#left this kind of vague wrt relationship dynamic

[arofili]

if you're still taking prompts:

Elrond/Erestor/Celebrimbor, 33 (“Forget me.”) - Autumn or winter, maybe a last farewell before the fall of Eregion? (could also be gen or queerplatonic if you'd prefer)

I hc Erestor as Caranthir/Haleth's son, include that as you'd like :) (I also usually hc Elrond as fairly Feanorian, but again, you don't need to include that if you'd rather not)

<3

~ maglor-my-beloved

Forget me, Celebrimbor’s letter had urged. Leave me behind, let me die...

As if they could do that. As if they could simply forget all their love for him, all the nights spent together, all the history they shared!

“You know we cannot win this fight,” Erestor said wearily.

Elrond set his teeth as he donned his helmet, the last of his armor before the march. “I know,” he said shortly. “But you know we cannot abandon him.”

“I know.” Erestor grasped his gauntleted arm. Even through the armor, Elrond could feel the strength of his grip, almost as firm as Celebrimbor’s own. “But—but we will lose him, Elrond. You must be prepared to retreat when it is time.”

Elrond wrenched his arm from Erestor’s grasp. “We don’t know that,” he growled. “We can save him, if we try—”

“This is war,” Erestor said. He was older than Elrond: he knew the odds. He remembered the long and bitter days of siege, of blood, of destruction.

Well, Elrond had lived through war, also. He was born into it, had come of age into it. And he was not powerless, not anymore.

“I will fight for him,” he insisted. “To the very—”

“Don’t,” Erestor begged, his voice cracking. “Elrond. I cannot lose you too.”

“You won’t lose either of us,” Elrond insisted. He had no time for this. “Now come, or don’t. Either way, there is a war to win, and I will not wait until it reaches us.”

He turned and began to stride away.

Erestor followed. He always did.

[renjirukia]

tbh i don't think too hard about the forty year renruki separation beyond the angst of the pining and avoidance but in an effort to un-vague that time period and make some sense as to why renji is so aggressive towards rukia during the arrest/reunion i have some thoughts.

more under the cut because this got long

first let's talk about the break up. they've been drifting apart since arriving at the academy; they're in different classes ; renji gets sorted into the advanced class while rukia is not and this creates a shift in their dynamic; as it's implied rukia was very much the leader of their little gang. renji doesn't seem to mind the shift as he finally gets an edge over rukia and likes to show off though there isn't any kind of malicious intent in his behavior. rukia on the other hand is going through an intense case of cultural shock, her shift in dynamic with renji is distorting her own self-perception and making her feel cut off from her one friend in the world. enter byakuya. rukia is hesitant to accept the offer of adoption but at renji's boisterous (and somewhat forced) encouragement she takes the offer. i think renji's actions here devastated rukia and saw it as a confirmation that she was right in feeling like she was being left behind or cast aside.

now the intervening years. in the soul society arc the root conflict between them is that she is a noble and he isn't and that class disparity is why they can't "be together" though there isn't much evidence of the gotei adhering to such a rigid caste system and that class mingling is acceptable at least during work hours (and like everyone wondered why renji just didn't get a job at the 13th if he wanted to hang out with her so bad). we don't learn too much of what they got up to during their estrangement other than rukia's kaien trauma and her tenure as one of the more unlucky heroines from an 18th century gothic novel. while renji graduated school went to the fifth got transferred to the eleventh and somewhere in their picked up the goal of surpassing byakuya. we get a glimpse when renji tells ichigo "for a long time... a real long time... for decades... rukia and i... ...had drifted so far apart we wouldn't even pass by each other. it was you... who closed that... distance between us."

Like i said i don't think academy renji was fully aware of how hard of a time rukia was having at adjusting to seireitei life. he teases her about not "getting with program yet" but i think renji was confident in rukia's moxie that he figured she would eventually settle in. i don't think it was much later he realized there were irreparable cracks in their relationship. in chapter 98 as rukia walks away he narrates "rukia finally had a real family. let her go... don't get in the way... that's what I told myself." but it bleeds into the present day and it reads like a retrospective rationalization. "but thinking back...maybe i was just... afraid."

