#literally. they have NO control over their own narratives. YOU are the deciding factor on everything they do.

[childofthestone]

thinking abt the veilguard companions and sighing heavily

[see-arcane]

considering it was the late 1800s, do you think Seward and VH are oblivious to Jonathan's watchfulness because Stoker couldn't justify writing Jonathan implying that "vampirism and blasphemy are fine if it's for Mina, actually" beyond his initial declaration? We don't seem to get much more of it directly from Jonathan's entries either after that, just by implication.

I wouldn't be surprised if that was a factor.

Considering all the very potent metaphors at work in the premise of 'God has denied love and protection to my beloved over X Violation and/or X State of Being which is beyond their control, and I have decided our love is more holy than any decision of the Almighty, and I would rather be a monster with her than shun/destroy her As Is the Righteous Thing to Do,' Stoker was already dancing on the edge of acceptability with Jonathan making his secret vow even once.

But thankfully, that single vow--and the adamant refusal to even pretend to make a new 'Yes honey, I will absolutely vampire martyr-murder you like a good Christian boy! God says it's chill just like it was for Lucy and everyone else Dracula has snacked on for untold centuries! God's will be done!'--likely flew over a lot of heads back in the day (as it does now) and simply landed in a lot of hearts with the more obvious factor of...

"Oh. He is literally willing to brave Hell and eternal damnation as the conscripted undead, possibly even cutting down his stake-wielding friends, just to protect and be with his beloved? ...That's kind of hot."

Especially during a period when romance was basically just a bonus to tack on to the Job of Being Married. Jonathan Harker is proven multiple times to be the un-Victorian Victorian man, running from the Brides (mistress stand-ins), happily letting his wife take the lead and holding her up as his equal until he's peer pressured out of it (which leads to dangerous consequences! Social mores fucked everything up! And He Only Follows New Directions with Mina's Approval Going Forward!), and now here's this romantic motherfucker ready to skin Dracula and French kiss the Devil so long as it sees his beloved safe and un-slaughtered, even if she isn't ~perfect and saintly and non-monstrous~.

Girls gays and goths of 1897 were definitely fanning themselves at the next tea party book club once they reached October 3rd.

Even without the ell gee bee tee undertones to glean from Stoker's own romantic leanings, the idea of 'selfish' personal love, of a mere human being, getting held up as more important than God, someone worth Hell, was extremely spicy to depict during that period. If Stoker had had Jonathan repeating himself over and over regarding his secret plans, it would have started to sound a bit like writing a smitten Poe protagonist. Which would also be sexy! But it'd risk taking some of the heroic shine off of him towards the end.

Better to let it hang over the narrative's neck in silence like an axe waiting to fall.

Or a kukri.

[btsandvmin]

A personal dilemma

I feel like I have to explain properly why I have reacted the way I did and why the asks about me not doing videos for Vmin affected me so much. I am sorry for dwelling on this subject so much but it is something that is important to me and effect what I do and how I do it a lot.

This post is a bit confused and I might also come across both as a hypocrite and as "high and mighty". But I believe every person has a responsibility for what they do no matter how small the effect. And I need to get this off my chest. This is a conflict within me that I don't have an answer to yet.

For the last few days I've seriously considered if I should continue with writing analysis for Vmin or not. Because at the end of the day I know what I do have a sort of snowball effect that is out of my control. So asking me to not do videos in worry about Vminies getting delusional faster or me being seen as a analysis maker more similar to some ji/kookers or tar/kookers like tkk/lives made me wonder not only if putting out videos was something that bring more bad than good, but if making any analyses at all was something that brought more bad than good.

Even if I try hard to stay away from sounding delusional and to warn my readers of the problems with believing the things I point out and the narratives I share might still lead to more confidence in Vmin being superior or real. Even if it's not my intention I can't control what people do after reading or watching my material.

Thus if creating leads to more bad for both the Vmin community and perhaps in the long run even Vmin... How can I in good conscience keep doing it?

I always believed and hoped that my way of writing, and of being open and transparent with the problems with shipping analysis would rather at least to some extent halt the ones reading and understanding my stance from turning delusional or over confident etc. That I could be clear about the difference between facts, theories and narrative and make others aware too.

When I started this blog I was just shipping happily and reblogged others posts. Until the "you can't ship Vmin they are friends" issue bothered me enough to write about it so I wrote "The “bromance” issue". Then I kept making material to show why Vmin is just as good and easy to ship romantically as any other ship. Thus my 10 reasons to ship posts etc.

The first time I truly got into analysing territory was with my first song analysis. And even then it was just a feeling that the songs could match and speculation mostly for fun. Vmin kept doing things, and yet I saw a lot of people get angry or defensive just for shipping Vmin. For example as 4 o'clock came out and Vminies got attacked for "making it about Vmin". Already feeling like Vmin's songs kind of fit together, and how other shippers tried to make the songs about their own ships (including 4 o'clock) I started to look closer at various ship analyses and seeing the lack of Vmin analyses compared to other maknae ships made me feel like people just zoomed in on their own ship and ignored everyone else. I couldn't help but want to add my own Vmin interpretations. I wanted to add a Vmin perspective as a sort of counter weight. Especially since I felt the things I saw had more to them than similar theories from other ships. For example the songs, being soulmates, using army as a substitute for each other or my own version of Vlive analysis, which was that Vmin seemed to avoid it rather than them hiding in each other's room. Other ships had these theories, despite Vmin having at least some of these things confirmed. So in a way, the soulmate claim and 4 o'clock was my starting point to look at Vmin in a different way and a bit after that I started making analyses.

It felt weird to see all of these things go ignored when other ship communities made their followers believe in the relationships with a lot less than I felt Vmin had. I never got confident that Vmin was real and I still think the odds of any ship being real aren't that big. But I did feel like many people completely ignored Vmin both as soulmates and as a ship.

So, while asking my fellow Vminies to be careful with believing I kept looking at Vmin and added my biased theories to show it could very much be done with Vmin as well. I never wanted to make people delusional, but having been in many fandoms before I also knew that with size that is something that can't be avoided. I saw that as BTS kept growing and as big Vmin moments happened, that more and more people shipped them. It made me happy. But I also knew it would mean more and more would eventually start to question Vmin the way other ships got questioned. I really think it's something that happens eventually with enough of a following. There are so many ships in Kpop that people believe in and try to prove, it definitely wasn't exclusive to BTS. (You can even look outside Kpop at things like the Sherlock or Supernatural or even Hunger Games fandoms where many speculated that the actors weren't just close, they were romantically involved.)

I wanted to talk about Vmin, but I didn't want to be one of those that told people what to think and to believe me no matter what. I wanted peope to question without "knowing" what the truth was. I was hoping to bring something different than just the safe "this is just my thoughts and you can take it or leave it" disclaimers. I wanted to explain the problems and to remind ourselves (me included) that shipping is something that can easily turn into more if you don't actively remind yourself that we actually don't know the truth. We have narratives that seem to make sense, but so does other shippers... So for many of these belivers it is impossible to be right. Not everyone can be right about their "truth", if anyone, since they go against each other. If Vmin turn out to not be together I do not want to be the one responsible for people believing they were real, only to get hurt when they aren't.

This is something I've always felt, and as I kept writing analysis I always wondered if I really should. Especially since I saw some Vminies get inspired by me or even taking some of my theories and run with them as facts rather than the theories they were. I put things out there, moments and ideas. A narrative for Vmin. And I saw others adapt them and go further with them. I wasn't sure how to feel as I realized my blog perhaps contributed to Vminies feeling more suspicious and slowly more confident in Vmin being more real than other ships.

Even if it was my goal to make people look at Vmin, I guess with all the things Vmin did it all started to feel more "real" for me too. So many of my theories seemed to work and even get proven or added new material. The songs kept coming and Vmin kept being Vmin. But I also knew this exact thing happend with ji/kookers after G.C.F came out. New material that "confirmed" their beliefs and in turn allowed them to become more confident in being right. So I kept reminding myself not to get swept away, because in the end I don't think no matter how much we have gotten, that it has to prove anything besides how much Vmin mean to each other. Romantic or platonic truly doesn't matter.

Another thing that makes a difference to me is also the way I view the different ships if they would actually be real. For example watching ji/kook and ji/kook theories it seems pretty clear they don't mind people shipping them or seeing things between them. I've never seen Jimin be careful, but instead rather bold and almost pushy, with moments with JK. If Ji/kook is together their shippers too believe that they want people to know. With Vmin I saw it a bit differently... I've seen Jimin be careful with how he and Tae comes across since 2014. Why I don't know. But if we imagine there to actually be something between Vmin, then it doesn't seem like it's something Jimin wants us to know. Taehyung is a bit bolder, but either way the "narrative" I see for Vmin if they would be real is that they are careful with getting exposed. Thus there is also that factor to consider when writing theories about them. If Vmin would be real somehow, and they don't want to be "exposed" how is what I do the right thing?

I have had a post in my drafts for a while and I wanted to add it here in case you are interested. After all, this isn't something new that came after the video asks, but rather something I've always questioned. Which is why it really got to me when I got asked to stop doing something for the sake of the community, myself and Vmin.

This is something I wrote a while ago and I decided not to post at the time. I hope you will understand my feelings a little bit better after reading all of this.

I hope you understand where I am coming from and excuse me for generalizing and speaking about the Vmin (and other ships) community as if it's one big force and not many individuals.

***

Now, I have debated for a long time if I should talk about this at all and basically take a stance in a way I would prefer not to. I know I will lose followers over this, and that's ok. I can't force anyone to listen. But with the way I see the Vmin community grow I also see the confidence in Vmin being real grow. It's natural and happens with all ships eventually, but I still hope Vminies can look at shippers from other communities and realize the same kind of reasoning applies to us all.

I get more messages that sound borderline delusional now than ever.

I always suspected we would reach this point, because again, as things get more normalized and ok to talk about the bolder statements and theories will become. It literally happens with all ships, slowly at first and then gradually worse and worse until you reach truly delusional levels where Big Hit are playing up other relationships to hide the truth or trying to create a glass closet for another ship and where every choice and action has a possible agenda. I don't think Vminies will get worse than other ships that are much bigger and bolder. But I do think we have already changed a lot in the last year. Even looking at my own posts I seem to have at some point escalated from "Vmin seem to have these push and pull moments" to "Vmin's push and pull" if you see the difference. It might be small, but it definitely matters in how my views comes across.

When I write I do try to present facts and then speak carefully and not confidently about narratives or meanings. If we take my song analysis for example I think there is a substantial amount of things even when just looking at facts. But, saying what those facts might mean will in the end always remain a biased guess. Especially since other shippers have their similar theories as well that they believe in 100%. I mean, I could make a case for Tae and Hobi's songs being connected as well. I've seen analysis like this from all shippers at this point, and I can't dismiss them anymore than they can dismiss mine. (As long as they keep to facts.)

I am careful, and even then I see some of my theories being talked about as fact, or att least very close to facts.

From what I have seen I have moments between Vmin I have notcied and shared that haven’t been picked up on before I did it. I still have some things like this I haven’t shared at all, simply because I think fans would run with them and become more delusional simply by knowing about them.

Sadly, the way things are going I feel uncertain if I should share more of these things at all. I don’t want to have to go around and debunk Vmin moments or urge people to watch other ships, because in the end every person has the right to enjoy a ship in their own way. But I do think confidence is dangerous no matter how good moments we get.

Ji/kookers got a lot worse after GCF Tokyo and started to talk about how Big Hit might be working towards a glass closet. And that might sound ridiculous, but I have seen Vminies say the same with the way Vmin has been "shown" as Friends came out and other pretty good Vmin moments from the last year. The question of "Do you think something is up with Vmin?" or "Do you think they are planning something based on the amount of moments we get?" are questions I have gotten many times.

You might think I am being too careful, but because I have been in many fandoms in a period of over 15 years I literally see the same development happen for all different kinds of shipping communities. Real and fictional. Where the fans get more and more confident as the groups gets bigger. It’s a gradual change towards feelings certain and allowing more logical leaps to fill the gaps, but it will get faster and faster once it starts.

I don’t want Vminies to get more and more similar to how many ji/kookers and tae/kookers act and think. Where we find suspicion in everything and allow ourselves to feel confident. (Or worried whenever something goes against that belief.)

I might sound a hypocrite considering I do write analysis on Vmin, but I am sorry to say, the way things are going maybe I shouldn’t anymore.

Every ship in BTS have moments, and every ship in BTS even have believers who truly KNOWS their ship is real. I often used to get the question “do you know this or that about this other ship” and “if you only looked at and knew about xxx you wouldn’t ship Vmin” etc. And honestly, they have a point. Only I think it works both ways for all shippers. We all mostly look at our own ship and have our own narratives and reasons to think they make the most sense. But as soon as we allow narratives to sound like the only or most logical explenation we have lost a big part of our ability to question others and ourselves. That's why I wanted to add the Vmin narrative in the sea of ji/kook and tae/kook theories.

Recently I posted Can shipping turn into conspiracy theories? and part of the reason I did so was because I have seen an increased tendency in the Vmin community to walk this thin line between shipping and belief.

I feel very conflicted honestly. I want our community to try and stay away from being sure, no matter how compelling the arguments. Again, I have literal hundreds of pages about Vmin being weird or doing things I think make them the most likely to be real in some form when looking at BTS.

AND I AM STILL NOT GOING TO BE CONVINCED.

I have followed another group where members kiss when drunk and talk like they ship each other and even if a ship might seem real there is just too much we don't know. And a lot about other ships we decide to ignore or don't know. I have been accussed of being a ji/kooker because I won't say ji/kook being real is impossible. But how can l? How would me saying ji/kook can't be real be any different to the aggressive ji/kookers who has come to me to say "Vmin is cute but ji/kook is real".

Of course every person might have their own level of what might convince them, but we also know that literally millions of other people are convinced of completely different things with incredible certainty.

I don't want to be scared to put my theories out there so they can be taken as facts.

I have said it before, and I know shippers are drawn to confidence, but that's the exact reason to why I choose not to be confident even though it gets me more hate and less followers.

***

So this is what I wrote a while ago... And hearing people worry about what might happen if I start making videos just made these thoughts resurface. Especially since I didn't feel that video was very analytical, but it still likely would make people notice Vmin in a "what if they are real" way. Again, I use moments that exists, but I also add them in a different context, with a Vmin narrative. If what I write or make seems legit and makes sense then my tone of being careful might not matter. People will get exposed to moments and ideas I highlight and then take them further. That's why I hesitate.

I don't think I am big or influential enough to do much, but just doing 'a little' shouldn't excuse it if it in the end leads to something bad, more than it leads to something good. That's why adding YouTube as a platform doesn't make much of a difference in my mind if I still do what I do here. Sure YouTube is bigger and things get spread faster... But I write much more analytical and questionable things here than I did in that video, and even if it gets spread slower and to less people isn't what I do here in a sense then worse?

If me making videos makes some of you nervous (which I understand and relate to) then what will it lead to if I post basically a book on everything weird I've seen and thought in regards to Vmin?

I want to feel like I add more good to the community than I bring bad. I always thought I was doing the former as I tried to make my followers feel open minded rather than convinced. Now I don't know where I stand anymore and so I feel even more unsure of what to do.

Maybe I should have kept this all to myself and not vented out my worries to you. But I take this rather seriously and while I love what I do and love being part of the Vmin community I am feeling conflicted and I felt like sharing why might be good for me.

I know this was long and I applaude you if you managed to read through it all. I am truly so happy to have gotten so many nice and understanding and kind messages from you all. And many of you even saying you are happy you came across my blog and that I brought a new perspective, made you more open minded or even kept you from turning delusional. It makes me feel like I at least did some things right. I purple you all. 💜

[jadelotusflower]

It’s Cold in that Fridge: The Case of Nakari Kelen

Since The Case of Mara Jade has been doing the rounds again, I’ve finally gone back to this post that has been sitting in my drafts for literally years. So let’s honour this absolute badass who deserved better:

Once upon a time, the Star Wars universe was but six films (and a tv series) in the story of the Skywalker family. But beyond George Lucas’ story was an absolute boatload of books, comics, games, and other materials that made up the Expanded Universe. When Disney purchased Lucasfilm and the rights to the Star Wars saga, everything in this universe was decanonised and deemed “Legends” - some aspects of this universe were retained or re-purposed, others sit in Disney’s figurative vault and will likely never see the light of day (and seeing how the ST turned out, maybe that’s for the best).

