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incorrectbatfam · 3 years ago

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What version of each batfam character is your favorite? Like, what comic series or cartoon or movie best represents the characters in your opinion?

Dick: I have hefty criticisms of Tom Taylor, which can come another day, but after all the previous writers that Nightwing has been churned through, Tom Taylor's iteration makes a lot of the necessary repairs to Dick's character. Taylor brings us back to the basics and removes Dick from Batman and past canon baggage, including that godawful Ric Grayson and Talon stuff. At the same time, we're not starting over, as you can see throughout this run, there are nods toward classic Nightwing comics like The Long Halloween and Zero Year. It's this delicate balance of acknowledging significant events that permanently changed him while undoing mistakes. This Dick feels whole because the story acknowledges his role as a hero, brother, son, friend, and partner, but it doesn't staple him to a specific entity like the Titans or the batfamily. Visually, the artwork fun and dynamic which accentuates the best parts of his character. My favorite version of Dick is the one that continues to learn and grow rather than becoming a static figurehead like we see with folks such as Superman.

Jason: Red Hood and the Outlaws, for sure. It's one of DC's record-breaking runs for a reason. This Jason Todd can pack a punch for sure, but what gets me is his one-of-a-kind sense of humor that blends the type of jokes you see from folks his age with the morbid chuckles as he grapples with events from his past. RHATO brings out his flaws as much as his strengths and shows us why he's an anti-hero. There were moments while reading it where I was like, "Jason, you could handle this so much better" but then I catch myself like "But that'd be a boring story". I also adore his friendship dynamics especially with Roy and Bizarro not just for the relationships themselves, but for how they use heartfelt moments to break down the notion that Jason is this cold-blooded killer. It's not the super cheesy fanfiction-level fluff because he's him, but it strikes a balance comforting gentleness with a little bit of tough love. I feel like I can grab a drink with this Jason, rant about my life problems, and he'd validate my feelings while also giving me the Occam's Razor solution.

Tim: I'm torn between the 90s Young Justice run and Red Robin. Red Robin is painfully good in that you can physically feel when Tim is cleaved off from the bats at a time when he's most vulnerable and it speaks to the experience we've all had of being abandoned at some point in our lives. He has freedom, which allows him to grow past the Robin mantle and showcase his skills, but the comics do a good job of highlighting the loneliness of suddenly being on your own. This contradicts the idea prevalent in a lot teen stories where freedom is supposed to fix everything, you're gonna be happier once you break away, etc. Watching Tim's spiraling mental state as he chases these lofty goals with nobody in his corner (until Kon comes along) gives his character a depth that we can all relate to. At the same time, however, I believe a lot of the batfam are most in their element when they're with their friends, and I think it's doubly true for Tim. The 90s YJ embodies the concept of well-intentioned but reckless youth. You have a hot-headed girl with the power of Zeus, a Superman hybrid clone who's barely introduced to the world, a boy who was sent from the future because of his powers' side effects, and World's Greatest Detective 2.0 in the middle of all of it. Yeah, they fight villains and stuff, but through every moment, they're clearly just kids that you can laugh and cry and have fun with. Combine these and you get a character that, in my opinion, feels the most human in the entire DC universe.

Damian: Hands-down it's gotta be the version in Super Sons. When we're first introduced to Damian, he's the Son of the Bat with master assassin skills who grew up far too quickly under his grandfather's command. In the Wayne household, he's surrounded by more adults and is expected to act on their level, especially when he is Robin. Even though Dick encourages him to loosen up, it's not the same because of the age gap, so Damian needs another kid pushing him to change. Enter Jon Kent. The two loathe each other at first as Damian is fixated on being a good Robin and Jon's superhero values align more with his father's than the bats. But as they move through the story, they start synergizing rather than butting heads—Jon learns from Damian all of what superheroing entails (including the not-so-pretty stuff) and Damian learns how to not take everything so seriously. When we think of character growth, we normally think of getting older and becoming more mature. Damian's Super Sons arc is interesting because it subverts that: he was already mature, but his growth happened when he allowed himself to undo it.

Duke: As much as I love the Batman and the Signal comics, I have to say his character shines before that in We Are Robin. My issue with Batman and the Signal is that Duke is, functionally, Batman's sidekick, even when his abilities and characters are being explored. We Are Robin has this rawness to it because it's a grassroots movement of teenagers who want to fix their community. Unlike the batfamily stories, which treat Duke as an accessory, W.A.R. places him front and center as both a leader and an emotional support pillar for his friends. Aside from villains, he also has to deal with common things like crushes, within-group conflicts, a system that's totally against him, and loss and grief (i.e. with Troy Walker). Looking at the comic's visuals, I also love how they integrate things like texts from their home base into the dialogue and action, which can be a metaphor for how Duke's constantly stretching himself between the vigilante and non-vigilante worlds. The details and expressions also make you connect and root for him. You feel angry when he's angry, you're celebrating when he is, and when gut-wrenching realities strike him, you find yourself needing to stop and take a breath too.

Cullen: There is next to no material on this guy, which means I have the fun of extrapolating. In the Batman Universe comics, we're given a backstory where he and Harper come from an abusive background and she got emancipated so they could both leave that environment. He's also bullied for his sexuality, and he found a sense of validation when he teamed up with Midnighter (basically a gay Batman). His Wiki also mentions some other interests, such as the show Supernatural, and I forgot where but somewhere it says he ships Destiel. His comics also show him wearing graphic tees that allude to something like Star Wars and he listens to rock bands, so we can kinda infer he has a part-nerd, part-emo personality. Since Harper's the one in charge between the two, Cullen's ability to take initiative and stand up for himself is woefully under-recognized. Being in the background works in his advantage though, because I can see the potential for him to secretly gain some tricks and make an impact from the sidelines.

Stephanie: Basically anything from before she dated Tim, because I feel like after they got together, she was treated as cannon fodder for his arc (this is why we need women in the industry). Keep in mind she had an entire story before Tim or Bruce. Her motivations stemmed from being the daughter of a D-list villain who wants to "spoil" her father's plans (hence her moniker). She's outspoken, a little reckless, and carries a consistent sense of humor as she apprehends her opponents. People often forget that she trained under Catwoman and Babs's Batgirl, meaning by the time she was Robin, she wasn't a fresh-off-the-street rookie. People also don't talk enough about how she breaks a lot of the stereotypes and taboos held about teenage girls (remember: she debuted in the 1990s). She has a well-rounded intelligence when girls were viewed at ditzy. She's not afraid to get messy when girls were expected to always keep up a perfect appearance. She carried out an entire teenage pregnancy in a time when people refused to even talk about it. Unlatch her from any guy ( love interests, mentors, frickin' Boomer writers, whatever) and you get a damn good role model for young girls.

Cassandra: Shadow of the Batgirl. The main continuity is... a lotta fighting. We see her easily smoke Batman, Nightwing, and other characters in battle. Looks cool, but in my opinion that's the least interesting thing about her. She's one of those characters where it's not her abilities that tell the story, but her decisions. Shadow of the Batgirl addresses this perfectly as she grapples with what to do now that she ran away from her life of isolated training. She doesn't have any connections, she struggles with literacy, and she's just desperate to fit in somewhere. The way she's introduced to Barbara and the Batgirl mantle. Throughout the story, we see her try, fail, and try again to change the soldier-like thinking patterns ingrained in her. Ultimately, she grows into the Batgirl role. Overall, her character highlights how doing what you know is easy, but changing toxic patterns is a never-ending series of tough but necessary decisions.

Barbara: Oracle Babs Oracle Babs Oracle Babs. For real though, she's not a little girl anymore, so I hate when writers try to erase her disability and pigeonhole her back into the Batgirl role. As Oracle, she shows us the different forms of badassery and gives us an appreciation for all the things happening behind-the-scenes that allow Batman and co. to do their thing on the field. Her being Oracle shows how her steadfast determination to help others allows her to adapt to change. I know I can't speak for those with physical disabilities, but she is also some much-needed representation in a genre that's dominated by able-bodied people and she breaks down idea that heroes have a certain "look". Even the names make a world of difference—"Batgirl" sounds infantilizing and undermines her abilities, whereas "Oracle" sounds more like the mature woman we've watched her become.

Harper: Batman Universe, despite all its flaws, gives us one of the most comprehensive depictions of her. I already went over their backstory in Cullen's part so no need to reiterate that. Here I wanna focus on her part with the other bats, and how she both compliments and contrasts them. Harper has this sorta "angry bisexual college student" vibe borne from being jaded by circumstances. She's a vigilante because she wants to protect the person she cares most about: her brother. What makes her different from other self-made vigilantes, however, is the fact that she use her electrical engineering skills to create gear that other Bats don't have, which gives her a unique advantage on the battlefield. Her sarcasm sits on the fence between bright humor (Dick, Steph) and a darker one (Bruce, Jason), so I think she has the most versatility when it comes to interacting with team members.

Carrie: Every canon iteration of her fucking sucks, which is why I just go off and do my own thing. The storyline she shows up in is total garbage, but her first appearance displays a few hallmark traits that I can work with. We have that she's a Girl Scout, she's fun-loving, she's a little impulsive and chaotic, and she's got a characteristic spunk. She's also, visually, the most colorful of the team. It's not much but it's enough for me DC please hire me I can make things better. We have right here the basis of the objectively weird girl. Why not roll with it? I've gotten some folks in my inbox telling me I shouldn't include her at all given the storyline she shows up in, to which I say: I spit at canon and I'm taking the full creative reigns here.

Kate: I wouldn't point to a specific comic, but I personally appreciate any version of her that shows how, underneath her badass Batwoman exterior, she is a woman riddled with flaws. I notice a lot of fans place her (and other women) on a pedestal where they focus on her cool kicks and punches, and in Kate's case, her sexuality. I say this as a lesbian myself: Batwoman is an important piece of representation, but there are moments where fandom tokenizes her. We tend to forget that she dealt with alcohol problems, had multiple partners, broke hearts and got her heart broken numerous times. She has a hard time addressing her past even when it's woven into every fiber of her actions, and consequently, she drifts from place to place. Seeing her make mistakes shed that image of perfection compels me to keep reading.

Alfred: Again, his character is more interesting when you remove him from the batfamily—in this case, with the Pennyworth comics. It's a miniseries connecting to the show, but while the show has a lot of qualities connecting it to other media like Gotham, these comics are flexible enough that you can connect them to the main DC comics. The story centers on a young Alfred in his spy days, and it's fun and action-packed with vibes that are a mix of traditional DC, James Bond, and the Kingsman graphic novel. We see Alfred's relationships, successes, failures, flaws, and strengths way before the Waynes are in the picture, and once we learn that, we can re-read the Batman comics to see how these traits have carried over to his role in the batfamily.

Selina: Catwoman: Anodyne. This run essentially revitalizes Selina's character after decades of being treated as a one-dimensional femme fatale love interest. These comics are also the birth of the Catwoman suit used today, which was designed by writer Ed Brubaker's wife, Mel. In the story, she seeks redemption by helping victims instead of simply going for a selfish steal. She reunites with Holly Robinson and starts on a gradual path to antiheroism and then heroism, where she joins the ranks of Batman and the Justice League. My favorite part is that her redemption isn't from simply falling in love with Bruce and having a change of heart, but rather a journey with clear lessons at every step that the readers can take from.

Bruce: Wayne Family Adventures. No, I'm not joking. WFA gets a lot right, the biggest among them being how Bruce is not a grimdark lone wolf that so many comic writers seem to love. He's serious in the right moments but you can clearly see he's moved on from his childhood trauma and finds a new sense of purpose with the family around him. This Bruce Wayne feels like a person that readers can look up to—he's firm but kind, resilient but soft-hearted, and he's not afraid to express himself or admit when he made a mistake. Batman is often viewed as the pinnacle of what a man should be. In WFA, he is. This version of Bruce doesn't simply dismantle decades of unhealthy superhero male power fantasies, but rather he redefines what masculinity ought to look like.

#ask #anonymous #batfamily #batfam #batman family #dc comics #personal #tw just in case

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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

#long post #anonymous #ask

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omiscurls · 3 years ago

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Hello you precious human! I saw you're taking request and I thought of something.. mabye you have an idea for this one, if not just ignore the ask >.< what if diluc and zhongli (seperate) don't know that their s/o is an artist and one day their sweetheart gifts them a full ass beautiful portrait of them. Maybe they had a hard day and you wanna make them feel better and surprise them or it's an anniversary gift idk, go wild with it ♡

Have a nice day ! Ily and thanks!

gift(ed)

a/n: thank you for this absolutely lovely ask! hope you enjoy reading this!

plot: the reader makes the character a portrait of them

contains: diluc, zhongli

warnings: none!

diluc

you know he hates his birthday, for very obvious reason

but what hurts even more when you hear it, is that from what his old friends say, he used to love it, once

it hurts to think that it became one more aspect of himself he has grown to forget

so you decide to do something about it

you know very well he doesn’t want any celebrations to be held, so therefore he also denies any gifts, but you can only hope he’ll accept this one

you work your ass off for a good long while, wanting it to be absolutely perfect, not one flaw on your canvas, worried he’d notice right away

when the time comes to finally gift it to him, you’re stressed beyond reason, sweaty palms probably ruining the nice packaging that covers the result of your relentless efforts. you have arranged to meet with diluc on starsnatch cliff, hoping to do it casually enough for him not to notice it’s a birthday thing, but also sure he will know, he’s far too intelligent to fall for anything like this, after all.

the sun begins to set as you sit down on the edge of the cliff, testing how far away from the stone can you move your foot without starting to feel dizzy.

the grass is already getting cold from the humidity of the night air, and you wonder if you should stand up after all, so not to stain your outfit.

it’s only a call of your boyfriend that rips you away from your train of thought.

“darling?” is what diluc says, voice uncertain as he stands below you “you asked to see me?”

you turn around, a welcoming smile crawling up your lips, and even though he doesn’t know the reason he’s here for yet, he already thinks it was worth it, just to see you, smiling like that in the field of cecilias.

“you’re here!” you exclaim happily, almost making him chuckle, because how could he not if it was you who asked?

you get up, careful not to show him the package behind your back too soon. he takes a big step forward, arm already securing you from the edge, hovering around your waist, but not touching you, still.

“let’s get further away from the edge, shall we?” he asks softly, and although you want to laugh at his endless worries, the love and care in his voice makes you swoon internally. “so?” he asks after making sure for your safety. “what’s with the scenery?”

“well” you grin, looking down at your feet, over the minute he’s been here he already managed to make you forget everything you had on your mind. “don’t take it as a birthday gift, cause it’s not that!” you explain rapidly, shaking your head “the only thing i wanted was to make you smile, or, i don’t know, the thing is, i hope you like it-“

you don’t quite know what to say, but diluc chooses to surprise you with a soft look you so rarely get to see.

“darling, it’s not like i have a phobia for birthday gifts or something” he assures “it just feels a bit weird to celebrate myself on such an anniversary, but i’m honored that you spent your time with me on your mind, i really am”

you feel more confident with that on your mind, and you hand him your gift.

he takes it, raising an eyebrow, slowly untying the ribbon you ornamented the packaging with. as he slowly unwraps the paper, his eyes notice something he genuinely didn’t expect.

it’s a painting of him, or at least he thinks so, smiling with his eyes closed, hand tilted and resting on his hand, slight blush creeping up his cheeks. he wonders if that’s really him, but the physical resemblance is unquestionable, even though he doesn’t remember the last time he has seen this kind of expression on his face.

