#one of the few things I actually like about BD2

[gisellelx]

Twilight Advent, Day 16

Masterpost/Prompts

Dec. 16 - Which non-Cullen vampire does Emmett like best?

For once, this headcanon is as short and sweet as it is strong for me:

Emmett and Garrett love hanging out, bro-ing it up, doing feats of strength and, if they come back to the Cullens together, ganging up to mock the ever loving shit out of Carlisle. Garrett was responsible for at least one of Emmett's slip-ups. But on the other hand, meeting Garrett for the first time, and seeing how Carlisle was genuinely friends with him allowed Emmett to really finally realize that Carlisle means it when he says that his family members are free to go their own way and not follow his lifestyle.

[be4tmblr]

More lies from the dreaded tabs

I know, I know...it's been like FOREVER since I've blogged, and I'm sorry to all of my regular readers! As of late, I've been trying to get ready for my big move to a new home, and I haven't been following much of the latest about Rob and Kristen. I know that Kristen will be presenting an award at the Oscars, and I know more tabloid rumors are being told (what else is new, right?).

I just had a quick thought that I wanted to share with all of you about the most recent rumor I've read about. People are still claiming that Rob and Kristen are only together for PR and that after the BD2 DVD release on March 2nd, they're gonna announce a few weeks later that they're broken up.

Okay...am I the only one who sees the HUGE lie there or do all of you see it, too? It's as plain as the nose on everyone's face! Let me spell it out for those of you who are too blind by your hatred for Rob and/or Kristen, and those of you who are choosing to be illiterate...

"...they're gonna announce a few weeks later that they're broken up."

Since when have they EVER "announced" ANYTHING about their relationship??? And this is what's going around because I read it myself.

LIES LIES AND MORE LIES. And the proof is in the writing!

Just wanted to point that out...and now I'm off to bed because it's late. Have a good night or day (depending on what time zone you're in)!

Oh, another quick thing...I've had the idea to start blogging about something that I tend to have a lot of comments about, and I just wanted to give you all a heads up in case I do decide to start saying something. I figured...this is my blog, I named it "Just My Opinion" for a reason...it's not all about Rob and Kristen (even though I know most of what I've blogged so far has been). I won't tell you what I'll be blogging about, but I will tell you that I actually had started a blog about this before, and I'm thinking of doing it again (I deleted the old account I used at the time).

Okay, NOW I'm off to bed. Goodnight!! 🙂

[adelle-ein]

kind of goes without saying but don’t re/blog this y/y

ya girl has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia and joint hypermobility after years of increasing pain so that's. where we stand now

talked about it intermittently on twitter but that’s why i’ve stopped doing any feh sprite edits or graphic design (started as a “i want to work more on drawing” thing but as my pain got worse it became impossible altogether. ESPECIALLY feh sprites that hurt way too much.) drawing is actually less painful than photoshop stuff, the tablet is easier on my entire body to use than a mouse overall (and yeah i’ve had a fancy orthopedic vertical mouse since last fall, it helped some and made my actual real work job bearable but i just cannot spend as much time click-and-dragging as i did.) writing is super hard and painful as well, although recently i finally found a cheap new desk that isn’t sized for children so typing isn’t quite as agonizing as it was when i was working on that last bd2 fic

anyway yeah i’ve been having chronic pain issues since 2017 and after fighting with many, many doctors and treatments and getting told to go to therapy (already in it!) and accused of being after narcotics a zillion times (never mentioned em!), finally twisted enough arms for a rheumatologist referral and they diagnosed me in about twenty minutes because it’s apparently very obvious to someone who actually knows what they’re doing!

