#i think this is part of why opinion is very split on this one - perhaps a mindset thing of being able to understand this level of obsession

[waywardtrek]

when i tell you that that level of observing your surroundings + weaving said surroundings into maladaptive daydreaming/intrusions/delusions + controlling and willing the narrative of your body into doing things based on fundamental abject fear is me to the fucking core, and that i have (actual, diagnosed) OCD and have always suspected glennis dennis presents many classic symptoms of OCD too, what then?

[seraphdesire]

Regarding Donna Beneviento and her characterisation in the fandom, I think it's important to note that she really isn't the shy awkward adorable blushing mess that everyone depicts her as being.

This got long but I did a mildly extensive read on her character under the break! :)

Here are the notes I took a screencap of, written by Mother Miranda, which talks about the suitability of Donna being a vessel for Eva:

There's the evidence you need that she is severely mentally ill, so babying her just feels... wrong anyway, all things considered.

Note - "and has divided her Cadou among her dolls in order to control them from a distance." While I'm on my 3rd replay of re8 I still don't fully get how the Cadou works, but what I think is essentially happening is Donna is literally splitting off parts of herself and putting them in her dolls.

The main one being Angie, of course.

I always used to consider Angie a separate character entirely but she's linked deeply to Donna on a very personal level. Considering what she's like and what all the other dolls are like - loud, funny, sarcastic, rude, etc - and how Donna is literally the one directly controlling Angie (that's the only way she moves lol, because Donna is carrying her places. Which is also why, when you kill Angie, the illusion melts away to reveal that you've actually killed Donna), I think it's safe to say that's what her actual personality is like.

Also, her only spoken line of dialogue? Please listen to it. For those who are hard of hearing, like me, she says: "don't leave... I can't let you."

Bearing in mind the way she speaks? Her tone? She sounds confident imo. Determined. And perhaps even a little angry at Ethan for thinking he can escape her.

Just a last addition as well, can I say that her abilities as one of the Four Lourds is genuinely evil? Everyone else has physical intimidation - Alcina has her height and her claws and mutation, Heisenberg has his ability to control magnetic fields and metal, and Moreau can mutate into that huge fish-with-legs thing that vomits something akin to acid? Oh yeah and he can swallow you whole too.

Donna, on the other hand, doesn't have physical intimidation like that. She only has the threat of psychological damage (which makes sense considering she's severely mentally unwell). When Ethan goes through her gardens and has to solve the puzzles in the house, she makes him hallucinate about his wife whom he thinks is dead, and about his baby who is somewhere in this unknown country with a bunch of mutants who only have bad intentions.

It's even worse in the Shadows of Rose DLC imo. As Rose, Donna makes her hallucinate the bullies from back home, being called a freak and a weirdo, made to relive the worst moments of her life. And the puzzles too? Hell. Having to actually recreate the scenes of her bullying with wooden fucking dolls. I remember feeling really sorry for Rose while playing through that part.

And yet Donna is still "the uwu baby" because what? I don't know. People love to declaw female villains just because they're attractive (looking at Lady Dimitrescu here). They love to reduce the characters down to their looks and not consider their actual lore or background or the role they play in the franchise (looking at Leon especially...)

Which, ya know, of course people are allowed their headcanons for characters and Donna doesn't get enough screentime to really have her personality even thought of, let alone to be made canon. But I think it's fair to say that Angie and Donna are basically one and the same because they're literally the same Cadou.

This is a quick reminder that you are, of course, allowed to disagree with me. Everyone has their own opinions and that's fine. If you would like to politely debate about this in my comments or in my DMs, or even in my asks, then you're more than welcome to! Please remember debating and arguing are two different things though.

If it really irks you that bad then please scroll, it's not hard. If you don't want to do that then feel free to block me - the button is free of charge after all and should be used more to cultivate your feed to your liking.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

OMG RAVEN YOU’RE INTO EVER AFTER HIGH? I love it but can’t talk about it bc none of my friends have seen it 😭 I wish it was talked about more, especially with how deep their lore runs. I love EAH’s dynamics with the complexities of destiny. If twst followed the same logic as eah’s world it would be so interesting. How would you feel if the worlds were to mesh together and how it would work? You can interpret that in any way you want; the characters meeting or twst being bound to the same rules and societal expectations of eah, or whatnot.

Also who’s your favorite eah character compared to your favorite twst character (Leona)?Jade, right?

And have you read the eah books? I haven’t, but I’m going to try to sometime!

Eah alt account when?

I'm still salty that the Monster High x Ever After High crossover movie never saw the light of day-- Part of the reason why I don't like Disney (I mean the faceless corpo, not all Disney products) is because they have such a strong association with fairy tales that it pushes other interpretations out of the market or it leads to people assuming Disney "owns" those fairy tales. Ever After High's lore and themes run so much deeper than most other fairy tale reimaginings I've seen (and I've seen a lot). It's such a shame it doesn't get the respect and recognition it deserves even though EAH is the one out here challenging the status quo whereas modern Disney is content with mediocrity that appeals to the masses.

I think EAH and TWST, at their cores, share similar ideas so combining them would work well. Friendship, self-identity, defining your own future, questioning what "good" and "evil" truly are... It's all there. I'd imagine that if Twisted Wonderland (or at least NRC) followed the same rules as EAH, then everyone would be descendants of their Disney counterparts. (This is actually a common misperception of what TWST was to new fans; people mistakenly believe the TWST characters are children of the classic Disney villains. This has never been canon.) Unfortunately, I'd have to take away the Disney villains being twisted to be "good" guys in Twisted Wonderland's world in order for this to work by EAH rules, so... There's that to consider. This, in turn, can result in the student body splitting into Royals (pro-following one's destiny) and Rebels (anti-following one's destiny). Perhaps RSA and NRC could be one school in this AU...? Just so we have a mix of "good" and "evil" descended children in the same vicinity as one another. A must-have are the constantly bickering Narrators!! It's only really when Yuu shows up that the majority opinion starts to shift. Maybe then Crowley becomes concerned with students rising up and fighting back against the system that relies on them being complacent to keep the cycle of stories going. I've seen some readings of EAH which theorize that Royals guaranteed a happy ending is a stand-in for privilege, and that interpretation leads into very interesting conflicts when we also consider that magic in Twisted Wonderland is a privilege afforded to few.

To cover just the dorm leaders (because covering all the TWST characters would make this post way longer), I definitely see Riddle, Kalim, Idia, and Malleus as Royals and Leona, Azul, and Vil as Rebels. Here's my thought process:

Riddle is pretty self-explanatory. He comes from a background where he's used to being told what to do by his mother and so he also heavily relies on her strict, unyielding teachings to play by the book when he goes out there in the real world. Riddle is inflexible and hesitant to go against the grain--and, more importantly, he fully believes that following the rules will lead to his happiness... that doing as his fairy tale ordains will lead to a happy ending. What happens to the Queen of Hearts is dubious in the end since it's framed as Alice's dream, so I think that vagueness gives Riddle hope that by behaving himself, he'll earn the happiness he desires.

Leona is a Rebel, and not just because that's the aesthetic of his dorm. Being that he is highly intelligent and demonstrates a lot of foresight, he'd be aware of what future is in store for him and aggressively fighting against that. It would make him more desperate than ever to prove his worth, because not only does everyone see his powers as terrifying, but they also see him as a future brother murderer and dictator that will bleed the land dry of resources. It'd make the situation with his family even more strained than it already is, not to mention the extra jealousy he must feel toward Cheka, who is still too young to understand what's going to happen later.

Azul is someone who acts like a Royal but is actually a Rebel. He acts polite and like he plays by the rules, but clearly he doesn't behind the scenes. I see Azul as the kind of Rebel akin to Duchess Swan... as in, he believes he can steal away someone else's destiny for himself. Azul would constantly be looking for loopholes to save himself. He's put way too much stock into becoming a better, stronger person and he'd want to defend this new life he has made for himself. His obsession with protecting his contracts could translate well here.

Kalim is a Royal because he's mega rich and has been sheltered from the concept of bad things that happen to normal people; he has nothing to worry about. It also helps that Kalim is twisted from a character that doesn't meet a bad ending. I think he'd be aware of Jami's doomed destiny, but Kalim is so ignorant that he thinks it'll just be fine and it'll work itself out. Part of his growth could be being forced to reckon with the reality that Jamil is suffering under the legacy assigned to him and accepting the role that he plays in that by not acting.

Idia is a Royal--or at least pre-book 6 Idia is. He's a very pessimistic guy and repeatedly expresses hopelessness about the future, bemoaning the curse he and his family have to bear. Idia doesn't want to try to fight his fate, he's already accepted that it will happen and so closes himself off from others to save himself that heartbreak. Post-book 6 Idia will have swapped over to the Rebel side thanks to Ortho reviving the hope in him.

Vil is a Rebel simply for the fact that he fights social conventions. He's already out here shattering gender roles, but finds it much harder to breach that expectation that villains are just villains and nothing more. Vil keeps getting rejected at every turn, told that it's impossible to rewrite his story, that his frustrations are the natural result of jealousy and an ugly heart that festers in side of him. He steels himself to prove that notion wrong, working himself to the bone to get up on that stage and stay on it, waiting to be lavished with praise that he truly is the fairest one of all. I feel this would be so fascinating for Vil's own arc about self acceptance; maybe he wears himself down emotionally because he HAS to basically be perfect due to his job but also denies himself normal feelings like anger and jealousy because confessing that you have such "ugly" feelings only validates that you're shallow just like the stories say you will be.

Malleus is a tough one, but I settled for Royal in the end. Maleficent is doomed to be slain by a sword, right? So am I saying that THE Malleus Draconia, who is infamously arrogant about his magical abilities, would lie down and take a stab like that? Of course not! However, I do think that Malleus is initially someone who values tradition and living up to noblesse oblige. As the future ruler of a nation, people's stories are relying on him to play his expected role out, which he'd be fully cognizant of. I also think Malleus would be afforded the luxury of not having to face his destiny as soon as his peers are due to his long life span. This is in part because the person destined to slay him doesn't come into his life for literally hundreds of years. Then when book 7 arrives, Malleus has to deal with his loved ones leaving and/or betraying him as well as the realization that this is his destiny: dying alone and unloved. That'd just break him.

ahdbiqwdbqwli I COULD TALK ABOUT THIS AU FOR FOREVER BUT I'LL CUT IT SHORT OR ELSE I'LL NEVER SHUT UP 😭

EAH has so many good characters and interesting storylines, it's hard for me to pick a favorite! I of course love Apple and Raven's dilemmas, but I feel like it's cheating to pick one of them as my favorite. The whole Wonderland gang is also fantastic... I'm a sucker for their aesthetic, but they're so fun and silly in general. Kitty, Lizzie, and especially Madeline are 👌

Mmm, when I think long and hard about it, I think my favorite EAH character has to be Briar Beauty, daughter of Sleeping Beauty. Firstly, I love all the pink, roses, and bramble in her design. Secondly, I love the layers to why she is the way she is. Briar's a party girl not because "lmao, wouldn't that be a funny haha subversion of Sleeping Beauty" but because she wants to live life up before she falls asleep for 100 years and literally loses all her friends and family to the natural passage of time. That's seriously so smart and such an inventive way to think about the trauma a descendant of Sleeping Beauty might have. Seeing Briar transition from one of Apple's besties and biggest supporters to an outright rebel is satisfying as heck. (Gotta take a moment to shout out this classic moment :3)

I don't know if I would compare Briar to Jade since they're entirely different characters. However, looking at the source material, I'm actually surprised I like Briar as much as I do since I have never cared for the story of Sleeping Beauty. A part of me finds this ironic since Malleus harbors a similar fear as Briar (losing loved ones) yet I see Malleus's desire as way more selfish and self-serving than Briar's. I believe that's because Briar doesn't have the same arrogance as Malleus, so I'm more forgiving with her. EAH's actual equivalent to Malleus is Faybelle, daughter of the Dark Fairy, but I don't like her as much as I do Briar (hence why I'm comparing Malleus and Briar, not Malleus and Faybelle).

I haven't read the EAH books but I want to one day! I'd prefer to borrow them since I don't have enough space in my room for more physical books, so as soon as I find copies at a library or something...

This blog has kind of become a place where I occasionally talk about my other interests, generally as it relates to TWST, my main interest. I'd like to keep it like this since managing multiple blogs can be so draining. It already takes quite a bit of time to regularly write responses to asks just on one blog!

