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wirewitchviolet · 2 years ago

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The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 8 - Post-Shadowbringers)

Last time, we covered Shadowbringers, the more or less universally agreed upon best expansion. Nicely self-contained, well-structured, focused, and not bogged down with any poorly done morally grey stuff. Bad news is, this interlude before the next expansion has a lot of stuff that’s bad and dumb and ill-fitting to the established setting, but at least there’s not a lot of it, and the exceptions are pretty great stuff.

First thing’s first, since everything is all perfect and settled here in the First, and you’re actually able to do so, unlike everyone else, everyone suggests you maybe slip back home to check on how things are going with the whole final war against the empire and all that. Estinein really stepped up to the plate as stupidly powerful protagonist putting out fires everywhere and popping back to talk with Tataru and Krile. He really recovered nicely from his whole previous life-quest wrapping up weird and being possessed and covers stuff pretty well. He has been hanging out with freaking redemption-arc-Gaius though, and he has good news and bad news about what’s up with the empire. The good news is, the whole plan to avert the everyone-gets-killed-by-biological-weapons future by taking pressure off the empire seems to have worked out. The bad news is they’re getting back into the weird giant robot approach. One of these is just a rebuilt Ultima Weapon that Estinein gets to deal with in a bit where you play as him in full ridiculous-dragon-powers mode, the rest of this you have to deal with in Werlyt, one of those new break-aways from the empire that isn’t important enough to bother putting on the map somewhere that isn’t covered in clouds. Cid’s there though, and wow has he been busy. Also it struck me earlier that the one and only time he got a new outfit back in Heavensward it came out really like, 1970s, heading to the disco?

Like remember Bones’ look from the first Star Trek movie?

We start out with the first new model, Ruby Weapon, and yeah, we’ve got a whole set of gemstones here. It looks pretty Evangelion. And then partway through the fight it gets... decidedly more Evangelion when in defeat the “oversoul” system in it activates and... it’s probably better to show than tell here. Skip to about 5:40 for the important bit.

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But I guess I also have to explain what is hands down just the stupidest, most badly written sidequest chain in FF14. So... Gaius. The “creeping mendacity” guy. Big ol’ nazi, hates all us primitive savages, strong should rule the weak, main villain of the base game? We’re retconning that he has like 7 or so beloved au ra orphan children he raised to keep them safe from all the evils of growing up in the empire, and already that’s just a hard no from me. That absolutely goes completely against everything about his established character. But we’re running with that retcon. We’re also, for some reason, retconning that the one female general under him in the base game, who incidentally had this whole speech before you fight her about how obsessively in love with him she is, was one of these children. I have no idea WHY we’re retconning that, beyond this all being just the worst, it adds nothing to this dumb thing except one of these other kids is jealous or whatever.

Anyway because they all love their dad so very much, after he uh... defected from the empire to start killing Ascians as a whole thing, they all decided to follow in his footsteps with this whole Weapon project, making a whole bunch of giant robots, that they all pilot, and which have this whole “oversoul” thing built in which... A- completely overwrites the pilots mind with that of some bigshot imperial general or other (in this first case, Nael, the big bad of 1.0 who does not appear in the game as it stands AT ALL besides here, kind of, and in the Bahamut raid 98% of players just completely skip, followed by in no particular order Gaius himself, Zenos, and uh... ones that don’t really come up). Not satisfied with killing the pilot by completely overtaking their mind like that, it also kinda melts their body into goo to power it up. With Ruby this doesn’t quite work right and you get this cool back-splits-open-goo-girl thing but that’s a defect the rest just get a boring second phase. And their big plan is to use these suicide-robots that destroy their minds to take down the empire that has oppressed them for their whole lives and honor the new path their dad is on, after first proving their combat readiness by... trying to kill their dead, and also the resistance to the empire, but, mostly you. It’s kinda just the absolute worst plan ever?

Meanwhile Cid just got super bored having to sit things out for a whole expansion and decided to kill time by... also building a giant robot. Something something found it in some Allagan ruins, made some modifications. In particular it originally came with big rending claws and he modified it to hold a lightsaber because he’s just a big ol’ nerd like that. I want to state for the record that this is still completely stupid and we really probably shouldn’t have two giant robots swinging lightsabers at each other and activating forcefields while fighting over the ocean that were both built by random nerds in a world where people still use maps that are half covered in clouds and we had a whole big thing about impoverished rice farmers trying to scrape up enough resources to like, charge at some people with spears, but... you can go to the hanger Cid keeps it in and pose on its shoulder and my heart is not made of stone.

Sadly you only get to use this thing for literally one fight. It’s surprisingly hard too, you have this whole mode-shifting system where you can toggle a damage boost and a shield on and off that need careful managing and a big laser cannon that needs to be precisely aimed. After that it “took too much damage and needs repairs” although it is reconfigured later to fly around and provide a big platform to stand on while fighting another weapon.

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Another baffling layer to all of this is the commander officially heading up the suicide robot division. He’s introduced in this cutscene where he’s just shot from the neck down getting all sweaty from doing pushups and gulping down a big glass of milk, and like... I can’t see any sort of world in which you introduce a character in this way if you aren’t trying to bait people into getting all horny for the sexy new villain, but every other time you see him he’s just... literally the Sewer King from that one episode of Batman? With the orphans?

I swear it’s an intentional reference. Right down to him also having a giant pile of orphans (on top of Gaius’ kids) he makes poke each other with hot brands when they misbehave. All he needs are the glasses. I feel like the sexy scene had to have been a tease at the end of one patch and then they radically shifted direction or something. So anyway all of these idiot children take turns getting in big robots and exploding themselves and you punch the robots, while this too cartoonish to be intimidatng jerk keeps whipping them and sacrificing random people to test more of this oversoul stuff. Eventually we’re down to just two kids left alive, and one of them has enough sense to sneak off and tell you she realizes that this really is just the stupidest plan anyone has ever had and wants you to intervene, but her brother’s already been dragged off to be turned into the core/brain of Diamond Weapon, which rather than having the combat data or whatever from some old general just has an idiot uh... mashed into goo with his brain preserved permanently stuck in the robot. Which is already what they were doing with all their pilots, and he doesn’t really have any particular combat expertise so, this is dumb.

Girl with a smidgen of sense has to get in the actual pilot seat though... and she does have the sense to remember that the whole point of this in theory was to get the best possible giant robot and start attacking the empire, so she tries to just gun down everyone in the lab, but they just cut the power while she’s charging her laser. Then they’re about to kill her but the Overmind, as opposed to oversoul system kicks in and Big Brother restarts the whole thing and gets her to safety. And then... still doesn’t attack the empire, despite this clearly being the last chance to do so. Instead we go right ahead with the standard boss fight. You win, Sewer King shows up to taunt you, Big Brother vaporizes him, and then, the path finally cleared to take his new death robot body and start smashing up the empire, the dream he and basically his whole family literally sacrificed their lives for, exactly according to the plan he personally came up with... does the whole “I can’t live like this, as a cool robot, please put me out of my misery.” So Gaius does, and then we just kinda... pretend this whole sidequest chain never happened and never bring it up again. Not even Cid’s giant robot which would really trivialize a lot of problems and is in full working order with cool upgrades at the end of this. You can go visit it in the hangar all you want, but, that’s it. Oh and your only reward for any of this is some guy makes a gunpla of every robot and you can decorate your house with them if you have one.

Once you’ve finished or completely ignored the stupidest sidequest chain ever, the biggest news from back home is that being in a coma for some unspecifed amount of time is kind of bad for you, and it might be worth maybe considering putting everyone’s souls back where they belong before their bodies die. As is everyone’s kinda just staying alive because Krile has given up sleep to spam heals. Having some actual time pressure, everyone does some brainstorming and realizes that hey, you can go back and forth all you want, and you drag your whole inventory along with you. Why not just like shove everyone’s soul into a magic crystal of some sort and keep them in your pocket? Ultimately this works, but there’s a few complications involved since everyone’s souls have been manifested as physical bodies for a few years eating snacks and such so they’re kind of heavy and none of you really knowing how to do any of this, but G’raha has an in with the local equivalent of Matoya, a nu mou named Beq Lugg (no offense to “Master Matoya” Y’shtola). There’s a whole lot of technobabble about needing to keep memories along with souls and special crystal vessels G’raha needs to infuse with his blood... and the slight hiccup that he kinda doesn’t have blood anymore being all crystalized but he makes due, and I don’t want to get into most of it, except it involves porxies.

I didn’t really have time to get into this, but on top of all the other flavors of fairy, there’s these things called porxies which are basically piglets with dumbo ears. There’s a random bit of background NPC frollicking where a pixie turns another pixie into one for fun, but mostly they’re familiars made by no mou out of clay. One does the whole nightmare eating tapir thing as part of the pixie tribe quests too. In this case though, the idea is to make a specialized one to suck out elemental imbalances from people, which will be of some use in getting everyone turned into a crystalized soul you will presumably take back home and... cram into the mouths of their unconscious bodies or something. This still takes most of this interlude to finish setting up though. The important point for now is that Beq Lugg mentors Alisaie in how to make her own specialized soul-cleansing porxie she names Angelo. And she’s a terrible sculptor.

As an added bonus, to test this, they try sucking some of the light taint out of some of the people in the slowly-dying-of-turning-into-a-monster-angel hospice, and specifically pull the emotionless kid who wandered out into the desert from that one cut scene I linked last time back from the brink enough to talk and mourn people some. Hey, Alisaie’s arc and a really horrific death scene get a nice payoff!

The next bit of major unfinished business before clearing out is dealing with Eulmore, because you kinda killed the guy who was in charge, and was personally providing food for everybody, and was keeping everyone in a magically induced chill malaise. They decided to make Chai-Nuzz, the middle-aged cat boy who hired Alphinaud to paint his surprisingly nice wife and then also oversaw the construction of the mountain sized golem that’s still quite visible anywhere nearby clutching that still-hovering mountain, and yeah, that seems like nice qualifications, but then he vanished. Turns out it’s not responsibility jitters though so much as knowing he’s not really qualified and looking for an advisor who is. He finds a former bureaucrat, who does the whole test of character thing, and you end up teaching him how to ambush a berserk talos or three so they can be disabled, repaired, and put to work as farming equipment. While you’re in the area you also dip back to the bottom of the ocean which kinda still has that big magic air bubble that’s still messing with the nice fish people, and help them out a bit with the problems that lead to, like their queen being ready to lay a huge clutch of eggs and having problems from not being submerged. Did you know what a birthing rope was? Because you bring her one.

The other thing going on in the vicinity of Eulmore is a couple of the local dwarves playing around with explosives and blowing a hole into Nier: Automata. This is the setup for our big party raid, and I have very mixed feelings. It’s a decidedly less elegant handling of a crossover than “would you like to help me research my new play, Final Fantasy Tactics?” in that we literally just have this whole absolutely huge crashed space station with like transforming fighter jets and city sized industrial robots from a decidedly more high tech game right on the other side of these silly dwarven mines. Plus we’re in a dimension that only exists because one god punched another really hard and that theoretically should only effect your home planet.

On the other hand, while it fits in really awkwardly for FF14, so far as I can tell this is weirdly well integrated into the canon of the Nier games? I still need to play the whole series, but I’ve picked up a bit from osmosis. The most interesting thing here is that while the actual major characters from Nier Automata are here, the first character we introduce is 2P. The palette inverted version of protagonist 2B who only exists because 2B was a crossover character in SoulCalibur 6 and the decided to get cute with the player 2 variation. And now we’re taking that sorta joke fighting game cameo-born character and actually fleshing her out a bit in this crossover with an MMO. I can’t really speak much on the plot past that because it’s really tied in with the source-game’s plot and I lack familiarity. Things do go pretty bad for this pair of dwarves making the discovery of these high tech android ruins though. There’s an air strike on their village that leaves it in ruins for the duration of all this, and personally end up dead and/or replaced by android duplicates and/or stuck in another dimension. Once you’ve wrapped the whole thing up though there’s this oddly drawn out prologue where you have this real-world weekly task of walking back through one of the now enemy-free dungeons seeking out items of interest for the dwarves to study as they rebuild, and get messages from one of the missing pair. After a month or two of these there’s a proper epilogue where the two lost dwarves find eachother and head off to... somewhere for a happy ending. It’s all a bit odd.

And of course mechanically it’s full of the sort of full-on bullet hell mechanics the Nier games are known for and an otherwise very noticeable difficulty spike from how these things tend to go, because the director of those games had a say in it. Also you get a replica of 2B’s outfit for your trouble and a good number of people are delighted that the leg piece is a thong that noticeably gives your character a bigger butt. That’s a thing.

