#parallel synthesis

[keuwibloom]

(Slight TW/CW for injury)

With how their whole positivity/negativity thing works (and that they're the only ones who can mortally wound each other), what if Dream and Nightmare aren't able to physically touch anymore?

Imagine, in the past, the brothers' main love language was physical touch (hugs, play fighting, etc). But after they ate the apples, the negativity and positivity act like poison to the other as a defense mechanism.

Any prolonged contact will burn Dream and make Nightmare's corruption boil and melt. It is extremely painful for both of them.

Imagine how this affects them in Parallel Synthesis.

When after all the fighting, after they've settled on a truce, after they've found peace and are able to actually be brothers again,

there will always be that one thing they can never have back.

Btw this takes place during the lunch meeting mentioned here! The stars and the gang decided to have an outdoors lunch :]

Dream and Nightmare belong to Jokublog

[nullapophenia]

Euphoria

line weight/vague lighting test :)

[whataboutfractions]

[grison-in-space]

What gets me is that this is exactly like MRAs complaining that it's hard to date women. You're subscribing to an essentially fascist, binaristic view of gender politics that posits that men and women are engaged in an eternal struggle for power in a world where their interests are inherently opposed. Plus you're throwing on top the belief that gender is immutably tied to sex, meaning that there is no way except one party's absolute subservience for people of different sexes to reconcile their interests to one another. And then you wonder why this is not attractive to people from other genders even if you ARE focused on rooting out people that you believe are "traitors" from your own "side" rather than achieving dominance over theirs at the moment.

Come to think of it, there are a lot of parallels between MGTOWs and the political lesbians of the 70s and 80s, too.

Many TERFs are so insulated within their cult that they don't realize most people don't agree with their unhinged ideology.

[arellas]

so we see in birth of the demon that ra’s initially discovered the pits in his quest to find something to aid the emperor’s son. his first attempts to cheat death were borne of two desires: the first being to help people, the second being his own pride.

though ra’s develops an enduring hatred of humanity later on, this glimpse into his youth shows us that he was a man of science, one who valued and appreciated the beauty of life. and there is a parallel to thomas wayne here as well; both went to great pains to help the sick, and were depicted as valuing life and the values of their vocation, even when their patients had wronged them (gotham’s criminals, and the emperor’s son). and they are both betrayed for it. ra’s has to see his wife be assaulted and murdered by the man he helped save, and is almost killed at his hands as well; all of thomas’s aid to gotham’s unfortunate is repaid with his and martha’s deaths.

thomas could not carry out his retribution, if indeed he wanted to. ra’s went on to become the demon’s head, a supervillain made distinct from the rest of batman’s roster of enemies due to his principled nature. but knowing and growing up with this grief is not enough to dissuade their children; it is his parents’ deaths that result in the creation of batman. and talia, raised in the shadow of her father, still chooses to study medicine, to leave her father’s league and everything she’s ever known, to help the people her father vows to kill.

there is a tendency in a lot of damian’s stories to contrast the two sides of his family, and the twin legacies he’s given. often, he’s asked to choose between them, as if being an al ghul is somehow mutually exclusive with being the son of bruce wayne. but his recent foray into medicine in the newest issue of batman & robin (#16) is a great bit of character development, and a synthesis of his families’ values. through medicine, he can carry the legacies of both his grandfathers, and embody the beliefs that united his parents. and unlike all the other inheritances he was made to bear, he chose this one all on his own.

[alexanderwales]

Pitchposting: The Waves

Here's the logline: a hero flits between universes where everything is different and yet all characters recur. The love interest is the same, whether she's a pirate captain, a cubicle worker, a bard, whatever. The villain is the same, whether he's a rear admiral, a corporate tyrant, or an evil overlord.

Multiverse stories are often about the path not traveled, the way that the world might be different. This would be a story about commonality, everything staying the same.

So there are some number of stories being told here, and the shape of all of them is exactly identical, all hitting the beats at the same time. A death in one means a death in the other, but our protagonist is only in one place at a time, so we see each beat only once and infer the rest. A car chase in one story is a ship chase in another. The climactic battle where soldiers crash against the castle walls becomes a climactic battle where the pirate horde smashes against the walls of a fort, and that turns into a modern cityscape where rioters smash against the walls of a towering skyscraper.

My vision here is that we do grand changes as we move between stories, only to find that everything is equivalent.

So what do you do with this? What's this sort of structure for? What cool stories or scenes does it lend itself to?

My first thought is to break it, naturally. If there are five or six realities that we're cycling through, maybe our protagonist can get just one of them onto a different track, one where fate has something else in store. I don't know how you would do this, there's this neat scene in my head where we go "all is lost -> all is lost -> all is lost -> all is ... wait, what's that?!".

My second thought is that having multiple realities moving in perfect synchronicity with each other allows for a way to really underscore a character, say something about them with thick red marker. The elemental thing that's supposed to define a tragedy is that the bad ending is something that came from within the character, right? Something that they could have stopped, if only they had been a different kind of person. The seeds of their downfall laying within them. So isn't there something nice about seeing that this is invariant? That the worlds are different, circumstances are different, but the choices are the same? You'd have to be incredibly careful with this (and the whole thing, really), because I think in constructing different parallels you might end up with something that the audience doesn't consider parallel. But it could work, layering the emotional beats on top of each other.

My third thought is what I think should have been my first thought: the story is one about mastery, coming to know and understand the rules, "winning" across all realities because of understanding, ideally with some kind of character synthesis along the way. I think this is ... well, difficult, given the rules as I've been talking about them. If there's a "twist", then it should be a twist that happens across all realities simultaneously. If there's something gained or lost, it should always have a parallel. I cannot immediately think of some clever way of breaking this system - something that the reader would understand to be clever or at least worthwhile. (I say reader, but this would be better in a visual medium.) Maybe "breaking it" in a different way is the ideal, pulling the realities into each other, swapping conceits and genres. But this, too, would take a lot of planning to pull off, and you'd need to be careful about these set pieces.

So if I were serious about this (which I'm not, this is pitchposting,) I would start out with our characters, then build some worlds around them, trying for maximum variation in those worlds. The plotting is also pretty vital, particularly the "standard" plot whether you're going to break that or not. I do really like the idea of having a single "mundane" world, a place of office buildings and stakes that are measured in lunch breaks and water cooler conversations. I want the swings to be extreme, but the parallels blindingly obvious when they're put in front of you.

To be clear, I'm not sure that this structure/gimmick could actually work. In a text medium, which is what I primarily work with, I think you'd have to spend too much time on blocking and descriptions and detail whenever you switched realities. Switching scenes can be rough even in the best of circumstances.

But it's an idea that I've had rolling around in my head, and if I can't do something with it, then I hope it can at least spark something in someone else.

[artificial-absinthe]

cybervampire au

Cybervampire Megatron feeds on Soundwave

Behold the yet worse pinnacle/ditch of my fall from grace.

I once made a drawing of cybervampire/not dead terrorcon Megatron (like it happened to Airachnid) for an exchange (it's horror type/dead dove I guess because of depiction of mild torture) and now it spawned an AU in my mind.

My old deeply rooted inclinations stemmed new branches and I intend to indulge into them to the worst/best of my ability. Thus, you'll be seeing this my otp, as well as other transformers content, painted in black with the fluids dripping of those thorned stems.

