#their relationship was written perfectly

[lycanine9]

my absolute favorite shot from the movie

they both hold a special place in my heart and i’m sobbing

[winterblues]

fool’s fate is such an immensely long and wild ride, it’s no wonder reviews are like “this is some of the most gutwrenching-doomed-by-the-narrative shit you’ll ever experience.” i feel like i’ve aged like five years since i first picked up fool’s errand. i mean so much happened, like, too much happened? how does one even go back to seeing fitz and the fool as friends? friends seems like a reductive word for the sheer intensity of what they’ve been through together, for one another. i won’t make assumptions about what i think hobb’s intent was (the intent of the creator of a piece of media is rarely as important as the audience’s interpretation of it). HAVING SAID THAT, i for one think it’s very telling (for a queer narrative) that fitz has always “compartmentalised” the fool as someone separate from everyone else that’s important to him. his dearest friend and yet the extent of his relationship with him is a secret kept close to his chest throughout the books, with chade probably being the only one with even half a true inkling about their connection, almost like he’s subconsciously protecting it. he leaves all the ‘intimate details’ out when reporting to the coterie, but this isn’t the first time he’s avoided speaking of things they have expressed to one another in confidence. he’s different around the fool, and holds little back from him save for his avoidance of the depth of his own feelings. i mean, you don’t risk your own death to breathe life back into someone’s broken & bleeding & decaying body because you’re okay with the idea of them no longer being a part of your life. this is doubly tragic because the fool loves and respects fitz’s boundaries so much that he would rather withdraw than risk ‘making a mistake’, (and it’s obvious he’s trying so hard not to be selfish, trying so hard not to be heartbroken that fitz didn’t come back, especially after fitz astounds him by asking to follow him) but i am truly convinced that if the fool had chosen differently, fitz would’ve slowly started to come to terms instead of reverting to dismissal and avoidance. but he more or less acknowledges it in the parting words of his epilogue, that he traded everything he had with the fool for the life he sought with molly as a boy because ‘a horse can’t wear two saddles.’ and the most important woman in his life will go years without knowing about the depth of fitz and the fool’s friendship, but her children will play with the toys he carved for them, and a prized horse named malta will graze in their stables, and her son will wear an earring the fool had in his safekeeping for years and only parted with in order to keep a promise to a boy they both loved from forever ago. and so fitz goes from being adamant that he’d find a way to change the fool’s mind to letting him go just like that, because he finally has his life back, after so many years of deprivation. it’s only it’s own kind of tragedy that while he is content and surrounded by the people he loves, he’s still avoiding the deeper issues at the core of his being; still in many ways a tool for the throne, and giving his daughter up to the same fate. meanwhile, the fool, who was instrumental in buckkeep achieving peace and the reversal of fitz’s partial forging, is just hanging on by the bare thread of knowing that fitz is finally ‘free’ of him, and living well

[saetiate]

those who like someone with competency vs those who like someone with incompetency. like to the point where it cound be considered a kink/fetish. very intriguing

[rotten-vivs]

tango being someone who has been constantly betrayed or taken advantage of by his own team

bigb betraying or throwing his teammates under the bus for his own survival multiple times before

skizz seeing past his teams' faults and always forgiving them in hopes they will power through them only to die before he experience his team's downfall

anyways, i can't wait to see what happens to the heart foundation for the last few episodes of this season :D

[thelilylav]

I’ve gotta admit as much as I know Darabella is a flawed ship (and some of the ppl who are anti for it have legit criticisms I love y’all for pointing it out cause it frustrates the hell out of me too trust) they’ll always just kind of be it for me.

Because as much as it was an “I can fix him” trope, as much as Rosabella could be selfish and Daring’s flaws got cranked up to 1000, she was also the first person to look at him after his destiny, the thing he dedicated his life to, failed, when people were questioning him as a prince and putting pressure on his and Apple’s relationship and tell him that, like, maybe it would be alright? Maybe this wasn’t his destiny, and maybe that was okay.

And the part that really gets me? She’s the first person after this happens to tell him that it doesn’t matter what’s on the outside, which as much as you can like other Daring ships or him whatever he desperately needed to hear. Not even cause he was selfish, that’s not what I’m saying, but bc he placed his whole identity on this image that people concocted for him based on him appearing the perfect prince. He was handsome, he was talented, and he was handsome! So who cares about him as a person?

