#let's see where it lands

[housewifeswag2]

"turn off that pretty little brain and be a dumb hole for me"

[koenichthomas]

[cherrywhite]

Silt Verses protagonists // Returning Home

[bunnyskull152]

“Joker stop- Joke-Joker seriously stop.”

“No! All your time spent with this- this thing! I won’t stand for it Batman!”

“Batman get him off I- Batman, he’s- HES BITING. HES BITING- BRUCE, HES BITING!-“

[waywardted]

1x07 | 3x01

[bestworstcase]

your point about team rwby being the maidens’ liberators made me think - do you think blake is going to have a special connection to the summer maiden? I noticed that she’s the only one who hasn’t been close to a maiden yet

i think gillian asturias is the summer maiden (and this post is hysterical in hindsight. at the time i wrote it, the full-length v9 epilogue hadn’t been released yet so we’d only seen qrow’s section and about half of winter’s – hence my pausing to lay out the argument for salem going to vale next and making a pretense of hedging my bets on the crown being narratively central in v10. lol)

now! with regard to blake and the summer maiden, the common thinking here seems to mostly run along the lines of “…and that’s why summer maiden ilia,” or the more general speculation that the summer maiden will be a faunus character.

to this i say:

it’s a fallacy to conflate “blake will probably have a strong narrative connection to the summer maiden” with “the summer maiden necessarily is or will be blake’s old friend,” and the argument for ilia being due for maidenhood is quite thin otherwise, and

blake can and does have important narrative connections to characters who aren’t faunus, and it’s a weird to presume that in order for the summer maiden to have a meaningful tie to blake, she must be a faunus herself.

to expand on that first point, let’s consider the personal relationships between each of the maidens so far and ruby / weiss / yang:

pyrrha -> ruby’s friend

cinder -> ruby’s personal enemy

raven -> yang’s estranged mother

penny -> ruby’s friend

winter -> weiss’s beloved sister

the takeaway here – other than that if you’re ruby’s friend and someone offers you to become a maiden you should refuse – is half the relations between maidens and members of team rwby are antagonistic. (raven seems likely to at least try making amends with yang in v10, but as it stands in the narrative right now things between them are very fraught.)

it is just as likely that blake’s narrative connection to the summer maiden might develop through a personal conflict between them, rather than friendship. yes?

and, if i’m right about gill being the summer maiden, well—stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl with a driving, passionate ambition to uplift her people from the ashes of centuries of conquest and subjugation is radicalized by a boy she loves who pulls them both deeper and deeper into violent, spiteful extremism that ultimately harms the very people they claim to fight for, until he finally crosses a line she can’t accept and she says no i will not.

that’s blake and adam but it’s also gillian and her brother. the difference between them is that blake’s red line was adam glibly revealing that the train heist was actually intended to be a massacre whereas gillian’s was jax stating his intention to commit suicide rather than retreat and live to fight another day; she helped yatsu subdue him specifically to save jax’s life, not because she had a crisis of conscience about their movement.

(there is a certain—really irritating—contingent of CFVY novel readers who project their own dislike of jax onto gill and insist that she turned against him because he demanded she ‘sacrifice her life’ to save him, which 1. he didn’t, he asked her to give him all her aura and then bodily shielded her because he’s physically bigger than she is so this was at worst a “if we’re going down together, i’ll make them go through me first,” 2. if gill only wanted to save her own neck all she had to do was rip her aura out of him and bounce, and 3. she explicitly says that the reason she did what she did is because he’s her brother, she loves him, and she couldn’t let him die.)

the point being, gill is still a radical; her soft betrayal of jax revealed her priorities in that she loves her brother more than The Cause, but in no way did it represent a break from her belief in the cause. if the epilogue is any indication, she’s just as committed to overthrowing shade academy as before. (and i think there’s a real chance that her actions will have improved her relationship with jax to some degree, because he believed she didn’t care about him at all! he thought she only stuck with him because his semblance compelled her to do so! and then gillian exploded his mind by revealing that his semblance straight up doesn’t work on her and she just loves him. which, if the twins are on the same page now, cuts down on the internal tension and likely makes them more dangerous adversaries to the coalition.)

