#the depth of the characters and the fucking moral greyness

[mikimeiko]

The Lazarus Project | Season 2 (2023), Joe Barton

[dykenastasyafilippovna]

sending character helene

First impression

i joined the boys and stared at her in my minds eye bc the first thing she does is just Be Hot on page! i didnt know whether she would be important or not so i dont really have a well thought out first impression bc like so much was happening

Impression now

my girl.. my special girl.. i adore her so much and i think she has so much more going on than the book gives her credit for. despite the terrible misogyny she is still complex and theres much in depth analysis to do with her . she is a lovely scheming woman and i love her ACTUAL moral greyness (messing wit h natasha) and that shes not just morally grey bc shes allegedly promiscuous .

Favorite moment

converting to Catholicism and how she cuts off the guy thats trying to convert her and says Ok We're done with that now how do i get rid of pierre?

Idea for a story

id love to go into her pov about how she sees her relationships . her perspective is so tragic to Me..

Unpopular opinion

SHE DIDNT FUCK DOLOKHOV OOH I HATE THIS 'OPINION' SO MUCH IF YOU THINK THIS U ARE BRAINLESS!!!!!!!!!!!! idc if it was supposed to be canon in the drafts or if tolstoy meant for th rumor to be true Death of the author it just doesnt make sense to me its fuckass stupid and You know my rant. shes not like that

Favorite relationship

I Love her big sister trait with anatole. theyre specials to me . the only real connection she has is with her stupid baby brother and theyre toxic and strange but i think at the core of it they love each other wonderful style its really jsut the circumstances

Favorite headcanon

My gilda inspired headcanon where she never slept with any men she just played card games and danced with them privately And made it seem like she was sleeping arounnd for her reasons.

[gayregis]

netflix messing up all the characters makes me paranoid for baptism of fire even though i’m almost certain they won’t get there without being cancelled first

if they make regis violent . i will be violent

[cringefailantagonist]

someone will explain in depth what grey morality is and how complex it can be because it's a mixture of good and bad actions for good and bad reasons and some dumbass will come in unironically like "um actually this character did Evil™ things so he can't be morally grey. also i have the moral understanding of a catholic priest so saying that someone who did horrible things is actually a fleshed out human being goes against my boundaries. moral greyness is moral whiteness with flavor and reserved only for characters with crimes i can personally stomach" like honeyboo morally grey characters are BAD PEOPLE. THEY DO BAD THINGS. HORRIBLE THINGS EVEN.

the only reason you think being morally grey makes their crimes have less weigh is cause you have a warped understanding of what it actually is. of course interpretation may differ, especially in a media like the Dream SMP with so many P.O.V's it's always important to take the whole character into account when making an analysis. saying "from the point of view of this character, this other character is evil" is not the same as "this character is only evil period". a character's opinion is not a fact. c!Dream IS evil and morally black from c!Tommy's P.O.V because he's his victim and he has no business trying to understand the man who ruined his life. that doesn't make everything else about c!Dream any less valid or true. he HAS reasons for what he does. he DOES, in fact, do good sometimes. he's a complicated little cookie. his crimes are still crimes and obviously reprehensible and in no way excusable. understanding is not excusing!

little example of a grey character that i personally hate A LOT: garbage on fire Endeavor from Boku no Hero Academia. he's fucking awful. he's abusive, egocentric and a self pitying coward. he's also in the middle of a redemption arc and even before that, he was the second (now first because ~reasons~) most efficient hero in all of Japan, making him a very standard morally grey character. doesn't make what he did to his family any less horrible (20+ years of abuse is really hard to water down) but it also doesn't erase all the good he did as an active protector to the general public.

despite (apparent) popular belief, moral greyness is not a get off jail free card, it's just a character model. a writing tool to make your plot/characters more interesting. that's it

thanks for coming to my ted talk

[balillee]

my unpopular dsmp opinions, some of which genuinely should be popular

c!dream has crossed the moral event horizon and is irredeemable. once you cross that threshold, you're no longer a 'morally grey' character.

