#like this whole concept relies on the entire world being in on the joke so things only happen if they're funny

[soulprompts]

THE SURPRISING HERO ( A PROMPT LIST! )

hello my beloveds!!! an absolutely incredible nonnie sent in a request for prompts based on the idea of someone becoming a vital part of saving the world through unanticipated events, and i hope i managed to achieve what they wanted in this list! basically i got a tonne of inspiration from comic book movies and the more fantastical vibes of high fantasy franchises, and i was going to make these more amusing, but i think there's something so hard-hitting about the concept of being thrust into greatness and heroism when you feel you aren't ready for it! anyway! enjoy, and as always: DO NOT ADD TO OR EDIT THIS LIST, AND DO NOT CLAIM AS YOUR OWN!

FROM THE UNEXPECTED HERO:

“ i’m not supposed to be here. i’m not like the rest of you; i’m not special, or blessed, or gifted. i’m just… me. “

“ you’ve got to be joking! i can’t save the world! i’m just an ordinary person! “

“ it’s funny. all these years, i’ve wanted so badly to see the world. now… i think i’ve never wanted anything so much as to go back home. “

“ so that’s it, then? i’m just supposed to sacrifice everything to save the world, all because some ancient prophecy says so? “

“ i still can’t quite believe we were doing laundry yesterday. now our biggest chore is traveling across the world to save it. “

“ i miss home. i miss how safe and boring and fine it all was. i never would’ve wanted adventures if i thought they’d be as scary and dangerous as this. “

“ they’re right to be angry, you know. everyone has a purpose here; i’m only joining you all because of some insane twist of fate. “

“ surprised? don’t worry, so was i. i don’t think it’s a normal occurrence for people like me to be part of massive quests like this. “

“ look. i’m not the chosen one, alright? i don’t want any part in any prophecy or ancient dictation. i just want to live an ordinary, safe, boring life. “

“ you think i don’t acknowledge what’s happening?! every mistake i make has costs, and those costs are often the lives of innocent people! “

“ you know, last year my idea of a grand adventure was going up the mountains for a picnic with my friends. funny how fast things change, isn’t it? “

“ i’m not a hero! i don’t know how to fight! heroes are special and unique and trained, and i’m none of those things. “

“ everyone looks at me like i’ve got the answers, but i don’t. i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “

“ you ever stop to question the solidity of this prophecy? because if the wording is that vague that it could name me as the savior of the world, then maybe we ought to revise it. “

“ this is stupid! putting the fate of the universe on some million-year-old prophecy! “

“ i’m not what you think i am. i’m not a hero. i’m sorry, i know you want me to be one, but… i’m just not. “

“ so you’re telling me, because i happened to overhear some weird out of context conversation, that the safety of the world relies entirely on me? “

“ don’t you see how daft this whole thing is?! i’ve got to save the world now because i happened to take a wrong turn on my way home! “

“ why can’t i just give you guys what i found, and you can go and rescue the world yourselves? “

“ i want to clarify that i’m not a coward. okay? i’m not running away from this. but i’m not exactly save-the-world material. so thank you for the opportunity, but… i think i’ll stay at home. “

TO THE UNEXPECTED HERO:

“ i get it, you know. it’s a huge responsibility for someone who’s only just realized what’s at stake. “

“ the others think i’m utterly mad for even considering you for this task. but the fact is, you’re the only person i genuinely believe to be capable of fixing this mess. “

“ would you like to know the mark of a true hero? it’s courage. not an absence of fear, not an ignorance of it, but rather, the choice to persevere in spite of it. you’re still here. that makes you one of the bravest people on the planet. “

“ don’t let anyone else tell you what you are and aren’t capable of. everything happens for a reason, and it wasn’t dumb luck that put you in our path. “

“ i don’t believe in prophecies, personally. i think the universe is far too chaotic for them to survive thousands of years. but i do believe that you being here is not a coincidence. “

“ fate only accounts for part of what happens in our lives. the rest of it is all choices. and despite how scared and inexperienced you are… you’ve chosen to stay. that tells me an awful lot about you. “

“ how selfish can you be?! running away from this destiny, this task! the world will fall into darkness if you don’t step up, and here you are, hiding from your fate like a coward! “

“ you need to learn to ignore the opinions of others if you’re going to stand a chance at doing this. this is the cost of being a hero. people will judge, not based on truth, but on a limited perspective. “

“ don’t be stupid. we’re not special or talented either; i was trained from childhood, i can fight men twice my size, but that’s not the mark of a hero. “

“ if you like, i could teach you how to fight? you may find it useful. even if it’s just to comfort yourself against these ridiculous self-doubts. “

“ heroes aren’t always massive muscle types. the inventor of new defense measures against attacks, or someone who discovered a cure for a disease, or perhaps someone clever enough to use new fuel sources in the winter… heroism isn’t always found in warzones, you know. “

“ fine. don’t do it for the fate of the world. do it for your family. your friends. do it for the ones you’ll return to once we settle this for good. save this world, not for the world itself, but for the ones you love, so that they may live on. “

“ you should know some things. most people, if you somehow perform outside of the very specific expectations they have for you, will be very quick and harsh in their judgment. it’s not something one can avoid. but you can learn to rise above those critics. remember. they don’t know the real you. “

" fear is normal. okay? we all fear things. the real killer is when you try to fight that fear. you're no lesser a hero for fearing things. expect it. accept it. embrace it. and once it's with you, work with it to fight even more. "

" you keep saying you're not a hero. tell me. what exactly is it that you believe a hero to be? "

" people make the error of assuming heroes to be golden, flawless, immaculate in both thought and strategy. it's never the case. heroes are the most flawed of all. that's what makes us admire them so. "

[evilkitten3]

tbh i think azula would do it on purpose to get back at zuko for doing it on accident XD

but yeah. realistically they probably wouldn't go with the gaang but nothing about this au involves realism so if they did they'd probably be astonished to discovery that useful items do not in fact just show up out of nowhere.

sokka: ok we need to find some food anyone have any experience hunting in this kind of environment

azula: no but we'll probably all figure it out within a week or two

katara: that's very nice but if we run out of food we'll all be dead within a week or two

zuko: it's ok, some will show up once it's clear that we need it

aang: what, like.... a friendly spirit brings it to you?

azula: don't be ridiculous, of course not. it just shows up

katara: why would it do that?

zuko: bc we need it?????

sokka: ...hey random question did my dad actually tell you guys that we were leaving things for you?

zuko & azula: *identical surprised pikachu faces*

atla crack au where zuko and azula burn the palace down as kids (like 12 and 10, respectively, pre-banishment but post-grandpacide), run away to avoid consequences, and somehow end up "discreetly" living in the abandoned fire nation ship in the south pole ("discreetly" is a word which here means "all the adults know they're there bc they have massive arguments every other day, and when hakoda's nearby he "drops" things that might be useful")

ozai ends up blaming the palace fire on iroh and banishes him. he must capture the children to regain his honor (translator's note: this is adult speak for "get their asses back here so i can ground them for the rest of their lives")

[alibrandi]

List 5 topics you can talk on for an hour without preparing any material.

a challenge from @ginevralinton

i um don’t have any topics that i consider myself an expert on (i have approximate knowledge of many things). anyway, here ya go!

oneirology: psychologists really spew a lot of shit about dream interpretation, fuck freud, dreams are cool, you shouldn’t rely on some quack (spiritualist or psychologist) for an interpretation, please listen to scientists and understand that your dreams are for your memory to process events & your imagination to go fuckin hogwild (if you’re lucky like me. sucks to be one of those people that has boring dreams or doesn’t remember them). but also damn isn’t it cool that there are some near universal symbols for hope (eg. birds) and fear (teeth falling out & other typical nightmare stuff). pls tell me about recurring symbols in your dreams. mine usually feature birds and travelling through a fantastical place.

disney’s frozen, and what a clusterfuck the entire production of it was: blame my 13 year old self for this but seriouslyyyy there was so much that got cut and rearranged and the concepts were way cooler and the world would be a better place if let it go had never been written, i’m not joking!!! there was gonna be a curse!!! the film was actually going to be about sisters!! AUGHHHHHH

frasier: hey did you know they made roz have a baby because executives thought she should “have a repercussion” (aka be punished) for sleeping around? isn’t that fucked up. did u know bulldog’s actor is gay? lilith is so hot & funny & human & im in love with her. did u know that one of the creators of the show died in 9/11, and that’s why they named the baby david? here’s my slideshow on why frasier’s should’ve ended up with lana. here’s why s4e6 “mixed doubles” is one of the finest pieces of sitcom television - i actually just deleted a whole paragraph bc i could talk about that episode alone, god i love it.

commedia dell’arte: harlequin <3 columbina <3 innamorata of various names <3 i’m not a big fan of pierrot but i understand the hype. more of an opinion piece on how the costumes & archetypes have been used throughout history (pre&post commedia) and why i think they remain semi popular.

making bread: less of a talking thing where i tell you what to do and more of a come into my kitchen, sit at the bench and let’s eat. i love you. use more water in the dough. yeah no we’ll put it in the fridge overnight. oh look at those bubbles. listen to that crack. maybe five more minutes in the oven. put some butter on that finished thing. and then we eat and sit quietly. this is something i like to do. usually lasts more than a single hour tho

tagging @cactus-bag @sleeeepy-demon @belladonnafey @retourne-toi-eurydice & anyone else that wants to.

P.S don’t reblog this from me pls i don’t like threads! i just like being tagged!

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

Ineffable Con 2020 Fun Facts

Fun facts from the Ineffable Con 2 (2020) guest panels :): 

Neil Gaiman, Douglas Mackinnon and Rob Wilkins

David G. Arnold (the music composer)

Claire Anderson (the costume designer)

Peter Anderson (Peter Anderson Studio created the opening title animation and in-show graphics)

Paul Adeyefa (Disposable Demon)

Jeremy Marshall-Roberts (the owner of Mary the Bentley)

1. Neil Gaiman, Douglas Mackinnon and Rob Wilkins

What do they have from Good Omens:

Rob has the statue from St. Beryls, all four motorbikes from the four horsemen, Crowley’s Devon watch, box signed by David Tennant with Crowley’s sunglasses and Aziraphale’s cocoa mug with Michael Sheen’s DNA :).

Douglas has the playing cards from Episode 1 and heavily annotated Good Omens book they used for filming with inscription by Neil: ‘For Douglas, make us love, make us cry, 3rd August 2017’.

Neil has Aziraphale’s chair from the bookshop that he bought from the BBC and he uses it for Zoom meetings.

What is their favourite thing that was not in the book and was added to the TV show:

Neil: all of the first half of Episode 3 - an absolute joy.

Rob: also the beginning of Episode 3.

Douglas: David Arnold’s music and Peter Anderson’s front titles.

Could Aziraphale get out of the Bastille easily if he wanted to?

Neil: if he could: absolutely. Did he have any conception of the mess he was in: probably not. It’s one of Neil’s favourite pieces of acting - the absolute delight on Aziraphale’s face when he realizes that Crowley’s there and then he turns around and rather petulantly, grumpily goes oh it’s you - that moment of joy on Aziraphale’s face when he realizes that he’s been rescued is one of Neil’s favourite things. 

Neil and yoghurt starter: I had this slightly mad thing where I would explain to everybody that fans were yoghurt starter. And I said, ‘Basically you start out with yoghurt starter and you put it into your warm milk and you leave it, and the yoghurt starter goes off and turns the entire thing into yoghurt. 

Neil realized that there was a cat in his house (Neil doesn’t have a cat :)). After the panel Neil said that he was going to look for the cat with a can of sardines and Douglas joked that he would find Michael Sheen in a cat costume.

What was the best and worst about making the series:

Douglas: the best - the camaraderie, getting to know the people, the cast and crew. 

Rob: the best - realizing that the book could be translated to the screen and watching it happen. The worst - coming to the end of the shoot and saying goodbye to everybody.

Neil: the best - the amount of love from everybody, the worst - fighting budget battles (producers wanted gone all of the cold opening and the death of Agnes Nutter).

Did they expect that Good Omens would attract so many LBGTQ+ people and how they feel about that:

Neil: Yes, absolutely. There are definitely people out there who seem to think that I accidentally wrote a love story with all of the beats of a love story including a break-up halfway through, without somehow noticing that I’d written a love story. And I may not be the brightest candle on the candelabra, but as an author who’s been doing it for a long time, I’m very well aware of when I’m writing a love story, thank you very much. And so from my perspective I knew that the love story would be one of the driving things that would get us from the beginning to the end. And I also made a bunch of decisions about our angels and our demons in terms of casting, in terms of gender that everybody backed me up on, which I loved. You know, the idea that the archangel Michael is played by Doon [Mackichan] is something that is... or Beelzebub is Anna Maxwell Martin, whatever, there’s... it’s not like we are going: these are women, there are men, we are going: these are demons, these are angels. They... this is not a thing. And also doing something like Pollution, where you go in and go: okay  well if we were doing this in... if 1989 was now, if there were they pronouns, we probably would have done that. We didn’t think of it at the time but that’s no reason why we can’t do it now. And we did and I remember having a... not exactly a battle, but a... my very tiny skirmish with one of our execs who was very nice and very bright and was like: ‘Why are you saying they?’, and I’m like... and I... explaining, and he’s like: ‘Well I’ve never heard of that before.’, and I’m like: ‘Oh, okay, but trust me, just trust me, it’s all fine, just trust me.’

Douglas: And you know I have to say, just following on what Neil’s saying, I’ve been directing for quite a while, and I tend to notice if characters are falling in love, I tend to notice a love story happening in front of me, and I think it’s there, and everything is meant, guys, everything is meant.

Neil added: I would just say, there are some things that you do while you’re writing a script intentionally. The fact that... I wanted to do this, well, it was a thing I did that I really enjoyed doing... where whenever people accuse them of being a couple: they don’t deny it, they don’t argue, there’s no flustering on their part. They absolutely… you know, everybody… what I’m trying to say is:  yes, other people in the story are perceiving them as a couple too. And here is Uriel perceiving them as a couple, here is wonderful Dan [Starkey, playing the passerby] …and you know, you do scenes like that because that’s... you are trying to make a point here and you’re trying to make a point on how people are perceived.

Season 2, yes or no [fiends, all three of them!]:

Douglas: What’s that?

Neil: Of what?

Rob: Is it muted for me as is for everyone else?

Neil confirmed that they are going to be Funko Pops. [yay!]

2. David G. Arnold (the music composer)

He didn’t read the book before he was approached to do the music. He was asked to do it by Douglas Mackinnon he knew from the Victorian episode of Sherlock and he said yes before even knowing what it was about because he wanted to work with Douglas again.  

The first piece of music he wrote for the show was the brass band doing the Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon [Episode 6, in the park before the kidnapping].

The second piece of music he wrote was the lullaby that Crowley sings to Warlock. He always liked the lullabies like in Mary Poppins so he said to Neil: Why don’t we do it like Walt Disney, but if Walt Disney was possessed by Satan? That was about 7 months before he needed to write anything again while they were shooting and it kept going round his head the whole time - the melody stuck with him and when it came to the Opening Title of the show, this became the middle bit.

The original opening title was Everyday by Buddy Holly and each episode was supposed to be closed with a different version of it: a death metal version, an angelic choir version, a carmina burana version... and he actually made all those. But he likes to find the musical identity of the show and put it in the opening titles because it’s important and it tells you: ‘This is the word you’re going to experience’, so he wrote his own opening title with the lullaby in the middle and played it to them [probably Neil and Douglas] with Buddy Holly as the backup and: Neil just turned around in his chair and said, ‘That’s Good Omens.’. From that point the instructions were with no rules, just to create whatever he wanted: the further you can go the better, the weirder and the stranger you can think the better. It’s a rare thing to be shown a world like Good Omens and be let free to run around in it. 

His favourite ending title is the Queen one in Episode 1.

One of the reasons he didn’t do a theme for Crowley and a theme for Aziraphale is that the theme of the show is theirs - it’s theirs and they share it and it’s both of theirs and there is no separating in that regard. 

About Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship reflected in the music score: It’s interesting isn’t it, because the relationship changed in a way slightly frequently and majorly infrequently. It seemed right from the start that their relationship was somehow seeded and planted and had begun by the time we saw them even though they may not have realised it themselves, you know, with the pair of them on the wall, considering one is a demon in the Garden of Eden and one is an angel. They act very charitably towards each other and they act with a lot of things you might not expect. And underneath that there is a sort of sense of togetherness and support even though they both know that their paths are going to diverge and they have different responsibilities. So I always felt like, right from that moment, when the wing came up on the wall, that there was something special about their relationship. Three moments that stuck with him: in Episode 3 saving the books in the church when they completely rely on the other for survival in the way that they were very open about, one in the car outside the nightclub in 60s Soho - the Holy Water, you go too fast for me, that genuinely tearing, that there was reluctance in those words that he spoke and that sort of things as a composer is gold, it’s about making those moments more, and in the last episode in a scene they’re not event in when we see Adam and Dog in the fields and Anathema that music there which celebrates Crowley and Aziraphale’s music which is the theme of the show - their shadow has passed over everyone’s emotional journey, and everyone’s emotional journey is theirs as well. The argument in the bandstand was important as well.

His favourite leitmotif from the series is the lullaby.

About the scene in the car in episode 2 when Thomas Tallis changes into Queen: Terry’s favourite piece of classical music was the Thomas Tallis piece [Spem in Alium] so Neil asked if they can go from Thomas Tallis - a choral piece from 16th century - to We Will Rock You, and: ‘You never say no. You don’t say that you can’t do it. What you have to do is to be the first person who solves the problem.’ In the end it was a two-days work just for this little bit and he mentioned that he never had these sorts of challenges anywhere else before.

His favourite non-musical detail in the show - the crucifixion, how the scene was shot, how it was upsetting, and how it was made more effective by Aziraphale and Crowley’s inability to stop it, that they had to observe and watch it, that it had to happen. I remember seeing that at the time and thinking, I wasn’t expecting that level of brutal honesty, in terms of the pictures that I was looking at and what they chose to show. And I think all the more effective for it. 

3. Claire Anderson (the costume designer)

When creating the costumes for the characters she started with mood boards. 

Aziraphale - she knew that he needed to have something winglike in his collar so that’s why there are sweeping lapels very often. Using velvet [for the waistcoat] because that was nice and soft and had all the appropriate qualities. His watch and fob that has little gold wings hanging from it and other tiny bits of symbolism. Tartan bow tie. Beautiful cashmere checkered trousers - not quite tartan but a nod to it. A mid to late Victorian coat, Michael only made his decision on the coat a couple of days before the filming. Aziraphale in the present settled on a ring with angelic symbol and harp cufflinks, earlier his ring in ancient times has got a much more roughly hewn set of wings on it, so before jewellery making became sophisticated he modernised slightly - he magicked it up to be a bit more modern, more gentleman signet type of ring, but he never modernises entirely. His heart is much more in the past.

After they began to define Aziraphale they started to look at how the Heaven army of angels might look - the element of tartan came sort of from Aziraphale and the angels have a not-tartan kilt with a semi military type jacket and a military band across that might hold arms or not, because they are not really violent. She used spats to make them look quite neutral and genderless so hiding fastenings and concealing little details like that seemed a way to do that.

Gabriel doesn’t wear spats because he’s on Earth such a lot. His shoe has a cover with two buckles on the side giving the same neutral element. He wears a cashmere light-as-air suit.

The other angels are all in bastardized versions of what era they may have died in, so they could have died in the 1930s or the 1800s and the costume would have an element of that era about it - though of course as an angel you can change things.

The Quartermaster Angel - the costume is a combination of slightly Indian type military, maharaja pants, longer spats from another era, all combined pieces of military tailored to be magical and slightly nonsensical, as Heaven might be.

Crowley - she felt that he wrapped around like a snake sheds its skin so she wanted something double breasted because that seemed to envelope his snakey charm. David wanted to be more casual than wearing a suit. Under his collar he always has a flash of red like the snake that he comes from - the red belly. They put a red seam into the sole of his boots so always there is a hint of where he came from. The red tie in the blitz. He was more rock and roll than Aziraphale and modernised more to a snakehipped rock and roll star really. His present jacket - the fabric there is quilted, they found an 80s jacket that had elements of things they enjoyed - part of that was that it had a slightly quilted quality to the fabric which was like a textured snakeskin. It took quite a long time to create the fabric and then to make the jacket from that - they quilted some fabric and washed and whooshed it repeatedly to create a bit of puckering in it. He has a snakey scarf around his neck like a chain mail linked scales of skin scarf that he wore that complemented his neck chain. The trousers he wore in Victorian times are the same he wore in the 60s when he meets young Shadwell. His present trousers - slightly waxy denim - we just were looking for a slithery finish. Crowley’s neck chain - there is only one in the world - her tailor has a Gothic church full of interesting stuff like busts and drapes with old things, this chain mail scarf was there and David was looking for something to complete his costume and liked it. 

Hastur and Ligur are her favourite characters - they were so enjoyable to create. She had an amazing book of 1920s and 30s criminals and they used that as a starting point, because they were all quite worn out and bedraggled and poverty stricken and like hell might be ideally. They burnt and decayed the bottom of them as if they were rotting from the Earth and rotting back into the ground - all demons have sort of gators as if they were rotting from the ground up.

One of the most difficult things was the demons - when they realized they had a few days to create hundreds of demons in South Africa (4-5 days for almost 200 demons). It was as if I had been dissolved in holy water when they asked me for another 150 costumes.

The sleeves of Anathema’s coat have been inspired by a Victorian cycling coat. 

The historical costume that Newt’s ancestor wore influenced his and Shadwell’s costumes - they used elements of the historical costume to put a little cape on Newt and Shadwell and their wax coats to give them the quality of that look. Newt's costume has a lot of mustard to make him feel a bit awkward and uncomfortable - it's not the most flattering colour on a northern European complexion.

The nuns’ headdress needed to look a little bit demonic - she bought a whole book on nuns’ headdresses for research. They also used the V in the nurse's apron because that was nicely demonic. The nurses' watch has got this Satanic symbol at the top - a little take on the medical since old nurses’ uniforms used to have watches.

For Madame Tracy she went back into the 70s, slightly Biba-esque makeup and a cape. They had only one pair of her goggles so it was always a nightmare to find them.

Which part of the cold opening is her favourite: I love ancient Rome because there is at least 6 to 12 metre of fabric in a toga and that was quite fun wrapping that around the boys and creating those., and her favourite was the Globe.

The lapels represent wings in every way and every shape and every form. Wings are very important.

4. Peter Anderson (Peter Anderson Studio created the opening title animation and in-show graphics)

The first thing that the director Douglas Mackinnon (with whom he worked on Doctor Who and Sherlock) said to him was: for all the graphics, for all the title sequence, for everything, I want you to promise me one thing, and that is very, very simple, promise that you send me emails that say: ‘this might be absolutely nuts, but my idea is...’.

The opening title it’s full of easter eggs - it’s a type of sequence that’s been designed to watch a thousand times, for example: on the escalator down to Hell there is one character running up deciding that he doesn’t want to go to Hell or the sea is full of plastic bags because we don’t look after the planet.

Every single face in the title sequence is either Crowley’s or Azriphale’s, they are repeated all the way through - inspired by Neil saying that there’s good and evil in all of us, so there is a grand procession of people of all the characters from the story - marching towards Armageddon - but all the characters have been taken over by good or evil. And along the way our two heroes are kind of playing tricks on each other, doing good, doing evil

The opening title combines multiple elements - two dimensional animation elements, three dimensional animation elements, CGI and live action (the people in the procession were created by live action on a travelator). So the result is a kind of strangeness - such as 3D figures with 2D animated tracked heads - which makes it unique.

Their first idea and version of the opening title was based on tapestries of old, subverting them, but then they wanted something more new and fresh.

Both Douglas and Neil were an important part of the opening title creation process.

The opening title sequence took about a year to make from the creative start with four intensive months towards the end.

One of things that inspired him was a Bauhaus theatre image from 1930s.

Question if the hand-drawn font for the graphics will be a purchasable font: no, because it was original and it’s unique and it was created just for this - it was for the love of the show and the story and it will be kept there.

In the scene where there are three photos of witchfinders - Neil and Douglas revealed in the DVD commentaries that two of them are their grandfathers - the third one is Peter’s great uncle.

Originally the signs telling us things like ‘Thursday’ or ‘Mesopotamia’ - were done as if somebody (who was living inside the television screen) ran up close to the screen and showed us the sign. In the end they simplified it, only showing the signs. The one time that it was sort of left in the show was when in Episode 5 a little demon in the video game shows a sign ‘GAME OVER’.

Outside of his work on it, what was his favourite thing on Good Omens: spending time with Douglas and Neil, and also working with Milk VFX - I think I can honestly say it's the best job I've ever worked on with the nicest people. 

5. Paul Adeyefa (Disposable Demon)

He first read the book when preparing for the audition - the character wasn’t in the book but he got into it, loved it and couldn’t put it down.

He didn’t know about the name Eric until the script was published and people started calling the demon that, he really likes the name and thinks it fits.

There was a version of the script where the demon was going to be dressed in different costumes each time he was discorporated (for example one in long hair wearing a dress) - they would be all the same but different incarnations, in one version they had different accents. 

The first scene he shot was the one where the demon goes to Heaven to deliver the Hellfire (and also wants to hit ‘Aziraphale’ which was cut). That first day was also his favourite moment of shooting because there was an immediate welcoming atmosphere and everyone was lovely and in love with the production.

Disposable Demon is like a permanent intern, running errands for the higher ups in Hell.

His favourite part of the costume were the eyelashes (though he loved the whole costume).

If he could change anything about the costume he would also want cool contact lenses - some brightly coloured ones.

Question what animal (like other demons have on their heads) comes to mind when we see the Disposable Demon: he didn’t think about it at the time, but later he saw people talking about his horns as bunny ears and found it interesting, and also the facts that there are so many of him and that he is quite happy and friendly for a demon so the bunny makes sense, so he might be a sort of a rabbit. Or perhaps something goat type because of the horns.

Question if there is another role in Good Omens he would have liked to have played: he always thought that the four horsemen were very cool and Pollution was his favourite so probably Pollution (also was the most jealous of Pollution’s contact lenses). 

If there were a season 2, he would be there in a heartbeat.

Question about Eric’s feelings on Crowley, if he’s a bit of a Crowley fan: I think he might be. There is something about Crowley and how he is somehow a little bit different from the rest of the demons. - and the Disposable Demon has, much like Crowley, interest in the human world. He could well be 6,000 how many years old, the same as everyone else, but he seems to have this younger vibe and I think he thinks that Crowley is quite cool.

Good Omens fandom is his first experience with a fandom of this scale. It speaks a lot, the fact that this kind of very, this minor character, a character who is only on screen for a very short amount of time gets any kind of attention at all, it's quite amazing really, it goes to show how big and enthusiastic the fans are. I never experienced anything like that.

6. Jeremy Marshall-Roberts (the owner of Mary the Bentley)

When Crowley used a miracle to switch off the Bentley lights in Episode 1 at nuns manor it was done by: there was actually a very small guy called Louis turning on and off the switches quickly.

David Tennant was allowed to wear the snake eye contacts for only 3 hours a day otherwise they could damage his eyesight.

For Mary, the Bentley, it was the second time she was ‘blown up’ on film - first being in the Endeavour with Inspector Morse about three years earlier.

He was a bit nervous during filming the bookshop fire scene because the Bentley was so close to a real fire - not wanting the paint to blister. The car was moved off after a few minutes of filming but still.

About the damage to Mary: Unfortunately, we overran, and Rob my stunt driver had already booked a holiday and off he went and so when he returned in January, on the 10th of January, I had this new driver who really had no clue how to drive old cars, so I showed him around, I showed him to go around corners. He came around the corner, the door was not closed properly for some reason and the door flew open as he went around. And instead of slamming on the brakes which is extremely efficient and would stop him straight away he kept on going, hit another car and really smashed the door quite badly. It did take the car off the roads for 10 months. The door was completely remade because of this accident and it cost the total of  £24 000 to rebuild the car to get it back to running as it is today.

The Bentley’s part most difficult to maintain and service is the engine. 

Would Mary be available for a potential season 2: definitely!

[miraculouslbcnreactions]

Sadly, I agree. I went into this looking for a different take on Origins and that's about it. Instead, I got the highlight reel for an AU without any of the meat that would make it its own thing.

The movie essentially relies on you knowing the show. It doesn't introduce the characters or the relationships or even the lore like you would in a normal movie. It just assumes that you already know all of that stuff. Take away the show and the movie falls apart, but the movie's different enough that you can't rely on the show. It needed to stand on its own two feet and develop this new world. Instead, it wasted time on largely mediocre songs that rarely felt needed.

This is a common issue with musicals that try to tell a complex story. They might have killer songs (ex: Greatest Showman), but when you actually look at the plot, it's nonsense. The best musicals are simple (ex: anything with fairy-tales) because the songs kill your run time.

There are several cute moments, but on the whole, I was not a fan. This would have been greatly improved by cutting most or all of the songs OR by having it be an origin story and saving this movie's ending for the sequel.

Highlights:

Elements of the Ladynoir banter

The Ladynoir song

Plagg & Tikki picking their Chosen

The idea of the ending, even if it wasn't earned here

Chloè being a more normal mean-girl bully without the insane power that she's granted in the show

Chat Noir's solo love song/singing voice

Gabriel being a good parent before the loss of Emilie. That's a personal headcanon that I always have and always will cling to as it makes his character far more interesting.

The power of love actually doing something positive for the good guys

The Ladybug and the Black Cat being treated as pair in terms of powers, even if the execution of that idea was odd

Lowlights:

No miraculous cure until the very end? We saw a lot of damage in those first two fights!

Whatever the heck they did with Plagg, especially when it came to his relationship with Adrien. Who approved the fart jokes? I know those are common in kids media, but they've never been a thing in Miraculous.

Adrienette being wildly underdeveloped

Tom following Marinette around/being a little too pushy, though I did like some of the dorky dad moments.

Chat Noir/Adrien being a bit of a jerk and never getting to show the kindness that defines him when he's being written well. Even the supposed Adrienette crush scene in the library is just basic human decency instead of him actually being kind.

Marinette's clumsiness. This is such a cliched way of giving a heroine a "flaw" without actually giving her a flaw, but at least the show uses it for humor and little else. The movie took it too far, making it feel like she needs medical intervention or something. She's not just mildly clumsy, she can't even walk to school!

Marinette's lack of friends. This is kind of a thing in origins, but it's one of the flaws in that episode, imo. It's common for heroines to have no friends at the start of a magical girl series, but that's because most magical girl series have a "let's make friend/learn about friendship" element. Miraculous doesn't, so there's no reason to give Marinette this issue. This is exacerbated by Adrien's setup, which screams "has no friends and needs to learn about friendship". Why Marinette was also given this issue is beyond me. The no friend thing makes even less sense in the movie because the movie focuses on friendship even less than the show does! You could cut Alya and Nino and lose nothing.

A severe lack of identity shenanigans. This is Ladynoir's movie, not a love square movie. I do love Ladynoir, but a big part of the fun is the identity-related hi-jinks that you get from the other three sides. You could cut the square concept entirely and have this movie play the exact same way.

The butterfly is just the evil miraculous now, which disappoints me as someone who has put a lot of time into lore fixing.

Meh-Lights:

Adrien not being isolated. I really like this setup for him, but the show never explained it, so it's a bit of a mixed bag that leaves you scratching your head and wondering if you're supposed to view the Agreste's as terrible parents. Getting rid of this does remove that issue, but it also massively changes Adrien's character. He's no longer trapped in his home and new to the world. He's just... some guy. Chat Noir is no longer a way for him to be free. Like, is he even a model in this? I don't remember it ever being mentioned.

The Emilie teaser at the end, which was just confusing and made the ending make no sense. Does Gabriel not know about this? Is Nathalie the one who hid Emilie away? I don't think so, but that is kind of how it comes across.

No akuma multiplication when you don't purify them. I've never liked that concept as it makes no sense lore-wise, but getting rid of it and still doing the purification was odd. Especially since there are no longer akumatized objects, which begs the question of how akuma are truly defeated.

Chat Noir uses cataclysm all of once and Ladybug never uses lucky charm. That not a major disappointment, it was just weird. Same goes for the yo-yo letting her fly.

Marinette's fashion design getting more love was fun, but ate screen time that should have gone to other things since she doesn't actually design anything in the movie.

Changing how Gabriel gets the miraculous. The show never explains how Gabriel knew about the miraculous in the first place, so having it be something that he seeks out after Emilie is gone makes so much more sense than random treasure hunting because they're too rich to consider adoption or surrogacy. Only magical slave children will do. At the same time, this changes everything about Fu and the Guardians, which was a weak point of the show in many ways, but it's still a core element of the narrative. Changing it without explaining the new lore leave me with a lot of questions, but so does the show, so meh.

