#you may think this is a lot of extrapolating based on two scenes but it’s not my fault ya’ll don’t know how to read between the lines 🙄 I’m | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

iztopher · 2 years ago

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FOR THE ASK GAME

Teijal 👻👽🦾💝💔🪢🔪🌟

Galahad 🧸🦾😺

Rhen 🫂📓💝

Beatrice 👻🌟🥇

(I realise this is a lot lol but if you want you can just answer the teijal ones!! Also for any of them you may add a random headcanon if you so desire)

saw this ask and said to danny out loud "when nobody else has got me xzoni has got me" THANK U!!!!

LONG POST INCOMING LOL

Te'ijal

👻 A headcanon about what scares them: death! or rather, ceasing to exist. mortality. she's sooo used to being immortal she's existential and terrified of anything else. similarly, the people she cares about dying. loneliness in general doesn't scare her, but loneliness because she's lost the people she's close to does.

👽 A headcanon about a weird quirk of theirs: everything Te'ijal does is a weird quirk let's be real here. I never have opportunity to put this into stuff I'm working on (I should draw it sometime) but I like to think she likes hanging upside down.

🦾 A disability headcanon: hm. how very interesting that you sent me this for Te'ijal and Galahad /j. I've got one and a half - one for canonverse (well, any verse) and half of one specifically for modern AUs! my canonverse is a developmental disability, autistic Te'ijal is my everything. for modern AU specifically - uhh I don't know if this actually counts as a disability because there's certainly a lot of overlap but it like, depends a lot, I think (at least based on personal experience) but I like to be self indulgent and make her a cancer survivor (probably a blood related one. nooo I'm not projecting I prommy).

💝 A headcanon about their love language: quality time... no surprise from the immortal I am sure

💔 An angsty headcanon: okay, hi, yes, so that thing about her being terrified of death? about that? I think she is like, genuinely super fucked up over the tower scene. I think it shook up her relationship w/ Galahad a little bit, and Gyendal significantly, and I'm not sure how thoroughly she lets herself think about it. I think she has trouble sleeping in rooms with windows ever since and wakes up way earlier than she'd realistically need to. Honestly on my far away wishlist to one day write is a fic exploring this as a traumatic event for her and the fallout of it because like - Yeah. Yeah.

🪢 A headcanon about their family: she and Gyendal are kind of sort of twins! they both came into existence as fully fledged vampires, born out of people's belief in the existence of vampires. they emerged from the same tomb together on the same night.

🔪 A headcanon relating to fighting/violence: BITE BITE MAIM MAIM KILL KILL. I love the idea of her using her bow and arrow to hunt humans the same way a human hunter would kill like, deer. Overall the idea of extrapolating her eating humans to actively hunting them is delightful to me.

🌟 A headcanon about their desires/wishes: I think Te'ijal like... wants to figure out how to bridge her fondness for humanity and her love of being a vampire. I think she feels kind of stuck between the two and is constantly trying to find ways to anchor herself to humanity. I headcanon she turned Beatrice in an attempt to find someone to share this middle ground with and it backfired because Beatrice liked being a vampire a little too much, so then she turned Galahad who seemed the guarantee of the exact opposite hoping he'd come around and meet her in the middle.

Galahad

🧸 A headcanon about their childhood: My Galahad childhood headcanon is the backstory Rhenegade gives him, aka an orphan raised by a religious order in Sedona who became the squire of a paladin as a young teen and the rest is history. I think as a result of this he had pretty much zero friends until he was a preteen, but on a conscious level he is not bothered by this because he was content to socialize with the caring but admittedly aloof adult figures he spent his time around. this is, in no small part, part of why he is Like This.

🦾 A disability headcanon: same snide joke as for Te'ijal! I'm almost bummed that these are highlighting the same headcanon essentially, but also I love talking abt it, so, developmental disability, this man is autistic.

😺 An animal related headcanon: he learned how to ride a horse as part of his paladin training! but he is not good with animals and he does not really do it ever.

Rhen

🫂 A friendship headcanon: I think she was originally friends with and looked up to Te'ijal and Elini when they both joined the party, but gets some distance from them after everything happens with Galahad and John, respectively. She's still friends with them, but it's more awkward/strained and no longer has this starry eyed "look at these competent and cool adults" element anymore.

📓 A headcanon about their hobbies: I really like the idea of a bookish, daydreamy Rhen. That, admittedly, is originally from Rhenegade, so for one of my own, I think she and her friends/family used to go camping growing up and she really enjoyed it! I like the idea of a Rhen

💝 A headcanon about their love language: Hmmm probably quality time and words of affirmation. I think Rhen really wants to know she's being seen for who she is by someone who loves her, and things like really apt compliments or assurances she was hoping for, and spending time with her, are good ways to accomplish that.

Beatrice

👻 A headcanon about what scares them: Oh man this is fun because this is not one I've ever considered for her before. I think Beatrice is afraid of losing her influence, and of not being listened to. This definitely manifests more as anger and a desperate, manipulative bid to get back in control, however.

🌟 A headcanon about their desires/wishes: I think she deliberately became a vampire to gain supernatural powers! I think she likes being in control, not just of her life, but whatever situation she's in.

🥇 A headcanon about what they’re best at: I don't think Beatrice has any innate magical ability, but I think she has a lot of knowledge and skills that come pretty much as close as she can get. She stands out to me as an Aveyond character I see as skilled with magic without technically having any.

#dear mel #thank u!!!!!#aveyond

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the-way-astray · 4 months ago

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my time has come. i must defend aldella against this slander . . .

first of all, i don't understand how you can read kotlc and say alden and della are "literally the worst parents in history", like. what about gisela??? cassius??? quan??? mai??? hello?????????????

"literally forces his two sons" *loud incorrect buzzer* he did not force them to do anything. alvar specifically states in neverseen that he did the sophie search to keep his dad happy and because "it was fun to sneak away to the forbidden cities" (somewhere near the end of neverseen, sorry). as for fitz, we can probably assume the same of him, extrapolating from alvar. also, i guarantee the second either had implied they didn't want to do it anymore, alden would've found another way.

"neglects/forgets his daughter too btw" literally where? if you mean him not telling her about the search, well that's because it was a secret. fitz likely didn't know about it either when alvar was searching. alden wanted to keep it between as few people as possible. it's even implied della didn't know, either. if you mean the lack of canon interaction between biana and alden, then we do have to take into account that the entire story is told from sophie's point of view. they likely interact a lot more off-page.

"compromising their education" nope. fitz was ranked number one in his entire class, and alvar won the radiant, the highest honor a basic level student can win. they both did this despite the search meaning they skipped school. no education to be compromised, try again!

"being too lazy to search for sophie on his own" alden is a top emissary and likely had tons of actual, official shit to do. he can't just be disappearing to the forbidden cities whenever he wants to. also, a grown-ass adult man searching for a preteen girl . . . yeah, that wouldn't be weird at all. imagine the part where sophie runs away from fitz in the very first scene, except instead of fitz, a young teenage boy, it's alden, a grown man . . . yeah, the implications aren't very good.

"to look for this random girl in the lost cities" the only part of this i agree with. i firmly believe there is no way in hell alden would've found sophie if it weren't for forkle sending him that article. and even then, fitz almost botched it.

"alden literally manipulates keefe and uses keefe’s trust in him to tell him to 'back off sophie'" actually, he tells keefe a very personal story about himself that he's literally never told anybody else, then gives keefe good advice based on personal experience. at that point in time, both sophie and fitz have known feelings for one another, and keefe just has an unrequited crush on sophie (by which i mean sophie knew she had a crush on fitz, and if you want to argue she had hidden feelings for keefe, you at least have to admit that she wasn't aware of them). so from alden's perspective, he's giving keefe good advice that will help all three of them down the line. he's wrong, but nothing he said was manipulative in any way whatsoever. alden does not "ship sophitz", he literally just wants all three of them to be happy, and from his perspective he sees two kids that like each other and a third that has an unrequited crush on one of the two kids. he's trying to get keefe out of this situation with the least heartbreak possible. was he right? no, but he was not manipulative. he also never uses the words "back off sophie" or anything of the sort. he tells keefe to "let them be happy" which is valid! again, he thinks keefe has an unrequited crush on sophie, who has reciprocated feelings for fitz. maybe he shouldn't have meddled, and should've let high school drama be high school drama, but remember, he wasn't even planning on having this conversation; it just came up. he did not go to candleshade with the intention to tell keefe to "back off sophie", as you put it. also we're reading keefe's perspective of this event both times he talks about it. which means we're subjected to a level of bias. keefe likes sophie and wants to be with her, bad. so obviously, anyone that tells him he should leave sophie alone and let her be with fitz is going to be met with just a little bit of disdain. just keep that in mind.

"what an ahole!!!" literally where. literally how.

alden and della are literally the worst parents in history. especially alden, literally forces his two sons (neglects/forgets his daughter too btw) to skip school (compromising their education for his own selfish reasons aka being too lazy to search for sophie on his own) to look for this random girl in the lost cities. alden literally manipulates keefe and uses keefe’s trust in him to tell him to “back off sophie”. what an ahole!!!

#kotlc #kotlc alden #alden vacker #pro alden vacker #alden vacker defense squad #kotlc della #della vacker #<- this anon mentioned nothing about della in their evidence which is hilarious to me because they cited her in the first sentence. oh well #anyway anon i don't hate you. trust me i understand what it's like to despise a character other people like. i would never call you invalid #i just heavily heavily disagree. hope you see where i'm coming from!#i understand the keefe lover people now. i felt my blood boil when i saw this ask. but i respect it #anon you should come to my ask box. we'll duke it out

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gffa · 3 years ago

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OKAY, I WILL DO MY BEST HERE, but it’s one of those cases where there’s A LOT of information and NOT A LOT of information at the same time! We have a bunch of details and some good general ideas, but it’s not like it was a set-in-stone process, so there’s plenty of wiggle room if you want it. The Inquisitorius was started in 19 BBY, the same year as the fall of the Republic and the genocide of the Jedi, but seems to have been officially started after the Purge happened. Sidious had been planning something like the Inquisitorius for a long time, but this specific version of them wasn’t necessarily always the only version in development. The Inquisitors are all fallen Jedi, presumably ones that were captured by the Empire and tortured into becoming dark siders. Several of them have mentioned that they were former Jedi, but the only one we’ve seen the process of is Trilla Suduri, who we saw being tortured for a very long time in Jedi: Fallen Order. (Link of the relevant scenes here. Warning: It can be a bit of a tough watch, Trilla is physically tortured and some of it you see from her perspective, as the electricity is jolted into her body, which can be kinda disturbing.) So, in theory, it’s possible that some of them fell on their own and agreed to join, but the one explicit example we have is where she was tortured into it and, while Cal is walking around their fortress, he talks about how multiple Jedi were broken there. (For another example, Prosset Dibs is a Jedi we saw falling to the dark in the Mace Windu: Jedi of the Republic comic, so he may have willingly joined or he may have healed while he was working in the Jedi Archives but not all the way and still had to be tortured into joining.) The Inquisitors are under the direct supervision of Darth Vader (after he’d discovered the program, he was put in charge of it), who trains them incredibly harshly--in Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, he’s shown cutting an arm off one of them and basically telling them to suck it up and keep fighting, to remember what loss feels like.

