#like i get wanting to 'reform' him into a person who can actually maintain friendships bc

[naggingatlas]

honestly i adore how openly hysterically depressed spamton is like hell yea let this man scream about how he feels like he's dying every day on main and hates everyone and everything in this world he deserves it (he doesn't its just funny)

[ikevamp-shrine]

Thank you @yanderepuck​ for giving me the courage to post this😊❤

Please ignore the crappy drawing of her, but that's kinda what she appears like in my mind. I will be writing with her character in future posts.

Name: Elizabeth Tudor

Vampire Type: Lesser Vampire

Height: 5’4

Birthday: September 7th

Occupation: Former Queen of England

Appearance: 

Long, curly (and extremely thick) strawberry blonde hair, fair skin, red lips, and intense icy blue eyes. Her stance is strong, regale, and respectable. Her skin is littered with smallpox scars (only a few, very unnoticeable ones residing on her face, neck, and hands). Her expression is usually blank and unreadable. Her movements are controlled and polite. Her brows thick and stomach soft. Legs long and fingers thin and graceful. There are patches of freckles on her shoulders that mix with her scars causing a unique blend of color. Thick thighs and pale, maintained feet. Smaller breasts.

Childhood:

When her brother, Edward, was born from her father and his new wife, Catherine, her line to the throne was pushed back even further (she was declared third in line). Thankfully she was not neglected instead her father, known for his cruelty, treated all his children with affection and love. She became very close with her half brother and was said to be inseparable. She was also very close with and benefited from the love her step mother, Catherine, showed her.

When her brother, Edward, was born from her father and his new wife, Catherine, her line to the throne was pushed back even further (she was declared third in line). Thankfully she was not neglected instead her father, known for his cruelty, treated all his children with affection and love. She became very close with her half brother and was said to be inseparable. She was also very close with and benefited from the love her step mother, Catherine, showed her.

She was taught a rigorous education normally only given to male heirs and was applauded for her perseverance and memory. She became fluent in French and Italian which profited when conducting diplomacy years later. Her involvement with the Reformation shaped the course of the nation, but she held no interest in religion.

With her father’s death, her step mother married the lord high admiral, Thomas, which resulted in his decapitation due to his intent to rape and impregnate Elizabeth forcing her to marry him in order for him to rule the kingdom. He was said to be overly flirtatious and acting inappropriately familiar with the young girl when around her (which one of the reasons she doesn’t like Arthur, his flirtatious nature reminds her of her past).

She was raised around sexism and taught that women were likely to act on impulsion and passion making them unfit to rule. Men were taught the arts of war and told they are the ones who dominate women while women were urged to keep their head down, mouth shut, and attend their needlework. She had remained unmarried, her want to remain single overshadowing any thoughts of seeking out relations with a man. She was rumored to have burst out in tears when Queen Mary, her older sister, had proposed to marry Elizabeth to a duke. This became a national concern when Elizabeth became queen and refused to take a husband, going against the belief that a woman’s place was a wife. It also raised worries that she would die childless, ending her bloodline, and giving Elizabeth’s title to Mary, Queen of Scots, a catholic posing a threat to the Protestants of England.

Dislikes: 

her privacy being intruded on, loud talking, 3am, those who play weak and stupid or whine to get what they want, people who are lazy but still expect to reach their goals, women who chase men and believe they need a man to be successful in life, messy rooms, fake personalities and cheaters (in both games and relationships)

Likes: 

walks in the garden at midnight, the sound of the birds singing their life’s song as the warmth of the day’s first rays of sun trace her skin, reading, learning new things, burning candles, smiling faces, happy children, the smell of freshly baked bread, warm blankets, animals, the laughter of children, hunting, dancing, and horseback (bareback more often than naught)

Personality: 

She appears cold at first because of her bluntness and blank (almost annoyed) expression. Unreasonably serious with a strong sense of duty, responsibility, and morals. She is a firm believer in working harder than everyone else to achieve greatness. A highly intelligent woman that believe women are equal to their male counterpart. Extremely stubborn in a non-disrespectful way. She is adaptable, disciplined, dignified, and confident with a wit and tongue as sharp as, if not sharper, than any of the residents. She is blunt, doesn’t sugarcoat the truth, and is always honest. Focused, logical, and exceedingly loyal to those she decides to put her trust in. She is protective and straightforward but rather quiet. She tends to keep to herself. She is paranoid and distrustful when meeting new people but will not show it. She tries to work on it, but she can be very vengeful when it comes to people betraying her or hurting those she loves.

Preferred company: 

Theo, Leonardo, Isaac, Jean, Vincent

Relationships (platonic, romantic, etc.):  

Jean- platonic with a chance of something more

Has a deep understanding with Jean. They don’t really talk about each other to each other; their conversations mainly consist of stiff, dead toned jokes that you wouldn’t be able to tell they were jokes until specified. She is one of the few people that has actually seen a sober Jean smile. He is extremely protective of her and will stand behind her just so he has the peace of mind that her back is guarded. If she asked, he would show her what is under his eye patch, no matter what lingering emotions he has on the ‘ugliness under the fabric’. His blade is always ready, his mind perfectly clear, when it comes to the safety and well being of the woman he had found himself connecting to in ways no one had before. Often, they go horse back riding together, Napoleon will sometimes accompany but its only when her and the former solider are alone does she throw her head back, her laughs unrestrained while the wind rips through her hair and clothing. Jean will race her and chuckle at how free she looks, but of course she doesn’t hear. Spares with and helps better the woman’s defenses and attacks along with Napoleon  

Mozart- platonic

Sometimes Mozart look for her and demand Elizabeth to listen to his new piece until she raises an eyebrow, daring him not to correct his wording. He’ll swallow thickly and glance off to the side, a scoff on his lips as he apologizes. She’ll nod and follow him to music room. Mozart will stare at her impatiently until she gives her honest (and extremely blunt) opinion. He values her words and while alone the pianist will replay the slight quirk of her lips as she praised his efforts. He has a small obsession with her and it drives him insane

Vincent- brotherly platonic and Theo- they horny for each other but don’t want to cross that line of friendship so they dance around their feelings while making out every once in a while

Has a soft spot for Theo and Vincent because their relationship makes her think of her brother. She only sees Vincent as a brother and will only allow him to do her makeup when he asks to, but with Theo its completely different. She sees Theo as a partner, a man she shares many values and goals with. She respects him and their shared opinions on responsibility and productivity. They understand each other intuitively and can conversate with just fleeting touches and quick glances of their eyes. There is a thick sexual tension that builds between them overtime resulting in hurried, frantic, sloppy kisses in hallways where the couple battle for dominance by pushing each other against walls and gripping roughly at the other’s clothing

Napoleon- just housemates (not friends or lovers)

She can and usually feels uncomfortable when around Napoleon. She has chalked it down to the fact they are both the leader ‘alpha’ types that ruled enemy lands. Truly, they just don’t have much in common and find it hard to build a meaningful relationship. Spares with and helps better the woman’s defenses and attacks along with Jean

Arthur- just housemates

Can sometimes get too snippy with Arthur. While she does find enjoyment in his jokes at times, she despises the sexual aspects of the author. Finds his skirt chasing habits understandable but disgusting. Admires his intelligence but can’t stand how he is able to tell you where have been just by the dust on your hand (she likes her privacy). Will play chess and pool with him even though she knows she will lose just because she enjoys playing. Will sometimes have deep conversations with Arthur in front of the fire place, both nursing a glass of alcohol, their eyes never leaving the fire as to not break the imaginary protective barrier around the two that eye contact will shatter. Smirks at his quirks and jokes sometimes and it literally makes Arthur’s heart leap because ‘damn a queen just found amusement in my joke.’ He internally freaked out the first time he met her mainly because the mansion now had two previous rulers instead of one and the newest one scared the living daylights out of him.

Comte- there is nothing between them

Doesn’t trust Comte as far as she can throw him. She can see the darkness in his heart and his past behind his eyes. She can see the death he’s caused- the pain, and while she knows that she, herself, has caused the death of many, she still has a deeply rooted gut feeling telling her to stay away from the pureblood. He wants her trust but soon realizes her opinion on him is similar to Jean’s. She will not take any gifts other than what is necessary from him (ex. Dresses for parties)

Dazai- just housemates

Dazai tries avoiding her. He feels suffocated when around and the victim of her stare. He feels as if her eyes and actions pick him apart and leave his in his barest, rawest form, and it scares him to no end. She does find his window habit hilarious though and will give him a hand up when he falls

Shakespeare- they don’t get involved with each other

She can tell Shakespeare’s mind is being manipulated, by what is the question she has yet to reveal though. She can tell he is dangerous. One who’s actions are watched and controlled by another always are. His unpredictable nature and mysterious, secret filled smile is what causes her to feel uneasy around him. She doesn’t ignore him, but she doesn’t want to be involved with the playwright and his actions so she tends to just quietly leave the room when he enters. He is polite to her and compliments her when they do talk but his fancy wording sometimes annoys Elizabeth, especially when she just wants to get away from him. She believes he is a good man at heart lead astray by forces more powerful than him, but still finds his company rather unnecessary. 

Sebastian- they respect one another, are not friends but have decent conversations

Has an interesting relationship with Sebastian. She wouldn’t call him a friend, she has very few of those so it is understandable, but she does respect him for his work ethic just as he respects her for her accomplishments and standing in history. She let him interview him once and nearly laughed out loud from how excited he got. They always have a cup of coffee or tea in the morning together, Elizabeth not quite woken up yet so they sip in comforting silence. Sebastian usually asks how she slept and she responds by telling him about her dreams if she had one. She’ll end up helping him cook breakfast.

Leonardo- friends with a chance of something more

Elizabeth appreciates Leonardo’s straightforwardness and honesty, so they have a decent trusting relationship, but his matureness makes her feel like a little girl again and it bothers her. Her thoughts tend to be: she was a queen; she ruled a country with a strength that rivaled even the greatest men, she should not look at this chain-smoking man with admiration in her eyes like a giddy school girl, flustered over a boy telling her she is cute, while around the Italian. The start of their relationship was rocky, due to Elizabeth’s personal feelings on the man- Leonardo could have cared less, but soon enough they started to appreciate each other’s qualities. Leonardo is mainly the only one she allows to touch her hair. They often speak Italian together on the balcony as Leonardo smoke a cigarillo and Elizabeth reads.

Isaac- they have the chance of being more than friends but their relationship is mainly just comforting one another through their presence and (when needed) touch- they also trust each other whole heartedly

Adores Isaac and will purposely sought him out just so she can listen to his calming ramblings while he tinkers away, a book in her hand and two cooling cups of coffee on the surface closest to the pair. He gets so red around her; at times he turns snow white from the intensity in her gaze and how her eyes never stray from her company. They share an endless loyalty to each other. Neither knows when the bond form, it just happened on its own (and very suddenly). Isaac has lost control and bit her but instead of reacting in anger she accepted it and pulled him closer, shuddering with each frenzied suck against her neck, her nails gently scratching the scalp of a whimpering Isaac. When Isaac finally came to his senses, he tried pulling away, his voice thick with unshed tears as his panicked words rang through the air until Elizabeth grabbed him and held him close, shushing Isaac as he trembled with regret and guilt in her arms. They had held each other for hours until they feel asleep in each other embraces. Isaac will link pinkies with Elizabeth when he is being picked on without realizing it for support and something to ground him so his thoughts don’t run too wild. Elizabeth will just glare and clear her throat and Arthur will shut his mouth while looking at the former queen as if he was a kicked puppy. She has a habit of fixing his clothing or hair after he nervously pulls, picks, or twists at it- Isaac doesn’t even notice it after a while. His face does burn intensely though when she places a hand on his overactive, bouncing knee when he is anxious.

Fun facts:

Due to her makeup being poisoned by her undetermined enemy, which resulted in her death, she refuses to wear any cosmetics other than what Vincent personally makes (learned how to from Leonardo) and puts on her skin himself when going to events if he asks to.

She tends to wear clothing that covers all skin other than her neck and face when leaving the mansion due to children being scared by her smallpox scars.

She usually never strays from wine unless her emotions become a little too overwhelming for her to just push the feelings down, only then will she drink something stronger.

Elizabeth is a quiet, peaceful drunk that tends to curl up on the couch, her shoes discarded on the floor, her hair loose and flowing over the decorative pillow she’ll grab and hug tightly to her chest.

She died a virgin and has remained one ever since her resurrection.

The former queen is hesitant to allow others to touch her hair from her past concerning the loss of said strands (a result of surviving smallpox), but if she trusts someone enough and knows they’ll be gentle she’ll let them style the curls, even if she is tense the entire time.

Prefers to braid her hair herself and wrap in into a bun due to the protective nature of the style.

Loves sleeping in but is often unable to due to insomnia.

She is highly particular when it comes to cleaning and organization. She has told Sebastian not to worry about cleaning her things or doing her laundry, instead she does it herself with up most focus and determination.

When she does open up or is around the boys long enough, they realize her heart is truly kind and nurturing instead of what she appears when first met (a cold-hearted woman with a resolve like steel). This is especially apparent when around animals.

She is very sarcastic and doesn’t mean any harm but usually her joking words sound hateful due to her dead tone and blank face.

Her voice is deeper and soothing, most times holding no emotion which creeps Dazai and Arthur out

Lives by “no pain no gain”

Doesn’t waste her breath on hate- if she doesn’t like someone or feels as if she can’t trust them then they just don’t exist to her. She won’t hesitate to cut someone off without warning.

Has a bad habit of bottling her emotions which causes her to explode when pushed over the edge resulting in one of the very rare moments where her anger creates an electric static in the room that demands the attention of anyone present. She doesn’t shout or scream but her words are sharper than a blade, her eyes burn with a fiery rage while she takes control of the room, overwhelming anyone (even Napoleon) and making them feel as if they are an ant beneath her boot.

Her eyes freak many people out- they feel as if the ice like orbs are staring straight into their soul, picking apart their insides, leaving nothing but shredded organs and an empty husk of what used to be a strong mind.

Can always tell when someone is lying. It’s a gut feeling, and her gut is always right.

She still wears her coronation ring on her wedding finger as a sign of her symbolic marriage to her people and country

[cosmidoodles]

finally whipped up a relationship chart for my camp camp high school AU that took me a lot longer than i anticipated, here’s what it looks like:

below are descriptions for each relationship

Dating

Liz and Petrol have been dating since their sophomore year. They’re madly in love with each other and went even as far as discussing marriage and parenthood.

[Shown in Related Category]

Kevin and Charity (Cute Waitress) have been dating for a bit over a year and are currently living together. The two met after Kevin got his act together and applied for a job at the same restaurant Charity worked at. Their love for each other is transformative.

Bonquisha and Jacob are happily married to each other and are raising Celine together.

David and Gwen are married (have been for about 3-4 years). They first started officially dating after David adopted Max and after a year, David decided to propose. During his proposal, Gwen felt sick and the two realized they were pregnant. They then got legally married and Gwen gave birth to their twin children, Willow and Rowan. They never had an official wedding.

Crush

Max has a crush on Nikki that he doesn’t want to act on in favor of their friendship, luckily Nikki is oblivious to all the clues.

Neil and Erin have a crush on each other but have yet to confess to each other. Neil occasionally tries to make a move but often fails or makes it very awkward. Meanwhile, Erin is very aware of Neil’s feelings but hasn’t made any moves because of Tabii’s past infatuation on him.

Nerris and Harrison have crushes on each other and still try to pretend they hate each other. This act didn’t really work as everyone thinks they’re just acting like an old married couple. Neither of them have actually owned up to their feelings.

Meli has a crush on Preston and doesn’t want to act on it because Preston doesn’t care about romance at the moment and is more focused on his passions.

Dolph has a conflicting crush on Space Kid and Space Kid is blissfully unaware of it.

Colin has a crush on Nurf but Nurf is unaware since he’s more focused on his after school plans and scholarships.

Ered and Celine have a crush on each other, Ered is more open with her attraction and flirts with Celine while Celine tries to hide her feelings and has more huffy reactions because she believes a relationship of any kind (romantic and/or platonic) is just a distraction.

Snake has a crush on Tabii but is too afraid to speak to her again after what went down between them at the Lake Lilac Summer Social. Tabii is unaware as she’s currently going through her journey of self-love.

Pikeman has feelings for Vera but she’s suspicious of his affections due to her being clueless about love and thinks he’s playing some trick on her.

Attraction

Nikki’s fascination with Ered still lives though her need to gain her validation has decreased. Ered doesn’t really notice Nikki (unless she’s hanging out with Nerris and Dolph).

Sasha is attracted to Jermy after his huge change over the years. Jermy, now gaining more self-confidence and intuition, wants nothing to do with her.

Sasha is also attracted to Max, but she’s really more attracted to the idea of him being a bad boy.

Despite not reciprocating his feelings (because he’s unaware), Nurf is aware of Colin’s existence and thinks he’s cute.

Even though he has intense feelings for Tabii, Snake is attracted to Vera. I mean, could you blame him? He likes his girls brutal and beautiful— but he respects Pikeman’s crush on her and doesn’t let his feelings wander into something stronger.

Exes

Erin and Ered were talking to each other through social media in Erin’s freshman year and Ered’s sophomore year. It stopped after Ered lost interest and ghosted her. They’ve never spoken to each other in person, but they have face timed.

Tabii and Pikeman had briefly dated for a few weeks during the summer of Tabii’s freshman year and Pikeman’s junior year. It wasn’t anything genuine as Tabii used Pikeman as a “rebound” while Pikeman was desperate to get with any girl. Their breakup was a mutual decision and agreed it wasn’t anything serious.

[Shown in Related Category]

David and Bonquisha previously dated but broke up (as you all know). They haven’t spoken to each other since the incident at the restaurant.

Ex-Crush

Tabii had an obsessive crush on Neil up until he made his disinterest clear during her freshman year (and his sophomore year).

Dolph had a crush on Ered back to when they were children. This ended by the time he reached puberty.

Erin had a crush on Snake during the Lake Lilac Summer Social and you all know how that ended haha.

Colin had a crush on Liz during their time in middle school, though his infatuation ended by the time he realized she’d never return the feelings. He never told her about this past crush.

Best Friends

Max, Nikki, and Neil are still close to this day and are often seen together. Though they have very different classes, they try to hang out with each other during lunch or passing periods and even outside of school.

Harrison and Preston grew close to each other during middle school because of their performative interests. Throughout the years, they would give each other the moral support they most often lacked in their childhood. To this day, they have contrasting schedules but Harrison decided to join stage crew as a means to hang out with Preston.

Nurf and Meli have a special bond that grew after Meli’s mother/Nurf’s therapist got them to befriend each other. When outside of their extra curriculars, they are inseparable despite being polar opposites on the surface.

Meli and Preston quickly became friends in each other’s freshman year during the fall musical-- Preston was only an understudy and often hung out in the make-up room with Meli whenever he wasn’t needed on stage (which was basically the majority of the show). Fast forward to the present, Preston and Meli are usually seen around each other during rehearsal.

After Ered and Nerris went on their journey to the abandoned half-pipe on Sleepy Peak Peak, they quickly became good friends by the time they reached high school, they became best friends.

Dolph and Space Kid have grown close over the years due to their closeness in age (much of their peers are older than them) and how they’ve always felt like outcasts ever since their childhood. They usually hang around each other and chill or Dolph uses Space Kid as his muse for his art. Space Kid also calls Dolph “Rudy” and is the only one who calls him that.

Despite their friend group drifting apart, Erin and Tabii maintained a close friendship and often confide in each other. They are typically around each other-- walking to their classes, eating lunch together, or gossiping during their free blocks.

Liz and Colin are childhood friends and are attached to the hip. They typically are around each other at school-- with Petrol third wheeling (cause y’know… he doesn’t speak)-- and outside of school.

Although there’s a gap with age and emotional maturity, Snake and Petrol have stayed right by each other’s sides throughout the years.

Friends

Nikki, Nerris, and Dolph have also maintained their friendship after all these years and occasionally hang out with each other whenever they all can.

After their decision to reside in Sleepy Peak, Dang, Hwan, and Vera have stuck together and tried to reform themselves in their new homes and have a begrudgingly sibling-like dynamic. Pikeman is still friends with Snake and Petrol to this day, though he isn’t necessarily close to them. They all hang out sometimes but it’s not often because of Pikeman’s other activities and priorities.

Meli had befriended both Harrison and Dolph through the theatre department, all three of them being a part of stage crew (Meli being in charge of makeup & costumes; Harrison, lighting; and Dolph, painting set pieces). They sometimes hang out with each other during rehearsal.

