#and that's compelling shit! that's a real character!

[elaratyrell]

Please Be Kind

As the release for hotd season 2 comes closer, please remember, the actors are not the characters they portray

Tom is not Aegon. He’s not a rapist, he’s not an alcoholic. He’s a real person who, from what I’ve seen and heard, is incredibly smart, charismatic, kind and funny

Matt is not Daemon. He’s not a groomer, he’s not an abuser. He’s a real person who seems talented, humorous, and good-hearted

Olivia is not Alicent. She’s not a usurper, she’s not a “cunt”. She’s a real person who seems incredibly sweet, warm and loving

Ewan is not Aemond. He’s not a cold murderer. He’s a real person who seems incredibly passionate, charming and intelligent

Fabien is not Criston. He’s not a killer or a “misogynist”. He’s a real person who seems hilarious, good natured and fun

I put “misogynist” and “cunt” in “” because I don’t personally think Criston and Alicent are those things

I could go on and on about each and every one of these cast members and how they aren’t their characters. It seems stupid that I should have to given it’s a FICTIONAL SHOW.

If the actors are compelling you with their performance and are making you feel strongly about their character, THEY ARE DOING THEIR JOB.

It’s gotten to the point where people saying on this site

“Tom’s outfit sucks.”

“Ewan looks shit.”

(actual posts I’ve read)

Has just made me think: why can’t you be kinder.

You can dislike an outfit choice or hairstyle, but choose kinder tones of phrase

You can dislike a character, but don’t direct your negative opinion to the person who plays them

Saying you’re disgusted Ewan is apparently gay because Davey referred to him as his “darling boy”. For one, why are we speculating? It’s not our business what his sexuality is. For two, so what if he is? Love is love, let him be who he is as a person. Support him in his privacy please.

Why can’t we just enjoy these incredibly talented actors and their performances?

Why can’t we rant and celebrate this messed up show without the fear of being accused of being a rape supporter, a groomer or misogynist, just because we enjoy certain characters?

No character in this show is 100% good. That’s what makes it so compelling.

It’s a war between the morally grey.

Please learn from the mistakes the fan base made in season 1, and that it’s continued to do so during this press tour

Please do better

There’s a reason why so many people who enjoy this show hate contributing to the fanbase

There’s a reason why so many of the actors don’t handle their own socials anymore

Please. Be. Kind.

#house of the dragon #hotd #hotd season 2 #House of the dragon season 2 #Team black #Team green

[iorekbyrinson]

lalo salamanca headcanons

He's a black-hearted asshole. It's an important core aspect of his character and it can't be ignored.

He has a dead sibling. My HC is a dead sister who got married and then her husband killed her. Death lives cheek by jowl in the Salamanca family. There's a reason for those empty spaces.

He wasn't born with severe antisocial tendencies, and a naturally extroverted personality made him more open to experiences than some of his more rigid relatives. The rot set in to the idealism early, maybe 7 or 8 years old. I actually see the twins grappling with suppressing their feelings more than Lalo - he's the perfect adaptable boy-Prince that adapts to suit the family, and never really took the time to build anything under that veneer. He takes information in purely to benefit himself or benefit his family. The emotionality and empathy has been stripped away. This is a DARK character.

One of the roles he's tried on that he's put a little more into is the benefactor role to the peasants that live on/or near his estate, in fact most of the underlings associated with the Salamanca holdings. It reinforces to Lalo a sense of benevolence, which at its core is still basically transactional. The people under him have no choice to do what they do. It's the performance of helping them out that makes Lalo feel good about himself.

He was absolutely going to murder Kim when Jimmy left. That whole speech about the people the assassins killed at his hacienda reeked of a tit-for-tat situation. He no longer trusted Jimmy at all so he had no further utility to him as a lawyer. He was going to kill Jimmy's wife as punishment for that, torture the truth out of Jimmy when he returned from the laundrette, and then kill him.

