#well she was until her child was murdered while being a fucking envoy

[echos-muses]

i’m not ready for any of it, i’m not ready for rhaenyra’s grief for luke, i’m not ready for daemon to betray her, i’m not ready for jace to die, i’m not ready for b&c, i’m not ready for helaena’s death, i’m not ready for ANY. SINGLE. BIT. OF. IT.

I don't think I'm mentally prepared for the relationship of the greens to get strained, aemond alr feeling distant towards his mother because of her hesitant nature and her not wanting to attack rhaenyra.

And aegon screaming that he wants revenge?

Alicent reaching out and trying to grab helaena's hand while running away?

Yeah I'm cooked 😭

[casliveblog]

Custom Toonami Block Week 159 Rundown

Spy X Family: We’r eback to the small vignette episodes now, Bond has a premonition of his own death and since they’re out of dog food he fears that if Yor makes his dinner he will just fucking die and if he refuses to eat Yor will murder him. So he tracks down Loid on a mission and does a fucking Air Bud spy mission deal and Loid is just kinda like ‘okay guess this is a thing data dogs can do’ and assumes it’s a conscious choice to get back at the company that turned him into a data dog when he’s really just avoiding his assassin wife. Loid’s weirdly okay with this and they manage to pull off the mission and get Bond some non-Yor food, it’s cute but between this and Anya building a pipe bomb last episode feel like they’re kinda pushing what some of the gag characters can do even for a comedy. Also with Bond’s premonitions already being cutaways and him having no dialogue it’s kind of hard to tell when one of his imagination spots is a premonition or one of the ‘exaggerating consequences’ deals that the other characters do. The B-story is Damian and his gang getting in trouble for lapsing on etiquette because Damian’s fucking burned out pushing himself to meet his father’s goals for him from the season finale. So his two flunkies get in trouble with him but the adults see what’s really going on and send them on a nature hike so Damian can relax for a day and shift gears instead of keeping his nose to the grindstone. I really hate his goons’ voices in the dub and I assume that’s intentional but it’s still a nice little fleshing out episode for all three of them.

Inuyasha: Man this fucking episode is like a third recap, it takes like seven minutes to get back to where we were last episode, I thought I clicked on the wrong episode for a moment since they basically just give you a speedrun of last week. Sango’s ready to attack Kohaku and break the rat shrine meanwhile Hakudoshi… summons demon slugs to attack Kikyo’s tree because I guess that’s something he can do now. It’s funny they have to tell Inuyasha not to Wind Scar the tree on accident to get at Hakudoshi but they end up clipping him and killing the slugs but the tree’s already dead and Sango can’t destroy the shrine because it has a barrier and she never almost killed a bat child to get the Red Hiraikotsu that’d be obsolete in a season anyway. Sango, Kohaku and Kilala all get swallowed by the rats while Sango’s trying to protect Kohaku and Kohaku’s trying to pretend to hate her so Naraku doesn’t know he’s not a meat puppet anymore. Like you’d think that’d be something you could feel, like if the guy whose brain you’re directly interfering with suddenly had autonomy you’d think you’d know. Still Kikyo comes out to break the barrier but Hakudoshi’s been Wind Scar’d so not much he can do about it. Sango angsts about Kohaku and how even though he’s directly tied to countless deaths today along she still wants to protect him as his sister which is fine because as far as they know he’s still being controlled but it’s actually a lot worse because he’s letting people die to get a shot at Naraku that we all know will never come, not that him not being there would dial down the death toll any, if anything using Kohaku as an envoy to fuck with Sango actually makes Naraku’s murder spree less efficient since he’s just a kid with a scythe and if he just starts sending poison demon puppets to blight the whole countryside it’d probably be a lot worse. Either way Kikyo gets the message that as long as Naraku’s looking for her he can just keep pulling filler demons of mass destruction out of his ass until he finds her so she might as well come fight him. I mean Naraku basically does that for fun as it is but this time he’s specifically pinning blame for it on Kikyo like a ‘you did this by not doing what I wanted’ because Naraku is a gaslight gatekeep girlboss.

