#oh I have so many long metas to work on so let’s just knock this one out real quick I said

[landwriter]

Are you doing the Spotify wrapped thing as well? If so, could I ask for the Nr. 4? If not, just ignore this, it's just that I have resigned myself to appear as the greedy being I apparently am and figured I'd just ask.

greedy beings unite <3

this is the incredible, perfect, flawless Hot Knife by Fiona Apple. i would write a meta/personal history on it

originally i was going to sort of throw up my hands and say it's just oaths - it is so incredibly oaths: two people who are very much a bit unhinged by one another, both hot knife and butter at once, hearts made cinemascopes etc.

BUT - butter, okay, hot knives, ok, perhaps - Hob is a scruffy professional baker who owns a little patisserie and Dream is a miserable IP lawyer at his family's law firm, which is incidentally located only two blocks away on the other side of a small city park.

Perhaps - one day a harried Matthew bursts in to Hob's bakery and says, since it's empty, and he has a flair of the dramatic, "I need all of your croissants for my lawyers." The caterer hadn't shown up and Matthew had actually been jogging down the street in his dress shoes and panicking when he saw Hob's storefront. The meeting starts in ten minutes.

"How many?" asks Hob.

"Lawyers, or croissants?"

And so Matthew leaves three minutes later with two dozen croissants, muffins, and a couple palmiers for good measure, as well as a sympathetic grin. When Dream, who is hanging on by, and I cannot stress this enough, an absolute thread, absent-mindedly shoves a blueberry muffin in his mouth, he pulls out his phone right in the prep meeting and texts Matthew at his desk: Who made these

Matthew writes a very hot dude who had flour on his face and then decides he likes his job, actually, and texts Dream the name and address of Hob's shop.

Dream means to go, but work comes first, and he keeps finishing long after they're closed. One day he finishes so late it's actually close to the bakery's opening hours, so, exhausted, he decides to show up.

Hob normally wouldn't answer the door except anyone who can knock loud enough to be heard over his music is probably the cops or the fire department - which is enough to get him out of the kitchen, and then when he sees Dream, he decides to open up anyways. He can tell this man isn't up early at 6 AM, he's up late, Hob knows the look - and also, well, he's beautiful, so he unlocks the door while Exodus' Toxic Waltz is blaring from the back, is halfway through apologizing for the mess and music (Why is apologizing? He's not even open yet.)

Dream blinks once, slowly, and when he opens his eyes again he understands he's fallen in love. He puts this knowledge aside for the moment, and stiffly offers his hand to shake (Oh, shit, sorry, yeah, let me just - oh god I've gotten flour on your suit) and introduces himself. "Do you have any more blueberry muffins?"

Hob, even though he has a thousand other things to do, for some reason hears himself saying, "For sure, yeah. I mean. Not right now. But I could. If you want to come in and sit?" and then mortifyingly continuing to say, "I have a coffee machine - I mean, I don't use it, but I have it, I'm pretty sure it works - do you want a coffee, are you going for the full 24 hours thing, or if not, I do also have a shitty couch in the office, you can nap?"

Then he realizes he needs to let go Dream's hand.

And so begins our love story, in the liminal hours between night and day, when Hob wakes up early to bake and Dream finishes work late. They make a routine of it, and although Hob is a little freaked out by Dream's apparently work-life balance and sleeping schedule, he doesn't mind the company, doesn't mind it either when Dream just shuffles to his back room and curls up on his sofa, because at least he's sleeping sometime.

They both try and impress the other - Dream by requesting increasingly obscure confectionery, Hob by nonchalantly making it perfectly. (He thinks he's found the culinary history book Dream is using and is staying one recipe ahead, in secret.) They both challenge each other and get under each other's skin, and think about the other person far, far, too much than appropriate. I think this one would be mostly sweet (ha) but with some proper actual We Can't Be Together Because of X or Y obstacles. I think this is the sort of story where they actually have a huge blowout argument in the second act about, like, the protestant work ethic, because they might be nursing massive crushes, but they also both are nursing massive proprietary feelings as a result, and have very different values surrounding work and hedonism and a life well-lived etc. Do they work it out! I think so! I don't think they can stay apart! And every chapter would be titled after a thematic baked good.

(p.s. alternative song mood for this fic: The National's Fake Empire) (p.p.s. i do imagine dream in this as one of those lawyers who makes buckets of money and drops a LOT of it on his version of therapy, which is gradual progress on like, an entire gorgeous tattoo bodypiece, some gorgeous hyper surreal cosmology thing, and i do think hob accidentally walks into a post one day when he glances into a tattoo shop where dream happens to be having his monthly session)

[some-unoriginal-fandom-trash]

Where can one possibly read that fanfic of the blues meeting the cod characters. And tex being stronger than Ghost. Just asking

All 6,000+ words (what the FUCK) can be found on my google docs. But here, have the snippet where Tex beats Ghost’s ass. (She’s technically human in this AU but we’re figuring that out)

“Shame, I was kind of looking for a fight,” you say, and then turn back to Caboose, who had been watching the whole interaction with rapt interest. “You wanna go, big guy?”

“Uhm, no. I do not want to get thrown around a lot again.”

“I’ll go.” You turn, watching Ghost walk in from where he’s been benching. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Tucker and Wash exchange a glance. “Been meaning for a spar without your armor, seems like an unfair advantage.” He sounds almost mad, but you’ve never been the best at interpreting his emotions. That’s Soap’s job.

Doesn’t matter how he’s feeling though, because his words piss you off royally. “Oh really?” Tucker, Wash, and Caboose all take a step back. “Fine then, let’s see what you’ve got.”

You both step into the ring, and equally size each other up. Ghost is pretty big, you’ll give him that. But he’s not as big or as strong as Caboose, and he’s certainly not as big as the Meta was. Still though, maybe it’ll be more even, as Ghost does tend to have the advantage of not being either a) completely brain dead, or b) crazier than a bag of feral cats.

You breathe in once, and as you exhale, he charges you. A tackle from this close has low risk, high reward if done right. If he manages to throw off your center of gravity, it’ll leave you off to a rough start.

You immediately shift into your stance, before sidestepping, and punching inbetween his shoulder blades as hard as you can with your left fist. The impact makes a loud noise as knuckles meet flesh, and you can feel it echo both across the gym and inside your bones.

It’s been a while since you’ve been in a real brawl like this.

The punch has him faltering down onto one knee, and you can see the spot already start to bruise, but he gets back up and turns to face you, your positions having switched. You’re ready for him, and as soon as he’s on his feet enough, you come after him with a right hook that he just barely dodges by ducking. It’s so close it grazes his hair.

He aims a punch to your abdomen, which you block with your other hand. The next few seconds are a flurry of attempts and dodges, equally from both of you, and it surprises you when he lands a hit on your shoulder, knocking you back a bit.

You don’t let it falter you for too long, as when goes for his next hit, you take his momentum and guide his arm upwards to leave his chest wide open. Your other fist goes straight to his diaphram, before you turn and land a powerful kick directly in the center of his abs. You’re just wearing plain work boots, but you know they hurt, having been on the wrong end of Carolina’s kick just one too many times.

He stumbles backwards, and you decide right in that moment that you’re sick of it.

You’re sick of how you brought the 141 into your home, you brought them to meet your team, the most important people in your life, and they keep you at gun barrell length. After the blood, sweat, and violence you shed and did for them, after the trust you thought you built up, they still have the nerve to mistrust and doubt you. None of them look at you the way they used to after you took your helmet off and spoke with your real voice for the first time. Like they forgot that you and Beta were one in the same, not two people constricted to the same suit of armor. That it wasn't just Beta who would protect them with incredible acts of strength, that it was Tex underneath the black titanium.

It’s with that pent up fury and frustration driving you that you move towards Ghost in one fast, solid movement, grabbing his shirt and yanking him towards you. You can see the exact moment he also realizes what you’re about to do, and that he’s as powerless to stop it as you are powerful to put it in motion.

You punch him clean across the temple, and he stumbles, only kept upright by your grip on his shirt. His head lolls back, eyes closed, and his mouth hangs open under the small face mask as blood pours from the small open wound on the left side of his head.

You come back to yourself all at once, and you hear commotion around you. You carefully set him on the ground, and then quickly back up. You broke the skin on both his head and your knuckles.

You haven’t done that in a long time either.

[nicnacsnonsense]

Things which do not necessarily indicate Stede was a bad father pre-canon:

Mary commenting that the kids are adjusting better than expected to him being gone — These kids have gone from living in a household with 2 miserable parents to one with 1.5 (granting a half point for Doug) happy and fulfilled parents. Something like that is going to have a hugely positive impact on them, even if they are missing their dad.

Alma angrily telling Stede she doesn’t want his moldy old food — A bit of a gimme, but obviously this could easily be a reflection of Alma feeling angry and betrayed by his one genuine bad dad move of leaving after previously having been a good dad.

Louis asking him who he is — Look, Louis is a little kid. If he did forget Stede, that doesn’t have to mean anything deeper than little kids forget things a lot. But it’s also possible he does remember Stede and he’s just confused because he doesn’t understand a lot of the way the world works yet. Picture little Louis sitting there at the table like the woman with the complicated math equations meme thinking to himself, Mom is my mom. Mom loves Doug so Doug is my dad. But I remember playing with this person and that he used to live in our house all the time too like a dad. But a person can only have one dad and Doug is my dad so… “Who are you again?”

Mary telling Stede to play with his kids — Yes Mary’s tone is annoyed here, but let’s be real; when your relationship with someone is as bad as Mary and Stede’s was, they don’t actually have to be doing anything wrong for you to be annoyed with them. From what we can hear of the kids, they seem to be having fun and entertaining each other just fine. There’s no clear and definite indicator that Stede is doing anything wrong by having been reading in that particular moment rather than playing with them.

Stede playing pirates with the kids when Mary said not to — Mary says playing pirates will give the kids nightmares, but we have no idea of how rational this belief of hers is. It’s possible she’s entirely right and playing pirates always causes nightmares. But it’s also possible the kids have nightmares sometimes for unrelated reasons and Mary has just come to the incorrect conclusion that it’s caused by playing pirates presumably because it’s a game she doesn’t particularly approve of regardless. We also don’t know how they actually started playing pirates; was it Stede’s suggestion or did the kids beg and plead and insist they didn’t care if they got nightmares until Stede agreed?

Stede never read bedtime stories to his kids/played any games with them other than pirates/tucked them into bed and gave them gentle forehead kisses goodnight/any other random thing someone wants to assert Stede didn’t do — Jesus. We never see Stede going to the bathroom either, are we assuming that means he doesn’t poop? I’m am begging everyone to stop casually asserting that Stede never did x with his kids without any evidence to back up why they think he didn’t do whatever it is.

Things which indicate Stede was a good father, actually (again, aside from the whole leaving thing; bad move there, Stede):

The way he treats the crew, especially in the first episode — He reads them bedtime stories! The whole flag making scene was basically kindergarten arts and crafts! Stede treats his crew the way you would expect a good father to treat his kids. Obviously this doesn’t prove that he actually treated his own kids that way, but that seems a way more intuitive assumption than thinking this is all new behavior from Stede. Especially given that reusing pre-existing scripts and patterns of behavior even when they don’t particularly fit in the new situation is something Stede is known to do.

The way the ship was outfitted — Stede originally designed the Revenge under the assumption his family would be there with them. And the inclusion of things like the children’s stories, the rec room, and the jam room show that he was actively considering how to make shipboard life fun and engaging for his young children.

Ed building a pillowfort — Admittedly this one is tenuous, but I swear I’ve connected the dots! From what we see of Ed’s childhood it seems doubtful he had any experience with building pillowforts. One thing that might explain it would be if Ed learned from Stede who in turn got his practice from playing with his kids.

Stede playing with his kids — Honestly I could write thousands of words (tens of thousands maybe even) on this scene alone, but I’m trying to keep this brief (well, briefer) so let’s just hit the highlights. Stede is reading at the dining table, the same room everyone else is hanging out in. Upon (presumably) hearing Stede agree to Mary’s request that he play with the kids, Alma and Louis try to sneak up on their seemingly oblivious dad — in particular note how comfortable and confident of her welcome in Stede’s space Alma is and the look of anticipatory excitement on Louis’s face — only for Stede to suddenly lunge out to try to “get” them, which at some point evolves into a game of pirates. We see that the kids love playing with their dad, something that happens frequently enough that an announcement that he is going to is not treated as something particularly noteworthy and he is instead pulled into their game in an apparently natural and practiced way. Furthermore, by reading at the table instead of whatever study/library he must have, Stede is making himself present and available for his children even when not actively engaging with them, something he is in part able to do because he does engage with them often enough that they don’t feel the need to demand/beg for his attention whenever he is physically present.

Alma giving Stede the petrified orange half — The orange is a metaphor for Stede’s heart, so leaving half of it with Alma and Louis while taking the other half back to sea when he leaves is a metaphor for him still loving and having a connection to his kids even after he leaves. But most importantly Alma is the one who did this; she came up with the idea on her own, then of her own volition went and found the orange wherever Stede last had it and broke it in half to offer to him. Despite her anger at him leaving the first time and her understanding why him leaving this time is for the best, she is still proactively reaching out to tell him she wants to maintain that connection with him.

[autisticandroids]

Oh patron saint of mpreg, tell us, what is the absolute gold standard canon divergent mpreg scenario with Cas and Dean?

so for me the gold standard is for cas to get pregnant due to some kind of magical or metaphysical situation that dean at least does not perceive as sex. bonus points is cas is hesitant about it but refuses to explain why (because he doesn't know how dean will deal with the concept of himself being able to potentially get cas pregnant), so dean is like "we're doing it anyway" and then they do it and then cas doesn't tell anyone that he is pregnant until circumstances force the information out of him. and then dean has to deal with the fact that 1) cas can get pregnant, 2) cas is pregnant, 3) it's his, and he does so pretty poorly.

the rest is under a cut because this post is over 2.5k words long.

my favorite times for this to happen are at the end of season nine, just before dean dies and gets demonized in do you believe in miracles, and at the start of season twelve, just before sam and dean go to jail, because the pining in both those scenarios is delicious but it is so much more powerful if cas is also pregnant, and never even told dean. double points if the truth somehow comes out while they're separated so when dean comes back it's like. yeah cas is pregnant. it's yours. welcome home dean now you have to coddle cas' emotions because he thought he would have to raise your baby alone.

the season twelve scenario is particularly delicious because 1) we can have lucifer slut shaming cas in front of crowley in rock never dies, so crowley knows before dean, and 2) much more importantly, mary is there, and i am obsessed with like. okay. several things.

- the idea of mary getting all baby fever because she misses her boys and this is like. a baby she can take care of because she never got to take care of sam

- the idea of dean working through some of his parentification trauma by coparenting a child with the parent whose place he felt he had to take

- the idea of mary coming in and projecting her insane 1980s gender roles all over cas, suddenly treating him like a woman, stripping him of agency, etc. and like. dean would also do this even though he's not from the eighties, but mary would do it double strength, and they would reinforce each other, it would be a nightmare

- also mary trying to relate to cas on the Travails Of Motherhood etc. and cas being like ?????????? like i cannot stress enough that the weird gender roles she projects onto cas are also standards that she held herself to back when she was a Wife And Mother. while cas is like mary i am not a human woman and also i don't see what "having to look pretty for my man when i'm all baby bloaty" has to do with anything. that's not something i feel like i have to do

oh and 3) could you imagine lily sunder has some regrets if cas was pregnant? unfathomable episode. like ishim and mirabel's reaction but ALSO lily's. and it would fix the number one issue i have with lily sunder, which is that the resolution of the moral dilemma is "well AKSHUALLY the kid was human and not a nephilim so killing it was bad" rather than "it was bad to kill lily's baby, full stop." like ishim's cover up and using the machinery of power to manipulate the truth is very compelling, but the fact that it results in the moral essentially being "it would have been okay if the kid had been a nephilim" suuuuuucks.

basically, there's a reason i have two entire mpreg aus set in season twelve.

and then the delicious part in the season nine version is like. one, dean is away for much longer and he could be anywhere. also he's a demon and he's cheating on cas with crowley. and then even when cas gets him back he's still cursed with the mark, so we can get all weepy over that. you know. i'm the one who's going to have to watch you murder the world and i'm eight months pregnant. etc etc.

but the other thing that's juicy about this version is that cas is still semi-involved with the other angels at this point, like he's roadtripping around with hannah and they're trying to get heaven under control, so carrying a nephil is going to really affect those relationships. so he's going to be probably disliked by the other angels, and there are MANY opportunities for slut-shaming, but at the same time, the other "outcast" type angels might respect him for violating heaven's dictates.

and then of course there's his grace vampirism victorian wasting disease. in canon he's perfectly happy to let himself die, but if he were having dean's baby he would absolutely not do that, that's dean's baby he's endangering there. so of course there's the terrible guilt of having to kill other angels so he can live, plus potentially preparing to die shortly after childbirth so he doesn't have to keep killing. delicious.

and on top of all this cas can get slutshamed by metatron in, depending on when exactly he gets knocked up, meta fiction, stairway to heaven, and do you believe in miracles. plus stairway to heaven would be insane like all the angels would know that cas is pregnant. they would see it in his grace. like cas' angel army would just. know that he was pregnant with a nephil, and have to accept that because he's their leader. in love with humanity indeed.

i'm trying to think of other good times for this drama with cas getting secretly pregnant through a nonsexual interaction to take place. it would be great in season six. like: he's doing a blasphemy with his body but at the same time he's this big important rebel leader so they can't say shit about him, and also he's pregnant while fighting these big important battles (fun and sexy), AND this is like, hot on the heels of the realization that something about his feelings for dean is untoward, expands beyond the bounds of ordinary friendship and camaraderie. like he realizes that, and maybe even that he has sexual feelings for dean, and then he gets immediately knocked up. stunning.

it would ALSO be extremely fun for it to be some kind of... i don't know, magical longer gestation times, whatever, but for cas to have gotten pregnant sometime in s5 and only realized during the Year Of Lisa. LOVE to watch a man rake leaves while both metaphorically carrying the taint of taboo sexual feelings for him and literally carrying his child.

but the thing about season six is, first of all, cas isn't really... envisioning a future with dean. not the way he does in the later seasons. like does he fantasize about a future with dean? yes. like. he really did watch that motherfucker rake leaves. but it's only fantasy. he expected to never speak to dean again after swan song until dean prayed to him in the third man. he's obsessed with dean, but it's distant. remote.

like, we talk about cas babytrapping dean in the later seasons with jack, and he absolutely does, and he would do it even more if dean got him literally pregnant, but that babytrap is about... how do i put this. it's about winning dean's affection. late seasons cas knows that he's going to die by dean's side. the difference that babytrapping dean makes is that maybe it will get dean to be nice to him in the mean time, instead of discarding him like so much toilet paper.

but season six cas doesn't think of it like that. if he were gonna babytrap dean, it would be in the more traditional sense of forcing dean to stay with him in order to raise their child together. and he would never do that. he wants dean to have a happy future, which in his mind does not include him. like, compare here "he's retired and he's to stay that way" in the man who would be king, where cas assumes that dean is happy without him and expects him to live out his days peacefully without ever seeing him again, to "i'm the one who's going to have to watch you murder the world" in the prisoner, where cas assumes that he will be by dean's side for centuries.

but anyway, the other, much more important problem with season six is that cas has a war to fight. like, in the later seasons, cas really has nothing. even when he's on tenuous good terms with the angels, he doesn't really have a home with them. the winchesters are his family, and he'd give up anything for them. he has nothing in his life. he's at rock bottom, and this becomes truer the further along you go. late seasons cas has nothing he would prioritize over serving the winchesters, and he would be happy dropping anything he was involved in to have and raise dean's baby. parenting would give him a purpose that he no longer has, because everything else has been stripped from him.

but in season six cas has a life outside of them. like yes, he has a war to fight, but he also has a place in heaven, with the other angels. he belongs somewhere, he has solid connections to the outside world. even if he didn't have a war to fight, i don't know how excited he would be to have and raise a baby (even dean's baby) because he simply has other things he could be doing. he's involved in the world beyond the winchesters.

like, the reason cas wants to be a parent is that he is totally alone and totally purposeless. having a child gives him both a reason for being and someone who will always love him and who he can care for. if he doesn't have that hole in his life he might not be so eager to fill it with a baby.

for all these reasons, this plotline really doesn't work in season six, because you simply cannot justify cas not getting an abortion, unless you do something nasty like make angel abortion impossible, which i don't love.

you COULD somehow put the impregnation just at the end of season six, maybe just before the man who would be king, such that cas doesn't realize he's pregnant until he's already godstiel. you guys are unfortunately very aware of how obsessed i am with pregnant godstiel.

actually, @jeanne-de-valois has a concept of like. a single, madness fueled midnight hookup immediately pre-tmwwbk (or maybe even during, but prior to the superman mistake), where cas is simultaneously so stressed from being stretched so thin from the war and the lying and the shady dealings, and so high on being The Big Man In Heaven, that he's bold and out of his mind enough to actually come onto dean, like he just appears one night in dean's bedroom and is like, fuck me, and dean is like 👁👄👁 okay. so they have one single adrenaline and madness fueled hookup, and then everything immediately goes to shit.

and i think that's a great place for cas to get pregnant, and then he doesn't realize until he's become god, or maybe he does and he's just like "i'll deal with it later," either way godstiel is like oh? i carry dean's heir inside me? i will have dean's baby. i will have dean's baby it is my right and also my boon to him and also a symbol of my great and magnanimous love for humanity. and also maybe i will put giant paintings of myself pregnant with his child up in churches. what about that. which would be fun. don't know when he would give birth though. actually it would be insane if he gave birth as emmanuel and was just like. raising dean's nephil when dean found him again. nuts. but it just doesn't really have the same flavor as late seasons mpreg. doesn't compel me nearly as much. like the symbolism of godstiel being pregnant with dean's child is fun and sexy but them actually raising the kid afterwards doesn't compel me nearly as much, so it's better to leave literal mpreg to the later seasons and let godstiel mpreg reside in symbolism and fantasy.

or maybe the fetus gets stolen by the leviathans when cas walks into the lake and dean has to battle his leviathanated nephil daughter as the main villain of s7. like she's dick roman's secret weapon. i think that would be fun, actually. kind of an emma situation but drawn out over the whole season. and he thinks cas is dead for most of it so she's all he's got left of cas and a mess cas left for him to clean up. big sexy.

and as a bonus, i will also tell you the best time, imo, for dean to get pregnant: near the end of season eight. possibly a single, tragic farewell fuck in sacrifice when cas is planning to lock himself away in heaven and they're never gonna see each other again. and this impregnates dean with cas' nephil.

but then cas is human. and he can't do anything about it. like generally if they managed to get dean pregnant somehow, cas would immediately talk him into an abortion (which wouldn't be too hard; dean's natural white midwestern man who doesn't vote aversion to abortion would be at war with the horror of being pregnant, and the horror would win), or might not even inform dean that he's pregnant, and just quietly end the pregnancy without dean's knowledge, because cas would never put dean through that. but if cas is human, he can't do that. and furthermore, that nephil is the last evidence of his angelic nature that persists. it's the last of what he used to be, the last of his grace. and there's something absolutely delectable about that.

then of course dean would have to leave the bunker if he was pregnant with a nephil, because angels would be after him, and he wouldn't want to lead them to gadreel, so i am imagining dean discovering that he's pregnant and then showing up in a panic at the gas n sip like "actually cas i'm also out of the bunker will you go on the run with me?" and then they go on the run and have to live in motels again and cas gets to live with take care of dean who is pregnant with his child which is essentially his dream, and he doesn't have to feel guilty because he's no longer capable of giving dean an abortion so he doesn't feel obligated to get him to have one. ideally cas gets re-angeled just in time to give dean an angelic c-section. or maybe they rely on a normal human c-section in a hospital and cas stays human and they are two humans raising their nephil, which is also fun to me.