Lalo's blue shoes tie into what I mentioned about him having an attachment to being seen as perfect/a benefactor/on the "right" side of things. Blue = personal law in BCS. Lalo never does anything that doesn't benefit himself or his family, so he always sees himself as following the correct path. He feels 100% justified in his sabotage mission against Gus, and then in the atrocities he commits in attempting to come back and bring him up in front of Eladio. He would actually feel morally angry at the implication any of that wasn't right - you protect yourself and you protect your family. In his eyes, he's bringing a liar and a traitor to justice, a snake who is attempting to bring down their cartel from the inside. In that respect, Lalo has a parallel with the most unlikeliest of BCS characters - Chuck McGill.

The insomnia is the barest of brush strokes that imply Lalo's possible ambivalence about the life he was born into. Gilligould have notoriously not given the characters of colour much contextual depth at all outside of roles that serve the cartel story, and Lalo is no exception, but I still think it was the barest of indicators of another story being played out there. Like Howard Hamlin dissuaded early on from putting up his own shingle and making an identity for himself outside of what his father expected of him, Lalo, neck deep in the lifetime role of cartel Prince, may have felt the twingings of his own destiny being held away from him. TDalton's comments about Lalo believing he could die at any point has an interesting, nihilistic extension here - so why bother?

He's a Hufflepuff. His people, his group, and himself above all. Duty, discipline, and "fairness" - all Puff traits. His contempt for Slytherin Gus is for Gus's refusal to accept his position and bend the knee - he sees Gus's strident individualism as selfish, in comparison to his own lifelong commitment to his family and the cartel. On the positive side, he can do a surface level cohesion with groups, some performative actions of good on behalf of the group(s) he identifies with, and skilfully takes Nacho and sends him up to the boss. There's a reason old ladies seem to adore Lalo - he, in an entirely selfish sense, works within the group.

#lalo salamanca headcanons #better call Saul #listen I've seen the posts extolling lalo as some romantic figure and if that's how you like him then sure #but honestly black-hearted murdering asshole Lalo Salamanca is a great character to me #he is incapable of having a human relationship! he's a cautionary tale about the effects of soul-degrading violence! #he is an extremely smooth presentation of cartel violence in the real world being soulless and sociopathic #and that's compelling shit! that's a real character! #uncompromising evil has depths #tbh I wish they could've done more on the cartel Prince side of things. I would totally watch Lalo Salamanca returning to Mexico instead #and pulling Shakespeare levels of shenanigans on Don Eladio to get him to turn against Gus #give me the Lalo Salamanca that has influence and turns men against each other for profit #and a wounded bat-sh*t sense of justice

[menlove]

that one poll about if you'd be friends w someone who cheated and the comments/tags were an all out blood bath got me thinking so

#infidelity tw #cheating tw #I'm curious bc a lot of ppl on that poll were Very very heated one way or the other #and I'm wondering how that applies to fiction #I myself don't seek it out but I don't mind it and sometimes it can be compelling in a story #it adds some Flavor and it's not like these characters are real yk? #but I get the feeling some people avoid it in a way they might avoid like. dead dove shit

[croakings]

i apologize for mithrunposting incessantly but honestly if any of you expected better of me you shouldn't have

anyway i get it and some of the failguy jokes are funny. i can tell that nothing i've run into is even malicious. but also it would be really cool and awesome if there were simply less posts calling a disabled person a failure or baby or a dog or whatever for needing accommodation or extra help, especially when like. hey did you know the source material very on purpose did not do anything remotely like that. critical thinking question: could there be some reasons these phrases are not great, potentially