(joint hypermobility in and of itself is benign, but since it went undiagnosed and untreated for so long i’ve apparently developed very bad coping mechanisms and now just sit and move entirely wrong which is amplifying the pain....the more you know.)

i start physical therapy soon so hopefully. idk. less suffering. these are lifelong conditions but all my coping skills are shit i cobbled together in the last few years bc doctors weren’t helping so maybe some professional help will get me back on my feet and better able to like. do things again. we hope!

not a success story but another classic “hey, sometimes you are right about your body and doctors are wrong and you just need to keep tantruming until you find one who listens” story

[volturialice]

i am procrastinating my work by thinking of this completely unrelated question.. but do you have a head canon about how alice's visions work when it comes to getting them i suppose? haven't read the books in a while but i've definitely read fics where they are like a tv channel where she can flip to whoever she chooses and check in on them. i always thought they were a little more random.. but she does say she watches the volturi in the books.. idk that just seems very magic mirror to me.

oof. yeah, you’ve pinpointed one of the major inconsistencies in the books, which is that we never really learn the exact mechanics of alice’s visions, they just work (or don’t work) as the plot demands.

so on the surface, that’s the guideline I use when creating a set of Psychic Vision Rules for fic purposes: what does this plot require? how do I create realistic limits and strike the right balance of verisimilitude without plot-breaking, deus ex machina levels of psychic-ness?

as you pointed out, there are a lot of individual little mechanical things to consider when writing alice’s visions.

#just psychic things

control - how well can alice control her visions? canon gives us…not a lot to go on. we know she can “target” people and “watch their decisions,” as she does with the volturi. but we also know she gets random, even intrusive visions without seeking them out, such as her original vision of jasper or the vision of bella cliff diving, which she was actively trying not to see but saw anyway.

subjects - we know alice can see vampires best and humans pretty well, and that she can’t see werewolves or hybrids at all (unless we go by BD2 movie canon, in which case she can suddenly see both.) but are there rules within those rules? 

fic example: in Call of the Night, a key plot point is that alice can’t deliberately seek out visions of people she hasn’t met yet (though she may still be subject to random involuntary visions of them.)

sensory stuff - we know alice’s visions are, well, visual, and presumably also auditory. but is that all? what other senses, if any, are involved? can she smell, touch, or even taste things in her visions? 

fic example: in Cowboys Have Fangs Too, alice’s visions explicitly do not include smell, touch, or taste.

in Magnolia, they include both smell and touch.

POV - from what point of view does alice experience her visions? is she a fly on the wall, or an invisible audience to what’s happening? if she sees a vision of her future self, does she experience it as herself, in her own body, or does she see herself from the outside like she’s watching a movie?

at least once in canon, alice talks about getting “the angle” of her visions right. what does that mean? who’s to say. you decide!

temporal location - how does alice know when exactly the events in her visions will occur? do they come with invisible timestamps, allowing her to “just know?” does she have to gather clues from the vision itself, like the weather, the location of the sun, or the time as seen on clocks or watches? canon gives us some…confusing answers on this.

in both eclipse and bd, alice knows the exact second that bella will wake up—but we’re never told how.

in bd, alice knows the volturi will come “when the snow sticks to the ground.” was she basing this purely off visual cues from the vision, or does she actually know it’s december 31st and just decided to express it in an obnoxiously poetic fashion ?

external symptoms - what is physically happening to alice as she experiences visions? at least once in canon, she zones out and her eyes unfocus. do these things always happen, or only when she’s concentrating particularly hard? and for how long is she unfocused? if she sees a vision of a ten-minute conversation, has she been zoned out for ten full minutes in the present, or only a few seconds? does she retain any awareness of how much time has passed?

does having a vision impede her senses in the present? in twilight, she’s able to draw the ballet studio as she experiences a vision of it. in new moon, she has visions while driving 100 mph through the italian countryside. are vampire brains just that good at multitasking?

were any of these external symptoms different when she was a human? in some fics, human!alice only experiences visions in her sleep, as dreams. in others, her visions trigger fainting fits or even seizures.

my own headcanons for how alice’s visions work vary WILDLY from fic to fic. I don’t have much in the way of personal preference, because I’ve seen well-executed versions of pretty much every possibility!

what about the rest of you? who’s got specific headcanons for how alice’s visions work?

[baconpal]

Bravely Default and BD2

Here it is, the partially prompted bravely default rant/retrospective/whatever the fuck!

With the announcement and demo of bravely default 2 out now for a bigger market than the original game ever had, I feel that as a massive fan of the original I should put some amount of effort into explaining what the appeal of the original is, why bravely second missed a lot of the appeal, and why bravely default 2 has been very, very worrying so far.

If you care about any of that, come on in and I'll try to actually avoid spoilers this time and make this a more legitimate recommendation of a game than usual.