[ravysu]

Sannin headcanons and thoughts

The last thing I would like to post for the sannin week. It is still 24.04 here! :D @sannin-central

This is long. Spoiler alert. Mostly Orochimaru, some Tsunade, a little of Jiraiya (because his story is pretty clear and spoken and idk what I can add). Also I recommend to read this meta about Orochimaru, it has influenced me a lot and has some good points. Sorry for any posible grammar mistakes. Also I really should put here a lot of references to the manga or anime but it was something that was piling up for a year and I'm soooooooo lazy. After all, those are just headcanons. Also: Im not excusing Oro's bad stuff here, Im trying to understand the reasons.

Ive already posted some hcs, here, here and here.

1. First if all, the chronology pic of sannin lifetime based on the info i found on naruto wiki and also some statements about wars from this post. It was tough considering what a mess naruto’s chronology is.

2. Sannin story shows what it cost to be a legend. They're like Team 7 but more realistic. Tsunade literally carried the war but left with nothing and developed a ptsd and have problems to just live on. Also anger control issues. I think she can be pretty bossy and stubborn which is not always nice. Jiraiya is the hero of the day but also very idealistic and can ignore some important details in the real word whether its the fight (he always injured during flashbacks maybe because each time he took too much to handle and on the one hand it's heroistic but on the other is a mistake that can lead your team to situations like in that Iwa cave) or your friends issues (I bet he saw what's going on but thought it's fine until Oro actually got red handed and left). He lives in his world and may have problems to get out to see it through someone else's shoes. As for Orochimaru, it seems like he was a normal guy for 20+ years (I mean, he didn't do crazy criminal shit and had something good in him and it was stated somewhere that it was his teammates influence. It is obvious they considered him as a friend, I don't thinks it was for nothing) but we mostly know his darkest side. Despite being a moster he is a human that have empathy and some ordinary human traits (man just decorates every bit of an environment he is in lol).

3. Tsunade was the leader of team Hiruzen.

4. Tsunade sometimes hit Jiraiya for some stupid things he did or said but never touches Orochimaru even if he did something same. Jiraiya complained about it once and almost got another hit.

5. Jiraiya had problematic parents that didn't care about him much and a lot of time he was wandering in the streets.

6. Judging by the look of Oro bangs and hair, he sometimes cut it off. A stress relief huh? And the fact that he doesn't do it now in Boruto..

7. It was shown that Tsunade and Orochimaru was acknowledged before they become a team. Maybe they did just before, or maybe some longer time before. I prefer the second option and hc that they met because both had no real friends - Orochimaru seemed weird and scary for everyone and Tsunade was Senju so everyone wanted to hang out with her but didn't really care. They weren't seen as what they were - people put the labels on them. But they didn't care about each other's labels and actually saw each other in true lights.

8. Tsunade knew it was an accident and it's not right but still she blamed Orochimaru for Nawaki's death for some time. It was something that seriously damaged their friendship and the team. Orochimaru was mad but also guilty, after all, he was responsible at least as a shinobi since Nawaki was under his watch. So he started to act cold and emotionless and was trying to distance himself from his teammates.

9. Jiraiya was in Ame while Dan died.

10. The whole his orphans mission was a bit irresponsible tbh. They already fought Hanzo and as he stated the conflict between Konoha and Ame is going to an end with Konoha's win. It's weird to stay here for three years in the middle of the war while there were other lands to fight. He left his teammates for some idea. Maybe that caused another crack in their team friendship.

11. If Tsunade would have find a way to live on with her trauma and follow the will of fire and stuff it would affect Orochimaru as well just as her grief affected him. It's like he would get an example that you can live on with this pain. So death isn't above human capability and we are not just the slaves of mortality (sounds stupid but i dont know how else to describe sorry). But as we know what he actually saw is that it broke her crucially to the point she couldnt be herself again. And so the death is above everything.

12. Oro wasn’t just acting as a cold pragmatic bitch in that cave but also tried to save Tsunade. Jiraiya knew it and that’s why he showed this sign to him like "I see what youre doing here" and that stunned Oro because he would prefer to look rather like a cold pragmatic bitch hehe

13. Just a thought. People in the village probably treated Oro as a foreigner or just wouldnt accept him because he looked so differently and had a weird attitude. That's why he sometimes didn't feel that Konoha is his home. After the wars where people were treated as means and tools, even the children, he himself developed this view on people - he dehumanized them and used as the means to his goals, just as his village did. Funny thing some people were straightly dehumanizing him too like Ibiki thought that he was a demon (tho he was a child). And he probably weren't the only one. Anyways the point is that it's logical that Orochimaru don't care about anybody but some few people, he's the product of his era. He's like Naruto that would chose the hatred way. But naruto had some good and understanding people around him and.. Orochimaru had them too, but match how Iruka treated Naruto and this Hiruzen's "I sAw tHe mAliCe in This cHiLd fRoM tHe BegGinNinG". And oro didn't even have a big ass evil fox in him. sry i hate hiruzen

ANYWAYS the moral of the story is not "go criminal if they hurt you" but always treat people like people. Waving my hand to Kant.

14. The reason why Orochimaru didn't pick some good morals to stick with through the hard times no matter what (like, idk, Jiraiya or Naruto) is because 1) I think he is/was pretty depending on people around him 2) the war fucked him and his friends up too much (Nawaki incident + Tsunade) 3) twisted addictions (though I don't think he's that sadistic, we never saw him torturing randoms just for fun, it was always some science experimental shit. He tends to get fun out of cruelty only when it's personal) that maybe developed as a way to sublimate anger and sadness caused by his parents loss (that's what they share with sasuke - unlicke naruto, they knew their parents and it's other kind of pain. Sasuke developed a revenge issue and Orochimaru - cruelty pleasure which... is kinda the same but less epic and more occasional lol).

15. Speaking of that, Orochimaru cared for Sasuke because he saw himself in him.

16. Oro hold grudges against Hiruzen for not choosing him to be Hokage not only because he was ambitious and/or egoistic, but also because Hiruzen was some kind of a father figure for him and his approval was important tho i doubt he was aware of that. He also probably could tell that Hiruzen was suspicios about him when he was a child and that led to many conflicts and was hurting as well.

17. Tsunade knew things weren't pretty with Orochimaru after the wars but she never expected them to be this bad. During the week that she was given in her arc she thought not only about how much she wants to see Nawaki and Dan again despite how wrong would it be but also was trying to bury all the good memories she had left of Orochimaru so it would be easier to kill him.

18. She poisoned Jiraiya exactly because she knew he would not let her do it. Jiraiya was always hesitant to kill and inclined to forgiveness, while Tsunade, as mentioned by Orochimaru, could be merciless (so much so that he was not surprised when Kabuto suggested that she wanted to use Jira for Edo Tensei).

19. That was one of her traits that scared Jiraiya and fascinated Orochimaru.

20. Remember how Oro grabbed Jiraiya's neck when the latter was trying to cover with hair jutsu? On the snake, in Tsnade's arc. Orochimaru could have easily kill Jiraiya by pulling the sword out of the mouth (arteries are right there) but he didn't. As well as he could kill Tsunade when she was still shaking - just aim for the neck or the heart. Instead, he just injured her lung and kicked her which is not a big deal for the kind of shinoby like her at all.. Also he helped Anko not accidentally kill herself but it would be way much profitable to let her do it. "Orochimaru has no feelings".

21. The reason he suddenly wanted to kill Tsunade instead of forcing her to heal his arms as it was planned (which is weird since it will not going to get him heals and he kinda said that he wouldn't want to kill her just minutes ago) is that not only she refused to help him (he thought he could work it out) but she also prefered the village over him (from his point of view). Out if everyone she was the closest to being able to understand him since the village caused her painful losses too but nevertheless she agreed to be on it's side.

22. He wasn't fighting her back in the end partly because he thought he deserved that. Somewhere deep inside hahah.

23. Tsunade got a fear to develop deep bonds so they probably weren't very close with Shizune (also the way she knocked her down in this hotel.. oh).

24. Orochimaru will be here when she'll die.

25. Orochimaru's eng dub to Tsunade: "I often wondered what it would be like to ring that pretty neck yours". No comments.

26. Orochimaru is either bi/pan or ace. Anything or nothing lmao

27. Hiruzen knew about at least some of the Oro’s illegal experiments and was okay just as he was okay with the Foundation all the time. Because it’s useful. Then he has discovered he went too far OR he knew everything and oro just became too inconvenient because of his methods. The way Orochimaru tells Sasuke about reasons they are well treated as the criminals is based on in his experience with Hiruzen.

28. As you may know the lyrics in Orochimaru’s music theme goes “don’t talk with the silence of the heart”. It was taken from one Indian song that also had lines like “don’t question life too much”, ”pain arose somewhere in the chest”, “don’t speak to the wounds of the heart”. Though I’m not sure 100% because I was translating it with some hindi dictionary with like zero knowledge of hindi

29. I like to think that this “silence of the heart” theme and the fact that he called his village a hidden sound village are somehow connected. The hidden sound is the possible explanation of all things waiting to be listened to but the truth is silent and you know it deep in your heart and it bothers you. The world is silent just like the life is meaningless but people can only hear. *Sigh* anyways

30. Orochimaru’s journey is the one about accepting death. When he saw Karin released her chains while was trying to get to Sasuke he understood that the death is a part of human’s strength.

Can’t wait to feel that everything I wrote is wrong or not enough or stupid and obvious lol. Anyways, it’s something that I wanted to share until I move to some other fandom.

[porgthespacepenguin]

The blueprint: looking back on episode 2.1

While researching episodes for my other posts, I ended up rewatching episode 2.1 entirely and let me tell you, my fellow Qcard gremlins: did you know they’ve been toying with us the whole time?

(We’ve been played, and we’ve been played good. )

Episode 2.1 is essentially the blueprint for season 2, and I can prove it. With a very, very, very long post.

Buckle up, folks, and let’s jump in.

(Some spoilers for 2.9 and 2.10 under the cut)

Warning: since this episode foreshadows almost the whole season, I’ve touched on many topics already in previous metas, so instead of repeating myself I’ve sometimes linked to the posts in some sections.

But before we start, I also want to remind you that in a production like STP, every single detail you see on screen has been specifically chosen and approved. Song choices, props, camera angles -- nothing is left to chance.

Time is on My Side

Right off the bat, we begin the episode with some solid madness. After the cold open and the intro, there’s a long scene of Picard and his friend from work Laris during the harvest.

As they’re picking ripe grapes under the sun (AHEM), a song is playing. And it keeps playing for a long time. A very long time.

1 minute and 22 seconds, to be precise (and yes, I timed it). For a TV episode, might as well be an eternity.

The song? “Time’s on my side”, by Irma Thomas.

Note that there are two slightly different versions of the lyrics; here are the ones in the episode, in all their heavily abridged glory:

Time is on my side, yes it is

Now you always say That you want to be free But you'll come running back I won't have to cry no more

Oh, time is on my side, yes it is Time is on my side, yes it is Remember, I'll always be around And I know, I know Like I told you so many times before You're gonna come back, baby 'Cause I know You're gonna come back knocking Yeah, knocking right on my door Well, time is on my side, yes it is Time is on my side, yes it is ' Cause I got the real love The kind that you need

Okay. So. That happened. They chose this song for Picard’s intro, while he’s working the vines at La Barre.

Under a bright shining sun.

Now who, exactly, has time on their side and is waiting for their wayward lover to wisen up and knock on their door? Because they have the deep love they really need?

Exactly. And trust me, we’re barely getting started.

Also remember how I said there are two versions of the lyrics? The other one, also by Irma Thomas, was later sung by the Rolling Stones and is vastly more popular. By a spectacular margin.

But the new version doesn’t have the following lines, and clearly the writers wanted them in:

Just like I hoped you would, baby You'll come running back (to me)

I know that you're searching for good times But just wait and see One of these days, baby (You'll come running back) Oh, and it won't be long

And indeed it isn’t long at all: less than a day later, Picard rushes out of the house toward adventure... and Q.

Choices were made, is all I’ll say about it.

A Life in the Stars

Later, we find Picard and Laris enjoying a glass of wine after a long day’s work.

They end up talking about Zhaban, and how much they miss him, then Laris makes a pass at Picard.

I actually ended up covering this part in details in my thoughts about the 2.10 trailer, so I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already.

But suffice to say, this is the first of three face touches in the season, and it fails -- naturally.

(Oh hey, look, it’s our good friend the rule of three!)

A Rose by Any Other Name

After Laris’ failed attempt at seducing Picard, the two look at each other until Laris makes her excuses and departs, leaving Picard reeling.

Awkward.

Anyway, there’s a flashback of Baby!Picard running through the house, inexplicably wearing 1930′s clothing, and then we find the older Picard walking into his mother’s solarium, dusty and abandoned.

As we now know, the solarium is the exact place Jean-Luc’s heart was broken as a boy when his beloved mother died. And of course, it’s also the place Jean-Luc and the love of his life will likely have a fateful conversation in 2.10.

Kneeling down, Picard picks up a shard of the painted window, as his mother says, in a voiceover,

“There’s magic here.”

(Oh, foreshadowing, how nice of you to join us. Come in, come in.)

Wait, what’s that on the shard?

A red rose?

What you may not know or remember, is that in the very first scene of episode 1.1, Picard is playing poker against Data in a dream. Eventually, Data plays an impossible hand: five queen of hearts.

Guess who is officially represented as a Queen of Hearts card in the early season 2 trailer?

Oh hello, Q!

And do you know what the Queen of Hearts holds in her hand in the French deck?

Oh yeah. It’s a red rose, all right.

Incidentally, the roses make another appearance in episode 2.4, as “Je ne regrette rien” plays (more on that later).

The camera lingers lovingly on the painted roses:

Anyone who has seen Tapestry before will remember the red rose bouquet Q brings Picard, naturally...

Anyway, back to our flashback. Maman comforts Jean-Luc, who is mightily displeased at moving to the countryside,

“Might as well have sailed straight off the edge of the world.”

His mother is certainly amused at his grumpiness:

Dramatic? Now there’s a word more often used to describe Q. And yet we get here a lovely, heartbreaking glimpse of who Jean-Luc was as a boy, before his heart was broken and he locked the door on half of his soul.

(Hopefully, this dramatic, wild side will reappear in the future...)

Maman then tells him,

“Look up at the stars, Jean-Luc.”

And together they look up at the starry night sky.

Search for Spock

The next morning, Picard goes through his library, frantically looking for a book. A very specific book. A book written by Spock.

He’s literally searching for Spock.

And the title of the book?

"The one and the many.” You read that right: a Wrath of Khan reference.

You know, the movie that introduces the Kobayashi Maru and in which Spock gives his life to save Kirk and the Enterprise.

(It’s not that they’ve given up on being subtle, folks. It’s that they started out with no chill whatsoever, and just kept going.)

Well, that’s awkward

Laris comes into the library, holding a cup of...

Poor Laris: all she can bring to Jean-Luc’s life is lukewarm tea, when the man is craving the warmth of a sun.

(Somewhere in the galaxy, sipping a cocktail with a tiny pink umbrella in it, Q looks on, and shrugs. Can’t relate.)

Apparently, Picard has been difficult to find,

“There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

She has, but Picard clearly hasn’t been looking for her in return.

They’re out of sync, a pattern that will hold true for the rest of the episode, and which foreshadows early on what will likely happen between them.

After giving Picard roughly 8 hours or so to consider her romantic overtures, Laris is clearly hoping Picard has changed his mind. To her obvious disappointment, the good admiral is more concerned with finding Spock’s book.

She does find it, and hands it to him. Is this foreshadowing her letting him go after Q in season 3? Hard to say. Time will tell.

The whole scene is painful to watch. Picard takes a step toward her, she steps back, putting the table in between them:

Again, they’re out of sync.

Picard tries to apologize,

“Last night, I was...” “You.”

The way Laris says it make it sound like Picard being Picard is, well, a bad thing. It’s clear she was expecting something different from him. She doesn’t love him, she loves the idea of him, of a romance with him.

(It’s never a good sign when a potential LI wants to change the hero. Just saying.)

Anyway, Laris then decides that she’s done. And when I say done, I mean done. She definitely implies that she may just... leave?

“Nothing has to change.”

“It’s too late for that, Jean-Luc. (...) Going forward, it’d all be too awkward. And I’m too old for awkward.”

So, what? She’s moving out? They’re not going to be friends anymore? After 20 years?

Wow, Laris, maybe take a breath or something.

Look up

Later, Picard gives an inspiring speech to Starfleet cadets, and I’ve covered this part in a previous meta already, so I wont go over it again in details.

What matters: the speech frankly screams ascension to me.

Including this little gem Picard ends his speech with,

Same words, same posture, same colors even. What a coincidence!

OR NOT.

(Anyway, another one for the potential season 3 foreshadowing pile. And the AGT reference pile. There are many piles.)

Holographic integration

We skip over to Seven on board Rios’ old ship. She’s still struggling with her Borg half, unsurprisingly, and seems to have left Raffi behind for now.

This scene foreshadows multiple elements that will come back during the season:

Seven’s difficulties with her Borg heritage;

Her equally complex problems with emotional intimacy;

The fighting capabilities of the holograms (brought back in 2.9)

But the most important point? The hologram.

That’s right, the hologram. Hear me out.

In season 1, La Sirena was equipped with a multitude of holograms replacing a crew, all based on elements of Rios’ personality. The holograms have now been combined into one integrated personality.

This foretells the central theme of the season: the integration of the self.

Trust comes from the heart

Next, we meet up with Soji and Agnes, attending a diplomatic dinner on a fancy planet. Soji has completed her journey in season 1 already, more or less, which is why she doesn’t end up tagging along like the other ducklings in season 2. She doesn’t need it.

This scene is absolutely, extravagantly essential for Qcard later on. I talk about it a little in my Trios-Qcard meta, but we ought to take the time to analyze the scene on its own.

Soji has been touring the galaxy for over a year, as a sort of goodwill ambassador for the newly-legal androids, and she has learned something very important,

“You can’t ask for trust through an interpreter. “

This sentence felt quite random when I first watched the episode. But loss of trust through failed communication is actually another defining theme of the season.

We see it happen to all the characters, with varying intensity. But Q and Picard are in a class of their own: In fact, from 2.2 all the way to 2.10, Q and Jean-Luc don’t speak to each other, except through third parties: first Soong, then Guinan.

No wonder things go from bad to worse for them.

Soji continues,

[Trust] needs to come from here...” Soji points at her heart. “Through here.” She points at her lips.

(Okay, if she’s not foreshadowing a Qcard kiss after a love confession, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. But we did get the exact same scene with Trios, so I have great hopes.)

And finally, the last nail in the subtlety coffin,

“True connection can only be forged when the heart has spoken.”

If this isn’t 2.10 Qcard, I’ll eat my hat.

The rest of the scene is mostly Agnes spiraling, despairing of ever finding true connection.

We learn that she has broken up with Rios, and that she thinks herself unable to sustain relationships, foretelling her future desire to belong to the Borg, and foreshadowing the end of her tenure as a Picard duckling:

“I have a feeling you’re going to be just fine without me.”

The Legacy

Agnes beams aboard the Stargazer, which is on its way to the anomaly,

“Get us there as fast as you can short of flying us through a sun.”

(Subtle, subtle.)

Rios makes a joke of emulating Picard (”Make it so”), and Agnes remarks wryly,

“Oh, the pressures of legacy.”

Remember this word: legacy.

It pops up everywhere late in the season, and also in the season 3 trailer, so it’s critically important. And that it starts here, with Rios, is probably not a coincidence.

Although until now, Picard has been holding them at arms’ length, Agnes and Rios both canonically see Picard as their father figure,

Picard and Agnes’ journey is certainly the most obvious one: their interaction on the Stargazer locks everybody else into a causal loop of epic proportions, after all.

But Rios and Picard’s journey is also fascinating. In 2.1, Rios does already “inherit” part of Picard’s legacy: the new Stargazer, a new ship named in loving memory of the old one.

But this was Starfleet’s decision, not Picard’s, and I think this aspect of their relationship will deepen in the future.

Anyway, we’ll come back to both Rios and Agnes later on.

The Q-bayashi Maru

Speaking of lovely homages, we hear about a few nostalgically-named starships: most importantly, the Grissom and the Excelsior.

The original USS Grissom was destroyed in Search for Spock, and in the same movie, the USS Excelsior was sabotaged by Scotty so it couldn’t catch up with the Enterprise.

(All together now: season 3 foreshadowing, season 3 foreshadowing...)

Anyway, chatting with Raffi, Picard then drops this little bomb of a line,

“I’m considering an update to the Kobayashi Maru.”

It could have been anything else in the curriculum, but no, it’s the freaking Kobayashi Maru (which was introduced in Wrath of Khan, incidentally). You can read more about the Q-bayashi Maru theory here. All I’ll say is Picard may end up regretting his words.

Picard and Raffi continue to chat, trading friendly barbs about their respective shortcomings, and we learn more about Saffi’s current difficulties, which of course they will work on during the rest of the season.

Raffi sighs,

“She has me hoping for something more.”

Picard also hopes for something more: that’s what held him back with Laris.

The man wants more than cold tea, and can you blame him?

Raffi then compares Picard to Seven: both ostensibly self-sufficient, both happiest in the stars...

“Hell, I wonder if either of you even get lonely.”

Lonely, eh? Let me see, who else is called lonely later on, through the mirror of Maman?

"Did you know that space is so vast, so infinite, it takes billions of years for that tiny pinprick of light to make that lonely journey from its star to our eyes?"

Picard is terribly lonely, Raffi. So is Seven and so is Q. Everybody’s lonely this season, what can I tell you.

Absolute Candor

Picard meets up with Elnor, who’s been assigned to the Excelsior, along with Raffi.

The book Picard had been looking for, almost making him late for his speech, is a gift for Elnor, who is struggling with integrating his Kovat Milai ethics with his Starfleet training:

“It’s paradoxical.”

(NO, THIS EPISODE IS NOT SUBTLE.)

Picard then quotes Spock at him:

“Exhilaration enhances the absorption of knowledge.”

Another major theme of the season: the heart and the brain do not have to be in conflict. Emotions and logic working together bring you wisdom.

(Doesn’t hurt that Picard is later symbolized as the brain, and Q as the heart; much like his father and his mother, respectively... More onto the pile.)

And, because the writers are sarcastic little gremlins, Picard drops this wonderfully ironic line:

“In other words: live a little.”

Take your own advice, admiral. Trust us. You won’t regret it.

(Well, you will. But only temporarily, so that’s okay.)

Before moving on, we get one last little cheeky line from the writers:

“Hmm, they’re playing my song.”

PLAYING A SONG, EH?

Wonder if a song is going to play a significant role at the end of the episode or something. Nah. I’m just being paranoid.

Anyways, Picard gazes wistfully at a commemorative plaque for the old Stargazer...

Help us, Picard

... and we cut right back to the new Stargazer.

The anomaly starts broadcasting, and the computer doesn’t know what to make of it. Of course, it’s Agnes who is able to decrypt and understand the message, because she’s the one who sent it, see.

The message is a mix of multiple languages, all working together to carry a simple message:

A Cheating Heart

Meanwhile, said Picard, in dire need of advice, has beamed to Los Angeles to visit an old friend. Again, I’ve covered this in a previous meta, but it’s worth spending time on. You’ll see what I mean.

As Picard walks into Ten Forward, “Guilty as Charged” starts playing, and the camera makes a point of focusing first on him, then on Guinan, for a very long 15 seconds.

