#which is completely irrelevant to the plot

[fishylife]

i haven't watched this movie so i'm just commenting on the discussion of standalone media vs larger universes. hope that's okay >.<

i would be fine if my favourite movies were standalone. for some movies, the environment is simply to support the story. if the story is about overcoming fears and slaying dragons, and the character successfully slays the dragon at the end of the movie, what is the point of another movie? this is a very plot-centric take on watching stuff, because in this case, the characters and setting are all just vehicles to advance the story.

the 'somehow palpatine returned' thing is an example. palpatine was defeated, why was he resurrected for a new story? that just invalidates the previous story and all of the work that was done to get rid of him the first time.

for some movies, the environment is the draw. i assume kpdh is like that. presumably there's demon fighting and all that fun and exciting stuff. these environments usually make for good tv shows or video games because there's a lot to explore. so in these cases i understand wanting a sequel. still, my opinion will probably depend on what happened in the first movie. if the first movie ended on a satisfying note, there's no need to reopen old wounds unless there's a good reason. so i think the sequel has to be removed enough that it doesn't uproot the satisfying conclusion of the first movie. i think that's why adventure or mystery movies are more suited for sequels. you can have multiple adventures or mysteries that have no relation to each other and also don't necessarily affect the characters' own personal development if that makes sense. (if a character already learned a lesson in the first movie there's no point in them relearning it in the second one). unless a movie was originally planned to be a duology/trilogy/quadrology in which the writer has carefully planned the story so that each movie is an important part of the complete story.

studios don't want standalone movies because they need to monetize everything. if there's an interesting enough universe, they want to monetize it. gone are the days of directors making a single movie and moving on. if inception was made today by a different studio i could see people wanting a million sequels afterwards.

for some writers/directors, they've created the world and they've written the story, and now they want to explore something else. i see this approach a lot with short story writers. they explore a gimmick in an environment, they write about it, and then they're ready to move on and explore another.

studios are worried no one will watch their new movie/show so they put it in a preexisting universe so that as a fallback they'll have fans of that universe, even if the story has no reason to be put in that universe. (we had some odd superhero mashup tv shows in recent years) similarly with many adaptations of popular books, studios think they'll at least get the book fans to watch the movie.

but it feels so unnecessary when they add other references/fanservice to it that have nothing to do with the story. again if the story is about a knight overcoming fears and slaying the dragon, why should i care about the king? the king who has their own story where they're the hero, but are irrelevant in the knight's story. they're just there for fanservice but add nothing to the knight's story. it makes me feel like the studio is being lazy. a cameo of the king doesn't make your knight story good, if the original knight story is still bad.

there's also the risk of studios nowadays stretching things out so long that i lose any love i had for it. things don't need to go on forever. again, that's why i appreciate media that starts and ends. the writers had a story in mind, they executed on it, and it's done. it doesn't need to be beaten to death. if the story is good, if the setting is interesting, i'll be thinking and daydreaming about it. i don't need a studio to make a sequel to do my daydreaming for me, especially if it's just going to make a less good version of the first one. (i do feel we're living in the era of a lot of not-good sequels unfortunately...)

so I see people praising KPDH for being an original property and not a rehash of existing stuff

Does that mean you'd be fine if there were never any other movies or media in that universe? Can you genuinely allow something to be stand-alone?

because we all know the studios don't want that, and a lot of fans don't, either

(I'm not judging—I got to the point long ago where I admitted that I don't really care about watching stuff*, so how much is original and how much is rehash doesn't make any difference to me, but I am genuinely curious how people who do frequently engage with media want to trade the novelty of a new story/experience with the familiarity of beloved characters/universes) (*I'm GenX, so the idea of not watching stuff, but in a way that still accepts that it has merits, and does not look down on it in a snobbish way, is not part of how I grew up)

[egophiliac]

So.... what are your thoughts on Ace's UM, if you haven't been asked this already?

sneaky magic for the sneakiest boy

no but really, I think it fits him really well! I had thought his UM would probably involve something kinda sleight-of-handy or pickpockety! and I looooved that it made such a nice loop-around back to episode 1. ❤️ I was. kind of half-expecting him to just run out and punch Riddle in the nose again. but instead this time 'twas he who offed the queen's head! it was great! and he did it while stone-cold terrified out of his mind! because Ace is the only remotely normal or well-adjusted person at NRC and therefore the only one who is like "we're going to literally die, this is super effed up". but he did it anyway!!!! I AM SO PROUD

[vulpinesaint]

kind of unfortunate that so many fantasy epics are also war novels because i will be honest i just do not like war novels that much... the grand clashing of forces is compelling obviously but it requires characters to talk about so much practical battle strategy and while i can get my brain to comprehend all these fantasy maps and kingdoms and borders and battalions and front lines and army movements it takes up. so much space in the book. feels like i'm fighting a war of my own trying to get through it sometimes

[mysterywriter2187]

Dean's attempts to dismiss criticism for separating Nani and Lilo has a lot of bullshit and ignorant logic to it, but this particular explanation is by far the stupidest.

Nani having no remaining family or trusted neighbours or friends to take Lilo in wasn't a plot hole for the remake to fix. It's the whole fucking reason there's even a conflict about Lilo's custody in the first place.

In the original film, the threat of Cobra possibly taking Lilo away and putting her in the foster system isn't just Nani being sad and sentimental that she can't see her sister anymore (like the remake implies).

It's the very real danger of a vulnerable (and heavily autistic-coded) indigenous little girl being sent against her will to live with complete strangers, who may not understand or accept her individuality, abuse her or God knows what else. And neither Nani or Lilo herself have any say in the matter.

If Nani did have a close friend, neighbour or even another relative that could look after Lilo on behalf, that would have been the first option well before Cobra and child services ever got involved. Which is exactly why the original film includes no such character.

Which is where the issue of Tūtū and the new ending in the remake comes in.

If Tūtū is able to talk to the social worker at the last minute and arrange to become Lilo's guardian, then it can only mean that was able to do so the entire time, yet she inexplicably chose not to, even when knowing full-well what was at stake and seeing for herself how the sisters were struggling. And from Nani's evident surprise in the ending, Tūtū clearly never even entertained this idea to her at any point before springing it on her here.

Even worse, since Nani has been forced to surrender Lilo to the state, rather than giving her custody to Tūtū directly, the state now has full freedom to change their minds and send her where and whenever they want, and neither Nani nor Tūtū would have the power to do anything about it.

Which, again, wouldn't have been an issue if this really nice, caring and loving neighbour, who is definitely a good character that we should like and root for, had stepped in for Lilo and Nani as soon as their parents died. But because the rest of the plot still has to follow the original (despite her presence radically changing the circumstances) she just… didn't do that. So now this new solution is too little, too late, and the film ends with virtually nothing changing for Nani and Lilo's dilemma compared to the start of the film.

Nani surrendering Lilo to the state is already a horrible ending regardless of who she goes to, but the very existence of Tūtū as a character actively undermines the rest of the story, and it ironically creates a major plot hole where they were trying to amend a non-existent one.

Oh, and by the way, Dean. Y'know the whole thing about how an auntie or uncle could have stepped in to help the sisters?

They did get an auntie and uncle in the original, but you made one of them irrelevant and you made the other one the villain for no reason!

[weaselandfriends]

Ender's Game (novel)

Is Ender Wiggin (pictured above as the little brother from Malcolm in the Middle) guilty of xenocide?

Actually, let's first answer a different, but related, question:

What game does the title "Ender's Game" refer to?

It's not as simple a question as it seems. There are three games that have a prominent role in the plot, all very different from one another.

The obvious answer is the Battle School zero-gravity game, where teams of competitors play glorified laser tag in a big empty cube. In terms of page count, most of the book is dedicated to this game. It's also the game depicted on the cover of the edition above.

Yet this game vanishes during the story's climax, when Ender is given a new game to play, a game he is told is a simulator of spaceship warfare. This "game" turns out to not be a game at all, though; after annihilating the alien homeworld in the final stage, Ender learns that he was actually commanding real ships against real enemies the whole time, and that he just singlehandedly ended the Human-Bugger war forever via total xenocide of the aliens. This is both the final game and the most consequential to the plot, despite the short amount of time it appears.

There's also a third game, a single-player video game Ender plays throughout the story. The game is procedurally generated by an AI to respond to the player's emotional state, and is used as a psychiatric diagnostic for the players. Of the three games, this is the one that probes deepest into Ender's psyche, that most defines him as a person; it's also the final image of the story, as the aliens build a facsimile of its world in reality after psychically reading Ender's mind while he xenocides them.

Because all three games are important, the easiest answer might be that the question doesn't matter, that the story is called Ender's Game not to propose this question at all but simply because the technically more accurate "Ender's Games" would improperly suggest a story about a serial prankster.

Fine. But why does the title use the possessive "Ender's" at all?

He does not own any of these games. He did not create them. He does not facilitate them. All of these games, even the simulator game, predate his use of them as a player, were not designed with him in mind, were intended to train and assess potential commanders for, ostensibly, the hundred years since the last Human-Bugger war.

It's in this question that we get to the crux of what defines Gamer literature.

These games are Ender's games because he dominates them into being about him. He enters a rigidly-defined, rules-based system, and excels so completely that the games warp around his presence. In the Battle School game, the administrators stack the odds against Ender, thereby rendering every other player's presence in the game irrelevant except in their function as challenges for Ender to overcome. The administrators acknowledge this in an argument among themselves:

"The game will be compromised. The comparative standings will become meaningless." [...] "You're getting too close to the game, Anderson. You're forgetting that it is merely a training exercise." "It's also status, identity, purpose, name; all that makes these children who they are comes out of this game. When it becomes known that the game can be manipulated, weighted, cheated, it will undo this whole school. I'm not exaggerating." "I know." "So I hope Ender Wiggin truly is the one, because you'll have degraded the effectiveness of our training method for a long time to come."

In this argument, Anderson views the game the way games have been viewed since antiquity: exercises in acquiring honor and status. This honor is based on the innate fairness inherent to games as rule-based systems, which is why in ancient depictions of sport the chief character is often not a competitor but the host, who acts as referee. In Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, the hero Aeneas hosts a series of funeral games (the games themselves intended as an honor for his dead father). Despite being the principal character of the epic, Aeneas does not compete in these games. Instead, he doles out prizes to each competitor based on the worthiness they display; his fairness marks him symbolically as a wise ruler. The Arthurian tournament is another example, where Arthur as host is the principal character, and the knights (Lancelot, Tristan, etc.) who compete do so primarily to receive honors from him or his queen.

In Ender's Game, it is the antagonistic figure Bonzo Madrid who embodies this classical concept of honor; the word defines him, is repeated constantly ("his Spanish honor"), drives his blistering hatred of Ender, who receives both unfair boons and unfair banes from the game's administrators, who skirts the rules of what is allowed to secure victory. Bonzo is depicted as a stupid, bull-like figure; his honor is ultimately worthless, trivially manipulated by Ender in their final fight.

Meanwhile, it's Ender's disregard for honor, his focus solely on his namesake -- ending, finishing the game, the ends before the means -- that makes him so valuable within the scope of the story. He is "the one," as Anderson puts it, the solipsistically important Gamer, the Only I Play the Game-r, because the game now matters in and of itself, rather than as a social activity. In the Aeneid and in Arthur, the competitors are soldiers, for whom there is a world outside the game. Their games are not a substitute for war but a reprieve from it, and as such they are an activity meant to hold together the unifying fabric of society. The values Anderson espouses (status, identity, purpose, name) are fundamentally more important in this social framework than winning (ending) is.

