#never known two characters to get completely annihilated like these two

[adoribullpavus]

[yvtro]

Two questions that I'm genuinely interested in your answer for (bc I love your metas ngl) but I totally get it if you don't answer.

What's your biggest unpopular opinion on Jason, and your least favorite popular/fandom opinion on him?

disclaimer: i’m moving blogs. still here to go through my askbox, but you will find me at @boyfridged most of the time.

i'm very flattered, thank you!! and sorry this took me so long to answer. and it did take me so long 1. because it’s really hard to tell what is actually an unpopular opinion (i did thankfully find myself in a circle of mutuals who mostly share the same intuitions when it comes to his character) and 2. because I mentally put a label on it “asks to get me assassinated.” and I guess the take that i have requires quite careful wording. 

so, my unpopular take is that from in-universe point of view, jason shouldn’t be a vigilante, and it would be best for the storytelling around him to focus on this fact. and i’m not saying that in a mean, moralistic nor diminishing way. i just think that jay’s storyline is a story of everything that can go wrong with a sidekick, and of how vigilantism can traumatise people into oblivion, and completely annihilate their ability to function normally. part of it is a result of the fact that imo jason isn’t naturally suited for vigilantism (that is not to talk about his skills nor efficiency in it, i will get back to it shortly), and part of it is a result of the circumstances in which he was introduced into it, and of course the subsequent trauma.

you could say “uhm every superhero story is like that, he’s not special,” but typically, when you think about characters such as bruce wayne or dick grayson etc., the event that comes to mind when you think about their biggest trauma is something that… pushed them into vigilantism? and vigilantism supposedly helped them in some ways? (it can be argued against, but that’s an underlying assumption) (+even without a tragic backstory, characters usually have much more agency in their decision to become vigilantes). and in case of jay, his biggest trauma isn’t anything that came before robin, and his life was awfully fucking sad, so i think that it says something. his biggest trauma is associated with what he went through already as robin and then retraumatising events that followed his resurrection. 

it’s really puzzling to me that this distinction is never deliberately written about nor truly brought up in comics…? i think the closest we came to this was, ironically, starlin’s run (when alfred straight up suggests that maybe robin just isn’t good for jason) and countdown (where jay intends to leave the superhero community altogether). 

okay, so you can say: vigilantism is kinda shitty for you. breaking news, we’ve known this already.

except there's something, in my opinion, that makes jason’s case special and more nuanced. it seems, at first glance, that with all the love and compassion jason has, he should be great material for a vigilante still. but he clearly isn’t. why is that?

the crushing proportion of other characters have moral systems, coping mechanisms, and understanding of vigilantism that make this life at least possible for them. on the other hand, jason’s personality, his lived experience, and his moral stance makes vigilantism extremely unsustainable. i mentioned it before in my post about eoc, but most (especially 1st gen, but not only, i’d argue that most former teenage superheroes also came to this point as well) vigilantes, even if associated with love and compassion as the core of their actions, have understanding of vigilantism and moral codes that jason doesn’t possess. (for a long while i was on a “jason has a moral code but it’s casually bastardised by most writers” team but since then i have thought about it a lot and my current take is that he was good at following orders as robin, and has some provisional rules as the red hood, but they’re nowhere near an actual code. as i said in the linked post, i think morality is more of an on-going emotional practice for him). and it all makes sense! let's circle back to bruce for a moment. of course, the reason for which he doesn’t kill is grounded within his own beliefs, but he is also very painfully aware of the thin line that vigilantes walk on when it comes to the law and being trusted by the public. i'd argue he is very conscious of the fact that being a vigilante comes with responsibility of cultivating a certain ethos. he had a lot of time to think about it! in many ways, he invented it. and it’s practical. it's what makes this life possible.

jason doesn’t have it. jason’s idea of vigilantism isn’t carefully designed nor sophisticated, jason’s idea of vigilantism is that he is in the field and he has power to do things, so he has to do them. he has to trust his moral intuitions. and in many ways, he’s not wrong – it's not a flawed view to hold, especially not in the ordinary life. but that also means that there are no lines that he won’t cross if he thinks he can help or fix the situation. but in the world that batman introduces us to (a world in which, to quote le guin on an unrelated matter, there’s no ends, but only means), it’s self-destructive. to compare him again to bruce, bruce is self-sacrificial, but his conceptual understanding of vigilantism and his moral code protect him in some ways. jason’s moral judgements and actions are unrestrained and radical (not to say that they’re reckless or inefficient; he’s still a great strategist and can be even overly careful if it’s required). and that is set in a world where evil never stops. we already know that the joker will always come back, for example. what does it mean for jason? he will try to match the energy, of course, and he’s not stopping either. bruce is similar in that aspect, yet he has a whole insurance set that helps him deal with extreme situations. there's an offset. and jason doesn’t have any. he won’t ever hit the breaks. i think you know where i’m going with this metaphor. 

so i guess my take is that… bruce’s outlook on vigilantism is, against the popular opinion, very rational. but jason just brings his heart into it and nothing else. and that’s just catastrophic.

this is really me just pushing the “love is his fatal flaw” agenda again tbh, but with additional emphasis on why the same trait isn’t that tragic for other characters who share it. also this is why it’s so crucial to me that he should have a civilian arc… 

and as to my least favourite fandom opinion on him, i can't think of anything very specific right now, but my general pet peeve is anything that divorces his characterisation from his 80s personality. i think you can tell that i really dislike painting him as resentful towards dick, and all takes that indicate that he's always been cynical and distrustful toward the world. i think a lot of people want his storyline to be one of someone who has, from day one, been full of rightful anger, but the thing is that it has not been his story to begin with. he had to be pushed really far for this to happen. and this is what makes him so special compared with most anti-heroes – that his story starts from a genuine place of innocent and naive hope and love despite all he suffered.

[gaast]

Good DBZ fights are like...

Goku vs Frieza: Goku is at a clear power disadvantage and has to use every tool at his disposal to try to even harm Frieza. He succeeds and fails and eventually pulls off a super dramatic Large Spirit Bomb and manages to actually enrage the villain. Really good, really fun. SS Goku vs Frieza pales in comparison just because the series set up "Super Saiyans" as being terrifying enough that Frieza believes he'd lose to one so the drama sorta fades away.

Imperfect Cell vs Piccolo: A brief fight in a town Cell just destroyed, with Piccolo letting Cell kill a man begging for his life just to get more info on the opponent. Cell reveals who he is and what he's capable of and through Piccolo we see he's a threat. The Android Saga changes from here, with Vegeta in particular excited to square off with Perfect Cell. Real showstopper confrontation.

Imperfect Cell and Semiperfect Cell vs Trunks and Vegeta (including Vegeta and Cell vs Androids 17 and 18): The father-son dynamic rules these fights, with the conflicting motivations of all the characters perfectly congealing into a really brutal sequence. The personalities of Cell, Trunks, and Vegeta are on full display, and we once again see Saiyan pride go before the fall. We'll also see this turn on Perfect Cell later--so we get an echo of this sequence later. Perfect Cell knocking out Vegeta in a blink of an eye is a nice bonus.

Gohan, Krillin, and Vegeta vs The Ginyu Force: Through all of Namek we've followed and supported the weakest two fighters vying for the Dragon Balls and now they have an uneasy alliance with their former competitor (hell, they agree to make Vegeta immortal as their only hope of beating Frieza) and they are STILL the underdogs. And they manage to hold off long enough for Goku to show up. The Recoome fight really stands out here.

Gotenks vs Super Buu: This is all anxiety. You know Gotenks can win. You know he can win easily. But will he? Will he actually get over his own arrogance long enough to stop showing off the coolest moves in the series against an increasingly exasperated killer?

Vegito vs Super Buu: Usually I prefer underdog fights but it's so cathartic to see the strongest version of Buu just get annihilated by the fused Saiyan pair. The fact that he lets himself get absorbed so he can rescue everyone Buu ate while weakening Buu makes it all the cooler.

Goku, Vegeta, Hercule, and Mr Buu vs Kid Buu: We know Kid Buu is the weakest Buu but his endless energy and sole drive to fight and kill (plus his continued childishness) make him feel far more threatening than any other Buu. Between their desire to protect the weaker fighters, increasing exhaustion, NEED to stop Buu, and inability to finish him, Vegeta and Goku's increasing desperation, pleas to the people of Earth for help, and, simply, Hercule make this a really splid fight.

You can tell I like underdog fights and split-attention fights. DBZ is really bad at underdog fights usually because it's fairly established that strong defeats weak, and technique rarely saves you. As such it has to make its characters love fighting too much to want the fighting to end (or something similar) until it needs to. That works MAYBE up until Perfect Cell but Gohan should have known better, and I don't care what the transformation has to say about it.

So like, Ultra Instinct is cool but it doesn't really sell well in a series where typically if you're bigger you're better imo. Baby is way more effective as an antagonist before he becomes Baby Vegeta; every Shenron is more interesting than Omega Shenron; Buu works because his motivations are completely bizarre; Cell stops being interesting beyond his fighting abilities once he becomes Perfect Cell and doesn't have a motivation.

Underdog fights rule because they force the heroes to think outside the box and play to their strengths. Goku almost beats Frieza because Frieza never trained and was so always so strong he never really learned How To Fight. Goku's experience makes up for the power difference. The Android Saga works because people who aren't strong enough to stop the world's deadliest roadtrip aren't strong enough to do it but they keep trying.

It's more interesting when you're not certain that someone will get a new transformation or fusion and win at the end. It's more interesting when Super Buu absorbs Gohan almost in a panic and still loses.

[lady-vetinari]

In my experience, pre written campaigns vary pretty wildly on how well they support the gm and how much work you actually have to do yourself.

I think one part that almost all of them fail at is giving good guidelines to tie the player characters into the plot. Lost Mine of Phandelver is an exception because it uses pre made characters with pre made motivation + connection, which I'd argue you should use even if your players make their own characters, but no other module I've read or ran provides as much. In a way it makes sense that you don't want to restrict the party too much, but also several of them do introduce cool backstory things but then give the GM basically no way of tying it into the story without doing all the work themselves (in Baldur's Gate, the party is drawn together because they were all in some way involved in the same crime to show the moral greyness of the city, but it never comes up. In Rime of the Frost Maiden, every character gets a secret or two to sow mistrust, but the gm gets at most one short sentence on how to tie the secret in, and a lot of them are complete derailments of the actual plot that seem too random and at times too big to spend half a session on and then not return to)

I'll go into more details on the modules I know below the cut, but also one thing I think often works better than one long pre written campaign is taking one shots, especially more generic ones, and running them in your own overarching campaign.

Essential's Kit: This one in my opinion is the easiest to run right out of the box, as it's designed to be. It's divided into clear quests, mostly from notice boards in town, and in the first part tells the GM what it is trying to teach new players with each quest. I ran Dragon of Icespire Peak first, and the ensuing trilogy a couple years later for a mostly different group with different characters, and I changed barely anything from the written module, either plot or encounter wise. It does require your players to be okay with 'simply' settling down in a town and take whatever quests are handed out by it, so not ideal for a group that wants to follow up on backstory or do their own thing, but it was pretty perfect for mine.

Lost Mine of Phandelver: The other, more well known intro adventure, is really pretty good, and there's a reason it's beloved. It's been ages since I ran it, but I also didn't change much of this one, and as I said above, it actually makes sure to involve character motivation. No idea how the new addition they just published changes it.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen: The first adventure apart from Phandelver they published, and it shows. As written, it's pretty nonsensical - you start in the south, travel north for ages (to see the pretty Forgotten Realms cities that players that already know them from old editions will get a kick out but leave no impression on new players, without actually giving the GM anything to flesh these cities out with, so it's just like "Oh, hey, we're in Waterdeep! Isn't that cool? Let's look around. What? Oh, we're immediately traveling on? Sure, I guess") and then teleport back south to much closer to the point where you started from, and it's so goddamn frustrating! Also the beginning wants to cram so many encounters into one night that it will inevitably overwhelm level 1 characters, and stop being fun. At some point they published errata to ease that a bit, but I haven't read either it or Rise of Tiamat. I ran it after Phandelver with the characters starting already in the north and being level 5, and thus skipped these two things and it was alright, but honestly, there's a reason nobody ever recommends this one.

Tomb of Annihilation: Where the earlier adventures had the problem of being too railroady, this one suffers from being too open. The first half of the adventure involves traversing a gigantic jungle island with a few points of interest, most of which your players can only discover randomly, and it gives exploration rules that bsically tell you to play out every single day. I unfortunately stuck to them fairly well and also didn't move any of the points of interest, so it dragged out endlessly and we all lost steam when we finally got to the interesting part, so I can't say much about the ending. If you highlight parts of the travel and choose which sites and encounters your characters will find by which you think are most interesting, this can probably be really fun, but you need to do that work and stray from the module.

Rime of the Frost Maiden: As I'm writing this I notice that it kind of has similar issues to ToA, at least for me? I knew enough about modules by the time I ran it that I should have known to alter the beginning, but I knew several people who adored how it started so much I stuck to the module to the campaign's detriment, and this one also fizzled out eventually. In the beginning, you're giving 12 or so towns each with its own quest that your party can do that will eventually lead them further out into the frozen wilderness to find more quests, and as written, your players just randomly encounter quests and do some of them until they level up enough, and it makes for a horribly disjointed story where nothing seems to come together and my players were trying to piece things together, but couldn't, because they had too much information on irrelevent quests and not enough on ones that came back later. This too, if you pick your quests with purpose to tell a more coherent story probably works better, but the adventure itself emphasises being a sandbox too much for its own detriment.

Emerald Spire (Pathfinder 1E): This is a straightforward dungeon crawl. I ran it in 5e for a Westmarches type server, ie different groups of PCs basically every session, and it was perfect for that. It did require a lot of work on my end because, well, I put it in a new system, but the dungeon itself was really cool. Requires you to like dungeon crawls, of course, and not want a more plot heavy champaign.

Age of Worms (3.5): This is what I'm running right now. Once again I am converting systems, so it's quite a bit of work, but it's the work I'm good at and like. I hate coming up with names, and I always feel let down by any plots or NPCs I come up with myself, but I really enjoy GMing and making encounters, so this really works for me. Also, as per usual even with modern Paizo adventures, it was published in parts, which means they have a lot more space to give aid to the GM. We're only on part 2 of 12, so I cannot say too much yet of how it will continue, but so far it has given me more framework and aid than any 5e module. A bad option of course if you want to run a 5e module out of the box, but so far I haven't had to stray from the actual plot or make up my own stuff in that regard.

Brief comments on adventures I've read but not played/ran:

Baldur's Gate: This is two adventures meshed together (first part urban in BG, second is Mad Max in Avernus), which gives neither the time to breathe, and makes the transition jarring. Also there's an encounter early on that will wreck your party if the GM runs it as written. Probably works better as setting frame work than anything.

Call of the Netherdeep: Most of it seems good to me, with two glaring exceptions that will once again require work: There's a rival adventuring party (really cool!) whose development supposedly hinges on the PCs' actions, but is only ever written one way, and also seems to become traumatized over like the course of like two weeks (not that trauma can't happen that quickly, but that the description of it reads as if it's the result of years). And the plot revolves entirely around a very important magic item that the party gets at the beginning, but I don't see how one party member using it won't seem like they're the main character.

btw, I mostly run homebrew dnd stuff and am not going to stop my campaign for a bit anyway but

what have been experiences with pre written campaigns, official or not, for 5e? I've run dragonheist before, and like anything it's more a framework that relies on good GMing more than anything... but also dragonheist is SUCH a mess and I wouldn't recc it to a GM. How do others stack up?

[fannish-karmiya]

Is Wei Wuxian's Cultivation Actually Harmful to Him?

Throughout Wei Wuxian’s first life, he frequently argues with Lan Wangji over his cultivation. Lan Wangji believes that his cultivation will harm him and eventually destroy him, while Wei Wuxian insists that he has everything under control. Many readers take Lan Wangji’s warnings at face value, leading to the common fandom perception that demonic cultivation (more accurately, the ghost path) is inherently harmful to Wei Wuxian and that he should indeed give it up.

But does the text actually back that up, when we examine Wei Wuxian’s use of his cultivation? While Wei Wuxian does experience a few losses of control, I would argue that they are far more due to circumstances than anything else, and not a sign that the cultivating with resentful energy is inherently harmful to a cultivator’s body or that loss of control is an inevitable conclusion.

Preconceptions

Lan Wangji is the character who most often tries to tell Wei Wuxian that his cultivation is harmful. Immediately when Wei Wuxian returns from the Burial Mounds and meets Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji again while torturing Wen Chao, Lan Wangji expresses concern:

One against two, Lan WangJi still refused to back off. He gazed at Wei WuXian, “Wei Ying, for cultivating an evil path you would eventually have to pay. Throughout time, there has not been a single exception.”

Wei WuXian, “I can pay.”

Seeing how unconcerned he seemed to be, Lan WangJi lowered his voice, “The path would not only damage your body, but your heart as well.”

(Chapter 62, Exiled Rebels translation)

Now, Wei Wuxian’s path (guidao, the ghost path) is brand new. He invented it, being the first person to ever successfully cultivate using yuanqi, or the resentful energy of dead humans. So why does Lan Wangji speak so assuredly of the harm it can cause?

The term ‘cultivating an evil path’ is telling. Wei Wuxian’s cultivation is a new path, but there are other dark paths of cultivation which exist. The Nie sect’s sabres are an example; they absorb the killing intent and evil energy of the yao and guai they kill, and over time their sabres become more and more powerful but also lead the wielder closer and closer to an inevitable qi deviation.

Of course, Lan Wangji is not aware of the Nie sect’s technique, which is a strictly kept secret, at this point. Nie Mingjue only seems to have told Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao because they were his sworn brothers. But there are surely other paths like this which are publicly known.

We know about other dark rituals which are not part of Wei Wuxian’s ghost path, after all, and ‘backlash’ is a frequent risk, either due to making the user vulnerable or failing to fulfil the contract one agreed to.

The body sacrificing ritual which Mo Xuanyu uses, for example, will cause backlash if you fail to keep up your end of the deal.

It was an ancient, forbidden technique. Compared to an array, it resembled a curse more. The caster of the array injures themselves by creating incisions on their body, and draws the array and writes the incantations using their own blood, finishing by sitting in the center of the array. They can then summon an extremely villainous ghoul and ask for it to complete their wish. The price to pay was to offer their body to the evil spirit, with their own soul returning back to Earth.

This was the forbidden technique opposite to stealing another’s body—offering one’s body.

[...]

The difficult part was that, as soon as the evil spirit has taken over the body of the caster, the contract is sealed by default. The evil spirit must grant their wish, or else the curse will cause a backlash. The spirit in possession of the body will be completely annihilated, never to be born again!

(Chapter 2, Exiled Rebels translation)

Interestingly, the harm here is to the ‘evil spirit’ if they fail to keep up their end of the contract. Well, also the caster who gives up his or her life in exchange. At any rate, this sort of thing seems to be a frequent risk of dark cultivation techniques. The paperman technique is also quite risky:

The good thing was that Wei WuXian had once learnt a certain technique of the dark arts—the paper metamorphosis.

Although it was indeed useful, it had a number of restrictions as well. Not only was the time strictly limited, the paperman must also return as it were, after it had been released. There mustn’t even be a single scratch on it. If, on its way, it was torn apart or broken in any way, the soul would receive the same degree of harm—from a year of unconsciousness to a whole lifetime of lunacy. Thus, one must be extremely careful.

(Chapter 47, Exiled Rebels translation)

This seems to be a frequent concern with any dark technique, which probably is what led Lan Wangji to believe that Wei Wuxian’s new path would be similarly dangerous. It’s also very worth noting that he grew up in Gusu Lan, which is known for being even more judgmental towards dark cultivation than other sects.

He immediately seemed to realize, “Oh. I forgot. Your uncle Lan QiRen hates crooked people like me. You’re his proudest disciple, so of course you’re the same as him, haha. I refuse.”

Jiang Cheng stared at Lan WangJi, cautious, “Second Young Master Lan, all of us understand the Lan Sect’s ways.

[...]

Wei WuXian had been angered as well, “Lan WangJi! Do you really have to make this difficult at such a point in time? You want me to go to the Cloud Recesses for the GusuLan Sect’s confinement punishment? Who do you think you are, what do you think the GusuLan Sect is?! You really think that I won’t resist?!”

(Chapter 62, Exiled Rebels translation)

While many people speak negatively of Wei Wuxian’s cultivation path, Lan Qiren is particularly virulent when Wei Wuxian first proposes the theory as a teen:

Everyone in the room was stunned. Lan QiRen sprang to his feet, “The essence of exorcising demons and annihilating ghosts is to liberate! You do not study the methods of liberation, and even think about increasing their energy of resentment! You reverse the natural order, and ignore ethics and morality!”

[...]

