#i'm a writer i understand

[technically-human]

Hi i'm absolutely in love with the reverse au!!

I want to know, in this verse does edwin still confesses to charles? if so how is it different? i feel if he did he would end it by apologizing, you know, religious guilt and all

There’s a train that goes through Hell.

Its journey starts in Wrath, and it departs already full of souls. It took Charles far too many years to realize that there were separate, more spacious wagons that demons could board. Not that he could understand why anyone, hellborn or not, would want to get into the damned thing. He certainly hadn’t.

Actually, Charles couldn’t recall ever boarding the train. As far as he could tell, he just appeared there one day, and had spent the next tortuous decades trying to get out. It was part of the torture. Getting out was entirely possible. More than that, it was necessary.

The train had no regular schedule that he could discern (not at first, though he had always been good at finding patterns, and was eventually able to crack it) but it would make quite a few stops before finally returning to the Wrath ring. Souls inside the train were already angry and far too close to each other (close, so close not even air could squeeze in) but when they got really violent was when the train made a stop.

Getting out didn’t mean you were free, no matter where you managed it, be it Sloth or Gluttony, Pride or Lust. No, as soon as the train finished its journey, you would appear back inside, in Wrath where you belonged, suffocating once again, getting ready to claw your way out for the millionth time.

Because if you didn’t get out, The Conductor would get you.

If he thought about it calmly, Charles could probably say that he got out of the train more times than not. Still, being caught by The Conductor once was bad enough, as there was no coal in Hell, and something had to serve as combustible. Souls could not burn to death, and the whole journey always felt longer than eternity when he was caught. Once it was over, he would be inside again, and fight with more desperation than before, not caring who stayed inside so long as it wasn’t him.

He couldn’t understand why anyone, hellborn or not, would want to get into the damned thing. He certainly hadn’t. But as the souls pushed and bit and clawed and punched their way out, Edwin boarded the train. And that wasn’t even the most groundbreaking revelation Charles had that day.

ko-fi

[mollysunder]

Sky and Viktor's relationship is such a horror movie to me. You've got a man who was frustrated by the limitations placed on his life that were out of his control, like his class, mobility, and general health. Despite everything, he manages to rise beyond his station and avoid being an assistant for the rest of his life.

Then you've got a woman from the same background who admires him and all that he's accomplished in spite of the similar class based prejudices they faced all the while she's his assistant. She works up the courage to take leap of faith and reach out to him with her own research to show what's possible if they worked together as equals. And then he gets her killed!

Sky's death isn't the end of it because while it affects Viktor it is in no way meaningful to Sky's life or value as a person whatsoever. Even the pendant he wears in her memory is based on the design of her notebook, but that was just her notebook's cover, she probably bought it from a store and the design itself is probably mass produced. Why not use Sky's signature that was in her letter and in the notebook, the thing part if the notebook with real value?

Then Sky's brought back in s2 and she really only exists to be Viktor's assistant again, who he kills, again! But this time it's different because this time Viktor's making a conscious decision to look Sky in the eye and kill her... to prove he's changed.

In the middle of all this, in no way has Sky's death been mourned by her family or anyone else who could have known her. Jayce wasn't affected by the reveal, he didn't think it was important to tell Heimerdinger, or anyone who knew her. Nothing about her life, death, or disappearance has spurred any emotional reaction or even curiosity about what happened to her.

Sky's new life was also extremely isolated because she became further tied to him (in some ways you could say she was defined by him). Viktor never mentioned Sky to anyone in the material plane during his commune arc, so she only exists to him and she has no way to communicate with others, she's just there for Viktor's sake.

Then in the finale we learn this all a part of a big time loop where Viktor actively set the wheels in motion to have him and Jayce create hextech together, but if everything follows as is, that means Sky is violently killed in those timelines too. That means Viktor weighed the costs and decided over and over and over again that Sky was expendable enough to let her die for his plan to work eventually. How is that not murder at this point?

What's worse is that post-finale Sky's humanity is a point of dispute amongst the fandom, the VAs, and the writers themselves. Sky's the hexcore manipulating Viktor. No, Sky's a manifestion of Viktor's guilt. No, she's actually supposed to represent his humanity/conscious made physical. And in none of these arguments do they discuss Sky as a person, she's just an object meant to serve Viktor both in the narrative sense and literal sense as his assistant.

The most absolutely maddening part is that with Viktor's new bio on the League site, not only have most traces of Viktor had been scrubbed by Piltover's archive, but Sky's life has been completely wiped. Her death was implied to have been swept under the rug, and only described as the "loss of life" consequence from his Hexcore experiment.

Viktor was afraid of dying a senseless death (created by the conditions Piltover condemned his birth to) in obscurity and then he turned it into Sky's destiny.

[lightgamble]

DAREDEVIL: BORN AGAIN | 1.01

I refuse to believe that a tragedy had to destroy everything. But it did.