Speaking of raids, the real big piece of unfinished business before you all really focus on going home is that Ryne has been feeling particularly ambitious and dragging her dad Thancred and what I’m still pretty sure is his dad’s on the downlow love interest I’m wary to commit to a pronoun for Urianger along to search the world spanning desert beyond the wall of life-destruction in this very Star Wars Landspeeder sort of vehicle, trying to find some sort of way to maybe fix most of the world being lifeless white sand, and they found... a thing, which they decide to call Eden.

It’s kinda like... half-spaceship, half- two semi-abstract angelic women fused together, and between the nerds you have looking into it, the general speculation is that way back a century or so ago when Ardbert and friends kinda defeated evil a little too hard, the big fancy final boss defeat light show with too much light element gave rise to this thing, which promptly started sucking all aether out of the planet, which just kinda glassed the place for the most part and caused all life to die with a few exceptions that became the first sin eaters. It’s mostly inert, besides the boss fight waiting when you step inside... which I probably shouldn’t downplay so much because I mean it gets one of these attacks.

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But you smack that inner core down and then you have access to a nice little ship control room, and the surreal realization that nobody’s all that shocked because really between some of the stuff in Imperial bases, Ayz Lla, and Omega’s whole deal, this is far from the first time you’ve seen this sort of setup. Anyway Ryne figures since she has the whole Oracle of Light thing going from kinda absorbing the weird Minfilia/avatar of Hydaelyn deal she was possessed by for a good chunk of her life, she should be able to just kinda take control of the whole thing and maybe get it to spit all that aether back out. Once you get it airborne though you have this confusing fight where this goth disaster with the sort of extreme platform heels I’ve only seen in fetishy specialty stores shows up carried by a sin eater and starts casting spells on a weird time delay. She’s unconscious after, and when she wakes up she’s kind of a rude jerk but more important has really severe memory issues, and wants to just kinda hang out while you check this out because she doesn’t know why she’s there either.

She’s not super clear on her name either but the voice in her head that tells her to do things calls her Gaia. She slowly warms up over the course of things as troubled goth weirdos with mysterious pasts tend to do in this game, but mostly you’re still focused on getting all that aether out of the big weird pinata. In a moment that really suggests your character just should not be left without supervision from people more responsible than Thancred and Urianger, you come to the conclusion that the most efficient way to get crystalized aether properly dispersed back out into the world is for someone to summon a god and for you to kill it. Kinda seems like a terrible idea to introduce that concept into a world that doesn’t have it, but you’re good at killing them and Ryne’s got plot armor against the whole Tempering thing that leaves you mind controlled thanks to her whole deal, so you pick a god for each element, do your best to describe them to her, she summons them, you kill’em, and sure enough, a bit of the matching element spills back into the local environment each time.

The details of all the gods come out a bit wrong thanks to the telephone game, which is what justifies these as a new set of boss fights. Leviathan has two heads. Titan’s kind of a robot. You don’t really have a dark god on file so you go with the Cloud of Darkness who’s decidedly less green and more full-bodied. After the first couple you start getting real needlessly reckless about it. Ifrit and Garuda you summon at the same time because hey those were total speed bump fights, right? And of course when you’re describing Shiva Ryne gets all excited about the tragic romance angle and Ysayle doing the personal possession thing instead of a standard summon. So despite everything going fine she insists on doing it that way and gets way too into character and ends up with this mini-Hraesvelgr all entwined around her and freezes you so Gaia has to step up and smack her with a giant hammer to knock her out of it. Otherwise things go pretty well, but I really have to wonder how it is you describe Ramuh as this pretty human looking guy with a big beard or confusing lightning orb collection mechanics (all of these give you a dialog choice between describing their appearance and getting all 4th wall breaky about the fight mechanics) and then Ryne goes and summons this.

That’s not even close Ryne. That’s way too neat of a beard, and for the rest of this you seem to have just been thinking about that poster on the Avatar’s wall in the intro to Ultima 6. Teenagers and their horny furry-adjecent phases, I swear.

Absolutely terrible segue, but speaking of Ryne being horny, her and Gaia absolutely 100% start dating during all of this. It really kinda sneaks up on you because FF14 is terribly addicted to doing a plausible deniability will-they-or-won’t-they/is this just a one-sided crush thing every single time they go there, with the exception of one minor side quest in this expansion where you help some woman work out how to propose to her girlfriend, but they go all in here. They’re going on little coffee dates and Ryne makes a necklace out of a leftover magic ice crystal after the Shiva bit for Gaia to wear and stuff. It’s pretty darn cute and wholesome.

Obviously this is setting up a big tragic turn where the voice in Gaia’s head actually belongs to Eden, which is also actually an Ascian, kind of. See the last boss Aldbert and friends fought was this pair of Ascians who did the whole Dragon Ball/Steven Universe fusion deal, which I may have mentioned a couple others doing in Azys Lla or I might not have bothered because everything involving Ascians not called Emet-Selch is incredibly boring and forgetable. He killed’em too hard with some sort of light-overload thing. One of them died in the pretty standard way everyone does where you go to the great aether flow/lightstream for a bit then get reincarnated as some person, but the fused bodies of both of them turned into this weird Eden thing and the other’s soul has just been stuck in it all lonely and hopelessly romantic and looking for the other’s reincarnated self. This isn’t a longwinded way of saying “so turns out Gaia’s an Ascian” because like, technically the way this works is that literally everyone everywhere is and that’s not a big deal, the losers who suck just never died and have been around forever, and this one’s obsessed with Ryne’s new girlfriend.

So the final dungeon capping all this off is her getting absorbed in by her jerk past-life ex who’s systematically destroying all her memories of cute dates with Ryne kinda like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and you have to charge in there mounting a defense against big shimmery memories of like going to this one place with good coffee and chocolate chip cookies and defending it from memory trashing monsters, and her forgetting everything and then it coming back to her while she’s pondering why she has such a dorky necklace and Ryne’s screaming from across a void at her. It is absolute peak power-of-love-and-friendship JRPG BS and I am totally here for it. And then of course if the whole thing wasn’t already super gay we make it really overt by just having this little paradisical private grotto with a giant rainbow crystal in it at the end.

I am as usual skipping around a bit. There’s a mandatory break in the Eden stuff until just before the next expansion properly starts, so Thancred and Urianger are no longer around to see all the drama at the end, but I legitimately keep having to remind myself that anything else even happens in this interlude. Hildy and friends don’t actually show up despite the clear setup for it, as Covid lead to a bit of cut content. The only other things we really have to deal with are a dungeon that doesn’t really bother having a proper setup, wherein you go investigate something in the basement of the Crystal Tower and it turns out there’s a little mini version of Alexander down there, with Cid’s personal branding stamped all over it, followed by a recording of Biggs from the averted dark future talking about building it from what they learned studying the original in the hopes of avoiding this stuff. I don’t think we really needed an explanation for how G’raha went back in time along with going to another dimension, but it was bothering Emet-Selch since it’s not something Allagans ever worked out, so, quick closure on that. Also the music is very good and there’s some running gag about people dancing to it.

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So that’s pretty fun. And yeah. That’s it. That’s the whole free patch interlude. Everyone goes off and says their goodbyes to all the people they’ve been hanging out with for the past several years and you wrangle them up to go home. Oh wait, right, right. There’s some dumb Ascian garbage first. And like, extra dumb at that.

So as part of your “let’s leave this place as nice as we can tour” you give a big public speech to set the record straight that Ardbert and friends were not in fact just a bunch of huge jerks who set off the apocalypse, but were good proper adventurers helping people and clearing their map of sidequests and all that, and everyone should stop using “warrior of light” to invoke like the worst possible person. And then Ardbert himself stands up out of the crowd to talk about how great you are too, and everyone cheers, and then you get a bit worried because wait, no, only you ever get to see him, and also you like permanently absorbed his soul into yours to cure the whole turning into a final boss disease thing. Having dealt with this before, everyone concludes that this is yet another instance of some Ascian jerk digging up someone’s corpse to run around in. Specifically Elidibus since he’s the only one who isn’t dead and got kicked out of running around in Zenos’ corpse.

He’s got this whole thing where like I get it, but it’s dumb, and it doesn’t actually go anywhere. Running with the assumption that you are in fact still the same protagonist from 1.0 who had a vision of this, or at least that you watched the original opening cutscene where it happens, you saw a big fire-y apocalyptic meteor shower, which triggered some sort of like ancient soul memory of one of those happening when the Ascians had their apocalypse that made them summon Zodiark way back when, and that in turn ignited your whole psychic Echo powers, and those let you pick up on Hydaelyn saying that whole “Hear, feel, think” thing from the start of the game, which according to this jerk she just kinda has running as a constant public broadcast to anyone who can pick it up, and they all get psychic visions and run around being level 1 adventurers from there on.

And he proves it by just running all around the First putting on illusiory meteor storm shows and giving huge swaths of the population the same call to adventure. Partially to taunt you about not really being all that special, and partially to get the ball rolling on that whole light overflow for the whole world deal. That part of it never really goes anywhere though. There’s also this thing about him having personally been the one to originally summon Zodiark all Shiva-style serving as his heart and it not making sense that he gets to be running around if so which... is a weird thing to even bring up when it just gets kinda lazily hand-waved away in the end. There’s also a bit with “lesser Ascians” who know the new body trick and on the team but are really kinda just otherwise normal human mooks are showing up everywhere that also goes nowhere.

Like I said, this patch wave suffered from some serious cut content thanks to Covid so they might have been planning more with this and never paid it off. As is, it’s just propaganda with this guy siccing would-be hero types on you and summoning some in from other dimensions and such. It would potentially be neat if the “in this world the forces of light are bad so you have to play villain” thing were a theme Shadowbringers actually committed to in a real way, as is it’s just kinda dumb and pointless. Like everything with Ascians. It does however cap off with my favorite sort of dungeon, where you have to just kinda book it with the help of some weird magic shortcuts through every overworld map to get from Eulmore to the Crystarium to hole up, and while you’re running and getting attacked from all angles, like literally every single friend you’ve made over the course of the expansion shows up to fend off big waves of mooks so you don’t lose your momentum. There was one of these setting up Shadowbringers too, and there’s ANOTHER at the end of this patch set, but like, keep’em coming. I love these.

Then you fight what’shisface and he takes on the form of “the original Warrior of light” which is like, the depiction of the collective main character from FF1 as per Dissidia’s interpretation. And like the rest of this total BS because in the process of this whole plot arc you basically work out that the Ascians had this whole fancy council called the Convocation of 14 (which has nothing to do with the 14 pieces the world was broken into or with the 12 gods plus the two Ascian gods, it’s just a number we keep using because it’s FF14), and basically the only member of it who didn’t suck was strongly implied to have been you, pre-shattering, AKA Azem, and Emet-Selch’s dead boyfriend’s accidentally made conscious ghost hands you the matching badge of office which is used from here out as the go-to hand wave for where you’re getting other party members from for boss fights where it wouldn’t make sense for anyone else to be there. Anyway you smack him around, he banishes you to the shadow realm, Emet-Selch’s ghost is hanging out and unbanishes you because aside from all the evil empire founding he really is a nice guy who likes you, G’raha pulls a weird trick kinda like Moenbryda to suck his soul out and trap it in the crystal tower itself, and then it’s finally time to head back.

Well, again, after everyone takes a goodbye tour. And people are starting to pass out because their bodies are dying from not having souls in them. But yeah, Y’shtola has to say goodbye to the cat man (as opposed to catboy) who she has clearly been either sleeping with for the past few years or waiting for to grow enough of a spine to offer her more than soup, Alphinaud has to say goodbye to his adopted catgirl mom, you have to go bring Ardbert’s old warrior of light crystal to his old amaro pal and let them know his soul’s just kinda in your body now, Alisae’s mourning her (girl?)friend who died horrifically and checking in on the kid she fixed with her porxie that she died to save, Urianger has books to pack and maybe some off-camera pixie thanking for helping work the whole trans thing out, and Thancred has to say goodbye to Ryne. That one sucks, since she’s kinda the whole party’s adopted daughter, but she doesn’t have a comatose body on the otherside to jam a soul in, and she’s got her new goth disaster girlfriend to spoil, so, she’ll be fine.

