#a fox on business of his own | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hedgehog-moss · 8 months

Text

I've been worried this week about birds of prey attacking my chickens—well, one bird of prey. I heard a hen make her very characteristic INTRUDER cry the other day and ran out of the house and there was a hawk flying in circles high above. I half-heartedly threw some sticks in its direction and told my hen not to be so dramatic (the hawk looked like it was minding its own business frankly), but the next day it happened again, and I thought, I've been unfair to the hens, the hawk from yesterday was actually reconnoitering and they could tell. Then there was another alert the next day. I was starting to get a bit alarmed about the fact that I was dealing with the world's most determined hawk—though I didn't see it again past the first time, I figured I arrived too late and Pandolf had already deterred it.

I ended up setting up a pen for the hens very near my house, under the hazel tree so they'd be sheltered, and spying from the kitchen window the next day, to see if it was still the same bird or what. It tended to attack at the same time every day, which was extra baffling.

And what I saw was Pandolf returning from his daily morning patrol around the pasture, faff around looking a bit bored, circle my house looking for me, and when he didn't find me, go to the chickens' pen and pretend to pounce on them like a fox, which startled them and made them cry out. Pandolf didn't touch them, he clearly just wanted them to make their magical Make Human Appear noise. Immediately after they yelped he turned to look at the front door expectantly, waiting for me to run out. He knows that when I get distracted from what I was doing indoors I often end up being like, well, now that I'm outside I might as well go do [outdoor chore of the day] and he gets to tag along, so he concocted this devious plan...

So. I must turn this post into a callout post for Pandolf. This is the face of a problematic dog, who tried to frame a hawk and use innocent hens for his own ends after he realised their person-summoning noises work while his do not.

#crawling along #''mais quel bandit de grand chemin'' a dit ma mère quand je lui ai raconté #ça m'a rappelé des souvenirs; mon frère et moi on se faisait régulièrement traiter de bandits de grand chemin quand on était minots #c'était contre-productif parce qu'on en était très flattés #anyway i bet if pan could imitate a hawk's cry he wouldn't bother the chickens #he'd just sit under my window earnestly making bird of prey noises to make me come out

5K notes · View notes

astonmartinii · 8 months

Text

mamma mia | formula one social media au

drivers: sebastian vettel, jenson button and fernando alonso

what the hell is in the water in greece? why are pregnancy tests so expensive and why does seb name his vehicles like that?

fernandoalo_oficial

liked by maxverstappen1, aussiegrit and 803,450 others

location: greece

fernandoalo_oficial: had a great break in greece recharging the old batteries 🔋

view all comments

user1: old man who is this woman?

landonorris: who taught you to soft launch grandpa?

fernandoalo_oficial: hey! respect your elders

landonorris: you just called yourself old? and WHO IS THIS?

fernandoalo_oficial: none of your damn business kid

user2: why is he particularly dilfy lately?

user3: he's approaching silver fox territory i fear

jensonbutton: i see that greece was a popular spot for wold champions this break?

fernandoalo_oficial: i also saw, sad not to bump into you old friend :(

maxverstappen1: where was my invite ???

jensonbutton: cool world champions only

lewishamilton: excuse me?

fernandoalo_oficial: idk what to tell you it wasn't planned, me, jenson and sebastian just have good taste

sebastianvettel: i see mary goodnight was appreciated

fernandoalo_oficial: yes thank you for lending me your boat, huge hit with the ladies

sebastianvettel: very happy with my choice to get it deep cleaned before i got there

fernandoalo_oficial: first of all, i'm not dirty. second of all, thanks for the faith in my game big man

user4: i am so confused by this comment section I DID NOT WANT TO KNOW ALONSO FUCKED ON SEB'S BOAT ???