In summary, I enjoyed a lot of the moments in this movie, but on the whole it's a dud. It tried to do and change far too much given its runtime and status as a musical. I'll probably re-listen to some of the songs, but it wasn't the fun alternative to canon that I was hoping that it would be.

Last night I sat down with my 15 year old niece (also a ML fan) and finally watched the movie.

Friends, it's not good.

The Good:

The animation is really pretty

The background djwifi is cute

The akumatized villains are really cool

"Watermelon!" 😂

The Bad:

I hated Adrien. We don't see any of his series kindness and he's kind of a jerk actually??? And I really didn't appreciate his pity party after Ladybug's rejection or his making everything about that when PARIS IS LITERALLY ON FIRE. Also he was pretty callous in the way he rejected Marinette.

I could see the ladynoir angle at least but it wasn't clear at all why Marinette even liked Adrien. I didn't ship the square in this at all though.

The singing. I don't understand why they made it a musical, but it wasn't a good choice. And using different VAs for singing can work but for Marinette it was jarring. We go from soft English speaking voice to deep French-accented singing voice and just no.

The whole plot line just felt really underdeveloped??? Like what even happened with Gabriel after his reveal at the end??

The ???:

So we're just making the butterfly the evil miraculous, eh?

Fu was just...weird

I think I need to go rewatch Origins as a palette cleanser.

Have you watched the movie? What did you think?

[ibijau]

concubine nhs pt8 / on AO3

It’s always nice when Nie Mingjue comes to visit, and it’s always awful.

Most days, Nie Huaisang can pretend that he’s doing fine. Three years is a long time to get used to living like this, and he doesn’t miss the world outside the imperial palace, because there's nothing beyond those high walls. As long as he can believe that, he's fine. 

On the first year of his life as a concubine, the emperor took him along when he went to the summer palace for the hotter months of the year, but that went poorly. In the summer palace it was too hard to avoid imperial relatives, ministers, and all manners of people eager to get in the good graces of Nie Huaisang, hoping it would give them influence over the emperor. Nie Huaisang had to ask to return to the capital, to hide in his little house where nobody can use him for their own schemes. The year after, the emperor eventually gave up when Nie Huaisang refused to return to the summer palace. 

It's easier like this. 

There's nothing outside Nie Huaisang’s little house. 

There's nothing, until Nie Mingjue comes to visit and brings the world with him. 

In those last three years, Nie Mingjue has visited five times. It is always the most exquisite of tortures when they are alone together. Nie Mingjue won't put up with his brother's attempts to cut himself from everything that's outside the palace, and tells him about what life is like out there. 

He talks about the war, about home, about the people Nie Huaisang once counted as his friends. The Jiang siblings are doing well, he'll say, and Meng Yao, whom he stole from Nie Funyu, is the best personal servant he's ever had and will get promoted. The Wen have besieged Yunmeng for two month and nearly got in, until Wei Wuxian came up with another of his stratagems and saved the city. Last month, Nie Mingjue captured Wen Xu, who chose to kill himself with poison rather than be dragged in front of the emperor or used as a hostage. And just like Nie Huaisang suggested last time, they're sowing discord among the Wen's ranks, which might give them a chance to weaken them, and then perhaps they'll be able to get to the Nightless City before the end of the year. 

When Nie Mingjue arrives, Nie Huaisang is always subdued at first, and reluctant to hear about these things. It no longer concerns him, he's already doing his part, he can't get involved, concubines who do politics never end well, and… and Nie Mingjue doesn't care. He continues talking until Nie Huaisang, his curiosity awakened, finds himself asking questions because Nie Mingjue is the worst storyteller, always leaving things so vague, forgetting important details. 

Maybe he does it on purpose, so Nie Huaisang will become hungry for more, hungry enough to ask about this world he's become so good at forgetting, his question growing more and more precise as the afternoon passes. He needs to know what Wei Wuxian did exactly, how dangerous it was, whether it can be reproduced somewhere else. How was Wen Xu captured? What became of his wife and son? Are they really hoping to get Wen Zhuliu to their side? And what about that city they’d captured last year, do they still have it? Why not use it then?

Nie Mingjue smiles and answers everything, so Nie Huaisang continues asking more questions. Like every good caged bird, he knows more than one song to please those around him, because not everyone wants to hear the same tune.

There is only one topic that Nie Mingjue normally avoids, it might truly hurt his brother. At least, he usually avoids it. But not this time. This time, perhaps because the end of the war is finally on the horizon, Nie Mingjue asks his brother if he’s happy.

The question takes Nie Huaisang by surprise.

Of course he’s happy. He’s well fed, he has everything he can ask for, clothes and ink and books, he’s even going to have birds, his very own birds, all because he mentioned in passing his childhood love of them, and so the emperor decided to build him a whole aviary, all for himself, one where other people won’t be allowed to pester him.

Who wouldn’t be happy? Who wouldn’t be satisfied?

Nie Huaisang would have to be stupid to be unhappy.

But he can tell, also, that this isn’t what Nie Mingjue wants to hear. Nie Huaisang has become a little too used to reassuring people and being what they want him to be. The emperor likes to have a loving little songbird who worries about nothing. Nie Mingjue likes people to be clever and determined, to be independent.

It’s so easy to be what Nie Mingjue wants him to be. To say that no, he’s not quite happy, but willing to endure it all for the good of the empire. It’s not even a lie, Nie Huaisang is glad to be useful, and he’d do this even if he hated it, as long as it can help his brother.

“I’m going to take you back home someday,” Nie Mingjue, so fierce that it startles his brother. “The day Father dies, I’ll ask to have you back, I swear.”

Nie Huaisang hesitates. Home is an odd concept. Home is here, in his perfect little cage, living his perfect little life, happy in the arms of a perfect man who would give him the moon. This is home. It has always been home. It will always be home.

Home, he vaguely remembers, is also a great house where he was always busy. A place where people talked to him just because he was there, or because they had a task for him to do, and it was all they expected of him. He remembers laughing and sharing gossip, he remembers going fishing with some other boys. He recalls his aunts and uncles, working in his father’s home or in the nearby town, feeding him candies, asking after his studies, reminding him to be a good obedient son. And there were also evenings spent with Nie Mingjue when he was there, listening to his tales from the border, sharing jokes, being comforted by him when he missed his mother.

Home was all this, once, but now that feels like someone else’s dream.

Nie Huaisang scolds his brother for speaking like this, for not understanding that, much like wild birds kept too long, he’s not sure he could survive outside his cage anymore. He’s happy here. He’s home here.

Nie Huaisang knows he’s lucky, and he knows he must protect his brother, so he quickly changes the conversation to something safer, and waits for the emperor to return. Then Nie Mingjue will see that Nie Huaisang is, in fact, happy enough, that the emperor is good to him, that this little cage is a great place to live.

Everything always feels better when the emperor is there. 

It's odd that the emperor isn't there yet. 

Eventually, some servants arrive carrying a meal for Nie Huaisang and his guest, as well as an apology from the emperor who cannot join them. Something came up, as happens sometimes. Nie Huaisang is sad, as he always is when the emperor cannot join him, but Nie Mingjue's company makes up for it. They chat some more about the war, using weiqi stones on a map to imagine how things might go. Nie Huaisang, who plays the Wens in black, almost wins that little game. 

"You're really wasted as a concubine," Nie Mingjue says as they tidy everything. 

"Maybe, but the food here is better than in the army," Nie Huaisang laughs. 

-

Nie Mingjue doesn't come the next day, and neither does the emperor. The two facts are linked, since they and some other ministers are stuck in a council that lasts until nightfall. Nie Huaisang misses both of them, but knows it’s already lucky either of them has any time at all to waste with him.

-

Nie Mingjue does come the day after, but it's to say goodbye. He really only came to the capital to ask for more funds and more men. The war is going well, but if the Wens find out that he's gone they could try to take advantage of his absence, so he cannot linger. 

Again, the emperor cannot join them. Three days without a visit is unusual, but not unheard off. Nie Huaisang tries not to show that it depresses him, for Nie Mingjue's sake. His brother understands when this whole thing is about duty, but gets puzzled or angry whenever Nie Huaisang tries to explain that he truly enjoys the emperor’s company because it is also about love.

He thinks Nie Huaisang is lying. 

Nie Mingjue doesn’t like being lied to.

It's easier to just say the right things, to be what others expect him to be. It's the best way to ensure that people never stop loving him. 

There's no lying in that, Nie Huaisang figures. Not really. He really is the loving little bird who loves poetry and painting. He is also the dedicated little brother who studies the war and guesses at its outcome. 

He's never lying, and it's his own fault if he's too complicated to be loved as his entire self. 

-

The emperor doesn't come. 

Four days is a long time, unheard of. 

The emperor doesn't come. 

Five days now. 

The emperor doesn't come. 

But his brother does, on that sixth day, because the prince has never yet missed one of their weekly meetings. 

"Has anything happened recently?" Nie Huaisang asks him, trying to sound calm and collected. 

The prince likes the quiet. Usually Nie Huaisang respects that, copying the behaviour of his guest, silent and elegant, wanting the prince to like him. They rarely ever speak while having tea togethr. But today, Nie Huaisang is too worried to keep his mouth shut. 

The prince throws him a puzzled look. He puts down his glass of tea, slow and elegant and irritatingly perfect. 

"You don't know?" the prince asks in a voice devoid of emotion. 

"Know what?" Nie Huaisang asks, wishing for once that he'd made more connections . He doesn't even trust his servants with any confidences, worried they might turn against him given a chance, but maybe that was a mistake. He's relied too much on the emperor as his only source of information about the palace, and now… 

"I don't know either," the prince clarifies. "But he stopped visiting you. It has been noticed. A dispute?" 

Nie Huaisang shakes his head. The last time they saw each other, the emperor was in an excellent mood. He seemed so happy that Nie Mingjue was coming to the capital, so excited to see his old friend again. It had been a happy night, they had chatted and laughed, they had gone to sleep holding each other close… in a rare stroke of luck, Nie Huaisang had even briefly woken up early enough to see the emperor as he left the bed the morning after, begging for a kiss before going back to sleep.

“Did he have an argument with my brother?” Nie Huaisang wonders, before shaking his head again. “No, da-ge would have said… Could your uncle have been pushing him to get a wife again?”

“He would visit you more, not less,” the prince calmly argues, starting to look puzzled as well. “I hope it does not last.”

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” Nie Huaisang says with a polite bow. “When I find what I have done wrong, I will endeavour to improve myself so I do not disappoint again.”

The prince says nothing. He picks up his tea again, finishes it, puts down the empty glass again.

“It will not last,” the prince says. “Brother cares too much.”

That’s the end of their conversation. The prince has obligations, and cannot stay. Nie Huaisang, ever the polite host for his brother-in-law, thanks the prince for coming, apologizes for bothering him with private matters, and promises again to do better in the future and avoid worrying anyone.

He’s then left alone again, and feeling lonely in a way he hadn’t in a long while. The emperor isn’t visiting on purpose, then. The prince did not say it exactly like that, but if the emperor had merely been busy, he would have said so. Has Nie Huaisang done something? Did he fail to do something? But it’s so odd. They’ve never had an argument, not really. The closest they’ve been to that was disagreeing here and there on the value of a poet’s work, and even then they’d always made up again before the evening was over.

It makes no sense.

Still there is that hope, however frail, that the prince might talk to his brother. Maybe he will complain against being dragged into their private life, and demand that the emperor sort this out so he doesn’t have to deal with Nie Huaisang’s emotional outbursts again. Or perhaps he’ll be nicer than that. The prince did seem concerned, and apparently he likes Nie Huaisang, or at least gets as close to it as he can ever get, so perhaps he will put in a kind word to his brother about that poor neglected little bird, all alone in his pretty cage…

But the emperor doesn’t come that night, and Nie Huaisang, alone in a bed too cold, struggles to fall asleep.

-

Then, after a week, while Nie Huaisang is reading the commentary to a military treaty, there is a knock on the door.

When he opens that door, the emperor is there, severe and distant like a true son of heavens, showing no hint of the gentle and tender man Nie Huaisang is used to seeing inside his little house. He is terrifying and distant, almost reminding Nie Huaisang of his father. Reminding him, also, who this man he loves truly is, when he's not playing pretend with him in their little house.

“We must talk,” the emperor says in a cold voice that tolerates no defiance.

And just like that, Nie Huaisang knows that it’s over.

[herinsectreflection]

An Episode Within an Episode: An Analysis of ‘The Zeppo’

The Zeppo is one of those episodes that so consistently shows up on fan lists of “underrated” episodes, that I don’t know if it can really be considered “underrated” anymore, but I think it deserves a little extra appreciation. It’s definitely an episode that takes a second viewing to appreciate, thanks to how oddly it is constructed, in a way that isn’t immediately advertised to the viewer. Other episodes with unusual styles such as Once More With Feeling or Hush very much wear their concepts on their sleeve; you can’t watch them and not immediately realise what they are doing. That’s not a knock against those episodes - part of what makes them so great and iconic is that they get right to the point and so can do interesting things with the concept. The Zeppo is just a quieter kind of unique. It uses the limited perspective of both the characters and the audience themselves to show a cracked-mirror version of the world. It’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer told from the perspective of somebody looking in on another episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s fun and weird and I want to dig into it a little bit.

We start off with a very typical Buffy scene. In its third season now, the show is pretty aware of and confident in its own tropes, and trusts the audience to be too. We don’t need any build-up explaining exactly what Giles has found out and what spell Willow is performing and what these monsters are doing and exactly how Buffy and Faith know how to kill them. We’ve all seen an episode of Buffy before, and we can fill in the blanks pretty easily. This confidence in the show’s own tropes and what the audience expects of it is key to what makes this episode work. We know exactly how a typical episode of Buffy goes, so we can receive this barely-cliff-notes version of one and understand it perfectly. It’s an episode that can only be done in a show’s third year, when viewers have become fluent in the show’s language.

After the fight and exposition is over, Xander stands up from the garbage, as out of context as we are as viewers. As this is a Xander-centric episode, he becomes the audience identification figure. As the one character not supernaturally gifted or linked in any way (as the episode points out several times), Xander makes sense as the viewer stand-in. Xander comments on how he wants to be more involved in the fights but is firmly rebuffed - and it’s clear he wouldn’t be able to impact them anyway. All he can do is watch the fights and plots happen from a distance. In this sense, Xander is no different to the viewer, watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, unable to affect it in any way.

This is where the structure of the episode comes into play. The A plot is a fairly meaningless runaround with zombies, while the B-plot is a finale-worthy epic apocalyptic showdown. We only catch glimpses of it, but it seems to contain all the standard hallmarks of a Buffy apocalypse - an evil cult, opening the hellmouth, tearful Buffy/Angel melodrama. Specifically, it echoes the previous two season finales, with the final showdown apparently featuring both the literal monster from the S1 finale, and some kind of sacrifice that involved Angel (evoking the S2 finale). The very last bit of dialogue we hear during this plot is “Faith, go for the heart!” from Buffy, encouraging her to kill the demon in the library, which you could argue foreshadows the S3 finale, where Buffy will use the Mayor’s love for Faith to kill him in the library. This plot is a facsimile of a Buffy season finale, giving us everything we expect and have seen before, stripped of all context, the very bare bones of a story. 

What this achieves is that it alienates the viewer from this story-within-a story, forcing us into an intentionally uncomfortable position, where it feels like we’re watching an episode through a keyhole. It intentionally exacerbates the divide between viewer and show, to highlight our inability to fully perceive or at all impact this world we tune into each week.

Xander is very purposefully chosen as the POV character for this experience. He is feeling very insecure and ineffectual - unable to help with either brains or brawn, and not having a whole lot of impact on the story. He feels alienated from his friends, fearful that they will leave him behind. The structure of this episode highlights this feeling of ineffectualness. Xander feels so alienated from the events and people around him that he, like the audience, becomes separated from them. A character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer becomes an outsider to the story, watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are encouraged to empathise with Xander because we are in the same position. We too have been robbed of our usual intimacy with this group of people, forced to perceive the shadows of an episode. This meta-emotion dovetails with the character’s internal mental state nicely.