I love vampires, and my mind told me vampire Megatron was as alluring as vampire Airachnid. Furthermore, there's my fascination with Megasound/Megawave. In vampire lore, there's nothing as intimate and sensual as drinking blood, and then it's the perfect pathway to sexless/asexual creatures to get into a sort of not organic erotism (as well as other erotic/fetishist practices but I'll explore that dungeon later on), as I do not embrace the popular fan concepts of humanization (as in organic/primal-instincts derived attributes) in interaction between Cybertronians in love-like relationships.

In this Cybervampire Au, Megatron got infected during the events of "Thirst", but not killed. Then he's some sort of living terrorcon, a vampiricon if you wish (I can imagine Miko naming him like that), just like Airachnid, but, given his tolerance to dark Energon and his synthesis with it, he's now even mightier, and not infectious unless he kills. I explain this as Megatron's systems/biomechanism being somehow different, hence why dark energon works in him conversely to other bots. Given that the coalesced energon that Knockout made contains dark energon, getting infected by its resulting chemical disease/mutation also works out differently in him.

On another regard, the plot of gothic horror where vampire masters control zombies finds its parallel, since Megatron was already able to do that.

As for the Megasound element, I've already suggested the innerent deepness that can be attributed to the act of blood/energon drinking. Specially when its given willingly. The symbolism, the possibilities of sensorial play.

When circumstances lead to this, Soundwave is, of course, honoured to be source of food to his Master, and he submittes himself to an extreme regime of fueling: Only the most refined and purest energon enters his body, so he'll be in optimal condition, therefore high quality and scrumptious food to his Lord. Perhaps he eventually becomes too invested in it, while consciously ignoring the veiled zealousness. No one should take the responsibility but him. No one is more qualified, or as committed to Lord Megatron as himself, therefore is only befitting that his life is laid to him in more than a sense. Everyone else is dubious, capable or prone to betrayal, or inefficient idiots, and like the hell he's letting anyone else have that sort of intimacy with Megatron. Every time Megatron gets overtaken by hunger and tries to take a prey he would be like: "no, my Lord, that scum is suboptimal and inadequate. Here's my neck"

I intend to create and write several works into this Au, with a collection of short stories in Ao3.

[regrator-the-ninth]

Do you have any fav ships (from any fandom) that the dynamics remind you of XueXiao? Why?

So, anon, you've opened the Xuexiao/Hualian parallels floodgates... I strongly believe that Hualian are Xuexiao reincarnated for a second chance at happiness!

Here's why:

The overall vibes are there! The kindhearted, somewhat naive, and very powerful one trying to help people in a world with difficult and complicated problems x the morally dubious but surprisingly loyal one who does the necessary dirty work and makes the other smile.

The last act Xue Yang does to initiate their final confrontation is breaking Xiao Xingchen's door, first act Hua Cheng does for Xie Lian in the main canon timeline of TGCF is make a door for him.

Xue Yang attempted to revive Xiao Xingchen for 8 years, Hua Cheng waited 800 years for Xie Lian.

Xiao Xingchen descended his mountain at age 17 to help the common people. Xie Lian ascended to the heavens at age 17 to help the common people.

Hua Cheng is especially paranoid about Xie Lian touching corpse powder and committing suicide. Enough said.

Xue Yang tells Xiao Xingchen to never forget him when they part for the first time after Xue Yang's arrest. Xie Lian tells Hua Cheng to forget him when they part for the first time after Xianle's downfall and Hua Cheng insists that he won't.

There's a whole extra in the last book which is just giving Hua Cheng a reason to call Xie Lian "daozhang" and pretend to not know him.

Hua Cheng's sacrificed eye, Xiao Xingchen's sacrificed eyes, and Xue Yang's missing pinky... there's some synthesis of these in my head that I can't quite put into words but hopefully you see the vision (or lack of vision lol).

Hua Cheng's whole thing was that he had a very unfortunate childhood and would've died or become extremely fucked up like Xue Yang had been, but Xie Lian breaks the rules to save him, changing fate. If Xiao Xingchen had been there for Xue Yang as a child, things might've turned out differently.

Their whole relationship metaphor and what makes them work well together in fights is Hua Cheng transferring spiritual energy to Xie Lian regularly, just like what Xue Yang did to Xiao Xingchen.

Hualian can dual wield each other's spiritual weapons in a way that no other characters can, like Xuexiao.

Jun Wu tries to make Xie Lian evil and fails, and Xie Lian chooses to die over continuing down the route of evil as soon as he realizes what is going on, just like Xiao Xingchen did.

Xie Lian admits to revenge crimes he didn't do and Hua Cheng feels a need to right this injustice, a foil to Xue Yang dressing up as Xiao Xingchen to commit revenge crimes on his behalf, framing him.

Xie Lian was the only one who saw Hua Cheng's talent even when he was a complete nobody delinquent from an unimportant family, like Xiao Xingchen was implied to have done in the MDZS villainous friends extra.

Hua Cheng promises to come back after "dying" and Xie Lian just believes and trusts in him, as compared to Xiao Xingchen dying and Xue Yang trying desperately to bring him back, not believing that failure was an option.

There's more but this post is long enough as is...

[greyborn2]

A SUMMARY OF MAORMER*

*with occasional headcanon

Gosh, so this one took a while. What follows is a complete summary of maormeri lore as it currently stands. Mostly taken from ESO since, well, that's been are biggest source so far really. Everything written in blue is as near to fact as we can get. It is either directly stated or pretty clearly inferred from the pieces of lore we have. HOWEVER... well, I couldn't help myself. I'm a theorist. Everything not written in blue is more theorizing and worldbuilding on my part. As a general rule I've kept to a 'connect and fill in the dots' approach rather than wholesale making stuff up. So while a lot of this isn't canon, I'm doing my best to keep to its spirit. Also; this is a long ass post so feel free to just skip around to titled areas that interest you!!

HISTORY AND RELIGION

Altmeri and Maormeri history (and faith, on the sea elves’ part) understandably differ somewhat on the topic of king Orgnum. The Altmer hold that he was once a nobleman, and priest of Auriel, and a phenomenally powerful sorcerer who turned from his god. He, they go on to claim, would start a cult in reverence of himself, bankrolled by arcane relics he forged. The Aldmer eventually being forced to break a part of their homeland away, cast it into the sea, and weave powerful mist magicks around it to contain their enemies.

The Maormer claim and fervently believe, for their part, that what the other Mer worship as Auriel is simply a small fragment of the whole truth. Their faith sticks surprisingly close to that of the Redguards; that the time god is both beginning and ending. The serpent god Satakal who bites on and eats his own tail. A god not unlike a synthesis of the traditional Auriel and the Nordic Alduin. They say Satakal, coiling serpent of time, upon who's scales all reality rests, would fall in love with the Mother Sea; from their union all the beasts of the shores and seas came. And so in love with the Mother Sea and his children was Satakal that he would shed his godly scales, for this rotation of time, walk as an elf. King Orgnum. From there the Maormeri and Altmeri tellings converge. They speak of Orgnum attempting to speak the truth to the Aldmer, of how most rejected him, and how he and the Maormer were banished.

While Orgnum-as-Satakal is the primary god of the Maormer, much reverence is also paid to the Mother Sea as well.

