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lerokpaw · 6 months ago

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🐉Dragon grass 🐉

You lit incense, but you didn't even think what it would lead to

!!!nsfw !!! !!! 18+ !!!

! All characters 18+!

Female reader

Sorry english don't my first language. But I hope you enjoy it 🐉

Status : Couple Y/N - Perfect (The head of a dilapidated dormitory)

A small heat source in the form of a green firefly lit the way for one of the most mysterious people in Twisted Wonderland or for you Tsunagotaro/Mal Mal/Malleus. His task at the moment was to see your face, or rather a smile on it. But first of all, to invite you on a little evening date. You and the future king of the Valley of Thorns have been dating for about six months and one of his favorite pleasures was to see you in a good mood, and if his favorite combo in the form of you, gargoyles, your love and beautiful art, which he saw in all of the above, were collected in one place and at one time, then Malleus was literally melting with love. And in the sky you could see how the stars were shining brighter. Wandering in his thoughts, the Dragon discovered that he nuzzled your door, while accidentally touching the bell with his horn, and he notified the resident of the Dilapidated dormitory of his majesty's presence. Hearing rapid footsteps on the stairs, the so-called Tsunagotaro moved away from the door and waited for your face to appear in its crack.

-Hello, Mal Mal! -"Greetings, my dear," horned smiled with his trademark gentle smile.

-Oh, listen - She slightly covered the already small gap as if to show that he does not have to see what is behind it. But now Malleus' interest has only grown.

-Yes, honey?

-I understand that you probably came for me on a date, but I'm a little unprepared… And could we sit here in the dorm today?

-I dare not refuse my dear couple this request, - he bowed familiarly You laughed a little

-Then come on in, I'm sorry, I'm a little at home.. I'm going to run to the kitchen for ice cream and return it, go to my room for now.

-Ice cream? Won't you need any help? - he already imagined how his favorite dish would be on his tongue.

-It's not worth it! Come into the room! - I was already shouting from the kitchen. The old wooden floorboards and stairs creaked under your boyfriend's feet. He was slowly moving deeper into the dorm when he felt a pleasant and sweet smell in his nose. Approaching your room, he realized that this fragrance was coming from there. When he entered, he saw Grim, who also exchanged a glance, but no longer friendly

-"Henchman, you brought that Tsunagotaro again without my knowledge! Malleus just narrowed his eyes and smiled at the furry creature.

-Don't go make-up, please, if something doesn't suit you, then go downstairs - she shouted through the whole dorm

-I'll actually go to the Adeuce duo then! At that moment, the monster ran out the door and pointedly slammed it -Sorry, Small, for this performance - she said calmly as she approached the room

-It's okay, I understand, my dear

-Your ice cream

-Thank you very much

Sit on the bed Have you started noticing how your boyfriend's pale face is starting to turn purple?

-Honey, are you hot?

-what? Oh, I'm sorry, I don't quite understand what's going on.. Am I just not used to it?

-Hmm, do you have an allergy to herbs?

-As far as I know, no, why? - now he was interested in what was happening to his body.

-Well, I just lit incense.. And I thought maybe they made you feel bad.

he approached you slowly and carefully, trying not to scare you off

- Can I smell you? -N-an unexpected offer- you blushed slightly - but I don't mind - you pushed the hair that was lying on your neck to the side, as if trying to tie it into a bunch

-Thank you - Mal said almost in a whisper and approached your neck inhaling the armat and now his previous sensations have doubled. As if waking up, he jumped back.

-I just don't know… It seems to me… - after these words, he attacked you with a sensual kiss. You've kissed before, but this… It was something that foreshadowed something more. After you stopped getting enough air.

-As if I want all of you - finally the thought was complete.

-What!? I'm sorry!? He abruptly leaned back from you

-Oh, I'm sorry.. I just.. I don't know what came over me Malleus rubbed the back of his head confused

-No! It's not that I'm against ours.. Continuations.. You started gesturing actively

-It's just me.. I didn't expect you to. Similar actions

-Hmm really? Malleus said, approaching you with a slightly mischievous smile and half-open eyes.

-Y-Yes! I am.. Sorry. I'm a little nervous.

-Maybe then you're not ready? I'll understand.. I won't insist - he gently took your hand and kissed it gently

-I didn't say that! It's just… this.. Nervous

-Are you afraid of me? -No! I love you very much! And as you can see, when you're so close to me, I don't push you away. Because I'm not afraid..

-Then I'll try to be gentle... Malleus smiled at you tenderly and ran his hand over your cheek You're blushing

- You always know how to embarrass me. Tsunagotaro gently ran his hand down your neck and ran his fingers a little over the top of your pajamas. He pressed his nose against your shoulder and inhaled the fragrance, his pupils sharply narrowed

-Darling? - He said in a slightly trembling voice

-What is it?

-Are you sure you agree to what happens next? I won't be able to restrain myself..

-Yes.. Just be gentle to start with You felt his smile appearing on your skin. It was important for him to hear the permission from your mouth. Now small spikes and a tail began to show on his back. Although it wasn't visible through his clothes yet

-Good...- he slowly began to take off your shirt. After he took it off, he said

-Darling.. I didn't think your kind had such cute gadgets..

He pointed to his chest and gently kneaded it with his hands

-Tell me if it hurts you. even in his lust-intoxicated state, he tried to take care of you. -M?!

She turned her head away, blushing

-Except yours.. Is there no view of them?

-There is, but I never paid attention to it…

He leaned against the chest area with a languid look and began to kiss her slowly and sensually.

-Mm.. The taste is as incredible as the smell ~

After his words, you whimpered softly while he kissed you and smiled, and his hands slowly made their way to the area below your stomach. Now Malleus was slowly sliding towards your stomach and was already kissing you there.

-Mm~ My rose.. Will you let me go on?

-Yes.. Oh sure The horned fairy grinned and his hands pulled the elastic of your night pants a little, gently pulling them off you. After that, your underwear became his barrier to your wonderful taste, he puffed up a little from this fact. But he continued to slowly spend his hands removing this obstacle, while feeling like you were already wet. Pushing your legs apart a little, the scent of your arousal hit him right in the nose and the smell of incense gave him even more strength to continue.

-It really looks like rose petals.. - he said, spreading your vulva

-Mm!? Where.. How? Where did you find this comparison? - She said, looking at him with one raised eyebrow

-Well.. He massaged it a little with his fingers and looked down intently.

-It's a little awkward..

-What could be more embarrassing than my position in front of you?

-Hehe, you're a darling.. Once.. When I was younger, I became interested in the topic.. Mating. And I asked Lilia what it was like.. Well, he told me that "everything is so beautiful for women that I look like rose petals" Frankly, I did not believe him, and I did not quite understand what he was talking about. But now that I see it all in person.. His words make sense

-Well, that's an interesting comparison..

-Do you think so?~ - he said in a seductive tone when his face was between your legs, where he slowly ran his tongue between the folds -Mh!? - you jumped a little out of surprise, thereby hitting him a little in the nose with your hips

-Honey, calm down.. Otherwise, I'll go crazy before I give us pleasure~ I'm already holding on with all my strength so as not to eat you.. That smell.. Intoxicating~ - Malleus tightened his grip on your legs, scratching them a little with his claws, starting to run his tongue up and down.

-Mmm~

-That's what I wanted to hear, my rose ~ -

He mimicked the movements of his tongue in your petals. Quickly finding the middle, he rushed there. Each time, his movements became more violent, as he quickly began to lose his composure. Listening to your moans, he couldn't hold back his own mooing, thereby sending you impulses that didn't help you not melt in his grip.

-Ah! - From his accidental sharp thrust, you moaned and mechanically moved your hands to his horns. With these actions, you finally pulled the trigger from the dragon, who was now furiously beating his tongue at you and your petals

Driving in like that for a couple more minutes, you felt a wave of pleasure begin to catch up with you. Malleus felt your back begin to arch and your legs to shake.

-Mm~ Have you already?

-Don't talk.. Ah! Go on..

-Hehe - you felt his smile tremble in you

-Mmm~Ah! - when he hit you with his tongue the last time, you sprayed him in the face, squeezing between his legs. The dragon rose slowly, carefully releasing your legs. His eyes were sparkling with a green light, and his whole face was in your netar. He licked his face and approached your already breathless face.

-Malleus.. phew..

-Yes, my rose ~ before you say it, I want to say that you are magnificent both in taste and aroma, as befits a flower ~

-You.. The dragon is too greedy..

-Naturally ~ - he gently tucked your hair behind your ear.

-Phew..

-Are you ready to continue? ~ - Malleus is clearly pissed off after your taste

-WHAT!? We just did..

-Hehe, this is just the beginning, I want to feel your nectar not only on my lips ~

-You.. You're vulgar! - you got up and hit him with a pillow

Ahaha, darling, but you like it ~ He stopped you by grabbing your hand - And since you're already so active, I can continue~

The incense finally burned out.. But the smell of "Dragon Grass" has long filled the whole room..

#twst #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland malleus draconia #twisted wonderland x reader #malleus draconia x reader #Malleus draconia #twisted wonderland smut #twst smut #malleus draconia smut #malleus #twst malleus x reader #twst x reader #twst malleus

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d4yl1ghts · 9 months ago

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be careful

mark sloan x pregnant, fem!reader

summary: you end up at seattle grace when you accidentally burn your hand whilst cutting and so your boyfriend patches you up

warnings: injury, pregnancy

A/N- i only realised halfway through that i was foreshadowing the plane crash i swear 😭

You hummed along to the song that was playing on the radio as you cooked yourself some spaghetti bolognese. Your baby was craving some spaghetti right now. You were currently thirty weeks pregnant and so were off work for now. Usually you would be in Seattle Grace, working in trauma right now. Your long-term boyfriend, Mark Sloan, also works there and that was how you met him. He used to be known as a man-white but that was ages ago. Ever since he met you he has changed his ways.

A beep from your phone distracted you from cooking the pasta as you read the news headline: ‘Plane crash in Seattle, 13 injured and 30 dead.’ That didn’t sound good. Mark would be late from work. As you focused on reading the article, you hadn’t noticed your arm getting closer to the boiling metal pan. “Shit!”, you yelled in shock. Once you had realised your hand was burning, you quickly put your hand under some cool water. You sighed as you looked at it. It appeared to be a second degree burn so you knew you’d probably have to get it checked out.

You called one of your friends who you knew would be free right now to take you to the hospital as you couldn’t really drive right now. As she dropped you off, you thanked her and hurried in before the victims of the crash arrived. You went up to the reception and asked if they knew where Mark Sloan was. They gave you directions and you offered them your gratitude as you followed their instructions. After three minutes you saw Mark at a water fountain. “Mark!”, you muttered loudly. He turned around after hearing your voice. “What are you doing here, baby?”, he asked concerned.

You showed him your hand. “Oh shit. Baby, why didn’t you call me?”, he questioned. “I didn’t want to interrupt as I thought you’d be busy getting ready for the crash victims.”, you explained. His eyes softened. “You know that I’d help you over them any day.”, he reasoned. “Anyway, let me fix your hand for you before it gets busy.”, he gently guided you into a bay.

As he started working on your hand, he asked: “How’s the baby, is she energetic today?”

“No, but she was very hungry for spaghetti which is how I ended up with this burn in the first place.”, you answered quietly. “You got this burn from cooking? I mean, I knew you were clumsy but…”, he chuckled as you rolled your eyes at his teasing. “Well, I was shocked when I read about the plane crash, okay?”, you said defensively. “Fair enough. It’s a bad crash, I can’t believe there are more deaths than survivors. I mean, the injured ones could still die. For all we know they could be seriously injured or just a few cuts and bruises.”

“Yeah… well, I hope it’s only a few cuts.”, you stated. You watched as he gently cleaned your burn with sanitised equipment. His hands were so good at everything. It was hot. He seemed to have caught you staring. “What are you looking at?”, he asked you playfully. He knew what you were looking at. You stared up at him and he gazed down at you. He passionately kissed you before his pager went off. “Your hand is all done, I’ve cleaned it and bandaged it up but be careful with it. I have to sort out these crash victims. I’ll see you later at home, baby.”, he hastily replied as he placed a chaste peck on your forehead.

#mark sloan #mark sloan x reader #mcsteamy #greys anatomy #greys anatomy x reader #greys anatomy imagine #greys abc #fem!reader

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anthurak · 23 days ago

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So I was thinking more about the potential hints and foreshadowing we’ve gotten about Loona’s backstory, particularly her “this kid probably sets dogs on fire” bit from Murder Family that likely points to Loona having some backstory and/or trauma involving fire. And then I remembered that we’ve actually seen a bit of an association between Loona and fire.

For one, there is her I.M.P. lighter we first saw in Seeing Stars and again in Mastermind which is DEFINITELY meant to symbolize her relationship with Blitzo. For one, we can definitely assume this lighter was almost certainly a gift from Blitzo.

And when we first see it in Seeing Stars, the lighter is clearly meant to represent the messy, dysfunctional but still genuine and earnest love and care Blitzo has towards Loona, and that Loona in turn recognizes. At first Loona can’t get the lighter to work over and over, much like how Blitzo, in her words, “fucks up, all the time”. But the lighter does eventually work for Loona in the end, just like her relationship with Blitzo. As Loona puts it; “He’s trying. That’s more important that you think.”

Which also makes this lighter’s second, and seemingly final, appearance in Mastermind rather interesting. The lighter shows up when Loona is trying to burn the records, and is once again finicky and refusing to work. Only for Blitzo himself to take the lighter and throw it into the booze-soaked paperwork and send it all up in flames. Which, given the symbolism that Seeing Stars attached to this lighter, is rather… interesting.

In the short term, this could be a nod/hint to Blitzo’s attempted big heroic sacrifice moment later in the episode, ie; Blitzo throwing away his life/relationship with Loona in a desperate attempt to keep her/them safe. Though I also have to wonder if this might be hinting at something else further down the line next episode/season.

Obviously, Loona’s and Blitzo’s relationship does not seem in ANY way endangered by the end of this episode, and is even used as a contrast to emphasize how Stolas may very well have DESTROYED his relationship with his own daughter. But you never know what kind of developments we might see next episode, particularly given the likelihood of Sinsmas focusing on a conflict between Octavia and Stolas, and the possibility of Loona becoming heavily involved in it.

But going back to the original point of this post, let’s look at the other notable association Loona has been shown with fire. Which, interestingly enough, not only also happened back in Seeing Stars but was even associated with the I.M.P. lighter.

I am of course talking about Octavia lighting Loona’s cigarette after she can’t get the lighter to work.

