#there *are* some thoughts for societal stuff but they're even more vague so!

[love-death-and-desert]

Hiiii. Can we hear more about your wizard universe redscape please?

Your art of them is so beautiful and it perfectly depicts the casual but very deepfelt way Mumbo and Scar show each other affection <3

well you see. it's been stuck on "vague thoughts and disconnected concepts" stage for a few years now i have an overall idea for it's aesthetics but not so much for sustenance

and thank you! i try my best

[stellar-mop]

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley has me thinking about gender and gender roles a lot. I know other people have done more in-depth analysis of this, but I'm just gonna throw my thoughts out into the void of tumblr (the void is welcome to yell back, just be nice please)

I think one of the things that makes these characters fascinating especially for me as a vaguely-agender nonbinary person is like the places I can see where their gender is impacting their interactions and choices. Like changing the gender of the characters would fundamentally change their story and personality (love y'all's genderswap AUs tho, this is not an objection).

Something I'm not sure how to articulate super well is how the game interacts with like neurodivergence gender stereotypes. On the surface level they line up with the "women are emotional and men aren't allowed to show feelings" set of gender stereotypes. But I think there's another layer if you look at it through the lens of how societal pressures around mental illness and gender intersect especially in like school-aged kids/teens. Like Andrew being the "easy child" and Ashley being... Ashley. In not-particularly-nuanced terms: "boy" neurodivergence shows as acting out and being a problem child (which Ashley does), and "girl" neurodivergence gets hidden via masking and passivity (which Andrew does). I think it's neat that this is contrary to societal expectations - like this would be a very different story if Andrew was a pushy chaotic mess and Ashley was apathetic but seething under the surface. Because gender! What's even up with that?

Less sfw thoughts under the cut, including some coffincest stuff. Warnings for unhealthy relationships and attitudes towards sex:

The way Ashley and the mom talk about sex is fascinating. I've read some really good analyses on here about Ashley thinking about sex as transactional and I think she gets that from her mom. In that one scene ("you fuck her") the mom asks Andrew something like "what does she give you to make it worth it?" Like, the only reason she can think of for why Andrew wants to spend time with Ashley is sex. That says a lot about the mom as a person (also wow she really does see zero value in Ashley as a person wtf), and probably the way Ashley was raised to think about sex. And that's a very gendered (like cishet women specifically) view of sex. Like sex in a relationship as something to be tolerated, and for Ashley "another way to keep him around".

But I'm also wondering about the flip side of that, like is the mom only tolerating the dad for sex? Because I don't really get the impression that she likes him very much, but they textually have a very active sex life. If so, this is also sort of counter to societal gender roles/expectations. I really don't like the parents but they're such fascinating characters too.

I guess my point with all this is like we got distracted by the cannibalism and murder and incest and demon summoning, but there's some really neat and subtle stuff about gender in here that I want to talk about too! It's just so well written there's so much depth

*slaps roof of game* this bad boy can fit so much dysfunction!

[avelera]

How the hell do people think that ANNE RICE is anti sex and homophobic?? TVC is weird sex stuff with queer people the book series??

I have no idea how people got that idea but I have seen posts floating around (mostly during S1) that seemed to be from people who thought that IWTV could "finally" show Lestat/Louis as canonically gay because Anne Rice had passed away or that she would be "rolling in her grave" if she saw Lestat and Louis kiss on screen which is... baffling nonsense of the highest degree. As you know, Lestat and Louis are canonically a couple in the books.

Here's what I think happened:

1)People conflated Anne Rice being anti-fanfic with her being anti-slash shipping. Since many authors of the era did have a problem with fanfic in part because of slash shipping, I can kind of see how this misunderstanding would happen. But no, her issues with fanfic were mostly legal and partially creative (she thought people's time would be better spent writing original works that they could one day publish rather than writing fanfic of her work, but I think that was more her misunderstanding the purpose of fanfic than being necessarily derogatory towards fanfic writers, even if her choice of words was somewhat dismissive, but I digress).

2) I saw one theory that Anne McCaffrey (of the Dragonriders of Pern novels) and Anne Rice might have been conflated, which again, kind of makes sense since they were popular during the same era? Supposedly (I can't confirm this) Anne McCaffrey was very against slash shipping of her characters so that might have got mixed in with the whole Anne 90s-Author is against slash fanfic game of telephone.

3) I only vaguely remember this, but I think a quote of Anne Rice's might have been taken out of context. Something to the effect of Lestat and Louis not needing to be shown kissing or having sex to be a couple. And I think people read it inversely from the meaning. She wasn't saying, "The vampires don't have gay sex." She has almost always said some variation of, "Sex is different for vampires. Blood drinking basically replaces and transcends it, as it replaces and transcends all physical pleasures. Louis and Lestat don't need to have sex in order to be a gay couple. Their existence and love as vampires transcends are our understanding of the physical, it is deeper and more all encompassing and and entirely strange to our understanding of sex and relationships on a physical and spiritual level.

