#prefering to make him a living retcon instead of having him deal with his feelings regarding both of his sons

[randomnameless]

Randolph is the son of the previous Count Bergliez's second wife, and one who caused much familial strife. I wonder what the noble descendants think of a man like that being welcomed as a leader. Believe me, I understand Her Majesty's desire to elevate those who have not yet had their moment in the sun. But taken to excess, I fear it will invite backlash. Though perhaps this conversation is lost on you, seeing as you are a beneficiary yourself.

(From a NPC in Supreme Bullshit’s chapter 9)

Uh...

Randy - the "step-brother" of the current minister of war, a member of House Bergliez - is compared to Barney, a nobody ? 

What the eff is the Npc imperial general saying here ? Only blood relatives matter ? 

So an Ashe who defects to Adrestia will never be seen as Lonato's son, but will only remain a commoner ?

But it makes for an interesting AU, imagining Randy outshines Caspar and Leopold “What is strategy I use brute force instead” von Bergliez, would Randy be appointed Minister of War, overriding his “step-brother” and nephew? What kind of nonsense would it create in House Bergliez? Would Randy accept it? 

Given how he “awarded” a sacred weapon to Caspar because Caspar is a member of House Bergliez (nepotism bad, except when it’s for your own kid I guess?) I don’t think Leopold “I am a living retcon” von Bergliez would kindly offer the same gift to his “step-bro”. 

[acourtofthought]

What would you say are the top 3 (or 5) strongest clues that say Elucien/Gwynriel are gonna happen? The ones that really feel so solid to you.

Ooooh, this is a good question.

For Gwynriel:

That Gwyn is the only character to treat Az's shadows as being separate from himself. It' like a guy who begins dating a girl who has children but he never pays attention to them versus the guy who goes out of his way to get to know the children, proving that he understands the girl and her children are a packaged deal.

That Az is not looking as Gwyn as someone in need of his protection. I'm sure there will be some of that in their book, mates always look out for one another, but there is a big difference between "we can do this together" versus, "I'll do it for you so you don't get hurt".

That Gwyn seems to have a bloodthirsty side to her personality, just as Az does. He can torture in a symphony of pain which means he has chosen to finesse his craft. He's not "let's get this over as quick as possible because I don't like it," it's, "I'm going to draw this out nice and slow and make it hurt in ways you never dreamed." I think he feels guilty about his enjoyment of it afterward because he thinks it makes him a bad person but I think he gets satisfaction from the actual act. Someone like Gwyn who was excited over the thought of the Valkyries cracking skulls and skewering their enemies is well matched for his brutality.

That Gwyn and Az seem to prefer a smaller group of friends over being extremely social, the life of the party. Neither seems to mind their alone time.

For Elucien, there are so many:

That Elain and Lucien share important core values. They are quick to apologize for failing others, they both prefer to avoid violence, they both enjoy being social and engaging with others. There will never be a time where they have to check up on one another, "I'm sorry, is this too overwhelming for you? We can head home if you need".

That Lucien has been loyal to Elain and only Elain ever since he found out who she was to him. No, he did not instantly love her but he chose to respect their bond while he took the time to learn about her whereas he could have easily continued his rakish ways especially after learning she was engaged to someone else. Loyalty to the FMC is sexy.

That Lucien was the one to meet Elain's father and live in the human lands. These are two enormous parts of Elain's past, things that mattered a great deal to her and it will only ever be Lucien who has insider knowledge of who her father was and what being human is about.

That SJM retconned Lucien's father so he'd have the power of the sun in his veins and had Elain constantly by the sunniest windows, as if any bit of darkness was abhorrent, claiming that she needs Sunshine.

That Elain has not yet touched or truly gotten to know Lucien. If the author wanted us to see why they were poorly matched, she would have shown them interacting. She would have shown that despite their best efforts to acknowledge their bond, they were just not fitting. Instead, she has Elain keeping Lucien at a distance book after book and I will never believe the answer to that puzzle is because "she doesn't like him," "she's clearly not interested." An author would more likely prevent two mates from interacting in a major way because she knows there is something there. She knows characters like Elain and Lucien need to remain apart because their chemistry will be obvious the second they start really talking.

Because Elain can hear Lucien's heart and because she is the most beautiful female he'd ever seen. Because he knew she needed fresh air when every single other person in the IC just accepted her being cooped up in her room for weeks. There is a connection between Elucien that is never going away and it would ruin any other romance for either character. No matter what Elain might share with someone else, Lucien is always going to hold a piece of her that the other cannot touch.

[tomwaterbabies]

How do you feel about VATSK as a concept? I’ve noticed a lot of people in the fandom like it but have things they would change, so I want to know your opinion

the concept itself is something i genuinely really am Deeply intrigued by (i'd have to be if im at this level of fixated on it) and generally i absolutely love it

i DO have a habit of fixating on things that have a base concept that simultaneously lets me add my own takes to it. i like being given interesting concepts and then building off of them. i'll admit that with vat7k- it's probably the most intense it's ever been LOL.... kind of sick in the head about it

that all being said, i do certainly have things i would change both in terms of the initial concept the storyboard artists created and what some of the fandom likes to do. here are some off the top of my head:

retcon the 7 kingdoms as they appear in tangled the series. like it wasnt a big deal within tangled's story but i think these kingdoms need to be better fleshed out and have a stronger form of identity. there is no way i can accept nuru's kingdom just being Generic European Kingdom, for example. i probably would change hugo's kingdom too and focus on heavy industrialism instead of just "scary warrior women" (to be fair to vat7k, the concepts dont seem to use the 7 kingdoms in tangled as the base anyway lol but just in case... im saying i would change them)

bloodline does not equal inherent similarities. with both varian's mother being an alchemist like him and his mom's side of the family being inventors too... it implies there might have been a trope im not super fond of. instead, i prefer the idea that varian has to learn that there is no inherent, birth-given truth that makes him who he is. his family became inventors because of the environment they live in, not because of something in their blood. i like the idea that the more he learns about his mom (and the unsavory parts about her), the more he fears he's becoming exactly like her (which culminates at the end). credit again to the concept- it seems like that was the idea with ulla, i would just want to make sure that notion is consistent throughout the story

hugo's character (in regards to some aspects). ive talked about it many times before but while i love most of his character there are a couple things i'd change about him. namely the idea he's flirtatious and the idea he is greedy in the typical thief way. i think he is far too emotionally repressed and distrustful that he'd ever (even casually with intimacy) want to do anything like that (this includes all forms of affection, including platonic friendship). i also think that while his longing for Finer Things and Wealth is present- it doesn't take the form of coveting precious jewels and treasure. he would more quickly be drawn to a device with top-of-the-line material than a golden crown. this kind of ties in with my whole take that he is ever so pretentious and particular about things- but that's also a sign that deep down he just genuinely has a strong spirit and sense of self, i just dont think he realizes this and considers himself a bad person, but doesnt really care if hes stuck being bad (lie). he is also, yknow, incredibly intelligent with a brilliant mind that makes him stand out to other thieves. this is important, and something varian can see quite clearly

varian's past is a big plot point. credit to the fandom this time, it does seem like this is generally accepted as something that should happen even if the concept doesn't seem to really talk about it at all. i would definitely want to delve more into the trauma varian has and the guilt he carries with him and how that works with hugo- someone also holding guilt and trauma. not to say the others would have nothing to do with it- they would! it's an important part of the story, for me, to depict how these characters handle trauma and a past they're not proud of (and even scared of)

[smittyw]

i forgot my dailies so heres some of the au redesigns ive been up to 🚶‍➡️🏃‍➡️🤸 return of the funnies, new and improved!! moonstone, plume agate & tigers eye!!!

lots more lore i never dropped + fusions below the cut- but this post will get long hahaa

making the post pretty for you :-) ok?

their rundown is that plume and tiger crash land on earth and team up with an already stranded moony, hoping to get back with an impressive enough report to save them from trouble. when this starts to seem less and less of a possibility, they have to face their feelings about staying on earth, and whether itd be worth it to take desperate measures just to return to a status quo they were never cut out for to begin with. theyre more or less minor villains of the week who have their own rich inner lives completely offscreen so i can claim theyre canon compliant.

moony- got retconned to be a bit of a fool jingling miserably across the court, while blue diamond pondered whether this was a good enough use for a former espionage class of gem. shes busy mostly crying about other things tho. and moonstone is too. on the first pity mission away from home they decide to sit pretty and stall until blue forgets to ask for updates, maybe forever.

plume- leader of a squadron of tigers eyes grunts (theyre a scout class, expendable and fast close range idiots without the benefit of tankiness). she's outwardly very tough on them but hides a lot of fondness for only them to see. she also hides an independent streak that fuels her history buff posturing, and is getting dangerously close to acting on her fantasy of becoming the next rose quartz.

tiger- the weak link of the squadron whos had her ass saved plenty of times by plume before. to prove shes not dead weight, she throws herself at every problem expecting to fail a few times and break a few limbs before succeeding. shes grown neurotic & wary of attention, and is liable to just go looney tunes at the slightest opportunity. if freedom calls she wont hesitate to scamper.

& hey! fusions as promised! helps to know what theyre working with dynamics-wise:

pietersite (piet)- shes very serene on the surface level while masked and doesnt speak, but underneath it kind of a terror...due to the constant dual internal monologue that gets broadcast telepathically from her out of sync brain...at least tiger doesnt mind it. theyre not very stable as a fusion due to an inherent mismatch in how their component gems communicate. it takes time before they get a handle on their combined strengths, so they dont form often.

unakite (una)- shes the worst and i love her, and she loves herself more (until she doesnt, at which point she combusts to avoid dealing with it, and both parties forget what happened). shes the manifestation of a long term work friendship & is therefore her own right hand man. her first inclination is to plot, then to destroy, then applaud herself for it. she has illusions of grandeur to become a permafusion due to her remarkable stability while formed, but has too much of a one track mind to last forever. still, shes around a lot when the situation calls for it.

chrysoprase (chryssie)- hes a delight but also sucks ass at being helpful in most situations that require more than chilling smiling and having fun. hes pretty stable but prone to long spells of isolation, and spends all his time on confusing hobbies that burn him out big time. plume finds them really frustrating and it takes her ages to stop wishing theyd just stay apart, after realizing their existence is like necessary therapy to the goobers involved.

p.s. all three gems use she/her initially as gems do, and plume continues to throughout. moony is very taken with human culture and later puts in a lot of effort to be like them, so he adopts their concept of gender and prefers he/they instead. tiger mirrors whatever she finds interesting and doesnt really care, so all her fusions default to the other party's preference

p.p.s, all the little refs in the corners of the fusion pics are outdated so pls ignore the discrepancies

i think ive said my piece for now.. if u made it this far, big thanks & feel free to take the mic, im trying to be less of a lore recluse !! this au does things to my brain.. id love to explain each of them and their little personal arcs in better detail soon, but plotty things can wait until i get the nerve to start doing comics again. CIAO!

[littledead-ridinghood]

Okay, building off what I've been bitching about in my reblogs for the last few days about how no one ever allows Jason to center his trauma and instead push themselves into the “spotlight”: Another way writers will tend to do this is by telling the readers about how “what a bad robin Jason was” (to make us feel bad for everyone else who had to “deal with him”)

Writers tend to retcon Jason’s OG run because they never read it and are mean want us to empathize with Bruce(or whoever) and/or prop up their preferred character. It’s to show what a struggle it was to work with Jason, how emotionally volatile he was, how he couldn’t do anything right, had no work ethic, etc etc. We lose the heartbreaking, tragic story of a young boy who had nothing and no one who then gained the entire world only to have everything he cared about ripped away from him with one of the most gruesome deaths in comic book history. These retcons center around the idea that:

A. Bruce failed to save Jason(in life and, when he comes back, morally which further pushes the idea that Jason was always destined to be who he is as The Red Hood)

B. How Jason was Just a Bad Kid and there was Nothing anyone could do about it

C. Jason couldn’t be saved, he was destined to die, yet Bruce tried his hardest to steer Jason away from “becoming a criminal”(ignore the fact that Jason said he didn’t want to partake in that lifestyle, The Rich Man savior complex and the classism in the idea that all poor people are/will be criminals rather than on the that poverty is the real enemy and is what breeds crime(rather than the people themselves), and the fact that vigilantism is literally illegal making every single mask a criminal. I digress, go batman *woo*) so readers feel bad about Bruce not completing his “mission” and how that makes him feel rather than he lost his and for the dead kid 

D. Etc. Etc. You catch my drift. The retcons are to push the idea that Bruce has the most emotional turmoil surrounding Jason’s death, to martrize and destroy the memory of a 15 year old boy, and to make readers sympathize with Bruce for ever taking in Jason to begin with because he got nothing out of Jason expect a loyal soldier(who is either God’s greatest warrior or the worst sidekick ever bc both are “true” at the same time) and absolute misery  

The thing is, these retcons don’t make me feel sympathetic towards Bruce(or whoever) at all but towards Jason. Bruce narrating in Hush “all Jason had was rage” and “...saw being Robin as a game...”, Dick in Dixon’s Nightwing: Year One “Maybe [Bruce] hired him before Joker could”,  Alfred in UtRH “had a mean streak...Jason was dangerous”

(Keep in mind, all those statements are Pre-Jason’s-resurrection about a 12 to 15 year old child, my god. Don’t even get my started on non-canon compliant comics like Batman: The Adventure Continues mmmmm rage)

Anyway, my point being is, if Jason was so bad at being robin then why did everyone allow him to fight crime? As Bruce is Jason’s primary caretaker then that would mean he knew Jason was unprepared and unfit to fit crime, yet he still sent Jason out in spandex anyway. This reads as him being a shit batman and an even worse father who’s ready to put a kid who never had anything in harms way for the advancement of his own mission. Rather than addressing the issues that Jason’s emotional outbursts and (so-called OG) violence stems from with therapy and healthy outlets, Bruce actively made those issues worse by only giving Jason Robin as an outlet for his trauma (such as Bruce does for himself). Bruce takes a traumatized boy and places him back in a position to watch those same events that traumatized him happen to other people, every night, with no emotional support, meaning he never got to leave the survivor’s mode he lived in for the first ~13 years of his life. 

Furthermore, all these retcons are trying to relieve Bruce of guilt over Jason’s death as Jason “had it coming” and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it meaning Bruce can in no way be at fault. But as seen in these retcons, Bruce says Jason was unfit, but neglected parenting him, neglected helping him in any long (or short) term manner. He doesn’t see Jason as a son, Bruce sees Jason as a Job. A Mission. A Chore. Something he needs to Fix and recreate in his own image. This leads Jason to run off to find Sheila making Jason’s death inherently Bruce’s fault. Which is counterproductive to what writers are trying to do, yet that’s what comes across in these retcons. Jason’s only outlet is robin, he is made to believe that his only worth is in how well he can take & throw a punch, Bruce takes away Robin, Jason realizes that Bruce thinks he’s not good enough as a sidekick therefore doesn’t need him anymore, believing then Bruce is going to send him away back to the streets because he needs a solider & Bruce never actually loving him, finds out he has a living bio-mother, runs away to find her so she can protect him and so he’s not alone again(even though she’s the one who abandoned him at birth) who then sells Jason out, and, finally, *Boom*.... literally 

Here is a man who supposedly has a plan for everything and then a back up for in case those go wrong. Bruce says Jason was distraught over what he saw as Robin and how he was getting angrier and angrier, but he Bruce is never shown to be helping Jason work through those problems. Jason’s left to deal with them on his own which he doesn’t know how to do. He’s a child who’s never been offered solid guidance before. Children aren’t born with common sense, how is Jason supposed to fix a problem on his own when he’s never been offered guidance on how to do so? So the emotions fester, and the story being written is that Jason doesn’t even like being Robin, but Bruce continues to place him out in the position and Jason believing he has to take up that role so he can stay in the manor. This further pushes Jason’s mentality into all his worth is in Robin and once more pushes the “Good Solider” complex. The memorial in it of itself, as Jason comes back into the folds, also pushes the idea that Bruce only cared about Jason in what he could offer Batman; Jason couldn’t just be enough as himself. The continuous standing of Jason’s glass coffin and half-assed epithet further humiliating Jason with the “knowledge” that no parent has ever loved or wanted him.