[littlefankingdom]

I really dislike when people have Damian own wild pets, like a tiger, an elephant, or a lion, because these aren't pets, they are wild animals. And Damian is supposed to care about animal rights, that's the Al Ghul's thing, they care about animals. So, no, he shouldn't be like "Yeah, a big cat is like a house cat, it totally can live in the manor with us", he would be like "this animal has specific needs and is NOT domesticated, in the sense of being accustomed to living among humans, this is dangerous for it and for people. It's not a pet, DON'T PET IT."

My hc is that he is a Disney princess, so wild animals weirdly love him BUT he is against owning one.

[frownyalfred]

here friend, I'll help you: when you realize the characterization isn't to your liking, go ahead and do me a favor -- scroll up to the top right of your screen and hit that big red X button. there, problem solved.

also don't bookmark it. I'm so freaking tired of having this conversation.

[welcometogrouchland]

my Stephanie Brown hot take is that she should get mad bitches now that she's single in comics. Yes yes shipping BUT the one time she had sex she was punished by the narrative via teen pregnancy. I think she should be allowed to have as much sex as she wants with zero consequences. Could be a lot of sex, could be a little. Point is she should get to do it without getting narratively baby trapped this time. she should get them pregnant, actually.

[meanderingstream]

Eliot at peace with being Damned

One of the things that makes Eliot hard to write for in-character (but also such an interesting character to explore) is that he believes he is damned to Hell and he is at peace with that. He has a lot of guilt, oceans of guilt, but it's not so much the tortured, anguished catholic guilt à la Nate or like, Daredevil. 

He has done monstrous, unforgivable things. But, on his own, he came to a realization of what he had done, and pulled away from that world. On his own, he left the worst person he ever worked for, and stopped using guns, and stopped killing. On his own, he switched from wetwork to retrievals. This all occurs before we ever meet him, so while there are many hints and inferences, the specifics of how that happened, how he came to those decisions, are left up to the audience’s imagination. 

Eliot wants to make the world a better place, and he works everyday with the team to help people, and he genuinely enjoys helping people and the work he does on the job. But he does not believe that he can be redeemed. (Not my own personal belief about him, but it is what he thinks). When he dies, he will go to Hell for his sins, and there is nothing that can possibly be done to change that. He doesn't need to angst over it, because it’s just a fact. It is what it is. There is no point agonizing over whether his soul can be saved, because he knows it cannot. This is both a keystone of his character, and also something he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about day-to-day, because it’s a settled matter. 

And as much as we love Eliot the character, he has a point that lives are not tradable for equivalent exchange. If he killed a specific family 25 years ago, that was snuffing out the light and potential and future of those particular parents and children. The surviving extended family lost those particular relatives. Saving a family now does not balance that ledger, because each person is a unique life and not interchangeable for another. While I may have different beliefs about Hell and redemption than Eliot, I still want to acknowledge that he has a point. That changing now doesn't necessarily help the people he hurt in the past, and unlike Harry, he can’t work down a list of making amends, because almost all of his victims are dead. There is no atonement to the dead. 

Eliot’s redemption is in seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and helping others get to it. Particularly the team, and particularly the pair he’s going to protect until his dying day. He will stay down there in the dark forever (he believes), but getting the others out is his redemption. 

I do not believe that Eliot will actually go to Hell when he dies, but his belief that he is damned is fundamental to who he is as a character, and he is going to believe that for the rest of his life. It can be really challenging to balance that when writing his POV, particularly when delving into events that dredge this stuff up for him (which we writers love to do because it’s so delicious). Eliot doesn’t exactly have a low self-esteem. He knows he has many skills and is exceptional at them (cooking, fighting, grifting, guitar, sports, etc). He pretty much knows his teammates love him, and care about him, and want him to stay alive for them, and spend the rest of his life with them. He has professional pride, and he will argue when he wants something. He is certainly not a doormat. However, he also believes he is fundamentally and irrevocably a bad person. Balancing between him not being too self-deprecating in normal situations / about his usefulness to the team, with his inherent belief in his own moral depravity can be a thin blade to walk without falling to one side or another. But it is also one of the biggest aspects of his psyche that makes him such a fascinating and complex character to explore.

[starcurtain]

I wish everyone collectively understood aventurine’s character like you…things would be so much easier! I genuinely don’t understand how people keep getting his motivations wrong??? Could it be because some of the most popular Aven fanfics were written prior to his release? That could have contributed to some of the takes we tend to see about him…thoughts?

I struggled all day to come up with a concise way to answer this and couldn't think of one, so here, have a long-winded ramble:

I don't think early fic writers have much impact in the situation with Aventurine's character now, since most people can look at when a story was posted and go "Oh, this was before we had ____ information."

I think that Aventurine's problem is being a male character in a gacha game. Gacha game characters are designed to sell. Hoyo can sell female characters very, very easily. Give her huge tits and a visible underwear strap and you're good to go. I love all my guy friends, but I'm not gonna sugarcoat it: straight men are not the hardest audience to please. Hit a particular fetish (feet, spandex, dommy mommy), and you're gucci.

