#Mostly because on tumblr I’m like… there’s more nuance to things than what either side wants to portray

[cobragardens]

In the first essay in this post Maya Gittelman articulates something that I think is really important: it's not just the gender(fuck) of the characters' coding that makes Good Omens a queer story, it's that the story is about queerness itself.

Gittelman's essay:

The thing is, this is the shit I’ve been waiting for my whole life.

Before I knew the words, I was impacted by how every epic romance, every classic adventure, every story I had access to and enjoyed was cishet. I needed to translate either the story or myself to find myself in it—every single time. I grew up in the oughts, in the days of the Tumblr fandoms you’re thinking of. I wrote about this a bit more in my essay on the first season of Our Flag Means Death last year, and that first line applies here—queer heartache has never felt this good.

I’ve been able to consume a lot of queer storytelling lately—mostly white cis m/m, but not exclusively and more than I’ve ever been able to in my life, because I’ve been searching for it for a long time. Yet as we know, there are a lot of mainstream stories with queer “rep” that at their core about what marginalized queer people have been cautioning around for generations—normalization. Assimilation. Respectability. See, we can be just like you. We too desire to marry, participate as cogs in the violent machine of imperialism. We too want the right to give you our service, our allegiance. We too want to join your armies. I certainly can enjoy plenty of that media, but I’m still desperate for queer storytelling that’s not sanitized, not flattened out to fit cishet beats, something that tells a good story that’s queer on every level. And that means we deserve to see queer characters who are messy, who hurt each other, because sometimes, love isn’t enough.

While Good Omens in some ways still white cis m/m, it’s also not entirely, and what works for me is that it actually delves into asking the damned question: What if this love is a threat, actually?

What if this love is something that does disrupt your norms, your ways of life? What if it’s an open danger to the systems you’re used to? What if this love could disrupt everything? What if it goes against God’s will and Satan’s too, what if it flies in the face of the ineffable plan?

What I’m saying is, I’ve wanted stories that let queer people be characters, with all the nuance and complexity that entails. Stories that are queer, intentionally, in both subtext and text, that aren’t asking an audience to justify their right to exist. Instead, they’re giving voice to the specifics of queer experience that don’t typically get mainstream care, multi-season tenderness. We deserve queer love stories that are wistful, epic, tragic not because they’re of the “same gender” but because the tangled truths of safety and trauma are inextricable from queer love. We deserve stories that are queer as subtext and text, metaphor and central plot and side plot too. We deserve queer stories that explore how queer love is infinite variety. We deserve genre stories that explore what immortality or something close to it does to pining, to longing, for wanting the one person in the universe you can’t have.

We deserve queer stories without homophobia that still explore the traumas of marginalized desire, in which neither party is truly the villain, just victims of the same system, at different stages of knowing it.

Show me what it looks like beyond the happily ever after, the will they/won’t they, the beats of a privileged cis white coming out. Breathe arcs of nuance and poetry and history into it. We deserve that epic romance, and we deserve to see how much it can hurt, because the depths of that wound evidence the ferocity of that love.

Growing up queer can feel monstrous, and I need to see that on screen. When you get preached at that people like you go to Hell for what you are and the ways you want, you start to relate to the demons. When you’re taught the truest, most joyful parts of you are unholy, it’s fair to ask—why should I respect the authority of a system that hates me for reasons I can’t control?

You learn to disguise your desire, and it changes you. It changes you to choke down your feelings, to deny them, to believe that they are sin. You learn to pour them into the hidden language of love that arises between you and whoever you’re lucky enough to share it with, so you don’t learn how to say them aloud. (Their arrangement, “little demonic miracle of my own,” the fourth alternative rendezvous. This is what queer love has looked like for millennia: something beautiful and true, despite, despite, despite.) Unlike those whose love has only ever been legal, permitted, “normal,” “holy”—your relationship is inescapably shaped by the threat behind it. You don’t get to see them as often as you like. You don’t get to talk, either to them or about them, because it might disturb the precious existence you have carved out together. You have to make up excuses, you can’t admit to anyone exactly why you can’t stop going back, and in this way you don’t always have to confront it yourself.

At the same time, that’s why queer love can be one of the most powerful forces in the universe—it saved the world last time, even if they didn’t call it that, yet. Aziraphale and Crowley don’t know so many details about each other’s lives and yet they know nearly everything important.

This is love—this natural state of slipping into the truth, until you awaken to it, inevitable and encompassing, all around you.

You might find yourself almost helpless to the magnetism. You can’t stop going back, finding your way to them, taking the risk, basking in the thrill of the comfort of their company.

And that’s why this finale, this story, this couple works so well for me—it’s queer in the telling, and while it always has been, this season literalized it on a new level and that matters.

#good omens #good omens meta #good omens as a queer story about queerness #christianity #ineffable husbands #the christian world is a dystopian horror #christianity is authoritarianism from the spirit outwards

[belphegorbillickin]

Hi! As someone who played your quotev match-up quiz (and had a lot of fun with it), I’m kind of curious if your opinion on it has changed any now. I could tell from your posts that you value accuracy to canon when dealing with fan content about characters, so I was curious to see if the new character information released since 2022 has affected how you view it.

Sorry if this came off as rude or repetitive in any way. 😅

Dw it's not rude at all! I love to ramble on and on about my projects and characterization anyway, and I'll really glad you enjoyed it! It also fuels my ego a little to hear that you can tell lol.

I'm curious to know who was your top 3 and how accurate you thought it was, was it surprising in any way? If you don't mind ofc, I just love being nosy about what people think of my stuff lol.

I'm inviting you to ramble along with me!

To be honest, that quiz was always meant to be more on the wish fulfillment side for the readers, because that kind of quiz is usually taken by younger, more sensitive people as a whole and it's hard to do more nuanced takes in that format.

I also can't really have my usual interests be more obvious like I can on tumblr and AO3.

It was kind of my way of trying to do what older fans had done for me back in the Quizilla days. (RIP Quizilla, gone but never forgotten.) I actually preferred the edgy, in-character variants even back then, but the TWST fandom on tumblr is very...

Let's just say I'm very hesitant to interact with most TWST fans first, unless they post similar things, and that I've gotten anon hate just for posting that quiz while being a yandere/OBM!/adult (as in age) writer.

That being said, the point allocation was intended to be fairly accurate without any cheat answers, and I didn't wanna sugar coat the results too much.

Some characters are easier to "game" than others, and some have broader or more niche tastes, but if you're not careful you could get Sebek or Vil instead of Riddle for example.

Also, Idia and Jade are pickier than Rook and Floyd and the points try to take into account what the player would want as well.

I've adjusted the point spread a lot since then at different times.

A tiny bit due to new characterizations, but mostly because the point spread system is annoying to work with and because I realized not everyone will read the questions and answers the same way.

You also can't do negatives, which would've helped the quiz be a lot more accurate, but what can you do?

I actually really regret accidentally contributing to the whole "crybaby" Azul and thought about it re-doing his result soon after posting.

I've actually been thinking about it again recently, but I kinda don't want to take away what people are used to either.

I had initially thought that was a joke/affectionate bullying, but I found out not too long after that a lot of people seem to genuinely think that Azul cries over everything, despite canon saying that he's changed.

It seems like poor Azul has been hit with a double dose of woobification and ukeification by the fandom, and I'm not a fan. He's a pos (affectionate) like the rest of them, and I'd like him less if he wasn't.

Tbh, I actually think he's one of the most morally bankrupt in the entire cast, along with the Tweels and Leona. Like, he's dealing in literal, violence enforced slavery whereas Jamil is trying to escape it for example.

(I also hate what the Eng localization has done to poor Jamil, but that's another rant.)

Also, Rook has said a lot of questionable things to Vil and I'm unsure as to what the intentions were. Like, is Rook negging Vil when he points out millimeters of weight gain? Is it supposed to be a normal, "positive" thing because Japan loves to glorify EDs?

It makes the VDC thing look really bad too, not the actual vote itself, but all of his other actions imo.

I'm leaning towards Rook being manipulative tbh, because he has a pattern of it, already really disrespects non-humans, and is very socially savvy and close to Vil. (This isn't bashing btw, I still love Rook as a character.)

Otherwise, not much has changed other than me getting more comfortable with the characters and fandom I suppose?

I'm guessing you're caught up as an Idia fan? Good choice btw, and if you are the one that sent the Idia ask dw, I'll try my best to fulfil it too.

Tbh, I'm actually really disappointed that his parents are actually really cutesy. And, speaking as vaguely as possible, I honestly don't like the new fae lore in Ch 7 either.

I feel like Yana has suddenly decided to start downplaying the more serious, heavy tones and I'm not quite sure why? Maybe to ease players into a slightly more romantic slice of life continuation after the main story ends?

Idk maybe it was always planned, but I feel like it makes Idia seem a bit more like a generic whiny teenager. I still love him, but I choose to ignore that part of canon and give him more distant parents who are still struggling with grief and their work.

But feel free to disagree, I don't mind at all. It's just nice to have someone to talk about TWST with too!

#twisted wonderland #asks

[rahabs]

I still don’t have a computer but to ease back in to making graphics I might try and do up some things for Indigenous history month, which is half-over but hush.  This means more posts on Canadian history and for my Terror friends/followers I do want to do a post or two on HBC trading and the Cree up north.  Would anyone be interested?  Or I could answer questions people have about anything, too; I actually am First Nations beyond just being a historian so I’m lucky in that I can approach issues from multiple perspectives.

#I really don’t post a lot about Indigenous issues despite being directly affected by them #Insert my family’s residential school/MMIW stories here (and there are a lot) #Mostly because on tumblr I’m like… there’s more nuance to things than what either side wants to portray #And people don’t like to hear it. #Anyone who says Canadian history is boring doesn’t actually know anything about it. #text #chey.txt

[ninjago-bingo]

final month recap

wow, everyone.  we’re here.  we’ve made it.  we’re reached the end of our bingo time, and i’m absolutely floored by the sheer creative output that i’ve seen over these last four months.  everyone, take a moment to give yourself a pat on the back!!!  no matter if you made 1 piece or 10, there’s now a work of art out there in the world that wasn’t there before.  and truly, that’s super heccing rad no matter how you look at it.

so let’s celebrate!  for this recap, we have a total of 20 new pieces, bringing the total amount of ninbingo pieces up to 50.  in the span of four months, this little event has created 50 individual works (five of them in the last day!)  holy cow ya’ll.

i’m putting out this recap now, but don’t worry, it’s not the end yet!  any submissions made to the end of the 30th still count and this post will be updated accordingly :D

fic:

all the things i’ve never done by @sa-you-na-ra. tumblr || prompts: competition and teasing

It’s always a funny thing when the ninja realize new things about each other. Even though living with each other meant they had to see each other all day, there were still small habits or actions that amused the others.

(mod comments: all these little interactions made me smile so much :D looking forward to the rest!)

error 404: answer not found by @m-aster-of-spinjitzu. tumblr || prompt: memories

Akita and Zane talk after the battle in ‘Awakenings’. The conversation… doesn’t go as either of them expect.

(mod comments: the nuances in this fic are fantastic!  also Akita is always a win :D)

Five times kai was a good brother by @/master-of-fluff. tumblr || ao3 || prompts: nightmare and brother

I'm writing kai centric stuff again.

(mod comments: kai IS the big bro of the team!!! i support him all the way!!)

How Garmadon became a chauffeur by @master-of-fluff. tumblr || ao3 || prompt: driving

"um...Kai? Don't you think we should go Slower?" Garmadon asked nervously trying not to panick as they raced down the road at what had to be over the speed limit.

(mod comments: who let Kai drive?  no but honestly this is canon alskdfj)

little things by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: hugs and crying.

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things." -Kurt Vonnegut

Lloyd’s tired of being left behind. How is he meant to be the green ninja when he always has to work harder, train better, and wait longer to go on missions with his team? He wants nothing more than to be their equal.

At least, that’s what he thought he wanted.

(mod comments: a post-ep-18 resolution scene?  SIGN ME UP!)

Neither Snow Nor Rain by @fangirltakesall. tumblr || ffn.net || prompt: post-fight

After their return from the Never Realm and all its troubles, Zane is quiet and Nya is incredibly worried. A call to action to a peculiar sort of battle might be enough to change both of those things.

(mod comments: the concept of these two on their own mission together is just so good! excited to see how their dynamic plays out!!)

Never Put Off Until Tomorrow by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: video games and chores

…what can be done today, yada, yada, yada, we all know the saying. So do the ninja- when Master Wu is drilling it into their heads every minute of every day, it’s kind of hard to forget.

Naturally, it only takes them a week (and the biggest new video game in Ninjago) to do so.

(mod comments: this is so in character that it’s frustrating lol.  also Pixal ftw!!)

oh take me back to the start by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: comfort and 3 am

The past should be left in the past. Or, at least, that’s what Jay keeps telling himself. Nadakhan is gone. It’s not logical to still be afraid. But he is, and now everything that he left behind suddenly feels like it’s never going to be the same again.

Cole isn’t so convinced.

(mod comments: Cole is truly the man we all deserve in our lives.)

On Our Own by @redefine-your-identity. tumblr || prompt: home

It’s been a few weeks since Kai and Nya’s parents disappeared without a trace. Needless to say, they’re struggling.

(mod comments: OU C H no poor babies 😭 the relationship dynamic here is great!)

orange and gold by @/m-aster-of-spinjitzu. tumblr || prompt: cooking

...I just need more Cole and Vania content, they seem like they'd be great friends.

