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kaijuposting · 2 years ago

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Pacific Rim kaiju biology - what do we know about it?

So I figured I'd do a writeup on stuff on how the biology of kaiju has been depicted in the Pacific Rim franchise. Once again, Pacific Rim continuity is messy, and its creators weren't always on the same page with things, so you will see some conflicting information.

As we most of us know, the first Pacific Rim film established that kaiju are alien beings with glowing blue blood full of ammonia and other toxins, and it established that they're all assembled from cloned biomass in what's essentially a giant monster factory. One of them, somehow, is pregnant. It established that they're controlled by mysterious alien beings via hivemind, and it also showed one of them (Scunner) communicating with other kaiju via vocalization, implying that the kaiju aren't completely reliant on the hivemind.

Aside from that, however, it's pretty vague. So what else is there?

The book Man, Machines, & Monsters gives us two quotes on kaiju, one from Guillermo del Toro and one from Travis Beacham. Beacham was quoted as saying, "They're a Darwinian army. They're grown in some alternate universe and pitted against one another, and the strongest mutations survive." This vision of kaiju originates from earlier versions of the story (you can find it in the draft script).

According to the book, Del Toro decreed three broad groups for Kaiju: crustaceans, lizards, and insects. Nothing furry. No tentacles, nothing red. Since they're newly manufactured weapons, no damage or deformities, and since Kaiju are bred to destroy, del Toro told the designers, "every element of design should be used as a weapon. If we create a Kaiju wtih three or four tails, I want to see it use them. If the Kaiju has a mouth on the end of the tail, then I'm going to use it to fight the robot with both ends."

By 2013, Beacham was blogging about kaiju as they actually appeared in the film, essentially describing them as 3D printed. According to Beacham, Otachi was created pregnant.

He also basically said that kaiju had completely alien biochemistry, that they would taste like "hakarl and cleaning chemicals," and that they'd have very little in them that you could actually metabolize. He also said that what Newt referred to as DNA wasn't actually DNA as we know it, and that it would be extremely difficult for us to cloned them because "their molecular configuration is just so radically different from anything we know of." Beacham also communicated that he didn't think our concept of sexes and genders would apply to alien biology, so it wouldn't necessarily be safe to assume that Otachi's pregnancy plus all of the kaiju being clones made them all female in any sense. (And yes, he distinguished between sex and gender.)

In a 2012 interview, Guillermo del Toro said that kaiju were silicon-based lifeforms. Although this never comes up in the movie, it also appears in the novelization by Alex Irvine.

Irvine's novelization also claims that their silicon-based DNA allows them to have genetic memory, which in my opinion is a superfluous worldbuilding detail when the existence hivemind adequately explains where the kaiju are getting their instructions. The novelization also presents genetic memory as the reason Newt thinks drifting with a piece of kaiju brain is going to help him learn about the kaiju. Again, it's a strange detail to add in light of the fact that Newt was drifting with a chunk of brain. (Mutavore's brain, according to Beacham, BTW.) Furthermore, it also suggests that the whole subplot with Hannibal Chau and baby Otachi were completely unnecessary, since presumably Newt should've been able to drift with any chunk of kaiju flesh.

The novel also claims that kaiju brains have a "bath of silicate transmission medium." Supposedly, it "carried neuronic signals inside the brain, just like lipid plasmas did in human neurons." I'm guessing the logic here is that because silicon is used in computer circuits, they can also be used in actual brains. But how this is supposed to work when it's in a "bath" form and therefore seems to have no means of actually directing electrical impulses is beyond me. Newt in the novel also describes kaiju as "silicate-based organic automata," which suggests that the kaiju are nothing more than organic robots, which... uh... suggesting that a biological creature is fundamentally nothing more than a robot sure is uh... a choice. A few paragraphs later Newt also has the impression that the kaiju are afraid of the Precursors, which suggests that they're enslaved against their wills, but this novel is, unfortunately, too hateful to think about the implications of that. In the novel, Newt speculates that the dinosaurs were a "cruder" form of kaiju, which... if you know anything at all about dinosaurs is difficult to imagine as true. He also speculates that that the Precursors "did a carbon-to-silicon upgrade," which would allegedly give the kaiju strength to carry extra mass and give it better brain function that allows it to move around better, which is just... not how this works at all. Newt also thinks that being silicon-based allows the kaiju to "carry more information at a genetic level," which is... baseless, to say the least.

The novel is also really contradictory on the alleged benefits of silicon; early on it says:

The Jaeger Project created a way for two human beings to merge their brains into a single organic supercomputer more powerful than anything you could make out of silicon.

So yeah. It's... it's a mess where all the silicon stuff is concerned, to put it lightly.

Before I move on, I just want to mention that the concept of silicon-based life was a popular idea for a hot minute due to silicon's similarity to carbon. But in reality, silicon-based life is extremely unlikely for a number of reasons; EG, silicon doesn't lend itself to metabolic processes. Basically... the whole thing is quite literally dead in the water. Literally all of the novelization's assertions that silicon is some kind of superior material to carbon are nonsense.

While the novelization asserts that kaiju are cloned, it seems to have a somewhat different idea of how this plays out than the movie does, as at one point it claims they're "assembled in great vats," which doesn't really sound like the "printing" process shown in the film. It also seems to have some of its wires crossed with Beacham's earlier ideas, as it also describes them bursting out of sacs and crawling out of a spawning pool. (One must wonder how many internal inconsistencies were in the notes and other documents sent to Alex Irvine.)

The novelization also brings up the kaiju having alien senses; when Newt experiences a "kaiju flashback," he sees colors "fall out of order" and experiences "a chaos of odors and information absorbed through its skin."

Beacham's own statements on his blog also back up the idea that kaiju might have some pretty weird senses - in response to someone asking about Otachi's tongue, he responds that it's a sensory organ - but who can really say what "taste" even means to an alien?

The novel, film, and the 2012 interview with del Toro all describe the kaiju as "acidic" and also claim their biology is full of ammonia. This does create a bit of a problem; ammonia is a base, not an acid. While it's definitely true that ammonia is corrosive and caustic, it's most definitely not "acidic."

There is also Pacific Rim media that ignores the alien biochemistry stuff to a large degree. The Uprising prequel comic Pacific Rim: Aftermath has a plot involving cloned kaiju with some of Hannibal Chau's DNA edited in, because mad science is absolutely going to rule the day here. (In this comic, a baby kaiju can actually track Chau down to try and eat him because of their shared DNA! It's extremely silly, and extremely fun.)

In Pacific Rim: The Black, some of the story's antagonists create various hybrid creatures, and even become hybrid creatures themselves. (Unfortunately, it's actually much less cool than it sounds, largely because Pacific Rim: The Black is mostly focused on being as edgy as possible while carrying on the political sentiments of Pacific Rim: Uprising.)

Pacific Rim: The Black also has kaiju living and breeding in Australia. While the first season mentions the Precursors, The Black seems to end up treating the kaiju themselves as the invading aliens. Ultimately, it's not really clear what's supposed to be happening here. (Or at least, it wasn't very clear to me. Maybe I missed something.)

While The Black shows that some kaiju creatures are capable of exercising free will, it also presents others as fully monstrous. For example, while the human/kaiju hybrid character of b0y (yeah, that's the name the poor kid gets saddled with for the whole show) is shown to have the capacity to make his own choices, one episode is extremely firm about the idea that the average kaiju can never be anything more than mindless monster, and that the idea that such a beast could feel anything like love is absurd. Somehow we have an Uprising jaeger/kaiju hybrid with free will (an interesting idea, to be sure!), but the human women mutated into kaiju hybrids against their wills are presented as unable to free themselves from the hivemind.

I think some of these apparent inconsistencies come down to The Black being more interested in being edgy and shocking than anything else, plus its trend toward aligning with conservative political views.

So that's about it; or at least all I know so far; I'm sure there's more out there I haven't come across yet. I might also be forgetting a few things about The Black because it's been awhile since I watched it, and quite frankly I found it such an unpleasant and distasteful show that I don't intend on watching it again anytime soon.

In any case, we can see that there's been a fair amount of variation in how the kaiju of Pacific Rim were conceptualized. Sometimes they've been imagined as so alien that we have almost nothing in common with them biochemically; sometimes they've been depicted as having DNA like our own. They've been described as otherworldly horrors, and they've been implied to be genetically modified dinosaurs. And I imagine that people will continue coming up with new ideas about the biology of the kaiju of Pacific Rim, whether in licensed media or in fan creations.

#pacific rim #pacrim #kaiju #pacific rim kaiju #kaiju biology #pacific rim lore

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ecto-american · 4 years ago

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Hey I wanted to fuck around and ramble about how I specifically headcanon and like to portray Jack and Maddie career-wise for my fanfics/personal take on the DP canon.

So to start; I headcanon Maddie as having a masters in electrical engineering and Jack as having a PhD in Thanatology (the scientific study of death and the practices associated with it), though he has a bachelor's degree in mortuary science while also having a funeral director’s license.

Why these? Because I absolutely see Maddie as the builder and thinker, the one who can build things, and Jack as the theorist who knows everything there is to know about ghosts. I picked Thanatology because it was as close as I could find to studying ghosts in an actual applied scientific sense, but I liked the mortuary science because it felt like a good accompaniment. I originally had mortuary sciences as his PhD (if you’ve heard me talk about this before), but I found out that I was actually a big dumb because in the US, you cannot get a PhD in mortuary sciences ihsofsa so I did research for an alternative.

So how do their jobs work? Well, I think it's approached in a very academic-y sense. While I kind of play with it loosely based on the specific fanfiction, I generally say that their job is a sorta combination of any number of the following:

Research grants to study ghosts, from both the government and just private companies

Writing books/textbooks revolved around ghosts (like ectobiology, ghost hunting, etc)

Contract ghost hunting work (like being paid to get rid of ghosts from private residents/buildings)

Income from ghost invention patents (think their Fenton weapons and things like the Fenton thermos)

They do non-ghost research and inventing as well (since they seem to custom build their own computers and other various technologies, and even just things like the Specter Speeder can be marketed to a non-ghost hunting audience like the military, and Jazz implied in GNO that Maddie has a lot of inventions outside of Jack that she works on)

Paid to teach/give lectures or make appearances at seminars, conventions or speak at certain events

Since Jack in this is licensed funeral director, he also occasionally works with a funeral home, and sometimes I even headcanon that Jack and Maddie used to own a funeral home before they got the grant/funding to build their ghost portal (which I touch on a little later!)

Jack teaches part time at a local community college/university, teaching normally one or two classes here but sometimes more, and sometimes even as Casper High teaching ghost 101 safety

Maddie is also a licensed electrician that does occasional work related to that

And this is kind of where you may be asking: wait, aren't they kind of a joke? Why are you giving them all this credit?

Well, honestly, I really like to think of the Fentons as being actually fairly well respected academically and by fellow ghost hunters. There's a lot of scientists that you'll basically learn are real Weirdos, but that doesn't distract from the fact that they are incredibly smart people who made amazing breakthroughs.

To me, I headcanon Jack as being autistic, and that ghosts and the paranormal is a special interest in which he's actually an incredibly well respected scientist, who has the most accurate (as far as the paranormal studies scientific community knows) information and knowledge about ghosts. He's been writing and studying it for twenty years, and arguably, essentially proved that ghosts exists because of his ghost portal and living in Amity Park, where ghost activity boomed. While there's canon evidence dedicated to him being made fun of in Million Dollar Ghost, I personally like to think of this as more of other ghost hunters just kind of seeing how Awkward and ridiculous he can be socially. We also hear about Danny and Jazz dunking on them, but I think this comes more from two teenagers being embarrassed about their oddball parents.

I definitely picture the Fentons as still being the town weirdos because well. You see their oddballness every day. But most ectobiologists would only see Jack when he's presenting and read his work, where I imagine he's presented as a bit less goofy and more serious. Because it's a chance for him to essentially ramble on about his special interest and area of expertise without interruption to an incredibly eager audience that's going to be asking questions and wanting his opinions. To me, Jack definitely seems like the person who you don't really think about how odd he kinda is (purely because of masking and it just not really coming up) until you're really with him 1v1 outside of these of these conventions/lectures/classroom environments.

I don’t totally see Maddie teaching, because while I’m definitely picturing her here as being a very smart mind that would likely also be a good teacher; the specific reasoning why I say Jack would be the ones that does the teaching part time is because it’s literally perfect for him. It's an excuse for him to trap 25+ people in a room on a regular basis to listen to him about ghosts. He'd absolutely just one of those easy A teachers, where if you just show up and listen to him babble about ghosts for 1-3 hours and turn in the homework (he gives no tests, midterm/finals or quizzes), you get your easy A. It’s the similar concept with the seminars and guest lecture things; Jack is just much more enthusiastic and would want that solo speaking time, and Maddie knows how much it means to him, so I feel like she would let him have this.

Maddie herself, I feel liker her heart rests more in just the general inventing and building side of it. While she has an interest in ghosts, this also seems to mostly enjoy the physical side of inventing. I say this mostly because, again, in GNO, Maddie has a whole bunch of inventions that she’s working on outside of things she builds/helps Jack build. To me, this straight up personal invention projects, even though they’re still ghost based, tells me that her heart and passion seems to lie within engineering and not necessarily too much in the way of ghost theory.

The way his and Maddie's relationship works to me is that Jack knows more of the ghost related information and he relays this to Maddie for her to build what they need. For example, he'll tell her “this is what the Ghost Zone is like, these are the dangers, this is what we need to survive, etc” and Maddie will have the knowledge to design the Specter Speeder, and they build it together with Maddie being the primary leader and troubleshooter.

However, Maddie has the education and license to do the electrical work and knows how to properly build and submit the patents. Meanwhile, Jack will eventually do all the research and write and publish the book detailing what they learned about the Ghost Zone. Repeat the process with ghost weapons and other such inventions.

I like to think that Jack and Maddie were essentially going through the process of getting the huge government grant they'd need to build the actual ghost portal, which took a lot of prior research, convincing, pleas for money and getting the city permission and code permits to get the money and permission building it, hence the like 20 year gap between the prototype portal and the final portal. Especially since they obviously started a family during that time too.

#danny phantom #headcanons #posts #my posts #jack fenton #maddie fenton

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anomalocariscanadensis · 4 years ago

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so. Blindsight. bleak as hell. i think the whole “everyone’s being extremely subtly manipulated by intelligences beyond their comprehension with precise results” thing is... well, it’s a compelling premise once, but i’ve already read Echopraxia. it gets kind of tiring the second time around, and i don’t really think brains work like that. but the aliens are very alien, and the whole thing with the first contact protocol was cool.

an interesting thing about siri’s relationship with chelsea is that he tries to not act like a chinese room in it - he tries to actually be himself with her - and it falls apart because himself just completely sucks ass and can’t interact with people. if he’d been a true chinese room he could have done whatever was necessary to get the best outcome, but he doesn’t. some bits were relatable but thankfully not the “explaining through evolutionary psychology why our relationship is doomed” sort of thing, jesus

the rest of this is going to be various nitpicking disagreements i had, because it is indisputably that sort of book.

vampires are obviously rather ridiculous, just too many convienient things all in one place. the crucifix glitch, obviously, but also, how do you evolve multi-generation hibernation that fast? when you must eat one singular species, and failure to hibernate means you completely wipe out your obligate prey and make your territory uninhabitable? and the longer you hibernate, the fewer generations per timespan *to* evolve in? i’d accept this sort of thing in a book that didn’t have a list of scientific citations at the end but it just doesn’t fit as well

the rationale behind Technology Implies Belligerence seems simply wrong. Sure, if you have all your needs perfectly met you don’t need to develop more technology, but the more extreme the competition, the less leeway you have to set up long-term things and the less free time to spend on idly thinking up new ideas rather than directly competing. I’m fairly certain if you tried to track it, you’d find most technological progress throughout history comes from societies with less day-to-day competition due to surpluses, etc.

Rorschach actually kind of proves this - their whole “sit around generating ATP anaerobically for thousands of years” strategy doesn’t work if you get eaten halfway through

Since Rorschach didn’t attack the humans until after they’d hit it with a probe that it actively told them not to do, it might just be wrong in-universe. Who knows?

there’s a lot of questionable evopsych, but I’m not sure how much the book itself puts stock in evopsych, vs. just Siri as a character putting too much stock in evopsych.

he does get called out for thinking he’s objective when he’s just projecting his own opinions onto other people

also one of the main conclusions he draws from evopsych is “every heterosexual relationship is doomed” (nothing to say about gay relationships, naturally) which seems obviously false enough that I’d suspect it’s a personal bias to the character

but it’s the sort of book where i’m not sure if that even counts

EDIT: i misremembered part of it, he was wrong about Bates plotting to mutiny. i remembered thinking she’d mutinied when her drone fucked up Sarastri, but forgot that she later confirmed it wasn’t her. so yeah i think the really dumb evopsych stuff can mostly be chalked up to Siri being biased

the consciousness as parasite thing is obviously an interesting sci-fi premise but i don’t actually buy it, at least not for Earthly life

chimpanzees do actually pass the mirror test, apparently

my personal experience is that, when i focus on it, i have a lot of really quick pseudo-conscious thoughts before they pass up more slowly into full consciousness, but not all of them end up getting into consciousness. i’d be surprised if consciousness didn’t serve the purpose of, at minimum, taking the good bits of unconscious thought and reinforcing them so they get stored better.

