#that this is a Very Deliberate neutral position

[thesiltverses]

Out of curiosity, just how unstable/stable would the Peninsula be following the Glottage Incident? Not going to go into specifics about it to avoid spoilers. I'm working on a thing for the RPG set after it, and wanted to see what the showrunners thought would happen.

Oh, that sounds really cool!

Personally - although of course this is no more canonical than any other bozo's opinion - this is what I imagined would happen to the Peninsula after the events of the show (spoilers below the cut)

Assuming that there are no wild cards from the stuff we deliberately left open-ended (i.e. that the polluted winds aren't going to sweep east across the entire Peninsula and render it uninhabitable)...

With Carson and Val gone, a whole lot of load-bearing lies are likely to come crashing down very quickly. The remnants of the CLS government will be able to publicly declare that the Peninsula only won the war with the help of a highly illegal rhetorical god who murdered civilians, committed countless war crimes, and threatened to unravel reality. Likewise, the High Adjudicator's sex coma was already on the verge of being an open secret, and his private plane flying out of Glottage then crashing in the west is only going to lead to more searching scrutiny about just what the hell was going on there.

If the Peninsula was ending the war in a strong position, all of this might not matter - but with Glottage in tatters, a power vacuum, a decimated population, and the war's outcome looking less like a heroic victory and more like an internationally-condemned and chaotic embarrassment, I imagine the remaining Adjudicators would be pivoting frantically to become peace-loving, harmonious and sustainable-sacrifice types, with the condemnation for the war being unceremoniously heaped on Carson and the High Adjudicator's shoulders in their absence.

As a result, I can see Shrue (with their history of anti-war speeches) being quickly re-embraced and co-opted, maybe even actively canonised as a saintly figure by the newly-pacifistic political establishment - because after all, wasn't their speech really raging at the wastefulness, lies, and corruption of certain politicians? We should all have listened to them earlier.

I can't see the Parish being publicly acknowledged as the true perpetrators of the Glottage attack, however - it's far more politically useful to state that Val must have been responsible (because then the people of the Peninsula are also victims of Carson's lies and his horrific terrorist-saint run amok, we all suffered equally, and we can all just draw a line under this tragic affair.)

The lasting winners of the power vacuum are likely to be the major international faiths, which can quickly position themselves as neutral mediators and peacemakers between the leaderless CLS and Peninsula, while swooping in to play a more active role in both nations' governance.

All of that scandal and upheaval would also undoubtedly continue to energise the Woundtree / anti-sacrificial movement across the country which might even find a legitimate foothold in mainstream thought, but the ideological risks to that movement (being neutered or softened or co-opted) would be greater than ever.

So...definitely highly unstable, I'd imagine, but with no shortage of players rolling in from the wings, just as before, to try and transform all of this into a nice, simple, tutelary story of saints and scapegoats.

[mariasont]

Can I request Hotch finding gender neutral reader asleep but they legit fell asleep to a true crime serial killer podcast- or they’re like obsessed with a new serial killer show (me with Hannibal rn 😮‍💨) thanks!!! Have a good day!!! <3

Late Night Podcast - A.H

a/n: omg i love love love this idea <3 thank you for sharing your idea with me i hope i did it justice! and i hope YOU have the best day 🕊️✨

masterlist

pairings: aaron hotchner x gn!reader

warnings: established relationship, hotch and reader being just so cute, bau!reader, reader and hotch are both simps

wc: 0.7k

Hotch's meeting dragged on, each minute stretched longer than the last tangled in bureaucratic red tape, and suits who really couldn't give a damn whether the BAU lived or died. It was all incredibly migraine-inducing, and he couldn't wait to go home and take you to bed.

He knew all too well that you'd be in his office, a realization that came with a twinge of regret. Not because your presence was unwelcome, but because your selfless nature meant you tended to put his needs before your own. You'd insist the after hours peace and quiet was perfect for catching up on paperwork.

He was very aware that was all a lie, you never needed to catch up on paperwork; he knew your work was always meticulously complete. He recognized your true motive; ensuring he got home at a decent time. And it usually worked everytime. The sight of you, patiently waiting, was the sweetest incentive to end his day.

"In this episode, we recount the tragic and violent story of Aileen Wuornos, a woman who turned from victim to perpetrator, ultimately becoming America's most infamous serial killer with seven murders to her name."

He stopped short in the doorframe, his eyes sweeping over the unexpected stillness of his office. There you were, draped across the couch in a tangle of limbs, one arm flung above your head while the other wrapped around your torso. The hem of your shirt had lifted just enough to reveal the softness of your belly. The rest and fall of your chest was the only movement, fast sleep.

You fell asleep to a seriel killer podcast.

He fought back a laugh, the sound caught in his throat as he laid the remainder of his work aside. You looked so peaceful, despite the macabre background that seemed to bounce off the walls. He paused your phone, knowing you'd hate to wake up and lose your place.

He smoothed your hair back, his rough hand lingering in the softness. The battle against his smile was lost; it warmed his entire face. He didn't want to wake you.

"Aaron?" Your voice was so sleepy, rough and cracked, but perfect all the same.

He wondered how long you had been asleep for.

"Hi, sleepy head."

Your eyes opened briefly, a couple of deliberate blinks as you nestled into a new position, curled on your side with hands tucked under your face. A smile, that you tried to hide, melted across your face as you quickly snapped those beautiful eyes of yours shut.

"Shh, can't hear you, sleeping," you mumbled under your breath, your nose wrinkling slightly as your struggled to keep a straight face.

A soft laugh broke through as he rubbed his face. "Well, this is the first time I've heard someone sleep-talk so clearly."

You said nothing, just the slight twitch in your lips as you pressed deeper into the couch.

"I'll take that as a yes to my carrying you out to the car then."

Before you could even muster a reaction, he scooped you up, your legs swept up in a fluid motion as you found yourself hoisted over his shoulder. Your breath hitched into a gasp, quickly transforming into laughter as you slapped your hands to his back.

"Aaron!" The word was muffled by the sound of his shirt as he started to march towards the door. "Put me down!"

"A lot of talk coming from someone who is supposedly sleeping."

His hand ground your ass, eliciting a burst of giggles from you as your hands roamed the expanse of his shoulders, legs dangling in front of him.

"Will you at least grab my phone? I need to finish that podcast on the way home."

A quick spin set your hair a flutter as he leaned down to grab your device from the table.

As he moved for the door, your hand found its way to his hair, mussing it fondly. "Thanks, handsome."

He finally let you down, hand entwining with yours. "Well finish the podcast together, but no more serial killer stories before bed."

regular taglist: @hotchhner @khxna @readergf @sarcasm-and-stiles @edencherries @aurorsworld @princess76179 @malindacath @freyy253 @broadwaytraaaaash

[stevieschrodinger]

I don't know, ficlet AU sort of thing.

Alpha Steve has a YouTube channel that, kind of, started by accident. Steve is not the most confident reader, like, at all. The words get kind of muddled and he got into a habit of just sort of trying to rush it, figuring he was going to mess it up anyway, so get it over with, right? And then he just sort of stops reading, even though he enjoyed it, because he couldn't get his brain to slow down and the muddling got worse and...yeah.

So one day, his platonic soul mate bestie suggests he read out loud. To someone. If he reads every word out one at a time, knowing it has to be clear enough for the other person to follow, that'll slow him down.

So, he tries it, but only for Robin. And it sort of works, kind of, and then she hits on him using something so he can only see the line he's reading, like a bit of card with a letterbox cut in it, and...Steve is on fire.

The words don't get muddled up so much, and his reading is slow and even, and he needs to read to someone, and Robin can't always be there. It becomes his own pet project, he reads out little bits of books he likes, parts of articles he has enjoyed, poems, whatever, and starts his own little you tube that has like, five followers, and they're all people he knows.

And then suddenly, almost overnight, Steve finds himself with four thousand followers. A very large portion of them are very clearly Omega, from the comments, and Steve suddenly finds himself with a lot of fans who are using his videos for white noise. He's literally reading thousands of Omegas off to sleep.

Which is...nice. Steve likes it. The hits and followers on his videos seem to settle down after a couple of weeks, and then, after having so many comments about how settling Steve's voice is, how the Alpha is relaxing and safe. Steve thinks fuck it.

As a test, he makes a ten minute video directly for that audience. He builds a nest, films it POV. He films the view of someone walking through the bedroom door, of what they would see as they climb into the nest, then resting the camera on his own chest.

Then he starts talking. Tells the omega how perfect they are, how much he cares for them, wants to protect, keep safe. How soft they are as he pets them, how warm and cosy they are in their nest. How snuggles with the omega are Steve's favourite thing.

He deliberately keeps everything as vague and gender neutral as he can. The video fucking explodes. Goes viral. Millions of hits, thousands and thousands of followers. Robin and the kids think it's hilarious, and encourage him to keep going, claiming he's doing a public service.

Hundreds of copycats spring up, but no one pulls it off quite like Steve.

He knows there are Omega out there getting off to his videos, despite there being absolutely nothing sexual about them, but Steve figures, whatever makes people happy.

He gets so many positive comments, omega telling him how much comfort he brings them. He has some regular commenters that he gets to know, too, which is nice. Sometimes he even takes requests, small things, the colour of his shirt, the time of day he shoots his videos, certain words and phrases.

One supportive commenter always stands out though : EdDio86. Steve's pretty sure he's male omega, and he's always so grateful when Steve posts a new video. The guy clearly has a lot of trouble sleeping, and apparently Steve really helps. They have a little back and forth in the comments, learning little bits about one another. Steve likes this omega.

Steve also gets the impression the omega is sorely lacking any comfort in his life. Considering the length of his comments, the guy never asks for anything.

Until he does.

At the end of a comment, always ever so politely thanking Steve, EdDio86 admits he's 'in a bit of a pickle' and could Steve, please, do a video where 'the omega' is with pup? Could Steve tell the omega that the pup is fine, and healthy, and that the omega is doing good and the pup is okay and everything will be okay...but cool if not. Bit of a weird request, I know, sorry to be a bother.

And Steve suddenly doesn't give a shit about the consequences of just,,,dropping his personal email out into the world like that, because he wants to tell this guy these things personally.