THE APPEAL OF BRAVELY DEFAULT The games obviously have a beautiful art style, especially when it comes to the backgrounds. Every city is like a painting, a beautifully composed shot that you see from just one direction to give you one very strong impression. While the overworld and dungeons are fully 3d and do not have as strong of an artistic impact, they are still very competent and have good colors and cohesive elements. The character design, including the job outfits, the monsters, and all the villains are just top notch. Simple, evocative designs that make the most of the 3DS' limited hardware and build upon the teams skill in making handheld games look good. (its the same team that did the ff3 remake and 4 heroes of light, which looks absolutely kino on original DS) The music is also consistently excellent, with great use of motifing, a full and varied orchestra, and many good slow paced tracks for most of the non-combat segments. Shit like "Conflict's Chime" being the main battle theme, "Infiltrating Hostile Territory" being a common dungeon theme, and "That person's name is" as the rival boss themes makes even the seemingly repetitive songs a constant joy to listen to.

The story is pretty decent, it's not the best part of the game, and there are definitely some aspects of the story some people loathe, but the characters (specifically ringabel fuckin love him) are pretty good and the make for an enjoyable experience. The side material like D's journal are really well done and integrate into the main narrative well for how tucked away and ignored it is.

The gameplay and systems are also some of the best of any RPG I've played, and I've played far too many. The job system from ff3 and 5 is brought to an even greater depth with the addition of universal job abilities, allowing any character of any job make use of another jobs features to create an endless depth to strategy. The way various jobs can mingle together, and how no job is completely perfect on its own makes for very compelling team composition and unit design. The extensive amount of jobs helps as well for replay value and for assuring that no easy winning strategy is found by all players.

The BP system makes battles take on a very unique pacing as the player and enemies can choose to save up turns or blow them all at once to make more complicated strategies possible, or to make the most of an enemies vulnerabilities. This powerful option gives the player a meaningful way to capitalize on their knowledge of the game, while also allowing them to make truly detrimental mistakes. That may sound not good if you're a fucking baby, but nobody wants an RPG you cant lose, but losing because you fucked up is much better than losing because the enemies are just stronger than you or anything to that effect.

But the single greatest part of bravely defaults, which creates the games wonderful balance and unique design philosophy, is that the player is expected to hit the level cap long before finishing the game. Reaching level 99 should occur somewhere just after the middle of the game, at the point where the player has access to almost every job and has encountered almost every type of threat. Reaching level 99 brings with it a certain security, the implication that from then on, all enemies will also be level 99, and that any failure to defeat an enemy will be a result of a bad strategy or the players own mistakes. The game is not easy, and is certainly intended for veteran final fantasy players used to the games with job systems and changing up your entire party to combat a single encounter. Leveling up is not a slow grind part of the game, as you have a lot of control over the speed and frequency of battles, and it is not difficult to keep up with the games level curve.

The other layer to this unique design is that the game expects you to "cheat", or use strategies that would be overpowered and frowned upon in most other games. Bravely default easily expects you to know or discover strategies such as: applying a status to all enemies and killing every enemy with that status using another spell, cycling a counter move over and over to have a nearly invincible party member, applying a healing attribute to a self-damaging character to get huge damage at little cost, casting reflect and dangerous spells on your own party to bounce them at the enemy, or duplicating a move that does maximum damage 15 times in a row. The game builds all of its encounters with the knowledge that your team will be the maximum level and that you will be using the most vile tactics you can come up with, and the game will do the same. Bosses and even common enemies will employ equally vile tactics using the exact same moves that you have access to, meaning you can learn from your enemies or quickly grasp the enemies strategy through your own experiences. One of the late game dungeons is entirely optional, but involves several fights against parties of 4 just like your, using the same jobs and skills you have gained during the game as a perfect test of your ability to develop counter-strategies, instead of relying on your own overpowered tactics. This type of design is really not something you find in many games due to the prominence of grinding or the lack testing strategies, and it is the most true appeal of bravely default to me.

BRAVELY SECOND EXISTS I GUESS So bravely second, a direct sequel to bravely default, definitely is a video game. It uses the original game as a base to generate more content, but completely misses the appeal of the original, and the new content added makes the experience even less focused. Overall, it's still a fairly alright RPG, but it fails to follow up on bravely default in a meaningful way or to provide as compelling of a gameplay experience. Here's some of the things it fucked up.

