#otherwise he would play a much larger role in the story than he actually does

[dimonds456]

If you told post-pacifist ending Sans that he was the final boss of the geno run, and/or that he's the hardest boss to beat in the Underground, he would not fucking believe you

[sergeantsporks]

The post hoot - i actually read the post about it on your blog, i think, that the writers wanted to explore how darius achieved his abomination transformation by doing dark sacrifices.

I reay don't think the shortening is an excuse for darius' treatment- just a meaningful mention of him by hunter, or a 10 seconds moment of him helping civilians in the background in the DoU flashback would have worked without taking much time. Like, bump is also puppeted, but it is clear he is important to others, so i stay bitter.

and it's not like it is the case of the bat queen where her story was hinted before the shortening, almost all darius stuff is after, so if there was never any plans for the conclusion of his and hunters development they should have made raine connect to hunter instead, and actually show darius and ebers friendship, instead they used darius to move hunters plot forward and then completely dropped him, which is both a sloppy writing choice, and unfair to the character, imo.

Hmmmm I don't remember that. Oh, well, I reblog a lot of stuff. I mean, we know that Darius is chillish with making sacrifices, you don't get to be coven head by NOT stomping on a few people. So I don't think that's exactly contrary to his character. He was willing to sacrifice the world for Eber, even knowing that Eber would die anyway, which is to say, Darius does NOT always make the most nonselfish choices. Even though ultimately he wants a good thing, he can stumble or do wrong things along the way, or do self motivated things rather than what's necessarily right or best for the collective good.

Yeah, I mean. Like I said, I'm keeping the clown makeup ON and hoping for a dadrius reunion, but in general. Idk about helping civilians, he was pretty passed out last we saw him, and I'm not sure he would have BEEN puppetified in the first place if he had been awake (he has a warping ability, after all, and he's a powerful witch), so I can see why they might not have gone there. But yeah, I would have liked for more from him.

Idk, I don't think he was ever a main enough character to really BE sidelined. I get what you're saying, why would they introduce these character dynamics and use him to push Hunter's character along only to not go anywhere with it, but, well. He's a side character, much as I love him. You don't ask why Adrian isn't showing up more despite this dynamic that was created between him and Gus, now do you? Or Steve, Steve pushed King's character development (and Lilith's, too), but I don't think anyone expects King to talk specifically how he misses Steve and hopes he's okay, no, he's focused Eda and Luz, and that's expected. Eda and Lilith haven't mentioned their parents ONCE, despite the huge role the two of them played in shaping them and how much is still unresolved between Dell and Eda (I mean, there's a whole plot point with Dell and that seed!) Similarly, Hunter's been way more focused on Flapjack, and Luz, and Belos, people who ultimately played a MUCH larger role in his development than Darius did. Sometimes side characters are THERE to push development for a more main character and then slink off gracefully. We've extrapolated that maybe Darius and Hunter hung out more, but we don't technically have any canon confirmation that they did. Hunter expressed concern for him at the DoU, which is probably most of the conclusion we're getting from that. Yeah. They care about each other. Moving on.

Much as we would LIKE to have more Darius, he is, at the end of the day, a secondary antagonist turned extra rebellion member. He's gotten about as much screen time as characters like that get. Not every single character has to be fully fleshed out on screen. sometimes things have to be left to interpretation and implications, because otherwise, your story can get too crowded/busy, even with all the time in the world.

[impalementation]

spike, angel, buffy & romanticism: part 4

part 1: “When you kiss me I want to die”: Angel and the high school seasons

part 2: “Love isn’t brains, children”: Enter Spike as the id

part 3: “Something effulgent”: Season five and the construction of Spike the romantic

* 

“But I can’t fool myself. Or Spike, for some reason.”: Buffy and Spike as a blended self

Before I get into seasons six and seven, it’s worth asking: why would the show do all of this? Why would it spend all of this time developing a supporting villain and joke id character? Why would it give him a romantic arc? I see people say that the writers only gave Spike these storylines because he was popular or they wanted to keep him around, but even that being the case, there was no need to give him the specific arc that they did. It’s more than possible to read meaning into the story that they chose from the array of possible options. 

Here is the thing about the id. It’s not actually something separate from you. It’s not a ravenous monster you can blame your weaknesses on while remaining pure and dignified. The id is part of you. The immediate and enduring appeal of Spike is, I suspect, strongly influenced by the fact that the things the id wants are so very human and sympathetic. His foibles and mistakes are often painfully familiar, even exaggerated through vampirism as they are. In fact, it’s precisely because Spike is allowed to show a full range of reactions to love, because the writing is under less pressure for him to do the “right” or dignified thing, that he can at times be compelling in ways other characters can’t. If Spike just did nasty things, his appeal wouldn’t be much more complicated than the appeal of Angelus, who people tend to like as a villain or storyline rather than as a relatable character. But Spike doesn’t want to dismember nuns or construct elaborate murder tableaux. He wants familiar things like love, identity and meaning, even if the ways he goes about getting them can reflect people’s worst impulses. 

Which brings us to Buffy, and Buffy’s story about growing up. Buffy is Buffy’s show, which means that every writing choice tends to revolve around her arc in one way or another. And this goes for Spike’s storyline even more than most. In the final three seasons of the show, the writing finally engages with how inextricable the id--and all of its impulsive, inarticulate romantic desires--really is from a person’s self. So instead of keeping Spike at a comfortable distance, both Buffy and the writing begin to take him seriously. They begin to invite him in.

Starting in season five, it’s telling how frequently Buffy herself projects on Spike, rather than just the writing setting them up as mirrors. She tells him that he’s the “only one strong enough” to protect her family, and later assigns Dawn specifically to his protection. In “Spiral” she describes him as “the only one besides me that has any chance of protecting Dawn.” This is a very intimate role that she otherwise only assigns to herself (and which is not really based on pure practicality, considering that she’ll later describe Willow as her “big gun”--yet never gives Willow the task of protecting Dawn). She tells him that he cannot love, which is the thing she fears most about herself. Her protests that Spike is a vampire, and thus cannot express or want human things like love, mirror her lamentations that as the Slayer, she cannot have a normal life.

From the Gilliland Gothic double essay:

More than any of her other lovers, Buffy and Spike overlap one another so often that at times their character arcs become nearly indistinguishable. With Angel, Buffy traveled a parallel path in attempting to master self-control. With Riley, her journey ultimately took her in the opposite direction. With Spike, Buffy’s journey is most closely shadowed, in that her interactions with him in many ways can be seen as metaphors for her feelings about herself.

So now Spike is multiple things. On the one hand, he’s the soulless id he’s been since season two. His vampiric behavior represents a morally uninhibited way of reacting to romantic frustrations, among other things. But on the other hand, his vampirism now also marks him as like Buffy, not merely her opposite.* Nor is he only her mirror in the realm of romantic love. The part of him that is a vampire is the part of him that is supernatural (ie, Romantically larger-than-life), that sets him apart from regular people, and dictates how he can and cannot behave. Just like Buffy’s slayerness. His vampirism is what makes him capable of protecting Dawn, while also making him (supposedly, according to Buffy) incapable of human feeling--again, just like Buffy’s slayerness. Instead of Buffy’s Slayer side being aligned with Angelus, who was an unmitigated evil, it becomes aligned with Spike, who is something more complicated. 

*(Though it must be noted that this was a process that began in season four, with the show aligning Spike with the Scoobies by making him a victim of the Initiative. Spike being supernatural suddenly marks him as non-normative, just like the Scoobies, in contrast to the institutional conformity that the Initiative represents. The evolution towards treating the Romantic supernatural as something positive and associated with identity plays a key role in transitioning the show to the more complicated attitudes of the last three seasons.)

This shift in the show’s attitudes towards the id affects how Spike is used. In “Blood Ties” for example, Spike assists Dawn in breaking into the Magic Shop and in “Forever” he helps Dawn resurrect her and Buffy’s mother. In both cases, Spike could be read as embodying impulsive behavior that Buffy is supposed to be better than. Yet both cases specifically involve Spike helping Dawn, who is repeatedly portrayed as Buffy’s human side. As Buffy says in “The Gift”: “[Dawn]’s more than [my sister]. She’s me. The monks made her out of me. [...] Dawn is a part of me. The only part that I--”. In other words, Buffy’s id becomes closely tied to her humanity, even going so far as to become its safeguard. “Blood Ties” ends with Buffy affirming her connection to Dawn, which Spike’s rule-breaking directly enabled, and “Forever” ends with Buffy acknowledging how desperately she wants her mother back too, and becoming closer to Dawn as a result. (Compare to “Lovers Walk”, where Buffy acknowledging her id results in her breaking away from Angel, not drawing closer to anyone). Or in “Intervention”, Spike building the Buffybot directly parallels Buffy’s own anxieties about what she thinks she should be. She thinks she’s losing her ability to love, and that effusive fakery is her only recourse (as she said in “I Was Made to Love You”: “Maybe I could change. [...] I could spend less time slaying, I could laugh at his jokes. I mean men like that right? The joke laughing at?”), a fear that even has some merit, given that her friends cannot tell her and the bot apart. Instead of Buffy and Spike having separate arcs in the episode, Spike learning the difference between real and fake dovetails with Buffy’s own relationship to her realness and fakeness. It turns out that neither of them want a bot version of Buffy. They want real emotion, things like sacrifice and heartfelt gratitude. If even Buffy’s id would let itself be killed for Dawn, then maybe she has nothing to fear from herself. Maybe there is some beauty in the emotional part of her nature that she thinks she must repress.

In other words, part of the writing (and Buffy) fully engaging with romanticism and the id, means engaging with the ways they can be bad and good. There’s this weird thing that happens with Spike as soon as he falls in love with Buffy, where suddenly his actions are more uncomfortable, and to many, off-putting, because their object is Buffy (instead of another vampire like Harmony or Drusilla, who either enjoy the same vampiric things he does, or the audience might be inclined to see as a moral nonentity regardless). His comic id quality becomes somewhat darker and more serious, almost like the way Angel’s early season two darkness becomes more serious after he loses his soul. But at the same time, Spike’s actions are also more intriguing, sympathetic, and even noble...because their object is Buffy. It makes no sense that a soulless vampire should not only fall in love with the Slayer, but genuinely attempt to transform himself into someone worthy of her love. And yet that’s exactly what Buffy inspires him to do. By loving Buffy Spike’s dual nature, and the dual nature of his romanticism, is thrown into relief: it’s something that can be selfish and creepy, yes, but also something that hints at the idea that real romanticism does exist. Something worth feeling romantically about does exist. Thus the writing can at once criticize, say, the way the chivalric mindset conflates love and suffering, while also suggesting that there are kinds of love it’s worth being transformed by. (Meanwhile, Spike’s fumbling bewilderment over how to love Buffy, and what the rules of loving people correctly even are, creates a human middle ground between monstrousness and heroism). By leaning into the way that Buffy and Spike have been used as mirrors for three seasons, and introducing the mythology-bending idea of Spike being in love with Buffy, the writing is able to fully engage with this complicated, contradictory nature of love and romance.

All of which is to say. Spike becomes a potential love interest, and is given a convoluted inner conflict between monstrousness, humanity and heroism, in precisely the season in which Buffy begins to reckon with her own inner conflict between her darker impulses, her human reality, and her supernatural role. It’s no coincidence that season five opens with Dracula, an icon of romantic vampire mythology, tempting Buffy with darkness and promising her insight into her nature. Or that a vampire kidnaps Dawn--again, her human half--in the next episode. Or that the season’s antagonist is a super-strong blonde woman who wants to destroy Dawn instead of protect her. Or that she says goodbye to Riley, the boyfriend who embodied her hopes for a more normative way of being (notice how Riley is progressively destabilized by everything non-normative about Buffy’s life, and provokes those anxieties Buffy expresses in “I Was Made to Love You”). Over and over in season five, Buffy fears that her Slayer half is cold, destructive, and otherwise dangerous. That these Romantic things like gods and vampires have it in for Buffy’s vulnerable humanity. Yet Buffy’s vampire id simultaneously gives lie to these fears by proving itself capable of heroism and genuine human feeling.

In other words, Spike becomes a potential love interest in a season that treats the Romantic--ie the grand and mythical--as something more than just an attractive lie to be disabused of. Rather, the question that season five seems to posit to me, and which will not be fully answered until the end of season seven, is this: once you do clear away the attractive lies, once you accept the hard realities, once you’ve seen the darkest underbellies, what are the things that are left that are truly grand and beautiful? What are the stories that are really worth telling, and the heroes that are really worth having?

And the show asks and answers these questions on both a very personal level, and a more meta, systemic level. On the personal level, Buffy and Spike are forced to confront their illusions not just about the world, but about themselves. They are made to ask themselves what constitutes a heroic role or a demonic weakness, versus basic, unromantic humanity. And on the meta level, the show asks questions about our expectations for how both love stories and chosen hero stories are supposed to go.

part 5: “Everything used to be so clear”: Season six and the agony of the real

[lochnessies]

I feel like 3H discourse gets fucked over a bit by people not taking into account that characters will say inaccurate information (without it having to be a plot hole). Perspective is a huge theme in Three Houses and characters are going to make, sometimes, dramatic actions based off that misinformation.

yeah

Like, Dmitri accuses Edelgard of being involved in the Tragedy of Duscur, but, she was like, 12 when that happened. It’s a lot more likely that Edelgard was being experimented on or recovering from experimentation during that point in time considering that the Tragedy happens not long after Edelgard and Dmitri last see each other.

do i think edelgard was involved? nah. it’s one of the few things i genuinely believe her on. however, it isn’t unreasonable for dimitri to think she was somehow involved. i mean, faerghast is pretty standard medieval when it comes down to fighting. was sent to quell rebellions at like 14. that’s really young. and in the middle ages the standard age that boys trained to be nights was at the very least seven (glenn was 15 when he was full on knighted). felix says he learned to fight before he could write his own name and dimitri was already swinging swords at nine. not to mention she was in the kingdom and then not long after she leaves the tragedy happened. so it could also look like she was a spy even if she didn’t set lambert on fire herself.

then there’s the whole shit of her saying nothing. a whole nation gets wiped out and she has no plans to ever vindicate them. hell, even dedue says that her being involved in any way is unacceptable and he’s fucking pissed. is he delusional? is he being irrational and unfair to edelgard? she isn’t the victim here, dedue, his people, the kingdom royals and co. are.

Likewise, Setheth accuses Edelgard of trying to become a false goddess when that’s not even remotely close to her goals.

ok this part right here is the reason that this fucking thing took forever to come out (sorry anon). i have so much to say and i wanted to write it all but i decided to put in my edelgard essay instead. i then waited to post this answer but sadly it’s taking longer to edit than i planned and i feel bad so you’re going to have to wait for this bit. so if you stick around i’ll talk about that in depth in the essay but just know that i disagree with the op very much.

Edelgard makes a ton of false accusations and misconceptions about Rhea. She accuses Rhea of being a power hungry inhumane tyrant who has no regard for life outside her own when that just isn’t remotely accurate.

And then there’s Claude, literally the only major faction leader that cares to uncover the truth and nuances of everyone’s decisions. He’s literally the only faction leader to not act like his version of events is the definitive truth. He acknowledges that he and Edelgard are fighting for similar things: a system overhaul of Fodlan. He also doesn’t oppose the Church because he’s learned enough about it to want to keep it’s institution in place. That’s why he’s the only faction leader that can survive in every route (I’d consider Seteth and Rhea to share the role as Church Leader since Seteth leads the Church Route but Rhea’s the one actually in charge of the Church). Claude is also the only leader that doesn’t make any false claims about other factions. I said a while ago that Claude would make the best ruler and this is why.

ok this is fine

But going back to what I said earlier about discourse, this impacts discourse drastically because people can just pick whichever version of events they prefer and there’s probably a character who claimed it went that way. The plot also doesn’t seek to clarify events one way or the other in any route. So even if you’ve played every route, it’s up to the player to make judgment calls on who’s speaking out of their ass.

except it’s literally not. we are told what routes have correct information from the devs themselves. and unreliable narrators can be proven and disproven when you put their words against everyone else, their actions, and the lore.

Between all the relevant character and plot details the game hides behind supports, endings, and other easily missable content and the fact that no two characters interpret the series of events that happen in the plot the same way (due to coming from various background, being present for some stuff but not others, having different priorities and biases that will cause them to interpret different things in different ways, etc.), no two players are likely going to interpret the events of 3 Houses the same either.

just because two characters interpret the events differently doesn’t mean they’re right. for example, the agarthans think the crest experiments are good but edelgard and lysithea would say otherwise. but you wouldn’t say that twsitd’s perspective is valid just bc they see things differently.

and when i see players trying to excuse some of the most horrific things bc they don’t want their fave war criminal to look bad yes i will judge them. you can like whoever but don’t excuse shit like imperialism and racism and we will be fine.

So, if you want to talk 3H, please acknowledge that none of the characters should be taken solely on their word, especially when describing major things. With the examples I gave earlier of misinformation in the game, it makes sense that Dmitri would place the blame of the Tragedy of Duscur almost entirely on Edelgard because he doesn’t know about the Agarthans or Edelgard’s history with them.

ok but she’s still complicate if nothing else. that’s still terrible. like if she was planning to clear duscur’s name that’s one thing but she isn’t. the only way to do that is to reveal twsitd and we know she doesn’t since it is a shadow war that the people don’t know about since that would reflect badly on her for working with them.

It makes sense that Edelgard has a lot of misconceptions about the Church because once you start completely rewriting and erasing history (and the Church does openly censor literature, which is shown in Claude’s route), any possible “true story” is more likely than the story you’re giving. Alongside that, Edelgard is getting most of her information from the Agarthans and a very private source only accessible to the Imperial Family.

fair but choosing war at like 13 is an extreme jump. maybe wait till your brain fully develops and you have a better picture of the world around you

It makes sense that Seteth might assume that Edelgard is trying to become a false god because he’s been helping lead a religion based on lies for centuries.

she is. also the religion isn’t based off of lies. sothis exists. she’s in your head. a few details were changed to hide nabateans from a red canyon massacre 2.0. however, the values are the same. also he came to the monastery 20 years ago not centuries.

When you’re trying to understand some part of Three Houses, you have to think about where that information came from, what factors might be biasing that information, and that there might be some detail that shines a new light on that information somewhere else in the game that you’re missing. And that’s generally a good philosophy to have when processing any information.

yeah

That’s something I like about Three Houses. I like how you have to sort through a ton of biases and misinformation within the game to understand the story. If you let your own biases get away from you too much, you’re going to miss the larger picture. The game let’s you know exactly where everyone is coming from in some way and (almost) everyone is given a sympathetic eye in at least one route. And (almost) everyone is viewed as irredeemable in at least one route.

the only people who are portrayed as irredeemable are edelgard and rhea (and maybe dimitri if you count edel’s contempt for him in cf).

[aboveallarescuer]

Transcripts of D&D’s Inside the Episode segments talking about Dany

This is a post with transcripts of all the Inside the Episode videos where show!Dany’s character and storyline are discussed by D&D.

We’ve already had enough of these two hacks, I know, but:

I still think discussions about the show can be productive, especially when similarities and differences between the book characters and show characters are explored. Comparing and contrasting book!Dany with show!Dany certainly brings to light interesting aspects that I may not have considered otherwise and enriches my understanding and appreciation of both of them (especially the former) in a similar way that comparing and contrasting book!Dany with book!Jon, book!Cersei and all the other book characters does.

I had already written transcripts of most of these Inside the Episode features for a while to comment on them in my books vs show reviews. However, since I’m no longer sure if I have enough energy and motivation to continue writing the reviews, I decided to finish writing the transcripts that were missing and to post them already. Maybe this can help people find more evidence that show!Dany’s ending was retconned at the last minute (which is what I firmly believe was the case).

Anyway, y’all know the drill... Expect a lot of mischaracterizations, inconsistencies, double standards, sexist remarks and implications and so on. Never accept what they say uncritically.

1.1: Winter is Coming

BENIOFF: Daenerys Targaryen, her nickname is Dany, basically went into exile from her homeland when she was so small she doesn't even remember it. She is the youngest child of the Mad King, Aerys Targaryen.

WEISS: She's never known her father, she's never known her family, she's never known her homeland, the only thing she's ever known has been her brother. She's been raised by her brother Viserys and Viserys has had his eyes on one thing and one thing only, and that is on regaining the throne that was taken from his father.

BENIOFF: She's had no stability in her life, the only constant has been this brother Viserys, so even though he is a cruel and sadistic older brother and even though he is really quite abusive to her, it's all she knows and she's been forced to - if not trust him, at least to follow his wishes, because not doing so would just lead to more abuse.

TIM VAN PATTEN: Like a lot of characters in the show, she is looking for an identity and a larger purpose in life. I think there's something deep inside her that's asleep, that's there, that she acknowledges and you see her start to acknowledge it, certainly, when she's thrown in with a Dothraki and she's presented with the dragon eggs. You could see this thought process starting, but there is something larger out there that I'm supposed to be a part of. I think she's on board for going back to the kingdom and to finding out about her culture and to having a home.

1.3: Lord Snow

BENIOFF: One of Dany's characteristics that comes to be incredibly important as the story progresses is her hatred of slavery, and I think part of the reason why she has great sympathy for the slaves is that she's grown up in a situation where she's had no power, she's basically been forced to follow the whims of her brother her entire life. Dany has a great deal of sympathy for those who are in difficult circumstances, for those who are the weak and the oppressed, and I think it comes to be one of the most compelling things about her as a character.

WEISS: She's been propriety for all intents and purposes, she's been her brother's slave and so I think she has an affinity for those people and she can actually look at these people and start to think about what their lives likely feel, the empathy with them that is natural to somebody who's sort of a slave herself and I think that she really kind of starts to realize that being somebody ese's property is no good and starts to show the beginnings of the impulse towards freedom that end up playing a much bigger role in her life and in the lives of the people around her as her story progresses.

1.4: Cripples, Bastards and Broken Things

WEISS: Daenerys lashes out at her brother - it's just something that's been building up inside her probably for years and years as long as she remembers.

