So Sampo is canon described as the only person who can travel between the overworld and underground, but it's never actually revealed HOW he gets around.
I'd like to believe part of the reason he's so secretive really is just because of business. One of the best ways to keep your customers is by being the only one to offer something, and Sampo stands to make a pretty nice profit if he's the only one able to smuggle in supplies. Gotta protect the trade routes ☆
BUT the other part is because he's probably one of the only ones that could SURVIVE it. I'd like to think a lot of his routes enter the overworld either in places like Backwater Pass, where it's technically in the city but is overrun by Fragmentum, or on the frontlines, where it's frigid cold and crawling with Silvermane Guards.
If someone manages to get all the way up, and even if they manage to sneak past all of the Guards/monsters and not freeze to death, there's still the possibility of getting caught in the city proper by regular civilians.
And if Cocolia heard word of someone caught in the overworld, I can't imagine there's any way she would just leave that, she separated the halves for a reason. This person would be interrogated, and then the route sealed off, and then the Undergrounders would lose a vital supply route. Sampo has to be extremely careful to not get caught and not be tailed.
And I'm sure he does a lot of shady trading in Belobog proper, but I think a lot of it also comes from him looting the Fragmentum-corroded areas, too. After all, in the Cyrille the Fool quest line, when the trailblazer sees something strange in the Fragmentum, the first person they think to consult is Sampo.
So I love the thought of Sampo being like extremely disciplined and being able to be out there for like days at a time.
Looting is easier in the beginning, but eventually Sampo has to go farther and farther out for supplies. Sometimes he'll be out there for days, and it's not exactly a safe place to sleep, but he can stay awake and alert for absurd amounts of time if he needs to be. Going for 24+ hours isn't unusual for him on a big supply run; Sampo will be awake for a day or two, he'll bring back everything he finds to Natasha, then sleep for a solid 8-12 hours and be back up again. He takes a couple of low key days where he rests or does easy work, then he's ready to plunge into the fray again!
On the rare occasions he sleeps in the Fragmentum, it's not for very long, less than an hour, and Sampo has traps he sets all around him while he sleeps sitting up with daggers in hand. Caelus finds out about this habit the hard way because he gets restless and decides to go explore (I'd like to think with the Stellaron dwelling within him, he's largely immune to any kind of Fragmentum corrosion), and he sees Sampo curled up in a corner, head down. So of course he approaches to see if he's ok, and-
A trap pops and hisses
There's a bright flash of pink
Caelus blinks
His back hits the wooden wall behind him
There's the sound of reverberating metal-on-metal right next to his ear
Caelus blinks again
...and is shocked to suddenly find that Sampo is looming over him, pinning him to the wall, one dagger sunk into the wood and the other blocked by his metal bat.
And they both just stand there for a beat, until Sampo blinks the bleariness out of his unfocused eyes, and then he yawns obnoxiously right in Caelus' face and tells him he shouldn't interrupt people's beauty sleep! How is Sampo supposed to stay so handsome otherwise!?
Caelus only notices shortly thereafter that there's a thin line of blood on his neck, and he belatedly realizes that Sampo really would have taken his head off by pure instinct if he weren't also incredibly quick with his reflexes. No wonder he's the only undergrounder surviving out in the Fragmentum; anything that approaches in his sleep thinking they have easy prey is almost instantly demolished.
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just so you know bc I don’t think enough people tell you this but every time I check your blog (a bit compulsively at this point? your compilations and opinions are very enlightening on the general psychology of those crazy motherfuckers and also the uhhhhhhhh other part) and see that you answered another ask I honestly break into the hugest grin and settle down at the next given opportunity to read the newest batssay (batsplat essay) like it’s an academic paper (it is to us sports scholars, I believe)… please never feel the need to cut short your thoughts on any subject. the longer the better! connect all the dots, bat! we are listening!!