Ender's game, as the Goosebumps-style blurb on my 20-year-old book fair edition's cover proclaims, is not just a game anymore. Its competitors are also soldiers, but the game is meant to prepare them for war; the spaceship video game is actual war. And as this is a war for the survival of the human race, as Ender is told, there is no need for honor. The othered enemy must be annihilated, without remorse or mercy.

This ethos of the game as fundamentally important for its own sake pervades Gamer literature beyond Ender's Game. In Sword Art Online (which I wrote an essay on here), dying in the game is dying in real life, and as such, only Kirito's ability to beat the game matters. Like Ender, Kirito is immediately disdained by his fellow players as a "cheater" (oh sorry, I mean a "beater") because he possesses inherent advantages due to being a beta player. In an actual game, a game that is only a game, Kirito's cheat powers would render the game pointless. What purpose does Kirito winning serve if he does it with Dual Wielding, an overpowered skill that only he is allowed to have? But when a game has real stakes, when only ability to win matters, it is possible to disregard fairness and see the cheater as heroic.

This notion of the "cheat power," a unique and overpowered ability only the protagonist has, is pervasive in post-SAO Gamer literature. To those for whom games are simply games, such powers can only be infuriating and obnoxious betrayals of the purpose of games; to those for whom games mean more than just games, for whom games have a primacy of importance, these powers are all that matter.

That's the core conceit of Gamer literature: the idea that the Game is life, that winning is, in fact, everything.

What sets Ender's Game apart from Sword Art Online is that it creates the inverted world where the Game matters above all, but then draws back the curtain to reveal the inversion. The Buggers are, in fact, no longer hostile. They are not planning to invade Earth again, as Ender has been told his entire life. The war, for them, is entirely defensive, and Ender is the aggressor. And due to Ender's singleminded focus on Ending, on winning, on disregarding honor and fairness, he ultimately commits the xenocide, erases an entire sentient species from existence. He wins a game he should never have been playing.

The obvious counterargument, the one I imagine everyone who has read this book thought up the moment I posed the question at the beginning of this essay, is that Ender did not know he was committing xenocide. The fact that the combat simulator game was not a game was withheld from him until afterward. Plus, he was a child.

Salient arguments all. Ones the book itself makes, via Ender's commander, Graff, to absolve him of sin at the end. They're probably even correct, in a legal sense (I'm not a legal scholar, don't quote me), and in a moral sense. In real life, it would be difficult to blame a 10-year-old in those circumstances for what he did. But in the thematic framework of Ender's Game the book, these arguments are completely inadequate.

Ender has been playing a fourth game the entire story. And this is the only game he doesn't win.

A game is defined by its system of control and limitation over the behavior of the players. A game has rules. His whole life, Ender has been playing within the rules of the system of control his military commanders place upon him.

Their control extends even before he was born; as a third child in a draconian two-child-only world, his existence is at the behest of the government. Graff confirms this to Ender's parents when he recruits him to Battle School: "Of course we already have your consent, granted in writing at the time conception was confirmed, or he could not have been born. He has been ours since then, if he qualified." Graff frames this control utterly, in terms of possession: "he has been ours." He does not exaggerate. Since Ender was young, he has had a "monitor" implanted in his body so the army could observe him at all times, assess whether he "qualifies"; even the brief moment the monitor is removed is a test. "The final step in your testing was to see what would happen when the monitor came off," Graff explains after Ender passes the test by murdering a 6-year-old. Conditions are set up for Ender, similar to the unfair challenges established in the Battle School game; he is isolated from his peers, denied practice sessions, held in solitary confinement on a remote planetoid. It's all in service of assessing Ender as "the one."

Ender wins this game in the sense that he does, ultimately, become "the one" -- the one Graff and the other military men want, the xenocider of the Buggers. He fails this game in the sense that he does not break it.

The other three games Ender plays, he breaks. Usually by cheating. In the single-player psychiatry game, when presented with a deliberately impossible challenge where a giant gives him two glasses to pick between, Ender cheats and kills the giant. "Cheater, cheater!" the dying giant shouts. In the Battle School game, Ender is ultimately confronted by insurmountable odds: 2 armies against his 1. He cannot outgun his opponent, so he cheats by using most of his troops as a distraction so five soldiers can sneak through the enemy's gate, ending the game. At the school, going through the gate is traditionally seen as a mere formality, something done ceremonially once the enemy team is wiped out (there's that honor again, that ceremony), but it technically causes a win. Even Anderson, the game's administrator, sees this as a breach of the rules when Ender confronts him afterward.

Ender was smiling. "I beat you again, sir," he said. "Nonsense, Ender," Anderson said softly. "Your battle was with Griffin and Tiger." "How stupid do you think I am?" Ender said. Loudly, Anderson said, "After that little maneuver, the rules are being revised to require that all of the enemy's soldiers must be frozen or disabled before the gate can be reversed."

(I include the first part of that quote to indicate that Ender all along knows who he is really playing this game against -- the administrators, the military men who control every facet of his life.)

Ender beats the war simulator game in a similar fashion. Outnumbered this time 1000-to-1, he uses his soldiers as sacrifices to sneak a single bomb onto the alien's homeworld, destroying it and committing his xenocide. Ender himself sees this maneuver as breaking the rules, and in fact falsely believes that if he breaks the rules he will be disqualified, set free from the fourth game: "If I break this rule, they'll never let me be a commander. It would be too dangerous. I'll never have to play a game again. And that is victory." The flaw in his logic comes not from whether he's breaking the rules of the game, but which game he is breaking the rules of. It's not the fourth game, Ender's game, but the war simulator game, simply a sub-game within the confines of the fourth game, a sub-game the fourth game's administrators want him to break, a sub-game that gives Ender the illusion of control by breaking. When Ender tells his administrators about his plan, the response he receives almost taunts him to do it:

"Does the Little Doctor work against a planet?" Mazer's face went rigid. "Ender, the buggers never deliberately attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals."

(And if it wasn't clear how much the administrators wanted him to do this all along, the moment he does it, they flood the room with cheers.)

Ender wins his games by cheating -- by fighting the rules of the game itself -- and yet he never cheats at the fourth game, the game of his life.

In this fourth game, he always plays by the rules.

In the inverted world of Gamer lit, where games define everything, including life and death, it's a common, even natural progression for the Gamer to finally confront the game's administrator. Sword Art Online ends when Kirito defeats Akihiko Kayaba, the developer. In doing so, Kirito exceeds the confines of the game, not simply by ignoring its rules and coming back to life after he's killed, but by demonstrating mastery against the game's God. Afterward, Sword Art Online truly becomes Kirito's Game, with nobody else able to lay claim to the possessive. Kirito demonstrates this control at the end of the anime by recreating Sword Art Online's world using its source code, completing the transition into a player-administrator.

(Though I wonder, how much of a class reading could one give to this new brand of Gamer lit? If classical games were told from the perspective of the one who controlled them, then is there not something innately anti-establishment in Kirito overcoming the controller? This is the gist of many other death game stories, like The Hunger Games, though none of them may be the most sophisticated takes on the subject, more empty fantasy than anything else.)

Ender never fights or defeats his administrators. He never even tries, other than rare periods of depressive inactivity. He doesn't try even though the option is proposed to him by Dink Meeker, an older student whom Ender respects:

"I'm not going to let the bastards run me, Ender. They've got you pegged, too, and they don't plan to treat you kindly. Look what they've done to you so far." "They haven't done anything except promote me." "And she make you life so easy, neh?" Ender laughed and shook his head. "So maybe you're right." "They think they got you on ice. Don't let them." "But that's what I came for," Ender said. "For them to make me into a tool."

Instead, Ender finds comfort in the control exerted on his life. When sent to Earth on leave, he seeks out a lake that reminds him of living in Battle School.

"I spend a lot of time on the water. When I'm swimming, it's like being weightless. I miss being weightless. Also, when I'm here on the lake, the land slopes up in every direction." "Like living in a bowl." "I've lived in a bowl for four years."

Because of this, Ender never cheats against Graff. He could; Graff states several times that Ender is smarter than him, and the fact that they have Ender fighting the war instead of Graff is proof he believes it. But Ender never considers it. He never considers gaming the system of his life.

If Gamer literature emphasizes the inversion of the world order, where games supersede reality in importance (and, as in Sword Art Online, only through this inverted order is one able to claim real power by being a Gamer), then Ender's Game acknowledges both sides of the inversion. For Ender, the games he plays are not simply games anymore. The psychology game, the Battle School game, the war simulator game; all of these he must win at all costs, even if it requires disrespecting the foundational purpose of these games. But his real life? Ender wants that to be a game, craves it to be a game, can't live unless the walls slope up around him like a bowl, can't stand it unless there is a system of control around him. He does what Graff tells him, even though he recognizes immediately that Graff is not his friend, that Graff is the one isolating him from others, rigging things against him. He does what Graff tells him all the way up to and including xenocide, because Ender cannot tell game from real life. That's the core deception at the end: Ender is playing a game that's actually real and he doesn't know it -- or refuses to acknowledge it, since nobody has ever tricked the genius Ender before this point.

Actually, that's not true. They tricked him twice before. Ender twice attacks his peers physically, with brutal violence. The administrators conceal from him that he murdered both his foes; he simply thinks he hurt them. The only way to trick Ender is to do so in a way that insulates him from the consequences of his actions. The only way he will allow himself to be tricked.

So, is Ender guilty of xenocide?

Under it all, Ender believes he is.

The dying Buggers, after reading Ender's mind, recreate the psychology game in the real world. The story ends when Ender finds this recreation, yet another blurring of the lines between game and reality.

The psychology game is different from the other games Ender plays, because nobody expects him to win it. Its purpose is not to be won, simply to assess his mental health. Yet Ender approaches it like the other games, cheats at it and systematically kills all his enemies until he reaches a place called The End of the World. (Another End for Ender.) His drive to win, to dominate, does not come solely from the pressures of the system around him, but from deep within himself, which is what Ender fears the most. But it is here, at The End of the World, where Ender finds atonement, both in the game and in the game-made-real. In the game, he kisses his opponent instead of killing them, and reaches a resolution he is happy with. He stops playing the game after doing this, though the game seems to continue (when an administrator asks him why he stopped playing it, he says "I beat it"; the administrator tells him the game cannot be beaten). It is through this act of love that Ender can escape the game-like system of control that puppeteers him no matter how smart and clever he is or thinks he is.

In the game-made-real, Ender finds his atonement in the same place, The End of the World. The Buggers left for him here, in this place that they (reading his mind) understood as the location of his mercy and compassion, an egg that can repopulate their species. Through this egg, Ender is given the chance to undo his xenocide. But that chance is also contingent on what The End of the World means to Ender, an end to the game, not simply the games he plays but the fourth game, the game of his life. Ender's Game.

[dreamersparacosm]

i want jealous jungkook too...but do you know who i want him to be jealous of? BAM. I WANT OC AND BAM I WANT THEM

tpod!jungkook would absolutely be jealous of a dog. like he already fought to have you, now he has to fight with his own dog?? what kind of world is this?

the price of desire — epilogue blurb 1!

prompt ; in which jungkook’s biggest competition isn’t a man, but his own doberman.

warnings ; none!

