#i just think we needed more time for death to actually established itself

[rei-ismyname]

Logan tried to murder Chuck. What then?

After the sun set on Krakoa and the dust settled, Charles Xavier surrendered himself to 'human authorities.' He was being transported to his super prison built by Reed Snitchards and Tony Nark when...

Logan came to kill him in a very unsubtle way. Surely those guards died or at minimum suffered serious permanent injuries. What little we get of his motivation is an objection to Chuck's time as Sentinel X - killing a bunch of humans. Logan Behavior, basically. Certainly hypocrisy.

Pretty stylish entrance though, The Shining style. He's just about to gut him after Chuck declines explaining himself or speaking at all. Keep in mind resurrection Protocols just phased into another dimension - Logan is aiming to kill Xavier permanently (comic book permanent obviously) here despite the fact he's going to prison for life. He'd actually be subverting punitive state justice here.

I hardly need to say that this is pretty extreme for Logan. He's killed countless people, but for the last few decades he's worshipped the ground Charles walks on. After AvX, when Chuck committed suicide by Phoenix, Logan appointed himself the custodian of 'the dream' and ran the school (though he renamed it after Jean because he's a creepy and petty man.) Cyclops is often held up as Chuck's heir, but I think Logan is just as much. (Though Jean and Storm beat them both out and surpass him.) Maybe this is a hypocritical broken pedestal moment.

Magneto objects, freezing him in place and proclaiming 'no more martyrs.'

Did you know 9/10 failed murderers say 'cripes?'

Then he yeets him out of the prison and levitates it so he can't get back in. Mags and Chuck have a chat and we see nothing of Logan until Wolverine #1.

These people all need therapy. Emotional intelligence so low.

That murderous unilateral motivation seems to have cooled - 'Charles doin' what he did' is third on his list of things that took their toll. Not to minimise his pain, but everyone else has experienced those things too. Many had it worse. Scott, for example, was tortured for six months with his eyes sewn shut and a broken back (which... healed somehow.) If someone else was doing this he'd call them out at best, more likely he'd tell them to get over it. This is #Logan Behavior, though it's weird he doesn't mention Daken's death.

I'm 99% sure this is next chronologically. Scott says Logan was 'in the area so he asked him to investigate' - 'the area' being Santo Marco, a fictional South American country that Magneto briefly conquered in 1963. The X-Men answered his distress call.

No mention of Chuck here, and he greets Scott warmly. No thank you though. They patch him up back at the Factory. Looks like he does have use for X-Men.

Wolverine can absolutely give up. It's his thing.

From 'I never should have left the woods' this has to be after Wolverine #1, but before Uncanny X-Men #1-4, because that takes place over a few days and the phone call between Rogue and Scott implies so. We only get the end of this conversation, but it's very safe to assume it was a soft recruitment offer and assumption of a family relationship. No mention of Chuck here either. He claims he's done, citing Krakoa as a loss. It is a loss, but it also bought back the 16 million Genoshan dead and established a mutant paradise in a heaven dimension - one he could have gone to.

Also, Logan didn't build shit. He had nothing to do with Genosha, in fact he opposed and obstructed it. He bailed on Utopia and the narrative kept genocidal threats away from the school. He had little to do with building Krakoa itself and while he went on the missions he was asked to, he remained a skeptic the entire time. He didn't trust the island and lived on the moon in a polycule. Anyway, he tells Scott not to come looking for him. I promise you he wouldn't say that to Jean.

She's right, they're not strategists.

Looks like he's fine hanging out with Rogue and Gambit. Rogue seemed fine with joining Cyclops and co, but doesn't argue at all when Logan (who is hours away from leaving and has no intention of staying) shoots it down for... reasons? They were X-Men enough when they rescued him from Santo Marco, ingrate.

Neither should struggle to imagine a community 'run' by Scott Summers. Logan has been living with him for at least 3 years and he wasn't everywhere when Logan and Jean were banging. Rogue was on a Krakoan X-Men team with Scott and he and Jean prepped new leaders and stepped back. They all considered themselves Krakoan and Scott 'lived to serve.' How does it end this way? The Chuck question answers itself, though Logan doesn't say 'I wish Magneto didn't stop me killing him' or something. Scott? Uhhh, you took this misanthrope's grumbling as gospel. Go to Alaska and say hi! Or maybe he'll call you. Kate? Uhm, she just told you. She broke in Fall of X, you know this.

Interestingly, Logan uses the term 'fill Chuck's chair.' I thought he was quitting the parts that don't work? 'Why do you even want to?' should be self explanatory. Rogue receives a phone call after this from Scott, and she says he's 'the last person she wants to speak to.' Maybe Logan is right and he shouldn't be around people. He infected Rogue with Scott haterism very quickly.

The Outliers show up and less than a day later he leaves, heading for the nearest forest. Even the swamp hag that guts him thinks he's a whining bitch. Logan is aware that Rogue's group are planning a prison break, that children are being hunted, though it doesn't stop him leaving.

Put all this together and it paints a very human portrait of a traumatized person pushing everyone away, albeit in the most immature way possible. This is what Magneto referred to when he said Logan Behavior, and he's right. If I was talking about a real life person it'd be unforgivably callous, but I'm not. I wrote this piece to interrogate his continuity from Krakoa to FTA, and I was expecting it to make less sense to be honest. As I said, this is textbook trauma response. It portrays that well, but the whiplash of Logan going from 'murder Chuck no matter the collateral damage' to 'Chuck did bad things but Cyclops is worse - don't be friends with him, Rogue' is severe and unsatisfying.

Uncanny #700 was one of the last things written for Krakoa, so it's likely that information wasn't available for FTA writers. Except Logan and Kate had both sworn they'd kill Chuck with plenty of notice, so I don't think that deserves a pass. Is anyone surprised by this? Maybe I should just write a post that says 'From The Ashes doesn't care about smooth continuity and has clumsily broken up these teams by fiat. Just ask Havok, Polaris, Angel, Storm, Omega Red, Jubilee and Shogo, etc etc. Also, it's pretty fucking mid' and pin it on my Tumblr.

That's no fun though. Even when it sucks, when it's safe and nostalgic, when everything you loved has been swept away and replaced with cardboard cutouts, when it's 'fine I guess', and even when it's great; the play's the thing. I love the X-Men and fans have as much ownership of the story as anyone. Not entitlement, just the right to be a part of the narrative, close to the characters. I find it fun and if I ever don't I'll stop (or spend a few years covering Krakoa). I hope you do too. Importantly, you should be critical of the things you love in good faith. As for Marvel the capitalist entity - all bets are off. Fuck em. They do it for the money, we do it for the love.

[bassia-bassensis]

In my mind, Castlevania ended with carmilla and Isaac's fight.

[moonxknightx]

♡˗ˏ✎*ೃ˚ :STITCHES: :;

╰┈➤ ❝ [PAIRING] ❞ Logan Howlett x F!Reader

・❥・GENRE: Fluff (And angst)

 ˚୨୧⋆｡˚ ⋆FANDOM: X-Men

ੈ✩‧₊˚ WARNINGS: Grumpy Logan, Mentions of blood, mentions of stitches, Established Relationship, (i haven’t proof read yet!)

˚₊· ͟͟͞͞➳❥SUMMARY: When a very injured Logan stumbles into the X-Mansion, his healing ability failing him, it’s upon you to make sure you save his life.

YOU WERE SITTING ON THE SOFA WHEN LOGAN STUMBLED INTO THE X MEN MANSION, CLUTCHING HIS LEFT SIDE AS BLOOD WAS SEEPING THROUGH HIS SUIT.

“Logan what the fuck? Are you okay?” You immediately asked when he entered the living room area, holding onto the wall for support.

“Yes i’m fine sweetheart, nothing to worry about, my healing is just taking a little longer i suppose.” Logan grunted while looking down at his side.

“This is the fifth time this is happening Logan…” You sighed as you stood up and went over to your man.

“I know…i don’t know what’s wrong with me, i should let Xavier and Jean have another look.” Logan muttered as he tried his best to look at you while maintaining his balance.

“Here let me help you.” You offered before wrapping one of Logan’s arms around your shoulders. “Darling i’m fine, i just need a moment.” Logan tried to stop you but to no avail.

“Lean onto me.” You said while helping Logan move towards the dinner table. “Baby…” Logan sighed but you immediately shut him up by saying “shh”

Logan rolled his eyes at your attitude, but secretly he was really loving the fact you were so worried about him.

“Here sit down.” You motioned to the table and helped Logan onto it. “Thank you.” Breathed Logan while trying his best not to think about all the blood that was coming out of his injury.

“You will have to take the suit off.” You said while moving closer so you could stand between Logan’s legs.

“Okay just give me a moment.” Logan muttered while trying to remove his suit with the hand that wasn’t covering his injury.

“Need help?” You offered while watching him struggle with removing the suit. Logan shook his head. “No i’m fine, it just takes some time.” He mumbled while trying his best to undo his suit.

It was very painful to see Logan struggle so much. Especially when nobody knew what was going on. Just out of nowhere, Logan’s healing ability disappeared. Or well it decreased. It took much longer for him to heal now and it kept getting worse each time he went on a mission.

“Here let me Lo.” You said softly before gently moving his hand away. Logan just looked at you and watched how you unzipped his suit. “I’m sorry if this hurts.” You said before carefully pulling the suit down his shoulders until it was on his lower hips.

“Oh fuck…” You breathed while staring at the awfully big wound on the left side of Logan’s stomach.

“Baby it just needs some more time than usual, it will heal.” Logan tried again. But you didn’t listen to him.

“Oh yeah? How much do you need this time? 5 hours? 10 hours? One day? Two days? A week?” You scoffed while carefully placing your hands on Logan’s stomach to inspect the injury on a closer level.

You weren’t mad at Logan. Even if it seemed so. You were just worried about him. What if his injury wouldn’t heal itself this time? What if his healing ability was actually really gone now? You couldn’t just wait for Logan’s body to start healing. Not if you and Logan weren’t sure when it would even begin.

“We have to get you downstairs to the lab before you bleed to death.” You said while taking a few steps back from his injury.

“Baby i swear it will heal, just give me more time and i am su-“

“You don’t have any more time! What if it doesn’t heal mhm? We can’t just wait and hope it will start healing when in fact you could just be bleeding to death!” You yelled, getting frustrated at Logan for being so nonchalant about the whole situation.

Logan just stared at you while you looked down at your feet. “I can’t lose you Logan. I can’t. So please just do as i say, so i can help you. Please.” You spoke quietly while still avoiding eye contact.

It was quiet for some time. That was until Wade entered the living room area with a bucket of popcorn.

“What the fuck is going on here?” He asked as he grabbed a hand full of popcorn and shoved it up his mouth.

You quickly turned around and sighed. “Logan’s healing ability isn’t working.”

Wade nodded and turned to look at Logan. “Wow buddy i’m so sorry to hear that…good luck!” He said before turning around again, wanting to leave the room.

“Fuck you.” Muttered Logan under his breath.

“Wade!” You yelled. You watched how Wade turned around once again to face you. “Yes sweets?” He asked.

“We have to get him downstairs so i can treat his injury. Will you help me?” You asked with the best smile you could put on.

“Mhm…” Wade thought while putting the popcorn bucket on the small coffee table.

“Just say yes or no man.” Logan sighed in annoyance. Wade began tapping his finger against his chin before finally nodding. “Fine. But i’m doing it for you sweets, not for the grumpy old man over there.” He told you while motioning for Logan.

“That’s fine.” Logan said while rolling his eyes.

You and Wade both went over to Logan and each stood on one of his sides. You both carefully put Logan’s arms around your shoulders and started your small journey to the basement.

“Man you are heavy!” Wade exclaimed while looking at Logan. “You better shut your mouth before i shut it for you.” Logan said through gritted teeth.

“Guys can we just…” You sighed while shaking your head in annoyance.

“Fine! Whatever she says, right?” Wade smirked while looking at Logan once again.

Logan decided to just ignore it for his, and also Wades sanity.

Soon the three of you arrived in the basement and helped Logan onto a bed, before Wade went back upstairs to get back to eating his popcorn.

Logan watched how you started pacing around the room, hands in your hair while trying to think how to take care of his injury.

“Sweetheart…” Logan sighed softly while trying his best to hide his pain. You looked up at Logan and he gave you a smile.

“Just do whatever feels best okay? I trust you. And i apologize for acting the way i did upstairs. I think i’m just afraid and angry about the fact that my healing ability is actually slowly vanishing.” Logan spoke quietly.

Your lips curled up into a small smile while nodding. “It’s okay Lo. I know it’s scary what is happening right now, and i am sure that somehow we will find a solution, but for now just let me take care of you.”

“Sounds good to me.” Logan half chuckled half winced as he clutched his side again.

“Okay let’s hurry up shall we?” You said while getting into action. You first went to the other side of the room to grab a cart with everything in it you needed for this mission.

You pushed it into Logan’s direction, opened the first drawer and pulled out an alcohol liquid bottle to clean the wound before doing anything else.

“I am just going to pour it on your wound because it’s a pretty big injury, okay?” You announced while looking at Logan for approval.

“Do you what you have to do bub.” Logan said while watching how you took the cap off the bottle.