Another book came flying from Lan QiRen. He spoke harshly, “Then, let me ask you again! How do you make sure that the resentful energy only listens to you and does not harm others?”

Wei WuXian ducked while speaking, “I haven’t thought of it yet!”

Lan QiRen raged, “If you thought of it, the cultivation world would not allow your existence! Get out!”

(Chapter 14, Exiled Rebels translation)

Due to their father’s seclusion and their mother’s imprisonment, Lan Wangji and his brother were raised by Lan Qiren. With his uncle having such a black and white view of such matters, it’s understandable that Lan Wangji would absorb that and struggle to reconcile the Wei Wuxian he knows and loves with the man who is cultivating an ‘evil’ path.

With his own sect and family so negatively inclined towards Wei Wuxian’s cultivation, I think Lan Wangji was primed to see every behaviour of Wei Wuxian’s through this lens. Similarly, the audience hears the younger Lan Wangji repeat these warnings so many times that I think many readers wind up believing him, too.

Confirmation Bias

However, I think much of this is actually a case of confirmation bias. Lan Wangji is predisposed to see Wei Wuxian’s cultivation as harmful, and is actively looking for signs that it is; he winds up correlating all sorts of things to Wei Wuxian’s cultivation as a result.

He does so when he visits Wei Wuxian in Yunmeng:

Lan WangJi, “Last time, during the hunt on Phoenix Mountain, have you noticed certain signs?”

Wei WuXian, “What signs?”

Lan WangJi, “The loss of control.”

Wei WuXian, “You mean me almost getting into a fight with Jin ZiXuan? I think you got something wrong. I want to fight with Jin ZiXuan whenever I see him.”

(Chapter 71, Exiled Rebels translation)

Which is true! Wei Wuxian and Jin Zixuan just do not get on at all. And if we go back to Phoenix Mountain, it’s clear that this was a perfectly ordinary fight:

However, Jiang YanLi didn’t turn around. Jin ZiXuan was even more enraged. He caught up to her in just three strides and was about to grab her hand when a shadow suddenly flashed before his eyes. Before he could see who it was, he received a blow on his chest. Jin ZiXuan swung his sword across and backed away.

When he finally could see, he raged, “Wei WuXian, why is it you again?!”

Wei WuXian blocked Jiang YanLi behind him, raging as well, “I haven’t fucking said it yet—why is it you again?!”

Jin ZiXuan, “Attacking because of nothing have you gone mad?!”

Wei WuXian struck with his palm, “That’s exactly what I’m doing! What do you mean because of nothing? What are you doing trying to grab my shijie just because of how ashamed you are?!”

Jin ZiXuan dodged to the side and returned to him a sword attack, “If I don’t grab her should I let her walk randomly around the mountain alone?!”

(Chapter 70, Exiled Rebels translation)

Jin Zixuan is described as being ‘enraged’ and tries to grab Jiang Yanli. He’s clearly being very hotheaded here himself. What brother wouldn’t be enraged after this, especially given Jin Zixuan’s pattern of speaking of Jiang Yanli derisively?

Earlier, Lan Wangji had forcibly kissed Wei Wuxian while he was blindfolded, and yet he didn’t display any loss of control or temper problems then.

(I also think this ties into how people tend to judge Wei Wuxian more harshly due to his lower social class; he’s often no more brash and arrogant than his peers, but because he’s the son of a servant only he is judged for it. Look at Jin Zixuan pulling his sword on a man who no longer carries a sword! He isn’t criticised for that. But I digress.)

Lan Wangji also believes that Wei Wuxian’s cultivation is doing him spiritual harm, using evidence such as Wei Wuxian’s unwillingness to carry his sword or receive spiritual energy to help him heal:

Suddenly, he felt an itch at his throat. Blood began to rise up his chest. Trying to restrain it, Wei WuXian coughed a couple of times. Seeing that Lan WangJi was going to grab his hand again, Wei WuXian dodged, “What are you doing?”

Lan WangJi, “Your injuries.”

Wei WuXian, “No need. Why use spiritual energy for such a small wound? It’ll get better after some sitting around.”

Lan WangJi didn’t waste any words with him, grabbing for his hand again. At this point, two people came from outside of the cave. Wen Qing’s voice sounded, “Get better after some sitting around? Did you think I’m dead?”

(Chapter 75, Exiled Rebels translation)

He observes this back when he visited the Burial Mounds in the day, and many years later tells Wen Ning that this was the conclusion he drew:

Wen Ning turned around. He couldn’t help but ask, “Young Master Lan, you don’t seem too surprised about this. Did you… Did you know about this as well?”

“…” Lan WangJi managed, “I only knew that his spiritual powers were somehow impaired.”

But to think this was the truth.

(Chapter 89, Exiled Rebels translation)

Working with incomplete information (since he doesn’t know that Wei Wuxian has no golden core, he instead assumes that he is being harmed spiritually by his cultivation) and a pre-existing bias against demonic cultivation, Lan Wangji viewed Wei Wuxian as someone who was bound to lose control at some point, and everything became evidence to prove what he already believed.

Loss of Control

However, I think it’s arguable that the instances where Wei Wuxian loses control are not an inevitability of his cultivation path. Instead, they occur in extremely dangerous combat situations where Wei Wuxian has no allies and is being besieged by hundreds or thousands of enemies.

I want to go over three instances where things go sideways for Wei Wuxian with his cultivation in his first life: Wen Ning’s awakening, the ambush at Qiongqi Path, and the battle at Nightless City.

Now, I wouldn’t even describe Wen Ning’s revival as a loss of control. Wei Wuxian had spent months trying to revive Wen Ning, and in the end he wound up waking up while Wei Wuxian was down in Yiling, not at the Burial Mounds to keep the situation under control. It’s like an unwatched pot boiling over.

Wei WuXian, “Didn’t I say not to touch the talismans on him?!”

Wen Qing didn’t even have the spare seconds to be surprised that Lan WangJi was here. She answered, “Nobody touched them! Not a single person went into the Cave! He tore them off on his own when he suddenly went on a rampage. Not only the ones on himself, he destroyed the restriction seals at the blood pool and the Cave as well! All of the fierce corpses in the blood pool got out. Wei WuXian, go save Granny and the others. They won’t be able to hold up much longer!!!”

(Chapter 75, Exiled Rebels translation)

Honestly, it’s hard to know based on this what caused Wen Ning to wake up or to return to consciousness. My suspicion is that Wei Wuxian’s efforts had worked, and he woke up with a lot of excess resentful energy he needed to work off; hence going to beat up all the other fierce corpses in the Blood Pool.

After this, Wei Wuxian takes measures to ensure that Wen Ning doesn’t lose consciousness again. For the next year until the ambush at Qiongqi Path, there are absolutely no incidents, and Wen Ning and Wei Wuxian go on night hunts together frequently.

Things only go wrong during the ambush.

Wei WuXian laughed coldly, “You’re seeking your own death!”

As he finished, Wen Ning raised his hand and tore off the red string that hung a talisman at his neck.

After the string snapped, his body wavered, and the muscles on his face began to twist. Marks that resembled black cracks crawled up his neck to his cheeks. He suddenly lifted his head, letting out a long, inhuman roar!

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

So Wen Ning wears a talisman which presumably suppresses his resentful energy, and which he must remove in order to fight at full strength. After Jin Zixuan shows up and completely fails to de-escalate the situation at all, Wen Ning kills him:

Wei WuXian was suppressing a blazing flame of hatred. His voice was cold, “Jin ZiXuan, move away right now. I won’t touch you, but you’re not going to provoke me either.”

Seeing that he still refused to yield, Jin ZiXuan suddenly lunged forward, as if trying to hold him down, “Why can’t you just back off for once?! A-Li is still…”

Just as he reached toward Wei WuXian, he heard a strange, heavy noise.

The noise was almost a bit too near. Jin ZiXuan paused in surprise. He looked down and finally saw the hand that pierced his chest.

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

It’s pretty clear that Wen Ning saw Jin Zixuan lunging towards Wei Wuxian and interpreted him as a threat. As objective observers, we can see that this is actually quite understandable, if tragic, and realistically could have happened similarly in a mundane setting with no magic. But Wei Wuxian of course would start to feel doubt when something so terrible happens:

He was clearly controlling Wen Ning properly.

Even though he activated Wen Ning’s rampage mode, he should still be able to control him.

He’d clearly always been able to control him perfectly.

He didn’t want to kill Jin ZiXuan at all.

He never had the intention to kill Jin ZiXuan at all! It was just that moment. He didn’t know why, but all of a sudden he wasn’t able to control it… He had suddenly lost control!

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

Wei Wuxian had always been able to control Wen Ning perfectly before. Honestly, it’s not a surprise that his control was looser in a situation like this; he’s in the midst of an ambush where 300 people are trying to kill him! Realistically, Jin Zixuan bears some responsibility in his own death, too. When you’re trying to negotiate a ceasefire, you don’t fail to give the target of the attack any assurance of his safety and then lunge for him threateningly! Of course Wen Ning saw him as a threat and acted to defend Wei Wuxian.

Later, Wei Wuxian observes that during his ‘rampage’ state, Wen Ning draws his guidance from Wei Wuxian’s impressions of people:

Listening to him stutter as he apologized over and over again, all of a sudden, Wei WuXian felt extremely ridiculous.

It wasn’t Wen Ning’s fault at all.

It was his own fault.

When on a rampage, Wen Ning was nothing more than a weapon. The person who created the weapon was him. The things it listens to were his orders as well.

At that time, with all the tension and the killing intent on top of how Wei WuXian had never hesitated to show enmity toward Jin ZiXuan in front of Wen Ning, when he was unconscious, Wen Ning recognized Jin ZiXuan as an ‘enemy’ when he attacked, carrying out the order of ‘exterminate’ without a second thought.

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

I actually think that if Wen Ning had killed, say, Jin Zixun, Wei Wuxian would simply have seen it as a case of self-defence and accepted it as that. It’s the fact that Jin Zixuan is the husband of his foster sister (and the one person there he didn’t actually want dead) which turns this into such a tragedy.

The intensely stressful situation in the aftermath of Jin Zixuan’s death is the only time we ever see Wei Wuxian express doubt in his own abilities or regret choosing the ghost path:

With the child’s cries coming to his ears from afar and the scared siblings who were at a complete loss as to what to do in his eyes, Wei WuXian felt his heart sink lower into darkness. He asked himself, Just why have I been locking myself up on Burial Mound all these years? Why do I have to go through all this? Why did I choose to walk this path in the beginning? Why did I make myself like this? What do others see me as? Just what have I gained? Have I gone mad? Have I gone mad? Have I gone mad?!

If only he didn’t choose this path in the beginning.

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

I think that during this period, Wei Wuxian was under an immense amount of stress. He was the sole protector of 50 people who the world wanted dead, and he had to be strong and confident for them at all times. Only during his initial panic after Jin Zixuan’s death does that confident front break down and show us just how much the stress must have been wearing on him:

As he thought and thought about it, Wei WuXian suddenly broke into tears.

His voice was submerged in a deep helplessness, “… Can someone tell me… what I’m supposed to do now?”

(Chapter 76, Exiled Rebels translation)

I honestly think that if Wei Wuxian had had someone to lean on and share responsibility with during this time, it would have helped him so much.

In the past, there were only others who asked him what to do. Now, though, he was the one asking others what he should do, and nobody was able to give him an answer.

[...]

Wei WuXian raged, “You can shut the fuck up! It’s already pandemonium the way things are right now! You two can stop adding more trouble onto my platter. Give yourselves in my ass. Did I tell you to do this? Take it out!”

(Chapter 77, Exiled Rebels translation)

Later on, at Nightless City, Wei Wuxian’s loss of control is directly tied by the narrator to his worsening mental state:

The more Wei WuXian panicked, the less control he had. The corpse ignored his command and instead lifted the sword in its hand, slashing it down at Jiang YanLi!

Wei WuXian had lost it, dashing as he shouted, “Stop it, stop it, right now, stop it!”

(Chapter 78, Exiled Rebels translation)

He manages to calm himself down and get back under control:

Jiang YanLi sighed, “A-Xian, you… you should stop first. Don’t, don’t…”

Wei WuXian hurried, “Yes, I’ll stop.”

He took up Chenqing, placed it by his lips, and began to play. He only managed to steady his mind with great effort. This time, the corpses finally stopped ignoring his commands. One after another, strange gurgles echoed in their throats as if they were complaining. Slowly, they bent down.

(Chapter 78, Exiled Rebels translation)

Only when Jiang Yanli is killed by a cultivator aiming for Wei Wuxian does he decide, in his grief and rage, to put the Yinhufu together again:

Yet, no matter the criticism, the blame, Wei WuXian could no longer hear any of them. As if governed by another soul, he reached out and took two objects from within his sleeves. Before everyone’s eyes, he put them together. One half on top and the other below, the two objects snapped into one, letting out a resonating clang.

Wei WuXian placed it on his palm and raised it high into the air.

It was the Stygian Tiger Seal!

(Chapter 78, Exiled Rebels translation)

We know that after the Bloodbath of Nightless City, as this battle comes to be known, Lan Wangji takes Wei Wuxian back to Yiling. However, Wei Wuxian is in a very poor mental state (most likely due to stress, exhaustion, and trauma), and only regains awareness a few days later at the Burial Mounds.

This is when he decides that the Yinhufu is a weapon which he should never have created, and determines to destroy it.

After using it for the second time, he finally decided to destroy one half of the seal. Before he could completely destroy the other half, the siege at Luanzang Hill happened, and it had since then been beyond his capabilities.

(Chapter 30, Exiled Rebels translation)

So Wei Wuxian was actually able to successfully destroy one half of the seal, and start work on the second, in the three months between Nightless City and the First Siege.

Toward his own creation, Wei WuXian was confident to say that even if the sect that got hold of it, made a temple for it, and offered it incense every single day, the remaining half of the Tiger Seal was just a piece of scrap iron. However, Lan WangJi told him something shocking—it appeared that Xue Yang could rebuild the other half of the seal!

Although Xue Yang was young, he was also quite clever, a bizarre eccentric. The LanlingJin Sect discovered that he could use the remaining half of the seal to roughly piece together the other half. Even though the recreated version wasn’t as powerful and couldn’t be used for as long, it could already result in terrible catastrophes.

(Chapter 30, Exiled Rebels translation)

I gather that the first half, he completely neutralised. The second half had not been fully drained of power when the First Siege happened. We never see the First Siege, but I think we can hazard a guess that once the Wens were massacred, Wei Wuxian knew that it was all over, and decided to destroy the second half of the Yinhufu so that no one there could get their hands on it. It is likely the backlash from improperly destroying/neutralising the Yinhufu which led to his corpses turning on him and ripping him apart.

Wei Wuxian does confirm that some sort of backlash killed him:

Wen Ning whispered, “Sect Leader Jiang, Jiang Cheng, brought a siege upon the Burial Mounds. And he killed you.”

Wei WuXian, “I’ll have to clarify this one. He didn’t kill me. I died from a backfire.”

(Chapter 43, Exiled Rebels translation)

“That’s merely hearsay. Although Jiang Cheng was one of the main forces, he did not give Wei WuXian the final blow. Because he cultivates the Demon Path, Wei WuXian’s powers had backfired and he was ripped to pieces.”

“Hahahaha… That’s karma! The ghost soldiers that he created are like unleashed dogs, biting everyone that they come across. It serves him right to be chewed to death!”

(Chapter 1, Exiled Rebels translation)

While the vast majority of information in the prologue is revealed later to be lies, Wei Wuxian does confirm this. Strictly, the ‘ghost soldiers’ were probably his fierce corpses. ‘Ghost’ or ‘Gui’ is used in Modao Zushi’s magic system as a catch-all phrase for dead humans, whether they’re actual ghosts (incorporeal spirits) or reanimated corpses. We know that Wei Wuxian was using huge numbers of fierce corpses to act as guards at the entrance to the Burial Mounds and protect the Wens, after all.

Wei Wuxian’s Second Life

So the risk of backlash is confirmed as a threat when using guidao and other dark cultivation techniques. However, it seems that they either have a clear contract which has to be fulfilled (like in the body sacrifice ritual), or a clearly defined risk which can be mitigated or prevented entirely through careful use.

It’s notable that Wei Wuxian is in control of his cultivation far more often than not, and in his second life we see absolutely no losses of control from him. This is probably down to a few things, one of them being greater experience. He also is no longer working alone; Lan Wangji is nearly always at his side or very nearby, which removes the intense stress of trying to fight against the entire world alone.

Honestly, I can’t even pull up any instances of Wei Wuxian struggling to control his cultivation in his second life or being even mildly harmed by it; there are absolutely none. We only ever see him dealing with mundane exhaustion, stress, and physical injuries.

He recovers very quickly from performing Empathy with Nie Mingjue:

Hearing this, Wei WuXian instantly pulled himself out!

He was still the thin paperman, stuck to the helmet that sealed Nie MingJue’s head. He had tugged loose the knot that tied the iron shells over Nie MingJue’s eyes, revealing a bloodshot eye, opened wide with anger.

[...]

There wasn’t much time left. He must return to his corporal body immediately!

Paperman WuXian flapped his sleeves, flying out as though he were a butterfly.

[...]

A while later, once his soul had returned successfully, Wei WuXian immediately took a deep breath. He raised his head, opened his eyes, and suddenly stood up. Yet, having not expected his body to still be disoriented, he felt dizzy and leaned forward. Seeing this, Lan WangJi caught him in his arms. Wei WuXian lifted his head once more, and the top of his head collided with Lan WangJi’s chin. With a thud, both of them grunted in pain. Wei WuXian rubbed his head with one hand and felt Lan WangJi’s chin with the other, “Ugh! I’m sorry. Lan Zhan, you alright?”

His chin having been stroked a couple of times, Lan WangJi lightly took Wei WuXian’s hand away before shaking his head. Wei WuXian tugged him, “Let’s go!”

(Chapter 50, Exiled Rebels translation)

After this, he is stabbed by Jin Ling and winds up spending four days unconscious in Cloud Recesses. I’ve seen it suggested that his short bout of hallucinating after he wakes up is due to harm from his cultivation, but I firmly disagree. He’d been unconscious for four days after being stabbed!

He immediately let go, almost wanting to roll away. His movement was so large that it hurt the wound at his stomach. He exclaimed an ‘ah’ as he scrunched his brows, finally remembering that he was still injured. Amid the stars before his eyes, Jing Ling, Jiang Cheng, Jiang YanLi, Jiang FengMian, Madam Yu… Many faces spun around in a large circle.

[...]

Only having ensured that his injuries were indeed fine did Lan WangJi finally let him go, “Four days.”

Jin Ling’s sword stabbed right through. The wound hadn’t been shallow at all. How it healed within four days without even leaving a scar behind meant that high level medicine of the GusuLan Sect had to have been necessary. Wei WuXian thanked him, mocking himself along the way, “I’ve reincarnated but somehow I’ve become even weaker. I couldn’t keep going after just a single stab.”

(Chapter 63, Exiled Rebels translation)

After being a bit muddled upon first waking up, he’s fine. He was also dreaming about his past while unconscious, which is why he’s described as seeing all these faces ‘amid the stars before his eyes’. The flashbacks in Refinement and Poisons-Evil are both framed as Wei Wuxian sleeping and dreaming about the past, and he’s thinking about them as a result; he’s not portrayed as actually hallucinating and thinking they’re really there.

Wei Wuxian is very drained by the events of the Second Siege and faints twice afterwards. However, it’s worth noting that during the Second Siege, he didn’t really use resentful energy (he couldn’t, as all the corpses there were under the control of the Yinhufu); he used talismans, which only require a small amount of spiritual energy.

Wei Wuxian even specifically states that Mo Xuanyu’s body is very weak, refusing to use Suibian before the Second Siege:

He wore it by his waist and didn’t seem like he was going to use it. Seeing how Lan WangJi looked at him, he fiddled with his hair and explained, “I haven’t used a sword in so many years. I’m not used to it.” As he spoke, he sighed again, “Alright. The real reason is that my current body is low in spiritual energy. Even if there’s a high level sword, it won’t be able to make the best use of it. And so, it’ll be up to HanGuang-Jun to protect the delicate man that I am.”

(Chapter 68, Exiled Rebels translation)

Wei Wuxian collapses due to exhaustion on the boat ride to Lotus Pier:

OuYang ZiZhen, “HanGuang-Jun, why did Senior Wei collapse?”

Lan WangJi, “Fatigue.”

Lan JingYi was amazed, “I thought that Senior Wei would never get tired!”

(Chapter 84, Exiled Rebels translation)

He collapses again during the fight at the Jiang ancestral hall:

Lan WangJi, “Wei Ying?!” His low voice rang within Wei WuXian’s ears, echoing endlessly.

Wei WuXian was starting doubt if something happened to his ears, “What’s wrong?”

