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thesunshinecourts · 8 months ago

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i was going to make a new post about this and had been thinking about how to phrase it since yesterday but then saw tei’s tags on this and realised it’s still relevant to this, so it may as well go on here.

anyway, i’ve been thinking about the jeremy of it all ever since posting this. it’s the main thing i’ve been thinking about, other than a kevin thing but that’s a different topic lmao, since finishing bc i keep feeling like we’ve got more pieces than we think.

so, like tei mentioned, there’s the moment jeremy avoids the cops:

i was already wondering about this, but then i went looking through the whole trojans era of the book bc of a question my friend asked about catalaila, and i reread this and paused, thought about it, and chucked another point in the column for JEREMY KNOX’S PROBLEMS WITH COPS, but this one makes it seem, to me, more clear that it’s at least team-public knowledge. so either to do with jeremy’s family situation, or, given it’s the head coach who says it, the southwestern district fall banquet:

when i first read it, i was so deep in jean’s head and also the horror of what just happened that i kinda brushed over it as more related to jeremy’s anxious mother hen impression outside the room, but when i looked at it again and thought about it without the immediate distress of the grayson moment hanging over it, i was like, oh, okay, this is definitely about jeremy’s specific issues.

i keep thinking about the way everything is phrased and framed, and i kinda think we’re getting as many hints from jean’s pov as jeremy’s, he just doesn’t know how to recognise all of them. like rhemann’s offer with the cops.

so the two mysteries with jeremy rn are his fall banquet, and his family. i think they’re definitely implied to be the same mystery, but the family has more moving parts involved (when the banquet tore his family apart, does that account for the brother that’s MIA? or is that a separate thing? jeremy doesn’t want to be referred to by just his surname, but his stepfather’s surname seems to be wilshire, so what’s going on there? cat changes course before she says three siblings, so is it that it was three and is less now, or that it’s three and once was more, or something else entirely?)

on the latter note, i was thinking about this scene:

jeremy’s reaction is obviously a reasonable reaction even for someone with no personal experience or trauma involving suicide. it’s not a thing generally appropriate to say, and although it’s obvious enough at this point (and becomes increasingly more so as the book goes on) why jean would say it, the trojans are used to normal social etiquette. so i think it’s a reasonable reaction in general, and maybe i’d be reading too much into it, but it’s the only time i can recall jeremy getting — he doesn’t quite raise his voice, but we’re in that genre of emotion here. even when he asks jean to only use jeremy, not knox, there’s no implication of ‘ferocity’, but here, there is.

cat winces too. and it’s cat where we get mention of another brother, and also a mystery about how that sentence was originally going to end. so i’ve been wondering if the mystery of jeremy’s siblings—cat’s uncertainty on how to end that sentence, whether it’s the missing brother—involves that.

i can see how cops would be involved if that were the case, and also how it would tear the family apart, but not really how it fits into the fall banquet, exy. so i’ve been turning it over in my head, wondering if it’s something else entirely. jeremy mentions the culture on his high school team was shitty, and fall banquet is early enough in the college year that there might be some of that in the mix if it was in his first year (which we don’t know; i’m kinda assuming that bc annalise’s line is “end the way you started”, which suggests first year to me, given we know it happened at college, but that’s an inference), but. i don’t know.

i’m not really laying these out to come to a direct conclusion, i guess? it’s just more presenting some of the pieces i think we have to work with, some of which are going to be relevant, and some that maybe aren’t.

i think the things i keep turning over most and mulling over connections between are:

jeremy’s mentioned fall banquet — scandal, annalise went from watching all jeremy’s high school games to trying to forget everything about exy and never forgiving jeremy for sticking with it. broke the family in half.

this is related to point one, but annalise. her support of jeremy’s exy to where she’s at now. “you already destroyed the family, don’t destroy my future too.” calling the congressman grandpa to prod jeremy with something sharp. she’s younger than him, so she was probably in high school when her exy opinion change happened.

jeremy avoiding cops. “no reason they’d recognise him” is more than his dislike of them, it’s previous interaction. there’s a chance it’s to do with something in his capacity as a congressman’s step-grandson. jeremy is also “permanently on his step-father’s bad side”, which feels like a thing to come under pt. 1, but it might be related to the congressman and publicity too.

jeremy’s family make-up. his dad has been stationed in europe a few times, his step-father permanently hates him, his mom’s bookkeeper is who he gives the receipts too and his mom got him a therapist and never once in her life raised a hand to her rowdy children. bryson, the yale brother who gets along with mr wilshire but jeremy avoids like the plague. annalise, who jeremy doesn’t seem to try avoid given he follows her out, but has not forgiven him. another brother, maybe still around. cat’s cut off words. jeremy saying he would really prefer not to be called by his surname, which presumably belongs to his mother or father, but not his stepfather. babe how many siblings do you have and are they all still present tense

jeremy’s reaction to suicide is less distinct than the rest, but seems to be personal in a way most things he reacts to from jean aren’t.

i feel like this is kinda all over the show lmao but maybe it’ll be useful for thinking about!

five curiosities for the next book, after reading the sunshine court

a non-exhaustive list, but five things i'm curious to (hopefully) find out more about in TSC2, or that i have questions about still:

what happened at the trojans' fall banquet (presumably jeremy's first year)? it's a Scandal, and jeremy cannot stand to be around bryson, and annalise has never forgiven him for sticking with exy after that, despite having attended all his games in high school. given the allusions to his stepfather, and also his step-grandfather being a congressman, i can see how jeremy's sexuality might be relevant to the situation—especially if we read into lucas' stiff apology and shame at his implication about jeremy and jean as being born from more than just common decency, but rather knowledge of this being a previous sticking point in terms of jeremy's scandals—but i also keep thinking about what cat said. jeremy has—three. two brothers, one sister. the way she says it, how it sticks out to jean as an odd switch, and the fact that we've only met two siblings – it makes me wonder what happened to the third. or if that's even the right question to ask, regarding jeremy's siblings.

elodie. i'm curious if we learn anything about what happened—by and large, i kinda hope not, if only because then jean has to too, unless it turns out stuart is lying, but that's a very different kind of fallout. (i don't actively theorise he is—at some point, these kids will run out of tolerance for ghost stories coming back to life—but i think its possibility ought to be considered, at least). i think we'll get more flashes of her from jean's thoughts, though, and i anticipate lots of heartbreak lmao

lucas. assuming stuart's contact comes through, and neil's hit goes ahead, we've got lucas in the aftermath of finding out his brother is a monster, and jean saying not to call the police, and then possibly his brother being dead. if it happens any other day—if it happens in west virginia, especially—i suspect lucas might be able to look at it like another domino in the ravens machine falling down, or even that something horrible happened to him when he returned home, but if it's still in LA, after what he did to jean, after jean said no cops-------i can see how that might twist into something more suspicious. who knows! i'm curious to see what happens there. grayson is a monster, but he is still lucas' brother. aaron and kevin still have complicated grief about tilda and riko, and they were their direct, constant abusers; cass never learned until after the fact, and lucas is in a complex space between the two parts of that spectrum. if grayson dies, i think the fallout will be unavoidable for exploration

this is a small one but man, i just want to keep seeing jean's list grow. it tears something out of me every time, and stitches me back together, and i want to go through that over and over, because i want to see a jean who not only hears that his life is his and worth living, but a jean who learns to believe it too

i'm just kinda assuming we see the foxes again, because i remember nora's character list having new details about characters who didn't show up in this one, but i'm also quietly hoping for more thea. their scene made me ache, and he'd never had good defenses against thea, and kevin knew that. jean would kill him for bringing her here made my heart do the !! double-tap. i'm extremely invested in jean, thea and kevin as a unit, and it would be so incredibly wonderful to see more

#jeremy knox #tsc spoilers #tsc #the sunshine court #suicide mention tw

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lady-literature · 4 years ago

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Accidental Crime Boss Marinette

Okay so,, I have this AU in my head, right? (not surprised) and I’m lacking any real direction for it (still not surprised) but it basically goes like this:

Marinette moves to Gotham.

She’s drawn there for whatever reason and the kwami are saying something about balance and being a Guardian and her sacred duty and something but Marinette isn’t really listening. She’s too busy trying to find a shop front where she can open a bakery without having to worry about getting mugged every time she steps outside.

Chloé comes with her, obviously, because they’re friends and Chloé has a business degree she puts to good use actually running Mari’s bakery and online boutique while Mari gets to bake and fuck around basically. Adrien, Luka and Kagami are not there, but that’s mostly because they travel too much to settle down and keeping an empty apartment in Gotham is just asking for trouble.

Kagami is a world-renowned fencer and Luka travels the world for his music company. Not touring, but soaking up cultures and ways of life so he can make soundtracks to movies and tv shows. Providing the background and life to a film is more his style than touring the world ala his father, Jagged Stone.

Adrien is having the time of his life being Kagami’s trophy husband. He has no pressing responsibilities he doesn’t take on for himself and he gets to fuck with the world’s elite with little to no consequences. He spends most of his days donating far too much money to charities and orphanages and then causing minor scandals that land him on the cover of magazines.

He has much the same kind of ‘dumbass with a heart of gold’ persona to the media as Bruce Wayne does, only without the playboy bits.

(There is a wall in the back of the bakery, where Chloé and Mari carefully cut out and frame every headline and ridiculous picture Adrien has. He is very much delighted when he learns about his ‘wall of fame’.)

Anyway, Marinette finds herself with a bakery not overly far from crime alley, much to Chloé’s chagrin.

(“What do you mean it ‘just felt right’?! I swear to kwami, DC, you’re going to get us robbed and sold into slavery.”)

They do not get sold into salvery.

In fact, despite their less than stellar choice of locale, they do pretty well for themselves. The only problems they have (according to Chloé) is the army of children Marinette accidentally attracted.

When asked, Marinette tells everyone that it was an accident. Meanwhile, Chloé, standing behind her, will shake her head and insist there was literally never any other option for them the moment that first kid came in looking to nab some cash and a few pastries.

Mari lives by the phrases, ‘kindness breeds more kindness’ and ‘do unto others’ and all that other nice person shit. Chloé just lets Mari pseudo-adopt her strays and makes sure that they don’t steal anything too important in the time it takes her to gain their loyalty.

The kwami stay staunchly out of any arguments involving the kids (and eventually the homeless all along their street and every working girl in a five-block radius). They do so with a special brand of amusement that never means good things for either of them. (After all, the last time the kwami looked that amused, they moved to Gotham.)

The first kid is named Serrure, as Marinette comes to learn over the next month after he returns again and again, getting closer and closer like a feral cat. Other kids come during that time, all of them too small and too thin and too guarded for Mari's tastes. She wants to wrap them all up and tuck them into bed but she can’t. She has to be patient, has to be gentle. These kids are just as likely to bite her hand as they are to accept help.

Serrure becomes an almost permanent fixture at the bakery after that first month. Mari’s not quite sure what she did to get through to him, but she did, she supposes. He can’t be much older than eleven and looks nine, but after getting settled, she and Chloé discover this little slip of a boy is just as mischievous as Trixx and has all the dramatics of their favorite black cat.

The kwami, when talking about him, only refer to Serrure as Loki, even after Marinette scolds them for it. She eventually gives up trying to correct them, it’s not like Serrure talks to them anyway(yet)((that she knows of)).

There’s an apartment above the bakery, which is where Chloé and Mari and all her strays that grow to trust her enough live. It’s three bedrooms, and at first, Mari just buys as many bunk beds as she can fit into the spare room and calls it a day. The kids feel safe in her home, which isn’t too surprising. Everyone thinks the bakery feels safe, feels like home or comfort or whatever else eases their minds.

And Marinette should hopes so. She certainly put enough time and effort and magic and energy into the wards around this place for that to happen. To protect her and the children and all her strays that no one else will help.

But, she eventually amasses too many kids to fit into the one room. Chloé throws a fit about having to share with Mari again—“I had enough of that in university thank you very much”—but she relinquishes easily enough.

Mari buys more bunk beds, and Serrure has taken to sneaking into her room to curl up in her bed anyway, and sometimes the smaller kids who have nightmares will come in and pile on as well.

(There are only a few that Chloé will allow to do the same with her. It is considered a high honor and breeds a playful kind of jealousy that Chloé finds amusing. Mari scolds her for pitting the kids against each other.)

That only lasts them another two months.

“This is getting ridiculous,” Chloé tells her one day before the kids wake up. Mari is at the stove, cooking and baking for a small army while Chloé balances the books. “There’s not enough room for us all, DC, and the only reason someone hasn’t come barrelling down on us about the abundance of children is by the grace of your absurd amount of luck.”

“Well I can’t just kick them out, Queenie! What do you want from me?”

“Either we need to buy more real estate in this city—which I’d rather not do—or you open up the grimoire and start building pocket dimensions. I know you can. I’ve read the chapter.”

Marinette looks at her. “That is such a bad idea.”

They do the idea.

And then Mari adds about a thousand more wards to the bakery, carved into the wood and counter and anything that’s a permanent fixture. Doorways become particularly ward heavy, what with them being the entrances and exits to the hidden realms and children’s’ rooms.

The apartment above the bakery isn’t quite infinite but it gets pretty damn close some days.

This also means, of course, that all the kids definitely know about magic now. Some of them—Serrure—have known about it for a while she knows, but it’s different now. The kwami followed her around most of the time and she doesn’t keep them trapped in the Miracle Box like Fu did, but now that the kids know, they don’t bother staying hidden.

The children, at least, love them and the kwami adore them with all the ferocity a god can give. After Chloé gets over her ‘ew children’ phase, she throws herself into their education (on top of actually running the businesses Mari keeps, mind you). She has the help of the kwami, who act as personal tutors to the children, and it’s not long before the kids start to joke about her being the Principal.

(Some tried to call her Warden, but that joke didn’t last long.)

Marinette has also been telling the kids bedtime stories ever since this started. Old stories of the Guardian and Chosens who fought back the darkness, she shares all she knows of the Orders history with these kids and it’s not until Wayzz points it out to her does she realize what she’s doing.

“Ladybugs are known for renewal. It is no surprise that you are rebuilding what was lost.”

Rebuilding the Order using children was certainly not her intention but, well. She supposes there’s no place safer for her kids than what is shaping up to be the new Miracle Temple. It’s the only haven where they can learn to harness their Gifts and powers, it’s the only place where they can be surrounded by others like them without being thrust into superhero-dom.

Context: about a month into this whole circus, Marinette had realized there was a significant—almost all of them really—amount of metas and Gifted in her little hoard of strays. Which is… odd. Especially with how few metas there are in Gotham.

She had asked the kwami about it, and they have that amused look again. “You are their guardian.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re their guardian. True, you are the Guardian of us, of the ancient ways, but you are a guardian at your soul too. You protect what is yours, and they are yours whether you realise it or not. The children can sense that, so they flock to you.”

And, huh. She supposes that makes sense but that’s also really kind of strange and weird and she doesn't want to think about that anymore actually.

