia being pronounced the way it is threw me off but i knlw thats the actuall greek way of saying it so it dosent bother me (i will continue to pronounce it the way i do though)

i thought it was interesting that they had annabeth see the fates and not percy i don't have many comments on this just that it was interesting.

i loved the way they handled medusa and her story but still managed to make her a monster for percy to fight l, its a delicate line that i think they managed perfectly.

the arch i loved the way percy swapped places with annabeth great cinematic moment, i thought it was weird that they didnt have percy jump in trust of his dad xonsidering the way they have changed percys attitude towards gods as parents at the time during the show, but i thought the hand of posiedon saving him was great aswell.

also the arch being a temple of athena was a cool edition i thought they played athenas pettyness pretty good. i did like that annabeth wanted to go becuse architecture but i dont mind the change.

tunnel of love chefs kiss not more to be said really, other than hephaestus he gets it i always liked him as a god.

the way they had grover talk to ares and manipulate him into taking while also reading his emotions so cool i loved the edition so much and it really gave us an in look into both grover and ares as people.

the animal truck was nice i loved the percy and grover interactions about the animals thought it was funny. missed percy not talking to a zebra.

lotus hotel very cool loved the music choice, loved the design, cool that they know its the lotus eaters before they go in. loved the chat with hermes and grover meeting a satyr and playing his hunt the human game. the lost memorys gives a proper view into ehy people would stay there and not leave. also love the little 'bianca' and the two kids who ran past in purple shirts (romans??).

stealing hermes taxi to go to santa monica awesome, i questioned the choice of 4 pearls tp begin with cause i thought 'this will make the prophecy obsolete' but having watched it all now so good loved the choice cause of course posidon would never abandon his queen amongst mortals

the choic of them running out of time on there quest i dont understand was it necessary i dont think them having a day left still would have changed anything that still happened after show wise maybe a few conversations tweeked. (if anyone knows why let me know im curious)

crustys this was the only monster wich i didnt like the way they delt with, i think they had to do it this was as alot of this was percys thoughts in the book which they havent really been transfering to screen that well. i feel like we lost some of percts brutal fatal flaw here with him not killing him and his smarts of him convincing him to get in the bed and trap himself, thats percys thing see if annabeth has plan, persuasion, then fight.

also the underworld not being in DOA :( that was a cool idea so fun and its a pun but maybe for time issues they just resorted to crusty doesnt bother me that much but ill miss it.

percy not bartering with charon again taking away percys skill at persuasion. but not a big deal in long run (missed the drown in bath joke though)

the feilds of asphodel i thought jt was an interesting take, its described in the books as a really busy airports or station of some kind just loads of people standing everywhere. i tought ut was interesting that the souls became trees (does that mean hazel isnt a tree but just wanders amougst the trees?) the fact rhat they made it regrets aste what stick you in asphodel and turn you into a tree i didnt agree with asphodel is the place you go when your life is juat average not bad or evil and not heroic or extremely good, cause u telling me that any hero that goes to elysium dosent have regrets? also annabeth being the one with regrets weird take it should have been grover who regrets alot (thalia for example) but i get they did that cause like the books they were setting it up to look like annabeth was the traitor.

loved the inclusion story about luke hermes and may.

i loved the characterisation of hades i though he was quite accurate to how hades acts in the actual mythology and you can totally see where nico gets it from. just loved the whole interaction.

loved rhw choice of the pearls going back to manutak rather than santa monica.

the fight with ares loved kt was squeeling the entire time, ares beeing cocky and toying with percy, percy showing beast controll of the sea and finally the cut on ares ankle. but what aboutbthe curse! the curse ares puts on percys sword that bexomes relevent not onece but twice. that surely will mess up the fufillment if the prophecy for a possibel 3rd season as thats the whole reason he dosent fight atlas and takes the sky from artemis. so ill have to wait and see how they do that.

annabeth giving percy her beads 😊

calling children of the big three forbidden children its a nice edition that i like (kinda remids me of the fanfic son of seafoam)

the interaction with zeus pretty good liked it the way that zeus appears to be taking kronos somewhat seriously though, well we will se if that lasts.