We move from a tragic story of a hopeful, yet traumatized homeless boy who was given the opportunity to do an array of things he never thought possible (sleep in a warm bed, three meals a day, help others like him, go to school) who then had all of that ripped away because he just wanted to meet his mom to a story of severely abused, powerless boy turned miserable child solider who had been beat around all his life, having no say or choice in being robin, never given the time, attention, patience, support or help he desperately needed and deserved, dying alone without knowing what being loved or happy even felt like

Because in these stories, Bruce doesn’t love Jason. He has no faith in him, he sees him as a problem and mistake he should have never taken in, he sees Jason as a failure, he regrets, not Jason dying because he had so much more life to live, but him existing in Bruce’s life to begin with. This is a Batman I would, and do, blame for Jason’s death. You have a boy who only wanted safety and love and is trying to find it in any place he can, even if that person’s a random stranger who has already abandoned him.

Therefore, I don’t feel bad for these characters when they bag on Robin Jason in these retcons because clearly no one helped him. No one cared. And he spirals, and in these retcons, never knowing a day of peace, safety or happiness till his infamous murder leading him to even more scorn from everyone. He had nothing only to gain nothing of anything except heartache. And authors will write these stories like “Don’t you feel bad for Bruce? Aren’t you glad we have shiner, better robin with less problems? Aren’t you glad that that terrible kid died? I sure am!” They give Jason so much more trauma, he wants to be back in this family(as RH) who is written as not even wanting him around to begin with, because that’s the most loved he ever felt. And that love is So Abusive, and yet, this heartache of Jason’s, in these retcons, is written as “He causes so many problems for me!” These retcons aren’t written to show Jason being angry at Bruce for not being there. These retcons are written so we hate Jason for being “unloved” and “unlovable” and to center how much of a struggle that is for everyone else rather than for the child. 

Once again, no one cares about how Jason feels or how this would effect him, just like how people only care about Jason’s death in relation to themselves and their struggles rather than how that trauma would effect the murder victim.

[clambuoyance]

Sorry if uve answered this before but like. What do u think kon and clarks relationship? I kinda like them being on good terms but in the nebulous ur ny uncle/brother/cousin/close family memeber deal instead of clark being a parent because... waves hands at luthor and the uh. Kinda constant issues of how kon was created and also because I think kon deserves to choose what people to mean to him after everything he's been thru but what do u think

ive had a couple asks about this and i dont remember if ive answered it before or not but i guess ill separate my thoughts into Fanon/my preferred timeline and then canon. but i think im in the same general camp where i think that theyre relationship is very nebulous, but don't mind if Parent is one of those relationships thrown into the mix. saying theyre brothers doesnt feel 100% right, but saying theyre father-son also doesnt feel totally right? i literally don't know how to explain how i feel about it but if you read this maybe it will be more clear

uh this will be long

1)Canon (pre retcon and post retcon)

Sooooo firstly with canon, i chalk a lot of the choices up to the narrative constraints and dc editorial things? because one, they wanted superboy to be a solo hero and not a sidekick, and two, his original story is that he is not a superman clone, but just a clone from a shitbag scientist named Paul Westfield that was altered to look and mimic clark, which is also pretty weird and understandably off-putting for clark still.

then when clark finally "returns from the dead" he's still pretty concerned about the kid? like he helps kon figure out what to do with cadmus and all, and then kon gives clark's old apartment back to him and says he's gonna find a new place and fly "second star to the right and straight on till morning" T-T

and you know from then on he's just a guy that occasionally pops up and gives kon advice.

and then we get to the whole "brother thing" because when kon went into hypertime and met teen clark, teen clark assumed his adult self had shared his secret identity and life with kon, which makes kon feel insecure about not being trustworthy. teen clark explains that he probably has a reason and says they could be like brothers. and when kon comes back and confronts kal-el, kal tells him he's family.

they do act familial, but the brother thing was proposed by clark first so it's not as clear on kon's side. personally, despite his rebellious attitude and insistence on being his own man, he's still a kid, and with how much kon latches onto father figures, laments about not having a real father or mother and even wishes he had one, gets distraught at the thought of losing his father figures like guardian or dubbilex, i don't really blame some readers for hoping clark would step in more as either a mentor or something more?

but again, that would require some big narrative commitments and mightve made it hard for them to be solo heroes with separate lives, and supergirls a solo hero too with a similar age range but she's already been established as a cousin.

now after the retcon, its been changed so that kon is half lex luthor half clark, and though there's still a mixed bag of opinions on it, at least kon's attitude towards paul and not wanting to end up like a shitbag and have to be told by clark he's his own person still applies i guess T-T and the circumstances are more iffy and kon does keep it a secret for a while. it also complicates things by painting clark to be some absentee dad, which frankly is out of character for him i think. so idk kon keeping both his donors a secret could be interesting ? i have to think about it and how to resolve that narrative issue T-T. but also, i dont think the retcon is necessarily bad, just had a bunch of missed unique opportunities they could've used to make it stand out in a medium where this type of plotline already saturates its stories T-T (you could buy a sandwich if you had a nickel for every hero with half villain half hero genes)

so yeah basically im pretty sure readers at the time were hoping for a more father-son relationship while some were fine with just being brothers, and dc cant decide so i have decided that i will apply homestuck rules in which they are genetic father and son and may call each other brothers but in a way where kon looks up to clark so much he's basically a father to him. or like in ninjago where kai and lloyd clearly have a brotherly relationship but lloyd claims "kai was a father to me when i needed one."

because relationships aren't so cookie cutter you know? especially when it comes to family.

ANYWAYSSSSSSS

2) Fanon/My canon timeline

In my mind's eye, their relationship takes a longgg time to develop, and it has to overcome misunderstandings, but they are always amicable to each other. (Basically, not whatever the yj show did?) Clark doesn't automatically set himself to adopt or whatever, but he promises to look after him and has a more active role in helping kon find a place to stay, on kon's own insistence on being his own independent person. He heavily distrusts Cadmus though but dubbilex and guardian seem trustworthy enough. There is a part where he asks kon to keep an eye on cadmus' shady operations, and in my fanon I'd rather him just say that kon should go to him if anything bad every happens more out of concern for kon's safety than anything else? If that made sense.

Also, Clark is young and still rattling with the fact there's a mini-him running around the place that was meant to replace him so he's allowed to feel weird about it and not have all the answers. He does know that the right thing to do is make sure the kid's safe, but the kon's got a chip on his shoulder and doesn't make it easy. Kon is no one's sidekick--he is going to be superman one day, because it's what he's meant to do. He doesn't always know what's best for him, and always gets himself into trouble, and maybe he knows that, but I'd write it so that he slowly has to learn that it's okay to be a kid and to fuck up sometimes and listen to someone who knows better. Also, he talks big shit about being superman but also places expectations on himself because Clark's shadow is just so big that it makes it hard to connect with clark maybe? Like that's the guy you were made to be one day. And you know for a fact he didnt mess up as much as you did.

And when kal gives him the name kon-el and proclaims that he is family, kon is so happy he cries so you're left wondering why it took so long for them to get to that point. so i think in my timeline it'd happen a bit sooner? or like i would not make it take so long lol.

then you meet teen clark, and i think that's when things start to change. Of course this is the homestuck in me talking, but I think i'd have liked to see kon spend more time with teen clark, where some of that walls between them could have been broken down at now that kon's able to see what clark was like as a kid and bring him down to earth more rather than view him as this big lofty figure in his life. that's also partly what the yj sins of youth arc does too i guess. mmm gotta love the coming-of-age-ness of it all.

teen clark says that having kon around is kind of like having a brother, and kon nods but wonders if adult clark will think the same. after returning to his reality, kon goes to kal-el who reassures him he's family and trusts him and is sorry he doesn't make that more clear. he'd ask what kon wants but kon himself is still unsure. and after that convo, clark makes it a point to check up on him more and grows more concerned. he's gotten to know the kid a lot more!

and okay i could go on and on but basically, he voices his concerns about kon's living situations and surrounding peers a lot more and is careful not to command kon like a scolding parent, but nudge him with advice and let it be kon's decision on what to do. basically this is the stage where clark is acting more like a guardian figure i guess and after kon is finally convinced to go live in smallville with the kents, clark gets a lot more unbearable and acts like an annoying family member to kon and smothers him with sagely advice lol. and kon appreciates the gesture but he's having a hard time adjusting to it all, at having to live a normal life, and no matter what clark does there's still this shadow and expectation that falls on him. and not knowing what to do kon gives in, and tries to mimic clark cuz his previous efforts to be his own person all always landed him in hot shit.

(and if we are keeping the retcon, then finding out you arent who you thought you were would just add more to ur identity crisis T-T and if ur like me who likes to think of kon as queer then aaaah this new life would do a number on you and you might try to act soooo normal and scramble for a sense of control and understanding of your own life. and insisting on keeping it a secret bc ur afraid it'll change what people think of you? ough ik it wasnt meant to be read like that but my brain just went aaaaah. the queer experience. and with the whole luthor mind control thing? I hate 70% of it but i like thinking about it from an angle where kon realllly has to fight for an ounce of control over any aspect of his life idk idk T-T even without the retcon, i think you could still find a way to do something with this notion of identity and control)

anyways, i think time in smallville would slowly allow clark and kon to bond even more and really see each other for who they are as people and for kon to really find out who he is and who he wants to be, not as a sidekick to clark or as superman but as himself (and he'd slowly come back to a more punk and/or flamboyant fashion sense T-T). he's friends with the coolest teen heroes ever who are his family, and he's ma kent's boy. and he's clark's family. he tells his school friends that clark's his cousin and maybe thats what the documents say, and they may agree to call each other brothers, but bottomline is clark will be a father to kon whenever he needs one and will always be there to help kon and be a home to him.

then when clark is older and has jon, i guess maybe kon would still stick around and help out and definitely sees himself as jon's brother. like regardless of what clark and kon decide to call themselves kon is jon's brother like i really want them to be silly brothers. also cuz jon deserves one. there's so many interesting things dc could do with jon and kon aaaag so sad. it's also important to me that clark is a good parent and even if he wasnt perfect, he cared about kon and explicitly shows theyre family? like even in canon sometimes it didnt feel like it T-T

maybe it's just me, but i guess i project a lot of my own experiences and my oc rolin's experience onto him a lot. because rolin lives with his aunt who is basically a mother to him, and he has an older cousin who is basically a brother to him, and then this little girl that barges into his life basically becomes his sister and he can act like an overbearing parent to her even though they're not related by blood. he's got a weird relationship with his own dad, so he sees a father in a lot of older ppl. you can never have too many parental figures!!! so i guess my mind's used to thinking of family members doing double duty T-T ? i just personally really think dynamics shouldn't easily be pinned down as just one thing and think ppl are too stuck on traditional (or perhaps a nuclear or western) family standards. ugh when i write my oc story you will all see.

sorry that was really long and rambly and didn't make sense in some parts--i probably should have done this in google docs and made this fancy. also! who knows i might totally change my mind on a thing anyways. canon is my playdough i mold to whatever i think suits a more interesting narrative or to my personal bias.

[mybg3notebook]

Astarion and Power - Part 1

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were made up to the game version v4.1.101.4425. As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information.

Additional disclaimers about meta-knowledge and interpretations in (post)

The number between brackets [] represents the topic-block related to (this post), which gathers as much evidence as I could get.

Before talking about Power, Cazador, and other details, I would like to quickly gather what little we have about Astarion’s past. 

Backstory: Mortal Astarion.

About his past we have little information, mostly given by Swen in interviews with game magazines or via his on-live demonstrations of the game early in 2020 before the release of EA. All this information is subjected to changes, of course, so we should take it with a pinch of salt. 

As a mortal, Astarion was a corrupt magistrate who judged criminals he later sent to the local vampire coven of the Szarr family as food. After a while, his greed got the best of him and started to sell those criminals into slavery as well, having a double profit from this. This movement brought the fury of the Szarr family upon him. 

From this short story we can infer that there was a high probability that his judgements were unfair, condemning criminals who needed a death sentence to lighter ones (this is related to his strange comment of “death is a harsh sentence” in Arabella’s scene, see the post Astarion's Standards and Manipulation) while condemning innocent ones; all with the goal of having a decent amount of living creatures to offer to the local vampire or to the slave traders.

We also know, by his own words in game, that when he was turned into a vampire, he had been the victim of an attack of thugs/Gurs (he says this information in different moments of the game, changing details. I don't know if this is on purpose to show Astarion’s manipulative nature depending on your reaction to Gandrel, or it’s a consequence of unpolished details during EA). What we know for sure is that these Gurs/thugs were angry because of a judgement he had previously made. It’s easy for us to infer, using the info above, two situations:

Astarion may have condemned some isolated Gur to an unfair trial who ended up in a slavery network, being discovered later by their Gur fellows who simply avenged them in Baldur’s Gate. This theory has been developed as a way to see fit the concept of Maiden Fel.  If Gandrel dies and Astarion performs a Speak with Dead, he will reveal that Maiden Fel is the head of his tribe who asked him to return with Astarion “unblemished”. Digging for more details about who Maiden Fel is, Gandrel says she is the “reason even monsters have nightmares”. Walking on the speculation ground, there is a chance that Maiden Fel could be a nightmare Hag, since Gurs consider hags as “wise women'', and unlike the rest of the humans, they respect them a bit more than common folks.

Or the whole setting was done by Cazador, who plotted this ambush to make it look as an act of barbarism using furious Gurs (which attack could be seen as an obvious reaction since Gurs are despised everywhere due to their nomadic lifestyle and all the stigmas they carry) as a way to punish Astarion for trying to outsmart him.

Among the many conclusions that we can draw from here is that, if Astarion’s backstory is not retconned and rewritten later in the full game, we can be almost sure he was an Evil-aligned character as a mortal. We can’t say that vampirism twisted his morals; they were rather poor in the first place. 

Astarion, the Vampire spawn

After the bite scene, Astarion presents himself as a vampire spawn, a creature lesser than a slave for his master, since Cazador’s commands are impossible to resist. He explicitly says that his body always reacts to Cazador’s word and for two hundred years he was tormented by him. Thanks to datamining information, we know that Cazador performed an infernal deal, and part of the contract is carved on his back. 

