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fite-club · 8 months ago

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Greg here. One thing I am struggling with lately is noticing how badly trans men are treated in the sex work industry. This isn’t to say it’s “transandrophobia”, just an odd specific issue I’ve run into while I’ve begun transition that’s been really disheartening.

Do you happen to find that there’s a lot of gay cis men, specifically, who treat even just the mere concept of trans men terribly? Saying awful things about their genetalia and such? I know trans women deal with this often from straight men, and what I find interesting is it really just depends either way I think. I’ve talked to trans women who still casually use grindr too and that’s wild to me because I always feel like I’d be breaching that space just bc of my junk; than again, I haven’t felt the “shift” obviously that a lot of trans men talk about. I still look like a cis woman.

Obviously in the case of the porn industry, it’s not fully reflective of society but in some ways can be. A lot of straight men seem to objectify trans women behind closed doors in worse ways they even do cis women — and both gay and straight men seem to just treat trans men like straight up unwanted garbage in the industry, which has been so disheartening as a sexworker for me lately. Maybe it’s something I just need to shake off, but it does sting to see so many gay men refer to your junk as a “turn off” and see very little trans men represented in the industry, bad representation or otherwise — just like… none at all lol — it kinda makes me feel like some mishapen peg that eventually won’t fit. I do wonder if there are any resources that discuss this very specific issue.

I do think, while just being the porn industry, it’s a massive industry more people take part in than they’d ever admit, so it definitely feels like it says something at least and was a glaring issue that was hard for me to not notice yesterday.

I think something that’s worth discussion too is how negatively cis gay men can treat trans men but how it’s often something brushed off as innocuous instead of verbally wounding and transphobic, and it definitely draws from a place of misogyny — (ie, a gay friend telling me once that dildos could never be like the “real thing” when I was what was ID’ed at the time, in very lesbian relationship l o l (i did chew him out for this—)) - of course, this doesn’t compare to a wide spread issue of violence unless it regards personal relationships and circumstances, but man, words can still fucking hurt and make you wanna take the highway right into “stay dysphoric and mask again” land, which is so lame dnjsnfje

you’re right in that there’s a problem with transphobia from cis gay men, but i want to make it clear that they aren’t more transphobic than any other group. it just stings more because of the whole “you’re marginalized too, shouldn’t you get it?” thing. but, cis people can be terribly transphobic despite being gay— there’s a good chance the transphobia comes from misogyny, as well as a sort of “stolen valor” they may feel as someone who had to deal with a lot of homophobia (particularly in regards to penises and anal sex). they may say “you girls just can’t understand”, but it goes right back atcha, buddy… our struggles are intertwined as LGBT people! they’ll never understand what we’ve been through, either.

i respect the personal preference for penis over pussy (i get it; me too) and in that sense i really don’t care how cis gay men feel about vaginas. the line gets drawn at transphobia and misogyny, but not being sexually attracted to trans people as a homosexual is not in of itself transphobic. like, that guy’s not wrong that dildos aren’t like “the real thing”, but that should be a neutral statement. it won’t react to stimuli or feel quite like a real penis, but on the other hand, it’s always hard and never goes soft unlike a real penis. so like, it’s the weird shit some guys say about it that’s the issue—that’s the shit that should NOT be brushed off.

quick aside about trans girls on grindr: it’s a misconception that it’s an app exclusively for cis gay men! you’ll find plenty of trans people on there, because we’re all looking for the same thing… BISEXUALS! the number one benefit of apps over irl places like gay bars/clubs is that you can disclose/gather information about each other immediately. so right off the bat they know you’re trans and you know they’re bi (and therefore neither of u are wasting your time flirting with someone who’s not into what you’ve got in your pants).

as for the trans guys in sex work thing… you’re talking to the wrong guy, because i’ve spent the past 5 or so years trying to enter that space but i’m stuck being lost and anxious. i don’t know which site to use (i think there are more men on justforfans?), i don’t know what hashtags to use, i don’t even know how i’d advertise my page once i made it. IT IS AN ISSUE!!! the market is so competitive that the trans guys i know who do cam/sex work do not want to share such information. and i get it, tbh! i’m not tryna mess with anyone’s bag! but good lord is there a void, yeah. if anyone has any resources about this PLEASE reach out.

a lot of it comes from how society treats trans men, though. i’m not gonna pretend like the hypersexualized trans women in media were good representation, but they were there on screen as love interests (and punching bags). there really was never any representation of trans men ever, and if there was, he sure as shit wasn’t portrayed as desirable in any way. can you think of a single transmasc love interest in media? no wonder we feel so unwanted and unlovable! it’s extremely hard to see yourself as hot when you’ve never been shown that it’s even possible for someone like you. not to mention our dysphoria makes us hypercritical of our appearance in ways other people don’t care about

like, on that note… trans men tend to have fat asses! and that’s AWESOME for us, because fat asses and thick thighs are GREAT! those things are loved, especially among queer men! but we might think it makes us look feminine, and see it as a flaw. you just gotta believe that you are hot just the way you are. i dated a cis bi man for a few years and he was, without a doubt, someone who had a total preference for trans men (without being fetishizing or chaser-y). he’d say “i’m just a gay guy who loves pussy” and it was the absolute truth. these men exist!! they are out there!!!

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prettyboykatsuki · 2 years ago

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i saw a taking saying you’re meant to hate makima and not like her and though that reveal of what she really was (control devil)/wanted (chainsaw man and only him) was meant to be a shocker and the obvious moment of “oh fuck her” it disregards the fact that she was very much meant to be a liked character. and even after that reveal and despite everyone hating her she’s still meant to be liked as a really prominent character. people still find her attractive even after the twist because she’s always been an attractive character. it’s like people on tiktok attempt at nuance and no one succeeds. it’s like that video of dj khalid on the basketball course fumbling around with the ball but it’s people on tiktok. (this obviously wasn’t the worst take compared to a lot of others)

along with that it’s sort of weird how there’s a sort of fixation on how you shouldn’t like makima at all in comparison to evil male characters, which for some reason are fine to like compared to makima. still liking makima is not equal to being fine with what she did to denji. i hope that tiny rant made sense it’s just a lot of people saying “you’re meant to do this” and them not knowing what’s really happening

anyways i want to suck on that woman’s tits so badly

also none of that is meant in a negative way at all it was just an observation i made and obviously not meant towards you :-)

cw ; mentions of grooming, trauma, poverty, HUGE CSM SPOILERS HOLY FUCK SERIOUSLY.

i promised myself i would never write csm meta (mostly bc i dont think i have a good enough grasp on every element to give consolidated analysis on the series) but this ask reallllyyy resonated with me because makima is SUCH a fantastically written villain and i think that while everyone who hates her is mostly justified in said hatred because she is awful but it's like. never for the right reasons and never with any real nuance or genuine thought. makima is FANTASTICALLY written and we as the audience aren't meant to hate her because the story is told mostly from the perspective of denji.

to understand makima, you really have to understand denjis circumstance as a protagonist. denji is a character who's motivations are overly simplistic and that's because of his upbringing. not once in his life did he experience genuine love, especially not parental or motherly love. ontop of that he was in such deep shit and financial debt that he was destined for poverty. he was poor, hungry, and lonely. all main characters suffer from sort of tragedy but that tragedy is meant to feed into their motivations and trigger a particular action.

yuujis grandfather dying would translate into his integration into jujutsu society. the death of tanjiros family with only nezuko remaining would give tanjiro a reason to become a demon slayer.

"show me your dreams." is a very intentional line in the context of who denji is because at the start of the series he has none.

all in all when examining denji as a character - you'll first notice characteristics he lacks before you notice things about him. what can people say about denji other than calling him a horny teenage boy? denji is a character defined by poverty, both metaphorical and literal. his experiences have tainted his character so that he's relatively amoral without the guidance of aki later in the series. and he, in general, is a character who is strangely empty despite his yearning desire to live. who is denji really? what does he really want? he has no idea.

denjis lack of motivation and that sense of emptiness is also very directly written in the text in this panel. it's a huge issue that he has no internal motivation and that is due to his trauma.

and worst of all, denji despite his sexual urges or perceived sexual urges, is deeply innocent in many of his perceptions. fujimoto confirmed in an interview about a year or so prior that what denji sought from makima was motherly love. and that always throws people off because he clearly seems to want to sleep with her... right?

that's the thing though and that's what you have to understand about denji and makima. denji is naive. and makima, as a character, caught onto this fact early and made use of denjis utter naivety. that power imbalance between them where makima offers her body to denji in exchange for his obedience is like textbook grooming. much in the same that afo groomed shigaraki to become what he did, makima groomed denji for her own benefit.

and maybe you and me and the other people who are reading the story can recognize the multiple read flags that are very obvious about makima. the way she casually mentions making denji her dog for one, but also her clear lack of respect for his agency and strange possession. the way she dangles her attention over his head. all of these things, we as the viewers can see and understand. but this story is not about me and you, but about denji.

the way makima is potrayed is through denjis eyes is always exceptionally beautiful. denji views her with complete reverence and that's why saying she's meant to be disliked is absurd. because even to the bitterest end, where makima has effectively robbed denji of everything for her own completely selfish gain - denji admires her. he cares for her, in spite of himself and in spite of knowing how wrong it all is. he wants her approval and that is all in thanks to what makima was able to do in the time they spent together. the deep attachment that she had created to crush in the end. grooming, again.

this panel is one i often reference because its one of those scenes that shocking and a lot to see. but what i want to discuss is the framing because it's so relevant so intentional. the near holiness in which this deeply inappropriate action is framed. the light behind them like a halo, the hand in which makima guides him, their positions and the obvious line of the window frame that separates them.

makima makes it so that denji idolizes her. and for reasons denji can't wrap his head around, he does and always will. makima planned that.

i think there are plenty of reasons to hate makima but her villanous actions are without a doubt impressive and well-written to the point it's alarming.

but i think the biggest crime she commits is that she, not once in the entire series, saw denji for who he was. to me, the most painful thing to watch was that reality. to realize that she didn't care about denji in her own fucked up way either but that everything was a ploy and what denji experienced in spite. for denji to cannabilize makima in the end is an immensely powerful scene, and i do hope that much later in the series denji is able to reconcile with the abuse he suffered at her hands.

she is an utterly evil person. like truly what she did is inconceivable.

all that being said, i like her as a character. it's because i like evil women in the same way plenty of people like evil and fucked up men. and because makima is MEANT to be liked. that's the whole point. that's how she got control over denji and orchestrated the chain of events that was his happiness.

because makima was kind to him. because she was beautiful and graceful and nonchalant. because she appealed to the part of denji that yearned for admiration and praise and approval. the reason makima could commit such deep atrocities is because denji likes her. every single moment that we see her from denjis eyes potrays her as beautiful and unobtainable and she does everything in her power to make sure it stays that. so that she can give denji a reason to have her.

it's that from the very beginning. she is meant to be a very beautiful poison and i think pretending you're supposed to hate her from the beginning is stupid because that's not true. maybe you, as an adult with awareness, caught onto how awful she was and you disliked her for that. that's plausible for sure.

but she's always meant to be the thing that denji reveres and fujimoto makes the clear from the very moment she comes on screen. perhaps the most sincere we see her is in the first panel in which she hugs denji but not a minute after.

hate makima all you want. but to pretend that was the intent when really we as audience are meant to feel the extent of her betrayal along side denji is silly.

#return to sender #grooming cw #fang.csm #csm meta #csm spoilers #csm manga spoilers #i get annoyed when people get mad that people simp for makima. there are so many horrible men in manga #YES she is the worst character on her yes she is fucking awful. she's sexy what do you want me to say

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 4 years ago

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Hot takes about Severus Snape are a wierdly decent glimpse into how a person with progressive values analyses things. Literally every time someone talks about Snape, it’s like this tiny window into how one-dimentionally people actually think.

Recently saw a twitter post that was a fantastic example. Here’s how it goes (paraphrasing):

Person A:“Snape is POC and Queer coded, that’s why you guy’s hate him uwu lol.”

Person B: “Actually I hate him because he was mean and abusive to children under his care uwu but go off I guess lol”

Both of these takes are designed to be dramatic and/or reactionary. They each use partial truths to paint very broad strokes. These are get-em-in-one-hit quips. This is virtue signalling, if you’ll excuse that loaded phrase. Nobody had a substantial conversation, but now everyone who sees their statement knows the high ground they took.

At least a hundred other people chimed in to add their own little quippy hot takes into play, none of which add anything significant, but clearly made everyone feel very highly of themselves.

So many layers of nuance and complex analysis is completely lost in this kind of discussion. On tumblr, you get more of this kind of bullshit, but you don’t have a word count limit, so you guys just spew endless mountains of weak overblown evidence backing up your bullshit arguments, none of which was really about engaging in a real conversation anyway.

Here’s the thing about Snape.

He is a childhood domestic abuse victim. His abuser is a muggle.

He becomes a student at a magical school that takes him away from his abuser and immediately instills in him the idea that being a part of this magical world is a badge of self-worth, empowerment, and provides safety and security - provided that he keeps in line.

There is a war is being waged in that world over his right to exist (he is a half blood).

He is a marginalized person within the context of the narrative, forced to constantly be in the same living space as the children of his own oppressors who are being groomed and recruited into a hate group militia (the pureblood slytherins). They are in turn trying to do the same to him.

He is marginalized person bullied by children who are also part of his oppressor group, but who have “more liberal” leanings and aren’t direct about why he’s being targeted (the mauraders are all purebloods, Sirius, who was the worst offender, was raised in a bigoted household, the same one that produced Bellatrix.).

He had a crush on a girl who is a muggleborn, and therefore she is considered even lesser than him and carries a stigma to those who associate with her. That girl was his only real friend. In his entire life.

For both Snape and Lily, allying themselves to a pureblood clique within their own houses would be a great way of shielding themselves from a measure of the bigotry they were probably facing. There would have been obvious pressure from those cliques to disconnect with one and other.

Every other person who associates with Snape in his adulthood carries some sort of sociopolitical or workplace (or hate cult) baggage with their association. Some of them will physically harm and/or kill him if he steps out of line. He hasn’t at any point had the right environment to heal and adjust from these childhood experiences. Even his relationship with Dumbledore is charged with constant baggage, including the purebloods who almost killed him during their bullying getting a slap on the wrist, the werewolf that almost killed him as a child being placed in an authority position over new children, etc. Dumbledore is canonically manipulative no matter his good qualities, and he has literally been manipulating Snape for years in order to cultivate a necessary asset in the war.

He is a person who is not in the stable mental state necessary to be teaching children, whom has been forced to teach children. While also playing the role of double agent against the hate group militia, the one that will literally torture you for mistakes or backtalk or just for fun. The one that will torture and kill him if he makes one wrong move.

Is the math clicking yet? From all of this, it’s not difficult to see how everything shitty about Snape was cultivated for him by his environment. Snape was not given great options. Snape made amazingly awful choices, and also some amazingly difficult, courageous ones. Snape was ultimately a human who had an extremely bad life, in which his options were incredibly grim and limited.

In fact, pretty much every point people make about how shitty Snape is as a person makes 100% logical sense as something that would emerge from how he was treated. Some if it he’s kind of right about, some of it is the inevitable reality of suffering, and some of it is part of the cycle of abuse and harm.

Even Snape’s emotional obsession with Lily makes logical sense when you have the perspective that he literally has no substantial positive experiences with other human beings that we know of, and he has an extreme, soul destroying guilt complex over her death. Calling him an Incel mysoginist nice guy projects a real-world political ideology and behavior that does not really apply to the context of what happened to him and her.

Even Snape’s specific little acts of cruelty to certain students is a reflection of his own life experiences. He identifies with Neville; more specifically, he identifies his own percieved emotional weaknesses in his childhood in Neville. There’s a very sad reason there why he feels the urge to be so harsh.

Snape very clearly hates himself, in a world where everyone else hates him, too. Imagine that, for a second. Imagine total internal and external hatred, an yearning for just a little bit of true connection. For years. Imagine then also trying to save that world, even if it’s motivated by guilt. Even if nobody ever knows you did it and you expect to die a miserable death alone.

There are more elements here to consider, including the way Rowling described his looks (there may be something in there re: ugliness and swarthy stereotyping). These are just the things that stand out the most prominently to me.

J.K. Rowling is clearly also not reliable as an imparter of moral or sociopolitical philosophies. I don’t feel that her grasp of minority experiences is a solid one, considering how she picks and chooses who is acceptable and who is a threat.

