#you will struggle to afford seeds for the coming seasons

[halfricanloveyou]

ya’ll KNOW it’s ORANGES ALL THE WAYYYYYY if you’re playing a farming sim!!!

Fruit trees in farming sims usually produce for several months at a time and don’t die, you have to cut them down. They take a while to grow but after that they usually produce fruit every day or every other day. They’re typically end game/later in the story line in terms of when you can get them but they’re the best in terms of stabled and continued profit, and they sell for higher than the earlier in game crops that take less time to grow but sell for much cheaper. Plus you can cook with them and dishes with fruit in them tend to sell for higher, even if the dish isn’t as complex/takes multiple different crop ingredients. They’re useful in multiple different dishes depending on the fruit, oranges are one of the most common ones just behind apples. typically they’re worth a little more than apples. with the combination of dishes and on their own they’re the most solid bet for maximizing your profits. Fruit trees are also the most likely to produce for multiple seasons, but that depends on the game. They don’t disappear or go away unless you cut them down or a fucking storm hits.

Depending on the game, sometimes a potato plant can regrow after harvesting, but they’re usually available earlier on in game and the dishes you make with them don’t sell for as much. They’re used in some more complex recipes but most potato based recipes don’t sell for much.

Flowers in farming sims are okay but you usually can’t get more money out of cooking with them so you have to sell them as is. They don’t usually sell for as much as crops do despite taking around the same amount of time. Flowers vary and which ones are available earlier on or later in game is usually different in every single game. They also never regrow and are single harvest.

Green beans are usually obtained mid game and can regrow after harvesting but there’s rarely any green bean based recipes so usually you plant 1-2 per year and keep the crops in your fridge. You’ll have that same harvest in your fridge for the next 2 years with how often you need them for recipes. After you’ve harvested from them a few times they also disappear so you have to replant them and start over. When that happens is typically at random.

Cabbages are typical crops, single harvest. They’re in a lot more recipes but require several other crops in those recipes like green beans do so they’re mid at best. Usually available mid to late game.

Pumpkins are basically the same as green beans but they do typically sell for a bit higher on their own.

Nuts are basically like fruit but they’re used in maybe 2 specific recipes so after you stock a few you can sell them on their own. However usually at that point dishes sell for more than crops on their own so you usually end up just growing one and then cutting it down after one season.

Time capsules are most likely similar to rare plants/crops that take multiple seasons or even a full year or more to grow. They’re cool and worth a lot of money on their own AND in dishes, but the amount of time they take to produce is what keeps them from being the best option.

Watermelon is just a fruit version of green beans but lacks the longevity of fruit trees, plus they typically only grow in the summer.

Every farming sim also has some kind of random, unpredictable storm that ends up killing your crops at random (which fucking SUCKS when it hits a time capsule/special crop that is ALMOST DONE growing and it makes you fucking START OVER) so they suck. They do sometimes leave behind more building materials or help to keep you from bleeding the soil nutrient level down to nothing but they suck. Plus they’re typically the ONLY thing that destroys a fruit tree.

Plant what you want but I’m here to get RICH so I can build more barns and get a bigger house!! Plus I can use the money to buy or unlock more field space to plant more shit!! Farming is about maximizing profits and weighing the pros and cons of what you plant where and when!

[traditional-with-a-twist]

lxv. Beauty and Her Beast

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“Reckless! Lunatic!”

Hands clenching and unclenching into fists, the Crab stared Umihebi down with his chin jutting forward. 

They faced each other across the breakfast table, choice fruits and sweetmeats arranged in delicate pyramids between them.

Ubmidebi’s plate was littered with the rind of a pomegranate, which she picked apart, bit by bit, while he stormed. 

...

“You have no sense of self-control — no idea when enough is enough! You speak to me of princes and kings from seasons ago, before the wars — and then you bring here a servant of the Crown! Here, to my house – a Royal Messenger of Clarines! You hold him a prisoner, here, against his will!”

He paused to grip his hair with both hands, as if trying to force the reality of the situation in through his brain.

...

Umihebi watched expressionlessly. His impotent rages bored her, even more than his blustering, now as they had long ago.

It was as pointless as listening to the wind rattle the windows.

...

“No,” said the Crab, looking up. “No more of this. I want you out – out! Now!”

Umihebi shifted her gaze to the blazing noonday sun. Shouts and calls from the busy streets drifted in through the window.

“Now?” she repeated, raising an eyebrow.

He reddened. It did him no better to send her packing in broad daylight than to be discovered with her inside. “Then choose your hour,” he muttered resentfully, “but I warn you — tarry too long, and I will have you out by force!”

He punctuated this threat with a slam of his fist on the tabletop.

...

Umihebi spat out the seeds of the pomegranate and stood up. 

She was tired of listening, she realized, even as he tired of turning a blind eye.

Both felt the balance had shifted with the arrival of her second prisoner. She had taken a decisive step towards transforming the Crab’s estates once more into her base of operations; thus had come his moment to concede or resist.

Her old partner had made his choice.

She knew not whether he would carry through his threat of involving the local authorities, but it did not matter.

She did not intend to give him the chance.

...

Once Umihebi had reached a decision, she acted swiftly. 

Summoning a pair of her landlocked pirates at a gesture, she descended once more to the cellar where she held her prisoners – a poor substitute for a ship’s brig, but it would do.

The light dazzled – she could see them blinking – and in the moments afforded by the surprise, she strode to them and seized the supposed courier by the back of his collar.

...

Even the strongest man will fold without air. She waited for the struggle, nostrils flaring in suppressed anticipation — but he only dangled, head hanging, laboring to breathe.

Likewise her first prisoner made no move. He just watched, his eyes narrowed. Tears seeped from them, but rather from the pain of the sudden light, she thought. 

“My, my, how strange,” she said. “You’ve had plenty of time to become reacquainted… Have you no word of pity, no plea for your friend?”

...

As she spoke, she slid a knife from her belt and held its point below Mitsuhide’s chin. “Don’t play coy with me…. how much is his neck worth to you?”

She saw Obi’s gaze travel from her to his cellmate, and her smile widened. 

“Or shall we say… his ear?” The dagger point traced up along Mitsuhide’s jawline, trailing blood in its wake.

...

Obi’s dry lips cracked in a smile. “You’re asking me, O captain queen? The man can speak for himself.”

Her teeth gritted at the mockery. Above all, Umihebi lived for power, and she burned with the want of it now.

She would crack him yet. Beneath that unconcern, behind the nonchalance, lay the soft tender places that every man holds in his heart, and she would get her claws into him.

...

Thrusting the knight away from her, Umihebi stepped back and stood with her arms akimbo. “So. You would see him die without lifting a finger.”

Obi cocked an eyebrow and waggled his hands as if to remind her that his wrists were bound.

She ignored him. Joke as he might, she sensed some unsteadiness in him, some change since her last visit.

...

Truth be told, Obi was in a sorry state – half-dead when he arrived and flagging now under the none-too-tender ministrations of his captors.

Battered, bruised, inside and out, he was no better for Mitsuhide’s appearance. When Kiki had come to Shirayuki in the belly of the pirate ship, they had known each other as allies; her coming had meant hope, sure deliverance. 

No such rapport existed here.

Mitsuhide had delivered Zen’s message only moments before Umihebi arrived. His words had laid Obi’s defences bare, and he was yet scrambling to right himself.

...

It was in this state of disarray that Umihebi put him to a final test. 

Perhaps at another moment, Obi might have slipped the snare — he was wise to the ways of the cunning brute, all those who through violence and manipulation bend others to their will.

Then again, Umihebi’s special genius lay in timing. She scented the moment to strike as surely as her namesnake, coiled with fangs bared, tastes the ripeness in the wind when its victim's death is at hand. 

...

She felt Obi’s uncertainty, his weakness, without understanding it was Mitsuhide’s words that had crumbled all his presuppositions and stripped away his armor.

She didn’t need to know; she had only to guess.

“So, then. The woman.” 

The air thickened, and Umihebi spoke into it, stirring the pot. “For yourself, nothing. You didn’t come here for a washed up knight — and not for the ghost of your prince, either.” 

Obi flinched.

Umihebi’s wide mouth gloated her satisfaction: she had the prey in her teeth now. He felt himself pinned, as surely as Mitsuhide’s message had frozen him in the midst of his headlong descent into oblivion.

“For her, though… for that woman… you fought your way into hell and back.

"It’s all for her, isn’t it —” she paused to watch the effect of her speech, “ — that apple-haired girl.”

...

“Stay away from her.” The words ripped from Obi’s chest. He sounded more animal than man; the chain clattered as he strained against his bonds.

Umihebi threw back her head and laughed. “And you?” She turned her taunting gaze on the other captive, not failing to note that he had also tensed. Perhaps there was a little life in him yet.

A new alertness wound taut the muscles once so placid at her threats, and she delighted to feel herself a violinist, playing on his strings.

“I seem to remember another woman — that little slip of a thing. The bonus prize who wasn’t.” Exultant, she minded not remembering her missteps. “Who would have thought that she was a knight…and you her partner.”

...

Mitsuhide’s head snapped up. For a moment he glared at her as fiercely as Obi, eyes blazing a warning — but then something snuffed the fire out.

His head drooped again. “I’m not.” His voice was barely audible. “I’m not her partner anymore.”

Umihebi shrugged. “Suit yourself. It makes no difference – partner or no partner, this time you won’t be there.”

...

Mitsuhide made no movement in reply, but Obi was on his feet now, transfigured with an inhuman energy.

Umihebi wondered how long the ropes would hold.

She turned away, laughing, and the cellar door slammed shut behind her.

...

At the outer wall of the Crab's property, her men waited in a tight band, dressed for stealth and armed to the teeth. One held a torch.

Umihebi regarded the exquisite gardens, their delicately trailing vines and lacey lattices.

Beyond, the many windows fluttered with silken curtains and gauzy drapes. Her teeth shone in the starlight, bared in a savage grin.

Then she nodded to the torchbearer. “Light it.”

[moneflower]

A Greek Tragedy

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A/N: Basically a drabble talking about a "war" that was significant but so vague that I almost forgot about it if it wasn’t for the new BSD season. Some character exploration of the next anatogonist: DOA.

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Warnings: Manga and light novel spoilers.

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In any piece of media, literally devices are no stranger for the progression of plot and/or to emphasize the stark differences between one character and the next.

From foils to paralells, they set up a character's struggle and the need to overcome it - either through means of confrontation or to plant a seed of doubt to question those beliefs.

To me, how I view Fyodor and Nikolai is like the purpose of a drug stimulant. His is to challenge people by making them step out of their comfort zone, while Nikolai's is to encourage the battle of your inner turmoil. You know, like between demons and angels.

But this all begs the question: Where does Sigma fit into this? First, I would say the name "decay of angels" is most likely to symbolize the fall of the good side, as evident in events of the cannibalism aftermath.

If anything, Sigma is probably Atusushi's moment of question, where good and evil blurs - the cruel capabilities good people can be pushed to when desperate.

Throughout this whole arc, we have characters reaching their existential crisis, namely Kunikida. As someone who goes by the rulebook, it's kind of jarring when Nikolai first shows up, and I'm not talking about his philosophy of freedom.

Like how Verline foiled Chuuya, his eccentricness challenged the limits of the poet's ideals and exceptions of rules - when do we cross the line and when can we forget what we were taught.

The decay of angels is an interesting concept in theory because not only did they happen to shift the narrative, but it seems to be questioning a bigger picture: What are abilities and their roles in society?

Events such as Dead Apple are an example of this, but like how abstract the question presents itself, the answer brings up more questions than answers.

Just what was "The Great War" and what happened to the supposedly ability users that were in the midst of this. From our current timeline, the older generation who were adults at the time were Mori, Fukuzawa, Fukuchi - the big three I'm going to focus on because of how much they influenced the plot.

In the most likely scenario, these characters could embody the varying perspectives of war. Fukuchi, the soldiers in line to experience it first hand, Mori, the cleaners: healing those fallen soldiers, and Fukuzawa, a cilivilan at home facing his own consequences of the war: famine, hunger, and population decline - all too similar to the story of Rashomon.

It wouldn’t be a too wild to speculate the surge of orphans could have come as a result of this: parents might have been dead or couldn't afford to keep them. 

Whether or not it's meant to reference history, did you know the term "great war" also refers to the first world war.

If what Fukuchi said is to be true, then I wouldn’t be too surprised if his motive consisted of revenge. It’s even more strange how in the BSD wiki page how most of the veterns are either missing or dead. 

There’s often this grey conversation of just how much does it takes to be a hero. 

Was the sacifaces worth it, did you regret any of it because that’s what our main protoganist will be facing besides the typical good vs evil. A grey morality that can be easily shifted if your justification are rightous enough. 

It’s kind of tragic to know they were just barely young adults before they were dragged into this mess, an adult’s game of poltics that ruined a future they had ahead of them. Like the cycle, it is now happening to the new generation that they can’t seem to break out of. 

‘You either die as a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villian.’

Fuichi is what you would call a tragic hero. He reminds me of Reiner from AOT when people were quick to turn on him before his perspective came out. All of a sudden he was this villianized person to someone redeemable. 

For now, he’s got what I like to call it the “Macbeth Treatment.” Someone reverd but somehow lost their way due to their own hubris or shortcoming. 

It’s scary because this could have became any’s hero fate, the fact that Dazai could or could have easily taken this path doesn’t make it all the more easy. 

We still have beast to talk about. Where Mori fits into this picture and many more, but that’s for next time. On a later post when I can gather enough brain power to write more. 

[subpixie420]

Okay can we talk about this, maybe we should talk about this. Chandler is the best friend. I'm an avid fan, the show is formative and I have thought for far too long about this, but it's not really that close. Rachel is self-centered and as a friend, struggles to put others ahead of her desires, things that aren't necessarily even needs, just things she wants. Rachel relies on the others which isn't fine, but she actively chooses not to get better, to do better and I find that frustrating. Phoebe is a liar. I have a longer theory about this because her timeline and attitude basically DO NOT LINE UP WITH HER STORY, but she is similarly selfish in a slightly different way, she sows a lot of seeds of discord by saying things that seem intentionally inflammatory, saying that Monica should tell Chandler who she originally wanted to sleep with and even again in that relationship, mentions Monica's lunch with Richard. She seems to want to see things blow up for fun. Ross is troublesome, in the ways that the show and the characters are blatantly anti-intellectualism, he IS frustrating and annoying, he's got issues that he needs therapy to work on, some from his childhood, some from his marriage and they're not just dangerous in his relationships, but also in his friendships. At the very least, he is selfless in some ways, indeed care is a very big part of his character, he cares about things and people so much. Joey is an absolutely terrible person to be in a relationship with. He's a friend who presents a dilemma tho. If you can afford the upkeep of him, you do get fun and kindness and enjoyment, but with the completely disgusting way he treats women, it's hard to reconcile. Monica comes close and in fact, their relationship evens them out in ways that ends with it being possible to say they as a COUPLE are the best friends, but before that, she is a bit controlling and actively ignorant or dismissive of her friends feelings and needs aside from the ones she wants to fulfill. Chandlers problems as a friend seem to fall rather solidly in the realm of lying. He's prone to keeping secrets and lying to avoid anger or consequence, but as a key action, he does own up and take his punishments or try to make things right. He's also clearly the funniest, even if that's born of a deep desire to be liked. He's jealous in the same way that Ross can often be, but it doesn't overtake him like it does Ross. His flaws do not detract from his friendship.