#* #mithrun #dungeon meshi #people are being weird about laois and falin wrt autism also but this is a separate issue #the downside of rep outside of like Average Action Movie Protagonist #which is to say. rep at all. as we would think of it. #is that you get to see not in-group folks talk about those characters. also. #and sometimes. people have. let us say. unexamined. or unacknowledged. biases. perhaps prejudices. at times. #ANYWAY #DISABLED PEOPLE HOWEVER DISABLED ARE NOT INFANTS OR ANIMALS. THANK YOU. #ALSO JUST FOR THE RECORD NOT THAT IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE TO MY POINT #BUT MITHRUN IS SAID IN THE STORY TO BE FAIRLY SELF SUFFICIENT OUTSIDE OF DUNGEON CRAWLING. #his intelligence and strength stats are both extremely high. hey. hey. hey guys. what about him compels you to portray him #as weak or bumbling or unintelligent. quickly. #edit: #like look. if your whole joke is just ''ooooh he's so fucked up. he's so fucked up he's basically a goofy dog''. think about some things. #talking about/including a character's disability: 👍✅ #exclusively talking about how fucked up it makes them/how fucked up it is to be disabled: 😕❌ #double anyway. fucking. please for the love of god if nothing else. understand that real life disabled people see how you talk about #and portray those with disabilities. and sometimes! it does not feel good. thank you. #this isn't no fun alloweding. just THINK before you say shit PLEASE. #the only character ive seen get called a dog as much as mithrun is fucking laois. which. yk? ykwim here? would u call chilchuck a pursedog. #would that be fucked up‚ maybe. can you tell me why. are you reading me. #ok. i'm done. just. god. negative sims interaction bubble. JUST THINK ABOUT IT THATS ALL. #''its funny to ship mithrun with beautiful people bc he looks so fucked up now haha'' PLEASE CAN ANYONE HEAR ME. #actually i have more to say. rbing this. god. God.

[ectonurites]

SUPER DARK TIMES [THE FROST — MITSKI]

this movie's had my brain in a vice grip all week

#super dark times #sdt #josh templeton #zach taylor #daryl and charlie are also there but this aint about them #well it is about daryl. it’s *all* about daryl at the end of the day. but ykwim #im simply a sucker for stories about best friends where everything gets sosososo fucked up 🤷‍♂️ #sam draws shit #sam edits #<- yeah it gets both tags i opened after effects for this #this movie fell into tht sweet spot for me where it was the right combo of compelling characters who felt Real with great visuals but also #with enough moments i was like ‘what. why?’ about that it keeps me thinking trying to decide how i feel about/interpret elements of it #like. i enjoyed it but it's flawed in the exact ways a piece of media needs to be for it to rotate around in my brain for a while #also i truly did NOT have the time to draw this i have so much other shit to get done but i couldn’t focus until #i got this idea out of my head so. here we are

[kurokoros]

but what the fuck was the point of having Eddie, Robin, and Dustin all batting for team st@ncy in S4??? i don't know what would make me angrier. the writing continuing that plot thread or just dropping it and never addressing things in S5. why the hell would you devote time to that in an already bloated season just to drop it in the final??? could these characters not have had anything meaningful to talk to steve about beyond his less than a year long high school relationship???

#could we not have had steve and lucas bonding to parallel dustin and eddie??? #could we not have had steve and max bonding considering she was. y'know. possibly going to be murdered violently??? #also it's so funny to me that S4 was like 'it's thanks to nancy that steve changed' #when actually it was steve's interactions with the kids in S2 that made him such a beloved character #like. sorry duffers you aren't going to make me give a shit about st@ncy after they've been broken up for almost 2 years in universe #and like 7 years in real time #i don't care. i'm never going to care. nncy was interested in a different guy for like 95% of their relationship #and steve is far more compelling when he interacts with literally any other character #why did you devote screentime to st@ncy hints in s4 when you could have done literally anything else??? #strangerthoughts

[wherestarsarestillasleep]

Tenmyouji biker speech is like the most important scene in vlr to me. Without that it looks like the narrative never even questions akanes explanations and plans and motives and like i guess that's easy to do when you playing video game are also viewing it from a dozens of timelines at once as means to the true end perspective. And the other characters in that bonus chapter like clover and alice are so bizarrely understanding and not mad at her for kidnapping them. But it being junpei of all people who forces you to think about how every timeline goes on and is the single linear world there ever was for everyone else in it. When akanes plan is so much "i am going to kill jumpy 6000 000 times so i can make a happy world with jumpy :)". It's so important and it singlehandedly fixes something that wouldve really really bugged me and it makes akane and sigma better characters when it's explicit the game isnt just like exclusively believing theyre simply correct

#seriously it #really contextualises akanes state in those timelines as a tragedy in a whole different way than she even acknowledges #my like Whole Take on akane is based around agreeing with junpei here i think #and that in real life i cannot time jump so how could i possibly not empathise more with that perspective i guess #this goes back a lot into how i write aoi even in just 999 also. ESPECIALLY the safe end so fucking compelled by the safe end #its kind of middle ground i guess cause he's operating under actions that align with akanes multiple world spanning plans but ive always #assumed hes a relatively shitty esper so even though he Knows she's right he can't Feel it. he is also just one guy in a linear world #that like. semi puts that aside #finding happiness in a world that hates it... #junpei you hearing this shit!? #tag later #(still does not have a tag for jumpy my top 3 character)