So things are… fine, Marinette supposes. The bakery is doing well, and she has about two dozen-plus helpers running around underfoot to help tend to the customers or run to the store or help in the back with the baking. And every kid of hers has new clothes, their street things thrown out for being too ragged and replaced with something fresh made by Marinette’s own hands.

She embroiders little fairy wings into the clothes normally, because that’s what her cloaked wards look like most times and the kids like it and its technically the logo for the bakery and there’s a million reasons she does it.

It is, perhaps, her first mistake.

(“It was certainly not your first,” Chloé will snark one dayin the future.)

Because now Marinette has an army of magical children learning to wield their powers and not fear them and they’re all wearing what can be considered her insignia and uh oh, it looks a lot like Mari is some sort of up and coming mob boss who uses kids and prostitutes and the homeless as runners. People on the street start calling her the Pixie, start referring to Chloé—her second in all things just as Chat had been her equal—as Wasp, as Yellowjacket, as the Unseelie.

(They cannot seem to pick a name for her, but Pixie is all but engraved in stone. Mari is not sure who coined it, and she doesn't think she wants to know.)

The first time the whole situation is brought to her attention, she punches the idiot who dared even imply such a thing so hard she knocks him out.

Because look. The kids are hers right? And she watches out for the people near her, makes sure the working girls are treated as well as they can be and offers the homeless extra food and a dry place to wait out the storm. She offers her hand and gives them all a place to rest, to eat, to exist without expectations or consequences.

She does that because she’s kind, because it hurts her to see people in need, to see them suffer, not because she’s hoping to gain something from it.

The fact that most of them repay her in gossip or information or bend her ear about the newest goings on in the corrupt elite or filthy underworld is strange, yes, but it’s nice to know what’s going on in the city, she supposes. And one time, Kathy, who works on the corner of Brookes and Gilmore, warned her of a drug raid that saved her an unnecessary trip to the police station so it’s not like it doesn't have it’s uses.

But mostly, Mari doesn't really think about all the information that’s unintentionally or otherwise passed onto her. She remembers it all, because it’s rude not to listen when people talk to her, but nothing comes of normally.

Not until Serrure—now twelve and well versed in the magic of illusions and glamors and knows almost as much about this city as her or the Bats—bursts into the bakery one day and grabs Mari away from the front counter right in the middle of a customer ordering. She should, perhaps, be a little angry at that but Tony, one of the older boys and just shy of sixteen, steps into her place almost immediately, so.

And then Serrure speaks and everything is pushed aside in favour of the next words to fall from his lips.

“Someone took Sophie,” he says and she nearly sees red.

After Serrure, Sophie has been here the longest. She is the youngest of them all, only seven, but oh so clever and kind and while she looks nothing like her, everyone calls her Mini-Mari. If Serrure is her beloved first son, Sophie is her treasured daughter.

She’s out the door in the next moment, storming her way to their base. She has Sophie and a handful of extra kids back by sunset, a little frightened, but no worse for wear. She doesn’t make a big deal out of it, besides making sure that the idiots who dared cross her never do so again, but word gets out.

Soon, her kids and teens and adults begin giving her more than just information, they begin giving her problems. Ones she’s meant to fix because she’s Pixie. She’s safety, she’s protection, she’s the one the people start to turn to for help.

And enter stage left, one Jason Todd who’s all snark and charm and smiles wrapped up in a nice leather bow and tall enough that Mari likely could climb him like a tree. If that was something she wanted, she guesses.

(She wants. She just won’t admit.)

He becomes a regular at the bakery and befriends most of her kids.

Mari’s wary when he first takes an interest in them. They’ve been hurt and a lot of them are still adjusting to being safe and it doesn't matter that this man is hot enough to burn, if he steps even a toe out of line with her kids she’ll make him wish he was never even born.

But, she stops worrying eventually. The kwami like him well enough, but seem to think something’s odd about him—but its Gotham, who isn’t strange?—and both Serrure and Sophie take to him like ducks to water and they’re both good judges of character.

There’s a certain intuition they both have that reminds Marinette just a bit too much about herself and pure magic. Not for the first time does she wonder if they got such strong magic from their parents or if it cropped up in them randomly, fostered by fortune and chance and the magic that’s so deeply seeped into the bones of her bakery it’ll be here long after she’s gone.

And, okay, so she was a little right to be wary because Jason was mostly there to investigate her. Far too many people respect her and are loyal to her and she has a veritable orphanage in her pocket and also Harley and Ivy like her and it just- it doesn’t look good right?

But Jason’s a good detective and it doesn't take him long at all to see that Mari is just as sweet and kind and loving as she appears to be. Not long after that, Red Hood declares Pixie and all of hers, under his protection. She, of course, is more than capable of taking care of her and hers, and the underworld knows this, has seen it, but he does it anyway.

The news, of course, gets back to Mari and she is… confused. Why would the Red Hood do something like that? She’s heard talk of him being sweet on kids, but to claim her? They’ve never even met.

Bonus points for Jason being there when she’s told about it. He kind of raises his eyebrow at her because, huh, that was fast, and then spends the next few minutes talking up the Red Hood to her much to her utter bafflement.

He actually keeps doing that too, talking up the Red Hood. Mari thinks he has a crush on the man for the longest time because of it. Until he reveals he is Red Hood, then she just wants to punch his stupidly handsome face for being such an idiot.

Shit happens from there and things go down and the two spend a couple of months dancing around each other and intentionally and unintentionally ruling the criminal underworld and at one point Marinette definitely punches Bruce and Batman in the face—separately, much to Jason’s unending joy—and she also definitely adopts Duke/Signal as well because that poor boy needs to know he’s not alone.

And it’s just them being domestic and badass and lowkey raising an army of children and falling in love while the kwami and the kids and Chloé are all in the background just yelling at them to get together already!

Which, they do. Eventually. After all the secrets come out and Jason knows about the magic and Order and meets Mari’s other friends, ie Kagami, Luka and Adrien who are all intimidating for wildly different reasons. And Mari finds out that Jason died and came back (which earns him the nickname firebird btw) and that he was a Robin once upon a time but is now Red Hood and oh my kwami it all makes sense now.

Jason confesses like three times via classic Victorian romance novel quotes because he’s a fucking literature nerd but it’s not until he basically spells it out for Mari does she really understand. it’s all very sweet and heartwarming and then the pair duck into one of the empty pocket dimensions they have lying around and aren’t seen for three days.

(No one really goes to look for them tbh)

Chloé definitely teases them about early honeymoons and things but besides the two being even more ridiculously lovey-dovey than usual, life goes back to normal. Or as normal as it gets for them.

And they all live happily ever after the end.

#maribat #jasonette #my typewriter #batfam #crime boss mari #miraculous ladybug #dc #mlb x dc #i was possessed by the need to write this all down #i have so many random ass moments from this au #just scenes taht barely fit together #zero coherency #let me know if yall want that ig #?

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aspoonofsugar · 4 years ago

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Penny’s Final Word

Cinder might have had the final word of the volume and that is a meta for another time. Still, there is another character who got to have another important final word:

Penny: Let me choose this one thing.

Penny’s arc has always been about self-actualization and escaping objectification.

She was created to be a weapon and everything was decided for her by basically... everyone:

Both enemies and loved ones alike ended up choosing for her multiple times, so it is fitting that Penny herself is the one who has the last word about herself. She makes the final choice that decides how her life should end and what her legacy should be.

At the same time, Penny’s final choice and sacrifice perfectly tie together all the major themes explored in the Atlas arc.

This analysis will try to explore her arc and to show how it is central to everything the Atlas volumes wanted to convey.

PENNY AND HER FAIRIES

What makes a person a person and not something else?

This is a key question in Penny’s story and it can’t be answered without addressing who her Blue Fairy is.

Is it Fria?

Or Ambrosius?

The answer is neither and both. These two characters are definately references to the Blue Fairy, but they are not the ones who make Penny feel human. The one who does is ironically a red fairy:

You saw my soul Through the nuts and bolts You're the friend I can trust Helped me see I'm not just a machine

It is Ruby’s aknowledgement of Penny’s personhood that makes Penny feel alive.

So, what about Fria and Ambrosius? What is their role?

Fria chooses Penny as the next Winter Maiden. This is a powerful moment thematically because it is an aknowledgement of Penny’s humanity. She has always been a real girl, a Maiden at Heart, hence she can be given the powers and protect them.

Ambrosius removes Penny’s robotic parts and makes the “real” Penny come to the surface:

Ambrosius: Okay, but if I take the robot parts out of her, that would leave...

Blake: Penny. The girl who's always been there underneath it.

Penny’s new body is human because Penny has always been human and has always wanted to feel human.

In short, these two moments are moments of recognition of Penny’s humanity. She becomes a human both in soul (Fria) and body (Ambrosius). In particular, she has always had a human soul and this is why it can be tied to the power of the Maiden. When it comes to her body, she aquires a human one because her new appearance is nothing, but a mirror of her soul.

Still, even if these two moments are both meaningful, they are also moments where Penny receives something passively. They are aknowledgements of Penny’s humanity yes, but Penny wants more. She wants personhood aka to live as her own person.

To truly become a person one must be able to make their own choices. And interestingly, Penny’s free will is linked to both moments with her two blue fairies.

Ambrosius’s magic does not simply give Penny a human body, but it gives her back her freedom. Not only that, but it makes it impossible hacking her ever again.

Fria’s interaction with Penny is more complicated.

First of all, Fria does not impose the power on Penny, but asks her to make a choice:

Fria: Penny. Are you the one?

Penny: I…

And Penny does so in a sense, but it is gray. Penny is given no time to think about this choice, differently from both Winter and Pyrrha. It is something imposed on her by the events:

Penny: But taking the Maiden power was the only way to stop--

Moreover, it is something she very clearly does not want:

Penny: I was the protector of Mantle, but now, I am much more than that, and I wish I was not.

In short, Penny’s interaction with Fria is a recognition of her humanity, but also a duty imposed on her by external occurrences.

It is not what Penny herself wants. To truly be human, instead, Penny should make her own choices and be given the chance to pursue what she wants.

Still, what does she truly wishes for?

PENNY AND HER JIMINY CRICKETS

Penny’s wish is made obvious since her first appearance:

Penny: "You called me 'friend'! Am I really your friend?"

Ruby: "Uuuum... Y-Yeah, sure! Why not?"

My wish came true That day that you appeared And called me friend

She wants friends to the point that Ruby’s awkward aknowledgement of their friendship is enough to make Penny completely loyal to the other girl.

At the same time, there are many Jimini Crickets that go in the way of Penny’s wish for friendship:

Penny: I've never been to another kingdom before. My father asked me not to venture out too far, but... You have to understand, my father loves me very much; he just worries a lot.

(...)

Penny: I... was asked not to talk to you. Or Weiss. Or Blake. Or Yang. Anybody, really.

Ruby: Was your dad that upset?

Penny: No, it wasn't my father...

Both Ironwood’s high expectations and Pietro’s overprotectiveness make so that she is not free to enjoy her own life as she wants.

She arrives to the point that she comes up with a plan to stay at Beacon with her new friends:

Penny: Ruby, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about. I want to stay at Beacon.

Ruby: Penny, they'll never let you do that.

Penny: I know, but I have a plan.

However, we never discover what this plan is:

This does not happen by chance and Penny’s plan is not a dropped plot-point. It is symbolic of how her agency is completely negated. She is objectified to the point that her story is interrupted before she can take any action. It is a meta-way to comment her character and her major struggle.

Penny’s first death is more than a murder. It is a way to refuse Penny’s personhood and agency:

Ruby: And Penny… was killed… just to make a statement.

She is used as a symbol of Atlas’s shady research. Penny’s own self is forgotten in the chaos that follows.

The same thing happens in Atlas as well:

Ruby: I don't think Robyn was their target. Salem's goal has always been to divide us. I think Penny was exactly where they wanted her, just like at the Vytal Festival.

This time she is not framed as a victim, but as a perpetrator and used as the symbol of an authoritarian regime.

Her enemies’ objectification of Penny is made clear in many ways:

Cinder: I have come too far to be stopped by some toy!

Cinder: You’re just a tool to be used!

Salem: Although he remains in captivity, it seems that he has worked with Ironwood to gain some control over the puppet masquerading as the Winter Maiden.

And Watts’s virus is just the culmination of it. It is the embodyment of the Jiminy Cricket trying to overwrite what Penny wants.

At the same time, though, Penny’s enemies are not the only ones who try to control her:

Pietro: I lost you before. Are you asking me to go through that again? No. No. I want the chance to watch you live your life.

Penny: But dad… I am trying to.

Penny’s loved ones have tried to protect her all along. However, this wish of protection ends up going in the way of what she really wants:

I've been combat-ready since The day dad made me Now I'll fight for something more Might sound wholesome, But strangely I've got friends Fighting for

What Penny wants is to fight together and for her friends. She does not want her life to be considered less than others’. Still, she does not even want it to be put before others’:

Cinder: I don’t serve anyone. And you wouldn’t either, if you weren't built that way.

Penny: That is not…I choose to fight for people who care about me.

In short, it is as Maria says:

Maria: Don’t you think Penny has had enough people telling her what to do?

PENNY AND BEING A REAL GIRL

At its root, Penny’s struggle has always been this:

Penny: I feel like I wish I could do both the things I need to do and the things I want to do. Is that normal?

She wants to reconcile her duty and her personal wishes.

It is her duty to accept the power of the Maiden and to protect it.

It is her wish to live with her friends and to protect them.

These two things end up coming into conflict multiple times:

Penny: And after the launch, I’ll return to help you all with the evacuation.

Pietro: About that, Penny. When Amity goes up, I think you should be on it with Maria and I.

Penny: But they need me here. Right?

Ruby: Well, if you stay far out of Salem’s reach, then she can’t open the vault. She can’t get to the relic. So...

Weiss: Maybe it is for the best?

Until the finale where Penny makes a specific choice:

Weiss: Penny, no!

If Penny were to act as the perfect Maiden, she would have just gone to Vacuo with the staff. In this way she could have protected both the relic and the power. Even if Cinder had ended up killing all her friends, Salem would have still lost.

However, Penny decides not to act as a Maiden, but as a friend:

Penny: You wouldn’t know anything about friends.

Even the reason why Cinder manages to mortally wound her is because Penny is worried about Jaune and Weiss and gets distracted for a second:

However, it is specifically in the moment of her death that Penny is able to make a choice to reconcile both who she is and what she has to do.

She chooses to protect the power:

Penny: She can’t get the staff..and the power.

And to save a friend:

Penny: I thought of you. And here we are.

Winter would have died without the Maiden powers and the same can be said about the people stranded in Vacuo. Penny saves all by choosing to be the one in control of her death.

Her choice is extremely powerful thematically and it ties together all the themes explored in these last two volumes.

1) It is a choice about trust:

Penny: Trust me.

Winter: Thank you for trusting me with this.

Penny asks to be trusted and chooses to trust as well. After all, this is what friendship is all about:

Attached but not By strings

It is a choice that uses the motif of “the part of you” in two different ways.