Idk man. You spend four seasons (I watch the specials on Netflix so that’s why four idk if it’s three to some ppl or whatever tho) watching him be praised for his looks, watching girls fawn over him, and of course he enjoys it so nobody really questions how much he enjoys it. And then you get this girl, this girl who owes him nothing, this girl who (contrary to popular belief apparently) has a life of her own and people she cares about outside of him, and she’s nice to him. And she’s the first person after everything happens to just be nice to him, for the sake of being nice. Something about that will always hit different for me

[moldy-flowers]

The interesting experience of being pro Sasuke, anti konoha, pro tobirama, anti Naruto ending, pro Sasusaku, anti Itachi, pro Sakura, anti SasuNaru, pro Tobirama×Izuna, anti Madara, pro karin, anti Orochimaru, pro Uchiha and anti Hashirama. And also as much as I hate the guy danzo was kind of hot when he was younger...

[the-way-astray]

ok so I know you don't like Keefe but I wonder what your extensive thoughts on Sophie are (if you have any)

i do, anon! all thoughts that follow are almost 100% subjective, etc. etc. etc. it starts out negative, because i want to end on a positive note :) this will be long

alright i will start by saying: i love sophie. but when i started reading the series, i was very much a sophie hater. actually, that's a bit strong. i was a sophie . . . non-enjoyer. while part of it was definitely the fact that i was exposed only to people that hated on sophie, i also did think by myself that sophie was a tad annoying, to put it mildly.

i've talked extensively about how much i dislike keefe, as you've mentioned, and part of that isn't really about keefe at all, so much as it is the way the narrative frames keefe. and the narrative is . . . mostly sophie herself. surprising exactly nobody, i'm not a fan of the way she lets keefe walk all over her, and the way she's kind of a doormat when it comes to him. she lets him off the hook all the time, justifies the crap out of his behavior, and even when you can tell she feels something negative from whatever toxic trait he's exhibiting this time, she never says anything about it, except for once or twice (i've talked about the nightfall scene at length before, and how it results in zero character development for keefe, just the illusion of it, and same with the legacy thing). it would be incredibly satisfying to have sophie tell keefe something like "hey, if you keep ruining all our plans because you're too stupid/arrogant to let the plan go according to plan, then we won't be able to include you. sorry not sorry". yet she doesn't. and she doesn't even have a good reason most of the time. like in legacy, when she went to tell him that his mom had ordered tam to kill him, after tam had specifically told her not to do that, because they both know keefe makes atrocious decisions when it comes to his mom. and yet sophie still goes straight to him and decides to tell him!!!! and it's like why the fuck would you do that???? keefe needs to be put in his place, and unfortunately, it seems like sophie is the only person that has the power to do that. it annoys the fuck out of me that the fact that keefe is constantly shitty to her doesn't seem to affect their relationship in the slightest. she somehow still trusts him the same after all the shit he's put her through, she still thinks him smart despite evidence to the contrary, and in general, when it comes to keefe she's excruciatingly irrational and lenient. and it annoys me. like she's so logical everywhere else, why can't she be the same with keefe? it makes her character ridiculously inconsistent, to me at least. i won't talk about this any more than this because i've already ranted about it at length but: the answer to that is basically that shannon needs to keep shoving sokeefe and keefe loving sophie and sophie needing keefe down the audience's throats. it's very fan-service-y, but i'll leave it at that for now.

here's where i may make some people mad, so i would like to say that this is all what i used to think. i've since matured, so i don't really think this anymore. but her crush on fitz. oh, boy. when i first read the series i found it the epitome of annoying. i was basically screaming at her (mentally, i did read most of this series in school lmfao) to get it together the entire time. i was just like. sophie. just. stop being so weird around him! he's just a guy! there's no need to act like an idiot and a half every time you interact with him to the point where everyone around you can tell what's up! it gave me a ridiculous amount of secondhand embarrassment. i was like . . . sophie . . . you can have a crush . . . but you don't have to be so obvious and embarrassing about it. anyway. i've since realized i'm aro and also apparently somewhat emotionally repressed so i think i'm just not like sophie. but because i couldn't understand why the fuck she was letting the stupid crush drag her through the mud, socially speaking, i found it excruciating. although i now understand why sophie acts the way she does, even to this day when i read those scenes where keefe or biana or dex makes a comment that implies they know exactly what's up with sophie and fitz it makes me so embarrassed (secondhandedly speaking), like come on, sophie, can't you make your crush just a tad less obvious???? but i also get that that's just how sophie is. again, this is entirely a personal taste thing.

