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that-ari-blogger · 6 months ago

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The Boss Music Starts Playing, Part 2/2 (Mulan)

This is a continuation of my previous post (link), because the original was too long for a single thing. So, I cut it down.

This relates to the theme of self-image really nicely. Because self-image, by definition, is how a person sees themselves. But it would be foolish to assume that how a person is seen by others doesn’t fit into this.

Shang’s self-image is centred around leading people, for example. That’s why he and Chi-Fu foil off each other, because Chi-Fu’s idea of himself is built on being in power over people. They are similar, but it is the nuances that set them apart, and that are at the root of Chi-Fu’s unmeritedly complex characterisation.

Chi-Fu is misogynistic doofus, but he’s also more nuanced than that, and honestly, he is one of the more interesting side characters in this film. He is a hypocrite, staunchly defending what he sees as masculinity while exhibiting exactly zero of the traits he places value in. He places value in rank above all else, willing to criticise those above him when he views their actions as unwise, but still following orders even when in doubt.

A lot of his characterisation is exemplified in this single line:

“Be careful Captain. The general may be your father, but I am the emperor’s counsel.

And oh, by the way, I got that job on my own.”

Here, he’s an eejit who throws his weight around. He respects the rank of Shang but takes care to position himself higher than him out of sheer spite.

But he’s also kind of correct. Like, I hate the fact that I am agreeing with this guy, but he makes a good point about the general’s nepotism here.

However, Shi-Fu is an antagonist in this film, and I don’t want to understate why he fills that role. Shi-Fu is misogynistic, unwilling to be swayed by Mulan’s displays of heroism because… well because she has boobs, and that disqualifies every point she can make. Again, he’s a misogynist.

Which brings me back to the thing about self-image and external perception, and I am going to bring back the non-binary reading. You can take the hormones, you can dress differently, you can do all kinds of things to make yourself feel more at home in your body. But all of those elements of self-image can be subverted by a single person misgendering you, or deadnaming you.

To those reading this who are not trans or non-binary, that is why we ask y’all to respect our pronouns. It’s not because we enjoy being contrarians (most of the time), it’s because referring to us in the way we see ourselves actually makes us feel better about ourselves. We’re asking you to help us in a way that objectively doesn’t cost you anything other than the effort to try.

Mulan’s feeling of self-worth comes from her sense of belonging in the army, the place where she can be one of the guys, and people respect her for that and accept her as that.

When that image is shattered, and she is left out in the snow to die or go home, it is a gut punch because that belonging lets her go.

This post was inspired by Cinema Therapy’s video on Mulan, and while I joked around in the introduction about accepting their challenge, I think their video was really good, and I wish no I’ll will towards them. But…

I think it was a missed opportunity to not talk about the scene in the valley, because it is an incredible demonstration of what honour and self-worth actually are. They are both influenced by others, yes, but in the end, they are both something you find for yourself.

Mulan could go home, she has saved her father, she has proven herself, she has achieved what she came for. But she chooses to go back to the army and be a part of that, she chooses to go back to the life that Ping let her lead. Like the trial of the arrow, this is for her.

Which leads me into the two “fight scenes”.

This is such well composed shot. Despite the utter lack of landmarks or even detail on most of the characters, you can see the scale and geography so clearly, and your eye is drawn to the stooges, then to the avalanche, then to Mulan and Shang sprinting away from it.

The three stooges carry this film, specifically in the matter of its tone. They set up the humorous, upbeat nature of the first half of the story with their antics and act as a benchmark for Mulan’s success in finding acceptance. Then they stop laughing to show the seriousness of the aftermath.

But here, the little spin that Lee’s helmet makes in the air serves to soften what would otherwise be a jarringly terrifying and gritty moment. They remind the audience what film they are watching and balance out the tone to distract from the visage of death behind them.

Anyway, Mulan’s actions in this battle and the final confrontation lean into a few readings.

First, the feminist reading. I haven’t mentioned this as much as I probably should have up to this point, but the reading is by no means any less valid or prominent as any other.

This is a feminist piece, with Mulan defeating the Hun army twice by going against the masculine stereotypes. She reclaims her agency through being a badass alongside the men, but not in the same way as them. In the finale, she uses her fan, symbolically the thing associated with womanhood in the early stage of the film, to defeat the villain. She demonstrates that she has equal ability and right to be anywhere as the dudes, and in the end, the whole of China bows to her.

I’m obviously not a woman, so I’m not exactly the expert on this, but I can point out the obvious story beats, and I can step aside for people with a more nuanced understanding of this reading to let their presence be known.

Second, the trans reading, specifically a trans masculine reading. Once again, I am not trans, I am non-binary, so I’m going to give my understanding of this read from my limited perspective, and step aside again.

So, Mulan defeats Shan-Yu twice using the things she has learned as a soldier, sword fighting and cannons. These are parts of the identity that she has built for herself as a man, and her proficiency with them shows her expertise in the field of masculinity that she lacked in area of femininity, as demonstrated by the opening number.

When I ran a draft of this post by a trans friend of mine to make sure I wasn’t being inaccurate, he asked me to point out the fact that Mulan ends up with a scar in a similar place to those left by top surgery. So, there’s that.

Finally, there is the non-binary reading of these scenes, which is where I get to go crazy with my own theories.

Mulan defeats Shan-Yu by thinking tactically, a trait not associated with either masculinity or femininity in this setting. Then, she uses both the fan and the sword, walking in both fields to accomplishing her goal, as if the concept of gender is irrelevant to her. She is neither man or woman, and both. Her gender identity cannot be defined so easily.

When Mulan is cast out from the army, that choice of whether to go back to being Mulan or try again at being Ping comes up, and her choice is a mix of the two.

“You said you’d trust Ping, why is Mulan any different?”

Mulan is Mulan, she isn’t trying to be Ping anymore, she’s trying to be herself. Now, she’s attempting to call on the clout and experience that that persona gave her, while distancing herself slightly from it.

Essentially, she isn’t entirely a guy, but she has some of the traits that are socially attributed to guys, and she is at home in the place that she carved out for herself. She is who she is, she cannot be classified. She is Mulan.

I love that the three stooges get to dress in drag for this moment, and I too lament the fact that Shang didn’t. But I also want to point out that, for all of modern media’s advances, this is the closest I have seen to a real fight sequence with characters dressed in drag. Come on Hollywood, you have the chance for the most epic sword fight ever shown, and you don't take it. Do it, you cowards.

That moment actually symbolises the breaking down of gender roles completely. Mulan walks between genders, and now these guys are free to exhibit their own masculimity in whatever way they see fit.

The moment is then played for comedy in a really cool way. It isn’t played as absurd at all. The comedy comes partly from the line “ugly concubines”, but also through the reverse of Mulan’s first scene as a dude.

The three stooges are comically really capable at pretending to be women and take to it ridiculously quickly. That is then contrasted with the fact that they don’t drop the disguises when they return to the actions they associate with masculinity, beating up people with excessive force, and even greet the emperor without changing. The stooges are confident enough in themselves and their gender that they can present this way without getting confused, and without stepping into Mulan’s theming as non-binary or trans or whatever your reading of her is.

Unconditionally, the best part of this sequence is the music, bringing back Make A Man Out of You, specifically the final chorus (also the reveal of the drag is timed to the beat of the song, which is such a cool little detail). Everything I said about the unity of people working together with different strengths and weaknesses comes back. And the lyrics pair with the different forms of gender expression going on onscreen.

“Be a man.

We must be swift as a coursing river.

Be a man.

With all the force of a great typhoon.

Be a man.

With all the strength of a raging fire.

Mysterious as the dark side of the moon"

Shang’s hypermasculine soldier, the three stooges and their varying levels of manliness through their drag, and Mulan, all working together to succeed. Dressing in drag, being a general, being trans or non-binary, are all displaying the qualities of the song. Swift of mind, force of hope, strength of competence, mystery of individuality and interiority.

The actions reference the scene with the arrow in more ways than just the one, because this isn’t exactly the final chorus, it’s the chorus in which Mulan gets the arrow. The backing music was still there in that one, and it’s still there now. The main difference is that when we heard this first, Shang’s voice was leading the chant, but now he is either not there, or has joined the herd.

Catharsis.

Speaking of which, the scene where the emperor honours Mulan is nice and all, but it is secondary to the film’s final moments, and Mulan’s reconciliation with her father.

The gifts sit in the foreground here, but also in the shadows that Zhou has to move out of to get to his daughter. They are a reminder of what Zhou is stepping away from to hug Mulan.

This is acceptance on a familial level. Mulan is happy with herself, and she has found belonging in the army. Now she returns to her father, and offers him the gifts from the emperor, but Zhou discards them like they are nothing, because to him, that’s what they are.

This scene takes place in the same location as their conversation at the start of the film.

“What beautiful blossoms we have this year, but look, this one’s late. But I’ll bet that when it blooms, it will be the most beautiful of all.”

Zhou isn’t perfect, but I’ll challenge you to find a human being who isn’t, besides Oscar Isaac of course. However, he goes through substantial character development in the film behind the scenes in a way that is directly related to the events of the story.

At the start of the film, Zhou values his family, but instinctively his need for honour takes precedent. He will offer advice, and demonstrate his desire for his daughter to find herself in time, but he will undercut himself by his willingness to die for honour and for the hierarchy.

Then he loses his daughter, and he is told to make a choi

ce. He can get his honour back and expose his daughter, or he can stay behind. One will guarantee a reward, the other is a gamble, and without hesitation, he choses the risky option, because there is a chance his daughter will live.

He then has time to reflect over the course of the movie, that’s the development behind the scenes that I mentioned. So, when Mulan returns, and he sees the adult she has grown into, honour doesn’t enter the picture for him, and he accepts her for everything that she is.

Zhou isn’t perfect, but in the end, he is a good dad, and he improves as a person because of that. That’s what matters.

So, Mulan is a story about gender. Either from a feminine lens, a masculine lens, a trans reading, or a non-binary one, this film discusses gender, and how it relates to self-image and self-acceptance. The film talks about honour, and what that truly means, and it deconstructs the form of the musical itself to achieve it's points.

In other words, the writers during the Disney Renaissance were bloody good at their jobs, who knew?

I love that the cricket is doing a Batman impression too. That's just golden.

Final Thoughts

Mulan is my movie. Not the sequel or the reboot, the 1998 original. Mulan is my movie.

It is a story about identity, and as a non-binary individual, this film shaped how I saw myself, and how I related to the world around me. It is also the direct cause of my obsession with cinematography. Mulan is my movie.

To the folks at Cinema Therapy, if by some miracle you read this, thanks. Your video was great, but it also inspired me to write this, something I am very proud of and something that helped me to articulate a few things that I have been struggling with. So, thanks for that.

Y’all stepped on my turf, walked into the labyrinth, and now the minotaur bows its head to you.

To everyone else, hello. I’m Ari, I make media analysis, so stick around if that interests you. Usually I don’t post things on Sundays, but I have a few things lined up, maybe keep an eye out for those.

Anyway, thank you so much for reading this (checks wordcount) 5000 WORD ESSAY. Dear Lord, this got long, and I haven't even mentioned the old married couple that is Mushu and the cricket, or their relationships with identity and gender. That might have to be a different post.

Thank you for sticking around.

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dubhdove156 · 2 years ago

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A psychopath's perspective on morality:

Morality is one of those completely made up, restrictive boxes that we try desperately to fit into in order to maintain social cohesion. It's not solid, not built into us biologically; it changes with each passing generation, culture, and ideology.

The issue that I see today, politically, is that the Left has tried desperately to ratify their idea of morality as objective. The funny part here is that the Left can't even agree on what morality means or create a definitive code of ethics, as evidenced by the constant Leftist in-fighting. The mistake that they make, is that they conflate "correct" and "incorrect", with ideas of "good" and "bad" -- entirely arbitrary constructs that serve no purpose beyond avoiding human suffering.

There are times in which the bad thing is the correct thing, and vice versa.

Morality is fluid, dependent on humanity's state and progress, while the truth is solid, objective, immune to the effects of time.

Conversely, the post-modern Right has become a wholly contrarian movement with each individual having the emotional intelligence of a rock. They've become entirely reactionary; easily triggered by their feelings of constraint and social pressure inherent to social progress. They try, desperately, to trigger leftists, but all I ever see are overgrown man-children having tantrums; their rallies, protests, etc serve no higher purpose than being combatative. Their sense of morality has become, "whatever makes the Left upset."

Moral Superiority ™️ has become the prime method of ending civil discussions and debates, but it does not follow logically that morality and reality are one-in-the-same.

We've become an incredibly divisive, binary society, incapable of seeing nuance within the bounds of "right" and "wrong." Something; a term, action, or ideology is either entirely "right" (and therefore correct) or entirely "wrong" (and therefore incorrect.) There is no room for gray areas anymore; neutrality, nuance, unclear lines.

It's for this reason that I deny any notion of collective morality or ethics -- instead, I define on my own what is right or wrong for me, in the given context. It's fluid, my morality changes depending on what is benefical, and what is not; what feels good, and what does not.

#aspd #antisocial personality disorder #satanism #psychopathy #philosophy #philosophies #morality

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liskantope · 2 years ago

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Okay, let me try to elaborate on my take on this. There's the current Debate On Mental Illness/Disorders as I've been concocting it in my mind based on the corresponding part of the culture/generational war that's visible to me, and then there's Scott Alexander's beef with Resident Contrarian and Freddie deBoer's beef in turn with Scott Alexander, which may not quite line up with the two sides of my simplistic conception of the Debate. Broadly speaking, I tend to be most sympathetic to FdB's (but not RC's) overall position on this issue even if he's visibly too emotional about it to always be fair and even-handed in his framing, whereas most of what Scott has to say seems not necessarily false or wrong, just kind of talking past the concerns that FdB and I have. However, to be fair, Scott was responding to RC, not to FdB. (This got pretty massive, so here's a cut.)

I did nothing more than vaguely skim the parts of RC's post that sparked the ACX one except for the excerpts that Scott was directly responding to. The parts of RC's take that I saw were in some ways pretty offensively objectionable and short-sighted and that Scott effectively rebutted some of this (e.g. the thing about stretching/simplifying the true story about symptoms to get a diagnosis, like saying you have a fainting problem even though you've figured out a roundabout way to avoid it, where RC's indignation does indeed seem flimsy).

RC is blithely dismissive of teenagers claiming DID and Tourette's as well as spoonies as self-evident liars that nearly everyone who sees them immediately knows are liars. This seems like an incredibly unfair attitude and lacking in empathy (although behind the bald assertions of dishonesty RC does appear capable of some empathy and nuance and his intent doesn't come across as malicious to me). I'm glad that RC is getting pushback from Scott over this. But Scott seems to be countering RC's model with a model that fixates only on the claims of DID/Tourett's TikTokers and spoonies as reflecting some sort of genuine internal experience. This mostly ignores the broader issue of how to interpret these genuine internal experiences, whether as forms of (traditionally treated as fairly serious) mental conditions or something culturally manufactured that can just as easily be un-manufactured or just part of every human's experience. This distinction matters and is what makes the issue so difficult and what has most relevance for how to treat the swaths of younger people claiming these things on social media, at least once we get rid of the assumption that they're just all a bunch of deliberate fakers. This is I think closer to the crux of what FdB is concerned about -- quite possibly it's the true motivation behind RC's attitude as well, and he's just taking the convenient out of deciding that people are liars.

So let's dispose of the very uncharitable assumption that most social media -engaged young people are just choosing to pretend to have disorders and assume that most are describing something genuine. The question is whether it's useful, accurate, and maximally psychologically healthy to brand these experiences as DID, Tourette's, or a mysterious chronic illness. Taking each of these in turn, here goes.

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No wait, I just remembered that Scott defended astral projection as a valid experience, and this works as a more straightforward representation of my stance without any of the current cultural baggage attached, so let's start with that. Scott says that we should believe people's reports of astral projection because it's just a thing you can do in lucid dreams. But in defending it this way, he's only defending the subjective experience of astral projections, not the characterization of them as some non-corporeal part of a person literally leaving their body! He's explaining them away as lucid dreams and is correct to do so (I've also had similar experiences) but puts on an air of not having explained them away at all but fully endorsing reports of them. This completely sidesteps a major -- perhaps the main -- aspect of the controversy surrounding astral projection: namely, whether its supernatural explanation is a valid one. This has actual ramifications in that endorsing the idea that each of our selves has a component which is completely unconstrained by physical barriers and can literally leave our bodies (and then perhaps see things outside of the range of our eyes, one could then assume) is completely pseudoscientific.