Blindsight’s perspective on consciousness does seem to have language being a product of genuine consciousness, because Rorschach can’t do it. but how the fuck else are humans supposed to communicate, besides language? Maybe you can theoretically have intelligence without consciousness, but if it’s necessary for language then I don’t think you get complex human societies without consciousness, even if they’re individually more efficient.

vampires seem to be able to do language which is a bit weird if they’re not really conscious? but also, like, they can’t do complex societies because they’re so individually territorial, so that’s an enormous disadvantage anyway. i suspect they’d have died out even without the crucifix glitch.

“you don’t need consciousness to do math/science/whatever because of a few anecdotes of people waking up having dreamed whole theorems” is completely unconvincing. like, okay, how much of the work did they do consciously beforehand? how big of a leap was the dream, how complete was it, how much did they have to do consciously to make it rigorous? how often do people wake up with incorrect ideas in their heads?

this sort of thing was more plausible with the Bicamerals in Echopraxia because they were basically magic. applying it to actual humans falls rather short.

also I think his evolutionary reasoning in his “dodo” analogy isn’t quite the right line of thought for the point he’s making. Consciousness, as he frames it, is an extra energy cost for no real benefit which persists only because we’re not facing enough selection pressure to weed it out. But the dodo lost flight because it was excessive and useless for its island, which is the exact opposite situation.

A dodo analogy would be appropriate if consciousness was useful when facing unexpected problems but useless on earth due to human dominance, so we evolved out of it

a better comparison might be the Irish Elk, which is often thought to have gone extinct due to its enormous antlers. Its antlers were way too large to be beneficial to survival, but they persisted and grew bigger over time due to sexual selection. then the argument becomes that consciousness makes you more likely to get laid but is actually bad otherwise. still questionable, but at least fits better

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spockandawe · 4 years ago

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The Disabled Tyrant’s Pet Palm Fish

Okay, legit book pitch time, because I’m doing a terrible job of coherently typing out the premise every time I try to tell a person about this book, and I cannot stop telling people about this book. Bottom line up front: The Disabled Tyrant’s Pet Palm Fish started off a little rough (a combination of everything happens so much in the story itself, and, I think, the translator finding their footing), but I’ve been having such a good time that I am deep, deep in the mtl pit, because I can’t stop reading it.

The premise! This is a transmigration novel, where our hero Li Yu (his name literally translates to ‘carp’, for the record) enters the universe of a novel he just finished. He does not enter the body of a character from the novel, he enters as... a fish. A tiny little ingredient-for-fish-soup tier fish. Before he’s totally figured out what is going on, there’s an attempt to turn him into soup, and even when he flails his way out of the person’s hands, he’s.... stolen by a cat. And then, at the very last moment, he’s saved, and placed into a bowl of water to recover. This is the part of the book where So Much Is Happening and I was genuinely stressed by fish suffering.

But once he’s safe in a bowl, he finally gets to really talk to a System, and gets given some actual instructions. Surprise, sucker! You’re in a book! And he’s tasked with changing the path of that book’s protagonist, who goes from being the fifth imperial prince to eventually being the emperor. He’s like ‘oh my god, are you serious, i’m literally a fucking fish’ and the System is like *shrug* and says that well, he can either do the mission or he can die? So he’s like ‘OKAY, COOL, LET’S CHANGE THIS PRINCE’S LIFE.’ He’s also told that if he completes enough tasks, he’ll regain the ability to become human again, which is where I was like okay, this book is maybe not going to be quite so ridiculously batshit as the summary implied. The initial mission doesn’t say anything about romance, but I was still reading it like ohohohohoho, romance!

And the original book! At first, the fifth imperial prince, Jing-wang, was nominally out of the running to take the throne, because he was born with natural mutism and the emperor was told that this might be passed down to his children. He was his mother’s only surviving child, and she died soon after his birth, so he grew up very... isolated and disconnected, which makes sense given his temperament, even before all the other factors come into play. He’s a very cold, distant man, and in the book, eventually won out over his brothers to become the emperor. A cruel, rigid tyrant of an emperor. But! He did have a husband who he loved a lot. Unfortunately, that husband was planted by his brother and sure didn’t love him. The text calls him a black lotus, and describes that relationship as ‘sadomasochistic’, which I’m not sure is quite the right word, but it sure seems... melancholy, and the relationship seems to make Li Yu sad when he thinks about it.

Now, Li Yu is very worried about how the hecc he’s going to impact this imperial prince’s life in any meaningful way, but from the very start, the people around Jing-wang see him going soft for his new pet fish. His father especially is very moved to see his son finally attached to something that way. And I want to say that even the very early bits are... unexpectedly sweet?? Jing-wang doesn’t angst about not being able to speak, which I’d been worried about (I do hear that the mutism gets fixed eventually, which i’m not wild about, but i don’t feel like he’ll ever be a super verbal person tbh), but it’s really cute seeing him figuring out to interact with a pet where not being able to speak shouldn’t even really be a factor. And especially early on, Li Yu makes an effort to be as cute as possible, and way he pets and plays with his fish is the cutest, CUTEST thing.

(li yu is given an escalating series of unbelievably lavish aquariums, but even one of his earliest ones, jing-wang notices he’s interested in a pearl and just quietly fills the aquarium with priceless gemstones for his fish to play with)

There’s something that’s very hard to articulate about this, but in an early scene, Jing-wang brings the fish with him to a stressful meeting and gets angry, and starts holding the fish in a self-soothing way, and Li Yu is like AGH, TOO TIGHT and wriggles out, but before Jing-wang can even get properly upset at being rejected by his fish, Li Yu circles back around and starts winding through his fingers. Even before romance is a factor, the physical contact and comfort were absolutely precious.

When I’d started reading this, my initial mindset was basically ‘okay, so i can see Jing-wang getting attached to his fish, but love? seriously???’, but honestly, the story handled it in a REALLY nice way. There are around 160 chapters total, and by the mid-twenties, Li Yu gains the ability to occasionally/briefly transform into a human, and by the mid-thirties, Li Yu and Jing-wang have had an extended interaction where they’re both human-shaped. And Li Yu acquires other special powers with time, including interdimensional storage space and Super Jumping Powers, and he is seriously, seriously, the most sketchy-ass fish you’ve ever seen, and Jing-wang is a smart cookie.

At first, it’s little things like ‘okay, while Jing-wang is out, I’mmmm going to explore this room!’ And he does the fish equivalent of holding his breath and hops around for a while before returning to his tank like a good little fish, but Jing-wang comes back and there’s water all over the floor and he’s like ‘..............’ So what does he do? He starts leaving teacups of water all over the floor so that his fish can stop and take a breather without worrying about getting back to his tank. And when his fish seems interested in the work he’s doing at his desk, he sets up a teacup next to where he works so that his fish can watch what he’s doing. And initially, he’s kind of like ‘this is normal fish behavior, probably’, but. Li Yu is so focking sketchy. And it really, really doesn’t take long for Jing-wang to start connecting the dots between the strange young man who periodically materializes in/near his quarters and steals his clothes and his fish.

But this story is so funny. When Jing-wang starts getting suspicious, what he eventually concludes is that oh, this is like that fairy tale about the white snake spirit who seduced a human man to steal his spiritual essence. Or the fairy tale about the fox spirit who seduced a human man to steal his essence. Okay. Awright. And he spends considerable time waiting very impatiently, wondering why isn’t my fish seducing me yet??? He even sets things up so that while Li Yu is on his desk watching him work, he starts pointedly reading erotica about the snake spirit and fox spirit, and I can tell that he’s embarrassing himself, while meanwhile, Li Yu is a modern human trying to read ancient Chinese writing, and he’s like ‘haha, lmao, he reads way faster than me, I have no idea what’s happening.’

(later on, when they’ve managed to do a little bit of communication and work things out, Jing-wang proudly tells someone (writes for someone) that the food he’s eating was made for him by his boyfriend. and when the person is like ‘ah, okay. uh. what... is a boyfriend?’ and Jing-wang is like ‘I’ve got no goddamn idea.’)

Also, you may note. That one of the tags on this story is mpreg. And that was honestly why I dove into it, I was like ‘haha, there’s no way a story like this could sell me on a plot point like THAT, go ahead, try, I double dog dare you’. Well. Last night I reached that plot point. Y’all....... it.... worked. It was still silly, but the character himself was like ‘oh my god, you can’t be serious.’ It was silly and cute. At a slightly earlier point, the emperor sends Jing-wang to take a military force and go fight bandits, so Jing-wang was planning to leave Li Yu safely at home, and Li Yu wasn’t happy and non-seriously said, ‘no, your highness, you can’t leave me behind, I’m... CARRYING YOUR CHILD.’ And he didn’t mean it, but Jing-wang wanted to believe it at first, and was really happy, and was :( when Li Yu clarified that no, physically, he’s... not capable of doing that.

Smash cut to not long later, when the System gives Li Yu his next task in the main mission line and it’s.......... babies. Li Yu tries to plead with the System that no, oh my god, I am not physically equipped for this, but also at this point? The System has straight-up modified his fish body several times. He doubled all his attributes once, not realizing this included size, and got stuck in his aquarium cave. And later on, he upgraded from minnow(?) to koi and promptly... got stuck in his aquarium cave. So they’ve already coaxed me along through believing body modifications. And then the actual fish pregnancy process was very understated and low-key, and then once the fish babies hatched, after nine months, they got the ability to turn into human babies. The story even plays around with the idea of fish babies being capable of much more independence than human babies, and the babies being Displeased with the situation. Guys, they sold me on the mpreg. How did they do that?????

And something I genuinely hadn’t expected is that the relationship takes negotiation and growth. The earliest courting scenes are very... high-handed. Which I was into! I can dig a romance novel like that, where the love interest pins the protagonist to a wall and kisses him so good he sweeps him off his feet. But Li Yu gets to be upset, and push Jing-wang away, and be angry when Jing-wang tries to wiggle around the boundaries he’s trying to establish. He gets to tell Jing-wang he feels disrespected and taken advantage of, and Jing-wang learns to back off. And when he decides that he does want to give this thing a try, he lays out a couple base rules for Jing-wang, and Jing-wang takes it so seriously that he legit hangs them on his bedroom wall.

And everyone who loves Jing-wang is so happy for him. They’re so happy for every positive development in his life. They’re happy when Jing-wang starts caring for his pet fish, and they’re even happier when he falls in love with an actual human. The main barrier to formalizing their relationship isn’t that Li Yu is a man, it’s that Jing-wang needs heirs, and well, that gets worked out. Even the emperor casually mentions that he used to have a male concubine back in the day.

You guys, I’ve been genuinely Moved by this silly novel about a fictional prince falling in love with his pet fish.

I’m not done yet, I’m almost exactly halfway through, and I’ve got no idea what’s coming next. I assume it will be political maneuvering, because Li Yu’s System told him that it’s guaranteed that Jing-wang will eventually become emperor, but the rest is up to him, and there are still a few other princes floating around who opposed him in the original book. And that black lotus husband from the original book is still around too. But Jing-wang has other allies who would have died in the original novel by now, who Li Yu managed to help save. And I’m so invested! I want to know what happens! Li Yu is periodically unlocking Jing-wang backstory reveals as rewards for completing missions, and some of these things give him a better understanding of Jing-wang in the present, but some open up brand new mysteries about Jing-wang’s past. I have to go do my actual job now, and I’m really unhappy about that, because I want! To read more!!! I’m reading the mtl right now, and if you’ve tried mtl, you know the prose can be barely comprehensible at times (i spent like ten chapters thinking jing-wang had two cousins when he has... one....) but still!!! I’m so, so invested, and I can’t stop recommending this book to everyone who has the misfortune to exist in the same space as me :’)

#the disabled tyrant's pet palm fish #long post/#cnovel rec

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masterweaverx · 4 years ago

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I’ve decided that the main characters of "My Next Life As A Villainess” can have D&D classes! So here we go. Big thanks to 5Etools for helping me out with this!

Katarina Claes: Kalashtar Redemption Paladin. Nobody said holy warriors had to be smart!

In all seriousness, Paladins of 5E are charisma-based “Half-casters,” which means they mix melee with magic. And it’s easy enough to reflavor a lot of D&D spells as “Oh, yeah, this character just happens to know X random thing or can talk so convincingly!” (Or the character doesn’t realize they’re doing magic, which would be so Katarina.) Plus the Redemption oath just fits so well for the girl, both thematically and mechanically. Throw on Strength-based combat skills because of years of farming and sword-training... it’s pretty obvious.

As to the race choice, the Kalashtar are a third-party Eberron race that are described as being “a fusion of humans and beings from the realm of dreams.” Which hey, what else would you call somebody who remembered their past life? And from a mechanical perspective, it would give Katarina resistance to psychic damage (she’s that dense) and automatic advantage on persuasion rolls (she can say just the right thing).

Maria Campbell: Variant Human Life Cleric. A “Well Duh!” if I ever saw one.

Clerics, the traditional healers and support characters in all of roleplaying, are wisdom-based casters in 5E. I was originally considering making Maria a Light cleric but, mechanically, Life clerics are closer to Light magic as portrayed in the series so, yeah, Life.

Variant Humans are the “Pick an ability increase and get a free feat at the start of the game” race, and Maria is sorta kinda the protagonist of the old game? Her player would probably just set herself up to fill in the gaps of the other characters anyway. So yeah.

Mary Hunt: Kaladesh Elf Samurai Fighter. Look, she can be scary, alright?

Fighters can be strength-based OR dexterity-based, and Mary would have a lot of dexterity skill from all the gardening and stuff. A lot of the Fighter perks are basically “No I’m NOT giving up!” which, yeah, fits her well. Being a Samurai not only enhances that, but it gives her perks for certain wisdom traits--Mary is not an idiot by any stretch of the imagination.

Kaladesh elves synch pretty well with this build, giving both Dexterity and Wisdom boosts, but primarily I picked this particular race for the free Druid cantrip in order to represent Mary’s water magic. Still, she would be one to choose to meditate instead of falling asleep, just to keep an eye on... things.

Sophia Ascart: Detection Mark Half-Elf Divination Wizard. She likes them books.

The class side of this was easy. Intelligence-based caster? Wizard. Love of books? Wizard. Not a physical fighter? Wizard. Had a talk with her past self? Divination wizard. What can I say, Sophia is pretty good at being a wizkid.

Race, though... oh, wow. So many options. I went with a Detection Mark Half-Elf because Sophia really, really notices things and that seems to be what that particular race was built for. Plus it’s an Eberron thing, like Katarina’s race, so that’s a past life connection! Yay!

Nicol Ascart: Storm Mark Half-Elf Swashbuckler Rogue. That smile works wonders.

Com on, how couldn’t I make Nicol ‘incapacitates a crowd with a smile’ Ascart a swashbuckler? Plus Rogues are usually known for being the skill class of 5E, doing things handling things that come up in adventures beyond punching monsters. Nicol does seem the most... level-headed of the group, so he would probably be the one to handle the little details.

As for race, I’ll admit I went with the ‘Sophia’s a half-elf so Nicol’s also a half-elf!’ route. But Storm Mark Half-Elves do come with a lot of wind-based magic, which not only fits canon but also enhances what Nicol could do as a rogue. Admittedly he would have to multiclass slightly to get at most of it, but hey, Gust is a cantrip and the other spells are there for him if he ever does.

Keith Claes: Fierna Tiefling Monster Slayer Ranger. Friendly, but dangerous.

Rangers are another half-caster class, and one with many ‘summon allies’ sort of spells. Sure, they’re technically animals instead of earth elementals, but I do subscribe to the ‘reflavor is fine!’ school of thought so Keith can have his dolls come out when he casts Conjure Animals. The Monster Slayer subclass is built around countering and containing dangerous beings... like, say, Keith himself? Oh, wow, I just picked it because it looked cool. Huh.