[utilitycaster]

Do you think this new option could lead to a break up in the party and some of the characters leaving the group? Because I can't see everyone agreeing that this is the best solution, but I also think Ashton is stubborn enough to refuse to consider anything else

This is going to be a very long answer for what is a pretty short question that could be answered in one sentence, and here's why.

I've gotten a lot of questions in the past week or so that are specifically asking me what I think the future will be - for campaign 3, and for Critical Role generally. And I've gotten a little frustrated by them, which is somewhat uncharacteristic of me because I love having opinions, but the fact is, I don't know and I don't even have strong opinions. So I dug into that, and why people might be asking these things more than usual, and I really think it's because the narrative of this campaign is so constantly under threat of derailment or going in the same old circles that pretty much anyone in the fandom with any sense of narrative structure, and what makes for a well-crafted story is like "so...what's happening." Which is translating as coming to me, a person who is very good at sounding confident and knowledgeable.

I do not fucking know. I share this frustration, and I cannot be the person to clear it up. i am not even the best at narrative or analysis in this fandom; as I pretty frequently state I took the hard STEM option with regards to my education so while I read a lot and have a pretty good sense for the lay person, there are actual like, trained and published writers. For what it's worth several of them are my mutuals and while I'm not putting the rest of this post on them I do feel safe saying they agree that the lack of narrative direction is at the heart of most people's frustrations with this campaign, even if they enjoy the characters. But getting back to the point, I do not know.

Here's where I stand on the actual plot before I go back to the bigger picture. I think that unless Bells Hells decide on their course of action pretty quickly, no ending will really feel satisfying due to that sense of directionlessness - and there are arguments for Bells Hells to take either the Arch Heart or the Accord's plan, though I think the Accord's is far superior, but they need to pick one.

Because of the ongoing issues with this party lacking perspectives that tied in well to this story and having to hinge everything on either one singular interpretation of one single instance in extraordinary circumstances (eg: Dorian), or stuff that feels, as I've said before, retconned, I have generally been extremely amenable to Bells Hells losing party members either through a split or through character deaths. This is not out of any sort of vindictiveness or dislike of characters, but just a hope that now that they know the vibe, the cast will make a character who has a perspective that is relevant to the story (which, FCG is not an ideal example because they happened to be the character who had perhaps best grown from their original concept to fit into the themes of this campaign, but Braius obviously is a very strong character informed by the story as well). I also think that a lot of the indecisiveness is part of the characters' various natures and that will also be a factor, especially since a new character can be both decisive, have a clear point of view, and be a lot more comfortable pissing off the rest of the party to assert it. So: if Bells Hells as they currently stand can decide what to do quickly, no need to break up! But if they can't, yeah, it would be to their and the story's benefit to do so. That's before we get into, for example, the sacrifice required from specifically Imogen or Fearne for the Arch Heart's plan; Ashton is not the one who has to risk their own autonomy for the rest of eternity. They might die in battle, but they will not become a husk housing an ancient hunger. I think the people who might have to do so get to decide.

Now: it may seem counterintuitive to demand a clear direction from a TTRPG, when part of the appeal is that we don't know how it will end, but the thing is, with the past campaigns, we did not know if the party would succeed but we knew that they wanted to do. Vox Machina could have fallen to Vecna but we always knew they were going to fight Vecna. The Mighty Nein's decisions not to get involved with the war are not indecision but rather a very clear decision (do not get involved). Their later reversal of that decision similarly follows from who they are and the richness of their pasts.

Bells Hells does not have that, and the endless circular conversations are both circular in game and a vicious cycle out of it; because we've always been focused on this plot from very early on and because the characters were not developed as strongly, we have a lot of very indecisive people who are too trapped in this crisis to develop and become decisive. In a way, it feels like Matt's been something like the Arch Heart here: saying "oh, THIS would be interesting, I wonder what will happen" at everything when it's like "ok but consequences are like, important, and maybe you should let things play out. I mean, two cycles isn't great but it is still only two; maybe you should actually let your children/players figure this out, even if it doesn't fit your idea of what should happen, instead of throwing yet another new thing at them."

So: I don't know and I don't have answers about Campaign 3 events at this point because, again, as someone who has a pretty good sense of what makes for a satisfying narrative, it has frequently subverted those requirements (which, to be clear, is bad - it's not genre subversion or a masterful play on expectations, it's subverting actual satisfying narrative beats; as someone said on one of my other posts in not quite so many words, it's like storyline-baiting). I know I tend to present my points with confidence, and I am pretty confident about a lot of things like CR lore and said sense of narrative, but like...maybe this guess on the fandom vibe is incorrect, but I think I'm getting these questions because people are saying "hey, do you know where we're going? I think I am reading this map wrong" to me and I'm here to say "no, you're reading it fine, we've gone off the road and are just kinda crashing through underbrush, and maybe we'll hit another road and continue on that and I can give some insight, but also we might go off a cliff, no way to tell."

[randomfoggytiger]

I trust your opinion on so many things. so if you would, humor me, and explain to me why I find no “comedic” episode of the X-Files past Clyde Bruckmans even remotely funny. Maybe War of the Coprophages. I find myself irritated when I watch Jose Chungs, Bad Blood. What is the difference you think?

I know I’ve said it on here and I’m not sure if you’ve read the post, but I consider the X-Files to belong to the horror genre, and not necessarily even science fiction. 

I can’t even begin to describe what this does for my opinions for seasons 7,8, 9 and beyond.

Hmmm... I think it would depend on which episodes you do like.

But let's speculate~. >:D

I think horror has very specific beats whereas sci-fi is more exploratory and loosely constructed. Ironically, the comedic episodes largely fit into the latter rather than the former category, in my opinion.

Do you feel the comedic episodes achieve nothing? Clyde teaches Scully something about herself, imprints that perspective onto her. Whereas Coprophages is more about infatuation and delusion than the truth, Jose Chung slips the truth through the cracks, and Bad Blood is a fun romp in Texas. There's no real "lesson" to be had from the latter adventures. (My sis describes Clyde as "a story that happens to have comedy" whereas the others are "pure comedy.")

Maybe it's Scully: are your favorite episodes more Scully-centric? Or episodes where she learns and grows alongside Mulder? Squeeze, for example; or Conduit, Darkness Falls, Memento Mori, etc.

Maybe the other comedies split she and Mulder apart ideologically but don't bridge the gap?

Perhaps the "nature of humanity" that is explored in the comedic episodes weigh less in your estimation of actual, on-the-ground discovery and investigation?

Or perhaps you like episodes where Mulder and Scully aren't passive observers, where they aren't just "part of this mess that is going on?" (another sis quote.)

But on the other hand, do you prefer horror to sci-fi? Or maybe the format of sci-fi scratches your itch less on reruns?

This fascinates me because I like the comedy episodes. Most of them. (FPS, however....) The only one that didn't make me laugh was Humbug-- except for Mulder's "pose" at the end. But then again, they're all kind of rambly-- which I don't mind-- and are more about exploring the human condition than horrifying realities.

What say you?

[galahadenough]

I keep thinking about Sidon, and how totk handled him. I really can't help but wonder if one of the higher ups at Nintendo stumbled onto a fic for which he was very much not the intended audience. Because while no individual thing feels like it's horrendously bad, when it all comes together something does seem a little... fishy.

First and most obviously, there's Yona. At the most basic level, that is a classic reaction to having too much shipping. Throw a fiancee into the mix. And her design is interesting. It ended up working for a lot of people, it seems, but the head shape is almost edging into a cartoony look in comparison to the other Zora, and there are no other Zora with that vivid of a color. And for me personally, the english verbal aspects (yes, yes; sure) was somewhat grating. Sidon is also a distinct color, though, and it could be an indication of royalty. But it is still such a vivid green. But she is also lovely, helpful, supportive of both Link and Sidon, and really stands on her own as a character. All of these things ended up working really well for her, but it makes me wonder about the intentions behind the design.

So, we have tick one in the fishy column. By itself it wouldn't really stand out to me, but it keeps going.

With every other sage, you find the sage and proceed to work together. It is such a feeling of companionship, and support, especially in a franchise such as Zelda that is built on solitary questing for the most part. With Sidon, he sends you off on your own for nearly every step of the way.

He sends you off to talk to Jiahto at Toto Lake.

He sends you off to find the king.

He sends you off to figure out Floating Scale Island.

Oh! Finally! He goes with you to check out the beam of light... but he stays behind when you go through the whirlpool to the Ancient Zora Waterworks. Nevermind.

He goes with you to Wellspring Island, but immediately suggests splitting up until you reach the Water Temple.

So this is fishy point number two for me. It doesn't really fit his personality and actions in the last game, and it feels very distinct from the other sages. By itself, not too weird, but we're doing math here.

The water temple feels kind of off to me too. With Tulin, you have the Stormwind Arc, a Rito myth and children's tale come to life with a thrilling ascent into the sky. With Yunobo you have the Fire Temple, a gorgeous monument to the history of the gorons, rooted in the very depths of Death Mountain itself, buried among the rocks and lava of the earth, feeling so symbolic of the earth the gorons come from. Even with Riju, with the game not quite committing to the contentious history that the Gerudo have due to their association with Ganon, you have this epic and ancient temple rising from the sand, a monument to the Gerudo's past, a part of their history consumed by the very desert they call home.

The water temple is... pretty enough. I might have been a bit more impressed if it were my first sage. But it's not that big and it doesn't feel very connected to the Zora. It's in the sky. They are fish. It uses the low gravity mechanism. Which is fun. But why?? Why here, why for the Zora who are built for water more so than running and jumping? There isn't even that much water involved outside of the vases you fill to dump on the muck. No rivers. Nothing very deep, nothing with currents, nothing involving large or natural sources of water. Just. Water facets. And weird Zonai (Zonai, not Zora) water bubble machines.

That makes fishy point number three, and in my opinion the worse point against it (tying with my next point, perhaps). A lot of this post is based on opinions, and things that could be explained away. But it feels wrong that this temple is so disconnected from the Zora.

Fishy point number four. The Mucktorok. It... I have no real issues with it existing in a Zelda game. It wasn't my favorite, and I can see how people could enjoy it. I've enjoyed hearing other's perspectives on it. It's goofy and silly. It's interesting, in a way. But it's placement in the game is what makes it feel like a deliberate snub at Sidon and the Zoras. It is the only boss that isn't cinematic. It isn't dramatic or epic, and it doesn't give a sense of danger as much as a sense of comedy. We've had enemies like that before, but they are mini-bosses. On top of that, from what I've heard, you don't even get a cool fuse weapon when you defeat one in the depths. That, to me, feels a bit deliberate.

My last point doubles as an idea for improvement, and is somewhat connected to my issues with the Water Temple. And that is Sidon's sage power. Outside of the temples I get the most use out of Tulin's ability. Then Yunobo. I don't really use Riju's ability often, but I can really see the use. But Sidon's ability really doesn't seem that useful. The shield feels like a worse version of Daruk's Protection due to the fact that you have to activate it by tracking down Sidon's shade (and I think it expires if you don't use it quickly enough?), and while not useless, I don't think a lot of people plan to be hit. And the water projectile probably isn't useless, but it seems like more trouble than it's worth when you can use an arrow, or just throw something.

Inside the Water Temple it feels even worse since that is where the ability is supposed to be showcased. I had so many splash fruit, and that was so much easier than remembering to talk to Sidon and waiting for his ability to reset. I think I only used his ability for the water spout wheels. Maybe a couple of times in the boss fight, but that felt more difficult than using the splash fruit, too.

My idea for improvement is a bit of a rework of the temple and a different ability. Sidon is shown to be able to manipulate water and currents, so his ability could be the ability to do just that. He could create a current that runs up or down a river (or through still water), the current could be a stream of water that rises up above the water, straight up or at an angle. That could be a method of travel in the temple. Instead of using those odd Zonai bubbles to travel it would be a Zora ability in the Zora temple. That would also give more of a reason to have more or larger bodies of water. You know. Having water in the Water Temple. And this is all without even considering adding some mechanic for going underwater, like is so common in Zelda games. But that is another option that would have fit so well.

I could see this temple being either in the sky or on/under ground. And this ability would be so useful outside of the temple. You could travel more easily in the water. You could use it to travel up into the air above water to get a boost up, and that could fill a little bit of the gap from the lack of Revali's Gale. It would be interesting, it would fit the character, it would be useful.

So that's five fishy points. That.. kind of got away from me, but it's been cycling through my head for a while now. And like I said at the beginning, all of these points feel fairly innocuous by themselves. It's just so many things that add up to the feeling that someone in the creators really didn't like Sidon. And that bothers me because I really like Sidon.