2) Becoming a part of someone else can be seen as a reference to the process of grieving, which is one of the themes explored in this volume:

Grieving means to come to terms with your loss, to accept your feelings for the people who are gone and also their contradictions:

Robyn: Clover was a lot of things. You respected him, but I gotta tell ya, I think you’re the better Huntsman.

Vine: Then perhaps Clover was wrong too.

The lost ones will be missed regardless:

Harriet: Don't you dare! Clover was... He was...

Vine: ...Important to you.

Still, once you manage to finally grieve, you’ll realize the other person has become a part of you:

It does not matter if Qrow’s semblance has evolved, if it is a part of Clover’s power having stayed attached to the pin, both or if it is Clover looking out for them.

What’s important is that Clover will keep on living inside Qrow because Qrow will never forget him or what Clover has taught him:

Clover: You shouldn't do that, you know.

Qrow: Don't worry, I-I gave that up.

Clover: I meant deflect a compliment. Those kids wouldn't be where they are without you. You've had more of an effect on them than you realize.

Qrow should love himself. Only in this way he can stop being a self-fulfilling curse. Only in this way he can start looking at his own life with hope and wish for good luck.

Similarly, Penny won’t be forgotten and her legacy will live through Winter:

Penny: She's… gone.

Winter: No. She's a part of you now.

Penny: I won’t be gone, I’ll be part of you.

3) Penny becomes a part of Winter because Winter is finally able to do this:

Winter: But yes Penny, we must still acknowledge our personal feelings, wrestle with them. It ensures us that we're on the right path. It's what makes us human.

Winter is the one who taught Penny this, but it is obvious that through volume 7 and 8 she has avoided to face her feelings for both her family and Ironwood. By the end of volume 8, however, she is finally able to accept her emotions. She can finally follow her heart. Penny becoming “a part of her” is symbolic of this. As a matter of fact their dynamic has always been about Winter acting as “the mind” and Penny being “the heart”.

Symbolically they integrate because they both are becoming their own person even if in different ways.

Winter becomes her own person because she rejects this mentality:

Winter: Penny. The general is making hard choices so we don't have to.

Penny becomes her own person because she is finally in control of herself and her destiny. Moreover, she is able to do for Winter what Ruby has done for her:

Winter: No, Penny, you were always the real Maiden at heart. I was just a machine. Just… following orders.

Penny: You’re my friend.

She affirms Winter’s personhood and in this way she affirms her own as well.

In other words, this version of Pinocchio does not end with the protagonist being transformed into a real boy by the Blue Fairy, but with Penny transforming Winter in the Blue Fairy:

So “becoming fully human” in RWBY means to do this:

Qrow: This last great creation would be given the power to both create and destroy. It would be given the gift of knowledge, so that it could learn about itself and the world around it. And most importantly, it would be given the power to choose, to have free will to take everything it had learned and decide which path to follow - the path of light or the path of darkness. And that is how Humanity came to be.

It is about gaining knowledge, like Penny does about feelings and relationships, loving life and accepting death. Finally, it is about making a choice, even if it is painful.

This is because being human is not always simple. It can be hard:

But I found that humanity It came with sacrifice

Having a human soul means you have a duty to do the right thing out of your own free will, like Fria’s gift showed.

Having a human body means you can experience the warmth of a hug:

But it also means you can be mortally wounded:

This is Ambrosius’s teaching.

Still, it was worth it all for Penny because she got the chance to meet friends and to feel alive:

An answered prayer A chance to Share the world To be a girl Who fin'lly felt alive

This is why her second death can be juxtaposed to her first one. Both times she was killed by Cinder. However, the first time she was used as a pawn in Cinder’s plan. This time instead she is not letting herself be controlled and she negates Cinder what she really wants out of her own free will.

In conclusion, there is this phrase by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

And I think it sums up Penny’s story perfectly.

Penny does not choose to be born a robot or to be used as a weapon. She is objectified in multiple ways...

Still, she manages to make something amazing out of herself.

#rwby #rwby vol8 #penny polendina #rwby meta #rwby spoilers #my meta #qrow branwen #even if only a little

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bookwyrminspiration · 3 years ago

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What do you think the point was of making Fitz a powerful Telepath when we already had a powerful Telepath? Why not a different ability?

Okay so excellent question!! Why give the ability to another person in Sophie's friend group when Shannon could've given the benefits of a different ability to them? Like a guster or a phaser or beguiler, all things that could be very useful. Especially since there are so many telepaths in Sophie's life for an ability that's supposedly so rare, and I think there's a fairly simple answer to this: because it means she's not alone.

Think back to book one and when Fitz first found Sophie; what was the first thing about him that really made her question things--not his unusual accent or strange eye color. It was that he could also hear thoughts. They both reacted to all the kids coming through the door, the barrage of thoughts. And for the first time in Sophie's entire life, someone is just like her. She's not the weird kid with the freaky abilities after hitting her head. She's not alone, because Fitz is just like her.

Imagine if Alvar had actually found her. Would she have been nearly as willing to trust him and to go along with moving if it'd been him? I don't think so. Because to Sophie being an elf isn't a strong enough relation between the two of them, and that's all they had in common. But because Fitz is also a telepath, there's a much stronger bond between the two of them and Sophie's a lot more willing to trust him. She's finally found someone like her--she even said in book one she'd always hoped to find someone else like her, someone else who could read minds. That's who Fitz is! Not just someone else whose an elf, but someone else who can read minds.

That's the importance of making him a telepath, it's the connection it gives him to Sophie. Not only does he become Sophie's first friend in this scary new world, but he's a friend who she can relate to and talk about telepath things with. If he'd been an empath, she wouldn't have nearly as understood. He'd have his empath things and she'd have her telepath, and they wouldn't understand each other in the way they do. They wouldn't have that foundation. He knows what it's like to hear other people's thoughts, to have this power she's struggled with.

And this isn't just important for the beginning of the series when she's being found, Fitz and Sophie are consistently a duo and understand each other because they have that foundation of a shared ability. They continue to rely on each other, to work together, to foster that friendship between them (as in nuture, not Foster as in be reckless and almost die, the definition given in Legacy), because of it. Fitz being a telepath enables Sophie to be understood on a personal level for the first time in her life, and to have someone else who goes through the same things she does on a deeper level throughout the series.

Think about how different the series would be if instead of just being a powerful telepath in her friend group, she was the only powerful telepath. That'd be so alienating for her. Not only super powerful, but also the only one of her kind. Fitz makes her less alone, because he's right there with her ability-wise throughout the series. He also provides a convenient and familiar frame of reference as to the capabilities of a normal powerful telepath in their world, so we can use that to better understand how different Sophie is because of the genetic experiments performed on her.

So while it would be interesting to see what ability he would've been given, he serves a very important role as a second telepath in their group. He's like Sophie, and so she's no longer alone in her power. She may be more powerful and able to do things he can't, but at the core they are the same and that is incredibly comforting and important to her.

Then there's also all the fun things they get to do as cognates, but that all comes later. It's fascinating to see the impact the two have on each other, so thank you for the opportunity to talk about it!

#i think that the sense of recognition and 'you're like me' is one of the main things that drove shannon to make him a telepath too #because sophie's telepathy is really what she struggled with her whole life #not being an elf. so it's not enough for the person who found her and to be her first friend to just be another elf #because sophie doesn't know jack shit about elves #but she /does/ know she can read minds #so when fitz can too? that's what she recognizes. that's what gets through to her #and it sticks the two of them together for the rest of the series #until the romance drama #but in terms of the foundation of their friendship it really was built off a shared ability #and that's what Sophie needed #so Fitz got to be a telepath too #all the cool cognate things come later. primarily sophie needed to not be alone and fitz gave her that #if that makes sense #kotlc #keeper of the lost cities #quil's queries #nonsie #fitz vacker #kotlc character analysis #long post

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daydreamslikewaves · 2 years ago

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Little mothers, bigger daughters.

So this is quite personal but it’s something that I want to post, because sadly I know that there will be many, many women out there who this is going to resonate with. It’s all about a realisation I’ve had which is helping me deal with /manage some not great behaviour which is just not ever going to change - and maybe it’ll help someone else out there. I feel like it’s personal growth for me to have reached this point, too, and it felt like a safe space to share.

TW: parental toxicity, talk about weight, food, body image.

My mum is a solid and reliable person. She is loyal to a fault and passionate about family and a very strong-willed woman. A force of nature. She is fierce. She’s gone through slightly more personal tragedies than the average human. One hundred percent, she would kill for me and my dad. All in all, we have a good relationship. But there is one aspect that has always been difficult to deal with.

I think we all know that it’s unwise for parents to comment on their children’s weight/body/diet. Even if there are genuine concerns, there are ways to tackle said concerns and ways not to. And this goes for any child/person, of any body type. But it’s something I have particularly struggled with as someone who has a very different build to my very petite mother. I am tall and athletic while my mother is absolutely tiny. There has been a lot of vigilance regarding my body, always. ‘That doesn’t look as good as you think it does’. ‘Are you sure you want to eat that.’ The ‘big-boned’ comments were meant as ‘compliments’ but were neverending. As was the focus on my posture, and how inelegant I was, and the emphasis on that I always needed to be active as if there was an undercurrent of concern as to what would happen to my body if I stopped exercising. All of this focus on my body which in turn made me hyperfocused on it. I’m that person obsessively watching myself in every reflective surface to make sure I’m standing normally. Because usually I don’t; I tend to shrink in on myself in an effort to seem physically smaller. I slouch in photos to make myself small, too.

I won’t go into detail about all of the comments I’ve received over the years, because they did get progressively worse. Some of them were extremely damaging - especially over the last two years. Me gaining 8kg over quarantine sparked endless debates.

Recently, though, I’ve come to the realisation that a lot of these comments might not actually come from a terrible place after all; and not in the way that all those Psychology Today articles suggest (’they do it because it’s their way of loving you, even though it’s flawed, unsolicited advice etc etc’). What they say goes some way when it comes to explaining it, but.. I simply have started to believe that sometimes, it’s as simple as this:

As a petite woman, my mum just can’t comprehend what it’s like to not be petite.

She has no frame of reference. Every woman on her side of the family is relatively small. She has been taught that petite is petite and that not-petite is big. That big can be negative. Needs someone to keep an eye on it. She does not understand what it is like to be the tallest in the class and how working out requires you to eat more to keep energy levels up. For her, good food and no bad food/less food + ‘moving your body’ (cardio only) = weight loss. No matter how much I try to explain that strength training combined with cardio is much more effective in getting leaner, she is horrified at the idea of me getting muscly because ‘that should not be your goal’. She is not a fan of tattoos but one big concern she has in relation to mine is ‘why would you want to show off your body?’. It is not said with disgust, more like a genuine question bred from genuine curiosity - she can’t fathom it. It isn’t out of spite that she feels these things but more because she a) has been taught certain things about how women should be and b) as a smaller woman her experience is completely different to mine.

I am trying to actively remember this as I go to visit my parents this weekend as undoubtedly, the fact that I posted a bikini holiday pic on instagram will be a pressing topic of conversation. I am trying to remember that she doesn’t know how tall/curvy women experience the world. I’m trying to see it as something that makes her really confused - because this is ultimately easier than seeing it as a constant slight against my physical appearance. It helps that I now think this is the genuine reason for her comments all these years. Just wish that it had taken me less than thirty years to figure it out.

Anyway, water off a duck’s back.

(I would like to add that this may not be the case for everyone experiencing a similar situation. Some people are just shitty to the core. But for others, the situation is much more complex. This is just my perspective on my own experience.)

#personal #mother-daughter relationship #TW: body image issues #TW: toxicity #TW: relationship with food #TW: talk of weight #shifting perspective #personal growth #parents

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onecanonlife · 4 years ago

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Wilbur has never had wings. He has long since resigned himself to that fact. However much of his father's blood runs through his veins, it is not enough to grant him that gift.

Wilbur comes back to life, and his back begins to ache.

(word count: 6,141)

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

It’s stupid, but when his back first begins to ache, he assumes it’s old age.

The thing is that he doesn’t have any real frame of reference for what constitutes as old and what does not. His father is old, but his father has lived for literally thousands of years. Technoblade is not quite so old as that, but Technoblade never dies is more than just a catchphrase. Tommy is young, he’s sure of that much, but Tommy has days where he wakes up and his head and ribs won’t stop aching, remnants of that third death that have never quite left him, so Tommy is perhaps not the best gauge of what pains are and are not normal for a young person.

Wilbur doesn’t think that he’s particularly old. He’s still not yet thirty, unless he counts the void years. Then, he’s older than thirty. Then, he’s older than his own bones. He tries not to dwell on the void years, because dwelling on the void years gives him urges that he’s still learning how to ignore. Urges like informing everyone gaily and at length when the inevitable heat death of the universe will be, or giving everyone a graphic description of what happens at a microscopic level in the human body when it picks up a stomach bug.

The point is, he’s not very old. But he feels it, a lot of the time, so when he wakes up one morning and his back is killing him, he shrugs it off and goes about his day. It hurts, sure. It hurts kind of a lot. But he’s had worse. The void took him apart molecule by molecule and put him back together again so many times that he learned to love it, and compared to that, this is nothing at all.

Life in the Arctic has been—nice. It’s been nice, reconnecting with Phil, cautiously rebuilding his relationship with Technoblade. Tommy comes to visit a lot, and it’s odd, trying to juggle the kid he thinks of as a brother with his father and his father’s best friend, especially when there’s so much bad blood between the lot of them, but they make it work. And Ranboo is around a lot, and he’s a nice kid, and Niki stops by every so often, and it’s good to see her. No one else is very interested in coming to visit him, which is understandable, but she always smiles at him, and he knows that they’re still friends. Which is good.

He’s fairly sure that the four of them, Phil and Techno and Niki and Ranboo, have some sort of secret club thing going on. They always give him different answers when he asks about it; Niki blinks and tells him it’s a book club, and Ranboo does not blink because he does not have eyelids, but Ranboo claims that it’s a pet grooming society. So they’re lying to him for sure, and he thinks he could know the truth if he wanted to, if he tapped in just a bit more to those bits of void that have nestled in his heart. The temptation is strong, sometimes, but he resists.

He doesn’t want to mess with a good thing, is all. He’s found a peace here in the snow that he didn’t think he would be able to find outside of the grave. He is hesitant to call himself healing, but most days, when his head cries out for blood and fire and burning the world and himself along with it, he can push the idea away and carry on without trying to act on it. That is healing, perhaps.

Captain Puffy tells him it is, anyway, and he’s found that Captain Puffy tends to know what she’s talking about.

But so. His back hurts. And he expects it to stop after a while, because even old person aches surely can’t last forever. Except, it doesn’t, and in fact seems to only get worse over the next few days, to the point that he starts to worry that it’s going to begin interfering with his functionality. Which he doesn’t want. He needs freedom, freedom to go where he wants, even if where he wants to go usually isn’t very far. It’s the principle of the thing. He does not do well with confinement, with spaces that are too enclosed, and if this pain ends up laying him out in his room, he’s going to go insane.

