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sketching-shark · 3 years ago

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LMK fandom: Oh, what do we do about this guy who has nothing but hurt Xiaotian, tried to replace Sun Wukong and his crew, hurt Tripitaka and ordered servants to cannibalize a monkey? Oh I know! We’ll turn him into our little meow meow~ he’s so innocent and Sun Wukong is obviously the villain!

What doesn’t help is this idea is perpetuated by multiple fan fic writers and artists for some reason. Especially some aus they make that turn SWK into a bastard for the sake of the story rather than considering cultural context and thinking they should be respectful.

And almost everyone lets them get away with it just because the art or fanfic is good and they get so popular that no one can point what is actually wrong without feeling like they’re going to get attacked.

I'm starting to feel like my blog is the one anons go to specifically to vent their frustrations about the Six Eared Macaque in his lego monkey show form & the associated fandom lmao. But I guess this makes sense, as I’ve had fun quasi-dragging him before & will in fact use this anon submission as an opportunity to have my own, to put it academically, bitch fest about not just this fandom's favorite protagonist-traumatizing meow meow, but about the way villains are often treated in not just fanon, but increasingly in canon works as well. But same policy as with the last anon; I'll post my opinions below the cut, and as fandoms love to say, don’t like don't read if you don't want to see me dunking on the six eared simian & common fandom tendencies towards villains.

Oh man I would say where would you even begin with this but anon you’ve pretty much started yourself with my main gripe with a lot of ways that the Six-Eared Macaque is portrayed in fandom; there seems to be this unspoken agreement that his acts of violence towards Sun Wukong, Qi Xioatian, and Qi Xioatian’s loved ones are either to be framed as somewhat or totally justified, to be immediately forgiven/excused, or to simply & completely be ignored. Like friends maybe this is just me not seeing the proper posts but while the fandom is inundated with art and fanfics of Macaque as a generally decent individual & a true member of team good guy, I have yet to see one person address the fact that this monkey literally kidnapped & mind-controlled Xiaotian’s best friend and father figures & forced them to brutalize Xiaotian while ol’ Six Ear looked on and laughed (X_X). Like this kind of fandom villain treatment is definitely not something that’s solely at work for Monkie Kid, but it is kind of nutty how fandoms will swing between yelling that people should be allowed to like villains without even mild critique, and then will just flat-out not address the villainous behavior, and will even bend over backwards to frame even characters who committed genocide as just poor innocent widdle victims who need a hug. At its worst, I’ve even seen tons of people in a fandom get really angry at other people who don’t like a villain, and will even start accusing those people of hating real-life mentally disabled or abused individuals all because they don’t like the fandom’s favorite literal war criminal. The Monkie Kid fandom is FAR more chill & better than a lot of other fandoms I’ve come across in that regard, but that is an exceedingly low bar, & the tendency to woobify certain kinds of villains-- as with Macaque and the extreme emphasis on his bad boy/sad boy thing--is very much at work.

I’ve also talked before about a kind of monoculturalization of certain character interpretations and story beats in fandoms, and one of the more popular ones that seems to be applied to Macaque a lot is the “hero actually bad, villain actually good” cliche, as observable from the general fandom assumption that Mr. Six-Ears he wasn’t even slightly lying or remembering things through a rose-tinted or skewed lens when he gave his version of his and Sun Wukong’s past. Like at this point it seems the possibility that people WILL NOT even consider is that Sun Wukong never did & still doesn't care that much about the Six Eared Macaque (in JTTW they weren’t sworn brothers & in Monkie Kid the only thing the monkey king really said to Macaque before attacking him was a pretty contemptuous "Aren't you ever going to get sick of living under my shadow?," & responds to his "beloved friend" getting blown up with "You did good, bud" to Qi Xiaotian, who did the exploding), or that their original fight may in fact have mostly been instigated by Macaque. After all, to repeat what this anon summarized & what I've said before about their original JTTW context (& in an example of the things that do feel like it's often lost in translation) is that the Six Ear Macaque was a villain not just because he beat up the Tang Monk, but because he wanted to take over Sun Wukong's entire life and identity so he could have all that glory, prestige, and power for himself. To quote the macaque himself from the Anthony C. Yu translation, "I struck the T'ang monk and I took the luggage...precisely because I want to go to the West all by myself to ask Buddha for the scriptures. When I deliver them to the Land of the East, it will be my success and no one else's. Those people of the South Jambudvipa Continent will honor me then as their patriarch and my fame will last for all posterity." And in order to do this, the Six Eared Macaque had apparently made Sun Wukong's "little ones," his monkey family, his captives through either trickery or force, and gotten a number of them to take on the appearance of Tang Sanzang and the other pilgrims. It's also made clear that in very direct contrast to Sun Wukong, he doesn't care about these monkeys beyond how they might serve him. In fact, after Sha Wujing kills the monkey posing as him the Six Eared Macaque not only all but immediately replaces him with another, but also "told his little ones to have the dead monkey skinned. Then his meat was taken to be fried and served as food along with coconut and grape wines." So this monkey is not only willing to risk the lives of a lot of other monkeys for his own personal benefit, but is also a literal cannibal. And yes yes, I know a lot of people have argued that Monkie Kid shouldn't be considered a direct sequel to JTTW & that's fair enough (for example, Sun Wukong probably shouldn't be smashing anyone into a meat patty in a children's cartoon lol). And of course, it needs to be noted that there are a buttload of really out there & really cursed pieces of media based on JTTW & that were created in China. Yet the above description is the oft-ignored in the west original facet of the Six Eared Macaque's character. And it is this selfishness, entitlement, and treatment of other individuals as tools for his own self-serving ends that is, from where I’m standing, still very much present in Monkie Kid. Like besides repeatedly going out of his way to physically and psychologically traumatize Xioatian, with the last episode Macaque seemed to be going right back to his manipulative ways. I’ve seen people frame their last conversation as Macaque softening to Xioatian a little bit, but personally that read a lot more like that common tactic among abusers where even after they’ve hurt you they’ll dangle something you want or need over your head (in Macaque’s case, the promise of desperately needed training and information about a serious looming threat), with the implication that you’ll only get it if you do what they want you to, such as, in this case, Xioatian going back to Macaque as his student even after having been so terribly hurt by this monkey, which would give Macaque power over Xiaotian and probably Sun Wukong as a result. And it is this violence and manipulation that it seems the fandom at large has tacitly decided shouldn’t even be addressed, instead leaning more towards a (and this is an exaggeration) “Six-Eared Macaque my poor meow meow Sun Wukong has always been bad & has always been wrong about literally everything” reading.

And while it is the case that I am not Chinese and feel that as such it would be best left to someone who actually comes from that background to provide more context into how common interpretations of the Six Eared Macaque from China may clash really badly with the stuff the western fandom creates, it also must be noted that, as much as we all want to have fun in fandom & in spite of all the out-there versions of JTTW from China, we westerners should recognize that there is a very long and very ugly history of western countries stripping other cultures’ important religious and literary works for parts & mashing them into their own thing while implying or even insisting that what they present provides a true understanding of the original piece. And while I trust most individuals in regards to Monkie Kid are able to step back and think “this is a lego cartoon and not a set guide for how I should understand JTTW” (especially given the insistence that JTTW and Monkie Kid should be considered there own separate works) there does nevertheless seem to be something of a tendency to take the conclusions people come to, for example, about Sun Wukong’s characteristic in his lego form & then assume that’s just reflective to Sun Wukong as a totality. I imagine a good portion of this is due to people not reading JTTW & especially to not having easy access to solid information or answers about JTTW’s many different facets (like geez awhile ago I was trying to get a clear answer on what is considered the most accurate translation of the names of Sun Wukong’s six sworn brothers & got like 5 different responses lmao), but that tendency to take a western fandom interpretation & run with it instead of doing any background research or questioning said interpretation is still very much at play. As such, & as made prominent in the way people have been interpreting the dynamic between Sun Wukong and the Six Eared Macaque in the lego monkey show, tbh it does seem kind of shitty for western creators & audience to sometimes go really out of their way to ignore all of this original cultural & narrative context for the sake of Angst (TM) in Macaque's favor, demonizing Sun Wukong, and shipping the monkey king with his evil twin (X_X).

And speaking of which, even beyond the potential inherent creepiness & revulsion that can be inspired by this specific ship given common interpretations of the og classic's original meaning (again, it's my understanding, given both summaries of translated Chinese academic texts I've been kindly provided with, my own reading of the Anthony C. Yu translation of JTTW, & vents from a number of Chinese people I've seen on this site, that the Six-Eared Macaque is commonly interpreted in China as having originated from Sun Wukong himself as a living embodiment of his worst traits, hence why only Buddha can tell the difference between them & why the monkey king is much more slow to violence after he kills the macaque), I'd argue that in the face of all the uwu poor widdle meow meow portrayals lego show Macaque is, especially if you include JTTW's events, still in the role of “Sun Wukong but worse” as he is very much a violent & selfish creep. Like he was basically running around in JTTW wearing a Sun Wukong fursuit, but there he had the sole reason of wanting to replace Sun Wukong wholesale so he could have all the good things in the monkey king's life without actually having to work as hard for them. But if you combine that with Macaque now claiming that he used to be best friend with Sun Wukong in his pre-journey days (something that's made funny from a JTTW context given that that status actually belongs to the Demon Bull King lol), his original violence has now blown into this centuries long and really unhealthy obsession with the monkey king. Like he's apparently gone from wanting to literally be Sun Wukong to being so obsessed with getting revenge on Sun Wukong that he's got basically nothing else going on in his life. Like he's only appeared in two episodes but...does he have any friends? Any family? A career or even a hobby that DOESN'T center the monkey king? Anything at all outside of his "get revenge on and/or kill Sun Wukong/use his successor as my personal punching bag” thing? Like dude! That is extremely creepy and extremely bad for everyone all around! As I’ve said before, this seeming refusal to see beyond the past or to do something that doesn’t involve Sun Wukong in some capacity is a trait that makes Macaque an interesting and somewhat tragic villain--he even seems to be working as Sun Wukong’s reflection in a mirror darkly, with lego show Sun Wukong pretty clearly not being able to heal from his own past which is hinted to be defined by one loss after another, and with Monkie Kid even kind of having these two characters somewhat follow their JTTW characterizations in that in the latter half of the journey Sun Wukong often gets sad & starts crying in the face of what seems insurmountable odds (& Monkie Kid Sun Wukong does seem to be hiding some serious depression behind a cheerful facade), whereas the Six-Eared Macaque retains a worse version of Sun Wukong’s pre-journey characteristic of getting pissed and lashing out if things don’t go his way--but it’s also what would make any current friendship or romantic relationship between these monkeys horrific. Although to be fair even the fandom seems to recognize this in an unconscious way, in that a lot of the art & fanfic seems to swing erratically between them kissing & screaming at each other in yet another example of bog-standard fandom adulation of romanticized toxic relationships lol.

At the end of the day, of course, this is nothing new. You'll find versions of this dynamic across a ton of fandoms and now even canonical work. And as such, I can only look at this kind of popularized relationship dynamic with a kind of resigned weariness whenever it pops up, & my frustrated question with the popularity of this kind of pairing is the exact same one that I have for a multitude of blatantly toxic villain/hero ships, given common fandom discourse & the tendency to either ignore or justify the villain's actions & demonize the hero: if you're THAT convinced that everything is the hero's fault, if you believe THAT much that the hero is the one in the wrong for the villain's pain and their subsequent actions, then why are you so set on them not only becoming a romantic pair, but framing this get-together as a good thing? Like I know we contain multitudes but that's waaay too many contradictions for me to wrap my head around. And it definitely doesn’t help that one branch of underlying reasoning behind this kind of pairing seems to be the ever-present “you break it, you fix it” mentality, where the assumption is that if you’re in a failing, abusive, and/or generally toxic relationship (platonically or romantically), if you put in enough time and effort & attempts to compromise, you’ll be able to restore/have the relationship you dreamed of, even with someone who hurt you really badly. And this assumption isn’t limited to fandom: I’d even argue that it’s everywhere in the culture, hence why a lot of people feel like they “failed” if they have to get a divorce or make the choice to leave an unhealthy friendship. Personally, I feel like people could really benefit from more stories about how it is not only the case that the people you hurt don’t owe you their forgiveness & you can still become a better and happier person without the one you hurt in your life, & that while it can be really hard it can also be a good thing to leave a relationship, even if it’s one that once meant a lot to you.

But in all honestly, from my own perspective this kind of pairing is starting to read far less like enemies to lovers and far more like a horrible fantasy where you can pull whatever shit you want, even on the people you "love," & never be held accountable for your terrible behavior or even have to consider that maybe you were in the wrong. It's another facet that makes me larf every time I see people insist that fandom is an inherently "transformative" or "progressive" form of storytelling like friends you are literally just taking status quo toxic monogamy & rebranding it as somehow beneficial & romantic (X_X).

But as to anon’s last frustration, it is hard to know what is the appropriate response with this kind of thing...like for my own part I’m keeping my frustrations to my blog & now increasingly to posts that you would have to click on the “read more” button to see what I have to say, but I totally get the hesitation to give even a mild critique to big names in a fandom. Like I've now seen it happen repeatedly where someone who has a big name in a fandom will make something that's kind of shitty for one reason or another, someone will message them with some version of "hey, that's kind of shitty, you shouldn't do that," and the typical response is either to blatantly ignore the issue completely, or more popularly to make a giant crying circus that seems deliberately geared towards stoking emotions on both sides of the, for example, fiction does/doesn't affect reality issue so that something that didn't even have to be that big a deal gets blown out of all proportion, with the big name often framing what often started out as a very mild critique into a long crying jag about how the initial response to their kind of shitty thing was so mean/cruel and they're just a poor innocent & that YOU'RE the true racist/sexist/bigot etc. if you don't agree with their opinion. It must of course be noted that there have also been numerous instances of people taking it too far the other way & sending not just big names but smaller creators literal deaths threats over stuff like innocuous ships which like holy hell bells people that’s a horrible thing to do. But for the big names at least, the end result of all this fighting is usually that once the dust has settled they have more attention/fame/money/power in the fandom than before, and with anyone who might have a problem with their stuff feeling afraid to voice their opinion lest they be swarmed by that person's fans. In that way fandom does often seem to increasingly be geared towards presenting an “official” fandom perspective about various facets of a piece of media instead of allowing for a multitude of interpretations, and with criticism, no matter its shape or form or how genuinely warranted it may be, being hounded out of existence. I feel like a lot of this could be made less bad if there wasn’t this constant assumption & even drive to think that a different interpretation of or criticism of your favorite work of fiction or your fanwork isn’t a direct claim that you are a thoroughly loathsome individual (& maybe also if people cultivated an enjoyment of learning things about important works from a culture outside their own, even if what you learn clashes with your own initial understandings), but I guess we’ll see if that ever happens.

So these are my general thinks about the Six Eared Macaque’s current fandom meow meow status & some of my bigger gripes with fandom tendencies as a whole. I stand by my idea that the most interesting & beneficial route for Macaque moving forward would be a kind of “redemption without forgiveness from the ones you hurt” arc--as I think was done pretty excellently with the character Grace in Infinity Train--and if for no other reason than gosh dern this monkey really needs to cultivate some sort of identity beyond his “Sun Wukong but worse” persona.

#lmk macaque #monkie kid macaque #6 eared macaque #monkie kid #lmk sun wukong #qi xiaotian #lmk monkey king #sun wukong #monkey king #journey to the west #jttw #fandom criticism #lmk

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 4 years ago

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So I watched 10.09 recently, and it has that part where Dean tells a story about him basically being almost roofied as a teen, but somehow it ends up framed as the funny joke and yet another proof that John "did what he could", and I kind of hate this? And it's the same episode in which MoC!Dean killed guys that kidnapped and tried to rape Claire, and you'd think writers would've addressed the parallels and acknowledge that Dean could've been triggered by this situation. 1/2

2/2 But in the end, it's never addressed, and the whole situation is framed as the proof that Dean is evil now. And I'm not even sure what I am trying to say, but with that being the show's approach back in s10, I'm not surprised about the finale anymore. Guess we should've known?

That’s an excellent angle to look at the issue because the Mark of Cain arc is a clear example of how people with different experiences will see the same thing in wildly different ways. There’s this phase of season 10 where everyone is like “oh no Dean is Getting Worse” and when you look at what Dean is doing... you actually go “...good for him”.

Let’s give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. It’s not “the writers” in this case, it’s Dabb. Plenty of other writers don’t fall into this John apologism thing. Just look at how the episode before Lebanon, written by Buckner and Ross Leming, says that sometimes John would temporarily kick Dean out because he was “pissed at him” despite Dean always taking his side to mantain the peace. It almost seems like a statement to sprinkle some salt given what Dabb does in Lebanon, you know? Maybe not, but there is a tension between “John was shitty” writers and “John did his best” writers.

In hindsight, we gave Dabb too much of the benefit of the doubt. We were like, weeell, that’s supposed to be way the characters perceive the truth, which is distorted by the trauma... But now it’s obvious that he truly believed in the John-did-his-best version. He brought him back and got Mary back with him. No matter what happened to the finale, the network didn’t print those pictures of John and Mary to hang on Sam’s wall. He never took Dean’s abuse seriously and it shows.

The “anedocte” of Dean getting drugged and “saved” by John from being raped is obviously there to parallel him with Claire. Which works! It’s so weird because it’s like. You are soooo close to getting the point. Younger Dean was assaulted just like this teenage girl is assaulted and Dean saves her... but apparently John yelling at those people is a good way of dealing with the issue, while murdering child traffickers is an overraction thus bad.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? That Dean’s murder spree is framed as an overreaction. Sam is like “tell me you had to do this! tell me it was you or them!” - the answer to which (by the narrative) is obviously no, it wasn’t self defense, he just killed them because he could. He just murdered those men for no reason except he felt like being murdery. And the audience is supposed to be like “oh no! Dean is murdery for no reason except for murderiness! That’s bad!”.

But it’s a power fantasy, isn’t it? Going on a murder spree on rapists and traffickers. I bet any people who’s been violated like that has fantasized of doing the exact thing Dean does here. Killing them all.

Dean had the physical strength and skill to kill them all, why shouldn’t he kill them? (I mean, in real life I’m against private justice because I’m a fan of the state of law, but the Supernatural universe obviously works on different principles than the state of law. Again, it’s a fictional narrative that plays out as a fantasy for the audience, so.)

So what was Dabb’s intention? I’m afraid it’s the worst one. “John Winchester’s not going to win any Number One Dad awards, you know? But, you know, damn if he wasn’t there when we needed him”. What the fuck, Dabb? It’s been established since season 1 that John WASN’T there when they needed him. Which... I’m afraid... leads us to the Cas-Claire plot in the episode. Cas has fucked off with Jimmy’s body leaving Claire on her own. Parallels how John wasn’t going to win wny Number One Dad awards. But! Cas is there when Claire Really Needs Him i.e. when she’s about to be raped by older men. Parallels how John was there when Dean Really Needed Him i.e. when he was about to be raped by older men.

I think the point is to say, Cas kinda sucked because he took Claire’s dad away but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Claire because he gets there in time to prevent her from being raped. Just like (ew) John kinda sucked as a father because hunting and stuff, but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Dean because he got there in time to prevent him from being raped.

It’s pretty yucky. Literally NOBODY wanted a parallel between Cas and John. But he made one. And he made one to absolve Cas from the guilt he carried for what he did to Claire (Claire’s mother is a mother so who fucking cares about her. She’s basically a Blurry Wife(TM), she’s only a tool for Claire’s arc, Cas apparently only cares about the harm he did the child, not the wife, for some reason.) and to absolve Cas from his guilt it absolves John too. Don’t worry, being a parent is hard. You often screw up. But you can *looks at smudged writing on hand* prevent the kid from being raped by predatory adults and everything’s fine now.

It’s not really important if the child suffered hunger or whatever, the only important thing is that they don’t get raped, because that’s bad, everything else is just a little detail.

All Dabb got with that scene was to paint Sam as extremely unsympathetic because he’s no longer a child, he’s a full adult now and still thinks of that episode at the CBGB as a funny story. That’s not a good look. It almost makes you think that the writer himself saw it as a funny story. Lol teenage boy biting more than he can chew. But then why the Claire parallel? The Claire scene onviously is not supposed to be anything but horrific. I'll give Dabb the benefit of the doubt on this specific thing.

It’s weird, yes, because Dabb wrote Dark Side of the Moon where he establishes that John was a bad husband/father even before tragedy hit the family. But apparently that’s the “not going to win any Number One Dad awards” part, I suppose? I guess he intended to write John as this flawed, ~complex~ figure who was imperfect but still brave and whatever blah blah did his best blah blah. I’m all for flawed complicated characters but a horrible father is a horrible father. A rose by any other name... parental abuse is still parental abuse even if the poor guy was complicated and traumatized and did what he thought he had to do to prepare his sons for a violent world.

Also, the story frames Dean’s escapade as a teenager being stupid. “You know what he got for that? Me whining about how much he embarrassed me. Me telling him that I hated him. But then he stopped and turned around looked at me and said, Son, you don’t like me? That’s fine. It’s not my job to be liked.” “It’s my job to raise you right.” This seems straight from a novel about teenagers doing something stupid that they’re too young to realize that their parents are right to be against them doing. But this isn’t just... a parent walking into a bar to stop their child to drink alcohol. Dean literally describes feeling sick from something that was inside the alcohol.

Sure, it makes sense that he’d lash out to John because of the shame and shock. But the scene is... off. Are we supposed to see this as a typical teenage mistake? Are we supposed to read it as something as horrific as what happened to Claire, literally sold into rape? Or, worse, are we supposed to see what happened to Claire as a teenage mistake, ah silly teenager, blindly trusting shady people, no wonder you end up in a situation where you’d get raped if a father figure didn’t sweep in and save you. I hope that wasn’t the intent.

To get back to Dean’s Mark-of-Cain violence, the writers clearly didn’t intend it to come from the Darkness up to a certain point. It was supposed to an arc about your own inner darkness (consider the Charlie episode, a couple episodes later). Then they came up with the idea of The(TM) Darkness, the suppressed cosmic feminine. While it caused a bit of dissonance in the subtext, it doesn’t really change Dean’s narrative, because his inner darkness is the trauma, and his trauma is inherebtly tied to the “feminine” i.e. the parts of him that don’t fit seamlessly into the scheme of toxic masculinity values. That the violence that comes from the Mark of Cain comes from Dean himself and that’s it, or is connected to the Darkness, it doesn’t change what it means for Dean. Dean and Amara have parallel histories, the feminine principle locked away, the trauma the anger stems from.

In 10x09 we’re still in the Before The (TM) Darkness era, before the suppressed cosmic feminine. The Mark of Cain arc is still about... well, Cain. But the shift is the signal that someone looked at Dean’s arc and said... you know what? “Lucifer gave me this curse so now I’m demonic and murdery” is meh. “Toxic masculinity suppresses the feminine and it creates trauma which rage and violence comes from” is more interesting. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was a good idea, and surely the idea came from seeing how Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding.

Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding in a certain way, in fact, because of a pretty simple reason. There’s a fundamental tension in Dean’s MoC arc. We want him to go murdery, but it’s also our main character, so we don’t want him to do really horrible things because he still needs to be relatable. The audience cannot hate him, so he must NOT do something entirely unforgivable. He still needs to be somewhat relatable, even when demonic or demonic-adjacent.

So he goes on a murder spree... but it’s rapists and child traffickers. He’s demon, but he kills a misogynistic dude that wanted his wife dead for cheating on him. He’s a demon, but beats up dudes that harass women. He does a slaughter, but they’re nazi. He’s off the deep end, but works a case of kidnapped and abused young women...

Speaking of which. 10x23, written by Jeremy Carver. Dean works a case where a girl was killed while dressed scantily and Dean makes some slut-shaming remarks, and we’re supposed to think “whoa Dean, that’s bad”. But later he confronts the girl’s father and what does he say?

I’m just doing my job, Mr. McKinley.

By suggesting my daughter was a slut?

I’ll admit that thought crossed my mind. Then I came here, and I smelled the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervade this home.

You shut your face right now.

And you know what? I don’t blame Rose anymore. No wonder she put on that skank outfit and went out there looking for validation, right into the arms of the monster that killed her.

Back then the episode was super controversial and everyone hated the case because of the apparent slut-shaming but I loved it! Because it’s not about the girl. It’s about Dean. Dean doesn’t think that a girl gets killed because she dresses in a miniskirt so it’s her fault. Dean is projecting on himself and he’s not actually victim blaming the girl, he’s victim blaming himself. And when he absolves the girl by putting the blame on the father... well, subtextually he’s absolving himself by putting the blame on his father. On the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervaded his own home. He’s textually not ready to absolve himself, of course, he summons Death to ask him to kill him later, but subtextually he’s on the right path.

Rose McKinley basically did the same mistake Dean did at the CBGB when he trusted some older people who offered him drinks and the same mistake Claire did when she trusted a man who sold her for money because he offered him a place and stability. She trusted the wrong people (in this case, vampires, which adds the whole subtext of vampires and sexuality) who took advantage of her. Except Rose had no one to save her. (Her friend, Crystal, gets rescued by Dean, even if he causes the other hunter Rudy to die in the process.)

Carver’s writing is pretty brutal. The girl made that mistake because was abused at home, so she was desperate for validation and that desperation drove her into the wrong hands. (Rose even has a brother who blames himself for bringing her sister to her future murderers, destructive sibling relationship check.) It doesn’t actually even matter if Dean guessed right about Rose’s family situation, because what matters is what it tells us about Dean. He basically relates to a dead abused girl. Actually all through the season Dean is paralleled to “skanks” “sluts” and sex workers. Obviously this happens kinda all through the show, the whole “the business is based on absent fathers” thing happened much earlier in the story, so it’s not new. But s10 draws a picture of female suffering - abuse, manipulation and death. Season 10 was difficult to go through. In hindsight, it was probably on purpose because it was supposed to be darkest hour of the feminine. Summed with some good old fashioned misogyny, but hey.

The Carver era was wonky but Carver wanted to free the feminine. (I believe that Mary’s comeback, while written by Dabb because of the showrunner shift, was planned before the showrunner shift.) We thought the Dabb era wanted the same, with Mary choosing life and Amara being independent and so on, but it evidently wasn’t the case. Not a single woman arrives at end of the story. It’s hardly ~Bucklemming or ~the network or ~covid because it starts before the very end.

I’m not saying that dead sluts are more feminist than living women, but if the women die or disappear anyway (and they did) I’d rather have an exploration of trauma than nothing. And I definitely prefer a dead slut narrative that calls out parental abuse than a narrative where women live but abuse gets the you-did-your-best treatment.

Whoops! I digressed! But feel free to ask for any clarification or send me any observation or thought.

#anon #my spn thoughts #season 10 #spn 10x09 #spn 10x23 #dean and john #parental abuse #john winchester's a+ parenting #mark of cain #demon dean #spn #i love talking about season 10 uh

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supercasey · 4 years ago

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Dumb thoughts on the Child Avatars AU

I dunno, just some dumb ideas I’ve had since I started talking about the AU online/brainstorming about it. (Putting it under a readmore for everyone’s sake)

The “Daisy kidnaps Jon” situation in this AU is Daisy riding her bike to Simon Fairchild’s mansion, holding a water-gun up to both Mike and Jon’s heads, and ordering them to ride with her to the grocery store to buy soda and hang out at a nearby playground for the day. Cue Elias flipping tf out when Jon isn’t at Simon’s place when he goes to pick him up later, Simon being half asleep because he was napping while the kids hung out, and Mike getting soaked by Daisy before he agrees to go with her, and since this happens in, like, late fall or early winter, he gets pneumonia afterwards and can’t hang out for awhile, leading to the kids jokingly saying he’s dead. Btw the only reason the trio was found is because Basira was invited after they made it to the park, and she convinced Daisy to let the boys go home. Daisy literally only kidnapped them because she wanted to play with someone.

Also the Buried!Daisy arc is Daisy getting eaten by a Buried controlled sandbox and Jon jumping in after her. The rest of the kids, who thankfully witnessed this, spent the next three hours digging for them, with Breekon & Hope eventually joining in to help since they were in the area. Daisy and Jon form a trauma bond afterwards and are now best friends.

Jon keeps getting marked by shit and it’s stressing Elias out because hE’S NOT READY FOR THE WATCHER’S CROWN YET!!! He needs more time to prepare, but his son is literally getting marked faster than fucking Sonic.

Speaking of Sonic, seeing as the “Console Wars” (Sega vs Nintendo) are happening during this time period, the kids take the rivalry Very Seriously. The biggest arguments are had between Sasha, Daisy, Julia, and Mike, who are all on Team Sega, and Jon, Martin, Tim, and Danny, who are all on Team Nintendo.

Sasha, close to tears she’s so angry: “Sega DO what NintenDON’T, Tim!!!”

When Martin was born, he only had one thick clump of curly hair that was white, but as he’s grown older and entered the Lonely multiple times, more of his hair has begun to turn white. As of the time of the AU “starting” (so when he’s 8 years old), he looks like he has white highlights in his hair.

Trevor isn’t a fully-fledged Hunt avatar yet, but the girls more or less are, so if you’ve ever watched Wolf Children, that’s pretty much the situation Trevor is currently trapped in. His daughters keeping changing into wolf pups and running wild as he frantically tries to hide their powers from anyone who isn’t Gerry.

(All of the kids secretly know already, even Basira.)

Basira is pretty much the only “normal” kid of the avatar children, save MAYBE for Tim, but he’s been deeply marked by the circus and has a few tiny powers (think S3 Jon as he was figuring out some of his powers, but wasn’t a full-on Archivist just yet).

The season 1 gang (including Danny) are the closest group of friends in the AU, save for Daisy and Basira’s friendship, and they hang out a lot at each other’s homes on the weekends.

Adelard usually brings Jane with him for his “trips” away from the institute, so it’s not unusual for her to be gone for long periods of time. But she always sends postcards and gifts to the institute for everyone!