pre-recorded, heavily produced lore killed the lore. it was cool, sure, but you completely misunderstand the magic that the smp had when people watched it initially. the story is improv and that's how we like it. we can tell the cc's have lost interest in it, you can admit that to us, we'll understand, just stop lying to me.

c!dream's pov isn't necessary to understand his character or his motivations. if you've watched literally any c!primeboys stream he's basically spelled it out for you.

i don't understand how fans can dislike l'manberg or have claimed to be against it since the beginning. i honestly don't get it. what's so bad about wanting your own spot where you make your own rules and skirt accountability that has been used to technically oppress you before - and, before someone who never saw the earlier streams tries to disagree with this, the og l'manberg crew were imprisoned for shit that everyone else on the server was practically encouraged to do. also, what do you have against fun and happiness?

i think some of you forget that 'hybrids' aren't a thing, discounting c!ranboo. there's no piglin hybrids, c!techno is just a pig. there's no avian hybrids, c!phil is just a man with wings. there's no creeper hybrids, c!sam is just a creeper who's indecently exposed from the hips down. canonically there's no hybrids, and therefore no hybrid discrimination. people ran with that concept too much.

the loss and the fanon rewriting of the early lore up until pogtopia has ruined fandom perception of c!dream and the og l'manberg boys. c!tommy is more morally white than you think he is, and c!dream has always been a villain - he massacres and he kills and he destroys and he schemes and he always has broken his own rules. no wonder the boys wanted their own space after how they were treated.

i think ranboo oftentimes forgets his own lore. he brings stuff up that c!ranboo may have done, such as exploding the community house to frame c!tommy, holding onto Cat, and it goes absolutely nowhere. we've gotten all of these developments in his story but they have never been expanded on, and we're nowhere closer to figuring out his relationship to c!dream and what his other side is and honestly i see no hope that we'll be any closer to knowing even by the end of the year.

your characters don't all have to be morally grey for the story itself to be morally grey. this is fiction - some people can be nothing but evil and others can be nothing but good. being purely good or evil doesn't mean that you're one dimensional, either.

c!dream apologists have ruined c!dream for me. he's not a good person. how about you let me enjoy a villain for who he actually is, rather for than your percieved woobified ragdoll you pass off as c!dream.

the story was better when there was a central writer. it was brilliant back when wilbur wrote it to be that the environment drives the characters and the story, and it was really good in early s2 up until techno's execution day when it was more character driven. since then, the amount of autonomy people have over their characters without any central 'director', as it were, has been a detriment to the story overall. there needs to still be one overarching figure or director or writer.

not everyone is a main character. just because they have a pov, doesn't mean they're a main character. some characters have such little impact on the overall plot and describing everyone as a main character oversaturates the story and makes some characters seem more important than they are.

the egg lore had so much potential up until it didn't. all that built up threat that we were expecting and we still don't even know what the egg wants really other than just controlling people. does it hatch?

genuinely, if there's no major plot developments by the end of the year (and let's be honest, it's a very big possibility at this point), a few of the more prominent members of the server should do a podcast style stream talking about where the story would have gone, because at least then we would have gotten somewhat closer to a conclusion.

c!techno is a villain and an asshole and a bad person. he stops caring for people once their interests don't align with his or if they look at him funny. he makes meta-jokes about his own tyrannical and oppressive nature. stop taking that away from him. he's a bad person. cc!techno does a fabulous job portraying that in a comedic manner and the balancing of him being a deeply flawed person with deeply flawed morals and ideas with his comedically-portrayed stubbornness and lack of willingness to hear out opposing viewpoints is incredible. i want to like characters who are arseholes for the sake of being arseholes, and who refuse to take into account the hurt they've caused either out of self-righteousness or because they don't care, so let me. he's the anti-peacemaker, LET ME HIM ENJOY HIM FOR THAT!!!!

i think tommy and wilbur's way of doing lore is my favourite. relies heavily on improv, voice acting, sprite acting and facial expressions. really shows off the acting props and they pull off the emotional moments well for the insanity of the creative medium.

i'm not a fan of fan-music. i find songs about media i'm into difficult to listen to. coincidentally i'm also not a fan of shit like slam poetry or live music/musicals/pantomimes.