Due to datamining information as well, we know that the first dream that Astarion experiences may not be the one related to the tadpole dreams mechanics since he dreams without having made use of the tadpole powers yet. I prefer to suppose that this dream is product of his own psychology, or even it could be an effect of Cazador’s power on him (maybe he can’t dream of anything but of his Sire, considering how possessive Cazador is)

As I said, this is not a dream of power and desire in the same way that the other companions or Tav have, and for this reason I’m inclined to say that the vampiric power of Cazador is the one making an effect instead of the tadpole (or simply Astarion’s trauma showing). This dream looks like a reminder, like a reiterative dream for Astarion about Cazador’s rule, which are:

rule 1: he will not drink from thinking creatures.

rule 2: he will obey him in all things.

rule 3: he will not leave Cazador’s side unless directed.

rule 4: he will know that he is Cazador’s proprietary.

Most options end up in the similar idea of: “Free? Lie to yourself, boy, but not to me. You are mine, forever.”

Cazador and Astarion

[Astarion has just related what Cazador made him eat] “Flies? What did you do to deserve that?”

“I existed, that was enough for him. He revelled in having power over me, because those with power can do whatever the hell they want.”

If we are going to talk about power with a character as Astarion in mind, we need to talk first about Cazador. Let’s start with the way Astarion describes him:

“The biggest threat to a vampire is another vampire. They're scheming, paranoid, power hungry beasts. So why would any vampire give up control over a spawn to create a competitor? Trust me, it doesn't happen.”

“Cazador Szarr is a vampire lord in Baldur’s Gate. The patriarch of his coven and a monster obsessed with power.(...) Not political power or military power. Power over people. The power to control them completely. (...) He turned me nearly two hundred years ago. I became his spawn and he became my tormentor.” 

“He had me go out Baldur’s Gate to fetch him the most beautiful souls I could find. It was a fun little ritual of his—I’d bring them back and he’d ask if I wanted to dine with him. And if I said yes, he’d serve me a dead, putrid rat. Of course if I said no, he’d have me flayed. Hard to say which was worse.”

“Cazador liked to make them art, spent all night with a razor, drafting a sonnet on my back. (Puppy eyes) Apparently the more I screamed, the more mistakes he made. And the more editing was required.”

“It was a group of Gur/thugs that attacked me that night in Baldur’s Gate. I would have died had Cazador not appeared and saved me. (...) He chased them off and offered to save me. To give me eternal life. Given that my choices were “eternal life” or “bleed to death on the street”, I took him up on the offer. It was also afterwards I realised just how long “eternity” could be.” 

“Cazador likes to toy with people. Let them think there was hope right until the end. Until he snatched it all away. Creatures like them don’t play games unless they know they’ll win.” 

(About Raphael’s encounter) “All that 'take your time. I'll wait' nonsense? He's playing with us. It reminds me of Cazador, taunting his slaves with hope when he knew the game was rigged. "

Tav: “Would he send another Gur to capture?” / Ast: “Yes, he probably thought it was funny.”

(“We can kill him.”) “No, you don't understand. You don't know him. Just trust me when I say we need to be careful. He'll send more lackies – he has plenty of souls to command. We just have to be vigilant. Keep our wits about us. And kill any monster hunters on sight. We can probably make an exception with Wyll... Probably.”

>>So far we know that Cazador has a particular pleasure for control, especially the one related to people’s will. With the nightmare information, we know he has powers related to mind control. He has many slaves, and enjoys cruelty, humiliation, and torture. He enjoys making Astarion eat putrid animals, carving his back with an infernal contract, and playing psychologically with him. He also likes to give false hope, making his victims believe that there is hope, removing it right in front of them. 

I want to highlight that this twisted way of giving hope just to offer a perverted solution to a person’s problem, and enjoying the pleasure caused by the break of the hope, can be seen in Astarion during EA: in the approval that Astarion gives to Tav when you revive Connor, and that pinch of hope in Mayrina turns into horror when she sees Undead!Connor. For Astarion this situation is “funny”. Similar can be said when he approves telling Arabella’s parents that she will be released after the end of the ritual, when she is in fact dead. 

Astarion describes a bit more what power we should expect from a Lord Vampire:

Shapeshift: turning into mist.

Calling wolves to do his bidding.

Shrugging off blows.

He “could walk into our camp tonight and kill you with his bare hands.”

Astarion and Slavery

One of the characteristics that so far in EA has got my attention was how little conflict Astarion has with slavery, despite having been his former condition. 

He is apathetic to slavery in the best case, or even supporting it in the worse case. Proof of this can be found in the Myconid Colony, when interacting with a duergar slave. He speaks as if it were a totally useful tool that inspires little sympathy in him, since they don't have consciousness. However, he leaves a quite open question when finally adding “Or maybe not”.

But this “maybe not” is not left to speculation, we can see what Astarion truly feels with a non-Gur human slave in another part of the game: in the Zhentarim hideout. This can be checked with Oskar, the painter slave.

You can free Oskar using persuasion with his kidnapper (Astarion keeps neutral, he doesn’t approve the freeing). Now, if you can buy Oskar by paying the gold directly or by using intimidation to lower the price, it would keep Astarion neutral until the moment of the payment is stated, which he disapproves. At first I thought it was because he was truly against slavery of thinking creatures... but it was not. It was because you are paying a lot of money (we need to remember Astarion is greedy [1] as well, he wouldn’t be a vampire if it weren't for his greed). 

Once bought, if you keep Oskar as a slave, and you demand him to keep silent because "you want your slaves silent unless they are spoken to", Oskar will think it's a joke, and you, again, can use the option "I don't joke with my slaves" and then Astarion will approve. None of these options is under any tag to make them believe they are part of a preformative act to prank Oskar. And this is key... this is not a joke. They are used as your real sentiments and intentions, and Astarion approves them.

These reactions are not random, they make sense with his—until this moment unchanged or retconned—backstory, where he had no problem trafficking with criminals as vampire food and later as slaves to have higher profits. So, these two aspects remain in his vampire nature unaltered: the most important thing is always to have profits, and his relationship with slavery is absolutely fine as much as it gives benefits, it’s useful or at least, gives him some entertainment.

The tadpole

We know the tadpole has a particular effect on Astarion. Unlike the other companions, Astarion doesn’t dream of a person who represents to him both desire and power. Power? undoubtedly, but desire? It’s hard to say. The implied, vague concept that Astarion has been sexually abused by Cazador is there (because we know these dreams are about “sensual” desire as well). 

It’s maybe a consequence of the vampirism and, by extension, of Cazador’s power, that makes Astarion unable to dream of anything else but his master. From the datamining information about the non-tadpole dream of Astarion, in which Cazador lists four rules, we know that the fourth one is about never stopping to be Cazador’s propriety, unable to be free, not even in dreams. Maybe Cazador’s effect also applies to Astarion’s dreams as well (but this is a mere speculation, there is no real proof of it on EA or datamining info so far). 

So when Astarion awakes in the beach and sees that some rules of his vampiric nature have been changed, he gets excited about the tadpole, and unlike the rest of the companions, he doesn’t want to get rid of it. He wants to master it, to have control of it. However, when the opportunity of controlling the tadpole appears with Raphael encounter, Astarion is one of the few companions who is completely against it at first. 

“Raphael is playing with us; Cazador liked to toy with people too. Let them think there was hope right until the end. Until he snatched it all away. Creatures like them don't play games unless they know they'll win.”

In that moment, he claims he won’t change a vampiric master for an infernal one. However, when the first use of the Tadpole causes the first symptoms of transformation evident, Astarion falls in despair: he is scared and, calling for Raphael to take him from the camp, he says a curious phrase: 

“I would choose servitude over oblivion any day”

So, after this moment, he is not completely convinced that Raphael is the true solution to his problem but he is more open to keep him as a plan B if anything else fails. Later he claims that it doesn't matter to be a servant of a devil, because he knows Cazador, and he wants to get rid of his power for good. 

“I won't lie, it's tempting. If I keep the tadpole, I risk transforming into a grotesque monster. If I lose the tadpole, Cazador has control of me, body and soul, and I return to the shadows. It's grim either way, so why not sell what's left of my soul to a devil? Better he has it than cazador. Whatever it's coming we need to have our options open.”

Astarion’s process of seeing the potential of the power of the tadpole increases along the game. It gets higher and wilder. The first instances of the tadpole use are about Astarion discovering how much this tadpole gives him powers he can barely understand. 

“The tadpoles are not so bad at all. (...) First I can walk in the sun, then make people dance like puppets? *laughs * I've certainly had worse days.”

He is not an idiot, he knows that, without control, they will end up turning into mind flayers, so he needs to find something powerful that can give him control over his tadpole. This is the reason why he encourages the use of the tadpole after knowing about the netherese magic containing the transformation via Omellun or Ethel.

Ethel explains that the tadpole had been tampered, so the dialogue goes:

Tav: “It's giving us more time, sounds good to me”. 

Astarion: “Perhaps. And who's to say it can't be tampered with further?” (She said it was netherese magic) “it must be powerful magic to stop the parasite in its tracks, I wonder what else it could do?

At that point in the story, he knows that the netherese magic is powerful enough to contain the transformation: so he is now sure that there is more time to use it. So he will end up being the only companion in EA who encourages everyone to use the power:

“What's not to enjoy (with this tadpole)? I can walk in sunlight, trespass upon any home, manipulate minds – I'm the most powerful vampire in the realms. Granted, the looming doom is an issue, but why not enjoy the benefits while we can?

Despite the nightmares happening after every use of the tadpole powers, Astarion doesn’t want to stop. At this point, he is the only companion who doesn’t want to. 

“The power to twist a mind to your will is worth some nightmares.”

By the end of the game, we are sure that Astarion wants this power without doubts. He revels in the power of mind-controlling people, ironically, despite having suffered so much of it under Cazador’s control. If we see all the situations where Astarion’s mind is controlled, or violated, his reactions will be extremely more aggressive than the other companions. He has suffered it a lot, but by the end of EA he is enjoying being on the other side of that power. 

This post was written on April 2021. → For more Astarion: Analysis Series Index

[thebibliomancer]

Essential Avengers: West Coast Avengers #3: Taking Care of BUSINESS!

November, 1984

This is a sad day for the fledgling West Coast Avengers. It’s a cool cover for the fledgling West Coast Avengers but a sad day.

Not only are they falling before Graviton but they’re falling perpetually.

Anyway, last time in West Coast Avengers: Hawkeye and Mockingbird were sent by the Vision to create a west coast branch of the Avengers. Since Wonder Man, Tigra, and Rhodey Iron Man were California based, they got the nod to be the West Coast Avengers, despite reluctance from Tigra and Iron Man.

Their first case was mistaking as a supervillain and beating up a friend of Tigra who had followed her to the Avengers Compound to make sure she wasn’t in trouble. So. That’s not great. Next, the West Coast Avengers tried to chase down a bank robber named the Blank. This is really overkill for a guy whose only power is wearing a slippery anonymizing force field but he manages to get away anyway. The charger for his force field also dunks Graviton back into the world.

And as you can see on the cover, this isn’t ideal for our West Coast Avengers.

But before that, there was an event that sort of happened between issues. In Avengers #249, Vision tried to contact the West Coast Avengers but only got their answering machine. And that’s because they were dealing with the local worldwide unseasonable winter.

If Avenging and stunt work doesn’t work out for Wonder Man, he should consider becoming the new Mr. Plow.

Anyway, the forever winter is over, thanks to the Casket of Eternal Winters being reassembled and shut over in the Thor book as part of a multi-pronged plan to take down Surtur.

The West Coast Avengers are still dealing with the remaining snow because its not like snow just evaporates! Without turning into water first! Look, it would take too much time, people have places to drive, or something.

The combination of snow everywhere but normal warm South California weather leads to some people taking advantage by going swimsuit skiing, mostly so Rhodey can wryly think that weird is a way of life for Californians as an excuse to not worry about why Wonder Man has been acting weird lately.

Uh, good rationalizing, Rhodey?

Some people who don’t care for skiing decide to instead rob Radio Shack because NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW!

But Mockingbird shows up and starts beating them up when they make the mistake of believing that they outnumber her. They are mathematically right and wrong in every other way.

Hawkeye also shows up to pin some others to the wall with arrows so one of the Radio Shack robbers runs to the getaway car and tries to get the getaway driver to help him getaway.

But cat’s got their car.

It sort of makes sense why Tigra has decided on this for her winter outfit and yet I’m still baffled.

If it had just been the boots, that’d be one thing.

She’s also the only one who has made a winter weather change to her outfit.

Bafflement.

The blond robber doesn’t even try running, saying “What’s the use? Just take me away. I wanna serve my time and forget this ever happened!”

Bad day when some electronics theft gets an entire superhero team on you.

By midday, the West Coast Avengers meet by the Hollywood sign (so that the audience knows that this is set in LA). At this point all of the snow is gone, as if it’s been whisked away. So I guess I was wrong. Earlier the casket hadn’t been repaired but now it has been.

Hawkeye: “Well, whatever happened to [the snow], you can all be proud of the job you did over the past week! You put in a lot of long hours and saved thousands of lives! I’d say we’ve all earned a little time to unwind! That’s why I propose we hold the first annual Avengers barbeque... commencing tonight at sunset, back at the compound!”

Oh ho, I see that Hawkeye is going to be the fun Avengers chairman. Don’t see Vision organizing a barbeque.

The rest of the team is pretty excited about this... except for Wonder Man, who is distracted, answers without any real enthusiasm, and then takes off.

Hawkeye wonders if he’s still upset about the Blank getting away but c’mon that was weeks ago! Surely no superhero ever obsesses over anything!

When the Avengers disperse, Tigra lies that Iron Man promised her a lift as an excuse to talk to him in private about Wonder Man.

Tigra: “Something’s bothering him, and I thought maybe you could get him to talk about it! After all, you’ve known him longer than the rest of us!”

Iron Man: “Uh... not really, Tigra! I hardly know the man!”

Tigra: “What are you talking about, Tony? You fought alongside him dozens of times!”

Iron Man: “Tony -- ?! Ohhh... you think I’m Tony Stark!”

Womp womp.

This is one of the exact things Rhodey was worried would happen if he joined a team with a bunch of people who knew Tony/Iron Man!

Rhodey isn’t about to just reveal his name to her over a case of mistaken identity but he does prove to a doubtful Tigra that he’s not Tony by showing Tigra the skin on his hand.

Iron Rhodey also suggests that Tigra talk to him for reasons of it’s always flattering when a pretty cat girl pays attention to you?

I mean, sure. Yeah. True.

Tigra is also the only person on the team who actually realized Wonder Man was bummed who didn’t immediately dismiss the idea.

I guess its up to you, Tigra.

Meanwhile, in the Santa Monica Mountains, our coverboy Graviton.

He didn’t sit idle during the big snow, oh no! He took over an estate. And then sat idle!

Dammit, it was cold out!

Graviton: I prefer starting my empire in a warmer climate!

With the snow cleared up though, he can get down to business........ of recapping his recent travails.

So, Graviton.

He comes from Canada because Marvel Canada is just like that. He was a researcher in Research City, working on a teleport beam, and accidentally gave himself gravity powers by increasing the power to see what would happen. People at the lab didn’t like him because he kept throwing stuff at them so he took over.

