#she is flawed

[autismcatboy]

all the maya hate from the live drama is hurting me 😭

she has a lot more nuance than we originally are let on to see and youre not supposed to like her at first but going straight to hating her at her introduction is excessive.

its obvious how many people hating her havent read the original manga and its sad to see all this hate in the main tag.

this is a slower burn series and the relationships ebb and flow. theres intentional moments of distance and misunderstanding. all of the characters we see are flawed in one way or another.

i can also tell many people reacting are expecting her to get in the way of the bl and have never had anyone use their disability to act like a savior. there is a level of solidarity between disabled individuals that someone ablebodied will never understand and while her behaviors arent right i can empathize with the intention behind them.

[perplexingly]

My favourite Merrill banter

[redr0sewrites]

yet again, not to start discourse but im adding her to this too bc she is ALSO so mischaracterized and has SO MUCH depth and dimension people ignore and also bc if she was a man yall would LOVE her i said what i said

as usual yapping in the tags if anyone cares

i will forever defend these two- NOT to start discourse but they are both so heavily mischaracterized by the fandom its INSANE like omg yes they are flawed but they are also trying their best PLEASE leave them alone 🙏🙏🙏

as usual im yapping in the tags if anyone cares

[lgbtlunaverse]

There's a version of the "don't go grocery shopping while hungry" rule specifically for writers where you should never under any circumstances be allowed to touch your draft within 3 hours of reading a really good story. Because sometimes when you read something great your head goes "fuck this is so much better than my stuff I should make that more like THIS instead!" Look at me. That's the devil talking and you should close the document NOW.

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF movie Vanessa was out of pocket for this one..

[dappy-dappernette]

I keep on hearing people go all "The voice of the Smitten is such a creep. All he wants in the princess is someone to control and keep as a pretty object. He'd drop the princess if she wasn't the perfect petite maiden like in the damsel route." and I will not stand for the Smitten slander.

Like- He's been in love with her as a burning corpse ghost lady:

A terrifying ghost woman who wants to bring fear and chaos to the world:

And even a murderous blade monster woman who would kill you and enjoy every second of it:

Like, he ALWAYS loves the princess no matter what she looks like or how she acts, he loves her for being herself no matter what or who she is. That's the point of his character and I'm tired of people slandering my boy.

[ir-abelas-vhenan]

Me:

[ineffable-screaming]

when ladybird got so drunk she ended up in the hospital and went to church with fucked up makeup and needed to call her mom to see i love you. me too.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Not beating the allegations.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[taitavva]

body swap

[codenamethebird]

God I have so much to say about Melinoe's characterization, and the fasinating implications about her future arc/the overarching plot of hades 2. I want to make a larger think piece with pictures but for the moment I'm just going to focus on this one specific thread.

In the wake of the Prometheus reveal, she has a slew of convos about his motivations for siding with Chronos, and the gods basically all go: this is his vengeance for us punishing him a tad cruelly. And Nemesis is like, yeah the gods 100% deserve it. But Meli's responds that he must have more motivation than just vengeance, it can't just be that. But when Prometheus explicitly goes, 'I'm doing this because the gods are horrible to humanity and I love humans,' she basically goes, no he must be lying. That motivation is both too pure, but also humans kind of suck why would you care about them?

Mel's humanity hot takes deserve it's own essay (Ms I think Humans should have never gotten fire and are better when they are dead), and I just want to focus on the former for now. She can not comprehend that Prometheus is fighting the gods for noble reasons. It just does not make sense to her. Mel's world is so black and white. She doesn't understand the nuance of the situation, and the thought that the gods might be actually in the wrong doesn't even get close to crossing her mind.

It's a fascinating (and horrifying) result of her upbringing. Of the constant state of war and the very convenient big bad that is Chronos, the evil monster who stole her family. If she accepts that his side isn't completely evil, that they might even be right in some (even many) respects, she would have to grapple with her whole life. Everything she believes would be thrown into question, the literal thing she was training her whole life for.

She can't have Prometheus fighting for a noble cause, because he fights for Chronos whose the Bad Guy tm. But he also can't be fighting for something as simple as vengeance, because that would also mean she would need to really think about what he's angry about. If the punishment was truly so unnecessary cruel.

When talking to Odysseus about Prometheus, when Ody's saying how much he respected him for stealing the fire despite knowing the consequences, Mel says that it was the price to be paid for breaking Olympus's decree. To her, Olympus's rules are sacred and ultimately good. Unquestionably. Prometheus broke the rules with intent, so to her, why would he be so angry at the consequences? Especially if he knew because of his power they were going to happen.

So he must have another reason, some secret machiavellian plan that drives him. Except as I already said, it brings her right back to him doing it for humanity, which she also can't accept. Because that would be admiting that the gods did something wrong to humans. She twists herself into knots to justify her worldview, and it's fascinating! She's so messy I adore her.

Please Supergiant please the final surface boss has to be a human pleeeaaasse (preferably a living one). Or at least have one (or more) show up in some other capacity. Mel needs to come face to face with the other side and have it utterly destroy her worldview.

And/or have (Pan)Dora betray her for Prometheus, that would also be very fun haha.

[pirincho]

Ordinary

[frodo-a-gogo]

Let us be brutally honest with ourselves and with eachother for a moment. If he weren't obese you motherfuckers would be capable of percieving evrart claires sexy sexy moral ambiguity and complex charms

[drolta]

Flashback!Drolta

[swiggity-swexual-i-am-asexual]

As per usual, it’s DP crossover with (probably) DC, although you could probably adjust it for other fandoms

ANYWAYS

A little kid and his mother are trick or treating in another city, perhaps at some kind of event rather than knocking on doors, and the kid is dressed as Phantom. It’s very adorable, with his little ghost-shaped bucket and clearly homemade and already stained costume—listen, white only works if you can just fly over street grime or phase it out of your clothes—and his slightly I’ll fitting wig. The kid is SO happy to be out and about dressed as his favorite, and maybe even showed it off to Phantom back in Amity Park before his family left.

The hero, insert whoever you wish here, is probably in civvies and just enjoying the event. The kid, meanwhile, is so glad when people ask who he is so he can explain, and so- the hero gets to hear ALL ABOUT the local town hero who is probably pretty small time despite the kid’s clearly exaggerated stories. The hero certainly never heard of him, but the kid’s mom confirms that Phantom really was the town hero, despite some mixed reviews of the poor guy.

“Did you manage to show him your costume?” the hero asks.

“Yeah! We went down to the cemetery to leave flowers and I got to show him my costume.”

Wait. Cemetery? Maybe it was part of theme, because Phantom had to be named that for a reason, but… it sounded like…

The kid ignores the suddenly VERY still hero and instead turns to his mom. “Momma, do you think we should bring him candy? He doesn’t get to trick or treat like we do, and I can work super hard to get him a bunch!”

The kid’s mom just smiles. “We could, but maybe we should bring him something homemade. I bet he’d like something more filling, teen boys like him have a hollow leg.”

The kid wrinkles his nose. “Like Vernie with the pizza bagels?”

“Like your cousin, yes. We can make some cinnamon rolls and take them to his memorial, maybe bring some of the apples from your grandpa’s garden…”

The hero is pretty much forgotten as the two-part family wanders off, not quite intentionally forgetting the hero is there so much as the hero somewhat accidentally ended the conversation when they just froze and didn’t ask anything further.

Not that the hero didn’t want to. But they’d learn something very serious.

One—there was a small town hero they’d never heard of. Two—that hero was apparently a teen. Third—most pressingly, the teen hero was both beloved enough to have kids dressing up as him and dead enough to have a grave.

This… might require some phone calls.

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."