#this is like the 1800s version of me trying to convince my younger brother to let me come with him to sneak out and buy snacks together

[arthursfuckinghat]

This scene has a special place in my heart, Lenny trying to be independent and prove himself and Big Brother Arthur not having any of it (rightly so)

[seeingteacupsindragons]

Perhaps some of you remember that time I wrote up an entire essay for the TVTropes forums to get William cemented as a Magnificent Bastard because you literally have to get fictional characters vetted by people who care an absurd amount about this to add them to the trope page.

I am now back on my bullshit, and just got Albert confirmed (Louis is in the works, but the voting looks good for him so far). I did his write up today and it should be up later this week? I enjoy the short version as well.

And now:

The Work

Moriarty the Patriot is a (very loose) retelling of the Sherlock Holmes stories combined with James Bond set in the late 1800s, focused on Professor James Moriarty and exploring his motivations.

The Character

This post is to open a discussion specifically on Albert James Moriarty, older brother of Professor Moriarty (who we already confirmed) and one the Professor's Co-Dragons. Albert is the original "Moriarty" family member biologically who took the other two in as children, and is the leader of MI6 for most of the series.

Why Is He a Bastard

I mean, he kills his own younger biological brother and his mother by hand and then arranged for the entire rest of his family and servants to die in their sleep in a fire. So like. Is that enough?

He also took two orphan kids in, then basically said, "Hey, in exchange for getting your little brother heart surgery he needed to live, help me murder like so many people. Kthx."

He tends to come off colder than either of his brothers, which is sort of impressive since they're all murderers.

I like Albert, but he's certainly a bastard.

But Not That Bad?

Much like his brothers, Albert is trying in a very fucked up way to improve society by murdering people he thinks are making society worse. He is...trying to help in a Pay Evil unto Evil sort of way.

Honestly, Albert is the Moriarty brother who gets the least amount of sympathy from fans, although this shifted a fair amount after it was revealed he has severely untreated OCD, which is a massive contributing factor to his need to eliminate the hypocrisies of all these abusive nobles who keep going to Christian churches. But it's not like most people with OCD are murderers, so there's a limit to how far this Freudian Excuse is going to take him.

Is He Charming/Magnificent

Albert is, according to an official Japanese fan poll, the second most popular character in the series (second to the protagonist of the series, who won by a landslide). This seems to track from the interactions I've had with people. So people are charmed by him.

Albert is also in the series pretty much assigned to "socialization" on behalf of everyone else. He doesn't seem to really like it very much, but he gets along with people rather well. According to his official character profile, he's still getting asked out and courted even after losing his title and going to prison for the murders, so apparently people are really into him.

He also has a similar flair for the dramatic to his younger brother. This is absolutely a man who is going to revel in elaborate schemes and acting a part. While he often asks his brother to arrange details and plans, he always shows up to convince people that he's just so worried about his kidnapped brother, please help him, and oh, gasp, people have died, how tragic.

But Is He Brilliant?

This, I think, is a key factor in Albert's case here: Most of William's subordinates are very subordinate to him. It's made clear that William expects all of his crew to be able to think and plan for themselves and make their own decisions, but the series doesn't always take time to show that off for everyone. Albert does get that time.

Albert often sees opportunities before he engages William for a plan to make it work. Manipulating Mycroft Holmes into getting MI6 created so he could lead it was Albert's idea, and he executed the plan (and he leads MI6 when it's not doing Lord of Crime business), even if William came up with many of the details to help him out. Albert is the one who sees the potential in Adam Whitley and brings the topic up to William.

Also, Albert was the first person to bring William's dreams of killing nobles and creating a brighter world into fruition and set it into a tangible, real path. He and William are frequently tagged as the only two who originated the entire plan.

Albert is a brilliant opportunist and an excellent man to have making sure everything goes off without a hitch, even if the details of getting things done aren't really his forte.

He's brilliant.

What About His Competition?

Most of the nemeses in the series are focused on William, and Albert is his subordinate. Basically none of Sherlock or Milverton's attention ever splashes Albert's way. The person he really engages with in a competitive dance with is...Mycroft Holmes. And while Albert doesn't exactly win, neither does he lose to Mycroft. They come to a couple of agreements and passes to work together and watch to make sure the other isn't getting in their way.

Verdict:

Yes.

[thereforepizza]

I just had a wild dream about camp and Avatar 2

My church sent some of my friends and I to a summer camp. When we showed up there were these massive, 6 story log cabins with hotel rooms.