Poor choice of words, that. But the point still stands, so he makes a decision. The decision is this: he’s simply not going to allow that to happen.

So he slaps a smile on his face and carries on with his business, and does his best to ignore the way his spine starts to feel like it’s cracking open and stabbing into the surrounding muscle. And he is a very good actor, if he does say so himself, so for the most part, no one seems to notice that anything is wrong. Phil asks him if he’s feeling alright, but he’s able to deflect by claiming fatigue, and Phil accepts the explanation easily. And the pain only increases, does not let up at all, but it’s a gradual sort of increase, so before too long, he figures out how to adjust to it. It’s fine. He’ll be fine.

And then Tommy stops by for a visit, and they’re chatting outside for a moment, and Tommy says something stupid and ridiculous, so he smacks him gently upside the head, which Tommy takes objection to. And then they’re wrestling, which makes the pain flare a bit, but it’s manageable, especially since he gets Tommy pinned in about four seconds flat, which. Is concerning, a bit, because he is not particularly strong, physically, so if he can pin Tommy, there are a lot of other people who could also definitely pin Tommy.

But he’s probably not thinking about it the right way. This was a play fight, not a real one, and it’s difficult, sometimes, to remember that the server is currently at peace.

He pins Tommy, both of them panting and grinning in the snow, and he doesn’t let up until Tommy admits defeat. And then he gets to his feet, and here is where he makes the error: he turns his back.

The snowball impacts him right between his shoulder blades. He stumbles forward with the force of it, and his knees hit the snow.

Tommy is already cackling, is calling him a bitch. Wilbur barely has time to think oh, shit before something spasms, and it’s like something has taken a knife to him from the inside out. He hears a strangled little scream, choked and agonized, and barely recognizes the fact that it’s coming from him, because black spots are dancing across his vision and his lungs aren’t inflating properly and he can hardly think.

“Oh, come on,” Tommy says, a wide smile still in his voice. “Don’t be such a pussy. I didn’t even pack any ice in.”

He can’t reply. The agony is centered where the snowball hit, but it’s radiating outward, and the whole of his back feels like it’s burning and freezing all at once, and he shudders violently, breaths coming in short, quick gasps. He clenches his fists, braces them against his thighs, pressing down hard enough to leave bruises.

“Wilbur?” Tommy asks, more uncertain. And then, Tommy is there, kneeling down in front of him, and his face goes all wide and panicky. “Wilbur? Holy shit, are you dying? Are you having a heart attack? A stroke? Are you freezing to death? Have I just killed you with a snowball? You’ve got three lives again, right? Where are you hurt, Wil, come one, you’ve got to tell me, you’ve gotta tell me so I can fix it, are you—”

“My back,” he manages, “my back’s been—my back’s been hurting, it wasn’t your fault, it’s just—” He cuts off with another gasp as all the muscles in his back convulse, tensing and untensing and tensing again and sending a wave of stabbing pain through his nerves.

“Oh, Prime,” Tommy says, “oh, Prime, alright, you’re gonna be fine, big man, let’s just get you inside, alright? Can you walk? Nevermind, just—” Tommy hooks his hands underneath his arms and hauls him to his feet, slinging one of his arms across his shoulders as soon as he can get them in the right position. He lets out a little whimper, and hates himself for doing so, just a little bit, but fuck, that hurts.

The stairs are a trial. His feet drag, and he would trip and fall flat on his face if it weren’t for Tommy. But then, they’re inside Phil’s house, and Tommy sits him down on Phil’s ratty little couch, and he immediately curls in on himself, hands gripping his forearms as if the pain will go away if he hugs himself hard enough.

“Okay, shirt off, Wil, let me see,” Tommy says, and he blinks dumbly for a moment.

“What?” he asks, his tongue thick and heavy in his mouth.

“No, just—you’ve got to let me see what’s wrong, yeah?”

“‘S old man aches,” he mumbles, but doesn’t try to fight it when Tommy begins manhandling his arms, pushing at his coat sleeves.

“What the fuck are you on about?” Tommy demands. “You’re not that old. Who do you think you are, Philza fucking Minecraft? Come on, just let me see—” He finally manages to get the coat off, and then the shirt, and his skin erupts in gooseflesh as it’s exposed to the air. Tommy freezes.

“What?” he asks. “What is it, what’s—”

“I don’t,” Tommy says, running a hand through his hair, “I don’t, Wilbur, I don’t know what this is, I don’t—holy shit, that’s actually kind of scary. Um! No, nevermind, don’t pay attention to me, just keep um, breathing! Breathing is good! Breathing exercises!” He breathes in and out, loud and exaggerated. “See, just like that. I’m just gonna—”

And he puts a hand out, and before Wilbur can stop him, he rests it on his back. Light and cautious, but still too much, and Wilbur stuffs a fist into his mouth to stop himself from screaming. In the same motion, he flinches away, violently, but the damage has already been done. Because the contact hurts, a lot, but what’s worse is the horror, because in the split second that Tommy’s hand touched his skin, he could feel the way that it is wrong, that his back is wrong, that there is something terribly wrong. Because there are ridges protruding from his back, long and thick and raised, and it’s wrong and it hurts and Tommy’s right, actually, this is scary, he’s fucking scared.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Tommy is saying, “I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I won’t do that again, I’m so sorry, Wilbur, are you okay? Please be okay, please—”

He nods, though it’s more like he lets his head fall and then painstakingly brings it back up a little.

“Okay, I think we need—” Tommy says. “I think that I don’t know what to do, so I think we need—” He takes a deep breath. “Phil! Phil!” Loud, panicked, earsplitting. Wilbur winces. “Phil! He is home, isn’t he? Phil!”

A second passes, and then, drifting up from the basement, a distant, “Tommy? Everything good?”

“Phil, get up here right fucking now!”

There is a beat of silence, and then there are footsteps, quiet at first but growing closer, and they are quick, hurried. Phil must have detected the genuine fear in Tommy’s voice, because Tommy and Phil generally stand on very shaky ground with each other, so while Phil will typically indulge Tommy in his whims, it depends on the day as to how far he’ll go, how quick he’ll respond. But it’s only a moment or two before Phil’s head pokes out of the floor, his hands clinging to the ladder, his face twisted in confusion.

“What on earth is the matter?” he asks, and then breaks off as his eyes land on Wilbur, who—he must be a sight. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t care. But terror flashes across Phil’s face, and he is crossing the floor in an instant, hands hovering over him, fluttering helplessly, though thankfully, he doesn’t touch.

“What’s wrong, where are you hurt, what—” The words come out in a jumbled flurry, but he stops just as abruptly, and Wilbur knows that he is looking at the horror show that is his back.

“It hurts, Phil,” he whispers.

“Okay,” Phil says, sounding—still concerned, but perhaps marginally calmer? “Okay, you’re going to be alright. I think I know what this is.” He settles himself on the couch right next to him and opens his arms, and Wilbur doesn’t hesitate before leaning forward, slumping against him. Phil seems to know better than to put any kind of pressure on his back, and instead places one hand on his arm and the other on the back of his head, threading his fingers through his hair.

“Then what the fuck is it?” Tommy demands.

“Tommy, I need you to run over to Techno’s and ask him for something for pain, and something for sleep. Can you do that for me?” Phil asks instead of answering, and perhaps Wilbur should be terrified by the implication that he’s going to need either of those things, but the promise of some kind of relief overrides any kind of trepidation.

“Like fuck I will,” Tommy says, “Not before you tell me what the fuck is wrong with him!”

Another convulsion wracks him. He bites his lip to keep from crying out, and tastes blood. His breath is hitching, and he can’t stop it.

“Tommy.” Phil’s voice is sharp, but then, Wilbur feels rather than hears him sigh. “It’s wings, I think. I don’t understand why now, but I went through this a long time ago, when I was very young. I recognize the signs. So Tommy, please.”

Tommy makes a surprised little sound. Wilbur isn’t looking, has his face buried in Phil’s shoulder, but he can imagine the look on his face: the slack jaw, the wide open eyes. And then, there are rushed footsteps retreating, and the door slamming, and Tommy’s muffled voice calling out for Technoblade.

And then, Wilbur processes what Phil just said.

He twists his head around so he can see his face, regretting it a moment later. Any kind of movement seems to make the pain worse, and he has to take a moment to tremble through it.

“Wings?” he whispers. “How?”

He’s never had wings.

If he were going to have wings, he would have gotten them a long time ago. He remembers nights spent as a child, staying up and hoping for feathered appendages to somehow miraculously appear on his back, just so he could be more like his dad. He remembers the crushing disappointment when he finally accepted that no matter how much divine blood runs in his veins, it is apparently not enough.

But he did accept it. He accepted it years ago. There is absolutely no reason for him to be developing wings now, as a fully-grown adult, but Phil sounds so very sure, and his back hurts so very much, and perhaps that’s consistent with actual appendages trying to sprout out of him.

“I don’t know,” Phil says. “I’ve never heard of it happening so late, even in avians. Which, I’m not exactly, but I got mine when I was a kid like they do, and I don’t—I don’t know, Wil, I really don’t, but I remember what it was like, yeah? I know what to do. It’s gonna suck for a little while, but you’re going to be fine, I promise.”

“Okay,” he croaks, “okay—” and then he has to stop talking, because the pain flares again, bright and intense and holy shit, but it’s worse this time, because now that he knows what’s going on, he can feel them. He can feel things inside of him, pushing against his muscles and his skin in ways that absolutely should not be possible, and there is too much of him to be contained in his body, and there are things inside of him trying to escape—

It’s almost like the way he gets when he thinks about the void too hard. Except not, because when he does that, he feels the urge to dissolve away, gently and peacefully, to let himself back into the quiet that is not quiet and the darkness that is not dark, where all the knowledge of the world is at his fingertips, too much for a mortal brain to contain and remain sane. That is not this. This is his own body trying to explode. There is no peace, no dissolution; it’s messy and physical and Prime he just wants it to stop.

He shifts in Phil’s grasp, fruitlessly trying to find a position that takes the pressure off, a little bit. It’s no use, of course, because he can still feel something moving under the skin of his back, and his vision whites out, and when he comes back to himself, he’s shivering, shivering and shaking and sobbing in Phil’s hold, and he doesn’t remember when he started crying but he can’t seem to make himself stop. Phil is keeping up a steady stream of soothing nonsense, and he latches onto the sound of his voice like it’s the only lifeline he has.

And then the door bursts open, and Wilbur doesn’t bother trying to look, but there are two sets of footsteps, not just one.

“Here,” Tommy says, panting, and there are several thumps, and several clinks, glass on glass.

“Oh god, don’t—and he’s doing it, he’s just dumping all of that on the floor. Don’t break those, Tommy, those aren’t splash pots. Have you never handled a potion before.” Technoblade pauses for a moment. “So, what exactly’s wrong with him? The child was making no sense at all.”

Wilbur thinks he detects a note of concern. But he’s not thinking clearly, and it’s always hard to tell anyway, with Technoblade.

“He’s got wings growing in,” Phil responds, voice clipped. Wilbur feels his hand leave his arm, and he whines at the loss of touch. And then another spasm, and he whines again, pressing his face harder into Phil’s shirt.

“Oh. Huh. Yes, that makes perfect sense, of course.”

Phil’s arm dips a bit, and Wilbur finds himself being moved, his head gently tilted back. Phil’s face comes into view, pale and blurry.

“You want to drink this for me, Wil?” he says, and then there is glass at his lips, and he parts them immediately. He doesn’t like being knocked out, doesn’t like the loss of control that comes with it, but if he has to be aware for another five minutes, he’s not going to be able to keep himself from screaming aloud.

He swallows, grimacing at the taste. The effects start hitting right away. His mind detaches from himself, and the pain drains from him. Every muscle goes lax.

He exhales.

“There we go,” Phil murmurs, “there we go. It’s gonna be alright, Wil. I’ll be here the whole time. You’re gonna be okay.”

The world falls away. He lets it. He trusts his father to catch him.

----------

He wakes up a few times, and each time, it hurts. Phil is always there, and usually, Tommy too, and sometimes Techno, and he can barely move but they always see that he’s awake, and they give him a potion and he’s under again, and he’s glad for it, because those moments of consciousness are a spiral of pain and confusion and his thoughts flying apart because he barely understands what’s going on or why he’s hurting and he just wants it to go away.

And then there is the time he wakes up and he thinks somebody is cutting his back open, and he can feel his own blood on his skin, sticky and hot, and he thrashes, trying to get away, and that makes the pain so much worse, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is inhuman, and he fights until a potion is poured down his throat and it’s back to sleep again.

And then there is the time he wakes up, and people are talking in low, hushed tones. He can’t make out what they’re saying. He cracks his eyes open, and it’s Phil and Technoblade, deep in some discussion, both looking terribly concerned. He decides he’ll ask what’s wrong later, and then closes his eyes and goes back to sleep again.

And then there is the time he wakes up, and some part of him is moving, and he doesn’t understand what it is because it’s not any of his limbs, not his arms and not his legs, and it feels alien and foreign and his back feels like it’s been shoved under a woodchipper and then tossed through a paper shredder for good measure, and he’s not aware enough to know why, so he panics. There is a bit of the void that still dwells in his heart, and he calls on it, cries out to it, and it answers, comes rushing in around him, and his mind expands to peer into galaxies.

Philza is at his side a moment later, and he is able to look at him and see all the weight of years that lie behind his eyes, and all the years that lie ahead of him, and the moment of his death, all spiraling out like a tapestry and like a mass, and the music is atonal, confused, but a closer glance reveals it to be twelve-tone, order in the chaotic lines. Wilbur is with the void again, and his heart still beats, but it’s a near thing, and he could stop it if he chose.

“Do you want to know, Philza?” he asks, words spilling from his lips like rain, like the river, like the flood. “Do you want to know when it will happen? I can see it. I can see how some part of you wants it. All our histories are like tangled up threads, but they all come to an end, and I can see those endings, Philza, I can tell you about them if you like.”

Pain constricts Philza’s face, and Wilbur doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know who wouldn’t love the void and its peace and its everything.

“I know, Wilbur,” Philza says, “I know, but how about you come back to me now, okay? Come back to me?”

“We’re all little bits of code, Philza,” he informs him. “None of us are real. We’re little bits of code and words on a page and lines in a script written by our better selves. Nothing in this world really matters. We might as well have all the fun we can before the lights go out. Do you want to know when that will be, Philza? Not too long after you, Philza. Not too long at all. I told Tommy, he knows, he didn’t want to know but that’s alright, he’s better off for it, if he hasn’t forgotten.”

“Come back, Wil, come on,” Philza says, “you can do it. You’ve got a heartbeat, do you feel it?”

Philza takes his hand and places it over his heart, and—that’s right. He’s alive. He’d forgotten. The void spins, and then it tucks itself away again, waiting for the next moment he needs it, and he is left with only vague impressions of what he’s just said and a vague idea that everything hurts and something is wrong with his back and he’d like to go to sleep now, please.