And why is Keith a Tiefling? In another life, he was a playboy, so of COURSE he’s going to get a charisma-boost race! A resistance to fire damage makes him perfect for, ah, interrupting a certain prince’s advances. And Fierna Tieflings get spells based around convincing people of things, like Friends and Charm Person, and there’s a certain dense girl in Keith’s life that needs a little guidance.

Geordo Stuart: Gold Standard Dragonborn Draconic Sorcerer. BURN BABY BURN!

Sorcerers are one of the charisma-based casters, with the idea that they have magic IN THEIR BLOOOOOD so they can, you know, cast without needing to do all that silly Study business. Plus they get some of their subclass stuff right off the bat, and Draconic Sorcerers get extra hitpoints every level. Geordo may not use his magic often, but it’s implied that as a royal his magic is redonkulously powerful, so this? This was basically set in stone.

And why did I make the prince a dragonborn? Why, because DRAGONS ARE AWESOME. Look, I don’t make the rules. More seriously, basic dragonborn have a charisma boost, strength boost, and a breath weapon. Admittedly this would probably make Geordo look a LOT different, but what the hey.

Alan Stuart: Silver Draconblood Dragonborn Lore Bard. He knows things so you don’t have to.

Bards are the other charisma-based casters, and a lot more support-based then sorcerers. Plus they’re good musicians, which fits Alan to a T! Lore Bards lean heavily into the ‘Jack Of All Trades’ mindset, with bonus proficiencies and extra magic secrets, because there was that competitive ‘I will best you some way!’ streak early on and that did lean into ‘I’ll learn all I can’ later in his life.

As to why he’s a draconblood dragonborn instead of a standard dragonborn? Draconbloods get an intelligence boost instead of a strength boost, and also get the trait Forceful Presence instead of Damage Resistance. He might not be able to do as much damage as his twin, but Alan is really good at getting attention and using it.

Anne Shelly: Standard Human Open Hand Monk. Somebody has to clean up after these kids!

Monks excel not just in unarmed combat, but in unarmed ‘getting places nobody thinks about’ as well as ‘keeping a cool head when everything goes nuts.’ And the Open Hand Monk doubles down on that, throwing in the ability to basically say “Stop That” whenever needed. This is perfect for Anne “My Mistress Is The Source Of All Chaos” Shelly, wouldn’t you say?

And yeah, she’s a Standard Human. In 5E Standard humans don’t get any special traits, but they do get +1 to every one of their abilities. That’s a small but significant boost to all rolls and a number of stats. Don’t underestimate Anne; she may be in the background, but she’s in the background of Madness and it takes a lot to survive that.

Rafael Walt: Fallen Aasimar Great Old One Warlock. Retired Edgelord.

Warlocks are, ah, not the easiest class to play. They’ve got a lot of special mechanics about their spells, having fewer slots but easier time restoring them. But they do also get a few free invocations, and their patrons can let them spread into different specializations. Rafael knows how to use his magic to the best he can, and... well, the Great Old One patron features just fit what he can do very well.

Aasimar have charisma boosts and darkness resistance universally, but Fallen Aasimar also come with a transformation into a terrifying shadow warrior. Look, Rafael's been through a lot, I’ll grant you. He probably deserves a break. But both thematically and mechanically, this just fits.

===

So that’s that! For now, anyway! Thoughts and opinions are always welcome.

#My Next Life As A Villainess #d&d 5e #Katarina Claes #Maria Campbell #Mary Hunt #Sophia Ascart #Nicol Ascart #Keith Claes #Geordo Stuart #Alan Stuart #Anne Shelly #Rafael Walt #I put way too much thought into this

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lhs3020b · 4 years ago

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The Wooden Spaceships, by Bob Shaw

The Wooden Spaceships is the sequel to the first Land/Overland novel, The Ragged Astronauts. It's set about a generation after the ptertha-driven migration from Land; civilisation on Overland is at least stable now, if not entirely-comfortable. Unfortunately "comfortable" isn't what Toller Maraquine is looking for in his older years. Apaprently he hasn't learned any lessons about getting what you wished for, because bad news arrives on Overland in the form of an airship from Land! That's right, apparently there are survivors on Land, and they're not very happy with their neighbours.

My thoughts are under the cut...

TWS is a bit of an odd book. It's really two main stories, somewhat awkwardly joined together. There's the plot with the attempted invasion by the New Men - briefly, the children of people who proved to be unusually-resistant to pterthacosis, who apparently are either immune or are tolerant enough to the disease that they've managed to live to adulthood. The New Men, sadly, have learnt nothing from their parents' folly and may actually be worse people; their survival seems to have convinced them that they represent a sort of superman who are destined to rule the universe. I suppose a more-sympathetic interpretation might be that they're the products of a collectively-traumatised society, and are dealing with said trauma by projecting all their negative feelings onto imagined enemies on Overland. That said, regardless of interpretation, their actions are not sympathetic and King Rassamarden is clearly a psychotic nutjob.

Also, it's worth noting that they are the New _Men_. While presumably New Women must exist, we never see any. This was an interesting ellision given that TWS is generally a step up relative to TRA for gender stuff. TWS is still quite bad, don't get me wrong, but there has been some improvement. Berise is a plot-relevant female character who actually gets to do stuff, the Kolcorronian king's key adviser is actually his wife Queen Dasseene and there has been some progress on the social front. The Air Corps has been opened to female applicants and it's implied that society as a whole has got a bit more equal. (That said, let's not go too far with this - this is still a society where an aristocrat can have innocent people executed on a whim, as we see with the Sergeant Gnapperl subplot, so Overland has a long way to go before it could be described as a genuinely-civilised society. It may have got a bit more egalitarian one way, but it's still a monarchical despotism ruled by the threat and fear of absolute force.)

Toller, of course, ends up involving himself neck-deep in the war with the New Men. This has the effect of cratering his marriage to Gessalla. In what is genuinely a moment of awesome from her, she tells him that while she's glad he's still alive, she's had quite enough of spending every day wondering whether today is the day she's going to have to bury her idiot husband's corpse. It's stressful and unpleasant, she's lost quite enough in her life already (literally including her homeworld!) and if he can't settle down and sort himself out, then they're through.

Toller, of course, can't deal with this. His marriage thus collapses, and that leads us onto the second part of the novel.

Incidentally, before we get to that, allow me one small tangent. We're halfway through the trilogy, and Toller has entirely forgotten his previous wife. After she disappears halfway through TRA he just - forgets? un-persons? has selective amnesia? goes into denial? refuses to take any responsibility for his own actions? - her entire existence. Toller, you were MARRIED to this woman! Seriously, what a cad! We never find out anything about what happened to Fera at any point in the series. Even in the third novel when a return to Land happens and Shaw could have tied the plot-thread off, but we get nothing.

(Since we never find a body, I've decided to invoke headcanon. Like Toller's father, Fera was one of the rare people who are entirely-immune to pterthacosis. As such she actually survived the implosion of Ro-Atabri and the end of civilisation on Land. After some confusion she eventually moved into an abandoned princeling's palace and has been living out her days in comfortable luxury; she spends her time either walking by the river or reading books - a hobby she recently developed - and occasionally she has been known to take lunch with some of the more pro-social New Men, so she's not entirely without society either. She mostly keeps away from them, having made a reasonable judgement of their character, but that said the odd social do can be refreshing. All considered it's not the worst situation she could have ended up in, and she's certainly managed better than virtually everyone else in Kolcorron. When the Overland exiles' return to the planet happens in "The Fugitive Worlds", Fera - still alive, though an old woman by then - sees the balloons and discovers that she simply has nothing to say to the people who abandoned her to her fate 50 years earlier. As such she decides to avoid them during their visit. In the abstract she supposes that it's nice that society has survived over on Overland, but really, neo-Kolcorron's antics are just Not Her Problem Anymore, so why even bother?)

The second part of the novel concerns a group of Overlander colonists who have recently arrived in a remote area of the planet, newly-opened to settlement. (One oddity of the novel is that for a planet whose population still must be less than a quarter of a million, nonetheless people are spread quite widely across Overland.) The area they've arrived in is fertile, has a pleasant climate and even pre-existing houses, built then abandoned by the last group of prospective colonists. You see, unfortunately, it appears to be haunted.

Bartan Drumme, the semi-leader of the group, is mainly there because he's trying to court his would-be bride Sondeweere. Amusingly, Sondeweere has his number and is quite-blatantly stringing him along, mainly to annoy her domineering uncle. Bartan is of course entirely-blind to this - honestly, Land and Overlander men all seem to run at a permanent +10 to Oblivious - and the "romance" proceeds in exactly the dysfunctional manner that you might imagine. Unfortunately, what would have been an amusingly-cringy romantic dark comedy gets interrupted when the new arrivals in the Egg Basket region start falling ill. Bad dreams, disturbed moods, sleepwalking, full-on psychotic breakdowns - all is not well in the Egg Basket. It quickly becomes apparent that the region is being influenced by some sort of external force. The sensible people leave; the less sensible people cling on and meet with various misfortunes.

(If there is one moral to the Land/Overland trilogy, it seems to be "if you see any hints of trouble, pack your bags and leave NOW, because things will only get worse, and don't expect the government to do anything even minimally-useful".)

Anyway things go from bad to worse, the Egg Basket's mini-society essentially collapses, and then Sondeweere gets abducted by aliens.

Yes, you did read that right. A spaceship turns up and hoovers her up. In context it's not quite as random as it sounds, but it is still quite random.

Anyway this leads Bartan to a decision that he wants to retrieve her from Farland, the third planet in the Land/Overland system. He teams up with Toller, who is now deep into the rebound stage following the implosion of his marriage. Along with Berise and some other acquaintances of Toller's, they construct a spacecraft capable of travelling outside of Land/Overland's mutual atmosphere and set off for Farland. Technically they're under commission from the King; honestly, I got the sense that the King and Queen have simply had enough of Toller's antics, and see this as a convenient way of getting rid of him.

Then reality ensues and they almost die, because nobody on the ship knows anything like as much about either outer space or basic Newtonian physics as they think they do. In fact it turns out no-one has any grasp about continuous acceleration, and they've been running a continuous halvell/pikon thruster-burn for entire days (somehow without running out of fuel, either - apparently the specific impulse on the pikon/halvell reaction is something insanely high?). By the time Sondeweere becomes aware of the ship's situation, it's running at over 100,000 miles per hour and is barely days away from reenacting the Chixculuub meteor on Farland.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention - Sondeweere was abducted because her nervous system had become host to an alien parasite (the same one that was causing mass psychosis in the Egg Basket) and she now has superhuman intelligence and telepathic powers. And also, a far better grasp of modern physics than anyone aboard the titular wooden spaceship from Overland. Fortunately, Sondeweere is able to take charge of the situation and arranges something close-ish to a soft landing on Farland - the crew don't enjoy the experience, but they get to walk away from it, and that's about as good as it gets in aerospace incidents!

Anyway my review here is a bit forced, but that's because the last 40% of the novel also feels a bit forced. The pacing is off and the narrative makes some rapid jumps. Honestly TWS's problem is that it's actually not one novel but rather two separate novellas that have been welded together in a particularly-awkward manner. A lot of things aren't really followed up or tied off properly. The fact that Farland is inhabitable and also inhabited turns up quite late in the book and is dealt with in what I felt to be a bit of an unsatisfactory manner. I was also intrigued to find out that all three planets orbit within 42 million miles of their sun. Apparently the star must be some sort of K dwarf, I guess - no, in fact it may well even be a brighter M dwarf, because this is roughly the orbital radius of Mercury! This is odd because the sunlight is never described as being pink-ish. The only thing I can think of is that maybe nuclear fusion also behaves differently in Land/Overland-verse? Perhaps not only is Pi equal to 3 but perhaps smaller stars are hotter and brighter than they would be here? Or maybe everyone's so used to the pink sunlight that no-one thinks to remark on it at any point?

(Canonically they do fuse - in fact Sondeweere actually has a go at explaining nuclear fusion to Bartan and the others at one point, which was thoughtful of her, though sadly the Overlander males remain as obtuse as ever so the effort may have been wasted.)

Anyway overall, I think this book suffers from a bad case of "mid-trilogy syndrome". I'm glad that female characters are handled better here, and I was cheering for Gessalla when she told Toller to fuck off. The extra expansions to the universe were interesting, and it was also interesting to see the gradual consolidation of colonial life on Overland. Madcap as it was, the interplanetary voyage to Farland did have some "big-picture" excitement too. That said, however, the books minuses were continued dropped plot-threads from the previous novel, unevenness in pacing and perhaps also just having too many ideas in a small package.

#Bob Shaw #The Wooden Spaceships #Books 2021 #LHS reads

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seyaryminamoto · 5 years ago

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I recently saw a heavy criticism of The Beach saying "it's the single least realistic portrayal of teenagers on television: spoiled, rich kids don't actively shun Zuko for having a disfiguring scar on his face, no one tries to start shit with Azula over the volleyball game, teenagers referring to themselves as teenagers, a teen boy tells people not to make a mess, a bunch of 14-16 year-olds sit in a circle and psychoanalyze each other, everything else about the campfire scene." Your thoughts?

:’) that someone looks at the Beach and dismisses it for being “unrealistic” by whatever their cultural standards are is probably enough of a sign of the irrelevance of said person’s opinion. I mean, obviously they’re free to think what they will, but...

Fire Nation society is not American society. I’m going blind here, maybe this person isn’t American at all, but somehow I mostly see such kinds of narrow-minded criticism from first-worlders who are seldom exposed to lifestyles outside their particular, contemporary bubble of experiences.

Now then, let’s get into the actual debate: Fire Nation society values violence quite a lot. Fire Nation society is full of people who saw Zuko’s literal Agni Kai burning scene, and didn’t look away: the only character who does is Iroh, a very obvious hint by the writers that Iroh has discarded the cruel moral values the rest of the Fire Nation upholds.

With this in mind, a boy with a scarred face might earn all sorts of “ews” from our societies, damn right. From Fire Nation society, though? If even watching how the burn is inflicted didn’t bother most of them, why would the result be a problem? If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if people with burn scars are even seen more attractive because it implies they were caught in violent scuffles with fire and still survived? Of course, the argument might go that Zuko’s burn is meant to be a mark of shame... but it’s a mark of shame for PRINCE Zuko. For that mysterious boy with the emo haircut in Ember Island, whose real identity is a mystery? It is shown, instead, to result in this reaction:

Now then, we could say that this is meant to be a jab by the creators and writers at Zuko’s hordes of fangirls, because frankly, Book 3 has several instances of groups of girls swooning over Zuko and it might be what they were going for. In this case, though, they’re swooning over him WITHOUT knowing who he is, as opposed to the fangirls in Nightmares and Daydreams. So, while it absolutely can be inspired on the many Zuko fangirls the staff knew about, this actually ends up serving to characterize a society, a culture: they don’t think his scar makes him unattractive. It’s blatantly stated that their reaction is the opposite. So, instead of thinking “oh god that’s so unrealistic”, how about we actually stop trying to measure everything by our standards and consider that this could be an element of WORLDBUILDING...? :’)

(Also, I’m pretty sure there’s a fair share of privileged young women in our current society who think Kylo Ren was hot as hell with a huge scar across his face... are those people not real, by any chance? :’D If anything, they’re living proof that girls swooning over a scarred boy in ATLA are absolutely feasible, no matter if not everyone shares their opinion)

Continues under the cut becasue this got long....

Now then, Azula is shown to take the Kuai ball game too far. She outright causes the ball, in the final kick, to burst into flames and burns the net. Going by Chan and Ruon Jian, these kids are privileged idiots, why lie... but are these privileged idiots stupid enough to see a girl flying three feet into the air, kicking a firebent ball and then giving a foreboding speech, and say “OKAY WE’RE GONNA PICK A FIGHT WITH YOU FOR BEING SO COMPETITIVE!”???? I mean... honestly. Why would anyone do this? Azula turned an inoffensive Kuai ball game into a battlefield singlehandedly: THIS, as well, is meant to be a display of characterization. That people don’t take the game so seriously, that they wouldn’t pick a fight with her because she’s dangerous or because they just don’t care as much as she does... it’s characterizing Fire Nation people every bit as much as it characterizes Azula.

Azula and Zuko are both shown reacting in ridiculous ways to casual things in this episode: Azula takes the game too far, potentially stages the burning down of a house in retaliation for being rejected by a boy, Zuko is hysterical and jealous and snaps at Mai over stupid things... it’s, again, a matter of showing how poorly adjusted these characters are. They’re not normal kids. They DON’T behave like normal kids. Normal, privileged kids in the Fire Nation, are kids like Chan and Ruon Jian. The episode literally gives you the chance to see Fire Nation society for what it is, in a way no other episode does... and because it’s not like our societies, it’s somehow wrong?