Here’s the thing about Jeon Jungkook: when you’re in Korea, he simply forgets how to function like a normal human being.

Sure, he could go to rehearsals. He could hang out with the boys, lift heavy things at the gym, play with Bam at the dog park until one of them drops dead from exhaustion. He could — and does — have a life outside of you.

But unfortunately, that’s impossible to uphold currently. Because Jungkook, in all his stubbornness, has decided that when you are in Korea, you are his life.

So he waits, with the particular blend of patience and agitation that only the hopelessly devoted can manage.

He waits while you sit through endless meetings in the Seoul office where he assumes you're probably reshaping the course of fashion history. Meanwhile, he — professional idol, household name, literal global phenomenon — spends his entire afternoon fluttering around the house like an overgrown golden retriever preparing for your arrival back.

When you finally do appear, hours later than you promised (”just a quick check-in meeting,” you said, like a liar), he’s orchestrated the perfect welcome. There’s even some of your candles lit that you got from the market the other afternoon.

He made sure to put on that stupid grey hoodie you once said you liked, the one that makes him look especially ‘boyfriend-coded’ which is insane because he is your boyfriend, but whatever, he’s trying to a better man for you.

There he stands in the entryway as your keys jiggle in the lock, heart metaphorically cupped in his hands like an anxious teenager, waiting for the moment your eyes find him after a day at work.

The door swings open with comedic timing.

You enter, still clad in your professional clothes, designer bag hanging from your shoulder. Your gaze performs a quick sweep of the space, a radar searching for something that’s not him.

Somehow, impossibly, you miss the tall international superstar practically vibrating with anticipation directly in your line of sight.

It’s too late; your attention has already locked, with laser-guided precision, onto what is apparently the actual love of your life.

"Bam!" You gasp, the name ripping from your throat with the same intensity usually reserved for reunion scenes in war movies. His dog doesn’t fight it, just wags his tail and pants excitedly when he realizes you’re home.

Just like that, Jungkook experiences the unique displeasure of watching himself become irrelevant.

He stands, a bewildered expression on his face, as you drop your bag, drop your coat, drop your body at Bam’s unsuspecting feet. Within seconds, you've transformed from fashion industry powerhouse to someone talkimg in a baby voice to a dog on his entryway floor. “Oh my god, Look at you, you handsome boy! Did you miss me? I missed you so much, mwah!”

You're now kissing the dog. Not polite little pecks, but full-on, emotionally-invested mouth kisses, as if you've spent your entire day in meetings plotting how to most effectively transfer your affection to this four-legged creature while breaking his owner's heart.

Jungkook watches this betrayal unfold, holding a spatula, like he’s someone who's just realized he's accidentally enrolled in the world's most elaborate third-wheel masterclass.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

He clears his throat once.

Nothing.

He shifts his weight to his other foot.

Still… nothing. No passing glance.

Sprawled on his floor in complete surrender, you’re essentially involved in an impromptu romance with his pet. Jungkook — who has spent the last three hours committing culinary crimes against rice and desperately channeling his mother's cooking spirit — stands frozen.

It’s fine. Completely fine. Absolutely, one hundred percent acceptable.

Except for the tiny detail that he’s mentally drafting adoption papers for Bam.

He clears his throat again, louder this time and pointedly.

Finally, as if emerging from a trance, you glance up. “Hi, baby," You chirp, lips puckering in his direction, clearly expecting him to bridge the gap.

As if he's some lovesick sitcom husband whose entire world revolves around whatever affection you decide to toss his way. (Which…alright. Maybe he is. But acknowledging that would undermine his current position.)

Jungkook stares back at you, arms crossed, mouth pressed into a flat line.

Your eyebrows furrow, lips still suspended mid-pucker. When his statue holds firm, you slowly lower your mouth into a frown.

"...Hello?" You venture from your position on the floor, blinking up at him.

"Hi," He returns.

You narrow your eyes into little slits, hands still rubbing Bam’s head. "Come here."

"No."

"Why?"

"You kissed the dog," He announces petulantly.

You blink again. And then, because you are exactly the kind of woman who built a million-dollar career off smelling blood in the water, you grin.

“Oh my god,” you say, already laughing. “Are you—?”

You dramatically disengage from Bam, remaining on your knees but pressing both hands to your chest in a theatrical gesture. “Are you jealous? Of Bam?"

Jungkook's jaw flexes. He glares at some fascinating invisible point approximately six inches to the left of your head.

“I'm not jealous," He mutters, hands clasped behind his back as he avoids your gaze. (Which is exactly what someone jealous would say.)

"You're jealous of your own dog," You whisper, tone faux sympathy.

You shift your weight back, settling onto your heels, craning your neck to study him like he's a fascinating psychological case study.

Bam, however, is blissfully unaware of his central role in this drama. He wags his tail so hard that his whole butt is moving side to side like a windshield wiper.

"I leave for a couple of hours," you observe with fascination, "and you've already picked a fight with a literal puppy."

"He's not even a puppy anymore," Jungkook snaps back instantly, as if the classification of his ‘competitor’ is somehow the most pressing issue in this standoff.

You gasp, one hand flying to clutch at imaginary pearls. “Oh my god. You're calling him old? You're losing it, Jeon."

"I'm not losing it," He grumbles defensively.

The evidence suggests otherwise.

You rise to your feet slowly and saunter over to him. He stands there, arms still crossed, watching you approach with a suspicious squint.

You stop inches in front of him. Looking up through your lashes with innocence that wouldn't fool a toddler (but still somehow works on global superstars), you deploy your sweetest, most saccharine tone: "Baby," you murmur, "Love of my life."

Your hands slide up his chest, fingers toying with the neckline of his hoodie. The very one he selected for your approval, now weaponized against him.

"Don't tell me you're scared," you whisper with mock concern, eyes wide. "That Bam's gonna steal me away?"

His response surpasses non-verbal communication: silence paired with a scowl.

You grin evilly, and you lean forward until your lips brush against the shell of his ear. “He does have better hair than you," you tease.

Jungkook jerks back like he’s been electrocuted, mouth falling open in outrage.

"I knew it," he declares. "I knew you liked him better!"

Your laughter echoes throughout the whole room. His expression remains fixed in accusation, still treating your interaction with Bam — who has now abandoned you two to roll on his back in blissful oblivion — as a mortal enemy who must be defeated.

You wipe under your eyes dramatically, pulling yourself together with exaggerated effort before tilting your head.

"It's okay, baby," you console with insincerity. "Some men just can't handle the competition."

The scowl on his face deepens.

You nod solemnly, caressing his bicep. "Maybe you should work on your wagging. And your fur. I mean, Bam's coat? Impeccable."

Jungkook's mouth drops open again in shock.

You heave a long-suffering sigh, the sound of someone burdened with the great responsibility of being with a ridiculous man.

“God,” you roll your eyes, stepping into his space and grabbing a fistful of the front of his hoodie. “You’re so dramatic.”

And before he can launch into another argument, you yank him down and press your lips to his. Firm, no-nonsense, entirely fed up, but still soft because, unfortunately, you’re obsessed with him. (But he’s obsessed with you right back.)

He smiles against your lips, the ones that taste like some coconut lip balm you always wear.

Of course, though, he can’t leave it alone. Has to get the last word in, even when his hands are sliding up your sides and his chest is rumbling with happiness.

“You taste like dog,” He mumbles into your mouth and when you pull back to glare at him, he grins wider, looking downright pleased with himself.

masterlist + request

[rowie264]

If someone criticizes something, it doesn't mean that they hate it. It also works the other way around. If you like something, it doesn't mean that it's done well from an objective point of view.

I love Jinx. Her design, her story, her personality, her character arc... I was just fascinated by her. Jinx has become one of my favorite characters in media in general. It was the continuation of her story that I was waiting for the most.

Jinx is still my favorite character in season 2. I love almost every scene with her. How she did Sevika's arm and the subsequent fight with the Smeech, the fight with Vi in Act 1, the prison break, search for Vander in the mines, epic appearance during the battle against Noxus.

I got a lot of positive emotions while watching s2 and especially during Jinx's appearance on the screen. But… an emotional response and objective assessment are two different things. And objectively, Jinx's character in season 2 is OOC and poorly written.

Removing very importand part of her story and personality. Her mental issues almost completely disappear. This is a very important aspect of her character. And no, Isha's presence and a "more favorable environment" would not heal her, the whole 2nd act is completely unrealistic and looks stupid, since all her problems with her mental health were magically solved off-screen;

Irrelevant piece of plot. Her arc of "Zaun symbol" passes by her - she becomes a symbol by accident, ignores the consequences and directly encounters all this revolutionary mood only during Isha's saving from Stillwater (at the same time saving her followers - an indirect action, not a purposeful one). So this arc is kinda about her, but she doesn't seem to participate in it herself, and it ends with literally nothing (like the whole Zaun revolution);

Making her more appealing to wider audience. Her hatred of Piltover and Caitlyn just disappeared. Yes, while she was with Vi in the mines she said "piltie goons who murdered mom and dad," but… that's all? Jinx doesn't kill a single enforcer in the entire 2nd season (although, for example, she could have in Stillwater) and tells Caitlyn "I didn't know your mother was there." Let me remind you that Jinx literally giggled in s1 when she killed a dozen enforcers during gemstone kidnapping, killed enforcers on the bridge without any care, she hated Caitlyn fiercely because she "stole" her sister from her, and she couldn't not know that Cassandra was a councilor. It isn't showed how and why she changed her opinion and this is important thing to her character, you can't explain such change with microexpressions or parallels;

Unrealistic happy family reunion. The reunion of Jinx, Vi, and Vander is a spectacular moment from Disney. Do you remember how Jinx reacted when Vi returned? Yes, she was happy but as soon as she spotted Cait she freaked out and immidiately thought that Vi betrayed her. Imagine what would happen if her supposedly dead - bc of her btw - father had returned and now looks like some animal;

Silco mattered much more to Jinx. A very "subtle" replacement of Silco for Vander in the role of father (Jinx calls him father, sniffs Vander's jacket and not Silco's), although Silco played probably a bigger role in this? And Jinx remembers about him like 2 times? Although it's been about 7-10 years since Vi's "death" in season 1, Jinx was still triggered by just a similar appearance. Apparently, Silco wasn't that important to Jinx (which is not true); I could still keep talking about Jinx, but let's leave it at that.

I love Jinx even in season 2. I like watching scenes with her. But my emotional attachment doesn't stop me from seeing that Jinx's character in s2 is not a continuation of Jinx's character of the end of s1. Her image is broken, the arcs are not completed, the relationships with other characters are poorly written.

[sporesgalaxy]

I HEARD WE WERE SHARING DANNY PHANTOM OCS FOR @dpocparadeevent AND I CAME RUNNING AS FAST AS I COULD!!!!!! BEHOLD, FAN FAVORITE CANON CHARACTER (lying),

SILENCE ALEXANDER

Silence is a ghost librarian who roams the Ghost Zone and the living world in order to learn everything there is to know about ghosts!

Age: ~150yrs

Height: short

Sexuality: Bisexual

Gender: Bisexual*

Powers: pyromancy, smoke-mancy, book summoning, encyclopedic knowledge of ectobiology and ghost history, and also literally possesses multiple encyclopedias about those things. She wrote most of them.