the death of l'manberg killed people's motivation to go on the server casually. i've talked about it more in depth before, but destroying what was a central, driving environment for the story killed momentum and motivation. imagine in an episode of she-ra, the princess alliance just nuke the freight zone and all of the members of the horde just have to deal with it. that would be shit.

until season 3 has some momentum, i'm counting the end of the smp as january 20th. that had a conclusion. season 3 has... whores, technoblade and tommyinnit. that's about it.

i wasn't a fan of the development of c!tubbo joining las nevadas. i preferred snowchester and the walled city conflict. give c!tubbo some backbone and some badassery. also tubbo where's the fucking nuke bro if you're shelving that plotline just tell us on like an alt stream what the plan was i beg

add like 2 or 3 new people to the server so that michael mcchill has someone to talk to and so that there's something always happening on the server. it gives the og's more motivation to return if things are happening in and out of canon and it'll help with momentum, and who knows? maybe they can write their own story/stories.

i really think that c!sam is an underrated character. he's multilayered, extremely interesting, and the dichotomy of his loyalty to his job and how far down the rabbithole that's taken him versus the genuine love he has for his friends that drives him to do what he does out of wanting to do right by them is brilliant. i don't talk about c!sam enough.

STOP HAVING FUCKING VILLAIN ARCS!!! I'M FUCKIN SICK OF IT!!!! i want to see more characters who see everyone else being absolute selfish, abhorrent cunts and go 'if nobody else is going to be a good person, i fucking will'. GIVE ME SOME MORAL WHITENESS!!! IT'S INTERESTING AND MORALLY GOOD CHARACTERS ARE FUN!!!

let tommyinnit build cobblestone towers. everyone bullied him too much for how ugly they were and the one he built outside of the prison looked genuinely really nice. it gives the boy something to do.

i'm a fan of the revive book and the canon lives system. don't ask me why, but i think it might just be the morbidity of it. it adds to c!dream's god complex persona, and i think the fragility of death itself is a really fun concept. not enough fan cc's have made connections with that and c!mumza, and it could make for cool fanfic.

ranboo your house is fucking ugly. it's an eyesore

c!niki, and to some extent now c!jack and c!fundy, are boring me and ruining my mood. i think c!jack is the closest to being an actually interesting sympathetic villain, mainly because nobody else seems to realise that c!niki is a villain. not a good one imo, but she's a villain. c!jack just has the problem of starting a new project over and over and over and over again and because of the slow in momentum for the primary cast, there hasn't been a lot of recent development for him.

not really a dream smp opinion, but if philza went full geordie accent, i would love it. i want him to, in canon, say shit like 'me n ye' instead of 'me and you' and use geordie dialect. i want him to be physically unintelligible because it's funny.

i don't really know what's up with c!foolish but i think he's a dumbass. he had a while to think about c!q's proposal and then changed his mind about joining the guy to admitted to letting him die just because. moron

i wish there was more c!eret lore. i wish he was an actual king with an actual kingdom and actual subjects and royal advisors. c!eret is far too fucking cool to be the king of nothing and nobody. fatten up the kingdom and the castle with people who work with c!eret, and don't just make it tyrannical and dictator-y to prove the point of the server's 'anarchists'. make it a healthy working environment, please - if you want moral greyness, have 'anarchists' who claim to care about the welfare of the server oppose a kingdom of happy people under a fair and just ruler because their ideologies clash.

the server needs more characters who oppose anarchy in more peaceful ways, or passively wish for systems to be a part of. i think a chaos vs order conflict ending only in mutual understanding where everyone understands that they should just leave each other alone would slot nicely into the story that's been created so far.

you need to have watched all of the previous arcs to understand the story. i've seen people argue that they don't need to know about earlier lore to understand the prison, but that's the equivalent of only watching the final season of pretty little liars and expecting to understand the context of what's going on.

some characters aren't that morally grey. some characters, take c!tommy for example, are definitely on the whiter side for the morality scale, he's just an asshole. he's abrasive and rude and a dickhead but he also doesn't agree with terrorism, he's patriotic, he strives for a better world, he's apologetic, but he's also a fucking BITCH.