posiedon stepping in and saving percy and then surrendering-- - my heart cant

pecry going back to camp and being celebrated great as he should. also live the percy luke flashbacks.

now my favourite way the show has changed the percy luke betrayal! i love the way thia changed i always thought that luke should have tried to recruit percy as he does in later books but percy dosent entertain as luke tried to kill him twice but i love that luke was all like percy we could run away and fight the gods. and thevlook on his face when annabeth throws a knife at him and the way percy sliced luke and immediately apologised because although hes angry he dosent acctually want to hurt him. and you can tell why people like luke and join him. obvs the way they have made the gods more likeable from the start means if you havent resd tbe books you probably dont understand lukes motivations as much but jes known the gods are shitty parents for much longer than percy as hed older and percy will get there one day but we all know how that ends up TLO.

percy annabeth and grover all making a promise to meet back at thalia next year so cute

percys dream about kronos really good gives information that made me jump with excitment as a book fan. sally coming to percy with a notebook to note down his dreams is telling in thats not the first time since camp that its happend. also is it his birthday i got the vibe its his birthday. percy telling his mum that kronos told him to tell her shes a good mum made me snort but its sweet that percy is trying to protect her.

over all i have many thoughts and opinions this isnt all of them and if anyone wants specific thoughts on certain things let me know.

i cant wait till s2 they just have to have a season 2!!!!!

sorry for the long post

[saintsenara]

the velveteen rabbit mrs cole & tom riddle general | 3.2k words

‘i don’t want you,’ he says, dark eyes bleary, tongue full of pus. ‘leave me alone.’

‘well, i’m what you’re getting,’ i say to him.

‘you ain’t worth having.’

‘and, yet, here i am.’

a boy has scarlet fever and wants his mother. he gets mrs cole instead.

this piece was written for week two of @ladiesofhpfest, which focuses on mothers [you can find the masterlist of the week's fics here].

author's notes under the cut

motherhood is one of the key themes of the harry potter series, but it’s often handled in a way i find quite reductive. in particular, the marian symbolism of lily potter means that all other mothers are found wanting beside her - the series understands motherly love as it understands all other love: as something whose nobility comes through sacrifice and suffering [as we see in its treatment of alice longbottom and nymphadora tonks, who it thinks did the right thing for their children].

mothers whose affection for their children is self-indulgent [petunia dursley, pre-deathly hallows narcissa malfoy], selfish [the more negative aspects of molly weasley’s characterisation], subordinate to their own concerns [kendra dumbledore], or lacking in affection [walburga black] get a bad showing across the seven-book canon. similarly, childless women either get forced into a quasi-maternal role [such as being a teacher at a boarding school] or become one of the many female characters who are portrayed as lacking some fundamental capacity for tenderness [rita skeeter, dolores umbridge, bellatrix lestrange].

but one particularly interesting mother whose relationship with her child is criticised by the text is merope gaunt.

and by this, i don’t mean that merope is criticised for how she became a mother - indeed, the text is remarkably dismissive of what happens to tom riddle sr. at her hands - but that she is implicitly criticised by both harry and dumbledore in half-blood prince for failing to stay alive for her son, with the subtext of their conversation being that witches are able to prevent themselves dying in childbirth and that merope just didn’t have the heart to make the effort.

i have always loathed this. i hate the implication that "muggle" ways of dying are things magical people are immune to - not least because it directly supports the views of blood-supremacists that wizards and muggles are essentially different species, which the series otherwise thinks it doesn’t agree with - and i hate the fact that the idea that merope "chose" to die inadvertently confirms her son’s belief that death is weak or shameful. childbirth was historically - and, indeed, still is - extremely dangerous, and plenty of witches must have died alongside muggle women, all of them hoping they could live to raise their children.

and this is what mrs cole tells us in this story: that merope wanted to live.

mrs cole - who, here, is an irishwoman in london, which gives her her own additional otherness to go alongside being childless - is one of those incidental characters i’m unjustifiably obsessed with.