thank youuuuu this is so sweet, I know this ask is a little older but trust whenever I get something kind in my inbox I very much read and appreciate it and it very much makes my day. and I love the term batssay. a lot
so I thought it'd be fun to do a follow up post to the casey/jorge/valentino one where I just dumped a bunch of photos with a wee bit of context... for the culture, y'know. and I'm doing this with just casey/valentino, mostly for 2007-09 but with one 2005 photo chucked in as. build-up. for flavour
we know from the #archives that the two of them did have like. a reasonably warm dynamic pre-casey's motogp debut. they'd talked... also at least one race where casey shows up to valentino's podium and chats to vale's crew chief and fellow aussie jb... I think about it often. what did it all mean
casey's first win!!! qatar 2007, very first race with ducati. he'd gotten very close to a win before - in his third ever premier class race at turkey, lost at the final chicane. casey's goals going into that first season with ducat had just been winning a few races... he notes that valentino congratulates him warmly, but reckons it's just because valentino didn't take him seriously as a threat, which. I don't think that quite stacks up with supplementary evidence from the time, but we'll allow it
one of my fave photos for a reason, idc it's sweet. I was trying to figure out when this photo was from through like, normal means of reverse image search, but then instead I had a horrifying moment of 'oh yeah I'm pretty sure I remember that specific presser backdrop is at mugello that year' and. I was right. which. god. anyway yeah mugello 2007 pre-event presser. by this point casey was 21 points clear in the championship standings
more mugello 2007!!! look at casey constantly sipping from his lil cup. this will have been after qualifying, where casey snagged pole. I'd forgotten valentino actually makes front row in qualifying because he makes a typically horrendous start. I'd also forgotten that this race is like. proper good. one of the best that year. slows down eventually but the first ten or so laps are some of the most exciting of the entire alien era
catalunya 2007, which unfortunately I also dated solely through the presser backdrop. idk I just like the vibes of this photo. anyway!! this race is ofc the one where casey won an all timer late race duel against valentino (+ dani). it is after this race that valentino said casey was, and I quote "riding like a god". a seminal moment
the championship is already extremely over by the time they get to estoril, but casey still needs to formally wrap it up: this is his first match point race. depicted here is valentino getting one of his few Ws that season. an account of this event: “valentino was playing table football in the yamaha hospitality and somebody spotted casey outside. so they invited him for a challenge. it was all good fun”
motegi 2007. valentino had managed to put off the inevitable the race before and temporarily stopped casey from sealing the title, taking his last win of the season (cool duel with dani in that one). but motegi... well honestly it's just a bit of a flop all round, nobody's bike is working the way they want it to, casey seals the title with his worst result all season of a sixth place (the horror) and in his autobiography he was kinda like 'well I was very happy but also. meh race' (I paraphrase). but really, who cares, he had his title
bit of a time skip!! after both of them have put their sketch early 2008's behind them, the pair of them had a proper fun fight at catalunya for p2. a continuation of the battle the year before with valentino once again coming from lower down the field, this time he gets the better of casey. still, things are finally looking up at ducati... and the post-catalunya test might be enough to put casey right back in title contention. the above photo is from donington, where casey confirms the progress ducati made by winning his first race of the season after the opener in qatar
still donington, both of them watching each other etc etc. valentino is in a much better place than the year before, given both casey's rough start to the season and how they're both now on the same tyres. but it's not a good sign if casey's hitting his stride... at assen, valentino makes his one mistake of the year and crashes on the first lap, remounting to finish eleventh (he still beats casey's teammate melandri). this puts dani in the championship lead - and with casey's second win in a row, he is now very much closing in
look at them chatting here!! cute imo. this is casey's third win in a row, at the rainy sachsenring. dani crashes out from a few miles in the lead - while casey had stayed sensible and brings it home for a pretty straightforward victory. valentino needed to fight his way through from further down the field and in the end he loses too much time to put any serious pressure on casey, but it's still damage limitation and he retakes the championship lead from dani (who will miss the next race due to an injury sustained in the crash). and yet, momentum really is firmly on casey's side now... and the rest of the calendar does looks like pretty casey-friendly territory. next up, they're headed to a race track where casey had won very comfortably the year before. would he seal his fourth consecutive win at laguna?
