#the point of view / perspective characters

[protect-namine]

the way everyone has a dislike in their profile that actually says something integral about their character. lu guang doesn't like plans getting messed up, cheng xiaoshi dislikes loneliness, xia fei with owing favors, vein with lying...

and then you have liu xiao, who dislikes... cilantro. and fish mint.

(shakes fist) (putting him in a glass jar and shaking vigorously) learn to be vulnerable!! tell me something about yourself!! I guess him liking movies lines up with the theater metaphors, and there's him liking chess, but that. doesn't count methinks

[rorah]

The mentally stable Dimitri Fire emblem 3 hopes.

It surprises me that there's still ppl claiming so, but then I remember we're talking about 3h interpretations and I have to make peace with it.

But that doesn't stop me from venting a little bit in this little space I have lol. Actually, it dries me and makes me feel bad to bring this up because I will have to talk bad about Dedue, and I don't want to talk Bad about Dedue. He's a genuinely good boy. But "Human" nonetheless, which means Flaws. I like Felix too but he's become some sort of a clown that doesn't make me feel too bad. I like Felix tho, In a different way.

Mostly talking about these two because the take that "Dimitri has better support system" baffles me because, technically, these two are his support system in HopesVerse. The persons who Dimitri relays on and seek solace/advice/support. The rest doesn't really tackle any of his personal struggles (aside from the Mage!Mitri frustrated dream, but that's out of the bad equation in our 'mentally unwell' set of pixels, and Shez only has a glimpse). Contrary, to Houses verse where the whole blue lions cast knew about his shit, didn't know what to do, but didn't leave either.

I tackled this topic with other person on Twitter who was (or still is) on board with this take and the phrase they used was They contained him better, which of course I agree and remarked that was exactly the problem. Contain him is gonna be contra productive. I used a water dam analogy, where the structure of such dam is damaged, and the pressure of water keeps accumulating. Causing a foreseeable damage for the dam itself and the surroundings. You don't need to be a genius to understand it, you need experience or knowledge for mental ill topics tho.

I really don't want to extend so much on here because it's mostly just, rant format more than a proper analysis so I just want to point out these two things in their support conversations.

First, Dedue. Encourage him to keep on the vengeful path. Which we know was the final goal of Azure Moon and if you payed attention to 3 houses message. The whole Vengeful argument was something Bad, to keep it simple. Despite Dimitri actively looking for answers/guidance for something that, in a rational state he can see clearly like vengeance will consume his life (also Shez and Felix called out this behavior). Dedue answer only encourage him to keep on that path, because he would do that 💔. Presenting 2 oposite views is a great formula for confusion and disorientation. Now, Dedue's role is primary SUPPORT, not guidance nor orientation. He will support his shit no matter what, and we are quite aware of that if played Houses.

Second, Felix. Felix is a special case. He is smart but also an idiot lacks A LOT of soft skills to actually be of help. He's the only one who knows in this verse about Dimitri having a mental issue. In their A support to say the least, so they don't close or solve anything. What makes it more worrisome is the fact that Felix conceals the issue as a secret.

"So try to keep that whole "removing their heads" thing in check, yeah? We can just call it our little secret."

this extract here makes me feel so unwell 😭help

The whole burden falls over him and his lack of skills and wisdom on the matter will be too much for him later on. He at least, will be able to recognize that the problem is beyond of his capabilities and will look for help. Felix himself has his own issues and journey where he needs to learn. He's forced to get pass beyond some of his angry teen behavior but hasn't completely get over it.

There is a lot more to tackle, but that requires more work and time. What are the topics some of you think is important to cover around understanding the Hopes verse resolution? Dimitri's route? something? Do you think the route without Byleth is better? With that being said, I would like to delve deeper into character analysis, and the role each played for the Lords too. That also requires to talk about the Byleth and needs a whole analysis on their own, which requires time (which i don't have much lol) To end this vent, I would like to encourage people to do a little research for the terminology they're using like "Support System". Who makes it up and how it operates successfully. The fact that ppl saying "he has better support system" only because he didn't go feral on the run alone is not entirely valid. A reminder that people can feel alone with or without people around them. And containing the issue within doesn't solve any problem. At best, it's presented later. At worse, it gets worse.