Despite this (not) small rant, I truly love the game and so many things about it. And the funny thing is, I don't think I would have gotten so worked up about it if I hadn't gotten the thought of some horrified high up Nintendo executive reading shark-dick porn stuck in my head. I still find that thought hilarious.

And with that, I'm off!

[brucewaynehater101]

Back with some summer camp ideas from the classes you suggested.

I think that the legal part could be divided in like two subsections: Heroes' rights/duties (Dick) and Civilian/Villain Rights (Jason). I feel like Dick would want them to understand that they too have rights and that they shouldn't let the duty part consume them (like it did for him). Knowing how boring it can be, he uses practical examples for every situation. His motto is "...and that's why now there's a law for that. Say thank you to [insert hero getting clowned on]"

Jason would make Harvey Dent proud, basically teaching the kids all the ways in which they can exploit the heroes legal limitations. You know, so they can avoid getting tricked by rogues :D. After passing this class any time the counselors try to reprimand the kids they just yell "You're not assermented!"

I really like the idea of older campers giving the little ones a heads up on the hardest classes or which counselors are the best in their opinion.

Every year they bring someone of the Arrow Family for an archery event because it's summer camp! You need to have archery. When it's Arsenal's turn he sneaks guns (with rubber bullets) with Jason's help. Dick is disappointed but not surprised.

If there's enough campers (you know, with the kids that aren't heroes but have powers) they would have different cabins and each would have an assigned batkid as their personal counselor. They would immediately turn it into a competition. The Batkids have to put a lot of effort into keeping it friendly for the campers (if it was them, it would be war).

Damian would be in Dicks Cabin, obviously and they would be so annoying about it. Maybe the split the older kids in different cabins so they can guide the new ones and that's how Damian and John end in opposing sides of the competition (this is the betrayal of the century).

Right now I'm thinking on how the Batkids would rule their own cabins. Dick and Tim have experience with their own super hero teams (and Barbara corralling the entire batfamily). If the outlaws are anything to go by Jason would be very chaotic. Steph would put a lot of effort in having the coolest looking cabin I think. I do wonder how Cass would deal with having that responsibility with her communication struggles. Maybe Lian Harper (Roy's daughter) is her old camper and helps her with the kids (she looks chill from what I know).

These are great ideas! For Cass, I think it depends on what part of canon it's at. Later on, she's able to communicate decently. She gets stuck on some words, but is overall fluent. She can communicate what she needs to.

However, it's understandable if she gets frustrated or overwhelmed. Perhaps there's hours or days where she just doesn't speak. She's grows tired of trying to communicate the ways that others do and thus stops for a bit (as a break. Am I maybe projecting from when I go nonverbal? Maybe).

They would also need to have a computer lab to teach kids hacking, internet safety, etc. Barbara obviously leads that class.

Would they have a library at the camp? Maybe they have textbooks available for kids to learn from.

I'm also fond of the idea that Red Tornado spends some time at the camp too. I don't know much about him, but I do know he looked after Young Justice a little bit. If it fits, he can spend time just running some of the background stuff, and being an additional person campers can turn to

[starlitiris]

The Feeling (part 1)

wrote this a few nights ago while I was in a spooky mood and ended up having to split it into two parts because it was too long </3

Here's part 2

SUMMARY: Reader is just an average person living a normal life, then Feitan moves in next door. He gives you an unsettling feeling, and eventually you find out why.

WARNINGS: mentions of torture, implied torture

You’d always felt like something was off about him.

You weren’t even really sure why.

Was it something he did maybe, that made you feel this way?

No. If that was the case, then you would know what it was.

Sure, he was a little antisocial and said strange things sometimes, but that wasn’t enough to warrant feeling unsettled by him.

You could never figure it out, so you just decided to ignore the feeling. You shouldn’t have.

For a while after he moved in next door, he was very standoffish to the surrounding residents.

You gave him a few days to settle in before you decided to go knock on his door. You wanted to welcome him to the neighborhood.

He didn’t answer.

But you could hear him inside.

Didn’t like being bothered, you guessed.

A few weeks later, you ran into each other in an aisle at your local bookstore. It seemed you both had similar taste in books.

Horror.

You wanted to wave at him, maybe say hi, but he didn’t even bother looking at you. Perhaps he just didn’t notice that you were standing next to him.

You minded your own business until you saw him picking up one of, in your opinion, the most underrated books of all time. It was your favorite, but you felt like you were alone in that.

You’ve read many reviews of the book online, and they all had negative opinions on it. ‘The ending wasn’t satisfying, that flashback added nothing to the overall story, this character’s actions didn’t make sense, blah, blah, blah.’ They just didn’t get it.

None of those people saw the point that the author was trying to get across. Nobody understood how significant that flashback was, or how that one character doing what he did made sense because of it. If only they read between the lines. And because nobody could look beneath the surface, they didn’t get to see - or feel - how powerful the ending was.

But you digress. You try not to get too worked up about these things. It is just a book, after all.

Your neighbor seemed interested in what the summary on the back of the book had to say.

His apparent interest excited you, so you finally said something to him.

“That one’s really good,” you blurted with a smile.

He looked at you, raising an eyebrow.

“I highly recommend it. It’s one of my favorites.” You gleefully added.

“Hm.” Was all he responded with.

It’s okay. He bought the book. You were happy.

About a week or so later, you ran into him again. This time at the food market. You weren’t going to bother him again, but this time he came up to you.

“Hey,” he started. “I finished the book.”

You smiled hopefully. “So… what do you think?”

You know he’s probably just going to say the same thing everyone else says, but you wanna stay optimisti-

“Was good,” he said, a faint smile gracing his lips. “I really liked it.”

Your eyes lit up in joy. Finally! Someone you could appreciate your favorite book with!

“Really? I’m surprised! Most people don’t like it. They’ll complain about all the ‘meaningless backstory’ and how the torture scenes were written.” You crossed your arms and rolled your eyes at the stupid critiques people have on this masterpiece.

“That so?” He asked. “Thought it was well written. Felt real.”

“I thought so, too! Though, it’s not like I have any real experiences to compare it to.” You laughed at your silly and obvious admittance.

That smile.

That was the first time you got the feeling.

The feeling that something was wrong about him.

But it was just a smile. He was talking to you, and seemingly enjoying your conversation. Don’t be ridiculous.

That’s what you would tell yourself.

From that point on you two started waving at each other or saying hi when you’d cross paths in town.

Every time you met in the bookstore, you would give each other recommendations on what to read next. Sometimes one of you recommended something that the other person had already read, and you would talk about it. Your favorite moments, little critiques you had, how the story made you feel. It was nice. You felt like you were making a friend.

Eventually you boldened up and asked him to come over for dinner.

Honestly, you expected him to decline.

But he agreed to come over.

So he did.

And he kept coming over.

You were glad you could call him a friend at that point. You really did enjoy each other’s company.

The more time you spent together, the more you would learn about him.

You learned that he has a friend named Phinks. You found out he likes horror movies, too. He doesn’t like pets. He never cared much for music. He’s a little short tempered, and he collects knives.

You liked learning things about him. But, oddly enough, the more you learned about him, the less it felt like you knew.

You couldn’t get him to tell you what his job was. You think he’s on a graveyard shift, though. There’s been a couple times where you woke up in the middle of the night needing water or the bathroom, and you saw him out the window. Dragging something into his house.

You couldn’t tell what he was dragging in the dark, but it looked big.

No idea what that could’ve been.

You asked if you could hang out at his house once, wanting to know what his place looked like.

He made it clear that wasn’t happening.

The look he gave you was indescribable. It gave you that feeling again.

He said no, and you decided not to push. Maybe he just likes his space. That’s not hard to understand, right?

Sometimes you would hear noises coming from his house.

Strange noises.

It never sounded like what you would expect to hear. Like floor creaking, dishes clinking together while being washed, voices from a tv.

Though, sometimes you can definitely hear when he’s watching a horror film.

‘He must have really good speakers connected to his tv,’ you would think to yourself. ‘The wailing almost sounds too real.’

But those strange noises were always impossible for you to distinguish.

Sometimes they sounded… wet. Heavy. Something about the sound sent chills down your spine. You didn’t hear it often enough to complain about it, but it was definitely disgusting.

Other times it sounded like a thick crack, like something breaking. Though, you couldn’t imagine what.

There were nights when you heard crack after crack.

You thought that whatever he was doing in there, he must’ve enjoyed having on a horror movie while he did it.

You often heard muffled cries and pleas while he… did his thing.

You wanted to ask about it. But you didn’t.

Maybe a part of you was scared to.

Or maybe you just didn’t deem it important enough to bother asking.

Either way, it’s probably a good thing you didn’t. Or perhaps you would’ve ended up here sooner, and not by your own volition.

“Here” being in Feitan’s house.

[kerubimcrepin]

Episodes 27-29 - Ecaflip City (part 2)

Hiiii totally-not-one-of-Ecaflip's-avatars

This says "Pub."

This is so cute... She really cares about his opinion of her outfits.

We need more scenes of them shopping together. (I say, as if we won't get this in the next episode.)

I feel like if I was Keke, this would be my time to start running and fleeing.

While it's never explained what his lucky dice mean to him, they obviously mean a lot. He was ready to die for them, in the comic, after all.

While this did start out as something he did for Lou, it became very clear that really, this is about Kerubim's sense of being inadequate.

But what really feeds his sense of inadequacy is his love for Lou, and it's kind of not-the-best-manliest-coolest-adventurer thing, to say, "I think I'm not good enough for the woman who already agreed to marry me."

The baron, being a god's avatar, doesn't really have insecurities. He plays to put mortals in their place.

Kerubim, however, plays because he doesn't want to go to therapy.

As I've said in the previous liveblog, if Ecaflip is testing his willpower or morals... Then that's a very cruel test, rigged in a way that doesn't seem to expect Kerubim to win.

Especially with how conveniently Lou is made aware of the game, right before the moment Kerubim is about to make the biggest fucky-wucky of his entire life.

We can see, here, how much he downplays his love for Lou out of fear of being vulnerable, and appearing weak before other people. But all it does, is make him look like an asshole.

Really, I've seen so many theories on why they broke up, — from terminal illness, to "well what if she got pregnant, and thought that Kerubim, who can't shut up about how much he loves kids, (though mostly orphans,) wouldn't want to have one, so she left?" — and none of them consider the possibility that, perhaps, she would leave him after remembering what he did, as well as everything else that happened and how their relationship was in general.

(Or perhaps, and this is my personal "theory that doesn't have any proof behind it and is just me throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks", what if she Would Not Fucking Want to be with a demigod, who might just end up not ageing, amd will outlive her and their theoretical kids? Because I can totally see him hiding this from her until the last possible moment.)

(Hell, both of these possibilities can coexist! There are so many factors that probably led to their split, god.)

I think, if the reason why she left him is remembering this, the only reason she hadn't beaten him to death is also remembering that 1. she's been an asshole too, 2. him finding her is what helped her recover her memories to begin with.

Just... a fail relationship. They both failed in every single possible way. God.

You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes, Keke...

As sad as I am, I think it's good that in the end, she left him. They both deserved better than this relationship.

Perhaps Oropo did nothing wrong.

Maybe we should kill and dethrone the gods.

New reaction images for when Ecaflip is being an evil fucking cat.

[altocat]

As much as I love all the fleshing out of our boi (lil bit of a negative rant here) I dont really like how he was given an picture of his actual birth mother tbh

To me it kinda destroys the whole idea of Seph's uncertainty about her, how he never even saw his mother, never met her, never knew what she looked like, but only ever knew her "name", which is why when he meets "Mother" during the Nibelheim Incident years later, its such a big moment for him because thats what hes searched for his whole life, and now hes seeing "her" for the first time

Like I'm sure you can maybe find a way to change my mind since your pretty good at that stuff, but honestly Im not sure about this idea anyway (if they rlly wanted a photo, maybe it couldve been a very blurred photo of Lucrecia or Jenova or some Random Woman, but still im iffy on it)

Sorry for da ramble btw, I love your look into Sephiroth's character and I just wonder how you feel bout it

(my opinion plz dont be mad aaah)

No, no! That's all totally understandable.

I'm personally pretty split on the photo. On one hand, it's extremely on the nose and tbh I'd prefer if Seph was almost completely kept in the dark about his mother, rather than know what she looks like. I'd always been under the impression that he was completely kept in the dark. Now he at least has a kernel. And that can take away a lot of the punch.

That all said, I think the scene is more of a means of reminding casual fans that Sephiroth has some serious abandonment issues in relation to his mother. These are things I've been talking about for a long time, but the games are surprisingly meager when it comes to ever bringing them up. He has some serious mommy issues and always had. If it took an added scene with a photo to illustrate this to fans, good. That's fine.