legacy sophie annoyed the crap out of me, not gonna lie. it was excruciating. keefe consistently told her, again and again, to reach out to fitz, to confide in fitz, to lean on fitz. and then! she doesn't!!!! the thing is i can't even necessarily be mad because she fully acknowledges herself that she was a bad girlfriend. but also it's like could you not have gone to fitz just once instead of keefe. just once!!!! he literally told you he'd go at your pace!!!! even after he knows about the matchmaking thing, he's still willing to be with her, and he also wants to help her search for her parents, something she has interest in at that point. just. watching sophie make a mess out of her relationship with fitz was so annoying to me. i would put around 90% of the blame of sophitz falling apart on sophie, because she's the one who consistently ignored him, despite being told not to do that exact thing by both himself and keefe. and it's like!!!! i get it!!!! it can't be easy knowing you're dating a guy who literally cannot be in a bad match after being told you're going to be a bad match. i get the perspective. but it was still hella annoying to read. i wanted sophie to properly communicate with fitz just once, just once, and the miscommunication grated on me the entire time. the miscommunication trope is one of my least favorites and god, i just wanted sophie to be a good girlfriend to fitz just once!!!! just once!!!! like you have fitz over here, doing literally everything he can to try to meet sophie halfway, beyond halfway, even, and then you have sophie, spitting in the fact of his efforts. it's hard not to get frustrated reading that.

there's also this small moment at the beginning of legacy where she gets super butthurt that keefe left her out of one of his personal projects that has nil to do with her, then tries to like . . . guilt keefe into telling her? almost? and it's the same thing keefe's always doing with her, and it's very shady. no, sophie, you do not have a right to know everything keefe knows just because you're his friend!!!! back off!!!! that same scene she flips through one of his personal notebooks without his permission while he looks visibly uncomfortable, too. stop it!!!! that's not yours!!!! keep your hands to yourself!!!!

and my least favorite thing sophie has ever done in the entire series happens in legacy too: hijacking fitz's project and letting alvar go. oh my goodness. i cannot even begin to describe how much that single (hmm maybe not single, but they're connected) action pissed me off. she knew for the entire book how hard fitz was working to find alvar! keefe explicitly states that he was feeling a mix of some very negative emotions, which is how he nailed down that him working on his dad's memories was about alvar. she knew he was dealing with keefe's ass dad for the sole purpose of trying to find alvar after the shitshow that went down in flashback, and she knew exactly what he was going through in that book as well!!!! and then!!!! she fucking hijacks his project, doesn't even have the decency to tell him, and tries to justify it with some bullshit "oh, your dad's gotten too good at pushing fitz around" stuff. like sophie. that's very talk-down-y to fitz. like he's not a little kid!!!! let him make decisions for himself!!!! stop taking his choice away!!!! and i don't like it. and then, when she succeeds at fitz's project, she doesn't even have the decency to tell him then!!!! like, girl, i don't know how i can continue to defend this!!!!

and then!!!! it gets fucking worse!!!! because she actively stops fitz from achieving the one goal he's been trying to achieve for the entire book (about three weeks, for context, it's actually the shortest kotlc book timeline-wise besides unlocked): trying to capture alvar. like, sophie. come on. and i do feel bad for keefe in this scene, i truly do. it's like the telling-sophie-to-confide-in-fitz thing, he's doing so much to try to keep their relationship together, and then when sophie's out here with a baseball bat fucking smashing it to pieces and he's just standing there watching it, you're like. okay, that must be painful. anyway, back to sophie. her reasoning is shit, this decision is shit, the fact that keefe is the one that tells fitz she let alvar go is shit, everything about this scene fucking sucks. as fitz said, not only is sophie more powerful than the average telepath, but she and fitz are cognates. there's pretty much no way they couldn't have gotten the secret from alvar, even if he supposedly knows how to hide the real story from the fakes. and!!!! that doesn't even consider the fact that sophie and keefe could've just backstabbed alvar. he was weak, and the deal was they'd let him go if he told them, right? well they could've just. not let him go!!!! that was a valid option!!!! it pisses me off that they didn't do that. the second sophie saw alvar, she should've been thinking about how fitz was looking for him and how she was going to capture him so fitz didn't go down a very dark path, the same thing she'd be thinking if it was gisela and keefe. but no!!!! she doesn't even consider capturing alvar a priority in the slightest, if not for the sake of capturing alvar itself, then at least for the sake of supporting her boyfriend. and that pisses me off.