yourusername

liked by yourbff, oliviarodrigo and 1,340.987 others

tagged: yourbff

yourusername: (sober) brunch with a side of light baby daddy investigation

view all comments

user7: only y/n would end up in a mamma mia situation, stay strong

yourusername: omg i didn't even realise, but donna was always a bad bitch, so i will just be the same

user8: i can't believe i am watching a girl investigate her own baby daddies on the internet (i love this place)

yourbff: if we can't find the lucky men, at least they'll have a cool ass aunt

yourusername: all fun and games until you have to change a nappy

user9: i'm enjoying this saga, BUT, why can't we just wait and do a paternity test

yourusernmae: i still need to know them to do that... and being nosey is far more fun

user10: all i'm thinking is this girl has to have GAME for three dilfs in the span of like three days... RESPECT 🫡

user11: i am so invested in this... please be interesting people 🤞

jensonbutton

liked by sebastianvettel, fernandoalo_oficial and 401,330 others

jensonbutton: back on sky duty and bumped into a couple of familiar faces

view all comments

user12: who let these old men talk about their sex lives on a live broadcast?

user13: i am entertained tbf

user14: obsessed with both needing to reinforce the fact that they pulled in greece

user15: i need seb to jump in on this conversation ASAP

fernandoalo_oficial: not happy with you pinning all of my success on seb's boat mate

jensonbutton: was it all your charming personality?

fernandoalo_oficial: obviously

sebastianvettel: i can confirm that it's always all the boat

jensonbutton: is that a confession?

sebastianvettel: gentleman don't kiss and tell x

charles_leclerc: jesus christ and we're the generation ruining the sport?

jensonbutton: f1 has always been slutty, you guys are letting us down

maxverstappen1: clearly you guys are still active enough to keep up the reputation yourselves

sebastianvettel

liked by charles_leclerc, jensonbutton and 902,180 others

sebastianvettel: retirement is looking fun, glad to take mary goodnight out for her first spin

view all comments

user21: did he just say mary goodnight? SEB WHAT?

user22: omfg he is potential baby daddy two??

charles_leclerc: so seb got a bit too lucky in greece?

user23: CHARLES?

user24: i am losing my mind they were right, they are the baby daddies

user25: i knew as soon as she said a nando with a samurai tattoo

user26: @yourusername he's number two !!!!!

user27: @yourusername we found him, boat and all

landonorris: YOU'RE POTENTIAL BABY DADDY TWO SEB WHAT THE FUCK

sebastianvettel: i don't understand lando

landonorris: check your texts

user28: don't forget the others lando

landonorris: @fernandoalo_oficial check your texts (and forward it to jenson i don't have his number)

fernandoalo_oficial: okay?

yourusername: WHAT THE FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

user29: i think someone needs to check on her

yourusername

liked by sebastianvettel, fernandoalo_oficial and 1,509,600 others

yourusername: i hot girl summer-ed a bit too close to the sun, what do you mean the three dilfs were f1 world champions?

comments are turned off on this post

sebastianvettel followed yourusername

fernandoalo_oficial followed yourusername

jensonbutton followed yourusername

note: AHHHHHH? idk if i love it or hate it? do i know who i plan on being the dad? no. but do i plan on expanding on this? yes. mamma mia chaos will return.

#f1 imagine #f1 x reader #f1 instagram au #f1 x you #f1 #sebastian vettel instagram au #sebastian vettel x you #sebastian vettel x reader #sebastian vettel #sebastian vettel imagine #fernando alonso #fernando alonso imagine #fernando alonso x reader #fernando alonso instagram au #jenson button #jenson button imagine #jenson button x reader #jenson button instagram au

4K notes · View notes

hashtagloveloses · 9 months

Text

The headline is pretty awful but this is one of those things that gets worse as you read it:

The 14-page petition, filed in Shelby County, Tennessee, probate court, alleges that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy, who took Oher into their home as a high school student, never adopted him. Instead, less than three months after Oher turned 18 in 2004, the petition says, the couple tricked him into signing a document making them his conservators, which gave them legal authority to make business deals in his name.

"Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys."

Oher was a rising high school senior when he signed the conservatorship papers, and he has written that the Tuohys told him that there was essentially no difference between adoption and conservatorship. "They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as 'adoptive parents,' but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account," Oher wrote in his 2011 best-selling memoir "I Beat the Odds."

But there are some important legal distinctions. If Oher had been adopted by the Tuohys, he would have been a legal member of their family, and he would have retained power to handle his own financial affairs. Under the conservatorship, Oher surrendered that authority to the Tuohys, even though he was a legal adult with no known physical or psychological disabilities.

