#this could also apply so so much to the owl house characters

[aquaaquila]

The Owl House Family Tree

Behold, the family of the Owl House mixed with my headcanons that I made because I felt like it, and gosh is it crazy. Explanation under the cut lol

The Grimwalkers (and Hunter who's a grimwalker) were created by Philip, essentially being his children, but Philip created them using Caleb's DNA and modeled them in his image. So yeah, they pretty much are both parents of Grimwalkers as they're not perfect clones of Caleb and it's fucked up in plenty of ways

Since both Gwen and Dell are theorized to be descendants of Clawthorne with how Gwendolyn follows the mold of Clawthorne women with her looks, power, and name. Still, then there's Dell who has an uncanny resemblance to Philip and Caleb, along with being the best wood-carver in the wood-carving family, so it's not clear who's the Clawthorne and who was married to Clawthornes, I went a different route. I made Gwendolyn a very very distant descendant of Clawthorne's ancestor (16 generations and possibly even more), whereas Dell is the descendant of Caleb as a compromise.

Lilith and Hooty are in QPR.

I included Hooty's mom along with possible ancestors and used the tapeworm in Titan's eye as a point of reference.

The BATTs are adopted children of Raine and Eda's co-parent to them. She however adopted the Collector, King, and Luz individually, even though Raine also would co-parent them to an extent. Granted Eda was called "mama Eda" by Amber, whereas Luz, King, and the Collector never referred to Raine as their parent.

Raine and Eda are neither dating nor married, but a secret third thing. And the same applies to Darius and Alador

Camila and Perry Porter (Gus's dad) are in QPR as well.

Professor Hermonculus is Amity's grandparent because yes xD

Eberwolf and Darius are "like brothers" but they aren't officially brothers by either blood or adoption, or they're necessarily in QPR. They're just bros.

Darius had a failed relationship that resulted in Gavin (that abomination Glandus kid). That's rather a leftover theory with plenty of story-telling potential that came back from season 2A days when we knew nothing about Darius and were looking for some connections. The picture of the mom came from the old photo from Reaching Out.

Gavin is dating Cat (Amity's former friend, she set them up).

There was a funny theory that once I heard about Mason being dad of Willow's dad and I decided to go along with it because A) I find it funny, especially since the point of connection is how alike they look, and B) explains where Willow got her green eyes from.

Mason is a grandparent of Matt and Steve, as I figured he's too old to maybe be just their dad IMO, but he could still be. It's also an old and forgotten theory from times of TOH S2B when Steve got revealed to be Matt's step-brother (meaning they share one parent and have 2 different parents of their own) and there were storyboards of ASIAS that revealed there was a storyline with Mason and Tholomules, granted as I said, it was forgotten so I can't say it's really valid.

Steve and Katya are dating. @secretly-of-course here is your Stevatya mention.

Any other questions? The ones that aren't asking who is who, unless it is a really obscure character then let me know.

[jess-the-vampire]

You know it's stuff like this why I partly can't join the owl house fandom. The fandom seems to persnickety about liking certain charactersand headcanons, especially as someone who has dealt with similar shit before in my other fandoms. Granted there are other reasons I hate the fandom, but this is the worst one. It kinda soured the show for me, granted I never cared for it, but they just worsening it for me.

At times like these, i think it's important to remember posts like this

Bigger fandoms, will always end up looking worse by comparison, it's inevitable unfortunately.

For me, this is also unfortunately nothing new, anyone whose been with me since the start knows that.

It was a decade ago, in another fandom, that i was harassed and accused of being homophobic, because i shipped some characters together that wasn't the popular same sex ship.

I shipped plenty of other same sex ships, heck, i considered the characters in question to be bisexual. But that did not stop me from being publicly mocked, harassed, and put on block lists.

I was underage at the time, this was my first fandom experience, and it also soured that fandom for me, even the show itself.

People go into these things, thinking they're protecting people, or helping others.

And on the surface, i could see how one would think that.

But you're really not, people are not that simple, and neither are what they enjoy or are drawn to.

I was a teenager having fun in my own little space, with a ship i knew was noncanon, and it wouldn't of taken much research to find out i had no issue with the lgbt community at all, but no, it was "You are erasing us, you only ship this because you hate gay people, you're a horrible human being and yada yada yada-"

now, a decade later, it's "You are ignoring the poc cast because you're racist, you only like this character and are invested in him because you believe in what he believes in, you're a racist and sexist being for enjoying him and yada yada-"

Look, people do this because they want to protect people who have been screwed for centuries, it's perfectly understandable to worry that people who think belos is a cool character could like him for the wrong reasons. But people who genuinely think this way are a minority, and will be way more outspoken about those beliefs, is the solution here really to go up to anyone who likes something you don't and ruin them without evidence? To accuse them all of horrible beliefs?

this entire belief system removes the possibility of many MANY other reasons people enjoy media, and is straight up jumping to conclusions that if someone doesn't fundamentally agree with what you think, they MUST be a bad person. No critical thinking, no trying to understand others, just straight up assuming things.

Which btw, ironically, is actually acting WAY more like belos then anything the artists doing wittober were actually doing. Even the idea people are making art about his childhood and therefore sympathizing with him falls apart because there have been just as much art about his crimes so far.

Belos is a villain in a cartoon, people have latched onto villain characters since the dawn of time, it's nothing new. If you're going to keep this train of thought going....is disney just bad for their villian brand? are people also horrible for similar reasons if they have a favorite disney villian?

This entire thought process can be applied anywhere if you try hard enough.

Which is the kinda thing that allows actual human beings to be genuinely hurt here.

like are people going to be hurt more because people make aus with belos, or are they going to be hurt more because people who make said aus are accused or being racist people worth scrutinizing?

This thought process also doesn't take into the account of the fact that the people who like belos, might also be lgbt or poc, which....a lot of them are from my experience.

You can't both preach the show's message of accepting people who are different from you, and then also try and justify harassing people because they fandom differently then you. Unless the wittebane people are actively spouting out racist and sexist stuff, they're not doing anything wrong by engaging in the parts of the fandom that interest them.

Not everyone will be drawn to the show for the same reasons, you always gotta remember that, everyone has different favorite characters, different ships, and different things that make them happy.

Fandom is meant to be fun, people make aus because they're fun, they want to play with the media they like and do new things with it.

I strongly doubt everyone who has made an au staring hunter, or belos, or who thinks the wittebanes are interesting, sat down and said "Man, i like this show, but there are too much minorities in it, i hate minorities, i should make an au removing them or draw the wittebanes because they are white".

as a fan of these characters myself, i like them, but don't care too deeply about the blights, other white popular characters. I feel that should imply my investment in them has a lot more to do with other aspects then race.

in fact this makes me wonder if the person complaining in the tags would have the same argument about aus staring eda or amity in the same vain, even though hunter eda and amity are all lgbt, and two are disabled.

If you are doing stuff like this, either don't engage with stuff that doesn't interest you, because it's really weird to be this obsessed with a part of the fandom you don't care about.

or maybe, actually try to understand why people like it, rather then assume it's for the wrong reasons.

just my thoughts.

[omaano]

SW Hades AU July Update

Other updates: May - June - July - August

I've made a lot more progress with my Star Wars meets Hades AU project than I'd imagined - and absolutely none in other aspects, so let's see how the past month has been!

I have finished the character illustrations both for Maul

and Omega, (look how cute she is in her pocket sized version! ^^)

and I have also finally rounded out my Din collection, so that I now have 6 variations on his character art (helmet on and off, with Grogu and the darksaber, and with and without Grogu and the beskar spear in hand).

Aphra has lines and flat colours too, as well as the very basic lighting layers on her!

I'm real hyped to start working on her! I'm very proud of the dynamic pose I picked for her, too. I'll likely up the red in her jacket and gloves for a bit of a pop in colour, because all this brown everywhere is growing a little boring tbh. Like with certain other characters...

There has been some progress with Obi-Wan, but it's going suuuper slow, and I continue to preemptively worry about how I should completely redraw him for after his reunion with Cody, too. (Iirc Patroclus is standing with his spear in hand after he's reuinted with Achilles in Hades, and I also very badly want to draw him with his lightsaber ignited, but I feel that wouldn't be very good for him just, you know, hanging out in front of his little house on Tatooine...)

And now I'm going to add my first ever poll for the next month in case anyone wants to weigh in on the order in which I add characters to this project:

I'm making no promises, but I thought this could be fun :)

This post is growing a little long, so I'm putting the rest about Obi-wan's background re-draw, and some musings on picking colours for Omega under the read more ->

There was no room for it in the previous update, but I'd fully redrawn one background finally for Obi-Wan's chilling spot!

It is the same setup as where you can find Patroclus in game, with the walls and the chasm and the doors out, but I added Obi-Wan's hut and a desert envisonment. (I've watched so many videos on how to draw in an isometric grid, because there was always something that just wouldn't work... I'd thought there was a trick to drawing squares and circles in this grid that I just couldn't figure out for the life of me - and it turns out that I was just careless and my grid wasn't tight enough so I had to eyaball distances and the width and length of things too much lol.) And now I'm faced with the difficult task of picking colours and figuring out if the character shading tricks also apply here or not.

For now these colours are more for just to block in certain elements in the background, but I have some more desert/desolate looking backgrounds saved from other Supergiant games (they've got some really vibrant and dark colours, like wow!) as well to hopefully help me out moving forward.

I'd redrawn those bulbs you can find over the door leading out of various chambers in-game, because I might as well go in full re-design mode bit by bit, and after some deliberation and googling I picked the Mandalorian Crusaders symbol as inspiration for it.

And now back to Omega for a bit:

While I was working on the character illustration for Omega and Batcher I became very aware of how weird it is to pick colours for me. (I very heavily rely on preexisting colour palettes; I have multiple saved just for the Hades project like for Rex, Ahsoka, Cobb...) I'd been working on Rex and Cody last (Maul doesn't count because he doesn't have very human colours, so picking reds and purples and browns for him wasn't so shocking tbh), and aside from the armor paint and hair colour they very much share the very same colour palette. That was easy, I'd picked the skintones off Boba and the little portrait icons already, upped the saturation a bit because seeing the base skintone laid down scared me, and off I went.

(Laying down the first layer of flat colours is always super scary because they too often seem too dark and too grey/green, which I know will change after the complete shading is done but it still looks very off putting...)

So. The way the colouring in Hades made sense for me is that it works with pretty desaturated colours, there is a lighter shadow colour that's a bit more desaturated and the hue is shifted cooler but is still pretty cool to the original base colour (so much that I'd often have to turn it darker so that I'd see it laid down if I'm not sitting right), and another darker shadow layer that is a tad more saturated and warmer in tone. And there is also (a possibly slightly cooler shifted) and lighter highlight, and another more saturated colourful highligt (in the skin that is the bright, peachy orange for example). (and the little super bright pops of colour at the very very end. I hate adding them so much, but they are very important!)

But while I could pick the skin tones off of Rex, the problem I'd tumbled into was when it came to shading her hair (it's very important to me that Rex and Omega shared all these colours). Omega has a lot more hair (shocking, I know), and so shading that required a lot more than Rex's simple two-tones, and the "shadow" colour from Rex just didn't work, it was too saturated and warm in a larger quantity. So I tried to find another blond character in Hades, picked some colours off of Theseus... and those didn't work too well either, because those colours looked too pale and washed out compared to how lively her skintone was. There had been a lot of adjusting - I'd colour picked all of Theseus' colours and watched like a hawk where my colour marker moved both in hue and saturation a couple times in every which way and tried to mimic that in comparison to my base colour... and then you already saw how she ended up.

Here is the visual representation of the process:

I do a lot of these swatches.

You can see them there next to Omega with the blues and the gold/metallic detail colours (the latter of which I'd ended up using in her crossbow), and up above with the Obi-Wan wip as well (I needed to pick a lot of colours from Chaos and Aphrodite to figure out how to go about his pale skin), but I also worked like this with Din and Achilles in the beginning, as well as trying to pick the greens for Boba's armor. Usually the first and biggest hurdle I run into is choosing my base colours... that's something I really need to work on; but after that this method really helped me feel a lot more comfortable with cell shading.