Those who have been following me long enough might remember my very first Loona-Octavia post a couple years back where I discussed this very interesting bit of symbolism. If this janky, unreliable lighter Loona struggles to get to work represents her likewise loving and caring yet still messy and dysfunctional relationship with her father, then what does that say about Octavia lighting Loona’s cigarette when she can’t get it to work?

As I said back in that original post, I still think this is very likely hinting to Octavia representing a much more reliable and dependable friend in contrast to the messy, dysfunctional relationship Loona has with her father, which in turn would parallel Loona being the same to Octavia.

And you know, given that we saw Blitzo send that I.M.P. lighter up in flames this last episode, I wonder if next episode might have another moment of intimate cigarette-lighting between Loona and Octavia?

Finally, circling back to the start of this post, I think all this makes Loona’s comment in Murder Family and the potential foreshadowing it holds to her backstory all the more interesting.

Like her father, it seems probable that Loona has some kind of trauma or other general bad experiences with fire in her past. Yet we also see, particularly in the scene in Seeing Stars, Loona having a very positive relationship with fire as well. With fire being tied into symbols of both Loona’s messy yet sincere relationship with her father, AND the start of her new, likely very close friendship with Octavia.

It actually makes me think of what we saw of Fizzarolli’s relationship with fire in both Oops and Mammon’s Midseason Special.

The former showed us fire representing this great FEAR and trauma for Fizzarolli, reminding him of the explosion that maimed him all those years ago.

Yet the latter showed Fizzarolli not one bit uncomfortable with OZZIE’s fire. He plays with it as part of his performance, and later the fire is even shown PROTECTING Fizz as part of Ozzie’s big transformation. Which of course is made all the more poignant when we remember that Ozzie seems to have been the one most involved in Fizz’s recovery and healing. Essentially to Fizz, fire represents both a terrible event in his life, but also all of the good that came after it.

So I have to wonder if we’ll see something similar with Loona.

#helluva boss #helluva theory #helluva analysis #theory spitballing #Loona #helluva loona #helluva blitzo #blitzo buckzo #Octavia Goetia #helluva fizzarolli #helluva asmodeus #symbolism analysis #contrasting symbolism

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vigilskept · 18 days ago

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Saw your tags on the last few posts and hard agree! Between the ever present Fen'harel foreshadowing AND Sandal's prophecy AND Mythal's reckoning? It always seemed like the Veil coming down was that proper big bang finish that would rewrite all the rules in a satisfying and interesting way. One of my issues with Veilgaurd is I feel like it took the series' opportunity for a destinct ending away. Personally, I believe good stories end. I don't want 30 DA games in a MCU verse. And now, to have the series end they have to come up with a stopping point that makes more sense than the Veil. Or revisit the Veil. And what would be the point in that when they wasted all the foreshadowing?

yes, exactly!! i felt like i was going insane on my soapbox there, thank you!! it really feels like they ran up against the natural end point for the franchise and just decided to do a little shimmy around it. i just don't see what exactly that achieves except to set up a new, bigger bad which we have no real stake in.

was i curious about the executors prior to veilguard? yes! but i expected them to appear in this game since they clearly had an interest in solas' plans!! not for them to have 3 completely missable interactions followed by the worst idea of a post credit scene i've ever seen. whatever curiosity i had about what they were up to & how the kossith relate to what's across the sea is pretty much gone at this point.

a "shadowy cabal" who's secretly responsible for all of the evil enacted in this world by people in power is not a plot i care to see play out in bioware's hands. it's a stupid, elders of zion ass direction to take things and was not worth trashing over a decade of build up.

there is nowhere they could take that plot thread (already relying on the worst possible trope...) that would give dragon age a more satisfying conclusion than dropping the veil.

it would've resolved or set up a potential resolution for all of the major conflicts that have been established up to now!! (mages under the chantry, tevene class structure/slavery, oppression of elves, the blights, the waking titans, etc. etc. i could go on!)

and with the way veilguard ends... it looks to me like they wanted to somehow get the implied resolutions that would come out of dropping the veil without committing to it. that's why no matter what you do, dorian or mae will become archon and singlehandedly restructure tevinter society. the load bearing piece of "mageocracy can't function if everyone's a mage now" is gone, so we have to have a poorly executed sideplot to resolve this plot thread for us instead...

i'm sure people will feel differently, but i personally would've found it more satisfying if the veil fell and the franchise wrapped up there. for good or ill, it changes everything and we can all have the time of our lives speculating about the Implications thereafter.

if they really wanted to(/needed to promise EA they could) make more games in this setting — they could've gone backwards! there's lots of stories you could tell throughout thedas in the gap between the fifth blight and solas' ritual! there's lots of stories you could tell about the centuries between andraste's rebellion and the fifth blight! there's so much happening in the background here that they've hinted at through codices that if they really wanted more content in this setting, there is so much room to expand on those.

could they set up world shattering events like "tearing down the veil" again? no. but i think that was a very obvious one and done situation, and i don't think anyone came into this franchise expecting their dragon age games to have stakes that apocalyptic until trespasser! i think there absolutely would've absolutely been an audience for a game about the assassination of queen madrigal or the fog warriors' resistance on seheron if they hadn't fumbled this....

#my bad i didn't mean to write an essay here 😭#it kills me tho!!! it was SUCH a neat ending all wrapped up in a pretty bow and they tossed it aside for...#*looks at scribble on hand* thinly veiled antisemitism plotline #classic bioware if you think about it #but MAN. i was really hoping this wouldn't be the thing they chose to double down on yet again #bioware critical #veilguard critical #da4 spoilers #veilguard spoilers

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wishful-thinking64 · 5 months ago

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One Hell of an Unpopular Opinion #03

Characters like Barbie Wire, Chaz, Crimson, Octavia, and Stella only exist as plot devices to garner sympathy for other characters. _______ I knew fully well that Chaz and Crimson were going to merely be plot devices for Moxxie the more I watched Exes & Oohs. And sure enough, Chaz was killed at the end of that very episode and Crimson is yet another wacky cartoon villain that the narrative expects for you to take seriously. Both of these characters existed so that the audience could gain sympathy (or at least pity) for Moxxie being raised in a Mafia family and having been abused as a child along with being betrayed by his ex-boyfriend (who also happened to be Millie's ex-boyfriend for some reason.) Other than Moxxie's Mafia family upbringing making zero sense the more you think about it, Viv has basically done this exact backstory before in the form of Angel Dust (with the whole mobster backstory who was also abused by his father.) However, the Exes & Oohs episode and title actually stems from one of the HH mockup episodes that was originally about Charlie and Vaggie coming across Charlie's ex, Seviathan (yes, that's what Viv named him), and his sister, Helsa, while they were at a dinner party.

Now, do I think Chaz and Crimson could've had the potential to be good characters? In all honesty, no. Especially not Chaz. The guy is a harmful stereotype of pansexual people and how, "They'll sleep with anyone," which no, they won't. I'm not pansexual myself but that thought process is as gross as it is fucking stupid. The only person who I've seen even re-writing Chaz has been Loves Art23 (I mainly know her for YouTube videos being critical on Hazbin Hotel + Helluva Boss along with other shows like the disaster known as High Guardian Spice) and I think she's done a fairly good job so kudos to her for making him work. Personally, though I'm scrapping him as that gives me one less character to worry about when re-writing HB. Crimson would have to be heavily and I mean HEAVILY reworked/re-written in order for him to make any actual sense. That and I'm tired of every character having some variation of the same daddy issues in the Hellaverse. Which means he's also gonna get axed from me. Moving onto the ladies I mentioned, let's start off with Barbie Wire.

Having been foreshadowed since the pilot of I.M.P. (as seen when Tilla was still Barb's and Blitzo's older sister rather than their mother) Barbie Wire was an anticipated character by fans for years! And then her actual appearance finally happened in Unhappy Campers, an episode hated by practically everyone who saw it, and no one really cared about her showing up, other than the fact that the writers thought that having her seduce a BARELY legal adult would make for a good joke, when in reality, it only made everybody uncomfortable and several people dislike Barbie because of it. Sure, near the end of the episode she had that "emotional" scene with Blitzo that wants the viewers to feel bad for him and Barbie before she left but in the long run it didn't matter as fans barely even talk about it because of how uneventful it truly was. So, with that out of the way, would I keep Barbie Wire around for a rewrite of HB? To that I say, yes! There are several paths Barbie Wire's overall character could go in. If you're mainly sticking to canon, then what you have to work with is a former circus performer who lost her mother in a fire caused by her twin brother that left his own best friend to rot and be disabled for the rest of his life. It's very likely that this very fire, caused her to be out of a job and probably even homeless for a bit which could explain why she ended up becoming both a drug attic and a drug dealer. Homelessness is one of the few things that nobody wants to experience. It causes people to be filled with a sense of overwhelming loneliness and desperation as many of them either believe that there's nothing they can do or they do anything and everything that they can to get out of it even if that means resorting to crime. If you wanted to have her be loosely based on canon instead, you could make it to where she never learned about who started the fire and actually stuck with Blitzo well into adulthood. Have her become one of the members of I.M.P. and later down the line have her learn through someone like Fizz or maybe Cash (her and Blitzo's father) what actually went down that day. Have her be rightfully pissed off at Blitzo for screwing over multiple people along with being the one responsible for killing their mom. Anyway, let's proceed onto Stella and her daughter Octavia.

As much as the narrative wants me to hate Stella with a burning passion cause she hurts Stolas, I can't do it for multiple reasons but I'll list my top three. #01.) Stella's just as (if not even more so) stuck in this arranged loveless marriage as Stolas is. #02.) If the man I had no choice in marrying not only cheated on me with a man from one of the lowest classes in all of Hell but IN OUR OWN HOME & SHARED BEDROOM NO LESS? OH, FUCK NO!

#03.) This woman had to spend 9 months having to nourish and care for a baby inside her stomach that she had with a man that didn't even want to sleep with her. On top of that, she had to have become pregnant with Octavia when she was a young adult since current day Stolas and Stella are only in their mid 30s. I need you to let that information sink in.

In short, I can't hate Stella for loathing Viv's pathetic self insert bird twink with every fiber of her being.

Having said that, would I have Stella in my HB rewrite? Well, considering that I plan on keeping the war that happened in the bible that caused Lucifer and several angels to fall from grace, one of which being Stolas. Kind of. Allow me to elaborate, I would keep Stella as Octavia's mother but I wouldn't have her marry Stolas. I'd have her be a surrogate mother that way Stolas still gets an heir and Octavia could still exist. Speaking of Octavia...

We all know that she exists to make Stolas look like a better person as several stans of this show love to say how much of a good dad Stolas is when he isn't. He neglects Octavia frequently in favor of Blitzo and only pays attention to her when she's gone although EVEN THAT doesn't last long as shown in Seeing Stars where HE KNEW Octavia was missing on Earth but rather than ACTIVELY look for his daughter, what does he do? HE SITS THROUGH A STUPID LIVE COMEDY SHOW CAUSE BLITZO IS PERFORMING! HE COMPLETELY SIDELINES HIS OWN DAUGHTER IN FAVOR OF A LIVE COMEDY SHOW!

God, Octavia deserves so much better than to have a dad like him. I'm keeping Octavia for my HB rewrite so that this poor girl not only realizes how much of a bastard her dad is but eventually gets the found family she deserves. I don't plan for it to be through I.M.P. though. In closing, the characters of this show deserve to be better developed but especially the women in them.

_______

That was a long one to get through cause it's been on my mind for a while. Thank you all for reading through it and bye for now everybody!

#vivziepop criticism #vivziepop critique #helluva boss critical #helluva boss imps #helluva boss criticism #hellaverse #hellaverse critical #anti vivziepop #anti stolas

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thesandyhooktragedy · 3 months ago

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i find adam lanza’s notes and sketches for a screenplay called “Lovebound” really interesting for a number of reasons, but it doesn’t seem like anyone talks about it much

it’s not very hard to notice that a lot of the things mentioned in Lovebound appear in lanza’s own life. it also presents more of an insight into lanza’s fascination with human sexuality, as well as pedophilic relationships

Lovebound, from what i can tell, centers around a ten-year-old boy exploring his sexuality. early in lanza’s sketches of the screenplay, he implies that the main theme of the entire screenplay would be the ten-year-old learning that his “relationship” with a pedophile is no different than any other relationship

this part is fascinating to me. not only does it imply the theme stated previously, it also displays that the ten-year-old possibly has a fascination with guns, much like lanza did. it also references familicide.

before attacking Sandy Hook, lanza committed matricide by shooting his mother—a form of familicide. it makes you wonder how much of this screenplay—if ever fully written—would’ve been lanza projecting onto the ten-year-old main character. perhaps he had thoughts of shooting nancy long before his plan for Sandy Hook was ever conceived.

lanza wrote his thoughts on marriage in form of a response to another person on the internet, carnage_complex. lanza closes his response with this:

above, lanza implies that marriage is “restrictively binding”. and, as he says in his response to carnage_complex, he states that he sees marriage as “innately mutually abusive”. lanza’s stance on relationships seems to be that he believes non-committal, casual relationships are the only way that a relationship cannot be abusive. relationships must be “boundless” (get it?)

(i encourage you to read through the entire document, it displays a lot about how adam felt about relationships and human connection in general. he also mentions eric harris and dylan klebold towards the end)

during this sketch of a scene, after discussing familicide, the goths hand the ten-year-old a pistol and tell him to “do what he considers is best”. one possible motive that’s been widely agreed upon for lanza’s attack on Sandy Hook is that he thought he’d be “freeing” his child victims from the burden of life by killing them. perhaps this was heavier foreshadowing of what lanza would later do, as well as a reflection of his thoughts on murder as liberation

lanza’s notes on Lovebound begin to end with an excerpt from an article on Heinz Kohut, a psychoanalyst, and his tutor

this excerpt, i believe, reflects a lot of lanza’s beliefs about pedophilia. lanza seemed to possess the belief that pedophiles in relationships with children deserved as many rights as anybody else. the description of kohut’s relationship with his tutor sounds very romanticized and leads us to believe that it did kohut a great deal of good rather than traumatize him, as pedophilic relationships do to children. lanza argues in his 35-page-essay defending pedophilia that pedophilic relationships would be “beneficial to both parties”.

the last page of the notes on Lovebound end with this:

earlier in the notes, the ten-year-old is sexually assaulted by his father. maybe lanza was referring to more sexual assault being inflicted on the ten-year-old when he said “bad things?”

Lovebound is very interesting to me, and i wish people would talk about it more! it not only offers an insight into how deep lanza’s obsession with pedophilia and human sexuality was, but is also another example of his affinity for screenwriting!

how do you feel about Lovebound?

