#i reafirm that i literally would

[lisxdumbr]

How do I explain this to my therapist

[demodraws0606]

WxS THEORY : Rui is driving himself into a corner

Ok I needed to make a big rambly analysis post again because I just read this post that absolutely rotted my brain (pls check it out) -> https://www.tumblr.com/sankatsuka/741871319388389377?source=share

I kinda want to share my overall thoughts on how Rui is being written overall and what I think it could possibly lead to.

Introduction.

So okay... we can agree how colorpalet writes Rui is weird as shit right ?

Like, this is very obvious when you look at Rui's two most recent events Backlight and Curtain. Both of them actually end on cliffhangers, leaving things open ended with hints at future problems. In fact Curtain Call's consequences haven't been fully addressed yet as Rui still hasn't talk about Asahi to WxS and we know he's coming back.

However, it's not just that that could be pointed out as strange, in fact, in both of these events Rui fails.

In Curtain Call, he fails to understand his own feelings as he accepts to join Arcland.

In Backlight, he fails to understand how to fix the issue in the movie

Not only that but those events both show Rui isolating himself from WxS (with varying levels of severity) trying to figure out the problem and fix it. Often to the point where WxS get mildly concerned for him and want to help him (again with varying levels of severity).

Both of these events seem to show that Rui is stuck on something, there is a reason why he can't seem to solve the problems that he's facing weither major or minor.

So, clearly there is a reocurring problem right ? If Rui seemingly keeps on failing then colorpalet has to be setting up something.

With Curtain Call it seemed like what they were setting up was some kind of confrontation about the disbandement but Rui is weirdly set aside in the Emu's event. Which it doesn't feel like a mistake considering they chose to make it an Emu event instead of Rui on purpose when they couldn't have it be a Tsukasa focus.

In Happy End, Rui's communication with WxS is very limited. His feelings never get personally confronted as he mostly just attempts to try and fix the situation until he's met with rejection to which he just very much gives up. It's only when Emu's brothers offer an olive branch that Rui finally jumps at the opportunity to speak.

However, despite it being a hopeful step forward...it doesn't fix Rui's issues here. In fact he withdraws from even speaking about his situation with Asahi which for me is the baseline of Rui being honest with his feelings.

Sure, he does end up helping in Happy End and his feelings are reafirmed but...he also fails here. His first plan to keep them together fails because he didn't communicate with them, it's Emu's brother that truly end up coming up with a solution at the end.

So what is Rui's problem ? What is the red flag that colorpalet keeps waving ?

2. A concerning pattern

Post-Curtain Call helped highlight a very clear pattern with Rui.

It's a toxic mix between his abandonnement issues and self sacrificing nature.

Rui gets insecure a lot about how his potentialy missgivings could affect WxS, to the point where it's become a concerning pattern.

-Dazzling Light Event (and Nene Canary Event) : Rui gets insecure over not being able to be a suitable director for Tsukasa and hurting his acting in the process. This insecurity comes back again in Nene's fourth event in Rui's side card story.

-Shibuya fes with Mafurui : He almost hurts his fucking leg because he couldn't bear the idea that he could inconvenience WxS

-Disbandement Arc : He refused to talk to WxS about his feelings and still hasn't talked fully about them with Asahi. He literally isolated himself to make a plan to keep WxS together behind their back.

All of these show that Rui still has this fear that he could do something that would set him apart from WxS and that often influences his actions.

Rui's issue here is a lack of priority and a self sacrificial nature that borderlines on self destructive at some poiints. Everything he does is motivated in some sense by WxS.

Recently when he mentions his dreams and ambition like in Tsukasa's most recent event, he wants to make WxS shine. It's the subject of one of his early second art stickers.

"I'll bring out your strength"

Which... let's talk about Rui's dreams and amibitons.

3. Rui and his dream

A lot of people characterise Rui as extremely passionate which is true....or is it really ?

Okay here me out, I don't think we can deny he definitely has a lot of passion for what he does but we can't deny there is definitely something going on.

First of all, Rui is the only character where we don't really have an event of him trying to progress towards his dream, backlight is the first one and it shows him failing.

Second of all, Rui is the only one to have been ready to compromise his dream for WxS which has not been the case for anyone else in WxS. Sure Emu left Pheonix Wonderland, but she knows she'll come back eventually.

Which like leads me to this realisation with his second event specifically it's name, Revival My Dream.

The event where we see Rui at his happiest, fully comfortable in where he was compared to now.

His dreams has never just been to bring people smiles, what he always wanted was a way to connect with people with shows to have a group of friends that actually liked him and didn't reject him for being weird.

But he was bullied into accepting that he didn't actually care about other people, he rationalised that maybe accomplishing his dream alone would make him happy but his friends are part of his dream.

It's this conflict between his dream and his relationship with WxS that is fucking him up especially post-curtain call.

He has to support WxS, he has to be the reliable one, he has to figure out how they can still stay together...

But why ? Why does he put that responsibility in himself

Even then in the Backlight event he's so obsessed with finding the answer himself

Because he's still on that mindset, similar to wonder-halloween just a lot less severe. WxS saved him and they mean the world to him that he'll just allow to be trampled just to make them happy. In fact you see that with even more simpple fun moments with how he ate Touya's rancid cupcake just to make him happy, it's shown time and time again he will sacrifice his own needs for the needs of others to a dangerous point.

4. What it means for Rui's future

I think all these things will end up catching up to Rui

We saw this with Tsukasa, we saw his ups and downs of trying to improve and fight his insecurities led to him having a breakdown.

All these things just keep on building up and colorpalet is very unsubtle with how strange they are with his sad expressions in the tetrad 2dmv and his trained cards (which i can go deeper into).

This could go again in different ways but eventually WxS will have to confront him about it, finally make him communicate his feelings for once.

Again we still have Cyberpunk Deadboy and what it could signify for the future of Rui's arc which I already talked about

It's all just really strange and weird there are even stranger things that i could talk about but i'm eepy so i'll leave it at that lol

[please-someone-give-me-love]

ONE PIECE 1122 SPOILERS REVIEW

I want to say there are a lot of things that I find really interesting in this chapter. The whole narratove, lore, development, there are a lot of things to talk.

The first one is the fact that there has been the belift that ONLY pirates would be able to find the one piece, which was proof to be false, everyone could find the one piece and here we are reading people's reaction to that. Some of them react ingenous or reacive and untrusty but others react with emotion.

What I find interesting is there's someone saying that "isn't that the reason on why the world sank in first place?" And it's so interesting this because ffor what we know, the reason of why the world is sinking is the goverment not necesarily the pirates.

Anad Vegapunk also mentioned a lot of being in a neutral side of what happened. I mean, we still don't have a lot of info but it's just curious to point it.