It also adds a new layer of sadism in Hojo's upbringing of him. Hojo gave him the photo, but also completely lied and then refused to tell him anything. That's....incredibly evil. And messed up. Perhaps it shapes how Sephiroth sees Jenova. Perhaps it resembles Lucrecia to him. Or perhaps he thinks the photo is a complete lie by the time he finds things out, hence why Hojo never told him anything.

I don't think it breaks his backstory lore that much. It's more of a refresher to players that this child has been bereft of his mother since birth and is now fighting a war. Is it a bit clumsily handled? Yeah. And I can see some people really disliking this change. But it's not too much of a big deal for me. And hey, we got a new render of Lucrecia just in time for Rebirth. If Rebirth and Part 3 are set up as legitimate entries in the series, perhaps we will FINALLY get some Lucrecia-Sephiroth closure.

[addictedtostorytelling]

team graveyard gsr reveal reactions: the detectives

part ii of this series.

one character at a time after the "keep reading," if you're interested.

__

brass

there is no canon evidence for brass one way or another.

however, in preface to my thoughts about how he might react, i should probably mention up front: i have the unpopular opinion brass doesn't actually know anything about grissom and sara's relationship with each other prior to the events of episode 07x24 "living doll."

i talk about my reasons why not here.

with that disclaimer in mind:

as i talk about here,

as for what he thinks about gsr after he finds out about them in episode 07x24 "living doll," we really don't get any indication of his reaction in canon. my guess is he's a bit surprised, particularly as he himself tends to view sara kind of like a daughter, and he might have previously assumed grissom, who is peer-aged with him, felt the same. however, ultimately, i think he's someone who very much subscribes to the idea "the heart wants what the heart wants," so even if he probably would never have guessed that grissom and sara were a thing on his own, once he knows that they are, he's cool with it. again, he's had an office romance in the past himself, so he gets how working closely with someone every day, particularly in the high-stress field of law enforcement, can oftentimes result in "sparks flying," you know?

i also think, again, due to his own past experience having an office affair (see episode 05x20 “hollywood brass”), he likely understands grissom and sara’s decision to keep their relationship a secret from everyone and can likely even sympathize with it, to the point where he doesn’t blame them for being deceptive, even to the extent other members of the team might do so.

sofia

again, we get no canon evidence on sofia’s reaction—especially as she literally disappears without a trace from the show in the immediate aftermath of episode 08x01 “dead doll” (and only resurfaces again for a one-off appearance in s11)—so it’s difficult to say where she might land.

she isn’t around for the early seasons of the show to witness all of the gsr ~weirdness~ of that period, and, indeed, only comes on the scene circa the same time grissom and sara repair their friendship and shortly after become a (clandestine) couple in s5/s6, so perhaps she has less of a sense of bafflement they would end up together than do some of their other teammates who had front-row seats to their more contentious encounters in the initial years after sara’s move to vegas.�� after all, for as long as she has known them both, they have been very kindly disposed to each other, have worked seamlessly as professional partners (and particularly after the team split, which is something sofia as their teammate at that time gets to witness up close), have had a generally warm rapport, etc., so she wouldn’t necessarily think it was strange for them to end up in a romantic relationship with each other. 

she also, despite being a collegial friend to grissom, doesn’t really know either grissom or sara very well, so, again, she may not be as surprised about their attraction to each other as some other people in the department might be; since her understanding of both of them is more surface-level, she probably just thinks of them as two consenting adults who work the same job and so have shared interests, simpatico lifestyles, etc. (as opposed to odd-duck, potentially incompatible social enigmas, one of whom may not even be interested in sex/romance at all).

of course, it’s open to debate whether or not sofia actually has feelings of her own for grissom and so, like greg, might be somewhat disapproving of grissom and sara’s relationship for personal reasons.

i don’t headcanon she does feel that way about him.

however, i do still believe sara thinks she does or at least at one point did, which has caused sara to sometimes act weird around her in the past (see episode 06x08 “a bullet runs through it,” pt. ii), and so in light of the revelation of grissom and sara’s relationship, she may suddenly gain some new insight into sara’s behavior (i.e., “oh! so that was sara being territorial because she thought i was sniffing around her boyfriend. got it”).

i also think for as much as sofia might be less shocked by the fact of grissom and sara’s relationship in itself than certain other members of the team may be, she also isn’t wholly approving either of it or of their deception, just for professional reasons.

sofia has, after all, served as the lab’s quality control officer and has been management, so she not only knows the department rules regarding romantic relationships between team members but she also likely understands the reasons behind them. that so, i don’t imagine grissom and sara’s sneaking around really sits well with her—and especially not because, she, like ecklie later does in episode 08x02 “a la cart,” can likely think of some workarounds which could have been put into place to allow them to “have their cake and eat it, too” had they just been forthcoming and self-reported to hr as soon as the relationship commenced.

she probably also dislikes having her own work potentially compromised by their actions.

after all, she works graveyard shift with them circa the same time their relationship likely begins, and later she is the assigned detective for several cases they investigate as partners (see, for example, episode 06x01 “bodies in motion”), so if there ever are any legal ramifications for their rules infraction—i.e., if any of the criminals they helped to convict ever successfully appeals their conviction based on “improper conduct” between grissom and sara as investigators—she might get hit with that blowback, too. not only might her work be overturned, but she also might be accused of negligence or even complicity, just by association.

and that possibility probably pisses her off, at least initially.

of course, since she seemingly stops working in conjunction with crime lab personnel from either the graveyard or swing shifts going forward—while by episode 11x20 “father of the bride,” she is said to have become the deputy chief of the lvpd, it is unclear when she receives that promotion and why we haven’t seen or heard tell of her within the universe of the show in the interim—whatever resentment she may feel toward grissom and sara for their unprofessional conduct probably quickly falls by the wayside, as she is no longer direct coworkers with either one of them going forward.

__

in our final installment, we'll discuss the reactions of the lab rats and morgue workers.

[masterghandalf]

Embers by Vathara: A Too-Long Review

Embers is one of the most famous – perhaps the most famous – fanfics in the entire Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom. It’s also one of the most controversial, prone to creating very strong, very polarized opinions among its readers. The fic’s fans call it an incredible piece of worldbuilding that turns aspects of the original show on its head and enriches others with a darker, more morally complex plotline and sophisticated themes. Detractors call it blatant Fire Nation propaganda that worships at Zuko’s feet and demonizes everyone who ever slightly disagreed with him. The fact that both sides of the debate can get very… heated, to put it mildly, only furthers the controversy. At the risk of igniting old flame wars (pun very much intended😉) I thought I’d step in and offer my own thoughts on things. In brief, I think there’s a lot of positive things to be said about Embers, and I can see why it has the fandom it does… but at the same time, for a number of I reasons, some major, some nitpicky, I personally cannot bring myself to embrace it. Let’s take a look behind the cut to talk about why!

What is Embers?

First off… what’s this about, anyway? Embers is an Avatar: The Last Airbender AU fic, diverging from canon early in Book Two, written by Vathara (a rather famous fanfic writer active in multiple fandoms, and IIRC has also published original fiction under her own name) from 2009-2014. Its basic premise involves Zuko, while on the run with Iroh in the Earth Kingdom, rediscovering, based on things his mother had taught him, a lost firebending technique- fire-healing. From there it snowballs massively as Zuko gets caught up in spirit shenanigans, becomes a yaoren (two-element bender) who can also bend water, wrestles with his own legacy, and ultimately explores finds himself caught up in an ancient struggle involving spirits and dragons with more at stake than anyone has realized. The story begins in a one-shot, “Theft Absolute,” and then continues in Embers proper, and it is long – 91 chapters (not counting “Theft Absolute”) and more than 700,000 words even discounting author notes, making it longer than the entirety of The Lord of the Rings (even if you include The Hobbit too), longer than freaking War and Peace, and roughly comparable to all three volumes of Brandon Sanderson’s original Mistborn trilogy together. Woof. In other words, there’s a lot to dig into here. Though the fic itself (at least the FF.net version) does not internally divide itself in any way other than chapters, its TVTropes page splits it up into twelve discrete story arcs, which I may bring up occasionally for ease of reference. Anyway, the sheer size and complexity of the fic means there’s a lot to discuss, so with the basic intro out of the way, let’s get to it.

What’s Good About Embers?

Before we begin, I’d like to say that while my ultimate feelings about the fic are largely negative, I can absolutely see why it got popular and why its fandom has generally been so devoted to it (and since I will be talking about a lot of negative things, I did want to go ahead and put this part first, to make it clear that I do have aspects I like, and the things I don’t like should be understood in that context). For one, it’s very long, very detailed, and as of 2014 it’s complete. As a fic writer myself who has written some very long fics (none this long, though!) I have an inkling of how difficult a feat this is to pull off and can absolutely salute Vathara for the achievement. As for the writing itself, I wouldn’t call Vathara a great wordsmith, but she is, generally speaking, a solid one, with prose that feels professional-novel-quality; considering what a lot of fic (especially from a fandom that skews young, particularly at the time of the show’s original airing and the time Embers got started) is like, that’s yet another breath of fresh air. While I have some issues with the plot itself (more on that later) it nonetheless has a clear plot, one with lots of moving parts, and pulls it together generally well. In short, as a literary achievement Embers is already head-and-shoulders above a lot of fic, and not a few published novels. It also uses a lot of tropes and plot points that have a lot of appeal in the fandom. Zuko is the hero! Multi-element benders who aren’t the Avatar! Fire healing! Zuko is the reincarnation of an important historical figure! Aang’s Fire Nation friend Kuzon is an important historical figure! Ty Lee is a secret airbender! Koh the Face-Stealer is the big bad and was all along! Spirit stuff! Dragons! Any of these are things the Avatar fandom tends to eat up; Embers has all of them. At the same time, it also avoids a lot of the common pitfalls; in particular, it mostly doesn’t focus on issues of romance at all and thus neatly sidesteps the fandom’s infamous shipping wars, which is both rare and a relief, especially for a Zuko-centric story. It also has a lot of worldbuilding of Vathara’s own devising that’s extremely complex and detailed; said worldbuilding is controversial, and I can say I’m one it doesn’t really work for (again, more on that later) but there clearly was a lot of effort put into it, Vathara did her homework, and if you do like it, it’s one of the fic’s major selling points. She also includes a number of OCs from various walks of life that offer different perspectives and flesh things out more. And, of course, deconstruction fics that seek to problematize the canon and/or offer darker, more “mature” takes on the source material are always going to have a following in any fandom. Regardless of what you think, it makes you think (as the fact that I felt compelled to write this review, something I don’t normally do, should attest… I certainly wouldn’t put this level of thought and effort into a fic I just thought was bad). In short, I can absolutely respect Embers as a piece of writing and as a rare achievement in fandom, and I can also see a lot of reasons why it has the appeal it does for people.

But in the end, the story doesn’t work for me. Some of the reasons why are obvious; some are more subtle; some are more nitpicky issues of personal taste. But I’d like to take a while to discuss why, despite everything I do think there is to like or appreciate about the fic, it rubs me the wrong way. First off, I think it’s best before anything else to discuss the lion-turtle in the room.

Is Embers Fire Nation Apologism?

This is perhaps the most common accusation levelled at the fic by its detractors; that Vathara loves the Fire Nation, presents them as being in the right and the war as justified and everyone who opposes them as being evil. In fact, Embers’s tropes page used to (it’s since been removed) compare the fic directly to The Last Ringbearer, an (in)famous LotR fic (actually a published novel in Russian, its original language, but a free fanfic in English) that flipped the tale’s original morality, presenting the elves and wizards as evil, Gondor and Rohan as their dupes, and Mordor and Umbar as innocent victims of bigoted imperialism. The fic’s fans, meanwhile, says that this is a surface-level reading that completely misses the story’s nuances and ignores its actual messages. So, what’s my take? Is Embers pro-Fire Nation apologism? My answer is… no. And also, yes. Let me explain.

First off, the fic’s reputation as Fire Nation apologism has undeniably been exaggerated by its hatedom. It presents the Hundred-Year War as being wrong. The genocide of the Air Nomads was wrong. Characters like Ozai and Azula (and, posthumously, Sozin and Zhao) who were villainous in canon remain villainous in Embers. Stopping the War and overthrowing Ozai remains a goal of all sympathetic characters in the story. That Last Ringbearer comparison is, I think, unfair (and, honestly, regardless of my issues with Embers, I think it’s a superior work to Last Ringbearer in every way… but that’s beyond the scope of this review). Vathara does not try to paint Hundred Year War-era Fire Nation as being in the right or “the real good guys.”

