#usually its clannibal

[hestermofet]

Me at 14 and me at 22 and me at 32 are having a bonding moment

Me at 14 and me at 22 are having a bonding moment

[alienscumbag]

The funniest part of the lesbian community on bluesky is that the femme4femme and butch4butch tag has so many posts in it but the butch4femme tag has 4 posts and two of them are this

[reachexceedinggrasp]

What have you been enjoying recently? I really enjoy when you dissect or talk about things that could be better about a lot of media, but thought you might like an ask about something else! I found a new ride-or-die ship to write about recently and I've been having fun doing that, it involves a villainess and a male healer. Do you always strictly like male characters in an antagonistic role and heroines? Hope you have a good day!

:) thanks, anon! Glad to hear you're having fun with a new otp!

I'm working on a self-indulgent one shot about my Clannibal-esque ship from Tell Me What You Saw that I posted a rec about, so I'm still on that show. I kinda love it more the more I watch it because, while it's definitely got some big flaws, it never betrays its themes or its lead characters and has a very satisfying, optimistic ending. It believes its characters can heal. I'll take a sensical, positive emotional arc and my favourite ship dynamic over a tight, realistic mystery story any day. Slightly silly plot twists aren't a dealbreaker for me when the things I care about are done well. Also I'm still trying to get the last couple chapters of my Lokane fix-it fic that I've been writing for aeons done, the guilt is unbearable.

Do you always strictly like male characters in an antagonistic role and heroines?

No... and I actually don't think I would even say I like it more often than not? I guess it heavily depends on how you define 'antagonistic'. I don't often go for what I would consider genuine enemies-to-lovers, liking a ship that fits the strict definition of the term is fairly rare for me. I don't like violence as sexual tension and I don't like romance to have any element of personal hatred. If they hate each other after getting to know each other and/or try to kill each other after they have some kind of connection, I'm not into it. I really, really dislike aggressive rivalry pairings or 'thin line between love and hate' type pairings. I don't like anything that easily fits the 'sexy bad boy' or DFP archetypes at all. No frenemies, no shounen rivals, no 'stupid sexy villain'.

The dynamic that I like is that there is a deep divide which needs to be crossed in order for the characters to connect, but that the divide is caused by not knowing or understanding one another. It's about misjudgement and the need for compassion, to see others as fully human with human motives despite surface level incomprehensibility. If you'd call a purely ideological divide e-t-l, then more of my ships would qualify, but they're not usually characters who are actively at odds. More like characters who share a common goal but have prejudices or moral disagreement or bad behaviour between them to overcome. Beauty has to see past the Beast's monstrousness to his humanity, but once she does she will never see him as a monster again and cannot hate him. She now knows where the monstrous outside comes from and what it conceals. There is fear and tension in the beginning, he can seem like a potential threat, but he isn't actually playing the role of a villain. He's not someone to be defeated, but someone to be understood.

I like stories where people learn that things aren't what they seem and where the writer really has to do the work to get the characters to fall in love. They have to talk and discover the truth about each other in order to find common ground and sympathy. This is why I'm so big into arranged marriage/soulbond/magical trap type plots, where people who would never have voluntarily spent enough time together to ever recognise each other are forced into cooperating and end up realising they're incredibly compatible and/or complementary. I live for that 'you're not who I thought you were' kind of epiphany, for finding beauty where none was suspected to exist. Surface contrast versus deep simpatico. Learning to have empathy and to appreciate hidden strengths, to not assume you know someone's whole story.

I don't consider myself a villain fan. I do enjoy a flat-out villain, they can be very fun characters, but they're not characters I'll spend a tonne of time engaging with. Unless it's ott and kinda camp, evil without conflict or pathos is boring. My only dyed in the wool, no caveats, villain ships are Jareth/Sarah and BTAS Joker/Harley (both very tame). Erik/Christine is villain/heroine in the original novel, but to me primary canon is Susan Kay, in which Erik is the protagonist. The vast majority of my Problematic Favs are characters who are anti-heroes, tragic heroes, or deuteragonists; they cause conflict and may do very bad things but they are not villains in the technical sense.