now with my sincere apologies to casey stoner, every photo that came out of laguna 2008 is objectively pretty funny. I have limited myself to a mere two podium photos, but lbr there's a full collection. casey had already rejected valentino's handshake in parc fermé - which some might have taken as a social cue to give him some space. whereas valentino, local dickhead, just will not stop yapping at casey on the podium. this is quite possibly as genuinely delighted as he gets after a race, and it's simply a beautiful contrast with casey who is not quite rude enough to actually tell valentino to shut the fuck up - but may be fantasising about pushing valentino off the podium. this, to me. is art
gather around body language experts, we need to have a conversation. this is at the pre-event presser of the race immediately after laguna, aka brno. by this point, casey's less than flattering remarks about valentino's riding at laguna had already been distributed near and far... everyone's been talking about them, people have Opinions. the captions for these photos are all something along the lines of 'stoner extends olive branch to rossi to apologise for his post-race comments after losing laguna'. now, I don't know if he literally is apologising in these actual photos - though of course he did publicly walk back his comments, saying all riders can react badly to losses and that he'd overreacted when he'd said he'd lost respect for valentino. he has since walked back his walking back, doubling down on his criticisms of valentino's comportment at laguna
still, for all the talk that the feud properly started after laguna, it's kind of fun to have the presser immediately after it showing... well, it does look like casey is actively engaging valentino in conversation, right? whether he's apologising or not - this isn't just valentino yapping at him, if anything it's the reverse. laguna had been right before the summer break, so casey had been given a month to cool off... and also be viciously criticised by the press. brutal, isn't it? it's not just the loss that sucks, it's also being excoriated by the press and fans for having the audacity to get mad over it. is all of this just him being forced into pretending to play nice to get the press to leave him alone? were there any genuine regrets over his laguna comments? what ARE the vibes between them like at this time? what story do these photos tell us
casey went on to crash out of this race from the lead, the first time he had done so in the premier class and his first dnf with ducati after their one and a half seasons together. when he crashed, he'd had a fairly comfortable lead over valentino - though valentino was steadily closing in, and the commentators were already rubbing their hands in anticipation of another laguna
the next race is at misano - and casey is struggling with an old hand injury, see the bandages in the photo. the previous year had been the first time valentino had gotten the chance to race at this circuit, so close to his home... but he'd suffered a mechanical dnf, not his first or last in a frustrating season. this year, everything is different - and casey once again crashes out of the lead as valentino takes victory in front of his worshipful home fans
another trip to america, this time for indy: their first time racing at the track. after the double whammy of brno and misano, casey's title charge is essentially over... but you never know, right? indy kinda gives off the vibe of being a good casey track
in the end, the race is extremely wet and very, very windy and is eventually red-flagged. because of how many laps they still have to go, it is initially unclear whether they would restart... at which point first valentino (who was leading), then casey (in fourth) go to dorna ceo ezpeleta to tell him they have less than zero interest in going out in that weather again. a beautiful moment of solidarity - long live the power of unionising, capable of overcoming even the bitterest of feuds. blast the internationale over the footage, I've seen enough. the race is called off and valentino wins his fourth consecutive race
by the time they get to phillip island, valentino has already won the title, courtesy of his fifth consecutive win at motegi - the same circuit casey had won the title at the year before and the home race of valentino's old enemies at honda. a couple of nice photos of jorge congratulating his teammate and casey spraying vale with champagne here. casey, known phillip island goat, would of course finally end valentino's win streak at that circuit, which is where the photos are from. idk they're fun to me, like this is still not that long after laguna. I'm aware being able to chat normally with your coworkers and share a smile with them isn't normally that high a bar, but canonically valentino has been known to completely blank some of his rivals. it's not like casey is particularly cold towards valentino either, eh
case in point. this is from sepang 2008. #TheEstablishment does not want you to know casey and valentino canonically still regularly yapped in pressers post laguna. they won't silence me. sepang was valentino's last win of this season, after a good scrap with dani - and the season is rounded off with a casey victory at valencia
jerez 2009, where valentino gets past casey with a block pass at the final corner on his way to victory. unlike in 2005, he actually manages to not barrel into his rival. this is just a fantastic photo... I don't even have much to say about it. a+ vibes
a lot of the photos from this season were already included in the jorge/valentino/casey post, which reflects how casey wasn't consistently a factor in the same way the other two were. this one's from assen, the race right after catalunya when all three of them were tied on 106 points. very good side eye here, excellent job casey. unfortunately, casey is now in mystery illness territory - and he can't really compete with the two frontrunners in this stretch of the season
this is the first race after casey's return to competition - valentino goes up to casey after qualifying at estoril to congratulate him for his front row grid position. casey would win an early race scrap with valentino in the race itself, eventually finishing second behind jorge and swiftly silencing all the people who had declared him mentally weak and done for in his absence. a race that brought back suspense to that year's championship
phillip island 2009, another important moment in the canon where I've limited myself to just the one photo. casey wins just his second race back - and he also hugs vale pretty warmly in parc fermé. jorge was kind enough to crash in the opening lap, meaning valentino can very much be pleased with a second place here
and at sepang, valentino seals the title, while casey wins another race. casey ended up crashing in the warm-up lap of valencia, apparently due to an issue with the tyre warming? just kinda... the general vibe of his 2009, really. valentino closes off the season with another podium at his least favourite track, while dani takes the win
anyway after that they spent three years getting into increasingly. dumb arguments. like. so dumb. by the end of 2012 you feel you're killing your brain cells by even engaging with this stuff. it's beyond undignified. there's zero competitive justification, but they just couldn't shut up about each other. that being said, they're still capable of doing a small talk with each other even during the dark years, so that's something. maybe one day they'll finally be able to get that dinner and talk about all the good times
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when people bring up the racism, homophobia, transphobia, romanticization of domestic abuse / rape / pedophilia / incest, literal actual written porn of literal actual real life flesh and blood children, et cetera et cetera on archive of our own, one of the ao3 stannies’ main defenses is “you can just filter out the tags if you don’t want to see that!” when that defense has no fucking legs to stand on.