He felt something streak down his face, but reached up only to retrieve a handful of scarlet. Accompanied by throbs of dizziness, blood continued to drip down his nose and his mouth, onto the ground.

[...]

Having come to the conclusion that Wei WuXian was only in a temporary state of unconsciousness due to extreme fatigue and anger, Lan WangJi finally tore his gaze away.

(Chapter 88, Exiled Rebels translation)

When he wakes up in Chapter 90, he feels unwell but recovers fairly quickly:

For a long while, he couldn’t figure out what was happening. Only when he saw the splatters of blood on Lan WangJi’s left sleeve, like a string of plum blossoms resting on snow, did he finally recall what happened before he passed out from anger. His expression twisted at once as he suddenly sat upright. Lan WangJi went to help him, but the ringing in Wei WuXian’s ears hadn’t stopped yet.

[...]

Lan WangJi knew that he wasn’t feeling well. Silent, he didn’t ask anything. He lay one hand on his back, sending him a warm thread of spiritual energy.

[...]

Looking around, Wei WuXian suddenly exclaimed, “I’m hungry.”

Lan WangJi looked up. Of course, Wei WuXian wasn’t hungry at all. He had just eaten three pies at the vendor in front of Lotus Pier’s gates. Lan WangJi only ate one, however, and it was the only thing he’d eaten in the past two days. The matter was on Wei WuXian’s mind.

(Chapter 90, Exiled Rebels translation)

The narrative again directly links it to exhaustion, not to anything more ominous than that:

In the fight at Burial Mound, Wei WuXian exerted too much energy and stamina. Both his mind and his body were strained for too long. A few hours earlier, Jiang Cheng angered him so much that he almost bled from his qiqiao.

He only recovered after a long time of rest. Although he didn’t feel too bad right now, if there was something he missed and he pushed himself all the way to Lanling, it was hard to tell whether or not an accident would happen at a critical moment. On top of that, he wasn’t the only one straining his mind and body in the past few days. Lan WangJi didn’t rest for a second either.

(Chapter 91, Exiled Rebels translation)

As said, there simply isn’t any proof, based on Wei Wuxian’s second life, that his cultivation is doing him harm, nor does he ever lose control of it.

This definitely indicates to me that Wei Wuxian’s losses of control in his first life were related to the circumstances and not an inevitable risk of his cultivation path.

In Conclusion

I actually suspect that Lan Wangji himself came to the same conclusion; he only ever gently warns Wei Wuxian to be careful when using dark techniques during his second life:

Lan WangJi let the paperman wriggle on his ribbon for some time. Just as he reached out to take it down, the paperman slid its way down as fast as it could. No matter intentionally or not, it bumped its head once against his lips.

Lan WangJi’s movements paused for a moment. Using two of his fingers, he finally caught it, “Do not fool around.”

Softly, the paperman rolled its body over his slender finger.

Lan WangJi, “You must be careful.”

The paperman nodded and flapped its wings. Clinging flat onto the ground, it climbed through the door slit and snuck out of the guest room.

(Chapter 47, Exiled Rebels translation)

He still does have some level of distaste for Wei Wuxian’s cultivation path, I would argue, due to the way he instantly latches onto the idea that Wei Wuxian would never have turned to the ghost path if not for his lost golden core:

“…” Lan WangJi managed, “I only knew that his spiritual powers were somehow impaired.”

But to think this was the truth.

Wen Ning, “If not because of this…”

If not because there really wasn’t a second path to walk on.

(Chapter 89, Exiled Rebels translation)

But the discussion of Wei Wuxian’s feelings on his cultivation is one for another day.

At any rate, I doubt that Lan Wangji is only holding back his feelings on the ghost path due to wanting to avoid any more fights with Wei Wuxian. After all, he spent 13 years mourning him. If he still believed that Wei Wuxian’s cultivation was going to eventually kill him, I doubt he would accept it so much more readily now.

I think the lesson he learnt, after looking back and thinking on the past a great deal, was indeed that Wei Wuxian would not have suffered such losses of control if he had had anyone to rely on in his past life. So now Lan Wangji always stands by his side and ensures that he will never reach such a state of desperation again.

[midnight-in-town]

About the current (last?) arc of AnY and going full circle

Sorry if some fans already mentioned those ideas but I’ve been rereading the current arc, because it’s been quite long and the pace has its flaws sometimes, so I wanted to broaden my perspective on the story. 

First of all, as an introduction can I just say that I’m, as always, impressed by Hak’s character. He had so much cliché and shallow potential when the story started (I really used to roll my eyes at him), but he became one of my absolute favorite by how deep and strong-hearted he actually is, once he allows people behind the walls he built around him. Anyway, my love for his character & development knows no boundary. I had to say this, ok. I’ll explain why later in the post. Moving on. 

A conflict of generation

If there is one thing I love about Kusanagi-sensei, it’s the feminine touch she adds to her writing. For example, when she naturally addressed periods during the Xing arc and it fit perfectly, because that’s just how her writing goes. In this arc, it shows through the initial bold move to tell us readers about the past through the thoughts and words of a character we’ve never met, that is to say, Yonhi, Yuhon’s wife and Suwon’s mother. 

And yet, it made absolute sense, because Yonhi was the reason behind the cataclysm that eventually led to Yuhon killing priests, as well as the falling-out between him and his younger brother, Il. All along, Yonhi was the silent but pained witness to this feud, watching as the ego of two brothers destroyed everything when none of the two backed down, leading to first Kashi’s death, then Yuhon’s murder and finally Suwon’s coup. 

So, in a way, even if I think Suwon makes a far better king than Yuhon or Il, his circumstances kinda precede the logical decision to get Il out of the picture before he completely annihilated his own kingdom in poverty and war, because there is too much resentment and hatred that fueled Suwon while growing up, even if we readers know that his motivations are primarily about saving Kouka from war against the Kai Empire.

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely despise both Yuhon and Il but, unfortunately for Suwon, Yona growing up sheltered and mostly unaware of the horrible truth highlights her own decisions throughout the series to be completely selfless and wanting to own up to her father’s misjudgement, rather than trying to get back at Suwon, effectively breaking the cycle of hatred amongst the royal family. 

Why the Wind Tribe kept on supporting Il when everyone else could notice that he was betting on his daughter as the reincarnation of King Hiryuu to save his country is beyond me (Mundok plz explain). Not that Yuhon was better, preaching wars, and I’m glad that Il eventually reconciled with Yonhi, telling him that he would accept Suwon’s judgement but...

...I can’t forgive him for his words. 

Like Yonhi, I’d rather he would have hoped that his conflict with his brother did not reach his children than entertaining it the way he did.

Hopefully though, now that Yona read Yonhi’s memoirs, she will work towards achieving that goal. Not that I have any doubt, since she never really managed to hate Suwon. 

Speaking of the past generation, reading the latest chapters I couldn’t help but wonder about Yona's sad dream... could it be that she inherited Kashi’s gift? Kashi did say that she had these prophetic visions since very young which doesn’t seem to be Yona’s case, but I’ll keep the idea in mind, because it’s interesting. I mean, from Yonhi’s memoirs, it seems that Kashi envisioned that the child she would have would be Hiryuu’s reincarnation (whoever the father was going to be), so Yona inheriting the same prophetic gift from her mother would make sense. 

What an ironic parallel to Suwon inheriting the Crimson Illness from Yonhi if that’s the case, am I right? 

Yona as Kouka’s next Queen

And by that I do not mean Keishuk’s plan to marry her to Suwon, because of her popularity with Kouka’s people. Obviously, the story always was to conclude in Yona getting her throne back and that’s even easier to imagine with Suwon’s disabling illness, but becoming a ruler is tough work and Yona had no real experience acting as a leader for an entire country. 

She didn’t know much before her father’s murder and, even after she became a runaway with Hak and the rest of the HHB, she finely dealt with crises affecting some parts of the kingdom but never the whole kingdom at once, like it’s doomed to happen with the war against the Kai Empire. 

So I really appreciated her stepping up when Suwon couldn’t, because that’s definitely good training and we see the results in the latest chapters:

To be fair, I always thought that Keishuk would be the biggest thorn in Yona’s side during this arc but, as many characters have said in this arc, he’s rather clever and honest about what he intends to achieve, which is why it’s not in his interests to get in the way of Yona if they share a similar goal. 

Looking forward to her facing even greater challenges. Good luck, Yona. <3

War against the Kai Empire: there is strength in unity

The Kai Empire has been depicted as the story’s big bad for a long while now and the common goal for which Yona’s faction and Suwon’s allies could unite, but I’m glad to get more specifics and new characters to explore that part of the plot.

Namely, Mei and Vall. With Chagol, they seem like the perfect foil trio to Suwon, Yona and Hak, except that Chagol seems like a real thorn in the other two’s backs, when a strong bond still ties our main trio in spite of the sad circumstances of the beginning. I particularly love the mirroring reflection between Mei and Yona...

&

...except that Mei is not at odds with one kingdom but with two and that she also deals with the Crimson Illness. :/

Now that war has started, the big threat that South Kai represents will obviously be dealt with, but Kouka kingdom will need more than its five tribes to win this. That’s where I’m sure we all expect to see old “enemies” come back, namely Xing Kingdom, since Kouren signed a military agreement with Suwon, thanks to Yona and Tao. I would bet that this won’t be enough either, but Xing are the only known allies that Kouka kingdom has. 

There is another “enemy” we know from the previous arc though, who have strong feelings against the Kai Empire, specifically about rulers treating their women badly and they are...

...Ying Kuelbo and the Tully tribe. 

The big difference between Xing Kingdom and the Tully tribe is that Suwon never met or dealt directly with Kuelbo the way he did with Kouren and Tao. The Tully tribe lost and Kuelbo ran away, betrayed and having to find a new way to take on the Kai Empire. That’s why I think the Tully tribe would eventually make for a good ally in this war: it showed good promises when Yuran and Yona got along and I think Yona understood where Kuelbo was coming from, especially now that Mei is with them and can probably tell them in details about Chagol.

Not saying this will happen soon, but since there is someone who met and fought against Kuelbo, probably gaining his respect, if this person was to seek the Tully tribe to make them Kouka Kingdom’s ally on Yona’s guidance, I think Kuelbo would give it a thought. That’s right, I’m talking about Hak, who’s currently on his way with Yoon to the Earth Tribe to fetch a drug that will not be able to save neither Suwon nor Mei, thanks Zeno for spoiling us. 

That’s what I meant when I said that Hak slowly became one of my favorite characters throughout the story. While the Sky Tribe seems to be taking bets on who between Yona and Suwon will eventually sit for good on that throne, there is a good chance that Hak will be one of the key players when it comes to winning that war against South Kai. Not that we should expect any less from the Thunder Beast. <3

To be very honest though, I expected this arc to be very tough for his character, because the truth behind Il’s death and Suwon’s coup would never be easily understandable to him (Yona’s own words, not mine): 

Yet, surprisingly he was able to at least listen and, no matter if he will ever understand Suwon’s choice or not, he decided to trust in Yona’s decision to back Suwon in the rising political issues.  

In general, I love how Hak is the least bound by the past before Suwon’s coup. He did respect Il as his king, but he did not protect Yona in the beginning for anyone else’s sake but her own. Just like Kashi once asked him to always protect Yona (which is sweet since she could see the future) but, considering he never even thought about her words once in the story, it’s likely he doesn’t remember that at all, making the choice to be by Yona’s side defined as solely his own. 

It’s this strength of his that eventually led him to say recently that he would go fetch that drug with Yoon, knowing that it was for Suwon’s sake (surprising Suwon himself), just like he will definitely fight for Kouka Kingdom, not because Yona wants him to but because it’s clearly his own desire (see ch211 where he let Yun go alone so that he could help the Earth Tribe fight):

All that makes Hak the wildest card of every agency in the plot, not simply because he’s strong and reliable and the biggest worry of the Sky Tribe, but because...

...Yona and the four dragons will never give him up.

Through Hak, Yona will be able to assert her political weight and he will be there for her, like he always was, making it impossible for their little group to lose. What a power move, I love it. 

I think I should stop there because I already rambled so much. Looking forward to the rest of the arc, it’s going to be a wild ride!! 

[guardianofrivendell]

LOTR/Hobbit Characters and  the Green Beast called Jealousy

I was working on another preference post, but then I got inspiration for this one and I just had to write it down! 

LEGOLAS 

No one escapes the Green Beast. Even if that person doesn’t know what jealousy is or feels like. Legolas would find that out soon enough. 

He first noticed the strange feeling when Boromir had pulled you down underneath the bushes in Eregion, to hide from the Crebain. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all. The way his arm was wrapped around your waist the whole time - which was totally unnecessary in his opinion - and your body too close to his. 

Legolas felt the same feeling return on multiple occasions: when you laughed at the jokes Gimli or Pippin told you, or when you gave Sam a friendly smile when he handed you your dinner.  Or when they only had two horses for four people on their way to Rohan, and he had to pair up with Gimli. Being forced to watch you ride a horse with Aragorn, your arms securily wrapped around his waist, he had been sulking the rest of the day. 

It was only when Gimli talked to him, wondering why he looked like he could kill Aragorn with his bare hands, that he learned the name of the nauseating feeling in his stomach. He was jealous... He was shocked when he realized what that meant - much to the delight of Gimli and Aragorn, who figured it out pretty much from the beginning, but he knew what he could do about it.

From that day on he made sure he was the one that pulled you to safety, or kept you warm on cold nights and held you when you cried. 

ARAGORN 

Aragorn wasn’t exactly the jealous type. He knew he could trust you. 

But that didn’t mean it didn’t affect him when other men had the nerve to touch you, or came too close to you. Especially if he saw it made you uncomfortable. He would be at your side in a heartbeat, wrapping an arm around your waist or plant a kiss on your temple to show you were his.  If they didn’t get the message, his cold stare would do the trick. 

You still laughed when you thought about that one time, when Aragorn had been jealous of your own best friend. Of course he hadn’t known that the bulky, handsome stranger you were talking to was your bestie who had just returned, and that you were completely fine with him throwing his arm around your shoulders.  Aragorn had swooped in, jaw clenched and eyes ice cold, ready to annihilate this person who thought he could claim you as his own.  After you told him who he was, Aragorn had apologized profusely. But you hadn’t mind, this was a side of him you could appreciate... Your Hero. 

EOMER   

Eomer gets jealous very easily. 

How could he not? You were absolutely gorgeous, the fairest in all of Rohan. He still couldn’t believe that he was able to call you his. But it also made him insecure, no matter how many times you told him you loved him, and only him. 

He knew he had to keep fighting for you, noticing the longing looks the other men threw your way when you passed them.  So yes, when there was a gala or feast with a lot of invitees, he kept a protective (and maybe a tad bit possessive) arm around you.  And maybe he threw some murderous looks at anyone who had the audacity to let his eyes linger on you for a second too long, but who could blame him? 

FILI 

Just like Aragorn, Fili wasn’t exactly the jealous type. 

He’d grown feelings for you a long time ago, but never acted upon them. He was going to confess to you eventually, just... not yet.  You had never shown any interest in one of the other Dwarfs, so he never had a reason to be jealous.

That was until tonight.  You and Kili had been acting very cosy, sitting close together on a log around the campfire. He was telling you stories and every time you laughed, Fili’s heart sank. He wanted to be the one to make you laugh like that. To see the dimples in your cheek when your smile grew bigger. 

Despite being near the campfire, you started to grow cold. Fili noticed it right away, you would make yourself smaller and pull your knees to your chest. When Kili finally noticed it too, he laid a blanket over your shoulders.  Up to that point, Fili could still handle it. But when Kili started to rub your arms to keep you warm, coming even closer to you, it felt like someone was squeezing his stomach a little too hard. 

He was jealous of his own brother.  Jealousy might not be the most positive sentiment, but it was because of his jealousy that Fili finally gathered the courage to approach you. 

Something Kili had counted on when he came up with his plan...

Aragorn taglist: @katethewriter​

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

The Voyage So Far: Paramount War (Part One)

east blue (1 | 2) || alabasta (1 | 2) || skypiea || water 7 || enies lobby || thriller bark || paramount war (1 | 2) || fishman island || punk hazard || dressrosa (1 | 2) || whole cake island || wano (1 | 2)

the introduction of the celestial dragons really is just so brutally effective. this is the first time we see them, and before they even show up on page they immediately establish themselves as both absolutely powerful and absolutely despicable. everyone is watching them commit atrocities in broad daylight, and nobody dares say a word. 

i mentioned it back in the enies lobby post, i think, with spandam, but oda is very, very good at creating villains who it just feels so good and so deeply satisfying to see them get annihilated, and the celestial dragons are maybe the crowning example of it. 

i really like how none of the strawhats are really intimidated or impressed at all by the celestial dragons, in sharp contrast to how everyone else responds to them. some of that is ignorance, but you can’t tell me zoro would have acted any differently in this scene had he known charloss was a member of the world’s ruling class. all the power the celestial dragons have comes from fear; of course their greatest weakness is someone who just doesn’t care. 

obviously this moment is just excellent, no qualifiers needed, but one thing i really love about it is how all the bad shit that results from this does not detract from the sheer satisfaction of what happens at the auction house at all. like, even though this leads directly to the strawhats getting crushed by the pacifista and kizaru and scattered by kuma, i’ve never once caught myself thinking luffy shouldn’t have done this. 

i’m a huge fan of how rayleigh introduces himself. he knocks out the whole action house with conqueror’s haki, but luffy is completely unaffected, and the two of them just watch each other down the aisle for a moment as everyone else collapses around them. 

i don’t know that i’ll ever get over the fact that oda created and designed the supernovas as he was writing sabaody. they’re all such distinct and memorable characters, and almost all of them have fit neatly into the post-timeskip story one way or another. they really feel like a part of the world that was always meant to be there. 

i think the way roger as a character is handled is very, very cool, because we don’t really meet him as a person- when we first learn of him, on the very first page, he’s a myth, a story, a framing device. which is fitting, because that’s all the characters know him as. the rest of the world doesn’t know what roger was like as a person or why he did what he did, and so neither do our main characters and neither do we. 

and then we learn, slowly, by following in roger’s steps and meeting the characters who did know him, like rayleigh and whitebeard and garp. and through their testimony and memories, over the course of the story, roger goes from being a faceless myth to being a proper character.

i think this panel, where luffy says he just wants to be the freest person on the seas, might be my favorite luffy panel. if nothing else, it’s definitely one of the ones i think about the most in terms of his characterization. luffy’s been defining himself by his dream since the very start of the story- he’s the man who’s going to be king of the pirates! but it’s only here that we learn what that goal actually means to him, and what he actually really wants. he just wants to be free. 

the tone shift of sabaody really is impeccable. because up until a certain point, everything seems pretty par for the course. the strawhats make some new friends, get into trouble for their sakes, get into a hard fight where they all have to work together but eventually scrape out a win. 

but then kizaru shows up, and another pacifista, and kuma himself, and for the first time in the story luffy says this is a fight they can’t win- 

and then zoro disappears, and all of the audience’s expectations for how this is going to play out get thrown completely out the window. 

it’s not that we haven’t seen luffy upset before this- his fight with usopp in water 7 and merry’s funeral are the two obvious examples that come to mind- but we’ve never, to this point, seen him as crushed as he is at the end of sabaody. it really drives the abrupt tone shift of sabaody home, because we’re used to seeing luffy be generally cheerful, and if not that, at stubbornly determined to power through. but here, he’s just wrecked- and the paramount war saga is just getting started. 

every time i see hancock i’m reminded what a lesbian i am.

i’m talking a lot about character introductions this post, but a lot of really good characters get introduced in the first half of this saga, from the supernovas to rayleigh to jinbe. on that note, i really like hancock’s introduction, for reasons similar to what i said about roger earlier. she’s introduced as a cartoonishly evil one-dimensional bitch, and she leans hard into that characterization for the first half or so of amazon lily.

and then luffy narrowly keeps her and her sisters’ worst fear from being realized, and her facade starts to slip, and we get to know her as- still kind of a bitch, but also a deeply traumatized person who has very valid reasons for being the way she is, and someone who is overall a lot more complicated than she appears at first glance. 

one of my favorite things about luffy is his ability to always, always defy expectations. hancock is dead certain he’ll take her offer of a ship and abandon marguerite and the others, but he doesn’t even hesitate before doing the exact opposite. luffy is always turning people’s worlds upside down.

i have a friend who coined the term “conflict of interest arc” to refer to the arcs where a crewmate is forced to choose between the crew and some obligation or baggage from their past- arlong park for nami, whole cake island for sanji, etc. 

marineford is luffy’s conflict of interest arc- he has to make the choice, here, to prioritize saving ace over reuniting with his crew. where it differs from all other such arcs, then, is that nobody else can come to back him up. he’s well and truly on his own. 

i love how thoroughly expectations get turned on their head with jinbe. for the longest time, all we know about him is that he’s a shichibukai and arlong’s former captain, so given what arlong was like and what the shichibukai encountered thus far have been like, it’s a fair guess to assume he’s pretty awful.

and then we meet him, and he’s ace’s friend, sitting bloody and beaten in the deepest dungeons of impel down for refusing to fight in an unjust war.

bon-chan is really one of the greatest examples of one piece’s stubborn refusal to treat any character as disposable, and oda’s endless ability to find new and interesting ways to fit them into the story. in pretty much any other manga, it would be all but guaranteed that we wouldn’t see a character like bon-chan again after the conclusion of the alabasta saga. here, luffy straight up would not have made it to marineford without him. this is true for mr. 3 too- who would’ve thought his ability to duplicate keys out of wax, established and promptly forgotten some three hundred chapters ago, would be the thing that let luffy free ace on the scaffold?

magellan is a good antagonist. i’m not saying i like him- i don’t particularly- but he’s a great antagonist for a couple reasons, and one of them is that his powers are terrifying. magellan is essentially what might be called in video game terminology an advancing wall of doom- the only viable strategy for dealing with him is to run.

i had more i wanted to say here but it literally kept turning into a rant about one piece’s take on morality no matter how many times i tried to keep it short, so i’ll settle for just saying that magellan is an antagonist but not a villain and i think that’s interesting. 

the absolutely ridiculous, eclectic mix of people that luffy winds up gathering to escape impel down is possibly my favorite part of the whole arc. i just think it’s so fun and so characteristic of him that even when separated from his crew, he winds up attracting the weirdest, most powerful bunch of people around to break out of prison with. 

the relationship between luffy and blackbeard is a really interesting one. it’s been plenty clear for some time that blackbeard is almost certainly going to be luffy’s final opponent to become pirate king, and yet they’ve been mostly running on parallel paths through the world, only occasionally coinciding (such as here and in jaya) and generally seeming pretty unconcerned with each other. it’s a really cool way to handle the built to an eventual showdown, and i really like it. 

this is one of my favorite spreads just for sheer smile factor. i love it so much. i think we should get to see jinbe’s whale shark buddies more often, it’s a crime we haven’t seen them since this. 