Sometimes they’d work with Darth Vader (the Grand Inquisitor went to the Jedi Temple in 19 BBY with Vader, where they confronted Jocasta Nu, the Ninth Sister went with Vader on a mission to investigate a possible Jedi sighting on Cabarria, Vader took them with when he went to kill Eeth Koth and kidnap his baby daughter, Vader had them with when he went to Mon Cala to confront Lee-Char, etc.), sometimes they operated separately from each other (all the times in Rebels or Jedi: Fallen Order that Kanan, Ezra, or Cal faced them when Vader wasn’t around, etc.), probably based on whatever Vader felt like or whatever Sidious felt like on a given day. The Inquisitorius as a group seem to have some degree of command over Purge Troopers, as they would often be seen leading a group of them (this happened often in Jedi: Fallen Order especially) and they could commandeer military assets (or probably civilian assets as well) if they needed to, so they had a certain amount of leeway when it came to their missions--so long as they didn’t piss off Vader or Sidious. Their main goals were to hunt down any Force-sensitives in the galaxy, whether newly discovered Force-sensitive children, former Jedi (whether they had left the Jedi Order or were Jedi in hiding, it didn’t matter), or even Force-sensitive adults who had never been trained by the Jedi. They would turn them if they could, but otherwise it was to kill anyone who might possibly be a Force-related threat of any kind. (What this means for planets like the Bardottens, they’ve never said.) They were greatly successful at their missions, so they wound up killing a great number of Jedi who had made it into hiding, along with Darth Vader being one of the biggest reasons the Jedi were mostly entirely gone by the time of the OT, which was helped along by Vader training the Jedi style out of them. Part of why he was so harsh to them (including cutting off limbs, etc.) was to force them to be more aggressive and less defensive, to be sharp and quick and fast to overpower Jedi, who were used to a different type of fight. They still had unique talents (as all Force-sensitives are not the same), like Ninth Sister had a great talent for reading emotions (including Vader’s, where she could sense how much he wanted to die),

As well as they weren’t actually Sith. Only Sidious, Vader, and Maul were Sith, the Inquisitors were dark siders or fallen Jedi or possibly a category unto themselves. They have some sort of headquarters, as seen in Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, where Vader is seen training them in issue #6 (same scene as above where he cuts off their hands or lightsabers their eye out), which is labelled as being on Coruscant, somewhere in The Works in the Industrial District:

There’s a training arena we see there and at least some sort of communication/strategy rooms that Vader and the Grand Inquisitor walk off into, while they discuss the other Inquisitors. Which means it’s a pretty big complex/building, but (according to Wookieepedia and I’ll trust them on this, instead of digging out my copies of the Complete Vehicles and Complete Locations book), it was a building of Sidious’ that he used as a hideout during the Clone Wars. To what extent Vader and the Inquisitorius took it over (whether they just had a few rooms or the entire skyscraper), I don’t think we know?

Later, in issue #20, we see there’s some sort of break room that Vader storms in on, when he returns to Coruscant, that the Inquisitors were sitting around and hanging out in:

From there, it would be reasonable to extrapolate that this was a base for their operations, the place they returned to after they came back from wherever they’d been sent, possibly even this is where they slept and ate and were sheltered in between missions. But that’s just reasonable conjecture, not hard canon! There is also Fortress Inquisitorius from Jedi: Fallen Order and it’s primary use was that it was where they took the Jedi they were torturing into becoming Inquisitors. I wouldn’t say it’s an academy, per se, but it was a place that they likely used as a headquarters. In issue #20 of Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, two of the Inquisitors rebel against Vader and he winds up chasing them down and cutting a huge swath of destruction in his path (LOL @ ANAKIN), which Sidious is not exactly pleased about. He says that he’s going to move the Inquisitorious off Coruscant to another world so this won’t happen again:

The comic was written in 2018 and Jedi: Fallen Order came out about 11 months later in 2019, so the above isn’t necessarily directly referring to that the Inquisitorious were moved to Fortress Inquisitorious on the moon Nur, but it’s also a very reasonable (and probably likely) assumption. We don’t have an exact timeline for when this issue takes place, but it’s minimum three years after Revenge of the Sith (the Mon Cala arc earlier in the comic is set three years post-ROTS), so probably around 15 or 14 BBY. However, Trilla seems to have been kidnapped much closer to Order 66, so it’s likely that Fortress Inquisitorius existed long before Order 66 happened, it was used to torture Jedi once their genocide happened, but it wasn’t the Inquisitor’s HQ until several years later. We don’t see a lot of Fortress Inquisitorious, the limited amount of areas you can play through it in Jedi: Fallen Order don’t tell you a ton about what goes on there, but it’s a pretty huge underwater skyscraper sized building and you do see several prison cells and at least one training dojo.

The galaxy at large didn’t know about Fortress Inquisitorious on the water moon of Nur or even the majority of the Empire itself didn’t know about it, it was a heavily kept secret. This is where Trilla and the other Jedi were taken, tortured, and forced into becoming Inquisitors and it’s likely that’s where the Inquisitors were based after the shitshow on Coruscant. It’s a big enough building that it’s likely to have pretty much whatever kind of stuff your clubhouse needs for the Inquisitors! But we don’t have much hard canon about it, no. As for the Inquisitors themselves, they’re complicated--some of them seemed almost loyal to each other, they would work together at times or even seem to avenge each other, but other times they would sneer at each other or mock each other, it seemed like they had a lot of shifting dynamics and probably a lot of it was fear at trying to survive being around Darth Vader. We don’t know for sure how many there specifically are or if, when one of them dies, they’re replaced by another, but it seems like there were at least twelve Inquisitors and we’ve never seen them be replaced, which I think implies that they were only ever meant to be a temporary measure and would be disposed of, as soon as Sidious knew all the Jedi were dead for sure/he could raise a new group of Force-sensitive children from birth. ANYWAY YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN: LOTS OF INFO BUT NOT A LOT OF INFO. 😂

#inquisitors #inquisitorius #fortress inquisitorius #meta #long post #really long post

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gemsofthegalaxy · 3 years ago

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To be frank I think what I've been told is true about the characters and relationships from campaign 1 VS what is actually presented in the cartoon is very interesting.

And i don't want to come across as rude but I do want to say like... people should be free to interpret and interact with the Legend of Vox Machina alone, as it stands, without accounting for stream canon, imo. because it is it's own thing to a degree and not everyone will go back and watch them.

Anyway. It's interesting because I've been Told Percy and Keyleth are best friends but, I didn't really get that level of closeness from them in the show. If anything Percy seems closest to Vex, and I have been Told they become a ship and I can see how this season sets them up, but they also could very much be read as platonic friends. It comes across that Vex just sort of "gets" Percy, combined with her defacto leader status, that's why she acts somewhat differently and more gentle around him than some of the others.

I've also been Told that Scanlan is sort of the odd one out and least connected of the group, but I don't know? He seems to be as valued a member as any? Maybe he doesn't realize it because, for instance, Vex only worries when he's not there. But his relationship with Grog seems quite strong and there are some solid scenes he has with Keyleth, and one could extrapolate in fanon to the two of them be close friends. And Vex DOES clearly care for him, if only because he's always the one in danger. I also did not see Scanlan's crush on Pike until the end, and even then I feel like it wasn't very heavy handed (which i am not complaining about, mind you) to the point where you could argue, based on JUST the show, he may or may not be interested in her more than he would just be interested in any beautiful person.

And lets not even get started on the juicy dynamic of Vex and Keyleth this season. Like I was a fan of their potential to be friends, but a lot of their interactions left me frustrated because of how Vex treated her. but clearly Keyleth doesn't hold it against her lol. Maybe everyone's just into Vex being mean to them, can't blame them really. BUT if I hadn't been told better I could seriously believe they might be setting up a vexleth relationship instead, based on the few minute sequence of Keyleth rejecting someone based on their hectic lives only to blush at someone else moments later.

Like... I just think it's neat to play in the space of the ashow and think of where relationships might land based on what was presented, rather than what we know/have been told by others will happen because this is an adaptation and they aren't going to change the canon ships. Now if only I could muster up the energy to write fic!

#tlovm #the legend of vox machina #vmnb

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serpenteve · 4 years ago

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I'm having the horrible realization that Aleksander never actually did any serious wooing of Alina in the books. It's all just Alina her self being horny attracted to him. But this is supposedly???? His grand scheme???? Of manipulation???? Implications! It seems like the girls in these books wasn't the only one slut shamed. I'm- ☠

Leigh wrote a man sexy and captivating and said "it's his fault, actually, that Alina got a crush on him. He shouldn't of.... uh.." Flips through papers. "Ah, had such pretty eyes."

Okay! 👀Yes, we are finally doing this!

I'm flipping through my copy of Shadow & Bone and noting down all the interactions between the Darkling and Alina which I've put in chronological order beneath the cut.

First of all, the Darkling and Alina are only alone together in about a handful of scenes. Most of the time, the are surrounded by other Grisha or Baghra or are in a public place. A lot of the Darkling's actions and words are clouded by Alina's own insecurities. She constantly voices how she feels like she's not good enough, not pretty enough, not strong enough and he takes it in stride and gently encourages and placates her. There are a few lies he does tell her (that the Black Heretic was his ancestor, that he wants to destroy the Fold, and he doesn't know what Baghra's power is, etc) but if we extrapolate the trajectory of her ill-fated romance arc, I think even book!Darkling would have told Alina about his real plans if she seemed like she'd accept them.

A lot of speculation has been made about the Darkling's seduction of Alina and honestly???? Aleksander literally just exists and Alina is thirsting for him because she's desperately looking for validation and re-assurance. I initially head-canoned his first kiss by the lake as being pure calculation and the kiss at the Winter Fete being 100% accidental (because Dark Lord Sasha played himself lmao) but on this re-read, I don't even know anymore. He already came close to almost kissing her after they have a tender moment, catches himself and then immediately leaves before he can catch feelings. Then when they share another tender moment at the lake, he kisses her and then is surprised by it and before he can really process it, Ivan comes by to cockblock.

Like, even Leigh (as much as she has shit on this ship) said at one point that the Darkling has strong feelings for Alina, even if he may not necessarily quantify them as love. So looking back, I don't read anything the Darkling did as manipulative seduction. He obviously lied about some stuff and wasn't transparent about his real plans for the Fold, but as a military commander who sees Alina as an opportunity for a coup, it makes sense that he'd play that a little close to the chest---especially when Alina has proved to be wary of his powers and has a very black-and-white sense of morality. If anything, this is less "the Darkling seduced Alina to manipulate her into being used!!11" and more "local dark lord tried to encourage his protege and accidentally caught feelings and it was a mASSIVE FUCKING INCONVENIENCE TO HIS EVIL PLANS"

But you know who does slut-shame Alina a lot? Baghra. Seriously, Baghra makes Alina feel like shit for her crush on the Darkling numerous times. She has all these lines:

"You want to be [his pet]...Don’t bother lying to me. You’re like all the rest. I saw the way you looked at him."

"Dreaming of dancing with your dark prince?"

"Foolish girl." (After Alina shamefully admits the Darkling might come to her that night)

At one point Baghra creeps on Alina and the Darkling's interactions and even though literally nothing happens between them and when the Darkling leaves, Alina catches Baghra giving her a snooty look. ("For no reason at all, I blushed")

She is determined to shame Alina for her feelings and make her feel like a lovesick idiot for daring to crush on him and this is in addition to all the slut-shaming Mal does. The narrative revealing the Darkling is the bad guy all along while leaving Alina no compelling arc to discover this on her own feels very much like Leigh hitting us all with Baghra's stick, like "Foolish girls! You thought he cared about Alina just because he has a sexy jawline??? HAHA HE LIED YOU SLUTS"

Scenes with Alina and the Darkling in Book 1

Their first scene together is in the Grisha tent. Based on Alina's description of him, she already thinks he's hot as barely any other character in this godforsaken series gets so many descriptions of their grey/smoke/slate/quartz eyes as Aleksander does 😏

The next time they're together he saves her life. Alina is traumatized from seeing a man sliced in half and the Darkling instructs her to keep her eyes on him instead. She is disturbed that he killed the person about to murder her and this aversion seems incredibly contrived and arbitrary on behalf of the author. It's almost like she wants Alina to be vindicated and shamed for not trusting her initial bigotry against him or something 🤔The Darkling admits even he can make mistakes and then he touches the back of Alina's neck (with some secret Heartrender/Healer abilities?) and she falls asleep riding on his horse.

They spend the next few days traveling. Alina notes that the Darkling hasn't spoken to her (probably because he's focused on getting her to the Little Palace without any more assassination attempts) but Alina is a paranoid she's offended him somehow. Again, this is just Alina's insecurity painting a narrative that simply doesn't exist based on what actually happened so far.

They exchange a few words by the stream and Alina fishes for pity points by saying she's ugly and can't possibly be Grisha. Aleksander appears 100% done with her stupidity and says she doesn't understand but he's not in the mood to explain at the moment and walks off ☠️

Alina joins the Darkling and his men for a meal. She notes that the grouse they've killed is meager shared meal but that the Darkling doesn't want to put his men in danger by sending them out to hunt in the forest at night 😌He also sits on the floor to eat like they do and he doesn't take more than the regular portion than they do 😌. Sorry, how is this man the most ~evil~ wizard on the planet? He is obviously a good and fair commander and beloved by the Grisha.

