#sunsets and tides

[lifemod17]

Hello my dearest love!! I hope your timezone is going well despite it being Monday. As you know @littlequeenofthemangoes and I were at a festival this weekend, but you may not know that every year the statue that is on festival grounds gets dressed up as different iconic NJ figures. It is a great meeting point for our friends.

This year he was Tony Soprano

And so when we said “if we get separated, meet at Tony!”

And Reina goes “oh god for a second I thought you meant OUR tonee” and I was like GIRL I WISH I COULD MEET AT TONEE

Anyway here’s a sunset and the moon and the ocean ok ilysm bye

I hope you all had a fun weekend!!!

you're right i did not know that about the statue

i hope guys did not get separated and had to meet at Tony Soprano

i'm being very brave and trying not to melt at "our" Tonee (i am failing. i love you guysssss)

it would be so cool if it was me haha

SUNSETS AND TIDES!! IT'S US!!

ilysm my love, this made my monday more bearable

[materterrae]

[maureen2musings]

Bryon Bay

shawnanggg

[kahuna-64]

🌊🌊🌊🌊

[lifemod17]

IT IS US INDEED!!!

Halo this is STUNNING are you kidding meeee??! The kind of picture perfect sunset one dreams of. brb crying about this 🥺🥺😭😭

Thank you for sharing your pretty sunset with us my sweet Halo 🥹🥹🥹

@lifemod17 @tonguetyd it’s you guys 💚

[pippenplayz]

So Rise TMNT Duo names I've heard:

🟪Don & Leo🟦

Disaster twins

Midnight Duo

🟦Leo & Raph🟥

Magnetic Duo

Leader Duo

Switch Duo

Blue Raspberry

A-Team

🟧Mikey & Donnie🟪

PB&J Duo

Smarts and Crafts

B-Team

Sun & Science

🟦Leo & Mikey🟧

Baja Blast

Portal duo

Sun and eclipse

Sunrise Duo

Tidepods

Unicorn Bros

Dr Duo

🟥Raph & Mikey🟧

Sunset Duo

🟪Don & Raph🟥

Brains and Brawn

Jampackets Duo

🟨April & Don🟪

Bannana Pancakes

DNA Duo

🟦Leo & April🟨

The gay agenda

Ikea Duo

🟧Mikey & April🟨

Orange Lemonade

Citrus Duo

🟥Raph & April🟨

Eldest Siblings

Pink Lemonade

🟥Raph & Cassandra🏒

Shred Red

Cherry Duo

🟦Leo Future Boy🔑

Father and Son

Sensei and Student

Edit: This is constantly updated with every Duo name that gets commented that I don't have in here.

[kamtarir]

[alibonbonn]

Rook's Achilles posting has a hold on me oough

[alteredstatesstuff]

rock shore line

[champagnexowishes]

[vibinsane]

how ironic, don't you think, coming from someone who had been obsessed with titanic since she was a little girl. how just a few years ago, she had rekindled her interest and this pull she had towards the history of the titanic and the movie, practically hyperfixated on it for a while actually. funny how rafayel's affinity 100 ring is the color blue and rose's necklace is also blue.

and how rafayel asks mc if she wants his heart, whilst the necklace rose had in the movie was called 'heart of the ocean'.

[lifemod17]

hey! i've never submitted one before but i found this sunset photo i took a while ago and immediately thought of you. i hope you like it!

HI HELLO PHOEBE!!! First time in my askbox and you brought me a gift in the form of a pretty sunset?? Brb crying this is so sweet 😭😭

What do you MEAN this is a picture and not a painting HOLY SMOKES THIS IS GORGEOUS!!! This is the kind of sunset you would have to physically drag me away from, otherwise I would just stay put until miss sun has fully set (because yes, my family has had to do that before cuz we had to go to dinner but I wanted to sunset watch instead at the park).

I absolutely adore this lovely, thank you very much for sharing this with me. Happiest of timezones to you!! The mouse is very grateful for the cheese sunset content 🙏💛

[jvstinderosa]

tides of change

a stormy sunset at Honeymoon Island

[bestworstcase]

your point about team rwby being the maidens’ liberators made me think - do you think blake is going to have a special connection to the summer maiden? I noticed that she’s the only one who hasn’t been close to a maiden yet

i think gillian asturias is the summer maiden (and this post is hysterical in hindsight. at the time i wrote it, the full-length v9 epilogue hadn’t been released yet so we’d only seen qrow’s section and about half of winter’s – hence my pausing to lay out the argument for salem going to vale next and making a pretense of hedging my bets on the crown being narratively central in v10. lol)

now! with regard to blake and the summer maiden, the common thinking here seems to mostly run along the lines of “…and that’s why summer maiden ilia,” or the more general speculation that the summer maiden will be a faunus character.

to this i say:

it’s a fallacy to conflate “blake will probably have a strong narrative connection to the summer maiden” with “the summer maiden necessarily is or will be blake’s old friend,” and the argument for ilia being due for maidenhood is quite thin otherwise, and

blake can and does have important narrative connections to characters who aren’t faunus, and it’s a weird to presume that in order for the summer maiden to have a meaningful tie to blake, she must be a faunus herself.

to expand on that first point, let’s consider the personal relationships between each of the maidens so far and ruby / weiss / yang:

pyrrha -> ruby’s friend

cinder -> ruby’s personal enemy

raven -> yang’s estranged mother

penny -> ruby’s friend

winter -> weiss’s beloved sister

the takeaway here – other than that if you’re ruby’s friend and someone offers you to become a maiden you should refuse – is half the relations between maidens and members of team rwby are antagonistic. (raven seems likely to at least try making amends with yang in v10, but as it stands in the narrative right now things between them are very fraught.)

it is just as likely that blake’s narrative connection to the summer maiden might develop through a personal conflict between them, rather than friendship. yes?

and, if i’m right about gill being the summer maiden, well—stop me if you’ve heard this one: a girl with a driving, passionate ambition to uplift her people from the ashes of centuries of conquest and subjugation is radicalized by a boy she loves who pulls them both deeper and deeper into violent, spiteful extremism that ultimately harms the very people they claim to fight for, until he finally crosses a line she can’t accept and she says no i will not.

that’s blake and adam but it’s also gillian and her brother. the difference between them is that blake’s red line was adam glibly revealing that the train heist was actually intended to be a massacre whereas gillian’s was jax stating his intention to commit suicide rather than retreat and live to fight another day; she helped yatsu subdue him specifically to save jax’s life, not because she had a crisis of conscience about their movement.