As an avid Friends fan who has watched the series over 20 times through I completely agree with you and I enjoyed reading this analysis a lot!

Chandler is definitely the best! He also overcomes a lot of his own traumas without it being the centerfold of his character as well and that's also been something I really enjoyed seeing with his character over the seasons

I love Chandler sm!

[bishopclimate]

Dear Child of God, I hope this messagel finds you well, walking in the knowledge that God is moving powerfully on your behalf in this season of divine restoration. I am writing to remind you that your breakthrough is imminent, and I want to continue speaking into your life with even more prophetic declarations as the Holy Spirit is stirring up a mighty work in you. Let me remind you again: The time is NOW. God is moving in a season of second chances, and He has not forgotten you. You may have experienced setbacks, failures, or delays, but God is about to do what no one else can do. As I prophesied before, this is your season of restoration, divine favor, and supernatural empowerment. And I want to expand on that prophecy today, knowing that God’s hand is upon you in ways you cannot yet fully comprehend. You see, the enemy’s plans to destroy you are being overturned right now. I declare that every work of the enemy—whether it has been financial setbacks, family turmoil, or emotional struggles—is being exposed and destroyed in the name of Jesus. The enemy will no longer have dominion over your life. Every stronghold, every lie he’s used to keep you in bondage, is being shattered by the mighty power of God. Your spiritual thirst is about to be quenched like never before. Where you have felt dry, weak, and weary, God is releasing rivers of living water into your spirit. You are going to experience a revival so powerful, it will seem as though you have been born again, revitalized in every area of your life. You will stand strong and walk in victory, no longer carried by the weight of past disappointments. In the days ahead, you will see doors that were once locked wide open. God is removing every barrier, and He is granting you access to favor, provision, and opportunities that have previously been out of reach. I prophesy that promotion is coming to you. Whether it’s in your career, your relationships, or your ministry, you will step into a season of new authority and greater influence. Hear me clearly today: Your harvest is now on the horizon. The seeds you have sown in faith, the prayers you have prayed in private, and the tears you have shed in anguish, are all coming to fruition. God is bringing in your harvest, and it will come with increase. You will lack nothing as you enter this new season. There will be no more lack in your life, no more waiting for provision. God will provide, He will sustain, and He will bless you abundantly. This is your moment of restoration. The years that were lost will be restored. The relationships that were broken are about to be healed. The dreams that were deferred are about to be revived. God will bring the vision He gave you back to life. This is a season of divine recovery—you will recover all that was stolen and more! But here’s the thing: This moment requires action. The prophetic word spoken over your life must be met with faith and obedience. Do not sit back and wait for something to happen—step into it with boldness and confidence. Write down the 11 areas in your life that need God’s touch, and present them to the Lord. The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated! You cannot afford to hesitate or allow fear to rob you of what God has already ordained for you. As a point of contact for your breakthrough, I encourage you to sow your offering into the ministry today. This seed of faith will be the trigger for the divine shift you are expecting in your life. By giving, you are aligning your finances with the prophetic word over your life, activating God’s promises, and partnering with us in the work of the Kingdom. I prophesy over your offering: “As you give today, you will see doors open that were previously shut, restoration come to every area you are believing for, and favor overwhelm your life. God is honoring your faith and commitment to His Kingdom. This seed is going to unlock breakthroughs in areas that seemed impossible, and you will testify of His goodness.”   Powerful Testimony About Financial Breakthrough : I want to share with you a powerful testimony from someone who received the prophetic word I sent out yesterday. Rebecca from London responded in faith, following every instruction. She sowed a seed of faith, as I instructed, and within 24 hours, she received unexpected financial breakthrough. Her business partner, who had previously delayed payments for months, contacted her with the full payment due, apologizing for the delay and committing to a future partnership! Not only that, she also reported a healing in her body from a condition she had struggled with for years. Rebecca followed the prophetic instruction, and God met her with miracles. Urgency of Support - A Call to Stand with God’s Work: This week, I want to emphasize the importance of supporting the work of God. As we are moving our offices to a new location, our mission to serve you better continues to expand. This move will enable us to reach even more souls, provide more resources, and serve you in a greater capacity. However, to make this transition smooth and impactful, we need your faithful support. Why is this important? •Your offering is a point of contact for your own breakthrough and helps support the work of God in this season of restoration. •As we expand, we are increasing our ability to reach more people, touch more lives, and bring more souls to Christ. Your giving is directly tied to these eternal rewards. •Supporting this ministry also ensures greater resources are available for your own needs, because as you give, you align yourself with the work of God, and you will reap the benefits of His abundant provision. This is the moment to act. Your seed today will serve as a foundation for the ministry’s expansion and an activation for your personal breakthrough. Declare with me today: “I am sowing into the Kingdom of God. I am supporting the work of God with joy, knowing that as I do, I am partnering in His purpose for restoration and breakthrough in my life. My offering today is a point of contact for my miracle!” Blessings and favor are upon you as you take this step in faith! Blessings and favor are upon you as you take this step in faith! CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR PRAYER AGREEMENT FORM & SOW YOUR SEED  Call Us 24/7: UK: +44 207 738 3668 | USA: +1 347 708 1449 Need to See Me Personally? If you haven't made time for a personal appointment, you're postponing the transformation God has for you. Call our office to arrange it, or simply visit us every Sunday at 9 AM—no appointment needed! Don't wait another day when your answer could be just a prayer away. Don’t Delay—Sow Today! Have you used the easiest and most secure way to give yet? You can sow directly into the ministry using online banking or by visiting your nearest Barclays Bank. Account Name: Bishop Climate Ministry Sort Code: 20-54-25 Account Number: 90144223 IBAN: GB56BUKB20542590144223 SWIFTBIC: BUKBGB22 If you haven’t contributed yet, why wait? Delayed giving is delayed blessings. Remember, God multiplies the seed you sow! For MoneyGram/Western Union, call our prayer line for assistance. We Are Praying for You—But Have You Released Your Faith? We pray for you daily, but without your seed, you’re holding back the floodgates of blessings God wants to release over your life. Take that step of faith, sow into this anointed ministry, and watch the power of God move in ways you've never imagined! God bless you abundantly, Bishop Climate Wiseman Bishop Climate Ministries P.S. Submit the 11 areas where you need God’s second chance and sow your seed today. Your breakthrough is waiting for you, and as you support this ministry, you’re helping us move to new heights to serve you better!   #SecondChanceSeason, #DivineRestoration, #BreakthroughIsNow, #PropheticShift, #GodsFavorUnstoppable, #SeasonOfRestoration, #FaithInAction, #KingdomExpansion, #MiraclesInMotion, #VictoryInJesus, #RestoreMyPurpose, #GodWillProvide, #HealingAndBreakthrough, #SupernaturalEmpowerment, #FaithThatMovesMountains, #UnlockYourMiracle, #GodsProvisionOverflow, #StepIntoYourDestiny, #FaithAndFavor, #ObedienceBringsBreakthrough, #GodIsFaithful Read the full article

[megaproduct1]

10 kitchen gadgets that make your life easier

Are you tired of struggling to do things in the kitchen? Do you feel like you can never find the right gadget when you need it? Well, worry no more! Here are 10 kitchen gadgets that will make your life easier. From opening cans to peeling vegetables, slicing meat, and grating cheese, there is a gadget out there to make every task easier. And, they don’t have to be expensive. Some of the best kitchen gadgets are actually quite affordable. So, whether you are looking for a new can opener, vegetable peeler, or meat slicer, there is a gadget out there that will make your life in the kitchen much easier. So, take a look at these 10 gadgets and see which ones will make your life easier.

1. kitchen aid mixer lead 2. Calphalon Cookware Set 3. KitchenAid Stand Mixer 4. All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan 5. Breville Smart Oven 6. Cuisinart Precision Chef Knife Set 7. Anolon Nouvelle Copper Stainless Steel Cookware Set

1. kitchen aid mixer lead

A KitchenAid mixer is a versatile kitchen tool that can make your life much easier. Here are 10 ways a KitchenAid mixer can help you in the kitchen: 1. Use it to make quick work of mixing eggs, whipping cream, or kneading bread dough. 2. Make homemade ice cream, sorbet, or frozen yogurt without any fuss. 3. Create unique and healthy fruit and vegetable juices. 4. Chop and grind nuts, seeds, and spices into fine powders or pastes. 5. Make quick and easy sauces, dressings, or vinaigrettes. 6. Puree cooked fruits and vegetables for baby food, soups, or sauces. 7. whip up frothy egg whites for meringues, souffles, or angel food cake. 8. Make small batches of mayonnaise, Hollandaise sauce, or chutney. 9. Emulsify oils and vinegar to make salad dressing or marinades. 10. Grind coffee beans for fresh, delicious coffee at home.

2. Calphalon Cookware Set

When stocking a kitchen, many people overlook the importance of having a good cookware set. A good cookware set can make a world of difference when it comes to cooking, whether you're a beginner or a seasoned pro. A good cookware set will have all the essentials, like a saucepan, a frying pan, and a stockpot. But a great cookware set will also have a few extras that make your life easier, like a steamer insert or a double boiler. 1. Calphalon Classic Stainless Steel Cookware Set This cookware set from Calphalon is a great option for those looking for a high-quality, durable set. It includes all the basics, like a saucepan, a stockpot, and a frying pan, as well as a few extras, like a sauté pan and a steamer insert. The stainless steel construction ensures even heat distribution, while the tempered glass lids make it easy to see what's going on inside. 2. Calphalon Premier Space-Saving Stainless Steel Cookware Set This cookware set from Calphalon is perfect for those who are short on space. It includes all the essentials, like a saucepan, a stockpot, and a frying pan, but the nesting design means it takes up half the space of a traditional cookware set. It's also made from stainless steel for even heat distribution and comes with tempered glass lids. 3. Calphalon Contemporary Stainless Steel Cookware Set This cookware set from Calphalon is a great option for those looking for a modern take on the classic cookware set. It's made from brushed stainless steel for a sleek look, and includes all the basics, like a saucepan, a stockpot, and a frying pan. Plus, it comes with a steamer insert, making it perfect for those who love to steam their food. 4. Calphalon Signature Stainless Steel Cookware Set This cookware set from Calphalon is perfect for those who want the best of the best. It's made from triple-ply stainless steel for even heat distribution and durability, and includes all the essentials, like a saucepan, a stockpot, and a frying pan. Plus, it comes with a host of extras, like a double boiler, a steamer insert, and a pasta insert. 5. Calphalon Elite Stainless Steel Cookware Set This cookware set from Calphalon is the perfect choice for those who want a high-end set. It's made from five-ply stainless steel for even heat distribution and durability, and includes all the essentials, like a saucepan, a stockpot, and a frying pan. Plus, it comes with a host of extras, like a double boiler, a steamer insert, and a pasta insert.

3. KitchenAid Stand Mixer

A stand mixer is a kitchen gadget that can make your life much easier. If you love to bake, a stand mixer can be a huge time saver. With a stand mixer, you can mix all of your ingredients together in one bowl and then pour them into your baking pan. No more need to dirty multiple bowls and pans! A stand mixer can also be helpful if you entertain often. Imagine being able to make all of your food prep in one area. With a stand mixer, you can mix up some delicious hors d'oeuvres, make a batch of cocktails, and even whip up a quick dessert. Your guests will be impressed with your culinary skills and you'll save time cleaning up afterwards. If you're looking for a kitchen gadget that can make your life easier, a stand mixer is a great choice.

4. All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan

The All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan is a kitchen gadget that makes your life easier. It is made of high quality stainless steel and has a non-stick surface. This makes it easy to cook with and clean. The All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan is also dishwasher safe. This means that you can clean it in the dishwasher and it will not rust. The All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan is also oven safe. This means that you can use it to cook food in the oven. The All-Clad Stainless Steel Fry Pan is a great kitchen gadget for anyone who wants to make their life easier.

5. Breville Smart Oven

When it comes to kitchen appliances, the Breville Smart Oven is in a league of its own. This oven is packed with features that make it easier to use than a conventional oven, and it’s large enough to accommodate a variety of items. One of the best features of the Breville Smart Oven is the fact that it has a built-in sensor that adjusts the cooking time based on the food that’s being prepared. This means that you don’t have to worry about overcooking or undercooking your food. Another great feature is the built-in recipes. The Breville Smart Oven comes with 40 pre-programmed recipes, so you can easily make a variety of foods without having to guess at the cooking times. If you’re looking for an oven that will make your life easier, the Breville Smart Oven is the way to go.

6. Cuisinart Precision Chef Knife Set

A good knife set is a kitchen gadget that can make your life much easier. With a good set of knives, you can make quick work of chopping vegetables, slicing meat, and more. A knife set is also a great way to have a variety of different knives on hand for different tasks. For example, a paring knife is great for peeling and slicing fruits and vegetables, while a chef’s knife is great for chopping larger items. A knife set is an essential gadget for any kitchen, and the Cuisinart Precision Chef Knife Set is a great option. This set includes an 8-inch chef’s knife, a 8-inch slicing knife, a 7-inch Santoku knife, and a 3.5-inch paring knife. The blades of these knives are made of high-quality stainless steel, and they are all razor-sharp. The handles are comfortable to hold and are ergonomically designed. The Cuisinart Precision Chef Knife Set also comes with a wooden block for storage. This block is attractive and will look great on your countertop. The Cuisinart Precision Chef Knife Set is a great gadget for any kitchen. With this set, you will have all the knives you need to make quick work of your food prep.

7. Anolon Nouvelle Copper Stainless Steel Cookware Set

If you're looking for a top-quality cookware set that will make your life easier in the kitchen, look no further than the Anolon Nouvelle Copper Stainless Steel Cookware Set. This set includes all the basics you need to equip your kitchen, and it's made with high-quality materials that will last for years. The Anolon Nouvelle Copper Stainless Steel Cookware Set includes a 1.5-quart saucepan, a 3-quart saucepan, an 8-quart stockpot, a 3-quart sauté pan, and an 8-inch skillet. Each piece is made with a triple-ply construction that features a copper core sandwiched between stainless steel layers. This construction ensures even heat distribution, so you can say goodbye to hot spots and uneven cooking. The cookware in this set is also oven-safe up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can use it for a variety of cooking tasks. Plus, the stainless steel exteriors are easy to clean, and the copper finish adds a touch of elegance to your kitchen. If you're looking for a top-quality cookware set to make your life easier in the kitchen, the Anolon Nouvelle Copper Stainless Steel Cookware Set is the perfect choice.