Basically it's just 'Cole goes to visit her there, they almost burn down the kitchen, and make way too many puns', lol.

(mod comments: I also always need more Vania content!! the puns in this were breadful!)

permafrost by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: loss of control and promise

It’s not like this is the first time this has happened. It’s not like none of his teammates have ever suffered this kind of guilt and pain. It’s not like Zane himself hasn’t walked through hell before and come out the other side (mostly) in once piece.

Except, this time, it is. It shouldn’t be different, but it is.

(mod comments: super sweet moment between two ninja who deserve more interaction like seriously!!)

Precautionary Tale by @/fangirltakesall. tumblr || ffn.net || prompt: protective

Fighting is different now, and Zane doesn't know why. Yes, he is titanium now, but why should that change anything? It seems to be changing everything, although is all really as it seems?

(mod comments: a great start to a zane-centric fic!  interested to see where it goes next :D)

Star-Ninja! by @rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: siblings and competition 

What happens when the loveable gremlin the ninja adopted off of the streets introduces them to Starfarer comics?

Chaos ensues, of course.

stuck with you (through bright and blue) by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompt: protective

Kai only wants two things: to protect Lloyd, and to give him the best birthday ever. Unfortunately, Lloyd seems hell-bent on making that as difficult as possible. Kai’s always prided himself on achieving the impossible, but dealing with human emotions is much more complicated than beating up Garmadon’s generals or shooting enemies with fire, as he quickly learns. Movie!verse

(mod comments: happy birthday lloyd!! look at him getting the love he deserves uwu)

Take a walk in the rain. by @/master-of-fluff. tumblr || ao3 || prompt: rain

Cole had always loved the rain, the way it smelled, the way it felt on his skin, and especially the mud! Whenever it rained his Mother would put on his rain coat and boots And they'd both go out and splash around in the puddles and make mud cakes and do all sorts of things.

(mod comments: this fic made me smile a lot :D loved the way it was arranged!) 

the hues of an empty sky by @/m-aster-of-spinjitzu. tumblr || prompt: crying

Missing memories, or having two of them for one moment - not quite the same, but if there’s one thing Jay’s leant over the last few weeks, it’s that literally nothing makes sense anymore.

Or, some Skybound aftermath, Zane actually expressing emotions about his memory switch being turned off for all those years, and what was supposed to be a ‘they tell everyone about the erased timeline’ fic, but it turned into a 'two characters who barely interact on screen talk at like one am in the morning, and don’t actually tell the other what exactly they’re alluding to the whole time’ fic that I wrote at like one am-

(mod comments: Skybound resolution? SIGN ME THE HECK UP YES)

The Make-Cole-Realize-How-Much-We-Love-Him Competition by @21st-century-ninja. tumblr || ao3 || prompts: bets and competition

Jay and Kai share a horrified look.  “He really doesn’t get it,” Jay says.

Kai shakes his head.  “We need to show him somehow.”

“Show me what?” Cole asks, exasperated again.  

“How much we love you!” Kai exclaims.  “Somehow, it’s not getting through your thick skull that we want to sit next to you because you’re you, so I’m gonna have to just prove it to you.”

(mod comments: a silly little movie fic!)

twitter was a mistake by @/21st-century-ninja. tumblr || ao3 || prompts: teasing and birthday

Kai 🔥 @flaminhotninja ☑

so who was gonna tell me that Jay used to be a game show host huh

🌺✨ the Gift of Jay ✨🌺 @zaptrap ☑

Replying to @flaminhotninja

NO WHO SHOWED YOU

(mod comments: twitter was a mistake)

two halves of a broken whole by @/rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: scars and post-fight

The Sons of Garmadon have been defeated. Garmadon is in prison. The city has been saved.

In the aftermath of the battle, Nya is more than ready to take a much-needed break. But the life of a ninja is messy. Recovery is never that simple. Although the wounds may have healed, the scars still remain.

Zane’s scars seem to match up, though. And maybe together, they can begin to heal.

(mod comments: aggressive care is my jam, and this is it!)

wait by @rosiehunterwolf. tumblr || ao3 || ffn.net || prompts: home and memories

Lloyd’s not so great at being patient. It’s not his fault though- maybe he would be better at it if waiting didn’t always end up being so disappointing- if people actually kept their promises. But this time’s going to be different, he knows it. His father will come back for him. And Lloyd’s going to wait.

As long as it takes.

(mod comments: baby.  baby boy.  baby.  protecc him plz.)

#ninbingo #recap #long post #but i don't want to hide anyone's work yk #ninjago #ninjago fic

[tsuisou-no-despair]

Higurashi When They Cry: Gou -My “Final” Thoughts

Since we’re getting a second season - and it’s so obvious that Gou was written as the first half of the story - I find it hard to rate Gou at this point in time. Do you remember how when Avengers: Infinity War came out and a lot of critics were like “well, we need to see Endgame before we can really make our judgements”? Yeah, it’s like that - hence why “final” is in quotes.

Even so, I still have some thoughts about Gou, Higurashi as a whole, and my experiences with getting in on something’s fandom. I’ll make a post for what I want out of Sotsu later - right now, here’s what I have for Gou.

What I Liked About Gou

Most of it, honestly! I enjoyed Gou greatly and I’m glad I sat down and gave it a watch. (This may be heresy, but I honestly found it better as an experience than the last airing-weekly anime thing I sat down and watched - that being Mob Psycho 100 Season 2) But as for the stuff unique to Gou thatI particularly liked:

First off, having a new Higurashi anime that’s actually good. We needed something like this after Outbreak, Kira and (to a much lesser extent) the non-Saikoroshi parts of Rei pushed the series deeper and deeper into a trash can.

I love the new art style and the new designs for the characters. There’s a lot of good in DEEN’s adaptation, but a lot of the time the art left something to be desired. Passione’s take on Hinamizawa gave us a cast that can be cute and beautiful and terrifying all while looking good.

There’s also a lot of really good cinematography - the shot used in the GIF above left me going ‘holy shit”.

The new themes are a triple threat of bangers. In particular I loved that they brought in Ayane to really give it a deeper tie to Higurashi as a greater franchise. (The best of these, of course, is Irregular Entropy)

Episode 4′s twist. Just... *chef’s kiss*. I know that people poked it apart and called it ridiculous after the fact but I don’t know if the feeling of dread when Rena’s eyes were hidden by shadow, and I realized that this wasn’t going to end well, is something I could ever really recapture.

Speaking of violence, the ending of Episode 13. The dull red light... the ringing bell... good stuff.

In retrospect, creating Tataridamashi by bringing in Minagoroshi was smart, specifically from a character-introduction standpoint. They needed to establish the existence of Kimiyoshi, Oryou and Akane for later parts of the story and dipping into Minagoroshi’s involvement of them is probably the easiest way to do it.

In general, Gou’s really smart about its character introductions. I didn’t think they’d bring in Akasaka but I’m honestly really pleased with how they did it.

SatoRika was confirmed! And was really cute... until it extremely wasn’t! (But in a good way!)

The fact that Satoko and Rika’s conflict at St. Lucia was so nuanced, with neither of them really being 100% right or 100% wrong. (Of course, this doesn’t last)

I might be slightly conflicted about Satokowashi as an arc, but none of those conflicts are with Eua. (The “FUCK YEAH FEATHERINE TIME” from Twitter was particularly tasty)

The dub! I know a lot of people are ambivalent towards the Gou dub but I for one am happy that we’ve got some great performances, as well as a Higurashi dub that’s actually good. Maybe not great, but far better than what DEEN got in the end.

This Shion face

This is the face of someone that’s going to wreck her sister’s chances with her new boyfriend for fun.

What I Didn’t Like About Gou

Watadamashi in general. This is easily the weakest arc by a long shot, which sucks because I like Watanagashi-hen quite a bit. A lot of the time, it just felt like the animators had chose it as the place to cut costs. As good as the Takano scene in the Saiguiden is, it’s one of the things that makes the least sense in retrospect given the changes to Takano that have been established in Gou. And Episode 8 was rough both from a pacing and a what-happened standpoint. While Watadamashi had some great moments (the above Shion face as well as Rika dressing down Keiichi), overall it was clearly the weakest arc, particularly after Shion left the picture.

The pacing of Gou in general left something to be desired at times - they really should’ve shifted the extra episode in the first cour from Tataridamashi to Watadamashi, and Satokowashi could’ve probably condensed some of its episodes down and gave more room to other things, like...

Satoshi. He really shouldn’t have been as absent from the series as he was - hell, until Ep. 9 I legitimately thought that he might’ve been cut from the story altogether (and honestly, if they did that maybe the story would have been better!)

On that note, Episode 22 just kinda sucked in general.

While I’m not on the “where’s Shion” train as heavily as some meme artists are, I do think that the fact that she had to be written out of the second cour entirely to make it work is one of Gou’s story’s objective faults.

There’s a lot of little details added or addressed in Satokowashi-hen that I feel are either less than good, or are just restrictive. The big two of these is Satoko watching all of the fragments (either Eua should’ve just given her a sample platter, or we should’ve seen more of Satoko’s thoughts and reactions) and the fact that the memories returning means that eventually Hinamizawa would end up “solved” without Satoko’s intervention.

Honestly, Gou’s finale needed a bit more punch - it wasn’t bad but honestly even for a halfway point it could have ended with a bit more of a bang.

The Fandom Side Of Things

First off, I want to preface this by saying thanks for following me, taking my theories into account (it always feels cool whenever I see something I threw into the aether in one of my Theory Times getting adopted and spread by someone else as an interesting idea!) and sticking with me through Gou and hopefully through Sotsu. You are all amazing and I love you all.

After Watadamashi concluded, I decided that my Higurashi bullshit needed its own sideblog, because I recognized that nobody in my other circles was even remotely into Higurashi and I didn’t want to shout into the void. So, I made myself a sideblog, named it after one of my favorite Higurashi console openings, and started posting my thoughts. Quickly I discovered a whole world of theories (”Satoko’s suspicious? I never would have thought of that!” - me, a young and naive fool), hot takes, and a surprising number of Rena kin. (Who are all delightful, I assure you!)

One of the things that stuck out to me was the different schools of opinion that formed. While I ended up as a relatively quiet analyst who overall liked Gou despite its flaws (a camp shared by two of my favorite blogs - @tarhalindur and @thewhitefluffyhat - that you need to follow if you don’t already), there were many others who had much stronger thoughts. Some of them were loudly cheering the story’s turns, while others seemed to decide that Gou could do no right and acted accordingly. Joining a Discord run by one of the larger Higurashi blogs on Tumblr gave me a live view of the process in Satokowashi’s later half, and it made me really realize what shaped people’s views on Gou. Some particular factors that caught my eye:

Whether or not they liked Umineko over Higurashi (mostly a Twitter element - the Umineko fans really enjoyed Eua making her appearance and overall reacted really positively to Gou)

Where they hailed from - honestly I think that Tumblr overall was one of the more positive fanbases for Gou (at least of the big concrete places like it and Reddit), given how the various camps thought of Gou’s eventual villain.

How they felt about Episode 16 - there were a lot of people that seriously felt that Rika learning the “lesson” of “maybe leaving the hometown where bad things happened isn’t the right call” was far, far more abhorrent and objectionable than the part where she got her entrails ripped out!

How they feel about Satoko, naturally - particularly, how much they sympatized with her and how much they didn’t want to see her go down the path she did. Tumblr in particular had a lot of people that related with her and her life situation, and it was never not interesting to see how the sympathy and occasional projection shaped someone’s particular thoughts. (There were some strong reactions to Gou showing an abuse victim becoming an even worse abuser, let me tell you.)

I think I’ll conclude these final thoughts by quoting my IRL best friend’s tags regarding the fandom of her choice:

It really is. And I’m glad I got on this ride and saw it through with all of you.

See you in July.

#higurashi #higurashi when they cry #higurashi gou #higurashi gou spoilers #higurashi gou thoughts #higurashi gou FINAL thoughts #i'll admit I'm still a little sad that satoko never killed anyone with that teddy bear #also i'm 100% going to keep posting and theorizing up to and beyond july don't you worry

[mediaeval-muse]

Book Review

Radiance. By Grace Draven. Self-Published, 2014.

Rating: 2/5 stars

Genre: fantasy romance

Part of a Series? Yes, Wraith Kings #1

Summary: THE PRINCE OF NO VALUE Brishen Khaskem, prince of the Kai, has lived content as the nonessential spare heir to a throne secured many times over. A trade and political alliance between the human kingdom of Gaur and the Kai kingdom of Bast-Haradis requires that he marry a Gauri woman to seal the treaty. Always a dutiful son, Brishen agrees to the marriage and discovers his bride is as ugly as he expected and more beautiful than he could have imagined. THE NOBLEWOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE Ildiko, niece of the Gauri king, has always known her only worth to the royal family lay in a strategic marriage. Resigned to her fate, she is horrified to learn that her intended groom isn’t just a foreign aristocrat but the younger prince of a people neither familiar nor human. Bound to her new husband, Ildiko will leave behind all she’s known to embrace a man shrouded in darkness but with a soul forged by light. Two people brought together by the trappings of duty and politics will discover they are destined for each other, even as the powers of a hostile kingdom scheme to tear them apart.