BENIOFF: She comes to realize that he is a fool, he thinks he's going to go back and reconquer the Seven Kingdoms, he can't conquer anything, he can't even beat her in the fight. She comes to believe that she's heir to the Iron Throne, she sees within herself the power that she wasn't even aware existed.

1.6: A Golden Crown

WEISS: Daenerys comes into the Dothraki horde as an outsider and a lot of her story up to this point has been her finding her place in that world.

DANIEL MINAHAN: Eating this stallion's heart becomes a symbol that she's actually carrying the person who's gonna be the savior of that Dothraki people.

WEISS: This is really the place where, in front of the tribe, she becomes one of them. She disconnects from her brother and her brother sees that and that, in turn, pushes him over the edge. Any importance and love or respect that she draws from these people is respect that he's not gonna be getting, so he's alone.

BENIOFF: After he threatens her unborn child and puts the sword point on her pregnant belly, from that point on, he's dead to her, I mean, quite literally dead to her.

WEISS: When Viserys gets his golden crown, you can see in her face that it doesn't mean anything to her.

BENIOFF: She doesn't look like a little girl anymore.

 1.9: Baelor

BENIOFF: Dany's high point with the horde is probably when she eats the stallion's heart and they're really behind their queen and then she starts doing things that they frown upon. For instance, when Drogo gets sick, people start to blame her, because she had this sorceress treat him and, you know, blood magic is very magic against the Dothraki code.

WEISS: Magic is pushed to the periphery of this world and, literally, it's way across the narrow sea in the east and it's way north of the Wall and also, it's very peripheral to people's daily lives. This isn't a world where a wizard shows up with a big pointy hat and a staff and creates all sorts of magical displays. This is a world that is more like our own world in terms of the role that the supernatural has in it, but Mirri is a source of actual magic.

1.10: Fire and Blood

BENIOFF: Mirri Maz Duur is a priestess of the lamb people and she sees a chance to get revenge, not only to avenge her people, but also to prevent this guy from doing it again to other people. From her point of view, it's completely just what she does.

WEISS: She has a pretty good point... I mean, these people did come in, completely rape, pillage and murder her entire village.

BENIOFF: Of course, from Daenerys's point of view, this woman betrayed her. She put her trust in this woman after showing her kindness and now the woman has turned around and betrayed that kindness and, again, it's a theme throughout the story that no good deed goes unpunished.

WEISS: We have people doing terrible things to people that you love and yet, if you were in their shoes and you knew what they know, you would probably do the same thing. Everybody is doing what they're doing for reasons that are grounded in the real human psychology and not in the fact that they're wearing a white hat or that they're wearing the black hat. Daenerys has an understanding that she has to give herself over to something larger than herself without knowing exactly what's going to happen, but she knows that, when she walks into that pyre, she's not going to burn up. Never in her mind is it an act of suicide, even though, in the minds of everybody around her, that's, of course, what it looks like.

BENIOFF: It's the crucial climax and Daenerys is standing there in the pyre and she's become the mother of dragons and the woman you would follow to the ends of the world because that's what those remaining followers are going to do.

WEISS: Dragons in this world are the ultimate source of power and, in a world where authority is directly derived from power, they're the ultimate source of authority and the people who had dragons were the people who shaped the world.

BENIOFF: Dragons are magical, but they're also supposed to be, in this world, real creatures and so, we're looking at bats and pterodactyls and other kind of great flying creatures like that for inspiration and always wanting them to look real, we don't want them to just look like magical creatures that have just popped up.

WEISS: If they survive to maturity and they grow to the size of school buses or however large they end up getting, as their mother, she becomes a very different person than the frightened little girl we saw being sold off to a barbarian in the first episode.

2.6: The Old Gods and the New

WEISS: This whole season is really the season where Dany learns the lesson of self-reliance, she's never, it's a very painful lesson for her to learn, I mean, she's lost all her people, she's lost her husband, she's lost her bloodriders. The temptation for her has always been to lean on someone else, a man of one kind or another. So, I think for her, what she's learning in this episode, especially, is that she can't trust in other people, ultimately, she ends up in a place where she needs to do things for herself and she needs to do things that nobody in the world could possibly do, except her.

BENIOFF: Dany is so defined by her dragons, they're so much a part of her identity at this point, they define her so much that when they're taken from her, it's almost like she reverts to the pre-dragon Daenerys, you know, everyone is a bit defined by who they were when they were an adolescent, you know, no matter how old you get, no matter how powerful you get, and Daenerys was a scared, timid, abused adolescent and I think when her dragons are taken for her, all those feelings, all those memories and emotions are triggered and come back and all the confidence that she's won over the last several months, it's as if that just evaporates and she's back to being a really frightened little girl.

2.10: Valar Morghulis

BENIOFF: I think there's a real, fairly radical change in Daenerys that happens over the course of the last couple episodes of the season, which is... For most of this season, she's been looking for help from others, you know, and asking for help and, by the end of the season, she realizes that she has to do it herself, she's got to help herself and that she's, she can't ask others to give her power, she's got to take it and that she can't rely on anyone else, really. You know, Daenerys Targaryen is not in a position where she can inherit the Iron Throne, the only way she's going to take the Iron Throne and take back the Seven Kingdoms is to conquer them and she's starting to learn what that means, I don't think she really knew before, even when she's asking Khal Drogo to conquer them for her, I don't think she really knew what that meant and she's starting to and it's gonna mean warfare, it's gonna mean slaughter, it's gonna mean a lot of people dying because that's, you know, the only way to conquer anything is through destruction and, I think by the end of the second season, you're seeing her really start to come into her own as the Mother of Dragons and the last of the Targaryens.

3.1: Valar Dohaeris

BENIOFF: For a great leader who is doing something unpopular for a certain segment, whether it's the Warlocks or the slave masters or whatnot, she's creating a lot of enemies, and powerful enemies, and those people are going to try to stop her regardless of how powerful she becomes, and it's something she's actually, in a weird way, used to, because she grew up running from assassins with her brother, you know, from the time, from the earliest time she can remember, she was being spirited from one city to another one step ahead of Robert Baratheon and the assassins, because there were so many people who wanted to destroy the Targaryen family and make King Robert happy and now there are thousands out there for all sorts of different reasons because she's made even more enemies, but, I think in her mind this is just the price you pay for being Daenerys Targaryen, for being the last of the Targaryens, and it's not going to stop her.

Anatomy of a Scene: Daenerys Meets the Unsullied

WEISS: Dany spent the first two seasons of the show leaning on men - her brother, Drogo, Jorah Mormont, Xaro Xhoan Daxos. She came out of season two realizing that the only person that she can completely trust is herself.

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious. What she wants, more than anything, is to return home and to reclaim her birthright.

CLARKE: She needs the manpower to go back and conquer the Iron Throne and to be able to right the wrongs that she sees going on around her.

MINAHAN: She's been brought to Astapor, where she's reluctantly going to meet with slave traders. Her quest in this is to build an army without taking slaves.

Comments from Charlie Somers (location manager) and Christina Moore (supervising art director) that don't have anything to do with the storyline

BENIOFF: The Unsullied were kidnapped as babies from their home countries and brought to Astapor and trained in the ways of the spear and castrated.

EMMANUEL: They won't do anything without the command to do so first.

Comment from Tommy Dunne (weapons master) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's being introduced to the Unsullied by Kraznys, the slave master in control of them.

EMMANUEL: Kraznys is being quite insulting to Daenerys. And Missandei very cleverly smoothes out her translation, just her initiative doing that shows her intelligence.

CLARKE: Dany sees a lot of herself in her and can kind of see that it's a young girl who's capable of much more than the position she's in. She's his No 1 slave. If you were in the UN, she would be the translator for everyone.

WEISS: Kraznys speaks a version of Valyrian that's been bastardized and mixed with other local languages.

Comment from Majella Hurley (dialect coach) that doesn't have anything to do with the storyline

CLARKE: She's struggling with the moral aspect of the way that these cities are run. And it's something she's been grappling with because they are an army of slaves, which she fundamentally has moral issues with due to the fact that she herself was a slave.

WEISS: The only way she can make the world a better place is to become the biggest slaveowner in the world.

BENIOFF: She's put into a difficult position, and she's got her advisors whispering in her ears.

GLEN: Jorah encourages her to get over her moral scrupules, with taking an army that were duty-bound to follow whatever leader it was, and that could change in an instant.

BENIOFF: Idealism is wonderful, but it's not gonna happen if you're idealistic, you gotta be a realist. She feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing is gonna prevent her from achieving it.

WEISS: What she wants to do isn't just conquest for the sake of conquest, but it's really conquest for the sake of making the world a better place, and she's a revolutionary in that sense.

BENIOFF: For Daenerys to win, ultimately, she's gonna have to be just as ruthless as the others, and maybe even moreso.

3.3: Walk of Punishment

BENIOFF: Dany has her lovable side, but she is also ruthless, and she is also fiercely ambitious and, funnily, like a Littlefinger style ambition where she's trying to climb this, you know, the social ladder. It's almost like a Joan of Arc kind of ambition where she feels like she has this almost divine mission and nothing's going to prevent her from achieving it, and that might mean sacrificing those who are closest to her.

WEISS: Giving away one of the dragons seems like a completely insane thing to do, especially the biggest one. I mean, we know that, historically, the biggest dragons were those bigger than school buses and they were weapons of mass destruction and able to lay cities to waste in minutes, and no matter how big or effective your army of 8,000 soldiers is. Taking even a small city is going to be a kind of a dangerous prospect for them, and the idea that she's going to give away what they see is her real future for a chance at a small army now seems insane to them.

3.4: And Now His Watch is Ended

WEISS: We never really got this, a sense of her capacity for cruelty. She's surrounded by people who are terrible people, but haven't done anything to her personally, and it's interesting to me that, as the sphere of her empathy widens, the sphere of her cruelty widens as well.

BENIOFF: I think she becomes harder to dismiss, you know, for a long time people have been saying, even if she was alive, you know, really, the only threat she poses is her name, she's a Targaryen, great, but she's a little girl in the edge of the world, so she's starting to knock on people's doors a little bit.

WEISS: All at once she becomes a major force to be reckoned with, she spent a lot of time kind of banging her fists on the doors and declaring that she was owed the Iron Throne by right, but now she's stepped in her own as a conqueror.

BENIOFF: Dany is becoming more and more viable as a threat, you know, both, you know, in attaining an army and because she's the mother of these three dragons who are only gonna get more and more fearsome.

3.7: The Bear and the Maiden Fair

WEISS: Daenerys is coming into her own in a powerful way in the season. She's always been very negatively predisposed towards slavery because she knows what it feels like to be property, I mean, she was a very fancy slave for all intents and purposes, she was somebody who was sold to another man, taken against her will and I think that her feelings about slavery have started to really inform her reasons for wanting the Iron Throne, it's finally started to occur to her that, if I want to take on this responsibility, it's almost - it's incumbent upon me to do something with it, and she sees this great wrong, probably the greatest possible wrong surrounding her, and she's decided that she's not just going to take back the Iron Throne because it's her right, she's gonna take back the Iron Throne because she is the person to make the world a better place than it is. She is going to not just take it, she's gonna use it for something greater than herself.

 3.10: Mhysa

BENIOFF: We see her get an army in episode four, and here in the finale you see her get her people, really, because she's got, she has her Dothraki followers that don't number very many, and she's got the people she's freed from the other cities, but now she is, it's not just - it's something even more, something almost even more religious about it than just a queen, I mean, she's the mother of these people.

WEISS: And it creates a whole new dynamic between her and the people that she's fighting for that she's gonna have to deal with in the future.

BENIOFF: The way they treat her, the way they lift her up and she is...  something that has its... A revelation from a prophecy and that glorious destiny is coming true.

WEISS: Here it seemed like it was really important to let us know just how many people were counting on her to see the full extent of, mostly, the full extent of her army and the tens of thousands of people who flooded out of these gates to pay tribute to her. And then, keeping the dragons in play because they're always such an important part of her identity, we just want to tie all of that together in one great shot.

4.5: First of His Name

WEISS: This scene shows Dany learning a lesson that all revolutionaries learn at one point or another, which is that conquering in many ways is a whole lot easier than ruling.

BENIOFF: This is the pivotal moment for Daenerys because, for so long, her sole goal was getting back to Westeros, conquering Westeros and sitting on the Iron Throne and becoming the queen that she believes she has every right to be, now she has the opportunity.

WEISS: She is driven by a kind of a deep empathy, a much deeper empathy than probably anybody else in the show. It's something that makes her as charismatic as she is to people, because they get a sense of that sincerity of it. Her empathy allows her to look at the people of Westeros and say, why the hell would they follow me if I haven't proven myself through my actions to be somebody worth following, why would they let me rule if I hadn't proven myself to be somebody who has ruled well somewhere else?

4.7: Mockingbird

WEISS: In season one, Dany's sexuality was central to her transformation from basically a piece of propriety into a full-fledged human being and with Drogo the first thing that she took charge of was the only thing that was available to her at the time, which was her own body, and she came into her own as an adult, really, amongst the Dothraki, who were not shy about their bodies in any way. That Dany is not really cut out to be a virgin queen and Daario is a bad boy who seems like a good idea to her at this moment, and she takes her prerogatives as a powerful person as powerful people sometimes do, and yet he's made himself more than available. She didn't ever expect Jorah to find out, she loves Jorah in her own way, she makes it very clear to him that he's far more important to her means, far more to her than a person like Daario ever could, just not in the way that Jorah might like.

BENIOFF: He's been in love with Dany from pretty much her wedding day and now he sees this young upstart, who just entered her life relatively recently, come into his world and sweep her off her feet. I think he's both incredibly jealous and also a little bit angry at Dany that she would fall for a man who he considers so unworthy of her.

4.8: The Mountain and the Viper

WEISS: It's hard to keep a thing like that covered up forever, especially when your enemies are so invested in putting a wedge between you, I mean, they are a good team, they compliment each other nicely in lots of ways that are really troublesome to the Lannisters especially, so it shouldn't be a surprise, I think it's just one of those things that, in hindsight, he probably should've told her a long time ago, and it's more the fact that he kept it from her than the fact that he did it, which seals his fate. I think, from Dany's perspective, this is the most earth-shattering thing that could possibly happen to her. He's her rock and her anchor, the way in which he stops her from flying off into potentially dangerous directions, and when someone that important to you, that central to you, is shown to be not just a liar, but when their entire relationship to you is shown to be based upon a lie, I think it poisons every corner of her world with doubt and mistrust. From his perspective, he may have started as an informer, but she is his whole reason for being, at this point, I mean, he's completely given up on his desire to return to Westeros in any way except by her side. His home now is wherever she happens to be, so this is really like being expelled from the Garden for him, this is the worst thing that could happen to either of them. For her, it's her child; when Viserys put her child in danger and pointed the sword at her stomach, you saw some switch flipping her, you saw something change and she watched him die without blinking an eye, even though he was her family and the other family she had ever known, and when she realizes that Jorah was also responsible for putting that child in danger, I think that's what closes the door on him forever.

4.10: The Children

WEISS: Ruling is about maintaining order and creating an environment for your people that is safe and her dragons, which were such an asset for scaring the shit out of everybody and making people throw down their shores and run in the other direction when she would come knocking as a conqueror, they're becoming a liability that she can't afford anymore. It's one thing to be killing people's goats and you can pay off a goat herder for his goats, you can't pay off a goat herder for his children. So, she realizes that she has to put the interests of her people ahead of her dragons, who are the only real children she's ever going to have.

5.2: The House of Black and White

BENIOFF: There always seemed to be this sense of "manifest destiny" with Dany and that she was going to take what was hers with fire and blood, and she has, but there's a difference between taking and keeping and there's a difference between conquering and ruling and she's finding out that the latter is much more complicated. It's impossible to rule over a city as large as Meereen without infuriating certain people.

WEISS: Dany is trying her very best to do the right thing, to be a good ruler, and sometimes, within the context of this world, being a good ruler means doing things like executing Mossador, it's about laying down a justice that's blind and impartial and applying it evenly to everybody, former master or former slave.

BENIOFF: And, in this case, with Mossador, it's very complicated for her because she has a great deal of affection for this young man who was a slave until she came and that's the reason he was selected to represent the free people on her council and he's been a strong ally of hers and yet he disobeyed her and so, from her mind, she's making a very hard-headed but fair decision, and in the minds of the freedmen and freedwomen watching this execution, she's turning on them and she's executing one of her children, one of the people who called her a mhysa.

WEISS: When she steps up and actually does that, of course, she finds that she doesn't win any friends for her blind justice and her commitment to the law that she alienates her supporters and the people who hated her hate her as much as they did before, so it's one of those things where doing the right thing doesn't have any immediate rewards associated with it, it just leads to a riot that almost gets her head caved in with a bunch of rocks.

5.6: Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken

(Dany doesn't appear in this episode; D&D discuss events from episode 5.5 here.)

BENIOFF: Looking at Dany in Meereen, she's facing a real tricky dilemma so far in that she's trying to create stability in the city where she's a foreigner, she's an outside power who's coming with a foreign army and she seizes power and about half the city hates her, so the way she's trying to stem the civil war is in part by police action and in part by marrying the head of an ancient family and creating an alliance with those old families and actually trying to bring them onto her side by marrying Hizdahr.

WEISS: She doesn't like Hizdahr, she doesn't trust Hizdahr, but she has enough wisdom to understand that she's not going to get this done by smashing heads alone, she's going to need to create ties to this world that she wants to be a part of and to rule, and she understands that marriage is the way to do that.

5.7: The Gift

BENIOFF: I think Dany is still not quite at that cynical level yet, she still believes that there's a higher purpose that she's there for, it's not just about power, it's about using that power to make humanity better.

WEISS: If somebody is telling you that one of those horrible things that's all the more horrible because you suspect that it's true, and she's an idealist who desperately wants to believe that that's not the case, but, in their relationship, Daario is one of the only people - the only person around her now - who tells her all the things she doesn't want to hear.

BENIOFF: So she's not yet convinced that she needs to be a butcher. At the same time, she realizes that, the longer the season goes on, that she has to be ruthless sometimes in order to maintain security, in order to keep herself in power, so that means some bastards are going to get sacrificed to her dragons, then so be it.

5.8: Hardhome

WEISS: Over the course of their conversation, the similarities in their experiences start to come to the fore, maybe the similarities in their worldview start to come to the fore.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has a lot of empathy for another orphan out there who had another terrible father, y'know, it certainly links that bond them. He realizes maybe Varys was right about her that she's the last chance for Westeros and this is someone who could cross the Narrow Sea and not only bring me back into power, because Tyrion still has his own ambitions, but create a better world for the people over there because, depite everything, despite his occasional cynicism and his lack of sentimentality, Tyrion is one of the few players in this game who believes that it's possible to make things a little bit better for people.

WEISS: Dany talks a good game and she's very charismatic and she's a very impressive young woman, but he's heard lots of people say lots of pretty words over the course of his life and he's seen how those plans go awry when they meet with reality. Like revolutionaries in our own world, she has every intention to change things, even if that means knocking everything down to do it.

5.9: The Dance of Dragons

BENIOFF: Even before we put it in the paper, I remember reading this scene in the book and saying "holy shit" and actually I remember emailing George right after I read the scene, even before I finished the book just after reading the scene and saying: "that's one of the best scenes in any of your books and I have no idea how we're going to do it". This seems like a big scene for a feature movie, let alone a TV show.

WEISS: It's one of the most powerful and seamless allusions we've ever created on the show; we've never had anything remotely like this before.

BENIOFF: Dany could stop this at any moment, as Tyrion says at the moment when it looks like Jorah is going to die, and she can, she's the queen, she can stop anything, right, and she doesn't, because, even if she is the queen, she is, as she says earlier, if I don't keep my word, why would anyone trust me? And she's exiled him from the city twice now, he's come back twice, so, from her perspective, she's not gonna step in and protect him, I mean, he's not worthy of her protection; but, at the same time, as tough as she is, she's watching this man that she's had great affection for for so long and it looks like she might lose him, it looks like he really might die, so there's just this witches' brew of conflicting emotions in Dany's head and Jorah, I think, is really hoping for her to stop and you know, at certain points, like, look what I'm willing to do to get back to you.

WEISS: The look he gives her in that moment, you can just feel how intensely it just digs into her and how it says volumes to her across that dusty arena without ever speaking a word.

WEISS: [the Sons' attack on the arena] It's one of my favorite moments in the scene and the season and in this series, that moment where she realizes this is over and she resigns herself to that faith.

BENIOFF: This isn't the way she saw it happening, it's not the way she wants it to end, but if it's going to happen, she doesn't want to die screaming, she doesn't to die in terror, she wants to have a moment of peace before it's over and then, at that moment, when all seems lost, Drogon comes. There seems to be a connection between them, it's been talked about before on the show and in the books, there's this very deep connection between the Targaryens and their dragons, and certainly that's true with Dany and Drogon, it's more than just a pet of hers, they are in a real sense for her her adopted children and so this is just evidence of Drogon's ability to sense when his mother is in great peril. Jorah has this conversation with Tyrion halfway through the season where he says, I used to be cynical like you, but then I saw this girl step out of the fire with three baby dragons and, if you've ever heard baby dragons singing, it's hard to be cynical after that, and it's the same thing happening here for Tyrion, it's hard to be cynical after watching this young queen fly off on a dragon and it's very hard not to believe that she really is the chosen one.

WEISS: I think at that point it's pretty hard for Tyrion to keep a grip on his cynicism. His expression watching her fly away completely captured what we wanted to capture in the moment, which is he's never seen a girl like this before.

5.10: Mother’s Mercy

WEISS: Daenerys is stuck on this beautiful, but isolated, plateau without any food and a dragon that mostly wants to sleep and get better, so she's got to find her on way, which is fine, except she encounters a group of people she probably didn't expect to encounter again anytime soon. When she sees the Dothraki, she knows what that means, and her relationship with Drogo was one thing, but Drogo is gone and she knows, in a way, that he was sort of an anomaly. She drops the ring because she's smart; that ring is the breadcrumb that's gonna point in the direction that she's being taken and somebody down the line hopefully who means her less harm than the Dothraki will notice.