“i-” he attempts to speak up, but stutters “where have you had this ordered?”

you grin even wider, knowing the biggest surprise is yet to be dawned upon him.

“i didn’t” you explain “i painted it myself, do you like it?”

you catch a sparkle shoot through his eyes before he lifts them up from the painting to find yours.

“no, really?” he asks in shock, quickly going back to admiring the gift. “it’s- you’re- you’re very talented, do you know that? it’s so detailed-” he shakes his head slightly, having a hard time comprehending all that was happening.

“i managed to sneak a photo of you on our anniversary dinner” you say “i wouldn’t be able to paint this without a reference, plus, i’d like you to know what moment i based this on. if i’m able to make you smile like that from time to time, then i never want to stop.”

you can swear his eyes glisten with a thin layer of tears forming, but he blinks them back as soon as possible, and you can’t get a good look. instead, he looks at you again, love practically seeping through his gaze.

“thank you” he says quietly, smiling just how you like it, not even fully aware that he is. he approaches you to wrap an arm around you and press a quick peck to your forehead. “this just might be the best birthday i’ve ever had.”

zhongli

you’ve been to someone’s birthday party together

and it came in the conversation between the two of you that he has never received a proper gift

offering is not a gift

it was a whole deal, with choosing the present for that person, wrapping it up, decorating...

and you decided - why not just make him something, with no occasion necessary? maybe he’ll like it, maybe he’ll just acknowledge it’s existence, worth a shot

so there you are, waiting outside the parlor, gripping on the package in your hands, and waiting for him to come out.

it feels like ages since the moment you arrived, but can’t be longer than a couple of minutes. zhongli has no liking to material possesions, and you’re aware of that, so you’re hoping he’ll value the effort and thought you’ve put into your gift. you know he’d never hurt your feelings, not on purpose, at the very least, but you’re still kind of worried.

“hello there” you almost jump out in surprise as you hear a tranquil voice behind you.

“oh my, you scared me!” you let out a breathy laugh, but he seems to have ignored your comment.

“have you been waiting long?” he asks instead, to which you shake your head slightly.

“no.” you say immediately, a gentle smile welcoming him as always. he nods and attempts to take your hand, intent to go on a walk in his mind, but stops, surprised as he feels the rectangular object in your hand.

“oh, are we planning to go to someone’s party again today? i wish you’d included me in the gift picking process this time too, it was entertaining the last we did it” even though he says that, no disappointment shows up behind his eyes as he waits for your response.

“ah, no, you see-” you take a breath “that’s actually for you”

his eyebrow rises ever so slightly as he mentally studies what date is today and if he has forgotten about anything.

“oh” he finally mumbles “and may i ask to what do i owe the pleasure?”

his talent with words seems to be on his side, and he’s apparently able to talk himself out of the confusion you put him in.

“to absolutely nothing” you shrug, smile growing bigger, as his mind spins even harder, not getting the point more now. “other than being my amazing person.” you add.

he feels his heart flutter in a weird pattern, but ignores it as you place the gift in his hands. he just sort of looks at it for a while, and you’re already scared he’s going to say something unexpectable, but instead he starts to unwrap the thing gently and carefully.

you watch his eyes widen as he sees himself, painted by your hand, the softest of smiles painting his expression in warm colours. to you, that’s just how he looks everyday, but to him?

this is just one of many forms to him. he doesn’t look in mirrors a lot, he doesn’t pay much mind to it, he never studies his appearance how others do. he doesn’t get insecure in a way humans do.

it feels foreign to look at the picture. it feels as if he’s looking at someone, indoubtly at himself, but through your eyes instead. he never knew his eyes looked this kind, and that the corners of his lips didn’t lift evenly when he smiled, instead having one slightly above the other.

you notice so many things, he realizes, and he looks up at you, a wandering gaze searching for your eyes, as he struggles to comprehend just how wonderful of a chance he had gotten to meet you.

he had seen miracles come to life and crumble before him, but never once had he though he’d be one to witness something as beautiful as your love and your affections are.

meanwhile you wonder if he’s searching for the right words to say you “just shouldn’t have”

you almost speak up, about how you just felt like doing something like this, and he doesn’t have to keep it, or something, but he manages to comment before you do.

“your work is gorgeous, dear.” he says blandly, but quickly adds “but you’re the best gift i could ever encounter.”

#genshin impact #genshin boys #zhongli x gender neutral reader #zhongli fluff #zhongli headcanons #zhongli x reader #zhongli #diluc #diluc fluff #genshin diluc #diluc x reader #diluc imagines #diluc x you #genshin x reader #genshin impact x reader #genshin fluff

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imagining-in-the-margins · 4 years ago

Photo

Alex Blake and Spencer Reid in “Through the Looking Glass”

A Defense of Alex Blake from an Autistic Person

Disclaimer(s) before I get into this: Autistic people/people with autism are not a monolith. We are all entitled to our feelings about how people discuss/joke about autism, and some of us will find things hurtful that others do not, and those feelings are entirely valid. The opinion stated below is just my opinion and only speaks to my interpretation.

Also please note that Asperger’s is, in the United States, an outdated diagnosis named after a Nazi. It’s been changed in the DSM to autistic spectrum disorder (ASD/autism), which is how I’ll refer to it in this post. I also don’t use “functioning” labels, but an opinion on this scene will obviously change depending on the severity of a person’s symptoms.

That being said, I’m here to explain why I love Alex Blake, why I don’t think this “joke” was ever a joke at all, and why I actually really love these scenes as an Autistic person.

So, to start, I think that this scene is filmed in a way that leaves it very open to interpretation. I personally find that myself and a few of my autistic friends interpret it a way very different from most allistic (non-autistic) people I’ve talked to.

This scene is, above all, extremely relatable to me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve discussed something just to be unknowingly describing things that apply to me. This exact scenario has happened to me several times, where someone points out as I describe autism that I was describing myself. When I saw this scene for the first time, I laughed. I laughed because I’d been there, and I was watching it happen to someone else. Things always seem more obvious when it’s happening to someone else, ya know?

This scene makes me happy, too. It makes me happy because I can see the love in Alex and Rossi’s faces when they share that moment after it goes over Spencer’s head. A lot of people view it as a mocking smile, but from my perspective I see two people who clearly don’t view autism as a bad thing and are just finding an innocent joy/humor in his obliviousness.

And I think that’s what a lot of this comes down to. For a lot of people (like my allistic boyfriend, for example), implying that someone is autistic is seen as an insult. But I do not feel that way, and I don’t think Alex or Rossi do, either.

In fact, they are two team members that don’t regularly roll their eyes at him or mock Spencer’s autistic tendencies (unlike Emily and JJ, both of whom I love, although they do regularly kind of hurt my feelings, lol). I mean, in this same scene, I don’t see people talking about JJ’s expression, which is clearly (also innocently) screaming “Do you really not hear yourself right now?”

Later in the episode, Alex is once again confronted with Spencer’s relatively obvious autism, and she actually feels bad about the fact that he might’ve understood what she was saying and interpreted her silence as mocking him. But then it’s very obvious that he didn’t realize it, and she’s just kind of overwhelmed with how much she appreciates him for his autistic traits.

It’s not often that obliviousness to social cues or a blunt, non-sarcastic personality is depicted as something admirable, but that’s exactly what Alex does. She tells Reid that his personality is why she loves him, and that she basically thinks that there is nothing wrong with who he is. She does all of this without ever denouncing his autism or speaking in spite of it.

And I think we also have to acknowledge that Spencer specifically said that he doesn’t take offense to the fact she insinuated he is autistic (and doesn’t deny that he is, either). He outright says that he doesn’t take offense to that idea, and I’m guessing it’s because (1) he also doesn’t view it as a flaw and (2) he knows Alex respects him.

We talk about the rest of the team as being close to Spencer because we see it on screen, but Alex and him knew each other before she arrived at the BAU. Their relationship went further back and in more detail than we saw. To her, he is an intellectual peer and a son figure.

So, yeah. Idunno. I think part of why some people interpret this scene as a bad thing is because we view autism as a problem/flaw. But there are autistic people who exist that don’t feel that way. I love who I am, and that includes my autism. Of course, it comes with its own struggles, but I’m forever grateful for a character like Alex who doesn’t take it too seriously. Someone who clearly loves an autistic person for who they are and doesn’t try to change him.

That’s my defense of Alex Blake. You don’t have to agree (obviously, lol), and if you were harmed by her lines as an autistic person, I deeply sympathize with you. We all feel different things about ourselves, and they should all be respected ❤️

And to all the allistic people who made it this far, thank you for listening! I hope this gives you a different perspective of how deeply anti-autistic narratives and beliefs can bleed into how we write, perform, and interpret autistic characters and storylines.

#alex blake #Criminal Minds #spencer reid #through the looking glass #autism #dr spencer reid #bau #long #personal #disability #activism #ssa blake #reid and blake #actuallyautistic

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ouyangzizhensdad · 3 years ago

Note

Do you think that making Chinese food is cultural appropriation? I'm white and started making some of the foods I saw in the shows I've watched since the untamed, but now I'm worried I'm appropriating the culture.

Hi anon,

As a fellow white person, I am also someone who needs to critically reflect on how I engage with different cultures. I can't give you the definitive answer you seek, the clear absolution from any potential wrongdoings; in its stead, I can only offer to share my current thought process on this topic. I’d still encourage you to seek other perspectives, and many people have written or spoken on this topic.

I believe we must first acknowledge that, on the terrain of the internet, discussions regarding cultural appropriation have reached a certain... extreme where some people view all forms of cultural exchanges as inherently suspect. They purport that so long as you stay within the bounds of ‘your’ culture, you will problematic behaviours. That perspective is inherent flawed. That is, it relies on a vision of culture as ‘bounded entities’ that exist in themselves. In reality, the ‘stuff’ that makes culture is emergent, existing only relationally, dialectically--it is a not a ‘thing’ that moves through time but an idea which is constantly negotiated and reproduced in relation to power and changing material realities to remain relevant and intelligible. The boundaries of cultural and ethnic groups are fuzzy, overlapping, and constantly being reworked and made meaningful. As an illustration, many of the food I grew up eating was influenced by ingredients and recipes immigrants brought in the 19th and 20th centuries, yet these dishes were understood as 'typically ours’. And it needs to be acknowledged that most of what is currently considered ‘white people food’ relies on ingredients that were introduced to our diet through colonialism and the violent dispossession of indigenous peoples (and, often, the current day exploitation of workers in the South and of migrant workers). No food can be truly ‘traditionally ours’, whatever the purported ‘we’ ends up being brought into the equation, and no eating behaviours can avoid the historical legacy and continuity of violence and power.

Of course, as people who exist in the world, we know that there are cultural differences. Bakhtin’s insights on language through the tensions between centripedal (ie towards uniformity, a common meaning) and centrifugal (toward diversity and change) forces can be expanded to help us conceptualise how we make sense of the way a ‘culture’ is perpetuated through time as something meaningful in our daily lives. Uniformity allows intelligibility, sense-making, but diversity and change are inescapable by-products of individuals and groups repeatedly going through life, meeting and trying to create intelligibility and sense together in a world that cannot stay the same. It is at the intersection of these two conflicting forces that something can be different yet considered the same--that we can create continuity out of change. But something perhaps less emphasized in Bakhtin’s discussions is how much power and material realities work on these forces. Power influences both centripedal and centrifugal forces, if only in orchestrating circumstances that shape how one encounters ‘different cultures’ or reproduces their 'own' culture.

We live at a moment where the world seems to have reached an apex of connectivity--where goods, people, ideas (and viruses) move across distance and borders at speeds that defy comprehension. Yet the way goods, people and ideas move (through which canals and systems? in which direction? to the benefits of whom? at the expense of whom? to what reception or use? in the service of which institutions and ideologies?) or are, inversely, incapable or unwilling to move, is influenced by power and material realities. It is inescapable.

In a roundabout way, what I’m trying to say is that it's useless to try to live life in 'your lane' by turning to a baseline 'culture' because we simply do not have a baseline culture to return to that is 'safe' from the influences of other cultures or the taint of the historical legacy and continuity of violence. So how do I personally reconcile that with how I engage with content that is produced from different cultural contexts, and how I engage with cooking food that is influenced by different cultural contexts? For me the guidelines I take into consideration are respect, attribution and avoiding forms of dehumanisation. These emerged out of witnessing how other white people have acted as well as critically reflecting on how I have acted in the past, and trying to do better (including of course, by listening to different perspectives on the topic). [just in case, warning for examples of racism/micro-agressions] I've been in China with white people who would praise the cooking we were eating in the same breath they were making jokes about dog meat. I've witnessed in Japan a dude decide not to come to an izakaya with Japanese colleagues, fucking off on his own to Akihabara instead, because he was disappointed he couldn’t talk about anime with them--too obsessed with the idealised version of Japan he’d created in his head to treat the Japanese people he met as people. The internet is full of white people telling you how to cook food from places they've never been and taking credit for 'popularising' that dish or 'making it better'. That's not even talking about the tendency for food to become a mark of a cosmopolitan, metropolitan identity in the West--the open-minded, the liberal, the traveler, the hip white person up with the times and beyond the mainstream. Hell, I've even seen people who act as if eating ‘ethnic’ food prepared by immigrants is the singular proof that they were people who cared about immigrants' well-being.

Food is rarely just about food, even when consumed at home. At the same time, we’d be remiss in all these discussions of power to dismiss how food is also one of oldest things we, as humans, want to share with others--including strangers. Feeding is nourishing and giving, eating is accepting into ourselves something made by others. Most people appreciate it when the value of a dish that holds importance for them is recognised by others--although, of course, many might understandably also resent that they have been discriminated against or mocked for eating that same food. Every time I’ve been invited in an immigrant household or at events with mostly immigrants, I’ve felt this sense of almost trepidation emanating from them, waiting for my reaction, and satisfaction once I was seen eating and appreciating the food they had served me--as if the acceptance of the food that was tied to their identity was a form of acceptance of who they were. Of course this can’t be disentangled from past experiences where other people might have been disrespectful, dismissive or outright racist: but the excitement they had in sharing food that had meaning to them and seeing others appreciate it was genuine.

Beyond situations of clear cultural sharing, where we get closer to what appears to be ‘cultural appropriation’, I believe that we cannot act as if there is something inherently sacrilegious in the idea of adapting recipes or using a specific ingredients in new ways--that’s centrifugal forces at play, and they have provided us with many dishes we love today: from immigrant creations like butter chicken to things like spicy kimchi. We cannot work with the assumption that people will only react with hostility at the idea of other people cooking the food they grew with, even in ways that are different from how they’re traditionally used and are thus “not authentic”. I still remember an interaction I had in a Korean grocery store, once upon a time when I lived in a metropolitan city. A man in front of me at the cash register who had been buying snacks and chatting with the employee in Korean looked at my stuff and suddenly asked me if I knew the name of the leafy green I was buying. I wasn’t necessarily surprised because I had overheard in the past customers and employees commenting in Korean about being surprised about the ingredients I, a white person, was purchasing, thinking I couldn’t understand them. I confirmed to him that I knew I was buying mustard greens. He then asked me what I was planning to do with them, and I explained that while I didn’t think it’s a traditional or common way of using it, I personally liked to add them to kimchi jjigae because it compliments their bitter/strong taste and I like leafy greens in my soups and stews. He said it was interesting, and that he was kind of impressed. The employee chimed to tell me I should be honoured at the compliment because the man was actually a chef who owned famous Korean fusion restaurants in the city. That was clearly someone who took Korean food very seriously and clearly had a certain degree of suspicion regarding how white people interacted with it, but he was also curious and interested in seeing how I approached ingredients without having grown up eating them.