Then he fought the Avengers. He kicked their asses. But the woman he was trying to force to date him threw herself off his floating city rather than date him (its cool, Jarvis saved her) so Graviton accidentally compressed his floating city into a super dense sphere with him as the nougaty center.

He managed to get out of that sphere, but with AMENSIA, and tried to kidnap that female scientist again but was stopped by the Thing and Black Bolt. So Graviton imploded.

He showed up AGAIN and tried to kidnap an entire Bloomingdale’s and was stopped by Thor, who dunked him into an interdimensional void.

Now here’s where it gets slightly weird.

The Beyonder’s construct passing through the void on its way to Secret Wars woke Graviton up and let him find his way back to Earth by homing in on the energy field of the force field the Blank uses.

I don’t know why that specific energy field. We may never know. The scientist who made it walked into the street without looking both ways and got run over.

Graviton is actually fairly pleased about winding up in “this most hedonistic of world cities!” He’s decided he’s all about creature comforts now.

The Blank returns from delivering message for Graviton.

Graviton gets annoyed that the guy is nervous despite having a cool dude who never fails like Graviton as a new boss and takes REAL exception when the Blank points out that the Avengers have beaten him before.

As well he should! Because technically its not true. If you’ll recall my recap, the Avengers didn’t beat him. He imploded. And then when he reappeared to fight the Thing and Black Bolt and imploded again. Now Thor, solo, managed to beat him where Thor, plus Avengers, couldn’t. Don’t ask why. That’s just a rule of comics. Daredevil beat Ultron once.

Among other ways he shows the Blank what’s what, Graviton demonstrates his force field belt ain’t so slick by switching it off through the field. Which, yes, technically gravity could work that way?

Meanwhile, over on ye private Avengers beach because if you’re going to have a sprawling compound, why not get a beach while you’re at it? Tigra interrupts Wonder Man pacing on the private Avengers beach and offers to tell her DEEP DARK SECRETS if he shares his.

Wonder Man: “There’s not much to tell... mostly, I’ve been wondering if I did the right thing in joining Hawkeye’s New Avengers team. I sometimes wonder if I ever did anything right, where the Avengers are concerned.”

He recaps his ENTIRE LIFE STORY to her, as is the style. Got powers from some Avengers enemies, turned against them, died. Came back to life, uneasy as a superhero, quit to become an actor.

He leaves out the part where he embezzled from his own company and was arrested, the part where he was a competitor to Tony Stark, and retcons in that he’s always loved acting. Rather than seeing one (1) movie and deciding he wants to be an actor now.

Apparently, Hercules’ offer to set Wonder Man up with some sweet Hollywood contacts didn’t pan out.

Then Simon worked as hired muscle for some scientific research groups but decides not to go into that.

There’s no ‘see such and such issue of book’ so I can’t tell whether this is a thing that was published or is a noodle incident.

Then a former agent got Simon that gig on the David Letterman show. Remember that one? David Letterman knocked out the villain with a big door knob? It probably made more sense at the time?

Anyway, although the show got pre-empted for a news report in New York, it did air in Cali-for-ni-a and a director reached out to Simon with stuntman work.

And its not the acting he wanted to do but it is acting and being good at it has done wonders, man, for his confidence. Which is why he jumped at Hawkeye’s offer to join the west coast team.

But then he let the Blank escape and now he’s back to feeling out of place on a cool superhero team.

So now that he shared his not so deep, not so dark, secrets, Tigra shares hers.

She knows what he means when he says he feels like a blunderer. Her stint on the New York Avengers team was a disaster (although she managed to get Molecule Man to go to therapy! By calling him a big loser! That’s something!). And she feels like most of her life is just things happening at her without her ever really feeling in control.

She also demonstrates that she can use that little tiger amulet (a gift from the cat people that turned her into Tigra) to look like her old self but she’s more comfortable as Tigra.

Hm.

That’s two whole characters who can technically transform but prefer to stay ‘powered up’ at all times. Tigra and She-Hulk.

It’s almost a pattern.

Anyway, Wonder Man and Tigra both try to be the insecure one on the team complimenting each other and deprecating themselves but Tigra decides fine. Wonder Man is hung up on losing the Blank? They’re going to track down a goddamn the Blank.

SHE MOONLIT AS A PRIVATE DETECTIVE SHE HAS A TRENCHCOAT SHE CAN DO THIS!

Tigra: “All right, Mr. Wonderful, come on!”

Wonder Man: “Where are we going?”

Tigra: “To see a man about filling in the Blank!”

Damn, good turn of phrase. You really do have this private eye patter down, huh?

She takes Simon to the Cat’s Jazz Club, Shroud’s hangout, to see if he has a lead on the Blank but they find the joint has been busted up.

The club employees are reluctant to talk at first but the Shroud shows up and tells them its cool, the Avengers are his friends. Also: he would like to know himself.

Club employee Mouse says that the Galeno Gang hit the club but they had a message that they were under new managment and that anyone that wanted to do crime business in town had to do it with said management.

So they hit the Cat’s Jazz Club because Shroud is pretending to be a crimelord to infiltrate all the crime.

So far, its working out really well for you, huh?

Anyway, Shroud says it’ll be easy to track down the Galeno Gang and find out who the new boss is but Wonder Man insists that he tag along to help. Call it payback for cracking Shroud’s ribs in issue #1.

Shroud doesn’t want all the crime to think he associates with the Avengers but Wonder Man has a STUPENDOUS IDEA!

So at the former home of Lucky Max Galeno, where some people are getting down and maybe even boogieing, the Shroud’s black fog fills the room and out strolls Shroud and Definitely Not Simon Williams.

He used his extensive acting experience to put on a wig and a jacket, that wily Wonder Man!

(Also Tigra is hanging upside down outside the window so its a good thing that Shroud and NotSimon are drawing all the attention)

Simon hoists one of the Galeno Boys and tells him they want to see the boss so the Blank comes out from the back room.

Its a testament to Simon’s INCREDIBLE ACTING TALENT that “he doesn’t look any more surprised than the rest of the crowd” according to Tigra.

The Blank justifies having the Shroud’s people beaten by saying that he had to establish credentials to consolidate all of the West Coast mobs so Shroud tells Simon to rough him up.

I like Simon’s like BOING here.

‘Sick ‘im!’ BOING, hah.

Also, the Blank has been smoking on and off throughout this whole issue but like. How does the force field work if he can just stick things into it? I mean, obviously, its permeable to air since he can breathe and... oh I think I just explained it. Dammit.

The boing stalls out midair leaving Simon hanging there.

Obviously its Graviton. No surprise to the audience. But very alarming to the characters who must think the Blank suddenly has more powers.

Off-panel Graviton hits Shroud with Wonder Man, knocking off the wig which wasn’t even secured in place. Dammit Simon, I thought you were an actor!

The Blank recognizes him as Wonder Man so the cat out of the bag, Tigra jumps through the window and onto the Blank’s back.

Graviton finally shows himself, exasperated with how much hand-holding the Blank needs to do basic things like fight several surprise superheroes.

Wonder Man: “Tigra! Get back! That’s Graviton! He’s one of the most dangerous men the Avengers ever fought!”

Graviton: “Nice of you to acknowledge that, Wonder Man!”

See, all he wanted was some acknowledgement. And to crush Wonder Man under a localized gravity field.

The Shroud tries to obscure the room under the idea that Graviton can’t fight what he can’t see. But the guy just grabs everything in the room and spins it around.

Then he pins Tigra, Shroud, and the Blank to the wall. The Blank because he managed to get captured off-panel.

Wonder Man KRUNKs up from the floor and tries to grab Graviton, alarming him that Wonder Man is fighting through the effects of so much gravity, having to block him with a “column of gravitic energy.”

The Blank complains about being stuck to the wall when he’s supposed to be Graviton’s partner.

Graviton: “Wrong, Blank! Very wrong! At beast, you were a go-between, a figurehead in my plans to organize California’s criminal element!”

The Blank: “D-did you say... ‘were?’"

And then he yeets Blank, Tigra, and Shroud out the window and into the ocean.

That certainly is a way to deal with some party crashers.

Meanwhile, the barbecue is going on without Tigra and Wonder Man.

Imagine being dunked into the ocean instead of eating Hawkeye’s steaks.

Hmm. I like that apron but I can’t help but feel that a modern comic would have a hilarious apron extremely specific to Hawkeye. Something in the genre of Quentin Quire’s shirts.

I also like Rhodey realizing that he’s not going to be able to eat any of this barbecue through his mask and deliberating revealing his identity to his teammates SPECIFICALLY to eat a steak.

Priorities.

Mockingbird points out that Tigra and Wonder Man are late and she can’t reach them on the radio but Hawkeye dismisses her concerns since they’re both so capable.

Meanwhile, Graviton dunks Wonder Man into the pool and holds him underwater so he can watch him slowly drown.

He’s also acquired some sexy swimsuit ladies from somewhere. This is LA so I guess they just spontaneously generated.

How will our heroes get out of their various water-based predicaments??

I assume swimming will be involved.

Next issue is last issue of the limited series and for the West Coast Avengers for a while.

And since the West Coast Avengers show up in Avengers #250 with the limited series wrapped up, expect me to schedule posting the posts in that way too.

Follow @essential-avengers​ because I know the recipe to Hawkeye’s secret steak recipe and I’ll tell you if you follow. Here’s a hint: take meat, set it on fire for a while. Also like and reblog and I’ll tell you how many potatoes Captain America’s potato salad contains.

[betweengenesisfrogs]

The Triumph of the Marginalia

Marginalia, n.:

1 : notes or embellishments in the margins (as in a book)

2 : nonessential items

-Troll OED

Is it just me, or is Nepeta and Equius’s arc the most slept-upon piece of brilliance in all of Homestuck?

A brilliance, might I add, that culminates in possibly the most triumphant, fulfilling emotional moment in the entire work:

https://www.homestuck.com/story/7928

*stands back and beholds its majesty while from the background comes the sound of James Roach brutally murdering ska*

No, but actually, I mean this 100% unironically, and by the end of this post, I think you’ll agree with me.

By now, I think we all understand the Act 6 double metaphor: the series of temporal loops and universes that Lord English commands is paralleled with, and in fact totally identical to, the narrative of Homestuck. Our characters’ lives exist within this context. They struggle to escape it, and are defined both by it and by the rejection of it.

Enter Nepeta.

The metaphorical meaning of Nepeta in Homestuck is irrelevance, and that’s why she’s the most relevant character in any discussion.

Nepeta was one of the characters killed off during the Murderstuck arc. Hussie argued that she was perfect for this role. In fact, I believe he said something like “Nepeta is sweet, but if you look up the dictionary definition of ‘expendable character,’ you’ll see a picture of Nepeta playing with a ball of yarn and looking very cute.” She’s an endearing combination of shipper girl and apex predator, but not one of your Vriskas or Terezis in being a driver of the plot. Hussie, it seems, created her just to round out the troll cast. He described one of his purposes in Murderstuck as being to axe some of the less necessary trolls to reduce the scope of his character list.

Except that didn’t really happen, did it?

Like a cat with nine lives, Nepeta just keeps coming back.

Equius is another addition to the troll cast who gets pushed away from the main action. He was a character-writing challenge: how do you make someone who’s gross, uncomfortable, and racist kind of likable anyway? I’d argue Hussie succeeded, in large part because of Equius’s relationship with Nepeta. By the time you finish with Hivebent, you’ll probably have a little fondness for their moraillegiance. And if that doesn’t do it, the conversation that serves as their swansong in Equius: Seek the Highblood will tear your heartstrings to shreds.

Because Equius dies, tragically clownmurdered. There was, at the time, some stink over this from Equius fans. Would he have really let himself be killed so easily? Hussie countered: yes, and it was the most in-character thing he could have done. He died doing what he loved: being asphyxiated erotically and horrifically by a superior. Truly, there could be no more fitting end to his character than that.

And yet.

No sooner did Hussie complete his self-appointed story cleanup challenge than he immediately began to undo his own work. It’s almost as if, in declaring his intention to own those who preferred more characters to narrative economy, he immediately had to own himself??

By the time we get even a little way into Act 6, we’re deep in the dreambubble landscape, meeting dead characters left and right. And who should show up there but Equius and Nepeta? Equius attempting to get it on with a bunch of Aradias, who dump him. And Nepeta, living out her romantic dreams as a representative of a timeline where she got together with Karkat. They both appear as symbols of this deadness, this irrelevance. Except that that brings them back into the story, into the spotlight – the opposite of where they’re supposed to be!

Like many bits of commentary, Hussie continues to incorporate the metaphor Nepeta=Irrelevance into Homestuck. Karkat’s remark on their journey that he would love to meet “FIFTY FUCKING NEPETAS” and embark on “NEPETAQUEST” alludes to formspring remarks to the effect that, no, Homestuck was not going to have much time for the minor characters. Except it clearly did.

Why couldn’t the narrative let the meowrails go? Was it that despite the economy of Murderstuck, something was still incomplete? After all, one of Equius’s charms was that he appeared to be growing into a less repressed, kinder person. In Seek the Highblood, we see him letting his guard down enough to roleplay with Nepeta for a change. Their love for each other: wasn’t that ultimately what could redeem Equius in our eyes? So his dying and thus failing to protect her–isn’t that something that should be addressed?

You could imagine many a Nepeta and Equius fan saying this to Hussie back in 2011.

But Hussie was already saying it to himself.

The duo come roaring back into the story in the Trickster mode arc, mid Act 6, thanks to Gamzee’s ridiculous resurrections. True, Nepeta is still reduced as part of Fefeta, the character formed from killed-off girls who never speaks onscreen. But doesn’t using that fact as a running gag kind of draw our attention to it? Doesn’t the fact that Fefeta talks to Roxy constantly offscreen inform us that once we get outside the frame of the narrative, Nepeta has a rich inner life and countless stories to tell?

And it’s here that Equius gets something he never got in his original “arc:” the chance to apologize to Nepeta. You’d be forgiven for missing it since there’s so much else going on at the time, but he does, while fused with AR. Here’s what you’d miss, though: he’s grown as a person in the afterlife. He’s come to regret that moment of weakness, where his fetish kept him from protecting his moirail. Impossible as it seems, he’s continuing his character arc.

The scene ends with Fefeta exploding (she’s also, after all, dealing with Eridan), but it leaves us with a tantalizing question:

Will Nepeta forgive Equius? Is there even a plausible time and space in that story when she could respond to his words?

Do you see what’s happening here? Instead of being erased, Nepeta and Equius are starting to slip the bounds of the story that killed them. They leap in and out of the frame, half-mythical figures. Marginalized, they write their own stories in the margins. They exist in complete defiance of the original logic of Homestuck.

Lord English is an alt-Author figure, a dark, brutal reflection of narrative control and narrative necessity. His world, in which horrible choices are necessary, in which the alpha timeline is a ticking clock leading inexorably to his manifestation, is one that beats down people not deemed important enough by his narrative. Which makes it identical to the one we’re reading. Throw all the unnecessary characters in the trash. Kill them off, if it suits my purposes. The world doesn’t need Nepeta.