Nah, we all know why Jade's trailer is Like That.™

Male characters in gacha are harder to sell because women as consumers are a little harder to predict. Does every woman want a tall, ripped hunk? Shit, no, small cute boyish models like Aventurine are selling better now? Why?! Would a bad boy be more popular than a nice guy??? It's harder to account for women's tastes, especially because they are often (a little) less visually-oriented.

Hoyo is good at what they do though, and they've figured out that male characters sell very well when they possess at least one of two specific traits:

Endearing vulnerability/helplessness

Gay ship tease

Give a character both, like Aventurine? They might as well be printing money.

That sound you hear is Hoyo's stock prices rising.

So, from the very beginning, Hoyo is incentivized to create a character that appeals to people, a character people will want to crack their wallets open for. And they achieved this, first and foremost, by giving Aventurine traits that female players (in particular, but men too), find especially appealing: emotional and physical vulnerability.

We see Aventurine's pain. We sympathize with his grief. We identify with his struggle to make meaning of his difficult life. He's our woobie, blorbo, babygirl, whatever the hell they're calling it now.

He can't hide his suffering anymore. He's on the very edge. He's a dude in distress. He's surrounded by enemies! He misses his mama! He's been betrayed! No one understands him like you do, dear player!

The ultimate feeling evoked is: He needs to be saved.

When people talk about male power fantasies, I think they forget that women can experience them too, and "Emotionally vulnerable man that only I (or my favorite character) can fix" is actually a female power fantasy.

And from there it's really easy, right: the people who shell out cash to buy warps for their harmed-husbando feel like they've saved him; the people who are into mlm ships look for the nearest hot dude to be the savior Ratio was waiting for his time lol.

Morally and intellectually, this type of deep-down-golden-hearted, emotionally-wounded male character is very easy to digest. There is nothing to dislike about this type of character or role in the story: this character is a good guy who has just gone through so many terrible situations, whose victim status makes him endearing, and whose lack of agency means that any of the questionable or downright bad things he does are always the result of someone else forcing his hand, and never something he would have chosen himself.

His motivations are always clear and consistent: get free, heal, and live happily ever after.

Insert the Wreck-It Ralph meme: "Do people assume all your problems got solved when a big strong man showed up?" But to be fair, a big strong man did kind of solve Aventurine's problem, so--

Anyway, it's simple. It's straightforward. Morally, it's pretty cut and dry, black and white: Aventurine is our hero, which means everyone dictating the course of his miserable life is evil.

Hoyo is not remotely discouraging people from literally buying into this emotional appeal.

And trust me, I get it. I'll be the first to admit that hurt-comfort is its own entire genre in fandom because it is so appealing. People eat up Aventurine's tragic backstory like candy! The idea of watching a character go through hell at the hands of bad guys just to finally find a happy end is like the definition of everyone's favorite story.

In fact... people love Aventurine's suffering so much, they have invented whole new ways for him to suffer that aren't even in the game.

This is where we get all the headcanons that Aventurine was a sex slave, every single person he meets hates him because of his race, the Stonehearts are executioners holding knives to his throat, Jade enslaved him to the IPC with a lifelong contract, his material possessions belong to the company, the IPC is forcing him to take only the most dangerous missions where he is being required by his evil jailers to continually put his life on the line... You name it and I promise you, I can find a fanfic where Aventurine suffers from it. 😂

Bro can't even sleep in on his day off; life is so hard for this man.

Being serious: if the game is telling us that Aventurine is a victim... Why not make him the perfect victim?

Why not envision an Aventurine with no freedom, who bears no responsibility for any of the horrible situations he is in or any of the dubious things he does?

It's so natural to like that version of Aventurine, so appealing to see a totally powerless underdog use his own wits and charms to claw his way up to freedom. Or, if you're the kind who really relishes angst: It's even appealing to see Aventurine lose more. To delight in fics where he loses his wealth, where the IPC punishes him for past crimes while he's powerless to stop them... (I assure you, this is many people's cup of tea and the fanfics prove it!)

Ultimately, there's nothing wrong with liking characters who are exactly this straightforward! It's completely fine to embrace characters that are intentionally written to be morally above-board, whose primary role in the story is to generate angst by being a good person who suffers, or those characters who never show unlikable traits, bad decisions, or contradictory actions.

The problem is that that's just not who the game is telling us Aventurine is.

Hoyo may be capitalizing off people who love to envision poor Aventurine still living his life as a slave... But the game also needs to tell a complicated enough story overall to appeal to people who don't care about this specific husbando--Aventurine's role in the actual game's plot has to be interesting enough for almost everyone to appreciate it, not just Aventurine's simp squad. (Don't get mad, I'm in the simp squad with you.)