The exact time needed, in fact, for us to hear the following lyrics,

“This road is paved with good intentions There’s something ‘bout me I forgot to mention I’ve got a cheating heart…”

To rephrase: Picard, still thinking about what happened with Laris, comes to Guinan for love advice, and so the writers give us a song about a cheating heart.

It bears repeating that nothing in a show like STP is a coincidence. Somebody chose this song, somebody chose the camera angles, somebody timed the lyrics to match. On purpose.

So the message is clear: Picard didn’t kiss Laris, because to do so would have been cheating. But on whom? If this were a romcom, the right love interest would eventually pop up out of nowhere -- oh wait, he does. At the end of the episode.

(Bloody unhinged, is what it is.)

In passing, love how we get a snarky call-back to Laris’ lukewarm tea:

(”911, I’d like to report a murder please.”)

But see, the thing is, Picard is not in the mood for tea at all. What does he want?

“Something stronger.”

You don’t say.

Guinan makes a quip about their age, and as Picard remarks that El-Aurians age very slowly, she mentions in passing,

“I noticed that humans don’t like to be reminded of their mortality, so I try to keep up.”

Funny, I wonder what other ageless entity is going to tactfully do the exact same thing in about, oh, 20 minutes:

“There, now we’re even.”

Probably just a coincidence.

Anyway, Guinan and Picard settle down for a chat with a bottle of hooch. Saurian brandy, which is as powerful as it is sweet.

(I give up.)

They start talking about love, and Guinan points that while Picard has known love, he’s only allowed himself to feel it shallowly:

“Only with those who would only be temporary. (...) So that you’d never have to fear any of them taking root.”

The first time I watched the episode, I remember pausing the video, because the phrasing puzzled me.

By definition, all mortal relationships are temporary. That’s part and parcel of well, being mortal. If Guinan had said, for example, “never anything long-term”, that would have made a lot more sense.

But they wanted the word temporary in the dialogue, because the opposite of temporary is forever.

(I lied, I won’t ever give up, this is insane. Also, taking root? Like... a rosebush, perhaps? UGH.)

Guinan continues with her usual brilliance,

“The problem isn’t time. It’s you.”

Now, if you know me at all, you also know I love these six words enough to have essentially based an entire fic around them.

Because they’re essential.

Later, they will play a significant role when Picard meets Guinan in the 21st century: they’re what convinces her that he’s not crazy.

Oh, yeah, and incidentally, they describe the entirety of season 2: the problem isn’t that they’re trapped in the past; but that Jean-Luc is trapped in his head.

(Given the show’s propensity for playing around with the rule of three, I wouldn’t be surprised if they come back again in 2.10 or in season 3.)

They keep talking about Picard guarding his heart, and then this happens:

“There are worse things than being dead.”

You know what’s worse than being dead? Being alive when the love of your life isn’t, because they gave their life for yours.

Guinan is dropping truths left and right in this scene, and I’m here for it, but that line is brutal in hindsight.

She then asks what is holding him back, and when Jean-Luc doesn’t answer, asks him why he went to the stars in the first place.

Interesting juxtaposition, by the way: what’s holding Jean-Luc back is stars-related.

There are so many possible layers to this:

His mother’s death, predominantly (”Look up”);

His love of exploring space as a Starfleet captain;

And yeah, a specific lonely dying star we shall not name.

Sensing weakness, Guinan goes in for the kill,

“The only place you have ever been afraid to explore...”

(What’s another AGT reference between friends, I ask you.)

Guinan then drops the million-dollar question,

“What happened in there, that you and I have never talked about?”

And now, as we approach the season finale, we finally know. Jean-Luc opened the door, and his mother killed herself. Since them, the door has remained closed, and his heart along with it.

Until Q helped him find the key again, allowing him to remember.

The scene concludes with Guinan dropping yet another truth,

“I think your answers are not in the stars, and they never have been.”

She’s right: they’ve been in his own heart all along. Q, the proverbial star, does not give him the answer he seeks. He gives him the means to find it himself.

Picard’s future though? It’s absolutely in the stars:

“Because I think there’s one final frontier yet to come.”

(Oy, who threw a BRICK at my face?!)

The Stars Come Calling

Speaking of stars, Starfleet drops by at La Barre with interesting news: a strange new space anomaly has been found, and it wants Picard.

And it wants to join the Federation. That too. But mostly Picard.

As Admiral Whitley puts it,

"An unknown entity that can open and close a hole in space-time wants to join the Federation, and apparently will only talk to you about it."

Oh, look, it’s the call to adventure!

(Also, a powerful, time-altering entity that will only speak with Picard? Tell me Picard didn't think it was the Q Continuum for at least a second.)

Out of Sync

Picard accepts the call, of course. And now we get to a particularly unhinged moment in the episode, that to me, seals the end of Laris as a viable LI.

Picard exits left, and a few seconds later, once he’s out of frame, Laris enters right.

Leaving aside the fact that they are, once again, completely out of sync, the stage direction of the entire scene is shockingly full of meaning.

The distinction between left and right wing dates back from Roman theater, where for practical reasons only one set was generally used, and the audience needed a shorthand to understand where the actors were coming from, or running to.

The left wing represented the farther distance: leaving the city, or even the country; while the right wing represented closer scenes: staying in the same street but changing houses, for example.

This convention persists today, in different forms. In modern theater jargon, exiting stage left means,

“To exit or disappear in a quiet, non-dramatic fashion, making way for more interesting events.“

Picard is leaving stage left to follow his destiny, which isn’t in La Barre, and never has been. He told us so in episode 1.3:

"I tried my best, to belong to this place. But I don't think I ever truly felt at home here."

Laris, meanwhile, enters stage right, and stays there, symbolically bound to La Barre, and to Earth. She cannot follow where Jean-Luc goes.

From the moment Picard leaves the frame, the camera stays on Laris. We hear the shuttle taking off, but we don’t see it:

The scene is now from her perspective only. There's no shot of Jean-Luc looking around for her before he leaves, nor of him looking down at her through the shuttle window. He didn’t even leave her a note.

Nothing.

Because, just like the camera angle, Laris’ feelings are one-sided.

Just to twist the knife a little more, the writers then show us Picard’s shuttle as it approaches the Stargazer to dock. This scene takes 10 whole seconds, and they couldn’t spare two of them to include a quick close up of Picard looking conflicted about Laris. Nope. Shuttle was clearly more important.

(And that, my friends, is what they call “show, don’t tell”.)

The Stargazer

Picard meets up with Seven aboard the Stargazer, and we learn (or are reminded) that the old USS Stargazer was Picard’s first command,

“Being here... it feels like my life has come full circle.”

(*whispers* It’s free foreshadowing.)

But the new Stargazer isn’t just a nostalgic call-back to the old days: it’s the first of its kind, a harmonious blend of Starfleet and Borg technology.

(Much like Seven herself at the end of the season, actually... Or Agnes.)

Old prejudices die hard, and Seven feels out of place aboard a Starship vessel,

“There are still many who fear the Borg. (...) My presence is increasing historical tensions and paranoia.”

Oh darling, if only you knew.

(By the way, here’s a free season 3 prediction for you: Captain Seven. Let’s hope they make it so. She deserves it.)

Picard!

Picard addresses the anomaly directly, and the Borg finally come out to play. Clearly, they had been waiting for him.

A gigantic Borg vessel comes out of the anomaly as the bridge looks on in dismay.

Pretty soon, many Starfleet ships join them in support, including Raffi and Elnor’s ship, the Excelsior.

(”We come in peace.” “RED ALERT.”)

Historical tensions and paranoia? Let’s say, about sky high.

“Right now, you’re the tip of the spear (...) and the devil is calling your name.”

Note how martial Rios’ words are. Him, and through him Starfleet, are readying themselves to fight, although he hopes for a diplomatic solution.

At this point, Picard is actually still resisting his fear. As he points out,

“That out there, could be the very point at which history turns.”

And it is, in more ways than one, as we learn later on in season 2. It’s potentially a defining moment for the Federation and its future.

Seven, on the other hand, is already ruled by her fear:

“The Borg consume. They assimilate. They don’t ask to be assimilated.”

She’s not wrong, and considering her own experience, and the Borg’s entire history, it’s hard to judge her for it.

Still, she speaks for the side of fear and is adamant that the Borg be treated as hostile until proven otherwise. Rios leans towards the same conclusion, but more reluctantly, driven more by facts than pure fear. Only Agnes advises caution,

“We could be putting a bullet into the greatest ally the Federation may ever know.”

Her words fail to convince them. Seven concludes, coldly:

“If I’m wrong, we destroy a Borg ship. But if I’m right, and we do nothing, then today is the beginning of the end of the Federation.”

The Queen

Meanwhile, the Borg are running out of time (keeping the anomaly open must be requiring tremendous amounts of energy) and decide to send an emissary to negotiate with Picard: Queen Agnes herself.

Agnes has learned from Soji, back at the beginning of the episode, that trust can only be achieved directly, and so she puts herself at risk to be able to talk to Picard face to face.

And to their surprise, their shields aren’t able to stop her from beaming aboard.

Driven by fear, Seven continues to advocate violence,

“Rios, don’t wait until it’s too late. Fire.”

Still symbolizing Starfleet, Rios remains mostly neutral, ordering his crew to arm up, but also not to fire before it’s necessary.

The Queen beams aboard, and immediately states her intentions,

And then, everything falls apart as the Queen announces she also needs power, and starts to take it.

(My guess is that opening the anomaly fully took a huge amount of energy, and she needs to replenish her levels. Most likely we’ll know more in 2.10.)

Fear rises, choking.

Seven gives in to it, and opens fire on the Queen.

The rest follow suit, and soon the entire bridge is shooting at her. She defends herself, shooting at them in turn.

It’s not yet too late, but the point of no return is coming ever closer.

Still resisting his own fear, Rios orders the crew to stop firing, with mixed results.

Seven, for her part, finally notices that the Queen is only stunning the crew, not killing them. But even that fact is not enough to assuage her terror.

The Queen starts to redirect the bridge controls, evidently needing something from the Stargazer. This, of course, raises assimilation fears for the bridge crew.

Yet we know that Queen Agnes is different: the new Borg offer choices, and don’t assimilate without asking. So something else is going on. But what?

As the countdown rises, so does the fear on the bridge. The situation is spiraling rapidly out of control. Seven reminds Picard of what could happen if they fail to act.

And Picard makes a fateful decision:

“Computer activate auto-destruct sequence.”

Je ne regrette rien

As the computer confirms the auto-destruct, awaiting the final command, a song starts to play.

“Non, rien de rien...”

And not just any song. A very important song, which holds special meaning to Picard:

It was the song his mother would play whenever he was scared, comforting him and helping him get past his fear.

When we learn about this in Picard’s flashback in 2.4, the show specifically focuses on two lines, cutting out the rest of the verse,

Balayé pour toujours Je repars à zéro

Which in English, translates to:

Swept away forever I'm starting over

“Starting over” is pretty clear in context: Picard is getting a second chance to make the right choice on the Stargazer. To unlock the trauma of his mother’s death and heal from it. To save the future.

“Swept away forever” though...

Not ominous or anything, no sir.

We hear this song a second time in the corrupted La Barre, after Q lashes out at Picard in 2.2. Technically, we’re overdue for a third one.

Let’s pause for a moment and take a dip into a truly galaxy brain possibility. Remember this absolutely mind-blowing moment from the 2.10 trailer?

The third face touch, the one that succeeds, the one that may lead them into a kiss.

I know, I know.

But let’s reach for stars here, for a second.

What if, as they are kissing, “Je ne regrette rien” suddenly starts to play, and Picard finds himself right back on the Stargazer, at the exact moment we heard the song the first time?

Starting over, while Q is swept away into nothing.

(I would start screaming and probably never stop again.)

But of course, this time around, Picard confirms the self-destruct and seals all of their fates: the Borg’s, Starfleet’s, his friends’, Q’s and his own.

As they stare at each other in stunned horror, the Queen calls him softly,

“Picard. Look up.”

Picard’s eyes widen in sudden realization, but of course, it’s too late.

And everything blows up.

Agnes in Aulis

But it’s not simply the future of a peaceful Borg that Picard destroys. It’s also the life of his own daughter figure: Agnes.

Like Agamemnon before him, Picard sacrifices his daughter on the altar of his fear. An unforgivable sin, as Q points out in 2.2,

“[You can] attempt, like Macbeth, to wash the blood from your hands. But I assure you, Jean-Luc, it’s unwashable.”

In killing Agnes, Picard has killed the future.

No wonder Q is furious. No wonder Picard must atone, in order to gain forgiveness for this grievous symbolic sin.

A Dark Chateau

There’s a flash of white light, ostensibly Q’s intervention, and Picard wakes up in his mother’s solarium, as bare and deserted as it is in the real chateau.

Immediately, he looks up, but the stars, or the sun, are nowhere to be seen,

Pulling himself up, he finds himself staring at his broken reflection in the unpainted windows:

The theme of the season is the integration of the self. Right now, Picard is as dissociated from himself, from his heart, as he’s ever been.

Picard tentatively explores this strange version of La Barre. Outwardly, the chateau is bright and clean, but a closer look immediately shows us the darkness lurking underneath, like rot under a thin layer of veneer: the decorations are martial in nature, the lights dimmer than normal, the portraits disturbing (to say the least).

Distraught, Picard calls out for Laris...

But of course, she’s nowhere to be found. 

Unsurprising, considering the circumstances, but I wonder if this is also not yet more foreshadowing of things to come.

@essence-stealer​ very smartly remarked that by the time Picard comes home to La Barre 2.10, Laris might be gone already.

She had expression the intention to leave earlier on in the episode, pleading the awkwardness of the situation, and Picard for his part left her without a backward glance. Not knowing what has truly happened in between, Laris is likely to have packed up her bags and left.

La Barre isn’t Jean-Luc’s home, it never has been. Part of his journey includes leaving the chateau behind, and while Zhaban and Laris remained, Picard couldn’t let it go. But now Zhaban is dead. If Laris truly has left, then nothing tethers him to the house anymore.

Actually, it’s a beloved headcanon of mine that Rios will one day inherit Picard’s earthly legacy as well as the spiritual one (being the captain of the new Stargazer).

Perhaps moving in to La Barre and raising his children there, painting colorful murals like Jean-Luc used to with his own mother:

(Surely, surely, a coincidence.)

It would make sense if this happened in season 3, actually, as all of Picard’s ducklings have now completed their journeys: Soji, in season 1; and now Rios, Seven and Raffi in season 2.

Since the TNG crew is coming back as the main cast in season 3, it makes sense that the ducklings would move on with their lives: Rios as the father he wants to be, Seven and Raffi happy and in love, the three of them in Starfleet where they belong. And Agnes, of course, leading the new Borg.

Enter the Sun

An android servant appears, telling Picard,

Solar shields? Preventing the light from getting through? No wonder this is a cursed place: this is a world that sunlight literally cannot touch.

Speaking of the sun, unsurprisingly, he makes a dramatic entrance,

Note how Q calls Picard, “mon capitaine”: a habit he, like Guinan, has never dropped.

And of course, like almost everything in this episode, this comes back into play later, in episode 2.7, specifically,

And indeed, Guinan and Q are Jean-Luc’s closest friends, the two beings in the whole universe who know him the best, and love the whole of him, in spite and because of his flaws.

“How I’ve missed you,” Q says, with pure honesty.

But Picard is still in the throes of his fear, his anger, and Q makes a convenient target: how much easier to cast Q as the villain, than to open his eyes and realize where the blame truly lay.

He’s not ready to face himself, let alone the consequences of his actions.

Q knows it all too well. Smiling, he casually drops the key to the next few episodes, and the rest of the season:

“You’ve been talking a lot about second chances. Well my friend, welcome to the very end of the road not taken.”

And, scene.

( If you’re interested, I’ve already discussed at length the reasons behind Q’s actions in season 2 in a different meta.)

Well, friends, this was a truly epic post to write, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it. ❤️

[cadykeus-clay]

i would low key love to hear your tangent about the differences there are between how VM and TM9 react with the world

ah, the perfect excuse for me to put off my 30 page reading, thank you :3

(i’m also going to preface this by saying most of this is stuff i’ve picked from other people’s various metas and i absolutely do not remember who those authors might be so i apologize jsdlkfsd)

....

but uh ... basically i feel like vox machina and the nein have a completely opposite standard for how they interact with the people the consider to be their “inner circle” vs. everyone who doesn’t qualify as that. 

vm is a group of individuals who, overall, had one cruel person that slighted them but didn’t really destroy their faith in humanity. (their faith in themselves is a whole different horse. that ones .... woof. looking at you percy scanlan tary keyleth.) Percy had the briarwoods, Grog had Kevdak, the twins and tary had their father. so, the way that they interact with just random people that they meet is - with exceptions of course - amicable, or at the very least, respectably polite. 

they’re the saviours of emon, the freers of whitestone. they have festivals held in their honor. they have kid fans and random farmers knocking on their doorstep for aid because they’ve heard tales of the kindness. sure, vex can be a hassle when she’s haggling down a price, and keyleth tends to poke buttons in way that gets her arrested a fair amount of the time, but at the end of the day they’re the people’s heroes, and they’re happy to be that!

their inner circle, however, is much more closely guarded. they have a few chosen allies (gilmore, allura, kima, kash and zahra, cassandra) and that’s it. They’re hesitant with anyone else trying to creep into their personal fold. Hell, it took beating up tary and him breaking down sobbing for them to even consider liking him. they’ve been burned by raishan and clarota and hotis, by individuals they let in and who then stabbed them in the back. they’ll do almost any favor for a stranger who asks, but they’ll be damned if they trust anyone to actually join their midst. vox machina is vox machina is vox machina and that’s incredibly hard to change. 

the nein, on the other hand, are fundamentally a group of rejects. some of them have specific people they can point a finger at and say “i hate you”, but those problems stem from a greater societal rejection. beau has daddy issues, but she also felt rejected by the entire cobalt soul until dairon found her. caleb has trent’s fucked up shit, but he also has this constant pressure of having failed his entire country, not to mention the faceless hate piled up on him from living homeless for a year. jester’s whole deal is that she had to hide from LITERALLY ALL OF SOCIETY for her entire childhood because she wasn’t supposed to exist.

and so, the nein are shitheads to society right back. they’re mean to random barkeeps, they trash their inns and don’t say sorry, they mock most NPCs behind their back (or sometimes right to their face. @ marius).  Every favor asked of them comes with a ton of deliberation and arguing about whether its bait or not (ie bowlgate, the giants in the mine outside rosohna, essiks “favors”). 

but, on the flip side, they’re willing to tug just about anyone into their ranks. if society already hates them by default, what’s there to lose if they get close to someone? nothing, there’s only more love to be found! so it’s adopting random bird girls on the road, its sending cupcakes to a hag that cursed your friend, its sending messages to everyone you’ve ever met just to check in, it’s making someone sit in the hot tub with you and share trauma and then when you find out he started a war you say “we get it bro” and kiss him on the forehead. it’s “welcome to the mighty nein”. 

and it’s also very interesting, i think, to talk about the ways in which the party interacts with themselves. vox machina was a family, undoubtedly, as is the nein now. but vox machina ... had a lack of desperation to their attachment. i mean for one, they took a full year off from adventuring together and scattered cross continent. even if the nein gets down time like they did, i expect they’ll just trail each other around like lemmings. (its kind of what they’ve been doing from hiatus until now with the eiselcross arc starting). 

but vox machina just ... went. and scanlan walked away from the party and (after the heat of the moment), they agreed to just let him be. and pike would spend weeks on quests for sarenrae without much of a complaint. even at the end - and this will be a controversial take, i know - but they let vax go pretty easily. (sure, mechanically they were wiped from fighting, but besides tears the only attempt to defy trq was from percy, which even he gave up on with minimal struggle because vax said to stop it). that’s not to say they don’t miss each other when they’re gone! of course they do!!! but they trust each other to go off into the world, because the world as whole is a place they trust. 

(the one exception to this might be vex, who fought every one of these situations adamantly, but that’s a whole separate essay about her issues stemming from an innate sense of ‘failed family’ that she’s desperate to not repeat, and less about a mistrust of everyone until proven otherwise)

the nein on the other hand. hoo boy. they’ve been hot glued to each other’s hips since day one. So many quotes (many from beau, which could be worked into my previous vex essay, as they’re very much cross-campaign foils. getting sidetracked again) are about their inability to separate. “You don’t get to choose who cares about you”; “No one goes”; “If one of us is gone for more than 7 days assume we’re dead and have a funeral”; “Do we have co-dependecy issues?” Jester’s cool personal vacation to her god’s get together turned into a party with everyone because why would she go anywhere without the nein? Veth’s time with Luc and/or Yeza is constantly overrun with the rest of the nein dropping in for fun. Even small things like shopping trips are so much more “oh well if you’re going then i’ll go” snowballs than they ever were with vm. 

Also, ashley’s absences had to be much more forceful than in c1. Post episode 11, the only time yasha left the group (rather than someone else piloting her) of her own free will was when she ran in grief from molly’s grave. And yes, there’s something to be said about “oh they were on a boat for a long time she had nowhere to go” but if Matt can justify astral projection pike, i feel like he could justify ‘the stormlord teleports yasha away for a bit’ and he chose not to. 

Because!!!!!!!!! of the dynamic that the nein has!!!!!!!! Because of this idea that the world is bad and cold and full of hate and in here in our little hut (soon to be mansion??????) it’s safe and good and full of love and no one can leave because then you’d be going somewhere much more dangerous and we can’t have that, now can we? 

.....

well uh. that’s a lot of words. i hope they made some sense??? and were at all what you were expecting???? thank u for sending the ask tho this was very fun to write!!

tldr: vox machina is a group of people who were betrayed by one bad figure, so they trust the world and are wary of the individual; whereas the nein is a group of people who were failed by the world at large so they welcome the loner and fear the pack. 

[verobatto]

Destiel Chronicles

Vol. LXXXIX

It was a love story from the very beginning

"You, me... And Sam."

Hello my friends!!! How are you? I feel much better now thanks to all your asks and your memes and your cracks, I adore them all!

Okay, putting that to a side, and still dreaming about how Jensen will give us the ending we all deserve, let's continue with this analysis, because is time to talk about the mixtape.

From butterflies in the stomach and Foreshadows of the new God

When the episode starts, there's a hint of what Jack's mission is. But coming out from Dagon's mouth, it became like a real bad future.

Dagon: Yeah. And he's not gonna stop there. Every sad, weak human, every tight-ass angel, every sniveling demon they'll all be consumed. So go ahead. Play your games. But whether you're healthy or sick, filthy or clean, He will be born. Good times.

Is almost the contrary to what Jack will actually do for the world. He will consume but it will be Chuck's powers until the last drop of it. And against Dagon's speech, he will save each demon and angel and restore everything.

Now, let's talk about CAS coming back to the bunker...

Gif credit @godshipsit

I think his face is saying everything here. The one entering in the bunker after go MIA, was Cas', so, Dean's face is scandalous.

Imagine that suddenly your disappeared crush enters through the door without previous announcement. Of cour we can read the bumping heart allnover Dean's cheek, his eyes went wide, in surprise. 'Is CAS!'

He was so worried this whole time, thinking the worst could happen to him, and now CAS is there, alive.

But his reaction to it will be completely different to Sam's reaction. This was settled to make us see the difference between how a friend would react and how a lover would react. Blatant.

Sam: Hey. You're all right. Um – Where have you been?

Sam is asking as a friend, but Dean, Dean doesn't...

Dean: Let me rephrase that for Sam. Where the hell have you been? And why have you ignored our phone calls?