***Full review under the cut.***

Trigger/Content Warnings: sexual content, bullying, violence, blood; references to infanticide, ableism, torture, and incest

Overview: I learned of this book when an artist I follow on tumblr mentioned it as one of their favorites. I had high hopes after seeing so many 4 and 5 star reviews, but unfortunately for me, I wasn’t as enthusiastic as most people seem to be. While I did appreciate that the hero wasn’t a gruff, emotionally damaged, violent man, I personally found the story as a whole to be rather dull. There were way too many scenes that focused on domestic life at the Kai castles, and while that could have been an interesting plot in itself if the stakes were high enough, the political drama wasn’t developed enough to be thrilling, nor was the Kai court different enough from the human one to be a tale about immersing oneself in a new culture. Even looking at this book purely through the lens of romance, I don’t think there was enough there; while I don’t think the hero should have been mean to the heroine or something like that, I do think the relationship could have benefitted from developing a little more, and for Draven to have really dug into the nuances of what changes when a couple moves from friends to lovers. Thus, this book only gets 2 stars from me.

Writing: Draven has a simple writing style that fits well within the romance genre. It flows well and balances telling and showing so that worldbuilding doesn’t feel too info-dumpy. My biggest complaints are things that are easily fixable, like correcting typos and moving flashbacks around so that they occur at more appropriate moments. Other than that, I don’t have too much to say about the writing; it was fine.

Plot: In a way, this book is a Beauty and the Beast retelling: two people must overcome their revulsion to the other’s appearance before they fall in love with the good character underneath. Behind this main plot is a political drama in which several kingdoms are vying for territory, making and breaking alliances while a conniving queen does her best to stay in power.

Regarding the Beauty and the Beast plot, I really liked that Radiance seemed to adhere more closely to the core themes of the original fairy tale than a lot of other retellings I’ve encountered; instead of a story about a woman trying to tame the “bestial” man with her womanly charms, both characters in Draven’s book have to learn to see the other as beautiful by learning to appreciate one another’s culture. The main scenes that come to mind that do this well are the times when Ildiko (our heroine) finds beauty in the Kai death ritual (the mortem light) and when her expectations are subverted when it comes to the food the Kai eat (not the scarpatine, but the other dishes). I also liked that Draven devoted a lot of time to detailing why the Kai found human eyes so off-putting, and Brishen (our hero) comes to appreciate them when learning to read his wife’s emotions. If anything, my main complaint is that I think Draven could have done more to enhance these themes by tweaking her worldbuilding; the Kai were different from humans in a lot of ways, but so much was the same (court politics, social hierarchy, etc.) that I think the task of learning to appreciate a different culture wasn’t difficult enough. I would have liked to see the Kai have a completely different social structure, one that was so alien to the human characters that learning to see the beauty in it proved to be more of a challenge. Because adapting wasn’t too hard and Brishen and Ildiko seemed to have no moments where they suddenly realized they loved rather than just respected or liked the other, I was frequently bored, mostly because there were so many domestic scenes without relationship milestones - instances where Ildiko and Brishen came together as a couple, bonding over things that challenged them to grow as people.

The political plot, in my opinion, was a little ho-hum and wasn’t nearly present enough to be important. We are told that there are rising tensions between three kingdoms, and some people disapprove of the marriage alliance between Brishen and Ildiko, but it kind of felt like a background threat, in part because there were so many scenes depicting feasts (4, by my count) rather than political intrigue, or we get scenes like Ildiko dropping her mother’s necklace in a vat of dye and then Brishen offers to take her to the next town to repair it. Sure, a couple of bandits try to kill Brishen and Ildiko, and some treachery happens later in the book, but the middle section mainly consists of feast scenes, domestic life, or petty drama. I wanted a little more substance to the non-romance plot; perhaps the marriage could have been more explicitly important for the well-being of the Kai kingdom as a whole, and Ildiko has to use her skills to make the Kai more loyal to her. Or, Draven could have gone another route and made the Kai queen to have a clearer political agenda throughout the book other than just being mean to everyone around her. It is mentioned that Brishen and his brother are afraid to cross her in part because magical ability diminishes with each successive generation; maybe that could have been a major focal point or hurdle when plotting against the Queen, rather than an incidental detail that only returns later in the book. Either way, I wanted the politics to be more than just background, and for there to be much higher stakes that will be felt by more people than just Brishen and Ildiko.

Characters: Ildiko, our heroine, is a human woman who enters into an arranged marriage with a Kai prince in order to seal an alliance. I really liked that a lot of the story was centered on Ildiko learning to acclimate to Kai culture and navigate their court politics, and I think it was smart to show that her experience as a courtier in the human kingdom helped her survive the Kai one. I do wish Ildiko’s personal arc had been more about her overcoming her prejudices to appreciate a different culture; while Ildiko isn’t outright racist or resistant to adapting, I do think it would have been more emotionally satisfying if she had clearly entered the marriage with a lot of assumptions about the Kai that turned out to be untrue. If that didn’t sound appealing, maybe Ildiko’s ability to navigate court politics could have been more integral to the plot as a whole, rather than her rather passive role during the final showdown.

Brishen, our hero, was a pleasant surprise; he was kind and considerate, and he didn’t let his power-hungry parents turn him into a gruff, emotionally-unavailable husband. While I did like that he was kind, I also wish his personal arc had been more about overcoming his assumptions about humans or overcoming some other personal conflict, such as balancing his duty to his people/kingdom with his desire to escape the more toxic elements of it. In that regard, I think his romance with Ildiko could have served an interesting purpose: by teaching Ildiko about his culture, he learns to appreciate it more while also finding an escape in her. It would also be cool if he realized that duty doesn’t necessarily mean obeying the monarchs, but doing what’s best for the people.

Supporting characters were a mixed bag. Some, like Brishen’s cousin Anhuset, were interesting but didn’t seem to have a subplot of their own, while others, like Queen Secmet, seemed one-dimensional. In some ways, the one-dimensional characters ensured that most of the focus was on Brishen and Ildiko, but I would have liked a little less feasting and a little more high-stakes conflict that involved these side characters functioning in ways that developed their own arcs.

Romance: Ildiko’s and Brishen’s romance follows a friends-to-lovers arc. When the characters first meet, they instantly bond over their willingness to be honest about their feelings regarding the other’s appearance and culture. I liked that they didn’t start out as completely repulsed by one another, and the friendship bond made for a good safety net when Ildiko has to face the Kai court. I do wish, however, that there had been more explicit developments in showing how the relationship moves from friendship to romantic love. For example, I would have liked scenes where Ildiko has moments of realization regarding what a good man Brishen is, and where Brishen realizes how good a woman his wife is, both in reaction to major plot points (rather than what we get, which is stuff like Ildiko watching Brishen prepare to spar or something). Some of those moments are there in the plot as-is - I’m thinking scenes like when Ildiko learns what an honor it is to have Brishen carry a mortem light for someone beneath his class - but I think there could have been a more defined romance arc.

Worldbuilding: I really liked that Draven didn’t feel the need to overwhelm the reader with worldbuilding details, but I also think she should have done more to make the world feel more purposefully crafted. My biggest problem with Draven’s worldbuilding is that certain elements seemed to be present for no reason at all, or because they were convenient details. For example, the Kai make this very expensive dye called amaranthine, and though we’re told that humans benefit from trading for it, the amaranthine isn’t really involved in an interesting way other than for Ildiko to accidentally stain her skin with in a moment of thoughtlessness. Also, during the last big showdown, we’re randomly told that there are magefinders and a temple which shields the Kai from these magefinders. It felt like these details were inserted for convenience, and I wish more was done to make the setting feel like a character itself.

TL;DR: Radiance does a good job at subverting some expectations, but ultimately doesn’t have a plot that challenges the characters to grow, either individually or as a couple.

#book reviews

[lordeasriel]

I really care about your opinion, how do you feel about the bbc show and the way it's going?

I feel like before I give my take, I need to say that I understand the show is its own thing, and while I do wish they did a better job adapting certain things, I understand that sometimes there is a need for radical change or cut, especially when your budget is not super high (which HDM does have a lot of money into it, still is not a super big budget production, so they have to worry about these things). And I do enjoy many things about the show, but my overall vibe is mixed, to be honest. I’m stating this now because people often question whether I like the show or not, becaus I do criticise it a lot, and I simply have a critic view of the things I like, which is why I discuss them a lot and it can be overwhelming.

My main issues with the show are these 3 things: (which I’ll put under the cut because this got a bit longer than I wanted to lmao sorry)

Lack of worldbuilding and loose lore: I’ve been talking about this since day one, and this mostly applies to season 1 because I can’t judge season 2 yet because it’s not fully aired yet, but the show suffers from lack of worldbuilding, especially in Lyra’s world, which is the world that sets everything in motion. I still dislike the fact they introduced Will mid-NL, I don’t think he needed all those episodes to establish something that easily could’ve been done in S2 and because they gave TSK a lot of time, other parts of Lyra’s world suffered considerably, mainly the witches and the Magisterium.

The show doesn’t really expand on those two groups, especially, and I think that’s not good, especially the Magisterium (which they have over simplified by making it one big baddie, or so it seems at least, not to mention that implying a single leader for them practically ruins Marcel Delamare’s arc in TBOD and I’m very mad about that lmao). A lot of the Magisterium plot has that infighting aspect, which creates tension on their side as well as against their enemies, but the show doesn’t really explore that or the nuances of the Church, and they also don’t explore how varied the witches are, and I feel like this is a serious mistake. (The portrayal of the witches is by far my least favourite thing in the show, if I’m being honest).

Dull parallel world (and lack of daemons): this ties a bit with the worldbuilding aspect, but this is mainly about design choices. I think the show doesn’t make Lyra’s world as unique as it should be. On its own the world looks pretty and the outfits of most of the cast are great, but when you realise that Will’s world is intertwined with that, you don’t really feel like these two worlds are vastly different.

There is an odd situation in which Marisa’s fashion feels 30s/40s, but most of the men from her social circle (not fair to compare with the gyptians) just wear plain suits and they look much more modern. And while I get that they went for a timeless vibes, with different eras and styles, Lyra’s world feels like a caricature and it doesn’t feel believable. The colour palette is mostly the same for both worlds (even in s2, it’s hard to tell much of the difference because either the scenes are indoors or at night.) This, paired with the lack of daemons (which has been discussed many times in the fandom) kinda bums me out.

Marisa’s oversimplification: I’m mentioning Marisa, specifically, because she is the one that suffers the most due to this writing issues, but other characters like Lord Asriel, MacPhail, the general collective of the Witches, they all suffer from the writing trying to take away the nuances of them and make them flatter than in the book. Marisa is the worst because without her complexity and her flaws, she simply gets dull and boring and flavourless, and it’s kinda what has been happening in the show in my opinion. All she does is weep and she has no strength that doesn’t rely on a random fit of rage that dies out and she gets upset. There’s some great moments, like when she mimics the Monkey, but most of the time she’s just a shadow of who she is supposed to be.

The show tries really hard to make her a Scorned Mother - right from the get go, they try to makes us see how she wants Lyra, how she struggles with her “bad nature” and how that affects their relationship. There is this lingering implication that Lyra was taken from her against her wishes; they make it seem like being a mother to Lyra is her driving force, the only reason why she seeks power and influence. And that is the opposite of Book! Marisa, who is a force of nature, ruthless and ambitious, with not an ounce of maternal instinct.

She does eventually decide to help Lyra, instead of harming her, but even that action comes from a narcisistic place: Lyra is to her a possession, something that belongs to her, and that she wants to preserve. The show just handles her badly, falling into overused, boring tropes that struck far from the book version.

These are usually my main complaints about the show, and they upset me every episode to the point I’m practically ignoring them now lmao The show does a lot of good things too, making Will less of a prick, restoring Lyra’s personality from the first book into S2 Lyra (so far, please keep it that way), Mary is looking great too. They have mostly a great cast, and they did improve the daemons this season (except uh, there are far less daemons to show because of the other worlds - and the Ruta Skadi daemon change pisses me off tbh).

They do have a lot of interest in the show, but the writing (the main issue to me) feels clunky and childish, with the show toning down most of the themes that make His Dark Materials so special, especially to me (which frankly I expected them to do, but it still stings a bit). They make the Magisterium a single bad entity that feels more Authoritarian-Fascist, than a theocracy (even if they sneak in the religious symbols and rituals and garments, it’s just not a good portrayal, it’s very tame and shy); and they try to justify Marisa’s actions (especially in current interviews, there’s lots of talk about how her background will play in the show to “explain why she is the way she is”). The fact the Magisterium is portrayed as pure evil makes it looks less familiar than it should be, and therefore they don’t look scary, they seem like a caricature, a joke.

A lot of the essence of the characters get lost, and the core message of the story too, like when Iorek and the Gyptians tell Lyra she can be one of them, to support her lack of “proper family”, when that is the opposite of the books message. It doesn’t make sense for them to change that, other than maybe Jack Thorne wanted to because it makes the story feels less hopeless, but it’s why he fails to adapt these character - he doesn’t capture the essence, he tries to write these character with gaps in them.

However, the thing that annoys me the most is how they portray Asriel. It’s just... it’s bad. Really bad, which is a shame cause James is talented as fuck, but he had little time to film for season 1, and then they portrayed him very poorly. That scene when he addresses Roger in episode 7 is ridiculous, Asriel would never behave that way; there was relief in him finding Roger was there too, yes, but not to that extent and not in such a cringe way. Asriel is not deranged or irrational, he is a man on a mission, and Roger was a tool (there is no pleasure in Asriel taking his life and no excuses - it needed to be done and he did it); they just needed him to sound creepy in the show for whatever reason.