[bl00dw1tch]

God. God. God. Holy fucking shit i love Avatar so fucking much

#horse.txt #im being so real right now it breaks my goddamn heart that so many people hate it on principle and go into it waiting to be disappointed #like. god. seriously? how do so few people seem to see the shit im seeing? how do people not GET its RIGHT THERE??? #idk man im like. high and the hd release is out so it feels like Christmas but this shit has been on my mind and its at like a precipice #its one thing when ppl just aren't into it but the absolute LOATHING and DISDAIN people harbour for these movies is just. baffling #i cant understand it #i hate statistics. why did it have to pan out this way #how can anybody hate this production literally decades in the making? the fucking DEFINITION of a Passion Project? #the labour and love and inventive GENIUS that has gone into these films--and #you know what? the writing ISN'T that fucking awful. its not perfect because no movie is ever fucking perfect and sometimes you #have to give a script and characters breathing room. room to make mistakes!!! because this fucking obsession with #'characters dont have to be realistic!' is BULLSHIT. and NO saying that does not conflict with the idea that Characters=/=real ppl in #discourse!the ideas can fucking coexist! having realistic characters is GOOD its fucking GOOD when theyre stupid and do shit you dont like! #because thats what REAL PEOPLE DO thats what makes them fucking COMPELLING thats what youre SUPPOSED to let draw you in!!!!!! #but noooo no no no no keep repeating your smurf pocahontas jokes and roll your eyes at anyone who does like it like theyre stupid #because you can't be assed to give something a chance just because everyone Else is calling it stupid #and you dont want them to roll their eyes at /you/ #i know this is dumb to be so heated about but im just. im sad man. im happy im having a great day!! but im sad #about how few people i can share it with yk..???

[soldier-poet-king]

I'm finally back into the way of kings and like.kaladin. Kaladin. Babe. My poor little meow meow. Sad boy times only. Prime Blorbo material. I would die for him.

What a shame bsanderson is such A Worldbuilding Guy and I'm very much more a character driven person where the world mostly exists to serve the narrative & themes bc like. Ho boy is this one dragging. The dalinar chapters SHOULD be smthn I enjoy! Sad old men! Guilt! Honour! Chivalric codes! The ever encroaching fear that you're losing your sanity! And yet. Mcdying.

Love shallan and jasnah. Absolutely fascianted by scholarly, philosophical and religious infighting and implications there. But Kaladin is THEE cosmere guy of all time. He's uprooted even my mistborn era 1 faves. Guilt complex chronically depressed sometimes suicidal enslaved soldier is actually meant to be a healer and a surgeon and he is kind. And good. He doesn't want to be a miracle but for his men he will be. But he also said fuck the lighteyes class oppression all my homies hate this shit. I stood ZERO chance of him not being my fave immediately

#fran reads #fran reads cosmere #not tagging bc i like to be alive and not yelled at for not loving it as much as everyone else #im having fun! but also the PACING OH MY GOD #and bsanderson worldbuilds for its own sake. and THEN populates it w characters #or it feels like that. which is fine. #but im such an emotive character and theme driven hoe its like. om. #ok. but i need to be compelled #ur little racial group cultures and religions that worship rocks and long eyebrowed traders #all fine. #but WHY do they exist like this. HOW does it affect our characters and why they behave certain ways #if youre gonna go ham on the worldbuilding i need historical anthropological explanations in world #else I just get. bored? #which is v much a ME problem its not really a criticism just a preference #i find i don't have the same issues w tolkien either bc nostalgia blinders or bc tolkien was a historian and linguist and that comes out #*out in his work #and most the rest of my fantasy novels are character driven. loke even tge which has an expansice socially stratified political world #it facilitates character arcs and interactions. it doesnt just exist for its own sake #REAL LIFE CULTURES. VERY RARELY. JUST DO SHIT JUST BC #yeah yeah archaeology for ritual purposes joke. but THATS SLOPPY ANTHRO WORK. WE HATE IT #unhinged insane of me ik. i am going back to being sad abt prime blorbo material kaladin #bc he truly is SO good. THE bsanderson character For Me Definitely