#sorry if it feels like i’m over explaining things #original post #tccblr #teeceecee #true cringe community #tc community #tcctwt #adamlanza #lord smiggles #smiggles #kaynbred #culturalphilistine #fuckcomments #sandy hook elementary #sandy hook #mass shooters #queerforkimveer

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squash1 · 1 year ago

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THREES THREES THREES:

Oh hello. I want to talk about the stylistic/textual role of Threes in The Raven Cycle.

Threes – as a general concept and as a number – are a major symbol and motif in the series. Maggie tells us that threes are important from the very first book: from Maura’s favorite saying being “good things come in threes” to Persephone telling Adam that “things are always growing to three or shrinking to three,” threes are discussed at length in the text of the narrative. Maggie also shows us that threes are important as a motif/symbol for important aspects of the story: three Raven Boys, three Fox Way women, three Lynch brothers, three main ley lines, three sleepers, etc. Threes are, textually, incredibly significant in The Raven Cycle, and we know this because we are shown AND told it throughout the entirety of the books.

We all know the significance that is given to threes in the story itself, but what I want to talk about is the usage of a thrice-repeated word or short phrase (going forward I’m referring to this as “Threes” or “a Three”) as one of Maggie’s writing signatures (across the series, there are 65 Threes). This creates a meta level to threes being an important aspect of The Raven Cycle universe. A classic example of a Three (one of my favorites, in fact) is from The Dream Thieves:

“As they walked, a sudden rush of wind hurled low across the grass, bringing with it the scent of moving water and rocks hidden in the shadows, and Blue thrilled again and again with the knowledge that magic was real, magic was real, magic was real.” (TDT, 12)

In a way, the Threes join the intradiegetic (what is happening within the narrative itself) with the extradiegetic (what the narration is communicating solely to the reader). The reader and characters are told explicitly that the number three is significant, important, notable, and powerful. In using Threes as a writing signature after giving the reader that information, the Threes are designed to signal to the reader that this line, this moment, is important.

So the question is: What Are The Threes Trying to Tell the Reader???

Amazing question.

In my recent TRC reread, I was already keeping track of Threes, because I was curious to see how many times they appeared. And then my sister, who was also rereading, said something interesting (after reading this Three from The Raven Boys):

“He was full of so many wants, too many to prioritize, and so they all felt desperate. To not have to work so many hours, to get into a good college, to look right in a tie, to not still be hungry after eating the thin sandwich he’d brought to work, to drive the shiny Audi that Gansey had stopped to look at with him once after school, to go home, to have hit his father himself, to own an apartment with granite countertops and a television bigger than Gansey’s desk, to belong somewhere, to go home, to go home, to go home.” (TRB, 370)

My sister said: “Adam’s like Dorothy.” And then she said: “Wait. Do you think the Threes are like a spell? Or… a wish?”

Which was……. Interesting.

What I have determined, after completing my reread and spending way too much time analyzing this, is that a Three is either a wish, a hope, a longing, a prayer – or, alternately, a warning, a curse, a negative promise.

In either sense, Threes are a foreshadowing of what is to come – whether it be good or bad. Threes exist to signal to the reader that they should be paying close attention to whatever is being said or observed.

Threes in….. Everything Else:

Before we get too far into TRC Threes, let’s talk about the precedent for three being an important number in art, math, storytelling, etc. I found some interesting information about how three is a satisfying number for the brain:

Grouping things in threes leverages the power of repetition to aid memory; denote emotional intensity or importance; and ease persuasion (research by Shu & Carlson (2014) found that three positive claims is the most effective for persuasion).

Three is the smallest number that the brain can still recognize as a pattern, and the brain loves pattern and repetition. This is true in visual art – having three main compositional figures to create a pleasing image – and also in storytelling and narrative. Using threes for repetition in storytelling is a very common occurrence.

Some classic examples of repetitive threes are Shakespeare’s “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” or Lincoln's “a government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In each of these examples, a repetition of three is used to create pleasing auditory rhythm. There is something inherently memorable about literary Threes.

Perhaps the most interesting information I found while digging into the precedent for threes is about the rule of threes in folktales. This information happens to come from Wikipedia (side note: Wikipedia is a modern tool of collective consciousness and we should utilize it more). This page describes how in its most basic form, the rule of threes in storytelling is just beginning, middle, and end. Because this is such a common convention, writers tend to “create triplets or structures in three parts.” It then talks more directly about the use of threes in folktales:

“Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folk Tale, concluded that any of the elements in a folktale could be negated twice so that it would repeat thrice.”

This is especially interesting to me. The idea that an element of a folktale “could be negated twice so that it would repeat thrice” shows up prominently in the plot of The Raven Cycle – a book that is heavily influenced by folktale motifs – but also in so many of the folktales/fairytales we all know. A classic example of this would be Goldilocks and the Three Bears – Goldilocks must try porridge that is too hot, too cold, and then, finally, just right. The journey of these three actions is satisfying to the brain because it is a complete pattern: the third and final result of “just right” porridge is only satisfying because of the two “not right” porridges that preceded it.

Getting back to Stiefvater Threes:

For anyone who’s seen The West Wing (and even those who haven’t), here’s a good way to explain what I think the Threes are doing. You know that thing they do during a The West Wing “walk and talk” where two characters will be throwing information and little quips back and forth at each other rapid-fire, and then suddenly, they will both stop walking, and the camera will stop moving, and they’ll say a line that contains really important information that you need to know to understand the storyline of that episode? That’s what Maggie’s Threes are doing for the reader. That’s what 6:21 is doing for the characters. It’s intentional: the writers/directors/actors/camera operators on The West Wing know that they’re throwing a lot of information at you, and know that they need to get you to pay attention to the most important parts somehow, so they do it by forcing the viewer to lean in and listen. It changes the focus and energy of the scene from something with momentum to something that pauses, and therefore makes you pause.

The Threes compel the reader to pause and consider the information being delivered as more important than they might consider it if it was not written as a Three. “Maura’s expression was dark” does not read the same as “Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark.” And in a text where characters directly state the magical importance of threes, compounded by three as an overarching motif, there is clear intention and meaning behind these written Threes.

In the context of TRC, Threes act as a fourth-wall break.

They are essentially a way to poke the reader and say: “Are you paying attention? Because you should be.”

These Threes use a symbolic motif – the rule of three – that is already heavily discussed in the text – to get the reader to pick up on the internal motivations of the character who is “wishing” their Three or the narration which is using a Three to foreshadow some important aspect of the plot.

The Threes are like the literary equivalent of a record scratch. It stops you in your tracks, breaking the established rhythm and making you take notice of what is being said in a new way.

Let’s Look at Some More Threes (but just a few don’t worry)!

1. We get a classic Three, and a very Gansey Three, right after the group comes out of Cabeswater:

“‘What about that thing in the tree?’ Blue asked. ‘Was that a hallucination? A dream?’

Glendower. It was Glendower. Glendower. Glendower” (TRB, 231).

Finding Glendower is one of Gansey’s core wishes, one of his core longings. Although this line is a literal answer to Blue’s question – he saw Glendower in the tree – in making it a Three, Maggie has given it added weight and meaning. It is prayer-like in its intention. It is almost an incantation: by saying it in Three, Gansey wishes it into being.

2. In The Raven Boys, after Gansey has bribed Pinter to keep Ronan at Aglionby and has learned that Noah has been dead the whole time they’ve known him, we are given this Three:

“The Pig exploded off the line. Damn Ronan. Gansey punched his way through the gears, fast, fast, fast” (TRB, 311).

This moment foreshadows what directly follows: a distinct lack of fast as the Camaro breaks down and Gansey is held at gunpoint by Whelk. This Three is not a prayer, but a warning, and an indicator to the reader that something important is about to happen. Had Gansey not been trying to go so “fast fast fast,” the car might not have broken down; because the Three incanted it, disaster follows.

3. To return to a Three I have already mentioned, but follows the typical Three structure:

“...to go home, to go home, to go home” (TRB, 370).

In this scene, Adam’s wish is less about actually wanting to return to his literal home, because his house was never really a home for him. Adam’s wish/longing is for a home that he could return to, that he would want to return to. He is longing for a place/feeling/experience that does not exist for him. The Three in this sentence comes after a string of active wishes/longings, and by ending with this Three, it casts a spell of sorts, honing in on the truest underlying wish that Adam has. In using the phrase “to go home” three times, the narrative is making sure you, the reader, know that this want, this need, this wish, is the most Important to Adam, and will drive his actions for the rest of his story.

Most of the Threes feel like this. They are often tacked on at the end of a sentence or embedded in a sentence. They’re an addendum to the action of the story. They’re like casting a spell – once to manifest, twice to charge, three to cast.

…..And Some Other Types of Threes:

Then there are the Threes that don't follow the typical pattern of the same word repeated three times one right after the other, but are still a Three in a different way.

There are short phrases/sentences that are repeated three times throughout a page or chapter. In the prologue of The Raven King, we get this:

“He was a king…

He was a king…

He was a king.

This was the year he was going to die.” (TRK, 1-3)

In this case, the Three acts as a promise of Gansey’s kinghood, but in ending the sequence with “this was the year he was going to die,” the promise of the three is given a condition: it is not going to be a joyful kinghood, but instead a kinghood intertwined with the death we’ve known is fated for Gansey.

One of Adam’s Threes from Blue Lily, Lily Blue, uniquely breaks the mold of Threes in a format that does not appear anywhere else in the four books:

“It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father” (BLLB, 242).

❋ (We’ll talk about this one more in-depth later.)

There are also a few “unfinished” Threes:

In The Raven King when Ronan is having a nightmare (infected by the demon) about Matthew and the mask, he has this Three:

“Ronan’s throat was raw. I’ll do anything! I’ll do anything! I’ll do anythi

It was unmaking everything Ronan loved.

Please” (TRK, 96).

With the uncompleted Three, there is an uncast wish. Ronan’s wish is about Matthew, yes of course, but also about being willing to do anything to keep those he loves (ie. Adam, Gansey, Blue, his brothers) out of the reach of the “unmaking.” This unfinished Three serves to foreshadow the harm that does ultimately befall first Adam and then Gansey as a result of the unmaking of Cabeswater by the demon: without the Three spell completed, his wish is not fulfilled.

*This is Not all the uncommon/mold-breaking Threes, just a few that are interesting!

Do All Threes Come to Fruition???

The short answer is: No. Or at least not in that way.

Once again looking at the text of The Raven Cycle, we are given an answer of sorts. In discussing Gansey’s predicted death, Maura says:

“First of all, the corpse road is a promise, not a guarantee” (TRB, 155).

This seems to apply to Threes as well. Threes are not a guarantee. They are a promise. Not all Threes come to fruition the way one might expect – or at all, for that matter. The important part of Threes is not that they will definitely come true, it’s that they could come true, because the Three gives them the potential to come true.

Structure, Structure, Structure:

The main Threes structures are:

Three of the same word separated by commas:

“magic, magic, magic” (TRK, 59).

A short phrase/sentence separated by periods:

“My father. My father. My father” (TDT, 369).

A short sentence that is repeated three times throughout a page/paragraph:

“Gansey did not breathe…

Gansey did not breathe…

Gansey did not breathe” (TRK, 209).

A word that is repeated three times and is connected by “and”:

“Round and round and round!” (BLLB, 224)

Italics vs. Non Italics:

Italics in The Raven Cycle are often used for character’s inner thoughts/anxieties. This continues to be true in the context of Threes. A Three that is not written in italics indicates a promise, or some foreshadowing of a plot point being foretold through the Three – it is typically more “real” – whereas a Three that is written in Italics seems to indicate a wish/hope/longing that is unattainable in some way. Italics almost always indicate a Three that may never come to fruition, or at least not in the way the character hopes it will.

An example of this distinction can be found in chapter three (hah) (I don’t believe in coincidences and neither does Gansey) of The Raven King:

First we are met with Ronan wishing/hoping to return home:

“That morning, Ronan Lynch had woken early, without any alarm, thinking home, home, home” (TRK, 24).

This home, home, home, is in reference to the idea of home rather than the reality. Ronan is wishing to return to a home that does exist physically, but is not the same as in his memory – he wants to be at the Barns as it was in his childhood.

Then, in the very same chapter, Ronan actually returns home and we are given this Three:

“Slowly his memories of before — everything this place had been to him when it had held the entire Lynch family — were being overlapped with memories and hopes of after — every minute that the Barns had been his, all of the time he’d spent here alone or with Adam, dreaming and scheming.

Home, home, home” (TRK, 27).

This second home, home, home, is about the actual reality of being in his childhood home – the good and bad that has existed in the years since the childhood he longs for.

The Addition of AND:

The most notable use of “and” is in Noah’s very last chapter:

“Sometimes he got caught in this moment instead. Gansey’s death. Watching Gansey die, again and again and again” (TRK, 416).

When “and” is added into a Three, it becomes circular, cyclical. The “and” gives the Three a sense of infinity, or creates a loop of sorts.

This Three operates in the same way “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” does in Macbeth – it is meant to convey the endlessness of time, a relentless cycle of tomorrows.

❋ While there are not many of these Threes with “ands” in The Raven Cycle, there are other examples of Threes or Three-like occurrences that fulfill the same purpose as the “and.” For example, remember this Three:

“It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.

He opened the door.

It was his father.” (BLLB, 242).

In this case, instead of the word “and,” the Three (It was his father) is connected by “he opened the door.” This Three is accomplishing the same feeling as “again and again and again” – the feeling of being caught in an endless loop.

Another example of an (implied) “and” in The Raven Cycle is: Gansey’s life. Gansey starts out alive and then dies as a child only to be reborn, and then killed again through his sacrifice, and then reborn for a final time. Gansey is Alive, Dead, Alive, Dead, Alive. And so Gansey’s life is a cycle of Three.

As with the Threes that contain “and,” Gansey starts where he ends: alive.

Other Ways Threes Show up in The Raven Cycle:

I will state the obvious once again: there are three Raven Boys, three Lynch brothers, three Fox Way women, three sleepers, three main ley lines (the lines that “seem to matter” to Glendower’s story), Gansey the Third (Gansey Three, Dick Three).

There are also the more obscure: the “three kinds of secrets” in The Dream Thieves prologue and epilogue; each Lynch brother inheriting three million dollars from Niall Lynch; the three figures with Blue’s face on the tapestry and later as a vision in Cabeswater; Adam and Gansey going to DC for three days; the shield pulled from the lake having three ravens embossed onto it; Ronan having dreamt Matthew at the age of three; the door to the Demon’s room needing “three to open” it; Aurora Lynch staying awake for three days after Niall died.

And of course, we have the ley line symbol/chapter header:

And then there are the 300 (three hundred!) Fox Way “villain” readings. (This was something that was particularly interesting to me.)

The first antagonist we meet is Whelk. When he comes for a reading at 300 Fox Way, he first pulls the Three of Swords.