G’raha’s in kind of a weird spot because he’s totally coming with you but his physical body is here, and also he’s kinda been pushing himself too hard with various big heroic sacrifice things and is kind of like 90% crystal 10% super old cat boy now. But, he’s got a crazy idea about how TECHNICALLY he totally does have a body back there. His past self, still in that version of the tower, not having gone through the whole dark future he averted by forcing you to take a break, and he’s pretty sure he can just kinda crystalize himself, you pass that off to young him, they just kinda merge since they’re the same person and have the same memories up until the point you do that, and tada, just a normal 20 something catboy with however many hundreds of years of extra memories. Which works out just fine somehow.

Back home there’s a big ol’ teary reunion with the two ultra short Scions who didn’t get to come along, and Tataru is nice enough to sew up recreations of everyone’s cool new goth phase looks and host a tea party, during which Alisaie is talking to Alphinaud and frankly just breaks the 4th wall to gripe about how everyone else gets cool new outfits and class changes and they’re still looking like they have since Heavensward, to which Alphinaud says they’ll get their turn and the rest needed it more. Which is totally referencing how they were still all using their release models before this expansion whichwere a few years out of date posability wise.

We’re still not quite done though! Gotta set things up for the next expansion after all. So getting right back into that, when last we checked on the empire outside of visions of doom from G’raha’s now averted timeline, Zenos had come back from the dead in a pretty convoluted way, and killed the emperor. Which WOULD make him the new emperor except you know that’s a pretty huge crime and also not even a country full of nazis are stupid enough to want this guy in charge. Hell, he doesn’t even want to be in charge. He just killed his father because if he didn’t he’d just go poison the whole population and kill a bunch of people without any big climactic duels, most importantly with you. Instead they’re just kinda having a civil war now while he hangs out in the throneroom as an official enemy of the state after killing everyone who tried to take him out before someone had the idea to just legislate that hey, none of us our with this guy.

Also hanging out in there is the hands down worst villain ever in the whole game, another Ascian, which doesn’t make sense because by my count they’re all dead. He’s just one of those “lesser” ones though, where someone found the reincarnated version of someone on their big evil council, taught him annoying immortality tricks, and gave him the badge of office. Since then he’s gone and found the single-most punchable face in the world to wear, that of Yatsuyu’s somehow even worse brother, with the whole dumb fake peace treaty plan. He’s very theatrical and dancing around and talking about his big evil plan and Zenos basically just tells him “hey do whatever the hell you want as long as it ends with me getting to have another date/duel with the protagonist,” and goes back to watching the empire just kinda burn down in a really devastating civil war.

Meanwhile Alisaie has the bright idea that if her magical big-eared suck-pig (which she named Angelo if I didn’t mention it, games past the SNES get only the weirdest name drops) can cure being on one’s way to turning into a sin eater, maybe with some tweaking it can also fix the whole Tempering thing. So, quick field trip to Azys Lla with G’raha so he can use his bloodline security clearance to get info on what they worked out on this, and short verson yeah. The info dump is on a failing hard drive so they need to get Cid to help fix it, but it’s the same principle, should work on anyone who’s not like, turned into a horrible fish-monster levels of god corrupted. Only problem is setting up the porxie with the right magic tricks is pretty time and magic consuming. Alisaie basically runs to make a test case of that traumatized to hell kobold kid who like I keep saying is the core of her whole character and yeah, pulls him back to just normal, functioning levels of traumatized. Also he’s voice acted and it’s not just shrieking sounds like in the kobold tribe quests and it bugs me.

So, cool. We have worked out a cure for religion. Only problem is scale. Quick visit to Matoya to pick her brain on that. She’s both flattered and really annoyed to find out that Y’shtola’s been impersonating her, and that frankly nobody ever comes to visit her when they don’t need a favor, but she has the bright idea to just make one giant horrible “mother porxie” that constantly spits out pre-templated ones that just need a competent magic user to de-religion anyone who isn’t too far gone. She has a super whimsical giant golem kiln in one of her many ridiculous back rooms, you just have to smack around some elementals and hop on buttons to get it working, fight a berserk giant flying pig with a little crown, and you’re good.

Anyway, hey! You know who we haven’t really checked in on since literally before the start of Heavensward when there was that awkward incident at the party, other than the peace talks with the emperor which went badly? Merlwyb, the admiral of Limsa Lominsa and first likeable character in the game! Since the problem of the big nazi empire is kinda resolving itself, she’s been turning her attention to the other big consistent narrative theme, and looking to solve racism. Or at least to get a formal treaty going with the local kobolds and sahaguin. This isn’t going over with a bigshot pirate captain (’s second in command running things while he’s sick), who kinda thinks it’s total BS that they’re this whole pirate nation and they’ve kinda stopped killing people and taking their stuff entirely, and has been particularly avid on screwing with monster folk because see they’re not really people, is his logic. Merlwyb has no patience for that, and just kinda goes, look, pirate rules, you don’t like how I run things, you challenge me to a duel, none of this sneaking around behind my back crap. Kid’s an idiot and accepts this, she shoots the gun out of his hand, the actual captain of his ship gets out of bed to ask hey what the hell about him being such an idiot and apologize.

Then right after that, she’s like, right, cool, now we have all these stolen crystals from the other locals, and this religion cure, let’s make a peace offering of these, I’ll personally walk in with enough crystals they’ll definitely have a priest try and summon Titan to kill me, Alisaie does her thing, actual peace talk time. That’s pretty much how things play out, except, you know, he has a lot of reasons to hate humanity besides the whole religious zealotry thing. Merlwyb goes yeah, fair point. When we first settled here we totally made a peace agreement on how to share things and totally screwed you over in a colonialist fashion rather than stick to the spirit of it. Here’s the gun I used to kill my father, who signed that and later got turned by Leviathan, if it’ll sweaten the deal here, feel free to kill me with it. He doesn’t obviousl, and hey, peace achieved.

So Alisaie, for real, I think you owe the nice cool pirate lady an apology for implying she was a bloodthirsty racist way back with the faction picking speech commentary at the start of the game. Things broadly get patched up with the other four races off camera, but all this gets interrupted because there’s suddenly big ominous imperial looking towers all over the world. This bugs the heck out of me because up until now a huge deal has always been made about territorial control and transportation logistics and such and just teleporting big buildings in all over does not fly with that at all. Everyone goes to Ala Mhigo to talk about it because frankly they just have the nicest meeting hall out of anyone. Ul’dah’s might be close but the last big meeting everyone had there ended pretty badly. Anyway Fandaniel, whose name sucks almost as much as his personalty and his plan, shows up with “Lunar Bahamut” because you can’t be a terrible villain without recycling better ideas, and explains his terrible plan. Roughly, “I don’t care about that whole restoring the world thing the proper Ascians were all into, I wasn’t there for any of that. I just want to kill everyone in the world and then myself.” SUCH a downgrade after this last expansion. Hell he’s a downgrade from freaking Lahabrea.

Anyway Thancred shows up for the after-meeting meeting at Scion HQ to share our other reveal. What’s up with the towers is the new unbearable jerk here worked out a plan where the citizens of the empire started worshipping the empire itself as a god and did the summoning thing. Just, religion-ified hyper-nationalism. So on top of getting set on fire along with other horrible things thanks to a civil war, almost the whole population of the empire is now all zombie-like with religious compulsion, and the imperial palace is this sort of nightmare tower that I guess is just like popping out sub-towers all over the world, also putting out that worship us field.

So naturally, we have a small little strike force going in to check one of these towers out consisting of... not you for once! Rauban has access to Fordola who’s still all in on suicide missions to repent, and Arenvald who... I swear is totally an established character I just haven’t mentioned him. There’s a bunch of minor background people who hang out at Scion HQ, he’s one of them, he went off to have a more major role in Stormblood but doesn’t really do anything specifically worth calling out, has an interesting little backstory about his mom slicing his head open because he was maybe growing that “third eye” the imperials have, he just kinda randomly has the whole Echo thing because some people do, involved in a lot of Fordola stuff. Anyway they sneak in, set off an alarm, get jumped by “Lunar Ifrit” he’s stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. They do find out though that the towards have hundreds of people embedded in the walls just like in Bahamut’s prison to summon whichever god they worship constantly, on demand.

Time to run around a bit and gather info. Tiamat summoned actual Bahamut forever ago, so Estinein’s off to pay her a visit and see if she has any insight here. The Scions are looking for Estinein because... frankly he’s cool and it’s nice to keep him in the loop on these things. You bump into him, he’s all “wow you look so much more mature and manly Alphinaud!” ... to Alisaie. She has no clue but is mad about someone making a fake version of her dead boyfriend/god and wants to help but, you know, she summoned the actual one and reminds you she might just end up doing that again what with the whole Tempering thing. Tiamat’s weird like that. But, you know, we’ve got a cure for religion now. No more excuse for just standing around Azys Lla in the weird bondage gear, come help with stuff. Specifically that other cool all-your-friends-show-up-to-help dungeon I mentioned, when Fandaniel and his pathetic fake Bahamut are terrorizing the cool lizard people by Ul’dah. Kind of a speedbump fight, the whole “lunar” gods thing is just kinda here for a little boss filler without needing new designs really.

Anyway, the liberated lizard pals are now onboard, getting their religion cures distributed. Ditto for all the others. For real, Alisaie and Merlwyb just kinda ended religion and racism between them, everyone’s cool with everyone now. Unless you’re still grinding out those tribe quests, then there’s still jerks around I guess. You shouldn’t be though, best content in the game.

Krile figures hey, why don’t I go back to Nerd Town (aka Sharlayan, aka Old Sharlayan... the ruins from Heavensward were kind of an expansion site, they still have a turbo nerd college town off on an island) and ask the neutral-in-every-war scholarly jerks there if they maybe want to help because the empire really shouldn’t qualify as a side anymore when not taking sides, it’s just kind of hell on earth and full of zombies. OK I shouldn’t say zombies for this sort of thing because actual zombies are a thing and they’re actually all very nice and polite, but you know what I mean. Anyway, she’s taking off, and figure’s hey, seat’s open, let’s maybe officially make Estinein part of the team? Welcome aboard you super helpful idiot.

It’s seriously just boardroom meeting season. You have another one to officially welcome everyone who didn’t count as human to your grand old alliance and also formally quit it with that don’t count as human thing because really what the hell with that. Anyway I don’t think that meeting’s even over when Nerd Town sends a representative over to answer Krile’s inquiry formally. Turns out it’s the twins’ father, and he is just a gigantic asshole. His response is basically, “no, screw you, it’s not actually ‘the end of the world’ just because some jerk says he wants to kill everyone, and hey while I’m here, screw my father, he sucked, and screw my kids, you suck, and you know what, I’m officially disowning you when I get home.”

Krile calls on the phone after (I’ve mentioned that’s a thing right? Technically they’re called linkpearls and it’s like some kind of quantum entangled clam and pearl thing or something? In-game rationalization for chat functionality that gets used pretty constantly in the plot to just... make phone calls, rings and everything). Anyway she says everyone in Nerd Town’s hiding something, ASAP people should come check it out. First though we need to have a proper gameplay endcap. The deal with the towers is they’re sucking all the aether out of the world to redirect it somewhere (turns out the moon, eventually, which I don’t think the characters really clue into until a bit later, but we get villain cutaways, but it needs storing somewhere first). Anyway, we have a big showdown in Carteneau, which is where the big end of 1.0 battle was happening when the apocalypse happened and I think is where the PvP stuff nobody cares about happens and I couldn’t point it out to you on a map to save my life. Between Thanalan (country Ul’dah’s the capital of) and Mor Dhona apparently, as I check a wiki. Anyway, big ol’ fight against all these lame Lunar gods with the whole party, and by that I mean control actually rotates around and you play as if not all I think at least most of your NPC pals for different bits.

We get a cutaway to Fandaniel doing the whole evil advisor thing, “oh they’ve stopped us from gathering party there, we’ll just have to redirect to an area we still control, heh heh heh” sort of crap but... honestly Zenos doesn’t actually care in the slightest what this guy does, it’s not his evil plan, he’s literally JUST here to kill/bang/be-killed-by you and has kinda just spent this whole patch series looking through his pile of absurd weapons for one that seems cool enough to bring for the rematch, settling on a big ridiculous switchblade-y scythe.

Meanwhile, yeah, time to see what’s up in Nerd Town. Before leaving you get a weird vision/brief glimpse of some woman with one of those lame Ascian masks all warning you you’re the only one who can stop the forthcoming apocalypse. But of course actually hopping the boat has to wait until next time.

Oof, I could have sworm MOST of this was in the next expansion proper, but this patch set really is just super heavy on foreshadowing the next expansion. I believe part of that is there was apparently some sort of writers room issues with the next expansion where basically, they had two ideas for what to do next, couldn’t decide which to do first, and kinda ended up just cramming both into a single expansion which among otherthings caused a BUNCH of setup to leak out over here.