I hated how they handled the bridge scene for Asriel, Lyra and Marisa, but that’s long and complicated for me to explain here. In S2, there has been some mentions of him so far, including the implication he might have ruined Cittàgazze himself and I frankly don’t understand where did they get that idea. But the cherry on the top was Thorold telling Marisa that Asriel was gonna kill Lyra and that’s just-- that’s so dumb. That’s genuinely dumb writing, because Thorold knows Lyra followed Asriel to the mountain, and while I do believe Asriel would have killed Lyra if Roger wasn’t there, there is no way Thorold should know or consider that Asriel was gonna hurt Lyra, because Roger was there. In fact, Thorold’s interactions with Asriel in episode 8 already disprove this, so either Thorold was lying in S2 for the sake of, I don’t know, chaos or whatever, or the person who wrote this was a five-star, solid gold, fucking moron.

I’m not gonna mention the lost episode because that was no one’s fault, but the fact that they discarded an episode that all information we have on imply that it was important to set up the backstory of the angels and the city, it’s... concerning. It means they wrote something parallel that should’ve been woven into the season.

The truth is, I still watch the show on Sundays, and I still like some stuff they do (especially Mary’s stuff, so far), and despite me slandering the show per your request anon lol (cause unfortunately my honest opinion is mixed, I just don’t try to overfocus on the negative on Tumblr, I mostly talk about it on discord or private), I do think anyone who has read the books should watch the show.

For me, personally, everything I love about HDM is barely on the show - complex characters, the philosophy, the oppression by religion, the interesting world - and the vibe I get is that they’re adapting a coming-of-age love story, which is the last and - being fully honest - the least important message these books give us, but unfortunately they were set to making a family show from the start, and my expectations were high and unmatched, and a family is what we’re getting: toned down, cute, pretty visuals and soulless (heh, pun intended), philosophically speaking. I expect a certain pattern going into S3, but I always like to hold out hope that they will hire better writers (apparently Jack Thorne already wrote 4 scripts, so there you go lmao), and try to give HDM the adaptation it deserves. The truth is, if you’re a picky, canon reliant person like I am, the show might be a struggle, but if you just like the story for the teen romance, or if you don’t care about overthinking a show/book, then most people can have a good time with it.

#asks #effie watches hdm #sorry it took me a while and sorry for the gigantic critique #but i wanted to be honest about my take on the show so far #Anonymous

[sweetdreamspootypie]

Kipo season 3 finale spoilers

The story and overall ending were great

but... that ending showed disappointing trope use.

Long ramble about redemption vs atonement arcs under the cut

Overall the ending and story was great.

But since I’ve seen so much discussion of it on tumblr, I’m really aware of and disappointed in the fact that the writers went with the Christian cultural “redemption arc” narrative that in order for a bad person to be redeemed, they have to sacrifice themselves for others.

It’s the Christian narrative of “oh this person was a Truly Bad Person and there is no way to change that, so to prove that he did Truly Change he has to die to make up for his sins and then he can be dead and you’re allowed to remember him fondly because he died Pure and Redeemed.

It couples with the fact that they also did the “the bad guy was Truly Evil because we all know that people are either fundamentally Good or fundamentally Evil. And given that the bad guy is Truly Evil, the only way to tie up the story is for them to Die For Their Sins.” Except it’s a children’s show about ethics so they decided to not kill the bad guy..... just send them to living hell. Because that’s better apparently. The ethical choice for people who want to be Not As Bad as the Bad Guy.

And that’s all just disappointing because the whole show was about the fact that people aren’t black and white, either friend or foe.

The show was ABOUT putting the effort in to make connections with adversaries to bring conflict to an end. It was ABOUT the fact that it’s not black and white and you have to accept and work with the fact that everyone is in a grey area in order to move forward.

And yet they didn’t have the creativity or courage to round the story off in any way except the Christian Disney “he died to save the princess, and the evil witch fell to her death as a result of a misstep during the big fight but wasn’t killed directly by the Good Guys because that would tarnish their Purity.”

So onto my specific thoughts about Hugo.

I’m going with the definition of redemption as proving you are a fundamentally good person, usually achieved by dying for the cause, 

and atonement is proving you are working on being a better person, by being in a similar position as before, and making a better choice.

(spoiler: imo atonement arcs are better generally, and much more appropriate for the narrative of Kipo)

So with that in mind,

Hugo’s atonement moment was... well ongoing. Because trying to change your ways and live like a better person is an ongoing thing.

But on the boat, at the end, he mind-controlled whatshername, then she got knocked out before he could action it. That was him continuing to go with his old approach, yeah he was now fighting for Kipo, but he was still using his old mindset. Use fear, use force, win because you overpowered others. Then Wolf stopped him and they had their moment, and decided to do it Kipo’s way. Yeah it was Wolf and Greta’s (ah! her name was Greta. Probably.) words, but he was receptive and accepted the principle that his was of force wasn’t the right way forward. The moved forward together in parallel, both giving up the last bits of their old thinking together, and decided to go forward and act like the people they wanted to be, that Kipo showed them how to be. They had already accepted the premise of “bring people together” - they had accepted that goal, but that was the moment they accepted that they needed to change themselves.

(same as how the Atonement Moment for everyone else is when they chose to protect the Mutes from the fireworks - they showed through their actions that they genuinely believed in the project, they weren’t just putting up with co-existence because it was a necessity)

If Wolf didn’t need to die, Hugo didn’t either. There is nothing wrong with having to continue to face the hard task of working to make amends, and facing the reality that not everyone has to forgive you.

(side note - the fact that the coming together to move forward thing also centered forgiveness is also iffy. They didn’t have to forgive the losses they had suffered so recently, they just needed to accept and make peace with the losses in order to move forward. Subtly different thing. Maybe that would be too nuanced to try and cover in the cartoon but still.)

With Emelia...

I’ve said above, that the “don’t kill her, just let her fall to her doom and leave her there” is a Disney style cop out.

But I’m also not entirely against her being marked as unredeemable. She proved that she wasn’t on an atonement path either, at least in that moment - she had the opportunity to not try and kill Kipo but didn’t take it.

And there is an argument to be made that that is perfectly ok from a narrative point of view.

I remember seeing criticisms of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because that show’s core message is that is you befriend people they will get better and you can work through it and heal together when you have support, so it is good to try and support people trying to get better, even if it’s hard initially because they hurt you. That is a good message, but is incomplete as a message, because obviously sometimes if you tell kids to just make friends with their bullies, they just end up with more exposure to the bullying. And that is fair criticism (but doesn’t mean the whole show is bad).

So with Kipo, I think that’s a nice parallel to MLP:FiM - make friends, bridge divides, put aside old grievances, collaborate for a future... but sometimes the hateful agitators won’t get better, and the reality is you need to deal with them somehow and minimize the damage they can do.

I liked that they showed that Emelia’s brother grew up with the same pressures as Emelia, but given the opportunity chose not to pursue the bigoted route, whereas Emelia did chose it. It showed that it was all a choice she was making, and what influences she was making them under, as opposed to a magic “Fundamentally Evil Person Who Hates People because she’s Evil”

That was a good choice.

But yeah. Acknowledging that some people just won’t come around from their old ways is one thing.

But why

- say let’s save her from the thing she tried to do to everyone else because “we’re not like her” and “nobody deserves that”

- but then still focus on her deserving “punishment” rather than just trying to prevent her from causing further social harm. Hugo got imprisonment and the time and opportunity for reform and his crime was pretty equal to Emelia’s. Again, very Christian narrative - redemption needs death, evil needs punishment in the eternal psychological torture building.

- and then because it’s “just” the good guys leave her in the Eternal Psychological Torture building. And that is supposed to not reflect badly on them because they aren’t the ones who pushed her in? It could have been a perfectly valid choice, because there was high risk to any rescue party attempted, and when you’re rebuilding a society, you can’t afford that risk. And the fate that she fell into was just a part of the risks of the environment and accepted as a fact of life risk. But choosing not to rescue someone from torture because you literally can’t do it, and shrugging and saying it’s right that someone be tortured, even a bad person isn’t. 

In real life maybe that’s different, sometimes you do laugh when a genocidal dictator gets a poetic demise, but this was a children’s show about the ethics of conflict resolution. So, uh, they probably should have come up with something more careful to say than “yeah mostly people need to be met where they are and we all need to forgive old hurts if we want to move forward... but sometimes some people just deserve to be punished and we won’t be conflicted about that inconsistency at all”

All that said

It was a great show

I don’t mind the ending overall - because the issues I have all stick out as “trope usages because they don’t know how else to wrap it up” and thus are easy for me personally to separate from the story’s merits as a whole

#long post #kipo and the age of wonderbeasts #kipo spoilers #my posts #redemption arcs #culturally Christian #darn Jewish tumblr making me aware of these redemption vs atonement things #I love it though - I love the new window to the world

[dredshirtroberts]

Hooooo boy we are feelin some EMOTIONS today, folks.

this is not a happy post, if you’d like to skip I entirely understand, and in fact encourage doing so.

I’ve been needing to do a one of these for a lil bit because I’ve got Thoughts and Feelings and they are complicated and I can’t accurately parse them in my head so we’re gonna air it out on Tumblr like a sheet on the line during laundry day.

here’s the thing.

I got some complicated family feelings in my chest places and it fucking *sucks*.

I was kept from spending time with my family by various means over the past several years to the point where I wasn’t attending holidays - which, in my family, is just not done. You can skip a holiday but you have to make it up on another occasion and I...wasn’t doing that anymore. Two separate people had me convinced I was not loved by my family, that they did not care for or appreciate me like *they* could and that I was better off not being around my family.

And maybe they had some valid points. Which I hate admitting because they used a lot of “valid points” to get me to be completely isolated in life without anyone but them and any time I branched out I was, for lack of a better term, “punished” for having denied them my attention or time or whatever. (this is of course not as nuanced a take on it as I would prefer but this is already going to be long without me going through the whole...everything, again. You can search the captain rambles and life post tags on my blog for more on this topic).

Anyway...so I’m no longer with people who are actively trying to keep me from talking to other people/being around people who are supportive of my own efforts and goals, etc. And I was welcomed back into my family with open arms and that was...honestly unexpected. After everything I’d had told to me about how they were and how they should be and what I should feel about them...I wasn’t expecting them to love me.

I rode that rose-colored wave for a *while*. But as the world descends into chaos and I learn more things about myself that make me feel more like *me* than I have...possibly ever now that I try and think about it, I am seeing things that I had hoped had been exaggerated or made up by those in my life who had hurt me.

My parents raised me in a very right-wing conservative household. The evangelical style of christianity didn’t come until I was already an adult but the building blocks must have been there or it wouldn’t have happened so...extremely when it finally did. There were a lot of...really shitty attitudes towards other people that I didn’t recognize growing up in it - I didn’t recognize it until a lot later, in fact.

They’re...They don’t see anything wrong with the way they are. Which, you know, *sucks*. 

There’s going to be a lot of dismissive phrases littered throughout this because I’m trying to be...i don’t know. I do it as a thing to lighten the mental load on myself - dismissiveness and joking around, exaggerating for effect, etc. - which i know might come off weird but like...this is really fucking bothering me guys and I...I’m doing my best.

Cause here’s the thing. I was raised believing the world was one way and that we were *right* about things. We had the answers and anyone (liberals) who didn’t agree with us were wrong and would either see the light and come to our side or were too stupid to know how wrong they were so we wouldn’t have associated with them anyway. (reasons why i’m currently frustrated with the political opposition to Republicans/Conservatives/The Right #1 actually)

And then I grew up and I saw the world was not that way. And I expected that my family would be able to see the world with the insight I had gained, and..they just...don’t.

I’ve excused a lot of their shit beliefs recently. not like, trying to defend them to anyone or anything but I don’t confront them. Mostly because I know while they won’t say it to my face, I know how they think about people who think like me (because I was there for those conversations, I was there and I thought like them and now i don’t and that makes me one of those idiots they talked about, a stupid person who can’t see the truth they believe so fully that they think is backed up by facts and figures but their facts and figures are *flawed* - mine aren’t better but I can acknowledge that and extrapolating data from all the things and coming to a conclusion is what I was taught to do but now that I do it for the wrong side what must they think of me? What must they say behind my back?)

I have...a lot of kinda fucked up shit about my family. Nothing overt, nothing that immediately screams to me “Hey fuck-o, this shit isn’t a universal experience and something is wrong here!” but it’ll be small things that I’m like “Ah, okay. Not everyone had this experience and those that did are currently working through the *trauma* of it by going to *therapy*. Hm.”

I’ve done some work in that respect and that’s good. Doesn’t make my issues go away but makes it so I can handle them a little better. Most of the time anyway.

I’m trying to make several things that are true but contradictory work together in my brain and it’s not going well.

1) my family cares about me and wants me to do well.

2) my family has hurt me in the past and is currently hurting me (though not intentionally and not maliciously - please dear god let it be unintentional and non-malicious). 

3) My family does not “agree” with LGBTetc people.

4) My family do not believe that there are systemic issues inherent in the government we live in/under and the society we must participate in (Because it benefits them, and they have not had to challenge their thoughts on this before).

5) My family are kind of racist.

6) My family was my only support system when I was leaving an abusive situation.

7) ...My family might have abused me a little.

I go back and forth on point seven a *lot*. See point 2 about the intentionality/maliciousness factors. If they didn’t mean to do it, does it still count? 

Does it matter if it still hurts?