10. Kitchen Gadgets that Make your Life Easier If you are like most people, your kitchen is the heart of your home. It is where you cook, eat, and socialize. It is also where you find the gadgets that make your life easier. Here are 10 kitchen gadgets that can help make your life a little easier. 1. A good knife set is a must. A good set of knives can make chopping, dicing, and slicing a breeze. 2. An electric can opener can be a real life saver. No more wrestling with those pesky cans! 3. A food processor can help you prepare meals in a snap. chop, dice, and shred with ease. 4. A slow cooker can help you make delicious, healthy meals with minimal effort. 5. An electric kettle can help you make tea, coffee, and hot chocolate in a flash. 6. A toaster oven can help you cook quick meals or reheat leftovers. 7. A stand mixer can help you mix, knead, and whip up delicious treats. 8. A set of measuring cups and spoons is essential for any kitchen.

VISIT HERE

[cjrae]

Series: Reaction to a reaction - Episode 17.

At some point, you just have to stop clogging the comment section with their character limits and hit "reblog" like an adult. @i-guess-im-into-this-now, let's have some fun!

1.) "Maomao sees Jinshi first thing in the morning and is stunned by his beauty. She's annoyed at herself for being so affected by this man."

Yeah. You don't spend this much time thinking about just how pretty someone is if you're not attracted to them. This is one of the things I enjoy so much about their dynamic is that Maomao is attracted to him and is SO MAD about it! Something that comes across better in the light novels is that the very first thing about Jinshi that Maomao is attracted to his voice. Kaiji Tang, the English language voice actor brings this aspect of the character to life. You can see that first moment of mutual attraction all the way back in Episode 2, when he steals one of her chocolate snacks. You notice he stands behind her, where she can't see him, but his presence is felt while speaking words of appreciation in her ear and ghosting his breath over her neck. It's the first time in the episode that the animators don't show her shuddering in disgust - instead she's caught wide eyed and frozen at her own reaction.

2.) "Before Maomao commits to altering Jinshi's face, she can't resist putting some lipstick on him. Just to see. A little experiment if you will. One that now lives rent free in the minds of not only Maomao, but Gaoshun and Suiren too. I would give anything to see Jinshi in full glam in this show."

**LAUGHS IN MANGA** Next season. Trust me, it'll be worth the wait. Or you can read the manga, chapters 47 & 48, titled "The Moon Fairy."

3.) "Basan is here, hanging back and watching Jinshi live out another one of his fantasies. Will Basan become jealous? One can only hope!"

I think it's pretty clear that Basen has absolutely no interest in Maomao. I do love the moment when Jinshi catches him and smirks, letting Basen know that he's not blending into the background nearly as well as he thinks he is.

4.) "Gaoshun thinks that Jinshi can't afford to be so focused on Maomao. Maybe he's worried about how Maomao makes Jinshi more susceptible to manipulation from people like Lakan. Or maybe he means that with Jinshi's status, that it can't be allowed."

I mean, we are talking about a setting where the men of the imperial family are encouraged to plant as many "seeds" as possible in the garden. At least it's not an Ottoman harem setting where once the crown prince ascends to the throne, the remaining male heirs are summarily executed. Just as the women of the Rear Palace are expected to be chaste and share a single man, there's an equally powerful expectation that it's the man's duty to spread his attention around in order to perpetuate the line - and speaking from a purely political standpoint, assuming Jinshi's identity is as theorized, that is a duty he is pointedly NOT doing.

5.) "I've come to realize that this show is going to be much, much longer than the single season I'm on. The progress of this romance is like the slowest slow burn."

Well, if it follows the pace of the light novels, we'll be talking about the start of a mutual relationship at the end of Season 6. A therapist would not help with this fear of intimacy - Maomao would just shut it down. You mentioned in an earlier review that one of the things Maomao likes about Jinshi is the fact that he pushes her and I think you absolutely nailed that. At this point the fastest way out of the River of Denial is through.

Plenty will happen in the intervening time, though. I think part of why this story has grabbed so many people is because the romance is the emotional through line of the story, but it's not the driver of the plot. That frees up the plot (and the antagonists) to have motivations other than thwarting True Love that create an environment for these two to struggle though together.

6.) "She says she could have taken Jinshi to some place in the Pleasure District if this was what he was interested in. She sounds disappointed in Jinshi, or maybe she is disappointed in herself for the jealousy she feels."

Yeah...she is NOT happy about being attracted to this man, and as she talks about how much she loves and respects Luomen, it's worth paying attention to the qualities about her father that she both immensely respects and is extremely frustrated by. It's very telling.

7.) "Jinshi is stunned, or perhaps horrified to realize what it might take to lower the value of a courtesan."

Well, it's a complete inverse of how the women of the Rear Palace are valued and an interesting continuation in the comparison of palaces and brothels. Both are places where women's sexuality are commodified, but the goals are opposite. A high class courtesan's job is to either be completely unavailable and pure in order to provoke expensive fantasies of having her, vs a consort's job to get pregnant with male heirs as many times as possible. It is literally Jinshi's job to facilitate as many pregnancies in the Rear Palace as possible and to intervene with any factor that could terminate one, because a consort's value is in her ability to bear children.

This story has a lot of interesting things to say about how the ability to control your own reproductive cycle (on behalf of both men and women) is connected to the ability to find true human relationships.

8.) "Lakan is bad news."

The next three episodes are going to be SO MUCH FUN to watch you react to. :D Next time, on the Apothecary Diaries: Maomao's actual trauma!

The Apothecary Diaries

S1E17 First Watch

Here's where I watch The Apothecary Diaries for the first time and give my thoughts, analysis, predictions, and occasionally I stumble into a joke.

To start at the beginning:

Episode 1

My character/locations cheat sheet

Suiren - Jinshi's attendant

Lakan - master strategist

Basan - an officer who works in the palace

This episode opens with Jinshi asking Maomao for help with makeup, and Suiren decides that this is a great time to leave these two alone. Maomao believes that to make Jinshi any more beautiful would cause men to go to war.

Maomao: If this man in all his heavenly glory were to put on makeup... Are you trying to topple a nation?

Jinshi: Where'd that come from? On second thought, I would rather you don't tell me.

Is he? Not that he's trying to use his looks to do it, but it's an interesting thought. Is Jinshi interested in toppling a nation? Or perhaps dethroning an emperor? What an interesting thing to ponder. Also, is Jinshi worried that Maomao suspects him capable of insurgency?

Jinshi very much cannot afford to be found talking about toppling nations. I'm sure that the people in power who know who he really is, are already keeping an eye on him to see if he will make a play for the throne. Perhaps it is one of the reasons he was sent to manage the Rear Palace. If he makes a single misstep that could be seen as disloyal to the emperor, it would be enough to depose of Jinshi.

Ah! Jinshi wants some freckles! No, he wants to look like a completely different person. I'm sure he has a reason for wanting this disguise, but to Jinshi who has been the target of so much sexual harassment, being able to look common must feel like having a shield. He and Maomao can probably relate on this. Unlike Maomao, Jinshi can't do this regularly, his beauty is a tool that he is required to use. I also don't know that he would choose to change his appearance regularly. Even if he sees his beauty as a curse, I think he's comfortable enough with his appearance that he doesn't want to regularly alter it. Maomao does offer a more permeant solution, and Jinshi turns it down. His refusal could be because he needs his beauty as a tool, but I would guess that he doesn't want to change himself. All of that said, he's looking forward to this disguise that Maomao is going to prepare.

Maomao sees Jinshi first thing in the morning and is stunned by his beauty. She's annoyed at herself for being so affected by this man.

Jinshi: What's this? Why are you already wearing a scowl? Maomao: It's nothing. I was just noticing how lovely you are yet again. Jinshi: A little early for sarcasm.

Jinshi has tried to use his appearance on Maomao before, and it has failed every time. She's made it clear that she's not interested in him because of how he looks, so to get a comment like this one, he's sure she's teasing him. Which she is but she's also serious. It's interesting that Maomao is letting Jinshi know that she sees the physical appeal of him, when she never has before. And it's happening in an unguarded moment when Jinshi isn't trying to preen or seduce. I wonder why it's happening now. Perhaps it is just something that has been growing.

Maomao does something that disturbs everyone in the room for different reasons. She grabs Jinshi's wrist and sniffs him. Jinshi is blushing, the action a lascivious one to him. Suiren and Gaoshun interpret it the same way, but are shocked to witness it. Maomao explains that his disguise needs to start from his scent.

Jinshi ponders how well Maomao understands the world of the courtesan. He considers Lakan's suggestion to ask Maomao about how to lower a courtesan's value. Will he work up the nerve to ask? Jinshi isn't one to shy away from difficult conversations, however this is a loaded question. Asking it could reflect poorly on Jinshi. We shall see.

And does Maomao know anything about makeup? The gal was an apothecary that worked in a brothel. I'm sure she's an expert.

And she is. Her brilliance mixed with her experience means she's a master of disguise. She uses various methods to completely overhaul Jinshi's appearance, down to the most intimate details such as scent and sound of his voice. During Maomao's work to transform Jinshi, she takes time to admire various parts of Jinshi's body, such as the smoothness of his hair, the clarity of his skin, and the tone of his physique.

Jinshi is enjoying having Maomao's full attention on him and her hands all over his body, and he's going to think about this day every night before he goes to sleep. Maomao will probably also think about this day. It's a rather convenient excuse for both of them to enjoy some intimacy that they won't allow without the pretense. Meanwhile, Suiren can barely handle the multiple indignities that Jinshi has to endure to don this disguise.

Before Maomao commits to altering Jinshi's face, she can't resist putting some lipstick on him. Just to see. A little experiment if you will. One that now lives rent free in the minds of not only Maomao, but Gaoshun and Suiren too. I would give anything to see Jinshi in full glam in this show.

Nothing gets past Maomao and she finds the callouses on Jinshi's palms, surmising that he must train with weapons, which she notes is not a typical eunuch activity. Add that to the mountain of evidence that Jinshi is more than a eunuch official, that Maomao will promptly ignore.

Oh hell yeah! Suiren and Gaoshun are teaming up to send Maomao on a date with Jinshi. He couldn't possibly be seen with his usual companions, that would be too suspicious. Maomao points out the obvious, which is that she is also a well known attendant of Jinshi's. No problem, Maomao can be given a disguise too. And what Gaoshun couldn't? These two could not be more transparent. It's too bad that Maomao can't read this kind of obvious play when it relates to herself.

Maomao is dressed as a pretty young lady from a good family. And she is accompanied by Jinshi who is going out as her attendant. Jinshi loves this role reversal, and Maomao is teaching him how to play his part well. Who they are performing for isn't clear.

Basan is here, hanging back and watching Jinshi live out another one of his fantasies. Will Basan become jealous? One can only hope!

Jinshi is getting progressively more upset that Maomao is drifting in her own thoughts instead of chatting with him. He gets all pouty when Maomao says they have nothing to talk about. His fantasy date isn't going how he imagined it would.

Maomao picks up some meat skewers and after removing the cotton from his mouth Jinshi tucks in with fond memories from "camp." I'm assuming he's talking about time spent with the military. Maomao notes this isn't typical of a eunuch. I wonder what is even left on the list of things about Jinshi that resemble a eunuch.

Suiren and Gaoshun have a discussion about Jinshi and Maomao while they're out. They are pleased with themselves for setting up this outing, but Suiren is referring to Maomao as a toy, as Gaoshun used to. She talks about Jinshi as a boy and how he would fixate on one thing, and how Gaoshun would struggle to find something else to shift his attention. Gaoshun thinks that Jinshi can't afford to be so focused on Maomao. Maybe he's worried about how Maomao makes Jinshi more susceptible to manipulation from people like Lakan. Or maybe he means that with Jinshi's status, that it can't be allowed.

I've come to realize that this show is going to be much, much longer than the single season I'm on. The progress of this romance is like the slowest slow burn. Jinshi and Maomao have been stuck at an impasse for ages. Whenever they do make progress it's in the smallest increment possible that takes more brain power than I have to process and tease out. But I've digressed.

Basan looks like he's starting to enjoy this assignment now that he's picked up some meat skewers, and he can now enjoy both a juicy meal and the juicy conversation he's overhearing.

Jinshi is hurt that Maomao seems to want to get away from him as soon as possible. He asks her very earnestly if she enjoys her life in the palace. She really does, but she is worried about her father.

Maomao reveals more about her father Luomen. I think Jinshi is starting to put some pieces together about what position Luomen might have held. He'll need those clues when he gets closer to figuring out Maomao's true identity.

And it is good to see Maomao open up a little bit. She so rarely talks to Jinshi or anyone about her past, her hopes or her fears. That she does so here, with Jinshi is a step towards friendship.

Maomao sees the restaurant that Jinshi has an appointment at and notices all the ladies hanging over the men outside. She says she could have taken Jinshi to some place in the Pleasure District if this was what he was interested in. She sounds disappointed in Jinshi, or maybe she is disappointed in herself for the jealousy she feels. That she both thinks Jinshi is a eunuch and that he want to visit a courtesan is... interesting. Not that I don't think a eunuch couldn't have fun at a brothel, mind you, but still, her ability to misread a situation is always interesting. I'm confident that Jinshi is not here to meet up with someone for the reasons Maomao thinks. He may be here to meet a courtesan, but if he is, than it is to gather intel.

Honestly I'd support Jinshi if he were here for a hook up. He's committed to no one at this point, and at this rate he'll hook up with Maomao by about the time he is old enough to functionally be a eunuch, so have at it. Go wild Jinshi.

Jinshi finally gets up the courage to ask a terrible question: how to reduce the value of a courtesan. Maomao answers as I expected, you either take her purity or worse yet, you impregnant her. I'm gonna be sick. Lakan is so terrible. Just why is Jinshi so interested in this topic? Is this all to find dirt on Lakan? Does Jinshi suspect Maomao's origins are from the courtesan that Lakan "decreased the value of?" Does Jinshi have his own motives for wanting to decrease the value of a courtesan?

Jinshi is stunned, or perhaps horrified to realize what it might take to lower the value of a courtesan. It's a surreal conversation between these two. Maomao has to wonder why Jinshi is even asking the question. I can't think that she would believe Jinshi wants to use this method to decrease the value of a courtesan, but perhaps she thinks he might be interested in purchasing someone's contract? I don't know what Jinshi hopes to do with the info. Is this something he hopes to figure out to help him against Lakan? If he was hoping the answer would help him find a way to help Maomao, he now knows it's a method that he won't be willing to use. I really can't see him trying to take her purity or impregnate her. If those things were ever going to happen, he would want them to be out of mutual affection, which is still lightyears away.