[love-takes-work]

I've seen a fair number of people interpret Rebecca Sugar's (and the Crew's) decision to put Ruby in a dress as subversive, and I want to discuss why that feels like a clear miss to me.

Every time--every single time--I've heard Rebecca Sugar talk about the queer relationships on this show, it comes with this expression of wholesomeness, and often glazed with a sheen of wistfulness, flavored something like "I needed this as a child and young person, and I didn't have it." Much of Rebecca Sugar's work to bring this wedding (and other unapologetic queer relationships) to the screen was framed as an emergency--as in, we HAVE to get this out there for those kids we used to be, because we know they're drowning.

Yes, it's funny sometimes when people make jokes about Sugar deliberately "adding more gay" or "making it gayer" as a big eff-you to the people who spoke against it, but that doesn't sit right from where I'm standing. It took so much strength (and resulted in so much battle damage) to fight that fight, yes. But from everything I can see from the interviews and conversations I've seen and read, this wasn't served up in a "ha-HA, take THAT!" kind of way. These characters having these kinds of relationships should have been a non-issue, and the fact that their very wholesome kids'-show wedding and very sweet kiss and very adorable love for each other was seen as Political when it should have been just two characters in love is so sad to me.

I've seen dozens of people suggest that Ruby is in a dress and Sapphire is in a suit "to fuck with the bigoted censors in other countries" or "to give the finger to gender roles," but again, I think it is simpler and sweeter than that. Rebecca's said that Ruby in a dress is how she feels in a dress. Celebration and exploration of feminine-coded stuff felt wrong to Rebecca for a long time, like it wasn't hers, because she wasn't really a woman and didn't want it forced on her. As a result she was robbed of all the beauty that should have been a non-issue, from what TV shows and toys she was supposed to enjoy as a kid to what kind of person she was supposed to marry and what she should wear as an adult.

Ruby never got a choice about how she looked really. Once she got to choose her presentation for a significant event, this is what she chose. It means so much more to see that than to construct it primarily as a reactionary measure, as if it would somehow foil the sinister censors in more homophobic countries (who, incidentally, are not therefore forced to show Ruby in a dress even though they tried to hide that Ruby was a "she" or that she was in a romantic relationship with another "she"; y'all, they just don't show the episode).

We see plenty of other examples of gender-role-related expectations being casually stepped on and squashed, like when they took the trouble to give traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine "clothes" to some watermelons to make the audience think there was a husband and wife watermelon only to have the wife be the warrior and the husband stay home with the child. With stuff like that, yeah, sure, maybe it's designed to make you think "oh isn't that very feminist of them!" Or maybe it's more "well why do I see this as a 'reversal' when it's just a thing that happened?" This show is full of ladyish beings who fight and have power. And as for Steven. . . .

Nobody has negative reactions onscreen (or even particularly confused reactions) when Steven wears traditionally feminine clothes, and it is (of course) also not presented as a "boy in a dress gag"--it's not supposed to be funny. When they go all in slathering Steven in literal princess tropes throughout the final act of Season 5, we understand that it's because the powerful Diamonds expect him to be Pink Diamond, not because the show is trying to girlify him or embarrass him or even make the audience think positive thoughts about boys in girls' clothes. It's more neutral than that in my interpretation: "these are literally just pieces of cloth, and while some of them have meaning, they don't inherently have a gender." I don't see this as transgressive. It's just in a world where putting on what you want to wear doesn't HAVE to be a political statement. (Though obviously it CAN be, and plenty of people wear a variety of clothes as a fuck-you to whoever they want to give the finger to. I just don't see that as happening here.)

Don't get me wrong; Rebecca Sugar certainly knew about the politics (intimately) and has lived at many of their intersections. She was not ignorant of how queer people are seen in this world. She was silenced as a bisexual person because her identity supposedly didn't matter if she was with a man and planned to be with that same man forever. She was shunted into "omg a woman did this!" categories over and over again, which she wore uneasily as a nonbinary person while accepting that part of who we are is how the world sees us. But what is it like if everything someone like her embraces is seen as a statement synonymous with "fuck you" to someone else?

She is married to a person who happens to be a man and happens to be Black. Her relationship isn't a "statement" about either of those aspects of his existence; her love is simply something that is. She is Jewish working in a society that's largely Christian. Her cultural perspective to NOT center her cartoon around Christian holidays and Christian morals; her choices to make an alternate world in this specific way is simply something that is. Her queer perspective as a nonbinary bisexual person has helped inform the Gems' radical philosophy of "what if we learned to explore and define ourselves instead of doing the 'jobs' we're assigned and being told it's our nature?" Her decision to include queer people in a broadly queer cartoon isn't designed PRIMARILY as a battle against baddies, or to drown out all the relentless straightness, or to deliciously get our queer little paws all over their kids' TV. It's an act of love.

So this is just to say that though I DO understand that sometimes subversion and intentional transgression are very necessary, I do not think that's the HEART of what's going on at this Gem wedding. We got a wholesome marriage scene between two of the most lovely little flawed-but-still-somehow-perfect characters, and I very much want to see their choices as being about them. About how Ruby feels in a dress. About how Sapphire feels about not having to always wear a dress. About them incorporating a symbol of their union into their separate lives so they can have some independence in their togetherness. About them celebrating their love by letting Steven wipe his schmaltz all over them.

There are many choices in the show that ARE carefully constructed to counter existing narratives, you know, giving the Crystal Gems' only boy all the healing, pink, flower imagery; having a single-sex species that's ladyish with all the members going by "she"; featuring many nurturing male characters who cry and cook and raise kids without mothers; pairing multiple fighty ladies with gentler guys; and importantly, intentionally loading up the show with stories, characters, and imagery any gender will find appealing despite being tasked with expectations to pander to the preteen boy demographic.

But it's very important to me that the inclusion of queer characters and the featuring of their choices be seen primarily as a loving act, and way way less of a "lol screw the bigots." I want our stories to be about us. Yes, I know it's a necessary evil that sometimes our stories are also about fighting Them. But every time I see someone say they put Ruby in the dress to "piss off the homophobes" or "stump the censors" I feel a little gross. Like the time I picked out an outfit I loved and my mom said I only dressed in such an obnoxious way to upset her, and I was baffled because my aesthetic choices, my opinions, my choices had nothing to do with her. Yet they were framed like I chose these clothes primarily to cause some kind of petty harm to her, when not only was it not true but I was not even that kind of person who would gloat over intentionally irritating someone.

The queerness of this show isn't a sneaky, underhanded act trying above all to upset a bigot or celebrate someone's homophobic fury. It lives for itself. Its existence is about itself. It's so we can see ourselves in a show, and it's so people who aren't queer or don't have those experiences can see that we exist, we participate, we want very similar things, and definitely are focusing way more about celebrating our love at our own weddings rather than relishing the thought of bigots tearing their hair out and hating us.

It's dangerous to turn every act of our love into a deliberate movement in a battle strategy when their weddings just get to be weddings.

I think there’s this idea that that [queer characters] is something that applies or should be only discussed with adults that is completely wrong. And I think when you realize that talking to kids about heteronormativity is just like air that you breathe all the time, it’s kind of amazing that that is not true in any other capacity. I think if you wait to tell kids, to tell queer youth that it matters how they feel or that they are even a person, then it’s going to be too late! You have to talk about it—you have to let it be what it gets to be for everyone. I mean, like, I think about, a lot of times I think about sort of fairy tales and Disney movies and the way that love is something that is ALWAYS discussed with children. And I think also there’s this idea that’s like, oh, we should represent, you know, queer characters that are adults, because there are adults that are queer, and you should know that’s something that is happening in the adult world, but that’s not how those films or those stories are told to children. You’re told that YOU should dream about love, about this fulfilling love that YOU’RE going to have. […] The Prince and Snow White are not like someone’s PARENTS. They’re something you want to be, that you are sort of dreaming of a future where you will find happiness. Why shouldn’t everyone have that? It’s really absurd to think that everyone shouldn’t get to have that! --Rebecca Sugar

[curseofdelos]

I finished re-reading TLH recently, and I want to talk about the common fan interpretation of Piper as a pick me girl for a sec (let me preface this whole post by clarifying that while this is ultimately a defense of Piper as a character, it is also a critique of how Rick wrote her, Drew, and the rest of cabin 10)

The way cabin 10 is written in the books has never been great. Very early on in TLT, Rick makes a point to establish that Aphrodite had both sons and daughters:

Take note of how Rick explicitly genders Aphrodite kids in this paragraph, but uses the gender neutral "kids" to refer to the children of every other god. This is a very deliberate writing choice, and I can't think of any reason why he would have done this other than to (initially anyway) avoid associating womanhood with vanity/interest in personal appearances.

...And then in every book after this, cabin 10 heavily skews female, and traditional femininity becomes the butt of almost every joke about them.

Cabin 10 doesn't get any real focus until TLH with the introduction of Piper, Drew, and the rest of Cabin 10, in which Rick spends a lot of time establishing how different Piper is from the rest of her cabin because she rejects traditional femininity. Piper cuts her own hair, she doesn't wear makeup or care about fashion, she hates dresses etc. This is in direct contrast with Drew who's often described as wearing heavy makeup, having perfectly done hair, manicured nails etc.

Note that Piper's description of Drew's appearance is fairly neutral. Her problem with Drew is not in how she chooses to dress, but in her behaviour.

This would be fine if it weren't for the fact that every time Drew's appearance is described, it is directly preceded and/or followed by her doing something heinous. She insults and degrades Piper's appearance within seconds of meeting her, and we see this again in the Cabin 10 scene where she bullies and manipulates their siblings - kicking them out of the bathroom mid-shower, dumping a bin filled with used tampons on the floor and making them clean it up, etc.

Piper and Drew are in direct competition throughout the entirety of TLH. Piper strongly disapproves of the way Drew runs the cabin, they have differing opinions on Silena Beauregard (despite the fact Piper doesn't actually know her but I digress), and they're both interested in pursuing Jason romantically - Piper out of genuine attraction, and Drew out of the desire to break his heart for the Aphrodite Rite of Passage.

The narrative at every turn pits them against each other. Piper's intentions are always painted as pure and kindhearted while Drew is consistently characterised as a stereotypical mean girl who hurts others simply because she can. Drew is never given any motivation for acting the way she does, and her sole role in the story is to act as an obstacle for Piper to overcome so she could become counsellor (which is kind of pointless considering Piper never interacts with her cabin again after this). She's flat and two-dimensional, and never gets any real character development. Her sole personality trait is mean.