So his character doesn't stop at just being a pure-hearted victim who is still waiting to be saved.

Aventurine is not that easy to label, and I think the biggest struggle in this character's fandom right now is between people who prefer the even-more-angsty, still-a-slave Aventurine versus people who want a morally grey, self-destructive character instead.

To me personally, while I greatly understand the appeal of fanon!Aventurine and the joy of a really juicy angst fic where characters lose it all, I think that missing out on the depth that canon is suggesting would be a real loss on the fandom's part.

The character motivations that Aventurine shows in the game are complicated. They cancel each other out. They're basically self-harm! He makes almost every situation he's in worse for himself--on purpose.

He is a good person, but also a person who has done unspeakable things. He does have morals, but he's not above allowing those who don't have them to use him to their advantage.

He's both the victim and the victor. He's his own worst enemy. He's a lost little boy who's been making terrible decisions for himself since he was like eight years old, and a grown ass man who is barely managing to fake his way through an existence that destiny is not letting him quit.

This kind of character is a lot harder to embrace. He's done things that most people would find appalling--like willingly joining up with the organization that let his entire race be massacred. He's invented a whole new peacock persona to frivolously flaunt riches he doesn't even care about (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 101). He actively plays into racist stereotypes about his people to manipulate others through their preconceived expectations. He's made a mockery of his mother's and sister's hopes and dreams by endlessly trying to throw his own life away.

He has flaws! He bet everything he had on a ploy without doing his homework to find out if the people he was risking his life for were even still around. (Maybe he already knew, and couldn't bear to admit it, even to himself.) He's intentionally off-putting and obnoxious to everyone he meets (Poison Dart Frog Self-Defense 102). He terrifies everyone who gets close to him by (seemingly) carelessly throwing himself into the jaws of death without the slightest provocation.

He knowingly allows the IPC to exploit his power and talents for profit. Did everyone forget that his role in the Strategic Investment Department is asset liquidation?! Like, his actual day-to-day job is ruining people's lives. Canonically, Aventurine kills people when his deals go bad.

His motivations change off-screen in two lines of story text. We're told in one line that his biggest reason for joining the IPC was to make money to save the Avgin, then in the next line we find out that's impossible. And... then what? What motivations does he even have now? The whole point of his character arc from 2.0-2.1 is that he was on the edge of giving in to utter despair and nihilism because he couldn't even perceive a single reason to stay alive. He has no purpose in life before Penacony, and that didn't start with the Stonehearts at all??

People keep saying Aventurine was held in the IPC by golden handcuffs, but how do you tie down someone for whom profit is meaningless? What can you offer to a man whose only desire is to bring back something already lost forever? How do you imprison someone whose only definition of freedom is, canonically, death?

Working for the Stonehearts is obviously not healthy. But that's why Aventurine was doing it--because taking dangerous missions allowed him to put himself at risk. The job that he originally pursued hoping to save his people became a direct means to self-harm, and the IPC's only real role in that was just happily profiting off the results.

The journal entries for Aventurine's quests are there deliberately to tell the player what is on his mind, and none of it has to do with escaping from his job:

Like... Work is the least of this man's problems.

At really the risk of rambling on too long now, he's also just a massive walking contradiction:

Aventurine is among the most explicitly religious characters in the game, yet he's one of the only people in the entire game that we have ever seen actively question his people's aeon.

You might be tempted to think Aventurine's risky gambles with his life as an adult are a result of giving up after finding out about the Avgin massacre... Butttt no, Hoyo makes sure to tell us that even at knee-high in the Sigonian desert, Kakavasha was already willing to risk himself in a fight to the death against monsters because even back then he found his own life to have less value than a single memento.

He's the "chosen one" who will lead his people to prosperity... except they're all dead.

He's explicitly suicidal... andddd also a pathstrider of Preservation.

He wants to die... He doesn't want to die. He wants to make it end, yet goes to staggering lengths to continually survive. (Every plan risks his life on purpose--but every plan's win condition is also to live.) He life is the chip tossed down, but his hand is trembling beneath the table. When faced with an otherwise unsurvivable situation, Aventurine literally became a winner of the Hunger Games. He beat other innocent people to death with his own chain-bound hands just to come out alive.

He knows the IPC failed the Avgin and left them to die... and he still willingly sought out a position of power in their organization. Maybe he really is after revenge... but maybe not.

He starts his journey in the IPC with a truly noble goal in mind: to help his people using his newfound wealth and power. He's a good guy who did genuinely want to save the Avgin and repay all those who helped him. But once it became clear he was too late, once it was obvious he would have no use at all for that monetary wealth and power he risked his life to get... What did he do with it? Unlike Jade, we don't see him over here donating to orphanages. (I'm not that heartless; I'm sure he does actually do a lot of good things with his money on the side, but the point is that the game does not show us that--it shows us, over and over again, Aventurine putting on a wasteful, over-indulgent persona toward wealth. We've supposed to feel how meaningless money is to him, how meaningless everything is becoming to him.)