All of that said, this is a logically consistent character arc. Within the context of his narrative, Snape is a marginalized person with severe PTSD and emotional instability issues who has absolutely no room available to him for self-improvement or healing, and never really has. And yes, he’s also mean, and caustic, and verbally abusive to the students. He’s also a completey miserable, lonely person.

There are elements in his character arc that mirror real world experiences quite well. If nothing else, Rowling is enough of an emotional adult to recognise these kinds of things and portray something that feels authentic.

In my opinion, it’s not appropriate to whittle all this down by comparing him directly to the real world experiences of marginalized groups - at least if you are not a part of the group you are comparing him to. There have been many individuals who have compared his arc to their own personal experiences of marginalization, and that is valid. But generally speaking, comparing a white straight dude to people who are not that can often be pretty offensive. This is not a valuable way to discuss either subject.

Also, I believe that while it’s perfectly okay to not like Snape as a character, many of the people who act like Person B are carrying Harry’s childhood POV about Snape in their hearts well into their own adulthood. And if nothing else, Rowling was attempting to say something here about how our perspectives (should) grow and change as we emotionally mature. She doesn’t have to be a good person herself to have expressed something true about the world in this instance, and since this story is a part of our popular culture, people have a right to feel whatever way they do about this story and it’s characters.

The complexity of this particular snapshot of fictionalized marginalization, and what it reveals about the human experience, cannot be reduced down to “he’s an abuser so he’s not worth anyone’s time/you are bad for liking him.”

And to be honest, I think that it reveals a lot about many of us in progressive spaces, particularly those of us who less marginalized but very loud about our values, that we refuse to engage with these complexities in leu of totally condemning him. Particularly because a lot of the elements I listed above are indeed reflected in real world examples of people who have experienced marginalization and thus had to deal with the resulting emotional damage, an mental illness, and behavior troubles, and bad decisions. Our inability to address the full scope of this may be a good reflection of how we are handling the complexity of real world examples.

Real people are not perfect angels in their victimhood. They are just humans who are victims, and we all have the capacity to be cruel and abusive in a world where we have been given cruelty and abuse. This is just a part of existing. If you cannot sympathise with that, or at least grasp it and aknowledge it and respect the people who are emotionally drawn to a character who refects that, then you may be telling on yourself to be honest.

To be honest, this is especially true if you hate Snape but just really, really love the Mauraduers. You have a right to those feelings, but if you are moralizing this and judging others for liking Snape, you’ve confessed to something about how you’ve mentally constructed your personal values in a way I don’t think you’ve fully grasped yet.

I have a hard time imagining a mindset where a story like Snape’s does not move one to empathy and vicarious grief, if I’m honest. I feel like some people really just cannot be bothered to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes, feeling what they feel and living like they live. I struggle to trust the social politics of people who show these kinds of colors, tbh.

But maybe that’s just me.

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jamlavender · 4 years ago

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Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: Mrs Coulter, misogyny and the His Dark Materials TV show

The show went hard on misogyny as a vital part of Mrs Coulter’s backstory, and I want to talk about how they did it, and why, and how it might have been done better. This is quite long (when is anything I write not, let’s be real) so it’s under the cut. Read on for thoughts on women, power and fictional villainy.

As a quick disclaimer, though: I’ve enjoyed the show a lot! I’m so glad they made it! Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as Mrs Coulter! There’s so much to appreciate about the show overall, including many aspects of Mrs Coulter’s portrayal. But the HDM team have also made gender politics and misogyny very explicit themes of the show – particularly season two, particularly season two, episode five – and I think it’s fair to critique that.

Let’s be clear: Mrs Coulter is a villain. She murders kids by tearing out their souls. She kills and tortures friends and foes alike without a second thought. She abuses her daughter. She upholds and advances a totalitarian regime. She’s a Bad Person, as confirmed by God himself with the unforgettable line: “You are a cesspit of moral filth.” She’s fucking terrible, but, in life as in art, many of us are fascinated by how such awful people are made. What drives someone to commit atrocities? I am keen to see such questions examined in fiction, because I don’t think exploring a character necessarily means excusing their actions, and because it’s interesting (I mean, of course I find her fascinating, I’ve written a novel’s worth of fic about her). However, after a few snarky comments (“What sort of woman raised Father Graves, do you think?”) and some subtler commentary on sexuality, gender and power (her unsettling MacPhail with the key in the bra in S1E2), S2E5 drew a weird line between sexism in Mrs Coulter’s professional and academic life and her vast and senseless institutionalised child murder, and the longer I’ve sat with that the more I’m like: what the fuck?

Look, Mrs Coulter doesn’t tear apart children to search for sin inside them and poison Boreal and break a witch’s fingers because she’s experienced sexism in the workplace and in her education. That’s… a very odd thing to imply. We have to remember that there are lots of women in Lyra’s world, all of whom will also have experienced sexism, misogyny and other forms of marginalisation (many in more expansive and pernicious ways than Mrs Coulter, who’s a woman, yes, but also white, wealthy, highly educated and very thin and beautiful), and none of them are running arctic torture stations. She will have experienced misogyny, absolutely, and that will have affected her in various ways that inform how she approaches her work, but to imply that being denied a doctorate is the reason she became a sadistic killer is frankly bizarre. Here are a few of the lines from that episode with my commentary:

“Do you know who I could have been in this world?” What does this mean? If she’d been roughly the same person in our world, the answer is: Margaret Thatcher, which is probably a step down for Marisa, all things considered, because the Magisterium is far more autocratic than any recent Tory government and would be a much easier institutional environment in which to enact her cruelty. What we’re supposed to think, clearly, is that she’d have been a different person: a scientist and a mother, and she’s had this realisation because she saw a woman with a baby and a laptop and had a three-minute conversation with Mary. This doesn’t make sense. We live in our world! It’s less repressive than Lyra’s world but it’s hardly a gender utopia. If Mrs Coulter had chosen the scientist-and-mother life (which, as I’ll revisit later, she could have done in her world but chose not to because of her megalomaniac tendencies), she’d still have been affected by misogyny here too. Our world is not kind to young mothers, nor young women embroiled in scandals, nor is the world teeming with female physicists. It might be a little better, sure, but it’s hardly as if those gendered challenges would have been solved.

“What do you mean she runs a department?” This is just the show forgetting its own canon. Marisa, you ran a massive government organisation (the GOB), including a huge murder science research initiative in the Arctic. That’s a much bigger undertaking and much more impressive than running a university department in our world. Pull yourself together.

“But because I was a woman, I was denied a doctorate by the Magisterium.” This is the show flagrantly ignoring the source material to make a clumsy political point. In the books, there are women with doctorates (notably Hannah Relf, also a major player in the new Book of Dust trilogy) and at least one women’s college full of female scholars. Now, would that women’s college likely be underfunded and disrespected compared to the men’s colleges? Almost certainly. But saying that is different than saying “I couldn’t get my doctorate!” when women in Lyra’s world can. The show knew what point they wanted to make, and were willing to ignore canon to do so, which is frustrating. Also, given that there are female academics and scientists in Lyra’s world, and that Mrs Coulter is a member of St Sophia’s college, it’s clear that she could have lived that life if she so desired. But she didn’t want that, because being a scientist and academic at St Sophia’s imbues her with no real power, and that’s what she craves.

I’m not opposed, in theory, to exploring Mrs Coulter and misogyny in more depth, but I think doing so through an examination of the sexual politics of her life would have made a lot more narrative sense and been much more powerful. It’s better evidenced in the text – her using her sexuality to manipulate people and taking lovers for political sway is entirely canon, as is her backstory where genuine love and lust blew up her life – and it links much more closely with the most shocking of her villainy, which involves cutting out children’s dæmons to stop them developing “troublesome thoughts and feelings,” referencing sexual and romantic desire (and what Lyra and Will do to save Dust is clearly a big ‘fuck you’ to those aims). She even says this to MacPhail in TAS, “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care - the care! - of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches - if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.” Don’t get me wrong, she’d have been a villain regardless, but I do believe that there’s a much stronger link between her sexual and romantic experiences and her murder work than between professional and academic stifling and child murder. It would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tenuous.

However, the show is trying to be family-friendly, and digging into why this terrible, cruel woman might want to cut the ability for desire and love (and other non-sexual adult feelings, I’m sure) out of people could get dark. We know that the show doesn’t want to go there, because they’ve actively toned down her weaponising her sexuality: in the books, she has an established sexual relationship with Boreal, whereas the show made it seem like she’s been stringing him along all this time, and made it about potentially ‘sharing a life’ together rather than fucking, which was clearly the arrangement in the books. Also, I think Ruth Wilson said she and Ariyon Bakare filmed a “steamy scene” together, and given that only a single chaste kiss between them aired it must have been cut. I think they deliberately minimised the sexual elements of the text, particularly regarding Mrs Coulter (the mountain scene with Asriel, which I did still love, was also a lot less horny than in the book) and replaced that with another gender issue, that of professional sexism, as if the two are interchangeable, which they are not. This is a shame, both for Mrs Coulter’s character and also for the story as a whole, because the characters’ relationships with sex and desire are an important part of the books! (If this minimised sexuality approach means that they don’t use the TAS scene where Asriel threatens to gag her and she tries to goad him into doing it, I’ll scream). Overall, I think they missed the mark here, which is a shame because I also think it could have been done well, if they’d been bolder and darker and more thoughtful.

Why might this happen? Why might the show take this approach? Why might it be latched onto by viewers? Personally, I think the conversations we have about women and power are very simplistic, which leaves us in a tight spot when we see women seizing power for themselves (even in fiction) and weaponising that against others, not just other women but people of all genders, because we struggle to move past ‘women have overall been denied power, so them taking it ‘back’ is good,’ even if that immediately becomes a hot mess of white, corporate feminism and results in the ongoing oppression of many people. I think we are so hungry for representations of powerful women that we – producers and viewers alike – struggle to see them as bad, because it’s uncomfortable to be so intoxicated by Mrs Coulter effortlessly dominating the men around her, subverting systems designed to marginalise her for her own benefit, and generally being aggressive and intelligent and ruthless, and then realise that you are entranced by someone who is, objectively, a terrible, terrible person. It can be hard to realise that if you channelled the energy of someone who mesmerises you, you’d be the villain. So instead of sitting with that (more on this below), a lot of legwork goes into reworking her villainy into, somehow, a just act, a result of oppression, as her taking back power that has been denied to her, rather than grappling with the fact that for anyone to desire power in such a merciless way, even if they have to overcome marginalisation to get it, is really, really dangerous.

The joy, of course, is that Mrs Coulter is not real! She’s not real! Adoring fictional characters does not mean condoning their (imaginary) decisions, nor do stories exist for each person in them to fit neatly into a good or bad box so you know who you’re allowed to love. Furthermore, fiction can be a fabulous tool for exploring and interrogating the parts of yourself that, if left to bloom unexamined, might perpetuate beliefs or behaviour that cause harm to others. Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be a feminist or taking down the patriarchy or a righteous powerful woman to illuminate things about gender, power and feminism for those reading and watching. In fact, it’s important that we explore what happens when women (most commonly white, wealthy women, as she is) continue to perpetuate brutal systems under the guise of sticking it to ‘men,’ because it happens all the time in the real world, and it’s a serious issue. Finding characters like Mrs Coulter so cool and compelling doesn’t make you a bad person, but it might tell you something about yourself – not that you want to be a villain or kill kids or whatever, but something about how you relate to your gender or women or men or power – and that knowledge can be useful! We all have better and worse impulses, and finding art that helps us make sense of ourselves, both the good and bad parts, is a gift that we should relish.

Anyway, tl;dr, Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be sympathetic or understandable or redeemable to be brilliant – but you wouldn’t know that from how she’s been portrayed in the new adaptation.

#his dark materials #marisa coulter #my analysis #this might be controversial idk #more thoughts that no one asked for #hdm meta

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kmclaude · 3 years ago

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Forgive me Father, I have no awful headcanons for you, only a general question on comic making. How do you do it, writing-wise/how do you decide what points go where, how do you plot it out (or do you have any resources on the writing aspect that you find useful?) Not to get too bogged down in details, but I attended a writer’s workshop and the author in residence suggested I transfer my wordy sci-fi WIP into graphic novel script, as it might work better. (I do draw, but I don’t know if I have it in me to draw a whole comic—characters in motion? Doing things? With backgrounds? How dare, why can’t everyone just stand around looking pretty)

I was interested but it quickly turned into a lot of internal screaming as I tried to figure out how to compress the hell out of it, since novels are free to do a lot more internal monologuing and such compared to a comic format (to say nothing of trying to write a script without seeing how the panels lay out—just for my own sake, I might have to do both concurrently.)

As an aside, to get a feel for graphic novels I was rereading 99RM and was reminded of how great it was—tightly plotted, intriguing, and anything to do with Ashmedai was just beautifully drawn. I need more Monsignor Tiefer and something something there are parallels between Jehan and Daniel in my head and I don’t know if they make sense but it works for me. (As an aside, I liked the emphasis on atonement being more than just the word sorry, but acknowledgment you did wrong and an attempt to remedy it—I don’t know why that spoke to me the way that it did.)

I thought Tumblr had a word count limit for asks but so far it has offered zero resistance, oh well. I don’t have much else to say but on the topic of 99RM, Adam getting under Monsignor’s skin is amazing, 10/10 (about the Pride picture earlier)

wow tumblr got rid of the markdown editor! or at least in asks which means the new editor probably has no markdown....god i hate this site! anyway...

Totally! So first, giant thank you for the compliments! Second, I have a few questions in turn for you before I dive into a sort of answer, since I can give some advice to your questions in general but it also sounds like you have a specific conundrum on your hands.

My questions to your specific situation are:

did the author give any reason for recommending a, in your words, "wordy" story be turned into a graphic novel?

is the story you're writing more, like you said, "internal monologuing"? action packed? where do the visuals come from?

do you WANT it to be a comic? furthermore, do you want it to be a comic you then must turn around and draw? or would you be interested in writing for comics as a comic writer to have your words turned into art?

With those questions in mind, let me jump into the questions you posed me!

Let me start with a confession...

I've said this before but let me say it again: Ninety-Nine Righteous Men was not originally a comic — it was a feature-length screenplay! And furthermore, it was written for a class so it got workshopped again and again to tighten the plot by a classroom of other nerds — so as kind as your compliments are, I'm giving credit where credit is due as that was not just a solo ship sailing on the sea. On top of that, it got adapted (by me) into a comic for my thesis, so my advisor also helped me make it translate or "read" well given I was director, actor, set designer, writer, editor, SFX guy, etc. all in one. And it was a huge help to have someone say "there is no way you can go blow by blow from script to comic: you need to make edits!" For instance, two scenes got compressed to simple dialogue overlaid on the splashpage of Ashmedai raping Caleb (with an insert panel of Adam and Daniel talking the next day.) What had been probably at least 5 pages became 1.

Additionally, I don't consider myself a strong plotter. That said, I found learning to write for film made the plotting process finally make some damn sense since the old plot diagram we all got taught in grammar school English never made sense as a reader and definitely made 0 sense as a writer — for me, for some reason, the breakdown of 25-50-25 (approx. 25 pages for act 1, 50 for act 2 split into 2 parts of 25 each, 25 pages for act 3) and the breaking down of the beats (the act turning points, the mid points, the low point) helped give me a structure that just "draw a mountain, rising action, climax is there, figure it out" never did. Maybe the plot diagram is visually too linear when stories have ebb and flow? I don't know. But it never clicked until screenwriting. So that's where I am coming from. YMMV.

I should also state that there's Official Ways To Write Comic Scripts to Be Drawn By An Artist (Especially If You Work For A Real Publisher As a Writer) and there's What Works For You/Your Team. I don't give a rat's ass about the former (and as an artist, I kind of hate panel by panel breakdowns like you see there) so I'm pretty much entirely writing on the latter here. I don't give a good god damn about official ways of doing anything: what works for you to get it done is what matters.

What Goes Where?

Like I said, 99RM was a screenplay so it follows, beat-wise, the 3-act screenplay structure (hell, it's probably more accurate to say it follows the act 1/act 2A/act 2B/act 3 structure.) So there was the story idea or concept that then got applied to those story beats associated with the structure, and from there came the Scene-by-scene Breakdown (or Expanded Scene Breakdown) which basically is an outline of beats broken down into individual scenes in short prose form so you get an overview of what happens, can see pacing, etc. In the resources at the end I put some links that give information on the whole story beat thing.