I hope it made sense to you, and it was at least a tad bit entertaining (or if I'd ruined the word "colour" for you for a while, I'm sorry XD, I know I'd used it a lot). This was really the first time I'd truly seen how I changed around the colours I worked with in a piece, and also tried to go a bit more consciously about shifting them around here (that's why I have all the screenshots XD) and thought I might as well share them here in this monthly update.

I've also switched over to using CSP and a display tablet, in the hopes that I can familiarize myself with them without the pressure of needing some fancy or very specific brushwork and work process. No texture, little need for pressure sensitivity - I hope to slowly pspsps my brain into accepting working with these, and build up some success and good experiences before I try sketching and drawing on it and maybe trying out some new unfamiliar brushes as well ^^;

[sepublic]

The Owl House's Ending Anniversary...

So it's officially been one whole year since The Owl House ended.

One year ago, I wondered how I would move on. How I would keep going. But I also knew I would, no matter what, because time keeps going on. Things will eventually pass, they always do, that's how so many moments and days for me have gone. Even entire periods of my life.

So I'm not surprised how things have gone on since then; I still had plenty more things to say about TOH, and I still love it just as I have. I've gotten new hyperfixations, and even returned to old ones as some of you can see with recent posts, so it's only a matter of time before TOH circles back again.

And man does it feel so slow, only to feel so brief, it really feels like this anniversary has snuck up on and surprised me! And once again, we have some other, appropriate event lined up; A solar eclipse on this anniversary! Luckily there's no sigils nor coven heads gathered to make me worry. But dang, it was raining in Connecticut when Luz returned there, and it was the rebirth of Jesus when Luz was resurrected.

Makes me wonder if anyone of the Boiling Isles, justifiably, has had PTSD from solar eclipses, and dreaded any that showed up, despite knowing it couldn't happen again. People must've held their breaths the entire time during the first eclipse, panicked at even the slightest fatigue, and then it passed and they realized it really was impermanent and over. And that there was another step towards moving on, which I guess I can relate to now, though this is something I'm much less happy to see gone.

I think a lot about how TOH has influenced both me and my writing, how I approach characters and stories now. I've found myself gravitating more and more towards personal, character-driven stories and situations now. I still have a bit of a taste for grander-scale stuff, but TOH was special for me in that it feels like the first time I really got and understood a show and its characters from the ground-up as I experienced it all in real time. The first time I truly grasped themes and character arcs and could make reasoned predictions based on those, some of which came true! It really feels like THE big start of my media literacy in a way?

It's been fun looking back at TOH as a 'whole' work more or less to reevaluate, and learning other things behind-the-scenes about the show. We've had a few more livestreams and stuff confirmed. Dana's done more drawings, including on her Patreon.

I haven't been writing as much TOH stuff lately, and tbf I've already said soooo much. I might have other, new things to say later down the line, and I do have a few thoughts I've written in notes that maybe could be fully-fledged posts in their own right. I've found comparisons to protagonists of other media, like Miles Morales, or Arin from Ninjago.

The Owl House still is and will probably always be something truly special to me; It feels like my first real fandom experience. My first time understanding and learning a show, appreciating it as it develops and even as I speculate. It broadened my tastes and horizons, my ability to participate with others in stuff.

I miss it; I miss new episodes, new developments. I'm still agonized over things that could've been, things I would've loved to see more of. I'm apprehensive over whether we'll get that Raeda prequel because I don't wanna get my hopes up. Plus Dana needs a well-deserved break and is trying and experimenting with new, different things. And I get that.

It's bittersweet, it's scary, it's freeing, it's sad, it's happy. I've gone so far, this show and fandom has gone so far. And it'll keep going, it has to, time keeps marching on. Luz had to lose her father Manny, process that, but still keep going and must be surprised looking back how much she's adjusted since then, how much she's still grown and gained and learned, while still holding him dear; The same applies for the Titan and the magic she once wielded. With grief and acceptance being a core theme in this show, I'm not surprised that it prepped up the viewers to do the same, and now we have.

And you know what? I'm gonna keep going on, like Luz Noceda, possibly my favorite protagonist of all time, one of the greats and a huge inspiration now for how I really want to write and focus on my own protagonists, too. I'm gonna keep doing this like it never ended. The rate and frequency might fluctuate, but every now and then I'll have things to say, and stuff to drop by and check, such as with the tag and the occasional trending post, others' reblogs, and so forth.

So again, thanks to Dana and the crew. Thanks to Luz Noceda, Eda Clawthorne, King Clawthorne, and the other many, many characters! Luz's story is one where it feels like the show really is about her at its core and wraps around to her, and I want to do a story one day that accomplishes the same feeling. And as I see how Dana has been inspired by past influences, I can't help but look forward to future generations and stories that will themselves have been inspired by The Owl House, I know I've been already, retroactively applying it to things that were already fairly compatible to begin with, and really needed the fresh breath of new inspiration.

I'm repeating a lot of the same things I've said last year. Will I say the same stuff another whole year from now? I'll see. But until next time... BBBBYYYYYYEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

[amorisxx]

“Going Native” trope and idealizing the “other world” in The Owl House

I’m surprised that Luz’s obsession with becoming a witch wasn’t ever seen as offensive by anyone on the Isles. Like the witches on the boiling isles are shown to be born that way and it’s kinda odd how Luz shows up with her own biases and preconceived notions about witches and immediately applies them to Eda and others.

It’s like someone showing up to a remote village only having read about the people but having simultaneously romanticized their culture. Maybe it’s my sociology/anthropology major brain interpreting it that way lmao but that’s a big no no when it comes to interacting with another culture.

I know Eda tells her she’s wearing a dirty traffic cone on her head in the second episode when she dresses up in the stereotypical witch attire. But other than that, I don’t recall her getting much flack for her behavior. (Unless we’re including Amity saying she’s not a witch but I feel like that was more about Amity’s personal gripe with Luz)

I think this is an example of the “going native” trope where the protagonist fully immerses themselves in the new world that they’ve been thrust into. Think Anne Boonchuy in Amphibia (specifically her connection to Wartwood) or even more so, Jake Sully becoming one of the Na’vi in Avatar. However, I think TOH is an underdeveloped example of the trope because the show’s narrative barely examines Luz’s journey from outsider to respectable member of the Boiling Isles.

Basically, Luz encountered such little obstacles when it came to being accepted in the isles and I feel like that was so unrealistic. It’s like no one cares that she’s a human at all. It’s completely different from how Anne was treated in Amphibia. She was considered a monster for most of season one, which was funny, but also interesting because it made her character development stand out all the more when the townspeople eventually considered her one of their own.

I guess what bothers me is that the show didn’t really demonstrate Luz earning her position in the boiling isles, which I feel like is important when it comes to considering oneself part of a culture that has been stereotyped and put down. And especially since she ended up being their savior against Belos.

Plus, Luz treating their everyday lives like a fantasy come true feels sorta icky. I feel like that was okay at first, but I never got the feeling that the novelty ever wore off. At some point, Luz should’ve began to acknowledge the boiling isles as just another place and not some fantasy world where she could escape from reality.

[great20sworld]

LIVING THE DREAM 

A Viktor x Reader fanfiction 

Author's note: Chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, chapter 6, chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 9, chapter 10 and chapter 11 along with summary are available in my Tumblr page. 

⚠️ Content warning ⚠️: Character death (not major character)

Chapter 12: Reverse!

__________________________

“We could've calibrated it better”

You said for the umpteenth time and Viktor didn't honour your exclamation with any comprehensible response, choosing to simply hum in acknowledgement. You put your head in your hands, forefingers pushing back the strands of hair falling over your eyes and thumbs gently applying pressure on your temples as you supress the weight of your eyelids gaining weight as each hour passes. An owl looked at you from the branch curiously extending to the lab, as if it also wanted to partake.

The lab was empty of human presence save for you and Viktor, the latter seemingly immersed in page turner resting in his lap, filled with equations. Though his eyes (much more vigilant than yours in the hour) were torn away from the book every once in a while, to rest momentarily on the dimly glowing line of crystals attaching itself to circuitry. It had taken almost another week or so to actually proportionally raise the charges to match the supposed output you predicted via modelling, and several hours before, your little team had convinced yourselves that the ‘portal’ was almost ready, and as soon as the crystals reached the charging point at a particular scale in the energy it generated, the phenomenon can be observed, granted that there would be a controller.

You remembered wearily how sceptical still Jayce had looked right before being pushed to the conclusion, running a gloved hand through his dark auburn hair and sighing. However, to your delight and surprise Viktor insisted and made a deal that if this “last attempt” failed, they would return to normal property analysis research and the unwilling labour had left Jayce tired, so he was definitely not going to be there to control it. Viktor had volunteered (very eagerly) and Sky also did, seconds before you also volunteered. 

Your gaze met Sky’s and you swore you saw something flicker behind her gaze, only momentarily though, as she quickly schools her expression to a cheerful smile, and saying something about needing to visit the green house anyways, before she thanks you for taking initiative. 

You try to shake away the small doubt already beginning to creep behind your head, as you had watched her leave with Jayce, for the day, leaving you with the tall lanky scientist with the lovely accent. 

Coming to terms with the hopeless fool trapped inside your struggling intellectual brain, you accepted to yourself that this was a moment you had been craving for. You two had gotten closer, ofcourse. With more time to talk, and more time to stress over your work with mutual headaches and late nights, it's been...nice, you presumed.

To spend some precious time with the man, where no other soul could bear witness to the "stolen moments" or so the foolish romantic in you chimed when he came closer, and closer, his beautiful fingers guided by the arm not supporting the cane extending forwards, (aiming at your hand at your side, you hoped).

Until...

You feel a soft flutter of paper being taken from the table you leaned against; his notes which he had compiled throughout the weeks, as he moves away, already ruffling through them, mumbling to himself.

You could've burst out laughing if it weren't for that tiny romantic blushing embarrassedly, clutching at its pearls making you quickly turn away, your gaze darting to the experimental setup. He had settled down next to it, and you, opposite to him, observing idly. When the silence got oppressive, you attempted to make conversation but were met with objective answers, not wandering far into what lay beneath his exterior. 

It didn't put an end to your silent study of his countenance, however. Only fueling it. In the shadows cast by the glow of the crystals and the milky white moon peeking in through the curtains, he resembled a sculpture with golden eyes moving gently in its sockets, made of the stars themselves, you swore. The lines over his cheekbones almost seemed intentionally crafted for beauty.

Then again... wasn't he?

The skilled fingers turned pages, as shoulders leaned back on the chair. It always startled you whenever his voice cut through the artificial silence to instruct you to check the controls.

Although...

Were your eyes deceiving you or was there a gentle tilt on his soft lips upwards whenever you made haste to adjust the systems or struggled to stay awake? 

Surely a play of the whimsical moonlight.

After the owl flew away, leaving you nothing else to make funny faces at, when your human companion wasn't looking, you sighed and looked away to the far end of the table, where your eyes linger on Viktor's workstation. There's another book over there that you hadn't recognised before. You sauntered over to his desk, unoccupied right now as the man sat at the main setup table to get a close look.

"In search of the sun", the title read. 

Ah, you have seen this before- just not up close as it were. You've observed at times when the scientist seemed to scribble away in this one, during moments of respite from calculation rechecking.

You flip through the old tattered thing, looking like one wrong tug at its spine would bring the papers down loose at your feet. It was handwritten, with crude but curious illustrations and erasure marks at most points. The recognition of illustrative depictions showing Zaun was instant, the fissures, the alleyways, and the descriptions. You didn't recognise the handwriting, but there were some scribbles at the sides of some pages, with arrow marks. That one, the sweeping letters- too illegible to be beautiful, but too pronounced to be ugly, you recognised instantly. 

The man's voice suddenly shakes you from your analysis, as he says, "She didn't get time to finish it."

You almost stumble when you find him standing next to you, but you make an effort to stay put. 

"Who?"

"The author."

"Who is the..." You try to flip to the back of the book, but his hand rests on top of yours, rendering you motionless.