But this transition between Legends canon and Disney canon was not so simple, because the nature of publishing meant that there were novels approved during the time of Legends canon that would be released in the time of Disney canon. In particular, there had been the planned trilogy “Empire and Rebellion”, set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, with each novel from the perspective of one of The Big Three.  

Razor’s Edge (Leia) and Honor Among Thieves (Han) were released prior to the Great Canon Split of 2014.  But while the Luke-centric novel had been planned, it was not due to be released until well after the Split. So Heir to the Jedi (so called as an homage to the Legends progenitor Heir to the Empire) became one of the first books of the Disney canon.

What does this background have to do with Nakari Kelen?  Perhaps nothing, but I do wonder how the writing process was affected by the shift from Legends to Disney - was the novel a relic of the old EU with any reference the LFL storygroup didn’t like excised during editing, or was it a trendsetter for the new EU, a Sign of Things to Come?  

The most salient point being, of course, that Nakari Kelen - like so many love interests before her - was not allowed to go along her merry way at the conclusion of the novel, but was shoved into the fridge.

If there was one constant of the Legends EU, it was that Luke Skywalker’s love interests couldn’t catch a break. Mara Jade naturally lasted the longest relationship-wise, with almost twenty years of marriage to Luke before some bright spark decided she had to go (as per the aforementioned case study). But before Mara there was Jem, Shira Brie, and Gaeriel Captison (who came close to escaping the curse), and in the Legacy of the Force series they brought back sole survivors Akanah and Callista, only to kill them off for good too (and rather brutally, if I may add).

So perhaps when Kevin Hearne began writing HttJ within the confines of the Legends continuity, he was merely sticking to the status quo, or perhaps once subsumed by Disney they needed to make sure Luke's slate was clean (so to speak).  And I can’t put all the blame on Hearne since I don’t know whether it was his idea, or LFL mandated - but regardless it was a poor decision.

The root cause of fridging, imo, is limited imagination.  How best to cause your male protagonist pain if not kill off someone they love, or at least have strong feelings for? The answer is of course, easily. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Luke Skywalker of HttJ is fresh from his victory in ANH, a lieutenant in the Rebellion: young, not dumb, and full of...

Nakari Kalen is an absolute Queen a civilian volunteer and crack-shot sniper who loans her ship Desert Jewel to the Alliance. Luke is immediately attracted to her, they bond over a mutual love of fast ships and leaving behind desert home planets, and engage in the inexpert flirting of two nineteen year olds while also risking their lives several times over.

I want to make it clear: I actually really like this book. It's a breezy read, almost serialised as The Early Adventures of Luke Skywalker, and is ofttimes genuinely funny. And credit where it’s due to Hearne, many of of the supporting roles in the novel are female. Other than Nakari, there's Soonta, the Rodian who gives Luke her uncle’s lightsaber, Sakhet the Kupohan spy, and the Givin cryptographer/math genius Drusil Bephorin. In a genre where male characters are often the default for these kind of roles, it was nice to see, but makes the regressive fridging of Nakari even more egregious.

Luke and Nakari make a good team fighting brain-sucking monsters and Imperials, but more importantly they have fun together - she encourages him to work on his Force skills, and he successfully moves objects with his mind for the first time (leading to Nakari adorably dub him "a little noddle scooter"). It's a very sweet, if brief, relationship, and a respite from the danger of the mission. They spend the night together (leaving the reader to decide exactly what happened behind closed doors), and share a kiss before splitting up to try and escape bounty hunters. No prizes for guessing what happens to Nakari immediately after she received the Skywalker Kiss of Death.

I assume there were two motivating factors for why Hearne and/or LFL couldn't let Nakari live:

1. If she survived, fans would wonder why she doesn't appear in ESB/subsequent material.

I recall this bandied about on forums back at the time of the book's release, and to that I say - so what? Fans are always going to wonder, and try to paper over the gaps in canon, to make up their own headcanons to explain any any perceived inconsistencies. It's certainly no reason to kill someone off.

It is in fact possible for two young people to have a romance that just fizzles, or doesn’t work out for whatever reason - it should not require great maneuvering or explanation. If Nakari doesn’t show up in the next book in the timeline, what about it? The reader is smart enough to assume she and Luke broke up, decided to just remain friends, whatever. But it seems that the only way for a female character to exit stage left is for her to die, which is bullshit.

And actually, there's no reason why she couldn't have shown up again. ESB and RoTJ cover a month and a few days, respectively, of Luke's life - just because there was no mention of Nakari doesn't mean she didn't exist at that time, whether or not she and Luke were an item. She could have made an appearance in a subsequent novel, or Rebels, or the comics - she could have become a recurring character, showing up when the Rebellion needed her, or - heaven forbid - even have her own comic/book/show! Her existence in Star Wars canon didn't need to begin and end with Luke Skywalker, merely to service his plotline and backstory and abandoning the richness of her own.

No, the only reason Nakari had to die was to facilitate this:

It was a blow to the gut, realizing what that sudden absence meant. I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but I had felt Nakari's life snuffed out through the Force, and into that void where she had shone anger rushed in - anger, and a cold sense of raw power and invincibility...I took a step to join in the hunt but stopped, breathing heavily, unaccountably sweating even though I felt so cold inside and the power of the Force roiled within me... I shook with emotion and power, and none of it felt the way the Force had before...I saw what kind of space it was , a black hole that would always be hungry no matter how much I fed it. I might never feel warm again if I didn't get myself under control.

Luke feels the dark side and is tempted by the boost of power it offers him, but immediately identifies it as dangerous and unnatural. I can understand why Hearne wanted to include this - it is a book of firsts after all: Luke's first solo mission, his first time using telekenisis, and ending with story with his first experience of the dark side makes sense. But it wasn't necessary, which leads to:

2. How to push Luke to touch the dark side without killing someone he has romantic feelings for?

Also, obviously, shite of the bull (or nerf, if you prefer). Even if this brush with the dark side was absolutely necessary for the novel's climax, there's any number of ways it could be achieved. At this point, Luke is fresh from losing important people in his life - Owen and Beru, Ben, and Biggs - lumping another death on top of that a narrative trick for Luke to react not only to losing Nakari, but the others as well. But it's cheap, the first card in the deck, and why not show a bit of imagination? Luke is young and inexperienced enough at this point that any number of things could be the catalyst - the whole book he's struggling with his growing powers, why not try and reach too far in the firefight with the bounty hunters, his anger and frustration with himself in not doing enough trigger the dark side temptation? It would work thematically and doesn't involve a fridging that ultimately has very little payoff.

Because Nakari is killed less than ten pages from the end of the book - afterwards Luke grieves, but ultimately chooses to honour her memory and be grateful for what he learned with her, recommitting to becoming a Jedi. It's all very surface level, and once again a female character's death facilitates a male character's development. Was it so imperative that Luke lost someone he cared about as part of this story? Sure, this was a time of galactic civil war, and it's far from unrealistic that these stories have a high body count, but who to make collateral damage remains an authorial choice, and in this case Nakari Kelen was (a) a female character of color, (b) a love interest of the protagonist - not just of this book, but the entire Original Trilogy.

I don't know to what extent (if any) race had to play in the decision. I'm sure there was a segment of the fandom absolutely livid that Luke Skywalker kissed (and maybe had sex with) a black woman. Was her death LFL hedging its bets, or demonstrative of the general lack of attention/respect they show their characters of colour?

In any case this was a chance to stand out from the old EU and it's fridge full of Luke's dead girlfriends, but instead they chose to introduce and kill off Nakari for the sole purpose of Luke's manpain and character development, and that's gross.

And then there's this:

A grisly yet reliable fact about custom bounty hunter ships is that you can always count on them to have body bags stashed somewhere for the easy transport of their kills. They often have built-in refrigerated storage, too.

NAKARI IS KILLED AND LITERALLY STORED IN THE FUCKING FRIDGE I COULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT I WAS READING.

I really hope this was unintentional on Hearne's part, because yikes. He was halfway there, this book was full of interesting female characters who had agency - Drusil in particular was a delight with her super math and inability to understand human interaction. Nakari was full of life and fun - capable but relatable, showing a different side of the Rebellion and those that suffered under the Empire's rule. Fridging her in her first appearance is considerably more vile, because it reduces her to a footnote of Luke's story, a plot device to Help Him Grow, rather than a springboard to tell more of her own story.

Because Nakari was a compelling character ripe for spinoff potential. I would absolutely have read or watched her continued adventures, juggling missions for her father's Biolabs company and trying to aid the Rebellion, shooting her slug rifle and cracking wise, maybe even finding a way to amplify her mother's song Vader's Many Prosthetic Parts to really stick it to the Empire, or try and free the political prisoners on Kessel.

The old EU was made great by allies and enemies of Our Heroes showing up again to help or hinder them, and/or branching out into their own material. We fell in love with them, and followed their stories even as they diverged from the main saga, eager to read more about their lives.

Nakari Kelen never got that chance. In many ways, she exemplified what Disney Star Wars was to become: an exercise in wasted potential.

[bellatrixobsessed1]

What do you consider demonizing Azula vs objectively describing her less flattering traits and harmful actions?

Honestly, it all comes down to word choice and language at the end of the day imo. If someone’s character analysis is presented with a certain tone I’m more inclined to say that they are demonizing her. For example saying that “ as a child Azula demonstrated red flags for mental illness and should have been helped” is a lot less antagonizing than “Azula was born evil, she liked to tease and bully Zuko from the start.” One of these statements addresses the complexities of her situation (a broken home and several poor adult influences/examples) while the other basically places full blame on a child. Things like that. I really, really do believe that it’s all about the tone an Azula analysis is presented in. 

Personally I would agree that some of her childhood behaviors, like setting Zuko’s pants on fire and burning some of the bushes in the place garden were huge red flags. They are harmful actions. BUT a lot of those could be 1. attention getting antics because her mother usually paid more attention to her when she misbehaved. 2. Her emulating Ozai and his attitude. And stuff like, “dad’s going to kill you.” Is very much Azula mimicking what her father demonstrated as well as her father actively rewarding her for behaviors like that. These are definitely harmful actions that started getting worse as she got older. An analysis like that is fair and not demonizing imo, because it recognizes that Azula is still a kid and it doesn’t write off the possibility for her to unlearn some of these behaviors later in life with the right help. 

While something like, “even child Azula is a insane, look what she did to Zuko! What kind of sociopath sings-songs about someone’s dad killing them!?” Here is an example of using buzzwords and implying that mental illness as something that automatically makes someone evil. It puts all blame on Azula while factoring out the adults in her life that either sat passive or actively taught her these behaviors. This, imo, is demonizing. 

One of my biggest peeves at the moment is when they say that fucking Ozai and Zhao are more redeemable. Zhao was literally seen in the Avatar universe version of Hell. It is canon that he did not get redemption. So by extension it is canon that he is NOT more redeemable than Azula whose fate is still ambiguous. And there is not one argument that can convince me that the grown ass man who burned his own son’s face off while tearing apart his self-worth is more redeemable than a fourteen year old girl. There is not one argument that can convince me that a man who made a weapon out of his daughter and (heavily implied) abused his wife (at least emotionally) is more redeemable than a fourteen year old girl. Usually I try to keep an open mind and be nice about my opinions in these discourses but I just can’t with this one; I think that this particular statement is stupid as hell. Ozai and (especially in canon and in Hell) Zhao are NOT more redeemable than Azula. Bye, miss me with that dumb shit. 

Some more specific examples that come to mind are;

 When people make Azula out to be a murderer and/or a sadist

The turtle duck thing

Baby Azula.  

The murder thing drives me nuts because, first of all, she’s a solider. She’s at war. Her one kill was a combat kill, he came back to life, and he was entering the Avatar state. Now correct me if I’m wrong but Aang killed Zhao in the Avatar state. You can’t tell me that no one died or was seriously injured in the episode ‘The Avatar State’. So of course she’s gonna shoot him down; he could have killed her just as well. He had no control over the Avatar state at the time. 

Furthermore she has the least amount of collateral damage. And one of the smallest body counts. Aang has killed so many background characters via the Avatar state. Sokka killed Combustion man. Sokka, Suki, and Toph killed several soldiers by crashing those war blimps in the finale. I think that you get the point. But none of them get called murders like Azula does. Everyone seems to be well aware that all of those were combat kills. The reason they get called soldiers instead of murders is because they are protagonists. 

Azula is not a murder. She is a solider. Combat kills are different than murder. They are horrible and unfortunate all the same but it isn’t murder. 

And then there’s the sadist claim. At best I think that that’s a misinterpretation of character. At least from my personal POV. I've seen it argued that she’s not a sadist but only because it’s more coinvent not to be; that she would be one if  she had time for it. But I think that a true sadist wouldn’t give a shit if it’s not convenient. If she were a sadist I feel like she would go out of her way to hurt people like Chit Sang even if it’s not necessary. Azula does only what’s necessary and that’s it. I do think that Azula is merciful. Perhaps not conventionally so but she isn’t cruel. She takes prisoners and as far as we’ve seen on screen those prisoners aren’t treated particularly bad (by Azula anyhow). She doesn’t torture her prisoners and she doesn’t kill them. 

Now, I will give more of an open mind to people who say that she is an EMOTIONAL sadist of sorts. I do think that she gets a kick out of scaring people and bullying people. I’m on the fence with this argument though because how much of her getting a kick out of Zuko’s suffering is her also being relieved that it is not her. And how much of it is more run of the mill teenage bullying? This is one thing where I’m more than willing to hear from the other side. 

I think that the murderer and sadism thing is very much an attempt to demonize her. I think that it can be an exaggeration of her unflattering behaviors. I’m not saying that the things she did aren’t harmful but I do think that some people over exaggerate them or make up stuff that isn’t there; I’ve seen people state that she ‘probably killed so many soldiers off screen’. There is no canon evidence to support this? Likewise these are generally the same people who tell Azula fans that they can’t say Azula was abused off screen. 

The other big one is the turtleduck one. Zuko demonstrates how Azula feeds turtleducks. He throws a piece of bread. I don’t know where the rock thing came from. Furthermore I very much think that Azula chucking a loaf of bread at a turtleduck is just a small child being a little shit. When I was like five or six I yeeted a good half a loaf at a duck because, “the more food they get the happier they are, right????” To me that just seems more like a small child who has not learned impulse control than a child who likes hurting animals. This whole argument, at least imo, is actively demonizing a child for actions that aren’t exactly uncommon for children. The problem is when the child doesn’t learn that yeeting whole loafs at turtleducks is a bad thing. THIS is where I see a fair argument forming because (as of late) Azula didn’t seem to have unlearned this behavior. This is an example of one of those red flags I mentioned in the first paragraph. Which is where some nuance and critical thinking needs to come in. The complexities that I mentioned above about how the child isn’t 100% to blame here. The adults in her life should have tried to teach her better and/or Ozai need to fuck on off and stop teaching her to do wrong. 

And finally baby Azula. I’ll just drop a link here because I already talked about this. But the tone of The Search literally tried to demonize a whole baby. The way the narrative decided frame her was really unnecessary. I really don’t see how this scene contributed to the story other than to remind readers that ‘Azula was always evil, see!’ Nevermind that she’s sleeping in a whole crib. Because that’s a literal infant. 

Anyhow I might come back to this later to add more or clarify but I’m about to make lunch so I’ll end this here for now. Feel free to discuss further. I definitely don’t mind hearing from the other side so long as arguments are respectful and open minded.