While the [movie] deal allowed the Tuohys to profit from the film, the petition alleges, a separate 2007 contract purportedly signed by Oher appears to "give away" to 20th Century Fox Studios the life rights to his story "without any payment whatsoever." The filing says Oher has no recollection of signing that contract, and even if he did, no one explained its implications to him.

The [movie] deal lists all four Tuohy family members as having the same representative at Creative Artists Agency, the petition says. But Oher's agent, who would receive movie contract and payment notices, is listed as Debra Branan, a close family friend of the Tuohys and the same lawyer who filed the 2004 conservatorship petition, the petition alleges. Branan did not return a call to her law office on Monday.

"Mike's relationship with the Tuohy family started to decline when he discovered that he was portrayed in the movie as unintelligent," Stranch said. "Their relationship continued to deteriorate as he learned that he was the only member of the family not receiving royalty checks from the movie, and it was permanently fractured when he realized he wasn't adopted and a part of the family."

For years, Oher has chafed at how "The Blind Side" depicted him, saying it hurt his football career and clouded how people view him. He has said that based on the film, some NFL decision-makers assumed he was mentally slow or lacked leadership skills.

"People look at me, and they take things away from me because of a movie," Oher told ESPN in 2015. "They don't really see the skills and the kind of player I am."

"Beyond the details of the deal, the politics, and the money behind the book and movie, it was the principle of the choices some people made that cut me the deepest."

#original post #the blind side #michael oher #this is one of the worst things i’ve ever read #this movie always was awful but somehow it got worse

5K notes · View notes

currently-evil · 3 months

Text

Alternative universe where Wymack gives up his “above my salary” rule and just straight up disses Andrew when he is pining over Neil

⫸

Andrew: breaks into Wymack’s apartment to rant about how much Neil is a problem and a threat Wymack: You want to fuck him so much it makes you look stupid

⫸

Andrew and Neil getting in their usual first book word scuffles Wymack to Andrew after Neil leaves them alone: So what have you decided on? Spring or Summer wedding?

⫸

Andrew: allows some fox to score on him because he was too busy staring at Neil’s ass Wymack not saying anything out loud but catching Andrew’s eyes with so much bored intensivity the words just materialize on their own in Andrew’s mind: Wow that was pathetic.

⫸

Andrew feeding Neil some “i’ll still solve you” or other talk like that Wymack not even raising his eyes from some documents he was filling out: I’ve seen fucking garden snails flirt better than you.

⫸

Andrew buys Neil a matching phone Wymack: And here I thought Nicky was the only useless gay in the family, good to see I can still be wrong.

⫸

Wymack calling Andrew after Neil hitchhiked his way back to his apartment the first time Monsters took him to Eden: CAN’T YOU TAKE HIM OUT ON A DATE LIKE NORMAL PERSON???? YOU HAVE TO FUCKING DRUG HIM???

⫸

Andrew: buys Neil like a half of wardrobe in a exact style Andrew prefer Wymack: just aggressively sideeyeing him in silence Andrew: SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

⫸

Wymack: shamelessly using Neil to stop Andrew from acting out against other Foxes Andrew: Fucking stop it. Wymack: No <3

⫸

Wymack: sends Neil to Andrew to ask him to stop throwing balls at Foxes’ ankles Wymack silently through very intense eye contact: JUST FUCKING BANG IT OUT AND STOP LETTING IT AFFECT MY GAMEPLAY

⫸

Wymack: Do threats of violence usually work for you? Or do you know about some Neil's fetish none of us are privy to?

⫸

Wymack to Andrew: Its good to know there is something that both you and Aaron share. I just didn't expect it to be inability to act like normal human beings around your crushes.

#Neil Josten #Neil Abram Josten #Andrew Minyard #Andrew Joseph Minyard #andreil #All for the game #Foxhole court #the foxhole court #aftg #aftg andreil #aftg headcanon #coach wymack #david wymack #aftg wymack #I do feel like after all this disaster flirting wymack should be allow to be like #are you fucking stupid??

1K notes · View notes

ominouspuff · 3 months

Text

Kote’s House

Kote’s first house is a pathetic thing, and he is incurably proud of it. The twi’lek he purchased it from very evidently could not make up his mind what to do with a man that grinned while he haggled, but it was the first time Kote had haggled over a purchase of his very own. He had thoroughly enjoyed it.