ok the point finally. now this part is just speculation and headcanon-ery but that's the lifeforce the animates any fandom so... basically i think rukia ignored renji. hard. after he finally went to work in the gotei 13 and i think it blindsided him. it's never stated exactly when renji decided to surpass byakuya but in the (frankly incredible) chapter 144 flashback kira tells renji "i suggest you stay away from her. for your sake and hers. i'm sure she realizes that she's not like us." and as that scene does not take place during their academy days i read it as renji only at that moment understanding the full breadth of their separation. i'm not sure i take kira's word as law wrt to her intentions because frankly he doesn't know her like that, and instead i see it more as kira encouraging his friend to move on and uses their difference in social status as a reason for her snubbing him ( rukia doesn't care about social status and it's not something she could have picked up from byakuya because 1. he doesn't talk to her 2. byakuya himself doesn't care about social status). next we cut to ikkaku saying "wow. that's quite a goal. to become stronger than kuchiki byakuya." and finally yumichika in all his wisdom sums up their break up era, "it's a difficult thing. discouraging, isn't it? it's always easier to tear down than to build. and much more difficult to tie than untie."

i read these scenes as a cause-and-effect from the order presented to us. rukia ignores renji (because from her pov he dumped her and she still feels some type of way about it) -> kira witnesses said ignoring and tries to impart some advice -> renji doesn't agree with the advice because he can see different social classes interacting all the time but kira's minor nobility does hold some weight with him so he takes what he wants from the advice -> concocts a plan to surpass byakuya (love the vague word choice surpass him in what? social status? ability? height? i don't think renji really knew instead using it as a launch pad to get back into rukia's good graces, because once they start hanging out again he seems more than fine with being byakuya's 2nd) -> yumichika imparts his own advice (which reads more like a thesis statement of the arc the way "a heart is born between two people" was used during the hueco mundo arc) but in the context of the scene he's sympathizing with renji and his relationship woes; "rukia finally had a real family. let her go... don't get in the way... that's what I told myself. but thinking back...maybe i was just... afraid." renji had doubts about pursuing rukia this way, but kept on course because he was uncertain he was in a position to 'tie' the relationship back together, but doesn't want to 'untie' it either.

now the other point; renji's aggression during the arrest. renji has dedicated a huge chunk of his (after)life into reaching a position where they can be equals again, and here rukia is fucking it all up with her "antics" as he later calls them. and if he's been living with the idea that rukia won't talk to him because of the gulf in their social status and here she is living amongst humans (not sure where humans sits on the soul society social hierarchy but i'm gonna guess they're not even considered they're so low) it probably brings up some deep resentments, i don't think renji has the heart to truly stay pissed at her for long and when ishida and ichigo step onto the scene they make for much easier targets. this isn't renji at his best, but i can see where he's coming from, and he drops the act completely when it becomes obvious rukia is willing to go to jail for a long time for ichigo's sake.

ok wow this really got away from me and i've forgotten the point i was trying to make BUT tl;dr i think the renruki break up is more complicated than initially presented and there are some incredible unexplored avenues of angst.

[vldkeith]

(i have read the faqs don’t worry!! )

why is it that you don’t like the dirty laundry fanfic? is it just not your type of ff or?

gonna copy and paste my answers from some older posts bc i mostly still agree with what i said then!

from one post i made before:

the whole fanfic was written by a white person, so their intense focus on portraying lance’s family as homophobic is….kind of racist? like just because it’s something that actually happens doesn’t mean white people get a pass to write an entire story centering around it, a story that is honestly just angst porn wrt lance’s family. like. it’s one thing for a hispanic person to write a story like this, but quite another for a white person who has not experienced it to do so, because they’re kind of just working off of stereotypes. i dont think the person who wrote it is racist at ALL but i do think that what they chose to write and how they chose to write it kind of exemplifies the racist dynamic of america & how many white liberals view hispanic people as hopelessly conservative wrt things like homosexuality. it’s really not their place to comment on it. there are also hispanic people who agree that it is racist, so it’s not like im going against the grain here. 