i do agree that fitz's . . . method of communication . . . was not the greatest. that's why i think he deserves 10% of the blame. but everything he says was perfectly logical. he just says it very emotionally so it's difficult for sophie to think about anything other than the fact that he's yelling at her. but his points were valid.

and what actually pisses me off isn't that in and of itself, it's just how quickly the narrative just . . . lets sophie get away with it. when fitz and sophie do their shoddy little make-up at the end of legacy, there's never an implication that fitz feels some resentment toward sophie for stopping him from achieving his goal. like he just drops it instantly???? and he's the one apologizing, which he needed to, but sophie owed him an even bigger apology, like what she did to him could be considered some form of betrayal???? like sophie. you were wrong. you were wrong. when is the narrative going to let sophie be wrong, and not villainize the person saying she is???? she should've been apologizing to fitz for the shit she put him through this entire book, yet she did not. when fitz shows up she sighs and goes "is this about alvar" and fitz is like "no, of course not!!!! i would never!!!!" and i was like. this should be about alvar. stop making it out to be that fitz would be in the wrong for making it about alvar, he deserves to call sophie's ass out for that instantly!!!! sophie should be villainized for that action. but instead fitz drops it and it never comes up again. now i am truly pissed at sophie. just because she's the main character doesn't mean everything has to bend to her whims. she's allowed to learn and grow like everyone else.

basically, if keefe is the main reason i don't ship sokeefe, then sophie is the main reason i don't ship sophitz. that comparison will make sense to people who have read my anti keefe stuff, but if you haven't, ignore that.

moving onto unlocked sophie! i don't know what happened to sophie in these later books but i don't like it. there's one specific moment that really grates on me in unlocked, except that moment then expands over like four or something chapters. which for a sixteen-chapter-novella is . . . a lot. when keefe decides, in an uncharacteristically logical manner, to stay away from sophie because she seems to be making his abilities go out of control, she gets so butthurt and at this point i'm just sitting here rolling my eyes because i don't even know how to defend this anymore. she somehow manages to twist it in her head to make it out to be like, "keefe doesn't want me around!!!!" and then gets super butthurt at something . . . that isn't happening. in the slightest. and it's not even a logical conclusion to jump to!!!! she just fucking does!!!! and then!!!! the narrative supports this view by having keefe apologize to her in an incredibly forced scene for something . . . he didn't do. his offense was *checks notes* trying not to harm anyone with his new, dangerous ability by keeping someone who basically acts as an amplifier away. i can only assume shannon put this in here because she loves her forced consolation sokeefe scenes, whichever direction they may be in, because it makes no sense whatsoever and is just about the dumbest thing to have to make up over.

and burning the archetype pissed me off. to be clear: totally chill with her burning down the storehouse. but the archetype???? and then later she justifies it by saying "well, gisela hasn't come looking for it so it's probably not important". like no???? gisela tells sophie and keefe in nightfall that she has a photographic memory and has the entire thing memorized . . . please . . . can you tell i hate it when. stupid characters. i hate this!!!! it's not even like an understandable stupid decision! sophie makes tons of those throughout the series and they make sense! but they're still stupid (see: reading king dimitar's mind). this was straight up stupid stupid. it was so bad . . . so bad . . . ugh. she tells flori to keep the archetype safe, then like five seconds later changes her mind completely???? i can only assume shannon did this because the archetype would ruin the story (make it too easy if the crew got their hands on it), but then she didn't have to write the archetype into that scene at all!!!! done! i don't understand the decision here . . . it was so utterly stupid it scares me.