(As an aside: for all my short comics, I don't bother with all that, frankly. I usually have an image or a concept or a bit of writing — usually dialogue or monologue, sometimes a concrete scene — that I pick at and pick at in a little sketchbook, going back and forth between writing and thumbnail sketches of the page. Or I just go by the seat of my pants and bullshit my way through. Either or. Those in many ways are a bit more like poems, in my mind: they are images, they are snapshots, they are feelings that I'm capturing in a few panels. Think doing mental math rather than writing out geometric proofs, yanno?)

Personally, I tend to lean on dialogue as it comes easier for me (it's probably why I'm so drawn to screenwriting!) so for me, if I were to do another longform GN, I'd probably take my general "uhhhhhh I have an idea and some beats maybe so I guess this should happen this way?" outline and start breaking it down scene by scene (I tend to write down scenes or scene sketches in that "uhhhh?" outline anyway LOL) and then figure out basic dialogue and action beats — in short, I'd kind of do the work of writing a screenplay without necessarily going full screenplay format (though I did find the format gave me an idea of timing/pacing, as 1 page of formatted script is about equal to 1 minute of screentime, and gave me room to sketch thumbnails or make edits on the large margins!) If you're not a monologue/soliloque/dialogue/speech person and more an image and description person, you may lean more into visuals and scenes that cut to each other.

Either way this of course introduces the elephant in the panel: art! How do you choose what to draw?

The answer is, well, it depends! The freedom of comics is if you can imagine it, you can make it happen. You have the freedoms (and audio limitations) of a truly silent film with none of the physical limitations. Your words can move in real time with the images or they can be a narrative related to the scene or they could be nonsequitors entirely! The better question is how do you think? Do you need all the words and action written first before you break down the visuals? Do you need a panel by panel breakdown to be happy, or can you freewheel and translate from word and general outlines to thumbnails? What suits you? I really cannot answer this because I think when it comes to what goes where with regard to art, it's a bit of "how do you process visuals" and also a bit of "who's drawing this?" — effectively, who is the interpreter for the exact thing you are writing? Is it you or someone else? If it's you, would you benefit from a barebones script alongside thumbnailed paneling? Would you be served by a barebones script, then thumbnails, then a new script that includes panel and page breakdowns? What frees you up to do what you need to do to tell your story?

If I'm being honest, I don't necessarily worry about panels or what something will look like necessarily until I'm done writing. I may have an image that I clearly state needs to happen. I may even have a sequence of panels that I want to see and I do indeed sketch that out and make note of it in my script. But exactly how things will be laid out, paneled, situated? That could change up until I've sketched my final pencils in CSP (but I am writer and artist so admittedly I get that luxury.)

How do I compress from novel to comic?

Honest answer? You don't. Not really. You adapt from one to another. It's more a translation. Something that would take forever to write may take 1 page in a comic or may take a whole issue.

I'm going to pick on Victor Hugo. Victor Hugo spent a whole-ass book in Notre-Dame de Paris talking about a bird's eye view of Paris and other medieval architecture boring stuff, with I guess some foreshadowing with Montfaucon. Who cares. Not me. I like story. Anyway. When we translate that book to a movie any of the billion times someone's done that, we don't spend a billion years talking at length about medieval Paris. There's no great monologuing about the gibbet or whatever: you get to have some establishing shots, maybe a musical number, and then you move tf on. Because it's a movie, right? Your visuals are right there. We can see medieval Paris. We can see the cathedral. We can see the gibbet. We don't need a whole book: it's visually right there. Same with a comic: you may need many paragraphs to describe, say, a space station off of Sirius and one panel to show it.

On the flip side, you may take one line, maybe two, to say a character keyed in the special code to activate the holodeck; depending on the visual pacing, that could be a whole page of panels (are we trying to stretch time? slow it down? what are we emphasizing?) A character gives a sigh of relief — one line of text, yeah? That could be a frozen panel while a conversation continues on or that could be two (or more!) panels, similar to the direction [a beat] in screenwriting.

Sorry there's not a super easy answer there to the question of compression: it's a lot more of a tug, a push-pull, that depends on what you're conveying.

So Do I Have It In Me to Write & Draw a GN?

The only way you'll know is by doing. Scary, right? The thing is, you don't necessarily need to be an animation king or God's gift to background artists to draw a comic.

Hell, I hate backgrounds. I still remember sitting across from my friend who said "Claude you really need to draw an establishing exterior of the church at some point" and me being like "why do you hate me specifically" because drawing architecture? Again? I already drew the interior of the church altar ONCE, that should be enough, right? But I did draw an exterior of the church. Sorta. More like the top steeple. Enough to suggest what I needed to suggest to give the audience a better sense of place without me absolutely losing my gourd trying to render something out of my wheelhouse at the time.

And that's kinda the ticket, I think. Not everyone's a master draftsman. Not everyone has all the skills in every area. And regardless, from page one to page one hundred, your skills will improve. That's all part of it — and in the meantime, you should lean into your strengths and cheat where you can.

Do you need to lovingly render a background every single panel? Christ no! Does every little detail need to be drawn out? Sure if you want your hand to fall off. Cheat! Use Sketchup to build models! Use Blender to sculpt forms to paint over! Use CSP Assets for prebuilt models and brushes if you use CSP! Take photographs and manip them! Cheat! Do what you need to do to convey what you need to convey!

For instance, a tip/axiom/"rule" I've seen is one establishing shot per scene minimum and a corollary to that has been include a background once per page minimum as grounding (no we cannot all have eternal floating heads and characters in the void. Unless your comic is set in the void. In which case, you do you.) People ain't out here drawing hyper detailed backgrounds per each tiny panel. The people who DO do that are insane. Or stupid. Or both. Or have no deadline? Either way, someone's gonna have a repetitive stress injury... Save yourself the pain and the headache. Take shortcuts. Save your punches for the big K.O. moments.

Start small. Make an 8-page zine. Tell a beginning, a middle, an end in comic form. Bring a scene to life in a few pages. See what you're comfortable drawing and where you struggle. See where you can lean heavily into your comfort zones. Learn how to lean out of your comfort zone. Learn when it's worth it to do the latter.

Or start large. Technically my first finished comic (that wasn't "a dumb pencil thing I drew in elementary school" or "that 13 volume manga I outlined and only penciled, what, 7 pages of in sixth grade" or "random one page things I draw about my characters on throw up on the interwebz") was 99RM so what do I know. I'm just some guy on the internet.

(That's not self-deprecating, I literally am some guy on the internet talking about my path. A lot of this is gonna come down to you and what vibes with you.)

Resources on writing

Some of these are things that help me and some are things that I crowd-sourced from others. Some of these are going to be screenwriting based, some will be comic based.

Making Comics by Scott McCloud: I think everyone recommends this but I think it is a useful book if you're like "ahh!!! christ!! where do I start!!!???" It very much breaks down the elements of comics and the world they exist in and the principles involved, with the caveat that there are no rules! In fact, I need to re-read it.

Comic Book Design: I picked this up at B&N on a whim and in terms of just getting a bird's eye view of varied ways to tackle layout and paneling? It's such a great resource and reference! I personally recommend it as a way to really get a feel for what can be done.

the screenwriter's bible: this is a book that was used in my class. we also used another book that's escaping me but to be honest, I never read anything in school and that's why I'm so stupid. anyway, I'd say check it out if you want, especially if you start googling screenwriting stuff and it's like 20 billion pieces of advice that make 0 sense -- get the core advice from one place and then go from there.

Drawing Words & Writing Pictures: many people I know recommended this. I think I have it? It may be in storage. So frankly, I'd already read a bunch of books on comics before grabbing this that it kind of felt like a rehash. Which isn't shade on the authors — I personally was just a sort of "girl, I don't need comics 101!!!"

Invisible Ink: A Practical Guide to Building Stories that Resonate: this has been recommended so many times to me. I cannot personally speak on it but I can say I do trust those who rec'd it to me so I am passing it along

the story circle: this is pretty much the hero's journey. a useful way to think of journeys! a homie pretty much swears by it

a primer on beats: quick google search got me this that outlines storybeats

save the cat!: what the above refers to, this gives a more genre-specific breakdown. also wants to sell you on the software but you don't need that.

I hope this helps and please feel free to touch base with more info about your specific situation and hopefully I'll have more applicable answers.

#writing #making a graphic novel #writing a graphic novel #tutorial #writing tutorial

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melto · 3 years ago

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good lord maybe im just a little crazy but bad buddy really just. god. my homosexual bestie pran has really really gotten to me. literally something something about the cycle of fated love and doom.

like. i think most people agree that the thing that sticks out with bad buddy compared to others that it does such a good job with showing that characters have a history together rather than just saying it and putting none of the work in it really does feel like pat and pran have known each other for so long and that they are so integral to one another outside of the basic haha they have been rivals since birth because their parents hate each other and all with like. idk other shows that want us to believe people have had this long and impactful relationship it is rarely there. like the people are literally strangers and nothing about their shared history has truly effected one another but pat and pran do very clearly remember each other in a way that informs how they act towards one another, you can see why they argue the way they do but also now why it is so easy for them to actually get along and be friendly

it especially shines with pran because he is so genuinely affected by things, because its always been him who's life getting all fucked up because of things that happen between him and pat like in the ep when he's just. miserable and crying under that bed while pat's dad is just going off about how 3 years ago pran always was following pat around and copying him and saying how he's just an awful and jealous boy and like pat's not agreeing but its been said, and even if pat doesnt believe that its something that pran does seem to believe, because he takes the blame and says its true and he's sorry and that he will leave so that he doesnt cause issues again which is like. god. and then the flashback happens about their misunderstanding 3 years ago with them getting along, even being more than friendly. its that exact thing pat's dad is calling pran jealous for and they are doing it together knowingly and having fun with it and then suddenly it gets ruined with parents showing up and pran's being transferred while pat stays and even though the flashback only shows pat being blamed by their friends for pran having to leave its so clear that pran feels the other way around, because he had to leave and he always needs to be ready to leave because he's the real problem and pat has seemed unaffected every time by whats happening so it has to be him like im assuming he wasnt supposed to play at the concert with pat specially and then being friends/in love with him ofc too but pran like going against his parents to do that with pat and all.

its something that has affected the way pran still is today, clearly, and the way pat responds is informed by that same history and it shows! their shared history has such a weight with it to them and they literally cant seem to escape each other (from birth, everything that happened in their childhood, pran transferring back without knowing theyd be at the same college, their friend groups always at each others throats, living across the hall from one another, etcetcetc) and they know that they will never be able to get away from one another but they are also scared that history will continue to repeat itself and they will be punished for their proximity to each other and the fondness but they cant do anything about it, because the connection is supposed to be there and they want it so bad but they feel doomed about what that means and like with them always saying stuff like you're my bad luck it always happens when i'm with you its just. they are so aware of it but truly arent making any moves to stop it from happening like always.

they’ve been forced to be rivals since birth so the only time they were ever allowed to spend together was when they were competing so its something that has become so truly important for both of them but neither are able to come out and say it. its all about this fucking competition its all about how their relationship is supposed to be all competing its all about how the love they shared in the last cycle was ruined at a music competition in highschool its all about well maybe maybe this time it will turn out different. there is just something so overwhelming for both of them AND me with them feeling like they are fated to be together but doomed to repeat a cycle that will never allow them to be.

and literally like everything i learn about pran and pat’s like shared history makes me evil. everything is so much. the fact they used to have a cans on a string to talk and pat’s kept it still despite pran being gone for 3 years and just threw it thru his window bcuz pran wldnt pick up his calls. pat keeping pran’s guitar safe all these years and waiting to give it back to him to see if he missed it missed playing wanted it back (easily read as if pran missed him missed what they had wanted him back). pat trying to make pran a guitar pick out of his student id and when pran wouldnt let him making it out of his own bcuz he really didnt want pran to get hurt (and it specifically being of his face which is just :|). pran’s repeated jealously over the same girl with pat, the flashback of him being so !!! when pat was like i’ll see you there and him getting that second drink only to hand both away to the first person he sees bcuz pat is in with her and he wasnt waiting specifically for pran like he had hoped. etcetc.

and then with ink... there is something that is just so much about her being introduced to be a point of conflict giving pran a bracelet she wanted to give him back then before he moved away and also having given pat one years ago so now they have matching ones with little 'p' charms followed by pran asking her if she liked pat and her saying no and that hes just a friend like pran and when she asks if pran wanted to know so he could hit on her and he avoids answering and struggles to find a reason as to why he wouldnt want to hit on her as an excuse because he cant just. come out and say why without having to truly confirm that he’s gay and has feelings for pat (which. basically happens at the end of this ep to himself. kms)

and the. god the ending of ep 4. i feel like shit!!! i really do!!! like them both asking if the other likes ink and pran is obviously so worried about the answer but so is pat and pran really thinks that the reason pat is worried is the same reason that pran is but the countdown happens and pran says no while pat says yes and pran just. seems so devastated. and then pat goes on to try and ask that if pran was her if he would like him and pran is like no you dont have good qualities why would i.

and then pat starts listing off things he's done for pran, rather than things that are just good about himself in general (which is like dude. cmon. even if pat doesnt really realize he wants to know if pran as himself would like him bcuz well. ur in love with him and u want him to like you back) and he keeps pushing it while pran is having flashbacks from highschool to present of all those moments and his eyes are glassy and pat is pushing and pushing would you like me would you like me and pran just goes i... hate you. and turns around

and for a moment it seems like pat is heartbroken bcuz for a second he really thought he would get the answer he wanted to hear much like pran before but he snaps back so fast and starts going like okay dude so mean<3 and says 'even i like myself' (which, arough bcuz pran very obviously hates himself and a handful of it stems from everything that has happened surrounding pat bcuz hes the one who has been punished the most by it all. i have a lot of thoughts about it obvi and im suffering) and then after a few seconds pran turns back around to look at pat and he's literally. you can see he started crying and then he covers his face to keep crying.

it sucks it sucks!!! he really thought for a moment that pat felt the same way back and then it felt like he was being mocked and he feels stupid and heartbroken bcuz for pran, the cycles of fated love and doom that come with his feelings towards pat is a one sided thing. its always completely his fault in his mind bcuz again, he's the one who's always losing. he had to move away, he's the one who's in love with him, he's the one who's misreading signals, he's the one who's like this while pat is just living his life and pran is what is causing all the problems bcuz the problem is and always will be pran's one sided feelings for pat. even if its like not true really, thats what is and always has been true to pran and i feel like shit and i wanna scream.

this is like probably incomprehensible nonsense i am just constantly full of feelings and thoughts about the cycles and fate and love and doom and my homosexual bestie pran.

#screaming crying throwing up i cant deal with this. sorry this is all fucking nonsense i prommy i actually have good thoughts on things #simply bcuz i am so cool and sexy but im also adhd and crazy. but im done for now.#god pran babygirl im gonna get u some thearpy and a psycharist #bad buddy the series #for my tagging purposes srysry #isaac drama posting hours

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yandere-mha · 4 years ago

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Ooh okay, so when you (obviously) start to wilt and withdraw and die on the inside after you’ve been snagged, which yanderes are the “aw this one’s broken, time to get rid of it” type, who are the “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” type, and who are the “oh thank god I’m here, they would have had to go through this alone otherwise” type?

Okay *breaks knuckles* so this is gonna get a little complicated because I feel like a lot of them would be multiple at the same time or none of them at all and here’s my reasons why:

TW: ABUSE, SELF-HARM, THREATS OF SUICIDE, VIOLENCE, TORTURE MENTION, SPOUSAL MURDER, SMUT, DUBIOUS CONSENT, NON-CON.

MAJOR BNHA MANGA SPOILERS.

READ AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION.

Dabi: He would be the “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” type on the inside and feel immense self-hatred, blaming Endeavor for creating him, but he would also be super insulted and angry at you on the outside. He’d take this as a personal insult, thinking he’s so unlovable and that you hate him so much that you completely withdraw from him out of spite. Not even you can love him. What the fuck does he have to do to have anyone give a shit about him? Tbh, he’d probably have sex with you featuring very dubious consent, not only because he’s looking to hurt, embarrass, and disgust you with his scarred body, but he’s so desperate for you to see the good things he can do for you if you just come back to him please just come back.