The house is built for one being, and a compact being at that, but Kote doesn’t have much. Moving in is quick, and most of his efforts during the next few days after go into attempting ambitious repairs for things he doesn’t know the first thing about.

His plumbing is an issue, he knows. Something is getting blocked up. Somehow while trying to fix the kitchen tumbler, his fresher spout explodes.

He hadn’t kept his new house a secret from anyone by any means, but it is still surprising when Fox barges in through his jamming front door. He finds Kote on the floor in his cramped kitchen while the fresher rains water in the adjacent room, laughing so hard and so crippled with delight that he can’t get up.

He tries to explain how wonderful it is —

“I-I have to fix my plumbing on my own, vod—”

—but judging by Fox’s single raised eyebrow he knows it doesn’t translate.

Fox, it turns out, is moving into the neighborhood. Kote doesn’t ask about the house Fox already has — the house he has visited, which is very nice and fancy — or point out that Fox’s contract there cannot possibly be up, which begs the question of why he’s here in Kote’s neighborhood — except that Kote already knows the answer to that question. So he doesn’t ask.

Fox doesn’t show him any grace or forbearance, though.

“Don’t even know how to fix a damn pipe, front lining show-off—” His brother snarls, but it is muffled; his top half had to go down beneath the floor they’d pried up to get at the plumbing issue.

“So that’s what they had you doing all these years.” Kote says, because he really is in a criminally good mood. He barely ducks the foot-long pipe Fox throws at his head, feeling giddy.

He makes dinner that night in thanks. Fox stays, ostensibly because now that he’s fixed the fresher he intends to use it, because his new house isn’t hooked up properly yet to all the supply lines and power grids.

They choke on homemade tiingilar (vode-style; Kote can’t pretend at the real thing yet) so heavily spiced it’s got grit to it that sticks between the teeth. It’s disgusting, but Cody had bought fifteen different spices and while usually he likes to keep his approach to the unknown more cautious, more methodical, he couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do more than use them all at once for the first time.

Wolffe joins them not long after; brings a few others along by recommending the apartment he picks out, so that soon most of the complex is taken up by vode, Kote hears, but he doesn’t visit yet. Everyone’s too busy coming over to his house, it seems; filling up his kitchen and asking why he hasn’t fixed the trash disposal yet, why he doesn’t have a couch, doesn’t he know they’re all the rage among civilized folk?

Kote fixes the trash disposal with Rex, who is better at it than he is but says it’s only due to Skywalker’s influence on managing all things mechanical.

“How is Skywalker?” Kote asks, and gets more than he bargained for over the next hour. At first he’s a bit off-put, because he’s trying to get dinner sorted again and he’s not been very fond of Skywalker at the best of times, but Rex is snorting out a story and laughing and it’s contagious, so Kote just resigns himself and settles in to enjoy.

Skywalker has little ones, now. Obi-Wan is the only one that can get them to sleep. Ahsoka is distressed; she knows better, but every instinct in her is apparently in agony over the little ones’ inability to eat meat yet. She obsesses over nutrients in their diet — which, given what tiny natborn humans primarily ingest in the early stages, makes for some slightly awkward conversations.

Rex helps with dinner afterward, and they take turns being incredulous over natborn baby facts, shoving around one another in the tiny, uncomfortable kitchen.

“What’s your next project?” Rex asks at one point, glancing sidelong with a cheeky look, and Kote levels his vegetable knife at him (he’s got a vegetable knife. Specifically for vegetables. It’s a very new concept).

“I make everyone’s dinner on Tuangsdays.” He says. “I’m productive.”

Rex’s sharp-toothed grin turns thoughtful. “Yeah” He says. “Everyone loves coming here, you know. You could be the new 79’s.”

Kote knows. He plans and plots, and puts more work into researching recipes than he’s put into any research whatsoever in months. It feels a bit like coming out of a shore leave; his thoughts quicken and his excitement grows. He hunts down a market. He brings a bag. He shops, bargains, and returns victorious.

He sends out a few comms., and can’t help but shake his head and grin at how different the responses are.

What a marvelous idea, Cody. His general — ex-general — says.