Alina has been checking Aleksander out the entire time so when he catches her, he walks over to talk. He fishes around for information on what Alina has heard about him. He seems sad when Alina mentions she has heard that Darklings are born without souls, though not surprised. He then spins the story about the Black Heretic being his ancestor and how the Fold was a mistake and how every Darkling since then has tried to undo it and how Alina is "the first glimmer of hope" he's had in a long time.

Because Alina is still on that "Grisha are unnatural monsters" agenda, she asks him about the Cut and he explains it but she's still distrubed. He asks her if it would have been better if he used a sword and she replies: "I don't know". The Darkling gets offended and leaves. Alina tries to convince herself she can't have possibly hurt his feelings (because Darklings don't have souls or feelings?) and then feels paranoid that she's failed some secret test. Yeah, the test you failed is called "empathy", Alina 🙄

Two days later, they arrive at Os Alta. Aleksander roasts the Grand Palace as the ugliest effing building he's ever seen. He leaves immediately after dumping Alina at the Little Palace and Alina actually seethes that he isn't paying more attention to her? I understand that it's overwhelming to go to a brand new place, but Alina expecting him to constantly hold her hand and explain everything to her after she basically insulted him is a bit strange.

The next time Alina sees the Darkling, they are scheduled to appear before the King and Queen. The demonstration is a surprise for Alina and Aleksander's lack of transparency of what's expected of her means she's forced to rely on him and trust his instincts. This might be his underhanded way of getting Alina to see that she can trust him; that he will not make her look like a failure or humiliate her; that they are in this together and it will only work if she trusts him.

After the demonstration, Genya and the Darkling trash the monarchy for a bit (Alina is horrified) and then the Darkling orders Genya to get a black kefta for Alina, to which Alina infamously wants a blue one. The Darkling doesn't really put up much of a fight, merely wanting to know why. Alina decides he doesn't approve of her choosing blue and wonders to Genya if he's angry.

After Alina's first day, the Darkling calls her to his quarters to ask her how her day was. Alina is surprised that this is all he wanted to know because she was paranoid he was going to torture her??? She says: "Why shouldn't I be afraid of you?...You can cut people in half. I think it's fair to be a little intimidated." If the Darkling is offended or angry about this, he doesn't show it and merely indulges her. He notes that she has a habit of running her hand across a scar on her palm and asks her about it, tracing the scar himself. Alina gets distracted by his touch but manages to answer his questions: she got the scar at Keramzin, Mal is also an orphan, he is good at tracking. He shows her a secret passage back to her rooms to avoid the main hall.

Alina starts her training and at one point laments that the Darkling is rarely at the Little Palace and when he is, he never speaks to her or barely looks her way and she is convinced it's because she's a failure and can't summon light on her own. It could also be because, you know, he's the commander of the Second Army and is usually seen in talks with other military advisors and the fact that Alina kinda lowkey insulted him with her wariness about his powers???

The next time they are together, Alina interrupts him and Baghra arguing. He politely asks her how she is. Baghra antagonizes her. The Darkling defends her. They talk about amplifiers and because Baghra is being a snarky little shit about it, they take their conversation outside.

Aleksander complains about how annoying his mom is and then asks Alina what stories she's heard about Morozova's herd. At one point he laughs for the first time and Alina practically creams her pants at the sound. Alina expresses her concerns that she can't summon any light and the Darkling says he's not worried and it will happen when it happens and worse case scenario, it will happen once she has the stag. They have a quiet intimate moment, gazing softly into each other's eyes and then suddenly Aleksander realizes he's catching feelings and steps back suddenly like "GoodLuckWithYourLessonsOKayBYE". Baghra watches this interaction from her hut and gives Alina a slut-shaming look.

Alina eventually does learn to summon light on her own. Baghra gives her grief about how it's not enough. The Darkling shows up during one of these lessons and says as much. Alina says she's useless. The Darkling corrects her (“I don't think you're useless, Alina....No Grisha is powerful enough to face the Fold. Not even me”) and then he apologizes for letting her down ("I've asked you to trust me and I haven't delivered"). He wonders if his mother is right and he's crazy to hunt the stag. They have a nice bonding moment, Aleksander lies about Baghra's power, and then he asks if Alina would think him crazy for still wanting to find the stag. She asks why he cares what she thinks, he seems genuinely surprised himself that he cares. Then he kisses her. He seems not to have meant to kiss her because then Ivan shows up for his 5 o'clock shift of cockblocking and the Darkling immediately pretends like nothing happened and walks away with him. Like dude is acting like a fucking dork who's allergic to feelings at this point. I should note here that Alina practically has an orgasm from how giddy she is about this moment. She can barely think of anything else.

The next time they're together, it's at the Winter Fete. They do their demonstration and Alina accidentally reveals her insecurities about how he had kissed her and then disappeared. He responds, "Did you really think I was done with you?" and then they enjoy some steamy kisses and thigh grabbing in an empty room before a random round of Grisha show up for their 6 o'clock shift of cockblocking. Aleksander is annoyed at his own attraction to Alina. He asks if he can come to her that night but Alina doesn't get a chance to respond.

and then the Darklina romance arc falls off a giant cliff and dies a terrible death 😭😭😭

#viv answers #god this ended up being so long WOW #i had a lot of feelings i guess #cw: purity culture #sab meta #grisha discourse #darklina #viv metas

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trekkie-in-space · 3 years ago

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Straight Fact about Marsella/Marseille from La Casa de Papel and some following Headcanon/Theories ✨✨

- Fact -

- Very discreet, he observes a lot and talk a little, called at a least at two reprises a mute (by Bogotà and Denver)

- Close to animals, especially dogs, love them, respect them, trust them more than human. He is against animal suffering.

- Ex-Soldier, has been called an assassin (by Bogotà) and Hitman (by Denver), killed human, killing a human is not a problem (straight up threatened Denver to cut him in half)

- Lost all his friends during war

- Had a dog during war, the dog was very loyal to him, stayed when human left (That dog was probably not Pamuk)

- Had a dog, Pamuk, very loyal/close to him too, got killed by children playing war

- Know many languages : Spanish, French, Italian, German, English, Croatian, Serbian

- React very quickly to Denver grabbing his arm/to physical provocation was trained to react that way + probably has a sharp instinct, not shy to threaten physically and orally someone

- Answer quickly to the professor order, see him as the chief/boss and obey him. One word from him is enough, do not discuss order.

- Extremely lucky - dude crash a car and get out pretty much without a scratch - I BEG YOUR PARDON ? - the car rolled and all, what if it had deformed to the point he couldn't get out ? What if he had broken a bone in the shock and couldn't dash out ? Because you can protect yourself all you want, getting in a crash, even one you plan, is very dangerous. Dude was like 'I have things to do and nothing will prevent me from doing them' and just walked out like nothing happened. Wtf man ?

- Has a lot of respect for the professor and to his plan. Will defend the plan when the professor wants to take risk but still follow change in plans if the risk is less than the gain (When they fight after Lisbon 'death' and then go into the crowd disguised.).

- Try to provide emotional support to the professor, he is clumsy about it but do his best and tries a lot of things

- Caring toward the professor, with (and I'm sorry but I don't know how to say it differently, but..) A certain tenderness. Like anybody in the group (or most) they are not just colleagues. But there is just a softness with him.

- React to Palermo 'Boum Boum Ciao' the same way the professor does. Seem annoyed, middly ashamed but also taken by the energy around (to crack a smile like the professor).

- Can be very intimidating if choose to, but in relaxed situation seem very kind/soft and not unbearing or obnoxious/showing.

- Extrapolations on Canon, Theories and Headcanons -

- The last hit he gave the professor when they were fighting is not because he misread the situation but because the professor just said Lisbon could betray them (which is technically true) and his hit was his way to say, 'have some faith/respect in your wife'

- During that fight he intentionally took hit from the professor to allow him to unload stress/give him a win. Why ? Because he is a trained ex-soldier who clearly shows good physical abilities, he knows how to fight and could probably take on Sergio even if he know how to fight too. Prior to this we see two scenes. One in a relaxed sitting (the soccer match) where Helsinki give him a slap and he doesn't react badly, he takes the hit and laugh, they were in front of each other he could have potentially avoid the hit, but did not hold grudges for that hit, basically taking a hit or two is not much for him and won’t be enough for him to get angry/escalate a situation. BUT during the pig scene to remove a micro, he reacts badly to physical provocation by Denver after he had to defend his position not to touch the animal with the rest of the team. Even if just a few said something, the whole team was baffled by his decision/principle, it was a moment where he was 'alone against all' and he defended himself in a quick and efficient manner.

They are in a middle of a heist, they are allies and he clearly does not want to fight, he fights because Sergio wants to fight and he probably doesn't give his all but just enough not to get bullied and give Sergio a mean to keep unleashing on him. (Man I swear you're doing too much)

- Definitely have some trauma and problem concerning human and trust. In two separate points, he has lost a lot or enough, and he had been deeply hurt by that (his friends all dead, his animals), probably have some unhealed emotional scars or one that heal badly and one way to cope is to keep a bit of distance + he seems to have a certain discipline/restrain in general.

Second, he mistrust humans, he is careful around them. Probably (definitely) has seen a large panel of the worst humanity has to offer. Probably don't trust easily but love when someone proves him they are worth trusting - which I think is what happened with the professor. Otherwise probably work alone or keep some distance.

- Jumping on that. He completely agreed to the professor as the boss, and his boss. Coming from a military background, he is used to having someone above him giving order and he answer promptly to the professor order or demand without questioning it/arguing (except when it touch to something the professor explicitly stated they should not do like improvisation, then he will argue). Overall he trusts him, might even admire him or have a deep respect for him and his plan/what de does/his personality.

-> I also believe his personality is one of a 'shadow' by that I mean he is his best as close support to someone/something acting behind for the good of the plan (which he does in the series), but I think he thrives in that role. He is a real doer. Dude will do anything that need to be done. like, he is perfect for a second, with someone above him to direct the action.

- Always had a good relationship to animals, now it had become a coping mechanism and a way to have companionship without the burden of 'human' nature. Not that he doesn't miss more close relationship to humans. Nor is it not painful when he loses someone or an animal close to him. it's just he find solace in animals compagny.

- Very soft, kind, caring inside. He let that out for the people he care about/trust. We see him mostly with the professor and above it being his role to care for the professor and all the 'beside' matter and needs. There are a lot of moments where he is very attentive to the professor or caring in ways that go above a professional setting (I'm sorry but when in the latest season when he put the cover back on Sergio as he sleep.. Such tenderness I swear ! or the way he tries to offer him emotional comfort/help)

-> Also the way he care for Sofia..

- Give off asexual vibe, sorry not sorry but it's true. That man is ace.

- Why is he on the heist ? I think outside of money and personal material gain he might be in for revenge against the system. He was a soldier, an executor in the government hands, he may want to fuck the system, give shit to a system that has used him, that took a lot from him. Maybe he was betrayed by that government and the people in it, root for his mistrust of human or just added enough to a preexisting base.

- The way he reacts physically and violently to Denver grabbing him when he turn away is very telling. He has a strong instinct and sharp reflex. But also definitely found himself in a situation where this would have been a life of death situation or overall high danger. This is absolutely pure speculation but outside of his work as a soldier and now hitman this reaction could be rooted deeper in child abuse and trauma, which could also reflect to his discreet and unshowing personality, he keeps to himself.

Anyway this looked like reflexes from training and from past traumatic experience. -> In a way his reaction seemed a bit too much (definitely) for the situation they were in, but also somewhat 'slow' (I'm interpreting too much the acting but whatever) as if he thought about reacting the way he did, nearly didn't but still did because he was pissed off from earlier and had been triggered. So he just decided to go with the outburst, and set his position straight.

-> Being grabbed from behind/prevented from leaving might also be from a fear/trigger to be trapped (the way he place himself behind in the class, close to the door (which could be nothing lol x) )). Which could also be tied to his time in military where his agency had been stripped from him completely/where he was lacking freedom and had to do things he didn't want to do.

- A big BIG softy, but also those hands have killed and will kill again. (in a way him and Helsinki are a bit alike)

- Keeps most of his emotions inside, tend to stay mostly neutral and what he show is just the tip of the iceberg, but don't be fooled, that man have a lot of emotions.

- Probably need a lot of time to open up, but do info dump at time when he think it might be relevant (ex: during the pig scene, or in the car with Sergio after Lisbon 'death') and you're like 'what ?' very likely need to be asked question if you want to know things about him.