Okay, let's just stop here, this is the way a wife will ask her husband. But because we are talking about Dean, we can see his shield. His shield is US/WE, his shield is SAM, because he wants to drag his brother into the feeling of being desperately worried. Because recognize that DEAN WAS THE ONLY ONE ALMOAT LOOSING HIS HEAD TRYING TO KNOW IF CAS WAS ALIVE OR WHWRE HE WAS IA SHOWING WEAKNESS, IS SHOWING HIS TRUE FEELINGS FOR THE ANGEL. So, the theme of the I/ME vs the WE/US is perfectly written all over this episode.

Castiel: Where I was, the – the reception was, uh, poor.

Dean: No bars? No bars. That's his excuse. Wow.

Castiel: I was in Heaven. I was working with the angels. When I saw Dagon had captured Kelly, I-I thought they could help.

Okay Castiel is proving he is lying by himself here, because he said first he had not signal, and now, he heard one of the so many voice mails Dean had left in his phone.

Sam: And?

Castiel: Nothing.

Sam: Well, at least you're back. We're glad you're back

And be prepared again for the difference between the friend and the JILTED lover.

Dean: Really? No, I'm sorry. Okay, 'cause while you were striking out in Heaven, we had a shot at Dagon, and we lost.

Maybe Dean was waiting Sam to second him in his anger. But it was only in Dean's heart, the deception, and the recalling of so many days be worried about CAS. Because that's what romantic love makes you be.

Castiel: I know. I received your messages.

This was like a bomb for Dean...

Dean: Oh, you did – you did receive the messages? Okay, that's good.

Sarcasm...

Castiel: Dean.

Gif credit @starlightcastiel

Dean can't handle the pain in his heart of being rejected and ignored by Castiel, so he searches for his shield again: We/Us/Sam and me.

Dean: So not only were you ditching us, but you were also ignoring us? That's great. 'Cause we really could've used the backup. But, uh, you were too busy with, um (Clicks tongue) What was it? Nothing?

Castiel: Dean, I –

Dean: What the hell is wrong with you, man? You know, whatever. That's (Chuckles) Yeah. Welcome back. (walks away)

Dean is so mad with CAS. And is blatant that his reaction is totally different to Sam's.

The Mixtape as a way to reciprocate Castiel's confession, and the desperate attempt to make CAS to stay by his side.

Okay, we are now in the scene. I'm sure this scene had been dissected by many meta writers. I won't say new things, but i will point a little to their body languages.

Okay, the scene starts with Castiel knocking at Dean's door to give him back the mixtape, so jus aknowledged there that Dean gave CAS a freaking mixtape, which doesn't have another meaning that ROMANTIC. But we can assume Castiel doesn't get this human's customaries, also, we can assume he does, because boop culture that Metatron out at once in his head... So...

After Dean, without looking at him, because he is mad and now he has to handle this angel lack of knowledge about WHAT GIFTING A MIXTAPE MEANS, he said "It's a gift, you keep those."

And Castiel gets nervous.

Gif credit @stardustcas

The swallow and the way he opens his mouth again to breathe and maybe to say something else, but he stopped himself. Castiel is nervous. I thought at first because he has to find the Colt, and he knew Dean kept it in his room. But we know now that it wasn't just that. He was flustered because the intimacy of the situation with the man he loves.

Castiel looks around before attempting to leave, maybe searching for the Colt, but then Dean starts talking:

Dean: Cas, you can't – With everything that's going on, you can't just go dark like that. We didn't know what happened to you. We were worried. That's not okay.

And in the middle of the intimate scene, awkward moment, Dean needs his shield more than never.

Castiel: Well, I didn't mean to add to your distress. I – Dean, I just keep failing. Again and again. When you were taken, I searched for months and I couldn't find you. And then Kelly escaped on my watch, and I couldn't find her. And I just wanted I needed to come back here with a win for you. For myself.

This speech is so important, because it shows how depressed Castiel felt, how uneasy. How unworthy. He needed to be useful. So he decided to start alone this dangerous journey that will end in his death. He also mentions the win. Because he didn't know he will be always Dean's win, as we will see in episode 13x06 when CAS comes back to Dean alive.

After they talk about Dragon, and Cas' asks if Sam and Dean are willing to kill an innocent, because that's dirty work, that's the mission CAS had taken in his own shoulders, Dean says this...

Dean: We will find a better way.

Castiel: You mean, we?

Gif set credit @deanwinchestrs

Cas points at Dean with the mixtape, because he wants to clarify if Dean is referring to them, to JUST CAS AND DEAN. YOU AND ME. THE TWO OF US. And Dean is now the flustered one. Look at Dean's face, being in just one spot, recognizing that the shield can be broken, that he is talking about CAS and him. Is too intimate. Too different. So his face is burning. And even so, the words are out. 'Yes, dumbass, we.'

What was this? This was an attempt coming from Castiel to get to know Dean's feelings. Pointing with the mixtape to just Dean and him. Not Sam here. Not shield. And Dean goes for it. Goes for that WE: YOU AND ME.

But then, Dean backtraks

Gif set credit @stardustcas

He starts explaining the WE, avoiding Castiel's gaze, he goes... 'You, me...' and then he tilts his head, and adds the shield back again: 'and Sam.'

The second gif is showing Dean backtracking, Because is too intimate, is too risky, he is standing on the edge between friendship and something else. He can't cross that line. Mostly because he is not sure about Castiel's feelings for him, and more now, after seeing how CAS ignored him for so long. Dean is like:

"What am I doing? Let's mention Sam here, and turn this into no homo conversation."

But the nervousness is all over the scene, i got nervous watching it because the awkward moment!

Gif set credit @stardustcas

More nervousness. Dean's flustered eyes. The swallowing. The attempt of staring into those blue eyes of the man he loves. (The butterflies in the stomach, the heart beating fast, the dry mouth) trying to make the conversation more normal, but their faces are loud.

Vas says he likes that and then Dean is more frustrated than never and his dry mouth is asking for a beer, or maybe he find a way out from the awkward moment, the gay moment. He needs to breathe. He almost let his guard down with this angel. And the desperate way to say STAY WITH ME. DON'T GO AWAY AGAIN. To his angel.

Castiel engages with a seductive look in the middle of the sexual tension

Sam: I mean, how did Cass even get the Colt out of the safe in the first place?

Dean drops his head. Sam raises an eyebrow

Sam Dean, you – you put the Colt back in the safe, right? Dean?

Dean: It was under my pillow. It – I like to keep it close. (Sighs) He came into my room and he played me.

Okay i can even explain the intimacy of this. Even if CAS didn't know about this and he just went searching all over Dean's room. Mention this after the huge scene full of romantic tension, has a meaning. Again: INTIMACY. And adding the "He played me" to all of this is another symbol way to show theme audience this was like that scene between the guy and his crush, in wich his crush takes advantage of it and plays him by stealing something from him. Yes.

Finally, when they find CAS... This scene...

Gif credit @stardustcas

Dean is mad, very mad at him. Because Castiel really played him. But... Look at the scene. Look at Castiel's gaze: PURE SEDUCTION. He maybe is aware of the effect he causes on Dean. And after the mixtape scene, he goes for it. Seduction as if they were in their first seasons together. And Dean is muted, and stares at him, then checks him out, and they're in their own sexual tension world, until Sam calls him. But he has to calls him twice because his brother is too embedded into Castiel's hot behavior.

But don't forget Dean is mad at him. So now, is Dean the one playing around with CAS. Throwing the keys at him and making him almost loose his stability to reach them.

Closing the circle

When Dean and Sam reach Castiel again in the middle of a battle with Dragon, Dean's desperation when Dagon is about to smite Castiel is high level.

But then Jack saves the day, not just showing CAS the future (the ending of season 15) but also, Jack gave him powers to finish Dagon.

Then, the scene in wich Castiel heals Dean is full of intimacy again. The lingerie touch, rubbing fingers. Because Dean is moving his hand slowly away from CAS touch but he ended by letting his hand to feel Castiel's rubbing his fingers. To let Castiel to heal him.

And then, CAS is gone again.

To Conclude:

12x19: The Future has Destiel all over it. Dean mad at him, reaching the level of a JILTED lover. Dean way to protect himself from another rejection using the WE/US/SAM shield. Just because he can't handle it. The doubts about Cas' feelings, and the way the angel always find to go MIA, makes his heart stutter.

The mixtape scene is one of the most emblematic. The nervousness is all over their faces, and Misha and Jensen transmite perfectly the romantic tension between the two characters and goes straight to our hearts, making us feel awkward and flustered too.

Hope you like this meta. See you in the next one!

Tagging @magnificent-winged-beast @emblue-sparks @weird-dorky-little-d @michyribeiro @whyjm @legendary-destiel @a-bit-of-influence @thatwitchydestielfan @misha-moose-dean-burger-lover @lykanyouko @evvvissticante @savannadarkbaby @dea-stiel @poorreputation @bre95611 @thewolfathedoor @charlottemanchmal @neii3n @deathswaywardson @followyourenergy @dean-is-bi-till-i-die @hekatelilith-blog @avidbkwrm @anarchiana @dickpuncher365 @vampyrosa @authorsararayne @mybonsai1976 @love-neve-dies @dustythewind @wayward-winchester67 @angelwithashotgunandtrenchcoat @trashblackrainbow @deeutdutdutdoh @destiel-shipper-11 @larrem88 @charmedbycastiel @ran-savant @little-crazy-misha-minion @samoosetheshipper

@shadows-and-padlocked-hearts @mishtho @dancingtuesdaymorning @nerditoutwithbooks @mikennacac73 @justmeand-myinsight @idontwantpeopletoknowmyname @teddybeardoctor @pepevons @helevetica @isthisdestiel @dizzypinwheel @jawnlockwinchester @horsez2 @qanelyytha

@destielle @agusvedder @spnsmile @shippsblog @robot-feels @superlock-in-the-tardis @superduckbatrebel @2musiclover2 @madronasky @anon-non2 @cea1996

If you want to be added or removed from this list, just let me know.

If you wanna read the previous metas from season 12, here you have the links:

Vol. LXXV, LXXVI, LXXVII, LXXVIII, LXXIX, LXXIX, LXXX, LXXXI, LXXXII, LXXXIII, LXXXIV, LXXXV, LXXXVI, LXXXVII, LXXXVIII.

Buenos Aires, November 24th 2020, 9:36 PM

[deafeninggardenerpanda]

Waddle Dee went to Kirby's house every day after finishing work at Factory Dedede to help aid the search.

"It seems that our president has also started searching for the gears. He’s been walking around town with a map and a magnifying glass."

Kirby nodded. "Not only President Dedede, but everyone in town is searching for them. It's difficult, though. No one knows the shape or color of the gears." 

"Hmm ... Do we have any leads?" Kirby and Waddle Dee pondered face-to-face. At that moment, the doorbell, which rarely rings, made a noise.

"Who is it?" Waddle Dee said to Kirby. "You don’t get many guests."

Kirby jumped up. "Oh! Is it the pizza delivery person!?" he shouted.

"Pizza delivery person? Kirby, did you order pizza?"

"No! But ... maybe the pizza place made a special pizza to celebrate my 100th consecutive victory of the airplane races!" Kirby opened the door in a hurry. There stood someone wearing a large hood.

"That? That’s not the delivery person, is it ...? " 

"Good evening, Kirby! It's been a long time. It’s Magolor, yo~! " Magolor, the traveling merchant. He traveled often from town to town selling medicine. Kirby, himself, had also once taken Magolor's medicine after he had previously rolled around in the snow and caught a cold.

"Did you come to sell medicine again? But I'm not sick ... "

"No, no! It's different this time. There’s a big story."

"A big story?"

"It's about the search for some gears." Magolor came into the room, put the large trunk he had with him on the floor, and sat down on it.

Kirby was taken aback. "Are you also looking for the gears, Magolor?" he asked.

"Yep, it's my dream to get the prize, build a laboratory, and develop medicine." Magolor spread his hands. "Kirby, we both have our strengths. If we put those strengths together, I’m sure we could find the gears! What do you think about some cooperation?"

"Yeah, sure!" Kirby nodded. Waddle Dee, however, was a little worried. 

"Kirby, is it okay to trust this guy?"

"Eh? Why not? It's easier to find something with three people instead of two." 

"Hmm ... but ... " Waddle Dee didn't trust Magolor. He came out of nowhere—maybe he was trying to use Kirby by taking advantage of his kindness.

Looking at Kirby, Magolor said, "I know a secret method for finding the gears. If you have me, we’ll easily be able to find them."

"Really!? Great, then let’s do it!" Kirby was overjoyed, but again, Waddle Dee was more skeptical. He became more and more suspicious.

"If you know a method, why are you telling us? Why don't you search for them by yourself?"

"I would, but ... there’s a big issue." Magolor took a deep breath and spoke with all his might. "I can’t do it alone. Kirby has a certain something we need." Kirby and Waddle Dee looked at each other.

"Kirby has ... what? Huh?"

"Here’s the thing, listen carefully!" 

"Okay." Kirby and Waddle Dee sat down in front of Magolor.

"I'm nuts about ancient magic, so I’m the only person who understands ... the gears of the ancient machine cannot be found because they’ve been sealed."

"Sealed?"

"Uh-huh. Once upon a time, the gears were stolen by an evil wizard. It seems the gears had a magic seal put on them during that. The sealed object cannot be seen with the naked eye, however, a special tool can be used to find it. I know the location of that special tool."

"Special tool?" Waddle Dee said. "A special tool that reacts to magic ... Where is it?" 

"I told you, Kirby has it."

"Eh? I do?" Kirby’s eyes widened. "I don't have anything like that! I can't use magic!" 

"You ... you have the Star Compass, right?"

Kirby was surprised. "The Star Compass ...? Yeah, I have it, but, hold on." Kirby rummaged through some junk piled up in the corner of the room and pulled out a small, star-shaped compass.

"That’s a cute compass. What’s so special about it?" Waddle Dee asked.

"The old man of the Magic Guild gave me this as a present a long time ago, after I defeated a monster in the City of Magic."

"Not the ‘old man,’ the Elder of the Magic Guild. The great wizard Tottemo." Magolor looked enviously at Kirby. "Tottemo … Totteeemooo ... The Star Compass, such a precious artifact. If you study magic, you'd want it even if it were in bits and pieces. When I heard an airplane pilot from Diamond Town got it, I was so jealous!"

"Huh ... I didn’t realize it was so important." Kirby recalled when he received the gift.

("Really? You want me to take it?"  When Kirby asked, the old man of the Magic Guild—no, the Elder, smiled gently.

"It’s a thank-you item. Please, don't hesitate. The Star Compass—if it falls into the hands of someone with a bad heart, it will bring terrifying results. But if it's with you, Kirby, it will be safe."

"Huh?"

"Besides, this compass, don't you like it? Ho ho ho!" He waved goodbye as Kirby left.)

That guy that Kirby visited ... Even when he asked what he meant, Kirby didn't understand at all. 

"This compass, it doesn't move. I can’t tell what direction it points because of it. I'm sure it's broken ... "

"That’s just because you’re using it incorrectly." Magolor reached out and received it from him. "The Star Compass is a tool used to search for the power of magic. If it’s not used correctly, it won't move. Watch." Magolor opened his trunk and took out a small paper packet. Glittering, sand-like grains spilled out when he opened it. Using them, he began to draw a mysterious pattern on the floor.

"Like this, if you draw it with magical sand and put the Star Compass in the center ... "  The needle of the compass, which had not been moving until now, began to sway. It emitted a pale light like the glimmer of the stars.

"Ah, the compass ...! " Kirby shouted. 

"Get a map of the town!" Magolor said. Waddle Dee hurriedly brought a map of Diamond Town, which Magolor put the compass on. He chanted a spell. The compass needle spun around wildly, increasing in speed, until it stopped at a particular angle. After a moment, it began spinning again and stopped at another angle, and then another. Magolor nodded.

"Okay, there are three gears in all. Here, here, and ... here." Magolor put three marks on the map.

"Do we know the position of the gears, now?" Waddle Dee said with big eyes.

"Yep! The movement of the Star Compass can tell you exactly where our magical objects are."

Kirby looked at the map. "The first one is ... the field! That field is where the goal of our airplane races is," said Kirby.

"Second is ... around the clock tower in the west," said Waddle Dee.

"Third," said Magolor, "‘The Town of Light.’"

"You can't go into The Town of Light," said Waddle Dee. "’The residents of the Town of Wind must not go into the Town of Light without permission.’ That's the rule."  

"Aw man … The third gear is postponed, then. We’ll have to figure out some other way. Let’s find the other two, first."

Waddle Dee nodded. "There’s a guard at the clock tower that won’t let us in, so we should start with the gear in the field."

"Okay! Come on, let's go!" Magolor stopped Kirby from running out the door. 

"Now, it's too late. You should wait until tomorrow." 

"But ... "

"The night is dangerous. We’re the only ones that know the locations, so don't worry so much."

"That's right. Let's start tomorrow," Waddle Dee said. "The factory will be closed, too, so we can find it together. We’ll all meet in the field, first thing in the morning."

"Oh, actually, I’m sorry. I have something to do tomorrow. I can’t go with you ... Instead, let me give you a thing." Magolor took out a small bottle from the trunk and gave it to Kirby. "These are magical eye drops I made."

"Eye ... Drops ...? " 

"As I said, things with a magical seal on them cannot be seen with the naked eye, however, you’ll be able to see them if you use these special eye drops."

"Wow, that's convenient!" Magolor, again, stopped Kirby from immediately trying to use the eye drops.

"No no no, it doesn't last for long! Only about an hour. It'd be better to use them tomorrow!"

"Okay, I understand. Thank you, Magolor."  

"You’re very welcome! Oh, and one more thing: once touched, the magical seal will melt. It will be so that the gears can be seen even without the eye drops."

"We just have to touch it," Waddle Dee said. "If we find the gears, let's deliver them to Mr. Fugo, together, and get the prize. We’ll divide it evenly!"

"Wow, sounds fun! Good luck Kirby, Waddle Dee."

"Yeah, we’ll do our best. Thank you, Magolor!"

Magolor headed home, dragging his heavy trunk behind him.

"Magolor is really knowledgeable and smart," Kirby said. "I’m surprised!" 

"I'm glad he’s on our side," Waddle Dee nodded. "Thanks to Magolor, we can get the gears. Let's do our best, tomorrow."

"Yeah! Good night, Waddle Dee." 

"Good night, Kirby." Waddle Dee waved and left the room. 

Meta Knight was sitting on the couch and thinking, of course, about the gears and the ancient machine that was discovered.

(Evil using an ancient machine ... What kind of machine could it be?)

A knocking sound was heard, and Butler Vul's voice soon after. 

"Excuse me, my lord."

"What is it?"  

"It seems ... a strange guest has come."

"A guest? At this time?"

"Well ... I told him to come back tomorrow, but he said that he wanted to speak to you as soon as possible. He spoke of gears—I didn't understand much of it ... What do you want me to do?"

" ... Gears." Meta Knight had also begun looking for the gears, but no one should know except Daroach. Not even Butler Vul should know. Meta Knight stood up.

"Okay, let me through the living room."

"Are you sure?  Somehow, he has a strange atmosphere about him ... "

"It doesn't matter."

"Understood ... " Butler Vul moved to return to the front door, however, he nearly bumped into someone on the way there. "Wahhh!?"

"Nice to meet you, Lord Meta Knight!" Standing behind Butler Vul was a person wearing a large hood. Butler Vul yelled at the intruder.

"Why—! Hey, you! You selfish—! How dare you just, come in on your own! I told you to wait at the door until my lord gave me permission!" But the guest just pushed Butler Vul aside and spoke to Meta Knight.

"I'm a medicine peddler named Magolor—"

"We don’t need medicine. Get out."

"—I want to talk to you, Lord Meta Knight. I have a story I want to tell you—"

"It's time for my lord to get his rest. Get out!"

"—A story about ... the gears of death!"

"Hey, why don’t you listen to a story about my wrinkles instead!" Butler Vul was furious, but Meta Knight just stared at the strange merchant.

"Okay, let's hear the story. Vul, you’re dismissed." 

"Eh!? But my lord ...! "

"I’ll call if anything happens. Don't worry." Butler Vul was so upset he left the living room with shaking fists. Meta Knight led Magolor to the sofa and sat down. Magolor spoke with a smile.

"Thank you so much, Lord Meta Knight. I’m sorry I’m here so late at night, forgive me ... " 

"Let's not waste time. About the matter at hand—what do you know about the gears?" 

" …………… " 

Magolor’s hood shifted and showed his expression. "Right to the point. As I expected from you, Lord Meta Knight!" Suddenly changing his tone, Magolor leaned back on the couch. 

"I know a tip for finding the gears. I want to tell you about it."

"What do you mean?" 

"What I mean is, Lord Meta Knight, I want you to find the gears ... " Magolor rephrased, seeing sharp eyes staring at him from behind the mask. "I’m telling the truth. I'll give you a tip because I want you to find the gears and win us the prize. I want to build a laboratory and develop new medicine."

"Why me? If you know a clue to finding the gears, you should look for it alone." 

"I can’t, it has to be you. You see, one of the gears is in the Town of Light."

" ... What was that?"

"As an aristocrat, you have the freedom to act in the Town of Light. If they see a merchant like me sneaking about, they’ll kick me out. To find all the gears, our cooperation is a must! Your help is needed at any cost!"

Meta Knight stopped to think. This medicine peddler, who called himself Magolor, was more than he seemed. He seemed to know important information about the gears, but Meta Knight was not yet convinced.

"If you need an aristocrat, I'm sure there are others. Why did you choose me?" 

"The aristocrats are a burden. Everyone, they’re sloths, annoying things. Out of all of them, the only one I can rely on is you, Lord Meta Knight."

Meta Knight didn’t believe it was that simple, but Magolor had a point. The aristocrats who lived in luxury had no adventurous spirit or curiosity. Meta Knight was the only one who was interested in finding the gears.

"Let me hear from you. What kind of hints do you know?" 

"Look at this." Magolor opened his trunk and took out a map. "The gear is here." A certain place was marked in the Town of Light.

" ... This is ...! " Meta Knight was shocked.

"Do you know where this is?" Magolor asked.

" ... Ah, yeah."

"Great! Then, do your best to find the gear. I'm going home ... Oh, one last thing." Magolor pulled out a small bottle. "These are magical eye drops I made." Magolor explained the eye drops and handed a vial to Meta Knight. "Good luck, Lord Meta Knight. Have a good night." He dragged the trunk out of the living room. After Magolor left, Meta Knight was still. He was staring at the map of the Town of Light. The gear—it was in Mr. Fugo's mansion.

"What does this mean?" Meta Knight murmured. "Regardless, I have to let Daroach know ... "

< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >

[s1utspeare]

Hi darling

You write such an awesome metas on fictional character so I wanted you to ask that what's your thought on Huo Dao Fu.

😊

AH OMG!!! Your ask could not have come at a better time, cause I have a feeling this man’s gonna be an important part of my next fic, so I really should start figuring him out. He’s SUCH A LIL WEIRDO??? honestly i love him, even though he’s a total Bitch 97% of the time, but I think at heart he’s just Looking For Something, as are all the characters in this show. 

What really interests me about Huo Daofu are his character parallels with Wu Xie, and I think that’s where most of the conflict between them comes in. Wu Xie, whether he means to be or not, is the Focus of Jiumen a good seventy-five percent of the time. Not always in a positive manner, because in Sha Hai they were all about ready to kick his ass, and in Reboot he pisses them off pretty good with his Warehouse Eleven stunts, but there’s a level of attention on him that other members of the families don’t receive, and I think Huo Daofu notices that, and is like “hey wait a minute why is he getting all the spotlight I want some spotlight >:( He’s not even doing a good job why is everyone paying attention to him”

Cause this bitch. THIS BITCH. He tried to be that bitch. He TRIED SO HARD. He went to EUROPE. He went to EUROPE and got a fucking like??? medical degree???? Like he went to GERMANY??? who does that?? not fucking wu xie, that’s who. Wu Xie went and got like a history degree or some shit which was just par for the course. But HUO DAOFU. He was DIFFERENT. He was gonna be THE SHIT. He was gonna be the unabomber of Jiumen, was gonna blow all that shit up and then say “fuck u” and all the future generations of Jiumen children were gonna hear horror stories about how Unique and Wild Huo Daofu was and he was never gonna have to deal with any of them ever again. 