Harrison is also a part of Broadcasting Club (thinking he could show off his magic skills… oh, how he was wrong) and only hangs out with Max— they’ve surprisingly gotten along a lot better.

Throughout his high school career, Preston got to patch things up with Nurf and befriended Tabii. They’re the only actors in the theatre department who aren’t annoyed by his boisterous nature.

From their time together in the Academics Team, Neil and Erin grew a pretty solid friendship and typically try to study and practice together as an excuse to be around each other. This friendship rekindled an old crush for Neil and sparked a new one for Erin.

Liz and Space Kid are both talented singers and in advanced choir. In class and practices, they love to goof off and sing together. They sometimes hang out outside of that curriculum.

Dang had also befriended Dolph and Space Kid. He and Dolph became close through their love of art and he became acquainted with Space Kid after he volunteered to be his muse for one of his photo shoots.

Dolph and Ered maintained a friendship throughout the years as well and have an older sister-little brother dynamic (which is strange considering Dolph’s past crush on her but let’s not talk about that-).

Erin and Colin are friends as well, they met from having a class together and the two immediately clicked. They aren’t really close and only hang out in that one class they share.

Colin is also friends with Jermy, who he met from Marching Band, and the two usually discuss about that activity and sometimes hang out.

Acquaintances

Pikeman, Sasha, and Max still share a “leadership” solidarity that they grew years ago. They still act like assholes to one another but it’s clear that they all care and respect each other.

Nurf knows Petrol (both in the football team) and Snake (both are in wrestling) and occasionally talk to each other during the practices of the respective activity.

Throughout the years, Jermy drifted from the Wood Scouts (Petrol, Snake, and Pikeman) but if they ever bump into each other, they try to catch up on each other's lives.

Sasha and Vera still sometimes speak to each other but only when Sasha needs a vicious favor, though they like to talk shit about the girls at their school.

Snake and Neil sometimes talk whenever they come across each other and most often, they hype each other up or give some advice if it’s needed.

The only person that Celine can consider an “acquaintance” is Hwan and that’s mostly because they share a very similar schedule and whenever there needs to be partner work, they choose each other since they both have no friends.

Dislike

After getting her heart broken, Tabii felt bitter and immediately grew a disdain towards Neil. But hey, at least it somewhat helped her move on.

Harrison and Neil still share a rivalry— it mostly consists of Harrison purposefully saying something stupid or doing anything to tick Neil off.

Sasha still belittles Nikki whenever she gets the chance, which annoys Nikki more than anything. It should be noted that Sasha is actually envious of how despite being everything she’s against, Nikki finds herself happy and content with everything/one she has while Sasha lost her childhood friends.

Max and Celine are both in the Broadcast Club (which also happens to be the School News Club bc their school sucks ass) and are often put together— which typically ends in disaster because of their contrasting personalities but also their strikingly similar stubbornness.

Nerris and Harrison still try to pretend that they hate each other for old time’s sake. But as mentioned previously, it’s clear to everyone that isn’t the case.

Though it’s been stated that they both have feelings for each other, Celine tries to mask her emotions by putting up a bitchy and unapproachable front for Ered.

Neil and Hwan share a rivalry within the Academics Club due to how Hwan keeps putting himself in a leadership position that Neil finds to be very aggravating.

Neil also has a one-sided rivalry with Liz. Both are passionate about science and Neil, being the petty asshole he is, dislikes the fact that Liz could be better than him at his biggest passion.

Even though it’s out of his nature, Space Kid despises Vera and vice versa. Mostly because their views heavily contrast one another. 

Related

Gwen and David are parents to Max, Willow, and Rowan. Max’s relationship with his parents is very much the same as it was in the series but more loving. His relationship with his younger siblings aren’t what you’d expect— he loves them dearly and is very protective of them. He also tries his best to be a better version of himself around them.

Nikki and Neil are step-siblings after Candy decided to give Carl another shot (mostly for her own personal gain) and the two got married. However, Neil is mostly in his mother’s custody and sees his dad on the weekends. Neil and Nikki’s relationship hasn’t really changed other than the both of them gaining a new sense of brotherly/sisterly love for one another.

Jacob is Celine’s biological father while Bonquisha is her step-mother. Celine’s relationship with her dad is quite healthy and she’s considerably close to him (especially after her mother’s death). With Bonquisha, she doesn’t mind her but doesn’t try to make any sort of bond with her much to both Bonquisha and Jacob’s dismay.

Liz is Charity’s (Cute Waitress) niece. Liz considers Charity to be more of a motherly figure than an aunt as she looked after her while both of her parents were at work. 

[starrynight0612]

OP of the latest Toews post is a PKane lover. You might not know but PKane and Toews are both well known as toxic so definitely don’t support them. Also they’ve been asked to answer for racism before and ignored it. They’re doing this to get brownie points and we shouldn’t buy it.

I am very aware of their friendship. And I’m aware of PK’s past actions and yeah, not a fan of that man. However, I’m going to talk about why I’m not going to hold that against Toews (but why I will hold him accountable moving forward). The main reason being if I write him off I violate my belief that people can genuinely change. I have to have that belief. Why? My goals in life as a result of my major and my experiences is criminal justice reform which I believe starts with reforming prisons to be rehabilitation centers, decriminalizing several laws, and believing criminals are capable of positive change. 

With that though comes the understanding that not everyone will have that journey. There will be some people who never change and repeat the cycle of crime, even if we were to give them every resource available to succeed. So if I believe gang members are capable of change what does it say about me if I believe this 30 something-year-old hockey player can’t?

I’m pretty sure I know which of my followers this is or an idea of a few people who this could be and we interpreted his speech differently. I see this as a person who’s always thought to themselves, “I’m not racist.” But you know it was the blanket antiracist statement the majority of people say because that’s what it means to be a good person. Then just goes on with life like normal not giving it much of a thought and when something does happen thinking people are sensitive because “Racism isn’t really that BIG of a problem. This isn’t pre 1960′s.” 

His statement spoke of someone who genuinely had been going through personal conflict. I was like him. I saw the riots and I about lost it. Like what in the damn hell? PEACEFUL PROTESTS. And God if that isn’t the biggest sign of social conditioning. Civil activism since the start has been glorified as the right way to do it and over the last two days, I’ve watched reactions and realized how even me, an avid BLM supporter, was still getting it wrong. The fact that he said this message was for white people and not black people floored me because how many of us keep addressing the population like it’s a collective whole, “ We need to...We must be..” Eff that. Black people know what’s wrong. They know what needs to change. It’s us white individuals who need to get with the damn program. 

Now Patrick Kane. Here’s where I disagree with a lot of people; stay friends with the racists. When we turn our back on racists we just keep them in their sphere of racism and if we want real change, genuine social change, we gotta stick with them as long as we can (I mean at some point we all realize that the person will never change and then I’m okay with walking away from someone). My mom, my strong Mexican immigrant mom who raised her children to be independent and passionate, and people say is the sweetest woman alive, was homophobic. Mexico is a strong devout Catholic country and so she knew no gay people. Her sister came out as a lesbian. When I tell you my mom and her struggled to maintain a friendship....or the amount of arguments she had with me and my cousins. Worst of all when I realized I like girls too and I’m not going to be able to express that part of myself because of my mom I was filled with so much anger and sadness. Then i was sent to live with my dad in Utah (we lived in New York). I called my mom the day gay marriage was legalized and said, “I know you won’t be happy but this happened and mom I’m overjoyed.” And she was like, “Why wouldn’t I be happy? That’s the best news I hear all day.” Turns out in the two years we lived apart she met countless gay people at her job and she realized she was damn wrong. Even when my sister started questioning her sexuality she had a family call and asked us all to chime in because she knew she was afraid of going about it wrong. And she’s struggling because it became even more real but we’ve had the best conversations about sexuality the last few months and I came out. She accepted me. I told my sister she’s too young to date (she’s 13) but when she’s old enough she isn’t going to be upset if she goes out with a girl and that’s her daughter. 

I could vilify my mom. Tell her she should know better. That she should have been this way all along. But I stuck with her and because of that my sister has a more positive experience coming out story than I do. I’m not telling people to forgive their parents. That’s your own journey to make and you decide what is best for your mental health and well being. My dad still on the whole homophobic front but I’m sticking with the man. Going to keep trying my damn hardest. 

Jonathan Toews is going to have to work with PK for probably the rest of their hockey careers. I’m hoping that Toews can take these last few days and make an actual change in those locker rooms. Let’s tell him to sign petitions to change the name of their hockey team since he brought up Native American’s in his speech. Tell him to hold PK accountable. Let’s use this moment to answer his question of “what can I do for you?” 

And if he does shit. If this is the extent of how far he goes. Well, I’ll be right there with you turning my back on the man. For right now though I’m holding out hope because I have to believe that these protests are going to actually change things. I believe they can. I’m already seeing so many of my white friends who usually stay quiet actually give a shit for once and speak up. If you don’t find value in what I’ve said and disagree completely then I give you two choices: unfollow me or engage in conversation with me. I hope you choose the second one. 

[akechicrimes]

not to speculate too hard about the inside of a silent protagonist’s head, but the more i think about joker persona 5, the more convinced i am that he’s firmly entrenched his approach to relationships in hiding aspects of himself from others so that he can fulfill some sort of transactional relationship. and the more i think about that, the more i really do think that akira’s whole thing about emphasizing transactional relationships and almost intentionally surrounding himself with only selfishly-motivated people is a fear of intimacy.

i was talking with @aryashi about this post with akira’s really heartbreakingly cynical opinions on friendship, and the weird phenomenon where in persona 3 and 4, the protagonists are intentionally pushed to reconsider their views on friendship and making bonds with other people, and come out of their journeys with friends who’d ride and die for them. but with akira in persona 5, it’s odd because akira has a very well-documented transactional/cynical view on how relationships work, but he isn’t quite ever pushed to reconsider that point of view.

which is to say, persona 5 as a game is much less about relationships and friendships than persona 3 or 4. in persona 3, minato has only two personality traits, and those are that he’s a 2006 emo MCR fan and that he’s self-isolated. his entire character arc is about him un-isolating himself, learning to have relationships again, and learning that other people make life worth living. in persona 4, souji (or yu) is a city boy sent to a tight-knit community where everyone knows everyone, winds up learning first-hand just how judgmental small towns can be even in their proximity, and is forced to confront the perils and rewards of other people knowing you for who you truly are. 

in comparison, persona 5 likes to say that it’s about justice and societal reform, and seems to actively encourage akira to mask himself (or at least parts of himself) in order to achieve societal reform. he is quite literally hiding half of his activities (thievery, mostly) from the other half of his life (his day life as a student). arguably, he’s also hiding his confidants/social linking side business from his own thievery team, too. logistically, this makes sense, since akira is avoiding getting put in jail for thievery by hiding his identity. the flip side is that akira works for a better society while never once being known for who he really is, which is a fairly common trope among masked heroes who do work for the whole of society while never once being thanked or recognized for their work, but it’s a stark contrast to the other games.

so in a lot of ways, not only is akira not pushed to reconsider his views on relationships, he’s actively encouraged to keep masking parts of himself from others, and to use his anonymity and ability to hide to his own advantage. in particular, akira is encouraged to find people who he can gain something from, people who stand to gain something from him, and to strike a deal; and this deal usually involves akira hiding parts of himself so that his new confidants will continue to work with him.

which is cool and also highkey relatable, sure, but it sure does seem to be one of the reasons why akira walks out of the game with a whole bunch of friends who seem to................. not really know him very well, for some reason? and all his social links are, like, a collection of business partners or sponsors?

that’s not to say that his relationships are always built on akira hiding parts of himself to fulfill a transactional deal. a lot of his relationships wind up being non-transactional even if they started off that way, and a lot of his relationships end with his confidants guessing that he’s a phantom thief. but i wonder if akira himself views them as non-transactional. or, that is to say, akira seems to move away from viewing relationships as purely transactional, but he’s never pushed to embrace a relationship that is purely, 100% altruistic.

he starts every relationship with a transactional deal from the beginning of the game to the end. he uses relationships as a “we mutually help each other out” sort of arrangement as far into the game as his last conversation with sae as his lawyer. and the fact that these relationships become deeper and more meaningful than a simple business arrangement doesn’t mean that they’re not still fundamentally business arrangements. it’s a bit like getting to know your local barista: you might have conversations and learn more about them and even become friends, but at the end of the day, fundamentally the arrangement is built on interactions where you pay them money for them to make you coffee. (and to keep going with the barista metaphor, such a business relationship depends entirely on presenting only certain aspects of oneself to another person so as to keep the relationship going.)

or, also consider what akira said in this tweet as linked in the first part of this post. it may be that he knows that, for example, kawakami comes out of her social link adoring her student, and would go above and beyond to help him if he asked. but that in itself is a transactional relationship of another kind, isnt it? akira has to continue being the sort of student that she likes in order to continue to have her support; in return, she lets him get away with all sorts of wild shit in her class. rather than a one-off transaction, the relationship moves almost towards a type of sponsorship, which akira trades behavior that she approves of for her continued, continuous help. so the relationship remains transactional, and in a lot of ways, akira is not only trading with supporting kawakami emotionally, but he’s hiding parts of himself in order to maintain the relationship he’s built.

aryashi said that he should have come out of the game with some ride-or-die friends like the other persona protags--friends who know him completely and entirely, and would go above and beyond for no transactional reason whatsoever. she said that he should have had at least “ryuji, or akechi,” which was so fascinating to me because those two characters are so entirely and completely polar opposites, but reflect akira’s issues of isolation from two really important angles.

ryuji’s probably the character who has the most altruistic relationship with akira. he latches onto akira and from the first time they meet, ryuji selflessly tries to sacrifice himself to save akira, who ryuji barely knows, met about five minutes previous, and actually doesn’t even know the name of. ryuji couldn’t have an ulterior motive to help akira if he tried. and ryuji’s remarkably consistent about his selflessness, too; there’s no benefit to ryuji when ryuji gets mad on akira’s behalf to defend him, and it continues all the way through P5R. 

but in a weird way, it’s like akira doesn’t--understand this? although ryuji is the character who seems to care about akira himself the most and consistently defends akira, especially in regards to akira’s record, the instant ryuji’s social link starts, the social link progresses in the same manner as a lot of other social links, in which akira exchanges emotional labor and support for better teammates, better teamwork, better personas, better social links. suddenly it’s not about ryuji caring about akira, but akira helping ryuji through his track team problems. it’s like akira and ryuji are speaking entirely different languages, or are simply thinking so differently that akira just had no idea what to do with ryuji when ryuji goes out of his way to reach out to akira just for the sake of kindness. he seems taken aback by ryuji’s enthusiasm and sincerity in several cutscenes.

which is not to say that i dont think that akira doesnt value ryuji immensely, because i think he does, and i think that ryuji reaching out to him when akira had first moved to shujin and was entirely alone meant the world to akira. but i think that going through a friendship constantly feeling like ryuji’s altruism has an expiration date, impending dealbreaker, or is simply just incomprehensible because it doesnt have any transactional value to it is a type of isolation in itself. and if not a type of isolation, then definitely a type of emotional barrier that prevents akira from really embracing a relationship or person like ryuji--if not out of confusion, then maybe just out of fear.

confusion or fear, or maybe just a history of being rejected for who he is--either way, i do think that one of the things that’s so notable about a transactional relationship is that it makes intimacy much more controllable. persona 4 intimacy was a fucking gauntlet to be survived, because it was just a sheer, undiluted blast of your entire self being put on display. in persona 5, intimacy can be controlled if you know what a person wants out of you. if you know what they want, you can be that thing they want. if you know what they want from you, then you can leverage what they want. if the terms of the deal are clear-cut and determined from the start, someone like akira doesnt need to be afraid of being rejected, and never has to guess at what a person wants from him, and need never take an emotional risk himself. the more selfishly motivated a person is, the easier they are to please, and the easier they are to extract a working relationship out of, and the easier they are to even have a relationship with.

which brings us to akechi, because it does seem to be the case that akira gets along so well with akechi because it’s understood between the two of them that akechi is NOT here to be friends and he DOES have ulterior motives. even without the whole shido thing, akechi is pretty obviously there to nail akira for being a phantom thief; the kindest possible interpretation of akechi stalking akira is that akechi is there to pick up blackmail material on him. 

not to speculate too hard about the insides of a silent protagonist’s head, but i do wonder if maybe that’s why he got along with akechi so well: he assumes that akechi wants something from him that benefits only akechi himself, and akira is totally right. that sort of selfish motivation is something that akira can understand, predict, and accommodate.

nobody is allowed to tell that one anon who keeps showing up in people’s inboxes trying to convince everyone that shuake is an unhealthy ship, but it’s not a great dynamic. it’s also not any different from any of the other social links akira has. it’s pretty par for akira’s course, actually.

it’s also what akira understands, and it’s what akira is comfortable with, and oddly it serves as a point of connection between the two of them, especially in their P5R s link. and the more that akechi pushes at various emotional issues throughout his social link under the cover of “i’m only here to investigate you,” the more emotional intimacy they can get away with while pretending they aren’t doing exactly what they’re doing.

which is like. bro. when goro akechi is better at emotional intimacy than you are. you done REALLY fucked up.

but at the same time it’s like........................ it’s very clear that akira walks away from the game with more or less the same point of view on friendships and relationships that he went into the game with, because akechi wasnt going to be the kind of person who pushes him on that point. again, akechi and akira having a relationship that started off transactional and grew to become something else doesn’t necessarily mean that either one of them have changed their general modus operandi on this point. the person that would have really pushed akira to change would have been ryuji--but for whatever reason, ryuji didn’t wind up being the catalyst for that sort of change that he should have.

i dont really have a conclusion because this is my blog and i can do whatever i want and nobody has yet paid me enough money to buy my silence, but if you really want a conclusion, have this: pegoryugoro IS a valid ship and they DO have an interesting and compelling dynamic and i SWEAR to god i will make it work one day.

[enneagramwingmiranda]

Parks and Recreation: The actual enneagram types of Leslie, Ron, Tom, April, Andy, Donna, Ben, Chris, and Jerry

The Protagonist: Leslie Knope [Type 3]

“I am big enough to admit that I am often inspired by myself.”

Enneagram Wing: 3w2 (Achiever along with a helper)

"I care. I care a lot. It's kinda my thing."

Core Fear: Being exposed as or thought incompetent, inefficient, or worthless; failing to be or appear successful

Core Desire: Having high status and respect, being admired, successful, and valuable

Leslie feels her purpose is to make the world a better place, specifically Pawnee, since this is the place she holds dear to her heart and is the most reachable for her. Her identity is defined by her work and her drive and passion are what allow her to continue to move up the latter. She takes rejection and set backs hard, however, she always gets back up and continues to move forward to reach her goals. Her influence shapes the hearts and minds of her coworkers. She inspires them to be better people and to find what they are meant to do in life and do it. Along with her go-getter attitude, she goes above and beyond for her friends (2) and they greatly appreciate her care and efforts. As for her childhood wound, she has described her mother as cold and withholding so we can only assume that she received praise and attention only from the achievements she made. Her mother also works in government and only respects those with an assertive and dominant presence. 

The Sensible Friend: Ann Perkins [Type 6]

“As Leslie’s maid of honor, I really need her bachelorette party to go well, which is why I’m stress eating gummy penises.”

Enneagram wing: 6w7 (Loyalist along with an enthusiast)

“I’m putting myself out there, meeting some new people, having some causal fun, and it’s awkward.”

Core Fear: Fearing fear itself, being without support, security, or guidance; being blamed, targeted, alone, or physically abandoned

Core Desire: Having security, guidance, and support

Ann is by far the most sensible character. She is the person everyone knows they can rely on. Andy unfortunately took advantage of this quality resulting in her becoming his caretaker rather than remaining an equal. Leslie appreciates her sensibility and this is what makes them such great friends. However, Leslie can trigger Ann’s already existing anxiety from her high expectations and good intentioned pushy behavior. Another side of the coin of is her fear of ending up alone. She is constantly dating and even settles a few times to avoid loneliness. It is when she takes the time to be single and soothes this fear that she and Chris end up together. Ann also has an adventurous streak. She likes to go out and have a good time. She just sometimes needs a little push from Chris, Leslie, or Donna.

The True Introvert: Ron Swanson [Type 5]

“That is a canvas sheet, the most versatile object known to man. It can be used to make tents, backpacks, shoes, stretchers, sails, tarpaulins, and I suppose, in the most dire of circumstances, it can be a surface on which to make art.”

Enneagram wing: 5w4|5w6 (Balanced)

“Don’t start chasing applause and acclaim. That way lies madness.”