The game reuses almost everything the original game had, including the same music, world map, and most of the original's towns and dungeons, while adding a few of it's own. Going through areas you've been before never feels good, and the new areas lack the quality or brevity of the original game, leading to uninteresting areas that overstay their welcome, despite being the only break from repetitively reused content.

This extends to the classes but in an even worse sense. One important trait of the original jobs is that they were not perfect by themselves. While every job provided some useful abilities to be shared with other classes, or provided a good base with which to make a character, no class was without flaws. The new classes in bravely second are a lot of the opposite, they are closed loops that think of everything they could have to make a good standalone character. The 4 starter classes you get in bravely second are all brand new, and there's almost no reason to use any class besides those 4 as they are just insanely good. The priest and magician specifically augment magic in a way that makes spells infinity scalable into the end game, completely trampling on any other magic classes territory without needing the extra effort of grinding a new class out. Many of the new job concepts are actually really interesting, like going back in time to return to a healthier state, or a class that changes the stats and attributes of all units in a battle, allowing for all new kinds of strategies; but these classes lack any opportunity to be used to their full potential since they don't mesh well with other jobs and are limited by their self-centered design.

Another completely missed aspect of the original is the level curve discussed before. Bravely second only really requires you get somewhere in the ballpark of level 60-70 to comfortably beat the final boss, and getting too leveled up is really hard to avoid if you are plan to try out various jobs.

Second also fails to account for how many incredibly strong strategies the player can come up with, and even introduces some of its own strategies that it has no way to counteract, such as halfsies (the first skill the first class gets) pretty much splitting the game in two by tripling the value of items like phoenix downs, and allowing for fool-proof strategies by making 1 character focus entirely on defense, effectively making the party unkillable. Essentially, if you play second after having played the original (like any sane person would) then you will absolutely destroy the game with no sense of satisfaction.

The story is also a large step down, enough to become an annoyance, as the writing style changes to a strange romantic comedy situation with, for lack of a better term please forgive my sin, anime writing, but like bad anime writing, ya know the kind of shit that makes people write off all anime cus a lot of it is awkward and unpleasant to listen to. The story tries to mess with some big concepts like "what if new game + was a real thing???" and time travel and shit like that but it doesn't mesh with the tone the rest of the game has and that tone doesn't mesh with the world or art style and it's just a mess.

BRAVELY DEFAULT 2 SEEMS KINDA POOPIE SO FAR So unfortunately, the big appeal of bravely default being part of it's end game makes it hard to judge how 2 is gonna go given we only have a demo of the beginning, but given that the original team behind bravely default has slowly been stripped out of the series as it goes on, the outlook is bleek.

Most immediately obvious is that the artstyle has made a horrible transition from handheld to console, somehow even worse than pokemon. The areas are all fully 3d and lack the style or compositional excellence of bravely default, and the outside environment look like asset store products. The small proportioned characters with simple features to be readable on a small screen have been replaced with identically proportioned characters with excessive detail and ugly features, and look horrible up close on a big screen. Only the negatives of the art style have made it over, and everything good has been made unsavory. The character and enemy design overall is much worse as a result, everything is messy, unclear, and clashes with everything else. It's an absolutely shocking downgrade.

The characters themselves are overly hammy and feel like shallow attempts to have a similar party dynamic to the original without having identical character types, and the writing as a whole doesn't seem to have improved from second, which was already quite a step down from the original.

The gameplay also has not done anything different or interesting yet, and seems to be selling itself to people haven't heard of or gotten enough of the BP system. Enemies being on the overworld as opposed to random encounters shows they have dropped the player agency over encounter frequency, which is dumb. The battles lack any of the flow the original had, especially when using the battle speed option, as the camera does not present everything very well and changes position often as a result. Overall, I have not enjoyed the bravely default 2 demo and feel it shows nothing but a continued decline in the series that likely should have just been a single game. With the release date being set for sometime this year, I feel there is no chance any amount of player feedback could save the game or even begin to pull it in the right direction, as it seems to be fundamentally flawed with an inescapable feeling of shovelware.

