#and the character in question has too much pronounced personality for it to feel natural to alter her significantly

[babytarttdoodoo]

Please (if you want to) expand on what you said about the different ways Roy and Jamie swear because that is extremely fascinating

I mean, I'll start by saying I am in no way a linguistics expert. I also lack the cultural and social background to speak about the swearing habits of Mancunians and Londoners with any authority. (Again, to clarify, I am Scottish.)

However, being familiar with the accents in question, being immersed in British media my entire life, and having had voice training does mean I have an instinctual 'feel' for what sounds right for their characters... or what does for me, at least.

Swearing and rambling under the cut.

Beyond just swear words, the cadence and tones of Roy and Jamie's voices are vastly different.

Jamie talks faster, for one. It is a bit of a trend that the further north you go in the UK, the speedier the speech gets. I slow down a lot, even if I'm just visiting England, in order to be understood by non-Scots.

Therefore, Jamie uses longer words or phrases more casually in conversation (if not always correctly, bless his heart) because the rhythm of his speech allows for it. This also means that if he swears mid-sentence, it's basically just punctuation and comes across as a habit.

Adding adjectives adds emphasis. So when he is intentionally swearing directly at someone, he would call that someone a "big hairy baby twat" rather than just a "twat".

(I will also point out that I think "fucking dickhead" is criminally underused by Jamie in both canon and fanon.)

Roy, on the other hand, has a slower rhythm. He still swears very naturally (obviously) but is more likely to use single syllable words i.e. "fuck", "prick", "shit".

The way that vowels sound in his accent also plays a part here. For example, he says "fah-ck", as opposed to Jamie's softer "foh-ck", which is immediately more tonally aggressive (the different way they draw out the vowels is important too but I can't think of how to describe it).

Roy doesn't need to add on anything extra because the harder tone of his voice gives every swear a weighty impact. However, that's not to say he can't get creative.

Let's take Roy calling the woman harassing Jamie a "nutty arsemonger" in the Protective RoyxJamie fic. I agonised over what Roy was going to say because when he takes a second to think about how he's going to insult someone, things get colourful.

Cultural influence plays a bigger part in these scenarios.

The use of "nutter" is pretty widespread in the UK. "Nutty" as a descriptor, however, is a bit more specific and something I'd personally associate with the South.

That has to be paired with something and, particularly as he's talking to a woman, that makes things complicated.

Now, if I'm being brutally honest, in reality, someone of Roy's background and age would probably have said "cunt". It's very much not as big of a deal over here as I know it can be in the States. Tat said, it still felt a bit harsh to me as something someone in the 'Ted Lasso' universe would say. It's also very gender-charged and if Roy were going to use it, he's more likely to say it to another man.

For similar reasons, I discounted him calling her a "cow" or a "bitch". Less severe, but still not quite right for a man in his (at this point) early 40s who goes out of his way to be respectful to the women he knows. (Moments of idiocy aside, of course.)

That brought me to "arse". Anyone can be one. Great.

But he can't just say "nutty arse" and call it a day. Firstly, because "s" is a soft sound, especially in a deep tone, and the insult sounds incomplete in Roy's voice if he doesn't end on a hard note. Say it to yourself, try out your best Kent impression - it isn't right, is it?

Jamie absolutely could just say "arse" because the "ah" sound is very harsh in his accent and the "s" is more pronounced by his higher voice.

But Roy needs something more to round out the phrase. I landed on "arsemonger" eventually because of the meaning more than anything. (Generally used for someone without class, implies promiscuity.) Introducing that "ger" at the end also sounded a lot better and more natural.

I don't know if I'm making any sense here but hopefully this communicates a bit of what I meant?

If you're looking to delve a bit deeper (without the swearing), a good point of reference might be the Ninth Doctor and Rose's era of 'Doctor Who'. It's not perfect (Christopher is from Salford, Billie from Swindon) but it's another really good example of North/South talking habits.

'Only Fools and Horses' might give you a good idea of the language Roy grew up around, just bear in mind it's more in tune with his parents' generation.

'Coronation Street' is the obvious touchstone for Manchester accents but I haven't watched it in a long time. The kids in 'Waterloo Road' might be a bit more relevant as contemporary examples.