Core Fear: Being annihilated, invaded, or not existing; being thought incapable or ignorant; having obligations placed upon you or your energy being completely depleted   

Core Desire: Being capable and competent 

Ron is an intellect, constantly going off on philosophical tangents about the corrupt ways of government, effective life hacks, and flawed human nature. He believes there is only one way to do things and his ways of going about things are very unique to himself (4). He is a non-conformist. He loves learning new things and adding to his craft. He is a breakfast and wood enthusiast. Ron is quite guarded and withdrawn from the world and prefers this. His childhood wound is that his mother was intrusive and over-controlling so we can assume he felt exposed and defenseless. This followed Ron in adulthood as he had many toxic relationships with women similar to her. Thus, Ron feels he is best served to live in isolation and fend for himself, as well as, rely on cerebral means rather than emotional means. Ron demonstrates his wing 6 with his desire to be safe and have security.

The Entrepreneur: Tom Haverford [Type 3]

“At the risk bragging, one of the things I’m best at is riding coattails. Behind every successful man is me, smiling and taking partial credit. 

Enneagram wing: 3w4 (Achiever along with an individualist)

“‘Zerts’ are what I call desserts. ‘Trée-trées’ are entrées. I call sandwiches ‘sammies,’ ‘sandoozles,’ or ‘Adam Sandlers.’ Air conditioners are ‘cool blasterz’ with a ‘z’ — I don’t know where that came from. I call cakes ‘big ol’ cookies.’ I call noodles ‘long-ass rice.’ Fried chicken is ‘fry-fry chicky-chick.’ Chicken parm is ‘chicky-chicky-parm-parm.’ Chicken cacciatore? ‘Chicky-cacc.’ I call eggs ‘pre-birds,’ or ‘future birds.’ Root beer is ‘super water.’ Tortillas are ‘bean blankets.’ And I call forks ‘food rakes.’”

Core Fear: Being exposed as or thought incompetent, inefficient, or worthless; failing to be or appear successful

Core Desire: Having high status and respect, being admired, successful, and valuable

Tom measures his entire worth from his successes and failures. He is extremely creative and is constantly coming up with unique ideas to form a successful business. 

The Misanthrope: April Ludgate [Type 4]

“I wasn’t listening but I strongly disagree.”

Enneagram wing: 4w5 (Individualist along with investigator)

“If you ever speak me to me in Spanish please use the formal “usted”.

Core Fear: Being inadequate, emotionally cut off, plain, mundane, defective, flawed, or insignificant

Core Desire: Being unique, special, and authentic

April portrays major apathy but it’s clearly done to hide her genuine care and insecurity. She wants to be unique and special, thus overdoing it with her quirky, odd, eccentric, nonconformist talk and lifestyle. Her speech and way of behaving is an oxymoron. She deep down wants what everyone else wants: real love, real friendship, and a successful career. As she grows up and matures, she moves further away from her exaggerated dark persona to a normal expressive, mature adult. However, she adds in whatever she needs to to maintain her individuality. April also values cerebral pursuits shown in her getting accepted to an exceptional veterinary school. Her wing 5 is what helps her identify with so much with Ron.

The Charming Goofball: Andy Dwyer [Type 9]

“It’s fine. It’s just that life is pointless and nothing matters and I’m always tired.”

Enneagram wing: 9w8 (Peacemaker along with the challenger)

“I’m not crying. I’m just allergic to jerks!”

Core Fear: Being in conflict, tension, or discord; feeling shut out and overlooked; losing connection and relationship with others 

Core Desire: Having inner stability and peace of mind

The epitome of Andy’s character is his easy-going nature. He is also very caring and thoughtful. He rarely ever voices if anything is bothering him and we see him go through great lengths to end any conflict between he and April. He attempts to make things right with Ann after their break up but doesn’t succeed. Andy possess a child-like mindset and view of the world and this is what seems to serve as a coping skill for the trials and tribulations of life. This also makes him endearing and what makes him perfect for April as she holds a similar mentality. 

The Nerd: Ben Wyatt [Type 1]

“I don’t even have time to tell you how wrong you are. Actually, it’s going to bug me if I don’t.”

Enneagram wing: 1w9 (Reformer along with peacemaker)

“Stick to the list and you’ll do great. I have total faith in you... (there’s like a 30% chance they’ll both die.)”

Core Fear: Being wrong, bad, evil, inappropriate, unredeemable, or corruptible

Core Desire: Having integrity, being good, balanced, accurate, virtuous, and right 

Ben is straightforward and willing to tell the truth, even if it could offend someone. He likes things to be in order. He often feels like the odd one out in the parks department because he values principles and professionalism while his colleagues behave inappropriately. He admires Leslie for her quirky professionalism. Ben also desires a peaceful environment and will keep quiet about things bothering him resulting in passive aggressive behavior.

The Optimist: Chris Traeger [Type 7]

“The world is my gymnasium, Ron.”

Enneagram wing: 7w6 (Enthusiast along with loyalist)

“I am 100% certain that I am 0% sure of what I’m going to do.”

Core Fear: Being deprived, trapped in emotional pain, limited, or bored; missing out on something fun

Core Desire: Being happy, fully satisfied, and content

Chris is extremely positive all the time to cover up his true inner turmoil. He had a tough childhood and coped with the trauma by avoiding the negative emotions and putting his focus on his health. Thus he became a health nut. In the field of clinical psychology, he would most likely be diagnosed with orthorexia. Chris has a lot of anxiety about life and desires to feel a sense of safety in his life and relationships, thus making him fall into the wing 6. He desires the guidance and support from others (he started seeing a counselor 5 times a week during his depressive episode). 

The Minx: Donna Meagle [Type 8]

“You better watch yourself.”

Enneagram wing: 8w7 (Challenger along with enthusiast)

“Treat yourself.”

Core Fear: Being weak, powerless, harmed, controlled, vulnerable, manipulated, and left at the mercy of injustice

Core Desire: Protecting yourself and those in your inner circle

Donna is the epitome of “an independent black woman who don’t need no man.” She essentially dos onto others what she fears they will do onto her.  Thus, she manipulates and abuses vulnerable men to get what she wants and then leaves them. We can assume that something happened in her childhood that resulted in this relationship pattern. She discusses her grandma dying while having a threesome so this behavior was certainly model for her. She falls on the 7 wing for her enjoyment of life's greatest pleasures. 

The Target: Jerry Gergich [Type 9]

“So I go by Terry now. They already had a Larry in the Parks department, and they suggested that they change my name to Terry. I told them my real name was Garry, and they said ‘who cares?’ What a fun bunch of guys.”

Enneagram wing: 9w1 (Peacemaker along with reformer)

“Well, you know it's like I always say 'it ain't government work if you don't have to do it twice.”

Core Fear: Being in conflict, tension, or discord; feeling shut out and overlooked; losing connection and relationship with others

Core Desire: Having inner stability and peace of mind 

Jerry is clearly a peacemaker in that he keeps his mouth shut despite his constant abuse from his colleagues at the parks department. He identifies with Andy in that Tom was trying to dub him as the new office target due to his similar easygoing nature and clumsiness. He shows that he is a wing 1 in his values of goodness and morality.

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

The Not-So-Amazing Mary Jane Part 7: MJ blindly trusts Beck (even though she wouldn’t!)

Previous Part

Next Part

Master Post

This post will be the first of maaaaaaany where I’ll be unpacking the problems prevalent in the status quo presented to us in at the end of AMJ #1.

My intent is to thoroughly explore these problems in this and consequent posts before moving onto issue #2. By doing this I (and others so inclined) can try to bear them in mind as prevailing problems with every issue until such as a time as they are addressed.

In future posts like this (at least until we get to AMJ #2) I will try to dispense with the preamble and get right down to business.

But for now I should start by clearly defining what exactly the premise presented in AMJ #1 even is.

The premise as I see it is as follows:

Mary Jane, out of sympathy for him and interest in the project, is making a movie with Mysterio. A Mysterio who has disguised himself as a respected film director and hired former felons and current super villains as part of his crew. He and MJ maintain Beck’s secret from everyone (which includes Peter but we’ll get there in another post).

In this instalment I will be addressing why MJ’s trust of Beck and failure to verify his claims is nonsensical.

As touched on in our coverage of AMJ #1, Mary Jane believes Beck’s sob story and ultimately agrees to work with him in spite of his crimes and the presence of active villains. Williams writes her genuinely sympathetic and interested in the film project, buying what Beck is saying and lacking any suspicion beyond that.

The most we get is MJ (arguably) noticing Beck’s abuse of one his staff and presumably bearing it in mind for future dealings with him.

Now, MJ is great at reading people and is very aware she possesses that skill. Between her upbringing moving around the country, her profession in acting and modelling (which puts many people, in particular young women, in potentially vulnerable positions) and her experience dating and living with a superhero, it’s an essential skill and one she’s honed. You could call it her personal brand of spider-sense.

If MJ’s Spidey sense were registering honesty from someone then it’d be crucial in her decision to ultimately believe them and judge their threat level.

These pages though get muddy because Beck is mixing the truth and deception. Technically everything he is saying is  true so MJ would likely be picking that up. But he didn’t actually need   MJ to be in the movie so he was lying about that and more poignantly he is omitting the fact this movie plays into Kindred’s wider schemes.

Is MJ’s failure to register deception from Beck a mistake? Is Williams dropping the ball here?

Actually no.

Mary Jane is a good read of people, but she is absolutely not flawless in this regard. There have been times she’s misread Peter and indeed been fooled by other people. Five key examples come to mind and we’re going to be starting with the most debatable ones.

Firstly there was Jason Jerome a fellow actor who offered friendship and support when MJ began working on the soap opera Secret Hospital. Jason was a harassing creep intent upon seducing Mary Jane, regarding her marital status as challenge that’d make his ‘conquest’ all the sweeter. I go into much more detail about Jason’s encounters with MJ in this post.

I will concede that it can definitely be argued that MJ was out of character or emotionally vulnerable during the course of this subplot so it doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Nevertheless, in MJ’s canonical history she was fooled by a fellow (and more experienced) actor than herself.

Secondly there was Aunt May’s death in ASM #400. Aunt May was impersonated by a dying actress who’d been genetically altered to look like and register as her. For around a year everyone (including MJ) believed their beloved May to be dead once more proving how MJ’s ability to read people isn’t flawless. Again though there is a lot of stuff that can be contested with this example, the most significant being that as originally written the intent was that this was the actual Aunt May, not an imposter.

However even accepting the retcon one could argue that due to her pregnancy, May’s miraculous recovery from a coma and the general stress of the Clone Saga up until that point Mary Jane’s ‘Spidey sense’ was not going to be working properly. However, canonically this is once again an example of a fellow (and likely more experienced) actress deceiving MJ.

My other examples don’t have nearly as much leeway.

Perhaps the most significant is Jonathan Caesar, the Parkers’ landlord who was obsessed with ‘owning’ Mary Jane. You can imagine what that  would’ve entailed. He abducted MJ and held her prisoner for a little while. The thing is initially MJ found the guy charming and the idea he was a threat never crossed her mind.

Unlike the above two examples there weren’t any obvious extenuating circumstances that I can recall to excuse MJ’s faux pas. She was just genuinely fooled by him.

Then we have her friend Lorraine whom you might recall from part 4 of this essay series. As mentioned there, Lorraine was an old friend of MJ’s who’d developed a cocaine problem. MJ sought to help her and Lorraine seemed willing to be helped. But when MJ left her alone for a little while Lorraine almost immediately snuck out to find her next hit.

Models are not actresses strictly speaking. But to my limited knowledge their profession must involve some degree of adopting a false persona. Even if we were to say otherwise, Lorraine was clearly capable of duping Mary Jane.

Finally, for an extended period of time the Chameleon fooled MJ and most everyone else when he impersonated J. Jonah Jameson in Web #52.

Like Beck, Chameleon made a whole career out of fooling people and Beck could be argued to be even better at it than Chammy.

So the idea that someone could fool MJ is definitely possible in a lot of stories.

But we shouldn’t take MJ’s trust as a sign that she is in the right. It’s so often tempting to side with the protagonist’s POV precisely because they are the protagonist. If MJ trusts Mysterio she must feel he isn’t dangerous and isn’t that bad really right?

But the possibility that she can be wrong is on the table based upon her history and (whilst I personally doubt Williams intended it this way) that is what is happening here big time.

Now I am not suggesting that MJ should second-guess every read of people she makes nor that the above examples should be sore spots in her mind. But collectively they would enshrine to Mary Jane herself that she shouldn’t just presume her immediate reads of people are accurate, and that would go even more so for professional actors.

In this issue MJ hasn’t got any extenuating circumstances to compromise her judgement. She isn’t in the midst of an emotionally turbulent time in her life. She isn’t being blinded my friendship, loneliness or familial love. She also hasn’t had much time to observe or get to know Beck up close and personal, this exchange being the longest amount of time they’ve ever spoken to one another.

But as I spent far too much time pointing out in parts 3-5, MJ is very aware of Mysterio’s skills, his typical tactics and the horrible things he has done. She knows he is a career criminal and a dangerous/nasty one at that. And she knows that he is an incredibly accomplished and experienced manipulator/deceiver/actor, almost definitely more experienced than her self. And this is to say nothing of the times he’s personally hurt her or the people she cares about.

Realistically upon learning of Beck’s involvement she should somehow start to work against  him and most definitely not trust him!

Even exempting the personal pain he’s been complicit in visiting upon Mary Jane and/or her loved ones, she knows enough about him to be suspicious.

In knowing his skillset and M.O. Mary Jane should either not trust him at all or at the very least not simply not take everything he says at face value. She would  be savvy enough to recognize whatever her ‘radar’ is reading. At best the odds are 50/50 that her radar is off. And those odds exist precisely because making you believe things that aren’t real is the entire conceit of Beck’s alter ego.

But wait, there’s more!

Beck basically admitted to:

Stealing a man’s identity

Wasting over a year of his life working on a project that doesn’t actually exist (in a location notorious for unaccounted for landmines btw)

Using that to con people into giving him their money

Using that money to make a movie which means he’s gambling with their money without their consent and potentially gambling with the public image of the film studio, the crew and the man he’s impersonating if the film gets a bad reception or financially flops

He’s doing all this off the back of what an extremely risky movie to make in the first place. Imagine if an empathetic and unapologetic movie about the life of George Zimmerman came out?

Said movie is a vanity project explicitly about himself

He’s using current super villains on the crew. If you are a current super villain then by definition you are not out on parole, you aren’t reformed and you are still wanted by the law.

And Mary Jane…goes along with this. Lampshading the fact that it’s insane for her to do that doesn’t excuse the extreme mischaracterization of doing that in the first place.

At the very least she should run a check online or with her various contacts in the super hero community to see if he’s actually  dying. Remember from MJ’s POV Beck has full on faked his own death at least twice.  She has no hard evidence for this whatsoever beyond the word of a man who is notoriously duplicitous.

Now to play Devil’s advocate we could argue that MJ believes Beck is out of jail legally. He might’ve served his time, been let out early for good behaviour or precisely because he is dying.  Or perhaps he had legal help that weaselled him out of being locked up.

However this angle of interpretation just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

For starters given his very long history of very serious crimes (even excluding the ones MJ is unaware of) it’d be common sense to presume that Beck would be serving time barring extenuating circumstances. Common sense would then lead anybody to try and confirm if any extenuating circumstances exist. This could prove impossible because how accessible records on costumed criminals are to the public is unclear. But anyone with a phone or internet access could at least try.

MJ has far more than mere common sense and she’s got far more than a phone and internet access. And yet there isn’t even a hint that she makes even a lazy attempt at confirming Beck’s story.

Now let’s pretend MJ forgot every single encounter with Mysterio she knows about before Nick Spencer’s run. No faking Aunt May’s death. No helping Doc Ock in ‘Ends of the Earth’. Nothing from ‘Guardian Devil’. None of the stuff we covered in parts 3-5.

Mary Jane would still realistically be fully aware Beck committed a HUGE crime mere months ago that involved the Avengers (plus other heroes) that was also the inciting incident that reconciled her with the love of her life.

This alone  should be enough for her to not so quickly or blindly trust Beck! Even if she was unaware of the legal fallout of that event it was still an event that endangered lots of innocent people and heroes. Chiefly it endangered the love of her life! MJ trusts the guy whose actions nearly killed the man she loves most in the world!

Speaking of Peter by the way, he’s a super hero who’s regularly tangled with this guy.*

She has also worked for, is an acquaintance of or personal friends with:

Tony Stark/Iron Man

Riri Williams/Ironheart

The main roster of the Fantastic Four

Several big name members of the Avengers (including Captain America and Jessica Drew)

The Avengers faithful butler Jarvis

Members of a support group comprised of the loved ones of super heroes (see ASM v5 #8-10)

Carlie Cooper, a forensics scientist who has worked for the police

She has also encountered shape shifters, impersonators, clones and body swaps in the last 10 years of her life, so a certain degree of safety precautions would be requisite for her.

Collectively this means MJ would not simply presume Beck is walking free legally and more importantly could and would  check up on that. It wouldn’t be hard. She wouldn’t even have to tell Peter if for some reason she was worried about him knowing; we’ll dive a lot more into this in a much later instalment.

Her research would then naturally turn up the fact that Beck clearly escaped from prison. Even if the details of Beck’s trial or consequent legal proceedings (like being paroled or cutting a deal) weren’t public knowledge Mary Jane’s contacts would be able to inform her of what would’ve happened. Thus she’d know  Beck was legally declared insane and sent to Ravencroft but not legally released. 

Similarly even if the details of Mysterio’s ��death’ in Ravencroft weren’t publically known MJ would have the means of learning that and thus confirm that Beck had faked his death once again; (see ASM v5 #24-25). This would then open up the possibility to MJ that the body the authorities have belongs to someone else. 

From MJ’s point of view, at best that’s macabre and unethical. At worst it could mean Beck caused someone’s death. MJ is clearly aware that Mysterio might be capable of such a thing because she is almost immediately concerned Beck has done something bad to the real Cage McKnight!

Now I’m not saying MJ is going along with Beck even knowing he probably killed his psychiatrist. But what I am saying is that it’s utterly out of character for MJ (or pretty much any character) to not check this stuff!

Maybe  Williams will address all this, but reading AMJ #1 it seems far more likely she’s not bothered to consider the implications of the direction she has taken. Or worse, she has but is ignoring them because she wants to tell the story she wants no matter what.

The point is moot though because MJ wouldn’t give Beck the benefit of the doubt in the first place.

There is more to be said regarding MJ’s trust issues in the story, but I think I’ll save that for next time.

*And typically won through a highly unique danger sense that MJ lacks, a sense that mitigates Beck’s abilities.

Previous Part

Next Part

Master Post

[fvckvalenciano]

introducing benji !!

[ FROY GUTIERREZ // 20 // CIS MALE // HE/HIM // MUSE J ] can you believe BENJAMIN ‘BENJI’ VALENCIANO is apart of the stellar world tour? the industry has dubbed him THE CHARLATAN and he has quite the reputation. sources say he is [ ENGAGING ] and [ ASSERTIVE ], but can also be [ VINDICTIVE ] and [ QUICK-TEMPERED ]. however, he is best described by the song [ SUPER RICH KIDS ] by [ FRANK OCEAN ]. i can’t to see what the stellar world tour has in store for him.

bio & pinterest

hi hi !! i'm sure you guys will recognize this as a reoccuring theme sooner rather than later, but i have absolutely no idea what i'm doing at any given moment, so i'm just gonna dive into a quick introduction to benji and hope for the best ! if you are interested in some slightly more organized thoughts i would recommend taking a look at his bio ( which i just fixed the link for because i'm dumb and it was broken this whole time haha, so let me know if there are any problems! ) & i hope you guys enjoy :)

okay so benjamin is born in greenwich, connnecticut, a town famous almost exclusively for housing some of the wealthiest families in america and not much else. his moms are both lawyers, cutthroat defense attorneys that pay for the family's summers in europe and vacation homes down south with somebody's elses blood money. he's an only child, and their scrutiny is merciless as it curates an envy for the anonymity of the shadows. their expectations pile too high in his throat, and he fears the day he chokes and lets them down, for it is inevietable. but he knows they'll do anything to get him across that finish line, walking across the stage at a prestigous law school he couldn’t care less about, which in an odd way is more terryifying than it is comforting.

music is not something that even crosses his mind until much later in life. it was never an option, still isn't, so he decides early that it is not worth the energy of entertaining, even as he finds peace only when the music is loud enough to drown out everything else. he is desperate to mold himself into somebody worth his mothers' undying affections, not just charades and party tricks. but they are patient with him nonetheless, smiles tight and forgiving through it all, and his stomach turns more often than not with the way pity flashes in a matching set of cool eyes, lightning-quick.

benji is created in just sixteen hours and thirty-seven minutes, an accident. it's a textbook definition of overnight fame, a shoddy youtube video gaining far more traction than it was ever meant to. he's nineteen and only in his second semester at college, and music was never the plan, but neither was law school, really. it's a headache, dizzying to imagine taking a life where he steps outside of his family's hold, and he is forced to make a real decision for the first time in his life. so he does.

in the same breath that he signs a contract with the label, they are prying his music from his fingers, the lyrics of missing a life that was never his to begin with are lifted away and delivered to somebody that looks more the part of soft and remoreseful. ( cue lincoln entering stage left, hello bb ) rather, he’s fitted with quick and aggressive lines, still technically his words but molded in a way that don’t fit right in his mouth. they tell him it fits his image better, and doesn’t he want to be famous? the worst part is that it works, his fans eat it up, and demand more, more, more. anger thrums beneath his skin, obvious even as he shoves it down like always, but any pr agent could spot it from a mile away, and they tell him to use that instead. he is familiar with the use of disguises, years of sneaking around in his own home make excellent practice, but it leaves a bad taste in his mouth all the same. nobody has ever allowed him the vice of anger before, though. he knows a lifeline when he sees one, and he runs with it. benji realizes all too late that this is not the freedom he thought he would be granted, realizes he should have known better, that he let himself get passed over from his mothers’ iron grasp to the label’s. he decides he prefers the way disappointing others lasts longer and feels better than chasing approval, and lets this time be different.