6.1: The Red Woman

WEISS: Tyrion is very much in the situation along with Varys where they're sitting on a volatile powder keg of a society.

BENIOFF: The enemies of Daenerys see a city ripe to be overthrown and it's going to test Tyrion's political skills, his diplomatic skills, all of his experience.

WEISS: He's optimistic in a strange way for him, he's not generally an optimistic person, but I think he feels inspired for the first time and he feels equal to the challenge that's facing him when it comes to Meereen.

6.3: Oathbreaker

WEISS: I think when Dany returns to Vaes Dothrak it's obviously with a certain sense of dread, because she knows that these widows of the former khals are not likely to welcome her with open arms, it's not like a "long-lost sister, where have you been?", it's "here's a funny-looking, white-haired girl who has put herself on a record as thinking she's all that" and stringing a bunch of highfalutin titles after her name. But the High Priestess of the Dosh Khaleen is not coming at it from the perspective of somebody who's looking to punish this young person with inflated ideas of her own greatness, I think she remembers what it was like to think that a glorious destiny awaited her and to find out that that wasn't the case. I think the High Priestess has a certain amount of empathy with Dany's position, which you see in the way that she relates to her, which is stern, but not quite as awful as anybody might have expected it to be.

6.4: Book of the Stranger

BENIOFF: The historical examples that we looked to in writing these scenes was, oddly, that was Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln was trying desperately to stave off a civil war between the North and the South and he wasn't ready to get rid of slavery quite as quickly as people think. I mean, he was trying to talk to the southerners and work out some kind of compromise at first and, you know, with Tyrion it's, as he says to Grey Worm and Missandei, slavery is an evil, war is an evil, and I can't have both at once, so what's the solution here? The whole point of diplomacy is compromise. He's proposed compromise, which he thinks of as a good idea, is incredibly offensive to Missandei and Grey Worm, who were slaves and, you know, from their point of view, you don't make a compromise with slavers because that's making a deal with the devil, so they're entering into these negotiations with slavers with deep skepticism, but Daenerys did choose this man to advise her, so if he's saying there's a chance, they're willing to try it, but with great suspicions.

BENIOFF: One of the things that was interesting for us was, you know, seeing how Dany can be strong when she is not in a position of power, you know, all the khals of all the gathered khalasars were within the temple of the Dosh Khaleen and Dany, an unarmed little woman, killed them all, by herself. You know, she didn't have a dragon flying and doing it, it was all Dany.

WEISS: The end of episode 604 definitely meant consciously to echo the end of episode 110. It's Dany stepping out of a flame to great effect; this time it was just on a much, much larger scale.

BENIOFF: Rebirth is clearly a theme this season, whether it's Jon Snow or Dany emerging again from the fires. When she did it the first time, only, you know, a few score people witnessed this miracle of Daenerys Targaryen emerging unscathed from the flames. Now it's the Dothraki as a people who witnessed this.

WEISS: The act of stepping out of that burning temple, in which all the Dothraki power structure had just perished, pretty much makes her the queen of the Dothraki in one fell swoop.

BENIOFF: And, of course, it's hard not to be impressed when you see her emerging from the fires unscathed. It's like a god being reborn, and that's why they all bow to her.

6.6: Blood of my Blood

BENIOFF: Daenerys talks about the dragons being her children and that the dragons are the only children she'll have. Of her three children, she's always been closest to Drogon, and they clearly have some kind of connection that goes beyond words and she just senses that he's out there in the scene. One of our favorite moments from season one was watching Khal Drogo deliver a speech to his gathered khalasar. That speech lingered in Daenerys's mind and she's echoing almost the exact same language when she's talking to the Dothraki now. So she's basically telling them the promise that one of the great khals had made years before and saying now's the time to live up to that promise and to fulfill it. It's something that's been set up for quite a long time and now we're seeing it come to pass.

6.9: Battle of the Bastards

WEISS: Daenerys, when she comes back to that situation, she has no idea what to expect, she doesn't know what's happened in Meereen. In a way, you feel for Tyrion because she left him with a terrible situation; the city was under siege from within and without and he really did, for so long, an excellent job of making things better there and, unfortunately, what she comes back to find is exactly what she would have expected to find when she left, and the fact that she has a city at all still is due to him.

BENIOFF: I think Dany's been becoming a Targaryen ever since the end of season one.

WEISS: She's not her father and she's not insane and she's not a sadist, but there's a Targaryen ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens.

BENIOFF: If you're one of the lords of Westeros or one of her potential opponents in the wars to come and you get word of what happened here in Meereen, you have to be pretty nervous because this is an unprecedented threat, you got a woman who's somehow formed an alliance where she's got a Dothraki horde, a legion of Unsullied, she's got the mercenary army of the Second Sons and she's got three dragons who are now pretty close to full-grown, so if she can make it all the way across the Narrow Sea and get to Westeros, who's gonna stand in her way?

6.10: The Winds of Winter

WEISS: Tyrion had a very steep slope to climb to win Dany's trust. His family played an integral part in nearly exterminating her family, but, at this point, especially given the hand he was dealt with Meereen after she left, he's earned her trust. One of the few people in this world at this point who's willing to speak the truth to her face.

BENIOFF: Mainly, he's proven himself to be very loyal, you know, she's gone for most of the season, but he didn't abandon her, he didn't go off looking for the next person to rule him, he was clearly trying to serve her interest while she was gone. Dany's not gonna do anything she doesn't want to do, she's not gonna take anyone's advice if it seems against her interests and so, when he recommends that she cut ties with Daario, she does it because she thinks he's right. The truth is, Tyrion's logic makes a lot of sense to her, you know, he's not gonna be a help for her when she gets to Westeros, she comes over there unencumbered and, as a queen without a king, that could be really useful in the future. You know, Tyrion has become a very capable adviser in a relatively short time, she clearly respects his intelligence and she now respects his loyalty. I think, especially given that she knows where they're heading, they're going back to Westeros, most of the people on her team have never been there, but Tyrion spent his whole life there, served as Hand of the King before, defended King's Landing during an attack, he knows these families, the ruling family, better than anyone, he certainly knows Cersei better than anyone, so, as long as she can trust him, which she does, he's the perfect adviser for her in this war for Westeros. He's the perfect Hand to the Queen and that's why she names him such.

WEISS: That shot of Dany's fleet with all of her newly arrayed allies making its way out of the Slaver's Bay towards the Narrow Sea and home, it's probably the biggest thing that's happened on the show thus far, it's the thing we've been waiting for since the pilot episode of the first season. The person she is now is very, very different from the person she was then. It hasn't been a smooth road, feels like she has earned it at this point.

BENIOFF: It's the shot that we're gonna leave everyone with.

WEISS: It was a real thrill to see her on the bow of that ship, with Tyrion by her side heading west. The ruthlessness that comes with even the good Targaryens, I mean, these are the people who came over from across the narrow sea and conquered the known world. It'll be very interesting to see how that plays out going forward.

7.1: Dragonstone

BENIOFF: For [Cersei] now at this point, it's about survival, and the way to survive is to defeat her enemy. She will do whatever she has to do to win, she'll blow up the sept if that will allow her to win, even if that means killing hundreds, probably thousands of innocent people. She's capable of anything, unlike Dany, who is constrained a little bit by her morality and her fear of hurting innocents. For those of us who have been with the story from the beginning and really followed Dany's journey, coming home is such a massive, game-changer on so many levels, and we just wanted to see that.

WEISS: There is so much weight on that arrival that we felt that a bunch of dialogue was completely unnecessary, it would only step on the emotion of the moment.

BENIOFF: Everyone is giving her a little bit of distance; Tyrion, who is usually the most loquacious of people, he's not talking because he wants her to experience it and, at one point, Grey Worm is about to walk up alongside Dany to guard her and Missandei holds him back because she wants Dany to experience it on her own. And then she has that time and she's ready to begin.

7.2: Stormborn

WEISS: I don't think they're that many situations in film or television where you see four women sitting around a table discussing power and strategy and war. We didn't really plan it that way, but once it landed on that we knew that these things had to be discussed, we knew the plan to take Casterly Rock had to be put out there. I think it's a scene that, had it been the exact same information, situation being put forward by a bunch of old grizzled guys with gray beards, it would have been a lot less interesting to have it be Emilia at one end of the table and Diana at the other end of the table. To me, that just is such a breath of fresh air, and made writing it a lot more fun. The end, after all has been said and done, then Olenna sits her down and tells her to ignore all of that.

Show!Olenna: You're a dragon. Be a dragon.

WEISS: When Diana tells you to do that you start to... go outside the scene and wonder if that applies to every aspect of your life and not just the scene you happen to be shooting.

7.3: The Queen’s Justice

WEISS: The spine of the episode is about their meeting. It was an exciting, thrilling thing to watch happening even as we were shooting it. Once we realized that we're kind of getting a charge out of just seeing this happen on a set, which is a notoriously boring place, we had a sense that it would carry over to the finished version of the scene.

BENIOFF: That audience chamber was built by Aegon Targaryen to intimidate anyone who came there.

WEISS: He doesn't have much insight into what she's gone through. So, I think he sees a rich girl with a fancy name sitting in a big chair with a fancy dress on, proclaiming herself the queen of the world. So, I don't think he's looking upon her with as much respect as she has come to take as her due.

BENIOFF: He's a very strong-willed person. He didn't come down there to bend the knee. He didn't come down there to join her in her fight against Cersei. None of that matters at this point, though. All that matters is... fighting the dead.

WEISS: She looks at him, and she thinks this is some unwashed barbarian from the North and a bastard. His name is Jon Snow, yet he's calling himself king. If she knew what he'd seen, she'd be looking very, very differently... at what he's telling her, but at this moment in time, she only sees somebody who's trying to carve up her piece of her kingdom for himself. And if what this guy is saying is true, then it really is an issue, and she has... her own very serious issues to deal with in the shape of the woman who's now sitting on the throne.

7.4: The Spoils of War

BENIOFF: There's tension on two sides. One is the political, where Jon Snow has his own very specific purpose here on Dragonstone, and that's to get the Dragonglass and, if possible, to convince Dany to fight with him. And Dany has her own very specific purpose, which is to get Jon to bend the knee. There's conflict, and it's conflict between powerful people. And then to make it all even more complicated, they're starting to be attracted to each other. And so much of it is not from dialogue or anything we wrote, it's just the two of them in a small space standing near each other, and us just watching that and feeling the heat of that.

WEISS: She had a nicely triumphant return to Dragonstone, which nobody contested or got in the way of. From that point on, she's lost two of her principle allies, she's lost a lot of her fleet. She's in a position where if she doesn't step up soon and come up with a big win for her side, she's gonna lose this fight before it even begins. I think she really feels the pressure of her situation more than she ever has before. This is the fight she's been waiting for her whole life.

BENIOFF: I think there are several stories interplaying here. Part of it is that Dany's finally cutting loose. The whole first part of the season, she's been frustrated. In following Tyrion's counsel, she's been fighting with one hand behind her back, and so she hasn't really unleashed the Dothraki horde. She hasn't really set the dragons into combat yet.

WEISS: With the loot train battle, one of the things that's most exciting about it for us... This is the first time we've ever had two sets of main characters on opposite sides of the battlefield. And it's impossible to really want any one of them to win, and impossible to want any one of them to lose.

WEISS: This dragon flies up. That makes it a totally different situation. It's almost like, "What if somebody had an F-16 that they brought to a medieval battle?" You start to scrap the history of it a bit, and just think about how would those things interact with each other in a way that's exciting and believable to the extent that dragons are believable?

BENIOFF: Qyburn realized that the dragons were vulnerable. They might be fearsome beasts, but they are mortal and they can be hurt, and they can be killed. We see the scorpion come into play, manned by Bronn. And we see Drogon wounded. Things turn out okay for them, but I think it also changes the calculation a little bit, because now they know these weapons are on the board. This ongoing war with Cersei is entering into a dangerous territory.

WEISS: Jaime's charge at Daenerys is a hard thing to top for me in that sequence, only because when you have a principle character trying to murder another principle character, that doesn't happen all that often.

7.5: Eastwatch

BENIOFF: One of the things that Dany has found immensely frustrating in the beginnings of this war against Cersei is that she is being asked to fight on a certain moral standard and... Cersei isn't. Because of that, Cersei has an advantage over her. The more ruthless opponent will often win. I wouldn't say she's acting like the Mad King because it's rational. She's given them a choice and they choose not to bend the knee to her and she accepts that choice and she does exactly what she told them she would do. And from her standpoint, she's not acting insane in any way. She's just being tough, which is what she needs to be to win. That's one perspective. Tyrion has a different perspective and hopefully people watching will have their own and they'll decide for themselves whether they think what she did was just or immoral.

7.6: Beyond the Wall

BENIOFF: At a certain point, they're just fighting for their survival. Once they retreat all the way to the middle of the lake, there's nowhere farther to run. She's always been willing to risk her life to do what she thinks is right. And in terms of going North to rescue them, a number of people up there have different claims on her heart. And Jorah's been by her side from the beginning, and he saved her life so many times, I think she would feel as if it was a betrayal if she didn't at least try to save him. And then of course, there's Jon Snow. You definitely get the sense that he's become quite important to her in a pretty short amount of time. He sees that they're all gonna die if the dragon doesn't take off. The rational decision at that point is, "You guys go to safety, and I'll try to keep them off you as long as I can." He's the guy who jumps on the grenade to save the rest of the platoon. That's always been Jon.

WEISS: I think that when she sees him return on the back of Coldhand's horse, that's a big moment for her in terms of the way she feels about him.

BENIOFF: I don't think either one of them really knew exactly how powerful their feelings were towards each other until these moments. Just the notion of falling for someone, that involves weakness. It's not something a queen does. But she feels that happening, and he feels it happening for her. I think both of them are on, kinda, unfamiliar ground. And especially because it's with an equal. It's kind of hard for her at that point, I think not to look at this guy, and realize this is not like the other boys.

WEISS: What was fun about the sequence, you know, awful way to us is that up until the end, it's very close to one of those battles where all the good guys get out the other side, and, more or less, scot-free. But we knew that killing the dragon was gonna have a tremendous emotional impact, 'cause over the seasons and seasons of the show it's really been emphasized what they are to Dany. We knew that the Night King would see and seize this opportunity. I'd like to think that when the dragon dies, that it's kind of a one-two punch, 'cause on the one hand, you've just seen the horror of one of these three amazing beings like this in the world going under the water and not coming up again, and processing that. Then you're processing something that's even worse, which is when it comes back out from under the water again, and we see in the last shot of the episode, what it becomes.

7.7: The Dragon and the Wolf

BENIOFF: Jon's not Jon Sand. He's actually, as Bran finally overhears from Lyanna, Aegon Targaryen. And that means he's the rightful heir to the Iron Throne. That changes everything.

WEISS: I would say the challenge with this sequence was finding a way to present information that at least a good portion of the audience already had in a way that was dramatic and exciting, also had a new element to it. Part of the answer as to how to go about doing that was in the montage, inter-cut nature of it. It was about making it clear that this was almost like an information bomb that Jon was heading towards.

Show!Bran: Robert's rebellion was built on a lie.

WEISS: The only way to really emphasize that was to tie those two worlds together cinematically, and to have Bran actually narrating these facts over the footage of Jon and of Dany.

Show!Bran: He's the heir to the Iron Throne.

WEISS: Just as we're seeing these two people come together, we're hearing the information that will inevitably, if not tear them apart, at least cause real problems in their relationship. And she's his aunt.

BENIOFF: It complicates everything on a political level, on a personal level, and it just makes everything that could have been so neat and kind of perfect for Jon and Dany, and it really muddies the waters.

Show!Bran: We need to tell him.

BENIOFF: We tried to contrast the various season endings so that they don't feel too similar. So last season we had a pretty triumphant ending with Dany finally sailing west towards Westeros. This one is definitely much more horrific.

8.1: Winterfell

BENIOFF: It's a whole new procession, and so instead of Robert arriving with Queen Cersei and Jamie Lannister and The Hound, it's Daenerys coming with Jon Snow. I don't think the North is the most welcoming place to outsiders. Dany's smart. She senses that distrust, and she's... gonna make the best of a bad situation, but that doesn't mean that she likes it or she's happy.

WEISS: When you're doing something good for people, and you get met with what Sansa gives her when they meet in the courtyard, it's understandable that she would be upset.

WEISS: I think that if Tyrion were to have shown up on his own to Winterfell, he would've gotten a much different reception from Sansa than he did coming as the Hand of the Queen, Daenerys Targaryen.

BENIOFF: No one's ever ridden a dragon except for Dany. Only Targaryens can ride dragons, and that should be a sign for Jon. Jon's not always the quickest on the uptake, but eventually gets there.

WEISS: We wanted to kind of re-anchor their relationship. It seemed important for it to involve the dragons, since the dragons play such an important role.

BENIOFF: It's a major thing for her when she sees they have some kind of connection to him, they allow him to be around them. And when he flies up with her and shows her where he used to hunt as a kid, I think she falls even farther in love with him.

WEISS: Seeing Jon and Dany on the dragons together, it's a Jon and Dany moment, but it also seeds in the idea that these creatures will accept Jon Snow as one of their riders.

BENIOFF: One of the challenges, but also one of the exciting things about this episode, this whole season, is bringing together characters who have never met. Sam has long been one of the more important characters in the story. But he's never seen Queen Daenerys, and yet they're connected by various threads. The obvious one, which we know from the beginning of the scene, is Jorah. Sam saved him, and so Jorah owes him this great debt. What none of them realize until midway through this scene is that they have another, horrible connection.

WEISS: There are all these things that you know about those characters that the other characters don't know. And some of them are very important. Dany murdered Samwell's father and brother.

BENIOFF: That's a really complicated thing for Sam because he had a really fraught relationship with his father. Yet Sam's older brother was not a bad person, and died, really, quite bravely, standing by his father's side.

WEISS: John Bradley did an excellent job. The difference between the way he takes the news of his father's death and the way he takes the news of his brother's death, it was a subtle thing that he does with very few words. It's the kind of thing that he could find out in a number of different ways, but it seemed like a very ineffective preamble and way into that later moment.

WEISS: The fact that Jon's real parents were who Jon's real parents were is not news to us at this point, but what we don't know is the way that Jon is going to take this. How's the explosion gonna look?

BENIOFF: Sam, as a brother of the Night's Watch, and Jon are more brothers than Bran and Jon ever really were. He knows it's gonna hurt Jon and it's going to shatter his whole worldview. For all they know, the Army of the Dead could attack the next day, and someone has to tell Jon before that.

WEISS: He's being told something that he both knows is true and can't handle. So he tries to throw things in front of it to prevent him from having to deal with the-- the truth of what he's being told. The thing he throws in front of it here is the fact that it means his father was lying to him his whole life. The truth that Samwell tells Jon is probably the most incendiary fact in the entire world of the show. We chose to play the whole thing on Jon's face because, as great a job as John Bradley is doing presenting this information, he's really just presenting information we know already.

8.2: A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

WEISS: When Jaime shows up to Winterfell, it's very difficult for almost anybody to know how to feel about it. On the one hand, Dany looks at him as the person who murdered her father, and even if she has come to terms with who her father was and what her father really was, it probably doesn't entirely erase the sting of her father's murderer showing up on her doorstep.

BENIOFF: Tyrion has made a number of mistakes now, and Dany's really at the end of her patience. Because she has a lot of fondness and respect for Tyrion, but many of his plans have really gone awry. And now Jaime Lannister's here, but not with the Lannister army. Tyrion can't really fight back because he knows she's right. I mean, he really did make a grievous mistake. If Tyrion has a flaw, he's a very clever man, but sometimes clever people overestimate their own cleverness.

BENIOFF: Dany comes to Sansa with a bit of an olive branch, trying to find a way inside that kind of cool exterior that Sansa presents. And one commonality between them is they both love Jon. Dany's his lover and Sansa's his sister. It's very much coming at it from the point of view of a monarch trying to make peace with her subject, and Sansa's not quite willing to accept Dany as her monarch yet. She's suspicious of people for a reason. She's had too many hard experiences not to be suspicious of people. And she sees Dany as possibly a tyrant, as somebody who has a lot of power and is seeking to get even more.

8.3: The Long Night

WEISS: We wanted our characters to feel, like, that this-- maybe this is all gonna work out, maybe things are all gonna be okay. We've seen how devastating a Dothraki charge can be just with their regular swords, and now when they're galloping into combat with, uh, flaming arakhs, it's-- it's-- Uh... What could possibly stand against that?

BENIOFF: What they see is just the end of the Dothraki, essentially.

WEISS: They have a plan, and it's important to wait for the Night King to reveal himself, and then have two dragons against one dragon, and a really good chance of-- of defeating him. One thing that they couldn't have foreseen was Dany's reaction to seeing the Dothraki decimated. Jon is the person who wants to stick to the plan, but the Dothraki are not Jon's; they're not loyal to Jon, they're loyal to Dany, and I think that Dany can't bring herself to just watch them die, and so the plan starts to fall apart the second she gets on her dragon, so he does too, and then we take it from there.

BENIOFF: We knew this episode was gonna be almost entirely battle, and that can get really boring really quickly. You can watch it for a certain number of minutes before the effect starts to dampen. Part of it was making sure that we really stayed focused on the characters, and so whether it's Arya's storyline, or Sansa and Tyrion down the crypt, or Jon Snow and Dany up on the dragons. Kinda like all these separate little battles within the... within the greater battle.

BENIOFF: I mean, we talked about various endings for Jorah for a long time, but, you know, you think about Jorah, from the very first time we met him, he was with Dany, and from that time, he's been mostly by her side. Part of Jorah's tragedy is that he was in love with a woman who couldn't love him back, but he's accepted that for quite a long time, at the same time he was going to fight for her as long as he could and as well as he could.

WEISS: There'd never been a moment where she more needed someone to fight to protect her than this moment. And if he could've chosen a way to die, this is how he would've chosen to die. So, it was something we thought would be powerful to give him.

8.4: The Last of the Starks

WEISS: Dany kind of structures the feast scene, in a way. I mean, she's really the person whose emotions and choices are guiding the scene.