I’m planning to finish this write up by the end of the month or close to it, hopefully people throw enough money at my Patreon that I can continue to survive past there. Meanwhile a couple quick last thoughts I probably should have squeezed in before now:

I don’t know if I mentioned this but all through Shadowbringers G’raha is constantly casting all the spells that were “grey magic” in FF6 (mute, float, invis, exit, etc.) which otherwise don’t exist in FF14, and I just think that’s a fun little gimmick to work in. Also I think I mentioned the bunny girl dancer that’s his captain of the guard? She’s not a super important character but there’s an interesting dynamic where she’s got a huge crush on him and is broken up about him leaving, but totally gets that she never had an actual chance, because he has a super obvious dorky crush on you to the point he’s oblivious.

Also, role quests. Shadowbringers had these instead of job quests. 4 for combat classes, 5 for crafters/gatherers. Pretty simple plot progression. The crafting ones are all about doing stuff around the Crystarium like helping the local vet and a girl who restores antiques, but then one has you help a cryptozoologist prove invisible brontosauruses are real, that’s kinda neat. The combat ones are all about the backstory for the rest of Ardbert’s old party. But there’s this whole thing where after you’ve done all of them, the woman running the bar who’s coordinating all the bountyhunters confesses to you in a pretty overly dramatic way that she was ALSO in Ardbert’s party, and before that she was one of the heroes in the Thirteenth, AKA The Void, or if you’re me just hell.

Turns out when things got screwed up there, the Ascians made basically the same deal with her they did with Ardbert. Hey, go to this other dimension, try and fix the cosmic balance by pushing things the other way. So she did and feels real bad about it. You forgive her because whatever, things worked out. But also, hey, she’s lonely, and while I think I forgot to mention it at the time, there’s also some kid who showed up back during that whole “Warriors of Darkness” setup who was also from the Thirteenth, doing the same sort of world hopping deal, who gives you a bunch of exposition on that. So you end up smuggling him over to the First in G’raha’s soul transfer crystal, presumably after rinsing it out first, they get to hang out. Nothing super important about this yet but I want to have mention of it here for sometime later.

Next up is Endwalker, which really sells itself here as being the actual ending of FF14′s story for real, flat out, and promises a trip to the moon.

#final fantasy 14 #ff14 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #hard mode ryne-shiva has magical girl transformations apparently

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starfleetbotanist · 3 years ago

Text

A Most Dangerous Game

Based on a prompt by @hlabounty96

"And what exactly is it you want out of this?"

McCoy glared at his captor as the ropes surrounding him tightened. He heard the sound of something connecting behind him, but couldn't crane his neck far enough to see. He was still out of it from whatever this low-life had slipped in his drink. It wasn't even alcoholic this time! You'd think a man could have a glass of sweet tea safely!

"Why, just a bit of fun, that's all, Doctor. Oh, I know you were on shore leave, but really. A famous face like yours? I simply couldn't resist."

The man stepped back, giving him a winsome smile that just came off as creepy.

"What do you mean fun?"

"It's a game, of course! Oh, don't give me that look. I left clues for your crew. If they really are as smart as everyone says, then you'll be just fine."

McCoy took a breath. If it was a good clue, surely Jim was already on his way. And Spock was basically Sherlock Holmes, he'd help. Not to mention Uhura, or Scotty or Sulu. Hell, Chekov was a genius, too, despite his age. Those were good odds.

At least, so he thought, until his captor stepped well away from him and the ground gave way. He wasn't even going to lie about how dignified his scream was as he plummeted, only for the chord attached to his ropes to snap back, preventing his death. The force of it made his body ache.

"You bastard!" He shouted up, unsure if he could be heard.

"It's all part of the game! If they can't find you in two hours, I'll simply cut the chord!"

Fear gripped him as he judged how far a drop that would be. Please, oh, please, let them come in time!

****

"Bones still isn't back yet?" Kirk asked, checking the time on the chronometer. "That's weird, isn't it?"

They'd agreed to meet back up, but he was late. It was a beautiful planet, with homes and buildings built right into imposing mountains. Shore leave came so rarely, he couldn't fault him for enjoying the scenery and losing track of time. Still, though, Bones was usually the punctual one.

"It does seem out of character," Spock agreed. Kirk watched as he typed something into his PADD. “I have found the location of his communicator. It seems it has not moved in the last one point three hours.”

“Where is it?”

“At a restaurant, Captain.”

Kirk felt himself relax at that news. Bones probably found somewhere with really good alcohol, or maybe ran into a former patient, or... No, no that wasn’t right, either. Bones still would have messaged him if he was going to be late.

“Let’s go check it out,” he said, putting on a confident grin for the crew. “Drag our doctor back by his scruff.”

Sulu laughed at that, but from the look he exchanged with Chekov, he was worried, too. Bones was the usually the mother hen.

****

If he was worried before, he was even more so now. They had found McCoy’s communicator at the restaurant, but not McCoy himself. According to the staff, McCoy had begun to feel ill while sipping on his drink, and one of the workers had agreed to take him back to the ship.

“Do you still have his glass?” Spock asked the waitress.

“Uh, yes, sir, our dishwasher was the one to take him back. He hasn’t returned yet, so his glass should still be--”

Spock nodded, simply walking into the back of the restaurant, tricorder in hand. Kirk wanted to follow, but trusted Spock’s analysis. He gripped McCoy’s communicator tightly.

“Didn’t you get the message he sent? He said he sent a message to his captain...” The lady looked at him as though her gut was telling her something was wrong. She’d make a good Starfleet officer.

“Message?” Kirk asked, quickly unlocking the communicator. Bones, good old Bones, always used the same pass code for everything, ever since the academy. He found his messages open, and something written there for him. He paled.

“Captain,” Spock said, returning from the kitchen. Knowing him as well as he did, he could see the concern written on the Vulcan’s face. “Doctor McCoy’s tea was drugged. I believe him to be in danger.”

“Yeah, that’s not the only thing.” He showed Spock the message, watching as he felt, acknowledged, and controlled the anger that rose in him.

“Greetings, Kirk, et al. Your doctor is with me. Let’s play a game. He will hang out with me, unless you can find him. If not, I will have to drop him off later. You have two hours.”

“He’s in danger,” Kirk said, pulling out his own communicator and calling for transport back to the ship. He was stopped by the waitress.

“Here is his address. I don’t know if he’d take him there, but it’s a start.”

“Thank you,” he said sincerely, taking the scrap of paper she offered him, and soon he and Spock were materializing on the Enterprise.

As soon as they made it to the bridge, Kirk debriefed the team as Spock and Sulu began to find the man’s address. They found it, and within minutes Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty were all suited up and in the Galileo, on their way.

****

McCoy took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves. His friends would be here soon. He just knew it. A sudden whirring drew his attention, and he turned to see the Galileo on the horizon. He nearly wept with relief.

“NO!” His captor spat, angry. “They figured it out already?!”

“I told you they were geniuses, dumbass!” McCoy shouted back. “You knew they’d get here!”

“They were supposed to get here too late!”

To his horror, he watched the man pull out a knife and begin cutting at the chord holding him up. God, no! He was going to fall, after all? Strangely, he found the thought of dying didn’t bother him half as much as the thought of the others having to watch.

A phaser blast suddenly rang out, and he saw his captor crumple.

“Are you unharmed, Doctor?”

“Spock!”

“The captain and I agreed that it would be better if the ship drew his attention. The ‘element of surprise’ was the wisest course.”

“Thank you,” he said, hanging his head, meaning it. “Can you pull me up?”

By the time Spock had him back on solid ground, Kirk and the others had arrived. Jim threw himself at McCoy, nearly knocking him over.

“Oh, my God, Bones, you could have died!”

“Yeah, I kinda got that, too.” There was no heat to his words, though, and he hugged Kirk back just as fiercely. He looked up to the assembled crowd.

“Thanks, y’all. You saved me.”

“Just returnin’ the favor,” Scotty grinned, though his relief was just as palpable as everyone else’s.

“C’mon,” Kirk said, righting himself. “Let’s get back to the ship. The authorities can deal with the rest.”

“Seconded. I don’t think I want to leave the ship again anytime soon.”

#Leonard McCoy #james t kirk #star trek aos #my writing #for hailey

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questionablygourmet · 4 years ago

Note

ok so awhile ago you said you'd be willing to talk about the history of the legal defense of insanity, are you still willing to do that? btw I love reading all your stuff, it's so well thought out and written that it's just a treat to read!

(Thank you! I’m glad my meta has been interesting/useful to you.)

(With reference to this previous post)

The following is a brief timeline of major modern (and modern-ish) developments of the insanity defense in the UK and US, and then some reference links. It is hardly comprehensive, but should give a pretty decent big-picture view.

Writing this (and the reading I did previously) has made me really want to get into aspects of the topic - namely, the development of the psychiatric profession and its links to criminal law - a bit more as directly pertains to Hannibal, too, and I was originally going to do that on this post, but uh, that was about two and a half hours ago, and it deserves more than just a couple of paragraphs, so I’ll save it for a later meta post that’s fully focused on the show.

So, all that said....

In 1800, James Hadfield attempted to murder King George III, and was acquitted after successfully challenging the previously-existing standard for legal insanity (which had stipulated that the defendant could not demonstrate any ability to reason whatsoever). While it was clear that most of his higher faculties were intact, it was argued that he should be considered insane due to having acted under a religious delusion, which was attributed to severe head injuries he’d previously sustained as a soldier. He was acquitted for the capital crime of treason, but committed to an asylum for the remainder of his life, as he was considered a continuing danger to himself and others (contrary to previous cases, in which acquitted defendants had typically been released into family care), and the precedent was passed into British law by Parliament soon after that.

In 1843, Daniel M’Naghten was attempting to murder the British Prime Minister, and fatally shot the Prime Minister’s secretary along the way. He was found not guilty on the basis of a persistent delusion that the Prime Minister was engaged in conspiracy against him. It should be noted here that this was a time where the psychiatric profession was making a major push to distinguish and legitimize itself as a group of experts on the workings of the mind, and how that related to criminality. There was a substantial public backlash to the decision, resulting in the codification of the “M’Naghten Rules,” which to this day are cited in pretty much any discussion of the subject of the insanity defense. The essentials of those rules were that a defendant had to:

be suffering from a “disease of the mind” such as to either

not understand the “nature and quality of the act”

or not understand that the act was wrong

In 1863, these rules were somewhat tested and solidified when George Townley murdered a woman for breaking off their engagement. One of the expert witnesses from M’Naghten’s trial took up his defense, and argued that Townley’s lack of remorse and assertion that he was “not responsible to God or man” was clear evidence of insanity. Townley was found guilty on the basis that he clearly knew what he did, and that it was contrary to both the laws of God (the sixth commandment) and man. The ensuing events were complicated - positive public reaction to the verdict and a corresponding derision of the psychiatric profession, a renewed inquest into his sanity and campaign by his wealthy family to prevent his execution (his sentence was eventually commuted to life imprisonment with hard labor, which was quickly cut short by his suicide, which launched a whole new discussion over the matter of his sanity or lack thereof...) - but ultimately resulted in a lot of ink being spilled, both in reference to the Townley case and others that followed it, over the question of distinguishing between, essentially, delusion and homicidal compulsion (or “irresistible impulse”).

The M’Naghten standard was generally accepted in the US, albeit with various adjustments on a state-by-state basis. In 1954, a more expansive “product test” was established in Durham v. United States, which added the concept that an insanity defense may be permitted if the crime was the product of a mental illness (however that may have manifested). This was not a popular decision, and in 1962, the new Model Penal Code established something of a compromise, stating that a defendant may be found not guilty by reason of insanity if “he lacks the substantial capacity either to appreciate the criminality (wrongfulness) of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.” (This is considered a “cognitive” and “volitional” pair of prongs.)

Then, in 1981, whoops, John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan and was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and Congress didn’t especially like that, so in the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, they removed the “volitional” component of the insanity defense from federal considerations, shifted the burden of proof for insanity to the defense, and raised the standards of that burden of proof. Many states followed this decision, while others adopted even stricter rules for an insanity defense, or abolished it altogether.

That’s the standard of where things are in the US today - the federal rules following the 1984 law, and states having various individual rules. In a 2020 Supreme Court decision, Kahler v. Kansas, it asserted that individual states are not obligated to allow an insanity defense that hinges on the defendant’s capacity to determine right from wrong (the “morality” prong of the M’Naghten standard).