He outright refuses to use underhanded tactics or to cheat at gambles, which is meant to show us that's he's more morally upright than his coworkers. There's an entire exchange where he says that he'll never stoop to using manipulation the way Opal does. But... he doesn't have any issue fulfilling Opal's exact agenda. He was never remotely morally conflicted about denying the Penaconians their freedom by dragging Penacony back under IPC control.

He's willing to risk his own life, which is one thing--but he's also willing to risk other people's well-being. Topaz accuses him of constantly egging their clients on into dangerous situations; we've actively seen him shove a gun into Ratio's hands and pull the trigger with no care for how Ratio would feel about that on their very first meeting... Dragging the Astral Express crew into the entire Penacony plan in the first place was exceedingly dangerous...

To me, I just think it's vital to understand his character through the lens of these contradictions because they demonstrate the extreme polarity of Aventurine's life: from rags to riches, from powerless to empowered by multiple aeons, from willing to kill to survive to killing himself... He has quite literally lived a life of "all or nothing," and while he is the victim of many terrible situations out of his control, his arc as a character involves facing the truth of himself and the future his own actions are hurtling him toward.

Frankly, the Aventurine that canon is suggesting is a little annoying. You want to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and say "Why are you like this?!" And he won't even have an answer for you, because he doesn't even know why he's still alive.

In the end, to me, this is so, so much more interesting. I can read an endless supply of hurt-comfort fics where Aventurine escapes the evil IPC and Ratio is there to fill the void in his life with the power of love and catcakes and be a perfectly happy clam online, but I want canon to continue to serve us this incredible mess of a man who constantly takes one step forward and two steps back.

Who is fully aware of his role as a cog in the grotesque profit-wheel of cosmic capitalism and still manages to say he never changed from the rags-wearing desert rat of the Sigonian wastes.

Who over and over again flirts with nihility but, ultimately, even if he has to wrest it from the grip of the gods themselves with bloody, chain-bound hands, chooses life.

[burningcheese-merchant]

So there's this Shadowvanilla fic on Ao3 Im fairly certain you know about, and in It SM and PV link up to eachother's minds/feelings/souls via their souljams touching, and its pretty sweet since since they're on their chests, the two basically have to hug to connect.

Which made me think, what about the other beasts and ancients? BS and GC would be by far the weirdest imo bc she would have to touch her forehead to his chest??? Which depending on the size difference It could still just be a hug.

SS and WL would touch their weapons (sword and staff), which can comes off as distant or cold, despite the fact they're about to peer into eachother's very being.

ES and MF suffer because their's are on their forehead and their ancient's are on their weapons���😭 imagine HB shield to EG's forehead, that'd be awkward af

I'm not actually sure what you're referring to 😅 is it Jambound? I think something like that happens in it? I don't really remember, I read the first 3 chapters a while ago and that's it haha (I really don't have the time to read fanfics, especially not ones as long as that one (it's like 15 chapters long now and still going with no end in sight, isn't it??? Goodness)). I never really did much of anything on AO3 tbh, I honestly just go there to write and post my own dumb garbage and then vanish into the aether again

Regardless. I always vibed with the concept of the Ancients and Beasts connecting/strengthening their existing connection through their Soul Jams. But the way I've tried to get around the fact that most of their placements are... cumbersome and don't really lend themselves to that (White Lily's staff and Silent Salt's sword, for example) is, I think of it as... Through the sharing of the Soul Jams, they're all already bound to one another, yeah? So do they NEED to have them be a component in the physical aspect of this? Do White Lily and Silent Salt NEED to have their staff and sword clink together to express that intimacy? Or can they simply embrace each other nice and tight, staff and sword set aside nearby, and their souls can resonate just with that action? The Soul Jam not physically being in their hands doesn't really mean it's left their ownership and they've completely lost access to its power, I don't think; we saw that with how the Light of Abundance refused to answer to Smoked Cheese when he took it, and how Golden Cheese could keep fighting Burning Spice for a while even without it (albeit weaker). So idk if they need the Soul Jams to touch so they can feel closer to each other. I think they've all been naturally imbued with that power at least to some degree and thus don't really 100% need the physical Soul Jams to facilitate that closeness. If I'm already super glued to somebody then not putting my hands on their belt buckle or whatever isn't going to make us any less stuck together ykwim

With that said I like to imagine BS's being particularly sensitive since it's embedded in his chest. GC can press her hand down on it, or lay her head against it, and feel his heart beating through it, if only faintly. Maybe it feels warm to the touch, and grows warmer and shines brighter the faster his heart races. Maybe his breath catches in his throat when she touches it because it feels different there than it does when she touches any other part of his body. Maybe it acts as a cute little nightlight when they're curled up together in bed. Maybe it burns hot like a coal and glows like the fire in a hearth when they're deep in the throes of passion. Maybe, as a charming little gesture, she actually will touch her forehead to his chest so they can listen to that soft little clink that sounds the little kiss Abundance and Destruction shares. Maybe a certain something stirs within them both when she does it, maybe not. But it's cute. They're so in love that even their Soul Jams want to make out. Lol