There's a lot of characters who are borderline or arguable, but that I would still not classify as villains, personally. Like sure, OUaT Rumpelstiltskin is 'a' villain, but he primarily functions as an anti-hero and plays a lot of ambiguous roles in the narrative so it's kinda reductive to call him that. Dr Lecter isn't a villain at all despite pop culture's insistence on calling him one. Bang-won moves from being a mere catalyst to being a deuteragonist to being a tragic hero, but the show was a mess and I don't think that was planned; I think he was such a strong, dynamic presence that he completely outgrew his original role in the story. It's easy to argue about how to define him since the structure he exists within is so sloppy and the lead characters are so weak. Maybe he was intended to become a villain, but I don't think he did. He's comparable in almost every way to Shakespeare's Prince Hal/Henry V and no one would suggest Hal is a villain. These are all sympathetic characters with complex motives who are not primarily figures of opposition for a protagonist to defeat or ideologically overcome. When a character's actual purpose is to oppose the heroes (to which any arc of their own is secondary), I don't usually get into that character.

So like... it is often the case that I like dynamics where the man is in a somewhat antagonistic role and where he is pushing the heroine to growth by challenging her or presenting a spiritual obstacle for her, but he's not The Thing to Be Defeated. He doesn't have malicious intent towards her, or at least doesn't have it for long, and isn't fundamentally opposed to her goals or beliefs. Even in the case of Jareth, who is legitimately the villain to Sarah's hero, he isn't actually hostile to her, just to her mission. It's a game and a seduction to him, he can be callous in pursuit of winning because he's childish and amoral, but he does love her. He does want her to be happy. The power dynamic and moral conflict between them is multifaceted, she's not innocent (she herself created this situation) and he's not just a bully who wants to possess her; their relationship is more complicated than that. Jareth is not evil and the temptation surrendering to his will represents in the labyrinth was about choosing immaturity and rejection of responsibility more than anything else, there's still a place for him in her life after she overcomes her childish selfishness. He doesn't need to be banished, just set within boundaries.

If you compare it to the movie Legend, where Darkness takes a shine to Lily, I don't ship that at all. He revels in darkness, enjoys it, and wants to corrupt her so he can have her for himself. That's real covetous villain with a crush, dark seduction of the ingenue stuff and I do not want her to fall for it. I want her to end up with Jack. I'm into the fairy tale prince and wholesome healing true love, not acrimonious or 'dark' shipping, I just like a super powerful prince who is lonely and tortured and in need of emotional rescue. Angst with a happy ending, basically. I like these characters so much because to me it's obvious they are profoundly sensitive people with highly developed consciousness of justice, but they're suffering under broken worldviews or from blinding fears which lead them to make bad choices. A villain who isn't suffering, who fully understands what they're doing is selfish and feels no guilt or conflict, just isn't appealing to me. Someone who enjoys being bad is not someone I find emotionally compelling. A boy has gotta be soft at heart no matter how much cynicism he's cloaked himself in.

Such as, imo Loki in Thor1 is a tragic hero rather than a villain. The film has three protagonists with equal, intertwining arcs (Thor, Loki, and Jane) and no real villain apart from human frailty. In Avengers he is a villain and that transition has a lot to do with why he's way less interesting to me in that film. A personality transplant wasn't necessary to have him play that role, but that's how Joss did it and the result is a character I would not have been very into and would not want to ship with Jane if this were his first appearance.

If you mean 'what if the sexes are reversed?', I have certainly liked this same dynamic genderswapped before, just less often. Not, I think, solely because it's rarer to find it the other way around, but also because the more straightforwardly heroic character is usually our main pov character and I much prefer a female pov in my reading. When I have male-hero/female-problematic-fav ships, it's usually a tv show or film where the influence of pov is less all-encompassing and if I read fic it's from the female character's pov. And, as I've talked about before, for emotional reasons I really prefer that the monstered character in the B&tB dynamic is always a man.

[mothman-clarice]

I'm back again :) As promised I'm gonna expand on my last hc post about the miss peregrine's crossover au, this time I'm gonna ramble about a clannibal interaction I thought of at work today.

So in this au hannibal has the ability to turn into a cat. As for why I made his peculiarity cat related, cats are one of the deadliest species on earth having wiped out hundreds of species across the world.

They're considered the world's most invasive species because of how many small animals they kill (yet another reason why cat owners should keep their cats inside at all times...).

They're prolific, lethally efficient, and engineered to be the perfect hunters. Cats will hunt for sport or simply out of spite and even sadistically play with their prey sometimes. They are loners who prefer solitude and lurk in the night.

All of these qualities I believe suit hannibal perfectly, hence he is a cat shapeshifter.

Now of course we all know hannibal and clarice are madly in love and nearly inseparable so they like going out together a lot, whether this be on a date or to the store.

