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kirayaykimura · 2 years ago

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This was partially written because I think Lili is wild enough to believe practice kissing is a good idea and partially because @sabraeal and I have spoken at length about a jealous Soo-Won and I thought, “Yeah, those two things will pair nicely.”

Soo-Won was engrossed in whatever he was reading at the moment and Lili was bored. So bored. The most bored she’d ever been in her life. Actually, she took that back. Nothing would ever be worse than the hours spent learning how to be a proper lady. At least with this boredom, she could lay flat on the ground in Soo-Won’s office, place the book she’d been reading over her face, and announce, “I’m so bored!”

If she’d done that around her teacher, Eun-Bi, she would have been poked with a walking stick and forced to practice calligraphy until her fingers cramped and she could barely see straight. Soo-Won, however, simply hummed disinterestedly.

“Entertain me,” she demanded.

“And how would you like me to go about doing that?” he asked.

He obviously expected her to give up on her request. It was raining heavily, a rarity in the Sky Tribe that had forced them indoors hours earlier and had yet to let up, meaning a walk around the castle grounds was out of the question. The problem wasn’t either of them getting wet; it was more that everyone would fuss about them getting dirty or, worse, sick, and Lili didn’t feel like dealing with all that. If she asked Soo-Won to tell her a story, he’d just read whatever dry text he currently had open aloud. She knew this because it had happened multiple times. She knew the strangest tidbits about foreign economic relations.

Lili groaned, directionlessly dissatisfied with her life and hoping her vague vocal displeasure would lead to Soo-Won having a good idea. Soo-Won ignored her.

It was tragic, really, her life. Someone should write her story. It would certainly be more interesting and much sadder than the story she was currently reading, in which a woman falls in love with a man but they can’t be together because he lives on a remote island and she is too poor to afford the ferry to visit him. The fifth time the woman said, “Would that we could be together for every sunrise!” Lili got annoyed and gave up on the novel. Thus, her current state of using it as a mask instead of reading the words on the page. Just be together or don’t. She didn’t understand why she had to suffer terrible prose for a problem that could easily be solved via theft.

“Have you ever tried kissing?” Lili asked.

She’d stopped reading just as the two main characters were about to kiss - though they would almost certainly be torn apart at the last second just like all the other almost moments so far - and all she felt was over it. But there must be something she was missing, right? It was in every book Tetora recommended, and even some she’d found on her own. There had to be something to it if it was all anyone could talk about. And if he wasn’t going to offer up any entertainment himself, she was going to choose this as their topic of conversation.

There was a pause before Soo-Won said, voice light with just a hint of nervous laughter, “Pardon?”

Lili sat up, letting the book fall from her face to land gracelessly on her lap. “Kissing. Have you ever done it?”

“I, uh-” Soo-Won said, “no?”

His smile did not look comfortable. The tilt of his eyebrows was all wrong. Plus, there was the fact that he was smiling at all. The most she’d ever seen from him was a small quirk of the lips that she had interpreted as fond, and that hadn’t even been directed at another person. It had been to a cat who let him rub her belly for ten whole seconds before wriggling up off her back and out into the gardens again. Over the months spent with him, she’d learned that he only ever smiled when he was either faking hospitality or trying to politely redirect someone’s energies. This, of course, just made her want to pursue the topic even harder.

“Have you ever wanted to?” Lili asked.

“Oh, maybe,” he said. “When the time is right. At the moment, I have other things-“

“You can stop lying,” Lili said, cutting him off. She didn’t know if it was amusing or insulting that he thought she couldn’t tell he was lying through his teeth. “I don’t think I really want to, either, but other people seem really interested in it. I wondered why.”

“Oh,” Soo-Won said. He instantly relaxed, shoulders falling away from where they’d crept upwards and mouth smoothing out to something more thoughtful. It was quite the transformation.

“Wait,” she said before he could comment on her curiosity, “why do you look so relaxed now?”

“What’s that?” he asked evasively.

“You were really freaked out just now. What was that about?”

“Nothing at all!” He gave another fake laugh that Lili refused to dignify. She simply crossed her arms in front of her chest and waited for him to fess up.

Sensing it was a lost cause, he gave an inaudible sigh, then said, “I thought you were going to ask me to do it.”

“Do what?”

She watched, delighted, as a blush spread across his soft, delicate cheeks. She had no idea why her question had inspired such a reaction, but it was always a good day when she could mortify the man to this point.

“Kiss you,” he forced out.

What? It took her a moment to piece together the broken fragments of his side of the conversation, but when they clicked, she asked, “You thought I was asking you to kiss me?” and then fell over with the force of her laughter.

“Okay,” he said softly.

“That’s hilarious,” she said, still very much laughing. “Why would I ever-“

Hold on. Pause. She sat up, abruptly serious, and said, “That’s not a bad idea.”

“Oh no,” was all Soo-Won said.

“You should kiss me.”

“I really shouldn’t.”

“We’ll finally get to see what all the fuss is about,” she said, ignoring him. “At the very least, we’ll get some practice enduring it, I guess, for people we actually like.”

“No,” he said.

She groaned, but his refusal wasn’t surprising. He really, obviously didn’t want to kiss her if the earlier part of their conversation was anything to go by. That was fine, though. She didn’t really want to kiss him either. She just needed someone.

She stood, tossed her abandoned book on a nearby table, and said, “Fine. I’ll go see what Ju-Do’s doing.”

“Ju-Do?” Soo-Won asked.

“Sure.” Lili shrugged. “He’s single.” Plus, they might yell at each other for a little bit and it was always fun to rile up Soo-Won’s staff.

“You’re going to ask Ju-Do to kiss you,” Soo-Won said.

“Yep,” Lili said. Then, “See ya.”

She made it about four steps before a hand caught her elbow. Soo-Won turned her back towards him and cupped her jaw with his free hand. She just barely registered that palm wasn’t as soft as she’d expected before he kissed her.

Oh.

Huh.

So this was what it was like.

It wasn’t unpleasant, she supposed. It wasn’t much of anything at the moment. Just a boy pressing his face close to hers. Though it wasn’t what she had planned, and though that plan had been formed less than five minutes ago, she’d be damned if she was going to let this opportunity pass her by without trying to get some sort of reaction. She moved her lips against his as he moved his hand from her elbow to her lower back, pulling her in closer and tilting her head just so and oh.

This was what it was like?

Well, hot damn. It seemed everyone was on to something after all.

Eventually, after an untold number of exploratory kisses, Soo-Won pulled back far enough for their lips to disconnect. Lili blinked her eyes open to a world in which she knew what kissing felt like and knew Soo-Won was kind of good at it. It was unfair that he’d picked it up quickly enough to give her goosebumps, and she would have been more upset if she had been thinking about anything other than how to get his mouth back on hers immediately right now.

“Don’t go to Ju-Do,” Soo-Won said.

She stared up at him, then asked, “Who?” two seconds before she registered what he was talking about.

His lips quirked upward in a small, rare, real smile. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t really smile at anyone because that thing was dangerous. Her heart gave a painful thump in her chest knowing that smile was meant for her, not some random cat that had wandered into his path. If it made him smile at her like that, she’d never remember Ju-Do again. It wouldn’t be much of a loss, anyway. He wasn’t old enough to interest her.

He stroked his thumb across her cheek, grounding her in the moment, and said, “Don’t ask Ju-Do to kiss you.”

“I’ll do whatever I want,” she said. It was a token protest at best, and they both knew it. “But you did a very thorough job of it, so I don’t need to ask anyone else for now.” She punctuated her statement with a friendly punch to his arm that she had never attempted before and never would again.

He glanced down at where she’d struck him, amused, before finally letting her go. The loss of his warmth as he stepped back made her goosebumps return for less pleasurable reasons. It was embarrassing how needy she was being at the moment. Over a boy who was obviously unaffected by all this. Over Soo-Won. Unacceptable. She dusted off her pride, raised her chin, and said, “Good work today.”

“You as well,” he said, clearly trying not to laugh at her.

They were saved from any more awkwardness by two short knocks on the door and Kye-Sook letting himself into the room. He spared her a brief, disdainful glance before focusing on the person he’d actually come for.

“Your majesty, you are needed in the library,” Kye-Sook said.