“Okay here we go…” You said anxiously, pouring the liquid over Logan’s left side.

“Fuck!” Groaned Logan as he balled his fists and threw his head back in pain, trying his best not to scream or yell. “I am so sorry! I’m almost done.” You said immediately.

Five seconds passed and you were done with cleaning the wound. Now it was just a very big open cut which covered almost the whole left side of Logan’s torso.

“Well…I am pretty sure you still have some healing ability left in you, because otherwise you would be dead for sure.” You said, trying to light up the mood for both you and Logan.

Logan just stared at you for a moment until he started shaking his head, letting out a breathy laugh. “You sure know how to lighten the mood, baby.”

“I’m sorry.” You laughed while grabbing the stitch supplies. “Are you going to stitch me up?” Asked Logan while looking at your hands.

“I’ll have to yes.” You said with an apologetic look on your face. Logan just smiled and nodded. “It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

You smiled upon hearing Logan’s words and inched closer to his cut.

“Are you ready?” You asked quietly.

“I was born ready.” Logan smirked, giving you the start sign.

~

“And i’m done!” You sighed happily as you finished up the last stitch. “You did great sweetheart. Thank you.” Logan smiled while cupping your cheek.

“You don’t have to thank me Logan.” You chuckled while starting to clean up the whole mess.

“Hey come here.” Logan said while gently grabbing hold of your arm. You looked up at him and couldn’t help but smile upon seeing him looking already much better now the wound is taken care of.

“I am really grateful for what you did honey. You always take such good care of me, even when i’m acting like a complete idiot.” Logan grinned.

“I’m used to it.” You shrugged with a slight smirk. “Oh i know you are.” Smiled Logan before pulling you into a careful hug, not wanting to cause anymore pain to his now stitched up wound.

“I love you sweetheart.” Whispered Logan into your ear before burying his head in the crook of your head. “I love you too Logan.” You breathed against his chest.

“Want to head upstairs? I really should change my clothes and maybe we can lay down for a bit after?” Logan offered while still having his face buried in your neck.

“Sounds like a plan.” You smiled before taking two steps back. You offered Logan your arm for support and together the two of you went upstairs, heading straight for Logan’s room to finally be able to relax after saving his life.

[thatdeadaquarius]

About your language brainrot. I see your "Reader's writing can't match tyvat's long and flowery writing" and bring you "Tyvat isn't used to books over 50 pages long so a short story to the Reader is a whole dictionary to tyvat readers".

Seriously, have you seen how thin the books are? They don't wrote novels, they write short chapters formatted in the way really old stories are. As in, summarizing all the events down into one smooth story then adding a few quotes. Fanfiction writers are insane. They will willingly sit down and write hundreds of words at a time. To them, a proper modern day story of maybe, oh 10k words or so, would probably be like the Oddessy itself.

If we were to combine the two headcanons. It would end up as many historians being intimidated by this insanely long written scripture in the language of the forgotten.

I'm going to take this a step further and say that if the creator asked some people to proofread their things, it would establish a hiarchy of who is able to actually finish the book the creator read and who isn't.

NOW THIS, THIS IS MY FUCKING JAMMMM

I'm so sorry this is so old!! u probably all know this by this point that I've really slowed down as the year has gone on, but I graduated university and then got my first job so its been pretty crazy!

Sun: Reader (you/they/them)

Orbit: Headcanons-ish

Stars: dash of all the book/nerds of Genshin, heavy on Sumeru?

Comets & Meteors: Content Warnings: Cussing, 16+ Mature Audiences, Spoliers for Sumeru Archon Quests/Scaramouche, & Trigger Warnings: mention of shipping/characters shipping themselves with you.

Comment if any missed, please.

☆

FULL STOP.

THE AKADEMIYA, FONTAINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE, HAVE BEEN WAITTTINNGGGG ON YOUR ASS LMAO

You fall from the fucking sky like a 5 star, or pop out of the Irminsul or whatever

and immediately are mobbed by scholars. LMAO jkjk (not really, bc that's what it’d feel like)

can you even imagine the dread older stories(”the classics” to them), that was instilled in the poor students around Teyvat??

id like to think ur works are the most preserved over the thousands of years of Teyvat archeologists excavating them, in comparison to other authors (teyvat just likes you more, suck it William Shakespeare)

also, bc I cant resist language differences/world building I'm sorryyyy 😭 😭

the vocab of Genshin lang vs. ours, has significantly less vocabulary like their actual dictionary is 1/3 the size of ours type of energy

(Omfg all ur fanfics being considered like insanely long realistic romantic classics or tragedies like Jane Austen-level, and only the richest and biggest play companies put on plays about ur stories bc the script goes on for hours)

(ur plays only get put on for rlly big events bc of this, like Lantern Rite or like a Summer/Winter festival/your birthday, which is, yes, an international holiday)

dude the sheer power move of anything you’ve written being essentially “Journey of the West” to them, like Damnnn.

endless like adaptations, plays, Teyvat-short stories condensing it, (THEIR OWN FANFICTION ABOUT UR STORIES)

the power is, in fact, going to your head every time another scholar both deflates at how long ur stuff is, but also lights up bc they get to read it

speaking of scholars… you know who snatched you up first. you know. you don’t even need to read the next line.

Alhaitham.

sneaky bastard he is, absolutely manipulated, mansplained (and manwhored bc he knows he’s handsome, cheeky little shit) his way into getting you to sit down with him and interview you about both translating other classics, your own, giving your own analysis of others works and ur own, and picking ur brain apart of how/why you wrote urs, etc. its fucking endless,

Kaveh had to come rescue you bc u were starving to death after getting stuck with the Haravatat scholar in his office for nearly 7 hours of interrogation discussion about literature

and Alhaitham wasn't even nearly done, he’d informed you as you left that he already had another appointment for later conversation scheduled (how?? you don't even know ur own schedule??? you have a schedule???) and was looking forward to more of your “creative and enlightening input” :)))

(you’re never going to escape him, not even Nahida herself can save you from his stubborn ass)

On another note, Xingqiu is quaking when you agree to autograph his copy of your stories (of which he has all hard covers of the first edition translations)

Zhongli/Rex Lapis is known for having a near-lifelong passion for searching for your works specifically, and learning how to translate them better into Teyvatian vernacular

like the same way he can absolutely speak on Rex Lapis facts/rocks/adepti info, is the same confidence he speaks about knowing ur work lol

(yes he did also ask for several autographs and another sit-down talk about the works, tho a lot more sneaky then Alhaitham bc he just casually gets u guys into it during dinner)

Barbatos/Venti has written some of the most famous songs based on your stuff, he has his favorites too,

but he always claims the best songs are any that have been written in the story, like either when a character sings something, or there are like quotes from songs ur fanfics are based on lol

(he also demanded to hear what they actually sound like from you, yes, you have to sing them for him lol)

Venti also can surprisingly drunkenly ramble the entirety of at least one of ur stories, like, word for word lmao

(Diluc gave in and did give him a drink on the house for that one, just once, Venti doesn’t remember it lol)

(I forgot to mention, u guys still speak the same language, just like, different versions of it)

ur works being one of the few things all the Archons can freely talk about with each other, like it’s neutral ground bc they’re all fangirling about it lmao

Furina and Neuvillette have had like,, fierce debates over the decades about character dynamics and the general drama of ur stories, they’ve gotten into it enough they’ve stopped talking to each other for a couple days a few times lol

Albedo, Sucrose, Kokomi, Yae Miko, Ei, Raiden, have read every single work they’re gotten their hands on in Teyvat (it took them like a literal year or longer)

Albedo drew you fanart for every single story, bc he’s hyperfixated on everything related to you ngl,

Kokomi had commissioned smaller pocket versions of ur works (which later got popular thanks to Yae Miko) both the OG and the Teyvat shortened versions

THE HARBINGERS ARE THE MOST DOWN BAD LMAO

Childe has literally tried to recreate battle scenes from ur works lmao

and gets especially riled up about fighting someone who resembles any characters from them (esp villains, what a cutie)

You cannot fathom the amount of research throughout Teyvat that has been secretly or indirectly funded by Pantalone/Tsaritsa

from the experts to analyze them, to funding play companies to act them out, to actually excavating places to get more of ur stuff unearthed

(the Harbingers absolutely are the first group of people that got to read several of ur stories first bc of this, like the world’s most exclusive secret book club lol)

Scaramouche used to clown on Childe all the time about how he was too impatient to even “sit down and read the King’s classics”, and he was downright insufferable when he found out about Tartaglia’s habit of recreating battle scenes/that being what motivated him to fight sometimes lol

that being said, Wanderer surprisingly never forgot ur stories.

Even when his memories were wiped for a bit, he found comfort in these fantastical epics still sticking around, even when his old names did not

(he mayyyy or mayyy nottt have secretly namedhimselfafteroneofthetragicprotagonistsherelatesto- )

oh btw, Nahida also found joy and comfort in ur stories when she was trapped, they also helped her literally grow as a person bc she had ur stories to help her sort of process the world/what life was like outside of her dreaming prison 🥺💔❤️‍🩹

◇

OMFG

ANYWAY FULL TONE SHIFT LMFAO-

the ABSOLUTE SPIRAL-RED-STRING-CONSPIRACY-THEORY-BOARD ENERGY IF THIS WAS A BLUNT LANGUAGE AU LMAOOOO

like specifically how Teyvatians like to give all the context ever thru their words, but older deities/beings like you just do simple phrases that can have deeper meanings (whereas teyvat just explains all the meanings behind their words)

STOP there’s like an official display at the Akademiya and Fontaine Institute of red string theory boards 😭😭 (look what you’ve done to themmm LMAO)

for like every story of urs, INCLUDING THE FANFICS STOP

IMAGINE THE SHIPPING WARS IF U EVER WROTE ONE THAT WASNT EXPLICIT OR LIKE ONE OF THE MAIN ROMANTIC INTERESTS HAD CHEMISTRY WITH OTHER CHARACTERS HAHAHAHAA

that's actually what Akademiya scholars argue about the most viciously, it’s like politics you can’t just bring up ships from ur stories casually in regular convos 💀

(poor Cyno has to deal with a shipping war once a year bc someone always makes the mistake of reading ur work for the first time (without being told to not talk to others abt ships lol) and it starts an all out brawl in the cafeteria every time LMAO)

Also yes.

Cyno is a fanboy.

(he has read Creator x Reader-insert fanfiction.)

(As have most of the characters mentioned, and those not lol)

…

(I'm gonna make a whole Creator x reader fanfic post one day i stg lmao)

☆

an iced coffee? for me?? :0

ok but real talk…

wtf do you guys wanna see for new years!!

i didn't do a inktober/october days thingy bc i felt too unprepared (and bc id wanted to post that 1000+ followers eldritch au for Halloween)

but now i kinda wanna, at least for a few days :o

ill post a poll in a minute, so check it out!! but still, please feel free to comment some ideas here! :)

Safe Travels Deafening Dreamer,

💀♒

If you wanna join a taglist, DM me what for! "Pspspsss, please tag me for [All SAGAU posts, Only SAGAU Language AUs, diff fandom, etc.]!"

(If you ever wanna drop, just DM me! "No more taglists/[specifically this AU/fandom] please!")

♡the beloveds♡

@karmawonders / @0rah-s / @randomnatics / @glxssynarvi / @nexylaza / @genshin-impacts-me / @wholesomey-artist / @thedevioussmirk / @the-dumber-scaramouche / @chocogi / @fallen-starr / @areaderofbooks / @devilangel657 / @esthelily

[phoenixyfriend]

Why I think it's important to understand the geopolitical anxieties of Israelis

Oftentimes, it feels like even recognizing that those anxieties exist is viewed as siding with Israel in the current conflict.

And I think that it's... weird, to do that. Dismissing the anxieties wholesale makes it harder to resolve the situation. Addressing them directly is possibly the only way to resolve the situation, because America.

Let me explain.

This will have three parts:

Why the propaganda works

How it affects current policy

How we can pressure the (mostly US) government about Israel using what we know about propaganda

Why the propaganda works

A lot of it is just propaganda, yes, but a lot of it is based in history, and a lot is also sort of self-fulfilling at this point. They have had reason to believe that some of their neighbors want all Jews dead or gone for a long time (see: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen), so it's not that it comes from nowhere. When over half the population is either Mizrahi Jews who fled from nearby countries that were happy to have a place to kick their Jewish populations out to, or their descendants, it's not hard to see that 'if someone else is in charge, we'll have to flee again.'

You could tell the French in Algeria to go back to France, but are you going to tell Mizrahi Jews to go back to the ME countries that they left? Sure, some left willingly, but that kind of wholesale eradication doesn't happen unless there's some degree of systemic discrimination or threat of violence. You cannot send Yemeni Jews back to Yemen.

The threat is real. It is not as large as the propaganda claims. It does not in any way justify nearly 30,000 deaths, half of them children. But the threat is not just imagined.

The fact of the matter is this: the propaganda is fueled by actual violence and legitimate fears.

And unless those fears are recognized and accounted for, Israel cannot be talked down.

Being told that a threat does not exist when recent history clearly shows otherwise is not going to convince anyone. I cannot emphasize this enough: even if the far-right government is replaced tomorrow, those fears will persist.