Hannibal knows it will be near impossible for someone to recognize him in public if he uses his cat form so he uses it often

He also knows clarice loves when hes in cat form so he gets a little joy out of that too

In order to get away with bringing him in places like stores clarice tells people hes a therapy animal in training. She even has a fake name for him since "hannibal" would be an odd name for a cat lol. The name is Pinot Noir (Pinot for short) because I had to lol (also the cat form he takes is a solid black Maine coon. Noir means black in french so it fits him even better)

She has him wear a service animal vest in public just to be safe.

He likes walking around with clarice so she always has him next to her feet. She has to put a leach on him though to keep up appearances which he pretends he hates but secretly kinda likes

Given hannibal's cat form looks GORGEOUS he often gets a lot of attention from people in public, asking what his name is, how old he is, the usual questions strangers ask pet owners

Heres an example interaction I imagine would happen

Clarice and Hannibal are out at a sports supply store looking at hunting gear.

Shes standing in front of a rack of bows with hannibal sitting next to her feet looking up at the display. Hes mentally picking one out for himself while clarice does the same.

Eventually he decides on a bow that looks good and makes a small meow to get clarice's attention.

C: oh have you found one you like?

He nods, standing up and gently pawing the one he likes.

C: oooo yeah I thought you might like that one.

She goes to put it in their cart when she hears a stranger gasp.

(S is for stranger here) S: (in spanish cus this is in argentina) oh my god look at that beauty!! Pardon me but I just couldn't help but marvel at this stunning animal you have here!! What is its name?

The stranger excitedly approaches hannibal before happily looking at clarice for an answer

C: (sort of taken a back she answers in spanish, which shes still learning) oh haha, thank you! His name is Pinot Noir but I mostly call him Pinot. Hes a therapy animal in training so I keep him with me a lot. I dont mind though, hes very polite and affectionate.

S: oh I'm sure he is polite! Look at him, that's the face of a noble gentleman right there!

Hannibal is of course a little surprised but he cant help but feel a little flattered and proud. His eyes close as though he was smiling with humble pride, his tail stands up with a hook shape towards the tip, slowly swaying.

S: oh hohoho!! Look at him! Hes looks so proud! Its like he knows I'm complimenting him! What a smart little boy you are!

She starts to scritch his chin to which initially he flinches but quickly succumbs to the glorious feeling of chin scritches

S: I must ask, how old is he?

C: about 5 years old, I raised him from birth so were practically joined at the hip.

The woman finally pulls away leaving hannibal feeling sad from the loss of chin scritches.

S: You werent kidding about him being very affectionate! How do you train him? Does he know any tricks?

C: oh well he can understand a lot of spanish and English words. It's not required for therapy animals but I like to train him a lot since its enriching for him and good for us to bond.

They continue chatting about cats for a while but eventually hannibal starts getting bored. He communicates this to clarice by gently pawing at her foot and meowing.

C: oh looks like hes getting tired, I've gotta go but it was nice talking to you.

S: of course! And it was more than a pleasure meeting you, Pinot!

Ok that's all I have the energy to write now but I'll love to further explore the shenanigans cat hannibal will get up to!

[reachexceedinggrasp]

Okay, so for my clannibal people, I have two recs where something very like The Dynamic has recently appeared in media. The first one has far more caveats than the second, but the first one is also the one where the ship is canon and has kissing.

The Method a Russian series from 2015 (it’s on Netflix). It’s about a young ingenue who decides to become a cop because of lingering trauma around an unsolved violent parental death (check), she’s accepted as the protege of an eccentric genius (check) through somewhat shady circumstances with some kind of ulterior motive (check). He, the eccentric genius, is not a serial killer- he’s a detective, but he is an absolute human disaster whose erratic behaviour and extremely questionable morals are tolerated by the police because they can use him as a weapon. He has totally killed people.

‘Byronic Hero’ is a vast understatement.

This show is grim, graphic, and very dark; it takes an extremely dim view of humanity in general and it doesn’t provide the hope or catharsis that Clannibal does- the protagonist does not get to have it all, so be forewarned on that. The implicit worldview and assumed ethical framework of the series is honestly appalling and the main characters are all fairly reprehensible by the end, so if you’re not prepared to deal with a whole lotta ugliness I would say don’t watch it.

The selling point to me is that the characters are interesting and the ship is very compelling. Again, it’s canon, so you will get satisfaction, but the actual romance is somewhat subtextual most of the time. Their connection is the lynchpin of the series, but it’s more about the protagonist’s ‘education’ into his world and an exploration of what that world is than it is focussed on them falling in love. He has no illusions or intentions about having a future (with her or otherwise), he’s trying to pass on his ‘method’ to a worthy successor, so his attitude is heavily informed by that. She is being broken of what idealism she ever had (told you it was grim).