Another point of contention is also that we cannot ignore that food is a sensual experience and that, while tastes are greatly influenced by our environment, they are not solely so. I grew up hating most of the food my parents would serve me, and started cooking in my early teens to avoid having to eat it. Before I started cooking, I would often just eat rice with (in hindsight horrible) western-brand soy sauce instead of the meal my mom had made. When I ate Indian food for the first time during a trip at the ripe age of 16, it blew my mind that food could taste like this. Of course I never wanted to look back, and with each years I discovered that a lot of Asian cuisines fit my palate better than what I grew up eating or other cuisines I had tried. When I was a teenager we visited my mom’s friend in France and I hated what she served us so much I’d simply choose to nibble on bread, prompting her to try to stage an intervention for my ‘obvious’ anorexia. Yet, being in China made me realise ingredients I thought I hated had just been cooked in ways I disliked. Do my taste buds absolve me from any need to think critically about how I interact with food? Of course not. But sometimes the reason we want to cook certain recipes and foods is just that it tastes great to us, and we want to reproduce the recipes we enjoyed with the ingredients and the skills we have. Or, really, sometimes we just want to try new tastes because we do a lot of eating throughout our lives, and it seems a waste to limit ourselves to a narrow number of dishes for decades to come.

So that’s where I currently am in my thinking about this topic, as a white person who cooks dishes influenced by a number of different places but who is also not trying to cook in a way that is necessarily authentic. Some things that I keep in mind that you can ask yourself now that cdramas and cnovels have made you interested in Chinese cooking is: are you taking this as an opportunity to support immigrant businesses when getting your ingredients? are you supporting white creators when looking for chinese recipes (some suggestion of youtube channels: Made with Lau, Chinese cooking Demystified, Family in Northwest China, 西北小强 Xibeixiaoqiang, 小高姐的 Magic Ingredients)? are you being respectful (not reproducing harmful stereotypes in how you talk about chinese food and the people who eat it)? do you use your interest in Chinese food to create a narrative about China and Chinese people that denies them, in some way, of their complexity and humanity? are you using your interest in Chinese food to create a narrative about yourself?

In conclusion I will leave you with a picture of some misshapen baozi I’ve made.

#anon ask #caution: word vomit ahead

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kattwritesuwu · 3 years ago

Note

Can I request a Clingy!monsterTom x Depressed!Reader? Maybe with cutting and suicidal thoughts?

I sure can!!! I LOVE angst!!!!!

---------------------

Fandom: Eddsworld

Character: Tom

Reader: Depressed

Fic type: Comfort/angst

Warnings: TRIGGER WARNING: This WILL heavily mention suic/de, blood, and perhaps other triggering topics, read at your own risk!!

Notes: People, I'm not trying to make depression and similar illness romantic, this is simply for comfort.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I hate everything.

Well, not everything, but the majority, y'know? Everything just...sucks. Life in general, it's all terrible.

People are terrible. Sure, I've found a few choice people that aren't the bane of my existence, but even they have their flaws.

Am I saying that I'm some heaven sent angel? Hell no I'm not. I'm just as terrible if not more! I hate everyone, including myself.

Am I lying? Yeah. Do I have a crush on someone? Yeah. Am I gonna do something about it? Nope.

Why should I? It's not like I'll be here longer anyways...

I'm planning to kill myself.

Am I scared? Kind of. But at this point I don't care. I'm always scared anyways. Always on my guard around people.

Most people don't know the fear and pain of constantly feeling...numb.

It's not like I never feel anything, it's just so rare. My most common emotion is pain. I just want to curl up in a ball and die. But all I can ever being myself to do is cry, and even that's a rare occurrence at this point.

I feel so alone.

Friends? Yeah I have a few.... they're all a bit odd in their own way. Can't complain though, they're like family to me.

My real family? Not many immediate ones, plus, I moved to England five years ago. They called me everyday for the first couple of months. Nowadays, I can barely get a text back... I get that they have their own lives in their respective country, but man, it just makes me so cold-feeling...

I guess where I was going with this, is that I'm scared. Not of my inevitable death, but everything else.

I'm scared of anything and everything now that I think about it. I don't exactly mean common fears they talk about in elementary school, I'm talking real world problems.

I'm scared of failure, not sure why. I've failed enough in my life....it shouldn't even faze me at this point.

Im especially scared of people.

My friends? Yeah them too. What if I make a fool of myself and they think I'm an idiot? What if I make the wrong move, and they hate me? They probably hate me enough as it is...

That why I won't confess to Tom. He'll hate me afterwards. There's just no point in ruining something for nothing in return.

These were the thoughts that ran through my head as my arms and legs were sliced up by a blade driven by my own hands. It's wasn't like it hurt. All it really did was sting, I'm just that used to being hurt, I suppose.

As I was wrapping up my little 'session' I heard a knock on my door,

"(Y/N)! You in there? It's dinner time! I made breakfast for dinner!" A British accent leaked through my door.

I didn't scramble around at the thought of him walking in, my door was locked after all. It's not like I'm that stupid.

" I'll be there in a few minutes, Edd." I spoke back in a raspy voice, not bothering to yell. Edd has good ears, he can somehow hear a whisper from across the house.

It takes me a minute or two to get up and walk into the bathroom that connects to my room. I stumble a bit with the loss of blood.

Once I get in there I take a quick shower, just barely long enough to stop the bleeding and make it appear as if you just took an actual shower.

Once I get out of the shower, I slip on my (favorite color) hoodie.

That was an easy part of hiding my self abuse. Everyone in the house wore a hoodie of their own designated color.

I also slipped on a longer article of clothing to go onto my legs. Couldn't let them see my thighs either.

Once I finished the rest of my cleaning up, I headed out of my little bathroom, and in front of my door. I took a deep breath, put on a smile, and walked out.

I got about halfway down the stairs before a screech startled me, causing me to trip a bit,

" (Y/N) IS HERE! YAY!" The high pitch British scream could only belong to the narcissistic ginger known as Matt.

Once I got my balance back into my feet, I continued down the stairs and greeted Matt with a wave.

" Yeah she lives here, idiot. She's not going anywhere." A deeper voice had spoken, I turned around and Tom was there as expected. I smile shrunk a bit at his last comment.

" Sup (y/n)." You snapped out of your thoughts and responded with a casual 'yo.'

The three of us then heard a thick accent cursing in the kitchen, no doubt it was Tord,

" For jævla skyld! Just let me have the last piece!!"

Sure enough, when we walked into the kitchen, Edd and Tord were fighting over the last piece of bacon. I let out a sigh, and the two boys finally acknowledged our existence. That alone didn't stop their argument though.

I didn't even bother attempting to break up the fight, I never could anyways. Their little fuss always ends one of two ways. Edd steals the bacon from under Tord's nose, or vise versa.

I just grabbed a small portion of food, and sat down.

I knew I would be gone by the end of tonight...but I wanted to taste Edd's cooking one last time.

Something interesting happened, instead of one of the two boys getting the bacon, they halved it and sat down. Of all my four years living in this house with these people, they've never shared their bacon.

Strange.

Dinner wasn't as talkative as it usually was when we all ate at the table. Usually we'd all have a big group discussion about our day, or week. Tonight was quiet, giving me an opportunity,

" Hey, guys?" Each one of their heads turned to me, and Edd signalled me to continue,

" I just wanted to say, thank you." Their brows furrowed but I held out a hand to tell them to let me finish,

" You four have helped me with so much over the past few years. From when you let me live here when I couldn't find proper housing situations, to letting me borrow the car. I just wanted to formally tell you all how grateful I really am. You are truly the kindest people I've ever met." As I went on talking, I realized how bad of an idea this actually was.

I mean, will they get suspicious? I'm just showing gratitude right? It shouldn't sound like a cry for help or anything...

As I snapped out of thought for the fiftieth time today, I notice that all of the boys have some type of smile on their face, even Tom!

Edd was smiling like a proud mother,

Matt was smiling giddily,

Tord had a smug, 'cool guy' smile,

And Tom had the smallest smile that made my heart melt.

I awkwardly continued my fake smile, and sat down.

Conversation continued on as would on a normal night, with the topic being past pleasant memories.

I volunteered to wash the dishes, it was the least I could do. There was only one problem. For some ungodly reason, Tom had insisted on helping me.

I couldn't figure out why at first, untill it dawned on me that he probably needed something from me.

So as I scrubbed the forgetten food off of the ceramic plate, he rinsed and dried them. We did this in silence, aside from the running water. Tom's the first one to break the tension filled silence,

" So, how have you been?" It was such a simple question, I could have simply faked a toothy grin, and said that I was great. I could have thanked him for asking. I could have asked him back.

But I only did one of those things.

" I've been doing just as good as I always do." I reply with a small sad smile. I tear my eyes away from the dish water," How about you? You've been awfully quiet tonight."

He chuckles lowly," Just had a lot on my mind, trying to face some of my problems, that's all." I stop what I'm doing and look over at him,

" Do you want to talk about it? I think the others are asleep already."

Normally when Tom is having any type of problem, he comes to me for advice, or even just for someone to listen to him rant when he's drunk. I even gave him a spare key to my room if he ever needs me while I'm asleep. He's offered the same for me, but I told him that I have a counselor. I try not to lie to my housemates all the time, only when necessary.

He simply shakes his head in response," Nah, this is one I have to deal with on my own," I sigh,

" Alright then, but keep my offer in mind. Just try to remember to see me before I go to bed, I'm...going to bed early tonight. I have something to do tommorow." He nods in understanding.

After we finish the dishes, we say our goodnights,

" I'll see you in the morning, (y/n)." I give one last fake smile,

" Same to you, Tom. Sleep well." I see him nod and walk down the hall as I close my door and lock it for the final time.

I walk into my bathroom and look into the mirror. All I see is a monstrosity of a person glaring back at me.

The bags under my eyes had only gotten worse after the sleepless nights I spent writing my suicide note.

I decided to skip reading over it one last time, I want nothing that could alter my decision at hand here. If I read my dying love letter that's written to Tom, I might stop myself in some kind of silly hope that everything could be okay again. It was too late for all that now.

So, I grabbed my blade that had served me well over the years, and stepped into the bathtub. I didn't cry, I didn't shake in fear of what I was about to do. I sadly smiled instead. As I took my hoodie off, revealing a tank top that no one knew I owned. I set my hoodie softly onto the floor, and turned on the hot water.

I took a deep breath in, and sigh, grabbing my blade and getting to work on my first artery. It took me a couple tries to find it.

But once I did, it started the red tint in the once clear bath water. I took in a shaky breath, adjusting to the dizziness of loosing so much blood so quickly.

At this point I couldn't even hear the bathwater running, everything was muffled.

I reached to turn it off, and a hand was placed onto mine. It takes me a good second to register that there was someone next to the tub, yelling my name right next to my face.

I try my best to focus on who could have caught me. Yet it's so difficult to take in my surroundings at this point.

So as I stare at the person beside my bathtub with fading eyes. I feel pressure on my wound, and see something being wrapped around it.

I start panicking, trying to say no, to let me die.

But I just can't. I just watch as my life is saved against my will.

Suddenly I can see that I'm moving, I can't figure out how until I notice the arms carrying me bridal style to a soft surface. That's when I lost consciousness for the next hour.

I didn't exactly 'wake up' more like fazed into existence. It's like I just gradually became aware of what was around me.

I became aware of the sobs coming from my bedside, and of the pressure squeezing my hand.

I forced my eyes open and tried to sit up. Yet I instantly regretted my decision, pain shot throughout my body. I glance over to my hand and up the....purple arm....

Who is this? Or perhaps I should say, what is this?

It's some kind of...monster? Hybrid? It looked kind of human... I could only see the torso and up. Even then, the arms grew bigger the farther down the arms stretched, and turned a deeper and deeper shade of purple. Horns poked out of the head laying slightly onto my shin, poking me a bit.

" Am-" I hold my throat. That hurt. I clear my throat of the mucus and start again as the unknown monster wakes up,

" Am I dead?"

The monsters head shoots up, and I can't help but recognize the 'eyes' that I've grown to love.

" T-Tom..."

He tries to smile for me, but it twists into a sad frown as his black orbs start to water,

" (Y/n)....(y/n) you're...y-you're okay! You're okay..." He said this over and over again as he cupped my cheeks with his transformed hands.

I grab onto his forearm to steady his shaking. This was starting to scare me.

I had never seen this man shed a tear in front of me, yet alone bawl into my shoulder like he was doing now,

" Tom, it's okay, I'm right here." I whispered this, and many other reassurances into his ear. Confirming to him that it was going to be okay and that, to my displeasure, I wasn't going anywhere.

He seemed to get angry after a few minutes, he ripped himself away from me and took hold of my shoulders,

" WHAT IF YOU WEREN'T RIGHT HERE? WHAT IF I HADN'T OF WALKED IN!! WHAT THEN HUH? YOU WOULDN'T BE RIGHT HERE!!! YOU'D BE GONE!! I would have...lost you..." He slid down the side of my bed as he finished his outburst. He sat crying into his knees.

I didn't know what to do. Is he mad at me? But despite the questions, I acted without thinking.

I began to run my fingers through his hair, almost brushing it. He seemed surprised at first, before he leaned into my touch.

" I'm sorry Tom. I didn't think it would effect you like this..." All was silent for a few moments. Until,

" Why..?" He sniffled a few times before I could respond.

" Why? Why what?" He looked up to me,

" Why would you try to leave me?" I couldn't even bring myself to say anything after that. Tom seemed to sense the frog in my throat, and continued,

" You don't realize, (y/n). You don't realize how special you are. To your family, your friends. I mean bloody hell (y/n)! What about us?! Edd would be heartbroken! And how are we supposed to explain something like that to Matt?" I avoided the possible eye contact and twidled my thumbs in my lap,

" What about me (y/n)? How am I supposed to go on living with myself if you, the love of my life, killed herself?" My mind went blank. He took my hand in between both of his,

" I know this isn't the greatest time for this, but if it'll boost your self esteem even a little bit, I don't care about embarrassing myself. (Y/n) (L/n), I am deeply in love with you, and have been since you moved in. I've loved you since you helped me to bed when I came in drunk all those years ago. I've loved you since you beat my Pac-Man score at the arcade, I acted so mad, but you were just so cute so excited like that... (Y/n)... Please let me help you love yourself by loving you..."

By the time he was done with his speech, I was in tears, a small frown on my face. He seemed to get the wrong idea as he instantly dropped my hand and got up,

" I got the message, I'll just uhm... I'll just g-" I grabbed his hoodie strings and pulled him in for a kiss.

We could both tell that there would be many more to come.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm sorry if it's extremely long, I just love to write angst haha...