“Right now?” Soo-Won asked.

“Yes, sir. Immediately.”

“Would you excuse me?” he asked Lili.

She waved a hand. “Go.”

“Lady Lili, you cannot-” Kye-Sook started.

“I’m not going to stay here,” she said.

It was an argument they’d had many times before. She wasn’t allowed to stay in Soo-Won’s office without him because he was afraid she would snoop, which was funny because, one, she already knew the big secrets and, two, Soo-Won routinely let her poke around when he was in the room. Nothing had ever been made off-limits. He obviously hadn’t realized that because he was still enforcing the rule that she left when he did. Just like he hadn’t realized what she’d been doing with his precious king moments ago. His eyes narrowed slightly at her smug grin, confused by the departure from her normally annoyed reaction.

“Have fun at your meeting or whatever,” Lili told Soo-Won. Then, because Kye-Sook was watching, because she still wanted to, she stepped back into his space, rose up on her toes, and pulled his face down to meet hers for a brief goodbye kiss.

She left two stunned men in her wake, which was, frankly, her favorite way to exit a room. If she never got to kiss Soo-Won again, at least she went out on top.

#lili x soo won #liliwon #yona of the dawn #akatsuki no yona #listen we don't know what lili and soo won get up to most of the time in the castle #you can’t prove this hasn’t happened in canon #anyway obviously the story after this is that they both try to play it so cool so casual #and make it about 4 days before he has her pressed against the door of a broom closet #it's really inconvenient for the cleaning staff #they wish the king and his...whatever lili is would get a room already #my fic

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roosterbox · 1 year ago

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Fic Rec Friday 6/23/23

Title: My Apologies Your Father is An Incompetent Bastard

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category: M/M

Fandom: Inception (2010)

Relationship: Arthur/Eames (Inception)

Characters: Arthur (Inception), Eames (Inception)

Additional Tags: Mpreg, Kink Meme

Summary: Arthur and Eames are on the run from a job gone wrong when Arthur goes into labor.

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Ah, mpreg. Probably the strangest trope I love. But this has always been so - when I started reading fic, it was a much more rare plot to see (and of course ABO wasn’t a twinkle in someone’s eye yet), but every time I found it, I loved it. These days I like to joke that mpreg is the gateway drug to get me to like a ship, which to be fair… is accurate. I could probably list off several ships that I was indifferent towards at best before stumbling upon a cute mpreg fic. But today, I’m talking about a ship I already loved, that just so happened to have a great mpreg fic written for it.

The characterization in this story is spot on. Arthur and Eames still feel close enough to their canon counterparts, but with a unique artistic flair, which I always appreciate (with how little actual canon there is for them, you kinda have to get creative). One aspect that rings so true is the state of their relationship, and how they both feel about it. More than one person has compared their canon dynamic to bitter exes who may or may not reconcile by the end of the movie, and that feeling comes across in this story very well.

I think Arthur’s characterization is my favorite. Eames is of course as amiable and jocular as always, but Arthur is much more bitter. And angry. Which is understandable given the, ahem, “state” he was left in by Eames. But there’s also a silly side to him, such as him refusing to acknowledge that he’s in labor because if he doesn’t acknowledge it, it isn’t happening, right? Oh Arthur - honey bear, boo child - that’s not how that works, lol.

As stated by the little preview I gave last week, the fact that the pregnancy isn’t explained is another thing I love. Oh sure, we know HOW Arthur got pregnant (you see, when a Forger and a Point Man love each other very much…), but just how men in general can get pregnant is open to interpretation; you’re left to draw your own conclusions, which I greatly appreciate. Same with the birth itself - how exactly the child came out of Arthur and into the world is not super elaborated upon, other than, obviously, it was a natural birth. Fill in the blanks as you see fit.

And, of course, happy ending. Maybe a bit ambiguous (there is still danger afoot), but for at least a moment, they can just exist as a family of three. It’s very sweet.

Last note, for one of my all-time favorite lines in any Inception fic ever:

Sometimes (most of the time) Arthur just really wanted to punch Eames in the nuts.

Beautiful.

———

Next Week: How about some Cherik again? And this one is a nice little non-mutant AU, featuring paralyzed soldier!Charles and catatonic Holocaust survivor!Erik. It hurts before it gets better, but the hurt is so good.

Until next time!

#fic rec friday #inception #dreamhusbands #arthur x eames #writer: cptnfrddy #mpreg #heartfelt and funny #the best of two worlds #lol

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icallhimjoey · 2 years ago

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could you do joseph quinn x actress!reader

you were practically nervous that you gonna have to do fake sex scene. You are in dressing room, walking back forth that you were bit nervous to do it, but then knock on door, it Joseph, he came to you that you were ready yet, you were quite nervous, he tells you that everything gonna be fine. He comfort you. So then you both ready, as director will get your places in scene, then ACTION, after that you were bit happy that it finally over yet, Joseph wanna to comfort you deeply that you feel bit safe

(hope you will write it, thanks and have a good day)

Yep yep yep yep yep Wordcount: 2K

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Going Off Script

You're in your dressing room. Nervous. Absolutely riddled with anxiety, but doing your very best to keep your breathing steady and remain somewhat calm. Ingrid, your intimacy coach, had just been in for a chat. You'd gone through some pages of the script, and had disected your spicy scene. You had mentioned your worries - nothing major, just, you'd never done this before and the prospect of having to do it in front of people? With Joe? Oof.

When you'd read the original script, you hadn't felt it. It was all beautifully written, and the names on the pages didn't have faces. None of them had been you yet, and none of them had been Joseph yet. When you had to do chemistry reads with a couple of actors up for the role during auditions, you had scanned the room beforehand and had silently thanked God that you found none of them attractive enough to make it weird. Imagine having to make direct eye-contact with someone you really fancied, with a long table of people boring their eyes into you. The worst.

But then they'd called in Joe. The charisma that had practically dripped off this man was almost too much, and your breath had hitched up into your throat.

It resulted in compliments for you. The director had "loved what you'd done with the character". You knew it was just Joe's doing, your whole performance literally a reaction to whatever he had done, but you had smiled and thanked him for the kind words.

There were a couple more actors you saw after Joe that day, but every other person you'd done the same scene with had lacked something. No sparkle in their eyes. The tension never built. It had resulted in you getting the part, and you knew Joe was going to get it too.

Ingrid had asked you if you'd be open to read lines with Joe now, a couple of hours ahead of you being expected on set. It was still early in the morning, you were fresh faced and ready for hair and make-up when they'd have the time for you. Your morning cappuccino hadn't helped, the caffeine and lack of other food in your system only fed the jitter. Of course you were okay reading lines with Joe. Giving it a run-through would obviously make you feel more at ease having to do it in front of a room full of people later.

A sex scene. Lots of kissing. Grinding. Hands on skin, all over. You had trained for this, you knew you'd be fine. But it was with Joe, and you had a growing crush you were trying to suppress. When Ingrid and Joe walked into your dressing room, you hugged Joe with one arm, bodies far removed, as you greeted him. Ingrid immediately picked up on it.

"I'm very nervous." you admitted before saying anything else, knowing it was the professional thing to do. Be up front. Let people know. Actually communicate.

"Oh, same." Joe furrowed his brow and nodded. It made you laugh, and you were sure he'd just said it to make you feel more comfortable.

You sat down and turned to a page in the script Ingrid instructed you to find. The two of you read lines back and forth from your safe spots on separate chairs, getting familiar with how each of you had interpreted the written lines, your innotations, his pauses. Joe had his eyes stuck to the pages the whole time, and you silently wondered if he had memorized them yet. He must have; you were filming this today. So maybe he had been nervous, and that comment wasn't just to ease your anxiety earlier.

Ingrid asked you to do a small bit of the scene again, but now include actions. She was basically saying, "okay now kiss and feel each other up in front of me.".

It was slightly weird, definitely awkward, it just being the three of you in a room, going through this. But it would've been weirder doing it without Ingrid there. At least now you had someone to turn your attention to if looking at Joe became too much.

Joe wasted no time, getting up and putting the script down, so you did the same. You started the scene again. This time, Joe grabbed hold of you, and it was electric. He must've felt it too. You ran through your lines, and this time it was Joe's eyecontact that shot hot anxiety straight into your veins. The script called for you to lay down on a bed, so Joe guided you back onto the sofa.