Now, keep in mind, at the time when a creator said, "Oh, these two same-sex characters aren't gay their bond transcends sexuality." They were sidestepping and meant, "I'm uncomfortable with same sex relationships and only want to see them as friends." Anne Rice absolutely did not mean that ^ . Anne Rice wrote tons of queer erotica in addition to her queer supernatural novels. When Anne Rice said, "They transcend gender and their sexuality is completely untranslatable to ours." She wasn't being like "So they're not gay." She wasn't saying they were straight either like other creators meant! She was literally, as someone who spent a lot of time thinking and writing about alternate genders and sexualities outside the mainstream, exploring ideas like the fact that if you no longer had the biological imperative to eat, sleep, or reproduce as humans do, your understanding of intimacy and sexuality would change dramatically as well.

(FFS, as you know, Lestat has a relationship with his mother after he turns her because they basically are no longer related at that point, or they are related on completely different levels as fledgling and sire, the whole plotline is tied up in how becoming a vampire is about transcending human norms but also how Lestat is deliberately, gleefully fucking around with taboo and social structure and the forbidden as a matter of course so like... yeah this isn't a one off, the vampire novels are all about how being a vampire means you now naturally break every societal taboo with regards to sex and relationships because you're not human anymore, they become meaningless and therefore we as human readers can also explore the metaphors of gender and sexuality and taboo vicariously and ponder what matters and what doesn't.

I mean, one reason it was so offensive to me to see Anne Rice mistaken as homophobic is that she's basically the reason I'm not homophobic and even felt able to explore my own bisexuality and rejection of gender as a construct after growing up in a conservative household like all you had back then as a teen was Anne Rice and Mercedes Lackey. ANYWAY).

So yeah, this rant got away from me, but while I will say over and over that Anne Rice isn't perfect, there's a lot of things she did in her life that I disagreed with and people have no obligation to like her works or her view of the world, she was actively dabbling in the forbidden and in taboo in ways that might make people justifiably uncomfortable, one way she was doing that was by normalizing same sex relationships way way way before almost anyone else was doing so in genre fiction and that's while I will fight to the death anyone accusing her of homophobia.

[codenamesazanka]

absolutely insane to me that Deku went and saved Shigaraki without a single thought about him and his situation. and it was justified. I know it's supposed to be brave and heroic and admirable, that he just ran head first into 'wanting to save that crying child', and in some ways it is, but it just. weird how we barely get any reflection or inner thoughts about it from him.

it's not like he was facing any strong opposition to saving Shigaraki - no questions of 'but shigaraki is dangerous, is this the moral thing to do, does he deserve this, why focus on him and no one else, why do you feel so strongly about this, if you hadn't seen that crying child then what?', so it wasn't even like he was shrugging off those hard answers. Ignoring naysayers and obstacles. Powering through with an iron will. Didn't need to address it! 'I wanna save that crying child'.

Even Shigaraki asks him, via the memories of Stain and Overhaul and ReDestro. But Deku just says 'no!' and that's that.

Ultimately the answer we get is 'he just wants to relieve Shigaraki's pain, he believes everyone has the same hearts'... but that motivation doesn't even come from him in the form of a shonen protag shout proclamation. Someone else has to do it for him?????

And that reasoning is nice and all! but it's so easy to bring up examples like Muscular, or AFO, and wonder if he thinks they have the same heart too, and wouldn't he want to help them as well? And because like I said above, he's never challenged on this, he never elaborates on why he might save Shigaraki but not Muscular, it makes the 'same heart' creed vague. it makes it feels like either some people actually don't have the same hearts because they're innately evil, or he needs to see them cry before he wants to help. or, idk, they did stuff so evil their hearts doesn't matter any more. Shigaraki did that too, evil stuff, but what separates Shigaraki from them is The Crying Child. And so good thing AFO has never shed real tears even as a baby (because he's innately evil).

admittedly it's really only when the societal angle was at play in Shigaraki Tomura's development that those questions are relevant, so now that it's revealed AFO plotted everything, none of that really matters. Questions of what is deserved, whether it's right to save this guy who wants to annihilate entire islands, if he even should be paying attention to villains - all rendered irrelevant. AFO was behind all of Shigaraki's actions, so the questions can't be applied to him, he was a puppet victim, so Deku was right to want to save him.

head empty, only 'save shigaraki'. and then—'head empty' justified, because none of the issues surrounding Shigaraki was real; 'head empty' justified, because things like 'what creates victims? what turns them into villains? why are they doing what they're doing' doesn't matter. AFO was behind it all.

Yeah, yeah, I know other people that addressed the non-AfO-caused issues. But that's the thing. other heroes addressed it. Not Deku. Shouldn't he have been part of addressing it, since he wants to be the greatest hero??? Oh, but maybe it's better if he doesn't, because then he won't be a pillar? the work is shared?

idk. Just doesn't work for me. must be working for other people though, and I'm jealous.

also. this all makes moments like at the mall and Jaku, where Shigaraki was essentially point blank giving away his damage - All Might smiling like there's no one he can't save, Heroes sweep pain under the rug - terrible in retrospect cuz like. he just ignored Shigaraki. You might say that what Shigaraki said was too vague for Deku to make out, but it's really not. literally, "All Might smiles because he thinks there's no one he can't save" is just overflowing with resentment, and in Jaku Shigaraki looked like this:

beseeching to the heavens.

It's not quite that Deku sees pain and wants to relieve it in general, else he would've wanted to help Shigaraki from the start. It has to be in the form of someone super sympathetic. the crying child.

I guess I have to hand it to him that once he finally does feel sympathy, Deku will stop at nothing to want to save.

I just think that's a terrible pre-requisite.