I would then ask Scott whether, since he probably believes most reports of the subjective experience of those who claim they hear the voice of God telling them things or guiding them towards a revelation, it is right to hand-wave over the distinction between the subjective experience and the experiencer's interpretation of it as proving the existence of an actual theistic god.

(A side-note: a very formative experience for my belief system was when, as a teenager, one of my best friends lent me a book he'd picked up used, which was a guide to astral projection or something very similar based in the personal narrative of the author's own experiences. My impression of this book was that it was very obscure and "low-budget" by a little-known author with no "credentials" or status within any scientific or spiritual community, and that all of it was based entirely on his own journey. I'd love to get my hands on it again but will never for the life of me remember the title or author's name. Anyway, not long into the book I recognized everything he was describing as lucid dream experiences similar to ones I myself had had -- I was very into lucid dreaming at the time -- and observing/analyzing the fallacious assumptions of the author was a resounding turning point in my adolescent philosophical development as a naturalist.)

Anyway, on to the communities of young people claiming mental conditions on social media. First, Dissociative Identity Disorder.

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DID, or "multiple/split personality disorder", has always been treated as a serious and profoundly life-disrupting illness that the sufferer has little-to-no control over and limited conscious awareness of. According to FdB at least, it's controversial whether the disorder even exists and if it has, there have been probably only a three-digit number of properly documented cases of it over the past century. At this point his bias is pretty obvious and I'm not sure whether to believe it's quite this rare, and I met at least one person who appeared to have once had a serious case of it. But I completely agree with FdB, to the point of finding it painfully obvious, that this new TikTok version of DID has almost nothing to do with how the disorder was understood up until a few years ago and that at least some of the DID TikTokers come across as extremely fake. I wrote about this at length a few months ago. In my just-linked post, I briefly speculated on a genuine subjective experience that mental-illness-culture-immersed younger people might be interpreting as DID:

Now that I think about it more critically, I can imagine a means, by a certain type of mental process, for someone to sincerely believe themself to have alternate personalities, especially if they believe themself to have co-consciousness of these alters, while they are essentially made-up characters. It is possible that these characters have become so real in the person’s mind (as I’m sure happens with characters invented by a fiction writer who is getting very deep into their work) that they can spontaneously hear what each character “would say” and find themself blurting it out at times. This is world where a lot of humans believe they’re “speaking in tongues”, as in letting some supernatural entity speak through their mouths, which I would consider to have a perfectly natural neurological explanation. So many cases of DID, especially among younger, hyper-mental-illness-aware people could be misinterpretations of a certain more mundane internal mental experience.

Scott describes several friends of his who have gone through something very similar to this same thing (and actually I'm kind of pleased with myself for speculating something fairly accurate without ever having known anyone who's described it). So Scott and I tend towards agreement that some self-identified DID people are probably describing a genuine subjective experience which looks like "creating a well-formed fictional character so well that you begin to feel it taking on a mind of its own". But why does Scott treat the difference between this and everyone's (certainly the scientific community's) conception of DID until up to five minutes ago as too unimportant to be worth mentioning? I'd be kind of shocked that a psychiatrist as smart and intellectually honest as Scott would not acknowledge the distinction between deliberately inducing a certain invoking-a-well-formed-character-and-pretend-it's-talking-to-you mental state that he merely considers "inadvisable", versus a severely life-disrupting Actual Serious Chemical Thing that happens to some people's brains where their consciousness and memories are split between multiple completely deluded characters. So if Scott does indeed recognize this, then it's astounding to me that he doesn't consider it relevant to bring up in response to RC, even as part of the broader discussion surrounding how believable self-diagnosed DID people are.

And similarly, again, I would ask Scott, does some people's claim of speaking in tongues come from a genuine subjective experience more or less equivalent to the existence of a actual supernatural being who speaks through certain individuals in this way? And if not, isn't that a distinction that we should care about enough to at least mention during most speaking-in-tongues discourse?

And it's not as though recognizing a distinction between a deliberate therapeutic process (even one that Scott deems "inadvisable") and an Actual Serious Condition that has the potential to wreck someone's life doesn't have concrete ramifications. If, until five metaphorical minutes ago, DID was understood for decades to be an Actual Serious Condition, and now you're an impressionable teenager and it seems like you have it or can induce it inspired by watching YouTubers and TikTokers who can slip in and out of various characters at will, the minute any part of your journey feels like it may be going wrong or not entirely in your control to the point that you might want to mention it to a mental healthcare professional, you are now asking for resources to treat something synonymous with (and lumped in with) this Actual Serious Condition. Perhaps it's only a small minority of these teenagers that go this route, but it seems to me that FdB is right to suppose that this cheap, sparkly version of DID is infiltrating the already overworked mental health care system and distracting from those with serious illnesses, as is a major part of his beef with the whole issue.

Similarly with Tourette's. Here the distinction between traditionally-understood Tourette's and Tiktok-brand Tourette's Lite doesn't seem as extreme or obvious to me, but the fact according to RC is that one clinic was actually getting a mysteriously surging number of young people admitting themselves with a particular tick ("beans") and it turned out to coincide with the popularity of a TikToker with the "beans" tick. If nothing else, this is evidence of a cheap sparkling [Serious Neurological Disorder] Lite filtering into the actual mental health care system, but Scott ignores this example in his response, even though he quotes RC's mention of it. When a commenter points this out to him, his response is that the contagion aspect makes the condition no less "real" and gestures at many real conditions throughout history (mass dancing manias for example) that clearly spread through social contagion. While Scott's response here is interesting and promises to lead to a good future post/discussion and I don't think it's actually wrong in any way, it again stubbornly sidesteps the issue of whether or not we would be best off reframing the prevalence of TikTokers glamorizing (a cheap variant of) Tourette's on the grounds that the current social spread of it, as well as the resulting confluence of this cheap version with traditional Tourette's, is a problem.

This is the crux of the issue for FdB. And again, to be fair to Scott, he wasn't replying to FdB but to RC instead. But this is probably a lot of the motivation for RC's dismissing people as obvious liars as well. This is the motivation of many on one side of this theater of the culture wars. I would expect a lengthy essay on the topic of realness/fakeness of claimed mental conditions to at least somewhat address it.

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I think part of the reason I'm being so hard on Scott about this is that I'm just surprised he's coming out this strongly in favor of "believe claimed subjective experiences by default" without distinguishing this from "believed claimed explanations of said experiences", because I always took Scott to be more sensitive to this distinction than most: his (and my and many others') criticism to mid-2010's (and later) Social Justice rhetoric largely revolves around this distinction! There are tons of people claiming to experience racism and sexism and what have you every day. Most of these people probably aren't liars, and it generally seems like a good idea to believe them when they describe a concrete experience ("someone said such-and-such to me, or refused to let me do such-and-such"). But there's a difference between this and assuming they're necessarily correct in interpreting this experience as racism or sexism or whatever, especially if they've been primed by their surrounding cultural bubble to expect as many things as possible to be racism/sexism (analog: if they've been primed by their surrounding cultural bubble to see mental illness/disorders everywhere)! I'm sure Scott would be the first to see this as a crucial thing to recognize!

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Anyway, I've been putting this off to the end, because it gets much more personal for me, but... okay, spoonies. This is a reference to the modeling of daily struggles in terms of Spoon Theory, where spoons are essentially units of energy that some claim they have a very limited supply of compared to others; this is often attributed to chronic mental or physical illness. This is going to be the most controversial part of my already-very-long post I think, and there's an irony in criticizing my perception of spoonie mentality on Tumblr of all places, but anyway... *deep breath*

My college girlfriend essentially developed into a spoonie over the course of our (long) relationship, even though to the best of my memory neither of us were familiar with the "spoon" terminology at the time. I've never said very much about her on Tumblr, but she's disappeared off my radar so thoroughly by this point, no longer seems to be socializing with our mutual friends, is so many years into the past now that, well...

A lot of my ex's later college experience, and the later parts of our relationship, was dominated by her conviction that she had some kind of chronic (physical) illness, her search for it, and her hand-wringing in the meantime. Her symptoms mainly involved constant tiredness, a claimed need for tons of sleep, a lack of fitness at physical excursions, struggling to keep up with the work in her classes and falling short of her academic expectations, and so on. All of this of course was being measured relative to her expectations and relative to her perceptions of the capabilities of those around her (a point I'll return to later). She had fairly severe attacks of acid reflux and seemed to have a weak immune system, as in lots of UTIs and easily falling sick with whatever was going around. At some later point she began to experience all sorts of stomach and digestion trouble as well, although that was not the case during most of this saga.

While I'm already not describing this in a particularly charitable way toward her, I deeply respect her and the fact that she went through a lot of real suffering and never -- not back then or anytime since -- imagined that she was lying or faking her symptoms in order to get attention. I was highly skeptical at the time of her assessment and interpretation of her symptoms -- particularly the vaguely- and relatively-defined tiredness (relative to her perception of other people's tiredness) -- and I had a number of arguments as to why a lot of her claims didn't really add up if she were to look at them objectively. I and others came to suspect that she had a streak of hypochondria, and I began to vaguely model some of her more direct physical symptoms as responses (psychosomatic or not) to her freaked-out mental state over less concrete symptoms. This was all happening around 2007-2009, before the mental illness awareness movement had properly hit its stride, and perhaps a few years later we would both have been more likely to recognize some of this as more a cluster of mental issues than primarily physical issues. As it happened, she was obsessing over first one physical medical hypothesis, then another, anemia being the one she kept coming back to but also mono and Celiac's disease (when digestion problems were flaring up).

I'm sure it sounds rather defensive of me to say that, as gently but frustratedly skeptical as I was, I was actually probably the kindest and least critical/dismissive person in her life at the time: I remember for instance her best friend and roommate being convinced that she had a lazy attitude and just needed to get outside and on her feet, I doubt that either of her (generally loving and caring) parents really believed her, etc. Still it's possible that some of my assumptions and assessment of what was going on were invalid or not generous enough; it was a very complicated situation and I can only imagine that if she saw this post she would consider some of what I've already written to be unfair. I'm haunted to this day by the question of whether I was truly reasonable and maximally charitable in my assessment of her interpretation of what she was going through. I don't deny that I had and still have certain biases towards not wanting to believe that anything much was (at least physically) truly wrong with her, or anyone I care about. But I do continue to kind of think that there was clearly at least some degree of "hand-wringing about vague symptoms, defined relative to what others seem capable of doing, exaggerating, and becoming obsessed over diagnostic explanations and everything you can't do and so on" of a type that was counterproductive going on here. Part of me feels like an absolutely horrible person for thinking this way, but it's the way I still find myself thinking.

Now at the top of the last paragraph, I said that I was probably the least critical person in her life at the time, but really what I meant is the least critical person in her meatspace life. Because eventually she discovered some online communities of people who believed and validated and provided ideal doses of sympathy for everything she was saying. At least one of these was a sort of precursor for communities like the spoonies mentioned by RC and SA -- I'm pretty sure it was a chronic illness forum / blogging area connected to Freethought Blogs and that most of her involvement was around when we broke up and for a couple of years after (so, the very early 2010's when I suspect that part of the blogosphere was reaching its peak, and I was seeing a lot of very early-2010's-SJ-flavored articles from there posted on a regular basis by her and other people. The highlight in my memory was someone with a chronic illness asserting that everyone who ever told her in a concerned manner that she "looked tired", including a coworker who didn't know about her chronic illness, was an "asshole".)

My ex also became heavily involved in an MMORPG where she made a bunch of friends who extended a lot more unquestioning sympathy and credulity to her than anyone in her meatspace life. I remember her saying that she was beginning to feel like her online friendships were now more meaningful to her than her real-life friendships, and that these online interactions were a sort of escape. Her involvement in the MMORPG became so heavy that it further limited her time and energy for schoolwork and other things and put a strain on our relationship.

And a major question for me was, did her involvement in these online communities actually help her in any way beyond giving her a sort of unskeptical emotional support that she was lacking in real life? I, as a sort of proto-SJ-critical, proto-activist-community-critical person in the late 00's, had a very, very palpable feeling that altogether it did not. And it was very obvious to me that this was enabling my then-girlfriend to sink and spiral further and faster and taking up a lot more of her time and energy which was already limited by all this tiredness and sickness and so on and contributing to her bad performance in classes, etc. She was clinging to the experience of being among groups of people who believed her without question and sympathized with her and helped her speculate and hypothesize on what may be going on, at the expense of actually finding a solution which might in fact simply involve a very different mindset, the opposite of the one permeating these online spaces. I wish she had received more fully compassionate support from the people in her meatspace life, including from me. But I also feel that sinking into these online echoey cesspools in search of better support and answers was probably one of the more harmful rather than helpful paths to take in her situation.

(Qualification: I'm expanding on a partial narrative here, of course. Finding an online community of others suffering from an unusual condition can absolutely be live-savingly helpful as well. I believe many here on Tumblr can attest to that! I quite recently vouched for the internet as being a net good for the world and cited "finding a community of people who share your unusual trait" as one of the reasons. It's just not always helpful by default and carries a sort of risk that I don't think is sufficiently acknowledged.)

Now where am I going with all this, and where does it relate exactly to online Spoonies? Well, that experience with my college girlfriend was my introduction to the idea that there are tons of people out there searching for a chronic illness diagnosis because of their overall limited energy which they perceive to be abnormal. While some physical symptoms were involved with my girlfriend's condition, the real core of it was that she just felt tired and unfit all the time. And there was something that just didn't quite make sense to me about her assessment of this as an Abnormal Thing That Must Be Diagnosed. It was kind of like her main argument was "I have less daily energy or ability to be productive than someone else". (If I asked her to name a particular thing she was incapable of doing, it often turned out to be something I didn't have the energy for either yet I didn't consider this to be abnormal even if I knew some other people who did have energy for it.) For years afterwards, I could never quite put my finger on the full extent of why this logic felt subtly but jarringly off-kilter to me. It eventually occurred to me that "some other people are way more energetic and productive on a day-to-day basis than I am" was a perception I already had experienced plenty by college age (and tons, tons more from exposure to a lot more people in the ~14 years since that time!) and had learned to sort of take for granted rather than treat as an Abnormality That Must Be Fixed And Until Then All I Can Do Is Feel Powerless. "I can't do as many things as some other people" is a relative assertion that will always be true as long as there is a visible range of productivity levels among different humans in the same society. Someone like my ex who was taking a bunch of really hard college classes while maintaining terrible sleep habits and living at a major social hub hosting a drama-ridden group of serious partiers just might be more on the unfavorable end of this daily-productivity scale. Maybe the best course is for each of us to do the best with what we have.

(My much-more recent girlfriend is absolutely a spoonie, as in significantly more tired and less fit than my college girlfriend was, taking into account a much less taxing lifestyle and external circumstances. She and her friends use the language of "spoons" very freely. However, when I was dating her she was far enough immersed in a more modern normalizing culture where being "exhausted by existence" is concerned and most of her friends were just as tired and unproductive as she was, and I suspect that's the reason why it hardly seemed to bother or concern her at all.)

I continue to be more and more unpleasantly impressed by just how wide this range is, how some people just seem innately able to do several times more than others, and how unfavorably I compare with a lot of my peers on this axis, to the point that in the past couple of years I've written a ton about it on Tumblr. Particularly since I started doing a lot of teaching at my job in 2019, I've become very upset and alarmed by it and so in that way I've kind of changed my tune: this is a Bad Thing that I want to fight, not because being less productive than many of my peers means that I Have A Disease, but because I just really, really want to have the level of success at life that those peers seem to have and I'm unsatisfied at the idea that I'm currently not achieving it. So I am, in some sense, a spoonie myself. I'm not entirely sure if there's any solution for me here or what it would be -- Adderall didn't really seem to work -- but I feel pretty confident that falling in with an community of very online people wallowing in their shared grievances with the world and how little the world understands them and how powerless they are outside of employing slightly underhanded tactics to get medication would be a big step backwards for me, much as my massive frustrations at pursuing a love/sex life would not be best served by falling in with a community of very online men wallowing in their shared grievances etc. etc. i.e. incel communities.