Helen is three years old, so theoretically she should be able to talk, but she rarely does so, preferring to communicate via giggles and laughter. Only Jon, the Stoker brothers, and Michael can understand her, and they take turns translating for everyone else.

Whenever she’s brought to the institute, Helen takes to toddling around after Jon and Martin, giggling up a storm the whole time. Jon finds it a bit annoying while Martin is endlessly amused by her antics.

A list of the guardian’s/adult’s ages before I fucking forget (as of when the AU “starts” in 1994): Gertrude Robinson - 62, Elias Bouchard “Jonah Magnus” - 51 (200+), Peter Lukas - 55, Simon Fairchild - 83 (300+), Gerard “Gerry” Keay - 30, Michael Shelley - 32, Alfred Grifter - Unknown, Adelard Dekker - 48, Nikola Orsinov - 30ish (100+), Annabelle Cane - 34 (Unknown), Trevor Herbert - 47, Agnes Montague - 25ish (60+), Jude Perry - 35, Jared Hopworth - 29, The Admiral - 10.

The “good” parents all keep trying to set up some kind of PTA meeting so they can actually talk about how to raise these supernatural kids properly, but it keeps going horribly wrong; last time they tried, Alfred Grifter and his band showed up and nearly made Simon go deaf, so no one wants to initiate the next attempt at a meeting.

Tbh, at this point the Fear rituals are more successful than Elias’s shitty attempts at forming a PTA.

At some point in the AU Gerry, Michael, and Trevor all pitch in to buy a decently big house together, which leads to some serious Shenanigans now that Melanie is around Michael and Trevor’s kids/wards... let’s just say there’s gonna be a lot of knife related accidents.

Gerry taught Melanie how to fight when he took her in and it is the single worst decision he’s ever made in his short, goth life, even if he’ll never admit it. Melanie can now beat the shit out of everyone but Julia and Daisy, and it’s pure chaos every time. Tim puts up a decent fight, but he’s been spoiled on easy wins over his brother all his life. Jon tries and fails to so much as push her. Martin runs away crying before Melanie even throws the first punch. Needless to say, the other kids are very cautious about playing with Melanie now.

None of the kids have an education of any kind except for Mike. I’m serious; the only kid who’s decently educated is being raised by Foxy Grandpa Off His Shits McGee! Julia and Daisy have had some public education but not much, Elias refuses to do anything but home-school Jon yet he sucks shit at math, Tim and Danny don’t even know what a school fucking looks like, Melanie and Jane were too young to go to school when they became avatars, Martin has only recently been allowed near other kids so fuck public school (Peter can do math but Nothing Else), Annabelle fucking forgot to give Sasha any kind of an education outside of Web stuff, and Helen is still a very small child. None of these kids have gone to school for more than a few years at most and dear g-d is that gonna suck for them later down the line.

As a result of this, Basira has taught the other kids a few things when she’s come over and insisted on playing “school” with everyone, but she’s still just a kid and can’t always get them to pay attention during her lessons.

Because of this Rosie, Gerry, Michael, and Gertrude have all started making an effort to more or less home-school all of the kids, which has gone... well enough, I suppose. However, things have recently taken a weird turn since Jon keeps giving everyone the answers to assignments/tests via telepathy.

Jon: Whoa, you can make tea all by yourself, Martin!? Martin: Yeah, I’ve been doing it by myself since I was a toddler. I can also do laundry, mop floors, vacuum, and cook a few things, too! Tim: Wow, that’s really cool, Martin! I wish I could do stuff like that. Gertrude, off to the side: *Gives Peter a horrified look* I’m sorry, but did Martin just say he’s been making tea on his own since he was a toddler? Peter: ╮(╯ _╰ )╭ Unfortunately, I’m severely depressed.

Yeeeeeeeah, Martin’s in a similar childhood situation to his canon one, but at least there are people actually willing to help him out of it in this universe. Also, Peter will clean himself up at some point here, he’s just still dealing with more or less disowning himself from his family and learning hoe to not be so lonely.

Speaking Of Which, the Lukas family are pretty big antagonists in this AU, primarily through Peter’s mother (I’ll come up with a name for her later if I can’t find it on the wiki), who is trying to kidnap Martin and more or less feed him to the Lonely so Peter will get over his “childish feelings” and return to being her favorite child.

And yes, she DOES accidentally kidnap Jon instead at some point... this kid can literally not avoid getting kidnapped.

I like to think Mike and Julia are really good friends in this AU, being the closest in age and all. They hang out a lot since their dads are both so chill and won’t get upset about it, the two of them mostly just playing video games, watching movies, and biking around their respective neighborhoods together.

(Also they may or may not be responsible for a statement that involves a woman seeing a “flying wolf” passing over London... they’ve yet to confess to it, but Elias is dead certain they’re behind the incident.)

The worms incident is 100% Jane’s secret worm collection getting fucking loose... she was keeping them in the walls “for safe keeping” and No One Fucking Knew, not even Elias, until Jon saw a spider, punched the wall, and Revealed them.

Jon and Tim got their scars because Jane lost control of the worms and they burrowed into the kids. Cue a very panicked 999 call from someone in the institute and Child Services almost getting involved, but Elias managed to cover it up.

Afterwards, Jon is incredibly self-conscious about his worm scars, but Martin tells him “now we both have freckles!” and it honestly makes him feel a little better about the whole thing.

Also Adelard makes an effort to track down a child psychologist/counselor with institute ties so he can get Jane some therapy/help controlling her powers. He loves her to the moon and back, and he’s terrified of her getting traumatized by what she accidentally did.

During the incident, a Notthem gets loose from Artifact Storage and attacks Sasha, but seeing as Sasha is of the Web and the Notthem is connected to a Web artifact, it only manages to really hurt her, but thankfully not kill her. She ends up hospitalized for a few weeks, but comes out fine later on. The table mysteriously disappears afterwards, and no one knows if it was Gertrude or Annabelle’s doing, but either way, the kids never have to deal with a Notthem again.

At some point I wanna get into Jon’s paranoia in season 2 for this AU, but I’m considering changing it from being because of the Jane Prentiss issue to be because of Mr. Spider almost killing him. I dunno how exactly it’ll play out, but I think it has a lot of potential!

Okay, before I end this post full of weird rambling ideas for the AU, I wanna make a list of the powers that the kids have at the time of the story “starting”/the ones they develop down the line because Jonny Sims himself said that all avatars have different powers, and I really wanna infodump on my thoughts for the kids!

Current powers of Jonathan Sims-Bouchard: Can simply know things whenever he wants to (so long as the Eye lets him, but the Eye sometimes keeps him from knowing anything he isn’t mature enough to handle), can compel people to tell him things (the other kids are better at resisting it, and so are other people touched by the Eye), can survive on very little food if he’s fed mostly statements/other people’s trauma, can non-consensually feel the pain and emotions of the people around him, has some weak telepathy powers, and he can subconsciously summon tape recorders.

Future powers of Jonathan Sims-Bouchard: Increased healing abilities, can know most anything if he tries, ability to resist other Eye avatars’ compulsions, can survive purely off of statements/other people’s trauma, can choose whether or not to feel the pain and emotions of the people around him, has much stronger telepathy powers than before, can force himself into people’s minds and read their thoughts, and he can summon tape recorders at will (though some still show up without his knowledge sometimes).

Current powers of Martin Blackwood-Lukas: Can disappear into the Fog for several hours at a time (he cannot be seen by anyone but other Lonely avatars while in the fog), can summon clouds of fog that he can momentarily hide things in (including people), can “banish” most anyone into the fog, and has “Sea Captain Eyes” (he knows where the Tundra is at all times, and can lead someone to it without a map or compass).

Future powers of Martin Blackwood-Lukas: Can change his hair color at will (only to red, white, and a mix of the two colors), can see much better in the Fog and can find anyone he’s pushed into it, can more or less teleport using the Fog, and he has what’s more or less a pocket dimension of fog for storage/hiding his friends from danger (think the inside of Gems in Steven Universe).

Current powers of Tim Stoker-Orsinov: Can make small bipedal toys “come to life” for a few minutes at a time (they can’t talk or communicate; only move around and perform small tasks/dances), can tell when a Notthem is masquerading as someone else, is supernaturally talented at gymnastics, and can dance alongside the creatures of the Stranger without being fully corrupted by them.

Future powers of Tim Stoker-Orsinov: Better control over the powers he already has as well as a high tolerance for the Spiral.

Current powers of Danny Stoker-Orsinov: Can order around creatures of the Stranger against their will, can tell when a Notthem is masquerading as someone else, can dance alongside the creatures of the Stranger without being fully corrupted by them, is supernaturally talented at gymnastics, and can change his voice to anything he likes (not always intentionally, though).

Future powers of Danny Stoker-Orsinov: Can more or less “teleport” to other circus locations by walking into theaters, can now change his voice to whatever he likes with his knowledge and consent, can take over as the Stranger’s ringmaster if necessary, can trigger a mesmerizing dance whenever he’d like, and has a high tolerance for the Spiral.

Current powers of Sasha James-Cane: Can communicate with spiders and have them send messages to other Web avatars, can read minds if she tries really hard, can “trap“ other entities in large webs that she can summon (takes a lot of energy), and she has Spider-Man-like abilities (can walk on walls and ceilings, can carry much more than her weight should allow, etc).

Future powers of Sasha James-Cane: Can now read minds without too much effort, can navigate almost any area that’s being controlled/influenced by the Web, can create webs without nearly as much effort as before, can transform her body to have more arms, legs, and eyes, and she now has venomous fangs (which can thankfully be controlled and/or hidden).

Current powers of Alice “Daisy” Tonner: Can turn into a wolf at will/when she’s especially emotional, can smell blood from several miles away, and has supernatural senses/physical abilities.

Future powers of Alice “Daisy” Tonner: Can now track most any monster she’s hunting once she gets at least one good look at them, can communicate with other Hunters via howling, and can navigate the Buried if needed (though this is very triggering for her and will cause her to pass out afterwards).

Current powers of Julia Montauk: Can turn into a wolf at will/when she’s especially emotional, can smell blood from several miles away, has supernatural senses/physical abilities, can track most any monster if she knows their name, can communicate with other Hunters via howling, and she can shift into a bipedal werewolf when she feels like she’s in danger.

Future powers of Julia Montauk: All of her previous powers have drastically improved, plus she has better control of them now.

Current powers of Basira Hussain: She has common fucking sense, something almost none of the other children have.

Future powers of Basira Hussain: She common sense AND she has a werewolf GF now. :) ((No dating for the babies, not until they’re at least teenagers))

Current powers of Melanie King-Grifter: Can listen to Grifter’s Bone without being damaged in any way, the music of Grifter’s Bone makes her powers exemplified for a period of time after she listens to it, the smell of blood triggers her to become violent, she can summon sharp weapons (knives, swords, etc) from thin air, and she can see a red aura around other people who have been marked by the Slaughter.

Future powers of Melanie King-Grifter: She has much better control of her abilities now, she can perform Grifter’s Bone songs for people and keep them from dying/going feral, and she can now also summon other weapons from thin air (guns, baseball bats, etc).

Current powers of Oliver Banks: Can see people’s deaths a week in advance via his dreams, he sees dark tentacles around people who are going to die soon, can see but not talk to ghosts, and he can smell death on anyone who’s undead/controlling other people’s bodies.

Future powers of Oliver Banks: Can raise the dead and control them to do his bidding (takes a lot of energy), can speak cat (not End related; Admiral related), and he can cause people to die within the week if he touches them in his dreams.

Current powers of Georgie Barker: Can see a “death countdown” over people who are going to die within the next thirty days, doesn’t feel any fear whatsoever, can see but not talk to ghosts, and she sees a dark sludge staining the clothes of people who have been marked by the End.

Future powers of Georgie Barker: Can bring people back to life for a minute or so by touching them (think Pushing Daisies type powers), can speak cat (not End related; Admiral is best cat dad), and she can communicate with ghosts much better now.

Current powers of Jane Prentiss-Dekker: Can summon bugs of most kinds from her mouth and under her fingernails, can communicate with bugs, and can fight off most diseases without any trouble.

Future powers of Jane Prentiss-Dekker: Can now completely control bugs via a hive mind effect, can summon bugs from anywhere on her body, has much stronger healing abilities than Jon, and she can see invisible bugs crawling on the skin of those who the Corruption wants her to get rid of (it’s hard for her not to give in to it’s desires).

Current powers of Mike Crew-Fairchild: Can levitate/fly at will, can summon clouds of any kind (rain, thunder, snow, etc) in any conditions, has much higher resistance to the weather/temperature, and he can “banish” people into the Vast at will.

Future powers of Mike Crew-Fairchild: Same as before, but with slightly better control than he had as a teenager.

Current powers for Helen Richardson-Shelley: Can change the world around her to be more like the Spiral (adding more doors, changing the colors of things, causing hallucinations, etc), can change any door into a doorway into the Spiral, and she can amplify her voice (very hard to control as a baby).

Future powers for Helen Richardson-Shelley: Can now summon doors that lead to the Spiral from thin air, has much better control over her powers and abilities than before, can morph her body to be longer and sharper at will, and she can “banish” people into the endless hallways of the Spiral.

((Holy shit, that took awhile))

Anyways, here’s a playlist I made for the AU, feel free to scream at me for my very weird taste in music: Pinky Swear That You Won’t Go Changing

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itsybitsylemonsqueezy · 4 years ago

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Hey, it’s me again! ^_^ I hope I don’t bother you too much with my requests, but your posts are so cool I just can’t help it. Upon completing Yakuza 4 I’ve had a lot of thoughts and feels about Daigo and how his character was handled across the series. To be honest, at first I didn’t like him much, because he seemed pretty bland (and his screen time leaves much to be desired), but soon enough he’s really grown on me. What is your opinion on him if you don’t mind me asking?

I definitely do not mind requests! Meta is my bread and butter c: I’ve just been busy for a few days, sorry ^^; And... my opinions on Daigo are not going to be as mindblowing or exciting as my opinions on Kiryu, I’ll be real ^^; And there’s a big advantage in Kiryu being the protag, All of the content is about him ^^; I do love Daigo, I think he’s a super interesting character, but his tragedy is just what you pointed out, he’s underutilized. And he isn’t set up very well to have the position he holds.

But, so saying, let’s get into my essay on Daigo ^^;

So, we meet Daigo properly in game 2. There’s little side stories with baby Daigo in Zero which helps build Daigo’s and Kiryu’s relationship and set up for what would later happen, but we don’t really know him until game 2. And game 2 is a LOT about Daigo and his arc and what he’s meant to be! There’s a tumblr text post meme somewhere with a pic of Daigo depressed in his little puffy white coat that says “And I’ll probably become the next chairman of the Tojo Clan. Things like that just happens to guys like me.” and that is totally accurate! Like, it’s a funny thing to complain about, but that’s obviously the struggle Daigo’s having, understanding from a young age that it was obviously his destiny to succeed Sohei, the only problem is uh... well... Kiryu.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Dojima Sohei never became chairman of the Tojo Clan. And that’s really wild thinking back to Zero and how powerful he was, he was all but a shoo in for chairman. But then, uh... Kiryu. Kiryu happened. Kiryu, and Majima I should say, are the reason Sera becomes chairman, not Sohei. Forever upsetting the wheels of fate. Given where we see Sohei next, I can’t imagine that he ever really recovered from that upset ^^; And I’m SURE it made him bitter towards Kiryu the rest of his life. And considering, again, where we see him next, I think the canon supports this ^^;

So what becomes of Daigo’s destiny then? His father had victory snatched away, destiny denied, and everything he had slowly crumbles over time, leaving his son with less and less to inherit, but still with the ideology that he should take this over. That’s an awkward position to be in.

And then Sera dies. Ooh, golly, I wonder who the next chairman’s gonna- it’s Kiryu. Of course it’s fucking Kiryu, how could it not be? It OBVIOUSLY should be Kiryu. He’s the strongest, the bravest, and who inspires the most loyalty. It doesn’t matter that Kiryu’s never been in leadership before, he TURNS people. Kiryu could get anyone on his side through sheer force of personality, which is hilarious to say about a guy with maybe 3 facial expressions. But tell me I’m wrong. I cannot count the number of part-time antagonists who turned on a dime because Kiryu beat their ass. And anyone who can do that can rule the world. Kiryu was absolutely the best pick for chairman and I will fight the world on this.

(Abbreviated for length, this is a LONG post)

But... then Kiryu makes the stupidest decision of his entire fucking life and renounces the chairmanship. And he has his reasons, feeling unworthy, traumatized from the events of Kiwami 1, unsure if he even wants to stay in the yakuza or if there’s maybe something else he wants to do with his life... he’s going through a lot of intense self-reflection and self-doubt and, I hate to harp on it, but fucking trauma. His brother blew himself up in front of him in a bid for redemption after all but telling Kiryu that all of his mistakes are Kiryu’s fault. Yeah, no, I’m sure Kiryu’s doing FINE with that. So, like, I can see why Kiryu said no, but it was still... fucking nuts. And it irrevocably changed the trajectory of everyone in this universe. Which Kiwami 2 goes out of its way to explore. Kiryu’s leaving? Majima fucking retires, Terada’s suspect, there aren’t any old, loyal hands left to lead the families, and we see how vulnerable the Tojo clan is on every side because Kiryu just up and fucked off.

(I have A LOT of feelings about Kiryu being chairman and someday I will have the strength to write the AU we all deserve where Kiryu stays as chairman)

So... the wheel of fate turns and oh yeah remember Daigo? Dojima Sohei’s son Daigo? The kid who’s been raised his whole life to take over the clan only to be denied at every turn? How’s he doing? Not great! It turns out, not great! Kiryu, his father figure, killed his ACTUAL father, but didn’t really, took the blame for some other weird guy, leaving Daigo with one badass mother and very little direction in life. Daigo’s been brought up thinking he’ll take over a great kingdom but all that’s left now is a broken wreck about to be demolished and picked apart by scavengers. Great, yeah, just what any kid wants to inherit. And he wasn’t trained to fix this, it’s kinda shitty to saddle him with destiny and then not train him for the thing that actually has to be done and then do it anyway. It’s real shitty actually. And not many people help Daigo.

Daigo couldn’t have taken the chairmanship directly from Sera, he was still just a teenager then. But it probably would have been nice if Kiryu checked in with him even fucking once since getting out of jail. But no, we never explain on screen to Daigo what happened as far as I can remember. Which, I feel, is a pretty fucking big oversight. How the fuck is Daigo supposed to trust you Kiryu? Or we’re supposed to believe he just figured it out off screen and holds no grudges? Like, I’m sure knowing Kiryu didn’t kill Sohei helps, but he couldn’t fucking tell you that himself? He couldn’t trust you with that information or that conversation? Fuck this. Very understandably, Daigo has his own crisis of faith about the yakuza, very much in parallel to Kiryu’s. Why the fuck SHOULD he go to bat for a crumbling organization that has only proven itself to be a dog chasing its own tail, willing to devour itself at the slightest provocation? It took his father, both his fathers, and he didn’t really get either of them back. Why the fuck should he try to fix that?

And to its credit, Kiwami 2 does a decent job of articulating Daigo’s motivations there. I could have done with even more, but I think they do him credit in showing him as disenfranchised and lost. And I think it’s refreshing to see someone have to confront the consequences of what’s happened since Kiryu left. Because the games don’t do a good job of showing that this is Kiryu’s direct fault. They never like to make Kiryu’s decisions have consequence, which is poor use of a protag. Rightly or wrongly, their decisions ALWAYS have consequence, or they’re not the protag. You can’t have it both ways. If this person is going to matter then, guess what, their consequences matter. Kiryu turned away. Rightly or wrongly, he did that. Daigo will never get that opportunity. Child of destiny. Not only was he bred and raised for this, he doesn’t know how to do anything else either. He doesn’t have other options the way Kiryu does. And we’re in a terrible vacuum of power. Terada’s namely in charge, but no one’s loyal to him. Even if he wasn’t deliberately fostering this, the Tojo Clan can’t survive without faith in their leader. Daigo, by fact of being his fathers’ son, can bind what’s left. And he has to because Kiryu won’t. Which is... really shitty. So either Daigo does this, or we all hang. And we never quite articulate that this is on Kiryu’s say so. Kiryu could still take over now and fix it he just... won’t.

And on top of this already comfortably stressful situation... we set Daigo up to come into a stable situation of power, where his transition would be smooth. We didn’t give him the tools to know how to salvage. He’s not practiced negotiating with hostile entities or even just people who will resent him because he’s young. And he’s lost a lot of faith, without even charisma and willpower on his side, this is a massively uphill battle. If he doesn’t believe, who else will believe him? Daigo knows this. And we watch that struggle go on, all while Kiryu just cheerleads. He hasn’t decided yet if he’s gonna stay in the yakuza either and he’s lowkey depressed after Kiwami 1. Lowkey he’s just suffering depression and can’t do as much as he normally would. Not an excuse, but I think an important way to read how tired and reluctant he is. Some therapy would really fucking help.

Anyway, we manage to get through Kiwami 2 and install Daigo as chairman, at which point Kiryu fucks off for good. Now, he kinda/sorta leaves some supports for Daigo, in Majima specifically, but also in Kashiwagi and I wanna believe in Daigo’s mom too. She was so cool and then we just... never talked about her again ^^; Laaaame *sigh* So, I guess, Kiryu did try to fulfill his remaining responsibilities as Daigo’s living father, but mostly it was just an excuse for him to leave and not feel guilty. Mostly it was him foisting off his duties onto someone else. He didn’t stay to teach Daigo everything he knew about the people Daigo would have to control. He didn’t teach Daigo and Majima how to talk to each other, a thing which REPEATEDLY comes back to bite us in the ass. He’s not there for Daigo to ask advice and help. Kiryu is full of confidence for Daigo, he’s not TRYING to make him fail, but Kiryu’s so caught up in his own need to leave, he neglects to people who need him.

And Daigo, to his everlasting credit, does his best to get by without Kiryu’s help. As much as possible, he never calls to ask Kiryu for help. And he does grow into a quite competent chairman! He does successfully rehabilitate the Tojo Clan, he makes them profitable again, he insists on respect and people don’t run amok under him. He does it, he salvages a dying organization. And he may not even really believe in it, but he has such a sense of responsibility, he does it anyway. He knows there’s no one else. He knows if he goes to Kiryu and says I don’t want this, Kiryu won’t help him. Kiryu didn’t mean for it to happen this way, he didn’t mean to be selfish and put others in a bad position. But he wasn’t there to listen. And I think Kiryu eventually comes to rue that.

The very unfortunate thing about Kiryu is... he is a dragon. Even though he is kind and generous and not greedy in a conventional sense, he is greedy. As much as Kiryu is a powerhouse because come hell or high water, he does what he thinks is right... this also makes him extremely selfish. He can be blind to other people’s needs and refused to be tied down. Again, for the best of reasons, because he’s trying to raise a family, because this environment is triggering for him, but he just hauls off and does things instead of talking to anyone which... makes him impossible to have a working relationship with. He has to learn to talk and to listen and that he can’t make all of the decisions by himself. The great irony being, Kiryu never wants to, but he doesn’t know how to ask for help. He’s so used to have everything put on him, he doesn’t realize it doesn’t have to be that way... but anyway, I’m getting caught up ^^; The point is, he thinks because he ditched the Tojo Clan they no longer care about him. Which is... naive at best. Of course people still care about you dumbass. Which makes Kiryu a massive vulnerability to the Tojo. In 3 and 4, Daigo makes stupid calls trying to protect Kiryu and trying to protect his interests. And because Kiryu hasn’t left open an avenue for them to talk, Daigo has to make these decisions on his own with bad information and he does his fucking best. But... he doesn’t know how to make the best of what he has, not like Kiryu would, and he fucks up sometimes.

I really, really love game 4 for that reason. Daigo’s fuck up is SO understandable, SO reasonable. It sounded like a good idea, it sounded like peace and harmony. And he was left without a leg to stand on before he knew it. In many ways, it wasn’t his fault. Kiryu himself says as much. And I may never forgive the end of 4 for letting Kiryu REALIZE he defaulted on his responsibilities but then, instead of changing his behavior in any way, he fucks off back to Okinawa. God... *siiiigh* ANYWAY.

And this struggle, this lack of communication, but unstated loyalty, comes full circle in game 5. When Daigo is literally drowning, literally knows he’s going to fail this time and there’s nothing he can do, and even when he’s with Kiryu, he can’t bring himself to ask for help. He knows Kiryu won’t or can’t. Instead he asks for absolution. He tries to tell his dad he’s just been doing his best and... he’s sorry for the terrible things that are about to happen. How gutting that Daigo can only see himself as a failure because... he’s not Kiryu. No one’s Kiryu. Even Kiryu refuses to be Kiryu. But Daigo knows if he was just Kiryu, things would be better. He’s not a legend. He’s not a god. He’s not all-powerful or crazy or impossible. He’s just a guy, doing his best because he had to. Because there was no one else. And some days Daigo does great, but a lot of days, he doesn’t measure up. And that eats at Daigo like mold. Kiryu would NEVER look at Daigo this way. Heck, most people at that point would never compare them. It’s in Daigo’s head, but it still hurts. He’s still, even now, looking up to Kiryu and he’ll just... never quite get there.

This is the only good thing I will ever say about game 6, and it was still 2 or 3 games too late, but Kiryu finally acknowledging Daigo as his son was good. Kiryu saying he was proud and saying he was grateful was good. Again, several games late, but... it still mattered. It still mattered that, in the end, Kiryu recognized his legacy in Daigo. That he understood so much of what Daigo did and does and is and was is for him. That mattered.

Daigo is a great chairman who takes care of his clan. But he was robbed of his relationship with his father. The games never work on the relationships that exist, strong relationships, for reasons I will never understand. Games 3, 4, and 5 would have been SO much more interesting if we had just like Kiryu talk to his fucking friends. Two would have been SO much easier if Kiryu had just been fucking chairman like he was fucking supposed to be and the transition of power to Daigo came later and smoother, with Kiryu helping to make it. Daigo tries his hardest every day and he’s an incredible negotiator and savior after all the shit he’s had to pull the Tojo Clan through, kicking and screaming and fighting to tear itself apart every damn day. The generation above him is all legends, Majima and Saejima and Kiryu. Daigo isn’t one of them. But he’s better because he was here and because he tries and because he succeeds. We need Daigo. We deserve him.

#Dojima Daigo #Yakuza #I don't even know spoilers for... all of the games #Games 2 and 4 especially?#The beginning of 5 #and the end of 6 #I mean... a little #you wouldn't know what happens in 6 if you read this #floweysky

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fireproofheart · 4 years ago

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Endgame Speculation

So I accidentally wrote a three page essay.

Tldr:

Caleb is consecuted,

the city(tm) is full of evil mages doing blood sport who want to unlease the chained oblivion,

Molly and Lucien are totally separate souls,

The empire knows more than it should about the beacons and the city

Ok so I decided about ten years ago that the astral city was actually where the souls that are stored in the beacon exist while they’re waiting to be reborn. Initially, I’d thought that they’d find Molly there, but clearly his body is already up and running. Anyways I think the city is some kind of phantasmal double of Aeor that they created to store the souls of mages who had reached umavi. Now I know there’s been lots of talk of a god killing weapon, but what if it’s that all these super powerful mages souls are in the city waiting to be unleashed. And then if you take to alpha and alpha to be a reference to the rebirth cycle (I go into that in this post) “We trek 'til homeward bound we be” makes sense as something like we drag ourselves through life after life through the rebirth cycle until we reach enlightenment and head back to the city and I think Lucien has figured this out, but Vess hadn’t (remember she was so close to figuring out the book).

I also think it’d be fun if the mages do actually have a god killing weapon up there but what they have is that they think they’ll be able to control the chained oblivion (I don’t think they actually can) but like what if they want to set it free so that it will destroy the divine gate and go kill a bunch of gods so that they can ascend? They might not even think that they can control it, they might just be banking on becoming gods and being able to defeat it.

So like what if there’s all this talk about umavi and perfecting your soul in the Dynasty, but that’s not it at all. What if it’s actually go through lives until you get powerful enough that the mages in the city are like oh hey come on in. We also know sometimes if you go through too many of these cycles you can go nuts. So like I wonder if the black city mages are just nerfing people who get too powerful and who aren’t good candidates to join them, or if they’re like trying to shape a world they want to come back to.

Like maybe ‘umavi’ is really just a shitty club running around hunting shit, like Halas had dreadnaught chained up in his basement essentially and also was messing around with using astral projection to achieve immortality, so why wouldn’t other mages be doing similar bullshit? We know something related to the city is hunting through the planes like Vokodo was Terrified. And if these beings are so enlightened why would they be sitting on top of like some kind of literal hell and engaging in blood sport?? Also what if the wizards knew it would be a hell city so they're all asleep and everyone who wasnt prepared to go is having a miserable time being hunted through an otherwise empty city? And this also works with Matt’s themes about false gods and blind faith!!

So, If we follow the line of thought about the city, it makes sense that the beacons are ancient Zemnian artifacts, created by the mages to ensure their immortal life. Halas was obsessed with immortality, so I think this tracks. I also have a suspicion that nine eyes is related to the governing structure that the mages used pre-calamity, possibly like a Cerberus Assembly type deal, like one for every school of magic.

Anyways! I think at least one of the assembly members possibly more have figured that out and that’s what they’re actually trying to do with the beacon. I think that initially, the assembly thought that the beacon was the ancient weapon, but I think they’ve realized it isn’t. So I think Trent is trying to recreate the consecution process so that they can continue using the rebirth cycle. That man has made some weird comments that hint about immortality, like how he doesn’t ever plan to leave his office, how he wants caleb to kill him etc. I think this raises the possibility that he’s already figured out consecution I also think it’s an interesting possibility that Trent himself is consecuted and has the memories of a pre calamity wizard, but probably the only way that’s possible is if he wasn’t that powerful, otherwise he’d know all these secrets the Empire is trying to decode.