The result of all of this is that traditional femininity gets associated with shitty behaviour, while the rejection of traditional femininity gets associated with kindness and generosity. It should be stressed that Piper herself doesn't actually think that she's better than Drew because she doesn't wear makeup etc; Piper's issues entirely lie with Drew's behaviour. The worst Piper ever says is calling all of cabin 10 "shallow" which is no different to how the other characters talk about them (which is still a problem to be clear; it's just not a problem with Piper specifically, but how the narrative characterises cabin 10 as a whole). It's the narrative that paints femininity as lesser because of the way it positions tomboy Piper (the protagonist) as a better person than highly feminine Drew (the antagonist).

In fact, the most explicitly we ever see the book paint Piper's appearance as preferable to Drew's is in Jason's POV - not Piper's. After Piper gets claimed and Aphrodite changes her appearance, Jason spends several chapters going on and on about how much more beautiful and desirable Piper is when she's not dressed up or wearing makeup.

Because of all of this, it's not difficult to see why so many people in this fandom have interpreted Piper as a pick me 'not like other girls' type girl. The narrative constantly presents her as a better person than the more feminine Drew, and Jason (the boy they're competing over) chooses her at least partly because of how naturally beautiful she is without trying.

However, even though I do understand where this interpretation of her character came from, I do want to push back on it for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it is explicitly stated several times in TLH that the reasons Piper doesn't wear makeup and cuts her own hair is because (1) she doesn't like being the centre of attention (see the first screenshot of this post), and (2) she's rebelling against her father.

Piper's entire character arc in TLH centres around her initially being insecure at the start of the book to becoming more confident over the course of their quest. It is stated on several occasions early on that Piper doesn't like being the centre of attention, but by the end, she feels more comfortable in her own skin. She goes from being embarrassed/hurt by Drew's comments about her to laughing them off and standing up to her by the end.

The term "pick me girl" refers to girls who do things for external, mostly male validation. This is the exact opposite of why Piper doesn't wear makeup or conform to traditional femininity. She does this precisely because she does NOT want to draw attention to herself. The only male who's attention she is trying to get is her father's, and she's doing this by acting out in ways he doesn't approve of. Piper does want validation from her father, but she's not cutting her own hair to get his validation; she's so starved for affection that she wants any attention from him, even if that attention is negative.

Similarly, a major point of conflict for Piper is whether or not Jason is attracted to her, but she is not rejecting feminine things because she wants to impress him Jason does find those qualities in her attractive, but Piper held these opinions long before they even met. It was Jason/the narrative that paints those qualities in Piper attractive, not Piper herself. (Side note: there's a lot more to be said about how their relationship was written in TLH, but that isn't relevant to get into that here.)

The other reason why I want to push back on the interpretation of Piper as a pick me girl is that she's a queer woman. In a straight patriarchal society, women (women of colour especially) are often expected and pressured to perform gender in particular ways - wearing makeup, dressing femininely, being attracted to boys and exclusively boys. In much the same way that Piper's coming out now makes it possible to read her relationship with Jason as compulsory heterosexuality, it's also possible to read her discomfort with traditional femininity as discomfort with being a straight girl. It's possible to retroactively read Piper's dislike for feminine things as her feeling uncomfortable with heterosexuality but is too closeted at this point to realise it. She does, after all, cut her hair very short at the end of TBM while she is the process of exploring her sexuality.

(To be clear: I'm not arguing that this is what Rick had always intended for her - I assume he expected Jason/Piper would be endgame at the time he was writing TLH - but I do think there's a 'death of the author' interpretation available here that her hatred of dresses etc is an early sign of her being a closeted queer woman who is beginning to explore her gender presentation and sexuality.)

I feel that sometimes, in their efforts to (rightly) criticise the way femininity gets treated in this series, some people act as if makeup is in intrinsic part of womanhood and that Piper is a misogynist for not wanting to wear it. This is not true. It is not inherently misogynistic for a woman to dislike it - especially when that woman is queer, and especially in today's society where many women are pressured into wearing makeup to be taken seriously. Piper disliking makeup is not the problem.

The problem with Piper's story in TLH is that the narrative consistently presents her as a better person than the more feminine Drew, and a more desirable option for Jason because of how beautiful she is without trying really hard like Drew and the other Aphrodite girls do. Because every highly feminine character is either a villain (Drew) or a joke (Valentina in TOA), the result of Piper and Drew's rivalry is that femininity gets demonised by the narrative. Again, it's not that Piper herself thinks she's better than Drew for hating fashion; it's the way the story puts these characters in opposition to each other that results in femininity being framed as lesser.

I think a writer with a better grasp of women's issues (and queer women's issues especially) could have written a great story here on gender as a performance, and an exploration on conforming (Drew) VS rebelling (Piper) against gender norms! How there really is no winning and women get harassed for being too feminine AND for not being feminine enough (See: the jokes about Clarisse in PJO not being a girl/being manly because she's violent and rough around the edges)! What we got instead was a story that carries the deeply unfortunate implication that girls who don't care about their appearance are kinder and more desirable than girls who do.

It's not Piper that's the problem; it's the narrative. I think a lot of people have been conflating the two, and have been unfairly pinning the blame onto Piper's characterisation when the fault lies with the plot, and with Drew's characterisation as a flat two-dimensional mean girl stereotype. I think if Drew had been given a redemption arc like Clarisse, or some amount of depth that explains why she hates Silena and acts the way she does, or even if she and Piper had learned to respect each other despite their differences, then we would be having a very different conversation.

[piracytheorist]

Twilight Eyes Project: "Secure a Wife" (part 1)

Previous episode analysis here

Unsurprisingly, as the very first scene of the episode is Twilight deciding that Franky isn't eligible for the wife role, we get Twilight eyes.

And as mentioned before, it's with certain expressions still visible through them.

We continue to closed Twilight eyes.

Eyebrows are still furrowed down towards his nose. That's usually a big telltale.

Continuing with more Twilight eyes.

I might not need to actually catalogue every single time we see his eyes. But those scenes were purely business as usual, with only Anya and Franky present. It makes sense why he wouldn't use "Loid eyes" or reveal his real face with Franky... but it's interesting how he doesn't use "Loid eyes" for Anya either. In his mind, being "neutral" like that works, so he doesn't bother putting more effort to make himself look more approachable to Anya. Little does he know why Anya already trusts him 😆

Then, we're onto the boutique scene. He looks at Anya with neutral Twilight eyes, wondering where she learns words like "getting trafficked",

and then, investigative eyes as he considers his options around the boutique.

After he rejects two possibilities and considers it will take a long time to find an ideal fake wife, in the manga we're still on investigative eyes looking to the front, but in the anime it's Twilight eyes looking to the side (where the shop owner was, as his attention was on her).

I believe this was done in order to emphasize on the animation of his face as he reacts to Yor's sudden presence behind him. The manga goes from the expression above to an immediate jolt. The anime allows him a small reaction of "wait what's that" before he also jolts.

And just who is that woman that sneaked up on him? Time for work! Thus, focused Twilight eyes.

Another difference: when the memory of Yor's picture pops in his mind, the eye we see in the manga is open, while in the anime they're both closed (in concentration). A deliberate change?

His eyes open right after, outside the "memory effect", as he looks back at Yor and inner-monologues about Yor's situation.

In the manga, he seems to turn a little back so he stands by her side, though pretending to not be looking at her. (at first he was leaning his side on the counter, so Yor came up right behind him. Now he's turned to lean his back on the counter, and I assume he did so he could check out who she was)

In the anime, he keeps his back turned on her. Still, in the manga he looks to his other side, away from Yor, as he berates himself for not noticing her immediately.

After all, Yor is supposed to be an everyday citizen, working a casual job at city hall, right? Why would she be able to sneak up on him? Must be his fault.

Anyway, the positioning is a little different here, though both cases seem to make Yor noticing his gaze make more sense. In the manga, if he turned around so he could keep her in his periphery, it would be noticed by her. In the anime, him looking over his shoulder at her is quite distinct.

Yor confronts him about his stare, and he swings a chance, telling her he thinks she's pretty. Yor reacts positively (albeit not in the way he'd expect from a honey pot target), and... though he activates Loid voice, his eyes are more expressive of his surprise at her reaction than anything else.

To be fair, her reaction was unexpected, so he probably wasn't sure whether the welcoming, over-willing "Loid eyes" would be appropriate. I just like that it threw him off, haha.

The anime treats us to another view of his face as he looks at her, having no idea she's about to ask him to be her pretend boyfriend and thus make all his plans fit into place.

Hi pot, meet kettle!

Twilight eyes as he considers asking Yor to play the wife role, then grows doubts about it. Kind of a miss for the anime to not have him say that he had doubts because he thought that Yor being so intuitive might become a hurdle.

Anya puts her plan to motion, Yor asks about the wife, and we get our first Loid eyes of the chapter/episode.

His backstory is already established (even though Franky called him a divorcee in the beginning, was that a translation error?) so he doesn't need "work" eyes, and said wife never actually existed so there's no emotions tied to her, so no excuse for "real eyes". But he gotta look approachable to Yor. He's but a mere single father, trying to do his best for his daughter that he definitely knows longer than a week, see!

I don't claim to be an expert in this analysis, so half the reasons I share these posts is so that more people can chime in. I don't think those below are "Twilight eyes", while Yor explains her situation.

They look more neutral than anything else. Definitely focused, but more relaxed since, curiously enough, Yor seems to be setting a very fruitful foundation for his plan. Almost too good to be true. If only he knew it will actually get even easier 😆

They do, however, turn into Twilight eyes as he undoubtedly goes like "That's it. That's my chance."

The next manga panel is too small to discern his reaction, but in the anime he immediately switches to Loid (?) eyes as he accepts Yor's request.

My question mark is there because "Loid eyes" make sense there, cause he's about to warm her up to his request, which is a far more complicated ordeal than hers. However, his eyes aren't as wide open as "Loid eyes" usually are. His smile reaches his eyes, making him look calmer - this is usually the telltale sign for "real eyes". But I think it's too early for him to show any honesty with Yor there. Maybe I'm overthinking it. There will be a lot of that down the line XD

Anyway! Twilight eyes as he explains his situation, and makes himself look like a very dedicated father who totally wants to honour the wishes of his late wife, who totally, 100% existed.