[morethanonepage]

what would you say are the dynamics and themes that interest you most? Also frankly I'm surprised you read any star wars fic still, I agree on just wanting to read some good finnpoe but that has gotten increasingly futile.

i mean the thing i potentially like so much about finnpoe is that they BOTH have very specific, in some ways very different traumas (finn being a child soldier and growing up in such a highly regulated way where he had basically no bodily autonomy VS poe being mind-raped AND seeing his inability to stop it as having betrayed his own people AND seeing so many of his friends & comrades die in quick succession AND still recovering from the loss of his mother as a child and Muran when he was commanding Rapier Squadron) but they both have a tendency to compartmentalize that and continue to function on their own while being loyal (Finn’s devotion to Rey, which gets a lot of flack in fandom but like -- that’s one of the first people he’s been able to form a connection with!! AND I think he lowkey feels that it’s his fault Rey got dragged into -- everything, so he feels a great deal of responsibility for protecting her) and passionate about a cause (Poe basically killing himself to keep the Ideals Of The Republic Alive, be it through trying to hunt down the FO before he’s even part of the Resistance, to doing everything he can to keep the Resistance afloat once he is). 

like they have those similarities -- a real sense of duty and responsibility toward their friends and those they’re fighting with -- but they have fundamental differences in approach that the movies did a shitty job of extrapolating on when it could’ve been such an interesting conflict: Poe is the idealist and thinks of duty to a higher ideal first and foremost (like Leia and his mother, tbh) whereas Finn is more of a pessimist and a cynic and believes protecting your friends and loved ones from the substantial evil is hard enough without setting up to FIGHT ALL OF THE BAD IN THE UNIVERSE like Poe wants/believes he has to do. and both of these things are based so much on their upbringings! Poe grew up with those ideals and freedoms and parents who fought, successfully, to protect them, and believes he owes it to them to live up to their example and protect them as well; Finn has SEEN the evil of the FO firsthand and seen everyone around him subsumed by it, believes it to be omnipotent bc for him and his squad mates it literally was. escaping all of that was an act of powerful resistance on its own!

idk i just think a lot of the fandom’s take on this is, if you focus on finn ~running away~ in canon or not wanting to join up with the Resistance just ‘cause it’s ~the right thing to do~ you’re feeding into this idea of black men being cowards and/or selfish when it’s like no! that’s the consequence of his trauma: he’s running away from an abuser who controlled every aspect of his life, who’s set up to hunt him down and destroy planets and take over the universe in a way that’ll mean he’s NEVER safe, and he knows every single person he grew up with and had some affection for are a part of it too, which on the one hand he might be reluctant to fight them, but on the other they 100% won’t be reluctant to fight him AND they know him well enough to know his weaknesses. 

all of this is A LOT and it’s heavy and dark stuff, which i GET can be hard to work into like, light fluffy fic about finn finally being happy or learning what sex is or w/e, and not everything about fanfic has to be a ~deep exploration~ of character’s inner turmoil but like -- idk. there’s ways of dealing with these elements of finn’s backstory without making the whole thing drudging tragedy porn (which is ANOTHER fanfic trend i can’t stand -- neither Finn nor Poe are characters entirely without hope and fics that treat either of their tragedies [lbr it’s mostly poe’s that get dealt with] as the focus or main characteristic of either also bum me out) and I just really wish fandom had more interest in it. 

Another factor that KILLS ME is how Poe has (justifiably) developed OBVIOUS distrust for the force and force users, and would have such a fundamentally hard time dealing with the fact that Finn is one. Canon didn’t even let Finn be explicitly force sensitive, and fandom is like YAY FINN IS FORCE SENSITIVE, NOW HE CAN USE THE FORCE TO BONE (POE), and any fic that does touch on it makes Poe out to be ~unreasonable for not trusting Finn, or having his distrust be a consequence of his PTSD alone, and a sign he has to deal with his shit VS a very real issue that Poe might genuinely not be able to get over: the force CAN be creepy and is too easy to abuse, and a lot of what Poe’s seen it used for WAS bad. 

the other dimension of all this is, accidentally or not, these dynamics take on all sorts of real-world implications given both actor’s identities -- the explicit parallels between Finn’s upbringing and chattel slavery (taken from his family at an early age, losing all connection with his birthplace and culture, seen as useful but dispensable by an oppressive, mostly-white empire)  & its legacy for Black Americans (that lack of connection with a historical homeland and the loss of a cultural connection that came from it) VS the first generation latinx immigrant narrative that Poe and his family embody (the sacrifice for and long separation from a child in the service of giving them a better life, the burden that child takes upon themselves to make that sacrifice worth it by excelling in certain spheres, the drive to be the VERY BEST representative of their new culture, the embrace of that culture’s ideals bc they don’t want to think their parents sacrificed everything for a lie [with the creeping knowledge and experience to know many of those ideals are flawed and not always lived up to]). 

and the canon ignores that bc addressing it would require world building that couldn’t center/come back to the Skywalkers in some way (and the only family dynamics it’s interested in is DADDY ISSUES, fucking Free Fall), and fandom doesn’t care about it bc it’s mostly white girls who, AT BEST, decide to focus on the potential ~sexuality conflicts (coming out, family rejection, etc) when writing real world AUS, without dealing with the intersectionality of a black and a brown man, their respective cultural context, and the resultant conflicts those would create beyond, idk, “POCs are always homophobic so finn and/or poe’s parents kicked them out or w/e”.  and like I really don’t WANT these people trying to grapple with the complexity of a queer, interracial relationship where neither participant is white (i’ve seen enough just watching them grapple with either character’s sexuality tbh). 

but idk, that’s what’s interesting to me: finn and poe’s backgrounds and how those set up fundamental conflict points for both of them, both in canon (Poe’s devotion to the cause of liberty and democracy for the whole galaxy VS Finn’s duty to the people he loves over anything else) and in a real world au (Black people have a fundamentally different relationship to the American Ideal than Latinx immigrants do, for very good reasons). And I want those things to be significant elements of the characterization for both, but not the ONLY elements of characterization for both: stories should, in even some small way, be about what characters WANT (even if it is just “to fuck,” as it often is when I write [ok it’s usually “to love but be able to show it without saying it, hence the fucking”]) and so few fics, these days, give me any sense of what finn and poe want besides, vaguely “each other” (”because the author feels like they have to write them bc the actors are hot/for woke points”) and that is just -- boring to me. 

also god i would just love to read some dialogue that isn’t just twitter/tumblr memes and/or mcu level mean quips. like, just in general. 

[paradife-loft]

why the nie sect leaders’ inevitable death by qi deviation isn’t (just) about the sabers

(now at AO3!)

So, okay, this is a meta I’ve been working on/wanting to write/dropping hints to various people about now for quite a while! I think it’s significant thematically to some of the main questions MDZS/CQL asks, about cycles of justice and vengeance, the tension between personal agency and aspects of a situation outside one’s control, and good intentions often not being enough on their own, particularly to forestall problems resulting from imperfect or fatally flawed means to an end.

As a fantasy story, I think one of the strengths of MDZS/CQL is how it uses magic to reflect aspects of its thematic questions in certain cases as literal external forces, events that exist in a format outside just a character’s internal journey. The metaphors and proper social and personal orders these characters live by, have very real physical consequences in the world that result from the existence and manipulation of magical/spiritual energies.

And to my view, the part of this that I want to make the case for here, is how this relates to the Nie sect’s cultivation practises, and why I think the clan’s history of leaders succumbing to instability and qi deviation is a more complicated interplay of a few different factors, rather than just an externally-imposed illness whose source is purely their saber spirits.

* * *

Like, okay. The characters and narrative do, in fact, spend a lot of time discussing the Nie sect leaders’ early violent deaths in the context of their sabers’ spirits becoming angry and aggressive and affecting their mental and spiritual stability. So it makes sense to focus on those actual items as the essential reason behind why they qi deviate and end up dying the way they do. But there was something… logically unsatisfying to me about the idea that just the number of edges on your bladed weapon would make such a difference that sword spirits (also generally used for killing! because they’re also deadly weapons!) are apparently morally neutral but sabers, on the other hand, just Cannot Stop with the killing once they’ve gotten a taste of it.

But if you take an experimental step away from the idea that sabers must somehow be Inherently Different from swords in their response to violence - what possible explanations are left? Or, asked a different way - what makes the Nie sect’s ideological cultivation focus distinct from other sects’? The Lan focus on regulation and self-restraint as the path to goodness; the Jiang focus on self-knowledge and following what you know as right even against difficult odds; the Jin seem to emphasise value in beauty and unique rarity… and what the Nie seem to place the most value on, is dispensation of justice and abhorring evil, even to an extent that refuses attempts at compromise.

The only problem is, the justice that they (and plenty of others) seem to focus on most often, is justice for capital crimes - paying with a life for a life - and no matter how righteous and justified the motives, what this still ends up with is a spiritual path that spends a comparatively awful lot of time on seeking others’ deaths. And we see, throughout the story, more than one thematic hint that this is maybe not the best method for moving toward harmony or immortality.

Lan Qiren’s impromptu quiz of Wei Wuxian when the latter is fucking off in class. His example problem specifies the resentful spirit was an executioner in life (societally-sanctioned to kill others for heinous crimes), and Wei Wuxian notes that one who’s killed so many is a very likely sort to become a resentful corpse; meanwhile his many victims also remain tethered to cycles of vengeance and anger, able to be easily stirred up into a force of resentful energy that would target him if their corpses were disturbed.

The dialogue between Wei Wuxian and Fang Mengchen in the Burial Mounds after the attempted siege turns into the major sects being saved from a trap. It’s all very fine and good to hold a grudge, to see a lack of justice for a harm that can’t ever be undone or repaired when the one who caused it gets to be alive and well (or even not!), but as Wei Wuxian says - what are you going to do about it? It’s so easy for there to always be a wrong that needs righting (in a real or alleged guilty party’s blood). But will it get you anywhere? Can a person, can a society, mete out justice or vengeance once and have that wipe the slate clean, or will the wound reopen again and demand yet more suffering? Where does it end?

The discussion about the Nie’s ancestral saber halls with Huisang, where Wei Wuxian notes that the method of suppressing the saber spirits edges rather close to demonic cultivation. In literal terms, that question seems to be directed at the actual use of evil individuals’ transforming corpses to contain the sabers’ power. But I think the entire conversation, and Huisang’s need to swear them to secrecy and enlistment as backup if other clans find out and get angry, contains a certain amount of thematic subtext reflecting not just on the saber tomb itself, but the Nie clan’s cultivation as a whole. These are significant and revered family heirlooms, not easily or justly discarded, but maintaining them isn’t without cost, and the spiritual fallout rests on the edge of a knife, needing the perpetual presence of an evil to fight to remain in balance: the saber tomb is both the literal and metaphorical end result of the clan leaders’ cultivation path.

“But why,” you may ask, “if the principles underlying the Nie sect’s whole culture have an edge that’s sharper and more harmful to the user’s qi than other cultivation philosophies of the rest of the sword-using sects, do we only see “death by qi deviation” as an issue for the sect leaders, and not more widespread among a larger portion of the disciples?”

And that’s where the “(just)” part of the title of this post comes in, because that aspect is where the difference comes down to the sabers - or, specifically, the named sabers that have spirits of their own. The spiritual sabers aren’t bloodthirsty and excited to haunt and/or kill people right out of the gate, but rather, as Huisang explains, they become restless after spending their wielder’s lifetime destroying evil. A cultivator and their spiritual tools develop a relationship over time, as their cultivation is practised and refined - they bond, they recognise one another, and crucially, they seem to be able to share a kind of spiritual feedback loop, with the energies and intentions of one connecting to and ideally bolstering the strength of the other. The Nie clan in general seems marked by particularly strong relationships between individual cultivator and weapon, considering the sabers’ refusal to allow a clan leader’s descendants to inherent them, and both the circumstances of Mingjue’s father’s death and his own trauma reaction to that death.

So in this case, the illness and eventual qi deviations the Nie clan leaders suffer, the way the saber spirits come to weigh on their minds and emotions, make sense to me as a confluence of the particularly close bond and almost spiritual symbiosis between wielder and weapon, and the particular subject of emphasis that the clan leader lives by in how they train with and use that weapon. Focusing on justice as killing, as violent destruction of evil (the last resort one should aspire to after other solutions have failed, per Lan Qiren’s lesson), may not be the most spiritually healthy in any circumstance, but it’s only when you have half a lifetime’s worth of a mental feedback loop between you and this external, semi-sentient part of yourself that’s reinforcing the spiritual toll of that path, that you actually end up with a resulting qi deviation and death.

* * *

So, anyway, I do want to be clear having put forth this argument, that my point here is not to condemn the Nies, nor for that matter blame the sect leaders for their own deaths - that’s very much not in line with how the text itself displays flaws and virtues as two sides of the same coin (at times divided only by the context around them), and shows how destructive consequences can result from the best of intentions. For that matter, each major sect has unquestionably valuable basic principles at its heart, and just like microcosms of any culture, society, or group, displays instances of those principles being distorted, misaimed, or taken to extremes in ways that cause disharmony and pain to those in their path.

I think the way it plays out for the Nie clan just interests me in particular because of the way their uniqueness in cultivation method plays such known havoc with its members’ bodies and minds, and the way it straddles the divide between upright and demonic cultivation. MDZS asks, I think, more questions than it offers definitive answers to, and a significant one of those is, even if vengeance, even if death-as-justice is righteous, where do you balance all the harm done to others (up to and including) the justice-seeker in deciding whether to continue down that path of action?

And if it’s the Nie sect’s spiritual focus in combination with the spirits of their sabers that wear down a slow stream of damage to their qi, rather than simply the external threat of the sabers alone - that seems congruent, to me, with the suggestions offered elsewhere in the story.

[takaraphoenix]

Buffy Season 8: Review

It’s bad. It’s just... really... bad. That’s the TL;DR of this review. There was one (1) good thing about this season and that was the return of Oz. So if you’re looking for something that hypes season 8? This is not it. If you are confused, angry or salty about season 8? Hi, yes, me too.

Starting at the beginning. At first, I was really happy that they introduced more characters of color, with Renee and Satsu. And when Renee was then even “promoted” to Xander’s love interest? Nice. The two were even cute.

But no. That was all just the set-up to fridge her. Which, I am so very tired of that trope. And that is what that was. That wasn’t just a slayer dying during a fight. The entire issue of her death focused on her and Xander, building up to their relationship, setting them up for their first date, having her be prominently featured, just to then kill her off and have Xander avenge her.

What made it feel even worse - worse than just the fridging - was that they really had to fridge one of their very few women of color. And, to top it off, spend the entire issue in which she dies having her subjected to racism. Just great. Really, you managed to make an already shitty trope even worse. That’s impressive.

The racism itself too. Dracula. They just decided to make Dracula totally racist now, huh? and it doesn’t get a pass just because Xander points out in the comic that he doesn’t remember Dracula being this racist. Because he wasn’t. This Dracula just throws around slurs left and right in a way that feels more like the writers just really wanted to use slurs. Because the character? He was suave, charming, heck he charmed the straight men and the lesbians too when he was on the show. He was a smooth talker. This Dracula? He just... He was just racist and rude in general. Why.

Moving on from the racism to the next failure in rep. The gays. At this point in time I am simply convinced that Joss Whedon is entirely unfamiliar with the concept of bisexuality.

I know I’ve already made a separate post complaining about this, but it needs mentioning in the review of the season too. Having Buffy hook up with a lesbian twice, but #NoHomo, just a straight girl in her “experimental phase”. That’s just cringey and also offensive. Just... make her... come out as a bisexual? It’s not like the writing in the show hadn’t already set her up with quite the bi vibes.

Instead, the narrative made it sound like the only options would be to be straight or to now suddenly turn “into” a lesbian. Which is also offensive on itself, because - as this very show had proven on screen - lesbians can come out later in life and genuinely, I adore Willow’s arc. For her narrative, it fit to have her come out as a lesbian, the circumstances and her life fit for that. I absolutely agree that it would have been weird for Buffy to have a sudden coming out as a lesbian at that point in her life and after everything, but referring to it as turning into a dyke was just not great.