Second aspect is Koby and a lot of people will be hateful or angry at him but listen to me.

Luffy didn't help Koby expecting him to gave his life and dreams for Luffy, he didn't hope that Koby would quit his own dreams just for Luffy and this is a big mischaracterized thing the fandom has towards them.

We saw Luffy and Koby more as friends than rivals when in reality, Luffy and Koby's relationship is a pretty resemble to Garp and Roger's relationship, which means that both are RIVALS and friends, Koby's sense of duty intervene on Luffy's goal, so they would eventually be in each others path but in opposite sides.

This was something already established since Water 7, they both knew they were growing stronger and that some day they would need to face each other and it was even more confirmed in Marineford where both of them "fight" for their own goals and their conclusion of the whole event was almost the sense "I need to get stronger"

Luffy is not expecting Koby to be only his friend but also his rival, so don't feel betrayed by Koby saying something that was already established!

My third aspect and probably my biggest point is Elmeth.

Oh boy, I cried so much with this giant robot but let's explore slowly.

I LOVE the way is constantly telling us that LUFFY IS NOT JOYBOY HIMSELF! JoyBoy is dead, so it can't be him, Elmeth said it by himself(?) And I think that was such a beautiful writing, "there's no way that you are still alive but it looks alike you so much, I can't avoid to feel like that time" (forgive my bad translation pls)

The sense of nostalgia of Elmeth knowing that JoyBoy is dead but even with that he can still see him through Luffy in a certain way that even if it's not JoyBoy, it's still similar to him.

And this is what I love about Oda, he literally went directly to say "Luffy is Luffy", hiw personality, his story, his goals and motivations are because of his own persona, not only because being related to JoyBoy and I like the way just reafirm by saying "I think you confused me with another person", he is just unaware of all the comparision and history JoyBoy could have because he doesn't think as himself as JoyBoy.

And finally, the part that broke my heart was when Elmeth was talking to JoyBoy and they are full "I will help you from the past" and "thank you, it makes me really happy because when you died I will know that you would still be by my side" "there's a lot of time yet, so much time that is hard to me to think that I will be alone in the future"

BOY I WAS BAWLING MY EYES. It's just the way so sweet that Elmeth talks about and to JoyBoy, you can sense his love for this person that now It's just vanished in time and that is a vague memory from someone in the past. THE WHOLE ANGST IS SO HEARTBREAKING.

And as someone in grief, this hits double, because it's a feeling that I have feel due to missing my beloved ones, it's a feelings that a lot of people have of wanting to know that no matter what, the other one would be always with us even if they are not in a physical state and it just hit me so hard.

And this stuff is what makes One piece so especial to me, the way that made me cried isn't normal, this knot in my throat because the grief felt so real when I was reading. It just the nostalgic aspects that really push me more as well.

A lot of people focus more intol the whole haki revealed and the way JoyBoy looks but to me the most precious part of One piece would be this type of emotional writing.

[quetzalpapalotl]

Jack Vessalius, Jack Vessalius, Jack Vessalius, ah...

The heroic/mentor figure turning out to be the bad guy is a common enough trope, but Jack is such a fascinating good and the trope is so well-executed it's very satisfying.

I am sure someone could figure out, lot's of things take on a new light on re-read. But at least in my side of the fandom we were fooled for years, fully buying the "u.u I killed my best friend with my own two hands, please don't call me hero" act. Wow, such a tormented noble soul. Until retrace 65 dropped and Jack attacked Leo and Gilbert remembered being wounded by him, and we finally get to see Lacie and she's meeting Jack and we all lost it and started reconsidering everything we know.

And I think one of the things that sold it for so long was that there were red-herrings on the narrative itself. Before all of this, Jack was presented as this larger-than-life figure casting a shadow over Oz, the direction of Oz's character arc was one of reafirming himself over his past life's identity to compliment his broader "I am here" arc. Jack having had relationships to Alice and Gilbert served that perfectly, reafirming Oz identity by seeing him for who he is and not as a remnant of Jack from whom they move on. And all of this works better if Jack is that golden hero. You sense the narrative role Jack has, so you don't think of giving him an entirely new one.

And then, even that previous direction wasn't empty promises. Oz overcoming Jack would have felt cheap if the answer was just that Jack sucks and he's better, but we discover a whole new depth of identity issues compared to which the Jack thing is small peanuts and Oz arc is still about reafirming his identity. Gilbert is still confronted by his old loyalties and chooses Oz instead. It's still teh same core story, but now Jack is a completely different shadow to Oz. And also, he betrayed me, personally.

I'm sure this is still all good for someone that reads it all in one go, but I can't express what it was like to face that reveal after literal years of trusting Jack. This is probaby why I'm obsessed with him.

[cto10121]

Re-watching the show def reafirmed my belief that at the beginning of the story Alina shouldn’t have had a LI(Mal).We should have git to know the character,her struggles and embrassing she’s Grisha. I mean no offends to Archie he did what he could to make Mal likeable but watching all these desperate stories makes it so obv he should have either never existed or have been killed at the begging. He has no real arc,he’s literally only there to love and protect Alina and he really overshadows any happiness or growth Alina achieved at the Little Palace since we’re constantly reminded he’s out there trying to find her,etc framing it as if Alina’s betraying him in some way by choosing to move on and what’s more gross is that Alina ends the season like she started it: on the run completely reliant on Mal,ugh.

Not going to lie, that’s why I love fics where Mal dies right off the bat or he disappears from the story altogether. It would have been like that scarf: His death marking the beginning of her passage into her new life. But as the show can’t do that, there are only two ways that I can see to salvage this mess and give him a proper character arc:

Make Alina genuinely morally gray and him being her voice of reason, royal-advisor/bodyguard style. That would at least justify why they can’t be fully together but also build some romantic tension and also bonus setting up Darklina. It would also exemplify the theme of power corrupts properly without the preachiness. Not at all my favorite, but that’s one solution.

Bring back Mal’s feelings of alienation and his dislike of Alina’s new status, but have Alina or the show narrative call him out for it. A lot of the problem in the book is that Mal’s lack of support for Alina is never called out for what it is—and that makes it terrible. But the show could have a true reckoning. Maybe when Alina says that iconic “Never” line...it really marks the beginning of the end. The only problem with this is that show!Mal is consistently supportive of Alina and her powers. Then again, as he is canonically uncomfortable with Grisha (“Grisha women scare me”...again, we see that insecurity) and as he even visibly struggles with his discomfort when Alina uses her powers for the first time in front of him...it well may be that he didn’t truly realize the ramifications of Alina’s power and what that means for their relationship until it does. A good writer could frame the inevitable conflict like that. Both Book and Show Mal still see themselves as a protector of Alina, but how do you protect someone with more power than you? Book!Mal could not handle that threat to his masculinity; maybe show!Mal could struggle a bit too before Alina makes him decide, give him an ultimatum, or he decides to accept his new place in her life. The show can get rid of some of his more assholey moves, no problem, like him kissing Zoya, but keep the central conflict.