Israel's current government is violently and militarily opposed to restructuring itself in a way that allows for either a secular democratic single state, or a truly free and independent Palestine in a two-state solution. Due to mandatory army service and large scale propaganda, many have been taught since early childhood that the only way for Jews to be safe is for Israel to exist and to be so incredibly overpowered for their size that other nations won't invade them. The fact that both distant history and more recent, across the world, is filled with antisemitic discrimination, feeds this paranoia. A lot of people are out to get them, and have been since well before Israel was established. The destruction of Judea, the Edict of Expulsion, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, pogroms, the Holocaust, the near-total eradication in Yemen, Jordan, and Syria, and so on... this shit keeps happening. Some of it long ago, some if it very recent.

But it does keep happening, and that is why the propaganda works. That is why the fearmongering has teeth. It has happened before, over and over and over again, and it is being loudly threatened again. The propaganda works in Israel, and it also works in Jewish communities, and non-Jewish people who just happen to hear it, based elsewhere in the world. Like America. (This is important.)

Before moving forward, I need to make this clear: There are Jewish Israeli activists, both within Israel and without, that are vocally against Israel's actions against Palestine. Some are organized, and some are individuals. Some stories even go viral: Israeli-born Natalie Portman's been criticizing Netanyahu for years and politicians have called for her citizenship to be stripped for it. Tumblr loves the story of the Swiftie Twitter that went to jail for refusing to join the IDF, and that's very common; plenty of young people get months-long prison sentences, sometimes multiple times. Right-wing mobs go after Jewish Israelis who speak in support of Palestine in any way, and these things get violent.

(In that same article, it also talks about how Israeli Palestinians are suffering much, much worse under the government's crackdown on free speech.)

How it affects current policy

The thing is, there are only really four ways for this to resolve:

Israel wins. They succeed in pushing Palestinians out of Gaza by killing anyone who doesn't comply, and take it over for themselves. (This is bad.)

Israel is cut off from any and all support from abroad, both 'here, you can help yourself with these guns' and 'here, we will fight your enemies for you,' and is very suddenly at risk of invasion, mass murder, and removal from the Palestinian Mandate by those groups they fearmonger about, the ones that include slogans like "death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews." (This is also bad.)

Israel is convinced to stop attacking Gaza, possibly through the threat of no more support, and settles in to figure out a solution with Palestine, whether two-state or secular single state or whatever, and normalizes relations with neighbors enough that they can start cutting back on their military. (This is the best option.)

A foreign power or coalition of powers invades and forces Israel to stop, and oversees a transition from military state to peaceful state while protecting from outside attack, like was done to Japan and Germany following WWII. (This one is... interventionism is bad, but also almost 30k people have died with no end in sight, so it's starting to look like a real possibility.)

We can all agree, I hope, that the first option is not an option. That is Bad.

I also hope we can agree that the second option is not an option. A number of Israelis may be settlers in the traditional sense of the word, but a lot of them are refugees from neighboring countries, survivors of the Holocaust, or descendants of such. "Just go back where you came from" doesn't work when many of them came from places that were also saying 'go back where you came from' because Israel now existed to expel them to. It's also been around for 75 years now, and some three-quarters of the population were born in Israel. Expelling them all, even the ones that were there before the early statehood aliyah? It's... I don't know. I understand in theory why some activists push for it, but I do think it is fundamentally different from any comparative colonization or settlement.

(Note: I do not include Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Those do need to be returned to their owners. Give people their houses and land back.)

The third option is the one that most people, I think, would like to see happen. However, the Israeli government is clinging to the propaganda that they will be eradicated as a Jewish people if they do not forcibly take power where they can, and they are spreading it out among Israelis. Dissent by Israeli Jews may not be criminalized, but the society around them sure isn't receptive to it. The recent invasion of Gaza has also inflamed tensions across the region, which means that even countries which were slowly normalizing relations, or at least.

Netanyahu has not been convinced, and by all appearances cannot be convinced. The only thing that may force his hand is the threat of no more military aid, so he suddenly has to start conserving what missiles he does have in order to fend off a possible attack instead of continuing to hammer on Gaza.

Sounds great, right? This is why we are all (I hope) calling our senators or representatives or whatever your country has to tell them to stop supporting Israel monetarily or with military aid. This is why I keep giving suggested topics for Americans to call their senators about, even if I'm just one voice, and there are much louder ones saying the same thing, but better.

And yet, the Senate passed the aid bill. They snuck it into a Veteran Affairs thing as a last-minute amendment, but they passed it, and any failure in the House will have little to do with sympathy for Palestine and a lot to do with domestic border policy.

So... Americans are also pretty convinced of the whole 'if we stop supporting Israel, they will be invaded and killed off by the Iran-backed militias' thing. Many do feel sympathy for Palestinians, hence the 'Israel, you need to knock that shit off' comments, but they also are genuinely of a belief that the Israeli propaganda of 'we will be overrun by antisemitic Muslim extremist militias and exterminated like in the Holocaust' is true.

Like. Either they fear for Israelis due to the antagonistic forces in the region, or they belong to Christofascist ideologies about how supporting Israel is the way to avoid suffering in Armageddon.

You can't get to the latter on ethics or morality or whatever. You can only rely on ulterior motives (the border things) or telling them 'your reelection is in jeopardy, change your mind or you're going to be voted out.'

The former, though... you can. They believe the things that Israel claims and has been claiming since 1948, with regards to threats.

And if you acknowledge why the propaganda works, you can address it.

How we can pressure the government about Israel using what we know about propaganda

If you say that there is no threat to Israel from Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, or so on, you will be dismissed as an idealist who hasn't done any research. If you say that Israelis should be left to their own devices, you will be viewed as cruel, and if you say they should be removed and the land given back to Palestinians, you will be laughed away (silently, but it'll happen). You cannot convince the American government with these tactics.

What can you say?

Israel is making things worse for itself in regards to these exact threats. Pushing on Gaza is making neutral and nearly-normalized countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia less inclined to get in the way of the 'death to Israel' militias. The campaign is creating a whole new generation of extremists who will join the militias out of a desire to prevent more of these deaths by Israeli hands, and that will only increase the threat to Israel.

Destroying Hamas isn't going to do shit if Hezbollah, Iraq, Iran, the Houthis, and so on, invade. Especially if twenty years down the line, all those orphans that Israel just created these past few months start a new Hamas for revenge because, hi, look how many orphans you just created.

Netanyahu is working against the interests of the Israeli people. He is trying to remain in power, and the Gaza war is a distraction from the charges being levied against him.

Netanyahu has a vested interest in seeing that Donald Trump is elected, as they are much closer than the at best strained relationship with Biden. This is very complicated but if your senator or rep is a Democrat, it is relevant.

Israel's continued offensive is leading to the risk of millions of Palestinian refugees entering Egypt and destabilizing them, which, in an already unstable country in an already wobbling region, is going to risk another war across the Middle East. The US still has not pulled out all troops from the last one.

The US cannot afford, monetarily or in terms of foreign relations, to aid in causing a new regional war.

If Israel slows, halts, and withdraws peacefully from Gaza, tensions will settle enough to avoid possible invasion by those hostile forces they're so worried about. The UN can, if necessary, deploy forces to maintain relative stability until peace treaties are worked out. We'd like to avoid option 4 if possible.

The only way I can see to convince the US government to stop supplying weapons to Israel is to push on the fact that continuing to do so will, due to Netanyahu and his party's actions, put Israel in more danger rather than less.

There are other things to say to your senators, and I'll be making a post about that soon (not today, but probably this weekend; stuff like Michigan, UNRWA, international reputation), but in regards to just the geopolitics surrounding the propaganda, this is it. This is why we have to understand it. Because the way we get the United States government to stop giving aid to Israel to defend itself is by telling them 'this is putting them in more danger due to their head of state's aggression.'

This was very long, but I've seen a lot of misinformation and a lot of generalization, and a lot of it is... not great. Well-meant, sometimes, but not great. I felt it necessary to be very clear and very specific. I'm anticipating a lot of comments to the effect of "you forgot about this" and "but that doesn't excuse their actions" and "well, not all activists believe--" and I know.

I know.

But I've had people say "Nobody is advocating for the removal of all Jewish Israelis" to my ask box hours after I was talking about Yemen, a country that enacted a removal of all Jews and largely under the control of a group that has a slogan about doing just that to the Jewish Israelis.

So let me be very clear that I have seen a lot on tumblr recently, a lot of it extremist, and I'm not pulling any of this out of my ass or making up a guy to be mad at. I may not know everything on this topic--I may not even know much at all, given that it covers centuries of conflict due to the Ottomans--but I've been listening to hours upon hours of news from a variety of sources (Al Jazeera, BBC, NPR, and more) every day just to make sure I understand.

Please trust that, even if I get some things wrong, even if I don't cite every detail or generalize just a bit here and there, that I mean well. Please trust that I am making this in good faith and am trusting you to respond to it in kind.

Call your reps. Write them an email. Donate to a Palestinian charity.

It's a slog, but we can make a difference.

[glassautomaton]

What Is the First Magic, Anyways? (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love FGO Spoilers)

Out of the five instances of True Magic, the Second and Third are known about in some detail, the Fouth is a total unknown from what I can gather and simply hasn't been expanded upon in the lore quite yet, and the Fifth being shown, but not explained in detail, which is its own post. The First Magic falls somewhere in the middle here, where a few vague things are known about it and the person who attained it, but not much in the way of details.

What we do know for sure is that the Magician of the First Magic was Yumina, the First Witch, who founded the Meinster lineage and used the First to create Ploys, which were passed down to Alice Kuonji, considered to be the last pureblooded Meinster by 1989 following the 'death' of her mother. Based on some information about Witches and the Meinsters in particular from the FGO collab from back in April, I think I can hazard a strong guess as to what the First Magic actually is: authority over Mystics/Mysticism itself.

Some spoilers for FGO's Lostbelt 6, though nothing critical to the plot, as well as this translation of Alice Kuonji's FGO profile.

First off, some basic information about Witches and Yumina that was dropped a solid decade after Witch on the Moly Night first came out, because Nasu's a fucking comedian:

This establishes a few things, first and foremost that Alice is actually Yumina's descendant, that Witches aren't human and are instead closer to faeries (although I'm not sure if they can be considered true faeries as this is phrased like they were created by an individual rather than born from the land or the Inner Sea), and that the daughters of Witches are essentially the next vessel for a singular consciousness, such that lineages are more like a single individual with several reincarnations. Not all of this information is actually completely relevant to this point but how insane is it that Alice got a lore drop for the first time in a decade and it was buried in the ass-end of a six-year-old mobile game? I just needed to get that off my chest.

Alice's profile reinforces this by seeming to allude that Alice's mother and her ancestors were all the same person, as well as the third paragraph using similar wording to how True Magic is often explained.

Crucially, the final line also states that Meinsters stand in defense of Mystics from humanity's constant march towards order, which inevitably destroys Mystics by coming to understand them, as is one of the overarching themes in Type Moon in general. Yumina's lineage seems to be actively pushing back on this.

Knowing Nasu, I could stop right here. See, it's thematically cohesive with the Meinsters and Alice's character arc of growing past the reminders of her family's past and learning to appreciate the present, and thematic cohesion is really all you need in Type Moon, established lore and rules be damned.

However, I think that my point is supported by the Ploys, which are all products of the First Magic. We'll start off with the Three Great Ploys, which we know were created by Yumina proper and not any of her later descendants/incarnations.

Flat Snark, Oil of the Moon, is the Great Ploy that's featured most prominently in Mahoyo. This is pretty straightforward - the prose in the scenes that feature it describe it as Magic, and it functions by transforming the world inside of its domain into a landscape of fantastical insanity. It is, quite literally, draping the landscape in Mystics once again. Even the air becomes dense with mana, similar to the atmosphere in the Age of Gods (as shown in Absolute Demonic Front), when Mystics were at their most common and well-integrated, before humanity had begun to push it back as much as they had.

The Thames Troll is the second of the Great Three Ploys, and one that, at first glance, seems to be by far the most simple - it's a massive golem that can get stronger based on what it's built out of. Alice states she has poor compatibility with it, and therefore can only use its first two forms, that being wood and clay/brick/stone, with its final two forms being iron and steel, then silver and gold. Thames uses the environment to create its body, be it the woods the first time we see it or the brickwork in the park during Alice's fight with Touko, which would mean that further forms would likely do the same. As Alice says that the final form would overshadow even London, this would mean that Thames is capable of annihilating entire cities. However, considering it would need iron and steel nearby to do so, it could likely only become so powerful when being used within a more advanced human settlement, likely for the express purpose of destroying it. Therefore, Thames is the Ploy that most directly serves the Meinster's goals of opposing humanity and safeguarding Mystics.

The final of the Great Three Ploys, which isn't directly stated in Witch on the Holy Night but instead FGO, is Wandersnatch, which frankly could and probably should be its own post. There's a whole hell of a lot going on with that thing.