[ H E A D C A N O N S ]

( i know this is all dramatic backstory so far lmao, let me introduce you to who this dumb asshole really is )

more than anything else, benji is all bark with no bite. he’ll curse you out for accidentally waking him up at 7:30 instead of 8:00, and hold the grudge for hours with icy stares and glorified pouting, like he’s got a personal vendetta for making himself miserable. he’s often a bit standoffish, distant in the apathetic way that you could cry on his shoulder for hours and still not hear a word out of him, look over and he’ll offer a placating grin and a shrug. he tells the truth to a fault, blunt and unforgiving and too impatient to waste time playing games with lies and faux-affection. even with all his own bouts of irritability, the kid is an absolute idiot when it comes to reading people and understanding social cues and he’s often left blind-sided when people are pissed at him without explicitly spelling it out. still, he doesn’t hold any actual distaste for anybody on the tour, floating between groups based on whoever’s personality suits him better that day, unless they are the ones to escalate the matter, in which case, good luck charlie. forgive-and-forget isn’t really in his vocabulary. once he makes a decision, it’s near impossible to get him to change his mind.

when he wants to be, or if you’ve entertained his interests in one way or another, he warms up and and indulges you with his internal monologue ( your chances are better if there’s a camera around, he doesn’t often bother wasting the energy otherwise, but still ) actually, it is not as hard as it sounds to gain his favor. crack a dumb joke about pr or offer him half a snickers bar and you’ve already got a foot in the door, baby. he reveals his friendship in odd ways — sarcastic comments and random compliments, nonchalant and declared like fact rather than opinion.

the real shortcut into his brain is alcohol. flash forward to like 11pm on any given day and the asshole is chugging fireball like it’s the first sip of water he’s had after years of dehydration, suddenly all bright grins and loud laughs, eager to collect drinking buddies like playing cards. it’s a harsh juxtaposition, from brooding and fabricated to giggling and tipsy, and his tolerance isn’t nearly as high as he likes to pretend it is, so he’s drunk off his ass and acting a fool more often than not. he’ll trade secrets easily, charming and tongue loose in a way that it never is when he’s sober. ( don’t even get me started with the amount of people he hooks up with, oh boy ) drunk benji’s a real headache for the crew, considering he’s not of drinking age yet in america and he’s got a rigid mask to maintain in order to keep up his charades and remain relevant. he refuses to be ashamed of it, though, and he’s adamant to make things difficult for them, relishing instead in impulsive decisions he never got the chance to make for most of his life. long story short, in a pinch, buy him a handle and he’ll probably like you.

when i say benji will try anything once, i mean it seriously, offer him literally anything and odds are that he’ll say yes. it’s kind of ridiculous. his self-destructive streak is always up for a good time, wink wink ( this doesn’t just mean drugs or anything, like dare him to eat an entire jar of nutella in under 10 minutes? where’s the spoon )

unfortunately he’s a stereotypical rich kid through and through, and he’s got the nicotine addiction to show for it. he won’t even smoke cigarettes out of the principle of the thing ( unless he’s blackout drunk, in which case, oh boy, watch your pockets ) but he’s got at least two juuls on him at any given moment. nobody knows how he manages it, but he’s got an extensive supply of the mango flavored pods even though they’re banned, because they’re the only ones he’ll use. he’s got lots of connections, and the fact that he uses them for this pretty much sums up his entire personality.

you would think that benji, with his reformed rich kid attitude and all his burning anger and sarcastic eye-rolling, would only drink expensive coffee, black and strong, right? no. he’ll walk up to any barista, pissed just to be awake before noon and gaze as hard and cold as hell itself frozen over, and order himself a frozen caramel frappuccino with extra whipped cream and extra caramel drizzle on top, deadpan and monotone. to add insult to injury, he’ll chase it by shotgunning a can of redbull, living off of unhealthy amounts of caffeine to have enough energy to deal with the others at all times. it’s ridiculous.

he’s grudgingly okay with the fact that his social media accounts have been sacrificed for his image, wiped clean and shaped into the public figure he is today. however, he guards his spotify account with his life, keeping it private and refusing to monitor this aspect of his life. his music taste is everything to him, and while he’s willing to plaster songs he’s never listened to all over his instagram story, his spotify is an extension of him, and he fights like a dog to keep it that way.

last but not least, benji’s fashion is atrocious. really, for the greater good nobody should let him dress himself, ever, and they usually don’t. he’s got quite the bad reputation amongst the stylists, infamous for scowling at the high-fashion look they want to stuff him in, refusing to hear reason to the fact that he has to wear makeup to the red carpet. whenever he knows beyond a doubt that no cameras will be waved in front of his eyes, he practically lives in sweats like it’s his religion, paired with genuinely whichever shirt he first lays eyes on. ( listen, he grew up filthy rich and just bought his first pair of sweatpants when he went to college, let him indulge bb ) some members will swear up and down to the fact that they saw him walk around in mysteriously stained sweatpants and a stolen back-up dancer’s skin tight, hot pink mesh crop top for a full hour into rehearsal before he woke up enough to realize his mistake. he’ll bite your head off for even bringing it up, but glance down and double-check what he’s wearing just in case.

oh wait also he’s dyslexic. words blur together in a way that makes writing lyrics a bitch, and just one song take him weeks to finish. it makes the sting of having them ripped away even worse. ( also i get to spell things wrong in the group chat and it’s in character lmao )

[eclare-draws]

My ML/Enneagram Theory

So I was bored and have a huge interest in the Enneagram personality type test, so I decided to figure out what Adrien and Marinette are on the Enneagram. I was just making points, and it somehow turned into an eight page double spaced essay. I’m realy happy with it and it only took a couple of hours, so here it is to read. It will help with the art I’m posting tomorrow ;)

The Enneagram is a personality test based on a person’s basic fears and desires in life. It is a set of numbers one through nine, each of which represent a specific type of person but are all connected based on how each basic type (the one someone identifies the most with) reacts to stress and growth. The system is largely based on fluctuation, but by analyzing the fears and desires of characters in Miraculous Ladybug, their basic Enneagram type can be quickly identified by the actions they take to change injustices and make sense of the world around them. Here, the discussion will be based on Marinette/Ladybug and Adrien/Chat Noir in various contexts.

In every episode, we see both Marinette as well as Ladybug strive to make the world better based on her beliefs of what is right for the city and her friends (which is typically in-line with what we as a society associate with good and honorable behavior). This attitude and drive is often associated with Enneagram Type One: the Reformer, who wants “to be good, to have integrity, [and] to be balanced.” This analysis of character can be seen in both personas Marinette takes on: the busy schoolgirl and the savior of Paris. Ones are often faulted with “always striving to improve things, but afraid of making a mistake,” which is clearly displayed in “Stoneheart,” where Marinette struggles to cope with the fact that she messed up to the point where she feels she is so incompetent that it would be better for her to give up her miraculous for the sake of Paris. “[Ones] try to maintain high standards, but can slip into being critical and perfectionistic.” Marinette’s sense of perfectionism is clearly seen in her designs and plans. She spends a disproportionate amount of time on tiny details, such as an embroidered signature, that no one else would notice but add depth and meaning to her work. Not only this, but her perfectionism shines when she makes detailed and convoluted plans, whether it is how to use her lucky charm as Ladybug or how she will get together with Adrien (see Operation: Secret Garden in “Gigantitan”).

The audience can often see Marinette trying to improve the lives of others, whether they ask for it or not. She often zeros in on a single problem and tackles it in order to help the world align with how she sees it best. When she is criticized for a mistake or wronged in some way, she reacts dramatically and impatiently. This aligns with the direction of disintegration, where “methodical Ones suddenly become moody and irrational at Four.” When Marinette is wronged, she reacts brashly and “[has] problems with resentment and impatience,” easily showcased in situations dealing with Chloe. All nine Enneagram types are associated with a sin, and Ones are paired with anger. This makes sense with Marinette, because while she tends to be level headed in most situations, she gets mad and defensive whenever something is turned against her or goes against the plan.

“History is full of Ones who have left comfortable lives to do something extraordinary because they felt that something higher was calling them.” Marinette started her career as Paris’ superheroine just as anyone would expect: spilling macarons everywhere while preventing an old man from getting hit by a car he could have easily avoided. Master Fu’s intention with the ladybug miraculous was Marinette’s higher calling. One of the more famous figures often referenced in speaking of the Type One personality is Joan of Arc (Jeanne d’Arc). Not only was Joan of Arc in a similar position as Marinette - a teenage girl destined to save France - but she is also depicted in the show as a past holder of the Ladybug Miraculous (see Befana episode and Thomas Astruc’s art). This revelation could be interesting to anyone, but it also enhances and hones this theory into a definite explanation. Marinette Dupain-Cheng is a Type One on the Enneagram personality test.

But what about her partner, crush, and friend, Adrien Agreste or Chat Noir? Well, it is made clear early on that Chat Noir is what Adrien would be if it were not for his father and the life he is expected to lead for the sake of looking good (pun intended). By analyzing this character in two parts rather than at the same time as previously done with Marinette, he becomes much simpler to understand. Chat Noir’s abilities allow Adrien to leave the fortress that is the Agreste mansion and live his life in a way that helps him grow and thrive, while being locked up puts him in a state of disintegration or stress. By evaluating the character from this point of view, it makes sense that Adrien would be an Enneagram Type Seven: the Enthusiast. 

Sevens want nothing more than “to be satisfied and content—to have their needs fulfilled.” Adrien grew up in a wealthy household and never had to worry about his physical needs being met but he constantly looks for ways to have his emotional needs met because his father refuses to do so and instead feeds into the basic fear of sevens: “Of being deprived and in pain.” Adrien’s worst nightmare is being locked up, as displayed in Sandboy, where bars appear in his room until he’s trapped and isolated. In “Riposte,” Ladybug hides him in a sarcophagus in the Louvre and, after escaping to be Chat Noir, he uses the excuse of, “I hate to be locked up.” While this is not actually why he left, his body language and tone show that he is being genuine in his words and that his clawstrophobia (sorry) is an actual problem. This claustrophobia is not only based in literally being in tight spaces, but also figuratively being trapped. His father over schedules him to the point where he, a young boy, cannot discover who is for himself or what his interests are. Despite the skateboarding ramp and posters in his room, does the audience ever see him even have the slightest interest in skateboarding? Or basketball? Rockclimbing? Piano? Fencing? Chinese? Modeling? While he seems to go along with these and generally find entertainment in them, there is no way to show that he is actually inclined to do these things - he is just expected to, so he does.

Being locked away in his room allowed him proficiency at the activities provided for him, but the only time he is ever depicted as actively enjoying one of these things is when he plays the piano with Plagg in “Puppeteer 2.” Sevens often prefer “to keep themselves excited and occupied, to avoid and discharge pain.” By giving in to the hobbies he is expected to have, he keeps himself busy so that he cannot worry about what he might actually enjoy. His ability to have high performance can also be attributed to the fact that “Sevens are frequently endowed with quick, agile minds, and can be exceptionally fast learners. This is true both of their ability to absorb information (language, facts, and procedures) and their ability to learn new manual skills—they tend to have excellent mind-body coordination, and manual dexterity (typewriting, piano playing, tennis).” While he might not be interested in the activities he participates in, he finds himself great at all of them because of this ability to adapt and learn. Despite this, it is likely that Adrien will struggle to figure out what he wants to pursue because, “Sevens do not feel that they can find what they really want in life.” The only thing he truly knows for himself and his future is that he wants Ladybug to be in it.

The few active decisions the audience sees Adrien make are in line with those associated with Sevens, in that he “[wants] to maintain [his] freedom and happiness, to avoid missing out on worthwhile experiences,” or, in this case, the experiences of a normal teenage boy. He decides he wants to go to school with other people because he deems it important in “Stoneheart”. In “The Gorilla,” he runs  away from home in order to avoid missing out on his mother’s movie. By keeping the black cat miraculous, he makes the choice to continue to have worthwhile experiences and make positive change to better his life. Sevens “do not feel that they know what to do or how to make choices that will be beneficial to themselves and others,” which is shown in “Reflekdoll” when Adrien holds the ladybug miraculous and worries that his choices are not the correct path without the assurance of Lady Noire. Sevens are known for “[keeping] their minds occupied, especially with projects and positive ideas for the future, they can, to some extent, keep anxiety and negative feelings out of conscious awareness.” As Chat Noir is being rejected by Ladybug, he quickly slips into a Marinette-like fantasy of moving to an island, living off fruits, and buying a pet hamster. By creating these plans, which one can only assume he spends much of his free time doing, he avoids the harsh reality of his family and love life.

Sevens are often referred to as being optimistic, which is certainly true of Adrien. Yes, he faces isolation and what is assuredly a deep set of insecurities and pain that a children’s show will not delve into, but he still finds the silver lining of every situation. When he is denied the love of Ladybug in “Glaciator,” he decides “her friendship is the best gift of all.” Even after he spent months trying to save Ladybug as Aspik in “Desperada,” he still decides that he can best help her as Chat Noir and sees the positive that can come out of what must have been a traumatic experience for him. Even in regards to his father, where most people would resent a parent who treats them like Gabriel treats Adrien, Adrien still manages to not only love but also respect his father and his wishes. When Sevens are at their healthiest, they “Assimilate experiences in depth, making them deeply grateful and appreciative for what they have.” When Adrien becomes his alternate persona, Chat Noir, the audience is able to clearly see the vivacity this character has and the beauty he finds in the world. Chat Noir often appreciates the smaller things in his life that others often tend to ignore, as he is unable to participate in life as Adrien Agreste. His separation from the world as his father’s son causes him to usually live in an unhealthy level for Sevens, where “their energy and health is completely spent: become claustrophobic and panic-stricken” which is again illustrated in his greatest fears of being trapped. “Sevens deeply resist feeling trapped or being in situations that continually produce unhappiness,” a statement that can easily be attributed to Adrien as he lives his life as a true Seven on the Enneagram.

It does not need to be stated that Chat Noir and Ladybug make a miraculous team (sorry). Their styles of planning, solving, and fighting are on opposite ends of the spectrum. Chat Noir tends to have a spontaneous take to his fighting, while Ladybug is methodical and calculating. This all makes sense with the analysis of the interactions of Ones and Sevens according to the official Enneagram study. “Enneagram Ones and Sevens have a particular complementary and reciprocal relationship. They are opposites who can either bring something needed to the other person, thereby helping both to achieve new growth.” The black cat and ladybug miraculous are said to be two parts of a whole, the yin and yang of the miraculous. Because of this, the interactions between them make sense to be reciprocal actions towards the same goal. While Ladybug creates, Chat Noir destroys. Their powers work together to create a balance in the world and within their lives. Occasionally, the audience sees examples of when their actions affect the outcome negatively because they are out of sync with the intentions of the other.

Sometimes, Chat Noir’s casual approach and joking attitude will get in the way of Ladybug’s plan, as seen in “Oblivio” and referenced in “Reflekdoll.” This dynamic between the two heroes can again be comprehended through the understanding of the two types, “Ones bring conscientiousness, orderliness, good work habits, methodical attention to detail, and a pleasure in maintaining excellence and high standards. Sevens bring spontaneity, high energy, curiosity, an orientation toward fun and adventure, the desire to try new things, and an ability to not get too hung up with getting everything done perfectly.” This is a perfect summary of their tandem relationship that balances out for a positive outcome. When things do not go to plan, Chat Noir finds a way to help Ladybug and solve the problems that they face most of the time. This spontaneity can sometimes cause issues between them, another common flaw between the two types. “As stress increases, Ones become increasingly critical, judgmental, inflexible, and insistent that things be done only one way, the right way—their way. They inevitably begin to see Sevens as undisciplined and inefficient, self-centered and childish. Ones feel that Sevens are scattered and tend to fool around too much.” In “Relfekdoll,” Ladybug points out these types of behaviors in her partner, going so far as to call his suit a “clown costume.” She also struggles to understand that Chat Noir’s approach to holding the Ladybug miraculous is vastly different from her own, which causes some bickering between them because her brain does not work in a “simple, straightforward [manner].”

As the audience does not see Marinette and Adrien interact in a normal fashion very often, it is harder to see these similarities appear between the two civilians. This is not only because of Marinette’s crush, but also because Adrien tends to guard his emotions to save face and do as expected of him. In “The Gorilla,” the dynamic between them peeks through as the friends have to rely on Adrien’s spontaneous changes of plan while Marinette struggles to follow along because she does not have time to make a cohesive plan. While Marinette can adapt quickly to her missteps around Adrien, she often finds herself floundering when she does not have a plan. Some of the few times she was almost successful in confessing her love can be noted in “Dark Cupid,” “Puppeteer 2,” and “Gigantitan.” In all three of these, she comes up with varying levels of plans in order to make Adrien fall in love with her. In “Dark Cupid,” she writes a love letter but forgets to sign it because she is distracted. “Puppeteer 2” shows her and Tikki devising a plan to play the role of someone who is confident around Adrien, but she had to go and almost kiss him in that situation. In “Gigantitan,” she develops what is easily her most in-depth plan (Operation: Secret Garden), which almost worked until she had to improvise. Her inability to improvise is greatly contrasted by Adrien/Chat Noir’s ability for the trade. He is a quick thinker and finds ways to avoid a negative outcome in the worst situations. When he tries to plan, such as his poem in “Dark Cupid,” it does not work out for him because he is able to do it on the fly with a higher success rate.

While Miraculous Ladybug may be a show intended for children, it is easily enjoyed by older viewers who look at each episode with a keen eye and interested mind. In the observation of interactions, mindsets, and attitudes, the Enneagram types of Paris’ heroes can easily be discovered and analyzed through a clearer lens. By doing so, an audience member can have a better understanding of the characters and make sense of their actions and thought processes without necessarily being able to relate to the characters all the time. By watching Marinette/Ladybug’s ability to plan and desire to do what is right for her city and her friends, one can see that her Enneagram type must be a One - the Reformer. She prefers a methodical approach to life that is filled with clear morals and a call to greatness and she often becomes frustrated when the world does not work the way she expects it to. On the other hand, Adrien/Chat Noir’s ability to see the positive in every situation as he improvises his way through life shows that he must be a Seven - the Enthusiast. Adrien’s family situation often places him in a period of stress or disintegration where he feels trapped and stuck in life because he does not fully understand himself. As the two characters interact with one another, it is made obvious that they are meant to be (whether as a couple or just the strongest duo in Paris) and that they can only improve and hone their partnership as they better understand one another on a deeper level.

(All quotes taken from “Miraculous Ladybug” and The Enneagram Institute.)

[cursed-to-be-a-sidekick]

DC Ladies and Why They're so Awesome

Barbara Gordan: So of course Im going to start of with a good part. Babs is probably one of the smartest people in the entire DC universe. She graduated high school early (at like sixteen) and went to college. She got her masters degree so she could be a librarian. In her 20's she became a congresswoman but apparently was too liberal to get re-elected. On top of this all she was batgirl. When the Killing Joke happened the DC universe thought they lost Babs. Not only did Babs stick around she became stronger. Babs used everything she had and built up the Birds of Prey using her quick thinking and computer knowledge to keep her team safe. Not only that but as Oracle Babs was the information keeper for the Justice League. She had every single superheroes number easily accessible and knows them all personally. Also Babs became a Green Lantern! Like thats awesome. Babs has been at war with the Calculator for forever and has won every time. You can not tell me Babs isnt one of the best DC characters hands down.