But. But.

Embers doesn’t try to paint the Fire Nation under Ozai as heroic, true enough. What Embers does do, however, is prioritize Fire Nation POVs and Fire Nation concerns. You might argue that this is a natural side-effect of the fic’s POV centering on Zuko, but I think it goes beyond that. Cultural clash is a major theme in the fic, and this is where a lot of Vathara’s worldbuilding goes is in exploring the worldviews and practices of the four nations in much more depth than the show does (more on that in the next section). But practically any time a Fire Nation character gets into an argument with a person from another nation, the Fire Nation character’s POV gets prioritized and they’re the one the narrative wants us to side with. Characters are frequently lambasted for not understanding the Fire Nation and Fire Nation values, and if they don’t that’s their fault, but the reverse is almost never true, with almost any conflict presenting the Fire Nation character as being in the right. The Fire Nation are literally descended from dragons, it’s eventually revealed (all Fire Nationals seem to have a little dragon ancestry; a few have a lot of it); none of the other nations have anything like this going on. Fire is consistently treated as a “special” element unlike any of the others, and firebenders get to do things like keep volcanoes from erupting to protect everyone else in the world and no other nation has anything comparable going on; we also get a lot of info on how unique the Fire Nation ecology is and the specialized management it requires. The war is mostly understood through the lens of how it affects the Fire Nation, with a lot more time given to how it’s warped Fire Nation culture than the harm they’ve done to the rest of the world (indeed, a big deal is made at various points about how once the Fire Nation conquers territory, they view it as just another part of the Fire Nation and its people as their people, to be treated as such, and those who don’t follow that ideal are presented as aberrations, which is… not how empires actually work). And so on.

But the biggest issue… Kyoshi. Embershas a really weird take on Kyoshi and her role in the Fire Nation’s history that hangs over the entire fic, and not in a good way. See, in Embers-verse the Fire Nation in Kyoshi’s time was a bunch of independent islands ruled by feudal lords (who fought each other all the time but apparently never tried to take more territory than they could control or unify the islands because they knew they couldn’t hold it, because that’s clearly how aggressive warlords think *rolls eyes*). But the Earth Kingdom was attacked by Fire Nation pirates, and none of the local “Great Names” could stop them because hey, the pirates weren’t their subjects. So Kyoshi committed genocide on half the Fire Nation and forced the survivors to swear allegiance to the Fire Lord, and in Embers if you swear loyalty to a firebender, you can’t break it without dying or nearly dying (more on that when we get to the worldbuilding). So, yeah, the political structure of the Fire Nation is presented as being an unnatural imposition and it’s all the Avatar’s fault, with the war being a direct consequence of this. Yeesh. This backstory ends up pervading the Fire Nation’s characterization, providing justification for why no firebender will ever trust the Avatar and why they’re convinced the other nations want to wipe them out and will if the war turns against them or if they try to make peace. It doesn’t justify the war… but it is used to present the imperialist conquerors as victims themselves, doing something they’d never have done if an outside force hadn’t mauled them and rearranged their political system first (all that pent up aggression they used to work out fighting each other had to go somewhere, apparently…). And that… really makes me uncomfortable, not least because of how it takes the onus for starting the conflict off the Fire Nation and puts it on someone else (not the only way the fic does this, as Ozai ends up overshadowed by the real villains too) while also creating a scenario where it feels like the world revolves around the Fire Nation and the Fire Nation’s issues, with the rest of the world as supporting players. In short, while it doesn’t try to justify the Fire Nation’s actions in the present, it goes to great length to make sure those actions are understandable and Fire Nation voices and Fire Nation concerns are prioritized by the narrative while those of other nations are generally marginalized.

 It gets especially obvious when you see the treatment Vathara gives the other nations. So, let’s take a look at the fic’s worldbuilding in general.

The Worldbuilding of Embers

One of the most talked about aspects of Embers is its worldbuilding; Vathara takes what’s established in canon and adds a lot of detail and complexity to it. Like most aspects of the fic, however, said worldbuilding can be very controversial; fans love how detailed it is and how it reframes their understanding of canon, while critics tend to think it doesn’t fit well with what canon establishes about the world. Personally, I tend to fall into “the worldbuilding is really interesting and compelling, but I’d like it a lot better if it was an original setting rather than trying to shoehorn it into the Avatar world,” but there are a few cases where I do think it has very profound issues of its own. So, let’s dig into it, shall we?

Bending: I’m going to address Vathara’s take on bending first, because it influences almost everything else she does with the setting. Bending in Embers works quite differently from how it does in canon. Most obviously, not only does every element have its own sub-school of healing (instead of just water), but every element has mind control powers of a different sort. Yes, really. I’ll discuss each of them in turn as I get to each nation specifically, but in general for a fic that prides itself on realistic consequences for actions and well-researched worldbuilding it's a rather... striking choice to throw in “but literal mind control” as an explanation for peoples’ actions. Also, benders (and non-benders, to a lesser degree) are often depicted as being under their element’s direct influence much more obviously than in canon, to the extent that it’s treated as genuinely surprising when someone does something opposed to their element’s philosophy; despite the work Vathara does to flesh out her various cultures, this ends up making them feel rather “planet of hats-y” at times. Ultimately, I kind of like Vathara’s bending as a magic system, creepy stuff and all, but I do think she adds so many elemental bells and whistles to things that the basic idea of magical elemental martial arts gets kind of muddled.

The Fire Nation (and dragons): I’m going to start with the Fire Nation, because it’s clearly Vathara’s favorite culture and the one where the dragon’s share of the worldbuilding goes to. And, okay, I’m a bit torn. Because on the one hand, Vathara’s Fire Nation is genuinely interesting. On the other hand, it ends up diverging significantly from the show’s Fire Nation, to a level beyond what I think Vathara intended or realized; for another, I think there’s some very problematic aspects of this society that go uninterrogated because Vathara is too busy squeeing over how awesome they are. I’m also including dragons in this section because they’re intimately (in some cases very intimately) tied with the Fire Nation, and because Vathara clearly really likes them and changes them significantly from canon.

To start with, let’s look at the political system. I’m honestly not sure Vathara realizes this because she doesn’t really discuss in in her author notes, but she somehow ends up giving the Fire Nation an entirely different form of government than they had in canon. The canon Fire Nation is clearly a centralized absolute monarchy; everything we see seems to be run by a centralized bureaucracy, its military force is a centralized, professional military, and the chain of command for both culminates in the Fire Lord, who has absolute legal, military and (implicitly) religious authority over everyone. Vathara’s Fire Nation is still a monarchy, but instead of a top-down absolute monarchy it's a bottom-up feudal monarchy where, instead of one centralized country, it’s made up of a bunch of local fiefdoms where people are loyal first and foremost to whoever their local “Great Name” is, that person has authority over the domain and then in turn swears loyalty to the Fire Lord. Needless to say, this is a completely different form of government and would produce a completely different social and especially military structure from the one we see in the show. Indeed, in the fic said social structure is greatly explored and becomes plot-critical, but it doesn’t really jive with other aspects ported over from the show’s version (such as why Embers’s Fire Nation still has a centralized professional military instead of each domain providing their own troops separately when called on, as would be the case in an actual feudal system). Unfortunately, I think a lot of the detail also comes at the expense of the other nations, with a lot of aspects of Vathara’s Fire Nation being held up as unusually awesome in-universe, whether explicitly or implicitly. Most obviously, Great Names (which, considering the Fire Nation’s Japanese influences, is a pretty clear equivalent of historical daimyo) and their heirs are awesome and Vathara really, really wants to make sure we know that. The fic makes it clear that to be a Great Name you have to be a badass, and you have to hold yourself to certain standards of behavior (even a Great Name as tyrannical as Ozai seems to have to have some standards at least where his subjects – ie, the Caldera specifically in his case – are concerned) and have to keep all the volcanoes in their territory under control so everyone should be grateful to them, and have their special court language based on Sanskrit that only they speak, and if you’re a real Great Name everyone will respect you and think you’re wonderful because you’re just. That. Awesome. Even Earth Kingdom characters are impressed when realizing that Zuko (or "Lee”) is probably a Great Name’s son and think that must make him a badass! It gets a little wearying after a while, to be honest, especially since the other nations have nothing comparable (titled Earth Kingdom nobles don’t get nearly as much focus, with a few exceptions, and the Water Tribes and Air Nomads obviously have completely different systems). At the same time, the Fire Nation is also apparently the only country that regularly fields female soldiers (this one does have some basis in canon – they certainly seem to have more of them, at the very least) and also the only country where a commoner can become a high-ranking officer, even though the sorts of feudal societies Vathara’s Fire Nation is modeled on tend to not have much room for social mobility, to put it mildly (military aristocrats are an elitist bunch, as a rule, and tend to guard their prerogatives jealously!).

Oh, and this is all held together by the Fire Nation’s version of mind control – loyalty. Basically, anyone who swears allegiance to a firebender can’t break it without resulting in severe illness or death, and powerful firebenders can even attract the loyalty of people around them and make them want to serve them, even if said people don’t want to or even know what’s happening (in some cases, like Azula with the Dai Li, even if they’re not Fire Nation!). Every Fire Nation citizen (except exiles) owe loyalty to someone, and again, can’t break it or disobey an order without potentially fatal consequences. And this is where I have my real problem with Vathara’s Fire Nation. This system as a whole is never criticized or problematized. Oh, sure, loyalty to the Fire Lord specifically is a bad thing… because it was imposed from outside by Kyoshi. In the natural state of things, every domain would be independent – but still under the control of their Great Name, still with their own little loyalty pyramid, just without the Fire Lord at the top over everyone. And, indeed, at the end of the fic, the solution to the war is… to dissolve the Fire Lord’s throne and return every domain to self-rule but keeping the Great Name/loyalty system intact. This is uncritically presented as a good thing, because this way the Fire Nation will police itself by means of domains fighting each other (and it’s made clear Fire Nationals always want to fight, and it’s a dreadful imposition to try and make them live peacefully) keeping any one of them from getting too powerful. What’s never addressed is the way this would logically lock a quarter of the world into perpetual conflict with itself, driven by the personal honor of feudal warlords whose people are essentially powerless to disobey them (and again, it’s made clear Fire Nation clans have to have conflict; we’re explicitly told Sozin’s father trying to mediate them all was doomed to failure and drove him to die young, and this was crucial for shaping Sozin’s outlook on life, his resentment of the Avatar, and his desire to redirect his people’s aggression outward). And despite Vathara’s insistence that a proper Great Name doesn’t take more territory than they know they can hold, I’m still not sure what’s stopping a particularly ambitious lord from conquering neighboring domains, forcing their lords to swear loyalty, and eventually building up enough of a powerbase to start the whole mess over again. I don’t think Vathara’s intention was for her Fire Nation to be read this dystopian, but personally, I find it very hard to read it any other way (it doesn’t help that almost all our major Fire Nation POVs are nobility, military, or both; we don’t really get the common person’s take on all this, but I somehow doubt they’re all that enthused). It does remind me a bit of PC Hodgell’s Kencyrath series (enough that I wonder if Vathara’s read it…) where the Kencyr also have a feudal society driven by magically binding loyalty to the ruling class and strict, arcane codes of honorable behavior, except that society is portrayed as deeply, profoundly messed up in ways that Vathara’s Fire Nation isn’t. Also, one last word on the concept of loyalty… it pretty much creates a society where the “I was just following orders!” defense is actually valid (yes, you can disobey orders in Vathara’s Fire Nation, but the consequences are bad enough it’s clear people generally don’t, and Fire Nationals in-fic tend to treat “I had orders” as a justification for most things) and… I really, really hope that was unintentional. Because if not… damn.

In hindsight, this may have sounded harsher than I meant it to. I really do find the concept of Vathara’s Fire Nation interesting, and “decadent empire run by corrupt, backstabbing sorcerer-aristocrats” is one of my favorite setting types, but I really wish she’d taken the very problematic aspects of this society and, well, problematized them instead of going all in on “clans and domains are awesome and Great Names are awesome and everyone wants a good Great Name to pledge loyalty to.” It’s not that Vathara’s Fire Nation doesn’t have problems, but said problems are mostly presented as being imposed from outside (the entire office of the Fire Lord, for one…) and the ideal solution is to essentially revert back to the pre-Kyoshi status quo. It plays into the overall theme, which I’ll get to at the end of the review, that yes, the war is wrong, and Ozai was wrong… but the Fire Nation itself is the real victim here instead of the people they were, you know, trying to conquer, or at least as much of a victim as they are. And, well, I don’t like the implications of that very much (and I’m less sympathetic to this sort of thing than usual this past year, considering certain current events), especially when you consider Vathara’s takes on the other nations.