Hawks: 100% the “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” type, but he would think of this as a necessary sacrifice to keep you safe. While he would curse himself and wish he were dead for making such a lovely and chipper sunflower lose the twinkle in their eyes, he prioritizes your safety over your happiness. He would rather have you be one of the walking dead than have to worry about losing the only person he truly cares about. Still, he would mourn your metaphorical death by clinging to your limp body and sobbing into your chest, pleading for you to just say something he’s so alone.

Shigaraki: Similar to Dabi in the way that he’d say “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” on the inside, but he’d get really pissed at you on the outside. Though unlike Dabi, he takes this more in a way that you’re protesting and being a spoiled little brat. He’ll convince himself that you’re just faking it and you’re not actually depressed, but you’re giving him the cold shoulder because you’re mad that you asked him permission to go outside and he said no. How ungrateful. He may even threaten you but it’s less in anger and more in a desperate attempt to have you react to something because you acting like this scares the ever-loving shit out of him.

Tamaki and Twice: I think y’all already know that they’re both “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” types. They’ll scream and sob and say that they’re sorry and to just please come back to them again they’ll do anything. They’ll even take out a butcher’s knife and hold it to their wrists in front of you telling you that they’ll kill themselves if it will make you feel better. If that doesn’t work they’d ask if you want to slit their throats yourself.

Fatgum: Mostly a “oh thank god I’m here, they would have had to go through this alone otherwise” type at the beginning, but as you start to neglect your wifely (gender neutral) duties he’ll quickly get bored of you unless you’re pregnant and become the “aw this one’s broken, time to get rid of it” type. He’d tell himself how much of a good husband he is for helping his wife or husband through this super random bout of depression. He thinks maybe if you eat a little more, get more cuddles, or get a pet, you’ll go right back to being normal. If you take too long to do so and he’s not getting what he wanted out of you, he’ll get frustrated with you which may end with him accidently killing you. Whether that does happen or not, there are other fish in the sea he supposes. Who wouldn’t want to be with such a great guy like him? There’s obviously still a lot of lingering resentment with him though since his next victim isn’t even allowed to speak your name in this house. He always compares the new victim to you in his head and snaps at them because they’ll never live up to you.

Stain and Aizawa: Again, “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” types. This would greatly upset the both of them and they’re aware that this is their fault, but they just can’t let you go. While they both would be really quiet about their guilt and not really acknowledge the elephant in the room, they would stare at you all the time completely still for hours on end just to see if you’d show any signs of life. They’d silently come up behind you and wrap their arms around your torso in a non-verbal plea to not leave them alone.

Overhaul: Imma be real with you, chief - he wouldn’t care and he might not even notice. He doesn’t care about you or your happiness because he sees you as a non-person. Would you care about the feelings of the chair you’re sitting on? That’s how he would feel on the subject.

Miruko: An “oh fuck oh no what do I do what do I do?!?” type, but she’d act like she’s the “aw this one’s broken, time to get rid of it” type to scare you. Though her sadism makes it seem like she only sees you as her toy to torment, and you are, she does legitimately love you and she wants you to love her back. Deep down, she’d know she went too far and that this is her own fault for not being able to have some self restraint, but her logic would be that she needs to scare you out of your depression and act like the monster you think she is. She’d tell you that if she doesn’t hear you scream, she’ll throw you away and get someone who screams louder, amping up the torture all the way to ten just to get you to say something.

Geten: This is when he can get... scary. He’s extremely devoted to you and the most distinct quality about yandere Geten is how differently he treats you from other people and how weak in the knees you make him... boy has an explosive temper though. He will shriek at you to stop this little game of yours because it’s not fucking funny, angry tears spilling out of his eyes. He has abandonment issues and this, in his opinion, is your own cruel way to abandon him and he will absolutely blame you for this out of a blind rage. He’ll grab your body and shake you violently, unintentionally giving you frost-bite on top of depression. This is probably the thing he will blame himself for though as he holds your trembling body in the tub of luke-warm water while he continues to shriek.

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fiveisnumber1 · 4 years ago

Text

Timeless - Five Hargreeves x Reader

Word Count: 2860

Warnings: I’m sorry.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23

_________________________

Pt 10 - Time Moves On (With Or Without You)

In the Hargreeves household, the day started out like any other one, with breakfast. With the ring of a bell, the uniformed children all filed in one line into the dining room and made their way to their seats. Quietly standing behind their chairs with their hands behind their backs they waited in silence for their father to arrive. Once he entered the room he stood behind his seat before commanding,

"Sit."

With that word the children pulled out their seats and sat at the table to eat, each of them quietly doing their own things. Luther and Allison exchanged small smiles to each other across the table, Diego secretly scratched a knife into the armrest of his chair, Klaus fiddled with some special paper under the table, Ben read a book by Anton Chekov and Vanya quietly ate her meal. There was one child who was having trouble keeping quiet on this day and that was Five. Although he had already done so much with his powers during missions and practice sessions he wanted to do more. He knew he could do more. Five wanted to time travel and it ate him up inside that his father wouldn't allow him. Instead of eating he stared down his father from the opposite end of the table. Anger and frustration building up inside him. When his anger boiled over he grabbed his knife and stabbed it into the table. The loud sound caused everyone to look at him.

"Number Five?" Reginald questioned

"I have a question." Five stated with contempt in his voice

The other children looked at their brother with concern and shock in their eyes.

"Knowledge is an admirable goal, but you know the rules. No talking during meal times, you are interrupting Herr Carlson." Reginald replies

Unhappy with his father's response Five forcefully pushes his plate forward before saying,

"I want to time travel."

"No," Reginald says

"But I'm ready!" Five explains sitting up from his chair "I've been practicing my spacial jumps just like you said."

Five then jumps from his spot at the table to right next to his father's seat.

"See?" Five comments aggressively

"A spacial jump is trivial when compared with the unknowns of time travel. One is like sliding along the ice the other is akin to descending blindly into the depths of the freezing water and reappearing as an acorn." Reginald explains

With his hands balled up in his pockets, he cocked his head to the side and angrily said,

"No, I don't get it,"

"Hence the reason you're not ready," Reginald replies

From down the table, Five can see Vanya shake her head no as if to tell him to stop pushing the issue.

"I'm not afraid." Five retorts to his father

"Fear isn't the issue. The effects it might have on your body, even on your mind are far too unpredictable. Now I forbid you to talk about this anymore." Reginald commands

Five couldn't believe what his father was saying. Ridiculous how he didn't believe that Five could do it. Five was going to time travel and was going to prove that old angry man wrong. Turning on his heel he runs away from the table leaving his father, Grace, and his siblings behind.

"Number Five. You can't leave the table you haven't been excused! Come back here!" Reginald yells

Five didn't care what the old man had to say though. All he cared about was proving he was ready to time travel. He ran out the front door and through the gates of the house in which he lived. Angrily walking down the street he was determined to jump through time. The one thing he didn't expect was you latching on to him. You had seen Five leave his house from out your living room window. You quickly called out to your mom telling her you were heading out before teleporting your molecules over to your friend and grabbing on to him. With a flash of blue, he had jumped through time and brought you along with him. You didn't notice though because you were too busy trying to get him attention.

"Five!" You called out as he walked for a little bit taking in the surroundings

"Not ready my ass." Five mumbles to himself

With another time jump, the two of you were in a winter scene.

"Five!" You called again

Five had heard you this time and stopped. Turning around he saw you holding onto him. You let go and took a step back.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Five yells

"I saw you leave your house from my window and you looked upset so I wanted to make sure you were okay." You reply

"I'm fine." Five states

"You don't seem fine is there anything I can do?" You question concern evident in your tone

"You can go home." He answers

"But Five-" You start but are cut off

"You wouldn't fucking get it (Y/N)! Just leave me the hell alone!" Five yells

Before you can say anything he turns on his heel and jumps again leaving you standing there alone.

"Well screw you too I guess!" You yell at the spot where he just was

Turning around you make your way back to your house. Looking around you see the snow around you. You could've sworn there was no snow when you left and even if you just didn't notice it you wondered how you couldn't with the amount of snow on the ground. Shaking your head you make the walk back home wondering what could've gotten into your best friend. When you make it back to your house the door is locked. You were confused, your mom never leaves the door locked when you tell her you're going out. You start to knock on the door but when you get no response you start to bang on it and yell out,

"Mom? I'm home!"

When you get no response you try again banging and calling louder,

"MOM! I'M HOME! IT'S COLD OUTSIDE LET ME IN!"

You were about to call again when you hear a voice behind you say,

"Whacha doing kid?"

When you turn around you see a garbage man putting trash in the back of the garbage truck for the houses around yours.

"I'm calling for my mom to let me in. My family lives here," you explain

"Yeah don't we all wish our family could live in that house." He replies with a scoff

"What? No, I do live here." You reply

"Yeah, and I'm the king of England. Nobody has lived in that house for eight years." The man replies

"What do you mean eight years, it's 2002." You state

"We're you banging on that door with your head? It's 2013." The man states "The family that lived there's kid went missing 11 years ago. They stayed in the house for three years but just up and left when they couldn't deal with the grief. Rumor has it they went off the grid and can't be found."

You look at him confused and he says,

"Whatever. It's not my business."

He then gets on the back of the truck and you can faintly hear him say,

"Weird kid."

You turn back around to look at the door. That man had to be crazy, you had only left a few minutes ago, there was no way it was 2013. Phasing inside the door the room is dark but you call out to your parents again,

"Mom! Dad! I'm back home."

You get no response. You make your way over to the light switch to try and get some light in the but they don't work. Maybe there's a power outage from the snow? You then open the living room curtains but when the light from outside shows in there's nothing there. The TV, the couches, the coffee table, nothing. The room was empty.

"Mom? Where did the furniture go?" You call out again

All you heard was silence. You made the way around the rest of your house. Emptiness was everywhere. Running upstairs you went into your bedroom. Everything was there like it was when you had left that day. Bed, toys, clothes, everything still in its place. Maybe your parents were just redoing the whole house. You made your way to your parent's bedroom you started yelling,

"Mom! Dad! Please tell me you're in there!"

You were about to bang on the door with your fists but with one hit the door slowly swung open. There was nothing here. Their bed was gone, their clothes were gone, your parents were gone.

"No, this can't be real..."

Your heart started to race a little faster. Where could they have gone? You only left a few minutes ago. You needed answers and if there was anyone who could explain what was going on it was one of the Hargreeves. They had to know what had happened. Without even a second thought you transported yourself from your parent's bedroom to the foyer of the Hargreeves house. In a panic, you started shouting the names of the Hargreeves kids,

"Ben! Diego! Allison! Vanya! Klaus! Luther! Five! Anyone?"

Frantically you looked around the empty house when you heard a voice behind you say,

"Excuse me, can I help you."

You recognized that sweet soft voice. Turning around you saw Grace standing there. She looked shocked.

"(Y/N)? Is that you?" She asks

"Of course it's me! Who else would I be?" You question

Grace slowly makes her way over to you. Gently cupping your face she looks at you and says in awe,

"You look the exact same as when I last saw you."

"Well of course! You only saw me yesterday. This last hour has been so crazy. First I chased after Five and he told me to leave him alone, and then I went home and no one answered and some garbage man told me how nobody lives in my house and my house is empty and according to the garbage man, it's 2013. Ridiculous right? Where are the kids I need to ask them some questions."

"Oh no, sweetie..." She says with a sympathetic look in her eyes

Grace doesn't say anything else she just looks at you sadly. Your heart dropped. This couldn't be real.

"Grace please where are the kids?" You pleaded tears starting to form in your eyes

"Well- they uh- they're not here anymore." She replies softly

"No! That can't be true! None of this can be true!" You shout before running off

"(Y/N)!" Grace calls but it's too late because you had already run off

There was no way that they weren't here. You ran to the library, typically Ben or Vanya would be there but when you got there you found nothing. Diego to Klaus was usually in the kitchen but nobody was there either. Running towards the bedrooms you opened every door looking for your friends. You checked in the courtyard, the dining room, everywhere. Tears leaving a path of where you had been. Each one of them was empty, abandoned as if no one had lived there. You ran back downstairs to check the parlor but when you got in there it was empty as well. All that was there was a painting of your best friend hanging above the fireplace. You turned your head and saw Grace standing there silently.

"I'm so sorry (Y/N)" she whispered

Your heart raced faster. You couldn't believe it. You didn't want to believe it. You turned your head back to look at the painting of your friend. The realization of your situation had started to set in and your body started to shake. You collapsed to your knees unable to support the weight of your body anymore. It felt as if you had just been punched in the gut and all of your breath was taken away. The tears started to fall faster from your eyes as you screamed,

"NO!"

Your voice was filled with grief as you let out painful cries of immense sorrow. You wrapped your arms around yourself to stop your shaking but it was no use. You were barely able to breathe as you screamed your pain into the empty silence of the house. There was no other sound except for you and at that moment you knew that you were alone. Your family was gone, your friends were gone, the person who mattered most to you was gone. The pieces of your life had fallen apart and you didn't know how to get them back.

At the same moment when you were coming to the realization of your new existence so was Five. After he had told you to leave him alone he had jumped once more through time. He looked around him and saw nothing but fire and destruction. With fear coursing through his veins he turned back around and ran as fast as he could towards the Umbrella Academy. When he arrived at the destroyed remnants of the building he called out into the rubble,

"Vanya! Ben! Dad!"

He received no response from inside the building so he turned around and shouted,

"Anyone!"

All that he could hear was the crackling of flames around him. This wasn't where he was supposed to be, he needed to get home. Five immediately tried using his powers to go back in time.

"C'mon" he begged of his power

But there was nothing he could do. Realizing it was too late and he was stuck he turned back to look at the remains of what was once him home. Collapsing to his knees the feeling of sadness overwhelmed him. There was nothing left. Slowly he regained his strength to stand and made his way around the house. Finding an area that wasn't consumed by flames, he carefully started to explore. Out of the rubble, he saw a hand sticking out holding an eye. Curiously he walks over to the hand and takes the eye out of it. He examines the eye before moving to see the person there. It was a man. He then looks to his left and looks out amongst the rubble of the building. Running over to another man he spotted he roughly tries to shake them but it is useless as they don't move. He then passes a female person before heading over to another man. He stares at the figure and sees the marking on his wrist, an umbrella in a circle. These weren't just people, these were his siblings. He could feel himself getting choked up as he stood there amongst their lifeless bodies. They were his family and they were all gone. Before he could fully acknowledge the sight he heard a faint gasping coming from further back. Running towards it he sees another figure impaled on some metal rebar. He makes his way over but when he sees who it truly is his heart sinks.

"(Y/N)!" He calls out rushing to your side

Five kneels next to you and takes in the sight of you. You were older but not as old as his siblings. It must've been because you took those jumps through time with him.

"(Y/N)" He says softly

Slowly you turn your head to him. You couldn't tell if you were imagining things but there was Five, your best friend, right in front of you. His blue eyes were full of sorrow.

"Five? Are you my angel here to take me to the light?"

"No, I'm here I'm real." He says tears forming in his eyes

He looks at the metal going through you. He had to get you out of here. He needed to.

"(Y/N) it's gonna be okay I'm going to get you out of here. You're going to be alright!" He says choking up

Five frantically starts looking for anything to stop your bleeding and help keep you alive.

"Five." You lightly call out

"Yes." He says turning his attention back to you

"The book." You say looking towards your hand caught under some rubble

Quickly Five removes the rubble and grabs what you were asking for. It was the diary you had gotten for your 13th birthday. Surprisingly it was undamaged compared to the world around him. Gently he brings to book to you.

"Here." He says

"Keep it." You reply weakly pushing it back towards him

Five places the book in the ground and turns back to you. Using what last bits of your strength you have, you lift your hand to the small boy's face and place your hand on his cheek. Five uses one of his hands to hold yours against his face. You can feel some of the tears that had fallen from his eyes on your hand.

"Are you still mad at me?" You ask faintly

"No, never. I could never stay mad at you." He replies his voice choking up more

"Good..." you answer quietly

You wrap your hand around your locket and then lay your head back and close your eyes. The smallest of smiles on your face as you let out a breath. Five watches waiting for your chest to rise and fall again but it doesn't. Grabbing your shoulders he starts to shake you.