Both options allow for a Malina endgame and a Mal-goes-with-someone-else-maybe-Ruby one, but for obvious reasons, I doubt that will happen. The showrunner already confirmed “lots of kisses” for Malina, so either they’re going to change their minds about that very quickly or that’s their plan at least and, well...remember when they said we would hate the Darkling and shot down Darklina?

[otomelavenderhaze]

Nobody ever asked me this, but If someone ever asked in which episode I would think that Candy said “I love you” to Rayan, plain, simple and direct, I would like to think that would be between episode 17 and episode 18 of mclul.

Episode 18 is when actually Rayan tells her direct that, just minutes before they go and tell her parents about their relationship, which I guess is okay. 

But imagine if they did it in episode 17, where there’s just Nathaniel’s arc still happening in the background, but when they finally got more time together, more freely. 

I think she would tell him after deciding be open about it with her parents, and I think she would be actually very smooth about it kkkkk like “afterall, they need to meet the man I love at some point” and just taking him totally off guard xD and of course, Rayan would be like “’the man you love’ you said” and she would just shrug, smiling “Exacly, I don’t think I will be able to fool them any longer, because I’m hopeless in love, you see.”

And he would give the most handsome of the smiles, chuckle, then tell her that just how much he loved her back, that he have loved her for a long time now, but wasn’t sure if telling it before would make her feel uncomfortable or compelled to tell him that back. Which she will call him silly, because he really is and just reafirm that indeed, she loves him too and also for a long time already too. 

Like, I’m up for what they did in episode 18, but she doesn’t say it back. I got upset because of it. But I guess, the important is not saying it, but showing..... even if, as a person that voicing feelings are important and valid, that being direct and honest is just the best way to be in a relationship, I really thinking that saying it word by word is very significant. 

But yeah, if I could choose, I would pick episode 17 for it instead of episode 18 in a party, in the middle of telling her parents that they’re dating :’) even if when he said it, my heart literally stopped because I wasn’t expecting at all. 

[chilvanakin]

If I had to remember how it started, I would have to replay the flashback of being told that when I became obese at 15, that I couldn’t “come crying”. I was 8 when my dad told me this. Afterwards, I had this increasing feeling of being in the wrong body, like I had been misplaced at birth and was suddenly realizing it. I looked around at everyone else, having fun and enjoying their childhood while I compared me to them. I compared me to my best friend who I often I asked, “why can’t I look like you?”

I felt misplaced in a body that was my own, always had been, because someone else told me I was. How do you teach an 8 year old to go on a diet? I loved food, I was a picky eater but aren’t we all at that age? So how do you tell them that they need to change and that they don’t look pretty enough without traumatizing them? My dad now reafirms that he only said that to me because he wanted me to have high self esteem. He wanted me to “take care of myself”.

I developed anorexia at 14. I became obsessed with diet culture, “clean” eating, and exercising until I colapsed. I used my notebooks for tracking my daily intake and writing hateful messages to myself. I would motivate myself through my own hatred. Slowly, I decreased my meals until they weren’t even meals anymore. I thought I was being “healthy” by going on 3 to 4 day fasts, thinking that the kiwi I had before I began was enough. Newsflash, it wasn’t. But I continued.

My family situation got complex during this time. My parents were separated and I felt alone. I distanced myself from my friends and I had also stopped going to school. Everytime I talked to my dad through Skype, he would comment on how I was too thin. Amazingly so, I thought he was complimenting me. I got more and more obsessed, the loss of my period and hair became my motivation. The internet was my best friend because I read all about the “tips & tricks” of starving. I was tired, lonely, cold and angry. I had no patience and I was insufferable. This is what being malnourished will do to you.

After months and months of these rituals that and rules that seemed like an endless of “how to die in 10 days”, I tried to recover. How? By getting into fitness. I did Insanity while I was recovering, which was bullshit because that is NOT recovery. I didn’t challenge myself, I didn’t give my body time to rest- I exercised every day, I underfed and I normalized exhaustion. I was terrified of chocolate, processed foods and fats. The thought of putting on weight became a source of nightmares, LITERALLY. I would have NIGHTMARES about looking down at my body and seeing fat start to accumulate over my bones. Somehow, I thought that since I was exercising and eating more than my standard oatmeal and toast, that I was recovered.

I went to live with my father at 15. I feel like this decision shaped me as a person because I was forced to grow up way too fast. I made choices that no one should make a 15 year old make. At this point in time, I had put on weight and I was no longer exercising. My dad had a baby with this girlfriend of the time and all I wanted to do was be with my new baby brother. I didn’t think about food or dieting because I felt like somehow, watching him eat made me be at peace with food. My baby brother was growing and being nourished by the food we gave him and I wanted to make sure he was never hungry. It made me feel so happy to watch him laugh and wobble his way over to his mom for lunch time. I loved seeing him nibbling with a toothless mouth on a soft cookie, and offering the slobbered leftovers to me. That all stopped very suddenly, because my dad would start to make comments. Not only him, but his girlfriend too. Comments about how I was “eating too much” and how I “would look better if I was smaller”. I was experiencing extreme hunger when I moved in with my dad, because I had stopped exercising and my body no longer was focusing the energy on repairing my muscles, it was focusing on repairing me as a whole. I HAD to eat a lot because I needed to be healthy again. This was thrown completely out of the window and I caved into my disordered brain again. I felt almost grateful to them for motivating me to start losing weight again because I thought that it meant that they cared. So the food rules started again. It’s just that this time I didn’t need to learn the tips and tricks, I already knew them. Losing weight was easier now, and faster. So 2013 was the year I dedicated to my disorder. I restricted long enough that my hunger cues began to fade away. I thought that my body had gotten used to what I was eating. A green apple in the morning, some lettuce leaves and half a red bell pepper for lunch, and a single serving of prepackaged soup at night. My brain stopped screaming at me and I stopped thinking. I was reduced to being a zombie of my disorder. I stopped singing, I stopped writing, I stopped making art. I never cried, I laughed only when I was around other people. My body felt numb. I felt numb.

I remember taking showers and watching as day by day the fur growing all over my bones got longer and longer. I later found out that this is called “lanuga” which happens when you have lost an extreme amount of fat and your body reacts as an attempt at survival by growing these hairs, desperately trying to protect you. I felt tired, I couldn’t carry my baby brother anymore. He would ask me to hold him and I would try, but be very afraid of dropping him so I would have to refuse. I remember how upset he looked, we were so close. He loved being with me but I was so scared of him watching me do these things to myself. What if he learned from me? What if my actions stayed in his subconscious? I tried putting distance between us because of my fears. I hate myself for that because I miss him so much now, I miss the days we would spend and the naps we would take. I can’t take back that time.