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mostlycompetentwriter · 4 years ago

Text

You Can STAY - Part 11

F/M Main Pairing: Y/N x Lee Felix (Side Pairing: Y/N x Stray Kids)

Genre: Fantasy AU; Scarlet Heart AU; OT8 SKZ

Warnings: Language; SMUT; very angsty feelings

Summary: King Felix takes the throne and Y/N makes a difficult choice.

Tag List: @angelphantomlove @moonlightracha @jjabbur @pinkchcn @straykidbaby @moonnstars90 @dru-shadow @skzooyeet @poutypoutybin

It’s impossible to escape Felix.

The weight of his actions and words hold me hostage in a Castle where I no longer felt like I belonged.

In the days following his ascension to the throne, I’ve watched his brothers leave their home, standing outside on the balcony behind Felix while Chan, Jisung, and Jeongin retreat into the distance. On the inside, I’m furious, observing the scene of unexpected cruelty; although, the fate of his brothers is certainly incomparable to the nightmarish decision he made regarding the former Queens of the Castle, including his own mother.

This was a Felix who I could barely comprehend, one who had been unraveled from the inside, leaving only the harsher parts of himself to remain.

But the heart beating inside my chest did not seem to understand that Felix had changed in those subtle ways, and despite my protest in delaying our marriage yet again, I couldn’t stay away from him long. In fact, after only a few nights of excusing myself to the Queens’ former chambers, I returned to Felix’s bed one evening after another frightening vision in which I saw a Felix painted with blood, streaking across the mural of his freckles, and standing in stark contrast to the murderous look in his eyes.

This was a Felix who I had abandoned, and I couldn’t stand the thought of causing Felix to unravel any further.

So, I gave in to my heart’s demands, and I listened to the warnings from that vision, and I approached Felix in the middle of the night wearing only a loose gown that swept the floor with every tentative step.

“Felix,” I whispered into the darkness of the room.

“Y/N,” his voice grumbled in return, husky with sleep.

I took his acknowledgment as an invitation, crawling next to him in bed. “I missed you,” I said, and then Felix was on top of me, kissing his way past all the heavy tension that had laid between us for so long.

“You came back,” was all he said before slim fingers danced their way across the bare skin of my thighs, twisting themselves into the hem of my panties before rolling the fabric down my legs and onto the floor. “Mine,” he soothed, tongue forcing its way into my mouth as he shuffled his sleep pants down to his knees, freeing his cock.

“Please,” I gasped, arching my back in premature celebration when he teased the slit of his erection between my puffy folds.

“You’ll beg me, Y/N,” Felix growled, and I didn’t have the position to deny him, especially now that he had all the power.

“I’ll do anything, Felix,” I cried, grinding myself down the best that I could to feel the friction of his hard cock teasing my sex, even if it was still not enough. “I want you more than anything!”

“Then you’ll marry me,” Felix insisted, and I could hardly fathom his persistence.

“Yes,” I agreed, almost on instinct despite my promise to stay strong until he brought back his brothers from their undeserved exile.

But I gave in to my heart and desire instead.

“Such a good girl,” he said, and he slid his cock inside, groaning low under his breath at the tight squeeze of my cunt, holding him as close as possible.

“Felix,” I said. “Faster.”

“Of course, my queen,” he said, and my heart did a strange somersault at the idea of being his queen, a softer sentiment that was lost in the next moment when he started pounding his hips against mine, drawing back out to the tip before pressing forward with powerful thrusts that moved me up and down the bed with the rapid pace of our fucking.

His fingers toyed with my clit, squeezing and rubbing harshly at the engorged bud, throbbing under his persistent touch and the heat building between my legs as the fiery friction of our connection grew to a boiling point, an explosion of his name across my lips as I fell apart under the one man who was meant to keep me together.

The priest wore a smug smile, looking between the two of us with a nonchalant shrug. “You cannot marry,” he said. “According to our laws, the new queen must be untouched by marks, and there are plenty of scars on Y/N.”

I froze, recalling with stunning clarity what seemed like years ago when I was beaten and punished for my supposed crime of trying to poison Minho. Of course, I was innocent on the matter, but my pleas for help went unanswered, and the guards who were put in charge of extracting a guilty word from me had been particularly brutal.

“That wasn’t her fault,” Felix growled.

“The scars are still there,” the priest said, and I sat back in my chair, defeated once again.

The next morning, I went on a walk by myself, upset by the previous day’s reckoning, and the knowledge that Felix was still unraveling, further still, now that the possibility of our union was completely rendered obsolete.

It was a lot to think about, and I was lost in my mind for a long time, wandering the perimeter of the gardens. For a while, I lingered on Felix’s expression of pure rage from our conversation with the priest because, for a split second, I was certain that he would demand the man’s death.

But Felix refrained. For now, at least.

“What can I do?” I wondered aloud, to stop him from sinking even lower?

“You can’t do anything,” a voice whispered from beyond my subconscious, and I paused at the edge of the forest, not realizing that I had traveled so far, to look at Jisung straight in his eyes.

“Jisung!” I gasped, immediately launching myself into his arms. “Are you well?”

“I’m okay,” he reassured me, and I pulled back with a start.

“If Felix sees you here...”

“Relax,” Jisung smiled. “I don’t intend to stay long. I only wish to talk with you.”

“Me?” I repeated.

“You,” Jisung agreed with a teasing lilt. “Come on.”

I hesitated only a for a moment, glancing back over my shoulder at the Castle, before following Jisung further into the woods. “Where are we going?”

“Not far,” Jisung said, and I knew that I could trust him, listening to the sounds of the leaves crunching beneath our steps when Jisung made an abrupt turn that brought us to the side of the worn path that led between the village and Kingdom beyond our own. It was quiet and well-hidden, and I leaned in closer to Jisung as he observed our surroundings before releasing a sigh. “You need to leave the Castle.”

I blinked in response, at first, looking at Jisung like he might suddenly start laughing at any moment and proclaim his order as a joke.

But he didn’t.

“I can’t leave him,” I said. “He’s volatile.”

“He relies on his emotions too much,” Jisung agreed. “And you bring out his most powerful ones.”

I frowned, hating the truth behind his words. “I love him.”

“I know,” Jisung said, and he gave me a meaningful look. “You need to leave him because of those feelings.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, and I resented Jisung in that moment, acting like such a decision could be made so easily.

“Felix needs to be King,” Jisung said. “He’s the only one who makes sense.”

“Why?” I huffed. “You’re suddenly fond of him?”

Jisung flinched at the comment. “He has allies in the North, and Chan and I received a visit from Hyunjin this morning. The South favors Felix because of his military background.”

“You saw Hyunjin?” I exhaled.

Jisung nodded. “He had to leave again. Something urgent came up, but he wants to return and see you...” Jisung trailed off, studying me like he was waiting for an opportunity. “He’ll only be able to see you outside of the Castle.”

I rolled my eyes at his insistence. “This is Chan’s idea, isn’t it?”

“Chan knows nothing about this.”

I took a step back, surprised by the admission. “What?”

“Y/N, Felix will leave the throne for you,” Jisung said, and it dawned on me then, the reason why he wanted me to leave.

“You know that we can’t be married.”

“I had my suspicions,” Jisung admitted. “The Castle is steeped in tradition, and future queens...well...they can’t be-”

“Flawed,” I finished for him. “Like me with my scars.”

Jisung lowered his head. “I’m sorry.”

I shook from the very inside of my soul, realizing the gravity of what I needed to do for the Kingdom. “I can’t ever be married.”

“If you leave here with me, then we can marry each other,” Jisung said. “The tradition only applies to our Kings, and Minho gave me permission when he was still in power, just in case anything were to happen to Felix. He wanted to make sure that you could still be happy.”

I swallowed hard, and my heart ached for a man who was gone. “Why would we marry?”

Jisung gave me a sheepish smile. “We can live together, in a village outside of the kingdom without suspicion.”

“With Chan and Jeongin?”

“No, they’ll remain here and watch over Felix.”

I stiffened. “Are they okay with that?”

Jisung sighed. “Everything is already planned, Y/N. All we need now...”

“Is me,” I concluded, rubbing my hands together even though it wasn’t cold. “I need to leave the Castle.”

Jisung nodded again, and I was grateful when he remained quiet once the tears started to fall freely of their own accord.

It was dark when I returned to the Castle, discovering Felix pacing in our shared room when I arrived.

“There you are!” he exclaimed, eliminating the space between us to accept me into his arms with a gentle kiss. “I almost sent the guards out!”

“I just needed a walk to clear my head,” I said, carefully extracted myself from his arms to wander over to the balcony.

Felix followed me outside. “What’s going on? Is something wrong?”

“Just some thoughts,” I said, gazing out over the Castle grounds.

“Thoughts?” Felix questioned, and I was relieved by his warm presence from behind.

“You need to lead the Kingdom,” I said. “I think you’ll be a great King.”

Felix chuckled, brushing a soft kiss across my cheek. “With you by my side.”

My heart clenched at the sentiment. “Felix, if we can’t marry, would you stay on the throne?”

There was silence for a moment following my question before Felix turned me around to face him. “I’ll figure out a way, Y/N.”

“But not at the risk of vacating the throne?”

Felix looked away, but there was a brief flicker in his eyes that told me everything I needed to know. Enough to validate Jisung’s arguments and my worst doubts. “There’s no need to worry.”

“Felix,” I finally said. “I need to leave.”

“Leave?” Felix laughed as if I had just told him the funniest joke. “Where do you get these ideas from?”

“When I leave,” I said, continuing on as if he had never interrupted. “You must promise me that you’ll stay and be a good king.”

Felix’s laughter died in an instant. “Y/N, are you serious?”

“Does it look like I’m not?” I returned, and Felix’s entire expression shifted into something frenzied and uncontrolled, using both hands to squeeze at my arms.

“I’ll abandon the throne!” Felix roared, but I only met his gaze calmly.

“No you won’t,” I replied. “You know that you can’t.”

Felix growled, releasing me and resuming his incessant pacing. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“To ensure that you’ll do the right thing.”

“The right thing,” Felix enunciated. “Is being with you.”

I sighed, watching as he fell apart. “I see.”

Because it was obvious to me that I would have to leave without saying goodbye, and that hurt worse than anything else ever could.

“You’re talking nonsense,” Felix said, and he reached out for my hand to pull me back inside our room. “We’ll finish this in the morning after we’ve both had time to clear our heads.”

I simply nodded, allowing my silence to put him back together again as best as I could. Meanwhile, Felix brought me next to him in our shared bed, pressing kisses into my hair and whispering nonsensical words, and I allowed him to do that too because this was our final night together, and I wanted him to remember me as the one person who had always been on his side.

It was approaching midnight and Felix’s breathing had leveled off into soft snores. It was the perfect opportunity to leave the comfortable embrace of his arms, packing only what I thought was essential before wandering out onto the balcony once again.

Below me, waiting in the coverage of the bushes, was Jisung. I waved my hand at him and waited for his acknowledgement before tossing down my belongings. He caught them easily, and I used my magic to help levitate me down to where Jisung was waiting.

From there, he brought me to the woods where two stallions had been tied to the large trunks of the trees. “You planned well,” I remarked, and then we both ensured that my things were secure.

“Did you tell him anything?” Jisung asked at one point, but I shook my head because it was easier than the truth.

“He’ll do the right thing,” I promised, and Jisung seemed satisfied, helping me onto my horse with a grunt.

“Let’s go,” Jisung said, and I waited until he was also properly situated before following him once again into the deeper coverage of the foliage, rushing further and further away from the Castle.

There were still some doubts lingering at the back of my head because I had always thought the answer was to stay with Felix, but I had been wrong. I was the problem, and when I left the Castle with Jisung that night, I looked back only once and wished all the best for the man I loved.

Dear Felix,

By the time you read this, I will have already gone.

It pains me to part from you at such a crucial hour, but I have no other choice.

We have no other choice.

Do not look for me. Worry about being a good king. Rule the kingdom as I would wish for you to rule. Fair and true.

Leave the rest to fate, and keep your distance from your brothers. No more of your bloodline should be sacrificed.

Yours always,

Y/N

#stray kids fanfic #stray kids smut #felix fanfic #felix smut #lee felix fanfic #lee felix smut #felix imagines #felix scenarios #felix series #stray kids x y/n #felix x y/n #scarlet heart au #stray kids imagines #stray kids scenarios #stray kids felix fanfic #mostlycompetent

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ryuichirou · 4 years ago

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Can you make your top 10 aot characters that have a good development? Like Eren and Reiner are considered to be the best characters as 'characters' themselves

Anon… dear Anon, you’ve been waiting for like a month I think, I’m so sorry. I took this ask waaay too seriously lol, but yeah, I can’t postpone it for any longer…

I know you asked for top 10, and this is a numbered list, but I wouldn’t call it a proper ranking, so the place doesn’t really matter all that much. Otherwise this list would’ve taken even longer, I’m very serious about lists, it seems lol

Before I start I want to mention (just in case): I feel like “character development” isn’t always about becoming better at something. Sometimes you can become “worse”; sometimes you can get “better” and then fall back to your old ways. It’s just how the character changes, and the trajectory of that change can be very different for different characters.

1. Eren. I can talk about Eren for hours and hours, and I have talked about him a lot, so I’ll try to be quick this time.

Eren’s journey is very interesting and enjoyable to read. He’s such an unusual main character. So aggressive at first, unlikable to some (not to us lol we adored him since day one), loud and stubborn. But it’s super cool to watch this hurricane of a person, especially as he gets calmer, starts controlling his emotions little by little, learns more stuff and understands the situation around him better.

I think I’ll talk about how perspective and knowing a bigger picture change the way character acts a lot in this post, but Eren is an ultimate example of this. He got every single thing: past, present, future, drilled in his head at one fucking moment. He didn’t get a bigger picture, he got the biggest 5d picture with special effects. And he had no one to share that with: he had to deal with it himself, knowing that he himself is the reason for everything that’s happening. It makes my head hurt to even think about that lol It’s cool and unnerving to watch Eren, who’s used to be such a fireball of a character, to just get… quiet and apathetic. We don’t know what he’s thinking about, we don’t know what’s going on anymore, even though his emotions were always the most obvious thing about him. It’s almost scary.

And the interesting thing about it is that nothing really changed about his feelings, at least I think so. Ultimately, the only thing he wanted is for his friends to be happy and live long lives, and who knows, maybe he saw that the “freedom” he was initially seeking for himself doesn’t really exist. This is up to debate and definitely not for this post though lol

2. Reiner. Ohh Reiner. He was one of the characters who wasn’t all that interesting to me personally at first, but as he got more and more complex and emotional, I fell in love with him more and more. This isn’t a numbered list, but he is definitely one of the best written characters. And what’s cool about him is that we see the reason for him being the way he is throughout the story: why he wanted to become a hero, why his mental state got so bad, why he was conflicted, why he got so depressed and why he was able to take responsibility for his actions. I love it when the story breaks its characters, and Reiner is certainly one of the most broken ones. His lower point (when he almost killed himself + cried and asked Eren to kill him) was very beautiful and painful to read, because we know why he feels that way and we know how smug and brave he was at the very beginning of the show/manga. And we know that it was all a lie, which makes everything even tastier.