"You won't find her name there. She never...got the time to put in her name."

Silence reined for a few seconds before vulnerable eyes met yours.

"It was...written by my sister. She...she used to write, about the undercity and the parts of it where we lived." 

 "Oh..." You breathe, looking at the book again with a newfound admiration. You don't remember coming across much authors from the undercity, much less someone who wrote about it, not without ironing out many wrinkles and smoothening out sharper details about zaun, that is. Viktor had mentioned that himself, in one of the conversations you had with him. Considering this one seemed, rather descriptive based on some of the sentences you caught sight of, what you saw now wasn't a tattered old thing anymore...

"She passed away a few years ago... Couldn't... couldn't finish writing it..." You don't miss the strained waver in the soft tone, it makes your chest ache and mouth part in shock. 

“Oh Viktor…” you murmur gently, hands clutching the book securely. “...I'm so sorry”

“It's in the past. She made a great effort though. But, it's not very comprehensive or fact oriented, more on experience…” he looks away.

“It's perfect.”

“What?” Viktor looks back at you, brows slightly raised. 

“Let me guess…” you say, your eyes trained on the book, once held by a beloved soul. “Some old critiques from up here, from the topside turned this down from being published, for all the reasons you just said.. and...you believed them.” 

Viktor was left speechless.

“Viktor… it is not detail orientation which moves hearts. This is not a documentary about zaun. It is not trying to be. It will not be happy to.” Your thumb traces the front cover. “I haven't read it yet, but from what I've gathered, this is a documentation of its people. Of a zaunite’s wishes, dreams, life. Moreover, what would a topsider know of that life? Know of the undercity?” You lift your gaze. 

“I…” Viktor’s voice quivered.

“You're no fool. You know this. You had been convinced. Viktor…why?” 

The shadows of loving sorrow came over the handsome face, you bearing witness to the past unfolding before those eyes, knuckles tightening around the cane supporting him. 

“My sister… Atira, was the kindest soul, who believed in the people, in hope, all in its own form amongst my people…our people, down beneath. Whatever she wrote, she wrote with emotion, differing entirely for whatever I stood for. She… O Janna, she loved the undercity. Loved it for what it was, believed and understood.  But, it all came to a startling close when one of the chem leakes happened. It happens always, we are usually able to foresee it sooner but…” 

His throat constricts.

“...She asked me to keep this, do whatever I must with it. Trusted me with everything that happens to a book, she believed I understood, because I was always the sharper mind in her eyes.” He sighed deeply.

“I went looking and searching for every publication sectors I could, sadly only available up here, but… none of them saw what…she had seen. What we had seen. It was never enough… I…” 

“I failed her…” 

The tilt of his head away from your view was something you hated with a passion, you own eyes filling with emotions so rough, you felt it in your heart. His sister had sought out the light. She was in search of the sun. You could almost see it. A woman, about Viktor's age, in the Undercity, eyes golden like the rays of the sun she sought after...

Seeing its brilliant rats in curtains over the crevices and cracks of Zaun, Atira might have wished to come up to the topside, but fear and prejudice may have stopped her.

A lover of nature, a lover of people...

If only she, and many others could have reached the safer side sooner in the time of the chem spills…

The sight of the ring of portal you had created in your table made you stop. A teleporter. Something that could connect and transport…

So that is why Viktor had insisted.

You take Viktor's hand, making him look at you.

“So much of the undercity…searches for the sun. Searches for safety…” you murmur. “Viktor, you haven't failed her! What if, what she desired was not the publication of the book, but the liberation of the undercity? She's smart, I have no doubt- if she has needed her book to get published, she would've sugar coated so much, but no- this is raw, this is true. What she wished, was the need of freedom, to seek the light. Somehow…” 

Viktor's eyes widen, his lips parting in shock. “Y/N… that is…”

“You can do it Viktor! You haven't failed… you have just started! ” Your hand, holding his, shakes it with excitement, as you see hope dancing in his eyes. In unison, your gazes darts to the ring set up the crystals almost charged up.

You smile and it gets wider when you feel his fingers closing around yours, face turning back to you, beautiful and hopeful, as he whispers:  

“We can do this.”

He's not alone...

“That's my boss!” You laugh, playfully patting his shoulder, as if long years of camaraderie had passed between you. 

Well, who needed long years when a part of your soul was standing before you?

Your eyes are blessed with the sight of him smiling, as you speak. 

“Why stop here! We can make a water filtration system!”

“And a heating system!” He adds.

“And an air cleaning system!” You grin.

He laughs, and the twinkle in his eyes when they meet yours makes your heart pick up pace. 

"Ah, you laugh now, but believe me when I say- this will change lives. So many. Both of undercity and piltover." You reassure, already up in the clouds with your visions.

“You are a lot like her.” He opines.

“I’m like your sister to you?” You ask slowly, a smile in your lips as you hold her book close to your chest, securely.

“My sister? No, no! You are not like a…sister to me.” 

A shy silence lingers between you, as the obvious reaches out from the top of your tongue.

“Who am I to you?” your question. More silence, his gaze darting everywhere except back to you.

“Your assistant…”

“Not just.”

“Acquaintance…?”

“More.”

“Friend…”

“More.”

“Best friend!”

“...”

“M-more..?” You blush.

Twin roses bloom on his alabaster cheeks, and a small strained breath from his countenance before his tender lips quirk upwards. Suddenly, you felt like a Victorian woman, a shy and quiet thing, before someone handsomely shy, yet, bolder. You gaze fixed on your shoes, as you see him stepping forward. 

“Y/N…” the quietness of his voice makes you lift your gaze up, met with the angel’s gaze, sweet and tender.…

Beep! Beep! Beep!

You and Viktor jump apart at the sudden beeping noise from your wrist, gasping softly. The chronoporter was going off, interrupting the sugary sweet moment, making you want to throw the thing right outside the window and be done with it.

"Dimensional drifts detected!" Chimes your mechanical companion, as your struggles to hide the dial of it from under Viktor's gaze proves faulty. 

"Is your watch...talking?" He asks, one eyebrow raised and lips slightly parted in bewilderment.

"Uh? N-no no no! It's, umm just I... I was saying that!" You laugh awkwardly, shifting your wrist wearing your watch out of his line of sight, pressing the mute button frantically as it resorts to angry text mode, indignant at being quieted by a mere human again. 

"What did you say?" Viktor asks skeptically, but you are once again interrupted by an ear splitting sound of metallic doors being squelched against one another and broken to pieces like rubber, the floor getting tremors as seemingly a giant's footsteps come by. Both yours and Viktor's head snap up the lab entrance, as you make out the figure of an old familiar face, now doused in purple hues, veins bulging and almost popping in the way muscles ripple beneath skin... 

"...."

"Oh thank God, you're not dead!" Were not the words you expected from your companion, but he has his ways. You look at him, your lips stretched incredulously in a thin horizontal line. Absolutely unbelievable.

"What! I was worried I had murdered him!" Viktor says back, frowning. You sigh, waving your hand dismissively before flinching as you see the goon pick up a huge table and throw it towards Viktor. Moving swiftly, you skid over to him just in time to splinter the table into pieces with your punch, Viktor cowering behind you, his eyes screwed shut. Before he could get in harm's way, you push him behind the huge board and the wall, as you step forward to face the goon, your blood rushing to your head in anxiousness. 

"How are you still doing this? Didn't you learn your lesson last time?" You say as you dodge away from the trajectories of whatever objects are being thrown your way. But you are answered with rageful screams and growls and maniacal howling laughter.

"Wait...wait wait! That's the voltmeter! No not the soldering set! Ahhh! The circuit board!" You say as the mindless man throws things at you, things you know are quite expensive, even up here in this functional universe. The monster of a man lunges at you and you roll away once more, jumping and galloping away, praying for an exit- but to your shock you see that the entrance is blocked with how much metal and rubber which used to be doors and walls piled against it. Viktor cannot save you anymore either, because if he threw the crystal again, the whole lab will explode- and you already had a sample of that.

Oh gods, what have you done?

You accidentally get hit by a wooden bench, making you see spots in your vision as you shake your head from disorientation. Your eyes lift up to meet the malicious ones of the man's, raising his whole torso to end you...

"Dimensional rift probability- calculated. 1.”

The room momentarily goes still, no life, no motion, until the next moment where it is bathed with the incandescent breathtaking sapphire hues wraps its curls around every crevice of the lab, pulling in itself, warping and twisting magnetically, with symbols flashing before your very eyes. Your feet lifts off the ground, as you defy gravity once more, the goon before you also airborne, to his dismay. However, the ring of charged arcane symbols rotating over and over, powerfully humming and thrumming over the atmosphere catches your eyes, mesmerizingly. 

“LOOK OUT!”

The sudden push towards the right as Viktor's whole body weight propels you out of the way of the beam of pure energy which surged through the middle of the room, made you dizzy, making you cling helplessly onto him, as he pushes you to the pillar, his cane holding you both in place. The screams of the brute maddeningly ringing around the lab, and vanishing all together- all in a staggering moment where you held him close. 

The light dies out, making everything clatter to the ground, including the two of you, as you tumble and fall, your fall made gentle by the low height you were at. 

Frantic gazes look around. No brute. 

The hextech crystal ring was glowing…

Deep breaths. Panting, hyperventilating. 

Your gazes meet, only inches apart, your arms thrown over his shoulders and his around your middle, cane pressed to the back of your leg. 

“It…it worked…” he whispers, eyes searching yours, in search of what- he didn't have a clue. 

“We…we did it…”

“WE DID IT!” 

Laughter fills the air as you both embrace, faces giddy, smeared with dust and dirt, eyes misty with unshed tears of joy and relief as you feel his hands shaking with nerves, holding you. The laughter gives way to soft giggles, and then chuckles as the tension loosens its grip on your throats. 

You pull away just enough to press a sweet kiss to his cheek, before hugging him again, not brave enough to face his gaze. You could feel him gasp, warmth spreading to the tips of his ears but you weren't sure if it was his, or yours. 

"Oh, and I saved Atira's book..." You say shyly, patting the inside of your cost pocket, the soft this of the book against fabric.

You feel rhythmic, almost symphonic beats of hearts against each other, this close…

Then…

A soft tender, chaste peck on your cheek by him…

You would have fainted. In his arms. Gladly so. 

The rest of the night felt like a dream, though you had simultaneously vague and pronounced memories of him helping you stand back up, asking you tenderly for permission to walk you home, passing by enforcers who were rather shocked to see you both unscatched, his hand in yours until you reached Gina’s house…

Another sweet kiss to your cheek before you watched shyly from the window as he walked away, grinning and smiling to himself stupidly as well, soft cheeks wearing blushes.

What a night…

Almost made you forget about the warning signal from your Chronoporter informing you that the portal you two had accidentally conjured up, had lead to your home dimension, and that Silco's goon had been dropped right before a location you recognised as a rehabilitation center. 

Good for him, you hoped.

Somewhere back in the academy, in the greenhouse, Sky Young prepares to tell you something.

Something concerning her heart.

_________________________________

Chapter 13 coming soon. Stay tuned.

[vyrid]

Hermione does not, in any way, overpower Tom Riddle, in any field. 

For evidence purposes, I'll use all of their achievements from book one to book 7. Instead of going on a long, disorganized tangent, we'll cut them down into 3 categories: studies, wit, and talent/strength. (I swear theres a difference between wit + studies.)

Studies --

During school, Hermione:

Was referred to as the brightest witch of her school year by Lupin

Got 10 OWLS (2 less than Bill and Charlie)

Prefect

She did get Slughorn's favour to an extent

During school, Tom Riddle:

Was referred to as the brightest kid to step into Hogwarts (possibly ever) by Albus Dumbledore

His grades are never revealed, but it is implied time and time again that he was a model student with a spotless record

Prefect and Headboy

Got a Special Award For Services to the School (hes a rat 😭)

Slughorn's favorite despite being Muggleborn and broke

There is not much I can work on in the studies department, because there isn't much text to support their performances involving the school directly, but it's obvious that Tom Riddle takes the cake. With every bullet point presented, Riddle's side of achievments is always 3x more impressive. I would like to add that he thrived in DADA and didn't shy away from any dark subjects, while Hermione was too scared to put thought into DADA + was too impatient with Divination (which I don't blame her for.)