- He likes honesty, but probably won't be himself, tend to be secretive, probably a good liar. He will be honest on a few important things otherwise...

- That man way of love his act of service x)

#LA CASA DE PAPEL #MONEY HEIST #MARSEILLE #MARSELLA #LCDP #EL PROFESSOR #SERGIO MARQUINA

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maxwell-grant · 3 years ago

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Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?

I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s).

I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.

Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.

He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth?

That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-

Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.

The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).

Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -

Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:

Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914).

Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.”

He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.”

Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.

The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins

And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,

Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion

One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day.

I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”

They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth.

You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.

Whoops!

Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.

The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm.

He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.

The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel

I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.

Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC.

So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?

Just until he gets his full powers back of course.

I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.

#replies tag #marvel comics #marvel #dc comics #dc #pulp heroes #pulp villains #martian manhunter #plastic man #kraven the hunter #two-face #shuma-gorath #marvel vs capcom

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scripttorture · 4 years ago

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Question: how much damage would beating someone with a chain cause? Assume I'm talking about an otherwise healthy adult male

Unless it was a very light chain it would probably cause lethal damage in a few strikes/seconds.

A chain can be made of different materials to different weights and thicknesses. So for the sake of clarity I am picturing a metal chain of width wider then two fingers, with a weight that’s at least several kilos. These are not common torture implements, which means I’m extrapolating based on what I know, rather then consulting a statistically sound modern data set.

Lethal whips, which are predominantly leather but studded with metal, strip skin and fracture bones.

A chain would break bones, split skin and probably cause damage to internal organs. I think that in order to survive a character would have to be hit very few times, have immediate access to modern medicine and be very lucky.

A single blow to the head would be enough to break the skull and cause significant brain damage. If struck in the front of the face it would likely break the nose and jaw, possibly causing enough damage that the victim would suffocate. It could also blind the character.

This is assuming it didn’t kill them outright. A single punch to the skull can kill someone if they’re unlucky. A blow with a chain could definitely kill.

Blows to the body would break the ribs and possibly the spine as well (depending on the weight of the chain and amount of blows.) Broken ribs could be forced into the lungs with further blows. A broken spine often leads to paralysis.

Blows across the belly or lower back would probably damage the internal organs and I suspect that they would be lethal. However I am not a doctor and I am not confident enough in my knowledge to say exactly what would be damaged and how.

A blow to the hips could potentially fracture the hip bone. Which is incredibly serious.

I think a blow to the neck would straight up kill someone.

Defensive injuries to the arms and legs would probably break the arms and legs. They could lead to complex breaks, a very long recovery time and possibly permanent reduction in fine motor control and strength. But that’s actually the most survivable scenario: one or two blows that only hit the arms or legs.

Death would probably be down to a combination of blood loss and multiple organ failure or uh whatever the correct medical term is for ‘too much widespread damage to everything for the body to fix it.’

So there are a lot of different potential injuries depending on how the attack plays out.

As a general rule I’d say if you want the character to live without disability then uh… may be pick something else for the other character to hit them with? A belt would be dangerous but would have a much better survival/physical recovery chance.

If on the other hand you want to write a disturbing attack with awful long term consequences or a murder scene, this is a really good choice.

With a surviving character you might want to take a look at the masterpost on common symptoms over here.

I hope that helps. :)

Available on Wordpress.

Disclaimer

#writing advice #tw torture #tw scars #tw mutilation #scarring torture #lethal torture #lethal whips #broken bones #major organ failure #disabling torture #writing torture

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feralphoenix · 4 years ago

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NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS: Leitmotif & Sound Palette In “Sealed Vessel”

whats UP hk fandom i am back with—“more picante takes?” WOW YES HOW DID YOU KNOW!!!

CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHTS PROGRAM: today we are discussing the hollow knight boss fight, and all that entails for all the characters involved. relatedly this post does not have anything nice to say about the pale king, so if you’re very protective of his character, you may want to skip it.

FURTHERMORE, i would like to iterate that this essay is working from a place of compassion for ghost, hollow, radiance, AND hornet, because every single one of them is miserable at this point in the game and doesn’t want the events of this boss fight to be happening at all. this post is not an appropriate place to dunk on ANY of them. if you want to do that, please do it elsewhere.

thanks for your understanding.

ALSO, AS USUAL: if youre from a christian cultural upbringing (whether currently practicing, agnostic/secular, or atheist now), understand that some of what i’m discussing here may challenge you. if thinking thru the implications of radiance and the moth tribe’s backstory is distressing for you, PLEASE only approach this essay when youre in a safe mindset & open to listening, and ask the help of a therapist or anti-racism teacher/mentor to help you process your thoughts & feelings. just like keep in mind that youre listening to an ethnoreligiously marginalized person and please be respectful here or wherever else youre discussing this dang essay, ty

NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS: Leitmotif & Sound Palette In “Sealed Vessel”

A while back @grimmradiance made a lovely essay about comparing and contrasting Hollow’s moveset in their Hollow Knight and Pure Vessel boss fights and using what can be gleaned from the differences to speculate about their psychology. (This essay is currently their pinned, but I’ll attach a link in a reblog.) It is extremely good, and it made me want to look at the Hollow Knight boss fight my own self through one of my own areas of expertise, meaning music!

As we are all well aware, Christopher Larkin's soundtrack to Hollow Knight rules ass. There are two specific ways in which it rules ass that are relevant to this essay: Leitmotif, and sound palette.

Quick rundown for folks who aren’t familiar with these terms: A leitmotif is a melody associated with a character or event or mood that's incorporated into songs in different ways based on what's happening in the story. Undertale is an example of a game with an incredibly strong use of leitmotif that’s really only possible because Toby Fox is both the composer and the game creator, so he can synchronize the subtleties of the writing with music and scene scripting too.

The phrase “sound palette” can have a lot of meanings, but in this case I’m using it to refer to specific instruments or groups of instruments that are associated with certain characters. If you’ve watched Steven Universe and seen interviews/production commentary by its composer team Aivi & Surasshu, you’ll hear them talking about part of their approach to scoring episodes being how each main character is represented by certain instruments: Steven with the triangle wave, Pearl with jazz piano, and so on.

Hollow Knight is a small team project rather than a one-person show, so Christopher Larkin can’t go quite AS over-the-top with leitmotif integration as Toby Fox can on simple virtue of Team Cherry having to communicate what they want to him. But Larkin is Hollow Knight's sound designer as well as its composer, so he folds leitmotif and character sound palette together with striking use of stems to create a very immersive and cinematic musical experience that enhances HK’s story and gameplay.

This brings us back to the track Sealed Vessel, which has EXTREMELY tight and cinematic sound design and uses leitmotif and sound palette to not just sock players in the feelings during a charged and dramatic boss fight, but also tell us a lot about what Hollow and Radiance are experiencing emotionally, especially with the gameplay in mind.

So, let’s play the soundtrack version of Sealed Vessel (and some other stuff) and talk about what’s going on in the game during it!

You may want to get out your copy of the OST or visit Christopher Larkin’s Bandcamp page so that you can listen along.

LEITMOTIF & SOUND PALETTE

Before we actually get into analyzing Sealed Vessel, let’s talk about the involved characters’ leitmotifs/sound palettes so we know what we’re listening for.

Both of these things are easiest to identify when characters have a distinct theme song. Ghost does not. However, the main theme of Hollow Knight (see: the title track, Hollow Knight) is used as a leitmotif for the vessels as a whole. Most pieces involved with a vessel character include this leitmotif somewhere. For instance, you can find this leitmotif and variations on it in Broken Vessel’s boss theme. The Vessel leitmotif is led by a cello solo here, so we can identify that the cello is the central part of Broken Vessel’s personal sound palette.

When the Vessel theme is associated with Ghost in specific, it tends to be performed by viola and/or piano, as it is on the title track and in other places like the opening cinematic.

Moving on to Hollow, their specific sound palette is established not in Sealed Vessel but in Pure Vessel, their pantheon boss theme. (Sealed Vessel was composed first, since the Godmaster DLC didn’t drop until over a year after HK’s initial release, meaning Pure Vessel was reverse-engineered/extrapolated from relevant parts of Sealed Vessel. But we’ll get into that later!)

The major instrumental fixtures in Pure Vessel are choir and tubular bells (i.e., those dramatic vertical fellas that sound like church bells or a carillon), with some soft background instrumentation: bass drum, woodwinds (appropriately led by flute in the main melody’s “falling motion” - flute is the centerpiece of TPK’s sound palette), strings, and high/mid brass. Hollow’s overall sound palette has a very Christian choir-esque sound (in the Pure Vessel theme this is very idealized and saintly: soft and slow and tragic) and the beginning of their leitmotif has a very distinctive climbing melody that mirrors their ascent from the Abyss. The Unbearable Vesselness Of Being leitmotif is absent from the Pure Vessel track.

Meanwhile, Radiance’s boss theme is a very fun expression of her character upon which Larkin evidently went ham. Her sound palette is expressed through full orchestra (plus choir and pipe organ) that has a special emphasis on the bass part of the brass section, which does not see much use in the HK soundtrack. Her leitmotif has also got cute and distinctive touches: It’s full of triplets to match her tiara-looking antennae, and also has a repeated “fluttery” pattern of background sixteenth notes as countermelody, often spiraling downwards.

The majority of the piece is loud and bombastic and in a minor key to play up the “resplendent and terrible” wrathful aspect of herself Radi is pushing during this section of gameplay, a very quintessentially moth intimidation tactic: Try to look as scary as possible to keep your enemies from messing with you, since you’re not built for fighting. These blasts of intensity from the brass section match Radiance’s strategy of Overwhelm You With Bullet Hell Spam To Make Up For Lack Of Battle Experience/Poor Aim. But in between said intensity spikes you can hear traces of softer instrumentation and major key, little glimpses of a gentle warmth we can otherwise only infer from her backstory and the implications of Moth Tribe lore.

0:00 - 0:41 - OPENING AMBIANCE

The Sealed Vessel track begins with the ambiance of the Black Egg Temple’s interior: The faint tones of the glowing seals we hear when we pass by them, the only light in a pitch-black world besides the floor lighting up under Ghost’s feet.

Then a slow string tremolo fades in, slowly growing louder. In the track new notes join the tremolo progressively, while in-game a violin joins the anticipatory chord every time you snap one of Hollow’s chains. Which, may I say: A+++++++ sound design!!!!!! Rules ass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The tremolo reaches a peak in dynamics - all three characters present are extremely tense - and then cuts off to allow for Hollow’s boss battle opening, i.e. Radiance screaming. Team Cherry kindly demarcates each phase of the battle with a Radi yell.

0:43 - 1:39 - PHASE 1: HOLLOW ON AUTOPILOT

Phase 1 opens immediately with Hollow’s leitmotif in bells, but with brass, piano, and percussion backing them up; grand and tragic. In the background the bass section of the orchestra's strings flutter in a repetitive pattern of 16th notes, i.e. Panicky Radi Noises. The violins harmonize with Hollow's leitmotif as it climbs, but then join the rest of the string section in fluttering 16th notes, transmuting what in Pure Vessel is the flute leading Hollow back down (8th notes) to a slightly louder “a” from the backseat.

In actual gameplay, the only attacks Hollow uses are their basic nail skills. Building on grimmradiance’s analysis of the window their attacks provide to their psychology, and pairing that with the Pure Vessel leitmotif booming over the metaphorical loudspeakers, we can tell that this is Hollow reacting automatically to a threat the way that their father trained them to. Their conscious mind might still be making dialup noises at Ghost’s sudden reappearance jumpscaring them with murky childhood guilt and trauma, but that’s only let muscle memory take over. Slash, parry, charge and thrust. Their time spent at bee bootcamp (which we can assume because Hornet was trained at the Hive and Hollow’s form while nail fighting is identical to hers on their shared moves) has served them well.

Radiance, meanwhile, has frozen completely for this combat phase, and contributes nothing here except the anxiety of the string section.

As the strings continue to go “a” the piano (Ghost) and woodwinds harmonize on something between Hollow’s personal leitmotif and the Vessel leitmotif in the backdrop.

However at around 1:29ish, the key changes, building into an overall color change for the Sealed Vessel piece.