... Also, teenagers referring to themselves as teenagers is somehow unrealistic? I mean... is it nowadays? I don’t think any teenagers had a problem with saying they were teens in my youth :’DDD literally remember MCR released a song called Teenagers and a lot of us loved it to pieces. What exactly is so outrageous about it? Might be that this worked better in the mid-00′s, but I hardly think this makes no sense? Aang refers to himself as a kid earlier in the show, is that unrealistic too and worth rebuking a whole episode over? Are all teenagers supposed to be pretending to be grown-ups, like so many 16-year-olds on Tumblr who always talk like they’ve figured out the world and try to impose rules on fully-grown adults upon whom they have absolutely no power? :’DDDDD Yeah, I think this particular point is a stupid thing to make a fuss over. Honestly, it is.

Chan tells people not to make a mess = unrealistic. Ha. Did this person ignore his reactions at the chaos Azula, Zuko, Mai and Ty Lee caused in his house? “YOU BROKE MY NANA’S VASE!!!”, anyone? Like... I’m sorry, but this IS characterization, yet again! This shows Chan is a spoiled brat who wants to stay in his family’s good graces. The party isn’t at all as crazy and wild as you’d expect from, again, an American teenage party... and why? Because, for one thing, Chan is clearly afraid of the consequences of too much chaos in the beach house: this implies fear of authority, of his parents, perhaps even his grandparents.

For another, again, FIRE NATION SOCIETY: what does this clever critic know, by any chance, of Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth? I’ve watched a few documentaries about it, and basically if you were a boy and you weren’t in Hitler Youth, you were no one. You were worthless. And what happened in Hitler Youth? Conditioning to the extreme. These kids were taught all the alt-right ideology that Tumblr despises, and they were made to believe it was an undeniable reality. Were there cases of kids who didn’t like it, kids who didn’t approve of it? Surely. But the general idea of Hitler Youth was to educate every kid to behave in the way Hitler considered appropriate, to the point where “the notion "Germany must live" even if they (members of the HJ) had to die was "hammered" into them.”

This is, of course, an extreme example and I’m sure Fire Nation education wasn’t that extreme because we saw it for ourselves, it’s not. But a slightly milder version of it? That’s absolutely feasible and consistent with what we see in The Headband. Therefore, kids getting high and drunk at a party? Maybe that kind of thing simply DOESN’T happen in a Fire Nation party? :’) Maybe they’re taught that those kinds of things are off-limits to anyone under a certain age (or outright forbidden, might be the case with drugs), and as they live in a tyrannical society that priorizes the Fire Lord and his decrees above all else, where his word is treated as that of a god, even mischievous teenagers refuse to act out? :’D oh, what an implausible concept, this just can’t possibly make any sense! Hitler Youth is unrealistic too!

Lastly, that a bunch of kids would sit in a circle psychoanalyzing each other seems implausible to this person is actually laughable for me. Not only have I constantly found myself, from my early teenage years to current days, serving as some sort of unofficial therapist for many of my friends, who share their woes and ask me for advice (whether they’ll heed it or not), most importantly, I once had an experience with a friend, back in high school, much like what happens with these kids in The Beach, after I’d spent years doing a lot of post-depression introspection. I shared a lot of stuff I didn’t often talk about, and beats me WHY I felt completely comfortable sharing it with my friend that day, but I did. She understood me, listened, offered her opinion, and we talked about her problems too. This happened when I was 15-16. If this person has never experienced such situation... why, that’s not anyone’s business. But it’s certainly not their business to determine this just DOESN’T happen, to anyone, ever. I can safely say it does, to people who do have problems and who sometimes just need a friendly shoulder to rely on. Maybe this critic’s life is just so perfect they’ve never had to share their woes with anyone else :’) I’m afraid that doesn’t invalidate those of us who are different, and it doesn’t invalidate the possibility that those four could talk, as they did, without breaking characterization, in the scene of the fireplace at the beach.

ANYWAYS...

Saying that a show about a group of kids who save the world and then effectively become leaders of such world, facing very little opposition in the process, is unrealistic because “teenagers aren’t like that becuase I wasn’t like that as a teenager” may be one of the most ridiculous and shortsighted things I’ve seen in this fandom, AND I’VE SEEN A LOT OF RIDICULOUS AND SHORTSIGHTED THINGS. A person’s experiences are NOT universal, regardless of how widespread their culture may be. More importantly, fiction does NOT have to abide by rules established by our current society’s state and cultural values. ATLA, as it is, is a completely different world from our own, regardless of its inspiration in many Asian cultures.

I, personally, find it a lot more unrealistic that Fire Lord Zuko can become Fire Lord without much in the way of visible protesting or boycotting when he was a banished prince who didn’t even win in his Agni Kai against Azula since it’s Katara who ends up defeating her and, as far as the rules go, Azula technically won even if not in the most dignified of ways. I find it even more unrealistic that LOK tells us Zuko was Fire Lord successfully for 70+ years and the Fire Nation has been fully reformed into a non-warmongering country despite the 100+ years of indoctrination started by Sozin’s rule. That this gets swept under a rug, not only in the neatly wrapped finale that leaves a thousand unanswered questions, but in the sequel show that merely confirms Zuko succeeded and shows NOTHING of how he managed to reform such a fucked up society...? That is a thousand times more important to me than “privileged kids aren’t acting like privileged kids OMG!”. Honestly, you want privileged kids abusing all their privileges in our society? Go watch Gossip Girl, I genuinely recommend it. You want something that proposes a completely different possibility and a glance at what a society guided by a tyrannical dictator looks like? Feel free to watch The Beach again with a completely different focus and MAYBE you’ll understand what the writers were going for.

If this person happens to see my answer, I hope they learn that worldbuilding, for a storyteller, entails CREATING a world that isn’t necessarily like the one we’re familiar with. There are multiple layers to such a world, and society and culture are some of them. Not all cultures and societies work the same way, which is part of why sometimes you’ll find behaviors from people who belong to wholly different cultures and wind up perplexed because whatever they’re doing is completely unfamiliar for you. Are there any universal behaviors in humans? Maybe! But in a work of FICTION, even the most universal of behaviors can be changed, deleted, altered however the writer sees fit! :’D it’s not a novel concept, and as far as logical fallacies are concerned, this show features a whole slew of those that have nothing to do with this peculiar sense of “realism”, fallacies that absolutely can and should be called out. Namely, things that contradict the internal logic of the show, rather than things that are incompatible with OUR world. Portraying a world that’s very different from ours, on virtually every level you can think of? That’s called creativity, not lack of realism. Please learn the difference.

#anon #... excuse me #but I got really unnerved by this one #just wtf #if this is supposed to be some sort of important critic #rather than a random someone on Tumblr #please don't ever watch anything they do ever again #realism ffs #BELIEVABILITY and realism are not the same damn thing #and solid worldbuilding requires the former not the latter #god I'll just #go chill #why #just why

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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 5 years ago

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With time some followers of polytheist gods became so fond of their particular patron that they drifted away from the basic polytheist insight. They began to believe that their god was the only god, and that He was in fact the supreme power of the universe. Yet at the same time they continued to view Him as possessing interests and biases, and believed that they could strike deals with Him. Thus were born monotheist religions, whose followers beseech the supreme power of the universe to help them recover from illness, win the lottery and gain victory in war.

The first monotheist religion known to us appeared in Egypt, c.350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared that one of the minor deities of the Egyptian pantheon, the god Aten, was, in fact, the supreme power ruling the universe. Akhenaten institutionalized the worship of Aten as the state religion and tried to check the worship of all other gods. His religious revolution, however, was unsuccessful. After his death, the worship of Aten was abandoned in favour of the old pantheon.

Polytheism continued to give birth here and there to other monotheist religions, but they remained marginal, not least because they failed to digest their own universal message. Judaism, for example, argued that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, yet His chief interest is in the tiny Jewish nation and in the obscure land of Israel. Judaism had little to offer other nations, and throughout most of its existence it has not been a missionary religion. This stage can be called the stage of ‘local monotheism’.

The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect’s first leaders, Paul of Tarsus, reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just Jews. It was thus necessary to spread the good word – the gospel – about Jesus throughout the world.

Paul’s arguments fell on fertile ground. Christians began organising widespread missionary activities aimed at all humans. In one of history’s strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.

Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century – Islam. Like Christianity, Islam, too, began as a small sect in a remote corner of the world, but in an even stranger and swifter historical surprise it managed to break out of the deserts of Arabia and conquer an immense empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to India. Henceforth, the monotheist idea played a central role in world history.

Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognises the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.

It worked. At the beginning of the first century AD, there were hardly any monotheists in the world. Around AD 500, one of the world’s largest empires – the Roman Empire – was a Christian polity, and missionaries were busy spreading Christianity to other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. By the end of the first millennium AD, most people in Europe, West Asia and North Africa were monotheists, and empires from the Atlantic Ocean to the Himalayas claimed to be ordained by the single great God. By the early sixteenth century, monotheism dominated most of Afro-Asia, with the exception of East Asia and the southern parts of Africa, and it began extending long tentacles towards South Africa, America and Oceania. Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another, and the global political order is built on monotheistic foundations.

Yet just as animism continued to survive within polytheism, so polytheism continued to survive within monotheism. In theory, once a person believes that the supreme power of the universe has interests and biases, what’s the point in worshipping partial powers? Who would want to approach a lowly bureaucrat when the president’s office is open to you? Indeed, monotheist theology tends to deny the existence of all gods except the supreme God, and to pour hellfire and brimstone over anyone who dares worship them.

Yet there has always been a chasm between theological theories and historical realities. Most people have found it difficult to digest the monotheist idea fully. They have continued to divide the world into ‘we’ and ‘they’, and to see the supreme power of the universe as too distant and alien for their mundane needs. The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.

Just as the god Jupiter defended Rome and Huitzilopochtli protected the Aztec Empire, so every Christian kingdom had its own patron saint who helped it overcome difficulties and win wars. England was protected by St George, Scotland by St Andrew, Hungary by St Stephen, and France had St Martin. Cities and towns, professions, and even diseases – each had their own saint. The city of Milan had St Ambrose, while St Mark watched over Venice. St Florian protected chimney cleaners, whereas St Mathew lent a hand to tax collectors in distress. If you suffered from headaches you had to pray to St Agathius, but if from toothaches, then St Apollonia was a much better audience.

The Christian saints did not merely resemble the old polytheistic gods. Often they were these very same gods in disguise. For example, the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was Christianised, Brigid too was baptised. She became St Brigit, who to this day is the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland.

Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle.

Dualism is a very attractive worldview because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. ‘Why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. […] Theologians have written countless books to answer such questions. Some find the answers convincing. Some don’t. What’s undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil.

[…] Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. Sometime between 1500 BC and 1000 BC a prophet named Zoroaster (Zarathustra) was active somewhere in Central Asia. His creed passed from generation to generation until it became the most important of dualistic religions – Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good god in this battle. Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC) and later became the official religion of the Sassanid Persian Empire (AD 224–651). It exerted a major influence on almost all subsequent Middle Eastern and Central Asian religions, and it inspired a number of other dualist religions, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeanism.

During the third and fourth centuries AD, the Manichaean creed spread from China to North Africa, and for a moment it appeared that it would beat Christianity to achieve dominance in the Roman Empire. Yet the Manichaeans lost the soul of Rome to the Christians, the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire was overrun by the monotheistic Muslims, and the dualist wave subsided. Today only a handful of dualist communities survive in India and the Middle East.

Nevertheless, the rising tide of monotheism did not really wipe out dualism. Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous dualist beliefs and practices, and some of the most basic ideas of what we call ‘monotheism’ are, in fact, dualist in origin and spirit. Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews believe in a powerful evil force – like the one Christians call the Devil or Satan – who can act independently, fight against the good God, and wreak havoc without God’s permission.

How can a monotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? Logically, it is impossible. Either you believe in a single omnipotent God or you believe in two opposing powers, neither of which is omnipotent. Still, humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions. So it should not come as a surprise that millions of pious Christians, Muslims and Jews manage to believe at one and the same time in an omnipotent God and an independent Devil. Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews have gone so far as to imagine that the good God even needs our help in its struggle against the Devil, which inspired among other things the call for jihads and crusades.

Another key dualistic concept, particularly in Gnosticism and Manichaeanism, was the sharp distinction between body and soul, between matter and spirit. Gnostics and Manichaeans argued that the good god created the spirit and the soul, whereas matter and bodies are the creation of the evil god. Man, according to this view, serves as a battleground between the good soul and the evil body. From a monotheistic perspective, this is nonsense – why distinguish so sharply between body and soul, or matter and spirit? And why argue that body and matter are evil? After all, everything was created by the same good God. But monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist dichotomies, precisely because they helped them address the problem of evil. So such oppositions eventually became cornerstones of Christian and Muslim thought. Belief in heaven (the realm of the good god) and hell (the realm of the evil god) was also dualist in origin. There is no trace of this belief in the Old Testament, which also never claims that the souls of people continue to live after the death of the body.

In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion.

- Yuval Noah Harari, God is one in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

#yuval noah harari #god is one #sapiens #sapiens: a brief history of humankind

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torendheavenandearth · 4 years ago

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2.4

“In the end of all things, there will be light, like a pinprick thou canst not see. But the darkness will be too familiar, and you will wish you never left the Shadow of God’s Wing. Then you will learn the truth of martyrdom, the hell of guilt, the inferno of penitence. Then you shall learn the Eight Cardinal Sin, both a Virtue and a Vice: Regret.”

- Mga Kanta sa Pangatlong Libro (Songs from the Third Book)

▼

Back in Barangay Laurel, a statuesque angel-being looks over the buried body of the crimson anghel. Dante, he knew him as. With a single whiff, he can smell the burning flame of Gahum.

He is in white military rayadillo uniform, black gloves, and high boots. His sabre hangs on one side, lazy. On the other side hangs a firecaster: a firearm that has a mini-spirit house sculpted onto its back, where a diwata of fire is enslaved.

A group of men and women in similar suits, albeit without a firecaster and only bolos for weapons, are bustling around the area. Some of them are acting as a human barricade to stop the townsfolk from interfering with the investigation. Others are going around collecting evidence, picking them up with gloved hands, and putting them in sanitizied pouches, mostly flesh tissue left over as well as spiritual residue from the dead anghel. Some of them are going up to the man with the firecaster.

“Kapitan Briogo, we’ve scoured the area. No other people nor corpses were found.”

Kapitan Briogo’s face is a mask of sculpted stone. It is shaped in the visage of the perfect white man: an aquiline nose, full lips, high cheekbones, eyes made of azure lapis lazuli. His hair is not hair but a twining of wires and clockwork. When he moves his head to look at the reporter, the machinery within him whirrs.

His wings are connected together by interlocking plates and clockwork. Clinging to his elbows are pistons. Rivets moving through imperfect seams along his perfect white-gold carapace betray complex machinations underneath.

“Go around for another round. Make sure no stone is unturned.” The Kapitan’s voice is a hollow monotone filtered through a mesh.

The one that spoke with him--a young tao--salutes once and moves away to relay the order. He turns again to the corpse. Slowly, the little light encapsulated within their little clockwork heart seeps back to heaven, to Pugad Langit.

“Kapitan,” another voice, this time also as mechanical as his. This one has the body of a young mortal boy, although he is blindfolded, and from his wrists and ankles hang broken chains. Despite having the countenance of a young handsome boy with golden hair, the seams running through his arms betray his true form.. “Do you have any conclusions? I can think of one.”

The Kapitan speaks. “There are times when a razor must cut through smoke and find the fire. What does this Gahum smell like, Antonio?”

“Brimstone.”

“This Gahum belongs to someone who is powerful. Someone we have felt before.”

“The winner of the Hagdanan,” says the young man.

“Correct, Antonio. The Winner of the Hagdanan. The Swordbreaker. Ang Nilapastangan.” He stares at the body of Dante, the killed anghel. “We ride, soon. We must.”

“To where?” asks Antonio.

“We follow the road.”

▼

Ang Nilapastangan clambers over the barrier, and so does Angela. Wooden chairs almost hit her due to the barrier basically falling apart. “I told you to go home. It’s not safe here.”

“I feel safer when I’m with you!” exclaims Angela as she pulls herself up and onto the top of the barricade.

Past the barricade is a strange sight.

There is the plaza, usually a site for lively recreation and jubilant mingling, now reduced into a greyed out silence pit. A fine sheet of ash has covered the area, draining the color out of the place.

In the middle of the plaza is that small park area with a statue in the middle. The statue in the middle is supposedly a statue of Yezu, raising his gun and proclaiming victory to the heavens, wearing nothing but a padded coat, pants, high boots and a trench coat.