If I had to compare them involving other characters, I would say that Tom Riddle is right up there with Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald, while Hermione falls below tier near James Potter and Severus Snape.

If Severus Snape is no match for Tom Riddle (atleast when he was sane), then Hermione isn't a match for Severus. Snape was the BEST potions boy to go to Hogwarts -- it could be argued that Lily was also up there but yk shes dead so we don't care about that -- and he wasn't scared to apply his studies in the Dark Arts to real life. He was a smart kid, and even though he was below Tom Riddle in terms of brilliance, he was pretty darn smart. If Hermione cannot even reach his level, it's kind of silly to compare her to Tom Riddle.

Wit --

This one is a no brainer. The thing that sets them apart is their ability to think outside of the box.

Tom Riddle believed in a world of magic. He believed there was not a limit in which magic could be stopped. He achieved GREAT things simply by letting his trust in his own magic and the wonders of the Wizarding World lead him to his goals.

Hermione is close minded. She believes what she wants to believe, and most of her information comes from her precious, reliable books. She was too close minded to believe in divination. She was too close minded to sit back and think that, perhaps, house elves were made a certain way in which they ENJOYED labour (which is a whole other discussion), she was too close minded to believe in the Death Hallows. She was too close minded to think that there could possibly be a better, alternative recipe to a potion that didn't come straight from the school book. Her refusal to simply believe held her back from many opportunities.

Hermione is studious. Tom Riddle is BRILLIANT. Most of Hermione's knowledge comes from what she's been taught at school, but Tom Riddle went out and learned his own knowledge. And that's not a bad thing. Being studious and smart already sets her apart from many, many people.

But Tom Riddle wasn't just a studious guy. He was a genius, a prodigy, kind of a psychopath. He learned at a young age how and exactly when to use his strengths to get what he wants. He carried himself up as social ladder reserved solely for purebloods before even finding out his heritage as the descendant of Salazar Slytherin. He made a grown adult women scared of him as a child. He didn't use his wit for good, no, but was he pretty damn smart? Yeah.

Talent and Strength --

When Hermione was a kid, she learned to utilize what she had around her to catch up with other kids. She taught herself the syllabus before even getting into school and even learned spells without being taught by Professors! She was always the first one to get the spell right and was quick on her feet in an argument. She had a lot of brewing talent in her. It is not easy to be thrown into a whole new world but she took all of it with grace.

She was amazing at spells. When the trio ran away during the 7th book, she was their rock to lean on--for strength, for protection, for guidance. She knew every spell in the book to hide them away from Voldemort.

Her duelling skills, while not on par with Harry's, were pretty darn good, too. She could hold her own in a duel if she really needed to get out of their alive, using her quick thinking and sometimes, deception. Ex. (When she changed Harry's face to not resemble him when they got caught by snatchers.)

I give Hermione a lot of credit in the book. She was stronger than she needed to be at a young age, and she handled it better than most people did.

Tom Riddle on the other hand...

His talent is unmatched when it comes to anybody else.

He learned to get a hold on his magic and command it like the king that he is at the baby age of one digits. Because of all the instances at Wool's Orphanage, it isn't crazy to assume that this wasn't just a case of accidental magic. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew exactly how to call onto his magic to do his bidding. I don't think even Dumbledore could have said he was able to do that.

He was a parselmouth. It's less a talent and more a skill, but he used his hereditary trait to manipulate and use another type of magic to do what he wanted. Speaking to snakes is one thing--getting them to actually listen to you has to count for something.

He made horcruxes at the age of 16. That is a type of deadly, deadly magic. It is so forbidden it doesn't even fall under Forbidden magic because it's blasphemous to even think to do it. The fact that his magic was so strong that he could go through that process and come our alive is actually crazy.

He made a whole persona for himself, under Lord Voldemort, and got a whole race of people to follow him blindly. He wasn't even a pureblood and he still had them down on their knees. That's talent.

He could perform all forbidden curses with ease and not get drained. Moody says that you have to mean your intent and that nobody can *just* cast the curses. You have to have the willpower and strength to cast them--the fact that Voldemort could cast dozens of them at a time without thinking about it already sets him apart in strength from Hermione. I doubt even Snape, as he brilliant as he is, would dare push his limits like that.

I don't want this to get SUPER long, but here are some things I left out about Riddle and didn't know how to add on the list.

He found the long lost Chamber of Secrets during his time at Hogwarts. It was there for millions of years--he can't have been the ONLY descendant. It's safe to say he was one of the first people to open it and actually use it for his own gain.

He acquired the Elder Wand. I mean, so did Harry and Dumbledore, but it doesn't change the fact that he did. He was kind of dumb when he grew up and became all insane but that's impressive, too.

It is implied that he was at the brink of winning the war before Harry killed him on Halloween. If he hadn't taken the bait, maybe we'd see a world overrun by his power.

He didn't inspire fear in just Britain. He inspired fear across the world. Harry Potter was known across every wizarding community, such as Bulgaria. That means they must've known Voldemort too. There was lots of foreign people at the world cup, but every single one of them ran at the sight of the Death Eaters--which means they recognize his sign in some sort of way. The Gregrovitch family recognizes him, as does the German witch does when she sees him in folds in fear.

Sorry, this became a long rant of Voldemort's powers and not just a comparison, but it does go to show that Hermione being even near his level. It's just not plausible.

You're welcome to argue with me or correct me on my oversights! I haven't fact checked everything and I won't be offended if you correct some points. (Also there is a lot of typos and I have a cut on my finger so please dont kill me for my grammar 😭)

[azuremist]

Hunter and the “curing the disability” trope: an analysis of the twist of For the Future

Let’s start with the basics. How do you define a “disability”?

In basic terms, a disability is a physical or a mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses or activities; a disadvantage, or a handicap.

In the universe of the Boiling Isles, there are a few things that can be considered a disability which do not apply to our world. For example, Eda’s curse is a pretty clear metaphor for disability, and would absolutely count as one. It limits her, it limits her magic. It’s a disadvantage, a handicap. Curses are disabilities; ones that can be caused by other people or inflicted onto someone with malicious intent, much like disabilities that can come from injury.

Furthermore, magicless witches and witchlike creatures are also disabled. The entire Boiling Isles runs and is dependent on magic and the assumption that everyone can use it. The inability to do magic is, again, a limitation. A disadvantage.

We even see parallels in disabled experiences in those with weak magic. Willow was bullied relentlessly for years because people thought she her magic was weak. This reflects the experiences of many disabled children’s school years; disabled children are more likely to be bullied because of their disability.

Willow is often called “half-a-witch Willow”, which, as we learn in Any Sport In A Storm, is an established term not just made up for Willow. “Half a witch” is an established, well-known derogatory term for witches with lacking magical abilities. The very existence of derogatory terms for this obviously draws parallels to minorities of the real world; with, of course, the most apt metaphor being disability.

Hunter uses the term to insult himself for his own lack of magical abilities. A sort of internalized ableism; one that could have (dare I say it? should have) been resolved within his storyline.

This would be a disability that one is born with, as opposed to gaining, like Eda’s disability is. Willow is naturally bad with abominations, and Hunter was created without a bile sack; thus, without a natural ability to use magic.

So, now we have established that powerless witchlike creatures are disabled in their universe.

Hunter as a disabled character is quite an interesting point of analysis, especially in terms of his relationship to Flapjack. Flapjack is his disability aid. Not just in the “emotional support” sense for his PTSD, but using Flapjack’s magic (rather than just being unable to use any magic due to his natural lack of it) is a form of disability assistance. Flapjack made it easier for Hunter to exist and function in this world not made for creatures like him; powerless ones.

So, when they killed off Flapjack, this is, metaphorically speaking, them killing off not only the disabled character’s best friend, but also taking away the disabled character’s disability aid as a form of or catalyst for “character development”. Which, itself, is an ableist trope which might deserve its own analysis on how it appears in The Owl House.

And then, here comes the writers, saying that Flapjack’s death gave Hunter the ability to naturally use magic.

To put this into perspective, in terms of the allegory here, this is the Boiling Isles equivalent of a writer killing off my service dog and then saying that the death of my service dog cured me of my autism.

If you are unfamiliar… The “curing the disability” trope is incredibly, infuriatingly ableist. It:

1 ) Implies that disability is something that can be overcome or cured in the first place.

2 ) Oftentimes, it’s treated as a “reward” for a character undergoing development. Hunter, of course, only was able to be “cured” because of how close he became with Flapjack. The disability being healed, narratively speaking, is his “reward” for overcoming his hatred for wild magic and Palismen, and making a true friend.

3 ) It implies that disabled people cannot be truly happy the way they are. If the happy ending that the writers imagined for Hunter was him magically losing his disability… That’s pretty damn depressing for us with disabilities in the real world.

And this isn’t even going into that many real-life disabled people don’t want to be cured.

So, basically: this plot development is bad. When Flapjack first died, I worried that this might be where they take it, but I ended up putting my fears aside. They did a very good job with portraying Eda’s disability; surely, they would have done enough research to know to avoid this well-known ableist trope with their other disability allegories!

Well, apparently not.

Disabled people deserve better than a show which is stated in its marketing of this season to have themes of disability having a disabled character’s disability aid and service animal die, and then be “cured” because of it. We deserve better than where Hunter’s arc is going. We deserve better than this.

[khey-s]

Hunter unceremoniously shut the book, exasperation written all over his face. After hours of poring over the aging pages, he had found nothing but bitter vexation. No matter how much he searched, nothing he read brought him any closer to the cure he was seeking. It was maddening, especially considering the time and energy spent wading through the muck, only to encounter yet another dead end. Unfortunately, this was an all-too-familiar disappointment. Finding success so quickly would have been too easy—far too easy—and if life had taught him anything, it was that nothing worth having came easily.

That didn't mean Hunter was the slightest bit happy with the results.

To top it off, not only was this reading session utterly unproductive, but it also had the insolence to bring him the mother of all headaches. Rubbing his temples proved futile, as the relentless throbbing only seemed to intensify. It was almost as though the pain derived a perverse pleasure from mocking his efforts. Hunter wondered if this was divine retribution bestowed upon him by the Titan for his brazenness. Given the Titan's capacities, such a punishment seemed well within the realm of possibility.

Perhaps the text was imbued with an insidious curse designed to torment the mind slowly with each passing moment. Once the absurdity of the notion sank in, Hunter quickly dismissed it. Who would use such a convoluted method to protect information when more straightforward and effective methods already exist? What was wrong with the old-fashioned spell keyed to incinerate documents if touched by unauthorized hands? Even wild witches, as irreverent as they were, should have better common sense than that.

Right?

Chapters: 3/? Fandom: The Owl House (Cartoon) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Hunter | The Golden Guard & Philip Wittebane | Emperor Belos Characters: Hunter | The Golden Guard (The Owl House), Philip Wittebane | Emperor Belos Additional Tags: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Child Abuse, Angst, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Young Hunter | The Golden Guard (The Owl House), Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary:

"Hunter was on the brink of doing something monumentally stupid. Immensely stupid. Outrageously stupid. It was such a mind-blowingly idiotic idea that he could hardly believe he had even considered it. He felt an overwhelming urge to shake his head until the notion was completely dislodged from his brain. This would easily rank among the dumbest things he would ever do in his entire life, which wasn't a small feat given his extensive history of boneheaded decisions.

Hunter was going to steal books about wild magic."

When Hunter started to study wild magic, it was to find a cure for Belos' curse. However, as he delved deeper into the subject, he found himself unwittingly snared into its allure.

[mdhwrites]

The Forbidden Stacks of the library in TOH puts me in throes. The books inside aren't even preserved if a zombie mouse can have a full-on buffet with them (going slightly off the rails "echo mouse" is a stupid name for something that doesn't absorb sound, I refuse to call it that). What's the point? What other history is lost because you'll let zombie-mice into the section versus employees/volunteers that aren't just gonna float around for the sake of being spooky? Why are they even forbidden when the section is smack-dab in the middle of the library and access-cards are evidently universal, you're just working off an honor system that people won't abuse accessibility? I guess that explains the zombie-mice. Or was it just more important for the writers to have a quick set-up for Lumity no matter how horribly applied the rules are?