#the art of swearing #I could be talking nonsense #jamie tartt #roy kent

[cloud0818]

Hi, sorry for a random ask :')

First of all, I'd like to thank you for all of your analysis so far. They're all very interesting and insightful.

So I was inspired by your Reading KHR in Japanese and went and reread some arcs in both English and Vietnamese (my mother tongue) and I find it interesting in how Kyoya addresses Fon in the Vietnamese translation.

While in English there aren't many pronouns that indicate the relationship between 2 speakers, Vietnamese has a lot of them. And Kyoya, throughout the series, used "ta" as a first pronoun and "ngươi" as a second pronoun, which indicates a bit of arrogance and dismissiveness, as well as superiority, and he uses them toward almost all characters, even for Dino and Reborn, except for Fon and only him.

For Fon, there are 2 version of pronoun set that I found, "tớ" - "cậu" and "tôi" - "anh", the former from the online copies, and the latter from the official translation, and of course they have completely different meaning. While both sets of pronoun are slightly polite and indicate some familiarity, the first one is used between friends or those in a same age, whereas the second one used toward men that are slightly older than the speaker, not too old to be the speaker's father, but old enough to be their brother.

This had been bothering me for the longest of time because of how unusual it is, and I'm curious if the Japanese version correlate with either set, or this is just a mistranslation or a localization.

Thank you in advance 😥🙏

Thank you for your very interesting question! And I'm sorry for the delay in answering.

First, in Japanese, Kyoya uses the same first person for everyone. It's general and neutral with no specific personality. Surety, there is a sense of nobility, but it's more strongly influenced by his other words than by the power of the words them own. Few people use this first person on a daily life in reality. This may make him appear put on airs. However, as can be seen from the fact that Mukuro and Shoichi or Tsuna when speaking with adults also use this first person, the word itself still doesn't have a strong meaning.

It's formal enough to be used for superiors and seniors, but not for business partners. It's polite, not too much. It also has a pure nuance as it may be used by young children. So it's not feel strange if people with opposite personalities use it. When used by Mukuro, it's emphasized formality and when used by Shoichi and Tsuna, it's emphasized purity. When Kyoya uses it, it can be taken either way because of what he says and does. Sometimes it's felt elegant, sometimes it's felt childish.

About the second person pronounce, he uses the same one for Fon as he does for others. There is no sense of intimacy or closeness in their conversation. It's no different than how he speaks to Reborn. Once there was a fairly shallow reference to Fon and Kyoya's mystery relationship in the comic, but at least it doesn't show in their conversations. They are together for their own benefit. It's not meant to be negative, at least there is no specific bond.

Kyoya uses different second-person pronouns for Dino than others. But it probably from his personality rather than expressing his feelings toward Dino or their relationship. In many case, the way we speak changes depending on emotions or relationship with the person we are speaking to. So we can sometimes know what they think of others by the way of speaking. But in his case, if anything it is more a manifestation of his character and nature. He doesn't care who they are. It's shows very clearly that he really has no human interest in anyone.

There are several types of personal pronouns in Japanese, but they doesn't have special meanings on them own. In the extreme, it's either formal or casual. It rarely changes with the level of intimacy. The same personal pronouns often have completely different nuances, so a word by itself is more just a means of composing a sentence than a meaningful.

I focused on English and Japanese, but Vietnamese is very interesting. Thanks for sharing great information!

#katekyo hitman reborn #khr #reading khr in japanese #kyoya hibari

[raisinchallah]