i read a lot of voldemort-centric things, and she often ends up shouldering a sizeable portion of the blame for his obvious childhood trauma. to some extent, i can see why - she’s drunk in the middle of the day when there are dozens of children in her care, she treats examples of voldemort’s emotional damage [especially him learning as a baby that crying was futile] as nothing more than amusing gossip - but i also think that focusing criticism on her is unfair.

instead, i wanted to have a look at her as a woman doing her best to be a surrogate mother to an extremely messed up child, but never quite being able to succeed owing to the pressures she’s under.

because, after all, love is something which also requires resources. it requires time to invest into the child; it requires the caregiver to have the mental and physical capacity to provide the child the attention they need; it requires the child to be warm and fed and clothed and the caregiver to not have to worry about those things; it requires the child to feel safe enough to be childish. mrs cole loves her charges innately, but it’s not always possible for her to spare the time or energy to make that love all-encompassing.

and that isn’t her fault. the failure of the state in tom riddle’s life isn’t given a lot of space in canon. the harry potter series emphasises the value of individual - rather than collective - choice as its central theme and, even when the wizarding state is criticised for something, that criticism is often aimed at one person [such as cornelius fudge in order of the phoenix] rather than at the systems which have enabled them.

but it is a matter of fact that orphanages cannot provide children with the support they need because they’re not set up to do so. the wool’s of the velveteen rabbit is underfunded and overcrowded - like institutions worldwide - and mrs cole spends all her time trying to get her charges through the day unscathed. state figures - such as the doctor who will not work for free [this being before the invention of the nhs] or the member of parliament who ignores letters or the magistrates ["beaks"] who fail to understand that stealing is an expression of the orphans’ fundamental trauma - let down the children at every turn.

including one particular child: tom riddle, whose complicated relationship both to his mother and to mrs cole is examined here through the lens of childhood illness. 

i’m wedded to the idea that tom was quite a sickly child. he is described in canon in terms which suggest that he’s somewhat physically fragile, and it provides an explanation for why he becomes so obsessed with magic if physical strength is a power that other children have over him. it also provides some more insight into his fear of death - after all, you’d want to live forever too if you knew you’d be dying as a child with only a woman you hate and who can’t give you the love and affection you need sitting at your bedside.

[the title of the piece is, of course, taken from the horrifying 1922 children’s book of the same name, in which a velveteen toy rabbit is burned to ashes after its owner has scarlet fever, but everything is alright for some reason.]

[zaiban2989]

Hi...if you don't mind, can I ask something from BNHA? What do you think are Bakugou and Midoriya’s greatest personality strengths and weaknesses? Why? What do you love about their dynamic (as a romantic or platonic, is up to you)?

Hey there! Oh that's such a great question, thanks for asking me!

I'm going to break this down into a few different things here, it might be a bit long, I apologise lol

First of, let's talk without the bkdk-glasses about their dynamics. So I'll be talking about it while trying to stay objective and looking at it from a platonic POV.

When you start to read/watch BNHA, you see Izuku as this little middle school boy who dreams every moment of the day to become a hero while being bullied by his childhood friend, right? This already sets the tone for the rest of the series because you can already tell that both of them are going to be important protagonists in the storyline: Izuku obviously because he is the main character, but Katsuki could have been a side character or even a one-off - once Izuku enters UA - as "the boy who bullied the MC and gave him hardship about being quirkless but now MC is following is dream and overcoming all of this", yet Hori decided to put them both to the front there, with All Might, the sludge villain accident, the fact that Katsuki runs to Deku afterwards to "talk" to him, etc.

You only need like 2-3 chapters/episodes to know that those two and their weird/broken relationship are going to be present throughout the rest of the show. Hell, you actually need the first 30 seconds of the show to understand that Katsuki will become an important pivot to Izuku's story, really: the whole childhood flashback of Izuku protecting one of his friends against "Kacchan"? Hori didn't start with that for no reason. It doesn't just show the fact that Izuku has been bullied about being quirkless since he was 4yo, it shows that the bullying has been done by "Kacchan", which we then see again when they're in middle school. If Hori wanted it to be about the quirkless factor alone, he would have picked either a different 4yo kid to do the bullying, or he would have left Izuku's "Kacchan" to the background and use a different idiot to bully him in middle school.