but her history, the way she became like this, is eerily similar to blake’s radicalization in the white fang, and i think blake would certainly be able to piece that together. she’s also by far the member of team rwby i would say is most likely to recognize and relate to the genuine pain at the heart of the crown’s movement—vacuo has suffered.

vacuo wasn’t even a state until the end of the great war. it was a mistrali territory. its people were enslaved and worked to death in a systematic and horrifyingly effective project to extract every last speck of valuable resources from the region, and then even statehood was a slap in the face because they were left to fend for themselves in a barren wasteland whose ecosystem had been completely and utterly destroyed.

the crown is a mirror held up to the white fang; blake is insightful and empathetic enough to realize these similarities and see herself and her past mistakes reflected in gillian, but this time she’s an outsider to the movement—she can’t effect change from within or reclaim the true, important work from the vengeful extremists. so she’s limited in what she can do, practically, even as it’s going to be painfully clear to her that the crown is falling into the same trap adam did.

and at the same time, the new white fang will in all likelihood either be in vacuo or show up to join the coalition in v10, so blake’s part in her own movement, her place in her community, can be directly juxtaposed with her opposition to/empathy for the crown.

v9 sets up for this with blake’s advocacy for the afterans—v7-8 do as well to a lesser extent, because blake is still dealing with the personal fallout of v4-6 and thus is quieter about mantle than say, nora is, but like. blake draws a comparison between her experiences in the white fang and with adam and the moral compromises ironwood starts making after the election. it just seems… pretty clear to me that the narrative has been setting up blake to play a pivotal role in relation to the crown since at least v4 if not earlier, depending on how granular the vacuo outline was during v1-3.

so this is a narrative connection i very much expect blake to have with gillian regardless, but… if gill is the maiden…

well, she’s certainly not trapped inside ozpin’s vault/key maiden paradigm! so in that case what does it look like for a member of team rwby to fulfill this narrative role of liberation? probably something like de-radicalizing her and her brother by convincing them there is a better way forward than their divisive, violent, paranoid ideology. and blake is unquestionably the member of team rwby best equipped to get the ball rolling there.

further, blake’s semblance is a really strong counter to gill’s – that’s true of ruby and weiss as well, because gillian has to touch a person in order to steal aura and so agile, fast opponents are going to be tougher for her in general. but blake has two more things going for her beyond the basic mobility advantage, vis-a-vis making it personal:

the illusionary aspect of blake’s semblance will allow her to create decoys, which is a very powerful tactical advantage against an opponent who really wants to grab her, and

blake’s girlfriend is a hand-to-hand fighter, and an incredibly brave one with an intense protective instinct at that.

clears throat. we all remember yang getting possessed in rwby x jl part 2, yes? and blake clocking it instantly? well.

if blake and gillian are meant to be not just foils but personal adversaries in the vein of ruby and cinder—yang’s gonna get got. agile though she is, as a hand-to-hand combatant yang is unavoidably much more vulnerable to the twins’ contact-based semblances than the rest of her team, her personality will make it very hard for her to play it safe and stay back if it comes to an open fight, and there is nothing the narrative could do to lock in that personal enmity that would be punchier than yang being compromised.

even if gill as a personal adversary to blake isn’t in the cards i expect yang to get got anyway because, let’s be honest: do we really expect crwby to set themselves up with a golden opportunity to do a climactic love-overcomes-mind-control scene with the bees in v10 and then not take it? with how nuts the entire creative team goes for these two? after the climactic battle in ice queendom hingeing on yang being able to free blake from a nightmare with the mere lesser power of unrealized lesbianism? do we reeeally believe they would pass that up? lol.

[toddtakefive]

thinking about todd and his resolve toward… not quite isolation, but being alone in a room full of people again. he goes along to the study room to sit on his own and do his homework, he sits at the poets table and follows along with what’s being said while keeping quiet, he goes to the meetings at all but doesn’t necessarily contribute (in fact, if you watch him when cameron is telling the story ‘from camp in sixth grade’, you can see that he recognizes it before any of the other poets but doesn’t voice it until they all have). he’s not alone, necessarily, if you want to get technical about it, he’s just lonely, and he’s generally okay with that. he doesn’t have friends and that’s fine, he doesn’t participate in class and that’s fine, he doesn’t have a relationship with his family and that’s fine—he could live without any real connection and he’d have been, more or less, fine.