you know i think its interesting that people like to debate this way and that what ruined the borg and made the borg stories so bad but idk ive never been a huge borg fan and it feels like as a concept just from moment of creation they were designed to not really work as part of a long form tv show like u could do a lot with them in a standalone book or movie or something but they inhernetly have diminishing returns and most of the stories kinda go the same way they are so overwhelming like theyre far more like something like the daleks or the cybermen which already suffer from problems of diminishing returns but they can play politics they can hide out in all sorts of settings the structure of doctor who allows for a lot more narrative flexibility with what you do with them and still huge swaths of dalek stories suuuuck like the borg are quite cool but very flimsy the longer u try to work with them its something that collapses under itself theyre a collective u cant create interesting characters who are still fully borg like seven of nine is cool and all but she really has almost nothing to do with the borg by the time shes well a character theyre almost a natural disaster more than a traditional enemy when handled well and tbh just being able to defeat them when nobody else had that humans give them that much trouble feels idk arrogant and silly i was surprised i rewatched i borg and honestly didnt really like it all that much on this time i feel like alfkkad its so funny how much the problem seems to be that the borg dont have a sense of individual identity and well thats just evil and wrong idk i think they also almost play the part of being the barrier of like this is as strange as aliens can get this is the limits of what we accpet and existences that are ok or not ok it gets more pronounced with seven of nine its just so funny like ok be your own person you just have to be like us dont get too weird on us or anything and u should be forced to be an individual and it allows borg drones to be used like zombies just meaningless bodies that are almost already dead so who cares u know like there is not a morality question to blowing up an entire borg cube like again i think the sci fi horror potential and the designs and shit its all very cool and quite compelling but its just a weird sell for a long sprawling franchise like star trek i do think its kinda interesting and i guess the irony or interplay between the federation wanting people to conform to their narrow range of being and the borg its like a compelling interesting tension i guess but idk i feel like nobody really figured out the best metaphors or concepts to really mess with and idk its fascinating

[red-dragon-archfiend]

Sometimes I have multiple ideas for one class when really I should just figure out what I would do if I had ONE character for each class

#musings #dungeons and dragons #realistically speaking i'm going to prioritize trying new classes over playing the same one in a slightly different way #i have a bunch of ideas for fighters but do i really think i would have enough opportunities to play new characters to play fighter twice #so instead of making several ideas i should boil most of them down into one character with all my favorite parts #the 'bandit king' idea is the only one i feel can't really be combined with the others neatly because it's so different in feel #and the character in question has too much pronounced personality for it to feel natural to alter her significantly #so what i'd probably end up doing is a dragonborn eldritch knight to play with the new ua #because eldritch knight is the subclass i'm most interested in #at first i considered fire genasi before i realized i really just wanted fire bolt and the fire genasi features are underpowered #then i wanted to try high elf for perception and the extra cantrip #but that may feel too similar to my cleric who is a high elf for those same reasons #the new ua dragonborns are the first lineage i looked at and really wanted to play a fighter with #so i may do that?

[stillness-in-green]

No, Re-Destro Is Not Destro’s Literal Son

and

Yes, I Will Die On This Hill

I have a number of small, persistent quibbles with some of the widespread misapprehensions I see included in BNHA fanfic, quoted as fact in meta posts, even cited on the wiki. Quirk cancellation restraints, what the 20% quirklessness data point means in practice, when Kurogiri comes into existence relative to the time of the Shimura Family Massacre, things like that. My biggest one, though, is as the title suggests: the idea that Yotsubashi Rikiya is Yotsubashi Chikara’s son.

I don’t entirely know where this confusion comes from. As far as I can tell, the early scanlations didn’t get it wrong—one rendered the line in Chapter 218 about Destro having a child he didn’t know about as being children, plural, but otherwise, they were all accurate enough. It seems people just assumed that the child mentioned in 218 must be Re-Destro, who was, after all, right there on the panel. Even though the scanlations never said it, even though the official translation never said it, even though ample evidence in the manga disproves it, the idea still got around that Rikiya is Chikara’s son.

I have and will maintain that this is obviously wrong if you stop to think about it for even a moment, but unfortunately, most people don’t. The error can be found on less well-tended parts of the fandom wiki[1]; it’s in tumblr meta posts about the villains; it’s in fanfic.

And now, god help me, it is on the official anime website, too.

“Stillness-in-green, maybe you should consider that you might just be wro—”

I will face BONES and walk backwards into hell.

But if you want, you can come with me, and I’ll explain on the way. Hit the jump.

Dialogue + Narration

There are two places where the relationship between Chikara and Rikiya is explicitly addressed—the lead-in to the dinner scene in Chapter 218 and the fight between Clone!Shigaraki and RD in Chapter 232. If you include the Ultra Analysis databook, the number goes up to four: once each in Re-Destro and Destro Classic’s character blurbs.

