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quantumfeat72 · 4 months ago

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Imagine after the loops end in assassiffrin assfrin au the party accompanies him on his redemption quest and keep having to protect him from people trying to get revenge on him.

Then Vaugarde turns on the Saviors for harboring the one half responsible for the curse.

They demand to know why and the family says "how is he supposed to atone for what they've done if they're dead?"

And then imagine Siffrin spends a lot of time learning more Wish Craft and finds a way to go back in time to stop himself from helping the king in the first place.

Buuuut of course he has a crisis because that means he'll lose his family as they are now but also he kinda did kill a bunch of people and mess up an entire country sooOoooOOoo

But theennn Isa or Odile catches wind of what Sif is trying to do and the fam manages to secretly tweak his wish so their memories are transported back with them too.

and idk they go back looking like loop or another star creature and hunt themself down to stop them from meeting/helping the king. The fam has to find him before he spirals too far.

its very late and my brain is going all over the place with this. Maybe he finds the king and is about to kill him but his past self walks in and is like uhhh and then they fight and stops him from killing their other self.

Loop is there too maybe idk and the king gets redemption too i guess?

Imagine.

ok so um. i got. a BIT carried away.

(chrono tag)

#in stars and time #isat #isat au #isat comic #isat siffrin #isat loop #mine #assassiffrin au #isat spoilers #isat two hats spoilers #ask #partly just wanted the practice with fight scenes #because those are haaard #but #yeah #i hadn't really thought about post-canon for this au #but this is interesting. i can definitely see siffrin doing whatever he thinks he has to to make up for what they did #i don't think they'd try very hard to redeem the king though after what happened during the loops #so he mostly defaults to the murdery solution #idk if siffrin COULD make a good impression on their past self if they wanted to... but mostly i don't think he'd ever want to #(ft. a couple firealpaca brushes i didn't know existed until recently)#(including those stars on pg 5. i cheated with those)#i was gonna ramble a bit but most of that got sublimated into the sketches so keeping it in the tags for this one #100 notes

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basket-of-radiants · 1 month ago

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Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway.

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book.

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be.

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones.

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters.

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think.

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed.

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war.

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

#sorry i sorta need to get this stuff off my chest to unpack my feelings about the series.#i hope posting this out of the blue doesn't come across as too mean spirited. my sensitivity reader DID sign off on it.#(that is a joke. although i do let my sister look over any 1000+ word posts ahead of time. and i would respect any disapproval from her.#but normally she just tells me i'm allowed to be more forceful in my opinions without qualifying them or apologizing all the time. pfff.#the reason i've been hesitant to write any especially spoilery w&t meta is mostly because she hasn't read it yet.)#discourse #asks #hey anon if you're still here after all these years. thank you.#at the time i was kinda fishing for an ask like this bc i wanted to vent but it felt mean to do so unprompted #of course this was still really hard to write. mostly because every time i tried i completely spiraled.#the version of this post that was sitting in my drafts was honestly a lot better than this one. in basically every way. except.#except it was nearly the same length and all i'd gotten to was the oathbringer paragraph #below which was a stupidly thorough outline of my itemized complaints #you KNOW i don't care about brevity but my god that would have taken forever to write and finish #and i did not want to spend that sort of time with a book i didn't like. which i would have had to do to get all my planned citations #sorry past self. you were clearly writing from a place of much more passion and that made your work better than mine. and yet.#so as i said. i'm only writing this bc i now like the series enough to talk about it again. sincerely not trying to be a hater.#side note: if any of you have thoughts/opinions about the shift in the way war is used in these books. i would love to hear them. lets chat

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i-dreamed-i-had-a-son · 4 months ago

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Just finished watching the Death Note anime for the first time after reading the manga a decade prior and. How did no one tell me. How did no one tell me that in the anime the last thing Light sees. Is L

#death note #yagami light #light yagami #l lawliet #lawlight #like. in the manga he dies pitifully in the warehouse surrounded by everyone so that's what i was expecting #but in the anime he has this dramatic emotional sunset run where he metaphorically passes his past self #making you wonder if he might have regretted picking up the death note--he's running away from where he had been going #and he stumbles into a water tower and collapses on the steps as the sun's last rays shine through the window #and he's just silently staring. nothing left to say. no lies left to tell. just looking at the world he's going to leave #and he sees L. standing in front of him‚ but with a beam covering most of his face. light can't look him in the eyes.#and that's when light's eyes finally close #like you mean to tell me that that fricking POETRY. that CINEMA. was just sitting there this whole time and i never knew??????#also light is DEFINITELY cooked. 'you're so inferior to L' 'L would have realized' 'i'm still fighting L' we knew he was cooked but THIS #he's the last guy you see before you die??? the guy YOU KILLED??? AND WHOM YOU SEEM TO REGRET KILLING AND CAN'T GET OVER???#like. come ON. i'm losing my mind #kay has a party in the tags #kay can i just catch my breath for a second