Narrowed, focused eyes. This is his one chance to get the ideal wife for the mission and the rest of his life. He can't pass it up.

And then, a complete change! Investigative eyes (aka extreme "Twilight eyes") in the manga... and Loid eyes in the anime!

I get the need for a change, though. The manga has a "shadow" over Twilight's face, suggesting that it focuses more on his inner thoughts - and planning - than what is being said. In the same manner, in the anime, the sound focus is on Twilight's thoughts, with his speaking voice being almost inaudible under the former. But! He's still trying to get Yor to trust him - he can't look shady like that. In reality, he does look at her with Loid eyes.

In a way, the manga gives us a more "inner" view, aimed at the audience. The anime shows us what the camera sees, aimed at the characters in-show.

Welcome to my blog. We overanalyze things here.

The supermarket cashier passes on a code to Twilight, and it's back to work with Twilight eyes.

Twilight realizes that his new side mission creates a hurdle to his meeting with Yor. The anime allows a second of animation to show him go from shock to Twilight eyes as he immediately puts a plan together.

(continued in part 2)

(anime only fan here, don't spoil me for the manga)

[goldxnfemme]

ID: Video that is a stitch made by @professorneil on tiktok.

The person in the video stitched says: "which is that it seems like quite a lot of people, particularly white liberals, will very often take on all these different queer and neurodivergent labels and feel as if they have to be oppressed by something because…”

And the person stitching said video continues by saying: “so, yes, this is absolutely a thing and not only is it a documented sociological phenomenon, but sociologists have come up with a name for it and it’s called the race to innocence and sometimes also the race to the margins, it’s the same thing. Now when Mary Louis Fellows and Sherene Razack coined this term back in 1998, they were thinking mostly about white feminists within the multiracial feminist movements, so bear that in mind as I read from their article, it is more broadly applicable, absolutely, yes, but that is their focus here.”

The person in the video proceeds by quoting from the article mentioned: “When a woman fails to pursue how she is implicated in other women’s lives and retreats to the position that the system that oppresses her the most is the only one worth fighting and that the other systems (systems in which she is positioned as dominant) are not of her concern, she will fail to undo her own subordination. Attempts to change one system while leaving the others intact leaves in place the structure of domination that is made up of interlocking hierarchies.”

The person in the video continues: “So, Fellows and Razack are implicating and critiquing here that the very second wave feminist, white feminist idea that all women share a common struggle, which it is only possible to suggest if you are ignoring the unique oppressions of queer women, women of color, women in poverty, etc. When faced with that challenge, the people who occupy a position of privilege, so in this example, the straight, middle and upper-class, white women will say “That’s not the issue that we’re talking about here, we’re talking here about being women, we’re talking about patriarchy, misogyny.” They will race to innocence; they will race to their own marginalized identity categories in order to avoid admitting that they have power and privilege and are also the oppressor. And, sometimes, that race to innocence is very calculated (in this part the screen in the video shows text that reads: *and defensive!), it is deliberate, it is strategic. I might be avoiding talking about my male privilege, my white privilege, when I am also discussing being a wave slave because I want to preserve those privileges, while attacking the oppression I feel, but it’s, at least, as often, if not more often, something that we are doing reflexively, uncritically. It is easier to claim solidarity, it is easier to feel empathy, if we are doing it from our own position of marginality, it’s easier to speak credibly from a position of oppression and to do so with authority, if you also possess privileges that allow you to appear unbiased, neutral and to do so safely, if afterward you can retreat to a place of privilege. So, it is certainly possible that, at least in part, this explosion of straight, white, cis men leftists claiming neurodivergence is explained by some sort of desire to claim oppression, to build those alliances, to feel that empathy and to access that credibility, but even if it is sincere, it is still dangerous. Of course, it could be strategic and insincere. When you race to innocence, race to the margins, be mindful of the privileges you’re leaving at the center.”

END ID

- Here is the article mentioned in the video, if you want to check it out (in PDF):

The Race to Innocence: Confronting Hierarchical Relations among Women

[littleeyesofpallas]

Hi,

would you make meta stuff about Mayuri's way of speaking? I mean guy speaks strange way compared to other characters and me with friend don't speak japanese and would like to know more about it.

Thank you! 💜

So, i do want to remind anyone reading my blog but please remember i'm not at all fluent in Japanese. I understand the grammar on a textbook level, and with enough dictionary resources I can poke around and sus out nuances of some word choices (particularly stuff like fictional names of people and swords and attacks and stuff, as those kinds of creative choices are very overt*), especially in irregular usage, but when it comes down to things like dialect, slangs, vernacular or phraseology, or more subtle tone indicators I'm pretty blind.

*(sorry to further clarify: when it's stuff like fantasy jargon it's stuff no one would ever actually say, and so the choices made in crafting those words or names from scratch are all reliably very deliberate. But when looking at more casual speech a lot of character voice just kind of defaults to what "sounds" right, and so the distinction between choosing one common word over another isn't always meaningful or readily apparent, both in general and to someone not fully fluent like me.)

Like if someone talks in a stilted overly technical or dry way I might be able to tell that much, but I'd totally miss more structural things like whether it makes them sound more like a mad scientist -vs- a tryhard edgelord fake intellectual -vs- a man out of time -vs- a stuffy rich person --or what the differences i'd even be looking for between all those would be-- I really can't tell outside of what i might be able to glean from things like narrative context more than the dialog itself.

With the exception of some very tropey, and thus easier to identify things like, movie-esque yakuza slang, or melodramatic historical feudal drama formal titles --and even then those are things i might more readily catch when actually spoken than when written on the page-- i'm just as lost as the next person.

That all being said, there are still a few little things i can sort of pick at without feeling totally out of my depth...

I think it's been brought up on some random post of mine before that Mayuri does notably use a "more feminine" 1st person pronoun, watashi[私] which is a pretty common pronoun, although its usage feels weird to explain in English?

Like... it is considered "gender neutral" in that there are other pronouns that are more specifically feminine or masculine and it's not one of them. But then in practice, you'd basically expect men to opt for one of the more overtly masculine pronouns, which just sort of leaves women with watashi as a default?

So it's not that it explicitly makes him sound ""feminine"" so much as it makes him sound less masculine; which suits his intellectual, non physical inclined, and at times cowardly or at least scheming demeanor. But like, it's also considered a little stuffy and sort of overly formal, or technical which is also appropriate to him.

Oh right and it's a formal pronoun as opposed to informal, but there's also a level of very formal pronouns, and it's not one of those, so that doesn't so much triangulate a position as it just leave in vaguely in the middle of the road...

Does that all make sense? it feels like super overexplaining for what is an extremely commonly used pronoun with mostly very neutral implications.

He occasionally ends sentences with a single katakana syllable rather than hiragana, indicating... not quite an "accent".. but like a sort of emphasis. Like a punctuating lilt in tone. Actually Nakao Ryuusei does this really noticeably in the anime and I don't know for sure if I heard it that way in my head and he just nailed it, or if i heard him first and it's just always colored my reading since.

A lot of the rhetorical NE[ネ] which begs confirmation, often translated into English as "...right?" (It's part of that desu ne[ですね] that you hear a lot in anime, where the desu[です] is just the verb to be, so together they tend to translate as "isn't it?")

YO[ヨ] which is again a sort of rhetorical thing that usually gets translated as something like, "...you know?"

and E?[エ?] which isn't even a word or part of speech so much as it's just like, an interrogative noise? Quite literally just "eh?"

But see this is one of those things were like... I can tell it's different from a sort of default neutral mode of speech, but I don't know what that indicates as, like, a point of characterization... Is it specifically condescending? Is it there to sound mechanical or stilted? Is it somehow old fashioned or polite/formal? I have no clue as to these sorts of specifics.

[edit]: I want to reiterate this is a rhetorical device, he's not literally asking a question and waiting for a response. If anything it's functionally the exact opposite, he's saying it to emphasize that he's stating things meant to be taken as facts, it actively closes the dialog off from further questioning.

He also says HOU[ホウ] a lot, which also isn't really a word so much as a sound, but given the pattern in speech above I feel like it's kind of inquisitive, or at least contemplative, which is (i think) how I remember Nakao delivering those lines too. Like a sort of, "Oh?" or "Huh..." or "Hmm..."

And given how close the camera gets to his face most times he says it, it gives an impression of being, not "quiet" exactly, but like you had to be close to hear it, so like, almost under his breath? Like it's clearly a noise he makes to himself, it's not like a thing or expression he's making to the other people int he scene.

FUU[フウ] or alternatively HUU, and I think once or twice FUN'/HUN'[フン] as a sort of grunt? not quite as guttural as that, but not quite a sigh? Like a "hmpf."

He also does your classic YARE YARE[ヤレヤレ] which definitely isn't unusual or unique to him but it has this kind "tut tut" or "tch"/"tsk" tone to it and tends to translated very loosely like, "oh my" or "good grief", but I think of it more like a "well, well, well..." but like kind of implicitly more exasperated than that sounds in english?

I don't know where to start trying to qualify, like... what kind of character says yare yare a lot, but it's definitely something that suits some characters more than others, and Mayuri it definitely fits.

He tends to laugh like ...KU KU...[...クク...] which is a kind of sharp snigger, sneer, or scoff. He really doesn't guffaw or cackle or have much of a more typical dramatic villain laugh, it's very understated.

Although in his fight with Pernida he does let out a full on maniacal FUHAHAHA[フハハハ] laugh for the first time in the whole series

I do love the fonts Kubo uses for a lot of Mayuri's dialog. At a certain point he starts to lean intothe same basic font as everyone else, but particualrly at the beginning he switches between a few unusual ones that are specific to Mayuri.

One's got that rough kind of pseudo handwritten quality to it. It reads to me as kind of scratchy, like a sharp pen nib on thick matte paper, with a kind of clotty ink flow that starts thick and wet but sorta tapers out too fast, leaving the lines spotty and rough.