When the women all draw cards together, they pull identical cards for Whelk: three of the Knight of Pentacles, then three of the Page of Cups. After drawing, essentially, three threes (the Three of Swords, then two sets of three matching cards) in this reading, the first Three of the entire series appears:

“Maura’s expression was dark, dark, dark” (TRB, 124).

The second “antagonist” we meet is the Gray Man, who comes to 300 Fox Way in The Dream Thieves to “observe.” Maura, Calla, and Persephone are predicting which card is on the top and bottom of the stack and the first card, predicted by Calla, is the Three of Cups off the top of the deck that Mr. Gray is holding (a remarkably happy card in stark contrast to Whelk’s Three of Swords).

When the third antagonist, Greenmantle, comes for his 300 Fox Way Reading he also draws the Three of Swords. The fact that each of the three antagonists come for a reading is in itself a sort of Three, but to further the importance of these moments, each of them draws some sort of three-related card.

All of the examples I have touched on have been more symbolic references to Three as a motif of the books as a whole. However, Threes also show up in the literal number of times important quotes are said/written.

I was tracking some of the most well-loved TRC lines to compile them, and noticed that the lines “don’t throw it away” and “safe as life” happen to appear exactly three times throughout the series. This was honestly pretty surprising based on the importance of those quotes – I would have assumed they showed up far more. Actually, they both appear twice in The Raven Boys and once in The Raven King. Threes, and the importance of Threes, is embedded so strongly into the narrative of The Raven Cycle that even the quotes we all think of as the most beloved of the series follow this rule of Threes.

Now, could you chalk some of these up to coincidence? I guess. But Gansey doesn’t believe in coincidences so I don’t either. So what’s the point of all these Threes?

Conclusion???

In a literal, literary way, Threes are a fourth wall break to make the importance of a moment obvious, but I’m not sure what the larger “point” of Threes is. My best analysis comes from the idea of The Raven Cycle being all about time and Threes playing into the importance of time as a sort of record scratch or loop. The Threes, as a stylistic, written motif, seem to connect the time-based cycle the characters experience to the time-based cycles the reader experiences by reading the books.

But my conclusion feels incomplete and so I would like to rely on the collective for this one – just about the most Raven Cycle thing you can do. So I’m asking you, the collective you, what conclusion would you draw? What do you think?

What I do know for sure is that Threes are magic, magic, magic.

For Your Convenience: Here is the textual significance given to threes within the books (chronologically):

And here are the Threes, Threes, Threes (compiled):

(If you made it to the end of all this, I love you. Have a gold star and a hug <3)

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tossawary · 7 months ago

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I still think that the ending of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" was poorly foreshadowed, specifically the lion turtles and the energy-bending. (Not Aang not killing Ozai! I like that part! It suits the themes, it suits the characters! That part is fine. I am glad that the last airbender found a way forward that respected his people and beliefs.)

Like, I saw ATLA when it was originally airing and I thought these things kind of "came out of nowhere" at the time. I have heard the arguments to the contrary over the years and I have never really been persuaded by them, while at the same time personally agreeing that the lion turtles and the energy-bending absolutely do fit the world and lore! They are fitting elements! They work! I like this ending at the same time that, in my personal opinion, I think it was poorly established.

I think that the story BEGINS to establish lion turtles and energy-bending well enough. We meet both many other spirit beings and bending-capable animals earlier on, including the Moon and Ocean Spirits who apparently gave the world water-bending. S2 introduces Ty Lee's chi-blocking techniques and Guru Pathik teaching Aang about chakras. There are also a handful of lion turtle easter eggs in the background of some episodes, the most prominent perhaps being on a scroll in Wan Shi Tong's library.

But the story then jumps from these various establishing elements all the way to "lion turtles are real and not extinct and telepathic and can also energy-bend and Aang has suddenly mastered this new art well enough to take someone else's bending away permanently, and these relatively new elements are going to resolve the main conflict of the show". It feels like "1+1=3" to me. I think that last jump in the story is too big. Like, we're REALLY close, but I personally needed another 1 in there somewhere to bridge that final gap and get to that 3.

(Includes some fic ideas / suggestions on how to maybe add to strengthen the foreshadowing under the cut.)

The fact that a lot of people, especially more casual viewers, were really confused by the way all of these elements suddenly came together at the end says to me that, no, the foreshadowing that WAS done (there WAS foreshadowing, I cannot rightfully say that it all came completely out of "nowhere", but it) was not good enough. Or maybe I should compare it to someone presenting me with all of the necessary ingredients for a cake and then telling me that it IS cake? Yes, all of the right ingredients are HERE, I agree, this COULD be a really great cake, but... you still have to mix it all together in a bowl and then put it in the oven to bake to get that specific cake. It's not quite cooked yet.

(Okay, wow, that sounds kind of mean. Maybe I should compare it more to a missing stair? We have MOST of the staircase, I just need one last step to get to the Deus Ex Machina at the top. To be clear: I don't think a "Deus Ex Machina" is inherently bad. I often like them a lot. I just wanted a little more foreshadowing than the stuff that is already there.)

In storytelling, there's this technique casually called "The Rule of Three". (And yes, of course, rules were made to be bent or broken depending on what story you're trying to tell, but usually, these rules exist because they are effective.) This rule is also sometimes known as "Introduction, Pattern, and Payoff". (It has other names, but that's how I remember it.)

Very loosely, this rule states that an important element of the story must appear at least three times. 1. It must be introduced / established in the world. 2. It must appear again to remind the audience that it exists / and establish a pattern such that the audience begins to expect it to appear again later. (And is hopefully excited for it.) 3. Payoff. The element returns in an important way, probably to resolve part of the plot. The previous two appearances have acted as foreshadowing for this ending.

There's also a "Rule of Two" version of this general storytelling technique. Like, "If this special crystal can zap the bad guy and save the day, we have to have shown or at least told the audience that it can do that BEFORE the big final fight scene."

In regards to ATLA, no, I don't think that a scroll in a library or a statue in the background of some scene served as adequate introduction and reminder for the existence of lion turtles, so it didn't necessarily feel like a payoff for me that they solved the main conflict. (It's the "solved the main conflict" that's most of the issue for me. If the lion turtles had just appeared in another episode as a random cool thing like those sea monsters by Kyoshi Island, I would not have cared.)

I actually think that the establishment of other spirits like the Moon Spirit and bending-capable animals like sky bison and dragons can serve as a decent enough "Step 1) Introduction". Though this does not establish that lion turtles specifically exist, we have established that powerful creatures similar to lion turtles exist. But I still needed a solid "Step 2) Pattern / Reminder" that would have established that lion turtles specifically exist and are important BEFORE one shows up at the end like that.

I think that there's at least one episode somewhere in Book 1 or Book 2 that could have been cut in favor of an episode where the Gaang meets and rescues a young lion turtle baby or something.

Maybe Guru Pathik could have learned his ways FROM a lion turtle? Aang could have gone to an isolated village somewhere (with more brown people besides just Guru Pathik?) where people are living in harmony with a lion turtle, or maybe even on the back of a lion turtle! That would be cool!

Concept: Aang encounters Guru Pathik living alone on the back of a lion turtle which doesn't talk to people anymore (Aang swims down to look at its face and it doesn't even look at him), because its kind have been hunted nearly to extinction and it's tired of violence. Guru Pathik learned his ways from his old teacher, who learned from his old teacher, all the way up the teaching lineage from a person who once learned from the lion turtle itself before it gave up on the world. Guru Pathik tends to this nearly empty temple on the back of a silent lion turtle who ignores him, because he will not forsake his teachings even when the world seems uninterested in hearing them and the old lion turtle seems like it could die any day now. The people in the fishing village on the shore think that Guru Pathik is crazy and most of them don't even believe that the floating island really is a lion turtle, it's just weird geography.

Guru Pathik could also have chi-blocking abilities! We could see him demonstrate them in self-defense! He could teach a few chi-blocking moves to Aang, who could later go on to use them occasionally in Book 3, and it would have been really cool to see Aang exploring non-bending skills. We don't need Guru Pathik to explicitly name energy-bending here, but I would like to connect him just a touch more strongly to chi-blocking. Like, he IS connected already by helping Aang clear chakras, which is kind of like a reverse of chi-blocking, but it would be nice to establish Guru Pathik as somewhat capable of the opposite but perhaps not liking to use the skill.

Aang really vibes with this dying culture of pacifists, but he still has to leave Guru Pathik before he can finish the training. Later on, he can encounter Guru Pathik and the silent lion turtle again, and he can confess to them how desperately he doesn't want to have to kill anyone, no matter what his past lives say. He just wants to STOP the violence and restore balance to the world without sacrificing himself. And THEN the lion turtle could wake up and gift him with energy-bending.

Or something like that! The foreshadowing doesn't have to be THAT heavy-handed, but SOME brief appearance by an actual lion turtle would have served as a better "Step 2) Pattern" to me.

Things like chi-blocking, chakras, water-bending healing, water-benders losing their bending when the Moon Spirit was killed, and even Zuko's spiritual turmoil serve as a good "Step 1) Introduction" to the concept of energy-bending to me. The ingredients are THERE. But again, I would have liked some clearer "Step 2) Pattern" that had actually baked the cake in regards to this being a skill Aang had specifically.

The above episode concept with Guru Pathik on the back of a lion turtle could have worked as a "Step 2) Pattern / Reminder" for energy-bending.

ANOTHER option would be to have Aang temporarily lose his bending at the beginning of Book 3, after Katara resurrects him with that special spirit water after Azula killed him at the end of Book 2.

I think Aang losing his bending for at least 3-4 episodes would have been really good for him / the show. So much of Aang's identity is tied up at this point in being the Avatar and the responsibilities of being the Avatar. Losing his bending, especially his AIR-BENDING, and his connection to the spirit world and his past lives would send him into a personal crisis. The Gaang could worry over whether or not a new Avatar has somehow been born or if the Avatar powers are gone forever. The characters could confront the fact that perhaps they've been relying too much on Aang as the Avatar and what they'll do now without the Avatar.

Also, it would be really funny if Aang woke up and picked up his glider to jump off that boat, then just fell into the ocean, and Katara needed to fish him out. (Which would then transition into the dramatic revelation that he has lost his bending!!!)

Katara could use her healing abilities to tell Aang that what's happened to him feels a lot like Ty Lee's chi-blocking. Katara would then probably try to emphasize with Aang, who gets angry with her and says she has no idea what this feels like! Katara could then have a really good intimate scene with Aang over how scary it was when the Moon Spirit was killed, what it physically felt like to lose that spiritual connection, and how scared she was even afterwards about what it would have been like to permanently lose that connection to her people and her culture. Aang then apologizes to Katara and they resolve to find his bending again.

Aang then goes on some spiritual journey with his friends to reconnect with his bending and his past lives as the Avatar. Probably some partially internal spiritual journey with Guru Pathik's teachings. Katara and Toph could both talk about what bending means to them personally as different people, and also what it feels like to them as they interact with the elements of the world around them.

Aang could have some cool fight scenes where he dodges some random thugs using all of his bending skills (martial arts) without the actual bending, air-bending techniques, water-bending techniques, and earth-bending techniques, and then finally some chi-blocking techniques that Guru Pathik showed him. There could be some scene where Aang saves a kid from these random thugs and realizes that he can still do good in the world even if he's not the Avatar! Even if he's not a bender anymore!

There could also be some REALLY funny scenes of Aang trying to get Appa and Momo to teach him how to reconnect with his air-bending. Aang mimicking their movements and so on. (Sokka: "Is that... working so far, buddy?" Aang: "NO! They're terrible teachers!!!" Cue sad Appa bleating and offended Momo chittering.)

You could even do it in a cycle of sorts, where Aang reconnects with his air-bending first using Guru Pathik's teachings and his friends' help. (He is OVERJOYED.) And then Aang slowly regains water-bending and earth-bending over the next few episodes, culminating in him having to face his fears learning fire-bending again. I think you could accomplish this storyline by squeezing it into about 3-4 episodes, or else starting off with losing then regaining air-bending plus the Avatar state in the first 2 episodes of the season and then threading relearning the other elements in the background through later episodes.

ANOTHER option where Aang temporarily loses his bending is after the eclipse, because he has a spiritual crisis over the fact that he was resolved to kill someone and he really doesn't want to do that. I don't like this option so much because it feels a little too late in the season compared to kicking off Book 3 with the drama of Aang losing his bending(!!!), but it's an option.

See, if Aang temporarily loses his bending and has to find it again somehow, then the show could establish what this kind "energy-bending" and spiritual manipulation within a person looks like. If Aang has had to get his bending BACK, then it would better establish Aang then using this ability he has now practiced on himself to take bending away from another person. It's a pleasantly surprising twist that Aang figures out how to reverse a previously established energy-bending technique and successfully uses it against Ozai.

And then the ending, though arguably still in the realm of a Deus Ex Machina (which is cool), would feel more like "Step 3) Payoff" instead of "What just happened?" We needed to see more obviously that Aang was capable of ANY kind of energy-bending before it saved the day like that.

Anyway! This post became way longer than originally intended! I hope this has made it clear that I like both the lion turtles and energy-bending as concepts. I think there are many elements in the show that begin to introduce lion turtles and energy-bending as Aang uses it as things that COULD exist. I just think that the show needed some kind of additional baking step in the middle to establish a pattern and use those ingredients to foreshadow that specific "an ancient lion turtle teaches Aang energy-bending and Aang then uses it against someone else" ending.