I think what he is doing is looking for Zemnian kids who might be consecuted souls. We all know Trent loves to fuck with memories, he does this shit constantly. So he’s picking up kids he thinks might be cycling souls and trying to extract or trigger their memories while he trains them to be loyal to the empire, so he can command some real powerful mages. I think it’s also very possible that some of the experiments he ran on them were to try and discover or recreate this consecution process. We know he was up to some Bullshit, but not what exactly. We also know that he’s doing all this when they’re teenagers, which is when their memories are supposed to be returning.

My guess is that only Caleb is actually one of the souls from the city. Also it’d be super fun if he was the soul of Mr. Destruction council member because I think that’d be a fun motive for Trent to be beating destruction magic into him (aside from the practicalities of course). But if Caleb is consecuted, it explains his dream when he slept near the beacon. Where he saw a dark sphere, which I think was the city, and multiple versions of himself. Matt also particularly said there were 17 selves which is a high number of rebirths (the bright queen has like 8 and shes starting to lose it) which goes to my theory that he has a super powerful soul. Also aligns with Trent telling him that ‘he has unlimited potential, unlike Astrid and Eodwulf’. And another thing he saw which tends to get overlooked, is a flame and when he looked at it, it felt familiar and overwhelming and he had to stop focusing on it bc he could feel all of his selves pulling at him. Which brings me to my next point.

Trent said that he traumatized Caleb to help him grow and that man basically never lies, he just talks around the truth. He also said that he thinks Caleb could be an assembly member and that other assembly members have been through similar situations. In the Dynasty, the memories don’t come back automatically, it’s just little flashes and then you have to have someone train you to remember your past lives. But the Empire doesn’t know about that process bc its super secret, so they have this other one that uses trauma to trigger the memories.

So I have two thoughts, one that maybe this works for some of the other souls that have gone through it, but if Caleb is one of the Pre Calamity assembly members who had reached a state of ‘umavi’, there was too much information coming through and his mind broke. And now he can’t access those memories at all, not because they’re magically supressed, but because they’re too wrapped up in his trauma. He started freaking out a bit in the dream when he felt the souls pull at him and looked into the fire and I think until he deals with allll that, he’s not going to be able to remember, if he ever can.

Or! I think it’s also possible If his soul was up there in the party part of the city and was like oh hi I don’t feel like hunting people for spORt anymore and got reborn on purpose and actively doesn’t want to remember. Who really knows.

But if this is the case and Trent was trying to run that process, it would also makes sense as to why he would keep Caleb around for that long in the asylum if he was still trying to dig them memories out. If the second possibility is right it also provides an interesting possibility that the woman in the asylum went nuts when she healed his mind, because if she tried to heal the second part and his soul was actively resisting and lashed out… like heyooo. Caleb being secretly super powerful and evil in his soul, but choosing to act against that also is a nice tie in with the themes around identity that we’ve seen so far.

Where do Vess and Lucien come into this?

I think Vess is trying to release the souls from the city and hadn’t quite figured out how. I think that she used Lucien as a test run for being the nonagon and sent his soul to the astral plane to go into the city using the book and then as part of the ritual, cut the tether to his body so he could go off and do whatever. So it tracks that he killed Vess if he thought that she tried to kill him/did kill him/didn’t tell him that he could die or whatever. It also wouldn’t surprise me if she was prepared to be the nonagon herself even at that point, but wanted to use Lucien because the risk of death was so high.

So anyways, the ritual failed technically, because an ‘umavi’ mage didn’t pop into Lucien’s body to come tell her how to release the souls (possibly by unleashing the chained oblivion lmao) When you cut someone’s tether, they die instantly so I think she did that, a soul didn’t appear and she went fuck ok so that didn’t work. They tried to resurrect him, didn’t work, so they left. But I think the ritual did work in a way. I think they called a soul from the city, just not the one they wanted and it took longer than they’d expected.

So Molly wakes up, has no memories of this nonsense, because as he said the entire time he was alive, whoever he was before isn’t him. And if the souls can’t interact with other souls there and they think it’s an empty hell city what if that’s why Molly came back saying empty because that’s how it seemed to him??

So Lucien accidentally gets stuck wandering around with all the other trapped souls. And what if that speaks to Lucien’s motivation to try and bring them all back. Like he’s been wandering around the shitty part of the city for years while Molly was up and running and the black city mages have promised him that he won’t have to go back there if he brings them back to the material plane. So I think Lucien mostly knows how to do this and like maybe needs that book for the technicalities, but I also think he’s going to Aeor to go find another beacon to use for the ritual. And obvi when Kree resurrected Lucien, he actually came back this time because his soul was willing and Molly’s wasn’t.

So I think Vess was trying to figure out how the ritual had failed, but I think after the nein told her about Molly and shit, she’s probably figured out that really the only piece she was missing was how to get the soul she wanted. I think that missing piece is probably a beacon and that you could possibly use them to communicate in a way or draw the specific souls from the city. But I think it took her too long to figure it out because the beacons are super important to the peace effort, and I don’t think she’d be able to sneak off with one right now, so I think she was going to Aeor hoping to find another one. I think if she had, she would have become a vessel for an umavi mage and she would have learned how to bring back the city and I think right now, we’re in danger of Lucien doing exactly that.

My final point is that a lot of people have been saying it feels like we’re getting into the endgame of the campaign with the stuff that’s happening now. I agree. I also think it would be very tidy if Matt had wrapped Molly and Caleb’s story arcs around each other to end the campaign. Also having them defeat the literal past, the assembly and possibly a god would be a baller way to end it.

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misterbitches · 4 years ago

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Hello! @flootweed replying to the post from before. the long format was killing me. why does tumblr look like this...

I haven’t watched episode 8 yet...or have I? If it’s the most recent one. No.

Is the hornbill a bird? It probably is but I have a terrible memory and I’m dumb so. I skipped the last few weeks because I’m scawwed. How are you liking it? I did see someone say that the hornbill makes sense (without knowing what it is...at all) bc heart transplant patients only live like 5-15 years after but someone in those comments pointed out that he was so young when he got his and that’s pretty rare so he has a higher likelihood of survival. Frankly, this is the only way I will proceed. Since when did shows ever care about the heart transplant health? Never and it needs to stay that way!

What did we think of ep 6? LMAO. I need opinions! And omg it makes me feel special when I can point things out to people because I so...rarely get to LOL. Editing is like one of my favorite things ever so I can be super particular about it but I try to do the thing you do when you’re supposed to see if it works within its context. I’d like to go in with scissors and glue but alas.

THe mic covering....the rustling....it’s like guys...please. Ironically the audio today wasn’t great. I don’t know why. IDK if you watch c-dramas but I am not even sure what’s worse between them because they dub their dramas. But actually no it’s best to have the dubbing because even tho it is painful they have to put a lot of effort into it. LOL.

Right? @ Aey! It’s just weird if they would show us more about what he’s done instead of saying he’s done sth bad and not even explaining that....like you could even do some shitty exposition. I think if he is to be a true villain then we really need to be privvy. All the warnings make it seem like he’s a fuckin’ serial killer so when we get the scene of him at home it’s like....actually this is really serious? Maybe his pain is like...for a reason. Althought you won’t even TELL US WHAT HE’S DONE WRONG BESIDES BE JUST FUCKING WEIRD AND ANNOYING! So from what we have it’s just a realllllllll fucked up sad person lol. god i forgot about the dinner! and i totally agree. he really needs them to succeed. i like your theory because it would make the scene where he like blocks the twitter user make more sense. he also says they dont really know each other etc so it’s realllllyyyyy probable that he just sees it as a way out. if not then we shall pretend u wrote it :)

god yea i wouldnt say it is art but i also guess we technically have to since it is technically. in the way that technically performance artists are artists but mostly i uh technically ignore them. Also one of my fav BLs is called the best twins. If you do not know what it is I will not elaborate further.t

i want to know more abt poli sci majors lmao but they sound DRAMATIC/ hopefully most ppl in ur cohort arent losers!

hahahha i understand. there was just a thing on twitter about DSA and then the day before about reading discourse. the same thiings. over. and over. and over. and over. we are our own worst enemies but also our own best friends? but i hate tankies and that wont change. but hasan’s a decent guy. he said sth abt black ppl during biden’s primaries in GA or whatever and i was like chill. but he’s insecure and has adhd which means ur more open to being wrong and changing otherwise u will suffocate and die.

and totally about hiding fuck ups. i’ve tried really hard bc of organizing IRL to like...be honest, question, etc but also like...approach it naturally? because if you’re trying to be perfect and so worried you’ll fuck up you don’t realize that puts more stress on you, makes you seem like a robot, and could potentially not make you realize the mistkaes you made. also if we’re privileged in certain spaces there is just no possible way we won’t get something wrong. im light and i know that honestly any way to speak up on colorism is going to be difficult and that’s a space where i have power so i just have to figure it out. we should be uncomfortable because we have to sit with unpleasant feelings and sort through our own whatever. that just makes the next time even better and people can trust u more. i think some people sweat it sooo much or maybe they think their personal life and what theyve been through is more the norm? on the other hand people can be sf reactionary in the worst way and idk what their issue is. there was also a user who said sth very inch arresting about tankies which i thoroughly enjoyed (how like violent lefitsts or tankies / ppl who are like ooh a gun whatever just want to be violent in another space so they have shit tendencies from jump and nothing of substance which i think i agree with tbh fo ra lottttt of ppl. like their anger is actually like “no im about to beat that ass” instead of what we actually want to get done)

sort of in the same vein re: taking it easy...we coudl all be more understanding too. to slow it down like you mentioned about not being privvy to fucking eveyrthing and saying anything on our mind. i saw this person talk about y2k which was a huge deal while happening bc it was the turn of the millenium (bruh were u even alive?) but this twitter user grew up in a super super SUPER religious household and was like why do ppl make jokes about Y2K it was insanely traumatizing? though my first instinct was confused ive tried hard to like look more before i judge especially thanks to a friend of mine. turns out that with the further reading the more we found out he was just really traumatized; it was very common in religious households to be afraid of 2000. so we could have come at him with no understanding and he could have thought that everyone had the same experience with that year that he did. his feelings sit precedent though but i think it was just very hard for him to fathom.

i didnt reply bc he didnt need that and what could i have said? he’ll see what the truth is with exposure and unfortunately this was something he really did go through.

and that’s what makes most people think others could be over the top. because it sounded ridiculous but then it was this huge traumatic thing that we could have never known about. so maybe when someone sounds like actually crazy they have an explanation? of course some ppl are just batshit or annoying but that’s anywhere not just leftists it’ just means more i guess when a ~~librul is annoyed~ but it can be easy to want to make fun of ppl too. lmao. basically what i am saying is the internet? especially twitter? for leftists? in this economy? bitch it’s the wild west out here.

i am 29! idk if i said it or not. i am OLD u probably werent even born in the year i was talking about wah. i know not old-old or old at all but compared to you i’m due for a colonoscopy.

omg i hope u can get vaxxed soon! are you wfh rn? i hope ur also not in a bad state as in state state not state as in ur being :| bleh what a fucking time. it sucks that you have to fucking do work. well unless u like school. which i hope u do. i just assume everyone hates it cos i did lmao

was it the lindsay ellis drama? that bitch is dumb. if there was other drama oh wait the drama i was referring to it all happened on the same day. idk book twitter that well but i saw something from someone who was abt that shit and wowie! the american people are not that.....intelligent to put it lightly.

i’ll get better. ppl tell me they miss me and im like aw. i have insanellllyyy bad insomnia and a lot of stuff happened this year HOWEVER I SLEPT FOR TWO DAYS FOR 8 HOURS AT A REASONABLE TIME. im a new woman. anyways you too! i hope ur not too burnt out with school. we just dont know when the burnout is or we just dont know we are burnt out until we are. the panaramiciccici hit and all the things i was ignoring kind of just fell on me and sooo much happened at once. and frankly it’s hard to take care of ourselves. lord.

Like if you aren’t interested in expanding on the issue in a way that hasn’t been done before all you gotta do it like… spread resources and donate if you can. I dont see the point in having to say something about every issue especially if you (not at you specifically just in general) aren’t immediately impacted by the issue. Like is the 14 yr old white marxist named sarah on twitter really gonna have meaningful insight on anti-asian violence ?

this is part of why i cannot telecommunicate. i dont want to do shit on the internet. i am able bodied so i know that this time has been of such ease for other people. but mentally i just can’t. i don’t have a comment on hand like that and i hvae no desire to engage with ppl that way. i am a super super super solitary person but thats bc it’s MY time so when it’s like all this effort with other people i dont ever want to be alone. it’s the same with the way i approach filmmaking. it isnt a sole thing so i hate it not together. that’s part of how u can get so sucked in and repeat doom scrolling. i was in this webinar last may after [redacted] and this black woman prof said “read with a community and talk” because otherwise she said we are torturing ourselves. you can’t carry that weight all on your own. unfortunately i hate zoom, discord, slack, signal, whatsapp, facetime. you name it this panera has made it evi.. L

you make a really excellent point. i think the young young gen zers are really really just interesting because it’s like this whole new world for them with leftist politics and they just can’t grasp the horrors of the world and the kind of freedom being a leftist can bring. and so many people don’t grow out of it. those people so happen to be the “least productive” in terms of how much time they spend IRL withe these issues. naturally, younger kids are gonna have a harder time. they are not as mobile as well so the internet becomes this place. but then it’s this echo chamber. and many times just things posted without sources. and social media NEEDS that to exist.

i think of the irony of leftist kids on tik tok and while i am happy it’s reaching them it’s just....different. very different. the growth of social media is so good but also so fucking sad, it’s too much! i think the point about not writing everything is major. even i have to do this which is part of the disappearing.y ou need to detach and make sure your head is on straight again. but when you think eveyrone has to be privvy to every thought and you can’t just sit back....which twitter and social media doesn’t encourage. you have to join in. that’s often why when i have something to say it is dense because i don’t feel like repeating it. ever. lmao ust ever. i cant pay attn. social media is a fucking minefield for my brain u can get so lost in it and absorb it but once u start talking you may not be able to stop.

i think a big part of that is it not being a leisurely thing but sort of just in our lives always. this sounds like a grandpa rant but ykwim. We dont have to see the same thing over and over again. And eventually it gets sincerely diluted or its diluted bc of capitalism or whatever. Or if theyre very young or maybe they don’t have like the greatest way of sharing the knowledge? then it can be butchered. I hope this is making sense...i’m talking beyoond the boring surface-level milquetoast shit. i see really ahistorical stuff on there from leftists (like this thing about NK + africa and it being a beneficial rship as opposed to a um not beneficial one. and it isn’t. beneficial but this young black girl was talking abt it and noname rtd and i was like it’s just too complex. there’s no good/bad here just bc it’s not america. dont get me started on this.)

but Lol that was kinda off topic but I think what I meant in my last reply about not turning off the voice in my head is about when I consume media, not necessarily when I’m online talking about. Even if I have criticism for something, I’m usually pretty chill when consuming fandom content bc I think being serious online all the time is kinda boring. Like sometimes I’m analyzing theme and shit but really most of the time im memeing.

exactly.........gotta laugh. thats why sometimes im like i cant think lmao. unfrotunately i have been ARGUING with ppl on the internet for rly no reason when i could have replied to ur very nice fun wholesome message. i love torture. i miss memes.

“ i think the people who get the least enjoyment out of that are those so obsessed with getting upset with anyone thinking outside of their lines as if it equates to them “ EXACTLYYYYY

kekekekeke im glad u got it. it’s like with conservatives throwing around snowflake. now im beginning to question who the real complainers are.

LMAO exactlyyyy. i posted a screenshot of this writer from twitter saying that exact thing. Like first of all, I’m...an adult? and if you are as well uh? i’m sorry for you but are we 12? But how is it affecting u this viscerally? And if it does why dont u...do...research? pihgofuaipoajghou but honestly everything u said. we’re trained to go into it with nothing. i was only around ur age when i started to get more serious about this stuff but you’re like lightyears ahead of where i was at 21. did i say this but i’m in iww and literally i can tell u in 2016 i did not think 2019 me would be in a union bc i told my friend in a train station that we don’t need unions. i was 23...but the thing is i didnt know what i was talking about. at all. and i knew i didnt know and she knew i didnt know and now i am the clown.

also yes at critical engagement. i had to learn so much through experience and this is tuff that i coudlnt be shielded from. there’s an empathy you kinda have to develop and this understanding that you move through the world as this person who is “nowhere and everywhere; nothing and everything” so i’ve always had to think about things differently just to survive. that’s also what can drag a lot of people towards it like theres so many black kpop fans bc i think a lot of the pain in SK can be mirrored (sort of) through our history. and theres currently a history now but it had to be forged. uh what was my point oh yea however i wouldnt have been able to move further if i didnt have my background to go off of bc i knew something was off when i started getting into all these things (ill give u a hint) but if i had no prior knowledge and didnt have to think about it then the critical approach is either stale or stupid.

i had to research but i dont understand how ppl are so bold with little to no research and understanding? thhey just inherently know with also like ZERO experience in what they need experience in. engaging critically means “how i see the world” with dashes of trying to be open adn understanding or whatever. actually that’s another thing like being afraid of criticizing things bc theyre foreign to you so u give it a pass (like we discussed) but it doesnt hAVE TO BEEEE JUST REAAAAAD and then take all the info ur teensy brain and apply it. be a normal human being and dont be fucking rude and racist. thats it! u can complain abt literally anything without being a dick.

as we start with LW and end with LW.....what do we think (i asked this already) omg please share wbl thoughts i THINK i know what ur talking about. well it could be two things; their rship when they came back and the physicality and then pei shou yi. i almost dont even want to use my brain to fucking look at that. i think wbl can get away with more bc of visual~*~*~* reasons (like literally, the look of the show. there’s more space to get lost in the frames. many thai dramas are a lot more literal? this isn’t the right word but it’s very heavily character focused particularly bc of $ i think) though good production also underscores flaws so i am also wrong. but like do u know what i mean? u have to kinda focus on it? or maybe it’s just cos like.....ur so used to it in thai bl idek. i’ve seen tw bl ofc.

look i swear i will justify this forever bc there are some things we miss right but if u feel like someone’s a bad actor....theyre bad. it’s about tone movement etc etc etc and since most thai bl productions have 0 interest in that....well. they take these newbies and put them in these situations. we dont understand thai but if we see them and we’re like “wow this is really bad” then they’re bad lmao. IDC i will never be like cos idk what theyre saying NO WHY HE LOOK LIKE A ROBOT???????? DOES HE EMOTE? why is he CRYING WITH NO TEARS? and it’s not even a total requisite to cry with tears(i mean for me it is) but it’s just like what is happening on ur face right now young man????????

painful.

the inflection stuff is very valid ooh good point tho but that’s only a part of the piece. plus we get used to the way they communicate. like the ppl from sotus were prtty bad. i dont like that show but thats an ex of ppl liing the actors and the person i thought was better other ppl dont think that? well apparently hes a shitty guy but. um. so when theres decent acting its so glaring.

although i must say even tho i dont care for 2gether anymore and would never like to be reminded about its existence (only bc i just cringe lol) i honestly....didnt think bright was a bad actor? but people keep saying he is and i am much more inclined to believe them than myself. though i am not often dickmatized that could have been it. until he opened his mouth and ruined it and then i stopped paying attn.

although honestly i’m so much more critical than i could be positive. i have ben stumped for the last day about how i wasnt mad at his acting in the show. is it me? is it him? who’s......the wrong one.....(me)

oh shit they have been denied? i haven’t been paying attn to whats been going on recently. i just got into it on MDL because of snowdrop. sometimes i literally cannot engage bc ill just be like alright well im black so this power button in my head is going off when ppl talk abt that shit. back in the day when kpop jawns were saying some real outta pocket anti black shit (now everyone is slick with it) it’d always be THEY DONT HAVE GOOGLE THEYVE NEVER SEEN A BLACK PERSON but really it’s like no...maybe they are just racist? that’s ok too.

also the past 2 weeks have been um atrocious bc how fucking easily people fell into the pit of white supremacy and started to turn their ire towards black people and making a competition between our groups just like they wanted. it’s not about the women who are dead anymore, who were sex workers, their womanhood, being asian, being poor anymore. it’s about how much black people get attention and why people only pay attn to us. i am not feeling very generous this week for ppl to excuse that hsit.

on a lighter note, ppl say that abt the whole husband and wife thing. i dont know how to explain how angry that shit makes me but maybe it’s because i do not want to think of my body in relation to a fucking penis at all hours of the day. if bls could kindly not do that it would be nice lmao

yes there are a lot of those. who are only there to gawk lmao. and just idk worship bc of the cult of personality thing bc of how weird and open they have to be as actors. some of the others are people who /think/ theyre really smart (i think im asmart but i also think i am very dumb and i have adhd to prove that MEDICALLY!!!) but are actually not? or their observations arent great? or idk if they are they arent interesting? but i think well..........we have more refined palettes :P

jk also theres just different personalities. you and i mesh more bc we have a lot of the same beliefs and are coming from the same place. that makes it easier to understand as well. i really try to remember that but some people are really weird so. again just...the perception of certain things even down to acting skills. but i also dont like.......believe this genre can really do anything at all. on one hand i want them to do it right bc it’s a piece of work so they should. be proud of it. cos most things arent advancing us bc representation and culturalism are a lie bla bla. it’s just that when the depictions are negative or not done well it adds to the problem as opposed to the things that are well done are fairly benign and can’t really pull us back (perf example is the black panther film. i woudl definitely not say it was transgressive as a literal work but visually it’s just stunning. and it’s sad that it’s stunning and surprising but still with basically an all black cast of mostly dark people abd like what it means in the zeitgeist yes. it’s also just a good movie. but it’s still imperialist prop and unfortunately and this is fucking pathetic to say it “opened eyes” in other countries where they hate black ppl and ignore their own racialized minorities HENNYWAYSSSS a better ex is moonlight except moonlight isnt mainstream and is indie tho...still thru a funnel of capital bc a24 but who cares bleed the fuckers dry is my motto. my point is moonlight is both a great work and doesnt bring any failures to the table and its existence helps in ways outside of art but they arent the defining things giving us material advancement sooooo i mean it’s complex (this is my conclusion to everything um guys it’s complex)

er i had one more point in conjunction to above. oh yea so i like dont need all these extra things to make it progressive. like people really want more women in the show and i am honestly like i really dont. i dont want them to actively do this. if they cant do it naturally then let someone else do it. i am not asking for more bc i dont want it from them. when something comes along i embrace it but i do not see why women should be represented when the genre RELIES on patriarchy. there is no complete satisfying existence for the women in these series. i dont want it. i dont ask people to show us~*~* or respect~* like fuck no the people who make it make it and hopefully more will make it in the future but i will not beg bc THEY DONT WANT TO DO IT SO WOULD FORCING IT MAKE IT BETTER? just fucking leave them out entirely. that’s the answer if theyre gonna make nasty female characters then those bitches can geaux. we have other plcaes to be. booked. and. BUSY!

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itsclydebitches · 5 years ago

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Let me start by saying that I love all of your meta and analysis soooo much especially the ones about Ozpin. I was curious to hear what what do you think are some legit motally grey things/mistakes he did, not the garbage the haters love to throw around. The only things I can think of are either in an impossible situation with only shitty options (where I don't really consider the decisions as immoral since morality needs agency and the chance of a better choice) like with Pyrrha and Oscar (1/2)

Thank you, anon! And honestly? I couldn’t agree more. I often say that Ozpin has made mistakes partly so that people don’t blow off the points I’m trying to make with, “Oh an Ozpin stan. Ignore her, she thinks he can do no wrong and thus can’t provide an objective opinion.” But honestly? Not all mistakes are created equal. There are mistakes one makes because they’re selfish, foolish, didn’t bother to take precautions---things that are preventable and therefore invite heavy criticism and an acknowledgment of responsibility. However, there are also mistakes that, as you say, are simply outside of your control. You don’t have the information available to make an informed and therefore better choice, or you simply just have bad choices from the get-go. For me, the vast majority of Ozpin’s mistakes are the latter.

Overall, I think the largest mistake he bears responsibility for is prioritizing his love for Salem over basic ethics. AKA, choosing to become a wannabe god with her and encouraging this mentality that they are intrinsically superior to everyone else in Remnant. Granted, there are many other factors involved in this, including Salem’s status as a creature now consumed by darkness (she was heading down this road no matter what Ozpin may have done differently) as well as her abuse towards Ozpin, her manipulation, and the sheer overwhelming terror of the goal Light set him. Which just reinforces that all Ozpin’s mistakes are understandable to one extent or another. He’s human and his mistakes resonate because, if people are honest with themselves, they’d probably admit, “Yeah. If I found the love of my life again I’d be tempted to ignore Light’s warning about her too. If I was offered a life of luxury and power under the guise of protecting the people, I might cave and go along with that as well...” We get how Ozpin got to that point, we may admit we couldn’t have done better, but we likewise understand that the man he became, regardless of how he got there---from natural human desires to abuse---isn’t okay. As Oz and his host ask themselves, “What are we doing?” And we see how he comes back from that edge. How he rejects that sort of power later when it’s offered to him after the Kingdoms were reunited. Ozpin learned from his mistakes.

Which adds further complications to his choices in the present day. Just as Ozpin learned that the world doesn’t need him as an all-powerful figurehead, he likewise learned that sharing secrets leads to nothing but the worst kind of consequences. The first time he reveals what he’s hiding? His wife announces that she’s going to take over the world, then murders their children, then him. A more recent time he reveals information? A very close friend betrays him to said wife. Tries to kill him. Nearly kills his allies. Is eventually killed himself. The latest time he was forced to reveal information? People are shouting, grieving, he’s punched into a tree, the one friend still at his side completely rejects him.

The fandom points to Ozpin’s lies and secret keeping among the group as his greatest mistakes and yes, objectively I agree. Without context I can say no, he shouldn’t have made a promise if he didn’t intend to keep it. He should have just told them that there were questions left, or that the relic attracted grimm. But the thing is that context is there and it always matters. I’ve spoken before about how I think Ozpin made that promise with precisely zero expectation that he’d ever be put into a situation where he might conceivably break it, that I’d also hesitate to tell a group that there were invaluable questions left when they were clearly eager to use them recklessly (which they then did), and that keeping the grimm aspect secret was the only logical course of action because telling them would just attract more. But even ignoring all of the potential justifications attached to each choice, I simply don’t believe we can ignore Ozpin’s trauma. I might not have lied to people like that, but I haven’t been horrifically traumatized for a thousand years whenever I do tell someone information. Ozpin has been conditioned not to tell people and though yes, everyone technically has free will, trauma like that will “force” you to take what you perceive as the only safe option. It fucks with your perception and your understanding of what even is an option in this situation. Ozpin simply no longer has the ability to go, “I’ll trust them!” like the others around him do and their reactions certainly didn’t help teach him otherwise. Imagine that for a thousand years you’re punched every time someone lifts their hand. Then someone you’ve just met demands that you stop flinching whenever they raise theirs. No matter how much you may want to stop, you can’t. Not immediately on someone else’s order. The human experience doesn’t work that way.

(As a side note, the reason why I emphasize a thousand years so much is because I believe the extent of the trauma and its implied consistency is really relevant here. As is the close tie between that trauma and Ozpin’s choices. There are many other characters out there who I don’t believe “But they had a hard life!” excuses their actions: Snape, Bakugo, recently what I’ve read of Yennefer---among others. It’s notable to me that Ozpin didn’t endure traumatic events by revealing information and then, say, go abuse his students for years. Or tell someone to kill themselves. Or take over someone else’s mind. Not only is his trauma more extensive than the vast majority of characters we meet, but he hasn’t used that trauma as an excuse to get away with horrific---and unrelated---choices. The love of my life rejected me and then died... so I’m going to abuse eleven-year olds under my care. My mom is demanding and people cater to me too much... so I’m going to gleefully beat up my weakest classmate. I dealt with being ugly for a good chunk of my life and now can’t have kids... so I’m going to take away someone’s autonomy and endanger a whole town. Unlike most other characters with tragic backstories, Ozpin has a one-to-one correlation between that hard life and the mistakes he’s made: people hurt me when I tell them things... so I just won’t tell them things. By keeping that strong connection it eliminates the possibility that Ozpin is just using his trauma as an excuse (knowingly or otherwise) and he is, notably, still a good person beyond those very specific choices. We see his horror at the decisions he has to make. We see his endless attempts to be as kind towards others as possible. We see how much he’s fought not to allow his trauma to warp him into a person he’d despise. A person like Salem. Just like not all mistakes are created equal, for me not all people making mistakes are equal either. I’m less likely to forgive your mistakes if you’re an all around horrible person. You’re clearly a good person trying your best? Your mistakes are easier to stomach and, as discussed above, I’m more inclined to assume that these mistakes stem from things outside of your control. If someone who has been nothing but cruel to me lied I’d automatically be pissed. If someone who has been nothing but kind to me lied, I’m inclined to ask them why they did that, expecting that there’s a good reason attached to that decision.)

So did Ozpin make mistakes? Technically yes, but I think they were mistakes largely outside of his control. Either he only had shit options available to him or he was in a position where the group demanded something of him that his mental health simply wouldn’t allow. People have to remember that we’re not Ozpin (insert obligatory, “He’s fictional” here). We have more options available to us when it comes to our choices, simply by means of not having gone through what he has. His choices are always limited, both by outside factors and his own experiences, and they likewise always have inevitable downsides. Ozpin doesn’t get the luxury of choosing anything that turns out well.

As a final note, with Volume 7 underway I’d say that another potential mistake has been introduced: making Pyrrha the Fall Maiden. Meaning, unless the story reveals that Winter actually can’t become the next Winter Maiden due to her age (unlikely given that others have said the non-canonical age limit is 30), it raises the question of why he’d choose a 17 year old over a 20-some graduate. However, to me this is pretty clearly a writing issue. The creators were more concerned with keeping the story revolved around RWBYJNR than they were the implications of having Ozpin choose Pyrrha over a more suitable adult. So though yes, I’d technically consider that another mistake.... obviously not much Ozpin could do against his own creators lol.