I think my favourite instance of this meta-perception being played with is in the scene between Buffy and Angel, where we are dropped without context into a tearful, dramatic argument where apparently Angel’s life is in the balance, filled with declarations of love and poetic exaltations, backed by this sweeping orchestral score - and then Xander pops his head in. The music immediately stops, he exchanges a few awkward lines with them before realising they have bigger things to worry about. As he leaves, Buffy turns back to the melodrama and the sweeping music surges back in. It’s brilliantly funny - it feels like Xander put an episode on pause for a quick interjection, then re-started it where we left off. It’s a joke relying entirely on the audience’s expectations of the kind of epic melodrama we might get from Buffy and Angel, and it works really well. In this moment, Xander completely becomes the viewer, peeking in on these two actors, observing through glass.

The Zeppo is very concerned with meta references, TV, and the act of watching. Obviously the title is a reference to Zeppo Marx, and there is also a running gag likening Xander to Jimmy Olsen. We are encouraged to think of Xander in relation to his narrative function as a fictional character, and so to watch this episode through this meta lens. One key shot just after Faith and Xander sleep together shows the two of them literally reflected in a TV screen. We are literally seeing a distorted reflection of reality in a TV screen, which on one level is essentially all we do whenever we watch any television show, but is also what we are seeing within this episode - a fuzzy reflection of a Buffy episode within a Buffy episode.

There’s another shot later that I like, of one of the zombies pausing during the final chase scene to look through the library window at the demon emerging from the hellmouth. We see him looking through the glass at this apocalypse monster for a couple of seconds before continuing on with his chase, like a channel-hopping viewer taking a brief glimpse of Buffy, momentarily enraptured, before switching back to what they were watching before.

One thing that stood out to me on this rewatch was how the villains are described. We purposefully get very little on the group, but what we do get is telling. “’Sisterhood of Jhe. Race of female demons, fierce warriors...' Eww. '...celebrate victory in battle by eating their foes.’”

A race of all-female warriors sounds very much like Slayers. They apparently eat after battles too, which according to Faith is also a feature of Slayers. The villain in this story is kind of a representation of the central concept of the show, which makes sense since it deals with Xander navigating around a typical episode of the show. You could also read it as representative of Xander’s pathologies when it comes to women and specifically women who are stronger than him.

What I like about this episode is that it doesn’t conclude by giving Xander a big important role in stopping the apocalypse, proving his worth to the group. That’s what a lesser show might have done. I like that here, Xander never gets involved with the epic finale-esque plot. He carries on existing in the spaces around it, becoming instead the hero of the monster-of-the-week runaround episode he has found himself in. Xander cannot be the hero of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, because he’s not Buffy. But he is still a human being, and all of us as human beings are the protagonists and heroes of our own stories. He can be the hero of his own life. 

S3 is largely about identity and forging one’s own path in life - obviously Buffy starts by having given up her name, then has to deal with facing off against her dark equivalent and making major decisions about her future. This season’s focus-episodes for the other characters reflect that: Giles is stripped of his role in Helpless, Willow rails against hers in Doppelgangland. This episode is all about Xander coming to terms with his narrative role within Buffy - as the non-powered comedic relief and occasional pep-talker. He could become frustrated with that, throw up his hands and let himself be at the mercy of his narrative function. But this episode allows him to find his own space, his own story. He accepts that he can’t colonise Buffy’s story, but he is still in control of his own decisions, and he can still have his own story. He can create a little one-off episode of Xander the Zombie Fighter that can co-exist peacefully with the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer happening at the same time. It’s a smaller, quieter story without the same world-shaking melodrama - but that’s OK. As Xander says himself, he likes the quiet.

As viewers, we can never shape the course of the media we watch. That’s part of the appeal - we don’t always know what we want or need - a problem Xander faces himself when he clutches at things like “being cool” or “a car” for things that might make him happy - but a good show gives us what we didn’t realise we needed. But it remains an eternal frustration, that we can connect on a deep emotional level with these characters, but can never help them or solve their problems. A good set of characters can feel like family, but a character can never love you back. When Xander faces up against this same uselessness as he observes an episode of Buffy from afar, it is the same uselessness the viewer feels. When he accepts this and inhabits his own story, it reminds us that we can do the same thing. Television can be a great comfort, but it is not our lives. Because we can affect our own lives. We aren’t in control of them, but we can guide and impact them, and we can each be the hero of our own individual existences.

[dear-yandere]

[ terror eyes ]

yandere! risotto nero x reader. commissioned.

› word count: 2.8k. › warnings: consensual kidnapping, delusions, dependency, implied familial abuse, graphic gore and murder. › art credit: 39805470.

“Nothing ever ends poetically. It ends and we turn it into poetry. All that blood was never once beautiful. It was just red.” — Kait Rokowski, Alight

he didn’t expect to feel this way. he didn’t expect to lose himself in you.

it’s the way your eyes shine when you look at him — the fleeting glances, the lasting smiles. it’s the way you say his name — the unexpected tenderness, the excitement on your face. it’s the way his heart beats wildly in your presence, the way he’s reminded of its existence. it’s the way you remind him that he is human, not the monster he’s made himself out to be. 

when he looks in the mirror, he sees a void, a blackness so thick he’s afraid it will devour him whole. of all the things risotto nero does not fear, he fears himself most. and yet, when you look at him, there is hope, light, the very opposite of what stares at him from the mirror. you look at him like there’s something worth adoring, something worth loving — emotions he never imagined could be directed at him. it’s a foreign feeling, something he hasn’t felt in years. nothing short of a nuisance at first, the way your gaze would pin to him like a fan adores their idol or a disciple worships their god. being the source of admiration is nothing new to him — many a man look up to him with a mixture of awe and fear, some groveling for mercy and others joining his cause. risotto nero is accustomed to being watched, to having eyes on him from every angle and direction: from diavolo, who both trusts and distrusts him; from the capos, who look at him with awe and scorn, and from his own underlings, who both fear and revere him. risotto nero is a force to be reckoned with, and yet, the way you look at him like a lover is enough to unravel his layers, as if there was nothing to fear at all.

it’s hard not to feel naked around you, to not feel vulnerable, as if you’ll figure out his deepest desires and worst fears if you so much as tried. vulnerability is not to be shown in his line of work, even you understand this much. despite the way you look at him with such ardor, you keep distance. whether it’s out of fear or respect, he doesn’t want to find out. it’s better this way, to keep you at arm’s length; you aren’t supposed to be alive. that thought rings true in the recesses of his mind, a reminder of who you truly are, who he truly is, of how this relationship was fated for end from the start. but even he isn’t immune to selfishness and desire.

“welcome home!” 

your voice holds the universe together, its stars and planets localized entirely to the house you both call home. there isn’t this urgent need to be careful around him — to feign happiness, to pretend your heart hasn’t been shattered so many times you’ve lost track of its pieces. there isn’t this urgent need to put your guard up around him, ensure it’s airtight, ensure it can take another beating. there isn’t this urgent need to be afraid around him. not anymore.

you don’t wait for a response, you never do. he never speaks without purpose, and you’ve grown accustomed to the way he wears silence like a mask. bounding up to him with a skip in your step, you attach yourself to his arm and lead him to the living room, the same conversation on your tongue as yesterday, the day before, and every day before that. 

“how was work?”

a trivial question, considering his occupation; work is never good nor bad, because to him, taking life is neither good nor bad. it’s normal, it comes as easy as breathing. but for a moment, he feels the normality of it all wash over him. the catharsis that an ordinary life brings, one where he is married to a loving spouse, someone who greets him when he arrives home, someone who dotes on him at his highest and comforts him at his lowest. for a moment, you are his home, and for a moment, this is normal.

but moments are fleeting.

his heartbeat reminds him that this is real, that you are real. but there’s an ache in his chest and a longing for something else — for something more. he wonders if this happiness isn’t enough for him. if he was good, would he be capable of love? if he was good, would he be worthy of love? of your love?

how foolish... murderers aren’t meant to dream.

“i was so lonely without you, even the little metallica got bored...” you rub the smooth head of the stand, a little part of his soul perched atop your shoulder. a means to keep track of you, but you insist on treating it like a friend. as much as he pretends to find disinterest in your affection, he feels your touch vicariously through the little being and silently revels in it. “you didn’t get hurt did you?” your eyes scan his chest, searching for any visible wounds. when you find none, you look up at him with a smile that reaches your eyes. “i know you have a high pain tolerance, but i know basic first aid, and...”, you hesitate, heat dusting your cheeks like stardust. should you finish that thought? it’d not like he particularly cares for what you have to say, or so he lets on.

“and i want to be of use to you.”

he stares at you, a sense of affection flickering through his gaze. his heartbeat quickens and he searches your eyes only to find that same brilliance, that same hope worn proudly like armor. a reminder that you are blameless in all this. there are still things you don’t understand, things you couldn’t possibly understand. the true nature of his job, the truth about his past, all parts of him remain shrouded with uncertainty, parts of him that will forever remain a mystery. never does he speak of the thoughts weighing him down. you wish you could understand and he wishes he could let you, but his heart does not allow it. you are better off in the light.

“aha, forget i said anything. i was just joking...” your laugh is sardonic and forced, and yet it is still music to his ears. “but rely on me if you need anything, okay?” the question is rhetorical, you don’t expect an answer nor do you expect him to ever need your help, but you offer yourself on a silver platter nonetheless. it’s the least you can do for the man who saved you.

risotto laughs through his nose and corrects that earlier thought: you may belong in the light, but you’re better off here. he tells himself that anyways, convinces himself that what he did was for purely for your benefit. and even then that sentiment feels foreign, his behavior like a man possessed. who is he? that day he saw you, that day he killed your parents, who did he become? he’s heard that some change when they meet a lover, that they become someone else. a sick yet romantic concept, to change into someone else entirely as easily as changing clothes, as if love is enough to change the depravity of humans. tragedy and hatred was never foreign to him, the better part of his adult years spent wallowing in contempt and resentment; a shameful part of him, one he looks back on with disgust. how he used to wish that were true, that the scum who killed his cousin would seek forgiveness and repentance. but life is no fairy tale. and yet, when he met you, he became someone different, someone better.

and it still isn’t enough to make him worthy of you.

you are not red. when he met you, you were pure, untouched, unsullied by the red that surrounded you. unaffected by the red of your parents who hurt you, by the red of your family who let them, by the red of your friends who left you. despite the sea of blood you used to live in, you were anything but. anything but that wretched color, anything but the color of blood. you were his realization, his epiphany: his world has been dyed red for so long, he’d forgotten the beauty underneath.

you make him feel alive again.

“you’ll tell me if something’s wrong, won’t you?” there is no need for words, but you speak in hopes of giving assurance. you want to be his shoulder to lean on and to cry in, even if that offer will forever go untouched. but he can’t. as much as he longs for that companionship, to fall apart in your arms and let you the collect the pieces, he can’t. he doesn’t know what he needs. he doesn’t even know if he needs you.

but you need him. “if it concerns you.” his reply is blithe, far too scathing a response for a lover’s concern, but you show no signs of quarrel. this isn’t the first time he’s brushed you off, especially when this false game of house has become commonplace: go to work, come home, be greeted a woman who’d happily be your wife if you asked, rinse and repeat. “i can take care of myself.”

you nod like you always do, but he knows you’ll fuss over him come his return from work tomorrow. a familiar smile is directed at him — a display which still feels foreign — and the gentle musings of a woman smitten with love follow as you guide him to the couch with the promise of dinner being ready soon. as he seats himself, the worries of the day roll from his shoulders like rain. how you fell for a man like him is beyond his understanding. even if he did save you from a far worse fate, from a family who would sooner be your undoing than the catalyst of your betterment, he is undeserving of your love. what he sees when he looks at you is hope and misguided truth — you’re too bright for him.

“we’re running low on groceries,” you call out from the kitchen, broaching the topic carefully, scared he’ll think you’re eager to leave. in this situation, you suppose most would assume that much, but you... you want to stay here. you want to be with him, to be around him more, not just when he returns from work. you want him, and you know he wants you too if only he’d let himself indulge. “i... i know you usually pick it up yourself, but i want to come with you,” you try to explain, confidence melting away like ice under his gaze. will your words get through to him? “n...next time, i mean, if that’s okay...” you meekly clarify.

if you didn’t admire him, the way he looks at you now would make your legs buckle. his eyes have never scared you, not like he expected they would, but there’s a certain terror they inflict when he looks at you as a nuisance rather than a lover. piercing red on black, the eyes of a demon rather than a human. and yet, he is your guardian angel, the only man who’s ever saved you. you know you’re safe with him, he wouldn’t hurt you like they did. the thought has flitted through your mind from time to time, memories of your abusers’ bodies mangled and torn apart from the inside. explanations don’t come easy to risotto, so you’re still left in the dark about your own parent’s deaths. not that you cared much for their passing, you were more concerned with the nature in which they died. tiny slits had opened on all corners of their body, as if they’d been instantaneously cut from the inside. you still remember their screams, guttural like the dying wails of animals, infused with the intense smell of iron permeating the air. you want to learn more about him, to understand him, and this... this power is the best place to start. why did he save you? why does he keep you? will there come a day where he leaves you too?

“it’s dangerous.” his eyes peel away from yours and you allow yourself the luxury of relaxation. “passione is still looking for you. your parents had an outstanding debt that your disappearance alone isn’t enough to tide over.” he notices the way your shoulders slump in his peripherals. if his lies weren’t for your own good, he might have felt some semblance of regret. “things will settle down, it’s pointless to keep asking,” he adds with a tone of finality. he’s never been one for consolation, so he doesn’t dwell on the sadness that permeates your being. you’re safer here, even you realize that; you don’t put up a fight.

“i see...” you turn away, hands busying themselves with a nearly-finished dinner. the smell of a home-cooked meal imbues the air with warmth, a reminder of his childhood. how long has it been since he’s enjoyed the presence of another, a meal made by someone who loves him? even when he treats you harshly, keeping you in the dark about your own safety and the reality of your situation, it’s never held against him. the love you pour into his meals is palpable, carrying a certain sweetness even where the dish has no place for it. if he’s being honest, it’s... addicting. to feel normal again.

his earlier reasoning isn’t a complete lie, more of a... half-truth. upon learning of your home life, of how much abuse you endured at the negligent hands of parents who refuse to let you leave, he’d intended to kill you too. put you out of your misery. leaving the children of hits alive is problematic for a number of reasons, the biggest being that grief drives people to extremes. risotto has always been keen on finishing jobs thoroughly, but even he could see that something inside of you was... broken. the way you watched your parents being ripped apart, mauled by something you can’t see nor begin to comprehend... amidst the guts and gore, he wasn’t able to place an emotion to it at the time, only that it was visceral, animalistic. realization only came later: the look on your face was one of pure happiness. surrounded by the blood of your own family, you were happy, relieved, hopeful. to see them finally suffer as much as you had, to see them finally gone from your life; you were so much like him, and yet so far removed all the same.

regret is lost on him. he doesn’t regret ‘saving’ you. your parents had it coming; their presence in the underbelly of naples had become troublesome for passione, the pair even going so far as to try to escape their debt to the mafia. a last-ditch attempt akin to the behavior of animals who’ve been cornered, risotto almost felt pity upon learning of your existence. the onus of repaying their debt would have fallen on you, a tactic even he didn’t quite agree with. but passione was never known for their lenience; this was the life risotto had chosen, after all. a life of crime and of murder, a life befitting a monstrous stand like his. at some point, he’d lost all sense of sympathy for his hits, their faces replaced by that of the drunk driver who killed his cousin. that scum’s sentence was far too lenient, and risotto has seen first-hand the trouble leniency can bring.

but he felt sorry for you. coming to terms with the sudden onslaught of pity was nauseating enough, but he’d offered to hide you until things settle down. the don was enraged that you’d ‘escaped’ before risotto could finish you off, but it was easy enough to let it go: you’ll ‘turn up’ eventually, and the debt your parents owed is the back burner for the time being. and, whether or not you preferred to die at the hands of your savior, you still followed him without quarrel when he took you. under normal circumstances, perhaps it’s better to say he kidnapped you, but you’ve always insisted that he did just the opposite; he freed you. for the first time in his life, he saved someone. where he couldn't save his cousin, he could save you.

“i’ll stop asking, but... maybe we can go together one day?” you pipe up, already setting a fresh plate of food before him. a model housewife, if this had been under normal circumstances. despite your attempts to hide any sadness, you wear a blissful expression when you glance up at him, head curiously tilted with the weight of your admiration for him. when you speak, he feels your love for him in every word; when you speak, he feels like he can love again. “as a couple,” you suggest, your smile genuine.

no, he doesn’t deserve you. not in the slightest.