[amwritingmeta]

15x19: A First Ending

This was a good episode! Oh, I know, I know - we didn’t get Cas back. But oh, boy, that should mean that Misha shot for five of eight days for 15x20 and that makes me want to rub my hands together with the hope of what that might mean. All the good things!

Oh, don’t hang your hopes on mine btw. I had very high hopes that we’d get Cas back, or very strongly established as coming back (as per 13x04) with a final scene of him waking up in the Empty or something like it, and that didn’t happen, but omg I’m so glad they didn’t.

When Jack started praying and reaching out to Cas my heart almost stopped. 

If Dean doesn’t instigate Cas’ return, then oh it would take away too much!

But then Jack’s moment didn’t lead to anything, and now, the more I think about it, there more it feels like a plant. A reminder of how he prayed to Cas the last time, and woke him. We shall see, eh?

And then we got Dean telling Chuck to bring Cas back, which was a pivotal plant as well. I’d been worried if they hadn’t mentioned Cas more than once, with Dean telling Jack and Sam that Cas sacrificed himself to save him, yeah? 

If there had been no more Cas for the entire episode then, narratively speaking, I would have started wondering what role Cas might actually play in 15x20.

But Cas was mentioned more than once. We even got to hear his voice and have that fake return to stir our... I almost wrote loins, but that’s not appropriate so let’s change it to stir our... martinis. 

Ah yes. We could all use a drink, I’m sure.

The dog as well! Dean was so happy and he carried the dog and petted the dog and put it in Cas’ spot in the backseat and was all, yes, emotional substitute! And then... poof. Because it’s not going to be that easy to replace Cas. *fingers crossed*

Here’s mostly why I’m hopeful for something quite different as the actual finale of the show, the proper wrapping up of these character journeys:

This first ending is for those who have followed the show explicitly to watch these two brothers. (yes there’s a word for them but let’s not)

It ends exactly how these viewers -- and quite possibly the writers who wrote it -- always saw the show ending. It gives an emotionally satisfying wrapping up of all the thematic threads of the show and gives the brothers their hard-won freedom, and keeps the brothers riding in Baby, together, indefinitely. 

And these viewers and fans will always be able to stop watching the show there and keep that as their perfect ending.

Except it’s not the ending-ending. Is it?

This episode neatly and gorgeously wrapped up the Michael/Lucifer/Chuck storyline. It wiped the slate completely clean. Especially with Michael killing Lucifer and Chuck killing Michael. These characters just completely annihilating  each other because they’ve all served their purpose.

And Chuck being drained of his powers and ending up ignored, never to be worshipped again, or even remembered, is such a fitting ending for him! And with Dean refusing to kill him, leaving him to his fate, I’d call that Dean integrating his Shadow.

No more fearing it. It’s powerless. Thanks to Jack (Dean’s inner child) who now holds all the power in the universe.

I’d say Dean Winchester has reached a point of internal balance.

And for all of these good things: Chuck powerless, Jack the New God, surely helping to fix what Cas broke by restoring Heaven (I’m assuming Heaven will be repopulated or that God’s grace will level it out) and Jack stepping into shoes that Cas once tried to fill and failed to, to the detriment to so many of his kin, is simply stunning.

I cried, properly, at Jack’s speech. It was beautiful.

But for all these good things and wrappings up of stuff, didn’t the ending feel kind of superficial? Like stuff was missing in those final five minutes or so? Like... I don’t know... Sam mentioning Eileen maybe? Because surely she was brought back along with everyone else, and one episode ago he was losing his mind over the loss of her.

And they didn’t even mention Cas. Jack mentioned Castiel as a good influence, but Cas was just bunched in with “everyone we’ve lost along the way”.

Meh.

Hey, it’s fine if all you care about is Dean and Sam and you think that they’re at their happiest when they get to drive along a road in Baby, listening to tunes and play-fighting and reminiscing about all those people that have come and gone, while they know they’ll always remain the same.

I mean, if we hadn’t gotten that montage at the end of this episode (a fucking MONTAGE ppl) I would’ve started thinking that maybe Misha was coming back to shoot flashbacks for 15x20, as we got to see the brothers remembering Cas (like with Mary), taking a walk down memory lane and driving around to well-known locales for a final hurrah.

But we got that fucking montage, ppl.

Leaving me to feel that they probably won’t also spend forty minutes rememberembering those same people. You know?

Also, dull. And Dabb is anything but dull. And Dabb loves pulling on stuff he’s hinted at in the first ep of the season. 

And I remember reacting to Sam being the one to escort the kid and her mother into the, what was it? The high school, right? For safety.

While Dean and Cas had that tense exchange by Baby, where Dean couldn’t not ask if Cas was okay and Cas saying, hopefully, that he was, but Dean remaining stone faced and distant. “Awkward” is what Belphegor called it.

Oh. Please let there be awkwardness in 15x20. I beg on bent knees. Beg, I say!

Anyway.

What is 15x20 going to be about if it isn’t about finally answering the question of what will make the brothers happy?

A balanced universe, of course! But freedom without love... sounds kind of lonely to me. 

So, have they answered the question of What do I want? yet? Is this what they want for themselves? More of the same? This season has hinted that it isn’t. It’s hinted very strongly that it isn’t.

So, I’m holding my breath that Dean’s final confrontation is to do with happiness and daring to want it for himself. Daring to admit to wanting it for himself. Daring to go after it... 

Cas does not belong in the Empty.

And hope that it’s telling how Jack didn’t even think to get Cas out of there and bring him home. God got Lucifer out of the Empty so Jack definitely has the power. 

And Dean didn’t ask him to get Cas out of there, not because he doesn’t still want Cas out, but because it would ruin the first ending for the people who want Cas to stay dead. Yeah? 

It’s kind of beautifully done, to my mind, as a nod and a thank you to the people who have supported one reading of the show. It’ll be difficult for them to go apeshit when Dabb and the writers can simply tell them they don’t have to watch further than 15x19 and be content that they’ve got an ending that lets them cling to the brothers as the begin all, end all.

And yes, I remain believing we will get Dean and Cas together-together before the end of the show. I have no clue how much of a together-together we’ll get, but for the show not to give us a clear understanding of how Dean loves Cas back is unthinkable at this point, and will stay unthinkable until the show tells me otherwise, because nothing but those two together makes even a lick of sense to me.

Dean’s feelings were in the subtext this episode because that’s where they always have been and hopefully fingers crossed because this ending wasn’t for us, it was for other sides of fandom, giving them room for denial, if they simply don’t want to see that what Dean wants is Cas back.

Our ending isn’t happening until next week.

Dean: It’s a helluva time to bail. There’s a lot of people counting on you. People with questions—they’re gonna need answers. Jack: The answers will be in each of them. Maybe not today, but someday.

For me this may be setting up for 15x20.

Dean could be said to be accepting the reality of Cas being gone this episode. He starts off not telling the whole truth about what happened with Cas (of course), he’s drinking himself stupid, he tries to demand of Chuck to bring Cas back, he finds that emotional crutch in the doggo and he moves into acceptance because what else can he do?

Especially if he’s still reeling and is struggling with his fear of happiness, with not feeling deserving, with it being easier to simply let it all go.

But.

Letting go of the need is healthy, allowing it to make way for the real want that is about choosing Cas, not because he feels lost without him, but because Cas completes him...

That would be something. 

(oh shush let’s get with the romance) (Jerry always brings it)

The brothers love each other, but throughout this narrative there’s been hints that they both long for more. So much more. It would be so weird if it didn’t all wrap up with more being wanted and chosen and offered and had.

So if the answers are to be “in each of them -- someday”, then maybe Dean just needs to reach a moment where he’s ready to admit to himself that he can’t stand the fact that Cas died not knowing that Dean loves him back.

I wonder if Sam will push for this admittance... I’d like to witness that conversation, that’s for sure.

And Eileen. I hope she’s back sooner rather than later next episode!!

What’s next episode going to be about if it’s not about the breaking of old patterns to make way for new ones...? Are we going to follow the boys around as they do laundry and cook and make a few tentative plans for their unknown future? They won’t be hunting much in 15x20, at least if Dabb is anything to go by. I guess there might be something brief as a final The Boys With Their Weapons Doing Their Thing, but... it won’t be a case episode. And it would’ve been strange if it was, you know?

So then. Hope. One more week breathing eating sleeping on hopes and wishes and we shall simply have to wait and see what we get.

I have every faith it will blow us away, but I’m also sitting pretty. Reining in those horses lest they run away with me. And whatever comes our way, I’m so grateful for this show!

[fae-fucker]

Zenith: Chapter 76-79

Chapter 76

Andi has a nice little poetic nightmare. It’s irrelevant. The next morning has the girls preparing for the ball, complete with dresses and makeup.

Some things to note include Lira saying that in Adhiran religion (which is global, I guess), one has to mourn for three days before “letting” the souls of the dead pass on into ... everything.

Andi tries to say that it’ll take time to heal from it all, but Lira is having none of it.

“It will take time to move past what happened on Adhira,” Andi started, but Lira held up a hand.

“My three days of mourning have passed. Lon’s and my aunt’s, too. Now we, and the others who lost loved ones during the attack, must give the lost spirits to the stars, to the trees, to the wind.”

Which basically means that she’s done feeling bad about the unexpected and brutal attack on her home planet, so that’s convenient. Well, if one of our main characters doesn’t care about her people getting senselessly murdered, then why should we?

She also lets us know that her aunt has fixed up the Marauder and brought it here, because of course. Lira wants to arrange for Lon to be transferred to the Marauder, and though she has a logical reason for it (taking him home personally), it’s only a setup so we know why he’s on there at the end of the book when Andi’s bleeding out and needs a universal donor.

Spoilers, I guess.

Andi’s mother, Glorya, intercepts Andi as she tries to leave her crew to their makeover montages, just so we can move into a scene where her mom is brushing her hair and babbling on about gossip and vapid high society stuff.

But Andi, of course, gets lost in a flashback that’s so amateurishly written it’s honestly embarrassing and only highlights Shinsay’s helpless reliance on flashbacks as a storytelling device.

Observe:

Her words faded away as memories took their place. Andi lost herself to them.

The whole flashback is written in italics for some inexplicable reason, even though it would’ve been fine as just regular text since we’re clearly told what’s happening now and what’s a memory.

Also, there’s one bit where the memory “fast-forwards” to a different one. Shinsay, this isn’t a fucking movie. This isn’t a screenplay. What the fuck are you DOING.

The flashback and the mother’s inane babbling are all there to illustrate how vapid and brainless Glorya is and how she only ever cared about her status and not about her kid. Glorya pretends that everything is back to the way it was but Andi curses her out for abandoning her when she needed them most and how “the way it was” was actually always shit.

I mean it’s fine. It’s all right. I see what they’re going for, it’s melodramatic as all fuck but it works for what they’re trying to do? I can see this as being a realistic way for an emotionally neglectful family to look like. I wish it was more nuanced and wasn’t just shoe-horned in here (Glorya doesn’t show up before or after this bit, this is the only time she’s ever present or even mentioned in this book in any meaningful capacity) for the sake of making Andi’s friends look better and for her to not have anything that anchors her to Arcardius, but like, I won’t say this isn’t realistic.

And then Shinsay can’t stop themselves and it’s back to silly time:

“Really, Androma...” 

[...]

“That is not my name,” Andi whispered. She allowed the darkness to come up into her voice, the mask of shadow and steel to sweep across her face. “My name is the Bloody Baroness. And if you or Commander Racella ever so much as utter a single word toward me or my crew again, I will personally strip the skin from your body and wave it like a flag from my starship.”

Glorya let out a soft squeak. Andi snarled with all of her teeth.

Guys I can’t breathe this is too fucking funny. And not in a good “woo vindication!” sort of way, but in a “they really put this right after an emotional confrontation about parental emotional neglect/abuse huh?” way. They really thought this was ... badass? Revenge? Andi, sweetie, you’re, like, traumatized? Presumably? I can’t really tell. But maybe get some therapy?

Do Shinsay think this is somehow a win and that Andi’s threat means she’s fully released from the hurt and pain her parents have caused her through their neglect? It’s honestly written as if Andi just confronted her mother and her own hopes of coming back to her family in this one short scene, and then upon realizing her parents never loved her, she scares her mom a little and then is all smug and satisfied at the end.

That ain’t how it works, darlings.

Then the annoying Marketable Space Pet runs in and starts biting Glorya’s toes and she runs away shrieking like a defeated Disney villain.

Way to undercut your own drama, Shinsay.

The chapter ends with Andi thinking about how her crew is her True Family for the bajillionth time. Because we’re all idiots and Shinsay wants us to remember that.

Chapter 77

It’s the evening of the ball and Andi thinks about how she missed Bavista, which is apparently your generic coming-of-age ball held at Arcardius for every 16-year-old. I’m guessing it’s a yearly thing? The book never clarifies. Not sure why the fuck it’s here tbh.

Actually, it’s a pretty good demonstration of how the worldbuilding in this book is presented so here, have at thee:

She could still remember seeing the otherworldly dresses and suits float by her on the feeds as she watched the girls and boys glide into the A’Vianna House in the Glass Sector. They seemed light as air, full of pride, bursting at the seams with excitement. Once inside, they would be greeted by members of the Priest Guild, who would award each young person three items.

The first was a vial of water from the Northern Ocean, symbolizing strength. For growth, they accepted a single leaf from the oldest tree on Arcardius, known as The Mother, which was said to have been planted when the Ancients first arrived. Lastly, they were given a single floating pebble, no larger than a child’s fingernail, chiseled from the very gravarock where the Cortas estate was. It represented the wisdom of rising above.

Is this relevant to anything? Does this help you understand this world or its inhabitants? Does it tell you anything of the culture of Arcardius or its youth and what’s expected of them? No? It’s just a really generic list of things thrown together using Mystical Proper Nouns as glue? Weeell heeell.

Also what does “it represented the wisdom of rising above” mean? This is utterly generic and means fuck-all, that’s what.

Anyway, Andi’s admiring herself in the mirror. Her dress is very sexy, trust me, I can’t be bothered to include it so just imagine your favorite My Immortal outfit description. It does include sword holsters at the back, which are Andi’s favorite part, because she’s a strong independent woman who don’t need no man. She never actually uses them or brings the swords to the ball so ... Idk what the point of this was.

We also get some shit about how Andi actually LOVES dresses and being pretty but she never admitted it to anyone. But don’t you worry, this badass space criminal LOVES all things girly, because that’s feminism! Can someone check in on Shinsay? I’m not sure they’re getting enough air with their heads so far up Sarah J Maas’ asshole.

Admitting to herself that she looked pretty was something Andi kept private. She didn’t want to give her crew the satisfaction of knowing her true thoughts about fashion. How even though she was a fierce, hardened criminal, she could still appreciate the joy of a beautiful, impractical ball gown.

Huh. And here I thought they were your family. That’s weird that you’d keep this information from them, especially considering all of them seemed pretty excited to be prettied up in the last chapter. I guess they’d really just haaate the idea of sharing this joy with their captain, huh? Why aren’t you admitting this to them, Andi?

You’re saying shit about how “even though” you’re a hardened criminal, you can “still” appreciate beautiful gowns, like those two are somehow contradictory. Are you, mayhaps, ashamed of having this traditionally girly interest? Hmm! Interesting. Why could that be, I wonder? Why would having traditionally feminine interests or even caring about one’s appearance be seen as something inherently shameful or embarrassing, as inherently contradictory to being fierce and “hardened?”

This is all just so *clenches fist* feminist.

Forreal though, somehow Shinsay managed to take their entire made up GALAXY and make it subtly and not-so-subtly sexist. Good job, morons. Really girlbossed that one, huh?

The only bit I like about this whole mess is this:

The dressmaker had also accented her gown with a sparkling necklace full of jewels that Andi didn’t plan on giving back.

This is the one and only space pirate-y thing Andi does -- sorry, considers doing -- in the whole book and honestly could’ve been used to build her character more, but it’s just a one-off joke here. Wasted.

Valen comes to fetch her and we get some subtle foreshadowing.

“Valen the Resurrected.”

He stopped to look at her, brows raised. “What?”

She shrugged. “It’s what the press is calling you in all the feeds.” Valen let out a deep chuckle.

[...]

“Something tells me things are about to change for the better,” he said. “I’m ready to see it all happen.”

Andi wondered what he would do now that he was home with a whole planet at his disposal.

He deserved to have some fun.

Is it bad that I’m rooting for Valen to destroy everything? And this isn’t my villain-fucker coming out, I just want this poor bastard to absolutely annihilate Andi and her gang of acolytes.

Chapter 78

Andi and Valen arrive at the ball. It’s all very pretty and space-y and aesthetic. There’s a bunch of aliens everywhere. Andi sees a woman with funky eyes and assumes it’s a body mod, because I guess she knows the genetic characteristics of every species by heart and can tell when something is real or not.

An old classmate of theirs comes up to talk to Valen and congratulate him on being alive, then Andi reminds him of who she is just to be a smug asshole and the guy fucks off in a panic. She’s just so cool and badass, you guys.

Then it’s time for Valen and Andi to dance, and of course General Cortas looks like he’s about to lose his marbles because these darn kids! >:(

The chapter ends on Andi noticing Dex pouting in the distance.

“Relax,” Andi whispered. “Let’s give them something to talk about.”

She flashed him a wicked grin as the music began.

And as Valen spun her into the first move of the dance, Andi saw Dex standing on the fringes of the crowd, an expression of longing clear on his face.

Chapter 79

This chapter is exactly 298 words of Dex moping around about how he’s actually not over Andi at all when he thought he’d done such a good job of repressing his feelings, and how he should be the one dancing with Andi instead of Valen. If you’re surprised, you’re clinically dead.

[dweemeister]

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)

Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, remains best-known for his children’s books. The Cat in the Hat; Green Eggs and Ham; and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! are household names in English-language literature. Seuss’ bibliography overshadows his work in films, beginning with the adapted screenplay of his own book, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins (1943) – directed by George Pal as part of the Puppetoons series. During WWII, Seuss was heavily involved in propaganda films and the Private Snafu (1943-1946) military training films. After the war’s end, Seuss returned to writing children’s books, but also continued to write for movies. The Academy Award-winning animated short film Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950) benefitted from Seuss’ story work, and Seuss’ success there inspired him to write a screenplay for a live-action fantasy film. That screenplay – the unwieldy rough draft coming in at over 1,200 pages – was The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. The eventual movie, produced by Stanley Kramer (1960’s Inherit the Wind, 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg) and directed by Roy Rowland (1945’s Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, 1956’s Meet Me in Las Vegas) for Columbia Pictures, would be Seuss’ only involvement in a non-documentary feature film.