The Forbidden Stacks could EASILY be improved if the writers had Amity work the section as a kind of promotion since she already has access, I could see a full burst of character development if her role was to ensure no one gets access to Philip's journal by orders of Belos himself, make her question why the journal itself is forbidden and if blindly following Belos' regime is worth being left in the dark. It would as be GREAT Lumity fuel if both sides had to choose between pleasing the other or preserving their own goals.

Now I've put myself in throes on how quickly all that could be adjusted. A devil's advocate should have been hired for the writing team LMAO.

So the forbidden section of a library in most fantasy media is a pretty common trope. Harry Potter wasn't the first to have something like it and The Owl House won't be the last. But... Well, I actually never gave it that much thought because it very much so does the job of the trope, give characters a place they're not supposed to with clear intentions on forbidden knowledge, but... I think this post very easily explains why the vibe of The Owl House is wrong for a fantasy show. I talked about this in general as of late but let's interrogate your complaints. Not to say your complaints aren't valid but it's the sort of thing that as a content creator is important to do. When someone tells you they'd rather have seen X thing be done in Y way, what are they really asking for? Tears of the Kingdom's fuse mechanic is a great showing of this as it fixed the breakable weapons for a lot of people while still allowing weaponry and the like to be a reward for exploration and combat, something that just removing the system would have lost. Instead, they made it so you can personalize your arsenal and it's MUCH harder to end a fight with simply a worse inventory than when you began (amongst a BILLION other great things about the fuse mechanic).

So what are the complaints here? A lot of them are what most would consider nitpicks. A story is allowed contrivances so as to FUNCTION and that's where suspension of disbelief comes into play. Something about the forbidden section broke your suspension of disbelief though. What was it?

Well, looking at them, my personal conclusion would be simple: It doesn't feel forbidden. It has a huge ass door that dominates one of the libraries walls, it comes across from how it looks to be SEVERAL times larger than the base library seeing as the base library only has like two floors, and yeah, it's not exactly hard to reach. Lumity go in in BROAD DAYLIGHT. There are also no traps, no detection systems, or... Anything to stop someone who has slipped inside from doing as they please, including animals. Like... While Amity is being scolded, is there just NOTHING watching the forbidden knowledge and only a weak magical lock? That doesn't really give the feeling of it being forbidden, does it?

And this isn't a new problem for The Owl House. They'll present a fantasy trope and then so half ass it that it barely feels like the trope. In fact, just tropes in general, hence the common complaint that Lumity is NOT enemies to lovers despite the setup because they spend almost no time being enemies. That's discarded for what is necessary for the plot point of Lumity.

But some people might yell at me about the Shortening, despite this being S2A which probably got minimal changes due to how production works, so could this have been done better without significant time changes?

...Yes. By making them physically act like they're in a place they're not supposed to be. You don't even really have to change the substance of what the two are talking about (which is hardly about the forbidden section). The two spend almost all their time there just laying or standing around. They effectively seem to be just in a library with bad lighting judging by their actions, posture, etc. like that, not helped by the two mostly focusing on each other than anything to do with the library. This de-emphasizes the library and the danger which is VERY common in The Owl House and is part of why it's such a shit adventure show.

Tweak their tones of voice so that they sound more like they're trying not to focus on how they're breaking the rules. Make their conversation travel while Amity points at places on the floor or the wall and both respectively either avoid or seek out those places. You don't even need to really up the animation here except for having them move at all because you don't need to show the magic traps and the like so long as you get the vibe right.

Better yet, this movement could also allow for more environmental storytelling and foreshadowing. They could pass by archived creatures, kept their for study and school project purposes but too dangerous to have just anyone interacting with, and one cage is broken open. Or the lid is slipped off and a sleeping echo mouse is sleeping within it. That way, the mouse didn't just slip in, it probably broke out recently and you just have to suspend disbelief that it chose the journal for its first meal.

This isn't even only doable in animation. You could do this in writing and have their actions and the background be the flavor that's helping punctuate and break up the conversation. In writing though, that WOULD add time and admittedly part of what gives my stuff a more brisk feeling is that unless it's important, I let the background be filled in with a mood and by the reader much more than vivid description. TOH IS animated though so having the backgrounds and the like help with the storytelling, or even just the movements of the characters, is part of how you tell a story in animation.

And yes, animation is expensive. My counterpoint to that is The Ghost and Molly McGee exists and its animation very commonly blows TOH out of the water with how expressive, dynamic, bizarre and HOW MUCH OF IT there is except for TOH's big ticket fights. I cannot believe that they could not do a simple walking sequence with scrolling backgrounds instead of more anime inspired "Okay, stop, freeze, talk, go," moments, especially in order to actually sell the fact that they're in a fantasy story.

There are other, smaller things like making it a smaller, metal door that requires multiple keys to be opened that are kept in the office that Amity normally would need to check out but isn't so that Luz isn't known to go back there. Admittedly, you could also actually make the librarian scary and rude. Make him more serious as to explain why Amity didn't just talk to the librarian because I've talked before about how it trying to be 'clever' (with the same joke its done how many times even by then of "Oh, you're such a fool to think it was actually dangerous or spooky") kind of makes the episode make no sense in retrospect.

And, most importantly, none of these changes would require a lot of time in the episode. Maybe a little more, just to have Amity have a line about a pressure plate or the like, but not much. The real difference is partially the difference between Amphibia and The Owl House because when the sleepover episode happens, the ghosts aren't the only reason that the place feels forbidden. It feels forgotten and creepy and they walk and talk to help show this in the posture the characters, the tones of voice they have, stuff like that. Amphibia enjoys its genre and concepts though while The Owl House CONSTANTLY feels like it would really rather just be a slice of life school series and so doesn't care about the fantasy or adventure elements.

And, well, Looking Glass Ruins is a good episode to highlight that. They murder illusion magic, they make glyphs EXTREMELY OP in it in ways that make no sense and make you wonder why the whole cast isn't adopting them, magical amplification should still ABSOLUTELY affect illusion magic so as to make it bigger or more believable, etc. like that even if it doesn't have a physical effect, etc. like that. But instead, the magic is warped and twisted and simply used for a trope that probably could have been done without the magic.

But like making the forbidden section incredibly boring and mostly just a background more than anything else and an excuse to get Amity in trouble... It all just feels like justification to make the concept they wanted without having to put in the effort.

Without caring. And an audience can feel when a writer doesn't care about something.

[bardkin]

taking on @who-is-page's Folcintera Week Challenge! do note that entries most likely won't be daily, because i have Various Things wrong with me (such as Work and Chronic Sleepy) <3

🐾 What is your species? How do you experience aspects of your nonhumanity?

I’m a fisher marten, human-gem-hybrid, coyote, animal familiar, artificial mobian hedgehog, and a demon-weapon. I’m also a Storyteller archetrope, though that doesn’t totally apply here (until it does, sometimes).

Generally speaking, I experience various shifts — most commonly in the form of phantom limbs / parts (ears, tail, fur, fangs, gem, etc), envision or "self-image" shifts (tho I hesitate to call them "shifts" since I don't usually internally "see" my human-body-self, when I think about my self-image anyway), and mental / instinctual shifts — and have sort-of-memories, as well as noemata. All of this is physiological & neurologically based (though, my Shadow fictotype was just kind of... dropped into my lap, uninvited, and I've simply been Shadow The Goddamn Hedgehog ever since), with a very "narrative" framework to a lot of it.

When it comes to my animality specifically, I experience it in possibly a very niche way. I do have very “usual” experiences of beastly shifts, instincts, etc, but I’m not just restricted to four legs. I’m kind of like those queer little animals in Beatrix Potter’s books, Little Bear, or RedWall — I’m a creature straight out of a beast fable. Kind of furry adjacent, but also Pretty Much A Furry in a very nonhuman way. It kind of melds into very human activities. Unnoticeable unless I become aware of it, because it’s become almost background-noise levels of normalized to me. I almost always have some phantom animal part, be it ears, a tail, quills, fangs, pawpads, claws. It's more noticeable to not have these shifts.

My animal familiar-ness is still something I have yet to delve deeper into, as this is a concept that requires connection to another; lending one’s self to help someone you’re bonded to. Admittedly, I haven’t had the chance to explore it yet, but I do know that it’s affected by all manner of its depiction and origins. Be that daemons from His Dark Materials, or palismen from the Owl House, each iteration of the “magical animal companion” feels like me. It also bleeds into dragon-rider bonds, and heavily affects how I experience that genre, or stories that have this as a trope or character. Rather than relating to the (usually always human/humanoid) rider, I find myself in the shoes (or, more aptly, the scales) of the ridden dragon.

Being Steven Universe is an experience I’m not sure I can articulate properly in a few sentences, other than... that is who I am. I am Steven in the most mundane, everyday ways possible. Being Steven is also the closest to being internally human that I'm ever going to get, and even that never feels like "human from this earth." I am Steven in the way I have endless optimism, in the way I always want to help and fix others’ problems (even if I can’t, and even if it’s detrimental to my own mental health), and in the way that I have Goddamn Mommy Issues. Again (which is only partially a joke). I may not be Steven-From-The-Show or Steven-From-The-Light-Games, but that's also me. Even some fanfiction iterations are me, which is something of an entirely separate essay in itself.

The demon-weapon thing is... well, saying it (simply) “feels good to identify as something that can turn into a weapon” seems... kind of surface level, but, it’s what I experience. There are days where it feels like I should be able to flex some unseen muscle, something under the surface, and have my arm become a blade, or to be able to morph completely into a scythe or sword. That I should be able to resonate my very soul with the one(s) closest to me, so that they could literally wield me as the weapon I was meant to be. It’s something I know will never be a reality, but that it should.

And... being Shadow the Hedgehog means experiencing a gut wrenchingly regretful nostalgia for a sister I never had & couldn’t save. It means having quill shifts out of nowhere, sometimes over top other phantom shifts, and having something to attribute my memory gaps to (even though I know they’re because of the auDHD, & not caused by this fictotype. Sometimes to get mentally well you have to be a little mentally unwell). It means embracing not knowing who I am, and forging ahead anyway.

[aquaaquila]

My very long rant about The Owl House many will have issues reading

Felt like writing my hot takes within The Owl House and its fan base after witnessing some crazy drama all over the blogs I follow and followed:

First things first, I want to establish that there's nothing wrong with liking other ships that are non-canon or ships that are canon. We can all co-exist peacefully, but we won't if we're going to assume that shippers of other ships by default must be sexist or delusional or just the worst. There are plenty of bad apples among all the shippers here, but they're not necessarily the norm (though to be fair the norm usually enables the worst behaviors of such shippers). As a whole TOH isn't a healthy collective and could never be as this fan base is much larger than people realise (you can't have so many people invested with this show for the fan base to be supposedly chill, like Fat Chance).