Weaknesses: water, her own hubris, emotional constipation, Vlad Masters who said that? must've been the wind...

•••

Silence keeps a massive hoarde of unique books and strange artifacts in her library inside the Ghost Zone. She will even lend these books and artifacts...in exchange for information of equal value! Plus, whatever info you offer isn't safe from being traded with others just as readily, should someone have a worthwhile offer for it! If someone uses that information to hurt you, then that isn't Silence's problem.

She uses one such artifact to disguise herself and traverse the human world. She is completely unable to use any ghost powers while disguised, but she doesn't seem to mind. In fact, she can almost forget she's a ghost at all...except that she can't taste or feel things the same way a human could.

She's very knowledgeable, but sometimes her pessemistic biases lead her to draw questionable conclusions. She assumes that all ghosts are fundamentally self-serving-- which means there's nothing wrong with her being selfish too!

PLOT INVOLVEMENT:

Silence met Vlad in the 90s, and was beyond thrilled that an unprecedented creature like a Halfa could exist. They got along like a house on fire and made it everyone else's problem for a year or so.

Then Silence suddenly disappeared, leaving Vlad with unfettered access to her many, many resources. How strange...

Silence reappeared 10 years later (during the events of the show) and wasted no time getting petty revenge by setting Vlad's mansion on fire.

She's not satisfied with just destroying his belongings, though. Silence also makes a point to befriend the Fenton family in disguise, using them to catch up on the years of research she missed.

Danny catches on almost immediately, but Silence is able to win him over with promises of Ghost Zone knowledge and dirt on Vlad. She seems to know a little more about Vlad than a "former business partner" should, but hey, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? And Danny doesn't have a lot of friends in the Ghost Zone.

Unfortunately, Danny will go on to learn that Silence is actually friends with most of his OTHER enemies, because Silence firmly believes that the ends justify the means when it comes to getting her hands on valuable information.

Even her and Vlad's mutual hatred seems a little, um...layered. Not that either of them will ever admit it.

Silence does not consider herself evil or underhanded, just...driven to succeed. She firmly believes that everything she does is necessary, and serves the greater good of scientific advancement.

Silence lived a very lonely human life and died feeling irrelevant and replaceable. She sees a kindred spirit in Vlad, which is both attractive and infuriating. She was deeply in love with Vlad during their time together in the 90s, but she refused to tell him and he was blinded by his focus on Maddie as usual. Vlad's betrayal reinforced Silence's pessemistic worldview and her unwillingness to be honest or vulnerable with others. Somehow, though, it didn't completely get rid of her crush on him...much to her continued chagrin.

---

BET YOU FORGOT ABOUT THAT ASTERISK. BUT I DIDN'T.

*Gender: Bisexual -- Antiquated version of the term that she still likes & identifies as. Similar to being bigender or genderfluid. Most people default to she/her and Silence doesn't really care.

---

Blorbo!

[charmac]

Earlier this month I asked members of the fandom to answer a series of questions related to the concept of "Canon Macdennis" — does it exist and what does that mean, if so, or if not?

I highly appreciate everyone who participated and shared their thoughts, as the concept of ships being canon in something like Sunny is a complicated and fascinating idea to me, and it was a lot of fun to pour through the results!

In short, the fandom is almost evenly divided on the idea of Macdennis being canon:

And this really comes down to a fundamental difference in interpreting canon as something that in the intent of the show (it is canon because jokes and/or plot rely on the audience reading their relationship a certain way), or something that is true to the characters (it is not canon because the characters don't acknowledge the relationship as such).

For those who believe that, yes, they are canon, I asked for Respondents to pin point the earliest season in which they are canon, and found that while results were a bit scattered, the majority sees Macdennis as being canon since Season 5 or earlier

Mac and Dennis Break Up was the most cited episode for the early Seasons, as may be expected, with the later Seasons heavily citing Dines Out or Tends Bar. In all of these episodes, Mac and Dennis are written to be viewed as a couple, clearly intentionally, but the divide on when this makes them canon seems to be at the point in which the viewer believes the intention of pairing them together "like a couple" isn't purely for the joke. Whether or not they're still paired to tell or perpetuate a joke is mostly irrelevant, because such a continuation of that, across so many years, makes it clear that they're written to be interpreted as being in a [extremely dysfunctional and fucked up] non-platonic relationship (and, in fact, many jokes and plots just don't work as well if you aren't reading them as a couple).

Those who don't agree that Macdennis are canon didn't report much on the idea of whether or not they're intended to be read as a non-platonic relationship, but instead focused more on the fact that Mac and Dennis, themselves as characters, do not identify as being in a romantic and/or sexual relationship (either because they won't admit it or because they truly don't think they are), and that is what bars them from being considered canon.

I asked those who responded no to Macdennis being canon to provide me with an idea as to what would make them canon, and responses were truly across the board on this idea: everything from 'once Dennis makes his feelings about Mac clear' to 'they have to be in an official relationship for the rest of the show' was quite evenly split. Even when narrowing the ideas down into two set categories, the fandom seems divided:

For some, it's just about getting a physically consensual act between the two and for some it's just about getting Dennis' admitted feelings, but for many it's about both of these ideas being continuing and genuine, as many expressed that they see Dennis having admitted feelings as a minimum expectation, but the two of them hooking up as a minimum standard for canon. But, unless Sunny becomes a completely different show, it is pretty unlikely that both of these things happen (at least, not at face value or without some kind of "catch") and stay consistent for the remainder of the show.

So, in some sense, it seems like the Fandom will probably never universally agree on whether or not Macdennis is canon..... but I can confidently claim that a sloppy makeout is guaranteed to push us over the line for more yeses than nos!

There's a more in-depth and complete discussion/breakdown of the Fandom's idea of canon Macdennis on The Paddy's Pub Blog!

[burr-ell]

re: bh never having faced consequences, what are some moments/things they've done you think there should've been consequences for? i'm asking because i've realized these past couple episodes that i also fear they won't face any consequences for this, but i haven't been able to pinpoint why i feel that way yet

I don't think the answer is that they've done things that demand consequences so much as it is that a lot of elements of this campaign just don't coalesce or feel like they matter. Things feel important and relevant and cool in the moment and then don't get any kind of followup, nor do they have a meaningful impact on the characters. So much of this story falls to the wayside with no followup, if it doesn't have the wind taken out of it altogether.

A lot of plot points wind up mattering more to the fandom than they do to the characters—even good arcs, like the events of the party split arc, don't seem to have left much of an impact. There are fans who still bring up Hearthdell as a point against the gods or Vasselheim, but Bell's Hells have barely mentioned it if at all since episode 65. Laudna derides it as a "pissant town" with "pissant squabbles" and is far less interested in the village and its people than she is in her own trauma and feelings about the Titans. Ashton only brings up what happened there because they're still sore about being judged by an angel. There's still a chance that they call out Vasselheim's leadership for the whole mess, but at no point during Ashton's rant to the Exandrian Accord did they ever reference the blatant encroachment and attempt at a land grab. Molaesmyr fares little better; Chetney is the only character who ever brings it up, and when he does it's in the context of rattling Ludinus personally—a point that only he ever presses, even though Imogen and Fearne were also there. The fandom has been debating off and on about how much the nature of Predathos itself can be linked to Molaesmyr's destruction, but nothing has canonically explained it one way or the other, in part because the rest of the Hells just aren't interested.

It's also that lack of interest that leads to major NPC villains that are almost completely irrelevant to the story. It does not ultimately matter that one of Ludinus's generals is Otohan Thull or that the Malleus Key was defended by Ozo Cruth. The audience doesn't really know who they are, and they don't know because the party had no reason to care and didn't try to get one. Matt has indicated that there's a story to Otohan that will likely be revealed in a campaign wrap-up, and the same is probably true for Ozo, but in the actual story, all they are to the audience is a couple of overtuned stat blocks with swords, and the characters they killed might as well have been gutted by a pit fiend for all it mattered. About the only death that has any narrative resonance is FCG's, and it feels less like they sacrificed themself to kill Otohan and more like the story had to lose an interesting and engaging character to get rid of Otohan.

Even returning antagonists don't escape; both Ludinus Da'leth and Delilah Briarwood, important villains from their original campaigns, have been done a great deal of disservice in this one. Ludinus peaked in episode 51; his gambit with Vax and Keyleth was great, but the longer he got to keep monologuing, in a campaign already full of talking in circles about the same issue, the more insufferable he became. Even his death, karmic as it was, is cheapened by the almost-immediate implication that he's got a way to come back, which might make sense mechanically but is utterly exhausting narratively. Delilah, on the other hand, could have been replaced by an original character and nothing of value would have been lost; there's potential in an undead warlock whose patron is their own murderer, but any of the emotional juice of that story is outweighed both by how tiresome the pacing is and how overreliant it is on maudlin imagery and nostalgia for the original Briarwood arc. We don't learn about why Delilah is here or what her specific goals are until episode 77, 40 episodes after the party confronted her directly and gave her an opportunity to explain herself that she did not take. The corruption arc, again, had potential, but fizzled out as soon as a level 20 wizard dropped the soul anchor solution into their laps, with little actual impact on Laudna herself.

The actual player characters have, for the most part, barely substantively changed. Chetney has solved the mechanical problem of not being able to control his werewolf transformations and he does push big red buttons when no one else will, but he isn't really moving anywhere as a character. Laudna continues to do everything in her power to bounce back to the old kooky fun-scary bit from episode 1 every time anything interesting happens to her. FCG did actually have a great arc with an incredibly heartfelt and moving conclusion, but is no longer a meaningful part of the narrative and the party's grief over their death was not given the space to breathe that it warranted. Fearne has matured a bit over the course of the campaign but is still largely just as aimless and go-with-the-flow as she was in the beginning. Imogen, at the very least, started to take something close to an actual stance on the gods and what to do about Predathos, but every time she has to make a choice, she continues to ask someone else what she should do and then hem and haw when she's told it's her decision. Orym has finally let himself lean on someone else, but has otherwise remained static. Ashton had a very promising arc after failing to absorb the shard, but has since regressed into doing the exact thing they called themself out for doing: looking for someone to blame and wanting to feel like they were robbed. Moments like Shardgate and Swordgate, which in any other campaign would have been major watersheds, have become functionally irrelevant for all the impact they've had on the actual characters.

The elephant in the room here, of course, is Imogen and Laudna's relationship, which has been a millstone around the campaign's neck from the beginning. Shippers have accused critics of being motivated by bigotry, but the arguments deconstructing it are ultimately rooted in this very same issue: nothing that happens to them truly seems to matter. This is intertwined with the issues with Delilah, because every time Imogen and Laudna actually run into any sort of conflict or difficulty, it has something to do with that plot thread: Delilah broke the gnarlrock; Delilah was reawakened when Laudna killed Bor'dor and Laudna was extremely upset and traumatized about it; and Delilah was the one Laudna was listening to when she tried to steal and absorb Otohan's sword. All of those conflicts fizzled out as soon as the immediate surface issue was resolved: Imogen dropped the gnarlrock issue entirely; Imogen kissed Laudna and insisted that she couldn't be a bad person for killing Bor'dor, and Laudna completely dropped the subject; and Imogen, as soon as Delilah was sealed in the soul anchor, immediately took Laudna back after less than a day of mild distance and they went off to have makeup sex. It feels less like their love is so strong it can overcome any conflict and more like they retreat to the same way their relationship was before as soon as they possibly can. Even starting a romance doesn't seem to materially change anything.