BUT THEN WU XIE DECIDED TO BE PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE AND HE DIDN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING OFF THE BEATEN PATH. HE LITERALLY JUST FOLLOWED WU SANXING AROUND FOR LIKE. A YEAR. AND EVERYONE LOST THEIR MINDS. Like if I had been Huo Daofu and tried SO HARD to be different from everyone else in my generation and then this Dumb Little History Twink kissed a Zhang and found some wild swamp treasure and everyone went nuts about it, I would have been pissed off too. 

Cause Jiumen is like. Annoying as hell, and everyone has a different way to deal with the fact that they’re a part of a treasure hunting org that has been around for hundreds of years and features immortals and weird-ass dudes with unbelievable martial arts skills and also Wu Sanxing. Xiaoge deals with them by Fucking Off Forever. Zhang Rishan deals with them by being The Most Competent Person In Any Given Room, and Huo Daofu deals with them by being The Biggest Bitch He Can Be, which isn’t even that much of a bitch, because there is always going to be a bigger bitch in Jiumen, and his name is Wu Xie. So it just backfires on him, because NO ONE GIVES A SINGLE FUCK. 

We’re introduced to him at Xiao Hua’s fake funeral (which lmao i love that) when he’s making some Evil Plans with the rest of Jiumen, but not for the same reasons, cause when they actually get to the desert, Huo Daofu does not care about the treasure pits. He doesn’t even go down into Gutongjing (I’m pretty sure), he just hangs out in the camps because he doesn’t CARE about the treasure, he just wants to keep Wu Xie from succeeding, wants to say, see, look, I can do things too, I can be clever and cunning, I can take them all down from the inside out and I don’t even need friends to do it. 

Huo Daofu is jealous of Wu Xie, I think, because Wu Xie is free of the confines of Jiumen, and Wu Xie has friends, and Wu Xie didn’t have to go to another country where he knew no one and didn’t even speak the language and work so hard and be fucking brilliant in ways that no one knows about and doesn’t always, always get overlooked in favor of someone who disregards everyone’s favor, but receives it anyway. 

So when Pangzi shows up with Wu Xie, half-dead, on Huo Daofu’s doorstep, I think a little vindictive part of him goes serves him right. 

But Huo Daofu is not a part of Jiumen in the ways that matter, and he’s a doctor, first and foremost. He took oaths because he wants to help people, he wants to save them, and even if he hates Wu Xie down in the pits of his stomach, he’s not just going to let him die. And so he follows Wu Xie to thunder city because, as he says, “I want to be there when you die.” He’s not going to kill him, he can’t do that, he’s a doctor, but that small, mean part of him wants to watch Wu Xie fall. 

(Also I love @kholran’s headcanon that Huo Daofu is Wu Xie’s bitchy ex, bc like YES??? OF COURSE???? like they had an on-again, off-again thing cause they were like “we’re not doing this with the Jiumen women” but they’re WAY TOO ALIKE and just ended up fighting all the time.)

Reboot loves the Rule of Threes, which is where an idea is repeated three times in order to create a pleasing pattern. Human brains love patterns, and so when we see the Iron Triangle, when we see the three pills that mark the stages of Wu Xie’s illness, when we see the three missing people from Sanshu’s journey, our brains go oh that’s important (and Reboot ALMOST kills the game, ALMOST knocks it out of the park, but then they have FOUR story arcs instead of THREE, and it drives me ABSOLUTELY FUCKING INSANE. WHY DID THEY DO THIS. WHY). 

And Huo Daofu is a FANTASTIC tri-tier replica of Wu Xie’s Greatest Hits, which are: 

Being a sort of outcast/family runaway (Wu Xie has very clearly said Fuck Everyone Who Isn’t Sanshu, and Huo Daofu has aligned himself with the Chen clan, because the Huo’s are like Fuck Men (which honestly good for them but pLEASE love ur special doctor boy he’s getting a Complex))

Acting based almost Solely on Emotions when in the Heat of the Moment (i.e. dropping his entire life to go play doctor with a man who will not calm down for any length of time in order to actual REST)

Solving problems that no person should be able to solve because he’s smart as shit 

Narratively, he’s a FANTASTIC foil for Wu Xie, because not only does he essentially hold this man’s life in his hands, but because he is what Wu Xie could have been if he hadn’t met Pangzi or Xiaoge, if he hadn’t had support from other people. And I don’t think that’s Huo Daofu’s fault, because he and Wu Xie are so, so similar. He just never got the people he needed, and its so clear that he’s achingly alone all of the time, so no wonder he’s jealous of Wu Xie and wants to become part of this little group so damn badly, even as he’s protesting and saying, “no, no, I want you to die, literally nothing would give me more pleasure, please die right now, I’m waiting.” 

Sure, he’s a flipper-flopper ass bitch, but he’s trying his best with what he’s got, and shit, that’s not a lot. He’s got zero support system. I mean why the fuck is he making street churros? Even Zhang Rishan, who has NO culinary expertise or connections whatsover, gets to live in a restaurant, while Huo Daofu has to make fried dough in an alley and then keep people from choking on their own lungs on his damn kitchen table. Someone please help this man. 

this is SO LONG i’m sorry but essentially I think that Huo Daofu is Like That because he’s trying so hard to be someone, and no one is paying any attention, and the person he would most relate to, Wu Xie, is off doing God knows what with his polycule of friends and Huo Daofu’s all by himself and like??? i would be SO FRUSTRATED??? please give this man a break and also give him Love??? like, this screenshot speaks VOLUMES (photo credit to @hey-its-wei) 

LOOK AT HIM!!!!! LOOK AT HOW FUCKING HAPPY HE LOOKS!!!! JUST TO BE THERE!!!! WITH A GROUP OF PEOPLE!!!!! WHO HAVE SEEN HIM AND LISTENED AND SAID “hey, you can come with us, we’ll take you, you don’t have to be alone anymore.” 

I said earlier that Huo Daofu, like everyone else in this series, was Looking For Something. And like many of our beloved Wu Crew, he was looking for a family. And look! He found them :)

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recaps - Volume 8 “War”

Hello, everyone! Story time.

Yesterday food was delivered for my two idiot dogs (they’re thrilled about it) but, because it was delivered by Fed Ex, shenanigans were bound to ensue. These particular shenanigans involved realizing that the food had not been left at the front door like tracking said it had. Instead, it was down the very long driveway by the mailbox. Specifically, it was on a low wall beside the mailbox, currently inaccessible due to a mound of plowed snow.

Now, how the delivery guy managed to get it there I’ll never know, but given that our postal system is currently killing itself to get us our Amazon orders for Christmas, I shrugged, let it go, and resigned myself to lifting an 18 pound bag plus box over that snow without dying. Which meant that in reality I just dragged it, uncaring what bumps the bag might accumulate along the way. What are the dogs gonna do? Complain about presentation?

Snow successfully circumvented; I was home free!

… until I was lifting the box into the car, hit a patch of black ice, and was suddenly looking up at the sky, my right hip and leg screaming.

I’m fine. Bruised, but fine. It’s 2020. Did I expect to not fall? C’mon, Clyde. Be sensible.

The reason I'm telling you all this is because falling on ice at 10:00pm with an oversized bag of dog food was less painful than watching this episode. 

I jest... but only a little. To be fair to RWBY, it admittedly wasn't painful in any new way. Everything that's a problem this week has been a problem for years now: confusing motivations, changing semblances, unpersuasive character beats, etc. So in some ways this episode — especially as a hiatus episode — is rather underwhelming. I expected RWBY to do something big before taking six weeks off, but this episode simply set the (unstable) stage for what's to come. With the exception of Ren, nothing changed this episode, which makes for a rather "Okay..." note to end on. It's not inherently bad, it's just a bit of a letdown after hyping ourselves up over the expectation that something even crazier than grimm soup will happen. Which, to again be fair, is on us as opposed to the writers. But that feeling of, "If this was last week, what in the world will we get right before an unpredicted hiatus?" was palpable. Turns out the answer was, "A pretty tame episode." 

As always though, let's start at the beginning. This episode is titled "War" — straight to the point — and it's actually a little shorter than our last three episodes, adding to that "Okay..." feeling overall. We open on the outskirts of Atlas, amidst what appears to be a wheat field, or something similar. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the bubbled city would be able to grow things not normally growable in the tundra. This might also explain Cinder's strange beginning. Perhaps her orphanage existed on these rural outskirts and then she was brought into the city proper? We'll probably never know for sure, but at least this is a simpler answer than, "The Madame went off to an entirely different Kingdom to secure her child slave." Occam's Razor and all that.

Ironwood's army has assembled to hold off Salem's army. Wow, aren't we glad Ironwood invested in thousands of trained professionals rather than a handful of independent fighters? Seriously though, this is now a battle of numbers. May says later in the episode that Ironwood's forces are doing their best to assist Atlas, so they should go help Mantle... but that help only exists because years ago he recognized that the tiny class sizes of the Academies, this 

wasn't going to be enough if grimm attacks suddenly increased. Sure enough, now they're in a situation where Ironwood needs even more men to keep up with Salem's creation magic. The fact that he has any at all is crucial to what little hope is left. How do Jaune, Yang, and Ren think they're going to get the time to look for Oscar without everyone dying while they're gone? Because Ironwood's army is keeping the attack at bay. I love how the story keeps angling for the "Military people are evil" message while actively showing us how much a military is needed in this world. If Ironwood had been a generic Good Guy who dismantled his armed forces because others wanted to ignore that they've always been at war against objectively evil creatures — both the grimm and Salem — then there would have been nothing to hold Salem off until small team rescue/bomb plans could be implemented. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. As usual. The army is on the front lines and one guy is scared enough that he's shaking. Can't say I blame him. As always, RWBY functions best when it leans towards horror, with skeletons rising alongside the normal grimm and intense music playing to convey the stakes. Ironwood watches the onslaught and immediately calls for a civilian evacuation into the subway system. Get people below ground, behind a few, defendable entrances, rather than wandering about the city where land or sky grimm can pick them off easy-peasy. Makes sense. Yet I'm already seeing fans make snide comments about how Ironwood is "still running," which just demonstrates how many viewers take the emotions of the show at face value — who is Good and who is Bad — rather than considering the situation and deciding for themselves. What's far more egregious than viewers enjoying a story however they'd like on a Saturday before the holiday though (seriously, my salt aside, no one has to enjoy RWBY any one way) is that RT again tries to paint Ironwood as crazy when he's... just not? Beyond the choice to animate him with scary expressions 

once he gives the order the soldier starts to say, "But sir — " and Ironwood yells for him to obey right now. The scene makes it look like Ironwood is doing something shady again. Here's this goon balking at the order, but we're not told why. What's bad about getting the people to (relative) safety? Why is this order treated like something to question at all? We're not told and, from what we do know, it's not something that would be questioned, so unless we learn something new post-hiatus, that line exists only to make Ironwood look bad. It's a (nonsensical) excuse to have another ally turning against him (slightly) and to give Ironwood the chance to look scary and violent again. Nevermind that his city is under attack and if a subordinate started questioning a completely sensible and time-sensitive order? I might yell too. 

So we're off to a great start. The above looks particularly stupid given that we immediately see the flying grimm arriving in a populated area, terrifying all the civilians there. Everyone bolts for the subway and we cut away from a man trying desperately to reach his daughter, unsure if either of them survive. But people want Ironwood to not use what few resources he has? See, this is why generic messages like, "You have to stand your ground" don't work. Sometimes there are situations where you should run and that doesn't automatically equal being a coward. It means you're smart enough to take the actions necessary to save as many lives as possible. 

Later on we'll have a similar issue with the message, "You have to trust people" when my darling Oscar briefly loses his mind.  

Now though, we see that the "fugitives" Yang, Jaune, and Ren have been taken into custody. Of course they have. Look, when the preview dropped yesterday I saw a number of takes along the lines of, "How dare the Ace Ops do this. They need to put aside their differences until the attack is over!" but no, they really don't, because it's no longer their responsibility to extend trust towards this group. Especially when doing so, to their mind, has a high chance of making a horrific situation that much worse. What are they going to do if, in the middle of a Salem attack, the kids they decided to trust betray them, attack them, and leave them knocked out somewhere while the world burns? 

...Oh wait, they already did that. 

See, the group broke trust first. Numerous times. The Ace Ops listened to Yang admit that she and Blake had betrayed Ironwood days ago. Then they watched Ruby betray him again by alerting the rest of the team, turning them against him. They swore they wouldn't attack, so Team RWBY attacked them first. They learn that Qrow had a hand in murdering their leader. They encounter the group again and Weiss gleefully asks if they want a second defeat. They watch Ruby tell the entire world to dismiss Ironwood because he’s the one who can’t be trusted. Outside of JYR not immediately attacking them when they arrived to help (something I praised them for), this group has never put their trust in the Ace Ops. So why do they — and we — expect the Ace Ops to do so now? Imagine for just a moment that it was reversed. We find out that someone betrayed the group for no good reason, set themselves against them, continued to do so as everything fell apart, told the rest of the world they’re the enemy, and then a close associate is involved in Ruby's murder. How many people would expect the group to just shrug all that off? Would they put their differences aside and embrace these people because blind trust is (supposedly) the right thing to do? Of course not! Yang would punch their lights out and everyone would cheer, but that's because they're the established heroes. Outside of that role, no one else is allowed to mistrust those who have proven themselves untrustworthy and take precautions against getting betrayed again. To say nothing of how these characters don’t have our meta perspective. Meaning, they live in a world where this trio is not a part of a protagonist group destined to remain a part of the plot because that’s how story conventions work. They’re three random teens who were promoted to huntsmen early. They’re three soldiers out of many who can, at any time, be taken out of the fight. No one on the Ace Ops is working under the belief that they “have” to be a part of this fight. From their in-world perspective, you could toss them in jail for the rest of the battle and that’s that. Outside of their fugitive status they are entirely unimportant. 

So yes, Jaune, Ren, and Yang are in handcuffs. They deserve to be. Don't worry though, they get out very soon. 

Yang makes a snide comment about Winter "Still just following orders" and honestly? I've lost the love I used to have for her as a character. Yang is just an exercise in frustration whenever she speaks now. Thus far she's blamed Ruby for everything that's gone wrong (ignoring her own choices there), did a 180 to yell at Ren for acknowledging how bad things are, worried nonsensically about Blake being disappointed in her even though Ruby is the one she fought with, and is now back to the "You just follow orders" shtick. Yang will label anything she personally doesn't like as evil order following, but conveniently ignores how following Ruby's orders helped get them into this mess, and how the one time she went AWOL made things even worse. These characters don't actually have  beliefs they stand behind, they just say whatever is currently necessary to make themselves look good, even if that contradicts previous statements or actions. 

She also gets mad at Vine for saying that grimm don't take prisoners, ignoring that she only found this out a few hours ago. No one in the group is equipped to navigate the emotional minefield that is this war because they can't even take two seconds to put themselves in another’s shoes. Weiss doesn't bother to consider Whitley's situation. Jaune points at the snow and gets frustrated that Harriet doesn't magically know there's grimm soup flowing nearby. Yang snaps at Vine for stating what she also knew to be a basic fact about grimm up until Oscar's kidnapping. It's all framed as, "How can you be this stupid?" rather than, "Oh yeah, these people haven't had the experiences I have. If I was randomly told this I'd doubt it too. I should try to explain this in a way that will make sense to them and increase my chances of being believed." 

This is the group who decided it was a good idea to tell the whole world about Salem and did it just as badly as I suspected they would. The story has shoved a delicate, information-based war into the hands of punch-happy teenagers and refuses to grapple with how that's a bad thing. 

Anyway, Ironwood comes on the radio to say that the whale is pretty indestructible on the outside, but it might be vulnerable from the inside, so let's get a bomb in there. Seems like a good enough plan as any, especially given that the grimm is currently on the very outskirts of the city, away from the civilians if/when it's blown up. What kind of bomb might this be though? 

Could it, perhaps, end up being a now severely damaged android who is based off of Pinocchio? 

Time will tell. For now, the group is quite obviously upset that Ironwood is planning a big BOOM while Oscar (and Ozpin! Tellingly, no one mentions Ozpin...) is still inside. Here's the thing: Both sides are right here. YJR are right to be worried about their friend, while the Ace Ops — who have no emotional ties to Oscar and, as just established, are questioning whether or not a grimm really kidnapped him — are right that they cannot prioritize a single life over the entirety of Atlas. They just can't! And any hero worth their salt is going to recognize this. You cannot knowingly sacrifice thousands of people (if not more) for one (admittedly awesome) farm boy. It would be a different situation if the people of Atlas volunteered to remain in danger to give Oscar a chance at escape, but that obviously isn't the situation here. If someone told me, "Sorry, Clyde, we can't get you out because the place you're in is super dangerous and attempting to extract you would likely cause the rescue party to die. Also, the longer we don't blow this location up the longer lots of other people die" I'd be like, "Fair enough. Have a nice life!" I mean, obviously anyone would be terrified and devastated by the news, but if you're still thinking straight and have even an ounce of compassion for others, you don't trade all those lives for your own. Spock does not open the door to flood the whole Enterprise with radiation!

And notably, neither does Kirk. Oscar isn't given the chance to sacrifice himself — ignoring his choice to try and undermine Salem's forces rather than escaping — so Jaune, Ren, and Yang are deciding that for him. Which, again, makes sense for them emotionally, but it's still a selfish choice. They're prioritizing their family over everyone else's. If someone ever told me they’d risked a whole city for my sake I’d be touched, but also pissed as hell. Because what were you thinking? 

Which is really my biggest issue with this divide. It would have been nice if the show had done more to make me believe these three are that ride and die for Oscar. Don't get me wrong, I'm thrilled that they are and I'll take this characterization over the apathy we had in the past, but let's be real, it kind of came out of nowhere. The group as a whole pretty much ignored Oscar up until the movie invite and two of these characters — Yang and Jaune — have actively hurt him in the name of getting at Ozpin. Now suddenly they're willing to toss aside their huntsmen duties — protect the people — in order to save him? Nice sentiment, it's just that, as always, we have very little development for it, especially given the level of emotion shown. Particularly when it comes to Ren. The prospect of someone sacrificing Nora? I 100% believe that he draws a hard line and this kick-starts a change in his semblance. Ren is shown to be thinking about how he lost his teammate Pyrrha? Totally believe it! Someone is sacrificing the kid I'm not sure he's ever had a conversation with? That's less persuasive. At the very least, it would have been nice to have the trio grapple with whether they can or should prioritize Oscar over everyone else, rather than taking such a black and white stance of, "Of course taking the time to save this one guy while everyone else dies is worth it. You're evil for thinking otherwise." 

We even get a shot of Winter's hand shaking and clenching like Yang's used to, just to hammer home who the correct party is. 

While they begin this argument we cut to Salem who is literally conducting her grimm in their attack against Atlas. 

Very nice. I love when a villain has 

Emerald watches her, clearly freaked out, and then sneaks off to where Oscar is held. In the hallway she encounters one of the jellyfish grimm, so she casually makes it not see her until it has passed. 

Her semblance works on grimm, but not “real girl” androids? Okay. 

We all realize how crazy powerful Emerald is though, right? The stuff that she could do in a fight is staggering and I'll be forever salty that all she managed in the Penny battle was to create a couple different Cinders. Emerald, Marrow, Salem herself... RWBY has a real problem of having the antagonists conveniently not use the power at their disposal when the heroes need to win. 

So Emerald starts listening in on Ozpin's torture. We learn that Hazel was recruited when he tried to kill Salem numerous times and had to watch her keep reforming. Which, if I remember correctly, is a technique she used back when she and Ozma were playing at Gods. It worked and now Hazel believes that they "share a vision. She's going to create a new world order," one without Kingdoms or Huntsmen Academies. No, says Ozpin, she's going to divide humanity past reform, summon the Gods, and hopefully die when they take out all of Remnant. 

...My god, did we finally get Salem's motivations after seven years? 

Seriously though: seven years. It's way too late, especially when we now have so many questions attached to this supposed goal. If Salem always wanted to divide the world irrevocably, why didn't she attack, oh, say, a thousand years ago? Why has she kept to the sidelines until now? None of this answers why she held off until our simple soul was conveniently ready to fight her. We also have the issue of Salem's knowledge, or lack thereof. So she obviously knows about the Relics and that they'll summon the Gods, but not how to work them? How did that come about? Even Ozpin's motivations are murky now. He repeats Salem's curse word-for-word — though notably, minus the "You must learn the importance of life and death. Only then may you rest" part — yet unless Salem told him this herself when they first reunited — and we know they both hid things from the other — Ozpin could have only gotten this line from the lore episode, something he witnessed along with us just a few weeks/months back. So is he only now realizing that this is what Salem wants the Relics for? Might he be wrong? Or did he somehow figure this out lifetimes ago and we're just not told how? If this is the case, why haven’t Salem’s motivations come up before now? 

This sudden, "Oh yeah, she's always wanted to die" feels pretty tacked on. Like RT had Salem arrive last Volume because that's ~cool~ and then suddenly realized that they have to deal with her motivations now, so they hastily cobbled this together. But, as said at the start, this is entirely expected for RWBY nowadays. A problem to be sure, though one we've been putting up with for a couple of years now. 

During all this, Hazel shouts that this is what Ozpin deserves and the first word out of his mouth is, "Yes." 

But Oscar and the rest of Remnant don't deserve it, so make the right choice for them. How did RT think they were going to make this guy an antagonist? Ozpin has so much self-hatred and yet is still trying SO HARD that he makes Ruby Drinking Tea While The World Burns Rose look laughable. 

Oh yeah, we'll be getting to that scene in just a second, but for now I just want us all to appreciate Ozpin as a character, even if the story won't. 

....

.......

..............

...Okay, moment done lol. Sorry, Oz, there's a lot to cover this episode. 

We cut to a semi-conscious Nora who asks Weiss, "Now what am I good for?" So that’s a double serving of oof. That's when Ruby arrives with fine china steaming with tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate. Whatever it is these girls are drinking. What comes next is accompanied by a strange kind of vindication for me. I mean, the fandom dragged me so hard for taking issue with their snuggly smiles during Ruby's message, yet now we literally have the girls sitting back in a mansion as everything goes to shit around them. I know the knee jerk reaction to this will be, "They have to watch over Nora" and “They deserve a break” but really? All three of them need to watch her? And a break during the height of the action? Blake says she hopes everyone else is okay, but who is actually out looking for information about the rest of their team? May. Who's going to do something to get Nora help? Whitley. These characters are so good at telling us they're the heroes while rarely ever displaying those traits. They all (somehow) saw the attack on Atlas and have the ability to get out there and defend people — the job they wanted — yet Ruby looks out the window and asks, "What can we even do?" while taking a long sip of tea. The people of Mantle are (supposedly) freezing to death, yet one of the few with aura, Weiss, sits by a roaring fire going, "Do we just wait for someone to come? If they even come.” I'm sorry, you didn't consider this before you told the whole world about Salem? No one questioned whether asking for potentially non-existent help was worth the risk and what they'd do if it never came? Or even just what they’d do in the meantime? I’m not saying the girls can’t have basic necessities like drinks, or that it can’t be done in style when that’s conveniently available. I’m saying them enjoying the food, warmth, and relative safety of the Schnee household (built on racism) while casually talking about what, if anything, they should do for the people dying outside looks a bit Not Good. "Should we wait for the fire department?" Asks the character as their kitchen burns, sitting beside a number of water buckets that could help slow things down. "If they even come," they sigh, taking another sip of tea. This is ridiculous! The city is currently under attack by the series' Big Bad and half our heroes are just sitting around, watching the evil lightning, wondering if they should try to do anything about it. 