Maryland, incidentally, has one of the more expansive sets of insanity plea rules among US states.

It should generally be noted that insanity pleas get a rather disproportionately large amount of press mileage relative to their frequency - especially in modern times, they’re rarely attempted, and even more rarely successful. Since involuntary psychiatric commitment following a successful insanity plea may end up being longer than a normal prison sentence, it’s pretty much only strategically useful for avoiding a death sentence.

Some (open source) references:

“Moral insanity and psychological disorder: the hybrid roots of psychiatry,” 2017. A UK-based historical perspective (pre-20th century)

“The Insanity Defense,” 2005. A brief summary of the insanity defense in the US.

“The Insanity Defense: A Comparative Analysis,” 2010. An honors thesis about the insanity defense in the US, and its differing state standards.

Kahler v. Kansas, 2020. The SCOTUS ruling.

“Defending the Mentally Ill in Maryland: The Guilty Plea vs. the Insanity Defense,” 1984.

#hannibal adjacent #meta #my meta #sort of #i'm tagging it that way for easy reference on my blog #replies #Anonymous

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whatiwillsay · 4 years ago

Text

The Duality of Lover

Hi! It’s me, the Cruel Summer anon, back with some more hot takes! Is this probably clownery? Yes, but it sure is fun! So take this analysis with a grain of salt.

In light of the new Kaylor timeline, I have had some thoughts about Lover as an album. I think there are definitely a lot of songs about Joe (or Lily, or whoever you think was Taylor’s muse for the album), but I also think there are a large collection of songs about Karlie. In terms of the timeline, I think these songs describe the “Messy Summer of Mess,” or the summer of 2016 and subsequent end of the Kaylor romantic relationship, as described by @swiftiesleuth’s new Kaylor timeline.

For a quick breakdown, here are the songs I think are about Kaylor:

Cruel Summer

Cornelia Street

Death By A Thousand Cuts

False God

So let’s get into it!

First off, we have “Cruel Summer,” which, in addition to being my favorite on the album and possibly my favorite Taylor song of all time, sets the tone for the entire chapter. If you’ve read my previous analysis, you know that I do not think this song is optimistic in any way, shape or form. Genius says that this song “narrates the fragility and uncertainty at the beginning of Taylor’s relationship with Joe Alwyn,” and I really just have to side-eye that description. Why? Well, as per my last analysis:

it’s cool, that’s what I tell ‘em/no rules in breakable heaven

they say that we’ll just screw it up/in these trying times, we’re not trying

I'm always waiting for you just to cut to the bone

if I bleed, you’ll be the last to know

said “I’m fine” but it wasn’t true/I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you

This ain’t the beginning of a communicative, healthy relationship, folks. That’s all I have to say on the matter. (You can read my other post for more.)

Next we have “Cornelia Street,” which I also think is a Karlie song because of the following lyrics:

I’d never walk Cornelia Street again

baby, I get mystified by how this city screams your name

back when we were card sharks, playing games/I thought you were leading me on

you hold my hand on the street/walk me back to my apartment/years ago, we were just inside

barefoot in the kitchen/sacred new beginnings

First of all, the obvious: in this song, Taylor links her lover very specifically to Cornelia Street and NYC as a whole. New York City definitely does not scream Joe’s name. But, as many before me have pointed out, it’s pretty inextricably linked to Karlie. I mean, Taylor literally has a song called “London Boy,” which makes it clear to me which city Taylor associates him with. London = Joe, NYC = Karlie.

A lot of arguments linking “Cornelia Street” to Joe are because the song appears to depict the beginning of a relationship–and obviously, in the traditional Kaylor narrative, Kaylor would have been together for a long time at this point. However, I think this song makes a lot of sense with the new Kaylor timeline. I could see it taking place sometime in late summer/fall 2016, in a time when Kaylor reunited and Taylor thought she and Karlie might actually work things out. Taylor’s word choices in this song support the idea that this is the beginning of another “on” period in an on-and-off relationship.

In the bridge, Taylor contrasts the true beginning of this relationship (which was “years ago”–a lyric that definitely does not fit Joe) with the present. The notable difference between then and now is how public the relationship is; their relationship is not “just inside,” as it was years ago. Now, her partner can “hold [her] hand on the street.” If you buy the Kaylor timeline, this song takes place in the fall immediately after the “Cruel Summer” from that song–perhaps Taylor thought Karlie might choose her over Josh once and for all, so they would not need the same level of secrecy as they once did. (I don’t think this lyric is about bearding–Kaylor were always publicly affectionate–but if you buy my analysis of “Cruel Summer,” the relationship may have been kept secret from Josh.)

She also calls the present a “sacred new beginning,” which would be redundant unless this is not the first beginning this relationship has had. The lyrics back when we were card sharks, playing games/I thought you were leading me on also allude to a shared history–and the idea that this might be their chance to make a relationship really work, when Taylor felt led on by her lover in the past.

While “Cornelia Street” is definitely a romantic song, it’s sad and desperate in the same vein as “Cruel Summer”–it focuses on the strong possibility that this relationship will end, unlike a song like “Lover,” which very clearly foreshadows commitment.

Next song! “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is overtly a breakup song. Taylor says this was inspired by the movie “Someone Great” on Netflix. Maybe it was, but we’re all mad here, right? So I'mma do some wild speculation and say that I think it could have some personal inspiration as well.

Notable lyrics:

I see you everywhere, the only thing we share is this small town

but if the story’s over, why am I still writing pages?

quiet my fears with the touch of your hand/paper cut stings from our paper-thin plans

gave you so much, but it wasn’t enough

Is NYC a small town? Nah, but I do think it’s still notable that this song ties Tay’s lover to a geographical location just like in “Cornelia Street” and “False God,” both of which I think are about Karlie. The lyric also has similar vibes to “I get mystified by how this city screams your name."

I also think the "still writing pages” lyric is telling–the relationship with Karlie is long over, but Taylor still feels compelled to tell the story even if it hurts her (“paper cut stings”). The “paper cut stings” and “paper-thin plans” lyrics form a direct contrast to the song “Paper Rings.” (Might do a more in-depth analysis of this later, but I’m just saying it’s interesting for now.)

And finally… “False God,” because:

we were crazy to think/crazy to think that this would work

I’m New York City/I still do it for you, babe

the altar is my hips

you’re the West Village/you still do it for me, babe

even if it’s a false god/we’d still worship this love

Is it a sexy song? Yeah, but it’s also very fatalistic; it’s basically a song about having an argument with a lover and then patching it up through sex. And knowing the relationship might still be ill-fated even if you resolved this particular argument with some wine and ~sexy times~, which is why I do not think it is about Joe.

First of all, we have the obvious geographic connection; NYC is very much a Kaylor thing, not a Joe/Taylor thing. I have no idea how you’d even argue that the “West Village” line refers to Joe–it just makes so much more sense for it to be referring to Karlie.

Second, the lyrics are very queer-coded. The lyric “the altar is my hips” seems very much like a reference to going down on a woman. Which is by no means an exclusively lesbian thing, but you get the point. The song also connects back to the religious imagery that Taylor uses in “Don’t Blame Me” (oh, Lord, save me and baby, for you I would fall from grace/just to touch your face). Subversion of religion is just a very gay thing, which makes sense because lots of people very literally think gay love is a sin. If you don’t believe me, see: “Holy” by King Princess, “religion (u can lay your hands on me)” by Shura, “Animal” by Troye Sivan, “God In Jeans” by Ryan Beatty, the music video for “Take Me To Church” by Hozier. Taylor and Joe’s love is not a fall from grace–but love between two women would qualify.

Anyway, all this is a long way of saying that I think Lover is at least partially inspired by the Kaylor breakup; songs like “Cruel Summer,” “Cornelia Street,” and “False God” aren’t as happy as they initially seem. I also think “Afterglow” and “The Archer” could have hints of the Kaylor narrative, but this is WAY too long already, so I’m gonna end it here.

And lastly: thanks, Cam, for posting these! I’d submit them to a Kaylor blog, but yours is my favorite gaylor blog, and also, uh… babygate. Obviously I do not believe the girls are together still, so I think the strong Kaylors would not appreciate my hot takes at the moment.

SUBMISSION⬆️⬆️⬆️

amazing stuff! tysm for writing this stuff up and submitting, i bet if you do end up starting a blog you’ll get lots of followers who would love more great content like this!

#kaylor #gaylor swift #cruel summer anon #submission

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janekfan · 4 years ago

Note

hmm prompt time... jon angst about his humanity or lacktherof? worrying about him not being good enough for+worthy of+safe for martin/general guilt/self hatred? before or after apocolypse idk maybe safe house maybe post change? maybe season 4 after coma? could end up being jmart h/c or just be jon sad time whatever works

https://archiveofourown.org/works/27232381

For everyone else it had already been six long months.

And for Jon.

Well. For Jon, it was just yesterday.

Sasha.

Gone.

Tim.

Gone.

Martin.

Gone.

Himself?

And wasn’t that the question of the day Jon thought as he dragged himself up the steps of the Magnus Institute. He didn’t have anything with him. He didn’t have anything left that he knew of. Just the Oyster card and set of clothes the hospital had been kind enough to give him as his own were thoroughly shredded in the explosion. Everything else was gone.

He should be gone.

He’s the only one who should be gone.

But he’s still here.

And they’re just.

Was he even allowed to grieve?

“Jon” Melanie’s sharp, irritated voice raked over his ill-fitting skin like claws and he lifted sore eyes in acknowledgment.

“Hm, y’yes?”

“Been calling your name. You up to your spooky monster shit already?” He winced, wishing the scratchy two-sizes too big tee shirt would swallow him the rest of the way. “Barely through the door and you can’t resist.”

“N’no. Was. Was thinking, s’all.” Rubbing his arm, trying desperately to feel something, Jon didn’t know if he was allowed to leave or not. If he moved would she be upset? If he stayed?

“Least keep to your office. Don’t want you...watchin’ me.” She shoved past him, knocking him against the wall, still unsteady on his feet, the effects from the statement earlier were wearing off, or whatever the supernatural equivalent was and he slipped like a shadow through the halls to his door to hide himself behind it.

Things did not improve. He was always in the wrong, always a menace and he’d caught a glimpse of himself in the restroom mirrors a couple times, surprised at how thin and pathetic he looked. But they were afraid of him. He Knew it. Because the Eye gravitated to these heavenly tastes of fear like a starving man did to food.

So he kept to himself.

I’m sorry.

As days crept in and out, Jon tried to keep stock of what was different and the only thing he could conclude after his careful analysis and study was that he. Jonathan Sims. Was now something less than human.

Less than.

That made sense. That was okay. He’d always been better off alone because when he was alone he couldn’t hurt people and all he seemed to do was hurt people.

Wasn’t that true?

Georgie Sasha Tim Martin Daisy Georgie Sasha Tim Martin DaisyGeorgieSashaTimMartinDaisy

What was the point of learning that hard-won lesson if he had no one left?

I’m sorry.

And there was no way to go back. He’d caused it. Been causing it since he was a child, alienating, precocious, and so unlikable.

And there was no way for him to fix it. Not when he was in so deep. Not when he was addicted to these, these tales of dread and panic and horror and pain and death and terror and loss. Not when he had taken from those that he haunted and hunted through nightmare and dream. Took what they had and made it his, feeding, feeding, feeding like some animal.

But animals didn’t have a choice did they?

I’m sorry.

He’d already been judged and found wanting. Georgie was right. He should have died, or stayed in the coma, or anything other than turning into whatever he was now. Something inhuman, un-human.

Un-made.

Twisted.

I’m sorry.

Pity there was no one left who would accept his worthless apologies. Not from whatever he was now.

Jon was barely in control, not in control. Not really. Exhausted and hungry and lonely, lonely, lonely. He decided to take control back, just a little, whatever he could because to be human was to stay in control.

And he takes it.

In the only way he can think how.

Blood wells up from scratches Jon gouges into his arms, from beneath the blades of dull knives and keen razors, deep and dark and dangerous if he were human. But he wasn’t. He couldn’t harm himself enough physically, healing too fast to really feel it like he wanted to feel it and the marks never stayed long enough. Didn’t, didn’t bleed long enough, fast enough, never enough.

There’s no one left to notice the rust and ruby lining the bin so Jon doesn’t bother putting effort into cleaning up evidence. It’s around him in the florid streaks crossing the blotter, the cardinal fingerprints on old envelopes, the scarlet trails of irregular constellations mapped beneath his chair.