Let’s take a look at each of those places, shall we?

The relevant Japanese text here is in the first narration box: 子ども, kodomo.

Kodomo is not gendered. It literally just means child. The key kanji is 子, ko. Like most kanji, it has a lot of potential readings, and you can add other kanji to it to modify it. Add 息 and you get musuko, son. Pronounce 子 as shi instead of ko, and you get a term that is frequently, though not exclusively, used to refer to boys. Add 女 to that reading and you get joshi, woman/girl. 子 is in a lot of words, many of them gendered! Used for kodomo as Hori does here, though, it does nothing to indicate a gender one way or the other.

Also too, it does nothing to indicate that Rikiya is the child in question; it simply states that there was such a child, somewhere in the world. Now, the natural assumption for anyone who knows how the graphic novel medium works and who understands basic literary analysis would be that the significant character we just met is, in fact, the child in question—except that everything else we learn about Destro and the original Meta Liberation Army here makes it entirely impossible.

I’ll do a full breakdown on why that is in the next section. In the meantime, here’s the next reference:

Here, we’re looking at the phrase the Viz translation renders as, “His blood runs through these veins.” The literal Japanese there is, Desutoro no matsuei chi o tsugu mono! In a literal translation, chi o tsugu mono means, “one who inherits the blood,” or, more loosely, “blood successor.” It’s matsuei—末裔—that’s the key word here.

Japanese has several words to express the concept of “descendant.” Matsuei is one word; the data book uses shison. So what’s the difference? Well, I’ll talk about shison in a moment, but I had an inkling of it just from looking at the kanji in matsuei—“end” and “descendant” respectively, leaving me with an impression of something like a final descendant or the terminus of the bloodline. Further research confirmed it: shison can refer to any lineal blood tie, but matsuei refers to a bloodline’s final inheritor, the person at the end of a long line of many, or even countless, generations. It’s the difference between being able to point to a grandparent and the kind of painstaking genealogical research that lets you[2] point to a famous royal from eight hundred years ago—matsuei is a word that very much assumes the existence of those countless generations.

So not only does Rikiya’s line there not imply that he’s Chikara’s son, but his specific word choice also tells us that he cannot be Chikara’s son. That’s, uh. Pretty conclusive, I would say.

Lastly, though, there’s also the data book. This is, perhaps, the actual closest you’re going to get to a manga equivalent of those character blurbs on the anime website, at least until such time as Hori deigns to give the MLA types character profile pages. (I live ever in hope.)

There are two relevant bits of text, one in Re-Destro’s entry, and the other in Destro Classic’s. The first describes how Re-Destro organizes the MLA as Desutoro no chi o tsugu mono: the same phrase he uses for himself in the manga, minus the matsuei. @codenamesazanka (the one who told me about the databook references among other citations, bless) rendered it as “Destro’s blood successor”; I have also seen it given as “the successor of Destro’s bloodline.” Note again, the lack of reference to a father/son bond.

Chikara’s entry uses that other descendant word I mentioned before, 子孫, shison. Notice that the term uses that ko kanji from kodomo before? As it does in joshi, 子 here reads shi. The other kanji, 孫, means grandchild. Thus, literally, grandchild-child—or, in the vernacular, simply descendant.

And then we have the anime website.

So, for comparison’s sake, the anime website uses 息子—the same combination of kanji that I said earlier gives you musuko, son. Heck, it even uses 父, chichi, for Destro—father. It’s as explicit as it’s possible to be, and I just don’t know why or how the anime website could fuck that up so bad when absolutely nothing in the manga describes the two Yotsubashis that way, and, indeed, one specific word choice actually rules out the possibility.

So, that’s all the manga says directly. It’s not the only evidence there is, though. In fact, the next piece makes it even more clear how colossally and impossibly wrong a father/son connection for Destro and his modern successor is.