My sister outright told me that she doesn’t agree with trans people (meaning she doesn’t believe you can be trans, really). But I’m okay because it’s me, and now I can be her gay best friend when we’re drinking at family stuff.

She didn’t understand why I was hurt by that. I attempted to explain it and she got defensive and angry so I just...didn’t fight about it. Just played the part. I’m her brother when it benefits her but otherwise I’m still her sister. I’m still mom and dad’s daughter. Even though I told them I’m not a girl. I told them I’m a guy.

Dad’s response was the most favorable initially and I think...he might eventually come around to it (he’s always wanted a son. he has a boy dog and has also imprinted really hard on his lawn roomba about it). He also might...not.

I’d like to transition further. Eventually. If it’s feasible. But also, right now it’s not. Right now it’s me cutting my hair short and not wearing dresses or skirts (even though they’re super comfy) because I want to avoid being misgendered as often as possible. It’s binding for uncomfortable and unsafe lengths of time because I am a MAN dammit, and I will be a man at this family function in whatever way I can. And when I go to the length that I do to be seen the way I want to be seen and I am *ignored*....

fuckin’ hurts you guys. I just fuckin’ hurts. 

And I want to correct them. I want to stand up and say STOP YOU’RE HURTING ME. PLEASE. I AM NOT A GIRL. I HAVEN’T BEEN THIS WHOLE TIME I JUST DIDN’T KNOW WHY I DIDN’T FEEL RIGHT AS A GIRL. PLEASE JUST CALL ME A BOY, USE MY PRONOUNS, USE A NEW NAME OR AT LEAST THE NICKNAME THAT ISN’T MY FULL NAME. 

but i don’t.

because I’m scared of losing them again.

And it’s fucked up because they’re *already* lost. They’re Fox-watchers and Trump-supporters and they don’t want to listen to science or facts or *anything* outside of what’s presented to them by pundits and talk show hosts, and the fucking EIB network with their political propaganda for anything that isn’t what the liberals want.

And I don’t know that I can get them back because they’re *real* far down that particular rabbit hole. And I’m...I’m just trying to figure out what I want in life. What makes me happy. And part of what I want is what I always wanted and never had.

I want my mom and dad to look at me, see me, see what I do see how I try and what I love and care about and tell me that I’m enough. That they love me because this is who I am and I am enough for them. Even if I wasn’t accomplished and didn’t try they would still love me because I’m *me*. and I’m their *child* and they *love me*.

And GOD it is so FUCKING painful to know that’s not a realistic thing to hope for. Because I’ve been trying for 28 GODDAMN years doing ANYTHING and EVERYTHING I can to be enough for them. I played good, christian, conservative little girl for SO goddamn long, even when I wasn’t Christian or conservative anymore, even when I saw the cracks, I wanted to be what they wanted.

And even now that I *am* what my dad wanted (a son) I’m not enough because to him i’m still a girl, to my mom I’m the failed daughter the one she didn’t do enough for so now it’s about how she fucked up and not about NO. This is ME. Stop. Stop LOOKING at me like that WHEN YOU DON’T SEE ME. YOU SEE SOME IDEALIZED VERSION OF ME WHO WAS NEVER GOING TO EXIST BECAUSE SHE WASN’T ENOUGH EITHER.

...

This is a lot more than I thought it would be, pain wise tonight, guys. My bad. 

I’m still struggling with my eating habits, I’m still struggling with my self-worth, and finding what makes me feel fulfilled. I’m getting better at some of it though.

I’ve smiled and laughed more in the past week or so than I have since I came out to my family. I wouldn’t have done that without my very very good friends who are very very kind to me and god I wish I could do more than draw stupid pictures and write stupid stories for them but it makes them happy too? so i’ll just do what I can and maybe it’ll be alright. 

Gonna try not to fall too deep down the abandonment issues pit tonight folks. I’m already upset enough. 

Good talk.

#I was fine and then all of the sudden I was no longer fine #whoops #lol #processing trauma'll do that to a guy i guess #the captain rambles #LIFE POST #haven't tagged that in a while heh #not feelin so great tonight babes but i'll be alright eventually #i love all of you very much and if you ever feel lost or alone or are hurting (esp because of family) please know i am here for you #i don't want any of you to feel that way about it #come to my DMs send me an ask whatever you need #i love you be safe be healthy and most of all be kind

[smokeybrandreviews]

Binary

This started out as a whole thing about Brie Larson. She’s started a YouTube channel and i figured I'd follow it just for kicks. I’m not a huge fan of massive Hollywood stars invading more accessible spaces but, technically, they’re the “You” in YouTube, too. I can’t be too mad at that. Of course Google is going to cater more to their brand, mostly because they bring in the duckets and understand PR so they know ho not to cause an ADpocolypse, but it’s still mad sh*tty. Larson’s first post was just her being goofy, trying to figure out how to even be a YouTuber. You kind of see a side of her that i figured was there, but never really was able to confirm. Brie Larson is the poster child for Millennial geekdom and i find that adorable as f*ck. Which is why i don’t understand the MASSIVE waves of hate she’s getting from the community. Cats are reveling in her perceived failure, it’s actually insane.

Now, before we go any further, i just want to be clear; I am a fan of Brie Larson. I think she is excellent at her craft. Ma is from my hometown and it’s always great to see someone make it out of this cowtown. I believe she has every right to her opinions and the fact that she voices them from such a visible platform, makes her one of the most endearing and real celebrities in an industry maligned by the phony. Brie ain’t quite Russell Brand but she is very vocal about the unjust sh*t she sees and will totally let you know it. That, i think, is why she garners such vitriol. Look, I'm a black dude living in the US. If she gets on TV and says f*ck white dudes, I'm inclined to agree. But she didn’t say that. What she said was there needs to be more voices making film, different perspectives in the arts. White dudes dominate the industry and she’s tired of seeing that movie. I don’t understand how that’s a controversial statement. It’s true. We need more dynamic, more diverse, storytellers making films out in the wild. The thing is, that one statement earned her the ire of every entitled white boy with time and and the internet. These motherf*cker decided to take that personally and we were off to the races.

When Brie Larson was announced as Captain Marvel, i was okay with it. I thought Charlize Theron or Katee Sackhoff would have been a better look but i get it. Larson is young and can portray the character for years to come. Kind of how Florence Pugh is going to take over Black Widow duties from Scarlett Johansson. Pugh can be that character for close to a decade, as can Larson. Once again, however, the interwebs were set asunder with rage and malcontent over the Cap Marvel announcement. It was f*cking ridiculous to me. Sure, she didn’t look the part going into this but neither did Gal Gadot, the latter turned out to be the best thing going in that trainwreck DCEU. Larson grew into the part, put in the work to look the part, and is committed to the role. She did her research, consuming massive amounts of the comics, trying to find Carol’s head space, which was a goddamn feat. Captain Marvel is as controversial as Brie Larson, herself. And it’s just as stupid.

Look, i adore Captain Marvel. She’s my fifth favorite Marvel character after Spider-Man, Doctor Doom, Laura Kinney, and Illyana Rasputin. In that order. Captain Marvel grew on me during the whole Mighty Avengers and Disassembled story lines from years ago. I have no love-loss for Bendis but that cat did wonders for building up more obscure characters, Carol being one of them. I also like what he did for Luke Cage, too, but that’s not what this essay is about. I’ve been a fan of this character since the early 00s and have rode this Carol train for years. I jumped on bored when she was rocking her leotard, which i miss terribly, took my time to dig up the back issues where she was in the original red and blue digs and moonlighted as Warbird for a bit. Then, Marvel Now happened and f*cked it all up. Carol went from this attractive, uber-powered, mess of a woman to a cold, manly, aggressively stupid caricature of herself. The Carol Danvers i had grown to love, with all of her faults and trauma, became some sort of butch nightmare and the poster child for why Woke Marvel was failing. I don’t think that’s fair.

Comic Carol was on her way to becoming a real force in the Marvel universe. She had learned there was worth in her strength, one she had to drag out through deep introspection and an understanding of who she really is. No longer was she just a gender-swapped, copyright placeholder that no one knew what to do with. Now she had agency. Now she was a force. Now she was relevant. Now tore all of that away. After Marvel Now, all of that growth and nuance was thrown out of the window. She became the idealized version of what the SJWs thought a “Strong Woman” should be. Marvel gave her a massive push in an effort to  cater to this burgeoning Tumblr dynamic and it failed miserably. Marvel wanted that Steven Universe crowd and they tried real hard to get it but that sh*t did not work. The changes to the universe weren’t extreme or feminist or PC enough. Courting a fanbase that had no longevity, Carol was sabotaged and thrown to the wolves. That’s the environment we were saturated in when Disney announced Larson as Carol for the MCU. It was a perfect storm of Nerdrage, one that has not died down in any capacity all these years later for either Brie or Carol.

I don’t think the feminist slant given to the Captain Marvel movie was actually such a big deal. I think the vitriol that flick faces stems from the combined maliciousness both the new version of Carol in the comics and Brie Larson, herself, garnered. It’s kind of crazy the massive tantrum everyone decided to throw over this movie. Cats were looking for this thing to fail as some sort of petulant schadenfreude ignoring the fact that this movie wasn’t made for them. As frustrated as i was with the ludicrous discourse, i knew this movie wasn't for me. his wasn’t my Carol and i was good with that. Unlike Marvel who pandered to the trend of PC nonsense, the MCU had a clear vision in mind for the audience they wanted; Young girls. They wanted a character who was strong enough to hang with Thor, stand equally with Iron Man, and have the respect of Captain America. Captain Marvel was the best option. She would be the tentpole hero of the MCU going forward and i accepted that. I went into the film with that understanding and, on my way out, i saw, firsthand, what this movie meant to the target audience. There was a little girl, about nine or so, gushing abut how cool Captain Marvel was. She as ecstatic to see a girl like her, kicking so much butt. In the face of that, every entitled argument you have against the character falls apart in my eyes. Captain Marvel is to young girls and woman, as Black Panther was to us black folk. It’s the same energy.

Do i think the film could have been better? F*ck yea, i do. I think the script should have had one more revision and the directors definitely felt out of place. They’re good at their jobs, they mostly make A24-esque fare, but a massive, multi-million dollar, space epic connected to the most popular film franchise in history? Nah, these cats were way out of their depth. I think Feige dropped the ball on this one, a rare miss. I think Kathryn Bigelow, Patty Jenkins, Lynne Ramsay, Claire Dennis, or  Lorene Scafaria would have constructed a much better film, both visually and narrative wise. I think if the movie was better as a whole, a lot of the controversy and vitriol would have been neutered. Carol is written quite wooden and a little pretentious. The interactions between the supporting cast feels forced. The overall narrative is fine but definitely could have been embellished at parts. Captain Marvel is boring and i don’t know how that happened. You have one of the strongest characters in comics, with a distinct, visually appealing powerset, and you make her movie boring? Really? More than anything, though, is the absolute mistreatment of Sam Jackson and Nick Fury.

The writing reduces Nick Fury, the mind behind the entirety of the Avengers Initiative, to lap boy sidekick in an effort to up Carol’s own stature. That sh*t is poor writing and it’s mad frustrating to see. I hate narratives that have to job established characters, in an effort to push new additions. I just wrote a whole goddamn thing about that with Punchline, Joker’s new “partner”. It’s bogus, cheapening the character and opens up an avenue for bad-faith complaints. Rey Palpatine is another great example. Her entire character is built on the slow, methodical, violent, destruction of the Skywalker legacy. Interestingly enough, that character was launched in the same environment as New Carol so i understand why the movie is the way that it is. I don’t agree with it, but i know why. It was an incredibly poor choice to introduce Captain Marvel in this way, however, and she’s never recovered. Brie has never recovered. You want a 90s buddy-cop space opera? Lethal Weapon with Skrulls and starships? You need your Murtaugh and Riggs to stand on equal footing. That was not the case with this flick. Having Nick Fury job to Carol Danvers for two hours was the wrong way to go about all of this and i think a different creative team could have made something truly excellent.

It’s nuts to me that this is even a thing though. Brie’s personal controversy is so f*cking stupid, i choke every time i think about it. How are you mad she stand up for herself, her gender, and everyone else in a position of persecution? Don’t you want though with a platform speaking up about the inequities of our country? I feel like the same people who hate Brie for her vocal advocacy, are the same people who stan “All Lives Matter” when ever someone says Black Lives Matter. That sh*t feels like the same energy to me. I feel like the criticisms launched at comic Carol have real validity, even if most of them are just whiny man-children who miss the leotard. I miss the leotard, too, but come on? We’re passed that now. I do think, when written well, Carol can be a force in the books. Her run as part of the new Ultimates was pretty chill I think she needs that in order to be her true self, until we establish a true self for the character. It’s weird to say but Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel previously, has been around for fifty years, and no one has any idea who she is as a character. I think Captain Marvel in the MCU, both the character and film, are hated for the wrong reasons. The fact that no one has any idea who this character is, makes for a lousy cinematic experience. The team put together in an effort to flesh this character out, didn’t have the creative capacity to do so and we were left with little more than PC tropes and Feminist agenda. The MCU let both Brie and Carol down in that regard.