BENIOFF: And things start to shift a little bit when Daenerys calls for Gendry and-- and names him the new Lord of Storm's End.

WEISS: It's almost like, as the queen, she's giving people... permission to-- to celebrate what they've done.

BENIOFF:  Things start to relax a little bit, and these people did survive and they-- they won, and they emerged victorious. And so what started as a very funereal scene gradually starts to shift into more of a party atmosphere as people get drunker and drunker. That shift does not happen with Daenerys; she's scarred by the events that just took place, but she's also very much thinking about... what Jon Snow told her, and she's really shaken when she sees everyone celebrating with him, and talking about what a mad man and what a king he is for getting on a dragon.

WEISS:  He has love and respect from these people that, even with the gesture that she just made, she can't ever equal.

BENIOFF: She realizes that his true identity is a real threat to her if it comes out. So, she's in a fairly dark place and while other people are starting to try to celebrate their survival and their victory, Dany's not in a celebratory mood.

WEISS: After the feast, she comes to talk to him and... with the intention of-- of... of making this all work out, and of bringing things back to the way they were before.

BENIOFF: There's a moment when they're kissing, and-- and it seems like things are kind of getting back to where they were, but... it's almost as if he remembers all of a sudden what she really is. It's tense for him. For her, she grew up hearing all these stories about how their ancestors who were related to each other were also lovers, and it doesn't seem that strange to her.  For him, it is a strange thing.

WEISS: Once Dany introduces the idea that everything can be as it was if... Jon... keeps this secret buttoned down and tells no one, she's introducing a conflict that plays forward.

BENIOFF:  From his standpoint, he's already declared his loyalty to her. He's promised her and he's a man of his word. But he's also, you know, a family man, and so, the idea that he wouldn't tell Sansa and Arya about his true identity, it just seems very wrong to him.

BENIOFF: He thinks he can have it both ways; that he can tell Arya and Sansa the truth about who he really is, and he can maintain his loyalty to Dany and everyone's gonna learn to live together.

WEISS: One thing everybody who... comes into contact with this information seems to understand is how incendiary the information is. Sansa's left with a very difficult decision, 'cause she promises Jon that she won't tell anyone, and yet when she's sitting up there on that wall with Tyrion, she knows... what will happen if she gives Tyrion this information. She's a student of Littlefinger, and she knows how information travels, and she can think many steps ahead into the game, the way Littlefinger did, and know that if she tells Tyrion, it's almost impossible for Tyrion not to tell Varys, and if you tell-- I think these are all things that have been occurring to Sansa between the time we see her get that information and the time she passes the message on.

BENIOFF: Part of the story here is that while we've been concentrating on Winterfell and the fight against the army of the dead, Dany's other enemies have not been just sitting still; they've been planning for-- for the final battle. We saw in season seven that Qyburn had invented this giant dragon-killing scorpion and it didn't quite work. Qyburn went back to the drawing board and he made even larger, more powerful scorpions. Dozens of them are now lining the walls of King's Landing, and dozens more are mounted on the decks of the Iron Fleet. While Dany kind of forgot about the Iron fleet and Euron's forces, they certainly haven't forgotten about her, and they're just waiting for her to come back. By this point, they would have gotten news that her army's emerged victorious and were gonna head south, and so they're just waiting in ambush for her return.

WEISS: In some ways, the most important thing that happens... to Daenerys in four, is the death of her second dragon. Now she's got one dragon, and that dragon presumably is just as vulnerable... as Rhaegal was. So, there's this-- the mourning of a child, which is very real to her, and then their best friend is taken. Dany knows that once Cersei has Missandei that she's not going to see Missandei alive again.

BENIOFF: This is a moment for Cersei where she has a chance to... maybe to flee and get away if she surrenders, but that's-- I think anyone who knows Cersei knows she's not gonna make that choice. Her feeling is, "If I give up the throne, I'm dead, and so, my only chance now is to win." And that's what she says to Ned Stark in season one. Dany is this young queen coming to try to usurp her, and Cersei's not gonna give up the throne that easily. She's captured an enemy, and this is how Cersei deals with enemies. Tyrion's perspective is-- is, you know, while we have these various wars for supremacy and everything, let's not forget about the people who are gonna suffer the most from it. He can envision what will happen to King's Landing if these two armies clash and dragons are involved, and it's an obvious catastrophe. She feels like the odds are actually pretty good on-- on-- for her at this point, and she's willing to roll the dice. I think for Cersei, the only good prisoner is a dead prisoner.

WEISS: She's really back... where she was... at the very beginning. Emotionally, she's alone in the world, and she can't really trust anybody.

BENIOFF: People have underestimated Dany's strength many times before, and-- and... no one's really done very well underestimating her strengths.

WEISS: Unlike them, she's extremely powerful, and unlike them, she's filled with a rage that's aimed at one person specifically.

BENIOFF: I think what's probably echoing in Dany's head in those final moments would be Missandei's final words. Dracarys is clearly meant for Dany. Missandei knows that her life is over, and she is saying, you know, "Light them up."

8.5: The Bells

BENIOFF: Dany's an incredibly strong person, she's also someone who has had really close friendships and close advisors for her entire run of the show. You look at these people who have been closest to her for such a long time, and almost of them have either turned on her or died, and she's very much alone. And that's a dangerous thing for someone who's got so much power, to feel that isolated. So at the very time when she needs guidance and those kind of close friendships and advice the most, everyone's gone.

WEISS: I think that Varys knew that it was unlikely that he would survive the attempt to overthrow Dany in favor of Jon. And he also knew that he ethically, in his mind, had no choice but to... try to do that anyway. I think that Tyrion is saying goodbye to his best friend in the world outside of his brother. And the amount of guilt that he feels over being the cause for his best friend's imminent death, it's hard to really get your head around.

BENIOFF: Jon Snow is someone that she's fallen in love with. And as far as she's concerned, by this point, Jon has betrayed her by telling people about his true identity, and also the fact he's unable to return her affections at this point.

WEISS: I think that when she says, "Let it be fear," she's resigning herself to the fact that she may have to get things done in a way that isn't pleasant. And she may have to get things done in a way that is horrible for lots of people.

BENIOFF: She chose violence. A Targaryen choosing violence is a pretty terrifying thing.

BENIOFF: Even when you look back to season one, when Khal Drogo gives the golden crown to Viserys, and her reaction of watching her brother's head melted off ...and he was a terrible brother, you know, so I don't think anyone out there was-- was crying when Viserys died, but... there is something kind of chilling about the way that Dany has responded to the death of her enemies. And if circumstances had been different, I don't think this side of Dany ever would've come out. If Cersei hadn't betrayed her, if Cersei hadn't executed Missandei, if Jon hadn't told her the truth. Like, if all of these things had happened in any different way, then I don't think we'd be seeing this side of Daenerys Targaryen.

WEISS: I don't think she decided ahead of time that she was... going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It's in that moment, on the walls of King's Landing, where she's looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to-- to make this personal. We wanted her to be just death from above, as seen from the perspective of the people who are on the business end of that dragon. In most large stories like this, it seems like there's a tendency to focus on the heroic figures and not pay much attention to the people who may be suffering the repercussions of the decisions made by those heroic people, and we-- we really wanted to keep our perspective and our-- our sympathies on the ground at this moment 'cause those are the people who are really paying the price for the decisions that she's making.

WEISS: I think that Jon is also in a kind of denial. At first, the siege is a war, soldiers killing soldiers. That's what war is. I think Jon is someone who's always been a very good soldier, who has never enjoyed being a soldier. He's been trained as a fighter from the time he was a little boy, and he's quite good at it, he's quite good at leading men into battle, and he also hates it. I think, for him, it all starts out seeming like it's gonna work out, and then it turns into a nightmare.

WEISS: When she takes off and starts burning the city, the Unsullied on the ground and the Northmen on the ground, take that as their cue that it's a moral free-for-all. The good guys are behaving like the bad guys, and the bad guys in this shot are the ones who are doing all of these horrific things around him, who are his own men. The moral lines that he's drawn, for himself, in his own life, can't be maintained for everyone in all situations.

WEISS: Feels like you needed a perspective to carry you through this horror. Like you need a Virgil to take you through the hell that Dany's building.

BENIOFF: The reason we decided to follow Arya out of King's Landing and to see the fall of King's Landing through her eyes is... something that we talked about with an earlier episode. You just care a lot more when you're with a character that you care about. So if we saw a lot of extras running around on fire and buildings falling apart, it might've been visually interesting, but it wouldn't have had much of an emotional impact. But when you're there on the ground with Arya, who's one of the people we care the most about, then everything takes on that much more of an edge.

WEISS: We knew that the Hound would be convincing her to part ways with him and to not go to her death. And once she decides she needs to get out of the city, well, she's in-- she's in the worst possible place you can be. So she's gotta get from that central point all the way outside the walls of the city. It's the longest, hardest journey anybody has to make in the entire episode.

8.6: The Iron Throne

WEISS: Dany has been above it all, literally, throughout this entire battle, she's fought the whole thing from the air, so, when she's in the plaza, all she's seeing is her own army's triumph in the city that she came to conquer for all the best reasons, and I think the idea of spreading her brand of revolution around the entire world is a very attractive idea to her at this moment in her mind, it's a very ethical idea because she's not seeing the cost the way Jon and the way Tyrion have seen the cost.

BENIOFF: What's interesting about it is that she's been making similar kinds of speeches for a long time and we've always been rooting for her and this is kind of a natural outcome of that philosophy and that willingness to go forth and conquer all your enemies and it's just not quite as fun anymore. 

WEISS: I think the final scene between Jon and Daenerys is something we came up with sometime, in the midst of the third season of the show? The broad strokes of it anyway. But there was a tremendous amount of pressure to get it right because we know this is not a scene that is giving people what they want.

BENIOFF: We got there and were like, oh my God this is gonna be so emotional and then it was realizing that we actually had to do so much work to get all those shots that we needed.

WEISS: There’s this discussion through the whole show of whether or not Daenerys is like her father, who was insane. Throughout the whole conversation they have, she maintains, like, a reasonable approach to the thing that she’s done and there are only a few places where something peaks out that tells him what’s really coming.

WEISS: The big question in people’s minds seem to be who’s going to end up on the Iron Throne. One of the things we decided about the same time we decided what would happen in the scene is that the throne would not survive, that the thing that everybody wanted, the thing that caused everybody to be so horrible to each other to everybody else over the course of the past eight seasons was going to melt away. The dragon flying away with Dany’s lifeless body, that’s the climax of the show.

[crystal-moon-101]

Y and U? For the unnamed ask?

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?: I familiar with shows like Troll Hunter & Miraculous Lady Bug through a friend of mine, and I have been meaning to get into them, just a little busy and have a lack of energy 😅. I am also familiar with Yugioh (At least the earlier series), mostly because of the abridge and because I’m really into Season 0 stuff, as it’s more my kind of thing.

U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites: Given you gave me three, I think it’s only natural for me to pick from The Secret Generator 10 trio, as I always up to talk about these three and what they mean to me. Of course, they’re hardly perfect character, but they all are special in their on way for me, and I thought I’d discuss why.

Rex: My favourite out of the three, with his show being my all-time favourite. Development, interesting background, mystery, angst, tragic, fun to watch, mostly consistent, amazing powers, and gets so much found family stuff going on, he hits a lot of marks of what I love to see in a character, and the same does do good enough of a job with him. Rex is a character that plays well with the concept of being a child soldier, having amnesia, and being the key to the larger story at hand, and the show still treats him like a real person, living and breathing, and not just a means to screw over every time they want to plot to work. 

He has many layers to him, at the start seeming like a cocky, daredevil, rule-breaking and rebellious teen, who you sometimes question he understands the weight of what is happening to the world and himself, but then you learn that he does understand, so much more than he lets on. While he is naturally charismatic and a jokester, you can tell he often puts up this mask of joy and playfulness just to make a dark world around him feel a little lighter, along with hiding how alone and scared he actually feels. Because well, who wouldn’t be when placed in a role like that? He knows very well he has powers tied to saving the die, even if he doesn’t fully understand them. He knows the danger the nanites and EVOs pose, but also knows the danger that humankind can pose if they’re not willing to listen to reason. When things do get tough, he knows when to cut the crap and be serious. He’s someone who knows the world isn’t black and white, even if he hates to admit it at times.

While we didn’t get to see much of it, I’ve always seen Rex as a part of three worlds. He works closely with normal humans, like Six and Holiday (As normal as you can be at Providence), and he understands how scared the world is, how scared every day people are that any second they or someone they love could turn into a monster and go on a rampage. And sometimes that hurts for Rex is that he often tries to connect to this part of the world, because he knows he was once part of it, and he thinks it can make him happy, but the obstacle blocking him is that he isn’t human anymore, and that many people are scared of him, even if he saves them. And yet despite all the harsh things people have said or done to him, Rex always comes back to be the hero, because he knows he can help and that there are people that need his help, and it’s commendable that he’s willing to put aside those issues to save the day, even if he doesn’t get a thank you out of it.

His second ties are, of course, to his EVO world. It’s interesting that, at the very start of the show, Rex use to have this view that everything EVO was wrong, most likely something he picked up at Providence, despite being one himself. He’s hesitant around them, and while he’s not one to kill, he’s often quick to think they’ll be a danger. And while he can be right about that most of the time, he does start to learn it’s not all that it seems. His Hong Kong friends, Circe, Breach, even someone like Biowulf eventually. He even eventually learns that, while he’s not normal, he’s not a bad person for being something not human. And it’s an interesting thought that while he’s one of the most human-looking EVOs, he can be considered one of the most dangerous, even more so than EVOs that look like overgrown monsters. His ties to the EVO world are what make him start to see the world isn’t black and white.

And then his third ties, kind of, are to his nanites and history. Despite how human looking Rex is, and that he is an EVO, he’s very much something different to both sides, a middle ground thanks to his connection to the nanites. It’s always fascinated me that something about him, out of anyone in the world, he has this tie to nanites that no one else has. That can be explained by a number of things, but I also like to think it’s also because of the person he is. I mean, you get someone like Black Knight who got similar powers to him, but you never see her have a level connection with them like Rex does. And that can be explained by poor writing, but again I like to tie it back to who he is as a person, and how the nanites have evolved to be around him. And with how long he’s been tied to him, they just feel like a natural part of him, even if he may reject it sometimes. And to have him be once part of the past that involved how the nanites came to be, it adds a whole another layer to this boy. I will admit the writing can get to him at times, sadly, especially around season 3, and we don’t get certain answers to question about him, but he’s still a great character in my eyes, with so much potential for the stories and ideas you can play around him. I respect him for his hope for wanting to do things a better way, and yet knowing that sometimes you have to do the hard and logical things to do good, even if it’s not easy to do. I could ramble on more, but I got to move onto the next one. 💙

Zak: Ah, my sweet cryptid boy, have season 2 gave you crippling anxiety. Zak I would say, out of these three, is the most consistent with his writing. He’s still the same cryptid loving, cool kid, with a passion for his job back at the start of things, but he also grows in a believable way over time, especially when learning what he really is. The twist with making Kur adds such a spin on who he is and how he feels in a great way that I love, because he was someone who was building up to be the hero of the story by everyone around him, only to learn that the supposed villain he was meant to fight was himself. I think one of the interesting things that The Secret Saturdays does is that it never really answers the question if destiny is real, and if Zak is meant to kill all humans. It’s a question left up in the air, and while there seems to be facts that say otherwise, the idea that this boy could kill all humans makes people scared or eager, making everyone say that his destiny is real, even if there is no proof. And because of this, it makes Zak fear and believes that it’s real too, that he is bad just by simply being Kur’s reincarnation, even if he hasn’t done anything that makes him bad. And yet, as easy as it would have been for Zak to just accept this, he doesn’t, he still plays the hero and goes out of his way to help those that need it. Because whether or not destiny is real, Zak is willing to fight it, and that makes a noble character. And while we don’t get clear answers about destiny and Kur, many of us get to play with the idea of what it means for Zak and this world he’s in. I personally thing that Kur’s history is more complicated than him being ‘evil’ as I’ve written before, but Zak is his own character, his own person, and it’s fun to see who he is, how he reacts and how he grows. I also love that, while he’s pitched as one of those classic kid/teen boys during the 2000s action cartoon eras, he does things you wouldn’t expect. While he can get into fights and combat and have fun with it, if he knows the fight endangers someone or a cryptid, he will always take it seriously. Like when they found the cryptid fighting ring, he was always disgusted by it and keeps repeating the notion that he wanted to stop it as soon a possible, even hating to have to put Fisk into the fight just to stall and get info. He clearly as a loving passion with cryptids and the world he’s in, and is always out there looking to see more to the story than others may see. He’s not quick to label someone as a monster unless he’s 100% certain that’s what they are.  And his family relationships are just golden, I love the Saturdays. It’s adorable how, instead of calling them pets, he treats Fisk, Zon and Komodo like his siblings. He respects them as equals, and while he can argue with them, he’s willing to listen and understand that they have their own needs and wants, and the four of them are always by each other’s sides. Drew and Doc, being one of my favourite couples of all time, have different relationships towards Zak, but both love and respect him very much. Even when they find out Zak is Kur, not once do they ever turn their back on their own child, and do everything they can to help him see he’s not a monster. Zak clearly looks up to them, and it’s great to see the growth they have by letting Zak spread his wings, and stop trying to be over-protective with him. And, of course, Uncle Doyle is great, in that he’s always respected Zak, even if he’s a child. He’s willing to be level with him, and push him when he knows Zak needs it, and the fact that Zak was the one in the family to be so quick to have him join is just so well done, as he never had a doubt that Doyle could be a better person. Zak love the world he’s in, and the beings and secrets that lay within it. Despite how it might push and hurt him, he’s often willing to get back up and show who he really is, that the labels that people put on him don’t define who he is. Despite how his world turned upside down with one sentence, he’s doesn’t give up.🧡

Ben: Oof, right...*Cracks knuckles* Time to get into the more iffy ones of the trio. Right away, I have no trouble saying that Ben has a lot of issues and flaws as a character. I have no issue denying that he can be an ass, and has done many dumb things. However, I’m not one to hate or fault characters when it’s the writing that screws them over. Because at his concept and core, the person he was meant to be, Ben is quite an interesting character. He’s not the standard hero with a cape, he’s very much flawed, can sometimes be a jerk and cocky often, and has been shown to be young and naive. But that doesn’t make him a bad person, in fact he adds an interesting element to the normal hero archetypes. When written well, he’s quite fun to follow and has quite the concept to play around with. Despite his outgoing and witty outside, Ben does go through a lot of crap ever since he got the watch. His teen years and parts of his childhood are mostly just dealing with the foes he’s made, and the troubles that comes with being the main hero of the galaxy, which is defiantly not an easy task to take. And yet he does it, he goes through all the dangers just to help people and the worlds around them. He’s often willing to stand back up and crack a smirk because he’s not one to give up. He sees hope, he sees potential and light beyond the darkness, and he wants to give others the chance to see that. And while his cocky nature can get in the way when written wrong, I do think it’s a trait that makes sense. People across the galaxy praise him since he was young, which can cloud his judgement, it’s a natural flaw that fits him as a character, and it has been shown he acts this way to hide how scared he really is. Cause I mean, with all that he has to fight, it is actually quite a struggle, so it is amazing to see just how much he takes and never backs down. He’s not a boring character to watch, he’s not a perfect hero that gleams in a golden light, he’s flawed and hows so many issues to tackle, but have a noble and bold side to him that you can respect. He’s been shown to bring people up, to teach and to guide, to take on the hassles of others just so they can get by in life. And while he does like the praise he gets out of it, you know deep down he does this because it’s good to just do good, even if it doesn’t benefit you always. He could have easily given up the watch and hand it back to Azmuth, but he never does. And his connection with alien and the watch have always been a personal interest with me, even if canon doesn’t delve much into it as they should. The thing with Ben is that he’s perfect for the watch, because he has no problem shaping into another being. And while it’s still Ben underneath, he does change parts of himself for the time being. And the reason he’s fine with this is because he sees life and potential with all the aliens he can be. He sees the different powers they hold and wants to show just what they can do to help, what the galaxy could build if they worked together. It’s funny that the omnitrix was build for peace purposes, and while Ben took it a different way than what Azmuth wanted, he found a way to make it work. I know other characters wouldn’t be able to handle the watch like this the way Ben does, even Albedo proves this by how he acts with his aliens, seeing them as nothing but tools while treating himself as the higher being, while Ben accepts what he turns into, and understands what makes certain aliens special.  Sadly, Ben is a tragic character when it comes to the poor writing and constant switch in series, as Cartoon Network can’t seem to understand what to do with him. But that does make him a fun character to work off of and write, and I’ve seen some amazing things in the fandom with what they’ve done with him. So I've seen hated Ben, because I often see his as wasted potential for the character he could have been, and he does have great moments that are canon that I love. 💚

[pbaintthetb]

Watership Down Rant pt.2/ How Hazel (Arguably) Misinterprets Bigwig

“Bigwig would certainly be a useful rabbit in a tight corner, he would also be a difficult one to get on with. He certainly would not want to do what he was told- or even asked- by an Outskirter.”~ Chapter 3, Hazel’s Decision.

As I briefly mentioned before, Hazel is the POV character, and while there is a narrator, it can sometimes be difficult to separate the two. My first time reading the novel I was much more inclined to go along with Hazel’s interpretation of Bigwig, but after finishing, seeing Bigwig’s whole character journey, and on a reread I don’t entirely agree. There are two main characters who Bigwig gets very angry at in the novel, Fiver, and Strawberry. Strawberry who Bigwig blames for leading to Bigwig’s almost death (and he forgives it soon enough), and Fiver who is continuously (at least in Bigwig’s  eyes) putting Hazel in danger- until the snare incident.

Hazel seems to imply that Bigwig is trying, whether maliciously or not, to create trouble. One of his fears when they leave Sandleford and Bigwig asks to join is that, Bigwig, as an Owsla and generally much larger and slightly short tempered rabbit is going to fight with him for position of leader. A position Hazel feels naturally falls to him. Hazel lets Bigwig come with them, mostly because he can’t really refuse him, but also because as much as Hazel doesn’t want a power struggle he’s aware that he needs strong fighters and someone who knows more about the wider world- aka, Bigwig. (More on Hazel’s pragmatism later.)