I'm not sure that I'm driving towards a single thesis very clearly in this portion, and I can already see space for all kinds of counter-arguments. I can't even bring myself to look up these spoonie communities that RC mentioned and Scott addressed, because I've let this suck up too much of my time already and I'm afraid it will be too painfully depressing and triggering of bad memories associated with my college relationship. I guess what I'm suggesting here is that (1) this is a topic I'm very sensitive about; (2) I very much doubt that I would look at these spoonie groups and see that they're all very obviously just "pretending to be sick" and assume that everyone else just knows that and it seems like a pretty cruel assumption to make honestly; but (3) Scott's treatment of the issue with "You should just believe the spoonies!" isn't really an adequate one to me. Scott points to an example where someone complained of particular very life-harming symptoms and nobody would believe him and finally a tennis-ball-sized tumor was found. As Scott says, there are no doubt tons of people with mysterious chronic illnesses that do have an as-of-yet-undiscovered physical or psychosomatic cause. Recently I knew someone who had a very serious lack of spoons, was taking multiple naps a day and so on, and then found that she was so dangerously anemic that she might have died in the next month or so had she not gotten treated when she did. After a blood transfusion she felt a thousand times better.

But when it comes to someone whose only real symptoms seem to be general weakness/tiredness/unfitness, which is vague to measure and mostly perceived only as a relative quantity, which is my understanding of the typical spoonie (Scott seems to be addressing something slightly more general), I'm not sure that it isn't perfectly common for there to be no real cause except that we are not all created equal in terms of our daily capacities. And I have serious concerns about the risks of allowing oneself to get sucked into misery-affirming (for lack of a better phrase) online communities and their effect on our society, especially the millennials-and-younger part of it.

And in other ACX news, Scott wrote a very interesting and provocative piece on claimed unfalsifiable mental states, which was in rebuttal to Resident Contrarian (whose blog I don't know well) but also cuts pretty sharply against one of Freddie deBoer's main hobbyhorses so of course Freddie immediately left a hostile comment, and now it looks like two of my favorite bloggers are at loggerheads. While it will be interesting (and I hope not too upsetting) to see how this possible budding drama will play out, the philosophical/social controversy itself is far more interesting and I definitely have Thoughts which I certainly don't have time to put into writing this evening.

Mainly I think the two sides (inasmuch as this issue has two main sides) are talking past each other, which is going to get frustrating pretty quickly if the debate doesn't get refocused soon.

#dissociative identity #tourette's #spoon theory #astral projection #lucid dreaming #naturalism #speaking in tongues #social contagion #social justice #anemia #medical procedures #chronic illness #i spent way too long on this post #which is ironic given some of its content

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nmikaelsonimagines · 4 years ago

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Gold Rush: A Klaus Mikaelson Imagine

Request from @lanadelswiftie: Hiii i saw your post and i was wondering if you could do a gold rush post where klaus gets jealous of everyone wanting or being enchanted by the readers beauty?

Thoroughly enjoying writing the Evermore collection! Hope this is okay for you lovely, and enjoy x

Want to hear the song? Find a link to it just below:

Gold Rush

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful? With your hair falling into place like dominoes I see me padding across your wooden floors With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door

Klaus was always blown away by Y/N. It didn’t matter where they were or what they were doing, she always managed to take his breath away. She was beautiful, something he told her daily earning a blush that made him love her even more, and he knew just how lucky he was that it was her that he got to wake up to every morning.

She was perfect, he knew that. It was just a shame the rest of the world did too.

Y/N had scolded Klaus about his jealousy multiple times, telling him over and over again that it didn’t matter if others out there wanted her. She loved him and him alone. That would never change. But her words, however comforting, never allowed him to forget that she would be ogled at in the streets, that, undoubtedly, the same thing would happen later in the evening at his family’s ball.

But as she approached him, bare feet padding against wooden floors as she made her way over to the bed, her hair falling perfectly into place, only for him to tuck it behind her ear as he kissed her, he pushed his jealousy away.

He may have been the Devil in disguise, but here was an angel willing to save him.

At dinner parties, I call you out on your contrarian shit And the coastal town we wandered 'round had nеver seen a love as pure as it And thеn it fades into the gray of my day-old tea 'Cause it could never be

Whenever someone looked at Y/N like she was the only person in the room, Klaus felt two things. The first was jealousy, naturally, a desire to go over and kiss Y/N hungrily, showing the world that she was with him. If anyone wanted to get in the way of that, Klaus was more than happy to rip their head off.

The second was a gnawing doubt, a fear that maybe, one day, all it would take was a smile, and Y/N would fall for another. One day, she would sit him down and tell him that she’d realised he simply wasn’t good enough for her and that she deserved better than a monster like him. She would tell him that she was tired of pretending to love him, of feeling like she was just something for him to show off as they walked around town.

Klaus was scared of his nightmare coming true, of losing Y/N completely. He couldn’t imagine a life without her, couldn’t imagine a life without her touch, her smile, her kind heart, her beauty that blew him away every day.

But as she walked over to him, the fabric of her ball gown sliding over her body perfectly, he pushed away his fears, linking his arm with hers and placing a kiss on her cheek.

“You look beautiful, Y/N.”

She blushed again, and Klaus couldn’t help but smile.

'Cause I don't like a gold rush, gold rush I don't like anticipatin' my face in a red flush

It wasn’t long before Y/N caught someone’s eye. Klaus rolled his eyes as the man, dressed in a shabby tuxedo, hair untidy in the way that seemed to be fashionable in the twenty-first century. He turned to scoff at Y/N, but stopped in his tracks when she waved at the admirer.

“Do you know him?”

“He works at the Grill, gives me free coffee every Monday morning.”

Klaus refrained from saying what he felt, that the free coffee was only a ploy to get to Y/N, instead feeling his face go red, a darker crimson than that of Y/N’s blushes. He hated this, hated that Y/N was so unaware of how people were using her for her looks. He looked over at the man, making sure that Y/N’s eyes were elsewhere before he glared, giving his opponent the look he reserved for his enemies.

Much to his satisfaction, the man seemed to get the hint, moving out of sight. Jealousy was clearly going to be a guest at the ball tonight.

But as Y/N tugged him away, over to Rebekah, telling him all about her day and just what she planned to do tomorrow, jealousy became a distant thought, a third wheel, and Klaus reminded himself that he was her date for the evening.

And would be for the rest of her life.

I don't like that anyone would die to feel your touch Everybody wants you

“You’re jealous.” Klaus rolled his eyes at his sister’s words as she tauntingly whispered them into his ear. “Anyone can see it, Nik.”

“Well maybe they should,” Klaus snapped back. His previous glare at Y/N’s friend hadn’t been all that effective. Y/N had told him she was going to say hi, and hadn’t come back for ten minutes. Klaus’s eyes were on the pair and he was seething.

He had tried really hard not to be jealous, not to be frustrated by Y/N enjoying the company of another man. But he couldn’t help it. He was waiting for the moment when that man would touch her, knowing that once someone had met Y/N, it was incredibly hard not to. He hated the way they treated her like an object, a marble statue, there only for their pleasure.

He had tried really hard, but there was only so much he could take. When he heard Y/N’s laughter floating across the room, he decided that it was time to take action. He stalked across the dance floor, ready to show her admirer just who he was trying to take Y/N away from him.

But, as he saw her smile, her eyes light up at the sight of him, her wave to usher him over, to meet her friend, to introduce himself as her boyfriend, all his anger dissipated, and Klaus decided to try and be calm.

Try being the key word.

Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you Walk past, quick brush

As calm as Klaus was trying to be, focusing on Y/N’s hand on the small of his back, he couldn’t help but notice the look in the man’s eyes. The glint as he looked Y/N up and down, no doubt wondering what it would be like to share a bed with her. That was knowledge only Klaus had, and knowledge only he would have.

It was going so well, his breathing steady, his jealousy and his temper at bay. And then-

“Well, Klaus, if you ever fancy sharing this one, you be sure to let me know.”

Hands slipped. Eyes widened. Snarls started to brew in his throat.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Well, I can imagine Y/N can be a bit of a handful, if you get what I mean.”

Klaus felt Y/N’s grip tighten on him, her words hurried. “Klaus, don’t. He’s drunk.”

He heard them, but he didn’t listen. Y/N’s words were just background noise as the sound of his blood pumping, raging, drowned out any sound. Y/N’s friend wanted to know what it was like to have Y/N touch him. Well, now he was going to find out what it was like to have Klaus do so.

He knew Y/N would be angry, but as she pleaded with him, a voice that normally would have brought him back down to earth fading into the distance, Klaus curled his fist, and threw the first punch.

I don't like slow motion, double vision in rose blush I don't like that falling feels like flying 'til the bone crush

It wasn’t like Klaus particularly enjoyed hurting people in front of Y/N. But he couldn’t deny that there was something awfully satisfying about the bones crunching beneath his knuckles, the blood staining white shirts, the colour of it reminding him of Y/N’s blushes.

Y/N. She had her hand on his shoulder, trying to pull him away, to make him stop. A crowd had gathered as Klaus pummelled this man to near-death, the bartender now unconscious. “Klaus, stop, please.”

Everything happened in slow motion. Klaus’s vision cleared at the sound of her voice, as he turned and looked at her. There wasn’t any fear in her eyes, just a spark that threatened to blossom into a fiery rage. He knew he would pay for his actions later, knew as he stood and let Y/N pull him away from the scene, back into their bedroom, that she would scold him yet again for his jealous behaviour.

“Y/N, before you say anything, let me-”

His words were swallowed by her lips on his. She kissed him as if she wasn’t angry with him, taking him by surprise. She’d had many a reaction to Klaus’s jealousy before, but never one like this.

He wasn’t quite sure what to do, but as she continued to kiss him, lips moving in sync, his angel healing him from the wounds anger had etched into him, he realised he didn’t care.

Everybody wants you But I don't like a gold rush

“What was that for?”

“For defending me. No-one’s ever dared speak about me like that before, especially not someone who’s supposed to be my friend. Not that I’m condoning just how far you went,” she looked at him with those eyes that he could never resist, and Klaus desperately wanted to kiss her again, “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

“Y/N, I’ll heal.”

“So you don’t want me to undress you?”

A familiar growl started to build in Klaus’s throat, earning a cheeky grin from Y/N. She was stunning, and he was so lucky to have her. For her to stay with him in spite of everything, for her to love every part of him.

She was perfect, he knew that. It was just a shame the rest of the world did too.

But maybe, just maybe, that didn’t matter.

Masterlist

Evermore Masterlist

#TVD #tvd imagine #tvd imagines #the vampire diaries #to #the originals #the originals imagine #the originals imagines #klaus mikaelson imagine #klaus mikaelson #klaus mikaelson imagines #klaus mikaelson x reader #niklaus mikaelson #niklaus mikaelson imagines #niklaus mikaelson imagine #niklaus mikaelson x reader #Joseph Morgan

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nonsensegnomes · 3 years ago

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hi I trust your taste and opinion. A, is succession any good, and B, should I watch it

oh thank you <3 altho i’m afraid you must be the first person to still think i've any taste after seeing my blog, i mean We Post Supernatural Here Sir asjwdwehdewhfefasdhjsidq

okay so you posed this as two different questions so i'll try and answer it like that & keep the replies separated as objective vs subjective altho i guess tl;dr is: Yes lmao

A) so the annoying thing for me as like. a practicing contrarian, is i do have to admit that this show is exactly as good as tumblr & the academy & all your friends & probably your great-grandfather's ghost have already told you it is. the dialogue is hilarious and horrendous but also so naturalistic that it can kind of lull you into thinking that it's a normal way of speaking for an hour; the satire is so well-pronounced in a way it could only be after getting smoothed out by precursor shows like the thick of it & peep show, and yet there's real emotion beating at the heart of it which never gets undercut to serve a Point; the soundtrack adds so much weight to every moment that somehow the scenes you're most excited by can be the ones where the characters are Just Walking Somewhere; and turns out all that obscene wealth IS obscenely good to look at.

so, unfortunately all the awards thrown at it are incredibly deserved, and if i weren’t currently (re)watching the sopranos & the wire i’d be one of those people up in arms about how it’s the most special-est tv show to ever deign to fit onto our screens – as it is i Do think it’s the best one airing atm, and it’s def going to find its place quite high up in the canon of prestige tv! (although i do think ppl overestimate the lear influence; they’re just riffing off of similar themes guys!!)

B) as to whether you’d personally like it! well,, listen as a fellow shameless & spn enjoyer, it really is like barely a question; like you know those moments in early seasons shameless when their lives would be doing okay for a moment + then monica would arrive back and just absolutely Bulldoze through the kids’ emotional stability until it’s one crying knotted-up mess that dredges up every toxic part of every family relationship? yeah that happens like every 2nd episode on succession and you’d think it would get old, And It Doesn’t!!! also watching kendall roy like zombie-shuffle through s2 was one of the most deeply satisfying & painful experiences i’ve had watching tv, so like. if you’re trying to figure out why treasured mutuals are making you look at gifsets of droopy old men.... it’s the poor little meow meow effect for SUREEE, and the only way out of that is through so you might as well join in!!

my word of caution would be that obviously this site can lead you astray in getting into it For Gay Reasons. like, some fun repressed characterisation makes it so pretty much every roy sibling (plus tomgreg obvs, and ig excluding connor?) has SOMETHING homoerotic going on, but i don’t think it’s a service to the story to be engaging with it Only on that level; there’s a lot they’re saying deliberately which is far more interesting! (e.g. roman imo is written as not at all attracted to women, but it serves the show far better if he never addresses this directly/‘comes out’ & instead continues forcing himself into these sexual relationships with them anyway)

on the other hand... i’m not saying they WON’T do tomgreg bc like. shit’s getting wild (but to be clear if they don’t i never said this – queerbait who?) on the OTHER other hand: If kenstew has a million fans, then I am one of them. If kenstew has ten fans, then I am one of them. If kenstew has only one fan then that is me. If kenstew has no fans, then that means I am no longer on earth. If the world is against kenstew, then I am against the world

also gonna link some classic posts here bc i think a lot of the people just now getting into the show may not have seen these Gems, which is a pity! & also they might form nice little samplers if you want to try a bite of this show!! i'll put them in increasing order of how much canon you'll need to be familiar with so you can avoid spoilers:

Rejected Lyrics to HBO’s Succession Theme

My [29F] husband [31M] has become obsessed with taking over his dad’s company since watching Succession on HBO

waystar royco IS monsters inc

succession if it were real life tiktok + pt 2 (ik there're more but i am Not tracking them down rn!)

logan has the m&ms

the first scene i ever watched oh my GOD what an introduction to this show

notes on Number-One-Girl-ism

kendall roy’s bathroom breakdown but with paper bag playing

THEE classic tomlette moment

it's rotten work / yeah it really fucking is!

not to me not if it's you. but fuck you're looking at potential corporate manslaughter

tomshiv forever <3

s2 kendall really needed to hang out with paddington bear

tomgreg cruel summer amv

does your mother know amv

The California Pizza Kitchen Controversy

the camera as a character video essay

john berryman ‘dream song 29’

saturn devouring his son >:)

ACTUAL king lear parallels

well, kendall, you’ve done it now… amv

anyway come back after you’ve seen to the s2 finale & stream laura marling’s hope in the air – sound of the summer!

(and i am actually contractually obliged to suggest that if you do end up enjoying kendall roy, perhaps try him in girlboss princess of a space-fish-war flavour?)

#asks #no way to avoid maintagging anymore so i guess this is just Never gonna get labelled succession :/#my post #also sorry for the delay i've had A Week #but at least i'm publishing it on succ monday!!#ALSO also very much enjoying seeing you work through my own private idaho tag friend <3 i Adore that movie #long post #wow look at all those words i sure can ramble huh 🤪#pinning bc unfortunately i did spend time i should have been doing assigned mints on this 😌#Worth It to find that it's rotten work post tho #lighth0uses #succession

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bonvoyagenoona · 3 years ago

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Fandom Ship Tag Game

Eeeee @jinpanman! Your answers were incredible! I found myself giggling and smiling through your responses. I felt all your emotions, haha. Thanks for the tag! And hiiii!

Alright, I took a whack at it!

Note: Potential spoilers for (I feel silly for writing this first one) The Lion King, You’ve Got Mail, Fleabag, Insecure, Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, Gilmore Girls, Supergirl, The Mindy Project, Parks & Recreation, and The Good Place.