I kept expecting this outing to be fun, and parts of it are, but there is so much that is undefined and unsaid between these two that there is an unsteady tension throughout the whole outing. Ultimately, the date fails to change any of it. Maomao does open up a bit about her father which is amazing. We so rarely see her talk about her life or her hopes or goals. Jinshi listens intently. And that is kind of the highlight of the day to me.

Obviously the final conversation about how to reduce the cost of a courtesan is important too. But without seeing the end of that conversation I can only guess what impact a question like that might have on these two's relationship. Because the implications of even asking the question aren't great, and I don't know where Maomao's mind is. What does she think Jinshi capable of? I tend to think she knows and trusts Jinshi pretty well, but when there is emotion involved her judgement gets all screwy.

And we haven't yet learned what Jinshi is up to. He wanted to come here in disguise for a reason. I assume he is trying to get information to help him against Lakan. At least, I hope that's what he's up to. Lakan is bad news.

To start at the beginning: Episode 1

Next Episode:

Coming Soon!

[servantofthefates]

How the Reigning Zodiac Sign Affects Us All

Think of a mom spraying cologne on her child in public. If you are nearby, you will smell it too. This is what happens with the shift of the seasons. The Zodiac sign’s planet is showering its children with blessings. But depending on the Zodiac sign, those blessings, for you, could mean the opposite.

CAPRICORN SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Saturn, Lord of Structure and Harvest. For this reason, Capricorn season is all about pushing yourself to be better. It is a time of looking your failures in the face and creating New Year’s resolutions. It is about planting the seeds for a brighter tomorrow.

AQUARIUS SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Uranus, Lord of Chaos. This is why in Aquarius season, everything seems to go awry. New Year’s resolutions are forgotten. People suddenly lose their jobs, or get divorced before Valentine’s Day. It is like a reset button. It is a time to be flexible.

PISCES SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Neptune, king of all things creative and mystic. And so Pisces season is a time of dreaming and fantasizing. People find themselves imagining their dream life, or writing poetry; reading more books or watching more films than they normally do.

ARIES SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Mars, Lord of War. This is why Aries season is all about battles. In my country, this is graduation season. When people are congratulated for their triumphs. But the fact that there are winners also means there are losers. For others, it is a time of painful losses.

TAURUS SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Venus. And Venus is a goddess. That is, someone who enjoys luxury and pleasure. For this reason, Taurus season is when the hedonist in us awakens. People find themselves craving more and more comfort. This is bad news for those who cannot afford it.

GEMINI SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Mercury. Specifically, Mercury’s trickster energy. And so Gemini season could be a time of manipulation. Be careful of scams and snakes. As always, the presence of the deceived means the existence of a deceiver. Some will come out as winners; others, as losers.

CANCER SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by the Moon. Which is only visible at night. So it is all about hidden emotions coming to light. That is why Cancer season could either be cathartic or damaging. Do not let your heart overtake your mind. Think, before saying anything too personal or unkind.

LEO SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by the Sun. A sunny day is when children come out and play. It means unlimited ice cream and going out swimming. This is why Leo season heralds fun and lightheartedness. Your problems are still there. But they are not as scary under the light of the Sun.

VIRGO SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Mercury. Specifically, the healer and messenger aspects of Mercury. Therefore, Virgo season is a period of wellbeing as well as of efficiency when it comes to daily tasks. People get more things done while feeling less tired at the same time.

LIBRA SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Venus. Specifically, Venus as the Lady of Beauty and Harmony. For this reason, Libra season brings with it gorgeous things and a peaceful energy. You might feel more attractive than usual, and you might find yourself being more forgiving than normal.

SCORPIO SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Pluto, Lord of Power and Transformation. Scorpio season is when Pluto helps his children transform into the most powerful they can be. And while Scorpios can handle that, others may not be able to. You might find yourself struggling with sudden changes.

SAGITTARIUS SEASON

This Zodiac sign is ruled by Jupiter, Lord of Luck and Expansion. This is why Sagittarius season coincides with the beginning of the Festive season. This is when employees receive bonuses and let their hair down at parties. It is when people enjoy good food and long vacations.

[idesofrevolution]

Okay: Bad Boy Musky Transformation it is. Enjoy!

I knew, of course, that Marco sold whatever the degenerates in the neighborhood needed. Weed, Acid, Ecstasy, Shrooms, Coke... take out the hard ones and you have his menu. He always seemed to afford the good things in life with his dark money. Two weeks ago he’d bought a Ducati; a week prior it was a 60 inch TV! God knows it wasn’t from dutiful employment, but I knew damn well just what it was that afforded him these luxuries: whatever could be inhaled, snorted, or smoked. And yet, here I was, working two jobs at McDonalds & Popeyes just trying to afford my garbage studio apartment. 

He’d only ever been kind to me, I’ll admit. He’d bring by a pizza he said he couldn’t finish, or his old speakers he’d upgraded. Nice guy, if a bit dim. Always out in the courtyard, laying by the pool with his shirt off. Always surrounded by other guys who’d slip him a hundred. It’s not fair! Four years of college and what did I have to show for it? Student loans and no job prospects. Yet there he was: no trade, no job, no future really; but living like a king. So it was one day where I’ll fully admit that my jealousy overwhelmed me. 

I was short that month, for the first time mind you. Short only by a hundred dollars for rent, but I had already gotten a notice on my door. Pay tomorrow or get lost. It was this desperation that made me remember every deal that thug made, every 8-ball, every eighth, every pill... Would he really notice a hundred missing from his pile? I knew for a fact that every Wednesday night, precisely at 10, Marco would leave for the hookah club and not return until 4 or 5 at the earliest. I knew he locked his door, a few locks actually, but I also knew that the moron left his window cracked nearly every night. It just so happened that on that particular evening, he did just that. 

In that fleeting moment of curiosity, a plan built up in my head. I watched him loudly slam his door, lock his several locks, and saunter out down the stairs. I waited about five minutes before creeping out of my apartment, careful to watch for other prying eyes. I had to be quick. I made a run for it, bolting to his open window on the balcony. It slid open quite easily, and I heaved myself over the ledge and into Marco’s dark apartment. I landed on the ratty old carpet and quickly shut the window. Looking around the apartment, it was a three bedroom for sure. In the same state of disrepair as mine, but furnished with some of the most expensive, gaudy things I’ve ever seen. Brand new leather couches, a coffee table made completely of glass, a massive stereo system next to his 60 inch TV... An absolute manchild lived here.

However, I wasn’t there for the TV or the oversized sectional. I had a sneaking suspicion that he, like many of us, kept his extra money somewhere in the bedroom. Ensuring that no noise would come from my steps, I snuck quietly down the hall, covered in paintings of scantily clad men toward the bedroom. Interesting, he swung that way, huh? Opening the door, a wafting stink hit me in the face. The room was covered in dirty laundry, used condoms, half rolled  blunts, and lines of coke on nearly every surface. This is what I was expecting, and I was surely right. Holding my nose shut, I crept toward his dresser, and began to ruffle through his belongings. Damp socks, damp underwear, damp lycra, everything in there was damp and reeking. I slammed each of the drawers shut, and opened the closet. There, on the tile floor behind rows of pristine sneakers were a pair of destroyed old Vans; and inside each were rolls of hundred dollar bills. Jackpot. I knelt down and grabbed one of the rolls, momentarily unclamping my nose to remove the rubber band. The smell was unbelievable. It took me aback, just how strong it was. I’m sure each of the pairs of Huaraches, AF1′s, and the like had strong scents of their own, but from this single pair of beat up old Vans was the most salty, sweet, almost cheesy footmusk that I’d ever encountered.

For a mere second, I contemplated bringing one of the shoes to my face, letting the dirty, wet insole touch the tip of my nose. However, it was in that second that I should have just left well enough alone. The lightswitch flipped on, and looming over me was the hulking, shirtless Marco. In my right hand was his wad of cash, in the left was his grody sneaker. My face flushed, and my stomach dropped to my toes. He crossed his arms and smiled.

“If you wanted a loan you could have just asked...” Words were caught in the back of my throat. I wanted so terribly to make up some fantastic excuse as to my presence in his closet, but the frog in my throat had other ideas. The growing grin of Marco, paired with him beginning to kneel down to my level made my heart nearly stop beating. “And if you wanted a sniff I’d have given it to you.” He smirked and slowly pulled the shoe from my hand, taking a quick whiff of it’s stench. He turned quickly and laughed, waving the wafting scent away from his face before grabbing the back of my head and plunging it right into the shoe. “Okay, deep breath now.”

I tried to struggle, to fight back, but the man was nearly twice my size and pure muscle. There was no chance of me weaseling my way out of this. I had to just play along with this weird fetish that he seemed to have. I inhaled a quick breath, barely getting any stink. 

“No, no. I said deep breath.” I felt a strong hand shoot to my crotch, grabbing my junk within my jeans. The shock of this invasive gesture broke my concentration, and a gasp of breath escaped from my mouth. Into my nose, my mouth, my sinuses, my brain did the musk penetrate. I moaned loudly, the confusion of a powerful grope and a powerful scent submerged me into a strange state of consciousness. Or rather, a lack thereof. I was inhaling the footsmell like air, and I couldn’t get enough. My cock began to tent in my pants, and I felt my right hand drop the roll of cash I thought I so desperately needed. “Ahh, haha. That’s right, let it in. Let me in.” 

His voice seemed distorted, as if we were in a deep cavern, it echoed in my skull. He removed the shoe from my face, pulling me to my feet by my bulging groin. Guiding me toward his bed, I sat down on the smelly sheets, no longer in complete control of my faculties.

“Take your clothes off.” His words entered my ears like soft velvet, it felt wrong to disobey. In fact, I wanted to obey. For the first time, I wanted to listen to whatever this man told me to do. His bulging muscles, his plump lips, the way his crooked smile felt so dangerously mischievous, the way his smell took my breath away like a vacuum. For the first time, this man was everything I wanted. I ripped my clothes off and lay there on his bed wearing nothing but my bare, cold skin. Smiling, he took hold of my throbbing, upright cock in his rough hand. Ripples of goosebumps ran up and down my body as he slowly ran his calloused hand up and down my shaft. Each stroke allowed a groan or a moan to sneak out of my lips, before he leaned down atop me and planted a soft kiss onto my lips. He tasted like an ashtray and as his tongue slipped into my mouth, rolling atop my own, I could feel some of his taste transfer to me. I can’t explain it, as we kissed I could feel that taste of cigarettes and blunts seep into my tongue. I pulled his pants down, his thick, uncut cock tumbling out of his compression shorts onto my stomach. He smiled as he pulled away from the kiss. I stuck my finger under his foreskin, swiping it around, and brought it to my lips. It tasted like ripe, sweaty cock, and I began to crave it. “Oh yeah, babe you’re a keeper.”

He jumped up, and pulled me toward the edge of the bed. I got a perfect frontal view of his gorgeous cock and saggy balls, his virile and manly smell kept pouring into my nose and into the depths of my mind. He grabbed me by the back of my hair and pulled my eager mouth forward, engulfing his slick, smelly cock. I suckled, my loud slurping seeming making him even hornier. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him fiddling with something just out of view. As he thrust down my throat, I realized just what it was that he had. His used condom, I presume from whatever sexy fuck occurred the night prior, was in his hands. I closed my eyes as I felt its rubbery walls close tightly around the tip of my cock, slickly sliding down my shaft until his cold, creamy load touched my slit. With a loud snap, I looked down and saw his thick white cum completely enveloping my cockhead. I only got a quick glance before he’d pulled out of my mouth, replacing his succulent cock with my now favorite smelly shoe. I licked the sole, letting the thick toejam season my ashy tongue as the musk thrust into my nose once more. 

I knew what was coming, and I was prepared when I felt that slippery cock slip like butter into my tight hole. He’d grabbed my cock, covered in his seed, and jerked in tandem with his thrusts into my ass. Sensory overload. His smell, his seed, his cock, his taste, the very sight of him... It was all him. He was marking me. I was his property, and I was glad to oblige. Every single hard smack against my ass cheeks, every stinking waft into my brain, every breath of his smoky breath coming out of my mouth... It was too much! He fucked like a madman, stroking my cock into his slime until I felt a strange tingling in my cockhead. It was a slick, penetrating sensation of his seed... slurping into my slit! I was nearly screaming as I felt it sink deep down my shaft, into my engorging balls. It was stewing, brewing inside my growing sack! I heard him howl as he unloaded his fresher load into me. 

I felt his cock within me shooting spurt after spurt... going from ounces to gallons very quickly. His cum spread throughout my body like water into a balloon. I could feel the silky liquid beneath my skin, creeping, inflating every part of my body. It seeped up my throat, into my mouth, behind my very eyes into my brain. The pressure grew as I felt growth, I felt strength, I felt different. My body was gelatinous beneath my skin, before slowly firming into a much larger form. An improved form. I pulled Marco’s shoe from my face, and looked at my changing body. The cum kept flowing as I saw my muscled arms, my bulging abs, a grotesquely inflated ballsack... He leaned down and kissed me again, giving me another much needed taste of his addictive taste. My brain was melting, reforming, changing... Things were fuzzy and blurred before it was my turn to blow my load. In it, was who I used to be, my failures, my strife, my worries and obligations... Flowed like a jet out of my cock into his condom. Cum flowed out of the top of the condom, before Marco ripped it from me, letting the hot juices pool between us. 

“Lookin’ good, babe.” He smiled at me, and I looked at the man I loved with a smirk. Yeah, I sure fuckin’ do look good. We laid there all night long, fucking and kissing and sniffing and tasting... By the time the sun came up, I was in his clothes, I reeked of his sweaty manly musk, I was wearing my favorite pair of red Vans, and I was readying an 8-ball for pickup later that morning (after a few lines for me and the boyfriend). I kicked back and lit a cigarette, enjoying the laid back life I’d come to love with my man.

It’s a love story. How touching. So let me know what you think. Give me some anons on your opinions! Also, toss a few quid into the tip jar and I’d be eternally grateful <3 <3

[bestworstcase]

We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding. 

to whit: 

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.  

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?” 

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built? 

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters. 

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it. 

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3. 

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.” 

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2�� only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too. 

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it: 

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc. 

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness. 

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad. 

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc). 

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing. 

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas: 

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons. 

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on. 

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse. 

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal. 

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now. 

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop. 

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character. 

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3. 

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often. 

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first. 

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc. 

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw. 

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop. 

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan. 

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan. 

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take. 

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[popculturebuffet]

Amphibia Weekly Reviews: New Wartwood and Friend or Frobo?

Hello all you happy people! And welcome back to another week’s worth of Amphibia reviews! And we got two standout episodes today as Marcy tries to home improvement her way into people’s hearts, and Polly makes friends with a destructive but endearing robot. Find out what I thought about in full under the cut!