Some tellings draw more parallels between the story of Satakal and Mother Sea to that of Anu and Padomay, with each related to the other respectively. By this account Orgnum, as the second incarnation of their telling of Anu, can be seen as a synthesis of Anuiel and Auriel into one.

Maormer see Orgnum as not just their king, but king by right of all the seas, of his love. By this reasoning all islands, from the tiniest rock to the summerset isles themselves, are his by right.

Legend claims that Orgnum made the Maormer his children, and the children of Mother Sea, by ''spilling the spirit of the sea'' into their blood, and it was this that transformed the Aldmer into the Maormer.

When Satakal assumed the skin of Orgnum, his visage as serpent god of time still shone through his mortal form. He began looking as an ancient Mer, and as this rotation of time slowly shortens so to does his mortal life, growing younger and younger by the centuries instead of older. In the current era, it is rumoured, that king Orgnum looks as an adolescent.

Though king Orgnum's full face is almost never seen, everything below the eyes being hidden by a long veil, those who have seen it say he possesses an otherworldly beauty. Some priests and priestesses to Satakal adopt this item of fashion.

Another mark of Orgnum’s divinity is his third arm. Legend says that one can reach toward the past, one the present, and one the future. Though little has been seen of his ability to manipulate time beyond minor miracles.

King Orgnum is able to adjust his form, taking on the shape of the largest sea serpent ever seen. This silver scaled beast is the terror of the Altmeri navy and has been seen swallowing entire ships whole. It is Orgnum’s duel nature of man and serpent that the common Maormer echoes by bonding with a sea serpent at birth.

PYANDONEA

Pyandonea is a floating island chain, kept above the sea by a vast 'bed' of roots beneath her, massive deposits of the naturally floating frog metal, and a small amount of lingering Aldmeri magicks.

Pyandonea, and her surrounding sea, is eternally shrouded in unrelenting mist. Without magical aid the mist is quite literally impossible to traverse. An unaided Maormer could no more leave the isles than a mainlander could enter it. Only with the aid of Sea Witches can passage to and from the isles be formed, as well as between island settlement and island settlement.

The landmass of Pyandonea is that of dizzyingly vast mountain archipelagos overflowing with verdant jungle rainforest, from which mist and waterfalls pour down constantly. The seas around her a maze of kelp which grabs, entangles, and drowns unwary sailors and ships alike, or smashes them against the rocks... though it is only with the aid of these grasping kelps holding onto the underlying root bed of Pyandonea that it stays in one place at all. Sea beasts and water spirits prowl water and land, only adding to the danger. She is a land designed to keep people in, and out, with no passage between; and it took the Maormer much skill to escape her and turn her defences to their advantage.

Maormer settlements are often built in or around the remains of huge emperor crabs, whale carcasses, or otherwise slain titans of the deep. Maormeri ships hunt them, drive them against the shores, and harvest what meat they can; but there is often enough leftover food to support a population for the years necessary to build up a new port or town, and so some of the crew stay behind. Further inland are overgrown Aldmeri ruins, some still inhabited as strange cities that look indistinguishable from the abandoned ones from outside, only within the vines cut away and replaced with signs of civilization. Orgnum himself holds court and rules (when he is not at sea, which he is for most the of year) in one such overgrown city of ruins.

Shades of blue and white are the most popular architectural colours, just as they are most popular in fashion. White marble walls with blue shingles, deep blue sunshades spread between the whitened ribs of old krakens, sky blue tents in bustling markets. It is seen as representative and in honour of the sea; of both her waves and her crashing foam.

Despite the jungles and humidity, Pyandonea is still quite unlike the forests of Topal or the Niben. Unlike both of those it is much further from the equator, almost down to the southern ice sheets, and thus even without snowfall it can be devastatingly cold. Unprepared travellers can find themselves soaked in the mist and losing an entire limb to frostbite... if they are lucky.

BIOLOGY

Maormer are split into, very broadly, two categories. The majority of Maormer are milky white in skin and eye colour, with predominantly white, black, or grey hair. Their ears end with fin-like ridges, and they are able of safely consume salt water - their tongues have an adaptation to safely filter out salt from water, an ability that even remains for a while even after death and removal. Contrary to popular belief, they do not have gills or any special ability to breathe underwater. Finally, almost all possess a mouth of sharp teeth, specialized in tearing meat and breaking shells. So called 'leviathan' Maormer are a minority, making up perhaps a tenth of the overall population. Theirs is a bloodline that has been altered by powerful magicks - sorcery combining their ancestors with beasts of the sea. While most leviathan Maormer are descended of sea snake-hybrids, having faintly white scaled skin, fangs, gills, and springy bones that flow through water at terrifying speed this is not the case of all leviathans. Some have chitinous shells, others semi-translucent jellyfish skin, some even bearing tentacles and bioluminescent patterns. There are as many shapes of leviathan as there are fish in the sea. All are larger than their kin, though, all more at home at sea than land, and all both feared and respected by their fellows. Any captain worth their salt has a coterie of leviathans in their crew.

Maormer are naturally resistant to lightning, though fire and heat can be potentially debilitating - drying their skin out far faster and leaving longer lasting damage than it does to mainlanders.

Maormer possess the uncanny ability to 'blend' into the background and go unseen until they move, or make a noise, oftentimes to the shock of those who forgot they were even there to begin with. While the ability seems chameleonic it doesn’t actually alter the colour or texture of their skin, indeed, even a Maormer in full armor has this power. This ability is most obvious in mist and fog, where they can achieve something even surpassing invisibility.

Maormer are naturally attuned to find their balance on moving ground, be that on the deck of a ship or on the shores of their floating island-homeland of Pyandonea. When forced onto stationary land almost all seem to fall into a strange, staggering, swagger, and many suffer from so-called 'land sickness'.

CULTURE

Maormer society is organized more as a fleet than a traditional nation. Orgnum presides over the entire kingdom as both god and king. Beneath him are the many Sealords, occasionally referred to as ‘Coastal Princes’, each commanding over a fleet and clan, with many holding seaports and territory on Pyandonea itself. These Sealords are the admirals of their people. Beneath them are countless captains of near endless degrees of power. Some are near-rivals to Sealords, commanding small fleets, and ports, all across Maormer territory. Most command a single ship and crew, however. All Maormer, from the lowest sailor to the highest Sealord give a tribute of their take to those above them. All wealth trickles toward their king.

Maormeri society is traditionally a strict meritocracy. When a Sealord dies, their most powerful captain takes the role. When a captain dies, their first mate assumes command and is expected to assign the most capable Maormer under their command to their former position. Nepotism is a grave offence, a betrayal of those that serve under them.

Maormer often take slaves, as well as plunder, in their raids. Those who require too much work to keep are often killed or abandoned, with the fit potentially remaining with their new crew and captors for the rest of their lives. In dire straits, slaves are sacrificed to power Maormeri sorceries. It is not entirely unheard of for a slave to eventually earn their freedom, either remaining with the crew as a true member, or being left on the mainland once more.

A Maormer ship is nearly entirely self-sufficient, and can remain at sea indefinitely barring repair work. The sea provides adequate food and water for a Maormeri crew, and captured supplies can support whatever slaves the ship has.