And as much as I love broken characters, I’m kind of glad Reiner found strength to continue fighting and to take responsibility for his actions (to some degree, at least). Not only he saw a bigger picture, he actually learned how to live with it. I’m so happy they discussed the Marco incident with Jean, and that after Annie told that it was her who took his gear, Reiner stood up and said that Annie was following his orders. He also apologized to Annie for everything he did to her and Bert.

Basically, Reiner went from wanting to be a hero to acting like a hero, then to being an actual hero to Marley and feeling like shit anyways, then to just being a human being, something like that. And that scene with his mom hugging him and being happy for him being alive is actually a very sweet and satisfying moment. Especially considering how much Reiner wanted to die lol

3. Zeke. I’ve talked about it in one of the replies about ch137, but I love how Zeke went from “I shouldn’t have been born” to “maybe small moments of happiness make everything worth it” at the very end of his life (what a cruel irony to realise that just before you die). Not only the character develops and changes, our view of him changes as well: I think Zeke was universally hated when he first appeared, but then he became more fun (dude’s too charismatic), and then he became sympathetic and vulnerable. All of this was always inside Zeke, but it was hidden since Zeke is a lying snake. See, Zeke is smart, but he’s super sure that his views are the only valid ones and that his idea of freeing Eldians is the only solution. His views are surprisingly black and white: I suffered, Eren suffered and our dad is bad. And no one challenged his beliefs until they walk through Grisha’s memories with Eren in ch120-121, and then he realized that Eren didn’t suffer at all and their dad is actually just a person who really regretted being a horrible father to his first son. I love that he got some closure with Grisha because he held that grudge for his entire life.

4. Grisha. He has a rollercoaster ride of a development lol: at first he was an innocent boy, then he became an angry boy, and then he kind of calmed his anger down for some time? But after learning what actually happened to Faye, his emotional wounds got open and all that rage blinded him again. And then, after being outed by Zeke, he lost everything, but had a harsh realization that by being driven by his anger only, he completely forgot not to be a shitty dad. He basically had a second chance in life, with a much better perspective about what’s going on, but now he has his younger son’s ghost haunting him and telling him to do thing he never thought he’d do. At different points of the story Grisha feels both like a mastermind behind things and like a pawn who doesn’t have a choice even if he just wants to live a peaceful and happy life with his wife and kids. The irony of him killing a bunch innocent kids when this whole story started because he got his little sister killed? Delicious. Oh, and I really love the fact that he realised that he screwed up as dad and apologized to Zeke. He loved his kids a lot: Zeke, Eren and Mikasa too (he called her his daughter after all).

5. Erwin. Way more interesting than people give him credit for. He’s mostly adored for being a badass, but he also has his own flaws that he had to deal with. He’s like a moth that’s drawn to the light, but right after burning himself and dying he kind of did “the right thing” that he had to do as a commander. Now, for me it isn’t really about Erwin ending up doing “the right thing” to be honest: we would probably adored him is he ditched everyone and ran to the basement because his selfish desires ended up being more important to him. But that scene where he confessed to Levi that he really wanted to find that basement and just told him everything about his capricious and selfish childish desires, talked about how he lied to everyone including Levi basically just to prove his dad’s point… it was beautiful, because it was basically “I have to do it, haven’t I? But I really don’t want to”. His character development is interesting in a sense that at first he was getting gradually more and more psychotic about his dream, doing crazy things even when he knows it might not be the best choice possible (like him risking his life instead of staying behind), but at the very end he stopped to think and… well we know the rest lol

6. Armin. I remember people saying that Armin is just a narrator-like character who is here to explain thing (I probably thought so too at first), but this is so unfair. It’s easy to make someone like Armin into this trope, and to leave him being a very one-dimensional dreamer who’s smart but naive. And Armin is so much more than that. Throughout the story he has a lot of “I should have been the one who died” moments, and I love that this is such a prominent issue for him, but he still got over it somehow. Armin was kind of lost at the beginning, but found his role. And wow, he had to go through it again after he was chosen instead of Erwin, because the burden on his shoulders just got 100 kg heavier lol He also got less naïve and more cunning with time and got much better at emotional manipulation, I think. While preferring a dialogue over violence, Armin still isn’t pure, and he acknowledges that constantly, especially after his first kill, and things got even worse since that point, which definitely changed him. But his violence-loathing (kind of…) core is still there.

Armin ended up playing a much bigger role in the story than I thought he would be, I really love it. He has his moments of weakness, but he still pushes forward and takes responsibility and does his best. Oh and let’s pretend that the Annie thing never happened, it doesn’t contribute anything to his character anyway.

7. Jean. I think Jean is the first character who starts showing character growth, and I believe his development is the reason he was Isayama’s favourite for some time. Tbh, I don’t find Jean annoying even at the very beginning: yeah he’s selfish, but he’s self-aware about it, he’s a realist. And he’s still a realist, but his conscience wouldn’t let him just have an easy life while everyone else’s suffering. I always feel like Jean is a spoiled mamaboy, so it’s great to see him showing that he can put others before himself. He also had an inner conflict similar to Armin’s: is it right to kill innocent people if you have to? Is it ok to kill not-so-innocent people because they’re against you? I really like this theme in SnK just in general.

8. Gabi. It’s no secret that I adore Gabi lol, and I think her character development is great. She was in her element when we first met her: she was confident, she was doing her best and succeeding, she knew the world around her so well, and then Eren took everything from her. People like to hate Gabi for killing Sasha and for being aggressive on Paradis, but I think it’s great that she didn’t have an overnight change of heart. It’s great that Isayama showed us her shock and her raw emotions, it’s more than natural for a child with her upbringing, even if it’s messed up. But I love it when stories take characters that are great at what they do, and they take them out of their element, to show them at their worst: lost, angry, broken and confused. I love that she understood everything herself and not because Falco told her “hey they’re people too” that one time. She had to go through this hell to figure everything out, and I think it’s great.

9. Historia. Historia was one of the least interesting characters for me (and for a lot of people, Yams included) at the beginning, and tbh I think it’s brilliant: we never saw anything in her; she was just a waifu material who’s nice to others. It felt fake and boring, well, because it was indeed fake and boring, and to this day I cannot believe that that was the entire point. I love how Ymir made Historia realise that she needs to think for herself, but what’s interesting about all that is that after Ymir left, she almost came back to her old habits. Which is also a development, and a very interesting one. The end of S2 was a high point for her (when she told Ymir that she isn’t scared of anything when they’re together), and then there was a very low point (when Ymir left), and then a high point again (when she remembered Ymir and Frieda and decided to act upon her own desires). She’s one of my faves now because of all that… It’s sad she didn’t have a bigger role post-timeskip, but I still appreciate her story for what it is.

10. Oh god this is so hard to pick one and this post is already so long… can I just give you a bunch of quick honorable mentions?

Annie (who was a loner that couldn’t really trust anyone but ended up showing her vulnerable and emotional side), Hange (started out enthusiastic and eager to learn more only to meet more pain and disappointment, crumbling under the pressure, but ultimately remembering her amusement with titans), Levi (granted it’s very subtle, but him going through Kenny’s death, Erwin’s death and his promise to him, realization that he’s been killing people all this time and other stuff fascinating and huge leaving a mark on him), Ymir (who got hurt and decided not to trust anyone anymore and to act selfishly, but ended up sacrificing herself anyway lol)…. God, these short description sucks, they can’t describe them properly. Also there are so much of them that I think have good development, and I’m 100% missing someone… but I think I’m done for now. Katsu I’m sorry for making you read all this.

That you for this ask, Anon <3 and sorry again for being so late

#replies #snk meta

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a-little-slice-of-fandom · 4 years ago

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In derry girls, what did you think of the episode where clare came out? Im irish (republic) and gay so i love that it was included, but some of the language used makes me uncomfortable i guess? I get that NI in the 90s wasnt very accepting but the directors have said that they already portrayed it through rose coloured glasses so having michelle say d*ke feels unnecessary. I love the show though and can certainly look past it! I was just interested in what you thought :)))

Hey anon!

Personally I love this episode of Derry Girls! In fact it’s probably my favourite episodes. I already liked Clare as a character throughout the series, probably because I relate to her a bit too much, so to have her be revealed as gay was just like the icing on the cake. Good representation for northern Irish characters are few and far between, and gay northern Irish characters are basically non existent. Derry Girls was this hit TV show that provided many with the first chance to see themselves represented meaningfully on TV, and that includes myself.

However, I think there’s a lot of really important stuff in this episode that people either don’t notice or just don’t really talk about, which I do understand because Derry Girls is, at the end of the day, a comedy and it’s much more fun to quote characters like Aunt Sarah saying “you cannot move for lesbians these days” than to think about the darker side of Northern Ireland.

(T/W for homophobia discussion!!!)

(Also this sort of turned into a ramble about acceptance by the end of the post but I just have a lot of feelings on what Derry girls represents and I feel like non northern Irish viewers maybe don’t catch onto that because they don’t have the necessary context)

Derry Girls, as a show, is so interesting and personal to me because it manages to perfectly strike the balance between presenting Northern Ireland as a deeply flawed and divided country, but also presenting it as a place where people can be happy and live their lives to the fullest despite the ever present danger of the troubles. And that’s a genuinely refreshing portrayal of N.I that we usually don’t get. However I’d argue that if Derry Girls doesn’t at least try and illustrate, to some extent, the causal and very rampant homophobia of northern Ireland then it runs the risk of romanticising Northern Ireland at the time, which I think is incredibly dangerous. I do think that the show is intentionally more digestible and does filter things through rose tinted glasses, however I’d argue that simply glossing over the homophobia would have actually been a bit disrespectful to the queer history of Northern Ireland and could erase the experiences and struggles of the LGBTQ community in N.I, both then and now. If the show doesn’t acknowledge that things were shitty then we paint an inaccurate picture of what it was like, and arguably still is like, to be gay in Northern Ireland. And considering that Derry Girls is one of the very few good depictions of Northern Ireland, it’s incredibly important that it’s an honest depiction.

You specifically asked about Michelle, but I think it’s important to talk about Michelle and Erin in relation to one another, and how they are both products of their time and of a deeply homophobic society.

(Now I’m going to briefly discuss Michelle’s use of the d-slur here however I just want to acknowledge that I’m probably not the best person to talk about this since it’s a lesbian specific slur and I’m not a lesbian. I welcome any additions to this post!)

I think Michelle sort of represents the overt and “loud” homophobia that’s present in our society. Michelle saying the d-slur is far from the first homophobic thing she says. I mean It’s literally a running gag in series one that she calls James “gay” constantly. And the sad thing is that Michelle’s off handed comments throughout the series are incredibly realistic to what you’d hear in Northern Ireland even today. I remember the f-slur being chanted during break time at my primary school, without anyone fully understanding what that word meant. Michelle is a representation of the homophobia that’s deeply ingrained into N.I to the point where it’s not even thought about or even seen as an issue. I mean...no one ever really talks about Michelle’s comments. Now whether or not they had to include her saying a slur specifically to illustrate the homophobia of N.I is not for me to say. You could change that sentence in the script and I think the point of Michelle representing “loud” and homophobia would still stand.

On the other hand...I think Erin represents the much more insidious and “quiet” homophobia.

Firstly, she has no issue with capitalising off a very personal essay for her own gain, shrugs off any protests that this might be wrong and doesn’t consider how her actions may hurt the writer of this piece (who is later revealed to be Clare).

Even the language she uses is a bit uncomfortable, saying that “a real life lesbian walks among us”. Are lesbians wild animals or mythical creatures? That seems to be what Erin is implying here. Plus Erin tries to make it out to others such as Sister Michael that she’s doing this because she genuinely believes in equal rights and wishes to stick up for the LGBT community, but when Clare actually tries to come out Erin is clearly confused and she reacts very badly. I mean, Erin literally says she doesn’t want Clare to come out and demands she get back in the closet, and you can see how hurt Clare is by this reaction. And this scene is kind of played for laughs and I think that straight viewers probably found Erin’s reaction quite funny...but this scene hit way too close to home for me. It’s the classic “I have nothing against gay people, but I’d just rather I didn’t have a gay friend/child/co-worker because they make me uncomfortable” that’s way too common in Northern Ireland. It’s the idea that people can present themselves as liberal and open minded, but when finally confronted with something that doesn’t fit their narrative, their societal conditioning kicks in.

As a queer woman, it was never Michelle’s causal homophobia that made me uncomfortable, it was Erin’s reaction...because it hit way too close to home. It’s a perfect representation of the “quiet” homophobia that’s still a massive issue in Northern Ireland today.

(Also the context of when Derry Girls was released is super important! Series one of Derry Girls was released in 2018...but Gay marriage wasn’t actually legalised in Northern Ireland until January of 2020 and even then it was quite contested by conservatives. Now I’m not saying there’s social commentary here but that’s absolutely what I’m saying.)

Now I’m not saying that Michelle or Erin themselves are homophobic, nor am I saying that they’re bad people. I think that they are teenagers that have absorbed a lot of homophobic rhetoric due to the time and the society that they live in. Although Erin’s reaction to Clare trying to come out was painful to watch because it felt so real, I don’t think her reaction was malicious. Erin is a teenager who has grown up in a homophobic society and now doesn’t really know how to react to this new reality and probably didn’t realise how hurtful she was being to Clare. (This isn’t me trying to excuse her reaction, again I am part of the LGBT community and I’ve experienced that exact same reaction from people, it’s me trying to understand Erin’s reaction). Erin and Michelle have both absorbed rhetoric from their deeply homophobic society, and unfortunately this rhetoric continues.

Plus I just want to comment on this idea of acceptance and change in Derry Girls. Derry Girls is set in the time of great change in Northern Ireland, where people were sort of starting to accept that people are allowed to be British or Irish or both. But this process was messy and it wasn’t instantaneous. And the acceptance of the LGBTQ community in Northern Ireland was the exact same. It didn’t just happen overnight. It was a slow and messy process of change, of people re-evaluating their previous beliefs and being given the chance to grow as people and to learn how to accept others. That’s not to say people haven’t made mistakes in the past, because they have, but they’re willing to take the steps to change. I‘ve always thought the LGBTQ subplot of Derry Girls is sort of a parallel to the overall process of change in Northern Ireland in a political sense. And I think that flies over so many people’s heads because they don’t have that context of the political situation in N.I.

(And this theme of acceptance is seen again in the series finale of series 2 with James! ✨ Thematic consistency ✨ )

Because at the end of the day, Clare is accepted by the group. In fact, we see both the teenagers and the adults actively take steps to make her feel loved, welcome and accepted. My favourite moment will always be Granda Joe saying “you’re a very talented people” to Clare in the most earnest voice. Clare is still loved by her friends and although they don’t exactly know what they’re doing, they do try and show their support for her. They absolutely make mistakes, and they did hurt Clare, but they’re trying and I think that stands for a lot, especially at the time.

And I think all of what I discussed was absolutely necessary to Derry Girls. Derry Girls might be a somewhat rose tinted portrayal of Derry in the troubles, but it never tries to romanticise the situation that the teenagers were in (because no one should be romanticising the troubles). I think that this stance of portraying the harsh reality of homophobia in N.I is equally important to the narrative of Derry Girls. I see my own experiences in Clare, despite the fact it’s 30 years later, so if they didn’t at least attempt to show the homophobia in Ireland it would have felt disingenuous and too “perfect”. Again, I’m not saying that Michelle using the d slur was the right way to go about showing the “loud” homophobia of Northern Ireland. That’s not my decision to make. However, just because Derry Girls is making efforts to present Northern Ireland in a more digestible way to audiences (especially non northern Irish audiences) doesn’t mean they shouldn’t also acknowledge the reality of Northern Ireland at the time.