Timeline

The long and short of this section is, “Since Harima Oji was Sako Atsuhiro’s great-great-grandfather, there is no possible way that Destro—who pre-dated Harima—can be Re-Destro’s father.” If you read that sentence and nodded your complete understanding and agreement, feel free to skip ahead to the last section. If you’d like the full explanation it takes to reach that sentence’s conclusion, though, read on.

So, aside from the word matsuei, the timeline is the most telling piece of evidence to my eye. I address it secondly rather than firstly because it’s less direct than the explicit narration; it relies on drawing conclusions based on things we’ve been told elsewhere rather than on the immediately relevant text. Oh, Mr. Compress’s relationship to Harima is explicit enough, but on what am I basing my claim that Destro predates him?

Regarding that, there’s no explicit year relative to My Hero Academia’s current events given for when Destro and the original Meta Liberation Army were active; the same is true for Harima Oji’s escapades. However, we are given some broad-strokes information, relative not to current events, but rather to the history of heroism as a legal institution in Japan.

We know that there was a widespread, lengthy period of chaos following the rise of quirks—called meta-abilities in those early years. At some point, however, people began to search for a way for meta-humans to live in peace with non-metas. The compromise that was reached was the foundation of professional heroism in Japan—while the use of meta-abilities would be legal in private settings, it was only by becoming licensed by the state as “heroes” that people could use their quirks in public.[3]

The legislation curtailing the use of meta-abilities—and the appropriation of a dead woman’s language to popularize a law establishing exactly the opposite of what she used that language to call for—is what catalyzed the rise of the original MLA. Thus, we can position Destro as being alive and active around the same time that heroism as a legal institution was being formed. Since we further know that he committed suicide in prison, we can assume that his child was conceived at some point prior to his capture. Ergo, Destro’s child, were they alive today, would be as old as Japanese professional heroism itself.

Next, consider Harima Oji, the Peerless Thief, a criminal who targeted the riches of “sham heroes.” We’re specifically told that he was active in the days in which the current system was settling into place—e.g. he only became active once the Hero System was established enough to have produced corrupt heroes. We’re told he preached reformation—he wasn’t just some pre-existing criminal who saw a shiny new target in heroes; he had specific grievances which he wanted addressed by the system, and which the system was not addressing.

The earliest Harima could possibly be active, then, is concurrent with Destro—Harima fighting against the corrupt people who had found their way into the new heroic institution, and Destro fighting against using the institution of heroism to oppress non-heroes. What I think is more likely, though, is that Harima came after Destro—Harima needed to have had time to realize what kinds of fakes had been drawn to this shiny new career path, maybe even to spend some time trying to change things the legal way.

I don’t suspect they were separated by very long—I would imagine Destro was easily within Harima’s living memory, and might well have influenced why he chose the path of protest that he did—but I do think they were separate.

Moving forward, then, Mr. Compress is four generations distant from his famous ancestor. Thus, even if you assume that Harima is of the same generation as Chikara, that’s what you’re looking at for Chikara’s child: someone who, were they alive today, would be old enough to be the great-grandparent of a thirty-two-year-old man.

Re-Destro’s probably a few years older than Mr. C, sure,[4] but that man doesn’t have Ujiko’s slow-aging quirk. Unless you want to start pulling theories about cryogenic stasis the story for some reason never saw fit to mention out of thin air, Re-Destro is in no way old enough to fit the bill.

This is backed up by one other piece of the timeline as well, and one more place we can look at language:

The small child at the center of the image is Rikiya, so young that he’s in schoolboy shorts for a meeting otherwise so formal that he’s been made to wear a tie. He’s, what, six to nine here, tops? And the adults speaking to him say that they’ve been in hiding for generations—代々, daidai, the kanji for generation followed by a kanji that just means, “See that kanji written right before me? Yeah, just read that one again.”

The original MLA was active for only a handful of years, and, per Chapter 218, they didn’t dissolve until Destro was captured. Thus, we can assume they have been in hiding since then, but not before then. With that in mind, this is another line that renders a father/son relationship impossible.

Remember, Chikara already had a child in the world circa his capture. If Rikiya were Chikara’s son, then Destro’s capture and his army’s subsequent dissolution could not have happened any farther back than nine months plus however old Rikiya was in this exact moment of his youth. Rikiya, who we see here as a child of less than ten.

