#who else still isn't over azure lion's death?

[its-leethee]

I wanted to wait I wanted to make you beg for me I wanted to wait I want it today, don't say it to me

Tell me what to do Just the thing that will break me out Tell me what to do I want a warrior fight with you

Aluna - Warrior (feat. SG Lewis)[Austin Millz Remix]

[ryin-silverfish]

I really like Azure Lion as a character. Yeah, you can stop following me now. /j

But no, seriously, I like how LMK has adapted this particular character, given him way more potential complexity than his novel counterpart——not that it's a high bar, the LCR trio of JTTW are just demon warlords living in a literal human slaughterhouse.

Which is why I deeply dislike the take that "Oh, Azure manipulated SWK into fighting the JE! He's just using him like a pawn!" Like, wow, way to completely butcher two characters' personality and agency in one go.

Such takes reduce SWK to some innocent kid, when he is at most an impulsive, daring teenager who haven't met a single real obstacle so far——he robbed the dragon kings blind, and they couldn't do a thing! He struck his name and all his monkeys' names off the Book of Life and Death! What couldn't he do?

And Azure's failing isn't him telling a toddler: "You know what? Driving your tricycle into oncoming traffic will be real fun, trust me kiddo." It's letting his friend go way over the speed limit and not telling him that he should maybe, y'know, slow down, bc he'd seen his epic driving skills, SWK's the bestest driver he ever met, surely nothing would happen!

(And also, no one in that car is sober, except Macaque.)

What I'm getting at here is, even without Azure, SWK is not gonna be content with sitting on his mountain, eating peaches forever. Hell, he sure doesn't in the novel, where his demon king brothers are little more than namedropped NPCs.

He is always gonna want more, chase after greater destinies, drown out that existential ennui and fear of death at the back of his mind with bigger and bigger power-ups and the laughters of his companions.

He told himself he would be content after getting this one thing he wanted. That he could stop at any time. But alas, like any ADHDer, he will not stop at this one exciting thing, and sooner or later, the boredom sets in, and he gets ideas and impulsively leaps into making them reality.

That is the Mind Monkey at his worst: being a whirlwind of chaos, while unknowingly enslaved to his own chaotic mind.

(In the book, this is Wu Cheng'en's reminder to the reader that, even though you shouldn't keep your heart constantly under lock and keys, Neo-Confucian style, the other extreme——letting it go completely wild, disregarding all external rules and consequences, can be equally disastrous.)

And when that car was driven through the Celestial Palace's front door, off a bridge, and straight into a ditch, it was him in the driver's seat, steering the wheels the whole time.

Everyone else in that car failed terribly as friends when they didn't voice any objections, or try to get him off the driver's seat, or realize that cheering and egging him on is an awful idea, however genuine their blind trust was.

Like, they are certainly not helping, and made the situation much, much worse. If you let your buddy drive while under influence and hand him more beers in the car, even if you are also drunk out of your mind and aren't actively trying to get him into a traffic accident, you are a shitty, irresponsible friend.

But the thing is? SWK is still responsible for the consequences of his decisions. He could have stopped, by his own volition, and no one was holding a gun to his head and forcing him to drive. He, too, wanted this.

That, to me, makes a much more interesting narrative than "Poor innocent baby SWK was puppeted into becoming the Great Sage in Heaven by shady blue cat, how awful!"

Oh, and since I'm feeling particularly salty today, I'll also ask some last questions: is SWK so weak-willed and devoid of self-agency to you that he couldn't even OWE his most famous title, the Great Sage in Heaven, 100%, without being manipulated into it?

Is SWK so immature and unintelligent to you that he is incapable of being a genuine idealist or rebel, that he cannot agree, out of the depth of his heart, that the Celestial Realm sucks balls and needs better management?

TL;DR: Havoc! Era Azure Lion isn't some cult leader brainwashing this kid into becoming his figurehead. He's the dumbass who's too busy staring at his teenage crush to care about the blaring police sirens.

Also, I had a bit of an epiphany after writing this: why am I so annoyed by people reading Azure's idealization of SWK as him intentionally manipulating and love-bombing him? Because it is a very western and modern reading.