Which finally leads to me saying that although Rooster Teeth seems to want us to believe that Ozpin is a morally gray character, they haven’t succeeded in writing one well. That characterization requires a fair balance between what most would consider “good” and “bad” traits. Not a good person presented with only bad choices. Or a character so horrifically conditioned that his ability to make a better decision is almost impossible. We wouldn’t call a person who was manipulated or forced into doing bad things a morally gray character, nor would we use that term if, somehow, they were sick and that led to those choices. That’s how I view Ozpin, mentally as opposed to physically sick. After a thousand years he needs evidence that trusting people and giving them his secrets won’t result in him being hurt. Until he’s shown that, expecting him to trust people just because they insist they are trustworthy is like asking someone with a broken leg to run you a race. They can try, but good look expecting them to succeed.

#rwby #rwby volume 7 #rwby volume 7 spoilers #long post #mymetas #Anonymous

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ziracona · 5 years ago

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What has been your favorite ilm chapter to write? Your least favorite? Do you have any interesting fun facts that were in cut pieces? I love this fic and the research put in is astounding. You put so much love into this. I'm glad to have been a reader :)

Thank you so much for asking this, and I’m really happy you have liked it! : ) Researching all kinds of wild stuff has been one of the most fun parts. (I’m holding the start of the answer to each question you asked, bc I talked about the first one for a while lol).

I do have a favourite chapter! I think to read, it would be a lot harder question, and there’d be a bunch of chapters tied, but as an author, my favourite chapter is most definitely Speak for the Dead. I have a lot of favourite moments and chapters, but that’s the one I’m most proud of. There’s a really rare thing in writing I call “script perfection,” which is not like, a perfect script in comparison to other scripts, it just means the version of the script that got shot/published was the best version of that particular script there ever could have been. It’s incredibly rare, and very hard to do. Even with films and shows I love, usually there will be seconds, sometimes minutes, off and on, that are the best version of those seconds there could have ever been. And the rest of it is great! It’s maybe the second or third or eighth-best it could have been, and that’s still super impressive--like man--eigth-best is still so close to 1st, eigth best is freaking phenomenal. It’s something to be really proud of. But that’s as high as it almost ever gets. For anything. Only extremely rarely is an entire script at 96% or above on script perfection. (I would say for reference that Galaxy Quest and The Incredibles are two such films).

It isn’t the most important part of a script or a story at all. Not by a huge amount. The quality of the story itself is. I have plenty of films that never hit 90% or above script perfection that I still prefer over films that did (like, Galaxy Quest is an amazing film, and I’m in awe that it hit that level of refinement, but I still like The Two Towers, which definitely did not, better. Because Sam’s speech at the end of it is enough to power me for a whole year). But it’s still such a rare thing. And god, it’s hard. Any kind of media is done on some kind of budget (be it financial or energy or both), and time constraint, and also it’s just not easy to do. Again, true-final-draft achievement (which is probably a better name for this bc it’s less confusing) is far from the most important or valuable aspect of a film, or play, or book, and it’s not necessary to make a story amazing. But it’s still always /so/ cool to see. It’s cool to see a nine minute continuous stretch of it even, on screen. And out of all the chapters I’ve written, the only one I think hit true-final-draft at least 96% or above, was Speak for the Dead. And that’s not embarrassing or anything. It’s wild. And I’m super proud of that. I’m proud I got even one. Because a lot of even my favourite books don’t. They just have perfected scenes, and a lot of them, but are not the best draft they could have been. Which does absolutely nothing to negate their worth as phenomenal books, but. I’m really, really proud of Speak for the Dead, and very happy with myself for having been able to do that at least once. I kind of treasure that.

It’s also a special chapter to me, because I had it only very loosely outlined/planned for at all, and it kind of came together on its own, and everything just came together and fell into place just right, and this chapter I had been really unsure of before starting turned into my favourite one in the entire fic. I like what I write, and I enjoy reading it myself, but there’s a line in Speak for the Dead where Tapp is trying to explain everything to Meg, about himself and his past and his family, and he’s been going through this like, awful mass of confusion and trauma and guilt and regret that’s all come to a head in this one day, and he’s found out who Amanda is and can’t deal with that and the person he knew, and the way Sing died, the choices she went on to make, and there’s so much even he doesn’t understand about how the world is falling apart around him, but somehow he figures it out enough to say it to Meg. And he has a line: “You’re supposed to stay late and work the extra eight hours overnight to catch the killer so somebody doesn’t die; you’re not supposed to go home to your family and give your kid a hug. It’s not as important, in an equation. It was my responsibility. And I didn’t get that the other job had its own set of rules. That the cop’s supposed to let the bus with his partner fall, but the dad’s supposed to let the fifteen people go and save his kid—he’s supposed to go running through crowded subway tunnels chased by gunmen, consequences be damned, to get them away from where his kid’s hiding. I didn’t get it. I don’t know why. I loved him right, but I didn’t act like it, because I thought I was doing the right thing. But if everybody’s just numbers, you lose anything that matters, no matter how high the numbers go up. And you don’t realize until it’s way too late that you do just as much good really helping one person you signed on to protect as you could have ever done bouncing off the lives of a hundred people who go on to be the next Jigsaw.”

And like. I fucking love that line. God. It’s such a hard thing to articulate, what he’s going through in that moment, and I try, but I think I often don’t do as good a job. But every time I read that last line it’s like a gut punch. And I really love it. How the fuck could you possibly feel after going through the experience he’s just had? It’s such a specific, indescribable kind of big, whole-world-view devestating.

There’s also a lot of really sweet moments with Meg, and Adam drugged and injured but trying really hard to help, and it’s a super understated chapter in a lot of the moments? Tapp’s one of my favourites to write, because of the way he thinks. He tries so hard to be lawful good in a world where there’s just no law at all anymore. And he’s older by far than anyone else, and thinks about the world that way. Honestly, it’s one of the most serious chapters. It’s less graphic than say Proven or The End of the Line, but it deals with some very not remotely fantastic and not pretty themes. It’s heavy. But I like the way it tells itself. I enjoy working in references when they make things fun, or better, or more meaningful, and I got to do that a lot. Plus, it gave Ace and Tapp a bunch of one-on-one time they didn’t really get on-screen as much in any of the rest of the fic, but I really loved it. The way they try to look after the people they care for, and how they understand each other. I just really fucking loved that chapter. Also, Tapp beat someone to death with a reverse bear trap that was still attached to his head so he could save Meg from dying in a way that would be super lastingly traumatic, and if that’s not the most metal thing I’ve ever heard? I really love Tapp. And I love that he sticks to the things he does. Meg never learns what Amanda was going to do to her, not in fic, not after. And Tapp does change how he does things are talking to Meg at the end of that chapter. Tapp’s the one who immediately says they can’t go public with any information on Rin until she’s passed on, even though it could really help them prove their case and hypothetically better protect the world, because he’s not willing to see a kid forced to revert to being violent and feral against her will in self-defense, or locked up in a government black site to get that. He did good. Life has not been kind to this poor man, but thankfully, Meg Thomas has.

Least favourite? Way harder. Hmmm. Always whichever one I wrote most recently 😂

In complete seriousness, I don’t think I have one? I have like 6 I consider “slightly-less-interesting” than the rest, but I don’t have one I hate period, or just dislike a lot. Uhhhh. If I had to pick one right now, I’d say Core Essentials, because I haven’t read it in over a year and don’t remember it as well as many others, and of the small number of chapters in the “Damn, been a hot minute, huh?” group, it’s the one I remember the least. This rating may change next time I actually read it, lol.

Hmmm. Interesting fun facts in cut segments. In the original draft for Shrouded, Claudette went into Philip’s basement and got a really good look at the other side of the wall, through one of the cracks, and saw the Entity and almost gave herself a panic attack. The other side of the basement wall was described as looking like the sun, like just looking at light, but only at first, and then there was movement like a snake coiling or some huge creatuer deep underwater sliding across your vision, too big to see, but alive in there in the middle of the light, and moving around, and it horrified her. It was extremely creepy but pretty cool.

The original draft for The Wraith included Philip experiencing fragmented audio memories from Signifying Nothing/his time with Vigo & co. while he was mostly unconscious. It was really cool and I forgot because I haven’t read it in forever, but it hinted at /way/ more of the plot to those past events. I really liked the draft, but ended up changing it into what was published because I’d never done anything with his memories before, and I didn’t want to disorient the reader too much (probably a good call, but it was still a neat scene in the OG form).

It’s not in the fic, but canonically, after leaving the survivors camp at the end of The Wraith, Philip came up with his plan to leave himself a message in the bell, and then called the Entity. Trying to talk his way out immediately failed, and it was shitty to him and pissed him off, and Philip had considered what might work on something like the Entity before calling it, and knew he was dead either way, so he tried to fight it. More to see if it would work than anything. He knew he would forget it even if he did, but sometimes impulses lingered, and it was possible if it worked, it would help him think of it again. He used his blood and drew a protective symbol against demons on his palm without it noticing, then rushed it, and it wasn’t scared of him so it didn’t give a fuck, but he smacked it with the charm and that actually succeeded in burning its talon (very little, but enough to cause it actual pain) and it flipped out and got extremely angry, and immediately stabbed him through the skull, which is why he returned with that chunk of his mask gone and has a scar on his forehead now. Originally, I was considering writing some of the events between The Wraith and Dawn from Philip’s POV, but decided it was much better sticking with the survivors and their uncertainty completely. Got to live in the anxiety baybeeee.

I’m sure there’s more but you activated my trap card asking about Speak for the Dead - a special interest- and I already made this long, so I should stop for now. Thank you again so much for asking! I hope my answers made sense are we’re at least kinda enjoyable to read. 💙💙💙

#ask #anonymous #in living memory #in living memory (fic)#writing #ilm spoilers #this was so fun and im glad i had an excuse to go writing meta haha. the one part of college i miss :’-)#thanks! 💙 it was really sweet. and fun to answer!#long post

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julius-scaeva · 5 years ago

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A couple of days ago I made this point on main. As you can see, it didn’t become very popular, BUT it’s still something I feel very strongly about (and yes, I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I’m biased), so I decided that I had something to say. (Obviously: HUGE spoilers for Darkdawn). Also, bring with you pop-corns, you’re here for a ride (there’s a tiny TL;DR at the end btw).

Let’s start by saying that I adore backstories in books. It’s my favorite kind of fanfiction to write and to read, I’m always glad when an author decides to give us flashbacks about a minor character, and I adore looking for little hints in a character’s behavior to get to know them better.

The explanation for this is pretty simple: I firmly believe that how we are heavily depends on what experiences we’ve come in contact with. I don’t think that our identity is solely based on experiences, but I also think that backstories are often more important than someone might think when considering a story.

I love when an author gives a minor character a voice because they are taking into account that everyone is the protagonist of their own story, everyone has had their personal character development, and, even though they can’t give a proper place for everyone to shine, they still can make us understand that these characters exist, in some way.

This is one of the reasons why I love the Villains series by V. E. Schwab and this is one of the main reasons why I loved The Nevernight Chronicle: almost (emphasis on almost) every character Mia (and therefore the reader) comes in contact with has a story to tell and Jay Kristoff makes sure we know that. That we know what has brought them to the point they are.

This is especially super important in a story that takes place in a country like Itreya where violence and prevarication seem, most of the time, the only options: if you give me a story that is meant to be super bloody and filled with morally questionable people, but then don’t make sure we understand why those people act in that way I won’t be impressed. I will only be extremely bored.

Itreya is a country that deeply influences people’s decisions simply because they often lack the opportunity to see that there’s another way: think about Furian, and how the meeting with the priest changed his life forever. Or about Ashlinn, about how she only knew vengeance before meeting Mia (and her father, how traumatizing had to be for him being imprisoned and tortured all those months). Or about Leona, who is surely deeply flawed and selfish, but is also scarred from an extremely traumatic experience from her childhood. Or about Jessamine, Hush, Carlotta, Corleone all characters we don’t really follow for a lot of time, but we have a little window opened for us and we get a small look in why they became who they are. (Ps: we don’t know shit about Cassius either and this pisses me off too, especially because we had Eclipse RIGHT THERE but that’s off the point I’m trying to make here. Just... if you ever plan to write something about him, let me know, okay?)

And, this is also essential, it doesn’t work only for the kids: like I’ve already said, characters like Furian, or Leona, or Corleone, or Ashlinn’s father are essential because we’re shown that this systemic use of violence and injustice isn’t something that screwed up only the last generation, but is deeply rooted in the very core of Itreya.

After all, what can you expect from a country born from a father killing his own child?

And then we come to the main antagonists.

Let me say this straight: there are villains, in The Nevernight Chronicles as well as in other stories, that don’t need backstories. Not ever single villain in a story needs to be super well developed or super interesting: there are some people who are just... shitty. And that’s all. Because that’s how the world works. There are people who are violent, who are cruel, simply because they can. Example: we don’t know anything about Leonides or Duomo, we only know how their actions scarred and influenced other characters. There’s nothing spectacular about them, nothing stands out: they are two men using their strength and power to abuse vulnerable people close to them. There’s nothing interesting, nothing even remotely alluring, nothing that captures my interest in a man beating his wife to death in front of his daughter or in an another man using his power to abuse young children to the point of one of them committing suicide. They are meant to be seen as disgusting. They are meant to be seen as monsters. They are meant to be seen as the embodiment of the extreme privilege that touches so few people in the Republic and causes oh so much damage. I don’t want to read about them. I never will. It would be the equivalent of reading about Donald Trump. (You can fight me on this comparison)

And then we come to the actual point of what I’m trying to say: I was extremely disappointed, up until Darkdawn, that we didn’t get any sort of background for the components of the Red Church and I was glad we had little snippets with some information about them (especially, especially Drusilla. She and Mercurio had more chemistry than half of the main couples I’ve encountered in books). We also had some kind of information about Solis too (more or less). But... what about Aalea? Spiderkiller? Mouser? Are we just supposed to believe they appeared out of nowhere, already assassins and murderers and completely corrupted by money and gold?

Are we supposed not to have sympathy for them just because they are villains?

Because, if that’s the case, it pisses me off to no end.

And I wouldn’t even be mad about this, like I said, if it hadn’t been made clear that backstories ARE IMPORTANT to make us understand what’s going on in the Republic. I mean, we know stuff about The Falcons that serves no purpose other than that, right?

But okay, o.k.a.y., Jay Kristoff, there are characters who maybe have too little on-page time to talk about them in depth (even though I’d argue on the fact that there was no time for them to actually have a proper backstory), or, maybe, you here were trying to, once again, like with Leonides and Duomo, make us see how richness and power slowly corrupt and destroy, and if you had given us backstories the message wouldn’t have been as effective as it was.

If I consider those characters to be more symbols than, in fact, characters, then I’m ready to look past their lack of background.

And then we come to Scaeva.

Now, if you haven’t already guessed by the url of my blog, or by its aesthetic, or by my main blog, Julius Scaeva is, by far, my favorite character in the trilogy. Which is saying a lot, because I loved almost everyone there (emphasis on “almost”). What can I say? I love me a great villain.

Up until the end of Godsgrave, I was interested in him, but, his character not being in basically two books, I hadn’t enough material to really consider him (even though his dialogue with Alinne made a lasting impression on me) and I wasn’t really sure how I would feel about him by the end of the series.

And then, then, the last pages of Godsgrave and the first of Darkdawn happened and I suddenly knew I wasn’t reading about “a villain” like, for example, Leonides or Duomo, or even Spiderkiller: I was reading about a well-rounded character.

What makes the difference, you might ask. Well, apart from the number of pages dedicated to him, Scaeva has a well rounded personality, interesting relationships with other people, especially Mia and Jonnen (please, tell me something about Spiderkiller apart from her liking gold and being good at making poisons) and is, undoubtedly, the most charismatic character in the whole thing. I feel like what really made his character, btw, are the glimpses of the past relationship he had with Alinne (the Nevernight wiki says that it was only sexual but it clearly wasn’t and I’m working on another analysis just to prove my point) and, most of all, the interactions with Jonnen. Especially, ESPECIALLY, the scene with them and Adonai (aka: one of my absolute favorites sequences in the entire trilogy).

Kristoff wants us to feel strong emotions towards Scaeva: negative emotions, of course (he totally failed in that with me, btw), but you can’t help a subtle hint of admiration for what he managed to do. It makes a lot of sense, since I’ve been confirmed that his figure was, as I thought, inspired by Caesar (aka: one of my favorite historical figures of all time, and kind of crush when I was a child)---I have to thank @kavinskhhy for telling me that Kristoff actually confirmed he was based off Caesar, which is.

The thing is: for characters that are half as complex as him (because he is a complex character, you can fight me on that too) we are given pages and pages that explain how they became the way they are (*cough cough* Maggot *cough cough*). And then we come to the main antagonist. The man Mia has despised all her life. The man that *shocking* is also her father. The man that alone has brought a State on its metaphorical knees. And we discover that he’s actually a well-defined and alluring figure. And...

We get absolutely nothing about him.

And when I say nothing, I really do mean nothing.

Before he became consul, we are left in the complete dark.

“He’s probably only another of those characters born in privilege” you might say. “Kristoff doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say!”

Had this been the case, him being born as a Darkin in a family of mellowborn and having to come to terms with that would have been pretty interesting to see nonetheless, considering the reputation Darkins have in canon (may I remind you that Alinne, in her madness, was terrified of Mia, telling her that she was not her daughter, just because “He was inside of her”? Like I said. Interesting.). But then, let me ask you: are you sure he was born in absolute privilege?

Leaving the comparison with Caesar (born in a very ancient family, but also... not really wealthy nor powerful, to use an euphemism) aside: are you sure that someone as Leonides and Duomo would have developed an obsession (I don’t feel any other word is fitting, here) with the concept of “will”? Would someone who thinks everything he has is well deserved just because he was born in the right family refer to what he’s doing as “a game”? Would someone who has never had to struggle his whole life care to develop a partial immunity to the Everseeing’s symbol, even thought it must have costed him an immense amount of pain?

But now you’ve proven yourself my daughter true. Possessed by the same will as I: not only to survive, but to prosper. To carve your name with bloody fingernails into this earth.

Look me in the eye and tell me that this man came from the same background as Duomo and Leonides.

“But maybe Kristoff only wanted us to hate him!”

No, he didn't. Because:

1) a villain you’re able to despise without any second thought isn’t a great villain (and you need a worthy opponent when you create a main character such as Mia): if you’re giving us a story filled with morally gray character, the MAIN villain has to be, in my opinion, as interesting as the others.

2) there are in the story characters you have no problem hating and I’ve analyzed why Scaeva is different from them.

3) there is a moment (only one moment, that’s true, but it’s enough for me to conclude that Kristoff wanted us to see Scaeva as a well rounded character) where you can’t help feeling the tiniest bit of positive emotion towards him. And that’s where he uses his own body as a shield to protect his son.

And even if he wanted us to hate him, that would defy one of the main messages of the book: everyone (or almost everyone: see the examples above) is a product of the environment they grew up in. Violence causes violence. And Itreya was literally founded over a murder.

So, to sum up: we know how important backstories are in the Nevernight world, to the point of even side characters getting a couple of flashbacks here and there. We have differentiated between characters seen as “symbols” and characters with their own depth. We’ve come to the conclusion that Scaeva is as (if not more) interesting as the majority of the characters who got their own backstory.

And you’re really really telling me that he is the only one out of them all we don’t get to know better?

Why?

Because he’s the villain? (Like I’ve stated up until now, this would make a TERRIBLE excuse)

Because there was no time?

What the hell should I conclude finishing this book? “Oh yes, everyone is a product of society and has therefore a story to tell except that one guy because fuck him, he’s a dick, we don’t care”?

If we take into accounts Spiderkiller, Aalea and Mouser the thing becomes even worse, because it really seems that everyone but the villain has a sad story behind them that makes them act the way they do.

“Oh, shit, something terrible happened to me when I was a child so now I’m a bad person, BUT NOT AS BAD AS THE BAD GUYS, WHO HAVE NO REASON WHATSOEVER TO BE THE WAY THEY ARE. OR MAYBE THEY HAVE, WHO KNOWS? WHO CARES? NOT ME!”

See? SEE? It doesn’t make sense!!!

And maybe you didn’t even notice that, maybe you don’t even care, but since I was little I’ve always took the vilains’ side, analyzed their actions and spent all my time wondering what their side of the picture might be, because almost no one ever cares for backstories of the side characters, let alone the ones of the guys you’re supposed to hate.

And when I come in contact with a story that almost makes mandatory to inform us of every single character’s background, because the author finally acknowledges the importance of what you’ve been through in defining who you are, because if you’ve only seen blood and violence throughout your whole life OF FUCKING COURSE you’re going to believe there’s no other way--when an author does all of this and then systematically leaves out the villains (even the most complex ones) from this mentality

THIS is when I snap.

TL;DR in case you got bored halfway through: if you use backstories in your works to inform us how a violent and cruel environment systematically fucks up everyone, no matter their social status, and then purposefully leave out the antagonists because they are antagonists, I’m not going to take it lightly.

10 notes · View notes

threeletterslife · 6 years ago

Text

Whipped with a Cherry on Top

→ summary: Kim Taehyung has been your friend for more than four years, having a very, very special place in your heart. Granted, he’s an annoying asscrack sometimes, but who isn’t? You love him to death — that is, if he doesn’t end up killing you first with his pesky tactics.

→ pairing/rating: taehyung x reader | PG-13

→ genre: it was supposed to be pure fluff but then my finger might’ve slipped idk now it’s crack too | f2l!au

→ warnings: just a shit ton of swearing as usual (:

→ wordcount: 6.5k

→ a/n: i literally power wrote this shit bc the empty masterlist bothered the crap outta me sdjflsdj i hope you’ll enjoy! <3

♫: Promise by Jimin | Something Just Like This by The Chainsmokers & Coldplay | Euphoria by BTS

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: oHmYgOd bitcb

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: bitxh

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: birch

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: bitch

[YOU]: bitcb

[YOU]: bitxh

[YOU]: birch

[YOU]: bitch (:

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: fuck off botch

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: GODDAMIT

[YOU]: yOU FAILURE

[YOU]: what’s up tho it’s like 3 am go to sleep

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: can’t. forgot the reading assignment… 143 pages of that shitty econ txtbook let’s get ittt

[YOU]: dude. we have the gov final tomorrow

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ikik… Y/N, baby can you send me the notes?

[YOU]: istfg it’s not my fault you never come to class sO WHY ARE YOU TORTURING ME FOR YOUR WRONG DEEDS

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ohmygod Y/N it’s not the time to be dramatic. my GRADES are at stake here

[YOU]: bitcb

[YOU]: bitxh

[YOU]: birch

[YOU]: bitch** fine. i am the bestest friend ever but fine. i’ll even send you my econ notes so you don’t have to read the txtbk. am i not the bestest friend ever

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: THANK YOU I OWE YOU BIG TIME I LOVE YOU

[YOU]: uh huh mhm

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ):

[YOU]: fine.

[YOU]: i love you too. nOW GO DO YOUR SHIT I NEED SUM SLEEP

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: WELL THEN SWEET DREAMS BOTCH

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: fuck

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: you know what. i’m not even gonna try

You giggle slightly, immediately sending that irresponsible dimwit of a best friend, Kim Taehyung, your econ and gov notes. Sometimes, you think that boy could’ve possibly died in college if it weren’t for you. But then again, you’d probably be dead in your grave if it weren’t for him. He’s saved you one too many times from disaster dates that could’ve left you traumatized for life.

Kim Taehyung has been your friend for more than four years, having a very, very special place in your heart. Granted, he’s an annoying asscrack sometimes, but who isn’t? You love him to death — that is, if he doesn’t end up killing you first with his pesky tactics.

He’s killing you alright. He really is.

“Oh, c’mon! It’s just one party,” Taehyung whines as he hands you your regular — a whipped chocolate ice cream cone. Today was Whipped Wednesday, a day where you come to visit your bestie at work and even get an ice cream cone for free because quoting Taehyung, “We’re only in trouble if someone finds out.” (Actually, you have no idea how the manager hasn’t found out about this yet, counting the fact that it’s been going on for years.) Whipped Wednesday has been a thing for both you and Taehyung for as long as you can remember — that is since he started working at the ice cream parlor at the beginning of freshmen year.

“Aw, Y/N! I owe you one, remember? From all that note-sharing? I’m just returning the favor and taking you out for fun!” Taehyung says.

You roll your eyes, taking a lick at the ice-cold dessert. “Are you crazy? It’s finals week, Tae.”

Taehyung laughs, rushing over to the ice cream machine to make some perfectly whipped ice cream for a line of giggling customers. Something tells you the giggling girls are here to feast their eyes on your best friend, not his impeccably made ice cream cones. Your best friend comes back to you, slightly out of breath from being worked for the past hour.

“That’s exactly my point, Y/N,” he huffs. “One party to fling away all that unwanted stress!” He rushes over to tend to some girl batting her fake-ass lashes at him.

“But my point is, really? During finals?” you call after him. You take a large bite out of your chocolate ice cream, deep in thought.

“Why not?” Taehyung calls over his shoulder. “It’s not like you can save your shitty grades with one exam!”

You scoff loudly, putting a hand to your chest. “Excuse you, I have all A’s!” you shout, redeeming yourself to the people who might’ve heard you have ‘shitty grades.’ “Only two are borderline,” you mutter.

“All the more reason for you to come and party!” Taehyung sings as he whips up two vanilla ice cream cones, handing them to young siblings, smiling at them warmly. He looks up at you, giving you the same, cordial smile.

God. If it weren’t for that amazing smile of his, you’d refuse every one of his foolish ideas. But because of his irresistible smile, you’re stuck doing stupid shit with him. I guess that makes us best friends, doing dumb crap together. I blame it all on the smile.

“You know what? Fine. Fine!” you say angrily, biting aggressively at your ice cream cone. “But I am not getting wasted!” You lean over the counter, glaring playfully at your friend.

“Yes!” Taehyung cries, rushing over to squeeze you in a happy hug over the counter. “But it’s your loss if you’re not getting dumb drunk,” he chuckles, winking at you.

You huff. “One of us has to get the other home — you and I both know it’s always me!”

“You know it!” Taehyung laughs. You can’t help but laugh along with him.

It’s times like this when you wonder what would’ve happened if you’d said ‘yes.’

Taehyung is getting ready for the party, ignoring your yapping of, ‘wear it and leave it!’ He faces his glowing mirror, his handsome, chiseled face slightly illuminated by the soft, yellow light. It’s the way how the gleam of white in his eyes shine. How his lips are perfectly pursed on his face from concentration. How his delicate nose sits on a perfect angle…

It’s how he laughs at your dumb jokes, how he takes care of you in the simplest but heartwarming ways, how he loves how outspoken you are, how he hates to be away from you…

You like to wonder what it would be like to date him. You like to wonder what would’ve happened if you had accepted his offer to be his girlfriend. Sometimes — no, often times (especially these days) — you wonder if he still likes you.

When Taehyung had asked you out back in high school, you had barely known him. You were the loud girl, captain of the speech and debate team. While Taehyung… he had been some kid hiding behind others in the marching band.

Too nice to reject him, when he asked you to your junior prom, you’d made some excuse about how you weren’t going — even though you had bought your dress and everything. You actually ended up not going, in fear of seeing Taehyung at the school party. But that had been the very starting point of your relationship with him.

You had to give it to Kim Taehyung. He was quite the persistent guy. By the end of the year, he’d joined the speech and debate club, pushing his way to the top finalists of the school — right next to you. It was hard not to befriend him if you had to see him countless hours after school to practice for competitions.

Easily, Taehyung found his way into your life. And much easier, he became the largest part of your life. By the time you graduated high school, you and Taehyung were inseparable: the best friends of the century. Taehyung was not the shy, nameless kid in band anymore, he was outgoing, spunky and risk-taking — even more so than you.

Both of you never, ever reflect back on that possible romance that could’ve bloomed between the two of you. It’s just too awkward, you suppose. Besides, you’d missed your chance. No matter how much you liked Taehyung now, you couldn’t really say anything without bulldozing over your solid friendship. You’d rather have Taehyung as a friend than lose him forever when he rejects you.

“Are you actually gonna wear that to the party?” Taehyung laughs, making you jump out of your thoughts.

“Yes,” you say boldly, gesturing towards the ugliest pair of sweatpants you have, then tugging on the collar of your fluffy turtleneck sweater. “It’s called my male species repellent outfit.”

“You’re fucking impossible,” Taehyung chuckles, shaking his head. “I’m almost embarrassed to be seen out with you.”

“But you love me,” you croon, rolling yourself across Taehyung’s bed as you plop yourself on his carpeted floor. “Can we finally go now? If I have to wait a minute more, I’m not gonna fucking go.”

Taehyung rolls his eyes. “Hold up, you idiot. Unlike some people, I want to look decent for a nice party.”

“Don’t look too decent or the girls are gonna steal you away from me,” you pout. Taehyung turns around, flashing you a smile that makes the blood rush to your face.

“I’d never let them steal me away from you, baby,” he coos.

Your heart threatens to bust out of your chest, but you calm it down with a deep breath. It’s too bad you know the pet names Taehyung often calls you are all part of an ongoing joke.

“Whatever, asscrack, let’s go.”

The party has the most atrocious music you’d ever heard in your life. Every single song boasts the same beat, making it seem like the same goddamn tune was on a broken record, repeating over and over and over again. Your head hurts like hell. You’re starting to actually think studying for finals would’ve been better than this.

At least the parties you usually attend have good songs. This one is the epitome of trash.

“Taehyung!” you yell at your friend who’s choking down another shot of vodka. “You idiot!”

Your friend turns to you, a lazy smile spreading across his lips. “Hey, baby,” he mumbles, gesturing you over. You roll your eyes but obey, walking straight to his side.

“Steady on the shots, Tae. Unless you want to wake up dead in the morning,” you sigh. “Who’s gonna shoo away the fuckboys for me, then?”