the thing about when he says “i can take care of myself just fine!” is that he isn’t really wrong, you can infer that he’s been doing it his entire life anyway, it’s that ‘taking care of yourself’ isn’t the same thing as really living or being happy. todd’s an introvert, certainly, and even as he gets closer to the group he defaults to sitting quietly in the background, but he’s also denying himself community out of fear not introversion. todd isn’t friendless because he’s an introvert, although that definitely plays a part, he’s friendless because he pushes anyone that might want his company away. if anyone has every wanted for his attention in the first place. (neil’s unwavering interest in him is unique (even when it comes to the rest of the poets, who are fine with todd coming along and joining the group, but aren’t really hellbent on him being there in the beginning) and his refusal to accept it is a direct result of being so lonely growing up.)

there’s obviously something to be said about the implications of his parents neglect, and the more than likely fact that he grew up friendless, and how those both play a part in in him being so skilled at dodging social interaction/being so avoidant of it, but by the time we see him in the movie he’s all but accepted his fate as being alone his entire life. he’s already accepted being the family disappointment, and he’s already accepted he’ll never amount to anything, and he obviously doesn’t like it, but he’d have managed living with that knowledge without the confirmation that it was all wrong. would he have been miserable? almost certainly. but he’d have managed. he’d done it for that long already, anyhow.

[slyandthefamilybook]

me when I'm the dumbest motherfucker alive

[r0semaryt3a]

Wow what an interesting character with such a cool character design! The blue hair, the red/pink jacket, the charismatic performer persona, the questionable morals!

Look at that “tries to look like he could do no wrong but is 100% doing wrong” face! Hmm, it almost…reminds me of someone but I can’t quite place who…

Rude-a’s Paradise starts playing gently in the background

At this point my taste in characters is so predictable that I could be posted to an r/cringe Reddit thread with every single thing that could possibly give away my identity covered up and people would still know exactly who I was.

[lesbinewren]

really did love the action in this episode, the earlier parts with mae and osha, plagueis, the KYBER CRYSTAL BLEEDING but i feel like such a stick in the mud bc i can’t get over what are some truly some baffling writing choices

[somesmartsmarties]

Oooooh I wanna make a comic about Morro discovering his true potential so bad

But brain small and smooth and can’t think of what his obstacle to overcome could be

Like yeah obviously, it would be learning that he wasn’t meant to be the green ninja and he won’t be able to get that title, and that’s okay! But it’s very similar to what Kai’s potential was (which btw side note, after seeing other people share their interpretation and thoughts on Kai, I too like to believe that the true meaning behind his potential is “I am enough, and I won’t be seen as any less if I don’t become the green ninja”), and I really want to tie in to how he could’ve still had a good life if only he hadn’t been so hellbent on finding the realm crystal

So maybe it could be something like “I am imperfect, I am broken, I have been hurt by others and I too have hurt others, but longing for something that I cannot achieve will not fix me or anything else; I took for granted what I had, I left the one person who truly cared about me, I sought out what I thought would fill the cracks that have formed throughout the years, but it only broke me further. I cannot change my past, I cannot go back to what I had, nor can I go back to who I was. But I can try and build a better future for myself. Despite all the pain, anger, fear and loss, I can still rebuild myself, and perhaps someday, these old scars will fade, and I will feel a little more human. Despite it all, I can still heal.”

Maybe idk, I’d love to hear what everyone else has to say <3

[akkivee]

ain’t no way ichiro immediately pulled up on kuukou the moment he saw him and stopped trying to stop his bros from arguing bro 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[sweetandglovelyart]

Knightfall in Dream Land - Page 5

Meta Knight loses a battle and his wings to Nightmare.

[found--family]

am i the only one who sensed some jilted lover vibes from jensen? 

[iniziare]

Tag drop: Aventurine.

[nolongerexistingsadcatface]

Ok yes America hating the cold is funny (eh) BUT. have you considered that I like the imagery of an America sitting alone in the forest in the bleak mid-winter landscape of an east coast woods, all alone in both body and mind, agonizing over her seeming doom to be stuck in the throes of loneliness for all eternity?