you can add onto this if you want, but not if you're a c!dream apologist. nobody likes your opinions

[crimeronan]

Can you explain the appeal of Julian Blackthorn? This is a genuine question because I read the books and came away utterly bored by him and unconvinced of his moral greyness as opposed to like, Adam Parrish’s. He seemed so one dimensional to me but I want to know if I’m Wrong TM considering I tend to be very very biased toward my favourite characters and bored by the rest, and my favourites were Mark and Kieran. So maybe I just didn’t pay him enough attention??

it’s been a while since i wrote any earnest tsc meta but cringe culture is dead and the chance to infodump about my julian thoughts has me vibrating where i’m sitting so.  yes okay.

technical stuff

(aka: things pertaining to How The Story Is Constructed)

cassandra clare’s characterization has become much stronger just in general since she first began writing the series like twenty years ago

perhaps most importantly: the more recent stuff i’ve read from her has involved characters who actually grow, change, and learn from their past mistakes 

rather than repeating the same stupid decisions over and over again

and over and over and over some more

seriously take a shot every time someone in tmi miscommunicates or self-destructs in ways They Have Learned Not To Do for no real reason. u will die of alcohol poisoning

in tda this shines ESPECIALLY with the evolution of mark, kieran, and cristina’s relationship, but that’s a separate post

clare’s trademark is also the angsty traumatized jerkass love interest with a secret heart of gold

the woman is almost singlehandedly responsible for draco in leather pants and the proliferation of this kind of character type in fandom and teen lit. this isn’t a criticism it’s me marveling at how if you commit hard enough to a single trope you truly can change the world.  follow your dreams

sad jackass with a heart of gold isn’t an Inherently Problematic Character Type

but poorly done it can lead to relationship dynamics in which one partner is constantly being hurt by and then forgiving the other despite them making no real effort to change, because they are narratively absolved due to being sad

(there’s a lot of this with earlier jace content.  in some ways i think will was later created specifically to be a same-archetype protagonist who actually does get called on his shit and grow. that’s also another post)

also if all of your sexy male love interests are tortured jackasses with a heart of gold then people start calling you a one-trick pony

enter julian blackthorn!

from the very start everything about him is designed to be the INVERSE of the heart of gold jackass.  which immediately makes him interesting just from a meta perspective

(mark and kieran are also both alternate angles on this time-honored archetype.  mark gets the heart of gold and kieran gets the jackass and then they’re both much more deeply messy than that.  yet another post)

julian is kind, self-sacrificing, empathetic, artistic, emotionally supportive, responsible, and favored by old grannies everywhere

so a completely nonthreatening milquetoast guy, right

immediately forgettable if you’re only here for the dramatic conflicts and shithead antics of clare’s other protags

except that he is A Mess

and that he has structured his priorities very carefully, and they are as selfless as you expect from The Hero (TM) but they are also Not Heroic (TM) and they do not align with the moral framework The Hero (TM) is supposed to use

moral ambiguity in characters always exists in relation to their narratives imo. you mention adam parrish - trc’s narrative already mucks around in different ethical shades of gray, and adam falls on the canon scale about where julian does on his canon scale.  both more willing than the average pov character to do the ruthless thing or make the fucked-up choice if the ends justify the means; both with an intensely strong sense of internal priorities that they adhere to at all costs, both so unbelievably fucking down for murder; etc

i do think there are ways julian’s choices could have been pushed even further, but considering the number of readers who hate his guts already, i can see why clare opted not to go for the most controversial possible conflicts

so we’re flipping the narrative

instead of seeing this angsty bad boy and peeling back the layers of his trauma to find his heart of gold, we’re seeing the put-together selfless family man and peeling back the layers of his Responsibility Mask to expose the rotting husk underneath