"How did it all get like this?" Ruby asks her cup, ignoring the many steps she took to make things this bad. It continually boggles my mind that Ironwood is out here trying to keep people safe in the subway, coming up with a plan to blow up this whale, sending out an army to kill countless grimm... yet "What can we even do?" Ruby is supposed to be the hero here. You know, the one who has silver eyes and could one-shot huge numbers of Salem's army if she actually went out there and tried to help.  

Ironwood is taking action... and so is May. As said, she's the one out looking for info on their teammates and when she returns says that they should all get back down to Mantle. Why? Because, as mentioned earlier, Atlas at least has an army to help with things. Mantle only has them. 

Yet suddenly, Weiss doesn't want to leave. 

Where did this come from? They succeeded in their preferred plan of telling the world what's going on over Ren and Yang's plan of helping what people they could, and now they're looking for something to do. Why wouldn't they head back to help? (Especially now that the shields are down.) Weiss yells that there are people dying in Atlas too but, as established, Atlas has the army. And where was this concern when they refused to let Atlas leave? After a Volume and a half of pro-Mantle content, this seems to come out of nowhere. Worse, Weiss tries to guilt May by asking if she has family in Atlas, which leads to the reveal that she's trans. Her family rejected their daughter. 

I want to be clear that I'm very happy RT made this canon. For what she is — a side character we know incredibly little about — I really like May and the fact that they were clear in her identity rather than keeping it to twitter deserves recognition. Yet I'm not going to pretend that the reveal didn't leave a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, simply because we have this incredibly privileged cis girl, who knows a great deal about shitty families, hearing how horrible May's was and still trying to tell her she needs to suck it up and help Atlas over Mantle. When May angrily asks whose side she's on, Blake makes a comment about hearing that before, comparing her to Ironwood. May is painted as the misguided one here, but can you imagine if someone told Weiss to go help Jacques over her found family, Team RWBY, regardless of what he's done to her? The fandom would explode, and rightly so. There's something to be said for realism here, showing us Weiss and Blake's inability to see where May is coming from... but it doesn't feel like a commentary on that. It feels like another Penny situation: May is put in her place for being inconsiderate, even though this time it's her choosing to help people who are ALSO in danger over the people who represent family she's broken with. 

I wanted conflict this Volume and I absolutely got it, but damn if it isn’t badly thought out at times. 

Because rather than grappling with these personal motivations, Ruby brushes them aside by yelling, "There are no sides! We want to help everyone." 

Does that extend to Ironwood? Ruby's speeches started falling flat when she betrayed Ozpin, attacked Cordovin, betrayed Ironwood, attacked the Ace Ops... This girl does not want to "help everyone." She wants to help those who agree with her. 

Yet her rock solid optimism generates the question, “So how exactly do we get out of it?” which, as expected, Ruby has no answer to. The story keeps showing us how bad a leader Ruby has become, yet no one is actively responding to that. They kinda disagree about lying to Ironwood, but still go along with it. Yang kinda criticizes her sister, but that's then lost to general worry as they split (on Ruby's end, anyway). They want to know how she'll lead them next and are seemingly fine when Ruby continually says, "I don't know." At this point I'd be like, "Well... you didn't like May's plan of going back to Mantle, but apparently can't come up with a plan yourself... so I'm going to go with her." 

This is the same conflict we had last Volume: Ruby spoke optimistically about saving everyone, yet was unable to come up with a way to do that. Ironwood had a plan that, while horrific, might save a lot of lives. Yet Ruby is presented as the one to back. Now here she is, hours later, still unable to figure out a way to achieve her perfect outcome. Ruby wanting things to be a certain way is not going to make them so and I’m wondering when someone within the group is going to recognize and act on that. 

As Ruby fails to answer this crucial question, we pull back to see Whitley listening in at the door. 

Cutting back to Ozpin and Oscar, Hazel has listened to all this craziness about Gods, immortality, the destruction of Remnant... and literally goes, "Cool story, bro." 

Okay, he says "Nice story" but the emotion is the same. Which I'm really happy about! I mentioned in a recent post that, as far as we know, Hazel hasn't been told anything about the Gods up until now. What Ozpin is telling him sounds like gibberish at worst, incredibly hard to believe craziness at best. Now chuck in Mercury's point that as a tortured prisoner he'll say anything to get free, as well as the fact that this is Ozpin talking to Hazel... and I'm really glad Hazel just ignored his speech (for now at least). It wouldn't make sense otherwise. Granted, this means that the plan literally amounted to, “Let’s info dump a bunch of nonsense-sounding lore on our enemy in the hope that he’ll believe us and betray Salem.” It’s something to try, certainly, and it admittedly is a much better plan than what Oscar is about to cook up. 

So since Hazel won't listen to Ozpin, Oscar wants to try instead. Why did you two switch in the first place? It's really obvious that RT is having the characters do weird things in order to stretch out the plot. 

Either way, our farm boy is in control again. What new strategy will he try? 

"Her name is Jinn." 

This is BEYOND stupid. No, none of this "You have to trust people" nonsense. This is not “people,” this is Hazel. There is a Grand Canyon's width of difference between learning to trust your allies and blindly trusting an active villain who just rejected your "Please defect :(" speech. Even if we remove Hazel from the equation, this is still a monumentally foolish move. I mean, has Oscar considered where he is? This isn't some random warehouse he's been taken to, this is a semi-sentient grimm, a creature creating other creatures out of its ceiling

and whose doors automatically open when people need them to (Mercury). This is a living being created by and connected to Salem herself. How does Oscar know Salem can't hear everything he says? Or that the whale can't relay information to her? That the grimm in the walls won't pop out and run to their master? Or even that a normal person isn't listening in at the door — like Emerald is. If that had been Tyrian instead, that's it. They're done. Game over. 

Someone: "Wow. Salem got the Lamp and managed to ask where the Beacon Relic is. Since the school is still overrun by her army, she snatched it up quick, finished destroying Atlas, and is now on her way to Vacuo. She's nearly completed her plan in days! How did all this happen? 

Oscar: I, um... told her what she wanted to know?

Someone: You what?

Oscar: But not Salem! I just told Hazel! ... and then the information somehow got back to her. 

Someone: "Somehow?" You deliberately told one of Salem's henchmen this crucial piece of information, in a place where there was a good chance you would be overheard by conventional or magical means, and you're surprised that she "somehow" learned it and used that information to doom us all? 

Oscar: ...Yes? 

This is so staggeringly stupid it... well, it could only have been done by a kid. So at least that fits lol. Oscar, I love you, but Ozpin should have been screaming in horror the second those words left your mouth. Generations of precautions undone because a kid wants to believe the best of the guy currently pummeling him. Sweet, but stupid. I’m all for optimistic characters, they just can’t risk the whole world on that optimism. Oscar risking himself on the seemingly doomed plan to turn Hazel is one thing, Oscar risking all of Remnant on the seemingly doomed plan to turn Hazel is another thing entirely. 

Even though you know this is precisely how the story will go. Oscar willingly hands over Jinn's name to Salem's forces, but happily none of the THREE who hear about it will tell her. The story's unwillingness to follow through on consequences doesn't change what a bad move this was. I mean, Oscar himself accused Ironwood of playing into Salem's hands by disagreeing with them about how to not die, yet a few hours later he will willingly give Hazel the one piece of information Salem needs to move closer to world-wide destruction? That's uh... well, that's something. 

They should have just had the poor boy be tortured, spill the beans to make it stop, and start an arc of self-forgiveness. Oscar can be awesome without coming up with world-dooming plans. 

So yeah, Oscar is hoping that Hazel will use the Lamp himself and find out the truth. He wants Hazel to trust him and the man he despises most in the world enough to go against the immortal woman he's terrified of, get the Lamp away from her somehow to use for himself, wasting a once in a generation question to confirm all this, so that Salem will lose a guy with muscle who, to be frank, is absolute insignificant in the grand scheme of her power. Fantastic. 

As said, Emerald overhears all this and immediately runs to Mercury, who is less than convinced by her "Salem wants to destroy the world" talk. Just as he's expressing doubt, Tyrian appears to confirm that this is exactly what she wants to do — and he's loving it. 

“Of course she is! You’re surprised? Salem is destruction incarnate!” 

It's a legit point. Are our villains so dense they never considered that Salem might do something to the world they didn't like? It's like the group not thinking about how Salem is still around if Ozpin has been fighting her for a thousand years. RWBY continually gives the impression that these characters don't think about their situation past what they're doing at any given moment. 

Tyrian maintains his title as best villain though, simply because I understand what he's doing, why he's doing it, and he's so damn good at it. 

Also, can we appreciate Mercury's face here? 

Amazing. This is the kind of humor we should be getting in such a tragedy-laden Volume. 

The two of them, Tyrian and Mercury, head off to Vacuo for the Secret Mission, despite Mercury's newfound hesitation. I quite liked these quiet moments between him and Emerald. It has a very "Do what you've gotta do" vibe while showcasing their care for one another, something we haven't seen in a while. 

Back with the airship group. YJR are still horrified that Ironwood would blow up Oscar (even though he has no idea Oscar is there), begging the Ace Ops to give them "a chance to try to rescue him first.” Ren goes pretty hard on the "no one is replaceable" bit, which is frustrating not being what he’s saying is inaccurate (it’s not), but because that's not the issue here. The writing has Harriet start yelling about Marrow replacing her old teammate and Winter replacing Clover, but the question is not whether you'll just forget a teammate and move on with someone new, but whether you're willing to sacrifice them for the greater good. That's the stance: Should we sacrifice one life to save thousands? Will you, as a protector of the people, put those people before your own found family? Yet what RT has Harriet say is: Oscar is replaceable. Which obviously makes her come across as an ass. Like the random soldier questioning Ironwood — or making Elm about to punch a defenseless Ren in her anger — it exists solely to show how bad these character are... even as they say pretty persuasive things. 

The writing also continues to be confused about whether the Ace Ops are friends or not. Yang certainly didn't think so... up until she asks (rhetorically) whether Marrow would sacrifice himself for Elm, Harriet, and Vine. Since their introduction, the story has loudly insisted that the Ace Ops aren't friends... up until it's revealed ("revealed") that Harriet is actually gutted about Clover. So which is it? Are we supposed to believe that these are cold soldiers who only work together out of duty, or that they're a team who clearly love one another? I'd say that show has shown us the latter, but it doesn't seem to understand what point it's trying to make. Does this look like a soldier who doesn’t care? 

It’s especially weird when Ren again makes the claim that this is why they lost to Team RWBY. Because they're not a team.

...So is this why they did such a fantastic job fighting the geist, demonstrating such perfect teamwork that the group was open-mouthed impressed? Is this why they nearly took down a Maiden together? Is this why Ren, while furious at Yang and Jaune, was still able to work seamlessly with them to try and rescue Oscar? Do we think if Yang was suddenly beside Ruby again that the two would fail spectacularly in a fight because they had a minor disagreement? 

This is now the third time RT has tried to excuse nerfing the Ace Ops with, "They disagree about things and are thus not friends and thus can't fight well together" — despite all evidence to the contrary — and it's getting really old. 

At one point Harriet tells Ren, "I had you pegged as the most level-headed of the bunch, but I guess you’re just as naïve" which, ignoring her then random claim that people are replaceable, is correct. I also pegged Ren as the most level-headed of the bunch considering he was just yelling at Yang for how much damage they've caused, all the mistakes they've made, and that maybe — just maybe — they should have tried harder to work with Ironwood. Yet now here he is, in a position to start that process, and the Ren we got in the snow is simply gone. He's fully Team Yang and Jaune again, facing off against the evil Ace Ops. 

I knew this was going to happen, but it's still disappointing. The story gave Ren a great speech to appease those of us frustrated with the direction the story has taken... and now we’re back to ignoring that. Ren was told off for daring to question how great the group is, apparently thought it over in the snow, and is now of the opinion that yes, they are that great. People are going to die because of us? Who cares about that anymore! We will absolutely, single-handedly rescue Oscar and there's no reason why this might be a questionable choice when an entire city is on the line. Again, emotionally understandable (if we buy into the group suddenly loving Oscar this much), but it rings hollow right after making Ren the one person who was willing to look at the big picture. 

Good news though: Jaune got the braincell this week! He suggests that they go in to try and rescue Oscar/provide intel, but won't stop the Ace Ops from launching the bomb when necessary. 

See, this is heroic. This is what the group should have done during the Mantle conflict: Volunteering to take the personal risk of facing off against Salem while letting Atlas try to escape. Basically, not forcing everyone else to risk their lives for their pipe dream, which is what Ren and Yang want by rejecting the bomb entirely. Jaune recognizes here that they can't prioritize Oscar over an entire city, but also that they may still be able to save him before the bomb is complete and ready to go. So they compromise, with JYR the only ones at risk. 

Good job, Jaune! 

Winter agrees to this plan with a firm, "I outrank you" to Harriet. People are going to love that. 

Oh, but in his anger Ren's semblance suddenly changes. So we're back to the ridiculous. 

Truthfully, I like this direction. Granted, I would have liked some buildup to it, especially since this is the second time this Volume that RWBY has dropped a major semblance change on us, but the idea itself is really cool. Ren can now see emotions! Awesome! And I don't mean that sarcastically. I actually think that’s a neat extension of his original semblance. 

Too bad the story seems to think he's a mind reader. 

Seriously, take a look back at the dialogue. What Ren sees are confetti-like petals floating around a person, their color seeming to determine their emotional state. Red means Harriet is mad, blue is sadness for Marrow, etc. But what Ren ends up saying is a great deal closer to mind reading. Harriet is angry about Clover and is gutted at his loss. Marrow is questioning his place here and wants to leave. These aren't base emotions, they're targeted thoughts and feelings about situations not immediately apparent from the verbal conversation. “In fact, you don’t want to be a part of it at all anymore." How does Ren know that? They just gave him telepathy instead of the cool power with firm limitations that the imagery suggests. 

There are also some, uh... iffy implications in all this. For example, Ren allows Yang privacy by not reading her mind emotional state, but has no qualms about reading every one of the Ace Ops’. So privacy is only for the people you care about, huh? 

We could also say something about RT perpetuating unfortunate racial stereotypes: the two women of color are pure anger, the marginalized man is pure sadness, the Asian coded character is pure calm... and the white woman set to turn against the others gets a mix of all emotions. AKA, human complexity. 

To be clear, I don't think RT is doing this deliberately. Rather, they’re writers who have demonstrated time and time again that they don't have a good handle on depicting the sort of sensitive material that RWBY is infused with, and that extends to the mild, but still unfortunate, implications in scenes like this. Even if we ignore the iffy details — a benefit of the doubt that, at this point, many fans aren’t willing to grant — we're still left with the continuity errors. Visually, we're presented with a woman who is experiencing multiple emotions at once and is, therefore, torn. Yet Ren reads Winter definitively: "I know you [don't want this] either." It's yet another moment that makes me wonder how much communication there is between the writers and the animators, because too often the two seem to be at odds with each other. 

As the group prepares to go into the belly of the beast (literally!) we return to Ruby who is, once again, failing to make me believe she's this super compassionate person. 

“Wait! What about Qrow and Robyn? Maybe if we get them out of wherever they’re held—”

Please tell me I'm not the only one who took issue with this? Ruby doesn't express an ounce of worry for her uncle, not even when she learns he's been arrested, and the one time she brings him up it's in the context of what he can do for them in this fight? Ruby doesn't grapple with whether to rescue her uncle (personal desire), or get the message to the world (her version of the heroic action) and then realize that, now that her duty is done, she can finally turn to the more selfish act of helping her immediate family. Instead, Ruby seems perfectly happy to let Qrow stay in prison up until she's unsure what to do next and thinks that maybe he has the answer. Heaven forbid Ruby think about rescuing him because she loves him.

Sadly, this Ruby is long gone. 

In recent years she's expressed no gratitude for him saving her life, no respect for him as her teacher, demonstrated incredibly little compassion for his own struggles, and outright told him that if he wasn't going to listen to her then he doesn't need to be part of the team. Then he's arrested and she doesn't care until she deems him useful again. Like the fandom wondering where the sisterly bond between Ruby and Yang went, I'm likewise wondering where the bond between Ruby and Qrow went. 

May outright rejects this though, yelling that they still don't get it. “This is not a situation where everyone wins!" 

She tells the trio they have to choose for once: Are you going to help Mantle, or Atlas? 

...which means there's immediately a knock at the door, interrupting the moment where they have to decide. 

See, this is just like Ren. The story keeps giving us moments where characters speak absolute truth, dangling the potential for the group to grow from these realizations... only to pull back before it goes anywhere. Ren is once again aligned with Yang and Jaune in their desire to save Oscar. May's demand is interrupted by the plot. If means nothing to give us these moments unless the story acts on them. 

It's Klein at the door. Whitley called him to help with Nora because I guess he's a doctor now, as well as a butler? Fine. Let’s run with it. Weiss is super pleased to see him and hugs Whitley for the good deed. 

Why so shocked that Whitley would look out for another, Weiss? Could it be because he's had so little reason to be kind when everyone, including you, has treated him horribly? If Klein always had these medical skills — if you’ve grown up with a doctor — why didn’t you talk to your brother and ask if he knew how to contact him? And of course, she apologizes to Klein for her father’s actions, but not to Whitley for her own. Whitley's surprise isn't cute to me. 

Weiss stuck a weapon in his face, insulted him, sent him to his room like a toddler... and now is randomly hugging him because he did something she liked. The context of this scene doesn't paint Weiss in a good light. Like the rest of her friends, she only extends basic respect and kindness towards others when they're assisting her. Whitley was nothing to her until he suddenly proved himself useful. That's not cute sibling love, it's a love that's going to run out the moment Whitley puts a toe out of line, according to Weiss' unspoken list of what behavior keeps him in her good graces. 

I believe that Klein cares for Whitley because he greets him kindly and gives him that shoulder pat on the way up. Whitley didn't need to first prove himself to Klein somehow and Klein didn't start this interaction by shoving a gun in Whitley's face, just in case he wouldn't let him through the door. They feel more like family than this hug does. 

So yeah, Whitley and May have done more good this episode than our entire main cast. How about we just make this story about the side characters instead? 

We then hear a massive boom and the group runs out to find a crater. Penny has landed in front of the manor, which is pretty convenient considering we saw her pass out as she fell. 

She's somehow still in control despite the hack and apologizes to Ruby, then falls unconscious (again). 

And that's where we end! Definitely a cliffhanger, though a rather underwhelming one considering we already knew Penny was in serious trouble. As said at the start, this episode felt rather underwhelming to me, especially as a halfway point before a hiatus, and compared to some of the stuff we've seen previously. It's not bad per-se — especially if we ignore the issues that have been around for an age now, which is most of what this recap deals with — it's just not terribly exciting either. Everything of importance — Salem's attack, Oscar's rescue, Penny's demise, subordinates turning, Nora's condition, etc. — had already been established in previous episodes and very little of it moved forward. Ren's semblance is the only thing the episode gave us that we couldn't have (generically) guessed for ourselves between last Saturday and now. 

So yeah, underwhelmed is the mood of the day, with a hefty dose of salt for everything that continues to be a story-breaking problem in this show. I will say though that, as has become the trend for this Volume, all the establishing shots are gorgeous. RWBY is, at the very least, pretty to look at. 

As a final note, in lieu of the Bingo board (since, again, not a whole happens plot-wise) I want to point out something mentioned by a friend: how absolutely bonkers our timeline is now. We began the second day last episode with the sun rising (recall that Jaune had tried to sleep that night at the outpost. So it’s definitely sunrise as opposed to sunset).

And we re-confirm that it’s sunrise at the start of this episode.

Yet throughout the episode many of our shots take place at night (note the stars behind the trio).

These moments with Ruby can't take place in the past because they're talking about the attack, an attack that only happened after Jaune's group met up with the Ace Ops and the geyser attacked — during early morning. I doubt I'm supposed to believe that it has been another full day of Salem starting an attack, a full day for the group to fly to the whale, a full day for Penny to fall, a full day which would put us at the end of the Volume’s timeline at only the halfway point... so I think RT is just going for the aesthetic of night shots without thinking about what that does to the continuity. It's a mess. 

Not the highest praise to end on, but I’m working with what I’ve got lol. I feel as naïve as Oscar when I say that maybe Part II will be better. 

I will, of course, see you all in six weeks. Until then, I'll do my best to catch up on asks. Another doomed endeavor, but one can try!

A very Happy Holidays to all of you who celebrate and, as always, thanks so much for reading! 💜

[Ko-Fi]

[unloved-cadillac]

My Heart’s First & Last.(Dabi x Reader)

I’m just a quirkless cop who’s in love with a villain.

𝖶𝗈𝗋𝖽𝗌: 1.6𝗄

Being a quirkless cop was one of the worst jobs you could ever ask for. Not only were you looked down because you were quirkless, many people made fun of the idea of a woman being an officer. But I rose from those ideas. I overcame the looks, the comments and became a sergeant in Mustafa police station at 25.

There were many villains roaming the town around this time of day. Luckily, today I wa son patrol with my partner, Koshi. We were on our way to a sweet store when we heard people scream and yell, “SOMEBODY HELP!!” We turned around and this person, or thing rather, pushed past us and ran. “Koshi, get around the building. Use your quirk and try to overtake him!” I order him and sprint towards this villain. He was fast. He turned and saw me running towards him and he spat some kind of fluid into the floor, but I luckily dodged it and pulled out my taser gun. Shit I mumble and run as fast as I can to get a good shot, but the villain is suddenly knocked onto the floor, dropping all of the stolen goods that he had. I catch my breath and look at Koshi, who was shaking off the pain of his arm he used to stop the guy. “Good job, Koshi,” I say and walk to the villain. “Thank you, mam,” he says and picks up the goods. “You’re under arrest,” I tell the villain as I lift him off of his ass and handcuff him. “Damn you.” He says and I chuckle. As we walk back to our patrol car, a woman walks up to us. “Oh my. Thank you so much, Ms Police officer. You saved my things,” she says gratefully and Koshi hands her her stuff as I put the villain into the car. “It’s no problem. If you don’t mind, my colleague here will take your statement about the situation that occurred,” I tell her and she nods. “Yes. Yes of course,” she smiles and begins speaking. I look around and sigh. Damn, what a nuisance.

When we returned to the station, I went to my desk and checked my phone for some new messages. I widen my eyes when I see this:

Unknown

Something is going to happen at Meta’s Ramen Store tonight. Be ready.

I sigh and wake up to go to my boss’s office. “Sir?” I call out and he turns to look at me. “Yes, L/n?” “I was wondering if tonight I can go on patrol again?” I ask and he furrows his eyebrows. “Why?” He asks. “I just...have a feeling something is gonna happen. May I?” I lie and he scratches his head. “Well, I always told you guys to trust your instincts. So go on patrol. And take someone with you,” he tells me and I nod and go out to find Koshi. “Want some extra pay, Koshi?” I ask him while he drinks his water. “Yeah..,” he says eyeing me. “Good. We’re going on patrol tonight.” I tell him and go back to my desk.