Like really you can go from canon purists who will keep everything wholesome and silly but because of how starved the actual canon left them they will include a hundred different headcanons that are not in any way related to actual canon and still be upset as if the canon was threatened when you can just to agree with the headcanons alone. There's still, of course, an issue of canon purists literally rejecting everything that's in their mind is supposedly not okay because it strays away from canon in a more direct way. Then you will have Wittelore enjoyers who just love everything about Belos, Caleb, and Evelyn in various different expressions, but it can at times go to becoming lowkey colonist apologist territory along with pretty much-appropriating everything that applied to the character of color into these three when two of them canonically were never given a proper characterisation and Belos is not supposed to be just a victim that deserves grace but the very force that creates victims and the one to continue the cycle without remorse or second thoughts becoming the cycle itself, thus not making it any wrong to unceremoniously end it, though plenty of people will still have problem with it and wish the show validated Philip's feelings. However, you will also have POC defenders who will give the attention and love to characters of color they deserve and even the demon characters like King for example, and acknowledge how they're in fact the main characters while pointing out the clear white favoritism. But this can also go to an extreme territory where you will be called racist for actually finding white characters your favorite and still being interested more in their characters, which as I said is in fact incredibly extreme and disingenuous and also, something that will invalidate all the other good arguments by the virtue of this extreme being the underlying reason behind all of them and thus completely diminishing the problem because people will no longer take it seriously. Then you will have shippers of non-canon ships that are literally harassed by canon persists and were like that for years until they snapped and started to return the favor in the same way to the point of being delusional about how the canon pairings were not the original plan and how they actually suck and it's the non-canon pairing that should be canon which also further fuels the cycle and validates those who believe that somehow the shippers of other ships are after them specifically and how they mean o good when in fact they're the monsters they created themselves. This also leads to the infamous "critics" of the show who will pretty much hate anything within it to also inaccurate extreme that is based on assumptions born from the collective gaslight of some headcanons being canon, along with people judging the show on the surface and assuming things that were never the plan because they made a connection to something else they liked and got disappointed when those two things turned out to be unrelated (for example Hunter's arc being not like Zuko's arc when clearly it was never the point) and thus shushing away any potential criticism the show actually could get by the virtue of getting criticism that holds no water upon the closer look and thus makes people believe the show is, in fact, flawless or that the flaws don't matter in the slightest (when they do as they help improve future stories to not make the same mistakes and create something better). And of course, you will have people collectively gaslighting everyone around them that everything is fine and there's no drama in the show even though everyone hates each other here and fuel toxicity together by constantly drawing distinctions between "us and them" but never talking about how toxic it is.

Congratulations, we created our Emperor's Coven at home! This entire thing is pretty much the reason why I'm making this thing.

But back to the rest of the actual meat of this post, that was mere appetizer.

Second of all: Multishippers exist. Some people like both Lumity and Lunter and there are Lunter shippers who like Amity, me included as Amity's one of my favorite characters. It's disingenuous to assume Lunter shippers are by default lesphobic or just hate Amity. Heck, the reason Lunter shippers dislike Amity is less about her and more about the fan base's attitude. Imagine being constantly harassed that you don't ship mainstream ship by being specifically reminded that a specific lesbian exists, even if this isn't about her. You would be tired of her too because "good for her to be a happy lesbian", but Lumity may still not satisfy people as it's basically all fluff at this point. People are so overjoyed with them being together they hardly explore now possibilities of them going through something. At most, they will use green-haired Amity but people still will be waiting for green to turn into periwinkle, and fluff will just overwhelm anything else. And don't get me started on how both of them also end up being flanderised and dirty because of each other (as it goes both ways). People can just not vibe with that or be indifferent, but because people get harassed for daring to not love Lumity or Amity, they just end up hating it more. The issue is not Amity, the issue is Amity being the only option allowed. And gatekeeping people from enjoying other ships isn't ok. It really makes you feel like people erase aspects of their characters just to conform to a specific image of them and how can you accept something like this when the show is all about embracing weirdness and differences and not conforming to anything. Loving Lumity is a norm in this fan base, not a break with convention.

Third of all: I'm sorry to y'all but I think that considering Evelyn and Willow as literal parallels because they both fell in love with "Caleb" is disingenuous to both of them. No one would draw this connection if Willow wasn't romantically involved with Hunter. And while I don't disagree that Huntlow is goated and canon/semi-canon, their relationship is still left to interpretation and they are only implied to have a thing but not confirmed to be downright an item. We don't know 100% if they're dating, playing the long game, engaged, or amicably broken up. And that's great as both of their characters work in their own right and they don't need an established relationship to be fulfilled and people can interpret their relationship however they like, no need to throw pitchforks at one another. And Willow being dressed up AS A STEREOTYPE just doesn't help the case of her somehow being Evelyn's foil. Luz was dressed as an actual witch character (even if said witch is also not how real witches operate either, but it's still closer in meaning than Willow being dressed up as a devil as if Evelyn indeed charmed Caleb and he didn't fall in love with her like a normal person or that Evelyn was ever in the wrong to like a boy).

And as for Evelyn: please stop just summarising her up to Caleb's love interest for Titan's sake. We may not know much about her but we know that they did start as friends according to Dana's livestream and later on they would become parents to their child (if Belos didn't ruin it). Not only it's different from Huntlow as Huntlow didn't establish where they stand in their relationship at the end while it's clear that Evelyn and Caleb fucked, but Evelyn and Caleb had their love story that did take time (Huntlow at most is just getting started but for all, we know they could still break up in the future cause why not, it's their choice, first love isn't necessarily the only option). My point is that Evelyn's life didn't revolve around her love for Caleb alone so saying Willow and Evelyn are parallels because of them being lovers of our favorite white boys pretty much erases both of their characters. Evelyn's worth as a character doesn't end on getting pregnant, but also being a catalyst of all the events within the story, along with being a Clawthorne ancestor and original wild witch living between worlds.

Fifth point: this is where I bring Luz into this as the parallel, the infamous "Luz is Evelyn" everyone just loves to discard because it's only used as Lunter's argument and further making Evelyn only Caleb's bitch and nothing else, but here's a thing: you can use this parallel platonically to further spite Philip. People draw the connection because aside from having no romantic feelings towards "Caleb" (which is the only distinction between the two), Luz is also a wild witch (wild as in both wild personality-wise, wild as in everything Belos stands against (and side note: Willow being someone Belos wouldn't approve of is not a high bar because Belos would literally not approve of ANYBODY within our cast, so Willow's not special in this regard, heck Belos doesn't even know Willow all that much), wild as in using the very magic that came from the titan and wild as in a wild card that changed the course of history) that traveled between realms and came from another world (let's be real, Hunter is a witch from boiling isles, not a human from the earth, so Luz by a longshot matches the description better than Willow who's just a regular witch born in the demon realm to Hunter that frankly wouldn't be hurt or restrained by the coven system as she only uses plant magic from her bile sac and didn't go against the empire until season 1 finale and even then she didn't do it as a wild witch but child witch railing witches belonging to the coven to release Eda). Both of them also have loose association with Clawthornes as Luz isn't legally one but just a surrogate daughter of one and Evelyn's surname isn't known, the clan could've been established much later down the line or Evelyn's descendant married into Clawthorne's family, making Evelyn just an ancestor at best and distant at worst. I also already mentioned how both of them are catalysts to both the rise in power and the death of Philip while having massive guilt over it (Philip died on the inside as he killed Caleb, crossing the moral event horizon along with setting on the journey of destroying the entire realm. Plus I cannot imagine the survivor's guilt Evelyn must have felt over Caleb dying and orphaning their unborn child - which parallels Luz thinking she doomed her palisman by carving into an egg thinking it could never hatch because of how "she keeps on messing up constantly"). And of course, it's clear as day that Luz kickstarts Hunter's redemption arc by introducing Flapjack (and Evelyn did the same with Caleb, meanwhile Willow's only interaction with Flapjack is her giving him flowers on his grave; and it's worth noting as I doubt that Evelyn intentionally 'fixed" Caleb, much like Luz didn't intentionally "fixed" Hunter, though people sure love to think otherwise), making him question what he knows (a witch hunter falling in love with a witch - existential crisis is warranted, along with tones of guilt) and making him "betray" Belos (Hunter disobeyed Belos in HP and then questioned him directly in HM; Caleb "left Philip behind"). Like I'm sorry but Willow did nothing but wait till Hunter gets his shit together by himself (the only thing she actively tried to change his mind about is not judging a book by its cover but that's where it ends; she didn't call him out on doing the utterly terrible thing of kidnapping them to his cult nor anything else he did that wasn't morally correct) while Luz openly defied him and his worldview for him to come to his senses ("You're really going to take all those Palismen? I know what he does with them. I thought you were a good guy, but that was just wishful thinking" Hunter then proceeds to protect Luz from Kikimora, reveals his name, and lets Luz go with the Palismen just like that). Trivia: Evelyn also has brunette hair that is wild and tied back, Luz used to have them too early on but shorter, and currently they're curly.

That's where parallel comes from. That's what Evelyn us to Caleb: catalyst of change. Yes, Luz isn't in love with Hunter, but we could headcanon away that Caleb would be merely an uncle of Evelyn's kid, who's going to stop us from doing that? We can even make it that Philip felt replaced by Evelyn by her being Caleb's "new sibling" just for the fun of interpretation of the character.

But even if we won't do that (as no one forces us) then we must remember that parallel characters are not 2 characters being one and the same. Evelyn and Luz would still be separate entities and there's no crime in that. Luz not falling in love with a blond white boy is fine because that isn't and shouldn't be Evelyn's defining trait. Evelyn's defining trait is kickstarting change in Caleb which kickstarts Belos's vendetta against Witches. Romance was a bonus.

My sixth point: Last but not least let's finally talk about the elephant in the room that is parallel between Philip and Luz. All interpretations are valid, if you're choosing to interpret them like that, it's your valid choice and opinion. But saying that it's THE thing that happened within the show is just not correct and let me explain why before you discard me altogether if you haven't already.

Luz projected into Belos and Belos took advantage of that.

There, I said it, that's the ultimate truth of the show, you literally cannot deny this isn't how it happened.

Luz pretty much only had Philip as a point of reference to someone who shared her experience of a human in the demon realm. However, if she got to know Caleb instead of Philip, he would be the one Luz would compare herself to him. Ironically, she would be more correct as both of them are humans who run away to the demon realm after being possibly rejected by the closed-minded society and leaving behind unpleasant reality and their only living family member who they didn't realize how much they've hurt for choosing to leave them for the world that made them happy and helped them flourish (compare starved Caleb in Belos's vision to Caleb living in the demon realm and introducing Philip to Evelyn before he decided to kill them,). You could even say that Luz is a fusion of both Caleb and Evelyn at once. But unfortunately, Luz doesn't know Caleb as well as the audience does, all she knows is that he used to be a witch hunter who fell in love with Evelyn but that's about it. She doesn't know that he even has a connection to the portal door or Clawthorne ancestry.

So with no one else as a point of reference, Luz is going to compare herself to Philip Whattabitch. She assumed that she must be as bad as Belos because she thought he sincerely thought he was doing everything for a genuine reason and not because he was just a douchebag. Sure Philips's motivations are complex, but they don't come from a good place in the slightest. The Titan himself literally asks Luz if she's drunk on Eda's apple blood for thinking she's just as bad as Belos.

Like seriously, Luz stumbled on the Isles by pure accident. It was never for a reason or a higher purpose. She was never "destined" to go there, but it was her actions and decisions that led her there and changed the world around her. She didn't know the reason why she landed on Boiling Isles because there never was any reason or a prophecy to justify her presence there as it was never needed. This is not the same as Belos who willingly went to the demon realm to both find his brother and destroy all the witches. Luz very quickly grew out of "I'm the chosen one" whereas Belos made himself a false messiah. Even the Titan said that she's not chosen to be given Titan powers by fate but for her actions and kindness she's given them to support her and it was her decision to accept them. Not to mention that she respected the Isles, the inhabitants, and the magic that was part of this world, while all Belos ever did was destroy, murder, and steal it all for himself.

The show doesn't tell you Luz and Belos are foils, the show tells you that Luz VIEWS herself as Belos's foil, but she's nothing like him. Even their respective hero complexes are different. Luz seeks self-improvement to find a community for herself to belong to. But Belos? Belos wants to get praise and glory for slaughtering "the evil". Those two are not the same because Belos doesn't care about anyone but himself while Luz is all about what other people feel and think about her and she sacrifices herself multiple times for other people's sake. Belos would never do that. Belos wasn't even happy that Caleb was actually well and healthy in the demon realm, in contrast to the vision where Caleb is starved and sleep-deprived because he had to look after him ever since they were little orphans, sacrificing his own well-being. But Luz would rather give up her own hopes and dreams just to not see anyone she cares about ever put themselves on the line like that.

At most, I can agree that Luz represents what's best in humanity and Belos represents the worst, but that is still an incredibly broad concept that just doesn't contribute much to the actual story of TOH which isn't about humanity as a whole. And I'm sorry but this parallel is just used to woobify Belos and villanise Luz, something that certainly is not right. Because even if you made Belos a hero and Luz a villain, they'd still be nothing like one another.