1:39 - 2:15 - PHASE 2: SHE’S AS SCARED OF YOU AS YOU ARE OF HER

In actual gameplay, the part of Sealed Vessel used for phases 1 and 2 of the Hollow Knight fight is the Entirety of 0:43 - 2:15, possibly because there’s no easy transition spot like there is between phase 2 and phase 3. But the changes to Hollow’s moveset are clearly tied to this specific part of the piece.

Phase 2 is where Radiance pushes herself past her freeze response and starts trying to hit Ghost. Hollow gains two attacks here, which we can tell are Radi because they’re often accompanied by her crying (a softer and more abbreviated sound than her full scream): These two attacks are the Infection blob blast and the Light/Void pillar attack that hits for a full 2 masks damage (which appear to be Radi’s take on Hollow’s Pure Vessel-exclusive moves, their grabby tentacles & silver knife pillars respectively).

In the Sealed Vessel track, this part of the piece is almost entirely Radiance’s fluttering. The strings start by following the descending motion of Hollow’s leitmotif but in 16th notes, then ratchet up to start spiraling down again while straying further from Hollow’s leitmotif. This section ends in a back and forth between hard blasts in a one-two-(rest)-one-two-three pattern and gasps of fluttering between, with piano and low brass building behind it. Eventually the nervous fluttering of the strings becomes less frequent between the blasts: Radiance is inexperienced with fighting and very very afraid, but she’s also FUCKING PISSED and prepared to defend herself.

The OST version of the piece punctuates the break between the first half of the piece and the second with Radiance’s scream.

2:16 - 4:04 - PHASE 3: “I’M HELPING! :)” SAID HOLLOW; “HOLY SHIT PLEASE DON’T,” SAID LITERALLY EVERYONE

Phase 3 opens with Hollow stabbing themself repeatedly, a movement pattern they repeat throughout the phase. It is shocking the first time you see it, and never stops being horrible and sad no matter how many times you do this part of the fight.

Here, Hollow’s mind has finally come back online after their own freeze response, and they choose to destroy themself and bequeath the duty of sealing Radiance to Ghost. Even if they can’t be the one to make their father proud, they can still make sure their directive gets carried out.

Radiance knows exactly what they’re up to and why, and she reacts to this by completely losing her head and mashing buttons in a panic. This is something we see out of her at the ends of her boss fights too, where she’s feeling too threatened and afraid to do anything but spam optic blasts. In the Hollow Knight boss fight this manifests in two horrifying-looking but easy-to-avoid new attacks: The Infection blob sprinkler and the ragdoll.

Ghost does not react visibly because we're in gameplay, but their horror and grief at their sibling’s choice is echoed in the BGM. The Sealed Vessel piece goes soft and sad, with Ghost’s associated viola leading the bass strings in the Unbearable Vesselness of Being leitmotif. At 2:51 the violin comes in with Hollow’s leitmotif, and gradually the choir appears in the backdrop. The ensemble’s overall dynamics build in a slow crescendo, and at the very end of this segment the other instruments begin to join in.

This segment of the piece is also used in phase 4, which occurs if you don't have Hornet’s help or miss your cue to Dream Nail Hollow. Phase 3 ends when Hollow reaches 0 HP; in phase 4 they are for all purposes already dead. But Radiance manifests an extra 250 HP out of terrified, unadulterated FUCK YOU FUCK THIS!!! even though all she can do is get Hollow to fall on their face trying to slash and ragdoll them around. The BGM continues to play as Ghost absorbs Radiance from Hollow and Hollow’s body loses its shape and dissolves into liquid Void.

And there’s one other place in gameplay Sealed Vessel (Unbearable Vesselness of Being) is used: The Path of Pain, the completely evil kaizo-level obstacle course which presumably featured in Hollow’s childhood training, and behind which the Pale King has hidden his last and most terrible secret—that he had realized on some level that Hollow was a kid with feelings who loved him and wanted to make him proud, and condemned them to death despite it all by using them to imprison and torture Radiance as he’d always planned.

The OST version of Sealed Vessel includes the music for both normal ending cinematics, so we’ll be looking at them too.

4:05 - 4:35: ENDINGS 1/2: NO ONE IS HAPPY WITH THIS

In the BGM for The Hollow Knight and Sealed Siblings endings, the Vessel leitmotif is played by violin, viola, and choir while the cellos and contrabasses—and then the brass bass section too—play a slower version of Radiance’s downward spiral. But once Ghost is pierced by the Black Egg’s chains and Radiance’s struggle to free herself ends in failure, the soprano and bass sections harmonize. The animation zooms out of the temple and the seal reforms. They are stuck together now until the end of Ghost’s life. Hooray.

The OST version of the track immediately segues into the BGM for Dream No More.

4:36 - 5:45: ENDING 3: THANKS, I HATE IT

Here, Hornet’s associated instrument, the violin, plays one long sustained note with a few notes of Ghost’s piano alongside as she wakes up.

TPK’s goddamn flute comes in at 5:00 with his leitmotif overpowering the backdrop Vessel leitmotif on piano while Hornet surveys the carnage: The temple has been destroyed, Radiance is dead, and what’s left of Ghost’s corpse is smeared across the floor. The Void may have taken umbrage with his horseshit and unceremoniously vored him, but the motherfucker still got what he wanted in the end; the Pale King has ended the Infection by completing his genocide of the moths, using the children he abused and abandoned as his proxies, and wasting two of their lives. Can I get a hearty THIS SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in the chat.

Given that Hornet herself is canonically unsure if bringing the fight to Radiance is really a just course of action, one can only imagine how she must feel when she sees the cost of that decision.

Our only real moment of catharsis is in this shit situation comes in at 5:13, where the flute gives way to a solo from Ghost’s associated viola, playing the Vessel leitmotif as the Siblings curl up and sink back into the mountain of their corpses. Goodnight, kiddos. You deserved better, and so did literally everyone involved in this whole stupid boss fight.

This is where the OST version of Sealed Vessel ends. Even without the gameplay and story context it slaps, but now that we’ve taken a look at how this 5:45 piece is wall to wall misery and fear on the part of literally every involved character, hopefully it will have even more impact!

#hollow knight #sealed vessel #the hollow knight #the radiance #hk radiance #ghost hollow knight #hk ghost #hornet hollow knight #hk hornet #essay #hollow knight meta

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winterhawk-olympic-bang · 4 years ago

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Writer’s Workshop: How To End Your Story

How To End Your Story

Guest Poster: Flawedamythyst

We’re in the final furlong before the deadline for the first draft now, so it feels like a good time to talk about endings, and how to bring your story together to create a satisfactory one.

Have a read and then head over to the Discord Server where we have a channel for you to take part in a discussion based on the post, with chances to share your own ideas too.

How To End Your Story

There are traditionally six types of endings for a story:

Resolved ending - one with no lingering questions or loose ends. (Most murder mysteries and romances fall into this category.)

Unresolved ending - the kind of ending that leaves the reader with more questions than answers. (Usually for books that are part of a series. A lot of the HP books have endings like this.)

Expanded ending - expands the world of the story beyond the events of the narrative itself, with a time jump forward or a change in PoV.

Unexpected ending - a twist ending that the reader doesn’t see coming, but that should seem inevitable in hindsight.

Ambiguous ending - one that’s open to interpretation. Unlike an unresolved one, it leaves things to be interpreted by the reader so they have to decide themselves how it goes.

Tied ending - that brings the story full circle, and ends exactly where it began. Often the case for ‘Hero’s Journey’ type stories, where the hero ends up back home at the end.

You can read more about them here: https://boords.com/storytelling/how-to-end-a-story or here: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/ways-to-end-your-story but also in multiple other articles online just by Googling ‘Six Ways To End A Story’.

But, of course, they don’t really tell you how to work out which one your story needs, or how to write one of them without falling into any of the traps that ends with an unsatisfying ending.

Motivation

Of course, often the hardest bit with an ending is actually getting there. Losing motivation is so easy, especially when you’re writing something super-long. I know lots of people get motivation by posting as they go and using comments/kudos as a spur, or even just by talking about it on Tumblr or other places and letting other people’s excitement buoy them up, but a Bang event like WHOB doesn’t allow for that.

I’m going to talk a bit about ways to motivate yourself when you’re having to keep things secret from all but a handful of people, but bear in mind that this is something that really is very individual. Everyone writes for different reasons, and so everyone’s path to staying motivated is different.

For me, I think it comes down to focusing on why am I writing this story to start with? Any time I feel myself flagging, I think back to that reason and re-capture the original feeling I had about it. Often there’s a couple of different reasons.

For example, when I was writing Look What The Cat Dragged In, my motivations when I wrote the first line were:

I want all of fandom to share with me the image of the Winter Soldier waking Clint up to threaten him while gently cradling a kitten in his hands, and

I was writing it as a present for @kangofu-cb.

So, if I flagged at all, I was able to either reread that moment with Bucky holding the kitten and think ‘wow, I really do thing people will enjoy this mental image’, or I was able to think ‘I want my friend to have a nice thing’, and that helped me drive on and push through.

A lot of my personal motivations come down to ‘I want to share this scene/witty one-liner/visual of Clint pole dancing while dressed as Captain America with people’, so often just rereading what I’ve already done is really motivating for me, plus it also gives me the chance to see just how much I’ve already done, and what I would be dooming to be unfinished if I just walked away without pushing through.

You might well have different motivations though, which are equally valid. Maybe you started a fic for this event because you wanted to get a shiny badge, or to do something that your friends were doing, or you wanted to prove to yourself that you could write something longer than usual or outside of your usual wheelhouse. It may feel harder now than it did when you had that first idea, but that doesn’t change why you wanted to do it, and it’s actually easier now than it was when you started, because you’ve already done some of it.

And, if none of those motivations work for you, there’s always spite. ‘Oh, my brain gremlins think I can’t finish this? Fuck those guys, I’m going to prove those assholes so very, very wrong’ is completely how I powered through to finish my first ever novel-length fic, a million years and several fandoms ago.

Resolution vs Ending

So, let’s move on to the ending itself.

There are two parts to writing an ending: there’s the plot resolution and how that all gets tied up, and there’s the actual ending of the fic - the last scene, and the last place the reader sees the characters.

Sometimes the resolution happens only at the very end of a story and so those are the same thing, but I tend to think that makes things feel a bit abrupt. Especially for fics, which tend to be more character-driven than mainstream media and so need a wind down on how the characters react to the end of the plot for the reader. (This isn’t always true, of course, some plots do tie up neatly in the final scene. Every story is different and you’re the person best placed to judge what’s needed in your fic.)

So when you’re thinking about the ending, think about both parts. ‘How does this plot resolve itself?’ and ‘where do I want to leave these characters in the readers’ mind’s eye?’

Plotting a Story Resolution

You may well have already got a resolution worked out as part of your planning, but what if that ending doesn’t seem to fit any more, or you realise just as you get to it that you forgot to think about an ending at all and have no idea where to go?

First of all, don’t panic! If the rest of the story is there, you’ll be able to pull together the strands to create the best ending. Trust the bones of your story.

When I’m facing a blank page and no real idea of how I’m getting from the Depths of Despair moment to the happy ending, the first thing I do is reread the whole story in case that sparks a fantastic, fully-formed idea to appear on how to tie it all up. Mostly that doesn’t work, which is always disappointing, but it’s still a good place to start, because you have the whole run of the fic fresh in your head to plan from.

The next thing I do is make a list of all the things that I know definitely need to happen for the plot to be done. These don’t need to be in any particular order at this point and they don’t need to link up, you just need a list of what needs to go into the framework, however minor. ‘Clint wears Bucky’s hoodie and Bucky is smitten’ is a totally valid plot point to include, or even ‘include mention of recurring joke about muffins’. If you know something needs to be resolved but you don’t know how yet, just putting ‘resolve plot point with badgers’ is fine. Hopefully once you’ve started thinking through all the different bits, you’ll work out what’s going to happen to the badgers, and it’ll make sure you know it needs to be included somewhere.

If you have a beta/cheer reader who can help, it’s also super helpful to ask them what they would expect from the ending based on what they’ve read so far, or what elements from earlier in the story they think will be coming back/will turn out to be foreshadowing. Sometimes you’ll find you’ve written the clues to your ending into the earlier bits without really noticing, and you can throw them down on the list to be included as well.

Once you have everything you know needs to be included, you can shift them around into a rough order you think they need to go in, and start filling in the gaps. For example, if ‘Clint gets injured’ is there, you can add in ‘Bucky tends to his wounds’ as the obvious next step and maybe that would be a good time to throw in a muffin joke, and then Clint might need to borrow a hoodie if his shirt has blood on it, so you can tick those bits off as well.