SO WHAT? Basically, all I wanted to say here is that the original bravely default is a very unique experience I think every RPG fan should give a good chance (and just do all the optional stuff during the "repetitive" part of the game, it's where all the best content is you bozo) and that the sequels are NOT the same experience. I guess it's kind of mean to just say "hey don't buy or like this new thing cus its not like the old thing" but people should know why there's a bravely default 2 in the first place, and should fight for what made the original great. I worry that BD goes down the same sad path that FF did, becoming a completely hollow, middling series that strayed so far from it's home that a whole new series had to be made to give the fans of the old style a place to go.

Thanks for reading, and hope you got something out of it.

[jessicanjpa]

Nessie kind of disrupts the Cullen family. Jasper has to live in a house smelling like her blood, Alice gets terrible headaches, Rose and Esme remember what they never will have etc. That said, do you see the family breaking up or changing? Canon makes it seem like the Cullens will be all together still in 50,000 years, but what do you think? Who are the most likely to leave?

Renesmee certainly has thrown everyone for a loop. It’s a good thing they had all the Bella/Edward drama to ease them into “whoa things are different now.”  To be fair, they had all gotten pretty sick of the routine by the time Bella came along, so it was time to shake things up anyway.

I assume that for most of Renesmee’s childhood, everyone is going to stick around, barring the occasional honeymoon.  They certainly all love her to varying degrees, and they know how quickly she’s going to grow up.  Esme and Rosalie, especially, will be savoring those first couple of years. I also think the family will be on high alert for a while following the confrontation with the Volturi in BD2, so splitting up anytime soon isn’t really a great idea.

Overall, I think Renesmee’s short-term effect on the family will be overwhelmingly positive.  There’s the enormous relief at how well she’s turned out so far, as well as the symbolism, however unwanted, that her existence carries.  There are some loose and frayed ends at the end of BD for various characters, but overall, they’re left with a feeling of hope and reprieve.  There are certainly inconveniences for Alice and Jasper, as you mentioned, but those are largely adaptable and a relatively small price to pay.

As she grows, Renesmee will continue to be a catalyst for change within the family; again, I think the effects are largely positive, while also being challenging.  As they each take some part in Renesmee’s upbringing and education, they’ll be obliged to engage the human world around them in new ways.  Once she starts having human friends (which I think she eventually will), they’ll have to adapt to having those friends around sometimes.  As adolescent/young adult Renesmee begins to grapple with her identity and find her place in a hybrid world, they’ll all be involved and affected to varying degrees. Children (whether genius or not) have a way of making grown-ups talk about tough issues, and the Cullen family needs this like nobody’s business. In general, getting to see the world through a child’s eyes is good for anybody, but this particular child is already straddling several worlds at once and has already faced some really hard things. She’s going to have a lot of interesting things to say and ask about over the next few years.

Once she’s grown, I honestly think Renesmee herself is the most likely to move out.  Whether she’s having a rebellious crisis and running away to the Amazon, marrying Jacob, or just needing some space to figure herself out, the fact is that she’s very different from her family.  In the end, she’s probably going to want to make a real place for herself in the human world, and that just doesn’t jive with the reclusive lifestyle/attitude of her family.  Barring any extreme rebellion, though, I do think she’ll stay nearby for the foreseeable future.

I’m guessing it’ll be hardest on Rosalie when Renesmee leaves (or just grows up and It’s Not The Same).  Esme still has her “children,” but Rosalie will essentially be left with an empty nest. She’ll feel cheated by Renesmee’s accelerated growth, and her grief over her infertility will feel overwhelmingly fresh again.  I think this is probably one of those times she and Emmett will be going off to do their own thing for a while, maybe 2-5 years.  It’s possible they and Alice/Jasper might be living separately from the others more often from now on, but in that case, I think they’d also stay nearby and move on together when the time comes.  Overall, I think the idea of “we are a family” has been strengthened by Renesmee’s existence.  Challenged and reinvented, yes.  They’ve all gone through hard times recently, and there’s definitely been some splintering and hurt within the family.  But in the end I think they’re stronger for it.

(Obviously, there are tons of dark!AU possibilities along the way, but that’s nothing new.)