Every ship keeps one or more Sea Witch, incredibly powerful mages able to command weather to devastating effect. Most Sea Witches are then further accompanied by a throng of apprentices, called Stormcallers.

Maormer trade with both Khajiit and Redguards as often as they prey on them, though some travel further afield. Even far-off Skyrim is at least partially known to them.

Almost every Maormer owns a sea serpent. When a new Maormer is born, the serpent who hatched nearest to the event is assigned to them. The two care and protect each other, forming a deep symbiotic bond. Though few sea serpents are afforded the food needed to grow to ship-crushing sizes, those who do make terrifying mounts for their bonded Maormer. Rider and beast attack as one, the intelligence of their Maormer given to their mount's terrifying strength in pure harmony.

Those Maormer who, by some means, lose their serpent are often paired again with likewise orphaned serpents - if such an opportunity is possible.

After a raid, the take is surprisingly often most distributed fairly and evenly amongst the crew. A captain or Sealord who denies his people their fair share is seen as betraying their service, and rarely long for this world.

Those Maormer unable or unwilling to live a life at sea will most often instead find themselves working as shipwrights or any number of other occupations in Pyandonea's ports. They are a small, but vital, minority.

While all Maormeri ships and crews are combat-able, not all are pirates and raiders. Some work as merchants, trading goods between Pyandonea and the broader fleet. Others make way as diplomats between the Sealords. Many more are simply 'civilian' ships; little different from a mainlander village save for the fact that they are always at sea and farm kelp and fish in place of grain and livestock.

For those Maormer unable to breathe underwater, drowning is a terrible fear. Many legends are of drowning Maormer being saved at the last moment from this fate, and their armor and clothing is designed to adapt as best it can to water and save them from drowning. Fabrics and leathers (mostly from porpoises and ornaugs) are kept resilient to water retention and wet-weight, boots are either designed with mostly uncovered feet or such that they can easily be shed, and the only metal broadly used is frog metal, or orgnium, a metal strong as steel but bearing incredibly buoyancy.

Mainlanders are often seen as clumsy, stumbling, and ill-suited to life at sea. The phrase 'groundwalker' is thus used as both a clear statement of fact but, also, often an insult to the clumsy or foolish. The irony that Maormer are just as clumsy on land is utterly lost on them - or, more likely, they simply believe it more important that one be at home at sea.

Treason and mutiny are one and the same, and both are rare indeed. The offence and mistreatment a captain must provide their crew with is incredible before the bonds of loyalty (and often blood ties too) are broken.

Song and music are major parts of Maormeri culture. From the rhythm keeping slave chants, to the sailors’ shanties, and and even the popular tunes of a pungi in a seaside town, it is hard to go long in Maormeri company without someone striking up a song or tune.

Maormer are far, far, less obsessed with breeding, pedigree, and lineage than the Altmer, or indeed most elven culture. In their eyes, their blood is only a very small part of what makes them better than mainlanders. Theirs is a sense of cultural superiority more so than racial, and those who integrate are often treated little differently than born Maormer - save perhaps for the occasional joke at their expense as they fail to find their sea legs. The endless forms a leviathan Maormer can take have almost enforced this view of accepted diversity amongst them.

[susandsnell]

hey coco! hope ur having a good day! was wondering if u’d like to talk about why u like and what u find compelling with atton/exile? do u have a particular route or headcanon underwhich u prefer them or is it more of an overarching meta appreciation?

Hi, friend!

Thanks so much for the well-wishes. My day's kind of ehh due to continued Issues but the weather's nice and I'm feeling a little calmer. Hope your day is good!

Thank you so much for sending me this and enabling me shamelessly. I've been ride-or-die for Atton/Exile (which is M/F if you played the Jedi Exile as female, which I did and which is 'canon' but let's not talk about the latter lest we kick the hornet's nest) since summer 2011, which is almost 13 years now? Wild. Literally half my life. Anyhow, my reasons/headcanons have changed and evolved just as I've done a lot of growing up since the time I was first obsessed, but I'll do my best to synthesize/organize my thoughts! (Assume all the Restored Content is canon). More under the cut because 'synthesis' is still essay-length for me, God help me.

First off, I tended to play the Jedi Exile as light-sided and Revan as dark sided; I find the narrative of both games to be the most meaningful with these choices. This post basically puts into words why Revan works better as a Dark Sider, but the Exile, to me, as Revan's foil and mirror, works inversely best as a light sider. The game seems to want you to play her light-sided given how Kreia's best stuff/approval lies in that path. KOTOR II is one of the darkest entries to the Star Wars universe by far, but with a light sided exile, it's a story about how moving through life with an unyielding belief in love and justice for others in your heart will ignite that light in the people around you, and repair a broken world/galaxy.

Enter Atton.

KOTOR II is great in that you technically have such a wide range of shipping dynamics/options, and exactly none of them are functional, largely because it's one of the Star Wars media entries with the most harrowingly realistic depictions of war and its psychological impact on the people it touches. Atton Rand happened to be my favourite of all the love interests at the time because of his voice and his snarky meta-jokes (I was a Daria fanatic almost 2 decades too late, what do you want). Nowadays, I love him because his character basically took the Star Wars expanded universe requirement for Han Solo expys and went off the rails with it, making his 'scoundrel' archetype half-his charming and humorous personality, half-a facade to cover severe and quite realistically portrayed war PTSD as well as his actions as Jaq, the torture-happy mercenary. It's "what if the self-serving charming rogue during wartime archetype was brought to its logical conclusion" and I am here for it.

So first you have the parallels and contrasts - both committed atrocities during the Mandalorian wars, but while Atton was loyal to Revan after their fall and never faced justice for his wrongdoings, the (light-sided) Exile turned from Revan and still was scapegoated by the Council. Atton is a character mired in his own bitterness and cynicism, and you have the option to choose to play the Exile as a character driven solely by her morals, even when she'll suffer unconscionably for them, and it is through this unflinching clinging to her morals that she gains the idealism necessary to survive everything she goes through. Atton once sought to rip freewill away from his victims; the Exile unconsciously, slowly saps it through the cipher.

As a young teen, I admittedly was starry-eyed over the 'sheltered good girl manipulated and hurt by so many meets sexy bad boy recovering from his own past and they protect each other as a power couple' archetyping, but it does go a lot deeper than that. Their dialogue options have easy, natural, sexy chemistry that draws you in, but I do think my appreciation goes deeper. This isn't a simple 'fixing the bad boy' because of the narrative device of the Force cipher meaning you quite literally have "I can fix him" and "I can make him worse" as your game mechanics, lol. You get your surface-level fun of their interactions between the proper, well-mannered Jedi and the flirtatious rapscallion, but you also have two people who, for the reasons I outlined above, fundamentally understand each other after harrowing lifetimes spent alone in their pain and trauma.

I'd go so far as to say Atton is the best-placed of anyone to understand the Exile; the Sion ship is compelling and squee-worthy to any Phantom fangirl worth her salt (as I was), but she's everything he couldn't be or fathom, Visas may have felt closer to the pain the Exile did over Malachor V but her worst actions were committed under duress as a captive of Darth Nihilus and not of her own volition (so I argue she's a lot more morally innocent than Atton or the Exile), Mical/The Disciple is the innocence and warmth of the Exile's upbringing untouched by how the Mando wars reforged her and while Brianna/The Handmaiden is excellent as a potential parallel for specifically the Exile's abuse at the hands of the Jedi (Atris in particular), she's still similarly sheltered to Mical. Bao-Dur was with the Exile during the war but the game didn't develop him enough and understands that aspect of her, but they canonically per the dialogue emotionally distanced themselves given the circumstances, and Mira the Bounty Hunter is cool sister-zoned, but I suspect her family being victim to Malachor V would drive a wedge no matter how much forgiveness the game preaches.