Therefore, it's already established that Izuku & Katsuki's personal storylines are closely interlinked with one another from the get-go. Whether people want to see it as enemies, rivals, rivals to friends, or lovers, the fact remains that these two are going to share the show until the end lol (and the fact that Hori himself keeps on pushing them to the fro any chance he gets with not so subtle bkdk moments is just the icing on the cake for me tbh)

The dynamic they have is so powerful it actually drives the entire plot and by extension the other characters around them, which is probably what I love the most to be honest. Plot-wise, like I said, it's driven from the beginning with the childhood friends' flashback, then the middle school period with the bullying and Kacchan being an absolute dick telling Izuku to take a swine dive if he wants to be a hero, and then the very same Izuku SAVING him because he looked like he was asking for help? Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps lol In that sense, Katsuki is both the catalyst to Izuku feeling absolutely useless (Deku), forcing him on an everyday basis to face the fact that he can never become a hero because he is quirkless, and being the trigger to the same Deku to turn into an actual hero by saving his sorry suffocated ass to the sludge villain. The fact that we see Kat's POV of the tree bridge and the river scene with small Izuku trying to help him just increases the focus on how that's a personality trait of Izuku that Katsuki hates (at first) and cannot comprehend for a very long long time.

Yep, with that I'm jumping into Izu's characterisation! I think that this is his biggest strength (though extremely dangerous): he has the spirit of a natural hero, he wants to save anyone who needs help without a fault (especially Kacchan) and that's what makes him so endearing. We know he is quirkless, he literally cannot do anything than most other people can, i.e. use a quirk to help someone; yet he still fucking runs in flames, crying, to try and save his childhood friend. That's hard to not like when starting BNHA. But this also brings up his self-sacrificing tendencies to the front and that's why this also easily turns into his biggest weakness. It's like a double-edged sword, really. This trait of his gives him the potential of becoming a great hero but Izuku needs to learn restraints when it comes to trying to save people because he ends up most of the time injured and then incapable to save everyone (see Kacchan's kidnapping arc for instance, he saves Kouta and then is unable to save Katsuki. It's the perfect example).

On the other side, you have Katsuki. He is brash, aggressive, basically the whole bad-boy "Imma blast you to the ninth level of hell" kind of attitude from the start, the huge ego thinking he is better than anyone else (because he's basically been fed this since he's a kid). He's got a powerful quirk and knows it, he knows how to use it and has this perfect physical strength which makes him shine during the UA exam. He's born to "win". And I think it's this very "win (to save)" attitude that's his personality strength. Even when he is facing hurdles (being humiliated by Deku saving his ass during the sludge accident, Deku beating him during their first fight at UA, being kidnapped, etc.), he takes it all upon himself to overcome them. (Like a lot of people, I strongly believe he doesn't just overcome them in a few days like it's shown in the anime/manga, it's hard to fucking let go of those fucked up situations like being kidnapped so easily, regardless of how strong-willed you are, but well that's another topic entirely) The fact remains that Katsuki is depicted to be this badass person - yes, with a shitty personality - but he is smart, knows his own physical strength, never sits on his ass thinking he cannot become better, he just keeps on trying to improve and be the best, and like Izuku does, we can only admire him for this.

Now for his weakness, I think it's pretty obvious? He lacks what Izuku have naturally: the empathy to help and save people, which is detrimental to being the best hero. And he has to face this on a daily basis as soon as he enters UA. It's been nagging him from childhood with Izu being a sore eye to him because subconsciously he can feel what he is lacking in himself, and having to confront that in the form of a quirless kid who adores him and keeps following him around despite Katsuki pushing him away every chance he gets is absolutely enraging. Whether you're a 4yo or a 14yo kid, it's still something very difficult to comprehend on your own, IMO. So when you actually see Katsuki facing this head-on in UA, first with anger and frustration but slowly with quiet comprehension and then understanding, it's just amazing really. His character development in the series is by far my favourite. That boy has grown so much and worked upon improving himself physically but mostly mentally over the span of a year, it's absolutely incredible (or like Izuku would say, "Kacchan sugoi!")