Yu Yu Hakusho: We just jump a hundred days after Yusuke announced the new tournament and it’s time for the prelims. Kinda speedrunning the arc here because we just have to take Mukuro’s word for it that Yusuke’s gotten stronger again since we have no clue what he’s been doing. It’s kinda funny that despite being the literal ringleader of the tournament Yusuke is still out of the loop on how it works, guess that’s his Goku instincts trying to keep things exciting. Most importantly Koto’s back to announce again, honestly one of my favorite parts of the series in general. Turns out there’s so many demons out there hoping for a lucky break that they had to have 128 preliminary brackets just to weed out all the mooks, luckily because there’s that many basically no one who’s named has to fight each other and everyone we already know advances except for Chu who gets knocked out by a sexy lady that’s way stronger than him, and Yomi and his son Shura have to fight each other which kinda sucks but guess we can’t have too many enemies off the bat. Also apparently Shigure is alive which I know he’s a really good surgeon and Mukuro has bacta tanks but dude got the top half of his head cut off, like not even just the head Hiei went right through the guy’s brain, that’d even kill a zombie but okay. Also there’s some kind of sexy monkey lady that Yoyo kids wants to bang so good luck with that I guess. The only halfway decent fight for this will be Shura vs Yomi and the show knows that so we just get a quick montage of everyone using their special techniques and blasting everyone who doesn’t have at least three degrees of separation to Yusuke.

Jujutsu Kaisen: Feel like this is the second time we’ve done the ‘shit’s going down’ cliffhanger only for Geto and Gojo to solve the problem off-screen, like I get that it’s to build them up as invincible badasses that can solve arc-spanning problems in an instant so when shit really does go down it hits harder but how many times are we gonna do this? So yeah the gang’s in Okinawa now with some time to kill after the kidnapping arc wrapped up quicker than expected so Gojo gives Riko the quick and dirty two day tour of Okinawa, I swear I don’t know whether the JJK author is using the series as an excuse to hit the tourist spots of Japan for ‘research’ or is just already well-traveled within the country and using that knowledge as inspiration because sometimes this feels like Adam Sandler levels of ‘the story’s set here because I wanted to go here’. Geto tells Gojo it’s not good for him to keep his infinity shield shit on for this long which I guess it’s something he has to turn on which was never really established nor is it something the fans seem to realize given I’ve seen memes of Riko slapping Gojo being the only thing to get through to his skin. Anyway they show up to Jujutsu High a day late but once they’re safe inside JJH Gojo turns off his barrier and IMMEDIATELY gets stabbed by Megumi’s dad, turns out the Arkham City Bane Plan worked and he’s officially snapped Batman’s back because Gojo being on high alert for two and a half days straight gave him enough leeway to ninja his way in and stab Gojo though this ridiculous Machiavellian planning is kinda pointless because Gojo reveals the surprise stab didn’t do much and it turns out Megumi’s dad also has a ‘cut everything even if it’s an infinity barrier’ sword so idk why he even needed the whole Arkham City plan. Anyway instead of both taking him on and having two people fight and protect Riko, they split up and Gojo fights Megumi Sr. (I’m prolly not gonna learn his name) while Geto takes a leisurely walk to let Riko make her choice. Gojo does his Almighty Push shit but Megumi Sr. ninjas around long enough for Gojo to think it’s a feint and he’s going straight for Riko but it turns out the feint was a feint and he actually just carves Gojo up like a Christmas Turkey. I mean we know Gojo doesn’t die so I’m really confused about what kills curse users in this universe which is why I’m only mildly perturbed that shots of dead bodies tend to be memes for this series because for all I know that person could just get back up and keep going.

Geto tells Riko that he and Gojo always planned to let her make the decision for herself if she wanted to be sacrificed and that even if it meant fighting the world they’d do right by her and themselves and not let the way people say things should be entrap them into doing something evil. She’s inspired by everything she’s seen over the past few days and has her ‘I want to live’ moment and… immediately dies. God that’s so simple yet effective, like Riko feels like a character that is deliberately not given much screentime or development, like it’s supposed to hurt like that, normally she’d be a manic pixie dream girl that inspires the heroes to live and want to see the world but that’s absolutely not her role here, she’s a deliberate anti-climax, she’s barely a person because she never got the chance to develop her own personality and is punished the moment she decides she wants to grow and it hurts so much worse than any kind of saccharine filler you could throw in there about her developing feelings for these two because she’s a girl with a lot of possibilities cut short, it’s the point where literally not fleshing her out too much gets the point across all the better. Also I have no idea what this means for Barrier Buddha given he still exists in the main story but doesn’t get his sacrifice here so I guess either they find someone else or it’s like a global warming thing where ‘it’s not gonna fuck us over right now but the next generation’s screwed’ which would be the main timeline’s period which that’ll suck. Also also, I guess Megumi Sr. passed by the maid on the way there so either she’s dead or let the guy that murdered the only girl she loved like a daughter ninja right by her without even knowing and I dunno which is worse. Anyway Geto hears Megumi Sr. ‘killed’ Gojo and is ready to bust out the demon dragons.  