Brie Larson isn’t a terrible person and she deserves more respect put on her name. She an accomplished actress with a bevy of awards and accolades to her name. She’s been in great films like Room and Scott Pilgrim, never once garnering a controversy. The fact that she speaks her truth, a truth the establishment doesn’t want to hear, should not disqualify her talent or the fact that she seems like a really chill person. Carol Danvers is a dope ass character with an amazing amount of potential. When she’s written well and not traded upon for trends, she can have real staying power. Her abilities open up a plethora of interesting, creatively fertile narratives yet to be written. Disregarding her just because Marvel decided to gamble on the pretentious third-wave feminism wave is shortsighted and makes you look like a childish brat. You’re entitled to feel however you want but let’s be clear; Brie Larson and Carol Danvers deserve so much better.

#Captain Marvel #Carol Danvers #Brie Larson #Marvel

[quidfree]

Hi! Thinking of Dumbledore + Sirius, do you think Sirius would feel sympathy for Dumbledore if he knew about how torn he was btw his siblings + feeling trapped? I judged him harshly at first, but now I think about the difficulty about losing both parents + sibling, but not wanting to sacrifice everything to step in as parent + guilt that comes with that. I do think Dumbledore loved his siblings + I was happy when his bro said he did a good job with their sis before her death.

hi! this is an interesting one hm

the thing abt dumbledore is that i’m pretty sympathetic to him all things considered- i’ve never really taken the time to explain my feelings about him on here but i definitely don’t think he’s snape levels of “fandom should see he’s irredeemably terrible!”, though i have a lot of qualms about him. he’s certainly not the hero rowling thinks he is, but he’s also not the guy rita skeeter says he is, to put it succintly.

on the one hand, i do think canon mostly fails to acknowledge that he was very manipulative/calculating and made a lot of very cold (or just plain terrible) choices- everything to do with sirius, for one, as well as the whole dursley situation. i know there’s a couple of reasons harry had to live with them (supposedly...) and i can’t be bothered to go into them, but even then i never understood why he couldn’t have done to petunia what he does in OOTP (?) sooner- send a letter to scare the shit out of her and remind her to treat harry decently or at least leave him to his own devices. like, there was so much he could have done in the years between the potters’ deaths and hogwarts- that squib neighbour was already spying/reporting for him, so he was fully aware of it all, idk. i just find that whole thing exemplary of his callousness. it’s more unforgivable to me than raising harry knowing he might need to die for the cause- because that was necessary to defeat voldemort, but giving harry an escape from abuse was so avoidable. his handling of other characters also doesn’t paint him in the best light, sirius as most obvious suspect- there’s a good piece on tumblr about sirius being a liability in his eyes because he’s not loyal to dumbledore or his cause above all else, but to the potters (and ultimately harry) and his own code, and i really think it’s the best reading of dumbledore’s handling of sirius in OOTP, because i always found that kind of insane. it’s brain-dead obvious that the worst thing to do with sirius (especially if you were worried about his unhinged state and whatnot) would be sticking him in grimmauld place- even if they had to keep him hidden, they could have let him floo between order hideouts! see other people! prowl london as a dog! it’s insane that dumbledore of all people would be that dumb about it, so it makes the most sense to me as him locking sirius up where he’s the most contained.

on the other hand, dumbledore was both a quirky schoolmaster and a wartime militia leader, and i think a lot of the weirdness in his character is bc rowling set out to write a much more child-like series than she ended up writing. dumbledore is a pretty iconic guy in the books, manipulations included- he’s such a chessmaster, and he has flair, as kingsley would put it. most importantly he clearly tries very hard to orchestrate the best possible outcome for the entire world- not based on arbitrary beliefs or personal whims, but because he’s sort of the main bastion of hope in the wizarding world. i don’t necessarily think his actions in this context are all excusable, but he’s a war-time leader, and pretty much knows it’s all down to him- although the order is certainly competent, it’s a very ragtag group of people dumbledore holds together, and in terms of skill, knowledge and aura he’s their biggest asset. he’s already been through a wizarding war where he probably set out to murder the love of his life, another wizard supremacist wackjob! we know he’s long past egoism- he’s genuinely For The Greater Good, and he clearly cares about harry; his choices are undoubtedly not made lightly. it’s also important to note just how bad wizarding society as a whole is on these issues- even the most muggle-friendly wizards are remarkably ignorant about them (arthur weasley), and everyone else is at least marginally bigoted; bigotry is built into the fabric of their society, and their government is extemely complacent/corrupt, so the order and their ilk are very much on their own, while people like the malfoys are tolerated despite the open secret of their wartime alliances. dumbledore has a tough job, and he doesn’t know all the things the reader knows. so i think the op-eds calling him Just As Bad As Voldemort or whatever are missing any nuance.

then we get into dumbledore’s backstory. it explains a lot about him, i think. it’s interesting to me that he’s so consistent as a character- he has always been about The Greater Good, and he’s always had an ego, but as a child he let the latter dictate the former and as an adult he forever attempted to substract it from himself lest he repeat the same mistakes. some more questionable rep from ms rowling in having her (1) gay character be the guy literally seduced into wizard supremacy by his evil boyfriend, but i always liked that beat of a very isolated extremely intelligent character drawn into a warped sense of righteousness- it’s also very consistent of dumbledore to believe he’s doing the best for someone when he’s not really thinking about that at all, which is the case with his sister. obviously his family’s story is tragic, and then he gets pulled into this fake vision of a better world, validated in his brilliance, and then there’s his mother’s death, and then his sister, and suddenly it’s all come crashing down and he spends the next years of his life slowly realizing he’s the only one who can stop a project he might have been overseeing once. aberforth lays into him for it, and fair enough, but jesus, what a shitty spot to be in fresh out of hogwarts. i don’t know if it’s because i’m an older sibling, but i can understand the horrible burden of knowing that it’s always on you to think of yourself second, even when you’re inches away from the best thing in your life.

getting sidetracked- the question was about sirius and dumbledore. the thing abt LMV is that i try to keep my own opinions out of it; the marauders-dumbledore dynamic is a difficult one. they all respect him endlessly, and in school i think they adored him, but as a wartime leader it gets complicated. i think in canon their relationship was better, just a little strained (and a little more for others) bc of his style of leadership- you know, keeping secrets, playing games etc. in LMV, though, his machinations got them personally into some shit, so i wagered things would be more terse. james i think thinks most positively of him, as he is wont to do so, except where he is somehow at odds with sirius, because his loyalties there are clear and he is far more violently protective of sirius than he lets on. lily is a close second, because she’s a big picture thinker and gets how hard his job is, but she tends to be wary of his reasoning. remus is a more distrustful person by nature, and dumbledore using him for werewolf stuff wears him down. sirius is not a fan of authority, does not like secrets, and hates people using him as a pawn, so things are most strained for him, obviously. i think a lot of dumbledore introspection in LMV is from sirius’ POV, somewhat accidentally, so he gets a harsh rep.

to finally get to the specifics of your question: would dumbledore’s backstory get sirius to sympathise? arguably not much. sirius is a tricky guy, esp because i write him in a period that we know nothing about. he’s not a cocky slightly feral 15 year old, and he’s not a traumatised 30 something prison escapee; i try to get a plausible balance, so i don’t lend sirius in LMV so much of OOTP sirius’ world-weary wisdom. he’s 21, and in a war where the other side are wizard nazis he’s mostly related to somehow; he sees things in blacks and whites almost necessarily. so either you’re good or bad, trustworthy or not. peter crossed the threshold, so he’s dead to him; regulus turned himself in, but he’s one of them, so sirius doesn’t know what to do with him. sirius might understand how hard it is to have younger siblings you love fiercely who don’t understand your commitment to a higher goal, but dumbledore was on the wrong side of things that time, so i don’t think he would draw any sympathetic parallels- i don’t see why he of all people would feel bad for where dumbledore’s youthful aspirations of wizarding supremacy lead him, despite his good intentions. he’s not very forgiving of bigotry, i think especially because he’s cut all ties with his own background so harshly.

tldr; i feel for the guy, and his life was fucked, but sirius probably would not, and dumbledore got enough unwarranted hero worship considering his dodgy actions that i don’t resent sirius for holding that grudge.

#qui repond #lmv #sirius #dumbledore #meta #hp #so loong

[whetstonefires]

asdfghjkl; I probably missed something so i'm sorry if this sounds dumb, but in your clone verse, why are the clones so afraid of meeting Damian, more than Batman? like is it just the whole "might try to kill us" thing like Damian's afraid of, or more of an existential crisis?

A (probably different) Anonymous said:

I may have missed something but in your Clone Damian's au, why are the clone so afraid of meeting Damian?            

In reference to this and this and this.

Sorry guys! Unless you’re one person who submitted twice assuming Tumblr ate the first one. In which case two people’s worth of sorry for just you. ;D

Thank you for the question. Took a while to answer. This is a really complex one and my computer keeps freezing or remotely updating when I’m about halfway through composing an explanation, so I have to start over. I’m backing up this one ffs.

So...first of all, you haven’t missed anything. It hasn’t been explained. I just said there were a lot of reasons and they unavoidably have a complicated one-sided relationship.

It’s mostly for emotional reasons that they’re focused on Damian. They have logical ones for wanting to plan their approach carefully if they have the option, and they are somewhat leery of him in terms of personal direct violence, but their kneejerk aversion to the point of steering away from a potential safe harbor/backup because they’re trying to put off a difficult confrontation is all interpersonal anxiety.

Nuhum (9) and Chihaarum (4) were banking on fleeing to Batman’s doorstep in high distress to get them in the door, because Talia liked to call Bruce sentimental and they figured even weirdo clone children can play on that, if they’re running from assassins. (Haftum thought this was a dumb idea. The others’ opinions of it varied.) But once they’d linked up with Tim, even those two admitted that the gain of having strategy help from someone who actually knew the parties involved was a better bet than ‘looking pathetic and hoping.’

As far as wanting to avoid Damian particularly...they’re his spares. One of their functions in existing at all has always been in case he needed emergency organ transplants.

In canon Talia replaced a bunch of his squishy organs and his spine on separate occasions before we found out she’d gotten into cloning him; it’s comic book medicine so the speedy recovery/lack of need for anti-rejection treatment doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but in context the meaning seems pretty clear.

There was more than one clone made, and at least one had been taken to pieces before Damian knew there were any at all.

The septuplets have an exaggerated expectation of Damian’s influence with Batman, but also he’s just been this figure in their lives as long as they can remember. He looms.

They ran because Talia had finally started coming to terms with his defection enough to start talking about selecting one of them to train up as a new heir/possibly his destined nemesis on her bad days; one of her hesitations was over whether defeating the other copies would actually prove the survivor was good enough to put up against the Real One(tm).

They know how he was brought up; they know almost nothing about Batman or why Damian chose to stay with him, and they’re cynical enough about Ra’s managerial approach to think it wouldn’t take much to make for a better offer than remaining an Heir of the House of al Ghul. So no, they don’t know he won’t try to kill them to assert his existence and/or supremacy, and they know he’s far more dangerous than they are, one for one.

This ‘verse assumes the League of Deadly Assassins is, primarily, a cult, and that like most cults a lot of the energy applied internally goes to making sure the members are primarily dependent on the organization, its norms, and its leader, for emotional validation etc. Damian and his clones all need support to deprogram, especially since they don’t have any pre-cult sense of reality to go back to; they however as mentioned in an earlier ask have very different needs, because Damian didn’t have brothers.

The cloneboys’ indoctrination went badly in large part because of their unclear status within the League. They got a blend of the lessons and ideology intended for the elites and that meant for the disposable foot soldiers, and the inconsistencies there, combined with having one another for support and reality checks (because a tendency to not see them as separate individuals meant a certain sloppiness about keeping them emotionally isolated from one another) allowed them a more realistic view of the League than Damian had even a few years older than they are. But they are still little kids, and it’s all they’ve known.

So Damian is just...an enormous figure for them. It’s like...idk...if Luke had known Anakin Skywalker was still alive and had gone bad, except Obi-Wan was 500% more a dick, and talked about Anakin around him constantly and sometimes called him by Anakin’s name by mistake. Probably it was a mistake. Who knows.

Except with somehow massively more identity issues involved, and Batman in place of the Emperor, leading to much more nuanced conversations because Bruce is just a more complex figure than Darth Sidious, especially from the respective perspectives of Talia and Obi-Wan.

And if Darth Maul kept popping in and out and annoying Obi-Wan by distracting, er, I guess Owen Lars, who is now Ra’s al Ghul, what have I done.

(Maul is Tim. Analogy-Luke has never seen Maul, but he has been complained to about him. Talia doesn’t actually have nearly Obi-Wan’s Maul issues with Tim. Should he be Dooku? Somehow not dead? And then...Dick is represented by Maul I guess? And...Jason is Ventress??? This has gotten way too complicated. In irrelevant directions. Please ignore this entire parenthetical.)

Also Leia is there. Leia represents Haftum. He gets a whole Skywalker twin to himself because he’s just so consistently pissed off.

Regardless of how badly I tormented it, I think that analogy did a much better job than any of the essays I previously attempted to convey their perspective with, so I’m letting it stand.

Except of course Damian isn’t their father, but they don’t know if he’d be willing to see them as brothers either, and they’re not all sure they want him to.

Meeting Damian is just a really alarming prospect for a lot of reasons, and they’d rather a) have time to plot how it goes and b) give as little impression of weakness to him as they can. So they would really rather not have him come to their rescue just now, if at all avoidable. Tim offered them options.

Although in reality saving them would probably have helped to put them in 13-year-old Damian’s relative good books, because one of the more heroic aspects of his character s a proprietary sort of protectiveness over small creatures he has chosen to defend. But they have no way of knowing that.