So all in all, those two idiots have their very own individual traits (the good and the bad ones) which make them who they are, and I think any real bnha fans (regardless of whether they are bkdk stans or not) can admit that these two are important to each other and for the story itself to move ahead.

One last thing I'm going to add regarding the dynamics is the fact that despite the huge drift that has happened between them once Katsuki had his quirk and Izuku was labelled as quirkless, despite the distance between the two and the bullying and horrible relationship they had in middle school, as soon as they're in UA, you have them work seamlessly with one another (however reluctantly, at first) whenever they have to fight a common enemy (example which comes to mind: class 1-A having to fight All Might as a villain in the first ova and Katsuki understanding what needs to be done without being told what Deku's plan was to defeat the baddy, that's just gold).

Aaaand I think this post is already super long, so I will make another post and tag you (if you want) to talk more about this from my rotten-to-infinity bkdk POV 💚🧡

I could honestly go all day about these two boys, I hope this answer didn't disappoint you. If it's too messy, well, sorry 😅 and if you have other questions please send them!

Thanks anyone who read till the end, the honour is mine, truly.

[bougiebutchbitch]

Congratulations, you made me start reading White Knight! I'm not a fan so far, but I believe you said it gets better?

lmao, I am shaking hands with you and pretty much every other Batjokes fan!

It does get better. By a lot. I would encourage you to keep going!

The whys & wherefores are below the cut - but I have to give the obligatory disclaimer that this is all personal opinion. I know this is a bit of a contentious comic in the fandom, for reasons I fully understand! I'm not looking to get into a debate - just to ramble a little and share my love for this series with folks who, hopefully, will appreciate that x

The most egregious issue I had with White Knight was that Jack seemed to be an entirely different character from Joker. So... why should I even care about him?

Like. He started wearing a suit? And working out to get the Stereotypical Superhero Bod rather than rocking that classic scrawny Joker look? And he became a freaking politician? Bullshit.

Add to that the shoddy mental health depictions (that's... really not how DID works, DC) and the blatant homophobia of "We will literally say ON THE PAGE that Joker is in love with Batman, but only when he's evil - when he's good, he's in love with Harley and hates Batman".... Yeah, the initial comic has issues, to say the least.

BUT. I do think that in the later chapters, after Jack's 'death' - so, in the Beyond the White Knight era! - Jack's characterisation gets wayyyy more believable. He reads like a good incarnation of Joker! He's annoying - purposefully, irrepressably so! He's a dork! He's hyper-intelligent but also just plain ol' hyper! He does his own sound effects! He goofs about because he thinks he's hilarious (and Bruce kinda indulges him and it's very cute)! He's A MASSIVE Batman fanboy, and hooooo boy does it show!

There's a gigantic Queer Undertone to his relationship with Batman - even more so than is the norm, for Batjokes. One need only look at the little heart emoticon when he talked to Bruce in the Valentine's Day issue. Or the whole 'Harley gets to call you Bats but I don't? :pout:' part. Or the 'those two bicker like an old married couple' bit, or the part where Jack asks Batman if he can ride on the back of his motorcycle ("You won't even feel my arms around you ;)" - holographic flirting at its finest!), or even Bruce's relationship with Harley!

I'm serious. You do NOT need to be wearing the Queer Viewing Goggles in order to interpret Jack wholeheartedly supporting Bruce and Harley getting together and being happy together, with or without his involvement, in a very OT3-sorta-fashion.

Buuuuuut if you're after explicit statements that Jack is still in love with Batman as Jack, rather than Joker, you won't find them in this comic. I would argue that there's enough implicit stuff there to see Jack as 100% bisexual, in love with Bruce and Harley, but, as usual.... that reading remains implicit. Instead, there is enough ambiguity for Comic Dudebros to argue that The Magic Brain Pills 'cured' Joker both of his mental illness and his love for Batman. Which... sigh. :/

In other news, I genuinely like the depiction of Bruce in this comic! So driven, so stoic... But he's also learning slowly how to be vulnerable with the people who love him, how to accept and live with his panic disorder, and how to impart affection to his sons! He's learning that he's allowed family, happiness, and peace! Those are arcs I will never tire of.