First Ship: Simba and Nala from The Lion King

Like Mai, I too came away from this animated film with some feelings to sort out. 🤣 I mean, these are straight-up bedroom eyes!

I really loved this sort of Disney introduction to friends-to-lovers haha. Their whole dynamic was just so fun! But I think it might’ve also helped me see more layers to love. I was only 4 when it came out, but my aunt told me that when we, as was our tradition, walked out of the theater and over to the Burger King to get post-movie Big Kids Meals (because I was a big kid), I surprised her with a response to a question. When she asked me if I was sad when Simba ran away, I said no, because Scar would’ve killed him and been the king instead. Then I wondered if Nala might not have loved Simba if he hadn’t run away, and if princesses always have to marry princes. So, this was the birth of angst.

First OTP: Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox from You’ve Got Mail

Looking back now as a woman, I see that the relationship isn’t exactly the healthiest? Growing up in arguably the first truly media-heavy culture, I was inundated with the concept of a “perfect body”. So, in a fluffier, romantic world, and in my younger, impressionable mind, I found wonder in the idea of someone falling for you through your words. (Plus, they were just so darn smart, witty, and funny, and it made me a lifelong fan of Nora Ephron’s work!)

Your Ship Since the First Minute: Fleabag and Hot Priest from Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is indescribable. Fleabag is everything. You know how I like to carry on. But I cannot express to you how much I learned and felt when I watched this show. Truly. I’m usually a straggler on trends, so if you still haven’t seen it, go watch it now.

Ship(s) You Wish Had Become Endgame: Molly and Andrew / “Asian Bae” from Insecure

I love Insecure so goddamn much it’s insane. It’s the show of my 30s. Of being in your 30s right now. Issa’s voice has been so curious, but kind. Expressive, but reflective. And generous. Molly’s whole arc with expectations about love has been eye-opening, and her character development is superb. Molly and Andrew in particular explored current themes in modern relationships, as well as what a relationship truly is at its core. What you have to give it. How much you have to give. And in some ways, how little. Technically, the show isn’t over yet, but so we don’t know if they’re not endgame, but also, we kind of do, don’t we?

Ship You Wish Was Canon: Harry and Hermione from Harry Potter

I mean, I wrote a fanfic about it, lol. I thought they just made sense, and I like love that just makes sense. Love that fits. After seeing what they went through, I liked the idea of them not starting out on this path, but love growing from those shared experiences.

Ship that Most of the Fandom Hates but You Love: MamoRei from Sailor Moon; Rory and Logan from Gilmore Girls

Wow, this picture, amirite?! 🤣 Obviously Usagi and Mamoru are OTP, but I remember being a little kid and getting so excited to see this dynamic! It was over so soon, rightfully so, but I was left wanting!

With Rory and Logan, I think it’s just about recognizing each other, and really seeing each other. Logan is Jess, contrarian and disillusioned with his past and environment, yet very happy to stay rooted in it. He’s just in a different environment. I think I liked that Logan understood that part of Rory’s life. And I liked how their relationship felt like an adventure. Kind of Rory’s true storybook romance. C’mon. “Ace”? 💔

You Don’t Even Watch the Show, but you Ship It: Supercorp

I literally know nothing, but every time I’d see them pop up somewhere, like on my old tumblr dash or in a commercial, I’d see the shippers, and I’d just feel so warm-hearted!

Ship You Wish Had a Different Storyline: Mindy and Danny from The Mindy Project

Mindy Kaling brought so many things together for me. She helped me own my own identity. I really loved The Mindy Project. Not really a critique of their time apart, as the character development felt necessary and true to life --- I just love seeing them together, so I’ll always be greedy for more time with them! Also, I just loved the ending song choice. The Chromatics cover of “I’m on Fire”. I can’t tell you how obsessed I was with the original, and I like that Mindy said that she chose that cover because “it was a version of the song they could both get behind”. That detail. Amazing.

Favorite Ship that is Endgame: Leslie and Ben from Parks and Recreation; Chidi and Eleanor from The Good Place

You know what’s interesting? Mike Schur is overwhelmingly responsible for my current take on healthy, happy love. The relationships he builds are so joyous, even in the face of complication or tragedy. Ben and Leslie show how you can be giving of yourself without sacrificing yourself. They display mutual, unconditional support. They already have so much in common, and they still enjoy each others’ “odd” quirks so much that they actively participate in them as well. Strong, unbreakable, unconditional love.

Then you take it out of Pawnee, Indianan and extrapolate that over stretches of vast, incomprehensible time and space? Chidi and Eleanor are essentially that hypothesis of joyous love being tested in simulation after simulation and holding strong. What I so valued from their expression of true, soulful connection, was the examination of when that is over, not because it ended, but because you truly realize you’re becoming something bigger than just the two of you, and that you simply are, as all things are. I still tear up when I think about the finale because it takes such a scary, awful, terrifying thing and somehow brings joy into that, too. Watch The Good Place if you haven’t already. If this hasn’t convinced you, then I’ll say that there’s a reason Namjoon admired it so much.

Tagging: @mochilatae @skyys-universe @shyfoxarbiter16 @parkblooming @palpalopaloma @m-yg93 @reliablemittenmain @sunshinerainbowsbts @chealsecharm and anybody else who’d like to play!

Clean list to copy:

first ship

first OTP

your ship since the first minute

ship(s) you wish had become endgame

ship you wish was canon

ship that most of the fandom hates but you love

you don't even watch the show, but you ship it

ship you wish had a different storyline

favorite ship that is endgame

#memes and games #i loved this one!#jinpanman

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cozy-the-overlord · 4 years ago

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Okay, so yesterday when I woke up the first thing I saw was this post from @lokistan, which as you can see from my reblog made me immediately think of “gold rush” by Taylor Swift. It made me realize that out of all the folklore/evermore songs I’ve annotated and analyzed, I had yet to do “gold rush.” So I decided to remedy that immediately (I actually started writing this yesterday, but then my computer glitched and I lost all my work and I was too mad to start over again right away). And yes, I am aware that I just spent the last two hours of my life on something that probably no one will read, but I don’t care-- I love doing stuff like this so much. Here’s my interpretation of “gold rush”!

“gold rush” is the third track off of Taylor Swift’s ninth studio album evermore. It immediately stands out from the rest of the album sonically due to its ethereal production and Taylor’s lilting, dreamlike vocals. This is fitting as Taylor described this song as taking place “inside a single daydream where you get lost in thought for a minute and then snap out of it" (x). The daydream in question revolves around a person the narrator comes across and is so enchanted by that she begins to picture a life with them, while still being very aware that such a life can never really exist.

Gleaming, twinkling

Eyes like sinking

Ships on waters

So inviting, I almost jump in

The opening to the song also serves as the opening to the daydream with an immediate departure from reality—the narrator sees this person as a magical thing, thinking of sparkling, shining imagery in regard to them. The “gleaming, twinkling” serves a double purpose: gleaming inspires thoughts of shining metal such as gold, which makes sense as this is the person around whom a gold rush is about to begin, while twinkling evokes images of stars and stardom (twinkle twinkle little star anyone?), which serves to show that this person is both incredibly popular and totally out of reach.

In the second two lines, Taylor plays with enjambment, a poetic device in which the sentence continues even after the line break, which can be utilized to give the sentence a double meaning. “Eyes like sinking” sounds like a version of the common love song trope of being so fascinated with the beauty of your lover’s eyes that you could drown in them (Taylor herself has used this trope many times before, including in reputation’s “Gorgeous”: “ocean blue eyes, looking in mine, I feel like I might sink and drown and die”). This continues to show that this person is incredibly captivating and that the narrator especially is entranced by them.

However, the song continues so that the full sentence reads “eyes like sinking ships on waters,” which completely changes the image. A sinking ship is something that’s irrevocably doomed, something that you need to escape from in order to save your life. By using enjambment in this way, Taylor gives us an image of this person while simultaneously giving insight into the narrator’s internal struggle: this person is captivating, fascinating, enchanting and the narrator is undeniably drawn to them, but she also realizes that trying be with this person would not only never work, but would probably hurt her more in the long run. In other words, she’d go down with their ship. Even so, she still finds this churning water inviting, so much so that she almost jumps in—almost, because she does know better.

But I don’t like a gold rush, gold rush

I don’t like anticipating my face in a red flush

I don’t like that anyone would die to feel your touch

Everybody wants you

Everybody wonders what it would be like to love you

In the chorus, we have the lilting vocals and ethereal strings of the opening replaced with a conversational tone and a firm backbeat. While the opening was the daydream, the chorus is something closer to reality as the narrator giving her reasons for not wanting to get involved with this person.

The main reason is that she doesn’t like a gold rush, which she repeats several times throughout. A gold rush occurs when gold is discovered somewhere, resulting in a horde of people rushing to the site hoping to stake a claim and get rich. However, there’s never enough gold to go around, and with the perilous journey to the gold mines and the amount that the miners have to give up to get there (in the California Gold Rush of 1849, people on the east coast of the United States were leaving behind their entire lives to either travel across the country by wagon or to sail around the tip of South America in order to get to California for a chance at some gold), people actually tend to end up losing far more than they gain.

To the narrator, this person is the recently discovered gold. They’re gleaming and rare, and now everyone is in a mad scramble to get a piece of them. She realizes that she is not the only one who is desperate to be with this person, and that chances are she’d be one of the miners who loses everything should she try to go after them. She wouldn’t be in control—she’d only be “anticipating my face in a red flush,” anticipating embarrassment, getting flustered over a person she could never have.

Walk past, quick brush

I don’t like slow motion double vision in a rose blush

I don’t like that falling feels like flying ‘til the bone crush

Everybody wants you

But I don’t like a gold rush

The second part of the chorus imagines the overwhelming nature of any relationship she would have with this person. She emphasizes how just a quick brush with this person is enough to mess with her abilities to comprehend reality: being with this person would cause “slow motion double vision” and make her think that “falling feels like flying” until she hits the ground and the bones crush (a visceral image). She ends the chorus with an adamant “I don’t like a gold rush.” However, her daydream is far from over.

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful?

With your hair falling into place like dominoes

I see me padding cross your wooden floors

With my Eagles t-shirt hanging from the door

The lilting vocals are back as the narrator once again allows herself to ignore the elephant in the room and just focus on how entrancing this individual is. She goes as far to imagine a life with this person, where there’s a sense of intimacy and familiarity (also, apparently there’s some debate about whether the “Eagles t-shirt” references the band The Eagles or the Philadelphia football team? It doesn’t really matter, as the point of the line is to show that she’s imagining a place with this person where she feels at home and safe with them, but for the record I assumed it was the football team because Taylor’s from Pennsylvania).

At dinner parties

I’ll call you out on your contrarian shit

And the coastal town

We wandered round had never seen

A love as pure as it

And then it fades into the gray of my day-old tea

Cause it could never be

She continues to imagine a life with this person, focusing (as Taylor does best) on the simple moments. “Contrarian” describes a person who goes against popular opinion often just for the sake of going against popular opinion, and the narrator imagines a level of closeness with this person where she could call them out on it. She also conjures up grander memories—visiting a coastal town where their love is the purest thing within it. However, she seems to wake up from this daydream before returning to the reality-steeped chorus when she allows it to “fade into the gray of my day-old tea”—a image that certainly contrasts with the gleaming, twinkling gold of the person she’s dreaming about. I especially love that she specifies that the tea is not just gray, but day-old—it shows how her life is mundane and emotionless. The tea’s gone cold and she hasn’t drank it yet, because she’s wistfully dreaming about something else.

Because the chorus is exactly the same as the first, we’re going to skip to the next verse.

What must it be like to grow up that beautiful?

With your hair falling into place like dominoes

My mind turns your life into folklore

I can’t dare to dream about you anymore

Again, she’s allowing herself to fall into this daydream, but there’s a heightened sort of awareness this time. Instead of imagining an intimate, peaceful relationship, the narrator admits that it’s all in her head—she’s turning his life into folklore. Folklore, besides being the name of evermore’s sister album, also refers to “the traditional beliefs, legends, and customs, current among the common people” (“folklore, n. 1.” OED online), stories that are often passed down orally through generations and change slightly with each retelling. She’s realizing that her dreams about this person are nothing more than stories that she’s changing in order to live vicariously through them. Here, she admits that it’s useless to continue doing so: “I can’t dare to dream about you anymore.”

At dinner parties

I won’t call you out on your contrarian shit

And the coastal town

We never found, will never see

A love as pure as it

And it fades into the gray of my day-old tea

Cause it will never be

Here we have the same daydream as before, only modified to fit reality. She’s not going to call this person out on anything, because they don’t have that level of familiarity. They’ll never find this magical coastal town, and both they and it will never see this pure love because it doesn’t exist. This time, when the daydream fades into the gray of her day-old tea, it’s not with the wistful “it could never be,” but with a firm “it will never be.”

Gleaming, twinkling

Eyes like sinking

Ships on waters

So inviting, I almost jump in

We end where we begin, with the reminder that she could jump into this beautiful disaster, that she almost does, but she stops herself because she realizes it will never work out the way she wants to—she’ll only end up hurting herself. She spares herself from the gold rush.

#song analysis no one asked for #taylor swift #gold rush

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thebibliomancer · 4 years ago

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Essential Avengers: Avengers #234: The Witch’s Tale!

August, 1983

“Seasons of the Witch!”

If Wanda offers you a free Halloween mask, politely tell her no thanks.

A lot going on in this cover. Because this is one of those issues that summarizes a character’s continuity because wikipedia doesn’t exist yet and back issues aren’t super easy to get.

Last time: There was an Avengers/Fantastic Four sorta crossover where Annihilus tried to blow up the universe. The primary fallout of that is that Vision walked into a null-field and then collapsed. He’s basically in a robot-coma recovering.

This time: the Avengers bring Vision home in a tube.

It looks like the kind of coffin you shoot into space but it’s not. It’s just a life-support capsule that looks like a space coffin.

Now though it sucks that Vision is in a robot coma, this does mean that he and Wanda are back involved with the book again. We briefly checked in with them during the Trial of Yellowjacket arc.

But we’ve been pretty short of Scarlet Witch and Vision since #211 when they left the team to try to have a go at a regular life. I’ll summarize in brief how that’s been at the appropriate time. Point being, that’s twenty some issues with a very low amount of my second favorite comic couple.

She-Hulk and Thor carry the capsule into the basement of Avengers Mansion because that’s where their medical center is. The basement. Of course. Why wouldn’t you put your medical center in the basement. Best place for it.

Wanda thanks Wasp for inviting her (and Vision) to stay at the Mansion when they could have stayed at the Baxter Building.

Wasp: “Nonsense! That place was left in a mess by Annihilus! Besides, the Avengers take care of their own!”

(Tangentially, the Avengers have always been more of a family to Wanda than anyone else aside from Django and Marya Maximoff who raised her and Pietro. The Avengers are Wanda’s family basically.)

Also, it’s not said anywhere but I feel like probably Reed Richards never did do that procedure that was supposed to help Vision recover more quickly as distracted as he was by Franklin’s injuries.

While Wanda hovers (metaphorically) around Vision’s tube, Wasp reflects on how hard this is hitting her.

Wasp: “She and the Vision were such a strange match, but they’ve been so devoted to each other their marriage worked -- !”

Oof, that bold hurts, Jan.

Wanda asks for some time alone with her husband so the Avengers leave the basement level medical center, all thinking thoughts as often happens.

Wasp feels guilty because she’s the one that called Wanda and Vision into action but justifies that they were needed. Even though they didn’t really accomplish much.... Kinda makes it worse.

Captain America asks Thor off to have a private chat.

Captain Marvel laments that they couldn’t destroy the field before Vision was injured. And Starfox muses about the sensitivity he senses from Captain Marvel.

Kinda wondering if Stern is trying to set up a love triangle between Starfox, Captain Marvel, and She-Hulk.

Speaking of She-Hulk.

She-Hulk: Any of us could’ve wound up in a tube... or on a slab. But that’s the risk we have to take!

A very typically She-Hulk of this era kind of thought. She’s very direct.

Wasp calls a rain-check on apartment hunting. Which is what she and She-Hulk were doing before the whole invisible dome thing.

And She-Hulk finds other ways to occupy her time.

She-Hulk: “Hey, Starfox! You have any plans for tonight?”

Starfox: “Well, I’d considered checking out the local sights, but if you have a better offer -- !”