We went to the doctor because I now, was at the brink of death. Truly I wish that I could say I’m being dramatic about that, but I’m not. My heart was weak and I could barely move. I was no longer sleeping and even sitting down hurt. My bones felt like knives crushing into my skin. I learned that I was at risk of heart failure and if I didn’t start recovering now, the next step would be having a tube thrusted down my throat. Force feeding. I couldn’t ever let that happen so I decided to once again, embarc on a lonely recovery path. As soon as I left the doctors, I told my dad to buy me chocolate. In response, he was annoyed. He thought that I was going to use my “verge of death illness” as an excuse to get obese. I cannot make this up y’all. He didn’t buy me shit and barked at me about how “you can eat at home”. Please, if anyone you know is going through restrictive eating disorder and they say they want chocolate- BUY THEM THE FUCKING CHOCOLATE!

I began refeeding and it was the most difficult thing I had ever done in my life. I couldn’t stomach food. I would eat and instantly have diarrhea. I had to have baby sized portions of food to be able to hold it down. This caused my weight to drop more, so I was now at the point where I actually did need to be hospitalized. I was afraid that I was going to die at any given point of the day. My dad once told me that “just because you have to start eating again doesn’t mean you can get as fat as you used to be”. I cried. This was the first time I had cried in so long. My numbed down feelings reflourished. The hate, the anger, the sadness I bottled up began overflowing. I didn’t stop eating, I gave myself the time I had to so I could stabilize myself. I was sent to go spend a few months with my dad’s girlfriend’s family. I barely knew these people, but they couldn’t handle me being this sick anymore. They didn’t want me. I was a bad influence to my brother. I was hurting them. My dad would have hated me if I told him I needed to be in the hospital, because that’s too much money so this was the easy way out. I guess if I needed to be hospitalized while I was there, it wouldn’t have to come out of his pocket.

I hated being away from my baby brother. I hated acting happy all the time when I was so depressed and furious. I tried making friends during my time away and all of them idolized my sick body. They asked me how I got to that point. I remember telling them I was sick, that I had to eat. They made me feel like that wasn’t neccesary, that I looked like a model. I ate anyway. I couldn’t go back home and still be sick, that would mean that I would be hated by them and maybe even have to leave home.

After a few months I gained some weight. I went back home. I asked my dad’s girlfriend if I was “fine now”, as in “am I not scary anymore”. She said I still looked very thin, but that it was fine. She told me not to go overboard. This meant “DO. NOT. GET. FAT.”

My dad and his girlfriend separated after a year and a half of my recovery. This whole period was very stressful since I was left alone with my dad. I was weight restored and I found some kind of peace with having no peace. I lived with the comments as a daily thing. “Don’t eat that, why don’t you do some arm exercises, you don’t really want that, why don’t those pants fit you anymore.” I got used to feeling foreign in my body. So being extremely malnourished was bad, bein inbetween wasn’t good enough and being restored to my set weight was just awful. I had no idea who I was or what I was supposed to be. I hated myself and I got used to that.

I am now 23 years old and I relapsed a few months ago. I understand now that I was never recovered. I was begging for help for years, but I got irritation and annoyance as a response. I never stopped having food rules, I never stopped being afraid of food. I cannot recover until my brain is completely rewired. I have to eat. I have to lose my fear around food. I have to HATE my disorder and push it out of every one of my pores until I am completely cleansed of it. I remember reading about how “this disorder never leaves you and you will always struggle with it”. I believed that for so long. I believed that I was never going to stop being afraid. I’m tired of feeling comfortable with my anorexia when it has ruined me to the point of feeling completely astranged from my body. I want to know who I am and not hate myself for it. I can’t recover fully until I rewire myself. Keep this with you. You cannot believe you are recovered just because some doctor tells you that you are weight restored. Your food rules need to disappear competely, you need to challenge yourself even if it terrifies you. I am so afraid, but I don’t ever want to go down this disordered path again. I want to spend time with the people that love me and not let anything get in my way. I am young and I am smart. So are you. Eat your fears.

[fightmeyeats]

ACNH: Colonial Desires in the Context of Quarantine

Since finishing up my undergraduate studies in June, one of the major things I've been doing with my free time is playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons (please don't @ me but I've already logged something like 400 hours). As much fun as the game is, one of the things that's really stood out to me is how much AC:NH depends on and reifies colonial logics, and how important it is to unpack this in the context of the game's popularity and the ongoing pandemic.

One of the first ways I want to address colonialism in AC:NH this is through the way I was first introduced to it, namely through its connection to my thesis and what I refer to as the "terraforming imaginary". Before I started playing or had even decided to buy the game, I was working on my thesis "Constructing New Worlds: An Investigation of Climate Change and the Terraforming Imaginary" (which, shameless self plug but if you're interested you can check out my 10 minute video presentation for symposium at Johns Hopkins University here). During this time I was talking about my thesis pretty non-stop with anyone who would listen and as a result probably about half of my friends independently sent me this meme

[ID: meme from @animalcrossingmemes which shows two children; the one on the left is smiling and looking off into the distance with the label "daydreaming about terraforming" while the child on the right looks stressed and upset with the label "actually terraforming". Beneath this meme is text from @kaijuno which reads "I realize this is an animal crossing meme but as an astrophysicist I was really excited for a second that someone was finally seeing the light on how fricking difficult an a huge waste of time it would be to try to terraform Mars". Beneath this text is another meme with four hands gripping each other's wrists to make a circle. In the center is the initial animalcrossingmemes image and each arm is labeled, respectively, "Minecraft Players," "Sims Players," "Animal Crossing Players," and "Astrophysicists apparently"]

Although my thesis addresses terraforming in the context of space exploration/colonization, AC:NH's engagement with "terraforming" (alongside other aspects of colonial practices and desires) helps to expand on the stakes of this. The reason I put "terraforming" in scare-quotes is because…technically, there isn't any terraforming in AC:NH, given that terraforming is "the operation consisting of rendering other stellar bodies—mainly planets and eventually asteroids—appropriate for human life" (Frédéric Neyrat, 46). While I'm all down for an interpretation of the Animal Crossing world as a non-Earth planet and the villagers as aliens, the island is already suitable for human life and the use of "terraforming" in the game is generally more readily identifiable as geoconstructivism: players redesign and restructure their islands, shaping waterways and topography to create idealistic spaces (as opposed to making the island literally livable). Either way, it speaks to the terraforming imaginary—the underlying set of logics and desires conducive to the imagining and desiring of “terraforming”, ie the logics and desires of colonization. Even though AC:NH's terraforming isn't technically terraforming, it is an embodiment of the terraforming imaginary, centering desires for the "civilizing"/"cultivating" of a space into an orderly, colonized ideal. On even a very surface level it is useful to think about this through the island rating system: islands are ranked out of five stars, with deductions made for things such as having "too many" weeds or not "cleaning up" by leaving items lying around rather than placed with intention. 