Like many who speak English as their first language, Dr. Seuss’ books graced my early childhood. So integral to numerous children’s youth is Seuss that his whimsy, wordplay, and authorial stamps are easily recognizable. In that spirit, the cinematic record of live-action Seuss adaptations consists of the scatological Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) and the visual nightmare that is Mike Myers as The Cat in the Hat (2003). Compared to the original works, both films are ungainly, casually cruel, and overcomplicated. Not promising company for Dr. T. But even taking into account the three animated feature adaptations of Seuss – Horton Hears a Who! (2008), The Lorax (2012), and The Grinch (2018) – and the fact that Columbia forced wholesale deletions from the rough draft script of Dr. T to achieve a feasible runtime, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is arguably the most faithful feature adaptation to Dr. Seuss’ authorial intent and signature aesthetic.

In other words, this is one of the strangest films you may ever encounter. No synopsis I could write in one paragraph will ever capture the film’s bizarreries.

Little Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig) is asleep during piano practice and his teacher, Dr. Terwilliker (Hans Conried), is furious. His overworked, widowed mother Heloise (Mary Healey) intuits Terwilliker’s unrealistic expectations (Terwilliker wants to teach the next Paderewski) towards Bart’s piano skills and inability to concentrate. Heloise also appears to be quietly eyeing the plumber August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes) and his wrench. With the lesson done for the day, Bart falls asleep again. This time, he dreams that Terwilliker is now the leader of the Terwilliker Institute, a pianist supremacy mini-state which is built upon five hundred young pianist slave boys (hence, 5,000 fingers) forcibly playing Terwilliker’s latest compositions. His mother is Terwilliker’s unwilling, hypnotized assistant and plumber August Zabladowski (Hayes is essentially playing the same character, but in a different world) is Bart’s only ally around. Together, Bart and Mr. Zabladowski must evade the Institute’s guards as they attempt to undermine Terwilliker’s plans for his next concert.

In its final form, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a muddled mess of a story. The analogues between Bart’s reality and his dreams are inconsistent, several would-be subplots never resolve (or at the very least develop beyond a basic idea), and the film’s initial lightness is subject to rapid mood swings that make this picture feel disjointed. Indeed, Seuss’ sprawling social commentary in his first draft – including allegories and themes of post-WWII totalitarianism, anti-communism, and atomic annihilation – is in tatters in this final product. The viewer will witness brief fragments of those ideas, remaining in this movie as the barest of hints of the contents of the original screenplay’s rough draft. Even now, Dr. T inspires psychiatric analyses and accusations that Bart’s relationship with his mother reveals signs of an Oedipal complex (to yours truly, the latter is too much of a reach). The grim nature of Terwilliker Institute renders Dr. T unsuitable for the youngest children. For older children and adults, try going into this movie without expectations of narrative logic and embrace the grotesque aspects that only Seuss could imagine.

If my attempts to describe this movie’s preposterousness through its narrative and screenwriting approach have failed, perhaps I can capture that for you by writing on its technical features.

For its sheer narrative inventiveness – inconsistencies, abrupt tonal shifts, nonsense, and Rowland’s uninspired direction aside – The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is nevertheless an ambitious film, and Columbia bequeathed a hefty budget to match that ambition. Much of that budget went to the film’s visuals. This is an extravagantly-staged motion picture, as nothing could do Dr. Seuss’ illustrations justice without fully committing to his geometric impossibilities: skyward ladders and improbable connections between rooms, an eschewal of right angles and straight lines, and architecture bound to raise the ire of physics teachers. One could compare this to German Expressionism, but Dr. T’s sets tend not to dictate the film’s mood nor are they subject to high-contrast lighting. Seuss went uncredited as the concept artist on Dr. T, and it was up to Clem Beauchamp (1935’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1952’s High Noon) and the uncredited matte artists to commit those visuals to the real world. Outside of animated film, Beauchamp and the matte artists succeed in creating twisted sets that seem to leap off the pages of Seuss’ most artistically interesting books. Some of the sets appear too stagebound, but the production design accomplishes its need to resemble a world borne from a fever dream (or, at least, a young pianist’s nightmare).

This movie’s outrageous costume design (other than Jean Louis’ gowns for Mary Healey, the costume designer/s for this film are uncredited) comprises absurd uniforms and two of the most ludicrous hats – the “happy fingers” cap (see photo at the top of this write-up) and whatever the hell Terwilliker dons in the film’s climax – one might ever see in a film. Most of the costumes are laughably impractical and ridiculous to even those without fashion sense. In what might be the tamest example, while working under Terwilliker, Bart’s mother wears a suit that is all business formal on the left-hand side and bare-shouldered, sleeveless, and nightclub-y on the right. The delineation of real life – which barely features in the film’s eighty-nine minutes – and this world of Bart’s dreams could not be any more unambiguous thanks to the combination of the production and costume design work.

The disappointing musical score by Fredrich Hollaender (1930’s The Blue Angel, 1948’s A Foreign Affair) and song lyrics by Seuss rarely connects to the larger narrative unfolding. Seven songs make the final print, with nine (yikes!) Hollaender-Seuss songs ending up on the cutting room floor. Seuss’ wordplay is evident, as are Hollaender’s melodic flourishes. Columbia, a studio not known for its musicals, assembled a 98-piece orchestra – the largest musical ensemble to work on a Columbia film at the time – for The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T alone. That lush sound is apparent throughout for the numerous nonsense songs that color the score in addition to the incidental score. It is unusual to listen to a collection of novelty songs orchestrated so fully. Listen to “Dressing Song: Do-Mi-Do Duds” and its complicated, seeming unsingable lines:

Come on and dress me, dress me, dress me In my peek-a-boo blouse With the lovely inner lining made of Chesapeake mouse! I want my polka-dotted dickie with the crinoline fringe For I'm going doe-me-doe-ing on a doe-me-doe binge!

The rich orchestration seems to hail from a more lavish film. But too many of these songs are scene-specific, and rarely does Hollaender utilize musical quotations from these songs into his score. “Get Together Weather” is delightful, but it seems so isolated from the rest of the film; elsewhere, “The Dungeon Song” exemplifies a macabre side to Seuss seldom appearing in his books. Nevertheless, Hollaender is able to demonstrate his playfulness across the entire film, none moreso during any scene with the bearded, roller-skating twins and the “Dungeon Ballet”, in which the music complements stunning choreography and fascinating props that recall the jingtinglers, floofloovers, tartookas, whohoopers, slooslunkas, and whowonkas from the Christmas television special How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966). Yet, Hollaender’s film score and the soundtrack with Seuss seems to demand something – anything – to tie the entire compositional effort together. Perhaps a song or some cue like that was cut from the film, which is ultimately to its detriment.

Hans Conried (who starred as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan several months prior to Dr. T’s release) stands out from a decidedly average Peter Lind Hayes and Mary Healey – Hayes and Healey, in a sort of in-joke, were married. Conried’s performance as the sadistic, torture- and imprisonment-happy music teacher can be considered camp, but this is anything but “bad” camp. He throws himself completely into this cartoonish role, sans shame, complete with mid-Atlantic accent, and topped off with exaggerated facial and physical acting that fits this fantasy. As Bart, child actor Tommy Rettig (best known as Jeff Miller on the CBS television series Lassie) seems more assured in his performance than most child performers his age during the 1950s. His fourth wall-breaking asides seem more appropriate in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but Rettig makes it work, and inhabits Bart’s flaws wonderfully.

Columbia demanded numerous reworkings of Seuss’ script, leading to several reshoots – most notably the opening scene (Seuss opposed the conceit of Bart’s dream framing the film) – and a ballooning budget. Upon its release in the summer of 1953, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T bombed at the box office and was assailed by critics. A crestfallen Seuss, who could not stand the production difficulties that beset the film from the start of shooting, would never work in feature films again. He would dedicate himself almost entirely to writing and illustrating children’s books, with many of his most popular titles (including The Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and Green Eggs and Ham) published within a decade of Dr. T’s critical and commercial failure. His hesitance to participate in filmmaking informed his reluctance to allow Chuck Jones to adapt How the Grinch Stole Christmas! thirteen years later. Animation suited his books, Seuss thought, and he would never again pay any consideration to live-action filmmaking.

The reevaluation of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T has seen a rehabilitation of the film’s image in recent decades. Home media releases and television showings have introduced the film to viewers not influenced by the hyperbolic negativity of the film critics working in 1953. This is not a sterling example of Old Hollywood fantasy filmmaking, due to a heavily gutted screenplay, scattershot thematic development, and incongruent musical score. Yet, the movie’s surrealistic charms and Seussian chaos know no peers, even in the present day.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[ratingtheframe]

I Care A Lot, Malcolm & Marie, Capone, The Life Ahead and the News of the World: Everything I watched in February.

Newsflash ! The cinemas still aren’t open and I’m starting to lose hope in them ever opening. Despite the UK government drawing a step by step guide into lifting the UK out of lockdown (like its flat pack furniture and not a critical pandemic) with cinemas due to open in April, I wouldn’t hold my breath seeing as our own human biology and its resistance is the actual measure of when it is safe to go out and about, not what our government says. So until everyone is vaccinated and has sustained the first few months of vaccination symptom free, I’m having to sift through Netflix and Amazon for something to watch, like I’m looking through a charity shop sale; without much luck. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for these streaming services, I (my dad) pay for them for Christ’s sakes and I know that one day I’ll be eating my words when I’m offered a Netflix deal that I (in a Vito Corleone voice) “cannot refuse”. However, unlike some of the creators on Netflix, I’ll make the most of this opportunity and be incredibly anal about what I want to make, even if it kills me. 

I feel like so many people are given the license to make whatever they want for Netflix and then I look at the trophy wall of Emmys that HBO has garnered over the years and consider their quality writers and casts. I would say most recently, shows like The Crown, Sex Education, Top Boy and Bridgerton are Netflix’s exceptions currently, being both of quality and giving us something we actually want to watch. And guess what all these shows have in common?! Not only are all the casts largely British but all productions of these shows are British too. The British quality of TV programmes for streaming services in the US is a win win for all; Americans get to watch our good quality TV and we get Golden Globes. Most notably, The Crown did exceptionally (as it always does) at this year’s Golden Globes, further proving the show's excellence despite controversy. I thoroughly praise Netflix's resistance to label the show “fiction” and the lengths it took in making the show as authentically as possible, despite the criticism. The awards speak for themselves and the Crown has scooped up several this year so far. 

To conclude, I want the cinemas to open just as much as anyone, but I’m happy to comply with the stay-at-home-and-watch-Netflix-rule for now. For now...Here’s everything I watched this February.

Annihilation (2018) as seen on Netflix

Netflix’s Annihilation starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Oscar Issac was a multitude of things that were difficult to comprehend. This is not me saying this is a bad film, in fact its me saying the complete opposite as the complexity drew a tangible beauty to the film from beginning to end. I reeeaaalllyyy liked the beginning and how the first scene sucked you into the crazy and fanatical story that later unfolded. Natalie Portman as always was wonderful in this role, playing a biologist who enters another world in search of her husband, who’s gone missing on a similar expedition to hers. Like with most sci fi films, it was difficult to gather the meaning of such a film, however this lack of meaning didn’t draw away from the story or how it was portrayed, in slow and enigmatic shots that told the story with a natural pace. If you’ve seen / liked Ex Machina (2014), Annihilation has the same director and I would thoroughly recommend you watch this too as the way Alex Garland merges sci fi with horror is incredibly seamless.

Score: 10/10

Eastern Promises (2007)  as seen on Amazon Prime 

This film starring Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel was incredibly dark and gritty. Even though I’m not Russian, I found Mortensen and Cassel’s Russian personas to be rather good for a Dane and a Frenchman. Their on screen chemistry was also really good and its make me wonder why I haven’t seen a film with these two in it before. The story follows Anna (Naomi Watts) a nurse and her hunt for the true identity and life of a baby that was born to a 14 year old girl. Nikolai and Kirill (Mortensen and Cassel) are Russian gangsters living in London and set about covering up this obscene scandal and getting rid of the product of it, a baby girl belonging to the condemned and now deceased child. It's a difficult plot to wrap your head around and like I said, it's incredibly dark. Actor and director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence 2005) directed this film and helped Viggo Mortensen with a nomination for Best Actor at the 2008 Academy Awards. 

Score: 8/10

Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) as seen on Netflix

So remember how I said I was DESPERATE for films this month...I watched Fifty Shades of Grey with zero expectations and I can say definitively that it was worse than I thought. It's a true miracle that both Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan still have careers 6 years after such a film was released and I personally wouldn’t rush to cast either acting in my film after seeing this. Harsh, I know but reputation is everything and when you sign onto something that instead of highlighting your acting abilities, highlights your body parts, what am I supposed to think... I’m all for body confidence and what not, but I feel like most of this film sort of abuses sexuality and sexual expressions. The fact is, the BDSM part of this film wasn’t even that bad, it was the characters that pissed me off the most and their LACK of character in fact. They were orchestrated in such a flat way and the only time where either one of them found any character was through the sex itself and the discussion of it, especially Anastasia’s character. The most profound and irritating thing about this film is that Anastasia’s life seemed to only have meaning when she met the so called handsome, charming, wonderful, drop dead gorgeous Christian Grey. What does that teach us about women people? I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, sexualising women in film and media shouldn’t be the only reason for them to be there. And the entirety of Fifty Shades of Grey is built upon that fact. Even though the novel was written by a woman, it definitely missed the point in giving us a strong female character who could both be into sex and taken seriously at the same time. Seems like a really hard thing to do in cinema as filmmakers either go for the over-hyped sexualised prostitute, the caring mother or the nun. Like female professionals have never had sex in their lives… think again. I like to wonder what it would’ve been like had it been Ms Grey and Christian as her submissive. Not only would that mix up the character dynamic and go against gender confirmation, it’d actually be interesting. But maybe I should just write that story altogether...To conclude, the characters in this film were flat and the entirety of the film hyped up sex and the act of it way too much. It's like making a film about walking or breathing. 

Score: 1/10

Malcolm & Marie (2021) as seen on Netflix

Malcolm & Marie received a lot of attention in the media and sadly not for the right reasons. In fact, what’s so childish about the backlash is that hardly any of it had to do with the filmmaking techniques Sam Levinson (Euphoria’s creator) used or the story he wrote. More of it had to do with Levinson’s controversial ideas about how the media likes to view and prod film like a goldfish in a bowl, acting ostentatiously towards the art and appearing woke as opposed to just seeing film for how it is. I gather many film critic’s egos were bruised when Levinson used the lead character, Malcolm (John David Washington) as a butcher to film critics. He says things like “I’m choosing to make a film that’s fundamentally political, but not everything I do is political because I’m Black” in reference to the ignorance of some film critics who stamp politics onto any black directed film, attempting to brand the films with their own understanding of the film as opposed to its real message and story. Malcolm spends the majority of the night loathing a fictional “white LA reporter” and betting on her exact words for his own film, about an African American woman trying to get off drugs. What he says is funny, so funny it's true. White reporters DO do this and instead of embracing Levinson’s satricalism, the real LA white reporters of our media got overly offended and used the “lack of story” card as a backdrop to fuel their distaste at being called out. Had they known Levinson’s intentions with this film, they wouldn’t have reviewed it all together as I’m sure Levinson knew what he was getting himself into when mentioning the annoying “white LA reporter” and making the stereotype central to the lead's frustrations towards the industry. Levinson also graciously mentions that even though Malcolm has such hatred towards the critics, he is their fuel and by making his so-called “art” he only joins them in the argument . Levinson made his bed when he made the film and I think he’s sleeping rather comfortably. No one even bothered to praise both Zendaya’s and Washington’s performances, which were phenomenal considering the circumstances and the added pressure of having to carry a whole story in one room using only each other to fulfil that story. The cinematography was ambitious and overall, it was a simple yet well executed story. What are y’all complaining about? 

Let's put egos aside and focus on the actual film for once, rather than how its perceived the articulation of your opinions towards it. 

Score: 10/10

Coming to America (1988) as seen on Amazon Prime

At this moment I truly was becoming a slave to streaming services. I wasn’t particularly leaping at the opportunity to watch this film, however I chose to watch it as I heard that Eddie Murphy was releasing a sequel this year. As someone who doesn’t like comedy, I found this rather funny in places but it's hard to laugh at the black stereotypes portrayed in such a film even when those stereotypes were perpetuated by a black person. There was also a lot of misogyny, something else that I don’t call comedy but just misogyny. I found it hard overlook these moments and kinda saw this element as the downfall to the film which detracted from any of the other comedic moments.

Score: 5/10

Do the Right Thing (1989) as seen on Amazon Prime

One of Spike Lee’s earlier films, Do The Right Thing is a film I’ve been dying to watch for quite some time. The film is like a fascinating book, with chapters on each of the plights of living in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Though it takes one character’s perspective, there are a multitude of other stories that can be found in this film, with them interlinking seamlessly and coming together at the end. This isn’t a film about race but rather one about anger and its potential to divide people, especially when things become heated and fingers are pointed. It covered a variety of perspectives which I like, almost like an episodic series where each episode is different and takes on a different character. This structure added variety to the film and allowed it to cover a multitude of topics in a small space of time. The structure of this film was only successful because its characters, who were funny, three dimensional and above all, had something to say. Director and writer Spike Lee played Mookie, the lead, a pizza delivery man and quite the f**k up on the streets of Brooklyn, using his mouth more than his actions to get by in life. I really liked the balance of moments of comedy and severity which had me laughing in places and immediately stopping afterwards. Well written and I commend Spike Lee for having written, directed and starred in the same film.

Score: 10/10

The Life Ahead (2020) as seen on Netflix

As an actress, Sophia Loren is one of my all time favourites. On seeing films such as A Special Day (1977) Two Women (1960) Marriage, Italian Style (1964), I began to appreciate the work of Sophia Loren and notice how much of an icon she still is today. Having picked up several awards over an expansive 71 YEAR career, she has been honoured many a time by the Golden Globes and Oscars as one of the finest actresses of all time. Her presence on screen is inspiring and she’s been often referred to as the Italian Marilyn Monroe for her beauty inside and out. Here at the age of 86, she plays a Holocaust survivor and foster mother who cares for a troubled boy in The Life Ahead. Loren’s character, Madame Rosa, eventually saving him from a miserable life thieving and selling drugs on the streets of Italian. Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti directed this film for Netflix and was generous enough to give us Sophia Loren’s presence on screen once more by casting her in the film as the lead.

Score: 9/10

Gold (2016) as seen on Amazon Prime

I found Gold to be one of those talky, talky films that starts at the end and ends at the end (if that makes sense) which in my opinion isn’t the most courageous structure one could use, but is common in biopics. It either starts on the protagonist’s death bed or at the point where the police have just caught them and for Gold it was the latter. The appearance of women in this film was second to none and that’s not me saying the director should’ve added female characters for good measure or token but why make a film that only appeals to one demographic, despite the intensity of the story...film is universal after all and if a film appeals to one certain group then what’s the point of releasing it? This doesn’t detract from Matthew McConaughey’s performance though as a “prospector” looking for gold in Indonesia. Even saying this, the character was very typical of him and it didn’t truly stretch his ability as an actor, not like Dallas Buyer’s Club (2013), Killer Joe (2011) or Interstellar (2014) did. To sum up Gold into one word it’d be “meh”.

Score: 7/10

Creed (2015) as seen on Amazon Prime

This was one of the most surprising films of the month. I’m not crazy about the Rocky films nor see myself watching all of them anytime soon, but Creed appealed as a more modern take on the hit franchise. Michael B Jordan plays Adonis Creed, son of Apollo Creed, a champion boxer who died during a fight before Adonis was born. After being adopted by Apollo’s wife, Adonis Creed sets out to follow his father’s footsteps by becoming a champion heavyweight boxer himself, much to his maternal mother’s displeasure and his coach’s the one and only Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). The story is similar to that of Rocky and if anything, is a complete revival, using the son of one of Rocky’s former fighter as a backdrop to tell the story. Director Ryan Coogler (Black Panther 2018, Fruitvale Station 2013 ) brought this story to life and a courageous performance out of Michael B. Jordan. Not only was I fascinated by boxing by the end of the film, but just the whole idea of Adonis Creed, a fighter and not a quitter who thoroughly believes in pursuing your goals until they are obtained. Not only is this film for boxing fans but for those who share that same universal message and refuse to give into their own inhibitions to achieve great things. We should look to athletes more often in this respect and consider the pursuit of our own desires as boxing matches and marathon races more often as it helps put our fight into perspective and teaches us never to give in. 