The long and short of it is that the Ploy consists of a dense fog, and numerous entities within it. Only by glimpsing Wandersnatch's true form in the fog can one escape, which makes the Ploy itself act as a microcosm for Mystics in general - it's an impossible, insurmountable obstacle that can only be weakened and overcome by observing it and learning more about it. It's little surprise, then, that Yumina herself choose Wandersnatch to inhabit while her current descendant doesn't yet harbor her consciousness - much of Wandersnatch’s presence has to do with Yumina attempting to exert more control on Alice in order to possess her and incarnate.

Ultimately, though, the smoking gun for me isn't one of the Three Great Ploys, but the most common one we see used: Diddle Diddle, Alice's favorite Ploy. This one has a simple function, that being that it strengthens Mystics in a certain area when dropped on the ground. Which is simple, yes, but also just absurd. You mean she can just crank out little Christmas tree ornaments that can singlehandedly counteract the one consistent force present in every single Type Moon property? She can just do that? Alice, and only Alice, can just say "nuh uh?" That's not attainable through normal magecraft, and has got to be an application of the First Magic through the Ploy. Considering how straightforward the effect is, it seems to pretty clearly point towards the First Magic being tied to Mystics.

As a final note, I also think this makes sense of Nasu's note that the First Magic was discovered after the Third but named as such for a special reason relating to its nature (although this is from an unofficial translation from the Fandom wiki so take this with a grain of salt). It would be very in keeping with what we know about mage society for them to say Mystics are more foundational and important than souls.

[smhalltheurlsaretaken]

One thing I do like about TOTJ's take on Dooku's fall is that it really highlights that the Dark Side makes you absolutely masochistic. (Mega long post ahead).

One thing TOTJ establishes is that Qui-Gon's death is absolutely on Dooku (no matter if the show itself doesn't seem to be aware of it).

His tone is concerned and his attitude sympathetic and supportive, but he knows. He knows it's a Sith Lord (he even knows Maul's name). He knows Qui-Gon almost died and is marching right into another trap, but he asks questions anyway and affects ignorance.

"I've been warning them about the coming darkness for years," he says, "never to be taken seriously." Using the Council's skepticism as an occasion to complain about how they didn't believe him while lying by omission is a great case of that hypocrisy Dooku loves denouncing in others. Dooku would rather Qui-Gon share his disillusionment with the Jedi than actually do anything to help Qui-Gon. The Council don't believe him? Okay, Dooku, but YOU DO. You can just tell him what's going on.

But he doesn't.

On some level, Dooku has to be aware of what's about to happen. Qui-Gon is walking into grave danger, and Dooku's response to that - before it happens, when there is still time to stop it - is to put the blame on the people who don't know shit while not doing shit himself. (Why can't Dooku be there to protect Qui-Gon, other than because he's already slavishly loyal to Sidious' plans?)

And this moment puts every subsequent action of Dooku's throughout the Prequels in perspective - particularly his relationships with Obi-Wan, Ventress and Yoda.

Dooku is a glutton for punishment.

I've written here about why I think the 'Box' from TCW 4x17 is meant to parallel Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon's mission on Naboo. The dioxis, ventilation shafts, the catwalks and lightsabers, the ray shields, the fire pit... Dooku's idea of a test to find the best mercenaries around is to have them survive what killed Qui-Gon (what he allowed to happen).

During the challenge, it's pretty obvious he starts to suspect Hardeen is Obi-Wan.

Or at the very least, he's taking an interest in the man who supposedly killed Qui-Gon's own apprentice - Dooku's spiritual grandson (see RotS novelization), whom he's been trying very hard to either recruit or kill himself. And what does he do with that interest? Tries to push "Hardeen" to kill Eval in anger.

Dooku, who still mourns the Padawan he knowingly let walk away to his death, watches a pantomime of his Padawan's death, while putting in mortal danger all he has left of said apprentice. If he knows Hardeen is Obi-Wan (and it's pretty obvious that he does), he tries to get Obi-Wan to Fall (or potentially die) in a scenario reenacting Qui-Gon's death. If he doesn't know for sure, then he's encouraging his all but grandson's killer to win the tournament because he admires him (for killing someone Dooku wanted by his side).

Whatever the outcome, Dooku chooses to relive his guilt and chooses to make the same choice to kill his loved one all over again, even though we know he hates that he made this choice:

He misses Qui-Gon and needs him but tries to kill or destroy Obi-Wan, whom he needs and wants by his side. (I haven't counted just how many time he does try killing Obi-Wan in TCW while still expressing his indefectible admiration for him - it's frequent, the Box just stands out to me as one of the most noteworthy occasions.)

And he keeps doing stuff like that!! He keeps choosing the path that causes him the most pain. He does it with Sifo-Dyas, he does it with Yaddle, he does it with Yoda and he does it with Ventress.

Just look at him confronting Sidious about Qui-Gon's death:

He KNOWS following Sidious got Qui-Gon murdered and he KNOWS Sidious will continue to kill or order him to kill people close to him. And yet he's quick to reassure Sidious that this doesn't change anything. Securing his position with Sidious matters more than his rage and grief. The ONLY WAY this behavior makes sense is if Dooku is fully aware that he had a choice about Qui-Gon's fate, and decides that this is the path he's on now: Sidious might make him kill everyone he cares about, but he's going to do it. Every time, things will play out the same.

Sidious tells him to kill Ventress, his new apprentice? Sure, why not!

(And it's not even out of true loyalty for Sidious, because he constantly tries to double-cross him later on. It's pure self-destruction:)

He hates it, Sidious promises him more of it, and he goes along with it!

This is why Yaddle's attempts at bringing him back don't work, in my opinion:

"Whatever lies he's told you, whatever you have done, you can make up for it now by bringing him to justice." This might convince a man who is looking for atonement, except Dooku isn't. He is looking for punishment.

Killing or harming those close to him leaves him broken, furious or in pain? He'll just keep doing it.

Sidious offers him nothing more than agonizing slavery? He'll keep on kneeling.

That's when Yaddle literally offers him the Light - the light that is so much more powerful than the Dark that it has Sidious cowering, the light that can save him if he wants - Dooku just strikes her down, even though he was heartbroken over thinking he had killed her just a moment ago.

He chooses to kill her, regrets it and hates himself for it, and chooses to kill her again. HE KEEPS MAKING THE CHOICE THAT HE KNOWS WILL HURT.

His remedy to guilt is to pick a shovel, because by God if he hasn't hit rock bottom yet he's going to dig!

[thetygre]

Working on a theory about the origins of the Chaos Gods specifically in Warhammer 40k.

Slaanesh was born from the old aeldari empire; that’s a given. So you can think of Slaanesh as being uniquely aeldari, even if Slaanesh is everyone’s problem now.

Now old, old lore states that the other three Chaos Gods are born from humanity, but this has widely been disregarded and abandoned because it’s clearly a cop-out. The only specific piece of data from this bit of lore is that Nurgle was born from humans during the Black Plague.

I’m actually not 100% opposed to this. I like the idea that Nurgle is uniquely related to humans the same way Slaanesh is related to eldar. Humans, being a naturally short lived race, would produce a Chaos God of death and decay reflecting their existential fears about entropy and the nature of time.

This establishes a pattern in 40k; every species with a major warp signature produces a Chaos God, who will carry on inherent traits of their creator species long after that species has been driven to extinction. Ergo, Tzeentch and Khorne were produced by two other, far more ancient alien cultures.

The only hints we can get about these extinct species come from their Chaos Gods’ Greater Daemons. As the Chaos Gods have no real physical form, their Greater Daemons are the most direct manifestations of their power we can experience, and therefore the only way to see any of their creator species traits. In the same way we can extrapolate an eldar from a Keeper of Secrets and a human from a Great Unclean One, we should be able to extrapolate… something from a Changer of Ways and a Bloodthirster.

This actually leads me to the tzaangor.

(These things. The bird people the Thousand Sons use when they don’t feel like getting their Rubric Marines dirty.)

The tzaangor’s presence in 40k is a leftover; they’re here because they’re in Warhammer Fantasy, and we need to flesh out Tzeentch’s armies, so in they go. Their explanation makes sense in Fantasy - they’re just another type of beastman. But beastmen aren’t really a thing in 40k, or at least they haven’t been for a few editions.

So that gets me thinking about the tzaangor, their similarities to Changers of Ways, and Tzeentch. I don’t think tzaangor in 40k are just some random mutants; I think they’re primitive leftovers of whatever species made Tzeentch. The similarities between the tzaangor and Changer of Ways are too obvious. (Like yes, duh; the tzaangor are derived from the Changers, but bear with me here.)

My theory is that whatever this species was, they were pioneers of the Warp itself. They harnessed it in a way not even the Old Ones had during the War in Heaven. They may even have been the creators of Warp travel, or something like it. They achieved a transcendental, almost godlike amount of power from harnessing the energy of the empyrean.

And then you know how the story goes; more power than mortal beings are meant to know blah blah blah, absolute knowledge is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely yadda yadda yadda, and then the next thing you know Tzeentch has been born. And Tzeentch keeps the leftovers of his creator race around for one of a hundred different reasons; anything can be justified with Tzeentch by it being part of one of his master plans or split personalities.

What’s left now of the tzaangor are Chaos-ridden mutants hustled around by the new power in the universe; humans. They’re still surprisingly intelligent, but comparatively primitive next to their species in its prime. I like to imagine that since the species was so psychically gifted, Tzeentch’s birth wiped their intellects in an instant, like Slaanesh and the Fall of the Eldar. Just a lethal psychic shockwave that decimated billions, Watchmen squid style. It’s taken millennia for the tzaangor to redevelop their current level of intellect, and they live in fear with the constant knowledge that Tzeentch can take it away again at any time.

Now as for Khorne! …I got nothing. I think, by his nature as the god of bloodshed and murder, Khorne completely wiped out his progenitor species. He did not quit halfway through like the other Chaos Gods. The only thing I can assume about them is that, as Khorne is the oldest Chaos God, they were ancient. Maybe even older than the Old Ones and Necrons. If the War in Heaven wasn’t enough to create Khorne, then I’d like to know what was. Like, this was the Cain species; the first species to really get into warfare and unrestrained violence. They might not even have known the Warp existed until Khorne came screaming out of it. And that species is remembered now as the ground floor of the Skull Throne.

Anyway, that’s that screed scooped out of my brain.

[thelakesuite]

The Rusty Lake Story in Bitchass Baby Terms

this is ALL off the top of my head (and i haven't experienced like 10% of it maybe?) so i might be wrong but i don't care right now

the lake itself isn't, like, that well established 'cause it's a mystery game or something so we don't need full exposition. it's some deity-like thing as old as the mammoths (not canon) that eats time. or rather memories that are stored in lil cubes. and it gives its zookeepers immortality so they can keep feeding it. they call themselves the Rulers of the Lake but we all know the truth. 'immortality', or rather enlightenment, is represented by you becoming your fursona and living maybe an extra century. mr. owl's looking for a new heir pretty quick in the process but we'll get to that.

corrupted souls are kinda a byproduct of all this. truly the lake's farts. when a person dies horribly, when their memories get extracted wrong, or when the plot demands it, they become corrupted. corrupted souls still talk, and some of them are even sensible (like your mom oooooh), but generally they're jumpscare beasts or wet little puppies. sometimes both. yes you can get corrupted when you're enlightened, and right now it's the more likely outcome actually. there's a whole 'elixir of immortality' that gets harped on, where one drinker gets corrupted and the other gets enlightened, but that is literally only a thing for roots and a little bit of cave so don't worry about it too much. unless you're making dramatic fanart in which case leverage that shit.

cubes come up a lot in cube escape, believe it or not! black ones are bad memories, white ones are good memories, blue ones are connected to the past in a way that's somehow not a memory, gold ones are connected to the future, red ones only exist in my fangame that ellesian recently unearthed, and green ones are jello yum. also suck it anyone who told me pre-tpw the gold cube thing was unestablished. anyway. it was a big thing mr.'s owl and crow were working on, creating a golden cube (presumably to extend their own lives) as seen in cave, but then one just kinda appears in the past within when albert does electric jujitsu. jury is still out on that.

onto the actual narrative i think.

in paradise, you're mr. owl pre-owling (1790-something). the lake's current suckass servants are your family who tried to sacrifice you to it way back, but your mom took your place for mom reasons. now mom's corrupted and guiding you to... well, to get sacrificed for real this time. but with your powers combined (yes mr. owl was two people, no it is never addressed) you get enlightened and tell your family to fuck off 'cause you're building a hotel on that island now. you also get a tease in the secret ending that dale and laura will do a similar fusion dance to be the lake's next suckass. we've been waiting 6 years for that to happen.

in roots, two alchemist brothers get that elixir shit going (1860-1935). one of them becomes mr. crow, while the other becomes a playable character for a game. and corrupted. you rope your whole bloodline into this, harvesting their body parts (usually after they die from other means, but you totally caused most of their deaths) for a reincarnation ritual involving a magic seed (that also only exists for this game). this is where the best characters come from because rusty lake actually wanted to tell a story with this game. you reincarnate into a woman! don't think about the implications.

in samsara room, the inside scoop of reincarnation is fuckin' weird, dude (1935). the original was made before rusty lake began, so it's not truly part of the narrative, but it got folded in for the fifth anniversary.