Another, perhaps more obvious, way in which AC:NH embodies colonial logics is through the "Nook Miles Tickets". Players trade in Nook Miles (an achievement based currency) for tickets which they can take to the airport and use to visit other, uninhabited islands which they can destroy to extract all of the resources slash-and-burn style. Players also have an increased likelihood of catching rare insects, fish, and sea animals to display to their own island museum or sell. As Wilbur, a dodo pilot, explains about this process: "we run the 'finders keepers' protocol here. Lumber, fruit, fish, whatever? Yours if you can carry it", going on to emphasize the importance of not leaving anything behind as there will be no returning; they "burn the flight plans" after each flight.

Although the rampantly destructive extraction of resources is the most apparent embodiment of colonial logics, the centrality of the museum and the imperative to complete each wing by finding and identifying all of the bugs, fish/sea creatures, fossils, and artworks in the game is an equally significant connection to colonialism. Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities that the museum, along with the census and the map, "shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry" (164). The specifics Anderson goes into differ of course, because he's talking about actual colonial states while AC:NH has the fluidity of embodying the underpinning desires which colonialism as process requires to function, but what holds true is that these specific forms of producing, organizing, and displaying knowledge which produced "a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility...to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there" (Anderson 184). Essentially, in AC:NH part of a player's ownership of the island occurs through a player's ability to classify and collect artefacts for the museum. Furthermore, this imperative to collect and preserve fossils, art work, bugs, fish, and sea creatures is part of the way the player's island is positioned as a place of value. 

The museum also implicitly functions to reify positions of authority, legitimizing a kind of monopoly of knowledge. In AC:NH, this primarily means the positions of the museum curator (Blathers) and, to a degree, Tom Nook (who selected and invited Blathers) are secured as the authorities on knowledge. When Tom Nook tells the player that the island(s) are deserted, we must take this as truth...yet fishing both on the player's island and the Nook Miles islands can turn up trash items like old tires, tin cans, and boots. Colonial logics depend on a management of who counts as "people" and what counts as "inhabited" and the myth of empty lands; Tom Nook's instance that these islands are all deserted is haunted by these lingering traces of some other inhabitation prior to the game's start. 

Okay, so you might be asking what does this all mean and why should we care? Let's talk about both the game's popularity and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which contextualized its release (and continues to shape daily life). Animal Crossing: New Horizons has not only received overwhelmingly positive critical reception, but is one of the best selling games both for the Switch console and the Animal Crossing series. According to freelance journalist Imad Khan's New York Times article "Why Animal Crossing Is the Game for the Coronavirus Moment," the game's appeal centers in its function as an escape to an "island paradise where bags of money fall out of trees and a talking raccoon can approve you for a mortgage". Khan quotes Dr. Ramzan (a professor of game narrative at Glasgow Caledonian University) who refers to it as "the universe you’ve always wanted, but can’t get." Given the significantly decreased mobility and connection that has accompanied social distancing, as well as the increased stress and heightened inequality which have accompanied COVID-19, this probably isn’t particularly surprising. It makes sense that a cute, low-stress video game would be a valuable form of escapism.

Mobility is a particularly fraught discourse in this context: on the one hand, concerns surrounding containment/immobility are heightened in the context of neoliberalism and within colonial societies, which depend upon discourses of individualism and independence to demarcate the “freedom” which comes from capitalist economies. At the same time, the desire for things like connection/community, movement, and spatial autonomy/sovereignty are not inherently colonial, even as colonialist logics frequently position colonial/capitalist/neoliberal expansion as the solution. Animal Crossing is heavily situated within this entanglement, simultaneously offering a very real form of connection (and even protest) for many people while also implicitly speaking to latent beliefs that colonization is a legitimate form of mobility and escapism. To say that AC:NH is the universe we’ve always wanted but can’t get is to refuse to engage with the inherent contradictions of neoliberalism and reafirm the notion that colonial capitalist worlds are worth wanting; that the fantasy of individual wealth and success through destructive extraction and market freedom, when obtainable, is good.

None of this is to say that playing AC:NH is the same as colonization, because of course it isn't. However, the colonial undertones of the game reflect the pervasiveness of colonial logics and desires in our daily lives, subsequently further normalizing them. Journalist Kazuma Hashimoto, for example, emphasizes the importance of contextualizing AC:NH's colonial undertones within Japanese Colonialism in "Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Japanese Colonialism". As Hashimoto argues, "I am only asking that people familiarize themselves with Japanese colonialism and why something as innocuous as discovering a deserted island can be read as colonialism — especially within the context of a Japanese game".

Inattentiveness to the more subdued, invisibilized manifestations of violence facilitates their internalization and acceptance; educating ourselves and paying attention to and challenging places where we feel comfortable with these kinds of escapist fantasies is an important exercise in critical thinking which can help us to continue to refuse their real life manifestations. 

[rainhalydia]

Hi! This is really random, but you once mentioned that everyone who tries to play a father figure for Jon at the Wall is annoying. Could you tell more about that?

Hey! No problem at all :D

This comes with the caveat that Jon is my least liked pov, so I’ve only read his chapters twice, so if memory fails, that’s the reason.

This is kinda hard to articulate, but Jon is supposed to be very defined by his bastard status. And he is in some ways. Inside his head, he spends a considerable amount of time thinking about it. If I recall right, he hardly comes and says “and this is because I’m a bastard” all the time, but he thinks about his rivalry with Robb, the way he wishes he could prove himself a good son, how he wishes he could have Winterfell, etc., and he knows the reason why those things can’t be is because he is a bastard. He has made the connection. If anything, he reminds me a bit of Tyrion in this aspect: they have suffered prejudice so often that when they do something that causes negative reactions from people with good reason (Tyrion destroying the houses of the poor in KL, Jon beating up the other recruits), they fail to see what they did and blame it on regular prejudice.

With Tyrion, however, we are shown the prejudice he suffers constantly. With Jon, we are mostly told, and this weakens his story for me personally.

We are told bastards face many prejudices, that they are sinners by nature, that you can’t trust them, etc. So how is the taint of bastardy affecting Jon? He’s not inheriting anything, but neither are any siblings besides Robb. He sorely misses a mother figure, but that’s on Ned not telling him anything. He’s packed off to the Wall, but again, could have been avoided by Ned making plans for his future.