#tossawary atla #fic ideas #long post #aang #guru pathik #lion turtles #spoilers

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whinlatter · 1 year ago

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sirius and ginny: a meta (part 1)

“Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking.’

are you a very brave, very reckless, very hot self-destructive rebel with a treacherous sibling and a flair for christmas decoration, harbouring complex feelings about your mother, close ties to crookshanks the cat and spend your days plagued by the memory of your worst mistakes and dark past? do you find yourself constantly being begged to stay in a state of protective confinement to save your life by a young man with a lightning scar, bad hair and crippling abandonment issues? if so, congratulations! you might be one of harry potter's chosen family members, sirius black and ginevra molly weasley!

basically - i want to talk about sirius and ginny. these are two characters who don’t share a lot of scenes in canon but who, i think, have some clear (if overlooked) parallels: stubborn, fiercely protective of harry, self-sacrificing, admired, principled, haunted (in different ways) by traumatic pasts and betrayals, with complicated relationships with their families and entirely uncomplicated devoted relationships with someone else’s cat. their narrative arcs are successive, with ginny ascending in significance in the series during sirius’ period of decline and ultimate death. and ultimately, they’re also the two people who become, over the course of the canon series, family to a protagonist desperately seeking to build one. sirius and ginny are the two people harry in canon most worries about, wants to protect, and thinks of as someone who embodies the promise of family and home.

sirius and ginny aren’t mirror images of each other. ofc, ginny also has parallels with the only other family members harry claims in the series, lily and james (i mean, especially james - she’s literally a cocky funny flirtatious chaser with a years-long debilitating mega crush who can also catch a snitch like a champ. come on now). it’s also clear in canon that sirius means more to ginny as a hero/role model/ally against her mother than ginny ever means to sirius. nevertheless, the text puts in work to let the reader know we should think about these characters together as somehow aligned. from the beginning of ootp, there are clues and signals in the text that foreshadow ginny’s emergence as someone important to harry, and that subtly let the reader know that the baton of being harry’s ‘person’ is about to be passed from sirius to ginny, two kindred spirits, after sirius’ death. so that's what this meta is about! (consider this my 700th attempt to show that, as the popular fandom complaint/all of reddit still insist, ginny as a character, and especially the harry/ginny romance, did not ‘come out of nowhere’.)

the following meta is part one of two (and yet it's still too long! sorry about it). o in this part, i look at the period from the end of goblet of fire thru the start of half blood prince, exploring how the text sets up the sirius and ginny parallels as a way of foreshadowing ginny’s emergence as harry’s main love interest and place as a family substitute. the second part (tbc) will be what the memory of sirius does for harry’s view of his relationship with ginny, and the kind of positive - and negative - ways this shapes harry’s ideas about love and what family do for each other. i wrote this meta as a way of thinking through some characterisation choices for my current WIP, beasts. if you're following along with that fic, this meta can be seen as a companion piece especially to my thinking behind chapters ten and eleven, so hope proves helpful for some of my thinking behind the sirius and ginny friendship that appears in that project. it's also dedicated to @ashesandhackles, queen of metas, who has reminded me to post this meta precisely 9 million times because she is a long-suffering saint.

ok - sirius and ginny. let’s goooooo!

sirius and ginny before ootp

before OotP, ginny is absent from any plot connected to sirius. ginny doesn’t know the truth about sirius’ innocence, nor does she know that harry, her brother and her friend are in regular contact with sirius and that harry now as a surrogate father/big brother figure to confide in and seek comfort in. in fact, in one of ginny’s few appearances in GoF, the narration is unusually insistent that the reader knows how little ginny knows about sirius:

“And have you heard from — ?” Ron began, but at a look from Hermione he fell silent. Harry knew Ron had been about to ask about Sirius. Ron and Hermione had been so deeply involved in helping Sirius escape from the Ministry of Magic that they were almost as concerned about Harry’s godfather as he was. However, discussing him in front of Ginny was a bad idea. Nobody but themselves and Professor Dumbledore knew about how Sirius had escaped, or believed in his innocence. “I think they’ve stopped arguing,” said Hermione, to cover the awkward moment, because Ginny was looking curiously from Ron to Harry. “Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?”

the only other tiny crumb of sirius and ginny we get is the news that the owl sirius bought in PoA and gifted to ron as a replacement pet for scabbers has been embraced and named by ginny. sirius gifting a tiny little spitfire of an owl that annoys ron? it's giving foreshadowing, your honour.

the reader, though, knows who sirius is to harry by GoF. throughout this book, for the first time in the series, harry has a person he can claim as something like a family: someone to worry about, someone who cares about him,who can advise, guide and mentor him, as well as offer him support and consolation in difficult times (‘someone like a parent…’) although sirius has not been able to offer harry a stable alternative home to the dursleys due to his status as a wanted man, he’s still filling a role that previously had been vacant in the series: he’s harry’s person, the surrogate parent chosen for him by james and lily. he’s close by, either by the floo or eventually living (at great personal cost) as padfoot in hogsmeade, and he’s present emotionally for harry in ways that prove incredibly meaningful to his young godson. in times of great of distress, sirius is there for harry to meet emotional needs that ron and hermione (understandably, no shade to them) can’t always meet. the floo scene early on in GoF, during harry’s row with ron, is a particularly good example of this:

“Never mind me, how are you?” said Sirius seriously. “I’m —” For a second, Harry tried to say “fine” — but he couldn’t do it. …Before he could stop himself, he was talking more than he’d talked in days — about how no one believed he hadn’t entered the tournament of his own free will, how Rita Skeeter had lied about him in the Daily Prophet, how he couldn’t walk down a corridor without being sneered at — and about Ron, Ron not believing him, Ron’s jealousy . . . Sirius looked at him, eyes full of concern… He had let Harry talk himself into silence without interruption’.

harry derives enormous comfort from sirius’ presence in his life during GoF. he writes to sirius, he repeatedly turns to him for advice, he worries for him more than he does any other person. sirius fulfils harry’s desire to be kept abreast of important information about voldemort and death eaters, doesn’t sugarcoat news for harry, and makes him feel important, cared for and understood. (harry even shows off to sirius telling him about how much of a slay the first task was. ugh). by the time of the third task, sirius is sending harry daily owls, a constant flow of reassurance and concern (‘He reminded Harry in every letter that whatever might be going on outside the walls of Hogwarts was not Harry’s responsibility, nor was it within his power to influence it. If Voldemort is really getting stronger again, he wrote, my priority is to ensure your safety.’) when harry returns from the graveyard at the novel’s end, it’s sirius who races to his side to advocate for him and offer him both words of comfort and physical affection as he processes the traumatic series of events that constitute the climax of the book’s plot. (my personal favourite part is where harry says ‘wormtail cut me with a knife’ and the text says sirius made a ‘vehement exclamation’, which i can only assume is children’s book speak for ‘fucking hell’.) harry goes to bed: sirius stays with him, a literal guard dog as he recuperates. after the most traumatic events of the series to date, the reader is at least consoled that harry potter has a person now, someone he loves for him to worry about and to worry for him, who catches him on the other side of traumatic events and makes them that bit much more bearable.

sirius and ginny during ootp

with sirius' role in harry's life established in GoF, OotP begins with harry, cooped up and restless at privet drive, angry with ron, hermione, sirius, and dumbledore for abandoning him at privet drive and keeping him in the dark. harry arrives at grimmauld place to find an anxious ron and hermione, with whom harry is angry and frustrated for having left him out of their summer hangs and having neglected him, by his assessment, in surrey. it’s the most conflict we’ve seen in the trio in terms of harry vs ron and hermione, and sets up one of the important themes of the book, which is harry no longer being solely emotionally fulfilled by the people he is closest to, including his two surrogate parents best mates but also his godfather. when he encounters sirius for the first time after the order meeting, he finds him surly, bitter, and depressed, furious that he is confined to his childhood home, and (understandably) much less able or willing to offer harry much in the way of comfort, apology or cheering words (‘Harry, who had expected a better welcome, noted how hard and bitter Sirius’s voice sounded.’) in this sense, the book opens with harry disappointed and/or more distant from all the people on whom he most depends and is usually closest to, and that there therefore is already an absence of a certain kind of emotional support in harry’s life that the plot demands be filled.

fresh off the back of harry’s row with ron and hermione is ginny’s reintroduction to the reader. after years of being so shy in harry’s presence she was often nearly mute, the reader finds that ginny is not only now speaking, but that her presence turns out to be remarkably refreshing. from her opening scene where ginny enters harry’s bedroom at grimmauld place, the reader discovers the new ginny is confident, up to no good, in cahoots with her most troublemaking brothers trying to intercept the order meeting, enterprising in her mischief (and very happy to lie to her mother’s face about it). she’s thoroughly unfazed by harry’s great display of rage that has just startled and upset ron and hermione. (side note: in both ootp and hbp, ginny’s opening scene is her entering harry’s bedroom, which is the kind of foreshadowing i personally find delicious). everyone else is behaving pretty much as they have been up to this point, but it’s ginny who is showcasing behaviours new to the reader, a signal that she might be about to play a different role in the series than she has done up to this point.

cut to the dinner scene. sirius and ginny are in the room together for the first time. sirius is moody: though he’s still able to laugh, enjoying displays of mischief and humour (the twins and the knife), he’s more bitter than harry and the reader have seen him since PoA. it’s an important scene for lots of reasons (not least the sirius v molly beef), but it’s also one where sirius and ginny are repeatedly drawn into mental association in the reader’s mind. it’s also a great scene because the behaviour of crookshanks the cat literally serves to foreshadow the behaviour of harry james potter in ways that are frankly extremely fun.

so! the sirius and ginny hints start small. from the start of the scene, ginny is amused by mundungus the crook (a man, we will learn, so disdained by her mother):

“Some’n say m’ name?” Mundungus mumbled sleepily. “I ’gree with Sirius. . . .” He raised a very grubby hand in the air as though voting, his droopy, bloodshot eyes unfocused. Ginny giggled. “The meeting’s over, Dung,” said Sirius, as they all sat down around him at the table. “Harry’s arrived.”

sirius and harry, sat at the end of the table, are both greeted by crookshanks, sirius’ old accomplice from PoA:

'Harry felt something brush against his knees and started, but it was only Crookshanks, Hermione’s bandy-legged ginger cat, who wound himself once around Harry’s legs, purring, then jumped onto Sirius’s lap and curled up. Sirius scratched him absentmindedly behind the ears as he turned, still grim-faced, to Harry…

when fred and george’s levitation goes awry, flinging a knife at sirius (now that’s how you foreshadow a death), crookshanks bolts:

‘Harry and Sirius were both laughing… Crookshanks had given an angry hiss and shot off under the dresser, from whence his large yellow eyes glowed in the darkness…’

during the meal, ginny’s with hermione, having a laugh with tonks, a character harry has just met but whom he has already decided to both admire and like. after the meal, when harry’s cheered up a bit and had his crumble (the man loves dessert), crookshanks finally emerges from his hiding place, having been coaxed out from his sulk by - you guessed it - one g. m. weasley:

‘…Ginny, who had lured Crookshanks out from under the dresser, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, rolling butterbeer corks for him to chase.’

a grouchy character, initially drawn to sirius, but prone to lashing out and locking himself away, only to be lured back out into comfort and safety by ginny weasley? wow………. radical

after dinner, the argument between sirius and molly kicks off. sirius is arguing hard for harry’s right to know, though he makes no attempt to advocate for any of the other weasleys or for hermione. ginny’s noticeably singled out in her reaction to this scene, the text highlighting that she is particularly struck by this conflict as if it is of particular personal resonance, including someone standing up to her famously overprotective mother for once:

‘Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George’s heads turned from Sirius to Mrs. Weasley as though following a tennis rally. Ginny was kneeling amid a pile of abandoned butterbeer corks, watching the conversation with her mouth slightly open. Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius.’

of course, molly loses the argument: harry gets to stay for juicy order deets (‘Sirius was right, he was not a child.’) after the row, ginny is the only person forbidden from hearing information about the order’s activities. suddenly, the roles are switched: it’s ginny who’s now furious and bitter to be kept out of the action:

‘“Fine!” shouted Mrs. Weasley. “Fine! Ginny — BED!” Ginny did not go quietly. They could hear her raging and storming at her mother all the way up the stairs, and when she reached the hall Mrs. Black’s earsplitting shrieks were added to the din. Lupin hurried off to the portrait to restore calm. It was only after he had returned, closing the kitchen door behind him and taking his seat at the table again, that Sirius spoke. “Okay, Harry . . . what do you want to know?”’

it’s not just the parallels of confinement between harry, sirius and ginny that are so revealing, it’s also the dual maternal conflicts. ginny loud raging at her own mother sets off the howling relic of sirius’, serving to underline two characters who continue to grapple with maternal relationships that are complex and full of conflict, though by no means solely negative (sirius i see you sleeping in your mother’s bedroom babe. don’t think i think your relationship with walburga is just one of straight hate ok). when ginny later gets knocked down the stairs by fred and george, there’s more direct mrs weasley/walburga parallels, with the two of them literally shouting over each other during the ordeal lol. as such, the readers see that the conflicts being set up for sirius’ character in this book - frustration at confinement, conflict with a mother figure, drawn to more reckless and arguably irresponsible characters (mundungus, the twins) and courses of action - are also conflicts subtly playing out with the new ginny we’re meeting, too.

as the rest of the summer at grimmauld wears on, there are more examples of sirius and ginny foreshadowing. the scenes where the two characters interact serve to place ginny and sirius firmly in the same camp of people harry admires and has fun with, the troublemakers and the rebels. over the prefects issue, ginny not only is sat chatting with the troublemaking adults harry likes most, but actively draws sirius into conversation on the issue, likely knowing the answer will comfort harry, but also showing a curiosity and interest in sirius that suggests she admires him:

“I was never a prefect myself,” said Tonks brightly from behind Harry as everybody moved toward the table to help themselves to food. Her hair was tomato-red and waist length today; she looked like Ginny’s older sister. “My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities.” “Like what?” said Ginny, who was choosing a baked potato. “Like the ability to behave myself,” said Tonks. Ginny laughed; Hermione looked as though she did not know whether to smile or not and compromised by taking an extra large gulp of butterbeer and choking on it. “What about you, Sirius?” Ginny asked, thumping Hermione on the back. Sirius, who was right beside Harry, let out his usual barklike laugh…’

ginny’s choice to try and draw sirius into the conversation bears fruit: sirius confirms james was never a prefect, and harry’s sour mood is suddenly lifted. (‘All at once the party seemed much more enjoyable; he loaded up his plate, feeling unusually fond of everyone in the room.’) ginny is thus beginning to provide harry with subtle comfort and reassurance, especially as sirius, struggling with his own confinement, is taking a less active role in trying to cheer harry up. what i also like is that we have evidence of how ginny views sirius - she’s curious about him and his past, she clearly thinks he and the other new rebellious adults are cool as shit, and she’s drawn increasingly away from her mother’s cautious overprotective approach towards these resistance fighters who prioritise the fight over safety. (it is noticeable to me that ginny does not become a prefect in HBP, suggesting sirius' example proved instructive).

we see more small parallels between sirius and ginny during the cleaning scenes. the battle against grimmauld place is an important symbol of one of the important themes of OotP as a book: a battle over past traumas and their persistent and unwieldy symptoms that are seemingly never-ending. while it’s harry’s experiences that, of course, take centre stage, sirius’, too, loom omnipresent throughout the text. it’s significant, then, that ginny’s own past gets brought up for the first time in three books here, albeit briefly:

'They found an unpleasant-looking silver instrument, something like a many-legged pair of tweezers, which scuttled up Harry’s arm like a spider when he picked it up, and attempted to puncture his skin; Sirius seized it and smashed it with a heavy book entitled Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound, and they all found themselves becoming curiously weak and sleepy until Ginny had the sense to slam the lid shut…'

in this moment, we see sirius and ginny singled in the larger group as quick-thinking, shrewd characters, with a good instincts and common sense (if a bit of a tendency to get scrappy). their respective dark pasts are subtly alluded to. sirius whacks a spider trying to attack harry with a book that might as well be entitled my big book of family trauma. ginny, meanwhile, steps in when everybody present starts to be enchanted by a mysterious object luring them into danger by whacking it shut (gee i wonder why!) given this is the book that will see ginny mention the events of CoS for the first time in errrrr three years, it’s significant that the text is careful to draw ginny into this broader theme that unites sirius and harry, the constant reminders of traumatic pasts at every turn. we also see here the revelation that regulus black was a death eater. coming after news of percy weasley’s betrayal, sirius’ bitter dismissal of his younger brother deliberately mirrors ginny and the other weasleys’ attitude towards percy, this sense of pureblood families split over wizarding politics, often fatally.

while harry fears his expulsion from hogwarts prior his hearing, he continues to fantasise about coming to live with sirius at grimmauld, and about being with a family member and finding an alternative home to hogwarts. sirius, as hermione astutely observes, tries to manage harry’s expectations and not to get his own hopes up: still, when harry is exonerated, sirius is visibly depressed, showing the beginnings of an emotional dependency on harry that harry feels great guilt over.when leaving grimmauld for the start of the school year, sirius, as padfoot, accompanies harry to king’s cross: unlike in GoF, though, he is spotted, and harry begins to worry much more actively about sirius’ vulnerability to capture, about his recklessness and about his judgement. concerned for sirius, and absent ron and hermione, who are in the prefects carriage, the person who stays with harry and offers him company is ginny. she sacrifices her own train journey (presumably with her own boyfriend) to find a carriage with harry and make sure he’s not lonely, bringing him to neville and luna and sorting him out after his embarassing cho run-in. it’s not a coincidence that once again we see ginny here taking care of harry crookshanks:

'“Where’s Crookshanks?” “Ginny’s got him,” said Harry. “There she is. . . .” Ginny had just emerged from the crowd, clutching a squirming Crookshanks. “Thanks,” said Hermione, relieving Ginny of the cat. “Come on, let’s get a carriage together before they all fill up. . . '

once harry’s back at school, having left sirius behind to languish miserably in london, we see he's more isolated and alone than ever. he’s tormented by umbridge, endlessly (though often unfairly) frustrated with ron and hermione, ghosted by dumbledore, yet absent the more stable, reassuring sirius he came to know in GoF, unable to write candidly to him and faced with a much less well sirius in the opportunities they do have to speak face-to-face. as sirius’ mental health declines as he is shut up at grimmauld, his ability to support harry and comfort him starts to falter, and he becomes a much more uneven source of advice and support, particularly during his car crash floo appearance, where he’s much ruder than he has previously been (cutting off, ignoring their pleas for him to be more cautious, the infamous ‘the risk would have made it fun for james’ moment). this new sirius, clearly struggling, is much more happy to do up guilt trip to his godson than we have seen him to up this point (‘I’ll write to tell you a time I can make it back into the fire, then, shall I? If you can stand to risk it?’ - you petty little shit, padfoot). all of this serves to increase harry’s anxiety about sirius’ wellbeing and reinforce harry’s sense of emotional isolation. even sirius’ encouragement on the DA is, as hermione points out, partly bound up in more selfish motivations (‘I think he’s really frustrated at how little he can do where he is… so I think he’s keen to kind of… egg us on.’)

ginny’s largely absent in this section of the novel. in the brief moments she does appear, it’s to inject humour (eg. her impressions at the DA meeting) and in little reminders that she now has a boyfriend, no longer harbours romantic feelings for harry, making sure the reader continues to hold her mentally apart from harry. harry, meanwhile, misguidedly tries to seek out a relationship with cho chang, who is showing clear signs of her own emotional distress and inability to meet harry’s emotional needs given her own grief. still, among this, there’s still room for some small subtle sirius/ginny parallels. once the DA plot picks up, we have another little sign that ginny weasley and sirius black think somewhat alike:

“Yeah, the D.A.’s good,” said Ginny. “Only let’s make it stand for Dumbledore’s Army because that’s the Ministry’s worst fear, isn’t it?”

“Trained in combat?” repeated Harry incredulously. “What does he think we’re doing here, forming some sort of wizard army? “That’s exactly what he thinks you’re doing,” said Sirius, “or rather, that’s exactly what he’s afraid Dumbledore’s doing — forming his own private army, with which he will be able to take on the Ministry of Magic.”

with harry's isolation and need for more emotional support established in this first term, christmas at grimmauld offers more opportunity to subtly develop the sirius and ginny parallels, as well as to highlight ginny’s ability to fill the gaps left by sirius’ decline. after the attack on arthur weasley, the group arrive back at grimmauld:

‘Sirius was hurrying toward them all, looking anxious. He was unshaven and still in his day clothes; there was also a slightly Mundungus-like whiff of stale drink about him. “What’s going on?” he said, stretching out a hand to help Ginny up. “Phineas Nigellus said Arthur’s been badly injured —”

could this be sirius literally lifting ginny up into plot significance? why yes it could

ofc the weasleys then argue with sirius about their right to go see their father. despite his own frustrations at being trapped at grimmauld, sirius proves the voice of reason and rational decision making against both ginny and the twins’ hotheadedness (ginny asks to borrow cloaks to go to the hospital: sirius: ‘Hang on, you can’t go tearing off to St. Mungo’s!’) crucially, though, when sirius points out that there are bigger things at stake - the work of the order and the resistance movement - it’s ginny who listens:

“Your father knew what he was getting into, and he won’t thank you for messing things up for the Order!” said Sirius angrily in his turn. “This is how it is — this is why you’re not in the Order — you don’t understand — there are things worth dying for!” “Easy for you to say, stuck here!” bellowed Fred. “I don’t see you risking your neck!” The little colour remaining in Sirius’s face drained from it. He looked for a moment as though he would quite like to hit Fred, but when he spoke, it was in a voice of determined calm. “I know it’s hard, but we’ve all got to act as though we don’t know anything yet. We’ve got to stay put, at least until we hear from your mother, all right?” Fred and George still looked mutinous. Ginny, however, took a few steps over to the nearest chair and sank into it. Harry looked at Ron, who made a funny movement somewhere between a nod and shrug, and they sat down too. The twins glared at Sirius for another minute, then took seats on either side of Ginny. “That’s right,” said Sirius encouragingly, “come on, let’s all . . . let’s all have a drink while we’re waiting…’

there’s a lot going on here: ginny’s willingness to follow sirius’ orders, but also her willingness to accept an argument based on some idea of the greater good before any of her brothers. she and sirius are aligned here, and it’s her decision to accept sirius’ reasoning that proves the catalyst for her brothers to follow. we see here how ginny has come to see sirius: someone she looks up to and admires, an adult whose judgement she trusts and whose worldview she subscribes to. (as a character prone to hero worship - see her view of her big brother bill - i think this is noteworthy, and is behind a lot of my characterisation choices for ginny towards sirius in beasts). but we also see that ginny agrees with sirius' worldview. there are some things worth dying for, and self-sacrifice is part of that.

when harry goes to sirius for reassurance about witnessing arthur’s attack, he finds sirius unable to properly console him and convince him that he was not to blame for arthur’s attack. the reader gets the impression of sirius withholding information from harry (‘He could only see a sliver of Sirius’s face; the rest was in darkness’), and the scene ends with sirius clapping harry on the shoulder and leaving him ‘standing alone in the dark’. while sirius throws himself into christmas preparations, obviously delighted to have company, harry shrinks from the cheer and isolates himself. in the end, ofc, the only person that manages to pull harry out of his dark, brooding thoughts is ginny. the text is careful to note she’s sitting beside him on the tube back from st mungo’s, when he looks very unwell. then, in the ‘lucky you’ scene, she showcases some of the same skills harry first came to appreciate in sirius in GoF. she tells it to him straight: she’s sympathetic, but not overly gushing, and she reminds him of her own intensely frightening experience which she endured alone, something harry can relate to, even if the experience of possession is not. it’s an important scene for lots of reasons, but it’s also, crucially, the intervention that causes harry’s mood to lift, and he gets to enjoy a christmas with his godfather, the thing he had most wanted in the run-up to christmas, and which becomes the only holiday period harry and sirius ever spend together:

‘I’m not the weapon after all, thought Harry. His heart swelled with happiness and relief, and he felt like joining in as they heard Sirius tramping past their door toward Buckbeak’s room, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Hippogriffs” at the top of his voice.’

of course, once christmas is over, sirius slips back into a depressed, gloomy state. harry wants a better goodbye than he gives him, merely giving him a quick one armed hug (there’s a real theme throughout harry and sirius’ relationship of very sparing physical contact on sirius’ part, which is obviously a hole in harry's life ginny will fill in - er - a big way). back at school, harry returns to umbridge’s increasingly draconian rule, maks a disastrous attempt at forging a relationship with cho, and continues to feel lonely, paranoid, and angry. unable to speak to sirius properly via letter or floo - and unwilling to open the present sirius has given him to communicate directly with him, the two-way mirror - harry is increasingly sullen, a mood that only worsens after seeing snape's worst memory.

the easter egg scene is obviously important for hinny for lots of different reasons. but here i just want to highlight how the scene serves to show ginny as both the conduit to sirius for harry, and someone whose behaviour echoes that of sirius in GoF when harry first began to open up to and seek comfort in him. harry is distressed by his now complicated feelings both towards the father he previously revered and towards sirius, who seemed to encourage james’ bullying behaviour. ginny hands harry a chocolate easter egg covered in snitches: chocolate, a canonical source of comfort against dark thoughts, and an egg that reminds him of the love of parent. the act makes him suddenly emotional, though he at first denies he’s upset. ginny presses carefully and sensitively, asking the right questions to get him to confess the source of his worry, waiting for harry to take his time to speak - all behaviours that echo sirius’ own effective listening techniques. ginny’s acquaintance with sirius, and knowledge of how significant he is to harry, is important here, too, and a subtle sign to the reader that he trusts ginny with knowledge about sirius after a long time of having her in the dark about his godfather. the reader leaves the scene having seen ginny breakthrough to harry emotionally in a way for the second time in the novel, in a way no other character has done (‘he felt a bit more hopeful…’)

of course, the course of action ginny has set in motion is itself risky and reckless (‘anything is possible if you’ve got enough nerve’ is very marauders as a philosophy). the decision to go ahead with the plan the twins come up with is one harry sees as a decision on whether to be more like james and sirius - a risk taker - or to abandon the hero worship for the marauders he has lived with for so long. in the end, of course, it’s a win for the reckless troublemakers: he chooses to go ahead with the plan the twins have crafted and that ginny has set in motion, and to speak to sirius.

and yet. sirius is still alive - there is not need for ginny yet. for the remainder of the book, ginny has to beg to be included in the trio's plans and to be allowed to be a part of the plot to rescue sirius. she’s is often in conflict with harry, showing a lot of sirius’ bitterness at attempts at containment and to keep her out of the fighting. she grates against harry’s insistence that she is too young and inexperienced, and having to remind the trio that she, too, has come to care about sirius and wants to see him safe:

“I’ve got a broom!” said Ginny. “Yeah, but you’re not coming,” said Ron angrily. “Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking.

of course, it all ends in tragedy: sirius, desperate to go to harry’s aid and absolutely gunning for a fight after months of confinement, is killed, leaving harry alone. there a subtle clues that something has shifted in ginny’s relationship to harry and the trio in the scenes after sirius’ death, including ginny positioned as the mirror image to harry in the hospital:

‘Harry was sitting on the end of Ron’s bed and they were both listening to Hermione read the front page of the Sunday Prophet. Ginny, whose ankle had been mended in a trice by Madam Pomfrey, was curled up at the foot of Hermione’s bed…’

despite this, in the immediate aftermath of sirius’ death, harry is extremely alone. he is unable to work out what he needs (‘Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.’) he tries to go to hagrid’s, but regrets it (‘He was starting to wish he was alone again’), leaving after hagrid reminds him of sirius’ core traits, an inability to stay out of the fight when he believes in the cause:

“But still, Harry . . . he was never one ter sit around at home an’ let other people do the fightin’. He couldn’ have lived with himself if he hadn’ gone ter help —”

unlike at the end of GoF, harry is isolated by his grief and the revelation of the prophecy's contents by the end of this book. he goes alone to a secluded corner of the lakeshore, ‘sheltered from the gaze of passersby behind a tangle of shrubs’, and ‘[stares] out over the gleaming water’, and cries alone. there is no sirius or other person to catch him and console him in his grief. his person has died, and there’s a gap in his life again, just waiting to be filled:

‘Wanting to impress Cho seemed to belong to a past that was no longer quite connected with him. So much of what he had wanted before Sirius’s death felt that way these days. . . . The week that had elapsed since he had last seen Sirius seemed to have lasted much, much longer: It stretched across two universes, the one with Sirius in it, and the one without.’

ginny and sirius parallels in HBP and DH

after sirius’ death, the parallels between sirius and ginny become more important as ginny moves into the centre frame as a character. at the start of HBP, harry arrives at the burrow and discusses his grief over sirius’ death with dumbledore in the burrow broom shed, acknowledging how profoundly the loss of a family member who cares singularly about him is affecting him. ('He felt stupid for admitting it, but the fact that he had had someone outside Hogwarts who cared what happened to him, almost like a parent, had been one of the best things about discovering his godfather . . . and now the post owls would never bring him that comfort again. . . .' beasts readers: there's a reason harry clings to letters!) of course, having reminded the reader of the gap in harry’s life that now needs to be filled, harry goes to sleep, the active reflection on his grief for sirius put to one side so the novel's plot can get underway. he'll go to bed mourning sirius and wake up in a sunlit bedroom. of course, ginny will walk into this bedroom too, only now things will be different: harry potter is back to the search for a loved one, for a family, and he's about to realise ginny is the one he wants to fill it. thus the start of the plot of ginny stepping into the role vacated by sirius beginneth.

so much of who ginny is in HBP is reminiscent of sirius. she frequently leaps into battle as harry’s protector (‘You’re taking orders from something someone wrote in a book?’, ‘Give it a rest, Hermione’), she’s scrappy (RIP zacharias smith), she’s funny and laughs easily in a way that less recalls sirius in the time harry knew him than sirius as harry sees him as a young man, in photographs or memories. she's the one who commits to the insane christmas decorations, determined to cheer everyone up over the festive period as sirius did the year before. she even enjoys the widespread admiration and lust of her peers, a trait that directly recalls sirius being eyed up by his peers in snape's memory. by the novel’s end, after dumbledore’s death, it will be ginny who goes to harry’s side after the climax of the plot and catch him in his grief just as sirius did in GoF, this time over dumbledore’s death:

‘He did not want to leave Dumbledore’s side, he did not want to move anywhere. Hagrid’s hand on his shoulder was trembling. Then another voice said, “Harry, come on.’ A much smaller and warmer hand had enclosed his and was pulling him upward. He obeyed its pressure without really thinking about it.’

their breakup has sirius all over it. taking place at the lakeshore, the place where harry wept alone over sirius a year prior, harry draws on the circumstances of sirius’ demise as a reason he must break up with ginny (‘Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to.’) the breakup does little to shift what ginny has become in harry’s mind, though, and he spends all of DH thinking of her as he once thought of sirius: the person whose safety he most craves, the person he misses, someone he claims as his, and whom he associates with (now banished) hopes of a home and a family:

“It’s not a problem,” said Harry, sickened by the pain in his head. “It’s your family, ’course you’re worried. I’d feel the same way.” He thought of Ginny. “I do feel the same way.”

of course, echoes of sirius will also come into play during open war. it’s now ginny, not sirius, who is the one left behind for her own protection: in the run-up to the battle, harry finds himself once again faced with the prospect of confining his loved one for their safety, despite their desperation to fight and do the right thing. but these are thoughts for part 2…….