Meanwhile, Atton knows and/or loves not pieces of the Exile, but as she is; the battered and betrayed veteran with a lifetime of wrongdoing to atone for that he recognizes in himself, and the naive Jedi she was before that the charming flirt in him likes to tease. And although his backstory is a revelation, and a harrowing one to the Exile, who sees what she might have become had she stayed with Revan, this is what their relationship is; seeing someone in their totality, and loving and honouring the worst with the best. Despite knowing what the Exile's done, Atton values her enough to still care about how she views him that he begs Kreia not to tell her the truth about his past. The two are instantly drawn to each other on Peragus, not just out of necessity but genuine, instinctive protectiveness, attraction, and a deeper sense (be it Force-Assisted or not) of understanding. Atton refers to it in his death scene (if you count that) as love at first sight, and while there was probably initial infatuation, I think there was just such an instant magnetism that grew and grew between them through shared experience. "Don't give up on me now, dammit!" and "You want her, you get through me." come to mind. Atton is the only party member that asks her to train him in the Force, whereas she has to prompt and convince the others into their awakening. He's deeply scarred by his experiences with the Force, not to mention it's actively dangerous to train as a Jedi due to the Exchange, but he's willing to face that for the Exile - he tells her that part of why he wants to train as a Jedi is to be better able to protect and fight for her. One of the first things he does is teach her to play Pazaak in her head to prevent from psychic attacks through the Force/harm through Kreia's force bond - the exact weapon he wielded against others. The tragedy of any Jedi Exile ship is the constant insecurity created by the force-wound/cipher; how much of anyone's choice to follow in their footsteps or love them is their own free will? What power dynamics, unspoken or obvious, arise from it? But Atton's fierce independence and selfishness almost serves as the clearest answer to this. He willingly reawakens himself to the Force to connect with her, to be better able to fight for her. He chose her, a thousand times over, and whatever role the Force Wound plays, he accepts her influence out of admiration for that steadfast-to-a-fault morality I talked about before.

This isn't some corny gender essentialist "she is his redemption" nonsense either, although redemption is a major theme of a light-sided KOTOR 2; by training Atton and others as a Jedi, the Exile is actively doing the work to heal the galaxy she helped to break. By protecting and teaching and bonding with the Exile, Atton is regaining his own humanity through recognizing hers, over and over, the way he failed to recognize those of his victims. They're together in this, in their recovery, in how they've experienced all extremes of morality. Love, in this story, isn't about fixing someone or breaking them, it's about meeting them where they are and walking alongside them, hopefully to someplace better than where you were when you both met. Is it any wonder that he's the one she walks away with in the end? (As if he'd let her walk alone ever again.)

With all this being said, and to address your question, while the route/headcanon preferences I prefer for Atton/Exile create, I think, the richest narrative with what's there, I've definitely got an overarching meta appreciation for them too. I spent my teen years eagerly eating up every possible iteration of them as a couple, and much of what I described above can hold true in a different aspect if people prefer to play them dark-sided, if people hold the tragic dying in your arms ending as canon, and so forth. They're compelling any way you slice them.

[keuwibloom]

Its been a while since ive posted anything Parasynth, so I thought id make these polaroid-inspired drawings to make up for it!

As an added bonus-- I have nicknames for the guys! I actually made these a while back, but I figured id post them here for organization purposes, and so its easier to differentiate when talking about Parasynth.

The nicknames + my reasons behind choosing them listed below the cut!

Blue "Polaris" - Also known as the "north star", polaris is the only stationary star in the night sky, commonly used as a compass for navigation. A star that symbolizes stability when you've lost your way.

Dream "Apollo/Pol" - Named after the Greek god of the sun, music, medicine, and archery, twin brother to Artemis. Went with this because of the twin thing and sun symbolism, plus the healer and archery association.

Ink "Opal" - Opal is a gemstone that shines with rainbow colors. A true opal gem also has a base color of white, which fits with Ink's whole thing. Ink also calls others "pal" so I thought the name would be a nice reference to that.

Axe "Condor/Kon" - A large scavenger bird, related to the vulture. One species of it is the largest flying bird in the world. A condor's head also has no feathers, which kinda reminds me of Axe's skull.

Nightmare "Artemis/Arte" - Named after the Greek goddess of the moon and the hunt, twin sister to Apollo. Chosen for the same reasoning as Dream's nickname. Artemis is also the goddess of wilderness and wild animals, which fits with the gang (in a "they're a group and they are dangerous" way).

Killer "Shrike" - A cute little passerine bird that is known to impale its prey on sharp things, usually thorns. Shrikes are also known as "butcher birds". I think it fits with his vibe, plus shrikes have these black markings over their eyes that remind me of Killer's eyes.

Dust "Owl" - A nocturnal bird that has eerily silent flight and large eyes that reflect light in the dark so it looks like its glowing. I was in between this one and "Kestrel", but I feel like Owl fits Dust's general vibe better.

Cross "Cypress/Cy" - A tree that symbolizes longevity and endurance, but also mourning. It's also associated with protection and strength. I was looking for stuff that was associated with the goddess Artemis and the cypress tree was one (also the gang as birds and Cross as the tree they rest on).

Error "Oregano" - An herb that has a very strong bitter/peppery taste and smell. It's known to have antiviral properties and other benefits, but it is best used in small amounts. I also chose this name to parallel Opal (rock VS plant).

Swap/Blue belongs to the AU Community

Dream and Nightmare belong to Jokublog

Ink belongs to Comyet

Horror/Axe belongs to Sour-Apple-Studios

Killer belongs to Rahafwabas

Dust belongs to Ask-Dusttale

Cross belongs to Jakei95

Error belongs to Loverofpiggies

[gayciate]

Cool Color Kids + Pokemon Parter HC's

Oughgghhh mashing more fixations together like dolls...

Isabela Madrigal

✨ Shiny Serperior | Nature: Adamant | Hidden Ability: Contrary

+ Graceful and sleek, Serperior is a classic 'mon with a regal air of beauty around it + Boasting a rare shiny variant I think would suit how propped up and admired Isabela is in the community + I see one possibly loaded down with a more passive, appealing set like Sweet Scent and Synthesis pre What Else Can I Do and branching into more offensive and experimental moves like Frenzy Plant and Leaf Storm after! + A little bit snooty, it tends to turn up its nose and glare at people who approach its trainer. I think it may intimidate away some unwanted attention, much to Isabela's relief + I can also see her with a Roserade or Petilil that eventually evolves into a Hisuian Lilligant! She seems like she may enjoy raising a variety of grass-types and I like to think she probably has a little nursery greenhouse area for them!!! + I think she'd also end up liking Cacturne (part dark) and Carnivine (not what would be considered "beautiful")

Luisa Madrigal

Mudsdale | Nature: Gentle | Ability: Stamina

+ A sturdy old gal, Mudsdale seemed almost too easy for Luisa - it's just so perfect for evolving from the donkey pokemon Mudbray and having the ability Stamina + I feel like Luisa would do very well to have such a strong and reliable buddy with her! It's both useful and calm-tempered, good to help her work and good to just relax with after a hard day's work

"It spits a mud that provides resistance to both wind and rain, so the walls of old houses were often coated with it." "Mudsdale has so much stamina that it could carry over 10 tons across the Galar region without rest or sleep." + I mean just look at those dex entries man...