And lesbian wasn’t the only option. Though, I’m unsure Whedon knows that, considering that 6/6 canon queer characters are homosexual and 4/4 wlw are lesbians. They just keep introducing more lesbians - which, as a lesbian I am always in favor of more lesbians. However, when you have a very small number (2) of queer characters, it figures you can not cover all the sexualities and it’s even fair that even with two, you still choose to have them both be the same sexuality. But... the more you add? The more questionable it becomes that you limit it to one sexuality only.

This arc would have so beautifully set up for Buffy to come out as bi. But no.

And while we’re on the wlw; one of the things I always loved about Buffy was that the lesbians weren’t just there for the male gaze, they weren’t oversexualized. They desired each other, they even had sex. But... in a normal frame work, to a normal amount, meaning equal to how the straights were handled. I always liked that, because especially in early days, lesbians were usually just there to look really hot and have hot sex that straight men could get off to. Well, consider me very unimpressed with the comics, because... man are lesbians sexualized now. Willow gets a hot constantly naked snake goddess girlfriend whom she can only contact by - and I am not making this up - having an orgasm. So we prelude the trip by her having sex with Kennedy, before waking up all nude in snake goddess’ realm and usually having am makeout session or sex with her too while doing whatever business she has with her. So much nakedness, so much oversexualization. Really... disappointing.

Staying on the romance but turning to the other Summers sister, I truly can’t believe they made Xander/Dawn canon. Like, I can not comprehend they decided to make that a canon ship.

Sure, Dawnie’s had a crush on Xander since the literal beginning of Dawn. And that was... cute, honestly. Fifteen year old girls have crushes on cute older guys who are nice to them. Figures. Adorable. But she kind of... grew out of that over the course of the show? Or so it seemed...

And Xander. One of the things I loved about Xander was that Dawn was always a total no go. She was Buffy’s sister, heck, she was kind of every Scoobie’s little sister. He had always had brotherly advise for her. Heck, in this comic he points out that it’s weird since he’s known her since she was little - and yeah it is. It’s not weird when two people were both little together, but when one was sixteen when the other was eleven and one has babysat the other? That’s weird.

Getting infinitely more disturbing by the fact that she... literally... just turned eighteen. If they had put this into a rather later season, or a bigger time skip, had Dawn been A WomanTM for a few years now and Xander had gotten around to separating the idea of kiddo!Dawnie from the woman she has become, but Dawn is only eighteen, she hasn’t become a woman yet. She just turned legal to bang and thus, a switch was flipped in Xander’s mind, putting her on his radar. And just... no. Why.

And even beyond this decision; Dawn spends the first third of this season being slut-shamed in ridiculous ways. Which is also tiresome. I am the last person to defend cheaters, but there’s a difference between “You cheated and are being held accountable for it” and “You cheated so now you are cursed to be a giant, a centaur and then a porcellain doll for weeks at a time, being publicly humiliated and having control over your body taken away from you”. That was... sure a choice.

Moving on to the actual main problem of this season. The plot.

Starting with the incomprehensibly dumb idea of “hey let’s retreat to Tibet, put a huge target on Oz’s new home and get rid of all of our magic. surely that will not come to bite us in the arse when the bad guys find us”. Naturally, it came back to bite them in their collective asses. This was just... No one objected or pointed out how dumb that plan was? Really? No one? Really?

Anyway, let’s talk villains. And work our way up there. The return of Amy and Warren. Once again, I ask why. I’m still salty about the 180° Amy did from sweet Wiccan to wicked bitch after her stint as a rat, but having her now... hook up with Warren, the second biggest misogynist on this show, who is also skinless. She used a spell to keep him alive but she couldn’t... give the spell a color? Anything? Anything to not make him look flayed? Because this was just unnecessarily gross body-horror.

Not to mention the... lack of reaction? Sure, some spoke grumpily against working with Warren. But... this is Warren. The guy who killed Tara when he was trying to kill Buffy. There really should have been more breather-scenes of the Scoobies talking about this, digesting the fact that the guy was still alive and more so when they worked with him.

But nevermind them, because they’re working for Angel. Because Angel’s the villain behind this season. I mean, he was manipulated into that by Twilight, but manipulated means he still chose to do it.

Now let me preface that I might not ship Angel/Buffy, but that really only factors marginally in here, because this plot would be bullshit even if it were my OTP.

We now retcon the creation of the Slayers as not just being something dirty old men did in a cave, it was now all the greater plan of the universe. Which. Might have worked had Slayers been... naturally occuring. And not created by men, forcing this upon a young woman. Sure, what people do can be seen as the greater plan of the universe too if you will, but that seems like a cop-out that absolves bad people of their bad choices and deeds.

Anyway. The universe created Slayers and vampires and the ““balance”“ between them (which is bullshit anyway because 1 Slayer vs thousands of vampires... not balanced at all), including the now supposedly destined romance between Angel and Buffy.

Both get rewarded with super-powers now so they can super-fuck and thus give birth to a new universe. That universe is called Twilight and manifests as a burning, winged, green lion who can talk (because that sure is how I always headcanoned Angel/Buffy’s children to look like /s) and who, through time-travel shenannigans, has been manipulating Angel into his own creation.

The magic pull between them is so strong that it overrides the “Angel just caused the death of over two-hundred Slayers” so Buffy fucks him.

At which point I just... this season was flat-out character assassination of Angel? He was manipulated by the bad guy. Not controlled, manipulated. He caused the death of hundreds. He threw everything he stood for and believed in out the window for the promise of a paradise where he could be with Buffy, when the real Angel has chosen other things, higher goals, over being with Buffy over and over again, because that’s what they do. That is their whole thing, they choose the good of the world over being together. They have always been a “will they/won’t they?” where the answer is they won’t, because they know they are needed elsewhere, by others. But now Angel just... doesn’t care about all that anymore, or heck about his own son and his friends, ready to abandon everything for this.

And then when Twilight is born and consequently abandoned by Buffy, who still prioritizes her friends, family and the world over being with Angel, Angel actually... needs convincing in the abandoning? Because, again, character assassination. Ultimately, Angel gets controlled by Twilight and used to kill Giles and try to kill Buffy.

But thanks to the Deus Ex Machina of Spike dropping in in the final arc, they know how to stop this. He hasn’t been in this season so far, because - truly in line with this season - he was off being the king of a race of alien bugs, traveling in their space-ship.

To stop this all, they go back to Sunnydale, where of course the “heart of the Earth” is located, the seed that contains all magic, and destroy it, and with it all magic. Also, the Master was apparently always just there to guard that seed. He is now back from the dead!

Let me summarize that once more, just for emphasis: The universe wanted Buffy and Angel to fuck so they can give birth to a new universe that personifies as a green, winged, burning lion but before it can destroy our universe, Spike, now king of an alien bug race, delivers the solution to go back to Sunnydale and destroy the seed of all magic that is being guarded by a resurrected Master.

How do you read that with a straight face? How do you pitch that? This is just so incomprehensibly stupid.

We end the comic with Buffy as a waitress, hated by many, Xander and Dawn now have an apartment and are playing house, Willow broke up with Kennedy because she realized she is in love with the snake goddess she will now never get to see again, Giles is dead, Faith somehow inherited everything from Giles and she is also the designated Angel-sitter now.

[samrosemodblog]

Time for Sam Ramblings! It's been a while since I rambled about something. Also whose ready for some Fandom Whiplash?

Cause I'm rambling about Homestuck.

Homestuck is strange to me cause I was in the PRIME position to absolutely adore it when it premiered, on account of being a huge fan of the series that came before it, Problem Sleuth.

God I loved Problem Sleuth. One of the rare series where from basically page 1 it had me busting my gut with the absurdities.

So I figured I'd love Homestuck too. And while I did dig it for a while, it was always kinda just "Okay" with me going along with the motions. And I DEFINITELY didn't understand the story telling pacing on account of all the time travel shenanigans going on, or the way Hussie decided to EXECUTE those time travel narratives.

I remember dropping out of reading the story around the time of Part 5 airing, you know, when the Trolls REALLY got involved in the story. Which is funny because apparently from what I've seen, this is everyone in the fandom's favorite part of the story.

And I'm rambling about this NOW, because I decided for the kicks to go back and listen to a Youtube Reading of Homestuck, just so I could actually say I'd seen all of Homestuck one day.

And those readings just got to the start of Act 5 now which means I'm all caught up from my past. So I wanted to put my thoughts to paper and then toss them into the void for anyone who cares.

The rest under a Read More!

To start my thoughts, a second read of Homestuck has done a lot for my understanding of Homestuck's story, even if I forgot a LOT of what happened near the end of act 4 on retrospective.

Having even some knowledge of the future meant that when those events occurred in the past, they made INFINITELY more sense than an initial linear timeline viewing of the story.

So in some senses I really was enjoying the story more this time around than I did the first time, though I think I can identify more of what the issue this time around is of why it just feels OKAY in comparison to Problem Sletuh.

Homestuck is basically a game within a game within a Webcomic, narratively speaking. All of that is LITERAL in terms of the story being told, even the 4th Wall is literally part of the story.

And part of the disconnected feeling is that the "Game" of Sburb, the game that starts the story off in Act 1, isn't really used to its full potential.

Like when Act 1 first started, I was FULLY into the idea of this double-layered story telling of kids playing a game and using the game mechanics while they were 'controlled' by a game on the outside.

Like I said, it's LITERALLY a game within a game story telling.

But the Game never really plays out to any meaningful effect. The 'Game' of Sburb is just a plot device that gives the kids, essentially, alchemy super powers.

Sure they can KIND of alter the area they spawn in, but that never really plays any kind of factor in the larger space of the story (at least as far as up to Act 5 is concerned, maybe I'm wrong here, but even if it DOES the feeling of disconnect is still there for all of Acts 1 through 4).

Like. I imagine Problem Sleuth, where the world FUNCTIONALLY is a dream world running on Dream Logic.

One of the first things that happens is the main character pulling a window off of the wall, but still being able to use it as a window to where the window exited out to, like a moving portal.

Imagine THOSE kind of shenanigans but with the game world. Being able to treat reality as if it existed in dream logic.

A story where Rose was able to take the windows on John's house and make duplicates of them around the world, giving John fast access back to his house.

If the new world they were exploring within Sburb was a hostile and dangerous world, and they made themselves safe havens that were essentially copy + pastes of their homes, with door portals that lead them between these havens, and allow them to 'fast travel' between locations.

The Game would be their world world, because the story would be dictated of them essentially living IN the game! And they ESSENTIALLY always have! They just never had direct access to that game until Sburb existed!

But of course this never really happens in the story.

Instead you get drawn into a confusing game within a game within a webcomic story, combined with so much time travel you can't even nervously shift in place without bumping into SOMETHING that was directly involved in time travel.

And that's not even getting into the whole absurdity of the 'Dream' world ALSO being the antagonist world that the kids are fighting against.

Essentially Homestuck gets bogged down REAL quick with all of these other story elements that, at least FEEL, completely separated from the game in the first place.

And sure, I get that part of the problem in the story is essentially that BECAUSE the kids prototyped the kernel sprite with Clowns, cats, pink, and birds that it caused the main villain to be infuriated over having to wear a stupid hat, but it's such a minor detail that it gets entirely lost in the shuffle!

It's not that any of this is necessarily bad, after all Homestuck's fandom was fucking HUGE when it came on the scene (especially with the trolls), but it definitely had always left me with a feeling of "It feels like a lot could be done with this concept, but instead of doing anything with it, we went with a strange time-travel and alien home-worlds warring narrative instead"

But I suppose this is all relative. It's not necessarily a BAD story, it's just one that leaves a lot up to the reader to figure things out and/or wait for them to be figured out on their own, and that can be kind of tough to deal with.

Also some of the language hasn't held up, at all. And I don't think it even held up even back then. 10 years is a long time in terms of cultural shifts, but even still oof.

But that's a minor part at the very least and doesn't come up very often, so I can at least shrug it off for now.

Anyways, that caps off my feelings of the first 4 acts as they exist right now. And I wanted to get them down because one of the most common reading advice for people new to Homestuck is "Skip to Act 3!" and it's like

That's such terrible advice and not a great way to kick off this huge adventure lol

But at least I think I figured out WHY Acts 1 through 4 gave me such a "This is okay" feeling, as said above.

But what kicked me out of reading the rest was Part 5 Act 1 (Seriously why isn't it just Act 5 and 6?? They're long enough to be separate acts, lord).

EVERYONE ELSE seemed to adore the trolls and loved exploring their world and getting to know them more.

They annoyed the Hell out of me originally.

Not only had I been thrown off/hated the whole fact that John made his own family and friends and himself RANDOMLY AND WITHOUT ANY THOUGHT (Like he literally just stumbles into a room and goes ahead and makes the paradoxes and just... Just does things??? UGH I STILL HATE IT), but then these assholes came along and just had COMPLETELY obnoxious personalities and text chats that were a pain in the ass to read and took over the ENTIRE STORY away from the characters I actually cared about.

ALSO PERSTERCHUM LOGS ARE WAY TOO LONG, EVEN FROM THE START OF THE STORY, EVERY TIME IT'S LIKE 10 MINUTES TO READ WHAT'S GOING ON, I SWEAR TO GOD-

So I just wanted to put my thoughts down on what Homestuck had been TO ME so far before I end up dragging myself through the rest of the story that I HAVEN'T seen until now.

I believe I got spoiled on how the story ends from a tumblr post but my memory of it is really vague and I don't remember HOW they get to that conclusion, but it felt very Problem-Sleuthy in how it ended so ya know.

Either way, it will be interesting to see if any of my feelings end up changing here. I doubt I'll ever be officially part of the 'Fandom' like other people were, but hey, if I get to the end of the story and like what I have so far I can at least partake in the fanart and fanfics and finally know what's going on lol

PS. I DO find it funny that "The Midnight Gang" was essentially a commissioned side-story in the Problem Sleuth universe, and one of the on-going 'Gag' commands was "Enter the Main story!", but of course they never did.

I guess Homestuck is what happens when they actually do lol

[dgcatanisiri]

I don’t know if all my Imperial characters will, but my Agent actually took a lot of pleasure in convincing Lana to step down as head of Sith Intelligence after Ziost.

It ties in to his general attitude towards the Empire - get the Force users out of power, their power games are what makes everything worse in the Empire.

And, yeah, on the meta level, I appreciate that for how it makes Lana flawed, a fact that BioWare refuses to accept in the later expansions, because they do exactly what they always do with their Expected Heterosexual Female Love Interest. They ignore the flaws and write her as unquestionable even when doing VERY questionable actions and emphasize her position in the plot - they did it to Liara in Mass Effect, glossing over the bodily autonomy issues of her giving Shepard’s body to Cerberus, and becoming the Shadow Broker, and they do it with Lana, making this Sith agent casually joke about spying and torturing their own people as if it is light-hearted jesting.

I want to like these characters. But when BioWare decides to write them as pure bastions of perfection, rather than flawed individuals, it is difficult to do that because it becomes a case of the writing not accepting that these characters can do or be wrong when they not only are, but it is literally more interesting when they are. Making them unquestionable means that nothing actually sticks with them, robs them of nuance because the things they do are never narratively considered wrong, even if they would be from anyone IRL, or even other characters within the narrative - but not this one character.

Making a character do morally questionable things but not acknowledging that they are morally questionable is BAD WRITING. Making an RPG where the only PC character option is to like a character is hand-tying for the player, because... Not everyone is going to like this character. Which, sure, nature of the beast, for cost reasons a video game can only be given so many options, I get that. But when you combine those factors into a single character, you get a character the narrative emphasizes and plays up to greater and greater significance by reasons that aren’t character related but just “because the writing says so.”