"(Y/N)! (Y/N) wake up! Please I needed you here! I need you with me! Please!" Five cries out

It was too late, you were gone. Holding what he could of your lifeless body he lets all the tears flow from his eyes. His painful cries of sorrow echoing throughout the empty landscape. He had lost you and was completely alone. And so in the same exact place, in two different times, you and five dealt with the same harsh truth. Everything you loved was gone and life would never be the same.

Taglist: @xplrreylo @joebob15274 @insatiable-ivy @fruitsaladtree @angelpeachamber @academy-umbrella @lizziel1410 @ir3neeee @faith-quake @aliens-with-colas @eddiomyspaghettio @lady-celeste25 @im-dead-and-hurting @nerdypinupcrystal @cherry-ki-d @anapocalypseinmymind @vicassa @2cuteforyourlies @taylorsmakingfuckingmacandcheese @n1ghtsh4d3-67

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fightabear · 3 years ago

Text

so some time ago, someone asked me to do meta about a scene in Injustice and i wanted to revisit that scene with the scene from Year Zero in mind. and then i ended up getting deeply into injustice damian, his relationship with his two awful dads, and it’s kind of a mini character essay?

so! here’s a warning for: tyrannical totalitariam regimes, child abuse, abusive fathers, emotional manipulation, evil superman, character death & also random he-man. please note that this is entirely about injustice and its characters, which are not a reflection on their mainstream counterparts.

there’s tension between damian and bruce from the get-go in injustice, and we’re never really told why. if we take cues from the game (though that entire scene doesn’t make sense) then it’s because bruce didn’t save jason, which fits in with my reordered robin theory in which tim and jason were switched, and jason has only recently died.

now, we don’t know whether jason is running around as red hood right now or not. but i’m inclined to say he isn’t, as his injustice 2 ending makes a big deal of him becoming red hood. and damian is close with jason in injustice 2, close enough that jason listens when damian tells him that he’s a lot more than bruce thinks he is and drops the shitty batman costume. close enough that during the (extremely weird, extremely out of alignment with the comic) scene in injustice 2 where damian betrays bruce for clark, jason is the name damian throws at him with the most vehemence. regardless of the robin ordeer, bruce’s failure to save jason is seems to be an incredibly sore point between them.

so it’s interesting that bruce is already counting damian out before injustice even starts. he’s comparing damian to jason - someone who he apparently no longer considers part of his legacy.

the kicker is: damian in injustice is actually probably the most morally centered version of himself. he shows open compassion and care for other people more often than he does in most of the mainstream runs. damian’s sense of right and wrong is solid, but what he wants is to break the cycle that gotham is trapped in. which from his perspective, is something bruce doesn’t seem to want to do.

injustice’s version of bruce is someone who truly believes that the ends justify the means - which means he’s apt to do some heinous things to people until they see his side of things. he seems to view people questioning as an act of betrayal, so instead of ever explaining himself he resorts to things like installing viruses in cyborg, kidnapping hawkgirl and replacing her, beating allies within an inch of their life - all of it is fine to him so long as they’re not dead.

but it’s not fine to damian. damian is constantly horrified at the lengths bruce will go to.

damian is afraid of his father.

so, this is about a specific scene. let’s get to that scene. its just important to note the difference between them, and emphasize that he’s not going with any intent to fight. if he was going to do that, he wouldn’t be doing this:

or respond like this:

or this:

he’s there to make amends, or at least try to. he still loves his father and he wants to be forgiven, and this is something that will carry on ten years later in injustice 2. damian made the choice to oppose bruce’s controlling nature but damian didn’t choose to abandon him and the bat family permanently. that choice was made for him. damian wants to come home.

and he’s terrified of his father. i cannot stress that enough. bruce at this point has already shown that he knows how to hurt his closest friends if they oppose him.

damian is a highly trained fighter, but he’s also a thirteen year old boy who knows he can’t overpower a man twice his size and weight.

and bruce?

bruce’s entire argument really hinges on ‘you, my thirteen year old son, didn’t take my side in this argument’. because, i have to put this in bold, the league was not executing the criminals they were removing from arkham. they were just transferring them to a more secure facility. something which is actually sorely needed, especially given what has just happened to metropolis. arkham isn’t fit to house them. and as far as damian sees it, bruce doesn’t like it because it’s removing an element of his control.

now, bruce isn’t wrong about how things will escalate.

but damian’s not wrong about his motivation here. i think there’s a conversation to be had about how bruce’s methods in trying to stop the regime actually drove it to further and further extremes. bruce never tries to talk to clark - or anyone, really. he just starts playing mind games to make them do what he wants.

it harkens back to the conversation bruce and dick have in the batplane. that bruce doesn’t talk to people, he doesn’t explain himself. he’s either right or you’re wrong and he won’t explain his stance. there is never room for debate. he’ll just stop talking and leave until you agree. there is no option where he sits and listens to an open and honest dialogue, no scenario where he entertains that he might be in the wrong or maybe things aren’t black and white.

and that’s why injustice bruce is not a good guy.

even on prime earth, damian had to bend over backwards to prove to bruce that he wasn’t a monster. it was damian who spent months digging through the sewers for martha’s pearls. damian who had to prove he was capable of loving titus. damian who constantly had to show that he was capable of empathy and thinking of others - bruce did none of the heavy lifting in that father-son relationship, he made damian climb the entire hill and still continues to put little effort into it.

and injustice bruce is even less empathetic and expressive than prime bruce.

which is why you get a confrontation like this:

this goes beyond dick’s accident and ties back into what clark said about bruce not tending to his son’s who are grieving because they lost friends in metropolis. damian’s fed up with never meeting bruce’s expectations. but more than that, he’s fed up with his feelings coming second to bruce’s.

bruce has already made a judgement on who and what damian is. damian has the potential to be dangerous and requires work to fix, and so he’s not interested in getting to know him beyond that. he tells dick that he’s “worried about damian being seduced by darkness” but never talks to damian himself with him about it.

but clark has looked at damian and and decided that damian is good. damian has problems, clark can admit that and does, but damian is good. like bruce himself.

and ultimately why when dick dies, clark is the one that reaches out to him because he sees damian for what he is: grieving child who just made a terrible mistake. it was an accident. damian didn’t mean for this to happen. meanwhile, bruce feels as though he was proven right. damian was dangerous and now his real son is dead. bruce will later admit, once he stops trying to manipulate damian, that damian was dead to him the moment dick died.

going back to year zero for a minute, they subtly show that damian is doing his best to be like bruce. baby damian idolizes his father. so i imagine a lot of bruce’s own feelings towards damian stem from self-hatred. from bruce seeing himself in his son and not liking the reflection it forces him to confront. injustice bruce projects a great deal of his own insecurities and shortcomings onto his youngest. damian is his worst what-if.

even though damian doesn’t deal with his grief the way bruce does. there are similarities, he puts his feelings into his fists and hits. just like bruce. but unlike bruce, and most likely because of dick, he does try to communicate. come injustice 2 he even talks about his feelings.

that doesn’t justify any of the violent outbursts. and he has a lot of them. he has significant issues with controlling his anger and struggles with lashing out, verbally and physically. it both worsens and improves as he gets older.

damian knows that he’s more than his grief, his loss, his anger. he’s also compassionate and capable of incredible feats of kindness. we see that in the flashback chapter in injustice 2. people aren’t pawns for damian, they aren’t a means to assuage his own guilt and validate himself as a good person. he wants to be good for those people.

damian’s relationship with heroism isn’t built on an intrinsic need for control or power, nor is it a means of validating his self worth.

people just need him. they’re suffering. and he wants to be there for them.

but again, we’re not there yet.

so, alfred reaches out to touch damian. damian asks him repeatedly to let go. when alfred doesn’t, damian tries throwing him off, not realizing how much strength he now possesses.

damian has a thing about being touched when he’s wound up tightly. it almost always ends with him lashing out at someone. which, tying back into why he felt comfortable coming back here, probably goes into his expectation that he’s going to get the lights knocked out of him. because again, damian did not go to the cave to fight or hurt anyone. the pill is entirely for his own defense.

from what we know of damian’s childhood in both prime and injustice, violence is the expected retaliation for misbehavior. toeing out of line is grounds for getting the shit beaten out of you, and while things should be different here....

from how bruce reacts he’s not wrong to expect it. note that bruce dodesn’t run to alfred to see if he’s okay, he goes after damian for hurting him. it’s damian who runs to alfred after he’s thrown bruce away from him.

( granted, yes, he threw bruce into the penny and it almost crushes alfred )

damian apologizes and he means it. alfred’s first question is to ask for bruce.

“”hawkgirl”” intervenes to try to end this fight before it can escalate further.

damian deduces that this isn’t hawkgirl and blows some stuff up. bruce calls after him probably - not to have a serious heart to heart with him about what just happened, or what happened in arkham, but to try to manipulate him into taking bruce’s side or in the very least stop his ruse from being uncovered.

this is a theme moving forward. bruce will dangle forgiveness in front of damian, but only when it benefits him and can be used to control him. eventually he’ll stop and will use the guilt he knows damian feels to wound him.

and here’s the second theme it introduces: damian is scared shitless of his father. he’s not afraid of bruce’s violence, as after this he charges straight for him time and time again, but he is utterly terrified of the lengths bruce will go to get his way.

this is also where he takes dick’s suit. i think this was his way of telling bruce that he didn’t deserve to use dick’s memory the way he uses his parent’s death - as justification for what he does. this comes up in injustice 2 later down the road, damian will bring up that bruce uses his pain to justify how he brutalizes the people around him. damian does the same thing -- but we also see damian grappling with his conscience about it. he wants to be better. he doesn’t want to be all his violence and loss.

back to the topic at hand, damian doesn’t do anything with dick’s suit. unlike bruce, damian doesn’t wear his grief and guilt in plain sight. he puts it in a box and doesn’t look at it, he covers the wounds with anger and as he gets older, develops a death wish and basically begins seeking a noble death in order to make up for what he’s done. it isn’t until dick passes the mantle to him in an attempt to steer him back on the right path that he even looks at it again.

damian isn’t the one that ended his relationship with bruce. bruce did. damian is very willing to reconcile if bruce genuinely wants it, but bruce doesn’t bother with damian outside of combat or when he needs something. damian actually keeps up visits with alfred, he gets him birthday presents, they meet up often and despite their opposing viewpoints, they get along just fine. damian even listens to what alfred says. he still loves his family.

damian himself is a mess. this line resonates because damian, too, is afraid. afraid of bruce, afraid of being what bruce thinks he is. there’s only so far he can bury it under the anger.

by the next issue of year one, after the confrontation at the manor, damian’s discarded any notion that bruce is a good person or justified in anything he does. everything he says on this page is true.

he’s not wrong. he’s more than bruce has even given him credit for being. injustice bruce sorts people into boxes impossible to climb out. damian made his attempt at reconciliation and instead, found out that bruce has kidnapped and replaced one of his friends to spy on all the rest. in that split second when bruce came at at him, he saw the disgust and anger in his eyes. he’s seen how bruce sees him and wholeheartedly rejects it.

he doesn’t want to be bruce. he will not be bruce.

batman was supposed to be better than the league. it was supposed to be a new way. instead he just found a new, different means to brutalize and control, and a new way someone justifies causing harm. and he doesn’t want it.

this isn’t to say that damian is a saint. he’s a very flawed, very broken person. he went from one abusive parental situation, to another, to another, and has the damage to show for it. he’s got bad habits from all of them, many of which he isn’t aware of or doesn’t think are a problem.

but unlike his two dads, damian doesn’t close himself off to what he’s feeling completely, nor does he decide to rush towards external solutions for his pain. he’s, again, very aware that something is wrong. he doesn’t hold to his convictions the same way bruce or clark do, he questions. he’s deeply unhappy with who he is and what he’s doing.

but damian is seeking answers using a very limited toolset, and there’s a very limited pool of people he can ask that won’t give him a biased answer or try to manipulate him for their own means. one of the people he confides in does just that.

the other gives him the honest truth.

his relationship with selina is fraught and she’s often one of the very nastiest people towards him, but it’s because of that he ends up opening up to her. she isn’t going to bullshit him and just say what he wants to hear.

and this is what makes damian different from them. both of them.

because he stops, because he questions, he’s still connected to reality. to his own humanity.

injustice’s bruce is a bruce that has quietly let his humanity die. he’s completely given over to the cold logic of batman and the idea that whatever he does to the people around him, no matter how morally dubious, is justified so long as it means protecting lives. he might not kill, but he really stops just short of that. he just doubles down on his beliefs and takes anyone who doesn’t agree with him as a traitor. he will go out of his way to rationalize how a largely guilty person is innocent (harleen) and how a largely innocent person is guilty (damian). and so he uses damian’s “betrayal” - ie, damian standing with clark instead of him - as justification for icing him out. that way he can ignore all the people who have reminded him time and time again that it was an accident.

bruce also can’t stand that damian won’t do what he says. bruce will ignore damian unless it benefits him. bruce will go on to frequently weaponize how badly damian wants forgiveness against him. there are multiple instances where he says “just do as i say and i’ll forgive you, son.”

and then in the next breath, he’ll tell damian that he “can’t forgive the deaths”, all the while he has harleen as his new sidekick. it’s fine that harleen helped with the scheme to blow up metropolis, killed jimmy olsen, and countless others. it’s not fine that damian did something he did all the time to dick - something dick himself shrugged off, because the expectation for this behavior was that dick would catch the baton - and it ended in tragedy.

because harleen listens to him and damian doesn’t. bruce cuts damian neatly out of his life and only really cares about him again when he’s a corpse.

damian, meanwhile, never stops trying to earn bruce’s forgiveness. in the canonical bad end (or well a comic offshoot of the canon ending) damian essentially dies begging bruce to forgive him, admitting that he always cared. he launches an absolutely insane rescue mission to save his father from clark’s torture and it costs him his life.

( but it’s worth mentioning - it takes damian showing bruce an image of kara for bruce to acknowledge him. )

even before this, damian was looking out for bruce in other ways. he was the reason selina got involved with the regime. because he offered her the chance to join and save bruce. damian’s anger towards bruce is less that he wants him dead, and more that bruce won’t stop unless he’s killed.

and damian is willing to kill him if bruce poses a threat to his ‘new’ family. he’s not going to watch bruce hurt the people he loves.

but his new father sucks just as much as his old one.

talia and bruce were more obviously abusive parents. they were controlling and sometimes asserted that control and obedience using physical violence and intimidation. in obvious ways you can point to and see abuse.

damian doesn’t recognize clark is using him until he sees clark discard kara, who should be everything to clark and is someone important to damian. before that, he has inklings that they’ve gone too far, but clark has been such a paragon of good that when he tells damian not to worry about it, he doesn’t. he hides all his darkness behind that smile and tells damian he’s good and worthy of people loving him, that they’re saving people and they won’t let another metropolis happen. clark talks to him and still (seems to) accept him even when they disagree.

damian misses clark’s equally as abusive tendencies because they hidden under the guise of a fatherly concern.

clark is manipulating him into divulging more than he wants to. a boundary damian set is being broken without damian even realizing it. damian’s uneasy. his body language goes from very easy and relaxed to overtly uncomfortable and almost submissive. it’s also very subtle but clark actually rises higher off the ground to intimidate and loom over him.

damian, who has only known bruce’s stormy silences in moments of disagreement, doesn’t recognize this for what it is. clark doesn’t take the slight out on him. clark doesn’t stop talking to him because he dared to question.

instead, he loops an arm around damian and praises him, rewards him for being honest and makes it seem like this is an open dialogue and not an interrogation. which it is. i wouldn’t call it gaslighting, but i would call it lovebombing. damian doesn’t realize that there was anything off about the encounter, or if he does, he’ll tell himself he’s just being paranoid.

after all. this ended amicably, not with him standing alone wondering what he did wrong, or being thrown across the room. clark basically stops just shy of ruffling his hair and calling him sport.

he was rewarded for honesty. and so any discomfort he felt was imagined.

i think a thing that a lot of fans miss is that injustice’s damian is a forthright person. he doesn’t lie or deceive much, and later on it will bother him that he’s keeping secrets from kara for ‘the greater good’. he loathes that bruce does it and works hard to not fall into that trap. he wants to be honest. he’s glad when he’s rewarded for that honesty.

because injustice’s damian doesn’t want to be batman. he wants to be superman. he wants to be good.

but injustice’s superman is not a good man.