You know it's all ingenuine movements - it's cold and technical, Joe's following words on a script, but it still makes your stomach flutter. And then he kisses you. Open mouthed. Soft. It's hot. You let a moan escape your throat, and you feel Joe's grip on you tighten. You're acting, you have to remind yourself. Acting.

At some point, your coach stopped you, and called your attention to a direction in the script. She showed Joe, who read with raised eyebrows, then nodded. His hand should have been on your thigh - Ingrid had seen a shot of it on the storyboard and knew it'd be important to not forget. Joe placed it there without hesitation, but he could feel you shudder. "This okay?" he asked. You nodded. Obviously it was. You just needed to get over yourself. Ingrid fed you a line, and you shook yourself out of your brain and hoped you'd shaken yourself back into your character.

Whenever the scene asked for the two of you to kiss, Joe did it so expertly that you almost question if it's real. The way Joe looked at you, sly smiles, soft eyes - it wasn't helping this crush you were trying to ignore. You lost yourself for a second, until Ingrid interrupted you before the scene was over. "Okay." you broke your kiss. "You're over the hump." she stated, referencing your earlier mentioned nerves and you tried to stifle a giggle.

After some advice and some last tips and tricks, Ingrid said she'd find you later. She left the two of you alone in your dressing room, but Joe also stalked his way towards the door.

"We should do fine, yea?" Joe's face read concern. He was looking out for you, the bastard. "Yea, I think so." you found your eyes back on the pages and grabbed a pink highlighter from a table beside you. "Let's see how we do under pressure though." you added, knowing it'd be different with lights and cameras and people looking at you.

Joe waved your comment away. "Do half as good as what you did just now, you'd still be fine."

Time passes. It's much later in the day. You're on set and you're practically naked. You're in a bra you know will be taken off in the scene later. It'll be the only truly annoying thing, knowing it would have to be put back on several times as you'd probably do several takes. Joe's getting his make-up touched up and you sneak a look at his shoulders. Nice. Broad. Arms too. Big hands.

"You alright, Y/N?" a producer snaps you out of your thoughts from behind a camera. Ingrid's there too. You give a thumbs up. If anything you were too good, you think, eyes wandering back over to Joe. Maybe a bit cold. Why did film sets have to be fucking freezing all the time?

You breeze through your scene with Joe. You were right, multiple takes meant annoyingly having an assistant redress you in your bra every time you'd have to start over. You didn't mind covering back up, but the attention it called to your tits every single time someone had to scoop it up from the floor was a bit much. It's mostly technical things that make the director call cut; a light that needs a little turning, a camera not getting the exact shot they were after, one too many of Joe's curls escaping its way onto his forehead...

Every time you cut, you zone out a little. You notice Joe doing the same and you pick up how his hands never leave your body in between takes. After a few takes you understand it's so he doesn't have to reintroduce his touch to you and you feel your heart flutter. But there's no brain-space for chitchat or smalltalk; you're both focussed on getting this scene right, your concentration's aimed at the task at hand. And every time the word "Action!" echoes through the room, it's straight back in with hot and heavy pants, hands roaming, bodies pushed together, tongues, wet lips and flushed cheeks. It's a lot. You have to keep reminding yourself that none of it is real, picturing the letters on the pages of script inside your mind, thinking ahead and anticipating every next second.

It helped keep your heartbeat down, but it also numbed your mind a little to Joe's touch, which didn't go unnoticed. The director called cut, and called Joe over, leaving you alone in a bed with camera's pointing at you from three different angles. You saw them talk, serious faces, looking back at some of the filmed footage on screens you weren't able to glance at from your spot. And annoyingly they were just out of your earshot.

Ingrid pointed at something on a screen, and then used her hands to explain something to Joe, gesturing towards where you were, bare tits out.

"You've done it too much now," Ingrid told Joe. "That's great, you know what you're doing, you've got it down, but it's leaving some of the urgency within the earlier takes." Joe looked at the still of your face that the director had paused at. Your eyes had only slightly glossed over, it was barely noticeable. They then skipped back to one of your first takes, and Joe had seen the clear difference.

Joseph, ever the professional, didn't just take the direction, but asked questions and made suggestions. Then he'd asked if it was okay for him to try something, and he had gotten the go ahead.

"Alright, let's go one more time!" the director called out as Joe jogged back to where you were.

"Y/N, you're doing great, we're gonna run it a couple more times to be safe but we pretty much have it." a producer reassured you as Joe got back into the bed next to you. The director told you from where to take it, and you shuffled into position together. It's forced, but it's nice to have Joe's warm body on top of you again. "Action!"

It's the same steps. At first. Then, Joe surprises you and he does something different. Joe went off script. Your eyes widened in shock as he suddenly digs into your neck - lips and teeth scraping skin that hadn't been scraped by him before. Then hands found your ass and hitched you up a little, pushing your hips straight into Joe's crotch. It instantly turned you on, and to be honest, more so than you felt comfortable with. His breathing was heavy, but the groans you could hear loud in your ear made your eyes roll. The way your sex was ground up upon meant you were basically dry humping each other, and it had left you a moaning mess.

The people around you were fast forgotten and you were there, in the moment, reacting to whatever Joe was doing to you. You stumbled through your lines, hiccups and stutters, breaths getting stuck in your throat, moans and groans interrupting your words but it felt like you meant them.

"Cut! Thank you, we got it!"

You're harshly pulled back into reality as 11, maybe 12 people around the room clap. It's a weak applause, but it's nice anyway. Joe is still hovering over you, awaiting your reaction as a smile plays across his face. "Jesus Christ," you're genuinely out of breath, making Joe laugh.

A quick rhythm of knocks on your door made you look up from tying your shoes. Before you could invite them in, the door had already opened and Joe popped his head 'round the corner.

"Some of us are going for drinks," it wasn't a question, so you didn't answer.

"Will you come?"

"Oof," you hissed through your teeth. "After working me up like that, you want to get alcohol into this system?" you joked. There was no trace of nerves or anxiety left within you. Joe let his head fall forward, guilty as charged, and he scoffed out a laugh.

"I'll bet you a tenner it's the take they're going to use," Joe made a fair point.

"Well," you got up, shoes now tied, and you reached for your jacket. "I wouldn't have been so good had it been with anyone else."

Joe looked you up and down. Your body stretched as you swung your jacket 'round your shoulders to get it on. Joseph was still waiting for an answer to his earlier question when you stepped closer to him and reached for the door handle.

"Where we going?"

#joe quinn #joseph quinn #actress!reader #joe x reader #joseph x reader #stranger things 4 #going off script

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qqueenofhades · 3 years ago

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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

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makeste · 3 years ago

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BnHA Chapter 316: We've Had One, Yes, But What About Second Explosion

Previously on BnHA: Deku was all “[powers up like whoa because it’s time to end the fight]”, and he saved Overhaul from getting not-shot, and then smashed up Nagant’s arm with the power of his new rechargeable super knees. Nagant was all “yoooo this kid is crazy strong whaaaat, it’s like he’s some kind of protagonist or something.” Deku was all “I AM A PROTAGONIST, ACTUALLY, DO YOU WANT TO JOIN FORCES AND FIGHT BAD GUYS WITH ME?” Nagant was all “ah shit why the hell no -- ” and then AFO was all “SURPRISE” and everyone was all “?!?!?!” and AFO was all “TIME TO EXPLODE NOW” and made Nagant explode because he’s an absolute fucking dick. And then Hawks showed up, because Horikoshi just wanted to stuff as many plot points as humanly possible into a single chapter I guess.

Today on BnHA: Hawks is all “good job giving motivational shounen redemption speeches Deku but I’ll take it from here” and screams very earnestly right in Nagant’s face until she finally wakes up. Nagant is all “oh hey it’s my successor, you seem surprisingly unfucked-up from your own HPSC tenure, how did you manage that?” Hawks is all “fandom is going to love hearing this one, but basically it’s because I’m very upbeat and also I had the world’s best role model Endeavor to look up to,” and I swear this man stirs the pot on purpose, but damn it I still love him so damn much. Overhaul is all “HELLO AGAIN, JUST A REMINDER THAT, THE BOSS!!” and Deku is all “MAYBE TAKE TWO SECONDS TO REFLECT ON HOW YOU TORTURED A LITTLE GIRL,” which, thank you, lol. Nagant is all “btw AFO’s hiding in a house in the woods”, and so Deku and the gang go to the house in the woods. Video recording!AFO is all “hi I’m AFO welcome to Jackass” and blows up the house. Sometimes I wonder if this manga is just a weird dream.