Yus pls, Ahsoka sends back, with some sort of strange tooka vidclip that dances with wiggly gyrations Kote can only assume indicate excitement.

Where is your house, Anakin says, blunt and to the point, and Kote can appreciate that.

He sends the address. He cooks all day. The sun sets, and Fox and Wolffe arrive, already bickering, Rex trailing behind with a long-suffering look sent to Kote, begging commiseration.

“Ugh, don’t you ever stop smiling, now?” He gripes when Kote just grins at him.

“Nope,” Kote says, unrepentantly.

He leaves the soup on the stove, simmering, and takes his cup of caf to the window. He leans on it, breathing in cool air, and just listens — listens to the squabbling as Wolffe gets on Fox’s case for not washing Kote’s dishes correctly the last time they visited. Hears the soft thumps of Rex sneaking into the cramped room Kote has set aside for plants and the sole pet he has; a pastel goullian, fins swaying ever so gently, permanent scowl in place. Thinks he catches, distantly, the sound of his remaining three guests (Padme couldn’t attend, and had made him feel very awkward by how thoughtfully she apologized for it) plodding up the hill.

“Cody!” Ahsoka cries, coming into view and waving.

Kote’s cheeks have stopped aching from all the smiling he’s gotten used to, so it’s easy to let another through.

1K notes · View notes

sunderwight · 3 months

Text

Moshang AU where Airplane transmigrates into a demon NPC from one of the fanservice clans he created, rather than into Shang Qinghua.

So basically, there was a point in time where a lot of PIDW chapters were just Luo Binghe running around propelled by political plots and rebellions from the demon kingdoms, and most of that actually just ended up being Luo Binghe collecting wives with cute animal ears and tails and various abilities that Airplane used all of once and then completely forgot about. They covered the usual bases of the sexy cat girls, sexy fox girls, sexy bunny girls, sexy bird girls with wings, etc, before moving into more, erm, niche animal hybrid demon territory.

Which is all a roundabout way of explaining Cute Hamster Boy Shang Qinghua in his faithful-to-canon clan of Hamster Demons, whose primary skills include cute squeaking noises and digging abilities.

In the process of making his braindead written-in-a-panic-at-3-am "world building" on this front actually function in a real version of the setting, there has got to be a way for the otherwise-unremarkable fanservice demon tribes to actually survive the incredibly hostile environment which Airplane otherwise described, though. Like yeah sure when you're writing a book you can just say in one breath that the demon realms are incredibly brutal and cutthroat, and then in the next that this tribe of bunny girls with no visible skills at self-defense has existed here for thousands of years, but if you actually tried to set that up in some kind of a simulation the bunny girls wouldn't last one year, let alone one thousand.

In that case of Airplane's hamster tribe, their digging skills are so supernaturally prodigious that they are able to construct massive underground fortifications in otherwise hostile terrain. But that still doesn't solve all of their problems, because they still need to acquire food, and for that they mostly do have to go up to the surface. Some of their weakness is mitigated by sheer numbers -- they have a lot of kids to offset the high mortality rate. However, to further increase the survival rates, the hamster demons also try and make contracts with some of the local liege lords or ruling clans whenever they expand into a new territory. In exchange for protection, they send some of their extraneous family members out as servants, to either cement alliances through marriage (that high fertility is helpful and was indeed the crux of Wife #whatever's acquisition in canon) or to work as diggers or even high-level architects.

As the like, twelfth son of the Hamster Demon chieftain, this is Airplane's fate. On the one hand he's highly positioned enough to get an education, and his plot knowledge helps a lot. On the other hand, he's not high enough in the hierarchy to be kept around, so it's either go work for some other clan or else risk his neck doing missions on the hostile and deadly surface. Neither seems great, but Airplane would rather try his luck as a sycophant than a warrior.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on his mood when he thinks about it) when Airplane reaches sixteen years of age, it's around the same time that the Hamster clan's tunnels have expanded towards the Northern Desert. Airplane ends up being part of the "hiii~ pleasedon'tkillus let's be friends~" tribute to Mobei Jun's father.

Mobei Jun's father tosses him to Mobei Jun, so Airplane dutifully latches onto him in order to avoid being eaten by any of the other retainers. Airplane has been educated in various subterranean building skills and is under the impression that he's been given to MBJ in order to build him his own palace or something?