It gets easier to see where the gaps are once you have it written out, even if it’s only things that you already knew would need to happen. Having it down in black and white helps your brain to move pieces around like a jigsaw puzzle, and start extrapolating on what comes in the gaps between.

Make The Ending Fit The Story

Think about what kind of story it’s been so far, and make sure that the ending you come up with fits in with it.

You’ll know the general feeling that you wanted for the fic when you started writing, so that will give you a solid idea on how the ending needs to go. (Often for me this feeling is ‘schmoopy and loved up’, because I’m a softie. A lot of what I’m doing when I’m writing a fic is just clearing out of the way any obstacles that are going to get in the way of my characters being schmoopy and loved up. When there’s nothing left in the way, that’s when I know it’s the end of the story.)

You also need to keep the tone and pacing of your fic the same, and make sure that your ending matches up so it all feels like it fits together. This includes keeping the pace the same as it had been, no matter how tempting it is to rush through so you can get the thing finished already, or slow right down so you can add in a few thousand more words.

Along with sticking to the tone you’ve set for the fic, try not to genre-shift - if you’ve written an action-packed zombie apocalypse fic, resolving the plot with domestic schmoop isn’t a great idea. The reader is invested in the style of story that you’ve written so far, so pulling the rug out on them will only give them whiplash, a vague sense of dissatisfaction or a persistent nagging feeling that zombies are about to attack.

Unless you’ve written a domestic schmoop zombie AU of course, in which case I would read the hell out of it. ‘Curtain!fic but sometimes the undead interrupt’ sounds like a lot of fun.

And finally, make sure you maintain your characterisation. If the ending you want involves your character doing something wildly out-of-character, then that’s not the right ending. (I like to call this an Endgame!Steve ending. No, I’m not over that.) Even if your audience is invested in your story enough to overlook the incongruence, they will be having to overlook it rather than feeling fully invested in the journey you’ve created.

Chekov’s Gun

The most satisfying endings are the ones that tie up most, if not all, of the loose ends, and provide an emotional pay-off equivalent to the build-up. If you’ve been talking about something big that might or might not happen, and then it doesn’t, it’s narratively frustrating. In the same way, if you drop something big in that doesn’t really fit with what went before, it’s going to make the story feel unbalanced.

Obviously that doesn’t mean you can’t have a surprise or twist ending but even if the reader is surprised by something happening, they still want to feel like they’re reading the same story. They need to look back with hindsight of knowing the twist and see how it fits in, and not how it stands out.

A good rule to follow is the Chekov’s Gun rule: If there’s a gun on the table in the first act, someone needs to shoot it in the second act. If you’ve been teasing something, make sure the pay-off is there.

And, of course, if someone’s going to be firing a gun at the end, go back and make sure it gets mentioned earlier in the story. It doesn’t need to be a heavy-handed anvil, but if you can drop in casual hints about guns earlier in the story, the whole thing feels more cohesive and thought out. No one needs to know that you only put those hints in after you’d finished the whole thing.

Loose Ends

Something I always like to do when I’m plotting exactly how the ending is going to go, is to go back through the whole fic and make a list of anything that feels like it could be a loose end if it didn’t get resolved. (If I’m having a problem working out my ending, often this happens at the same time as writing down all my ending plot points, as I described above.)

Some of those are obvious, like ‘Bucky and Clint need to kiss’, but some are less so. Did Clint think about how much he just wants to be done with all the drama so he can snuggle with his dog? Maybe throw in some Lucky cuddles somewhere in the finale so he gets the emotional pay-off. Has Bucky mentioned really want to punch a bad guy in particular in the face? Give him a chance to smack that asshole around a bit. Has there been a minor relationship drama along the way, like someone leaving their socks lying around? Have them either make a point of putting them away, or the other person just rolling their eyes and accepting it as a part of being with them.

It’s also important to think about where your secondary characters are going to end up, and if it feels like they’ve had an arc that needs resolving. Has there been another pairing with a bit of screen time or some background drama? Give them a chance to make out/make up. Has the bad guy done something that affected one of the other Avengers? Let them have a slice of revenge along the way.

For example, in my plan for Be All You Can Be, one of the original characters I introduced as other soldiers doing Basic Training, Havelka, didn’t turn up again after he’d been kicked back a level to another training unit. When I reread that, it became clear that he needed to prove himself somehow or his arc would be a depressing downward slope partially instigated by Clint and Bucky, so I brought him back at the end to do some First Aid and gave him a line or two to point to how his future was going to go, so the reader knew he was going to be okay.

You don’t have to completely resolve everything of course, and sometimes it is nice to leave a couple of things up to the reader’s imagination, but it’s nice for the reader if there’s a sense of things being tied up in a little bow.

Ending

So, you’ve resolved your plot, how are you going to handle the actual final ending?

Depending on how your story has gone, you might not need much after the resolution, or you may need several epilogue-y type scenes just to make sure everything is wrapped up.

Take a moment to think about what feeling you want the reader to take away from the fic. If it’s a romance, do you want to end with a warm fuzz of ‘aw cute’? If it’s been an angsty dig down into Clint or Bucky’s mental health issues, do you want a sense of optimism or catharsis? If there’s been a lot of action and drama, do you want a bit of peace and quiet for your characters to signal it’s all over with?

The best way to end any story is with a sense of hope, even if you’ve not gone for a completely happy ending, or have left yourself open for a sequel with some unresolved plot points. You want the reader to feel at least in some way uplifted. After all, regardless of whatever else has gone before, that’s the emotion they’ll have when they get faced with the Kudos button and the Comment box, so you need them in a good mood, right?

When you know what kind of feeling you want your ending to have, that will give you a major clue as to what the characters should be doing in the final scene.

One thing that can work well is bringing back something from the first scene or two and twisting it to be part of the ending. For example, at the beginning of Be All You Can Be Clint uses the song Make A Man Out Of You from Mulan as a way to torture Bucky, and then at the end, they watch the movie together while snuggling.

You do have to be careful not to be too heavy handed with that, and it doesn’t work in every fic, but I do like the feeling of ‘things coming full circle’ that you can get from doing it.

Afterglow vs. Too Much Ending

I always think that good stories come with a certain amount of ‘afterglow’: Just a scene or two to round things out and give a pointer towards the future.

For example, in general, I don’t like stories that end with a first kiss, which is one of several reasons I usually find Hollywood romcoms unsatisfying. It feels like too much of a beginning, and leaves too many questions open about how things are actually going to go for the couple in question. As part of a complete ending, it feels more satisfying to have an ‘epilogue’-y type scene afterwards that will give you a sense of how things went from there, even if it’s just a couple of paragraphs about them planning their first date.

I’m sure we can all think of other times we’ve read or watched something and had a moment of ‘oh, was that it?’ after the last sentence/when the credits rolled. Abrupt endings without a bit of afterglow can leave the reader blinking a little and wondering where their damn cuddles are.

That said, you also don’t want to go too far in the opposite direction. If the plot is over, there’s no need to keep going with multiple scenes of fluff or porn that doesn’t really add anything. We don’t need to see their whole lives mapped out, and it can get fairly dull once the tension of the plot is over. Ask yourself if the three chapters of them having sex on every flat surface in their apartment is actually necessary, or if some of them can be cut and used as one-shot sequel/missing scene fics.

In general if it’s not adding to either the narrative or emotional arcs, try to cap it at a scene or two. Just enough to feel like you’ve had a bit of post-climactic afterglow, but not so much that it’s starting to drag.

In Conclusion…

Ending a fic is, in so many ways, the most satisfying part of writing. You got right the way through your plot to the end! You did all the writing! Your characters made it through to their happy/sad/ambiguous endings! You deserve all the gold stars!

You just want your reader to feel the same way, by making sure the ending fits with what came before, ties up all the ends that need tying up, and leaves them with a deep glow of whatever feeling you want the overall story to convey.

And then you just need to do the editing, but that’s a workshop for another day...

#winterhawk olympic bang #WHOB #winterhawk #writer workshops #writer workshop: endings #guest post #flawedamythyst

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funjoushi · 4 years ago

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Miki/Souma is a perfect ship don’t @ me

This ship has taken me on one of those journeys that feels like it has just lashed me against the rocks and left me stranded. So bet prepared for a little bit of some slightly messy but extremely passionate meta.

I started out with “haha, Hakuouki keeps making rival pairs with blistering sexual tension” to “maybe this could be a tasty fucked up ship” to “oh no they are husbands” which is always a wild ride to go on let me tell you.

In general I tend to only get attached to an mlm ship once every ten thousand years. From my observations these ships tend to have a lot of intertwined personal history and themes of loyalty/sacrifice/self-loathing and idealism

However souma/Miki has some particular aspects that really stick out to me

As mentioned before, Hakuouki has a habit of setting up rival and antagonist relationships with a lot of sexual tension wether intended or not. The most notable being Shiranui/Harada and Kazama/Hijikata.

Kazama/Hijikata is only nominally similar as it is much more of genuine enmity but I do believe that the ultimate source of that rivalry is in personal weakness and seeing that weakness reflected in the other. Hijikata whole struggles with the loss of his humanity, and Kazama who rejects humanity altogether.

Shiranui/Harada is one much closer to Miki/Souma in that they are two very similarly motivated men who just happen to be on opposing sides. Shiranui and Harada are both motivated by loyalty to their friends and by love(you cannot convince me that Shiranui wasn’t in love with Takasugi).

Miki being Souma’s rival specifically never made sense to begin with and still doesn’t really, but as a result it leads to a much more fascinating dynamic. They aren’t sworn to kill one another nor obsessed with the other, but instead just two guys caught up in their own stories and cause them to clash.

The fact that they are not directly antagonistic to one another is something that is key to their potential dynamic. Yes, they started out at odds due to the factional divides, and Miki did accost Chizuru which earned Souma’s dislike, but on a personal level, it’s never more than a surface level dislike. Miki thinks Souma to be foolish and wasting his potential while Souma thinks Miki to be nothing but a brute.

However, in reality, they are far more similar than either of them first realise.

During most of their interactions, they appear to be pretty starkly contrasted. Souma is earnest, hardworking and incredibly humble. Meanwhile Miki is prideful, blunt, and distrustful.

However, if you recall...Souma was very different when he first met the Shinsengumi. When Souma was still employed by his domain, he was ashamed of his clan’s neutrality and disgusted of the general state of the country and of the bushi class. He at first views the Shinsengumi as nothing but violent wolves, but eventually comes to learn and understand them and want to be counted among them.

Which is to say that Souma in himself has some similar idealistic, judgemental and spiteful tendencies that Miki ends up displaying during his time in the Shinsengumi. Miki overall appears to view the Shinsengumi as similarly foolish and misguided

This viewpoint of Souma’s I view to be not all too different than how Miki views things, he simply has a different set of base values and puts a lot more value on birth station while Souma values action and conduct. At their core, both are unshakeably loyal which eventually leads to their actual clash.

Another major factor in my like for this ship came in one of the ginsei no shou episodes.

In a scene directly after Souma, Chizuru and Nomura escape Edo after Kondou’s execution, Souma reflects on how he now feels that he can understand how Miki feels. Looking back on how Miki became unhinged and obsessed with revenge after his brother was killed. Itou was like Miki’s sun, he states. Something that illuminated the path that he followed and made everything make sense. And Souma viewed Kondou in a similar way and in that moment feels blinding rage and a desire for vengeance towards those who killed Kondou. But then essentially Souma insinuates that the only thing keeping him from a path of bloodshed is his remaining friends. And so in that way he does not at all blame Miki for his revenge quest.

This section directly highlights how Miki and Souma mirror one another and hold within them very deep similarities.

Souma’s main character flaw is that he is deeply self-critical and has basically no self-esteem. He constantly pushes himself too far out of a desire to improve himself but without support that will only lead to ruin.

We can extrapolate some similar points from Miki, based on how over the course of Souma’s route he becomes increasingly more suicidal as his quest for revenge sends him to deeper and deeper depths, which culminates in him trying to die upon Souma’s sword in the final chapter.

However, Souma notices this. Souma could have easily chosen to just end it all there, but again. Souma has no particular grudge against Miki. And in truth, he pities and identifies with Miki.