But he also alternated with a thicker rounder font that has these subtle curls to them that I don't see other character use often.

and then he's got a second font choice that basically has all the same tones as the first one, except maybe a bit, like, louder(?) implicitly just based on context? It tends to be used in creepy action scenes where as the thinner one is more for creepy conversation?

In his very first appearance he chastises Gin, and he changes font between sentences, giving a very distinct sense that it's a change in tone. It reads to me like a low heavy hiss, almost like his voice is normally shallow or throaty, but when the font changes he suddenly drops his voice into a chestier range and speaks almost more smoothly?

Then there's just the perfectly regular fonts he uses sometimes, basically any/every other character uses these same fonts at some point or another.

and he has a neat thin wispy font that he only uses the one time when he liquefies himself. Along with the voice bubbles used, it gives a super distinct impression of his voice barely being audible.

He also one time speaks enthusiastically in an italic version of the more standard font when he arrives in Hueco Mundo.

And then in the Hell Jaw one shot he just has a completely different standard font because Kubo probably didn't keep track of what fonts he'd been using from like 8 years ago

There's also a subtly funky sort of font he uses briefly in the tbtp sidestory? I dunno what to say about this honestly. It gives me these vague 60s-70s vibes that I can't quite place? (I feel like I know i've seen it before but on what? A bowling alley sign? A little back alley cafe? a jazz album cover??)

I have no idea that the take away from that is supposed to be though.

And I guess that's it. I dunno how I thought I was gonna end this. It didn't really reveal any new facets to his character that weren't pretty apparent from the rest of his whole design and demeanor. Plus Nakao's performance in the anime basically nails all of this and i think makes it pretty apparent in tone even if you don't know much about Japanese.

[margotoo0]

Random thought

1. Sukuna would definitely get you hooked on human flesh. Quietly, secretly.

2. If you are a woman, then his favorite days of the month are your menstruation. Forgive him.

3. Sukuna would also give you a try. Oh, he would be happy if you tasted his flesh. The highest degree of love from him to you. Accept this as a gift, as a blessing, as a heart ripped from his chest to be placed in your beautiful hands.

4. He would giggle like a damn girl if you accidentally made some mistake/tripped/hit yourself and said obscene words. No, he would openly laugh at you, because you are so angry, irritated and serious.

5. She becomes a gossip very quickly. The most important thing is that something terrible happens.

6. Cats. He had been neutral towards animals all his life, but cats followed him. Luckily, you were also cursed by cats. One day you couldn’t restrain yourself and bought a short-fur cat so that there would be no problems with the fur. You had your own house, so the cat lived there. When you returned from work, the following picture took you by surprise: A huge man is sitting on your bed, and a cat is hanging from one of his four arms. Black cat grabbed Sukuna's hand and falls into his other hand. You watched this little game for a minute until you started coughing.

– Well...

Now, you have a son-cat that Sukuna fights with for bed space, lmao.

7. Sukuna loves to chat about philosophy, life and jujutsu. He will be very happy if you are of the same opinion as him. Both are so evil and destructive...

8. You found some kind of bundle of paper on his table, where things were written in a chaotic order and in quick, careless handwriting, which you fleetingly recalled as “tasty, beautiful, interesting, favorite...”. He doesn't remember things like that well.

9. A man definitely has taste, but sometimes you can take the initiative and choose something nice for him. Kimono color, painting, something for the interior...After a while, he began to consult with you. It's not because he can't decide for himself, he's just curious to know if you'll actually argue with him. He deliberately took a different position to see how ardently you would defend your tastes. He likes it, I don't know why. Little moment.

He so tiger, cat coded 🤲🏻

look how handsome he is

[spoiled-milk]

honkai star rail characters’ reaction to your tattoos [ft dan heng, welt, blade, kafka, gepard]

a/n: it's been four weeks of uni and i have pulled too many all nighters and consumed way too many energy drinks. i am running on no juice at the moment and i wrote this is like two sittings and it is very much not proof read

content warning: mentions of tattoos (duh), very out of character characters probably, shitty writing, sfw

word count: ~780 words

dan heng

neutral to your body tattoos and just see it as another part of you

i personally hc that he has at least one on his body and it’s on right shoulder (source: me i saw it in person in his bed)

doesn’t mean that every time you wear a tank top and your back is somewhat visible he can’t help but stare at you

it’s just fascinating to him. he wants to know if it has meaning to you or if you got it on a whim, if you were meticulous in picking every element represented or it’s just a collage of your favorite things. if the artwork on your back shows your lifetime story that words can’t describe

sometimes at night when the you’re giving him information to fill in the data bank and you fall asleep he’ll unconsciously hover his hand where your tattoo is and rub circles where it is

welt

welt sees your tattoos in pretty much the same way dan heng does, but he admired how the artwork on your body highlights your beauty

when you fall asleep on the couch filling out paperwork for both himeko and for the data bank, your tattoo is visible

as you snore on the red couches in the lobby of the express, welt can’t help but bring you a blanket and shift you into a position that won’t hurt your back in the morning

welt sits next to you book in hand while he watches you snooze away. eventually he too succumbs to slumber and he is seen sleeping next to you on the couch (no one is sure how the two of you manage to fit on one couch)

blade

he’s the first one and probably the only one to notice that your tattoo covers a scar

he won’t ask you about it (it’s not any of his business) but he would point it out in private

“you’ve got a scar there” he’d point at your tattoo and you’d play dumb “pfft… what scar?” then he points at the exact spot on your tattoo where ink covers scar tissue

freaks you out tbh you thought it was not that noticeable and blade senses your panic and reassures you it can’t be spotted that easily

he’s a little confused on why you would want to cover it and you tell him honestly. you don’t like it when people point it out while in public and you just found out easier to cover it up permanently without needing to always apply foundation

he feels bad for you but he’s got bandages on his hands so who is he to talk about covering up wounds

he has a new sense of closeness to you and vice versa. You sometimes catch him eyeing your tattoo and you ask him if he wants to get one too

he politely declines but if you wanted to get matching tattoos with him in a discreet spot, he won’t reject probably

kafka

i’m surprised that in that one light cone of kafka from forgotten hall she’s got none but that’s okay she’s still hot nevertheless

mommy kafka thinks your tattoos are hot probably so she deliberately buys you clothing that don’t cover the tattoo (backless dresses, sleeves less shirts, low rise jeans, shoulder less blouses)

she will be upset if you don’t wear the things she buys you

she probably thinks back tattoos are the sexiest and if you let her she would totally kiss your back just to make you squirm

loves water color style type tattoos the most, but whatever you have on you is hot to her

gepard

in one of gepard’s voice lines he mentions that he’s into gardening (hot hot hot) so i think if you had a tattoo of flowers he’d melt probably

if it’s on your shoulder or back and you show him? he will scream. he’s gonna scream, throw his jacket at you, then go into another room. he’s just a little baby you gotta cut him some slack

will admire your tattoos from afar but cannot look you in your eyes because he will go red in the face

if you ask him for his input for some flowers for a new tattoo idea that you have, will be honored that you asked him of all people

he would suggests lilies, amaryllises, morning glories, or bellflowers. don’t ask him why though he will not be able to tell you without blushing

he thinks all these flowers are gorgeous and he finds you gorgeous and if you incorporated some of these in your new tattoo he will be putty in your hands

he rarely gets to give out advice that’s not related to silvermane guard rules, regulations, and formalities so he’s secretly ecstatic

[ratwithhands]

Character relations/opinions!

Alright before I post any more Battle Addict stuff I should probably explain what a League Council is. Here's a summarized diagram:

A Pokemon League is a region's network of specialized skilled trainers. It is run by the League Council, which includes finance, HR, marketing, PR, and other managing departments which are divided into different branches depending on who they work with.

This is all to say that everything gets messy very quickly when news of the diagnosis spreads through the network. Originally the diagnosis was supposed to be private information for only the Battle and League departments, however certain higher ups felt it was a safety risk and notified gym leaders as well in the event of future collaborations.

The network is mostly divided into people who are positive/neutral about the news, and people who feel negatively about the twins as a result. Coworkers who were already familiar/close with the two tend to be positive, or at least supportive, whereas those who didn't know them got another reason to avoid them. Some people think they should go on leave for "recovery", but some are more forward and want them terminated.

If you're wondering where Cynthia falls in this, she's a foreign top league worker (Sinnoh Champion) who is hosted in Unova. Basically she has dept. employees assigned to help her connect to people around the region and get different services if requested. She's basically watching everything unfold from the sidelines, with every interview about her opinion boiling down to "lol if you're scared of people stronger than you then get good". She does also bring up historic accounts of CM/HCCM though, mostly to clarify that CM is not a new or scary thing. She's not for or against the twins, rather just hoping to use this as an opportunity to teach others.

I didn't end up drawing her because I got tired but Elesa got the news too!! She actually got it before everyone else since the twins decided to go tell her beforehand. The general scene basically had Ingo and Emmet deliberating in the car, Ingo telling Emmet it's not too late to turn around and go home while Emmet was hesitant but adamant that they needed to tell her first. She probably took it the worst out of everyone but that's mostly just cause it caught her off guard that her friends would just randomly drop in to deliver the news. She's still rooting for them though, mostly trying to support the Subway with more collaborative events to make the twins look better after the hit from the media. She also tries to rework Emmet's restraints where possible, usually trying to make them look more cohesive with the rest of an outfit or trying to make them less visible (cause as much as Emmet says it's not a big deal it's still the first thing he looks at in his reflection).

Here's them in alt clothes :7

Man is cuffed under there (T_T)

Can't really think of too much to say so hope you guys like the art and see you later!

[lamentable-comedy]

The thing about Baz is that he's so good at not having the things he wants, but in a way that, like. Isn't repressing that he wants it in the first place. He acknowledges the desire, but denies any fulfillment of it and gets really, really good at doing that. His whole thing is carefully and deliberately maintaining a very rigid self control to compensate for how much of himself he feels like he is powerless over. You can't control the want, it's always gonna be there, but you can tell yourself it won't happen and refuse to consider indulging it.