in hotel, you do not get the backstory of the third bird man (1890ish). instead, you get to kill mr. owl's family again, but one-on-one as animal people. how did they become animal people? fuck you that's how! mr. owl probably did it on purpose to spite them with shit sandwiches and bullets to the brain. oh, also, there might be an evil twin of mr. rabbit that shows up later.

in arles, you're vincent van gogh. that's it. he's not relevant. but it is funny seing the death date of paul gauguin in the timeline docs.

we're talking about the past within later but the 'past' segment takes place around here. 1926 iirc?

in birthday, your parents get shot (1939). you're going to be an important detective, dale, but like right now you're getting traumatized. or rather you're experiencing that memory, then doing blue cube magic to fix it and have your grandpa shoot evil mr. rabbit instead. is your grandpa actually mr. crow? no. shut up about it now.

in underground blossom, your mom gets abducted (1935-1972 maybe). okay, well, not you. this is the laura backstory metaphor game but you're actually playing as the third bird man who is both her stepdad and her pet. and her grandpa albert takes her mom rose for his own nefarious reincarnation schemes maybe probably. rose is surprisingly okay with it but characters rarely put up a fight with the plot anyway. laura's a lonely kid, starts dating robert, picks up art to soothe her nightmares, gets murked, then reaches some kind of epiphany that we just train ride away from before finding out what actually happens. she's your daughter, damnit, you should support her transcendence. not enlightenment importantly. also, no, laura's life didn't literally happen at train stops, it's just a vehicle. not even a pun don't fucking laugh i see you snickering.

in seasons, you set up a really interesting plotline that gets utterly countered by everything that came after (1960's-80's). it's just laura time in there, and she uncorrupts herself, thank you very much. the series has been struggling with how laura gets her corrupted self to 1980-whatever, and so far only one other game's even taken place after 1972. and that game's the past within which also counters every other plotline. sigh. maybe we're not smart enough for these puzzle games. at least harvey's cute and bird-shaped. key point that's impossible to fuck up is that laura dies in 1972, and it's unclear whether it was a murder or suicide. that's why we get a detective.

in harvey's box and the lake, uh i don't know really (1969). these are early games that are basically spinoffs of seasons. they help with the overarching stuff but aren't much for the narrative at this point. also they suck

in case 23, dale starts investigating laura's death and gets wrapped up in the lake stuff (1972). it was supposed to be just another murder case, but he got too into it and it got too into him, so he gets teleported to the lake chapel and ferried off to. somewhere idk. he goes into an elevator that takes him down memory lane to the lake floor.

in the mill, mr. crow is really trying to clean house before dale gets here (1972). this is where laura gets her ass corrupted by mr. crow, and we find out how the lake eats memories or whatever. it's supposed to overlap with case 23 and it almost succeeds. whatever skrunk is still there is forgiveable, this was the flash era after all.

in theatre, dale learns about ripoff hinduism, goads a man into suicide, and abandons his darling toilet fetus son (1971). it's like birthday again, where this is a memory we're seeing, but that is a light distinction. robert kills himself at the bar, and we take his memories for legal reasons. there's some sixfold wheel we learn about that doesn't matter much.

in the cave, mr. crow still cleans house before dale gets to the Magic Memory Machine (1972). mr. owl's kinda sorta dying, and dale's been elected his son or something. gotta get his mindmeats. you read a textbook about cubes, pilot a submarine to the lakefloor, put dale and laura in a surrogate fusion dance machine, then give dale the golden cube it makes before sending him up the elevator again. hotel did imply something serious was gonna happen when he gets to the top, but that was eight years ago. the devs probably forgot and fell too in love with albert vanderboom in the meantime.

in the white door, robert unkills himself and gets wrong psychiatry (1972). as it turns out, mr. owl has a front business running a for-profit psych ward to extract totally good and healthy memories from people. this one is an actual factual spinoff but is kinda relevant for the greater rusty lake metropolitan area.

in paradox, fuuuuuuuck who knows maaaan, isn't it all just a metaphor? (1972). there's a consensus that none of the stuff that happens in paradox actually happens, and that it's all in dale's head while he's in the Magic Memory Machine from cave. even though there's five different endings, he kinda walks away at the end, which might be the worst ending of the lot. the information's solid though; mr. owl spells out the whole heir thing, there's bits of backstory for dale and laura everywhere. also the movie's sick.

in the past within, albert becomes a mechanical engineer for the sole purpose of making plot armor (1926/1984). yeah, remember that guy from roots? the voodoo murderer who got third-hand alchemy information to make up for his lack of pussy? yeah, he invented a time machine decades ago. and he enlisted his daughter to talk to her past/future self to grow him back to life in 1984. with a gold cube that he somehow got. and somehow his scar is genetically coded in him. and we don't see his wiggly lineart dick. what does he do in 1984? trap his daughter in a time loop then who the fuck knows. he's stuck in his jumpscare beast ways from being corrupted for so long. how did he get corrupted when he was literally buried in the ground and salvaged bones from? next game!

there's an ARG that i never saw a thing of because i hated it, best kept memory. from what i gathered, it was another front scheme for memory harvesting, except in the 2000's. does that mean it's enlightened dale/laura doing this one, since mr. owl presumably passed on the title then turned into a fish? i'd like to know too!

also, a chapter of underground blossom i haven't completed, and a paper-based game coming out within the next two years or whatever. i don't know how much they'll clear up.

toodles!

[greenerteacups]

I think I've seen you mention in previous asks that you didn't really like aspects (or possibly the whole thing) of DH. I'm curious if you could expound more on that? Was it the horcrux hunting? The hallows themselves? Did you think the final battle came too quickly? What did you want to see when you read it the first time? And looking back as an adult what ways do you think DH should have been altered?

I've always found DH has too many plot holes.... Almost like it tried to wrap itself up too quickly. When I was reading the books as a kid I actually thought there'd be more than 7 books. Like there'd be a least one more since the war began and ended rather quickly when the first wizarding war seemed to go on for years.

To make a long story short, I don't like DH because it's not a war story, and Books 5 and 6 read like the setups for a war story. They are books packed with espionage and spycraft, flareups of violence, and are simmering with tension. In contrast, most of DH is spent camping in a forest, far away from anywhere that the Death Eaters or the main battle could have been. The Order has vanishingly little to do and the friends that we spent the last 6 books making and learning to care about vanish until the last act, where half of them die in a big battle that only happens because Harry needs to find the last horcrux.

And the thing is, horcruxes are a great plot mechanic for the final book, because they give you discrete milestones that count down to the final battle. They also clearly establish why you can't just rock up and fight Voldemort the old-fashioned way, i.e., why the Order needs to run defense for most of the book. What they don't explain is why the Order isn't then a much bigger part of the horcrux hunt, because by all accounts, Harry's first move should be to tell them what's up with Voldemort and how they can help, including — especially!— if Harry and the Trio happen to die, in which case the only knowledge of how to kill Voldemort would die with him. This is the nightmare scenario, and I cannot think of a counterfactual risk attached to telling the Order that would outweigh the danger of this happening. But I could honestly tolerate plot holes if it weren't for the thematic problem — if the story is about love and familial sacrifice, why do we spend 75% of the last book completely disconnected from the found-family that Harry built? Why are the Weasleys gone? Where is Ginny? Where is Molly? Where is Lupin?

The book really should have been called "Harry Potter and the Last Horcrux," in my opinion. The Hallows are red herrings, and they're used more as excuses to set up nice scenes/moments than they ever are as mechanics that fully integrate into the world. The ring gives Harry the ability to talk to his parents before the final sacrifice, which is a nice touch, and it explains why his Invisibility Cloak is so OP, but (and I've complainted about this before, but TLDR) the Elder Wand stuff makes no sense except as a buff for Harry in the final battle to explain how he beats Voldemort in a 1v1. Which, fine, but it opens up more questions than it ties off: how does it work? What does this mean for wand ownership? Is it actually possible for a wand to be "unbeatable"? Also, why do wands respond to fucking monkey-in-the-middle rules? If you hand your wand to someone, does that count as disarming? Etc., etc. And it also weakens the final battle of the series, which should be about Harry as a person triumphing over Voldemort because he was capable of doing something Voldemort never could, i.e., fully and willingly sacrificing himself for another person (or people). You have a soft magic system! You don't need to invent these weird rules of wand ownership to give Harry the W here! There's so much more that could have been done with this!

So. To leave a long story long, I was disappointed with Deathly Hallows. It wasn't bad, in that there were no decisions I thought were galling or egregious breaks with someone's character, and nothing happened that ruined what came before; but there was a ton of missed potential, and that's why I still kvetch about it all these years later.

[bibibbon]

I started this with a silly joke about the best frenemies but we can take a lot here. I think.

Shiga never earned the respect of LoV...do you think he cares? Or LoV cares? Bc they follow his plans ...and from what I get...Shig is not noisy, so if they have a side hustle....shig is fine with with it "what a nice boss" not really!

This supposed side hustle could have been a problem for Shig ...and the fact he doesn't even asks what they do...is concerning, but even if we go "LoV wouldn't do anything to prevent Shig's insane dream to be true" it's also a huge leap hori wants us to take...regarding shig bc dude has no interaction or desire to know LoV. He manipulates them...and sure he give the sushi but it was more to manipulate them "you all did a good job, here take a reward" than anything

(btw that in itself is miles better than what Izu has. You say A1 has potential. I agree but as I mentioned many times...this potential is not in being nf IZU's friends. If I had to give friends to Izu ...I would make him befriend people who aren't from A1)

Shiga is a pretty incompetent leader. His goals and plans make no sense.

And as much I like dabi and I think his past is better, writing wise, than Shig...doesn't mean he is better. Bc I don't get what was Dabi's plan before joining LoV. What was he doing? Killing random people? Did Endy even cared?

Also if we go "it was essential for dabi to join LoV" ok...show us why. Bc the way I see dabi had no real plan, a goal yes but no plan. The video thing could have happened without LoV.

Sorry it's just ...dabi has some blank spaces and it leave me confuse me.

Shigarakis character and his whole substance/arc/development or whatever you want to call it is underdeveloped and very much lacking

In my opinion this is one of the reasons why we as readers can't say much. Before shigaraki dies his last words are dedicated to spinner and the league but we haven't seen Shigaraki really care for the leauge and grow into a reliable leader for the leauge. This in my opinion stems from horikoshi doing tell don't show instead of doing show and tell when it comes to his story.

Shigaraki as a character is never truly explored in depth. The MVA and overhaul arcs could of been great arcs for him by giving focus on his relationship with the league and izuku himself. After the kamino arc shigaraki should be in a somewhat tough position having left behind three members of the league some of the league members would feel vulnerable and may not trust shigaraki as he literally abandoned three team members!! Shigaraki also lost AFO at this point so he would be in a tough position without advice or anything really so the overhaul arc would help him to grow into the role of a leader and prove to the leauge that he can be trusted. He could do this by getting revenge on maganes death and all and he could use overhaul to learn more about the underground and izuku in general.

I would also have it so that it's Izuku that gets kidnapped in the training camp arc (not bakugo or have both izuku and bakugo be kidnapped) and that would establish a connection between the leauge and izuku even if it may start on a bad foot.

when it comes to the MVA arc the leagues loyaltly and shigaraki's loyalty is put to the test. We would get more bonding time with them and just see their overall other goals that may contradict with the league itself.

Shigarakis interest in Izuku doesn't disappear and he actually uses the MVA resources to actually reach out and get to know izuku or he tired to get to know more about izuku be all.

Dabi first joined the league due to the influence stain and had and in my opinion he also joined due to needing a place to crash and free food. His goal was to take down and kill enji but I guess during that he lost his true goal and ended up doing things to build his reputation as a villain (like burning people alive)

In the end I would very much change this and build up on the leauge of villains characters and explore their personality, goals and how these two things can contradict or compliment eachother which can cause conflict .

[incorrectinfinity]

@heatwa-ves AN OPPORTUNITY TO YAP!?!?!?

Mainly it's personal issues with taste.

I am not really an enjoyer of Diavolo, I think his motivations beyond his need for anonymity were unclear and kinda disappointing. Don't get me wrong I appreciate pure evil villains who do what they want when they want, but they have the right personality for it (DIO and Kira) in my opinion Diavolo did not have that much of an interesting personality and was mainly just underwhelming. His most interesting trait was his care for Doppio but after their separation he didn't mention him once so like?

I also wish he had something more to do with Giorno to help make up for his lack of screentime. When watching the first time I thought that he was going to be revealed to have something to do with Giorno's hero, but that's not really a criticism of the part itself it's just something I would've done.

Along with that I am not a big fan of body swapping either, there were many moments that I found annoying or just insanely abrupt considering the dark tone established with the previous arcs and how hugely this was built up to. I made a joke about it in the post this comment was under it about how Mista and Trish's silly conversation was abruptly met with Giorno's final monolog. That scene just entirely summarizes my thoughts about Chariot Requiem as an arc.

Though to be fair to it, at least in the dub the voice actors are all trying to do impressions of eachother and that is fucking great I actually loved that a lot.

And then. Rolling stones.

In this final arc with all of the characters that we had lost.... why wasn't Fugo used more?

It just bothers me, and again the tone of Part 5's ending is so insanely inconsistent it makes my head spin. I get that it flows with the theme of fate throughout part 5 but also I really did not need this arc to be satisfied with the ending. It feels abrupt and out of place.