Even Luz's dynamic with Hunter is nothing like Caleb and Philip. Caleb and Philip grew up together and they were the entire world to one another growing up. But Luz and Hunter didn't even have each other when growing up, they didn't get to know them until their teens, and the first time they meet they were at each other's throats which is different from Wittebane brothers having a loving relationship early on only for Belos to stab Caleb. Arguably, even if liked the idea of Luz and Hunter being siblings, I'd be disappointed with how much the show didn't do anything with them and it's always the fan base that pulls heavy weight on them being sibling-like. Like Hunting Palismen is them not even being friends let alone family and it's still supposed to be the pinnacle of their sibling rivalry, even though they were actual enemies and Luz is just as petty and immature here as she is with Kikimora? Luz supposedly didn't go after Hunter after he ran away from the Owl House whereas she did chase King when he learned the truth in Echoes of the Past? Supposedly we never had an on-screen scene where Hunter officially becomes a Noceda? I'm sorry but I will take a "You're family" from Afro-Latina as not confirmation that I'm a sibling but a friend who is close enough to be as valued as a family member, especially followed by Willow's "You're one of us now" and preceded with Camila's "I'm a mother of six". Are Hunter and Willow siblings too now? Hunter didn't even get to be in a photo of the Noceda family in the epilogue, what kind of brother would that be?

Camila is more of a Caleb to Luz considering it was her who raised Luz through trials and tribulations, sacrificing her own quirks and encouraging Luz to do the same just to conform to the norms of Gravesfield. But quite frankly it's Luz who ultimately runs away because of a certain Clawthorne Witch leaving Camila behind. Hunter literally has no such story with Luz, unless you count him running away in HM, only to return to COTH a week later and then finally live under Nocedas' roof.

Even when Luz didn't like Hunter's guts, she would never kill him. And despite being dressed up as Belos in the nightmare sequence, there's never a parallel between Philip and Caleb, because truly this isn't their relationship. And while we're at it, the whole nightmare sequence is once again a play on Luz's insecurities and doubts, but none of them are the truth. None of Luz's friends blame her for what happened, none of Belos's crimes are her crimes, and Luz would never willingly destroy the Boiling Isles because she doesn't destroy the things or people she hates. Even Belos was not finished off by Luz but by boiling rain and her family.

Ok, I finished venting about everything that's been going on inside my head. Might add more on the way, but those were the issues that were bugging me so now do whatever you want with it.

[aquaburst3]

Yesterday I posted some polls about which Disney Princesses people ship the overblot guys with. The results are in, so I want to go over them quickly.

The Winners

Riddle: Alice Leona: Belle Azul: Ariel Jamil: Jasmine Vil: Tiana Idia: Meg Malleus: Aurora

My Thoughts on the Results

Some won by a huge landslide like Riddle/Alice, Jamil/Jasmine, and Idia/Meg. I'm not too surprised about these results, since they're the heroines of their respective movies. Though, I'm a little taken aback by how much Jasmine won Jamil's race since I thought some of the other results would be more popular like Esmeralda, Moana and Cinderella.

But there were some surprises and close races. Snow White came close to edging out Tiana near the end, but Tiana was still came out victorious. Belle came close to winning Malleus' race for awhile. Leona's pairing results were the most dicey. At first, Mulan was the winner, but then Belle overtook Mulan several hours before the polls closed.

Most of the results make sense and I can see why others chose them. Tiana and Vil both value hard work and are quite determined. Leona and Belle have the Beauty & the Beast thing going on. Same goes for Malleus/Belle (the second place winner for him). The only one I'm baffled by is Leona/Mulan coming in second place in his race. (People who picked that option, why did you choose it? I'm genuinely confused about that one.)

As for my own thoughts on these choices? Like I said, I can see the logic in all of them minus Leona/Mulan in second place, but don't fully agree with a couple of them. Vil/Tiana is cute, but I ship her with Azul more. However, Tiana is my second choice for Vil. Leona/Belle isn't my first choice, but I can sorta see it with them being smart outcasts and her calling out his BS. However, I ship another with him more. I don't see Vil/Snow White (the second place winner for him) at all. Snow White is pretty much a female version of Neige, so she'd get under his skin extremely fast for the same reasons Neige does. The only way I can see this maybe working is in an enemies to lovers situation where Vil at first compares her to Neige, but then learns to see her as her own person and comes to like her more, even then I'm not sure. But, eh. I think even these could be interesting in the right story. If you like those options, to each is their own. The others on this list I have no complaints about.

My Own Choices

(As a side note, all of this applies to twisted OC versions of these characters too, so their partners can be of any gender. But I'll be mainly referring said partner with female pronouns to make things less confusing.)

Riddle=Alice (aged up)/Luz from The Owl House Reason: Riddle needs someone who's free spirited, smart, creative and is able to call him out before he flies off the deep end. I can see Alice providing that. I can also see him grounding her. This same reason also extends to Luz from The Owl House if she was isekaied to that world instead, since his storyline is similar to Amity's.

Leona=Eilonwy (aged up) Reason: Leona needs someone who is fiesty, confident and bold, but at the same time is able to stand up against him and call out his BS. Kinda like Kris from @thosebrookfieldgirls's Thorns and Ink series. I can see an older version of her providing that. On the flipside, I can see him stabilizing and grounding her more headstrong nature.

Azul=Tiana Reason: He and Tiana have a lot in common. They are both ambitious, hardworking and goal-driven people, who want to open their own restaurants and face adversity for reasons beyond their control. Tiana faced adversity thanks to her race while Azul was often bullied for being a fat octopus merman. I can see them connecting thanks to that. Tiana would calm down his "Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss" tendances while being able to understand where he's coming from. Azul needs a partner who would help him accept and love himself, even the fat version of himself in the past, which I can see her providing too. I think Tiana needs someone who can keep up with her and push her to reach her goals, which he definitely would. Once Azul works on his dubious business practices, I can see them being a cute couple and even possibly opening up a restaurant together.

Jamil=Jasmine or Moana Reason: This first one is sorta like Aladdin/Jasmine except without him lying to her constantly. Both he and Jasmine feel trapped in their current circumstances and want to escape. I can see him finding her drive to want to help her people and be a just ruler admirable. They are both clever, smart and athletic with a love of dancing and singing. Jamil needs a more extroverted and down to earth partner, who's able to bring him out of his shell and help him relax. I can see her providing that. Jasmine is a sassy, clever and outgoing girl, who is still capable and down to earth so that he wouldn't feel like a babysitter around her like he does with Kalim. Plus, she would also help to bring out his fun and mischievous side. Jamil in return would be able to ground her and help her to long term plan better. Him being a poor servant would also help her to expand her worldview and understand what life is like for others outside of her palace. She would get along with Kalim and his family really well. Imagine Najma telling her embarrassing stories about her brother. Moana shares a lot of those same traits, too. Plus, him having a foreign partner would be rather fitting considering one of his biggest wishes in life is to travel around the world.

Vil=Belle Reason: They both deal wrongly perceived notions about their character, becoming outcasts and having hardly any friends. Vil is perceived as a heartless villain by the general public when in reality that's not the case while Belle is seen as the town oddball. They similarly are rather bookish, being rather close with their single fathers and have mothers who died. (I hc that Vil's mom passed away when he was very young hence why he always talks about his father, but never about her.) Belle would see Vil for Vil, instead of as just a celebrity and influencer. He would do the same vise versa. She also wouldn't put up with his harsh and overly critical judgement calls, even when he has a point, helping him to learn to say his points in a less cruel manner. He would help her to become more bold and reach her full potential. Once Vil works on his flaws, I can see them getting along and falling in love much like Adam/Belle.

Idia=Meg Reason: She's sassy, wicked smart and confident, which are all qualities that I think would make up his ideal partner. This especially goes for a twisted version of her or in a modern AU where they can possibly be as big of a nerd as he is. Meg would be able to balance him out, bring him out of his shell and make him go out and have fun. He would be able to ground her and help her through her own issues like with her exes. She would be a fun big sister figure towards Ortho. What can I say? Nerd and popular person romances are fucking adorable.

Malleus=Aurora Reason: Malleus is super lonely. He has no family outside of Lilia, his retainers and his grandmother. Everyone is afraid of him thanks to his powers and aura. Hell, even my friend @stormkitty97 made a comment about his dorm room seeming rather barebones compared to others like Vil, ADeuce, and Cater during one of our vc writing sessions, which is a great show don't tell way of showing that issue. He desperately wants a friend and even a partner who isn't intimidated by him, seeing him for him. He also needs a partner who is kind, understanding and open minded. That's why he values his relationship with Yuu so much in the game, since they fit that description. Honestly, I can see Aurora fitting that description if they befriended each other and then fell in love.

Conclusions

This was a pretty fun social experiment. This gives insight into what others think these guys' ideal partners would be like. Thought exercises like this help me as a writer in order to determine what types of people could get into a healthy romantic relationship both for TWST and my original works. I hope that there'll be more content shipping these guys with Disney heroes and heroines in the future, because that sorta content needs more love in this fandom. I might do another one of these polls for the other characters sometime.

If you want to see content for Malleus/Aurora, Azul/Tiana, Jamil/Jasmine, Idia/Meg, and some of the other pairings I've mentioned here, stay tune for the stories in the These Twisted Tales series by me and @stormkitty97 over on AO3. Stories featuring all of the pairings that I mentioned that I like here minus the Riddle one will show up in it eventually. These are standalone love stories where each of the overblot gang falls in love with a Disney Princess and goes through each of their respective fairytales. The only ones out right now are Malleus/Aurora and Vil/Belle. They're all rated teen on AO3, so they're all safe for work.

As for Jamil/Jasmine, my own Yuu, Adriana, resembles Jasmine a lot personality wise (along with Tiana and Cinderella). Adriana and Jamil share a similar dynamic as Jamil/Jasmine. So if you love Jasmine/Jamil and want to see more content with them in a way, check out my own fic series and are 18+, Take Me to Twisted Wonderland series on AO3. It's a canon rewrite where Night Raven is a university, so everyone is aged up a few years and all of the NRC and RSA students are 18+ adults. I promise this ISN'T a word by word retelling and will have a ton of twists and turns along the way, including a different final boss, totally different Ignihyde/Diasomnia arcs and no Mickey or weirdass dreams.

Like I said earlier, because these stories are set in a university, the writing will reflect that and be more mature/adult, especially compared to the official English version. These stories will include things like drinking, smoking, sex, and other such activities that happen in universities throughout this series, especially in the later entries, to make things more realistic. If you are under 18, don't read them.

Write in the replies or comment about what Disney characters you can see these boys dating and why? If you voted, who did you pick and why did you make that choice? I'm genuinely curious.

[booksandpaperss]

obsessed with everyone on that post like "not true! there's never more than one woman in the media!" 1. that's literally the type of excuse the post is trying to shut down. 2. that's. still misogyny. like that's misogyny on the creator's end but it's still misogyny. 3. have you tried maybe reading something other than shonen manga and watching something other than a marvel movie, because idk your choice of media could be part of it. like it's actually INSANE to me that you can be on tumblr where shows like spop and the owl house and atla are popular and think there's truly NO MEDIA with good characters. like those aren't the only examples of course it's more than just kids cartoons but. seeing as these people probably don't watch anything without an established tumblr fandom

REAL Also the adamant denial on that post that there’s any piece of media with well written female characters??????

Ppl are also discussing how it’s bc “most ppl in fandoms are attracted to men” like. have u never seen a lesbian in a fandom space.

There’s also been several examples listed of fandoms with shows that have majority female characters and STILL the mlm ship is more popular so that debunks most of the arguments anyways

it’s literally not possible to apply all the excuses ppl are coming up with to every single piece of media??? And more often than not now when female characters are poorly done the male characters are too bc the writing is and all around, or even if it’s just the female characters that’s once again: a different only semi related issue (still misogyny too tho like u said) and not applicable to every show or movie ever??