Score: 11/10

Arrival (2016) as seen on DVD

Before anyone comes for me for not having seen Arrival, before I was a movie buff I had briefly come across the film several times but had never taken the time to sit it out and watch it from beginning to end. I’m glad I did as Denis Villeneuve is one of my favourite directors evah and along with Christopher Nolan, I consider him as the King of Sci Fi. Every single one of his films is incroyable (as the french say) and it's a mystery why he hasn’t been handed an Oscar yet. Arrival is this slow and beautiful story of a linguistics teacher (Amy Adams) who agrees to help on a mission to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms that have landed on planet earth in the form of twelve huge spaceships. Structure isn’t something we typically consider when watching a film, but it plays such an important part in Arrival for time and the manipulation of it is the main theme of this film. Essentially, the language in which Dr. Banks translates from the intelligent life form gives its readers the ability to see into the future, which is when we come to realize that she’ll have a child, who will die of an unnamed disease. Despite this fact, she decides to live the life fate intended for her. The reason why Arrival is a highly credible film is because of the coverage it has as a film in terms of what it's trying to say as a film. From someone who finds it hard to bring out the emotion of a screenplay, Arrival is a great example to me as a film that combines both a cinematic feeling and a strong emotional presence throughout the film. It doesn’t abandon emotions or relationships just because the film is about aliens, but instead embraces them into the story and intertwines them with the aliens who’ve come to planet earth. At the end of the day, we can have explosions, spaceships and aliens galore, but if we’re unable to connect with characters on an emotional level then the film becomes boring. Arrival is far from boring and may bring a tear or two to your eye by the end.

Score: 11/10

The News of the World (2020) as seen on Netflix

I feel like it's impossible to hate a film with Tom Hanks in it and The News of the World definitely fits into that.  Five years after the US Civil War, Cpt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) spends his days travelling around the US ‘reading the news’ to anyone who’s willing to listen. The majority of the US was illiterate in the 19th Century, meaning it was up to people like Jefferson to inform others of the ongoings in the world by reading them the paper. It’s a wondrous thing to think about, how information was once spread throughout the world in such an archaic format. Jefferson did this off his own back, not asking for much and finding fulfilment in the reactions to the news that he “broadcasted” to them. Whilst on his travels, Jefferson comes across a young girl (Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengal) who’s negro family had been killed by lynchers. The girl was originally from a Native American tribe but had been separated by them, leaving her to fend for herself. When Jefferson comes across her, he’s reluctant to take her in at first but decides to take her to some relatives across the country. It’s definitely the role you expect of Tom Hanks and his heart warming nature is captured for us in this film for Netflix.

Score: 9/10

The Mask (1994) as seen on Netflix

It's hard for me to label The Mask as a good film as that would mean shaking off the horrendous amount of misogyny it has and the lack of diversity within its characters. Films mean different things for people, but ultimately most of them reflect an element of humanity and explore it on screen with originality and authenticity. Cameron Diaz’s character was only there to fulfil the sexual appetites of the men around her, which is something I loathe in female characters. Originality The Mask has, authenticity, not so much. That's probably the reason why I hate comedies so much, most of them are written by men and are about men so it can get quite boring to watch at times. I liked the idea of The Mask but it definitely could’ve been executed in a less misogynistic way. 

Score: 5/10

Jackie (2016) as seen on Amazon Prime

One word; perfection. This film was hands down one of the most beautiful, genuine and honest films I’ve seen in my entire life. It had me reminiscing Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015) in a number of ways, from the similar filmmaking techniques to the slow and melancholy atmosphere that was being created on screen. The AMAZING Natalie Portman plays Jackie Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy who was brutally assassinated on a visit to Dallas, Texas in 1963. The fact that I didn’t even KNOW that his poor wife was in the car with him at the point of the assassination is shocking. On watching the film, I learnt Jackie was a remarkable, brave and intelligent woman who after her husband's death put so much into preserving her husband’s legacy despite his lack of popularity. The way the film is shot and the music by the brilliant Mica Levi (Under the Skin 2013 , Monos 2019) just ties everything together into a enigmatic and wonderful film. Natalie Portman was nominated for Best Actress at the 2017 Academy Awards and rightly so. This film has further proven my thoughts on her as one of the greatest actresses of our time. I seriously cannot EXPRESS how much I love this film, directed by Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who’s also made another film that I can’t get enough of Ema, which was released 2 years ago.

Score: 12/10

Foxcatcher (2014) as seen on BBC iPlayer

When we first think of Steve Carell, our minds probably drift to his most notable performance as Michael Scott from The Office or even Gru in Despicable Me. It's rare for a so called “comedy” actor to find his way into films with a more dramatic substance and over the last few years, this is what Carell has been showing us on screen, with this role in Foxcatcher and more recently, in Felix van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy (2018). Foxcatcher is the true story of a wrestler offered the opportunity to train with a private wrestling team owned by a huge chemical corporation. Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, a quiet and reserved wrestler who trains alongside his brother David (Mark Ruffalo), also a champion wrestler. What's sad to see in this twisted story is how validated Mark feels once the powerful and wealthy John Du Pont (Steve Carrell) begins to take an interest in him and takes him under his wing. This relationship drives a wedge between Mark and his brother David, but much to John’s displeasure, it doesn’t last long. This is definitely a story of power and how people can react in bad ways when they are owed too much of it. Every performance in this was astounding and the slow and subtle telling of the story was truly beautiful to watch. Foxcatcher is a film I’ve been dying to watch for some time and it DID NOT disappoint. Period. The film was also nominated for five Oscars back in 2015, including Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. 

Score: 11/10

In Fabric (2018) as seen on BBC iPlayer

Based on the current reviews of In Fabric, I deem the film a poncy experimental spectacle. Not only did it not say much, but what it was trying to say was rather disturbing and quite frankly bizarre. However, it's not a film I can necessarily hate on as it is experimental, meaning from the get go, I shouldn’t be expecting any sort of clear cut narrative, with relationships, protagonists, conflict or hierarchies. Experimental films are more about exploring a central idea and having all its “characters'' not essentially prove the idea, but just talk about it, like a debate but everyone agrees in the end. A debate where everyone agrees would be boring, which is why I find experimental films to be boring as most of the time they don’t have a meaning and sadly as humans, we’re obsessed with finding the meaning of things or else we’ll go crazy. And I would say this film definitely left me crazy at the end, proving the idea of man’s constant need to find meanings in things. In Fabric wasn’t really relatable, funny, clever or bold. It kinda just...was.

Score: 5/10

Delicatessen (1991) as seen on DVD

I love how the world likes to think that the American film market is the only film market when in actuality the French created the actual concept of cinema and the idea to project “movies” onto a large screen. With this has come a plethora of incredible movies from France that have gone onto to change the film industry forever. There’s a reason why the most prestigious and exclusive film festival in the entire world is held in the South of France and not LA. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the auteur behind Amélie (2001) one of the most well known independent films ever to be made and before Amélie came Delicatessen. This film is Tim Burton meets Wes Anderson but in French and tells the story of a man working for a butcher and the crazy characters he meets in the same apartment as him. By the end it's clear that The Butcher is selling more than pork and beef down in his store and that the new tenant is due to be the next item on sale. I loved how weird and larger than life the characters were and the otherworldly set design used for this film. There were so many moments that are quite hard to explain the beauty of them and if you’ve seen Wes Anderson or Tim Burton’s work, you’ll notice the similarities between this film and their work, perhaps showing a french influence on the current American market.

Score: 10/10

Amélie (2001) as seen on DVD

Continuing on with the French theme, I was reminded this month of the beauty of Amélie. Every, single, shot in this film is pure perfection and I bet all my money that Wes Anderson was a mega fan of this film when it came out. It's truly a film like none other and it’s only this time around did I realise how much I RELATE to Amélie. The way she sacrifices herself for others and gets nothing in return, the lengths she goes to tell someone something instead of JUST SAYING IT, her lack of friends, I can definitively say that there isn’t a character on screen that I’ve related to more than Amélie (besides Elio from cmbyn). If you haven’t seen Amélie have a word with yourself.

Score: 11/10

Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) as seen on Amazon Prime

Pan’s Labyrinth was a surprisingly amazing film and I wonder why I hadn’t seen it sooner. I was astounded to see it was in Spanish which I thought made the story somehow better. It's rare that we see such high budget and well known film that’s in a foreign language but I’m glad this film got the noise it did when it was released. Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water 2017) tells us the story of 10 year old Ofelia and her discovery of magical creatures in the woods that inhabit the outskirts of her new home. Not only that but it’s 1944. The Spanish Civil War has been over for five years but small groups of guerrilla rebels continue to fight against the new fascist dictatorship led by Francisco Franco. This is a well structured film that shows two strong worlds and combines them in a satisfying way, which isn’t an easy thing as sometimes films can get lost in the facts of history instead of the emotions and dynamic relationships. The set design in this was UNREAL as always and I really felt for the characters and their given circumstances. And that’s what we call a film.

Score: 11/10

I Care A Lot (2021) as seen on Amazon Prime 

For a full review of I Care A Lot, follow the link: https://ratingtheframe.tumblr.com/post/643763403606867968/a-strong-performance-from-rosamund-pike-that-we

Score: 8/10

Interview with a Vampire (1994) as seen on BBC iPlayer

We were doing SO WELL until I made the costly decision to watch this waffle of a film, directed by Neil Jordan. Not only was the story all over the place, but the dialogue itself was incredibly on the nose and self explanatory throughout. It feels like there was more talking about the film instead of showing the film, which just made me switch off from early on in the film. I hated the casting of Tom Cruise in this and there were moments when I believed his character, but none of them outweighed the overarched and over bearing performance he was attempting to give. Brad Pitt was marginally better but the performance of Kirsten Dunst who was 12 years old at the time this film was released, outdid both actors. She was the only character that I truly felt for / cared about and her on screen presence was both enviable and wise beyond her years. Personally, I can’t explain what this film was even about because I truly didn’t get what was going on, however if you’re a fan of Kirsten Dunst’s work, this would be a suitable film to watch in that respect. 

Score: 4/10

Fargo (1996) as seen on Amazon Prime

Fargo is probably most known as a Netflix series, but before that, it was originally a film directed by the Coen Brothers and starred the likes of Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, William H Macy and John Carroll Lynch. I’ve been meaning to watch Fargo for quite some time and I was not disappointed with the outcome of it. It's one of those good old fashioned crime films, with lots of twists and blood split throughout the film. The film won two Oscars in 1997; one for Best Actress which was handed to Frances McDormand playing a police officer investigating a string of murders in Minnesota and another for Best Original Screenplay. A really well constructed story with a fantastic cast and great cinematography work from Roger Deakins (1917 (2020), Blade Runner 2049 (2017) The Shawshank Redemption (1994). 

Score: 10/10

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) as seen on Amazon Prime

The Darjeeling Limited further proves to us Wes Anderson’s ability to create entire new worlds and show us stories that take place all across the world. Three brothers, Peter (Adrien Brody), Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Francis (Owen Wilson) have travelled to India in an attempt to bond with one another “spiritually” after the death of their father. Peter and Jack aren’t too keen on this little expedition, irritated at their brothers' intrusiveness over the trip. The majority of the film is set on this fanatical train travelling across India and yet again, we are blessed with some phenomenal production design to tell us a fun and uplifting story. What’s more is that the boys’ mother (Anjelica Huston) lives in India as a nun at the foot of the Himalayas. This becomes the real reason for their venture and such a thing changes the character dynamics between the three men. India is shown in all its beauty in this film using the backdrop of three men’s relationship with one another as a story.

Score: 9/10

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou (2004) as seen on DVD

Another one of Wes Anderson’s lesser known films but equally as good as the rest, this film follows a group of marine explorers travelling across the pacific to try and kill a shark that supposedly ate a member of Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) ’s crew. With an all star cast composed of Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Jeff Goldblum and Anjelica Huston this film was entertaining, enlightening and cinematographically ambitious. Steve Zissou is a fictional character who makes a living off of extreme and dangerous marine explorations. He makes films of his travels using his crew and after screening his latest film, he meets a young man (Owen Wilson) claiming to be his son. Evidently, Zissou is reluctant to accept that this man is his son and uses his presence as financial gain to the project. I appreciated all performances in this film and the set design (as always with Anderson’s films) was exceptional.

Score: 9/10

Life of Pi (2012) as seen on Amazon Prime

A highly visual and emotional film that carries beauty throughout in both performance and story, Life of Pi was directed by Brokeback Mountain (2005)’s Ang Lee and tells the story of Pi (Suraj Sharma and Irrfan Khan) a young boy alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a fully grown Bengal Tiger. Winner of 4 Academy Awards including Best Director at the 2013 Academy Awards, this film does a phenomenal job of reminding us why cinema is such a superior and infinite art form. Pi’s family are on their way from India to America, exporting a large number of their zoo animals in hope of selling them once they reach the other side of the world. After a horrendous storm ravages their cargo ship, Pi is left all alone in the ocean with what only appears to be a small dingy, but to his horror, he comes to find that the zoo’s tiger Richard Parker is keeping him company in the middle of the ocean. Now if that ain’t a viable story, then I don’t know what is. To make a film look like it was set in the middle of a Pacific and with a Bengal Tiger is no small feat. Suraj Sharma’s performance was both truthful and powerful, despite the film being mostly shot in a studio with nothing but animation for Richard Parker. This is one of very few films that does the original novel justice. 

Score: 11/10

Capone (2021) as seen on Netflix

Yikes. Capone has not been getting a lot of love in the media since its release on Netflix on 24th February. Personally, it's not the most god awful, offensive film I’ve seen and yet I wouldn’t have been the one to have made such a film either. The film is supposed to depict the last year of the infamous and notorious Al Capone, who suffered from numerous illnesses at only the age of 48. Tom Hardy plays the blood thirsty gangster and I have to say, this was a thoughtless casting choice. Hardy doesn’t have an ounce of Italian in his face and he put on this larger than life caricature of an accent that had me feeling rather sorry for him at moments when I shouldn’t have been. The acting was exceptional, but believable and interesting? That’s another argument altogether. Cinematography and sound wise, I thought the film was excellent in those respects but again, those should be additions to the integral story of a film. I get why Hardy signed up though, what actor wouldn’t want to play a mob boss? Maybe the point of Al’s life in which this film was built upon was perhaps wrong for the screen and I’m sure most would have preferred Hardy to play Capone at his peak. This film is a clear example of people getting ahead of themselves when they first explore an idea for a film. This film could have easily been saved in the development stage had someone said let’s not do this.

Score: 5/10

Creed II (2018) as seen on Amazon Prime

Obviously a prequel will always outdo a sequel, however I found Creed II to be just as meaningful as the first film. Maybe even more so as Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) is becoming a father his responsibilities have shifted dramatically. He’s also desperate to fight Viktor Drago, a Ukrainian ruthless boxer whose father accidentally killed Creed’s father in a match decades before. Drago is tough, beyond what he and his coach Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) could ever imagine and because of this, it drives a wedge between Adonis’ relationship with his coach. Creed thinks Rocky doesn’t believe he can beat Drago but Rocky insists not fighting the bull of a boxer would benefit him greatly, after all, look what happened to his father. The character dynamics have shifted in this sequel, but the structure has remained largely the same. We kind of knew what we were being served at the end and the change in character was there for everyone.

Score: 10/10

...and that’s it! Everything I watched this February, you do not want to KNOW how long this list took to compile. Thanks for reading and see you next month!

ig: @ratingtheframe

[morsking]

And so we have concluded Lostbelt 2! Now that I’ve experienced it for myself, I have a much clearer picture about how I feel about this chapter. As I progressed one thing became very clear to me, and that was that Hazuki Minase likely did NOT have any influence with this chapter, and its weakest points can be attributed to its main writer, Hikaru Sakurai, once we more closely scrutinize her work.

For starters, I would like to apologize to the people who kept trying to tell me Minase had nothing to do with the writing of Losbelt 2. You were correct, I simply acted stubbornly because I was terrified that one of the writers I loathe the most had returned to haunt and corrupt the franchise I hold very dear to me. I insisted on blaming him for any flaws because he was an easy scapegoat and a bogeyman, and while we all agree he is a pervert and a hack who should be fired, it is simply not fair to point fingers at imaginary criminals. A person should always be held accountable only for the misdeeds they have actually committed. Indeed, we may now explore Lostbelt 2 and the integrity of its writing with a more objective perspective, or rather as objective as I can manage to be.

The overall theme of the Lostbelt is “acknowledging one’s emotions as a vehicle for personal growth”. The issue persistent in the setting of Lostbelt Scandinavia was that it was a place where only young humans were allowed to survive. These humans would be oblivious to what real growth and prosperity were really like. They were innocent, and emotionally and intellectually stunted groups of people who only knew to live for the truth of their eventual demise. They lived short, rushed lives where they would stay ignorant of basic human experiences, such as love, grudges, aging, vice, hate, competition, and companionship because they devoted themselves to living how Scathach-Skadi ordered them to. They were unable to think or decide what to do for themselves, and were thus incapable of not just taking the reins to decide their own evolution as we do in Proper Human History, but also of fathoming doing such a thing in the first place.

This is a mirror to Ophelia Phamrsolone. Ophelia was conditioned to only listen to others for purpose and direction. Ophelia doesn’t actually know how to listen to her own feelings or even what those feelings even are because she was never allowed to connect not just with herself but with anyone. Ophelia, like Surtr points out, is still very much a little girl terrified by everything around her because she has no balance, no capacity for finding her center as a healthy and normal human being would. Unbeknownst to herself, all her interactions with others are a plea for help. Her very first interaction with Mash in 2017 was asking her if she’d like to have lunch with her and Pepe because Ophelia is terrified by male strangers and wishes to connect with other women as well. Ophelia’s conversations with Kirschtaria are also her not knowing how to proceed with challenges and therefore appealing to authority both for comfort and advice. Finally, her monologues with the Alien Priestess are Ophelia venting about how she feels, as if she were unaware of what to really think of herself as her helplessness and indecision drown her in a lake of self-loathing. 

These cries for help extend to the way she summons her Servants. Ophelia is noted to be incredibly proficient at evocation. Some might even call her a genius. In fact, she is such a genius she unknowingly managed to contract not just with one, nor two, but three different Servants all at once. The first Servant to answer her summon was Sigurd, the King of Warriors from Nordic mythology. The second Servant was Surtr the King of Giants and Scourge of Ragnarok (titled by yours truly), who hijacked the summoning and took over Sigurd. The third, and most pivotal, was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor whose Spirit Origin was modified to embody the “ideal Good Fellow who could make dreams come true” rather than the actual historical Napoleon.

What these three Servants have in common is that Ophelia wished for all of them from the darkest depths of her heart. Ophelia desired capable Servants who could give her some form of direction and stability. 

Sigurd, for example, is a hero renown for rescuing Brynhild and giving brand new meaning to her life by showering her with love and devotion. Love and devotion are things that Ophelia not just desires to be shown but actively struggles to adequately express to others because she has never known what it’s like to experience those things. To Ophelia, Sigurd represents “being given that which you have never known and finding fulfillment”. 

Surtr, on the other hand, embodies a darker type of direction: the terror stagnation, conformity, monotony, inaction, and eternal suffering. Surtr exercises control over Ophelia by threatening to destroy the world if he is released, prompting Ophelia to flash to her childhood locked away by her abusive parents every dreaded Sunday. Surtr locks Ophelia into a state of helplessness and indecision where she has to carefully consider how she will proceed with dealing with Surtr. Ophelia has decided to lock herself in with him as a way to prevent him from breaking out of both Sigurd’s body and the physical prison inside the Lostbelt’s sun. This is a situation where Ophelia is in a constant state of stress and fear, since as a Crypter the last thing she could ever want to see is the destruction of yet another world by her hands. More personally, the death of the Lostbelt would also mean death for Ophelia, as she has failed her purpose once again and thus would have no worth as a person. However, what Ophelia cannot understand, because Surtr himself does not, is that Surtr’s destructive impulses are how he wants to show love and devotion towards her. Surtr has reasoned that since their worlds abandoned them after they failed to perform their ordained tasks, the only thing left is to annihilate them completely as retribution for their suffering. Surtr does not wish to hurt Ophelia, but because he is a being defined only by his overwhelming desire to burn everything, he cannot help her heal or grow in any way that matters. All he can offer is annihilation. To Ophelia, Surtr represents “self-destruction through a static state of being”.

Finally, there is Napoleon. Napoleon represents a pronounced antithesis to Ophelia’s entire personality. He is an upbeat, improvising, confident man who chooses to not stress over things because what he is seeing is only what lies ahead, not what lies in front of him.He also breaks her defenses by asking something so ridiculous and unexpected as her hand in marriage when they have only just met. Napoleon refuses to give in to any negative outcome regardless of how much the odds are stacked against him, as he demonstrated in Scathach-Skadi’s throne room where he refused to let Sigurd kill his Master despite being restrained by Skadi’s paralyzing rune. He demonstrates this once again when he blows his final shot at Surtr during the final battle, sacrificing his own life to give Chaldea the opportunity to regroup and bombard Surtr to bring him down. He is called the Man of Infinite Possibilities precisely because he faces the unknown head on and finds the best path to walk for his comrades to advance. He does not let fear take over his heart and judgement, he creates a rainbow as a bridge connecting the present to the bright, shining future. He is precisely the hero Ophelia needs, because he embodies “the bravery to grasp your own future and find your own direction”. 