Bigwig’s two flaws that Hazel picks up on and I agree with are- he can be quite short tempered (though we’ll see, Bigwig is good at separating personal feelings from  non-personal matters), and specifically doesn’t take uncertainty particularly well.

However, these aren’t traits that make a particularly good Chief Rabbit, Bigwig can think on his feet- but not as well as Hazel, Fiver, or even Blackberry. I feel like Bigwig is somewhat aware of this fact (his reaction to being told he’s not suited for a task later in the novel due to his temperament is one of someone who doesn’t disagree, but doesn’t like the fact). Therefore, my basic point is that I don’t think Bigwig is gunning for Chief Rabbit, and I particularly don’t think he is at any point trying to usurp Hazel. As to whether he truly believes Hazel is their true/great Chief Rabbit  from the beginning… no. But, he does acknowledge him as leader of the group, he does seem to default to him, or at least treat him as equal, and his criticisms of Hazel seem to be more that he wants Hazel to be better than Bigwig thinking he, or anyone else, would make a better leader.

Bigwig has a basic level of respect for Hazel from the very beginning, seen when he allows Hazel to speak to the Threarah, even though Bigwig knows it will create trouble for him because he trusts Hazel has a decent reason. Who doesn’t Bigwig really respect? Five, at this point he’s entirely neutral, but he trusts Hazel to trust Fiver. There is still plenty of room for Bigwig’s respect of Hazel to grow- arguably culminating in Efrafa- but he never once treats Hazel as lesser or makes a bid for power. The closest he comes to a mutiny is actually against Fiver and specifically because he thinks Fiver is endangering Hazel and Hazel’s authority.

Now, Bigwig’s not perfect, he does feel he’s owed more respect than say, Blackberry or Dandelion (though he also respects their own skills and talents and gets pretty mad when Cowslip’s rabbits aren’t impressed by Dandelion’s story telling), but also like... eh, he’s not wrong. Bigwig is the most knowledgeable about the world (Blackberry is a mad genius, but he more theorises things than knows) and is often the one explaining crucial things- roads, snares, predators, and most importantly- how to stay safe. He and Silver (tldr Bigwig but calmer) often stay up to take watches- amd this, like most of the tasks Silver and Bigwig do together are clearly coordinated and arranged by Bigwig. Bigwig also takes charge of a lot that Hazel feels he should do as leader, but Hazel is not lazing about during these times, he’s taking care of other tasks that a leader needs. The most usurp thing Bigwig does is essentially take charge while Hazel is away, but he always hands it back. Bigwig works like a second in command- and Hazel doesn’t seem to see this. This is particularly funny but also a misunderstanding on Hazel’s part when considering some of the first things Hazel does is put Bigwig in this role. Additionally, Bigwig is more than happy to share is wider knowledge as a result of his experience, but mostly to Hazel- because teaching takes time and it’s not worth, for example, teaching Pipkin how to fight a cat. This is why I feel that Bigwig simply wants to improve Hazel, he’s very calm and polite when he teaches him about the road, and points out that as an Outskirter and not an Owsla there is no reason why Hazel should know these things when Hazel is embarrassed about the fact. Both the other two Chief rabbits we meet in the book are ex/current Owsla, Hazel is not, and thus it makes sense for Bigwig to catch him up to speed. Personally I think Hazel is paranoid about his own position and protecting that outwards.

Onto how Hazel views Bigwig and why I think he’s wrong- but with textual evidence. 

“Bigwig would certainly be a useful rabbit in a tight corner, he would also be a difficult one to get on with. He certainly would not want to do what he was told- or even asked- by an Outskirter.”

Hazel seems to think Bigwig wants to usurp him because he was more powerful than him before they left their home. And in Hazel’s mind this is justified by Bigwig’s bluster and the fact that Hazel keeps stumbling across him taking charge of the rabbits... because Hazel has been away/busy/doing another important task and someone needs to hold down the fort- so Bigwig steps up, and then quite calmly steps down once Hazel is back, who doesn’t seem to quite see this at first because he’s paranoid. No Hazel hate, just truth.

However, for all of Hazel’s fears, there’s little truth to them. I’m going to quickly run through all the supposed challenges Bigwig offers upto their arrival at the Warren of the Shining Wires. (I’m deliberately not calling it Cowslip’s warren- because it’s not, he’s not Chief- the human is, the rabbits just live there.)

“If you’ll take my advice-” began Bigwig. “If we stay here any longer I shan’t be able to,” answered Hazel.~ Chapter 4, The Departure (after Bigwig has bested Holly, immediately before they leave Sandleford.) See how respectfully Bigwig brings up his potential criticism? And there is no note of Bigwig being resentful, rude, or sulky that he was shut down. He acknowledges that now is not a time for discussion/democracy, it’s a time to pack up and follow Hazel- whereas you’d expect some kind of grudge if Hazel was right. At the very least you’d expect something the next time Bigwig “criticises” Hazel in chapter 5. However, Bigwig simply states that the group needs to stop, he lists out the reasons why he knows Hazel won’t want to, but also lists why they need to- simply put that Fiver and Pipkin physically can’t. At this point Bigwig doesn’t even know Pipkin’s name (he refers to him as “this half-sized fellow”), but he’s one of Hazel’s squad and Bigwig’s protective instincts are coming out. Hazel is reluctant, but listens. Also of note is that Bigwig doesn’t demand this in front of the group as if it were some power-play, he walks off away from the group to quietly talk to Hazel, and it’s still Hazel who announces they’re stopping. Bigwig is not trying to convince Hazel of this after the fact.

Chapters 7-8. When the Badger finds them it’s Bigwig who leads them away, however, this most seemingly obvious element of insubordination is not remarked on by Hazel- internally or otherwise. This is because Bigwig is the only one who knows what it is, how dangerous it is (it’s of the “lets not invite trouble” variety). And yes, it’s because he’s Owsla, but Silver is Owsla too- this is how Bigwig seems to view himself, not as Chief, but Captain of the Owsla for their group and sharing power with Hazel. Now, Hazel has not given this role- but as we’ll see later he kind of defaults to putting Bigwig in it and Bigwig has already won a fight for Hazel, it’s not an unreasonable assumption. Bigwig is very annoyed when they arrive at the river and takes it out on Hazel- who notes that Bigwig is only steady if he’s certain of their options. Hazel uses some flattery to calm Bigwig down (honestly, a great talent of Hazel’s in many situations).

Bigwig gets angry. So, in chapter 8 Bigwig starts to actually shout and rage, but it’s interesting to note that this is prompted by Fiver. Bigwig is clearly irritated at being led to a dead end- but it’s more the exhaustion and confusion than anything about Hazel. However when Fiver says they need to swim the river (noted to be impossible for exhausted rabbits by the narrator) that Bigwig starts to get annoyed- remember that Bigwig was the one who got them to stop earlier. Especially considering there are other options. Still, Bigwig lets it go. And again, when he comes to talk to Hazel about a potentially sensitive situation he talks to Hazel aside from the group, and comes to ask what Bigwig should tell the group- Bigwig very much asks for permission not forgiveness. It’s when Hazel says they should stay- clearly for the Benefit of Fiver Bigwig gets annoyed- probably because of his slightly more worldly nature- they are in a very open and vulnerable position and he’s smart enough to know that Hazel just wants him to cross the river. However, some flattery, and Bigwig happily swims across, alone, to scout. This, again is very telling. Bigwig is clearly able to swim the river and not altogether unwilling.  It also displays Bigwig’s protective instincts and why he’s such a good Captain. Bigwig’s issue is revealed- though Hazel doesn’t seem to realise- to not be crossing the river, but the fact that not all the rabbits are able to make it. This culminates in Bigwig screaming at Hazel, after BIgwig reveals there’s a dog in the woods. First, he gets all the other rabbits to swim across (Bigwig has returned) and then he shouts at Hazel to go over, and not to stay for Fiver and Pipkin saying they’ll all be killed. Even Hazel notes here, that he’s surprised, but admiring the fact that for all his talk, Bigwig isn’t running off to save himself. Bigwig is a captain and can’t leave his men to die, but Hazel is the leader and he can’t leave the survivors. Frankly I’m very interested to see if Bigwig would have stayed, fought Hazel, or dragged him had Blackberry not saved the day. The main point here is that Bigwig never challenges Hazel on the grounds of not trusting or respecting his authority, only occasionally his decisions, and primarily for the collective safety of the group. However Hazel is still viewing Bigwig as a fierce independent rabbit who is going to make trouble.

4. Hawkbit, Speedwell & Acorn challenging Hazel, Chapter 10, The Road and the Common.

Hawkbit, Acorn & Speedwell (HSA) start to challenge Hazel, first saying they’d like to stop (they’ve been having a very gruelling climb), and then it escalates to saying they’d like to go back because they believe Hazel is lying to them and full of it. Notably they bring up his lack of knowledge about the road- something Bigwig did talk to Hazel about in front of the whole group for once. Hazel starts trying to explain why this is stupid (if the rabbits go back they’ll be killed), and what they even expect him to do, likely in the hope that HSA will talk it out until they air their grievances until they realise they’re wrong. However HSA are cut off before this can happen by Fiver and Bigwig approaching, Fiver who wants to talk to Hazel, and Bigwig who- it’s not explained why he’s there- but he’s heard the whole thing (likely looking out for Hazel). Bigwig scowls and says he’s going to have a “few words” with HSA- which from the little we hear through Hazel’s POV is mostly insults with the purpose of reminding them their place. We hear what we’re told is likely the end of Bigwig’s speech though and-

“And now, you bunch of mole-snouted, muck-raking, hutch-hearted sheep ticks, get out of my sight sharp. Otherwise I’ll-” [then he’s cut off by the wind]. 

Once more evidence of Bigwig throwing his weight around doesn’t support him being a usurper, in fact he seems angry at the disrespect to Hazel, and is doing his best to make sure dissent and disorder doesn’t fester in the ranks. Whether Hazel or Bigwig’s approach is better is a different story and more to do with their different personalities and roles- Chief/Captain.

Hazel, upon returning asks Blackberry where HSA are and we’re told this:

 "There's been a fearful row. Bigwig told Hawkbit and Speedwell that he'd scratch them to pieces if they didn't obey him. And when Hawkbit said he wanted to know who was Chief Rabbit, Bigwig bit him. It seems a nasty business. Who is Chief Rabbit,anyway--you or Bigwig?" 

Bigwig, being Owsla manages discipline much firmer and through strength/power. Hazel notes that he doesn’t know who the Chief Rabbit is, merely that Bigwig’s stronger. But this is actually a very good example of Bigwig’s loyalty- he’s angry but sticks to physical discipline while they’re merely talking about not wanting to follow Hazel. However, once they start snarking and perhaps suggesting Bigwig lead a coup/suggesting he’s a usurper/Hazel isn’t a good leader you can see how the switch flips in Bigwig’s mind. He doesn’t take the insult well, Bigwig views himself quite clearly as a second in command, and a loyal one at that. (Loyalty, strength and protectiveness are some of Bigwig’s best features). The incident isn’t really focused on again, but safe to say there’s no more questioning who’s really the boss, just as there’s no questioning Bigwig’s tendency to lead in lieu of Hazel. This isn’t just because of Bigwig’s own presence, it’s a lot to do with how Hazel treats Bigwig, even if he doesn’t seem to quite consciously focus on it yet…

Lastly to note and really seal the deal, when they meat Cowslip several of the Sandleford Rabbits refer to Hazel as “Hazel-rah” (calling him chief), Bigwig… doesn’t, but he doesn’t seem to object in any way, and, in a scene that I will dissect, really does seem to view Hazel with incredible respect and as leader- to who Bigwig follows but offers meaningful criticism to allow him to be better.

[scoutception]

Robotics;Notes Elite review

Robotics;Notes, the third visual novel in the Science Adventure series, is by far the most unfortunate entry in the series. Not only is it the follow up to Steins;Gate, one of the most acclaimed and popular visual novels ever released, something that even extends to its anime adaptation, but it had to wait until 2020, 8 years after its release in 2012, to be translated into English, well after every other main entry in the series besides Chaos;Head, with its anime adaptation being the only way to experience it beforehand, and while said anime is a decent watch in its own right, it definitely accentuates the source material’s problems, while adding several more. Needless to say, Robotics;Notes had a lot of things going against it when it was finally released, most of which weren’t even its own fault, and it can definitely come off as an underwhelming entry just from that. However, today, we’ll be putting aside all those external factors and take a fair look at the VN itself, and how it holds up on its own. The version I played was the Steam version, using the Committee of Zero patch, a fan made patch that, among other things, fixes many issues with the translation, and is absolutely the recommended way to experience the VN.

Kaito Yashio is a student of Chuo Tanegashima High, and one of the two members of its Robotics Research Club. The president of the club, Akiho Senomiya, Kaito’s friend since childhood, and little sister of the club’s founder, Misaki Senomiya, is completely committed to completing GunBuild-1, a lifesize recreation of the titular mecha from the extremely popular anime Gunvarrel, and a project the club has been working on since its creation. Unfortunately for Akiho, everything seems determined to see her efforts be in vain. The club gets no funding, and is seen as a laughingstock among the students, its advisor, Mitsuhiko “Mitchie” Nagafukada, is completely irresponsible and rarely does anything of help, and Kaito is completely apathetic to anything that isn’t KillBallad, a mobile fighting game he’s determined to become the top player in the world in. While the club soon manages to gain three new members, namely Subaru Hidaka, an expert in robotics whose knowledge far surpasses Akiho’s, Junna Daitoku, a former member of the karate club, and Kona Furugoori, aka Frau Koujiro, the teenage creator of KillBallad, their personalities are just as difficult: Subaru sees the project as a lost cause, and refuses to help with it without a compromise, Junna is painfully shy and has a fear of robots, and Frau is a complete shut in and social mess, being completely perverted and mostly talking in outdated slang, which keeps most people from even understanding her. Despite all this, Akiho’s unrelenting passion for mechas, and desire to step out of her sister’s shadow, compel her to continue on.

Meanwhile, Kaito one day encounters Airi, an AI that exists within the augmented reality app IRUO, along with a strange AR annotation called the Kimijima Report, authored by Airi’s deceased creator, Kou Kimijima. Within it are warnings of a grand conspiracy that aims to devastate humanity, the details of which are contained in similar reports hidden all over Tanegashima, locked behind “flags” that must be cleared before they become visible. Though at first skeptical, it soon becomes clear to Kaito that the reports contain a disturbing amount of truths, and that he’s become involved in something far larger, and far more dangerous, than he bargained for.

I’ll say it now, the story’s focus on both of these plotlines causes a number of noticeable issues, mainly due to feeling very disconnected from each other. While all of the main cast except Airi are heavily involved in the Robotics Club plot, only Kaito, Airi, and to a much lesser extent Frau are involved in the Kimijima Report plot, in comparison to, say, Steins;Gate and Chaos;Child, which tied its whole cast into their stories much better. In addition, the majority of the focus is on the club, and though always interesting, the reports tend to go rather uneventfully as well. Due to this, the story can feel very slow and meandering if you don’t know just what you’re getting into, much more so than the other entries in the series, which can definitely make it seem unappealing. Additionally, the story is much less standalone than most SciAdv VNs, where the references are often minor. Here, there are some rather significant references to Chaos;Head and, to a lesser extent, Steins;Gate, to the point of outright spoilers in a few cases, meaning going through those beforehand is heavily recommended, which is especially annoying when Chaos;Head still has no official translation, and only a fan translation for the incomplete PC version.

Despite all of this, both plotlines are actually quite compelling, once you get used to the game’s pacing. Robotics;Notes’ biggest strength is its absolutely great cast of characters. Everyone in the main cast is very likeable, distinctive, and well developed across the story, and have good dynamics with each other, with Kaito and Akiho’s interactions being some of the biggest highlights of the game, with the end result making everyone feel significant in their own ways, and truly feeling like a unified group, something Chaos;Head and even Steins;Gate struggled with at times. Kaito, who initially comes off as a very motivationless character, has a good amount of backstory and a constant, if subtle, arc throughout the game that makes him properly fleshed out. Subaru, who’d normally just be the token other guy, is a prominent and likeable character in his own right, having a very important role in Gunbuild’s construction, while Frau, who initially just comes off as comic relief, has many great moments throughout the story, with her focus chapter in particular being one of the best in the game. Even Airi has quite a bit more to her than it may seem. The cast is definitely a worthy successor to the cast of Steins;Gate, even more so than Chaos;Child’s, I would say.

The cast also heavily ties into one of the main themes of the game, namely dreams, the harsh difficulties and compromises one faces in pursuing their dreams, and how losing one can change a person. All of them face this, with varying amounts of focus, and it’s a theme furthered with the prominence of robots throughout the game, both the idealized kind found in mecha anime, and the real, practical robots of the real world. There’s an almost exhaustive amount of detail put into the construction and function of real robots, which makes for some interesting, if sometimes long winded, discussions throughout the game, in true SciAdv fashion.

While the story is mainly told through Kaito’s perspective, it switches fairly often to other characters, most often Akiho. While the rest of the series except for Steins;Gate does this as well, it’s notable here for giving almost every character, even the supporting cast, at least one scene from their perspective, often focused on their own personal dilemmas, or flashbacks involving Misaki. These perspective switches make a nice change of pace, and definitely help flesh out the characters even further. On the subject of the supporting cast, while most other entries either have supporting casts that are very inconsequential, such as in Chaos;Child, or almost nonexistent, such as in Steins;Gate, Robotics;Notes, on the other hand, has a much more prominent and fleshed out supporting cast. From Mizuki Irei, the harsh and snarky convenience store employee, and info broker to Kaito, to Tetsuharu Fujita, the grumpy but fair “Robot Doctor”, to Mitchie, the horribly unreliable, yet entertaining club advisor, they certainly leave much more of a mark than usual. The most interesting of all, though, is a 20 year old Nae Tennouji, originally a very minor character in Steins;Gate. She has an almost surprising amount of prominence throughout the game, and even has her own ending, if a very short one.

Compared to most other entries in the series, Robotics;Notes definitely carries a much lighter tone. Tanegashima makes for a very relaxed setting, and as mentioned, there aren’t quite as many big events as one might expect. The characters are generally pretty lighthearted in personality as well, up to Kaito not being nearly as unlikeable to start off as other SciAdv protagonists. However, the tone works quite well, and helps slowly endear the characters to you even early on. And while it’s not quite as messed up as, say, Chaos;Head, it’s got more than a few disturbing elements and scenes of its own. Ultimately, it has the same “feel” as the rest of the series, and when it wants to be intense, suspenseful, sad, or whatever else, it absolutely works, especially from chapter 7 onward.

As far as “gameplay” goes, there’s a surprisingly large amount of interactivity available. At most moments during the story, Kaito can pull out his tablet and access its various apps. Most prominently, there’s Twipo, an obvious lawyer friendly version of Twitter, where Kaito can look at tweets from the Robotics Club, its associates, and even random accounts commenting on current events, with Kaito having the option to reply to those of the Robotics Club. There’s also IRUO, the augmented reality app, which lets the player look around the area and scan geotags, which contain small profiles for characters, or details for locations or objects. IRUO is also used along with a map app to search for the Kimijima Reports, letting you travel to various different locations on Tanegashima to search. It’s a neat concept, but the icons for the reports are so small, and so many locations tend to be available at one time, that finding them can often just be annoying. There’s also, of all things, the otherwise story reliant KillBallad matches, where you have to successfully input a string of buttons, the length of which varies depending on the opponent’s skill, within a time limit in order to win. Most of the time it doesn’t matter, but there are achievements and even story sequences reliant on winning or losing certain matches. All in all, these make for nice occasional changes of pace, but it’s still a visual novel in the end.

Visually, Robotics;Notes is actually quite impressive. As can be seen in the screenshots, instead of sprites, 3D character models are used instead in normal scenes, and having played Virtue’s Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma well before this, I was more than a bit wary of them before release. Thankfully, compared to the cheap models of those two games, they’re much, much better. They’re actually very expressive, and have some great animations that give each character a lot of life. The backgrounds are also quite well done, and Tanegashima definitely makes for a unique and atmospheric setting. As usual for visual novels, there’s also CGs throughout the game, done in a different, but still appealing and well drawn style. Finally, in one of the biggest additions to Elite compared to the original version, occasionally, clips from the anime adaptation is used, mostly to better demonstrate details that were only narration originally, as far as I can tell. This blend of 3D models, CGs, and animation is a bit bizarre at first, but it works surprisingly well, and makes for one of the most visually appealing entries in the series.

As far as sound goes, Takeshi Abo is once again the composer, and once again puts out a very good soundtrack, which further captures and enhances the atmosphere. The soundtrack in general is definitely much lighter and peaceful than usual, but actually has more tracks than most of the SciAdv soundtracks, allowing it to cover many other moods as well. From the very relaxed Winds of Tangegashima, to the mysterious Uchugaoka Park, to the nostalgic Memories with Big Sis, and especially the beautiful title screen theme, Robotics Notes -2nd theme-, there’s a lot of great songs to be found. The voice acting is also very good, and the characters wouldn’t work nearly as well without it, with Ryohei Kimura as Kaito, Yoshino Nanjo as Akiho, Kaori Nazuka as Frau, and Sora Tokui as Junna especially sticking out to me.

It’s worth noting that Robotics;Notes is on the longer side when it comes to SciAdv, much like Chaos;Child. It’s hardly Fate/Stay Night, but it’ll take some time to get through. It also has a very, very weird and annoying ending system. Whereas in other titles, endings are, just that, actual endings you can diverge into somewhere in the story, Robotics;Notes’ endings are actually just regular chapters that are part of the main story, which just happen to focus on different parts of the cast. The divergence happens in chapter 5, and depends on your replies to said characters on Twipo in both that chapter and the preceding one, with you instead going to the short Nae ending if you don’t fulfill the requirements for any of them. While Steins;Gate had a similar system, and was annoying in of itself, Robotics;Notes takes it to another level by making all but the Nae ending mandatory, though said ending has some points that make it worth seeing regardless, and occurring in a specific chronological order, despite allowing you to get the endings nonlinearly, meaning you could accidentally skip from chapter 5 to chapter 8. The system overall is just unneeded, and following a guide, such as the one by the aforementioned Committee of Zero, is highly recommended.