I really doubt the Cullens are ever going to use the Saga cover story again; the family is just too big, especially with Jacob and the magic werepire twins plus any of his pack members who might be along for the ride.  I also think the danger everyone faced during the Saga has made them all feel a little more mortal in a “tomorrow isn’t guaranteed” kind of way.  As a result, I think everyone is more likely to pursue their actual interests and live their lives a little more fully in the years to come.  Their family bond is powerful, so I still think they’ll do a lot of things together, but it’ll be more piecemeal from now on.

[jessicanjpa]

I saw your tags about how you wanted just one line that shows what Alice and Jasper thought about the whole Aro wanting Alice thing and I came to ask what do you think they both thought about it? What were their initial reactions to hearing about it and what do they both feel towards it?

Yeah, that’s why I wish we had gotten a couple of clues, because it’s such a mystery… not least because we’ll always be guessing about the inner workings of Alice and Jasper’s relatioship in general.

(long, nebulous answer under the cut…)

Alice’s level of worry is probably very dependent on what she’s seen in her visions.  Edward mentioned that mental image he had seen in Aro’s mind- the one where he (Aro) was imagining Edward and Alice by his side… but what did Alice actually see?  We know she can sometimes see multiple possibilities at once, or at least she can gauge probability based on the “clarity” of her visions.  I think it’s quite possible that she did see a vision that matched that fantasy Aro dreamed up- one in which she was at his side, red-eyed and wearing a cloak.  But I think it’s just one of many pictures in her gift’s collection, many of which are so ridiculous that she would never give them a second thought.  Her worry would probably be based more on how often that vision came up, and whether the probability/”clarity” is increasing or decreasing.  Unfortunately, we got very little insight into what her gift was telling her in New Moon, and again when she disappeared in BD, as well as after her return.  In general, I don’t think “worrying” is really her thing; it’s way too passive for her character. She’s constantly filtering through possible futures, choices, and consequences in her brain.  

But you asked about initial reactions.  Let’s say that Alice saw the possibility of being killed and/or coerced into the Guard before she and Bella even got on the plane in NM.  It seemed that she definitely saw those first two possibilities, at least, so we’ll just assume the third as well.  That was definitely a moment of crisis for both her and her gift, one of those times where she’s furiously sifting through visions and decisions, trying to decide which path would result in the highest probability of success.  I think she did the only thing she could do, which was try to hope for the best and run with it- she saw it was possible, to some degree, after all.  Her optimism and her faith in Destiny no doubt came into play right there. I honestly don’t think she wasted a lot of brain-space on the what-ifs… like “if I do get coerced into the Guard somehow, how is Jasper going to handle that?  Should I bargain for Bella to be changed right there? Should I try to escape or would it be better to stay put for a while?” She’s more the type to focus on the outcome she wants and how to make it happen.  Same thing with the drama in BD2, or even in the years after the saga- I think she sees those scary possibilities, but it’s both her personality and more effective to focus on the desired outcome and play with her visions until she figures out how to bring it about.

Jasper’s not an optimist; he’s a realist.  When he talked to Alice on the phone when she was on the plane, her promise/lie wouldn’t have done much to reassure him.  Even if he 100% believed her (which I doubt he did, having known her for a while now lol) it was only the assurance that her visions hadn’t *yet* predicted her death or capture.  There’s not only the possibility that her visions can change in the blink of an eye; there’s also the enormous arena of “too unclear yet for any outcomes to materialize.”  If Alice couldn’t even see yet whether the Volturi would grant Edward’s request for immediate destruction, how can she have any real faith that she’ll make it out okay? If she had any substantial hope of that, she would have told him flat out.  

So for now, that’s all it is: faith.  I do think he’s come, to some extent, to believe in the Destiny that Alice has believed in for so long.  But this is one of those times where his mind is definitely going down every possible path… to the frightening conclusions of each of those paths.  This isn’t a battle against Fate or his iffy self-control; it’s a real, tangible danger in vampire form...vampires who enforce the Law, the Law which the Cullens have broken.  Alice, Edward, and Bella aren’t the only ones in danger, though at the moment I doubt he cares about that.  He sees the worst-case scenario—Alice’s death as an accomplice—and he’s dreaming up Scary Consequences to that, but he also knows that Alice’s gift makes her an invaluable asset.  Even if he’s not yet aware of Aro’s tendency to “collect,” I think he’s latching onto the possibility of her being spared and forced into the Guard.  Despite his healthy respect for the Volturi (if not as people, at least for the important role they fill) he would never want that possibility, but it’s a thousand times better than her death. It’s a no-brainer; he would go join her and accept whatever role allows him to be with Alice. And hopefully, with their cooperation, the others would be pardoned.  Hopefully, they would find a way to be free again someday.  