I really would've preferred getting answers to what happened from Giorno's victory onward, but Araki only writes what he finds interesting so maybe he knows it would've been sucky. I am still curious.

On the other side Narancia's death was literally the perfect scene, the final anime-original tribute to him breaks my heart into a million billion pieces.

Bruno's self sacrifice also makes me emotional and one of my favorite scenes of part 5 is where he tells Mista to shoot his body, with Giorno clarifying to say that it's meant to slow him down. Them staring at eachother afterwards is fucking brilliant. Giorno's optimism built upon denial is so interesting to me... he gives me brain worms.

Also very few classic dub insults. The only one I can think of is Mista saying "Golden Wind Whatchmacallit" and I don't think that counts. 0/10 terrible part I hate jojo.

[wimbledon2008]

so i just finished the captive prince series about a week ago and am rereading it now. just finished the hello lover scene and honestly im still so confused over what's going on in laurent's head lmao like??

was he previously compartmentalizing his resentment so well that real feelings developed, but now he finally has a chance to truly let his anger out, he's locking down the positive feelings?

was he being truthful about manipulating damen the whole time (highly unlikely to me)? or was the cruelty in and of itself a play, either to push damen away despite not actually wanting to, or some other convoluted reason? bc damen really would have done anything he asked, trying to outmaneuver him like that was unnecessary.

my first theory feels the most right to me, and he just needed more time to process and purge his desire for revenge but idk im a taurus and very akielon coded. i love laurent but i do not understand that man lol

okay, disclaimer, i haven't read the books in quite some time so this probably isn't the fullest or deepest analysis. i welcome any additions or corrections from those who are better at meta than me <3

so the hello lover scene is incredibly complex and nuanced, a standard of pacat's writing that makes his works so infinitely re-readable. based on my personal understanding of the scene, there are a few key things that help to explain why laurent behaves the way he does in the tent scene:

1. laurent needs damen and the akielons to win against his uncle, which he very much wants to do. charcy didn't go how he'd originally planned, and he knows damen is pissed about it and probably thinks the worst of laurent right now - that he intentionally abandoned the akielons at charcy for his own purposes. so laurent is being manipulative; he is trying to outmaneuver damen. because what damen says is true: laurent has no allies, no friends, he's ruined his reputation by aligning himself with akielos, etc. we as the readers know that damen cares deeply for laurent and wouldn't just abandon him, and if laurent simply explained what happened and asked damen to help him, damen wouldn't hesitate to stay at his side. but laurent doesn't think damen has any reason to trust him, so laurent can't trust damen either. so instead of being honest, he chooses to be cold-blooded, to assert control over the situation and force damen's hand to ensure that the alliance he worked so hard to establish stays intact. he could've just asked, but this is laurent, and there are other factors at play, such as the fact that

2. laurent is already in love with damen by the tent scene, or at least most of the way there. but laurent can no longer pretend damen is anyone other than the person who killed his brother. damen walks into that tent as prince damianos, in full akielon regalia, covered in blood, with a sword. laurent has been doing some aggressive compartmentalizing, especially in order to have allowed himself to sleep with damen. who killed his brother, which was the inciting incident that made laurent's life a living hell. laurent has not forgiven damen for auguste, and he's having to really confront that hatred and anger for maybe the first time since the first book. and laurent is also punishing himself for caring for and sleeping with damen, his brother's killer. can you even imagine? it's better not to. laurent probably hates himself as much as he hates damianos in that moment. so he shoves all those glimmering, positive feelings down because he wants to hurt damen, and himself too. and none of this is particularly rational because

3. laurent is very upset at the beginning of king's rising. this is an understatement. he's still reeling from nicaise's death, which he blames himself for, he's losing damen, the only person he trusted, he was recently stabbed, and everything is spiraling out of his tightly held control. and when laurent is upset he's cruel. he's not at his best in the tent scene. he's clinging to his own self-preservation, and he's making it up as he goes along because whatever his original plan was got blown to hell, which is clear because he's saying shit that doesn't even make sense. see, e.g., this post about him allegedly enduring damen's "fumbling attentions" to win a battle he didn't even know about at the time. while laurent is being cold and ruthless to secure his position as best he can (see no. 1), he's also acting from a place of emotion instead of strict rationality, which is how he typically operates, and how he prefers to act. he's on the defensive, he's deeply confused and unable to cope with all of his conflicting feelings about damen, and he's lashing out - protecting himself before damen can hurt him first. and then damen literally sticks his thumb in his stab wound. basically: our boy laurent's going through it in a major way.

going back and re-reading your message i realize i've essentially just reiterated everything you initially said but with a lot of extra words. so i guess the long and short of it is: you're right. honestly there are so many ways to interpret the tent scene and everything else laurent says and does, which is what makes him so fascinating! so thanks for giving me the opportunity to dive back into his psyche for a little while <3

[avelera]

Reflections on the Ides of March

After all the excitement yesterday about the assassination of Julius Caesar, I think it's worth mentioning that Julius Caesar's death being celebrated as the common man's answer to tyranny is a little like celebrating the Mayflower Pilgrims for being on the side of religious tolerance.

Like, the Mayflower Pilgrims emigrated from England because England wasn't religiously controlling enough for them. They wanted more religious tyranny and were upset that the government was too moderate for their liking in allowing other ways of life.

In a bit of a distant parallel (bear with me, ADHD connection brain go brrrr) Julius Caesar first made enemies among the aristocrats who eventually murdered him by being a populist endeavoring to solve Rome's growing inequality issues by bringing land reform to Rome specifically targeted at redistributing land that had been gobbled up by the rich and powerful to give it back to its people.

It's a little complicated because, yes, Caesar's move to dub himself dictator for life was absolutely an authoritarian move. In addition, Augustus and subsequent European authoritarians/monarchs (I believe we should use the term more interchangeably tbh) used "Caesar" as a title and justified their reign going back to him via Augustus's eventual ascendence as his heir after a bitter power struggle and killing off all his other rivals who could claim that title, and thus brought an end to the (already tottering) Roman Republic. This puts Caesar as a step on the path to a reduction of a form of non-authoritarian rule.

But tyrant, as Caesar was referred to by those who assassinated him, in the ancient sense had a subtly different meaning. A tyrant was usually a figure who gained popularity among the masses by becoming their advocate against the rich and powerful and who ascended to power usually on the wave of a cult of personality and promises of egalitarian reform. They rarely established dynasties because the skills needed to reach their position of power rarely appeared in their biological heirs and without the structure of a monarchy to pass that mantle of authority onto their sons and heirs, the power structure of that tyrant usually fell apart upon their death.

Basically, one really magnetic person would occasionally rise up when the rich and powerful had gone too far in the societal imbalance. Rich aristocrats hated that. The enemy of most classical tyrants were the rich and powerful. Tyrants were populist leaders who usually took power for life (often, a rather short one if they couldn't keep the reins of power well in hand). This is a part of the rather complex political history of "rule by the people" and how it wasn't always a straight line from "rule by one" straight to democracy, sometimes a single authoritarian dictator/tyrant actually was the representative of the common man in confrontation against the accumulation of power by oligarchs.

So, Julius Caesar is a bit of a complicated figure here, because he rose to power by being a champion of the common man, in a tradition in Rome going back to the ill-fated Gracchi. By taking "dictator for life" powers, he was feared to be setting himself up as a king, or rather as a tyrant by Roman Senators, all wealthy aristocrats and by today's standards, oligarchs. Rome originally became a Republic, historically, when a Brutus family member assassinated the then-Etruscan tyrant so Rome could rule itself (or rather, could be ruled by its own oligarchs, which was much more democratic before it exploded into an empire by Caesar's time).

But the material damage the Roman Senators feared from Caear was just as much that he would take their land and money from them with that dictatorial power in order to repair the desperately crumbling "middle class" (term used loosely as it does not directly translate) which had been picked clean and robbed blind by the aristocrats over the past century or so in Rome since the Punic Wars. Caesar was championing anti-poverty measure that was looking out for the actual common citizens of Rome, something the Roman Senators did not want Caesar to do because it would bite into their wealth.

This makes it rather bitterly ironic that the common people today celebrate Caesar's death when, at the time, one of the reasons he was murdered was for being the champion of the common man. However, it is an understandable irony given how Caesar's legacy would be used by authoritarians after his death, up to and including in modern times.

[licorice-and-rum]

On Fascism, DEs and Dumbledore - the actual essay lol

Hey, guys! Sorry it took me so long to write this one, I really had some themes to mature before I could put all of my thoughts in writing but I finally feel like I’m ready to talk about what I want to. Before I begin, however, I want to point out a few things:

First of all, I ask all of you to enter this with an open mind because not everything I’ll say here is exactly popular opinion in the HP fandom. And, although I recognize that my perceptions and interpretations are frayed by my own background and way of thinking, my literary analysis is still based off, on some level, of academical knowledge. It doesn’t make it true, of course, but I believe it’s a solid base to have.

Second, this is, in no way, an attack on people who like the Death Eaters (Barty, Regulus, Rosier, Draco, and so on). These people are not the problem I’m talking about here because, to begin with, the characters they like are not exactly the Canon version of them, and then, because a work of fiction doesn’t determine a person’s character.

It's completely normal for popular works of fiction — and that’s especially true in Literature — to have their characters remodeled to fit a better narrative to the time they are inserted in. It happens with Fairytales, it happens with classical books — Sherlock Holmes is one of the greatest examples I can give —, it just happens. And the new interpretations are an attempt to almost self-insert: is a mirroring of our interpretations and experiences in those characters we like so much.

That said, I still have a problem with how normalized it has become in our society to make a sad backstory to fascist-like villains and that’s where I would like to start this rant/analysis. This issue is not focused on the Harry Potter characters, however: it has happened in Star Wars (both with Anakin and more recently with The Acolyte), in The Hunger Games (with Snow, although it wasn’t the intention) and many other big films/books/series in the industry.

It has a reason: we’re living through late-stage capitalism, which means capitalism is in shambles and it needs a “emergency button” of sorts, something it can use to establish some kind of control back. That’s why we’ve seen so many far-right parties win elections lately: it’s a normal thing for people to be attracted to fast and simple solutions when things are bad, even though they might not be solutions at all.

Anyway, I digress: the point is, when fascism (capitalism’s emergency button) arises, it needs to have a cultural support so that people can assimilate it better, accept it better so it can maintain itself. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not, by all means, saying that a bunch of men sat down on a white room and decided that now they would start creating Art that endorses/romanticizes fascist narratives, of course not.

This is a natural process, it happens because we, as a general rule, already lean into right wing theorical thinking by living into a capitalist mode of production. So, when capitalism collapses, many of us pull our values farthest into capitalistic mindset because that’s what we understand as secure, as stable. And this translates into art through some favored tropes or classical narratives, such as the Chosen One or the “the system is not corrupted, the people running it are” narrative.

Both of those tropes fit into the Harry Potter series in obvious ways, of course. But lately, I’ve been noticing a really particular characteristic of these narratives/tropes that are used to endorse fascism, which I believe has to do with the time period we’re at right now and who the target-audience is, and that is what I called the “individualization of narratives”.

I’m not gonna be arrogant here and say that I’m the only one who noticed this, of course not, but I haven’t found any works on that, so I’m gonna describe, in my own words, what I think this phenomenon is:

The individualization of narratives, as I call it, refers to the details some characters’ backgrounds have when they are into the “dark side”, the side that is supposed to be the fictional version of fascist-like groups. And those details — or lack thereof — are done in a way the reader can fill in the gaps in such a way to identify and empathize with them.

Again, that’s is not the problem, this happens to every character ever, it even happens with celebrities. Our brains are wired to fill in gaps in a person’s personality or character when we don’t have all the information, it’s a natural reaction. Problem is that, as it’s becoming popular to write a villain with a purpose, a “morally gray” character if you will (although I take issue with how that’s portrayed, which I’ll treat more carefully when I talk about Dumbledore), the fascist-like narratives that became so popular with post-war people, gain a new meaning.

That’s not the doing of the Art itself, it’s just a reflection of political issues that are already here but that are also perpetrated and continued by Art and material cultural production, just like anti-socialism dystopian books were in the Cold War scenario, for example. However, it’s undeniable that this movement serves a purpose, a political purpose, and that is to endorse fascism and fascist narrative. Let’s not get over ourselves here: again, this is not the evil doing of some unknown entity, it’s just a natural process of the current political climate reflecting in cultural production.

But it still serves a purpose, and what I aim to do with this essay is to demystify a bit this movement in Harry Potter. But first, we have to understand what fascism is:

Capitalism, which begun more or less in the 1600s, is a mode of production (a mold to which our society fit to work within capitalism’s needs of existence). It is based on profit, which means our society is shaped to produce that profit, everything in a society is shaped to serve this purpose, from the industry to our perception of reality — it’s all a capitalism-based ideology.

Again, reminding: that’s not a secret plot to convince people, it’s a natural process of building identity within reality. It happened in feudalism, and before that with Ancient Empires, and so on and on. There’s nothing inheritedly evil in this process.

However, capitalism is a mode of production that demands, in order to continuing to exist, more than society can provide, so it collapses from time to time. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 and the following Great Depression is one of the most striking examples of capitalism collapsing, and it’s not by happenstance that fascism arose right after this collapse.