and from another, earlier post:

 i read this like….back in 2017 when it was still semi-new (and was there to see it replaced with the bee movie script after it got so much flack, and then when it was deleted altogether) and i have to say…as literally the FIRST klance fanfic i read (i always sort by hits/kudos) it was such a BAD INTRO TO THE KLANCE DYNAMIC!! like! god ok i don’t remember it being written that horribly but the plot points were just WHACK like. kenzie mentioned yesterday the like car fight thing?!?! what the hell was that??? and lance’s family being homophobic?? lance not rly accepting keith’s “love letter” (writing the words “keith’s love letter” was painful bc keith would never DO THAT) but then trying to make up for it by like…serenading him in a mcdonalds or smth?! idk if im remembering right and tbh the most i remember from the fic was like, the roadtrip and even THAT i don’t remember a lot bc it was kind of boring and bad characterization but tbh it was just so overhyped. ppl were like “wow this is the klance fanfic this is what the fandom is founded upon” and i just don’t see it and even back then i don’t think i saw it, though i acted like i did bc i was 17 and just wanted to fit in. again it was also one of my first experiences with klance so i didnt rly have a strong frame of reference yet but man….idkidk i dont think it deserved the intense hate it got but the vaguely racist(?) (stereotypical might be a better word? racist seems a bit intense but i cant think of another word rn) undertones of how lance’s hispanic family was portrayed definitely rubs me the wrong way thinking back on it now and i just dont think the author was equipped to handle such widespread popularity given that. 

i think i was actually too easy on it with this answer ^ from 2020 lmao.

it just plays into soooo many racist stereotypes about hispanic families/people and about the "drama" of gay male relationships (they get out of the car just to physically fight each other at one point like i mentioned up there) and if that wasn't enough to convince people it's just not a good fanfiction, the characterization of both keith and lance is very Off imo again as i outlined above. overall just a product of early klance fandom that is best left in the dark shadows of history, only to be resurrected as a demonstration of what you probably should not do when youre writing a mlm relationship between poc

[bthump]

casca and/or farnese

thank you!

Casca

First impression:

waaaay back when I watched the anime for the first time, my first impression was “I sure hope she isn’t a love interest.”

Impression now:

“I sure hope she isn’t a love interest.”

lol to be more detailed, my impression of her now is that she had so much potential to be a great character with a great engaging narrative, and even after everything she still has that potential. And the saddest thing about Berserk is how utterly and wholly and horrifically that potential was thrown out the window first by making her narrative revolve solely around her romantic feelings for two dudes, then by writing her out of the story through a grotesquely eroticized rape scene, and now quite likely by making her motivation fucking generic gendered maternal instincts.

Like forget the Golden Age, this is the real tragedy of Berserk.

Favorite moment:

toss up between the moment when we cut away from Griffith’s seemingly futile plan to Casca entering stage left to make it work and win the whole war, which honestly gives me chills every single time

and Casca triumphant:

Idea for a story:

Casca as the Black Swordsman AU is the ideal Casca story tbqh.

Unpopular opinion:

If anyone should’ve left the Hawks to ~find themselves~ it’s Casca, not Guts.

Favorite relationship:

Human Griffith tbqh. Like if I have to pick a romance it’d be Farnese, but I can’t really call them my favourite relationship because we haven’t really even seen them interact as full characters.

But I actually find her friendship with Griffith interesting and compelling. They have like, the potential to be a really solid and mutually supportive and understanding friendship, and instead they blow those opportunities and it turns into a giant trainwreck. I love the idea of an AU where nothing goes terribly wrong and they eventually kind of relax into a comfortable friendship. Casca gets over her hero worshippy crush, Griffith opens up a little, they grow into mature adults. I feel like they could be great bffs.

And I also like a lot of the messed up aspects of their friendship, like the way the prospect of some kind of domestic marriage situation with Casca and without Guts made Griffith suicidal, Casca getting jealous and possessive over Griffith even when she was planning to leave with Guts, Casca, unlike Guts, expressing rage and betrayal when Griffith made the sacrifice, their conversation in the river going nowhere because Casca said the wrong thing and Griffith refused to accept her comfort, etc.

Basically they’ve got an interesting friendship with positive and negative elements and, despite Miura doing his damndest to completely and utterly flatten Casca’s motivations during her speech before she tries to kill herself and then fucks Guts, I like it.

Favorite headcanon:

Casca’s gay and her feelings for Guts and Griffith were friendship and gratitude for saving her life that she misinterpreted as romantic feelings bc she’s still young and doesn’t have much experience or opportunity to explore her sexuality. Tho ngl this is somewhere between my genuine author-is-dead interpretation of canon and headcanon lol, like there’s a lot to support the reading that her crushes on the dudes aren’t genuine imo.