Liara doesn’t get called out for making a unilateral decision for what to do with Shepard - we don’t harvest the dead for organs if the deceased has said not to consider them a donor, Do Not Resuscitate orders are legal matters that are considered to outweigh any effort to revive a person, and yet Liara’s violation of any request Shepard might have had for themselves - or for their next of kin, which may as well have been Ashley, Kaidan, or nobody instead of her - is treated as perfectly fine, while in ME3, Miranda carries guilt for wanting to implant a control chip and violate Shepard’s autonomy. Lana is not called out for her repeated remarks of calling for torture and spying on allies, and indeed, ends up being treated as the Commander’s most trusted second-in-command, which... On the Republic side, that just leads to a great big “WHY?!” from me, because she comes from the enemy, and even on the Imperial side, it’s not unlikely to, as I point out above, view all Force users as the Empire’s problem, and she is a Force user, as well as a major figure in their Intelligence service.

These are flawed characters who should be allowed to be flawed, to have those flaws explored. Instead, the writing says we should treat them as no more than loveable quirks, if they’re even acknowledged. The only reason this doesn’t extend to other characters in other games is the lack of character carryover, but it’s clear it would happen there - I remember after Andromeda released, someone had timed the content for the romance options for male Ryder, both friend and romance content, and Cora had the most at about an hour, Peebee fifty minutes, Vetra forty, and Gil twenty. This is what BioWare does, they prioritize content for who they think is the “proper” love interest in the game, give them more spotlight, and short others. And this gets worse when the game characters carry over between games or, in TOR’s case, expansions.

Again, I want to like these characters. But the fact that BioWare basically decides that we the audience MUST like these characters... That’s where my problem begins.

[leakinghate]

Chasing the Ghosts of Season 8

Let’s skip the flowery intros and get to the point, because this is important.

Lotor’s vindication and reunion with Allura were originally part of VLD s8 and I can prove it. Most animation relating to this plot was excised, while other clips were re-purposed to make it look like he was dead all along: but some are still in there.

The removal of this plot line was one of the major factors in completely messing up season 8, and it was a change that was made very recently; no earlier than August in fact. There is a significant, non-zero chance that an unedited version of Season 8 exists in its entirety; completely finished.

The evidence is below the cut.

Trigger Warnings: Gore - that image and discussion of it, body horror, sexism, and major character death.

There’s something rotten in the house of Voltron, and by that I mean Dreamworks animation, because for reasons yet unknown the season 8 we got was not the one the writers had planned to give us.

The people involved likely can't talk about it due to NDAs, but I follow *most* of the cast and crew on social media, and from the way many of them were talking prior to the drop it’s obvious that whatever they'd recorded had led them to expect a very different season.

The almost total radio silence afterward is also telling.

So far as I can tell, AJ (Lotor’s VA) is the only one actively posting about it, and his posts have been expressing his distress over what happened to Lotor - a stark contrast to his excitement about the season prior to its airing. It’s very apparent that he thought Lotor would have a very different fate than he appears to. At the moment of the season drop he tweeted out “Lotor was framed”, and later didn’t seem to realize that ‘Allura’ was trending because she’d died.

Some of the other VA’s scarce posts lead me to believe that they’re having similar reactions: a now deleted post from Bex (Pidge’s VA) about having watched up to episode 6 consisted of an image of DOTU Lance captioned with “[internal screaming]”. Bex has since removed all references to VLD from her bio.

I’m certain that the VLD s8 we got was NOT the s8 that was originally planned. Or the one the writers and VAs had been alluding to in various interviews up until recently.

We know there were some very last minute changes to season 8. I guarantee you that Ezor was actually dead before the backlash over Adam in August, and you're kidding yourselves if you think that epilogue existed before then either.

Kihyun Ryu's 'last Shiro' tweet - that we now know to be from the wedding epilogue - was posted on September 13th, 2018. Less than two months ago these changes were still in progress. Less than a month before the first trailer premiered at NYCC these changes were still being made.

And those was absolutely not the only things which were changed. It was hinted we should pay attention to the s7 episode "the Feud" to spot some foreshadowing. Well? I've seen both that episode and s8 and I sure as heck can't find it.

This was beyond last minute.

JDS and LM were still talking in ways that would lead us to expect Lotor’s redemption roughly up to s7 in August; so whatever happened, it went down between August and November. Which is probably why s8 is so shitty; with such a terribly compressed timeline to make edits.

And edits they were, because with those time frames season 8 was either completely finished or very near to it when someone decided that things had to change.

I can prove it.

Do you know how?

Because the animation was recycled and altered to fit the new story, with only small parts made new for it. And because it was something else first, it’s still possible to partially reconstruct the original Season 8 from it.

Lets start with the big one, the one I’m sure you’re here to read: Lotor’s redemption and reunion with Allura.

One of the most frustrating things about season 8 is that it leaves the colony unexplained. The big question, the thing that results in Lotor’s murder at the hands of people he calls friends, and leads to a power vacuum that causes the deaths of untold billions of people. What was Lotor doing at the colony?

It’s never addressed or given an answer.

At least in the version of season 8 that we got.

Or is it?

Because they might have removed the conclusion to that plot thread, but they couldn’t get rid of it entirely.

In e8 ‘Clear Day’. Allura's suffers from several nightmares/dream sequences. They don't make any sense in context, and it’s never explained what caused them. Except, they make perfect sense, if you watch them as the first step towards understanding The Colony. 

Allura sees herself standing in a Juniberry field on Altea. Her mother greets her and proclaims that Allura has arrived just in time, and that only she can save them, “Only you can protect us.”

A Galra fleet passes over head, raining down laser fire.

Allura suddenly finds herself the pilot of one of the white mechs. She plunges her spear into the ground, draining the quintessence, and then fires on the fleet; obliterating it.

But as she grins in victory she realizes that the quintessence she siphoned from the planet has turned her immediate landscape to ash, including her mother. Allura is horrified, but as her mother crumbles away her voice echoes, telling Allura she is so proud of her.

In case me describing it wasn’t clear enough: what just happened to her was that Allura was literally put in Lotor’s position, operating one of his mechs. The places and the people were those that Allura cherished deeply, so that she could understand how terrible Lotor felt about what he had to do. It literally puts Allura in Lotor's place: having to take the responsibility of destroying parts of something she loves in order to protect the whole. 

And her mother? The Altean who was ‘sacrificed’ in this scenario? Praised her for taking the actions she did, because Allura was the only one able to do it. And the only choice was to save most of Altea, or none of it.

When Allura eventually does take the entity into herself we see the lights of Honerva’s mech’s faceplate lighting, then flash to a scene of Lotor in Sincline. He’s laughing, grinning as he did during s6′s finale, and as the camera zooms in on his face he shouts “Follow me!”

Briefly we see Voltron in front of the planets of Earth’s solar system, which is drowned out by a peculiar scene transition: an intense white light that appears to obliterate everything as though in an explosion.

None of these scenes are ever explained, but it’s reasonably comparable to the flash of images that Haggar sees in season 3 when she is first confronted with Zarkon’s memories. We’re left with the impression that we’re about to be enlightened, and the end of the episode reveals that Allura has passed out on the floor unconscious.

In this version of season 8, we never are told what exactly caused Allura to experience those visions. We can guess: was it perhaps the entity tempting her with its dark magic? Honerva attempting to place her under a spell?

But is the entity really dark magic? It’s different from the types of magic we’re used to, and the colors of it are certainly dark, but it in itself never actually causes Allura harm. Any harm she suffers after taking it into herself is caused by Honerva exploiting it.

Could it be a spell by Honerva? Unlikely. It took her almost two whole episodes of the paladins fooling around inside her mind for her to notice they were even there. If Allura had never taken the entity none of Honerva’s plans would have ever been found out. Yes, she did steal all the energy from the Atlas’ crystal, but she did that primarily to combat the Atlas and disable it. She didn’t need to get it from there, the energy her Komars were able to provide was all she needed.

So what caused those visions?

Lotor did.

Once he was free of the rift he was able to connect with Allura somehow and reach out to her. That was really him. Where he is now, trapped under Haggar’s control, he has no means to combat the witch. But Allura does. Everything he says to her? Is true.

The next episode, s8e9 “Knights of Light: Part 1″ begins with Allura awaking, Coran and Lance by her bedside. She’s been asleep for two quintants (days). She has apparently come up with a plan to infiltrate Honerva’s mind, but from whence she gets this plan is never explained. That’s because we’re missing an entire episode between these two. This is where Lotor’s redemption happens, where he and Allura finally reunite. God knows what else was in that episode, what else was happening while the paladins were waiting for Allura to wake. Lotor bids Allura to follow him, to finally allow him to tell his side of the story, and for some reason we weren’t allowed to hear it.

But from what we did get to see? It all but confirms @crystal-rebellion‘s Colony Theory. Albeit, the white mechs were built by Honerva, but Lotor was attempting to keep the colony safe in the only way he knew how. The Alteans who died did so willingly; to preserve the lives of all the others.

There’s a repeated narrative that the only person who encourages Allura to take action, to strive and push forward, is Lotor. Sometimes others accept it, but they never encourage her. Everyone else seems to consider her too fragile, or not capable of making her own decisions. They want to protect her and coddle her, don’t believe she should be taking any risks. They are supportive emotionally, but want to limit her physically. They care about her, but don’t truly trust her judgement or want her to be making her own choices.

With Lotor though, it’s different. He truly sees her as an equal, respects her judgement in her areas of expertise. This plot line revolving around the entity is a prime example. Lotor provides Allura with the information, that she has everything she needs to take down Honerva right in front of her; she just needs to utilize it. But from the moment Allura wakes the people closest to her doubt her decisions and choices.

And yes, those choices lead to painful consequences, but in the end they are proven to be the right ones, to have been necessary. Allura took a calculated risk, and it pays off - if she hadn’t they’d have never caught Honerva in time to stop her from destroying everything. They wouldn’t even have discovered her plan in the first place.

If Allura hadn’t made the choice to listen to and trust Lotor, by her own judgement, reality itself would have ceased to exist.

Both Coran and Alfor are given specific scenes this season where they judge and approve of Lance in his pursuit of Allura. But key, neither of them ever ask - or even mention - Allura’s feelings on the matter. The s8 we got, rather disgustingly, portrays this as the right thing. I believe the original s8 was meant to subvert this. Because Lance is everyone else’s choice for Allura, but when Allura was allowed to make her own choice? She chose Lotor.

Allura once again ends s8e10 ‘Knights of Light: Part 2′ unconscious. I firmly believe we are missing more moments  - if not an entire episode - with Lotor here, in s8e11 ‘Uncharted Regions’ - probably explaining somewhere along the way how exactly he is able to contact her in this manner.

Which, uh... as to my personal theory on how that is, well... what did Lotor and Allura do together that might have crafted a unique spiritual bond between them?

What did you two experience in the quintessence field Lotor?

But, those were happier times...

I also think this is the episode, this missing one, that that particular image properly belongs to. We now see it in the previous episode, as one of Honerva’s memories. But the reason we see it is that the paladins apparently see it too. The only problem is, they don’t react to it at all. They literally have a stronger reaction to finding out they can see Honerva’s memories in the first place. There’s no possible way that Allura saw the melted corpse of the man she loved and had no discernible reaction. We see her reactions to Lotor’s presence multiple times over the course of s7 and s8, and they’re always intensely emotional ones.

But speaking of that image, since we’re on the topic. That’s a very detailed image.

There’s details there you don’t immediately spot, because you’re too distracted by the horrific imagery of the corpse of a main character. A character who’s tragic, abusive childhood was the focus of almost an entire episode earlier in the season.

Details such as the motes of light floating up from his body.

Motes of light we’ve seen in exactly two instances before: from Zarkon and Honerva’s eyes immediately after they were restored back to life by the rift.

And from Zarkon’s body: vanishing after he died.

Yeah guys, I’m about to make that image much worse.

That’s not Lotor’s corpse, because he’s not dead.

He’s still in there, in that state, and he’s been in there for over three years.

Melded, physically and mentally, with Sincline by his time spent in the quintessence field.

What. The. Fuck.

As the season progresses it becomes much more difficult to tell what was supposed to be happening because of how badly it’s been chopped up, re-arranged, and edited.

But there is a very distinct difference between Sincline’s two appearances in action - that is, it’s only in the first one that it actually is in action.

The last time we see Sincline move of it’s own accord is e6 ‘Genesis’. From the moment he reappears Lotor is on the attack; he is stopped only two times, once of his own accord and once by Haggar’s mind control.

And that one time he stops himself? Is when he takes aim at Allura. She’s running across the ground, about to strike Honerva with her bayard, when he raises his right arm and takes aim. We see her in his sights, through his eyes. And the view zooms in on Allura’s face.

Lance sees what’s happening and dives in Red to stop him, but is blocked by one of the white mechs.

Yet. He lowers his arm and doesn’t take the shot.

Lotor never fires.

But immediately afterwards the white mech lingers too close and Sincline impales it with it’s tail. It’s not an aversion to killing that stayed his hand.

It’s that it was Allura.

This scene unambiguously shows that Lotor is both alive inside that mech and somewhat aware of himself. He’s become a robeast.

Yet after that episode the mech never moves again. It hangs lifeless in space during the battle at the pyramid; the white mechs having to do the fighting. The lights on it’s chest have gone out, only relighting when it is charged with quintessence from the Komar. For all intents and purposes, Sincline is empty.

Oh, and speaking of Sincline, up until s8e9 it’s only ever referred to as “Lotor’s mech,” but suddenly, in e11 ‘Uncharted Regions’ they’ve learned its name and Allura calls it “Lotor’s Sincline”.

I think that at some point between ‘Knights of Light’ and the second half of e11 ‘Uncharted Regions’ Lotor was to have been rescued. 'Uncharted Regions’ is one of the worst episodes this season for flow: it’s extremely choppy and hard to follow - flicking back and forth between scenes without anything really happening in them.

But the most telling thing?

‘Uncharted Regions’ begins with Honerva in her haloed mech searching Alternate realities for her ‘perfect’ one. We see several clips of her doing this, the mech floating in front of the pyramid, alone, with the spinning disk of its wings as a viewport.

Suddenly, almost exactly halfway through the episode, we get an image of Honerva kneeling inside the pyramid, in her Altean commander uniform, one uniformed Altean to either side. She says “The princess has awakened,” and then the scene changes.

When next we see Honerva she’s floating above the pyramid, the silent and immobile Sincline by her side.

The entire time this is happening there is combat going on around the pyramid, first with the coalition fighters and then with the Atlas itself. This sequence appears in episode as though it all happens successively in a very short period of time. But it doesn’t make sense like that. Why should Honerva stop what she’s doing, and exit her mech just to check if Allura is awake?

In this scenario why does Honerva even care if Allura is awake? By this point she’s apparently found her perfect reality and is prepared to move on to it? She doesn’t need Allura for anything, none of her plans require Allura. Why should she even bother to announce that Allura is awake, as though this is something she’s been waiting for?

This entire episode, including the fight scenes, has been chopped into little pieces and rearranged. Other scenes have had edits to their animation, or were re-done entirely. What we have in ‘Uncharted Regions’ is a frankenstein’s monster of an episode constructed of the tiny remnants of of at least two, possibly three, original episodes.

If you watch this episode carefully you’ll notice that there’s a clip out of order. The lights on Sincline’s chest are dark until it’s charged with the quintessence from the Alteans on the Atlas. But. The close up shot of Sincline the paladins see immediately upon exiting the wormhole in front of the pyramid has the lights lit up. This clip clearly is part of the sequence we see later in the episode just before the mechs combine. So when the crew on the bridge of the Atlas is shown reacting in horror, whatever they’re actually reacting to has been cut out.

These original missing episodes would have contained what I’m fairly certain was our big Alchemist vs Alchemist reprisal fight between Honerva and Allura; something we’ve been waiting for since season 2′s finale.

Why was such an anticipated fight removed?

I think it’s because the fight was over Lotor, and ultimately Allura would have rescued him.

Every time Allura uses the powers she obtained in Oriande it’s mentioned where she got them, and often that she has them because of Lotor.

She’s shown again and again restoring life and health.

What happened, what we’re missing, is her using the abilities she has thanks to Lotor, to save him.

Allura is supposed to storm that pyramid, infiltrate it, and rescue Lotor from the evil witch holding him captive. She’s supposed to find him in that horrible state we saw him in, and she’s going to heal him. She’s going to fight for him, to protect him, when no one else in his life ever has.