Ten years in hiding doesn’t make one generation; it damn sure doesn’t make multiple ones.

Now, you could make theories about cryogenic statis that would explain this ludicrous discrepancy, sure. You could also theorize about e.g. artificial insemination,[5] or time stop quirks, or any number of other possibilities in the vast panoply the HeroAca world offers. The point is, though, that you don’t need to. There was, in the manga, no discrepancy that needed to be explained. It is only fanon misinterpretation and a glaring disinterest in the series’ villains from official sources that have presented this issue.

I’m praying that it’s all just a misunderstanding on the part of whoever maintains the website, and that the anime itself will render the relevant bits of dialogue correctly. Given the extreme cuts and alterations that My Villain Academia has been subjected to thus far, though, I’m sure you can appreciate my being concerned.

…So that’s the meat of it. The idea that Rikiya is Chikara’s son is wrong simply on the basis of what’s said in the text, and it’s doubly wrong on the basis of the timeline. There is, though, one other thing I think points towards Re-Destro being exactly the descendant he says he is, not a son playing down the connection out of humility or something. This one is a lot more headcanon-y, though, so I saved it for last.

MLA Social Dynamics

It’s quite simple. We have, in the MLA, a group of people that venerates Destro’s bloodline to an obviously unhealthy degree, putting up portraits of him wherever they can get away with it, tagging his successor with a “Re-” as if to invoke reincarnation or miraculous return, entirely willing to throw their lives away for what they think was his cause, and others’ lives if those others say anything too scathing about the words Destro wrote, quite as if they treat Destro’s memoir as some sort of holy writ.

They venerate Destro that much, and you’re trying to tell me that they wouldn’t just call a spade a spade and acknowledge RD as the son of their great leader? Come on.

Since long before I turned up the matsuei factoid in researching this piece, since long before Mr. Compress gave us such a helpful generational comparison, I’ve held the opinion that, given a group that holds their leaders in such high esteem, with such particular regard for bloodline, the only reason Rikiya does just call himself a descendant, rather than citing the specific term for what he is, is that the specific term is distant enough that it actually does sound more impressive to just say “descendant,” rather than something like, “great-great-great-grandson.” That kind of thing just begs the question, “What took you guys so long?” or, “You and how many other people, buddy?”

Mr. Compress may have the panache to carry off a line like that, but Rikiya’s a different story. If he had something so amazing up his sleeve as, “I am the son of the great Destro,” I have to think he’d just say it proudly, not fall back on the impressionistic vaguery of something like chi o tsugu mono. Even if I had no other evidence to work with, I’d think the same—all the evidence you need is right there in the character writing of who Rikiya and the MLA are and how they talk about the man whose dreams Re-Destro was raised to carry.

A closing note: I will allow that Rikiya is being overdramatic when he uses matsuei and its connotation of countless generations. There are a few other things we can use to trace the history of heroism—Ujiko’s age, and the 18-years-or-less periods that One For All was held by its pre-All Might bearers—and running those numbers leads me to believe that it is, in fact, entirely possible to count the number of generations between Rikiya and Chikara, and the number, while higher than one, is probably not all that high. Certainly matsuei is being more dramatic about it than is entirely warranted, hence the poetic flourish of the official translation’s, “His blood runs through these veins!” The theatricality only makes me fonder of him, however.

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

FOOTNOTES

[1] It was changed and reverted on Re-Destro’s page at least twice before it finally stuck in January of this year. Chikara’s page took until July to be corrected, and it’s still wrong on various other subpages.

[2] Or your kids, if you have those. Only the last generation in the bloodline is the matsuei, but that’s a moving goalpost as long as the bloodline is still propagating.

[3] This summary of events combines what we know from both My Hero Academia proper and the Vigilantes spin-off, which I recommend to anyone who’s at all interested in finer-grained worldbuilding on Hero Society Japan than the main series makes time for.

[4] I personally headcanon him as 42.