+ Luisa feels like she'd connect with an overworked old horse and take it in, maybe even become softer on herself sometimes seeing that even this actual beast of burden needs rest and gentle care to thrive + I don't see her training a lot of pokemon, but I do see her devoting a ton of time to each one she does. She may specialize a bit with Ground, Rock, and Fighting but don't see her being all that picky with types! + I just want to draw a big giant Mudsdale sleeping soundly with Luisa leaning on its side taking a nap really

Mirabel Madrigal

Cosmog | Nature: Hardy | Ability: Unaware

+ Unusual and not fully understood, it's a pokemon with a lot of potential that may initially be clocked as having little power or use + I can definitely see Mirabel having a soft spot for pokemon that are deemed powerless or otherwise underestimated and taking in any weird ones cast aside + I don't see her having any hard type bias and raising pokemon as day-to-day companions more than anything else + Cosmog is also a naturally curious and explorative little fella who can teleport around and keep up with Mirabel's energy - I definitely see the two of them getting into all sorts of hijinks everywhere + The unaware ability actually just ignores the opponent's stat boosts and attacks directly through them - something that maybe parallels how Mirabel pushes through everything stacked against her? Maybe more of a stretch, I just think that Mirabel running around with a little cosmog in her bag is extremely cute + Can also absolutely 100% see Mirabel having an Eevee - absolute classic and certified perfect for anyone with an arc where they're trying to see/find themself

[velvet-vox]

Oropo; the ideology of power behind being god: Part 3

Doing an analysis on Oropo proved to be a messy, disorganised process, not all that different from the actual character's actions themselves.

Every time I have tried doing this, I ended up saying nothing worthwhile and mostly just rumbled for a bit without reaching any meaningful conclusion; but I feel like I've finally found something that's actually important and can help the discussions surrounding the character.

Buckle up cause it's time for me to introduce to you all a little something also known as:

The complex of Oedipus

Conceived in 1909 by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the Complex of Oedipus is a section of the written paper "Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy" in which Freud outlined the fear of horses of a boy known as "Little Hans".

The psychoanalyst determined that the boy's terror was due to feelings of anger he had internalised. According to Freud, all small boys choose their mother as their primary object of desire. They subconsciously wish to usurp their father and become their mother's lover. These desires appear between the ages of 3 and 5, when a boy is in what Freud defines as the "phallic" stage of development.

This stage represents an important point in the formation of sexual identity. The analogous experience for girls is known as the Electra complex, in which girls feel a desire for their father and jealousy of their mother. The child, however, suspects that acting on these feelings would lead to danger, thus he/she represses his/her desires. This leads to anxiety.

In order to resolve the conflict, the boy then identifies with his father and the girl with her mother. It is at this point that a superego is formed; it becomes an internalisation of the parental figure that strives to suppress the ID's impulses and make the ego act upon these idealistic standards.

The ID, ego and superego are, as described by Freud, the three main parts of the human mind that develop our personality through their interactions.

The ID is the most primitive. Within the ID are all the inherited components of personality we are born with, including the sex instinct, the Eros and the instinct towards aggression. The ID operates entirely unconsciously; it does not change with time or experience, since it is not related to the external world.

The ego is the rational, pragmatic part of our personality. It's less primitive than the ID and is both conscious and unconscious; it represents what may be called reason and common sense. Freud used the word "ego" to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning and memory.

The superego is concerned with social rules and morals, and covers what many would refer to as "conscience". It develops around the age of 3-5 and it consists of two systems: the conscience and the ideal self. The conscience is a part that can punish the ego by making it feel guilty. The ideal self, on the other hand, creates an imaginary picture of how you ought to be, and deals with ambition and social behaviour, including how you treat others and how to be a useful member of society.

According to Freud, the ID, ego and superego, are in constant conflict so that adult personality and behaviour are directly from the results of these internal childhood struggles.

The parallels

So, now that we have established what the Complex of Oedipus is, it is time to see how it connects back to our deranged owl man and to the entire race of the Eliotropes.

At this point though, I have to make a brutal yet sad confession: I have not watched the fourth season of Wakfu nor the Oropo special with all of the new Eliotropes, so all I'm going to focus entirely on Oropo for this analysis and hope that somebody else who has watched season 4 can piece together what aspects of Freud research are present in which Eliotrope and how it all ties back to Yugo.

For now, we can see how the first four paragraphs of the document have unsettling similarities to the entire concept and actions of Oropo and the Eliotropes.

Now, we need to consider that Freud at the time probably didn't take bisexuality and other gender identities as things an individual was born with; because in the case of the Electra complex we need to remember that all female Eliotropes are canonically lesbians, as reiterated by @cocogum in this post , thus, the more modern (or at least the most Wakfu relevant) interpretation of the two complexes that we should consider is: "the child wish to usurp the parent whose at the recieving end of the kid's sexual attraction, and to overcome said urge, identifies with that parent". I could make a different case for bisexuality, but it's not relevant.

The important thing about these two complexes is explaining why Oropo feels so much attraction for Amalia to not be able to contain himself even with Lady Echo. The entire concept behind the Eliotropes is that they were incomplete parts of Yugo that came into existence by accident and couldn't survive nor have an identity of their own without Yugo.

For how much Oropo plays himself up as this secretive master planner, he's actually a mere sexually repressed clone-child that's unable to grow up due to the very nature of his existence.

Finally appreciating canon Oropo: the trilogy's finale.

I feel like, once I learned about the connection between Sigmund Freud and Oropo, I finally started to care a little bit about the guy and the entirety of the Eliotrope's race. Granted, this analysis does fix the many problems and qualms I have with the character; like, if his writing problems limited themselves to the season 3 finale then I could pass it off as just the sad, miserable conclusion of a doomed existence, but no. Unfortunately, Oropo has problems even in the manga and ova created solely to expand on his character, it's like Tot is completely unable to give his writing pet the necessary traits to make him an antagonist worthy of the Wakfu's standards, and instead just uses him for cool visuals and to fill in the untold parts of the lore.

He came up with a truly brilliant concept reminiscing the psychoanalysis of the 19th century, and couldn't find a way to explore said concept in a meaningful way because he had to turn it into a fight. Naturally, this isn't just a Wakfu problem, this is an anime and media problem at large, where we necessarily have to resolve conflicts into a battle because otherwise the audience could feel bored and disinterested in the final product.

This is a problem that carries over to the Avatar franchise, where the creators tried to have meaningful political commentary and couldn't find a meaningful way to have it that didn't involve a fight, because, if they don't turn it into a fight of good and evil, then the audience could feel scared at the prospect of such a challenging, morally compromising story.

To me, Oropo would have been a far more interesting character if he just wanted to overthrow the gods for their selfishness and wanted Yugo to approve his decisions because he was his creator and he loved him.