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: There’s a lot of gay in this episode and I have many questions but still it’s pretty good. There’s a thing about a screenplay that doesn’t come back up this time around so I’ll skip it and get to the part where Ramona has discovered Scott was actually kidnapped by a Rick and Morty portal and idk if turning into coins is a normal thing in this world or if that should’ve been their first clue but yeah Ramona does have trans-dimensional imagination powers and I can’t tell if magic is just a thing that exists in this world or if some people are just not phased by it because they’re world-weary twenty somethings. Knives and whatsherface do a very gay little jam session and that’s pretty cute and Ramona continues her investigation by talking to people that knew/dated Scott which is kind of a neat inversion on how I thought the plot was going to go with Scott learning more about Ramona through her exes, kinda interesting to have the title character be so absent and be an ephemeral presence in the background. Anyway while Ramona is questioning drummer girl who was Scott’s first girlfriend, Roxie shows up and she’s what I imagine that kid from Craige of the Creek that roleplays as a knight is gonna grow up to be and they have a cool trans-dimensional movie ninja Amy Rose airplane samurai fight and do the Soifon/Yoruichi thing of ‘I’m fighting you because you left me weirdly’ because there’s apparently only one lesbian fight in all of fiction. Still it is fun and I do like Roxie and how quick she is to check if every girl she meets is a lesbian just in case. Though this does make me kinda question Ramona because with Matt we did establish it was a fling on a whim from when she was young but then with Roxie we saw that it was just… no real reason, just kinda grew apart which obviously happens but the fact that Ramona has so many of these types of relationships makes her seem like someone that has a lot of hyperfixations and then burns out quickly, like not a deal breaker but if the series is going for ‘yeah her and Scott are the one’ deal it’s gonna have some work to do to prove this isn’t Ramona just liking someone for a while and then pissing off when she gets tired of it like the color of her hair (though assumedly Scott would be cool enough about it to not go off on an evil tirade and be a jerk) also Gideon’s in his Poor Kaiba phase which never happened in Yugioh but the comedy basically writes itself so I’m down.

Ranking of Kings: So we’re still in filler but this one’s actually pretty interesting, the story of Ouken’s descent into madness. It’s basically just an elongated version of the flashback of Desha, Despa, and Ouken overthrowing their dad and committing war crimes but also with the added wrinkle that Satun tried to posess Ouken when they killed him and they may not have driven all of him out completely. It’s really kinda creepy to see Ouken go from ‘I can use infinite healing as a superpower for fighting to help people’ to ‘I am a murder machine because I must keep fighting’ to ‘I wonder why people have to die at all, lemme just run some tests…’ and then finally he starts seeing his ghost dad everywhere and stards murdering people, donning the armor and going on a rampage, wanting to see more death thinking if he sees enough he can cure himself until that much blood just kills his soul and without fear or compassion he becomes the rampaging Dark Souls boss we know from the main story. Not really much in the way of new information but seeing the whole journey is pretty neat.

Vinland Saga: So Olmar’s still being a whiny little pissbaby about how no one treats him like a man while he’s rolling on the floor drunk crying like a baby, so his dad’s bodyguards Fox and Badger convince him the quickest path to toxic masculinity is murder, like not even war duel murder like the shit Thorfinn was on, shooting fish in a barrel ‘bring out a guy to kill’ murder. And of course the guys they randomly pick to have him kill are Einar and Thorfinn (dunno why they picked up both in the first place, like having a witness is probably a bad thing and killing two slaves is twice the monetary loss) so they interrupt Thorfinn and Einar’s nice morning of waking up screaming and hitting on handmaids respectfully to come get them killed. Obviously Einar’s not a fan of the plan but Thorfinn’s just like ‘yeah sure why not’ and this kinda pisses Fox off because if people don’t value their lives he doesn’t feel a macho when he kills them and then he’s out of a job. He just starts cutting chunks out of Thorfinn and Thorfinn’s like ‘why should I fear death? Life’s been nothing but dead father figures and slavery so go ahead, fucking do it, DO IT’ and before Fox can go too hog wild on him, Snake steps in and shows who’s the real badass, punching out Fox and making the lesser guards piss themselves while being impressed by how Thorfinn was cut to ribbons without even flinching so looks like these guys may be up for a promotion.