I am once again reading the Bean version because I think it was actually the best out of all three translations last week. and that is surprisingly including Viz’s. “faux” is not nearly as entertaining as “knockoff”, and also I have literally no idea why Caleb thought Deku was saying the Third’s lines lol

oh hey, Endeavor’s here too! not that you’d ever be able to tell from this first panel lmao

glad you received All Might’s call, mysterious unidentified glowing smudge

oh snap he says he’s weaker in the rain. is that why AFO told Nagant to attack then?? except that as we discussed the other day, I believe that AFO fully intended for Nagant to lose the fight, so him giving her info that would give her an advantage doesn’t really fit in with that. maybe he wanted Deku to be separated from Endeavor and the rest for maximum angst, though

btw Deku’s eyes are unsurprisingly back to the new normal here

alas, the angst continues. I say, pretending like I’m not totally eating it up each and every week and writing essay after essay about it lol

anyway so apparently Hawks can’t actually fly lmao. he was just yeeting himself with style

for some reason this is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen omfg. wave to Hawks, kids! say “bye, Hawks!”

j/k of course Deku is catching them. -- except???

wow so he was just running on fumes there at the end. well, good to know there is actually a limit to his shenanigans, particularly regarding this new “knockoff” 100% OFA. it will definitely not alleviate any of the discourse, but it’s good for my own peace of mind because it’s solid confirmation that he still needs his pals in order to win this thing

anyway, but on to the rest of this conversation, which is basically Deku deducing what we all deduced last week -- AFO implanted some sort of trap into Nagant when he gave her Air Walk. though I’d still like to get the actual details from AFO and/or Horikoshi, because this was particularly wild even by quirk standards lol

omgggggg

she still has a face after all!! so it’s confirmed, Horikoshi has no idea what “blowing up” actually means. we might have guessed, based on what happened to Toga in the MVA arc, and also based on everything Katsuki does ever, but shhh

so now Hawks is all “NAGANT PLEASE WAKE UP, IF I SHOUT MY NAME AT YOU WILL THAT DO THE TRICK”

this is actually kind of touching though because even though we all know (or most of us acknowledge at any rate) that Hawks is a pretty caring person, it’s rare to see him actually panic over someone’s welfare like this

oh shit Horikoshi is really doubling down on it

I wonder how much Hawks knew about what really happened between Nagant and the HPSC. regardless, he probably sees her as a kindred spirit of sorts, and I’m more than happy for Deku to pass the redemption torch onto him now that he’s on the scene. like no offense Deku but they actually know each other and stuff lol

DAMMIT NAGANT CAN’T YOU SEE HOW LOUD HE IS YELLING

apparently being freed from his HPSC shackles has finally given Hawks the space to embrace his own inner shounen protagonist. is there anything more shounen than trying to motivationally scream someone awake when they’re lying in your arms inches from death?? 100% guaranteed to work

!!! IS THIS NAGANT’S POV OMG

SO SHE IS ALIVE. THANK GOD. Horikoshi doesn’t want to meet with my emotional distress lawyer today after all

love how she’s all “just gonna stir up the weekly Hawks Discourse pot here by implying that he probably committed a lot of Atrocities just like I did, so now people can get all hopped up about that, even though there’s no evidence he’s ever killed anyone aside from that one horrible ‘damned-if-you-do...’ situation with Twice.” no one asked for your provocative speculation young lady!! trust me Nagant, our rabbles don’t need the rousing lol

but nice save there with the “so how are your eyes so untainted” well you see it’s because even when he was following the HPSC’s orders he always went to great lengths never to go against his own moral compass. which just to be clear was incredibly difficult, and led to a ton of pain and suffering on his part, because the life of a spy is basically just one impossible situation after another. but in spite of that he never stopped trying to do his best to help people. I don’t really know where this tangent came from or is leading to, lol, but anyway p.s.a. I love Hawks a lot and he’s a good kid dammit

oh shit??!?

how is the League always able to swing all these fancy forest mansions. where do they find them. how many do they have

so Deku’s dropping them -- very roughly, not sure if he was reacting to finally getting AFO’s location, or if his energy really is giving out -- and now Nagant’s saying that AFO hired other villains as well. well of course he did. gotta keep chipping away at OFA’s ninth successor little by little

now Nagant is asking Hawks how he’s able to keep making “that” face. I assume she’s again talking about the fact that he somehow didn’t let the HPSC wear down his spirit

oh my god???

thanks for stuffing this chapter to the brim with good nutritional Hawks Feels, Horikoshi. what a good. he just keeps on trudging forward undeterred no matter what bullshit comes his way. what a steadfast little guy. I WILL PROTECT YOU FROM DISCOURSE MY SWEET SUNSHINE

lmaoooo

“SPOTTED THIS DUDE JUST CHILLING OUT THERE ON THE ROOF WITH NO ARMS, SEEMED PRETTY SUS” good job Endeavor

anyway so you don’t really need me to tell you that Overhaul is immediately starting in with the “BUT THE BOSS WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO TAKE ME TO THE BOSS YOU PROMISED YOU WOULD TAKE ME TO THE BOSS” stuff again. but I will go ahead and tell you anyway. so yeah. he’s doing that

OMG YOU GUYS LOOK AT DEKU’S “of all the fucking assholes to just randomly drop in on my life once again why did it have to be you” FACE THOUGH, OMG

fun fact, if you go back to chapters 124 through 160, there was an entire story arc where Overhaul imprisoned and tortured a little girl. yeah, I know!! suuuuuuuuper evil. anyways just an interesting little anecdote for you all that’s somewhat relevant to the current situation

OMG, YES. FUCK YES, DEKU

THEN WHAT ABOUT SPARING ONE FOR HER!!! YES!!! EXACTLY!!! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, SOMEONE GETS IT

HERE’S THE PANEL OF DEKU SAYING THE EXACT SAME THING I’M SAYING LOL

(ETA: so apparently there’s some discourse about this because some people are interpreting this as Deku saying “you should apologize to Eri”, which would obviously be a terrible idea even if Overhaul actually wanted to do that, because Eri shouldn’t ever have to see him again. however I just want to point out that there is a HUGE difference between saying “it would be nice if you could direct that feeling of regret/being sorry towards Eri as well”, vs saying “you should also apologize to her.” all Deku is doing is rightfully pointing out that Overhaul has hurt way more people than just his boss, and if he really is remorseful, then he should extend those feelings of remorse to Eri and the rest as well. it’s not a directive to take any specific action, and I’m 1000% sure no one at U.A. would let Overhaul within 100 miles of Eri ever again.

tl;dr “try feeling remorse sometime” =/= “do you want me to fly you over to U.A. right now to surprise the little girl you traumatized”, lol.)