Could have made for a far more interesting story than just simply going back to the status quo and compromising it only through the inclusion of the Necromes, who pretty much just sought destruction and didn't really change the hierarchy in a meaningful manner.

<<<<Previous part

Nox analysis

Qilby analysis

[mirach]

About Job and coffee (GO2 spoilers)

This is a synthesis of several theories I've seen and some of my own. There are several hints throughout s2 about what is important:

- Gabriel arranges the books by the first letter of their content. The playlists released by Amazon have messages in the first letters of the songs. First letters are important.

- As @cassieoh pointed out, the coffee is, specifically, Oat Milk Latte with Almond Syrup. OMLAS

- Omelas is a city in a story by Ursula Le Guin where everyone is happy and comfortable for the price of one child being kept in misery.

- The story about Job reflects this. Job is good. Job is God's favourite. He loses everything (but not what matters most, thanks to A&C's deception).

- There may be a parallel between Aziraphale and Job. Aziraphale also loses everything at the end of s2. Earth, his bookshop, Crowley.

- We don't see the full conversation with Metatron. Others already pointed out his manipulation techniques and that the coffee might be poisoned. I don't think it is poisoned, but I think the other option offered was in the name of the coffee shop. So predictable that nobody picks death, right?

- (I already made a post about this but I'll mention it again) the Book of Life was mentioned several times, but never used. I think that was the other option: Aziraphale and/or Crowley would be erased as if they never existed. Apocalypse 1.0 would happen (and one of them would be lonely for 6000 years)

- Erasing things from existence is important, too. We saw Nina erasing the Eccles cakes from the board, and they're never seen again where Aziraphale put them in the bookshop (noticed by @ariaste)

- Writing is also important. We see Aziraphale writing a script for what people will say at the ball and we see them saying it against their will. Metatron could do that, too. We can’t be sure about anyone saying anything here... (again @ariaste has a deeper theory about this)

- So what does it mean? Is Aziraphale recruited for the position of the child in Omelas? Is he being tried like Job? Did Metatron erase God since we don't hear God's narration anymore? Did Aziraphale and Crowley talk in a timestop and swapped places as @lonicera-caprifolium suggested? I guess we need to Wait and See. But the plot is much deeper than it looks on the surface.

[incesthemes]

ok tumblr deleted most of my tag essay on this post, so i've recreated and expanded upon it in its own post.

so the op of the post made a great point which really touched on why i've been feeling that i had a fundamentally different takeaway of season 9 compared to the rest of the fandom. i have a lot to say in response to this, not in argument but in support and synthesis of it.

i'll start with dean at the beginning of season 9: he has a great struggle in 901 regarding gadreel possessing sam, more so than any other struggle he's faced when saving sam's life, which points to me as him being aware of and conflicted about sam's history of possession. he understands this is crossing a line because it's similar to lucifer and meg, and so accepting gadreel's deal is violating sam to a length dean hasn't gone to before. dean by and large is the one who has this particular ethical problem (shown throughout the first half of season 9), not sam. hell, dean is the one who leaves sam once gadreel's out, without even waiting for input because his self-loathing is that strong.

sam, on the other hand, is more textually concerned in his 912/913 arguments with the lack of trust ("i can't trust you, not the way i thought i could") and dean's selfishness ("you did it for you"). this is an ongoing conflict sam has with dean, since the beginning of the show. dean doesn't trust sam to make his own decisions and therefore makes them for him, without sam's consent or knowledge. sam wants to be trusted to stand on his own, and he wants dean to put the same faith in him that he puts in dean. this is the core of sam's needs; the violation of autonomy is just an externalization of these needs and this conflict.

and i don't entirely disagree with the connection between going behind sam's back to keep him alive against his will and a rape narrative. both involve a lack of consent and a violation of agency. however, it really doesn't stop there, and it's a lot more complex than that.

and that's what rubs me wrong about more common interpretations of season 9 that i've seen. because this isn't really what the season is about. this violation on its own isn't the point. or if it is on the surface, it's equally about sam lying to himself about what it's actually about. he's consistently left out of major decisions regarding his own life and then lied to about it "for his own good," and he wants the right to choose his own path.

except, as we learn, that's not true. he lied about it. because the point of the whole season is that sam and dean are the same. they will make the same decisions to save each other over and over again. the point of the whole season is that sam has been lying to himself.

i said this in another post, but i think a big reason sam was able to lie to himself about this fact is because he's had the opportunity to let dean go on several occasions. he's been unable to save dean the way dean has saved sam. he fails where dean succeeds. sam has been forced to endure a grief that dean has never had to experience because dean always brings sam back. and so because sam has endured these experiences maybe he's more comfortable letting dean choose death in the abstract—the hypothetical. but in reality when it comes to that point, sam can't actually follow through, because he's just as dependent on dean being there for him as dean is dependent on sam.

and that's what season 9 is about. sam has been lying to himself about this reality from the start. this is why 1019 parallels 311 regarding how insane sam is about dean. it's reiterating the facts we've known but with a new perspective, now that sam is done deluding himself. he needs to accept that he was lying to himself and to dean, and this is what allows season 9 to close and for season 10 to begin, because season 10 is a response to sam's realization. he chooses dean over everything else in a monumental display of hypocrisy and genuine understanding of himself and who dean is to him.

seasons 8-10 should be taken as a single, cohesive unit, and the show goes to great lengths to enforce this. season 9 mirrors season 8, and season 10 acts as a response to and therefore a continuation of season 9. you can see this in the way charlie's death mirrors kevin's (one brother's lies and deceptions leads to increasing stakes that could have been avoided through honesty and openness, which culminates in the death of their beloved ally, and the deceptive brother blames himself for that death because his own unethical actions led to it), or how both of them undergo a change in their physiology as a result of godlike power entering their bodies which mutilate them from the inside and have fatal consequences (sam with the trials, dean with the mark of cain) which can only reasonably be resolved with their deaths (and they both even enter the final stages of this conflict by going to confession). also the plot structures of seasons 8 and 9 on their own mirror each other very closely.

this is all very important because it outlines the purpose of each of these two seasons. it's about them being fundamentally betrayed by their brother, causing that brother to become desperate and feel rejected and unloved, only for them to get what they need out of each other to reaffirm their love. they have to function as a unit, because otherwise both season's primary conflicts (as in, the conflicts established in the first half of each season) are left unresolved. instead, sam gets what he needs from dean in 823, which means that in return dean gets what he needs from sam in 923, thus closing the circle that was opened in 801.

dean reaffirmed that sam is the most important person in the world to him in sacrifice, that he would choose sam over every single other person on earth—this is what sam needed to hear, because it's the foundation of the conflict in season 8, since sam thinks dean chose benny over him and this sent him spiraling into a suicidal depression and self-loathing. so season 9, consequentially, is about dean getting what he needs from sam: he needs to know that sam will do anything in his power to save dean, which is a conflict that began in season 8 (with sam not searching for dean in purgatory) and is reasserted in 913 when sam tells him that he wouldn't violate his agency if the situations were reversed.