In the end, would I recommend Robotics;Notes? To a SciAdv fan, absolutely. To someone who isn’t, well, I already explained the problems there. I can’t say its one of my favorites among the series, but by itself, it’s still something I enjoyed a lot. Despite the issues it does have, its very well done cast, visuals, sound, and overall story make it a memorable and emotional experience in its own right. Now, with yet another long VN review out of the way, I anxiously await the Committee of Zero patch for Robotics;Notes DaSH, to finally finish off my SciAdv journey, for the foreseeable future, at least. Till next time. -Scout

[lostplay]

Game 21: Batman The Telltale Series: The Enemy Within To say Telltale got around when it came to licenses is an understatement. One of the biggest reasons it fail was because it was always taking on too many projects, and for a long time, I thought it was because Telltale didn’t actually care about making a good choice system or care about the material at hand. On revisit, I have found time and time again, the opposite is indeed true. Telltale crafts a lot of these stories well, and try to help set up their own versions of characters, plots, and world building. While The Enemy Within is a great example of Telltale creating something new from old, it sadly still has a lot of technical problems and decision issues that plague it’s otherwise great tale. Enemy Within being effectively the second season of the Telltale Batman universe, we are given a small glimpse of what happened and what choices we made during the first game. Aside from a few off handed mentions in the first episode, the choices you made in the first game just feel irrelevant after the fact, and the choices that did matter, matter very little. This isn’t much of a testament of the choice system in this game, as it kinda has a similar, but different problem. The majority of choices in Enemy Within just don’t really feel they impact much or really feel like conflicting choices. Most of the choices seen either contribute to an overall relationship dynamic or just feel so weighted one way that it’s a clear choice for most people to go with the other option, often leaving 70/30 polls at the end of these episodes. On the technical side of things, Enemy Within does look better than it’s previous season, but sometimes models can feel a bit off pending on movement timing. Fighting has been far more refined to feel like a fighting sequence, but there is still a lot of one missed key deaths that have seemed to cause Telltale to increase the leeway on key accusation instead of Heavy Rain’s far more interesting flown combat script system. It does feel like Enemy With takes 1 step forward tho and 2 steps back; as they have a number of fights that do feel pretty stunning to actually playthrough compared to the stilt action of most telltale games. Detective work is pretty much thrown away after the first episode too, as the second season is far more interested in a certain dynamic more than anything else.

Relationship dynamics are always the most interesting part of telltale game’s as the iconic, “____ will remember that” is often a trope found in a lot of them. So, of course, the iconic duo, Joker and Batman would have a larger focus on their relationship dynamic compared to everyone else in this series. While Joker, aka John Doe, played a minimal role in the last season, he is brought in heavily for the second season. Perhaps what is the most compiling thing about John Doe and Batman is more so how there relationship dynamic can change so drastically pending on your actions as both Bruce or Batman, making the origins of Joker itself far more multiple choice, and either far more connected to Batman than before or someone that was simply a lost cause. While the relationship with Joker and Batman has always been a prominent dynamic in the series, it was never something that was established with Bruce/Batman having all the power. John Doe is honestly just a really mentality unstable patient that is looking for support, and in this way telltale actually makes us empathize with him. Not to say that their isn’t other relationships or characters in this story that aren’t interesting, as I do enjoy these versions of the Riddler and Harley compared to how we usually get them. Still every relationship takes a backseat to John Doe and Bruce/Batman, and really that’s what makes this season far more interesting than the last.

While I don’t think we will find this version of Telltale’s Batman any time soon, I honestly enjoy my time with both games, and consider the overall experience a positive one. Any problems I had with this season were often minimal in comparison to the majority of Telltale’s other works, and while I do think it was both enhanced and suffered from the focus of one relationship, I don’t think I would trade that unique approach with the usual same old same old. It’s both a testament to Telltale’s writing skills and the staying power of these DC characters.

[jazy3]

Thoughts on Grey’s Anatomy: 17X3

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I liked this episode, but nothing beats that Premiere. I mean Wow! This episode for me felt very much like a continuation of the two part Premiere. It was confirmed that Meredith has COVID-19 (!) and we got to see how she’s doing and where her treatment is at. My best friend who I watch with pointed out that some of the treatments they mention are things that health care workers were trying in the early days of the pandemic that we now know aren’t very effective. It’s interesting to see the doctors work through this process as it would have happened for health care workers at the time.

We get to see Derek Shepherd again which is always a treat! His words confirm that the beach Meredith is on is some kind of limbo and that her reaching Derek will mean she had died and is transitioning into the afterlife. Derek tells her she can’t reach him because she’s worried about the kids and how reuniting with him means leaving their children behind. My guess is that she’s going to code in an upcoming episode and will reunite and talk to Derek once that happens and then they’ll resuscitate her and she’ll come back to the land of the living.

I loved how Derek kept saying the sand wasn’t real and then Meredith ran to him and tripped and fell and she called him on it and he laughed. Classic Derek. He loves her, but he was also kind of an asshole at times and that was so him. I loved the scene with Bailey and Meredith and that we got an Alex reference. God I miss him. I got the Meredith and Richard scene I’ve been hoping for! That I felt like was missing last season and in the premiere. It was so sweet.

I think Meredith made the right choice with her Medical Power of Attorney (POA). Richard loves her enough to do everything to save her, but is clear headed and wise enough to respect her wishes if she becomes too far gone. I loved his joke about it being pay back for what he did years earlier. I loved the conversation she had with Hayes too! When Maggie asks if he wants her to say Hi he says no and jokes that he wouldn't her to think she’s special and we later see that Hayes does that so that he can visit Meredith in person and talk to her through video outside her window.

I had a moment where I thought that Meredith might make Hayes her POA, but then he made the comment about how you don’t want it to be a family member or someone who loves you so much that they’ll do anything to keep you alive. It should be someone who can be objective and respect your wishes. Hayes cares deeply for Meredith and if it were him he’d do everything to keep her alive no matter what and I love that implication from their conversation. I love how he told her all the reasons people fear and respect her and how the disease had nothing on her. So great! I love their interactions so much.

I liked that she asked him about Abigail because we’ve seen him ask her about Derek and her past relationships and it’s been implied they’ve talked about his, but this is the first instance we see on screen. Through this interaction we learn more about his wife too. He called her Abby and when she was sick with cancer her sister was her POA and made them do everything they could to save her even though Hayes and his boys objected. Which is interesting considering on her death bed Abigail described her sister as crazy, but not a bad person and made Hayes promise to let the boys see her. I’m guessing she didn’t want to put Hayes through having to make those decisions for her.

We also get to see Hayes and Maggie interact for the first time! We see that like Amelia, Maggie is a fan. She knows about his feelings for Meredith and their relationship and is supportive. Which is more than anyone else except Derek ever got from anyone in Meredith’s life so major points there. The interactions between Maggie and Winston we’re very sweet and I love how they comforted each other and the shot where they made it look like they were on opposite sides of the wall was very cool.

Some great acting on the part of Kelly McCreary in that closet scene! I felt her heartbreak. I’m disappointed we didn’t get more Meredith and Hayes scenes and that we haven’t gotten any explicit romantic content from them so far this season. I love a slow burn as much as the next person, but after watching Meredith jump feet first into relationships with men who turned out to be her boss, married, engaged to someone who wasn’t actually dead, her student, or that she wasn’t ready for only to have those relationships completely blow up in her face I want to see her in a healthy committed relationship with an actual grown up.

Hayes is that person and while I loved their slow burn last season I really wish they would pick up the pace here. I love seeing their relationship develop, but at this point they’ve established that they are good friends who have a lot in common and are able to talk openly about their kids, dead spouses, past partners, and problems. Hayes has made it clear he’s interested in her romantically and Meredith appears to reciprocate his feelings, but it feels like those feelings are just under the surface of their interactions and I’m starting to get a bit frustrated.

There are multiple romantic plot points I could have done without over the years with regards to Meredith’s storyline. This is one that I really want to see and I wish they would hurry up. I did like the mention of how Meredith will have to quarantine at a hotel for at least two weeks after she’s discharged. I’d love for Hayes to be the person she quarantines with and see them spend some time alone together and I think there’s great potential there.  

I loved that we got to see a scene with Meredith and Ellis! She’s so cute! Bailey and Ellis are starting to talk more as characters and we’re getting more insight into who these kids are which is great! Up until recently we only really got a feel for who Zola was. I love also that they’re finding ways to do it that keep the child actors who play them safe while incorporating moments with them.

I love seeing Richard step into the Chiefs role. He’ll be great in it and can really help Grey Sloan and the other Catherine Fox hospitals through this. I liked his speech to Tom although he didn’t seem to take it to heart. It was also cool to see him give a speech to the new interns that they introduced. It’s not his usual speech because these are not usual times and I like that they reflected that. Also, Sandy from ER is one of the new interns and I love that. My best friend and I have spotted a lot of cameos in this season of Grey’s so far from other long running shows which is really cool.

Tom was floundering again this episode and I feel like they might be moving towards wrapping up his storyline because if him and Teddy aren’t getting back together, which appears to be the case, and with Amelia on maternity leave there’s no real story for him. Since it’s now been revealed that he has COVID-19 they could choose to kill him off or have him recover and return to where he was working prior to moving to Seattle. It was heartbreaking to watch Amelia and Maggie worry over Meredith. Especially Amelia knowing that losing her sister who was also Derek’s beloved wife could compromise her sobriety that she has worked so hard to achieve and maintain.  

I liked the scenes with Amelia and Link, but it’s starting to feel a little gratuitous with the sex angle I think because none of the other characters are able to do that right now. We got some nice Jo and Link interactions. It was nice to see Link back in the OR. It was also nice to see Jackson remember he has a kid and talk about Harriet! We get some updates about his co-parenting situation with April and Matthew and that he doesn’t get to see Harriet as much as he’d like because he’s picking up more COVID shifts than April is. He likes Matthew, but he’s irked when Harriet says that he cuts her sandwiches better and I mean fair.

We see that DeLuca is wearing a yellow scrub cover whereas the Attending Physicians are wearing dark blue and the new interns are wearing light blue. This appears to confirm that he’s doing his Fellowship as otherwise their scrub covers would be the same colour. He spends the episode following Teddy around which seems to imply that he might be doing a Fellowship under her. Which would explain why Meredith didn’t know about it as she and Teddy aren’t super close and Meredith is presumably on Owen’s side in the fallout of Teddy’s affair being made public. Still, we’ve never seen DeLuca take any interest in Cardio or have any scenes with Teddy prior to this so it’s unclear.

I feel like the actor who plays DeLuca must have some kind of personal connection to someone who works behind the scenes on the show because at this point his character doesn’t really serve any real purpose in terms of the plot. His character doesn’t move any of the other characters storylines forward and you could remove him from Seasons 15, 16, and 17 and it wouldn’t affect the story at all. Prior to that his character served a purpose in Maggie, Alex, Jo, and Amelia’s storylines, but that ended in Season 15.

Since then we’ve seen him creepily pursue Meredith, date her largely off screen, and then get sick with Bipolar Disorder. That’s it and none of those plots affected the larger story of the show in any major way because they made it clear through dialogue that DeLuca isn’t part of the gang and the other characters don’t like him and simply tolerate his presence. Now they’re having him follow Teddy around and help treat Meredith off screen. It’s like they’re grasping at straws. His character serves no purpose at this point so I’m confused as to why they haven’t written him off. Maybe they will in the second half of the season? 

In the Promo for next week they tease that there’s something else on that beach that’s a familiar face. Someone Meredith has lost that’s passed on and that they’re hanging out at the outpost we see on the beach. My money is on George O’Malley.

Until next time!

[oumakokichi]

What do you think of the idea that there's a mastermind behind Monokuma like the first game, and Tsumugi was like a second fiddle to them? I feel like if there was one, they could have been hiding under that hatch in Ouma's lab. Multiple roles were relevant in past games too, plus Monokuma bothers me a bit, I feel like there's something... off about him that isn't expanded on

Hmm... that’s a difficult question, because while I definitely do think Tsumugi was working with “Team Danganronpa” as a whole, I’m not quite sold on the idea of her being a pawn in someone else’s schemes.

I know some people lean more towards the idea that Tsumugi herself was brainwashed via the flashback lights and that’s why she’s the ringleader, but I’m not so sure about that theory. She herself says in chapter 6 that once you know how the flashback lights work or doubt their credibility then they no longer work at all: you might see the memories play out in your head, but you no longer believe that these things happened to you because you’re aware that they’re fictional.

I’m inclined to think she’s telling the truth too, given that other characters like Ouma and Angie call the flashback lights into question in much earlier chapters, and Ouma himself clearly doesn’t believe one of the flashback lights at the beginning of chapter 3, when he mutters that he’s “disappointed in everyone for believing it so easily” before quickly changing the subject when Saihara presses him for details.

I definitely do think Tsumugi’s part of a larger problem, or rather that it’s her way of thinking that’s the problem: it’s not just that she’s a single bad individual to be blamed for everything, so much that the complete desensitization to violence and commodification of Danganronpa as a means for kids to die on television and get famous is the real “evil” here. At least, that’s always what I interpreted her line differentiating between herself as the “ringleader” and the people in the outside world as the “mastermind” to mean.

But I don’t quite agree with the idea that someone else was physically present in the killing game and pulling the strings with Tsumugi, not only because I feel it would take away some of Tsumugi’s autonomy as the main antagonist of the game, but also because it would sort of go against typical mystery rules like Knox--namely, the idea that the culprit of a mystery work should always be introduced or at least foreshadowed at the beginning of your story, otherwise it makes said mystery unfair and much harder to solve.

Rules like Knox’s aren’t set in stone of course, and are often more of a general guideline for mystery works in order to provide an idea of what’s “fair” and “solvable” for the readers trying to solve them. All mysteries are games, of a sort, not just Danganronpa. So having an unseen, unnamed culprit who was never actually introduced or brought up just wouldn’t be fair to the players, in my opinion.

I suppose you could make a case for “Kaede’s twin sister,” since Tsumugi herself does bring this up as a red herring in chapter 6, but I always took that line to be Tsumugi desperately making things up to throw suspicion off of herself while everyne was investigating. Not only that, but I assumed it was sort of a joke about how Kaede’s Japanese voice actress, Sayaka Kanda, played both Junko and Mukuro in the stageplay for dr1.

There’s also Tsumugi’s line about being a “cosplaycat criminal,” but I personally assumed this was foreshadowing about the outside world, and people’s devotion to and obsession with the Danganronpa series as a whole. I think a case could definitely be made for her referring to someone within a larger group outside, whether it’s Team Danganronpa or some unknown group of similar DR fanatics, but I didn’t feel as though she was referring to another person directly present in their killing game.

As for your point about Monokuma, I think part of it may just be the fact that Monokuma seems to largely operate as an AI in ndrv3, rather than a direct mouthpiece for Tsumugi all the time. Obviously she could operate him and input commands to the Mother Monokuma in her secret room inside the library, but unlike Junko who spent most of dr1 holed up in the control room, Tsumugi spends the majority of her time in plain sight (ha) with all of her fellow classmates. If Monokuma were operating largely as an AI designed by Team Danganronpa so he could walk and talk independently when she didn’t have an opportunity to control him herself, I think that might explain some of the inconsistencies.

Of course, most of this is just speculation! It could turn out that I’m totally wrong and that there was someone else all along, depending on whatever Kodaka has in store for the future, or if he even writes another game for DR at all. A huge part of what makes ndrv3′s ending and Tsumugi herself as a character so much fun is, in my opinion, how open-ended and perfect for speculation and theory-crafting it is! Thank you for the fun question anon, I hope my response was okay!

[contextualrandomness]

The Shouldn't Waste Your Pretty Face Playlist

The long anticipated (cough, cough - or the thing I promised myself I would make before posting but then got impatient??) playlist to Shouldn't Waste Your Pretty Face! Enjoy and if you're interested, below the cut are my reasons for putting each song into the playlist and what I think each represents in the story.

Head Above Water by Avril Lavigne – “My life is what I’m fighting for”

When this story starts, Nolan is overwhelmed and scared and desperate to make his hockey dream a reality. All of his energy is focused on making sure he does everything right because his life in hockey depends on it.

Gasoline by Halsey – “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me”

This song was my anthem while writing this story. There were so many lines in this song that I debated making the title but given the themes of this story I felt like ‘shouldn’t waste your pretty face’ was the perfect epitome of Nolan’s struggle. The world hates it when we don’t fit into their boxes.

LOST BOY by Troye Sivan – “I say I want to settle down, build your hopes up like a tower”

This is Isaac’s song. Or it’s the song of Isaac and Nolan and the constant push Nolan feels to surrender to this sweet boy with kind eyes and a gentle smile and the equally constant pull he feels of knowing that their dreams of the future don’t line up and he needs to get out now.

Friends Don’t by Maddie & Tae – “They don’t hear each other’s names and forget to concentrate”

I struggled somewhat to find the best place for this song within the chronology of this playlist because honestly this song is just the entire beginning of TK and Nolan’s relationship. This almost immediate connection that always edged a little too close to ‘not just friends.’ And the absolute roller coaster of emotions it brings for Nolan as his feelings for TK grow and bubble up under his skin.

Good as You by Kane Brown – “You’re more than just the surface, you got the heart of gold”

Oh, the fight. Stories just aren’t the same without at least a little bit of drama. Losing TK as a consistent touchstone in his rookie season quickly morphed into unbearable for Nolan. Recognizing that a lot of his own bullshit hurt someone who has been nothing but an absolute gentleman to him was just the bridge Nolan needed to cross to begin to find out who he really is. This fight is the first turning point into Nolan’s transition to becoming who he’s really meant to be.

I Like Me Better by Lauv – “I knew from the first time; I’d stay for a long time”

Nolan’s friendship with Nico is a really important part of this story. Nico is the first person who truly gives Nolan permission to be himself, to explore all his angles in the comfort of a safe space.

Numb by Linkin Park – “All I want to do is be more like me and be less like you”

Nolan’s mom played a much larger role ‘on-screen’ in the first iteration of this story. In the final draft she is the constant, omnipresent ‘villain’ but doesn’t get as much airtime. However, this song was so, so important to keep in the playlist. This probably reveals that I’m someone who came of age in the early-aughts, but this song was my angsty anthem as a teen. The constant fight of wanting to be different than what your family expects of you. So, chronologically, I’ve put it in roughly where we ‘see’ his mom for the first time, but it’s an applicable song throughout the story.

Sucker by Jonas Brothers – “You’re the medicine and the pain, the tattoo inside my brain”

The theme song of Nolan’s second heat. The moment he realizes that he can clock TK’s scent in a crowded bar, the moment he lets TK cut his strings and give him exactly what he needs. That moment, after, when he’s tangled in the sheets with TK and knows that if he could, if he wasn’t broken, he’d want this every moment of his life.

Silver Lining by Mt. Joy – “Wear your silver lining, wear it close to your skin”

Is this really a Nolan Patrick story without a Mt. Joy song in its playlist? No. No, it’s not. So here is Pretty Face’s shameless inclusion of a Mt. Joy song in its playlist. It also happens to be my favorite Mt. Joy song and a perfect fit for the metaphor that clothes play in this story.

homecoming queen? by Kelsea Ballerini – “But what if I told you the world wouldn’t end if you started showing what’s under your skin”

I really debated if this song had a place in this playlist or the playlist for TK’s story. In the end I think it fits both and so this is my secret, easter egg that hints at a bit of what TK’s story is going to be about. Think – first verse is Travis, second verse in Nolan, and the chorus sums up the entire message of both of their stories.

Adore You by Harry Styles – “Honey, I’d walk through fire for you just let me adore you”

THIS IS TK’S SONG AND YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE. TK one hundred percent believes that one of the most important things he’ll ever do in this life is adore Nolan and make sure he knows how amazing he is. In terms of actual story moments, I always think about this song during the scenes with the courting presents.

HEAVEN by Troye Sivan, Betty Who – “So if I’m losing a piece of me maybe I don’t want heaven”

Can you tell I really like Troye Sivan? I really like Troye Sivan. I always really connected with the lyrics in this song. In particular, this song makes me think of the scene right at the end of Nolan’s last heat of the first season and they’re in the Brooklyn hotel room and TK grabs the end of Nolan’s braid, tugs it, and tells him that it looks good.

Voices in My Head by Ashley Tisdale – “All the voices in my head always try to break me”

As the summer after Nolan’s rookie season starts to bleed into late July you begin to see Nolan’s shift towards owning his thoughts, feelings, and emotions. He’s beginning to recognize that the fucked up voices in his head are just the expectations society put on him and that they don’t necessarily reflect his own thoughts and desires.

Scars to Your Beautiful by Alessia Cara – “And you don’t have to change a thing, the world could change its heart”

This is my Maddie Patrick song. Even though many characters throughout this story remind Nolan that there isn’t anything wrong with his true self, Maddie is such a critical person in this regard. She grew up in the same household as Nolan and knows the bullshit he received. She’s the one that constantly reminds him of the patriarchy and bodily autonomy and the importance of owning yourself. And that it’s the world that needs to change, not him.

Brave by Sara Bareilles – “Maybe there’s a way out of the cage where you live”

This song is essentially representing Nolan’s journey to getting his tubes tied, after finally allowing himself to admit out loud what he’s always known – his body doesn’t fit him perfect and it’s time for him to change that.

Worship You by Kane Brown – “Every time I see you smile it’s like I’ve seen the light”

Would it be the soundtrack to TK’s love confession if it wasn’t country music? Or Kane Brown? I feel like TK would like Kane Brown. I feel like TK just wants to spend his whole life worshipping Nolan and reminding him of the miracle he’s giving TK by loving him back.