Which is precisely why it does. Because isn’t defying Lord English the entire point? Isn’t it what Homestuck reveals as truly heroic?

What might Nepeta be capable of?

Let’s talk about two other victims of English’s forces of marginalization. Davesprite might be the most quintessential example. He teaches us what the alpha timeline is and how it works, by going back to fix a doomed timeline and submitting to being doomed himself. Except he merges with a bird and avoids that fate. Okay, but he clearly gets killed off fighting Jack in Jade: Enter. Except he comes back and hangs out with Jadesprite. Okay, but he dies in the planetsplode in the Retcon. Nope, he comes back from that, too. Huh. He keeps slipping the fate decreed for him by – who else? Lord English.

But it’s a struggle, clearly. He’s caught up in various cycles of guilt and shame. Over being “not the real Dave.” Over his feeling that he has to be a hero in the sense Bro demanded he be. Hussie describes Davesprite as fitting the “way of the unbroken sword:” his experiences have led him to believe in being strong and capable at the expense of all else, in contrast with the other Dave, whose belief in Bros’ toxic ideas is beginning to slip – the “way of the broken sword.” And where did Bro get his toxic ideas from? At least in part, the whispering voice of the soul of Lord English.

Now we turn to Dirk. Like Dave, Dirk has a marginalized, “less important” splinter self but it’s more of a pressing concern. AR shows Dirk’s darker side: exhibiting manipulative tendencies that human Dirk is trying to move away from. He’s also a copy removed from humanity, who feels an understandable amount of disillusionment about being removed from physical existence and his own identity. But as much as Dirk may splinter, like his dumb anime sword, he never breaks. What this means in the symbolic language of Homestuck is that Dirk lives fully, instinctually, in the way of the sword. He believe in a world of hard choices, masculine heroism, and necessity. Ultimately, this, too, is part of what makes Bro so harmful to Dave. In AR and Davesprite, we have a strange parallel: two splinter selves, both of whom are enmeshed in the logic of LE.

Except AR, unlike Davesprite…kind of is LE.

What is Lord English composed of? Well, there’s Caliborn, the most unrepentant shithead of all time. There’s Gamzee, embodiment of horrifying clownery. And then there’s AR, a version of Dirk even more removed from the person he wants to be.

And…Equius?

Allow me a moment to get really indulgent and take a big puff on my Homestuck scholar’s pipe.

The metaphorical meaning of Equius in Homestuck is: sort of growing out of being a creepy racist.

Or maybe let’s say: the opportunity to do that. We said that Equius was on the verge of being redeemed (even had been, in the eyes of many readers). What does it mean to stick him in with Lord English’s souls? It means two things:

1) Equius is a product of his society, which was shaped by Doc Scratch, aka by Lord English, both of whom are kind of him, but Scratch picks up on his traits especially. This is a recognition of that fact: the part of him that sucks is, itself, Lord English in a dizzying loop.

2) Equius’s story is a tragedy. It is the story of a kid who started to escape his society’s tendencies, but was sucked back in by the evil force behind them.

Although…maybe that’s not the whole story.

Because both Equius and AR aren’t really that bad. AR’s pretty understandable, and by no means beyond the possibility of goodness. And the combination of the two? Honestly, pretty harmless. They counter each other’s worst tendencies by devolving into a weird goofball. In fact, AR even says he wants to do something heroic: to sacrifice himself for something really important. He does, kind of, mustering a last-ditch robohorse assault on Caliborn. But at the same time, this is the substance of his tragedy. A hero whose defeat of a great evil forces him to become the substance of that evil. Which could not be a more fitting summary of how these characters function in their story.

But maybe that’s still not the whole story.

Enter Davepeta.

At first glance, the creation of Davepeta seems like Hussie’s most batshit troll move yet. I feel pretty confident in saying that even those who predicted either of these characters returning didn’t see that one coming. However, a few pages of Davepeta’s presence reveals a fundamental truth:

Davepeta is fucking amazing.

In them, Davesprite’s depressive moods are buoyed up by Nepeta’s upbeat optimism. Nepeta’s reclusive shyness is balanced by Dave’s tendency toward brash banter. Both of them gain confidence from being the new person they are. They quickly let go of ideas inherited from the world that kept them from self-knowledge and happiness. Dave, his toxic masculinity; Nepeta, her fear.

A great point I’ve seen made is how much Jasprose and Davepeta resemble fantasy selves for Rose and Dave: indulgent, technicolor manifestations of people they could be if they let go of inhibitions and limitations. But I think Davepeta is the most unambiguously positive of the two.

The metaphorical meaning of Davepeta in Homestuck?

Growth.

Not giving a fuck about what the world thinks. The world, aka Lord English. Because Lord English could never have predicted that his machinations would also spawn a confident, powerful fusion of two beings he had discarded as totally irrelevant.

They’re also a multicolored non-binary furry, so that’s even more points in the pissing off shitheads column.

They are someone Lord English never conceived of, never could have conceived of, but which lay as potential within his domain all along.

And if Lord English is a reflection of the author, of what Hussie feels one has to destroy or sacrifice, than Davepeta is an indulgence existing in defiance of all that.

And this makes Davepeta the most powerful person of all.

They are the light at the end of the tunnel. They are the person you could be, if you could get past your mental shackles and just grow. It may not be possible to ever get there as a mortal human, may only be for a godlike sprite, but striving to be like them matters, is purpose and fulfilment enough.

And they love ARquius.

Nepeta believed in Equius, believed he could grow, and was growing. So as much as ARquius traps himself in a Lord English loop of his own making – grown, perhaps, out of Dirk’s belief that there should be a loop, that importance is admirable—Davepeta pulls from him, in his last scene, his finest qualities. His love.

Equius asks forgiveness again, and this time, Nepeta’s able to give it. Davepeta easily accepts ARquius’s apology, an apology which never could have existed within the confines of a normal narrative. A reconciliation that both of them fought for by defying their narrative, by existing outside it. By being not the trolls who lived and died, but their broader, conceptual selves, who exist beyond lifetimes. Beyond the comic page. And they consummate that reconciliation with that most cherished and loving of gestures:

A hug.

And even as this is Equius and Nepeta’s reconciliation, it’s also Dirk and Dave’s. Which, I should mention, is also taking place, simultaneously and circumstantially simultaneously, just below. It’s a more difficult one, certainly, especially as filtered through the splinters of Davesprite and AR. Here forgiveness is not quite the right word. But – knowledge, and recognition, and a kind of peace. It’s Davesprite’s chance to reunite with the part of his brother he loved, while also being a person who’s grown beyond him. And it’s AR’s chance to be loved.

Oh, sure, the art is ridiculous, the pose absurd. But that’s what makes it sublime.

I mean, what did you think that Sbahj comic was really about?

A boy distancing himself from his feelings through irony, never acknowledging that the story he’s telling is about two bros who desperately want to hug each other, but don’t know how.

Here’s the hug.

I want to dip into Epilogues territory for a moment, but it’s territory which is fairly well implied by Davepeta’s statements and role in Collide. The Meat Epilogue, I think, only illuminates what was already there.

Lord English is uniquely vulnerable to Davepeta.

And why shouldn’t he be? They, like so much else in Homestuck, are a consequence of his actions spiraling far beyond his control. But it’s more than that. Davepeta is finally able to lay the unbroken sword to rest by following the “prophecy” about Dave defeating Lord English. On the one hand, that’s kind of what happened. But it’s also completely different from what English intended, antithetical to his desires and goals. Which makes the victory all the sweeter. But at the end of the day, Davepeta doesn’t fight for the reasons Davesprite did. They’re free of that, now. Instead, they fight from a place of genuine compassion. Because Davesprite, like Dave, knows the true meaning of being a hero: caring about one’s friends.

But the most important thing about Davepeta is that they know Lord English, on a level that perhaps neither he nor they recognize. Both AR and Equius are in there, and both are capable of redemption. It’s only Gamzee and Caliborn who are truly beyond it.

How does Davepeta defeat Lord English?

With a hug.

They wrap their claws around him, and carry him into the sun like a piece of garbage. It’s an aggressive hold, but it’s also effectively an embrace.

And I have to wonder: in those final moments, did they sense a connection there? Did Equius and Dirk stir somewhere within Lord English? Did they give him a moment’s pause? Resist him? Make it just the tiniest bit easier for Davepeta to do their work?

If so, then that, too, is heroism.

At the very least, it’s circumstantially simultaneous with the hug we see in Act 6, and so it carries the same message:

Redemption.

Not for the shitheads, but for those who wanted to be better.

And if this isn’t enough, there’s a third reconciliation here, too: between author and reader, or to put it in other terms, author and character.

If Lord English is a shadow of the author, what part of the author can be redeemed? Maybe not the destructive, antagonistic urges. But the part that plans and designs and philosophizes as Dirk does. That part of Hussie wanted Davepeta to be there, to strike that final blow, and made it happen.

Because, when you get right down to it, as much as Hussie pretends to be antagonistic toward his readers and the characters they enjoy, it’s the fans, the shippers, the furries, those whose hearts go out to a cute, shy cat girl that he most celebrates.

Hussie fucking loves Nepeta.

Nepeta and Equius are, sneakily, the best characters in Homestuck, because they understand its fundamental message: that to succeed in Homestuck is to defy Homestuck. They defy everything it throws at them, and somehow, improbably, come out on top.

All of this is there on that page, a whole edifice of storytelling culminating in that singular, grand, supremely indulgent expression, a feast of looping leitmotif and color and imagery and meme and sound. It’s all there, if you know where to look.

Nepeta and Equius love each other, and that’s pretty fucking great.

See? I told you.

<> Ari

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep12

First things first, I’ve finally gotten around to getting a subscription to AnimeLab so I’m not just pirating everything I watch each season, so that’s cool, lol. I can’t really justify getting multiple streaming service subscriptions, though, so I’ll still probably pirate anything that this site isn’t streaming. But thankfully they’re streaming this series, so I can watch it guilt-free.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

I honestly wasn’t expecting them to continue following Minagoroshi in an almost 1:1 manner since we’re getting so close to the end of this arc, but the fact that there’s only one episode left before the next arc starts makes it pretty obvious that we’re going to get some real curveballs and a sudden ending in the next episode..

I think that in the original anime’s version of Minagoroshi, there were like three episodes left in the arc after what this one covered, so there’s no real way for them to actually cover all of that. But obviously this isn’t trying to faithfully adapt Minagoroshi from start to finish, so it’s just been a matter of time until things change.

Honestly, I feel like this episode is another example of how Gou has been functionally more of a remake than a lot of people probably want it to be. I’ve been seeing lots of people complaining about how the show’s been really boring because like 90% of it has been going over stuff from the VN, and that just really goes to show that they weren’t kidding about this being accessible for newcomers, and probably aimed at them first, and old fans second.

I also think it’s totally fine that they’ve really toned down the horror aspect of the series. I never really liked that the blood and gore became the big defining part of it’s cultural legacy and how people remember it, so I’m glad that Gou is more faithful to the focus on mystery and drama in the VN. There isn’t the same sort of slow-burn dread and paranoia, but that’s just something that a 24-episode anime split into 5-ish arcs fundamentally can’t do properly, so they’re going for a different sort of pacing and atmosphere that works more naturally here.

Anyway, since this episode was almost 1:1 with this part of Minagoroshi, there isn’t a whole lot to say there, but I still spent the whole episode being worried that everyone in the main crew was two seconds away from murdering everyone in the village council, lol. It didn’t help that my memory of Minagoroshi is really fuzzy, so I couldn’t remember if everyone was acting this way originally, but I think it was all pretty faithful to the VN.

There are still a few notable differences from the VN, though, like Ooishi just randomly showing up at the meeting to creepily observe Keiichi, which I think is original to Gou. Considering that he also had that ominous final scene in the last episode, I’m really suspicious of what the hell’s going on with him in this arc. I thought maybe he’d show up here to stop Keiichi’s plans to save Satoko, or to reveal something about what’s going on with her and Teppei, but he didn’t really do anything. He also seemed like he was maybe supportive of Keiichi’s whole plan to rally the village, so I just have no idea what he’s thinking at this point, lol.

I also think the first scene with the damaged shrine might be original, and I don’t really know what to make of it. It might have just been there so we could see some random villagers talk about how everyone secretly thinks that Satoko and Teppei will be the victims of the curse this year, but I feel like there must be more to it. For one thing, I’m skeptical that it was actually Teppei who did it in the first place, but I also think the symbolism of a desecrated shrine is pretty heavy for a story like this.

Part of me’s still convinced that Teppei might already be dead, but honestly I’m less certain about that after how this episode went. We also didn’t even see Satoko at all, which is kinda worrying. Maybe she’ll wind up dead, but I’m not sure.

I guess the bottom line is that there’s only one episode left to this arc, so there’s only so much they could do at this point, and it’ll have to happen pretty quickly. So I at least think that part of the big divergence in this arc will involve the outcome of the village rallying together for Satoko. I thought at first that maybe this time around they’d fail in getting Oryo’s support, and the whole plan would fall apart, but things played out the same as the VN with her, so if something’s going to screw up the plan, it’s probably something else. And since Ooishi seemed kinda supportive of Keiichi here, maybe he’ll sit back and let them continue their protesting like in the VN, instead of breaking it up this time.

But other than that the obvious guess for how this will all fall apart at the last minute would be if we find out that Satoko and/or Teppei are already dead, which would immediately invalidate the entire protest.

Though I’m still also thinking that maybe they actually WILL succeed in saving Satoko, and it’ll lead to a deceptively happy ending where everything just falls apart afterwards due to some other reason, like in Minagoroshi. I doubt it’d be the exact same thing, though. 

I guess a more or less happy ending could still happen with the Satoko situation if Teppei alone winds up dead, and Satoko just gets to go back to living with Rika afterward. Which would probably at least take less time to deal with than having the whole process of getting Satoko to speak out against Teppei and provide evidence of abuse to the CWS.

I still like my theory that all the main characters will survive this arc, and that this will lead to the future where teenage Rika gets murdered, but I’m not entirely confident about that at this point.

One thing that’s still bugging me, and is making it hard to predict exactly what’s going on, is that I can’t tell exactly what’s going through Rika’s head, and what she actually thinks is going on. She’s continuing to apparently remember and quote stuff Keiichi said in Minagoroshi, but even in the VN they established that she can’t remember that arc at all. There’s also the scene early in the episode that seems to imply that she’s suspicious of Takano, but the idea of her knowing about Takano being evil still feels really strange to me.

For one thing, it feels like in every arc thus far she’s done absolutely nothing to try and stop Takano’s plans, but it also feels like Rika is doing the exact same thing she did in Minagoroshi originally, where she assumes that in this type of arc the only thing they need to do to achieve a happy ending is save Satoko. But in Minagoroshi the whole point was that she *didn’t* know about Takano, so she didn’t realize until it was too late that saving Satoko wasn’t enough. But this time around it seems like even though she’s maybe aware that Takano’s evil, she’s still going with the idea that saving Satoko is all they need to do to achieve a happy ending. And she isn’t even saying anything to her friends to make them aware of what’s going on with Takano so they could at least prepare for it in advance instead of being caught off-guard by her.