and this is exactly what dean gets in 923, when sam says he lied about all of that. dean gets the affirmation that sam's love for dean goes beyond petty ethics, which translates to "dean is more important to sam than anything else in the world" where the "anything else" includes sam's own moral boundaries. this is important to dean because dean eschews his own moral boundaries for sam's sake and safety over and over again throughout the series, and this is a major source of his own character development (see: 122, 203, 214, 222, et cetera et cetera). sam repeatedly denies that he's the same way, and has proven at least once that he wouldn't do the same, so this is an important affirmation for sam to give and it's why dean had spiraled into a suicidal depression and self-loathing (look, another parallel).

so season 8-9 are mirrors of each other, and they have to be mirrors of each other in order to work structurally and for any of the conflicts presented to be resolved. season 10 then is a response to this which shows the consequences of those dual resolutions: aka, sam acts just as unethically as dean does in the rest of the show, except this time knowingly and intentionally instead of subconsciously as he has been doing up to now (see: 1001, 1003, 1004, 1018, 1020, et cetera et cetera).

in order for all of this to work, the conflicts in season 8 and season 9 have to be equal. i.e. dean has to violate sam and his ethics as badly as sam violated dean and his ethics. it also has to be suitably Bad because it's revisiting a conflict that's existed in various iterations across the entire show. this is why it's also deeply important that 923 dean's death also parallels 222 sam's death, because it highlights how this conflict has always existed and how sam and dean are similar to each other. they both make the same choices under pressure and go to equally unethical lengths. which is why season 9 couldn't end until crowley told the audience that sam was trying to make a deal with him to bring dean back to life, specifically after dean begged sam to let him die. the point, then, was never about the violation itself: sam disregards dean's right to choose death just as much as dean disregards it. the season is about how sam and dean are at their cores the same, and it's about sam becoming aware of that reality and then actively, consciously choosing it. which is what sam reiterates across season 10, as a response to his choice in 923.

he only realizes that this is a Bad Thing in 1101 (i.e. after the response has run its course) when he says they both have to change. and the "both" is important because they are the same, fundamentally. sam isn't innocent of this violation of agency and obsessive deception of his brother, and he needs to understand that before actionable change can be made, which is what season 10 is all about.

and there's something poignant that can be said about 1023 being titled "brother's keeper," because this episode is about sam playing the role of brother's keeper, only for it to blow up so spectacularly in their faces that it causes the apocalypse 2.0. it forces sam to recognize that his original conclusion (that dean was right, and that he was lying) was not actually the correct and moral way to continue living. the significance of 1101 only reveals itself in the foundation laid by seasons 8-10, because these are the seasons about sam discovering just how down bad he is for his brother and accepting it wholeheartedly. season 11 then seeks to fix what seasons 8-10 broke, which is of course the entire fucking planet.

and this is the problem: the first apocalypse was caused by the absence of love, and the second was caused by too much love. their love is a destructive force that has world-ending consequences. that's the point of these seasons, what it all comes back to. in receiving the exact type and strength of love they needed from each other, they ended the world. and this is the conflict they need to resolve in season 11, or at least try to. because their love for each other can, has, and will destroy the world, over and over and over again. this theme can't exist unless seasons 8 and 9 mirror each other, unless season 9 is about sam's hypocrisy.

without that world-ending love, they couldn't have started the second apocalypse. if sam weren't a liar, he would have respected dean's choices, and he would have let dean die. if sam truly cared about bodily autonomy, dean would have died in 923 when he begged sam to let him. but he doesn't; that's not the point of the narrative. of course the violation of autonomy is important, because it provides the foundation for the conflict. but the violation is itself a metaphor, a triple whammy of symbolism: the possession is a metaphor for violation, and the violation is a metaphor for betrayal (as seen through the lens of deception).

the point of season 9 is not that dean metaphorically raped his helpless little brother; rather it's that the violation of agency goes both ways, and sam is a hypocrite for trying to maintain his autonomy while stripping it from dean. it's a continuation of season 8, which thus compacts his guilt over "abandoning" dean in purgatory and his self-loathing and fears of not being good enough or worthy enough of dean's love, which thus causes him to act recklessly and injuriously toward himself and dean. it's not a positive conclusion by any means; like i said, this is what causes the second apocalypse, and it's only after they've ended the world twice that sam finally sits down and says maybe they were wrong about this whole thing. maybe their love is too destructive.

in 912, sam says: "something's broken here [...] we don't see things the same way anymore."

in 1101, sam says: "this isn't on you. it's on us. we have to change."

sam goes from blaming dean to blaming both of them, because he realizes that they're both equal partners in their toxic, fucked up love. season 8 and season 9 allowed them to become equals by giving each other the affirmations they desperately needed to achieve true enmeshment, and season 10 is the consequence of that unhealthy relationship.

the point was never that dean violated sam. he does that over and over again throughout the series without destroying their relationship. the point is that sam is willing to violate dean all the same, and he had to face that reality head-on and accept it to resolve the conflict between them and give dean the affirmation he needed, just like dean gave sam the affirmation he needed in 823. the violation was simply a vehicle through which the conflict could come to a head, and the most provocative symbol this show could possibly use was the metaphor of sexual assault and rape, given sam's history with it via meg and especially via lucifer.

i've probably written enough now. the tl;dr is that season 9 invokes what can be interpreted as a rape metaphor not to vilify dean or even really to continue sam's ongoing rape narrative (though the violation that occurs in season 9 uses this as a foundation for the conflict and that's important to understanding the gravity of the situation), but rather to give appropriate stakes to mirror the primary conflict of season 8 and provide grounds for dean to get resolution for the conflict that began in 801 and continued through 923. god i hope this makes sense because now i've written this essay twice and i'm so miserable because of it.

my apologies if any of this is repetitive or meandering or lacking in any way; i tried really really hard to recreate my original essay and also provide more evidence and groundwork for my argument but obviously i'm sure i've missed some details and overlooked structure in many places. if you read this far, i love you and please talk to me about seasons 8-10. i'm losing my mind

[fazedlight]

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Please check out my fics tag or see my works on AO3

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All my fics here are COMPLETE + HAPPY ENDINGS. (I also have many ficlets!) 💘 = I suggest you start with one of these

Season 2: * Synthesis - How Lena avoids the rift

Season 3: *💘 Darkness in All Things - Worldkiller Kara AU * Echoes of the Forest - Something odd happens in the dark valley

Season 4: *💘 No One and Nothing - Red Daughter causes an accidental reveal, shifting the events of season 4

Season 5: *💘 Even Though You're Kryptonian - Lex tries to keep Kara and Lena apart. (Some exploration of Krypton's culture, blends into season 6.) * Iridescent - Kara shows up on Lena's balcony... and she's dying. * So I Kept Pretending - Kidnapping AU * Paragon of Invention - Crisis rewrite * It's a Metallo Life - Metallo Lena follows Kara back to Earth Prime * Retribution - If Mxy had visited Lena instead of Kara * The Parallel Effect - After Lena's betrayal on Mount Norquay, something strange happens.

Season 6/Post: *💘 Inauthentic - A pink kryptonite story... but it's not what you think! * Of Songbirds and Home - What does “home” mean for someone who drifted across galaxies? A Kara character study. * The Observatory - Did kryptonians ever wish on stars?

Other: * 💘 The Medallion - Archaeologist Kara meets Lena as she searches for the Medallion of Acrata to stop her brother from killing Superman. * A Sea of Green - A canon-compliant Lena character study