The answer to his problem became clear soon after. The statements. Addicted to them, it wasn’t until Basira pointed out that he should stop that he realized the easiest way to hurt was to deny himself. And they wanted him to stop. They want him to hurt and he should hurt. It’s fine, it’s okay, it’s what he’s been looking for.

Maybe when they thought he’d hurt enough, they would forgive him.

The pain was good. Every time he denied the Eye was good. Better than, it was intoxicating. The smallest act of rebellion and he revelled in it. Knowing he was weak, that he couldn’t be used for whatever purpose he’d been created for while he was like this, filled him with a perverse hope.

Restless, Jon retraced his steps through the Archives, trying to avoid Basira and Melanie where he could though they didn’t do anything more than ignore him unless he had a purpose or interrogate him about leaving, finding a victim. Compelling them against their will.

“You look shite, Jon.” He avoided their eyes, stared at their feet and watched them fade in and out, as he swayed back and forth, and he knew they were sneering because he could hear it in their voice. “Proof enough, I suppose.” Melanie lifted his face with a gentle finger placed under his chin. “Haven’t been galavanting in people’s dreams?” Back bowing under the weight of her scrutinizing stare, Jon did his best to stand straight. Removing the influence of the Slaughter didn’t make her undivided attention any easier to stomach and he put effort into quelling the ever present shiver thrumming through his bones, playing his sinews like strings.

“Uh, n’no. I don’t leave much. Or at all.”

“Mm.”

“Melanie?” Narrowed eyes stared through him, followed the quick rush through the highways of his veins. She knew where to strike to do the most damage.

Jon Knew it wouldn’t stick if she tried.

He was sure he’d seen him come this way. Martin. Whom he missed more than he ever thought one could miss someone. And, really, what did he know of Martin? Other than how best to ridicule him? He’d done this, or at the very least pushed him toward it. A victim for the Lonely. For Peter Lukas to control and manipulate and Martin assured him he was fine. He was fine and Jon shouldn’t look for him anymore because it was making it harder, it was making it worse. And Jon could do that. Could do one thing to make it easier for Martin?

But when he saw him, pale and small and Martin should never seem so small, Jon abandoned all his promises. He’d never been good at keeping them anyway. Why start now? Dizzier than he thought, the first step almost sent him sprawling and he just managed to catch himself on the wall, resting against it long enough to lose him. He pushed off, caught himself again as the hall twisted around him, spiraling like Helen’s eyes when they burrowed into his own and he followed, stumbling, a body ricocheting from surface to surface; floor, window, door, battered and bruised where no one could see. Not like the scars and the timeline they’d scripted silver and hoary on translucent brown vellum.

Martin is not there.

Jon has arrived too late.

He was good at that.

The first sob cleaved him in two, the second carved his chest clean out. Empty. Painfully empty and worse than anything he’d done to himself thus far. There wasn’t room to breathe between, there wasn’t time or space and rather than cower in the open doorway Jon threw himself into the office, crashing to his knees and pressing his face into the wood of his neatly organized desk before he gathered the wherewithal to pull himself into the chair, nicking the jumper folded over the back of it before crumpling again. Soft against his cheek, the well worn wool comforted him enough that he gained tentative control over himself again. He spent the time there dazed between bouts of crying, gradually tugged into the deep and the dark, exhausted and guilty.

He’s visited by dreams instead of nightmares. A cool palm gently coaxing the blazing, feverish heat from his skin. Stroking back tangled curls from his damp face and murmuring gentle things, lovely things, that he had no right to take comfort from. Jon dreamt of being hushed, of tears swept away by mindful fingertips, of clinging to Martin’s cardigan so tightly his hands ached. There was warmth here. Softness here. That he didn’t deserve and stole anyway, greedy and covetous because that’s what monsters did. And he took it, held it close, let it soothe the aches and the agony he carried so deep in him it hurt to let free.

Sasha.

Tim.

Martin.

Jon woke to the smell of sea air and surf.

To the last of a thick fog clinging around his ankles.

To a mug of tea, still hot.

And a statement.

#Tma #the magnus archives #jon sims #martin blackwood #hurt/comfort #self worth issues #self harm #Cutting #Blood #starvation #It's dark times up in here #Be careful #angst

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laurashapiro-noreally · 5 years ago

Text

Obligatory Good Omens Lockdown meta

Only a crisis of these proportions could get Aziraphale to create any comestible more complicated than a cup of cocoa, IMNSHO. He has the greatest respect for people who create the food that he loves, but until now I don’t believe he has had any interest in making it himself. This is going to be a whole new Thing for him.

They have not (yet) moved into the cottage in the South Downs, and that works for me. It’s been less than a year. Doesn’t mean their relationship hasn’t changed since we last saw them, just means there are a few things to consider before you decide to move in with someone, especially if you’ve never lived with anyone before. And you’re immortal. IJS.

I can cheerfully believe they have had their post-Ritz first kiss, or that they banged the night they save the world, or that they’ve been fucking since Rome -- this little gift doesn’t change anything. All it means is they maintained their own flats and each happened to be on their own when the shelter-in-place orders hit London.

As someone else has said (if you know who, please reply/reblog!), they aren’t following Hell’s or Heaven’s rules anymore. They’re following humanity’s rules now. 😍 I like the whole “throw off your shackles” vibe of this fandom as much as anybody (more, even), but these two are on our side now. And that implies certain responsibilities.

It also means Crowley is free to stop making people’s lives worse, and he can even own up to it! I haven’t seen anyone talking about the fact that he just straight up admitted to Aziraphale that he’s too compassionate to risk making people ill! Look who’s not worried about looking nice anymore!

Aziraphale, OTOH, still expects Crowley to behave like a demon, apparently. While not actually going about behaving like an angel, doing good deeds as Crowley expects, because that would be breaking the rules. A WHOLE LOTTA CONVERSATION ABOUT BREAKING THE RULES HERE, given the times in which we live, but augh, so much also about Aziraphale’s psyche. As I have written (at great length!), he needs those rules.

So I am personally very happy with all the lockdown fics wherein Aziraphale’s first refusal of Crowley’s offer of company is merely the inevitable first step in their ineffable dance, soon to be followed by total capitulation. Because Crowley breaks the rules, and he “tempts” Aziraphale into breaking them. Because Aziraphale couldn’t possibly make that choice for himself, nuh-uh, no way.

In conclusion: I love them, they love each other, and they love us.

Also, I hope someone smarter than me does a visual analysis of the video, because there is a lot going on there...

#good omens #good omens lockdown #good omens meta #ineffable husbands #aziraphale #crowley

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quicksilversquared · 4 years ago

Text

The Substitute Ladybug: Chapter 6

After Lila takes things too far and Marinette ends up with a broken leg, Paris is going to have to deal with a different superhero arrangement for a bit. Having to share her superhero identity with her parents before Hawkmoth can be defeated isn’t something that Marinette had planned on doing, but- well, it might end up being a bit of a blessing in disguise.

links in the reblog

Marinette entered school Thursday morning to find Chloe and Adrien in what appeared to be a very heated discussion in the corner of the classroom. Chloe's expression was switching back and forth between furious, pleading, and absolutely aloof as they talked, and at one point, she stomped her foot. Adrien flinched at that, but only for a fraction of a second before he squared his shoulders again and raised his chin, clearly determined.

Marinette ducked her head down and tried to focus on her sketchbook. Normally when her classmates got into arguments with Chloe she tried to step in and provide some backup, but Adrien and Chloe's relationship was different. As much as Marinette didn't understand it, the two of them had a history and in the past, her trying to step in didn't work out so well. It just put Chloe on the defense, and made things harder to solve instead of easier. Even if she kept her distance- well, Chloe would try to throw a fit about her eavesdropping.

So she did her best to not eavesdrop, but it was hard not to overhear the stray word here and there. "Bully" and "unacceptable" came up several times, as well as more than a few exclamations of "ridiculous!" from Chloe. And then, quieter but still loud enough to be heard, "but you promised..."

"That promise was based on the assumption that you would continue doing better, Chloe," Adrien said firmly, stepping away from Chloe. "And you haven't. And I can't tolerate you bullying my other friends."

Chloe turned up the sniffles. "So you're breaking your promise? To be friends forever?"

Marinette couldn't resist the urge to glance up at that. This was usually the point when Adrien would cave to whatever Chloe wanted, when she turned on the tears. This time, though, his expression didn't waver.

"You're just being manipulative now," Adrien said, stepping back. "I told you why. You just don't want to do any work to be better, and that's not fair. I shouldn't have to be making excuses for you all the time."

"Excuses?!" Chloe snapped, and now it was impossible not to overhear. "Excuses for what?"

Adrien looked absolutely incredulous. "Uh, for your bullying? For how you behave? For how mean you are to my other friends? For-" He gave himself a shake. "Actually, you know what, I'm not going to go over this all over again. I've already told you my reasoning. You know what you need to do better on if you want me to be your friend again. And I'm not going to argue about it."

And with that, Adrien turned away from Chloe, steeping away and heading back to his seat. As soon as his back was fully to Chloe, Marinette could see the nerves surfacing in his expression, nerves that he hadn't let show before. Clearly he was going out of his comfort zone by standing up to Chloe, but this time he was standing firm.

Her heart skipped as Adrien let out a short breath before pulling himself together, shaking off his nerves and squaring his shoulders up again before sitting down in his seat. That- that was really attractive. One of her biggest reservations- one of her biggest concerns, really- about Adrien and her crush on him had been his friendship with Chloe (as nonexistent as that friendship seemed sometimes, considering that he seemed to prefer hanging out with basically anyone else) and his reluctance to call Chloe out for her bullying.

It- well, it had been frustrating, sometimes. But now- this time, Adrien hadn't backed off when Chloe grew upset. Yet, at least. It was still early.

Either way, it was a step in the right direction. Hopefully.

Chloe sulked for the entire morning. She sent pouty looks at Adrien on and off all morning, clearly hoping for a change in heart, but Adrien didn't even glance in her direction. There were a few times when he almost did, but he caught himself right away.

"Ugh, I hope she doesn't get akumatized again," Alya muttered as she glanced at Chloe sulking in her seat as everyone else packed up for lunch. "Every time Chloe gets akumatized, something bad happens. Or at least it seems that way."

Marinette nodded in agreement, automatically checking her bag to make sure that the box with the Horse in it was still safely stashed in its pocket. Thankfully, with the change in Guardians and the corresponding change in the shape of the Miraculous Box, the shape of the temporary housing boxes had changed too, to a more circular shape that somewhat resembled her yo-yo, and it didn't make nearly as strangely-shaped of a lump as the other box style would have against the fabric. With that change- well, hopefully it wouldn't stand out enough for anyone to question what it was. So far, she had been lucky.

"Then again, maybe Hawkmoth won't bother," Alya mused after a pause, gathering up the last of her things and heading for the door. Marinette followed on her crutches at once, not wanting to miss the latest on superhero gossip. "After all, it's been- what? Five days since the last attack? I think that one really rattled Hawkmoth, because everyone that was nearby swore that Mayura got hit by Sting right away and the superheroes just dodged all of the akuma's beams, no problem. And actually- did you know Max analyzed the footage with Markov, and he says that the chances of that happening, especially with a completely new team member in the mix, were, like, single digits. So it's insane that they managed it. And in such a short, intense fight, too- like, they got right in there instead of trying to fight from a distance!"

Marinette hid a smile. Those sounded like fairly accurate percentages, honestly, considering the number of resets that she had had to do for entirely getting-hit-by-akuma-beams reasons. "That's pretty cool."

"Yeah, and I wanted to post his calculations and analysis of that, but Nino pointed on that it might spur on the Ladybug-vs-Coccinelle debate and I didn't want that." Alya let out a long sigh. "This whole thing- all of the sudden inexplicable improvement- it's weird. When Coccinelle first showed up, the fights were pretty comparable in length to when Ladybug was there, and then they just changed like a switch was flipped." She frowned. "Like there was some other change. But I can't figure out what."

"Maybe there was," Marinette suggested. "And- I mean, Ladybug's probably still been involved, right? Since normally she's the one giving the Miraculous out and a couple extra ones came into play?"

Alya snapped her fingers. "Yes!" she exclaimed, pointing at Marinette. Then she frowned again, her hand drooping back to her side. "Unless she just gave access to the other Miraculous to Chat Noir or Coccinelle. Probably Chat Noir, because why would she put a temporary holder, even a long-term one, in charge of that? She didn't even let other temporary holders keep their Miraculous for more than one battle in a row."

...Marinette was detecting a bit of jealousy there, but she wasn't going to try to call Alya out on it. After all, even now, Alya wasn't supposed to tell anyone about being Rena Rouge, and sensing jealousy wouldn't make sense unless Marinette already knew (or just suspected, but Alya probably wouldn't think of that) about Alya's superhero identity.