[slings an arm around Deku’s shoulders] you’re a good kid. I like you. I don’t know if I tell you that enough, but it’s true

meanwhile here is Overhaul’s “spare... a thought... for Eri...???????” face sigh

the struggle is real y’all

(ETA: and that’s... the last we ever saw of Overhaul, I guess? well all right then. I assume Deku will make good on his promise, so we know he’ll get that little bit of closure before going back to jail or whatever, and I confess I’m more than fine with leaving the rest of it open-ended, especially given his character’s history. I think this was pretty generous all things considered.)

lmao holy shit

All Might what did you do to those tiki torch guys?? did you thrash them. did you give ‘em those hands. did you deliver their own asses to them complete with a sticker reminding them Amazon Prime Day is on June 21. we missed out goddammit

so Endeavor, who wasn’t the one he was asking, is telling him that they captured (well let’s be real, Deku captured, give the credit where it’s due) Nagant and Overhaul. and so I guess they’re going to take Nagant to the ER now

fire is no one’s weakness

-- oh my GOD I scrolled down and audibly gasped

[is politely but firmly approached and asked to remove my arm from Deku’s shoulder by the physical manifestation of all this Dekuangst] “we’re sorry, he’s not allowed to have visitors right now” oh shit, my bad. [goes to stand behind a police barricade]

lmao what. did you run out of room on the previous page

what an exaggerated fade to black lmao

-- AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I actually can’t see what he’s reacting to so maybe I’m just seriously jumping the gun here lol, but THE HELL WITH IT. the next panel appears to be a cut to Haibori Forest, so I’m just gonna go ahead and declare that Deku ran off on his own all wounded to go have more Dekuangst, just like I manifested. now go call Katsuki goddammit

[scrolls three more inches down] oh

yeah so like I said, Deku is walking very slowly a few feet in front of Endeavor, who’s telling him to wait up. yep. we’ve all gotta be so careful to not just jump to conclusions. I know we’re excited but still

anyway, so! welcome back to Mt. Lady and Kamui Woods (ARE YOU GUYS DATING) and Edgeshot! have fun walking into this obvious trap lol

dammit Deku why are you so determined to tempt fate

[monkey puppet meme faces]

OH MY GOD THIS IS PURE GRADE-A CHEESY COMIC BOOK VILLAIN 101 SHIT AND I’M HERE FOR IT

that’s such a weird way of clapping who claps like that

unlike certain other people who shan’t be named, AFO doesn’t feel the need to inexplicably take his shirt off when recording sinister villain monologues. I think we’re all pretty grateful for that

high fives to everyone who called it!! yep yep

anyway so this whole scene has major booby-trap vibes, which I’m enjoying immensely even though I don’t think anything is really going to come of it lol. probably just another long-winded AFO Speech. but wouldn’t it be funny if like the ceiling started lowering down to try and squish Deku afterwards lol

(ETA: well the explosion was still pretty funny too ngl.)

ffff

[“Dekuangst is the trap” intensifies]

anyway so yeah. he’s just hitting up all of his usual villain talking points. we get it, you’re so smart and you see right through the thin veneers of society and people who don’t conform are left to fend for themselves and labeled as villains and history is written by the victors, and blah blah blah dude are you just jumping randomly from one soundbyte to another lol. literally what are you talking about. what does this have to do with you blowing up Nagant

-- holy shit??

[”Dekuangst is the trap” intensifies MORE?????]

LOL WHAT

BRO. WHAT IS WITH YOU. DON’T YOU KNOW HOW TO LAY ANY OTHER KIND OF FUCKING TRAP GOOD LORD

“YOU’RE NEXT” THE CALLBACK?? THE PARALLELS?? THOUGH WHEN ALL MIGHT POINTED HE MADE IT LOOK WAY COOLER. AFO’S POINTING JUST LOOKS LIKE SMOKEY THE BEAR

HAS ANYONE CHECKED IN ON KAMUI WOODS I HEAR HE IS WEAK TO FIRE?? THE ONLY ONE WHO IS, APPARENTLY

r.i.p. to this particular forest mansion. don’t worry they have a ton of backups

remember last week when I said maybe AFO thinks explosions are gauche. well never mind. he fucking loves explosions

anyway so that’s the end of BnHA, everyone. hope you enjoyed. it was a good ride while it lasted. see you all, good luck in your travels

#bnha 316 #hawks #takami keigo #lady nagant #midoriya izuku #all for one #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #manifesting 317 opening with a slightly modified version of my previous fantasy scenario lmao #'WHADDYA MEAN THEY BLEW UP THE NERD'#that's *his* job #sorry lol I kid I kid

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theophagie · 4 months ago

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Arranged marriage. Sex in an arranged marriage! Sex in an arranged marriage that you are forced into because Destiny is a thing and it is in your Destiny to have an heir. How free are you, to what degree are your agreements your own? Ehhhh 😬😬😬...

Stella's character is about as deep as a puddle atm (unless you like to chew on things and choose to read into them), but I feel like ignoring the broader picture is a disservice to both characters involved and the subplot that they're entangled in... Because sexual coercion is an element that was at play here, but it affected both Stolas and Stella and was born out of their society and families' demands and expectations. Demands and expectations which Stolas and Stella coped veeery differently with (and neither remotely well, mind you) (Stolas by trying to obliterate himself as much as possible, Stella by reacting aggressively to everything she perceives as a threat), and I don't really like that people take that as definite proof that a rape happened because... Stella Plainly Evil, rather than going "there's a system here that damages people, and sometimes some of those people will then go on to inflict further damage onto others". Which is what happened with these two! Insults and cruelty, humiliation and isolation, physical violence, that's Stella's power over Stolas, with the both of them having been little marionettes for the Goetia family at the same time on top of that (on bottom of that? As the basis of that?)... And. I especially feel like it's a kinda shallow and reductive read of the situation to take Stolas' passivity in bed as The Ultimate Proof that a rape occurred, because to circle back to my opening about arranged marriage: your "agreement" to having sex with your spouse can only be so (not) free or genuine in such circumstances, especially when you also take into account the Sexuality Factor, but you can choose how you engage with it, which is what Stolas did... like with everything else, by being passive to get it done with, thus "making Stella do everything" and unintentionally fuelling her hatred for him because what the fuck do you mean you refuse to play the role your family wants you to play when I'm being so obedient instead, motherfucker you're already a prince with so much power in your hands, you have everything you could possibly wish for and still you decide to humiliate me like this, it's not like you're the one who's going to have to carry your fucking spawn, just act like a goddman man AHHHH shit I'm entering Personal Reading of Stella's Character And Behavior Territory. Which wasn't good, obviously, but sexual assault and rape are a demonstration/enforcement of power over someone, and it doesn't feel to me that HB even tries to imply that that's what took place between Stolas and Stella. But what it does feel to me is that lots of people will go out of their way to look for the "worst" interpretation possible, which... I understand as a whump lover and from a fanon perspective, but when it comes to discussing the actual canon I'd hesitate to... like... take a line like "He just lays there staring at the wall" and tear off my shirt in anguish and shout from the rooftops that "Stella dragged Stolas to bed every night and forced him down and abused him so bad that dissociation was his only escape from that hell, that's what that sentence could only mean, it can't mean anything else and if you think that it could then you're evil and a rape apologist and you hate Stolas". Like. Can we maybe calm down

Tldr 1) sexual coercion is inherent to Stolas and Stella's marriage, but it came from the above, from their families and more broadly from their society 2) Stolas' way to cope with it was to retreat into his shell, and I don't think that accusing Stella of being an aggressor in this sense because of that (on the sole basis of her own account of the fact no less. something something taking ahold of the narrative to give yourself more standing and power) is the right way to go

And re: standing and power. What she does do is humilate and sexually harass him in public on the basis of his (to her & co) ~invirility~, and. I don't know how to say this. "Stella's behavior at the party and her enjoyment of his degradation must mean that Octavia was conceived through rape" is a big assumption to make because - on top of everything else - it also feels like the underlying assumption is that the sexual harassment displayed there wasn't "severe enough" by itself to be taken seriously, or that doing one must inevitably lead to the other. And when people take it even further by looking at Stella coping with her own miserableness by punching down and outright stating or insisting that not only she raped Stolas, she also enjoyed doing it (eg "well she says she had to force herself but she still gets a rush from making fun of Stolas, so actually she must have enjoyed his discomfort back then". Horse Looking At The Sea_Man.jpeg)...... Horse Looking At The Sea_Man.jpeg. Once again, I'm all for whump, but let's maybe try not to warp canon into a tumblr writing prompt list

I have. Thoughts about the way I often see people talk about Stolas and Stella

#helluva boss #series #mytext #stolas of the ars goetia #stella of the ars goetia

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galadhremmin · 3 years ago

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We have derived Caranthir liking the Dwarves (and vice versa) because apparently, Finrod succeeds in every field Caranthir fails, and at this point it's clear this derives from the in-universe writer of the Silm and his own biases. Think about it: "Dark Finwë" , a grumpy, prejudiced lordling, and "Hair Champion", most handsome, noble king, have met with the same people!! Yet the king of the first secret kingdom is everyone's friend, but the prince that trades with them regularly is not... seems sus.

Hence, Caranthir is friends with the Dwarves. (But that is just an interpretation, so you're free to think what you wish, I just have several opinions on in-universe prejudice and the almighty narrative.)