But analyzing these characters further is a post for another time. What I want to get into are the gripes I have with this Lostbelt. 

Now, I could lead you on through a couple more paragraphs before I wham you with what this all means in a much higher metatextual level, but I don’t have the time nor the creativity to do that so I’m just gonna give it to you straight. This square between Ophelia, Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon is the storyline that matters most in Lostbelt 2. Scathach-Skadi matters little despite her own parallels with Ophelia and being the Lostbelt King, and the situation with the Lostbelt’s inhabitants matters even less. Why?

Because Lostbelt 2 is Sakurai coming full circle and writing an otome game like Fate/Prototype was meant to be before Fate/stay night became a thing. 

SHOCKER!! SOUND EFFECTS OF SURPRISE!! DRAMATIC KAZOOS GALORE!!

Now, that’s exaggerating a little. Or maybe not that much, actually.

What Sakurai was doing was applying conventional otome game tropes into the setting not just what she’s familiar writing for, but because Lostbelt 2 is inherently an incredibly self-indulgent project. 

There is a classic trademark otome fantasy at play here: the fantasy of multiple men being devoted to a female main character a player can relate to. There is no denying there is a certain appeal to the idea that there are several handsome men all willing to devore their entire lives to a person. Sigurd, Surtr, and Napoleon all embody certain otome game love interest archetypes. Sigurd is the cold, composed, intellectual man who is actually earnest, just, affectionate, and wise. Surtr is the dark-hearted troubled man with fiery disposition struggling with expressing love. Napoleon is the strong, confident, borderline pixie manic dream boy with almost zero brains but plenty of empathy and... *ahem*, physique to make up for his seeming lack of tact and intelligence (he’s a himbo is what I’m saying but that comes as no surprise). The problems arise with Napoleon himself, however. Napoleon hounds Ophelia with marriage proposals she refuses time and time and again. When he proposes to her in front of Chaldea for the first time, the narrative has Mash take Napoleon’s side and urges you to do the same because Sakurai believed the reader would’ve caught on to what’s actually going on between Ophelia and Napoleon. 

The issue here is that Sakurai’s clues up to that point had been far too hidden for the player to make a proper connection, and it’s not until AFTER the proposal that the player discovers Napoleon is predisposed to fall in love with whoever summons him because that’s what Ophelia wanted out of an ideal Servant. Because of the poor execution in presenting all these factors that completely recontextualize the relationship between Napoleon and Ophelia, when Sakurai has Napoleon say “You did not reject me therefore you DID agree,” we jump to the conclusion that Napoleon is engaging in extremely reprehensible behavior and ideology reminiscent of dangerous and abusive men IRL rather than take it as harmless flirtation from a well-meaning oaf of a man as he tries to break the shell of his beloved. Sakurai invokes a very dangerous trope that does more to excuse misogynistic behavior when done incorrectly rather than successfully appear as a romantic gesture of attempting to liberate a loved one from the clutches of isolation and victimhood.

On a larger scale, the application of these tropes is where Lostbelt 2 starts to suffer, and that’s where Sakurai’s writing further begins to resemble Minase’s. Sakurai spent so much time building these interpersonal dynamics that she spent the least amount of effort actually building upon the situation of the Lostbelt and Scathach-Skadi’s character and motivations for keeping the Scandinavia the way it is. 

Upon scrutiny, it’s not very difficult to pick apart the setting and make a mark out of the glaring logistical inconsistencies of maintaining a population of only 10,000 humans for a span of 3,000 years by having them reproduce at 15 years old at the latest to execute them at 25. Anyone with a passing understanding of biology would know that forcing children to carry babies to term can lead to terrible health and psychological complications that would certainly end up in a lot more miscarriages, stillbirths, and failed attempts at impregnation than actual successful births. The problem here then is rather evident. Sakurai wanted to use the fact that all these children are young, innocent, naive, gullible, and ignorant to draw a connection to Ophelia’s own psychological and emotional circumstance. However, she realized that because she was writing a setting that obligated her to work around a 3000-year gap between Ragnarok and the present day. She needed something that would compromise the need for a realistic system that would ensure the reproductive viability of a human population through such a long period of time and the thematic vehicle of childhood and repression of growth as a way to connect Ophelia to her environment. This compromise ended up working for the absolute worse because she chose the worst possible system she was aware was the worst possible system she could’ve come up with and therefore decided to forsake that part of the plot without going through the implications of it and leaving the specifics to the reader’s imagination so they could sort it out in her stead.

This unwillingness to properly explore the problematic implications of Scathach-Skadi’s system not only deprived the player of a possible engaging storyline where child endangerment, a common theme in the Nasuverse, is explored and criticized through a different angle, but also actively hurts Scathach-Skadi’s connection to the player because we never get the opportunity to debate with her about her ideology and the state of the Lostbelt. We never hold her accountable for enforcing such a brutally predatory and dehumanizing system that targets children, instead Sakurai opts to build her up as a flawed, self-absorbed mother figure desperately trying to combat the extinction of the remnant of her world who also never really learned how to deal with the revelation there is an entire life she did not get to have in this universe that we MUST sympathize because she occasionally sees through the characters and acts kind towards them until the time comes for us to fight her in earnest as a matter of principle completely divorced from the question of how she’s managed her Lostbelt. The fact Scathach-Skadi’s model of sustainability does not work is made obvious by the fact it takes place in a Lostbelt, what we are trying to get at here is that it does not work from a writing standpoint because of all the different holes you can poke on it before you’ve punched through the paper screen entirely and revealed the superfluousness of it all. 

There is nothing inherently bad about self-indulgent storylines. If I’m being honest, if Sakurai wanted to use Ophelia and Musashi as self-inserts to fantasize about romancing the different kinds of characters she finds attractive, more power to her. But the problem surrounding Lostbelt 2, which is the same problem that plagued Septem and Fate/Extella, is a veritable lack of restraint from her part as a professional writer in charge of a multi-billion dollar mobile game. What the writing room over at Type-Moon has to realize is that they are no longer a small doujin writing circle that can get away with whatever they want because they operate under obscurity. They are visible to the entire world and will be held accountable and criticized as professionals by consumers and their peers in the industry. A little bit of self-fulfillment in a published work never hurt anyone, you can cater to yourself most of all with your professional work (I mean, just look at She-Ra), but you must be sure that in your pursuit of indulgence your work does not suffer for it and ends up alienating and disappointing your fanbase and giving them the wrong impression of what you stand for. 

Anyway we’re popping the biggest bottles when GudaMoth becomes canon this December. 

[natsukitakama]

Hi ! I just found your blog, and I love your domestic headcanons for manbun!Eren it's so soft aaah I'm dying ;; Also ! If you're okay with some reincarnation AU, could you write some headcanons of manbun!Eren reuniting with his significant other in this lifetime ?( Like, for example, considering what happened in the last manga chapters, would he feel too self-conscious and/or guilty to even approach them now, even if it was in a different lifetime? etc etc.) Thanks a lot

Author note : aaaannw thank you so much I’m so happy you enjoy it as much as I enjoy write it ♡ Your request sound so sweet to me I hope you’ll like it. I’m sorry for taking so long ! 

Warning : Some angst nothing to nasty / Reincarnation AU / Some spoilers if you haven’t read chapters be careful (just mention though). Also you could find a prequel to this here

i do not own the gif credit(s) to the owner(s) 

Masterlist 

Normally when someone is reincarnated, they’re not supposed to remember their past life : it’s like the whole point. But it wasn’t Eren’s case. 

At first he thought those were just bad dreams, something all made up because of anxiety which were due to his future exam. Deep thought he knows they weren’t dream : they felt too real and the more he thought about it the more he could remember. 

Since he couldn’t forget about it, Eren decided to face the problem so he could fixe it even annihilate it. He didn’t take long before he remember everything. 

His past life, his mum’s death, his father turning him into Titan, Him eating his own father, The way he promised himself and to everyone he will kill every titan, the choice he made in order to be free, you and especially the last time he saw you. 

His mouth went dry at the mention of you, he could feel his stomach twisted as if he would throw up. But nothing will happen, because he lose you, because he didn’t trust you enough or maybe because he was too selfish to even ask your opinion. He could picture your last meeting easily. He was still bitter about it, he shouldn’t talk to you the way he did

After the Marh’s incident Eren was detained, on the jail he used to live couple years agp. The moment he was in jail, Eren knows he’ll leave to execute his plan, this was too important for him to waste time in some talking. Everyone around you wanted an explanation about Eren’s behavior while all you wanted was to see your boyfriend and to check him be sure he was okay and healthy. However it took a lot of arguments for Hanji to let you go to see your boyfriend, they weren’t sure if it was a good idea they still has doubt. 

As soon as you have Haji’s approval, you run as fast as you can to meet Eren, you couldn’t wait to see him, talk to him. It’s been a whole year since the last you two were together, you couldn’t describe how much you miss him and frankly you would easily into Hell just to hold him close to you. 

During this year you overworked yourself, knowing Eren would need everyone’s help when he will be back : the last thing you wanted was to be a burden for him. He was your beloved there nothing you won’t do for him. So you trained again and again, always working harder to become stronger, so you could be strong like Mikasa (or at least get closed to her level). Everyone was impressed by your motivation, some even jealous about your passion. You and Eren have both your goal and nothing won’t stop you from achieving them. 

However nothing could prepare you to this, no one could train you enough to that moment : When you were finally face to his jail, you met nothing but a cold-glare not a smile or sign of happiness to see you. As if you were the last person he wanted to see. 

« What are you doing here Y/N ? » 

« What are you talking about ? I wanted to see you silly » 

« Again what are you doing here ? » 

« I don’t understand Eren, I mean it’s been a year … Don’t you think I’ve the right to want to see my boyfriend ? To talk to him after everything happen ? » 

« What do you expect me to say ? » 

« I don’t know why do you leave without telling me something ? What happen in Mahr ? What was your plan Eren ? Innocent people died  » 

« Armin used to say that sometimes you need to do « bad thing » in order to achieve your goal that’s exactly what I’m doing now. » 

« So is that the reason why you don’t say anything to me ? Because you were afraid I might tell you to not do it ? » 

« No I didn’t talk to you because I knew you couldn’t understand you never did » 

« That’s unfair Eren I was always on your back, I always support you no matter what » 

« Exactly you never question my opinion » 

« Because I was agree with you otherwise I will tell you » 

«  I don’t think so, I think you follow me like a lost puppy because you were eager of my love you would everything so I will love you » 

« That’s not true Eren and you know that » 

« Oh yeah ? Then tell me why did you come ? » 

That question froze you, of course the main reason was you missing him but you wanted an explanation, his truth about what happen so you could defend him properly. But was it true ? Did you always support him because you were afraid he might stop loving you ? Were you so desperate ? 

« See you couldn’t even answer a simple question and you dare asking me to explain my plan ? Why will I do that ? You would be a burden anyway » 

You swore you could hear your heart break at this instant, you being a burden ? No it couldn’t be, you work so hard to help him so you could be useful to him. Then you felt it, something hot was rolling on your cheeks you were crying in front of the man you try to convince you weren’t useless. What a shame, you should be mortified crying in front of Eren no wonder why he thought  like this about you. Fortunately you manage to say something 

« That’s not true, I work harder I wanted to help you because I believe in your goal because we make a promise we will achieve our goal together. Did you forget this ? » 

Looking at him right into his eyes, all you could see was disappointment and probably some frustration as if you bother him. Why was he acting like this ? It was so out of character at least that’s what you thought. 

With a sigh he gave you his last word to you, Eren still feel bitter about it 

« I have to be honest with you I don’t know if I ever love you back in days I was probably too young to understand what I felt about you. But now I am sure about something I don’t want to be with you anymore I don’t want a burden when I’m fighting for freedom. You should be thankful cause I’ll let you take benefit of my fight but you don’t deserve it. Weak deserves nothing but slavery ». 

That’s what the last time he was until he somehow manage to achieve his goal and then waking up in some alternative present. This time weren’t full peace but nothing to compare at what he lived. He has a pretty good life, friends, a complete family, even good grades but since the beginning of his new life he know something was missing. Now that he remember about his past life, he knows he was missing you. He needs you. He couldn’t lose you again. 

He knows at this very moment he has to meet you again, he has to apologize for his behavior, he has to tell you everything : he never wanted that, he thought you couldn’t manage his plan, the last thing he wanted was you being hurt because of him. All he wanted to do was to fight so you could be finally free. In titan’s universe he knew he didn’t have much time left, everything had to be done quickly before his own end. It was his goal since he knew about his life expectancy : To give freedom for his people. 

So yeah some things has to be done, but he promised himself to never ever have regrets. But still, he shouldn’t talk to you like this. All he wanted to do now was to make things up. 

Eren Jaeger was a lucky man, he always was and this time made no difference. He used to meet you time to time in college for some school you two shared. Before he was fully aware of his past, he already felt attracted to you : you were kind, always known what to say and when to say it, you were smart funny and never afraid to show your opinion. And dear lord, you were so attractive, the way your eyes was full of passion and your lips Eren loved the way they shake slightly when you cracked a smile at him when you made fun of him. 

Yet, something has changed, your behavior has changed you weren’t like you were used to be : Could you remember your past life just as Eren did ? Were you connected so when one of you were aware of his past life the other one too ? 

If this was true, would you ever want to talk to him again ? Was it right for him to desire you ? Should he work to own you back ? Did you ever love me ? 

Eren Jaeger is a brave man, but in rare occasion he could feel fear not about the situation but he could be afraid about himself. To be clear, even after the time skip he still felt self-conscious about him : like he wasn’t strong enough, he could be a burden and now he was afraid you might don’t want to ever speak at him again. He was afraid he might lose you back there : the worst was he couldn’t even be mad at you for hating me, he was such a bastard to you. He talked to you like shit, he broke you and for what ? Be sure you won’t mourn him when his time would come ? 

It’s been a month since your behavior changed and Eren never talked to you, he couldn’t barely sleep : each times he was falling asleep all he could see was your broken face when he called you slave, he swore he could hear your heart broke at his harsh words. And each times he falls asleep because of exhaustion from crying over and over at you. It felt like he was that young boy he used to be who joined the army. 

One day his mum decided enough was enough, she was aware about his son’s pain and was more than ready to confront him about it. She decided to wait until he’ll be back from school and will ask him for a talk. 

The two were sit face to face while Carla Jaeger took a deep breath and then look at his son : he seemed so sad and yet so angry. 

« Did you have a fight with Armin and Mikasa again ? »

« W-what ? No ! Why would you think that ? » 

« Because it’s been a month since you couldn’t fall asleep without crying first and I want to know why » 

Of course his mums knows, she always knows everything when it came to him or his father 

« Well there that student I used to study with I really love them like a lot but … I did something wrong no I said something awful to them I literally broke them but now I have this chance to make things up to clear my own mess » 

« Then why don’t you do it ? » 

« Because everytime I tried to talk to them I have the feeling I shouldn’t do that cause I don’t deserve a second chance you know ? » 

His mum sighed of course, Eren being the man he is, would think too much about it. Being self-conscious give him the feeling he deserved nothing and should be ashamed. 

« Look I couldn’t say I know what you’re feeling cause I’m not. But I know you Eren I know you could be stubborn when it came to something you loved ou believed and I know sometimes you made mistakes. So I’m going to tell you this : if you felt guilty for what you did to them then apologize don’t try to explain your behavior just apologize tell them your sincerely sorry and please for the sake of your mum tell them you love them and there nothing you won’t do to fix your mistake » 

What Carla said was true, it might no make things like they used to be but at least Eren won’t feel that guilt everytime he puts his eyes on them. They won’t probably ever want to talk to him, he didn’t deserve that, yet he has to do this. 

One day after their sharing lesson was over, Eren went directly to them asking for a « talk » which surprised it’s been a couple of weeks since you two ever share a glare at each other. But you followed him not knowing why you shouldn’t 

« So ? What did you want to tell me »

« I wanted to apologize »

« For what you did nothing wrong ? » 

« Yes I did ! You can’t remember but I did something terrible I even hate myself for daring to say something like this to you. I don’t even know what I did this in the first place but I did because it felt right to me. But now I realized I shouldn’t talk to you like this, especially because you mean everything to me you were my world - you still is- you need to know that everything I said or did was for you I wanted you -and the others- to be free because I couldn’t be here with you. The last thing I wanted was to you fighting to chose someone to take my burden after my end. I was supposed to end this. Of course you don’t know what I’m talking about but- »

« I do » 

Freezing, Eren looked at your eyes only to meet your tearing one. The smile you were wearing reminds him his dream and his past life when you two used to date, imagine your future together. But that couldn’t be that right ? 

« Y/N What does that mean ? » 

« It means I’ve waited so long I hope you would remember me. I always hope there were something behinds your words, i would do anything just to meet you again just to talk you one last time and asked you. »

« Wait does that mean… » 

« Yeah Eren I remember everything, one day I just woke up in my bed and I just known who I used to be who I love »

« Y/N I’m so sorry I wish I could do better » 

« You can do you know why ? »

«  I don’t » 

« Because we have a second chance now » 

A second they had, after reuniting with you Eren never missed a time to cherish you like he was supposed to. It was as if he tried to counterbalance everything he did wrong this terrible day. 

During your whole life together he did everything to make you happy, couple of months after his apologize he asked you to be his partner for the rest of his life. You practically jumped into his arm, tears all along your face while saying again and again « of course I want to of course I will marry you » 

You two get engaged and get married after graduating from your college, all of your friends were here as if nothing has changed since your past life. 

3 years later you and Eren have finally become parents 

2 years after you two became parents for the second time 

Coupe years later like 60 years later, Eren died peacefully in your bed he was looking at the window thinking about his whole life : his past life and now, he felt lucky very lucky he got everything he ever wanted, his family back, his friends were saved and finally free, he got you by side (you never left him and he couldn’t be more thankful for that), he has two amazing children who now were adults and started to built their own life, he got the chance to cherish you like he was supposed to. Eren felt like it was his time, in fact there nothing he would ask except some extra-times with you but he knew after all he’ve been through he would be selfish for him to try to live longer. With a last look on the window, looking at the landscape he then took a last look at your family picture on the wall besides him and then closed his eyes for the very last time with a smile. 

Couple months later it was your turn, like your husband you felt like you have the life you deserve and know it was time to let your children and the next generation live their own life. Imitating your husband you took a look at your family picture and with a smile you closed your eyes too knowing your husband was sitting somewhere waiting for you to come by his side. 

You two were soulmate it took you a long to realize what linked you, but if Fate got you together one time you know you would reunite to your Eren again. 

You couldn’t wait to see in which life you would be reincarnated  

[crystalelemental]

And now, ranking the Fates characters by how good they are as parents.  I’ll just be ranking the canon parent, since generic supports annihilated cohesive characterization by making all the parent dialogues identical.

Also, I do need to address this.  Every parent in Fates is garbage.  They throw their kids into an interdimensional time portal and essentially don’t raise them at all.  So comparing them like this is basically comparing turds by how rank they are.  It doesn’t matter that some aren’t as awful as others, you’re still not gonna find one that smells good, you know?

Corrin - Honestly, she’s got a strong Camilla-esque vibe to her protectiveness toward Kana.  I like it.  Also Kana knows when Corrin is coming to visit, and seems to imply that this is a routine thing, making Corrin one of the few known parents who actually makes a point to visit her kit.  A-rank.

Azura - Once again, your decision to be cryptic for no reason causes nothing but problems for everyone involved, and your son, who you didn’t raise on your own, had his entire village annihilated by foes that went after him to get to you, but you never warned him or them about anything?  D-rank.

Jakob - While hyper-critical, he’s not entirely off the mark, in terms of what Dwyer needs to be doing.  He’s not a bad kid though, so it does come across as more harsh than he really needs to be to make a point, since Dwyer is ultimately self-sufficient and capable.  C-rank.

Silas - Actually a pretty good dad.  He’s one of the few that just actively admires his child coming out of their deeprealm to help others, is fully supportive of them staying with the group, and is supportive of Sophie in general. It is Silas, so he’s a little generic with his praises, but it’s still a better parenting approach than most of them. A-rank.

Kaze - And here to completely outdo Silas is Kaze.  Again, Midori seems to know when he’s coming, meaning like Corrin, his appearance is a routine thing in her life.  Not perfectly routine though, which creates a bit of conflict between the two, in which Kaze is able to express that he always did his best to be there for her, but kept her here to be safe.  Willing to admit mistakes, accepting of her decisions, clear care for his child despite the poor general decision of leaving your children unattended in deeprealms, but is willing to actually be a parent and reprimand them for their poor decisions, while still being compassionate in his approach.  S-rank.  Kaze’s a good dad.

Ryoma - Honestly, I love that Shiro actually calls him out about not raising him at all.  Also the unnecessary secrecy about who he is and not letting Shiro know his status, and then being irritated when Shiro grows up without any direction in life.  Honestly I’m coming around on Shiro, who has so far been right on the money about how shit a father Ryoma is.  D-rank.