Corpses pile up by the base of the area. Unmoving. Untwitching. Deader than dead.

“What the fuck?”

Angela’s gaze looks further and past the plaza she sees the town hall and the church. The church’s double doors are destroyed: one is lost and the other hangs by a single hinge. It's too dark for Angela to see what’s inside. Other than that, it's a simple stone church with a few carvings onto the doorway made of stone and with that inverted triangle at the top, where crosses from churches back at Angela’s universe would be.

Although now looking at carvings, they have been defaced, one way or another. Their faces shattered, hands and feet missing.

The town hall doesn’t look any better. Its walls have been dilapitated, covered in the sheet of ash. A dark cloud passes over it. Not literally, but Angela can’t help but feel dread claw from the bottom of her stomach as she looks. As if the town hall is about to open its eyes and stare back at her.

“D-Do you see anything?”

Ang Nilapastangan shakes her head. “No. Her Gahum is in there, somewhere. Deep in there. But I can’t pinpoint where.”

“Shit.”

“Let’s go back to the commune first and have a plan before we do anything rash.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

▼

They get on their horses and trot out. It's not twilight yet. Jaime and the others are nowhere to be found.

“Looks like we’re going back before they do,” says Angela. They’ve done a few stops to pick up some extra supplies--clothes, salt, sacks of rice--so that they have something good to bring back at least.

They gallop across the field going back to the commune and then they slow to a trot as they reach the flanked path. As they trot along, Ang Nilapastangan says, “We should get out of here, soon.”

Angela raises an eyebrow. “Why? What’s the problem?”

“It’s not going to be long until they find us here. And this is the closest barangay to Laurel. We should get going by tomorrow at least.”

“All right,” says Angela. “If you say so.” Now at the bottom of her gut, she wants to go back and find the albularyo so that they can get out as early as possible. Yet, at the same time, she can’t help but feel bad about the people still here, surviving in the commune. Will they ever get out?

“You can help them get rid of the amalanhig, right?” asks Angela.

Ang Nilapastangan shrugs. “If my guess is correct, the anghel or whoever the Trinity makes follow us can take care of whatever problem they have. What we need to do is find the albularyo. Got that?”

Angela nods. They reach and cross the stream.

Babaylan Salinas greets them as they enter into the commune. “Ah, o great and mighty Ang Nilapastangan!”

Angela sees Ang Nilapastangan manage a small smile. She shakes her head and says, “Please, lola, simply Nila is fine. I don’t seek to be treated as a great hero.”

Babaylan Salinas stares at her for a few moments, before smiling herself and nodding. “The others are surely still on their way back. Please, take a moment to rest and recuperate.”

Ang Nilapastangan nods. “Wait, uh, lola, can I ask you a few questions before that? Regarding the barangay.”

The Babaylan dips her head in a slight, reverent nod. “Yes, please. Would you like to have it over coffee and bananacue?”

Angela usually eats bananacue every afternoon, made by her mom. But now, her mother is gone. Well, no, technically it’s she who’s gone, not her mother. But what does that mean for her?

Sitting there, on a nice textile fabric on the floor, eating out of a porcelain plate a few nice bananacues and some really strong coffee, she’s suddenly transported home. Back to where she’s supposed to belong. Sitting on her plastic chair in front of their wooden table, where bananas and apples would be lying. Leftovers from last night’s dinner would be kept in an ice cream tub.

Tears well up in her eyes, bleeding sadness.

“Anak,” says Babaylan Salinas. “What’s wrong? You are…” Angela glimpses up and looks at Babaylan Salinas, and the Babaylan peers into her eyes. Through the veil of her tears, the Babaylan sees something that makes her frown.

“You are lost.”

Angela wipes away her tears. Ang Nilapastangan watches her for a bit, before she coughs and says, “Let her deal with it. Babaylan, I seek answers to a few questions.”

The Babaylan gives Angela one last sad glance, before nodding and turning to Ang Nilapastangan. “Yes, I will try to answer to the best of my ability.”

“The barangay, it has been like that for how long now?”

“Since… Unangaraw.”

“Today is Pangatlongaraw, so that means it’s been that way for 2 days?”

The babaylan nods.

“Very well. Was there anything strange going on before the day it happened?”

The Babaylan shakes her head. “I was a busy one, doing many healings during that time. It was an Unangaraw, so I thought nothing of it. I guess that should’ve been the first evidence that something wasn’t right.”

Ang Nilapastangan nods. “Amalanhig are usually brought about by either the residue of yawa souls… or aswang witchery. You, being the babaylan, would know if there was a yawa in the vicinity, would you not?”

The babaylan nods. “There weren’t any during that time,” she replise. “Nothing out of the ordinary. However, when I consulted with the Diwata, they answered nothing. It was strange, for sure.

“And then, when it happened, it did so quickly. Like a wink lost in the crowd. That night, most of the barangay had been turned into amalanhig. Mostly those that lived in solitary homes were able to get out in time.”

“So you are implying that it was indeed the work of an asuwang?”

The babaylan nods, without hesitation. “We barricaded the plaza because we think that’s where the asuwang might be, but we’re not so sure.”

“A simple barricade will not stop an asuwang,” says Ang Nilapastangan.

“I know. The barricade had the secondary purpose of keeping in the corpses.”

“Then we should do something. Tonight, I will try to get in and see if there is asuwang within the vicinity. The earlier the better,” says Ang Nilapastangan. “If we manage to end the asuwang, the amalanhig menace will be gone as well.”

“But… that would mean--”

“The means to bring a soul back to life is gone with the Karanduun of old,” says Ang Nilapastangan, solemn.

There’s a choking silence that follows. Darkness glows. Candlelight flickers. Angela wipes away the last of her unfounded tears, eyes wide, still unknowing why she’s crying.

“It might be the albularyo,” mutters Ang Nilapastangan.

Babaylan Salinas nods. “She was certainly acting strange before the happening, but I cannot in good conscience think she has done… that.”

“You’re right. There’s nothing in it for Gumamela. Either she’s had something to do with it, or she’s in there, somewhere, doing something.”

“What do you plan to do?” asks Babaylan Salinas.

Ang Nilapastangan sighs. “I’m going to face whatever is in there. Tonight. If I don’t find the albularyo, taking care of what has caused the amalanhig menace will definitely be a help. I need to know if Gumamela has been taken by whatever is in there or if she’s still alive.”

Angela’s eyes widen. She rubs away her tears. “Then I’m--”

Adlay’s voice cut through Angela’s protests: “Jaime! Jaime is missing!”

Ang Nilapastangan is already on her feet, rushing forward and out of the door. The babaylan is raising her hand to stop her, but Ang Nilapastangan is unimpeded. Angela blinks, wondering why she is so quick to respond to that news. Is Jaime somewhat important to her? Or is it something else?

She leaps from the door and over to Adlay in a single bound. “What? What happened to Jaime?”

“O, O great Ang Nilapastangan!” says Adlay, shuddering. “Jaime has been taken captive by the great devourer!”

“What? Take it slow. What happened?” Against the bonfire light, Ang Nilapastangan’s face is a shadowy mask.

“It-It was like a dark shadow!” shouts out the tikbalang, Damian, getting off of his horse. Angela sees this, and stifles a chuckle at the absurdity.

“It plucked Jaime out from the darkness when he got too close to the barricade!”

“Shit. I know what it’s trying to do,” says Ang Nilapastangan. She runs over to Stella, her horse, and is off, galloping back presumably into the barangay. She doesn’t stop. It’s as if her spirit is guiding her.

Angela watches her ride off, and then she’s running toward her own horse as well.

“Hoy, where do you think you’re going?” asks Adlay.

“Going after her.”

Damian grabs her by her bicep. “I’m sorry, girl, but you will not be rushing headfirst into danger. We have to protect our own.”

Our own? Angela stops. She turns and looks up at Damian. “I can’t leave Ang Nilapastangan alone.”

“I know,” says Damian, patting her head. “But she can handle that better alone than with you. Think of it: she’d rather not have you there to protect. She wouldn’t want something bad to happen to you. I’m sure of it.” There’s a pained wistfulness in Damian’s voice. It breaks Angela.

Realization creeps up to Angela, and she releases her tension. “What if she dies?”

Adlay, from behind them, shouts out: “Hah! Her? Die? Ang Nilapastangan faced GOD and lived! We don’t have to worry about her!”

Angela releases her fists. She balled them up while trying to get to Ang Nilapastangan. “You’re right.” Her shoulders drop.

“Ang Nilapastangan will be fine. She is sung. She will be known. She will save Jaime.”

“Babaylan Salinas, why did you not simply call upon help from other barangay? Or from the Kingdom? Ang Nilapastangan told me there was a kingdom that ruled over you.”

Damian turns around and shakes his head. Adlay sighs and scratches his head.

The Babaylan gingerly picks her way down to the ground. She walks over to the bonfire and lets out a sigh. The wind rustles her bramble hair. “Iha, we have tried,” says Babaylan Salinas. “We have tried. But do you think… do you think the Kingdom listens?”

Angela swallows.

“Us being off dead is better for them. They can build more estates upon the graves of our people. We went to Biringan, the capital of the Kingdom, a long time ago. We tried fighting for higher wages, for better treatment, for we were being killed because we are trying to protect the farmlands that are ours.

“But no. They did not listen. They will never listen. The Kingdom does not care for us. None will care for us but each other.”

Angela breathes. She lowers her hands. She realizes she’s raised them. “I’m sorry. Has it always been this way?”

The bark-skinned spirit medium simply nods.

Damian stares at the path that Ang Nilapastangan has left behind. He chuckles. “You can’t really stop someone that is resigned to death, huh?”

Return to Table of Contents

#to rend heaven and earth #karanduun #webnovel #2.4 #outbreak

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redandfranticfeelings · 5 years ago

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an autistic analysis, lyric by lyric, of ‘i love play rehearsal’

ive been hyperfixating over bmc for the last month and i keep thinking about how autistic the main characters are and christine is so very very very autistic coded to me. so i decided im just going to straight up deconstruct the lyrics of her signature song in the context of her being autistic (and also having adhd, but my experience is mostly in autism)

this is very very rambley and based more on personal experience than research, so i doubt itll be interesting to anybody but me, but i just want to talk about christine, the autistic queen

I love play rehearsal Because its the best! Because it is fun. I love play rehearsal and I get depressed as soon as its done.

it goes without saying that chrstine’s special interest is theater right? the way she treats it as the “highlight of [her] life” and then switches into this song after acting completely awkward and disinterested in jeremy outside of the context of him being engaged in her special interest.

But not depressed as in like kill yourself depressed No, im not into self-harm Dude, I swear, here check my arm!

overexplaining in a way that reads very much like speaking before she thinks, even though bringing up self harm in casual conversation with someone you barely talk to is not exactly proper etiquette. i think this is also an adhd trait? going faster than your own brain. that’s basically this whole song.

See, I just use the word to emphasise a point, Show the passion I have got I am passionate a lot. I have mad, gigantic feelings, Red and frantic feelings, About most everything Like gun control, like spring,

a lot of people assume autistic people are typically emotionless but it’s also very easy for us to get caught up in emotional issues especially when it comes to stuff we love, and it catches us off guard. christine being hyperempathetic is implied later in the show when she has that awful survivors’ guilt over making fun of rich and jake, and it also plays into her being so socially conscious as well.

Like if I’m living up to all I’m meant to be.

being an high school junior is really rough bc of all the decisions that have to be made regarding college and your future as an independent adult, and being autistic just makes it worse bc it can easily lead to burnout to deal with so much at once, if you even can comprehend these things much at all (i had no idea what to do, lol). i doubted my ability to grow up and succeed constantly because i had no idea who to talk to and what questions to ask and how to present myself. that’s something that a lot of people worry about, but having social delays makes it way more of a pressing issue than it is for neurotypicals, i feel.

I also have a touch of ADD. Where was I? Oh, right!

self explanatory and very canon. adhd and autism can be diagnosed simultaneously nowadays and the symptoms overlap a lot, btw.

I love play rehearsal, Cause’ you are equiped with direction and text, Life is easy in rehearsal, You follow a script so you know what comes next. Anywho the point that I’m getting to is sometimes life can’t work out in the way It works out in the play

this part screams autistic culture to me. unpredictability is scary because social situations don’t always go smoothly like in fiction! this is why social scripting is a popular therapy tactic for autistic children- you have to manually study social situations like a script. theater is something meant to be memorized and recited until you’re able to process it and manufacture emotion, but honestly for autistic kids, life feels a lot like that sometimes. remember how miserable she got when one of her favorite plays had the script changed without her permission to make a whole new story she doesn’t know? of course that’s just upsetting on its own, but in the context of her knowing theater so well and being fully prepared for one story only to be forced to learn a new one? ouch.

christine is never shown as comfortable outside her element- she hides in a book during “more than survive” and shrinks into nothing at the party. it’s a recurring theme that she has no idea exactly who she is, struggles with her identity outside of theater, and despite not really caring about how people see her, she does care about her own ability. socializing makes her feel awkward, especially when something totally unexpected happens like jake or jeremy asking her out. if she doesn’t have a plan or routine or, well, a script, then she can’t trust herself to go forward.

Like the only time I get to be the center of attention, Is when I’m Juliet or Blanche DuBois

as an autistic theater kid, i just really do relate to being clueless and dumb in real life but being able to totally thrive on the stage, because you can channel the energy that is usually misplaced in real life social interactions, and transfer it through dialogue and song and dance that someone else laid out nicely for you.

and can I mention? That was really one of my best roles, Did you see that?

an epic combination of letting your mind wander easily without caring about making sense to the person you’re speaking to, and taking every opportunity to infodump. in a lot of productions she even mimics her blanche voice just for fun. jeremy tries to respond here but she doesn’t care because she’s in her own brain where everything only really seems to make sense to her.

And no matter how hard I try, It’s impossible to narrow down the many reasons why, I love play rehearsal. I happiness cry whenever it starts!

if she isn’t being hyperbolic then this plays into my ‘so much emotion it’s hard to control’ thing detailed a bit above. either way, big special interest mood.

It’s just so universal Getting to try playing so many parts. Most humans do one thing for all of their lives, The thought of that gives me hives! I’ve got so many interests I wanna pursue,

it’s a lot easier to lose yourself and connect to your special interest than focus on your very complex, very overwhelming real life issues. escaping into fiction and being able to play in a variety of social situations as a totally different person, yay theater!

in general i just like the idea of christine struggling to visualize who she is and thinking about a lot of hypothetical but being unable to choose which one is most desirable or plausible. idk if that’s autistic or just a fun character trait lol. i know jumping from interest to interest is an adhd thing though.

this little passage is good for at least showing that christine distinguishes herself from ‘most humans’ in a way that isn’t so much ‘not like other girls’ but like ‘life is so much more confusing to me than it seems to be to others’ (which the show proposes isn’t exactly true and is the same closed-mindedness that jeremy has, though christine realizes it sooner; however; the sentiment rings true in that christine, as a neurodiverse young woman, has a lot more hoops to jump through than a neurotypical classmate.)

And why am I telling this to you? Guess there’s a part of me that wants to.

jeremy is also very autistic coded in my eyes, but that’s a separate post. i just like them being drawn to each other through that sort of kinship. also if you interpret her as having an unrealized requited crush on him…well, i think for a lot of us, romantic love is easy to confuse with friend love, if even that, because the specifics of emotions are a mess to unravel. (which also explains her confusion on her relationship with jake)

oh and right after this, she starts squawking just because she had the impulse to do so. vocal stimming, much?

Back to play rehearsal, My brain is like ‘bzzz’ My heart is like 'wow’

my brain is always like bzzz honestly lol. this is generally a pretty good way to describe being hyperfocused.

Because we’re here at play rehearsal, and it’s starting, We’re starting, It’s starting, Sooo-ooon.

it’s been confirmed as a deliberate decision that christine’s songs never end on a rhyme, except when she’s squipped and it isn’t ‘really’ her, because she subverts everyone’s expectations, including jeremy’s. i feel that could make for a nice simplified metaphor for autism, right?

#christine canigula #autistic headcanons #allistics can reblog!#be more chill #bmc #gif #long post #queue are so busted #i might do something like this for loser geek whatever and/or more than survive #or even just bmc songs in general if i cant get enough material from them individually #be more neurodivergent #kin tag

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vaguely-concerned · 5 years ago

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TEMERAIRE LET’S READ: BLOOD OF TYRANTS, THE WILLIAM LAURENCE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT NG+ SPEEDRUN

- oh NO LAURENCE D:D:D:

I do love that one of his first realizations is that he’s definitely not dutch tho lol this dumbass remembered that he was english before he remembered his own name

- caught between OH NO TEMERAIRE (and it’s only page 9 it’s going to be one of those books huh) and laughing my ass off at the thought of him swooping into notoriously isolationist japan and yelling ‘HAVE YOU GUYS SEEN MY DAD???’