I think that 'we' might actually have been Dawn Felagund years ago. Maybe this reading existed even before that, but I doubt that-- she's been very influential in silm fandom and was long before tumblr was much of a thing. https://dawnfelagund.com/caranthir-the-slandered

I wouldn't say it's 'clear' that what amounts to Caranthir's entire documented personality derives from the bias of the in-universe narrator, though as you can see from Dawn's writing it's a reading you can argue for. There are a number of different approaches you can take to the Silm and its biases anyway. One of the few times when it's absolutely clear the text isn't telling the entire story is when it talks about the Easterlings. I've posted about this before but the recorded names are, uhh.... the ones to betray the elves are unlikely to actually have been named things like 'ugly lord' and 'ugly beard.' 'Dark Finwe' on the other hand is a documented reference to his haircolour being dark like Finwe's own; hardly a negative judgement!

I personally think Caranthir can be exactly as ill-tempered and prejudiced as the Silm paints him without becoming an unsympathetic character. If a writer cannot make a moody, deeply prejudiced man an interesting character that is a failure as a writer; there are after all enough books who manage exactly that. That is not to say choosing not to write him that way is a failure (obviously not), but it's not necessary in order to make a reader feel for him at all.

Just going by the text, I think it actually might make for a more interesting narrative to explore in fic to me. Because he does change his mind about something, and at a very specific moment; when he meets the Haladin. That is much less dramatic if he secretly been as nice and popular as Finrod, and got along with everyone all the time already. He's been raised by Fëanor, who said things like 'No other race shall oust us!' and rallied the Noldor not motivated enough by vengeance for Finwë alone by playing on their deep-seated fear of being replaced by the Secondborn. Very unlikely that had no impact. At best it has made him uninterested in humans in his area (while they're not much of a threat to ruling instead of the elves anyway). The text says they paid them no heed.

And yet! Caranthir sees how brave Haleth and her people are. He 'does her great honour.' He changes his mind and offers them lands. His tragedy to me is not that of a slandered figure, but of this deeply, deeply prejudiced person raised to distrust the motivations of human beings -- who overcomes those beliefs, offers friendship, is rejected! then extends that same trust to the Easterlings anyway... and it's those specific Easterlings, not the ones who ally with his brothers-- who betray them all. And cause the disastrous ending of the Nirnaeth. It's the 'to evil end shall all things turn that they begin well' part of the curse hitting him in the least fair way possible. Someone finally changes for the better, and the outcome is treason and destruction.

That is a very good character arc to me, actually. His aesthetics-based scorn for the Dwarves is reprehensible but strikes me as deeply Elvish, and part of his prejudices. Naugrim is too unflattering a name for them for it not to be common. His temper-- well why can't he have one? Sure there's only one recorded instance -- but that's imo because there are hardly any conversations in the Silm! Anyway I like some people with tempers well enough. Personally I think people are missing out on opiniated grouches.

Obviously the biased anti-Feanorian Pengolodh reading is a nice one, and I have enjoyed a lot of stories written based it. But it's not at all a reading that is necessary for me to read Caranthir as a flawed but sympathetic character. He can have serious faults and still, ultimately, be someone I feel for.

What I was asking though was if I overlooked any canon evidence of Caranthir being particularly, personally fond of the Dwarves; and it seems I did not. Also; there is room for Caranthir growing to like the Dwarves over centuries without an anti-Feanorian bias reading this strong, there is simply no evidence for friendship in the rather barebones narrative (I'm not interested atm because it's wildly overdone to me & I like variety).

That said, in my opinion making Caranthir the hidden, slandered Feanorian Finrod equivalent with a dash of Curufin's Dwarf affection is not as enjoyable as simply working with what little canon character is actually there. Because there is one (and it's not the greedy tax collector of some fanon depictions either imo)

1. To start with, wrt Caranthir as the anti-Finrod, I don't think it works that well. Sure sure dark/light, open/prejudiced, repressed/shouty, but different motivations, different locations, plus they meet very different peoples even if both are Edain-- besides, Caranthir's own older brothers do successfully ally with the Easterlings without betrayal, while Curufin (much more so than Finrod! no Khuzdul for Finrod!) is the Dwarves' Friend(tm). Also, a flawed Finrod already exists. That's just the regular edition. He has his own faults and (very different) tragic arc.

If Finrod never seems to have strong prejudices to overcome, and if he's not confrontational (which... look he's a diplomat. Make of that what you will. Pretty awkward there in Doriath, buddy!) he does have trouble facing his own complicity (he wanted to sail those ships despite the murders) until Sauron beats him to death with it. He leaves Valinor with the idea of ruling but he has to give up the crown. He's ambitious, he seems emotionally repressed, he's.. possibly paying the greater Dwarves to drive the Petty Dwarves out of their ancestral home to build a city? Oops. Depending on the version you go with in that case, of course; there's also ones where he's free of the blame of that one. Not of wanting to sail those ships and being uneasy with the guilt wrt wanting to do so despite their being stolen and murdered for though. No he doesn't kill; but he wants to use the result of it anyway, and to make it worse he is actually half Telerin.

There's also (to be fair, only for sure after the disaster of the Sudden Flame because that's the recorded instance) his guards killing random innocent trespassers to keep his kingdom hidden -- yes, that's right there in Silm, yes he's still King at the time. Beren has to wave that ring. People just seem to miss that he'd be killed without it somehow.

I think it's just too easy to reduce him to the golden perfect opposite of Caranthir. Yes he's described more positively; he's also just mentioned more because unlike Caranthir he rules an actual kingdom, the greatest and richest in Beleriand in fact; and does things that have a lot of very longterm effects, like helping B&L steal a Silmaril. They don't 'meet the same people' anyway -- the Haladin have a different culture from the Beorians which contributes to their reaction to Caranthir (and iirc their later fate).

Sidenote: Dawn's essay attributes the Green Elves helping the Feanorians at Amon Ereb to Caranthir's diplomatic skills; but why not to those of Amras or Amrod? This is the quote; 'Caranthir fled and joined the remnant of his people to the scattered folk of the hunters, Amrod and Amras, and they retreated and passed Ramdal in the south. Upon Amon Ereb they maintained a watch and some strength of war, and they had aid of the Green-elves' -- nothing here indicates it was Caranthir who got them that aid. In fact A&A are the hunters, i.e. more likely to have roamed in various forests where they would have encountered Green Elves, imo.

There's also the very desperate times to consider in which this aid takes place. This is just post Sudden Flame, and even if the Green Elves didn't like Caranthir they probably liked him better than Morgoth. Also, speaking of cosmopolitans, Maedhros allies with, yes, Dwarves (Azaghal), Grey elves, Easterlings (and you might say: Fingolfinians); even part of the remaining people of Dorthonion rally to Himring post sudden flame (that means Edain and Arafinwean followers in Himring, at least for a time), and he manages to be friendly with Felagund despite calling him a badger. ;)

Finrod is not the only other leader to forge diverse alliances, and though B&L ends happily his people mostly do not. Caranthir's not much like Finrod in any way. Not in motivations, temperament, tragic arc. That's fine. No hidden kingdom for a dragon to eat either. Finrod could probably do with being a little less like Finrod sometimes, though he's well-intentioned and likable. Caranthir loves to shout and isn't sneaky. Good for him.

2. Curufin also already exists. His love for Dwarves is one of his defining and redeeming characteristics and boy does he need them. He's daddy's favourite, a sneaky overambitious bitchy bastard who is also a talented smith and linguist, and truly considered a Dwarf friend, which is apparently exceptional. He's quite flawed; tries to help Celegorm force a political marriage, laughs with a bruised mouth, seeming to lose his mind while attempting and failing murder after first losing his own stronghold and then the city he tried to take from his cousin. He's just... a personality. Mostly a bad one! You can feel for him though, because he seems like an utter mess. Many 'i would love to study you' feelings on my part. Would hate for him to be real but also I'd pay to be his therapist.

3. And then finally there's Canon Caranthir. A difficult, prejudiced person who despite that (which doesn't at all have to mean there is no despite, the despite is what makes it juicy)

- seems to be responsible for re-establishing (large scale?) trade with the Dwarves, whatever he might think of them (and they of him) to their mutual benefit. I don't think he's greedy either. It seems like a mutually profitable situation. Access to Dwarvish goods seems pretty vital to Beleriand, and facilitating trade is a real service.