(This all kind of makes it sound like I want Clare to get hate crimed which I obviously do not want. I think the way that Derry Girls showed the issues in Northern Ireland were perfect and very much necessary, minus the use of the d-slur specifically which wasn’t necessary to the plot.)

Anyway thank you so much for the ask anon! This was much more rambly than my usual posts but I just really have a lot of opinions on Derry girls because it does mean a lot to me and it often does hit close to home.

#derry girls #michelle mallon #erin quinn #clare devlin #enya discusses: derry girls #long post

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aspecpplarebeautiful · 4 years ago

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I wanna be proud of being ace, but like. I feel like I’m sexualising myself? If that makes sense? And also sexualising my peers. I’m a minor, so I feel like it’s bad that I’m even discussing my ace-ness, esp since I’m gray ace so I feel sexual attraction sometimes, even if rarely. Is it true that it’s weird to be proud of being ace? Esp at a young age? I just. It’s the discussion of sexual attraction and relations between teenagers, and ik that society is still weird about that, looking at you netflix, but still. Am I contributing to the sexualisation of minors? I def think literal children are off limits for saying wether they’re allo or ace bcus theyre children and they don’t even know yet, particularly with sexual attraction, bcus kids don’t feel sexual attraction. I think. And hope. And the argument of if they can id as straight then they can id as ace and it’s like neat! But also they didn’t even choose to id as straight thats society baby. And people saying they’re straight are probably focusing on the romantic part, not the sexual one. I’m getting off topic here. But like. I’m 14. Am I sexualising kids/teenagers? It’s weird to think people my age even feel sexual attraction tbh, (including me lmao) but I think that’s a common ace feel. I think. But am I? It’s implying the rest of them who are allo are, well, allo. And it’s not like society doesn’t consider that. They teach sex ed and have the cursed netflix shows and discuss things and crushes and stuff. But. I just can’t get over it. Am I sexualising others? Am I being overshary? I want to come out to my family, but does my mom really want to hear about how her child doesn’t feel sexual attraction except sometimes? I have this friend who says this kinda stuff all the time and also is an exclusionist, which uh,,, I’m not an idiot, they probably contributed a lot to me thinking like this. But are they right? Do I have internalized aphobia? Am I sexualising people? Idk I’m just. Agh :(

Alright so let’s start with the main question. I’m not sure what you mean by sexualizing your peers, but it’s very normal and natural to think of people your own age in a sexual way. Generally speaking I separate feelings that are largely outside of your control with actions, most 14 year olds will naturally think of other 14 year olds in a sexual way. But it’s still important to be respectful of people and boundaries and not actively sexualize anyone who doesn’t want it or hasn’t given consent. But yeah, generally speaking at 14 hormones are fairly strong and people are learning to deal with them for the first time and these thoughts are going to come up and that’s OK.

Sexualizing minors is definitely an issue, but the big issue is adults sexualizing minors. (And god wouldn’t it be nice if we could start having more shows about younger adults figuring their shit out and navigating life if you wanted to do a show about young sexy people? The actors are usually that age already anyways.) And honestly a lot of your peers are definitely having similar thoughts and going through similar things.

Children can actually experience sexual attraction, when people start experiencing sexual attraction can vary widely. It’s important to acknowledge this because people who do start experiencing it young need to know their experiences are normal too.

Sexual attraction, or looking at people sexually isn’t a moral flaw. Sexuality isn’t morally wrong. It’s important to respect things like consent and healthy boundaries, but generally speaking sexuality on its own is normal and healthy. You may benefit from looking into the sex positivity movement, sometimes they forget about asexuality a bit which is an issue (newer stuff is better though), but it’s important to see that perspective too, and unlearn the more puritanical ‘sex and sexuality is a sin’ idea our culture tends to push.

Yeah you can be a minor and ace or gray ace (both or whichever you prefer). As said above, actually at 14 a lot of people are experiencing sexual attraction already. People are still going through puberty until their late teens/early 20′s, so it’s always possible your orientation is still developing until then, and some teens do prefer to hold off, but it’s a personal choice. And whatever happens in the future doesn’t change that something is true now. It’s fine to go with and identify with how you feel right now.

For literal children identifying as ace (I’m assuming you mean like under 10 here), honestly that’s usually not an issue because of the way our brains develop, young children haven’t reached a point yet where they’re solidifying their identities and orientations. That usually starts to happen during the pre-teen and young teenage years.

But also there’s no harm done in trying on a label and realising later that that label doesn’t fit. It’s a normal and healthy part of figuring out identity to look into and consider different ones and try them on.

I have to be honest that I was reading through this ask and wondering what you were reading/seeing, because a lot of this comes from exclusionist rhetoric. Exclusionist rhetoric is also very very good at getting into your head and making you doubt yourself or feel guilty for being your own orientation/hate your own orientation. This may sound extreme but this friend is probably not a very good friend to you, and if they don’t know you’re ace it will likely get worse if they find out.

Ace exclusionism (actually any form of lgbtqia+ exclusionism) acts as a hate group, they target specific groups and base their identity around their hate/fear of that group. The tactics are the same, they exaggerate the power of the targeted group to make them appear like a threat, downplay their oppression, and actively target and harass those groups, and slowly become an echo chamber.

At the very least I really strongly recommend following ace people and ace blogs so you are getting good information and can build up a support for your identity. Remember exclusionists will often lie, fact check anything you hear from them, but you’ll probably see too just from watching the ace community yourself that the picture they paint doesn’t match up to reality at all.

So please take care of yourself and watch out for yourself.

All the best, and good luck!

#the so-called discourse cw #Anonymous

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itsclydebitches · 4 years ago

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “Divide”

Hello, everyone, and welcome back! It feels good to be doing some normal RWBY-ing in this strange world of ours. First, some supplementary materials.

Number One: In response to any (valid) questions along the lines of, “Hey Clyde, it’s now been a full year since Volume 7 was airing and you still haven’t answered my ask about it. Or the ones about Volume 6… what’s up with that?” I’ve created what I hope is an informative video detailing the problem:

vimeo

(I assure you, the Earth, Wind & Fire was a happy accident during the screen recording.)

Needless to say, there’s a lot and I’ve known for some time now that I will LITERALLY never get through all my asks. Which doesn’t mean I don’t want you to send future thoughts in! Just know that as we head into Volume 8 territory I’ll most likely prioritize those, as well as any Volume 7 asks that aren’t woefully out of date. But I do want everyone to know that I read all the asks I receive, appreciate them immensely, and think too much about hypothetical answers, even if I don’t have time to actually write them out 💜

Number Two: There’s a bingo board this year!

Jury’s out on whether I’ll remember to update it, but at the very least this serves as a decent glimpse into my — and others’ — expectations going into this volume.

Number Three: I’ve collected a list of things I’ve heard about Volume 8 from what seem to be reputable sources. I did this because RT is developing a tendency to talk up certain points and then fail to deliver, either because something was taken out of a volume/moved to another, or because RT apparently has radically different ideas about what including something means. So this might be handy to keep on file and ask ourselves two months from now, “Did RT actually deliver on what they promised?”

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

I was also going to include a list of all the threads that need to be continued/wrapped up, but honestly that would have taken too large a chunk off my life. Let’s just throw out the highlights:

Are we really going to have Qrow gunning for Ironwood?

Clover is dead regardless. Press ‘F’ to pay respects

Oscar bb you got shot please acknowledge this

Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this

Penny is a Maiden now. I feel like the fandom has been sleeping on this (myself included)

Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake.

Ren spill your deep dark secret already and it had better be something more than just ‘Oh no Nora might someday die :( ’

Salem is here so how the actual fuck is the cast surviving this?

Will Ironwood likewise survive his descent into antagonism? Yes or please yes no?

I think that’s all the biggies. I strive to keep lists like this in mind while analyzing, but honestly RWBY has a hundred moving parts that are abandoned or changed or simply retconned at the drop of a hat. So an attempt will be made.

Number Four (last one I promise!): Normal disclaimers and reminders for Recaps apply:

Please don’t fill up the already full inbox with flames. It’s still 2020. No one has time for that nonsense.

There will absolutely be typos and wonky parts because I try to get these out the same day an episode premieres. I have now been working on this for ten hours, nearly straight, and have no more energy for edits. Apologies in advance and RIP to my Saturdays.

I reserve the right to use stupid GIFs and memes at my discretion.

I strive to keep my focus on recapping/analyzing but salt tends to worm its way in… If you’re a die-hard RWBY fan with little patience for criticism, let alone (at times) snarky criticism, please proceed with caution.

No wait I lied, this is the last thing:

Okay, got that out of my system LET’S DO THIS!

We start not with the episode itself but rather Rooster Teeth’s (RT’s) strange non-promotion of it. If you follow my blog you may have caught the post where I pointed out that there was nothing on RT’s website to suggest that one of their most popular shows—if not the most popular show—was premiering today. Nothing on the main page. Nothing on the RWBY page either, not unless you count the Volume 8 poster background (easily mistaken for the Volume 7 poster) and the trailer buried all the way down past Episodes, past Merch, in the Bonus Features section along with videos like Live From Remnant and the volume intros. RT… the promotion of your feature show is not a bonus. This should be front and center! Honest to god, five minutes before the episode dropped I was checking the website for a Volume 8 section, a countdown, anything that would tell me the episode was imminent without relying on fans on tumblr to keep me in the loop. We got nada, zilch. I’m not sure whether that speaks more to RT’s iffy management of the series or simply the website’s horrible design—RIP losing RWBY on Youtube—but I was surprised when I saw the episode a few minutes after 11:00am. At that point I honestly expected to hear about a dely.

So that’s the mood I entered the premiere in, but truly? We start off strong. Things take a pretty severe nosedive later on, we’ll get to that, but I was impressed with our beginning and that probably has a lot to do with the fact that we start with our villains.

We open on a Cinderella character, Cinder, and thus I’m immediately pleased that we’re getting something about her backstory after all this time. Seven years! She appeared in episode one, folks! To say we’re overdue is an understatement. There isn’t a whole lot to go on, just a younger Cinder sadly scrubbing the floor, poised under a spotlight. What we learn, or potentially learn, is based far more in cultural knowledge than this scene. We know Cinderella’s story, which includes the abusive family, the longing for more, the eventual escape, and thus we’re able to read all of that in this image, despite the image itself not telling us any of this overtly. That means we could be wrong in our interpretation, but if we’re not it’s an easy shorthand in an already packed story.

What I’m really impressed with is the sound bridge between the scrubbing and her nails on the back of Neo’s chair. Fantastic way to confirm that this is Cinder as well as showcasing just how far she’s come. The sound of her labor has been replaced with the sound of her power and given that Cinder’s power is stolen, tied to a grimm arm, the property of a genocidal maniac… that’s messed up. It’s a Cinderella story gone wrong.

So yeah, Cinder tells Neo to head straight into the creepy, grimm infested blood cloud to see Salem and Neo is like, ‘Uh… no thank you?’ lol.

RT does a good job this episode with her expressions, ensuring we know exactly what she’s thinking despite an unwillingness/inability to speak.

Poor Neo might be in too deep, but I quite like the overall atmosphere of this opening. Say what we will about Salem’s awful characterization, at least she has style. This woman knows how to make an entrance and, piggybacking off of the Apathy, RT knows how to infuse horror elements into their fantasy. The red and purple coloring of the clouds, spiked whale teeth peeking through, bright orange in the background looking like explosions… that’s all 👌 Including the intro card.

The only thing I want to gripe about is this:

I’m sorry, why does the whale grimm have landing pads? Or something like it?? The whale otherwise works because it’s poised between the natural and the fantasy synthetic. It looks like a real grimm whale on the outside, but is sporting a throne room, a control panel, and other unnatural elements on the inside. It’s a visual indicator of Salem’s ability to control and change grimm. Now though, the additions are wrong, infringing on the line between organic and tech, the line between what helps the grimm individually (giving monkeys wings) and what just helps Salem. Every other aspect of the whale straddles that line wonderfully, adding to the creep factor, like a grimm version of the Uncanny Valley: it’s not quite a whale anymore… but landing pads? That looks ridiculous. Why does Salem even have that? How many ships are her people feasibly using? Why are there five?

Take it away, please.

Cinder waltzes in like this is a normal home visit, but Neo has an appropriate ‘What the actual fuck?’ face going on.

They approach Salem on her throne where Cinder immediately kneels, greeting her with, “My queen.” I mentioned during my trailer breakdown that I think Cinder is lying her ass off here, and I still think that based on a line we’ll get in a minute, but now at least we have a sense of how she can pull this off. A woman who started out as a (presumed) servant is going to know how to mimic subservience, even if her heart isn’t in it. Salem is very good at playing the girl who will still kneel and scrub the floor for you. She will scrub the floor, she’ll do everything you want, she’ll just be plotting her own rise to power while she does it.

There’s quite a bit of interesting cinematography in this episode, not all of it good, and I think one of the mistakes is here when we get a closeup on Salem’s mouth as she greets Cinder. A closeup like that should be reserved for more significant dialogue—“Rosebud”—and yet we get this shot again when Cinder tells Emerald to be quiet. It’s awkward and coupled with the numerous eye closeups we got in the trailer, I think RT is playing a little fast and loose with the camera. Each shot should add something to the scene, not distract from it. If you don’t have a reason for including a technique like that then leave it be.

Back to the actual dialogue though. We knew that Salem knew Cinder was alive and now it seems that she just expected her to come back? I’m slightly lost. It feels like we’re missing something here. Cinder goes off to secure the lamp, fails, nearly dies, wanders on her own for months, and then randomly shows back up on Salem’s whale doorstep, yet Salem isn’t angry at all? Did she have faith that Cinder would return when she has something to offer? Did she just not care about Cinder, considering her return an unnecessary but otherwise welcome surprise? That would make the least sense given that she holds the key to accessing Beacon’s relic… but that circles right back around to why Salem is seemingly indifferent to Cinder’s comings and goings. Surely she can’t actually believe that Cinder is loyal?

“So I trust you wouldn’t return to me empty handed,” she says. Yeah, trust means nothing in this show, Salem, didn’t you watch Volumes 6 and 7? Again, I simply don’t know. I suppose I’ll just chalk it up to confidence, that if Cinder did bail Salem knew she could track her down again. Deciphering her motivations and beliefs is a lost cause when the show continually gives us so little.

The important thing now is that Cinder does indeed have an offering and you can see that Salem is somewhat surprised at being handed the relic.

Cinder, of course, takes credit for the victory and we’re given another wonderful shot of Neo. ‘YOU took it?’

Oh, Neo. Best get out while you still can.

Tyrian appears having obviously made his way to Salem’s ship sometime between her arrival and now. The exchange is pretty standard for this group. He insults Cinder for failing and needing this victory to make amends, talks about how any win against Ironwood says more about his lack of intelligence than her skill, and Cinder… doesn’t have a whole lot of comebacks, actually. I’d say Tyrian won that verbal spar, enhanced by a better use of the camera when we get his tail looming menacingly towards Cinder and Neo.