"That's what I'm assuming given the evidence, at least," Alya added hastily after a second, glancing back at Marinette as they headed across the courtyard and towards the locker rooms. "Since we never had the same temps show up for two battles in a row."

Marinette smothered a grin. "Right."

"I'd try to get in after a fight and ask questions, but with the short fights- unless I'm nearby to start with or they don't show up right away, I can't get there fast enough," Alya added. "And I kind of doubt that Chat Noir would answer much more about Ladybug's absence. Vacation, burn-out, and illness seem to be the top theories on the Ladyblog, but I bet he wouldn't want to narrow down the field of people who might be Ladybug by confirming anything."

That was the understatement of the century. Her partner wasn't going to do or say anything that would further risk her identity. In fact, she and Chat Noir had discussed the possibility of asking her mom to maybe be Coccinelle again for a week or two later in the year, just to throw people off, just in case anyone was suspicious about the timing of Marinette's broken leg.

If nothing else, random reappearances of Coccinelle might help put Hawkmoth on edge and a bit more cautious about coming out and joining the battle himself, knowing that Ladybug and Coccinelle could swap out without warning. If he and Mayura ventured out, they could end up in a normal battle against Ladybug or Chat Noir, or they could end up on the losing side of an intense 5-minute battle against Coccinelle and Chat Noir.

...really, the more she thought about it, the more appealing the idea to swap out teams on a random basis sounded. It would keep Hawkmoth guessing and hopefully off-balance, which was right where they wanted him.

"D'you think that Chloe's gonna try to throw another party to get back in your good graces, Adrien?" Nino asked from behind them, pulling Marinette out of her musings about how often Coccinelle might come out again after her leg was fully healed. "Since it worked last time?"

Adrien snorted, and both Alya and Marinette abandoned their conversation to step back and join the boys. "Maybe, maybe not. I mean, it didn't exactly end great, did it? Chloe didn't want anyone finding out about her bear, and then the whole school did. And having to be on her best host behavior for several hours clearly wasn't easy, plus her mom is at the Grand Paris now. She might put her foot down about having a bunch of collegèe students running all over the hotel for an entire evening." He shrugged. "And it's not going to impress me now. She's actually got to keep it up if I'm going to want to be friends with her. Or even tolerate her company outside of the classroom, really."

Nino squinted at him for a minute, then blinked. "Who are you, and what have you done with Adrien Agreste?"

"Har, har," Adrien retorted, tugging on Nino's arm before he could walk straight into a wall. He didn't look nearly as confident as before, glancing away uncomfortably before looking back at Nino. "It's just that, well, I've realized that she isn't a very good friend, and I'm not being a great friend to you guys when I don't say anything about her being a bully. And maybe she'll eventually decide that she doesn't care about whether I'm her friend anymore and go back to being a bully, but maybe she won't. Or she won't behave as badly, or- well, even a little reprieve is a good thing, right?" He sighed. "Though stopping altogether would be better."

Marinette bit her tongue. In all honesty, she really, really doubted that Chloe would stop bullying people. She had been doing it for so long that it was habit now, and why should she stop? When she bullied people and ordered everyone around, she got her way. The loss of one friend- one friend who had been spending practically no time with her anyway, since Adrien clearly preferred to hand out with their more pleasant classmates- was probably less of a sacrifice than suddenly no longer getting her way on everything.

"But I guess we'll see," Adrien finished, glancing back towards the classroom once more before resolutely turning away. "We can only hope for the best, really. So. Uh." He glanced around, clearly wanting to change the subject but struggling for a topic. His eyes landed on Marinette's crutches. "What's new? Marinette, how's your leg feeling?"

"It's healing," Marinette said, trying not to make the words sound as robotic as they felt. She shrugged as much as she could with the crutches. "I'm halfway done with the crutches, though. Hopefully, at least. The doctors said that it could be six to eight weeks until the cast could get removed, though they were leaning more towards six." She made a face. "I hope it's only six weeks. I want to be able to go back up to my room. And I'm tired of stairs being difficult."

Alya made a funny noise that was very quickly smothered. Marinette gave her a dark look.

"Stairs aren't normally difficult, I just sometimes go too fast!"

Alya looked like she sorely wanted to say something about that but couldn't. Adrien just nodded, though, completely sympathetic.

It didn't take long for them to drop off notebooks and gather their things to bring home for lunch. Nino and Alya darted off for a lunchtime date in the park, waving over their shoulders as they dashed off in their hurry to not waste any of their lunch hour. Adrien lingered by Marinette's side like he always did, making sure that her crutches didn't get knocked over by the other students rushing through the locker room.

It had flustered her at first, but she had gotten used to Adrien's concern and his chivalry over the past couple weeks and had adapted to it. She had had to, because it was either that or end up in a Marinette puddle by the end of the day because he was always right there and ready to help her at a moment's notice.

With a bit of help from Adrien to get down the stairs in front of the school, it didn't take long for Marinette to reach the (mostly) even footing of the sidewalk. She thanked him with a quick kiss to his cheek, then hopped towards the bakery, dodging the other students as best as she could as everyone scattered for lunch.

Dodging was much easier when she didn't have crutches and a cast and could maneuver more easily, but at least most people tended to give her a wide berth. Marinette suspected that at least a few were worried that she might topple over and whack everyone with her crutches on her way down.

"How was school?" Tikki called as soon as Marinette made her way up to the kitchen and through the door. She was perched on Mrs. Cheng's shoulder as she warmed up lunch for Marinette. "Did it go well?"

"Someone made sure to lean down for his thank-you kiss today!" Sass called out, flitting out of Marinette's purse with an impish snicker. "He's looking forward to it now!"

Mrs. Cheng raised an amused eyebrow at Marinette while she spluttered. "A thank-you kiss?"

"I- uh- well-" Marinette spluttered, blushing bright red. "It's just- he always waits for me at my locker to make sure my crutches don't get knocked over, and then he's been carrying me piggyback down the stairs, and just being really sweet, and, uh..."

Tikki was giggling. "So he gets a kiss?"

"A cheek kiss!" Marinette clarified hastily. This was why she hadn't told her kwami (or Alya) about the cheek kisses, because she knew they would tease her. "As a thank-you! Or a hug, but he seems to like the cheek kisses and he leaned down for it today so that it would be easy for me to reach."

Tikki cheered and zipped over to Marinette. "That's good news! It's progress, right?"

"Or he's decided that it's a normal thing to do between friends," Marinette told her kwami with a little laugh. She had been working hard on not getting her hopes up or reading too far into Adrien's behavior. Doing so would just end with her stumbling over her words. "I doubt that he's seeing it as anything more."

"Yes, but he's clearly comfortable enough with you to encourage you to be in his space," Mrs. Cheng chimed in, stepping over to the table with a plate and cup for Marinette. She smiled at her daughter as she pulled out the chair for her. "And it's always nice if you're getting comfortable enough with each other to share casual touches like that."

Marinette just ducked her head, unable to keep the blush off of her face.

"So other than thanking Adrien for helping you out with getting around school, how was your morning?" Mrs. Cheng asked. She brought over her own plate of food, settling across from Marinette at the table. "Anything interesting?"

"Adrien is standing up against Chloe," Marinette told her mom, remembering the conversation that she had partially overheard from that morning. "He's told her that he's not going to be her friend when she's bullying people." After a moment, she frowned. "He seemed determined about it, but also really uncomfortable, somehow. Nino was teasing him about it, since the last time Adrien told her that, she went right back to being a bully right away, and Adrien just changed topics right away."

Mrs. Cheng smiled, setting her fork down. "Adrien is probably self-conscious about it, and drawing more attention to what he's doing is just making him uncomfortable. I'm sure he'd prefer quiet, private assurances that he's doing the right thing over teasing, no matter how friendly the teasing is."

Marinette frowned at that, puzzled. "Why would he be self-conscious about that, though? I don't understand."

"Because he's probably only recently realized what kinds of effects his friendship with Chloe and his excuses for her are having on his other friends," Mrs. Cheng told her. Her smile turned sad. "And a realization like that- well, it would be a bit uncomfortable that he hadn't realized it before, when it probably seems obvious looking back. So then he wants to make things right, which means going against habit. Habit, and I assume what he's been taught by his parents as well."

Marinette considered that. It made sense, but... "What his parents taught him?"

"Mr. Agreste seems the sort to drill in 'don't rock the boat' as an acceptable life lesson," Mrs. Cheng said, her nose screwed up in distaste. "And not the sort to want to point out what kinds of behaviors are right or wrong, or else he'd run the risk of Adrien knowing how very terrible Mr. Agreste's behavior can be." The nose scrunch intensified. "It's easier to just not bother to teach those lessons. More convenient, too."

"So if he's not been taught, then how would he be noticing now?" Marinette asked. She took a quick bite, then glanced up at her mom again. "Or do you think it's been something that's building up over time?"

"Well, it's impossible to know for sure, but I would assume that maybe a trusted adult mentioned something." Mrs. Cheng got up as the teapot started whistling, pouring herself a cup before returning to the table. "Now that he's going to school, he's coming into contact with more people than he used to. He's meeting more adults than the ones that his father had vetted and has control over. Maybe one of them said something."

Marinette thought about that. It had to have been a teacher, to see how Adrien and Chloe and all of the other students interacted, but that didn't seem right, somehow. "I can't see any of the teachers saying anything, though. Madam Mendeleev doesn't really get involved with student lives, and Ms. Bustier- well, she thinks that Chloe will get better if we're just nice to her all of the time instead of calling her out on being a bully."

"It might not be a teacher," her mom reminded her. She took a sip of tea, then made a slight face. "Ah. Needs honey."

"But how else would they know about what's going on at school?"

"Adrien might have told them," Mrs. Cheng said. She was rummaging through the cupboards now, then smiled as she pulled out her jar of honey. "He may have picked up that something about how he was interacting with others was off, and wanted to figure out what with an outside perspective. It's what Chat Noir has been doing, because- like Adrien- he hasn't had the best adult figures in his life so far."

Marinette bit down the reflexive mum, secret identities!whine that rose in her throat in favor of listening. "Oh?"

"They've had poor social training, but neither of them are stupid. They're bound to pick up on discontent and exasperation when they do things like not speak up about bullying." Mrs. Cheng scooped in a half-spoonful of honey into her tea, then rejoined Marinette at the table. "In their eyes, they were responding correctly to the situation, so why is it causing problems? Noticing that something is wrong and reaching out to figure out how to correct it is hard, and actually changing your own behavior... well, it's very hard. I can tell you that Chat Noir was quite worried that people would make a big deal about it."

Marinette could understand that. When she first started really standing up against Chloe, she had been going out of her comfort zone. Chloe was an established bully with plenty of influence with the teachers, and Marinette... well, she protested against Chloe's bullying, of course, but actually pushing back as hard as she did now hadn't come easily. Just staying out of Chloe's way and not getting into fights- and especially getting into fights on her classmates' behalf- was easier. Just trying to comfort her classmates after the fact was easier- well, until Hawkmoth arrived on the scene and could dig his claws in before she could find them and cheer them up.

After that... well, Marinette had gotten an extra confidence boost from being Ladybug and a whole lot more determination from Alya, and she had thrown herself into pushing back against Chloe. It had been hard, and there had definitely been times when she had maybe not acted when she could have because she was too tired.

And she had started from a completely different point than Adrien had. Marinette had never been friends with Chloe, and Adrien had had years of when Chloe was his only friend. Marinette had been on the receiving end of Chloe's bullying for years and knew what it felt like, while Adrien never had. If her mom was right, Adrien had probably been dissuaded from recognizing and calling out bullying, while she hadn't. He was probably going completely out of his comfort zone.

Which meant that he needed his friends' support, not teasing.

"So do you think that I should say something about it?" Marinette asked. "Like, encouraging him? Or do you think that would embarrass him too?"

Mrs. Cheng smiled. "Well, it depends. Not everyone is the same, and it would be different if you brought it up yourself versus if Adrien had just faced off against Chloe again or someone else brought it up. I'd say that if he brings it up, that might be a good time to mention your support, too."

Marinette nodded. "Right. That makes sense."

"Good." Mrs. Cheng took another sip of her tea. "So, other than that, how was your morning?"

Afternoon classes were still ten minutes away when Marinette returned to school, giving her plenty of time to pick her way up the outside stairs (carefully) and across the courtyard. There were still some students walking around- after all, some people just ate in the cafeteria instead of going home- but for the most part, Marinette had a clear path to the locker room.