New Wartwood: Marcy episode! Wu-hoo! And true to the show’s current status quo, and I do love how it evolves, it’s her first day in Wartwood and she’s pumped. And true to the awkward, probably autistic like yours truly, nerd we’re dealing with.. she does not make a great impression or intergrate herself to the naturally suspcious of outsiders tow. So when questioned by Anne how her day went she gets into how the town’s carefully built on a swamp.. and how the townsfolk hate her, complete with Angry Mob. Anne disperses it but it’s still the funniest moment of the episode to me, both in how a small one sprouted up so quick.. and how polly’s there despite LIKING Marcy (”I go where the mob goes anne!”). ALso i’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Anne just.. casually blushing while talking to Marcy. There’s no catalyist or any reason she would for any other reason than being sweet on her. 

So Marcy, after fixing a statue she knocked over, decides she can earn their love faster as she dosen’t want to wait.  This does get to one of Marcy’s core issues.. while she has many, like any of us, it ties back to the fact she has trouble getting this isn’t a video game. I mean she does get the diffrence between real life and a game on an objective level, but she can’t get real life dosen’t WORK like fiction, something i’ve also struggled with and can massively relate to. So she assumes helping them, via fixing up the town a bit, will make them like her. It makes them warm up a little but they still don’t. 

So naturally, who should come in by blimp to give her a tempting offer that will end badly but Mayor Toadstool! He also has a blimp now but it keeps escaping... I think I know where it went. 

So THAT’S how he can afford those things. Naturally seeing how nice Marcy made things he has a plan to exploit the hell out of her gifts with masonry to pretty up the town as a tourist attraction to make him more money. Anne talks her out of it.. but she ends up caving in the middle of the night. I also love the touch of her staying in the Fwagon, not forgetting the plantars bought it and finding a practical use for it in and out of story now i’ts no longer needed. I also love the little signs she has on it. 

The next morning the town awakes to marble pillars in front of all of the shops to make them look fancy and Marcy and the Mayor promoting the town’s new effort,s including a golden founderss tatue and a horrifying golden clock of toadstool, with Anne warry of her girlfriend’s antics. Mostly becaue you can’t force people to like you or bribe them to. Otherwise you cause the entire town to sink into the water bellow... like now. But while Marcy is now convinced the town will never accept her she still dosen’t want them all to die, and summons Joe Sparrow.. who continues to be the best thing ever added to this cast I swear to god as he helps her save the day, removing the various new things to reduce weight, saving some villiagers from a pillar (as Croaker points out their frogs ending up in the water isn’t that deadly), and getting rid of the gold monstrosities. 

So the end result is that the town is rightfully liviid, though she does genuinely appologize.. and suprisingly.. TOADSTOOL actually tries to take all the blame. The town rightfully dosen’t let him, but it’s clear he’s somehow growing as a person. Even if anne’s assement of him as “What would happen if the Monopoly Man had a Baby with a PIece of Fried Chicken” is still 100% accurate. They do agree they’ll like her with time, just like Anne, and if supscious, will gladly give her another shot. So Marcy’s learned her lesson.. always listen to your girlfriend. And while she literally fixes her damage.. the mascot toadstool hired explodes as it’s full of bugs. 

Final Thoughts on New Wartwood: This was a fun episode. A fairly simple and predictable one, but sometimes that works perfectly and this one was just damn funny, charming and full of good character stuff. Top notch. 

Friend or Frobo?:

I have a confession to make: I fricking love robots. It’s something that really HASN’T come up before, but I love a good robot. There’s just tons of good stories to be had with artifical beings, their struggles to be recongized for who they are, their cool powers, their awkward but endearing attempts to fit in with us less than deserving humans. And ficton’s had TONS and TONS of awesome ones: The Vision (in both 616 and MCU flavors), who is one of my faviorite heroes period, Red Tornado, Jenny Wakeman, Shard the Metal Sonic, BOYD, Aya, Data, Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy, Growler, Robo, Grimlock. the list really DOES go on into infinity for me. 

WEirdly though I didn’t pay much mind to Frobo before this episode.. but with no real personality other than endearlingly running into the same obstacle for hours, and no real background yet, I didn’t really have anything to attach to other than “Cool anne’s either going to nearly get killed by a robot or get one”. But this episode changed that using the oldest trick in the book: having a child befriend it. We’ve seen it before with Sentinels, Badniks, Autobots and Iron Giants. Now we get it again with largeish frog robot. And it is pretty damn good. 

This is a Polly episode. It’s Hop Pop’s faviorite day: Seed Store Day! Naturally Marcy has come along and naturlaly she’s just as geeked out about seeds as he is because she’s precious and I must protect her from the horrible trauma her trusted father figure is about to inflict on her. Polly naturally wants to get into some shenanigans but suprisingly.. Anne and Sprig don’t wanna anymore. THey’ve learned their lesson and decide to just play video games. So polly does the resonable thing.. and blames them for some shenanigans on her part and goes out to get into more shneanigans only to find it’s lonely without a friend. 

Enter Frobo, named that because he looks like a frog and she heard the term robo from anne’s game. And despite very limited programming... Frobo is VERY loveable. As Polly notes he’s essentially a baby: he starts by mimicing her, including his horrifying but endearing laugh, and even doing her spin dash she gained a few episodes back I didn’t mention because I forgot. That one’s on me. Sprig also did the Yooka Laylee thing on top of her spin dash then so there’s that. 

Point is it’s all fun, games and heartwarming bonding till Frobo accidently floods the city and gets mobbed and one of the mobbs makes the terrible mistake of accidently kicking polly. 

He goes into Red Eye Iron Giant HOmage mode and starts fighting everybody.. including Anne and Sprig who show up to contain things, but eventually Polly wins everyone over with a heartwarming speech as she stops him, pointing out it was her fault and while he is weird, he’s just an innocent> The town.. decides why not. As the mayor points out “We already have two freaks what’s a third”. And given Marcy nearly killed them all yesterday and they begrudginly acepted her and anne did it WAY more than once and they see her as one of them, yeah they give up. 

Naturally once they get back Marcy is an easy sell. Now she can do chrono trigger cosplay! Hop Pop is a bit till it’s shown that frobo can farm super fast, and he’s part of the family now. Sprig and Anne shrug off him having come from the factory, and this surely won’t backfire on them surely. 

Final Thoughts on Friend or Frobo:

This one was excellent. The idea of Polly having to learn repsonsiblity was a nice idea, and Frobo is as I said endearing: he’s simply an innocent being who knows nothing and is slowly learning and his friendship with polly is really fucking cute. And giving him an emotional attachment to the plantars means whatevers going on with him gets higher stakes.. and given how robots are treated in fiction i’m just counting the minutes till he tragically gets blowed up real good. But until then this episode was a standout for the season. While as I made clear the “Kid befriends death machine” trope is not NEW, the baby concept made it feel fresh. It also as usual had some good jokes. 

So all in all a top notch week, really great stuff and i’ts only going to get better next time!

Nexttime: Mayor Toadstool is tempted to leave. Kay. But more importantly MADDIE EPISODE AGAIN BITCHES. AND IT HAS MARCY IT. I’M READY. 

Next On This Blog: Final Space Yo! Quinn and Gary visit earth and Tribore leaves.. again. Be here or be... elsewhere I guess

If you liked this review, follow for more, join my patreon, and comission your own review if you want via my askbox, discord and dms. See you at the next rainbow. 

[leavesofolive]

🌞🧹🌻Hearth Witch Tips!🌻🧹🌞

04: Your kitchen eats with you!

Just like with the rest of the house, what you put into the kitchen also heavily affects its energy. When you treat the hearth in certain ways, it reacts in certain ways. Your relationship with any room in the house is give-and-take. That means that if you don’t give back occasionally, the room will grow cold and stop appreciating your presence. But there are plenty of ways to mend your relationship! And the first step is to identify the problem!

From my experience, there are three main reasons why the kitchen stops being a warm and inviting place: 1) You are filling the cupboards with too much toxic, processed foods; 2) You aren’t spending enough time in that room; 3) Or you aren’t keeping the room clean enough.

When there’s a problem in the hearth, it’s always either one of these things or some combination of them. We’ll start with number three since it’s the easiest to explain. The kitchen should be anyone’s top priority to keep clean. It’s where all of your food, the nutrition and fuel of your physical and spiritual bodies, comes from! What you eat is your first defense against illness, injury, and your mental health. If the kitchen is filthy, then the food you take into your body will also begin to develop the same properties.

To keep the kitchen clean, I always start my day by washing last night’s dishes and give the counters a quick wipe. Once a month, I take stock of what’s in the fridge and freezer and scrub them out to prevent bacteria build-up. Sweeping the kitchen floors happens once a week and takes me all of three minutes to complete, tops. Once per season, normally at the beginning, I scrub the floors with soap and water, descale the coffee maker, wipe down the other appliances, and clean out the cupboards. So the only true “cleaning days” for the kitchen is four days out of the entire year. The rest of the time, the chores only take me about 30 minutes. As a quick tip, rinsing your dishes before setting them in the sink speeds up the dish washing process a ton! I’ve personally never trusted dishwashers since they don’t clean stuff well enough and it’s easier, faster, and far more cost effective to do it by hand.

The next problem the kitchen’s energy might be suffering from is how much time you’re spending there. First, spending a lot of time in the kitchen is a great thing! It absorbs the energy you feed to it, so when you don’t go in the kitchen very often or just don’t spend much time in there to begin with, the kitchen grows darker and colder. It loses the warmth and emotion and love that would’ve been sinking into it when you aren’t there.

The way to fix this problem is actually really easy! Cooking your own meals ensures that you are in there for a good amount of time each day because of the prep work and meal planning, etc. Plus, you get healthier, tastier food that way too! If you can’t cook all that well yet, don’t worry! Just like any skill, there’s no talent involved in learning something. It just depends on how much effort you apply to it. Another way to boost the hearth’s energy is to just hang out in that room. Invite some friends over, set out a snack tray, and just chill in the kitchen. Of course, since it’s pandemic right now, it’s best to wait until that’s over with to try this approach. But you, yourself, can still hang out in the kitchen!

The last problem, and a very, very common one in this day and age, is the influence of toxic food. Just like how your house absorbs energy from the land its on and what its built with, the kitchen also absorbs energy from the ingredients you keep within it. Toxic foods include anything processed or with a bunch of added sugars, and even GMO ingredients to some extent due to the trace chemicals that are still on the crops. These kinds of foods, if that’s the only thing in your house, will rot the energy. Not to mention, easy to grab snacks also end up causing you to spend a lot less time in the kitchen if that’s all you eat. Needless to say, no one eats healthy all the time. I don’t either! But having only toxic food in your kitchen isn’t great for you or the hearth.

Once again, cooking comes to the rescue! Even if you’re bad at it, it’s the thought that counts and little by little, as your skills grow and improve, the kitchen will learn to help guide you. There have been many times where I’d be stuck on how to fix something and a bottle of spice would fall of the shelf right next to me. If you listen to the kitchen, it will listen to you, too! Even if you don’t have time to cook, snacks like apples, berries, seeds, nuts, and dried meats are all healthy alternatives! I usually keep kale chips in the house for some yummy, salty crunchiness!

                                    ------------------------------

If you are worried about cost with this approach (believe me, due to my own situation it’s been a struggle at times), I’ve found out several tips and tricks to significantly lower the grocery bill. Anymore, my bill would actually be bigger if I bought crap food instead! Here’s my advice:

☀  Plan your week ahead! I always plan four meals a week that I’ll cook, and three days that I’ll scavenge for snacks and leftovers. I also stick to the rule of “one simple, one chicken, one meatless, one freebie” to remain more cost effective! The “simple” meal is just something I can make quickly if I know I’ll be short on time. The reason for have one of the meals be chicken is because it’s a much less expensive meat than beef or pork, and it’s a little better for the environment. The meatless meal is for the same reasoning. Meat is expensive and commercial brands are horrible for both the environment and the animals themselves. When I do buy meat, I make sure to buy local, grass-fed, organic meat as often as I can afford to. Keep in mind that every time you purchase anything, you are casting your vote for what is acceptable for society to continue. The “freebie” meal is just whatever I’ve been craving. If I want some kind of beef, I wait until this day.

☀  Learn to bake your own bread! For those of us with the time, this is a great way to save money and to stay healthy! Basic, white bread is actually pretty easy to make and only uses a couple ingredients. Those ingredients also go a long way. It costs me about 24¢ to make one loaf of bread because things like flour, sugar, salt, butter, honey, and yeast are all things that you buy once and can use for several loaves before you have to buy them again! It’s also not as time consuming as you’d think. Yes, it takes about 2 hours, but most of that time is proofing so you can easily be running around doing other things in between.

☀  Grow a garden! Even if it’s just a small, window herb garden, it can take the edge off of your overall food cost. Portobello mushrooms are also super easy to grow inside with minimal effort and equipment. If you have outdoor space, planting a small garden with the ingredients you use the most can help immensely!

☀  Only buy what you need! I know those sales look crazy tempting, but most of them are actually bogus and don’t actually save you any money. Think about what you are actually going to use before it goes bad and stick to your list. The bottom shelves at the store, aka the ones not in your direct line of sight, are usually where the grocery stores hide the better priced goods. At the back of most stores that have bakeries, there’s also usually a spot to get baked goods left over from the previous day for a slightly cheaper price. Day-old baked novelties like bread, cookies, and cakes are still perfectly good, and much easier to enjoy where you don’t have to spend as much!

☀  Check what’s already in your fridge before making your list! This is a huge one, since it prevents food waste, which in turn prevents money waste! What can you make during this week that can use up some of the ingredients leftover from last week? You’ll be impressed how quickly your food cost drops when you aren’t throwing things away. Waste not, want not! This trick also applies in another way, as well. When making your weekly meal plans, what types of foods use similar ingredients? If one meal calls for a slightly pricier ingredient, what other food can you cook with that ingredient to make the cost worth it? This also ensures that you get full use of things without wasting them. For example, this week I bought some fresh mozzarella cheese. Because this item is a little more expensive, I’m using it to make both the tomato mozzarella sandwiches and the beef wellingtons I’m making this week!

☀  Buy mostly produce! One of the best ways to lower your bill while still eating healthy is to simply add more fruits and veggies into your diet! There are so many tasty recipes that call for these babies that you’ll never run out of options, and there’s several things out there for everyone! Because I deal with sensory issues, I had to experiment a lot with what textures and tastes I could handle, especially on the bad days, but even still I found an over-abundance of things I love to eat. Fresh produce is way less expensive than meat, and much less expensive than many of the more mainstream snacks like chips or other processed foods.

                                     ------------------------------ All in all, taking care of your kitchen will also end up taking care of you, as well! Spending time there, actually using the kitchen the way it’s supposed to be, and just keeping it clean can work wonders in opening up your home and making it ten times warmer and more inviting! Trust me, your health and home will thank you for it!

[meet-with]

Paying it forward

When our children were very young, I started growing flowers. Elora is in her third year of college, while Jasper just graduated from high school. I have been growing flowers for a long time.

Chris was working as a mechanic down in Seattle when the kids were little, and he commuted to work every day. During the week, he was rarely home and I was alone with my two young children, so I had a lot of time to think about what I wanted to be when I grew up.