Takumi - Honestly Takumi’s pretty solid?  The support has him being a bit of a dick because he’s jealous of his own kid’s ability, but in the paralogue proper he’s honestly a pretty solid dad?  Like he shows up unannounced so we know he’s taking time to actually meet with his kid, and is fairly protective of him.  He does give in to letting Kiragi come along for dumber reasons, but on the whole he’s solid.  A-rank.

Saizo - He’s kind of a dick?  This is very much how Saizo is, but his entire thing is like...the honor of the family name to the point he doesn’t seem to have any connection to his kid, just his bloodline.  He does eventually let his kid be himself, but only in that, when he demonstrates “his own brand of honor,” Saizo gives him that freedom, but by basically disowning him as next in the Saizo line.  Which is I guess what the kid wanted, but still, it’s kind that “Grant your freedom, but you’re not my son” type feel.  D-rank.

Kaden - He’s alright?  He doesn’t do much, but he at least makes plenty of time to go visit his daughter just for the sake of visiting.  Still, he’s so bad at raising his child that she doesn’t know what dead means, and thinks poachers are there to play.  So present, but perhaps too permissive and uninvolved in actually raising her.  C-rank.

Hinata - Apparently just fucking forgot to make time for his kid.  He’s loving in his own way, but clearly not putting his child as a top priority in a lot of cases.  Not the worst, but certainly not good.  C-rank.

Azama - F-rank.  I don’t really need to explain this, do I?  Fuck Azama.  Even Saizo realizes how much of a callous fuckhead he is toward his own kid.  SAIZO!  Also you somehow gave your daughter a separate world from yours, in the attempt to give her a life of peace, which she achieves and is happier without you, so you storm in only when she’s in active danger, then insist on dragging her out of this peaceful realm into the world of constant war...just because?  Fuck Azama.  F-rank forever.

Subaki - He’s a decent dad.  It does kind of imply that he’s been away for a while, so questionable how much time he’s actually spending with her.  And while he’s generally doting and kind toward his daughter, there is that weird ending bit where he gets nervous about her outperforming him.  I’ll give it a B-rank overall.

Hayato - Honestly, he’s wishy-washy.  Either you fully support your daughter’s mad science or you don’t.  You can’t half-ass this, acknowledging she loves the dark arts and permitting her to mess around with it, and then step in and insist it’s off limits when it turns out the dark arts also have some potentially evil consequences.  Stepping in when he does to take things away feels more like backpedaling on a decision he already made to let her do as she pleases, which was probably too permissive as it stands.  C-rank, which is honestly pretty good for a teen parent compared to some of these other shitheads.

Xander - Finally on the Nohrians.  Xander actually like...talks to his kid.  Siegbert knows what his role is, and even if Xander can’t visit as often as he’d like in person, he keeps in contact through missives.  Now, there is the issue of his stance being “You have to learn to shoulder some burdens alone,” and thinking his son refusing to contact him about these fucking swamp demons was commendable.  So he’s definitely not perfect on this front.  But he does acknowledge that this is the burden of a leader having to make such choices, is accepting and understanding of his son’s autonomy and decisions while still being firm about keeping him safe from war and sending him back should he prove himself unready.  A-rank overall, I think.

Leo - Okay listen.  While I do recognize that Leo comes around and starts trying to be a better father, and I recognize the importance of growth and improvement. But the fact that Leo has spent most of his son’s life avoiding him because he disapproves of his interest in feminine fashion is just inexcusable.  The time to step up as a parent and learn this shit was a long-ass time ago, man.  You’ve basically been out of your child’s life this entire time, shown up only to angrily disapprove of how he lives his life, and now want to walk back in and expect that trying to change means he should give you that chance?  Why?  There’s no reason for Forrest to be the one who has to acknowledge you’re changing and growing as a person.  If nothing else, at least Forrest completely tells him off, and when Leo makes his attempt at reconciliation, his first thought is that he’s excited to get to know Elise.  Get fucked, Leo.  At least you go to save your kid, and don’t seem to express that you’re willing to let him die.  But you did stall on going, so like...fuck you.  F-tier.

Benny - And now for the exact opposite.  Benny’s an absolute sweetheart, and it’s no surprise he’s the same with his son.  He seems to care greatly for his son, is proud of his actions, and while protective, is willing to support his son’s decision to become stronger and learn to defend others with courage, while also teaching him that he’s not as fearless as he seems.  Honestly, maybe it’s just the feeling coming off of Leo, but S-rank.  We don’t really know how often he visits Ignatius, but I’d like to believe it’s often.

Keaton - Nothing too exciting, nothing too bad.  An easy, uninteresting B-rank.

Arthur - Apparently he’s never visited.  And openly stated that because he thought his son was safe here, his job was done.  This is the most intense version of just literally not being there for your child at all.  Still, at least he gives a shit, so D-rank, but a low D.

Odin - I think he’s solid.  Honestly there’s nothing outstanding here, but I really like Odin as a person, so A-rank.

Laslow - Okay, so in the intro to her chapter, Laslow mentions that Soleil has a band for town watch, and that she should be in her Deeprealm but goes where she pleases.  Which implies he knows she’s in his world already.  So he’s already letting her do as she pleases.  He’s openly aware she’s bi (let’s be real, here) and is fully supportive (LEO).  He taught her some great mechanisms for coping with difficulties in her life, and helps her realize it’s okay to not be positive when it feels forced.  And when confronted with the reality that Soleil is way better than him at flirting with the ladies, instead of being an insecure prick about it, he’s like “Hell yeah, that’s my girl!”  S-rank, easy.

Niles - I hate Niles, but as far as parenting goes, he’s not the worst.  It’s not clear if he’s been to visit her much (sounds like a no), but he at least has clear care for her.  He does try to emphasize to her what kind of life he’s had and that he doesn’t want her to have to live like that too, so I do appreciate that angle for him.  B-rank.

And that’s everyone.  There are some decent parents in all this.   The only real failures are Leo and Azama.  I think Azama’s a bit worse based on not showing any inclination to change or any particular care about his child, while Leo at least learns something and grows from it.  Though Leo’s issues are such a problem for me.  I think Laslow’s the best, though Kaze and Benny were also really great.

Shame about the Baby Realm thing, though.  That whole idea was just so stupid...

[cheshiresense]

Oh, can I ask for Ichigo in a Witcher AU (if you've watched the show ? Medieval Fantasy Generic AU if you haven't...)

I’m afraid the only thing I know about the Witcher is that the main character is this really strong antisocial grumpy dude that nobody likes, who goes around killing monsters for money, and one day he saves a guy who becomes like his PR manager/best friend or something. That’s it. So I’ll have to go with a generic medieval fantasy AU instead.

1. Ichigo is a mercenary, a monster-killer-for-hire (which is the only bit of the Witcher I can incorporate lmao). But yeah, he’s a mercenary, trained by his family, who have been hermits in like the Forest of Menos or something since before Ichigo was born because the Kingdom of Seireitei exiled them ages ago for dabbling in dangerous magic. Oh, normal magic is fine, the healing chants that their clerics learn, the potions and elixirs that their druids make, the purifying prayers their priests all know to defend the kingdom from ghosts and demons.

But the Shibas had always been a little too curious for their own good, more interested in pushing the boundaries of magic than being afraid of it, and even before their exile, they’d been fairly well-known for their summoning magic, which already made them powerful, one of the biggest noble families of the kingdom with a specialized branch of magic passed down through their line. But then they discovered elemental magic, and even worse, they refused to hand over their research and knowledge to concerned parties who would’ve been able to monitor its usage more responsibly. That was the last straw, as far as the church and the other nobility and the government were concerned. Some wanted that magic for themselves, others wanted to erase all traces of it. Most of the Shibas were hunted down and killed, the rest scattered, and summoning magic was banned in their wake. Elemental magic left with them, not a single page of notes left behind in their wake, a final fuck-you to the kingdom they’d once served so faithfully.

Decades down the road, the Shiba name is barely remembered and never spoken of. Ichigo’s left home after deciding the hermit life really wasn’t for him and he’d like to see more of the world. He knows his history, knows to stay out of Seireitei, so he makes his living by wandering the lands around his ancestral kingdom. Mercenaries like him can find work so long as there are monsters, and there are monsters everywhere, and Ichigo is good at his job, especially with his family’s magics at his disposal. There was a reason Seireitei drove the Shibas to death and ruin the same way they annihilated the Quincy kingdom in the east, too scared of the exorcist warriors they trained to tolerate their existence. Fear has always been a powerful motivator.

2. Meanwhile, back in Seireitei, a huge fuss is kicked up when one of the Kuchikis’ youngest up and coming officers ends up freezing the entire sparring yard one day at the Academy after snapping under the stress of constant bullying for coming from lowborn roots. She collapses immediately after, but there’s no taking back all the frozen trees and grass and buildings in the vicinity. Incorporating ice magic into her blade definitely counts as elemental magic, one thing leads to another, and by the time she wakes up, she’s been locked up in a cell somewhere because half the kingdom wants to know how she did it so they can do it too while the other half wants her dead. Everyone agrees that they can’t risk her falling into the wrong hands or under the wrong influence. Weeks later, when her execution seems imminent, her brother-in-law and head of house manages to sneak her out of the prison and back to the Kuchiki estate, where he then practically throws her at a portal gate already open and waiting for her.

“You cannot remain here,” Byakuya tells her, cold and aloof like he doesn’t care at all, but the grip he has on her shoulders is almost bruising. “Seireitei is not kind to those who are too different.” He shoves a bag into her arms. “This is all I can do for you. This portal will take you to the outer edge of Rukongai. Do not use ice magic. Do not come back. If you are found within Seireitei after tonight, I will not save you again. Do you understand?”

Rukia wants to cry and rage and beg Byakuya to make this all go away, she’s actually still not entirely sure what she did wrong, accidental magical outbursts don’t happen every day but they’re pretty common in students just beginning their magical studies. What did it matter if she froze a few things? She didn’t even hurt anyone! Was ice magic really so terrible? She’d never even heard of anyone using it before.

But she also promised herself that she wouldn’t do anything to dishonour the Kuchiki name after Byakuya was kind enough to continue looking after her just because he’d loved her sister.

So she swallows down her protests and takes the supplies, and they both pretend she doesn’t have tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes.

“Will I see you again?” She can’t help asking.

Byakuya’s face looks carved from stone. “I sincerely hope not.” And then he pushes her through the gate.

Rukia staggers out somewhere on the outskirts of Rukongai, the surrounding expanse of land that lies between Seireitei and the other kingdoms. The portal snaps shut behind her, and then she really is well and truly alone. It isn’t as if she’s never been in Rukongai before, she and her sister were born here after all, but she’d never been here, so far out, so much closer to the rest of the world than Seireitei.

So she does what she’s wanted to do for weeks but wouldn’t let herself when there were guards watching - she spends the next ten minutes or so huddled on the ground sobbing her eyes out, because now she has no family, no home, and no idea where to go from here. She’s no stranger to survival - at the very least, she knows how to barter and trade, look out for pickpockets and navigate towns without standing out too badly, which is actually more than she can say for a lot of highborn kids, but she’s also completely alone, and she wasn’t even out of the Academy yet. If she stumbles on monsters, which is more likely the farther away she is from Seireitei, she’s probably going to end up very dead.

Eventually, she stops, scrubs her face clean, and digs through her pack to see what Byakuya had given her. Money, clothes, a bit of food and water under preservation spells, a map of Rukongai, a couple daggers, and some healing salve and bandages. It’s better than she expected, less than she hoped for, but anything less than a magic wand to turn back time is less than she hoped for.

In the end, all she can do is shoulder her pack and begin trudging her way towards the nearest town. Whining about the unfairness of it all isn’t going to help her, and night will fall soon. The last thing she wants is to be caught out in the middle of nowhere when the sun goes down.

3. Of course, it’s just Rukia’s luck when two weeks later, trouble runs into her. One moment, she’s counting coins in the room of another inn (she’s already running low, with no real job prospects in sight), the next, there’s shouting and screaming from outside, and in the distance, a lone wolf’s howl splits the night.

In the room next to hers, Ichigo’s eyes snap open. Oh good, his meal ticket has arrived.

By the time Rukia’s good sense is overridden by the desire to figure out what is going on, someone - from the room beside hers - has already leapt out the window, more shouting and screaming and running footsteps have stampeded through the streets below, angry snarls has followed, and Rukia bursts outside with a dagger clutched tight in her hand just in time to see a cloaked figure whirl around the fangs and claws of a beast, a werewolf, a blade of silver in his hand, and Rukia barely even sees the rise and fall of it before the werewolf has lost both arms. It barely has time to howl in agony as it collapses to the ground, and then orange light sparks at the stranger’s fingertips, and a moment later, the werewolf has burst into flames.

Rukia gawks like an idiot because she’s definitely never seen a spell like that before, and more than that, the stranger made the whole fight look easy. Against a werewolf.

The street is silent once the werewolf dies. No one else is around, and the stranger simply straightens and turns. It takes her a few seconds to realize he’s leaving.

It takes her less than that to run after him.

If this man knows fire magic, surely he would know something about ice magic too? But, more than that, he is strong. If she can be half as strong as him, then maybe, maybe, even if she can never go home again, she might at least be able to make something of herself.

4. Ichigo would like it to be known that he had not agreed to this. But this stupid, ridiculously weak girl won’t stop following him around, and the one time he’d shaken her and left her behind in between towns, his conscience had forced him to double-back when he’d heard from someone in the next town that there’d been a pack of wargs roaming the surrounding hills. Of course, because either his luck was shit or the girl’s luck was shit, he’d arrived just in time to prevent her death-by-warg.

She really was useless with those daggers.

“So teach me how to be better then!” The girl demands, a humiliated flush high in her cheeks but a stubborn tilt to her chin. She looks scruffy and tired, and Ichigo has no idea what she’s doing on her own because it’s pretty fucking clear she’s not used to nomadic life. But she seems to want to get stronger, and everybody has to start somewhere, so Ichigo supposes he can’t begrudge her ambitions, whatever they might be.

Still, “I don’t do anything for free,” Ichigo tells her, even though that’s not strictly true considering he’s already saved her life for free.

The girl glares at him because they both know full well she barely has enough money for meals and a roof over her head these days, but then she offers, “Teach me, and once I get strong enough, I’ll become a mercenary too. Then, I’ll give you a portion of my pay for however long it takes me to clear my debt.”

Ichigo stares dubiously at her, at her dirty but expensive clothes, at her daggers that would probably cost Ichigo half a year’s worth of bounties, at delicate hands unused to the wilderness. But he also takes in the way she crosses her arms and scowls back with a desperate sort of defiance and steel in her spine, and in the end, he heaves a sigh.

“You better keep your word,” He warns her. “Or I’ll take your head myself.”

The girl brightens. Ichigo already regrets everything.

But from that point on, he gains a travelling companion/pseudo-apprentice. Her name is Rukia - no last name - but it becomes pretty clear why when he starts her magic studies by telling her to show him what she already knows. It’s all basic stuff, and she’s not even that good at it, but then she also haltingly admits to an uncontrolled burst of ice magic, and Ichigo gets a pretty good idea why she’s wandering around like a ruffian.

After that, he tells her of Seireitei’s glorious history, specifically the parts the kingdom has swept under the rug, and the consequences of using elemental magic even outside of Seireitei. Not illegal, but not wise to flaunt either.

“But you know it too!” Rukia points out. “Fire is elemental magic, isn’t it?”

Ichigo grunts an affirmative. “Yeah, and I either make sure nobody’s around, or if they ask, I show them some matches and pretend they just didn’t see it.”

And then, fed-up with talking, he shoves her into the river at their feet. She screeches the whole way in and the whole way back up. “ICHIGO!”

Ichigo smiles meanly. “If you want to learn elemental magic, you need a better foundation first. Let’s start with meditation.”

If she gets good enough one day to even halfway succeed in murdering him the way her furious black glare tells him she wants to, he’ll consider these lessons worth it.

5. And basically I just want these two to become badass mercenaries together. Ichigo was totally fine and prepared to spend the rest of his life alone, with maybe the occasional trip home to visit family. But then Rukia barrelled into his life and refused to leave, and as he gets to know her and vice-versa, he supposes there are (significantly) worse people in the world. She’s a quick learner, and she doesn’t complain, she works hard, and their somewhat antagonistic relationship smooths out with time, enough that eventually it becomes second nature to look for her first. And even after Ichigo deems her good enough to strike off on her own, all she does is remind him of her debt to him and refuse to leave. He feels like that’s going to become a theme in their lives.

Their little group probably expands over time. They bump into a Quincy exorcist, one of the last of a lost kingdom. Ishida is even pricklier than Ichigo but he can shoot a target blind and he takes to following them too after the three of them lay waste to a cave full of vampires with a combination of elemental magic and fancy arrows. Apparently, the scholar in him just can’t leave a completely unknown branch of magic alone.

They pick up more people - Kisuke and Yoruichi, two survivors of a caravan train that had been travelling from Seireitei to Las Noches (”Shihouin,” Rukia whispers to Ichigo the moment she lays eyes on Yoruichi’s eyes and hair and skin) that had been overrun by nightwraiths. For apparent nobles, they don’t seem to be in any haste to return to their kingdom or call for better aid than three suspicious mercenaries. In fact, Yoruichi seems overjoyed to cut her hair and purchase a concealment tattoo for her eyes from Ichigo and basically take to monster-hunting with the enthusiasm of a child let out to play for the first time. Kisuke didn’t even look like nobility to begin with and won’t stop pestering Ichigo about his magic the moment he spots him making a campfire without flint.

They get Mizuiro, a bard who smiles through the massacre of the bandit camp that had abducted him, and the enhancements he hums in battle are impressively efficient in speeding up their movements or strengthening their blows or reinforcing their shields. Then they get Inoue, a healer with spells in her repertoire as unknown as elemental magic, and her friend Tatsuki, a martial artist without a drop of magic in her but can give Ichigo a run for his money in a spar.

They  probably bump into another group of bandits except this one’s a bit weird (”We’re not really bandits,” One of them, Yumichika, claims), but that’s the label people have slapped on them, it’s what happens when you loot the rich (”They can usually afford strong fighters,” The leader Kenpachi grouches) and give to the poor (”What the fuck am I supposed to do with a mountain of gold?” Kenpachi demands). And somehow or other (obviously when Ichigo wasn’t fucking looking), Kenpachi and his people don’t leave either, and by this point, they’ve pretty much gained a bit of a reputation as some kind of mini-organization of protectors roaming the countryside, it’s fucking ridiculous and Ichigo regrets all his life choices but especially when Renji and Ikkaku and Rukia and Tatsuki get into another knock-down drag-out fight at an inn or a tavern and Ichigo’s the one who has to pay for the damages.

But anyway, eventually, Ichigo probably takes them all home where they can be his family’s problem instead. Needless to say, they get on like a house on fire, Kisuke invents like three new branches of magic in the Shiba library in the space of a week, Yoruichi and Kuukaku take to each other like long-lost soulmates, and in general, there’s just a lot of Found Family Feels. Kenpachi is in heaven, he’s never had this many people who can knock him on his ass and be down for another round.

And EVENTUALLY, someone from Seireitei probably comes to poke their nose into where it doesn’t belong because How Dare some lowborn mercenaries go around taking all the monster-hunting business away from the kingdom? Also Kaien may or may not have started spreading rumours of elemental magic and summoning magic and other never-before-seen-or-heard-of magic that makes Seireitei Very Anxious. It devolves the way it always does and results in the usual - Seireitei sends a bunch of their military in to seize everything that should be under their control and to get rid of any loose ends.

Ichigo, already stressed from the madhouse inmates he lives with (THIS IS THE WHOLE REASON HE LEFT IN THE FIRST PLACE, AND THEN HE CAME BACK AND MADE IT TEN TIMES WORSE), and he is Absolutely Delighted when Seireitei gives him the perfect excuse to blow off some steam.

And then idk there’s probably a revolution cuz the citizens and surrounding kingdoms are sick of Seireitei’s shit, none of the Shibas want to be crowned though because wow, what a waste of time, sounds boring, so Rukia is like maybe my brother can do it, he’s responsible and stuff, so they give the crown to him, and Rukia gives him an awkward hug, no hard feelings but she’s not sticking around, and the Shibas are given a place back in the city and everybody knows not to fuck with them and Kisuke starts publishing all their inventions and spreading them so even normal everyday people can learn. And then Ishida’s probably like I wanna rebuild my kingdom but there’s an asshole living in it at the moment who leads a cult and pretends he’s a messiah come to save us all so we need to kill him first, and Ichigo’s like DID YOU SAY MURDER AND AWAY FROM HERE I AM SO DOWN, and then basically Ichigo’s Menagerie of Misfit Mercenaries go to take back Wahrwelt from Yhwach, but that’s another story.