But despite all those scenarios flying through his mind, I do think Jasper had some faith at that moment, as well.  He’s learned time and again to trust Alice, and while we know the darker possibilities that his character is capable of… he never actually seems to go there.  Whether it was trust in Alice’s Destiny/Optimism, hope in a pardon based on Carlisle’s history with Aro, or whatever, he stayed put because she told him to.  I do think he kind of fell apart while he was waiting to hear back, and he was ready to put all kinds of plans into action, but the point is that he trusted her enough to wait in the first place.

Now fast forward to BD2, when the stakes are even higher, and when unfortunately we know even less about what’s being said between Alice and Jasper.  All we know is that he and Alice came back, which I think shows that trust in action again.  It’s a pretty common headcanon that Jasper just short-circuits and goes into Overprotective Male Vampire mode when Alice is in danger, but I honestly don’t see that on the page.  Even when he was planning to kill Bella, he came back to the house for the meeting and let the plan go as soon as Alice said a few words—while Bella was still a liability. He decided that the risk was worth taking because Alice asked him to take it.  I do think there’s a point where he would snap and take matters into his own hands, but if even the craziness of the Saga wasn’t enough to push him to it, it’s more theoretical than anything.

Finally, I think Alice and Jasper have talked about the various scenarios- either when she returned in NM (man can you imagine the conversation they had when she got back?), or during their trek to South America in BD. That conversation would be an uncomfortable one, at least in terms of “oh right, our values clash sometimes” but I think they took it on.  I think, more than anything, Jasper was upset that he hadn’t been with Alice when she went to Volterra, and that her grabbing him in BD when she ran was her way of keeping a behind-the-scenes promise that whatever comes, they will face it together.

[jessicanjpa]

Okay, so (like the Denalis)if a vampire actual sibling was also a vampire, but they had to choose between their mate and their blood sibling (no pun intended) in a life or death situation. How do you think that would turn out? With a theme in the books being strong about how family is better than anything, how do you think this relates?

I assume SM’s stock answer would be their mate, but she’s also shown us enough variations in mated relationships to make me think it would depend on the vampire- and also on how old and how positive both the relationships are.  You mentioned the Denalis- by the end of BD2, it’s clear that Garrett is head over heels for Kate whereas Kate seems to be falling in love at a more normal pace, and that pace is disrupted by her grief over Irina’s death.  I do think there are a few couples where SM intended to convey a more rapid/magical “mate bond” forming, but in most cases I think it takes time for that intensity to build up as they get to know each other, and can sometimes be unbalanced or one-sided (case in point, James and Victoria).  If Kate were asked at that point in BD to choose Garrett or Irina, she’d probably choose Irina- and Irina’s not even a blood sibling, but being “sisters” for a thousand years is nothing to sneeze at. (It could be said that she did, in sprinting to kill Caius at the cost of her life and love.  Whereas the strength of Garrett’s “mate bond” to her was demonstrated by his ability to withstand her electrocution when no one else could.)  

I guess the ultimate test would be Jane and Alec.  They’ve been living in their twinny world for a loooong time. If one of them were to find a mate (which kinda grosses me out at their age, but whatever) I’m sure there would still be secrets and things between them that the mate would never be a part of.  But yeah, I’d be really curious to see if they would choose their twin over their mate in a life-or-death scenario.

Aro is curious too and wants to Experiment

(Aro was able to kill Didyme, which could indicate that being a blood relative isn’t as “magical” a bond as with a mate. Though Aro is weird and therefore not a normal example for this conversation)

The only other blood-related vampires I can think of are Luca and his creations?  Since he doesn’t really see them on a regular basis I think it would be an easy choice, especially since those creations are only his great great great -nieces and nephews.