Later that night, Koshi and I drive around our district until I see the ramen store. “Stop the car, Koshi.” I say and he parks it off across the place. “What is it?” I stay silent and watch the ramen shop. Nothing happens for almost half an hour, but my eyes widen when I see people in hoodies walk into the shop. “Koshi, let’s go,” I tell him and hop out of the car. We walk up and down the store, casually. Nothing seems to be happening out of the ordinary so far, but it was until I heard screaming did I grab my gun and walk back to the store. Koshi covered my six while I walked into the store. One of them had a shotgun and the other held a bag. “I’m not gonna ask again! Put the money in the damn bag!” I hear them scream and the old man was shaking. “Hey!” I yell out and they look at me, one pointing his gun at me. “Who the fuck are you?” “I’m a cop. Drop your weapon and nothing needs to happen.” I say, gripping my gun. “Fuck you.” He says and points the shot gun at me. Suddenly, I shoot his leg and the other bolts out the door, pushing me. Luckily I tripped his leg and he fell, face flat on the floor. Koshi walked into the store and cuffed him while I cuffed the other after I bandaged his leg. “Up we go,” I say lifting the injured man, “let’s go.”

God, this is gonna be so much of paperwork. As we make our way to the car, a flash of blue fire was fired in the distance. As well as normal fire. “Looks like Endeavor’s working too, huh Serge?” Koshi says and I chuckle. Yeah, someone else too.

When I went back to the station and all of that shit was sorted out, I go back to my house. All I wanted was a nice, long, hot shower and to have some food that I made yesterday. I go upstairs and strip from my uniform and go into my shower. I washed your hair and dried myself then changed into my shorts and shirt.

After putting my gun in my safe, I go back downstairs only to hear my back door open. I wasn’t scared nor did I find the need to go and get my firearm. I turn to the door to see him taking off his shoes and shrugging off his jacket. He looks back up to see me and broad, handsome smile displays on his burnt face.

“Hey beautiful. Sorry I’m late.” “Touya.”

I say and walk up to him. “I saw you today,” he says while holding my hands. “Really? Where?” I ask. “I saw you take that guy down after he stole that old lady’s stuff. Pretty badass, Y/n,” he chuckles and I smile. “Koshi stopped the guy. I saw that you were busy too. Flashing your flames everywhere,” I smile and he leans down and kisses me. God, I missed him so much. I haven’t seen him in almost three days and my house, OUR house, felt so empty. He pulls away from me and rests his forehead on mine, while staring into me with his deep, serene blue eyes. “I missed you, baby.” He softly says and I hum. “And I’ve missed you.”

We both walk to our kitchen where I warm up our food while Dabi sits by the counter, watching me. I feel his eyes on me and I turn to look at me. “What are you looking at?” I ask and he scoffs. “What, I can’t stare?” He asks and I blush slightly and turn back around to cook. I hear his chair scrap and shortly after feel his body pressed against my back. He leans down and grazes his lips against my neck. I tilt my head so he could have better access and he hums in approval. Dabi ghosts his lips on the outer shell of my ear and teasing bites it. “Touya~” I breathe out and he chuckles. “God, Y/n. I need you so badly,” he whispers, slightly grinding into me. I quickly shut off the stove and turn around and leap into him. He wraps his hands around my ass then lifts me up, making me lock my ankles around his waist. Dabi moves his lips from mine to my neck and walks the both of us upstairs to our bedroom. He lays me down on the bed and we indulged in each other, making up on lost time.

After our activities, I fell asleep for a while but woke up when I felt Dabi’s hand run up and down my bare back. I open my one eye and look at him as he propped his head on his hand. “Hi,” he says softly. “Hi.” He moves hand from my back to move my hair away from my face. We stayed in silence for a long time, just enjoying each other’s company. He sighs and moves onto his back while still looking at me. “What’s on your mind?” I ask and he closes his eyes. “I just...” he begins, “really wanna fucking marry you.” Dabi says, with a voice that I haven’t heard since the first time he proposed.

“I can’t leave the League. I can’t marry you. There’s so much of shit that I can’t do and I fucking hate that,” he says putting hand over his face. I sigh and move to lay on his chest. “Tou, it’s alright. There’s just so much happening now and marrying each other just doesn’t seem like the right thing to do now,” I say and look at him. His hand was still on his face and I move on top of him and moves his hand away, but his eyes were still closed. “Look at me, baby.” I tell him and he slowly opens his eyes to look at me. “You’re mine and I’m yours. Forever. You feel this,” I take his hand and place it over my heart, “This beats for you. You were my hearts first and you will be my last. We don’t need any document to say that we belong to each other. I already feel married to you. And that’s my favorite feeling in the world.” I pour my heart out to him and he leans up and captures my lips with his and we melt into each other. Dabi flips us over and breaks the kiss. “I love you much, Y/n L/n” he tells me as I cup his cheek.

“And I love you, Touya L/n.”

———————————————————————

“Credit to @bnhacaps for the Dabi manga panel”

🖤🤍Thanks for reading🤍🖤

-Caddy.

[forever--rain]

hi ever!! 3, 4, 8, and 18 for the ask game!

BLUE!! 💜💜 (Like, “SUKI!!” But it’s you!)

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Oof... This is tricky.

Okay. So I reference this conversation in a future chapter of Covered in You, so you guys haven’t seen it yet. (I guess that makes this somewhat of a spoiler.) Without giving away too much, the scene I would like to write but likely won't is a scene in which Katara ends her relationship with Aang. They have to come to terms with the fact that they see their lives going in very different directions and that they have some very conflicting values regarding certain things. And she has to tell him that she just doesn’t see a way for them to move forward together.

It’s not that I can’t be arsed to write it because of set up and context, it’s that I’m very aware of the fact that people really love Aang and I don’t want to make waves. (Not that it would be a scene that bashes him. It just involves some headcanons that I’m hesitant to write.)

4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

“Katara is not to be underestimated either, however. As victory flashes in Ayako’s dark eyes, the waterbender kicks out, landing a blow to her opponent’s calf and knocking her off balance. Faster than lightning, she pivots, her fingers wrapping around Ayako’s wrist. There is a weight shift, a tipping point, and Katara rolls forward like a cresting wave, bringing Ayako over her shoulder. The other girl’s body slaps to the ground, the breath whooshing from her lungs.” - Your Soul Has Crushed Mountains

I don’t write action scenes! I consider myself very bad at them. But I worked hard on this opening spar in YSHCM and I think it turned out okay, all things considered! (You wouldn’t believe how many martial arts videos I watched in order to get that scene somewhat readable.)

8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Yeah! I think so. I’m a big sucker for Zutara AUs. I love to write ‘em. I love to read ‘em. Let me watch them fall in love with each other over and over again in a million different (and sometimes similar) ways! I’m not much of an action/adventure person (can’t write it either). Gimme my OTP staring longingly at each other from across crowded rooms and pining for one another any day of the week!

18. Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

AHHHH! YES! Okay. So.

*takes a deep breath*

*the intro to TSwift’s “...Ready For It?” plays*

You were supposed to see this idea in Ten Strides first, but it ended up making its first appearance in Covered because of how prompts fell for Zutara Month. I know we’ve all spent a lot of time positing what the Southern Water Tribe’s betrothal item(s) would be. And this is my take on it.

Rewatching ATLA, I’ve noticed that Katara starts wearing her hair down once they reach the Fire Nation. I’m sure there are any number of explanations for it. I myself first thought, “Oh, well, she’s just trying to fit in with Fire Nation folk.” But then I thought of Ty Lee and her braid and that started me off down this headcanon I’ve developed regarding Katara’s hair (which will now feature heavily in any fic I write from here on out).

So my theory is that braids are for young girls in the Southern Water Tribe. Girls who haven’t reached the age of majority. But when they reach the age of majority, they wear their hair half up, the way Katara does. In my mind, the age of majority for girls in the Southern Water Tribe is fifteen. Which would mean (in my own personal headcanon) that Katara is fifteen by the end of the war (you can see evidence of this headcanon littered throughout my fics). This also makes sense if you believe that most waterbenders are born in winter. If the seasons and hemispheres in the world of ATLA work the way ours do, then the fact that they’re in the Fire Nation by summer would mean that Katara has turned fifteen because it is winter in the South Pole. Thus, Katara wearing her hair half up (as she does for the remainder of the series) means that she has reached the age of majority in the Southern Water Tribe!

I then theorize that women in the Southern Water Tribe wear their hair this way until they settle on the person they want to marry. When they’ve decided, they then wear their hair in some kind of updo as a signal to their tribe and that person. If that person reciprocates, they present her with a set of beads for her to wear in her new hairstyle. (Hakoda keeps the beads he carved for Kya in a jar on his desk in the beginning of Covered and Sokka is carving beads for Suki.) This makes the process of getting engaged in the Southern Water Tribe one of much more equal footing that the tradition of betrothal necklaces in the Northern Water Tribe.

Following that, women wear their hair up for as long as they are married. Nobody aside from their S.O. and children is ever supposed to see them with their hair down again as it’s considered too intimate.

These meta asks for writers are pretty cool! Come ask me some things!

[leverage-ot3]

notable moments from The Rundown Job

leverage 5.09

the HEART EYES in parker and eliot’s eyes as they watch hardison crack the code of the vault is my religion

- - - - -

Hardison: Kiss for luck?

Parker: Who needs luck?

confident baby

- - - - -

(Parker begins doing elaborate moves and turns to get through the lasers, quickly reaching the far wall)

Hardison: I never get tired of that

THE HANDSHAKE BETWEEN HARDISON AND ELIOT BC THEY LOVE THEIR BADASS GIRLFRIEND

- - - - -

Parker (opens a case to reveal it is full of diamonds): Oh! Bup-bup.

(Eliot snaps at Parker to get her attention)

Hardison: Eight new schools. Okay, take care, sister Agnes. (hangs up)

(Parker closes the case and gives it to Eliot for mailing as Hardison dials the phone)

Hardison: Hey, Nate, we’re done in D.C. We’re flying back tomorrow. See you.

Parker: They’re so shiny. Couldn’t I have just kept one?

Hardison: Road to redemption, Parker. Just think how good it’s gonna feel when you get that Christmas card from those orphans. Hell, we may even get Eliot to smile.

parker deserves all the shiny things

“the road to redemption” THEY CHANGE TOGETHER

- - - - -

Riley: Why’d you quit, anyway? (pushes button again)

Eliot: Started running with some different people...

(Riley pushes button again but it doesn’t seem to be working)

Eliot: Like a hacker...

(Hardison enters room and nods. Riley pulls a gun from his drawer and shoots toward Eliot, but the gun is empty)

Eliot: And a thief.

(Parker taps on Riley’s head. He turns. She is holding the clip and a bullet from his gun)

Parker: Click. (tosses clip and bullet on table)

eliot “I started running with some different people” spencer loves his partners and I adore that with my whole (whole) heart

- - - - -

Eliot: Good night.

(Parker stuns Riley, who slumps on the desk)

I’m glad they’re enabling her tasering obsession

- - - - -

Eliot (checks his watch): I’m gonna keep her alive. You guys find a way to get her out of here.

Hardison: With what? I…

Eliot (walks away): You stole a Michelangelo with tinfoil and chewing gum. Figure it out!

eliot is like bitch please you’re smarter than this

- - - - -

the way the three of them back up to each other, covering their backs ,,,

- - - - -

Hardison: This is a violation of my constitutional rights.

Vance: You’re Alec Hardison. You cracked the Pentagon servers when you were 12. N.S.A. has a file on you a mile long.

Hardison: Do they? What do they say about me? I hope they gave me a cool nickname.

Vance: Parker here... No file on you, which is...

(Parker appears to be sleeping)

Vance: Is she asleep?

Eliot: She bores easy. What do you got on us?

hardison probably does have a cool nickname

also I LOVE how they still have no clue about parker

+

eliot being like “she bored easy” 🤷🏼‍♀️ the MARRIEDNESS

- - - - -

Hardison: Y-you’re talking about stopping a terrorist attack in an afternoon. We’d need all your intel.

Vance: That truck back at the crime scene... It’s an N.S.A. Mobile response intelligence unit–

Hardison: With the Schneier cryptography system and the j-dam satellite uplink? That... I know nothing about, ‘cause that would be treason and wrong. (to Vance) Are you for real

hardison: I wouldn’t know anything about that because that wouLd Be TrEaSoN

- - - - -

Vance: So, you grab the truck... (moves to sit by Eliot) Hell... Your girlfriend’s already out of her cuffs.

(Parker sits up holding the handcuffs and tosses them to Vance)

...they didn’t deny that parker was eliot’s girlfriend. they didn’t bother to correct him because it is, in fact, true that she is both their girlfriends. in this essay I will-

- - - - -

Agent: No, I can’t let you in the truck.

Hardison: A gigabyte gone... your job, gone.

Agent: Security clearances.

Hardison: You’re not gonna let who...

Eliot: What are we, terrorists? Okay, that was my plan was to come here, show you a real badge that I somehow got, and then bring somebody crazy to break into a secure vehicle? We’re gonna move this down the block. He’s gonna spend about an hour doing spot-checks on databases. I showed you my badge. Man, here, take my badge. (tosses it to Agent) Call it in. I got to deal with this guy

it’s funny because it’s true

- - - - -

Hardison: It’s got every database... N.S.A., CIA, FBI. It’s got hard backdoors into most commercial systems, live feeds into every security camera on the grid. Man, if this wasn’t such a gross violation of our civil liberties, I would be in love right now.

they never stop calling out the government and I’m Here For It™

- - - - -

Parker: Where do we start?

Eliot: We start with getting you two on a plane out of here. You didn’t sign up for this. Trust me.

Hardison: And you? You’re going to handle this by yourself? Come on, she’s a lady, man. She needs the right touch. What you gonna do with your big punching hands... Punch the screens? No.

Parker: We agreed we all change. Better or worse, we change together.

Eliot (after a moment): What do they got on the gunman?

ELIOT JUST WANTS HIS PARTNERS SAFE

also,,, for better or worse, we change together??? BITCH THOSE ARE WEDDING VOWS

- - - - -

Parker: Do you know why you bring a cooler full of ice to a robbery? No? I do. Everything we need to know is in that basement. I’ll drive.

Hardison: Hold on.

Eliot: Exactly.

Hardison: No, hold on. (holds on to table)

Eliot: Oh, you... oh, hell, man (sits down in chair across from Hardison. the van horn honks twice and eliot looks around, fumbling) No seat belts up in this thing- (looks at Hardison) d-do you got a seat belt?

Hardison: No, uh-uh, hold the wall (holds the wall)

eliot and hardison being exhausted boyfriends at parker’s reckless driving, I love this song

- - - - -

Parker: How do you lose track of a whole laboratory?

Eliot: There’s over 200 tons of uranium missing from the United States nuclear storage.

Hardison: The air force lost a hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia.

Eliot: Countries are big things, Parker. A lot of secrets slip through the cracks.

wow I love knowing these things and having to live with it

- - - - -

Hardison: The Spanish flu killed 50 million people during World War I, and now somebody’s got it. (opens door)

Parker: Look, we can do this. Just treat it like any another job.

Hardison: This isn’t just any other job.

Eliot: All right, all right. Stay focused.

Hardison: I focused! That bug in there killed 50 million people! 50! And that was when the population was lower.

Parker: Now?

Hardison: Now? 150 million people. 150 million dead. Hey, we’re thieves, man, and we’re good at what we do, but this is way, way out of our league. And you expect us to go catch some psycho with a city killer? A country killer?

Eliot: You scared?

Hardison: You’re damn right.

(Hardison turns to enter the truck but Eliot grabs his wrist, holding him back)

Eliot: I’m not. I got the best thief And the smartest guy I know chasing this guy.

(Hardison looks at Parker, but Eliot grabs his head and pulls him back)

Eliot: Hey, listen to me. You’re smartest man I’ve ever known, Hardison. I need that brain to get me to him. ‘Cause you know if I lay my hands on him, it’s done. Get me to him. (lets Hardison go)

tHe WaY hE gRaBs HaRdiSoN’S fACE

eliot knows hardison is spiraling but he also knows how to get him out of it because he knows hardison like the back of his hand and knows how to get through to him

THEY LOVE EACH OTHER

- - - - -

there are so many good ot3 shots in this episode it brings me so much joy

- - - - -

parker climbs hardison like a T R E E to turn off that detonator as eliot provides counterbalance

- - - - -

Eliot: Did it work?

Hardison: I... I don’t know. I’m trying to get the phone speaker.

Vance (on phone): Move, move, move! Get to cover! Pull everyone back to the perimeter!

Eliot: Ohh! My boy! (hugs Hardison) That is what I’m talking about!

tHe HuG, yOuR hOnOR

- - - - -

they really be playing grand theft auto in this one

- - - - -

(Udall fires toward the trio and they dive for cover. Eliot and Parker look at each other and nod. Parker looks at Hardison)

Parker: For luck.

(Parker kisses Hardison, then she and Eliot nod at each other. Parker grabs the briefcase and runs off the train while Eliot runs toward Udall. Hardison goes after Parker, and Udall shoots Eliot in the leg. Eliot reaches Udall and punches him, knocking him out. Hardison continues after Parker, who stops and opens the briefcase)

F O R L U C K

also high key the look parker and eliot share? it had the same vibes as “we do the things that they can’t, won’t”

+

parker high key kissing hardison “for luck” but also kissing him because eliot can’t

- - - - -

Hardison: Yeah. Yeah, that’ll do... that’ll do it. (he pulls her into his arms) Don’t do that to me. I can’t lose you. Do you understand? I can’t lose you. Don’t scare me like that.

Parker: Yeah.

Hardison: I can’t

he loves her so, so much

- - - - -

Vance: Promise you’ll at least consider working with us again.

Eliot: I work with them now.

Vance: Honor among thieves?

Eliot: Something like that. (walks away)

something like that,,, HE LOVES THEM, YOUR HONOR

- - - - -

Vance: World can always use some more good guys.

Parker: Yeah, well, too bad we’re the bad guys

smh, “sometimes the bad guys are the best good guys”

- - - - -

Parker: You’re shot. You should go to the hospital.

Eliot: I don’t do hospitals. (drops crutch)

Hardison: I told you. He takes getting shot very lightly

he drops his crutch to lean on parker and hardison THIS IS NOT A DRILL

- - - - -

after watching this episode, I agree with y’all wholeheartedly that this was an ot3 GOLDMINE

edit: also, notice how much is written in pink (the colorcode for ot3 notes and meta). like, more than half of it. because LITERALLY ALL OF THIS IS OT3 MATERIAL

[tfw-no-tennis]

ani....morphs.....

ok so picking up after the david trilogy, which hit hard as FUCK, we have book 23, which basically was a semi truck that ran over my corpse, jesus christ, they really followed up the david trilogy w/all that....

23 was so so good and also painful. its the culmination of a lot of tobias’s characterization in the series thus far and also we finally get the reveal we’ve been waiting for about elfangor....ooooh man 

and there was a lot of painful stuff in this book but the worst imo was tobias wondering if it were possible that somebody wanted him and would take care of him, only to have it all come crashing down in the worst way when it turned out aria was visser three in morph, ouch. 

that was so brutal augh. and when he figured it out and just crash landed and kept thinking about how he wanted to die and how he was stupid to think he could have a home...bro get these kids some THERAPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

so yeah that book was absolutely brutal but also so good...and it further fleshed out the animorphs working as a near-flawless team, w/the whole setup of tobias meeting w/the lawyer being so airtight and well-planned 

also more free hork bajir!! its cool that there's stuff happening w/them offscreen, I like that 

I literally had to take a break from reading the books bc the david triology + 23 was like so much, and also bc the olympics were on and all my time got dedicated to watching those, but then I opened 24, not sure what to expect, and BAM it was the helmacrons lmaoooo

I don't even remember the helmacrons but ig a lot of people hate them? lmao so that whole reputation preceded the book and I was like oh wow time for a change in tone

which wasn't wrong but also I liked that book?? I was never bored, even tho the whole thing was patently ridiculous and also had very little bearing on the overarching story

but I think it would be a standout if it were a TV episode w/a good budget - the visuals were amazing even in text, and I can imagine all the cool shrinking/growing/cellular stuff would be WICKED cool visually (ideally 2d animation but an ant man-esque live action adaptation wouldn't be terrible if they had the budget for it)

whatever let me dream. so yeah I didn't hate the helmacron book even tho the helmacrons themselves were...sure something. lmao I think they come back? that should be interesting

next book is the arctic one, we have yet another alien of the week style adventure - I liked this one too, it felt like more plot-y stuff happened since they destroyed the base, and marco’s POV is always fun 

I do find it funny/interesting how sometimes when the animorphs do something - like in this book, destroying that base in the arctic - it doesn't really seem to impact the yeerks much/it doesn't get brought up much after that. and then other things like them destroying the ground-based kandrona get mentioned a lot (that example is understandable tho bc that WAS a big deal). its just hilarious to me how blowing up entire building complexes has become so routine that it isn’t even worth mentioning at this point

Also I adore when they meet other random people/kids and are chill w/them, like w/that kid they met in the rain forest earlier on w/the time travel 

the descriptions of the brutally cold weather were great. I hate the cold so I was like oof this is a nightmare lmao

also ig that was the first ghostwritten book and I did kinda notice it was slightly different than usual? maybe? I could be imagining it tho 

okay but book 26 tho...BOOK 26. bruh 

that was SO good and I really didn’t know what to expect - but when we finally revisited Jake’s dream w/crayak I knew it was gonna be good (but I didn’t expect it to be a chess game war epic..!)

basically I loved it. SUCH a good Jake book - I really appreciate his character now as opposed to when I was 10 and often overlooked him (sorry jake).

similarly, when I was a kid and read these I sympathized a lot w/the chee and felt bad for them towards the end of the series when they had to get more involved in the war (genuinely don’t remember what they even do but ik I felt bad) 

but now I've basically 180′d and I'm like damn those chee sure are hypocrites huh. 

like they could solve So many of the animorphs problems but their stringent adherence to nonviolence leads to them actively getting in the animorphs way sometimes? and obviously pacifism is a complicated topic, but in this case it also intersect w/the whole ‘child soldier’ thing, and as beings who are insanely old and wise, the chee probably shouldn't just leave all the dirty work to a bunch of literal middle schoolers

aaaaanyways. there’s so much I love about this book. the iskoort! they were sure something. and the ‘plot twist’ that they are actually 2 beings, the Isk and the Yoort - and the Yoort are essentially Yeerks - that slapped. the symbiosis of it all! 