Farnese

First impression:

God this is hard to recall. I think it was mainly excitement at the prospect of another female soldier character followed by disappointment that she can’t actually fight.

Impression now:

She’s the most interesting part of Guts’ narrative imo, I’m disappointed that instead of giving her a character arc Miura gave her a half-assed chapter long montage in which she completely changed as a person, but I still like her a lot.

Favorite moment:

Stabbing a demon tiger in the eye with a candlestick at a ball. I really did love how that chapter showed that even though Farnese is insecure about her contributions to the RPG group and feels like the least useful one, she’s worth more in a fight against monsters than a room full of actual knights.

Idea for a story:

I’m really fond of any kind of AU where Holy Iron Chain Knight era Farnese encounters Casca and gets into an enemies to lovers thing with her as her worldview slowly shifts.

Unpopular opinion:

She should legit be the main protagonist and point of view character of Guts’ narrative right now. If I was adapting the story I would frame her as the central protagonist and distance Guts from the audience a bit starting like, chapter 185.

Favorite relationship:

I can’t say Casca for this either lol, they need to actually interact more first. So Serpico I guess. It’s another platonic relationship that I find interesting in a dark, messed up way. Not so much the weird brief sexual overtone in their backstory, but yk, the imbalanced power dynamic, the earlier us against the world vibe, the more current sense of Serpico maybe missing that as Farnese grows out of it and forms new relationships, etc.

Favorite headcanon:

I like to think that even if Miura’s not showing us, she’s still wrestling with such an immense shift in her worldview and her own self-image and self-esteem wrt who she was. One vague apology to a witch who doesn’t give a fuck doesn’t cut it lol. Also she’s still kinky.

[slamsquietly]

Okay. So. Ur probably right in that it was a vague and difficult to justify comparison, but I wasn’t really talking about lesbians so much as I was talking about the double standard between men and women in regards to gender nonconformity. The point I was clumsily hinting at was that while we’ve hesitantly accepted that gay men *can* be masculine, men are still seen as incapable of producing genuine femininity on the basis that femininity in men is intrinsically monstrous/dangerous/perverted/comical/grotesque/unnatural while women are allowed much more liberty in how they transgress against norms all while still permitted to be women with most, if not all of the social dignity of that “class” left intact. And I stand by that assertion because I think I’m right.

On the topic of some of your other thoughts, any deviant sexuality is going to be seen as gender-non conforming. This is not unique to women. I feel like that’s so obvious, so like if you actually want to say that you find the other stuff I said problematic within your paradigm you can say that lol. “We decenter men so butch-femme has no correlation or association with masc-fem dynamics.” I kind of get what you’re saying which is a kind of moralistic stance: that gay relationships and gay sex shouldn’t be thought of as referencing straight relationships and straight sex, but I think that they often do, indirectly, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. We are all drawing from the same source material which is hetero-normative. I think the accumulated subconscious knowledge of human civilization wrt gender, built on heterosexuality and its rituals of sexual and romantic power exchange/roleplay are unavoidable and will naturally inflect even how many, but not all, gay men and lesbians feel about themselves and the object of their desires. There is also a definite homo-gender dynamic that is basically impossible to find in straight relationships. None of us should be ashamed of our desires because of our bodies or think of them as less real than the desires of someone else. We are all derivative beings and we also have the ability to create new paradigms. However, I will not refer to something I have seen many times before as new.

Honestly, the attitude with which I actually took some issue and caused me to become hysterical enough to write my original post is this: that any dynamic between two individuals which can be understood as having a traditionally gendered basis, is surely deeply rooted in patriarchal oppression. That’s so cynical and boring and not true! The dynamics and ideals I’m talking about wrt sex and romantic relationships are poetic and issue from the deep wells of the subconscious. It is a spiritual resource to understand not only the self, but one’s relationship to the other as well. Pull from it what you like or just build a bridge over it completely, fuck it, it’s a river not a cage, so to speak. Gender, like power, i believe, is not intrinsically oppressive, nor is its involvement dependent on a penis and a vagina. It’s bigger than our prosaic, academic, and increasingly dogmatic epistemology of patriarchy.

I hate this post with my whole heart topping and bottoming are not related to power dynamics shut up shut up shut up