He spends years knowing he's in love with Simon but wholeheartedly believing it's impossible that anything would happen between them AND, moreover, that it shouldn't. That second part is the important one, cause Baz isn't just against wanting things for its own sake, he's really hard on himself for wanting things that he thinks he shouldn't want or doesn't deserve. Like, "oh we can't have that, so it's Bad to want it". I think that's why there's less of the "I'm depraved, ask anyone" vibe to Baz's attraction to Simon in the second two books. I think he's still interested the same stuff with Simon, but because he now knows he can actually have a relationship with Simon, he's no longer moralizing wanting that, which I think leads to him being less likely to frame it as depravity in his own mind.

Also, if it wasn't obvious... this is a vampire thing. Like, Baz is like this because his daily existence is defined by craving something which would be morally wrong to take and which he therefore will never allow himself AND ALSO, Baz's vampirism is a really great metaphor for this part of his character. He forces himself to get by on more or less the bare minimum amount of blood. He doesn't drink humans. He can't control the desire for it, but it's an immoral desire and one he doesn't want, so he restricts himself as much as possible surrounding it. He never denies that the desire is there-- he can't-- but he DOES moralize wanting it; the fact that he wants to drink blood makes him an irredeemable monster who is unworthy of love and whom any Good Person would have killed. As a result, deny himself fulfillment becomes a way to punish himself (the Right Thing to do), for a desire he's disgusted by, and so he denies himself as much as possible, even beyond the extents of the desire itself.

Baz is ashamed of hunting and drinking animals, but he doesn't need to be. He's not doing anything worse than a human who hunts for food. But, because it betrays the deeper desire for human blood, it becomes shameful and something to deny himself when, really, it's neutral. Positive even, if you consider that it's a way of not, you know. Doing a murder. Compare Baz's perspective on it (not wanting Simon to see him drink rats, knowing what the bare minimum he needs to survive is in a way that clearly implies that he's tried only drinking that) to Simon's in "Snow for Christmas", where he expresses admiration and affection for how Baz looks feeding. Simon's perspective is devoid of Baz's moralizing self-loathing, and presents his behaviour without the baggage Baz has placed on it. Denying himself animal blood is not necessary and serves no purpose. Caring for himself by feeding is admirable.

I see Baz learning to control his fangs when he eats, on a metaphorical level, as a step in learning to manage the kind of big, desperate want that he moralizes and then denies himself, which itself lets him inch a little toward lessening the shame he feels. He moderates the desire (controls his fangs) rather than restricting his actions (not eating in front of people). This allows him decouple the desire (vamp hunger) from unrelated activities that he attaches to it (eating food), and actually let himself partake in something that previously felt wrong (eat food without revealing his fangs). His desire for blood is immoral, so he can't have that. All hunger is now associated with hunger for blood, so he can't eat around humans because he can't reveal that he wants something that he's Not Allowed to want.

I don't think the end point of his progress on this is indulging in the desires he feels ashamed of. Sometimes there are reasons not to do something you can't help wanting to do (there are some pretty good reasons not to go around drinking humans). I do think Baz needs to be gentler on himself for wanting things that for whatever reason-- shame, self-hatred, what have you-- he believes he shouldn't want. He only does this with his love for Simon because it's reciprocated, which doesn't actually solve the problem, it just recategorizes Simon/their relationship as something okay to want. He needs to learn to stop punishing himself for wanting things even if they're desires he can't or shouldn't act on. I think by AWTWB he has made progress. He's getting there. But MAN do I have a lot of feelings about the fact that he's like this at all.

[pluckyredhead]

Can you please say more about the Lanterns' politics?

I am so glad you asked me about this because I've been thinking about it since I reblogged that post but also I'm definitely about to get yelled at lol. ANYWAY THIS IS GOING TO BE LONG.

Tl;dr: John is the only one with a coherent political position or an up-to-date voter registration.

Hal:

So something interesting about Hal is that his stories are often very political but his character is not. With one extremely obvious exception, he rarely talks about politics; rather, he serves as a means through which to tell political stories, usually unintentionally.

What do I mean by that? Well, for example, in the Silver Age, his love interest would occasionally be possessed by a misandrist space jewel that would force her to attack him, but always lose because women are inherently inferior to men and prefer to be subjugated by them anyway. That's the original Star Sapphire concept. It's wildly misogynistic, but it doesn't mean Hal the character is misogynistic. But it's also a very political story, even if I don't think the writer was deliberately trying to make a point so much as...being an average, thoughtlessly sexist guy living in the 60s. (Carol continues to be the subject of mindbogglingly sexist writing and art well into the 2000s. Fucking comics.)

And so you have Hal Jordan, whose love life was ruined by his girlfriend getting promoted above him and who called his best friend by a racist nickname for decades; Hal Jordan, poster boy for chest-thumping post-9/11 kneejerk patriotism; Hal Jordan, lightning rod for a certain kind of regressive bigoted fanboyism. Choosing Hal as the Lantern for a particular story over John or Kyle has come to signify something very specific, but none of that is necessarily reflective of what Hal himself believes.

So what about Hal himself? Well, when we first meet him, he's the epitome of privilege: a white, straight, cis, Christian (I know he's canonically half-Jewish now but that's only as of the past decade or so), ablebodied, upper middle class (Geoff Johns retconned him to have a working class background, but in the Silver Age, he had one uncle who was a millionaire, another who was a judge, and a successful politician brother) man with a flashy job. Privilege tends to lean Republican; even if he is from California, I suspect Hal voted for Eisenhower in 1956.

In GL/GA, the word "Republican" isn't used to my recollection, but Hal is definitely presented as...I'm going to say conservative by I mean lower-case C. He doesn't have deeply held political beliefs, but he's traditional. He doesn't question the system, because he's never had to. He resists things that challenge the way he's always understood the world works, and that's very relatable - most people do! And he will absolutely argue with Ollie, who certainly isn't always right about everything. But he's also willing to listen, and have his mind changed, and certainly reachable via appeals to compassion and fairness.

Once the "relevance" trend of the late 60s-early 70s was over, Hal's stories default back to ostensibly politically neutral, although obviously nothing is actually politically neutral. In the late 80s and early 90s he's the most unpleasant version of himself, and that has political manifestations, like when he allows John to be imprisoned in apartheid South Africa for a ridiculous and unnecessary crime Hal himself committed. It's extremely fucked up, but again, it's less because of Hal's actual opinions and more because Christopher Priest wanted to write about apartheid, even if it does make Hal look incredibly, horrifically racist.

Then jump to the mid-2000s and Green Lantern: Rebirth, and you might imagine that losing his hometown, getting possessed by a giant space bug, becoming a supervillain, dying, and becoming the embodiment of God's vengeance might have some effect on Hal's politics, but that is not what Geoff Johns is here to write. Johns is writing a Hal who teleported in from, like, 1967 - no nuance allowed. He's a summer blockbuster that walks like a man. He's a Baja Blast. He's never had a coherent political thought in his life. In his defense, he has had more and goofier concussions than any superhero I can think of and his brain is smooth like an egg. Still.

Anyway, all of this is to say that I think Hal tends to default to center right positions but can be easily coaxed over to center left. That said, he has never not once in his life had his shit together enough to vote in a single election, not even for his own brother.

Guy:

So Guy's deal is a little bit complicated because his most vocally political era was also in part due to severe and personality-altering brain damage.

When Guy was originally introduced in the 1960s, he had the pleasantly bland personality of all superheroes. Many years later, he suffered a series of major injuries, torture, and a lengthy coma, and he emerged from the coma in 1985 with the aggressive, abrasive personality he's best known for today. Justice League International took that even further, using him to parody the jingoistic, red-blooded American action hero of the 80s.

This version of Guy is a vocal fan of Ronald Reagan and despises the USSR. He's pro-war, proudly xenophobic, and treats women badly enough that it crosses the line into repeated sexual harassment, both physical and verbal. (To be fair...ish, this last also applies to Wally West and arguably a number of other men, and was always played for laughs. It was gross all around.)

Again, this is partially a manifestation of his brain damage. There's also a running gag in JLI where if he gets hit on the head, his personality changes to this cloying, timid, gentle one, sort of halfway between a child and a flamboyant gay stereotype. Hit him again and he goes back to Asshole Guy. I'm not going to pretend I don't find some of the gags funny, but it's obviously all highly problematic, and not just from a medical standpoint.

That said, I don't think we can dismiss Guy's politics or his usual personality as simply a manifestation of brain damage. We see in later flashbacks that he developed the abrasiveness as a defense mechanism from growing up in an abusive home, and as he matures through the 90s, he doesn't actually become a significantly different person, even after his Vuldarian healing factor kicks in and heals his brain. (It's a thing.) I think it's more accurate to say that the brain damage probably affected his impulse control, his filter, and arguably even his paranoia levels.

All of which is to say that as much as I would love to go "Guy's better now, so he's not a Republican!"...that dog won't hunt. I think a really good canon writer could make the case that Guy is pro-union-style working class and also a former teacher so he's at least center left, but as of now canon evidence is pretty firmly on the red side. It doesn't help that the GLC has been written as fetishistically pro-cop and pro-military since Johns got his grubby hands all over it. I will happily ignore the New 52 retcon that Guy was a cop, and you could even try to argue that he dislikes cops because his brother was a corrupt cop who became a supervillain, but I think it's much more likely that he identifies with cops as a Corps member. Although I don't think he would have any patience for killer cops. ("You were afraid for your life even though you were the only one with a weapon? Then fucking quit, coward.")

All of that said, I think Guy is similar to Hal: defaults to center right, can be talked into center left on certain issues but he's more stubborn about it. (They would also both be enraged by Jan 6 and disgusted by the current Republican party - I can't quite argue that Guy Gardner is a Democrat but Green Lanterns don't have any patience for traitors or cowards.) It's also kind of a moot point because he never knows what is happening on Earth and hasn't voted since his pre-coma days.

John:

Oh John Stewart, thank god for you.

John was introduced as an explicitly political character in an explicitly political story. The first time we see him, he's stepping in to defend Black men from a white cop, citing his own knowledge of the law to do so. He shows a much more perceptive and informed perspective on the issue's main plot (a racist senator running for president) than Hal does. Even in the little moment above, we see that he's sensitive to exactly what it means for him, a Black man, to be taking on this role.

None of this is a surprise, since we'll later learn that John's parents were civil rights activists. Not only would he not have had the privilege Hal and Guy did to assume his existence was politically neutral, he was explicitly educated about political realities and progressive advocacy from childhood. He's well-informed, he's passionate, and he's going to tell you when you are being fucking stupid.