i don't like stellarlune sophie. i don't like stellarlune in general, but stellarlune sophie feels like a hyper-girlbossed caricature of sophie. kotlc has a major girlbosses-instead-of-proper-female-characters problem, and nothing illustrates that more than stellarlune sophie. if the elves were to make a movie out of sophie after this is all over that parades her around as a hero, they would characterize her as something close to stellarlune sophie. absolutely despise sophie's personality in that book (and the books leading up to it, legacy and unlocked). everyone's constantly telling sophie to her face how she's not that little girl anymore and how she's so grown up and how she doesn't take anyone's shit anymore (false, see: keefe) and how she has this badass new personality now and how they're a fan of her snark and this and that and the other and it makes me want to scream (because one, it's terrible writing, and two, it's just not true). one of shannon's worst examples of tell-not-show. i don't know how to describe stellarlune's entire vibe aside from "desperate". currently on lodestar in my reread (well, if my computer lets me back into the ebook) and i just. like sophie so much more in this book. she has good plans, she has some fight, she has somewhat of a sense of humor and the narrative isn't constantly spoonfeeding how cool she is at the reader. you're allowed to form your own opinions on her.

which is a good way to start talking about the things i like about sophie! i love sophie in books one through seven. there's a conversation in flashback with mr. forkle (blech) where he tells sophie that she may be ready for more responsibility in black swan, and it feels infinitely more natural than the weird spoonfeeding we get in the later books about how grown up sophie is, because you can feel that sophie in flashback is very different than sophie in keeper, and not in a weird over-the-top forced girlboss-ish way. i genuinely liked that scene, despite forkle (yucky).

okay, the storehouse fire. i liked it, as i mentioned earlier. it was a fantastic character moment for sophie. but what i like even more than that is that sophie faces a ton of opposition for it, both rational and irrational (irrational being the shit like "you just started a war" . . . to which i say, hello, where have to been for the last eight books, as well as the rational stuff like forkle saying that she didn't think before she started the fire, as well as the mid arguments of like "now the neverseen are going to be extra motivated to get revenge, and it's your fault, sophie"). because that's realistic! when you do anything bold like what sophie did, you are going to be met with lots of illogical and logical arguments for both sides. it's a lot to navigate, and it's a lesson in nuance. sophie now has to navigate this, and she does, for pretty much the rest of the book. in the end, you're sort of forced to sit with the fact that sophie's action wasn't perfect, nor was it horrible. it had bad sides (she did it somewhat recklessly) but it also had good sides (she did take out their soporidine stores and retrieve the caches). and that nuance is a fantastic addition to the story.

i like the concept behind sophie. outside kotlc tumblr, one of the main criticisms you'll see of sophie is that she's too overpowered . . . and it's like . . . yeah . . . nice job, you have successfully nailed down the premise of the series. do you want a cookie for this marvelous achievement. literally the point of the story is that sophie cannot defeat the neverseen with her numerous, powerful abilities alone. she can't. they have been planning this for years and unless she puts some serious thought and good planning into it, she will never be able to catch up. it doesn't matter how powerful she is, the neverseen are smarter. so what's the solution then? well, she has to sit down and come up with a solid plan to take them down. she has to go on the offensive instead of just defending herself and her loved ones. and you see her take that step in stellarlune. and most importantly, she has to stop being so reckless. this is the thing. sophie has shown throughout the series that she has a knack for being reckless. you see it with king dimitar, you see it with several other things. but the thing is that that's a flaw. it puts herself and others in danger and if she wants to take the neverseen down for good, she needs to work on that. in that way, the fact that sophie is so overpowered serves as a vehicle for character development: at one point she'll realize that it's just not enough. and she'll have to change accordingly.

i think sophie being faced with the fact that she'll likely end up having to kill a neverseen member is a good thread to introduce. i wish it had been done before stellarlune, because this series is gloriously repetitive, but better late than never, i suppose. i like that she knows that one day she may have to go there, and she's dealing with that beforehand and trying to stomach it before she can get there. i'm curious to see where this will go, and i'm not entirely certain it will go anywhere, since shannon has a tendency to drop random plot/character threads, but that will be interesting to see unfold (if it does).