A friend of mine is absolutely obsessed with ketchup. Puts it on everything from steak to chips—basically anything she doesn’t deem flavorful enough. In this dream, I found a ketchup bottle and I’d had enough of her shenanigans. So I took it and I covered the stairs with ketchup. All 6 flights.

My group eventually made it to our cabins on the top floor. I don’t think I warned them about the ketchup. We got settled in and there was a camera aimed at the beds to ensure we didn’t do anything sus. We didn’t even care.

So we got ready for bed in a room with like 8 beds. Each of them had one or two people in a bed. For some reason my getting dressed was to wear this freakin 1800’s, several layer, heavy dress. Anyway we went to bed and I stayed up trying to figure out where the heck my brother was because I hadn’t seen him once since we’d arrived. In the meantime I showed a little animal (maybe it was a mouse or a raccoon or smth) HTTYD and taught it some tricks or smth.

then my brother finally came in the room and told me he’d been in the bathroom sick since we got there. But he felt better so he was gonna go to bed.

It was well past lights out at this point but we decided to all chat and stuff anyway. I showed my brother the tricks I’d taught that little animal. Eventually we got too loud and got yelled at. We didn’t get any quieter though. But at some point we actually went to bed.

Well, kind of. The dream shifted slightly. And my brother turned into the younger brother, Lo’ak, from Avatar 2. And when I looked around everyone was in the same bed, and it was all the main characters from Way of the Water. We tried to sleep but my brother perked up, listening to something. I only kind of heard it. Jake went over to him and tried to figure out what he was hearing.

Then Lo’ak got up and went to the door. Jake and I followed. He said something about that sound being specific. Something he’d heard before. It was a pattern. Then when we opened the door and looked out, the hallway began to rock, water coming through in waves. That was when we knew to run.

We got the whole family outside and instead of being in the woods, we were now at the ocean at night. Some nightmarish creatures were trying to kidnap as many Na’vi as they could. So much happened in this portion of the dream that the details are getting fuzzy.

I guess Lo’ak has a cousin. My dream followed him trying to save some Na’vi from the creatures and being sucked down deep into the water until he couldn’t hold his breath anymore. There were these torpedo-like creatures that went super fast underwater and when one tried to push the cousin back to the surface, I could hear him saying (probably just thinking) “no, I cannot go up like that. I will not survive.”

And lo and behold he went up with one of them and uh… probably didn’t survive. Idk

Anyway, the dark creatures left finally and the Sully family went back up to our room. At that point mostly everyone switched back to my camp buddies. My brother was my brother again. I changed out of that stupid dress I’d been wearing the whole time.

We had to fill out a report for anyone who had an accident or died. Out of the like 20 people that came on the trip, we had like five left. My brother kinda switched in between being him and Lo’ak. And the one chick that’s the teen version of Grace was there trying to fill out an incident report but she didn’t know how to write, so she was just putting scribbles and drawings on it. We hardly had enough papers as is. Lo’ak took an incident report but he was in denial about his cousin’s death. He was convinced he wasn’t actually gone. I didn’t say anything to him, but I took one of the reports to go out and make a few copies so we’d have enough. I went out to the hall and tried to let the papers air out because they were still wet from the building flooding.

When I was out there, my mom showed up. I asked her what to do about the papers to make them dry faster. She just shrugged. I set them down and mom and I walked along the floors, looking at the damage. She told me someone suspected my teacher of causing the incident. As I walked along the floor had split more and more right down the center. And all I could think was “there’s no way she would’ve done this.”

And then some nonsense that’s all jumbled together happened and I woke up.

[fireemblems24]

Merit Based System

This is a bit all over the place. Sorry about that. I watched a show this weekend that really illustrates why I no longer believe in Edelgard's system after her support with Ferdinand.

Spoilers for Fire Emblem Three Houses CF route and Edelgard & Ferdinand's support and the show Segodon up to episode 8.

Segodon is a taiga drama that retells the life of historical figure Saigo Takamori a. k. a. the last samurai. This man was a brilliant politician and played an instrumental role in Japan's tumultuous 1800s where they overthrew the shogun and instated a modern government. The show itself is absolutely fantastic so far (though, I love anything to do with the Bakumatsu, no, that's a lie, there's some real shitty Bakumatsu anime.).

Like the real life Saigo, the fictional representation has a lot of "merit." As the show writes him, he has a high level of empathy for people who are hurting because of Japan's horrible, outdated systems and is constantly does whatever is in his power to convince the powers that be to back off a bit because their taxes and punishments are so harsh at times, his native Satsuma was at serious risk of starving its entire agricultural force out of work.