[mysticandskepticmuses]

MEET Rori LuAnne* Dearing.   ( Altered Carbon based original character. )

                *Please note.  Any use of her middle name in character will result in her losing her shit because who the fuck names their child LuAnne in the 25th century it’s so 400 years ago….

                 First things first, OOC, yes, this is the same face claim as I use for Saori; it’s intentional / for plot purposes w/ certain characters where that holy shit it’s like looking at a ghost trope is lots of fun so…  Also, I think it’s particularly interesting in a world where bodies can be custom made and DNA is literally just a playground for scientists for there to be this freak natural repetition / recreation after 250 years.  It is something that family members remark on from time to time, but it’s not something that a lot of them really pay that much attention to, it’s the oh you look so much like so and so, but since none of the living family members even met Saori they don’t realize just how identical the resemblance is.  And most people that meet her wouldn’t know enough about her history / lineage to know though so.  She’s just a pretty, long-legged, pierced and tattooed cutie pie.    [ Any of those rare survivors from Envoy era that were at Stronghold or on Harlan’s World, or any that might have VR’ed in to a conference or something w/ Saori are totally free / encouraged to notice and react of course !!! ]

                  Yes, Rori is the great-great-great …. whatever many great-granddaughter of my other / latest original character, SAORI DEARING, an uprising sympathizer who lived on Harlan’s World during the Envoy war / during the time of the destruction of Stronghold.  [ the battle of stronghold is widely known as the battle where the Protectorate finally defeated the evil Envoys, murderers of children and women and whole families, terrorists who used sabotage, infiltration, mass murder, torture, bombings, wide spread terror attacks, etc. etc. etc. to try and overthrow the protectorate who wanted to do nothing more than keep the peace in known space etc. ] Rori and her older sister, CLAIRE DEARING, currently know nothing about their ancestor’s involvement with / support of the Uprising – which is probably for the best because Claire would probably die of mortification and Rori would loudly and proudly blast the news from the rooftops.  

                   Claire, written by Liz @magicandsciencemuses, is a (mostly) upstanding citizen who works earnestly to better her way of life and has a great amount of respect for the law and a more than healthy respect / knowledge of what the Meths are capable of; she is one of the directors of the Bay City branch of Psychasec as well as being a well renowned scientist in the field of genetics and body mods, cloning, synth, etc. etc.  She is very much the model child, works hard, works long hours, pays her taxes, follows the rules, tries very hard to keep out of trouble and avoid drama.    ADDITIONAL NOTE:  CLAIRE IS 200+ YEARS OLD.  Rori is in her forties (even though she appears in her early twenties) – in Meth years, Rori is practically a BABY.  

                   Rori, on the other hand, is pretty much the exact opposite.  While she is also intelligent and well educated, she was the wild child from the get go and was always the one that came home with the scraped knees and the bloody noses and the torn clothes, whether it was from actually just falling the frack over her own feet or getting into a fight with someone twice her size in defense of someone else or because they offended her with some smart ass / ill thought out comment that provoked her short-fused (but typically short-lived) temper.  She was almost always involved in some form of protests, some form of protect the planet, protect the species, protect the people, protect the sleeves movement, and became more and more focused on protecting the equality (or what is left of it) as she got ‘older’.  

                   She believes that a lot of what is acceptable and norm when it comes to the treatment of sleeves when it comes to the prison system and victim restitution as a whole is beyond fucked up   She believes that the whole essence of the prison system, stacks in storage, etc. is a huge step backwards and one that just does no good to anyone except those profiting financially from the system.  Ripping someone out of their sleeve and sticking them into storage seems entirely opposite of helpful to her.  There is no longer any opportunity for reform in the penal system.  Being on ice doesn’t give you time to think.  It doesn’t give you time to reflect on your life choices and realize what you’re missing.  It doesn’t give you time for soul searching or to learn methods in which to cope, it doesn’t allow you to better yourself in any way – literally the only thing that it does it rip you out of one time and then toss you back out into the world in what was just a blink of an eye to you.  Nothing changes.  Worst case scenario, you’re in a stranger’s body, a hundred years later, maybe you’ve got a family member or someone that was told about you enough to show up and give you a place to crash for a few days while you get your shit sorted but.  