ao3 is not an archive, it is barely even a website: a rant <3 (very long)
ignoring the fact that it’s a problem that all of that is permitted on the site in the first place (i guess child porn and racism are fine, and the people who allow it on their platform are fine, as long as i, personally, do not see it), that defense literally means nothing. it’s assuming that every little thing on ao3 is tagged properly and it absolutely is not, and if you think it is you are dumber than rocks. i mean for fuck’s sake, just touching on archive warnings and not tags, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is literally a valid option for fic authors to use when it should fucking not be.
if someone is a freak who thinks that pedo shit is hot, they might not tag it as “rape” (archive warnings OR tags). i’ve literally seen underage father/son rape porn with no trigger warning tags but “child abuse if you squint”. IF YOU SQUINT. if someone thinks that domestic abuse is actually cool and sexy when attractive people do it, they might not tag it as “abuse”. if someone is a freak who likes incest, but bends over backwards to justify it by only shipping adopted family members, then they tell themselves that they don’t view it as incest, and might not tag it as “incest”. if someone is a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, et cetera and they wrote bigotry into their fic (or else wrote a deliberate troll fic to trigger people on purpose), do you really think they’re going to tag it as racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera? and some people get kicks out of writing purposefully triggering content and either leaving it untagged or mistagging it so that people will read it unsuspectingly.
even for just general content tags, it’s a mess. people just forget to tag things all the time. people deliberately won’t tag the endgame ship of their fic because “it’s a spoiler heehee”. people use the romantic or sexual “x / y” tag instead of the platonic or otherwise “x & y” tag, sometimes by mistake sometimes on purpose. it’s a joked about issue how people will tag characters or ships that appear in their fic for two sentences.
there’s no standardization of tags, which is a pretty obvious problem. what first comes to mind is the “dead dove: do not eat” tag which should just not be a tag at all because it just has no meaning. depending on the individual fic writer using it, it could mean anything from “literally the most sickening and depraved thing you’ve ever read in your life” to “horror w/ gore”. but it applies to other vague tags too - different fic writers will have different ideas of what the tag means.
in addition to that, what is and isn’t made a filterable tag, what tags are made synonymous, et cetera, is entirely up to the whims of the site staff. as an example, if you’re trying to look for fanfiction of a singular animated disney movie, the infinite crossovers with other disney movies will not actually be counted as crossovers (which they are) because they’re classified as the “disney theatrical animated universe” (which isn’t a fucking thing), so you can’t filter them out the “exclude crossovers” way. if you try to filter out the fandom tag “disney theatrical animated universe”, it’ll show up with zero fics because that tag is synonymous with every disney animated film (regardless of if the fic author actually used the tag “disney theatrical animated universe” or not), thus also filtering out the one you actually wanted to find.
and do not get me fucking started on the “all media types tags”, which also just shouldn’t be a thing because it makes it fucking impossible to find the specific fics you’re looking for. some people use it in place of tagging a specific canon / adaptation when their fic very clearly draws from one specific canon / adaptation, and you can’t filter it out because it’s synonymous with every fandom tag under its umbrella.
as an example of the issues of both the “all media types” tag and mistagging in general: as a fan of the witcher books, it used to be a fucking ordeal to find fanfiction specifically for the books (post netflix show release). some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag their fics with the book fandom tag in addition to (or even in place of!!) the show fandom tag when their fics were unquestionably show-specific, meaning i could not simply search only in the book fandom tag. i could not simply filter out the show tag, because some show fans would, for whatever reason, tag as fucking “all media types”, when their fics were unquestionably show-specific. and alas, i could not filter out “all media types” and the show tag, so that i see only those fics which have been deliberately and exclusively tagged as the book, not only because as mentioned some show fans would tag their show fics with only the book tag, but also because the fucking all media types tag filters out the book tag as well, leaving me with zero fucking fics REGARDLESS of if the author actually used the “all media types” tag. now, thankfully, i’ve thankfully seen this issue in this specific fandom lessen, but it still occurs in other fandoms and i guarantee that it didn’t lessen in the witcher fandom because of any fixing of the site on the part of ao3 staff.