Maybe this is just bad writing, but I still prefer to think that she doesn’t actually remember or know anything about Takano, and the show’s just been misleading old fans into assuming that she does. Which is why I came up with my theory that Gou’s whole story is an in-universe fictional story written by someone like Featherine that involves a fictional version of Rika who basically branches off from the level of knowledge and development she had around Tsumihoroboshi, before she learned about Takano. And that the happy future she told Hanyuu about isn’t actually Matsuribayashi, but an arc in Gou where we get a seemingly happy ending but Rika dies as a teenager anyway.

Either way, I’m still at least going with the theory that Takano isn’t the big obstacle this time around. If only just from a meta perspective of how it’d be the biggest way to change things up compared to the VN’s story, and how there’s just not really enough time to actually cover all the stuff that happened with her in the VN. There’s still the question of why she still seems to be the exact same person as in the VN, including having the name that she got after being adopted by her grandfather, but I still think a lot of this could be explained by having Gou be a fictionalized version of the Higurashi gameboard where the surface level of Takano’s character is the same, but her backstory has basically been retconned, either intentionally or because the person writing this doesn’t know about what’s going on with her.

And on the note of Takano, I still think this arc should end up providing more clues about what’s going on with her and Tomitake in each arc. They haven’t really done anything in this arc yet, but it’d be weird if we don’t get some more clues about them before the question arcs end and we start getting answers.

But we haven’t even gotten to the festival yet, and there’s only one episode left, so who even knows if we’ll get far enough in the timeline for anything to happen with them in the first place.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about all the different theories of what’s going on this time around, and where this is all going to go in the long run, and even though it’s too early for me to really be confident in anything, one idea I’ve been messing with is that, at least in the first two arcs, Keiichi was a lot more involved in the different murders than we’ve been lead to believe. Basically I just thought about the fact that he almost definitely hallucinated most of his fight with Rena, and I tried to see if I could really go wild with that sort of storytelling logic and apply it to anything else that’s happened.

This is mostly just me trying to see how far I can stretch this whole theory, so this is kind of a reach, but to begin with, it’s possible that Keiichi is the one who murdered Rika in the first two arcs. Maybe in Onidamashi he killed Rena and then remembered how Rika convinced him to trust her, and in his L5 state he decided that she must have been trying to get him killed, so he took the kitchen knife and went over and killed Rika [with Satoko being caught in the cross-fire].

My theory for him being potentially responsible for her death in Watadamashi ties into my similar idea that maybe in that arc, if not also in Onidamashi, he killed Takano and Tomitake. And then later in Watadamashi, Rika went full Bernkastel at him and revealed that she knew about Takano and Tomitake being dead, and he ended up snapping and killing her. One thing that’s been nagging at me about that whole sequence is that that episode ended with Satoko inviting him to play dodgeball with her and the other kids, but then at the start of the next episode she’s being suspicious of him and asking about if he was with Rika when she disappeared. Which might have just been Satoko lying, but there were other kids involved who could have vouched for Keiichi if he was with Satoko the whole time, so I think that they just lead us into assuming that he took up her dodgeball invitation, when in actuality he didn’t, and he went off and killed Rika in secret, which is why Satoko acted like she didn’t know what he was up to.

But going back earlier in Watadamashi, I think that after everyone left the Saiguden, what actually happened might have been that Keiichi succumbed to paranoia and attacked Takano and Tomitake off-screen, and then later on Mion called him on the phone pretending to be Shion, and got him to agree to a fake alibi that she made up to cover up what he did.

This might also shine more light on what happened behind the scenes with Mion and Shion after the festival, if what actually happened was that the village elders all more or less figured out that Keiichi killed Takano and Tomitake, and Mion snapped and murdered everyone after they started to suggest that he should get punished for it.

It always seemed a bit weird to me that multiple characters pressed Keiichi for info about if he was with not just Shion but also Takano and Tomitake at the festival, and that Mion/Shion was getting him to confirm that he met everyone on the shrine steps at the festival even though they all should have remembered that. So it might explain a lot of stuff if Keiichi was actually involved in their disappearances, and people started getting suspicious of him, while Mion worked to make up an alibi for him. The whole story of them fleeing the village might have also been made up by Mion as part of the alibi to explain why they disappeared.

I still think Rena killed them in Onidamashi because she thought Keiichi found out about her murders and that he’d ratted her out to them, but part of me’s still kinda suspicious of how Keiichi walks up to them at the festival but then just stops and walks away before actually talking to them, while Rena stares at him in the background. It makes me wonder if the way the scene was depicted wasn’t actually true.

In general I wonder how much Gou might be willing to intentionally depict false information to the audience about Keiichi’s POV. There’s a few scenes where he obviously hallucinates stuff, but maybe it extends more than that.

Looking at it from an Umineko perspective, Keiichi might be the viewpoint character in Gou, but that doesn’t necessarily make him the detective, so it’s possible that his perspective is sometimes just straight up misleading.

If we’re willing to doubt Keiichi’s perspective on things, I also think this raises a lot of questions about the Yamainu’s potential involvement in things. If he was the one who killed Rika and Satoko in Onidamashi, then maybe in that entire arc they didn’t actually do anything at all. And maybe in Watadamashi Rika didn’t even talk to a construction worker at all, and that was just Mion covering for Keiichi. He might have also hallucinated seeing them on the security camera footage due to being suspicious of them by that point, but it’s also possible that what he saw was just some random construction workers doing work near the Sonozaki property, and in his paranoid state he interpreted them as being evil and coming to murder them all. I don’t think he was directly involved in Mion and Satoko’s deaths, but I wonder if maybe the Yamainu weren’t involved either, and it really was more of a murder-suicide. The gun looked like it had been swapped out, but maybe someone other than the Yamainu did it, like Ooishi.

A lot of this is a big stretch, but this ties into a lot of little things that have been bugging me, including the fact that Keiichi has felt almost strangely ‘innocent’ in each arc thus far, compared to how he was in the VN. And looking at this from the perspective of Gou being an accessible mystery to new fans, it makes me think that maybe a lot of these mysterious incidents aren’t being caused by effectively unknown third parties, but by Keiichi himself.

It might be a bit cheap, but I think the first two arcs at least provided very understandable motives for why he’d kill Rika, which even new fans could catch onto. In Onidamashi she basically tried to gaslight him into trusting Rena which lead to him nearly getting murdered, and in Watadamashi she straight up started talking about Takano and Tomitake’s deaths while acting like she has a creepy amount of knowledge about everything going on. On a similar note, it’s starting to kinda worry me that there’s been several instances in Tataridamashi of him noticing that Rika keeps talking about stuff that he apparently said to her, that he has no memory of. It just feels like in every arc she keeps doing and saying stuff to him that from his perspective would be extremely suspicious.

I think Watadamashi also provided enough evidence for how he might have snapped and killed Takano and Tomitake off-screen, since he was acting weirdly hostile toward Takano during the entire Saiguden scene, and then freaked out at Shion/Mion when she talked about what Keiichi was up to at the festival and provided the cover story of him just hanging out with everyone on the steps. Even when Ooishi questioned him about what he was up to, he got defensive about it and complained about how everyone keeps asking him about his involvement with them.

It’d at least be a pretty simple way to have Takano and Tomitake be red herrings this time around, if we find out that they just keep getting killed by people who get suspicious about them.

Along these same lines, I have to wonder if maybe Teppei’s going to wind up dead because Keiichi killed him off-screen in some kind of paranoid fugue state that he might not even remember. But we’ll see how it goes.

One thing that I like about this theory, at least, is that it would play into how Gou seems to be designed specifically to mess with Rika’s preconceptions, and having Keiichi be responsible for a lot of what’s going on would really fuck with her, especially with how she’s acting in this arc. Honestly, I started thinking about the “Keiichi culprit theory” after how it started seeming like blatant dramatic irony that Rika was talking over and over again about trusting Keiichi. In basically each arc thus far she acts under the assumption that things will play out a certain way, and then they don’t, and in this arc the main thing she’s done has been trust Keiichi and assume that he’s going to resolve everything with Teppei peacefully and lead everyone to a happy ending.

Anyway this got a lot longer than I wanted it to, so I’ll stop there, lol.

[co-mixed]

What’s wrong with the characters in TROS

Obviously, Spoilers.

None of the characters were treated properly in this movie. And, before we go one by one, there are some things to consider. First and foremost, Rian Johnson went deep with trying to understand what each one of them would do and why. So, in a way, he’s given JJ the perfect outline of what they should do next. The only thing he had to do is listen. But somewhere it went wrong, so we went back to one dimensional archetypes, lifted straight from the OT. More mythical, less human, more standard, less unique. Let’s take a look.

Finn

Let’s face it, if and when somebody really stole John Boyega’s script, the only thing they found there was the line “Rey” randomly scheduled for different points in the movie. There is an attempt to make up for that with Force-sensitivity, but that’s a hint that you just don’t drop in the last movie of a trilogy. And that’s what TROS is supposed to be, a finale to the two movies that came before. And with Finn’s complete lack of knowledge or understanding of the Force that we’ve seen in the comics or books, it really has no place there. Where was that famous story group? Maybe taking a day off.

Finn has nothing to do in the movie, since there was no story for him. He just tagged along with Rey or Poe, became a general through nepotism, even though there were much more experienced people for that job, and ultimately, he was just there as a plot device several times.

Rose

That’s one of the worst cases. JJ spent a lot of time saying how glad he is to Johnson that he’s cast Kelly. Then he simply didn’t write a story for her either. Because you know, galaxy is not a place for a righteous optimistic girl. (Unless she’s a Palpatine)

And I would’ve written more, but well… it was wrong and that’s just it.

Poe

Poe already has a backstory. So what do you do? As a writer, you try to understand how to work his guilt from TLJ into TROS. But as someone who’s trying their best to undo TLJ, you just throw it all away and play off of similarities with Han. He’s charismatic, shoots well, flies well. Done, make him a smuggler. The whole unnecessary retcon kind of might work for general audience, since most people never learned anything from his past. With TLJ they’ve learned who he is now, but did they even need more? He already went through all the needed changes, to get him to lead the rebellion.

The only in-character moment was his rant at Rey, where he says that she is the best fighter, and they need her.

The most out of character moment is him blaming his so-called friends for being an ex-stormtrooper and a Scavenger. Man, you chose to do that, they were forced into it.

Zorii

Why was she even there? Nepotism maybe? Cool costume? Merchandise? I don’t know, but she was not there to serve the story.

Allegiant General Pryde

Pretty much the same thing as Zorii.

Hux

Poor character. I mean, really. He was a fanatic of the First Order, of the Empire, and all the evil regimes. This was pretty well pictured up to the point when one brave writer decided that his hate for the newly self proclaimed Supreme Leader is stronger than his hate for… let’s call it lack of Order. It seemed from his story, that he’d be the first in line to pledge allegiance to the Emperor. But surprises never cease in TROS. Not for a moment. Also, JJ deals with him in a matter of minutes. Done, and done. Next.

Jannah

What a cool character, for a show or a spin off. She has potential, I’ll give her that. Naomi Ackie is likable enough to carry her own show. But there was no need for her in TROS. Partly because it’s way too late for new characters, and partly because she’s also not given much to do. That mumbo-jumbo about the Force and troopers defecting, that’s a nice sentiment. But also could have been done by any random trooper.

Leia

Let’s not talk about her being in the movie, let’s stay on character topic. Her Jedi training was just a very random last minute concept, probably straight out of Legends. And she could’ve just as well been giving Rey pep talks or reach Ben without it. So that’s more of a “just why” moment. The part would have been the same, the lightsaber wouldn’t have existed, but that is still very fixable.

Palpatine/Snoke/All the Sith

Just why would you even bring him back? Anakin brought balance, killing him, got his redemption, taught the audience the primitive rule that only death is truly redeeming (which worked fine in the 70s), and Palpatine died. But then he was back because reasons, and we don’t need to see how or why. He also now is All-the-Sith-in-One, and very very powerful. Apparently, at least one character spends their off screen time learning. So… good for him?

If they wanted ancient evil, I’d rather they went with Plagueis. He could’ve seen the rise and fall of the Empire, he could’ve fooled death and he could’ve easily fooled his apprentice along with Kylo and obviously Rey.  It even works perfectly within the concept of balance where “Darkness rises, and Light to meet it”.

To be even more honest, I’d prefer that TROS was just concluding the trilogy, without bringing up old bad guys. There is still plenty of those in the next-gen.

Rey/All-The-Jedi

As every imaginable critic has already stated, one of the most inspiring messages of The Last Jedi was “you could come from nothing and become something”. And this way Rey would have been a perfect representation to any girl of how you build yourself with the help of your friends. That is what fairy tales are usually about. That or space princesses, heirs to Palpatine, who, we have to believe, had a son. At this point it would be way better if the stranger on Pasaana did randomly name her Solo (imagine that).

But my verdict is that Rey’s story in this movie wasn’t necessary, and was a rehashed story of Kylo Ren. Think about it, he was fighting the light in his bloodline, and tried every imaginable thing to destroy it, but still couldn’t. Not that it’s a bad idea, it’s just that we’ve seen in already in 2015. The character had a clear path ahead of her after TLJ, but again, she was forced into a completely different story. Just because she wants to be a Jedi really bad, doesn’t mean that she is immune to the Dark Side, because she’s not immune to fear. One scary vision of her on the Dark Side, and that’d be enough. Not to shoot lightning, but to go a bit dark, effectively pushing her adversary closer to the Light. And that would’ve been fine.

But she had to be All-The-Jedi instead, didn’t she. Funny how that’s now a thing, and we still have separate Force Ghosts of Luke and Leia (but not a certain Solo). This whole things falls apart, and if someone just reread the story at least once the day after it was finished, they would see it.

Somehow, the movie comes down to Palpatime defeating a Palpatine, and Skywalkers were in this Saga there for the show.

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo/The last Skywalker

His story feels fairly well done, except for a few moments. Because in TLJ, hу killed Snoke, we were lead to believe that he would come into his own. We also know what a nerd he is, so he probably has some knowledge of who Palps is, and how his kind operates. Now when he delivers the line “I killed Snoke, I’ll kill you”, I believe him. When he starts asking questions, I don’t. And that’s because it’s written, it’s there on paper, but that’s something the character refused to do willingly.

This happens a few times, and probably the cringiest of them all is when the writer forces him to say that Rey is a Palpatine. Because that’s the first time we hear that out loud, and aside from thinking “No-nо-no not that”, we experience a case of disbelief. That’s not how we wanted this to go, and that’s not how the story was supposed to work.

Then there are wonderful scenes with Rey and with Han, the ones we were always supposed to get, and then the awaited redemption. That was the story, the one that resonates with his character. What does not is what happens after — yeah, the pit. The last Skywalker spends his final battle, the destiny of his bloodline in the pit, while the Jedi choose to support Rey.

His death is another choice that I deem unnecessary, and a bit lazy. You need to live with your mistakes and learn to forgive yourself, while working through your issues. But sure, death it is.

Overall

Probably the biggest mistake of this movie is letting a Palpatine take the Skywalker name, and letting the last Skywalker be pretty much forgotten. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Rey’s supposed bloodline defines her, but it just doesn’t sit well with me. She’s lost someone important, a soulmate, and so many fans felt the loss, imagine how she supposed to feel. Her next stage would be Dark Side, because she by no means can live with that. And that’s far from a hopeful message.