sophie's character is about perspective. a change of perspective in a world that desperately needs it. and i like that. it's easy to see how the elves might carry on thinking their world is perfect, because that's all everyone talks about or verbalizes. like we know our world isn't perfect, only because we are taught the appropriate history and we have exposure to several resources that show us the sneaky (and not-so-sneaky) ways people are exploited. but the elves don't have that. if you are talentless or otherwise affected, it's like, well. you shut up, and i think you're even almost gaslighted into thinking yourself that the world is perfect because that's what everyone says. there is nobody to tell the elves to check their internal biases, there is nobody to show them all the ways their society is wrong. so sophie is valuable there. on top of that, people pay attention to her. this makes her perspective all the more valuable, because people will actually listen. and i think that concept is incredibly fascinating. i want to see a scene where sophie calls everyone out in a really bold way, where it's undeniable that she's poking holes through society's weak spots. so far, we haven't really seen her make any bold statements, just her checking her friends' biases every so often. but i hope that's where her story is going, and why shannon seems so obsessed with spoonfeeding us how bold sophie's getting.

obviously, as a reader, i'm dead curious about who her bio parents are. but i think it makes a lot of sense that sophie herself doesn't want to know unless provided with an incentive (matchmaking/fitz). it makes her even more fleshed out, because it sort of reminds you that sophie doesn't like any of this. given the choice she probably wouldn't even be a noble. she wants to be as detached from project moonlark as possible, because she doesn't like the spotlight. she doesn't want to know things because she's curious, she only wants to know them so that the neverseen can be defeated. and you see a sort of attitude of trying to be as detached from project moonlark as possible while still insisting that she's the moonlark, meaning she was designed to be a part of everything that's going on. that's really interesting to me. the relationship between sophie and project moonlark, and how it distorts her perception of herself. she doesn't like being the moonlark, yet she's obsessed with being a perfect one, she's obsessed with filling the role she tells herself she needs to fill. you can see how that leads to conversations like the ones where black swan members are telling her she wasn't really made for anything other than to be herself, and you see her grapple with that for the series.

tldr: i like the themes and general direction that sophie's arc and story appear to be going in, but there are a few things she does that i feel the narrative lets her off the hook far too easily for.

[alegocarmadein]

kane for once was joking. he was always lying but now he was joking. a complete kane was a dream, was a nightmare. i remember all the chats with him. the all of him. the sadness of a case unsolved, a detectives work failing. the sadness of lapping waves on a rowboat. he sat by my side and rowed with me.

[tnbc-thoughtsandheadcanons]

I have a hard time imagining or believing Jack and Sally would get into any arguments. I’m sure they would eventually since every couple does.. but it’s just hard to think what they’d disagree about.

I agree, anon! They're a very sweet couple who were clearly established 'dearest' friends before starting their relationship, so I think they get along well, even after they're married.

I don't doubt they would eventually have an argument / disagreement with each other, I previously speculated it might be over something to do with Halloween Town + the Holidays, if they might butt heads trying to do things different ways...

I've seen some people say Sally should 'snap' or stand up for herself when Jack doesn't listen to her. I understand why she doesn't in the movie - her concern was over Jack's wellbeing and not necessarily being 'right' about her premonition - but I do think having her repeatedly ignored in further adaptations beyond Christmas justifies Sally asking him to simply give her words more consideration, after constantly being pushed aside like that.

HOWEVER. Sally DEFINITELY should have put Jack in his place in Mirror Moon, when he dumped all the Halloween planning/prepation on her without any full permission + discussion on his intentions, and ran away before she could object to it. I would've loved to see a proper confrontation and apology in that series.

[seokwoosmole]

Oushi is one of the best recent examples of character development done right. Cause when I first started this series I definitely didn't like him. And now, I can confidently say that I do and he's such a good character.

[nogenrealldrama]

Lily Evans never quite feels like a lily.

[Petunia&Lily growing up - Microfic/fic excerpt - 362 words]

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

Lily Evans never quite feels like a lily.

Lilies are the flowers that guests sometimes bring to her mother’s dinner parties, stiff stems already cut and pre-arranged in the crinkly wrapper. Her mother slots them into a vase in the middle of their dining table and they linger for a week or two, their white petals never getting to unfurl in the sun or to sway in the wind.