Diana Prince: Okay I bet you're all surprised I didn't start off with Diana. I love Wonder Woman so much and there's so many reasons why. First off Wonder Woman defied her Amazonian sisters and went out to the real world. She didn't know what was out there and didn't really care. She wanted to promote peace and be a diplomat and that's what she was at least for a while. When Diana killed Maxwell Lord she regretted it so much that she decided not to be Wonder Woman anymore. Even though everyone told her that her reasoning was just (cause like yeah it was). Wonder Woman has this huge sense of responsibility and like how can you not love her for it. Also the fact she's more powerful than most of the Justice League and the Justice League knows and admires it. Yeah that's definitely a plus.

Mary Batson: Okay I love Mary and honestly I don't know much about her but I'm going to take a stab. Mary carries this sense of responsibility, she wants to be a hero and she's damn good at it too. When she lost her powers around Countdown she was devastated. When she got them back and become "Black Mary" that absolutely sucked. But she came back became Mary Marvel again and built herself back up. Mary is a key part of the Marvel family and I don't know what Billy would do without her. She's also still a kid. Like an actual kid. A teenager and she's out helping save the world. Yeah I have respect for that.

Kara Zor-El: Of course Supergirls on this list. Why would she not be? Okay supergirl has an interesting story. She's the sole survivor of not one but to planets. When she arrived on earth she knew nothing about the planet at all. She had to trust her cousin knew what he was doing to help her. She wanted to build a whole life away from being a superhero too. She just wanted to be a normal kid. She has her ups and downs but ultimately Kara is probably one of the best characters because she's realistic. She's written to be an angsty teenage girl who is still trying to figure herself out. Sure she's chronologically 30 years older than Superman (depends on what story you read) but that doesn't make her any less of a kid. Also she fought Darkseid and Lex Luthor while still figuring out her powers, she single handedly took down the entire Justice League and she's more powerful than Superman. I think that's pretty cool.

Dinah Lance: The Black Canary's name has belonged to like three different Dinah's at this point. But that doesn't make her any less awesome. Dinah is trained in all forms of martial arts and is thought to be the second best martial artist in the world. Yeah the entire world. Dinah is hot heated and can be moody at times but she knows what she's doing. Even after losing her Sonic Scream she continued to kick ass with the Birds of Prey. She did get her Sonic Scream back later while in the birds but she never seemed to rely on her powers, she always just used her gut instincts and quick thinking. At one point Dinah adopts a child who was being trained to be an assassin. She kept this child and even stopped being with the birds to settle down with Oliver Queen and have a family. Dinah is undoubtedly one of the best ladies in the whole DC universe.

Helena Bertinelli: Okay not only is Helena a superhero known as the Huntress shes also a school teacher. Helena originally was the daughter of Batman and Catwoman but at some point during Crisis she became a vigilante who was the daughter of a mob boss. After her whole family is murdered in front of her she vows to end the underground crime ring in Gotham. Shes pretty good at it and almost succeeds. Sure her methods arent well liked by Batman but she gets her job done. She joins the Birds at one point and actually gets a family. Babs gets her a job as a school teacher and Helena is happy again. Towards the end of the original Birds run Helena manages to take over the underworld and Gotham and manages to (almost) take it down.

Stephanie Brown: Okay Steph is the daughter of some low class supervillain called the Cluemaster. She becomes Spoiler as a way to make up for all the things that her dad did. She literally built herself up from nothing and became an amazing superhero. Steph might have never had a major standing in the comics but she was there in the background spoiling everyones plans. Also Steph got pregnant as a teenager. Like thats really hard to deal with. And she did it mostly while continuing to be a vigilante. Steph maintained a good friendship with Cass and when Cass ditched the title of Batgirl Steph took it up. While Batman never approved of her actions Steph did everything she could to be an accepted member or the batfamily. Plus she was briefly Robin which is really cool.

Cassandra Cain: Okay daughter of assassins is already cool but the fact she can speak solely with body language is amazing. Cass never learned how to speak and was trained to be the worlds best assassin. When she did learn how to speak she spoke few words. Despite that she maintained a great friendship with Babs and Steph. Babs trained her to be the new Batgirl and Steph ended up being her best friend. Cass is even better at fighting than Batman and she took down the Joker her first time fighting him. Not only did she break the Joker out of Arkham she beat him and sent him back just as easily. Cass had a great character arc and I just love her character. She really brought the name Batgirl to mean something entirely new and when she dropped it and gave the name to Steph she did it with honor. Cass did at one point leave to go run the league of assassins but she eventually came back to Gotham.

Talia Al Ghul: I dont know much about Talia but I think I know enough to write a paragraph about her. Talia is the heir to the demon. She trained as a child to be an assassin alongside her father Ra's Al Ghul. She also fell in love with Batman. But thats probably the least cool thing about her. I mean she is an assassin who will potentially inherit a whole army of assassins and be immortal. Like I dont know about you but I think thats pretty friggin awesome.

Selina Kyle: Okay Catwoman is amazing. She trained to fight under Catman which is pretty cool. Also like she controls part of the Gotham underworld. Selina is an amazing woman who is a great thief and she also has morals. She doesnt do killing (most of the time) and shes even been a hero for a while. Catwoman became a hero alongside Batman but at some point she decided to return back to crime. She's worked alongside the Birds of Prey a few times and at one point was even a member. Selina also decided not to marry Bruce because she knew marrying Batman might give him a reason not to be Batman anymore and she knew people needed Batman more than she needs Bruce. Also Selina helps girls on the street. Like thats a major thing. Helping kids who dont have much. Like thats great. Lastly she feeds and takes in stray cats and thats just wonderful.

Harley Quinn: Okay while I wouldnt consider Harls a hero persay (shut up new 52 and rebirth) she is still an amazing character. Harley is a genius, she blew through med school and became a psychologist. She built herself up from working at Arkham from the bottom all the way to working with the highest class psychos. Harls was also an amazing gymnast and she had tons of medals. After falling in love with the Joker she did some regrettable things but the fact she managed to get herself and she started to redeem herself shows a lot about. Harley now just wants to help people she wants to fix what she did wrong. Harley has a big heart and wants to do right and while she knows her methods arent that great shes trying hard. She just wants to please the people she loves and cares about.

Pamela Isley: Okay Ivy is a tricky character. She doesnt really have a set backstory or anything that I really know of. Ivy was a scientist and something happened that changed her physically. She became connected to the green. Now Ivy isnt really sure who she is. She became the Batman villain known as Poison Ivy and became an ecological terrorist (at least thats what I think they call her). Ivy really just doesnt know her place in the world. Ivy is wicked smart and she has patented a lot of biotech stuff and she made Harley the antidote that made her immune to toxins. She does end up re-entering the field of science a few times and is genuinely trying to turn a new leaf and become a better person. At first she didnt really understand that what she did was wrong she just wanted to help out the plants because she saw all these terrible things happening to them. For the most part Ivy is a misunderstood person who is trying to find her humanity.

Kara Zor-El (Earth Two): Okay Power Girl is a tricky character to figure out because she has so many different backstories due to the destruction and then reformation of the multiverse. Anyways Karen Starr is from another Earth specifically Earth 2. When she arrived on Earth 1 she learned there was already a Supergirl. She took on the name Power Girl and founded a company that focused on software (I think.) Shes older than Earth 1s supergirl and is kind of like a big sister figure at times even though her and Kara are the same person. The two also didnt start off on the right foot with eachother. Karen for a while led the Justice Society of America which is really flipping cool. Karen knows whats right in her heart which is what makes her like Superman in a way. Because like her cousin (even if the two arent really cousins on earth 1) she wants to help people.

Donna Troy: The original Wonder Girl will always hold a special place in my heart but I kid of want to focus on her time as Wonder Woman and also as simply just Donna Troy. When Wonder Woman quit being Wonder Woman Donna took her spot and she made a pretty great Wonder Woman. She doubted herself a lot and didnt think shed ever be as good as Diana she pushed herself up to the top and did it. As Donna Troy she was an amazing Teen Titan and she even cheated death. Her spot in the multiverse has been looked over a few times but her Roy and Jason last I heard were all kicking ass together.

Rachel Roth: Ravens a weird character Im not going to lie. Shes kind of mysterious. Rachel was a key addition to the Teen Titans, her powers are unmatchable in battle a lot of the time. Also shes the child of the demon Trigon. Rachel herself never really knew what to do with herself but while growing up she knew she had to do something and that she has to save people. She spent her teenage years with the Titans and continues to be with the Titans even if shes technically supposed to have aged out by now.

Kate Kane: Kate is one of my favorite characters of all time. Batwoman adds so much to the story and it covers a lot of things Ive never even thought of. Kate was kicked out of Westpoint under Dont Ask Dont Tell. The story talks a lot about her experience with PTSD, being gay and also being in the army. Kate runs a major business and is Batmans cousin. Kate literally gives zero craps about what Batman says and she does what she wants even if he doesnt approve. Kate has a big heart and ultimately she just wants to save her sister. After being kicked out of Westpoint Kate became a party girl and an alcoholic becoming Batwoman changed all of that for her. She became the woman she was meant to be.

Maggie Sawyer: Maggie Sawyer is a badass cop. Shes also Kates girlfriend and shes a mom. Being a cop in Metropolis is one thing but since moving from Metropolis Maggie has joined the GCPD. Being a cop in Gotham versus being a cop in Metropolis are to completely different things. Maggie can do it all and she works well under pressure. Shes an amazing cop and deserves so much more credit that what she gets in the comics.

Renee Montoya: Renee Montoya started out as another Gotham City Cop well until she became The Question. Also one of Kates ex girlfriends Renee has taken up Vic Sage's mantel and become the Question. She's a cop turned vigilante who is trying to do everything she can to keep Gotham safe.

Zatanna Zatara: So Zatanna is a magician. An actually magician with real magic and also a performing magician for kids. She does a lot of volunteering and loves showing her magic to the kids. Shes part of Justice League Dark and her powers are probably some of the most powerful in the whole DC universe. Zatanna can literally do anything just by saying it backwards. She doesnt get as much credit as she deserves but Zatanna is a kid with a big heart and deserves a lot more than she gets. Also did I mention she once climbed Mount Everest?

Courtney Whitmore: Not many people know much about Stargirl but this teenage girl is a key part of the Justice Society. Stargirl is a nobody without her Cosmic Staff but with it she is one of the greatest members of the JSA. Courtney has befriended Supergirl and has run around on all sorts of adventures before she could even vote. Her friendship with Supergirl is strong even if it isnt seen too often in the comics. Stargirl is just another kid who wants to change the world and who does manage to do it.

Lois Lane: Supermans girlfriend has ring to it enough but pulitzer prize winner Lois Lane is so much more than that. Shes an investigative reporter who strives to find the truth no matter the cost. Time and time again she goes undercover and risks her life for her job. She has no powers and no fighting skills just faith and a keen eye for a story. So sure while she's Supermans girlfriend she so much more than that. She's a woman who's going places and will always be independent. (Bonus: the first time Clark meets Lois she's yelling at some guy at the phone for being sexist)

Lana Lang: Supermans other girlfriend. Lana kind of got abandoned for a while but trust me she's still great. Lana takes in Kara while Kara is still struggling to figure her life out. Lana is the most supportive and loving person there is. She really cares about Kara and treats her like a daughter and as a best friend. Her friend ship with Lois Lane is amazing and Lana had an amazing story arc when she became possessed. Moral of the story never mess with any of Supermans girlfriends because they will fight back and theyll fight back hard.

Lady Shiva: If it wasnt for Lady Shiva Black Canary would be the best martial artist in the world. Lady Shiva is a long time Batman villain and not even Batman himself can beat her. Shes said multiple times that the only time he did she let him. She just wanted to know how worthy of an opponent he was. Shiva and Dinah trained under the same sensei together and have a mutual respect for eachother. For a short period of time Shiva even took Dinah under her wing to teach her new techniques no one else in the world even knew.

Mia Dearden: Speedy is hands down the best Green Arrow sidekick. And no Im not talking about Roy I really do mean Mia. Mia was living on the streets for the longest time and as a teenager. Constantly in the comics she talks about what it was like as a teenager being homeless on the streets, doing drugs and even selling her body just to stay alive. She became a great fighter while training with Ollie and Dinah and becomes the second Speedy. Mia is quick thinking and knows how and when to act. Later in the comics before she joins the Teen Titans she gets diagnosed as HIV +. That was the first time the DC universe made a character be HIV + and it hit hard for a lot people. Her backstory is really sad but its meaningful and really tells a lot about things that nobody knows anything about. Mia is a spunky kid with a lot of personality and she wants to help people.

Emiko Queen: Emi wasnt really around until she become the Red Arrow in Rebirth. She had her ups and downs but she stay devoted to Ollie throughout all of it. Emi is a tough character who really wants to be just like her big brother. She does at one point join a cult but then she breaks away from the cult to save her brother. Emi really admires Dinah and their friendship is great. Her story is still just starting to develop and its really cool to see where its going.

Zinda Blake: Lady Blackhawk has been no where in sight since New 52 hit. Im not really sure if theyll bring her back but I hope they do. Zinda is a hotheaded pilot who thinks more with her fists than she does with her brain. Shes a key member to the Birds of Prey and a true hero. After somehow re entering the continuity despite having to have originally been in WW2 Zinda has begun to fit right in with her weird accent and odd slang. I really hope she gets put back in soon.

Charlie Gage-Radcliffe: Misfits not really a well known character but shes a good one. Shes a spunky kid with an obsession with Batgirl. She takes on the mantel of Batgirl briefly before the real Batgirl, Barbara Gordan, stops her. Babs takes her in as one of her Birds and trains her. Charlie is just a kid and Babs knows it. Charlie doesnt get to see much action throughout the series but her character really grows a lot and she molds into this amazing character. Misfit is pretty impulsive and her mind (and body) tend to bounce all over the place. Charlie is just like any other teenager and she does everything she can to look on the bright side of every situation

Cassandra Sandsmark: Cassies Wonder Girl is what got me into Teen Titans. Cassie knows what she wants and knows how to get it. She can be short tempered but she had a really good heart. Her friendship with Supergirl is one of the best friendships in the whole DC universe. Cassie ultimately just wants to impress Wonder Woman. When she's not roaming around with the Teen Titans or on Paradise Island she's like literally every other teenage girl. Sitting at home argueing with her mom. Her power for her lasso comes fron her anger which she seems to carry a lot of. Shes still figuring out how to be Wonder Girl but shes become a valuable asset to the team. Cassie is a really relatable character and I love her for that. Her and Diana are a great pair and seeing them together is amazing. (Bonus: In New 52 Teen Titans she can put up a fight against basically anybody including Tim Drake and she hates the name Wonder girl)

There are more characters but this took me about two hours to write so Im going to cut it here. If anyone wants me to add any more characters let me know in the notes and I'll edit this. Also special shout outs to characters who I didnt have enough info on to put on here but are still equally as awesome: Martha Kent, Director Cameron Chase and Linda Park.

[storm-driver]

How Kingdom Hearts III will probably go down

First of all, THANKS FOR LIKING MY WRITING STYLE. I TRY MY BEST. To do with the theory I wrote, the huge majority of it was thanks to @derekscorner, who I really couldn’t thank more for letting me post the revised version. Seriously, it got so much attention and I’m so happy that lots of people saw it and liked it.

So... how do I think the ending to Kingdom Hearts III will happen?

*rubs hands together, snickering in the darkness*

Kingdom Hearts III trailers and teasers are SUPER unclear with what the main plot is leading up to. 

We all know that Xehanort is preparing 13 vessels of pure darkness in order to forge part of the X-Blade and plans to use the 7 Hearts of Pure Light, i.e. the Princesses of Heart in order to forge the rest. So to protect the 7 Princesses, we need 7 Guardians of Light. Seems correct, one Guardian per light to ensure that the Princesses aren’t hurt or corrupted in any sort of way. 

This being said, I’m had my fair share of wishing for our beloved and under-developed Kairi to become a Guardian of Light. But plot-wise, it doesn’t make sense. Yes, train Kairi to use her Keyblade so that she may protect herself and her friends! I want my fearless Kairi more than anything!

(i appreciate the hood with cat ears more than god damn anything else, seriously, she looks so adorable)

But do I really think Sora and company would really risk having Kairi on the front-lines when Xehanort has so easily corrupted people in the past? Sora nearly fell into the Darkness in Dream Drop Distance and almost became another pawn. Not to mention, Riku got pretty damn close some times and Terra literally lost himself in the Darkness. Xehanort is a master tactician who’s manipulative-nature has hurt so many people. 

So instead of having Kairi up front and fighting, I’d think that Riku more than anyone would want her to stay behind, where it’s safe. From there, she’s isolated. And that’s a golden opportunity for someone to go after her. 

And that leads into Lea/Axel’s role. During the Orchestra tour, there was a reading of Kairi’s letter to... someone... about how Lea was really sorry for what had happened to her and that he wanted to make it up to her. He’s going to become protective of her, try to support her in any way he can to atone for what Axel did, kidnapping her out of brash action to get Sora to chase him. 

You’d assume Sora would be the one to protect Kairi, since he’s clearly one of the Guardians, but he’s having to go out to other worlds, search for the Keyblade of Returning Hearts, the lost Keyblade Wielders, regain his lost strength. Sora can’t stay back with Kairi when there’s something else he has to do. So who’s best to stay with her? Well of course, it’s Lea.

“So.... who’s the seventh Guardian?”

Hey, I didn’t even NAME all of the Guardians. I’ve got reasoning as to why each person on this list is a Guardian. Yeah, that’s right, unlike SOME PEOPLE WHO WON’T RELEASE INFORMATION ABOUT THE GAME, I’ve got EVIDENCE to back my conclusions. Be this reasoning for defensive or offensive action, it should all make sense.

So who ARE the Seven Guardians of Light?

1. Sora

Quite literally the most obvious one since he IS the main character. But Sora isn’t a guardian to a SPECIFIC light, but rather he’s supposed to maintain caution for all of them. I have the sneaking suspicion we’ll be visiting all of the worlds pertaining to the Princesses of Light, only further backing the idea that Sora is supposed to defend all of them versus focusing on only one.

2. Riku

With ties to the Darkness, Riku is one of the most fit to defend those from the Darkness. While Sora and Aqua clearly show power to defeating the Darkness with Light, Riku fought valiantly against it using his own combination of both the Light and Dark. After all, Darkness isn’t a bad thing, as we’ve been taught by his character arc. It’s what happened in the past and those that abuse it that give Darkness a bad name. 

3. Aqua

Having her own experience with the Darkness, living in it for over 12 years and fighting it off for all that time, she will know how to combat it to protect those she cherishes. She knows how to fight Xehanort. She’s the only one BESIDES Terra who’s actually been in a direct fight with Master Xehanort. She understands how to fight the Darkness with Light and could teach it to the others. She’s the expert.

4. Ventus

This one is a bit dipping into theory zone, but assuming Vanitas and Ventus reformed together as one heart instead of two separate entities, Ventus should have all of Vanitas’ memories and experiences. Which means, to an extent, Ventus should have a pretty good picture of what Xehanort plans to do with the X-Blade once it’s been forged and how to stall that from happening. Even if he hasn’t recovered Vanitas’ memories, he has the most experience fighting him and definitely knows how to fight off the Darkness, which adds into a whole “Vanitas can return” arc and how Xehanort might exploit that, etc. Alongside his brotherly nature and stalwart actions, he’s a perfect candidate for going to recover Terra.

5. Terra/Lingering Will

Terra is currently in a very questionable state. His heart is sealed inside his body, which is currently being shared with Xehanort. Meanwhile, it appears his will to fight has been sealed inside his armor. And then there’s the fact that Terranort as Ansem’s apprentice gave into the Darkness and created a Heartless and Nobody. His Heartless, Ansem the Seeker of Darkness, held both Xehanort’s and Terra’s hearts captive in it’s Darkness. Meanwhile, his Nobody, Xemnas, held Terranort’s shared body in existence. Both were destroyed and became whole again. But when Terranort reformed... he didn’t look like Terranort, but rather Xehanort has regained his original body. So... where’s Terranort? 