Taehyung chuckles lowly, looking at you from under his long, eyelashes. “I shall rise up as a guardian knight to protect m’lady,” he declares dutifully in a weird, ancient accent.

“Oh no, no role-playing,” you seethe through your teeth. “Last time was bad enough! Kim Taehyung, you hear me?” you yell at your friend, taking his cheeks in your hands as you shake his head in an attempt to cure him of his drunkenness. It does shit though.

“M’lady! I must beseech you not to… caress me as such. You make me test my heart, dear lady,” Taehyung wails drunkenly.

“Shut up,” you snap. “Let’s get you out of this dump.”

“Please, dear Y/N, will you promise me to be by my side ‘til the autumn leaves turn their pleasant shade of amethystine? Will you swear to never leave me even if the sun collides with our heavenly planet?” Taehyung says dramatically, clutching onto your sweater in the process.

You roll your eyes. “Yeah, I’m staying, Taehyung.”

“Thank you, m’lady. You are too kind to me,” Taehyung mumbles, attaching himself onto you as you struggle to maneuver both you and your best friend safely out of the bustling party house.

Once outside, you’re finally able to take a deep breath, the cold night air filling your lungs. It would’ve been peaceful if it weren’t for the nasty music that you can still hear and your best friend tugging at your hand as he kneels down on one knee in front of you.

“Yes?” you ask, annoyed as you look down at your friend. He’s so pathetically drunk that you have to fight off the huge urge to video record the whole thing.

“M’lady, I must confess to you what my heart has been telling me since the start of time itself,” Taehyung says sincerely, his eyes never leaving yours.

You scoff. “Taehyung, get up from the grass. These people might water it with their own piss, judging by their music choices.”

Your best friend pretends not to hear you. Either that or he’s so drunk he can’t hear anything but the voices inside his head. You’re joking. Kinda.

“Y/N! Oh, Y/N!” he howls. You’re so glad the shitty music is so loud no one else can really hear this wailing except for you. “Dear, Y/N!” Taehyung vocalizes. “I’ve admired you from afar for too long. I have ventured upon treacherous lands to earn your love. But all I get is the reward of acquaintances! I must ask for more my dear!”

You laugh, even letting a snort loose. “Oh, Taehyung.” It’s particularly enjoyable to watch someone you like to be so drunk — especially since he’s literally trying to drunk-confess to you in some medieval language.

“I love you, oh dear Y/N!” Taehyung declares, softly squeezing your hand as he stares at you through his hooded eyes.

You giggle, patting his soft head of hair. “You should’ve taken acting classes instead of following my ass into speech and debate,” you mutter, smiling fondly at your friend.

“Please, Y/N,” Taehyung pleads, “will you marry me?” He pulls out a slightly crushed onion ring from his pocket and holds it out for you to admire.

You nearly choke on air as Taehyung presents you your edible wedding ring. “Tae…” you breathe, a bright smile making its way onto your lips. Honestly, when’s the next time my crush will propose to me? Oh, fuck it. I’ll play along. “Why, yes, my handsome knight. I will marry you!” you giggle, sliding the slightly greasy onion ring onto your ring finger.

“Oh dear! My love, my sunshine! You’ve accepted!” Taehyung wails, taking your hand and peppering it with at least a thousand little kisses.

“Surely I will accept the marriage proposal of such a wonderful knight like you,” you laugh, tugging your friend back up to his feet. “Shall we get you home?”

Taehyung doesn’t answer you, his eyes looking somewhere that were definitely not your eyes.

“Taehyung! Let’s go,” you repeat yourself, starting to drag your friend to his car. But he stays rooted on the ground. You sigh. “We’ve role-played enough for one night, don’t you think?”

“Oh, but I agree. It’s about time we stop,” Taehyung says softly. You follow his gaze to see he was staring intently at your lips. Subconsciously, you lick them, your eyes flickering down to gaze at his lips as well. He tugs you close to him — so much so that you can feel his hot breath on your skin.

It’s enough to give you goosebumps. God, you don’t know if you should stop him or just let him continue… But it seems as if Taehyung doesn’t want you to overthink (as you usually do), quickly leaning forward and pressing his warm lips on yours.

You gasp into the kiss, finding your balance by gripping on the front of your friend’s shirt. All thoughts fly out the window as you melt into Taehyung’s embrace, breathing in the slightly alcoholic scent and chasing his lips with yours.

Taehyung is in no hurry as he lingeringly moves his mouth across yours, hands moving up to cup your cheeks in a loving manner. He breathes his hot breath against you, leaving you feeling a bit faint as you slowly wrap your arms around his neck to secure the both of you.

In your opinion, it ends too soon. Both of you pull away at the same time, gazing in each other’s eyes. You’re still catching your breath. You want to take a minute, close your eyes and forever engrave this moment in your head.

But Taehyung speaks. “M’lady, that was a wondrous kiss, was it not?” he speaks slowly, your noses touching in the middle.

That’s when your perfect world shatters. It’s no time for victories. Your crush confessed to you, proposed to you and kissed you drunk. It wasn’t real. You feel a goddamn migraine creeping in and you grasp your head. You swear to god, you usually always have something to say. Goddamn Taehyung. He’s the only one that can get your tongue so twisted.

Immediately, you jerk your head away from your friend, looking down at the grass. “Let’s go,” you say, tugging at his wrist.

“Lady, why in a hurry? Let us dwindle just a bit more,” Taehyung giggles. But you’re persistent, tugging him all the way to his car. You sit at the driver’s seat because god forbid you’re gonna let Taehyung drive dumb-drunk.

“Y/N?” Taehyung whimpers in the shotgun seat, watching you drive with your eyes looking straight ahead. “Are you mad at me?”

You sigh, your head throbbing from your headache. “No. No, I’m not.” I should be mad at myself for falling for all that.

“Oh okay,” he responds in a small whisper. “I’m sorry.”

Why is he sorry? Your stomach does a few somersaults.

“Are we voyaging to slay the dragons?” Taehyung whispers, biting at his nails nervously. “I have forgotten my armor and my sword…”

You don’t feel like replying back with something snarky. “No, we’re taking you home, Tae.”

“Oh, lord. Thank thee.”

Taehyung’s probably not as thankful for you as you haul him into his bed, grunting from his weight. It’s really not that your best friend is heavy, it’s more like your body isn’t built to haul heavy mass.

“Y/N?” Taehyung asks as he scrambles up from his bed.

“Go to bed, Tae,” you say, shaking your head, cheeks continuously flushed.

“Can you stay?” your best friend whines, staring at you with his large, puppy dog eyes. “I don’t wanna be lonely.”

You want to so, so bad. But you don’t want to wake up in the morning, laying on the same bed as Taehyung and regret even more things in your life. “No, I can’t stay,” you say, smiling meekly. “Finals stuff. I’m sorry Tae, I’ve got to go.”

You don’t give him time to answer as you practically bolt out of his room, cold hand massaging your burning forehead. If this was anything like Taehyung’s other drunk encounters, he should forget everything in the morning. You just wish you were drunk so you could forget too.

You wake up the next day, drowning out the distracting memories from the night before as you groggily force yourself to sit down on your desk to get some last minute cramming done before your finals. It’s almost noon by the time you’re done, and you get ready for your very last exam, grabbing a pair of sweats and a crinkled hoodie for your outfit of the day. Taking a granola bar in your mouth as you tie your greasy hair up into a messy bun, you leave your dorm in a rush.

The final goes well, as expected. You were in a good mood, actually, having finished all the exams. You could’ve lasted the whole day without feeling any sort of dread until the memories flood back to you.

Oh fuck, I kissed my best friend.

You’d plum forgotten from all that econ cramming. Shaking your head and taking pity on yourself, you sigh, checking your phone the first time that day. 31 messages from yours truly, Kim Taehyung.

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: gud mornin

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: rise n’ shine

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: you up

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: thx for getting me home last night lmfao

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: did i do stupid shit

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: jk dumb question

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ofc i did (:

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ok i found a goddamn onion ring in my bed

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: did you put it there

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: istg you love those greasy little shits

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: they remind me of your hair during finals week haha

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: jk please don’t kill me i love you

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: you nerd why aren’t you answering

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: i bet you’re studying for that econ final

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: bitch i’m winging that shit

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: make sure to eat something more than a granola bar

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ik it’s not whipped wed but come see me at my shift at the ice cream parlor after the final!!!!

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: !!!!

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]:!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: lmfao you’re gonna kill me for spamming you and i value my life so i’ll stop here

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: but srsly meet me at the ice cream parlor

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: you need to tell me all the stupid shit i did yesterday ahahfsdjsfljf

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: also i’ll whip up your fav when you get there

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: COMPLIMENTARY because i love you

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: you’re not gonna see this until after the goddamn final but

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: GOOD LUCK BITCH

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: if anyone deserves 120% (haha the curve) it’s YOU

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: KICK ASS BBY

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: ps

[ROYAL ASSCRACK]: istfg if you recorded my drunk ass i’m going to SHANK you

You’re glad he doesn’t remember shit. You’re also glad that you didn’t record him last night. An angry Taehyung is not something one can survive so easily. You’re joking. Kinda.

Your heart flutters slightly at his texts, how he worries for you. You really don’t know how you can see his face again without possibly fainting from blushing so hard. It’s as if the kiss fueled your feelings for him and now they were more uncontrollable than ever.

You’re not sure if you should tell Taehyung exactly what he did last night or just tell a little white lie for the sake of your friendship. But then again, you kinda suck at lying. You’re just stressed that you have no idea how he’ll react if he finds out about your feelings for him. Will he distance himself from you? Will your friendship stay but never be the same? What if… he still likes you?

Shaking your head, you laugh to yourself. Fat chance. We’ve friendzoned each other ever since high school.

You head over to the ice cream parlor, feet thudding heavily on the sidewalk. As soon you open the door to the shop, Taehyung greets you with a loud, “Y/N!” which turns a few customers’ heads.

“Hey!” you smile, waving back at him. You slightly duck your head so you won’t have to see his handsome face in fear you’ll get all flustered over again. “What’s up?”

Taehyung hands you your favorite whipped chocolate ice cream and this time with a cherry placed neatly on top. “Just work,” he laughs. “Like the little addition to your usual? I wanted to try something new for you!”

You smile, looking at the impeccably whipped ice cream, admiring every little swirl and the shiny, red cherry sitting on the very top of it. “Mhm, of course. Thanks, Tae.”

Your friend gives you a bright smile, sending your heart into overdrive. God, I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up without blowing my head.

“So… What kind of crazy shit did I do this time?” he grins, rushing over to tend to a few customers waiting for him.

“The usual,” you say, as nonchalantly as possible. “Role-playing.” You take the round cherry, popping it into your mouth.

Taehyung bursts out laughing as he whips up more ice cream cones like the professional that he is. “What did I role-play this time?”

“A fucking knight. You were using this weird accent and your vocabulary expanded by a tenfold,” you chuckle, licking at your ice cream. “Apparently I was the princess you were so in love with.”

“Oh?” Taehyung asks as he settles over the counter, leaning against it just like you. “Enlighten me with more,” he says, a full grin pasted on his face.

Your cheeks heat up at the memories. “Um… Something about fighting a dragon without your armor… A love confession in some Shakespearean language… I think, at one point, a marriage proposal?” you say as casually as you can.

“Woah, woah, woah, there!” Taehyung snorts. “Me? Propose to you?”

“Yeah, with a goddamn onion ring,” you chuckle slightly, biting your ice cream cone. “I don’t know how it got in your bed but…”

Taehyung raises his eyebrows. “Oh shit,” he mutters. “Did we…?”

“No, you ass!” you blurt. “You asked me to stay with you but I…” you trail off. “Can we not talk about this? How was your final?” you say, aggressively biting at your ice cream.

“Bombed it,” Taehyung answers shortly. “You’re trying to change the topic, Y/N. Why? Did I do something that bad?”

No, it was fine. Great, actually. But you can’t tell him that. “No… Yes… Maybe? It depends on how you think about it,” you sigh. “I dunno. Forget it,” you say. You can literally feel the blush creeping in and settling on your cheeks. If it were any other person, you would’ve easily told them they’d kissed you drunk, but with Taehyung… it was so much harder. You’re struggling to form coherent sentences. It’s so not like you, the queen of speech and debate.

“Oh, c’mon! What’s there to hide?” Taehyung pushes you, leaning even closer towards you. “I already confessed my undying love to you drunk, so…” It hurts because you know he’s joking.

You sigh loudly, resting your chin on the counter. If Taehyung didn’t feel the same as you, nothing would matter, right? Ah, fuck it.

“You kissed me.”

“Wait, what?” Taehyung asks, completely caught off guard from your sudden spilled truth.

“You kissed me, Tae.”

“I…” Taehyung’s eyes widen as he searches your face for any other reaction. He laughs nervously. “Well, this is awkward.”

“Yeah…” you mumble.

“I was drunk, Y/N,” Taehyung says slowly, looking away from you. He chuckles without happiness. “You must’ve been caught off guard… I’m sorry. I swear it was nothing.”

It was nothing, huh? Fuck. That didn’t hurt at all. No, no. It killed you over.

You want to spill it out right then and there. Yet it seems so that you can argue about sensitive topics such as abortion, gay marriage and politics but you can’t seem to confess your feelings. Yeah, but a lost debate isn’t as serious as a lost friend, you reason.

“Oh, okay,” you manage to answer. Already, you feel the awkwardness.

“Yeah…”

“Mm…”

“Um, my shift will be over in a few. I’ll drive you home,” Taehyung says blandly. It feels so weird to not hear him tease you, or have a playful tone in his voice for that matter. He usually nitpicks at everything, but seeing him just tell you that in the dullest way possible… You don’t know what to think.

It’s then when you’re finally able to feel your chocolate ice cream melting, the sticky, brown liquid making a mess of your hand. You don’t have much of a reaction to it as you get some napkins to clean yourself.

It’s dying, melting away in an ugly shit color — just like your friendship.

You and Taehyung both take your seats in his car; you haven’t spoken a word to him since fifteen minutes ago — which feels so weird because usually, you two are talking up a storm. There’s always something to say. Except now.

Taehyung must be embarrassed, you think. His reaction tells you exactly that he hadn’t meant it. It kills you. Your heart feels shattered. Somewhere deep inside you, you’d hoped he’d said something on the lines of, ‘Oh, Y/N, I meant that kiss with all my heart.’

Who am I kidding? You know that stuff only happens in movies.

Taehyung starts the engine of his car and you jump slightly. Your friend takes no notice as he keeps his eyes straight ahead. The car ride is so silent, you can literally hear the gears of your brain working as all sorts of bad thoughts fly through your head.

Does this mean… an eternal goodbye to Whipped Wednesdays? What if we won’t meet ever again? What if… he won’t be a part of my life anymore? Does he hate me for letting him do it?

You’re still shaking in anxiety as Taehyung parks in front of your dorm building. “See you, Y/N,” he says shortly, waving slightly at you.

All you can do is nod in acknowledgment, quickly exiting the vehicle.

And just like that, Taehyung exited out of your life for a good week. You agonized in your dorm, moping around and eating a shit ton of ice cream that wasn’t perfectly whipped by Kim Taehyung. Your phone was collecting dust somewhere in the dorm and all you ended up doing for almost a whole week was binge-watch your favorite rom-com show on your laptop — probably accumulating as much weight as the text messages your friends were probably sending you.

It was nothing. It was nothing. It was nothing.

His words echo in your head the whole time. Just as you’re finally able to crack a small smile from a corny joke on a show: it was nothing, it was nothing, it was nothing.

Maybe he hadn’t meant it? you had reasoned. No. He had been so disappointed in himself after finding out. You’d seen the look on his face. The horror, the humiliation.

You don’t want to think about it, but it’s all you can think about. It takes you almost a full week to finally cease your moping. You take a nice, long shower in hot water, treat yourself to a healthy salad and squeeze some yoga in, in an attempt to lose some of that weight you gained from binge-eating so much ice cream.

On Wednesday morning, you finally pick up your phone, wiping off the dust with your hand. 561 unread messages. 12 missed calls. Shit. Your friends probably thought you’d finally snapped from stress and buried yourself in a ditch.

All of the calls and half of the messages are from Taehyung. You take the liberty to scroll through them quickly. To summarize, most of the texts comprise of, ‘are you mad,’ ‘you dead,’ ‘you gud?’ Then the most recent text, just five minutes before: ‘don’t forget about Whipped Wednesdays!’

Shit. Right. It’s Wednesday.

You don’t know if you want to go. You’ve never missed a day of Whipped Wednesdays since the day Taehyung started working at the ice cream parlor. But you’ve already come this far mourning a heartbreak. You don’t know if it’ll be healthy for you to see Kim Taehyung so soon.

Regardless, you find yourself wordlessly getting ready, curling your hair and wearing a presentable outfit for once. At exactly noon, someone knocks at your door. You know it’s Taehyung, arrived to pick you up.

You open the door, your stomach doing insane acrobatic tricks, making you feel all queasy. There, Taehyung stands. Handsome as usual.

“Oh good, you’re good,” Taehyung says, rushing in to hug you. You’re taken back by surprise but soon, you find yourself wrapping your arms around your best friend as well. You had missed him. “I thought you were dead, the way you weren’t checking your goddamn phone. You idiot. I worried. I was so close to breaking in. But then I realized you were probably going through one of your moody phases.” He chuckles in your ear.

The hair on the back of your neck stands up straight as you nod. “Yeah… moody phases,” you repeat. “I’m fine,” you say, pulling away and giving your friend a small smile. “Let’s go.”

Again, most of the car ride is silent, as if staying away from each other for a week made you strangers, foreign to the other’s presence. You really can’t take the silence though. God, you want to say something so bad, but what would you say?

Haha, sorry Tae, but the reason why I was moping around like a baby for a goddamn week is that I might like you?? And you kinda rejected me??

You mentally slap yourself. You’re never this tongue-tied. You hate not being able to say what’s on your mind. You want to speak. You need to —

“Tae?”

Your own voice surprises you as you can see Taehyung jump slightly in his seat, his hands still fixed tightly on the steering wheel. Immediately, you regret ever speaking. Too late now.

“Hm?”

You literally want to shank yourself for being an idiot. You’re stuck. What are you supposed to say? Maybe apologize? Yeah, apologize for being the bitch that you are, ditching your friend for a week, Y/N.

An “I’m sorry” spills from your lips at the same time as Taehyung. Both of you chuckle. It was pretty common for both of you to say something in a unison. Soulmates, as to how you two had reasoned it as. Already, the awkward atmosphere isn’t as suffocating as before.

“You should be sorry,” Taehyung teases, a grin escaping his lips. “You had me worried sick!”

You huff. “If anything, you should be sorry. Just… just kissing me like that out of the fucking blue! How am I supposed to goddamn act?”

“Okay, first of all, I was drunk. Second of all, it was nothing, I told you!” Taehyung laughs.

“Oh my god, don’t call it nothing!” you blurt out. As embarrassed as you are for saying that, you feel better just voicing what’s on your mind than being silent.

“What would you call it then?” Taehyung asks.

You roll your eyes. “What am I supposed to say? It was the best kiss I’ve ever had?”

“Best kiss?” Taehyung laughs. “I mean, of course, I was involved,” he says sassily.

“Oh god, no,” you stifle a giggle.

“Well then, tell me, Y/N. Do you feel the same as me?” Taehyung asks, wiggling his eyebrows.

You make an ugly face. “What kind of vague question is that? I’m no mind reader! How am I supposed to know how you feel, huh? If I knew, don’t you think I would’ve cried from rejection or happiness, already?”

“Wait a minute —”

“I’m not waiting anymore, you asscrack,” you huff. “Whether you like me back or not is out of my fucking hands. But you have no idea how much I regret not saying ‘yes’ to you four fucking years ago.”

“Like you back? Regret not saying ‘yes?’ You like me?” Taehyung asks as a grin forms on his face.

It feels like you’re on the debate podium, expressing yourself with your words — except, it’s way more nerve-wracking than any competition you’ve been to.

“Yes, asscrack. I like you,” you admit. It feels so good to let it out, your chest immediately feeling so much lighter. In fact, you think you lost the fifty pounds you’d gained over the past week. “You have no idea how hurt I was when you called the kiss, ‘nothing.’ Yeah, I’m a sensitive bitch and I admit I was being an absolute asshole for avoiding you, but you can’t just kiss me and expect me to act as nothing happened!” you pause for a deep breath, nearly choking on air doing so. “Agh! But the worst part is, Kim Taehyung, I know you’re not an asscrack or an idiot. You’re not even a complete shithead! You’re amazing, a bit annoying when it comes to schoolwork, yes, but also a caring friend, kind, loyal…” You trail off, fumbling over your words. You don’t know what to say. Again.

You bury your face in your hands. “I’m not crying, I just lost my train of thought,” you sniff. “You just make me… lose my fucking words. I don’t even feel like a goddamn debate champion near you. You make me blabber around like a fucking second grader! I can’t form coherent sentences for shit! I don’t even fucking know what I’m saying right now! Fuck, you make me cuss so much, goddamit!” You finish, letting out a huge breath you hadn’t known you had been holding in.

You hear Taehyung’s low chuckle and you jerk your head up, glaring through your teary eyes. God, I hadn’t meant to get emotional. Or to be fair, I hadn’t known I was going to confess now, either.

“Wow, Y/N,” Taehyung laughs. “Are you really blaming your foul mouth on me?”

“Are you fucking kidding me, Kim fucking Taehyung?” you rage. “I just confessed my whole heart out and that’s the first thing you say?”

“Yup. And I’d pay good money to see you confess to me again. 10 out of 10 you’re the better confessor between the two of us,” Taehyung chuckles, giving you a final look before parking his car in the back lot of the ice cream parlor.

Your eyebrow twitches in annoyance. Aggressively, you wipe away the tears welled up in your eyes, glaring at your friend, your crush.

“Oh, Y/N,” Taehyung says between laughter, placing a hand on your arm. “I’m sorry! I really am,” he giggles. “I swear I’m not laughing at you. I just can’t believe after all these years — Idiot! I like you too!” he blurts out.

What.

What the FUCK?

“YOU ASSCRACK!” you scream, shaking your arm away from Taehyung’s grip. “YOU MADE ME CONFESS LIKE A FUCKING IDIOT!”

“Well, duh. I’m getting you back for rejecting me in high school,” Taehyung laughs. “Besides, I’ve known you for years. I know how much you tend to blush around people you having feelings for.”

You scoff as you swing open the car door, hurriedly stepping out. “So are you rejecting me right now?”

Taehyung smiles at you, stepping out of the car. “I would be crazy to reject someone like you.”

“You would still be crazy even if you didn’t reject me,” you tease, smiling as you nudge Taehyung to the side.

“Yes, definitely. I’d be crazy for you,” Taehyung giggles, nudging you right back. He intertwines his warm hand into yours as if to prove it.

You flout. “Asscrack.” But of course, you don’t mean it. You never do.

Oh god. His hand fits so perfectly interlocked with yours and you stare down at it, so happy your chest feels like it’ll burst.

“You know you love me,” Taehyung answers, swinging open the door of the ice cream parlor and letting you inside first.

“I do know,” you reply shortly as Taehyung gives you one final grin before parting from your hold and walking over behind the counter. He dons his apron and washes his hands, then grins at you. “The usual, Y/N?”

“Hmmm… the usual,” you confirm, “but with a cherry on top.”

“Got it! One whipped chocolate ice cream with a cherry on top! Free from all costs because you’re all mine,” Taehyung announces, his sparkling eyes locked onto yours.

You’re at a loss of words once more. You swear something in your chest explodes at that moment — it’s a burst of emotions, actually: warm, fuzzy and cordial. You’ve got to admit, sometimes Kim Taehyung is a beautiful angel. Other times, he’s a straight up asscrack. Too bad you’re whipped for him — just as he’s whipped for you.

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blooblooded · 3 years ago

Text

Outline Book One

OK this is as good as it’s going to get for now, Rosaline plot needs work

Act One:

1) Kassidy comes home after a long night at work (she is a 3rd shift nurse-- graduated one year ago), just as everyone else is waking up. She is exhausted and talks to Esther and Ayda. Her boss won’t move her to day shift, she has a lot of problems with him. Due to her anger, she broke into his office that night and took something from him-- a BOOK that she had been strangely drawn to. Casey has been out all night and Ayda is worried about her-- make reference to how Casey is wrapped up in working for their dad. Esther is thinking about calling out of work at her shitty job at one of Eden’s recycling centers because she feels ‘sick’. Rosie left early because she is making extra money participating in medical research. They’ve moved in together in this 4 bedroom house (owned by one of West’s private housing companies) fairly recently, mostly because of money reasons, but Casey and Ayda haven’t really hung out with the others since high school so it’s hard to get used to and there’s still some awkwardness. They’ve all been through a lot. Ayda is talking to Marty and Marty acts weird/guilty around Kassidy. There’s always been something that follows Esther but Kassidy can’t see it-- she knows Ayda can. In a sudden flash, Kassidy sees the monster for a second and it lashes out at her. Frightened by this, Kassidy retreats to her room and then, takes the BOOK from her bag and opens it.

2) Smiles and his team wake up and get ready for their shift. He is feeling irritated by them because they are all acting up. They were late for breakfast because Nickels and Johnny were arguing, so none of them got to eat. Their shift that day is in the Sewers, they’re supposed to hunt down and destroy some of the slime creatures that have made their home down there. This is unpleasant. The sewers are disgusting but essential to Eden’s self sustaining infrastructure, filled with rats and monsters. The squad annihilates a few of them, so we get to see them use their abilities and also get some exposition about slime creatures in Eden. The sewers don’t have cameras so Smiles and the gang spend time goofing off. They appear to all simultaneously love and hate each other, lots of weird tension and dynamics. Recruitment is in a few weeks, with new kids coming in to go through the Gauntlet, and Smiles jokes/threatens to get rid of Nickels and Johnny and replace them with A Class agents. Rats start swarming, running, which freaks everyone out.

3) Kassidy flips through the BOOK on her day off. It’s making more and more sense to her, she is really drawn to it. Casey barges into her room and Kassidy shoves the BOOK away. Casey annoys her, there is tension, she wants to hang out but it seems like she is just bored and there’s nobody else around. Casey won’t shut up. Kassidy looks at her bills on her phone and feels resentment towards Casey for having money. Her mind and body are tired from work. Casey says that Esther is acting crazy, that the ‘Thing’ they can’t see won’t leave her alone. Everyone in Eden is vaguely aware of things beyond most people’s comprehension. Casey shows her an ad she put on the internet for someone who can get rid of the thing, treats it like a big joke. Kassidy takes this more seriously because she remembers what happened when Esther’s monster attacked a bully named Ben who was picking on them in middle school. Suddenly she feels like she is in danger. Casey wants to go get lunch together but Kassidy tells her no, she is tired and just wants to read.

4) Kassidy is at work a week later and her boss Cihad Tariq shows up out of nowhere, which is unusual for him since he works during the day. Cihad is a real strange guy, he has a weird accent, he’s huge, and he has red eyes. Tariq asks her if she has been in his office, but Kassidy is an excellent liar and denies it. She asks him why he’s at work so late, since she knows he has a kid, but doesn’t get a good answer. This experience shook her, so she tells her supervisor that she is sick and goes home. On the subway ride home, there is a checkpoint (something that is relatively normal, ever since B-Day made security stricter) where 2 secret police members get on the train and scan everyone’s IDs. Kassidy has an anxious reaction to seeing secret police, and her internal thoughts reveal that this is because 6 years ago, her brother, Kip, was dragged away by them and this was the last time she saw him before he was shot for a crime he did not commit. The secret police scan a guy’s ID and he is the guy they were looking for, they drag him away while he is begging them not to hurt him. Nobody on the train does anything. Kassidy’s hands don’t stop shaking until she gets home. It’s 2am, Ayda and Marty, a guy who is from another Colony, are still awake playing video games. They make fun of Kassidy because they’re edgy dicks, but they aren’t malicious or anything. Kassidy goes to her room and opens the BOOK. She has a hangnail that she picks at, drawing blood, and is suddenly filled with power that she has never felt before, the essence of the VOID. For the first time in a long time, she is exhilarated and happy, euphoric, feeling powerful. From Esther’s room, she hears a scream.

5) Smiles and the squad frantically clean their dorm room because they found out that staff is doing room checks. They have some contraband: snacks (JVP’s), a knife that had not been returned to the armory (Nicky’s), some sedatives that Smiles had not taken because he wanted to save them for when he needed them. A member of staff, Saturday, tosses their room and finds everything, the gang begs her to not turn them in but she tells them it’s her job and she has to write them up for something. They get in trouble and have to clean the bathrooms. As they go over there, another agent named Creedo, who is frenemies with Smiles, tells him that someone was just ‘Retired’ aka shot in the head, because they aged out of the program. I’ll call this person Rally, A-Class, telekinetic. Rally was a person Smiles once had a relationship and he thinks about that. While cleaning, Pete is angry at the others because none of the contraband was hers, Smiles argues that there are worse punishments than cleaning. Johnny is lazy and keeps trying to sneak off and doesn’t want to work, which makes Smiles, still upset about having lost someone, lose his temper and hit him. Pete is mad at him for smacking the kid for no good reason, but Smiles tells them that he is the team leader and they have to listen to him. Johnny acts like he deserved it, which irritates Smiles more. Pete comments that the way he is acting and stepping out of line, he won’t be around much longer. Nickels says he is going to be around long after she is gone anyways, indicates that she has been getting nosebleeds. They talk about what they think they’ll be assigned on their next shifts, about some upcoming training, gossip about their enemies, and allude to stupid politics shit that will come up later, like West being a sketchy problem, and the blood magic cult. They finish cleaning and get Saturday to sign off on it and try to squeeze info from her and triangulate. She tells them some of the missions going on. They go to a rec room and Nickels goes to train with another psychic named Wicker. Division among the team. Smiles leaves to get some training bullshit stuff from their dorm. He sees a guy named Coop and beats him up, transferring his aggression, thinking about how he lost another person in his life.