John isn't immune from the GL cop/military...thing, although I can't blame Johns for that - it was the cartoon that made him a Marine, and the comics followed suit. But that's never outweighed his origin or his upbringing. Like, he's friends with the DCU's fictional version of Nelson Mandela.

This one is straightforward: John is a staunch progressive. He is, however, in outer space 90% of the time, so he's always at least a little bit out of date. I imagine every time he comes back to Earth he spends the first 24 hours watching the news in abject horror.

Kyle:

Kyle doesn't talk about politics a lot, but when he does, he lands pretty much where you'd expect a young California-born artist living in New York City to land: to the left. My read on Kyle is that he hasn't really thought any of his politics through, which makes sense - he's a character who is led by emotion over reason every time. He doesn't have John's carefully thought-through arguments or knowledge of the law behind him. I feel like when something political upsets him, he's more likely to splutter angrily than make a coherent argument (which: same). When he's given the time to think things through and speak from the heart, though, he can be very eloquent, like in his speech to Terry after Terry accidentally comes out to him.

It's also worth pointing out that his solo appearances were mostly in the 90s, which were prone to avoiding politics or only addressing them in a halfhearted both sides-y way like the story above.

That said, I don't think he ever actually does anything about his political opinions. He never votes in midterm or primary elections, and probably only voted in a presidential one because Alex dragged him along one time. I feel like Donna tried to do the same when they were dating and that was when Kyle realized he'd forgotten to change his voter registration from California to New York. Jennie wasn't responsible enough to Mom him into doing his civic duty, and he's been in space pretty much nonstop ever since, so...

Simon:

In that other post, I said Simon's experiences should have radicalized him, but instead he was created by Geoff Johns. Simon is a Muslim, Lebanese-American man who came of age in the post-9/11 era, and was wrongfully convicted of terrorism and waterboarded at Guantanamo Bay. His reaction to this was...to put on a ski mask and wave a gun around. Like, it's been a while since I've read these issues, but aside from the "ripped from the headlines!!!" of it all, I feel like Simon's experiences largely don't inform his actions or perspective except that he's super angry (fair enough).

The thing about Simon (and Jessica) is that he hasn't been around very long, and most comics don't have characters directly expressing political opinions. It's not a coincidence that these characters are in chronological order and each write-up is shorter than the last. I can think of about three times where Kyle has ever said anything I can interpret as political, and he's been around for 30 years. Simon only has a third of that history. So while one could certainly extrapolate what Simon's opinions are likely to be, I can't think of any canon where he actually says them.

Jessica:

Jessica has even less to go on in terms of explicitly political comics. You'd think she wouldn't like guns because of what happened to her friends, but she has one of her own and doesn't seem bothered by Simon's. I'd imagine she has opinions on immigration as someone whose family is from Mexico and Honduras, but it never comes up. If I were writing for DC, I'd make both Simon and Jess leftists, but as for actual canon proof? I got nothing.

I will say that she probably avoids political discussions because anxiety, and I bet she got really good at voting by mail during her years not leaving the house. She probably votes by mail from space. Maybe John's not the only one with an up-to-date voter registration.

Kilowog:

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I really don't have any time or respect for people who call themselves marine mammal scientists while acting as lobbyists and continuously misleading the general public about marine mammal welfare.

Animal welfare is a relatively new scientific field - especially in cetaceans. It's really only in the last few decades that we've been actively studying and determining welfare parameters in dolphins and whales.

That said, we have scientists like Dr. Isabella Clegg, Dr. Jason Bruck, Dr. Heather Hill, Dr. Kelly Jaakkola, Dr. Kathleen Dudzinski, Dr. Fabienne Delfour and many other incredible scientists, research fellows and facilities contributing amazing welfare data.

Not to mention the fantastic global Cetacean Welfare Study

We're learning how to study welfare, what good welfare and bad welfare looks like, what affects welfare the most, monitoring welfare acoustically, comparing parameters to wild animals, what is actually the best habitat for these animals and so much more.

Yet you have people like Dr. Naomi Rose, Dr. Lori Marino and Dr. Ingrid Visser who claim that "the science is settled" on cetacean welfare. That we don't need to do anymore research, show's over, nothing to see here. Tank bad, sanctuary good, don't look at over there at the actual research, trust us - we're the scientists.

That's why I get so frustrated when I see people uncritically use these scientist's sources. Or any sort of anti cap media who take their word as gospel, regurgitate Blackfish talking points and deliberately mislead with emotive, anthropomorphic language.

I can't understand why, when presented with the notion that these animals may not be suffering, that the response is anger.

Why? When I realised that the orcas at SeaWorld were living a much better life than what was portrayed in Blackfish I felt relief! I was happy to see the high energy enrichment and training session videos.

I was happy when I travelled all the way to Orlando from Australia and spent hours and hours at SeaWorld at the underwater viewing area. I asked questions and I watched the orcas rest, play and engage in sessions. I was excited about the idea of being apart of this world and getting to work with animals using positive reinforcement and prioritising welfare.

Little did I know that only in a few years I'd be networking with those amazing welfare scientists and working with dolphins! I don't expect others to have the same journey I did, but I hope some of what I post can make a difference in changing how people perceive cetacean welfare.

There's a lot more we need to learn and study but a lot of the current data is pointing to positive/neutral welfare states in cetaceans in human care. I hope more will be published on orcas - a lot of the data is in bottlenose dolphins (which is probably why lobbyists aren't targeting them in legislation as much anymore).

Cetacean welfare is in no way a settled science, so be very wary of sources that claim it is or make uncritical claims about "captivity".

[fanficsforheartandsoul]

New Recruit | Simon Riley x Masked!GN!Reader

To keep this as neutral as possible since anon did not specify the gender, this is written in 2nd POV. 

There are some spanish sentences here and although I’m actually learning the language with Duolingo (lmao) I used a translator for this, I apologize if it sounds clunky. I googled how to use gender neutral forms but I’m not sure if I did it correctly sooo.

Also, this is very short because I can’t for the love of god, produce words and a correct sentence in my head at the moment.

Fandom: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022)

Warnings: Ghost is OOC, Ghost might have a kink or more than one, Typical COD Pew Pew is Mostly Omitted, Injuries

Summary: A new member joins taskforce 141 for the hunt of Hassan but you are not what the others expect. Something sparks in Ghost when he shares eye contact with you and you two are on the same eye level.

Word Count: 2,3k

If you want to be tagged in my stories send me a pm with the fandom/character name! Or comment on the fic :)

Masterlist

It was already unusual for the taskforce to get a new member. Therefore it was even more unusual to get one in the middle of an important operation in another country. 

It wasn't exactly convenient but when would it ever be?

Fact was that Hassan Zyani, a major of the terror organization Al Qatala escaped their grasps.

They needed to work with Mexican Special Forces to follow his tracks, so if it was one more member or two, it didn’t really matter now. 

Yet it was quite a surprise when Ghost and Soap heard the news.

"Someone will join you in México, a new member of the taskforce. I wanted to introduce the lieutenant a bit later, but Chryso was in the country anyways, so I guess now is as good as ever."

Ghost listened silently to his captain on speaker phone while Soap asked the questions lingering in his head; what kind of muppet name was Chryso? And why would the soldier join them right now when they had something so important to do?

Trusting a stranger in a hostile environment wasn’t exactly an easy thing to do.

Price ignored Soap’s words deliberately and continued: 

“Chryso is already known to the Los Vaqueros and Alejandro and as you're aware they know their way around in Las Almas. Be nice and protect your backs. We will talk later and I’m sure Chryso will answer any questions you have.”

Great, Ghost thought and looked at the flabbergasted Soap who stared at the phone display showing the end of the call.

“He just hung up?? What the hell... I feel like someone just told me my sister got married in secret and I have to meet her husband.”

He raised an eyebrow but the other obviously couldn’t see it behind his skull mask.

“You have a sister?”

Soap blinked.

“No, but if I had one...”

Ghost sighed. He hoped that the new addition to the team wouldn’t mess up their operation and would focus on the task at hand. Catching Hassan.

-

You startled out of your sleep when you heard your call sign.

“They’re arriving in 5, Chryso” said Felipe, the Los Vaqueros soldier who was on the look out with you in one of the abandoned shacks close to the village where intel suggested Hassan Zyani’s location.

Your last undercover mission had taken a toll on your body and you tried to make up for it by napping whenever you could. Felipe’s humming had made you drowsy and apparently your consciousness had slipped away for a bit.

A quick glance at your combat watch proved that you had slept more than an hour and you sat up straight quickly.

“Perdón, you know my last OP still got me fucked up... Did anything move?”

“No pasa nada.”

The man waved his hand dismissively and watched as you stood up and stretched your arms. He had to tilt his head slightly to look up to you. Felipe's eyes wandered over your mask and then he said:

“They’re staying put and keeping quiet.”

You breathed out and rolled your shoulder. Maybe you shouldn’t have slept in such an uncomfortable position...

You were about to meet two members of Taskforce 141 - your new team - and group up with them and the Los Vaqueros to participate in one of their missions. No chit-chat and icebreakers, just business, straight-up. 

This was how work had always been with Captain John Price for the few times you had fought together, so it didn’t exactly bother you. But it was making you a bit antsy that he wouldn’t be part of the operation.

You weren’t exactly keen on entrusting your back to total strangers. Not with your... special circumstances.

Your habit of wearing a mask 24/7 often confused other people and many soldiers had treated you slightly differently due to it. Whether it was done deliberately or subconsciously, it often hampered with the beginning of your new relationships until people finally got used to it. Which usually took a while. Seen by the lack of other soldiers accompanying you and Felipe.

Strangely Price didn’t seem to react much to your mask. Maybe that was why you felt comfortable around him. He didn’t treat you any different, he had just looked at it once and then moved on. 

You hadn’t told him why you were wearing it but if anyone had to know, you would probably feel most comfortable telling him.

And when you had signed the contract to work as a new member of taskforce 141 you had mulled about doing it. Possibly when you would first see him again. You had believed that it would be today.

But he wouldn’t be part of this mission, which he told you 2 days ago. Instead Lieutenant Simon Riley and Sergeant John Mactavish would cover your back. 