I BELIEVE that there are many, many downsides to being a bastard. But in Jon’s chapters, we mostly see how it affects his feelings. We aren’t shown a lot of how it affects his prospects, his social standing. Sure, someone calls him bastard to his face from time to time, but I’d like to see actual consequences. Other tertiary characters get them. Everyone feels entitled to go and interrogate Gendry about his dead mother regardless of his feelings about it, for example, and he’s blamed for rough-housing with Arya. Getting married to Joy Hill is considered an insult. Ramsay gets the smelly servant no one wants around for child-support.

This is where all the father figures come into it. By having all those important men in positions of traditional autority be eager to sponsor Jon, the point that being a bastard is hard is lessened.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I realize my dislike is about Jeor. I’ll allow Benjen wanting to be a father figure to Jon. I doubt he hadn’t put two and two together and realized this is Lya’s kid. He makes sense. I’ll give it to Qhorin and Tormund too. The first is more mentor than father-figure, he had reason to be impressed with Jon and he used him and his men to serve his mission the best he could. For the second, Jon was instrumental in saving Tormund’s people from the ice apocalypse. Hell, even Stannis, a little. Makes sense that the man who has an ex-smuggler as Hand and and ex-slave as a lover/advisor would not care about Jon being a bastard.

But with Jeor... the North is not supposed to be any more permissive about bartards than the rest of the continent. The Wall is supposed to, but in practice all the classism beliefs manifest there and blood is rewarded above competence all the time. And then we get Jon there, and he’s immediately picked as Jeor’s presumptive heir. What has Jon done that is so impressive at that point? He threw tantrum after tantrum because the Wall is harsh, because he’s not a Ranger, because he doesn’t get to go with his uncle beyond the Wall. He beat his fellow recruits. He gets better, but so fast that suddenly he’s next Lord Commander material in Jeor’s eyes? We the readers know that Jon is a good person with good skills, and his humanitarian perspective is essential in the fight against the Others, but at that point, Jeor doesn’t have any of that information.

So I’m left thinking that Jeor picked him because he’s the bastard son of Ned Stark, and the Starks are one of the noble families that act as supporters for the Night’s Watch, and Jeor as a former Lord would have had some relationship with Ned. So here Jon’s bastard status is not the burden we are told it is, but the thing that first propels his ascention through the ranks.

And that comes into play with Stannis a bit too, with the whole thing where he’ll grant Jon Winterfell if Jon backs him as king. He could give Winterfell to literally anyone who proves himself to him, but he offers it to Jon because he thinks it’ll easy the transition and make the northern lords trust him more if he puts a Stark there.

Because to those men, Jon was a true Stark all along and that is something worth exploring.

Through these pseudo-fatherly connections, Jon’s bastardy is undermined and ironically, the Stark connection he had with Ned (the only father he wants) is reafirmed. Even though Jon’s whole deal should be that, however loved by his family, he couldn’t truly belong due to being a bastard and thus an outsider.

Besides, Jeor raised Jorah, so his Dad credentials are not that good.

I get that this is all maneuvering to put Jon into the position he needs to be for his plot, but I think GRRM’s hand was too heavy on the scales right at the beginning and it made the start of Jon’s story weaker for me. He gets better later, which is also why I have more tolerance for Tormund as a father figure to Jon than for Jeor.

[sodomymcscurvylegs]

Was there any time in your when you weren't an SJW?You got those typical anti-logic characteristics. If you don't want to have sex with black people you're racist. When something is a disadvantage for black people it automaticall is racist. I assume you also think white men have easy lives and are privileged,racist and abusive. And generally black people can't be racist and the system of many countries including the USA is against minorities. Have you ever had the idea to overthink your mindset?

“I don’t like you calling out systematic racism and oppression, so your commentary is ‘anti-logic’.”What a lot of people forget is that I’m Latino but I can also be white passing and I have literally experienced the difference in person. My brother looks pretty much like me but has a Spanish accent and is brown; you should how often he gets profiled in ways I never do and probably never will. The thing about white people such as yourself, anon, is that you would rather live in a bubble than actually ever have to put any effort into changing the system you inhabit and working on not perpetuating such systems of power. What you want is to do the easy thing, but you also want to have a clean conscience. The problem is that you can’t have both, because you know factually that there’s a schism here: racist social systems exist, and your behavior 100% perpetuates them, but you don’t wanna feel the guilt of that. So what do you do? Pretend like every oppressed minority is wrong: you get to have your cake and eat it too. Benefit from racism and oppression of others with none of the guilt. Or, at least, you tell yourself so. But you know, don’t you? That deep down inside, you’re wrong. That will probably haunt you for as long as you’re in denial. I can’t imagine it can be fun to live with such level of cognitive dissonance daily just to reafirm my own biases.Best of luck to you.

[dachi-chan25]

If Jon is not playing Dany's pasty-white ass, then I'm just going to accept that he's a stupid dude with an unhealthy attraction to crazy, creepy, and psychotic women (Ygritte, Melisandre, and Dany). NO TASTE! LMAO

Anoooony, you are so right.But my hopes that Jon is playing Dorito hasn’t faded at all, It’s all in the subtext of their relationship (or lack of) even in 7x07:

-Dragonpit scene actually made me snort a lot, because isn’t this completely OOC for Jon “there is only one war that matters Snow to refuse to be neutral? He hasn’t bent the knee (“I would bend the knee but–”)not really, you know in the same way that Arya ‘who longed for her family ’ Stark was OOC threatening Sansa and shit when it was a ploy to kill LF. I meaaaan the idea of going to Cersei in the first place was to appease Danita, cuz she cared more about the throne that the WW, if she didn’t then why was this meeting necessary at all? To increase their numbers? Well yes, but Cersei’s army is not that big anymore thanks to someone *side eyeing D Tapioca* and Tyrion most of all knows they can’t trust Cersei (dude he has been outplayed by her this whole season) and so does Jon (or he should) he was warned by Sansa, for me it’s clear he is playing his Northern Fool persona this hard because Cersei? She is not really necessary, sure is nice to have more people but at the end of the day D keeps being the ally he absolutely *needs* to secure and you saw her face when he said the bullshit? She was orgasming right there (cool for her cuz boatfuck seemed boring af)

-That talk about the Dragonpit, and how the Targaryens stopped being speshul snowflakes without Dragons (god the anti-d@enerys people have been saying this all the time and It’s nice to get confirmation from the D herself) and omg how awful is to be like everyone else (yikes) duuuude cry me a fucking river! Her family was a clusterfuck that brought doom and lots of conflict to Westeros, she is delusional and an hypocrite, she also chained and kept her dragons under a fucking pyramid because it was the responsible thing to do after one of them actually killed someone cuz their tamer wasn’t shit. And Jon? He would never admire nor care for someone so entitled, he was raised by Ned Stark ffs! his deadass response was ‘you aren’t like everyone’ talk about being vague af (they’ll come to see you for what you are’) yeah good you say that Jonny boy but if Imma buy a romance you got to tell me/her Why? What is it that sets her apart from everyone in your mind? Cuz otherwise she is just filling the blanks in her self-important mind and oh! Would you look at that? It almost make sense.