It really just gets me, man. Like, I know that it’s because Miki survives historically, but despite that, they managed to make it so completely and utterly in character. It absolutely makes sense that Souma would show mercy. But what is truly beautiful to me is that said mercy is not out of any sort of pride or high morals, but out of pure and simple empathy.

Just about all of Miki’s former fellow Goryoueiji members are dead, his beloved older brother is dead. And on top of that he is estranged from both his birth family and adoptive family(historical detail not brought up in the game but it SHOULD BE). And while Souma has lost a lot, he still at the very least has Chizuru, and Souma’s humility also compels him not to take that for granted and reach out a hand to someone who wasn’t so lucky.

And considering that they do both survive, and as Souma says they “do not know what the future has in store” :) who knows! Maybe their paths may cross again.

Yes, I fully understand that the fact that Miki did try to kill Souma and Chizuru at one point might be a turn off to some people, which is fine. But also Chizuru was about to be killed by the Shinsengumi upon first meeting them. That’s just kinda how it goes in the world of samurai! And because the grudges aren’t specifc, that’s why I can still find them so compelling. Also I do find it so fascinating that Souma’s kyoto winds bad ending only occurs if Chizuru lets him kill Miki. Hmm! Funny that!

Anyway, in conclusion. This ship is good and no, I will not shut up about them. Thank you for reading and pls ready my fic--

#hakuouki #hakuouki meta #souma kazue #miki saburo #miki saburou #miki x souma #my stuff #my meta #the first image is an edit and not an actual game cap

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ablogthatishenceforthmine · 3 years ago

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My Thoughts On Titans Season 3 Trailer

Overall

So, the trailer was pretty much what I expected (and I don’t mean that disparagingly); mostly focusing on Red Hood and new Gotham setting, but with a fair amount of other stuff, with most character getting at least one moment that emphasized them.

The characters who I felt got the most focus were Red Hood/Jason, Dick, Babs, and Kory (in that order). No, this isn’t based on a quantitative analysis of screen time in the trailer, just a general feeling of who was emphasized that I came away with. But overall, it didn’t feel that unbalanced to me, and felt like is tried to give at least something to most of the characters.

Kory

Kory looks so good! Like so so good! I can’t get over it. I know people were hoping to see more of her (and I for one could always take more Kory), but I didn’t feel like she was sidelined. As previously stated, I felt like she got the fourth most focus/emphasis (and Titans has a lot of characters). And she got the final line of the trailer, which I don’t think is insignificant.

Blackfire

I know people are also disappointed by the amount of Blackfire in the trailer. But, I don’t think that necessarily reflects her role in the season. And I don’t necessarily mind. There are many possible reasons that she was only in a few shots. They could want to keep her role and what she is doing under wraps (if this is the case then I support it, because I kind of want to be surprised with her story). Or the trailer could only be from the first few eps, and her role in those may be smaller. Or a lot of other reasons. Based on how much she’s been filming, I’m not super worried about Blackfire’s presence in the season.

Dickkory

I, like a lot of fans, were disappointed with the lack of Dickkory in the trailer, but, I didn’t really go in with any expectations of what we would see of them in the trailer. So, I’m not upset or angry; it’s just something I would have liked to see. I also think you can’t tell anything about Dickkory this season from the lack of them in the trailer. They might get together this season, they might not. This trailer doesn’t say anything in regards to that; it’s totally neutral. I don’t think the lack of them in the trailer says that they won’t happen or that they won’t have that many scenes together. I’ve seen some people convinced that they will never happen or that they won’t have scenes this season because of this trailer, and I think that is WAYY too much to extrapolate from a trailer. A trailer only tells you a very limited of stuff, and doesn’t always mean that much. While I have no idea if we will get romantic Dickkory this season, I do really think we’ll at least get some scenes, based off things one of the writers and the Titans account said on twitter. Now many scenes they’ll be or if it will be building to a romance, I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone else can reasonably say so either based off the small amount of info about them and this season that’s been released.

Also, on this subject, while the writer’s and Titans twitter’s account responses about Dickkory have been encouraging, I also don’t think that means we will necessarily see them in a romance this season. For one, for some people using a shipname might not necessarily using or seeing it in a romantic way. They might see Dickkory as referring to Dick and Kory and their general relationship, and not as referring to a romantic relationship. I’ve definitely seen that happen with other fandoms, where people behind TV shows would respond to or use shipnames just to refer to a dynamic between two characters. Now, I’m not saying that’s the case here (I actually lean more towards that it’s not), but it is still a possibility that I think a lot of people overlook. I’m not trying to discourage anybody or rain on anybody’s parade, I just don’t want people to feel they have been definitively promised something. I’ve seen this a lot in fandoms (people feeling they were promised something and getting angry when they don’t get it) and often it comes from a miscommunication between the creative teams and fans. That being said, I am still pretty confident we’ll get more scenes between them in season 3 than we did and season 2, and am also hopeful about their romantic future in the series; nothing in this trailer changed that.

Dick

I so a lot of people fearing that Dick will take up the Batman mantle, and again I don’t think that’s NECESSARILY the case. It might be! But it might not. For one, we didn’t see Dick’s response to Bruce’s request. And second, it’s unclear what Bruce even means by telling Dick he needs to be a better Batman. He could be referring to literally being Batman, or he could referring to “Batman” just as a superhero who protects Gotham. In the latter case, Bruce could just want Dick to protect Gotham as Nightwing. Like most things in this trailer, and most trailers, it’s unclear. Overall, despite his prominence in the trailer, I didn’t get a good feel of what Dick’s story would be this season, so I don’t really have any judgements on his character this season yet.

Babs

I’m excited to see Babs this season. I’m intrigued (although I little worried) to see her dynamic with Dick. I’m diehard Dickkory, so I hope it doesn’t turn romantic. But if it happens, it happens. While I definitely see tension between them in the trailer, I didn’t get the impression that they hate each other, like some people did. For one, there’s only like two or three scenes between them, and one is delivering exposition. And the other seems tense, but not hateful. The writer said on twitter that their relationship would be one of respect, so I don’t think they will be hating each other. I hope that their dynamic is one where they disagree and argue with each other, but there’s still that respect there and that it doesn’t turn romantic again. But we’ll have to see!

I’m also curious to see how much of the season she is in. I’ve heard it thrown around online that she is only going to be in 5 or 6 episodes. But I have no idea where this idea originated. Does anyone know? I think it might be from IMDB, in which case it might not be accurate. IMDB is very inconsistent when it comes to the accuracy of information posted there. And given that she is on the poster, it might be more than that. But again, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Trailers in General

In fandom in general, I think people really overestimate how much they can gleam about the actual show or movie from trailers and other marketing materials. First and foremost, trailers are intended to advertise a show or movie, not give an accurate representation of what the movie or season will be. Trailers can often be misleading, but even when they are not, they are only giving viewers limited information, and without context. Often, trailers aren’t even made by the writing or directing team, but by an in-house marketing team at the company that produced the show/movie or an outside.

Really, trailers are just giving viewers breadcrumbs; sometimes accurate breadcrumbs, sometimes misleading breadcrumbs. But that thing is, it’s impossible to know how accurate a trailer is until you see that actual show/movie it’s advertising. So, you can never really know ahead of time how representative what you’re seeing in a trailer is of the actual movie/show.

Not to mention, there is very little context for the scenes, images, and lines of dialogue you are seeing. And in understanding scenes, and characters, context is EVERYTHING. And for TV shows, you also don’t know how much of the season the trailer is using. This titans trailer could only be using a few episodes, or it could be more. There is no way of knowing unless we’re told. There is just so much uncertainty with trailers.

When it comes down to it, trailers are just scenes, lines, and images completely removed from their context.

But unfortunately, I think fandom can sometimes treat trailers as a lot more than this, believing they have a better understanding of what they season/movie is going to be than they possibly could given the nature of trailers. Sometimes these impressions are right! But i just find it so hard to ever know.

#titans #kory anders #blackfire #dick grayson #dickkory #red hood #jason todd #barbara gordon #titans season 3 #my posts #ablogthatishenceforthmine #otp: maybe we can figure it out together

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metellastella · 3 years ago

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ATLA Meta: Power Differences

So, there’s a TV Trope that at first I thought might fit with ATLA. ‘Conservation of Ninjitsu.’ It is where, no matter how many guys a person is fighting, they always come out on top. In any world, realistic or fantasy, with no superpowers, this is obviously unrealistic. Samurai and martial artists of the past could excel, sure, but if they were going up against another army, they had to have the numbers. This trope is called ‘Old as Dirt’ because even in Roman mythology it’s mentioned that one warrior ceasing to fight within a battle turned the whole tide. In media this narrative device tends to play out as the ‘hero’ or hero’s team being able to keep up with multiple nameless mooks, no matter how well trained in martial arts they are.

Think, Ninja Turtles versus hordes of Foot Clan.

ATLA is an interesting twist to this, because you’d expect benders to at the very least knock out lots of nonbenders. Those with powers should overwhelm those without, right? And yet, we see the second highest ranking person in the Fire Nation choose nonbenders as her primary fellow combatants! I’ve given a plausible explanation for this with Ty Lee.

In my fic, she has unique senses that allow her to excel past even most benders in hand-to-hand combat. She can track the movement of their gathering chi, and therefore predict what their resultant move will be. And she can also sense chi pathways, so she strikes with a sure hand. For Mai, I haven’t come up with anything specific. But, I encourage you to note, against benders, the necessity of taking up a ranged weapon like throwing stars and knives, as opposed to a close to the body sword or anything like that. Whether Suki was unusually skilled, or over-confident, or thought she had the numbers, or merely desperate in challenging Azula with a katana, that is up to the viewer’s opinion.

In my fic, I also explain how a nonbender might fight or defeat or disable (or kill) a bender, and extrapolate on how firebenders in particular MUST use non-bender techniques if they are to be truly effective in combat.

Did Suki ally herself with benders in other situations? Was Kyoshi wiped of benders like the South Pole? But their leader said that they stayed out of the war. Surely the original KW were benders? Why are there no adult Kyoshi Warriors?

Anyway, I’ve always liked ATLA because the ‘superpowers’ were subtle, and not truly ‘superhuman.’ It not only made the characters somehow more relatable, it blended with the world better and the stakes felt higher when they couldn’t just keep taking hit after hit like your typical superhero. Katara got knocked out in the North Pole, for instance.

So, this all still begs the question, given the scene where Zuko rescued Iroh from earthbenders, are there vast power differences between benders? Are the ‘heroes’ merely good at fighting because of that narrative device I mentioned earlier, or is their ability to fight off many foes at once canonically based? We have some clues to this, as Aang got his master tattoos earlier than any other airbender. It’s even explained by the fact that he’s the Avatar. So it’s not just typical Mary Sue OP, it at the very least has an in-world basis.

Azula and Zuko are powerful because Ozai deliberately sought out the Avatar’s bloodline, according to the comics. Which makes total sense for him to do. I don’t give a lot of credence to the comics because of the way it clashes with what the creators originally planned for the Ursa-Ozai relationship, but the reversal of royalty looking to “marry into” a family because of bloodline is interesting and really points up the sheer importance and power of this world’s Avatar.

Toph is OP because she is blind, and that has given her a unique connection to the earth. Katara is the only one without an explanation or justification.

If you don’t count Iroh, which I don’t. He is just OP. No explanation needed. Ok, so, I could spin a yarn about how the current dynasty of the Fire Nation retained their rulership because they are the strongest firebenders in existence. But that would only have tenuous basis in canon.

Just remember that the dude, practically in the nude, put a beat down on earthbenders that had shields for firebending (a very inventive use for those hard coolie-style hats). And that was when he wasn’t in shape like in the finale, or in this fic.

He also, in canon, as has been covered with Sokka in my fic, bested Azula’s hand picked team of men early in Season 2.

(These chapters I discuss here have not been posted to my fic yet, but they have been written. It's just getting the in-between scenes written that still needs doing.)

The idea with powerful benders accruing wealth or power might partially explain Toph. We don’t know if her parents are benders or not- maybe in current cultural mores they genuinely think bending and fighting are low class. But the idea that’s where her strength comes from back in family history would not be as fun as canonical blindness powering her up.

So, just how powerful is Toph?

She resisted Wan Shi Tong’s entire fricking several story stone library sinking.

When being pursued in The Chase, she made a wall that appeared to extend possibly a hundred feet in each direction. So thick, Azula had to resort to lightning just to break through it. I’m pretty surprised that, with only two nonbenders at her side, Azula even decided to keep pursuing THE AVATAR in that tank, going up against him AND power like that.