[blissfulrain12]

Okay, I'm just gonna say it. Saying "This abuse victim is partially responsible for their abuser attempting to murder them" is wild! And saying "Because this abuse victim failed another abuse victim they are just as bad as the murdering rapist that physically, emotionally, verbally, medically abused them, canabalized them, and forced them to eat their own leg." is even wilder! Like ya'll know this is just victim blaming, right?

Also by this logic Anya is also as bad as Jimmy! She enabled Curly's physical and medical abuse. Also unlike Curly it wasn't through inaction. Anya asked her rapist to provide medical care to her nonverbal patient and then left them in a room alone together. There were two other guys she could have asked instead. The rapist had also spoken to her about wanting to kill the patient and she had witnessed at least one instance of verbal abuse from the rapist to the patient(Curly's birthday party). And yet she still chose to ask her rapist to perform medical care multiple times.

Also it should be noted that taking needed medication from patients for personal use is a form of medical abuse. So yeah when Anya took all of the remaining pain meds she might have committed medical abuse against Curly. So if Curly is just as bad as Jimmy there's no way that doesn't apply to Anya too!

Seriously the fandom has fallen into the "good/bad victim" dichotomy which is extremely damaging to victims. Anya has been labeled the "good" victim so her flaws are diminished, ignored, or justified. Like I've seen people argue that Anya enabled Jimmy to abuse Curly as revenge and acted like that was a good thing instead of Anya being as bad as Jimmy.

Meanwhile Curly has been labeled the "bad victim". This means Curly is denied victimhood. Instead Curly gets victim blamed (Curly's at fault for his own attempted murder) and his abuse is called "deserved", "karma", and "punishment". His abuse is mostly talked about as metaphor for other people (seriously guys the unborn baby 🤨). When Curly's abuse is talked about there's always a disclaimer: "not to defend Curly", "this doesn't excuse Curly", "CURLY IS NOT INNOCENT" which might as well be saying "this victim is a bad victim/not a worthy victim". Curly's also been equated with his abuser sometimes even being said to be worse than the abusive rapist that ate Curly's leg. Also I'm pretty sure Curly's "bad victim" status is also contributing to the ablism around Curly's disability.

In conclusion stop victim blaming Curly please.

[dxxtruction]

Louis' "You're boring!" Could mean so many things, but I think what's most apparent about that line is that Armand takes no initiative just for himself. He's not really anybody, because he never goes out and finds himself or gets attached to anyone but Louis. Without Louis as his guide he's literally just sitting on a couch picking lint! That's the thing.

He orbits constantly around what would make Louis happy, and never really fully going what would make me happy? Ultimately that drive to please Louis is what drives him to torturing Daniel, not so much that he'd care to just do it. Ultimately, not giving proper care to Louis is just a way to make sure Louis knows he has to orbit around him as well, with shoving Lestat onto him just that other nail on the coffin. So, even if he fails to figure out how to make Louis happy with him, he still knows what Armand is good for, and better than.

That dependency is what drives Armand's abuse. It really just comes down to that. Armand doesn't even realize how suffocated he is by his own dependency. This is just how life is to him. (It shouldn't be lost either that dependency is a theme considering this episode also deals with addiction).

Daniel's fascinating because he's just so driven to be somebody. He's largely independent, he seeks things because he wants them. It's his drug to poke and prod at all the things that he shouldn't. Daniel's exciting because he lets Louis in to something different, lets him in to all this potential in another person that he can also do the same with for himself. It's a real connection. A two way street. It's easy to tell how Armand can be smothering then because he's never introducing him to anything really new, and most the ways both of them connect are all painful and traumatic. It's never just fun because there's always that layer of that pain. Fun died with Claudia.

50 years on they've gotten to a lot better place, both of them, but it's still that same shit. No seriously, "How is this any different from last time, Louis?"