A happy ending for this space fairy tale would’ve been the only reasonable choice.

[lladmie]

Auberon's death: canon!lore speculations

I was reading for the umpteenth time the Aen Elle chapter in the book "The Lady of the Lake", and something started to caught my attention...

The short sub-story of the Aen Elle is the most unsolved one. A lot of questions and mysteries still hang in the air. The death of Auberon, for example, the old king of the Aen Elle. It was retconed in the games, that made us believe Eredin was without a doubt the cold killer, but in the book... it's way more shady than that. I have a few hypothesis and I want to start with the one I find the most plausible right now.

Auberon killed himself

“Undoubtedly,” he began slowly, “you already know little enough about Auberon. You certainly already noticed that he is ambitious. There are things that he’ll never accept, never take note of. He’d rather die.”

Let's start here. This was the first alarm, and the first suggestion. It's a very important line: Eredin here is basically saying that Auberon won’t accept that he is unable to impregnate Ciri, and that he actually thinks that dying is better than a total failure.

It was Ciri who assumed immediately that the bottle was poison and later that Eredin killed Auberon. But Ciri didn't trust Eredin at all, we can even say she had real prejudices toward him for a whole lot of reasons I won't analyze in this post. But she didn't trust him, didn't like the way he acted, and her little childish infatuation made her think (and even hope deep down) that he was going to abuse her soon. That maybe he wanted to replace Auberon. And shit, it's so funny to think that she was so afraid about Eredin's intentions and at the same time asked Avallac'h to impregnate her without concern and he was the one who almost chocked her. Eredin would have probably laugh lol

Interesting to notice that, to that point onward, Auberon started to act with more and more impatience and rage. He was trying everything to have sex with Ciri: porn, drugs... and nothing worked.

“Despite all,” spoke the king, “I resent dying, Zireael. And I find it terribly sad that it has to happen. Who would have thought. I thought that I would have no regrets. I have lived a long life, I have known everything. I’m bored of it all… However, now I feel regret.”

Auberon was calm, controlled. He wasn’t surprised, he wasn’t acting as if someone killed him. He admitted that he was bored of living and thought that he would have died without regrets. Without being sad. He didn’t expect that he would have felt resentment toward his own death. Honestly, this makes me think of a suicide.

“He overdosed on the stimulant you gave him. Or was it meant to do something else entirely?” “What are you talking about?” “He’s dead.” He quickly shook off his surprise [...]

Eredin seemed genuinely surprised to learn about Auberon’s death. He was not faking it, there is no way.

Auberon, though, drank the potion. So how could it have killed him if the bottle wasn't poison to begin with? Was it another bottle? Seems too far-fetched. Of course, there is a possibility that it was just an incident. An overdose due to the fact that Auberon was using drugs and mixed them with it, or he was too old or too weak for a strong aphrodisiac. Or...

Eredin killed Auberon

Everyone, I think, has thought about this possibility, not only because the game went for this option or because Ciri herself wasn’t convinced of Eredin’s innocence (not even after his reaction), but because Eredin was the one with the bottle in hand and the entire dynamic seems a little... strange and secretive, to say at least.

He asked Ciri to follow him and talk with him in private. Then, he immediately framed the other elves as liars and deliberately told Ciri she won’t leave the planet—ever, not even if she does what she needs to, simply because they don’t want to let her go. But Eredin doesn’t want it either, only... we discover this much later.

He was saying Ciri’s situation was hopeless: they won’t let her go and Auberon didn’t even want to cooperate, because he’s ambitious. While Eredin didn’t care, didn’t think Ciri was important, and so he offered his help, another deal, this time with him. Assuring her that she will be victorious independently of what the bottle contains. But he didn’t clarify what it actually contained, didn’t even bother to explain, despite threatening Ciri about her assuptions. And why didn’t he say what the bottle contained and try to pass through Ciri and not Auberon directly?

Now, or Eredin is really naive to the point he’s easily misunderstood—something he doesn't give me the impression to be, because he even seemed to know she had a crush on him and was acting on it—and the scene was written in a weak and intentional deceitful way, or it's honestly stinky. Because a person who has nothing to hide won't talk like that.

All the dialogues can be read in a way or another. Auberon could be resentful that he's dying without having control over it. He's calm because he's an elf. Eredin could have been aware that Auberon wanted to die and took advantage of that, he was the one saying he'd rather die after all.

“We are going back, Zireael. Auberon is waiting. I assure you that tonight he will be lively and full of vigor.”

This little sentence could be innocent, simply an excuse to take Ciri back, but it could also be the proof that he actually gave the bottle to Auberon that very day. That he knew Auberon had it, but he clearly didn't know Ciri went to Auberon already. His surprise is very brief, though still a clear evidence of his innocence. But he didn't argue against it, it’s a simple and shallow reaction for something so important.

Eredin’s characterization is also very interesting. His nature is uncharacteristic for an elf. He’s the only elf in the bunch of the Aen Elle that was presented as impatient, for instance. His presence in the whole affair wasn’t so explicit and obvious as that of Auberon and Avallac’h, that are also personal involved. He was playing his own games, breaking useful lies and dealing with Ciri alone in his preferred style. Just an helper or something more?

The last possibility is that

Avallac'h killed Auberon instead 

This is something I see some people enjoy to think because he's so foxy—to the point that everything could be his fault, he could be the mastermind behind the entire plot, basically, if we overthink it... well, he actually might be. Being the cunning and clever brain he is, Avallac’h’s probably the most dangerous of the Aen Elle. But this is a leap in the void. There is not even a single clue that make us assume it could be his doing. Probably the only suspicious sign is his disappearance; suspicious, sure, but it tells us everything and nothing at all (especially because he fought with Ciri the day before). Eredin comparing his new method to Avallac'h's—" Much more effective than the attractors Avallac'h's servants put in your cosmetics."—kind of contradict that he could possibly be involved, too. He didn’t even slightly suggest that his plan was Avallac’h’s or that he was acting on his instruction. Together with the fact that Avallac'h seemed to believe Auberon should absolutely be the father of the child (so much that he snapped at the thought that Ciri could say something in front of the king that she shouldn't say) make it seems unlikely. But well, he is a suspicious candidate nonetheless.

Everything is possible. Thanks for reading! If you notice some differences in the dialogues, that’s because I tried to translate the majority of them from the italian version.

[acourtofthought]

Following your last comment about SJM not talking about Elain or more about Lucien...

Even if she didn't do the two together, it doesn't make sense for Elain to win the pov with Azriel and solve a plot that she has with Lucien.

Would we then have Azriel along with Lucien and Elain? How boring would a book like that be, where the two are on the same mission and Lucien would just be a plot object.

I don't trust SJM very much, but I believe there is no way to erase his question from the source. Who will speak for him? Az or Elain?

Our fox will have a point of view, it only remains to be seen whether SJM will invent a retcon and ignore Elucien. Elain and Lucien have so many possibilities that it would be a waste not to make them get together.

In the two extra chapters both Elain and Lucien are mentioned (she appears in Az with lines).

We have Nesta talking about the continent and the Spring Court emphasizing Elain. We have Cassian talking about the same things. We have Nesta talking to Lucien and Cassian admiring him and feeling his heart tighten with the same pain in his eyes that he once felt.

We have Lucien spending time with the girls' father, with Elain being the closest (mentioned by her two sisters). We have Lucien getting into a lively sports conversation with his partner's mates.

This girls' dad thing has been mentioned by Nesta endlessly and in Feyre's extra they talk about his name.

We have a beautiful path to Elucien, I don't know how they can think that Elriel is the only option or that a hidden romance would be good, hurting everyone around them.

Anyway, what are your thoughts if Elucien is not endgame?

To me Elucien is so spectacular because they don't need to be anything different than who they are right now to be well matched.

I do think they'll evolve and grow in their own books. I imagine they'll learn to fight harder for the things they want rather than just accepting their fate and trying to be happy with it. But even if they didn't, they are both generous with their affection to those they care for, they are both brave when they need to be but don't regularly seek out dangerous paths (instead preferring to gather information through observing and conversation), they share a similar love of nature, they both easily adhere to social formalities as it comes naturally to them. Lucien developed a relationship with Elain's father and he meant a great deal to Elain which connects them in a way none of the other males can relate to.

I don't know how E/riels can't see their compatibility.

If Elucien doesn't happen though, I don't think it will be at the expense of Lucien's character. I personally can't see Elain and Az looking "better" than Lucien, reducing him to a meaningless character in favor of their love story. I have never seen SJM "reward" a MMC who behaves like Az (obsessive, jealous towards Lucien who has done nothing wrong) by getting the girl. If you asked someone who is not emotionally invested in these ships to analyze the situation, I'm pretty certain they'd say Az is in the wrong right now and Lucien has done nothing but show respect for Elain and the IC. And from what we know of SJM as an author, she doesn't like characters who are examples of "toxic masculinity." Az threatening to kill an ally over jealousy is 100% an example of toxic masculinity and unless her moral code has drastically shifted since she started writing the ACOTAR series, Az isn't going to get Lucien's HEA.

Now if she goes a different direction with Lucien and has Lucien decide HE wants something else, than that would be a different story. I don't see that happening but, maybe I've misinterpreted who Elain and Lucien are as individuals.

But I find it difficult to imagine her taking a character who she obviously invested a whole lot of time in since book 1 (even more than Elain) only to reduce him to a plot device for the love story of two other characters.

[judedeluca]

LOSH APPRECIATION WEEK 2019 - Headcanons

*Sigh* I expect this isn’t gonna get a lot of reblogs but whatever.

This is mainly Lightning Lad centric with a few WG ideas.

Lightning Lad and Arsenal Are Friends

Art by Phil Jimenez

Despite that Roy and Garth have never really interacted with each other in a published story, I’ve long since believed the two have the potential to be friends because they have a lot in common.

They’re both redheads, both dads, both have lost an arm at some point, have dealt with anger issues, and people underestimate them as the weakest of their respective groups (the Fab Five, the Founders)

Art by Levy Rasputin

In my main story ideas, the Legionnaires became involved with Roy dealing with Lian being brought back to life and their memories of the real DCU restored. The Legion was forced to witness Cheshire almost killing Roy and Lian, and offered the Harpers a space to recover in the 31st Century as they further tried to determine what was going on in the universe because of Doctor Manhattan’s damage to the timeline.

Roy and Garth just sort of clicked since the Harpers spent a lot of time living on the Ranzz Family’s farm on Winath. Lian even calls Garth “Uncle Sparkhead” since she already HAS an Uncle Garth (Tempest/Uncle Gillhead). Garth calls Lian “Tiger.”

The Legionnaires are super protective of Roy, Lian, and Lian’s baby brother Tommy. Lian’s taught moves by Shadow Lass and Night Girl, and Roy’s slept with a couple of the Legionnaires.

Roy and Garth are sort of the Batman and Superman of my DC Trinity. The WW’s an OC.

Saturn Queen And Dark Angel Are Allies/Lovers

Art by nanihoo

I mentioned before my love of this version of Eve because she’s a survivor, so I paired her up with another Multiverse survivor, Dark Angel.

The two of them have been acting behind the scenes of the DCU, operating outside of time and space which spared them from Manhattan’s revisions. They’ve been responsible for many of the retcons in the DCU as well as some of the more tragic stories. They made Superboy into a clone of Superman and Lex Luthor. They’re the reason why Mia Dearden left Lian Harper by herself which led to Lian’s death when Star City was destroyed. They brought Jason Todd back to life. They made everyone forget about Mae Kent and Linda Danvers. Why? Because they see it as a game for their enjoyment. They’ve no need for money or ruling the world. They have all the time in the world.

Art by @empty-b

After Manhattan altered the DCU and replaced numerous heroes and villains with his shoddy knock offs, D.A. and Eve are the ones who pulled them from limbo and have been keeping them in stasis until Manhattan’s been dealt with. They’re the reason why the real Legion’s been missing since the New 52 began, but their endgame is something far worse beyond inflicting psychological torture.

They later establish a new version of Villainy Incorporated, recruiting dozens of villainesses from all throughout the Multiverse as part of their final game. They are, surprisingly, decent bosses to work for as they rely more on getting these women to trust them instead of brainwashing or threatening them.

Truthfully their behavior takes inspiration from Bernkastel and Lambdadelta of the Umineko series.

Kinetix Hates White Witch

After Zoe’s soul is freed from within Mysa when Mordru’s spirit is removed, she develops an unforgiving hatred for the White Witch for not doing anything to help her. Zoe claims Mysa knew Zoe was inside her and suffering all this time, but Mysa was more concerned with quieting Mordru (which, in the process, muted Zoe’s cries for help).

As a result, when Zoe is brought back to life and freed, she makes it clear she wants nothing to do with Mysa and has threatened to kill her if Mysa ever speaks to her again.

Considering Zoe already had issues with her universe’s version of Mysa, those didn’t help.

Mysa is very remorseful for how she handled this.

Chubby Lightning Lad

Art by @empty-b

OKAY YES I’M GETTING TO THIS ONE

Art by Levy Rasputin

I frequently, if not always, commission Garth with a round body type instead of the muscular build he has in the comics. And it’s not just one version of him. As an asexual/autochorissexual/whatever sexual this is my thing, and I wish there was more body diversity in the comics. Anyway...

Art by Tim Fish

For Pre-Crisis/Retroboot Garth I tend to imagine he gained some weight after all the shit settled and he and Imra moved back to Winath. All of the Legionnaires lost a considerable deal of weight when they were on the run because of the JLE (you can see in Gary Frank’s artwork how malnourished they appear).

Art by lotusmelon

Alongside Garth’s anger problem calming down and rescuing the boys (Graym and Garridan) after they were kidnapped, Garth felt guilty about the way he treated Imra. Looking back on how his family was denied the basic comforts of a roof over their heads, beds to sleep in, and access to food, he started to experiment with cooking and put himself in charge of meal planning as a way to show he cares. He worries about their health and is making sure Imra and the kids are eating properly.

As a result he put on a few pounds while trying out different recipes and because he’s simply not taking food for granted anymore.

Coupled with all the work he has to do on the farm and you’ve got yourself a big beautiful farm boy.

I’ve had other ideas for two other versions of Garth, mainly Threeboot!Garth and Cartoon!Garth

Art by lotusmelon

Threeboot!Garth’s a stress eater, which started as a result of him developing anxiety over leading the Legion and his nasty break-up with Saturn Girl. As a result he got a little chubby since he has to spend most of his time seated at Legion HQ overseeing everything.

Eventually Garth decided he needed a vacation in order to relax and figured at one point “Screw it.” If he doesn’t have a girlfriend and has to deal with handling all the Legion’s affairs, he might as well eat and came back from vacation heavier than when he left. Once he stopped worrying about this he proved to be more effective as leader.

Art by @sewerbetta

Cartoon!Garth I just prefer as heavyset because it bothers how all the male Legionnaires have such narrow waists but broad shoulders. And really I think Garth looks good with some padding.

Art by Kris Smith

No one really has a problem with it except for Brainy, who keeps complaining about having to update Garth’s robotic arm to match his build. Unfortunately, Brainy’s criticisms became increasingly nastier to the point of body shaming and Garth begins to feel legitimately upset by all this since he didn’t have a problem with his body.