There’s also a clear switch. When Sincline is active and alight Honerva several times refers to it as ‘my son’ but afterwards, she stops and uses Sincline as a tool for her to reach an Alternate Reality and obtain a ‘new’ version of Lotor. With the exception of one shot, where, since we can’t actually see her speaking it seems that the audio and animation are sourced from different original scenes, Honerva ceases treating Sincline as Lotor after the lights go out.

The line that causes Honerva to snap s8e12 ‘The Zenith’ is when the little alt Lotor says “My mother is dead”. It’s framed like a deliberate callback, like it should be echoing something. But it’s a line we’ve never heard. I’d hazard that this final rejection, this line was spoken by *our* Lotor as Allura is rescuing him.

Lotor was not dead in there, he was alive, and he was saved.

There is a really good theory going around, my friend @tsunemori told me about it. I don't know who first came up with it, but I fully support it, because I noticed the scene in question was really off too.

But the theory is that that hospital bed scene? Was originally Lotor in the bed after they rescued him, and Allura was in Lance's place. Which makes total sense, because after that scene, when Lance takes Allura to the bridge? His height is all wrong, and he is hanging onto her for support instead of the other way around: it should be Lotor there.

Do I have any concrete proof of this one? No. But there is something off about that scene. It just doesn’t feel right.

So yeah, if I ask myself, “Is this a scene that might have been re-animated, the characters traced over and re-drawn as different ones?” I can absolutely see that. When looking for places where actual edits to the animation have been made you have to factor in several things: the complexity of the animation - how many characters, how many settings, how much movement, who is the focus/moving/talking.

This is both a pivotal scene, and an incredibly easy one to alter, comparatively. Two characters, one laying still in a bed and only getting a single one-syllable line - the other character’s name, which might have been taken from anywhere. Lance has a long string of dialogue, but he’s sitting beside the bed the entire time, and he moves very little.

I strongly believe this scene was either altered significantly or created whole-cloth for this edited version of s8.

Things that are much harder to alter, because they’d be much more expensive, are the fight scenes. It’s where I started looking once I suspected what had happened with season 8, and it’s where I started finding things.

S8e12 ‘The Zenith’ is one of the best episodes in terms of flow, and I believe that’s because it suffers some of the least editing.

We are however missing at least two scenes: a farewell between Allura and Coran - presumably as Allura boards the Blue Lion - and an explanation as to how Voltron followed Honerva into her destination reality after the rift closed on them. I believe both of these scenes were edited out because Lotor was key in them; several scenes in the following episode s8e13 ‘The End is the Beginning’ lead me to believe that he spent the final battle in the Blue Lion with Allura.

Two scenes during the fight stand out to me: the first, a split screen where Keith is mysteriously given a double width section as compared to the others. It’s especially noticeable, because he’s not even centrally placed and he’s scaled to a different size than his fellow paladins. In the entirety of the series we have never before seen a split screen cut among an even number of characters where one of them is given odd prominence like this. The screen is arranged so the characters appear in a color gradient, Keith is red-black and immediately to his left is Allura who is blue. If there was a missing section here, the color space would correspond to indigo/purple - and those are Lotor’s colors.

The second is a moment when Allura is speaking facing forwards and very clearly looks to the side and makes eye contact with someone. Now, VLD does have moments when the paladins will react in their own lions as though they can see each other, but this isn’t like that. It’s the way her eyes move, and look, she’s talking to someone who’s point of view we’re seeing her from. And that person is Lotor.

There’s also a peculiar moment in this episode where the same split screen is used twice; another thing which has never before happened in the series. It appears first about a quarter of the way through the episode as the paladins enter the stage for the final showdown and then again as they push Honerva into the glowing whiteness at its center. I believe that the second one of these is its proper place, and that the one that originally went in the first instance had Lotor included in it.

Finally, and this is going to take several images, so be warned. When the paladins appear before Honerva in the heart of it all, fading into view, they’re spaced very strangely.

There’s six of them, so you’d expect they’d be spaced something like this:

But they’re actually spaced like this:

(yes, I know Honerva would be blocking someone there. She moves. I just picked this cap so you could see all the shadows; there’s no point showing you the empty space)

It rather looks like there’s someone missing.

The last half of the final episode is so heavily manipulated that it’s difficult to say what actually happened. But we have two very strong clues from which we can reconstruct it.

Remember the leaks?

Now that we know the leaks were real, it begs the question, why was this scene one of them. Unlike the others, which were all from the epilogue, this scene is from roughly halfway through the episode.

Well, I believe we have the answer now: whoever leaked them chose those because they were the scenes they had on hand. These were the scenes that were not originally part of VLD s8, and were added only in the last minute edit.

This one in particular is another where I think it’s taken an actual scene and traced over it to make it into something else. Lance is far too tall here, and doesn’t look like himself hardly at all.

It’s also very clear from the framing of the shot where Allura is going down the line of paladins and hugging them that Lance should be getting a send off in sequence to the others, not apart like this.

No, I think Lance was animated over Lotor here, and the audio was spliced in parts from Lance’s actual goodbye scene and Allura’s “I will always love you” comes from somewhere else. That portion of the line is said in a distinctly different tone of voice than Lance’s name beforehand. There’s different emotions to it than the rest of their conversation, and I’d guarantee we’re hearing it out of it’s original context.

I don’t know what else changes in the ending, but I’m very certain that it was not supposed to be read as Allura dying.

The reason we now read it that way is that Allura and Honerva are seen greeting the spirits of people we know that are dead. I’m fairly certain this scene is either new, or it was only Honerva going to meet them, and of course, that Lotor wasn’t among them.

And I think it was Allura and Lotor who stayed behind to do the work of restoring all realities. My proof of this is one of the very best and strongest among my evidence: the very last closing shot of Voltron: Legendary Defender, after the credits.

The lions of Voltron take off to rejoin their new Cosmic Entities; Allura and Lotor. Whoever was responsible for editing Lotor out of this picture only actually slightly blurred him.

Thanks to @articianne for the outline!

If you play around with the image contrast and brightness it’s even more obvious that the both of them are there, back to back.

It only looks like Allura dies because the spirits but without them there? It looks like they ascended to a higher plane of existence or something.

They haven’t died at all. They’ve become, of all things, like Bob, the gameshow host from s7e4 ‘The Feud’. An ‘all-powerful, all-knowing interdimensional being’.

And y’know? Bob was perfectly able to interact with the paladins no problem.

I don’t understand why these changes were made. To me? This looks like a perfectly happy ending.

What else was cut I don’t know. But I found all this evidence by looking for the things that weren’t there, that a competently structured plot would lead me to expect would be. Chasing ghosts, as it were.

A short list of additional things I strongly suspect were cut?

Several scenes between Keith and Shiro.

A pivotal scene between Allura and Coran.

A follow up event with Pidge referencing her sacrificing her videogame to get Allura a dress.

A scene between Lance and Pidge, possibly referencing said videogame.

A resolution to Lance and Pidge competing to get Allura the best present.

A conclusion to Axca’s sub plot.

A Hunk and Shay scene, to explain how and why the Balmeras all show up in s8e12 ‘The Zenith’.

An additional scene with the blade for the same reasons.

Actually, y’know what? I’m not just going to leave this, because I have a strong suspicion what one of the other cut subplots was about.

You see, the other half of ‘Clear Day’ isn’t entirely filler - it’s specifically a callback to the season 2 episode ‘Space Mall’, and it’s not the only one in this season. The little shopping trip from s8e1 ‘Launch Date’ is also one. Specifically they’re part of a plot for Pidge about her feelings for Lance.

In ‘Space Mall’ Pidge and Lance spend their time scrounging up change to buy a videogame console. The game that they purchase is part of a series that Pidge later trades the only copy of the latest version of to get Allura a dress. During ‘Clear Day’ Pidge and Lance both spend their time trying to get the best present for Allura (hint hint, Pidge is the one who actually got the ‘”something sparkly”).

Now, as I’ve already covered, there’s missing content between ‘Clear Day’ and the next episode. Part of that content should have been what the other paladins were doing while Allura was unconscious. And in series, we never actually see Allura receive either of those presents that were bought for her. So where did they go?

I think Pidge and Lance spent the time waiting for Allura to wake up together, and they got to talking about how Lance has once again failed to acquire the sparkly thing Allura would like. Perhaps Pidge trades her mining helmet for Lance’s signed Blue Lion, and then it comes up how both times Lance went to get a present for Allura he ended up getting one for Pidge.

And that first time was the video game wasn’t it? A perfect place for Lance to find out what happened with the video game in s8e1.

So why did Pidge trade that game? To make Allura happy, yes, but also to make Lance happy. Because Lance likes Allura and Pidge wants them to have a good time, because Pidge likes Lance. Like, check e1 when Allura tells her she's going on a date with Lance, Pidge's reaction... isn't really a happy one.

I think this should have been the turning point for Lance, where he learns the difference between infatuation and sincere affection. I think very soon after this his relationship with Allura would end, and he would naturally progress into a different sort of relationship with Pidge.

As much as I love s8e7 ‘Day Forty-Seven’ I don’t think it was originally part of season 8. I also get the feeling that s7e2 ‘Shadows’ may be composed of scenes we were supposed to have gotten throughout the later half of season seven - though I expect that this change was made in a much earlier spate of edits, likely when s7 was re-done. It’s been confirmed that this happened, and that s7e4 ‘The Feud’ was made to ease the pressure on the exhausted animators who’d been working overtime to get the other episodes done in time. It’s never been confirmed what exactly was changed about season 7 or why, but I highly suspect it was to include more content with the MFE fighters, who the higher ups at Dreamworks might have been hoping to spin off into a sequel.

I suspect that the episodes were shifted forwards, because the first half of the season has no 'event' episode. s8e6 ‘Genesis’ should have been that, and what we're missing is the mid-season event. Which was where they would have saved Lotor. They excised an entire climactic fight between Allura and Honerva, reprising their battle from season 2. The alchemist vs alchemist fight that was repeatedly alluded to being inevitable, yet we never got.

It was animated and voiced to be Lotura and Lotor's vindication.

But someone wanted that changed.

We know when and why ‘The Feud’ was created, and because we were teased in several interviews to pay attention to it so that we might spot some foreshadowing, we can definitively say that the mucking around that was done to season 8 happened at a much later date.

In fact, the animation portion was likely completed all the way back in June. These are two bumper images that were used to advertise Season 6, which released on June 15th.

We haven’t yet seen this image of Lotor appear in the show (for what it matters, the full color one is the correct way around; Lotor’s hair always curls up over his right shoulder, the left can go either way), we have scoured every frame of him to find it, but it’s just not there (yes I know it looks like it should be from s5e4 ‘Kral Zera’, but trust me it’s not). Every other image that’s ever been used in these promotional bumpers has been from somewhere in the show, but this one is so far absent. Therefore it’s from a piece of animation yet to appear, and one which was made by the time these images showed up in June.

Now that we know what the truth is, I am sure we will get the full story eventually. It's only a matter of time before it filters out.

But right now is the key time if we want to convince Dreamworks to release the original season 8. Tweet at them, email them, snail mail if you have the time! Sign that petition!

The fandom response now will determine if we find out what really happened sooner rather than later - and later could mean years.

We are the only people who can make this happen. The cast and crew are all bound by NDAs, and publicly reacting negatively towards a show you worked on is practically career suicide.

It has historically been fans who’ve made a difference when companies interfere with their favorite shows. Fans have been able to effect change in the past, and they will again in the future; lets make sure this is one of those times. We need to fight to get the VLD we should have gotten in the first place.

Just remember to apply your energies in the right places. JDS and LM aren’t perfect people (no one is!), but this isn’t their doing. This is someone above them responsible for the mess that was s8. Dreamworks Animation is the culprit. There is a very real chance that the original season 8 is completely finished and able to be released, and we just might get it if we’re persistent enough. 

Be polite, be reasonable, but be firm. Take this proof and use it. Show them that we know they changed things and that they can give us the original if they so choose.

The messages they inadvertently pushed with this slap-dash edit are vile and toxic, and people far more knowledgeable than I in those areas are speaking out about them. This needs to be fixed.

They need to say something. They need to tell us why they changed it. They need to give us the original Season 8.

Click here for Part 2: Seek Truth in Darkness

I, and any of you who enjoyed this meta, owe @nomadicism a huge thank you. She reminded me of that strange "Follow me!" scene, which prompted me to crack open 'Clear Day' for another watch... and I realized that Allura's dreams weren't nonsensical at all.

As always, thank you to my many friends in the Lotura Discord. You give me the strength and encouragement to keep going. I couldn’t have done this without you.

[the-awful-falafel]

Rick and Morty - S4E6 "Never Ricking Morty" Podcast Summary/Breakdown

So y'all probably expected this based on how often I've been talking about these official companion podcasts. I recommend listening to them yourself either on the official Adult Swim YT channel or the official website, but I thought I'd go ahead and make bullet point breakdown of some key points for this particular podcast, because trivia and behind-the-scenes knowledge really appeal to me. And this episode is pretty divisive in the fanbase, so I think this podcast will assuage some fears even if you still personally dislike it in the end.

For some reason, the title of the podcast calls this S4E7 instead of episode 6. It wasn’t commented upon, so I assume either it was a typo or it was 7 in the production order and got swapped shortly before release.

The interviewed staff involved in this episode were Carlos Ortega (character design lead), Erica Hayes (director), James McDermott (art director), and Jeff Loveness (writer)

The idea of this episode was conceived in October/November 2018 as a "one-up" of anthologies and clip shows. They didn't want to do a straight anthology because many other TV shows had already done that, so they tried to go more experimental and bold and basically went balls-deep with the metanarrative as a result

It was a substitute for Interdimensional Cable (which they were going to do instead but it fell through for unknown reasons)

"We had to go so far up our own ass, because if we didn't go far enough, people would be mad that we didn't."

The writers intentionally mocked themselves as much as the fans, pretty much, and it was meant to be all in good fun

The artists really enjoy designing all the weird aliens in the show, as well as getting to reuse/repurpose them when applicable. Apparently next episode (Promortyus) is going to be reusing a lot of designs for something (but they obviously can't say due to spoilers)

Compared to other episodes, "Never Ricking Morty" went pretty smoothly once it got to the art stage. That doesn't mean it was easy, but there weren't a ton of revisions they had to do

There was a joking spoiler about Rick becoming pregnant later this season. At least I think it's joking.

While writing this episode, the writers came up with a huge whiteboard list of complaints about the show, misconceptions about the show, etc. to consult for the meta jokes. Loveness later clarified that it wasn't quite about attacking "complaining" though, and it wasn't meant to be mean-spirited

The Bechdel test skit came from them realizing they hadn't done much with Beth and Summer this season, which definitely can be considered a flaw. Therefore, as part of their self-mockery, the writers decided to force them crudely into the episode as a joke, while also making fun of men who write women characters poorly and reductively.

The Jesus Christ / Rick suddenly being Christian part was written in response to the writers asking themselves "what would kill Rick and Morty as a show?"

Jeff Loveness said this in the "Inside Never Ricking Morty" video as well, but he really loved the "old man is really ripped and ready to kick your ass" trope and is partially responsible for it becoming a running gag this episode along with "cum gutters". Apparently cum gutters return in season 5 (also said jokingly, so who knows)

One of the Q&A callers called multiple times, with different phone numbers, and kept asking about potential crossovers for some reason

"A lot of people are saying that the show is fucking with their fans. Is that accurate?" "I think some of those fans deserve to be fucked with a little bit."

They point out how some fans feel entitled to the idea they should be pleased by the show all the time, and the writers feel like the show should ideally surprise the viewers in a good way, but you still may not like every episode and that's alright

At the same time, the episode wasn't meant as an attack on the fans, it was more of a "we'll do this our way, be experimental, and push the envelope of what we can do" message they were sending. Jeff Loveness promises that there's "good stuff coming up" that he thinks the fans will be happy with, presumably in late Season 4 or even Season 5

"Just because we showed it this way and you'll probably never see it this way again, that doesn't mean we're dropping these storylines completely." There you go, everyone! The ongoing story threads are still happening at some point, and the message of the episode wasn't about dropping continuity or mocking people for caring about it. Although if you were hoping for resolutions similar to what was shown in this episode (Evil Morty w/ a giant army, Tammy VS Summer with lightsabers), those scenarios are almost certainly not going to happen canonically based on this statement. Let's hope that what they do come up with is both unexpected and awesome.