[memorys-skyscraper]

yknow going through the whole yakuza/LAD series as quickly as i did made it really interesting to see how the series as a whole and some characters in specific evolved over time in response to changing audience interests, specifically a growing desire for pathos in their video games

if you'd told someone who'd just played 1 & 2 on the ps2 back in 2006 that by 2024, several of the most recent entries in the series would end with the protagonist having an absolute sobbing meltdown and/or begging the main antagonist to give up in lieu of just punching them into complete submission, there's a 0% chance they would've believed you

#rambles #yakuza #like a dragon #yakuza liveblogging #like it was fine for majima to just be a ~crazy guy~ in 2006 but by 0's release in 2016 that wasnt enough anymore #so he gets a tragic backstory with a love interest #nishiki gets fleshed out a ton in 0/kiwami 1 for the same reason #kiryu is sad about yumi's death in 1 but not so sad it stops him from starting a fling with sayama in 2 #but later games retroactively cast yumi as the one and only love of kiryu's life #and her death as probably the singular most traumatic event he's ever experienced #(though her/nishiki's/kazama's deaths all kind of get lumped together since they happened in such quick succession) #6 is the misadventures of grandpa kiryu bc dad kiryu is a much more compelling character vs. plain ol 'dude who punch real good' kiryu #hell kasuga in his entirety would not have worked in this series in the 00s except as a joke/side character #a dude who relentlessly believes in the inherent good of mankind and their ability to start over and change their ways no matter what? #in *yakuza*? nah take that shit back to kingdom hearts #anyway. its good! probably a necessary evolution for the series to stay relevant but good nonetheless #'dude who punch real good and cries sometimes' >>>>> 'dude who punch real good'

[welcometoteyvat]

things they couldve demonstrated way better in hsr:

high cloud quintet lore

#there's wayyyyyy more but this is the only thing i really care about #somewhat because this was part of the reason i started playing LOL fandom osmosis was rlly selling the tragic friendgroup/polycule lore #xianzhou contender for worst plot in history like they literally said have an entire story of exposition #im rewatching the jingliu jing yuan and yanqing video and it's so sad girl. erosion 2.0 star rail style #like where was this storytelling quality in the actual main plotline lmfao #hsr #ramblings! #queued #i'll admit you only really find out about zls dead harem in event quests and artifacts too but at least they're in events in some form #theyre also in story quests and shit like the impact on the world is real #in star rail i feel like the 5 dead gays r literally just forgotten unless you have the characters who were connected to the quintet #and yet their story is way more compelling than everything that actually happened in the main arc lmfao

[bobtheacorn]

I have a 3 y/o and it's after turkey day and she developed the Sniffles this weekend so today we laid on the couch and binged Mickey Christmas movies/specials and Duck the Halls (2016) was one of them and I just have a couple of questions that I'd like to ask the furry fanfic whump authors that were sitting in that writers room pitching ideas, chief among them....... Why?

#like yall were not slick i see you lmao #girl what were YOU doing at the devil's sacrament .jpg #one of those 'makes no goddamn sense. compels me tho' things for real #look it was on in the background while i was making alfredo and like #i dunno!!!!!!!! #anyone feeling weird abt diving into the monster/animal physiology of their fav anthro characters don't even worry about it is all im sayin #the big mouse done done it Apparently #get weird with it who even cares #donald almost dies of hypothermia bc hes a duck that didn't fly south and his friends rush to save him this is the most #trope heavy #whumptastic #furry fanfic writing shit ive ever seen in a cartoon aimed at kids like i'm laughing this isn't a good example #furry fanfic writers do it better #at least they play it straight and dont chuck it under a goofball lense skjdasfkla I DUNNO *throws hands* #i have to laugh i don't know i'm rotating that stupid 20 minutes in my brain and it won't get out #personal

[weed-hotel]

feeling like neil josten the way i dont give a shit about anyone other than the og foxes