6) When Kassidy used blood magic, Esther’s monster had lashed out at/attacked Esther. Esther had a breakdown and went to the hospital for 48 hours. Kassidy wonders if there was a connection with the blood magic-- a connection between blood magic and the slime creature. She goes to Rosie, since she knows she is religious-- Ayda is religious too (turned to religion after being traumatized by Bomb Day) but Ayda can be kind of a jerk sometimes. Rosie looks kind of fucked up, Kassidy asks her about the medical testing but Rosie tells her she doesn't need to worry about it. She asks Rosie what she knows about the Red Religion, who practice blood magic, and Rosie reacts with disgust. Wanting answers, Kassidy goes to one of their churches. It’s creepy. She meets a woman named Helen who provides exposition on blood magic. Helen shows Kassidy scans of 15 pages that look like the Book, but Kassidy doesn’t reveal she knows about it. Helen says that they popped up on the internet about 3 years ago and nobody really knows where they came from. There are a lot of people who practice the Red Religion/Blood Magic. Most people can’t do it, their bodies can’t withstand it. Kassidy asks Helen how someone would know that they could use this magic. Helen pricks Kassidy’s finger, mingles the blood with her own, and then grows terrified. Kassidy in turn gets scared and flees. She buys food that she really can’t afford and feels nervous, like everyone is staring at her. When she returns home, she finds Casey and Ayda with a one-armed sketchy looking woman who introduces herself as Tabitha Delmont, the person who is going to “solve their little monster problem”.

7) Detective Sashi Mahajan gets a call from Vega Pelenato (chief of staff and notorious snitch/rat) in the very early morning, informing her that the CEO of Prosperity and notorious corporate gang leader, Richard Prospas, passed away during the night. They speculate on whether this was murder. Sashi goes into work early and encounters her miserable boss, Dana Nguyen. Dana tells Sashi that she’s going to have to make a statement about a recent case of police brutality (that she obviously thinks was not brutal enough). Dana hates talking to the press, because she feels like they harass her. But then, everyone in Eden hates Dana, including Sashi-- Dana does not work hard, is an alcoholic, and there was some nasty business in her past having to do with how she handled a disaster known as ‘B-Day’. Early in her life, Sashi was involved in the police union along with Dana’s dead wife. Sashi notices that Dana’s phone keeps ringing (Silas?) and she ignores it.. She pulls up information on the case and thinks about how much she hates her job. Sashi later speaks to Rome Prospas about the death of his father. Richard Prospas allegedly fainted into the blades of an industrial meat slicer on his factory floor. Rome states that he has an alibi, corroborated by his bodyguard. But Sashi has several reports filed by social services 6 years ago that state that there was violence within the home. She suspects that this is motive for murder, on top of the inheritance and power grab. Sashi is tired of rich people in Eden taking advantage of poor people and believes that everything is very unfair. When she was young, she used to be involved in union stuff, so this is important to her. She just wants to have enough money to start a family. She submits her report detailing the murder, and more importantly, the unabashed levels of power the Prospas Corporation has, just like the obscene power the Agapama corporation has too much power, and how the economy is about to get hit hard, which will lead to poor people suffering.

8) Tabby Delmont is a difficult person to deal with and Kassidy can spot a con artist. Casey seems to be taken with her though, and is proud of herself for putting an ad for an ‘exorcist’ on the Internet. Everyone gathers in the kitchen. Tabby boasts that she has killed dozens of monsters and that she sells their ichor on the black market for a profit. She has exorbitant prices. Esther, still not feeling well, asks Tabby why she has to kill these creatures, asks Tabby why she has to kill this Thing that follows her because she does not hate it. Tabby tells her that if it isn’t killed, it will kill Esther, because something has riled it up and it is stronger than most of the ones she has seen. She talks about how these monsters latch onto people with Abilities and feed off of their emotions. She says that they eventually drive people insane, and says that her twin brother had one attached to him and he ended up murdering his ex wife. Marty calls bullshit, but clearly wants to be included. This is the longest all of them have been together for a long time, and Kassidy misses her dead brother for a moment, but quickly represses those feelings. Casey tells Tabby to get on with it and kill it, Tabby pulls out a weird Voorst bioweapon and attempts to slice the Thing but is thrown back and it mauls her metal arm. Everyone is freaked out, especially those who can’t see the Thing. Kassidy has started to get flashes of it more often, which is weird because she shouldn’t be able to see it. Tabby says she’ll figure it out, she just needs a better weapon. She bullies and harrasses them into letting her sleep on the couch LOL. Casey is obsessed with Tabby’s charisma and we see how….bored Casey is and how she is drawn to stupid shit that interests her just to not feel that boredom (ADHD alert).. Rosie and Kassidy talk after getting Esther (who had been really negatively affected by this) to bed, Rosie says that Esther’s mom was angry that she was in the hospital again and wants to IVC her for a longer stay, that her mom and the others in her family want her to come home so that they can take care of her. Kassidy hears the Thing whispering to Esther as it is curled beside her in bed, and feels a chill. She returns to her room and the BOOK.

9) The team (mostly Pete) is still mad at Smiles for being a bastard. It’s Recruitment day (twice a year, new kids are brought in to replace the ones who have died or been Retired) and they decide to go watch all of them compete in the entrance test known as the Gauntlet. They are hardened to this. Going over to the gymnasium, they hear BG and Lady bragging about how they recruited (i.e. snatched kids with Abilities) a bunch of the newbies, which thankfully Smiles is rarely assigned to do since he fucked up too many times. There are 6 newcomers who begin to fight it out Hunger Games style with some volunteers. Smiles jokes about how he and Pete picked out Nicky and Johnny and it’s actually really disturbing to the reader that Smiles is joking so casually about something that must have been brutal to kids who were fuckin...15 and 12 at the time they were taken in. He notices that Nickels and Pete are acting close...too close…. They watch as one new kid gets really badly hurt and starts to cry, and Smiles hears BG and Echo laugh about it. He is bothered by this and dissociates. When he comes to, he’s back in the dorm and reflects on how he doesn't remember going through the Gauntlet. He is desperate to feel like he’s back in his own body, to feel present, so he tells Nickels and Johnny to get out and asks Pete if she wants to have sex. She agrees to this and they bang it out. Afterwards, she tells him that watching all that violence made her feel worried about Nickels and Johnny, since they’re weaker agents and will be Retired faster. Smiles tells her it doesn’t matter. All of them have an expiration date, they’re all going to die really bad deaths, it’s just a matter of when. Bad things happen to weaker agents. They can’t get out and most of them don’t even want to get out-- including Smiles.

10) Tabby brings back all kinds of crazy contraptions. Casey tells her that she isn’t going to pay her any extra money. Sometimes it feels like Casey is flirting with Tabby LOL ew. There’s a lot of tension between Tabby and the girls, since this woman is literally crashing at their home. Kassidy tells Casey that this woman is definitely going to rob them blind and is a scammer, and tells her that Casey can’t see it because she grew up so privileged and doesn’t have experience with scummy low class people, but Casey laughs it off, believing that nobody would dare because of who her father is. Marty tells them that where he lives, there are no slime creatures, but there are other...Things…., and Tabby demands to know where he lives. Marty talks about the Northern territories. He and Ayda play video games with their friends from the Colony of Green River, and Tabby asks how that is even possible, since Eden’s internet access is super closed off. Ayda is cagey about the whole thing and deflects. Esther’s sweet father shows up to check on her, he says that the rest of the family is doing good. Esther is not doing so good. The Thing won’t let her sleep. Seeing Esther and Quentin in such a state makes Kassidy scared and angry and she searches the BOOK for anything that might help her solve the problem. She finds information in the BOOK and is unsure of how she is even understanding what is written, because it is all gibberish to her. Something inside of her is hungry. She can’t stop eating. During the night, she cuts herself and makes a circle in the living room with her blood, then gets freaked out and covers it with a carpet. Her wounds heal with impossible speed and don’t scar. She can’t remember why she felt like doing that. It just felt natural to do.

11) In the Northern Territories, Field Marshall Anatole Surkhov returns to the Capital of Ile de Matane after a long campaign. He reports to the Prime Minister, Florence Gauthier, and tells her that he and his men destroyed many monsters in the woods. When he tells Florence that he lost a lot of good men, she doesn’t seem to care. Florence tells him that they need to double their efforts, but that her spies have heard that loyalists are congregating again in the cities and she doesn’t want another war on their hands. Anatole tells her that he would like to stay in his home Territory of Kemenka, which suffered the most losses during the war and where his mother and sisters live, and she denies him that. Florence has knowledge about him that would destroy his life if exposed (he is trans and the Northern Territories are not very progressive-- but they have gotten better under Florence’s regime) and uses that, as well as his family’s/dead father’s history of uh...war crimes...to control him. Anatole leaves, angry. He walks with his manservant, Dog (make implications about Dog’s history/we see parallel between what Anatole’s father was doing and what Silas is doing with secret police), and one of Florence’s little spies approaches them. Anatole tells the spy, Flick, to leave before he beats him down, and Flick just laughs. He asks if the wilderness is getting safer, because Florence wants to re-establish the trade routes with other Colonies. Anatole says that the last time they sent people to Eden, they never came back. Flick says that he doubts that was because of the crawling, twisted flesh creatures in the woods-- he knows about the people of Eden and he says that he wasn’t talking about Eden, he was talking about a different Colony, the ‘Lost Colony’ to the east where something bad happened a long time ago. Flick says that there is a powerful weapon there (talking about the BOOK) that can Make the North Great Again (™ lol). Anatole says that he only knows about Eden because of the witch boy Marty, but Flick says he has been in contact with someone involved in trade (Percy and West…) who want to open up trade routes as well. They walk past the gallows, where Florence has left the bodies of several political enemies hanging. Flick comments that he can’t imagine what would happen if Florence got her hands on the rulers of Eden, who have let the Northerners suffer and starve for 200 years. Anatole tells him not to be stupid, he would never allow his men to die for a pointless war. Flick asks why he thinks he has any say in the matter at all.

12) Kassidy is hungry, she can’t stop eating. She is eating her roommates' food because she is so hungry and they are getting mad at her. She calls out of work again one night, this has been happening more and more often. She is starting to feel worried. Every day, she understands more of the BOOK, even though she can’t read it. She thinks about showing it to Rosie, who she trusts more than Casey and Ayda, and who has proven that she can handle stressful situations. In the living room, Tabby is there, and she asks where Kassidy got the BOOK from in a weird way. Kassidy feels defensive. Rosie doesn’t take it seriously and seems distracted. Upstairs, Esther starts screaming again and Rosie leaves. Tabby tries to engage Kassidy in conversation. They are similar: both survivors, both very poor. Tabby asks to look at the BOOK and Kassidy grows angry at her, pushes down the desire to lash out.. Kassidy tells her that this is stupid, but knows different. Casey comes home later in a confrontational mood because her father’s shipping business is being threatened by Prosperity Inc’s new business procedures. The dark thing is is that Casey has killed two people-- other gang goons who were trying to kill her right back-- and it is hard to reconcile with that sometimes, since Casey does not seem to feel bad about it at all and is actually very open about having stabbed people to death before (so….Casey is actually internally very troubled by this and we’ll get into that in Book 2). She asks Kassidy if she remembers Rome Prospas from high school, since he’s only 20 and now a huge threat to her father’s business. The memories of that time are too painful for her to even think about, and Kassidy returns to her room and stares at the BOOK.

13) Dr. Lily Bellamy is hard at work as a geneticist. She works on contracts, sometimes for Eden’s government, but mainly what she does is create Artificials. The first Artificials were developed 30 years ago, using technology her parents developed. Dr. B imagines a world with no more sickness or disease. She checks on the development of several fetuses ordered by some rich people and we see how cold and clinical she is. She has her own laboratory. A chemist named Yancey Passero shows up to talk about work. Dr. B has been cheating on her husband with Yancey. They have disturbing sex in the lab LOL. Dr. B is worried about her daughter Esther and doesn’t know how to protect her from herself. The two of them look over some clinical trials that they have been working on together and Dr. B recognizes a name (Rosie). Yancey seems frustrated by the trials because there have never been any human survivors. Dr. B tells him that there was one, 7 years ago, but it was an accident and the subject is now insane (it’s Lee…). In Dr. B’s lab, there is tons of ichor from slime monsters that she has procured on the black market. It’s late, and she goes home to her husband Quentin, who is disabled and irritates her. We see that she is motivated in her genetic projects because of her family members who aren’t ‘perfect’. They watch TV and West comes on, we see that Dr B is troubled by him for some reason. She thinks about her project and wonders if she’s just wasting time.

14) Kassidy and her roommates and Tabby Delmont are ready to destroy the monster. Tabby has finally procured the weapon that she believes can kill it. It is unusual for these slime monsters to be this strong and she asks Ayda if she has also noticed that there seem to be more of them, and they are multiplying. Ayda hurriedly changes the subject but Marty tells her that it’s stupid to try to protect herself because everyone already knows that she is a psychic. Kassidy finds herself wishing that she was like Tabby, Esther, and Ayda. They gather in the living room and Kassidy remembers that she painted a circle of her own blood on the floor beneath the carpet. When Esther walks in, Kassidy finds that she can see the Creature that follows her. It’s terrible, a crawling black slimely thing with a white skull face like a stag’s. It looks at her and it is not angry, it is afraid in the way an animal is afraid of a predator, it’s scared! Kassidy feels so hungry when she looks at it. At first, nothing happens. Tabby brandishes the strange weapon and Ayda tells her to stop, that this isn’t a good idea, and her psychic fear affects the group. Esther is like, wait, wait wait! Kassidy wants to see the slime Creature Destroyed, completely and utterly, and has a vision, a memory, of another place, another universe that these slime alien things originated in and a huge hungry presence ripping a hole in their dimension to get at them. Tabby slices into the creature again and again without mercy, Esther is screaming and screaming and Rosie tries to protect her. Ayda begs Tabby to stop, she is empathically connected to the creature’s fear. But Tabby does not stop and the creature is reduced to flesh and black blood. Ayda passes out from the psychic connection, and Marty freaks because he is so worried about her. Kassidy feels energized from the massacre, but everyone is wiped and exhausted. Casey, who was unable to see what happened but now knows Tabby was not just conning them, asks where Tabby got the weapon. Tabby said it is secret police tech, sold on the black market. The gang is chilled by that, especially Kassidy, who has a huge fear of them because her brother was murdered by those people almost 7 years ago. Esther begins to cry. The creature had been a part of her life since childhood. Kassidy stoop to touch the black blood and has to keep herself from putting her finger in her mouth to taste it. Marty asks “what now?”

ACT TWO

1) Kassidy returns from work, exhausted. It’s too much, she is not particularly good at being a nurse, and she has too much to occupy her mind. 8:30 am, she gets home to find Tabby, Casey, and Esther -- since Rosie and Ayda are people who, you know, have jobs. Tabby irritates her and she asks why she hasn’t left yet. Tabby says that she’s sleeping on the couch now and Casey has agreed to let her stay if she pays part of the rent. Kassidy doesn’t like this and confronts Casey about why she didn’t talk to her about it, and Casey says that her father’s company owns the house so she makes the choices. As they are beginning to argue, someone knocks on the door. Esther, still recovering from her ordeal, and annoyed by Casey and Kassidy’s angry flirtation rituals, goes to open it and says that there’s a homeless guy on their doorstep. Casey yells at the guy to get lost but he won’t leave. Kassidy suddenly feels unnatural interest, she gets up to go to the door. The guy is DISGUSTING, smells like actual shit, dirty, rotting teeth, scrawny, ragged clothes. As a medical professional (lol) she recognizes that the guy has a severe septic infection in one eye and tells him he needs to go to the hospital. The guy is muttering to himself, crazy things, not lucid at all. He Looks at Kassidy with his one good eye and starts talking crazier, trying to comfort himself, calls her Cathy and starts apologizing to her and talking about something inside of her. Casey becomes protective, pushes him away from Kassidy, tells him to get lost before she beats him into the ground. Tabby finally gets her lazy ass up to deal with the problem and tells him to scram. The guy looks at her, calls her by her name, and tells her that he had to find her. He says he had to find her, something’s coming, something’s coming, saying that something is ‘talking to him again’, something from the Rift. Tabby then recognizes him and tells them that this is her brother Tony, who she thought was dead. Despite this reunion, Tabby does not react with huge emotion. Kassidy feels jealous bitterness twist inside of her-- after all, her brother is dead, he’s not coming back.

2) Smiles, BG, Lady, Echo, and a few other A-Class agents go on a mission to the Prison District to help subdue a riot. It seems that there have been more and more riots and violence over the last couple years. Smiles makes this comment and BG scoffs and says that he wouldn’t be saying that if he had been active during B-Day. Smiles has no memories of the bombings, that was before his time. This riot was in response to an act of brutality by a prison guard against an inmate, and now the prisoners have taken over a cell block. They meet the Warden (Hax...reeeeeeeeeee), who gives off bad vibes and is just as casually cruel as everyone else Smiles deals with. The secret police go to the cell block that inmates have taken over and start fuckin...bashing people, they work together effectively. Lady asks Smiles why he and Pete don’t get rid of the dead weight on their team and replace them with A-Class agents, which Smiles ignores. She gives him the creeps. An inmate gets the jump on Lady and knocks her out (as a psychic, she is physically fragile) and Smiles protects her with his bubbles. BG goes into a rage and kills several inmates, which they weren’t supposed to do. He begrudgingly thanks Smiles, says he owes him one, and Smiles tells BG he would rather keep Lady alive so that she can make BG and Echo suffer than giving her the mercy of killing her.

3) Kassidy calls on Marty to help her research the pages of the 15 pages of the BOOK that had showed up on the internet in Eden 3 years ago. She is trying to not get involved with the house drama of Tabby’s brother Tony showing up. Casey, generous and curious as ever, took him to a street doctor to get him fixed up -- they had to remove his eye and teeth because of the rot and give him new ones.The rest of the girls are interested in the Tony drama, especially because of the murder that he claims to be responsible for but didn’t actually commit, but Kassidy feels something strange when she looks at him and the way he reacted to her when they first met made her uneasy. Marty is naturally suspicious of Tony and claims that it’s unsafe for them to have let a random dangerous man stay with them, like wtf is wrong with them, but as usual, Casey’s word on the matter was final. Casey is really causing a lot of problems. Why aren’t they worried about living with a guy who may or may not have killed someone? WELL, it’s because they already live with a girl who has DEFINITELY killed people before. Kassidy and Marty haven’t hung out much since they were teenagers and Marty seems glad to spend time researching with her. Neither of them want to mention Kip but Marty drops a few hints that he feels guilty about something that happened back then and mentions someone named Lee-- Kassidy tells him to drop it, it doesn’t matter because Kip is dead. The blood magic religion seems to have spread like crazy over the last 3 years. Marty says that there’s something similar in his Colony, remnants from a nearby town called Blagodat, that was wiped out by the military over 20 years ago. Marty doesn’t know too much about this town, only that they were all blood magic practicing and had a black pyramid and that the owl-masked priest did something to the Princess of the North to make her monstrous. He saw the terrible Princess briefly 10 years ago before she was killed by another blood magic practitioner named Olive. He also knows about rumours about something called the Lost Colony where blood magic stuff was rumored to have destroyed it, which Kassidy has not heard of, but it gives her a chill. Marty says that in the North, there have always been rumors of a weapon there, and that 200 years ago the last democratic leader (Frank Martel….who Silas fuckin let Jerry eat, bitch) went there to investigate and never came back. Kassidy says that it’s hard to get much information about the outside world because of Eden’s political stances, but they’ve learned more because after B-Day, they had to bring laborers in from the Colony of Serenity to help rebuild. Kids in Eden are taught that the outside world is a terrible, dangerous place that is full of monsters (it is) and that the Rift emits weird toxic rays. Marty bitterly says that because of Eden’s trade embargo and isolationism, his Colony has suffered 200 years of starvation and war. He tells Kassidy he will find out more info about the Lost Colony and the blood magic town of Blagodat, if he can.

4) A meeting of the Central Committee, the people who govern Eden. Sashi, who has filed more charges of corporate corruption against the mega-corporations belonging to West, Rome, and Gena Voorst, is called to give a statement about it. Her findings on how much power private companies have in Eden get a stir from everyone. Dana Nguyen is included in this but hates participating. Mayor Malena talks about cracking down on Agapama shipping to and from other Colonies, as he is concerned about drugs being trafficked in, particularly stimulants. Dana is asked what she thinks should be done about the influx of violent crime, but she is hungover and unprepared. A group of civilians have signed a petition about the number of missing children in Eden over the years, but the Committee does not take this seriously since most of them agree that it is likely due to human trafficking to other Colonies and again blame Agapama-- they want to use this as an excuse to crack down on private corporations. The Central Committee begins talking about the pros and cons of moving to Nationalize the corporations and what it would look like for Eden to be completely self-sufficient, and ways that they can cease trade. They have ceased trade with one Colony (The Northern Territories) before, about 200 years ago. Sashi is told that she can leave since she is done presenting her findings. As she walks out, a quiet and normal looking woman she has never seen before and who said nothing during the meeting (SILAS AHHH RUN AWAY BITCH) thanks her for her hard work.

5) At work, Kassidy goes overboard while assisting with an autopsy and mutilates the corpse. Her supervisor asks her what’s been going on, she looks sick and her work has been getting worse. Kassidy evades the question, her mind filled with images of rotting flesh. Her supervisor asks if she needs time off and Kassidy says no, it’s just her home life is chaotic because of her idiot roommate’s insane decision to bring random people into their home. She has not forgotten that Tony allegedly murdered his pregnant wife and the only reason she has not turned him in is because she’s scared of Casey and Tabby. Kassidy goes on break and practices blood magic, she has scanned all of the pages of the Book (BIG MISTAKE) so that she can look at them anywhere and so that she could share them with Marty. It’s 3am. Esther calls her and asks if she’s heard from Rosie, since she didn’t come home yet, but Kassidy has heard nothing. She tries to be comforting to her friend who is worried, but is not very good at it. At this point, Kassidy can completely understand the Book and looks at a spell that can help you find someone. She thinks about using it, but does not.

6) Smiles learns that he has lost 3 days of time. Pete is beyond angry at him and tells him that Nickels and Johnny are terrified because he snapped on them and treated them really poorly and cruelly and said some really mean things to them. Smiles says that’s bullshit, he would never do that, and Pete tells him that she watched him. The last thing that Smiles can remember is being on a simple surveillance mission, watching the Mayor give a press conference to a bunch of journalists (psycho violin noise...yes he saw Lee Harlan). He does not know why that upset him. He tells Pete again that he would never hurt anyone on the team on purpose, that he didn’t do anything. She tells him that’s not an excuse and that he is responsible for his own actions and says that he needs to go to the infirmary to see someone named ‘Doc’ who is on shift, because there is clearly something wrong with him. Smiles says there’s something wrong with everyone in the program, idiot, they were all kidnapped as children and tortured and forced to hurt others. Pete has a lot of problems with his leadership and believes he is not doing a good enough job. The staff member October, comes and tells Smiles that he is taking him Upstairs for re-education, because his behavior has been troubling to staff. Smiles does not remember this but knows better than to fight it. As he gets led away, Pete doesn’t look sorry for him at all, she looks like she thinks that he deserves this. October is mean to Smiles as he takes him Upstairs and Smiles fantasizes about how easy it would be to kill him. Smiles gets strapped to a chair in a little room and Lady comes in to hurt him and get into his brain. Lady tells Smiles that he is all fragmented inside, that she knows deep down inside he is vulnerable like a child. Smiles tells her that he shouldn’t be responsible for things he can’t remember and Lady tells him that he’s not special, she can’t remember anything lol and then Lady begins to torture him by bringing back painful memories. The last thing he sees is an explosion contained by one of his bubbles, and he blacks out.

7) Rosie has not returned for 3 days at this point and is not answering her phone, and Esther is beside herself. Despite the Monster no longer following her, she seems really unstable, and she is like well, you would feel unstable too if you lost something/someone who you grew up with. Well, Kassidy does know the feeling of losing someone she grew up with. Esther goes to her parent’s house because she needs support from her dad and siblings. Casey had unthinkingly made a joke that Rosie probably couldn’t deal with Esther being so high maintenance and left her, but they’ve been dating on and off since high school and during short break ups before, Rosie always talked it out with Esther. Kassidy and Marty talk about their theories about the Lost Colony and blood magic. Tony is there, but weird and zoned out as usual, Kassidy thinks he is a huge freak and feels uncomfortable with him living in their attic but can’t fight Casey on it. Marty gets a guy he knows, Anatole Surkhov, to talk to Kassidy about his experiences, because he has explored a lot due to being in the Army. The cast of weird adults Marty seems to live with is well known, especially by Ayda and Casey, they have talked to them all before-- especially Jules and Flick. It is evident that Marty doesn’t have any friends his own age where he lives, and it seems kind of sad. Anatole takes blood magic seriously and seems annoyed with Marty because he is busy. But he briefly talks about what the cultists of Blagodat and their black pyramid did to his territory, destroying the landscape with hideous fleshy pits, poisoning the water and turning people into monsters (YEAH. proof that people are trying to ‘turn people into monsters’ i.e. Rosie, and Lee etc etc), and says that when he was a child, his people eradicated them. Suddenly Tony speaks up and asks if they killed the women and the children as well, a strange look on his face, a sadness. Anatole says that there were many survivors, and that is why the North continues to have problems with blood magic, and it is one of his goals to destroy these people Then he says something to Marty in another language and leaves. Kassidy asks Tony what that was all about, Tony is evasive and tells them to stop messing around with stuff they don’t understand, it destroyed his life and it will destroy theirs as well. Kassidy and Marty, bastards that they are, say that’s probably because he killed his wife. Tony does not deny this (wahhh he feels guilt for Cathy’s death) but repeats that they shouldn’t be messing around with things they don’t understand. He asks Kassidy where she even learned all the stuff about blood magic and Kassidy feels defensive/evasive and says that there are 15 weird pages about it on the internet, that she found out about it from an advertisement from the Church.

8) While Kassidy was asleep, Rosaline returned. It has been a whole week. She seems guilty and apologetic, saying that one of the medical projects she does for extra money went a little wrong and she had to stay at the hospital. She looks sick. Esther is beside herself and wants to reach out to her mom for help, but Rosaline firmly says she does not want to do that. Rosaline can’t stop throwing up black stuff and her eyes look weird. Kassidy feels strange but has to get ready for work, these days she does not leave the Book around because she doesn’t trust Tony. Tabby takes one look at Rosaline and says that there’s something fucked up about her and demands to know what kind of testing she was doing. Rosie says she doesn’t want to get into it all, but she made about $5,000. Tabby rants about how you can’t trust the intelligentsia, that the scientists in Eden do all kinds of messed up things to people, and basically starts talking about conspiracy theories about how the government steals children and does bad things to people (dude if Tabby was real, she would be like a weirdo Q-anon freak). Kassidy gets out of there and goes to work. Cihad Tariq is still at the hospital again despite it being 11 and he checks in with her and says she looks sick, genuinely worried. Kassidy realizes that his accent sounds like Anatole’s (Russian. The Northern Territories are divided by language-- English, French, and Russian. So CT has a light russian-yaccent, he is scary). Rudely, she asks Cihad where he was born, because she figures that he might be from up there, possibly from the destroyed town of Blagodat, and that is where the Book came from. Cihad tells her that is not appropriate and that he does not appreciate her pushing his boundaries like that. Kassidy has the Book in her backpack and Cihad’s red eyes linger on it. It’s clear that he is about to ask her about it, but then gets a call (from Silas, but Kassidy doesn’t know that) that upsets him, and he says he has to leave. Kassidy, angry at him because she knows that he knows what she has done, tells him that when she was a kid, her mom used to always be at work too, so maybe he should think about his daughter.

9) Kassidy wakes up with a bloody nose and finds that one of her fingernails is flaking off. She opens up the BOOK, and has become really possessive of it. There is a passage in it that talks about bringing the dead back to life. Kassidy fixates on that. She allows herself to think about bringing her brother back from the dead and reads over the passage again and again. She goes downstairs to hang out. Esther is like, “hey Kassidy, did you see Ben got out of prison?” and we see Kassidy get angry but it’s not really elaborated on who Ben is or why this is significant. Ayda is talking about her new crush, the dad of a kid she teaches and everyone roasts her for this LOL. Casey comments on how much Kassidy has been eating lately (like crazy amounts) but says she looks like she’s lost weight and is pushing boundaries again. Kassidy feels irritable and snaps at her by trying to say something hurtful, but Casey is immune to it. She asks Marty if he’s found out anything new about the Lost Colony, and he says no, then asks her if she’s learned anything about it from reading the BOOK, because he is literally autistic he never really ‘got’ that Kassidy wanted to hide that from Tony like everyone else did. Tony freaks out and says that he knew it, he fucking knew that the BOOK was here, he had Seen its presence on Kassidy. Tony basically loses his mind and starts ranting about Cathy and gets up to go to Kassidy’s room to try and destroy the BOOK, saying that they were all in danger, blah blah blah. Casey thinks this is terribly funny, but it’s scaring Ayda. Kassidy feels rage she hasn’t felt in years and tries to physically take it back from him but Tony is bigger than she is, even though he is weak as shit, he is stronger than she is. He attempts to tear it to shreds, to rip out the pages, but is unable to, then starts raving about how he is going to take it and leave. Kassidy attacks him with blood magic in front of everyone, takes the BOOK back and tells him that she will kill him if he ever does that again. Tony starts laughing hysterically and talking crazy about how this was fate, that ‘IT’ has set everything up because ‘IT’ wants to kill him, that he never should have left the sewers, that this was ‘IT’s’ plan, that they were all going to die because this little girl wanted to mess around with things she didn’t understand. Casey asks Kassidy wtf is wrong with her because seeing someone use blood magic is fucked up, but Kassidy just tells her that she wants the Delmonts to leave or else she will, and that Casey needs to choose between these people who she views as entertainment or Kassidy, her friend of many years. Casey hesitates for a beat too long. Then Kassidy pushes past her and leaves the house.