The episode is intended to be non-canonical, similar to past once-a-season clip show episodes like Interdimensional Cable

Story Lord was inspired by characters like Mysterio and Q, and the writers created him late in development as a type of villain they hadn't done before. Dan Harmon also put a lot of self-mockery into the character with how much he loved narrative structure and the story circle. The character artists even initially asked if Harmon could be the design for the character but that received an immediate "no", as it was perceived as being too on-the-nose.

Jeff Loveness was surprised the Rick/Birdperson musical made it to the final episode since it seemed like the sort of thing that would be cut or lost in development. He was also surprised the Jesus thing stayed in mostly untouched

The Story Train was intended to be an actually purchasable product by the time the episode aired-- the writers were emphatically excited about that being the culmination of the joke in the writers room-- and they were surprised that it didn't go through by the time the episode aired. They guess it's due to the coronavirus pandemic interrupting merchandising plans, but they're ultimately unsure because the decision isn't discussed with them

The artists do receive some limitations on how much gore they're allowed to depict, but they can show as much blood as they want, so for the most part they can still be creative with gruesome violence (like the Tickets Please guy ripping in half in this episode)

The artists are credited for elevating most of the fight scenes in the show, sometimes with only vague script direction which they use to be very creative

In response to a viewer calling in and asking the question about whether Pickle Rick will return: "I think there's a conversation to be had about: do we want these things to return or it better to do a one-off story?" So my take on this is that not literally everything will factor into the continuity-- they put thought into what ideas have more long-running potential and they build those up. Which is kind of obvious but the question was silly anyway. (They're still ambiguous about whether or not Pickle Rick will come back, by the way)

They aren't going to do an outright Star Wars parody in Rick and Morty because other shows have already done that, but they can still parody what Star Wars represents rather than doing a "branded commercial" for it. Apparently there is a lot of that specifically coming up this season (although indirect in the way they're describing). I assume this is referring to the upcoming "Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri" episode, so I’m curious about how they’ll reference Star Wars in that one.

The COVID-19 reference this episode was thrown in last minute, presumably with just alternative dubbing and changing the lip sync animation. They say that sometimes episodes are still being worked on up until the moment they release on television. Referring to a previous episode as an example, the character of Shadowjacker from the dragon episode was thrown in last-minute

With the exception of James McDermott, most of the staff interviewed had no control or participation over the commercial product placement work, such as the Wendy's/Pringles commercials. They don't mind them for the most part and find them funny

The writers try to avoid being too topical because the scripts take so long to turn into animation that any references will become outdated by the time it releases. Therefore, they try to be "timely" in the sense that they're writing about things that are happening in the world, but in a more abstract/thematic sense. Jeff Loveness implies that the next episode Promortyus will have a lot of that

In response to another viewer Q&A: There is no Rick and Morty movie currently planned. They wouldn't mind one, but nothing is really in development at the moment

The staff say they're excited for the next batch of episodes and seem pretty proud of their work on this season

They don't plan on making a Rick and Morty musical episode at the moment, as they feel like other shows like South Park and the Simpson have done it excellently and don't feel like they're capable of doing it better. The Rick/Birdperson bit in this episode was the most we're going to get

The code inside the broken-off throttle lever was intended to just be a bar code decal (to show it's a toy) and doesn't actually mean anything. James McDermott jokingly said it's "where the bodies are buried"

The Rick army / Evil Morty scene was huge from an animation standpoint and they almost couldn't do it due to how ambitious the shot was. They were going for a "Lords of the Rings", faux series-finale vibe, where they "give the fans what they THINK they want". Justin Roiland insisted they do it

There are definitely more big animation setpieces planned for the future

And that’s it! I’ll probably do more of these for the future episode podcasts, if anyone is still interested.

[emilyofjane]

Life Update (don’t worry, it’s a good one this time)

For those of you that have been following me for awhile, you might know that my personal life has been kinda...rough this year. But things have been going a lot better for me recently, and I have BIG news about my career path and my future as a whole.

But first, I need to provide some background:

As you all know, I’m a senior Biochemistry major in college, and I plan on graduating this December. Over the past year, however, I slowly began to realize that I’m...really not that good at my major. I’ve always kinda struggled in my science courses; I’ve never been able to make any higher than a B in any of my lectures, and the only labs that I earned an A in were my Capstone labs because my mentor is just really nice. When I started applying to grad school this past summer, I suddenly discovered that my major GPA (which is based only on my science courses and is separate from my overall GPA of 3.3) was well below 3.0 — too low to get accepted in any of the graduate programs I wanted to apply to.

The whole reason I became a Biochemistry major in the first place was to use it as a stepping-stone for my ultimate goal: to move on grad school and become a cancer researcher. So when I suddenly realized that I was guaranteed to be rejected from grad school no matter what, all of my plans for the future were suddenly turned upside-down. I felt like I had just wasted 4 1/2 years of my life working towards a degree that I didn’t even want; I was stuck in limbo with a mediocre undergraduate transcript that would never lead me to where I wanted to go in life. To make matters worse, I had taken out nearly $80K in student loans at this point, so I couldn’t just jump ship and switch majors, either. I was too far into my degree to turn back now, so I just felt stuck in a career path that I wasn’t even good at, let alone enjoyed.

My confidence took a nose dive after that, as did my motivation. It made me feel so incompetent to see everyone else breezing through my senior-level science courses while I struggled to get a C, that by the time my last semester started this fall, I sort of just...stopped trying. I didn’t see the point in putting in my best effort when I knew it was never going to be good enough anyway. I hit my lowest point in October, when I couldn’t even bring myself to log onto my Zoom lectures or pull up the slides to study. My grades plummeted beyond the point of salvaging, but when I finally broke down and told my mother about it, she refused to let me get a full medical withdrawal, basically forcing me to fail all of my classes and drop my already low GPA into oblivion. I truly felt like the world had set me up for failure, and that my entire future was ruined.

But then, as I was crying in bed and silently cursing out my mom for refusing to help me, I suddenly had an epiphany.

I’ve always loved to write and create, ever since I was a little kid. I remember writing stories in my notebooks in elementary school, which blossomed into writing short stories on Neopets, roleplaying and collab writing with my Deviantart mutuals in middle school, and eventually writing fanfiction on Tumblr and AO3. For the past few years, my catchphrase has always been “in a perfect world, I would’ve become a screenwriter instead of a scientist” because writing was my true passion, but my parents wanted me to pursue a practical career instead. You see, my parents are both business people, and their philosophy has always been “you have to make sacrifices to yourself and your family.” And I’ve always been a pretty smart kid — not a god-given genius like they thought I was when I was younger, but still very bright — and I’ve always thought that science was neat, particularly astronomy. That’s why I ultimately went into science instead of art; my parents convinced me that I could never make a living doing what I loved, and that I should become a scientist so I could support myself and my future family instead of “wasting my intelligence” on becoming a “starving artist.”

But if there’s one thing that they never took into account, it’s that I’m not like them. I’ve never really cared about money or material things in general — all I really need is food, caffeine, a roof over my head, a nice soft bed, my cat, and some wi-fi access, and I’m happy as a clam. I don’t care about going on regular vacations, or living in a fancy house with a pool in the back, or having a wardrobe full of cute and fancy clothes, or driving a nice car without bumps and scratches, or whatever the case may be; they never took into account that I don’t need any of that stuff to be happy, and I never have. And, even moreso, they never took into account that I’m not straight. They pushed the heteronormative narrative on me for so many years — that I was practically guaranteed to find my soulmate in college and get married and have kids or whatever — that I honestly believed them; it wasn’t until I actually got to college and discovered that I was aroace that I began to think otherwise. By my Junior year, I knew that I was never going to get married or have a family of my own, and frankly, I was perfectly okay with that. Besides, quarantine alone has been living proof that I’m perfectly content with living as a hermit by myself with my cat. Add these two factors together, and it becomes increasingly obvious that money is never going to be an issue with me; as long as I can pay the bills and support myself and my cat, that’s all I’ll ever need.

I realized all of this as I was sitting there in my bed, and it was at this point when I finally asked myself: did I really want to spend the rest of my life doing something that only made me miserable?

Once I realized this, something changed inside of me. I decided that I didn’t want to pursue science anymore, and I wanted to pursue my real dream of becoming a screenwriter in LA. And the very next morning, I marched straight to campus and met with every person I could think of to make it happen.

Now I’m planning to graduate with a Regents Bachelor of Arts in December, and I managed to drop all of those science courses I was failing in while keeping enough credits to maintain my student status. I haven’t reached the finish line yet — hell, I’ve literally just gotten started — but the important thing is that I got started. I finally feel like I have control over my own life again, and this is honestly the happiest and most optimistic I’ve felt about myself and my future in years.

Tl;dr I’ll always love and appreciate science, but I finally realize that I was never meant to be a scientist. My true calling is to be a writer, and that’s exactly what I’m going to be. I’m going to graduate with my Regents Bachelor of Arts this December, build up my resume and portfolio, save up enough money to move to California, and become a screenwriter for TV and movies in LA. It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to happen right away, but I’m not going to let that stop me from following my dreams — no, never again.

[bbq-hawks-wings]

Series Review Pt. 1/3

So, this isn’t even a YouTube video where you have the advantage of hearing a voice over a recording with snappy editing to lighten the mood or convey feeling; but believe me that there was a lot of earnest sincerity put into the review this time around.

But before I put the rest of it under the cut, there are some corrections/clarifications I want to put down about my last review that I believe we're significant shortcomings on my part. 

My first, and probably most MAJOR goof was my choice of words in trying to describe the scene with Hawks and Twice at the end of 263 - “ he clearly hasn’t killed Twice yet, and we don’t know why, but if he has to he’s prepared to do so without hesitation or remorse.”

BIG OOF. I hadn’t even been looking much at others’ opinions and the common-enough impression that Hawks doesn’t care about Twice at all/is incapable of empathy/ONLY concerned with his mission from the Commission. When I looked back at my own review, though I didn’t have any indication anyone believed I was one of those people (“without remorse” being the problematic phrase in question), I could easily see how others could get the impression and decided to wait until the next review to do a better job instead of just saying I would. My views on that particular scene will be clear later on, but at least that’s out of the way in case that was keeping people from reading this in the first place.

Second, I failed to arrange my observation points in a more ideal order. If anything, the fact that we were seeing that last page from Twice’s perspective should have been the first point. This mistake made it sound like a neutral assessment of the situation instead of an observation through the context of Jin's feelings. This ended up confusing even myself, as someone who usually writes these reviews solo, into forgetting to factor in that Twice's perspective may be warping the perception of Hawks guarding him into one of intent to kill while forgetting that the Hero Code forbids killing others unless it's truly a necessary last resort. For some reason, Sad Man's Parade and Twice's two-double limit also slipped my mind which brings me to the last point.

Third, I rushed things. When I rush, I make mistakes, sometimes pretty sloppy ones. It has been a ROUGH couple of weeks to be a Hawks or villain stan, even more so if you’re both, so for some reason I felt like I needed to get my thoughts out there quickly. I don’t have any kind of real incentive to do so other than a faster response - I don’t make any money off this, don’t have any relevance algorithm to feed as if I was on YouTube or Twitter, and I’m not the only half-decently known blog to hold these opinions so I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s my problem, but that doesn’t mean I have to make it anyone else’s.

For complete transparency, I’ve been reading and re-reading through the entire series canon again, starting with Hawks’ manga debut, and reviewing the entire series’ events and in-universe history, and have been taking literal whole pages of notes and drafts since Thursday the 12th. I’m glad I did because it brought to mind things that often get left out of pockets of fandom discussion who hyper-focus on their circles of interest while forgetting that each individual section is meant to work with the whole.

That’s what we’ll be working with today, and additional thanks goes to  @baezetsu and @dorito9708 for volunteering as proofreaders and editors to make this more focused and concise. If you’re interested please keep reading. A fair warning, this is what we in the professional field call a “long-ass post, no seriously guys grab a drink and a snack we’re gonna be here a while.” It's actually so long I have to split it up into parts because Tumblr Mobile is stupid and doesn't like making the "read more" function available to the mobile version.

So here we go, people, let’s try this again one last time…

Where we’re at in Chapter 264 (or at least, you know, ignoring literally everyone in the series that isn’t these two) is Twice and Hawks’ confrontation in the study room; but let’s put a pin in that for now and come back.

The biggest piece of information to keep in mind is that even though both these characters are currently front-and-center and have major plot and symbolic value in the series, they are still not the main characters. Their conflict is also not the central conflict. Let’s zoom out to the big picture and see what happens when we put everything together at the end.

The whole inciting incident of the series is when humanity began to display superhuman abilities in a few random individuals. These abilities are neither inherently good or bad - they are constantly intended as neutral with the potential being dependent on the user. Eventually these abilities began to be collectively termed as “quirks” - literally just a single facet of each person’s unique identity. From a social commentary standpoint, quirks have been used as a narrative stand-in for the unique situational circumstances or combinations of circumstances individuals may find themselves with that are either mostly or completely outside of their control like aptitude, physical ability, race/appearance, mental state, and inherited societal station. While more of these examples have been explicitly stated and inserted into the story later on, quirks still serve as the main catalyst and lens by which these topics are discussed.

Because of the initially new and unfamiliar nature of these abilities, people who possessed them faced descrimination and persecution despite having no say in whether or not they had them; and some who did possess these abilities began abusing their power. Taking advantage of this, a man calling himself One-for-All took unwanted quirks from people and redistributed them claiming to want to help others and bring about peace but merely wished to amass power and a following for his own gain. Morally upright individuals eventually rose to the occasion and placed themselves between innocent bystanders and evildoers, earning no official reward or compensation for their work, though eventually they became so effective that they became recognized and endorsed if they went through proper governmental training and channels. These endorsed specialty crime fighters came to be dubbed “heroes.”

All-For-One had risen to prominence by this point and his loyal following actively supported him in his now blatant criminal empire despite the morally reprehensible actions he committed which incessantly terrorized innocent bystanders - earning him the title Symbol of Evil or Symbol of Fear. Eventually a hero named All Might rose up to specifically deal with All-For-One’s reign of terror, having worked his way up from obscurity taking down criminals and saving civilians in unprecedented numbers, determined to create a world where everyone could feel safe in the face of danger. Though only succeeding in beating AFO into hiding All Might ushered in a new era of safety and prosperity earning him the title Symbol of Peace.

Therein lies the central message - “It’s not the situation you’re given that determines your worth or potential but what you choose to do with it” - and the main conflict is - “I want to use what I’ve been given for my own benefit" vs "I want to use what I’ve been given for others.” Deku and Shiguraki are merely the next generation iteration of this conflict distilled down to their simplest essence. Deku's desire is to save anyone who needs help the moment he realizes they need it. Shiguraki wants to remove people's sense of security regardless of their character or situation. 

This conflict is initially framed as simple - a clear black and white/good and bad dynamic that’s easy to see from a distance; but as characters and groups developed over time it’s become more and more difficult to tell the two sides apart. It was not a coincidence that immediately after introducing the clear-as-day bad guys to the series we were presented with the idea that who we perceived to be “good guys” could be bad people doing good things or that people could do good things for the wrong reasons when we were presented with the personal conflicts that Bakugo, Shinsou, and Todoroki all faced at the Sports Festival that were either their internal struggles with the way the were perceived by others or were their personal struggles with the way they perceived themselves. Immediately after that, we were introduced to Stain's criticism of modern heroes and shown who would come to be the core members of the League of Villains.