                   Now you’re a stranger, with no working knowledge of the world, the politics or laws that have changed, the events in history that might have been world shatteringly important that you missed, no relevant job history, no contacts, no resources, and depending on what field of study or what kind of job you had, you might be entirely irrelevant plus - you’re a convict so what does that do for your likelihood of finding gainful employment - especially while in whatever broken down sleeve they give you on release ???  It pretty much guarantees the only life the newly released have to go back to is – crime.  

                And that’s not even getting onto the topic of renting out people’s bodies and how that just feels inherently wrong to her – they don’t even bother to try and use it as a deterrent tactics, it’s just a WAY OF LIFE and it just seems cruel and unusual to her.  There have always been accrued costs of prison, one way or another, sticking a body on ice / suspending it / cryogenic storage or whatever is WAY cheaper than actually housing criminals used to be.  And how easy is it for someone that’s corrupt to play that system ???? Want a particular sleeve for yourself or your partner but they won’t sleep with you?  Get them convicted and rent it for a week.  Have a Neo-C that you need out of the way at your job or that’s married to someone you want to pursue or that you have a grudge against and want to see them suffer / their family suffer?  Set them up for even the smallest crime, because once they’re yanked out of their sleeve that’s it, bye-bye.  

                   And it’s not just punishing the criminals! Seeing someone else walking and talking in the sleeve of your lover, your brother, your mother, your best friend and knowing it’s not them - it doesn’t matter how tough you are or act like you are, that hurts – knowing that that body is being used for god knows what and you can’t keep it safe / protect it ???  Knowing that the person’s sleeve is out and about because you couldn’t afford the mortgage payments to keep it hanging out empty until the person’s time was up and they can get put back in it ? That is brutal and cruel and unusual punishment to people that did nothing wrong but care.  

                   So… yeah.  Human rights / sleeves’ rights activist.  Has had the occasional brush with the law in terms of protesting, the occasional riot or act of vandalism, threats against particular organizations or Meths or whomever it is that she’s up in arms against at the time but, generally low level stuff that hasn’t gotten her in a ton of hot water legally speaking.  She actually does have a semi decent relationship with some of the beat cops or a detective here or there, she’s happy to turn over intel and information she finds about acts of actual violence or terrorism that she catches wind of and is especially happy to turn over anything she hears that deals with corrupt cops, politicians, Meths influence on anything with policy or wrangling positions of power for their chess pieces in law enforcement or political circles etc.  

                   She does dabble in some drug use, she drinks, she smokes, she swears, she sleeps around, she has tattoo and piercings that fluctuate a lot - she is still in her birth sleeve (though second clone after an airtram derailment a few years back).  She gambles, she shoots pool, she gets into the occasional fist fight, she has no problem calling anyone out on their bullshit but – she has a good heart and does her best to help out people in trouble around her whenever she can.  She drifts through a lot of circles; she has friends in all manner of walks of life in the underworld and legit circles, she makes it pretty clear she doesn’t have any interest in being involved in drama outside of her choosing and tends to usually manage to keep from pissing off the wrong people (she’s way more likely to have enemies among the politicians, the Meths, the policy makers than get caught up in a turf war etc).  

                   She has a loft apartment in Licktown, but she also has four or five other roommates and it’s very crowded and busy so she tends to prefer to crash at her hookup’s place when an option and also makes a semi regular habit of showing up at Claire’s in the middle of the night and crashing on her couch for a few days.  Despite their glaring differences, the sisters are actually pretty close and as much as they rib on each other, they would not hesitate to come to the defense of the other if necessary, in a heartbeat.  

                     Rori does come from a family of Meths.  Her lifestyle choices, her behaviour, the fact she lives on the Ground and in Licktown are all huge sources of embarrassment for the majority of her family.  The only reason she isn’t actually just cut loose and written off as the black sheep of the family is because Claire wouldn’t stand for it.  Rori does have access to a large stipend, which she does live off of at times but in general she prefers to make her own way - she works as a bartender, a tattoo artist, odd jobs here and there.  Whatever she doesn’t use of her monthly allowance, though, she does pull out every month and donate to a number of different activist groups, shelters, etc. - wherever needs it the most at that time.