Lily broke that vase once, while trying to make Tuney play the new version of catch that the Blythe boys had taught her. The lilies spilled all over the dining table, the water that soaked into the tablecloth smelling a little like a creek in high summer. Tuney scolded her right away for being careless. Later, their mother got back from the shops and scolded Tuney for the mess.

By the end of the week there is a new vase on the dining table, and by the end of the month it is again filled with lilies, pale and elegant and still like a wax sculpture.

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

Petunia Evans never quite feels like a petunia.

Petunias are the flowers that tumble down the windowsills of half the neighbourhood, their streaked and striped and spotted trumpets a confetti of every colour available in the newest gardening catalogues. In spring, she helps her mother carry trays of them from the market, little bundles of leaves that seem to know nothing of the tireless display that would soon be expected of them.

It was a thrill guessing which of the plug plants would produce the most outrageous colours, until Mrs Blythe mentioned that she finds petunias quite naff. Petunia wasn’t sure then what that meant, but next spring her mother comes back from the market with fuchsias and begonias instead. Petunia had never wanted to vie for the windowsill spot but now she retreats further, to the back bench in school and to the quiet obedience at the dinner table.

She tries to warn Lily, Lily who is still loud and bright and who plays with boys in the creek, but Lily never listens to her. And, as years pass by, Mrs Blythe never mentions that lilies are naff at all.

[bidokja]

genius archer's streaming is actually a much more fun read than i was expecting and handles the disability aspect better than i thought it would

[jackass-jones]

The anguish I feel knowing no story is ever gonna have characters as good as the letter 😔

[himejoshiangels]

u ever read a fic that has u like: this time I'm really gonna do it

[emiliemaria]

.

[heartbeatbookclub]

It's 2 am as I start this, and I feel the need to put pen to paper on this thought, so to speak, because it's something I think about with relative frequency.

This is going to be more of a personal musing on my experience with Doki Doki Literature Club, and why it had such an impact on me when I first played it, as opposed to any more concrete analysis, so I guess you can keep reading if you want to know more about me as a person and my overall personal relationship to it.

Something I think about often in reference to DDLC is its status simultaneously as a satire on visual novels and all of the tropes therein, as well as a love letter to that genre, explicitly. It's very readily apparent if you've played a good few "weeb" visual novels that it very much fits that bill. I think my first experience with it makes it especially funny in that respect.

To give context, I first experienced Doki Doki Literature Club like a month or two after it came out, in a Skype call (shows how old I am) with 2 or 3 of my friends. During this period of my life, me and this small group of friends spent lots and lots of time just hanging out in Skype calls like this, doing whatever we pleased, spending time well into the next morning just enjoying each other's presence and seeing what fun shenanigans we could get into on the internet.

One frequent passtime of ours was playing visual novels. Not just any visual novels, no; we went looking for the most low effort, mediocre, low hanging fruit of visual novels we could download for free. The goal wasn't to enjoy a good story, the goal was to find something amusingly bad, whether in cliched, awkward, lazy writing, or in sheer absurdity. I still do this sometimes, though it's admittedly with a different thought in mind now.

I don't think this perception we had of visual novels, being that they're typically sloppy, cringe-inducing messes is necessarily uncommon even now, but it was especially common back then. It was "weeb shit", simple as, but even deeper than your typical weeb shit. The perception was something like watching High School DxD unironically; it's just weird.

And I don't really think the perception of visual novels being that way is necessarily inaccurate; there is a very low bar to entry to actually creating a visual novel just by the nature of the medium, so really, anyone with enough passion for a project and time on their hands can make one. As a consequence, there are a few egregiously bad visual novels, there are a few really excellent visual novels, but there are a great many just sort of okay, somewhat mediocre visual novels, and lots of visual novels created with not so honorable goals in mind.

And one thing we really enjoyed was just exploring what existed in the depths of unpopular visual novels slipping through the cracks of what people saw. For most of it, we were making fun of it, but there were a lot of points where we found stories which were mediocre, but ended up really enjoying our experience with it. I think an important thing to understand with that lower barrier to entry is that it enables people who really are passionate about telling a story to tell a story that has a lot of heart, and you can see all of that heart as a diamond within the rough of the actual construction. Even in VNs with more polish, typically there are still cracks right around the edges, where you can see just a little bit of the humanity that goes into it. It's sort of magical.