There's no interest in unpacking anything that could cause a problem, either. Laudna canonically has no issue with Imogen floating the idea of siding with the Vanguard, even though it was a Vanguard general who killed Laudna in the street to get to Imogen; in fact, she refuses to take a hard stance for or against Imogen joining Predathos because she doesn't want to "hold Imogen back from her destiny". Prior to Laudna attempting to take the sword, Imogen told her explicitly "if you need [Delilah], then that's my answer"—and then instead of addressing that, Imogen blames herself for Laudna giving into Delilah by wondering if she should have given into her own toxic influence so at least Laudna wouldn't be alone. At no point have they ever had a difficult conversation about any of their underlying issues, like the actual material harm Laudna has done to herself or others or the fact that both Imogen and Laudna have repeatedly tossed aside their actual needs in favor of maintaining their status quo of unending support and presence in each other's lives. They both just attribute responsibility to someone or something else and continue to swear that they'll always be there for one another—just like every other conversation they've ever had. There's no challenge and no movement, not from them or from anyone else; nothing has ever upset the idea that this story could be anything less than idyllic, no matter the increasing evidence to the contrary.

A common refrain for a very long time, and perhaps one still around in some circles, was a desire for Character A and Character B to "finally talk", and not without reason. In previous campaigns, A and B probably would have talked. This, however, is a campaign centering on profoundly incurious characters with a narrative that is disinterested in those characters becoming genuinely invested in its setting or each other beyond a bare surface level. Of course they won't face any consequences for releasing Predathos when they didn't need to, nor will they face consequences for not communicating their incredibly risky and contentious plan ahead of time. Why would they? It won't matter. Nothing in this story matters, and that's the entire problem.

[citronverveine]

when you think about it, tgcf really wouldn’t have the same impact if xie lian didn’t cultivate through abstinence.

it’s funny because it’s not even relevant to the core of the plot itself; xie lian never uses his cultivation as a reason to stay away from hua cheng. he only reminds the reader of it when he drinks wine, which is pretty irrelevant anyway. but if it doesn’t impact his relationship with hua cheng then it must serve another purpose, otherwise it wouldn’t be here, because things in fiction don’t exist just for the sake of existing.

xie lian abstaining from earthly pleasures fits into the narrative of control, expectations, and divinity, the transcendance of his mortal body.

xie lian’s goal, very early on, is to become a god. and what are gods? above mortals. or that’s what everyone thinks, but not xie lian, not entirely at least. xie lian views godhood as a means to serve the people, not being above them. this is why he doesn’t think kneeling before gods is right, and why he doesn’t want his believers to kneel.

obviously, very few people agree with him and tell him how his godhood should be, even his own believers who think it’s stupid to not kneel before a god.

xie lian always saw godhood as a tool, and his body as a tool to reach godhood. xie lian is self-sacrificing in nature, and even if at first he doesn’t really know how much it takes, it reaches extremes once he is forced to self-sacrifice for a hundred people at once.

during that time, xie lian’s body and autonomy was taken from him. “this is what you want? then take it.” it makes it seem as though it was his choice. he wanted to help, so he got to help, he should be happy, right?

i often wondered why xie lian didn’t just say to hell with it and broke his cultivation through his eight hundred years of banishment. not once, as far as we know, does he willingly break it completely and irreversibly, even though he is shackled, even though he doesn’t even actively cultivate anymore.

i think it’s about control. during that time xie lian had very little control over his life.

godhood is about repressing your human traits. when he was a god, xie lian was asked not to care, not to intervene, not to help. he was asked to sit back and watch as his people suffered, as his kingdom threatened to fall. he couldn’t.

that’s why he couldn’t be a god. he realized that himself after almost releasing the resentful spirits on Yong’an. he ascended and asked to get bannished once again. all of what he did was too human, from start to finish, and he would never be fit for a god.

his cultivation was the third and last shackle, self-imposed from the start. the first shackle bound his spiritual power, the second his luck, and the third one his cultivation, asking him to repress his humanity.

this is why it’s important that xie lian makes the choice of breaking his cultivation for hua cheng. it’s an obvious choice when you understand all of this. hua cheng gave xie lian his autonomy back by letting him be himself and making his own choices, and trusting him with them. never did he doubt xie lian, never did he tell him what to do, even when he had his own opinion on the matter. hua cheng lets xie lian be. while supporting him through it all. he’s always behind him, no matter what happens, no matter whether xie lian does good or bad, he’ll always be there to catch him regardless of what he does, because he is there for who he is. he’s xie lian. he’s human. it doesn’t matter that he’s a god, a prince, a scrap collector, a curse.

and because xie lian has finally found someone who accepts him as a whole, can he finally let himself be whole and let go of the control he has on his body. he doesn’t have to hold back. he doesn’t have to try. he can indulge. he can be human. he can want. he can love. he can hurt. he can cry. he can laugh.

tl;dr: xie lian, once aware he has someone that will accept him, the whole of him, can finally let go of any artificial control on his self to fit in what the world expects of him

[neo--queen--serenity]

The Black Butler revival will, of course, in this day and age, be the complete embodiment of pro-ship vs. anti-ship discourse, given the subject matter.

But for those of you who are watching this for the first time in 2024 (which includes myself!), there are certain things about the show you simply must understand, for the sake of media literacy.

The first is that Black Butler is supernatural gothic romanticism at its core. This genre alone should tell you that the relationships integral to the plot will be complex, messy, and toxic, by default. That is not only a huge part of this genre’s appeal, but very much the point of the story.

The themes are dark, the terrible things that happen to the main characters are dark, and therefore the relationships at the forefront (and in the background) will reflect that.

The gothic genre has been alluringly popular for over a century (longer, if you know your history) because audiences are entranced by the macabre, the tainted antiheroes, the monsters who live inside us all. It’s popular for a reason.

That being said, understand that whether you, the viewer, ship Sebastian and Ciel or not is irrelevant. Their bond doesn’t need to be understood as romantic or sexual, but it sure as hell isn’t normal. It isn’t healthy. And the audience knows that. That’s the draw. It’s what makes them compelling to watch.

Ciel and Sebastian’s relationship mirrors many gothic novels, poems, and penny dreadfuls written in the Victorian Era (the very same time period in which Kuroshitsuji takes place). The Victorian folks who read these tales for the first time ate that shit up, because it was tantalizing. It was shocking. It was inappropriate, and monstrous, and violent, and erotic, and went against societal norms. But that was the point.

A huge part of gothic romanticism is the blatant sexualization of the relationship between the “monstrous” characters and their human counterparts in the story. Sex itself doesn’t need to take place for their bond to be sexually charged. The forbidden nature of their relationship—which typically involves layers of social taboos, moral ambiguity, or simple infatuation—is what makes their interactions erotic. Sexual contact rarely ever actually happens in these stories. It’s the taboo nature of their bond that creates the tension.

One of the many reasons audiences love this genre is the constant question of morality in its themes. Who, between them, is the real monster? Could the human character have ever been saved? This genre is often associated with tragedy, because the bond forged between the characters in these stories are destined to end in death and destruction. The reader knows it can’t end any other way. How can it?

But an integral element of these gothic tales is the catharsis that comes with this tragedy. The corrupted human often gets what they want in the end, even if it’s at the cost of their own life. Whether they regret their choice to foster this monstrous relationship varies on the story, but it doesn’t change the trajectory of their descent.

Sebastian and Ciel’s relationship is the whole plot of Black Butler. Their closeness bears a grotesque ick factor, but it is deliberate. It is a constant reminder of how unnatrual their bond truly is. Rationalizing or watering down how abnormal they are about each other misses the point entirely. They will never have a normal, healthy relationship, and that’s what moves the plot forward.

That’s why you’re watching it.

[sosa2imagines]

Ooo can I please request a Lloyd Hansen x fem!shy!reader where she is Carmichael’s assistant (so she’s not an agent or anything). She doesn’t know about the more shady stuff that her boss has been up to but she has met Lloyd on the few occasions that he had worked with Carmichael and Suzanne. He took a quick liking to her and was all intimidating and flirty, and she shied away from his attention. Anyways, now later on, the start of the Gray man plot starts, where Carmichael has Suzanne contact Lloyd to use “Hansen Government Services” to track down and take out Six. Lloyd agrees to help on one condition, Carmichael to give up his assistant (Y/n) and have her permanently be Lloyd’s assistant instead (which he would also require that she lives in the mansion). Y/n would probably be scared about this whole situation, between finding out about her (now ex) boss’ shady business and now being sent to work for and live with a man like Lloyd. He doesn’t treat her like he does his other employees though, he’s patient with her, never yells at her, and he’s also extremely flirty and sweet in his own intimidating way. He spoils her rotten and tries to make her comfortable in her new home. Lloyd is completely in love with her and he knows she is is love with him too. One of Lloyd’s enemies breaks into the mansion one night to get to Lloyd, but finds Y/n first and they try to hurt her? Lloyd would completely obliterate them omg, no one hurts his girl! She’d cling to Lloyd after he saves her🥺

Hey, I hope you enjoy this.

Warning- Fluff, little angst, slight assault. Lloyd is a warning!

You’ve worked for Denny Carmichael for just over a year.

It’s not the worst job in the world. The pay’s decent, the office has a view, and if you keep your head down. Carmichael usually ignores you, which is honestly a blessing. He’s curt at best, cruel at worst. You’ve mastered the art of silent efficiency, typing fast, fetching coffee hotter than hell, and answering his calls before the first ring finishes.

You’re not an agent, not even close. Just a regular assistant who updates schedules, reviews briefings she’s not supposed to read too closely, and pretends not to notice the occasional encrypted file with a red warning label.

It’s all above your paygrade, anyway.

Or it was, until he walked in.

The first time you saw Lloyd Hansen, it was like someone dropped a wolf into the middle of a business meeting. All sharp smiles, arrogant swagger, and a polo-shirt unbuttoned just enough to be inappropriate. He looked like trouble dipped in designer cologne and fancy moustache. And he looked right at you.

“Who’s the shy one?” he asked, gesturing toward you with a half-empty coffee cup he’d just taken from Carmichael’s desk without asking.

You froze.

Carmichael didn’t bother to introduce you. He waved you off with an irritated glance, mumbling something about "irrelevant staff." But Lloyd? He didn’t stop looking.

And he kept looking every time after that.

Now, weeks later, you’re alone at your desk, tucked in the corner of the tenth floor office, typing up meeting notes and wondering if it’s too early to sneak your third cup of coffee, when the elevator doors open with a ding.

You don’t look up right away. You don’t need to. You feel it, that oppressive, magnetic presence. Like gravity just shifted.

You glance up. And there he is.

Lloyd Hansen. All six-feet-something of smirking, menacing charm. Aviators hanging from the front of his polo-shirt. A toothpick between his teeth. Like he owns the building. Like he owns you.

“Hey there, Sugar.”

You flinch. The nickname slides off his tongue like a threat wrapped in honey.

He saunters closer, not even pretending to head for Carmichael’s office. “I was hoping I’d catch you here.” His voice is lower now, just for you. “Did you miss me?”

