#like i also love web of fear but i think i'd rather get a part of a fully missing thing back than the last piece of a partially missing

[bookishjules]

Hi Jules,

Saw your post about RWBY. I have seen up through V8. PLEASE tell me all your hot takes. (If they’re anything like your sohae analyses then they’re going to be immaculate). <3

omg welcome to the list of followers i know watch rwby!! (it's a small list, but it's also one of my favorites hehe) idk that i have any esp hot takes?? but i'd love to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently..?

that thing is the schnee family... i personally am a huge sucker for the mechanics and evolution of family dynamics and how each individual functions within and outside of it. and aside from the belladonnas, whose family web has a third of individual relationships as the schnees, weiss's family is really the only one we get the privy of seeing in totality?? which i think is really interesting considering they are also the most public family of any of our mcs--even pyrrha, who was more known for her own name than her family's.. but i digress.

so much of the character of the schnee family really is based around that public persona, the facade they each present to the world. while we aren't very familiar with the former heads of the family, or of the sdc, i'm still inclined to believe a lot of this attitude was brought to the family by jacques, who has been acting since day one. he acted like he was in love. he donned the schnee name. he dyed his hair white. he swept willow aside, took her family's legacy from her, and then spent the rest of his life pretending like he deserved to be where he was and manipulating people into playing along. and of course behind every facade is something worth hiding. for jacques i think there was a lot of insecurity and fear there--youthful desperation that he was never quite able to move past because of his choice to take the cheater's way to the top.

willow, on the other hand, seems to move through life with a lot more vulnerability--loving jacques. loving their children. i'm sure there's probably an amount of safety and security growing up as a schnee heiress that resulted in her never having to form that shell that jacques did, but that's exactly why he was able to get into the power position in their relationship, and making it so she just gave up when jacques showed his cards to her, bc she didn't have anything up her sleeves.

and i think its really interesting to consider the kids growing up in this climate.. each of them learning in their own ways what parts of themselves to control and diminish vs. which strengths were valuable to play to. even with both winter and weiss stepping out from their father's control, the effects of their upbringing still follows them. they saw the powerless position their mom was reduced to because she didn't demand respect the way their father did, she didn't walk into a room with the air of the most important person in it, at least not within the confines of their family--because why would she? meanwhile, jacques, who viewed their relationship as nothing more than a stepping stool, a business transaction, would have maintained that facade and that attitude no matter how intimate the setting. and of course both girls would notice and internalize that at a young age. we see it in weiss, especially during the beacon arc. and even winter's choice to become a soldier, and then her ability to move herself up to the top of ironwood's ranks... they wanted to escape the pressure of their father's thumb, but they just carried his lessons with them, adapting them to their own lives. school and the army. and then that's something they need to unlearn. or rather.. they need to learn to tap into the heart they inherited from their mom as well, to fight against the fear of weakness and collapse that they associate with softness. it's in much of weiss's arc throughout the series, and we see it in winter as well as we reach the end of the 8th volume and she's struggling between her personal beliefs and ironwood's as he continues to devolve. without the rules and control that ironwood brought, winter is then forced to tap into her heart.

whitley on the other hand... whitley fascinates me. since he was younger than both his sisters, he would have had less time to see their mom as her genuine self before she lost herself to depression, paranoia, and alcoholism. for whitley, the only option was to be like his father, which only makes it harder for him to see the distinction between who he is and the controlled front he presents to others. his relationship with weiss, his small bits of character development we've seen so far, are so important to me, because it really shows the possibility for all three of these kids to grow beyond the trauma that perpetuated within the walls of their icy mansion. even down to the one who suffered the worst of it all by himself. willow once told weiss not to forget about her brother, so i refuse to stop projecting hope in his direction.

[avariceaside]

SPACE VAST OC GANG!!!! please share more about Gracie I'd love to compare :3

Yeah!! Another Vast Oc for the pile!!

Hoo boy where do I start with Gracie. I think she'd have always been a bit obsessed with the space and the ocean as a kid, and become an avatar after nearly drowning on a open ocean diving trip with her parents. She went a bit too deep (fell into a Vast area) and ran out of oxygen, but was just like "eh, worse ways to die. I'll admire the ocean in my final moments" and kinda just, accepted the Vast. Idk how to really put it. It kinda filled a longing in her, a void in her soul that yearned for the endless expanses and infinite blues I think is the best way to say it.