Everyone else assumes that the Hamster demon is a concubine.

Mobei Jun also thinks that's what he's been given, but he's too busy bristling in teenage offense at being given a concubine by his father to actually consider taking Airplane to bed. So when Airplane starts doing other things for him, he just sort of bemusedly lets it happen.

Gradually it becomes apparent that Airplane himself isn't interested in being a concubine. No. Clearly, this Hamster is gunning for future empress of the Northern Desert! How else would one explain all the lengths he's going to not only to win Mobei Jun's favor, but to secure his position and ensure his future rule? The system also wants Airplane to ensure the Abyss plot arc happens in the future, too, which means Airplane helps Mobei Jun win and instigate conflicts against the righteous cultivation sects too.

Obviously, Airplane wants power. Mobei Jun knows that if he gets an heir off of Airplane that will be that, the wily minx will use any children to secure his position, and MBJ is not convinced he could control himself well enough to prevent that sort of eventually. Airplane is fiendishly attractive, and he clearly knows it, and Mobei Jun is not sure if he wants to accept what increasingly seems to be the inevitable. He won't be a ladder for someone else's ambitions! But... as long as Airplane remains loyal to him, he will consider it. Even if Airplane never harbors any true affection for him, and simply considers him a means to an end. If, by the time he ascends the Hamster has not betrayed him or tried to elevate himself by flipping over this uncle's side, or seduced any of his other relatives or any of the highly-placed lords all salivating to steal MBJ's would-be empress, then Mobei Jun will grant his wish and make him the second most powerful demon in the North.

Airplane, meanwhile, just wants a snack and a nap. Maybe if he builds a secure enough fortress and amasses enough of an intelligence network and hoards a few advantages for himself, and figures out how to stop pissing off MBJ, he'll survive long enough to retire. Somehow.

#moshang #svsss #mobei jun #shang qinghua #airplane shooting towards the sky #scum villain's self saving system #og shang qinghua doesn't factor in I don't think #airplane gets shipped north around when mbj would have run into hhp and rescues him instead

1K notes · View notes

jeansyvesmoreau · 12 days

Text

no because like. he taught him french and it would be their little secret. they had each other when it felt like there was no one else. kevin saw nothing but the court and jean had given up on hoping for more than that years ago. he got punished because he let kevin go. he hates him now. they can hardly speak civilly to each other now. kevin gave him a place with the trojans. they were "tight". he sent him postcards and souvenirs and jean kept them all. he knew better than to look at another man too long and how appropriate, how in character that a pretty face had fucked him over yet again. he wished a thousand painful deaths upon the foxes' queen for just minding his own business. he ran messages between him and his gf. he slit his throat on the way out. once upon a time jean would do anything for kevin and kevin knew it.

#yes we got basically canon jerejean but I'm going INSANEEE over the kevjean crumbs you have no idea #the sunshine court #tsc spoilers #kevjean #kevin day #jean moreau #all for the game #melone.txt

803 notes · View notes

comicaurora · 4 months

Note

Hey Red, sorry if this was asked already, but do you have any advice on writing a trickster hero? And do you have any favorites yourself?

Huh! This is something I've never really thought too hard about before, but I do have some loose and unformed thoughts!

So the trickster archetype is, broadly, a character who wins by being cunning and tricking the people around them. Typically this is because they are an underdog facing a powerful opponent, and if they face that opponent on the terms that opponent defines, they'll lose. For instance, a physically strong opponent might want to make everything into a contest of raw force; a politically powerful opponent might want to make things a legal battle; a commander of a large army might want to battle on a flat terrain-less battlefield and overpower the smaller enemy force through raw numbers; etc etc.

A trickster doesn't have the raw power to make a scenario happen. Instead, they achieve that scenario by making other characters make it happen, usually by misleading them into thinking it'll have some other outcome they want.