#the damian clones #prompt 5 #cloning #damian wayne #talia al ghul #questionable use of #star wars #cloning ethics #cloning blues #the heir and the spares #batman #my fic #writing #hoc est meum #a nonny mouse #ask

[battlestar-royco]

im not a GOT blog, but i follow a lot of got blogs that are D(any)-oriented, because she's admittedly my favorite character since s1 (cant speak for the books). and i love her because she has problems, not despite them, and i love the weaknesses and strengths shes had thru her arc. i think we have to remember that the D fandom is a LARGE group of people, with vocal bad seeds and good seeds. I've seen San/sa stans be entirely nasty. I've seen D stans be open and critical and mindful. (1/2)

one group in the fanbase doesnt reflect them all. maybe ive had a better experience, since I’ve been following kind and analytical/critical dany fans for a while now. but through it I’ve also seen how often D fans get lumped together. Very few people think D is perfect, and its because of her triumphs and downfalls that she is appreciated. The Sa/nsa and D rivalry was fueled by the show, and I think avid stans from either side are the root of the rivalry. But outside of that, Sa/nsa is loved too

There are definitely bad eggs in every fandom, which is why I don’t follow any Sansa blogs or go through her tags much either. (I mostly just rb what’s on my feed or answer asks about her.) I find the entire Sansa vs Danielle discourse counterproductive and boring tbh, but many book and show fans (and certainly the show writers) have hated Sansa since before the Sansa/Danielle rivalry was even a thing, in a fierce way I have never seen targeted at Danielle. The average ASOIAF/GOT fan is often either enamored of or indifferent toward Danielle, while the average fan is either indifferent or hateful toward Sansa. The only place I’ve seen where Sansa really has a strong fanbase is Tumblr, but Danielle is one of the top three favorites in all the fandom (the other two being Jon and T/yrion). Everywhere else–Reddit, Youtube, etc–that basic empathy for Sansa is simply nonexistent. I often find the reason for that dislike is because she didn’t report on Joffrey when Nymeria bit him, she wrote a letter to Cat and Robb while she was an 11 y/o political hostage under duress, she wasn’t affectionate to Tyrion as a child bride, she doesn’t fight like Arya etc. The reasons people dislike Danielle is because she exercised military force to take over cultures that were not her own, and (on the show) abandons those cultures in political turmoil, and she burns people who disagree with her. Does she get unreasonable misogynistic hate because she is a woman? Absolutely. Do I think anyone’s entitled to like Danielle in spite of all her flaws? Absolutely. But I also think the Sansa hate is unfair.

Also, part of my relationship with Danielle and Sansa is and has always been independent of the fandom. Of course every character in ASOIAF/GOT has done sketchy things, but imperialism and white saviorism, especially to the degree they appear in her storyline, are things that I will never be comfortable with, and I’ve encountered several Danielle stans who say she’s not an imperialist or that the racism in her storyline doesn’t matter because she’s a feminist hero. That’s the problem I have with her story: that she’s portrayed in such a way that people can and will excuse the way she treats POC. (This is also why I can’t get behind T/yrion. People love to brush over the way he treats women and especially Sansa.) The stereotypical writing for Essosi cultures and settings also turns me off even further from her storyline as a whole. I do find some parts of her character empathetic (like how she is an abuse survivor), but I’m a lot more like Sansa than I am Danielle. For all these reasons I am much more inclined to like and defend Sansa. Danielle does get a lot of hate, but the show’s narrative doesn’t completely belittle and betray her at every single opportunity like it has done to Sansa since season 1. In fact, they’ve been simplifying Danielle’s storyline to make her succeed more and dumbing down, erasing, and enacting violence upon Sansa. In my fandom experience, Sansa needs someone in her court more than Danielle does, so that’s where I stand. I understand of course that there are toxic stans of both Danielle and Sansa, but the whole situation is nuanced, and a lot of contention has been created between the fandoms due to the show’s terrible writing.

#sansa stark #i honestly don't hate dinosaurs; i just feel like anyone who likes sansa rn gets grouped into people who hate her #i fluctuate between mild interest; indifference; and the negative side of neutral #but i'd still rather read her pov than almost any male character besides like jaime and jon

[mysticsparklewings]

Lady Bugs

More watercolor experimentation!   I was semi-inspired by this canvas print I saw at Belk: www.belk.com/p/lightning-bug-l… And also just wanting to play around with my three various watercolor supplies (Viviva Watercolor sheets, Arteza Woodless Watercolor Pencils, and Jane Davenport Mermaid Markers) some more. I was also channeling my childhood when us girls at recess in the spring would always catch ladybugs--and at least twice I happened to be the one smart enough to bring a small wooden box with a screen in the top to put them in for a couple of days.  Unfortunately for me, I didn't have very good friends back then, so I ended up with a few ladybugs down my shirt and to this day do not like ladybugs touching me and minorly freakout if I find one in the house (or elsewhere that it shouldn't be). But I do still find them pretty to look at. So I sketched out the jar first, then the hands, and then transferred the sketch to watercolor paper. And I used my black Copic Multiliners in a .3 and .5 tip because the ink is waterproof, but I'm finding I really want a set of water-proof pens in other colors. (Though from what research I've done they're either hecka expensive or nonexistent). I then laid down a bit of a base with the Arteza Woodless Watercolor pencils on the hands, ladybugs, and certain areas of the jar. Then I went back mostly with the Mermaid Markers and topped some area off with the deeper colors from the Viviva Watercolor sheets, mostly the skin and the longer/evergreen leaves, and a little on the ladybugs. Along the way, I used the water brush to help with blending and lightening when I needed it. (Which was more than I care to admit). I was doing good until I really overworked the paper around the palm-area on the hands... And at first when I tried to fix I just kept making it worse.  It looked like this poor person hand fallen and really skinned their hands or something.  Naturally, after I re-evaluated my entire life and realized the hard truth that at that point I had put too much work into the thing to just trash it, I started trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't just leave it, and there wasn't a lot I could do to continue to doctor it that would've actually helped. "So I'll cover it, I guess." Well, that happened to be the worst possible spot to try and fix a mistake that way, because there wasn't a lot I could do to cover the overworked paper without it looking very awkward or potentially covering up the little ladybug there at the bottom of the jar.   "Great. Now what do I do?" Fortunately, when I did my Lore Olympus fan art, I had started to do the line art in colored pencil on a piece of watercolor paper when I changed my mind and decided I wanted to use my Dr. Ph Martin ink instead. I felt bad about essentially wasting that piece of paper at the time, but I figured I could come back and use it for something else later. And whaddya know!  I got the idea to just re-draw the front portion of the hands (so the palms and thumbs) and cut them out to just place over the original. Unfortunately, the shading didn't turn out quite as nice the second time around (it's a bit pink for my taste), but I got it to this point before cutting the hands out (because I figured the paper would warp less if I painted them first and then cut them out, rather than the other way around) and decided I best stop before I ended up overworking the paper a second time. Additionally, originally I had blended the bottom of the hands out into the background, but once I concluded this was what I needed to do I had to extend the wrists down to make a clean cover-up. And I avoided trying to add any "blue" toning to the palms this time (as a cast from the jar) since that was what led to my major problem in the first place. At the very least, the hand on the right does look a bit more nuanced as a result, as part of the knuckles you can kind of see is actually a bit of the original thumb peaking out. I was going to completely cover it, but when I was placing it I noticed it fit a bit better everywhere else if I did it this way, and it did look like it was a knuckle/part of the hand that was supposed to be there, so I went with it. Other than that, the only problem I really had with coloring/painting was just trying to get the right color tones on the leaves. I wanted a few leaves in more of a neutral green, some a little more yellow, and some a more blueish-evergreen. I didn't get quite as much variation as I wanted, but I still think it worked out okay. I actually thought the ladybugs themselves were going to be a giant pain, but they were actually arguably the easiest the color in and shade. Go figure.  Even the one at the top of the page, in the lettering, that I added after the fact. (Also the one at the top of the jar is supposed to be on the outside--I'm not sure I conveyed it properly ) I had decided semi-early on I wanted something above the jar when all was said and done, and that only increased after my mistake that left me with more at the bottom than I originally had. It just felt particularly empty. After toying with the idea for a while and not having a better one, I settled on writing "Lady Bugs" in hand-lettering above the jar. Total, I've probably spent about two hours practicing hand-lettering so that I could actually do that, I still ended up using a pencil and lightbox to make sure I got it right.  Hand lettering is a lot harder than it looks, folks! Then it still felt like it was missing something, and eventually, I decided we needed one more ladybug. I was going to do another just sitting, but then I thought having one flying would be a little different and maybe make more sense (as there's no lid on the jar so it kind of looks like it flew out). To be fair, it's not technically correct because it's actual wings should be much visible/exposed, but I didn't want to take it too far and mess it up (as I'd had enough accidents with this piece for one day), so we're going to pretend it either just took off or it's just got weird wings or something. And I didn't plan on the bit of red blur, but one side got a bit excited, so I decided to roll with it and make it look intentional. And it's actually kind of pretty, I think. Last thing; I added the shine to the ladybugs with my white gel pen, and I went back over a few areas of line art to make them a true black (as the watercolor muted them a bit in some places), but some I left alone, like the fingers on the backside of the jar, as I thought it looked more believable that way. Overall, though I had my struggles with it, I thought it turned out pretty nicely. I might do a sequel piece to this one that looks closer to the original (at night, with fireflies, etc.) as I like the idea of doing like "childhood bug-catching traditions: day and night," you know? And then I could do a third piece with both of them on appropriate sky backgrounds. Maybe. We'll see. Depends on how much of a hole I dig myself in with my schoolwork. ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[daemon-knight]

Well folks, it’s time for me to once again shake off all the conflicting feelings and nagging thoughts I’ve had about Tumblr RPing and the general community. Yup, another semi-off-the-cuff Rambling. And I’m using the tiny text this time, so you know it’s big. 

I… honestly don’t feel comfortable calling it off-the-cuff given how many times I’ve edited and organized this, but it breaks my usual rules of a Rambling due to how blunt it is, so… here we are. I want to say this will be the last time I make an off-the-cuff post like this, but I also know I’m going to be doing posts like this for as long as I continue to RP, especially on Tumblr. My gripes will never cease, and I always have something to whine about.

But with that all said…

Nitpicks that Bug Allen

I’m going to just knock out the smaller issues I have with the RPC now before I really start rant and rave about the issues I want to get to. For those who have been following me long enough to know about my ramblings and gripes these are probably issues you’ve heard me talk about once or twice… or thrice. In any case here are the short ones, or at least the ones I can summarize in a sentence or two:

People still have very long bios and rules pages and it needs to stop. I’ve talked about these five times and I the fact I’m bring it up again  just makes me mad.

Speaking of continuing issues, passwords are still a thing too. Get rid of them. You wouldn’t need them if your rules page was short to begin with.

Also gonna’ say this again, but musing and aesthetic posts do nothing to show your character’s personality, traits, or themes, you’re writing does.

I’m starting to see blogs with half-finished or non-existent about pages promoting   �� themselves. No. Stop that. Finish the blog or drop it, don’t do it halfway and expect to be rewarded.

Probably gonna’ be its own section in this giant Rambling but stop trying to world-build outside of your character. That’s annoying and it makes more work for your partners that’ll be a wasted effort if you yourself only     adhere to it when it works for you.

Dash Commentary. It’s either funny or it’s metagaming. If you aren’t making a comment about something happening to be funny, then don’t post it, that gets very annoying in more plotted storylines.

Pretty sure judolette/Lita covered this at some point, but canon blogs depending on wiki links for bios… no.

Power Levels are still a thing that piss me off, but I’ll go into this later, for now just watch this, this, and this to get an idea of what power levels mean in terms of writing. The short version is that you don’t have the luxury of a universal power scale on     Tumblr, so you have to actually show strength instead of imply it.

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Well, I just said the P-word, so I guess I’ll just get to meat of it now…

Power Levels and Fight RPs

Apparently, I can’t talk about this without going on a rant, so here we are. Okay, quick question for anyone that’s been following and reading Claudia’s stuff for a while.

How strong do you think Claudia is?

Take a moment to think about that. On a scale of one to ten, where do you think Claudia stands? Feel free to message me the answer if you want. If you want some context she’s canonically fought a dragon, a ninja, an alien mercenary, a monster hunter, a vampire-hunting vampire, and so on.

Okay, have your answer? Good.

You’re wrong. Claudia is as strong or weak as she needs to be for the plot to have stakes. Her strength in terms of value is irrelevant so long as its believable.

Claudia is strong enough to match her super alien girlfriend, but weak enough to be hard countered by the four-foot inquisitor. Strong enough that she can face off against the six-foot dragon gatekeeper barehanded, but weak enough for the creepy space witch from space to scare her despite her brave face. Strong enough to 1v1 an actual dragon, but weak enough to get overpowered by her little sisters.

You get the point?

Is it clicking?

I’m not even talk about things that happened off screen, Claudia has fought against all these threats and people in canon. When it comes to fight RPs my logic on if an attack hits or misses is simply what reaction creates the best reply. This is why Claudia consistently gets wrecked by Nero but is having an epic kung fu battle with Meiling, it’s interesting and cool. It’s why Temma and Claudia’s sparring matches are low-key and simple while Syn’s fights are bombastic and having them throw each other through buildings like a DBZ fight.

Again, is it clicking? This is basically how a lot of pro-wrestling works. 