Not only is Saigo intelligent, but he's also tenacious. He "dares" to ask his "betters" to see the errors of their way, goes out of his way to try and get audiences with people far above his station, and does everything he possibly can to help everyone around him. Whether he's tackling problems with a larger system or a hurting individual around him, he's trying his best to make things right. And when people listen to him, things improve. People are also naturally drawn to his leadership and overall gentle disposition.

He's also broke.

Saigo comes from a very poor, very large family. So when the powers that be grant him an opportunity to travel to Edo (then capital of Japan), where he could get real experience, where he could start rubbing shoulders with the right people and find ways to gain influence, learn, etc . . . He can't. Because his family can't cough up 30 ryo.

No matter how much merit Saigo has, his upbringing keeps him from reaching his full potential. The top leadership of the area invites him to the opportunity of a life time, but even with an open invitation, he can't so easily accept it.

His mother, father, and grandfather had all just died (and this is a historical fact, at least) and left him in charge. The family went into even more debt buying medicine during various illnesses. There's younger and elder family he needs to look out for, a sister who he now needs to find a husband for, and a new wife on top of everything else. They don't have 30 ryo to spare.

No matter how much merit Saigo has, no matter how much he wants to make a difference, he can't. Because he was born into poverty, because he can't afford to step away from the family land or else risk running out of food in the winter. His merit isn't enough. You need privilege. And he's already got privilege in that he wasn't born a farmer, that he has the personal attention of those in charge through connections and channels his family name permitted him, he's already jumped over hurdles others can't - and he still can't take advantage of his merit.

A merit based system benefits those who have and punishes the have nots. All the rich kids with rich parents who don't have to think twice about spending 30 ryo and have servants to take care of the elderly and young in their families. They can take every opportunity so the gap widens even further. Even worse, a merit based system tells the people born poor, born sick, born neurologically divergent, born into an abusive family, born into a historically disadvantaged race/gender/sexuality/etc, etc . . . that it's their fault they're not at the top. That if they just "tried harder" and had "more merit" they could make it. You too could be a billionaire if you just pulled on your bootstraps hard enough, and failure means you didn't try hard enough. And, yes, this is very much happening in our culture today.

That Edelgard didn't even consider something as huge as inequality before starting a war that would kill thousands really shocked me. Her support with Ferdinand exposed just how naive she is and how narrow-minded her world-view and experiences are. If she's going to sacrifice thousands of people for her supposedly better system, I wish she'd put at least some thought into it.

I do not expect a Fire Emblem game to get hyper-political or into nitty-gritty details. Honestly, I wish this support didn't exist. If their A-Support focused just on educational reform or even Ferdinand cementing himself as a actual check/rival to Edelgard, then I'd be more willing to believe she could make a good leader. But, for some reason, they decided to use this support to show how little Edelgard actually thought about her actions despite the dire consequences of them. These details aren't needed. These lines could be completely omitted and let the reader imagine Edegard has the political know-how to actually pull what she wants off. But instead the game went out of it's way to show she doesn't really have a single clue what she's talking about, and I cannot fathom why. This isn't even touching on her admitting it didn't even occur to her that her actions would leave a power vacuum and would need to fill it (like - what -), but that's for another day.

THIS is why I can't get behind Edelgard. Because her merit based system isn't worth all the lives she destroyed in her war. She thinks her ideas are worth everyone that dies, but her ideas aren't well thought out. This episode 8 of Segodon illustrated perfectly why Edelgard's system is a house of cards that will do nothing but pat the nobility and otherwise rich and privileged on the back while blaming farmers and otherwise disadvantaged for their continued poverty because "lack of merit."

I honestly can't express how badly I wish these lines in this support didn't exist. It serves no purpose except to expose Edelgard's lack of forethought and lack of understanding about the lives of the people she's claiming she's making better.

But, yeah, watching this episode just made me think about Edelgard's system and reminded me again of the exact moment I gave up on supporting her war.

(spoiler alert about Segodon: all those people he kept helping scrounge together 30 ryo so he can go to Edo and leaves the lands in charge of his younger brother, and yes, he's going to go down in history, but also . . . prepare for a downer ending if you actually watch this (I mean . . . it's the Bakumatsu). I already know I'm going to cry my fucking eyes out and I haven't even meant this version of Sakamoto Ryoma yet)