She-Hulk: “Spaceman, I can show you some things you won’t believe!”

She’s very direct.

Over at Captain America and Thor’s private conversation, Captain America catches Thor up on the happenings re: Iron Man, i.e. Tony Stark.

Cap(tain America): “It’s Iron Man, Thor... the Wasp and I paid him a visit to find out why he’d resigned from the Avengers. I... don’t quite know how to say this, but... Tony Stark hasn’t just left the Avengers! He’s given up his identity as Iron Man... turned his armor over to another man!”

Thor: “Eh? ‘Tis most passing strange!”

Cap: “That’s not the only thing that’s ‘most passing strange!’ When we talked to him, Stark was so drunk, I’m surprised he was able to stand up! And when I suggested that he’d had too much to drink, he ordered Jan and me out of his apartment!”

Turns out that off-panel at some point, Tony confided his problems with alcoholism to Thor.

Another example of the close relationship that Thor and Iron Man used to have and lamentably don’t seem to have anymore.

Cap even says that Thor has known Tony longer than the rest of the Avengers. While Wasp has been on the team just as long as Thor has, yeah, Thor has known the man in Iron Man longer.

So Cap asks Thor to try to talk to Tony because maybe he could get through to him.

Thor: “I could try, Captain! But if he rejected your advice, while under the influence, I fear for my ability to do better!”

Cap: “What about your mortal identity? Maybe if you approached him as Dr. Don Blake... man to man...”

Thor: “Mayhap. I shall give this thought.”

Thor then hammer-whirl flies off, leaving Cap to think about whether there’s anything additional that he could do, maybe in Iron Man #172, which was on sale at the same time.

Since this issue is otherwise going to be a lot of recapping Scarlet Witch’s entire life, why not pop into another book briefly for some additional content?

I’m the boss and I’ll allow it.

So over in Iron Man in general and issue #172 specifically, Tony Stark is on hard times. We know about the alcoholism and Rhodey taking over as Iron Man. But a man called Obadiah Stane is also attempting an incredibly hostile takeover of Stark International. He’s bought up all the company’s debt (and it has a lot), he has a bunch of civil suits pending against the company, and he’s secretly been the architect behind Tony Stark’s imploding life. That and Tony himself. Takes two to implode.

The last hope Stark Int. has is a writ that will force Stane to back off for a week or two. It’s not a lot but it’ll be some breathing room. Only problem is that it needs Tony Stark’s notarized signature before 5 PM and they kinda lost track of him after he broke into a museum to put on some knight armor and had to be bailed out of jail.

Rhodey decides to call Captain America for help and that’s how we get the asterisk indicating that you should check out Iron Man #172.

Cap does find Tony but unfortunately, Tony slips away in the confusion when an old Iron Man foe called Firebrand (unfortunately not a gargoyle) sets the hotel on fire because he’s just incredibly pissed off at the idea of Tony Stark.

Cap’s less-nice confrontation with Tony about his drinking is decent drama (but possibly not the right tactic to take) though so have some of that.

Anyway. Back to Avengers.

Meanwhile, over on Long Island and at the Cross Technological Enterprises building, industrial espionage gets aggressive as some men in jumpsuits and balaclavas climb the building to sneak in.

One of them is worried because that Avenger guy Hawkeye is in charge of security but the boss is like pssh Hawkeye is a chump with a broken leg.

Then Hawkeye arrives on a hover scooter because insulting Hawkeye probably just summons him to prove you wrong. He has that kind of contrarian energy at times.

He shoots all of their guns out of their hands and pins them to the wall with arrows all before they can really do anything.

His leg may be broken but his arms aren’t. And those are the limbs that do archery.

Sure, his style is slightly harshed by having only one swashbuckler boot on but that still doesn’t stop him from shooting arrows.

A woman and a photographer show up instantly to take pictures of Hawkeye’s cool victory. Apparently the woman is Sheila Danning and she says that she’s in charge of PR for Cross Technological Enterprises.

People showing up to take pictures of how cool he is makes Hawkeye feel very appreciated so he happily poses for some pictures with the captured intruders.

I feel like this is going to end up related to the Hawkeye solo miniseries that’s published around this time. The events of the miniseries cost Hawkeye his hearing but gain him a wife. So we’ll call it a net positive for Clint.

I’ll possibly summarize the relevant parts of the series when it becomes relevant to Avengers, which I’m sure it will.

Several hours later, back over at Avengers Mansion, She-Hulk wakes up after a night with Starfox.

So let’s discuss a thing.

In a later She-Hulk series, the moral iffyness of Starfox’s ability to shoot pleasure at people’s brains and make them become infatuated with him is explored. In a legal sense. As in, Starfox gets put on trial for sexual assault and accused of using his powers to seduce people.

The question is raised whether he had ever used his powers to seduce She-Hulk in regards to them getting together like this in Avengers. And when he won’t give her a straight answer, she beats the shit out of him.

Eventually, the case goes all the way up to the Living Tribunal, the cosmic judge of all realities because of course there’s one of those, and a mind probe proves that Starfox did not use his abilities to influence She-Hulk’s decision to have sex with him.

They’re both just horny people.

Anyway, Starfox and She-Hulk get on first name non-codename basis with each other. Then Starfox takes off to go explore New York, but he and She-Hulk do make plans to get together again in the evening.

She-Hulk’s post-implied-coitus giddiness is rained on when she learns that Wanda hasn’t slept at all and has spent the whole night at Vision’s side.

So now its time for She-Hulk brand very direct friendship.

She tells Jarvis to go make breakfast and she’ll deal with Wanda.

As we saw in and about the Trial of Yellowjacket, She-Hulk doesn’t really beat around the bush.

So when Wanda says she’d rather stay at Vision’s side rather than get breakfast, She-Hulk grabs her and tries to physically drag her towards self-care.

She-Hulk: “Look, watching your hubby won’t make him get well any faster. You’re coming with me! You’ll feel a lot better with a little breakfast in you!”

It doesn’t go over well.

Wanda blasts She-Hulk away and now Jen and Wanda are angry at each other and Wasp arrived just in time to play baffled mediator.

She-Hulk: “I hope you have a good dentist, Red!”

Wasp: “Jennifer!”

She-Hulk: “She started it, Wasp! I was just showing her some hospitality, and she sent me flying with her crummy hex bolts!”

Scarlet Witch: “What?! You physically pull me from my husband’s side, and you call that hospitality?!?”

Wasp: “Girls, girls! We’re all friends here! I know how upset you must be, Wanda, but you mustn't let worry get the better of you! I think we all need a spot of breakfast! Please join me, Wanda. The She-Hulk will relieve you at watching over the Vision... we all will!”

She-Hulk: “That’s what I was trying to tell her!”

Jen’s heart was in the right place but she lacks much in the way of tact?

Anyway, Wasp and Wanda set up in the library and Jarvis brings breakfast pastries to them, though Wanda refuses any.

Free breakfast aggros Captain Marvel and now she’s here too. That and She-Hulk trying to make up through a proxy.

Captain Marvel: “A little bird told me that you were serving your continental special, and I just couldn’t stay away!”

Wasp: “A little bird, C.M.?”

Captain Marvel, whispering: “Well, a big bird! She-Hulk radioed me that the Scarlet Witch was still a little down, and suggested that I might be of help, cheering her up!”

You have a good heart, Jen-Hulk.

Also, Monica just beams right in through the library window as a sunbeam before forming back into her human shape. And that’s delightful. But would be startling. Jarvis is startled. He’s seen it all but all keeps expanding.

Monica and Wanda briefly bond over both speaking French when Monica praises that Jarvis’ pastries rival the best of the French Quarter. Jan is a bit lost because she doesn’t know any French but Monica and Wanda were just very excited because they don’t get to French very often. The language.

AND with the ice broken, Monica smoothly shifts topics over to asking Wanda about herself.

Captain Marvel: “You know, there’s so much I’d like to ask you. I’ve read all about you in the files, of course -- but they’re so impersonal. You’ve led such a fascinating life.”

Scarlet Witch: “Fascinating? I suppose... but I was too young to appreciate some of the more fantastic moments.”

AND THEN WANDA LEGIT, NO FURTHER PROMPTING, STARTS NARRATING HER WHOLE LIFE STARTING FROM BIRTH.

DAMN WANDA, exposition under pressure?

So Wanda tells Monica about how she was born in WUNDAGORE, a Balkan mountain in Transia with a super-advanced city built on it. The High Evolutionary was making furries for reasons which escape me but it explains why a cow-woman answered the door when Magda, supposedly Wanda’s mom although that has changed, came knocking on the door.

She was double pregnant and on the run from a husband who had developed terrible problems and an attitude problem.

The cow-woman Bova, invited Magda into the city and helped deliver her children Pietro and Wanda. And then Magda walked off into the snow to die, pulling a Padme-on-purpose-but-years-ahead-of-time by dying just after having twins.

Her thought process was that Mystery Husband would come looking for her but if he found her frozen in the snow, he wouldn’t find out that she’d had children? I dunno, this logic is a bit spurious.

I’m glad that Wanda’s current in the year 2021 real mom isn’t someone who walked off into the snow to die because it seemed like a good idea.

Showing what an awful idea this was, Magda left Wanda and Pietro in the care of Bova who had no idea what to do with two babies. So she took the matter to the High Evolutionary who also didn’t want to deal with it and decided to dump the babies on a childless Roma couple.

High Evolutionary: ‘DOES ANYBODY WANT SOME BABIES?’

Except the comic doesn’t say Roma, they say the g-slur. I don’t think Marvel ever stops doing that. Its a weird case where the portrayal is overall sympathetic but tinged with stereotypes and using a slur.

Shape up, Marvel.

I also notice that Wanda’s recap leaves out Fake Dad Robert Frank, the Whizzer.

The first time Wanda’s parentage was Totally Revealed For Real, it was revealed that not only Magda but Robert and Madeline Joyce Frank were hanging around Wundagore waiting to give birth.

I’ve already been into it before but originally it was just the Franks kids but the Whizzer whizzed off in grief when he learned his wife died in childbirth. Then when someone got it into their head to retcon otherwise, Magda was at Wundagore and gave birth to twins and then the High Evolutionary had Bova try to give the kids to Robert but he ran off in his grief so shrugged and passed them off to Django and Marya Maximoff AKA the real parents even if not biological.

To editorialize, the Maximoffs actually raised Wanda and Pietro so no matter what, I’ll always consider them the twins’ real parents.

Anyway, the Franks aren’t part of this retelling. Which is funny because for a while Wanda thought the Whizzer was their dad and treated him like one and now she’s dumped him like raw meat for ease of retelling. Tsk tsk.

So, Wanda and Pietro lived a good life and “better parents could hardly have been found.” Then when adolescence happened, Pietro suddenly could run really fast and Wanda “discovered that strange, unpredictable things would happen if I was in a certain frame of mind and gestured in a particular way.”

That’s a pretty specific mutant power. And she relates that she kept causing accidents by gesturing in the particular way while in a certain frame of mind, it’s like, Wanda, don’t gesture that way? Get mittens or tie your fingers together. Its not hard.

Your powers are so specific!

Stereotypes happen and an angry mob burns down the Maximoffs’ camp.

Pietro ran Wanda to safety and the shock was so great that they got AMNESIA.

Marya, I think, died but Django survived and went a little mad with grief, assuming he lost his wife and kids.

For a couple years, Wanda and Pietro just kicked it around Eastern Europe, Pietro using his superspeed to catch game. Things were going okay but not great up until the time that Wanda wandered into a village and made the fuck-things-up gesture and whoops fucked things up.

I’m telling you, Wanda, mittens.

Anyway, she set a house on fire, WITH HER MIND, and now there’s an angry mob after her assuming that she’s a witch.

As sometimes happens in Marvel Eastern Europe.

The mob chased Wanda to camp where Pietro lost his shit and superspeed tried to beat up a mob but wound up getting pinned down and beaten.

Then Magneto showed up and yanked all the crude farming implements away and told the mob to gtfo.

Magneto: “Come no further, homo sapiens! The two whom you attack are under the protection of Magneto!”

An idiot: “With power such as his, he can only be Satan himself!”

An idiot who has the right idea: “Run! Run for your lives!”

Wanda thanks Magneto for the save and he demands “Let neither of you ever forget what you owe me... ever!”

Cool. Cool cool cool.

Wanda: “He took us in... fed and clothed us... but never did he show us any human kindness. We were supposed to be above that, he said... we were mutants, and under his tutelage, we became Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch!”

What a dick.

Anyway, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver were forced to join Magneto and his other agents Toad and Mastermind.

Magneto’s Brotherhood clashed with the X-Men multiple times. And then the Stranger just sorta yoinked Magneto into space.

Early X-Men is a bafflement to me.

Wanda: “Our debt had been repaid to Magneto many times over. We were beholden to him no longer... We were free. And... we were alone. We had just begun to realize the potential of our mutant powers, but we did not know how best to use them. Cut off from Magneto’s cruel exploitation, we didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what would have become of us, had we not been accepted as Avengers! The Avengers gave purpose to our lives, gave us something to be part of.”

Anyway, being on the Avengers meant dangers and foes to fight but it also meant allies, friends, and ROBOT BOYFRIENDS.

Wanda: “Were it not for the Avengers, I might never have met the Vision! He was the product of a laboratory -- and many thought him to be inhumanely cold -- but I grew to love the warm, feeling inner man.”

Of course, if you tell Vision he has feelings he gets mad and insists NUH UH.

And dating Vision pissed off Quicksilver who basically disowned Wanda for a while.

But who gives a fuck what Pietro says, Wanda also learned WITCHCRAFT and (although not explicitly mentioned) how to summon METEORS TO SMASH HER FOES.

And she got married in a double ceremony where the other bride married a tree! That tree part doesn’t get mentioned.

After this, Wanda and Vision went on a short honeymoon but found that the hashtag Avengers life kept them so busy that they didn’t have a lot of time to themselves.

Then Real Dad Django Maximoff showed up and Wanda and Pietro went with him to Transia to learn their backstory.

Annnnnd Wanda got possessed by Chthon. Won’t be the first time ha ha.

Thankfully, the Avengers managed to do a care bear stare to unpossess her. Oh, and Django died. A misstep if you ask me. There was too much character potential to just kill him off after one arc.

Alas, alas.

Anyway, the recap skips over a whole bunch of stuff and doesn’t mention Moondragon’s role but we get to the point where Wanda and Vision quit the Avengers.

Wanda: “When the Vision and I were finally reunited, our thoughts began to turn inward. Our life with the Avengers was fulfilling, but apart from our careers, we had no real private life of our own. Would society accept us on our own, away from Avengers Mansion? We didn’t know -- but we had to at least try to find out. Taking our accrued Avengers salaries, we bought a modest little home in Leonia, New Jersey.”

So a brief recap of their adventures in the first Vision and Scarlet Witch miniseries.

In the first issue, Captain America’s Halloween housewarming gift of a cursed book winds up being cursed and contains Samhain. When Wanda didn’t immediately free him, he got angry and turned some trick or treaters into monster versions of their costumes to attack Vision while Samhain attacked Wanda. She manages to set the cursed tome on fire, ending Samhain’s power. FOR NOW. Then Not-Actually-Their-Father-But-Doesn’t-Know-It-Yet the Whizzer shows up.

In issue two, the Whizzer is looking for Wanda’s help in regaining custody of his son Nuklo the Nuclear Man. With their help, Whizzer manages to get the court to agree to release Nuklo to his custody. But the lead doctor managing Nuklo is secretly ISBISA! ... Y’know, the Whizzer’s old foe from his All-Winner’s Squad days? No? Okay, well he also masterminded the nuclear ‘accident’ that led to Nuklo’s birth in the first place. And now he’s back to finish the job with radiation siphoned from Nuklo. In anger at Wanda being drawn into Golden Age drama, Vision reveals that Wanda isn’t the Whizzer’s kid but it little matters because Whizzer has a massive heart attack and dies. Nuklo helps defeat Isbisa and both of them are drained of atomic power leaving them human. Oh and Vision’s arm gets melted off. That’s kinda important.

In issue three, Vision is in a robot coma and he needs an energy donation from Wonder Man, his brain brother, to recover. Comic books! Vision has a meaning laden coma dream where Ultron screams at him a lot. Grim Reaper attacks and tries to kill Vision and Wonder Man while they’re incapacitated because he has one character beat and its that. But Vision manages to subdue him.