I have reason to believe that Xehanort regained his old body while Terra regained his real one. But seeing as how his will is trapped inside a suit of armor, his body is unresponsive and his heart will not awaken. So Xehanort is holding him somewhere until they reclaim his armor or find some other way to awaken him. That being said, that puts Terra in a prime position to be recovered by Sora and company. He should know everything Xehanort is planning to do and how to combat it. And being that he probably hates Xehanort don’t know why he wouldn’t, he’s hella ready to fight back.

6. Roxas

OKAY HOLD ON, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GONNA SAY, BUT just listen to me okayyyy

Roxas is very hard-set on achieving his goals. He’s stubborn and aggressive when he wants to be, making him a top-notch fighter. He throws what people say over his shoulder and keeps on going. But while he does ignore what people say directly to him, what happens to his friends is what hurts. Roxas puts himself in harms way repeated times throughout 358 in attempts to help those he cares about. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if his only passion to fight was because he wanted to protect others.

Also, pretty sure this kid has the biggest grudge against Xemnas and will probably not stop being angry until the man has a key in his chest.

7. Mickey

Because it’s Disney, fuck real reasoning.

You want a PROPER StormDriver™ explanation? ‘Kay, I’ll try.

Mickey, having shown to be such a powerful Keyblade wielder in multiple instances, is clearly adept at taking on the Darkness and protecting other people. He’s basically a pro in all of the instances here, having been fighting the Darkness since before Birth by Sleep. It’s literally experiencing outweighing youth. 

He also probably feels passionate about protecting his 3 friends even though he never met Terra and wants them to all be happy. Ven is in a coma, Aqua is in Hell, Terra is... God knows where. And it’s Xehanort’s fault. He probably wants to avenge them.

“But what’s gonna happen?!”

Kingdom Hearts III is concluding the Xehanort saga. That basically confirms Xehanort is gonna fucking die. We’re not just gonna resurrect everyone and then YAY WE WIN BECAUSE LIGHT AND FRIENDSHIP AND

spare me please

If there’s ANYTHING this franchise has taught me, it’s that Sora Squad does NOT get the easy button. 

In order to properly prepare for the oncoming battle with Xehanort, there is literally a to-do list for this game’s plot.

Find Aqua and hope she’s not dead.

Find Ventus and his missing heart.

Find out what the fuck even happened to Terra.

Retrieve the Keyblade of Returning Hearts.

Ensure all of the Princesses of Heart are okay.

Honestly, the list goes on and on. There’s so much shit we’ve gotta do to make this turn in the hero’s favor. Which means this game is gonna be HELLA long and probably REALLY FUN. 

Upon completing said to-do list, odds are shit hit the fan and someone got hurt. Discrepancy in their ranks is gonna lead to them half-way losing the battle against Xehanort, the X-Blade is gonna be forged, Kingdom Hearts is gonna fuck shit up. And then the heroes and heroines are gonna have to try to fix it with the power of friendship or some bullshit like that.

It’s honestly too soon for me to make any kind of real theories about this game, considering we have a grand total of 3 cutscenes from the trailers.

(In case you’re wondering, I’m referring to the scene of Sora holding the Master’s Keeper keyblade from the first trailer, the conversation between Pete, Maleficent and Hades, and the scene where Xemnas accuses Sora of using the Darkness.)

IF we get more stuff outta the D23 trailer, I’ll be able to say more. But I seriously can’t make any real theories besides ones that beat the old games even more.

[cryptoriawebb]

Smufs the Lost Village: review

So I saw this forever ago, but there were so many movies coming out this review kind of got pushed on the backburner...

I was pleasantly surprised by this movie. The trailers looked promising but I had heard it didn’t receive stellar reviews. I couldn’t imagine an animated film suffering from what I believed the first two Smurf movies did, but I was hesitant no less. There were a few years where Hollywood believed the only way to reinvent vintage material was to grossly mock it throughout, and even though the trailer didn’t look as though it was headed in that direction, I couldn’t be certain.

I’m glad I gave it a chance. The animation itself was colorful, crisp, and true to design. I actually found it something of an improvement over the original cartoons, but that might be my generation speaking. I found the palette played a large part in dictating atmosphere: always rich, but used in different ways (the blues and purples of Smurf village compared to the sickly yellows and greens Swamp of No return I think it was called?) I’ve always found it amazing how strongly a hand color plays in creating the tone of an environment: the female Smurf village (whose name also escapes me) also used several greens and golds, for example. In contrast to the swamp, there was a welcoming, almost dream-like quality floating around it, largely, I believe, to reflect Smurfette’s reaction.

At its barest bones, the plot wasn’t overly original. That said, in context, I found the focus on Smurfette mixed with expanding Smurf Mythos in a respectful and I’d say ‘serious’ way, worked very well. I’ve never been a big Smurfette fan: I found her too delicate and feminine as a child. As a tomboy, I tended to dislike female characters of that nature. As an adult, however, I look at things more critically, and I definitely think she was the right focus for this film. She’s not only the one female Smurf, but she’s also got an unconventional origin. I admit, despite being an animated reboot I was afraid Sony would retcon this. I admit, I prefer to go into most movies blind—after the first couple of trailers, I stayed away in order to avoid any spoilers and I certainly didn’t look up more info beyond its critical reception. An honest review, I think, comes from blank slate, rating aside. I like to know what I’m up against, if that makes any sense.

I also think this movie did a decent job expanding on Smurf personalities, characteristics and bonds. Brainy, Hefty and Clumsy were an odd but at the same time expected trio to accompany Smurfette on their journey. I do like, however, that they were more than their names made them out to be. They each had a lot of heart, and I felt their friendship genuine. Not only that, but presented in a way that was not over-the-top touchy-feely or preachy, which in my opinion, is a bit rare for a children’s film.  And it was called a kid’s film by many critics. I get it, not every movie can possess the sophistication of Moana or Kubo and the Two Strings, but there was more maturity in this movie than say, Ice Age or Trolls. There was hardly any potty humor and far less over-the-top reactions than I expected.

Side-note: I liked the female Smurfs a lot. They had their own quirks without being too stereotyped any one way, which I actually find very interesting. I love that they were named after flowers and plants, as did I that they seemed almost to move more as a unit as opposed to one standalone trait. I wonder if that was alluding to how the female Smufs are, like Smurfette, who also doesn’t have one set defining trait. I mean they definitely had unique personality traits (Smurfwillow and Smurfstorm for example) but there was a notable difference. Or maybe it speaks of how their village is, the rules to live by or the way these Smurfs grew up (provided Smurfs grow up and don’t just appear out of mushroom dust or something.)

I will say that while I like this change in Gargamel’s antagonistic pursuit of the Smurfs, stealing their magic to enhance his own just seems far less intimidating than wanting to eat them.  It’s also, at least, I think it is a more-heavily relied on trope. I understand times have changed, and the film seemed like they were trying to veer away from an overly dark tone. It’s just different, and it does succeed in maintaining Gargamel as a goofy, only moderately successful villain. I haven’t seen the series in several years, but I do feel like the film captured his essence and that of his animal companions, despite toning them down a few notches. If his character suffered from anything at all, it was the degree of exaggeration and silliness, but again, they toned him down. And I do like that he didn’t reform at the end. I didn’t expect him to, but it’s always interesting to see the hero’s offer of generosity blow up in their face. And I loved Gargamel’s dialogue leading up to that moment. Probably the funniest I found him in the movie.

Papa Smurf’s character was…interesting. I loved most of his interpretation: I’m not sure the balance between ‘serious father figure’ and ‘dumfounded humor’ worked entirely successfully. That said, I didn’t dislike his character. It’s hard to dislike anyone played by Mandy Patinkin.  He’s the perfect father figure. My friend and I were joking the other day he must have some kind of ‘father figure’ phone, on reserve for whenever Hollywood requires immediate casting for any such father character. I will say I’m a little surprised Papa Smurf and Smurfwillow didn’t have any kind of history, but that’s for the better I think. It suggests this separation surpasses their generation and I hope it means we’ll see more of it explored in the future. If Papa Smurf and Smurfwillow want to become a thing (because let’s face it, there was something there) I’d be more than alright with that. Leading a village is a daunting responsibility. They could use someone to lean on.

Speaking of character chemistry, I actually didn’t mind Hefty’s little crush on Smurfette. Love interests aren’t terribly unsurprising, even in animated films, but this, I felt, remained mild enough it felt honest, natural as opposed to forced. And I also liked Smurfette’s reaction to it. She wasn’t a damsel and actually protested his protecting her, but appreciated his admiration as well, and when his protection actually led to his capture that was more important than the act of his jumping in the way. As it should be, and as it usually seems to be, but it isn’t always easy to tell what direction some movies will go. Admittedly, when I discovered this movie really would revolve around Smurfette I worried the director would turn it into a preaching pedestal for female empowerment. I have no problem whatsoever with female empowerment—I actually love it, having grown up in an era where most female characters were delicate sidekicks or love interests. I just don’t want it shoved into my face. I worried it was headed that way with the opening narration. A direct approach tends to go either very well or very poorly. There’s so much more to a film than that and a successful message not only blends in but promotes itself through strong, likeable and believable character development. It should never overshadow or corrupt the art of a movie itself. If it does, it veers away from entertainment into political propaganda and I just don’t want to see that. This is a personal preference of course, but it’s one I’ve believed for a very long time, frustrations or no.

Overall, I really liked this film. I laughed out loud now and then, felt engaged enough with each character to care, and I loved the use of that classic nineties’ song, Blue. It’s not a perfect piece, it’s not the most original and the ending was so predictable it was like watching the first Pokemon movie again; despite all this, when looked at in the context of the film on its own, I came away satisfied. It’s funny, I feel like this growing trend of animated reboots began with the Charlie Brown film. Maybe I’m wrong, but that was the first one I’ve seen that didn’t try to make fun of itself and didn’t try to be anything more than what it was. The characters, the art style, remained as true to the source as hey could and proved, at least to my opinion that what you think may not be cool anymore, what you think won’t sell, actually will. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Looks like the Smurfs are finally on the right track.

[iamashamedofmyfanfics]

Less Than Expected [11]

Less Than Expected (by iamashamedofmyfanfics)

Pairing: I.M Centric, Kihyun/I.M/Wonho  + Platonic I.M/everyone Genre: Friendship, Romance Universe: Vampire AU Rating: PG13 Warnings: Blood, Swearing, Death mentioned, references to sexual stuff but no actual sexual stuff Length: Chaptered (ongoing) Chapters: [First] [10/Previous]

Notes: it returns

{ao3 version}

Summary: Changkyun was supposed to be recovering from midterms, not being robbed, stabbed, and then turned into a vampire. Yet that’s what happened. Luckily the vampires aren’t half bad company.

He's doing it again; looking over paperwork. Somehow, Kihyun hasn’t noticed- or at the very least hasn’t mentioned- Changkyun staring at him, but the latter has been for the better part of ten minutes. The end of summer is approaching startlingly quickly, reminding them both that they’ll be back in college, again, but the paperwork in front of Kihyun has more of his focus. Has for weeks now. The plans for when he “dies,” and what will happen to his assets.

“What are you actually afraid of?” The question rings around in Changkyun’s head. He’d answered, when Minhyuk had asked. Admitted he was scared of more changing, so soon after he was finding an amount of normalcy in his life. So soon after he’d lost it in the first place. That Kihyun would leave, faking his death, and would suddenly disappear entirely from Changkyun’s life. Despite knowing this, despite knowing his worries aren’t warranted, he hasn’t brought it up.

“Is something wrong?” The question startles him out of his thoughts. Changkyun shakes his head, turning away from Kihyun, now that the other is looking at him.

“No, nothing. Thinking about school.” The lie comes easier than it should, probably. Kihyun nods, though he seems unconvinced when Changkyun finally turns back to him.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I’m okay.” Changkyun shakes his head, again. Realizes he’s doing it, and frowns, standing. “I’m going to be with my human friends, okay?”

“Sure?” Kihyun raises an eyebrow at that. Presumably confused that Changkyun feels the need to say it like that. As if he needs permission. “Be safe.”

“When am I not?”

“Two separate stabbings, Changkyun.”

“Alright, I see your point.”

“You realize during that entire time, I’ve managed to maintain my friendships with the others?”

In a hundred years, Minhyuk and Kihyun had maintained a friendship. In nearly that same amount of time, Hyunwoo and Hoseok had also maintained relationships with Kihyun, too. The latter wasn’t so likely to just disappear entirely from someone’s life. Changkyun shouldn’t be worried about it. Or, at least, should talk to the other if he is.

But he doesn’t. And he wouldn’t be able to explain why he doesn’t, if pressed.

It’s late, dark out, as Changkyun makes his way home. He didn’t actually spend any time with his human friends, despite what he said, but was on his own, contemplating. Contemplation that didn’t help him any. Should he talk to someone else about it? Surely that would help, at least, to mentally prepare him to talk to Kihyun himself about it, right?

“Hey, look at that, you made it back without any problems,” Kihyun says, when Changkyun returns. He nods, closing the door.

“Maybe I’ve beaten whatever night-time curse I’d had.”

“Let’s hope so. It was sort of getting out of hand.”

Everyone had said not to worry about it. That it wasn’t a big deal. That, logically, everything would be fine. And they were right, probably. Most definitely. But it didn’t help. It didn’t make him feel better or ease his worries, because he already knew.

“I’m scared of what’s going to happen, when Kihyun inevitably fakes his death,” Changkyun says. Admits it to Hoseok, as they walk back towards Changkyun and Kihyun’s apartment. Hoseok pauses, stops walking, startled by the words. “Not- like- the fact it’ll happen. But that things will change, and I’ll be there alone, when I had finally accepted what happened before.”

Before meaning when he was killed.

“Okay.” The word is simple, accepting. Hoseok begins walking again, and Changkyun falls into step beside him.

“Okay? That’s it?”

“Yeah.” Hoseok nods. Grabs one of Changkyun’s hands, and swings it between them as way of focusing on something else. “You know that’s okay, right?”

“What?”

“That you’re worried?”

“But I shouldn’t be.”

“You shouldn’t, but you also shouldn’t have had to worry about walking home at night, and yet.” Hoseok pauses, but Changkyun can tell he has more to say. “It might not help, but you should tell him that you’re worried about it.”

“I know.” It’s Changkyun’s turn to pause, before speaking again. “Does it bother you?”

“Which part?”

“That I’m worried about that, when you’ll still be here.”

“No.” Hoseok shakes his head, tightens his hold on Changkyun’s hand. “He was the first person you saw, after you died, right? And he saved your life. It makes sense that you’d be worried about him disappearing. The fact you still are, despite being given plenty of reason not to be, means that this goes far beyond you just wanting him around.”

“Oh.” A nod. “That makes sense, I think. Surprisingly insightful.”

“Okay- well- now I’m offended. What do you mean surprisingly?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

“Yes!”

The conversation Changkyun finally has with Kihyun is muted. Feels uneventful. Changkyun tells the other his worries, that he knows they’re irrational, and Kihyun responds as simply as Hoseok had.

“Okay.”

“Okay? Really, you too? That’s all?”

“What do you want me to say?” Kihyun’s words make Changkyun freeze, because he doesn’t know. Isn’t sure what Kihyun could possibly say that would help any. What kind of response would feel like a satisfying conclusion to Changkyun’s concerns. “You’re allowed to be worried, but that isn’t going to stop things from happening.”

“I guess not.”

“But- how about this?”

“What?”

“I promise I���ll be here until at least next summer. I’m sure our neighbors wont get too suspicious that quickly, all of the sudden.”

It doesn’t change anything, really. There’s still a guarantee there, in the words, that the conclusion is inevitable. That Kihyun will fake his death, and leave, like he must have done dozens of times since becoming a vampire. Still, knowing it wont be soon- knowing he isn’t going to suddenly leave the next day, or the next week- eases Changkyun’s worries immediately.

“Okay.”

“I just want to say I am not, in fact, suffering today,” Changkyun says.

“What a twist,” Hyunwon responds, paying little attention to Changkyun. “Then why I am I even here?”

“To steal food like you always do?”

“You’re absolutely correct.” A nod. “You know that offer to make them suffer with embarrassing stories still stands.”

“Ah, so we’re still awful people. Got it.” Changkyun pauses. “But what kind of stories?”

“Admittedly I haven’t known them as long as they’ve known each other.” Wasn’t possible, considering how long each of them had been alive. “But they’re embarrassing at all times, so they gave me plenty to work with.”

“I assume living with one of them helped.”

“I’ve lived with both of them,” Hyungwon reminds him. Changkyun had entirely forgotten about that, until now.

“Oh yeah. What happened with that?”

“What kind of monster gets up so early in the morning?” Hyungwon mutters, presumably to himself rather than Changkyun.

“What? Aside from for classes he doesn’t get up that early?”

“Oh, I see, when you live here he acts like a normal human being.”

“He’s not human.”

“My point still stands.”

So their neighbor is outside, again. Is standing there, when Kihyun kicks Hyunwon out, upon returning, and looks even more suspicious upon seeing they had a guest. Which Changkyun doesn’t think makes any sense, since that was normal. He’s already forgotten the kid’s name, admittedly.

“What are you doing out here, again?” Changkyun asks, while Hyungwon leaves and Kihyun seems to have taken to ignoring the other.

“I know something’s going on!”

“Don’t you have anything better to do?”

Without response, the other leaves, seeming to have taken offense to the question. Changkyun heads back into his apartment, feeling more annoyed than worried, now.

“Are we sure you didn’t just offend him, somehow?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Think so,” Changkyun repeats, disbelieving.

“Well if I did, I don’t know how.”

It happens, again. Another nightmare about that night. Changkyun doesn’t understand why they’re happening, or why they weren’t before. If he was going to be reliving that moment, so traumatically, he would have expected it to happen closer to the event. Yet, the further from it he gets, the more often it shows up. It makes blood unappealing, entirely, which is a problem all things considered.

Changkyun breathes a heavy sigh. One problem- temporarily- solved, another to deal with, he guesses.

Summer's end approaches startlingly quickly. While Changkyun still has another two weeks before classes begin for him, that wasn’t the case for a lot of people who had previously attended the same college as him. Or, rather, it wasn’t the case for his human friends. They begin classes within a few days, and thus had already moved into their dorms. Away from where Changkyun remains. Another piece of normalcy being chipped away at, in his life.

Yet, for some reason, it doesn’t bother him as much as he thinks it should. Despite losing the barely-reformed stable parts of his life being one of his major concerns, when it came to multiple things already, it doesn’t register. Doesn’t bother him. Which, in and of itself, bothers him.

Did his human friend's place in his life mean so little? Was it because he could still contact them, or had their space in his life- since becoming a vampire- shrunk so much it didn’t register as a change?

“You’re keeping your human friends?” Jooheon had given Changkyun a look that made him think he shouldn’t.

At the time he had been determined to keep them. To retain a place in his life, for them. Even more so recently, as one of them became aware of what actually happened to him. The thought, somewhere in the back of his mind, had been that this meant he succeeded. That he’d managed to keep them an important part of his life.

Was that wrong?

When he takes the time to think about it, Changkyun knows that he spends less time with them. Besides the majority of his time being spent with Hoseok and Kihyun, the rest of his time, too, was in majority spent with vampires.

Realizing this, Changkyun finds himself immediately calling the only one of them not gone to another college- Taehyuk- to spend time together. With no actual idea what to do, specifically. Still, the other agrees, maybe realizing something is up with Changkyun.

“So, what’s wrong with you?”

“What a way to ask if I’m okay.”

“Well?”

“I’m just trying to keep… something normal.”

“Is that so?” A pause. “You really think things were normal, before, just because you were human, and spending time with humans?”

Changkyun is caught off guard by the question. It was, probably, the last response he expected. “Yes?”

“Okay, well, as your wise friend-”

“Wise.”

“Let me tell you a secret.” Taehyuk glares and Changkyun remains silent. “There’s no such thing. Normal is nonsense. You’re just worried you’re extra weird now, but you’re really not. Different, sure, but if you were that weird I wouldn’t have been the only one to realize what happened to you.”

The conversation, like a lot recently, sticks in Changkyun’s mind long after it’s over. There’s no such thing. Was that the problem, then? Clinging to the idea of normal, when it wasn’t real. When, even if it was, he’d lost the ability to be normal a long time ago? It didn’t feel like that long ago, really, but it had been almost a year, he realizes. Almost a year since that night.

Was that why? Was that why it didn’t bother him that his human friend were out of reach? Was that why that night kept coming back to him, all of the sudden?

And, if it was, is there anything he can even do about it?

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

‘The Absent Father and Spider-Man’s Unfulfilled Potential’: Rebuttal Part 2: Introduction Continued

Master Post

Fettinger continues that in his civilian life Peter’s life was a directionless disaster.

This is again profoundly unfair and untrue.