- “Yes,” [Laurence] said, unyielding, as he could not be otherwise. ahahahahaha way to summarize the entirety of old school!laurence with one fucking sentence

(I am very much enjoying this uh. ‘setback’ of his character actually? novik really did just roll him back to factory settings and went ‘now... from the top again, let’s see if you’ve been paying attention these last seven books’ haha. no one told me there’d be a test!!!!!!!!!!)

- Kaneko really has the patience and graciousness of a saint, @ laurence please... please try to be marginally less sketchy hm? (I guess his sheer obliviousness to how direly he comes across here must be why kaneko hasn’t dismissed him out of hand)

- y’know... at least laurence is in no position to have to worry about all this shit temeraire and the others are pulling. when people start talking about black-scaled celestials shaking the country to its very foundations he’ll be blissfully, innocently unaware. that’s something, I suppose... well who am I kidding we’ll 100% get a couple of paragraphs of him convincing himself this is all his fault somehow anyway

- . . . and His Majesty’s Government does not behave in such an underhanded a manner as to attack another nation with no warning or quarrel. aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha oh what a strange beautiful fantasy land you’ve been residing in for most of your life william laurence, hang on tight for the opium wars

- hahaha oh my god this is like a platonic version of that text post

temeraire: have you guys seen my dad??!?!

them: what does he look like?

temeraire, crying: beautiful and human and has gold buttons

- I take it all back old school laurence is such a tremendous idiot. just PRETEND you’re willing to cooperate at least you huge fuckign dummy, all you’d have to do was say something vague about how the ship can’t get too close to shore; it won’t actually help them and they’ll know it but you won’t make yourself look so unspeakably willfully suspicious

- :( making me read things where temeraire is just hurting should be ILLEGAL actually

- NO LAURENCE STOP TRYING TO KICK LITERALLY EVERY POLITICAL HORNET’S NEST WITHIN REACH BAD BOY he is... a disaster but I love him and fear for him as a son so here I am anyway

- hahahahaha yeah wow laurence it sure would suck if you ever had to commit treason huh death probably would be preferable indeed

b o i

- i like that it took him like a week to even give a single thought to edith lol at least he remains aggressively himself

- I think temeraire basically just invented dragon baby photos and I can’t even think for how darling it is

also every dragon physician is delightful; they fear neither god, man nor huge ass patients who could swallow them in a bite

aw man I love gong su

- ahahahahahahah kiyo is the actual best I can’t breathe

KANPAI INDEED, MY LADY, MY LIEGE, I DON’T CARE WHAT ELSE HAPPENS I WOULD FOLLOW YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

Laurence was forced to at least moisten his lips in a show of accompaniment, and hope that he had indeed buried Caesar and not praised him, or for that matter raised him from the dead one act too soon; he was not perfectly sure. He did not think he had been this appallingly drunk since he had been a boy of twelve, trying to make good on every toast at his captain’s table. I. am. dying

thank you thank you thank you for the mental image of laurence drunkenly trying to stumble through the ‘friends, romans, countrymen’ speech as well as the entire rest of the play in a one-man performance

- oh no... I would die for junichiro, baby boy who loves his teacher SO MUCH ;____________; aaaaand there are laurence’s adoption instincts, I see, right on time <3 I like how they have had one actual conversation now and laurence is like ‘ah well nothing for it then guess you’ll have to stay on my ship and I’ll have to be your dad now, brash 16 year old child’

junichiro is being Full Teenager about laurence not knowing ~*obvious*~ things and it’s a delight

- y’know this period of japanese history is always portrayed in the west as paranoia and it could probably only be done because the country was a strict military dictatorship at the time... but having read oh, any history book ever, deciding that nope nah don’t think so no europeans ever is the greatest ‘fair enough’ in human history. (...I guess this series is sort of AU fix it fic of the period in the first place haha)

- seeing temeraire this level of straight out angry is very interesting and also very unsettling

- ooooof whenever laurence almost-remembers temeraire... stab me in the heart why don’t you

- man churki really is the mom friend of these dragons she’s the only one who has a lick of sense

- *laurence, upon clobbering several men with an oar* “Ma’am, I beg your pardon,” Laurence said to the old woman, who was still sitting ramrod-straight in the ferry over the side from him and regarding him with a flat expression of utter disapproval and not the least evidence of fear; he put out a boot over the side and shoved the ferry off with a heave

god this book is just a continual parade of glorious mental images, just this old woman glaring at him like ‘RUDE’ and “Ma’am, I beg your pardon” fdslfhsdlkjh

- I have a lot of sympathy for hammond. imagine having to navigate the extremely delicate diplomatic situation between europe and japan, with the real prospect of a war breaking out over it, while temeraire is looking over your shoulder... real dragon in the glassware shop vibe going on here, i’m sorry about your life hammond

- AUGH laurence just sort-of-remembered emily he just half-remembered he basically has a daughter someone hold me (...junichiro is so so sweet ;___;)

- bwahahaha yeah I’m sure the only reason this impressionable young kid who’s slowly becoming very impressed by you has for sneaking glances at your bare chest is manly appreciation of your battle scars laurence, well done (I mean a supremely understandable innocent teen crush to develop but stay safely out of that, kid; I trust tharkay to survive the sheer field of mayhem around this man only because he’s got like 20 years, extreme competency and a world of cynicism on you)

- aw junichiro :(:(:(

- ...laurence you need to stop making your dragon boi think you’re dead because this is hurting me. my heart lies in sad little pieces on the ground right now. you are stepping on them with tapdancing shoes.

- “I am under an obligation to Junichiro,” [Laurence] said, quietly, “who you must know has aided me for love of you. If I surrender myself and am made prisoner in this way, will your honor be satisfied?”

fdsfhsdkfsdja *ELMO SURROUNDED BY FLAMES GIF* this is all awful they’re all such good people why must this happen why this

(what a way to remind me why I love this stupid wonderful man so much tho uuuuuugh)

- “He is a prince of China, and my captain.” “The devil I am,” said Laurence. This might be the funniest heartbreak I have ever experienced

- good job making me cry whenever I read the words ‘principia mathematica’ naomi novik that was real nice of you

- maximus is such a solid bro. not the brightest, but by god a good 80% of that boy’s gigantic body mass is pure heart

- I love the sheer trollishness of just dropping all these hints about whatever’s going on in the US and then moving on like nothing has happened lol at least it’s deeply implied that hamilton squandered his chances at the presidency by pulling his dumb hoe act in this universe too... constants and variables friends constants and variables

- bOY for a moment there I really did wonder if junichiro was going to die, thank god for a quick google to stop my heart from leaping up my throat and out into thin air to shatter yet again on the flagstones beneath

- in unrelated news I recently found out a bit more about the whole historical Situation in Australia at the beginning of Tongues of Serpents (incidentally, by reading Mark Forsyth’s ‘A Short History of Drunkenness’, which is very funny and quite interesting although I can personally testify that the chapter about vikings at least is completely riddled with misunderstandings or straight out factual errors about the mythology, the role of women in society and uh the entirety of how poetry worked so maybe take him with a pinch of salt lol), and now, in retrospect, I have to say Novik does a poor job conveying the sheer hilarity and madness going on at that time. Like. I was quite bored in those first few chapters, whenever Tharkay didn’t have page time. how could you make this incredible spectacular shitshow boring. it should have been easy comedy gold and not just like. misery. oh well great times, let’s return to the book at hand

- I remain utterly devoted to Lady Kiyo. livin’ life, drinking sake, giving no fucks, absentmindedly scoping out the western style ships and starting an entire modern navy for her country, getting some Theater up in here.... truly I would follow her into the jaws of hell itself, safely in the knowledge that she’d find some way to have a good time down there

- kaneko tearing up at laurence promising he’ll take care of junichiro 😭 this is so cruel to me, personally, specifically against my person, I am undone

- I like how the incan dragons are told like ‘don’t pick just one special person; you can love all your humans equally’ while the poor japanese ones are told ‘actually don’t love any of your humans very much at least not more than Honour’ lol they must have so many neurotic dragons running about b/c that when that attachment happens it seems extremely central to their psychology (and considering lady arikawa it’s not like they’re exempt from it, they’re just supposed to repress it to conform)

- laurence desperately trying to work out whether emily’s his daughter without actually asking anyone... delicious

the descriptions of roland’s letters: even more delicious

- temeraire sees the sad remnants of laurence’s robes and ‘hello darkness my old frieeeeend’ starts playing in his head... too bad laurence isn’t really in a position to experience the relief

- He is very much a one-note character, but O’Dea’s resolute dedicated fatalism is extremely funny

- hahaha poor temeraire... when you try to introduce bae to the family and they insist on being TOTALLY EMBARRASSING god

- The guilt of having caused pain to one deserving only consideration at his hand mingled with unanswered disquiet. I’m bawling laurence’s dad instincts are so pure and good even tho everything’s a bit messed up right now. like this whole paragraph is so powerful b/c you can see laurence’s natural loving impulse at war with his dad’s cold authoritarian parenting style and because his lived experience is removed he doesn’t know what is right.............. oh b o y

- oh okay I see my earlier comment about the opium wars proves unexpectedly prophetic

- it cannot be overstated how much I love junichiro or how happy I am that laurence is being so soft and patient with him. this kid has Been Through some shit

- emily roland shoulder to shoulder with laurence killing fools and he never doubts her for a moment... *chef kiss emoji*

- the problem with these books is that there are just so many good characters and so many of them don’t get any real page time in any given one -- I’m sitting here plaintively like ‘I realize this is not the most pressing issue right now but how is demane and sipho doing. are they okay. does sipho have enough books’

- ouch memory loss isn’t stopping laurence from flashing back to victory of eagles :(

there’s something so disconcerting about knowing why laurence reacts to things the way he does when he doesn’t; novik is using that very efficiently, this is a very satisfying use of amnesia just from a writer’s POV haha

- I like how none of these suckers really have the tools (or in some cases even inclination) to understand how messed up junichiro’s political situation is in all this

they just expect him to come home to britain with them and meanwhile he’s just found out that The greatest threat to his nation (from his POV I mean china/japan relations irl seem uh complicated) has more dragons in one field than he’s ever seen in his life. it’s a rough and lonely deal being this kid in this book

- oh ouch yes hey there laurence there might have been... a little bit of treason. true. extremely justified treason tho. I mean. oh dear

we don’t have tharkay and his unique mix of deep cynicism, incisive sarcasm and surprising depth of concise moral clarity here to assist with the aftermath so this could get u g l y

- listen what did I SAY about making me read about temeraire being miserable :(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((

- SIPHO!! hey baby boy pls have some thought for your brother’s cardiac health tho

- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw the fact that laurence is getting out of this crisis so much quicker this time because of his bone-deep instinctual knowledge of how much he loves temeraire, which doesn’t need specific memories to be true and felt. god. jesus. stars above

- laurence: approaches little

little: gay panic

- [Laurence] groped after the truth of himself like a prisoner in Plato’s cave, watching shadows. *clenches fist with great emotion* fuck naomi novik why must you be such an excellent goddamn writer im in pain

- oh hay arkady

poor poor temeraire feeling like a failure in every way is so awful but also kind of funny. ‘oh shit arkady’s egg oh fuck oh crap’

- I LOVE that hammond is so clearly and repeatedly shown to be a very astute political thinker and working shit out before everyone else! he may be a dumbass and a bit of a weasel but by god he’s great at what he does!

- laurence wouldn’t have changed anything if he could u guise. I . that. hm. oh

- thARKAY

.........arkady I am only a human and a small one at that but I will find some way to climb up there and wring your neck

(how cute is it that apparently jane roland realized she needed someone to find laurence and was like ‘well I need someone who can take care of themselves and knows the area and speaks dragon and Understands the chaotic ways of william laurence and also has looked uncharacteristically like a kicked puppy at the very mention of his name ever since being forced to leave him behind in australia.... hey tharkay you want a job’ fhkjshdfkalhsd)

- I’m very glad I googled ahead and spoiled myself a bit on this, because if I just read this part fresh I would have expired on the spot

- MISSION GET MY BOY BACK SAFE FOR GOD’S SAKE is a go

- general chu is pretty cool for an old dude you feel me

- . . . and Laurence knew him; knew him and knew himself.

ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahaha

hahahahahahahhahahahaha

hahahahhha

haha

what... what pure undiluted soulmate nonsense is this. what. how. WHY would you do this

- I think I said something offhandedly in my victory of eagles reactions about how tharkay makes laurence remember who he is. I. thought I was exaggerating slightly for dramatic effect at the time. um wow

- I am having the sort of feelings about I need to write fiction about because my ability to express it any other way is failing me. That’s just about the highest praise I could give, really, Novik sure knows how to plant interesting seeds in her stories lol

- for the record this is not how I wanted him to end up in laurence’s bed

(im not thinking too much about how he got hurt b/c if I do I’ll start crying and that’ll just be embarrassing for everyone)

- “I hope you will forgive my mentioning it, Will,” Tharkay said, eventually, rousing Laurence from his reverie. “ -- I recognize there is a certain pot-calling quality to my doing so under the circumstances, but have you noticed that the top of your head appears likely to come off?”

a) my love for him is just. so pure. so complete. so deep b) consistent first name basis; the one sure way to make me swoon c) the implication that he’s just been quietly watching laurence while he was lost in thought... im so soft

- oh god laurence very gently helping out demane and roland because he remembers now....... i cry and my tears are blood welcome back buddy

- “I am of the opinion,” Tharkay said, “that you ought not assign to free will something more likely the consequence of a sharp blow to the skull.”

he truly is the gift that keeps giving. an endless cornucopia of sarcasm and delight. we do not deserve him.

- [The man he was eight years ago] would not have valued his own feelings, on such a matter, higher than the law and the discipline of the service. *AIRHORN AIRHORN AIRHORN* there we have it folks that’s literally his character arc spelled out, he would have done SO MUCH BAD SHIT because he thought his own feelings didn’t matter and yet he chose another direction, stupendous, brilliant, revolutionary

also him trying to get his support across to both of them in as roundabout and discreet way as possible... laurence you beautiful disaster

- im just so happ. so happy. so happy temeraire has his dumb dad back

- oh so the russians think the BRITISH, of all people, are too soft on their dragons... ruh-roh

- sdfskadlfj yes good tharkay the ROBES (also the implied depth of fond schadenfreude-tinged amusement contained in that ‘those particularly magnificent robes’.... *prayer hands emoji*)

laurence is like ET TU BABE?????

I think this is very delicate gong su speak for ‘please do not be a dumb bitch your majesty’

hahaha chu knows what’s up -- I am growing desperately fond of him, please don’t have him suffer any cop-one-day-from-retirement style accident

- “If I may cut your Gordian knot,” Tharkay said, with a glint in his eye. fdsklfhsdkflhdsakjfhdskjh remember back in black powder war when he was all closed off and phlegmatic and purposefully distant... and here he is... with a glint in his eye and a crazy ass plan that requires other people and that he actually shares before pulling it off and calling laurence by first name in public......... we’ve come so far

- Also this means he’s close enough to Laurence’s height and build that he can wear his clothes without it looking weird, which is nice to know because Laurence is sometimes more preoccupied with describing what men are wearing than, y’know, what they look like lol. (probably not quite as broad in the shoulders, tho, since it’s pointed out every time laurence is described that he has shoulders like a linebacker)

- temeraire: eXCUSE me god didn’t do this the emperor of china did???!?! rude???

- pffffffffff tharkay and chu being jaded world-weary bros for a second there... this is what I read these books for folks

- NOOOOOOOOOOO chu this is the one thing I asked you NOT to do D: temeraire being sad and scared about it is slowly murdering me, thank god laurence is back online for him

- dunno this napoleon dude sounds pretty great and all but this also sounds suspiciously... like trying to invade russia in the winter time. immovable force and unstoppable object or something. I mean I don’t read history so I don’t know. might be a great idea. who’s to say.

- I see that tharkay and laurence have reached the ‘communicating complex information solely through eyebrow movements’ stage of their relationship. *drinks this excellent excellent OTP juice with both hands*

- god I love how cool temeraire!napoleon is, in a strangely believable way. he’s just so weirdly charismatic and novik is SO GOOD at setting up a situation so you understand just how brilliant a move he’s made whenever he seems to be backed into a corner and turns it all around. I kind of want him to win at this point (though tbf all of europe fucking sucked at this time so like he doesn’t have to doll it up TOO much to look better by comparison haha)

- boooyyyy Laurence is P I S S E D (also him being like ??? :D that the general basically agreed with him lol)

ALSO also the fact that laurence does not realize that he’s like the fucking horror story all the major authorities around the globe tell each other at night... fjksdfhsdkjlhf

ah russia. truly consistently one of the most shit places to be a peasant or apparently a dragon through so much of history.

