#in which tori writes

[cobra-wives]

ngl i dont like complaining but i’m a bit upset about how quickly we jumped over from tory’s mom dying to… keenry relationship drama. im seriously peeved about how many people are boiling tory and robby’s characters down to being romantic partners, and i don’t think the writers understand how leaning so heavily on keenry weakens both the individual journeys robby and tory go on — robby with his father/role as miyagi do’s captain/brotherhood with miguel/running in 2nd place, and tory with her mother/role as ck’s captain/relationship with kreese/betrayal of her friends. they CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT be each other’s personal saviors; they HAVE TO SAVE THEMSELVES.

[raelyn-dreams]

In light of fine's event announcement, I would like to formally welcome Eichi to the "Event 5-Stars Going Through The Horrors™️ (2024)" squad.

[cxtori]

wanting to write a wolverine/logan x reader enemies to lovers slow burn sooo badly. thoughts? 👀

[illyrianbitch]

Shitting my pants knowing our horribly adjusted malice babies are coming back

malice! az and reader are happy to know that they were not forgotten by the masses hehehe

[variousqueerthings]

writes many thousands of words of meta over the course of years to explain why cobra kai is about closeted gay people, when really I could've just left it at "it's a martial arts sports show in which everyone has a same-gender rival that they're obsessed with but can't admit to being obsessed with, while they blunder aimlessly from underwritten het-romance to underwritten het-romance"

[purplerakath]

Cobra Kai S6 - Various Part 3 Thoughts

So I'm not going to go as far as saying 'it stuck the landing' because... it dropped a few things pretty hard, but it did much better than I expected. And at least did something approaching resolve some of my overall issues with the show.

The sorts of things I whine about whenever I post on this.

So please enjoy this rambly hastily cobbled together thing on the whole of it. Spoilers, obviously.

The most Important Thing (to just me)

Sam looked so good in the Cobra Kai gi.

...what? You thought it'd actually be important? I mean- it is, if your whole thing is 'failing to figure out how to conclude a fic where Sam is team Cobra Kai from the start.' But okay, okay, onto the real matters.

The End is the Beginning

So Team Miyagi Do (which in this case means Danny, Sam, and Robby) had the right lessons for it. If you really wanted Robby to win... anything, ever, I'm sorry. But the whole point, the whole thing, of Miyagi Do, is not fighting. Robby didn't need to win, he needed to know he could win. Sam... wasn't really fighting for herself anymore (once S4 and S5 resolved her threads with Tory she was there for Miguel and her dad, nobody else). And Daniel was trying to defeat an enemy that didn't really exist until he made it exist.

Which left only the characters with actual things they needed to fight for.

The Show isn't Miyagi Do

The pivot away from team Miyagi Do winning the tournament to Cobra Kai is one that only works because the show is Cobra Kai. And the only characters left with a thing they needed to prove were all the pinnacle of Cobra Kai.

Which isn't for themselves, for the record. Miguel knew who he was and what he can do. Johnny knew what his purpose was and where he needed to be. Tory knew she was no longer alone (although reminding her helped). And all three knew that those Iron Dragon assholes needed their kick teethed out onto the mat in front of everyone in this very arena!

I don't think they stuck the landing on Axel, balancing 'really is just a sweet kid' that 'happened to be weaponized by his sensei' but they got close enough. Wolf and Zara are entirely deserving of all that happened to them. Which helps, that of the three fights the narrative of fighting monsters was more in the latter two fights, Axel was just... there to be a punching bag for Miguel.

Old Couple's Explosive End to Marriage

So the Silver stuff is gold (pun I do not apologize for), his reason for everything, what's going on. Why he's doing this all worked. It's petty and dramatic and overblown and we love that for him. He's good, love it.

Kreese's sudden heel face was less believable largely due to less foreshadowing this season. There was plenty of it in earlier seasons showing he genuinely cares about his students (and expresses it in destructive bad ways). But this season it came out of nowhere after having him double down on evil.

That. Being. Said. Kreese's final act being to protect his student from Silver did work. He apologized to everyone, expected nothing in return, and died in a way nobody will ever really know. He doesn't get lionized in death. He just- at the last moment, did the right thing in the shadows.