[5] To which point I would refer back to the word kodomo, and note that that word choice indicates that Destro had a child in the world. Not a sperm sample kept in a freezer somewhere, waiting for the right would-be mother: an actual child. Some quick research on my part says that the farthest that term stretches is in using it to refer to yet-unborn children, fetuses still in the womb. Seeing as Japan doesn’t even allow inmates conjugal visits in real life, much less in a setting where villains are so dehumanized that Tartarus is an acceptable punishment for them, the line about Destro “having a child out in the world” takes us right back to a date of conception no later than Destro’s final night of freedom.

#boku no hero academia #my hero academia #bnha #bnha meta #yotsubashi rikiya #yotsubashi chikara #re-destro #destro bnha #meta liberation army #my writing #i have thoughts on the anime's nonsense too but #hahawow #that's gonna take a little longer to get coherent #preview: it's not about capitalism #it's about fear

[itsclydebitches]

Rewatching RWBY there's this chilling lack of empathy through the volumes that I used to just wave off. Yang has no empathy for Tai, Blake is just entirely about what Blake needs, Weiss almost kills a woman at a party and her takeaway is 'my dad is mean so I'm going to run away'. Qrow sinks hard into depression in vol. 6 and Ruby's reaction is to yell she's never needed him. No one has EVER helped a civilian. It's so prevelant. Knowing how 7&8 go really changes the earlier writing.

I think there was a great deal of well-written empathy in the early volumes — after all, this cast was designed as the kind, well-meaning heroes — but that care was expressed almost solely within the group itself. Ruby sits by Jaune in the hallway and says "Nope!" to his self doubt. Weiss offers Ruby a hand up after she fails to kill the death stalker. Yang seeks out Blake and gets her to open up about what's bothering her. Now, I want to emphasize that there's nothing inherently wrong with this. It actually makes perfect sense. These are our main characters and they're written as peers co-habiting the same space. Of course whatever emotional growth we get, which automatically includes moments of compassion, would be directed towards each other. Similarly, the dynamics originally introduced — that of teachers and parents — likewise (rightly) puts the burden on the adults to provide the comfort, not the other way around. Port snaps Weiss out of her arrogant mindset. Ozpin reassures Ruby about her leadership worries. Tai is there to support his daughter when she's recovering from a lost limb. That's the natural order of things, so to speak.

The problem, to my mind, begins to occur when the group exits those dynamics. They're no longer students, they're licensed huntsmen. They're no longer kids, but equals who never needed adults in the first place. They're no longer doing things for themselves and their friends on personal downtime, they're doing them for the community at large as a profession (to say nothing of the world-altering war they've insisted on shouldering responsibility for). That's what a huntsmen is meant to be, a defender of the people, not someone who uses that power for personal interests alone. All of this is a huge change from where we started out: cutesy kids going off on comparatively low-stakes adventures because one or more of their teammates are invested, only just beginning to realize that they're signing up for a job where their desires come second (that fireside conversation at Mountain Glenn).

This change invites — demands, really — that the audience read them differently too. Qrow's spiral in Volume 6 is a good example of this. If Ruby is demanding to be treated not just as an equal in terms of maturity and experience, but also as the primary leader of this group, then the viewer expects her to treat her uncle as an equal too, not dismiss his hardship. I've seen numerous fans defend that arc with some version of, "He's her uncle. He's supposed to take care of her. He's failing" but that, according to the show, is no longer the dynamic. Qrow is now just a member of Ruby's team, someone she's responsible for as their leader. It's easiest to see the problem if we switch out Qrow for any of the other members. If Blake developed a drinking problem, do we think Ruby would just shout at her until she magically got over it? If Jaune endangered the group, do we think they'd all be angry about it, rather than trying to figure out the source of what caused the mistake? We don't even need to think hypothetically for that one because we saw it on screen. Jaune attacked Oscar and drove him off, not just threatening him, but arguably endangering the whole team by requiring a search party. Fans have long insisted they had to steal that airship right then because being in Argus was too much of a risk, but if we buy that reading (which I personally don't, but), then that means Jaune made things exponentially worse by forcing them out into that super dangerous city, rather than allowing everyone to stay hidden inside. He made a massive mistake which, according to the logic of Qrow's arc, should be met with frustration, disdain, and eventual demands to get over his anger at Ozpin or ship out. But, of course, he received nothing but concern. Yang was worried about him, not Oscar. The search becomes about his grief for Pyrrha and his team's willingness (as well as Pyrrha's family member) to provide more comfort. Suddenly, the tendency to express care solely towards those within the group becomes a flaw the story won't acknowledge.