Also any excuse to put her face in those big strong man titties is 👌👌👌 in her opinion

[rawliverandgoronspice]

re: sympathetic ganondorf vs evil for evil’s sake ganondorf, i think this is misrepresenting and underselling what’s actually offputting to people

“i’m evil because i’m evil” or “i’m evil because demise is evil” and the associated lust for power simply for its own sake has always been lame and low effort. there’s a reason it’s “shit tier” on the classic “villain motive tiers” thing

“i’m evil but there’s enough nuance to make the player at least somewhat sympathetic to me even if i’m still ultimately a bad guy” is a good thing that people like? i’ve never personally interacted with a zelda player who thinks windwaker ganondorf ruined the character or anything - he’s generally regarded as the gold standard of villain writing both in and out of zelda. this is roughly “high tier” on the tier chart

“actually TWIST i’m not evil at all, it’s the good guys who were evil all along, i’ve done nothing wrong and i’m completely justified in my righteous quest against the status quo, you’re the real secret true villain for being complicit in preserving it” is technically regarded as “elder god tier” on the motive tier chart but i would personally label it as “oscar bait tier”. these things *can* be compelling in conversation with the existing landscape, but often it comes across as a deliberate effort to subvert the audience’s expectations for the sake of being unpredictable (or worse, for the sake of proving you’re the smartest one in the room). in separate works where this conversation/critique is the entire point (eg. Watchmen or The Boys), that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the audience sets their expectations accordingly. in an established, long-running franchise, however, this almost always reads as dripping with contempt for the audience, like walking into a room and going “you morons like this shit? let me, a person much smarter than you, explain what it’s Actually about, because you’re an idiot if you’ve been a fan of this series before now”

on top of that, in the context of a series like zelda, this type of story feels myopic and disrespectful to the future of the series. “welp i burned down the 20+ years of lore behind this character so i could do a deconstruction, good luck using them in any capacity in the future, sounds like a you problem”

all this is to say, i think it’s a bit disingenuous/strawman-y to suggest that people put off by this want ganondorf to have 0 depth at all. there’s a lot of room for different kinds of depth, it’s just that the trend of the last decade has been for “depth” to mean “condescending deconstruction”

Hey!

Thanks for taking the time to write this ask, I think it warrants an interesting conversation. To me, there's like, a lot of things about what you're saying, and tbh I do see where you're coming from --in part.

First thing first... No yeah unfortunately some people Are hostile to even WW Ganondorf. It's been a rising trend in the fandom since TotK was released --people being very against the concept of any additional complexity to the character, either not getting it or considering anything he says pure manipulation that doesn't even warrant a conversation, literally making fun of people who were intrigued by this and wanting more out of this particular thread. This position not only absolutely exists within the fandom --less so on tumblr, I'll agree there-- but it's not even hard to stumble upon as a pretty regular opinion that gets tossed around. I had some interesting asks thrown my way, let's say. The idea that Ganondorf is a remotely interesting character that deserves more thought than what he gets is very much Extremely not the norm, and the very fact that you, as a fan, likes him as a guy is perceived as weird and missing the point by a lot of people. Like a lot a lot of people.

So I'll just... I guess I haven't clarified my position in a while, so I will reclarify my position on our favorite evil dude: I do like him perfectly fine as a villain, I do not want him to be "redeemed" by the narrative, I think he works fantastically as an ongoing threat, I think they could make him even scarier and more offputting and that would be super fun and thrilling... and I also think he already is complex. Like, inherently. Everything Nintendo has been putting into him since his first appearance is complicated --even their attempts at flattening him back in TotK do not fully work because they can't scrub him of the extremely loaded ideas they injected into him from the get-go. Nobody forced Nintendo to do a Mega Orientalism when inventing him, nobody made them write the NPCs to have this super weird antagonistic relationship to the gerudos in OoT, nobody made them have all this lore of the one man born every hundred years, raised by twin witches --and then nobody made them press on that tension point in Wind Waker explicitely, and then, in a more subtle fashion, in TP too. Nobody forced their hand when it came to having the strange "round ear" situation, suggesting (confirmed even, in additional canon) gerudos are born unblessed. The fact of the matter is: everything to make the relationship between Hyrule and the gerudos complicated has been there since 1998. There's no need for a Switcharoo to prove that anyone is smarter than the audience: everything messy has always been baked within the worldbuilding itself. It's in the cartridges already!!