For someone with traditional Confucian beliefs, it is perfectly normal——it is what you are supposed to feel, as a liege who has found your just and virtuous lord.

If Romance of the Three Kingdoms existed back then, he would probably describe himself as the Guan Yu to SWK's Liu Bei, however wonky the analogy was.

(Gosh, now I want a "Four Classics read each other" crossover.)

I'm not saying it is healthy or wise. But under this context, putting your lord on a pedestral was normalized, and even encouraged, as the virtue of a righteous gentleman. It was the sort of ideals romanticized culture-wide. NOT having such beliefs would probably make you look weird.

And since the Celestial Realm in the novel is a parody of Confucian hierarchy in a Daoist trenchcoat, it was really no surprise that an idealistic ex-celestial soldier would hold the same beliefs.

To torture the analogy further, the problem is that he was trying to be the Guan Yu to SWK's Liu Bei, when the Brotherhood had more in common with the Bandits of the Marsh, down to their giant downer ending.

[blaiddydbrokeit]

OC ask prompt: Gonna pick some randomass numbers

7, 8, 13, 69, 88, 100

Go wild

Thank you, I have no chill therefore I am going to hyperfixate on Allan for this.

7. Which of their relationships have impacted them most positively? Well, this one should be obvious enough, but Dimitri. Over the course of the story, from being estranged cousins to being classmates with similar academic goals, to becoming more like brothers with each other's backs. It's one of the reasons that writing him to be canon-compliant still demands some minor changes for them to tempo the focus to and from each other, being the two sides of the same coin. Without Dimitri, he would have ended up a similar case to Marianne - who if not recruited, often disappears in Part II entirely, rumored to have died.

However, that is not to say that he should be Azure Moon locked - quite the contrary, because although Dimitri's presence does allow him to open up given the right circumstance, Dimitri's absence and subsequent death in SS and VW also inadvertently fulfills Rufus' very first intent for Allan's purpose - to displace and remove Dimitri, such that Allan becomes King. In a sense, that is neither a good ending nor a bad one, but that it is a salvaged ending where they must make do with the circumstance to make their efforts bear fruit - that is why I call those endings the "Loog II" endings. They are the endings where the Kingdom must be reborn from ruins of war, but leaves a legacy of both the old and the new.

8. What's the weirdest thing they have ever eaten? He attempts to put cheese on everything. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. The weirdest thing by far was the time he put grated hard cheese on peach sorbet thinking it would make the peach sorbet more enjoyable. It did not. He vows to try it with cream cheese next time.

13. How do they react to feelings of guilt? Allan takes guilt terribly. His more reclusive childhood in Itha with Rufus leads him to realize that in some way that he doesn't understand, Rufus has wronged Lambert. Even though he isn't at all meant to be responsible for Rufus' acts, he still feels incredibly guilty because he can't bring himself to mention it until after Rufus' assassination. As a result, he actually attempts to take Dimitri's place in execution, believing it to be if nothing else, an equalizer for Lambert's death in Rufus' stead. Thankfully, he does come to realize that such a thing would only unfairly put more weight on Dimitri's shoulders and leverages on the immense power of two crests to break out and flee.

69. Is there something that they find really gross? "Gross" is an interesting adjective in this context - much of his trauma from the experiments being held in terrible conditions and frequent encounters with bloody scenes and illnesses have desensitized him to these typically gross settings. However, as a child, due to Rufus' frequent womanizing when he was still in his prime, he has an aversion to provocative, promiscuous dressing. In other words, gross to him is like seeing bare ankles on a woman.

88. Are they trustworthy? Most of the Blue Lions are, and he is no exception. However, given that many of them have their own groups, few actually find reason to confide in him first. Dimitri is the first, entrusting his feelings of being unfit to inherit the throne, to which he does not try to exploit. This is one of the catalysts to Dedue eventually also trusting him enough to confide his worries about Dimitri's deterioration. Most others try not to load too much on him, though, since they come to realize that he is also keeping the heavier depths of his own trauma to himself.

100. Wildcard (I'll just give a fun fact for this) As the Grand Duke of Itha and part of House Blaiddyd, his personal official motto is "In Life I Serve, In Death I Inspire".