A classic example of this is found in a Brer Rabbit story where Brer Rabbit has been snatched by Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit begs and pleads with him to not throw him into that briar patch, oh the torment he would experience in that briar patch would be unimaginable, drowning or burning would be bad but still better than that briar patch. Brer Fox naturally throws him into the briar patch, at which point Brer Rabbit vanishes into the underbrush and helpfully clarifies that he was born and bred in a briar patch. He was unable to escape through his own power, so instead he convinced Brer Fox that yeeting him into the briar patch would give Brer Fox something he wanted (Brer Rabbit's unimaginable torment) when in actuality it gave Brer Rabbit exactly the cover he needed to escape. It only worked because Brer Rabbit understood that Brer Fox was fundamentally not just hungry, he was cruel.

Tricksters usually achieve victory through lying, stealing, sneaking around and generally being dishonest. These are usually not seen as heroic traits, but the trickster hero is an archetype of character who is broadly heroic - and uses trickster tactics to win. It's an interesting suite of character traits to balance. In order to make a trickster heroic, them being the underdog usually needs to be played up. It's not really easy to root for someone with power to manipulate people for their own ends, but it's easy to root for someone scrappy and underleveled to manage to gumption their way to a victory over a broadly superior opponent.

A sympathetic trickster usually isn't someone who picks fights. Trouble comes to them, and then they need to find a way to escape or stop it. This is the paradigm that makes Bugs Bunny work as a trickster hero - he starts off basically every adventure minding his own business, and when someone comes around with a blunderbuss and a hankering for rabbit stew, their actions are what prompts him to unleash absolute hell on them by using toon physics and trapping them in ironclad social conventions to completely unbalance them until they're eventually defeated.

If we see a big, loud, powerful jerk try to stomp on someone small and innocuous, we're inclined to root for the small and innocuous person. This setup makes us very eager to see the small and innocuous person use tricks and shenanigans to make a fool of the powerful jerk, and it automatically makes us more okay with the sympathetic character doing on-paper unheroic things like lies and manipulation as long as they're doing them to someone we're primed to dislike.

So trickster heroes are usually fundamentally reactive characters. Something bad happens and they respond by unleashing hell. Another easy way to make a character instantly more heroic is to give them an even weaker, even more sympathetic character to protect or assist. Thus, many trickster heroes have a suite of supporting characters they're protecting who are not tricksters by nature, and are instead just there to be endangered or bullied by Nasty Mean Powerful People. Our trickster heroes stepping in to aid and protect other people thus gives their actions an even more heroic cast, because not only are they reactive to an outside threat, they're selflessly reactive.

This is the framing that's used in Leverage, where every episode has a victim of the week being cruelly taken advantage of by a jerkass of the week, at which point our team of liars, grifters and thieves roll up to ply their trade on the jerkass and award the spoils of war to the victim of the week. Because the person they're tricking is proven unequivocally to be truly awful and completely insulated from legal consequence a solid 98% of the time, we don't feel particularly bad seeing our team of heroes manipulate, gaslight and eventually absolutely destroy them over the course of a crisp 40 minutes. The vileness of the villain combos with the innocent powerlessness of the person they're advocating for, and thus their assorted unheroic qualities become reframed as absolutely heroic due to the circumstances under which they use them.

Crucial to the formula is the horrendous nastiness of the villain of the week, because if we were even kind of sympathetic to them, the schemes of the protagonists would be kinda scary. They are very good at quickly getting the bad guy to trust them and then taking apart everything they've built, and that's only fun to watch if the audience is 100% sure the villain deserves it and is not going to spend too much time thinking "wow, it would be terrifying if that happened to me." The fact that our heroes almost always take them down simply by leveraging (heh) the bad guy's badness is a big part of what makes the formula work. Almost every episode is functionally similar to a Briar Patch scenario - "oh gosh I sure hope no SOULLESS CAPITALIST VAMPIRES take advantage of how MANIPULABLE I am to try and get my MONEY and/or VALUABLES", and then the villain's own established cruelty cascades into their downfall when it runs into the dominos our heroes have set up to expose them. And that does a lot to make the audience sympathize with a crew of four self-admitted terrible people (and Hardison, who's an angel and we're delighted to have him)

Another way to get the audience to root for a potentially nonstandard protagonist is to set them up against a villain who is smug. Smugness is a very dangerous trait for any character to have, because it primes the audience to want to see them break. A villain who thinks they are too powerful or too strong or too smart to be defeated has the audience immediately rooting for them to be proven wrong just so they can watch the expression on their face. This is the strat they use in Columbo.