“Alright, yeah,” Phil says, “here, you can have this, you can sleep. You’re doing so well, Wil, I promise it’s almost done.”

He takes the potion. Or tries to; Phil has to hold it for him.

“Okay,” he says faintly. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” he hears Phil say, very far away. “So long as you come back, everything’s okay.”

He goes back to sleep again. He thinks he wakes up a few more times, but he doesn’t really remember. He doesn’t really want to.

----------

And then: awareness.

The first thing he processes is that everything aches, deeply and acutely, but none of it feels nearly as bad as it did before, and not even as bad as it’s been over the past couple of weeks. It’s irritating, painful, but more than manageable, really, practically a relief. The second thing he processes is that he’s lying on his stomach, and that there is something weighing him down.

His mind puzzles over this for a moment. He tries to roll over, to see what’s going on, but something stops him, and then he remembers: wings.

He’s got wings. There are wings on his back. Growing out of him. A part of his body. Wings.

As soon as he realizes that, he becomes aware of them. And it is so very strange, to suddenly have access to two extra limbs, to suddenly have additional body parts to move about and control. It’s a feeling impossible to describe, and he has to take several minutes to process it, to try to become accustomed to it. It doesn’t really work, but he tries moving them anyway, just a bit of a flex, and—

Ouch.

He groans, shoving his face into the pillow. A mistake. That was a mistake. He’d rather like to go back to sleep now and pretend that none of this is happening.

But his vocalization draws attention, and then there is a hand on his shoulder, gently brushing him just enough to feel, not enough to pain him. He turns his head to the side, reluctantly, and Phil is kneeling beside him, his face open and soft and clearly relieved, his lips curling into a slight smile.

“Hey,” he says. “How you feeling, Wil?”

He considers this, and decides on honesty. “Bit like I’ve been caught between a piston and a wall for the past couple of days,” he admits. “Better than before, though.”

“Good to hear,” Phil says, and then his face goes a bit more serious. “How much of that do you remember?”

“Not much?” he says. “I don’t think? Impressions, I guess. I know I wasn’t having a good time. I’m glad I don’t remember it too clearly. I was out for most of it, yeah?”

“Most of it,” Phil agrees, and Wilbur thinks that perhaps there is something he’s not saying, but he doesn’t feel like pressing the matter. He can guess what it is, anyway; there is a chill in his chest, and his thoughts feel just slightly more fractured than usual, so it’s not hard to assume what might have happened. Not hard to assume where he might have gone. He’s sure he’ll feel terrible about it when everything stops feeling so surreal.

He has wings.

“It’s over now?” he asks, and winces at the way his voice cracks. “It’s done?”

Phil’s eyes do the thing where they go immeasurably soft and crinkly at the edges, and it’s love and relief and sadness all at once. “It’s done,” he agrees, and then hesitates. “You’re not gonna be able to fly on them for a while, but would you like to see?”

He doesn’t understand why Phil is being so cautious about it. Of course he wants to see. If he’s going to be put through hell, he wants to see what came of it. He wants it to be worth it.

“Usually, when wings grow in, they’re all downy and shit. Like a baby bird,” Phil says, probably in response to whatever face he’s sure he’s making. “Flight feathers come in over the next few weeks.” He pauses again, and Wilbur thinks he understands his reticence, now, understands the still-present concern.

“But that’s not what happened with mine,” he states, and Phil shakes his head.

“Yours are fully fledged,” he says. “Probably part of why it hurt so much. I don’t know why, Wil. But do you wanna have a look?”

Wordless, he nods, and Phil takes that as his cue to reach out and help him sit upright. It’s far more effort than it should be, compounded by the fact that his sense of balance feels all wrong, and that’s going to take some getting used to, he can already tell. And he’s sore, like he’s run a marathon or fought another half dozen wars all in one go, and his head spins a little bit when he finally situates himself. He closes his eyes against it, breathing in sharply.

He feels Phil guiding his wings forward, into his field of vision. He opens his eyes.

They are very big, is the first thing he notices. They would have to be, of course, to hold his weight up. Magic and suspension of disbelief only stretches so far. They are very large, and the feathers are very large, and they are very angular and neat as well, so neat that someone has to have arranged them while he was unconscious, because there’s no way that they came out looking like that.

The color, though. The color. He swallows, hard.

They are black, perhaps. They look black. But he knows on an instinctive level that they are black in the same way that the void is black, and that if someone were to stare at them for too long, they would realize as much, would realize that actually, they are not black at all, but rather some color or some lack of color that is beyond human comprehension. The void translates as black to the human mind because it is as close as the human mind can get to true perception, and most of the time, Wilbur remembers it as black, but it was not, and his wings are not, and he is never going to be free of it, is he?

On some level, he knew that. Knew that the void is in him and about him, and no matter what he does, it will never leave him completely, not after all the years he spent with it, intertwined with the infinite nothing. But now he has wings on his back, and they should be a connection between him and Phil, should be something to celebrate, but he stares at the plumage and feels sick to his stomach.

“Wil?” Phil asks. He sounds confused, sounds worried by his reaction. “You okay, mate?”

He’s not sure how to phrase this in a way that Phil will understand. Not sure that he wants to.

“Void,” he manages, voice a broken whisper. “They look like void, Phil.”

He looks up just in time to see Phil’s face crumple.

“Wil—”

“They look just like it, Phil,” he continues. “Just like it. And I know I’m not always good about, about being here, about keeping myself stable, but I’m trying. I try to ignore it when it calls, I try not to reach out to it, and when I fail, I, I try to come back, I do, I swear. I can’t—I can’t have these, Phil, they’re from it, that’s why I’m getting them now, maybe it triggered something, I don’t know, but I can’t, Phil, I can’t—”

He reaches out toward them, intending to do—something, maybe, and Phil must have a better idea than he does, because his hand darts out and snags his, stopping him in his tracks.

“No, Wil, don’t do that, okay? We can work on it, we’ll figure it out, but please don’t—”

“You’re up!”

He and Phil both freeze, and as one, look to the door. Tommy is standing there, grinning like nobody’s business, and Technoblade is lurking behind him, his face contorted into an expression that looks like he wants to murder someone but really just means he’s feeling very awkward.

Tommy glances back and forth between the two of him, and his face slowly falls.

“Is everything okay?” he asks. “Nothing—I mean, it all went right, didn’t it?”

He blinks. Tilts his head slightly. Gently removes his hand from Phil’s grasp, and then spreads out his wings behind him, putting them on full display, as far out as he can make them go, and it aches and he’s not going to be able to hold them there for long, but it’s worth it. He wants Tommy to see. Because Tommy will know. Tommy remembers. And unlike him, Tommy hates to remember. Tommy hates the void. So perhaps this is an act of self-sabotage. That’s what Captain Puffy would say. But he does it anyway, because he wants someone else to see and understand, understand in a way he knows Phil won’t be able to.

“I’ve got void wings, Tommy,” he says, and a smile splits his face. “See them?”

Tommy’s eyes widen, and he flinches.

Gratification is not nearly as sweet as he thought it would be. Actually, he just sort of feels like crying.

But then, Tommy’s brows draw together. And he steps further into the room, coming closer and closer until he’s standing right up against the bed, staring at the feathers. Wilbur holds himself very still.

“I see,” Tommy says slowly, “but Wilbur, I’m not sure you do.”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, and cranes his neck to try to see whatever Tommy’s looking at. For a moment, he doesn’t; there’s just the feathers, void feathers, death feathers, a reminder that—

But arctic sunlight slants through the window, and if he shifts his angle just a little bit—

The noise that escapes him is small and involuntary. He hopes no one calls him on it, but that’s the least of his concerns right now. Because the colors do not change, not exactly, but if he holds them to the light, the sun illuminates the feathers, haloing their edges in gold, and there is a sheen of color running across them, a sheen that ripples and moves as he shifts them in the sunbeam, and it is a beautiful, rich blue.

And they’re lovely.

“Oh,” he says, and Tommy laughs at him, the fucking gremlin.

“Yeah, fucking oh,” he says. “You’re such a moron. They’re so fucking ace, Wilbur.”

“I think that maybe you need to work on rememberin’,” Technoblade says from the doorway, “that you’re the sum of all your experiences, and not just one.”

Wilbur stares at him.

“Oh my god,” he finally says. “That’s so cheesy. Who the hell are you and what have you done with Technoblade?”

“Alright,” Techno grumbles, “see if I do anythin’ nice for you ever again. I didn’t come up here to receive this kind of treatment. This is an outrage.”

He laughs. He laughs, from the sheer relief of it, and his trepidation is melting away like snow in the sunshine, and he can allow himself to revel in it, to revel in the wings on his back, and he is sore and tired but this is what glory feels like, maybe, and perhaps he can fly into the air and there will be no wax to drip away.

Perhaps these wings are of the void, but they are of him, too.

And he looks to Phil again, and Phil is smiling at him, warm and happy. His own wings are flared out behind him, tattered at the edges, so many feathers torn or still missing entirely, and the more time that passes, the more and more likely it is that those feathers are never going to grow back, that Phil truly will never fly again. Phil has already resigned himself to it, he knows, but Wilbur has never given up hope, will never be able to bring himself to give up hope.

“It’s not fair that I can fly when you can’t,” he says quietly, and the room goes still and quiet. Especially when it’s my fault, he doesn’t say, though he knows everyone hears it.

“Wil,” Phil says, “nothing could bring me more joy than this.”

And Wilbur hears what he means: you, here.

So he flexes his wings and revels in the ache and revels in the sunshine and revels at his family, here, his father sitting by him and his friend-protege-brother poking at curiously at his feathers and Technoblade still in the doorway, not leaving even for all his grumbling. He revels in this, revels in this life, and for a time, the void recedes entirely.

And in its wake is the sunlight.

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redspiderling · 3 years ago

Text

MCU Breakdown: Black Widow, Part 1

I can’t believe this is happening 😭

First of all, congratulations to all of you who’ve been here all these years. We got it. We begged for years, and it’s finally here.

For once I wasn't dreading revisiting this film to write down what I got from it. I felt more like I might not do it justice. This film is so special to me, but here it is, the MCU Breakdown of Black Widow, part 1 (of who knows how many).

I remember back when I started running this blog and talking about a hypothetical Black Widow movie that had never been announced, always "yeah, we would be happy to do it, maybe, someday in the future", and arguing that it would be important for women and girls, no matter its content. I'm so glad we got it like this. So, so glad.

The rest under the cut.

Let's start with some technical details. The film has a lot of setups and callbacks, nothing is done in chance. For example, I love how the light, and the sounds we hear when we first, and last, see Natasha in the film, are the same. We greet her in bright -birds cheeping- morning light, while she's riding her bike home, to her family

and we leave her in bright -birds cheeping- morning light, while she's riding her bike home, to her family (I'm using the term family very liberally here in reference to the Avengers for the sake of the movie, bear with me, you know how I feel about those dudes).

It's signifying new beginnings, each time, not endings. Notice how, what we see is natural light, which makes this scene pop out, and look more real because the light is coming from the sun, and isn’t artificially made on VFX software. You will notice the stark differences in colours and lighting when the emotions and the atmosphere change in this film, because there is a visual language being employed here, the director has a story to say, and she uses all the tools she has to tell it. The light is exactly the same in those 2 scenes, because Cate wants us to make that connection, even if we make it unconsciously.

Natasha is placed in such a positive way, both at the start and the end of the film. There's this discussion about how "real" their little family was, but it was the characters that muddled up that image. The reality of their lives in Ohio is presented in a happy way, that had deep rivers under the surface, for sure. This wasn't accidental, for a lot of reasons.

First of all, if you take it the literal way, they were spies, and had to present themselves as normal. If you take it the allegorical way, any girl could fall victim to trafficking, and if you take it the character way, both Scarlett and Cate wanted to showcase that Natasha is human. They also wanted to give her something that wasn't always dripping with pain and sadness. They were both parts of her life, yes, but there was also joy, and light, and once upon a time she had been a kid, playing with her sister.

Also, and this has been mentioned before but it bears repeating: I love the actress they chose for young Natasha, and I love how they presented her character. She's allowed to be a young teenage girl. She's not sexualised. She's at that gangly stage between childhood and adulthood, and there's nothing sexual about it, no provocative clothing, no excessive makeup. She's a kid.

Plus, I know Cate said the actress already had her hair dyed blue and they just decided to let her have it, but I think it works well for Natasha's character. That small act of defiance, even that early on, against the system that wanted to break her. Also, the film gives us such great character moments, because they let the camera roll and don't rush through scenes, look at Natasha looking at Melina comforting Yelena. We can see the pain, the fear, where she knows that this isn't going to last, and wonders about what will become of them once their lives begin to unravel.

We also get to see the joy on her face, the wonder of discovering the world, how often do you get to see Marvel characters do this, just live in the moment?

Bioluminescence: the production and emission of light by a living organism. Or how Natasha is a bright light, that shines from within. Not my words, Cate Shortland's words. I felt it when I was watching this scene, but it was lovely to have it verified in one of her interviews. I wish I could meet her, and tell her that everything she wanted to put on screen came through, incandescent and crystal clear. Fireflies are a symbol for Natasha, as a bright light that shines from within, and never dies.

Small details that I love, the magnet on the fridge: Don't forget, above a picture of Natasha. LIKE WE EVER COULD, CATE.

We have another setup here, where the family gathers up to have dinner together. Even the sitting arrangement is the same as later on in the film.

Notice also how both young, and adult version of Natasha, communicate so well with Melina, just with their eyes. It doesn't necessary show a deep history between them, but it does show a bone deep level of understanding. Not just of their current circumstance, but of their future, and of what it will do to them. Melina knows what's coming and she's says it "I'm sorry", but they're both resigned to their fate, Melina because she doesn't see a way out, and Natasha because, well, here she's a kid, and therefore is powerless.

The dynamics between Yelena and Alexei is so different. Yelena is young and doesn't understand, so they're speaking about completely different things. "I don't have my shoes" is what she says, and it's heartbreaking in its innocence, as Alexei is loading his gun and reading himself for battle. We can still see that he's not indifferent to her, telling her she can have "fruit loops in the car". He's not a monster, he just doesn't have a choice (or at least, he thinks he doesn't).

Also, notice how the camera angles are employed here: Natasha and Melina look each other eye to eye, Yelena looks up to Alexei, Alexei looks down on her, there is an imbalance of power and understanding in the second set of images, and the camera tells us that.

Melina doesn't let Natasha take the photo album. For one thing, it's certain that Natasha wouldn't be able to keep it. For another, Melina wanted the memories, and probably didn't want anyone else to realise/think that they cared about their little family unit.

There's just a lot of thought that's been put in the details of the script, to show us their bond, their attempts to hide it, to show the characters' personality in everything around them (notice the plants that are ever present in Melina's home, in Ohio and later in Saint Petersburg). She might seem cold, she has been through a lot, but she cares. And that care has brought her pain. And we have to see that pain, because we get the quiet moments like this one, where she stands alone in an empty home knowing that part of her life is over, never to return.