10) Smiles and the gang all innocently watch the news in the breakroom. An interview with Rome Prospas comes on where he talks about his economic plans and his company. Johnny is massively triggered by this because Rome looks exactly like him and it is clear that they are related. Johnny, someone who can’t handle rejection, wants to know why his family didn’t want him, like what was wrong with him that made his family not want him. Smiles and Pete are not helpful and tell him that recruits are always kidnapped, so he shouldn’t worry about his family not wanting him. He has a BPD meltdown and leaves. Nickels tells them good job, he’s going to go hurt himself, and Smiles says that he’s sick of having to constantly look out for his younger squadmates and at some point you have to learn how life is. Nickels says he can go fuck himself, because they’re always watching out for Smiles. Pete takes her side, and Smiles is troubled by how close they’re getting (NICKELS JUST WANTS TO TOUCH SOME TITTIES). Smiles goes to work out with Creedo, an old team mate of his. He asks her how she deals with her own shitty teammate, Pills. Creedo grudgingly tells him that she’s the closest thing she has to family and that weaker agents get Retired faster, so it’s better to care about them while you can. Their lives are so bad and so short. They take out their aggression on each other, then go to the dining hall to get a snack because they can’t stand their own teams LOL. There is some weird sexual tension between Smiles and Creedo, but also they can’t stand each other and can’t work with each other. They listen in to some of the missions getting assigned for the next few shifts, mostly recon, but it looks like squads are getting assigned a raid at a blood magic church. Smiles and Creedo agree that blood magic is the biggest problem in Eden right now and they are scared of it and don’t understand it. A staff member passes by and insinuates something bad happened with Johnny. Smiles coldly tells Creedo that people have to be responsible for their own actions. Creedo tells him that he would have never said that when she first met him at 18. Frustrated, Smiles leaves her to go find his teammate. He finds him, it’s clear that Johnny is too young and mentally ill to understand he doesn’t deserve to get hurt. Smiles clumsily apologizes and says that of course his family wanted him, Smiles explains the recruitment process (we see how eaten up by guilt he is for having participated in this in the past). He asks Johnny if he wants to know more about his family. Johnny says no, but Smiles knows he is lying.

11) Kassidy falls asleep at work and has dreams of the planet eating monster ripping a hole through dimensions and of a bright comet shooting through the sky. She wakes up and realizes that she didn’t hear a patient’s call button and that they are dead. Kassidy is not bothered by death, only by the fear that she may get in trouble. She contemplates death and finally allows herself to think about her dead brother Kip and what he would tell her to do. She re-reads the passage in the Book about bringing the dead back to life (Also….this is the spell that Reuben used to bring all of the Immortal gang back permanently…). Marty messages her and asks why she hasn’t just turned Tony in to the police, since he is still wanted for murder. Kassidy hates cops and hates Eden’s justice system-- after all, it is what unfairly got her brother killed all those years ago. She goes home and Tony is there. He apologizes to her. He tells her about his past, about how he abandoned his wife and baby due to fear of the slime creatures and sensing the Book’s presence for the first time in the hospital, his own experience with addiction, then how he reunited with his family and watched as Cathy became consumed with researching the Book and the Void, that it formed something inside her body and was killing her, and that she killed herself, leading to him hiding in the sewers for 2 years. He says that he does not want that to happen to Kassidy, or to anyone ever again. He talks about evil, true evil, evil that is hungry. Tony asks Kassidy if she understands how devastating it is to lose someone. Kassidy does understand. She accepts his apology, but says that she is going to continue looking into blood magic. Tony tells her that he will help her, but that his reasons are different than hers (see if he can do anything to destroy the BOOK/monster).

12) Sashi continues to research bullshit corporate crime going on in Eden. She tries to get one of West Agapama’s daughter’s, Cassiopeia -- a known enforcer in his organization-- to come in for an interview, but typical Casey does not cooperate and will not without a warrant. Still, Sashi has compiled mountains of shit on the corruption within the megacorporations, as well as the economic impact it has had on the people of Eden. She’s working hard. She goes out to lunch with her wife, Kelsey, who is also a cop, but not a detective. They talk about their days. They are thinking about having a baby together. A nice moment. Sashi goes back to her office to work. And then...fucking....Silas shows up. Sashi is very confused about who this person is, exactly, but feels like she is probably high up in the government since she was at the Central Committee meeting. Again, Silas tells her that she appreciates her hard work investigating corruption in Eden. Sashi thanks her and then politely asks her who she is. And lmao, Silas just tells her that she has worked ‘behind the scenes for a long time’, which is...a little unsettling to hear. Silas asks Sashi about her ambitions, and Sashi truthfully says that she wishes she could get a promotion so that her salary is higher, because she and her wife would like to start a family. Silas is kind of quiet and awkward, but nice to talk to. Silas asks if she thinks that Dana Nguyen would promote her, and Sashi sort of slips up and says that she does not believe Dana likes her. Silas, in a roundabout way, asks Sashi in her opinion, as someone whose job it is to research corruption, is Dana Nguyen corrupt/not loyal to Eden. Sashi truthfully tells her that she might be, and talks about some of the stuff she has observed (her behavior, her closeness to Vega, the fact that her son Christopher was part of a terrorist organization)-- she really believes that Silas must be someone very high up on the food chain. Silas just listens, then thanks Sashi and leaves. Sashi sits in her office and thinks about how weird that was. She continues to work, then leaves at the end of her shift, passing a truly miserable looking Dana on the way out. She goes to bed, and when she wakes up, she sees an email that says that she has been promoted from mere Detective, to Detective Superintendent.

13) Rosaline is still sick, so she and Esther travel down to the Lower Levels to visit Rosie’s old guardian, Barbara Church. Kassidy, Marty, and Tony all discuss what they know so far about the Book, the Lost Colony, and Blagodat. Kassidy tells them that she believes that her boss, Cihad Tariq, is involved somehow-- he is a foreigner and owned the Book to begin with, and she believes he brought it to Eden with him. Tony scoffs and says he knows all about Cihad Tariq, that they have a...history and that he needs to be avoided for more reasons than his blood magic. Kassidy is like WTF why is everything connected, and Tony talks about his belief in fate/something bigger than them manipulating/pulling the strings. Marty says that it’s strange that someone could have traveled so far to Eden with the Book and be allowed to live there, and even go to school and rise to such an important job. Kassidy says that she could just ask him, and Tony says that she needs to leave Cihad alone, he was involved with sketchy things (Silas…) and probably still is. Tony tells them that Cihad raised his daughter with Cathy and that they think he’s dead and he wants it to stay that way. When Kassidy mouths off, he asks her how she would feel if her mom suddenly came back into her life. Kassidy says she never told him about her bad relationship with her mom and Tony says that he picks up on things, he just knows things, he can See things, he’s a psychic but tries to give people their privacy. Kassidy thinks about how it isn’t fair that some people were born with Abilities and she is powerless and grows more determined to use more blood magic despite the side effects.

14) Anatole returns to the destroyed blood magic town of Blagodat because Marty would not stop asking him to show it to him. Dog is with him, and so is Marty’s guardian , a witch named Jules. Also along is a survivor of the town whose name is Olive. Jules and Dog have a weird dynamic where it’s clear they like each other, but nothing is ever going to happen. Blagodat is less than 50 miles away from the nearest Territory, but Anatole is watchful. He carries his father’s sword, which is forged of starmetal and was enchanted by Jules. There is not much left of the blood magic town. Marty investigates the place where the black pyramid once stood, and excitedly talks in English to his virtual friends, Kassidy and Tony in Eden. Olive says that she is glad she doesn’t remember living there-- it’s destruction was so traumatic for her that she lost her memory of it all. Jules spits on the ground to guard herself against evil and tells Anatole that they need to leave. Anatole remembers the day that his father led men to destroy this place. When he approaches the ruins of the black pyramid temple, his sword begins to vibrate and hum. He spots something hauling itself through the rubble and tells Marty to get off the phone because they need to leave. It’s a grotesque twisted disgusting hungry creature, a leftover of what occurred to 90% of humanity when the RIFT opened 800 years ago. It attacks them. They (except Marty) work together to destroy it.. Marty is shaken by seeing one of these semi-human things for the first time and asks how many of them there are in the world and if they are the same thing as the slime creatures he has heard about. Anatole does not know the answer to this. He tells Marty that these creatures are the reason that the Northern Territories are so isolated-- The North is very close to the Lost Colony that lies to the east and these things are drawn to it and the surrounding area. Marty accuses him of being a liar, he lied to him and Kassidy when they were asking about the Lost Colony. He gets worked up and has a seizure, Jules asks him what he saw and Marty will not tell her. Anatole tells him that there are things he is better off not knowing about, and he should be grateful for his ignorance and how he has been so protected. His mind is drawn to the Lost Colony and what happened there.

15) Kassidy goes back to the blood magic church in the Lower Levels and finds Helen. She tells her that she has been practicing blood magic and Helen seems surprised to learn that she’s been doing it without a teacher. They talk about power, and lacking power. Kassidy opens up a little about growing up poor and getting bullied by other kids, and Helen relates to this (HEAVILY imply that Helen did something to get rid of a man who had hurt her a few months ago and that is one of the reasons that lately weird things have been happening in Eden, why people are angrier and more violent). Kassidy asks about the possibility of bringing the dead back to life, and classic psycho religious person Helen says that it is a matter of faith. She invites Kassidy to become a member of the Church but Kassidy still finds all religion creepy. She wants to know if it’s possible to become very good at blood magic without a teacher and Helen tells her no, which is why she should join the Church. Helen tells her that things are about to get better in Eden because God is about to come back, God just needs a human body. Kassidy remembers what Tony said happened to Cathy and feels very afraid. She gets up to leave, but Helen grabs her by the hand and asks her if she has seen God, and then talks about looking into the VOID. Kassidy tells her to let go of her, but Helen won’t. She keeps asking her if she has seen God, talking crazy stuff about how society needs to be rebuilt and how every Artificial is an abomination, and how Bomb Day had been a great cleanse and sacrifice. She notices that Kassidy’s eyes have not turned red, despite using blood magic, Kassidy’s eyes are still black. Kassidy attacks her with her blood magic and escapes the Church, then passes out on the train. She realizes that she left her ID there. AND THEN….REPULSIVE SEX SCENE LOL Kassidy just wants to feel in control and bangs some random girl.

16) Smiles and his squad are sent to the blood magic church to take in Helen Guttierez. Information says that she has been causing disorder and is personally responsible for the deaths of 3 people, partially responsible for the deaths of far more. Blood magic did not exist in Eden only a few years previously, and the Central Committee has just ruled that it is illegal and punishable by death. The Squad is uneasy and scared of blood magic, they have seen what it can do. They break into the Church. It’s the middle of the night. Helen is still awake and they find her...doing...something. Surrounded by candles, in front of an altar, naked, covered in blood. There is a mutilated body in front of her. Smiles and co are like wtf. Helen is clearly having some kind of religious euphoria, talking to Something (the god of the rift) saying that she knows it is there, it’s in Eden, and that she has seen it. The Squad interrupts her prayers. Smiles is like, you’re coming with us, lady. Helen tells him that she is done doing what others tell her to do. Smiles bubbles her and she easily breaks it, then summons HUGE slime monsters to come and attack them. Big fight, and the Squad is losing badly. Helen sees Johnny, her face twists in hatred, she says that such aberrations should not exist and that soon there will be no more Artificials. She starts hurting him badly, then does something that turns him against them (setting up the future thing where Artificials all go crazy). 2 of her church members bust in. Pete has her hands full with restraining JVP. Nickels’s nose is bleeding like crazy as she uses her powers and she is growing weaker. Smiles is like, uh oh, I think we’re all going to die...And they are all overpowered by the blood magic. Helen is like, did you really think you could fight the power of god? God is here. She takes off Smiles’s clothes and takes him to the altar, it’s pretty clear that his guts are about to get spilled. Smiles thinks that it’s ironic that he is going to die like this instead of from a bullet to the head. Nickels saves the day by opening her mind to Lady. BG’s Squad busts in and is easily able to wipe the floor with the cultists. BG tells Smiles that he owed him one anyways for saving Lady in the Prison District. Smiles pushes him away and rushes to check Nickels, who looks like she’s going to keel over, he thanks her for her quick thinking. Nickels is not feeling good, because she just had Lady in her mind, and Lady does some psychic shit to help her. BG is like wtf is wrong with Johnny, because he is still acting crazy, Smiles doesn’t know-- this marks beginning of BG and Johnny friendship. Smiles wanders around the temple. He picks up Kassidy’s ID from the hospital that she forgot the last time she was here, and is compelled to put it in his pocket so that nobody else sees it.

17) Ayda tells everyone to act normal because her crush is coming over for tea. They agree to behave. Rosaline is still sick and Kassidy has a conversation with Esther about what they’re going to do if she doesn’t get better, Esther says that she’ll get her family to hire a lawyer and press charges. When Ayda’s crush shows up, it’s fucking CIHAD, but he’s acting blank and weird and confused. Kassidy pulls Ayda aside and asks if she’s doing that to him, because Cihad barely recognized her and she knows Ayda is an empath. Ayda becomes offended. Tabby comes in and her presence seems to jar Cihad from his trance and Kassidy realizes that he sees Tony in Tabby’s face. Kassidy panics and goes to the attic where Tony has been staying and tells him not to leave or freak out because his ex is downstairs. She gives Tony the BOOK because she is in a full paranoia attack. Tony demands she get it away from him, but she leaves him anyway. Cihad shakes himself more from Ayda’s control, sees Kassidy, and asks her where his BOOK is. Kassidy denies that she has it. Ayda grows upset, with the situation and with herself. Casey thrives in the chaos. Cihad tells Ayda to get the hell away from him (he is very triggered by the mind control-- mirroring what we just saw Smiles do), becomes angrier with Kassidy and demands she give him the Book because it belongs to him and has been in his family for a long time. He tells her that he can see she has been using blood magic and that it’s going to kill her, he has always known that she has been using blood magic. Cihad uses his own blood to complete a detection spell to find the BOOK and heads towards the attic. Kassidy tells him he can’t go up there but he ignores her and pushes past her and goes up there. There are screams and lots of noises from the attic. Casey is like, “Good job Ade, you just got Tony killed” LOL because they can’t get up there and it sounds like someone is being murdered. Eventually, Cihad comes down with the BOOK, and they hear him tell Tony to not follow him. Then he tells the girls he never wants to see any of them again, and leaves. They all rush up there to find Tony very freaked out and upset and all he says, miserably, is that he does not understand why he even tries-- there is a fixed, natural order (Fate) in the universe that he can See, and there is no point in fighting what is predetermined. To him, this order/fate will inevitably screw him every time (lol Tony). Kassidy, who is numb and shocked that the BOOK was just taken from her, is not willing to believe that things are predetermined and is not going to give up using blood magic.

ACT 3

1) Kassidy gets called into work during the daytime. Cihad sits her down and fires her. He tells her that he can’t trust her as an employee because she broke into his office, stole from him, and lied to him. He pauses and tells her to be careful because she doesn’t look well and what she is doing is destroying her body. He doesn’t seem angry anymore, just...disappointed lol. Kassidy feels numb on the train ride home and thinks to herself that now she will have more time to practice blood magic. She looks at her phone and sees that the blood magic church she had gone to has been raided and Helen Guttierez, along with other churchgoers, have been arrested for murder. It is clear that this was secret police and Kassidy feels scared. She almost faints on the train again. She gets home, sits down with Tony, and tells him that she got fired. Tony tells her that he has been fired from a lot of jobs before he got sober. Kassidy already knew he was an alcoholic and thinks about her mother, but doesn’t make the obvious connection to the fact that she is also engaging in addict behavior to cope with her brother’s death. She asks what helped him stop drinking and Tony told her he stopped wanting to die. Kassidy thinks about what CT told her and wonders if she’s dying because at this point what she is doing is compulsive. Esther calls her and tells her that she thinks something’s really wrong with Rosie because they went to see her mom and Dr. Bellamy was acting really weird around Rosie, like she was property, Esther says she thinks she had something to do with it. Little throwaway expository thing about Yancey-- someone Esther already knows vaguely because he works for her mom. Yancey was the one running the clinical trials behind what happened to Rosie.

2) Kassidy goes to her childhood apartment to take some of Kip’s belongings so that she can try to bring him back. The apartment brings back a lot of memories but Kassidy is determined not to feel them. It looks like her mom has not been doing so well, everything is dirty and piled up. She goes into Kip’s bedroom, which has largely been untouched since his death and suppresses her emotions even more. She finds his old jacket, which was very sentimental to him because it belonged to his mom Harry, who ‘committed suicide’. Kassidy also tears everything apart to find his gross old hairbrush that still has his hair in it and an old toothbrush (YES THANK GOD DANA IS DEPRESSED AND A SLOB). She also takes the container that has Kip’s ashes in it, that were given to the family after the execution. She is about to get out, when Dana comes home, extremely drunk, and she is like wtf are you doing here because they have not seen eachother in over 2 years, Dana didn’t even come see her when she graduated nursing school. Kassidy feels disgust and anger towards her mother, she blames her for what happened all those years ago, for not noticing how mentally ill Kip was, for not being around. Dana thinks Kassidy looks like she is dying (she looks really bad) and goes ballistic because she gets angry when she is worried. They get into a terrible fight and Kassidy tells her that she wishes Dana had died instead of Kip. She leaves, wearing her dead brother’s jacket, and allows herself to think about what happened. The BOOK is corrupting and seductive inside of her mind, and she uses blood magic to shove people out of her way. She is angry and full of grief and more determined than ever to be more than the way she was born. She knows she is no longer helpless and will give anything-- even her own life-- to make sure that she does not become powerless again. This is someone who has lost everything and is willing to destroy herself to build herself back up again.

3) Anatole checks in with Florence about the politics in the Northern Territories and grows more frustrated with her. He is tired of the constant struggle and her desire for expansion and believes that their efforts are most useful on their own turf. He is tired of losing people-- the war is over! He wants to go back to his home Territory of Kemenka but she will not allow it. Florence asks Anatole why he made an exhibition to the destroyed blood magic town of Blagodat and asks him if he found anything there-- something that would look like an old BOOK. She has been reading the former leader of the Northern Territories’s (Frank Martel….) journals and heard about it there. She takes him to a room and shows him a glass tank of preservative fluids, where she has contained the corpse of the former Princess of the North, a woman killed by Olive 12 years ago, who was a hideous hybrid of human and slime alien. This Princess had been mutated by the Red Priest (CT’s Dad…) as a child. This body is hideous and repulsive and it is proof that it is possible to create bodies that...Entities….can live in without decay and corruption (we think of Tony and the thing that Helen said about God needing a body) Florence asks Anatole about his loyalty. He knows that she has stopped trusting him and his pride is hurt and he leaves. Flick walks up and tells him that she has sent surveillance parties to both Eden and the Lost Colony and that they never came back. He has a tape recorder with radio transmissions from the party that went to the Lost Colony, and plays it, and they listen to a description of a strange device (figure it out-- this is the device that the BOOK wants to strap Tony in so that it can do the Ritual) and then screams. Flick is like, you know everything she told you is real, think about how we need more power if we are ever going to Make our Colony Great Again. Anatole knows that Flick is a manipulator and answers to Florence and does not understand why he would purposefully add to his mistrust of her. He says this, and then beats Flick into the ground for being an untrustworthy rat and messing with his mind. Anatole’s mind turns to rebellion against Florence. He goes to Jules’s house to find Dog (bc Jules and Dog like each other). Marty is there, talking to his little friend Ayda. Anatole finds Dog and Jules, the witch, and straight up asks them if they would support him against Florence if she has gone off the deep end.

4) It is Bomb Day. 7 years ago, in the morning, a group called the UPLF (United People’s Liberation Front) detonated bombs across Eden, leaving 5000 people dead and countless more injured. That same day, Kip Nguyen was arrested and killed (along with 21 other collaborators) for his involvement, despite his innocence. Kassidy can’t think of a better day to bring her brother back from the dead. It seems symbolic to her. The news is broadcasting all kinds of memorials, it is a highly emotional day. Kassidy empties her bank account and buys 153 pounds of meat (correlating to Kip’s weight when he was 18) She reflects on how if she had not been fired from the hospital, she could have taken a human corpse, but according to the Book, flesh is good enough as long as you have DNA from the person you are trying to bring back (Kip’s hair and his toothbrush and his ashes).. Kassidy does some kind of fucked up shit in her room to prepare this ritual that I will figure out later after some more research into necromancy. She has black slime ichor she bought from one of Tabby’s sources on the black market. She cuts herself and loses a lot of blood because a large component of the ritual is sacrifice. Kip’s jacket is there as an emotional connection, since he wore it all the time and loved it. In the background, the news is playing. It is talking about Kip (and the other UPLF terrorists who were caught), how he was a terrible person, blah blah blah. Kassidy lets the BOOK’s power fill her body, letting it have control. She starts talking in the language of the VOID. She completes the ritual.The flesh, the blood, and the black slime come together to form a crawling, whimpering thing but it is not Kip, Kassidy does not know what it is. For a moment she has hope that she brought him back, no matter how disgusting and fucked up, but it isn’t him. The disgusting form squirms in a repulsive, stinking heap. She failed. Kassidy is full of rage and hurt, hating herself for what she perceives to be weakness and failure (JK Kip is alive and that’s why it didn’t work, there was no soul to yank back into the body). She screams and starts wrecking her bedroom. Casey, the only person who was in the house, comes in and sees what she has done and is horrified by it, horrified by what Kassidy has done, horrified by the crawling crying abomination. Kassidy yells at her, telling her to get out, get out, she hates her. She ‘kills’ the barely alive squirming meat monster with blood magic in a very brutal, angry way.The TV has a picture of Kip’s face on it and she knocks it over. Casey holds Kassidy, and in her grief and rage Kassidy hits her again and again, but Casey still holds her. For the first time in years, possibly for the first time since Kip’s death, Kassidy begins to cry. Casey keeps holding her. She picks up Kip’s jacket and puts it on. He is gone. There is nothing she can do about that.

5) Smiles has just been punished and he doesn’t know why. He’s in pain and just wants to lie down. He walks in on Nickels and Pete acting a little too touchy feely and snaps at Pete, telling her that she’s acting irresponsible, taking advantage of someone younger than her, and putting Nickels in danger because of her pyrokinesis. Nickels tells him that she doesn’t understand why everyone else can get what they want and she has to be alone. Smiles asks her if she would think the same thing if he allowed Johnny to act on his crush on him. Nickels says it’s different and they get in a fight, culminating in Nickes going inside of his mind and ripping out a memory of Smiles when he was a child, in some sort of juvenile facility, being bullied and physically hurt by the other kids. Smiles attacks her, tells her that he hates psychics, that he hates people who go into other people’s heads without asking. Nickels fights back, asking if he still thought she was too helpless to make her own choices. Pete gets them apart and yells at Smiles. Smiles stomps off and nearly runs into a completely ordinary, frumpy woman named Silas. Silas asks him what the matter is. Smiles is terrified of this woman, he doesn’t understand why she is on the dormitory floors. This is the big boss, Smiles knows that she is behind everything and is the reason that his life is shitty and he suffers all the time. For a second, he lets himself fantasize about killing her, but knows that the punishment he and his team would face would be long and brutal. Silas says that she’s there to see BG, but she is acting very nice and kind towards Smiles. She offers him a piece of candy and he does not take it. They have a weird, scary conversation that Smiles doesn’t entirely get but he starts to feel like his time is coming to an end and does not want to give them the satisfaction of killing him, but also does not want to kill himself.

6) The gang holds an intervention for Kassidy LOL. Some people take this more seriously than others. Tabby runs the whole thing because she says that she has a lot of practice having interventions for Tony and for her mom. Very funny moment where Ayda is like “So were those interventions successful?” and Tabby is like “Uh. No.” All the bad things Kassidy has done while using blood magic get laid out in front of her-- getting fired from her job, eating everything in the fridge, getting sick, losing weight, smelling like she is rotting,, dragging 150 pounds of meat into her room (nobody but Casey know why she did that though). Everyone tells her that they care about her and are worried about her and want her to stop using blood magic, they say she can keep doing her research. It seems like everyone has figured out that Kassidy has been pouring herself into this stuff to feel a sense of control, except for Kassidy. However, Kassidy was raised by an addict and starts squirming her way out of trouble and turning it back on everyone else LOL. She is honestly such a bitch and is like, well, if you guys are so worried about me, why aren’t you worried about Rosie, huh? And laying out everything that seems weird about the Rosaline situation, the being missing for days, the sickness, the obviously being experimented on by evil scientists thing. Kassidy is really trying to deflect from her own behavior, very classic. Too bad Rosie is a very solid, honest person. She and Esther kind of look at each other and then Rosie is like “OK…” and transforms into this monster thing. AND EVERYONE ALREADY KNEW EXCEPT FOR KASSIDY bc Rosie doesn’t fucking hide shit unless she doesn’t want to stress someone out more. Rosie is like “Yeah, this is a whole thing, sorry I should have told you but the government is doing some fucked up things to people and they did this to me, I didn’t want to bother you because it seems like you're really going through something right now.” And Kassidy just thinks about how she is literally the only person in the group who does not have some kind of Ability and/or is Artificial. She feels determined to keep using blood magic even if it can’t bring Kip back, because it makes her feel better about herself.

7) Sashi goes to work. She has been watching the news like crazy, working hard, submitting more evidence of corporate corruption in Eden. Because of her promotion to Detective Superintendent, she is making more money, and she and her wife Kelsey are going to try for a baby. Sashi feels happy. As she is working, Dana Nguyen calls her into her office. Dana looks fucking rough, she hasn’t been taking care of herself. In Dana’s office, we see a family photograph of her and her dead wife Harry and their children, and Sashi looks at it and feels a moment of pity for this woman, because she can’t imagine losing a partner or a child, even a child who was a terrorist lol. Dana is like, you’ve been working hard, I see. They talk about what Sashi has worked on, all the surveillance and all the numbers crunched. Dana tells her that she agrees with what she has been working on, that she also believes that people like West should not have the kind of power that they have. But then she says that she does not believe that the government of Eden should have that power either. Sashi is like...what are you talking about? Dana gets angrier and angrier as she talks, saying stuff that Sashi doesn’t understand, about always being watched, about how her life has been destroyed. She has been drinking. Dana is like, I remember you were involved in the police union with my wife, all those years ago. Sashi is like, “yeah, Harry, before she killed herself.” And Dana’s face grows cold. Dana is like, “so remind me how you got promoted’ and stupid, truthful Sashi tells her about the day Silas came to her office and talked to her, and talks about how she knows Silas is some kind of high ranking official and how grateful she is to her because now she can finally start a family . And then Dana is like, ‘go pack up your stuff. You’re fired.’ There’s this terrible shock, Sashi is like “WHAT?” Dana repeats herself. Sashi tells her that she can’t do that, and Dana tells her that she can do whatever she wants. Sashi doesn’t understand, feels lost and confused and angry and hurt, having just worked so hard only to get cut down for no reason. Dana is like, “You don’t understand, but I’m helping you. I’m protecting you. Get a new job, do anything you want, just get out of here.” Sashi leaves, feeling numb and betrayed. She passes by chief of staff Vega Pelenato and sees her go into Dana’s office behind her. Sashi remembers everything that she heard about Vega’s dual loyalties and can’t help but wonder if Dana is in West’s pockets as well. She starts to firmly believe that West is paying off Dana and endeavoring to maintain control of the private sector as Nationalization closes in on his corporation. It feels like there is nobody who Sashi can go to, since Dana is at the top of everything. There’s nothing she can do. She thinks about Silas again. Hurt and betrayed, Sashi requests a grievance report from HR and fills it out against Dana.

8) Death Squad spends a shift on surveillance outside of the main gang’s house. They are all very bored and slaphappy because this is a boring mission. They talk about why they were assigned this mission: to drag Rosaline back to the Research and Development floors if it even looks like she’s about to go into hiding. Our goons all think that any Research and Development project is automatically disgusting but they have not been given any information on Rosaline other than to watch her. Smiles watches Kassidy (who is…..wearing Kip’s jacket, sob sob sob) through the sights of his rifle and doesn’t feel anything other than curiosity, because he knows that this girl was at the blood magic church. A staff member radios them to tell them that their location is changed and that they need to go observe the AGA owned warehouse that West keeps his trucks parked in. Smiles is like “what, why?” and staff is “big things are about to go down, we need to know about movement, weapons, etc”. They get their stuff and travel through the secret little corridors that are all over Eden. Tension between Pete and Smiles. Smiles’s bad leg is troubling him. They pass by one of the secret ways out of Eden, more of a hatch than anything else. Smiles opens it and they look outside at the world. Smiles is like, what if we just left. Pete tells him that’s not funny. Smiles is like they’re going to kill us all anyways, but deep down inside he knows that there is only one way he knows how to live and that’s in the program. Very helpless scene bc even though they’re all in this bad situation, none of them would dare escape. But they look, for a moment. Suddenly BG teleports in and is like wtf are you people doing? Smiles is like “are they fucking keeping eyes on us or something? Is Lady fucking surveilling us?” BG is like uh yeah obviously you people aren’t trustworthy and now she has a connection to your telepath. Someone tells him something over his radio. BG is like, “I gotta take your psychic back to HQ”. The Squad protests. BG tells them they don’t need Nickels for the rest of the mission. Nickels is like BUT I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING. BG is like, yeah but you were thinking it. You thought about it. And grabs her and teleports her out, presumably to be punished for Thought-Crime ™. Pete tells Smiles this is his fault, he is always messing around and getting the rest of them in trouble, he is supposed to protect them. She keeps going. Smiles looks outside again, at the outside world. He asks Johnny if he thinks he is failing to protect them all, if he thinks that he has not done enough to keep them safe. Johnny says no, of course not, and that he knows Smiles is doing everything he can (OW….) Smiles closes the hatch to the outside and hits a hand hard against his own leg.