clark keep secrets, many terrible secrets, and often hurts people and justifies it to himself. he just hides it far better than bruce does. clark is even more controlling and cruel, but he leans harder into his humanity and emotions to hide it. it’s easier to see bruce being cold and calculating and miss the way clark subtly uses what you want to get what he wants out of you. and you never really see it coming when he lashes out. he’ll apologize for it, of course, and if you’re not dead you’ll forgive him, because it’s clark. he didn’t mean it. right?

bruce manipulates overtly and grandly using intimidation, clark manipulates subtly using emotion. damian only recognizes one of these things when they happen.

so clark gives damian what he wants - a parent who loves him, someone he can talk to and even show a little vulnerability with - and then uses that against him.

the worst thing - the very worst thing - is that bruce and clark love damian. he knows this. both seem to genuinely consider him their son. and he knows this.

in injustice vs motu, bruce snaps fully into awareness just as diana snaps damian’s neck. he’s awake just in time to watch his son die. and when clark is brought onto the scene, clark falls to his knees and mourns damian and laments his role in driving him to this.

but they weaponize this parent-child bond he wants against him and each other. frankly, neither of them were very interested in him for who he was. nor for helping him be better and master his anger. damian’s body isn’t even cold before bruce uses it against clark, failing to acknowledge his own part in damian’s all too early demise.

he’s another chess piece on their board. one clark can use to wound bruce. one bruce can use to wound clark.

the person damian is when away from both of their influence is a more complete damian. he’s the very best of both of them.

the damian here is still curt and sometimes rude, but he laughs and bonds with the people around him. he values people’s freedom and seems to strive for honesty and communication. meaning no one is in his war to reclaim the world doesn’t want to be, and he makes no move without everyone knowing.

when he recruits adam, he tells them their story and what they’ve gone through and gives adam the choice to join them or stay in eternia.

anyway, all of this is to say that even all these years later, i continue to be so sad about injustice damian wayne.

edit:

now, there’s actually one other thing i want to bring up because i totally forgot about it.

so. issue 8 of injustice 2.

if we’re going with the idea of the reordered robin theory, which is what makes the most sense to me considering jason’s age and the friction between bruce and damian, this before jason dies. and if i’m wrong and the robins don’t have a different order, then this is before some enormous event that broke the slowly building trust.

there’s none of the undercurrent of hostility and distrust that shows up in year 0, which is immediately before year 1. we’re not given a timeframe for when this occurs, either, it’s just happier times.

but what’s really hard to ignore is that the dynamic between bruce and damian is completely different here. maybe tom taylor’s just settled more into writing the two of them, but i don’t think so. year zero comes after this.

he even acknowledges damian’s anger earlier in the chapter. but it’s less of a condemnation of his character and more a concern that he might not be ready to be on his own. alfred is the one advocating for caution, asking if he’s ready, bruce is the one saying yes, he is.

it’s a complete reversal.

and his trust is rewarded with a night of damian abandoning the “”mission”” he was given (get home from the furthest point of gotham in three hours) to help everyone along the way. which was the real goal all along, it was a test to see if damian’s compassion would win out over his want to win. and it does. bruce is proud of him.

so... what happened between them? what caused that shift?

i’m kind of worried we’re never going to know. like, i’m so glad that tom taylor is dc’s new golden boy and they’re just letting him build a million different aus. i buy every book he writes.

but also i’m dying because IJ2 was clearly planned to go on a lot longer than it did and i have questions that i know netherrealm doesn’t care about answering.

#damian wayne #injustice #bruce wayne #dick grayson #alfred pennyworth #jason todd #clark kent

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thekrawratalksbnha · 4 years ago

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let’s talk unreliability real quick: bnha 291

so in light of recent bnha events, i wanted to write up a real quick thing on unreliable narrators based on some things i’ve seen going around and some stuff from my own experience based on my work with unreliability.

just because someone says something in canon story, doesn’t actual mean that’s exactly how things are. there’s some important factors that play into how much you can trust information from a character.

some of the main ones being:

how old were they?

what circumstances were they in?

could they be reliably asked to remember this event?

how much information were they privy too and how much are they assuming?

do they have a reason to lie?

let’s look at shouto for example:

shouto is the youngest of four. he is probably about 9 or so years younger than his eldest sibling. that means there was a lot of time before him for family relationships to strengthen or in this case deteriorate.

additionally shouto went through some pretty severe trauma when he was very young. reliably we know he was trained to the point of throwing up at five years old, witnessed his mother’s mental state deteriorate and be abused by his father, walked in on his mother having a severe mental breakdown overhearing her talking about his left side being unsightly and proceeding to pour boiling water on it, and was kept separated from his siblings with little social contact.

FURTHER, we’ve only ever seen shouto actively place blame on two people. himself and his father. even though it is for very valid reason, we know that at least to start he was more than willing to assume the worst of endeavour.

we also have canonical proof that shouto had suppressed/forgotten important memories of his childhood. so we know his memory might not be the most reliable.

what does all this mean?

shouto is in no way the most reliable narrator to discuss about the todoroki family. while he doesn’t really have any reason to lie about what happened, he was in a position to misinterpret or remember things.

this doesn’t mean he’s wrong. it just means there’s too many blank spots in shouto’s memory and understanding and too much bias for him to be an actively reliable perspective into his family’s situation as a whole.

he can probably pretty accurately speak about his experience, but anything he’s said about his family before he was born can pretty reasonable be called into question.

and you can run down the list of todoroki’s and see that well…none of them are necessarily reliable.

natsuo:

second youngest, most of his memories are from a time that we know was definitively bad

closest with some of the family members who suffered the most

neglected by endeavour, shaping his opinion of endeavour but also not leaving him privy to much info

fuyumi:

her biggest issue is the information she is privy to.

has expressed a very clear desire to mend the family, and does have reason to downplay certain events or moments

she was still a kid when things happened and most of her memories are probably largely tainted by emotion

in general i’d say fuyumi is probably the one of the most reliable of the todoroki’s though.

rei:

suffered severe mental distress

we don’t know much about rei and her experience before shouto which makes it hard to judge how reliable of a narrator she is

enji:

went through at least some period of time where he was a shit father

did have strong emotions and ambition that could have blinded him — but since his atonement arc has started, has very little reason to deviate from the truth

in general though, hate me for saying it, at this point in the story he is probably the most reliable narrator in the todoroki family.

and then of course there’s dabi, which brings us to the whole point of this post.

dabi is probably the most unreliable of all the todoroki’s as a speaker. not only was he a kid when shit went down, he also is the only todoroki who has motive to lie or over-exaggerate events.

dabi’s play right now is to ruin endeavour. and yes, most of what he says probably has some truth involved. but keep in mind dabi is a very biased perspective and is gunning for maximum damage. he wants to destroy endeavour’s legacy (and probably shouto’s by extension). he wants to hit them where it hurts.

which means that any new information dabi gives isn’t automatically what happened. we already know in his grand reveal video he’s willing to bend the truth, remove context and leave out important details (exhibit a — hawks). we should expect that he is doing the same in regards to his story about endeavour. he’s trying to cast endeavour in the worst light possible so he is not revealing anything potentially redeeming about the man.

compare dabi’s story to the flashbacks endeavour has. they are full of contradictions.

so which one do we trust?

if endeavour says one thing and dabi says another — quite frankly, it’s probably more likely that endeavour is telling the truth. even if its not an intentional lie on dabi’s part. dabi’s experience was when he was younger, very emotional charged and in a very negative place. that has probably coloured his perspective of everything.

and as mentioned before, he has very clear reason to not tell the whole truth if it might be able to help endeavour’s case.

on the other hand, especially internally, endeavour has no reason to lie or hide the truth. his whole atonement is about him acknowledging that what he did was wrong. and he has — internally at least. he has acknowledged his faults. and really there’s no motive for him to lie to himself. he was old enough to understand and process his actions. and it wasn’t quite as emotional for him as the kids (who were developing at that time and emotion often would take precedent over fact).

so just keep that in mind as official translations come out and future chapters and more information gets exposed.

dabi wants to paint endeavour in the worst possible light. some of what we know about the todoroki’s come from shouto, who could very well be a very unreliable narrator in that regard. all of what we know about the todoroki’s could be very biased and influenced by their collective awful experiences.

(the follow up to this is that when somebody has an interpretation you don’t entirely agree with — they might not be wrong. there is a lot we don’t know. and a lot that we assume to be true but could very easily be proven false. both dabi and endeavour have done wrong and the story we get might not be 100% accurate. so whether you are pro or anti endeavour — keep unreliability in mind. you can’t necessarily take every character at their word)

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hyperbali · 4 years ago

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Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Alright. Finally had to sit down and write my way out of this quiet, internal temper tantrum, and a few people were interested in seeing what I had to say, so I present to you:

Agatha Harkness Was Right, And Here’s Why

Disclaimer: MASSIVE spoilers for the entirety of WandaVision, and I am not nice about it.

I’ll start off by saying that, for all its foibles, WandaVision was genuinely a good example of a property within the MCU/Disney umbrella that stepped out of the usual ‘good guys fight bad guys action extravaganza’ in a way that pushed the envelope. The pseudo-horror aspect of the first few episodes is something I would really love to see engaged with on a more thoughtful basis in future projects.

I would say that it proved to be more than a vehicle to promote toys, but… well…

Yeah. Anyway.

I’ll assume that you watched WandaVision if you’re reading this, but quick recap: In the aftermath of ‘the Blip,’ Wanda is left broken and alone with no one in her corner. Her biggest mentor willingly abandoned his team to get his own ‘happy’ ending (do not get me started on Steve, that’s a document in and of itself), her other biggest mentor is probably off enjoying his family while ignoring the incredibly racist killing spree he’s been on for the past five years, and her lover is dead. When she goes to claim the body, she’s told nuh-uh, that’s government property, please leave.

So she goes to a plot of land in the middle of some nowhere town in New Jersey, which Vision apparently bought despite the fact they were living a pretty decently comfortable life in Scotland, where she looks at the deed that Vision drew a heart on and wrote ‘To Grow Old In’. Very sweet. Kind of weird, considering nothing of this caliber had ever been suggested for either of their characters and they’d been actively running from specifically the U.S. authorities? But sweet.

She has a breakdown and, in her grief, contains the entire town of Westview and all 3,892 of the people in it in her own personal paradise, where nothing bad ever happens beyond sitcom hijinks, no one dies, and every problem is tied up and neatly dealt with by the end of an ‘episode’. Except we learn that this is only paradise to Wanda, who apparently shares the aspect of having to relate everything to her favourite pop culture with Tony, because everyone else in Westview is more or less being psychologically tortured by the incredible amount of pain she’s in, forced to be puppeted actors to make her happy.

Bear in mind, Westview might have been bigger at some point - we have no idea how many people survived the Blip, or how many have been brought back to life within the past few weeks of the current setting. Either way, this is a town that has already dealt with a lot of trauma being dragged into yet another awful, much more specific kind of emotional damage, thanks to ‘the heroes’. Nice.

Agatha Harkness, a witch who’s been up to who-knows-what in the 340 years since she drained the coven that tried to kill her for getting a little too ambitious into jerky, feels the massive expenditure of magical power and decides to investigate. All the while, she carefully uses her own magic to try and peek into Wanda’s psyche, her motivations, all while keeping up appearances and not letting slip that anything is amiss.

I’ll point out that she’s no saint here, either - she specifically keeps one Westview resident at her mercy, and knows what’s happening to the rest of them, but doesn’t attempt to stop it. I’ll chalk that up to her pragmatism; their ‘sacrifice’ was fine to her as long as she could figure out how Wanda could have done something so unheard of in terms of power.

What we come to learn over the course of the show is that, given everything that happened, Wanda didn’t mean to take over an entire town and tool it into her own personal slice of heaven. She very quickly became aware of it; we know that she knows it’s her own personal bubble as soon as episode three, when she’s confronting Monica about how the latter could possibly know about Ultron. Wanda is made further aware of how much damage this is inflicting on others in episode five, when Vision himself tells her that these people are scared. But still, she has everything handled! It’s okay! The outside world is worse, trust her!

Her handling of the question, ‘where are all the children of Westview,’ is one that bears some thinking - and, y’know, kind of more than a little concern. They’re allowed to walk around as part of the ‘Halloween special,’ but as Vision walks further and further out towards the edges of town where Wanda doesn’t have as much full control, people are just frozen in place, or conducting the same few seconds of action over and over. And fully aware of being trapped.

How are they being sustained? Eating, sleeping? If someone isn’t part of her storyline, is she just locking them down into a coma? What made Wanda decide that keeping the children ‘out of the way’ was somehow kinder than involving them, especially given her later argument that she’s been trying to keep the entire town safe and happy?

The fact of the matter is, she only actually starts to feel remorse for any of this after she’s confronted with the fact that, after weeks of being at her mercy, the townspeople of Westview would rather be dead than endure another moment of having to play nice for her enjoyment. She finally opens the ‘bubble’ to let them out - which leads to the ‘epic’ finale of three different entities trying to take down Wanda and her happy family: the S.W.O.R.D. military led by Hayward, the White Vision, and Agatha.

Winding back to how we got here: after Agatha uses her own trapped resident, Ralph Bohner (who, given his casting and the props in place during the last episode, I’m willing to bet is actually the missing witness protection person Jimmy was looking for) in an attempt to lure out Wanda’s reasoning - and fails - she’s pretty much done pretending. She tricks Wanda into her basement, nullifies her powers, and makes her face her own past to get to the truth of the matter.

Not going to lie, favourite moment of the show. Kathryn Hahn killed Agatha’s slightly-amused-slightly-irritated observations about Wanda’s coping mechanisms, and the whole arrangement was extremely meta. I would have paid real money dollars to see her do the same thing to the likes of Tony, Strange, and Loki. Hell, even just having her meet the rest of the Avengers? Augh. If wishes were fishes.

When Agatha comes to the conclusion that Wanda is the vaunted, nigh-indestructible force of nature that she’s literally spent her entire life reading about is the ultimate source of chaos magic and will likely bring about the end of the world, she’s pretty understandably taken aback. To that matter, the fact that Wanda… has very little control over any of it, and is using what she does understand to play housemaker? After how long Agatha has spent learning control, hiding in plain sight, just to be child’s play compared to what Wanda has at her fingertips? I’d be pretty pissed off, too!

The way that WandaVision handled both of the major ‘fights’ - Vision versus White Vision ending in philosophy, and Wanda ending up beating Agatha at her own game of deception - is excellent. A little grating that they had to go with the beat down angle before they got there, but this is MCU; punches and thrown cars had to get shoved in somewhere. And, given that this series very much played with the idea of grey morality, I was sort of hopeful that Agatha would end up in a not-quite stalemate arrangement with Wanda. She’s not as powerful as the Scarlet Witch, but she has the know-how that Wanda sorely lacks; in recompense for her own deeds, she would be able to teach what she knows while also kind of scheming on her own time.

Y’know, like what they did with rehabilitating Loki?

Except that Wanda, who has just gone through the entire rigamarole of coming to terms with the fact that she trapped thousands of people into a nightmare scenario against their will, rendering them helpless to her mercy… traps Agatha into a nightmare scenario against her will, rendering her helpless to Wanda’s mercy.

That moment actually shook me. Oh, my god. We’re supposed to still look at Wanda as a good guy after this?

This isn’t even covering the incredibly awful confrontation with her and Vision where she tries to gaslight him into believing that everything is A-OK, or the fact that the person she gets most violent with (apart from Agatha) is Monica Rambeau, a black woman who spends most of the show bending over backwards trying to say that what Wanda is doing is understandable, justified, and just needs a gentle touch to be dealt with.

That could be its own document, too - how Monica, much as she’s incredible and definitely looks to be a really exciting addition to the MCU roster, more or less gets used as the Good One to absolve and enable Wanda’s actions. One of her last lines to Wanda, after seeing how the people of Westview (rightfully) look at Wanda like she’s monstrous, is “they’ll never know what you sacrificed.”

Sacrificed what? The fake husband and fake kids she made out of her own compulsion to pretend that everything is okay? None of that would have existed if she’d been given the proper resources to actually cope with how much loss she’s had to deal with. None of that would have existed if she hadn’t caused this problem in the first place.

In the end, Wanda flies off in her fancy new gear before the FBI shows up, avoiding any real consequences to her actions - which has pretty much been the running theme of her character ever since she was introduced to the MCU in Age of Ultron. The worst kind of direct consequence she’s ever gotten was being grounded to her room for a while, then kept in the Raft for, like, maybe a day - and both times, she was broken out post-haste.