Anyway, their relationship is very fucked up and the series has a legit horrifying (also aggressively stupid) conception of what mental illness is like, but it was very engaging and it was totally unapologetic about the romanticism of the dark love story, so there is a lot there for you if you want to see something like a Clannibal dynamic again. Just don’t expect the positive turn or healing. The ending is not happy or hopeful in any sense. You could make a good argument it’s a full-on tragedy, though I don’t think that’s quite the intent. And the tragedy is Titus Andronicus. If that gives you an indication of how grim we’re talking.

The plot does completely fall apart by the end (it’s like if OUaT were an r-rated crime show, it becomes that much of a mess), but the acting is good and it remains very compelling because of the characters.

Tell Me What You Saw a kdrama from this year. THIS is what I’m talking about. A young ingenue decides to become a cop because of lingering trauma around an unsolved violent parental death (check), she’s accepted as the protege of an eccentric genius (check), through somewhat shady circumstances with some kind of ulterior motive (check). She has to go visit him alone in a giant, creepy old building where he is confined (ooo, new check). He, the eccentric genius, is on the side of the angels and is again not a serial killer lol. He is a legendary criminal profiler and ex-detective who spends most of the series as a somewhat morally ambiguous anti-hero. He’s brilliant, he’s troubled, he broods and plays mind games from on high, and he’s always 17 steps ahead of you. I love him. Also, crucially, he is hot:

The first six episodes have great build-up to a not-totally-unpredictable but still fairly epic twist and then, sadly, the following episode is a bit of an anti-climax from what felt like it should be the jumping off point where the series kicked into high gear but turned out to be a bunch of wandering around aimlessly in very loosely connected episodic plots. There’s narrative justification for this, but I did feel like someone slammed on the breaks and switched gears. It takes a while to regain momentum and is never quite as focussed or well-balanced again.

The pros of the series are its very strong characters played by mostly very strong actors, quality atmosphere, great action, good suspense, and loads and loads of interesting relationships brimming with potential. The one that interests me most being, of course, the one between the protagonist and the profiler. It’s pretty much exactly the clannibal dynamic- he picks her apart and challenges her for his own reasons and then comes to enormously respect her; she is at first intimidated and angry but gives as good as she gets until she reaches a point of growth where she can challenge him in return. And, in the end, he has helped her self-actualise and become who she wanted to be and she helps him heal from his past to the point she can radically alter his outlook on life.

Their relationship is ultimately very positive for both and remains central to the series throughout. There are complicated feelings at play that are given some time in the spotlight, but it is sadly underdeveloped from what it should have been imo. Especially on his side. And there is no romance or explicit attraction, though I think the show supports her at least having a crush on him. If it had ‘gone there’ it would not have shocked anyone, let’s put it that way. They could have gone there. It is one of those flawed canons with good characters super ripe for fic. (Please watch this show and write fic so I can read it, is what I’m saying.)

The cons are that the story ends up being ridiculous on multiple levels and there are some intensely irritating moments of characters being profoundly idiotic and unreasonable just to keep the plot going. Incoherent motivation, mainly for the heroes, is a BIG problem. Apparently rampant police incompetence (including from all the main characters) is the second biggest problem. There is a fantastic female character who is the team leader for our main cops and she gets hit with both of these possibly the worst of anyone. The big reveal about her also makes no fucking sense. There was a maybe cliché but perfectly serviceable route they could have gone instead without changing anything, it seemed like they were setting it up, but they just go with... nothing. And in retrospect this undermines her entire character for the whole series. Which hurts because she was genuinely awesome.

So yeah. There are logic problems and all three ongoing major questions in the overarching story basically have terrible ‘solutions’, but it is extremely well-made in every other respect and the characters remained compelling enough that I couldn’t stop watching. The single-episode mysteries are usually very good with good pacing and satisfying resolutions. It’s consistently entertaining despite the frustration and it manages to pull out a fucking GREAT A+++++ ending right when you’re about to get super pissed off about more deterministic grim teenage nihilism ruining everything. The protagonist got to learn from all her experiences without losing her optimism, rise above adversity and be rewarded for her faith, and it was honestly so nice to get that. So unexpectedly hopeful and uplifting. I love a story that gets dark but never despairs.

If they make a second series with the same cast, I will be there with bells on.