“...i’d like that.”

but maybe one day he will.

dear-yandere, all rights reserved. 

[seriously-mike]

Yes, yes and yes. I am thoroughly fucking with the concepts of Warhammer 40000, and like I mentioned under David Prokopetz's post about the setting, Thatcher era Great Britain and communist era Poland worked very similarly. I even saved a clip of one of my players going mental over it for posterity.

Me: Nobody, absolutely nobody wants to do anything about it, the paperwork is fucked, the forms get lost, communication lies unread for five to ten years... KokosFLY: Fuck, Dźwiedź, I'm here to play a science-fiction system, not some fucking Poland! Me: Dude, dude, really. Administratum is... Mumik: Dark Heresy is a very realistic system. Me: ...It's Poland but IN SPACE. Zyntek: They lived in Poland for a hundred years to write the Dark Heresy corebook.

Of course you do have a lot of chuds not grasping the obvious like the whole thing being joyless and religious to the point of parody, but that's entirely on them. It's meant to be thoroughly mocked and skewered at every turn. Warhammer 40000 is like Terry Gilliam's Brazil: you could fit about everything that goes on in that movie into a Dark Heresy adventure and it wouldn't feel out of place. Corruption and inefficiency everywhere? We know. Rogue repairmen? That's a given. Executing someone by mistake? Any day but Sunday. Fucked up plastic surgery? I swear there's an actual official adventure involving that.

As for the character being a wreck, I'm not expecting every Inquisition operative to be a functional alcoholic or an indoctrinated sociopath, just the opposite. Those people are sitting a little above the general stupid, and need to be in on the joke called the Official Version. The higher you are, the more you know which parts of the Official Version are complete horseshit, which ones are an exaggeration and which ones are right, particularly for the wrong reasons. Officially, Inquisition has a Holy Duty™, but once you're in, you learn it's more of a "Holy Shit, we have to herd idiots and make sure they don't blow something up trying to show off how clever they are." Every prebuilt character I wrote has some reason to be in on that joke to some degree. There's the Overseer, who overstepped his Administratum authority in order to do something right but against the regulations, the Spider who's an underworld fixer and investigator, the Walpurgite who's a bit of both and relies a lot on code switching between the former inmate with shitty gang tattoos and the modest, buttoned-up, low-rank Ecclesiarchy or Administratum messenger or secretary, the Light of the Emperor who is not only a psyker (ironically - pyrokinetic who's afraid of the dark), but also a historian and theologian thanks to being from a Cathedral World and privy to some stuff that's not supposed to be known by the general stupid, the Reclaimer who saw a lot of classified shit on the space hulks he was supposed to explore and secure in addition to the standard Adeptus Mechanicus oogabooga intended to keep the tech users compliant and docile instead of attempting rogue repairs on their own, the Aspirant who is a cop with everything you can infer from that, and both the Astromancer and the Ace Pilot who know that most of the anti-alien propaganda is horseshit thanks to working for Rogue Traders who trade with, and occasionally spy on, those exact aliens that are supposed to be the enemies.

As for the idea of ripping off Jojo Rabbit, the reason is simple, crude, cruel and fairly common for a totalitarian regime: the government is stealing your child, doesn't want you to ask questions or shout accusations about it, doesn't want you to learn where the kid went either, and you're, unfortunately, breaking rocks in a prison colony. So they'll kill you and only then steal your child so she has nobody else to turn to but her new handlers. This, of course, is not Inquisition nor Adepta Sororitas level of plotting, but your typical low-ranking goon being ordered to "do something" to the best of his low intelligence and ability.

I hope this helps.

Recently, I prepared a prebuilt character for my group to pick from.

It's Dark Heresy 2 we're playing, so I bashed together the Prison Colony origin, Adepta Sororitas background and Assassin class, with the absolutely preposterous combination of AS class ability (you can't mutate, you can only go crazy) and the Jaded perk you can pick for the Assassin during creation.

That combo, along with unusually high stat rolls (30+ on Strength, Toughness, Willpower and Weapon Skill), wrote the backstory. Imagine a statuesque woman, basically any Strong Female Character in black tanktop and tight pants you saw in Stargate, Farscape, Firefly, The Expanse, Person of Interest and so on, and the key sentence in her description is "she's all out of fucks to give and the only new ones available are in the Warp." The potential for neurodivergent snark is too large to pass up.

Another sentence that came to my mind after rolling the Prophecy for her is "Innocence is an illusion, and the Walpurgite, being born in the penal colony of Stygma, is very much disillusioned." If you know the crazy shit the Battle Sisters field, from the Sisters Repentia, through Arco-Flagellants, Penitent Engines, Mortifiers and so on, you can imagine, mostly, why no cruelty, mutation or fucked-up xenos can move her. You can also add that scene from Jojo Rabbit for a good measure (she's from an Imperial penal colony world, what do you think goes on there?). She's functionally crazy and any psyker reading her mind would have to make a Fear roll due to diving in a steel drum of really bad negative emotions and memories that aren't as much bottled as they're sunken in concrete, welded shut and dumped in a bay.

She basically has more issues than Detective Comics and willingly ignores them. Which is why she might give no fucks seeing gore and/or genocide, but any psyker can gleefully take a drill to the Big Steel Drum of Negative Feelings™ and then kick it over, wreaking all kinds of havoc.

[loopy777]

I'm gonna pick "Sokkla Makeout," just to learn if it actually is what it sounds like.

I'm not going to give away the game, but since it's already complete, I might as well post the whole thing.

Keep in mind this was written in response to a discussion on ASN, which was (surprise!) centered on Sokkla. I forget the full details, but it touched on the possibilities of Sokka and Azula being secret agents together and falling in love. Secret Agent Sokka was a thing in fandom, for a while, and is partially what prompted me to put him in a 'Bond Girl' role for the story where I wrote Mai as 007. (Zuko was the Bad Bond Girl, although not actually bad in any way. It's all about the dynamic in the story formula.) As alwasy, I couldn't avoid putting in my own thoughts of an Azula 'Redemption.'

Also keep in mind that I typically dashed these things off without trying to make them good. Looking at it now, I'm not satisfied with Sokka's characterization.

Anyway, here you go:

Torture is Kind of Like Pranking, Right?

He should have been enjoying his first chance to ride in the new Drake-class Rapid Transport Zeppelin (that he helped design, thank you very much).

If not, then he should have enjoyed being trapped in a tiny passenger cabin with a spectacularly hot girl.

If not, then he should have at least been able to get some sleep, considering that he was on his way to another dangerous mission to preserve world peace or stabilize the price of rice or something.

Instead, he was scared out of his mind for his life.

Azula shifted her gaze away from the small porthole to look at Sokka with those darned-perfect eyebrows raised. "You're shaking. Are you cold? I can heat the cabin a little, if it would make you more comfortable."

Sokka tried to scoot away from her, but since he was already pressed into the wall on the far side of the bench they shared, all this accomplished was to squeeze him further up the metal barrier. Azula was literally driving him up the wall. "No Firebending," he growled. "I see one flame, red or blue, and I'm having this thing turned around and telling Zuko that you tried to kill me."

Azula's brow scrunched up, perhaps in irritation but more likely in evil murderous rage. "I'm trying to be nice; the Socialization classes my dear brother is paying for taught me that the first step in forging bonds with people is investing in the well-being of others. Since we will be working together on this mission, it would be most efficient for us to find a way to 'get along,' and something akin to a working friendship would be the ideal solution."

Sokka's eyes narrowed. "What does that all mean?"

"It means," she hissed, "that there isn't a single reason for me to do anything bad to you, so would you take your accusations and keep them to yourself?!"

There was the gaze- that scary Azula Gaze, the one that said she was about to destroy the entire world just for the joy of watching good people suffer. Sokka tensed and readied for an attack, but it didn't come. Azula just huffed a breath -- a warm one -- and turned to look out the porthole again. There was nothing but clear skies and rolling green plains to gaze at.

Sokka continued to eye Azula, just in case. She was a little different since she got out of the crazy house, but Sokka thought that Zuko deserved to take over her old room there for actually putting his former attempted-murderer to work. Zuko was far too trusting, and relied too much on logic, when it came to his sister. Normally, Sokka was a fan of logic, but Azula was Evil, and Evil is never logical.

Still, she was different, no denying that. She had completed five of these dangerous, off-the-books missions for Zuko, and seemed to be loyal to him, for now. Right here in this cabin, she was wearing a simple red and black tunic, and hadn't put her crownpiece in her hair. The old Azula liked the fancy robes of Fire Nation royalty, and even when she wasn't wearing her crownpiece, she was still wearing it in spirit.

That Azula was different now just meant she had gotten more sneaky.

"Why are you so convinced that I'm out to kill you?"

Sokka's jaw dropped, He hadn't thought she was paying any attention to him. "Maybe because you've done it before, every single time we met? And don't tell me you're a different person now. I've seen Zuko do that whole Evil To Good thing, and you're not working any of that magic."

She shrugged. "Honestly, I don't invest much into the concepts of Good and Evil. Back when I tried to kill you, I served my father, and by extension the nation he ruled. Of course, that drove me to... my bout of weariness. In the time it took me to... return home, Zuko had taken over the Fire Nation, ended the war, and began transitioning our country into peacetime. The only way to make myself useful is to serve him, now."

"And it never occurred to you," Sokka barked with a laugh, "to kill him and make yourself Fire Lord?"

Azula looked at him like he was a spiderfly in the process of defecating in her dessert. "What kind of an absurd notion is that? I'm one of the most reviled people alive, both in the Fire Nation and especially abroad. Even if I could somehow oust Zuko and take over, he's completely reversed our economy and state of readiness. If I tried to restart a war for conquest, I'd be defeated inside of a week, and the Fire Nation would suffer for it. That would be the height of pointlessness. Better to let Zuko rule, since he's trusted, and do what I can to make sure he has a stable reign so that the Fire Nation can prosper. Dear Zuzu has decided that I'm most useful on these covert anti-terrorist missions, so that's what I'm doing to prove my reliability. Maybe one day he'll let me function as an adviser."

Sokka could only stare at her through the whole tirade. "Do you honestly expect me to believe that?"

"I honestly couldn't care less. You're the one who's been staring at me the whole trip. Either you're a paranoid moron, or you're 'checking me out' as the expression goes."

Sokka snorted in indignation, which cleared his sinuses too quickly and set him coughing. As soon as he recovered, he croaked out, "No! I'm scouting the enemy!"

Azula tapped a finger to her chin. "Well, you've misidentified the enemy, but scouting isn't a bad concept. Actionable intelligence is the key to a successful operation, and it's good to know as much about your allies as you can. Perhaps even more important than knowing your enemies. Especially considering the mission that's planned for us."

She said it so nonchalantly that Sokka was immediately suspicious. "What do you mean?"

"Didn't they give you the extended briefing? We're going undercover as lovers in order to infiltrate enemy territory. I was given a wardrobe that even Ty Lee would consider daring. I hope they taught you how to brush your teeth back in the Water Tribes, because we'll probably be exchanging quite a bit of saliva."

Sokka couldn't speak. He couldn't even breathe. He was getting up the energy for a good scream when Azula leaned over him with a predatory expression on her face. "Might as well practice, hm?" Then she grabbed him and kissed him.

Then again, 'kissed' was probably the wrong term for it. Sure, their mouths were connected, and probably their tongues, too, but the degree to which Azula was pressing her body against his, limbs entangling, definitely pushed things beyond kissing. Maybe it was even a few notches above making out, depending on your definition. It certainly had its own power, which is why Sokka failed to even try to break free. If he had to classify it, he might file it under those Magnetik Energies the Mechanist was currently playing with.

Whatever it was, it was heating the room like crazy.

Of course, everyone needs air -- even Firebenders -- so the Way More Than a Kiss ended with stereo panting as the two of them eased back to their respective sides of the bench. Sokka found his voice first. "What- you- we- I... I don't care how great that was, no way am I pretending to be your lover! You're evil!"

Azula sighed. "Relax. I was just joking. My Socialization class that says humor is a very effective way to lighten moods and create superficial connections between people who are otherwise having trouble bonding. I guess I'm no good at pranks yet. Perhaps I'll ask Zuzu for an additional tutor." She turned to stare out the porthole again, leaning her chin on her hands.

Sokka watched her very carefully for the rest of the silent, awkward trip. And it totally wasn't because he was checking her out.

END

[botwstoriesandsuch]

The reason aoc had no stakes is cuz even if we lost link would just take a nap and then wake up and murder ganon with a stick

Ok I recognize that this is a joke and I love you good job have a lil kiss *mwah* nice joke nice joke but also I am in MAJOR WRITING MODE which means that I am prompted to write essays on the storytelling process at the flip of a switch and buddy, pal, chum, mate, this is a major switch that has been flipped

Because it gets on my nerves, it’s one of my BIGGEST PET PEEVES of ALL TIME, I abso-fucking-lutely DESPISE, when people think that stakes is equivalent to life and death. I just hate it, it makes me seethe to no end. I could grip the clouds from the heavens, and my rage would make it rain upwards.

People who think stakes is just about winning or losing or living or dying, I will stake you, I will do violent crimes. You wanna know why those big superhero movies like Justice League and what not don’t work? It’s because it thinks that big giant death armies are meaningful stakes. You know stuff like Civil War, or hell even shows like Attack on Titan or Gravity Falls work? It’s because it’s stakes exist both externally and internally, and the consequences of actions exist beyond just living or dying or winning or losing.

Listen to me very closely. The reason Age of Calamity has no stakes, is because you don’t care about the characters. It’s not because of the timelines, or resurrections, or whatever whatever, no. It’s because you don’t care about the characters.

Now Ashshshshsh, yes you love your bird and fish husbands and wives very much ok yes I get that, I do too. BUT, BUT, when you look at this from the storytelling perspective, like thinking from the perspective of someone experiencing the story fresh for the very first time, with or without botw context. You did not care about the characters, you cared about the ending. That is why there are no stakes. 

Why the fuck do you care if Teba dies? Like, sure, if Teba dies, you are sad, the character that you love is dead, you might even cry! But why do you care, what are the consequences of his death, what happens if he dies, what does he, on a character level lose?

What you’re typically supposed to do to get your audience to care, is establish a character, develop them, then give them a goal and a need to attain that goal, a good goal or motivation that affects a character both externally and internally, and then when the conflict or battle comes up, you’re left with that feeling of “oh no, I really hope this character wins, because otherwise, [insert something] happens, and I don’t want that.” That’s what stakes is, in very broad concept. 

That’s why living and dying is a form of stakes, but it’s not the only one. “Oh no, this character is hurt, I really hope this character wins, because I like them, and I want them to live.” That’s you stakes. Same idea with winning and losing.��“Oh no, this character is losing this volleyball match. I really hope this character wins, because they’ve worked hard to reach their goal, and I don’t want to see that go to waste.” Okay, great. 

Now the PROBLEM is, those concepts are overdone to the point of extinction, like it’s arguable that the stakes of living and dying just doesn’t exist as a strong good form of stakes in media anymore. Whether by symptom of plot armour, of predictable writing, or the establishment of modern tropes and clichés, blah blah blah, you can’t solely rely on those ideas for stakes. ESPECIALLY in the realm, of video games. I don’t need to spell out the whole living and dying aspect of it right? And the winning and losing stakes goes out the window because that concept has an entirely different meaning and tone when the player is the one in control. Essentially what I’m saying here is, on a character level, you can’t rely on those ideas as a sense of stakes because it just doesn’t have meaning. But the thing is, Age of Calamity does rely on it. And it SOME aspects, it worked. 

You have experience good stakes in this game before. You’ve probably done it on some crazy tough side mission or some interesting self-made quest to find yourself that last raw bird wing to finish up that upgrade. You yourself struggled, and understood the journey that you went through, the time that you invested to make yourself better (as big or small as it may be) at the game, and you eventually beat that level, or found that item. And you were genuinely relieved and happy. Whether you realized it or not, you were on the edge of your seat, intently focused on the task and “battle” at hand, you were invested in yourself, and the effects of the outcome of your struggle. That’s what good stakes does. That’s why so many videogames have impactful story telling.