Harley is also a delight - a take-no-shit, smart yet fun interpretation of the character. She doesn't really read like the Harley I know and love, but regardless, I'm invested in her and her story!

So, yeah. Awesome art, decent storyline (not exceptional, but far from the worst out there!), fascinating Elseworlds look at the entire Batfam, and strong, strong implications of an m/m/f OT3... There's a lot not to love. But there's a lot to love, too!

I hope you enjoy!

[akkivee]

watched the bat vs mtr stage!!!!! here’s the tentative script if you wanna read it full too!!!!!

anyway here’s the stuff that had me screaming!!!!!

i still hate the way kuukou’s written, but what the stage did do was take a majority of kuukou’s development, which primarily happened before he formed bat, and fit it into a linear, easy to follow, format for the stage. not something i particularly agree with but i understand why they did!!!!!

i still don’t understand why they removed his compassion tho lol

they started to set up parallels between kuukou’s arrogance and jakurai’s arrogance back in track 3 and i’m happy to see it come together here in bat vs mtr

on that note, wow!!!!! sensei was kind of an asshole lmao!!!!!

nah like you look at these lyrics and man!!!! sensei really had just written off his and hitoya’s friendship in this play!!!! damn dude!!!!

hitoya displayed a degree of levelheadedness his canon counterpart didn’t; here in the play, hitoya is willing to admit he’s changed as well and maybe jakurai’s change wasn’t the only reason they fell apart. interesting stuff

sensei’s dancing in mtr’s new group song is 🥵🥵🥵🥵

kuukou was not in the wrong for this btw lmao

*cries* bat haiyuu chemistry is too good genuinely

i personally think it’s always a little weird when doppo’s the one to not notice how sensei’s feeling. like both hifumi and doppo are sensitive to jakurai’s emotions, doppo just stays quiet about it because he doesn’t think it’s his place to say anything. but i digress lol

i love!!!!!! how hifumi’s actor changes his voice!!!! when he puts on the jacket mid sentence!!!!! it’s having both the audio AND visual that’s setting me off lol!!!!!

kuukou: *beating up an entire host club* stop crying jyushi we’re not doing anything illegal!!!! 😈

the way jyushi dramatically introduced himself due to his nerves and the proud way kuukou smiled at him!!!!!!!!!! 💜💜💜

kuukou @ dohifu: oh i’ll give you a reason to fight us 😈😈😈

me:

between kuukou fighting everything that breathes in this play and hitoya yelling at jakurai that their fight wouldn’t be meaningless, there’s like a reason to fight thing going on that’s making me curious about fp vs mtc lol

LOL WHEN THE COPS SHOWED UP AT THE HOST CLUB JYUSHI ACTUALLY PICKED KUUKOU UP LONG CAT STYLE AND WADDLED HIM OFF THE STAGE HELP

AND JYUSHI DRAMATICALLY CRYING HES GOING TO DIE ALONE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET AFTER HE AND KUUKOU GOT SEPARATED UNTIL HITOYA HAPPENED TO FIND HIM IS TOO FUNNY IM DYING

kuukou: *stumbles across jakurai after his battle with hitoya* hell yeah!!!! fight me and if i win, you have to buy me food!!!!!

jakurai: *passes out*

kuukou: bro what i didn’t even do anything🧍‍♂️

hitoya actually had work in shinjuku and didn’t just come to beef jakurai lol so we’re treated to courthouse rock where jyushi cheers hitoya on his case lol

DOHIFU HAVE A REALLY GAY NUMBER ABOUT HOW THEIR HOME IS THEIR SANCTUARY AND KUUKOU TIED UP IN SAID HOME TELLS THEM TO SHUT UP AND TO STOP SINGING IN FRONT OF HIM LMAOOOOOOOO

the way they characterised jakurai’s war trauma as a storm and hitoya’s revenge as a flame!!!!! bright and dark!!!!!! bright!!!!! dark!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—

jyushi pulled out hitoya’s backstory from hitoya and we get a really sweet number about jyushi’s hero worship towards hitoya 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 and how jyushi wants to be the one to save hitoya this time 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

what had me yelling was how they took hifumi’s feelings about honobono and applied it towards getting jakurai to open up towards reconciliation!!!!!!!!!!! some relationships you have to fight for hifumi said!!!!!!! goddamn they really made sensei face hitoya!!!!!!! i love it!!!!!!!!