Peter’s life lacking direction was directly attributable to the life he led as Spider-Man.

And yet Peter managed to leave home, later get a place of his own, graduate collage, got married and was attended grad school on three separate occasions.

He only failed to finish grad school the first time around because he made the smart decision to put things on. He was struggling to juggle the increased workload, his social life and Spider-man activates. He passed the first year through the skin of his teeth and was aware the second year would be worse. At the time he’d gotten into a new relationship with the Black Cat who had been severely injured following a battle, recovering very gradually. Peter was also trying to help pay for her medical expenses. Felicia was also a reforming criminal who’s prior attempt at going straight had failed. In order to keep Felicia on the straight and narrow, in order to help her recover and build a future with her it made a lot of sense for Peter to put his education on hiatus whilst he got his affairs in order.

A quick successions of attacks upon his personal life occurred during his second attempt to complete grad school meaning he naturally dropped out again. These attacks were not his fault. Your best friend trying to kill you, your parents coming back to life, your aunt entering a coma and you having a mental breakdown   all BEFORE your clone shows up and your wife gets pregnant are incredibly legitimate reasons to drop out of collage.

Only his third attempt was arguably illegitimate as he dropped out off-panel during the Mackie/Byrne run.

Even this can be defended in-universe on the grounds that his aunt May had recently been revealed to be alive, thus justifying time off. Soon after he landed his dream job. Why bother finishing school when you have the occupation you wanted. Why try to juggle that job, your family and your studies all at the same time if it is unnecessary?

Moreover Peter’s dropping out was simply one of the many, many, many, many, many out of character moments that pervaded that run and the stories intended to lead into it. Fettinger himself would tell you that so they really shouldn’t count.

Not to mention, the series never actually confirmed for us if Peter did or did not drop out. He was attending grad school and then a time skip later he wasn’t. Realistically given how a Graduate School programme can last years he likely hadn’t finished earning his degree, but again that wasn’t confirmed for us.

At the time Fettinger’s essay was published, Peter had also taken on a job as a school teacher, joined the Avengers, had made (successful) efforts to reconcile with his wife, acclimatise his Aunt May to his superhero identity, was making more time for both ladies in his life and was working to try and help rehabilitation of some of the criminals he had captured.

Hardly ‘directionless’.

This is to say nothing of how quite frankly in the mid-2000s MOST people around Peter’s age (25-30) didn’t exactly have a clear cut ‘direction’ in their lives and this was even more true in the consequent decade.

I think this is a criticism equitable to incredibly old-fashioned thinking from older people wagging their fingers at ‘the younger generations’.

Fettinger continues by saying ‘His scientific prowess should have made him a peer of Reed Richards and Tony Stark, men who became prosperous and/or well-respected for their civilian achievements, but he seems to have squandered his potential. These men are not immune from the ravages of human frailty, with alcohol being Tony’s personal demon, and Reed’s neglect of his wife Sue nearly driving her into the Sub-Mariner’s arms more than once, but both have succeeded in balancing superhero careers, satisfying intellectual pursuits, and maintaining some semblance of an organized personal life.”

This was another ‘what the fuck moment’ for me when re-reading this essay.

Honestly, as someone who loves this character this statement made me angry  and even made me question if Fettinger ever  actually LIKED the character himself.

First of all, have  Reed and Tony even succeeded at what Fettinger claims they have?

Tony’s life has often been pretty fucked up. Circa Civil War he and Reed were the pariah’s of the super hero community. Tony’s alcoholism had brought him and his company close to ruin more than once. Reed and Sue had separated in the past more than once and at one point Reed but their son Franklin into a coma. And both men have had their lives made exponentially more difficult by being heroes.

That’s not a ‘semblance’ of an organized personal life. Just because they’ve managed to invent things and be superheroes at the same time isn’t proof to the contrary.

More importantly, even if we accept Fettinger’s claims about Reed and Tony, this is a gigantic false equivalency.

The central reason that Peter has failed to balance his super hero career, intellectual pursuits and an organized personal life is because it is impossible!

Fettinger, despite being this so-called authority on the character is demonstrating a huge misreading of the intent behind Spider-Man’s creation.

He was created specifically to be a more realistic super hero. In that context his superhero life wasn’t allegorical for a real life job or responsibility. Rather the point was to explore how a (relatively) realistic person would believable handle being a hero. This is why Peter initially seeks to use his powers selfishly and needs to learn  to use them altruistically.

In other words, Peter has to deal with all the stuff we deal with in normal life in ADDITION  to being a superhero.

In real life, your job or family might be the most important thing you do. But for Spider-Man they are inherently secondary.

They are just as important to Peter as they are to anyone in the real world but he also has a huge burden even greater than they are to manage.

This is literally the central conflict behind the character. The constant struggle to juggle real life responsibilities against this grander calling.

You might argue he’s the equivalent of a cop, fire fighter or soldier, but that’s not true. There are similarities rendering those roles appropriate allegories. But that allegory breaks down when you consider he is unpaid for his services, has to maintain secrecy whilst performing them and still needs to earn an income. Imagine doing your job but then also being a cop/fire fighter/soldier who has to be potentially available 24/7 as well.

Reed and Iron Man were never treated with this degree  of realism in mind. None of the classic Silver Age Marvel heroes were. Daredevil developed a similar (or arguably greater) degree of realism later under Frank Miller’s pen. And noticeably he too has struggled to find a balance in his life just as Peter has.

Even if we ignore this metatextual argument, the in-universe do not corroborate Fettinger’s point.

I’m no F4 or Iron Man expert so feel free to correct me on anything I get wrong.

But last I checked, circa 2006, Reed and Tony categorically didn’t operate as heroes the way Peter did.

Reed and the other F4 were not crime fighters, and never were. They might deal with crises that arose if they were made aware of them somehow. But they weren’t keeping an eye on organized crime or the drug dealers moving onto the local street corner. They weren’t actively going on regular patrols seeking out petty theft, car jackings, alley way muggings, bank robberies, etc.

IIRC nor was Tony. I think at most he was more concerned with industrial sabotage, the activities of international criminals like the Mandarin, foreign powers like the Soviets or larger scale crises. It wasn’t like he (with or without the Avengers) was responding to every bank robbery in NYC or sticking it to the Maggia or Kingpin.

Spidey though was going out almost every day and night specifically to seek out crime and directly intervene in it. He wanted to avoid anyone else losing their ‘Uncle Ben’ to a burglar because he was passive or complacent.

That didn’t just entail living his life and intervening if he happened to bump into any crime. He was proactive in actually going on the prowl for threats he could help resolve.

Fettinger is also disgustingly unfair because he’s neglected the context surrounding when Reed, Tony and Peter became heroes.

Reed and Tony were ALREADY  financially secure and scientifically accomplished men in their late-20s-late-30s when they became heroes.

They’d already figured out effectively methods of playing the game of life, they already mastered scientific skills and had a foundation of accomplishments and money that could make their superhero lives easier  if anything.

It’s simply easier to maintain  those things as a super hero when you start off that way.

In contrast let’ consider Peter Parker.

He was 15 when he got his powers. He was at most lower-middle class and his family didn’t have much money. Unlike Reed or Tony he had an elderly, health challenged relative to provide care and support for. He was still in school and whilst scientifically gifted didn’t yet have a full education in any scientific field. To get one he’d need to attend college but his household wasn’t able to afford that even before the breadwinner (Ben Parker) died. Therefore Peter didn’t just need to pass high school but earn a scholarship simultaneously. And as for his social life he’d never really had any friends and was thus more poorly practiced at maintaining friendships or romantic relationships than even his fellow school peers. Even if he hadn’t been he didn’t have the same level of experience with such things Reed or Tony would have had due to his age. He wasn’t done growing up yet. Granted Tony wasn’t exactly wise in the ways of serious relationships, but he nevertheless knew how to play the dating game. Reed on the other hand was engaged (or on the cusp of it) when he got his powers.

These were men who had figured out a lot of life, accomplished a lot and grown up long before they began superhero careers.

Peter was starting out with MASSIVE handicaps compared to them.

He needed to simultaneously:

Figure out how to be a grown up

Do that faster than his peers

Care for his sickly aunt

Grieve his uncle

Figure out how to navigate the social scene of people his age, including the ways of romance

Maintain his school grades

Earn a scholarship

Educate himself in various scientific fields

Become the bread winner for his household or else risking them losing their home and May’s access to the medicine that was preserving her life

THEN he needed to be a superhero on top of that!

And what did that even entail anyway?

Figuring out how his powers worked and their limits

Figuring out how to fight

Risking his life against people who regularly wanted to kill him

Dealing with people who went out of their way to target his life, sometimes having that bleed over into his civilian life

Maintaining secrecy as best as he could out of fear of being imprisoned or even killing his aunt due to the shock

Dealing with some people who were actively trying to uncover his identity

For most of his career, never having anyone to mentally relieve his burden by sharing his secret

Figuring out how to seek out crime, track crooks, gather information, the structure of criminal organizations

Fending off deadly and often more powerful opponents

Being hated and feared by most of the general public, authorities and fellow heroes.

Fighting alone most of the time

Created and maintained his own equipment which he did out of his own pocket, despite the hit it took to his finances

Being accused of various false crimes by the press, public or authorities

Helping his boss smear his name because he was the only reliable means of income Peter had

NOBODY could deal with all that. It’s a miracle Peter merely maintained his sanity, never mind successfully kept a roof over his and May’s heads, lowered the crime rate and successfully built a long-term relationship with Mary Jane.

Sure, some of that stuff would get easier over time, but even if other things hadn’t arose to make life harder for him, it’s still an impossible juggling act.

And unlike Tony or Reed Peter rarely had access to much cash, resources or a supportive team to help him. Those things would make all  the difference if Reed and Tony were engaged in that time of superhero work.

Reed could rely upon his family to handle a crisis to help out with his latest experiment if necessary, giving him more time to focus upon other things. Tony could delegate duties in his company to staff members whilst he zipped off to save the world or alternatively could turn to his Avengers colleagues to handle a crisis if he needed to attend to important business. And obviously this support network could greatly help if Reed or Tony had any sickly relatives to look after.

With Peter everything was riding on him. Aunt Anna could help out at times, but she wasn’t a full time caregiver. He had no teammates to help bear the burden of fighting crime. Even his partnership with Felicia entailed going on patrol together, not her going out instead of him.

He had no financial security. He lived from one pay cheque to another because he had no choice. Even when he got older and didn’t need to worry about May as much being Spider-Man critically undermined his ability to maintain a 9-5 job. Hence why Tri-Corp (and later HORIZON labs) gave him flexi-hours and why he needed to take so much time off as a teacher and was basically kept around because Midtown High was just that desperate.

It’s one thing to maintain financial security as a super hero when you begin like that. It’s another story entirely when you are clawing your way up the economic ladder from a lower class position whilst being a hero at the same time.

The same thing applies to his scientific pursuits. Where was he supposed to find the time, money and resources to invent anything that’d win him accolades?

Gee if only there was a story which illustrated how being Spider-Man fundamentally held Peter back from fully living his own life…if only that story had then formed the basis for a major motion picture in 2004…

But yeah, if only Peter had a father figure all this would be a none issue.

From a certain POV that’s true, but only in the sense that Peter would’ve had some of the burden lifted from him. He wouldn’t have had to be as concerned about supporting Aunt May. He wouldn’t have had to have spent as much time figuring out how to play the social game if his Dad had maybe been around to show him (although Aunt May was there for that too so would Ben have made much of a difference?).

But it wouldn’t have meant his life would’ve been fixed and his potential unfulfilled. Because being Spider-Man innately held him back no matter what. He was never going to be able to hold a 9-5. He was never going to be able to give his loved ones all the attention he owed them because duty would inevitably call. And unless his father figure was loaded he’d have never had have access to the resources necessary to invent shit. But that wouldn’t have happened regardless of Richard or Ben Parker dying or not. Peter needed a scholarship even before Ben died, so the Parker household was clearly not well off financially.

Let’s also consider that Reed’s home and hero life are functionally one and the same. His scientific pursuits go hand in hand with the work the F4 usually do. This arguably became the case with Tony as well once he discarded his secret identity in the 2000s. Even before then, he had a much easier solution to maintaining his identity considering it would be believable for a rich man like him to have a super powered body guard and his tech would have enabled him to remotely control the armour at times to maintain appearances.

Peter had neither luxury, with his two lives only overlapping in moments of crisis 9/10.

Not to mention Fettinger’s logic here is hurt when we consider neither Tony nor Reed’s Dad’s were all that great in the first place. It seems both of them succeeded in spite of their father’s not because of them.

Basically, father or no father, if Peter had the same circumstances he’d have been in roughly the same position he is now. He wouldn’t have become Reed or Tony.

So confession time.

I began writing this rebuttal at a time when I had no access to Fettinger’ essay sans the physical book it came in. I began writing down bullet points for his consequent points.

And just as a reminder Fettinger’s ‘thesis’ for this essay is that Peter is a screw up with loads of ‘unfulfilled potential’ because he never had a stable father figure in his life following Ben’s death.

·         Peter flunked out of college and even failed to graduate with his class because he forgot to take a required gym credit.

Peter didn’t flunk Grad school and he made up his collage degree by earning the SINGLE credit he needed over the consequent summer, which is entirely different to truly flunking.

It’s also got jack to do with not having a father or failing to fulfil his potential. Like around that time Aunt May was in the hospital, had nearly died and he was kinda busy saving people’s lives.

·         Two attempts at post graduate education failed.

Actually he tried three times and ‘failed’ is very subjective. See what I said in earlier instalments about the stuff around the early-mid 1990s and the Mackie/Byrne era. Those were the second and third times he tried for a post-grad. The first time he never failed, he simply decided to quit for perfectly practical reasons and return later.

·         He made only a marginal living mostly as a freelance photographer because until recently (remember this was written in 2006) when he became a high school teacher, he couldn’t hold a steady job.

Notice how he acknowledges being a high school teacher and yet claims Peter is ‘directionless’.

And more poignantly NO ONE can be Spider-Man and hold a 9-5.

That’s literally the entire reason Lee/Ditko had Peter become a photographer. Because they were trying to tell the story of a realistic super hero and a realistic superhero couldn’t hold down a 9-5 when he might be on duty at any time; even matt Murdock has a partner  in Foggy Nelson to cover for him if needed. So they engineered a method for him to earn a living whilst still being Spider-Man, by making being Spidey the means to that end.

·         His friendships often failed because he neglected them.

This is not true, his friendships rarely ever failed. When they did it was often not due to his being neglectful. Even on the instances where this could be said to be true again he had a good reason for that. He was SPIDER-MAN!

·         Any success with women, including his marriage to Mary Jane Watson (who left at least once) owes more to his partner’s Job-like patience than any effort on his part (and part of MJ’s devotion to Peter may be tied up in her own relationship abandonment and hero worship issues).

It is true MJ has the patience of a saint. But so do the wives of many police officers, fire fighters, soldiers, politicians, political activists etc. And I do not necessarily disagree that MJ’s patience was a huge factor (maybe the biggest) in keeping that relationship going. But Fettinger’s wording here combined with the wider context of his prior points make it abundantly obvious that he isn’t saying Peter put in effort but MJ’s patience happened to be a bigger factor. He is saying that Peter did not put in enough effort, that he slacked off.

Which is bullshit because again, he was being Spider-Man and more importantly with MJ and many of his OTHER relationships he plainly DID put in effort and consideration. Also it’s disingenuous for Fettinger to refer to MJ leaving Peter because he KNOWS that was OOC nonsense and wrote about it. See his 2001 Year in Review from his Spidey Kicks Butt website or this site.

As for MJ’s ‘abandonment issues’ and ‘hero worshipping’ issues, let’s unpack that.

MJ’s issues weren’t about abandonment. Not unless Fettinger is referring to MJ herself abandoning her sister.

MJ was never abandoned as a child. Yes, in ASM #292 MJ claims her Dad walked out on her mother but re-read her origin from ASM 259 or Parallel Lives. It was the other way around.

So MJ literally hasn’t got any abandonment issues in the first place.

Even if you did  contort it to being about abandoning her sister that’s not a matter of her ‘issues’. That term refers to the idea MJ has unresolved baggage that, if she only addressed, she’d have not been with Peter or stayed with him.

That interpretation though is BS for two key reasons. Firstly, MJ resisted committing to Peter for the longest time which was also at the root of her leaving her sister high and dry. Her staying with Peter when Gwen died and helping him was an example of her GROWING as a person and becoming BETTER, not her doing it as some kind of weird repentance for her abandoning her sister in her time of need.

Secondly, MJ was only able to fully commit to Peter when she’d laid her demons with her sister to rest in ASM #292. There was still unresolved business between them and her own father but when she settled that she was more  comittied to her marriage to Peter not less.

Maybe Fettinger’s intent was that her father’s abuse of her represented a form of abandonment. Or maybe he just phrased himself badly and meant the latter point regardless. Well that too doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Parallel Lives shows us MJ’s issues with her father was a motivator for her to steer clear of Peter not grow closer to him.

And more importantly if MJ’s romance with Peter has anything to do with her father it’s only because Peter is so unlike  her father. In her mind her father’s traits =bad. Peter, in having the opposite traits = good, and therefore attractive.

By any metric MJ’s desire to be with Peter clearly has nothing to do with any ‘issues’ she had. On the contrary her not  being with him was because of her issues. This was incredibly basic and laid out. Fettinger himself touched upon it in this essay.

Now for her hero worship…what hero worship?

Yes MJ respected and was attracted to Peter partially because he was a hero. But that’s not an ‘issue’ because most women  would likely have been attracted to such traits. Doctors or firemen are a common turn on for many women and Spidey’s job is analogous to that.

In truth MJ was turned on more by his sense of responsibility embodied by his heroism as discussed in Web #6 (which Fettinger cited in the previously linked to essay). MJ doesn’t want Peter to be a hero out of concern for his health but also recognizes that if he wasn’t a hero he wouldn’t be the man she fell in love with. Stories like Spider-Man the Final Adventure and the MC2 universe though prove how MJ wouldn’t fall out of love with Peter if he quit being Spider-Man.

She doesn’t have hero worship issues!

·         If we didn’t know Peter was Spider-Man we would probably consider him either “brilliant but lazy?” (see ‘Spider-Man 2’) or simply a loser.

Right except we DO know he is Spider-Man hence so many of the above criticisms are totally out of line, even ignoring many of the blatant inaccuracies to them.

·         He appears to be a chronic underachiever in both identities.

Yeah no. That statement ignores then recent developments in Spidey titles. More importantly it ignores the fact that to ‘fulfil his potential’in either identity he’d have to have access to things (like money and team support) that he simply lacked or else dedicate himself to one life over the other which he cannot do. It isn’t that there is something wrong with HIM it’s that the nature of his SITUATION is rarely conjunctive to success.

·         Why is this? What kept him from putting the disparate parts of his life together and becoming an even greater  hero?

What further greatness does he really need?

Circa 2006 he’d become an Avenger, the premier heroes of the Marvel universe. He had won a Hell of a lot of battles against seriously powerful foes. He’d saved countless people in his time an lowered the crime rate.

I’m just going to give you the gist of Fettinger’s next several points.

He basically argues that Peter has always subconsciously sought out a father figure to replace Uncle Ben.

Which is TRUE.

But he goes on to argue that the reason for Peter’s unfulfilled potential is BECAUSE he’s lacked this father figure in his life. To be fair to him and give him the benefit of the doubt he does say a positive male role model ‘could’ have made the difference and qualifies that there are plenty of people who do fine without positive male role models.

The problem is that he’s set up this whole essay by being cynically over critical, inaccurate and disingenuous about Peter’s ‘failings’.

Meaning he isn’t clearly asserting that Peter’s lack of a father merely might   be the cause for his ‘underachieving’. He is clearly saying Peter is an underachiever and lacking a proper father is the reason why. It’s also disingenuous because Fettinger earlier on in the essay called out Peter as an underachiever by comparing him to womanizing, alcoholic hedonist and weapons manufacturer Tony Stark who you know...had an awful  Dad!

·         Fettinger lists off the difficulties of growing up in general and how supporting Aunt May and being a superhero made that more difficult. And how it’d be especially hard when doing it on your own. Which is true and a father by his side to help him would’ve made Peter’s life much easier.

But to say that the complications he faced wouldn’t exist if he had a father is asinine.

Aunt May still could have died as she did repeatedly.

There is no assurance that Peter would’ve confided the truth into Uncle Ben or any male role model in his life.

And balancing normal life whilst being a hero is innately impossible even if Peter did have an easier time growing up because there wasn’t as much of a burden on him to support May or figure out how to socialize or be a man on his own.