I loved the part where they all realize what this means, that this is why Crayak wants the iskoort destoryed - because someday the yeerks might come across them and realize parasitism is not the only way. I love it! 

alas I don’t recall the iskoort returning in the story (but also my memory is terrible so who knows?) but still that would be cool

basically I feel like this is the book where Jake Truly comes into his own as a leader, in every sense. he outmaneuvers Crayak, and even the ellimist, who’s yanking them around in his own way

the scene where jake shoves the howler off the cliff and jumps off and morphs and acquires the howler...that was fantastic and tense. 

also the murder is definitely becoming more overt. I mean, it has been for a while, but it isn’t really pointed out as much anymore. oof

more on the chee - as Jake points out in this book, and other characters point out in other books - the chee could have saved the pemalites, but instead just stood by while their creators were slaughtered. on the other hand, jake says, what do the chee do AFTER they’ve killed the howlers - where to point them next? when is the end of their violence? 

buuuuut also standing by while atrocities occur is pretty damning, as is frequently mentioned in this series - from the very beginning, when marco initially doesn’t want to get involved in the war at all, and the other animorphs basically tell him that turning his back on the war and acting like he doesn’t even know it’s happening would be immoral and cowardly (which imo this reaction helps to push marco in the direction he ends up going, but I digress) - this topic comes up again in 19 when cassie quits the team and rachel is upset bc she sees it as cassie elevating her own feelings above the greater good (as in, as long as cassie feels good about how she acts, it doesn’t matter how much preventable evil the yeerks are committing while she turns away). etc etc. but that’s essentially what’s happening w/the chee - even tho they help w/intel, the lack of any sort of Action on their part means that they’re essentially allowing awful things to happen when they could prevent them. this is rambly but basically...animorphs deals so much in grey areas, and the chee are noticeably black and white in their actions, despite falling, in a meta sense, in an extremely grey area. its such good, thought provoking writing!

anywayssss I keep talking about the chee lmao what else was there. oh YEAH jake and cassie kissed for the first time awww that was super cute 

and ofc immediately marco teases them as asks jake if he’s gonna kiss him next, and all I can say is...marco is a bicon 

also I love the background worldbuilding w/the iskoort, how they have all these groups and guilds and stuff - its not dwelled on much, which actually works really well to give the world/species a sense of lived-in realness 

okay oh man and the reveal at the end that the howlers were just like...children who thought the whole thing was a game...AUGHH man that’s sooo fucked 

like, when jake morphs the howler and has rachel ready to knock him down in grizzly morph if he gets out of control due to the howler’s murderous instincts, and he morphs to find that the howler is...playful, like a dolphin morph. SUCH a good fucked up sense of dawning horror there 

and the fact that as far as I can tell the chee KNEW this, but wanted revenge anyways, so they let the animorphs assume that the howlers were Evil On Purpose

also I love smaller moments, like jake seeing that ax is ashamed for briefly running away during one battle w/the howlers, and then entrusts him w/an important task bc he knows that ax will see that as redemption - and when everyone thought jake was dead and were so happy when he wasn't (they all love each other so much im gonna cry about these child soldiers augh)

basically that book was so good

man one thing I absolutely love is that the longer the series goes on the more obvious it is that andalites, despite inventing morphing technology, barely use it themselves 

like, most of the andalite characters we see barely morph. its kind of a last resort to them, as they’re already plenty dangerous in their regular forms 

meanwhile for the animorphs, that’s all they have to fight with. that’s their only weapons against the yeerks, and its so fun to see them use the power in so many varied ways, and so creatively, while the andalites have barely scratched the surface of their own technology

its also interesting to contrast against the yeerks who start out w/absolutely no technology, and the andalites share some but not all of their technology w/them...its too bad that morphing technology was just starting out cause that would’ve been interesting

like imo a lot of the conflict w/the yeerks could’ve been avoided if they could just nothlit into better forms - of course, there’d still be plenty of yeerks who want to go start wars or w/e, just like pretty much any species in the series, but a lot of yeerks would probably be like ‘yeah I'm good’ and just chill out as nothlits

also people online love to talk about how humans are alienfuckers and would definitely have sex w/sentient aliens and whatnot, and while I'm not saying that's untrue, its just funny bc in animorphs the truest alienfuckers are definitely the andalites

as of the hork-bajir chronicles, we now have a second instance of an andalite morphing another species to be in an inter-species alien romance (and eventually have kids) 

speaking of, I don’t think I’ve talked abt the hork bajir chronicles yet??? even tho I read it a while ago lmao 

HBC was great...I honestly haven’t really run into an animorphs book I’ve actually disliked at this point, I’m sure it’ll come w/all the ghostwriting and whatnot, but I’ve liked at least some aspects of every book

anyways HBC was great, and it’s funny bc I remember that I read this book as a kid, and yet rereading it now I didn’t remember a single bit of it lmaooo

I really liked the framing device of the free hork bajir telling this story to tobias. I also liked how we know from the beginning that this story wont have a happy ending - we know all the hork bajir end up enslaved by the yeerks, but it’s still somehow hopeful at the end? I think this is largely due to the framing device tbh. 

also I love toby, and I love that the First free hork bajir named their kid after tobias ;_; 

and oooh mannn I LOVED the different POVs from this book. all the characters were so interesting! aldrea was fascinating - I really like the increasingly negative view of the andalites that the readers are getting, all while maintaining the sense that they aren’t like, actively evil, just that they have their issues - like aldrea’s arrogance, and the general andalite arrogance which lead to the loss of the hork bajir. also, who knew andalites had their own brand of sexism? Ls

I did like getting a female andalite tho, that was cool. and dak was really cool, he was such a good, compassionate character who was able to maintain his morals in an interesting way throughout the story

and VISSER THREE...or should I say esplin 9466, because he’s not visser 3 yet...getting his ‘origin story’ was excellent - I really like how we’re learning about visser 3 backwards - we start off the series w/him as the main villain, and he’s campy and menacing, and then we see him in the andalite chronicles as a power-hungry sub-visser trying to climb the ranks and eventually getting alloran as a host, and then back even further here, w/the start of his focus on the andalites and the beginning of his ambition. its been very cool and interesting to see

plus, the beginning of the yeerks as we know them! seerow! alloran! it’s a party and nobody is having a good time, except for some of the yeerks. 

I like how it’s pretty obvious that the andalites are well-meaning with their interactions w/the yeerks, but go about it the wrong way - they give them enough technology that the yeerks realize there’s a whole world out there to experience, and then they blockade the yeerks on their planet and tell them they can’t leave. nnnnot the best approach imo

again, as I said above, I’m interested in how things could’ve gone if the andalites had given the yeerks morphing technology early on - could a lot of the conflict have been avoided, or would it have been worse? the yeerks seem pretty evil in this book, immediately jumping to enslave anyone they can. otoh we hear from esplin that not all yeerks like having host bodies, and find it overwhelming, preferring to swim around in the yeerk pool as a slug - I assume as host bodies became more available this type of thinking was probably stamped out in yeerk society or w/e, but there are a lot of interesting what-ifs in the situation 

I loved the scene where esplin first experiences having a host, and immediately knows he can’t go back. there are a bunch of great sensory descriptions, and it’s a nice scene to pinpoint as a foundational moment for the visser three in the current story, who spent a lot of time and energy getting what he sees as the best possible host body, an andalite

I find it interesting how much visser three clearly respects the andalites, even while constantly deriding them. and you can see the origins of that here as he immediately focuses in on the andalites, working to become an expert on them in order to make himself useful enough to move thru the ranks

another thing I like is how esplin seems a lot more crafty and ambitious than the visser three from modern times - I would guess that reaching his goal (andalite host body) and being given all that power was detrimental, playing on his weaknesses instead of his strengths. basically, I don’t think it’s ooc or anything, I can see how HBC-esplin became animorphs-esplin, especially w/TAC in between

as for seerow...poor dude. you really do have to feel for him, because you get the sense he really did just want to be kind to the yeerks, but it was borne from a place of pity, and he (and the other andalites) consistently held too much power over the yeerks for the species relations to ever be truly equal and functional 

AUGH I have so many thoughts about alien space politics. omg. I need to talk about the actual story lmao

so yeah I also feel for aldrea, she had a rough time, watching her entire family die and being thrown into a hopeless war

and then the andalite council or w/e not listening to her bc she's a girl AND seerow’s daughter...oof

also, I really really liked the running theme of the andalites - specifically aldrea - looking down on the hork bajir as ‘simple’ and constantly underestimating them, especially dak

and I like how this is portrayed as a bad attitude for aldrea to have, and she still remains and interesting and sympathetic character even while having obvious flaws. it’s about being 3-dimensional baby!

and oh man I love that dak realizes that aldrea looks down on him, and his entire species, but he can see that that’s how the andalites are, and it all connects back to the beginning of the story w/the yeerks, bc the andalites looked down on the yeerks and treated them with pity and kept them pinned under their proverbial thumb ‘for their own good’ and look how that turned out 

but dak is wise and kind enough to not hate aldrea for this, even acknowledging when she’s using him, but not pushing her away because he recognizes good in her too - and she ends up changing, partially because of his faith in her

and I feel like it can all be compared to that scenario of like - a hypothetical creature that lives in a 2D world suddenly being thrust into a 3D world, and comprehending what its seeing, and understanding that there’s so much more out there outside of the flat lines of its world - and then its dropped back into 2D-land with the knowledge of all the stuff its missing out on, and no way to get back to it or explain it to anybody else

I loooove that ‘trope’ or w/e you wanna call it, and it’s done beautifully here w/the yeerks - whos the say they wouldn't have been fine in their pool swimming around; as esplin said, a lot of the yeerks were terrified of having a host, it was only from the andalites’ perspective that their lives were sad and pitiful, and the andalites showed them what the world could be like, and then said ‘no, you can’t travel the stars like we do, you have to stay here on your planet and do what we say.’

and then again, w/the hork bajir - dak talks about how, even though he drinks up the knowledge that aldrea gives him, in the end it might have been better to just have lived peacefully, not knowing what was in the sky or the Deep - as aldrea says: “It was too late for Dak: he knew that the stars were not flowers.” 

plus the hork bajir having to go from a completely peaceful species who don’t even understand the concept of violence, to a bunch of soldiers fighting a war...oof 

basically everyone in this story uses the hork bajir. the yeerks use them as hosts, the andalites use their planet as a convenient place to dump seerow and then take their sweet time coming to help, and the arn created them as means to stabilize the planet, but block them off from their society and refuse to help when the yeerks come

like, the arn modifying themselves to be un-infestable by the yeerks and then being enslaved for physical labor instead? oof guys. if they had teamed up w/the hork bajir resistance things might have gone better, but probably not 

more on aldrea - throughout the story I was always thinking ‘how am I supposed to see her? as a good person, or as a bad person?’ 

as a POV character, especially a ‘good guy’ andalite, you just start off automatically thinking of her as a good person, but as the story goes on, she starts getting lost in revenge and begins using dak and the hork bajir, and you’re left wondering if this is a story about her slide into darkness, and then towards the end of the story her character development culminates in her making the decision to stay w/the hork bajir, and the be with dak, and that’s about when I went ‘ohhh right this is animorphs so every character is pretty much gonna be grey’

I feel like that moral grey-ness was on full display w/aldrea, and I really enjoyed that. I love so much when characters who are good do bad things, for good or bad reasons, especially in media like animorphs that’s aimed at kids. it’s so compelling. 

oof, and the ending when aldrea convinces dak to mobilize the hork bajir and teach them violence...and dak asks her if she’s ever killed another andalite, and she’s horrified, and says of course she hasn’t, and he says that that’s what she’s asking him, and all the hork bajir, to do - to kill their own people, even if they are being controlled by the yeerks. biiiig oof. I love that dak can keep up w/aldrea and her andalite supremacy attitude - it seems that the non-andalite characters who get along best w/the andalites are the ones who wont take their bs 

what else happened....oh my god how could I forget about alloran, and his quantum virus. oooof. I like how we find out about alloran in parallel to visser three, in the same backwards way - in animorphs he’s the tragic host of visser three, in TAC he’s the disgraced but still semi-respected war-prince who becomes the first ever andalite controller, and here he’s the guy who decides to commit some war crimes because, hey, we haven’t tried that yet 

but yeah that was fucked up, I love it. I’ve said it before I think but I like that alloran isn’t some perfect martyr tragically taken by the yeerks - it’s a lot more compelling that he’s a very flawed person who was taken as a controller partially due to his own bloodthirstiness. 

but yeah, the part where aldrea morphs alloran and ‘sneaks’ into that room was great. aldrea’s dedication to disposing of the virus is a great indicator of her character development - it really feels like the straw that broke the camels back w/re: to the andalites not being what she thought they were, w/their tardiness coming to help the hork bajir planet and the way her father was treated being the precursors to this realization. it all culminates nicely in aldrea saying ‘fuck this actually’ and nothlit-ing into a hork bajir.

and it’s really tragic but realistic that even though aldrea and dak end up seeing eye to eye at the end and getting together, the virus ends up being released anyways (and fails in its objective to stop the yeerks from using the hork bajir - the whole thing was p much a lose-lose situation oof), and aldrea and dak still die fighting a hopeless war 

but then we have the free hork bajir on earth, including toby, who, like tobias, has andalite ancestry, but no DNA to show for it - I like that they have that connection as well as tobias being her namesake

so yeah I enjoyed that one and its many-layered themes

WOW this got long uuuuuhhh ok I think i’ll leave this one off here. at the time I’m actually finishing the writing and editing, I’m on book 35 lol so I have some backlogging to do. never fear, I have a lot to say....

[popculturebuffet]

Porky Pig Black and White Birthday Special!

H-h-hello you happy people! And it’s time for my first birthday special for  Looney Tune! While I covered some with Tex’s birthday last week, this is the first of these specials i’ve done to cover one of their stars.. and it’s apporirate it starts with their first big one: Porky Pig! 

Yes for those of you who didn’t know, and until a few months ago that included me turns out Porky wasn’t always a second banana who still had an iconic habit of closing out shorts with his signature “T-t-that’s all folks!’. He was Warner Bros first big star and mascot. Like Daffy would do in Porky’s own shorts he started out  as a sidekick in shorts for Beans the Cat

No one Brak, that’s why eventually Beans, who was a diet Mickey outside of his first short, which we’ll get to in a moment, got the boot while the stuttering adorable pig got the starring role instead. Porky was the studio’s big headliner for years and years.. but most wouldn’t know it. Outside of Porky in Wackyland, none of his shorts without Daffy or Sylvester really got a lot of play on Cartoon Network or other repackages, likely because most were black and white and for whatever reason they didn’t mix them in. But after seeing oh so many in the menu for Looney Tunes on max I was super curious, and thus super excited for this day to come so I could take a look and see how they held up, holding off watching them so they’d be fresh. And outside of three shorts: his first appearance, one suggested by my friend Blah and one picked by my Patreon Emma, as one of the perks for my patreons is getting to pick a cartoon when I do one of these 10 cartoon specials, I just went with my gut, what sounded interesting or what have you, avoidnig the ones where he was Daffy’s sidekick and what not to focus soley on porky hamself to see how he stacked up alone. 

How’d it turn out? Well join me after the cut for a nice pile of ham, bacon, sausage and other pork products as we dig into everyone’s favorite pig. Well almost everyone I have my own favorites. 

Yes yes you are sweetie. Reviews of 10 Porky Shorts, all but one in black and white, under the cut.  Trigger warning: One of these shorts involves attempted suicide Yes really. So if that’s a trigger for you, please avoid this review entirely or if you want to just avoid that specific entry, the one on Porky’s romance. Thank you. 

1. I Haven’t Got A Hat (1935): Bope A Dope A Dope Dope

As I mentioned Pre-Porky, Warner didn’t have a star to compete with Disney, and given Disney was so character based, and a lot of these shorts were coming out at the same time Disney was spinning Donald off into his own series giving them TWO huge stars, it was clear Warner needed at least one to complete. So they came up with a plan: a knock off of Our Gang, aka what would later be dubbed The Little Rascals, starring a bunch of animal kids to see if one or all caught on. As you can tell one did but as the intro made clear it took them a few shorts to realize it. 

The short is about a school recital to raise money for the teachers, just in case you thought them being underpayed was a new thing. So it’s really an excuse for four diffrent segments of hyjinks following a diffrent kid or kids each. Our first is the reason this one is here, porky’s introductoin where he stutters, and struggles throught he midnight ride of paul revere. It’s alright mostly do to his animated actions like the above seen simulating hi mriding his horse. Not bad but like a lot of Porky jokes it relies on his stutter which wasn’t funny to me as a kid or now as an adult, and comes off pretty inesnitive in hindsight, especially as the stutter was a medical condition of his voice actor that forced him to retire and be replaced by Mel Blanc after “Porky’s Romance”, which we’ll get to.

The other three bits are likewise decent: Kitty, a small cat, nervously makes her way through mary had a little lamb next, whic is fine enough. My faviorite is after here, Ham and Ecks, two puppies performing the title number, which is mostly funny because they sing like normal kidddies.. except after saying the title name with Ecks suddenly going in very low. it’s not bad. 

Finally we have Beans and Oliver Owl. Beans wants to get back at Oliver for not sharing Candy so he puts a dog and cat in his piano. It’s colossal, it’ stupendous.. it’s mediocre! As is the whole short, not bad bits, but only the title track is super memorable. It is easy to see why Porky stuck out the most though with his stutter and neat design. As mentioned it would take warner a few shorts to realize his appeal but once he did he was off to the raises and the next three shorts are all from the very next year. 

2. The Blow Out (1936): Insert Silly Jig Music Here

This one is simple but it works: A mad bomber, what bombs in broad daylight, is setting up time bombs and being hammy. Meanwhile Porky, whose still a kid in this one, wants a big old soda float and only has half the money, but after helping a guy pick up his cane on relflex, starts helping people pick up their items. You can see where this is going and the climax is damn fun as you’d expect from Tex Avery. The runner of Porky doing a silly little dance with a catchy musical sting as he trops the pennies he gets in his pocket is also pretty neat. Not the best he’s done, given I did a whole birthday special last week he’d get much better, but still some fun silly stuff. 

3. Plane Dippy (1936): Spin It! Even better, with a simple premise: Porky joins the army, we get some hyjinks as he does the tests and then he’s assigned to dust a remote plane that Kitty ends up accidently directing when talking to her dog. There’s some really fun screwball stuff here, though the ending is a bit weak, everything else is pretty strong. The pattern for the last three holds: not the best thing i’ve seen from Disney, Warner or MGM, but pretty neat. 

4. Porky In The North Woods (1936): Turtle Paddlin

This one’s a disney style picture as Porky sets up an animal refuge, only for an egotistical hunter to outright ignore his signs and presumed legal right and set up traps then try and kill Porky for daring to. undo his traps.. in an area outright labeled as an animal sanctuary. I’d say just hunt somewhere else but as the modern republican party has proven Stubborn assholes afraid of change won’t just go away or obey the law. The animals return Porky’s kindness by kicking hte guys ass, the best bit being some turtles grabbing some paddles and giving him what for, to the point I screencapped that bit specically.

But other than the Climax it’s just alright, but the hammy villian does help elevate this one. 

5. Porky’s Romance: I made a Huge Mistake

This one was one I picked out I knew wasn’t on Max but curious about Petunia’s first apperance, I added it to the rotation anyway. 

I’m not sugarcoating it because this short dosen’t deserve it: This is the worst of the shorts i’m covering here today. It is pure awful distlend into 7 LONG minutes. 

As some of you may recall, back when I did my first shortravaganza for Donald Ducks birthdy, I reviewed Donald’s Diary, the last Daisy short and one with some pretty cute Donsy stuff but ends with him reconsidering proposal like a jackass because he asasumes marriage will be terrible and she’ll turn abusive and “GASP” make him do chores like a responsible partner. It’s one half a good short, and one half a really bad short. 

You want to see the truly terrible version of that done years earlier, on less of a budget and only satisfying at hte very end? No. Well I didn’t either but that’s what I got. The short starts okay, with a bit introducing Petunia in am eta way. But the short itself after that little meta bit?

The short has Porky lovingly picking out choclates and a ring for Petunia. Petunia in this short.. is a horrible monster who dismisses him out of hand and only lets him court her to get his choclate, her dog barks at him trying to get some, so their all assholes, and she outright laughs at his proposal. 

It’s here where I needed a trigger warning, as Porky tries to kill himself over it. So we have a woman using a prospective partner for finacials and her real intentions driving him to suicide. I.. why would you put this in here. How is this funny? or entertaining? Or anything I want to watch in a looney tune? I don’t want to watch Porky get depressed and try and hang himself. No one wants that and if you do, please get some help. 

He hten has a dream, hence the comparison, of an awful wedded life with Petunia where he does everything, and she GASPS puts on weight.. even though...

He wakes up, finds Petunia likes him now but leaves, takes the choclates and kicks the dog. Haha he’s sitll not a good person. 

As you can tell, this short is throughly miserable. It’s not funny, it’s not tearjerking, it uses sucicide for some reason and takes a dark tone, and is VERY sexist saying “Well women be like this you know” it feels like. It also makes VERY light of domestic abuse, and while that was the style at the time it dosen’t make it any better. Tackling either suicide or domestic abuse is fine, their very important issues.. but don’t put them in your looney tune, for god’s sake. I do not get the tone they were going for but I hate it. I HATE THIS ONE. Do not watch it it bad. Let’s please move on. 

6. Porky’s Garden (1937): It’s A Me! An Itallian Sterotype!

My good friend Emma, whose now one of my patreons, picked this one mostly because it popped up on youtube when she did a youtube search. ironically she herself is itallian and i’m 100% convinced she had no idea what this cartoon contained: Porky versus an itallian sterotype for a county fair prize. Now is this the worst thing Looney Tunes has done? Nope the censored eleven exist, Porky’s Romance exists and Loontics unleashed exists, so i’ts not the worst but it’s still just very cringe inducing that the only joke the guy has is “laugh at the evil foreigners funny accent” It’s not very good, not worht your time, and has weird popeye joke for some reason. 

7. The Case of the Stuttering Pig (1937): The Creampuff in the Third Row This one could’ve been done for Halloween, as Porky deals with a lawyer turned into a monster stalking him and Petunia.. whose possibly his sister here which somehow makes Porky’s romance even worse but given the unviersal adaptor cast of the looney tunes, i’m assuming it wasn’t. That short is horrible enough own without that little chesnut. The short is dripping with atmosphere but on the whole is just okay, though the runner about the villain insulting a guy in row three only for that guy to get even at the end and save the pigs is pretty great not going to lie. 

8. What Price, Porky? (1938): Daffy!

I purposefully chose not to have as little of other looney tunes as possible, in order to make this Porky’s day. As you can tell for the most part that’s been a mistake but even the one with Daffy is just okay, but at least has a creative premise. Porky is a farmer, a surprisingly common theme, and some local ducks are stealing his Chicken’s corn. So while he tries to ask them nicely not to, the general, played by daffy, attacks. Sadly he’s barely in it but we do get some neat gags and it’s far more of a ride than the last few. The ending is bad, the ducks win despite being the antagonists, but still pretty fun. Thankfully we’ll be getting more Daffy in April. 

9. Porky’s Hare Hunt: Halfway To Bugs

As you can tell this day ended up being kind of a disapointment: Porky just isn’t the most intresting leading man and ended up working better as a straight man.  I still genuinely love the character, but it’s clear there was only so much you could do with him in the lead and by the end here, he was either being sidelined so Chuck Jones could do something else like the last one or made the foil to someone goofier often daffy but our last two, and today’s two best, this one being secon dbest, prove whyt hey’ve stuck to that since. 

This one has him hunting a Rabbit whose a bit nuts and utterly delightful, a prottype for bugs.. and for woody woodpecker, whose va he shared, and Screwball Squirreel. THANKS...FOR...THAT... but unlike screwy, this rabbit at least is being hunted, so we get a fun breezy short with some goofy antics and a loveable protgangsit going up against Porky as the antagonist. Good stuff. 

10. Porky in Wackyland: Ending on a High

As I said this ended up being kind of a slog. I wanted to honor Porky by showing his solo career and instead found it dated with a few good shorts.. but only a few really held a candle to the disney stuff going on at the time or the warner stuff to come later like Porky’s Hare Hunt and the Blow Out. Otherwise it’s pretty standard outside of the previous entry.. and there’s only one true masterpiece. This one. Porky in Wackland. 

Porky in Wackland is just Bob Clampett going nuts for 7 minutes and it’s glorious to watch. Porky is hutning for the last Dodo and ends up in the utterly deranged and wonderous wacky land. The only bit that does not work in this entire 7 minute orgy of weirdness is a refrence to the jazz singer with a creature screaming mammy that’s a slight caracture of a black person. I’ve seen much worse but i’ts still eesh. But unlike some shorts, that dosen’t slow it down for long and it’s almost etnirely just fun, utterly batshit stuff and a great chase with the dodo himself at the end and one hell of a warner brothers logo gag. Check this one out, it’s admired for a reason. Tremendous stuff. Should be on max with.. that bit.. edited out. 

So that was a look into Porky’s solo career and yeah, I can see why he’s better as a straight man. I still love the guy though and he has lasted as long as his brothers while others from this time were forgotten> He’s still a good character.. he’s just better paired with Daffy or someone else, part of a team. As a solo act.. he’s just okay but as part of a group.. he’s sensational. 

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