another common defense of ao3 freaks is that it’s an “archive”, and therefore can’t get rid of anything anyone posts, and disregarding the fact that that is not how archives fucking work, they don’t just allow anything and also ao3 DOES get rid of fics... when they say that they don’t like proshippers, apparently, archives have... you know... archivists. they have someone or a team of someones making sure that everything in the archive is *properly fucking categorized*. they have someone or multiple someones making sure that everything they recieve (1) belongs there and (2) is properly labeled and organized. same for libraries. meaning that if ao3 really were an archive and not a sub par fanfiction website, they’d have something like that in place. something as simple as a report button for fics with a review team that will see if something’s been mis- or untagged. they’d have some kind of standardization of tags (especially the warning / trigger tags) and have proper tagging enforced in some way. and then they could also do something like stop being spineless racists, queerphobes, and pedos have the barest minimum of content guidelines saying that you can’t post fucking hate speech.
if something is mistagged or untagged, the most you can do is leave a comment politely asking that the author fix the issue, and then hope and pray that they do that. and if that person thinks [insert form of abuse] is hot, or if they’re just straight up a bigot that wrote bigotry into their fics to be bigoted, or they’re a troll that gets kick out of deliberately traumatizing people by tricking them into reading their mis/untagged fics, they might not! AND if you see a major tagging issue on an orphaned work, or a work that has an inactive author / hasn’t been updated in forever, good fucking luck getting even a negative response.
you can’t permanently block tags (i mean even tumblr.hell has that), meaning that if you would like to search for fic without coming across something troubling, triggering, or just something you don’t like, you have to either (1) do a work around by having a bookmarked link for every fandom you’re in or every character you like with all of your tags already blocked, (2) download browser extensions that do the work for ao3 because they can’t be bothered themselves, or (3) input every individual tag every time you search ao3 and don’t forget that all of those options only fucking work at all when everything is tagged properly, and we’ve already established its not. you also can’t actually block people (you can only prevent them from commenting) meaning that if there’s a specific person you’d like to stay away from your fics or a specific fic author that you don’t like and would like to stop seeing their fics clogging up the tag, you’re out of luck (though for the latter you could insert “-[username]” into the “search within results” box, but then uh oh we’re right back around to having to input that every time or have a bookmark)
their archive warning system is shit. first of all it’s functionally useless because, as mentioned, “creator chose not to use archive warnings” is an option. what’s the fucking point of special required archive warnings if you’re going to allow people to opt out anyway. second of all, aside from “chose not to use warnings” and “no warnings apply”, the only warnings are “major character death”, “graphic depictions of violence”, “rape/non-con”, and “underage”. disregarding the fact that they shouldn’t be allowing porn of underage characters in the first place (but i’m talking to a brick wall on that issue) and that “non-con” (and “dub-con”) as terminology needs to die, it’s just fucking rape lets not use weasel words... this is a paltry list of possible warnings. there’s no official warnings for depictions of: domestic abuse, animal abuse, depictions of racism / homophobia / transphobia / et cetera, suicide, self harm, et cetera et cetera. and we return to the issue of standardization of tags. in your required archive warnings at very least, there should be a standardization of what these mean, but ao3′s own faq is just like “ehh... you decide. we’ll leave it up to you”. what qualifies as graphic depictions of violence? two people may write the same level of violence, but qualify “graphic” differently, and make different decisions regarding their warnings. and we also return to the issue of: if a freak doesn’t see something that is clearly rape as rape, they might not tag it as such.
this website gets a disgustingly large amount of money every year that it doesn’t fucking do anything with. it’s been over a decade and they’re still in fucking beta. features that would actually be useful, like an actual block system, don’t exist. they technically have a report system for abuse and harassment and such, but apparently what they qualify as abuse and harassment is fickle. ao3 defenders seem to be very proud of the legal work they do for fandom / fanfic authors, but they set aside a very small amount of the money they get every year for legal advocacy, and they actually use even less of that, because it’s not the early 2000s “anne rice hates fanfiction” era anymore - you aren’t going to get fucking sued for writing fanfiction in the first place. based on their own self-reported yearly cost of upkeep, they literally already have enough money to run the site as they are now for the next twenty years.
once again: ao3 is not an archive. it is not a library. it is barely a even a website.
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