And Doki Doki Literature Club was an odd edge case, which successfully played with all of my perceptions of it. DDLC is probably the only game whose story is reliant on a plot twist where I actually went in completely blind. By all appearances, it was a silly little visual novel made with no sense of irony, and I spent a great deal of time laughing at its contents, completely unaware that they were in on the joke.

And my perception of it being this way I feel like colored a lot of what happened next when I looked into it. I forget exactly when our playthrough ended--we didn't make it to any of the deeper stuff, I watched a Let's Play for that--and I forget how the whole series of events following that went, but somehow or another, I learned of some of the true nature. Namely I saw what happened to Sayori.

It reminded me of Corpse Party, when I actually thought about it.

I'm not going to go deep in depth on all of my thoughts about Corpse Party nor any of its history, but to be frank, Corpse Party reeeally sits in that realm of "mediocre, but lots of heart" to me. I don't really think Corpse Party is very good, particularly elaborating on a lot of the lore, but I really enjoyed it when I first experienced it, and it's still something I occasionally like looking back over. It's deliciously dark, and is extremely effective at creating an oppressive atmosphere out of what's ostensibly a collection of happy warm anime character tropes with little serious personality outside them.

So when I say that Sayori's death reminded me of Corpse Party, I mean that the way it paired playing the happy warm visual novel setting straight with extremely grim subject matter was done well.

Really, there were only a few other examples of this kind of media I could think of that really effectively utilized the exact kind of gut punch that DDLC did. Everything about the way the game framed itself around it, up until the final plot twist, really did feel like they were just elements of a visual novel playing themselves out. Sayo-nara really sets that tone for me--it still gives me chills sometimes when I hear it, because it sounds perfectly like what a "Bad Ending" theme for that kind of ending would likely sound like. It plays itself remarkably well into creating the setting, it really effectively feels like it is a normal visual novel falling apart at the seams.

I think that, more than anything, is why DDLC made such an impact on me when I first experienced it (which is remarkably different than the kind of mark it leaves on me now), it played so effectively with a genre I was so familiar with, and simultaneously played "mediocre visual novel with lots of heart" straight while also completely knocking "deep and terrifying existential horror" out of the park.

It's hard to truly describe, but there's just so much that feels so right about DDLC just being as it is. There's such a unique quality to the way it's written, to the way it's constructed, that goes down to its bones. It feels like that exact brand of junk food media you go to visual novels for. You don't necessarily want to think too deeply about the characters, or the setting of the story, or any of the deeper themes surrounding it; you just want to experience a nice story with some anime girls.

And then it yanks the rug out from under you, and makes you think it's junk food media with a side of deep and disturbing horror.

And then it yanks the second rug out from under that one, making you realize it's something much, much deeper.

I think something else it really appealed to, to me, was just that sense of being on the edge of the world which most indie games of that sort always give me. There are a shitload of examples I could give for this, but this sense I'm describing is the opposite of the sense which games like Undertale give me. Undertale's world feels lived in, it feels like it exists in a much, much wider concept of a great, sprawling world where billions of people live.

DDLC feels like you and the 4 girls in it are the only people in the universe. There are all of these environments you inhabit which ostensibly have other people who pass through them, live in them, there are implications of people, but inside this world, there's only you.

I think it just appeals to my desire to be transported to a complete other world for a little while. A limited space, where only things important to this experience exist, for this pure feeling of emotional catharsis. And that's something a lot of these sorts of simple visual novels appeal to; the goal isn't necessarily to tell some deeper story, it's just to present beats as they happen. DDLC takes that, and plays with it, both in a textual sense, as though these fictional characters exist and are somehow aware they're fictional, and in a meta sense, by directly playing around with your expectations and the way the entire thing is framed.

Or something like that.

Fun fact 1: Doki Doki Literature Club (specifically Sayo-Nara, still one of the few songs I can play entirely by memory) is what got me to start learning piano. I taught myself to play, and started mostly with the DDLC soundtrack (Which is very simple to play by ear, by the way, it's pretty much entirely C major.)

Fun fact 2: What initially inspired this thought was this video, which really reminded me of other visual novels we/I played that would utilize this particular style of music.