"Marinette! Wait up!"

Marinette paused, turning as much as she could to see Adrien trotting towards her, a grin on his face. He caught up to her right away, placing one hand on her shoulder to steady her as she turned back around to head forward again. "Hey! Where's the fire?"

"I wanted to catch up, that's all." Adrien grinned over at her. "You're going really fast on those crutches now. I don't think that I ever get that good when I broke my leg."

Marinette blinked. This... well, this was the first time that she had ever heard of Adrien having broken his leg before, too. Which- well, it was hardly as though there hadn't been chances for him to bring it up before, but maybe he had been worried about looking like he was trying to make himself the center of attention or something. "When you broke your leg?"

Adrien winced. "Yeah. I broke my leg when I was nine, during a basketball game against a team of older kids. It got a bit rough, and I ended up getting tripped and going flying." He paused, stepping ahead of her to hold the locker room door open for her to come through. He sent a glare at another student when they ducked through the door he had just opened, apparently oblivious to Marinette's crutches. "It was a pretty serious break, too. And I remember how much it sucked to have to deal with a broken leg. One of the things I hated most was getting my pants on and off every day. Like, even with shorts, it was just so hard to get them over the cast. So I may have begged my parents to just let me wear a skirt instead."

Marinette couldn't help but giggle. "Oh, man, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for that. I bet your father wasn't thrilled with the idea."

"Not at all," Adrien agreed. "Even though I pointed out that the Scottish have kilts- I thought that was a very compelling argument, actually- and then the ancient Greeks and Romans had tunics. And it wasn't like I was going out in public anyway. But Father wouldn't hear of it." His grin widened. "He did eventually design several pairs of pants that had a zipper running all the way down the side, so that I didn't have to wrestle them over the cast. That was only after I started making and wearing bedsheet togas in protest, though."

Marinette had to stop walking so that she wouldn't fall over while laughing, leaning heavily on her crutches as she tried to imagine Mr. Agreste's face. He was so incredibly straight-laced that she had to imagine that his reaction had probably been either pretty funny or borderline frightening. She herself was glad that it was warm enough outside that dresses and skirts were an entirely practical choice, though she couldn't deny that she was also looking forward to being able to go back to her normal outfits as well.

But pants- capris, maybe?- with a zipper up the side? That was an idea.

...except that her sewing machine was only really accessible via use of the Horse Miraculous, unless she wanted to go up the stairs on her butt, and she was trying not to abuse the Miraculous powers for her own personal benefit. And maybe her mom had offered to bring the sewing machine down, but then she had to think about what materials she would need, and there were just so many components to think about, and she would need to start with a base pattern, which would mean going out to search for one.

Ugh. Fine. She would stick to skirts for now.

"Nino thought that it was a bit weird when I mentioned it," Adrien commented after a moment, neatly catching Marinette's crutch after it slipped out from under her arm because she was laughing so hard. An uncertain look flashing across his face for a moment. "Because 'guys don't wear skirts' or something like that. But I thought you might find it amusing."

"Nino's jealous that he can't pull off a skirt and you can," Marinette said right away, wanting to wipe that insecurity off of Adrien's face. She could totally see Nino being weirded out by the idea of wearing a skirt, but he hadn't ever had a broken leg. He didn't know how inconvenient it was to get dressed with a cast in the way.

And for Adrien, who had all of his clothes closely fitted to give off an ultra-tailored look, it would be super inconvenient.

Adrien laughed properly at that, taking Marinette's backpack so that she could open her locker. "Most of it is in the attitude, I think. If he's uncomfortable, it'll show. If you're fine with it, things tend to look normal."

Marinette nodded. She could understand that. After all, it applied to models normally, too. Sometimes it really was all about how something was presented. "I wish I could have seen that. It sounds like it would have been cute."

Adrien perked up. "Would- would you want to come over sometime and see the photos I have, maybe? Mom took a bunch, since it took Father a couple days to make zip-side shorts that actually worked."

"And you wore a toga the entire time?" Marinette asked. Without waiting for an answer, she grinned. "I'd love to come over. Just let me know when it would be a good time."

Adrien lit up. "Great! I'll definitely ask Nathalie when you can come over. I'll have to frame it as a study session, probably," he added. "Just in case Father is still being a stick in the mud about the whole thing and doesn't want me to tell anyone about it. So we'll have to do some studying, too, to make it realistic. And it might not be right away, either, since I don't know how full my schedule will be."

"Oh, no, how terrible," Marinette deadpanned, smiling wider when Adrien snickered. He had been super self-conscious about his father's habit of having Nathalie or the Gorilla check in on him and his friends when they were over there to study at first, so it was good to see that he wasn't so worried about how they would react anymore. Adrien knew that they weren't going to judge him for his father's over-supervision. "Studying? How will I survive?"

As Adrien laughed harder, Marinette could only smile over at him fondly. After how uncomfortable Adrien had clearly been that morning, it was good to see him relaxed and laughing again. Maybe it wouldn't last long- after all, once Chloe returned from lunch, it was very likely that she would make another attempt at getting Adrien swayed back to her side- but for now, Marinette would just enjoy their time together.

#Miraculous Ladybug #my writing #The Substitute Ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste

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alien-til-i-stage · 7 months ago

Text

I think its important to talk about *this* scene for a bit.

I believe this scene is a perfect example of Luka’s character. He’s displayed in front a bunch of aliens who peer and gawk at him, completely invading his privacy. Its clear he doesn’t want to be here, if the way he huddles and clings to himself as well as closing his eyes are any indicator.

However despite what he wants, the aliens continued to stare and show a camera in his face. He is powerless and unable to get away, so he deals with it in the way he can.

Another detail to note is the caution tape in front of Luka, the one that reminds the aliens to keep their distance. While Luka isn’t valued enough to care about his needs, he’s a trophy esstienally, which is why the aliens can only look, never get close.

Another thing I find interesting is how alone Luka is in front of the aliens. Hes kept away from them but he’s still alone, both literally and metaphorically. By this point Hyuna has already left and we know Luka to be a loner, perhaps a conscious decision or because of circumstances. The tape keeping everyone away is ironic, because he is already alone

#alien stage #luka alnst #luka alien stage #alnst #uhhh whatother tags #alnst hyuna #i dont even know actually #uh follow me ill make more analysis #pwease 🥺

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lairofsentinel · 4 years ago

Note

I love your BG3 analysis posts and wanted to get your insight into one of Gale's lines. On point 21 you discuss his 'doubt' lines. There's another line that I find similar / fitting: if the main char tells Gale they think their night together was a mistake then he says something like "Let me clear your mind of doubts: it absolutely wasn't." He doesn't discuss the 'why' of it - or express he's disappointed but accepts their choice. He tries to discourage that line of thinking outright. Thoughts?

Hey, hello! Thanks for reading those big posts. :D

[Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Spoilers]

For those who don't know what those numbers mean: [Gale in 27 points or more]

Yeah, in (21) I found curious that he just says "doubt is a spoilsport" in another desperate attempt to make the MC stop thinking about it, and go for him already. Yes, you are right. The other line afterwards, when the MC shows doubts again about the whole night, he desperately tries to cast them aside. Again! They are like attempts of "no, no, dear, stop thinking right there. We are not a mistake, we are just we. Stop thinking. I don't care if I encourage questioning in general. On this matter, question not" XD

Which I found hilarious in comparison with his personality which is ALL the time in his mode "we need to doubt about everything", because well, that's a scholar. Scholars tend to be better at questioning than knowing things most of the time. This shows once more that he is desperate to stay with the MC, so far. I want to believe that there are not more hidden secrets, or ill-intended motives coming from him.

His mental state by the time he meets the MC is quite a mess. If you think that since too young he was abandoned by Mystra with that orb of Netherese devastation stuck in his chest... we can assume that there is a high chance for him to have been alone ever since. The quest in saving himself from that bomb probably prevented him to use time and energy in relationships (like I say in (15)), and by (12) we know he feels deadly alone. Especially if we take his description of how the bomb makes him feel, which is an increasing terror the longer he stays without consuming artefacts.

If you fail in that conversation of the Loss scene, when you insist about what he lost, he will push the MC away and will say something like "I'm strong enough to keep on". But we know that by the end of that night (or after the party in case MC did not romance him), he will say it anyway. He will talk about Mystra abandonment. He can't hold it anymore. He needs to share the burden and find someone to trust. Which will be the MC, as a friend or a lover.

I still think about the mind-shocking impact that the Weave scene caused him. It's not only what he states, his mindset has been focused on solving his bomb condition for too long. Relationships have been out of question for a while (15). And then, he has this Weave moment with the MC showing him their romantic interest; it not only took him by surprise, it caught him quite vulnerable too (too much feeling of loneliness and fear and despair plus the tadpoles looming danger), so the event had a stronger effect than he lets show in that moment. We know he thinks about that event the following days in between the Weave scene and the party, and apparently, that makes a click in him.

As I said, he is desperate for the MC who shared that magic moment of the Weave. Magic is his life, as he said, and sharing it with someone who has supported him and giving him their trust, it moves the ground he is walking on.

He is a char that, when a chance appears, he doesn't want to let is waste. And that romantic scene in the weave was a completely unexpected chance happening in front of him. Serendipity, as he said. (I don't know if by choosing the last option, the one in which you imagine nothing, Gale will want something anyway. I have to explore that.) (** I already explored this [here] **)

In sum, the concept here is that, as a scholar, he is into doubts and questioning all what you want. He will encourage such attitude in the MC. Except when it comes to question his emotions for the MC and their night together. Because questioning them, may cause abandon him. We also need to remember he was abandoned. Abandonment issues must to be added to his psychological profile. It was probably this issue the one that made him wait to the last moment before saying the truth. Because he is all about consent and let people know the truth, but he freaked out at the thought that maybe that truth could mean a second abandonment. That fear is there even if the MC did not romance him. He reached to a point in his life where loneliness, the bomb, and the tadpole became too heavy to deal with alone anymore. He needs the MC. And needs to be sure that they won't abandon him. That's why Gale ends up doing that rotten move of saying the truth only after sleeping with the romanced MC and after all that speech of the book of Anm: through intimacy he wanted to have a deeper link with the MC in order to prevent the abandonment. This is why he says “after all what we passed through, after the night we spent together”. He wants the MC baaaadly. And he wants not to be abandoned again. You see him bending and breaking his usual philosophy just to avoid abandonment. That's... a bit dangerous.

Once more it gives me the feeling that Gale is a nice mature character, who knows where he walks as long as we are not in the emotional ground. Emotional-wise... seems that Gale has pretty bad experiences, filled with over-idealised situations (Mystra) or over-darkened by misery (his bomb condition and now the tadpole) and in the back of all that there is a constant abandonment issue that may make some situations quite... complicated.

Asking for middle reactions to Gale on these matters seems to be a bit too much for his char. XD This is why I like to joke that he is basically proposing the MC right there... I mean, the book of Anm speech? If you choose “hey Gale, we are not newlywed (stressing that fact), but newly acquainted”, he gives a shit to the definitions of the words (the scholar, uh), he says “let's write the prequel”. One can interpret it like... he is assuming he and the MC are walking that path through and through. He is riiight heading into marriage. Lol. I personally would not like this kind of chars, but I make my exception here because, at least, Gale has a solid reason to be this way: he may die at any moment.

This kind of soft emotional instability char may be a dangerous compound in Larian's hands. You see, Larian in DOS2 offered romances that clearly were not going to last after the ending of the game; and you had hints of that pretty early in the game: one companion was married looking for their spouse, and another was betrothed, and had a fling with the MC meanwhile, if you want to. Another companion you can romance, simply disappears later by the end of the game. So... Larian... is not Bioware. Having a man like Gale that can break or bend his usual philosophy and his morals to a certain degree when it comes to matters of the heart.... well... it's dangerous, to say the least.

I fear Mystra appearing, and telling him that she abandoned him not because she wanted to, but because the netherese orb put her in danger (a logical reason that Gale could accept without problems no matter how much he suffered because of it, check (4),(14) and (20) ). And if Gale gets rid of that orb, and Mystra asks him to be his Chosen One “with benefits” once more (lol)... I'm not so sure if he will not abandon the MC. Unless the MC accepts a polyamory relationship (with a goddess? XD), because I totally see Gale has no issues with Mystra or MC having lovers besides him.

Magic is his life, and he longs a lot the powers granted by the title of the Chosen One. And Mystra's affections are where the true magical power lays (Gale's own words). So.... yes. Dangerous.

Ah, damn... I derailed again. Sorry.