9) SECOND DR. B CHAPTER, FIGURE IT OUT. Dr. B is troubled by Yancey’s unwillingness to take the only surviving subject of their project in, but he says that it’s better to observe for now. After all, the other living subject from 7 years ago is out living his life. Dr. B tells him that was a mistake and that he should have been terminated. They argue about this in Dr. B’s laboratory. She is worried about her daughter’s connection to the subject. Data has been submitted to Silas. Yancey says that information should have been kept private, but Dr. B keeps nothing from Silas. IDK IDK IDK

10) Kassidy realizes that there is nothing for her at home and she has nothing to lose. Kassidy is hungry, so hungry. She goes outside at night and wanders around, wondering if she has lost her mind. She comes across one of the slime creatures and kills it easily with blood magic. Hunger overcomes Kassidy. She ravenously eats the gelatinous body of the creature, and for a while her hunger is sated, but she is horrified by her own behavior. This is usually that moment where someone thinks about how they need help, but Kassidy knows at this point there is nobody who can help her. She just kind of sits there, disgusting, black slime all over her face and hands. Kassidy thinks about calling her mom. There is only one person she knows who knows about this and she calls him. Cihad picks up. Kassidy is like, I’m sorry, I know you hate me, but I don’t know who else can help me. Eternal savior complex guy that he is, Cihad gives Kassidy his address and tells her to come to his house. She rides the subway, thinking about how she is going to probably die soon and wonders if she is OK with that. She arrives at Cihad’s house. It seems so nice and normal. Cihad tells her that she is slowly killing herself, that most people’s bodies cannot handle blood magic. Kassidy says she feels like it’s something more than that. She can feel the BOOK nearby. She asks him where he got it and Cihad carefully says that he has always had it. She’s like, you’re from the town from up North that was destroyed, aren’t you. He says he is. He says that she has to stop using blood magic and tells her that 2 years ago, he watched someone he cared about a lot die a slow, painful death because of this same thing. Kassidy tells him that it isn’t that simple. Deep conversation. Cihad is very different when he is out of boss mode. Then, a child who is presumably Cihad’s/Tony’s daughter and….something….come into the living room. The thing is one of the horrible slime aliens, and it can fucking talk in a human voice and calls Cihad ‘dad’. Kassidy reacts in horror, realizing that Cihad is up to some really dark shit, worse than anything she can imagine, if he is treating one of those things, the same kind of thing that tormented Esther for years, as his child. She’s like, you’re a cultist, you came from that place and infiltrated Eden and brought the BOOK here, you’re evil, this is all your fault, you did this to me, blah blah blah. Cihad, with his terrible red eyes, comforting the little disgusting slime alien that is scared of Kassidy, says “Don’t go. Please. I want to help you.” And Kassidy says “I don’t want your help” and stumbling, runs out.

11) The gang realizes that they are in trouble after Tabby discovers hidden cameras in their home-- this has to do with the Rosaline plot. We really see that Rosie is dealing with her monstrous new nature much better than Kassidy/we see the parallel. Esther receives a summons from the court because her mom is trying to get her committed (Dr. Bellamy trying to control her daughter but in her own way, trying to protect her bc she is aware that danger that is about to come down bc she works with Yancey). Esther is like no no no, I’m not going back to the hospital, there’s nothing wrong with me. Somehow (no idk how right now because I am stupid) the Rosie stuff gets bigger stakes. Kassidy is the first one to suggest they leave Eden— she feels no connection anyways and wants to see the Lost Colony and CT’s town/the black pyramid. They discuss Marty’s vision of seeing them with him in his Colony. Discussion of pros and cons of leaving that somehow ends up with the majority saying they want to go. Some people (Ayda, Tabby) take more convincing than others. Tabby wants more money and Casey promises her a crazy amount of cash when they get back, she promises Tabby anything she wants. Some (Tony especially lol) want to get far, far away. The saddest thing is that we see that Marty is very excited at the prospect, even though his friends are in danger, and we see how desperately he wants to have real human contact and connection.

12) Preparing to leave Eden. Asking West for one of his trucks. We find out that West has been in contact with people in the North, bypassing Eden’s restrictions with the help of his technopath Percy. West has a lot of foster kids and says some bullshit about wanting to keep them safe from something. Kassidy finds West sinister. She overhears him asking Casey what’s wrong with her/asking her if she’s sick and Casey says something hurtful about Kassidy just looking like that/being ugly (OW but Casey is not tactful and not the best liar). Kassidy doesn’t know why she feels hurt by this, she has always...accepted that she will never be pretty (ow this hurts I feel it). Kassidy goes into the fancy bathroom and looks at herself in the mirror, at how dull her skin has become, the dark circles under her eyes, the weight she has lost, her teeth turning grey and brittle. She looks ugly now. But she thinks, maybe, she hadn’t been so ugly before, even though she had felt that way about herself. Kassidy scrubs at her face. She looks in the mirror. She sees a flash of...of something else. A flash of the planet eating unholy thing that for a long time, she has suspected has been living inside of her body. She recoils in disgust, but what is she supposed to do? She leaves the bathroom to go sit with Esther and Rosie. She asks Rosie how she’s doing, with the whole...being a monster thing. Rosie says that she isn’t a monster and that nothing could make her act in ways that go against her values, no matter what her body has become, no matter what anyone has done to her. It’s frustrating to hear that, because Kassidy feels helpless. She gets up and wanders around, feeling the urge to use blood magic but having to reason to do so. She thinks about the Lost Colony. Are they really doing this? Some of her friends have no skin in this game, and she wonders why they would even decide to put themselves in danger. The Lost Colony. The Lost Colony. Bodies, being in the wrong bodies. Kassidy feels like there is something so wrong with her body.

13) Preparing to leave Eden. IDK, this is just like….a logistics chapter…...lol…..a beat of calm nothingness before the climax.

14) The gang packs up and gets into one of West’s trucks. Most of them hide in the back. This should be normal, after all, AGA ships things to the neighboring Colonies of Green River and Serenity all the time. Tabby and Casey in the front, everyone else in the back. Kassidy can feel the thing inside of her grow excited, like it wants to leave Eden. She starts getting sick, leaking black goo from her mouth and ears. They arrive at Eden’s entrance and there is a checkpoint. Secret police. They start asking Tabby questions, Tabby says that they can look at the schedule and that it says that they have prior permission for this shipment. Ayda and Tony start panicking because they can psychically feel that it’s over and they know what’s up. Smiles tells them that there’s a new law and that there are to be no more shipments to or from Eden. He tells them that he knows there are people in the back of the truck and tells them that they’re all under arrest for human trafficking and orders them all out of the truck. They all get out, line up. Vague menacing energy from the Death Squad psychos. Everyone is terrified that they’re about to get shot in the street, especially Kassidy, who has a horrible fear of these people. Scary moment where one of them is like “Hey, aren’t these those people we were running ops on the other day???” One of them (it’s Nickels lol what a bitch) starts to harass Kassidy, saying that she looks sick and saying that she’s a blood magic user aka shoot on sight, and starts to get rough with Kassidy. Casey is the first one to go ballistic and attack (Casey vs Nickels and Pete, Esther vs Smiles, Rosie vs JVP). Tony pulls Kassidy back into the truck with Ayda, Marty gets into the system to try and force the gates open idk anything about technology I will figure out how later.. Kassidy uses blood magic to incapacitate Pete (because we literally can’t have someone who can incinerate everyone in this fight lol) and this seems to piss the rest of them off. Gate starts to open. Rosaline transforms and beats the shit out of JVP and his helmet gets knocked off and she realizes that this is a 15/16 year old child and is like UH GUYS….Cihad shows up huffing and puffing in his scrubs and crocs out of nowhere, yelling at Smiles and co to stand down and is like WAIT STOP STOP, and this throws them off a little bit. Smiles crushes Esther’s arm in a bubble after she shocks him. Gate opens more, everyone gets in the truck and Tabby starts to floor it. Cihad starts using blood magic to pull them back. Tony is losing his fucking mind, like we have to get out, we have to go, we have to go! They really are all gonna die. This is scary. Kassidy uses her last ounce of strength to lash out with blood magic against Cihad and his hold on the truck is broken. We see in his face that he knows that the Entity is living inside of her body (THIS IS THE REAL REASON HE WAS TRYING TO KEEP THEM FROM LEAVING). Kassidy passes out and stops breathing, her heart stops beating, and Casey gives her CPR to save her life and ends up snapping her few ribs.

15) Smiles is taken to a room and is interviewed by Silas about how he fucked up and how he failed and how he is stupid and how he sucks. Getting shocked has jarred something loose in his mind, not a memory, but a clarity about a piece of himself that he has protected for all these years-- his sense of self is conflicted. Smiles is thinking oh boy, this is it, she’s about to tell me I’m getting Retired. But nobody ever gets a warning for that. He straight up asks Silas if this is it, if this is the end. Silas tells him no, no, she needs him (IMPLY THIS IS FOR MORE THAN JUST USING HIM AS A TOOL). Smiles fucking SNITCHES and is like, “You know Doc was there, right? He knew about those people and was trying to stop them. Did you know about that? Did you know he uses blood magic? That’s why you can’t pick him up on all your little cameras, isn’t it? Well he is trying to fuck you hard.” (Until this point we were unaware of CT’s involvement with Silas and the secret police too….uh oh Cihad is a mysterious bad guy) And Silas tells him to get out. Smiles returns to his dorm, and it’s clear that his team all thought they were never going to see him again. Heartwarming reactions from Nickels and JVP to show how much they truly love and were worried about Smiles. Pete isn’t disappointed but she had been amping herself up to be team leader lol. Smiles thinks about the outside world and thinks about the people who just got out of Eden. He remembers the things that have been done to him. He remembers the things that have been done to his little family. He tells them all that he isn’t going to let them die here. He can’t lose them. The ID of the woman Kassidy Nguyen is still hidden in his room. He looks at it and to his horror, he feels some kind of familiarity and believes that he must have known her before joining the program. He tosses the ID to Pete and asks her to burn it. Pete does so.

16) Some random loser journalist named Lee Harlan is bored and depressed and his life sucks. He has chronic horrific migraines and scars at his hairline. He thinks about different stories he could write and really doesn’t have much inspiration. Just a normal guy. Then he goes to sleep and goes into a VOID hallucination where he is tormented by a version of a 13 year old Marty who he beats to death with a rock, he just starts bashing him over and over while Marty calls him a pervert and a creep and he says that he is not. He sees 18 year old Kip who is like, you killed me, you killed me, you killed me. “No I didn’t, I didn’t know what was going to happen, it wasn’t my fault!” He sees Kip getting shot in the face over and over again. He ‘wakes up’ but he is still in the Void. He can’t get out. It’s like this every time he goes to sleep. He wakes up for real and tries to kill himself by slitting his wrists. It doesn’t work. It never works, he always just heals. Pain and guilt. Nothing matters. There is nothing that matters. Lee turns on the news and sees that a bunch of people were shot for trying to get out of Eden. He sees their faces on the news as Police Commissioner Dana Nguyen talks about the incident in a way that is very broken lol. He knows this isn’t real. Lee does some bullshit smart person internet thing that I will think up later because I am stupid and he finds traces of Marty. And suddenly….Lee does not want to die any more.

17) The gang rides down the road in the truck together, shaken by what has happened. There is a 10 hour trip in front of them and none of them have been outside of Eden, this is exhilarating and terrifying. Kassidy is barely conscious and in pain. Technically she just died, her heart had stopped beating, only brought back by the simultaneously violent and loving act of CPR. She is slipping away and nobody is noticing. She is gently held by Tony. She has memories of Cathy, a person she never met, because the Book has memories of Cathy. Kassidy realizes that they have made a mistake by leaving Eden, this is what the thing inside of her wants, it wants to get out. It wants to go back to the Lost Colony and has been making her interested in that place the whole time. She tries to say this but is unable to. Kassidy fully slips away. The Book is in control now. It sits up, despite the injuries in its body and the harm it is doing to Kassidy. IT TAKES OFF KIP’S JACKET. It tells Tony that it is hungry and asks him if he has anything to eat. And from far, far away, Kassidy sees Tony realize that it is fully in control.

#Planning

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kopfkinoes · 7 years ago

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I’ve been a Naruto fan for like 13 years now but after the manga ended I pretty much left the fandom because I anticipated the vitriol that was going to follow after the ending. Every once in a while I stumbled upon a Naruto post that made me realize I had been right and I didn’t interact. But at the end of 2017 I came back and…nothing has changed. I honestly think this is one of the worst, most immature fandoms out there. I feel like so many of the people in the fandom are perpetual twelve year olds. And it kind of bothers me that Sasuke and Sakura, my absolute favourites since day one, are still disrespected as fuck. Now, mind you, I’m not talking about the ship, I’m talking about them as individual characters although I do ship them. I’ve multishipped for a long, long time but not anymore.

They are the first ones I shipped because I had a feeling stuff was bound to happen between them but then I discovered the wonders of the web and instantly moved to ship Naruto and Sasuke. I never once hated Sakura and Hinata though and even in the later years when “feminist” rhetoric moved into fandoms, I took the “these women are strong and powerful and I love them, they don’t need no man” thing to be good. But after the ending, and now seeing how many of the people who ship Naruto and Sasuke are downright anti-Sakura and insult and disrespect her in so many ways I realized “Wow! I had been an idiot all along. These people never gave a shit about Sakura, they were saying all of that stuff to get her out of the way.” I don’t see people talking about how Naruto and Sasuke’s bond diminishes their battle abilities, I see none of the shippers implying that their development would be flushed down the drain if they ended up in a relationship. Yet, that is apparently true for the women. Right.

Sasuke is a character with a lot of potential. But he was never able to evolve. And do you know why? Because of Naruto. Sasuke was created in order to be the opposite of Naruto and, for the most part, that is all remains to be. I’ve been staning Sasuke forever but this is the truth. He exists in order to be Naruto’s rival and in order to be pissed that he, a guy coming from a clan of prodigies, keeps falling behind the class clown and loser (who is anything but that when you think of it, Minato was anything but a weak guy and Kushina, while we don’t get a good look at her abilities, has loads of stamina and healing powers and her abilities were considered exceptional even among the Uzumaki, not to mention how easily Naruto masters everything new he tries). In the end, he is subdued by Naruto and the Will of Fire.

Even after all of this, he is still not allowed to be around his family. Why? Simply because he needs to be the opposite of Naruto. He needed to point a sword at his own daughter and it was Naruto who had to comfort and reassure her. Sasuke will never be an overly affectionate person, I don’t think he will ever realistically go back to his pre-massacre personality (he wasn’t exactly super bubbly as a child either, he was reserved around other people but very happy around his family) and frankly, he doesn’t need to. He wouldn’t ever be a husband who does grand romantic gestures or a super cuddly father but he’s loyal and devoted and these things shouldn’t be brushed away for some mission or for creating angst just to prove that Naruto is a better, more understanding person that he’ll ever be, even when it comes to Sarada. Like, for fuck’s sake, does everything Sasuke does need to happen right before Naruto waltzes in and puts him in his place by being a better person? Can Sasuke not be a person in his own right without the constant comparisons to Naruto?

What I also find interesting is how often I see Sasuke becoming completely OOC when paired with Naruto. Of course everybody says Sasuke is OOC when paired with Sakura but frankly I’ve rarely seen Sasuke presented as lovey dovey around Sakura, people usually want him to be proud of her but he stays his usual tepid self. Because that’s Sasuke’s personality, he’s not a conventionally affectionate person and there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s why it bothers me when I see Sasuke made to be a soft, sensitive, pastel boy aesthetic. He’s not that and he wouldn’t be that even if he were gay. I mean, I understand headcanons but don’t root them in the “seme and uke” dynamics, please.

Moving on, I have a particular kind of contempt for people suggesting Sasuke cheated on Sakura with Karin. It makes absolutely no sense character-wise and it just shits all over Sasuke by assuming he’s a disgusting fucker who would cheat. Are you telling me that the dude who didn’t even consider taking advantage of even a single one of the girls who were fawning over him would have a face-heel turn and cheat? Yeah, right. I don’t understand how you can call yourself a Sasuke fan and genuinely support cheating. Why would Sasuke wait to be with Sakura in order to have sex with Karin when he and Karin had so many opportunities to bang prior to this while they were travelling together as a team? Why would he have a child with Karin and just dump the child on Sakura’s head? I don’t even want to hear superiority arguments that go along the lines of “Karin is an Uzumaki so she has superior genes compared to Sakura who doesn’t come from a clan” because…arguments like these are disgusting. I don’t think it was ever even slightly implied that Sasuke (or the Uchiha for that matter) held beliefs like this. If anything, these guys didn’t like being othered and set apart from the rest of the village. I don’t think Sasuke ever implied that he believes some vaginas are not genetically pure enough for him to get into so please don’t put these shitty beliefs on him. Sasuke was described as “pure”. It’s simply the way he is. I really don’t care that you think he’s not a “True Hetero Guy” unless he cheats and/or has sex with loads of women.

I always see people saying fans who ship Sasuke and Sakura are “disgusted” by the thought of Sasuke having sex with someone else. But do you know how many people I’ve seen saying how grossed out Sasuke must be by being around pussy (specifically Sakura’s) and how he probably cries and is traumatized by the experience? I’ve yet to see people talking about how Sasuke must be super disgusted by dick.

Moving on to Sakura, pretty much 100% of the vitriol I’ve seen thrown at her comes from misogyny. People always like to say it’s not misogyny and yet it always is. It comes from Kishimoto himself and his ideas of women. He constantly described Sakura as “not cute” and “a hard woman”. And it’s true, Sakura’s not demure or submissive and doesn’t appear to be very suited for domesticity. I don’t believe that just because she is loud and outspoken she would make a dreadful wife and mother. She was very shy as a child (mostly because she was insecure) but she grew into herself. About her not being cute, I’d say that’s debatable. Kishimoto said she’s not cute in the beginning and I see a lot of haters talking about “that ugly bitch Sakura” but let me tell you this, Naruto and Rock Lee had pretty intense crushes on her and Jiraiya compared her appearance to Tsunade’s (although the man’s trash when it comes to women but you get my point). What do people base their opinions on when they say she’s ugly? On her exaggerated anger expressions? Because Sakura is not drawn as prettier or uglier than any of the other female characters. Is it based on the fact that people love to bring up time and time again, that she doesn’t have big breasts? Yeah, she doesn’t have breasts as big as Tsunade’s or Hinata’s or even Ino’s but what does that have to do with anything? Nope, this is rooted in misogyny because, just like in real life, when you don’t like a woman you insult her based on her body and appearance because you believe that’s where all the worth of a woman is. Besides, don’t you think there something wrong with focusing so much on the body type of a girl aged 12 to 17? Because I think there is.

I always feel like laughing at people who call her stupid because Sakura is a nerd. This is why she was paired with the more battle prone Naruto and Sasuke because she was too much brains and not enough brawn. I know that it was Ino, Shino and Sasuke that graduated top of the class but, according to the Databooks, none of them beat Sakura in intelligence, she is equal to Shino and higher than Ino and Sasuke. People love to say that her being able to do the written part of the Chunin Exam all by herself doesn’t prove that she’s actually smart, buddy, it does. The fact that she’s smart doesn’t make the rest of the students who cheated idiots. That was the point of the test, the questions were too difficult for 12 year old genin to answer. The fact that Sakura could, however, isn’t bullshit. You wouldn’t call an exceptionally gifted kid who can answer really advanced academic questions “not that smart really, it doesn’t prove anything”. Freaking Sasuke commented on her analytical abilities, she’s an extremely skilled med-nin, she is able to put pieces of information she’s previously learnt together in order to form a present opinion, her hobbies are trivia games and memorizing medical ninjutsu material for God’s sake.

I definitely don’t think comparing her to Hinata achieves anything. Hinata does represent the ideas Kishimoto seems to have about women. She is soft-spoken, she is never confrontational, she never wants to offend anybody. Sure, Hinata also has her insecurities and doesn’t place much value on herself (we have her father to thank for that) but even after getting out of that shell and discovering she has some iron at her core, she is still mostly soft. That’s not a bad thing at all, it’s simply who she is as a person and it doesn’t make her better or worse than Sakura. I know that Sakura fans have always been bullied online, from forums to YouTube to tumblr to any other comment section of blogs and stuff, people have always thrown shit at Sakura, saying she’s useless, a whore, an idiot. The amount of times I’ve seen people wish violent, horrible deaths on Sakura (for the sole reason that she didn’t spread her legs for Naruto being the catalyst in pretty much 100% of the cases) is immense. The amount of times I’ve seen people wishing Hinata would kill Sakura “for what she did to Naruto” is huge. So based on this, I understand why Sakura fans feel the need to get defensive. I don’t agree with putting Hinata down but I understand why some people might do it. I’ll never put down someone’s fav (especially when the fav is as unproblematic as Hinata who honestly did nothing wrong) but I definitely understand why some people will do it.

Naruto is a shonen, battle manga. We will never get 100% healthy relationships in this because the manga is not focused on romance. It is why the relationships between Sasuke and Sakura and Naruto and Hinata were not greatly developed and why there was an overemphasis on Naruto and Sasuke’s bond which is basically “we’re forever competing to see who’s better”. Kishimoto based it on his relationship with his brother but I’m pretty sure he took it up to eleven in the manga. Because Naruto is a manga for whom the target audience is boys, female characters will never be 100% appreciated. Most of the boys watching identify with the downtrodden outcast, guys such as Lee or Naruto. It’s a thing, associated with the stereotype of the Western man who watches anime, a stereotype that is proved to be correct in most cases, sadly. How many of these guys think they’re gems, that they’re precious souls to have around and girls just don’t see them for what they are? Both Naruto and Lee are very loved among male fans and they are both rejected by Sakura. (I could also say something about the stereotypes Western anime watching men place on Japanese women, namely “the pliant, submissive wife, who would do house chores all day, would never say no to sex and worship them as the much better versions of Japanese men that they are” but I’m not going there.) Never cruelly though, she remains friendly with both of them. Her bond with Naruto is very strong and they’re actually a pretty rare example of a good male and female friendship (the violence that is played for laughs doesn’t really mean much to me).

However, for the male fans that is never enough. How many times did I see stuff like “She chose Sasuke although Naruto never left the village” or “Naruto did so many things for her yet she still chose Sasuke”. Dude, there was never a competition. Sakura loves Sasuke, plain and simple. You can disagree with that if you want, you can disagree with how she expresses her love for him but there was never competition. Sakura has always loved Sasuke, what she feels for him is true love. Many people don’t believe it exists but it is what it is. I find it funny (and by funny I mean idiotic to the heavens) that people always say her development was crushed because she didn’t give up on Sasuke but Naruto’s was improved by not giving up on Sasuke. This is bias and misogyny at its finest. Sasuke is not just a crush to Sakura. People always want to say Sakura was a fangirl to Sasuke and nothing more and that she simply needed to get over her obsessive crush. She wouldn’t have said all she wanted was for him to acknowledge her if he were just a crush, she wouldn’t have suffered so badly over him. Many of the village girls had a thing for Sasuke and I doubt all of them cried over Sasuke at night after he left. Only Sakura anticipated when he was going to leave. People always say that Sakura maturing would have meant her understanding that her and Sasuke are just not meant to be a thing. The thing is, she wasn’t holding on to the idea that her and Sasuke would be “a thing”. Kakashi made it pretty clear (to Sasuke and to all fans who just can’t get it in their heads) that Sakura only wanted to help him, not to get into his pants.

People are also super quick to judge the relationship between Sasuke and Sakura as abusive. Why though? All the times they were violent towards each other (and there weren’t even that many times) they weren’t dating, they were combatants on opposite sides of battle. There is nobody in this series that Sasuke is more violent towards than Naruto and yet I never see this relationship classified as abusive, instead it is considered romantic and heartfelt that he wanted to sever his bonds with Naruto in order to make a martyr out of himself and be consumed by darkness. Like, yeah, that’s super healthy. I see the same thing being said with Karin, that Sasuke impaled her simply because he wanted to cut all of his bonds, not because he actually wanted to kill her. Which is…stupid to say the least. Like, cool story, still murder. He knew that impaling her would result in killing her but damn, was he willing to make that sacrifice. The reasons why Sasuke wanted to murder the people in his life are not important. In truth, all the murder he wanted to commit was because people were getting in the way of killing Itachi and, after killing Itachi, people were getting in the way of his goal to be completely alone in order to destroy/reform Konoha. Sasuke is not a psychopath who murders for fun but that doesn’t mean he was in a good place.

I shipped Sasuke with Karin but I never saw their bond as overly emotional or true love. I’m not saying Karin doesn’t care about him but I do think her feelings for him are more in the realm of sexual than the romantic. She does care for his well-being, she wants him to be happy, she is impressed by him and wants to be around him but it’s not romantic. Does she suffer when she thinks he’s dead? Naturally. Because she cares about him and she does love him but, again, not romantically. Karin’s sexual feelings for Sasuke are not bad, they don’t make her a whore or whatever. But it’s quite silly in my opinion to mistake them for some sort of pure, true love. They’re not that and it’s fine that they’re not. We see Sakura wanting to be alone with Sasuke but she never thinks of how she’s so excited she can barely stand it and how she wants to “ravage Sasuke like crazy”. We don’t see Sakura’s reaction, upon seeing Sasuke arrive on the battlefield to be “I want to lick Sasuke all over right now”.

People always like to remind everyone that Sakura ended her friendship with Ino over Sasuke. However, we never see Sakura and Ino be hostile to each other. Compare their rivalry to the one between Sasuke and Naruto to understand what I’m saying. They had a mild dislike going on but we see them quickly overcome it in the Chunin Exams. Sakura and Ino never really gave up on their friendship, their rivalry was mostly played for laughs, I never took it seriously because I don’t think it was presented in a way that was saying “you need to take this seriously, this is the real deal”. Mostly because it dealt with who has prettier hair and who can get the seat next to Sasuke first. Nope, not serious.

Back to Hinata, this is the reason why so many of the fanboys prefer her. Look at the opinions Shikamaru, another character the fanboys adore, has about women. He is downright misogynistic but that gets overlooked in fandom time after time because of his 200 IQ. Instead, I see people saying it is Sasuke who hates women when there is no indication of that, except, you know, people who think he’s gay and because he’s gay he MUST hate all women and consider them absolutely gross (except for the, sometimes OC, self-insert in fanfiction). Just like his father, Shikamaru has this thing that women should be sweet, soft and tender not headstrong, demanding and even harsh (women like his mother, Yoshino, Ino, Temari, Tayuya). He hates receiving help from women, he is frustrated when he has to fight women. He sums up his views of women himself by saying “C'mon. You know what they’re like. You can never figure them out. You never know where you could stand with them. The smallest things could put you in their bad side. Always playing little mind games with you. Trying to make you do what they want. They’re just a big pain basically.”

For the most part, many fans linked Sakura to Kushina because of her fiery personality. Minato kinda sealed this comparison when saying Sakura reminded him of Kushina. So a lot of people, while calling Sakura an ugly bitch and a whore who needs to be raped and die, still wanted her for Naruto and believed she will ultimately change her mind and go for Naruto. Personally, I don’t care about that because so many characters in Naruto are carbon copies of people who came before them, enough similarities are enough. This idea that a guy should marry a woman just like his mother is weird for many reasons to me. It’s only men that have unhealthy relationships with their mothers that want a woman exactly like their mothers. Then the ending came so Hinata, being the embodiment of what a woman “should be” became more appropriate for Naruto in the eyes of so many fans. The fact that she fits these patterns doesn’t take away or add to Hinata’s character in any way. It just is. However, fanboys will use it in a sexist way. I definitely don’t agree with the criticism for Hinata that it’s wrong her motivation for becoming strong is Naruto. The motivation of pretty much all characters in becoming stronger is in order to protect others and there's nothing wrong with wanting to improve yourself because you feel that would put you on more equal grounds with the one you love. This manga places great value on the power of unity and community and people who seek power for power’s sake, for revenge or for evil don’t do well. They are either defeated or they change their minds. Great emphasis is placed on the “you only become strong when you have someone you need to protect” mentality. And women are allowed to make connections in this life, they don’t have to live “lone wolf” lives in order to be “truly strong”. Loneliness is an enemy in and of itself in Naruto.

Kishimoto’s views on women are not necessarily progressive but they’re not exactly bad in my opinion. It all has to do with how fanboys twist his ideas and make them bad. Because I don’t think he ever blamed Sakura for not hooking up with Naruto. I know there are people who believe that he’s holding onto the belief that people (and women especially) must forever be with their first love. I think it just so happens that Naruto and Sasuke were Hinata’s and Sakura’s first loves but, more important, they are their true loves. Ino moved on and I see people saying she shouldn’t have. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t I guess. To sum up, I’ve yet to see dislike for Sakura that’s not misogynistic. I’m not even talking about people who think she’s weak. She is the only one who’s not from a clan and yet she managed to surpass Tsunade, a Sannin. She was impaled by Madara and shook it off immediately, she saved Naruto’s, Kankuro’s, Hinata’s and Karin’s lives, she saved Sasuke from an infinte desert, she saved Obito from a sea of acid, she punched an alien all-powerful goddess in the face.

People saying shipping Sakura and Hinata with the guys they’re canonically in love with proves their fans are selfish because they just want them to look cute next to Sasuke and Naruto amuse me. That if you really cared about them you’d ship them with guys who “actually” care about them like Lee or Kiba or whatever. Dude, people love who they love. And a woman has no obligation to be with a man who was friendly and nice to her, not even a man who has a crush on her if she’s not attracted to him or doesn’t love him.

#my post #not even going to tag this because not only am i not trying to start a fight i don't want any #these are simply my thoughts #i never thought i'd be this involved in this fandom in my 20s #mind you i don't think either of these relationships are abusive #like i said this is a battle manga with battle situations #combatants fight it's the way it is #but if you're gonna consider one abusive based on standards you made up #might as well not be a hypocrite and consider all ships abusive #even the ones you like #honestly all the pseudo arguments i've read are baseless #just admit you don't like certain ships and move on #no need to give justification #because you're tying yourself in knots and just soundind like a jerk

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