As someone pointed out in the replies, the Silm does mention Dwarvish companies travelling east to Nan Elmoth and menegroth various times, but quote wrt Caranthir says 'Caranthir’s people came upon the Dwarves, who after the onslaught of Morgoth and the coming of the Noldor had ceased their traffic into Beleriand' and 'when the Dwarves began again to journey into Beleriand.'

They stopped at some point and Caranthir's people made it happen again.

- which means he's practical. He seems like he's good at organising, and setting his own feelings aside if necessary despite his prejudice and temper (which is an achievement it wouldn't be without his, hm, everything). Also he and his people as well as the Dwarves work together well because ''either people loved skill and were eager to learn,' despite their (initial?) mutual dislike. Those aren't bad characteristics; seems like it was an exchange of skill as well as goods and possibly providing safe travel opportunities.

I don't like the 'greedy Caranthir' fanon and don't think it is even that easy support entirely with canon. 'They had of it great profit,' the text says-- both Caranthir and the Dwarves. They exchanged skills and knowledge and Caranthir seems to have helped them start trading in Beleriand again. That's hardly Scrooge Mcduck.

- Another thing we can say about canonthir (lol) is that he apparently attaches a lot of value to aesthetics (was he a visual artist? is a he a sculptor like Nerdanel? WORSE: AN ART CRITIC?! Feanorian art critic is truly nightmare fuel) and that's why he dislikes Dwarves (of all things...). Either way points to 'aesthetics' as something apparently important to Caranthir. Which makes sense given who his parents are. What is interesting to me is that this apparently DOESN'T matter to Curufin, who is a lot like Feanor in most things. That's interesting!

I've never, never seen this but I think it would be very funny to attribute his aesthetic prejudices to Nerdanel. I love her; but why should her opinions be perfect? I know she wasn't considered beautiful herself, but she's an artist. She's got to have had some strong opinions on aesthetics anyway. I doubt it's the beards; Mahtan had one as well. And 'stunted'...at least some of this comes down to the Elvish obsession with height yet again. Hm.

- eventually Caranthir overcomes what have to be some very deeply held beliefs about human beings and their place in the world, and offers what for all intents and purposes looks like real friendship, not the ruling over Men Feanor seems to have had in mind at best. He's capable of real change!

Anyway his character works just fine to me from canon, and what he achieves and the ways in which he fails are more interesting that way rather-- neither slandered Feanorian Finrod 2.0 nor Curufin 'Dwarf Fan' Feanorion without the sneakiness and murder attempts pack the same punch as a stupidly prejudiced grouchy man doing his best anyway for centuries in this stupid ugly cursed land, eventually changing for the better, opening up-- and being brutally punished for it by the Doom.

Dammit. I hope there's therapy in the Everlasting Darkness.

hm a bit long but that's what I get for trying to gather my thoughts wrt why after considering it a bit transferring Curufin's love for Dwarves to Caranthir is a bit boring to me personally. Though there are still stories that still do it very well.

#no one asked including me but there you go anyway #that's what you get when i wake up at nearly 3 in the morning and thnk. FUCK i can't sleep #caranthir

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s1utspeare · 3 years ago

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y'all i am losing my entire fucking mind

so if you know me like, at all, you know that i am absolutely obsessed with theatre, especially musical theatre, and lately, I've been trying to study foreign musical theatre, especially Asian musical theatre (which is entirely due to the Korean Hamlet rock opera, which i discovered like three years ago and listened to on repeat even though i had no idea what anyone was saying lmao). ANYWAY i've found as of late that Korea has numerous musicals based on Western classic literature, which fucks because 1) musical theatre 2) most of those stories would be made better by being musicals but western musical theatre either won't do them or fucks them up (like there's a Dorian Gray musical??? i've been waiting for one of those for fucking ages???? help)

so today i am going to talk about the Korean musical Frankenstein (프랑켄슈타인 ), which will be opening Nov. 12, 2021, and running through February of 2022 at the Bluesquare Shincard Hall (if you have a chance and can go see it for me, please do) and how fucking GALAXY BRAINED IT IS. NOTE: I am not a Korean speaker, nor do I have any connections to the culture, so if I make an error or say anything offensive, please let me know (My credentials are that I have a degree in theatre and have read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein an unfortunate amount of like four times). Also these are my personal opinions and interpretations of the text, so don't take them as fact, and feel free to discuss your own interpretations!!

The show was first written and directed by Wang Yongbum, with musical composition and direction by Lee Seongjun, in 2016, where it sold out its 23-show run and was given a 3-week performance extension because of how popular it was. It's since been performed 3 times, coming back to the stage in 2021 for a fourth.

As far as my knowledge goes, Korea has a fairly limited musical theatre canon, at least for original Korean musicals. Typically, when they perform musical theatre, they outsource to other countries for shows, or adapt shows from other languages for Korean audiences, which is absolutely fine, but that makes Frankenstein very exciting, because it is an original Korean show, and made by a team that is known for their original shows. They're also known for not casting kidols in productions in order to draw ticket sales, so the fact that this show did as well as it did with odds stacked against it is incredible (also the amount of tech work in this production is??? incredible).

Anyway the songs all slap and the production value is ICONIC and they double-cast every single part, which brings me to my main topic of conversation: the absolutely galaxy brained decision to make this incredibly gay and also good.

so in the original version of frankenstein, victor is a terrible disaster bastard man and i hate him. If i saw him in real life i would punch him in the face. He is gay and homophobic. a terrible person and a terrible scientist. actually the only character i like in this book is Henry, who deserves the world actually.

WHICH IS WHY THIS MUSICAL GOT ME SO HYPE!!! because they MADE HENRY A MAIN CHARACTER!!! and not only that, but they changed the script so that Victor is like, a military general, I think? idk he's tasked with creating like superhuman soldiers for the military, and since his parents died when he was young, he's got some sort of weird notion that he's cursed, so he decides to go PLUS ULTRA and just. make people. and to do this he grabs field surgeon henry dupre and is like "bitch let's make some people" and henry's like "fuck ok"

now, in the novel, victor is obviously. very into men. given the fact that he creates the most perfect man imaginable with the best proportions and all of his kinks as his creature, but then becomes disgusted with him due to his repression. BUT IN THE MUSICAL henry gets accused of murder and sentenced to death, but before he dies, he sings a whole love song to victor and they hold hands through the jail cell bars and he asks victor to use his body for science, to complete their shared goal, which UM. BITCH. THAT'S????? FUCKING ROMANTIC AS SHIT anyway here's the love song bc it's making me go insane i literally started sobbing when i watched it for the first time. not only is it gorgeous, it's also so full of love and lost dreams and the desire to stay with someone even after death? catch me crying in the club. please do yourself a favor and listen to it, it's gorgeous

Edit: I watched a version with dialogue at the beginning and basically Henry takes the fall for a murder Victor did and when victors like “why did you do that when you’ll die?” Henry says, “because you’ll live” 😭😭😭😭

BUT THEN. THEN. VICTOR HONORS HENRY'S WISHES AND USES HIS BODY TO CREATE THE CREATURE, BRINGING HIM BACK TO LIFE. WHICH. FUCK. makes SO much more sense than him just being like "oh fuk big scary monster lol" and freaking out. if he freaks out because that's his lover, the person he cares most for, and he's just sentenced him to a lifetime of being almost-human-not-quite? I'd freak out too. (Also the lab set when he’s making the monster FUCKS HARD)

(anyway then he like??? sells him to a fighting arena?? idk there's this whole dance number with them throwing henry all over the stage and chains and he gets punched a lot. very very fun you know).

i won't spoil the ending but just know that it's WAY better than the book, with like, an actually satisfying ending for both the creature and victor (satisfying plot-wise), and I'm obsessed with the changes they made, and also just how this musical is tonally and everything overall? i'm gonna start learning korean just so i can go watch theatre.

uhhhh this really wasn't that much of a post just??? i needed to scream about this??? also the love song is once again gorgeous, please go watch it if just to see how beautiful the actor playing henry in this version is

if you're interested in watching more of this show, they have a whole performance of the first act songs here. The cast album (with at least half of the songs) is on Spotify.