- junichiro Y__________Y no wonder laurence is so protective of him, he’s finally met someone as stubbornly stupidly ~*honorable*~ as himself. godspeed bb boy I wish you only the best even though I know your story line is never properly brought up again

- I ship... roland and demane... so much. like with my heart. she’s so young and earnest and curious and misses him so much and casually scandalizes alice about it fsjdakfjhds

- well I mean. dragons eating people is clearly not g r e a t but also... karma. y’know?

- this is a lot of words to use to convey the sentiment ‘oh they are all so fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked’ naomi novik

(feels a little like she wrote herself into a corner here tho -- she’s set up such an impossible situation, in RUSSIA in the WINTERTIME, that I’d need a hell of a lot of convincing to believe they get out of it)

- aaaah okay I really enjoyed this one too, especially the first half! I feel like this series is often at its most inspired when it sticks to a tighter character focus (for example I still vividly recall the part in the first book where Laurence stays in his father’s house and it’s Bad. relatedly........ F U C K lord allendale), and this brought that in spades. I love this series so much, it’s shamefully underappreciated in the speculative fiction world.

also it brought *me* to my knees with a simple “Tenzing,” [Laurence] said, which... holy shit. fuck. damn. that’s my personal recommendation of this book, tbh, even beyond my wish for this series to be more appreciated within the genre: Tharkay was there and it was very gay and non-obnoxious soulmate vibes???? I never even thought it could be done but here we are

This is probably going to be my last reaction thingy for the foreseeable future, since my local library doesn’t have book 9 and honestly... having read a few summaries of what happens in it I’m not that keen on reading it? That’s not the ending to this story I want, so I’ll just live over here in denialville, I-realize-the-author-made-the-choice-to-not-make-further-use-of-Lien-AKA-THE-coolest-antagonist-in-this-series-and-indeed-did-not-wrap-up-numerous-character-arcs-or-plot-lines-but-I-don’t-like-this-choice-so-I’ll-ignore-it

(actually I do sort of appreciate the idea of not having one grand final duel or something, because that’s not how it usually works in real life, but that she’d just shrug and not mercilessly hunt for the revenge she’s so clearly motivated by when everything she loves is falling apart around her again... that’s too much of a letdown to bear, really)

let me just... live in willful ignorance and pretend anything could happen from this point onward haha.

- let me give a final shout out to my boy gong su, who’s been hanging around since book 2 (!) and yet we do not know One Single personal detail about him for certain except that he sure knows how to handle knives. that’s some good spy shit right there, he knows what he’s about

#temeraire #blood of tyrants #willzing #william laurence x tenzing tharkay #aaaaaaaaand last one for a while! I had a lot of fun with this one even though I lost focus for weeks at a time at some points haha #that's not the book's fault that's very much a me problem

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hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger · 5 years ago

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Spider-Girls #2 Thoughts

Mixed feelings but don’t get it twisted they’re mostly good mixed feelings.

When I say I have mixed feelings it’s a case of me trying to decide what this series is.

Now I went into Spider-Girls expecting it to essentially be Spider-Geddon’s equivalent of Scarlet Spiders in that every issue would focus upon one of the 3 main spider characters (wow I’ve never used the word spider so many times in a sentence before).

What I wanted from Spider-Girls was a lot of Mayday focus and/or her interacting with Annie and addressing the fact they are pseudo sisters.

However my expectations were in fairness not based upon what was advertised, the series wasn’t stated to follow that narrative structure. As for what I wanted this series has delivered on that to a certain extent.

But more importantly than what I expected or wanted is what the series actually is, what it’s trying to be and whether it lives up to that.

And that’s where I’m debating with myself how to evaluate this.

Because it’s clear to me to a large extent Spider-Girls #1-3 is effectively....Renew Your Vows #24-26 (or #29-31 technically).

Put aside how the book is written by Houser for the moment. These past two issues have seen Annie as the focus character, the action wholly take place in her world, involve her supporting characters, centre upon her powers and utilize major plot elements from her book. So like I said this doesn’t just continue Annie’s story from RYV it is to a large extent the next 3 issues of the title.

Key phrase there though, ‘to a large extent’.

Because the series also pays attention to Mayday. She’s not the POV character, we don’t see her internal thoughts, but her emotional journey in this story is given panel time and played as important. Anya’s isn’t.

If this series is supposed to be about all of them as the main characters then this is bad, because Annie is stealing the limelight. But if this is a continuation of RYV it is also bad because Mayday and Anya have basically replaced Peter and MJ’s roles as second/third fiddle to Annie and that series was supposed to be about the whole family.

Buuuuuuuut...the series isn’t titled RYV, it’s it’s own off to the side mini-series.

So in that sense we’re sort of in a unique situation wherein it has to adhere to established continuity of all these characters (in Anya’s case I know next to nothing so let me know about that) but it doesn’t have to be consistent with RYV’s central premise.

Houser is free essentially to do as she wishes so long as she’s consistent within the context of this book.

So evidently the series is about Annie amidst an adventure where she is joined by Anya and Mayday. I guess then a more appropriate title would be Annie and the Spider-Girls but that makes for a lame title.

The fact that this is an off to the side thing also helps or mitigates the fact that there is a mystical aspect to this series which normally shouldn’t be in a Spider-Man book nor RYV.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, within what this book is trying to be, is it any good?

The answer is in fact yes, it is very, very good.

From my personal POV I want so much more Mayday/Mayday and Annie interactions but I can’t hold that against the comic. Especially when what we do get of Mayday is done well and is respectful to her character; unlike the cover which saw fit to omit her apparently.

We get direct references and flashbacks to Mayday’s past, with the writing and art clearly demonstrating they did their research.* Normie was a huge part of Spider-Girl and having Mayday think about him and for the comic to briefly play compare and contrast with RYV Normie is both natural and very appreciated. It also helps to explore Mayday’s character, something worthwhile given how long ago her series was. You can tell from the art and dialogue her romantic feelings for Normie still sting a bit.

Houser doesn’t rely just upon going over old ground with Mayday, she continues to showcase Mayday’s feelings of unease in Annie’s universe, which is perfectly natural. She also uses Anya quite effectively in this way.

Were I an Anya fan (as opposed to someone who resents her for getting Mayday cancelled and stealing her name) I might be more upset about that and her over all treatment in this book. Because this is Mayday and (even moreso) Annie’s story, Anya is kind of just there as a vehicle to propel the plot and to get help explore Mayday’s feelings. As she says herself she’s not a Parker which I choose to take as Houser throwing shade at Anya and I love it. The only thing I dislike regarding her use really is

a) Her tension with Normie. She claims Normie having six arms should convince him to believe in her magical mumbo jumbo but really that doesn’t stack up. Science and sorcery are different things to the man on the street. A genetic experiment giving you six arms is frankly easier to buy than magic scrolls

b) Her inclusion at all. Beyond helping Mayday to open up I see little creative rationale for her inclusion if anything the story would be stronger if it really was just Mayday and Annie. I’m sure you could find some reason for Mayday to go after Annie alone even with the same central premise. Like I dunno say Anya and Mayday got attacked and separated, with Mayday getting a hold of the scrolls or something.

Going back to Mayday briefly, one thing that is a double edged sword is how she’s changed since Spider-Verse.

By this I don’t mean her costume (I kind of miss her Spider Island suit but oh well).

I mean that she’s become a bit more cynical. Not overly so but it’s there. She refers to her adventures as Spider-Girl as a very distant past, going so far as to say ‘back in High School’. I’m choosing to take that as not meaning Mayday has graduated because that wouldn’t make sense. But the fact she refers to high school like that and treating her high school worries back then as meaningless is a clear sign of how she’s changed.

This is as I said a double edged sword.

It’s bad for two key reasons. The first is that it gives new readers a warped impression of Mayday and wouldn’t encourage them to check out her old stories (which Marvel wants you to do hence her recent epic books and this series happening around her 20th anniversary) let alone helping get her any new stories. Secondly it’s simply for older fans not the Mayday we knew and loved. Don’t get me wrong it’s a drastic improvement of how not like Mayday she was in Spider-Verse but it still undermines including her when surely the point of that is to entice back older fans.

On the flipside though it is entirely realistic for Mayday to feel this way in the wake of what happened in Spider-Verse and Web Warriors, especially as some stories have implied (illogical as this is) that she’s spent most of her time with the latter group. Losing your Dad violently, then being embroiled in a war for survival, then acting as a police officer of countless worlds, then being stranded in one of them, losing your newly found ‘Grandpa’ and then finding yourself in another violent war with the same people will believably make your old high school worries seem trivial.

In a sense I feel for Houser as she is in a lose-lose situation.

Spider-Girl fans want the Mayday we know and love but we also want her to be treated believably and to develop as a character (albeit preferably under the pens of her creators). In the context of this situation those a mutually exclusive goals.

Houser has opted for the latter which I guess if nothing else helps maintain Mayday’s verisimilitude so that hopefully in the future writers may pick up on her and course correct her organically. It’s also in line with the direction her creators chose to adopt for her in the wake of her Dad’s death so Houser is continuing to be respectful. In fact between the respect she’s shown and how much her run echoed Spider-Girl’s I think she might be a fan.

In a lot of ways the situation brings my mind back to Howard Mackie’s Hulk issue of PPSM. It saw Spider-Man picking a fight with the Hulk in the immediate wake of losing Mary Jane. Losing MJ was a horrible situation that should never have happened (much like everything involving Mayday in Spider-Verse and beyond) but the story was good within that bad context.

Moving on to Annie, as much as I complained about the over focus upon her in RYV, her exploration here ain’t bad. We acknowledge that she’ll feel a little adrift with her parents gone and her sense of reality opening up. It’s also right and proper she feel guilty about what goes down. I think much more could’ve been done with her though. I know we have a fair amount of plot to get through but you had space for more thought captions.

As for the elements of her series that have come back they kind of make me feel better and worse about the final RYV arc.

Looking back the final arc of RYV was probably it’s worst, at least of the second volume. There were major problems with Slott’s first volume when you look at it.

But a lot of elements from that arc clearly were written in as set up for Spider-Girls. Normie’s mutation. The spider creatures created from Annie’s blood. Her hyped up Spider Sense. Peter and MJ’s first child.

That’s all to this series’ benefit because we need not waste any of the 3 issues we have setting that stuff up. In that sense I can see now why that final arc was the way it was to some extent. The X-Men connection is still unforgivable though. On the other hand though it means that the grand finale of that whole series was in service of this which taints the arc as a whole. Not only was it problematic unto itself but it existed for something else, that isn’t even technically the actual finale arc of the series. It’s a spin-off continuation for one particular character from that book.

Anyway let’s wrap up with a few smaller points.

· We have the Inheritors show. Up obviously I hate seeing them but I guess it’s mandatory. I will say that the choice to use the twin Inheritors is a neat one given the story revolving around two pseudo sisters in this series.

· I didn’t think of this at the time but Normie’s six arms are reminiscent of his black costume form in Spider-Girl. That works well in this series but it retroactively makes it’s inclusion in RYV yet more derivative of MC2.

· I liked the brief interaction between Annie’s parents and the Spider-Girls. It was believable for parents to behave that way.

· I liked how the series went as far as to point out some of the spider creatures were deemed fit for trial so they didn’t all get jailed nor let off the hook.

· There is a spelling error in the comic when Normie says ‘immortal spider powers people’ it should be spider powered . A nitpick and rich coming from me I know but my blog isn’t a professionally written comic you pay for.

· The art is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaantastic! I makes me made these 3 issues have better art than basically all of Houser’s RYV run. Special kudos for that cool splash page.

Much as I can pick problems with this issue it was still really lovely to read.

*Except on Normie’s black costume design but that’s an artistic licence thing I guess. They balance it out by recreating a Spider-Girl cover, from ASG IIRC. Also they fixed her legs unlike last issue so kudos.

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nyanzaya · 5 years ago

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I know this gonna be long story but please tell me about your boys i'm all ears all night (´∩｡• ᵕ •｡∩`) i send this because you don't want to hijack my post, even if it's a good thing ( ˶ ❛ ꁞ ❛ ˶ ) please introduce me to this world of Iza and Zuo (◍•ᴗ•◍)❤

@if-that-so

Oh gosh lol I can try for sure since it’s all in my brain, I got something written but-- Let me see if I can explain what kind of world they are in to begin with because I mean they are like alts so they would obviously be in Ikebukuro/Japan. They are hybrids, you can sort of think of it as that typical neko-trope with cat girls and cat boys and a bunch of other hybrids and supernatural type creatures.

In Iza and Zuo’s world, basically the hybrids are seen as less than human, of course there are people who see them as normal people with added on traits that make them distinct from humans. There’s a lot of themes, even dark themes, that go into their world honestly lol I don’t personally touch on all of them because there are just some themes I just don’t bother with lmfao. That’s basically like the premise of their world really. It’s pretty normal with, not much that’s weird about it? Hybrids are a normal thing but depending some see them as ‘less than’ human and others see them as just human and then there’s probably some that see them as something special.

I’m not sure which boy would be more interesting but honestly I think Iza is more interesting because he’s pretty complicated so I’ll start with him. ((This also got really super long so i-- put it under a read more LOL)

His whole beginning; basically he was born into the “pet life” and was taken away from his mom when he was...I want to say when he was like a 6 months old? And was basically given away as a gift and the thing with his mom (who’s name is Kata) was she was prized and treasured for her unique colorings, a black Burmese and garnet colored eyes with tufted ears and was basically “bred” because her kittens(kids) would sell for a lot of yen lmfao--- I’m not going to get into that because that’s literally a whole different topic--- Well, Iza was basically treated and raised as a cat, but for his young age he was very intelligent(and even the Burmese breed on their own are VERY smart) and the fact he was human too he just learned by watching, as a result he is very good at reading body language but he can’t read facial expressions. He literally watched and observed his First Master for 12 years? And if I remember right his First didn’t exactly see Iza as a cat, he saw him as like his son but what happened was he got blackmailed and his company was literally being destroyed and failing from the inside out. I think his friend who gave him Iza only gave him Iza as a gift because his wife left Iza’s frist master and like he was depressed and felt like his whole life was out of control and just getting this rare black little cat gave him a reason to keep trying because animals/other people/things that depend on you do that to you. Well, while he was blackmailed he had to do horrible things to Iza and had to basically make him an obedient pleasure pet. He hated literally every second of it and then he gave Iza away to the man that blackmailed him and disappeared because he was so disgusted with himself. Iza actually, has a narrative poem about it but I don’t think I’ll ever post it, maybe I should because that’s literally Iza’s poem but... I can’t bring myself to post something that implies you know lmfao. He does have two other poems about the first half of his life with his second and then when he was about 19-21? I can link them if you’d be interested in reading them

Life with his second master was well, horrible. At first it was fine but well, as a pleasure pet he had to do things he was taught to do obediently or be disciplined. Iza at one point did try to escape, but he was caught and was whipped, he still has the scars on his back and he even suffers from nightmares and ptsd because of him. Then afterward he was collared/chained to his second master’s bed. While he lived with his second he met a wolf hybrid who then later became his obsession before they had disappeared when they were saved from his second master. Iza was only with his second, who’s name is Yasui Teijo for... maybe 3 or 4 years honestly?

When he was rescued from his Yasui Teijo he got placed with a third master who isn’t exactly relevant to his story. Iza did eventually end up killing his third master but he only did after he climbed up to a position of self-made power. He became an informant and the way he gets his information is through the cat in the city because he has the ability to speak to them quite fluently. He became really credible and he even hides under the guise of a Fashion Designer. Well, this is the part where Zuo comes in.

Now. Zuo was literally created to be Iza’s equal and opposite reaction. It was originally only supposed to be about Iza, but he became too powerful and even in normal roleplays and threads no one stopped him(besides Shizuo--but that’s a whole different situation and he isn’t part of Iza’s story). Literally, Iza was allowed to murder and assassinate whoever he wanted whenever he wanted and with that new found power he went and used it to get his third master assassinated among other people.