#meta #sirius black #ginny weasley #it's not NOT an aged up sinevra ship agenda #hp meta #hp analysis #hinny #marauders #black family #beasts

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justanotherpersonsuniverse · 4 months ago

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Hey Cap!!

Miscellaneous meta PN lore question!

I have some questions about Time Travel! In Panthera, Bunnyx is yet to show up, I presume because her first canon appearance is in season 3, however I’m curious about what thoughts you have regarding the Rabbit Miraculous and time travel in the series in general :3

Time travel always has a lot of different interpretations and it’s one of those things that can be an absolute pain in the ass to plan for. Especially cause as soon as you open up the ‘time travel is possible’ can of worms it either a) has to be addressed why the big bad evil guy wasn’t just… stopped before they could begin or b) have some sort of rules about time travel that generally change depending on what is convenient for the plot (or secret third option c) use suspension of disbelief because the story wouldn’t have happened if someone had went and fixed everything).

Sorry, I think about time travel a lot. A version of time travel is a main component of my original fantasy story so this is actually a hugely pared down prelude to what I wanted to write.

Anyway! I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on how you're going to handle the fact that it, well, exists. It feels like the sort of thing you wouldn’t shy away from, especially because of all the lovely existential dread that could come from having access to that power, though it would come in different flavours depending on how you choose how time travel works. (Eg. You can’t change the past but you can partake in it, it's just that this was always what happened but the time traveller is the last one to experience that moment. Or you can change the past but would it be ethical or right? etc.).

Obviously, Time Breaker could (and did!) time travel, but the mechanics of that were just totally different so it's a different ball game. Though I did like how you wrote Time Breaker and the ramifications of that, I'll get into that for my story observations :3

But… it’s also a total bitch to plan around writing wise, you need, like, a special kind of foreshadowing for it to pay off properly and it's all complicated for no reason so I totally get if it’s a canon aspect you want to mostly ignore.

oOHOHOHOH HAVE I THOUGHT ABOUT IT <3

Ive thought about it a LOT on why Bunnyx hasn't 'fixed' any of the in universe problems.

I love Alix, so I have great plans to explore how she goes from being Alix- a very emotional character with strong emotional ties and, as Timebreaker showed, the drive to recklessly fix something if she's given the chance to- to Bunnyx, someone who- well... is an enforcer of the future.

I'll keep my cards close, but I will leak some details on how time itself works in this universe though! See;

If this universe is a gated off garden, the many different timelines that co-exist are the singular different plants and flowers growing. Different seeds grow into specific plants.

A tomato seed turns into a tomato, a Chat Noir timeline produces a Chat Noir timeline, and so on. Bunnyx's job is to tend to this garden, keep timelines and their roots from interfering with each other. This means alternate timelines exist.

Becoming Bunnyx means she's not allowed to pick and choose what timelines she wants but is responsible to make sure they end in the ways they're meant to, and if they're not, she will know because they often interfere with other timelines like Weeds.

In minor situations, a timeline will feature a hiccup where a scenario doesn't go exactly how it's meant to or occurred without meaning to, and Bunnyx will either readjust this event to make it work smoothly into the 'canon', ignore it because its harmless, or cut the hiccup entirely so it never happens.

In MAJOR situations, a disrupted and unintended timeline will not only occur and change the direction of a single timeline, it will slowly weed its way into causing the other timelines around it to ONLY END the way the original Anomaly does. That is when the event that caused the anomaly must be cut from the root- before it's infection affects her too.

#panthera noire au #writing #sneak a cat #my art #bunnyx

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alicent-archive · 24 days ago

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Fic Recs: Larys Strong (part 1)

Here is a selection of some of my favourite fics that feature Larys Strong from House of the Dragon.

Some are: character studies, fics that feature a particular paring (Larycent, for instance), and some are where he only appears as a supporting character, but I included the fic because the way the author wrote him was superb.

The fics will align with my tastes and do not appear in any particular order or rank.

I did my very best to write my notes in a way that was (mostly) spoiler free.

Happy reading!

The Hour of the Cockroach by TheSithVirtuoso

COMPLETE; 2.6k words.

Set during the events of the Hour of the Wolf in F&B, this work features a conversation between Cregan Stark and an imprisoned Larys. It's quite dialogue heavy—with all the Medieval flourishes of the ASOIAF world—but that's really where characters like Larys get to shine. The relationship between Cregan and Larys was incredibly fascinating because their ideals and beliefs are so different; duty and honor vs. deception and guile. The power dynamic is fascinating as well, because even though Larys is the one imprisoned and sentenced to die, he dances verbal circles around Cregan and seems wholly unbothered by his proximity to the Stark executioner—it's as if his death is merely a slight inconvenience. The work is philosophical, haunting, dark, and even in his final hours of life, Larys remains in control.

Of Rats and Weirwoods by Aliffo

COMPLETE; 3.5k words.

As soon as I watched Alys in S2, I couldn't wait to read fics that explore a relationship between her and Larys. In this fic, Alys is both an ominous and kind mentor figure to Larys. Her character truly leaps off the page, and you can just hear Gayle's Scottish drawl drip from every piece of dialogue. The authors depiction of Larys is exceptional. As a child, he's a little bit cheeky and more than a little bit judgmental. He's an observer, a watcher, a boy with a bad leg and a talent for lip reading. He's not quite the person we, as viewers, know from the show, but it's easy to imagine how this boy becomes that man. The writing is beautiful. Just... beautiful. It's deeply poetic, the descriptions are so vivid and rich, the foreshadowing of future events and fates is stunning, and the ASOIAF language it features would fit perfectly into a GRRM novel.

the fire spread throughout my bones and stayed by silent_heaven

COMPLETE; a little over 1k words.

This is another work that explores the relationship between Alys and Larys, but unlike the previous rec, this one really emphasises their family connection. Alys is fourteen, and is akin to an older sister. The way the author physically describes her is gorgeous. There's also some slight Alysmond, for those interested. Larys is nine and is grappling with his greenseer gift. What I enjoyed most about his POV is his thoughts around Harwin and his father; his anecdotes of the Strong family in those early years at Harrenhal felt incredibly authentic and real. The fic is an stunning exploration of family, of blood, of fate. What makes a family a family? If your sister is this cursed bastard, why does she look so much like you? If what you see with your eyes closed is what will come to pass, then why is your home burning? Why do you taste ash on your tongue?

Firebug by 2_ticky

COMPLETE; 2.2k words.

If you have siblings, reading this fic will gut you like a fish. Out of all the wonderful works that I've included on this list, this is by far the one that caused me to experience the most emotional turmoil. Do with that information what you will. Throughout the TV series, Larys is depicted as being many things: a nobleman, a cripple, a confessor, a confidant, and (rather briefly, as most details are when they don't include a member of the Targaryen family) a brother. This fic digs into that sibling relationship, and by GOD is it full of feelings and angst. Harwin, both literally and figuratively, haunts Larys. It's so sad, guys. So unbelievably sad. Read it.

Covenant by Halja

COMPLETE; a little over 500 words.

Although quite short, this work—all prose, no dialogue—is a beautiful look into the relationship between Alicent and Larys. Beautiful is an understatement though, because every single line of this fic is pure poetry; like, I need those sentences tattooed on my body effective immediately.

Nothing can stop us from becoming nothing by killinggame (@necrofacility).

COMPLETE; 2.8k words.

Larys and Aegon's relationship in S2 is captivating on several levels, especially their potential for romance (or, what either man could constitute as romance, anyway). Set on a ship bound for Essos, the pair are orbiting each other with all the tasty flavours of co-dependency and shifting power dynamics. Aegon, in true Aegon fashion, is somehow brimming with insecurity and full of unmitigated confidence; is this both endearing and frustrating? Yes. And no one is experiencing these emotions more than Larys. The man balances the roles of servant, guide, and confident with practiced ease, and the author's writing transitions to each of those facets with utter smoothness and subtly. The pair have a very "whatever the fuck these two got going on" dynamic that is quintessential to any larysgon fic, and this work does this deliciously.

#hotd #house of the dragon #asoiaf #fire and blood #fic rec #larys strong #cregan stark #alys rivers #harwin strong #aegon ii targaryen #alicent hightower #larysgon #larycent #hotd fanfic #my: fic recs

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randomfandommaddness · 8 months ago

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Silent Salt is the Founder of the St. Pastry Order Conspiracy

Solidarity- unity of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common goal, interest, or BELIEF.

Freedom- The power of choice in actions, thoughts, words without hinderance. - Alternatively, the option to choose the greater good for one's self, and/or for another's sake.

Silence- The restriction of actions and words, and the total control of thoughts. Complete obedience even if the actions are wrong. Tyranny.

Three Updates foreshadow the connection:

1 - The First Tower of Sweet Chaos Update

A- Aesthetics:

- The Backdrop Color scheme for the church Matches Silent Salt's color pallet

- The Shadow sister's order is the closest we get to matching outfits

- Silent's current clothes look torn, but their former attire appears to contain a lace-like fabric (Similar to the pastry order's robes) * There appears to be no imagry of Silent anywhere in to order's church. There are three potential reasons for this:

1- Silent DOES appear, but their helmet is removed (They are the praying cookies at the edges)

2- Silent HAD imagery that was removed after their imprisonment. (Reputation is important for religious groups or cults. Heretic imagery is heavily condemned.)

3- Silent REQUESTED no imagery of them to be made and they operated in the shadows of the order. (Most likely)

B- Beliefs:

* The order worships the witches, And Silent was personally baked by them, so... This could be a case of abusing a belief for the sake of control. We have absolutely no idea what the witches would have wanted, but the order's actions actually don't align with the witches. If they did want what the order is preaching, then Silent Salt WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN LOCKED UP. This actually makes the whole Order built on literal pillars of salt. If the truth got out about the founder, then no one would be fooled by it. Cookies with morals would leave enemas forcing the Order's leaders to crack down on rebellion.

* The order believes that cakes and monsters don't have a place in the world (Similar to medieval beliefs that were influenced by Christianity- Beautiful= Good, Ugly=Bad)

- By the destruction of "The World's Order" Pastry was probably referring to the perseverance of cakes and other desserts (Notice how we don't see anything other than cookies in the order proper)

- This is backed up by Red Velvet, saying "And when you meet your Godly creators, ask them. Ask them about your precious 'Order' that decrees pretty Cookies to live, and forsaken, burnt Cakes to be SLAIN!"

- The weapons of the order are specifically made to purge monsters.

* There is LITERALLY a Book of Salt in their Bible's Equivalence, the Quote "...may thy will guide the fork of your humble servant" is an example. (Of course there are more books, like the Books of Butter and Flour, but Salt being mentioned is suspicious.)

C- The Cake Tower Itself:

-According to the Order, and the cookies of darkness, the first cookies were baked in the tower. As for whether or not the five beasts were baked here is up for debate. But it is possible that they were.

-White Lily being involved with the tower and the witch's banquet in of itself is proof that the order connects back to Silent Salt. White Lily becomes Dark Enchantress Cookie by being re-baked. Did anyone ever make the connection to Dark Enchantress having a very demonic design? The very thing someone like the Order would oppose.

It's not just the design though... It's also her goal! Dark Enchantress seeks to overthrow the witches and recreate the world in her image. And destroying the world that the pastry order protects is absolutely against the order's code. With the Order worshipping the witches, Enchantress is obviously their enemy. But the order is also bad for its own reasons.

If Silent Salt did found the St Pastry Order, then it has been around for a very long time. Long enough to shape the cookie world. Just as Christianity shaped Medieval Europe, The Pastry Order shaped the land of Earth Bread. Even without Silent Salt at the helm, their order is carrying on their wishes. As for their wishes, it's to ensure that cookie kind flourishes, while other desserts are deserted. And there's more...

2 - Cookie Run Odyssey (Where things get dark :D)

A- Asthetics (They're getting more convincing)

- The Cookies in black masks are the closest design to Silent by far - Why the masks guys? Something to hide? (Or someone they're referring to?)

- The weapons all carry a very refined astetic, and also a fork symbol.(Silent's soul jam kinda resembles a fork too. Huh)

- The very presence of the missionaries in the Creme Republic. (Silent's design could be a reference to the Templars from the crusades)

B- Beleifs (They carry the ones above here, but lets add some more salt.)

* The Order Believes that Cookies were made to be eaten (White Lily learned that the hard way)

- The first cookies ran away from their creators (They could be referring to the beasts, but that may not be the case)

- The witches are waiting for the cookies to return (So they can fulfill their purpose of desserts)

- Elder Mille-Feuille Stated "The First Oven will open, and all will become one." This could be referring to the baking and consumption of cookies.

C- Goals and Motives shown in the Odyssey

1- They are after the soul jams. As for why, they say that combining the soul jams together will summon the witches. While we don't know if that is true, it may be possible... But I think that the real reason that they want the soul jam is that it was Silent Salt's final order before they were imprisoned. That way, the order could free both them and the other beasts and restore their power. (Of course, they can't say that that would be selfish!)

2- They are NOT working for or with Dark Enchantress Cookie. We do fight the Order in Odyssey, but during the Final battles, they are nowhere to be seen.

3- The order is trying to convert as many cookies to their cause as possible. Since the youth are impressionable, that's a good place to start. Preaching to the desperate is also a good tactic if they wanna get followers. (Yeesh, they're more like a cult than a church. At least the church is optional!)

3 - White Lily's Beast Yeast Update (Trust me, this update is important)

It is within this update where we get introduced to Silent Salt properly, along with the rest of the beasts. We notice that certain areas of Beast Yeast refer to the five. In the Land of Silence- the Salt Flatlands we see a giant cross on the map. A GIANT CROSS. Yep. Defidenty guilty.