The writer said that in the future he hopes it could come to Broadway or West End and I fucking hope so too!!! pls cry with me about this show i'm absolutely not okay

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onceupona-chaos · 4 years ago

Text

SJM setting up a forbidden romance

(And why I think ACOSF was written to set up Elriel)

This is my interpretation and obviously an Elriel post. So if that's not your cup of tea, be warned.

I made this post to basically organize my thoughts and then I decided to post it (lol). Here I talk why I think Elriel will be endgame based on my perspective that SJM already set up a lot of things that point to Elriel and a forbidden romance.

ACOSF is the first book of a new trilogy, which means SJM wrote it with an overarching plot in mind that we began to know in ACOSF. So whatever happens in ACOTAR5 is a direct consequence of the events in ACOSF.

For example, SJM won't kill Koschei and write another plot. She made her decisions when she was writing ACOSF and the overarching plot already started to be established.

I already made a post talking about the plot. I think Elain is the only character that can move the plot forward, because she's Made, therefore she can find the fourth trove and she has a connection with Koschei, which combined with how little we know about her and her powers makes her the perfect main character. But here I want to talk a little about how Sarah wrote ACOSF preparing Elain's character in terms of romance and how she set up a future forbidden romance.

At this point, it is canon that Elain is Azriel's secret, I'm not going to talk too much about, because you can check this amazing post here.

SJM structured the first book of the new trilogy around the ideia that something is deeply tormenting Azriel to the point he can't sleep and then we find out he has a secret. The bonus chapter made it canon: his secret is Elain, so there's no going back from that.

Just from the book, we know that there's something wrong with Elain and, whatever it is, she is hiding it.

Elain had already departed with Feyre, claiming she had to be up with the dawn to tend to an elderly faerie’s garden. Cassian didn’t exactly know why he suspected this wasn’t true. There had been some tightness in Elain’s face as she’d said it.

Alright, so the regular reader knows something is up with these two characters. (That alone is already a reason for the next book be about them, but moving on)

But when ACOSF is read with the perspective of a future forbidden romance in mind, we understand precisely why SJM needed us to know some very specific information.

Azriel's personality traits

SJM highlighted specific personality traits of our bat boy:

Az had a vicious competitive streak. It wasn’t boastful and arrogant, the way Cassian knew he himself was prone to be, or possessive and terrifying like Amren’s. No, it was quiet and cruel and utterly lethal. Cassian had lost track of how many games they’d played over the centuries, with one of them certain of a win, only for Az to reveal some master strategy. Or how many games had been reduced to only Rhys and Az left standing, battling it out over cards or chess until the middle of the night, when Cassian and Mor had given up and started drinking.

Sarah made a show to tell the reader the fact that Azriel is competitive, so she needs us to remember that.

That whole scene had one job: to emphasize that Azriel is competitive and strategist.

Now, if Azriel is giving up on Elain and moving on to another character, why bother to let the reader know he doesn't give up easily? If he is going to just give up on the only female that is making him get over his five hundred years passion, why bother to write a scene where he spares with Cassian only to tell the reader that?

Mostly important, why tell the reader that in countless times, Azriel seemed to be loosing, but he turned things around and won?

He's a strategist. Don't forget he planned his strategy for the snowball fight for a year.

“It seems you’ve forgotten how much of spying is waiting for the right moment. People don’t engage in their evil deeds when it’s convenient to you.”

Cassian rolled his eyes. “I stopped spying because it bored me to death. I don’t know how you put up with this all the time.”

“It suits me.” Azriel didn’t halt his sharpening, though shadows gathered around his feet.

When I read this for the first time, I honestly hadn't understood the meaning of the shadows gathering around his feet and it clearly had a deeper meaning.

But reading again, SJM used Cassian's character to emphasize that Azriel waits for the right moment all the time. Not only when he is spying. Being patient, calculating, persistent are arguably Azriel's strongest personality traits, at least the ones that are highlighted in ACOSF. Sarah is letting us know Azriel plays the long game and doesn't give up.

Every information SJM is giving us regarding Azriel (and Elain, more on her later) is essencial for a forbidden romance story. If you know what's going on with these characters, all pieces of information just... click together.

Elain's personality traits

This is a bit more complicated, mostly because Elain is passing through an inner change, which means being prepared for her arc.

However, SJM compared Elain to Azriel in ACOSF:

“Elain was the only one who guessed. She caught me vomiting two mornings in a row.” She nodded toward Azriel. “I think she’s got you beat for secret-keeping.”

We already know from ACOMAF that Elain is good at secret-keeping. But here SJM not only reminded us that, but she compared Elain to Azriel in secret-keeping, emphasizing both of them are probably the best in secrecy among the IC.

Remember: these two characters are clearly hiding something in ACSF. It's not a coincidence that SJM compared them in this case.

She scanned Elain from head to toe, wondering if she’d been taking lessons in stealth either from Azriel or the two half-wraiths she called friend.

SJM compared Elain's abilities to Azriel's (and his spies) not once, but twice. And if you take into consideration the previous books, it's not the first time she compares these two characters.

Both of them showed defiant behavior

Defiant: refusing to obey authority

Elain:

“What happened.”

When Rhys spoke like that, it was more of a command than a question.

Elain waved a hand in dismissal before flinging open the veranda doors and striding into the open air.

And of course, he have that fight with Nesta. Nesta isn't exactly authority, but she was described as "Elain's guardian", which means their relationship was at least a little hierarchical.

Azriel:

“No,” Feyre and Rhys said at the same time, in the same breath.

Azriel’s eyes shuttered. “I wasn’t asking for permission.”

“We take no risks,” Feyre said, voice flat with command. “Pull all your spies out.”

“Like hell I will.”

Honestly, is this the guy people are thinking that's going to give up on Elain because of Rhy???????

SJM deliberately let us know about them getting over their previous LI

I've seen a lot o people arguing that "they can't be endgame, because the first couple never is".

But... are we forgetting that they were in love with two different people before?

When Elain met Azriel she was deeply in love with Graysen, and he was still into Mor. The readers didn't even know about Mor sexuality then.

Until ACOFAS, we can see that both of them are not entirely over their LI yet.

Elain:

“I don’t want a mate. I don’t want a male.”

She wanted a human man.

Azriel:

Azriel choked on what I could have sworn was a laugh, his normally shadowed face lighting up as Mor bustled in.

Az, to his credit, gave Mor a smile of thanks, a blush creeping over his cheeks, his hazel eyes fixed on her. I looked away at the heat, the yearning that filled them.

However, we get to see that they are slowly getting closer. Azriel shows he's uncomfortable in spying on Lucien, Elain's throat bobbs at the sight of him, he seeks her out to wish happy Solstice, she gives him a present, they stay up past three in the morning talking and on and on.

Months go by. We already knew they are getting closer and then we have this:

Elain:

She knew Elain had given her maidenhead to Graysen a month before they’d been turned Fae. Elain had been glowing the next morning.

Elain cocked her head. Didn’t dissolve into the crying mess she usually became when Graysen came up.

Elain was glowing: she was in love, happy. She loved Graysen. And now she is getting over him. Not only that: SJM made sure to tell us she has had sex before (and enjoyed very much lol). Elain is clearly being prepared for her arc in terms of character development, plot and romance.

And Azriel:

Mor no longer sat beside Cassian, draped herself over him, and Azriel … those longing glances toward her had become few and far between. As if he’d given up. After five hundred years, he’d somehow given up.

Few and far between. It's a process for both of them to move on. At first they were friendly and then it became something more.

Azriel didn't wake up one day, realized that his brothers were mated to Elain's sisters and went: WAIT A MINUTE I WANT ONE. I would argue he showed interest in Elain since their first meet, just like Cassian showed interest in Nesta. However, Nesta and Cassian weren't in love for anyone else, differently from Elain and Azriel.

Also, Elain and Azriel are very much quieter in comparison, so... it makes sense that they needed more time to get closer and be romantic interested in each other.

But again: why bother to tell us both of them are moving on from their previous LI? Why tell us Azriel doesn't give up easily? Why tell us they are both good at keeping secrets and are hiding something?

SJM knew exactly what she was doing.

#pro elain #elriel #pro elriel

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