But listen here, the reason you only experience those good stakes through the gameplay, is because you don’t need to put in the effort to care about yourself. You’re you! You know yourself, you played out your motivations and struggles. That all happens without the games help. So now the issue becomes, you need to emulate that same feeling for the story world and it’s characters. And Age of Calamity just puts in none of the meaningful work to get you care about the CHARACTERS on a CHARACTER LEVEL. It relies SOLEY on the work done by Breath of the Wild, with the exceptions of maybe Kohga and King Rhoam. And also Sidon is an exception in the sense that his relationship to his sister is a pretty decent stake (but tbh the bar is VERY LOW)

We’ve established how the stakes of winning or losing or living through a battle don’t have as much strength as motivations or stakes in this game. So, knowing that....Name Daruk’s motivation. Name a true and honest reason why Zelda shouldn’t die. And don’t tell me that “because it would make the other characters sad” because that is just a reaction to events (based on the characterization and writing work done by AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT GAME cause again Hwaoc doesn’t character develop for shit) being sad isn’t motivation, or stakes. Being sad is a normal human reaction to anything ever, it isn’t anything new, and by god it doesn’t inherently impact the world or story around you.

You know what would have been good stakes? If Age of Calamity developed the New Gen Champs a bit more and maybe one of them could say something like, “I feel it’s my duty to help stop the Calamity, because the fact that I time traveled here means that I have a big responsibility, and if we lose then I’m a failure in both this time and my own. So I need to step up to the plate that has been set for me” or something something. Or, and this is a big one, give ASTOR something to do (because stakes is inherently about CONFLICT and you can’t have good internal and external stakes when there is nothing to CONFLICT with the other characters) let Astor be like “This world doesn’t deserve to go on, humanity has made too many mistakes, I was abandonded as a child, the King murdered my mom, I need power to get revenge, or to revive some dead family member” blah blah blah pick one of the clichés but at least it would be SOMETHING. When motivations conflict, that’s what gets you to care about characters, because then it’s not just about living or dying, it about the effects of that death, or that loss. If this character dies, they died believing a lie, or believing they were a failure and I don’t want that. If this character is defeated, they won’t get another chance to save the people they care about, and I don’t want them living with regret. These two characters have sympathetic goals, and I can see the points that both sides have with their motivation, but I also like them so I don’t want them to die, oh no, what’s gonna happen. 

If you don’t CARE about the characters, and their goals, if the only thing that’s keeping you awake at night about them living or dying is “I like them” then there is something wrong. 

You didn’t finish Age of Calamity because of the characters, you didn’t finish it out of an honest desire to see these characters reach their goals. MAYBE there’s a connection you had for Zelda, but honestly compared to Breath of the Wild, it’s nothing. You finished Age of Calamity simply out of curiosity to see what happened at the end, to see what your efforts of gameplay lead up to. You had no actual character arcs to latch onto or care about, which means you had no expectations or desire to see how they would play out, no STAKES no INVESTMENT. Which means live, die, resurrect, or perma-death as you see, you’re not invested in the characters, your invested in the time you put into that media. 

[anxiouspotatorants]

Alright for those who have seen my Mal character analysis post here is part 2. For more context see the intro (and if you, want the whole thing) of said last post. But once again some disclaimers first: I haven’t read the original trilogy and use this to my advantage when analysing Alina based on her show-character alone. I do ship Malina (at least at the writing of this post), so that might influence my interpretation. This is just my opinion, so feel free to disagree. And spoilers for all of season 1 of Shadow and Bone.

Part 2: Alina

Now what I have seen so far when it comes to critiquing Alina, is that her character relies too much on Mal. She mentions him constantly while at the Little Palace, and once reunited with him practically attaches her own hip to his. Some argue that her growth was stunted by their reunion, and that we don’t get to see enough of who she is apart from Mal. And uh, yeah I disagree. It’s not that I find this argument inconceivable, just that after seeing the season twice I don’t really think that opinion holds water. Who is Alina? That is quite literally the mission statement of the season. Alina goes from an outcast cartographer with a small but somewhat reliable group of friends to finding out she’s not only grisha but a special kind of grisha. And from then on she basically has multiple identity crises only to end the season mentally preparing for a new roller coaster of identities. So let me try to map it out.

The power-reveal might happen in episode 1, but we actually find out a lot about who Alina is and was pre-reveal. She’s an orphan and social outcast due to her mixed race status (being half Shu in Ravka is not exactly easy). She’s had one friend throughout her childhood, Mal, and managed to find comradery in her cartographer team. From a young age she has had a talent for drawing, and Ana Kuya encouraged young Alina to direct this skill towards cartography, as this would provide her one of the safer roles in the army, which Alina was doomed to join from the start. As a child she was not popular, but her friendship with Mal shows a girl who was brave, loyal and determined. She was willing to up the stakes to protect her loved one (see: bully scene). As a young woman she still seems to keep that fighting spirit, but has also grown a larger sense of humour. She jokes around with Mal and their friends, but she’s also clearly insecure — repeating her question about Mal’s stories and her decision to hide her jealousy over Zoya suggest as much.

Post-reveal, Alina has to deal with a lot of different people saying a lot of different things about who she is. The grisha soldiers view her as a form of redemption for their people. Her former superiors and First Army soldiers view her as grisha-business. Mal, although Alina never finds out, tries to double down on his pre-established view of Alina until he sees the test. The king makes it clear to Alina that he sees her as a tool to reunite the two Ravkas. And the Darkling tries to create an entirely new narrative for Alina: she’s his other half, his one equal in the world, the one he has been waiting for that will right his his ancestor’s wrongs. Then there’s the Apparat who introduces her to the religious aspect of her powers, and Baghra who first treats her as unworthy of her powers and then as an unready foil to the Darkling. Alina has to navigate a lot of roles at the same time: saint, freak, saviour, tool, rival, enemy, heroine, lover, royal subject, the list goes on. It is through the combined impressions of Baghra and Mal that Alina starts to find herself again. Baghra consistently tries to get Alina to become her own person in harmony with her powers («who are you holding back for?»), but Alina initially twists this pep-talk into shifting her focus from Mal to the Darkling. Once Baghra reveals the Darkling’s true identity and motivations, Alina finally has to make the choice to go out on her own without allies. She outmanouvers the crows and gets in altercations with soldiers before running into the woods and into Mal. Mal’s presence reminds her of who Alina is at her core: an underdog with a lionheart. And the thing is, once reunited with Mal, Alina genuinely starts to change. She isn’t just returning to banter or insecurities or relying on support. She confronts Mal on his assumed silence and pre-established view of grisha. And she doesn’t give up on her new goal and run away with him — she insists on finding the stag, defeating the Darkling and destroying the Fold. She has found her goal and is following it free from the expected roles that have been thrust on her. At the end of the season, Alina might be back to her and Mal against the world, but she is a different woman. She is more confident and more goal-oriented. She has directed her stubborness towards a specific mission, and is preparing to have to battle all the roles that will be thrust upon her in future seasons (see: Zoya’s speech about Alina becoming a martyr before she becomes a saint). Who is Alina? She’s a fighter facing her new bully head on.

But there are two other elements I find important to rant about when it comes to Alina’s season 1 journey. The first is her connection to Mal. The two have been tight since they found each other as children in the orphanage. Alina suppressed her powers unknowingly for years and sabotaged her grisha test out of fear that a positive result would separate her and Mal. She makes it clear in later episodes that this fear of separation is what motivated her actions. But I don’t think it was about just Mal. I think Alina is terrified of being alone. And once Alina is brought to the Little Palace, she has no one. Not Mal, who was denied even a quick goodbye and whos letters are kept away from Alina. Not her cartographer friends, who all died either in the Fold or, in Alexei’s case, alone in a cellar at the hands of Kerch mobsters. She once again faces alienation, not just about her race but her commoner-soldier status, and quickly attaches herself to Genya, who is one of the few to show her kindness. Once she has been made to believe that Mal doesn’t care about her she also gets closer to the Darkling and recenters her world from around one man to the other. She feels pressure to perform as is expected of her to gain acceptance from what she now has to assume is her new home. Alina attaches herself to whoever seems decent enough because it is safer than being alone, especially in a world like the one she lives in. When it is then revealed that the Darkling has manipulated her the whole time, Alina starts to question everything again and journeys out on her own for possibly the first time. It is Mal who tracks her down and helps her out of a predicament, thus providing safe harbour for Alina again. Alina doesn’t just run back to him and regress as a character. As written above, her journey to episode 6 has impacted her to the point where her and Mal’s relationship changes too. The casually joking tone they used to have is much more subdued, and the two have to confront and open up to each other about revelations and feelings. They apologize to each other and show compassion. This isn’t a giant leap from their relationship pre-power reveal, but it still stands in contrast to their tense silences and evasions in episode 1. To put it this way: they bullshit each other a lot less now. And what is important to note is that Alina reunites with Mal for a reason. As implied by the last paragraph, a lot of people have a lot of expectations for Alina. Mal is (as many have pointed out before me) the one person who always sees her as a person instead of a concept. Where others see a saint or a weapon, he sees his friend. Where others see a threat or an unworthy vessel, he sees a girl who stands up to bullies and protects her loved ones. Alina and Mal bring out each others’ humanity, and that is a crucial thing to have in a world that sees them as inhuman: whether as prophetic legends on pedestals or anonymous cannon fodder.

The other point I want to bring up is that I think Alina has a second mission in season 1: navigating who to trust. We know that in the beginning the ones she trusts are Mal and the cartographers. Once in the Little Palace, she starts out by putting knives under pillows and only revealing emotional vulnerability in private. But she quickly starts to place her trust in others. She considers Genya a friend, the Darkling an ally who could be something more, and Marie, Nadia, Ivan and Fedyor as companions. She even becomes receptive to the Apparat from his lesson about Morozova. On the flip side she has an understandable feud with Zoya, and an equally understandable hot-and-cold relationship to Baghra. By the end of the season, Marie is dead and Nadia and Fedyor are nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile the Darkling is revealed as the true villain with Ivan as his underling and Genya his spy. Even The Apparat is implied to become a future enemy. Baghra and Zoya, on the other hand, have proven themselves to be more helpful to Alina — Baghra by exposing the Darkling, and Zoya by turning against him and helping Alina in the final Fold battle. And those Kerch crows who attempted to kidnap her ended up playing just as important a role in her rescue and in letting her go to continue her journey freely. Alina has spent the season learning that people really are not what they seem. Those who call themselves friends of you could be locking you in a cage, and those who wished you harm could turn out to have morals and redeem themselves. And Mal has an entire trust-arc for Alina of his own: he goes from her one friend to someone she thinks has left her behind, only to return and prove his loyalty and how worthy he is of her trust. I think this theme is something that will follow Alina in the next season, especially since she and Mal will be more vulnerable than before. She’ll need to learn when to keep her guard up and who is worthy of her softness.

So yeah, if I haven’t made myself clear enough I think Alina has a massive arc this season and that Mal doesn’t hinder this arc but rather is a reflection of it. Mal doesn’t regress her character, but rather reminds her who she is in opposition to who she is expected and told to be. And being a protagonist who interacts with a lot of characters, she is set up to have just as much of a journey (if not a bigger one) in future seasons. Is Mal going to be part of that? Probably. But he will continue to function as someone holding a mirror up to Alina reminding her of who she is. And Alina will continue to grow and deal with conflict as any protagonist should.

[sugakuns]

[os] you’re beautiful | u.keishin

I think I made Ukai a little ooc at the end 😬 this scenario is definelty not one of my best works so I apologise in advance :(

Today would’ve felt like any other day if it weren’t for the heavy weight being pressed onto your chest by the monster known as ‘insecurity’. It was like a heavy rain cloud was present over your head for the entire day and not once did the rain let up.

When Ukai left for work that morning, you pretended to still be asleep, not wanting to face the world or see the way he looks at you with.. disgust.

He was scheduled to work from 8 in the morning until 6 in the afternoon so you had the whole day to yourself. How great..

You know Ukai is home when the front door swings open accompanied by a tired grunt. Usually it would make you laugh or even have the urge to tease him for making such a dad sound when he doesn’t even have kids yet but you just can’t find any ounce of joy in your body to do so.

It doesn’t take him long to saunter into the living room with his fluffy black house slippers you bought him a while back. They were a gag joke since you knew that Ukai would never admit that they’re his in front of guests but he still wears them anyway. Ukai’s wearing his navy tracksuit with the white stripe down the side, the one you called his ‘knock-off Adidas’ and he’s running a hand through the mop of bleached hair on his head. The strand fall down in tendrils over his eyes and he’s once gained the youthful look you know him for (although it doesn’t mean you don’t like it when his hair is back too).

“Hey baby” He greets as he plops down on the sofa next to you, his left arm coming up to rest on the back of the sofa. His eyebrows twinge as he takes note of the channel playing on the TV. It’s some teleshopping channel that you’d never be caught dead watching and by the distant look in your eyes he knows that you aren’t watching it.

“Hey, what’s wrong babe?” He asks as he runs a hand down your curled leg. You barely react as your eyes dart from the TV to his concerned eyes. You barely mumble out a response and within seconds Ukai’s on the floor in front of you with his hands holding yours.

Your hands fall perfectly into his warm ones which instantly relaxes you. He’s always been something you can rely on to be consistent in your life. He always stayed the same and you can count on him for literally anything.

“Just a bad day - I’m fine” You can’t bring yourself to bring your shaky eyes to his because you know when you do you’ll burst out crying. His thumbs rub against the back of your palms in a calming manor. He tuts as releases one hand from your grasp to bring it around the back of your head. His fingers gently tangle into your locks and pushes your head into his chest as he sits up in the process.

“You can tell me anything, you know that?” He reassures you with a gentle voice, one that immediately its way to your heart.

A shaky breath passes through your lips - one you didn’t even realise you had let out - and suddenly your eyes are watery. Your bottom lip trembles slightly as you try to compose yourself. You barely tilt your head up to look at him and the tears have spilled out of the corners of your eyes to roll into the hair at the side of your head.

“I just- just.. got reminded of what I don’t like about myself” phew. How you managed to get that out surprises yourself “I don’t want to talk about it”

There it is, that sad pout that makes Ukai’s heart melt. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth as he moves his hand to your eyes to rub away the tears against your temples. He’s seen a few of your sad faces in the past but this one is different, he can’t quite grasp the concept of you disliking anything about yourself. You’re absolutely perfect to him.

“You’re beautiful, (y/n)” he starts “I couldn’t name a single flaw about you, my little cherub” a soft giggle emerges from your lips at the cheesy nickname you know has him gagging on the inside.

Slowly, your lashes separate and because of the tears that had just escaped your eyes your vision was now blurry. You sniff and blink away the stray tears, finally seeing Ukai’s calm expression. He’s looking at you so lovingly that you forget that you ever mistook his expression for anything but love.

“I love you, Keishin” the sentence is so simple yet it makes you feel like a schoolgirl on the inside. You can’t help the blush that raises to your cheeks even though you’ve said it hundreds of times. Ukai smiles and bends down, pressing a slow and soothing kiss to your forehead.

“I love you most”

[gay-jesus-probably]

What's up fam does anyone want to hear my new theories on Paranatural JUST KIDDING YOU'RE GETTING THEM ANYWAYS

Okay so first things first: of all the medium's we've met so far, I think that Isaac and Johnny are the only normal ones. And also maybe Walker? Cause during the flashback at the start of Chapter 7 he uses his mute powers with his bare hands, and doesn't seem to use a tool to fight. It'd explain why his flashback aesthetic is so aggressively 70's even though the flashback is set in the early 00's and his usual style is 'cowboy' - makes sense if his flashback look is a symptom of possession.

...That's not the point. Flashback Walker being a medium is completely unrelated to this.

Anyways.

When Possessed Max was threatening Doorman in ch 3, the Doorman immediately identified it as 'a broken god'. Given that the spirit mentions it "didn't end up with the sense of humor", the broken part is probably very literal. Then later on while talking with Nin, Doorman says that Max is "unaware that he carries one of the s-". While the last word is cut off, my guess is it's the start of a number, and refers to how many pieces the Broken God is in.

So that leaves us with three major questions: 1. What is the Broken God and why is it broken? 2. Where are the fragments? 3. What do they want?

Under the read more, because this is 3k words and I’m not an animal.

What is the Broken God, and why is it broken?

While it was whole, the Broken God was a terrifyingly powerful entity with apocalyptic levels of power. It might have been a spirit all along, or it could have started as something else entirely. If that's the case, then the act of breaking might have 'killed' it, turning the fragments into spirits. Whether it was originally a spirit or not, it couldn't be destroyed completely, but being shattered left the fragments weakened and gave the rest of the world a chance against it. It's possible that it hadn't done anything to warrant being attacked, and it was just shattered out of fear of what something that powerful might do, but I think it's more likely it was a very active threat that needed to be brought down.

So who broke it?