Meanwhile, she worsened the issues in Sokovia (which, I will say upfront, was Tony’s fault to begin with), unleashed the Hulk on Johannesburg, got a pretty significant amount of civilians killed as bystanders in Lagos (hey, how come Wanda keeps turning a lot of black people into casualties?), and stood back in Wakanda to let their people try to fight off Thanos from getting to Vision until it was clear that there was no other option than for her to get involved.

Great Power Comes With No Responsibility At All, Actually.

Wanda, in the several years she has maintained her identity as an Avenger, has proven time and time again that she takes on innumerable risks without any full understanding of what they mean, allows others to take on the brunt of the fallout for her, and looks sad until she’s forgiven and moves on to the next problem. She has no business casually throwing around the kind of power that being the Scarlet Witch entails, not until she’s actually made any kind of headway into making reparations for what she’s done and tried, really tried, to get a handle on what she’s capable of.

Which she’s apparently doing in the last post-credits scene, astral reading the literal Book of the Damned on her lonesome in the mountains, but… without anyone to guide her, or give her any kind of boundary?

[I ran out of images I could post, but you know exactly what image I am referring to here]

Agatha Harkness was right. And that should terrify everybody that has to deal with Wanda in the future.

(P.S. Do we know if she actually even killed that dog? We never see her holding anything but a blanket, and characters go in and out of that show all the time. Granted, she wasn’t great with the cicada-turned-bird... hmm.)

Additional Notes:

“Well, you’re a Tony Stan, of course you think Wanda’s a villain”

I like Tony because he’s such an awful mess, and the narrative isn’t exactly kind about telling him what a piece of shit he can be! He reaped a lot of problems, created practically half the villains in the MCU, and ended up dying a martyred hero. Thanks to being the tent pole by which this franchise hoisted itself into a cultural powerhouse, he will always be their golden savior. If you want to read about how he’s the true villain of this entire affair, feel free to look up any number of takedown pieces about him that are out there. He’s a dick. I will never “uwu sad baby who did nothing wrong ever 🥺” him the way people do about Wanda.

“Why are you so pressed about this”

Because something as good in concept as WandaVision could and should have been about anyone other than the whitewashed, antisemitic take on Wanda Maximoff that MCU brought upon us. They put crucifixes on her wall in Civil War, for fuck’s sake!

“Weren’t you mad about them not including Aaron Taylor-Johnson”

At this point, I am almost kind of relieved the real Pietro wasn’t resurrected for this, because god knows they probably would have killed him all over again just to inflict that much more pain on his sister.

“Anything else you’d like to tell us, turbo nerd”

This was literally itching at me all weekend to write, so it’s more or less just to get it off my chest. If you powered your way through it, uh… thanks? Sorry if I yucked your yums, but I tried to be as clear with the disclaimer as I could. 🤷‍♂️

#blah blah #long post #marvel #mcu #wandavision #wandavision spoilers #wandavision critical #anti wanda maximoff

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motherwasapapafucker · 3 years ago

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You've obviously spoke about the Ghost as a Superman figure within the larger context of Doctor Who but do you think the opposite is possible? A Doctor-like figure within a larger superhero setting?

There's been a couple of attempts, never quite as....jarring as the Ghost but that’s pretty much down to mad scientists and time travel being far more commonplace in superhero settings than overtly super-heroic figures are in Who. To the point the handful of times Who has played with that (Conundrum, Starfall, The Return of Doctor Mysterio) all draw at least some of their story out of the jarring presence of a superhero figure within the narrative. There’s a really nice sequence in Conundrum where the Doctor “explains” the presence of the superpowered figures in a way that reads like he’s as much kidding himself because he would like to think it’s possible as genuinely trying to explain how these people have gained their abilities. Which really feels like a deliberate building on “I wish...I wish I believed in wishing wells” given how Conundrum plays out. There’s obviously the conflation of Captain Britain’s Merlin and Who’s Merlin a couple of times, but that’s really overstated even if only in terms of Britain’s Merlin functionally different beast to the point any doctor connection is largely a minor detail as any attempt at creating a Doctor-like figure. I think then, when it comes to your Doctor-like figure the big thing that would distinguish them from other standard mad scientists and science heroes is the face changing, and basically none of your overtly doctor-influenced characters actually do anything with? Your big one in a standard setting is Professor Gamble in Power Man and Iron Fist #79, who really stands out in terms of being the only doctor-lite comic figure overtly building on Classic Who rather than Cultural Juggernaut David Tennant Doctor Who. Some overlap with Dr. Mysterio’s use of the Ghost in the conflation of the real and fictional but in very different directions; Gamble writing a fictitious account of his own life, dreadlox a fictitious account of the Incinerators. Gamble’s personal Dalek-stand in born of rogue temporal cleaning devices that have decided destroying space and time is the only way to clean everything. Where the overlap falls apart is the fact that Power Man and Iron Fist is arguably a far more flexible book at that point in its history than Who is by the point of Doctor Mysterio. So #79 is less of an out of genre moment so much as just more weird shit happening to Danny and Luke. As far as I know Gamble has popped up here and there since then, and is one of a fairly sizable amount of Who references across Marvel/Marvel UK (Yeah yeah we all know about Death’s Head, W.H.O. and aw that pish) The other big, very very direct and direct to Cultural Juggernaut David Teannant Doctor Who is...weirdly…Qubit in Irredeemable. Which is barely relevant to this question because it’s really not a standard superhero setting beyond the superficial, but bares some comment given it’s arguably the most prominent of recent takes and really hard to ignore how much he’s just David Tennant with a James from Twin Peaks forehead and LEGION hair. Also worth commenting on how fucking strange his entire role in the arse end of Irredeeamble is given the final 20 or so issues largely devolve into “The Tenth Doctor fights Evil Superman.” Given how little that aspect is remarked upon, and how incongruous it is with the broader attempt at presenting an Evil Superman story that gradually pairs back to show that the character’s never really been evil superman because for him to have that “turn” you basically have to have it be the tip of an iceberg that sketches back decades and ultimate reveals the character was never really Superman in any way beyond the iconographic. So the fact that happens while he’s fighting David Tennant is really strange, though I do like so much of that spilling out of the Plutonian forcing Quibit into one of those big, painful NuWho moral decisions, but I really struggle to care about Irredeemable beyond thinking Incorruptible was generally the stronger book towards the end. You’ve also got things like the Allred/Slott Silver Surfer that overtly drew influence from contemporary

Doctor Who, but it’s building on an already distinctive character so it can never really function as a direct one for one. I know, vaguely, that Ben 10 had a Doctor Who figure. But having never watched the show I’m not sure how he appears within the show and tbh I don’t care enough to look into it. I suppose the thing is that Doctor-lite easily slides into a superhero setting without losing too much and without drawing too much attention to the homage while someone like the Ghost is, by basic nature, designed to be at least somewhat strange within the larger normality of the show’s present day. The closest point of comparison I can think of is something like Silver Sentry in TMNT; There’s really nothing in TMNT or Doctor WHo that precludes the existence of “proper” superheroes, nether show is exactly the height of realism but the sudden introduction of basically superman presents a fundamental shift in their respective idiosyncrasies. I imagine people would be tempted to draw a comparison between the Milligan Shade the Changing Man revamp under Vertigo and Who, and given it’s MIlligan I’m sure there was some influence their even if only in terms of an English-coded otherworldly figure who undergoes startling changes across the run, but tbh it’s basically a passing resemblance and kinda overlooks the fact that Shade kinda hilariously preempts a lot of where Who as a franchise goes during the 90s and 2000s. It’s presentation of Shade’s changes as far-more psychologically damaging than classic who’s regeneration compared to some overlap with how NuWho treats the event particularly, but also in terms of the EDAs there’s a fairly notable arc where Shade gives up his heart to cope with a torrent of emotional loss and devastated worlds. Make of that what you will. I still haven’t answered the fucking question have I, right since you’ve asked me you’re going to get my shite, because here’s how I’d do it. There’s only one way really, one word Metalek Because the fucking rule don’t they? Morrison’s first, best Dalek-homage. The Xenoformers from Galaxy X, sentient construction vehicles serving masters that no longer exist. Terraforming the Galaxy one world at a time. Bow before Metalek. So yeah, those guys exist and they’re fucking great. I have...more thoughts than I’d like to admit about the “Metalek Empire” that’s really just self-indulgent pish. But that’s DC comics. So they exist, and they present what’s probably the best approach to a Doctor-alike in a superhero setting. In the same way the Ghost might as well be Superman in a setting where he isn’t the soul focus, you’re Doctor Who figure might as well just be Doctor Who in a setting where, building on the fact the key elements aren’t that notable, they really don’t stand out that much, so what then? Well he’s the mad scientist, but a good mad scientist. Counterpart to all the lunatics and madmen with their metal monsters, who is he? Who’s the grant morrison character fighting the dreaded metalek menace when they aren’t intruding on Superman’s narrative? Who spent decades trapped on earth, leading a reformed STAR Labs into a strange, wonderful new world? It’s Leo Quantum isn’t it. Basically, Leo’s one of those characters like Lan-Shin in Smashes the Klan or John Henry Irons who click perfectly into place with the larger idea of Superman’s social network. And given I’m an egotist, I’m going to do what I like with him building out of that admittedly bullshit old idea he’s future lex back to repent. If the Ghost is a version of Superman who’s world exists in the shadow of the Doctor, Leo would be a version of the Doctor that exists in the Shadow of Superman. He’s not literally Lex, he’s your Kristin Wells/Legion/DC One Million figure, possibly a future Luthor, possibly the first child of the Luthor/Kent families coming together in the far off 42nd century. A temporal adventurer who’s early experiments caused all his potential futures to crash down on top of him, transforming him into a hypertime singularity. His technicolor dreamcoat crafted from fifth world

wondertech, regulating his body to ensure each hypertime strand gets its time in sun while keeping the darker fringes in line….most of the time. Or at least, that’s what I’d do, feel free to discard this as mental bastard bullshit.

#doctor who #comics #superman #superheroes #rambling bullshit #leo quantum #grant morrison #metaleks #irredeemable #dc comics #the ghost #the return of doctor mysterio #tmnt #silver sentry is pretty great tbh

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kiara-carrera · 3 years ago

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permanent ink

note: this is set the day after this drabble i did, but also set in that quick little sad montage in s2e1 when jj gives himself a stick and poke. this is probably gonna be reworked once i actually get to season 2 just for any context issues i run into later on, but the bulk of this is canon for them, my tiny lil babies. none of this is really season 2 spoilers tbfh, but also just know this is set in s2e1. also v unedited.

pairing: leah thompson x jj maybank

cruel summer, season two

When Leah woke up, it was to the sounds of chickens clucking somewhere in the distance and to the dull throbbing of her side against an uncomfortable surface. Even before she could adjust to being awake, even before her eyes could flutter open to assess her surroundings, there was no doubt in her mind that she was at the Chateau, on John’s uncomfortable ass pullout couch.

And then there was that pang in her chest at the thought of even just his name. None of this was right. None of it made sense. It seemed as if everyone around her had just accepted the fact that the Phantom had gone down and wrecked, that John B and Sarah had been lost to the sea. That they weren’t just gone for a bit of time, but forever.

And yet something in her just wouldn’t let the information click, wouldn’t let the all too apparent truth win the battle with the denial warring through her mind. Grief was something that Leah was slowly realizing she wasn’t capable of stomaching, her brain reverting back to the denial stage like a broken record.

It didn’t make sense. The truth was too much to handle, too much to rationalize. To Leah, it didn’t make sense that the same fate that had befell the father had occurred again for the son, like some sick and twisted tragedy. These were the things that existed only the the thoughts that she shoved down and down, deep where she hoped they would never resurface.

They always did.

She let a groan escape her, an annoyed and frustrated little noise, as she rolled onto her back, eyes still squeezed shut as she considered praying to a god she didn’t believe in to let sleep take her. If not for refuge from all thoughts of John Booker Routledge for another moment, but to get away from the sounds of those fucking chickens.

“Sleeping Beauty finally awakes,” someone said from beside her, a snarky yet somewhat joking tone laced into the words.

Her eyes snapped open as she flailed a bit against the couch, heart jolting in her chest. She managed to sit up a bit before her eyes landed on the source of the voice. A somewhat amused JJ was sitting across the room, legs crossed and his foot in his lap, a pencil dangling precariously from his fingers.

Memories of the night before slowly came crawling through her mind, sitting on the dock, silent tears streaming down her face under JJ’s arm. They’d sat there until at least two am, mostly in silence while passing a beer between them. She wasn’t sure what had happened after they came back in the house, laying back on John B’s couch the last thing she could remember before she must have fell asleep.

“Jesus Christ, JJ,” Leah breathed out, hand running over her face, her heart galloping in her chest. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

JJ snorted. “Geez, good morning to you too, sunshine.”

“Fuck off,” she groaned, letting herself flop back onto the couch. She could hear him laughing as she pulled the pillow out from under her head to shove it over her face — it was way too fucking early to be dealing with this.

Look, she wasn’t saying that being around her best friend was awkward, because it wasn’t. At least, she was doing her best to make sure it wasn’t. But there was always that little nudge at the back of her mind, always trying to get her to work through whatever the fuck she was feeling, because it sure as hell wasn’t normal friendship shit.

She spent an inordinate amount of time trying to convince herself that nothing had changed, another round of denial in her life, but really, what was she going to do? Have feelings for JJ? Her best friend? And do what with that, exactly? Dig herself into a friendship ruining hole? Tell him? Hope he’d, in some fucking weird twist of fate, feel the same? The same JJ who’d never had an actual relationship and flirted with basically anyone, including her, even though with her it was always jokey?

Yeah, fuck that.

But that didn’t make this any less awkward in her mind. Last night had been a bit easier, despite the influx of grieving, but she’d been able to ignore that and just be with JJ without wanting to completely bury herself in a hole and never come out.

And there was also the fact that she told him she’d go to Yucátan with him, that she’d pretty much go anywhere with him, regardless of anything. Yeah, that wasn’t something they were skirting around lately. Well, she figured they’d be if she had completely just left that conversation in the back of her mind.

And it was clear he’d more than likely taken it as a friendly yeah, I’m totally down for just fucking leaving my entire life to go somewhere with you thing considering he hadn’t brought it up once. Which was kind of shocking because while some people tended to write him off as an idiot, he was oddly perceptive when he needed to be. And yet somehow he hadn’t noticed her speech leaned more on the side of weird, cringey, cliche teen rom-com movie bullshit rather than friendship.

God, she hated her brain.

Leah let out another groan, deciding to take initiative to not be a complete fucking weirdo around JJ because fuck, they all needed to stick together now more than ever, and so she promptly chucked the pillow off of her.

Normal, she could do that. And then she truly focused on him as she turned onto her side again, picking up on how he’d fallen silent. The pencil was now held tightly between his fingers, a crease between his eyebrows that was born of pure concentration as he poked at the skin of his lower calf with the needle he’d fastened to the writing utensil.

Oh, great, he’d set up an impromptu tattoo parlor while she was sleeping, that wasn’t concerning at all. And — was he wearing fucking overalls?

Christ, of course he looked good in overalls. Just fucking spectacular.

“Stare any harder and I’m gonna start charging you by the minute, Lee Lee.”

Leah’s eyes snapped up to meet his once again amused expression, not having noticed how her gaze had seemingly just zoned out at the sight of him. She could feel heat coursing up the back of her neck at the embarrassment at being caught, not even caring at the use of that god awful nickname

“Nice overalls,” she told him, sarcasm all over her tone. Inside, she was cringing. Nice job, Leah, draw attention to another thing you don’t want to think about, fucking brilliant job, she thought to herself, but her mouth was already going again before she could just, y’know, shut the fuck up. “Is there a barn raising I don’t know about?”

JJ narrowed his eyes at her, playfully brandishing his pencil at her. “For all you know these overalls could have gotten me the best handy of my life once.”

She couldn’t help the laugh that escaped her, rolling her eyes at his cocky grin. “Please, no one gets laid wearing overalls. And what the fuck are you even doing right now?”

“Stick and poke,” JJ said matter-of-factly, raising his eyebrows before promptly sticking himself again as if to prove his point. He barely so much as hissed at the stab of needle, tugging his teeth between his lips for a moment as he focused back in on his work. “Kie showed me how to do it.”

“Please tell me you at least sterilized the needle.”