Every Columbo villain is rich and powerful and very insulated from legal consequences, and we start every episode seeing them arrange and execute an attempt at a perfect murder. We know from the start how they did it and usually why, and because they are smug - they are almost never regretful or reluctant - we become invested in seeing how Columbo figures out what they did, how they did it, and how he can prove it and get them arrested. Columbo is a nonstandard kind of trickster hero, because he is deeply and fundamentally a Lawful Good archetype, but he is also a very casual liar. The only time the audience sees Columbo almost certainly telling the truth is when he's dealing with background characters, his fellow policemen or his dog, or when he's by himself silently putting the pieces together; at all other points in the episode he will typically conceal how much he knows, how he knows what he knows and why he's asking specific probing questions. The audience has a tremendous amount of dramatic irony in terms of information about the perfect murder Columbo has to disassemble; we'll see Columbo zero in on exactly the one small detail that pokes a hole in the supposed airtight alibi, but instead of saying "I think you killed them and I am determined to prove it" he'll dance around why he's focusing on those details - just curiosity, just a desire for completeness, his superiors told him to continue the case and he doesn't know why, his wife is just such a big fan of their work, etc etc.

As a rule, the first time in any given episode that Columbo admits he's suspicious of the villain is the beginning of the last scene of the episode when he proves that they did it and they subsequently surrender. When Columbo is dealing with the villain, absolutely nothing he says can be trusted until that final scene - and it's a rare treat to get a glimpse of Columbo showing an honest emotion, especially something like genuine fury. Most of the time he maintains a very harmless and affable attitude, but sometimes when the villains are very smug and they know he's suspicious of them but can't prove anything yet, his righteous anger peeks through and we see why he does this.

He's a trickster hero because he can't unravel the case, the villain's motivation and the shape of the crime if the villain knows everything he knows and can correspondingly keep up with him. But he is 100% committed to exposing the truth of the situation and making the murderer face justice. Their perfect alibi is supposed to protect them from everything, but it's their confidence and certainty that they could never be caught that Columbo leverages to win. They never know entirely what to make of him, and he's never wholly honest with them - and with the audience - until the very end of the episode. It's good, cathartic payoff to an episode's worth of lies and manipulation from both main players, and it's always fun to see the non-smug party on the side of justice come out on top.

Some trickster heroes are more like standard heroes with trickster tendencies that occasionally surface. These guys are usually pretty straightforward, but in a pinch they can bust out a surprisingly cunning scheme or two - one such moment hits at the climax of Across the Spider-Verse, and it's a great moment of characterization for Miles, who has thus far been a pretty typically heroic guy who has unfortunately spent the entire movie thus far being lied to by people he trusted. It kicks off an enormously long and complicated chase sequence that takes the entire spider-community out of the home base chasing him through an absolutely massive complex and eventually onto a space elevator. It's such a fluid scene, you kind of just accept that it's a desperate chase sequence - Miles is just running. It doesn't occur to the other spider-people that Miles might have a plan beyond running until he basically tells Miguel that, hey, he did just get every other spider-person out of the facility that has the portal to get him home. He wasn't just running away, he was luring everybody away so he can leave.

And this moment is fantastic on a meta-level, because Spider-Man is traditionally a bit of a trickster hero. Most of his enemies are able to physically outpace him, and he needs to use mobility and strategy to take them down, often luring them into environments that work against them - like a fun moment in Spectacular Spider-Man where Spidey defeats the Rhino by luring him into a steam tunnel and basically giving him heatstroke through his armor plating. But because the entire core theme of this movie is "Miles isn't a real Spider-Man," it literally doesn't seem to occur to the other spider-people that Miles's seemingly panicked running might be him pulling a Spider-Man on them. We're so used to being in Miles's head and knowing when he's got a plan or a ploy that this is a very fun moment to watch. He's successfully deceived an entire army of spider-people, and the audience is just as blindsided as Miguel - and a little less electrocuted, so it's a lot more fun for us.

So yea, trickster heroes are a fun little space of character, but you gotta be careful to put them in the right kind of situation, lest their fundamental dishonesty come across as alarming rather than extremely rad.

#I also have a reboot example but I shan't inflict that on you guys without due cause #asks #writing stuff #not aurora

1K notes · View notes