At the current events in the series we’ve waded through so many shades of grey we’re expected to determine who’s a “hero” and “villain” not by what they say but what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. The individual members of the League of Villains touch on various ways a person might be driven to a life dedicated either to the pursuit of personal satisfaction with no concern to others or to the active pursuit of destroying others, and generally the villains are some of the most morally gray characters we have in the series, though not all of them - the two most notable morally gray “good guys” are Hawks and Endeavor.

There’s one last thing to note about how the series chooses to distinguish morally gray characters as “good” and “bad,” and that ultimately boils down to the choices they make with the hand they are dealt - that being to help or to harm others. This is not quite the same thing as a “hero” and a “villian” (I know, as if it wasn’t confusing enough), but the series has now gone to great lengths to make a clear distinction between the ideals of heroism and the institution of heroism.

Looking at the difference in institutions and ideals as the series presents them we get a better picture of the actual core issues the series seeks to address. The institution of heroism is a utilitarian approach to maintaining a sense of order and safety, and it does so by incentivising people to resolve as many public altercations as possible in exchange for wealth and fame. Criminals are those who break the law regardless of the motivation for the crime or its degree of impact. The institution does not take into account factors that may drive someone to commit a crime nor is it concerned with the core motivations of those enforcing the sense of order.

On the opposite hand, the ideal of heroism offers no reward, no recognition, may require some amount of suffering on the part of the hero, and never guarantees that the victim in question will be saved. Conversely, villainy/evil is any action taken for one's own gain with zero regard to the impact on others and/or is any action committed with malicious intent. These definitions are about moral obligation and human to human connection.

While having a strong correlation (helping others because it's right usually helps the majority in the long run, and doing harm is often ultimately bad for the majority) these two schools of thought are able to function independently of each other. In other words, a criminal can be a good person fallen on hard times (like stealing food to feed their family, but only as much as they need from someone who won’t notice it missing) while a “professional hero” can be an evil person doing good things for the wrong reasons (like obsessing over gaining wealth and popularity with no mind to collateral damage they may cause). Most characters are categorized and even described in-universe as morally aligning with the institution they associate with; but several have been explicitly noted as exceptions to the rule such as Gentle Criminal and La Brava, Endeavor, and Twice. 

Are we properly confused yet? Great, because there’s one more layer to consider! What do we make of someone who is trying to do a good thing (like saving as many people as possible from a known threat) but to do so has to make a choice that might leave a few people in the fire? Which outcome do we use to decide if this is a good person or a bad one? Do we judge based on intent or on the outcome?

Now we zoom back in to Hawks and Twice, but we’ll pick that up in Part Two.

Part Three

[skinfeeler]

very serious accusations have been leveled against me recently along the lines of emotional abuse and coercing people into sexual acts. honesty demands that i respond to them.

for whatever reason, this callout starts out by citing my post in a round of discourse that happened about a year ago over this site. the crux of the discourse was that a number of straight trans women (all white) claimed to have it worse than trans lesbians because suffered from physical violence at the hands of men, as if plenty of trans lesbians haven't been in (abusive) relationships with men, experienced violence while doing sex work, or gotten assaulted or threatened in the streets— all of which were claimed to be exclusively or predominantly straight experiences. i stated that they weren't, and that moreover, straight trans women often commit a real and important violence against trans wlw: that of making what few community spaces with proper funding and that are accessible to people not already in the know/well-connected to other trans women uninhabitable to trans wlw. i see this violence as important, and i consider this dynamic inextricable from the suicides of trans wlw in which social isolation and inability to find a support system were leading factors. it was never the equation of 'white trans suicide' with 'twoc murder', since i was (quite on purpose) relating my statements only to the white straight trans women who claimed to be the exclusive victims of violence. it could be said that a large problem with this discourse was in fact that it was mostly white people involved in it, which i'll admit to being oblivious to at the time.

nevertheless, it wasn't the kind of colorblind rhetoric that eris accused me of. moreover, in the context of this callout it kind of only seems to serve the purpose of "dawn said a bad thing and that makes everything i did to her, which i obliquely omit in my callout of her completely warranted," and obviously i can't abide by that, so therefore, this clarification of what i actually said.

now on to what eris actually wanted to talk about.

eris and i had a very troubling association back when we were friends. we flirted a lot, fucked around, but early on in our contact i got raped and my behavior became increasingly erratic. while initially we were headed to a real committed relationship, this acute trauma made a lot of complex and repeated trauma resurface, and with it a lot of commitment anxiety. call it jerking her around, call it sending mixed signals, call it playing with her feelings, i will insist that i simply didn't know what i wanted with her, if i could be with her in any way. i do recognise that this was painful to her. however, the way she frames it, as me purposefully hurting by still talking about other girls i find hot — of course it's easier to be unequivocally into people who you have never properly approached in a romantic sense, when you haven't even gotten close enough to either get rejected or to become stuck together, this much should be easy enough to understand — is completely absurd. frankly, i find this oblique language that describes my behavior as fidgety and neurotic recent rape victim as being emotionally abusive in a real sense insulting and repulsive. i understand that it hurt, and this is part of why i decided to cut ties: we simply weren't good for each other.

frankly the only thing worth taking seriously here at all is the severe accusation of me pressuring her girlfriend jackie into sexual acts and that i did my best to isolate these two from each other and the world at large. it's difficult to exonerate myself here because in order to talk about it, i have to talk about conversations about sex that were had, revealing people's proclivities and in general disregarding a couple boundaries. i can however quite simply state that i never 'punished' eris for talking about jackie by blocking her unannounced: what actually happened is that i tried to negotiate something with eris with regards to jackie and that the only meaningful response i got was her gloating about how she was with jackie (who i had feelings for at the time) but i'm not. obviously that was hurtful, and after saying as much — no worse than "maybe people would like you better if people said things like these" which sure, is mean but not exactly a torrent of verbal abuse — i blocked her for literally less than two days, immediately after which i started talking to her again and which i eventually apologised for. hardly the pattern of controlling behavior i'm being accused of, and certainly not a de facto ban for eris to talk about jackie ever. i understand that eris from this point on may have had trouble speaking about jackie, but i cannot be held responsible for someone being so unwilling to communicate with me and to take care of her own emotional affairs that i end up being blamed for me very simply saying that i am hurt in the most barely assertive of voices.

i will say this much: if you (the reader) and i are close, and you take these accusations seriously, then i am willing to present documents that i believe make it clear that what was stated to happen didn't happen. it takes the form of a small amount of screenshots, a statement by jackie herself (archived on pastebin by herself), as well as my own testimony. all placed into context, it makes it clear what actually happened. the nature of this material is obviously sensitive and of sexual nature, which is why i've treated it with such care up until this point.

i had to search back thorugh logs time and time again to convince myself that i didn't do what i am being accused of and what people tried to browbeat me into believing without even bothering to listen to my narrative (even though accusations of this kind are very severe and they pretended to be friends with me at the time) and i would honestly consider my accusers to do the same. trauma and mental illness can cause memories to be conflated especially in highly volatile situations, but we all have the responsibility to do the occasional reality check which fortunately, given that this is all on record, is extenuatingly easy. i know that i spent many hours doing so.

in short: trying to figure out what i want in a relationship with someone without making this fully clear isn't emotional abuse, the fact that eris felt unwanted does not definitely implicate me as an emotional abuser. i did not pressure anyone into any sexual acts which i can and will prove as necessary— although i refuse to be part of a de facto public court which these people very willingly instated without provocation or any real attempts at reconciliation or respect for the ways in which _they_ severely damaged me in the wake of acute sexual trauma, the ways they were careless with me. please keep this in mind as you engage with my words.

"you are hurting me, we are hurting each other" is the simplest statement to make, and "please do not use private communication channels to contact me and although i am more than willing to share group spaces with you, please do not use group conversations for the explicit purpose of soliciting my attention" is the simplest boundary to set. eris broke that boundary in record time by sending me an ask in which she impugned me as a hulking aggressive troon for so much as me setting it, as part of her long-standing legacy of openly despising trans women who aren't demure like her.

i will not be deterred from doing my best to protect myself, no matter how vile some people may think that to be.

[nellynee]

FowlPlayAU (aka Miraculous Peacock Marinette AU)

Literally no one asked but I don’t care. An AU in which Marinette holds the Peacock Miraculous

This actually developed from a few different threads that I tugged on over the course of a few months.

I guess the starting point for this was probably the season 1 episode “Simon Says” with the very short but profound moment of understanding between Gabriel and Ladybug over the pedestal they both placed Adrien on and the subsequent really, really heavy handed comparisons everyone kept making towards everyone else about who resembled Emilie the most

Basically I thought this episode was the heaviest seed in the narrative of the parallels between Gabriel and Marinette, both fashion career focused workaholics who take way to much responsibility on their own shoulders and get obsessive to the point of destructiveness over their respective, similar love interests, and using those parallels as a point of interest in showing both Marinette's growth as she moves beyond that destructive mentality and towards regarding Adrien as a person and how Gabriel’s “love conquers all” mentality isn’t an inherently positive thing but no. *sigh* no, they needed more screen time for one time characters. It fleshes out the world,yes, but not the characters. LOTS of interesting long term threads were dropped in favor of broadening the cast to try and shoehorn that “kid superhero group” into the show that was originally tossed. Basically I’m saying that I do think Gabriel and Marinette have enough in common to surprise some people, including each other, and I’m a sucker for intergenerational friendships

The second main factor was the small subplot at the time of Gabriel suspecting Adrien of being Cat Noir. I got really interested after “Gorizilla” about what might actually happen if Gabriel did figure out that Adrien was Cat Noir at that point in the series (I have words about Cat Blanc, trust me. No those words aren’t “throw the whole mess out the window” because I actually love it. But many, many words) Going off the heavy handed implications that Emilie was the former Peacock, I thought it would be interesting, and in character, for Gabriel desperately analyze his son’s behavior as Cat Noir, trying to figure out WTF Adrien thinks he’s doing, only to realize that Cat Noir has some pretty obvious affections for Ladybug. This is unacceptable of course, but understandable in a “he’s a hormone ridden, teenage boy, and Gabriel was once too the same sort of boy in love with the same sort of heroin” sort of way. The obvious answer to getting rid of what is the only possible obstacle for his son’s cooperation (I was going off the pilot with the potential of Cat Noir as a Hawkmoth agent because of their familial connections) is to get rid of his affections, and since it has to be shallow, he’s too young and also Gabriel controls his whole life so it can’t be love, then all he has to do is shift his son’s affections. Cue an uncomfortable number of episodes in which Gabriel subtly inserts a B plot into his Akumatized villains by trying to push various girl together with his son in carefully controlled circumstances. Because this is before Kasumi, and again, those nice parallels between Marinette and Gabriel himself, he eventually after trial and error settles on Marinette as the perfect candidate. Thus, we get a series of hilarious situations in which Marinette and Adrien are pushed more and more into high pressure uncomfortable and intimate situations, losing time and ability to turn into their superhero personas as a natural deterrent to power creep and justifying the use of other Miraculous users a lot more. 

I saw someone comment in one of their author’s notes on a fic a long time ago that they hated the trope of Marinette being an emotional Atlas and my instantaneous internal response that that kinda WAS Marinette's character early series, especially the origin episode, and that a lot of the most prevalent fics were written in that time period, and that really intense response from me really stuck. 

Peacock aesthetic. yup, that alone gets an equal piece of the pie 

So yeah, if any of that interests you, keeping in mind that on top of potential sympathy and understanding of his actions, Gabriel is still absolutly a shitty person, then the actual (canon divergent) AU is under the cut.

The actual thing diverts during Stone Heart, in which the moment Marinette decided to become Ladybug for realsies rather than try to faust it off Alya doesn’t happen. Rather than deciding to put on the earings, Marinette distracts the monster enough they can get away. Alya finds the earings, and takes up the Mantle of Ladybug.

This decidedly marks a regression in Marinette. Where as Ladybug, and with Tiki’s constant assurances and influence, Marinette learns to work past her urges to take responsibility for everyone’s emotions, Marinette has now lost that constant companion, and has to deal to with her new best friend’s time being diverted

Cut forward to “Stormy Weather” and Marinette has fallen into a vicious cycle of guilt. The little creature had told her it was her destiny to be Ladybug. And while we know that the situation with Hawkmoth is not much different than it is in canon, Marinette is totally convinced that the only reason Hawkmoth is still around hurting people is because she rejected the call. That guilt has built into a feeling of impotent inadequacy that convinces her that she’s no longer deserving of the Ladybug roll, and so she’s both unable to do anything, and responsible for Hawkmoth still being around. 

The most prevalent of episode changes is Lady Wifi. It’s Marinette who’s akumatized, not Alya, and it’s a fairly traumatizing, but empowering experience for Marinette. 

The ultimate culmination of this is this universe’ “Volpina” episode, where, in the background of main battle events, Marinette gains an understanding of the suspicions that Gabriel might be Hawkmoth, and in the climax of the battle, believing Adrien in danger, she confronts him, confirming his alter ego. 

In a scene I have no time to actually extrapolate on, if your curious, just ask, Gabriel and Marinette come to a tentative understanding. He’ll give her the powers to protect his son, and she’ll actually have some sort of control in her life again. This akumatization takes the form of a faux Peacock Miraculous. 

This marks the first half of her partnership as an antihero with Hawkmoth. (and yes, I do have the mechanics of how he can akumatized more than one person at a time without Catalyst, which will be extrapolated upon request, but this is long enough already)

Again, I wanna draw attention to those Sweet, Sweet Marinette and Gabriel parallels. Gabriel, through half truths and carefully peppered moments of emotional manipulation and practiced vulnerability, attempts to B plot Marinette into stealing the Miraculouses. Believing herself to be at least somewhat in his thrall, Marinette allows herself to empathize with his plight, and they build a surprising, if strained, raport. 

After discovering that she is not, in fact, under Hawkmoth’s control Marinette rebels just long enough to have Hawkmoth take back his Akuma, and Marinette caves the next time Adrien is in Genuine Danger, stealing the real Peacock Miraculous and using it.

This marks the second half of their partnership, and Hawkmoth reveals that the miraculous is broken, and Marinette is now dying from it’s use, and that her only choice of survival is to help him make his wish. This evens out the power balance, at they both now have the same goals and powers independent of each other, but also ups ante. 

That’s the most tldr general of overview, with other more specific highlights like

Ladybug!Alya having to reach her own emotional maturity, her earlier stint as a hero leaving her with a much bigger ego in terms of how she perceives her impact of the morale of the city and where her priorities lie in trying to boost that morale vs her personal needs. Ladybug!Alya tries too hard to take notes from already established heroes and public images. She still runs the Ladyblog, Spiderman style.

After quickly realizing (after some confusion) that the Ladybug he fought Stoneheart with the last time is not the same as the one he fought the first time with, Adrien gets a big old case of the pining sighs

Early series Adrien and Alya are both not the type to value secret identities, and so yes, they do reveal said identities to each other fairly early.

They also can both keep a fucking secret, so it works. They are secret BFFs

After the first time Adrien is rescued by the mysterious Peacock Holder, he figures out that whoever she is, she’s the original Ladybug, and more and more ends up distracted and drawn away from fights by her, the perfect reason for Alya to have to bring in other miraculous users. (the interactions tend to take place on moonlit balconies. There’s heavy Pilot influences here)

Marinette does this thing where she spreads her fan when she’s startled and hides her face. Mostly because Cat Noir wont stay out of it. The miraculous’ memory means she tends to fan speak a lot. Symbolism

Speaking of symbolism, the character designs are rife with them. I know exactly what Peacock Marinette looks like and there’s a reason for everything.

The subplot where (inspired by the pilot) Cat Noir finds out that there used to be a curse on the ring that could only be lifted by a kiss from Ladybug (thanks to her creation/retcon powers). Cat Noir convinces (inaccurately) himself that his destruction powers can totally do something similar with Hawkmoth’s mind control now all he needs is to kiss the Peacock user and she’ll be free! She’s totes not a bad guy!

Yes, Marinette does get a different miraculous ala being an episode helper, and her emotions are complicated about it

And other fun tidbits. This got way to long but I’m more than willing to extrapolate on anything more specific that anyone is curious about