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

THAT IS FUN AS FUCK

then when julian DOES lash out in hurtful, uncontrolled ways, he has significantly more narrative justification for it than most of clare’s protagonists (will elaborate in characterization thoughts)

julian is also interesting as fuck because of how his struggles allow for a more in-depth look at the failings of shadowhunter society, something that’s also sorely lacking in clare’s earlier work

his apparent amorality is simply the result of him making pragmatic and impossible choices because he has been faced with fucked-up ethical dilemmas since age 12 Because Society Has Failed Him

which opens the door for narrative exploration of how and why he’s been failed so badly & what needs to change

i also love that he has such a coldly calculated way of analyzing situations and allowing harm to occur when need be, bc a lot of clare’s early protagonists have such a bad case of Rush In And Get Myself Killed Because I’ve Got Feelings About Impulsive Heroism syndrome that i wanna push them in front of a truck

probably there’s other meta narrative stuff i could say but i’m stopping myself and moving on to character analysis

characterization stuff

(aka: reasons why i’m also attached to him in a vacuum)

i don’t read him as one-dimensional at all tbh

u may feel the narrative pushes “ruthless julian blackthorn” too much without delivering enough actual ruthless julian But i don’t think that’s the same as having only one dimension

from the get-go, the big question centered on julian is always “how far are you willing to go?” and the narrative pushes the stakes slowly higher and higher to continuously test julian’s “the price is always justified” mindset

he has a far more layered and realistic response to trauma than clare’s early protagonists - trauma affects every single aspect of his personality and how he conducts himself, and the effects vary depending on the circumstances

his conviction that he has to be the perfect parent to his siblings because they will fall apart if they see him show weakness??  rooted in how he feels like he’s fallen apart since losing the stable adult support he once relied upon

his willingness to hurt semi-innocent people, commit coldblooded murder, manipulate people using political leverage, allow harm to befall any stranger if it protects his family??  rooted in how he has already had to ask himself how much he’s willing to sacrifice, and how his family is his only source of stability when the world has never done Shit for him

his conviction that he has a darker heart than anyone else because he killed his possessed father, even though intellectually he knows he was saving his brother’s life??  rooted in having no means of processing this trauma and being unable to voice his feelings for fear of backlash from a deeply non-understanding society

the way he represses every single negative emotion he ever has, to the point where emma - his actual literal magic soulmate who can feel his emotions - is startled to find him hurting or angry??  once again all about how he has to be the perfect father or he’s failed completely

the way his anger is so totally disproportionate to different situations and the way his negative emotions can only come out in completely uncontrolled breaks??  all that repression baybey.  this kid has not processed a single bad feeling in five years.  every single real grievance and petty annoyance has been festering indefinitely inside him like a slowly spreading infection

julian’s arc involves him needing to get thru being his worst self to actually start to heal

as in, he has to actually learn to acknowledge his feelings, take care of himself, lean on his family, and let other people take some responsibility

he also has to learn that in his quest to be the perfect emotionally controlled authority figure, he has not actually learned how to control or deal with his emotions. like. At Fucking All. good god

the narrative setup is also about asking “how far are you willing to go?” until the answer is finally “not this far.  not this far”

and once he reaches that point, he has to reevaluate everything about how he weighs his priorities and morals and plans, etc

(i also like that emma has a perpendicular arc in which she’s always the one tempering julian and telling him “no we can’t go that far” until she’s willing to do something horrific that he absolutely won’t and HE has to stop HER. very sexy)

it’s also just really nice to have a character who’s learned to relate so well to literally every single member of his family while still having a very detached ruthless interior consciousness. i have similar feelings about how adam teaches himself to love people, but with julian it’s spelled out more explicitly in canon & it’s a more central character theme

i’m sure i’m also forgetting stuff here but this post is long enough so i’m gonna say good enough

and like i said in the tags on my other post, there are things i’d personally write differently if it were my story - plot points i’d shift, character contrasts i’d up, themes i’d explore differently, pacing i’d adjust, etc.  i have plenty of ways i could be nitpicky and editorial about the effectiveness of julian’s arc.  but i also don’t feel like writing them out at the moment & none of my critiques on effectiveness have an impact on the core appeal of his character 2 me.  he’s so fucking good

[fatesdeepdive]