Before we go on, one last word I’d like to have is on dragons. Vathara clearly likes dragons a lot. I don’t blame her – I went through a big phase of dragon-loving in my teenage years, and they still remain one of my favorite fictional creatures. In a broad sense, I really like Vathara’s take on dragons. Unfortunately, she’s shoehorned them into a setting where they don’t fit, and it makes a mess. Canon’s dragons are “the original firebenders,” fire’s equivalent to sky bison for air or badgermoles for earth. They’re powerful, wise, ancient creatures, sure, but still essentially animals. And I really think Vathara didn’t like that, because her dragons are sapient, nigh-immortal shapeshifters who can and do often interbreed with humans. On its own, none of that’s bad – I like most of those traits in dragons, and there’s mythological basis for most of it. But where Vathara tries to jam them into the place of canon’s dragons is where it gets awkward. In particular, she seems to have an axe to grind with canon’s take on dragons, at several points actively mocking how dragons are often considered animals by humans, people who don’t realize dragons are sapient, or how they are regarded as no more than sky bison (which in canon I’d say is no insult at all, but, well, I don’t think Vathara likes sky bison very much). That “can breed with humans” bit becomes particularly important, because it turns out all Fire Nation people are descended from dragons. Most of them very distantly, of course, but some much more closely, including (of course) Zuko. And we get treated to a lot of exposition on how this directly influences Fire Nation people’s psychology and culture and makes them different from other humans, especially “dragon-children” with close draconic ancestry. So basically, what it boils down to is Vathara’s favorite nation having literally superhuman ancestry (I count “being a dragon” as superhuman) something none of the other nations do (it also adds another layer to fic!Fire Nation’s persecution complex, since they think if the other nations find out they’d consider them subhuman). Normally, I’d love to read about a culture of dragon-people, but it’s just so incredibly out of place in the Avatarverse that I can’t really connect with it there, especially since I feel like it just serves to underscore that Vathara’s favorite culture is special, everyone!

Basically, there’s a lot I find conceptually interesting in Vathara’s Fire Nation, but I don’t like it as written. Personally, I’d emphasize the self-destructive nature of their feudal honor culture more, play loyalty for horror in general (not just if you’ve got a bad lord), and move it out of the Avatarverse entirely into another setting where the dragon stuff could be made to actually fit, or at least into a fic where it’s a full AU from the start in a sort of “Avatar: The Last Airbender reimagined, ultimate universe style” rather than a canon divergence AU that still accepts large swaths of the show as having happened. This is something I’ll be coming back to quite a bit, actually, since I think Vathara’s Fire Nation really highlights how much of this stuff I’d find much more palatable as original fic (or, again, full AU) rather than fanfic.

The Air Nomads: Okay, this is where I think real problems lie. Because even if I unironically loved everything else about the fic… I still wouldn’t be able to rec it unreservedly if it had Vathara’s take on the Air Nomads in it. Whereas most of my other issues with the fic are about context and execution, its take on the Air Nomads is something I find inherently irresponsible and indefensible on its own merits. Vathara’s Air Nomads disturb me – not their activities in the fic, but the meta fact that this portrayal exists at all.  What am I talking about, you ask? Well, first off, there’s a running theme that starts in the fic early any time the Air Nomad genocide is mentioned talking about how it actually makes perfect sense that everyone in the world secretly hated and resented the Air Nomads and weren’t that sad to see them go. To the point that it starts getting uncomfortably victim-blamey. Then we later learn that in the distant past the Air Nomads used to be Mongol-like warlike conquerors. Okay, that’s not as bonkers as it seems on the surface (real-world Tibet did have its imperial age, and there are some interesting historical connections between Tibet and Mongolia) but considering the earlier portrayal, I still side-eye it. And then, we get the big reveal – the Air Nomads, or at least the Air Monk elders, were evil. See, the airbenders’ version of mind control is something called “Harmonious Accord” that is never really explained in detail but is apparently just flat-out brainwashing. And the Temple Elders used it to force all their people to agree on everything and to use the Air Nuns as baby factories then force them to give up their children to be raised communally. Anyone who dissented, and anyone who wasn’t a bender (canonically, all Air Nomads were benders, but clearly Vathara knows better) were kicked out and forced to live among the other nations, which boiled down to the Air Nomads inflicting their criminals on everyone else. Since they were all conditioned to not be attached to anything, the Air Nomads wandered around the world, causing disruption and refusing to deal with the consequences of their actions. Oh, and little things like “compassion” were brainwashed away too, apparently (which is, like, the antithesis of actual Buddhist belief – hey, Vathara, compassion’s the whole point). And it turns out that their pacifism was a hypocritical sham, forced on them by one bitter old monk (who started the temple system) who was jealous of the warlords and seized power during a power vacuum and remade the whole culture in his image (and apparently by forcing the airbenders to be peaceful, he somehow locked them out of most of their powers, including healing… somehow). Yeah, so basically, Vathara’s Air Nomads were a literal brainwashing cult created by an evil old man bitter because he wasn’t a good warrior as a form of revenge, and everything Aang knew about his people was a lie! I can get trying to grey up the Air Nomads a bit, break a few of Aang’s pedestals, but this is just excessive. And, sort of as the antithesis of how it seems like nobody can ever get a word in edgewise arguing with a Fire Nation character, any time Aang tries to defend his people, he’s met with evidence of some new horrible thing they did.

Now, like I said, Embers doesn’t try to justify the genocide itself. The mass murder is clearly portrayed as wrong (though it also has some of the edge taken off – a lot of the kids got out, with help, and there are enclaves of surviving airbenders around the world, including in the Fire Nation, so Aang’s not really the Last Airbender). But at the same time, the destruction of the Temples themselves and the culture that was based there… Vathara seems to think that was good, or at least necessary? She even has Gyatso, or at least his ghost, seem to agree with her on that. And, okay, I hate it. I hate that Vathara took a peaceful, monastic people from canon and turned them into evil baby stealers, for reasons I’m not entirely sure on (partially, I feel this may be to punish Aang specifically – more on that when we get to characters – but I also can’t help but wonder if a Buddhist monk wronged Vathara somehow in real life, because it’s sort of… weirdly personal). But I especially hate it because the Air Nomads are a stand-in for people groups who have faced genocide in real life – Tibetan Buddhists most obviously, of course, but others as well. And while Vathara did say in some of her ANs that she wanted to engage with the sort of propaganda that makes genocide possible… what she honestly ended up doing, IMO, was creating a culture where that propaganda is true (they’re not like us! They don’t think like us! They don’t value our culture! They don’t care about family or loyalty! Peaceful coexistence with them just isn’t possible!). And, well, by about the dozenth chapter where I feel like I’m being treated to the Protocols of the Air Temple Elders (seriously, the only thing that saves the fic from flat-out slandering the Air Nomads with blood libel is that they don’t seem to steal other nations’ children – though honestly, I wouldn’t put it past Embers’s Air Nomads) I just feel angry. Even Yangchen gets reduced to having been a brainwashed nun who had to be saved by the yaoren before she could realize her destiny as the Avatar. I just… am deeply disturbed Vathara thought going this far was okay, and desperately hope the unfortunate implications here were unintentional. Desperately.

The Water Tribes: Vathara’s take on the Water Tribes has me torn. On the one hand, she does go into a lot of detail about what the lives and customs of an actual Arctic tribal people might entail, in particular how their wars and raiding work, how their chiefs lead and gain honor, the role of women elders in the tribe as peacemakers, negotiators and sources of wisdom and authority, etc. I like all that stuff a lot. But there’s also some problems. The biggest problem, as I’ll get to when we talk about characters, is Katara. Vathara openly hates Katara, and a lot of what we learn about the Water Tribes is filtered through her take on Katara, which ends up painting a lot of it in a bad light. Furthermore, a lot of the comments Vathara makes about the research she did for the worldbuilding here comes across as, well, pretty condescending in the way she explains how “tribes” have to prioritize survival above all else (as if “tribes” are some sort of unified phenomenon), using the “E word” unironically when talking about real-life Inuit peoples, and the hopefully unintentional implication that anyone who lives in the Arctic is definitionally driven insane by the lack of a regular day-night cycle. Ultimately, this ends up painting a picture of the Water Tribes (especially the Southern Tribe; the Northern and Foggy Swamp tribes don’t get as much focus) as backwards and parochial, focused on their own communities above all else and not really caring about the rest of the world except as it affects them; also, they’re seemingly obsessed with revenge, to the point that it’s treated as fact that if a Water Tribe Avatar is born while the Hundred Years’ War is still ongoing, it will almost certainly end with said Avatar leading their people to commit genocide on the Fire Nation as “enemies of the tribe” (which also serves to feed the fic’s ideas about Fire Nation victimhood, and is part of a general trend where the fic equates “the desire to see the Fire Nation as a state and military power defeated” with “virulent racism against the Fire Nation as a people”). Also, Vathara’s waterbenders have the power to control other peoples’ emotions and bind them together towards common attitudes and goals; it’s very telling that unlike Fire Nation loyalty, this is called out as being creepy and dangerous, and Katara gets portrayed as a terrible person for doing it, albeit subconsciously. It’s not all bad – Water Tribe warriors, including Sokka, Hakoda, and Bato, tend to get fairly sympathetic portrayals (even though they do sometimes need other characters to explain things to them that I really think they shouldn’t) but then you also get weird asides like the implication that Gran Gran is apparently into murder and eugenics(!) on rather spurious reasoning. So, all in all, it’s a mixed bag, with some genuinely interesting worldbuilding I actually really like, that unfortunately often gets filtered through a seeming need to make Katara look bad that negatively impacts the portrayal of the whole culture.

The Earth Kingdom: This will be the shortest section, as Vathara’s Earth Kingdom feels very close to the canon Earth Kingdom. Even earthbenders’ form of mind control apparently just involves binding people to honor contracts and agreements, which is pretty straightforward and doesn’t get much focus. The biggest issue is the Dai Li. Honestly, I think Vathara gives the Dai Li more overt whitewashing than she does the Fire Nation. Vathara’s Dai Li are actually supposed to be an order of badass spirit-fighters, protecting the people from dangerous spirit world threats, which they apparently still do most of the time, with the whole "secret police” thing being more of a sideline. While Long Feng is still presented as evil, the overall vibe is more that the Dai Li are only corrupt because he’s in charge, rather than the whole organization being rotten (and we’re treated to a number of sympathetic Dai Li characters, most obviously Shirong, while the Gaang get called out for assuming the Dai Li are evil, even though none of their interactions with them have given them any reason to think otherwise). And even Long Feng gets a war hero backstory he didn’t have in canon. I assume this is more of Vathara’s desire to add moral greyness to the setting, but, well, I don’t think that the creepy authoritarian secret police were a group that really needed a sympathetic POV showing that they’re mostly a bunch of honorable men who just want what’s best for their city and it’s just the guy in charge who’s a bad apple, honest! She also gives Kuei a bunch of superpowers for being Earth King, which I’ll discuss when I get to the fic’s themes since I view it as part of a larger trend.

Spirits: Embers uses spirits a lot; it also really plays up the blue and orange morality of spirits in a way I genuinely like and appreciate (though Vathara seems weirdly defensive about this, like she expects her readers to assume that all spirits must be “good guys” and she has to defend a different portrayal, despite the fact that in my experience most of the Avatar fandom considers spirits to be assholes and thinks the world would be better off without them). I do have one particular issue, though. Maybe no one else cares, but as a grad student in religious studies it bugs me so much. That’s Vathara’s use of real-world deities. Agni as the Fire Nation’s patron god has some slight basis in canon, since Fire Nation honor duels are called Agni Kais (Agni is the name of the Vedic fire god… but it’s also literally just the word for “fire” in Vedic Sanskrit) but then out of nowhere partway through the fic she throws in Guanyin as a deity worshipped in the Earh Kingdom, and Tengri as the deity of the Air Nomads. Tengri, in real life, is the chief deity of Tengrism, a traditional religion of Mongolia (which ties back to the connection between the historical Air Nomads as fantasy Mongols from the fic’s history) while Guanyin is indeed venerated in China – but she’s a Buddhist bodhisattva, which is especially weird because the Earth Kingdom isn’t really coded Buddhist in either the show or Embers (shouldn’t the Air Nomads be the ones revering a bodhisattva? And this one really gets me in particular; for some reason, likely Guanyin’s comparative real-life prominence, it feels as immersion-breaking as if it turned out one of the Air Temples was now home to a sect of Christian or Manichaean monks). It’s especially jarring because the Water Tribes still revere the Moon and Ocean Spirits rather than real-world deities (and Vathara gets their names backwards – the Moon is Tui and the Ocean is La, but she flips them for some reason). Honestly, I wouldn’t use real-world deities in the Avatarverse in the first place (I have referenced Agni in some of my old fanfics, following fanon at the time, and I now consider that something of an old shame, fwiw) and if I did, I’d stick with a unified theme of Vedic deities (going off of Agni) rather than taking a grab bag of different traditions and trying to weld them into one cosmology.