You blink, mouth slightly parted, your fingers still frozen above the keyboard. “I…I didn’t know you were coming in…”

“Oh, it’s a surprise visit.” He leans against your desk, so close his cologne makes you dizzy. “Thought I’d see how my favorite desk jockey’s doing.”

You flush. You hate how warm your face gets when he talks to you like this. You manage a whisper. “I…I have a lot of work, Mr. Hansen…”

“Lloyd,” he corrects with a slow, teasing grin. “Mr. Hansen makes me sound like I give a damn about rules.”

Your breath catches as he plucks a paperclip from your holder and flicks it between his fingers.

Carmichael’s door opens sharply behind him. “Hansen!” your boss barks. “Office. Now!”

Lloyd doesn’t move right away. His eyes stay on you, then he winks. “I���ll be back for you, Sugar.”

And just like that, he’s gone.

But your pulse is still hammering and you already know you’re in trouble.

"You want me to clean up your mess, Denny?” Lloyd Hansen leans back in his chair, legs spread like he owns the Pentagon and the planet it sits on. One boot scuffs the marble floor with deliberate disrespect, his smirk lazily cruel as he watches Carmichael squirm.

Carmichael grimaces. “Sierra Six has gone rogue. He’s dangerous.��

“And you lost him.” Lloyd’s voice is soft, almost bored. “Tsk, tsk. That’s not very 'elite CIA' of you, is it?”

Suzanne Brewer shifts beside Denny, clearing her throat. “We need someone outside the Agency, someone untraceable. You said you could handle it.”

Lloyd twirls the gold pen he stole from Carmichael’s desk earlier, then pauses mid-spin.

“Oh, I can handle it,” he says. “I’ll find him, I’ll gut him, and I’ll gift wrap his corpse with a bow, red or black, your pick.”

Carmichael exhales a breath of relief, but Lloyd raises a hand.

“One condition.”

Denny’s jaw clenches. “Of course there is.”

Lloyd doesn’t bother to explain. He simply pushes a thin folder toward them, one you didn’t know existed. One labeled with your name.

“Her.”

Suzanne glances at it, brows lifting. “The assistant?”

“My assistant now.” Lloyd’s tone sharpens. “She’s underutilized here, answering your pathetic emails and dealing with your tantrums. Waste of good potential.”

“She’s not part of this operation,” Carmichael says flatly. “She doesn’t have clearance, hell, she barely has spine!”

Lloyd chuckles. “Exactly. She’s perfect. Quiet, soft, compliant. I like her.”

Carmichael’s face reddens. “She doesn’t belong in this world…you are…”

“And yet, here she is.” Lloyd stands, towering, voice turning venomous. “Don’t forget who the fuck I am, Denny. You called me. You don’t get to say no.”

For a full ten seconds, no one speaks.

Then Carmichael nods, bitter and furious. “Fine.”

Lloyd’s smile returns too sharp. “Good boy.”

You don’t know any of this until it’s already done.

You’re filing some paperwork Carmichael left for you, he didn’t say goodbye, didn’t even glance your way, when two men in suits show up at your desk.

“Miss,” one says, holding out a leather folder with a red seal. “Effective immediately, you’ve been reassigned.”

“What?” Your voice wavers. “Reassigned to what?”

The man doesn’t blink. “You’ll be working for Lloyd Hansen, under Hansen Government Services.”

Your blood turns cold, “I…I’m not trained for field work…this is a mistake…”

“You won’t be in the field,” the second man says. “You’ll be his executive assistant. Relocation is part of the contract. Your things are already being packed.”

You stare at them. “I didn’t agree to this!”

“It’s been authorized,” one replies. “By Carmichael himself.”

Your heart pounds. You don’t understand. This has to be some kind of joke.

But it isn’t.

Thirty minutes later, you’re in the back of a black SUV, gripping your phone with numb fingers, trying not to cry as the city fades behind you.

The driver says nothing. He doesn’t have to. He’s taking you somewhere far more dangerous than you’ve ever imagined.

To him.

The mansion is surreal. Marble floors. Velvet drapes. Security cameras everywhere. It smells like leather, bourbon, and something darker.

You’re led up winding stairs, into a private wing with tall doors and a view of the world you used to belong to. You’re not sure if it’s a gilded prison or a wolf’s den.

When the door opens behind you, you already know who it is.

“Sugar.”

You freeze.

Lloyd strolls in like this is all perfectly normal, tugging off his gloves, grinning like a cat about to play with its food. “You’re finally home.”

Your voice is small, terrified. “I didn’t agree to this…”

He steps closer, tilting your chin up with two fingers. “You didn’t need to.”

His eyes devour your fear. He likes it. But beneath the thrill in his gaze, there’s something else, obsession, maybe. Possession.

“Relax,” he purrs. “I’ll take real good care of you.”

You expected chaos. Screaming. Orders barked in your face. Maybe even a locked door or two.

Instead, Lloyd gives you a room with cathedral ceilings, the softest sheets you've ever touched, and a closet full of clothes you know damn well didn’t come from a department store.

You haven’t even unpacked yet when he knocks and waits patiently.

You open the door slowly. He’s leaning against the frame, two glasses in one hand and a wine bottle in the other.

“Room service!” he says with a wink.

You blink at him. “This… this isn’t a hotel.”

“No,” Lloyd murmurs, handing you a glass. “This is my house. My rules. And rule number one…” he raises the glass in a mock toast, “you get spoiled.”

You don’t know what to say. You’ve been bracing for a nightmare, but he’s smiling at you like you hung the damn moon.

The next few days blur like a fever dream.

He doesn’t yell. Not once. Doesn’t scold you when you mess up his calendar or accidentally send the wrong file to one of his contractors.

He just laughs, nudges your foot with his under the desk, and says, “You’re cute when you panic, Sugar. Makes me wanna bite you.”

You try to keep things professional. You really do. But damn he makes you blush, all the time.

But Lloyd doesn’t play by anyone’s definition of professional.

He brings you breakfast every morning. Personally. Scrambled eggs, avocado toast, fresh fruit, exactly how you like it. You never told him. Somehow, he just knows.

He has your favorite snacks stocked in the kitchen before you ask. He adjusts the AC because you looked a little cold once. He even sets up a separate workspace, facing his, of course so he can keep an eye on you while you work. “I like you where I can see you,” he tells you, voice low. “You calm me down. Which is ironic, ‘cause all I wanna do is wreck you.”

You choke on your coffee.

He just grins.

The weirdest part?

You start to feel safe.

Safe in a mansion built like a fortress. Safe in the presence of a man with blood on his hands and your name on his lips like a prayer.

And he never touches you without permission. Never pushes. Just lingers.

Like now, when he walks past your desk and drops something beside your laptop. You glance at it. A box.

You open it carefully. Inside is a delicate, glittering necklace. A charm in the shape of a sugar cube. Diamond encrusted.

Your lips part in disbelief. “Lloyd…”

“Wear it,” he says, already turning away. “So everyone knows who you belong to.”

Your heart pounds in your chest. You want to argue, say something snarky, logical, self-protective. But instead… you touch the necklace with trembling fingers.

And smile.

That night, he sees it around your neck and smiles like a man who’s just won a war.

You meet his eyes, your voice barely above a whisper, “I know what you’re doing.”

Lloyd leans in, gaze molten. “Yeah?”

“You’re trying to… soften me. Spoil me into staying.”

His lips brush the shell of your ear. “Sugar, you already stayed.”

He pauses. “And I already know you’re in love with me.”

Your stomach flips, “W…what makes you think?”

“I know,” he interrupts gently. “Because I know how you breathe when I walk into a room. How you flinch, not because you’re scared, but because your body doesn’t know how to handle me.”

He smiles against your jaw. “You’re mine, Sugar. Always have been.”

And the worst part? He’s right.

The mansion is quiet that night. Too quiet.

You’re curled up in your oversized bed, one of Lloyd’s T-shirts hugging your body like a second skin. You never meant to fall asleep in it, it just smelled like him, and your own clothes didn’t feel comforting enough anymore.

The dreamless dark is thick when you hear it.

A faint creak. A footstep where there shouldn’t be one. Your eyes snap open. Your chest tightens. You slip out of bed, bare feet padding across the hardwood floor. Maybe it’s one of Lloyd’s men doing rounds. Maybe…

A cold hand clamps over your mouth.

You scream, but it’s muffled.

“Shh,” a low, unfamiliar voice hisses against your ear. “This isn’t about you, sweetheart. But if you make it about you, I’ll carve a message into your skin before he even gets here.”

Your heart races like it’s trying to escape your chest. You struggle, thrashing, clawing at the masked man holding you against the wall.

He slams you once hard into the dresser. Pain blooms across your ribs. And then, you hear it.

The echo of a gunshot. Not from the intruder.

From him.

Lloyd crashes into the room like a hurricane dressed in black and fury. No mask. No hesitation.

Just rage.

“What the FUCK do you think you’re doing?” he snarls, voice rough and feral.

The intruder doesn’t get a full sentence out before Lloyd unloads, two to the leg, one through the shoulder. Precision pain. The man screams, buckles, and tries to crawl away.

Lloyd stalks after him like a goddamn lion.

“You thought you could touch her?” he growls, grabbing the man by the collar. “You came into my house and laid your hands on my girl?”

Another shot.

“You should’ve died before you even thought about it.”

By the time his team storms in, the man is bloodied, sobbing, and barely breathing.

“Clean this shit up,” Lloyd mutters, panting, gun lowered but still ready. “He doesn’t get to die yet. Not until I say so.”

He turns back to you. You’re on the floor, still shaking, arm cradling your side. Your lip is trembling, and you hate that you’re crying, but you can’t stop it.

Lloyd kneels beside you in one breath. His hands hover before they touch, so gently it almost breaks you.

“Sugar,” he whispers, lifting you like you weigh nothing. “Jesus. I should’ve been here. I should’ve…” You cling to him hard, not letting him finish his sentence. He holds you closer. “I’ve got you now,” he murmurs into your hair. “You’re safe. I swear it. No one touches what’s mine.”

You bury your face in his chest.

And that’s the first time he doesn’t smirk. Doesn’t flirt. He just holds you. Tight. Like he’s anchoring both of you to the earth.

Days pass. You sleep in his room now, his bed, his arms. Not because he makes you, but because the nightmares only stop when he’s there.

He never pushes. Never crosses a line.

But he never leaves your side.

And somewhere between quiet breakfasts and late-night movies on the massive couch, it happens.

You fall.

Not slowly. Not sweetly.

You fall like a match to gasoline.

One morning, you turn to him with trembling fingers and swollen eyes, half embarrassed, half defiant. “I think I love you,” you whisper. “No. I know I do. I’ve tried not to, but I can’t… I can’t stop. I don’t want to.”

Lloyd blinks.

Then, something softens in his face.

The kind of softness no one alive has ever seen in him. Not Suzanne. Not Carmichael. No one.

Only you.

“Sugar,” he breathes. He cups your face like you’re porcelain.

And kisses you. Not rough. Not angry. Not possessive.

Just home.

But you still feel the hunger under his skin. The heat barely restrained. When you pull back, breathless, he chuckles against your lips. “Finally,” he murmurs. “Took you long enough.”

You smack his chest. He catches your wrist. Kisses your palm.

“Now you’re really mine.”