In issue four, is the pertinent one for this issue.

I’m going to say, I think the second Vision and Scarlet Witch series is better. This was a series of loosely related mishaps. The second volume does more with Vision and Scarlet Witch living in suburbia as a concept.

Anyway, in the fourth issue and in this Avengers recap of Wanda’s entire life, after Vision lost his arm, he and Wanda went up to Attilan to get it replaced. Because the Inhumans can casually just build him a new arm that works with his powers.

And people say the Inhumans aren’t good for anything.

While on the moon, Wanda and Vision decide to visit with Pietro and Crystal and their new daughter Luna. Pietro was even not a dick to Vision. It was a nice moment until Magneto barged in and started a fight by insisting he wasn’t here to fight while trapping everyone inside the building. Also, he threatened Bova to get information on who his kids were and frankly, that’s unforgivable. Bova is an angel. A cow angel.

They fight fight fight and then the fight is ended when Luna cries and Magneto realizes he’s doing a big superhero/supervillain fight in the same room as a fragile child and realizes ‘wow maybe i’m the dick here.’

Now the Vision and Scarlet Witch series ends with the internal-reveal that MAGNETO is the father (for now) of Wanda and Pietro. Magneto asking them to accept him as such. And on a confused moment of ‘shit what now.’

The Avengers issue picks up on that and finishes out the scene.

While Wanda is too stunned to know what to say, Pietro has some choice words.

He snatches his daughter away from Magneto and tells him fuck off, you’re no father to me.

Magneto’s argument is ‘hey genetics is the only thing that matters you’re my son like it or not.’

Pietro’s counter argument is ‘nuh uh’ and that Django Maximoff is the only man he calls father. And Wanda agrees.

Its good to see some Django respect.

Magneto tells them they’ll see the error of their ways and flies off.

Which is the wrong tack to take to prove that you’ve changed and are ready to get some good dadding in and won’t kill your granddaughter for being a human.

He’s super bad at this.

After that, Wanda and Vision went home to New Jersey and just stayed at home for a while, Wanda was so horrified by the reveal.

Wanda: “Even now, I can hardly begin to express the horror, the shame! It’s as if I suddenly discovered Hitler lurking in my family tree! Part of me wishes that he is really sincere about tempering his hatred for non-mutant humans. But even if he was telling the truth, that can never excuse his past crimes... Nothing can!”

Its really surprising how ready people are in-universe to compare Magneto to Hitler. From Wanda to Cap to Xorn.

Wasp: “Wanda... you mustn’t torture yourself this way! Magneto has no claim on you, and you’re certainly not responsible for him! I know it must be tough, but you can’t let him ruin the rest of your life!”

These are helpful things to tell Wanda to calm her down.

Less helpful is when Wasp speculates that hey maybe it was okay not to believe Magneto when he said he’s changed because maybe he’ll become worse! Maybe his newfound tolerance of humanity will lead him to try to save humanity from itself rather than wipe it out. In reference to how Moondragon tried to do that on that planet we never heard from again.

Wanda: “Heaven help us, if such a thought occurs to Magneto!”

I’m pretty sure he’s going to be too busy in the near future trying to be teacher to the most death-prone idiots this side of Westchester. And then after that when he decides to be evil again, he’s going to do some nonsense with Asteroid M. But I don’t think he ever hits the ‘save humanity from itself’ point.

Anyway.

Wasp and Captain Marvel reassure Wanda that if Magneto Strikes Again the Avengers will be with her!

The following day, Wanda returns to Leonia, New Jersey to put together a suitcase of stuff since she’s going to be staying at Avengers Mansion for a while.

Wanda: “Jan was nice enough to offer me a few of her things, but they’re all too small for my figure. And that robe the She-Hulk lent me last night fit like a tent!”

Wasp and Scarlet Witch usually look the same size and shape but that’s important canon body shape information for someone, I guess. If they wanted to draw Avengers But Not All The Same Paper Dolls character designs.

Anyway, the issue really ends with Dr Strange showing up to pull Wanda into a crossover with his own book in Doctor Strange #60.

Ergh. This era sure has a lot of stuff going off on the sides.

I’ll synopsize Scarlet Witch’s time in Doctor Strange’s book if it becomes necessary but I’ve already looked at five non-Avengers issue for this post and am probably going to have to cover the Hawkeye series in brief too when it intersects with Avengers.

Follow @essential-avengers for grudging contextualization of everything that’s happening in Avengers, when I feel like it. Like and reblog if you liked.

#avengers #scarlet witch #the vision #the Wasp #Captain Marvel #Monica Rambeau #there were more people but they're not very relevant #essential avengers #essential marvel liveblogging #because this is a big recap of everything wanda it has a lot of the g-slur in it #i've tried to not use panels where its used #and just up and cropped the high evolutionary one

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astoracademyrp · 5 years ago

Note

Can you post about what made you pick the apps you did?

This took me an embarrassingly long time to answer... But here ya go! I’m not sure if this is what you wanted, or if you would have preferred a separate post for each app that we received. But really, we’ll probably just jot down the same things.

For the Divine, the character of Evangeline Morales really captured how we interpreted the skeleton with the little blurb that we gave, but also made it so much better. Ness gave more to the character, and really touched on the core of what the Divine is. One of the things that was mentioned in the skeleton and was important to us was the value of family, and we liked how the she built on that foundation.

If you look up the definition of the word ‘contrarian’, it is Anastasia Fitzgerald. The character contradicts even herself, and honestly, not to sound repetitive, but Kate made the character so much more. The Contrarian has always been one of the more extreme characters, and she was certainly that in every aspect.

Margaret Amano as the Addict. We really liked how the addiction part of her character is interpreted, and the way Adri built Maggie on that foundation, but also all the other things that make her the character that she is. I’ll be repeating myself throughout this whole thing when I say they gave the skeletons lives and stories that I couldn’t have imagined for them, but it’s true-- they all really did.

For the Deviant, when Laurel was reading the application, she actually forgot whose application she was going through at that point. When she realized it was for the Deviant and decided to reread the skeleton, she thought it made perfect sense. Agata Almeida’s story captivated her, before even remembering that it was for that specific skeleton.

Soren Wang as the Adventurer really embodied the skeleton. It’s easy to mistake the skeleton with the Reckless, but there is a childlike joy and cheekiness in Soren that was specific to the Adventurer. And Elyse wrote Soren in a way that makes you feel for him, but also understand that restlessness that he feels.

There’s a line in the application that Ness sent in (honestly, there are certain lines in everyone’s application that made me think ‘that’s it-- that’s the character’, and this would be much longer than it’s supposed to be if I enumerated all of them, so I’ll include the one from Ness’). “She should’ve realized she’d never get her own story line when she identified more with secondary characters than with the main.” Estella Bierman took the Pristine to places we didn’t even think of for her.

Ram Rueangrit is the Optimist, but not in the way that I first envisioned him to be. That’s the thing though, I fell in love with the Sarah’s interpretation of the character that I threw my image of him out the window. Not to say that he’s a completely detached from the skeleton, but Sarah wrote him in a way that made sense that he is the Optimist, but also giving the title a whole different meaning.

The app we got for the Tempestuous was also fantastic. I mean, they were all fantastic, but the app we received really captured the essence of the Tempestuous, you know? Zolo made her the Tempestuous, but also gave her a cause. She made the character flawed, but in a way that the Tempestuous is supposed to be flawed.

A gave the Reckless a dark streak that we hadn’t considered for the skeleton at all, but it fit perfectly. Just like the Contrarian and the Tempestuous, the Reckless is an extreme character and Kellan is definitely that. He was written in a way that actually makes you fear him a little bit, but also excites you.

I was always looking forward to seeing what kind of character could fit the Enigma, and Em’s interpretation of her is captivating. I really liked the story behind why Mira Lalbhai became a wallflower, which is an important personality trait of the Enigma, and why she is the Enigma just makes perfect sense, you know?

Emmylou Ward is the characterization of the skeleton. Bunny wrote her as this incredibly intelligent character, and so completely unashamed of it. And that’s the Overachiever. She thrives in pressure, and is proud of how academically gifted she is, and Emmylou is just that.

The Fervid is an incredibly interesting character. We obviously have no expectations as this was for an OC, but if we had any, they would have been blown out of the water. A girl who was raised to be a pageant queen but wants to be the president? Yes. Bridget wrote her in such an enthralling way, there’s no way else to describe it.

#Anonymous #answered.#why do i feel like i had to use so much brain power to write this??#i gotta go lie down for like 2 mins.

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moth-fuzz · 5 years ago

Text

20 Questions for 2020

I got tagged by @bumblequinn and tumblr hasn’t been my #main #platform for a while so I miss these things and I never pass up the opportunity to read about people and share about myself x3

1. Do you make your bed?

no lol

in all honesty, sometimes. it makes me feel better when I do. But I like to just jump out of bed and get working when I can

2. Favorite number?

love 6... love 16 as well. 6 is a nice number. divisible by 2 AND 3. Honorary odd number. 16 is a nice 2^2^2 or 4^2 or 2^4.. nice round number.

3. What’s your job?

I’m not working currently but I’m due to start working at a software consulting company a month from now... I don’t wanna be rude but I’m looking for other opportunities in the meantime x3

4. If you could, would you go back to school?

definitely not for computer science. They don’t teach you anything a programming job expects of you. IF I went back to school it would be for philosophy. Philosophy’s the only thing that makes me feel like I’m doing something real (ironic when you consider philosophy’s public image). I took a few philosophy classes, 2 entry level and 1 upper level. They were the most impactful and the most far reaching classes who had a real and legitimate connection with me as a person I ever took. I’d pay just to have those experiences again. Everyone deserves those kinds of experiences.

5. Can you parallel park?

Kinda? I mean I did it when I took my first driving test, but I haven’t tried in a few years and I don’t have a license so I don’t really have the opportunity to tell.

6. A job you had which would surprise people?

I’m sure they’d be surprised that in my 4.5 years of college I never pursued work til my last semester hahaha

7. Do you think aliens are real?

I’m sure by all statistical likelihood they’d have to be... but the universe is a huge place. And human’s lives are short, compared to our modes of travel. We haven’t seen any simply because we can’t, in our lifetimes, drive out far enough to see them. And they probably haven’t visited us because... I mean we’re a tiny dot in the middle of a trillion stars. It’s like finding a single grain of sand on the beach. It’s just hard. I gotta give em a break for that...

8. Can you drive a manual car?

no...

9. Tattoos?

okay this one’s a toughie for me! I want, at some point in my life, to be covered in tatoos. I think it’s just a beautiful look. But also! I can’t think of anything meaningful enough to me to put on my skin. Let alone a dozen or a hundred of meaningful images to put all over my body. So I’m stuck on that...

10. Favorite color?

I love purple. I love honest, muted, natural colors. My favorite pallet is purples and grays. Maybe black too. I love cloudy skies, smoky rooms, and furniture faded with use. I like pastels that just seem to add to the scene, to paint the scene with a subtle hue, soft colors that diffuse outward and bring a certain quality to the entire area instead of bold colors that just draw the eye to the single colored object... je ne sais quoi.

11. What’s your guilty pleasure?

I love comfort food. I feel like a child whenever I eat anything that isn’t like ... complex. Granted I love complex foods too (indian cuisine particularly is my favorite) but there’s a special place in my heart (and my stomach!) for like. Candy and mcdonald’s and sodas and stuff.

12. Things people do that drive you crazy?

blatant contrarianism. People who just pick the worst hills to die on, all the time, forever. Their entire public image is hatefulness. It’s so so tiring I don’t know how they do it. Are you happy? Do you enjoy this?

Another thing I can‘t stand is people who think they’ve got everything figured out. Not so much people who claim to know things, but people who claim to have some mental framework that covers ... everything. And often they’re wrong!! But, of course, according to their own mental framework, they’re right and everyone else just hasn’t figured it out yet. Insufferable.

13. First thing you remember you wanted to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be a theoretical physicist pretty much up until I got to middle school and discovered programming. I like math and science, I still do. Computer science at its highest level is basically just applied math with a bit of imagination. Theoretical physics is... kinda the same thing too. Except instead of computers you have stars and atoms. Just subject material. Same mental space. Same abstraction of nature that becomes a sort of nature in itself.

14. Favorite childhood sport?

Okay I loved the variation of soccer I used to play in elementary school where the athletic kids would play actual soccer and me and the other unathletic kids would just slowly walk around the field and give a kick here and a kick there...

15. Do you talk to yourself?

Yes! All the time. Mostly when other people aren’t around. It helps me realize and catalogue my thoughts because otherwise my brain moves too fast to keep up :3

16. What movie do you adore?

I think my favorite movie ever was kimi no na wa or Your Name. It had AMAZING pacing, AMAZING visuals, AMAZING characters and the plot was just so incredibly written and everything was so well tied together and everything came at just the right time and the conclusion was so so so fucking satisfying I dsajkfghdf UGH

and the SOUNDTRACK!!! FUCK!!!!

17. Do you like doing puzzles?

Big ADHD feel. I love puzzles. I love puzzle based games. I love the elation of figuring something out. I love puzzles so much, in fact, that I kinda think of everything I do as a puzzle in some way... Programming is definitely a puzzle. Finding all the pieces that fit together - except, you get to design the pieces!! But now >:3 the burden is on you to make it elegant and adaptable. Anyone can hack something together but the REAL puzzle is designing a system that both solves a problem and does it in a way that’s efficient and Also elegant and easy to use. Puzzles within puzzles.... ohhhhhhhfh I love thissssss

18. Tea or coffee?

100% coffee. I drink tea but I’m not a ‘tea person’. I love coffee so much. Black coffee. Lattes. Starbucks sweet coffee concoctions. Espresso. Coffee from all around the world. God Do I Love Coffee.

My favorite coffees tend to be from asia, currently I’m really liking sumatra mandheling. I love coffees that taste like dirt. Rich, earthy, complex. Real dark and real bold. Usually those are from asia. I’m okay with african coffees but they tend to be really deep and fruity, sometimes even chocolatey, which, is real hit or miss for me. If you’re from america usually you’ll have south american coffees which tend to be light, woody, nutty sometimes. They’re usually too light for my taste but sometimes they really really hit. Gross generalizations aside, I love trying out every coffee and there’s more exceptions that blow my mind than anything else. I don’t think I’ve ever had a coffee I actually didn’t like, just many I like better. In any case I just love coffee!!!

19. Phobias?

Ocean. Don’t like big bodies of water that I can’t see down. Also there’s weird stuff in there. I don’t know how people just hang out at the beach with crabs and urchins and crawdads and jellyfish and sharks and riptides I’m just scared out of my mind!!! This is their land!! Not mine!!

20. Favorite kind of music?

Alternative rock of all sorts. Shoegaze, grunge, post-rock, math rock, electronic rock, emo... I also love hardcore and post-hardcore as well. A lot of metal does it for me but also a lot doesn’t so it comes and goes. I love music with a strong groove and complex textures. Me big ADHD so I like to tap along in weird and complex ways so it really helps if the meter is weird and complex already x3

Big runner up is hip hop and pre-2000s edm. Big groove, heavy on the swing, lots of samples, really rich. Future funk also falls under this category even though it’s modern.

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

The Inevitable Part Where It Asks You To Tag 5 People

Feel free to pass up on this but here we go!

@mothman @bobbybobertson @exowave1 @reydiantskyes @sylvium-z and p much everyone else who follows me! I’d love to hear more from everyone else :3

#long post

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sceptilemasterr · 6 years ago

Text

MW Act 1, Scene 6 - Analysis

Title: Most Wanted: The Hollywood Killer (A CIU Screenplay)

Main Pairings: Dave x Sam

Other Pairings: N/A

Genre: Full Rewrite

Rating: PG-13 for violence, blood, swearing, alcohol, and sexuality

Summary: While talking to the crime lab’s eccentric trio, Sam and Dave learn more about Tull... and each other.

Previous Scene: The Other Case

Masterlist: Link

INT. L.A.P.D. STATION - CRIME LAB - NIGHT

The crime lab is a scene best described as “organized chaos.” Pop music blares from a speaker sitting at the workstation of a man with short black hair, glasses, and a blue cardigan, spinning idly in his chair. This is NIKHIL MANTHA, forensic specialist. Opposite him at another workstation is a man with messy brown hair and a patterned sweater, gritting his teeth in annoyance as he stares at his computer screen; this is REZA FASSIHI, data analyst.