(there is a certain—really irritating—contingent of CFVY novel readers who project their own dislike of jax onto gill and insist that she turned against him because he demanded she ‘sacrifice her life’ to save him, which 1. he didn’t, he asked her to give him all her aura and then bodily shielded her because he’s physically bigger than she is so this was at worst a “if we’re going down together, i’ll make them go through me first,” 2. if gill only wanted to save her own neck all she had to do was rip her aura out of him and bounce, and 3. she explicitly says that the reason she did what she did is because he’s her brother, she loves him, and she couldn’t let him die.)

the point being, gill is still a radical; her soft betrayal of jax revealed her priorities in that she loves her brother more than The Cause, but in no way did it represent a break from her belief in the cause. if the epilogue is any indication, she’s just as committed to overthrowing shade academy as before. (and i think there’s a real chance that her actions will have improved her relationship with jax to some degree, because he believed she didn’t care about him at all! he thought she only stuck with him because his semblance compelled her to do so! and then gillian exploded his mind by revealing that his semblance straight up doesn’t work on her and she just loves him. which, if the twins are on the same page now, cuts down on the internal tension and likely makes them more dangerous adversaries to the coalition.)

but her history, the way she became like this, is eerily similar to blake’s radicalization in the white fang, and i think blake would certainly be able to piece that together. she’s also by far the member of team rwby i would say is most likely to recognize and relate to the genuine pain at the heart of the crown’s movement—vacuo has suffered.

vacuo wasn’t even a state until the end of the great war. it was a mistrali territory. its people were enslaved and worked to death in a systematic and horrifyingly effective project to extract every last speck of valuable resources from the region, and then even statehood was a slap in the face because they were left to fend for themselves in a barren wasteland whose ecosystem had been completely and utterly destroyed.

the crown is a mirror held up to the white fang; blake is insightful and empathetic enough to realize these similarities and see herself and her past mistakes reflected in gillian, but this time she’s an outsider to the movement—she can’t effect change from within or reclaim the true, important work from the vengeful extremists. so she’s limited in what she can do, practically, even as it’s going to be painfully clear to her that the crown is falling into the same trap adam did.

and at the same time, the new white fang will in all likelihood either be in vacuo or show up to join the coalition in v10, so blake’s part in her own movement, her place in her community, can be directly juxtaposed with her opposition to/empathy for the crown.

v9 sets up for this with blake’s advocacy for the afterans—v7-8 do as well to a lesser extent, because blake is still dealing with the personal fallout of v4-6 and thus is quieter about mantle than say, nora is, but like. blake draws a comparison between her experiences in the white fang and with adam and the moral compromises ironwood starts making after the election. it just seems… pretty clear to me that the narrative has been setting up blake to play a pivotal role in relation to the crown since at least v4 if not earlier, depending on how granular the vacuo outline was during v1-3.

so this is a narrative connection i very much expect blake to have with gillian regardless, but… if gill is the maiden…

well, she’s certainly not trapped inside ozpin’s vault/key maiden paradigm! so in that case what does it look like for a member of team rwby to fulfill this narrative role of liberation? probably something like de-radicalizing her and her brother by convincing them there is a better way forward than their divisive, violent, paranoid ideology. and blake is unquestionably the member of team rwby best equipped to get the ball rolling there.

further, blake’s semblance is a really strong counter to gill’s – that’s true of ruby and weiss as well, because gillian has to touch a person in order to steal aura and so agile, fast opponents are going to be tougher for her in general. but blake has two more things going for her beyond the basic mobility advantage, vis-a-vis making it personal:

the illusionary aspect of blake’s semblance will allow her to create decoys, which is a very powerful tactical advantage against an opponent who really wants to grab her, and

blake’s girlfriend is a hand-to-hand fighter, and an incredibly brave one with an intense protective instinct at that.

clears throat. we all remember yang getting possessed in rwby x jl part 2, yes? and blake clocking it instantly? well.

if blake and gillian are meant to be not just foils but personal adversaries in the vein of ruby and cinder—yang’s gonna get got. agile though she is, as a hand-to-hand combatant yang is unavoidably much more vulnerable to the twins’ contact-based semblances than the rest of her team, her personality will make it very hard for her to play it safe and stay back if it comes to an open fight, and there is nothing the narrative could do to lock in that personal enmity that would be punchier than yang being compromised.

even if gill as a personal adversary to blake isn’t in the cards i expect yang to get got anyway because, let’s be honest: do we really expect crwby to set themselves up with a golden opportunity to do a climactic love-overcomes-mind-control scene with the bees in v10 and then not take it? with how nuts the entire creative team goes for these two? after the climactic battle in ice queendom hingeing on yang being able to free blake from a nightmare with the mere lesser power of unrealized lesbianism? do we reeeally believe they would pass that up? lol.

[kahuna-64]

🌊🌊🌊🌊

[shelovesplants]

Found some tidepools 🌊 sat in the water watching the sun about to set🙌🌊🏝🤟🩷🌅