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[geekeryisafoot]

I have been so curious to see more about Kagami's royalty inheritance because I feel like that's the a non-subtle thing that really REALLY tells you how a story and its author sees gender. The vast majority of fantasy has gender based inheritance, and even the ones trying to subvert that frequently simply mirror it into a matriarchy. It is bizarrely rare to see depictions of fictional royalty that is completely gender-agnostic in terms of inheritance.

Which is a more obvious pointer towards how a story treats gender implicitly: what does a story say in the background, in the subtext, about the differences between genders? What does it considered inherent traits for men vs woman? What does it believe about the differences between proper behavior, acceptable violations of proper behavior, roles, hobbies, personalities, priorities of men vs women?

Ichi the Witch has it's core premise that only women can use magic as the only difference between genders. Beyond that core world building, it's completely normal about gender. It is managing- even in the subtleties where real world biases usually creep in- to treat women and men as completely utterly equal. It's seeing every single one as an individual while gender is irrelevant to their personality and how the narrative treats them. You could gender swap any character and their role in the plot would change but their personality would not.

So, like, props Ichi the Witch. You are truly a delight to read and you build my confidence in you more and more with each chapter

[nicotachi]

my clumsy review aka my unorganized thoughts on Hit New Yuri Game "Love Curse: Find Your Soulmate"! you can buy it on steam here

cyn and i spent the past week or so playing through all 10 endings and i just wanted a place to write down all my thoughts. i feel like i have a Lot to say and barely anyone else to tell so i'm going to attempt to rein it in

under the cut is nothing but spoilers so tread at your own risk! also: i do not hate any ship, but if you are averse to ship hate you may not want to read any of my criticisms!

PLOT SUMMARY

you play as a 20 year-old lesbian (named selene yan by default) navigating her transition from college into the workforce. however, you are suddenly informed of a curse that will kill you in one year's time—the only way to lift this curse is to find your true soulmate (yay a girl) before then.

there are currently 4 romanceable options: your cute childhood-friend-turned-girl-next-door, your classmate's mysterious twin sister, your reliable upperclassman, and your intimidating boss at your internship. who will you choose??? 😳

OVERALL

wow. what a game!!! i have limited experience with visual novels as most of them have been linear. all the otome games i've played were written for straight female audiences (with the exception of kang jaehee of mystic messenger) and designed for mobile. this was my first foray into an honest to goodness Sit In Front Of Computer And Pick Your Girlfriend game, and this time for actual lesbians! and i liked it a lot! what stuck out to me with this game—and keep in mind my limited experience here—is that ALL the endings felt like legitimate endings, even the bad ones. for some characters, the bad endings even felt preferable! this made me feel respected as a reader/player, and gave me a sense of agency in that i was able to choose whatever ending i liked without feeling like other endings were more 'correct'. and boy, did i enjoy some endings much more than others.

there are two curious things about the game.

the first one is a unique mechanic. each character has two meters: an affection meter, and a ??? meter. i thought the affection meter seemed pretty straightforward: get the affection up and get the happy ending. however, this was not so simple for 3 out of the 4 romanceable characters with the second meter in question. if the ??? value reaches a certain number, this may trigger the bad ending for that character. while the ??? value is never outright explained, it seems to represent something different for each character.

the second thing that stuck out to me was that half of the characters' routes directly relate to the lore behind the curse. honestly, it took me a while to even remember the title of the game because the 'curse' part seemed irrelevant to me with my preferred route. while two of the romanceable characters' routes explain the origins of the curse and why you have it, the other two are completely independent stories that could live in a vacuum.

this is likely not the first time this has happened as this was a feature in mystic messenger as well; zen/jaehee/yoosung were labeled 'casual story' while jumin and 707 were labeled 'deep story'. however, it's still an interesting choice as i believe overarching plot relevance influenced the characters which influenced how much i liked each character and/or their route.

which brings me to the main reason i even started this review: RANKINGS. yes, i wanted to rank each ending, explain why i liked them, why i disliked them, and what i think they could have done differently. this is where my opinions will become Opinions so dread carefully (not a typo).

very conveniently, i saw this post which brought me this chart, which i will use to grade each ending:

and now...the rankings!!!

first, i will start with ranking much i liked each character. this is based on writing/design/overall vibes and enjoyment:

iris (by a fuckin MILE omg)

nyx

victoria

eleanor

next, here is the order in which i played so you can have some more context with each route's review:

Iris BE

Iris HE

Victoria HE

Victoria BE

Nyx BE

Nyx HE

Eleanor BE

Eleanor HE

True End

now, here is how i rank each route. this is mainly based on writing and enjoyment:

9. Eleanor HE

Score: ⭐

i'm so sorry eleanor fans. personally i think eleanor was done dirty. tragically, her pre-awakening chemistry with selene is very cute. she's the closest to a classmate that selene has out of all of her love interests, and therefore the closest in maturity level. their banter reminds me of like idk. rory and jess from gilmore girls. basically two people who feel comfortable riffing off of the other. and this is no coincidence; they mention several times how they feel they have known each other for years.

which is a shame, because the route starts going downhill after eleanor's memories are reawakened, which is pretty early on. her personality shifts and it no longer becomes selene x eleanor, but selene x someone who thinks she's jianghe. everything we know about eleanor is thrown out the window in favor of her becoming 'jianghe', whom we barely know anything about.

and i think that's one of the major issues: we never do learn much about jianghe. not in her HE, BE, or even the true end. we don't even get a sprite! how are we supposed to care about jianghe if we barely know her relationship with fuguang? was jianghe also a confident perfectionist like eleanor? was she just as playful? why do we so easily accept that jianghe = eleanor, when in other routes we make it a point that chimei =/= nyx and fuguang =/= selene?

sure, there are hints that eleanor has been controlling since before her memories awakened, but that's still related to jianghe as it's a result of the spirits she pissed off. maybe it would have felt better if being controlling were a core part of her personality, the way iris and nyx's flaws feel more baked into their characters (which is why i thought iris' house arrest was way more interesting but anyways).

what would i do differently? i honestly would have emphasized an internal struggle in which eleanor doesn't know if she wants to continue being jianghe—someone paralyzed by paranoia, fear, and regret—and instead live as eleanor, who respects selene as a fellow intellectual. the house arrest arc dragged on for wayyyy too long. it honestly made me root for nyx to come break us free. instead, what happens is we get a rather bland fairytale ending of us overcoming nyx and living happily ever after.

also, i find it a little unsettling that we never find out eleanor has been tracking us, especially since i read someone on twitter suggest she has been tracking us THROUGH THE SMART WATCH SHE GAVE US IN THE COMMON ROUTE!!! which honestly is a crazy cool detail

8. Victoria HE

Score: ⭐

(WARNING: i do not hate this ship but i can see how you might interpret this as ship hate, so beware)

i like selene and i think i like victoria (even though i wasn't a fan of her routes), but i think selene and victoria have negative chemistry. not a single unit of rizz together. 1+1=0. watching their mutual attraction unfold felt like watching one of those slow trash compactor videos. two cars backing into each other in a parking lot. just something very unpleasant that i didn't want to keep seeing, yet kept reading in hopes of being swayed—and it never happened.

TO BE CLEAR!!! this is NOT because i hate either character and not because of their age gap or boss/employee dynamic. my number one ship rn is gan/qing for god's sake which is both of those. and i think it's BECAUSE i love gan/qing and office romance that i was so put off by their development.

victoria is presented as this cold and intimidating boss who scares selene during her internship interview. and she just...becomes very soft and caring after that? she just starts hanging out with selene like she's on her level and texting her like a friend? to me, it felt like the writers wanted to ignore their power imbalance until they couldn't ignore it anymore, which felt worse imho. what's the point in even making them boss and employee if you can't lean into the forbidden love territory!!!

not to mention, the conflict in both routes is just...i feel like it doesn't do her character justice? victoria is this cold woman who has her own young subsidiary under the qi group, treats rosalie like an annoying cousin, but is powerless to go against them at the same time?

and when she does finally go against them, it feels...idk, too easy. selene barely even does anything honestly, victoria solves it herself. and she just sells all her shares for a cute intern she just met??? even her affection for us feels too 'easy'. i wanted it to come with more strings i think...the writing and reasoning just felt way too disjointed for me.

what would i do differently? for one, i think i would lean into the 'problematic' aspect more. this is the toxic yuri game for a reason!!

i would have preferred if victoria were engaged from DAY ONE. chapter 0 baby. it would have made her 'innocent' flirting with us all the more scandalous in hindsight and made us rethink her green flag status.

i also would have amped up their boss/employee dynamic with them both knowing it's a line they shouldn't cross (and do). for example, more subtle gestures from victoria under the guise of Work. hands brushing over paperwork, a hesitant pat on the shoulder, idk ANYTHING!!! GIVE ME SOME PRIDE & PREJUDICE!!! IN FACT JUST REBRAND GAN/QING AND HAND IT TO ME ON A SILVER PLATTER. it was a mistake to have so much of their flirting over text because it feels both out of character and kinda just? ick? idek. it would have been funnier if victoria were a super dry texter but gave mixed signals in person.

7. Eleanor BE

Score: ⭐

i gave this one more points because eleanor actually dies. NOT because i hate eleanor, but because actions have consequences and her death is the consequence of her and phoenix keeping selene in the dark and not respecting her agency.

however, it still has the flaw of the incredibly long house arrest arc, as well as something that bothered me: this eleanor feels incredibly vindicated by her actions, even in death. first it was the flower pot incident, then it was tracking selene and being able to die for her in the forest.

what would i do differently? well for one, i think eleanor should have had regrets in her dying moments. it would have been better if she had that final realization that hey, maybe controlling every aspect of selene's life, memorizing her schedule, and viewing her movements 24/7 IS bad and the reason she's dead. unfortunately, she's still too stuck on fulfilling jianghe's wishes and basically dies as jianghe.