Well... Because Armand's going to be, at the very least, making one [1] decision only for himself - and that's to hold power over Daniel's life. Fucking sick foreshadowing.

They aren't driving each other to the brink anymore but "The vampire is bored" STILL. Maybe it's even worse, despite being in better places, because Louis' sort of just been defeated by it. (I mean, can he even really leave this either?). He's accepting the dependancy cause he kind of has to. He'd literally ended up letting all the enjoyment be up where he can't reach [The book shelves]. Armand so desperately wants Louis happiness but what really ends up happening is that Louis ends up having to give Armand all his own. He's got no one or anything else to get it from. But like an iPad and an over the top eating ritual. Two extremes of what's just more lint picking.

This whole relationship is one I find just tragic inside and out. You have to just pity it, really. There's ways in which you can find yourself feeling bad for both of them. But you can only really be mad at Armand for any of it. Armand, who isn't even 'free' in any sense, having so little concept of his own independence, but is at the same time so controlling over other's. It's a tragic cycle. It's an infuriating one.

Louis at least has the mind to know when enough is enough. If just needing that extra push to get there. Armand's too scared of it being over to even try.

[silverwhittlingknife]

"the fault, dear Brutus -" (Julius Caesar)

Quotes from A Critical History of English Literature by David Daiches. Panels from Death in the Family, Under the Red Hood, Lost Days, and Batman and Robin.

[magiefish]

Something I've kind of noticed about a lot of the academic scholarship I've read about Frankenstein / Dracula / Jekyll & Hyde is that everyone just seems to completely dismiss/ignore the characters as actual characters most of the time unless they're the Main Guys. Like, they'll go really in depth about Victor or the Creature's motivations and backstory and spend ages talking about Jekyll's relationship to Hyde and stuff, but the second it comes to characters like Enfield and Elizabeth or Lanyon and Clerval or frankly the Entire Rest of the Cast of Dracula, they just immediately seem uninterested. They'll just sort of vaguely gesture in their direction and go 'Oh yeah X and X thing happens to this character and here's a one sentence summary of their personality which doesn't really matter because this entire cast is interchangeable, anyway, onto the next theme' and half the time their One Sentence is just textually incorrect (looking at the New Woman/Traditional Woman descriptions of Lucy and Mina). And the reason I find this so baffling is because with other analysis I've read (e.g. Great Gatsby stuff) people seem to actually slow down and consider the characterisation and motivations of the cast as a whole with like. Nuance. Like they sit down and treat the characters as multifaceted and complex and having actual relationships with one another, and then you get to these books specifically and no one seems to care? Like they'll go really in depth with various interpretations and historical context for the Big Guys, and then never apply the same sort of examination to anyone else, and if they do, very rarely and probably only for one other character e.g. (Utterson or Mina).

If I had to posit an explanation, I would say its a combination of the archetypal nature of the title characters and the admittedly patchy writing of these books (which arguably lends to their archetypal status). I think academics kind of assume that the primary draw of these books are The Big Guys and the expansive themes and ideas they cover and that everyone else is just a pawn there to enable the narrative around the Big Guys, and the propensity for film adaptations to scrap or rewrite characters probably compounded this impression. And while I think this is at least partly true, the thing is, these characters were not always archetypal Big Guys. They originated in stories alongside *these* other characters *specifically* and it is worth asking what it is about the rest of the cast that makes the story interesting as well. Because, let's be real, if there was approximately no interest in the fucking *narrators* of Dracula, the best friends of Henry Jekyll, or the victims of the Creature, the original readers would have been completely bored out of their minds for most of these novels and public interest in them would not have been as great as it was. All of these novels were stories before they were myths, and academics should not be letting pop culture eclipse them unless they're specifically talking about the relationship between the two.