He goes on to say that Watts was a “necessary sacrifice” so, uh… I’m just going to toss out the ask I answered yesterday. Based on our intro I’d say Watts is still significant to the volume—hacking Penny is my guess—but by the end? He could be in trouble.

(As a side note: I plan to analyze the intro next week. It’s just easier when it comes first.)

Tyrian also calls Neo “little one” which I just found absolutely hilarious. In an on brand creepy manner, that is. Not that Neo couldn’t kick his ass, but there’s something wonderfully chilling about having the serial killer use an endearment towards a potential victim, one that comments on her size while he’s looming.

In contrast, Cinder refers to Neo as a “valuable asset” and we get our third mood of the episode.

Who’s going to start a Neo reaction image collection?

It’s true enough on the surface—who wouldn’t want an ally who can turn into anyone else?—but we’re still bumping up against question of why Salem needs this. She’s immortal! She has an endless army! Magic! This scene works well with a villain who needs a skillset like Neo’s to succeed, but Salem doesn’t. RT is doing a great job writing a story thus far, just not the story we’ve previously been given. This isn’t the story they set up.

This will come back up when we reach the RWBYJNOR group. Just wait.

Before that though, the gang’s all here as Emerald, Mercury, and Hazel show up, all in new outfits.

I think I like everything except for the weird Xs on Emerald’s jacket—it’s way too distracting and frankly makes an otherwise good look ugly—and the fact that she’s showing her midriff in Atlas. Hazel doesn’t have any sleeves! Oh my god, why doesn’t anyone dress for the weather in this show?

Frankly, I found their reunion to be kind of lackluster. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. Emerald does sound briefly excited, she does run, and it’s in character for Cinder to cut her off… it just didn’t resonate with me emotionally. I thought after two volumes of thinking she’s dead, then working through the knowledge that she’s alive, that I would feel Emerald’s shock and relief more, but I didn’t. And I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t want to level any accusations at the voice acting because frankly I know next to nothing about that skill (and from what I’ve seen it’s usually praised in the fandom), but I will say that throughout the premiere I was noticing it more than I ever have before. The lack of emotion here and some awkward deliveries later, like when Yang goes, “Ruby, there is no way Ironwood will cooperate with us” and I immediately thought, “Wow, that came out stilted.” These observations stick with me because, as said, voice acting usually isn’t on my radar. It’s not something I’ve studied or had practice analyzing. If you’d never told me that Ren or Qrow’s VA changed then after a year hiatus I literally wouldn’t notice… but there’s something about this episode that didn’t sit right. Anyone else get that sense, or was it just me?

Regardless, the arrival of our other three villains really doesn’t amount to much, though I’m happy for all the Emerald and Mercury fans who get to see them in new outfits. The focus is still on Cinder as she delivers a line indicative of her true motivations: “That power will be mine.” Yeah, she’s not loyal to Salem, she’s just power hungry. Of course, Salem immediately takes note of this and raises her hand, in another nice use of the foreground, reminding her that she hasn’t given that order.

Cinder is shocked, angry even, but quickly covers it up with her “Without you I am nothing” line. If I caught it right I think she also calls Salem “Ma’am”? Hilarious. Again, skilled at playing the servant.

Also, before I forget, it’s worth noting that almost everything from our trailer appeared in this episode. Yeah, there are a few details like Nora attacking some tech and the group on their bikes, but on the whole we’ve already seen the majority of our promo material and will likely get most of the rest next week. It makes me both interested and nervous for what another twelve episodes are going to hold.

Salem opens her whale, or opens a portal type view in it, something that gives us a long-distance look at Atlas. I don’t know what exactly is going on here, but it’s pretty so I’ll take it.

She also delivers the frankly badass line, “Just because you’re more valuable to me than a pawn does not make you a player.”

She waves them all away with perfect ‘You mean nothing to me’ attitude and we sadly leave our villains.

Sad not because I don’t love my farm boy, but because things are about to get a whole lot messier.

Oscar has made his way to a camp of civilian survivors… all of whom are just hanging out in the supposedly deadly cold. Yeah, there’s a single fire, but at least four of them aren’t anywhere near it. Three of them also aren’t wearing gloves. What was that survival rate again?

A nice if gruff dude gives Oscar soup—water?—while showing off his… badger claws? I don’t know what kind of faunus he’s supposed to be, but he feels like the sort of two second, minor character who could easily become a meme lol.

Oscar thanks him (my polite son!) and hands the bowl back after a single sip. Which is impressive because I would have assumed the guy was giving me the whole bowl and just taken it. Hell, I’ve done that even when I didn’t assume it’s all for me. A Starbucks barista once approached me with a tray and a plate of samples, I knew I was supposed to take just one, yet for some reason my hand went to take the whole goddamn plate. He had to tell me off, then I was trying to explain that I didn’t actually want or think I should have eight shots of cappuccino all to myself, I don’t even like coffee, he clearly didn’t believe me… it was awkward. So good job, Oscar. You’re less awkward than me (though that’s not saying much).

Now a question, Oscar. Darling. Brilliant boy who has been through too much: why the fuck aren’t you talking to Ozpin? This will be A Thing later when he presents a lack of time to talk as justification for keeping more secrets (we’ll get to that too…) yet here is time! You’re just sitting there for who knows how long, with plenty of privacy to hide a supposedly one-sided conversation so the Mantle citizens don’t get weirded out or suspicious. Talk to Ozpin. Our headmaster gets two lines in this episode, utterly inconsequential lines like his airship scene, lines that feel like they exist to say, “See? He’s still included in the story!” even though he absolutely is not. Two volumes of mostly silence, a perfect setup to start the reconciliation process, but we’re going to put it off again?

Instead Ruby randomly and conveniently appears. I want to know how she found him. Oscar isn’t wearing a tracker. He clearly didn’t call them because he’s surprised when Ruby shows up. He fell alllllllll the way back down to Mantle and then wandered to a random part of the slums. You’re telling me they flew over the entire city—after beginning this search thinking he was in Atlas—and somehow managed to spot him from up in the air? C’mon. I would have rather had a beginning where Oscar makes his way back to the group himself, giving him and Ozpin time to hash things out.

“Need a lift?” Ruby says, eliminating that potential. Sigh.

Oscar immediately starts beating himself up when he gets onboard, saying that he “was stupid to think the General would listen.” Nah, you were stupid to buy into Ruby’s nonsensical confidence and for telling Ironwood he’s as bad as Salem. Sorry, Oscar, but everyone is written badly these days. I will, however, say that I am THRILLED at the group’s reaction to his return. Ruby says that she’s “just glad you’re alright.” Nora has a wonderfully tender moment where she hugs him gently rather than her usual glomp.

That? That added a year to my life. Everyone else seems relieved that he’s okay too, so kudos there. After four years of Oscar being an outsider in the group, this is one of the few moments that feel like he’s 100% accepted. Really glad to see it.

Now let’s see if it sticks after they learn Ozpin is back...

They fly to the Happy Huntresses’ base and I again feel like I’ve missed something crucial. When did they team up? I mean, RWBYJNOR was working directly under Ironwood up until the last hour and Robyn ran off to fight Tyrian/Clover in the last couple episodes. When did she have time to explain her (briefly) changed allegiance and why would the Happy Huntresses trust the group without that? Did Robyn share that Blake and Yang went behind Ironwood’s back for her? Do the Huntresses instinctively trust them because they’re now wanted by the military? How did they even run into each other?

Again, I think we would have been better served to have an episode before all this. Let Oscar make his way back and let the group struggle with the magnitude of their situation on the airship, before they find new allies. Transferring directly to, “They have help and a secret base and a plan in the works!” makes me feel like I missed the real premiere last week. You know, the one where Salem unexpectedly arrived and we left the group like this.

This is where we’ve ended up though. The group is cozy in this hideout, getting info from Joanna, and my only other thought is, “Why is she giving all this exposition?”

Shouldn’t it be May? I mean, we were told that she was going to play more of a role this volume, a promise that’s pretty important imo given her status as a (so far off screen) trans character, so why not put her in the role of mediator between the Happy Huntresses and RWBYJNR? Giving her that setup as a leader among her people as well as lots of lines would be meaningful. A trans character just existing and being a part of this fight! May could obviously still fill that role—I’m well aware that we’re only one episode in—but it just seems like a missed opportunity to me. Out of all the undeveloped Happy Huntresses, our premiere focuses on the one who has the least importance to the fandom.

As said, Joanna talks a fair bit but what it basically boils down to is trying to get everyone to the crater below Atlas. It’s apparently not safe, but it’s warm, which is what matters right now.

So… let me get this straight. You want to gather everyone into a not safe crater, by leading them through an army of grimm, so that they can wait there in case someone moves the Staff, thus dropping an entire city on top of their heads? That’s the plan? Which admittedly isn’t Joanna’s fault. This is another instance of RWBYJNOR having information that a leader does not and they should really consider speaking up about it. But of course they don’t.

Also, how long does everyone have in regards to the cold? Shouldn’t there be dead civilians by now? The time it would take to find the Happy Huntresses, team up with them, get settled in the base, and find Oscar says that things should be pretty grim right now (pardon the pun), yet every non-aura user in this city seems content to just hang out in the snow. Either the cold is deadly enough to justify moving everyone to the crater, or it’s mild enough to let everyone survive this long, not both.

After hugs are given everyone obviously wants to know what happened to Oscar. His response?

“It’s a… long story. I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.”

That’s a check for the bingo card! We’re halfway through the first episode and we’ve already got another secret. Yes, this is a secret. Oscar actively chooses not to tell anyone that Ozpin is back—something Ozpin himself comments on—and then skillfully draws attention away from himself with “I get the feeling there’s been a few of those tonight.” Indeed, all eyes go to Penny. Oscar’s plight is forgotten, which is what he wanted. His justification?

Ozpin: “You’re not going to tell them?”

Oscar: “You and I aren’t done talking yet.”

Along with this look.

Oscar no. There’s so much wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s create a list.

As said, you had plenty of time to talk to Ozpin and chose not to. Miss me with this excuse.

You are now doing to your friends exactly what you and your friends did to Ironwood, which in turn is what Ozpin did to you! I can’t believe we’ve got Oscar critically side-eyeing him when they are still—still—repeating the behavior they drove Ozpin away for.

What is there to even talk about now? Oscar didn’t punch himself/Ozpin (lol) but he did steal Jinn’s name from Ozpin in the first place. You got what you wanted, drove him away, and have been lying and keeping secrets ever since. The only thing they should be talking about involves apologizing. Any further criticism—which is what Oscar’s expression and curt reply suggests—is beyond hypocritical.

Seriously, what needs to be discussed? There’s no reason not to tell the group unless Oscar wants to talk about whether they should tell them. There’s no good ending here...

Don’t you think it would be nice to know that Ozpin is back and you’ve got super magic powers while making plans to save the entire world?

This is all especially stupid given Oscar’s “Salem wants to divide us” reminder to Ruby in a moment. Oscar, you are doing the most to divide the group right now. By not forgiving Ozpin. By refusing to work with him. By keeping him secret from everyone else.

This is bad, friends, I worry for what the rest of the volume will bring…

The story is done with Ozpin for now so I guess I will be too. The group continues filling Oscar in and we get some shots of the base, including a rather prominent poster of what I assume are two Happy Huntresses. Did they die in battle perhaps?

It’s a little strange.

Oscar: “Where’s Qrow?”

Me: “Likely still making bad decisions.”

No one knows so they just drop it. Which I kind of get, only so much you can do to find him if he’s not out on the streets like Oscar, but it still reads as kind of iffy that two nieces look down at the ground for a hot second and then move on with their plans, content to leave Qrow to whatever fate befell him. In a minute we’ll see Yang firmly take Ren’s side regarding helping the people they can in Mantle, which frankly comes out of nowhere for her. I think an easy motivation would have been Qrow. Ruby wants to save the world, Yang wants to find and save their uncle, and that just happens to align with Ren’s desire to save the civilians who need immediate grimm and cold help. Don’t get me wrong, I like that there’s finally some division between the sisters, I just wish it hadn’t come about so abruptly. Ren had setup for standing up to Ruby. Yang did not.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Joanna lists the grimm horde and no heat as the major threats to everyone. The group agrees.

Me: What about Salem?

Joanna says that this is all doubly dangerous because there’s “no more military protection.”

Me: Oh, so now you want the military?

This is all so disjointed. Even more-so when Joanna mentions that Ironwood has stopped all evacuations to Atlas, likely due to the “hard light shields” that are the only thing standing between Salem and the city. Thing is, the show never makes this connection, I just did it myself based on this scene and the one that comes later. The show presents Joanna’s line as a pure condemnation. Ironwood won’t let more evacuees in because… he’s just evil, I guess. Yet there is a justification here, namely that continuing the evacuations even while he’s stuck without Penny leaves him wide open to a Salem attack, the death of everyone currently safe, but that argument is never presented to the viewer. I don’t need people to agree with Ironwood’s perspective, I just wish that perspective was offered as an option. The show is very good about acting like RWBYJNOR’s opinion is the only justified opinion, or simply the only opinion at all.

After everything is laid out Weiss goes, “We’re never going to sleep again, I just know it.”

I could make a crack about the lack of continuity and how the group should be collapsing right now… but that was a funny line. It can stay.

What is far more of a problem is the fact that no one is talking about Salem. Okay, that’s a lie. They do talk about her, but in a roundabout way like her presence isn’t impacting every decision they make. That’s the real issue. They’re acting as if Salem isn’t here right now, like she’s off far away, maybe approaching slowly, and they’re arguing over how best to prep the world for her eventual attack. There’s no emotion here—let alone action—to reflect that the series’ Big Bad has arrived and is poised to murder them all. Literally what is this? Ruby is yelling about warning the world and, ignoring the continued question of why that’s a good thing when the world can do nothing to stop Salem and knowledge of her continually drives people to horrible acts, she has yet to acknowledge that… she’s the world? Ruby is the world in this conflict. She, Mantle, and Atlas. Salem is here for you all. Right now. You are, this instant, in the situation you want to warn others about, so why don’t you try to do something about it? Or at least acknowledge it. Ruby wants to warn the neighborhood about a potential fire while her house is actively ablaze, and the fire could have totally killed her by now but decided not to for… reasons.

“Ruby’s right,” Nora says. They have to tell the world so “they can prepare.” How? How are they supposed to prepare for this? The story cannot continue ignoring Salem’s immortality.

“Ruby’s right,” is all Blake says and I’m starting to thinks that’s why her character exists now, to agree with Ruby. It’s great that she’s getting a little distance from Yang, but man.

As Ruby asks whether Pietro can get Amity up and running despite it not being finished (called it) we start an incredibly odd sequence of flashforwards to their individual missions. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this already and though I agree that, in theory, it’s a good way to save time, I found the actual execution to be jarring. Upon thinking back through our timeline, it became clear they were flashforwards, but while watching I thought they might be flashbacks (especially since that’s more common).

Some of the shots, like Nora’s, just look awkward when you’ve got the exact expression and pose transplanted from one scene to another, like she’s a cardboard cutout behind a green screen. To say nothing of how the flashforwards ruin any suspense (I use that word loosely) in the conversation itself. If the question is, “Will they decide to go to the military compound?” then that question is answered when we see Ruby scoping out the compound, not when the group actually decides on the course of action.