Soul Meets Body by Death Cab for Cutie – “I want to live where soul meets body”

And here we are at the end of Nolan’s journey where he has two tiny scars on his hipbones that remind him that the outside of his body finally fits the inside. That his soul and his body are finally one and the same.

[adhd-wifi]

MDZS and the Legends of Hou Yi

So just for fun, I wanted to talk about how much the tales of Hou Yi, a famous figure in Chinese legends, is referrenced in the story of MDZS. I’m pretty confident that MXTX is quite the fan of this particular story. (Note: There are multiple versions of this tale, and I went with the one that had most ties with MDZS, which, coincidentally, happened to be the version I personally grew up with, with one or two minor differences.)

This post took me 6 hours.

The Legend:

Back when the world was still new, there were ten brilliant suns in the sky, children of the Heavenly Sun Emperor Di Jun. They took turns illuminating the sky, bringing light and warmth to the mortal world below. However, the ten suns were still children, and despite their father’s strict instructions of only allowing one of them into the skies at a time, they all went out together one day to play together. 

The mortal world suffered from their game, the blinding light and unbearable heat killing crops and livestock and causing the people immense suffering. Seeing this suffering, the great immortal archer Hou Yi climbed to the top of a great mountain, armed with exactly ten arrows in his quiver, and spoke one final warning to the suns, asking that they return home peacefully. But when they did not heed his warning, Hou Yi drew his divine bow, letting loose nine arrows made of dragon bone towards the heavens. One by one, nine suns were struck, each of them falling dead to the Earth as blood red crows bearing three legs. With one arrow left in his quiver, however, Hou Yi chose to spare the last sun so the world would not fall into icy darkness. The last sun promised to behave, fearful of the archer who shot down his brothers. The mortal world declared Hou Yi a hero and their saviour.

Di Jun, however, was furious at the deaths of nine of his children, and so he cast Hou Yi and his wife, Chang'E, from the heavens, stripping them of their immortality. 

Seeking a way to return them to the heavens and relieve the feelings of grief felt by his dear wife, Hou Yi sought out the help of Xi Wang Mu, Mother Queen of the West, who was known for having created the Elixir of Immortality. Xi Wang Mu took pity on Hou Yi, and also recognized his heroic deeds in shooting down the suns despite knowing there were consequences, and thus, she gave him her last bottle of Elixir. She warned him, however, that the elixir was too strong for any single mortal, and it must be shared between him and his wife. 

Overjoyed, Hou Yi returned home, hiding the elixir in hopes of surprising his wife with it. He told her that the 15th day of the Eight Lunar Month would be a special day, for he planned to share the elixir with her on that day, and ascend back to the heavens together under the light of the beautiful full moon. 

However, others had heard of the elixir the famous fallen hero had managed to obtain. Greedy with the thought of ascending to immortality themselves, they stalked Hou Yi home and overheard what he told his wife. So they planned an ambush on the promised night, when Hou Yi left to go hunting for a special feast. They attacked Hou Yi under the moonlight, killing him and then raiding their home. They tried to force Chang’E to give them what they wanted, but Chang’E refused to give it up to her husband’s killers. To ensure they never got their hands on it, Chang’E drank the entire elixir. True to Xi Wang Mu’s words, it was too strong for one person, and she was immediately cast into the skies, forced to leave her husband behind without even saying goodbye. She then decided to live on the moon, the closest she could to the Earth, where her husband was, her only companion the Jade Rabbit of the Moon. 

References to the Legend in Mo Dao Zu Shi:

The Wen Sect & the Ten Suns

The Wen Sect represent the Ten Suns, who enjoyed their lives and did what they wanted at the expense of others

Though we don’t meet all of them, there are exactly ten named (sort of) characters bearing the name Wen

Wen Mao

Wen RuoHan

Wen Chao

Wen Xu

Wen ZhuLiu

Wen Qing

Wen Ning

Granny Wen

Uncle Four

Wen Yuan

Note: While not explicitly stated, Granny Wen & Uncle Four were only ever considered part of the sect, so it’s fair to assume that they were in fact surnamed Wen

Out of those ten Wen Sect members, only one was alive by the end of the story, Wen Yuan (Wen Ning was technically dead)

The Wen Sect as a whole is said to be bad at archery, and they were furious upon losing an archery competition where missing a shot disqualifies them (Hou Yi only had ten arrows, at first planning to shoot them all down, and couldn't afford to miss a shot or the world could've been left with more than one sun)

The indoctrination can be seen as a metaphor for the suns playing and exerting their power harmfully over the mortal world

The Wen Sect primarily resorted to burning and fire, the element most associated with the sun

The name of QiShan Wen’s residence is 不夜天城 (bù yè tiān chéng), (overly) literally translated, “No Night Sky Palace”, AKA Nightless City. With the Ten Suns in the sky, night could not fall

Wang LingJiao took the shooting of a sun-like kite as justification for her accusations of the Jiang Sect going against the Wen Sect 

It was specifically the child of the Wen Sect Leader, Wen Chao, that led the attack on Lotus Pier, like how the Ten Suns were the children of the actual Sun Emperor

Also on a narrative note, both the Ten Suns and Wen Chao had larger roles in the overall story compared to their fathers, despite their fathers playing key roles as well

The first Wen Sect member to take Wei WuXian’s side, which ultimately led to Wei WuXian & Jiang Cheng surviving the massacre of Jiang Sect, was Wen Ning, the only notably skilled archer of the Wen Sect

On a similar note, Wei WuXian, who was the considered a hero and major player in the fall of the Wen Sect, was also the winner of the archery competition

This means two skilled archers were heavily responsible for the Wens losing the war in the long run, albeit somewhat indirectly

The Sunshot Campaign is literally named the Sunshot Campaign and was in fact directly and explicitly referencing the legend of a great hero shooting down the sun in canon (meaning the story of Hou Yi exists as a legend or fairytale in MDZS canon, nice!)

Wei WuXian, who is the Hou Yi of MDZS and a hero in the war against the Wens, is represented by a crow in official promos for the animation, and when the suns were shot down, they turned into red crows with three legs (this one could be pure coincidence since crows are also just seen as symbols of death in general and he controls the dead)

The Golden Core, The Yin Tiger Seal, and the Elixir of Immortality

Since golden cores are seen as necessary to cultivate, and cultivation leads to immortality, they are what represent the elixir in MDZS

Wen ZhuLiu, a Wen Sect member, having the ability to destroy golden cores could be seen as referencing how Di Jun took away Hou Yi and Chang’E’s immortality in retaliation for shooting down the suns

Jiang Cheng into going up a mountain to meet BaoShan Sanren to restore his golden core is similar to how Hou Yi sought out Xi Wang Mu to restore their immortality

On a related note, MDZS’s version of Xi Wang Mu is both BaoShan Sanren and Wen Qing combined, BaoShan Sanren playing the role of the immortal figure to give the golden core, and Wen Qing taking on her identity while being the one to actually give it through the experimental surgery

After getting the elixir however, it became more similar to the Yin Tiger Seal instead, being sought after by hostile people who were willing to kill Wei WuXian for it, all for personal reasons (Fuck you Jin Sect)

Wei WuXian hiding the golden core transfer from Jiang Cheng can be seen as similar to how Hou Yi initially hid the elixir from Chang’E, though Hou Yi always planned to tell her about it unlike Wei WuXian

In an alternate version of the tale, Chang’E was suspicious of Hou Yi’s secrecy with the elixir after subconsciously blaming him for their immortality taken away (Hou Yi may or may not have told her about his task, depending on what version of this alternate version you read), thus peeking inside the hidden box while he was away on a hunt. When he returned, she panicked over betraying his trust and drank the whole thing. This alternate version can be seen as similar to how Jiang Cheng wasn’t sure whether to trust Wei WuXian or not after the events of the Sunshot Campaign, and his inability to trust his “former” brother heavily contributed to their separation. I mean if Wei WuXian & Hou Yi had just talked to their loved ones in these versions of their stories they would’ve had a little less problems but what’s an ancient Chinese dramatic tale without miscommunication am I right?

WangXian and Hou Yi & Chang’E

Both Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi share aspects of Hou Yi and Chang’E’s individual sides of their stories in MDZS

Lan WangJi, like Chang’E, wasn’t present during his loved one’s confrontation with the Wen Sect (”the Suns”) 

Lan WangJi is also associated with the moon in some official art and his robes are always white and resemble “mourning robes”. This ties into Chang’E being the goddess of the moon and being known to wear white, some believing she does so in mourning the loss of her husband who remained on Earth

In contrast, Wei WuXian is more associated with the sun narratively, having fought the Wen Sect during a major turning point in his life, then lived as family with the Wen Remnants and always having something red in his otherwise dark outfits (his ribbon). This ties in with Hou Yi’s involvement with the Ten Suns in general

Side note: Lan WangJi wore clothing that was more typical of a non-combatant (long, flowy hanfu-looking robes), like Chang’E, who was a dancer never saw the battlefield. Wei WuXian tended to wear clothes more typical of an active combatant (pre-Yiling Patriarch at least) with narrow sleeves and trousers, similar to the portrayals of traditional archers such as Hou Yi. He no longer wears such attire in Mo XuanYu’s body. (CQL not counted for this point)

 WangXian’s representative animal is the rabbit, specifically the two rabbits Wei WuXian gifted Lan WangJi. Chang’E’s main (sometimes only) companion on the moon is the Jade Rabbit

On a related note, the Lan Sect is the one that keeps the rabbits, and the Lan Sect happens to be the Sect most associated with jade ornaments, even though the other sects have them as well

Like Chang’E, Wei WuXian was unwilling to give his assailants the Yin Tiger Seal, choosing instead to ensure they could never have it, but by destroying the seal (”drinking the elixir”) he ended up being separated from his loved ones in the mortal world, in his case by dying

Also, part of his decision to do this was driven by the grief of losing someone he loved, though in his case it was Jiang YanLi instead of his future husband

In an alternate version of the tale where Hou Yi survived the ambush, or the version where Chang’E betrays his trust, Hou Yi becomes violent and cruel, going from a worshipped hero to a hated tyrant. This alternate version can relate to both Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi. Wei WuXian was a hero of the Sunshot Campaign, but became hated after the war was over (though he did so by sticking to his personal morals). Lan WangJi turned against his sect and the cultivation world despite his reputation as a righteous man because he feared losing the man he loved, then upon losing Wei WuXian he lost himself in his grief, especially notable in his drunken rampage where he branded himself with the Wen branding iron

Also related to the alternate versions in which Hou Yi lived, like Hou Yi, Lan WangJi was left on the mortal surface without his love, who had gone to a non-mortal plane of existence and was unable to even communicate with him

Hou Yi and Chang’E, post-separation, are sometimes associated with the concept of Yin-Yang, representing the “opposites” of Earth and Heaven respectively, connected by love. WangXian is similar, having started as opposing personality types with shared ideals, then their relationship became that of love by the end of the story. (WangXian is also more visually representative of Yin-Yang, with their black and white clothing respectively)

Welp this got so long LMAO. Anyways this was still really fun to do, especially since I personally really like this story, since it was one of the stories I was told growing up (it’s not my favourite exactly, tiny-baby-me got mad at the Jade Emperor a lot, but one of them). Hope this was just as fun to read lol. 

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Ladyhawke: The Characters

The problem with putting a fairytale on screen is that the characters are usually the least interesting part of the story.

In most legends, the focus of the story isn’t really on the characters.  It’s on the plot, and what the characters do.  When you come right down to it, the point of most fairytales isn’t really about character growth, it’s about good vs. evil, heroic deeds against acts of villainy.  The characters tend to be archetypes, with the side of good led by the Hero, the Champion, the Dragonslayer, and the side of evil led by the Ruler, or the Classic Villain.  There are damsels in distress, mentor figures, and sometimes sidekicks along the way, but when it comes to fairy tales, there isn’t a huge amount of variety or development in the people involved.  The characters exist to champion a side, to move the plot forward, to give us someone to root for.

In a story so reminiscent of a fairy-tale, Ladyhawke could be forgiven for using these archetypes as a way to advance its plot.  The thing is, it doesn’t.  

Instead of marching out the clichés of standard sword and sorcery characters, Ladyhawke does something different: it plays on subversions of simple archetypes, developing them in different ways that adds to the distinctive style of the film.  Today, we’re going to be taking a closer look at these characters and the unique way they are used, beginning, of course, with our protagonist. (Spoilers below!)

As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, the most interesting thing about our main character is that he really has no business in this story.

In any other fantasy story, Phillipe Gaston would be a smaller character, perhaps a comedic sidekick or a helpful rogue, taking up his own part of the narrative without changing too much or growing as a character.  He is an Action Survivor, a shrewd thief that possesses both boyish charm and wry cynicism.  He’s smart, but impulsive, lies often, but is honest about himself.  He avoids battle at all costs, and wavers back and forth between arrogance and apprehension depending on the scenario at hand.  In short: Phillipe is by no means a fantasy hero, and really doesn’t belong at the forefront of this conflict.  Even more interestingly, he knows it.

Again, as I’ve mentioned earlier, Phillipe seems very disconnected with events around him.  He is only involved in the plot simply because he is the only person who has ever escaped from the place Navarre is trying to get into.  He is involved because of his skills, not his importance to the plot.  Phillipe has no connection with anyone, not Navarre, Isabeau, the monk Imperius, or even the villain, the Bishop. With no connection, he has no investment in the characters, no reason to help.  On top of that, he doesn’t really have any of the traits befitting traditional fantasy heroes.  

Putting it like that, Phillipe really seems like a terrible choice for a protagonist.

Now for our next question.

Does Phillipe as a main character work anyway?

Actually, yeah.

Now, wait a minute, you might say.  You just told me why he doesn’t work as a main character, and now you decide that, going against all good characterization of main leads, it works anyway?  Isn’t that going against the laws of film critiquing?

Here’s the thing.

Sometimes, characters who seem like bad ideas in theory turn out to be good ones in practice.  In my opinion, Phillipe Gaston is one of those characters.

In my last film review, I talked about what made Dorothy Gale such a good protagonist for The Wizard of Oz, and one thing that I mentioned was that every protagonist needs a problem, particularly a problem pertaining to the plot.  At first, it seems like this is fuel for the argument that Navarre should have been the protagonist and not Phillipe, a closer look perhaps proves otherwise.

At the beginning of the story, Phillipe’s problem would appear to be not only simple, but being taken care of: he’s in prison.  More specifically, when the story picks up, he’s escaping prison, trying to stay ahead of the Bishop’s guards.  He doesn’t want anything except to get away. Nothing drives him.  He has no goal except that of escaping pursuit, which, while not being a traditional fantasy hero’s goal, is extremely understandable, and relatable to the audience.

I want to draw your attention to that fact, because that’s extremely important to both Phillipe’s character, and his role within the story.

Throughout the entire film, Phillipe responds to everything in a reasonably realistic manner, one that is relatable to the audience.  He learns things at the same rate that we do, and as a result, Phillipe ends up being the audience surrogate, hence his aforementioned ‘outsider’ viewpoint on the story.  As mentioned in the ‘story’ segment earlier, it is an inversion of the ‘Hero’s Journey’: an unheroic hero being forcibly drug along on a quest that is not his own.

This is part of what makes the character of Phillipe work so well for the first half of the film, and here is where things get tricky.

You see, if Phillipe had remained this type of character throughout the entire film, he really wouldn’t have worked as a protagonist at all.  For a main character to work, they have to change, and in the case of characters whose goals don’t fit with the story, the goals have to change as well.

In Phillipe’s case, it’s moving from a selfish goal to a selfless one.

Like I said, Phillipe’s objective at the beginning of the story is to escape. His concern is for his own skin, as it remains even after being hauled along into Navarre’s quest.  However, something happens during the story that affects a change in his plans, and in the process, his character.

After Isabeau’s injury, while Imperius is explaining the curse and the history of the lovers to Phillipe, his focus shifts from himself to Navarre and Isabeau.  Due to growing friendship with the couple (Notably Navarre), Phillipe decides to do the right thing and help them, to the point where he is attempting to convince Navarre of the way to end the curse.

That change is where the magic (forgive the pun) happens.  Phillipe’s introduction into the grander scale of what’s going on is the realization that jolts him into being a more active part of the story, putting him firmly in the actual main conflict.  The second half of the story is where the ‘protagonist’ part of his character comes in: when his goals begin to match up with the story. He is the catalyst, the thing that prevents the other characters from total despair, and it is because of him that the curse is broken.  It is Phillipe that causes the other characters to regain their hope, and as a result, reach their own happy endings.

If that’s so, you might say.  If Phillipe grows into being the main hero, then why isn’t he a bigger part of the climax?  Where’s his ‘hero’ moment?

That’s a fair question.  With character arcs, we like to see them end, satisfactorily.  How does his arc cumulate?

Like Dorothy, Phillipe’s ‘hero’ moment isn’t a dragon slaying moment, and unlike Dorothy, his hour of bravery isn’t even at the climax.  It comes earlier.

As I pointed out in the ‘story’ segment, Phillipe’s ‘hero’ moment arrives when Navarre, in wolf form, is falling through the ice over the water.  This is the scene where, for the first time, Phillipe puts himself in harm’s way for someone else.   Going in after Navarre allows him to fully switch from selfishness to selflessness, or, in other words, from petty thief to hero.

In short?  Phillipe Gaston, while seemingly out of place in both personality and role, somehow manages to be a compelling, if unusual, supporting protagonist.

But of course, the main draw of a fantasy movie is the Knight in Shining Armor, right?

At first glance, Etienne Navarre seems like the perfect fantasy hero.  He is stern, quiet, an expert swordsman and great warrior.  He’s decked out in black armor, possesses an ancestral sword, a horse, and, of course, the secret of his curse.  Navarre is the one with the quest for this story, and as a result, has a connection with every other character in the movie. He is an active character, driving the plot with his own goal.  

Remember what I said earlier about the character subversions?

It is Navarre’s goal that receives the subversive treatment.

In many fantasy stories, the hero’s quest is a great moral battle, a good and evil, right vs. wrong.  Luke Skywalker wants to overthrow the Empire.  Harry Potter wants to stop Voldermort.  Frodo Baggins wants to destroy the Ring of Power to stop Sauron.  These are all larger-than-life stories about defeating an evil for the good of the world.  

Following this pattern, you’d think Navarre’s quest would be to break the curse and overthrow the Bishop for his tyrannical rule, whether by consulting a wizard or raising a rebellion, or going on a great journey to find a way, but it’s not.  Navarre is cursed, and he knows it, and in a world with magic so infrequently used, his mission is that of revenge.

Navarre wants nothing else but to kill the Bishop at the start of the film, and that is where we get our subversion.

This decision is not to indicate that Navarre is a bad person, or an antihero in any way.  Like I said earlier, the characters in this film respond to things with startling amounts of realism.  Most of us wouldn’t search for a magical cure, most of us would immediately think to the ‘realistic’ way of dealing with it: revenge.

So it is with calm, cold precision that Navarre waits for two years for a sign to attack, and the sign comes in the form of the escape of Phillipe Gaston from the Bishop’s prison, causing their paths to cross.  Navarre’s plan is smart and simple: use Phillipe to get in, and murder the Bishop with the sword of his ancestors, completing his mission.

What’s interesting about Navarre is that he too experiences a goal change, albeit a little later than Phillipe does.

See, at the point where the film begins, Navarre (and Isabeau) have lost hope, if they had any to begin with.  They are worn down with the effect of the curse, and Navarre’s anger at the situation comes out in this revenge plot.  It is to the point that, when Phillipe experiences his own goal change, realizing he wants to help the couple, Navarre refuses to believe in a way to break the curse, and commands Phillipe not to tell Isabeau.

At first, this seems kind of selfish on his part; it almost seems like he’s putting his revenge plan over an actual way to save them both, and he doesn’t even give Isabeau a say in the matter.  The thing is, once again, it’s a realistic answer.  Not believing in the miraculous would seem like a good way to not be let down easily.  On top of that, the curse breaking isn’t plainly worded, and seemingly impossible to fulfill.  For both their sakes, Navarre refuses to believe in what he sees as a foolish hope.

What changed?

Phillipe.

It is his change of character, his dive into the water after Navarre, and the following day’s realization that Phillipe had rescued him at personal risk, (with the scars to prove it) that makes Navarre decide to give the breaking curse a chance.  By the same token, he does remain practical, and changes his plans back to revenge when there seems to be no sign of a ‘day without a night’.

In the end, of course, Imperius and Phillipe are right, and the curse is broken, reuniting Navarre and Isabeau, giving them their happy ending. And in the end, Navarre is also changed, becoming a more hopeful person after the proof that sometimes, miracles do happen.

But what of the other half of the couple?

Let’s talk about the titular Ladyhawke: Isabeau d'Anjou.

The interesting thing about Isabeau is, once again, tied to her utter practicality and realism.  Neither a helpless damsel nor a great warrior, Isabeau is a subversion of most female fantasy archetypes, being very simply a woman with a problem.  It’s just that the problem is a little more fantastic than most.

We don’t really know a lot about Isabeau’s character, since she doesn’t appear a lot within the movie itself.  Human by night, she carries with her an air of sadness and mystery, gentle and warm, but with a heart of steel underneath.  Isabeau is an incredibly strong person, living out her days by night, never seeing the man she loves except for at twilight and dawn, and having to fend for herself each night for survival.  Time and time again, she displays incredible strength of character, rushing out into the wolf-trap-littered woods to save Navarre, and, during the curse-breaking, takes the hawk jesses and coldly throws them at the Bishop’s feet in her own show of victory.

By the time of the story’s opening, Isabeau too has lost hope. After two years of living like this, separated from all she knows, she is despondent, with no discernable way out.

Once again, it’s Phillipe to the rescue.

It is his intervention on the couple’s lives that brings them to the point of hope.  Without him, there is no catalyst for the plot, there is no knowledge of a way to break the curse.  And at the end, when Isabeau stands with Navarre, fully human, she is finally joyful, full of hope for the future.

But there would have been no curse-breaking if not for the monk, Imperius.

Imperius is an ex-priest, living as a monk as penance for his accidental betrayal of the couple.  Being the one person confided in about the relationship, Imperius, while drunk, accidently informs the Bishop of it, leading to the curse in the first place.