and the fact we still get to hear hifumi’s feelings about honobono!!!!!!! they had to keep mtr drama light because bat’s drama wasn’t as devastating as mtr’s in the battle album and the more equal stakes are a great call!!!! but yay!!!!!! hifumi’s complex feelings about honobono!!!!!!!!!

kuukou ‘playing’ the bad guy to get jakurai to fight hitoya 😫😫😫😩😩😩😩🙏🙏🙏👌👌🙏👌👌👌🙏

LOL at the end of it all during the redux stuff we were treated to jyushi sexy dancing in front of the crowd and kuukou bodying his teammates they’re so funny 💜💜💜💜💜💜

overall a fantastic play!!!!!! very clean storytelling with a few choices i prefer over canon!!!!! godspeed hypstage thanks for the banger!!!!

[thedreamermusing]

Snirius + Snily!

Snirius:

Ship it of course; we do it together haha.

What made you ship it?

You said everything in your answer. I'm a huge, huge sucker for enemies to lovers + narrative foils to lovers and these two have both in spades. They are mirror images of each other in SO many ways and I kind of love how even their character arcs echo each other through the series. There's a real simmering hatred there that's very personal. Like, we know James and Snape's hatred is largely to do with Lily + toxic masculinity posturing. But with Sirius and Snape, it's like they recognise the deepest parts their own insecurities (blood purity, class, family, appearance etc) in the other person and just hate the other in order to get rid of those parts of themselves. Honestly, I feel like if both the Marauder and Snape fandoms were not so sharply divided, this would have been a ship with as many fics as Drarry.

What are your favorite things about the ship?

Pretty much the parallels, the deep simmering hatred, just the tension in the room whenever these two are within speaking distance (that argument in OOTP!), the fact that theyhave so much else in common.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

Some of the characterisations are not to my taste. What makes the ship appealing in my view is that they're both more or less equally awful to each other, if we take the sum of their whole lives. I think fics tend to focus on either one thing and making excuses for the other--Sirius's bullying + The Werewolf 'Prank' or Snape's Death Eater days and bullying as a teacher, when ideally, they should be looking into both.

Snily:

Don't ship it.

Why don’t you ship it?

As per canon characterisation, I don't see it. A crucial element for me to ship anything is for me to see an obsession, hatred, fixation, or attraction on both sides. In canon, we see it clearly in Snape. But it's a very one-sided dynamic. It's barely a friendship. Lily as a character is also too vague for me to understand what could work or not work in their dynamic. It's too much guesswork.

Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

I like its potential. I think if there were some tweaks to the story it could have been a Cathy/Heathcliffe level dysfunctional romance/friendship. There's just so much that could be done with the idea of this boy from the wrong side of the tracks in love with a girl who's too good for him in the Muggle world, but when they enter the Wizarding World, they find that some people think the other way around. I love the idea of a Lily who's desperate to hold on to the boy who introduced her to magic, of them experimenting and pushing the boundaries of magic together, of a Lily who feels just as isolated and like an outsider as Snape does despite her popularity, of a Lily whose closest friend was Snape and who lost a significant part of herself when the friendship ended, who clung on to the Marauders even harder when he betrayed by calling her a slur, who maybe was both scared and furious every time she fought Death Eaters because she had no idea if the person behind the mask would be him. All this is just great material to work with.