It just made an already muddled scene worse for me, so I hope this trend doesn’t continue.

And of course, Amity can be used despite all the info last volume claiming that it wasn’t finished. Pietro suddenly acts like it is finished and the only thing standing in their way is Ironwood providing access. If that were the case, he would have used Amity weeks or days ago like he wanted to! When was it finished? Not after Watts commented on how incomplete it was. When did they get back the resources they needed from Robyn? It’s as ridiculous and retcon-y as I thought it would be.

Yang points out that Ironwood will never listen to them and Ruby counters that “he doesn’t have to.” They’ll just take the access from him. Because why wouldn’t they in a series where they’ve already stolen two airships? Stealing from the super evil military that Joanna wishes were helping them right now is just the group’s go-to plan nowadays.

Pietro isn’t sold on this plan though. He lists at least three obstacles they’d need to get through “and then… oh boy, I might need to think about this some more.” “And just to clarify,” Oscar says, “This is the easy option?” Um...no it’s not? We also know there’s an access point in Ironwood’s office so… why not go there instead? They really think the Academy is less guarded than the military base? There’s a potential justification here along the lines of, “After Neo and Cinder broke into his office Ironwood will have the place on high alert,” but unless I missed it the group doesn’t assume anything like that. They just listen to Pietro point out all the ways they can’t get into the military base and jump straight to that being the best option. It feels like a transparent way to create conflict for the group. We’ll just have them taking the most dangerous route despite an easy route being offered alongside it. Why bother mentioning his office at all? Just have the access in the military base. Boom, done.

It’s that conflict and the fact that Ruby tends to hear “You can’t” and digs in her heels. You can’t go to Atlas. I’ll just steal a ship then. You can’t defeat Salem. Watch me. You can’t break into this base. Guess what I’m doing! She’s dangerous in her fairy tale, meta-driven insistence that everything will turn out her way because she wants it to.

Speaking of, we finally—FINALLY—get someone challenging Ruby. Sort of. Not actually but it’s the closest we’ve ever gotten:

Yang: “Ruby, when we came here we said we’d follow your lead… but things haven’t exactly worked out.”

Now, there are two things to take away from this moment. The first is how utterly shocked Ruby and the others are. I mean, take a look at these expressions.

Ruby straight up can’t believe what she’s hearing. Weiss put her hand to her mouth like this is the most dramatic thing to ever happen to her. Oscar looks down in a ‘Yeah, I agree but please don’t look at me and make me admit that’ way. And Nora looks indifferent in the screenshot but animated she goes sort of stern, likely pissed that Yang would dare say that given her own agreement with Ruby. This not only reiterates that Yang’s challenge came out of nowhere—seriously, how did we move from following Ruby no matter what to this? Last volume she asked a single question along the lines of, ‘You sure?’ and when Ruby said ‘Yes’ Yang was entirely on board—but also demonstrates that no one has EVER said no to her before. Ruby is amazed that someone would challenge her. The act of challenging Ruby is, in and of itself, shocking. This group has gotten so used to following Ruby blindly that the teensiest little pushback is greeted with this.

Because it is teensy. This is the second takeaway: Yang barely challenges her and that challenge leads nowhere. She doesn’t accuse Ruby of anything, she doesn’t question her continued authority, she just broadly implies that things could be better. We followed you, now things are bad, take from that what you will. It’s incredibly mild as far as criticism goes, making the shock all the more, well, shocking, but it also amounts to—wait for it—nothing! Because Yang didn’t truly challenge Ruby’s leadership. She’s still in charge, she’s still calling the shots, and they’re still listening to her. We might have gotten some change if this division had been allowed to play out, but instead Jaune comes in with a, “Let’s go for both!” solution. It let’s both groups get what they want which, in turn, releases them from the need to grapple with whether they’ll listen to Ruby when she’s advocating for something they don’t agree with. We have now lost the chance to see whether, when push comes to shove, Ren and Yang will cave to Ruby’s will or stick by their own beliefs.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s more conflict than we’ve gotten in years, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling conflict. It’s good by RWBY’s standards, which doesn’t necessarily make it good. The actual issues at hand—Ruby’s dangerous arrogance, the group’s loyalty, her choices up until now—are just swept under the rug. For all the visuals we get insisting that there’s this great divide in the group… there’s really not. Not in any way that matters.

Also, Ruby is an idiot. Okay, that was mean, but she really is in this scene. She’s actually not an idiot overall because she was written as wonderfully intelligent in the early volumes, but now? Lately? She makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

“But that’s how Salem got this far,” she cries. “By dividing us!”

Ruby… oh my god, Ruby. No one should have to explain to you that dividing people means turning them against each other, not literally dividing your team to complete separate tasks. This girl honestly thought that because there was this teensy disagreement and that half the team would complete Plan A while she and the other half completed Plan B, both of which notably work towards the goal of, “Protect people from Salem,” that this was somehow what Salem wanted. That is was dangerous. Honestly, it’s a scary look at her view of leadership too: If everyone doesn’t 100% agree with me and do what I say, that’s an objectively bad thing that the grimm queen wants, right? Does Ruby think that unification means following a single person (her) without question or variation? That would explain a lot...

The fact that Oscar needs to explain the difference to her is not good. It really doesn’t say great things about this version of Ruby. Though he was comparing Ironwood to Salem last volume, so really they should all be wearing dunce hats.

Penny offers to take the relic directly to Salem in exchange for her leaving the kingdom alone. I honestly didn’t expect that. If anyone took that risk I would have put my money on Ozpin (but of course, during all this talk of the women he knows best, he’s kept quiet). Oscar is again the voice of wisdom, pointing out that they have no reassurance that Salem will keep her word. At least Penny is thinking about Salem as a threat though, so kudos for that. When this plan is shot down she volunteers to get Ruby past the military security instead and, uh, she’s a little intense about it.

I’m not entirely sure what is going on with Penny. She disagreed with Winter but then seemed to come around to her point of view, enough to help anyway. They had another (stupid) disagreement about the value of individual lives, so that helps to explain why she’s teaming up with RWBYJNOR (if you ignore that Ironwood is also trying to save individual lives...). Did watching Fria die shake her up? Is it being the Winter Maiden that’s not sitting right? Does Penny have lingering feelings about the framing that haven’t shown up until now? Her status as a ‘real girl’? We’ve got a lot of reasons that could definitely explain this sudden need to fight, but we’re not told which—if any of these—is the driving force.

We’re then given a lot of little details. Someone points out that if Salem gets the staff and “create[s] anything else” then Atlas will fall (so yeah, let’s move the people underneath it). We still don’t know what exactly the Staff does because “creation” is kind of broad and “powering a city to float” doesn’t seem to sit within that category at all. Pietro gives Yang the keys to his lab so they can get the bikes. We see the group dividing in the flashforwards, something I do like, especially since the show has gone out of its way to break up most of the usual duos. Nora in particular is pissed at Ren for his choice.

“Oh, I’m saving Mantle because I actually believe we can do this.”

#yikes. Well, I did say I wanted a conflict other than ‘Oh no, one of us might die’ and it looks like I got it. But Nora, the only reason you can do this is because the plot is in your corner: none of you are collapsing from two major fights, you didn’t lose your aura so the cold isn’t a danger, the military is barely a threat all of a sudden, Salem is helpfully hanging out in her whale instead of killing you, and the story decided that Amity can function so long as you all are the ones who get to use it. That’s why you can do this. Ren, who follows in-world logic and doesn’t want to risk a whole kingdom’s worth of lives on a pipe dream, thinks differently, oddly enough.

As they leave though Penny gets a call from Ironwood. I know precisely what the fandom is going to say here: “This evil man is just trying to use Penny to open the vault!” Of course he is. He needs it open to save everyone he can, Penny included. Plus the concept of “using” her is a double-edged sword. What do we think the group is doing right now? Using her to get past the security. Penny’s power is a tool any way you slice it. Granted, Penny volunteers to help the group, but notably here Ruby speaks for her. Penny seems torn and Ruby takes the scroll away with, “She’s not going anywhere until you change your mind about Mantle.”

Sorry, Ruby, but coming from you that sounds less like a reassurance for Penny and more like just an order for Ironwood. Remember Harriet? We’ll stop attacking you provided you do what we want. Ruby has yet to learn about compromises, let alone acknowledge that she might be wrong. How about you let Penny decide where she goes, especially since by all logic she should have a lot of loyalty to Ironwood. She knew him before she ever met you. She’s worked with him since she was rebuild post-Volume 3. Despite what Penny has said, if the story would just let her think about his actions for a hot second—making her the protector of Mantle, sticking up for her after the framing, sending her to the party, teaming her up with Ruby, etc.—she might realize that the ‘He doesn’t want me to have friends’ and ‘He just treats me like a tool’ assumptions are just that, unfounded assumptions. But no, Ruby speaks for them both because Ironwood is evil now.

“If she makes it through our defenses,” Ironwood says, “everything that follows will be on your hands.”

That’s true! Kind of like how it’s own Qrow’s hands that Clover died. When you insist on making a bad situation worse you hold responsibility when the shit hits the fan. You know though that Salem won’t get through their defenses now, somehow, so that there’s no chance RWBYJNOR will be blamed for it. Or, by that point Ironwood will be so crazed that anything coming out of his mouth is dismissed, no matter how accurate it might be.

We then transfer to the Ace Ops who are, despite what the fandom theorized for many months, clearly upset about Clover. Also pissed. Which they have every right to be. Their friend and leader was killed. Imagine for a moment that Ruby had been murdered by Tyrian with an allies’ help. Exactly what do you think the group would do? Swallow it quietly and get over it? Ha.

I’ve already seen some speculation that Clover survived due to details like showing us the bandage and his room being listed as for a “Patient,” but he looks pretty dead to me.

He got gutted through the chest and left out in the snow for who knows how long. We saw him slip away. Qrow screamed over his dead body. He’s not breathing now. If RWBY suddenly claims he survived this, I’m calling BS.

Most of the other visuals we get here were already dropped in the trailer. Winter is pretty injured from her encounter with Cinder, likely permanently based on her new outfit. Ironwood had to replace his arm—and I am calling BS on that “Losing his arm is reflective of him losing his humanity” commentary from RT. Please go read up on a couple decades worth of ableism in media and then get back to me.

We get Ironwood’s line about the light shields and, notably, a whole lot of empathy. Regardless of what he might want Penny for, he still called her with compassion. He’s watching the Ace Ops mourn their friend. He’s talking about protecting his kingdom. The first thing he says to Winter is, “Thank you, Winter. I don’t know what I would do without you.” Ironwood has a heart! It’s always on display, which makes this scene utterly ridiculous.

I literally don’t know how to respond to this. The gunshot made me jump, both because it’s a gunshot and because, again, what the fuck? I know I said that next volume RT might just have Ironwood descend into full villainy, shooting whoever he pleases now that he’s shot Oscar, but I didn’t actually expect them to do it. Because he never should have shot Oscar in the first place! I wanted the story to let Oscar grapple with it a bit and then quietly backtrack, acknowledging it as the mistake it was. The concept that Ironwood, empathetic Ironwood, rational Ironwood, always thinks before he acts Ironwood, let’s kids yell at him Ironwood, tried to team up with Robyn Ironwood, did everything Ruby wanted Ironwood, won’t kill Watts after he destroyed his arm Ironwood would shoot this guy just to shut him up is absurd. It was absurd then, it’s absurd now.

That being said, there’s a possibility he didn’t actually shoot the council member, but rather just (“just”) gave a warning shot down the hallway. I say this because the reactions to this are pretty tame. Everyone looks startled, yeah, but after the initial shot there’s nothing that I would expect if there was now a guy bleeding out on the floor. The council woman doesn’t scream. Winter doesn’t seem overly shocked. No one is running to try and help him. Basically, if Ironwood had just killed a political figure in front of six witnesses, entirely unprovoked, I would expect a bit more of a reaction than this. This feels far more like a, “Damn he’s not joking around, letting off warning shots to get people to leave him alone” not “WOW, our general just killed someone in cold blood!”

What I really hate though—beyond just assassinating his character—is how many fans think my friends and I are delusional for calling it character assassination at all. I hopped onto the RWBY tag for five minutes this morning and was bombarded with posts about how Ironwood needs to be murdered horrifically, anyone who likes him is sick, the Ironwood stans are as bad as Adam stans, you’re an idiot if you want him redeemed… because apparently the concept of a story writing a character badly doesn’t compute. I’m not here to argue that Ironwood didn’t do these awful things (regardless of whether he actually killed the guy or not). I’m not here to argue that they’re not awful. I’m just here to say that we never should have gotten these scenes in the first place, or if we were going to get them, we deserved an actual descent into murder at the drop of a hat territory. I’ve already explained extensively on this blog how early Ironwood was not accurate foreshadowing for this, and Volume 7 certainly wasn’t setup, but it looks like the majority of fans aren’t interested in examining whether any of this adds up. Which makes my job, as someone trying to examine this series somewhat objectively—in as much as that’s possible for any single viewer—as well as simply enjoy it as a show, really hard. It’s bad enough when a story keeps taking the characters you love and villainizing them, and doing that badly, but then when you turn to the community and see them rallying around the idea that you’re awful for being dissatisfied—you’re the bootlicker, you’re the blind stan, you can’t see what’s ‘really’ going on here… that sucks. For those of you happy and satisfied with Ironwood’s arc, that’s great! I’ve also seen a lot of posts hyping up the complexity of his character now. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying what we’ve been given and I’d never want to imply that just because it’s not what I wanted it’s somehow wrong. I’m honestly thrilled that after a year of worry so many people have adored our premiere, including this scene. I just wish that I could say RWBY had given me something I didn’t want in a persuasive manner and that the fandom as a whole was a bit more welcoming of differing criticisms.

Not that I didn’t already know the RWBY fandom had its flaws, but still lol.

That’s basically it for our premiere. Nice note to end on, huh? Our final scene is of Salem using the lamp to set her bloodhound grimm on the city. Why doesn’t she just go herself? What was she planning to do here in Atlas in the first place, considering that getting the relic was a surprise? Who knows. Little about this holds together. But we do end with another awesome shot, so small favors.

It’s always strange concluding a recap, but even more-so when it’s a premiere, during a historical moment in the U.S., amidst all the nonsense that is 2020. So for now I’ll just conclude with three quick things:

The updated bingo board will be listed at the end of each recap, provided I don’t forget about it lol. Today I’m checking off tone (not nearly enough freaking out about Salem), the team keeping secrets (Oscar), and major plot point dropped (Amity is suddenly finished). I could also probably check off the cold not killing civilians and getting Amity up and running, but we’ll see if any changes with those.

I’m including my Ko-Fi link at the end of recaps now. Not with any expectations. Not with anything resembling pressure. I thought long and hard over whether to include it at all—let alone mention it here—because I love doing these and never want anyone to feel like it comes with strings attached. But life is a little harder and weirder than it was last year, so I figure it can’t hurt. Feel free to pass on by and I won’t be bringing it up past this note.

Far more importantly: thank you for reading! :D

(Bonus 4. Editing this was an absolute nightmare — damn you, tumblr! — so I apologize if anything is super wonky when I finally post.)

See you next week! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

#rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #rwby recaps

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