During those early years, I experimented with many small business ideas to see what would work, including planting an heirloom cider orchard (I didn't realize it would take at least five years before I could harvest anything).my first viable harvest). I raised more than a hundred chickens in our backyard for a rainbow egg business, but the birds kept escaping from their coop, and I would get angry calls from our neighbors daily.

Even though I tried growing miniature vegetables for local customers, I quickly discovered that it takes a lot of zucchinis to make $5. I tried so many different ideas, but none of them worked.

In the process, I added flowers to my garden and began selling the extra blooms.sta Flowers stirred such deep emotion unlike any other thing I made or grew.pow When I delivered my homegrown blooms, complete strangers would open up and share their most beautiful stories with me. most beautiful stories with me.

Every recipient could recall a flower memory as if it were yesterday. After I started sharing flowers that I had grown myself, I felt like I had finally found my calling.

As a result, every waking minute was devoted to the garden. I was obsessed with it. However, I knew very little about flower farming.

I spent nearly every evening email conversations with flower growers across the country, and spending my days reading every gardening book my library could order and trying out all the things I had learned in the books.to practice all the things I had read about in my garden.

During that time, social media wasn't even a thing, and there was very little information available on the topic ormIn addition to Lynn Byczynski's The Flower Farmer, Sarah Raven's The Cutting Garden, and Martha Stewart's Gardening: Month by Month, I just made it up as I went along.st made it up as I went along.

Even though I believe in being self-taught, building a business from scratch with so little to go on and no community was incredibly lonely and challenging for me. Since I was learning everything as I went along, I made so many painful and costly mistakes.

When IIt still amazes me that I didn't give up in those early days. think back to those early days I am still amazed that I didn’t throw in the towel. I failed way more than I succeeded and for the first few years, I really thought about quitting every single day.

Each failure was a sign that I was on the wrong path, and nothing came easy. Whenever I questioned what I was doing and questioned my faith, Chris always said, "The flowers are different.". So I would get back up, dust myself off, and try again.

After struggling my way through the first few years, I managed to grow a small business in our backyard and eventually start making a little profi tittle business in our backyard and eventually start making a small profit. Every penny that I made with my flowers went into paying off a mountain of debt that we incurred some years earlier.

Due to the fact that we were so determined to get out of debt and clean up the mess that we had made, there was never any extra that I could invest in myself.

As I made thousands of mixed bouquets in our garage, I dreamed of the day when I could finally leave the farm and learn from my flower heroes. My heart would ache every time one of them announced an upcoming class or workshop.class or workshop my heart would ache.

Although I was working hard and making good progress on paying down our debt as well as getting better at growing and arranging flowers, I didn't feel like I was getting any closer to realizing the big dreams I had for myself.

During that time I had started writing articles about my flower growing journey and had the opportunity to interview Ariella Chezar, I started writing articles about my flower growing journey and had the opportunity to interview Ariella Chezar, the godmother of seasonal floral design, and we became penpals.the godmother of seasonal floral design, and we became penpals. She knew how badly I wanted to attend one of her workshops but I couldn’t ever come close to affording it.

I’ll never forget the day that I received her email saying if I could get myself to her next workshop that I could attend for free. Up until that point my flower journey had been so incredibly difficult and nothing came easy. I had gotten so worn down by the grind that I was on the verge of quitting altogether.

So when I got that offer, everything I believed to be true was challenged in the best possible way. At that moment, I decided that if I ever had anything of value to share with someone else who needed a leg up that I would pay it forward as many times as I possibly could.

The workshop was beyond anything I could have possibly imagined and the experience completely altered the course of my life. I came back to the farm after that blissful week in California changed.

Having someone who I admired so deeply believe in me helped me believe in myself. That act of generosity felt like getting permission to finally go after all of the dreams that I had put on hold for so long.

I quickly got to work overhauling my little flower business and from there things really took off. Within a few short years, I had the opportunity to write my first book and eventually welcome more than 500 budding and established growers and designers to learn with us on our tiny 2-acre farm.

Over the next few years, our small family operation grew and we started a seed company, built an amazing little team, were fortunate enough to find our forever farm, wrote two more books, and transitioned our on-farm workshops online.

I can so easily trace each one of these blessings back to the moment I received that life-changing email. You never know just how much sharing with another person can completely change their life.

I have tried my best to infuse Ariella’s generous legacy into everything we do and our scholarship program is my very favorite way of paying it forward.

Next Tuesday, September 14, we will be opening up applications for our scholarship program. This is our 9th anniversary of both teaching the Floret workshop and offering scholarships.

I am so excited that we will be awarding 12 seats, our most ever. Each recipient will receive full tuition to the 2022 Floret Online Workshop, plus a box of goodies from the farm.

If you’ve been dreaming of filling your life with more flowers, but the Floret workshop is out of reach, I highly encourage you to take the time and apply for one of our scholarships.

[killingeveperspectives]

Perspective: Did Villanelle’s character arc in Season 3 get lost in translation?

Killing Eve Season 3 became something of my object of fascination by the odd disjointed experience I have watching it. It feels like it makes sense at first, but the whole lot is rather off. The more I revisit it, the more it appears that what we see on the surface is but an attempt at telling a very different story. But precisely by failing to convey their intended story (Or not committing to), the authors inadvertently created a slate with enough inconsistencies that it fits any rationalization the audience wants to impose on the final product. Its lack of clarity and internal logic made it adaptable to several points of view. I can impose the interpretation that Villanelle was given an irreconcilable redemption arc, or that she is still a psychopath and it will still somewhat work.

However, when the season is consumed stripped from our expectations, there is a dissonance between the narrative and the other elements of storytelling which sends mixed signals, especially in the most developed storyline in the season: Villanelle’s character arc. In the midst of this confusion and inability to get a hold of the character, I tried to grasp the intent of the author instead of the material itself. Upon reading interviews with Suzanne Heathcote, Sally Woodward and Jodie Comer, many of my initial interpretations of her arc were challenged. They seemed to never seek to rectify Villanelle’s psychopathy or nature, but to explore her deep need to belong. There seemed to be an awareness towards the truth of the character, and the journeys they have been on so far. It appears that their idea is that her impulses are her true self and the tension arises from the inescapability of her own nature and its exploitation, which becomes the sole designator of her worth as a being. This is indeed much more interesting than what I initially interpreted. So, I want to revisit Villanelle’s character arc with new eyes... in more detail... and see if I can find something new.

Villanelle’s initial motivations set-up a “ Self-affirmation” arc, not a Redemption arc 

Initially, the show seems to set two main motivations for Villanelle: a search for autonomy and a search for belonging, which will prompt her desire to become a keeper and find her family. Objectively, her motivations set up a journey for authentic self-identity. 

The opening wedding sequence is a good way of introducing her search for autonomy. Six months after Rome, Villanelle is gold digging her way through life, still very psychopathic of her. This is the first time we see Villanelle exist without a parental figure and without the tight control of ‘The 12’, and it turns out she is doing just fine. Where her wedding represents her agency and autonomy, being dragged into ‘The 12’ by Dasha has her sitting in the back of the car like a moody toddler. Her relationship with ‘The 12’ is infantilizing, controlling and coercive. It does plant the seeds for her struggle by visual storytelling, which I dismissed for a silly comedic effect.

Villanelle seems more aware of the power plays behind her bargain to come back, contrasting with her previous aloofness. This time, she seems keen on cutting her own part of the deal which is to become a Keeper (which oddly never involves getting the names of ‘The 12’). Her request is so absurd, and their agreement to make her a keeper so obviously fake, that it shows how Villanelle is truly unaware of the magnitude of what she is dealing with and how little leverage she actually has. But her effort to carve some degree of freedom and agency within her world is an authentic motivation. Her overall disinterest for the job also helps to solidify the idea that she is dreading being controlled, and only agrees to perform the kills as part of her promotion process. Which should not be confused – although it easily is – with a lack of enjoyment in Killing. In fact, Villanelle thoroughly enjoys herself in the kills she performs before Episode 5, be it improving on a relic, stealing a baby, or scaring hiccups away. Villanelle isn’t opposed to killing, she is tired of being ordered to kill. As welcomed as this development is, in many moments her motivations could be mistaken by childlike Villanelle just being capricious.

Parallel to her self-affirmation comes a search for a sense of belonging. This is a deep foundational motivation for the character that had always been in the subtext of the show. There is a fascination towards family and normal life in Villanelle, that she tries to recreate with those she “loves”. Arguably not even the character can articulate this urge, so when Season 3 sets to explore it, it feels forced. Villanelle seems intrigued by the gratuitous affection the baby elicits in people, including those that don’t own it, leading her to kidnap the baby as an experiment, then literally toss it away. It did not elicit in her the gratuitous affection it elicits in everyone around her. She is a psychopath. When the baby is reunited with their father, she is once again puzzled at the happiness in the dad’s face. The baby belonged to him. Did she ever belong to someone? This question will lead her to seeking her own family, taking her to Russia. 

Being so far removed from the events of season 2 and considering that Konstantin and Villanelle’s scene was completely overshadowed by the subsequent events, I found it hard to add weight to this motivation. A large part of the audience is understandably eager to learn about Villanelle’s past, however there wasn’t enough development to justify why the character wanted to learn about her past. Instead, she enunciates her newfound fascination with babies, without elements or events to convincingly move the character in this direction.

Villanelle’s journey home: nuanced and conflicted story telling got lost in translation

I have broken down how I believe this episode not only retcons her background, but soft retcons Villanelle’s psychopathy and her entire character – and I still believe in practical terms it inevitably does - but it’s a shame, because the episode in itself doesn’t. It’s all about perception and expectation tainting interpretation. The writer’s original idea was to have the audience go on a journey with Villanelle to this disconnected corner of the world, as she is surprisingly charmed by the oddity of what she finds. It was the perfect escapism from her claustrophobic world of ‘The 12’. We wrestle with the nature x nurture question as Villanelle wrestles with it herself, we feel at home, we connect with the family and feel rejected and deceived as Villanelle does herself. This episode was written from Villanelle’s perspective alone, she is the voice telling the story, we are literally asked to see it from her eyes:

But there is a catch: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator. The writer did plant elements that challenge Villanelle’s narrative, mainly as glimpses of other characters perspectives: Bor’ka has a normal loving drawing of his mother on the fridge; Pyotr likes his mother alright and challenge’s Villanelle’s perception of their mother meanness, by stating Villanelle herself used to be mean to him, implying a connection between the two; the husband reveals that Tatiana still cries every night because of the whole thing. All of which becomes the core problem with this episode: Villanelle is an unreliable narrator but we don’t perceive her as such because of our emotional investment in the character. Who is to say Villanelle’s tendencies and behaviour didn’t genuinely scare and tear the family apart and without knowing what to do after her husband died, Tatianna abandoned Oksana in the orphanage, despite genuinely suffering from the decision? Tatianna is a very flawed mother and Oksana is a very troubled child, both these realities are valid and interconnected, in the most nuanced, emotionally challenging and complex episode of the entire show. 

Underneath Villanelle’s standpoint, Suzanne Heathcote managed to hide a sensible and honest perception of that family’s complicated past: the heartbreaking reality is that deep down, despite all the layers of pain, trouble, blame, shame and guilt, both characters wished it was different and they could somehow connect, but the truth is that they were, and still are, unable to. Thus, both characters were speaking their truths, however we are not afforded a chance to truly see her mother’s perspective because we are stuck in Villanelle’s world and Villanelle has empathy for no one (Except for her little brother but I don’t want to beat on this dead horse). Despite her manipulative and violent behavior towards her family, from where Villanelle stands - and within her own perspective rightfully so - her mother was simply neglectful, abusive, and worse: saw her as something alien. Thus, having her mother admit her own “darkness” was so important: This darkness I carry belongs to you, therefore I belong to you. Ingenious. Upon revisiting this episode, I truly appreciate it as a showcase of the potential of Suzanne Heathcote’s writting, with beautifully crafted storytelling that seems straightforward at the surface but invites us to dive deeper. Unfortunately, this gem is lost in translation.

The episode was all about how Villanelle made sense of herself and her past, not about what really happened, as the writers claimed they didn’t want to excuse Villanelle’s actions nor erase her psychopathy. It wasn’t about the authoritative writers explaining Villanelle’s past to the audience and deliberately painting Villanelle as a child tortured into becoming a monster because of her upbringing… the problem is that it feels like it was. And when later you add Dasha’s abuse to the mix, the retcon of her psychopathy is irresistible to the audience, but the creators are not naïve and especially as the word “psychopath” seem to have vanished from their vocabulary, when previously it was the selling point of the show; something doesn’t add up. Killing her mother marks a turning point in Villanelle’s character arc, and here things start to get complicated...

Killing her mother sets Villanelle in an identity crisis but what is it exactly?

When Villanelle gets rejected, she kills her mother and sets the house on fire mirroring the orphanage arson. In the train scene, we see Villanelle wearing her mother’s clothes and listening to crocodile rock while crying, smiling, jamming, reminiscing. Despite her efforts to wrap herself in the elements that symbolize the moments she felt like she belonged with that family, she is still alone and there is a lot of pain – fair, psychopaths are not painless. But what that scene represents for Villanelle is an enigma, and I believe not Jodie Comer, nor Suzanne Heathcote, nor anyone, actually knows what this scene is really supposed to mean emotionally for Villanelle.

I want to contrast this scene with another scene in a movie where we watch an actress cycling through many emotions in a long shot as she listens to music: the final 2:30 minute long take in Portrait of a Lady on fire. The scenes parallel each other, and kudos to the unafraid acting of Jodie Comer and Adele Haenel. However, there is a key difference between the two: Celinne Sciamma (screenwriter and director) knew exactly what she was looking for and walked the lead actress Adele Haenel through all the emotions she would be evoking, their succession order and meaning. All the emotions conjured in the scene were carefully crafted in the audience throughout the entire movie, generating a deep connection and understanding of the characters, the story and its symbols, that culminates in an apotheotic cathartic release. That scene was not just a beautiful, emotionally loaded scene: it had intent, it had a clear meaning. And from there on is where Villanelle’s emotional scenes start to break apart.

The display of a person suffering through emotional pain will obviously evoke feelings of compassion, care and empathy in the audience, but this level of immediate reactive connection does not equal an understanding of characters’ emotional reality. It’s important that audiences not only know that the character is in pain but what that pain means, even more so when you are exploring the boundaries of emotion in a character that has a fundamentally different subjective experience than the audience. Given the lack of build up and more extensive exploration of the mother and daughter relationship, it’s not only harder to add the appropriate emotional weight as it is to understand it’s ramifications. Thus, despite lots of tears, Villanelle remains an emotional black box after coming back from Russia. 