The mission, is the last thing Melina asks about. The last thing Alexei mentions, the last thing either of them cares about. First, she refused to accept that they had completed the mission and were now hunted, then she accepted it and they loaded their family in the car, and then she asked about the leaked files.

Also, notice how that shot is framed. Both images silhouetted by the light because it’s the moment and the prop smack down in the middle of the frame that’s important, now what they’re going through, emotionally, they’re not themselves in that moment, they’re nameless, tools of the trade, expendable in front of that tiny floppy disk.

Yelena is singing while the rest are plunging in despair, but still humour her and play her song.

I found this shot a bit... Jarring. I get it that for American audiences this would show that they're actually leaving "home" behind, but for the rest of us... Eeeh, I'll give it a pass because it is an American production and this is just something to be expected. I mean, Yelena's song was American Pie. We get it, you still love America, just because you're making a film about Russian spies doesn't mean you're a commie Marvel, it's ok.

But in any case, the setup for the action scene here was excellent. Happy, familiar music playing, car is on the main road, car goes off the main road familiar music gets toned down and eventually completely lost in the darkness.

Yelena knows what to do, we see it, so that we know that this 6 year old girl who holds her stuffed animal and walks barefoot has practiced for this moment.

By the way, Natasha did take another item with her along with the photobooth pictures (it also looks like a photo album with Disney princesses on it), it didn't survive the trip. We are informed of this for a very specific reason: Melina didn’t ask Natasha not to take the photo album out of malice, or just because she wanted to keep it for herself. She knew it wouldn’t survive the trip in Natasha’s hands. We also get a close shot of the image strip (and we get it again, during the credits), because it will be important, later on.

Bet y'all also forgot you were watching a superhero movie until this happened? That wasn't accidental, they wanted us to see them as normal people, this is the moment when that ends.

Natasha saved her family, even though she was a terrified kid.

I know that they did the huge titles thing to connect this film to Civil War but... Listen, Civil War needed the huge titles because that script and the way that movie was directed was a complete disaster. We needed to know where the characters were each time with huge ass title because there was NO OTHER WAY TO TELL. Between complete lack of a timeline, and the fact that you couldn't even tell what time of the day it was due to the horrible lighting, you definitely couldn't tell what the location was because it was irrelevant to the plot like, 90% of the time. Not to mention the title cards in Civil War were usually followed by dimly lit grey corridors so, yeah, give us a title so we know at least where they are, generally.

This film. Didn't Need That. For the most part anyway, there are 2 locations where the titles worked. First one was Ohio, the other I'll reveal later.

But here. Guys, they're Russian spies escaping from the US on a small plane... Where else would they go if not to Cuba?!?! This is the Black Widow movie paying for the sins of Civil War, in a small way in this instance.

Yelena tells Melina that pain only makes you stronger, Natasha cries, and they setup my heartbreak for later.

Natasha protecting Yelena, terrified, and staring men down the barrel of her gun anyway. Such a badass and heartbreaking callback.

Notice how this scene makes us look at how men view this. There's an allegory here as well, but I'll address what's actually happening in the film:

Dreykov notices Natasha's natural instinct to protect herself and her sister, and all he sees is something he can use. A tool for violence, instead of sex, in this case. But the implication is there. Not a person, or a terrified girl, just an object to be used by men.

So glad that piece of shit got blown up and never mentioned again. Any man looking for exposition on Dreykov to feel the "loss" when the villain is gone: Fuck you. Go get some therapy.

Moving on from that piece of shit, difference between Melina and Alexei: Melina apologised. Alexei lied, but he also tried to give them hope. We can see the devastation, because the soldiers never thought of them as girls like he did, and didn't blink before drugging them and taking them away.

Yet another setup, of Natasha and Yelena, drugged and powerless as they are taken away. Because it wasn't enough that they were kids, they took away all their choices, and rendered them unconscious.

What can I possibly say about this credits scene.

It's very real, probably the realest minutes in the entire MCU, and it's merciless. They don't try to sugar-coat what's happening, and there are no jokes to diffuse the drama. These are girls being trafficked from all over the world. I don't know about you but I felt the switch from true parallel to real life traffic victims like this shot that looks like footage from Interpol

to Red Room victims as being a clear shift, and I was actually grateful for it. Because here I could put my back against the fact that the red room wasn't real, otherwise I would have broken down before the credit sequence even ended.

It was a stroke of genius to create an introduction to this entire world like that. We rarely see credit sequences anymore and it's a shame, because when they're well done they tell stories in and of themselves, and this is one of the best I've seen.

Even the villain is set up here. He's pointing at girls and saying "that one, and her", like he's picking pigs for slaughter. How much more setup than that do you need, to want to murder that man dead? Not any more, that was enough.

Nobody speak to me I’m crying.

Subtle, but there. Trafficking (and traffickers) exists because it IS being tolerated by governments around the world.

Unnecessary title aside, who else says Natasha looks at herself in the mirror hear and repeats "pain only makes you stronger", as she's being hunted away from yet another family.

Then she's saying it again because it bears repeating and Natasha has been through A Lot these past few years. I love how unfiltered our first image of her is. After all she's been through, we basically see her stripped of all her tricks in a moment where she’s alone with herself and her thoughts(something we later learn she tries not to do much), and she's just a woman having a tiny breakdown in a semi-public bathroom. Again, human.

This is where I will leave you for this first part. Hey, I got through the intro, I count that as a win given just how long this breakdown has already been. If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading, come yell at me in my inbox whenever, see you for the next one xo

#MCU Breakdown #Black Widow #Black Widow Spoilers #Natasha Romanoff #I'd like to think that all my followers have already seen it but just in case

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qitwrites · 3 years ago

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⬅ Previous || 11 || Next ➡

The hoodie incident begins with Kaminari, as most absentminded things do in the dorm.

It’s a cold Saturday morning, and Kaminari can’t find his hoodie anywhere. He briefly looks through his room, the common room, the dishwasher (because it’s happened before and no, he would not like to comment), and the courtyard before deciding he’s probably lost it. Just as he starts to make his way back, with plans to stop by Ashido’s or Kirishima’s room for a spare jacket, the jingle of a machine stops him in his tracks.

It’s the sound of a dryer that’s completed its cycle.

Kaminari doesn’t remember the last time he did his laundry but decides its worth a look anyway. He ventures into the laundry room, and when he sees the familiar shade of yellow, slightly worn out and well-loved but vibrant yellow nonetheless, he picks it up from the basket and beams.

‘How did you get here?’ he muses and puts it on with a satisfied sigh. He doesn’t question why the hoodie is so warm, or why it smells like fresh detergent, or how it’s way too big in pretty much every single way. He just decides that it’s his and leaves for his room.

Satou, for the life of him, cannot find his yellow hoodie.

It was in the laundry basket when he’d left to go grab a glass of water, and it’s gone by the time he gets back. It’s a whole ass mystery honestly.

It’s too cold to be without a hoodie, so Satou decides to borrow one from Kouda for the time being, and figure it out later. Kouda hands him a purple one with chewed up drawstrings and a front pouch pocket that sheds lint, and Satou gives him a huge grin as thanks.

This works out fine for everyone so far, but then Kouda drops some milk on his only other hoodie an hour later, and he can’t ask for the one he gave Satou back because Satou hasn’t found his either. So, Kouda just goes to Shoji and asks if he has any jackets to spare. Shoji, ever the minimalist, has a limited collection of clothes, but there is a sleeveless jacket, dark and warm, on a hanger in his closet that he happily hands over to Kouda.

Shoji is a pretty warm-blooded person, but the day is quite cold. When Tokoyami sees him shiver once, almost imperceptibly, he goes to his closet and pulls out a sleeveless moto jacket, dark as midnight and lined with faux fur. It isn’t really Shoji’s style, but he appreciates the gesture and shrugs it on. It’s warm and smells like nothing, and they go back to watching a YouTube documentary on Tokoyami’s floor, with Dark Shadow curled up nearby.

Dark shadow has the biggest soft spot for Tsuyu, so when Tokoyami is in the common room chatting with Iida and Ojiro later in the day, Dark Shadow sneaks off towards Tsuyu and tells her Tokoyami is feeling a bit cold, and happily takes the offered green jacket. He hides it away from Tokoyami the best he can.

Tsuyu, with her frog like disposition, does not do well with the cold. In fact, it’s one of her biggest vices, so the minute her jacket is gone, she feels herself seize up. Jirou walks by a few minutes later to see Tsuyu curled up on the couch, not moving and dressed too lightly.

‘Tsuyu,’ she shouts, rushing towards the green haired girl while pulling her hoodie off. She gently nudges Tsuyu into the material of her maroon hoodie, and Tsuyu finally exhales, warmth seeping into her extremities. She gives Jirou a happy smile.

‘Thank you,’ she croaks, and Jirou pats her head before plopping down on the couch next to her.

Jirou feels the cold soon enough, even as she snuggles into Tsuyu, but she doesn’t want to go to her room and pull on another jacket. She’s having fun watching a music concert on TV while others talk in the space around them. It’s homely, and she’s scared of breaking the moment by leaving, because they don’t get moments like this very often. Moments where everything is normal, or as close to normal as they can get, and the air is calm and the dust settles in random pools of sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the hall. So she just sits and waits.

Bakugou shows up 45 minutes into the concert, a black and orange hoodie draped over his arm. He leaves it on the couch next to Jirou as he walks over to the kitchen to refill his bottle, and because Jirou lives to irritate the ever-loving shit out of Bakugou, she simply picks the hoodie up and pulls it on. The material is soft and cool and smells of fabric softener. The sleeves are more worn out than the rest of the hoodie, tiny holes and jagged corners littering the cloth sporadically. Tsuyu gives Jirou a nod of approval, and she returns it with a cocky smirk of her own.

Bakugou takes one look at the back of the couch, one look at the girls, one more look at the back of the couch before he snarls, exploding the bottle in his hands and spraying water everywhere.

‘I’ll KILL you.’

‘Try me,’ Jirou taunts drily, not moving her eyes from the screen. Tsuyu protectively curls into her, and the two slump lower into the couch.

Bakugou takes one step towards them when Kirishima, sunshine Kirishima, Bakugou tamer Kirishima, the lord and savior Kirishima steps into the room, takes one look at Bakugou’s expression, another at Jirou’s frame covered in black and orange before shrugging off his green hoodie and stuffing it over Bakugou’s head, wrestling him into it. The blonde yells and kicks the whole time but lets it happen because Kirishima’s hoodie is warm, slightly oversized, ridiculously comfortable and smells safe.

‘You’re going to train right?’ Kirishima asks with a wide grin. ‘Let me come with ya! I’ll let you beat me up as much as you’d like.’

Bakugou snarls in Jirou’s direction one more time but surprisingly relents, pulling Kirishima away by the collar of his shirt.

‘Clean that shit up,’ he shouts over his shoulder at Jirou, referring to the exploded water bottle in the middle of the room.

‘Ok mom,’ she shouts back, and sniggers at the yells of fuck you and shitty hair let me go I will end her. Messing with Bakugou is the best. She waits for the hour mark to pass on the concert before getting up to find a mop and a dustpan.

Kirishima and Bakugou train for upwards of 2 hours, oscillating between working their quirks till their bodies ache and sparring without their quirks to strengthen their bodies. Their fights look like they’re dancing, so attuned are they to each other’s movements, so familiar with each other’s fighting styles, it’s almost art. Bakugou is faster, more agile, and hits where it hurts, but Kirishima is an immovable, unbreakable wall, taking hit after hit and pushing back, standing strong, giving as good as he gets.

They’re drenched in sweat by the end of it, and Bakugou pulls on the green hoodie as the cold seeps in, giving Kirishima a feral smile.

‘Shouldn’t have let ears steal mine,’ he smirks, before sauntering over to the vending machine to get himself a hot drink. Kirishima just shrugs with a smile, and lays down on the ground, slowly stretching out his hamstrings. He’s always run a bit warm, so the cold isn’t anything unbearable, and he doesn’t mind Bakugou wearing his hoodie. The blonde doesn’t do well in the cold at all, so he’s a lot more manageable when he’s warmed up.

Kirishima twists to the side and something under one of the exercise mats catches his eye. He rolls over to it and picks it up and finds an off-white jacket roughly in his size. He feels like he’s seen it before, so he just shrugs and pulls it on. It’s a nice thick material, and fits just right, maybe erring on the side of tight around his shoulders. Bakugou comes back, cocks his eyebrow at the jacket but doesn’t say anything.

He throws a drink at Kirishima and starts walking back to the dorms. Kirishima smiles at the warm coffee in his hands and runs to catch up, launching into a story about a kitten, a tree, and a stupid idea.

‘Can we drop by the gym? I think I left my jacket there,’ Ojiro says to Tenya as they walk towards the main entrance. Tenya had expressed his desire to go out for a walk, and Ojiro, who’d been in earshot, had decided to tag along, having felt cooped up from sitting inside the dorm building all day. Iida agrees enthusiastically and they begin walking to the gym, passing Kirishima and Bakugou on the way.

It isn’t until Kirishima is out of earshot that Ojiro realizes the guy is wearing his jacket, and when he watches the red head walk into the dorm, he decides he doesn’t really mind. He didn’t want the jacket back cause he’s feeling cold per se, he just wanted to make sure he got it back. He can pick it up from Kirishima later he decides.

‘On second thought, I think I’ll look for it later,’ Ojiro murmurs, and Iida shoots him a confused look. They start moving away from the gym, heading down a well-worn path often traversed by the students and talk about upcoming hero movies and its easy and fun and the sun is bright not harsh. It’s a perfect day for a walk.

Iida and Ojiro get surprisingly into their conversation that they don’t even notice someone is yelling at them and when the earth just sort of vanishes beneath Ojiro’s feet, he yelps out loud.

He looks over to see Iida’s eyes widened in surprise and then there’s black tendrils wrapping around their hips as they’re yanked back. Looking down, Ojiro’s stomach whoops at the wide chasm, as if at the edge of a cliff. He might’ve been super invested in his conversation with Iida, but there’s no way they missed the edge of a cliff, right? Also, was there always a cliff here? What the hell?

‘Guys.’ They look up to see Midoriya standing there, pulling them up with his black whip. He’s like a guardian angel, but he’s still not great with it so when he yanks them up, they land pretty hard on their sides, and Ojiro lands in a mysterious puddle of water, effectively soaked to the bone.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ Midoriya gushes, rushing towards them. ‘Shit, I didn’t mean to put you guys down so hard, are you alright?’

Iida gets up, fortunate enough to not have landed in a puddle of water and straightens his glasses. ‘What is going on? Where did this cliff come from?’

Midoriya shrugs. ‘The land seems to be giving out weirdly. I was out here doing some strength training and the land just crumbled away. It reappears after some time. Also, it’s not a cliff.’ He points at the spot he just pulled them from. ‘Seems like a quirk, some kind of illusion one. The land had given away and the fall is steep, but it’s not a cliff. Just looks like one.’

Ojiro’s head spins with the random assortment of info, but he has more pressing problems to deal with. His soaked shirt is making him shiver, and it feels icky against his skin.