Perspective on it is what could change, though --because, except in Wind Waker, we never get even a hint of a sense that we should think, as an audience, that Hyrule's super weird relationship to the gerudos is maybe questionable. Worth thinking about at least. Which, given the optics, is wild to me that to bring this particular can of worms up is still very largely considered crazy talk within the fandom (that, or the Sheikah situation across the series, also insane in many ways). And yes, it would perhaps lead to themes that are a bit heavier than what Zelda has been overtly dealing with (though, again, Majora's Mask exists --and I do find a lot of unpacked ideas in the Wild Era, like the very unquestionned gerudo bridal pipeline, very uhhh unfortunate already if I'm being honest --even moreso because it is unquestioned). But Zelda, when well handled narratively, can do wonderful things with evocative subtext, open doors never fully crossed, a lynchian pressure on what should feel offputting. We don't even need a sad monologue about it. It doesn't even need to be handled explicitely. But I think the pressure point is just better when understood and incorporated in some form, instead of being denied so hard the world itself start to feel incomplete and unlived.

I do want to say... I get what you mean with the whole "oscar bait" thing. There has been, historically and in recent years, a tendency to be driven by an external, almost panicked sense of morality rather than by the internal drive of a story, its internal thematic logic. I also do think it can feel very corporate, very "Disney looking back at its own movies and scrubbing off everything Buzzfeed deemed problematic in 2014 while making everything glossy and lifeless and awful" and it's not that great!!! and tbh I can't say I would trust Nintendo to handle any appreciation for the fact that the story of an eternal golden kingdom cheering on beating the evil outsiders who want to corrupt everything good and pure and blonde about that perfect inherently good place, is like, extremely not neutral. It absolutely is a delicate thread to weave, and I agree that putting a definitive end to Hyrule is probably not the smartest IP move to do. But, Hyrule doesn't have to be condemned as Bad, it can be merely complicated. And ongoing, regardless. To keep on with the Disney parallel: The Lion King would feel weird if we started to peel off the internal politics of the hyenas, it's just not the right place for it, when everything about this story revolves around the Righteousness of the Divine Right to Rule. But if the Lion King was an ongoing series that had been looping on itself for a while... wouldn't it make sense to figure out how to achieve majesty by studying other angles too, eventually? Is it that strange to suggest the exercise is like, possible? That it can be handled with artistry and soul?

I feel like... Yes, to acknowledge Ganondorf's humanity --not even to coddle it, just to acknowledge it-- implies taking in everything that makes him who he is, and that might rattle some foundational ideas about why this ancestral fight is even happening in the first place. I also do not think it means that he must be Good now. He can still punch a child and cackle maniacally, he can still be unredeemable --he can still destroy himself and others out of the most unconstructive spite ever, and we can still see the purpose in defeating him while basking in the "yea....." left in his wake (Wind Waker did that!!! Wind Waker did that and then we had more Zelda games!! crazy how that happened). This is hardly undoable. It does take some narrative skill, and some commitment to taking a bit of a risk, but Ganondorf is genuinely unmanageable as a character if you insist on your refusal to acknowledge his foundations --and I think it's partially why TotK's story is such a mess. He sells a TON, but you can't have him breathe slightly too loud without risking the entire world falling apart. They did try in TotK, so very hard, and to me they still failed--as insane as he behaves, Hyrule still doesn't come out of this looking good or particularly justified, because the very central core of Ganondorf's character is to be subjugated, and then rebelling in a destructive and brutally selfish, uncompromising manner that ends up robbing him of humanity --and the discomfort of that premise will therefore always haunt the conversation. Nintendo dug themselves into that mess. I feel like a lot of the Ganondorf fans I know merely... point at that. At the mess. And I feel like the longer the games avoid this mess, the more coats of spinach green they slather ontop of his skin, and the more nonsensical characterization they pile up, and the more Ganondorf will become a parody of who he once was, and what made him compelling to begin with.

And to top it all off, as if he wasn't contentious and complicated enough to handle already, they leaned into the internet turning him into a sex symbol for some fucking reason??? Yeah I genuinely have no idea how Nintendo will manage this dude moving forward, because to me, he is, at best, an endless source of (very lucrative) headaches, and at worst a ticking time bomb. I'm not sure how long they can get away with that TotKification strategy, is what I mean.

(Also: I tried to not overdwell on all the incredibly complicated conversation re: race and orientalism, but it's borderline impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging that I have never seen a major pop culture villain receive more pushback against "woobification" than him, and I don't think it's a complete coincidence let's say :) )

[8ug8ear]

Man, I really wish people would stop bringing up that Mel is black to sideline the way she treats Viktor as a Zaunite just because Viktor is white, because it's clear that within the society the show presents, the color of her skin is in no way something their society looks down on. In fact I dare say we see more people of color in Piltover than in Zaun, if my memory serves me. At the very least, there is an equal distribution. There is less of a schism between the color of your skin than if you come from above or below the city, and it seems like people keep using that as a gotcha to excuse the way she clearly speaks over him and frequently ignores him if he is in the room. I even saw someone say she should have treated him worse.