Free Space: Demetri Sucks

We didn't get a lot of the rest of the cast for the finale due to... five episodes with a lot of fights. So naturally we let Demetri fail back into a relationship he blew up by cheating on her and he did nothing to win her back and I hate everything about this.

They never actually wrote this character learning anything about himself and I will be bad about it forever.

Plot Twist: Saying something Nice About Daniel

My other 'the writers do this so wrong' focus is on Daniel, and his 'do this my way and no other way' behavior (which the show never calls out and he never learns from). But he actually learned something once? Weird, I know, but it happened!

He hit Johnny with a Cobra Kai pep talk! He wore the gi, he went to Johnny's side of things and did things Johnny's way! That's way more than I ever expected from him! He even owned up to how much his emotions got hackled by the sign (in a throw away line but I'll take it!)

Odds and Ends

Sam/Miguel's romance stuff was sweet and generally good vibes. It was the right balance of grand gestures and practical 'teenagers moving on with their lives' to it.

Robby/Tory still doesn't work, largely due to it having a very poor basis two seasons ago. Their moment during the Zara fight was aces though.

Devon hugging Johnny after the fight was so wholesome, she'll be a great older sister to Johnny's daughter.

Hawk's hair was great, no notes.

The answer to Miyagi's backstory mystery was... fine? It didn't really do anything long term. It created a plot arc for Daniel he didn't need. But it ended on a message of ACAB so I'll take it.

Deepfaking dead actors is still weird and they need to stop.

The girls training storyline worked better than the boys training storyline, but at least the boys one included Robby being stunned how much his step-brother is more like his dad than he is.

So, overall...

It could have been better, but it could have been so much worse. I wasn't expecting Daniel to step aside and let it all fall to Johnny, to Trust Johnny.

The focus on Johnny getting his dojo at the end, loved that. So I'm pleasantly content with this.

[happy-tori-friends]

mine creachures arrived (i underestimated how large they would be)

now they get to live on the dusty bedside shelf with some other friends :)

[rosie-tyler]

.

[unbearable-lightness-of-ink]

so anyway I took another look at the old hatefic which went on pause because the source material is actually unredeemable but I still really stand by all the bits I added and the ocs and the concept overall so here's what I'm thinking:

actually go through and check which lines are mine and which are sourced so I can be sure I'm not plagiarising any phrasing. it's unlikely bc I remember really hating the source writing style and rewriting lots of entire scenes to be less painful to me but I need to be sure

rework some of the characters and setting to actually work for me, which also gives me tons of leeway for the plot stuff too. scrap anyone who isn't an oc and create ocs to replace anyone who's still necessary

figure out what's going on with all the characters who don't take off on a trauma bonding camping trip

figure out what the actual plot is. there's enough foreshadowing I didn't bother to figure out the meaning of that I should be able to do that, especially since I no longer have to be in any way beholden to the source worldbuilding

assess how gay it is and then make it gayer

[readbetween]

there was an incident at my bar (all's well) earlier in the week and my manager's takeaway to me, PERSONALLY, was, "jeez, you have a lot of material to write about working here!"

.. what does she KNOW

[yume-fanfare]

*LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER SOUND*

[privatelife]

my little brother clowning me for going to a concert for only one song but idk. im going alone, i wont be bothering anybody around me, im not going just for internet clout, it's not really a mainstream artist. i just get attached to SONGS a lot of the time and im not gonna deny myself the euphoria of experiencing art that's touched me live and in person simply because it's the only song im currently familiar with. i wont ever feel bad for it. but also because a part of me does feel weird and poser-y for such things it always pushes me to listen to more of their music anyways in preparation. so. idk. it ain't that deep it's just got me thinking... see more live music. it makes life worth living.

[queencvbra]

honestly I don't think I have much to say about part 3 when it comes to tory's arc, I'm just happy for her. and I wish there was more of her bc I feel like she needed at least one conversation after the fact to kind of . . . establish the new ground for her character? wrap up her journey? if that makes sense? like we see *where* she's going afterwards and the trajectory of her life (in the short term at least) but I wanted a moment to hear her say how *she* felt after finally getting what she worked for.