Entry 27: A Tiny Smidge of Morally Greyness

It has come to my attention that I made a few mistakes during my rant in the last entry. Hinoka is not, as I believed, Corrin’s younger sister. Hinoka is older. I had her and Takumi’s ages mixed up. This doesn’t really alter my point, because Sakura and Takumi are still younger than Corrin despite having the same mother as Ryoma and Hinoka, but it was an error. Now, I could own up to this error, which was absolutely my fault, but I’d much rather blame the game for never giving ages and keeping how long ago things happened in vague terms, which makes it hard to get a good mental timeline. I’d also like to note that I’ve been assuming Corrin was a toddler when kidnapped, which seems to be wrong. Corrin’s younger than Hinoka, who was seven at the time of the kidnapping, so she was still a young child, but Corrin was at least old enough to form memories with the other royals. Now that I’ve corrected myself, let’s go back to mocking the writing in Support conversations.

Support: Kagero/Ryoma

C: Ryoma, grateful with all of Kagero's recent work, asks her what he can do to reward her. She says his thanks is a good enough reward. Ryoma orders her to think of a better gift idea.

B: Kagero asks Ryoma to reward her by sparring.

A: After sparring, Ryoma invites Kagero to have tea with him.

S: Kagero has been working herself to death. Ryoma asks her why and she reveals her inappropriate love for him. He says he loves her too.

Review: Kagero and Ryoma are both very stern, very serious characters, and putting them together in an ordinary fluff Support line ends up being incredibly dull.

Support: Kaden/Orochi

C: Kaden is looking for a lost cat when he runs into Orochi. She gives him a cat summoning talisman, but he runs away before she can explain its horrific downside.

B: Kaden starts drowning in pussy. To clarify, the talisman, which is just a bunch of catnip, attracts every cat in the area.

A: Orochi explains that she likes cats and uses the talisman to summon them.

S: Kaden and Orochi play with kittens. Orochi says he likes Kaden because he's like a cat. The two of them make a lot of cat puns.

Review: Cute and fluffy. Like a kitty.

Support: Oboro/Subaki

C: Subaki finds Oboro working in a store, skillfully convincing customers to buy things. She explains to Subaki that she's helping out the store's sick owner and that it reminds her of working for her parents as a child.

B: Oboro continues working in the store. Subaki helps her hide this from the army.

A: Oboro thanks Subaki for covering her and says she's surprised Subaki did so. Subaki says that he noticed Oboro enjoying herself and thought it would be mean to screw her over.

S: They get together, because Subaki likes Oboro for working in a store and Oboro likes Subaki for keeping her secret. What.

Review: Ignoring the clumsiest confession yet, this one wasn’t too bad. Oboro being an old-timey merchant is fun and it’s nice when Subaki isn’t a dick.

Support: Azura/Hinata

C: Hinata spends all of his money buying bamboo shoots from a cute girl at the market. He gives them to Azura, who calls him an idiot.

B: So, this is a weird one. The girl who sold Hinata bamboo shoots, actually a Nohrian spy, follows Hinata back to our secret base in the Astral plane that apparently anyone can just waltz into. Azura actually recognizes the spy as a Nohrian noble she knew as a child. The spy runs away and is never heard from again.

A: Hinata gives Azura more bamboo shoots, which makes her smile. Azura reveals that the spy bullied her as a child. Fucking bold for her to do that, considering Azura was the stepdaughter of the infamously violent king.

S: Hinata returns from the mountains with more bamboo for Azura, who is apparently a goddamn panda. He then uses the bamboo to propose to her. She says yes because he’s fun.

Review: This is such a weird Support. First off, himbo Hinata is nice and I like Azura calmly worrying about him. But this Support also introduces a new NPC, who is never mentioned again, who has interesting relationships with both Hinata and Azura. I want to recruit her!

Birthright Chapter 22: Hidden Capital

The gang arrives in Windmire. Oddly, the city is completely empty. Silas explains that that’s normal, and that most people just hide in their homes all the time to avoid being killed by the faceless or bandits that are apparently common in the capital city. Silas also explains that Nohr is kept in perpetual darkness, which means crops don’t grow, which is why Nohr invades neighboring nations. It would have been nice to have this tiny bit of moral greyness to the Nohrians at any point earlier in the game, but I’ll take it where I can get it. Ryoma says that because Hoshido has an abundance of resources, they should share them after the war. Which I guess Mikoto never considered doing.