You had heard their names before when Price talked to you about joining the taskforce but you didn’t know anything specific about them besides their names and ranks.

And Rodolfo and Alejandro didn’t let anything slip when you asked them if they knew anything about the two soldiers.

They did know more than you but based on the little smirk around Alejandro’s lips they purposely kept information from you, which annoyed you slightly.

But well, Alejandro was a colonel, furthermore the leader of Los Vaqueros and he obviously had to be informed about his allies in such a special operation. 

You knew not to question him and he wouldn’t keep anything dangerous from you, he wasn’t like that that’s what you could tell based on the few days you had spent at the Las Almas base. He kept his soldiers safe, had to in the corruption-filled town. 

And you would meet the other taskforce members soon anyways.

So you decided to focus on the task at hand and ignore everything else. Whether that would involve strange looks and stupid comments about your mask or not.

The Al Qatala terrorist had to be caught by all means. The files you had received told you enough about the threat he posed to basically everyone in this world. He wouldn’t escape your grasp. Not under your watch.

You strapped your black vest tighter and checked your gear.

A low hum announced the distant approach of some vehicles and Felipe looked out the window to see 3 black jeeps drive down the dirt road.

“They’re inbound.”

You nodded and followed him out of the room down the stairs.

-

"I have a feeling you'll fit right in, just like Y/N."

Ghost was still mulling over the strange comment of Rodolfo Parra, when they spotted the army checkpoint and Alejandro explained why they had to evade it and he forgot the words quickly.

However, when their convoy arrived at the other side of the river in their AO, he and Soap exited the truck and a few seconds later when he first exchanged eye contact with you, he remembered the words instantly. 

You had just moved out of the shack, following a Los Vaqueros soldier. Your back was turned towards the convoy when the man told you something and he gesticulated while you checked your back pockets.

Ghost noted that the soldier talking to you was at least a head smaller than you. You were clad in back and his interest peaked when he realized that your head was covered by a hood. Oh...?

He followed Soap behind Alejandro and Rodolfo and walked up to you while the other Los Vaqueros soldiers readied their guns and spread out. 

“No me gusta el hecho de que no tengamos refuerzos” he heard you say through your clenched teeth and your counterpart hummed in agreement. 

Alejandro coughed and you turned to face them while he introduced you to him and Soap. Your eyes roamed over them and they lingered a bit longer on him, which made Ghost’s heart beat quicker for some reason.

“This is lieutenant Y/N L/N”, the colonel announced and the smirk on his lips suddenly made sense. He just stared and Soap did the same. 

“Just call me Chryso” you said and gave Alejandro an annoyed look that the other ignored and you turned your head back to look at Ghost and you stretched out your hand. 

Ghost’s voice was rougher than usual when he told you his name: 

“...Simon Riley, but call me Ghost.”

He shook your hand with a firm grip. Hazel and e/c eyes met, both hidden in the shadows of a mask. He caught a glimpse of your spirit in the e/c shade and noted that the skin around your eyes was also hidden behind black makeup.

“Nice to meet you, Lieutenant.”

Fuck, he thought when he realized that he could gaze directly into your eyes without lifting or lowering his head. 

And bloody fucking hell, he thought when he realized that in a very strange way he found that mask of yours attractive. Like you were mirroring him, like you two belonged together, like you were meant to be his and he was meant to be yours. 

There were not many things that Ghost found immediately attractive upon meeting someone. 

He considered himself to be more of a “character”-person than someone who cared about appearances first but there were some things that just drew him in...

Pretty smiles for example. Or the hint of a strong character in one’s eyes. But what really invited his immediate attraction was what Soap had called the most surprising and strangest thing ever when he accidentally spilt this piece of information during one of their long scouting sessions; when someone was just as tall as him.

There was just something about someone being his height that created a spark in his chest. 

“That’s a fucking kink” Soap had said back then. Looking at you now and considering the growing feeling in his chest, the scot might have been right.

He let go of your hand before he was holding onto it for too long but he kept his eyes on you even when you had already turned towards Soap to shake his hand.

“Sergeant John Mactavish, but call me Soap.” 

The sergeant shook your hand enthusiastically and grinned from ear to ear. He glanced at him and Ghost’s alarm went off in his head.

“You have pretty long legs eh? How tall exactly are you?”

You blinked and Ghost couldn’t stop himself from groaning inwardly when he saw slight confusion and annoyance in your eyes. 

“Roughly 6′3 if I remember correctly.”

Soap looked at him but Ghost ignored the stare deliberately and when Alejandro told them to follow him, you immediately turned away from them and hurried to fall into the colonel’s and Rodolfo’s step.

“Oh dios, lo dijo.” Rodolfo said and laughed and Ghost cursed himself for not learning more Spanish on the way here when you groaned. He was about 99% sure this was about your interaction just now.

"¿Dijo que?" Alejandro asked, his voice now lower as they moved closer to the houses, weapons raised.

"Una de las tres cosas que Y/N odia a que le pregunte.¿’Por qué Chryso como apodo’? ¿’Por qué llevas una máscara’? y ¿’Qué tan alte eres’?”

Rodolfo muttered and while the colonel laughed quietly you only sighed.

Ghost didn’t understand what exactly was going on but based on the mocking tone Rodolfo used for his last few words, it was probably something bad. He also mentioned your call sign and he was smart enough to know that the conversation was most likely about them. 

As much as it bothered him, they had already reached the stone wall so he turned his attention to the mission at hand.

“Where’s Hassan?” he asked.

“White two-story building at the back”, Alejandro replied and two seconds later they entered the gate and he didn’t have time anymore to think about your height, nor your skull mask that seemed to compliment his own and the fact that your utility straps nicely showed off your thighs. 

-

But all these thoughts and much more rushed through his mind after he had helped you out of the river. 

It had already been hard for him to breathe with his mask but your experience with yours had been much worse, the cloth wasn’t exactly made for missions involved with water and you - in your words “almost got waterboarded back there”. 

Added to the harsh landing in the river and the bullet graze on your left arm, you weren’t exactly feeling your best and you felt exhausted for a moment, so much so that you had to drag your limbs out of the water when it was your turn. 

The soldier in front of you turned around and you looked up at him from your cowering position where you had temporarily bandaged your wound.

Ghost offered you his hand and you took it. 

“Thanks” you huffed and he pulled you up with more force than necessary which messed with your balance and made you take a step forward. 

He could see a waterdroplet on the tip of your eyelashes and his heart stuttered when he noticed how close you two suddenly were. Your loud breathing made his ears tingle and he took a step back, though not letting go of your hand. 

“You good, Chryso?”, he asked, ignoring his imagination where you were panting for a different reason. Jesus Christ, you were injured. And he hadn’t even seen your face yet.

You nodded and he let go of your, pointing at your left arm. 

“I’ll bandage your arm in the car, that wrap is a sad excuse of first aid.” 

You huffed in annoyance but he saw how your eyes turned into slight halfmoons again, showing him that you were actually smiling.

“Whatever, lieutenant.”

You walked past him, waving your hand in dismissal and he followed you, a small grin on his lips, definitely not sneaking a glance at that ass in those wet black cargo pants. 

-

“I’m really curious... What kind of muppet name is Chryso?”

Alejandro snorted. “Y dale.”

You sighed beside Ghost while he secured the re-wrapped bandage. Soap looked at you through the front mirror.

“We had this guy in my unit, Turner, he was a huge biology nerd. When he first met me, he just said ‘Chrysocyon brachyurus’  which is the scientific name for the maned wolf in South America.”

Soap tilted his head in confusion when Alejandro laughed. “Okay...?”

The colonel tapped the steering wheel. “They have really long legs, hermano. Really long.”

[metaben]

Body Language of the Emperor

NOTE: I have a habit of using they/he for Emperor but I understand that as a Mind Flayer, his gender contains multitudes.

So, I'm really eager to explore the body language behind the Emperor, and specifically how the body language of the DG reflects his own expressions and is essentially a V-tuber avatar.

I obviously have to replay the game and examine his animations for this, so a full examination will take some time. However, I'm already intrigued by his body language as DG and want to make some points.

Scott Joseph, actor for the Emperor, has remarked that a big challenge in playing the Emperor is their restricted movements. He'd leave filming/recording with pain in his shoulders, due to how restrained the Emperor's posture is.

The Emperor is extremely deliberate in all his motions, almost like he doesn't want to startle you, or is trying to contain his greater powers. While I played a recent scene, I noticed this is true for the DG.

This is their sort of neutral stance, but it's firm. Everything about them is tightly held. Shoulders, jaws, lips. The only exception are the eyes, which always look at the player with a very open expression.

A moment later, his posture firms even more, but is still restrained. He's leant forward in a beseeching manner, almost confrontational, but it's very subdued. Then in his shoulders and back, you can see again that rigidity. Interestingly, their eyes barely change. They continue to look on almost pleadingly throughout your conversation.

Now look here! A flourish of the hand! Something we see Emperor do a few times, but still very restrained. In scenes with the DG, it's very easy to miss these quick yet dramatic motions. But his shoulders, his jaw, his neck. The restraint is still there. And again, I must point out how his eyes betray all this restraint.

Finally, we have this. In this moment, he's pleased. I can't remember which dialogue option I chose, but it was an agreeable one to end off the scene positively. His shoulders have relaxed, but not much, and his jaw and mouth have relaxed, implying the hint of a smile. Yet, you can tell he's still not fully reassured- most notably, his eyes are no longer pleading, but they are withdrawn, darkened. I wonder if he might feel some guilt that he can't give you all the answers right then.

But overall, he's feeling a bit more confident here, a bit more trusting of you, but he knows he still can't fully relax.

All these screenshots were taken from the scene that starts with "you haven't been using your tadpole powers, you think you don't need them" in act 1, after speaking to Halsin but not eating any tadpoles.

Anyway, I'm really intrigued by all this. A big criicism of the Emperor is that he approaches you in an altered form, and rather than demonise him for this, I'm more interested in pointing out how his astral avatar still corresponds to his true feelings.

One thing I can say about BG3 is the animation is stunning and purposeful and really shows off the actor's physical skills through their mocap, and this is evident most of all with the Emperor, whose body language is micromanaged to communicate his purposes. Big shout out to Scott Joseph, I really believe he was given the hardest role to portray, and he killed it!