[toxictrannyfreak]

Good to know that I was right. Cobra Kai got so fucking shitty after episode 1

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Being honest though, I may shit on YGO GX in areas...but its a still better YGO successor then something like Zexal or Arc-V.

[mangled-by-disuse]

Tried to put this in the replies, but it got long and is relevant to the OP, so:

Less so than the average British/South African white guy of his time, which is to say: yes, but not notably so.

He did also speak very bluntly in his response to the Nazi requests to translate his work, claiming he would have been proud to be a genuine Aryan [that is, from the Indian subcontinent] but unfortunately he's just German and English. Some of that is "Oxford fellow thinks he's being very smart" rhetorical devices, but he also does seem to have been pretty vocally of the belief that different cultures and ethnicities held value, and while he left South Africa very young and considered himself English, he did also remark on the brutality and inhumanity of the apartheid regime there. He also criticised C.S. Lewis' assertion (in The Last Battle) that some people couldn't get into heaven on the basis of race and culture, but "have a theological argument with C.S. Lewis" does seem to have been one of his primary hobbies at the time so idk if that was purely anti-racist.

At the same time: this was at a time when the N-word was in common parlance (including in children's nursery rhymes and even in leftist discourse), when Britain had an empire and Tolkien had been raised in one of its colonies, and when the school system emphasised "the white man's burden" and the savagery and primitivism of "lesser" cultures. And Tolkien was not a radical, and not sufficiently concerned with race as a topic to break fully from that social conditioning. So it's not like he wasn't a racist, but he wasn't a racist by the standards of his time, background, and immediate environment. (Bearing in mind that his immediate environment was the same one that saw the rise of Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill.)

What Tolkien WAS was a genuine, old-school British conservative, which I think is what right-wingers pick up on in his work. He had an engrained belief in hierarchy and traditionalism, and his arguments against capitalism come from Catholic semi-feudalism, not socialism. "The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate/God made them high and lowly and each to his estate" is very much an underpinning of a lot of Tolkien's work, which emphasises the importance of working to, and being satisfied with, your status in life - Sam's strength is his humility and desire to be a simple gardener, but, while humility remains valuable throughout, Aragorn's strength is that he knows that he is born to be King. Ruling is all he can ever ethically do (noticeably, whether or not his people consent to be ruled - note that the first Man of Gondor he comes into contact with is Boromir, whose response of "ok mate where the fuck have you been when we were fighting and dying for the past forty years?", and that is cast as a mistake on Boromir's part, and he is told to sit down and respect the rightful king by Literal Voice Of The Gods Gandalf), and it would be wrong and evil for him to try to do anything else, just as it would be a moral wrong for Sam to try to be a king.

Lord of the Rings in particular is very concerned with noblesse oblige and the burdens of power - while, yes, the core story is "minor gentry [Sam is the only actual working-class character] rises above his presumed station and, through being literally and metaphorically one of the little people of the world, slips under the radar and completes a heroic quest", almost all the surrounding stories are about the difficult duty of managing power. And, unfortunately, this lends itself very readily to a "white man's burden" kind of reading - these people, you see, are simply of superior race (literally, in the case of the Elves, and in the case of Aragorn, Boromir, and the ruling class of Gondor being measured by their proximity to Númenorean bloodlines), and so it is their unfortunate duty to command and to cleanse the lesser (Orcish, and by extension Easterling and Haradrim) races from their nice, functional societies.