On the other hand, there is this interesting motif with Villanelle that death brings freedom: once a person is dead, they cease to have a hold on her, allowing her to reinvent herself. For example, when Eve hurt her in the season 2 finale, she kills her to break free from her hold. In her own words: “I’m so much better now my ex is dead”. This motif is again brought up in her conversation with Bertha Kruger in episode 04. As Villanelle tries to reinvent herself after killing her mother and whatever that meant, she learns she was being tricked by ‘The 12’ and that her promotion was a farce, bringing her full circle. She went through these journeys and still didn’t break free: she was still controlled and still rejected, thus her only solution was escape literally and metaphorically. 

Her mother rejected her because of her violence, which is precisely the only worth ‘The 12’ see in her. Both of her Nemesis reduce her to the same image: she is a violent kid that kills. Thus, her shifting relationship with killing becomes more interesting when it is framed as a desire for self-affirmation and not as a rectification of her nature as the result of a new found moral compass and compassion, which places Villanelle in the same territory as traditional female assassin characters before her. She is reclaiming her identity, from her past and from her subjugators, hence the motivation to not kill could be seen as a deliberate act of rebellion. However, it is unclear how concrete this motivation is, given that she does indeed keep murdering, and how it interplays with the emotional changes we are shown the character is going through, altogether making her distancing from killing narratively elusive.

Character development couldn’t commit to a narrative, going from nuanced to disorienting

Part of the charm in Killing Eve is what is left unsaid and implied, but nevertheless registers, connects. This relies on the smart use of character expositions and film language to efficiently get the audience on board with the character’s world organically. All previous season’s made good use of monologues and dialogue to flesh out the world and specially characters. In Season 1, Villanelle was explored and developed through excellent dialogues, and in Season 2, when exploring her intimate inner reality, the writers opted to use the AA meetings for a direct exposition via a monologue that tied together previous visual and narrative set up elements. 

This type of efficient character exploration doesn’t lend itself well to the nuanced layered exploration the writers set out to do in season 3. And still, they stubbornly committed to it, withholding characters from fleshing out information through dialogue, while overplaying ‘show don’t tell’ trying to convey character’s inner realities with fragmented elements scattered over a disjointed plot, thus relying heavily on the actors to create a semblance of coherence out of the cacophony. I truly believe this choice was extremely detrimental to the season, since it created unnecessary challenges for the main goal which was character exploration. The result is an unsettling gap between the writers’ vision of the characters and their arcs, and what we, the audience, experience. 

I want to take a moment to explore examples of storytelling choices that I found confusing in developing Villanelle past episode 05, by taking a look on her 3 murders after she comes back from Russia.

In the Romania kill, we see Villanelle sitting on the bed halfhearted, downgraded into taking this job after her promotion debacle. The title card links us back to the scene in the beginning of the episode when she realizes she was conned. This is bullshit, this job is bullshit, and yet she has to do it. All elements are underlying the conflict in her search for autonomy, but then the song in the background evokes sentimentalism, underlying Villanelle’s growing feelings, subtly implying she feels bad about the act of killing. The scene composition sends mixed signals. Then it cuts to Villanelle ready for the kill with the upbeat recap intro music playing (????), she can’t focus, gets stabbed and cut to an angry tear-eyed Villanelle stitching up her own wound in the bathroom floor, fleshing out how she felt used and that she wants out. Then for a moment, the scene gets more intimate and she says - or even confesses? - she doesn’t want to do it anymore. We look down to a defeated and vulnerable Villanelle underlying the characters impotency or is it a moral struggle? The entire sequence purposely avoids committing to whether she failed because she didn’t want kill, or because she couldn’t kill. These two conflicts have completely different implications in interpreting and understanding the character development, but we remain in the limbo, confused as to what it could be.

To make matters worse, both these motivations: quitting ‘The 12’ and stopping killing, will be flipped when Villanelle pro-actively asks for a job and decidedly kills Dasha (who survived out of plot contrivances luck ). The scene with Helene is also interesting. When Villanelle meets Helene there is a conflict around identity and belonging. A particularly childlike Villanelle is again falling into tears as Helene breaks into her personal space with an embrace. Villanelle gives in to the embrace then pulls away at the mention of the word monster. That is not the identity Villanelle wants, nevertheless it feels good to be accepted. Then Villanelle asks an exasperated Helene for another job, not before being reminded she is a child, again powerless.  

“Look what you made me do” playing in the background.The song alludes to the power domination she is under and her motivation to break free, but the entire scene alludes to her conflict over her self-perception and belonging with Helene as a mother figure. I’m nor sure I follow what the character wants, I’m hanging on a spiderweb on the wall, Villanelle is crying, and can we please stop torturing this character into feelings for five minutes? Who is this reformed character? Jokes aside, there is one message that emerges, which is Villanelle doesn’t want to be a “monster” (violent killer, or more subtly violent in general) but she is forced to do it. This scene does succeed in softening Villanelle by emphasizing this new narrative leap following her seeming new found conscience: that Villanelle was made into a violent woman, but she is not naturally one. Her brutality is not transgressively hers anymore, it is a burden imposed onto her, which again places Villanelle’s character back into the comfort of the place designated to violent female characters: sad broken woman went murderous. Which stands in sharp contrast with Villanelle characterization so far, and what made her character iconic in it’s own right. The only way to make this narrative work is assuming killing her mother erased her psychopathy and gave her the whole bag of feelings and empathy. But if episode 05 fails to sell that, then the following episodes feels like tumbling down a rocky narrative slope. But the seed still lingers on my mind after reading paratext from the creators and cast: if you’re not trying to retcon Villanelle, then what does this all mean?

Rhian’s murder is a pivotal moment in Villanelle’s arc that fell into obscurity by jarring storytelling. Here the narrative seems to finally address the elephant in the room: when push comes to shove, can she control her violent impulses, which, no matter if inherited or cultivated, became a core part of herself? The ballroom tea dance effectively distances Villanelle from killing, but Villanelle and Rhian’s exchange show things aren’t so simple. More overtly so, Rhian and Villanelle subway brawl is all about giving Villanelle a chance to fully articulate the conflict around her subjugation to ‘The 12’ and her self-agency. Villanelle beats up Rhian, which could symbolically represent her refusal to be an obeying “sheep”; but, despite trying to get a grip of herself, her nature takes over and she kills, which could represent the uncontrollability of her impulse.  Thus, the interaction between these two scenes, ballroom dance and Rhian’s kill create a conflict surrounding Villanelle’s nature, self-control and capability to change that goes beyond the central conflict of each scene alone. Interesting, better explore it late than never, right?

The next scene seems to give us the resolution of this conflict, as Villanelle exits the subway, marching forwards, defiantly looking at us while we hear “Nothing matters if you bury it deep” in the background. It sends a message that Villanelle ultimately embraced her nature, and perhaps herself, and by doing so symbolically broke free from the oppression, emerging victorious. One could say she found her mojo back by killing on her terms. However, this never has any effects on the character, Villanelle is still as conflicted about her self-identity and still expresses her desire stop killing when we meet her again in the final scene as if her march after killing Rhian never happened. so what was the writers trying to say with the Ryan’s kill sequence when, despite disconnecting and contradicting the previous and following scenes with Eve, it seems to have no effect on Villanelle herself? What narrative are the writers committing to?

Villanelle’s character arc: the faithful translation of a uncommitted vision

Villanelle’s character arc, not that it is her privilege, gets muddled by deliberate ambiguity, character isolation, confusing motivations, and overall disconnected narrative as the writers refuse to commit to a vision. Thus, set-ups, pay-offs, conflicts and cause-effect are muddled, devoiding the character development of tangible meaning or aim – nuanced or otherwise. Despite it all sort of working moment-to-moment, it’s hard to keep up with what is being established overall, the ever shifting and clashing elements making it impossible to crack these characters and their journeys. In threading the fine line between the said and the unsaid, Season 3 had its characters bottling up so much that we are alienated from them. Simply saying “something changed inside her, and she is facing lots of things” doesn’t mean anything. Having the character state that she doesn’t want to kill (be it in general or for ‘The 12′) only to have have your character still actively killing both for ‘The 12′ and for personal reasons and ignoring the conflict it creates, shows the character’s motivations don’t mean anything. Villanelle was in search for an authentic self-identity but in the end who is she? What was this journey all about? Honestly, fixing Villanelle to allow a romance no one really knows. 

So my overall impression is that Villanelle’s character wasn’t lost in translation because there wasn’t any coherent vision behind it, but a succession of floating undecided moods and motivations tied together by powerful performances that leaves you feeling like Villanelle was redeemed. Thus, the audience  - and arguably the cast and creators - are left relentlessly rationalizing Villanelle so the character doesn’t fall apart. Some see Villanelle truly in love, some see her as obsessing, some see her as emotionless, some see her as a pastiche, some see her as blossoming into her true self, some see her as two different characters (Oksana/Villanelle), some just think she cries a lot, some think she is remorseful, some think she isn’t, some believe she is a psychopath, some think she matured, some think she was never a psychopath and some think she is outright cured. No one fully grasped what is happening with Villanelle, not because her character is complex beyond comprehension but because her character remained conveniently inaccessible. Ultimately, Villanelle’s character growth is a mystery the show teased at but did not commit to crack. 

[loveafterthefact]

Love After the Fact Chapter 48: The Mental Kind of Growth

Keith and Lance practice their skills as warriors, rulers, and a couple.

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It's been a phoeb and a half, and Lance’s sparring has improved dramatically. From one strike, to two, and onward into minutes, into technique, into refinement, Keith's amazed at his progress.

He’s come to move, if not entirely with confidence, then with enough grace to convince otherwise. The natural poise that carries him through the halls of the castle has transferred well into a mixed swordsman style, taking influence from the Alteans’ refinery and the Galra’s tenacity.

It suits Lance well, Keith thinks, the combination of dignity and violence. It fits the burn in his blue eyes whenever he draws his sword. He wonders what his husband thinks of to make his eyes blaze like that. He’s not certain he wants to know. He is certain he wants to see how Lance handles combat with his bow, but Lance has yet to bring it to training.

“Well done,” Keith murmurs, softly smiling. They’re keeping their budding romance behind closed doors for now. Keith supposes it’s because Lance is afraid to make fuss in case he doesn’t meet the Altean’s expectations. He certainly doesn’t live up to Lance’s typical opulence, decked out in jewels and gold ornaments for breakfast and new ones for lunch. Keith’s style is far more… holistic.

“Thank you.” The Altean’s skin glitters with perspiration, chest rising, straining against his stiff clothes.

Keith reaches out, undoes the clasps of Lance’s delicately embroidered vest, listens to the great breath Lance takes in. “We need to find you something better to train in. Armor or something. I won’t have the Crown Prince of Altea fainting on us.”

“I have ceremonial armor, but it’s heavier than the clothes we had for the frost ball. Heavier than my wedding clothes!” Lance beams goodnaturedly despite the obvious strain on his body.

“Still.” Keith makes to inspect the Altean’s fingernails for some indication of oxygen intake, but they’re painted blue. His gaze roves over his face instead, over cheeks flushed beneath scales and paling skin around his lips. “I don’t like you training in these clothes. It’s fine if you're just doing a few forms here and there, but now? It’s not healthy. No more until you get something suitable.”

“Always so confident when you’re on the training field.” Lance leaves his vest open, gives a cocky spin of his sword to match the crooked smile on his face. “I quite hope to see more of it.”

“Shut up and swing your sword,” Keith growls, extending his own blade. They meet in a flurry of sparks, Keith’s platoon pausing to watch as the first strike of a new round rings out across the yard. Keith leaps back, turning to his soldiers. “Did I tell any of you you were done for the day?”

“No, but watching you flirt is more interesting.”

“Extra lap, Ryan. Gods forbid I flirt with my own husband.”

“Disgusting, Prince Yorak. Shameful, unprofessional behavior.” Lance leans on the point of his sword, squealing, flailing as it gives way beneath him.

Keith drops his ears, letting his tail swish across the floor, feigning unamusement. “Shameful behavior, eh? You would be the expert.”

The soldiers laugh.

“Expert in fun, you mean. Don’t worry. You’ll learn soon enough.” Lance gives an exaggerated wink, and Keith just groans, rolls his eyes. The soldiers laugh some more. They’re easily charmed by the geniality of the crown prince, the familiarity between their future kings.

It’s grown easier, being together. Keith feels at ease with Lance, with his place in the castle. Lance has begun to ask him if he’ll be coming to meals, to court, to some meeting or tea or another, always looking hopeful, always looking at him with eyes made of moons.

It makes Keith feel so light he might float away.

Sitting through court makes him feel the exact opposite. Listening to Ladies Seran and Renli prattle and scream about the latest slight against their children for some doboshes strains his patience and his ears, finally forcing him to close his eyes, tipping his head back against his throne.

Lance attempts to coax the ladies out of their fury, citing his spouse’s sensitive ears, but his errant concern for someone other than them sends the women into renewed screaming. The constant assault on one of his most delicate sensory organs has Keith’s head and ears pulsing. Eventually, his patience evaporates.

“Ladies, enough!” Lance does nothing to stop Keith as he rises to his feet. “Do you know what sort of complaints I would be hearing back on my home planet? Kits without parents and parents whose kits have died. On my home planet, kits starve or have been killed by your soldiers, and yet you stand here and scream because a vendor refused to hand over their wares to your kits for free? You are both perfectly well, as are your… well-accommodated kits. Be grateful for your blessings and be on your way!”

“HOW DARE-”

“Leave now, or the guards will show you out.” Keith throws himself back into his chair with a groan, massaging at the fronts of his ears, jostling his new circlet. “And do learn how to project your voice as opposed to shrieking. My poor ears…”

Lance merely bites his lip against a laugh, taking a moment to compose himself while the furious women are shown away. Once they are gone, he clears his throat. “Thank you, beloved. I’m very sorry about your ears. Now then, who’s next?”

“I am, your Majesties.” An older Altean, older than the kings, marches up to the edge of the dais. Oddly enough, Lance realizes, he rarely sees people of this man’s status here: those of the lower classes, the farmers, the smiths, miners, the people the court don’t wish to look at.

Keith envies the old man’s clothes, the way they’re loose except at the waist, which is cinched with a wide belt. He’s missed clothes like those. They make him think of home. Glancing around, no one seems to share his interest, all muttering, some frowning at the dusty prints on the pale blue carpet.

“And how may we be of service to you, sir?” Lance asks. Keith sighs with relief at the smile in his spouse’s voice. The elder man draws himself up, proud, dignified, important. It’s immediately evident that this man is someone of importance where he comes from.

“Your Majesties, I must tell you the road between the city and my commune is quite damaged, and our vessels cannot travel into the city to deliver our crops. They rot in the fields!”

“Damaged?” Lance raises an eyebrow, frowning. “Then why has it not been fixed?”

“It is the King’s Road, your Majesties, and thus my commune does not have jurisdiction. I was not even permitted to acquire the necessary materials.

“I have inquired as to the road a decaphoeb ago now, and it still has not been fixed. I understand your Majesties are very busy, but my commune… We have no way of transporting our goods. My people are suffering, your Majesties. They are relying on me to rectify this problem.”