Speaking of Azula’s motivations. I’m going to freely admit here that this is an interpretation that is probably far away from what the writers were going for in canon, for Azula’s actions. But, I am attempting to look at it in a realistic lens, which is what I’ve aimed to do for everything possible in that fic.

For example, Azula’s refusing the hostage trade between Mai’s kid brother Tom Tom and King Bumi, I’m sure, was SUPPOSED to come off as conniving, cruel, and heartless, by the writers.

The implication was probably supposed to be here, that she would ‘rescue’ her friend’s ‘baby brother’ IF she were a ‘good person.’

However.

Bumi is an incredibly skilled martial artist who has most likely violently defended Omashu from the Fire Nation for an entire one hundred years. He therefore by default, by view of any even casual outside observer, is either powerful, or smart, or both. Azula would know this in detail, studying the war growing up.

He would be one of these OP benders. Like, REALLY OP.

The idea that a leader of her country should free such a dangerous enemy man posing a threat to her people in exchange for a toddler, is utterly ludicrous.

Now, maybe the writers intended the viewer to logic that out. But I doubt it.

Therefore, drawing kidnappers out of hiding to have a shot at rescuing him would be using her smarts in service to Mai and her family.

#Metella's Metas #atla #atla suki #atla ty lee #atla fanfiction #What Meets the Eye by MetellaStella #WMTE #toph #azula #azula stan #ozai's angels

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a-duck-with-a-book · 4 years ago

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REVIEW // Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1) by Jay Kristoff

★☆☆☆☆

So I’m very late to the party, but I just finished reading Nevernight by Jay Kristoff I had such high hopes for this series based off of what people recommending it had told me and what I read about it before picking up. Dark fantasy? Check. Strong leading lady? I’m here for it. Gays? It’s literally my only personality trait. Sign me up. Unfortunately, this book fell flat in all those categories. It reminded me a lot of Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass, which made me take one point off of to begin with simply for making me think of Maas’s writing. Overall, I just found the book to be too predictable, with bad writing, exposition, and pacing, and too many parts that just made me ~uncomfortable~.

In case you are not familiar with this novel, Nevernight tells the story of Mia Corvere, a girl who lost her family when she was a child after her father was convicted of treason. When the book begins, she is 16 years old and embarking on a journey to join the Red Church, a school for assassins, so that she may one day be able to avenge her father’s death. Along the way she meets a bunch of forgettable characters whose names I can’t be bothered to remember and is taught by the most fearsome killers in the Republic. Here she gains many valuable skills, like how to survive being poisoned, how to fight, and how to get big boobs.

+ Side note: by chapter 3 three I started picturing Mia as the crow guy from RWBY and I could not shake that for the rest of the book

I had many issues with this novel that I will try to summarize in some sort of coherent fashion, but to be honest this book sucked the will to live out of me so I don’t know how much energy I can put into this review.

// image: official cover art by Jason Chan //

FOOTNOTES

The footnotes were probably the most jarring element of the book for me, and, unfortunately, there’s a lot of them. Their function seems to be twofold:

they are the form of most of the world-building, explaining several customs, the history of the institutions and peoples Mia meets, and the mythology followed by the people of the Republic.

they allow for the narrator of our story to interrupt with comical one-liners or cryptic foreshadowing

In my humble opinion, both of these are unnecessary and stupid. The interruptions come off as crass and immature and make the other more textbook, boring exposition come off as a joke, especially when it is dealing with sensitive or serious topics. There is one that explains this brothel called the Seven Flavors, which the footnote explains refer to “Boy, Girl, Man, Woman, Pig, Horse, and, if sufficient notice and coin was given, Corpse.” Now, on its own, this passing mention of pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia could very well contribute to the world building and tone of the novel, but when placed side by side with the childish, joking tone of the “cue the violiiiiiiiins” or, regarding the acoustics of a room, “…they were, as it happens, exceptional. Falalalalalalaaaaaaaa”, come off as way too light-hearted for the topic at hand. Maybe I’m being way too sensitive, but I’m pretty tired of authors using serious topics as off-hand remarks as a lazy way to make their world daker and grittier. Plus, these footnotes were just so incredibly cringy that I would recoil from second-hand embarrassment every time. They resemble the things I wrote when I was 14 and trying (and miserably failing) to be funny. Also… there are way too many of them. While at first I appreciated the attempt to deepen the lore of the story (I’m a sucker for world-building), after a while it became evident that the author was just forcing information down our throats without taking the time to actually weave the lore and background into the story itself. It came off as a very lazy way to force exposition.

OVERLY FLOWERY LANGUAGE

This story is BRIMMING with similes and metaphors, like every other sentence is some overly complicated way to describe something that could have been presented in three words. When you include so many metaphors/similes/etc., they begin to lose power. They should allow the reader to extrapolate more meaning and emotion from a sentence, but if the book is bursting at the seams with them, they become increasingly ordinary, to the point of losing all of their luster. One prime example appears on page 30:

“It was a bucktoothed little shithole, and no mistake. Not the most miserable building in all creation. [here there is a footnote about some other inn/brothel] But if the inn were a man and you stumbled into him in a bar, you’d be forgiven for assuming he had—after agreeing enthusiastically to his wife’s request to bring another woman into their marriage bed—discovered his bride making up a pallet for him in the guest room.”

So first of all what the fuck is that supposed to mean? That whole paragraph is a fever dream. Let’s begin with “bucktoothed little shithole”. Bucktoothed? Really? What does that mean. Please, someone explain to be right now what a bucktoothed building is. Is it uneven? Is it awkward? Is it half-finished? Is one side longer than the other? Did they do a bad paint job that only covers on side? Are the windows askew? Is the door too big for its frame? We already know from the paragraph above that it is “disheveled” as well, so why the need for another weird phrasing of its appearance? We then move on to that whole JOURNEY of a sentence, where the inn is compared to a man being cuckolded. That is the most insane tale-can you imagine running into someone in a bar and that story being the VERY FIRST thing that runs through your mind??? I know I’m focusing way too much on this stupid paragraph, but basically what I am trying to get at is that even though we spend half a page talking about how bucktoothed and disheveled and cuckolded this building is, we get no actual physical description of it. Imagine if Kristoff had just written that it was a run-down, ill-kept building that looked as worse for wear as its owner did. Done, one sentence. Great. Let’s move on. Instead, we spend so long reading these absolutely batshit descriptions that ultimately tell us next to nothing. Flowery language is placed over actual context. You may think that a description this long and complex means that this inn is a significant or recurring setting in the novel. Nope. It’s not. Mia leaves and that’s that. The reason that I’m focusing so much on this objectively irrelevant paragraph is because it is so representative of the biggest issue I have with the writing in this book. There are so many unnecessary comparisons that function only to make the author feel clever rather than add anything to the story at all. It’s very à la 2010s Tumblr.

THE (IN MY OPINION, BAD) WRITING

For the first half of the book, we are constantly being TOLD things rather than being SHOWN things. With the exception of one of the teachers cutting off Mia’s arm, we rarely see the ruthlessness that the assassins are so feared for, but we hear about it in nearly every other sentence Where are the consequences? I think this book would have been way more enjoyable if there were actually consequences to the characters’ actions. The inclusion of the weaver and the weird vampire guy completely remove any tension regarding the fate of the central cast. When Mia had her arm chopped off, I was shocked, and pleasantly surprised. How was she going to overcome this unexpected obstacle in her training? Then a couple pages later, its reattached with absolutely no lasting consequences. All of the initial tension and shock value of the loss of Mia’s arm is entirely removed because of the two incest-y siblings. Their entire purpose for existing is just to undo all damage to the main characters. Then suddenly, out of the blue, Mia is willing to take on a ton of consequences and completely throw away her chance at becoming initiated in order to avenge her family just to save Tric from receiving like one punishment??? Like why?? As an aside, the only moment I truly enjoyed was when Ash fucking stabbed Tric to death. I assume that when the reader’s favorite moment is one of the central characters’ death, it does not bode well for their reception of the book.

THE THEMES

TW: rape-y subjects

The author seemed a little too keen to include rape and sexual assault in his story. Mia withdrew her consent in the sex scene in the very first chapter, and even if you read it as consensual (which I do not), it is described as incredibly unpleasant on her end. Tric is the result of a rape, which is brought up several times throughout the story. Further, Mia is constantly facing harassment from men. I understand that this is frames the idea that the world she lives in is misogynistic and ruthless, but there are other ways to push that idea through other than constantly putting in her in those situations. As in, this didn’t need to be the ONLY way we explored this subject. Beyond the uncomfortable propensity for sexual assault, I also very much disliked the sexualization of the 16-year-old main character. Oh. My. Gosh. Mia is CONSTANTLY sexualized. Every single damn character makes comments about her body, how hot she is, how much sex she potentially has. It is so weird and uncomfortable. I feel the need to reiterate that she is SIXTEEN. There is, however, a focus placed on the power Mia can gain from seducing her targets. Girl power? Not to me, really. The issue I have with this is the idea that a woman has to be overtly sexual in order to be considered powerful. This is something that we can see in many female assassins and supposedly powerful female characters in fiction (like Black Widow) especially those written by men. Now, there is nothing wrong with using one’s sexuality as a weapon, and I’m certainly not saying that a strong female character cannot be sexual, but the idea that a sixteen-year-old girl is shown having her body painfully modified tp be more desirable, and in a graphic sex scene with another character, in order to for the reader to read her as liberated and powerful does not sit well with me. I don’t really feel like this aspect of her training should be relevant to the overall story. I wish the time that Kristoff had dedicated to hammering into our heads that Mia is a femme fatale to developing her Darkin powers instead. The way she is written now feels more like she is a faux strong female character written for a male audience.

Secondly, Mia is fully written as “the plain-girl-who-is-actually-pretty”. This whole trope bothers me IMMENSELY. YA is full of girls who are described as plain, forgettable, or ugly while their physical descriptions are just the dictionary definition of conventionally attractive. It seems like a way to market off of girls’ self-consciousness while still being able to market the main character as a hot heroine in official art. And there is, of course, the issue of Mia’s boob job Readwithcindy (just “withcindy” now!) did a whole video about this so I won’t get into it much just to repeat what she already said, but I agree that the idea of a 30-something year old man including this completely unnecessary detail regarding the sexualization of teenage girl, who we have ALREADY seen in a rape and being sexualized by other men in the story, made me really, really, uncomfortable. I highly recommend you go watch her video, as she touches on this in way more detail. [Cindy's video

RATINGS

Worldbuilding: ★★☆☆☆

A lot of thought obviously went into the world-the mythology, society, and politics are well-thought out. But the way they are introduced is annoying and bland. It seems like the author put a lot of effort into constructing this world but realized a lot of it would be left out of the book, so he crammed it into footnotes instead.

Tone and writing style: ★☆☆☆☆ for first half, ★★★☆☆ for second half

The tone of the first half is all over the place, like it doesn’t know if it should be dark and gritty or comical and immature. Footnotes and character dialogue ranges from lighthearted and crass to seeped with themes of torture and sexual assault. It is jarring, to say the least, and often feels like the author doesn’t take these ideas of rape or violence seriously. There are so many instances where the scene is tense or gritty, and Kristoff is actually writing it pretty well, I’m enthralled and on the edge of my seat, and then Mia or some other character (or the footnotes) throw in some stupid comment or make the same “Mia is such an asshole lol” joke for the billionth time and completely ruin the mood of that scene. The second half of the book moved much faster and was helped with way better writing, but it really did not do enough to make up for the horrendous structure of the first half of the book.

Pacing and structure: ★☆☆☆☆

The first half of the book really drags on. Once we arrive at the school, there are constant jumps in timeline, marked with periods when a thousand things happen all at once and the plot moves forward at a dizzying rate, and others when the characters just seem to be going about their daily lessons.

Concept: ★★★☆☆

I found the overall idea of the books to be very interesting, even though it is certainly not the most original or unique concept for a YA fantasy book. The issue is that the potential is squandered with a poor execution.

Characters: ★☆☆☆☆

I truly did not care about any of the characters. The token mean girl, the bumbling nice-guy-who-is-definitely-the-love-interest. too many of the characters just sat nicely within their tropes, doing nothing much to pique my interests. I think my favorite overall was Mister Kindly.

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