-The baby talk reafirmed the one-sided nature of this relationship, D once again opens up and talks about a very sad and traumatic moment in her life and Jon?? He is not sympathetic, he doesn’t say he is sorry about it, he just straight up says a half assed 'maybe the witch was lying?’ and keeps being closed-off about himself.

-The meeting in DS, D is the worst ruler again when she listens the advice of the guy she wants to fuck instead of the man who went through hell and back with her, a man who has shared everything he is/has done with her, and who has proved his loyalty (and kinda creepy love obsession) to her. Rather listen to the dude she just met that Tyrion Lannister who straight up risked his life to get Cersei to agree to stop hostilities with them after the lil’ stunt said random dude pulled. And I am not surprised, lots of people in Meeren told her to re-open the fighting pits (that really is a complicated issue in itself) cuz they were an important tradition people liked but she listened until Daario (her boy toy) told her to, if anything Jon is playing her in the best way. kudos!

-the sex. I wasn’t dreading the scene so much as the wank that was sure to follow, and tbh I kinda wanted it to be hot (hey if I was gonna watch such stupid, fake tension set up for Targbowl it better be super hot) K1t and €milita are very attractive but dude, what a fucking let down! I was straight up laughing, I am mostly a functional adult involved in sex-ed and proud member of the bdsm comunity of Mexico City, I don’t laugh at sex, last time I laughed at sex was when reading the 50sog first sex scene (and if you’ve read it you’ll know why, also I was 15 at the time). Okay so, I am an actress I have done sex scenes in theater mostly, if this was got’s epic romance and J0n was really conflicted about the depth of his feelings vs. Duty to the North he wouldn’t be the one initiating it point blank, there would have been a set up (Missandei and Greyworm anyone?), a conversation, sexy undressing some kind of foreplay! Cunnilinguis! If this fandom agrees in something is in Jon Snow being the God of Oral Sex, yet we get 20 seconds of missionary possition humping? In a season that had not one but two oral sex scenes? Something smells rotten in this (the red herring) and don’t even get me started in the voice over or the wierd ass focus on Tyrion.

Now onto Jon’s past tyrst/love interests? He didn’t have much option with them did he?

I mean I really liked Ygritte (much more in the books that the show because this friggin show never portrayed the soft side that made Jon really fall for her in the books) but Jon was playing her in the beginnig, he literally had to fuck her or die, he was a horny self-repressed boy that ended up catching feelings, and let’s be honest she also warmed him up and made him understand the wildlings which was huge for Jon’s development, but at the end he chose his duty, honor and vows.

Melissandre, she can’t even be considered as a tyrst or love interest, she was feeling him up and undressed for him (de to her creepy ass sex magic) and Jon rejected her, oh yes he was tempted (Carice Van Houten is hot af and he hadn’t had sex in a long time) but he still said no and held his ground, duuuude he didn’t fuck her or show any interest after she brought him back from death)

So we have stablished a very clear pattern of Jon being true to his love for the North, even if he has to decieve, do less that honorable stuff and yes forfeit love for it. Plus all the warnings, literal textual evidence of Jon not making the same mistakes as the honorable man he admired and came before him.

But Then again this is just my opinion. Hope this cheered you up and help you keep faith on Jon.

[macstarli]

I’ve been thinking about the revival some more (don’t know why I am doing this to myself...) and I think it’s really interesting that both act like the only major obstacle between them is odette. There is never really any mention made of the fact that Rory also has a significant other (even if she does keep meaning to break up with him...) or that she apprently feels free to sleep with other people like the wookie without it affecting either one of her relationships. 

It’s kind of fascinating because throughout the revival you can tell that Rory is the one pushing the whole ‘what happens in vegas...’ thing, whereas Logan keeps trying to push it just a little bit further towards being real. Right in the beginning he tells Rory ‘I wouldn’t do that to you’ when she asks if she’s gonna find other girls stuff (and I do think that it’s interesting that she asks about other girls, plural, because I think it’s one more way she’s trying to put distance between them. if Logan is cheating on his girlfriend in general and she’s just one of the many, it doesn’t mean anything (and I think it makes her feel less bad about being the other woman again, because it puts more blame on Logan and invalidates his relationship, so she’s not doing anything wrong because there’s nothing there to hurt) whereas if he’s faithful in general, but just makes an exception for her, their “thing” actually means something) and she response by reminding him about their vegas agreement. when she just says ‘vegas’ a bit later, you can actually hear him settling for it, because it’s what she wants, when he reafirms ‘yes, vegas...’. You can almost sense the regret he has from ever agreeing to that stupid rule, because it’s not what he wants at all. He wants to tell her that she means so much more him than they’re pretending, that he considers her someone who is an actual factor in his life and whose worthy of making an effort for, because she has a place in his life (and his aparment).

And I’m actually beginning to think that their last hurrah, wasn’t really meant to be just a last hurrah. It was his last push to say, hey, I know we’re more than we’re saying we are. When they talk in the club, he brings it up by saying ‘I should have told you about odette moving in’ and again he immediatly gets shut down by Rory’s answer ‘that wasn’t our agreement, you didn’t owe me anything’. But he doesn’t just leave it at that, he actually pushes a bit further saying ‘technically yes, but...’, trying to say that no matter what they had been saying, it was always more to him than that, that even if he didn’t technically owe her anything, he still wanted it to be more than that. And again she shuts him down a second time repeating ‘no strings’ from way back when and he caves. He tried, he really did, to have the conversation we all wanted them to have and she shut him down quite clearly, blocking his approach and signaling that it’s not something she wants to discuss. Which is so weird, because seconds later she asks him ‘are you really going to marry odette?’ like it’s gonna break her heart and I think he can see that, which is why he doesn’t say no or yes, just that it’s the dynastic plan (notice, not his plan), but he can’t really say anymore than that, because she literally just shot him down moments ago. He can’t tell her no, he doesn’t want to marry odette, he wants a life with her, because based on the agreement she just upheld again literally like a minute ago, he’s not supposed to do that. He tried and now the ball’s in her court and she doesn’t take it, even though she clearly wants to. Which is why I think that as heartbreaking as this scene is, it’s awful writing. Because while I get Logan’s mindset through out it, I really have no idea what makes Rory first double down on ‘what happens in vegas’ when clearly Logan is literally saying there’s more to it then that for him, only to then make a complete turn around and ask about odette like she’s expecting him to tell her, no, he doesn’t want that life and is so disapointed when he doesn’t do that as if he didn’t just try to do that ten seconds ago and she shut him down hard. Like seriously, what the fuck was that?