“Wait. You’re telling me that you came here once before seeking help and were turned away?” Keith asks.

“No, your Majesty. I was assured that the roads would be fixed. But they haven’t been, and my people are struggling to get by. Our resources have been depleted. The last of our coin went toward the royal taxes, coin we need for clothes and supplementary foods. We will soon have no choice but to take to poaching.”

Lance’s frown deepens at the thought of his people scraping their resources together to pay taxes to a Crown that failed them. He turns his gaze to Adam, who searches through his datapad. “There is no record of the headman’s request, your Majesty. It must have been lost.”

“Not good enough,” Keith declares. “What is your name, headman?”

“Riel, your Majesty. Headman of Commune Larsemik.”

“Headman Riel, my husband and I apologize for the disservice done to your commune, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. Workers will be dispatched promptly to repair the King’s Road. In the meantime, please speak to Adam regarding your losses due to the Crown’s error. You will be compensated, both in money and material. Feel free to be a bit… hyperbolic.”

Lance cuts in where Keith drops off. “Furthermore, if you would do me a service, in return?”

“Of course, your Majesties. It would be my pleasure.”

His response makes Keith sick. The man genuinely means it.

“Stay, if you can, until this evening. Prince Yorak and I rarely hear from the lowlands, and we understand the journey is a long and treacherous one. Still, your commune and those of your fellows are valuable, and the people in them are as valuable as any here. If you would stay, we would hear of our brethren and their well-being, and see if there might be some way that communication from the lowlands might be made more feasible for both of us.”

Riel regards them both for a moment, then nods his head. “I thank you, your Majesties. I would be happy to stay.”

“It is we who thank you, Headman Riel.” As he speaks, Keith takes Lance’s hand. He imagines that to this old farmer, they seem beautiful, untouchable, all-powerful. It’s all a matter of perception. “It is a duty, a pleasure, and an honor.”

Speaking to Riel proves invaluable. As it turns out, he is sort of the headmen’s headman, and knows practically everything that happens in the communes skirting their mountain kingdom. He’s happy, too, to teach the princes. He doesn’t even bat an eye at Keith, who still receives his fair share of odd glances and side-comments on the daily.

Lance learns that, thanks to his new tax system, certain communes will be able to afford much-needed equipment or more seeds for a larger harvest. Some communes would still benefit from subsidies. Riel’s commune would gladly host the princes should they wish to visit the lowlands during planting or harvesting season. And-

“These days, we find ourselves shorthanded.” Riel sighs. “Not dangerously so, but just enough to notice. Still, we must produce the same or greater harvests as commerce goes to the stars. There are fewer of us, your Majesties, and no way to fill out our numbers.”

“It is the same everywhere, my friend. There are just enough empty homes, empty stores, and empty chairs to feel an absence.” Lance smiles, a little small, very sad. “I may raise our child limit very slightly. Just to one-point-five-to-one. It will take time for our population to recover, but we cannot be allowed to grow beyond our means.”

“Well,” Riel rises to his feet. “I am glad to know that the future of our planet rests in capable hands. You are both well on your way to being legendary leaders.”

“Thank you,” Keith says, rising also. “That means a lot, coming from one such as you. We look forward to seeing your commune, and I look forward to seeing the lowlands.”

“Agreed.” Lance shakes Riel’s hand. Keith’s surprised when the old Altean grips his arm instead.

“Good to meet a Galra under these circumstances. Ancients know I got tired of killing you.”

Keith laughs. “We got tired of killing you, too. I’m glad we’ve move forward after all this time.”

“As am I, your Majesty.”

"Are you sure you won't stay? It will be quite late by the time you arrive at your commune." Lance smiles, much like he already knows the answer.

"I cannot, your Majesty. My son and his wife did not survive the war, and my grandchildren will no doubt be waiting up to see me. Triplet girls, eight. I'll tell you something: fear the age of eight. They get mean, and they get sassy!"

Laughing, Lance slips his arm around Keith’s waist, smiles when his tail twists around his ankle. “Very well. You will find a shreika waiting for you by the gates. No need to return it. Consider it a gift. Also, there will be some dinner for you in the saddlebag.”

Headman Riel bows as he exits, leaving the princes alone. Lance’s cordial smile fades, replaced by the usual post-court exhaustion and some deeper troubles.

“Lance? You don’t seriously think Alfor would disregard a headman’s request, do you?”

“N- No, of course not. He wouldn’t do that.” Lance sighs, smiling. He takes the time to give his spouse a kiss. “My father is a lot of things, but needlessly cruel isn’t one of them. All the same, I hate that it happened. Come on. You’ve been quite hungry lately. We should get you something to eat.”

Keith heaves a shaky breath, thinking of everything coming his way. It’ll be good, he knows, full of new discoveries and experiences. But first? Dinner.

“Are you gonna join us, beloved, or do you want to go back to our rooms?”

“I’ll join you.” Lacing their hands together, Keith leads the way out of the sitting room. Lance grins, more than happy to follow. “After dinner, I’d like to research more about the lowland communes. I was able to follow along alright, but I’d like to know more.”

“As would I, truth be told. We’ll grab some tablets and head back to our rooms. Maybe Adam will join us. Hunk and Pidge might, too. We can all do a work night together.”

“Sounds good. I can keep arguing with them about whose kits will be more useful.”

“They’re only arguing about usefulness because they know ours will be the cutest.”

“Oh, absolutely. No contest. Except maybe Allura and Lotor’s baby.”

“Pfft, they wish. Hello, Dad! Hello, Father!” Lance dances his way into the dining room.

“Hello, Lance!” Coran smiles. “And hello, Keith! How are you boys doing today?”

“Pretty good.” Keith settled in front of his plate. There was noticeably more food on it than usual. “Lance, would it kill you to accept the boundaries of normal people who can’t slip inside my skin and find out all of my biological secrets?”

“Were you going to ask for more food?”

Glaring at his spouse, Keith shoves a spoonful of beans into his mouth, flicks another spoonful at Lance’s face. “That’s my business.”

“Rude!” Lance pulls back his own spoon, eager to retaliate-

“Lance…”

Leave it to Coran to be the one who cares about table manners. But underneath the table, Keith squeezes his hand. The smile on his face promises they can goof around later.

Then Keith stomps on his foot with a snicker. Unbelievable.

[sheconquers]

SEASON ONE // EPISODES 6-10

S1. E6. A Golden Crown

The thought crosses Daenerys’ mind that perhaps the dragon eggs are not simply stone. She studies it closely, remembering that fire cannot harm a dragon, that even she thrives in heat. Out of curiosity, she places one of the eggs on a brazier… but nothing happens. It is a disappointment, but when she pulls her hands away from the heated egg, unharmed, the thought continues to linger that perhaps there is a way to hatch them.

Soon, she is summoned by the dosh khaleen, the wives of khals slain in battle who run the city. Before them, she eats a stallions heart as they read omens. She struggles at first to keep the organ down, but, to the relief of both her and her husband, she manages to compose herself. As she finishes the heart, the crones declare that her son will be “The Stallion That Mounts The World”, the khal of khals, the ruler who will unite the Dothraki into a single horde to overrun all of the lands according to Dothraki legend. Daenerys then announces that her son shall be named Rhaego, after her brother Rhaegar who was slain by Robert Baratheon. She is then lifted by Drogo who carries her about the room as the Dothraki chant their son’s name.

Infuriated and drunk, Viserys arrives at a feast to celebrate the Khal and Khaleesi to demand that Drogo pay him for giving him Daenerys. He draws his sword to threaten Daenerys and her unborn child, believing that since the Dothraki cannot draw blood in their sacred city that he cannot be harmed. Drogo promises that he will give Viserys a golden crown “that men will tremble to behold”. Daenerys makes no move to argue or disagree, knowing that this has always been how things must happen, this is how the story has always been written.

She watches as Viserys’ pleasure quickly slips to pain as Qotho grabs him and breaks his arm before kicking him to the floor. She watches in silence as as her husband melts a belt of golden medallions into a pot and her brother begs for mercy, begs for her to stop what is about to happen. She watches as her brother is blessed with a golden crown that encases his head and burns his scalp. She sneers as he dies, collapsing on the ground, stating that he was no true dragon.

For fire cannot harm a dragon.

S1. E7. You Win or You Die & S1. E8 The Pointy End

It begins to occur to Daenerys that, perhaps, her son should sit upon the Iron Throne. She begins to plant the seed in Khal Drogo’s head that an invasion of the Seven Kingdoms would benefit the Dothraki. However, Drogo does not wish to cross the Narrow Sea and that a man does not need an “iron chair”. He only needs a horse. Daenerys realizes that the conversation is fruitless and continuing it would be pointless, so she tucks the desire away for a better time.

Instead, she travels to the marketplace with Jorah and her handmaidens. She takes the opportunity to ask Jorah to help her convince her husband to invade the Seven Kingdoms because the throne is hers by birthright. In response, she is reminded that Aegon the Conqueror was only able to take six of the Kingdoms because he had dragons who were able to fight alongside him.

When Jorah separates from her and her handmaidens, the group wanders into a wineseller who is seemingly eager to impress the Khaleesi with a particular vintage. However, as she has been convinced to drink the wine, Jorah intervenes. It is quickly discovered that the wine is poisoned and that this was an assassination attempt. Jorah explains to her that that Robert Baratheon will never stop trying to kill her.

Once back at the tent, Drogo quickly arrives. He glares at the wineseller but immediately goes to Daenerys to be sure she’s unharmed. As a thanks to Jorah, he offers him any horse of his choosing before becoming enraged and shouting that his army will cross the “poison water” to take the Iron Throne for his son as punishment for their assassination attempt on his Khaleesi.

The next morning, the khalasar leaves Vaes Dothrak… the wine seller tied naked to the saddle of the Khaleesi’s horse, forced to walk until he collapse from exhaustion to be dragged to his death.

Khal Drogo wastes no time in making good on his promise to Daenerys. Almost immediately he begins the march of conquest towards the Narrow Sea. In order to afford the coming war, the Dothraki must raid villages and take people to sell into slavery to allow them the money they need to hire ships for their assault on Westeros. Despite this being explained to Daenerys, she is distraught at the aftermath of the raid on a village in Lhazar. She sees the Dothraki killing the villagers, raping their women, and she orders it to stop. The Dothraki grow angry, but Daenerys quickly claims all of the women she sees to protect them. Angry, the warriors make their complaints known to Khal Drogo. However, Drogo is amused by his Khaleesi’s boldness and allows her to keep her slaves, much to the frustration of the Dothraki.

Drogo is challenged by an offended warrior, Mago. He takes a wound to the chest in the midst of the fight but quickly kills Mago, silencing the complaints. Daenerys sees the wound he has received and insists that it be treated as she is concerned that it will become infected and fester. She allows a healer, Mirri Maz Duur, whom she rescued, to treat the wound despite Drogo’s bloodriders proclaiming her a maegi… a witch. Unbeknownst to Daenerys… this is the beginning of the end.

S1. E9. Baelor & S1. E10 Fire and Blood

Despite the help Daenerys has sought from Mirri, Drogo’s wound begins to fester. He keeps marching forward despite growing weaker and weaker while his Khaleesi watches on, concerned. Eventually, he is unable to remain upright on his horse and he falls to the ground. Daenerys understands how dangerous this makes the situation as a Khal who cannot ride, cannot rule. To buy Drogo time, she orders his bloodriders to make camp and claim that the command came from the Khal. She then orders that Mirri be brought to her.

Drogo is brought to his tent with Daenerys and Jorah arrives soon after, warning her that the khalasar is learning of Drogo’s fall. Distraught, Daenerys begs for Jorah’s help, begs him to help her save her husband. When there is none but the two of them, Jorah removes the covering of Drogo’s wound to reveal a deeply festered and rotted patch of flesh, leading him to declare that Drogo is as good as dead. He immediately urges Daenerys to flee, that the power struggle that will follow Drogo’s death will likely end in the winner killing Rhaego. Daenerys, however, refuses to leave Drogo’s side. Instead, she sends Jorah to fetch his armor to be sure he is prepared if something happens.

Once Jorah has left, she asks Mirri to save Drogo using blood magic. The witch warns her that death may be cleaner and that only death may pay for life. Though, once Daenerys is reassured that her life is not the one needed, she agrees to the ritual. Once the ritual begins, Daenerys is instructed to be sure that no one enters the tent during the ritual. As she leaves, a battle breaks out amongst the bloodriders and Daenerys’ Khas. Rhaego begins to kick and Daenerys falls to the ground as she goes into labor. The birthing women of the khalasar refuse to treat her until someone in the crowd suggests Mirri. Concerned for Daenerys, Jorah lifts her and carries her to the tent while she is too weak to protest.

Days later, she wakes with one of her dragon eggs in her arms. Something she had requested during one of her few waking moments between fever dreams. Jorah is there, having not left her side, and reveals to her that Rhaego was born dead and deformed, covered in scales. He also explains that most of the khalasar has gone, moved on, and left them behind. However, Drogo is alive.

She demands to see him. She is taken to a cliff where she finds Drogo in a catatonic state. When questioned about when he will become himself, she is told “When the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. When the seas go dry and mountains blow in the wind like leaves. When your womb quickens again, and you bear a living child. Then he will return, and not before.” In this moment, Daenerys realizes that the death of her son and husband is her fault as she is the one who invited Mirri into their Khalasar and asked her to treat him.

Miri is arrested and Drogo is taken to Daenerys’ tent. She spends the evening bathing him, speaking to him, and attempting to seduce him. But nothing works and she understands that he is no longer there, that though he breathes, Khal Drogo is gone. She kisses him one last time and, crying, smothers him with a pillow because she knows this is not the life he would want.

Daenerys and those who have remained with her build a funeral pyre for Drogo. She speaks to those left and tells them that they are welcome to leave if they would like but that those who stay, she will lead to a glorious future. She frees the slaves in her presence and asks that they stay among her as equals. Though some walk away, this does not deter her. She commands that Rakharo place her dragon eggs on the pyre and has Miri Maz Duur bound to a pillar in the midst of the pyre.

Concerned, Jorah approaches her, believing that she intends to take her own life. He begs her to reconsider this choice, tells her that they can take the eggs, sell them, and travel far away, proclaiming “I won’t watch you burn”. Daenerys grows quiet for a moment before softly responding “Is that what you fear?”. A kiss is placed to his cheek as the pyre is set aflame. Calmly, Daenerys turns and walks into the flames, quickly appearing to be consumed by them.

Come dawn, Jorah is the first to approach what is left of the pyre. Instead of her charred corpse, he finds Daenerys sitting among the embers with three newly-hatched dragons crawling over her. She is covered in ash, her clothes have been burnt away, but she is completely unarmed. At the sight, Jorah and the remaining Dothraki drop to kneel and swear their allegiance to Daenerys.

The Mother of Dragons is born.