Within this update, we are introduced to our first beast Shadow Milk Cookie, Pure Vanilla's polar opposite. Oddly though, Shadow also has a rivalry with White Lily due to Elder Faerie Cookie leaving her the post as Guardian of the Tree. I always thought it was weird that Shadow would target another ancient hero that isn't Pure Vanilla Cookie... Until we consider Silent Salt's stake in all of this. What if this isn't meant to be a three-way fight, but a four-way?

Silent Salt Vs Pure Vanilla Cookie. How would that play out? Let's start with the very fun possibility of exposing the St. Pastry Order as frauds. After all! Pure Vanilla cookie holds the light of truth, so letting such a harmful and dangerous lie run its rounds unchecked would be against what he stands for! Moreover, having Silent Salt paint Pure Vanilla as a heretic would be very in character for them. Pure Vanilla was inspired by Jesus Christ, Who was persecuted Himself! Oh wait... Does this mean that Silent Salt is going to successfully kill Pure Vanilla Cookie?

The Themes of Solidarity, Freedom, Tyranny, Deceit and Truth. Solidarity is defined as unity. It is a special force that the individual can connect too but is also felt by multiple people. I imagine that the original source of the soul jams power is derived from its core aspect:

- Imagination and curiosity are the source of the power of Knowledge

- Will power and motivation are the source of the power of Volition

- Interest is the source for the power of Love

- Action is the source for the power of Change

- Unity is the source for the power of Solidarity

Now, just as the original soul jam before it was split, the power is still fueled by its aspects, but instead the conditions are a little more specific: - Delusion powers Deceit, while Acceptance powers Truth - Lack of will powers Apathy, while strong will powers Resolution - Lack of Care powers Laziness, while immense care powers Passion - Desires for Carnage power destruction, while Desires for Worth Power Creation - Absolute submission powers Silence, While Individuality Powers Freedom.

Now unlike most powers, Solidarity is powered by a group of cookies with a common goal and a feeling and sense of unity. In order for that power to be strong, the connection they share must be strong. Kinda hard to do when everyone believes in completely different things... But what if they didn't? What if all the cookies believed in the same thing strongly? Then the power would flow like the salt in the seas!

However, in order to have a strong belief, you would need a very solid idea. An idea so important that it would be impossible to ignore, doubt, or question... an idea like your makers. Worshipping your creators, creating an empathetic narrative around them... Making it easy to get both mentally and emotionally attached to them, and most importantly: being able to connect to others who do so as well.

It's why the order deems anyone who isn't a cookie as blasphemes. Cookies are a dime a dozen on Earth Bread. But they are also capable of thinking and common sense. Why else was no other dessert chosen to potentially become the order? Other creatures aren't as bright as cookies. And for that reason, cookies are able to be saved, while other desserts are a heresy! Hence why they have to be purged.

If all creatures of Earth Bread share a likeness in the form of cookies, then they have more in common, making it easier to connect with another cookie instead of a cupcake.

When it comes to Silence itself, we are talking about Tryranny. The complete restriction of words and actions. It's all about complete control, even if it's against the will of the victims. ESPECIALLY if it means doing something that will hurt another person. Being constricted isn't going to last forever, and almost always ends in disaster.

Of course, being deemed a "holy being" meant to pass judgement in the name of their creators lets you get away with some messed up stuff. How do you know if they are acting for the cause, or for their own interests? You can't tell, and that's the whole point. Silent Salt is using a so called "Holy Cause" as an excuse to do horrible things to other cookies and desserts. Namely:

- Making everyone believe in a suicidal ideology (.... What do you even call this? Brainwashing?)

- Deeming any critics as Heretics and killing them (Assassination/Murder)

- Using everyone's impressions as a source of power and control (Abuse on a wide scale)

- Going against the witches, all while claiming to work in their name (The worst evil in the world: Hypocrisy)

- Using the set of beliefs that controls everyone to cut down innocent creatures who did nothing wrong. (Mass Genocide)

- Tricking others into killing for the cause as well (They're still guity, but it's not entirely on their heads)

- He probably turned families against each other as well! Mainly over beliefs. (I... I have no words for this. It's too horrible to even imagine.)

Yes. The list of crimes for this cookie is long. I wouldn't even be surprised if they were the evilest of the Beasts.

Now for the million dollar question: How do you beat Silent Salt cookie?

Well, their power comes from unity under their constrictive control, and that control comes from the strong beliefs in the orders followers. So, the only way to beat them, would be to turn everyone against them. More specifically, dividing the order, and getting them to disband somehow. The number one way to do this is by exposing the order to the truth. And it's no stretch to believe that Pure Vanilla himself will be involved with this part.

Just as White Lily beat Shadow Milk with the power of free will (She chose her own option over the two options Shadow gave her), Pure Vanilla is going to use the truth and expose the Pastry order, having them turn on themselves in disarray. With infights and zero control, Beating Silent Salt is just a matter of skill. Of course, you'd have to be pretty convincing to go up against the order's core beliefs. So, what if Pure Vanilla bought the witches into the picture? It would be cool if he could find out the real reason why the cookies were baked the way that they were. Though I'd imagine that Silent would actually turn the order against him at first, get Vanilla killed, then the witches would re-bake pure vanilla cookie in front of the order. That would be super cool! :D

Also, I forgot to add that the St. Pastry Order will probably invade the Fairy Kingdom. Just as Christianity Settled in northern Europe.

Where Silent Salt Is Sown

Living Things can't be Grown.

Small Note: There may be more that I forgot. Feel free to add to the list!

#cookie run #cookie run kingdom #silent salt cookie #white lily cookie #pure vanilla cookie #shadow milk cookie #crk #crk theory #scatterbrain #:D

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itsbenedict · 12 days ago

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Did anyone else play Cluefinders as a kid? They were these edutainment point-and-click adventures, sort of... Indiana Jones by way of Scooby-Doo? These were my jam back in the day, and I went back to them to see how they held up.

And the answer is... uh, there's a surprising range of quality!

Basic Cluefinders knowledge:

The Cluefinders are a group of mystery-solving teens, who, uh. It's not entirely clear how they find clients, but they're apparently world-renowned for it.

Joni, the redhead with the glasses, is the leader. She is spunky and belligerent and likes to punch problems until they're not problems.

Owen, the green shirt kid, is Shaggy. He talks in surfer dude slang and likes to eat. He's just Shaggy.

Leslie is Velma. Just Velma. That's kind of it. She uses big words and knows about science and things.

Santiago is also there. He has a phone? I think his trait is that he has a phone.

Laptrap is the mascot character and the game's menu. He is a hovering robot turtle thingy. His job is to be scared of things and complain about them. Both entirely reasonable reactions to the things that are happening! He is nonetheless treated as an embarrassing wet blanket and deserves better.

3rd Grade is weirdly the best one, I think? And the first one they made, indicating that the budget dried up at some point. It's this kind of mystery about an evil dragon that's been terrorizing a magic jungle full of living plants and talking monkeys and stuff, and it's got like 20 different educational minigames that teach and test various skills. The writing is like, very stupid and for-kids, but not offensively so. It all comes together with a twist villain that they foreshadow pretty well over the course of the game.

And there's musical numbers!

youtube

Fun stuff! I was kind of surprised by how well it held up. The others... did not, as much.

The fourth grade one is... bad. It has this structure where there's just four minigames, and you have to do them over and over and over and over again to get enough "Cairoglyphs" to proceed. Proceed how? An old man decrypts them and tells you clues. What clues? Don't even worry about it. Once you get enough of those, we switch to a second phase of the game that's also doing four minigames over and over and over again, this time to get gems to get past way too many doors in an ancient temple. It drags things out so much.

And the rest of it is... truly bizarre. Everyone's drawn totally off-model. It's narrated by a talking dog with a Brooklyn accent who's treated like a core member of the group despite never showing up again, and concerns... uh, a plot by an evil egyptologist to resurrect Set and take over the world? Maybe? It's very weird and loosely-sketched. Like... nothing connects.

The badguy is a comically extreme Dan Backslide ne'er-do-well, and he's the only part of the game that's any fun. I love him. He does not have a motive. He does not have a reason to kidnap "the professor" who the player's stated goal is to save. The professor appears to only exist for this guy to gloat to about how evil he is to. He dies almost immediately upon realizing his ultimate ambition when the evil god he resurrects predictably fails to recognize the authority of his summoner. Could not be more stereotypical, but the voice actor is clearly having the time of his life and the energy is infectious.

The rest, though... The Cluefinders' connection to this kidnapped professor is something it has no interest in describing, apparently banking on the audience's willingness to accept that they must just be walking in on an episode of a show whose background was established earlier (it wasn't).

It's hard to even describe how silly the climax of this one is. You... collect gemstones from talking mice on behalf of a sinister cat, who lets you into a temple where various ancient Egyptian gods congratulate you on being so smart and give you entirely useless superpowers.

Joni gets "bravery" (a costume change, she was already brave), Leslie gets "intelligence" (a costume change, she was already the Smart One), Owen gets flight (a costume change, useful precisely Never for any of the puzzles that involve finding a way to cross over a pit), and Santiago gets "strength" (a costume change, useful precisely never for any of the puzzles that involve finding a way past a heavy stone door). Then, in short order, you arrive at the villain's lair somehow, too late to stop his evil plan! But then, you do anyway! By, uh...

...you, um... it all happens in a cutscene, and I couldn't follow the mechanics of it at all, but there was some kind of mechanism in the temple? And they had Santiago lift up some pillars? And this somehow resulted in Set falling into a bottomless pit and that's the end?

I... I dunno, man. I dunno what happened here.

The 5th Grade one is pretty wild. There's like, a floating island that eats people? It collects castaways from across various time periods, somehow, and shlorps them down into some bottomless pits that appear out of nowhere, and you gotta figure out what's up.

The writing is like... weirdly... I wouldn't call it good, but the writers put their actual-writer hats on for it. There's one minigame that's like a reading comprehension thing, where there's all these lore journal entries from various survivors ruminating on their situation (and they're broken up into paragraphs and scrambled so you have to put them in the right order for the entry to make sense), and you get this kind of background on the culture clash of castaways from different time periods banding together to avoid being eaten by the island (and ultimately failing).

Gameplay's pretty bad, though. 3rd Grade had 20 different minigames, 4th Grade generously had 13, and this one's got eight. In terms of reusing content by making you do the same thing over and over to bypass arbitrary obstacles, it's one of the worst offenders.

There is this guy, though:

There's a minigame where... god, it's such an off-the-wall justification for the minigame, but- it's a geography minigame about reading maps and stuff. There'll be various cities or states or countries on a map, and you start at one and need to reach another target one, and you have a bunch of rules written down like "don't pass through Illinois" or "you must cross the Mississippi river twice", and then use a limited number of options to chart a path from point A to point B that satisfies all the conditions. Kind of fun, honestly.

But this guy- the fluff for it is that he's the notorious Cryptile Thief. He stole everyone's cryptiles, and to keep them safe, he threw them into, uh...

...this small grove of piranha plants. He knows how to get them back, because he knows some safe paths through the evil flytrap cluster, somehow. But he wrote down his paths in code, basically, in the form of those constrained maps. No explanation is given for how he mapped real-world geography problems to flytrap-safe loot routes, but supposedly it Just Works. Problem is, he got locked up by the villagers for stealing everyone's cryptiles, and can't get out.

(No, it is not explained why in the world the villagers had a bunch of cryptiles and why they valued them or what he was trying to accomplish by stealing them.)

But then while he was in the stocks the ground opened up and slowly devoured all the other villagers one by one, including the ones with the fucking key, so unless someone goes and saves them, he'll be stuck here forever. It's kind of grim! It's unclear how the time-warping aspect works, and how long this guy's actually been here. Is he immortal and he's been here for three hundred years, or did all this happen yesterday? He acts like it was yesterday, but there's also a crazy old man castaway who acts like it's been decades at least.

Anyway, 6th Grade was, if I recall correctly, about an underground army of sentient mutant plants plotting an invasion of the surface world, but this was apparently when they discovered 3D graphics and did a lot of experimental bullshit under the hood that no longer works on modern computers. It kept crashing on room transitions when it was trying to do fancy 3D effects. Womp womp.

The only other one of these I played (besides some sort of... weird day planner software that wasn't really a game) was Math Adventures, which I remember being my favorite as a kid but I couldn't tell you why. It was based around this logic cube thing, where- after completing minigames for villagers- you'd get clues that would let you eliminate possible culprits, until you got down to one and could corner them.

Culprits of what? There's this remote Himalayan village where the village's treasures have all been mysteriously stolen. Somehow the Cluefinders get wind of this and go to solve it, and then... you play eight minigames over and over again.

Structurally, it's very weird. You corner the culprit, and invariably it's one of the minigame host NPCs who just says "okay, yes, I took this thing and hid it here, but it's because I was being threatened by the yeti! So we're cool, right?" and then the village chief goes yeah, "we're cool, we're not going to have you face any consequences for this." (If they went to jail, how could you play their minigame fifteen more times?) Repeat, yes, fifteen times, until you've recovered all eight treasures. Yes. There's duplicates of these priceless unique treasures, for no apparent reason. I think they designed it around eight and then decided to double it to pad it out???

Some of the minigames are cool and challenging, like the one where ice blocks fall from a conveyor belt and you have to form them into valid math equations. Others are...

...a really shoddily-implemented breakout clone where you have to catch numbers to solve equations, but the game can only handle three numbers onscreen at once so actually being good at breakout is actively disadvantageous because breaking too many blocks at once just makes it harder to hit blocks later. Or... uh... the second one there, where, um... these blobs of purple goo with numbers on them come down a track, and you need to shoot them at these shelves to splat the right numbers into place based on the graph to the left. It gets insanely hard later in the game, because there'll be three rows of shelves and three graphs and the graphs will stop conveniently locking to the marked numbers so you have to try and eyeball whether that line on the line graph which bends between 20 and 30 is doing so at 26 or 27. If you ever get one wrong you instafail and have to reset. Ugh.

(Why is this happening in a library? What are we accomplishing? How does any of it help this woman remember a clue to the mystery? Not one second of thought is spared for these questions.)

Anyway the ultimate culprit was the only NPC who doesn't have a minigame and only shows up in the opening cutscene to loudly blame the stolen treasures on the yeti and insist that everyone give up on finding them. This was not even surprising to me when I was eleven years old. Very lame.

I never had any of the rest of them! I'm kinda curious to play them and see what I was missing, even though I kind of don't expect any of them to have been good.

Anyone else remember these things? Or know what was going on with the one with the scary clown rollercoaster or the evil toy store?

#cluefinders #long post

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