Ron Swanson; it burned his hand so he punched it

Bad jokes aside, I think something that powerful would push the Godzilla threshold enough to make a lot of groups put aside their differences to bring it down. Judging by what we've heard about them so far, I assume that early versions of the Cousinhood of Man and Paranatural Activity Consortium were involved. The two organizations might have actually been founded in response to the crisis, or were originally a single group that had a schism after. I don't think it was just them, but I do think the Cousinhood and Consortium were major players in the whole mess.

Which brings us to...

Where are the fragments?

I can't say for sure how many pieces it's in, but judging by the Doorman's comment, my guess is it's a number that starts with S. That's a lot of options, but I'm guessing six or seven, because any higher numbers that start with an S would just be ridiculous - six or seven is manageable, but double digits or higher is way too much to keep track of, the story would never be able to give all of them the focus they deserve.

So we've got six or seven fragments of a broken god. Where are they?

Fragment One: Possessing Max, which is the only thing currently confirmed by canon. This is a very recent development, as Max isn't showing any physical symptoms, was able to cross the barrier to enter Mayview, and his spectral abilities didn't kick in until his first day of school. Given that Johnny starts seeing shades roughly twelve hours after his possession, that implies that Max was possessed the day he moved into Mayview.

I think Max's fragment was stuck outside of Mayview, and looking to get in. It came across the Puckett's heading towards Mayview, and hitched a ride by possessing Max. This is backed up by the fact that Max began to awaken as a spectral before having noticeably interacted with anything supernatural - on his first night, Max could hear Hissin' Pete, saw PJ as a shade, and PJ was able to physically interact with him. If we compare that to the timeline of Johnny being possessed around midnight and seeing his first shade by lunchtime the next day, Max would have been possessed at some point in the late morning of the day he moved to Mayview.

Max's fragment is not Scrapdragon. I think that Max is a little like Mr. Spender, in that he's a medium whose also wielding a tool. Max's fragment is very chatty, revealing itself to the Doorman with no prompting, speaking in long, eloquent sentences, and even talks at Isaac about the concept of school buses and his own morality. On the other hand, Scrapdragon's communicated only in angry screeching so far. Also, Scrapdragon is obviously the source of Max's magnet powers, and he can only channel them through the baseball bat that Scrapdragon's possessing. I don't think Scrapdragon likes the fragment either - despite being a grudge, it seems fairly neutral towards Max, and only gets angry when he accidentally hits it. I don't know if Scrapdragon is trying to oppose the fragment the same way Lucifer fights the Shadow, but I don't think Scrapdragon wants to hurt Max, and it might end up helping him.

Fragment Two: Alright so now we're getting into speculative territory. I'm not numbering these by order of introduction btw, from here on out I'm looking at this via connections.

Boss Leader is possessed by a wight that the Consortium's been studying for a very long time, and is fairly non-hostile. Although it can't communicate clearly, it can express its emotions to BL, and she seems to have a lot of trust in it. Despite Boss Leader's shenanigans, it's been repeatedly shown that she takes the safety of spectral kids very seriously - if she thought there was any chance her wight would be dangerous, she never would have introduced it to two teenagers and a toddler, especially not just to explain the concept of a wight. This is also backed up by the wight's actions during that conversation - it's clearly paying attention, but it doesn't show any hostility, and the only thing it says is "PLEASE DON'T BE SCARED". Hell, it even seems to be a little disappointed that nobody reacts to the wight/white pun.

Despite this, I believe that Sandman is a fragment of the broken god. Not so much because of how it acts, but because of its connection to other possible pieces.

Fragment Three: Dr. Gwen Burger and her husband got stuck inside the prison of an unknown Wight. It was imprisoned by the Consortium before the current Boss Leader took power, it's lonely, dangerous, and really wants out. If it escapes, the results probably won't be pretty, time works differently in its prison, and its dream is connected to Gwen's. I think that Gwen might be its medium, given how warped her appearance is in the dream world, and that the wights prison relies on it being bound to a medium.

Gwen's wight is seemingly hostile, given that it attacks the group at the first opportunity, but what it wants is hard to say - its only line so far is "LOOK AT ME", and it may have been responsible for the demise of Gwen's husband. It also looks very similar to Sandman, implying a connection between them. Given that it's already been established that a Broken God is out there, it only makes sense for Sandman and Gwen's wight to be more fragments.

And more importantly, they're both very clearly connected to another powerful spirit.

Fragment Four: The Shadow, which has been possessing Richard Spender for at least thirteen years now. It's obviously powerful, given how much it scares Spender and Lucifer, and how being its medium has affected Spender's reputation. Given how he reacts to Forge saying he 'defeated the strongest spirit', that likely refers to Mr. Spender's past experience with the Shadow, and the circumstances that led to his possession.

Apart from its power, the main reason I think the Shadow is a fragment of the Broken God is because of its connections to Sandman and Gwen's wight. With Sandman, they look incredibly similar - the Shadow's face resembles a sun and is noticeably missing an eye, while Sandman's face resembles a crescent moon, and its only clear feature is a single eye. This suggests that Sandman and the Shadow are directly related to each other. As for Gwen's wight, it's connection to the Shadow is made clear by Rick's reaction to being attacked by it - while everyone else reacts, Rick freezes up and starts shaking in terror, either recognizing it as being similar to the Shadow, or having a flashback to his obviously traumatic possession. Probably both.

There's also the reactions of Sandman and Gwen's wight. When the group is attacked by Gwen's wight, the framing of the scene heavily implies that it's reaching out to grab Spender - Boss Leader and Walker are moving to defend the others, Gwen's almost completely hidden behind Walker, Mina's reflexively shielding Rick and Ed, Ed's hidden behind Walker and Mina... and Rick is perfectly centered at the back of the group. Furthermore, the way the wight attack contrasts to Rick's flashback heavily implies that it's reaching for him specifically. Meanwhile when the kids are introduced to Sandman, while it's kinda hard to track its line of sight, it seems like it might be staring at Rick the whole time. What the two wights say could also be interpreted as them speaking directly to Rick - Gwen's wight wants him to look at it, while Sandman begs him not be scared. If the two wights are fragments of the Broken God, they might be able to recognize that Rick is the medium of another one, and react accordingly. Gwen's wight wants him look at it, possibly realizing that he's frozen in terror and wanting to keep him that way so that he's an easy target. Sandman also realizes that Rick is traumatized and keeps its distance, asking Rick not to be afraid, as it doesn't want to hurt him. The point is, the Shadow, Sandman, and Gwen's wight are obviously connected to each other, and the most likely reason is all three are fragments of the Broken God.

I believe the Shadow was imprisoned at the bottom of Mayview Lake, though not by the Consortium. Thirteen years before Max came to Mayview, its prison was somehow broken by group that wanted to free the Broken God, though they were widely disorganized. Somehow a young Rick Spender wound up in the lake as the Shadow got free, and it pulled him under before possessing him. Given that Spender dying would free the Shadow, it's possible that the Shadow needed to possess a medium to escape its prison, and was trying to drown Rick right away to free itself. Lucifer intervened, pulling Rick out of the lake, and the two of them have been imprisoning the Shadow in Mr. Spender ever since.

Fragment Five: The Angel of Mayview.

Yeah, I know, she's definitely an enemy of Max's fragment and seemingly means well, but hear me out. When she speaks with Nin and Doorman, she pretty much immediately says she doesn't deserve to be called master. She also seems invested in Forge getting a second chance, not just to advance her goals, but also just for his own sake. These two details give me the impression that she's done some seriously bad things in the past, and is actively trying to make amends for it. Being part of the seemingly evil Broken God would qualify.

My other evidence is what Max's fragment says in Chapter 3. It specifically says that it "didn't end up with the sense of humor", implying that it's unable to find things funny. And right after that, the fragment and Doorman have this exchange: Doorman: Your return changes nothing, schemer. My master does not fear broken gods. Fragment: She should. Would if she could. The comedy your ignorance breeds is wasted on my ears.

This suggests that the Angel isn't scared because she can't be scared. Like she didn't get the ability to fear things, because another fragment has it. Max's fragment also suggests that it knows more about the Angel than Doorman does, and that considering her an enemy of the Broken God is ridiculous. All of this heavily implies that the Angel herself is another fragment.

Fragments Six and Seven: At this point I'm mostly out of obvious suspects. There's really only two major players unaccounted for, and while I do think both are fragments, I think they might both be fragments I've already discussed.

The great power that sleeps in Mayview is heavily implied to be a Big Deal. That being said, I think we've seen it already - who do we know that's a suspected medium for a fragment of the Broken God, and is permanently asleep? Yeah, I think the sleeping power is referring to Boss Leader. Her physical body is comatose, making her completely defenseless in the real world, and if Sandman is a fragment, Boss Leader is obviously very powerful. If Boss Leader's real body is in Mayview, then she's definitely the sleeping power.

Alternatively, it might be referring to the Shadow being imprisoned in Mayview Lake. Forge hasn't been in Mayview in a long time, so it makes sense that he wouldn't know the great power he's seeking was released over a decade ago. His attempt to command the pixelhounds also makes it clear that he's not above using evil methods to try and do what he thinks is right, so it'd make sense that he'd be willing to try and take control of it to help the Angel. It'd also explain why Mr. Spender starts laughing when he hears that, despite the fact that he's literally being tortured - Forge doesn't realize that the power he's looking for is right there. Mr. Spender also calls Forge misinformed right after that, suggesting that he knows what the sleeping power really is. Could be that he knows it's Boss Leader, but it could also mean he knows it's him. Either way, Forge is looking in the wrong place, and Mr. Spender knows it.

As for the other unexplained mystery, we have Penny Spender and her white spectral energy. That's a trait unique to wights and their mediums, which suggests that Penny is the medium of a wight. And given that all wights seen so far are probably fragments of the Broken God, it's likely that her wight is as well... but I think her wight is the Angel. We know fragments can speak through their mediums if they want, and the Angel hasn't made any personal appearances yet, only speaking over the phone. And the reactions of Nin and Doorman imply that's normal for her. Penny's obviously hiding that she's a spectral, so the Angel might be hiding that she has a medium to protect them both. As for why the Angel is possessing Penny, well Richard and Penny are obviously siblings, and Rick first got possessed when he was thirteen. If Penny doesn't know there's something horribly wrong with her brother, I'd be very surprised. I imagine we'll find out more about her, but whether or not Penny's possessed by the Angel, I think she's somewhat aware of her brothers situation and is trying to save him. Whatever her situation is, I'm looking forward to seeing more of Penny Spender, and I really hope she appears at some point in Chapter 7.

So now that we've got a rough idea of where the fragments are and why, that brings us to our final question.

What do they want?

I don't think they all have the same goals. Max's fragment saying it didn't end up with the sense of humor is an extremely informative sentence if you think about it - it means that the different fragments got different aspects of the Broken God's personality, and therefor will want different things.

The Angel and Sandman both seem to be non-hostile (for now at least), and the Angel is actively opposing other fragments. She also seems to be trying to make amends for the Broken God's actions, and feels deep shame over her past, leading me to believe that the Angel has the Broken God's remorse. The other pieces don't feel bad about what they've done because they can't. Likewise, I think Sandman might have inherited its fear, as it almost looks like it's trying to hide itself under blankets, and putting its medium's in a coma allows it to hide from the waking world.

Given their actions, I think the Angel and Sandman are against the Broken God's original goals, and are fairly benevolent. They do not want to become whole again.

Meanwhile, the Shadow, Gwen's wight, and Max's fragment all seem to be hostile. I believe Gwen's wight definitely wants to rejoin with other fragments, given that it seemingly tries to grab Rick. Max's fragment is harder to judge; it's definitely opposed to the Angel, but the Doorman's words imply that it's not really a powerhouse like the others. Max's fragment is the manipulator, the schemer - not the fighter. If it's the weakest of the bunch, it makes sense that it would want to become whole again. As for the Shadow, given that it's first move upon getting free is to attack Max and Isabel, it's definitely an active problem. The fact that it's indirectly described as 'the strongest spirit' implies that it got the most raw power out of all the fragments. I don't have any evidence that it wants to become whole again, but something about it gives me the feeling that it does. Here's hoping Mr. Spender realizes Max is possessed before either of their fragments makes a move. And no, I don’t think the Shadow realizes Max has another fragment yet; he’s still in the early stage of possession, so I think the only way for Max’s fragment to get caught is if it exposes itself. But Max’s fragment definitely knows where the Shadow is after chapter 4, so that’s bound to turn into a nightmare at some point.

Also on a probably unrelated note, the Shadow is a spirit of darkness that chooses to look like a sun, and if you look closely at Rick's memory getting possessed, you can see the Shadow had a massive slasher smile as it reached up to grab him. So uh... I think I know which fragment got the sense of humor.

Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk, I look forward to being proved wrong about all of this. But I also kinda really hope I’m right. Either way, if anyone writes fanfic using my theories, I will love you forever.

[bwprowl]

Me vs. The Mitchells vs. The Machines

The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a really cool movie. Seriously! It’s the Spider-Verse crew continuing to be at the top of their game, doing their damnedest to elevate and evolve 3D film animation in a way apart from the ongoing Disneyfied edge-sanding seen elsewhere. Several sequences, especially the final fight scene at the end, are absolutely jaw-dropping. A lot of the writing of the movie is also genuinely clever, with some cool tricks of weaving in Chekov’s Guns that you don’t even realize WERE Chekov’s Guns until they’re deployed, but then make perfect sense. And I also just have to say there’s something oddly heartening about a movie that does a lot to target Millenials in terms of nostalgia, but not so much via our shows and movies and music the way other project might go about, but specifically by tapping the internet meme culture of the early-00’s that’s so media-unique to that emergent generation. There’s some genuine heart visible in so many of the levels of how this thing was made that I can understand its touting as an instant classic and the waves of praise and popularity that have followed its release.

Unfortunately, I can’t so unilaterally praise this movie, mostly because I can NOT stop thinking about how poorly-implemented and mis-framed its central familial conflict is.

Oh yeah spoilers for this movie I guess

So I’ll need to detour at first and talk about A Goofy Movie, which isn’t much of an issue for me since I fucking love A Goofy Movie. And watching The Mitchells vs. The Machines my initial takeaway was a pleasant observation that someone had basically grafted A Goofy Movie to The World’s End, which could have made for an extremely fun time for me. A Goofy Movie, so it goes, centers on the conflict between a father and child trying to understand each other, spurred on by the father conscripting the child into an impromptu road-trip which the child initially resents but eventually leans into as a vehicle for understanding as the family members open up to each other and end with a greater appreciation for their familial bond as well as healthier, more open lines of communication. There are comical misunderstandings, dramatic misunderstandings, and escalating Wacky Adventures that keep the trip feeling suitably cinematic in scope. And as The Mitchells vs. The Machines continued on, I kept finding myself rounding back to that comparison and asking “Why am I not getting into this as much as I do A Goofy Movie?”

It turns out to be a point of motivation, actually. In A Goofy Movie, Goofy dragooning Max into the cross-country fishing trip is immediately borne out of his (however misinformed) desire to keep his son from going down a wrong, potentially delinquent or criminal path. Goofy has concerns about the lessened connection and communication with Max, sure, but that’s a symptom of his inability to communicate his actual worries about Max’s behavior to him, not the sum total of the problem he feels needs fixing. Goofy is under the impression there are genuine problems Max is going through, and while he’s got the actual particulars wrong, he’s not really that far off, since Max still IS the kind of kid to elaborately hijack a school function or make up extravagant lies to get attention from the girl he likes rather than just talking to her and asking her out like a normal human-dog-person. Goofy’s objective is firmly centered on helping Max for Max’s sake, and he’s only taking up a few weeks out of Max’s summer and causing him to miss a single party in order to do it.

I lay all that out so you can try to understand my headspace coming at critiquing The Mitchells vs. The Machines and negatively viewing its own take on a plot concept I ostensibly love by default. The problem, as said, is one of motivation. In The Mitchells, Rick’s dissatisfaction with his relationship with his daughter Katie is purely that: Dissatisfaction with their relationship. Katie herself is, by all accounts, doing spectacularly. She’s got a healthy relationship with friends and other family members, she’s gotten accepted into a prestigious film school, and her YouTube account seems to pull pretty keen numbers (With all the tech jokes in this movie it’s a wonder there’s never a riff on her shilling NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends). The conflict between father and daughter is purely a case of them growing apart in her teen years demonstrably because Rick has no understanding of her current passions and makes no effort to do so, which leads to him having consistently questioned and doubted her ability to succeed in her field. The film frames the impromptu road-trip as his attempt to ‘fix’ the issues between them, but the only thing broken by the presentation of the story is Rick’s approach to parenting in the first place. He could easily have made Katie warm to him on the way out by replacing or paying for the laptop he broke and throwing her a subscription to her YouTube channel, but then the movie would be shorter and we wouldn’t be able to pretend the conflict was anything other than his own pursuit of self-centered actualization.