Overall she's pretty carefree, and just uses her powers to chill in the void and/or infinite sky, while occasionally throwing some poor dude into the Vast. I think her favorite would be scaring divers by just chilling underwater in normal clothes way deeper than people should be, or doing the same thing to astronauts but that doesn't really get to happen that often. One time Simon Fairchild got to a victim before her and she still holds a grudge. (She uses his money to pay for uni and other assorted things as 'payback')

Physically when she's not using her powers her hair moves in the air slightly more than normal, almost floating, and her eyes are a very light blue. She also usually wears hoodies/ comfy clothes. When she is using her powers her eyes can shift from an almost glowing bright blue to an endlessly deep blue, like deep space or the depths, and her hair whips around like its in intense wind. Being around her kinda feels like when you're in between sleeping and awake and youre just starting to dream, but then it feels like you trip and you jerk awake, but constantly.

She also has a girlfriend! Her name is Jackie and she's an avatar of the web. They met in high school after Gracie came back from her trip. Jackie was already an avatar and decided to help show her the ropes. They started dating after they started university, which is coincidentally how they got involved with the archives. They needed to get some statements for a project (and bother Elias) and it snowballed into them hanging around and being cryptic at Jon and the others.

Jackie usually keeps her hair up, with one side of her head shaved, and a pink streak in the other. Her eyes are a really deep brown, and when she uses her powers they shift to a bright red. She can also open 6 other eyes, or form more arms, as well as being able to create/ see the threads that connect others and manipulate them. While Gracie is a bit ambivalent towards feeding her fear, seeing it more as a necessity to keep the powers that make her 'whole", Jackie enjoys creating fear and toying with others, even when she doesn't really need to.

Overall I'd say they're rather attached to humanity, and were pretty disturbed by the whole Eyepocalypse, and they definitely tried to help Jon and Martin undo everything. (Although I will say Jackie probably had a little more fun with the whole thing, and Gracie probably didn't hate every part of it soooo).

After the Eyepocalypse they lost their powers and kept a low profile during what I'd imagine would be avatar hunts (if the Simon Fairchild comment was anything to go by), before starting a YouTube channel to boost their image. Jackie is the face and Gracie is the camera and nothing ever goes wrong. They for sure never try and film at a place suuuper connected to the Fears like, say, Hilltop Road, and they for sure don't get pulled into an alternate dimension. No siree!

There's probably a lot more rattling around in my brain about those two, but I think those are the broad strokes. I also realized I've done a shockingly small amount of digital art of the two, so I guess I'll just put what I can scrounge around under the read more because this post is pretty long already :p

ALSO! Thank you so much for sending the ask! If you can't tell I love to talk about my little guys lol

them <3

[galacticlamps]

So I finally just saw the Fury From the Deep animation, and I’m just gonna go ahead and pop some very random and unconnected thoughts on it here

I don’t know why, because I didn’t think this when I saw Macra or Faceless Ones, but I’m really curious what this one would look like in black & white. Maybe it’s because there were more reds & warm tones in it than I expected - I hadn’t noticed I gave it a color palate in my head but I guess the foam/seaweed/north sea aesthetic just got me thinking everything was gray and blue and green lol - but most of the sets seemed much darker and larger than I’d imagined as well, which made them look less clinical and more atmospheric, I guess, but I’d still be interested to see it once without color.

I think there was a calendar that said 1975? I wonder why they updated it? Surely not just to throw some pics of the Master in the background, they did that in the Faceless Ones and that’s definitely set in ‘66.

I found it funny how the animators went out of their way to devise a staging of the scene with Jamie standing on the Doctor’s shoulders that would protect their little cartoon guy from getting upskirted, while the telesnaps seem to imply no one in 1968 was as worried about being polite with the real actors.

I completely forgot the Harrises lived at no. 420. In fact, when I first saw that on their door, I thought it was a joke the animators tossed in and I was surprised they were allowed to be that blatant - but then Maggie said the number in a line of dialogue and I had to go to google to try and figure out if Victor Pemberton could have been trying make the joke himself - but everything I saw says 420 only became a byword for “the weed” in the ‘70s, which just goes to show you, good science fiction really does predict the future! Of all the serials, right?

Weirdly, I think this is the animation that I missed the actors’ movement in the most. I know the Second Doctor has a lot of physicality that must be missing from any animated episode, but here you’ve also got scenes like the one where Maggie Harris is sick and her husband’s all distressed, and even though I know why the characters are mostly standing still, it’s hard to not laugh a little at how stilted that can feel. But of course right after that, they managed to make it  more dynamic again with those dutch angles and the sharp cuts between her and the weed on the patio, so I guess they were also looking for ways to make it feel less static, and it’s nice to see the animation actually adding something other than pure watchablity - at least in this kind of animation, where it’s not meant to look like a shot-for-shot remake like with the Moonbase or Reign of Terror.

Maybe the stupidest thing I liked about it was seeing more of the Harris’s house - I realize it’s a silly thing to worry about but I think the novelization made a point of mentioning how small and simple it was & somehow that made me feel a little bad that Victoria was going to live with them if they were hard up for space already, but they’ve got a nice house and I’m sure she thought so too.