An Outlaw named Shura shows up and tries to mug the group. After a quick battle, Azura asks Shura if he knows about the secret passageway into the palace she was kidnapped through as a child. Shura explains that he used to live in Kohga, a ninja nation destroyed by Mokushu, and that his family served the Hoshidan royal family. When his country was destroyed, the Hoshidans refused to accept refugees, forcing him to move to Nohr. I guess King Sumeragi wasn't all that good after all, not that the game will ever acknowledge that fact again.

Ryoma offers to help Shura reclaim his homeland and Shura joins the team. Shura also monologues internally about how he kidnapped Azura as a child. Shura leads the group to an underground marketplace where they recruit a quartet of rejects from the academy. The marketplace, hidden from the king's soldiers, is the true heart of Nohr and is very lively.

Corrin runs into Elise, who is in the market visiting her old nanny, Cassita. Elise explains that the family has fallen apart and that Garon has been acting more and more evil lately. Cassita explains that Garon was a good man when he was younger, but became bitter after the death of Xander's mother Katerina and Azura's mother Arete. This does, admittedly, give a hint of depth to Garon. It isn’t much, but it’s something.

[altealives]

You know what I really want to see from this season of Voltron? I want to see more of Altea’s dark side. Because we all know from Hole of the Sky that it exists: we saw the Altean ideal of peace taken to extremes, and I have a feeling we’re going to see it again. Specifically, I want to see the moral greyness of Altea emerge more fully--we saw that in Oriande, where all you need is the proper bloodline and not good morals in order to seek the deepest secrets of alchemy. And I want to see more of how Alteans are just as susceptible to demagoguery and manipulation as humans. They fell for Lotor’s plot when he had them all literally worshiping him like a god. It would be all too easy for Honerva to manipulate Lotor’s narrative to her own advantage, and secure her own place as a godlike figure.

I have a ton of personal hcs about how Altea isn’t as peachy-clean as their narrative presents it, hcs that are nowhere near canon even though they do not contradict it--in fact, the Altea of my headcanon is probably even more fucked up than our human world. I won’t go into those here. But I have discussed them all in depth with my friends and I want to see just how right I am about how fucked up they really are, if any of what canon says lines up with what I’ve come up with.

More than anything, I want to see Allura--who has idealized Altea to the point of ignoring blatant imperialism from the alternate reality Alteans--confront once again the dark truths of her own culture. Whereas many humans would immediately be skeptical of Hira’s claim of “bringing peace to the universe” because of the whole white man’s burden implications that carries, Allura seemed to just blindly accept that everything was hunky dory, without even asking about how that peace was achieved. This demonstrates that she carried the assumption that Alteans are innocent and good--and also demonstrates that even THIS reality’s Altea was zealous enough about “spreading peace” that they would want a peace formulated on their terms to be spread throughout the universe. And while we saw Allura being upset that the alternate reality’s Altea was nothing like what she wanted it to be, we never really heard her (or anyone) say anything to the effect of “boy, this sure does say something about (us) Alteans, now doesn’t it?” So, that is the conclusion I want the characters to draw from Season 8. I want Allura and the others to see what Honerva does to the colony, and not only learn but also articulate the flaws of Altean ways of thinking.

My other hope--which is really a stretch since I don’t think Voltron is going to get that philosophically complicated--is that the fact Alteans use a weapon, Voltron itself, to bring peace, gets addressed. While I doubt the series wants to trouble its young viewers with the idea that the protagonist method for saving the universe opens the door to some seriously significant abuses of power, I would be over the moon with happiness if we saw that play out. For example, what if, in the past, the strength of Alfor’s weapon was used for more than just saving people? What if it was used to keep them under the pre-rift Galra Empire’s thumb? (I have an entire massive headcanon in the works about  Voltron being used to suppress rebellions in the Galra Empire, which I’ll post later.) Once again, not likely to happen, but would be supremely interesting.