As I said before, fascism is capitalism’s emergency button: when systems collapse, that’s where they get more vulnerable to radical change, and the extreme hardships the masses had to endure after its collapse in the 1930s could easily signify a chance for a change in the modes of production throughout the occidental countries of Europe — something that couldn’t happen if capitalism was to survive.

What I mean by bringing all this to the essay is that I want to be very clear with what fascism defends and what it means: it’s the supremacy of not only a country, or exaggerated nationalism, it is also the management and upkeeping of a society’s very structure. And, to be even clearer: that society is white, rich, and patriarchal-based.

There’s a reason why fascism is considered a white-supremacy political movement: because it defends capitalism. And capitalism was built over the need of cheap work force.

Many of you may have thought slavery when I said that, and you’d be correct.

However, with the times progression, that changed into a new form of exploration: because of the past with slavery and exploration of resources of colonized countries, it became easier — and also a natural progression from the dehumanizing of non-white communities to justify slavery — to just cheapen the work force by making non-white communities poorer, more vulnerable and more desperate to fulfill their needs.

That forces those communities — and third world countries as a whole — to accept the money and the exploration of not only first-world countries (colonizer countries) but also big corporations. I could go on and on about all the effects this policy has in non-white communities, from police brutality until the banalization of the violence in large scale (such as the Palestinian genocide) but I want to stay within the scope here.

This justification of slavery, the dehumanization of non-white peoples, is one of the main pillars of capitalism, and as such, it’s the main pillar of fascism. In Harry Potter, the intention is that those characteristics don’t present themselves in race but in blood — not that Rowling is very successful with this, considering the amount of veiled and not-so-veiled racism in her books but whatever.

Now, as I see it, Harry Potter is not a good portrayal of fascism and that has a very clear cause: Rowling’s lack of understanding of what fascism is to begin with, or how the root causes of it affect the system of the wizarding society.

As someone who have studied it, I can say that the blood purity issue wouldn’t be present only in some rich people’s minds, it would be structural to the wizarding world, in a way that would present itself in hardship for muggleborns to get jobs, in jokes that are not funny, in opinions that are degrading, in isolation and discrimination in a day to day level. And of course, there is some of it in the HP books, but it’s not treated as a structural issue — it’s treated as an individual problem.

And that’s where the real problem begins: if we treat fascism as a problem that stems from a person’s own choices instead of a political and collective movement that elevates to a highest level the structural issues that are already there, we fall into the trap of minimizing the problem because, if someone is a fascist because they’re evil, the next question to make is: why are they evil?

Currently, what we’re doing with our villains becomes a problem in these situations: in an attempt to individualize our villains, we make them human. Human in the sense that we can empathize with them, we can understand them. And, for a fascist-like narrative, that’s extremely dangerous because it makes us unconsciously start to endorse their trajectories and choices when we absolutely shouldn’t.

Fascism is not equivalent to rebelliousness.

“Oh, the good side is not so good because they treated this character bad and now he had to turn to a fascist group and decimate people because he’s traumatized.”

See how, when I say it like that, it sounds ridiculous?

But of course, you probably know that. Again, I’m not accusing people who like those characters of endorsing fascism, what I am saying, however, is that the political climate of today is doing it and it’s reflecting on our art production. What I am calling for is for people to recognize that their view of those characters as they really would be if they were anywhere near reality is not only flawed, it’s entirely wrong.

Snape, Barty Crouch Jr, Evan Rosier, Draco, Bellatrix, the Blacks as a whole — they are not the abused little teenagers who had no choice but to join the Death Eaters. They are fascists, they have always been fascists, even when they suffered. And sure, to some of them, there is more to their characters than this but the truth remains that they, in some capacity, not only endorsed a fascist narrative, they actively perpetuated it to the detriment and the suffering of marginalized peoples.

And none of them had a good, believable, and more importantly, complete redeeming arc.

Our interpretations of them are cool, I love it, I prefer them to many HP characters, to be honest. But that doesn’t change the fact that, if HP was a little bit more real, a little bit closer to reality, those characters wouldn’t be bullied teenagers forced into fascism as a means to become powerful enough to escape their abuse — as if that makes it so much better —, they’d be incels, they’d be bullies themselves.

And that’s not an opinion: we, as a fandom, tend to forget that the DEs are the ones with real societal power in the wizarding world. Most of them are purebloods, most of them are rich, most of them are friends with rich and pureblooded wizards, and they are privileged. They are not ostracized as we like to imagine, they are royalty.

For them, to fight for blood purity is to fight for their own benefit, is to fight to maintain the pillars that keep them unaccountable for their behaviors and privilege whilst at the same time, pushing marginalized people — muggleborns, fantastical creatures, even half-bloods — to a dehumanizing condition. And they don’t feel sorry for this.

Now, the truth is that this is partially Rowling’s fault: her lack of understanding of how deep the issues she’s portraying really run makes it possible for her to interpret her own characters as redeemable because they somehow exchange sides when it fits them.

That’s mostly seen with the Malfoys: neither Draco, Narcissa, nor Lucius ever change sides because they see the suffering of others and think of it as wrong. They change sides when Voldemort’s cruelty starts to weigh on them — their change of loyalties are not coming from empathy for marginalized peoples or decency, it comes from self-preservation.

Kind of the same thing with Snape (I wrote some essays focused on Snape, so if anyone is interested, here’s the first, then the second).

Now, of course, that’s not to say those characters weren’t abused on someway or suffered but that’s the thing: no abuse in the world justifies the persecution, torture and killing of innocent people. To offer a counterpoint, the marginalized peoples the Death Eaters persecuted are also traumatized in some, they also can have had abusive parents and/or families but that is not taken into account when we talk about the Death Eater’s own traumas.

The narrative that the Death Eaters were abused their whole childhoods is so strong today in fandom that most people don’t stop to think that those teenagers probably were horrible people. Yes, maybe horrible because some of them were abused, I’m not denying that, but still horrible, which means they wouldn’t accept help. To hold them responsible for their own doings and their own privileges would seem for them as a persecution against them — just like fascist-like narratives often portray pro-LGBTQ+ or non-white policies and/or narratives.

It is also one of the reasons I take issue with the Slytherin portrayal of abused kids ostracized by the rest of the school. It’s really just isolating fascist narrative and only partially based on truth but I don’t think I want to stretch this conversation now (I can write more about it later if you want though).

So no, respectfully, I refuse to accept that those people — mostly men and rich people, I am forced to point out — would be anything but disgusting, and that’s where I take issue with some behaviors within the HP fandom. Because we’re being influenced by almost two decades of fan fiction and the current political climate, it’s very often that I find people who are sincerely incapable of dissociating fandom to canon.

Hence, the actually infuriating villainization of Albus Dumbledore.

Now, that’s a topic that makes me impatient AF. Not only because it is based on a strong fetishization of who Dumbledore really was, and what he could and couldn’t do, but also because it is a clear example of most people’s inability to differentiate between what they’re reading for fun and what they are internalizing from that media.

Let’s begin with that: Dumbledore is not some evil mastermind, and he is not equivalent to Voldemort. He is a flawed character, that’s true, but he is not a villain. And to think so is to play into the narrative that, because the “good side” fails, or makes wrong decisions, or even actively makes bad decisions, or immoral decisions in times of war, that is somehow equivalent to the “bad side”.

It is not.

That narrative is the same narrative that allows Israel to build an equivalence between Hamas’ violent acts and their own when in truth, as reproachable as some Hamas’ decisions may be according to various perspectives, their violence is a reaction to heavy and even more violent oppression.

What I mean is, even if Dumbledore failed in some of his decision-making in the Harry Potter books, even if we may believe we could do better, Dumbledore is a true morally gray character. But first, to make the point I want to make, we have to understand him:

For this, I will first separate his two identities as they appear throughout Harry Potter: as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Dumbledore plays a role as a leader and role model, but he is also a person with flaws and mistakes like anyone else. These are the two main “faces” of Albus Dumbledore for this defense post, so now let's analyze them more closely:

The first "face" we see of Dumbledore is that of the leader, and this is primarily because of Harry who, at eleven years old, sees Dumbledore as the kind of man he would like to emulate. This also happens with many other wizards throughout the story: it's clear to anyone that most of the people within Harry’s personal circle like and admire Dumbledore, while those who despise him are often the “bad” characters (Lucius Malfoy is probably one of the earliest examples of this).

Although that doesn’t mean they are somehow starstruck by the headmaster: Sirius, Snape, the Weasley parents, Moody, even James and Lily, they all question Dumbledore and his decision making at some point in the books. They end up following through more times than not, that’s true, but trust in someone is different than blind-faith. Those characters accept Dumbledore’s leadership because they trust him, not because they think he’s some type of a god.

However, we see things through Harry’s point of view, and Harry is a child who has no parents, no model figures, no one who really supports that role to him until his eleventh year. It's easy, then, to see how the leader face Dumbledore presents is one of someone the characters (and readers) can trust not to fail, and even easier to view him as someone with great power. This is the fandom’s biggest mistake in viewing him.

Shall we now remember a bit of Dumbledore’s history and delve into his personal side?

As a young man, he met Grindelwald and, according to J.K. Rowling, fell in love with him, as well as with his goal of seeking the Deathly Hallows and becoming the most powerful wizards of all time. 

In the last Harry Potter book, in the King's Cross chapter, Dumbledore himself confesses to Harry how the desire for power blinded him to what was truly important, how power was his greatest weakness, and therefore what made him unworthy of it. This is why Dumbledore remained as the headmaster of Hogwarts when he could have so easily become more important in the wizarding community (besides, of course, his love for the students): to keep himself away from power.

Here's the quote (It might be a bit different in the original, considering I’m translating it from Portuguese):

“‘I was gifted, I was brilliant. I wanted to escape. I wanted to shine. I wanted glory... Invincible Masters of Death, Grindelwald and Dumbledore!... The years passed. There were rumors about him. They said he had obtained a wand of immense power. Meanwhile, I was offered the position of Minister for Magic, not once, but several times. Naturally, I refused. I learned that I could not be trusted with power.’

‘But you'd have been better than Fudge or Scrimgeour!’ said Harry.

‘Would I?’ asked Dumbledore heavily. ‘I am not so sure. I proved as a very young man that power was my weakness and my temptation. It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.’”

This is what the fandom most fails to understand: the admiration of wizards for Dumbledore makes him influential, but not powerful, and this becomes especially clear during the end of The Goblet of Fire and throughout The Order of the Phoenix.

One of the first signs of this in the fourth book is when Fudge refuses to believe Dumbledore about Voldemort’s return: let's remember that, until that point, Fudge sought Dumbledore’s advice for his decisions as Minister of Magic precisely because the headmaster had the respect of much of the wizarding population. But when Fudge, who has the actual power, puts his foot down and says that Dumbledore no longer has influence over the Ministry’s choices, Dumbledore lacks the power to deny it, to stop it.

If he did, it would be safe to say that he would have used his power over the Ministry to convince everyone that Voldemort had indeed returned, and more, to mobilize the Ministry against Voldemort. But none of this happens simply because Dumbledore does not have that power.

Thus, it becomes easier to differentiate power from influence.

It’s Fudge’s power that causes the Ministry as an organization and the wizarding media to turn against the Headmaster, and Dumbledore doesn’t have the power to stop it, but he has enough influence to still be heard by part of the wizarding population. It’s Fudge’s power that leads to Harry’s expulsion from Hogwarts at the beginning of Order of the Phoenix, but it’s Dumbledore’s influence that convinces the Ministry to agree to a trial, and it’s his influence that moves the people present to listen to his defense of Harry during that trial. If Dumbledore had power over these events, Harry wouldn’t even have had a trial — something the Headmaster categorically calls an absurdity.

Therefore, Dumbledore doesn’t have power; he has influence, and there’s a difference between what he can actually do and what the fandom seems to believe he can do. Dumbledore has no power over the Ministry; he can’t boss anyone around except, perhaps, the Hogwarts staff and the Order of the Phoenix, a group whose members agreed to make him leader.

What he really has are people willing to listen to his advice and thoughts, as well as inclined to follow him, but that doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily do everything Dumbledore says (Sirius, anyone?).

It’s important to separate these two concepts for this analysis to continue because it will make Dumbledore’s actions make much more sense in this discussion. That said, let’s now begin to analyze “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore”:

The main criticisms I see regarding Dumbledore revolve around Harry’s life and the decisions the Headmaster made concerning him.

Before I begin, however, I want to point out that, despite Dumbledore’s flaws, he is still a leader (just like Harry), and as a leader, he bears responsibility for the lives of the people he has chosen to protect (just like Harry). It’s important to keep this in mind so that I can highlight a few things later.

So, let’s start with when the prophecy is heard and Voldemort begins hunting Harry instead of Neville. It’s important to emphasize here that, once a prophecy is made in the Harry Potter universe and the people the prophecy is about start acting according it, it’s going to happen; there’s no way around it, or at least that’s what we’re told as canon. That’s why, as soon as the prophecy is made and Voldemort actively choses to hunt them down, everyone knows that Harry (or Neville) will be the one to face Voldemort, and one of them will die — hopefully Voldemort.