The Avatar and Yaoren: Vathara’s take on the Avatar is… interesting. On the one hand, she does have a running theme of each Avatar having to wrestle with their predecessor’s mistakes which I like, and which basically became canon as we got more stories focused on different Avatars (though I do think Vathara sometimes takes it a bit too far, making it seem like the Avatar has caused more problems than they’ve solved; seriously, what did Kyoshi do to you?). On the other hand, she for some reason feels the need to retcon that the Avatar is not actually the reincarnation of their predecessors, but the World Spirit (this fic being mostly written before the introduction of Raava) choosing a new, different human host each time. And I absolutely don’t get the point to this (conceptually, the Avatar is basically a cross between the Dalai Lama and the Avatars of Vishnu, and in traditional interpretations that’s not how either of those work) and it mostly just seems to be thrown in to give Aang something else to be wrong about. Yaoren, on the other hand, Vathara loves; they’re her own creation and as two-element benders are basically mini-avatars (though they’re actually older than the Avatar) and of course Zuko gets to be one. And while the fic goes into a lot of detail about how traumatic the experience of becoming a yaoren is, the way it also lays on thick how important yaoren are and how the Avatar needs them as advisors and how the world falling out of balance is partially due to their decline and how her yaoren characters (especially Langxue) seem to have a better idea of what’s going on and how to fix it than everyone else just oftentimes makes it feel like she’s really laying it on thick regarding how amazing this creation of hers is, with the traumatic aspect being more about milking more sympathy for Zuko than something that actually affects the plot (ie, being a yaoren supposedly cuts Zuko out of the line of succession for good, since he’s now technically a waterbender… but that ends up not mattering because the position of Fire Lord is abolished anyway, and it doesn’t stop him from becoming the Great Name of Dragons’ Wings once it’s established).

Well, this is all getting a little long, so I think I’ll stop here for now and split my overall review into two parts (at least). I hope you’ll join us next time, as we dig into characters, plot, theme, and the fic’s relationship to canon. And if you’re reading this and do like Embers, please keep in mind that I’m not trying to attack you for liking it, and all of this is just my own opinion, no more, and no less. Otherwise, see you soon (fingers crossed!) for part two!

[idontwanttospoiltheparty]

kind of a random question but what's your take on plastic ono band, musically speaking? a lot of people seem to have very extreme opinions on it so i'm curious about yours :)

Hi anon!!! Don't worry, POB is one of my favourite albums to talk about tbh.

(I'm not sure if by "musically" you mean separate from the lyrics, but I definitely have more to say about it lyrically – please come back with another ask if you want me to delve more into some aspect :) )

I actually rarely listen to the whole thing, because sonically it's not necessarily my cup of tea and there are songs on it I find hard to appreciate outside their album context. Although, the last time I gave it a full relisten, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the sound of songs like I Found Out and Well Well Well.

I find the album on the whole an incredible and very concise presentation of a worldview that strives for personal independence, yet feels held back from achieving it for various reasons. It explores various aspects of "dependence", starting with parenthood and then moving on to religion, celebrities, drugs, among other things. It's not something I personally agree with, but the earnestness of the whole thing strikes a chord with me. It's also interesting to me that I've seen various accounts of people who made it out of high-commitment religious groups find the album really resonated with them.

One thing I find the most interesting about it is the fact that iconoclasm is one of the central themes of the album and, the way it opens with Beatle John Lennon screaming for his parents and closes with him singing a lullaby about his mother's death just after declaring he doesn't believe in Beatles and that the dream is over, the album is actually attacking John's untouchable image, forcing the listener to reassess their own relationship to John as a potential idol. In that sense, he's not only preaching, he's also being vulnerable to drive his point home, while simultaneously doing what he believes is necessary: "feel your own pain". I find the way the album plays with the fourth wall fascinating. It made me cringe at first, but I found examining why it made me cringe to actually be really fruitful. The album is challenging and forced me to reconsider it in a way I have rarely experienced with art.

On an individual song level: Isolation and Remember are among my absolute favourite John songs. "I don't expect you to understand / After you caused so much pain / But then again / You're not to blame / You're just a human / A victim of the insane" is a career highlight and the centerpiece of the album to me. It puts all the cutting and perhaps even cruel remarks made before and after into perspective. Plus I loooooooooooooove how that part completely shifts the energy of the song. The triplets in the last line are so good.

Remember is just endlessly sad to me, the interpolation of Bring It On Home lyrics is HEARTBREAKING. I interpret the song as being about reminding yourself why you have to leave a situation. In the context of the Beatles breakup, his use of a 1962 song of that nostalgic (to John) style about wanting someone to come back makes me a little fucking crazy. He took a song about regretting a split and changed it up into a reminder not to look back lest he come to regret his decision to leave.

Otherwise, I think God is incredible musically-speaking (shoutout to Billy Preston's beautiful piano playing!!!) but it's so much lyrically I don't listen to it super often. Love is very very pretty.

Mother and Well Well Well are often a bit much for me, but I find the way they sort of weave primal screaming into the music cool. Hold On and Look At me are quite soothing.

Working Class Hero is probably my least favourite, it's just kind of boring to listen to, though I am thankful to have some John f-bombs so there's that.

[irrigos]

Irrigo's Best and Worst Exceptional Stories from Every Year

This is going to be incredibly long. Should I have split this up into several posts? Perhaps. But I didn't. Anyway here's my extremely subjective opinions that may or may not match up with the subreddit's yearly survey. This post is long and has some spoilers, but I've tried to mention them only when necessary and labeled which little blurbs have spoilers in them.

2015

Best: Cut With Moonlight

I can say this very confidently now that I've played many many too many Exceptional Stories: a lot of them really fumble the ending. So, the fact that Cut With Moonlight has a good twist I wasn't expecting, and ties the ending back into the beginning of the story is what makes it a (haha) cut above the rest

Worst: Flint

There are lots of people who like Flint, and that's not illegal (despite my many petitions to the government), so I just have to accept it. I played it when it came out, and liked it at the time, even though I couldn't really grasp what was happening! I thought it was just because AK's writing was too deep and poetic for my simple mind, but now that I'm no longer a teenager, I think maybe he might just be a bad writer? Playing it now (when it's not split in half with a month between) it's way too goddamn long, it's really boring, I don't know why he made it canon that the Mountain of Light experienced sexual violence when she's literally a pile of rocks, and also the fatphobia in it really started to get to me. Like, I get it. The Imperturbable Patroness is big, but it felt like her size was brought up constantly. It might just be me, and other people maybe wouldn't have gotten this impression, but when I played it last, it felt like every sentence about her was like, "She heaves her huge body, holding a knife in her meaty fist, and stomps her big feet on the ground, and looks at you fatly"

Honestly, I would recommend this ES if you want to remind yourself why we're glad AK is gone.

2016

Best: Five Minutes to Midday

Are there better, more compelling stories, with more variance in the choices you could make? Perhaps. But this is MY list, and I'M in love with the Subdued Protestor. This one was extremely in character for my PC, and also particularly timely (I think when it happened, Morgan had just lost their soul), and the Protestor was sooooooo big and handsome and I love him. He's my best friend, my homeboy, my rotten soldier, my sweet cheese, my good time boy. I really don't have much more to say than that!

Worst: A Waltz to Move the World

(Spoilers)

This one's complicated! There's a lot to like about it. I like that it has a soundtrack! I like that it's got cool Great Game stuff! In isolation, I like the idea of helping a woman reconcile with her father! But... I just can't escape the fact that the story expects you to have a lot of sympathy for this guy whose problem is he's so sad about the time he murdered his wife. Also- was any of the lore about The Old Man and the Winter in Vienna ever followed up on, or has it been mostly dropped? I don't remember. Someone who knows more lore than me might know, and I frankly don't care enough to check.

2017

Best: HOJOTOHO!

This one is one that is widely loved, and yeah, it deserves it! I don't actually have too much to say about it. Who doesn't love hanging out with some weird little kids? Having a little girl see an opera, latch onto a part of it, and just immediately be like "THIS IS ME NOW" is so accurate. Also, the final choice in this one was really tough for me! It was a doozy!

Worst: The Clay Man's Arm

I've written about The Clay Man's Arm already, so I almost wanted to pick something else for worst, just so I'd have something new to say. But how could I pick anything else! This is my least favorite story I've ever played in Fallen London. There are others that I think are worse in construction or morals or metaphorical implications, but I have not found a single one of them to be as repulsive. You couldn't pay me to play this one again.

2018

Best: For All The Saints Who from Their Labours Rest

(Spoilers)

Everyone knows I love Church and Hell stuff. And if you don't, you should! I'm the one who made them put the Bishop of Southwark in Mask of the Rose, because he's my special favorite! That said, I can't say I really loved this one as much as some of the other "best"s. I mean, I got some got Reggie moments, so that's good. But... I don't know. I was excited about there being a sexy priest, but sadly the Intrepid Deacon is EXTREMELY not my type (my type is.. well! Reggie! not little baby men who've never done nothing to nobody!). Also... well I'm not quite sure how to express this, but I think it's really weird that the end of this one basically confirms that Lucifer is... real? That he's one of the fallen princes of Hell, or something? Possibly implied that the Christian God is a Judgement? idk it rubs me the wrong way to have a religion confirmed true or false within the fictional universe. So, while I think this one is the best of the year, I can't say I don't have some pretty hefty problems with it. Also I always get the name wrong

Worst: Factory of Favours

I already wrote about this one here, but the important thing is, it's boring. There's really not too much more to say- you do a series of boring actions to achieve dull goals for NPCs who I wouldn't even say rise to the level of being actual "characters", and then it's over and you go home. It has all the substance and style of a dinner consisting of a single sheet of blank paper.

2019

Best: Cricket, Anyone?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know it's the best one. Everyone says it's the best one. I'm so filled with spite I wanted to be super contrarian and pick a different one, but I can't. It's so fun, you guys. The lore reveals in it are cool (and it's important when an ES doesn't make me resent the presence of a Master- I do not enjoy those guys!), and the plot is exciting, the mechanics work really well, but in my opinion, the most important thing about Cricket, Anyone? is this: it's funny. There are points in FL where you can really smell the influence of Terry Pratchett, but they never manage to actually emulate him (turns out, when you try to combine Terry Pratchett, TS Eliot, GK Chesterton, and Jorge Luis Borges, you just get like... Neil Gaiman. And nobody wants that!). I love Pratchett's humor, so Groover capturing that, and actually delivering on the "hilarious" part of the "dark and hilarious Gothic underworld" that's advertised on the log-in page was really exceptional to me.

Worst: The Stag & The Shark

(spoilers)

2019 was actually a really good year for Exceptional Stories, and I had a hard time picking a Worst one. The Stag & The Shark was well-constructed, and I wouldn't say there was anything really wrong with it! I just wasn't really invested in the characters and I didn't care about any of their goals. The titular Young Stag wants to kill a Bound Shark because he think it will prove that he's cool, his dad wants his son to be safe and also stop being so fucking weird, and the fisherwoman whose boat you're on wants to recruit the Young Stag to the New Sequence. I don't really care about some rich kid wanting to fit in with the Young Stags, I don't care about his dad, and I also think the New Sequence sucks, so I don't care about them achieving their goals either!

2020

Best: Go Tell the King of Cats

Okay, you need to know one thing about me: I'm a cat guy. Also, a Cats guy. It's a good musical. And auxiliary to both of those: I love stories about old and busted bastard people. So this one was basically made for me. I don't want to talk much more about it, because I really think you should play it, especially if you like a story about an old bastard man (who is also a cat) trying to get a second chance. I teared up at the end.