HAYLEY ROSE (ON SPEAKER) (singing): Sirens flickering in your tail lights, your long-lost love’s your only flaw...

REZA: Nikhil, can we please turn that off? This wasn’t a good song four years ago, and it’s still not good now!

NIKHIL: But that’s the point! Pop princess Hayley Rose experimenting with a contrived club album with a hokey country twist? “Outlaw” is incredible in its American awfulness.

REZA: How does that make any sense?!

As the music plays in the background while they continue, the third occupant of the room ignores their argument entirely. MIRASOL BAUTISTA, criminal profiler and psychoanalyst, sits at her own workstation, frowning at whatever she is reading on the screen. She wears a white blazer and has her dark hair tied back into a bun.

NIKHIL: ...it isn’t my fault your tastes are embarrassingly mainstream-

MIRASOL (muttering): The contrarian hipster act, clearly a false front meant to get on people’s nerves. Typically seen in those with low self-esteem and-

NIKHIL: Ouch. I heard that, Mirasol.

MIRASOL: Oh, I know.

The door swings open, and Sam and Dave enter. Sam blinks in surprise at the music. Dave doesn’t bat an eye as he strides up to Nikhil’s workstation and hits the power button.

DAVE (deadpan): Oops.

NIKHIL: Hey! Excuse me, Dave, we were listening to that-

REZA: Correction: you were listening to that.

NIKHIL: Mirasol secretly enjoyed it!

MIRASOL: Excuse me, what?! I will murder you, Nikhil.

REZA: She’s not kidding, Nikhil. You weren’t here for the time she brought a live grenade to work, but-

DAVE: Look, as entertaining as this conversation is, right now, we’ve got a killer to catch. And more importantly, we’ve got company.

Mirasol, Nikhil, and Reza all look up and notice Sam for the first time.

DAVE: This is Sam Massey, U.S. Marshal. Massey, meet the Three Stooges. That’s Reza, our data analyst and resident computer nerd.

REZA (frowning): “Nerd?” Excuse you, Dave, I’m a data analyst and digital security consultant and a moderator for the Crown and the Flame official fansite... Okay, I may be a ‘computer nerd.’

Sam nods, clearly not understanding most of what Reza is talking about.

SAM: ...Pleasure.

DAVE: Over there is Nikhil, forensic analyst and card-carrying hipster.

NIKHIL: Nice to meet you, Marshal. I have to say, this ‘thing’ you’re doing with your outfit? Talk about defying the mainstream L.A. look with your rough-and-tumble style. Such a middle finger to the masses.

Sam crosses her arms, frowning.

SAM: I’m not trying to do a “thing.”

NIKHIL: Exactly, right? Everyone else is always trying too hard. But you get it!

SAM: Uh...

Dave shakes his head in amusement before moving on.

DAVE: Anyway, the cheerful one over there is Dr. Bautista, our criminal profiler and psychoanalyst.

MIRASOL: Just call me Mirasol. These two clowns don’t go by fancy titles, why should I?

SAM: I can respect that.

DAVE: Right, well, that’s the introductions. So, what have you all got for us?

NIKHIL: Perfect timing, actually. I’ve just finished my initial run-through of the forensics. Don’t have much to work with, but I was able to analyze those bullet casings you found, plus the autopsies and ballistics.

SAM: Let’s hear what you’ve got. I’ve got a hunch I want confirmed.

They walk over to Nikhil’s workstation. Nikhil swivels in his chair to face them.

DAVE: How’s it look?

NIKHIL: The autopsy and ballistics reports indicate an abdominal wound from a sawed-off shotgun, fired from approximately three feet away. Casings confirm standard double-aught buckshot. (shakes head) Can’t have been pretty.

SAM: Point-blank, straight to the gut. Tull’s specialty, the sick bastard.

DAVE: Anything else?

NIKHIL: Well, I’ve got an educated guess on the type of shotgun he used. It’s hard to tell for sure, but from what we could get from the camera footage, I’d say an old-school Easton 850, sawed-off.

SAM: Wait. Did you say an Easton 850?

NIKHIL: Why, does that mean something to you?

Sam gets a faraway look in her eyes, staring at a point on the wall. She says nothing for a long moment. Finally, she shakes her head and turns away.

SAM: No. You just... don’t see those every day.

From her station, Mirasol watches Sam with a calculating look. Dave notices and walks over to her, Sam following.

DAVE: Dr. Bautista, what do we have?

MIRASOL: I’ve told you not to call me that.

DAVE (smirks): Why do you think I keep doing it?

Mirasol rolls her eyes and turns away from him, facing Sam.

MIRASOL: Beckham had your file sent over, Massey. Frequent physical altercations. Questionable use of force. Repeated altercations... fascinating stuff.

SAM: Alright, alright. Let’s cut to the chase. What have you got?

MIRASOL: Let’s see... Propensity for violence and hot-headedness, such as when you brought in a fugitive with multiple broken bones. Then the report of you telling a fugitive with hostages to, and I quote: “Grow a backbone, dirtbag.”

NIKHIL: Ooh, I want that on a shirt.

MIRASOL: And then there’s the raid on the New Flores Cartel, where the massive property damage perfectly showcases your flagrant disregard for-

SAM: Okay, okay, we get the idea! Lemme rephrase: what have you got on Tull?

MIRASOL: Oh, don’t worry. I’ve already put together his profile too, or at least a preliminary one from what little we know.

DAVE: Perfect. Let’s hear it.

MIRASOL: He’s a hired killer, but he’s brutal when he doesn’t need to be, even when it makes his job harder. Clearly enjoys inflicting pain. He’s clever but unstable, with textbook signs of egocentrism, obsessive behavior, and possible narcissism.

DAVE (sarcastically): This guy just gets better and better.

SAM: Anything else?

MIRASOL: Just that... look. I’m not easily disturbed; hell, I read the profiles of psychopaths for a living. Sometimes even for fun. But this guy... he scares me.

Sam nods in understanding.

SAM: Then we just gotta be scarier.

She turns away from Mirasol and heads over to Reza’s station, Dave following close behind. As she approaches, Reza springs awkwardly to his feet, accidentally knocking over his chair as he offers an excited handshake.

REZA: Wow, a Texas Marshal, surrounded by L.A. glitz and glamour! Love it! The fish-out-of-water thing is a classic trope in the industry, y’know.

Sam shakes his hand, looking puzzled.

SAM: The... data analysis industry?

REZA: What? No, the entertainment industry! I’m also an aspiring screenwriter, you know.

NIKHIL: Emphasis on the ‘aspiring’ part. He’s never actually finished a script.

REZA: Shut up, Nikhil! Anyway, my point is that I’m a bit of a film buff.

SAM: Huh. Sounds like that might come in handy in this town.

REZA: Yeah, I know, it’s not really... wait, what?

SAM: Hey, from what I’ve seen, Hollywood’s a special kind of crazy. Might help to have someone who speaks the language.

REZA: Ha! Boom! How’s that defeat taste, Nikhil? Someone actually appreciates me for once!

Nikhil groans and rolls his eyes as Reza picks his chair back up and sits down.

REZA: And speaking of ‘Hollywood’ and ‘crazy,’ by the way, I’ve pulled up some info on the main victim.

DAVE: Gavin? Could be a lead. But what about Tull?

REZA (frowning): Not much. From what I can tell, he surfaced suddenly about a year ago as a paid killer. Other than that, I could barely find anything.

SAM (frowning): What do you mean he ‘surfaced suddenly?’ Where the hell was he before that?

REZA: It’s the weirdest part of this whole thing. Far as I can tell, he emerged from thin air last year. His first kill happened in rural Montana, and before that... the guy just vanishes.

DAVE: Fake name, maybe?

REZA (shakes head): Nothing I can find. But I’ll keep looking. Gavin, on the other hand... with how much he’s posted about himself online, the guy practically did my job for me.

Reza swivels his monitor. Sam and Dave look at the screen, which is displaying a celebrity blog site titled “Dirty Hollywood.”

REZA: His personal blog is plenty already, but the real interesting part is this one. “Dirty Hollywood.” It’s a celeb gossip blog, and with the things he’s posted, he’s made quite a few enemies.

SAM: Could lead us to whoever hired Tull.

DAVE: Agreed. So, who’s on the list of Gavin’s potential enemies, then?

REZA: Honestly? Literally everyone he’s posted about. I can list all of them for you, but we’d be here all day-

DAVE: Give us the three most likely, then. Anything in the past week or so

REZA: Well, let’s see... he leaked some emails from screenwriter Josh Neely, exposing him as a plagiarist.

DAVE: Hold on. I spotted Neely on the tape, just before the murder. He was arguing pretty fiercely with Gavin!

Sam raises her eyebrows.

SAM: Damn. We’ve got our connection, then.

DAVE: Not so fast. Lots of celebrities were at that party, it doesn’t mean anything on its own. Reza, who else?

REZA: Gavin also posted evidence that Ryan Summers was making large, discreet payments to an unknown woman. Sure, Gavin never actually says she’s a call girl, but he sure as hell implies it.

DAVE: Huh. Ryan never mentioned that...

SAM: First-name basis with Ryan Summers? Really.

DAVE: Yeah, he’s a good friend of mine. We play poker on the weekends.

SAM: I’m not sure what’s harder to believe: that your poker face is that good, or that you’re actually telling the truth.

REZA: Anyway, the third suspect is pretty timely, considering Nikhil’s taste in music. Gavin leaked some of Hayley Rose’s, uh... illicit photos from her personal phone.

SAM: She’s the singer you were just listening to? How did Gavin get all this?

REZA: Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t legal.

Dave sighs, shaking his head in disgust.

DAVE: Typical. Thanks for the leads, though. Let us know if you can find any more on Tull, okay?

REZA: You got it.

Sam and Dave step toward the door, out of earshot of the analysts.

SAM: So what the hell does any of that tell us?

DAVE: I admit it’s not much to go on. What about the gun?

SAM: What about it?

DAVE: You seemed familiar with that specific model when Nikhil mentioned it. Do you know something?

SAM (muttering): Ugh. Of course. Goddamn detective.

Dave raises an eyebrow.

SAM: Nothing that would help the case. Look, Tull’s a killer for hire, right? So, first things first, we should look into the people he offended. Find out who hired him.

DAVE: That’s fair. It’s as good a place as any to start. Let’s go; I’ll drive.

SAM: Hope you drive fast. Every second we waste is another second Tull’s out there, a free man.

Sam heads for the door, but stops when she notices Dave hasn’t moved. He studies her, frowning.

SAM: ...What?

DAVE: Look. If we’re gonna be partners on this, I need you to level with me. Why are you really here?

SAM: It’s my job-

DAVE: Massey, I’m a detective. Half my job is knowing when someone’s lying. We do have Marshals in California, y’know. Something made you get on a plane and fly halfway across the country to nab Tull yourself. Something makes you look like you’re gonna punch a hole in the wall when you think about him.

Sam sighs in defeat.

SAM: Alright. Fine. It’s personal.

DAVE: There. Was that so hard?

SAM: Look. Tull killed someone close to me. I’d rather not say any more right now.

Dave nods and opens the door to head out of the lab.

DAVE: That’s fair. Listen, Massey: we’re gonna get this bastard. That much I can promise you.

SAM: Damn straight.

Next Scene: Good Cop, Bad Cop

CIU Tag List: @brightpinkpeppercorn @endlesshero1122 @bbaba-yagaa @acidsugar0

MW Tag List: @griselda1121

#most wanted the hollywood killer #choices most wanted #choices stories you play #most wanted rewrite #ciu project #choices interconnected universe #fanfic #reza fassihi #nikhil mantha #mirasol bautista #sam massey #dave reyes #john tull #error 404: es references not found #but wow are these three fun to write

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kaishi101 · 2 years ago

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I'll make a stand for you

(this is pinned because I want people to ask me for things)

Have you ever wondered what kind of Stand you or your OC would have (read below if you have no idea what a stand is)?

Well I'll make you one! Copy and paste the format below into asks or reblog this post!

Because I know that you people like to tip, I am clarifying here that for now I have no Patreon or Ko-fi or Flip Flop or whatever so don't spend an hour scrolling through my posts. If you really feel satisfied with what you got, blaze this post I guess? whatever.

Name or OC's Name:

Personality:

Taste in music (preferably list bands/songs and not genres, if the OC lives in a verse with different music, put your own taste in music):

Other favorites (movies, games, celebrities, etc.):

Anything else (prominent physical characteristics, preferred powers, preexisting powers, etc.):

What is a stand?

A stand is the physical manifestation of your fighting spirit. A character who loves cooking might develop a stand that can change into cooking ingredients. A person who has depression might develop a stand with the ability to amplify negative emotions.

Stands have the following rules (with listed exceptions that do not really break the rule but still)

A person can only have one stand (however if you have separate personalities (like Doppio and Diavolo for instance, if you want a specific example), each one can have a stand)

All damage done to a stand will reflect on its user, and vice versa (stands are often humanoid, or at least have human parts like arms and legs and a head. However, sometimes a stand can be an object, in which case this gets very blurry. In addition, colony stands are stands that have multiple bodies, and they share damage inflicted on the user, while the user is less affected if one is injured.)

Stands function with pre-existing powers

Only stand users (ppl with stands) can see other stands (if a stand is an object, people will see the object, but not anything abnormal the object might do. A stand that manifests as a necklace will look like a necklace, and if it's ability involves a spirit coming out and punching someone, the average person will not see the spirit.)

Example:

Name or OC's Name: pukicho

Personality: contrarian, absurdist

Taste in music: as far as we know his own

Other favorites (movies, games, celebrities, etc.): pukicho, pukicho, pukicho, pukicho, and your mom

Anything else (prominent physical characteristics, preferred powers, preexisting powers, etc.): the ability to terrorize turkish coastal towns

YOUR STAND IS...

God Complex

God Complex is a close-range stand with the ability to induce irony. By targeting a statement or circumstance within five meters, he can cause something ironic to happen. Even he cannot control this incredible ability. For instance, by targeting a news article on a newspaper he is holding that says "Irish people are happy this week," he might/ make King Charles immediately choke to death on a dildo.

He must be careful with this power, however. If he does not see it coming, it might affect him (which would be even more ironic).

Enjoy sending me your characters to make stands for!

#jojo #jjba #oc commission #making shit up

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norsecoyote · 6 years ago

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MCU Rewatch: Thor: The Dark World

Get ready for possibly my most contrarian take in the whole MCU: I legitimately love The Dark World.

I mean, yes, okay, Malekith is probably the single worst-realized villain in the entire shared universe, a character for whom “I want to destroy the universe... BECAUSE I’M EVIL!!!” is not even slightly an exaggeration, and who has a truly ridiculous power of Being Wherever It Is Convenient For The Plot Regardless Of Plausibility Or Established Rules About Interplanetary Travel. The Aether is also one of the all-time ill-defined McGuffins, although honestly post-Infinity War it’s significantly less so -- understanding that it’s the Reality Stone and seeing how Thanos uses it both makes its various effects in Dark World less arbitrary and does in fact explain why Malekith is after it.

Also, yes, Jane Foster continues to be a giant empty space where an actual character should be. I am bothered by that less in this movie than the first Thor because, this time around, she is given zero agency, and just kind of pushed around the game board by the other characters! Yes, it would probably have been better to just, you know, characterize her, but at the cost of some awkwardly regressive gender politics the film is at least able to make her stop being an active problem with the story’s believability (and it does some genuinely great things with Darcy to earn back some of its feminist cred).

So yeah, this movie is by no means perfect. But do you know what it is?

Funny as fuck.

Seriously, from the word Go, every single part of this movie (that isn’t one of Malekith’s solo scenes) is just immensely clever and entertaining. Even as it lays out a pretty unexciting plot, the dialogue sparkles, the actors’ timing is across-the-board excellent, and both the editing and sound design are working in concert to throw a constant stream of gags at you. The movie as a whole isn’t “shot like a comedy,” but there are absolutely sections of it that are, and they are just delightful -- we were laughing out loud most of the way through.

Special mention has to be given to the final battle, which is the funniest fucking Big Action Movie Fight Scene I have EVER SEEN. Seriously, watch this:

youtube

It starts out so hyperserious and dramatic, and then... the cuts, the foley work, the absurd sequence of events, the framing (those cars crashing into the hillside on Svartalfheim...), even the facial expressions are perfectly pitched to turn what is simultaneously a hugely dramatic confrontation into a genuine farce.