[groovycrusadeperson]

A thing I just realized about the Tony/Loki/Bucky (but I’ll get to him in a sec) squads that I’ve noticed- a lot of them say they never liked Steve to begin with because he’s “boring”, a “boy scout”, etc., and you notice that they only stan for morally grey/villain types even if they have to twist canon to do it (I’ve seen so many of them argue that Bucky was culpable for everything WS-related). It’s like ordinary human decency is uninteresting to them, which, I think, is a sign of immaturity.

Wait there are Bucky stans claiming he is culpable for the things he did when he was brainwashed?? Bucky stans??

As for the stanning of morally grey characters only - that would make sense. Except these same squads are always completely unwilling to understand and sympathize with even the slightest flaws and mistakes of the characters they label as ‘boy scouts’. One would think that if hints of fallibility and moral greyness are seen in the boy scout these same fans would begin to like them more instead of using every single instance of the slightest flaw in the boy scout to ‘prove’ why their fave is actually a better person than the boy scout. And yet.

Which makes me think it’s less about the appeal of the moral greyness per se and more about the deeper appeal of being Tragically Misunderstood that comes with the moral greyness. A common theme for most woobie squads (at least in my experience) is that they’re really into the idea that no other character can (or is willing to) understand their fave or their tragic secret past and angst. Because it’s hidden behind all that moral greyness.

I think how incessantly the bad boy trope is fed to us is responsible for this since in its simplest form it is usually about discovering the hidden depths of a guy who begins the story by being a total fucking douchenozzle but then, as the story progresses (and through the power of the love of a gullible girl) becomes a better person. And then you discover that douchebag has secret tragic trauma.

By pulling out the secret tragic trauma the narrative can both 1) explain how this total asshole is suddenly capable of being the good guy (he never got the love he needed!! now he’s getting it from Gullible Girl and hence he’s healing from the trauma and turning his life around!!!) and also 2) justify away all of this dude’s previous assholery (it was all that pain of his tragic past that made him do it!!!) without having to deal with messy things like consequences and genuine redemption.

So I think the fans you’re talking about are the kind, who the second they clock an anti hero/villain/morally grey hot guy character, automatically jump to the “misunderstood” part of the bad boy trope because that is actually what the appeal is here. Look at how much woobie squads like to lovingly headcanon abusive childhoods. That’s the lowest hanging fruit in building the secret trauma that will make their woobie Tragically Misunderstood.

With Bucky (at least in the MCU) it’s even better because he’s practically a wet dream for a fan of this sort. He actually is misunderstood. The label of 'villain’ that was given to him by the world is actually undeserved. He’s the most unproblematic bad boy because he’s literally never done anything wrong in his life but got blamed anyway. He is the most misunderstood of them all.

So anyway… that’s my rambling hot take - for fans like this the appeal isn’t moral greyness but the potential for a hot male character to be Tragically misunderstood that comes with it.

Whatever it is, I’m glad I can’t relate. I love good guys.

[meliorn]

all shadowhunters are racist, yes, I get that, but Aldertree was smug and derived joy from torturing Raphael, there's a difference. It even may be a fault on the writers part, but so far Aldertree's transgressions are incomparable to the others

the point is still that white villains are allowed so much more cruelty and moral greyness if not absolute evil without being hated by fandom. actually, the crueler and problematic a white villain is, the more fans he’ll get. the more meta will be written about him explaining why he’s really just a misunderstood little boy. but that’s just not the case with characters of color, and especially black characters because of the damaging Angry Black Man stereotype.

white villains can do just about anything and they’ll still be adored by fandom. it’s a strong pattern that people just fucking love their villains, but only their white villains. white characters are allowed to be cruel and also have more depth to them, even if that depth comes from fan work and not from canon. why are you so upset by a black villain getting the same attention?

people have always loved villains. that’s an established Thing: people find villains interesting. that and the intersection of racism is why white villains keep getting sugarcoated by fans. is it really that goddamn horrible for 1 black villain to get that adoration too? especially because i know literally no one who stans victor and excuse his actions, but there’s a lot of people who, directly or indirectly, excuse the actions of certain nazi characters from tfa in favor of writing fluff about them.