[strangertheories]

I feel like there's too much discourse surrounding Mike's character nowadays that you cannot really talk about his character without it being turned into a ship war situation or slander. It also feels weird because many people seem to think that his character can be 'good or bad' based on Byler/Mlvn happens or not and it's just...? Do you even like him as a character or just perceive him from ship POVs then? It's like saying you wouldn't like Lucas or Max if they broke up or you wouldnt like Hopper, Joyce, Nancy etc if they just entered a relationship that you personally dont like. Because a character cannot be primarily defined or perceived based on shipping reasons, because they also have to stand on their own characterwise.... Max is my fav character and I wouldn't dislike or love her based on her romance choices. Yet whenever I see takes about Mike's character it just seems like both sides only ever focus on his romantic endgame. Or oftentimes just misinterpret his character by inventing made-up things about him that do not exist in canon. So is he that weak of a character then idk, because it seems like Mlvns will just hate him if he ends up with Will and many Bylers will call him a badly written character if he continues to be in a relationship with El or if the narrative doesnt turn out the way they expect or *exactly* want it to be. And it's especially kind of annoying when these both sides just want to insert Mike into a category that they like but when you just look at it, it sounds like they don't even like the canon!Mike but the fanon!version of it.

OH MY GOD, YES. I do get why people will like him less if Byler is not endgame, less because of Byler but more because they interpret Mike within the frame of being queer which means their justification for his behaviour or the reason they relate to him is now gone. However, I also think it's important to remember that he's 14 and traumatized and him getting angry at Will doesn't have to be projection or secretly be him being the best guy ever. He is flawed, canonically, and he has been a bad friend to Will since S2.

But people tend to act like he's an evil asshole or a perfectly innocent guy because their analyses are working backwards from each of those conclusions. I used to actually not like Mike very much, and I'm still not a huge fan, but I think understanding why he has his flaws without explaining them away helped me to understand him more. Also someone edited him to First Love, Late Spring by Mitski and I'm not even joking when I say it was the first time his characterisation clicked for me. And the show has been making this explicit, both in his need to be needed and his depression in S2, but they've not been as effective as writing him in years.

Even within the show, Mike is always defined in relation to other characters ever since S3 when he was less of a central character. In S2, they introduced all of his struggles with depression and emotional issues because of his loss of Eleven which was solved when El returned but it never really addressed the actual root issues that he had. I think fans analysing this behaviour from that perspective is completely valid because I do it too.

He could have a lot of depth but I feel fans give him much more than the show has awarded him in a way that Byler endgame can't exclusively solve. Because whilst they can write him falling in love with Will, they've given themselves eight episodes to break up his 4 season relationship, have him accept his queerness, come out and get with Will. And whilst I'd enjoy that, I also think they've just not written Mike as well in the later seasons. This may sound silly, but there's a point when I blame a character's actions on the writers and not the characters. Think of Nancy and Steve being weird in S4.

Overall, I think the route of this issue is that they didn't know what to do with him after S2. His primary goal in S1 was to find Will. His primary goals in S2 were to "get over" El and to help Will. In S3, his goal was having a good relationship with El and in S4 it was to confess his love (which he already did?). The issue with the last two seasons is that it felt like they were working backwards from a conclusion. They wanted conflict but didn't know how to and so he became a bad friend and bad boyfriend so he could have a character arc.

And I know we can explain his behaviour from a Byler POV which is why I do think it impacts my perception of the character, but Mike's "it's not my fault you don't like girls" line, Mike not contacting Will, Mike not noticing Will was crying, Mike saying the best day of his life was the one where Will went missing (I think the Duffers forgot that context too), and Mike being unable to effectively communicate with El feel out of character to me. In S1, we saw how even when angry with Eleven, he was highly emotionally intelligent and was able to communicate effectively. And we saw his special bond with Will in S2 where he was highly aware of Will's emotions, much more so than the other people in his life. And then by the next Summer, that was all gone. Even his whole "need to be needed" thing fell flat for me because it felt a bit random, it would've been way better for me if they had instead looked at his fear of loss or emotional repression or parental issues.

Jesus, this post grew arms and legs. TL;DR: Mike isn't an evil asshole and he has depth but he's also been failed by the writers in a way people justify with fanon but not the canon text. Byler helps to improve his character, but he's not been written outside of his relationships, romantically or platonically, and his struggles with mental health get solved by the power of love or whatever. Don't get me wrong, people hating Mike is bad but acting like they just don't understand the show or are stupid is also bad in my opinion. Everyone is just trying to fill in the gaps left by his under-writing in the later seasons.