Worst: The Dilettante's Debut

(spoilers)

uuuguughghguhgughguhghghghhhhhhh. Okay, the thing about The Dilettante's Debut is that I wanted to like it. I always want to like Exceptional Stories! I like it when things are good! But the ending on this one is.... god. It's bad. So you're trying to help the Dilettante restore the reputation of the Fairfax family, and also show up his cousin (the Wild-Eyed Socialite). I'm on board with this! I can do this! I generally don't see the point in undermining the people who hired me, so I didn't work against the Dilettante for the majority of the story...

... and then it turned out the final goal of the Dilettante's Footman was to use shapeling arts to mutate the Socialite into a Starved Man. If you agree to help him with this, in the end, you're told she's been put in a sanitarium. This is possibly (probably) a lie, but also... I mean, I'm supposed to mutilate this woman's body without her consent, and then banish her to either the Roof (most likely), or genuinely a sanitarium, a place where women were frequently abused, and for what? Because she drinks too much? She's successful and the Dilettante isn't? She's kind of rude to him?

I refused to help the footman, but then I didn't have enough cache with the Socialite to decent ending, so it felt like I was being punished for being loyal to the guy who hired me (because I didn't really have much reason to betray him) until he was going to commit and atrocity. I was either supposed to betray him for no reason earlier, or stick with the atrocity, and both are bad.

Anyway, it felt like Unto Dust (the story two months later) was trying to do something similar to The Dilettante's Debut, but it did it way better.

Anyway, it felt like Unto Dust did "last scion of a noble house dealing with his grandparent's legacy" way better two months later

2021

Best: The Tempest

Between this story and HOJOTOHO!, Fallen London really is the only game that I've ever played that truly understands little girls. The Tempestuous Urchin is pissed the fuck off about her lot in life, and she's right to be! And I just really enjoyed a story about how powerful anger can be, both to let go of AND to utilize. I just feel like you don't really see that a lot, and I really liked it.

Worst: For A Dream of Innocence

(spoilers)

I've talked about this one before, way back when it came out, but short version is: this one had a lot of errors, the story was unfocused, and I thought that it had some really Troubling implications.

The long version is: There were a lot of typos, or times when it referred to a character with the wrong pronouns. It seemed to have three different ideas, any of which would have been a decent ES in itself (a rogue French spy, making a new life in a vat, an enclave of Rubberies living under a bridge), but because they're all crammed together, none of them really seemed to pay off, and it just felt like the story wasn't really ABOUT anything.

And then the Troubling Implications.... first of all, the Abbess's motivations for being duplicitous and manipulative is that she's old and wants to be young and hot again, which... I mean it's possible for a person to want that, but it just seems kind of misogynistic to me. Like, yeah, why else would a woman bargain away the lives of a town? Women be obsessed with their youth!

On top of that, it also doubled down on the Rubbery lore that I really hate. I kind of thought that the fact that Rubberies are constructs with no interiority or culture had been retconned, or at least allowed to fall to the wayside with the Tentacled Entrepreneur/Helicon House bringing focus to Rubbery art and music. And I was glad for it! So I didn't like that it was brought up again here, and in a way that came across as particularly colonialist. These beings, who are less than people, do not have any culture, and any they have acquired is only from association with a More Civilized people (in this case, Londoners), and this is viewed as a disgusting aberration by their close-minded rulers, is. um. Well. It Sure Is Huh.

2022

Best: Adornment

I would say that I'm a pretty well-known Masters Hater, so when I saw that the art for this one was Mr. Stones, I was like.... ugh. Great another one to pander to the Masters fuckers, the only audience that FBG cares to cater to.

I was wrong! I was very wrong. I mean, maybe I wasn't wrong, but I was being too negative. This was a really fun story, and I really really liked all the characters in it. A fun nonbinary anarchist criminal and a Quaker clay man? Were they writing this one for me exclusively? I even enjoyed Mr. Stones' presence in it!!! It was really fun. Anyway do you guys think Mica and the Smuggler ever explored each others bodies

Worst: Darnier Cri

(Spoilers)

You gotta do real bad to make me hate the story that's about Victorian fashion, a thing I love very much. You get asked to help a fashion house design their new collection, and eventually learn that the fashion house has been run by revolutionaries, using the inherent magical powers of Neathy fabrics to influence Surface politics (specifically to undermine the Transvaal Republic, which was an independent republic in what is now northeaster South Africa, in an attempt to drive the colonists out of Africa). It's newest investor is an agent of the Transvaal Republic, who is trying to destroy the fashion house.

I guess I would say that it's a... BOLD choice, to try to explicitly address colonialism in your alt-history adventure game where you can fuck a squid. I'm certainly not a "keep politics out of my video games" type person (I think art is inextricable from politics, and I talk about the politics of FL all the time) but I really don't think that FL is equipped to actually address this subject head-on. And, frankly, it's incredibly jarring, when the idea of anti-colonialism has never come up in the game before. I know there ARE colonies in the Neath, even one that you can be the governor of, but I would argue "the magical fantasy talking tigers seem to graciously tolerate your presence" is very different from "the European settlers in Africa think they are genetically superior to the native Africans." It's just kind of jarring!! And honestly, I don't think this game is really equipped to address it!!! It's just a little out of place. And on top of that, a lot of the language the villain uses to... uh. be racist, I guess, is also a lot of the same language the game uses around the Great Chain/Liberation of the Night, like talking about a "hierarchy of being" and people "knowing their place in the chain". Like... the implication of that allusion is that the fictional hierarchy that exists in Fallen London, that puts Judgements above Curators above Humans above Apes, is the same as... racism? Real world racism? So LoN is anti-racism? So anyone who doesn't support LoN... supports white supremacy? And if that WERE the case, then why would the game keep framing LoN as morally ambiguous? Do we not like anti-racism actually?

I don't think that was necessarily intentional, or at least, I don't think that's an implication that FBG meant to include with the Liberation, but I think it's pretty sloppy writing.

Also, I hated the ending choice. The clothing studio is on fire, and you can save one thing from it. Your options are: a unique clothing item, a different unique clothing item, or the garment you made to send to a high-ranking client on the Surface, that is intended to influence them to side with the Africans over the European colonists. Like... why. Do you want a special hat that you can only get by paying real money, or do you want a special coat that you can only get by paying real money, or do you want to end racism?

Baffling. And that's not even getting into the fact that it's been pretty well-established that the special Neathy fabrics lose their special qualities in the sunlight, so the entire premise of this story is either impossible or a huge retcon.

In Conclusion

if you're wondering how much I've spent on exceptional stories over the decade I've been playing this game... uh... no you're not!

[dearweirdme]

so this larry situation has started a discussion. i am not a larrie btw but i know rain you used to be one. in my opinion larry is definitely an example of shipping taken too far.

louis's statement kinda scares me "there’s nothing I can say or do to dispel the believers of that conspiracy. they are so intertwined with what they believe to be the truth now that they won’t actually see the truth for what it is." even after this statement, i saw a few larries who still believe that his management is making him do all this. that gave me the shudders.

if louis and harry used to be a thing and this is how they turned out now, i would happily accept tae and jk to be just friends rather than their relationship turning into something disastrous like larry.

i think for me the only way i will continue to believe in taekook (assuming that they cannot come out officially as a couple) is if they both stay single for pretty much the rest of their life. so this is like a pretty long term theory lol but this will be my ultimate proof. because if they cannot get married or openly be together, its not like they can just tell us that, the only way we can spot it is if both of them are single. and ofc this theory only works out if only tae and jk out of all the members are single well into their age. if literally any other member is also single then this theory doesn't work.

anyways what do you think? what is your version of final proof?

Hi anon!

The difficulty of Larry fandom is that after 1d went on hiatus.. there was close to no real interactions to be witnessed between Harry and Louis. Before hiatus, most Larries were still quite certain they were together and they got to actually watch them interact and look at how they reacted to each other. When that disappeared.. the fandom kinda had to go by clues and fill in the gaps. But that leaves so much room to be wrong. That is why I feel fairly certain that they were together during or for parts of 1d, but perhaps not much after hiatus. There’s so much that makes Larry fandom a tough and complicated place. They are dealing with a band that’s no longer active, two solo artists that are quite different, a lot if newer fans who don’t really understand 1d history.. etc. All stuff that makes for a complex situation. Not all Larries are as unhinged (same as how Tkkrs differ from each other), but if you base your opinion on twitter larries 😬.

I think unhinged theories emerge when fans think they have to speak and fight for their favorite artist. We can kinda see it here too, with some fans talking about members hating each other. To me that is unhinged as well. You are absolutely right in saying Larry fandom (as a whole) takes it too far. There’s a lot of unhinged theories going around. I don’t think Louis has to do this because of his management, I think he has a lot of control these days. The idea that he doesn’t is something that stems from their earlier days, when their label and management did seem to have a lot of control.

It is very important to take note of time passing and of situations changing and I feel that is lacking in Larry fandom. A lot of people hold on to what once was without leaving much room for new developments.

The same thing goes for Tkk. I just try to go with what Tae and Jk show us. I think they have continued to show us their closeness so at this moment I have little reason to doubt that they’re together. When that changes (and not to bring down the mood or something, but we do not know how enlistment and being apart will effect them) I will still go with what I see and accept if I feel they have broken up. If at any point one of them announces an engagement or marriage.. I’ll take that to mean they split up or that maybe we were wrong (depending on context).

You always have to do with the information you get. In this situation it’s always possible that at one point something comes to light that changes our perspective. For me Taennie wasn’t that, but for some it was. For me Tae and/or Jk denying Tkk probably will be, others might still carry on.

My ultimate proof of Tae and Jk being together will be when I see both of them come out in 10+ years or so. If they make it so far ofcourse.. otherwise I’ll probably forever wonder 😂. But it’s not that important for me to get ultimate proof of them together. In the end what I want is for them to be happy, whether it’s with each other romantically or platonically.

[rollercoasterwords]

on the topic of girl/boy scouts and gendered education - in my country scouts is not split into "boy scouts" and "girl scouts", everyone goes together. however! for decades the groups for the younger kids were split into girls and boys - they did the same activities but it was still stereotypical (more play and physical work for boys, more creating and discussions for girls). a few years ago there was this initiative to mix the groups of the younger kids bc this was the only instance where the girls and boys were separate and it caused very wide discussions in my circle of a. would the kids be bothered by it (we were scared we would get only boys from some schools and only girls from others; that the kids would segregate themselves), b. would it damage the kids' safe space (we're talking ten to twelve year olds, right at the age when they're not yet teenagers but not toddlers by any means), and c. (and most importantly in my opinion) what is our role as their guides and educators? because at the end of the day we strive to not just create a fun environment to play but also discuss serious topics, from climate change to politics to civil rights and even broad subjects of history, and learn practical stuff, from anything camping and building to first aid and the different ways one can volunteer. and at the end of the day, there isn't any need for girls and boys to be taught these things separately. they ended up mixing the groups and remarkably it not just worked out but actively benefitted the kids; there were so many we didn't think would come and now did because their friend group from school was of both boys and girls, because their closest friends/cousins/twins even could be in the same group with them and provide them with the safe space they needed. all that to say, if this person insists on discussing girl/boy scouts, it's worth mentioning that the way the movement functions in different parts of the world varies widely - and even more than that, education is not static. the right adjustments should and can be made for certain kids (should the broader system "allow" it, which is exactly why we need it to be flexible and considerate and anything but static), but the way you educate - the system in which you provide others with knowledge and lead discussions - is the basis of it all. i could go on because i feel like people like to misinterpret girl/boy scouts because those are very old and very successful movements, but even the stuck-up sexist movement created by a perhaps-pedophile in an attempt to show british boys how to Be Prepared for a war after wwi can change and shift, because that's what education is all about. to try and define a "correct" way of teaching, of schooling, of either formal or informal forms of education is not just simply futile but legitimate dangerous to the basis of the field itself; it's ever-changing, ever-growing, and trying to deny it inherently means keeping others (mostly children) in the dark. the thing is, lots of people who advocate only for one type of static education (be it segregated, modern, conservative or new and innovative) know it doesn't include everyone (it's easy to look at conservative forms of education, but at the same time not separating girls and boys tends to prevent religious communities from attending, for example) and they still continue to advocate for it because it's a lot easier to just take one thing and stick to it. this ask is getting long lol just wanted to share my thoughts on the subject! from my (pretty wide) experience with various forms of education (formal, informal, conservative, modern, etc) i can say that the best educators i've seen have been the ones that learned to be flexible and make education about the children (even students) rather than the textbook academic definition of their approach. education, when done right, is slow, and we don't get to see the results for very long years; which is exactly why it should not be set in stone.

don't have time to write a long response atm but i appreciate ur perspective!! really interesting to hear an anecdote from someone who's witnessed an instance where boys + girls were separated vs mixed together in the same program