Not even looking up from his leg, he gestured the pencil in the direction of the table beside him. “What do you think the lighter is for?”

Sure enough, his light was discarded beside him. That didn’t do much to make her feel better, though, and she raised an eyebrow at him. “Considering it’s you? Anything from smoking a J to arson, probably.”

“Haha, real funny, Lee,” he deadpanned, rolling his eyes as he continued to stab at his skin. JJ was silent for a moment before asking, “Want one when I’m done?”

If you had told her she’d be waking up to her best friend wearing overalls and offering to give her a tattoo in John B’s living room, she probably would have just stayed asleep. She wasn’t really sure how to tell him she didn’t exactly trust him to stab her multiple times with a questionable looking needle ... and dear God, she didn’t even want to consider what he was possibly using as ink. So she opted to go for the slightly less scathing remark.

Leah sat up a bit, supporting herself on her elbows. “Do you have another needle?”

“Uh...” JJ paused, glancing around the table. “That’s a negative.”

“Then at the risk of getting an infection, I’m gonna pass.”

“I could just do the lighter thing again,” he offered.

Leah sighed, running a hand through her hair as she sat up fully, legs swinging to hang off the edge of the couch. “J, I’m gonna be honest, I don’t even know if I trust that you sterilized it right the first time.”

“Ye of little faith,” JJ cried out in offense, once again brandishing his pencil at her. He jokingly narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re wounding me here, Lee. Total lack of respect.”

“I’m sure your big ass ego will get over it,” Leah retorted, shaking her head at him with a laugh.

They lapsed into silence again, JJ continuing to prick his calf with a steady hand and an oddly intense air of concentration. Leah reverted back to just watching him quietly, resting her elbows on her knees and dropping her head into her waiting hands. This was probably the most still she’d ever seen him as long as she’d known him, bar when he was passed out asleep.

Compared to last night, the JJ she was seeing now was doing a pretty bang up job at holding it together. Or, at least, pretending that he was. They hadn’t said a whole ton last night, but Leah knew as well as she knew the sky was blue that JJ wasn’t doing okay.

The open (and most likely empty) can of beer on the table beside him only solidified that thought.

She wanted to comment that giving yourself a tattoo after drinking was very much not recommended, a know-it-all tone ready to join the factoid on her tongue, but she wasn’t sure how many buttons she’d be able to push before it’d turn into an actual argument.

And fuck, if there was one person she didn’t want to be on the outs with any time soon, it was him.

So instead, she kept her mouth shut, letting her eyes trail across his furrowed brow and the tongue poking out from between his lips in thought. From where she sat, she couldn’t see what he was etching into his skin and while she wasn’t really supporting the impromptu DIY tat, the suspense was starting gnaw at her insides.

Before she even realized what she was doing, she was up and crossing the room. JJ didn’t even bother looking up as she approached him, his attention only being hooked when Leah pushed a few of the things on the table aside before boosting herself up to sit on it.

He looked between her and the table a few times, before a laugh escaped him. “Sure, just make yourself at home, why don’t ya? You’re lucky I’m done,” he told her, setting his pencil on a bit of the table not occupied by her.

She shrugged, taking the opportunity to look down at his skin. Turning her head to the side so that she was actually viewing the tattoo the right way, she couldn’t help but feel a tug in her chest once it clicked for her.

P4L was scribbled into the skin in JJ’s all too familiar handwriting, thin and somewhat crooked lines formed into a tiny brand of Pogue status. More than that, it was a sign of friendship, of family. In a world of haves and have nots, they had each other.

A soft smile pulled at her lips, corners turning upward as she looked at it with an equally soft gaze. “It looks good.”

JJ flashed a weak smile. He cleared his throat and the words he spoke were joking, a clear shift for the conversation to go somewhere less somber, less intense. “You jealous you’re not a true Pogue, Lee?”

Leah’s brow knitted together in confusion. “Excuse me?”

“No tattoo, fake Pogue.”

“I don’t remember that in the Pogue friendship rulebook.”

“Just added it,” JJ shot back, a smug little look in his eyes.

She couldn’t help but snort. “Great, I’ll be sure to tell Pope about the new mandate so he can promptly shit his pants at the thought of getting a tattoo with a needle duct taped to a pencil.”

“Nah, Pope’s got guts,” JJ countered but all it took was one raised eyebrow from Leah for his statement to fold like a cheap suit. “Okay, yeah, he’d freak.”

“Ya think?” Leah asked with a laugh, her eyes bright with amusement. She took another glance at his new tattoo. “It really does look good, though. If I actually trusted you to permanently alter my body with a needle, I might’ve reconsidered.”

She expected JJ to scoff and go on another rant of how she was insulting his honor or something, but all she was met with was JJ staring intently at her, lost in thought as he mulled something over. That creeping feeling filled her chest as he looked her over and she had about nine thousand guesses for what could possibly be going through his head as she grew a bit nervous under his gaze.

None of those things were JJ going, “Got an idea,” while reaching around her for something on the table.

She watched on in quiet confusion as he retrieved a Sharpie from behind her, waving it around a bit like he’d just won a prize. There was a devilish grin on his lips as his eyes trailed over her before zeroing in on her arm. JJ didn’t bother with niceties as he pulled her arm from her lap, tugging it towards him and flipping it palm side up.

“What are you ... ?” Leah asked, trailing off as she let him all but manhandle her arm.

“Shh, genius at work,” he told her, pointing yet another writing utensil at her in a mock threat. He took her wrist in his hand, using the other one to push up the array of beaded and string bracelets crowding her arm.

Pulling the Sharpie’s cap off with his teeth and spitting it out to the side, JJ’s brow furrowed in concentration as he put the marker to her skin, leaving black ink in his wake. Leah already knew what he’d be writing, but still she found herself watching intently as his chicken scratch scribbled across her skin, as if he’d suddenly depart from being sentimental and draw a dick on her arm or something.

He pulled back after a moment, gently rubbing his thumb just under his masterpiece, and he grinned at her, the first real smile she’d seen from him in days. It reached his eyes, the blue of them clear and bright and just ... happy. He looked happy, even if this exchange would only last for another few moments, and it made Leah’s heart do a funny little flip in her chest.

At the risk of making eye contact with her best friend for longer than necessary, the kind of extended look that would risk awkwardness and things Leah was far too sober to think about, she averted her gaze.

Written in what honestly looked like some of JJ’s best handwriting, P4L inked her skin, a small and semi permanent declaration of her Pogue status. A tiny laugh escaped her, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips as she looked it over.

“There, now we match,” JJ told her.

She looked back up, eyes locking with his. Dimples showing, JJ was still giving her that smile, that goddamn smile that only ever worked to make hers grow wider. The same smile that had, as of late, made her feel slightly dizzy, like her once perfectly structured world had gone just a hair off-kilter and metamorphosed into something else. And it wasn’t helped by the fact that, though there was no reason for it, he was still holding onto her wrist, callused fingers hot against her skin.

Her heart did that funny little flip again, just once more with feeling. Leah out a breath, nodding just a bit. “Yeah, I guess we do.”

#leah thompson x jj maybank #obx oc #mayson #fic: cruel summer #this is me being self indulgent af #and not working on the actual fic #amanda's writing

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jenniferstolzer · 4 years ago

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Babylon 5 rewatch Episode 2.22: The Fall of Night

Babylon 5 is at the center of not one but three conflicts as John Sheridan agrees to shelter a wounded Narn cruiser. The Centauri don’t like this. Earth doesn’t like this. The Shadows don’t like this. But Sheridan has a strong moral compass and what he doesn’t like is how much the institutions around him are willing to sacrifice in the name of forging some kind of cursory peace.

Things I liked about The Fall of Nighit

1, Lennier and Vir’s friendship. If you ask me Vir, could be friends with literally anyone. He’s such an understanding soul. Lennier is by nature a little judgey. More closed off. So when they sit down next to each other and discover how much they have in common both of them look at each other like “hello what” and automatically agree to meet again. But even this exchange is done almost like spies meeting and I don’t think we stop to think about that very often. These are the attaches of two ambassadors for two of the most powerful races in the galaxy… they could very well be exchanging state secrets instead of expressing solidarity for their equally frustrating jobs.

2, The Centauri are apparently willing to put their ships on autopilot and black out from g forces if it means when they come to they’ll be in a better firing position. This seems extremely reckless and VERY Centauri. It is the spacebattle equivalent of the hair. Big. Flashy. Not well thought through.

3, In the wake of the mass driver bombing, Sheridan gives Londo an opportunity to speak and Londo is like “NOPE” and jets before he says something that’s going to get him and his whole race in more trouble than they already are. Garibaldi then reads Londo like a literal book, delivering one of my favorite analyses of the character. Everyone thought Londo was a clown, indulging in opulence, going into debt at the casino, drinking himself to a stupor in public, but Garibaldi was his friend and knows that Londo’s not dumb, he’s actually very smart and his mind moves really fast. His error is in his judgment and priorities and he’s currently in waters he did not expect to tread. He’s scared, and he’s going to keep darting in and out of cover until he feels like he has a handle on things or he gets picked off by a hunter, whichever comes first. Also a very classic JMS line “He’s a pain in the butt, but he’s our pain in the butt.” Hunt for that or similar lines in other JMS stuff, he loves that line.

4, The ache of watching McCarthysim at work is very effective. Zach knows the guys he’s ratting on don’t deserve to be ratted on and even says so. “They’re just fooling around” but we can tell by the level of interest and tone of the Nightwatch captian’s voice that they’re gonna get blackballed. Zach can’t deny that they said what they said, but can tell that ratting them out is the wrong thing to do. In the end he relents with a bunch of qualifications but the Nightwatch doesn’t want qualifications. They want names. Thank you for your service.

5, I love that the guy there to ally with the Centauri is from the Ministry of Peace. So poignant. They’ll get peace all right, by paying off the aggressors.

6, When the Narn ship was coming under threat by the Centauri warship, Sheridan opened a line to Londo just to spit in his face and hang up. It was amazing. Also during this crisis, Sheridan whips out a law book to smack the Nightwatch guy back in his hole. Sinclair would be proud.

7, Watching B5 come under attack is so emotionally stirring. Even on a rewatch, I don’t want to see it hurt.

8, We have arrived! The scene where Kosh reveals himself. I love that G’Kar is hiding in the plants – like he’s not a huge gecko man who people are going to notice. I also love how plaintiff his voice is, thinking if he speaks on Sheridan’s behalf it’ll help him in the political shitshow he’s currently in. I mean he’s issuing this apology for helping a Narn ship and G’Kar is very very very grateful for that. Also B5 blew up a Centauri warship so he’s pretty grateful for that too, I mean come on… I like that B5 has like a standard subway system in the middle of it and that they let the Puppet Friends ride. I miss the puppet friends. I love that the rotational gravity system means there’s a weightless portion in the center of hydroponics and that we used that to our advantage in this story. Also the vorlons in their native form play on the perception of the lesser races. They are light beings, and humans see them as angels. The rest of the races see them as prophets or gods, but none of these perceptions are perfect. We see wings and white robes and think Angel, but Kosh didn’t appear like a rennaissance painting. He’s got a butterfly look to him, too. The face he wears is a facsimile of a human not an exact human. He’s not perfect, we’re just in awe. Love that.

9 And finally a lot has been said about why Londo doesn’t see anything when Kosh appears. He’s been touched by the Shadows, so he can’t be converted by the Vorlons b/c we’re playing a game of Othello today I guess. Maybe because he doesn’t actually believe in his pantheon of gods so he doesn’t have any deities to witness. Maybe he’s lying because what he saw was his own greed and vanity. The general consensus is the first – that he’s incapable of seeing the light because he’s in the dark. For a fresh take on it, let’s look at the Vorlons through this lens. Kosh said before that if he revealed himself everyone would know him… I take this as being a side effect of being Vorlon. Vorlons are a feeling not an image. Like Magenta. Magenta’s not a real color, it exists on the color wheel because something has to connect red and purple on the color spectrum… but the spectrum of visible light is actually a straight line. The wavelengths for red and purple are far from touching, but our brains can perceive when they’re both present, so Magenta occurs. It’s imaginary, but we see it for real with our eyes. That’s Vorlons. Perhaps Londo saw a shapeless light thing in the sky, perhaps that’s what Vorlons really are… or perhaps they have no visible representation at all until they hit our brains. Our eyeballs behold something, but our brains have to construct it out of pieces. When the rest of the galaxy looked at Kosh they used the color wheel to construct him, but Londo was only given the wavelengths. He saw nothing, because nothing was there to see. I really wish there was another Centauri there to be like “I saw the goddess Li welcoming me to her arms!” and Londo’s over there like “I’m the problem” instead of not really answering that question. Maybe it’s answered in season 3, I don’t know. Did Vir see anyone up there? He must have been on break.

What I like Less about 22

1, So here’s where I’m going to talk about Keffer. I know the origin story…. that he was an unwelcome addition to the cast added per network request, but who the hell is he other than that? I think its remarkable how he slips right out of my head the minute he is off camera. We know he’s a pilot, that he was close to Carlos (whose story/death you may recall I was laughing at in a previous episode because its significance ALSO came out of nowhere), and that he made friends with the GROPOS grunts (who we incidentally learned to care about enough in that one episode that we were sad when they died…. Awkward considering Keffer’s contribution to this episode…) Honestly the most interesting thing about him is that he’s got an old-timey fighter pilot scarf he wears and he believes in ghosts and I bet you all forgot about the ghosts. Honestly, the most interesting thing about Keffer is how he’s a lesson in how not to write an interesting character – and no shade on JMS for that, I know he did it on purpose. Significant things happening to a character does not automatically make them a strong character. Keffer experienced loss, came face to face with the shadows, got in fights… a lot of stuff happened to him, but he was almost always the only named character in those scenes. We cared about the GROPOS because they cared about each other and we responded to that. Keffer was there to play cabbage head and ask questions. He’s not tight with any of our main cast who we’ve had tons more time to grow attached to, and dies for plot reasons without leaving an impact with his loss. Heck, you can see the value of interpersonal relationships on character development in action when the show used a shoehorn to try and force some in in context to Carlos a second and a half before he died. We had him drinking at the bar with command staff suddenly, we had him die as a result of a flight mission Sheridan was part of to make Sheridan feel guilty about it. Everyone was standing around going like “No, Not Ramirez” and if you recall on my previous episode writeup I was LAUGHING at how tortured this sudden human connection was. Keffer could have been made interesting. Follow me on this.

My treatment on how to make Keffer interesting:

Let’s say Keffer was introduced as an old friend of one of our characters – Fraknlin let’s say. He was a friend from the Minbari War days that helped him sneak behind enemy lines. Perhaps he was complicit in the covering up and destruction of Franklin’s notes on Minbari anatomy. As a result, the two hang out in medbay sometimes, talking about old times and comparing the current war to the one they fought together. We learn that Keffer has a fire for justice. Hates bullies. Sees the strong as absolute defenders of the weak and that any stronger race picking on a weaker one is a bigger coward than the unvierse can hold. Then when Carlos gets killed by the ghost he starts researching what it could be. Kosh and Delenn tell him to stay out of it. The audience assumes he’s going to uncover something and bring Franklin and other characters into Delenn and Sheridan’s confidence about the shadows through curiosity and honor, but we’re learning through the episodes that the Shadows are IMMENSELY powerful and have no patience for flies. When he breaks off from his squad to go have a looksee at what he suspects led to his personal friend Carlos’s death, we know this is going to kill him. He ignores the warnings of those who have more awareness and dies to bring back evidence of the Shadows to the station. Sheridan recognizes how Keffer’s curiosity and sense of judgment led to recklessness, something Sheridan himself is prone to. He vows not to let Keffer die in vain, but also states that the proof he got has changed everything… and that Sheridan would have done the same. Killing your men in the name of a mission is never the goal but there’s a line everyone crosses when the safety of the universe is at stake and sometimes things are worth dying for. Franklin walks into medbay, casts a look to the counter where Keffer used to sit all those nights, and turns away.

But that’s not what happen. Keffer’s dead now and I don’t miss him. Glad he emailed the Shadows to ISN five nanoseconds before he died.

Babylon 5 is now the last best hope for victory because sometimes peace is another word for surrender and because secrets have a way of getting out. On to season 3!

#Babylon 5 #babylon 5 rewatch #season 2 #episode 22 #babylon 5 spoilers #art #jenstoart #kosh #john sheridan

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