His life would’ve been easier but her wouldn’t have achieved all Fettinger claimed he’s leaving unfulfilled.

Shit, Mayday Parker never balanced things even though she had it objectively easier than Peter ever did. And her Dad was literally Spider-Man!

·         Fettinger writes that without May or MJ Peter would likely have fallen apart.

On this he is on the money.

·         He writes that neither May nor MJ can relate to Peter as a genius, a superhuman being, a pursuer of justice nor simply as a man. Neither could substitute for a father figure.

Which is...kinda true....but also kind of not.

Yes MJ and May cannot directly relate to Peter in any of those ways. But, exempting being a male, neither could any given father figure. Other specific father figures (like the ones Fettinger goes on to discuss in the essay) potentially could though so I suppose he was just setting up the rest of his essay.

That being said Peter’s sense of justice didn’t come from nowhere so May could perhaps relate to this on some level. And MJ has shown that she has a certain sense of justice herself.

·         Fettinger continues by listing off different potential father figures for Peter and examining the hypothetical end results of if they’d fulfilled their roles as father figures.

I’m going to dedicate an instalment to each one of them starting next time.

So with that I’ll leave it there.

Master Post

[blackthornroot]

Haven’t Done One of These in About a Year Let’s See How it Goes...

So while I’ve been away in college I’ve been on a secret mission in an underground laboratory with the Metalborgs, known across the world as over-zealous, justice-obsessed maniacs who would always use their full force, even when, and I quote, “hunting small fry” and clearly valued power above all else.

But now I’ve found a way to reform the Metalborgs into the Kind Borgs.  Robots that are considerate of people and the environment.

With these new Friends at my side, I set out for a large gathering of fellow nerds with one objective in mind, “convert everyone to the side of justice.”  The side objective was to brutally murder anyone who was not in line with these ideals, but let’s not talk about that...

So anyway, the mission was simple enough:  Win 5/7 Games of Cardfight Vanguard in order to make enough friends to be allowed to make it to Day #2, where I could make more friends and get to the Top 8/16/whatever.  Sounds easy, right?  Well let’s see how the Kind Borgs held up against the very mean-spirited forces that live in New Jersey:

But first, a word on Metalborgs (since not only is the deck old as fuck and nowhere near tier 1/1.5, but I’m not exactly running a standard strategy either):

Metalborgs rely on an outdated gimmick, “Guard Restrict.”  Their bosses make it so the enemy can’t guard with G1 or higher cards from their hand when said bosses attack (so basically, no PGs, but guarding with triggers, intercepts, and special cases like guarding from soul/deck are still allowed).  This sounds cool and possibly menacing when combined with Commander Laurel and a crit trigger or two, but keep in mind that these days the better G-Guards let players no-pass 30K columns for 1CB.  G-Guards are also unaffected by the Guard Restrict (since they technically come out of the Extra Deck).

So what I’ve done is make a rush deck that can sit on G2 against the meta (every meta deck sans Blasters was GB reliant to a fault at the time of writing this), but also can reach the late game against less threatening opponents (Even though the opponent can G-Guard, they can only do it 4 times max in a game.  So theoretically if I can punch through all 4 I can win pretty easily after that).

Anyway, I’ll post the decklist first with brief explanations of cards in case you care:

Starter: Metalborg, Locobattler (into soul -> +6K to VG if in legion, +3K otherwise).

Triggers: 5X Crit (4 of which have the same effect as the starter). 7X Draw 4X Heal

G1: 16: 4X Commander Laurel (if VG hits rest 4 RGs to restand VG) 4X Metalborg, X-Blaise (10K attacker) 4X Dimensional Robo, Daishield (Old PG (the kind that can guard RGs).  Some of my RGs need protection and I don’t use CB that much.) 2X Metalborg, Death Blade (SB1 -> +5K to VG). 2X Cosmic Hero, Grand Police (Vanilla 8K).

G2: 13: 4X Metalborg, Ur Buster (Legion Mate to main boss, RG Skill: on-legion -> +4K to VG + “When VG attack hits a VG, kill 1 RG.”  The effect stacks if I have multiple Ur Busters on the field.) 3X Metalborg, Diggerion (Vanilla 10K) 3X Metalborg, Lionetter (12K attacker) 3X Metalborg, Blacking Barrow (Is an 11K body permanently if my VG is in legion.  CB1 + Move into Soul -> When Legion VG attacks, give +11K to VG). The G1+G2 lineup is the way it is for early aggression.  Triggers are to maintain survive-ability and help draw into Laurel/PGs/the G3s.

G3: 4: 4X Metalborg, Sin Buster (Legion: If it’s power is >= 20K (after boost) and attack hits a VG, draw 1.  It it’s in Legion and it’s power is >= 30K (after boost), opponent can’t guard with G1s or higher from hand.  He’s the win condition/finishing blow, obviously.  The G2 rush is to force the opponent to drop all their triggers to guard.)

Strides: 2X Hyper Metalborg, Guilt Digger (No I’m not making that name up.  Effect = “Persona Flip -> search your deck for up to one card that legions with your heart and perform legion in your heart.  Then draw 1.“  Saves me the trouble of wasting a turn legion-ing if I don’t want to).

4X Hyper Metalborg, Heavy Duke (CB2 -> On-Attack, pay the cost.  Opponent can’t guard with G1s or higher from hand.  If the attack hits, draw 1 (draw 2 if heart is in legion).).

2X Super Cosmic Hero, X-tiger (+4K for each face-up card in G-Zone.  Gains a crit if power >= 45K).

G Guards: I run more than 4 G-Guards because Metalborgs have no good strides and the entire point of the deck is invalidating the opponent’s PGs so the regular D-Police strides aren’t worth running. 4X Enigman Patriot (+5K if opponent’s attack is >= 20K) 2X Super Cosmic Hero, X-carivou (+10K if opponent’s attack is >= 30K) 2X Dizmel

ROUND 1: Kind Borgs Vs. Fanservice Mermaids (Bermuda Triangle: Harmony):

Opponent was a kind/polite yet slightly disinterested girl (I chalked it up to either being dragged along by her SO or being tired from a potentially long car ride (some people drive like 5+ hours to come to these things on the day of the competition)).  She had no idea about the overwhelming power of friendship and love that the Metalborgs had in store for her, so she guarded early.

Needless to say when I explained how Sin Buster worked she knew she was toast.  GG.

WIN!  Record: 1-0

ROUND 2: Kind Borgs Vs. Dino DNA (Tachikaze: Dogma):

Opponent was a jovial fat man.  Very loudly proclaimed his moves for all to hear.  I might sound like I was annoyed by this, but I found it hilarious.  I rushed the shit out of him by giving him all of the justice he could handle, pushing him to 5 by turn 3.  He responded by denouncing my kindness by striding and triple driving 3 Heal Triggers.  Of course.  My death was long and agonizing after that point.  Dogma is strong when you’re actually able to live long enough to use it.

LOSE! Record: 1-1

ROUND 3: Kind Borgs Vs. Nova Grappler (Victor):

This opponent, along with the girl I played Round 1, were the only “normal” people I played all day.  The guy decided to have a G2 duel with me.  Little did he know I was slowly but surely sniping his G2s and taking the triggers out of his hand.  I was eating a lot of pain too though, since he knew enough to dive on my RGs constantly.  Eventually, I was backed into enough of a corner that I had to ride to G3 and Stride.  I explained what Hyper Metalborg, Heavy Duke (read effect above) did to him at least 4 times, and he clearly read the card, but he didn’t understand that, on my second attack, he was allowed to guard with whatever he wanted (since I couldn’t pay CB2 a second time).  So he ended up dead with 9 cards still in his hand.  Serves the guy right for casually disregarding my deck I guess.

WIN! Record: 2-1

ROUND 4: Kind Borgs Vs. DINO DNA 2: Electric Boogaloo (Tachikaze: Dogma):

Opponent was 100% neckbeard.  Probably left his fedora at home.  The Kind Borgs began to become frustrated that they had yet to face a meta deck so far today (i.e. Blasters, Luard, Gears, Messiahs, etc.).  So frustrated in fact, that they decided to be decidedly unkind, giving me a trigger-heavy hand and damage check two of my G3s in a row on turn 2.

My opponent was able to capitalize on my being grade stuck by throwing his whole hand down on turn 3 and murdering me.  Ow...

LOSE! Record: 2-2

ROUND 5: Kind Borgs Vs. Murakumo (No clue what this deck was supposed to be, honestly):

Well shit, there were still 3 round to go and I couldn’t afford to lose a single one...  Hopefully love and justice won’t die just yet...

Opponent was another jovial fat man who wouldn’t stop talking about Sailor Moon with the girls that were playing in the game next to ours.  Slightly unsettling behavior but whatever, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just getting his weeb on.  I have no idea what his Murakumo deck was supposed to do, but the basic strategy revolved around effects that went off if I guarded his attacks.

How do I beat a deck that does things if I guard?  Humm...  Well, I no-guarded his attacks, got to 4 damage, and used Heavy Duke to murder his face (like my round 1 opponent, he early guarded, clearly not being acquainted with the power of justice).  Justice Prevails.

Win! Record: 3-2

ROUND 6: Kind Borgs Vs. Luard:

2 rounds to go...  Come on cards I blew money on a two-night hotel stay don’t let me down yet...

Opponent was a overly extroverted girl who piloted the deck as if it was borrowed.  She was friendly though, if not uncomfortably so...

This is honestly the only game where I made an actual mistake/misplay all day (guess it was late).  After getting pushed to 5 by nothing but enemy crit triggers (she called no RGs for the entire early game), I noticed that:

A:  She was at 4, since my rush had been going pretty well. B:  Out of the 6 cards in her hand, I knew 5 (Crit, Crit, Abyssal Owl, PG, Macha, Mystery Card). C:  She’d damage checked a heal and a crit already, so there were only 3 heals and 9 crits not yet revealed. D:  If I went all-in and G-Assisted out a Sin Buster, I had the resources to pump it to 37K, so the absolute best she’d be able to guard for would be 31K as long as the last mystery card wasn’t a heal trigger (if it was another crit it’d be a 41K guard, a 1-to-pass).

So, thinking the odds were decently in my favor (and since I couldn’t ride another G2 over my current Vanguard to prevent myself from being Sea-Breezed), I went all-in, betting basically the entire tournament on my opponent not having a heal/crit in hand.

Let me just say that this was a mistake not because of the gambling aspect.  It’s because historically I personally have absolutely terrible luck in RNG scenarios like this. 85% chance to hit in Fire Emblem?  Miss; 6 triggers in an 8 card deck?  Twin Drive -> G3, G3; Etc.

So I went all-in but her mystery card was a conveniently placed G-Guard.  At that moment I realized I was dead.  Spectral Diablo was happy to introduce my face to the pavement.

LOSE!  Record 3-3!

MISSION FAILURE!  UNACCEPTABLE LOSS COUNT!

And so ends another episode in the saga of me playing card games.  Reviewing my notes from previous years attendance was decently down this year:

Reference (I missed singles regionals in Fall 2016 because I was too busy with school):

2015 Singles: At least 498 Players (I was badge #498 and we got to the event pretty close to the end of registration) 2016 Teams: At least 210 Teams (I was on team #210.  Again my team was basically the last one to sign up.  We get to these things a bit last-minute...).  210 Teams X 3 Players/Team = 630 Players.  A bit unreliable since people always drag along their SOs to fill slots of teams.

2017 Singles: We got there with 5 minutes before registration closed.  I was player #451.

So a slight downturn in attendance from 2 years ago but nothing suggesting the game is dying.  Luck and Logic, a dead game, had a whopping 16 players competing, for comparison.

@dragonstoneplus had a much better go of things than I, she made it to Round 7 before losing her 3rd game.

Some random kid from our shop who plays Novas (Victor) cleared Day 1.  He’s probably wrapping up his performance as I write this.  I wonder if he actually managed to top... (He’s pretty good, but can’t really put up a fight against my teammates and I when we’re actually trying)

[theconservativebrief]

Kanye West and President Donald Trump sat down together on Thursday for a conversation in the Oval Office. They were reportedly expected to discuss prison reform, gang violence, crime in Chicago, and American manufacturing, but instead Kanye delivered a lengthy speech on mental health and job growth, while Trump periodically interjected, “That was quite something!” It was the unlikely pair’s second official meeting since Trump was elected president, with their first meeting taking place at New York’s Trump Tower in December of 2016.

But Trump and Kanye’s relationship stretches back long before the election. Even before Trump entered politics and Kanye veered to the right in his rhetoric, the two men have been drawn to each other. Kanye rapped repeatedly about Trump; Trump name-dropped Kanye in interviews. For years, they’ve seemed to understand each other as fellow practitioners of fame — not just fame as a tool for increased wealth, but fame as an ideology, an end in and of itself.

And when Trump and Kanye talk about fame, they seem to instinctively understand that each of them can use the other to shore up a vulnerability in their own personas. Before the Trump presidency, Trump offered Kanye access to the kind of hard power that is historically forbidden to black men, and Kanye offered Trump access to the cultural capital that he has never quite managed to acquire on his own.

But since Trump took office, the balance has shifted. Trump can still offer Kanye access to power, even more than ever before — but what Kanye offers Trump has changed. Kanye no longer gives Trump the flattering light of beloved and famous attention. Now he gives him grievance capital.

Kanye referenced Trump three times in his lyrics before the 2016 election, primarily as a shorthand for the idea of wealth, luxury, and the ability to fire people. The first reference came in 2005 when Kanye freestyled on the YouTube channel Tim Westwood TV (“I ain’t no clown like Ronald / Uh, more like Donald / Trump, with the way I get it crunk”), then in 2009’s “Flashing Lights (Remix)” (“You fired mothafucka Donald Trump ni**a”), and then in 2010’s “So Appalled” (“Balding Donald Trump taking dollars from y’all / Baby, you’re fired, your girlfriend hired”). He also featured a naked depiction of Trump in the bed tableau that appears in the video for his 2016 song “Famous.”

All of that added up to four Trump references in seven years. (For comparison’s sake, that’s more than Kanye has referenced, say, Givenchy, but less than the 12 times he’s mentioned Gucci in his lyrics.) In Kanye’s songs, Trump is a symbol of the kind of wealth and power that American culture generally withholds from black men: He has the kind of decadent wealth that you can use to party with, but he can also control other people’s employment, hiring and firing them at will.

Trump, meanwhile, has long taken every opportunity to work himself into the Kanye West narrative.

In 2009, Trump inserted himself into the Kanye/Taylor Swift scandal that unfolded at the MTV Video Music Awards, calling for a boycott of Kanye and declaring (hilariously, given the source), “[Kanye] couldn’t care less about Beyoncé. It was grandstanding to get attention.”

But if they were enemies then, Trump had upgraded their relationship status to “cordial acquaintances” by 2014, when he told Mario Lopez there was no reason he’d be invited to Kanye’s wedding to Kim Kardashian but that he thought both Kanye and Kim were very nice people and that he wished them both the best of luck.

In 2015, the narrative changed again, and Trump began to talk about Kanye as a close and longtime friend of his — making sure to tell everyone that the feeling was mutual.

When Kanye teased a 2020 presidential run at the VMAs in 2015, Trump credited himself as the inspiration for Kanye’s decision. “I was actually watching, I saw him [announce his candidacy on the VMAs], and I said, ‘That’s very interesting. I wonder who gave him that idea?'” Trump told Rolling Stone, adding, “He’s actually a different kind of person than people think. He’s a nice guy. I hope to run against him someday.”

Later, Trump reconsidered the idea of a campaign against Kanye, saying, “I’ll never say bad about Kanye West. I love him. But maybe in a few years I’ll have to run against him and take that back.” Still, Trump maintained, he would hate to say anything bad about Kanye “because he says such nice things about me.” For Trump, Kanye has become a useful shorthand for the idea that he still has wealthy, famous, well-liked friends in a time when much of liberal Hollywood has denounced him.

Kanye and Trump each serve a need for the other, filling a void in each other’s public personas. Kanye uses Trump in his lyrics to signal the idea that he has access to wealth and power. Trump mentions Kanye in his interviews to signal the idea that famous people like him.

Before the 2016 election, it wasn’t clear that Kanye was actually saying nice things about Trump. Kanye spent most of 2015 appearing to quietly support Hillary Clinton, or at least supporting his wife’s support of Hillary Clinton.

He donated thousands to the Democratic National Committee and to Clinton’s campaign. He didn’t speak publicly about the election prior to November, but few people believed that the guy who famously said “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on national television would go on to support Trump, who was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. Trump’s claims of friendship with Kanye, it seemed clear, were the same kind of baseless name-dropping Trump had leaned on all through election season; there was no evidence they were based in fact.

But then the election happened, and Kanye revealed during a concert that he greatly admires Trump. “If I would’ve voted, I would’ve voted on Trump,” he told a booing crowd that November.

He clarified that he doesn’t agree with Trump on everything. “That don’t mean that I don’t think that black lives matter,” he said. “That don’t mean I don’t think that I’m a believer in women’s rights, that … I don’t believe in gay marriage.”

But he nonetheless admired Trump’s style. “There’s nonpolitical methods to speaking that I like, that I feel were very futuristic,” he said. “And that style, and that method of communication, has proven that it can beat a politically correct way of communication.”

It’s a style that Kanye shares. For a long time, Kanye was considered a master of getting people to take him “seriously, but not literally,” the way many of Trump’s supporters seem to think about him. For proof, let’s turn to Kanye’s pro-Trump commentary at that November 2016 concert, which prompted the LA Times to wonder if the whole thing “wasn’t just stream-of-consciousness trolling his fans from atop a floating light platform.” Or his Twitter feed, on which he tends to free-associate about how he can’t be managed and how he and Trump share “dragon energy,” and has prompted a series of earnest debates as to whether it can legitimately be called performance art.

Trump and Kanye both built their careers on the power of saying something outrageous and then watching everyone else scramble to figure out if they truly mean what they say. And as Kanye pointed out at that November 2016 concert, that style is a powerful means of communication: It can help forge a media empire. It can win elections.

At Saturday Night Live in September, Kanye took that argument a step farther. “I’ma break it down to you right now,” he said: “If someone inspires me and I connect with them, I don’t have to believe in all they policies.” The style is what matters here; the content is secondary. You need to be provocative, and what you’re provocative about doesn’t matter.

Of course, the key difference between Kanye and Trump is that Kanye is a musician, and when he’s provocative, he’s being artistic, or at worst eccentric. And when people get tired of his empty provocations — as they by and large seem to have done by now — they can ignore him. Trump is America’s president. When he’s provocative, there are major consequences.

Regardless of how Trump and Kanye actually feel about one another, their latest meeting is a continuation of their mutually beneficial relationship.

But when Kanye visits Trump now, he’s no longer arriving as a beloved rapper at the top of his career. Now, he’s the butt of SNL jokes and the recipient of earnest texts from John Legend begging him to reconsider his stance. He’s the guy who showed up at TMZ and said things so over-the-top outrageous that the staffers of TMZ looked like the reasonable ones.

All of this means that Kanye can no longer offer Trump the flattering belief that the famous and beloved institutions of Hollywood adore him. Instead, he can offer him something almost better: He can offer Trump the chance to be aggrieved and defensive about someone who he believes to be on “his team,” and who is being attacked by the liberal elitists of Hollywood for daring to be there.

Like many, I don’t watch Saturday Night Live (even though I past hosted it) – no longer funny, no talent or charm. It is just a political ad for the Dems. Word is that Kanye West, who put on a MAGA hat after the show (despite being told “no”), was great. He’s leading the charge!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2018

So at Thursday’s meeting, Kanye got to be photographed with the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, and hence remind everyone that he has connections with legitimate hard power, and that he is therefore a winner. In his comments, Kanye lauded Trump for the masculine MAGA hat that makes him feel “like Superman,” as opposed to the effeminate Hillary and her “I’m with her” slogan. What Kanye seemed to want out of the meeting was to affirm his connection with Trump’s masculine-coding power, and he got it.

And Trump got to be photographed with someone famous who has stayed on his team despite outrage from the left, and hence remind everyone that he, Trump, is someone with a team and the means to defend it, and that he is therefore a winner.

What they were talking about did not matter, and in fact they discussed almost no political matters of substance. What mattered for their purposes is that they were both provocative.

And Trump and Kanye can continue to reinforce each other’s beliefs in their great success, their winningness, on and on. But whether they believe in them seriously or literally remains an open question.

Update: This article was originally published after Trump and Kanye’s December 2016 meeting. It has been updated to discuss their October 2018 meeting.

Original Source -> Kanye and Trump’s mutual fascination with each other, explained

via The Conservative Brief