Of all things I feel like the ones who treat her worse due to her skin color are actually the writers themselves, who notably seem to shove aside any dark skinned character, like Mel, Ekko, and Sevika, if they can give control of the narrative to a light skinned character instead. Mel and Ekko especially seemed to be shoved aside until the last minute that they could, and were then given a cool power to hopefully make everyone forget how long they were absent with no impact on the plot (which sadly seems to have worked). I just wish people would stop blaming fans for engaging with what the show actually presented, and instead ask why the writers presented it that way at all.

[emwallas176]

Just gonna put this here to showcase how badly the Smallville writers fumbled the bag with this one.

I aM tHe ViLlAiN oF tHiS sToRy.... yeah okay. You messed up a perfectly good character is what you did.

[littlefankingdom]

Tumblr already showed me twice a post where OP implies that Bruce made the choice to not help Jaybin when he was attacked by an angry mob in Legends, so I had to check, and look at that, they were lying.

Context: the general population has been turned against superheroes.

An angry mob does attack Robin, and what is Batman's reaction? To come to the rescue! He even immediately calls him "son", switching to an endearing term to reassure him. However, Batman is hit in the eyes with a bottle of perfume and blinded, as his attention was on his boy. Gordon tries to get him to leave, but he refuses because he can't leave his boy behind, and when Gordon tells him that his men will take care of Robin, Batman is like "I don't trust your men with my son". Batman is forced out of here, he is so pissef, and he is called "arrogant" by the cops there.

This man trusts ONE cop, and it's Jim Gordon, that's it. And people dare to tell me Bruce isn't an acab believer. He grew up in Gotham and his parents were murdered when he was 8, of course he believes in acab. That's why he was so against his son becoming one.

Anyway, later on, Jason is in the hospital (Bruce was right, Gordon's men didn't do shit), and Bruce is pissed at the situation. However, Jason feels guilty and ashamed, and Bruce immediately goes to comfort him, reminding him he isn't at fault for getting beat up, that Bruce is proud of him and that he is a great Robin. And when Jason compares himself to Dick, Bruce stops that too, bringing up that Dick also had less glorious moments like this. And again, Bruce switches to "son" and "Jay", which convey affection in the goal of comforting his boy.

In the end, Bruce leaves his son safe at the hospital, resolved to not obey the president and get to the bottom of this. Later, Jason decides he cannot stay there and must help, even if it kills him. And people dare say that he wasn't reckless.

Anyway, the other thing about this, apart from Bruce didn't walk away WILLINGLY from Jason being attacked by an angry mob, is that as awful this is, the writers never intended this to be a traumatic experience for Jason. Of course, it would be normally, but it's just a plot point here to get Robin away from Batman while he works with the other heroes. Damn, there isn't even a follow-up to Jason leaving the hospital, he doesn't show up in the next issues to help.

Sometimes, especially with older stories, comics' events don't matter as much as you think they do. If you want to re-imagine them as impacting for the characters, that's your choice, but let's not act as if they were intended to be. Because I saw that moment being used as a comparison to Under The Red Hood, to be like "see Bruce keeps abandoning Jason", and like, calm down with the shortcuts. Because you are making that up, on your own, with what was given to you by different writers over the decades that didn't communicate with each others or agree on the characters.

[accio-bagel]

✧ Get to know Ellie with memes ✧

[bougiebutchbitch]

it's been [xxx] years and I'm still so sad that Thor's weight gain was used to make him the butt of a joke rather than to take an actual honest look at how people often turn to short-term sources of comfort - like food and alcohol - in times of immense depression and grief

I know it's stupid to expect anything actually progressive from a disney film but it still makes me sad

[rocketbirdie]

What do you think of the remnants as characters? If still involved in the story, albeit in a longer medium, to give space for exploring Cloud’s grief and trauma, how would you feel about them?

They're three very similar characters that all serve the same narrative purpose within the same story simultaneously— so if I had to describe how I feel about them in a single word, I'd call them "redundant."

I understand that they're supposed to be an exploration of the way that Jenova scrambled Sephiroth's soul. Manifestations of a shattered identity, grappling with the subtle difference between life and existence. But this unique idea contends for runtime with what is essentially a rerun of the OG plot: Jenova, in the form of Sephiroth et al., wants the reunion to happen so that she can become powerful again.

If they wanted Advent Children to be about Jenova, then the foundation for that already existed: in the form of geostigma, yet another new source of conflict that doesn't get properly fleshed out due to the movie's scattered attention. Therein lies the real problem: the remnants are fine in concept, but they get sabotaged by their only major appearance being in a movie that can't decide what it wants to be.

I would be interested in seeing the remnants expanded upon in a setting that doesn't compete for the spotlight with the main cast plus multiple other plot points, similar to how Ever Crisis has done so for Angeal and Sephiroth so far. I think it's unfair to the remnants that Advent Children relegates them to hardly anything more than fight scene spectacles and repetitive monologues.