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auset66 · 1 month ago

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guess we all are leaving people and circles behind which used to be very close to our chest? Times are weird. I wish you all good luck. I am going through the same with you all. 🌱🍓 whatever new is comming except it. These opportunities. Let go of past people, carrer and patterns to make way for new opportunities to come. I am also trying. We all will try. ❄️💫

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shakingparadigm · 1 year ago

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what is the theory that ivan manipulated the event where till and mizi met the wagyein?

It's not a theory, actually! It's confirmed that Ivan orchestrated the whole event. The true reason as to why however is still unknown. The information provides more context to this scene, though:

During the earlier times of ALNST the most rational explanation for this scene was that Till ran after a flower crown (presumably Mizi's) and Ivan followed him in out of curiosity. Now we know that Ivan was conveniently just standing there because he was waiting.

Side note, I find it heartbreaking (and maybe a little funny, sorry) that Till most likely didn't notice Ivan in this scene. That's just like him, isn't it. Always too busy running after Mizi while Ivan trails behind, an ever-present shadow.

I'm not sure how Ivan manipulated the circumstances for both of them to end up there, but it is confirmed that everything was intentional. What strikes me most is how they describe this particular scene:

I can't copy down what they said word-for-word (Patreon info), but they described Ivan watching "creepily" as Till and Mizi are faced with danger. We know that Ivan was familiar with the Cerberus wagyein beforehand, enough to touch its teeth and even to rest himself inside its maw. To Ivan, the wagyein is not dangerous, but to Till and Mizi, it could be. Ivan prepared the wagyein, led them there, and watched "creepily" from afar as Till fell on his knees, seemingly injured.

The closest I can get to making sense of Ivan's "scheme" is that he wanted to see how other children would react in a dangerous situation. Ivan's always been an observer, after all, and he's learned to survive by copying the more "normal" behaviors of his peers. This situation occured when Ivan was still young and had not yet developed his more charming mask, so perhaps he staged this encounter to study a situational response, to learn and mimic the emotion of fear. And what better subjects for the experiment than two of the most expressive and reactive humans of their batch? It helps that he was already fixated on Till beforehand, too. I think Ivan became irreversibly obssessed after this incident, especially since it's framed as a turning point in Ivan's life, comparing Till to the stars.

This is just my attempt at an interpretation, though. It could very well be for another reason. He most likely chose Till and Mizi specifically for personal reasons, not just for reaction. I'm still not sure on the purpose behind the whole thing.

The team wanted to capture Ivan's "dark emotions" through the shot of his stalking, which could relate to his more sinister intentions. His gaze can be read in a few different ways, though. Curiosity, interest, fear, etc. Maybe that's why they decided to redraw the shot in ROUND 6.

I think this better sells the feeling they were trying to convey.

#ivan u fucked up little guy.#also okay i just wanna clear this up #i know i make a lot of posts about ivans darker side and his more problematic traits #but this isn't me trying to villainize him or reduce him down to “toxic yaoi”#I HOPE YOU GUYS KNOW ALL MY TOXIC YAOI POSTS ARE LIGHTHEARTED.#i just want to clarify that ivan was always intended to be a darker and complicated character. even since his debut in round 3 #the way i refer to ivan (“twisted” “creepy” “obssessive” etc) are literally the direct words used by q and v themselves to describe him #but despite that id like to emphasize that i don't see ivan as a villain or a completely bad person. hes complicated #there is no normalcy in this world they are living in. none of the characters know what being truly normal is #this isn't me condoning his actions #but it has to be acknowledged that alnst is fucked up in nature. we can't expect perfect relationships from people who are born to die #plus ivan has a lot more layers past the “dark” parts. he's constantly battling himself and his desires #especially at the end of round 6 where he performs a myriad of conflicting actions (kiss strangle peck smile)#thanks to the r6 production notes we now know that ivan was going through a rapid internal conflict #“sure and unsure at the same time”#there is sooo much to ivan. his low self-esteem. his desire and possessiveness despite knowing till will never love him #his VEHEMENT insistence that till will never love him vs his desperate persistence in trying anyway #uh i need to shut up i think #anyways sorry. just wanted to clarify my thoughts on him in case people think im. yk.#in short. hes a fucked up little freak and he fascinates me. this poor tragic child. i love him.#SORRY I GOT CARRIED AWAY #alnst #alien stage #alien stage ivan #alnst ivan #asks

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