That’s the other issue, of course, the way The Mitchells vs. The Machines consistently rounds back to the point that Katie is somehow shouldering half the responsibility for the father/daughter communication breakdown. But as stated above, it really has hardly anything to do with her. Katie’s succeeding on her own terms, and the only outreach she would theoretically need to do to her dad would be to make HIM feel better, something he could do himself if he’d only actually pay attention to the cool videos she keeps trying to show him and not constantly deciding that HE knows that SHE will fail. It’s a fundamentally one-sided conflict from what we’re shown, and yet the other members of the Mitchell family continuously treat Katie like she needs to accommodate her father’s personal whims and not hurt his feelings despite the fact that he’s the one who went behind her back and canceled her flight, even forcing her to miss her first week of college (!) simply because he felt sorry for himself that they didn’t like the same things anymore. Again, Katie’s doing great, it’s Rick that decides to make his problem the entire family’s problem, and while I’m going to hesitate to refer to this behavior as out-and-out abusive, it is still absurdly selfish and pointedly poor parenting. 

The movie seems to nominally strive for balance in the conflict, not making it entirely Katie’s job to fix her dad’s hurt feelings, and indeed having a whole sequence where he realizes what a Big Jerk he’s been about not trying to understand or support her passions, and resolving to actually Make An Effort moving forward. The problem is that this is still framed as one half of the equation, as Katie supposedly gets to understand where her dad is coming from, which...makes her feel better about all the times he said she would fail and so she should rely on and appreciate him more? And the reason that’s a fundamental issue is annoying, because it means we have to talk about Rick’s Stupid Fucking Cabin.

Look, I hate doing this. I personally try very hard to keep in the mindset that stories are stories and things happen in them because they are stories. I am loathe to attempt picking apart the points of particular plot points, but the problem is that this Stupid Fucking Cabin is positioned as the heart of the humanity of the entire movie, yet it hinges on a sequence of decisions that no actual human being would ever come by. First off, do you have any idea how long it takes to BUILD a home like that, let alone as one guy apparently doing it himself? Rick spent the better part of his twenties building this big Fucking Stupid Cabin to fulfill his lifelong dream of ‘Living in the woods’, only for his wife to get pregnant once it was finished, leading to him just dropping like that? Was there no planning in this family? Was Katie an accident that Rick immediately was this endeared to? I mean, he totally seems like a pro-lifer. But then why do they need to sell the Stupid Fucking Cabin on account of a kid coming along? How were Rick and Linda planning on living out their lives there if not with resources that could support them as well as a kid or two? Rick could have just raised his kids in the woods in his Stupid Fucking Cabin and they would have stood a better chance at turning out like little duplicates of himself and his own interests like he clearly wanted. That’s to say nothing of this sequence of events being framed as a ‘failure’, despite that fact that Rick handily succeeded at what he set out to do, only to turn around and abandon the thing he succeeded at himself on seemingly the same sort of impulsive whim that leads to him dragging his whole family on a road trip because he doesn’t understand YouTube. There are motivating factors to these decisions he made that could inform the whole context of this supposedly tragic backstory, but we aren’t privy to anything resembling them, and the result is a plot point that seemingly only exists to make Katie (and the audience) feel bad for Rick in the third act of the movie.

The real answer is the ultimate assertion of this thing by the finale, that Katie should be ‘grateful’ to Rick for his ‘sacrifice’ of his dream that supposedly allowed her to be in the place she is now. Except Katie had no part in Rick’s bizarre impulsive choice to build a Stupid Fucking Cabin then sell it as soon as a kid popped out so he, I guess, could feel some sense of important familial contribution. That’s to say nothing of the point about parental figures who make grand, sweeping gestures nominally for the good of their kids, but are effectively and emotionally unavailable in the day-to-day engagements of their lives. Because unlike Goofy in A Goofy Movie, Rick isn’t actually doing what he’s doing for Katie’s sake. Her motivation for most of the movie is to move away from home and go to college, a completely normal-ass thing that children do. Any of Rick’s outreach or efforts to ‘fix’ relationships and situations are purely for the sake of his own hurt feelings, and the way Katie’s mother and brother consistently push her into going along with them only highlights the overt way this whole family’s problems are hung up on the insecurities of of this single stubborn jerk. But then, that’s my other major misgiving with The Mitchells vs. The Machines: Its expected exaltation of the default biological family as some hallowed unit for which it is a tragedy to fall into any degree of dysfunction. This is with pointed dismissal towards the idea of Found Family, seen as a distraction, an obstacle to Katie realizing who her TRUE people are, and coming around to a sense of fulfillment because she managed to massage her dad’s ego for long enough that he stopped being totally dismissive of the things that brought her joy. You see, Found Families are fun, but they aren’t REAL or SPECIAL because they already accept and appreciate you for who you are, unlike these people you’re biologically obligated to share living space with for 18+ years whom you have to forge bonds with through varying degrees of communication breakdowns and compromises in self-agency.

With all that in mind, it highlights some of the smaller issues in the movie’s setup as well. This is perhaps petty, but jeez was I annoyed with the film’s framing of The Mitchells as this ~craaaazy~ ~weeeeiiiird~ family which included such outlandish quirks as ‘Dad who doesn’t understand technology’ and ‘Young boy who really likes dinosaurs’. And the wishy-washy tone of the familial conflict is echoed in the ‘The Machines’ part of the plot, which mostly led to me sitting on edge throughout the whole film as I wondered how it was going to come down on the subject of those kids and their darn smartphones. It ultimately doesn’t go full anti-technology, which makes sense given how much of Katie’s character revolves around using the stuff, to say nothing of the predilections of the people who actually, uh, made this movie. But the most it can manage is a halfhearted “Maybe unregulated big tech bad?” which even then is undercut, mostly I assume because of the various big tech companies involved in producing and streaming this thing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m overall glad it doesn’t go full "durr hburr technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch", but a lack of any insight or ideas on that front means that the familial relationship element is the only conceptual element it really has to stand on, and I just spent over 1800 words breaking down why that fundamentally didn’t work!

It’s an aggravating situation, because lord did I want to love The Mitchells vs. The Machines. It’s gorgeous, it’s got some clever bits in the writing, and it can honestly sling a punchline like nobody’s business, there are some KILLER jokes in there. But it just became impossible all the way through the end for me to engage with the heart of the movie, its central connective conflict, on the terms it wanted me to. Now it’s admittedly possible that, perhaps like Rick Mitchell, that’s my problem. I’ve seen a lot of love for this movie from my peers, and it does make me question my own projections: I don’t want to get TOO personal on main, but I admit that it’s entirely possible that people who’ve enjoyed an actually functional fatherly relationship would better engage with the emotive connections this movie wants you to make. But even with that caveat, I was able to find my own way to resonate with the similar stakes of A Goofy Movie just thanks to the more effective way that one was framed, so if this one couldn’t hook me, maybe it was The Mitchells vs. The Machines’ fault after all.

[linkspooky]

Black White Getou Gojou

The past twelve chapters, a flashback arc to when Gojou and Getou were both in Jujutsu High together has gone into length about why the strongest duo broke up, and why Getou in particular defected from Jujutsu sorcerers to the side of curses. 

This is one of the most interesting arcs so far, as it provides a lot of foiling for two of the strongest jujutsu sorcerers in the series on opposite sides of the conflict, and it also elaborates what likely the central thematic conflict of the series is. And it all ties to Getou’s motivations which are a lot less black and white then they appear to be at first. Let’s elaborate on that under the cut. 

1. Gojou and Getou

Getou and Gojou are introduced to us in the flackback as polar opposites. Gojou is impolite, sardonic, and basically uses his overpowering strength to push around and bully others. He is just as pushy and rude as his older self is.

Whereas, Getou is much more calm and collected. Unlike Gojou who uses his overwhelming strength to pick on a girl, Getou goes out of his way to save her and then lectures Gojou to keep him in line. Gojou jokes around, Getou is serious. 

The two of them are quite different, but they also are indtroduced to the scene in the same way, by showing off a massive feat of Jujutsu. The one thing they have in common is their strength. 

Gojou starts out questioning the system, while Getou himself is a defender of it. However, their reasons for questioning and defending are both central to their character. Getou thinks the current system is the righteous one, it’s the one that helps the most amount of people. Whereas Gojou himself is not questioning the system because it’s unjust, but because he personally does not want to be responsible for other people.

Getou himself feels an incredible amount of responsibility. That is how he believes his strength should be used, for others. Gojou does not feel any responsibility at all, and mainly uses his strength for himself. While Getou and Gojou switch sides, Gojou staying with Jujutsu society and Getou siding with curses, their viewpoints and natures however do not change in this arc at all. Gojou is still irresponsbile and thinks the current system is wrong only because it limits him and believes strong people should not have to bow down to a system and should be able to change it, and Getou still feels a tremendous responsibility for everything around him. 

If you were to reduce them to the extreme points of their views. Gojou sees Getou as a child just repeating what has been told to him by others because he is too weak to come up with his own ideals. Whereas Getous sees Gojou as a child who wants to detach himself from any kind of responsibility and solve everything with strength. Once again that’s only putting them in the extremes of what their ideals represent, but they are so opposite that they constantly provoke each other. 

The manga references again and again how they funadmentally see the world in an opposite way. Gojou treats it all like it’s one big game (that’s a digimon reference) whereas Getou’s perception of it is very textbook. He believes the world is structured in ideas like right and wrong, whereas for Gojou the structure of the world is the same of that as a game. There are rules to get stronger, and rules to win. Gojou’s is a lot more impersonal, treating the world like a game tends to be that way. Whereas Getou’s is a lot more righteous. 

Getou is obsessed with what’s proper and right, and what he thinks the way things should be. He’s trying to find the right path for the world and he’s very aware of the people around him. Whereas, Gojou is very obsessed with his own personal strength and solves almost everything by strength.

He also tends to be way more mindful of others, as opposed to Gojou who thinks of himself and is in his own little world. Getou is shown sympathizing with the girl they have to escort, whereas Gojouo himself finds being soft on her to be an inconvenience. This isn’t to amke Gojou sound like a bad person (though he is kind of a jerk) just to point out that Gojou thinks of himself first fundamentally, and Getou fundamentally thinks of others before his own well being. These traits do not make Gojou good and Getou bad, because Getou thinking of others first is what drives him to tragedy. 

It’s also important to notice that Gojou is not someone lacking in compassion either. It’s just he can only ever show it in his own way. Put in another way, Gojou is very internal, and Getou is very external. Gojou is focused on his own little internal world, whereas Getou always considers the environment around him and that leads him to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. 

As different as they are Getou and Gojou are able to work together so closely, because they both perceive that ther’es something off about the Jujutsu system around them. When they both realize that the girl they were going to sacrifice as a vessel has her own wishes and needs, they no longer want to sacrifice her for the greater good and instead want her to live her own life. 

They also believed, naively so,  before this mission that their strength alone would be great enough to change things. What makes Getou start to crack is when he’s rendered utterly powerless to help an innocent girl right in front of his eyes. 

Getou fights with everything he has, and is completely helpless before someone who cannot even use Jujutsu. In the same situation where Getou cannot do a thing for the person in front of him, the person he wanted to protect, Gojou steps up and becomes the strongest. 

Which once again, while Gojou is someone who is capable of sympathizing with others, and reaches out to them in his own way, he’s also someone so perfectly suited to be a jujutsu sorcerer that he doesn’t really connect with the humans around him. He’s so strong he doesn’t really need to. He’s always been able to exist with strength alone. If Getou is far too connected to the physical world, to the worries of people, to the innocents who dies, than Gojou takes the exact opposite path he’s far too connected to the spiritual world. When together the two of them balanced each other out, but when their partnership breaks apart they both spiral in opposite directions. 

It’s even Gojou himself who suggests that they just murder all the cultists in revenge for the girl. That they just settle this now with strength in order to resolve their feelings of loss. Once again, Gojou isn’t unfeeling he mourns the girl just as much but in an entirely different way. He suggests the highly individualistic method of taking revenge. 

When Getou says that they should spare these people, he says so because he believes the system will take care of them. The system will take care of them and dismantle them so there’s no need to act on their own feelings. 

Gojou’s world is defined by his own personal meaning. Getou believes the system has meaning for shamans like them, and therefore they should strive to do the right thing. But this is only because of his belief that the system helps people because his desire really in the most basic sense of the word is to help others. Which is something that he comes into question when he is traumatized by watching a girl die right in front of him, a girl that was going to be a sacrifice to the system in the first place and a girl he could not save. 

However, both of the boys start to take unhealthy paths after this mission. Gojou decides to do everything alone, and because he was Getou’s anchor, Getou starts becoming lost as well. 

2. Getou’s Motivation

Getou’s fatal flaw that causes him to become disillusioned is not that he cares too little, but rather he cares far too much. A year later he cannot get over the death of an innocent before his eyes. 

The entire point of this sequence is to establish how someone good natured  like Getou who believed in the system, could slowly slip and start to radicalize once he not only sees the flaws in the system, but also how powerless he himself is to do anything about it. It’s not that one tragic thing happened, but rather he watches tragic things happen again, again, again, all for the same reasons. 

Getou is deeply invested in people, but he’s also invested in indivudals not the masses as a whole. The site of the cult is a traumatizing thing to him, because it’s a metaphor for the Jujutsu system at large. One little girl dies in front of their eyes, and they could care less, it’s like their suffering is entirely invisible. 

The majority is kept safe, due to sacrificing the minority over and over again. It’s that which Getou becomes fed up with, because he believed in this system, believed that it was his responsbility to help others following this path and yet he constantly sees others die around him and does not feel like he’s helping a single person. 

Jujutsu Kaisen is an interesting deconstruction from the ‘secret hidden world of magic’ concept because, keeping the world hidden is shown to actively make people suffer and even cause high school age students to constantly die in battle. Which is why I doubt Getou’s motivation is something as simple as “Kill all non-shamans” 

But rather become an enemy that forces the system to evolve, rather than being a piece upholding a system that’s fundamentally not working and relying on the sacrifices of a minority to protect a majority that has no idea at all about the existence of curses. 

What breaks him is the idea that all of his work, all of the sacrifices he’s watching is not protecting people at all He wants their sacrifices to have meaning at least. Look at the face he made when he realized that after everything they went through with that girl and the innocent he let die, just another innocent girl is going to be raised to be a vessel and sacrificed. 

He loses his trust in the system, because he believes that the system is just getting Shamans killed over and over again rather than trying to affect a true change. 

Getou did not want to change the system so he could end his own burden. While yes, his main flaw is he feels too much responsibility for others, what breaks him is watching the suffering of other people around him. The incident which causes him to defect is when he sees ignorant people hurting two innocent children once again. 

He does not hate them because their weak. He hates that their ignorance forces suffering on others. Getou is, in all essence, a deconstruction of a messianic figure. The way his fingers are posed in this cover art is a reference to christ.  THe fingers spell out “IC XC” a widely used for letter abbreaviation of the of the Greek for Jesus (IHCOYC) Christ (XPICTOC). The hand gesture is specifically a blessing, by the name of Jesus people of faith are saved and received blessings. 

His wish to save everybody, to martyr himself for the sake of a better world is what leads him to the side of curses and to defect from Shamanism. His flaw is that he feels the pain of others far too much, and because of that cannot make sense of his own feelings. He’s driven by the system around him to reform it. 

And finally we hit the central theme of the series. The Jujutsu System creates it’s own curses. That is to say, the current system is flawed and only treats symptoms rather than the cause. Not only does the system create Getou, but an antagonist of this arc, Megumi’s father only was radicalized in the first place because he was worthless to the Zen’in family due to being born without any cursed energy at all. 

He is just another one of the sacrifices, not only that but his son was stolen away from him at a young age, to the point where he almost forgot his name until the last moments. 

In action the system is creating it’s own greatest enemies, and simply fighting against curses only keeps a broken system in power. While Getou is lost currently and has fallen to extremism, that does not mean he is wrong and the central conflict of the manga will most likely be about reforming this system that is manufacturing it’s own greatest enemies. 

The enemy in this series is not just the curses, but the humans who make them.