Horrified and distraught, Imperius becomes a monk, desperately seeking the answer to this curse to seek redemption.  His growth comes in that redemption.

Rejected by Navarre, he is encouraged to follow them by Phillipe, proving his worth as he assists them in both the rescue of Navarre and the breaking of the curse.  It is this man’s desire to make things right that allows the happy ending in the first place, giving him peace and granting him forgiveness from what he inadvertently caused.

Although, let’s not lay excess blame at his door.  After all, the Bishop is our big baddie here.

The Bishop (no name given) serves as the main villain of this film, and once again, is a subversion of the traditional fantasy villains.  He’s not an emperor, a warlord, a king, or a leader of a band of orcs or goblins.  He is a selfish, controlling, old man who is driven by his lust and jealousy.  (Think a version of Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

The curse, as mentioned previously, is his fault.  After his pursuit of Isabeau is rejected, his anger causes him to lash out at both her, and the person she is in love with.  This curse, an unnatural thing called up with considerable effort from a darker realm beyond ours, causes the animal transformations that prevent the couple from ever being together.  What’s notable about this is that the curse does not only affect Navarre, but intentionally Isabeau too.  The Bishop’s line of thinking is even said out loud: “If I can’t have her, no man shall.”

The Bishop is not extremely powerful in a traditional sense.  He is the leader of the church, which gives him power over the people there in an influential way, and uses this power unjustly. He has no armies other than a band of guards (which Navarre dispatches) and himself is no match for the fury of a trained warrior.  In fact, it is because of this that the curse needs to be broken the way that it is.

The curse is not broken by killing him.

In many fantasy films, all curses are undone by killing the curser. Not so here.  Against a villain with no physical power, what better way to pose a problem for the protagonists by making the answer one of non-violence?

To break the curse, Navarre and Isabeau must confront him together, as humans, demonstrating that he has no power over them.  The curse is broken in a way that demonstrates direct defiance of his jealous and lustful nature, the couple reunited and human, despite his best efforts.  Sure, he dies anyway, but the principle of it is that show of boldness against him.

Another interesting thing about him is how he relates to the realm of villains in general.  In many cases, villains have personal ties with the main hero, or a symbolic connection, something in common or in contrast with the main character that draws some kind of connection.

Harking back to what I said earlier, the Bishop has no ties with Phillipe whatsoever besides being the one whose jail he escaped from.  The main conflict in this story is between the Bishop and Navarre, again, nailing home that final point of what I’ve mentioned earlier: Phillipe is an audience surrogate character slowly turned into a protagonist, not a heroic fantasy character. The Bishop is Navarre and Isabeau’s enemy, not Phillipe’s.

So how does this make him work as a villain?

Surprisingly well.

He has elements that very much make him seem like a real-world villain. He has no magical abilities of his own, he has no armies, no physical abilities.  He is a man placed in power who chooses to abuse it.  He is selfish, controlling, jealous and hateful, like any rejected suitor who tries to use his power for his own gain.  His curse is not of his own, but the result of much searching to intentionally make the couple’s lives utterly miserable because of his denial. Once again, the key to his characterization is the utter realism in which his motivation and execution is rooted.

He is thoroughly believable, and thus, the audience rejoices over his defeat and death.

The beauty of all of these characters is the total reality in which they are grounded.  These are very real people, stuck in fantastic circumstances, dealing with it the best they know how.  The characters are relatable to the audience, whether it’s the cold anger of Navarre, the sad sincerity of Isabeau, or the bewildered but witty reactions of Phillipe.  You feel their emotions, and you understand where every character is coming from because of the realistic way they are portrayed, and the lifelike ways in which they react to the events around them.  No one is superhuman, nor unrealistically incapable, they exist as people that we can easily see existing.

Ladyhawke’s characters work as subversions of traditional ‘fairy-tale’ stories because it plays the ‘fairy-tale’ aspect straight, while playing around with the character archetypes.  There is a romance, a curse, and true love conquers all, but the way in which it is done, and the way in which characters go about acting out the fairy-tale turns it from a bright children’s story to a familiar-feeling, simple, but emotional story about people the audience, no matter what age, can relate to.

As with The Wizard of Oz, these characters are not overly complex, but in this case, they are not simple, either.  They serve their purpose, which is to relate to each other and make us care about what happens to them, and this film definitely succeeds in that.  In a film much more grounded than contemporaries such as Labyrinth, the characters and their struggles hit that much closer to home, and we feel the sincerity of what’s going on.  Even in the unbelievable aspects, such as the effects of the curse, Isabeau and Navarre’s pain is tangible, and the audience isn’t immune to that.

The characters in Ladyhawke leave a strong, unique impact in an equally unique film, a film that really does deserve a higher place in the history of fantasy films, if for nothing else it’s courage to combine the tried-and-true and the innovative ways of conveying story and characterization.  These people make the plot compelling, and they make us care about them, and in the end, that’s the point of characters.  With that in mind, Ladyhawke certainly does its job, memorably so.

Thank you guys so much for reading!  If you enjoyed it, stick around for more, since we’re not done talking about the elements that make up Ladyhawke. If you have something you’d like to add or say, don’t forget that the ask box is always open!  I hope to see you all in the next article.

[domreaderrecs]

Oh boy do I have some kink discourse for you. Here’s a wholeass list:

1. A female dominant does not need to be a sadist who is always torturing and abusing their sub. They can be soft and kind and caring.

2. Findom is a valid form of domination and is really a kink, it is not just women faking it to get money.

3. Online domination is possible, although there are more risks involved, it is still a valid form of domination.

4. Submissive black men are allowed to refuse to be called slave and their dom shouldnt be annoyed they can’t used their preferred honorific.

5. Kink and fetishes can be incorporated without the use of the power dynamic found in BDSM.

6. BDSM is still BDSM if the rope is pink and the outfit is white lace instead of red and leather.

7. It should be standard practice for there to be a safe word that means everything is fine so that the Dom can check in on the sub easily without breaking the scene.

8. It is only BDSM when both parties have discussed before hand, otherwise it’s sexual assault (yes that includes Chad who brought out the rope without warning and now Bethany is just going along because she likes him)

9. BDSM has always and will always be driven by the LGBT community.

10. Under 18 year olds do not have a place in the BDSM community. If they wish to learn, then they should do so by finding articles and books, not by asking people involved in the scene.

Yeah that’s about it for now. I’m realizing you probably didn’t want this much but oh well. We’re here now. Let me know what you think!

whewww so much to unpack here lets go its essay time

1. !!!! this is probably one of the most fundamentally misunderstood parts of femdom. it don’t gotta be ball crushing and whipping and calling him a worm all the time, or even at all. this is probably what turns so many women off from trying it or thinking they might be into a more dominant role. gentle femdom is way more palatable for beginners and for me personally, just way more enjoyable (even tho i definitely would wanna make a boy cry from time to time)

2. I used to be one of those people who looked down on findom. I still don’t understand why anyone would be into it tbh but findoms get a lot of shit for no reason... being a sugar baby is so glamorized but if you’re a findom you’re cold, or a bitch, or taking advantage. even though they’re both just people who get money from men who have money to throw at them for sexual favors... but one’s demonized and one’s all the rage... hm i wonder why

3. I have no real/successful experience with this... more on that in number 10

4. 100000%!! the stories i’ve seen from black subs in kink (mostly black women but still) are horrendous. a lot of doms will try to enforce a master/slave relationship, and try to exercise their authority to make subs agree to it. i know it’s a common dynamic, but that shit is wayyyy different to black people... any dom should know that. forcing your sub to do anything is wrong, but especially something so racially, historically, and culturally insensitive. and don’t get me started on the surprise “race play” stories i’ve heard... like i said doing anything without your sub’s consent is wrong but THAT kind of thing requires double consent with a cherry on top. this is part of the reason I’m so scared to enter the kink scene... this shit scares me. thats why the title mistress and master/slave dynamics in general just isn’t for me. it makes me think of my ancestors :/

5. again, 1000% agree. i’ve said this on my blog before, but i’ll say it again. not everything has to be dom/sub stuff. if you wanna peg your bf you don’t have to tie him up and call him names or boss him around, you can just peg him. i feel like ever since FSOG this whole dom/sub thing has grown way out of proportion, but that’s a whole other essay for another day

6. yessss I hate the stereotype of dom outfits as black, latex, leather, way too high to walk in boots... like does it look fire?? yes of course but pink and lace and knee high socks would make a fit that’s just as fire. 

7. this is non-negotiable to me. whenever I hear someone say “I don’t like safe words” or “I/We don’t need a safe word” it’s just a red flag to me. idc what anyone says safe words are mandatory.

8. Yes. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this but with the rise of the popularity of “rough sex” (again, thanks FSOG) there’s seems to be a rise in people who just assume their partner may be into something, or who just try to experiment on their partner without asking them first. I’ve heard a lot of friends and other girls talk about guys just going straight into choking them, spanking them, and pulling their hair without even asking if they like it (another reason I’m scared to get out there and do stuff, as a person who is very much not a sub or into being treated roughly or tossed around, it’s a big fear of mine). I’ve also seen a lot about girls just randomly trying to finger their boyfriends. If it’s not vanilla, and y’all haven’t discussed it, do not assume it’s on the table. We’ve gotten to a point that kinky stuff is so talked about and normalized (especially with young adults) that people forget it’s actually kinky. 

9. period.

10. okay so story time, around the age of 15/16 is when I started to realize I was into kinky stuff. The preference had kinda always been there, but I couldn’t really place a name to it. I had always felt like an outcast among my peers when it came to the way they would talk about romantic and sexual relationships (I was a year ahead, so all my friends were 1-2 years older than me, so they started to do that stuff earlier than I did) because the things they talked about and liked were way different from the stuff I would think/fantasize about, so I always stayed quiet (teenage girls are very vocal about having choking/daddy kinks but that’s definitely indicative of a much larger problem that i will not get into bc that’s a whole other very very long essay that I will definitely write on here one day but not now). So when I found out what gentle femdom was I felt like I had a community that understood me, and everything just clicked. I would lurk on online communities and I lived for the discourse on there but I could never actively participate because every community had a strict “no minors” policy. They would say exactly what you said, “If minors wish to learn, then they should do so by finding articles and books, not by asking people involved in the scene.” I didn’t want to make anyone catch a case and I didn’t want to get targeted by predators so I tried to follow their advice. i found nothing. There honestly just isn’t that much educational stuff for “kinky teenagers”, or at least none that fit me. There was no femdom oriented stuff. I mean sure there was the standard “consent is important especially in bdsm relationships” but like that didn’t really help me. I had so many questions, that I could never feel comfortable asking my mom or a therapist, and especially not my friends. I didn’t know how to express this part of myself. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it and I couldn’t even watch porn like a normal teenager (we all know the state of femdom porn. its bad) so I was this ball incredible frustration and confusion and i didn’t know what to do with it. So I unfortunately turned to twitter. There I made a little like minded friend. he was also 16 so i thought “this is good, a non adult also kinky teenager who I can relate too. what could go wrong :)”(I’m sure you see where this is going) I was so excited to have a new friend, but ofc, our convos soon took a turn. However, since he was the first person to ever show interest in me, and the only person my age who i could talk to who understood me, i started to catch feelings. But he was a teen just like me, just as horny and confused and sooo immature. He started to pressure me into domming him/becoming his domme, but I refused because I wasn’t ready (i saw on one of those online communities I used to lurk in that its not healthy for your first sexual experience to be bdsm and I took that to heart). he ghosted me. needless to say that “friendship” was toxic. i realized too late that he only saw me as a kink dispenser, and didn’t care about me on a personal level. it also made me realize how not “mature for my age” I was. i say all this to say, NO, teenagers should not be participating in kink. they are not mature enough. however education and resources for them are not where they should be. if we want to discourage them from putting themselves in these situations, we need to better provide them with education and healthy ways to relieve these urges/feelings (i eventually took up writing, it helped me a lot). i feel like had i found a healthier and safer way to express/explore that side of myself, I would’ve never gotten in that situation to begin with. That experience has kinda put me off from dipping my toe into the actual community (well that and the lack of diversity but we’ve already talked about that)

ALSO the amount of very young children i’ve seen in the kink “community” on twitter is alarming... you’re not a little you’re 12

anyways, thanks so much for this essay of an ask and sorry i wrote an essay in response to each one lol but like I said I could discuss kink all day

[chorusnihili]

I'd love to hear more about the development of your Gaster! :D

BACKSTORY ASK MEME 1. How did you first come up with your muse’s backstory, if you did at all? Continued from here Also asked by @alagaster 

So I left off with the question of just how Gaster's soul ended up in pieces.

I’m actually going to detour at the moment and say that it was around that point that I had decided to make the blog.  I had a vague beginning and an ending, and usually that’s not enough for me to want to start, but I was excited, I had a lot of fun, so I went for it.

Honestly, one of the first things I need to have before I even think of making a blog is a good url.  Urls are super important to me, and generally, whether or not I think of a good one is a key factor in whether or not I actually make the blog.

But in this case, I was too eager to start and I actually just threw together chorusnihil so I could get started on the pages.  The thought process remained the same--the chorus is from Greek plays, the group of characters that narrate the actions occurring in the play.  nihil is Latin for nothing--and I later changed it to nihili, which is Genitive, to roughly make the “chorus of nothing” or “nothing’s chorus,” a reference to the fact that the guy wiped himself out of history, and so there’s no protagonist to narrate.  This was supposed to be a temporary URL, but I got attached to it, for reasons I’ll get to later.  

(And really, isn’t a roleplay blog a modern chorus in it’s own way?)

Also there’s the phonetic pun-- CORE-us, anyone?

So I threw together a lot of the basic bios.  Most of the stat pages are really bland, most of the guts of the story comes from the hidden details, most of which were added on later.  

Something that came up around this point was Gaster’s relationship to Asgore.  A lot of fanon pictures them as really close.  A lot of fanon also portrays Gaster as Gaster as desperately wanting to retake the surface, which...as mentioned previously, my Gaster just, wasn’t into.  

So it sort of put Gaster in between Asgore and Toriel--he wasn’t happy about the decision to go to war with humanity, but he wasn’t going to abandon everyone, even if he did become really reclusive.  

I thought about the idea of the human souls, and I knew that Gaster would immediately hate the idea of working with them.  And that was convenient, too, since it allowed me to further separate Gaster and Alphys’s work.  At first, it was just a heavy disagreement.  The idea that Gaster killed Asgore accidentally came a great deal later, but it honestly served to be a rather critical piece of the story. 

The design of the DT Extractor and Sans and Papyrus were also very vague concepts at this point. 

Revisiting the idea of his fall.  We know from the canon dialogue that he fell into his own invention and that he was scatted across space and time.  

The CORE is the common culprit and it was what I had chosen, too.  But how?  How could an energy source... do that? 

So the idea occurred to me that maybe--maybe that was exactly as it was designed to do.  After all, even in the real world, we have power plants that operate by ripping apart molecules.  So... magic.  Why not magic?  A machine that derives power out of ripping apart magical energy.

And monsters are made out of magical energy.  

Falling into that sounds like a very grisly fate, indeed.      

The idea of how he got erased from reality isn’t one I really have solidified.  G has a couple of theories, and I’m willing to roll with either of them, but, really?  I’m not super interested in making a hard reason for it.  Namely to adapt to other versions of fanon other muns might have. 

Essentially, the theories say that the CORE destroying him released so much energy that it tore a hole in the Determination that pushes the timeline forward, thus allowing the Void to enter and merge with his soul.  

From there, either, 

A., his Determination very briefly was larger than that of the Timeline, and he himself invoked a Reset, but given that he was outside of the timeline at the moment, it was corrupted and only erased certain parts rather than fully resetting.   I think that this was the original theory that I used in the original RP.  

B., the Void acted as a corrective force trying to correct the hole in the timeline.  In doing so, it erased Gaster from the reality, thus replacing the existing timeline with a new one in which certain things never happened.  

C., something involving the power of Rewrite that Gaster has from the duality of Determination and Void.

D., something else entirely.  

And so we had the scattered Unbound Gaster. 

Which, funfact, the name Unbound Gaster for the form was supposed to be temporary, as well.  It’s a reference to Unbound Hoopa for Pokemon.  (Which is why Provoked Form Gaster isn’t called Unbound Form!)

Within the original RP that I developed most of this lore, Refused Gaster didn’t exist.  In fact, that roleplay ended with Gaster’s permanent death--and being permanently forgotten to the world.  A choice he intentionally made because the damage he did to the timeline by falling into the CORE was still present and only getting worse, and the only way to fix it was to allow his Soul to come together and pass on properly, thus allowing the damage to mend.

It was sad.  I cried.  I got emotional.  

I got attached to a traumatic asshole character I literally had for four days.  

Somewhere in here, I began to think about the origins of Gaster.  Like, way way way in the past.  Some people have Gaster being actively involved in the war, but it didn’t work for my portrayal, of having him be so afraid of humans and the surface.  So for it to work out, I had him really young for the war, really young when everyone got driven underground.  

I killed off his parents because ......

Frankly I didn’t want to design them :|

There’s a lot of varying opinions and interpretations about skeleton monsters, and it’s a section of the fandom I’ve decided to stray away from for now.  

But I didn’t want the loss to be traumatic.  Gaster’s been through a lot already, and I have personal vendettas against characters who solely consist of trauma after trauma.  

So I decided to make the loss very distant--he’s aware he probably had parents, or maybe he came to be some other way--but he doesn’t remember them, there’s no tragic “my parents were killed in front of me,” it’s simply something he didn’t have, and something he never needed given the nature of monsters to be kind and caring.  

...

But it felt like it was missing something.

So I started to toy around with this idea of a mentor, one who played the role of a father-figure, one who would plant the seeds to give Gaster the appreciation of science and knowledge.  Someone who could take this lost and terrified boy and start to turn him into the intelligent and steady doctor we end up with.  

Then came the problem of how he and this mentor would actually meet; Gaster’s scar proved to be a convenient excuse, plus it gave me a backstory for that, as well.  A few humans attacked him and delivered the injury, and Gaster’s mentor found the wounded boy and took care of him.  

The mentor is meant to be a vague entity, and you can view this in action in this memory.  (Only partially because I didn’t want to name them.)  Unfortunately, as per the nature of characters created post hoc, their fate was already sealed.  I made the choice to cut their influence on Gaster’s life short.  

(If they were around longer, who knows?  Maybe they could have prevented some of the stupider things Gaster has done.  Maybe they could have changed fate.  But...  as we’ll get to, everything happened exactly as it had to.)  

Again, I made it a very distant loss.  It’s a rather simple conclusion that not every monster would be happy vacating the surface--Gaster’s mentor had lived there their entire life.  It was their home, they were not leaving, even upon threat of death.  And so it was a bittersweet parting, but one with closure, and Gaster said his farewells and departed to the Underground.  

Honestly, what I find really shocking about this character is just how intensely he wants to do good.  I mean, I’m no stranger to good characters, but few of my characters push it as far as Gaster does, and how quickly that feeling came to me, considering he started in the original roleplay as a ruthless asshole bastard more than willing to fuck over and torture a bunch of children just for a chance at being whole again.  

Most of Gaster’s early life in the Underground found in this post was written on the spot as I wrote that post, so it came really late.  

I still find it hilarious that he used to work in therapy.  You’re well aware you need therapy you fucking bastard.  Quit denying it.  

So, revisiting the idea of Gaster and Asgore.  I do like the idea of them being close, and Gaster even calls Asgore his best friend.  The declaration of war put a huge strain on the relationship.  

I originally thought about the idea of him accidentally killing Asgore for shits n giggles.  At my heart I am indeed an angst gremlin, so I was just thinking about what an alternate timeline where that happened might be like.  After all, Gaster’s angry, Asgore’s full of guilt, with the way monster magic works, it wouldn’t be too far of a stretch to think that it could happen.  

But the more I thought about it, the more it fit eerily well.  The guilt gave Gaster a reason to create Sans (and later Papyrus) as part of his belief in Karma (creating a life to replace the life he took) and to look into Alphys’s research into Determination enough to create the blueprints for the DT Extractor; both of these things were things that I couldn’t otherwise really fit into his storyline.  

And finally...

His declining mental state and despair over the concept of the DT Extractor was what led to him being distracted enough to make such a critical mistake and fall into the CORE.  

And given that the timeline changes when he falls, I realized that...  I could have this happen, and the current timeline be unaffected.  

Now, given that I said that I wanted to avoid more trauma in Gaster’s life, this decision might seem contradictory.  But, it also served a very important point--Asgore returning to life, that mistake being fixed upon his fall gave Gaster something to hold onto.  Something that made his fate not as awful as it otherwise would have been.  A small piece of solace in hell.  

Plus, Gaster’s guilt at the incident caused him to resign as Royal Scientist, further allowing him and Alphys to have their separate stories. 

And pretty much everything snapped together at that point.  Really, strangely well.  I joked before on this blog if I’m really the one writing it.

If Gaster had not killed Asgore, he would have never created Sans and Papyrus, he would have never created the DT Extractor blueprints; if he did not create the blueprints, he would have never been distracted enough to fall into the CORE, if he never fell into the CORE, the blueprints would have never ended up with Alphys, she could have never created Flowey, and if Flowey was never created, he could have never used the souls to break the barrier and the True Pacifist ending would have never come to pass.  

It all happened exactly as it had to.

It feels oddly poetic, given the way Undertale works.  

In some ways, it’s cruel.  Gaster regularly struggles with the idea that for his people to be happy, he had to literally be wiped out of existence.  But in other ways, it’s a comfort--for at least he knows that his suffering wasn’t for nothing.  That there was a purpose--that even if he had to be erased, he played a vital role in ensuring his people found victory. 

Oh.  One final note...  In finalizing this story, you may notice that Gaster follows a classic pattern.  We have a hero, who’s mostly good, but through his own flaws makes a tragic mistake and seals his own grim fate.

It’s called a tragedy and they’re common in Greek plays.

What was that about a chorus again?

I think that’s just about every important point I could cover.  That being said, if you couldn’t tell, this is a very fascinating topic to me, so if you have any further questions or need any clarifications, feel free to send them in.