But it’s funny, because at the beginning of ep 3, Rory was trying to reach out a tiny little bit asking if she should come sooner only to realize that odette has moved in and suddenly it comes crashing down for her. Because I think as much as she was hiding behind ‘what happens in vegas...’ it didn’t really feel that way to her. It was a way of putting some artifical distance between them (i think to make her feel more in control), but nothing in their day to day interaction was based on it. She was clearly in the habit of randomly calling him to talk about things and I can imagine that he made a point of always making time to listen to her when she did, because he wanted to be the one being there for her. He probably loved that she let him be that person, giving him just a little bit of space in her life, even as she insisted that they didn’t mean anything to each other. So she probably never really felt like the other woman or like she was second to anything in his life because I’m guessing he made an effort to put her first as much as he could. And now Odettte’s moved in and they can’t pretend she doesn’t exist anymore. Rory can’t just crash at his place, using his computer and so on like she’s the only person in his life that has the right to do that. They actually have to start sneaking around like they’re doing something wrong and for the first time it’s hitting her that that’s really what they’ve been doing all along. It was just a whole lot easier with odette being all the way in france. 

And you can tell it’s killing Logan that he has to tell her about odette (which is why he doesn’t) and he tries to make it a non-thing, by just saying that he’ll book her a hotel room, because he’s not ready to let go, but he also doesn’t get a strong enough signal from Rory to push for more than what they’re doing right now. So he just tries to hold on to the little piece of her he still has even if probably already knows that odette moving is the end for them. And maybe a part of him was hoping that by forcing the issue, making things come to ahead, Rory would decide that she wanted more, that it would force the conversation he’s probably been wanting to have ever since they started their thing (which is why he’s telling her they’ll talk when she comes over in three weeks) , but of course Rory is just so flabergast by this development that it’s not gonna happen. And I do think that part of that is on Logan for not pushing a bit more, by just saying, come in three weeks like we planned and we’ll talk, like that’s what they’re going to be from now on, without adressing anything. Is she still gonna be staying in a hotel or is odette gonna be gone during that time? Even if odette is gone, Rory’s still gonna be moving around between all of her stuff and all of sudden it’s not just Logan’s place anymore, it’s odette’s as well. She’s also sleeping in that bed (which was always true, but probably easier to ignore without any reminders around), she also uses that kitchen, she’s tainted everything in that place and that must really suck because it also retroactively taints every memory in the aparment. And I bet there were a lot of good memories in there (we saw some of them) and she was probably used to hanging out in there alone, helping herself to anything in his fridge, using his computer and just generally feeling very much at home at his place (even when she tries to put some distance in there like when she asks about other girls stuff...). And now that’s all gone and she’s reminded that it was never her and Logan’s space. It was Logan’s and odette’s space and she was technically an intruder to that even if Logan certainly never felt like that. 

So now it’s real and when they talk again, she’s already upset about her fight with Lorelai, she hears her calling from the other room and now odette is an actually existing person, someone who has a voice and she’s right there with Logan and she cuts the cord and he let’s her, because I don’t think he knows what to do in that moment. He’s pushing her towards continung their relationship as is, telling her to talk to him and just ignore odette like they always have, except of course everything has changed. And you can tell how heartbroken Rory is when she tells him that they can’t even break-up, because they’re nothing. That this is what they come down to. Nothing. Even if she always insisted that’s what they were it still hurts her so much to realize that it’s actually true. And he doesn’t say anything, because what is there to say? The only possible thing is to tell her that he’s gonna break up with Odette and that has so many implications and consequences for their relationship and I really do think that that moment was not the right one for that particular conversation. Rory was absolutely not in the headspace for it, still feeling suckerpunched and reeling from the sudden re-evaluation of their relationship to this point and her fight with Lorelai. 

So I guess I give Logan a bit of a pass for not handling the ‘odette moved in’ conversation very well, because Rory never really reached out enough to give him a clear opening to ask for more or start having an actual conversation about their situation (on the contrary up to that point she had probably always shut down any attempts in that direction pretty consistently) and while I think there’s a possiblity that if odette hadn’t moved in and she had come over like she had considered, they might have moved towards that direction, they certainly weren’t there yet. And I think he planned on telling her when she came over, so when she called him and forced the issue he was probably just as blindsided as she was if only because I’m pretty sure he knew this was a face-to-face kind of conversation, not an over the phone one, but there was no way that was going to happen now and he just had absolutely no idea how to make this better in that moment, He probably knew they were doomed the moment she found over the phone, but still wanted to pretend there was a way to go on, because he didn’t want to loose her and certainly not like this. Her pronouncement that they were nothing must have hurt so much, because of course that’s not true. She still means the world to him and to have them end with so much bitterness and sadness and reducing everything they ever were (even they’re actual committed relationship in college) to this... Yeah, I’m so glad it didn’t end like that, even if the way they did end is still horrid writing, at least there was a lot of mutal respect there and an acknowledgment of everything they meant to each other and everything they were, even if it makes no fucking sense that they then don’t stay together, 

Okay, I’ve gotten so far off my original point by now, but I kinda feel like I gotta get back to it, which is that I think it’s kind of weird that in the end the revival treats odette (and therefore Logan for not breaking up with) like the obstacle between them rather than Rory’s insistance that they stick to their vegas agreement. Because while I can believe that the shock of odette moving in is enough for her to end their arrangment and break through her paper mache wall of trying to keep Logan in a box so it won’t hurt again (which I’m guessing is her reason, the revival never really made it clear...) to make her reach out in the club and ask if he’s really going to marry odette, it then makes no sense to have her revert back to her earlier stance earlier. Which I guess is kind of the point. Because I think the only reason that’s in there is because if Logan reaches out and she actually accepts it, they don’t get their full-circle crap. And if she reaches out and hasn’t just shut him down, there’s no way Logan’s not gonna drop everything and be with her so again, no full circle. So the only way to get both their full circle ending and both Rory and Logan saying goodbye full of longing for each other (rather than just saying one or both doesn’t love the other) is to throw in Rory’s vegas agreement as the insurmountable obstacle for Logan and odette as the insurmountable obstace for Rory. So basically they somehow wrote themselves into a corner in a planned out 4 episode show and in order to get their stupid full-circle thing they decided to bend everyone involved into bretzels. Well done! Because even if you’re okay with their starting points, that’s still some pretty shitty writing.