To be clear: I do not think this is how Tolkien intended it. I think, in his own traditionalist, cloistered-academic, Catholic way, he was pretty egalitarian. He doesn't treat the ruling class as actually better than the working class - Sam is no less a hero than Frodo, Merry, and Pippin, all of whom are gentry or nobility, and none of them are lesser as people than Aragorn or Elrond or even Gandalf or Galadriel - even if he does view class distinctions as fundamental and immutable differences. He values friendship, peace, and the laying down of grudges (against all the problems caused by revenge, note that Éomer's first and most noble act of kingship is "accepting the Dunlendings' surrender, treating them kindly, and making peace with them", and they are so impressed by this that they too put aside a centuries-long war and help rebuild the country they helped to destroy). While he often forgets that women exist (I will die on the hill that "three out of 22 rulers of Númenor were women, despite equal inheritance being explicit" is evidence that Tolkien just did not think of women as being half the population), he is quick to defend their value in both masculine and feminine pursuits, and to express them as people outside of marriage and childbearing - and his own life, in which he married a much older divorcée from a different religious background against all voices from their families, reflects that same sense of valuing women on human terms. He is a humanist, not in the religious sense but in the sense that he values humanity above all things in his writing; he writes consistently against power for its own sake, against war as glory, and against bigotry and condemnation.

BUT

he was also a traditional, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, Catholic-restorationist, pro-feudal Oxford don who was raised in a much more conservative time, place, and social class than most of us, and he brings that to his writing too. From a conservative perspective, reading with an eye for right-wing ideas:

Éowyn ultimately turns from the aberration of being a warrior and becomes a wife and mother, embracing "feminine" traits of healing and caring as part of her own healing.

Class is reified through Sam's heroism being that of a servant, and Aragorn's that of a king, and the return of the king is the source of great rejoicing.

Some races, and some classes, are simply better at things. Dwarves are better craftsmen. Men are better warriors. Elves are better at everything because they're special. they are also tall and fair and European

The idyllic Shire is a cottagecore dream of traditional British rural life, in which people know their place, women are real women, and everyone has good manners.

Most of the "good" societies are coded with European or Classical trappings (the exception is actually Gondor, which is pretty easily read as Byzantine), and opposed against a literal rampaging horde from the East. Some of the horde from the East are literally inhuman, while others are elephant-riding brutes who hold oblique historical grudges and strange religious customs. Compassion against these foreign invaders is looked upon favourably by the narrative, but only after you've killed them.

With the previous point, and the films, in mind, it is easy to conclude that regardless of species diversity, the Fellowship is a cadre of brave white men fighting to protect their society from a monstrous foreign threat - one in which a cunning trickster from within the main setting has puppeted the less evolved races into destroying Western civilisation.

While the story is anti-war, it is anti-war in a way that allows for cool battle scenes and noble deaths, and there are several points at which Dying For A Cause is lionised and seen as redemptive in a way that slots nicely into a lot of more militaristic ideologies (including fascism).

again, I cannot underline enough, I DO NOT BELIEVE THIS IS A FAIR READING OF THE NARRATIVE. I think it's an ideologically-motivated reading that ignores both Tolkien's personal views and large chunks of the text. But the thing is: the people who read it in the way I've described would probably say the same thing of your description.

The thing about Tolkien's much-discussed distaste for intentional allegory is: Lord of the Rings is not 1984. It is not an explicit political polemic. It is one man unpacking his Great War trauma and political anxieties, his expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature, his special interests in folklore and etymology, his love of the English countryside and his dislike of modernity, his Catholicism and his conservatism and his egalitarianism and his loneliness and his loves. It is not absolute in its politics, because it isn't trying to give you a political solution: it's trying to give you morals, yes, but they're as much personal ones as societal ones.

It is not a shock that right-wingers latch onto Tolkien's work, or see parts of their beliefs reflected there. It's still a fucking insult to the work, but it's not a shock.

Seeing conservatives and bigots being fans of Tolkien works is a special type of jumpscare bcs what are you doing here man? In the franchise about folks from different backgrounds and races come together in brotherhood to vanquish the villain? Where kindness and compassion and sinple happiness were seen as the best ways to keep evil at bay? Where war is not glorified and seen as a grim necessity to the point where the son of the author gor criticised the movies for glorifying the war too much? Where men openly engaged in feminine activities and were open about emotions other than anger? Where multiple characters gender presentation varied from those we normally associate with their gender? Where women were empowered in multiple different ways? Where greed was presented as turning one into a literal monster?Where the villains are all thinly veiled depictions of capitalism? Where care for the enviornment is seen as a given?