6. Victoria BE

Score: ⭐⭐

i share the same gripes with her HE. however, i rate her BE higher because the ending is actually very interesting to me. i liked the line about selene realizing victoria and rosalie are still cut from the same cloth, that at the end of the day victoria will lean on materialism and privilege to keep selene at her side. the symbolism of selene kissing the ring instead of victoria herself is RAW AF. especially when contrasted with her HE cg (kissing the ring that belongs to another woman vs holding the hand wearing selene's ring, the drawn curtains vs open window, etc). really cool of the writers and artists to do that.

what would i do differently? same as her HE criticisms, but especially the bit where i think victoria should have been cheating from the start. i don't think it's unfair as there is evidence to support eleanor has been tracking us since the common route. i do appreciate that all the characters' flaws do show up in the common route/happy endings

5. Nyx BE

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

before this route: oh nyx is just that childhood friend who is a littleeee bit clingy and unsettling but i'm sure she means no harm. i saw her kissing cg in the trailer it's very romantic she's just doing her best

during this route: holy shit she's an evil demon from our past and the reason why we're even cursed to die to begin with?

no real notes. banger story that gave me my first peek into the lore, more music tracks that were great and stellar voice acting from nyx. the backstory reveal and how they met bell was sooo cute. the final scene was raw af with selene being like "no. i'm not going to die with you because i don't want to 💃💃💃" and wanting to bid her ACTUAL LOVED ONES a proper goodbye. metal affff

also, the common cg with chimei lying with fuguang is gorgeous af chimei is literally channeling hu tao there

what would i do differently? well this one's a bit shallow but.....can they redraw fuguang and chimei's sprites please. the cg is so good just make it match

4. Iris HE

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

i LOVE iris but i felt like the outcome of this route felt less deserved when compared to her BE. iris is such a compelling character whose cruel breakup with us was the result of her strong feelings of resentment (and let's be real depression). i NEEDED her to GET INTO her resentment!!! but what happens is that she is literally about to tell us wtf is her problem with her family when she gets interrupted by a phone call. and disappears from work. and we don't see her until a few days later by coincidence. and she begs for us to take her back and we do.

to be honest, i had played her HE second and initially rated it way lower than it is here, but i recently replayed it after the true end and enjoyed it a lot more than i did the first time. while their reconciliation was a little ? to me (see: next entry), their redo date was super cute. i love a good breakup and grovel and reconciliation, and iris giving the date her best was really nice to watch. she had spent all that time in the common route/beginning of her route flirting with us meaninglessly, so it was nice to see her doing it with the actual intent to charm us.

while i had initially disliked the scene in which she spills her feelings and asks us to to take her back when compared with the cafe scene in the BE (peak), i do like it for what it is, and i especially like the part where she politely asks us to not reject her as she doesn't think she can take it at the moment. 😭

the final section with the business trip was kinda meh (victoria, why are you asking iris who is supposedly on a different team and also a newbie to substitute for selene's senior coworker lmao), i do love the implied sex the night before. WE LOVE YOU FADE TO BLACK WE LOVE YOU DISCRETIONARY SHOTS!!! iris said it may take her a while to become intimate with someone (maybe someone who knows chinese can tell me what exactly she meant by 'intimate') but girl it only took you several months to eat her cookie huh?

what would i do differently? see the next entry mostly. but honestly, i would have revealed more about her family and resentment and hate here rather than leaving it up to the BE.

3. Iris BE

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (Spicy🌶️🌶️🌶️🥵)

if you haven't guessed by now, iris is my favorite character in the whole damn game. her bad ending was actually my first route as i totally fell into the xuejie trap and did everything i could to please her. consequently and to my surprise, i overindulged her and activated her dormant yandere state.

i had some suspicions about her as selene continued to rebuff her attempts to get back together, but i too was caught off-guard when iris decides to ROOFIE AND CHLOROFORM US. OMG. they even get into the weeds with the details of the kidnapping to show how scary the situation is e.g. iris feeding us literal crumbs and water in the dark. girl when can we pee?

but oh my god. that cg. that iconic cg that apparently made the rounds on twitter that i had thankfully avoided getting spoiled by but you know what? if i saw that cg first i'd have bought the game too. the game seems to sell at least part of itself on the idea that everyone has a dark side, but iris' ending takes it up a notch with "everyone has a dark side, and sometimes their dark sides are also sexy." because goddamn iris!!! her whole schtick is being miss perfect who is tired of being perceived as perfect and wants to bare her ugly side too, but sorry xuejie your ugly side is kind of sexy too soooo idk...

this is becoming a hornypost for iris i'm sorry. anyways um what would i do differently? my main gripe is while i commend selene for being much stronger than me, her reasons for continuing to deny iris in the BE vs her reasons for accepting iris in her HE make no sense to me.

the divergence in iris' route happens after the bathroom scene, in which you can either choose to walk in on her phone conversation/cry session (increasing her ??? meter) or try to give her some privacy (increasing her affection meter). interestingly, if you walk in, she will lie and claim she was trying to create a situation in which you two would bump into each other.

in the bad ending, you take her to the cafe where you had your first date and where she also dumped you and she pours her heart out about her family, her insecurities, why she broke up with you.

and you still decide to treat her coldly after that.

i can see how this would make sense, sure. selene is incredibly hurt. iris doesn't get to just hit the undo button because she's feeling regretful one month later. but this also doesn't make sense, because in the happy ending where you DO take her back such a conversation doesn't happen!

what happens in the HE after the divergence is: she stalks you at your social gathering (ironically she doesn't kidnap you in this one), is interrupted by a phone call before she can tell you more about her family, you find out about her family by very nicely asking victoria (simp) to disclose confidential info from iris' personal file, and you randomly bump into iris at school (iris has long since graduated), where she cries and asks you to take her back.

what??

not to mention iris' sudden slip into crazy. hotness aside, when and why does she decide to kidnap us? does she go out and buy some chloroform after eavesdropping on our resignation convo? i'm not opposed to the yandere thing at all, i just needed a little more believable buildup. she goes from completely cold and resentful of being needed to "i want to make you need only me" in the blink of an eye. maybe the writers could have connected it a bit more—maybe her doubling down into the dependable breadwinner role is her rejecting her most honest and imperfect self, realizing her true feelings were what pushed selene, her only love, away.

but anyways. still good tho.

2. Nyx HE

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

being a 'deep route', nyx's route does a good job of being a satisfyingly complete story that fleshes out her character while delving into the lore. the payoff feels good, and i like that the writers don't try to downplay nyx's red flags even after they officially get together. nyx being jealous of their cat that SHE originally took in herself is just as amusing as it is a concern.

what would i do differently? well, my main thing with selene/nyx is that while i do find them cute (as well as fuguang/chimei), i sort of get the sense that selene is partly with nyx because she sees her as her responsibility, much like the way fuguang saw chimei. while i was very impressed by selene's development from being the least interested in nyx (IMHO) in the common route to seeing her as a lover, i think part of me isn't fully convinced that she fully reciprocates nyx's intense feelings. their final cg is soooo romantic though it invokes the shoujo doki doki fr

1. True End

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

holy shit. no notes. the true end appropriately ties everything together. i loved the extra insight into fuguang's personality, the extent of nyx's crimes, as well as more tragic bell moments.

there is NO WAY the writers weren't teasing a lil selene selfcest, because holy shit that cg? with the cheek touch? and selene admiring fuguang's calloused hands which were so unlike her own? and becoming hyperaware of the fact that they are different people who happen to share a soul? there is nooooo fuckin way that she didn't feel a lil something for fuguang. my god.

the idea that selene travels into the past to save her own soul and ends up staying behind to save FUGUANG'S soul is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. and she becomes this wandering traveler who makes sure to protect herself/fuguang's reincarnation for eternity WHILE legitimizing every single route is just. wow!!!

if her curse weren't already broken by the paradox, it would have been broken by her true soulmate literally being the one person who shares her soul. time travel ALWAYS equals yuri. so so good. perhaps an unintentional aesop about loving yourself lmao

what would i do differently? i know the moments after fuguang passes away are supposed to blur, but some actual onscreen interaction with jianghe would have been nice. we literally know the bare minimum about her!!

ok let's wrap it up

you know what it's way past my bedtime so i should just end it here. in closing love curse was such a fun read/play and i enjoyed all the ways in which it wrinkled my brain and made me think about what i liked and what i wanted. i highly recommend you go buy it and support the devs so we can show how much the world wants yuri!!!!!

EDIT: cyn had to remind me of the actual order in which i played the routes so i edited it accordingly LOL. i think it’s actually because i disliked victoria’s happy ending so much that i started playing the bad endings first again

also, i mention 10 endings but only rank 9. this is because the 10th ending is the one in which you die due to not establishing a meaningful soulmate connection in time. currently, we’ve only read through iris and victoria’s versions of it. i do like iris’ a lot (shocker) because she sees you as a blip in her radar, something that could have been. i’m ngl i laughed out loud at victoria’s because why is my boss situationship organizing my funeral and not my own PARENTS LMAO

[ofbreathandflame-archive]

What do you think of Tamlin as a High Lord?

Hi anon!

It's hard to quite talk objectively about his performance as a High Lord, as this series is politically-consistent, nor motivated, for that matter. In short, I don't think we're supposed to pay attention to the politics, save for when its convenient.

But -- when I zoom out from the love story, the protagonist-centered moral compass, and look objectively to how a character reacts to situations, I believe that Tamlin's actions make...a lot of sense. I would even go as far as to say -- given his situation(s) -- I quite agree/understand why he makes the decisions he does.

For example, when Feyre goes UTM, his strategy of pretending not to know Feyre made a lot of sense! Think about it: Amarantha is a passionately jealous person. If Tamlin confessed his love to Feyre on day one, Amarantha would have just killed Feyre. We know this because at the end of the novel, when Tamlin expresses his love for Feyre...Amarantha immediately tortures and kills Feyre without question, without even trying to uphold her end of the bargain. If anything - throughout the events of UTM, Feyre's irrelevance partially saves her life. Amarantha forgets about her, and only drags her out when its time to complete the bargain. Tamlin's ambivalence meant that Amarantha got nothing to torture her with; and when Amarantha is given information about Feyre, she uses it to further devise her trials (such as Rhysand telling Amarantha that Feyre is a hunter....and then sending the Wyrm after Feyre, her illiteracy, which I won't place entirely on Rhys bc we truly have no idea how Amaratha knew). Imagine if Tamlin spilled the beans, Amarantha would have gotten Unknown Daemati #217 to crack his mind open, and now Amarantha knows about not just Feyre, but her father, her sisters, and the entire human congregation living by the wall.

Secondly, Tamlin was the only one of the High Lords to remain cognizant of Amarantha--which is the reason Rhysand was wary, to begin with. And even under heavy watch, he still allows refugees from other courts to take refuge at his own home. He still works through the curse, despite how many men he was losing, and ONLY stops because he was tired of sacrificing his friends with no end result. He even feels guilty about having to make Feyre fall in love, so much so that Lucien has to tell him to do it, even though he knows (to some extent) that Feyre killed Andras with hate in her heart. He still defends the borders (which ofc is bare minimum)

Thirdly, when he realizes he cannot fend against Hybern's vast army, he staunches the flow of Hybern soldiers into his land through his alliance, all the while, still collecting stacks and stacks of information to send back to the other High Lords. And I should note -- he doesn't have to do this as the bargain would at least ensure the safety of his people (and please don't get me started on the flimsy nature of bargains in this series, because Hybern should have faced consequences for breaking it). And even AFTER the Nigh court ruins the operation, Tamlin still comes, still saves Feyre, and STILL brings Rhysand back from the dead.

And even with Ianthe - I never know what game the story is playing. I definitely think its a blunder to trust her, but WAR made it pretty clear that Tamlin was wary of Ianthe, and probably was only using her to cement his alliance with the King. While I think Ianthe attempts to manipulate Tamlin, and does to some extent, in relation to his relationship with Feyre, I don't know that he was completely inept in that situation. I also think its a weird plot hole to have Tamlin defer to a woman, while making the argument that Tamlin is a misogynistic asshole who hates to see women in power. As with his dynamic with Ianthe - we know that's not true. Especially because the story is arguing that Tamlin had an issue with Feyre being in power, when in reality, he seems to have no issue taking political advice from a women, and seems to actually take in to consideration what Ianthe is saying, though its not the greatest thing. The difference between how much power Ianthe had in Spring, and how little power the leading women of the IC have is quite astounding. Like yeah Ianthe is evil, but why is she pulling more strings than the Second-in-Command eldritch monster, or Third-in Command warrior princess?

Look - the politics in the series starts on uneven footing - but I just feel like Tamlin made very reasonable decisions despite being in completely unreasonable situations. Like, he's placed in the lose-lose situations, but ultimately always makes the right decision. And in the realm of this story -- with the other High Lords as a metric -- I think Tamlin is a pretty good High Lord. I think I can come to that conclusion, but I'm up for discussions if anyone disagrees.