The other Legionnaires aren’t happy with Brainy’s attitude as well. Bouncing Boy in particular is peeved because he finds out Brainy never said anything about HIS weight because “It served a purpose.”

Art by @peskyshortcake

Imra especially enjoys having a boyfriend with curves.

[elizabethrobertajones]

I've been thinking about what Misha said before the season aired about how Cas would be back but he might not be exactly the same. Based on what we've seen so far, do you have any thoughts on what he might have meant by that? I still have fears that he's really The Empty in Cas form and he's come back to Earth to confirm that there's "nothing there" for Cas to kind of taunt him. Like the only way for real Cas to come back would be for Dean to tell Empty!Cas what he really means to him.

If you want reassurances, I’m about 100% convinced the writers wouldn’t be putting in the energy to pull a long con like that. :)

They really flag up when something is wrong with a character, to let us know that we should be suspicious with the sort of tropes or character beats which should be readable from space. If anything we’ve seen more non-Cas-es this season than normal, all different variations of Empty Cas and Casmodeus and Zach-as-Cas etc. Which contrasts more to our Cas using him as the baseline, than a warning that it’s not him. If Casmodeus kidnapped and replaced Empty!Cas, that’s treachery on treachery, and also away from the Winchesters and pointlessly stuck for 2 weeks, a cosmic entity more powerful than God wouldn’t have been concerned about Lucifer and Asmodeus finding out what it was and would have preferred to get free and go back to playing the con IT wanted to do about Sam n Dean and how Cas feels about them, so the sooner it’s back with them the better, no time to suffer fools along the way. 

I feel like it’s pretty safe to assume the Empty is behind us for now, though it’s something we’ve explored a little and now we have a little better knowledge of it to be used some other time maybe, or maybe not, it was entirely there for Cas as a character than for setting up some plot stuff. It’s like I’ve been talking about Mary lately, where people are convinced the stuff from the AU and the things it’s saying about her deal are retcons or something, rather than reflecting on how the terms of the AU actually mean anything for her as a character or that the set up was entirely for her emotional benefit.

She and Cas had pretty directly paralleled states at the start of the season (really, they’re still continuing as she’s sort of taken over Jack for him now they’re on the other side of the AU together, so they’re sharing a responsibility for him in a parental sort of way that doesn’t exactly overlap with the way Sam and Dean related to him…) and anyway, while Mary was off in the AU, Cas was off in the Empty, and between their appearances in 13x01-4 the storytelling was using the dramatic irony set up of Sam n Dean thinking they’re dead while their narratives are continuing merrily away. For Mary that was supposed to be an exploration of the AU from her perspective to discover this world that her AU counterpart sort of helped ruin (to be facetious - obviously cause and effect vs blame is kind of a thing right now :P) and okay so we don’t get that until non-Buckleming write her in 13x14 but we can work with that.

But for Cas he gets a strong exploration of where he is at as a character, almost like a “this is your life” sort of thing, to sum up everything he’s been through, up to the point of finding himself for the first time facing perma-death instead of instant resurrection before he could find his way to the Empty. It reads his mind and finds out everything there is to know about who and what Cas is, and therefore we have to assume it’s picking its words carefully when it talks to Cas, trying to make him give up and go back to sleep by beating him down with everything it knows. 

Having resisted this and convinced the Empty he won’t be made to go back to sleep, and overcoming all the stuff it tells him which is drawn from his lowest points and worst opinion of himself, Cas chooses living over endless sleep, and to return to the fight… He still has some negative feelings towards himself but overall he’s had to acknowledge and accept a lot of things in order to put them aside and resist the Empty and not let it win by admitting it’s right - by telling him things his own depression has been telling him for years (vocalised by all the angels who are mean to him through the last few seasons). 

So when he comes back he’s ultimately got to have an at least slightly different perspective or sense of self-worth than he has had before. For example, he does actually snidely get out of jail with Asmodeus and Lucifer by not suffering the idiots around him and acting 100% better than them in every way, but he does it as Cas, and not as the Empty - full of compassion, righteous pissed-off-ness at Lucifer, and a clearly stronger sense of self. He’s also back to snarking at Sam and Dean, grumpy banter with Dean, and while he still has hella issues, they’re not the same issues as the depression arc (though I obviously think you can’t say he’s magically cured of that, but that it’s at least something he’s doing BETTER with now), but exploring other scars left on his psyche, such as by being an angel for billions of years and the damage that would do on someone’s self-esteem and sense of purpose while trying to be a member of a team and family instead now. (Aka everything he kept saying about being a soldier in 13x14 which was so alarming. Worrying, yes, but all coming internally from Cas and highlighting where his character arc is going now, since they’ve resolved, somewhat, his depression arc which culminated in his death in season 12, and had to be overcome on a personal level in order to re-enter the story…) 

And since Cas got back, by the first few minutes of 13x06 it felt clear to me there was no way it could be anything other than our Cas (not that I had doubted it from the moment he woke up in the field, as he clearly won the argument in the Empty and the stakes for winning were set out by Cas immediately, that he would be returned to life if he wasn’t going back to sleep), just because the emotional arcs came back and the story is being told about Cas and his feelings in such a way that it is definitely about his internal processes and reactions, and not about some stand-in for Cas who will not benefit from these things.

I suppose the easiest example, especially to keep it non shippy, would be that they gave him a scene alone with Jack, which would benefit no one if it was played like that but was not Cas, and if it were not Cas, the story ought to have been prompting Jack to be suspicious about who Cas was when the Winchesters were unable to sense something was off, rather than Cas being curious about who Jack was. And of course Cas’s interest in Jack has been calm and emotional rather than over-zealous and seeking power or curious about what he can do rather than who he might be. When he needles Lucifer about who Jack is and how he’s not like Lucifer, that’s something only Cas could or would even care to do, rather than emphasising his power or potential. He reassures Jack that he’s supposed to do great good but again that was about Jack’s heart, at the core meaning… If it were not Cas, any other creature would be encouraging Jack to conquer, even if it was dressed up as pretending to spread love. There’d be something blatantly wrong with Cas’s message if he were not Cas. And this would be where we would pick up on it.

Also, my personal favourite metric for judging if Cas is Cas or not: he’s been knocked flat on his back like 5 times already since he got back.

That’s our boy there.

[deadmandairyland]

Chihiro Fujisaki for the ask~

Thanks for the ask! I probably put way too many words in this. I hope you like reading!

002 | Give me a character & I will tell you

How I feel about this character:

Chihiro is probably my favorite character in Danganronpa. I think there was a time where I would have said he definitely was my favorite, but I have to give credit where credit is due because most of the characters in this series are amazing and uniquely and creatively designed. But Chihiro will always be near the top of my favorites if he somehow isn’t in first place. He is an unsung hero of the series. Without him the survivors of DR1 would have never escaped the school. He is at least in part responsible for the creation of the Neo World Program, which is a key part of the Hope’s Peak Academy arc’s lore. Supplementary materials often show Chihiro being at least somewhat involved in the backstory of the series. As I mentioned back when Absolute Despair Girls came out, Chihiro was basically the Adventure Time snail of the series for a time, showing up in or being mentioned in about as many installments and spin-offs of the series as Junko Enoshima. I’m pretty sure Chihiro has made more appearances in one way, shape, or form than friggin’ Komaeda, and everyone loves Komaeda. (Though screentime, on the other hand, is another story. I think it’s safe to say Junko and Komaeda won out on that end)

All in all, I feel that this is a character who deserves better–not just because he died such a tragic death, but in a meta sense as well. I feel like the series, after building up Chihiro in flavor text for so many installments, decided to backpedal a bit and make him more of a footnote than anyone important. This is especially disappointing considering that when most people talk about Chihiro, most of the time it’s in reference to the gender controversy, rather than his accomplishments in the series. Granted, this is a very important aspect of Chihiro’s character as well, and I’m not going to go out of my way to be a dick to people who say they saw something different in Chihiro than what I saw, but whenever I go through the tags it does seem like Chihiro seems to be one-note to a lot of people, and I feel it is a shame because there is a lot going on there. Themes of inner strength and resurrection and how destructive enforced gender roles and bullying in Japanese high schools can get when taken to the logical extreme. A lot of this seems to be ignored. I mean we all joke about how Chihiro’s birthday is Pi Day, but how many people also realize it’s White Day, the day when boys are expected to give gifts back to girls in response to being given chocolates on Valentine’s Day? Thinking about it that way, it makes you wonder what Chihiro’s birthdays were actually like. With all the talk surrounding Chihiro’s gender, I’m surprised that I’ve never seen anyone speculate on this. Might make for an interesting fanfiction prompt too, regardless of how you view Chihiro’s gender identity.

This got awfully wordy and more political than I expected it to get and I apologize. Though, to be fair, Danganronpa is a very political series… usually. Still, this is just a fun little meme, and I don’t intend to dive head first off a cliff into the sea and jagged rocks of fandom discourse, so let me end this segment by briefly saying another thing I like about Chihiro that will hopefully lift all of our spirits before we move on:

Chihiro is a sweet and adorable cinnamon roll that we do not deserve.

Just look at his smiling face!

No matter how sad I am, that smile will always make me feel a little better, if not outright happy.

All the people I ship romantically with this character:

Well, I could look over the charts I’ve made and find probably a million Chihiro ships (okay that’s a bit of an exaggeration; it’s probably more like twenty, which is still about fifteen too many), so I’m just going to stick with the big ones.

Naegi, Asahina, Sakura, and Ishimaru.

…Maybe Mondo. Maybe Leon. Maybe Mukuro. Maybe real world Chiaki. Maybe Kuzuryu. Maybe that Yukimaru guy who we sadly never get to see. Maybe Miaya… who we sadly never get to see. Maybe a crap ton of others…

But mostly the first four I listed.

My non-romantic OTP for this character:

All of the “maybes” in the previous section.

Am I cheating at this? Yes.

…

My unpopular opinion about this character:

Don’t worry. I won’t be going for the obvious joke. (I mean I better not, especially after that first segment. It would defeat the purpose of that giant wall of text I made you sit through)

Instead I’m just going to remind anyone who thinks Chihiro is overrated and wasn’t an important character that Chihiro vicariously saved Naegi’s life and therefore the other survivors’ lives as well and y’all can suck it.

Also there’s that thing I made a thing in my DR3 fic that I still haven’t finished yet or even updated since November (oh my god it’s May already) where Chihiro is a fan of professional wrestling and that’s now a headcanon of mine that I’m sure very few people have or would agree with.

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon:

This might seem like a cop-out, since this is Danganronpa and all, but I wish Chihiro survived.

To be fair it wouldn’t make sense from a narrative standpoint. Alter Ego is essentially a replacement/doppelganger for Chihiro, so having them co-exist in the story would be jarring. Also Chihiro plays the part of sacrificial lamb perfectly, and the foreshadowing leading to Chihiro’s death is written remarkably well. (Even as far back as the very beginning of chapter two, which occurs immediately after Leon’s execution, Chihiro is distraught over having sent Leon to his death, and Chihiro even says that he would rather die than do that again)

But that doesn’t mean I’m happy about it, damn it.

#LetChihiroLive2018

my OTP:

Naegi x Chihiro. Two adorable cinnamon rolls with heartwarming and occasionally sad Free Time Events that actually tie into the plot in such a way that they actually feel 100% canon. There is also that punch to the gut that happens at the end of Chihiro’s FTEs if you manage to get them all. Naegi’s reactions to Chihiro being gone are also heartbreaking, especially in the anime adaptation which includes this response to Alter Ego being crushed into a ball that I admit there is a possibility I could be taking out of context here but it’s worth mentioning.

“We lost him again.”

And of course, as I mentioned before, Alter Ego saves Naegi’s life later, which means Chihiro saves Naegi’s life, which means Chihiro effectively saves all of the DR1 survivors. Important character is important.

Oh, and also Naegi can give Chihiro a thong for a present, which is still hilarious to me. I mean I know Chihiro isn’t the only character who likes the thong, but even Togami liking the gift isn’t as funny to me as Chihiro liking it. And Togami alone liking it is straight-up absurd. It’s a thong. That you can give as a gift to other people. During a game where people are forced to kill each other in order to escape what is essentially a prison. A thong. The only thing that would make it funnier is if it changed the outcome of School Mode. “Hey, remember this thong you gifted me? I’d like to return it, because it just occurred to me that this is a really weird gift. Why, Naegi? Why did you give me a thong for a gift? You could have given me perfume, or a Kirlian camera, or a portable video game console, or a punk rock T-shirt, but no. You gave me a thong. Why?”

But for the most part, it’s their interactions. FTEs included, I love all of the interactions between these two, both one-and-one and with the group. It always seems like they have each other’s backs and care about each other’s well-being. Chihiro even foreshadows the memory wipe very early on in the game in a way that makes me wonder how close they might have been before the memory wipe.

Also, they’re just sweet to each other and it’s adorable and heartwarming and, y’know, goals. But if you prefer your ships to be more interesting, these two do have that potential what with their baggage and all–Chihiro for obvious reasons and Naegi being just some guy in a relationship with someone who is far smarter, nicer, and more talented than him. So if conflict (though it’d likely be more along the lines of inner conflict, or conflict dealing with others outside the relationship) is what you’re looking for, there is potential for that too, even if we don’t see it very often.

(Honestly I think that’s why there isn’t a whole lot of content of this ship, at least nowadays. It seems like a lot of people ship it, but no one really writes for it much or draws much of it beyond fluff. The ship itself, I think, is seen as too fluffy for engaging storytelling… if you’re not thinking outside the box, anyway)

my cross over ship:

Pick a programmer, a hacker, or an intentionally gender-ambiguous or “otokonoko” type character who is roughly within Chihiro’s not-fully-established age range from any work that I’ve personally seen or played and I’ve probably considered shipping Chihiro with them at least once. Honorable mention goes to Pidge and Saika Totsuka, whom I’m pretty sure I’ve at least talked about and compared Chihiro to on this blog.

a headcanon fact

Remember when I said that the series seems to be backpedaling a bit after making Chihiro have an ungodly amount of behind-the-scenes importance? Well screw that. I mentioned it here a couple years back (and I have since mellowed out on the whole “If Chihiro isn’t important in DR3 we riot” thing so don’t worry about that), but I’ll mention it again. IF said that Chihiro recognized Monokoma’s programming as something he worked on. His FTEs say that he was working on an AI project for some company. And Usami looks way too much like Monokuma to be a coincidence.

So screw any potential retcons that may come out of Monaca Towa being the mass producer of Monokuma units, because I believe that the company Chihiro was making the AI for was Towa, and Monaca modified the AI to fit Junko’s needs, which would tie everything together into a neat little bow.

But sadly, this is still only a headcanon. But it’s one that I feel has a lot of weight to it, and that the series has yet to make impossible. So I’m clinging onto it like a friggin’ koala.

Holy crap, this was long! And yet I feel like I haven’t said much of anything. It’s tough to bring my thoughts into words sometimes. But I think it’s plain to see (damn it, Tsumugi, get out of here, we’re not paying your VA double for this post) that I love Chihiro, and he’s definitely one of my favorite DR characters if not my top favorite.

Thanks again for the ask!