Granted, I’ll admit I don’t plot a lot of the RP fights on this site because I see Tumblr RPing as a lot more free-formed than in the forums where nearly everything is a plot line to an extent. This place tends to have a lot of on-and-off RPs that can go quiet and dead for weeks and months before getting started again. That… makes me hesitant to plot anything that isn’t silly or nonsensical because the chances of it truly playing a role in a plotline can get wrecked the moment someone goes dark for a month.

But speaking of Tumblr RPing...

How Allen Views RPing

I think this is the main thing that gets my goat for a lot of the things that go on with the RPC here on Tumblr. To me, role-playing is just that, playing a role. The main idea behind it being to make a character and write them in whatever wacky adventures you and your partners can think up while keeping some thread of continuity and stakes. To that end the biggest thing I like to see as a writer in this type of medium is convincing and interesting characters that would mesh well with the characters I’ve written, be it their personality, background, mannerisms, writing style of the writer, etc.. 

Or you’re a shipping/smut blog that just wants to kiss and bang. No judgement either way that’s just not what I’m into, at least not on Tumblr.

But back to my point, this type of writing is very character driven. It depends a lot on making an interesting character in background, premise, personality, and actions, as well as showing those things through the writing. 

I know I make it sound complex, but for me, if I find a character that can punch Claudia in the face and will, in fact, do so if challenged then that’s enough to at least get me interested in a plot of some kind. Granted, there are some nuances for that, but I’m a pretty simple guy at the end of the day.

You see my point, right? A lot of RPing revolves around the character and making them feel real, or at least probable. This is a part of story writing too, but it’s not the only thing to worry about when writing a story, and it doesn’t have to be the focus unlike RPing.

This also plays into why I don’t partake in nor appreciate things like musings or aesthetic posts. Those don’t sell people on the character, what you write sells people on the character. Pictures, quotes, and other aesthetics do little to show how your character behaves and acts, they’re a shortcut to skip out on writing a character, and I refuse to partake in it.

Essentially, it’s a lot telling and not much showing, and that pisses me off.

I know I sound like a bit of a hypocrite since I occasionally post my drawings of Clauds and her musings, but in my defense most of my posts involve actual writing and her musings are writing in character to her specifically.

And on that note...

Allen’s Views on Canon Blogs

A lot of what I said about writing your character and show their personality and traits through said righting mostly applied to OC blogs and OCs. I won’t go into the nitty-gritty of character writing, but the basics are to just write a character, a premise/goal for that character, and keep the personality and behavior consistent with what you’ve previously established.

Canon characters are a different story.

Well, not completely. I see canon blogs in a similar way, but under much more scrutiny. With an OC you just need to make sure your character is within the grounds of what you’ve written in their profile. So long as it’s probable it’s not OOC or cheating.

Canon characters don’t get that much leeway.

The same principle of selling your character applies, but now with a character that already has an established background, personality, and expectations by fans of the series. This is the reason I think a lot of canon blogs in the RPC get into drama. The fact that these characters already have established backgrounds and expectations can cause a lot of people to get in a fit when those expectations aren’t met. When someone veers off too much from established canon without good reason it breaks the emersion and people get annoyed by that. This is also why when I use to be involved in Canon blogs I usually went with side characters or main characters from very small/unnoticed properties.

Like I said, the idea of selling the character still applies, but that also means the musing and aesthetic postings I mentioned before annoy me even more for canon blogs. The fact that there’s already a lot that we know about these characters to begin with means there’s no real reason to try and cheat by using musings or aesthetic post to get an idea of the character, we already know them or there’s a wiki page that explains them. Or your profile did what it was supposed to and gave us a basic idea of what the character is about. The only case I would see for a reason to cheat would be if your character was diverting from canon in an extreme way.

Which is a nice segue to…

Canon Divergent Blogs

I see two main types of Divergent blogs.

The first type are the blogs that pop up because a character was killed off in canon or put in some state of incapacity like a coma or warped to another dimension, or… just written out of the media for some reason. In this case I think a divergent blog is fine. There might be some narrative issues that would lead to certain characters not evolving or developing because of the sacrifices made or the attempts at realism within the story might ring hallow, but that’s overall harmless in the grander scheme of things and there are some writing tricks to make a fake-out death just as meaningful as a real one. 

However... the second type has me worried. 

The second type is usually some variation of “this character was written poorly by my standards and I’m rewriting them to what they should properly be.” As someone writing their own story and has attempted to write several stories in the past, I’ll tell you straight up that story writing is hard as hell and RPing is a cakewalk by comparison. Making a story from scratch with consist and entertaining characters that have unique character designs and personalities is probably one of the hardest things to do. And that’s just writing, I can’t even imagine the trials animators and professional comic/manga artists go through in order to do the same for all the work it takes to have a series, let alone a successful one.

This stuff isn’t easy, though I do understand the mindset. If character X got shafted and you want to give them a better shake, fine. But… be wary when you assume the version of the character you’re writing is the better one or what was supposed to be, especially for children’s media/anime. Just… remember that you’re writing for a character that was probably made for kids and not an older adolescence crowd, no matter how dark or deep the writing got. When a canon character deviates so far from the original Canon can you really say they’re the same person?

That said, as an OC blog that doesn’t follow a particular canon universe, I myself have no real stake if Sasuke Uchiha from Naruto starts acting like a happy-go-lucky ditz, or if Jin Kisaragi from Blazblue actually starts to visibly care about people other than Ragna and Tsubaki. Claudia has nothing to do with character, so what they do and her reactions to their interactions is... eh, negligent at best in the grand scheme of things.

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I… don’t have a good segue to this next topic, so…

Shipping

A bit random, but I wanna’ get my opinions on shipping out the way while I’m here. This is something I’ve never really understood, neither in RPing nor in fandom. 

From a writer’s perspective, a romantic subplot is tricky because it an easily become the focus and create a huge genre shift that will annoy your main demographic. As such, when two characters get together it’s usually at the end of a story and end it there, because writing a continuous relationship with ups and downs can be difficult when you’re an action series about explosions and punching people. However, the general rules of writing a relationship is usually to keep the character... well, in character. I’ve talked about this before as well, but Claudia dating Syn doesn’t change a lot about their personalities, or at least Claudia’s. She’s still a tomboyish girl that likes fighting, she still picks fights with essentially everyone, she still... acts like Claudia. The only addition is that she’ll occasionally mention she has a girlfriend, and even then she’ll admit that their relationship isn’t the greatest. Syn is always on missions or jobs off planet that just leave Claudia to hang out with her robot maids. Syn is noticeably stronger than Claudia and that ruffles her pride a bit. Syn does a lot of dirty jobs that could harm Claudia’s reputation further if political enemies learned about Claudia’s relationship with her. Hell, Syn is substantially older than Claudia by hundreds of years and that age gap itself creates issues of perspective. This is just a series of things to touch and write about.

Ah, but I was talking about how this played into RPing. 

Again, from a writer’s perspective my main question is does the ship make some form of sense and will the ship create a genre shift that turns what I was originally watching/reading into some romantic series. If the pairing can make sense and the tone/genre remain steady, then I see no issue with it. In terms of RPing, so long as the ship doesn’t lead to you never replying to other RPs and keeping your character consistent with your original premise then I see no issue with it.

So I’ll never understand why people get so riled up about this. Folks need to realize that these are fictional characters that aren’t real. Who they date won’t affect you, and unless it cripples the writing, I don’t think it needs complaint. But then again, romance is my weakest point as a writer next to smut, so… who knows, maybe I’m off base with this one.

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I… also don’t have a good segue for this one either, so let’s talk about…

Multi Muse Blogs

To every multi-muse blog following me right now. I want you to do me a favor and pick out your top five characters, the top five that you always like writing for and playing as. You got them figured out?

Okay, delete everyone else from your blog.

Take it from a guy that ran a Multi-Muse blog for three years, don’t just add every random muse that pops into your head. Figure your top five and if you need to have more then make them side muses and specify on your blog somewhere, they’re side muses. Remember all that talk I gave about keeping things in your profile short and simple? Well now you have +5 characters, so that because a requirement if you want to keep your blog running smoothly. Everything I said before about running a blog, aesthetic posts, and so on just become five times more important now because you making five times the work for anyone coming to your blog.

Here’s a quick rundown of how I managed my multi-muse blog:

It’d be best to keep every character within the same world/universe or following a similar theme, my OC mutli-muse was focused on mercenaries and my canon multi-muse had all the characters from the same organization for an example.

Make your profiles short and simple. This is very important because you have 5+ characters and we need to get an idea about them very quickly.

Again, try and keep the limit around five. If another OC pops into your head do me a favor and write a short story about it if you really need to write them, keep them away from your blog unless they’re absolutely needed.

Wouldn’t hurt to get a page code from theme-hunters and have a small blurb about each character either. I know that’s a lot of work, but it really helps when it comes to summarizing a character at a glance.

That’s all I can really say on the matter.

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And yet another bad segue…

World Building and Verses

Pretty sure I talked about this several times before, but let me put it in basic terms:

If it’s not relevant to your character, it’s not relevant to us. Your world’s 5 deities mean jack if your character isn’t religious and not actively worshiping one of them while warring with the other four. That long 5-page essay about your world’s magic means jack if your character doesn’t use magic, and even if they do just describe it in a way that’s relevant to your character. Your character’s ancient sword passed down from the great hero king means jack if that king isn’t King Arthur or someone of actual world renown. Hell, this is why a canned the lore of Claudia’s spear in her profile, it wasn’t that relevant to Claudia as a character nor did a play a part in any RP, so it was pointless text and I removed it.

Again, I’ve said this before, but Tumblr RPing doesn’t work like a group/forum RP. Your character’s world is automatically fuses with everyone else’s unless there’s a specific verse for it like RWBY. That world has a lot of specific rules and systems relevant to it, but nearly every other universe is just a spin on modern fantasy, which I be glossed off with a bit of creativity. This is how Claudia’s Soul Eater verse works. Soul Eater is within a modern world, but has supernatural elements like people that can fly and shoot lasers and the like. Claudia’s canon world has those things too, but not cars and other modern devices. At the same time, the Soul Eater verse can keep Claudia as a normal human with some decent fighting skills and keep her skills relevant.

Let’s be real, being able to wield a spear or other melee weapons is pointless in our modern world, but if said weapons were the only way to kill demons and other monstrosities, then people that can master those weapons have worth and can beat up said monsters and other threats with melee weapons without people batting an eye at it. The Soul Eater verse isn’t there just for the sake of Soul Eater, but for the sake of Claudia interacting with characters in a Modern setting that won’t destroy her premise of low-born noble joining military to no suck dick.

Actually, I’ve been talking a lot about writing, and I think that’s the last of things that truly annoy me about RPing on this site, so I think I’ll concluded this with…

Something of a Disclaimer

Now that I got all that out of my system let me say this while I have your attention, because I know I probably ruffled some feathers with this post.

Don’t take what I said to mean I think Claudia is being written with the idea of exploring deep themes, complicated relationships, or anything like that. Claudia is a Black, lesbian knight from Medieval-RPG-Fantasy -France that wields a black spear that can transform into other phallic weapons and is dating a cannibal alien mercenary from outer space while sparring with her robo-maids. She is currently training/mentoring an android that was made/adopted by a hyper-sexual dimensional space witch from space. Her circle of friends consists of a ninja, two catgirls, a vampire, ghost skeleton, and her samurai uncle. And need I remind you of all the times I’ve even taken my potshots at her. Trust me, I’m not saying my character is a stream of good writing.

For example, I’m trying to write my own original story. It was originally going to be about forest ninjas solving a civil war/political schism, but that got canned when I started to work on the world-building and realized writing out a solid civil war plotline was too difficult for someone of my skill. So, I changed it over to kung fu girls and that’s slowly turning into a series of vignettes with an over-arcing plot about a turf war in the background, something in the vein of K-On in terms of structure (a little ironic given the main character is named Kyo-Annie). 

This isn’t even my first time trying to write about the kung fu girls or the ninja girls, this is my third attempt at both over a year’s time. Writing, especially for a story, is hard. You need a well-made plot, decent world-building, entertaining characters, good sentence structure, unique writing style, and so on. Not to mention understand enough about the very language you’re writing in to make sure all the words flow properly. I honestly have no idea how you multi-lingual folks do it, I’m truly impressed by you guys.

But the point is, writing a story and writing a character are very different things, and I’m someone that’s been leaning more towards story-writing as time goes on than character writing. Writing Claudia’s character involves me making sure her dialogue and actions match up with what I’m presenting as a tomboyish, competitive jock that likes fighting and wants to maybe be a princess. Writing Claudia’s story involves me delving into things like upward social mobility, researching medieval politics and warfare, talking about themes of conservative tradition vs. progressive advancement at the cost of identity, whether losing oneself for the sake of their goals is worth it, and the list just goes on. 

It's like I said in my views of RPings, I see this as a very different form of writing and when doing a story, especially on Tumblr. You don’t have the luxury of icons to show expressions, or a profile to get a basic idea of a character. A lot of world-building needs to be done properly and carefully integrated into the story. You can’t just randomly add character upon character without it getting called out as impulsively hopping POVs. There’s just… a lot to keep in mind, and as I start writing these stories and get more involved in writing off Tumblr, the more… Tumblr annoys me.

Ugh, this got depressing. I think I’ll talk about something positive next time. Anyway folks, this 3000+ word Rambling is done. Hopefully I’ll talk about something more fun later.

Like fight RPs and fight narratives, those are always fun.

#.ooc #.ramblings