FUCK, it’s so good.

But aside from... well, actually no, as part of that cavalcade of comedy, the other reason I love this film despite all its flaws is that it finally fixes Loki. For as much as Ragnarok is a reboot of Thor, this movie reboots his brother, and actually gets him right. It throws away all the shitty, nonsensical “motivations” and “plots” he had before, gives him a new central drive and characterization that makes a shit-ton more sense, and finally lets him be funny.

Prior to this, if we ignore the Unbiased Reviews, Loki wanted to rule Earth, because... he’s mad about Odin concealing his true heritage, and now that he knows he wasn’t born heir to a king he wants to rule a random backwater planet because he deserves to as an Asgardian, which he isn’t, and so since he wants power he’s going to ally with an alien army who will somehow get way more power than him, and... yeah.

New Loki: he’s lost his adoptive mother, the one person he actually, genuinely believed cared about him as a person (even if he would never admit that), and in his grief he is desperate to earn the love of Asgard (and maybe even his idiot brother, too, whom he now sees not as an obstacle but a fun plaything). Yes, it absolutely sucks that they fridged Frigg (har!) to get there -- although to be fair, she absolutely did deliberately sacrifice herself to save her home -- but now Loki a) has a genuinely sympathetic motivation, even as it still pushes him to act like a dick at times, and b) is free to have fun, since he’s no longer trying to Screw Over Literally Everybody.

Hiddleston in this movie is goddamned hysterical -- you can feel Loki’s manic glee at being freed from prison (although the surprise of Chris Evans’ cameo is definitely a huge part of why that scene works so well). This movie finally gives us the Loki I didn’t realize I was waiting for through the first Thor and The Avengers, and it’s another one of those things where it’s just so good that it retroactively colored my memories of his first two films.

(side note: Anthony Hopkins does an incredible job playing Loki playing Odin; the way he mimics Hiddleston’s body language is so perfect and subtle that I realized “oh hey that’s Loki” even before I consciously noticed what the actor was doing to communicate it.)

So yeah. There’s really not much “thematic depth” to this movie to analyze, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t the single most fun movie to watch out of the whole MCU up to this point. Even now, it’s still only really surpassed for sheer joy by the two Guardians films and, of course, Ragnarok.

Just a pity about the plot, you know?

#mcu-rewatch

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artcanary · 7 years ago

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1-50

oh my god dude

im gonna put this under a cut bc this is a lot. this is a ride, have fun i guess

1. Your first OC ever?god. its got to be Super Kitty. when i was like … an incredibly small child I used to draw comic strips about this feline caped crusader, who was friends with everyone in the city, and the comics always involved him stopping an evil banana man from stealing money from the local bank. He was paid with donuts for his service to the city. i still remember how to draw him.

2. Do you have a personal favourite among your OCs?i’d get arrested if I didn’t answer this with Bronze, probably… but really, they’re very important to me

3. Have you ever adopted a character or gotten a character from someone else?man, i cant remember! i really dont think i have… P:

4. A character you rarely talk about?there’s loads of characters ive never even posted a single picture of on tumblr, i wouldnt even know where to start asdf

5. If you could make only one of your OCs popular/known, who would it be? bronze is the easy answer, but… i guess that could also go to Servant or Westrin. Servant has a comic project in the works that basically stars him, sort of a series of one-shots about the things he’s experienced, i feel like that would be a good thing to take off and run with. Westrin’s just fun as hell, i love the guy.

6. Two OCs of yours that look alike despite not being related?real talk now… there’s at least five different characters that i refer to as a whole as “bronze-tangential”, who started out as, “what would bronze be like if they were in this world?” and then becoming their own thing within said world because i just get stupid attached

its an epidemic

7. Are your OCs part of any story or stories?nearly all of them, actually. that’s the main reason i make characters, after all! too many to really go into specifics here, again P:

8. Do you RP as any of your OCs? If you do, introduce one of your RP OCs here!not often, but i think Bronze and Westrin are the most common ones. unless playing a character in dnd, or running an npc in dnd counts… then a whole lot more hahaha

9. Would you ever be willing to give any of your OCs to someone else?it depends on the circumstances. i don’t really like the idea, though.

10. Introduce an OC with a complicated design? Westrin’s old getup is a pain to draw, and there was one other design i did that I cant find anywhere… whichever way, i dont often tend to draw super complicated things often

a couple fakemon ive designed though… heheh those can get pretty finicky

11. Is there any OC of yours you could describe as a “sunshine”? hmmmmmmmm my immediate thought was Eric Silverdale from a comic i was working on a few years ago. hes a darling, i want him to be my friend irl

12. Name an OC that isn’t yours but who you like a lothow could you do this to me i love each and every one of all my friends ocs GOD the first one who comes to mind is @d20-official‘s Smith, whos Bronze’s friend… everyone in that DND party actually

13. Do you have any troublemaker OCs? Rated on a scale from “harmless” to “honestly somewhat frightening”: -Baromet (charming and quite friendly but definitely a kleptomaniac),-Westrin (demigod of bards and travelers), -XEN09 (a nonsense hacker), -Conny (needlessly contrarian and dumb as HELL), -Enza Colie (long fucking story but hes a good-for-nothing), -Hemlocke (mad scientist, chaotic evil), -Iris (AI and hacker, VERY bad), -The Terminus (glitch-in-the-matrix demon, chaotic evil), -and Sydd (the Queen of the Faeries, hopefully the danger there needs no explaining :’D)

14. Introduce an OC with a tragic backstory Mmm… there’s a few of them, most obviously Lent (whose background I did a short comic about). Basically his entire town got eaten by ghosts and turned into zombies, he only barely survived with a sliver of his soul left.

15. Do you like to talk about your OCs with other people?yes, i often discuss storylines and such with friends

16. Which one of your OCs would be the best at biology (school subject)? Probably Bronze’s dad! I don’t talk about him much, but his name’s Devon Reed, and he was a biotech developer specialising in android design.

I often describe him as being something of a reverse Arthur Weasley - a very fatherly scientist fascinated to the moon and back with the concept of magic.

17. Any OC OTPs? having trouble thinking of a lot of them right now, but there’s Eric + Lent & Naiadine + Tailias from Emerald Sigil, Avken + Baromet from my space campaign world, Sydd + Wyvv from my unnamed campaign world, and I’ve been considering Westrin + Servant as an interesting dynamic in Servant’s story

18. Any OC crackships? My character Bismuth and @autistictimeknight‘s oc Eros. Theyre so fucking in love, I love it. Its been awhile but I do still think about them sometimes.

As I recall, Eros is an empath, she can read other people’s emotions. But Bismuth is a robot, and Eros can’t read her. Because of this Eros can let go of her fear of unintentionally manipulating the emotions of her date, which would hold her back from most other relationships.

19. Introduce an OC that means a lot to you (and explain why)Hey, meet Bronze! I definitely do not talk about them every five minutes, why would you say that.

Bronze was with me through two of the hardest years of my life so far, and being a DND character they grew with me, both as a fighter and as a person. They were non-binary before I started using those pronouns, they were the first character or person or anything who I fought someone about using the right pronouns for, they make a great icebreaker for if I want to see how someone reacts to non-binary pronouns …

One funny anecdote about Bronze is that when I first made them, their “gimmick” was that they would sometimes glitch out and mess up their speech, mostly because I wanted an excuse not to engage in the roleplaying (which I was very bad at). The interesting thing is that as I got better at interacting with the group, we both grew out of needing it very quickly.

I’m very proud of Bronze.

20. Do any of your OCs sing? If they sing, care to share more details (headcanon voice, what kind of songs they like etc)?Westrin is a bard! His singing voice sounds like Bill Wurtz and these are his theme songs.

21. Your most artistic OCProbably Westrin again, he writes a lot of songs… and Hallux is a game designer?

22. Is there any OC of yours people tend to mischaracterize? If yes, how? I honestly dont know… no-one talks to me about them, haha!

people use all manner of pronouns for bronze, though.

23. Introduce OC that has changed from your first idea concerning what the character would be like?I’m gonna go with Enza for this one. Enza Colie was originally written entirely because I wanted an antagonist for a short starring his sister, Jane Colie. But the more I fleshed out his reasonings for acting how he did and explored his character, the more I realised he’d make an even more interesting character if allowed to have a redemption arc, too.

I just want to state for the record that I was very reluctant to the idea, and he basically dragged his way out of the villain pit entirely of his own accord. I am dubiously proud of him, and also a bit scared.

24. If you could meet one OC of yours, who would it be and why?Probably either Eric (Big Man, Best Friend), Crocus (Mother figure), Reed (Father Figure), Westrin (hed just make a good friend u kno??), or Bismuth (she makes good conversation!)

25. The OC that resembles you the most (same hobby, height, shared like/dislike for something etc?)probably the homestuck fan-troll Hallux, but that’s mostly because they were based on a troll-sona I made awhile ago. They’re a hope/prospit game designer who is small and full of rage and love

oh, and there’s dave! dave’s a superhero speedster, existing in a modern-day superhero version of seattle. theyre idiot, just like me,

26. Have you ever had to change your OC’s design or something else about them against your will? this is an interesting one… i don’t think ive ever had something Bad in a design ive done called to my attention by someone, but I did create my character Servant at around the same time I was first really expanding the diversity of my casts. (since i don’t talk about him often, a little context: he’s a magic spirit creature bound to human form to serve the royal family of the land and follow their orders.)

somehow, younger-and-more-stupid me managed to have the revelation that making this “eternal slave” character literally anything other than a white man, especially as a white author, would be Pretty Not Good. im … thats really, really not something i should pat myself on the back for, but i do consider it one of the biggest bullets dodged in my artistic career so far that i realised that not all representation is good representation so quickly, before i could make that incredibly, incurably stupid mistake.

after that, trying to make sure my characters and their presentations don’t harm anyone pretty much has become a paranoia. i don’t seem to have stepped on any toes yet, but when it inevitably happens, please let me know - i didnt know, and i want to fix it!

27. Any OCs that were inspired by a certain song? None that I can think of, actually! I don’t really do that often.

28. Your most dangerous OC? god damn it i have no idea!!! is it the terminus? glitch in the matrix god of chaos motherfucker?is it sarle? terrifying calculating scientist with the power of the soul at her fingertips ??? is it ares??? is it athena????? is it petra?????? the gatekeeper????

… actually, the gatekeeper might be it, if “dangerous” just refers to “the amount of raw power it can wield”. the Gatekeeper is a titanic entity that exists in interdimensional multiverse space, and its implied to have the ability to create and destroy entire universe bubbles at will. for what cosmic purpose, no-one knows.

at a more personal scale, though, literally all of the aforementioned characters are pretty bad to run into too.

29. Which one of your OCs would go investigate an abandoned house at night without telling anyone they’re going?god. Mina or Tawn. Tawn is the Indiana Jonesy type and probably dumb enough, but also competent enough not to get into too much trouble there. Mina would probably drag her friends along.

30. Which one of your OCs would most likely have a secret stuffed animal collection? XEN09. No-one knows, because no-one knows xir personal identity. Xe absolutely does, though. It’s less of a secret if you know xir in person, but good luck finding out about it otherwise.

31. Pick one OC of yours and explain what their tumblr blog would be like (what they reblog, layout, anything really)dave just reblogs memes all the time tbh. they like to keep tabs on the ridiculous superhero news going on, and they show human jokes and cat videos to their alien gf. they dont really post or add to posts, but they talk in tags a lot.

32. Which one of your OCs would be the most suitable horror game protagonist and why? i want to say tawn because i literally just realised ive been imagining their voice as sounding like luigi this entire fucking time and i never realised until this exact instant

33. Your shyest OC?probably baromet. they prefer to keep to themself in their hideout, with their collection of shiny things. they don’t really enjoy trying to communicate much, mostly because they expect to get yelled at.

34. Do you have any twin characters?Yes! At least two sets;

- Crocus and Sarle. (x) (x) They don’t exactly have a very well-developed relationship, but they are both quite important to the plot of my campaign world, and they are both very interesting. Crocus is a motherly figure who just exudes friendliness, while Sarle is .. very much not that, a researcher studying very gruesome things and pushing the boundaries of reality.

- Jane and Enza Colie. I haven’t talked a whole lot about either of them here, but I’d rather leave their story to do the talking whenever I get around to it. Essentially, the both of them were intended to do the dirty work for their crime boss family, but Jane ditched to study medicine. Most of the conflict between the two of them comes out of Enza not understanding why she made the choice she did, and coming to understand how he’s been manipulated.

35. Any sibling characters? I can’t really think of any off the top of my head, I should … I should really work on that.

I can talk about Westrin, though. Westrin (a demigod of many things, but namely bards, travel, travelers, and people who are lost) often becomes close friends with mortals, sometimes practically adopting them. These people who consider him family, and people who have received his blessing, are able to use his surname, Brilanta, as their own if they choose. So I guess all of the Brilantas are siblings, at least in spirit.

Oh, and XEN09 has like, seven siblings. Xe is the second-oldest, and least remarkable.

36. Do you have OC pairs where the other part belongs to someone else (siblings, lovers, friends etc)? I already talked about Eros and Bismuth up there a ways in question 18, but I’ll talk about another relationship here. @autistictimeknight‘s character, Nova the Alchemist, is mentor and adopted parental figure to my character Munna. Munna … Munna isn’t a very good apprentice. She tries very hard.

37. Introduce an OC who is not quite human That’s most of them, I’m not quite sure what to say here. Bronze is an android? Bronze again? Westrin? All the aliens ??

38. Which one of your OCs would be the best dancer? man. uh. westrin or jean. or perhaps valencia.

39. Introduce any character you want ??? uhhhHHHhhHHH Lord Brillium is the reigning deity of the Cloud Kingdoms in the other campaign setting I’m working on. They represent light and the quest for knowledge, and spend most of their days in the Cathedral Observatory watching the stars.

40. Any fond memories linked to your characters? Feel free to share!one time bronze flew a hover-bike through the stained glass window in a cathedral blaring all star by smash mouth on their iguana

also one time bronze rickrolled a rakshasa demon and then pulled updog on it like, two minutes later

another time bronze scared off an entire army by pretending to be an automated security system

41. Has anyone drawn fanart of your OCs? If yes, maybe show a picture or two here (remember sources & permissions!)ive got a whole little folder on here from all you blessed people !!!! right now ive got a drawing quinn did of one o fmy characters as my lockscreen

but i think the one i’ll really never ever get over is this piece of Jane, by @rabendraws / @owoltron:

(i bet you thought i forgot about this, dude. dude. think again.)

42. Which one of your OCs would be the most interested in Greek gods? this is kind of a weird question, m, I feel like Bismuth would find learning about the mythos utterly fascinating, as would Tawn.

43. Do you have any certain type when you create your OCs? Do you tend to favour some certain traits or looks? It’s time to confesshaha. uh. i might.

aside from the entire “bronze-tangential characters” thing i mentioned awhile back, I tend to really like designing characters with hair color lighter than their skin color. it just looks so cool man. i love drawing freckles but dont put them on enough characters. i like really curly hair, but also really long and flowy hair. i like drawing triangular body types, and pointy/prominent noses.

44. Something you like about your OCs in generaluhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is a really vague question. m. m.

45. A character you no longer use?there’s old versions of characters, but a lot of my older ones have been somehow repurposed. I guess there’s Turien, my first-ever DND character, who’s just kind of sitting dead now. Haven’t really done anything with him other than a pretty recent tangential character.

46. Has anyone ever told you that you treat your OCs badly?Not that I can think of.

47. Has anyone ever (friendly) claimed any of your OCs as their child? Im certain it’s happened, but I can’t remember any specific instances.

48. OC who is a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world, too pureSpring. spring knows nothing of th dangers of the world who is letting them into fights someon eneeds to stop this

(spring roll, hehe.)

49. Which one of your OCs would most likely enjoy memesim not sure what this question is asking since many of my ocs actively enjoy memes including but not limited to westrin, dave, bronze, xen09, iris, and doctor archersen

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you wanti think. i think im going to pass on this one. i gave you the good old oc talk. your damn turn, yall:

if you have any questions about any of these guys feel free to shoot one at me!

thats all from me im tired and its one am. techskylander you absolute madman

#yetanotherOCmeme #WHY #personal

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