And once again STRANGER THINGS, which is a very popular well known live action PG-13 TV show has relatively well written female characters (there are some issues but the women in the show are written with care and complexity which is way more than a lot of shows can say, it’s the fandom that tries to take the complexity away) with chemistry yet the most popular ship is steddie, and even byler, another mlm ship, is not as popular as the mlm ship between two dudes that had like 3 interactions, much less ronance in which the two characters in the ship had a whole arc together and one is canonically a lesbian.

And the way ronance and elmax were both voted out on that poll before jopper bc everyone was so quick to sacrifice them.. like Ik it’s Reddit but still this is a FANDOM SPACE I know you guys aren’t choosing a straight ship over sapphics 🤨🤨 the only scenario where I actually prefer a straight ship to a sapphic one is lumax over elmax and that is a rare, rare occurrence

Anyways, rambled, but ur so right and the fact that this is literally a phenomenon in almost every single fandom but ppl are still trying to excuse it for anything other than what it is like come ON.

Oh and fyi this is the post I’m talking abt if anyone is seeing this and extremely confused

[sepublic]

Homesick!

I just gotta say I love the pun of this episode’s title; I thought Homesick would allude to it being about Luz missing home, but it was actually a joke on Hooty being sick!

That said, we DID get what would’ve been our first look at Manny, as well as an early version of Camila lore! Turns out she was going to be a nurse, but in the end I think I like veterinarian better. Still, I remember discussing healing back during S1A as a potential track for Luz because of this, so to see that theme be apparent with both parents was cool!

Manny’s face being shrouded also seems to indicate that the dramatic reveal behind him -the illness- was always planned, at least since the pilots. Luz said he drove an ambulance, past tense, which seems like some dark irony given he probably needed one at one point. Remember how some of us theorized after Reaching Out that the Abomaton alarm reminded Luz of an ambulance siren related to her father? Man… On the plus side! We can guess Camila and Manny met through their professions, so we could try applying that to canon as well! Compassion is such a Noceda trait I love it.

Likewise, I appreciate how these two leaked storyboards have Luz and Eda covering for each other! One sticks their neck out because something means a lot for the other, but the other decides it’s not so important they’d sacrifice the one for it… With this episode, Eda doesn’t want Luz to look like a dunce but Luz is honest and can’t bear to see her mentor be mocked either, and is trying to take responsibility for what she feels is HER mistake too! It’s really sweet seeing Eda inadvertently teach Luz the Healing glyph.

Speaking of, it seems we would’ve gotten individual glyphs for all spells, as the fandom once assumed! I guess the show did glyph combos to explain why Luz doesn’t immediately find everything, as well as create a sort of fun system behind Luz having to mix and match things. And we even got to see what we always wanted; Luz making an ENORMOUS glyph around her enemy! Goes to show my speculation that since glyphs rely on the magic around them, they aren’t physically taxing; Something we see brought up with Eda’s own magic.

Caduceia reminded me of an early Hermonculus, being a teacher who didn’t really care much for the actual students and even seemed to enjoy mocking them! She looks like Raine, so much that I wonder if the design was repurposed for them because it was such a nice one! I dig the play on Caduceus, with Snakeslie as a palisman! Snakeslie looks so much like a worm on a string. Given Luz and Caduceia are both healers, it’s neat they have a snake in common, though Caduceia’s seems to allude to her being a snake (liar); Her palisman’s name is literally Snakeslie. Snakes lie. Glad to see Stringbean with the positive rep!

I also love the gag of King calling himself the King of whatever’s convenient, and it was really cute seeing him want to prove his own worth! Because two witches, it’d be easy to feel like he has nothing to offer, which is part of Sense and Insensivity in canon! There’s parallels between the A and B-plots, with Luz and King feeling ineffectual and their owl friend supporting them, only to be helped as well! Eda and Owlbert are linked and hell so are the demon hunters and Caduceia!

The House Demon lore was neat, even if it was stuff we already figured out with canon; House Demons being like hermit crabs, and also rare! Seeing healing magic be used to make someone sick and even control their mucus/phlegm was disgusting yet fascinating! And I was delighted to see the demon hunters again, they’re underrated side characters imo and we even got a crew nickname for another one of them!

I also like the bit of the moral here; That sometimes, it’s not that a student is bad or isn’t trying, sometimes the teacher is failing them. Maybe some people think this generation is raised too soft and coddled, but I think it’s an important reassurance for a lot of kids who struggle and blame themselves for it; I’ve taken teaching classes before, and we were taught to be vigilant with ourselves as potentially inadequate for students. It’s the onus of the teacher to adapt to a kid’s needs after all, and actually care!!!

What an unexpected delight! I never imagined the crew made storyboards for additional episodes and not just the pilot! This one has no voice alas, but it’s better than nothing and I feel storyboards have such a nice charm to themselves as well! I really thought the pilot would be my last episode review, but I keep getting pleasantly surprised and gifted by this show…!

[speaking-at-the-theater]

watching and dreaming

WATCHING AND DREAMING! i’ve got popcorn and soda ready :D 

OH SHIT

–

the in-between? yay?

funky little in-between places between worlds, the unknown, the in between, the nowhere realm, gotta love them

–

FUCK

–

AMITY VS LUZ! the fight to the death literally no one wanted!

–

oh shit. poor…..everyone!

–

terribly sad moment but the color coordination or purple+green+red´+yellow+blue was great (couldnt get a pic w amity’s hair in it that didnt exclude hunter

–

gotta love those tiny details in dream sequences that remind the mc that something is wrong. toh is so good at that, keeping consistency across eps! a witch’s duel was introduced in s1, and yet now they are recalling the concept, drawing attention to it, in a way

—

it’s interesting how ‘light’ here also has implications of truth, reality, knowledge. reminds me of hs in a way, though ik the idea is not exclusive to that

–

family reunion time!

-

rai-rai? really?

collector is soo cute!

collector is just an amoral child propaganda yes!

(can you guys tell i love collector???)

–

spiders are cool yes!!

-

wow! character who does bad stuff but doesnt realiza it’s bad? sign me right up! i love collector, did you know that?

-

the interesting contrast of childish innocence plus terrible atrocities is always fun to watch

-

watcha playing eyyy!!

–

love how luz, eda and king are kind of showing collector what his games feel like (getting injured, painful) for them, while being part of the games themselves! i imagine this si setting up for a ‘stop! this isnt funny anymore’ ‘well, that’s what everyone else feels too’ moment

–

poor collectorrrr nhghhshshshsh new fave character ig

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O COLLECTOR IS THEY THEM I DIDNT NOTICE

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love this shot

–

collector is so like a child, they encounter a feeling they dont like and immediately become mean

–

couldnt help but notice their eyes were without that white dot- kinda like the amity-puppet, yk?

-

collector spinel kinnie, also older-collectors are archivists? cool

-

ok so my predictions about the archvists taking collector in where wrong, cool. might wanna do something with that later tho

-

man that’s- that’s sad. collector literally got abandoned by their siblings, and then made new friends, just to see their siblings practically genocide everyone there, just for one of their friends to blame them for that and trap them in an empty dimension for a lot of years (and obviously leaving collector w some trauma). even if they dont say it in grown-up words, what happened to them was awful

-

luz collector parallels yes!

-

fuck you belos! go raine!

–

texts i found

-liar

-i gave up my palisman for you (i think?)

-im done

–

oh they really said ‘go big or go home’ w the horror here didnt they? 

–

i think it’s cute, seeing luz tell her story of the owl house. kinda like those end of movie narration where the mc describes what they learned. very…heartwarming, excuse me while i cry bc this is the series finale

-

the knee! i love that theme of ‘can you hear the world singing?’ i’ve seen in so many other places. real magical. and TITAN MAGIC?? gimme.

-

no but fr they baby

-

collector saying a baby could do what it took luz like 6 eps to learn

-

i love!!!!! the idea that luz and the titan/isles are connected to eachother, have loved it since i first came upon it in s1, i should do a (heavily canon divergent basically full on au) fic of it.

–

at first i heard ‘he must really like you’ as ‘he was really like you’ and honestly i like both.

–

‘hear that?’ ‘hear what?’ didnt that also happen last ep? i’ve been watching so much media it’s mixing around in my head

—

oof. collector recognizing raine’s earring. 

-

oh?? collector tell us your plan??

-

‘kindness and forgiveness’ wont help you now collector.

-

also isnt belos kinda a titan now??? should he be inmune to collector’s magic?

-

what a load of second-hand embarrassment

-

collector is such a child!! they see a new rule in this game we call life and they assume it always applies and are surprised when it doesnt! .

‘no, you did good, collector’ yes!! bc collector wasnt completely in the wrong for wanting to understand belos! it means they learned from what luz taught them!! it’s not their fault belos is an asshole!

-

wow! for everyone who thought king was gonna be the petrified one this season, not quite!

-

that silent ‘oh no’ look

–

no dont say that!! that’s sad!!! i’m sad now!!

–

luz! light! she became light!!

-

gotta love ‘tiny golden sparks representing magic through a connection with the world surrounding you’ sounds too specific but both toh and spop have done it!

-

collector i gte you’re grieving but please stop putting yourself in dangerous situations you have to be rescued from

even so: ‘the archivists arent here! the couldnt have taken her!’ noooo

-

oh. luz’s…..shards, return to the stars. the light glyph is written in the stars. huh.

-

‘i should have thanked them’ oh. bc everytime they get separated, the separated party thanks luz (‘luz, thank you for being in my life’ ‘thank you for being my big sister’)

i’m crying now.

-

KING’S DAD????

i should be more surprised but this was set up since the beginning

-

‘luz is a noceda! you know what that means? it means she’s too strong to let any of this bring her down’ literally!! the name noceda means ‘don’t give up/yield’ theory of language my beloved

-

‘I’m sorry for everything!’ reminds me of catra. damn. and ‘i don’t want anyone else to go missing……’

-

i need the music for the titan luz scene.

-

love this logo?? bc 1 it reminds me of the solar system which correlates w the space theme we’ve got going but also, it reminds me of like, connection. how mixing glyphs together makes them stronger. how luz’s strength is in her friends, her attachments, her connection to the world!

–

OH!!! THE INTRO LEITMOTIF IN THE TITAN LUZ SCENE!!!

-

is that collector screaming????

-

no he looks like a cat fr

–

no but??? the isles being overtaken by green vegetation?? utterly natural for humans (belos, and to an extent luz) but utterly alien to the people of the isles?? then luz giving back the red vegetation??? smth about accepting other people’s differences even if they dint align w yours???

-

gotta love all the callbacks this ep is doing. i could make a compilation of them but it’s like they’re saying ‘we know this is the end, but remember the journey’ remember remember remember ughhhhhh toh will never die.

-

love how all the glyphs have their natural element form, but also other connotations! the light glyph deals w light, but also knowledge, truth (it helps wake up the people of the isles) but also the obscuring of truth (the invisibility glyph) while fire is both fire and like, movement, the sphere titan!luz travels in is made of fire glyphs while the teletransporting spell has a fire glyph in the middle, light also seems to have themes of ife? and it makes sense for fire to be movement: the more hot something is, the more the atoms in it aare moving and just…. hajdjakd.

–

eda’s requiem???

-

what the fuck  is going on here what does that do

-

also ‘i am the good witch luz child of the human real student of the demon realm’ YES????? BC SHE’S NO LONGER PRETENDING TO BE SOMEONE ELSE, SHE’S ACCEPTED WHO SHE IS AND WHERE SHE COMES FROM

-

MORE CALLBACKS

collector seeing the hex-children and curling up…… gonna save this

-

whoa!! belos is a bastard!! come on, still attepmting to manipulate luz??

also ‘you’re human, you’re better than this’ ‘WELL WE AINT’ (stomps) YESSSS 

and the acid rain not hurting luz….nice detail. the titan does look upon her

-

’Hunter deamonne is canon!!’

–

uh??? no- no more glyphs???????  nooo

–

my babies!!!! theyre all so grown up now

–

in remembrance of flapjack 

ToT

…..

i’m going to cry now. bye

i have no grand speech about how much this means to me, mostly bc there are no words to describe it. it’s just…..thank you, TOH, for being in my life.