Zuo and Iza met when they were both around 19/20(Zuo is a year older than Iza) At this point in Zuo’s life, he had been out of pit fighting/the gladiator ring for about 4 years. What happened to Zuo was his mother Aiko was also a pet just like Iza’s mom but she escaped and Zuo was one of her only kitten that she had. Now, their life was hard. They had to live on the streets because they were homeless and when Zuo was, I want to say like 8 or 9 I think, he actually hurt another normal kid on accident and his mother basically told him to use his strength and power to help people, not harm them and he held onto that tightly. Well, I want to say Zuo was like 12 when he was basically kidnapped and was thrown into the arena to fight for his life. Because of that, he is physically powerful; as in he could up root a stop sign too but he can’t stop something extremely heavy like a crane. He fought for survival and eventually ended up becoming Champion(A long with a ton of scars, especially on his hands and chest) but he couldn’t live with himself for getting to the top because he had to kill the people he considered his friends, including his senpai and kohai. So, he’s got a lot of like, ptsd. Zuo forced his way out of the pit fighting by basically starting a rebellion within and broke out.

At 17 he decided “Fuck this shit. Fuck all those horrible people. I’m going to do what my mom wanted me to do and protect people and help people who need help.” It kind of back fires. He became very prone to aggression and anger and would outright attack people instead, but would be remorseful about it. It would happen because he was still in that mindset of ‘This person wants to kill me. I have to kill them first so I can survive.” and it took him years to get out of that mental state. So when he met Iza when he was about 20 he was better, of course he still had his issues but he was in better control of himself and became a vigilante to do justice in the city; because at the same time Iza was gaining more power and had eventually gotten 2 or 3 police officers in his pocket and Zuo became frustrated because some police were not exactly doing good. He saw the police force as corrupt and took it upon himself to make things right in the city.

Zuo meets Iza, but he mistook Iza for a woman at first because Iza can and he does cross-dress. (he was supposed to be a drag queen but I decided against it) It’s not written in the original drabble, and if i were to rewrite it, I would mention that Zuo had gotten a strange feeling of “knowing” who Iza was, but he couldn’t exactly place where he knew him from because Zuo remembers his past lives. You end up finding out that Iza and Zuo had been chasing after each other in previous past lives and they always ended up opposite sides so they were always fighting since the beginning of their soul’s birth. Their souls, were predestined to always be at odds and everyone in their world has someone who is their opposite, whether they end up in love or hating each other always depended on the circumstances but the “good end” would be for them to end up together and be in love and the “Bad end” would be for them to always be apart. So, it’s almost like a WHOLE multiverse type thing, as in, in one universe they are happy together, but in an alternate of that same universe they are enemies. It sounds complex but basically every decision you make splits the universe so you have a universe where you did the thing and another one where you didn’t do the thing basically lol. WELL ANYWAY- Zuo ends up having mixed feelings for Iza because Iza got in his way from stopping a man from human trafficking and then Iza ended up killing that man in the same night. They were always after the same people, but the way they went about “stopping” them was opposite but in a sense it was the same? Iza used violence and ended up killing the people, but Zuo refrained from violence and only used it when he needed too which ended up being often.

I haven’t written how they actually got together but I’m thinking the way they got into a relationship was they talked and decided to work together instead. This was when they were like, 22/23. While together they felt “complete” but, because of Iza’s skewed vision of love he ended up manipulating and reverting Zuo back into someone violent and someone who used violence and justified it by “it’s for the greater good.” Eventually, Zuo realized what he was doing was wrong when I think he saw Iza kill some innocent people and realized that he had gotten drunk off the power and chaos. It’s in his birthday drabble but here’s the exert:

Iza laughed.

And laughed before abruptly, he stopped. He gave a side-glance to the pole that had embedded itself in the wall, grinning. “Tom, just give into your true nature already. This-” He gestured to the fallen men before himself. “This is what you’re meant to do. Don’t you get it? Together, you and I could actually change something. Isn’t that what yo-”

“Shut up! This- this isn’t what I fucking want. It’s what you want.” Zuo spat, the fur on his tail was fluffed, his ears laid back in defensiveness.

These men Iza gestured to wasn’t the work of Zuo. The iron in the air wasn’t the fault of Zuo.

It was Iza that drew blood and he was covered in it. The tips of his ears to the tip of his tail. He wasn’t drenched but it was easy to tell that the blood on his clothing didn’t belong to him.“Don’t shift this...this shit on to me. You did it.”

Iza’s ears twitched. Rejection was a bitter taste. “I’m doing you a favor, Dear. Isn’t the scent wonderful? It tells us that we are survivors. So, why don’t you draw some blood as well?”

A light flickered and suddenly Zuo felt a pain on his cheek. His brows furrowed. Iza flung a blade a him. The smell of iron further increased his rage. He didn’t want to return to being a brawler. Zuo was done being a gladiator for the entertainment of others and he sure as hell was not going to give into what Iza wanted. He brought a hand to his wounded cheek before he looked at his hand. Zuo saw the blood on his fingers.

“Enough..” He spoke softly, his hand was shaking.

Iza was quiet, watching Zuo. “Enough? Enough of what? This is the only way.”

“How is this the only way?” Zuo’s closed his blood-tipped hand, as if to show his resolve on the situation.

The black feline paced, taking a blade out of his pocket and twirled it between his fingers. “How? Haven’t you heard of the saying: ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’? To allow these...humans to continue to use us and further lower our quality of life and longevity would be horrendous, no? We are just as capable as they are.”

“Fuck off with your ‘we’ shit! There is no ‘we’. It’s just you against everyone else.” Zuo growled, flexing his hands before he brought them together to crack his knuckles.

Iza stopped pacing taking in Zuo’s words. No we? He understood now. Even Zuo was an enemy of his now. This feeling in his chest hurt. It hurt to feel how Zuo rejected him. They were together, though Iza supposed that was impossible. There was a sting at his eyes but he wasn’t going to let Zuo see him fall into tears. Without thinking, Iza flung his knife. He almost missed his target, but his blade had impaled itself in Zuo’s shoulder.

“Well, well. If there is no ‘we’ then there can never be an ‘us’.”

Zuo knew Iza twisted his words. That wasn’t what he meant but if that’s what Iza saw, then all he could do now was to stop them from this senseless killing.

These were innocent people. All Zuo saw in front of him was someone who was crazed, lusting after more bloodshed. Someone who, Zuo was fond of. It hurt to see Iza turn into someone he didn’t know, or perhaps he had known who he was all along but had never seen it from a different perspective. Perhaps, Zuo had tolerated this behavior until it was too much.

How could he save them?

The cream-colored feline pulled the knife from his shoulder. “You threw your knife at me. So, I’ll assume you meant to hit a pressure point. That’s what you do, huh? So, that means you wanted to disable me to kill me then, huh?”

Iza’s ears leaned back.

Zuo brought his other hand to the other side of the blade, snapping it in half before dropping it to the floor. Another solid resolve. Zuo was going to be the one to stop Iza. He had to be. To let the black feline running wild with power? He understood now that Iza couldn’t handle the power; the rush of the high of being on top of the world.

Zuo would bring them back to earth. Even if it meant that this was their fate: To fight and oppose each other until the end.

That’s basically when they broke up but they officially stated they are not together.

Zuo and Iza both have the same exact goal: To save their kin from being seen as less than human but they go about it so differently that they will always butt heads.

Someone had to stop Iza from senseless bloodshed.

There’s definitely more facts to them for sure, like how they made a community together before they “split up” and how they were actually really in love with each other but the timing was off. They are like 27/28 now and by the time Iza is like 35 or 36 their kin would be “free” from being used for profits like animals but canonically, Iza ends up dying and leaving Zuo. I’m debating if I want to have it so Zuo dies too but LOL It would make sense if their souls are “bound together” in a spiritual sense.

But that’s pretty much their story. There’s a lot of details I didn’t add in honestly lol there’s so much more but this is already super long aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

#im sorry its so long LOL I can talk like hours about my boys #there's a lot....like a lot a lot....#About Iza #About Zuo #if-that-so

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antoine-roquentin · 6 years ago

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ASAD ABUKHALIL: Well, first of all, I need to say that it’s quite ironic for the mainstream media, especially the Washington Post, which has been invoking lofty ideals about democracy as a slogan of it — even though it’s owned by the wealthiest man in the world — has been speaking in the name of democracy, and yet has been serving as the mouthpiece for the intelligence apparatus.

Mainstream media, the Post and others, imply very directly that the president of the United States has to do whatever dictates from the military and intelligence apparatus, as if this is the chain of command. I mean, it is the president of the United States who should subordinate the military intelligence agencies to its role as somebody who is elected by the United States, the American public, and so on.

However, I think because the Washington Post in particular has been a mouthpiece of the intelligence service, particularly the CIA, it should be said that there is an agenda for the CIA on this. And I’m glad you quoted John Brennan. As you know, John Brennan, before he became CIA director, was the Middle East and the CIA — and he was CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, where he cultivated very close ties with the royal family.

There is nothing about the need for accountability in the CIA leaks which wants to bring down Mohammed bin Salman. This is all about choosing between the various lousy princes.

As you know, Mohammed bin Nayef was ousted last year by Mohammed bin Salman, his cousin. He was the choice for the intelligence agencies and the FBI, because this man, when he was deputy to his father, the minister of interior for many years, was a very close ally — client, you should say — of the U.S. government and its intelligence agency.

Mohammed bin Salman was unknown. It’s not somebody that they know for a long time. But far from wanting great accountability for the murder of Khashoggi, as if the intelligence agencies are really up in arms about the death of anybody in the Middle East, this is about worrying about the future of the Saudi regime.

In other words, I feel that Donald Trump wants what is best for his administration. He has somebody, he has Mohammed bin Salman, as he best can have him. He is holding him by the neck. And if he survives, he — Mohammed bin Salman — will be greatly indebted to Trump, and to Netanyahu, because those two stood by him and kept him afloat. And because of that situation, Mohammad bin Salman will be obligated to make so many concessions — political, military, and financial — to the United States, and even to Israel. Some of it would be more direct now. Perhaps he would even visit the Israeli occupation state.

On the other hand, the intelligence agencies, I think, my reading, is that they do not think that Mohamed bin Salman is capable of steering the regime in a direction that is more in the interest of the stability of the regime. As a result they would rather make a change in order to save the regime. They worry that bin Salman is too reckless, and his thinking is ruled too precarious, which endangered American interests in that region.

BEN NORTON: There’s a lot to respond to there. I want to talk first, before we talk about the tension within the royal family — you mentioned Mohammed bin Nayef, who was slated to be the next king and was replaced by Mohammed bin Salman. Before we get to that, though, let’s talk a bit about the relationship between the CIA and Saudi Arabia.

As you mentioned, John Brennan, the former director, had a longstanding tie to Saudi Arabia, worked a lot in the kingdom. And of course, I mentioned the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in which the CIA worked with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to arm Islamist extremists to fight against the Soviet Union, and the Afghan government backed by the Soviet Union.

We also saw in Syria that the CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to arm and train rebels, many of whom were also Salafi-jihadist extremists. So this relationship continues to this day. It’s a very close one.

So can you talk a bit more about the relationship between the U.S. intelligence services and Saudi Arabia, and maybe the different figures aside from Muhammad bin Salman and what their roles have been in the CIA? Because there is speculation that Jamal Khashoggi himself might have been a CIA asset.

ASAD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, I do not know about that. But I’m glad in your introduction you accurately — contrary to the way the media refer to the past of Jamal Khashoggi — accurately described his background. Jamal Khashoggi, it should be said over and over again, was part of the establishment and the propaganda outlets of the Saudi regime for many years.

This is a man who’s been made by Human Rights Watch and mainstream media as if he’s a longtime critic of the Saudi government. This is a man who spent a career making money from being a propagandist for the Saudi royal family, and moving between one prince and another.

And in fact, he only fell in trouble — he did not count on democracy. He counted on the wrong prince, which is the Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who fell out of favor in this new regime in Saudi Arabia. And as a result he was in trouble himself, and he fled.

And he suddenly discovered the love of democracy and freedom in the United States, in the really lame articles he’s been writing for The Washington Post, which reads to me as being heavily edited by his editors over there, which is fine.

I should also say that Jamal Khashoggi was very mild in his criticism of the Saudi regime. He did not in any way call for an overthrow. He always committed himself to the preservation of the monarchy, and even played, he even played on the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This is left unmentioned in the media coverage.

So John Brennan himself — and this is a graduate of the Obama administration — suddenly now they are now posing as advocates of democracy in the Middle East when they themselves were characteristic of every administration since World War II; have been advocates of dictatorship and despots throughout the region.

In fact, propaganda brochures that I have seen in Arabic, produced by the Saudi regime, have quotations from John Brennan in praise of the Saudi regime and American-Saudi relations. And if you look now on social media to the graduates of the Obama administration, the various functionaries, you will see now that they are pretending as if Trump suddenly changed the course of American foreign policy and made it not in any way pay too much attention for democracy.

If you look at the agenda or the record of the Obama administration it doesn’t differ at all from the Trump record. If anything, Trump is more honest than the duplicitous Obama administration. And in fact, in Ben Rhodes’ book about Obama’s foreign policy, John Brennan himself is quoted as opposing any change for democracy in Egypt and for standing up to the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. And he made the old classical colonial point that “Arabs are not ready for democracy.”

So in that sense the military intelligence apparatuses basically have various intelligence agencies in the Middle East that they basically work at their pleasure. So they have a great relationship with them. Sometimes they are paid by them, like in the case of Saudi Arabia. Or sometimes they pay them, as in the case of Egypt and Jordan, where the intelligence agencies there are subcontractors of the CIA and the various intelligence agencies.

And it is, in fact, for this reason that the American intelligence agencies were caught totally by surprise with the Arab uprising in 2011; because they relied too much on the advice and wisdom of intelligence agencies in Jordan, Egypt, and elsewhere that they pay a lot of money for, in order to provide them with work that perhaps they were too lazy to do on their own.

BEN NORTON: And then, finally, let’s talk a bit — you mentioned earlier Mohammed bin Nayef — let’s talk about the internal dynamics. Mohammed bin Nayef, who was supposed to be the original crown prince; he was supposed to replace the current king, King Salman, who is likely senile. Mohammed bin Salman took his place, took Mohammed bin Nayef’s place.

MBN was the interior minister. He oversaw the so-called “counterterrorism” program inside Saudi Arabia. He also studied in the U.S., and he trained with the FBI. In 2015, in this kind of ceremony, when he was appointed crown prince, he visited with Obama in the White House. It was very clear that NBN was the U.S. man, who was going to be the next king.

Also, you’ve mentioned before in a previous interview here at The Real News that Khashoggi was very close to Turki bin Faisal, as well. Turki bin Faisal was the head of Saudi intelligence; he was the Saudi ambassador to the United States. And when he was here in the U.S., Khashoggi was actually his spokesperson.

So can you talk about who the U.S. and the CIA potentially — of course, this is largely speculation — but who they would prefer to have over MBS? It seems to me that they want to go back to MBN. Do you think that’s one of the main reasons?

ASAD ABUKHALIL: You’re absolutely right. And I want to say that — just one minor correction. Mohammad bin Nayef did study in Portland for college, but he did not graduate. Most Saudi royal princes study in the United States, but they never bother to graduate, for some reason. In fact, and this is scandalous, in my opinion, Turki al-Faisal is now a professor at Georgetown University. This man studied at Georgetown University in the 1960s at the School of Foreign Service, but he never graduated. He in fact was awarded a degree that he did not earn only many years later thanks to the generous donations he and his family made to the university.

As far as Mohammed bin Nayef is concerned, you are right in mentioning that he studied in the United States because, this has become very clear in many Western media writings. They really like princes who study in the United States. They assume that they are much easier to do business with, for some reason. And one of the complaints that I have read, I think even in Thomas Friedman’s article, as annoying as they are on the eyes, that Mohammed bin Salman is somebody who did not study in the United States.

Well, I think the preference has been very clear for many years that Mohammed bin Nayef is their choice. It is not that Mohammed bin Salman has been unreliable, or he has not been loyal. But they worry that by his recklessness and impulsiveness he may jeopardize the very security of the Saudi royal family. This is something that was missing of the coverage.

So I think the CIA’s interest is that they are really worried about the precariousness of the Saudi regime. More than ever, in a long time of contemporary history of the regime, maybe the first time since the 1960s, early 1960s, when the regime was really in trouble with the rising tide of Nasserism, there is a real danger about the cohesiveness of the royal family and the stability of the regime.

Because for this reason, I think that the CIA and other intelligence agencies of the U.S. government, and the military, would rather have any other prince. It doesn’t have to be Mohammed bin Nayef. But this guy in particular [Mohammed bin Salman] has proven to be too adventurous, too troublesome. And sometimes he seems to act on his own. And that really worries the United States. Not so much out of concern about the people of Yemen, or about about the plight of journalists who may be killed by this prince. But it’s more about the stability of the region due to his action over there.

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