#this is a bit !! but i do love my kids what can i say #not that the ravens or the trojans arent compelling to me im just going to fixate on like any of the foxes before them prolly #aftg #like if im being real the non fox (or fox adjacent adult) character that im most compelled by is (my ocs. but thats a whole other thing) pr #prolly thea maybe just bc i crave . women. but the thing that gets me about thea is that we never once see her (. we never once see her) #but like we dont see her capitalize on kevins fame/identity at all and thats such a low bar ! but considering we barely know anything about #her outside of just like Being a Raven i feel like thats a like standard path nora could have taken w kevins raven gf is that shes like #at least a little manipulative/aware that being involved w kevin could get her where she needs to go and theres no indication of that #which could def just be that everyone knows riko is in charge ! like that tracks but still..... thea tell me your secrets........ #and the fandom treats her like shit bc shes canonically an aggressive/not charismatic dark skinned black woman. but i digress !

[orcelito]

I love that Zazie and Elendira r my fav Gung ho guns bc of the Trans Vibes. And who's my third favorite? Well, I'm glad you asked!

Mid freak the horn valley

#speculation nation #this isnt counting wolfwood or livio bc Obviously theyre both favs too #for the actual antagonists who stay antagonists. these 3 r my favs #for midvalley it's 100% bc of itnl making me think about him enough that im just like #damn he's such an asshole & an objectively awful person. he compels me tho #elendira is a BITCH and i love her so much. every time she's snippy at Legato im just like yessss go offff #also canon trans woman. she could do anything and i would support her. #and then me the nonbinary/genderfluid person LOVING zazie's vibes. the bugs shit is so cool and so is the 0 care about gender #This Is A Trigun Maximum Love Zone. 98 Zazie Do Not Interact. #yeah. theyre all just real cool. i cant wait for the midvalley & wolfwood vibes in itnl bc the double double agents vibe is gonna b Great #like that spiderman meme. double agents but in the opposite directions. Love It. #id say Legato is more of a love to hate kind of character. awful awful person. really interesting character tho #idk i love the gung ho guns in general. what an eclectic group. Wonderful #trigun spoilers/ #itnl shit

[finitevariety]

i'm obsessed with how stupid mountaineering is. you put yourself in that situation

#i watched touching the void today and was left uhhhh cold #just bc you survive your act of hubris doesn't make it narratively compelling #and it doesn't make you a Strong Character it makes you a Lucky Dumbass #not to get into the imperialism bits but this is about imperialism actually #and also about how rich assholes are alienated from struggle and thus real achievement #so the especially stupid amongst them go off to die in crevasses and so on #or more commonly exploit sherpas who carry them up there w their oxygen tanks and then they write a shit book or do the speaker circuit #anyway yates was right to cut simpson's cord especially since he is now fully a transphobe on twitter so. #perhaps next time you break your leg and fall off a mountain just take that as a sign and give up #field notes

[gold-wolf-soldier13]

With all the new Anakin and Ahsoka posts I’m seeing, I’m also seeing more and more Obi-wan post and ig here’s my hot take of the day: fandom has absolutely made me hate Obi-wan. I honestly didn’t think much of him in the movies but the more I interact with fandom, and the prequels fandom in specific, the more I hate fanon interpretation of him which leaks into the canon portrayal and it’s gotten to the point where any time i even see his name I’m scoffing out loud and rolling my eyes

#idk how to fully describe it but I saw a post recently that was about anakin’s idolization of obi-wan and it gave me such an uncomfortable #feeling I had to close the app cause yeah maybe it’s been a while since I’ve seen anything past tpm but I never once got that impression #like ik this is very much a me problem but people need to calm tf down about obi-wan #like he’s really not that great of a character sorry not sorry #anything that makes him compelling is in the eu and eu isn’t canon #for fandoms as large as Star Wars is I hold to the general rule (that I bend at my discretion) that if it’s not stated in canon ie #the movies then it isn’t real and in the movies obi-wan is kind of a shit character #not whatever weird mix of messiah/poor mew mew fandom has turned him into #generally obi-wan in the fanon works I’ve interacted with is treated as like #the main character and everything that anakin does/feels/is gets so that it’s all about obi-wan and how it effect’s him #and I don’t know how to filter it so I’m still seeing all the anakin-focused prequel fic I want without him having to share the narrative