‘Oh, you must be cold,’ Midoriya notices immediately, and before Ojiro can say he’s fine, Midoriya shrugs off his All might hoodie and holds it out for Ojiro. ‘You can pull your shirt off and use this for now! It’ll suck if you get sick.’

Ojiro almost says he’s ok, but he’s getting colder and colder and the hoodie looks so warm and inviting so he decides screw it and peels his shirt off, shuddering when the cold air nips at his skin. He quickly tries to brush off any stray droplets before tugging on the hoodie, and sighs at the warmth he’s enveloped in. Midoriya is like a furnace apparently, and it’s wonderful. He gives the green-haired man a warm smile.

‘Thanks man.’

‘No problem!’ Midoriya says. ‘I think I’ll go back to the dorms and give everyone a heads up about this, maybe tell Aizawa-sensei as well. Will you guys be ok?’

‘We will be fine,’ Iida says, hands rigidly gesticulating in the space between them. ‘Ojiro and I will survey the land around and see if there’s anything we’re missing. We will be careful, so do not worry about us Midoriya.’

Midoriya flashes them an easy smile and with a wave, he makes his way back to the dorm.

Midoriya loves that hoodie, an old All Might piece that’s a tad big for him but warm, warmer than most of his clothes. He’ll ask Ojiro for it later he decides, slowly trekking back to the dorms. The whole floor giving away and light playing tricks business seemed more silly than villainous, but anyway, it made sense to bring a teacher into the loop to deal with it accordingly.

As he walks back to the dorms, the sweat on his body cools and chills him to the bone, and Midoriya misses his All Might sweater with a vengeance. Rubbing his hands along his arms, Midoriya picks up the pace and sighs in relief when the dorms come into view. He’s maybe 150 meters away when a familiar voice calls out to him.

‘Midoriya.’

Todoroki looks comfy and fashionable in a beige coat, a white shirt, and trousers paired with semi-formal shoes. Midoriya puts it together and realizes he’s coming back from one of his hospital visits, and gives him a warm, familial smile.

‘Welcome back, Todoroki. What’s up?’

Todoroki nods at him, smile small and hesitant, but there. It’s so much progress from where they started, like he’s thawing and cracking the ice around his soul.

‘Just got back. What are you up to? And why aren’t you wearing a jacket, it’s a bit cold outside, isn’t it?’

For Todoroki, the jacket is more for show than a necessity, considering his temperature quirk. He’d once told Midoriya that by using clothing to regulate his body temp it allows him to conserve energy, but overall it wasn’t too much of an effort for him to regulate himself on the daily. It’s all so fascinating, and Midoriya has like 4 pages worth of notes on this alone.

‘It’s a long story,’ Midoriya laughs, rubbing the back of his neck. He gestures for the dorm entrance. ‘Should we head in?’

Todoroki nods again, and Midoriya starts walking, trying to find things to talk about. He knows Todoroki’s hospital visits leave him feeling a little lost, a little sad, a little drained. He’s deciding between a new hero analysis he did about Sniper and a puppy rescue video he watched on Instagram when a coat is placed over his shoulder, extra warm on the left. He startles at that, turning to look at Todoroki with wide eyes.

Todoroki acts like he’s done nothing and starts the conversation instead. ‘On the way here, in the train, I saw someone wearing a tomato costume. I am confused, to say the least.’

And they don’t speak of the jacket. Midoriya slips his hands through the sleeves, pulling it around himself tightly and laughs at the imagery in his head. Todoroki’s soul thaws a little bit more and they walk to the dorm, contemplating why anyone would be in costume outside of Halloween.

They part ways when Midoriya says he wants to talk to Aizawa, and Todoroki heads to his room in a lighter mood. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence once he talks to Midoriya. Though, if he’s being honest, that seems to be the case with most people that speak to Midoriya, with the exception of Bakugou.

Todoroki settles into his room for the evening, content with just reading his manga and maybe getting some homework done when he hears a knock on his door. Bookmarking his spot in the manga, Todoroki walks to the door and opens it to find a grinning Sero.

‘Hey man, got a minute?’

Todoroki nods, and gestures for Sero to come inside.

His friendship with Sero is strange. It’s strange because it’s effortless. Sero doesn’t push him to talk or open up, he doesn’t question him, doesn’t stare at him because of his dad, doesn’t ask about his scar or his family, doesn’t really say much at all. They share comfortable silences, and Sero shows him new music, new clothes, and new stories. Todoroki, in turn, shares his mangas, advice about training, and his love for Soba.

Sero walks into his room and sits at the low table, placing a cloth bag on it. When Todoroki sits in front of him, he pushes the bag towards him.

‘For you!’

Todoroki’s eyes shoot up in surprise and he carefully opens the bag. Inside he finds a jacket, made from a cloth that is brick red, the material cotton soft and breathable. It’s cut like a short kimono, and the patterns are simple and subtle. It looks very much like the clothing Sero normally wears, kinda bohemian.

‘Mom sent me a care package, and I think I talked about you a lot on the phone, so she included this for you as well! Apparently she found it at a nice boutique or something.’

Todoroki isn’t used to friends, much less gifts from said friends. Something inside his chest shifts, and he hugs the jacket to his chest.

‘Thank you.’ His voice shakes just the slightest bit.

Sero’s laugh is warm. ‘Try it on man! I need to take a picture and send it to my mom or she’ll think I kept it for myself.’

Todoroki pulls the jacket on slowly, and Sero whistles low.

‘Damn, looks so good! The shoulders fit nicely too. Do you like it?’

Todoroki nods. ‘It’s very comfortable. Please tell your mother I said thank you.’

‘Fo sure, fo sure. Can I get a picture?’

Todoroki is awkward as all hell when it comes to pictures, but he agrees, and Sero takes one mercifully quickly. When they both stand up, Sero walks over to him, throws an arm over his shoulder and pulls him close for another picture. Todoroki throws up a peace sign, something he’s seen the others do just to have something to do with his hands.

‘This one’s real nice!’ Sero says, admiring the photo.

‘Send it to me later.’

Sero reaches out for a fistbump that Todoroki returns. ‘Sounds good yo. I’m gonna get going, I’ll catch you later yeah?’

Todoroki nods and with that, Sero leaves his room. Todoroki belatedly realizes that the jacket smells like Sero- like sandalwood and fresh tea. Perhaps his family smells like that. The thought twists that little something in his chest even more.

Tonight is act-like-bakugou-will-only-cook-for-himself-and-eat-the-“leftovers”-that-can-somehow-feed-the-entire-class night and Sero loves to stand by the kitchen isle and contribute with his stellar sense of humor. Watching Bakugou create mini-explosions and scream bloody murder is just a bonus.

When he gets there, the blonde is already working on dinner, clad in a green hoodie that looks a lot like the one Kirishima wears. Sero takes a seat by the kitchen island and pulls his phone out to scroll through some memes when he suddenly finds himself assaulted by a face-full of glitter.

Gasping, Sero leans back in his chair and falls on his ass, the glitter coming with him. He hears shouting and laughing and someone saying You have, and please excuse my French, pretty shitty taste Monsieur and Sero is so confused.

When he pulls the lump of glitter away, he realizes it’s a jacket, a sequined jacket that’s a bright, bright gold. It’s soft in his hands, and the inner lining feels like actual silk.

‘What-‘

‘It’s Aoyama’s,’ Kirishima says, pulling Sero to his feet. ‘I got here right when Bakugou yelled you fucking walking disco ball little shit and Aoyama decided throwing the jacket was the way to go. Clearly,’ Kirishima gestures at him, ‘he missed.’

Sero laughs and holds up the jacket. He turns it in his hand and takes a closer look at the fit and the material. Considering it’s Aoyama, he shouldn’t be surprised, but the jacket is actually the perfect balance between tacky and really, really nice. Sero looks over at the two blondes yelling at each other, Bakugou brandishing a spatula while Aoyama threatens him with his navel laser and Sero just shrugs and pulls the jacket on.

It fits like a dream, comfortable on his bones, the length perfect even on his tall frame. He adjusts the sleeves and is surprised by how deep the pockets on the inside are. When he looks up again, everyone is staring at him.

Sero clears his throat self-consciously. ‘What?’

‘It looks good on you Monsieur,’ Aoyama says with an actual sparkle in his eye.

‘Damn Hanta, looking like a whole-ass meal,’ Kirishima cheers, and even Bakugou has a quirked brow. He gives him a small nod and then snorts, ‘Still looks like a shiny voltorb.’

‘I’ll take the compliment,’ Sero grins, shaking his torso this way and that. The light catches in these fun and trippy ways, and Kirishima playfully shields his eyes. Aoyama bounds over to him and winks. ‘That’s not all.’

He runs his hands up Sero’s arms, and the gold glitter turns to silver, and Kirishima squeals.

‘That’s so cool!’

Sero runs his own hand up the sides and he feels like a child again, and it’s amazing.

He looks at Kirishima. ‘Want to try drawing a penis on the back?’

Kirishima howls, Bakugou throws a spatula at Sero, and Aoyama looks rightfully horrified. He lets Sero take the jacket anyway.

Iida is not happy when he finds Aoyama in a sleeveless jersey when its cold enough to see your breath, so he lectures him for a good 4 minutes before handing over his track suit jacket. Aoyama wears it with a grumble of All my twinkling has died a painful death.

Uraraka drapes her shrug over a napping Iida sprawled across the couch after a long day, belly full of Bakugou’s amazing food. She pulls his glasses off and keeps it on the table, tucks the sleeves against Iida’s body and hopes the make-shift blanket works.

Mina thinks Uraraka’s outfit is missing something and throws a denim jacket on her from her own closet, a cute cropped piece with some artfully placed rips. Uraraka beams at it, digging her hands deep into the front pockets and posing for a picture.

Momo watches this happen and shyly offers her own chunky sweater to Mina, asking her to make an outfit around it. Mina smashes the challenge, and the end result is so good that Momo insists she keep the jacket, claiming she can honestly just make her own, even though they both know she won’t, because, you know, Momo is the most conscientious person ever that actually cares about the economy.

When the night winds down and everyone finds themselves sprawled over the couches and each other, Hagakure follows Uraraka’s example and pulls her bomber jacket off before draping it over Momo and herself, a make-shift blanket. Momo huffs out an amused laugh and pulls the invisible girl closer. The night is cold, but the common space is just warm embers and crackling fires and the smell of smores.

And finally, just before bed, Shinsou decides to tackle the mountain of clothes on his chair. He hangs the jackets, folds the pants and shirts, and rolls up the socks. At the very bottom of the pile is a well-loved, slightly faded but still ridiculously bright yellow hoodie that belongs to the one and only. Shinsou huffs in amusement, and proceeds to pull it on before climbing into bed.

The hoodie incident begins with Kaminari, as most absentminded things do in the dorm.

It doesn’t really end though.

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erazonpo3 · 3 years ago

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WOWM

so What Once Was Mine came out and I read it.

My General Thoughts are that this book was something of a rollercoaster but in like a pop up carnival with dubious safety regulations and diseases in the DIY log flume water kind of way. I had some fun reading it but I also feel like I picked up a rash.

If you're like me and you enjoy picking a book apart for morsels of interesting concepts then you might enjoy it, if you think holy shit why the fuck is a literal real historical serial killer in this book I need to see this then you might enjoy it, if you care about engaging plots and character beats then you probably won't.

If you want to ask me anything specific go ahead, but otherwise for more in depth thoughts: spoilers ahead

Basic Summary of the Plot

Okay so here's the deal. The story has the framing device of two siblings in a cancer ward, where one tells the other a story. I'll get into that later, but that's how it starts. Our actual story starts with a pretty long prologue: We learn that the King & Queen got the Moonflower thinking it was the Sunflower, Rapunzel was born with silver hair, and then baby Rapunzel kills a maid who accidentally hurt her when brushing her hair.

Oh, by the way, Max is a human man named Justin Tregsburg. Yeah.

Anyway, the royal family puts out feelers for legit witches who can safely take care of Rapunzel because the baby is too dangerous, and Gothel shows up to take her away. Queen Arianna visits Rapunzel once (but is only allowed to watch through a peephole) and decides watching another woman raise her child is too painful and throws herself into restoring the kingdom's orphanages instead.

Now we're in the present. Rapunzel is nineteen and she wants to go and see the lanterns (a mourning tradition of the Dead princess in this story). She tries to argue with Gothel but gets shut down, and Gothel makes her kill a chicken to prove the point that she can't go outside because she's too dangerous. However we as the audience already know Gothel plans to sell Rapunzel off as a bride or a servant or a weapon to some other nobles, because she's evil.

Also by the way Gothel still has access to our Sundrop Flower and is using it to live forever that's just a thing that happens in the background.

When Gothel is gone Rapunzel watches as a man (Flynn) stores a satchel in a tree outside of her tower, and that motivates her to leave the tower for the first time. Then she goes back inside the tower with her prize of a crown, and a skink she found and named Pascal. Rapunezl and Gothel have another spat, and Rapunzel decides she will run off to see the lanterns and she will find Flynn and make him her guide.

She ends up at the Snuggly Duckling and she doesn't find Flynn but she does find Gina, a young career criminal girl looking to break the glass ceiling. Gina agrees to help her find Flynn. They find Flynn, and he agrees to help guide Rapunzel to see the floating lanterns for a split reward of the crown with Gina.

The Snuggly Duckling gets burned down by Countess Bathory (yes that Elizabeth Bathory) and the Pub Thugs are pissed about it and also they're helping Rapunzel even though she didn't sing the I've Got A Dream song don't worry about it. We learn that the nobles that wanted to buy Rapunzel are now hunting her down so she can go to auction.

Gina takes them to her adopted mother's cottage. Gina's mother is a white witch, who goes by the name of Goodwife. She doesn't get an actual name she's just The Goodwife. Anyhow, the cottage is a magic safe space (for now) and Goodwife teaches Rapunzel that her hair isn't inherently evil and may not even be all that deadly! Rapunzel learns that her hair has other powers too, like the ability to turn skink Pascal into a sentient Chameleon. Yeah.

Also Goodwife tells Rapunzel she's the dead princess but this isn't like, an immediate call to action. Not a lot happens until we get this story's version of the Mother Knows Best Reprise where Gothel finds Rapunzel again but has to flee, but this Rapunzel has a bigger support network and isn't buying it. Flynn and Gina decide the safest course of action is to bring Rapunzel to the castle, but along the way she gets kidnapped by the Countess.

Gothel is pissed because she still wants the money for Rapunzel, so she rallies the armies of all the opposing bidders. Flynn and Gina convince Max the Man to send for his troops, and he joins them in going to the enemy castle. Flynn tries to sneak in, gets caught, and meanwhile there's a bloody battle out the front between the noble armies. Max jumps into the fray, Gina turns around and rallies the Pub Thugs.

Rapunzel uses her shrinking magic (!) to disappear half the castle and escape with Eugene, and the Pub Thugs arrive and basically end the battle. The Captain is dying but it's okay! Rapunzel turns him into a horse :) Also Rapunzel sees Gothel and tells her to fuck off.