Although he’s the one to whom the prophecy was made, Dumbledore has no control over it: there’s no way to avoid the fact that Harry (or Neville) would face Voldemort at some point in their lives once Snape overhears it and tells Voldemort. All he — and everyone else — can do is give the Chosen One the tools and knowledge necessary to face Voldemort with the best possible chance of winning — which he does later on by becoming Harry’s primary mentor.

Then the Potters are “chosen” and go into hiding in Godric’s Hollow, making Peter the Secret Keeper. Some more information on this choice: Dumbledore offered to be the Secret Keeper, but James and Lily refused and preferred to choose Sirius. However, they switched to Peter without telling anyone, not even Dumbledore. This is another thing I see the fandom complaining about a lot, but it’s explicitly canon that no one besides Sirius, James, Lily, and Peter knew about the switch.

This wasn’t because they didn’t trust Dumbledore, but because Albus was in the middle of the storm as one of Voldemort’s biggest targets. The Potters didn’t reject Dumbledore as their Secret Keeper because they didn’t trust him (they wouldn’t even be in the Order if that were the case, don’t you think?), but because they were thinking primarily of Harry’s safety, and placing their family’s safety in the hands of the second biggest target of Voldemort in that war simply doesn’t seem like a wise move.

So, there’s no reason, even up to the third book, for Dumbledore to suspect that Sirius is innocent and try to intervene to get him some kind of trial or chance to explain himself. There’s no indication that Dumbledore had contact with Sirius before he was sent to Azkaban, so how could the Headmaster be blamed for that?

Again, it’s important to emphasize that Dumbledore has influence.

Even if he wanted Sirius to have a trial, there’s no evidence that he could make it happen, since everything pointed to Sirius as the culprit — remembering that there’s a big difference between a trial for underage magic and the murder of thirteen Muggles, plus the whole Secret Keeper and high-profile situation. In fact, it’s also good to remember that as soon as Dumbledore learns the truth, he does everything in his power — even sending Harry and Hermione back in time — to save Sirius from being kissed by the Dementors.

But going back a bit, a week after Peter becomes the Secret Keeper, he reveals the Potters’ location to Voldemort, and on Halloween night in 1981, Voldemort goes to Godric’s Hollow and kills James, then Lily, then tries to kill Harry but fails.

This event needs to be broken down into two parts. The first is about Lily’s protection: when she chooses to die even though Voldemort gave her a chance to live, Lily protects Harry, and that’s the reason he survives that encounter with the Dark Lord, who also “dies.”

Since the fourth book, there’s a very specific characteristic of this protection that’s seen many times but never explicitly stated, which is the fact that Lily’s protection has a blood-related nature. In other words, Lily’s protection is especially tied to blood, which is why Voldemort chose Harry’s blood to resurrect himself: because in that way, he also “has” Lily’s blood and, consequently, her protection, which frees him to harm Harry in a way he couldn’t before.

And this is the point I want to reach: Dumbledore chooses the Dursleys to raise Harry not because he wants him to suffer, but because Petunia is the only one who carries Lily’s blood and, therefore, the only one who can ensure that Lily’s protection — the thing for which her sister died — continues to work. The blood Petunia shares with Lily even prevents Voldemort, even after the resurrection ritual, because her blood makes Lily’s protection even stronger.

And it’s good to remember that this measure ends up saving Harry in The Philosopher’s Stone — Quirrell and Voldemort couldn’t touch him because of Lily’s protection, guaranteed by his living in the same house as Petunia — and keeps him safe in the Dursleys’ house for sixteen years, until Harry turns seventeen and the protection finally stops working, even though he still lived with Petunia.

Once again, people overestimate Dumbledore’s ability to act: he had no control over the nature of Lily’s protection; he acted to keep Harry as safe as possible within what he could actually control.

Unfortunately, the choices presented in that situation were either to leave him protected from Voldemort’s assassination attempts or spare him the suffering of growing up with the Dursleys.

Neither choice was ideal, but this is where Dumbledore’s leadership character comes in: Harry’s responsibility to face Voldemort was no longer a choice, even though he was only a year old, because of the prophecy. So, it makes much more sense for him to protect Harry from the greater threat (Voldemort) while ensuring that Harry would have more time to develop and grow before having to face him again.

Dumbledore didn’t make the choice to give Harry to the Dursleys joyfully, wanting him to suffer, but thinking about giving him more time and more opportunities to be a child than he would have had if Lily’s protection weren’t ensured. Obviously, this doesn’t work out very well because the Dursleys are especially cruel to Harry in a way that Dumbledore hadn’t really foreseen, something he himself admits in The Half-Blood Prince:

“‘[...] Harry, whom Lord Voldemort has already tried to kill on several occasions, is in much more danger than on the day I left him on your doorstep, fifteen years ago, with a letter explaining that his parents had been murdered and expressing the hope that you would care for him as a son.’

Dumbledore paused, and although his voice remained light and calm, and did not betray his anger, Harry felt a certain coldness emanating from him. He also noticed that the Dursleys huddled together almost imperceptibly.

‘You did not do as I asked. You have never treated Harry as a son. In your care, he has only known neglect and often cruelty...’”

But it’s important to note that Dumbledore didn’t have good options regarding Harry’s custody; he didn’t have the power to change how Lily’s protection worked; he was working with what he had, which wasn’t much.

The second part of this event focuses more on Voldemort and Harry and is probably the most controversial regarding Dumbledore: the creation of the Horcrux inside Harry and how this is somehow seen as Dumbledore’s fault — hence the famous phrase about being “raised like a pig for slaughter,” but... let’s be honest? What, exactly, could Dumbledore have done against the fact that Harry became a Horcrux?

Once again, here’s the exaggerated view of Dumbledore’s power that the fandom seems to have: he had no control over what happened to the Potters in Godric’s Hollow on Halloween night in 1981. He had no power over Lily’s protection or the Horcrux in Harry. He has no power over Lily’s protection, nor over the Horcrux in Harry. The only thing he has the power to do is to act in a way that ensures his plan guarantees Voldemort’s ultimate defeat and thus saves the entire wizarding world.

I hate it when people say Dumbledore “raised Harry like a pig for slaughter” simply because he knew that Harry would have to die for the Horcrux to be destroyed, as if he had any other option in the matter. Harry’s fate was sealed as soon as Lily’s protection saved him and a part of Voldemort’s soul entered him; Dumbledore bears no responsibility for what happened that night.

So what Dumbledore can do regarding Harry having to die is exactly… nothing. He literally has no power to change this fact, no matter how much he wants to — and he does, because he loves Harry, as he himself says in Order of the Phoenix. But Dumbledore is still a leader, and he still needs to think about the best plan of action to ensure that people continue to have hope and that they can truly see that hope — of being free from Voldemort and his reign of terror — come true. And if that meant Harry had to die to destroy the Horcrux, then that was it. Period.

But it’s also important to point out that Dumbledore didn’t force Harry into anything: by the time Harry receives the information that he needs to die to ensure the salvation of everyone and Voldemort’s mortality, all the people who know this — Dumbledore and Snape, in this case — are dead and unable to do anything if Harry decided to simply run away and leave everyone to fend for themselves because he didn’t want to die.

But, as I pointed out before, Harry is a leader. And he fully accepts the responsibility of this role the moment he decides to face death: he goes to Voldemort willing to die by his own choice, wanting to save those who matter to him, those who trust him to end Voldemort. Not because Dumbledore ordered him, but because he — Harry — is a leader, and a leader sacrifices himself for his cause when necessary.

Saying that Dumbledore was the “cause” of Harry’s death, besides being wrong, also takes away from the greatness of Harry’s choice in that situation. Harry is the protagonist of his own story, and he is always making decisions based on his own mind and beliefs (going after the Philosopher’s Stone, entering the Chamber of Secrets, sparing Pettigrew, going after Sirius in the Department of Mysteries, pursuing the Horcruxes, etc.), so it’s completely unfair for people to place the responsibility for his choice to die on Dumbledore’s shoulders just because the Headmaster gave him the information that Harry was a Horcrux. Harry always acted according to his own mind based on the information he had been given — why would it be any different with the Horcrux inside him?

It simply wouldn’t be. Dumbledore gave the information, but it was Harry who decided what to do with it.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Dumbledore didn’t tell Harry about having to die to destroy the Horcrux inside him earlier because (a) Harry was a child, and (b) Dumbledore didn’t want to take away Harry’s hope. Additionally, after the fourth book, there was still the possibility that Harry could survive because, by performing the resurrection ritual, Voldemort intertwined his life with Harry’s, thus giving Harry a chance not to die when allowing the Horcrux to be destroyed. So why would Dumbledore tell a teenager that he would have to die at some point in the future… if there was a chance Harry might come back? It seems (to me, at least) like an unnecessary cruelty to place that burden on someone for so long.

So the biggest issue I see with the fandom in relation to Dumbledore is the belief that he had power over things that were completely beyond his reach. Dumbledore was a leader doing the best he could with what he had, within the limitations presented to him and his own experience.

Moreover, it’s admirable that Dumbledore had such a dark and flawed past and acknowledged each of his mistakes, always acting to ensure that he wouldn’t repeat them. It was the events of his adolescence that led him to always remember to value what truly mattered: love and people. He grew through his own pain, through the consequences of his own mistakes; he never forgot or repressed what happened to Ariana — which would certainly have been much easier — but instead, he used that painful event to become a better person.

That’s a morally gray character, that’s someone who had been stuck between a rock and a hard place and did what he thought was best, that’s a character who did the best he could with what he was given. And I really don’t like how fascist-like characters are more often than not considered more complex because of trauma than characters like Dumbledore.

But I guess that’s a bit because we can actually empathize with them better by being convinced that they didn’t have a choice, or that they were somehow forced into those choices even if they really didn’t want to and that might be the case, but to be honest, after seeing what fascist narratives do to marginalized people, I can’t say I care much about it. Anyway, be my guest to comment on my analysis but please be kind, I won’t engage in rage baits nor Zionists, Free Palestine loves <3

[gwenllian-in-the-abbey]

I know that you dislike how Aegon was portrayed in the show, but I really like alot of the elements they added to his character. The decision to invent an entirely original character just for him to assault was one of the strangest choices by the writers. However, I appreciate how they depicted his relationship with his parents. For instance, Viserys adored baby Aegon because he thought he could be a replacement for Balon. But as Aegon grew older and began to resemble his mother, he was no longer what Viserys wanted. Balon's shadow still looms over Aegon even in his adulthood. This is very similar to the dynamic between Tywin&Tyrion, and how Joanna's shadow still looms over both of them. Aegon's relationship with his mother is also very interesting. She loves him because he is her firstborn, but she also resents him. She believes that by crowning him, she could save him, but that's what ultimately leads to his death. There's so much to Aegon's character in the show, but most of it has been left unexplored. I wish that in S2, instead of vilifying him even further, they would explore the elements they added to his character.

Actually, I agree with a lot of this. It's mostly the invention of the OC to assault that I take issue with, and the way the show's writers can't seem to decide if they want Aegon to be an outright villain or a more grey character (which I think he certainly was in the book). But this is how a lot of the S1 characterization went. Given the time jumps, they had a hard time establishing a consistent characterization that felt like it developed organically over time. It's fine to have characters act in an inconsistent way, but you have to establish that this character has two warring sides and why. As GRRM likes to say, his favorite stories are about the human heart in conflict with itself. A character can do things that are unexpected or against their own interests, but we need to understand the conflict. Aegon really only got a handful of episodes in S1, so it's not surprising that his character is undeveloped compared to Alicent or Rhaenyra or Daemon.

There are lots of things I do like about the show's portrayal of Aegon though, and some of it is down to TGC's acting choices, but some of it is on the page. I think actually the show did the best job with the writing of younger Aegon in episodes 6 and 7, where you really see a spark of happiness in Aegon dim from the start of episode 6 to the end of episode 7 as the weight of expectations settles upon him. I also like that the show has made Aegon more or less an abused and neglected child. While I don't think that Alicent is an abusive parent per se, she and Otto both get physical with him even when he's not done anything (the kick to the ribs from Otto I think does cross a line). From episode 6 onward, there's not an episode in which Aegon is not being manhandled to some degree, and I think that's a really interesting choice. He's kicked around and slapped and grabbed and all of this culminates in him finally being metaphorically shoved onto a throne against his will. I think it gives this sense with Aegon that he is never really allowed to exist as his own person, that his very body isn't his own. He is either a vessel for kingship (and thus the protection of his family) or he is a representation the challenge he poses to Rhaenyra. His feelings don't matter, his wants don't matter, his pain doesn't matter. His father, very literally, erases him, and he's raised believing his sister probably wants him dead. I think it feeds very well into his hedonism, and I'd like to see that explored more.

But I agree that Season 2 should develop his character, rather than vilifying him further. I don't actually think show!Aegon is a total lost cause but the writers are treading a thin line with him. Most of what I enjoy about book!Aegon hasn't happened yet on the show, and there will be plenty of time post-Rook's Rest for Aegon to reflect upon his life and his choices, so let's hope they use it! A lot of people die in the Dance but we've got Aegon until the last episode or so, so the show really needs to make sure he's compelling to people who aren't already invested in his book character.