Overall, I just feel like academics are not only shooting themselves in the foot, but also doing a disservice to these stories by not bothering to investigate the other characters because frankly. It's lazy. It's lazy to dismiss an entire cast and basically skim read any sections involving them just because it's easy to focus on The One Guy. If you people really cared about themes, you'd understand that characters are inextricable from them. Like shit dude I see more care given to characters in essays about Greek tragedies, you guys are waaaay fucking behind

[pokemonranch]

You want to be left out of protagonist shenanigans? What about your sister? Girl literally brought a zekrom to your ranch. That’s protagonist behaviour

I have to admit she HAS protagonist vibes, but I ain't. I can tolerate the occasional world-ending threat comin' to my ranch for a weekend, but it's not like I'm actively searching for it

[illarian-rambling]

Damn, what if I reworked Starbreaker to be exclusively in Anarac's pov instead of trying to balance 5 new povs in one book?

Thoughts?

[astrolotte]

augh . this show

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

re: s5 episodes 6 and 7

going into watching the x files, one of the very few things i knew about, because i had consulted my best friend wikipedia, was the emily plotline. i knew it was coming, so in a way it felt inevitable, and my reaction to finally reaching it was approached from the in-universe knowledge that this was how it would be from the start.

but now that i read the notes on my liveblog post, i think about how i would have interpreted the episode if i had not known that fact, or had i been a contemporary viewer. i think i would have also felt frustrated that they decided to give the female lead a baby over two episodes and then kill her off and act like nothing happened. i think i would be frustrated with that, especially when i have other, existing complaints about the way women are treated in this show. how once again the plotline, from its very core, revolves around removal of scully's reproductive agency. and i think that rings even more true nowadays.

it's interesting to imagine my reaction had i not known it was coming. because the foreshadowing was there, what with the abduction plotline and the clones and the earlier babies in tubes and hybridizations and blah blah blah. but i guess i would have thought (or hoped) it was handled in a different fashion.

we'll never really know what my first thoughts would have been had i not known what was eventually going to happen, but hearing your thoughts from seeing it is making me ponder.

[iqmmir]

Milgram is so funny because the more you like the character the more you make up a backstory for them so you can like them even more. The more you like the character the less of them you understand basically

[dollypopup]

listen, i'll say it

if S3 doesn't give us significantly more Colin scenes, it'll be a failure

Colin is completely underdeveloped as a character. He has gotten just about 0 POV. All we know about him is either filtered through Penelope or in an ensemble scene with everyone else. And at this point, even if S3 is half and half, it still won't be fair. To balance out the discrepency, it should at *least* be 75% Colin and maaaaaaaaybe 25% Pen because we've gotten nothing for him

I ship Polin, I like Pen, but I'm over getting Pen's POV all the time. We've had enough of it. We've certainly had an unfair amount of it in comparison to his. I'm sick of seeing all the Whistledown behind the scenes and all her quiet contemplative moments when Colin doesn't so much as get 5 minutes focused on him being on the boat, or on his travels, writing his letters or talking through a problem to himself.

I love Colin. He's my absolute favorite character. And it sucks to have a favorite character who is *supposed* to be a lead but has had a grand total of nothing. Bton stripped him of character qualities and threw them onto Benedict, gave Colin like 5 lines, and filtered near all his 'development' through Penelope. Aside from his 'everyone says that [I'm Daphne's favorite]', our literal second scene of Colin is through Penelope's eyes. Everything he says, everything he does: it's always through Penelope's eyes. And I'm over it. I wanna see the world through *Colin's* eyes. And it would only deepen the narrative if we do.

Listen, the directors and showrunners have called Colin 'stupid' or 'dim' or 'not smart enough for Penelope'. The fandom has been rather blatant with their disregard of him, calling him boring, that he's not leading man material, writing him as a cardboard cutout in fics, assuming he's an empty charmer (hmmmm, just like what he's upset about in the books), and it's all because he's been denied a narrative. Colin is a rich, nuanced character. He's funny, he's kind, he's compassionate, he rejects toxic masculinity, he's got imposter syndrome like nothing else, he has a very unique role in his family and experienced a very unique perspective after his father died, he has hobbies (writing, boxing, fencing, studying, traveling) and strong values. But we've barely gotten any of it. Sure, we're *told* some things about him, but we never *see* it.