The story ends with a tearful reunion between Rapunzel and her parents, Eugene and Gina are implied to be biological siblings, and things are good but of course in direct parallel to Cass Gina leaves at the end to become an adventurer. The end.

(There are a few other smaller plot beats, but you get the idea.)

MY THOTS

So here are my thoughts™.

Framing Device

I'll just state that I didn't like that the story was told via the vehicle of an older brother telling his 16 year old sister a different version of the Tangled Movie in a cancer ward. From what I've heard it also isn't normal for the Twisted Tales series to use a framing device for the AUs either.

I sympathise with the author's personal story, of course I do. That doesn't mean I'm stirred with compassion every time the flow of the story is interrupted to remind you to be sad because this is a story being told to a girl sick with cancer. It feels more than a little tragedy-porny rather than emotionally touching, and maybe that's because I'm too burnt out on real life tragedy to waste emotional energy on fictional cancer patients but we don't need to do Fault In Our Stars discourse again.

Real World References

This story goes heavy with Real World references. And another issue with the framing device as above is that you do feel like this is a story being told by someone namedropping every historical figure they know which makes it harder to get into the story.

There's like... a lot of references to Christianity, particularly in the prologue. There's a priest that thinks Rapunzel's hair is the work of the Devil or whatever. It's a lot. The Patriarchy is a thing. And that's not even getting into the Countess. I put it very succinctly in my notes so I'll paste it here:

I wish she’d just been an OC who could exist to chew scenery because the fact that she was a literal historical serial killer is super. Off putting. Like, she could have been an obvious reference to Bathory, but it feels like Miku Binder Hamilton levels of uncomfortable to me.

I miss Lady D.

Which basically sums up my problem with trying to take the setting of Tangled and put it somewhere in the Real World and somewhere on the Timeline. Who thought this was a good idea.

Misc. Thoughts

So, I used the five highlighter colours my ipad allows to organise my thoughts and organised them accordingly: Yellow for out of place IRL references, Blue for worldbuilding/character points that aren't plot relevant but still interesting, Pink for when something I find personally amusing happens, Purple for when the story feels like it's trying to 1-up the movie in some kind of way and Green for Heterosexual Nonsense. I'll touch on those last two in the Character sections but be prepared.

Also: for a book about giving Rapunzel killer hair, her hair isn't very dangerous. I wanted to see Rapunzel kill someone, and I'm disappointed that I didn't.

Characters

I'll do a deep dive into my thoughts about the characters before wrapping it up. I'm starting with Gina because she's honestly the easiest to get through.

Gina

Gina is a new character introduced for the story. She's a young woman trying to make it as a career criminal but keeps hitting that glass ceiling. So here's the down low, for all those who want to know: Gina is basically Cass, only not really. She's implied to be Eugene's biological sister, as previously mentioned, but you can imagine she's Cass the entire way through without breaking your immersion because if you imagined Cass if she were adopted by a Goodwitch rather than the Captain and had a looser, more wilderness survivor than trainee guard upbringing then you get Gina.

I liked Gina! I think she's fun as her own character too, and her best moments are when she's interacting with her mother Goody Goodwife, and she of course picks up a natural sibling rivalry with Eugene, but I was disappointed with how little she really bonded with Rapunzel because she needed to make room for Eugene and Rapunzel's romance.

Rapunzel

Okay, here's our protagonist. There's a notable effort to make Rapunzel more active in her destiny and whatever, and sometimes it works but sometimes it doesn't. I was worried they'd try to go full butt-kicking girlboss with her but I was pleasantly surprised that Rapunzel was pretty useless in most scenes, genuinely love to see it.

With a more intimate look into Rapunzel's psyche through the medium of prose, we see Rapunzel really questioning Gothel's behaviour even before she leaves the tower, and while I appreciate that she can develop her own cynicism I feel it starts unnecessarily early. This is my purple colour; the movie needs to be "fixed" by showing the readers that this Rapunzel is quicker to distrust Gothel. She's also quicker to hatch a plan to go outside of the tower on her own, and she makes a plan to make Flynn her guide for the lanterns even though he never stumbles upon her in the tower- and even though she has a perfectly rational reason not to trust him which is that he is a stranger and a Wanted Thief.

In the moments where it does work is when Rapunzel is surrounded by her new support network: Flynn, Goodwife and Gina, who encourage her to question Gothel's sincerity, and Rapunzel comes up with her own defences for Gothel so that she can poke through them herself.

I have some other thoughts about Rapunzel's hair and her powers, like how the story provides the interesting concept that her hair gets different powers with the different phases of the moon, but a lot of the powers are uhhh stupid and also I feel like it really robs the story of the whole gripping conflict of "Yes I'm Rapunzel Yes my hair kills people what of it".

In as far as just Rapunzel herself though, she still felt pretty in character nonetheless, and maybe that's all I can ask.

Flynn Rider / Eugene Fitzherbert

My boy I am so sorry. They neutered my boy.

Long story short: Eugene in this story is the sexy lamp. He contributes nothing to the plot except to be there for Rapunzel to drool over. And of course because he won't get any character development, he starts from the very beginning as a sweet soft boi with none of the Flynn Rider characterisation from the movie because we don't have time for that, he needs to be husband material stat.

His whole character is the colour green for Heterosexual Nonsense.

So, here's the problem. In the movie, there's not a lot of time for ~friendship~ between Rapunzel and Eugene because they kind of immediately see each other as a romantic prospect. And whatever, it's a movie and there's only so much time. But this book had the opportunity to take things a bit slower and instead chooses to make Rapunzel get jealous whenever Eugene and Gina interact and for her to be constantly wishing he was holding her hand.

Say what you will about Lost Lagoon, but it tells a good romance story just by virtue of not intending to be a romance story, because the author is trying to convey a strong bond between Rapunzel and Cassandra without using "and they kiss" as a cheatcode. What Once Was Mine says "he was a boy, she was a girl, could it be any more obvious?" and leaves it at that.

Now as for how this all pertains to Eugene's character? Well, it just robs him of any flavour. In the movie there's a clear distinction between Flynn and Eugene, when we learn Eugene's real name about halfway through. We see a clear difference between the Flynn we knew- kind of an asshole, wanated to drop Rapunzel off at the Snuggly Duckling and get rid of her- and Eugene, who is sincere and chooses Rapunzel as his New Dream in opposition to his Old Dream of living alone on an island with a bunch of money.

This version of Eugene is basically Eugene all the way through, because the plot doesn't really need Eugene there but he has to be there because it's a Tangled AU so there's no Rapunzel rescuing Flynn from the guards and healing his hand scene, he just loves her immediately and that's that. They have a little spat at one point but it's cleared up later and not because they actually communicate but because they kiss.

Rapunzel only learns Eugene's real name at the very end of the story, and gives a speech about how Eugene is the real him, but it's just so flat because 'Flynn' has been sincere this whole time? Anyway he does nothing of value for the entire story except be there for Rapunzel to lust after. Eugene I'm so sorry.

Gothel

Gothel's sort of the Big Bad and is characterised as an abusive asshole, the usual. I wish there were a bit more nuance to her character but then again in this story she's not just being passively evil- taking care of Rapunzel for selfish reasons but nevertheless maintaining the status quo- she's being actively evil in trying to sell Rapunzel off.

It's notably funny that Gothel sees the Countess Bathory and is like "what the fuck".

Anyway Gothel in this story also feels very weak in part because this Rapunzel is more critical and in part because this Rapunzel has a new support network. It's for that reason the Mother Knows Best Reprise scene doesn't really work, because the original has Gothel pit Rapunzel against Eugene, whereas she can't do that here so it remains a Gothel vs Rapunzel thing.

She gets a boring death as an epilogue addendum that someone rips out the Sundrop flower, which tbh? lame. It would be a lot more fun if it were open ended but I am also preferential to Rapunzel actually using her killer hair to kill someone. Please

Captain Justin Tregsburg

It's Max. He was a human but then he got turned into a horse. what the fuck you guys

#how did you spend your day

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magicalgirlsandcerulean · 4 years ago

Text

Thanks for watching ep. 9. Here's an Uruu from Sayaka Tokunaga, who did the key frames for Uruu's transformation and was the chief animation director for the battle parts.

Details about Kusano's blog post for ep. 8 are under the cut (it's dated 24th May 2021). Spoilers below, including some previously-mentioned tweets from Hishida and Ishikawa.

Hishida says:

Ｆ蘭８話でテーマになったやりがい搾取っていうのは、僕らアニメ業界でも切実な問題だったりしますね。園長みたいな奴、マジでGO to Hell！ッス。

社会派監督なんでついこんな事も呟く

"F-Ran ep. 8's theme is about job satisfaction exploitation, so it's a pertinent issue for us in the anime industry. People like the childcare centre director can really GO to hell!"

"Why is the socially-aware director only now tweeting this sort of thing?"

Ishikawa says:

F蘭丸７話人工呼吸～打ち合わせで怒り憎しみ８割、キスへの興味２割結果８話で首絞められるというね、しかし、焔は自分のしらない所でキスをされ首を絞められてるという～(/´△`＼)なんという…

"F-Ran ep. 7's CPR ~ In the preparatory meeting, it was meant to be 80% hatred and 20% interest from the kiss, with the result being the strangling in ep. 8, but Homura doesn't even know he's being kissed and strangled~(/´△`＼) There's nothing special about it...

Hishida replies to this:

へーそうなんだ。知らんかった。僕はそんな細かい指示しない監督です。　#現場でも足蹴にされる監督

"Ehh...so that's how it is? I didn't know. I'm not a director which gives that kind of precise directions. #DirectorIsBeingTreatedBadlyEvenOnSite

(Some of Hishida's tweets reveal this "director is being treated badly" hashtag is a running joke of his. He's even monopolised the tag, based on a request from a fan.)

Now, on to the blog post proper:

The title of the post is こわっぱこわっぱ〜！そうだそうだ〜！な樹果回 which doesn't translate well, but こわっぱ is a derogatory term meaning "brat" or "youth". However, the important thing to note is Kowappa kowappa! is also what the leaves at the start of the episode were shouting, so it's meant to be cute and not derogatory. Therefore the translation would be something like "Juka's Episode: Kowappa kowappa~! Yeah, yeah~!"

That had to be explained because Kusano starts with こわっぱ instead of a proper greeting (highly likely to have been used in place of こんばんは, based on the similar sounds and the time the episodes air).

Kusano starts by asking how ep. 8 was and he wrote as much as he wanted. He then puts a spoiler warning.

A part:

Homura's alive.

As explained, the leaves are yelling "Kowappa kowappa!" as they revive (?) Homura. Kusano finds this cute and wants people to yell it out at a screening event (one where people are encouraged to cheer to participate).

Even in this kind of emergency situation, they still have to gather attachment...really, fairy errands are scary. Kusano notes Takara is being sketchy and knows something, but he's interested (in finding out what Takara knows).

Juka's flashback scene: We get to see the Arbor Clan's world and it's a fairytale world. Juka's father is amazingly kind, but he looks a bit like a carrot. Kusano giggled at the thought of this.

This time's person who has to be helped is Aru, who works at a childcare centre. Juka's helping with something unexpected, so Takara immediately makes a joke out of it.

Kusano admits he did the voice of the smol Juka.

In the other room is...Uruu?! To get to the point of strangling someone...what's he doing?! The audience gets a better indication of what's going on with this and then Ranmaru intervenes (literally, "saviour Ranmaru"). Kusano notes Ranmaru's ability to sense danger is amazingly high (so much so that he goes "nice!" with a thumbs-up emoji).

When the scene changes, we go to HOTEL Tsubo CLUB. That's the "tsubo" quota checked off. Kusano thinks the childcare centre director's thoughts are insane...or rather, being a host was fun. Each member of Go to Heaven voiced their favourite host.

B part:

Time to dig potatoes. Juka's the youngest, but he's good at taking care of people, huh?

Aru is working her hardest, even though she's in a black childcare centre (<- play on black company). Kusano's chest tightened (<- in an emotional sense) when he saw Aru trying her best and then there was the line 「誰のことも傷つけちゃ駄目なら、自分のことだって傷つけちゃ駄目なんだよ。」 (CR translation: "It's good to work hard to keep others safe, to make sure you never do harm.") Kusano was emotionally touched by this scene.

Then the transformation!! So, Juka! Go and help Aru! (Yeah! Yeah! Yayyyyyyyyyy!) (Again, this feeds back into why I translated the title.)

Juka's clothes melted away. Kusano notes that's a bit perverted. Juka's in a pinch and it seems like he'll be melted, but he revives himself. Kusano thought, "Isn't Juka really strong?" End with "Go to heaven!!!" and the director collapsing without much incident.

To Bar F. Uruu asks his question to Homura (*cue police light emoji and relevant sound effect*), Homura's answer shocks Uruu and Takara gets flustered. Will everything be wrapped up okay in 4 episodes...?

Later developments:

The director got dismissed from her position. Kusano thinks it's really nice that Aru's doing better, now she's gone.

Aru: 「お芋は新聞に包んで持ち帰りましょうね〜！」 (CR translation: "Now let's wrap [the potatoes] in newspaper and take them home!")...hmm? It's the newspaper with the article about the director's dismissal?! Aru did [such a daring thing]. Kusano feels as if Aru's somehow gotten a bit stronger [from that ordeal].

Juka also receives a bit of praise for being part of the Arbor Clan. He's matured a bit again. Kusano wants to protect Juka from now on as well.

Juka: 「でも、やっぱカッコよくなりたいな〜。」 (CR translation: "But...I still wish I could be cooler!") Juka's foundation (i.e. his wanting to be "cool", instead of "cute") never changes, which is also part of his appeal.

Next episode: Apathy. At last, a man who's trendy on Twitter appears?!?! Look forward to it!

Takara's comment for this post matches his previous joking: 「普段から園児の格好でもええんやで～」 ("It's okay, even if you normally look like a kindergartener~.)

Update: It turns out the hashtag may be a reference to a book called 現場で求められる声優 (roughly "Voice Actors Are Requested On Site") and going back through the hashtag's history reveals it originally lacked the も (thereby making it closer to the book name), so I changed the hashtag translation appropriately. Also added a bit of history regarding that hashtag (since the tag that asks Hishida to monopolise the tag is the first tweet to add も).

Update 2: It also turns out "arbour" is not a word meaning "tree", but it's a thing that supports trees. Google-sensei has more details. Thus, I changed "arbour" to "arbor" (no extra U) so then it does mean "tree".

#Fairy Ranmaru #Fairy Ranmaru spoilers #Masakazu Hishida #Tetsuya Ishikawa #Sayaka Tokunaga #(The way Kusano broke the post up meant it was easier to navigate than usual...might use this format for later eps.)#(Today's translations also went unnaturally well...)#(...I hope this means I've gotten better at my craft...)#Uruu Seiren #(Note to self: This post took 2 hrs including accidentally posting just the tweets and pre-cut content and having to redo it.)

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