So if S3 is going to be his time to shine, his season, his falling arse over elbow in love era, they *have* to give us his perspective, and I don't fucking want it all to be his perspective about Pen. I am *tired* of Colin as an extension of Penelope. Penelope has had so much room and time and care to be a character on her own. Colin has gotten nothing. And that kind of dynamic does not a good love story make. And if all that underdevelopment wasn't to pull an Uno Reverse on us and give us a season that focuses on him and builds him up, what was it even for?

S3 should be Colin's story

[meowsticmarvels]

we are so fucking back. despite intending to go into vlr/ztd spoiler free i could not handle it anymore and ended up spoiling myself on a few things (...not everything bc its Mostly just related to characters I care abt and im gonna try and gaslight myself into pretending I didn't see it anyway).

but oh my fucking god clocking phi as transfem in the first hour of vlr was some incredible foresight because she is even more transgender than I thought

original post here if anyone wants to see it or my additional reblog but god. im crazy

[martyrbat]

world's finest (1990) #1

[ID: two in-universe drawings from two different orphan children talking about their heros. The first one is by Ann Gray, who's eight years old. She drew a surprisingly decent photo of Batman in front of a yellow background and wrote, ‘My hero — Batman. He is strong and fierce and he can beat anyone. He is very tall. He wears a cool suit with a bat on. He is not afrade of bullits and he saved my life (true). No one nows his reel name or address. the biggist crinminel in all the world could not make him sorender. Batman keeps gothum city safe for everyone and pets.’

The second drawing is by Zachary Sikes who's 12 and a half years old. He drew a photo of Superman using his heat vision as he flies. He wrote, ‘My Hero — Superman. My hero is Superman. He is able to fly and I have seen him lift up a car (with 2 peeple in it). If you hit him in the face then he will just laff. Every one likes him and he saved my life once. The big S on his shirt is for his name (Superman). He lives in Metroplis (where I used to life also). He keeps everything there in law and order.’ END ID]

[iniziare]

Inquisitor: The Evanuris were elven mages? How did they come to be remembered as gods? Solas: Slowly. It started with a war. War breeds fear. Fear breeds a desire for simplicity. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Chains of command. After the war ended, generals became respected elders, then kings, and finally gods. The Evanuris. Inquisitor: You said that the elven gods went too far. What did they do that made you move against them? Solas: They killed Mythal. (Chuckles.) A crime for which an eternity of torment is the only fitting punishment. Inquisitor: I thought Mythal was one of the Evanuris? Solas: She was the best of them. She cared for her people. She protected them. She was a voice of reason. And in their lust for power, they killed her.

You know, sometimes I wonder about him in regards to Mythal. Not only over how intensely he struck down those who slayed her (and the severe repercussions thereof, even if he didn't realize they'd occur as they did), but the sheer conviction he holds in regards to the future. He banished the Evanuris, and in doing so, single-handedly brought devastation to his people, and Mythal's, leaving their descendants scarred and 'weak', shadows of their former selves. But it's the 'and Mythal's' that gets me. He 'avenged' her and in turn, became the 'undoing' of the elven civilization she'd loved and protected above all?

Inquisitor: That's the past. What about the future? Solas: (...) My people fell for what I did to strike the Evanuris down, but still some hope remains for restoration. I will save the Elven people, even if it means this world must die.

[lord-squiggletits]

"Rodimus is a better Prime because it didn't hurt for him to bond with the Matrix while for Optimus it did" headcanon/theory my beloathed.

One day I'm literally gonna snap and make a whole post addressing why what's wrong bc I'm tired of the inaccuracy and tired of ppl not understanding the Point TM of IDW and its version of the Matrix/Primacy and even more tired of people putting down Optimus in favor of Rodimus by essentially arguing that being unworthy means you deserve to be punished/put in pain bc you just weren't good enough to hold the Symbol of Ultimate Authority