And then it spirals. The thing to remember is that no single act here is bad on its own, especially when we consider that yes, we want flawed characters. Rather, it's about the pattern. Ruby is allowed to get mad at Qrow for his behavior and chuck her scroll in frustration. She's human. I'd be crazy frustrated too. However, if Ruby is meant to be written as a caring, sympathetic character, she should not only respond to the situation with frustration, yelling, a refusal to listen, and demands that he follow her lead, no questions asked. We can, and should, acknowledge that Weiss was the victim during that party. Her father was hurting her, the woman was beyond insensitive, Weiss was triggered in regards to a horrific event, and her power acted on its own. However, if we want to write Weiss as a compassionate, mature huntress to-be, she should acknowledge that she nearly killed someone — even an asshole someone — and vow to work on her control because she's not willing to put someone in danger like that ever again. Both of these moments have a "They could have been handled better" response attached to them — the former more-so than the latter imo — but these moments are made far, far worse due to later events in the show, events where the characters are cruel without any justification attached. Weiss didn't mean to attack that woman, but she did mean to ignore Whitely and threaten him with her weapon. So once we see that, it informs our understanding of what came before it. "Oh. The fact that Weiss never reacted to nearly killing someone isn't just a bit of missed potential, it's an early indicator that she... doesn't seem to care. If she endangers people, threatens people... that's fine with her." The group has a right to be frustrated with Qrow. The group did not have the right to magically steal Ozpin's entire life story, assault him, and blame him for the world's problems until he felt his only course of action was to run from them. So when we see that it becomes, "Oh. The fact that the group treated Qrow so poorly isn't just a one-time mistake born of a stressful situation and young adults being out of their depth in regards to alcoholism. They really will just abandon anyone the moment they start making mistakes." Anyone outside of their group, that is.

To say nothing of how all of these moments interconnect. Yang's recovery isn't just about getting used to not having an arm, it's about getting used to having a new one. Weiss' party isn't just about nearly killing someone, it's about not committing manslaughter because someone else stepped in. The Volume 6 arc isn't just about trying to escape with the Relic, it's about trying to get it somewhere safe. Fans frustrated with Ironwood's treatment don't harp on these details out of some desperate attempt to make him look good post-murder spree, rather, they recognize that he's a character that's been around since nearly the beginning, originally written as a good guy, and thus has accumulated a number of key connections with the cast. So when none of those connections are acknowledged during an arc about trust... that makes the group look very uncaring. Yang doesn't care that he gave her the arm, Weiss doesn't care that he saved her from hurting/potentially killing someone, Qrow doesn't care that he's trusted Ironwood for years (in a rival-bros way) and that they've been heading towards him this whole time. And when Ironwood begins to spiral, they don't do anything to try and help him, let alone acknowledge that their own choices, that lack of trust and empathy, had a hand in getting them here. "But it's not their responsibility to fix him!" Isn't it? Even a little? Just as human beings seeing an ally struggling under horrific decisions and circumstances? Sure, they don't have to try... but that doesn't make them look very heroic to my mind. And we can't even shrug that off by simplifying things with, "Well, Ironwood is evil now so who cares about him." They simultaneously don't care about finding Qrow who is missing, then captured. They don't do anything to try and find their missing teammates, with the exception of sending May to do it instead. They don't help the army fight off the grimm. Don't try to make sure Pietro and Maria had portals to escape through. Barely hesitate when the newly resurrected characters goes, "Kill me. That's the easiest thing for everyone." And these are just a few of the big ticket moments. It doesn't even begin to cover all the details we get that paint a picture of, "Wow okay. They just really don't care about people outside the group, huh? I mean, they say they do, in a life-or-death way, but they're not putting forth effort to show it on a daily basis."

And if you pick up on all that, if you acknowledge how much the group has changed based on where they started out, you might wonder when in the world that started. Surely we didn't just flip a switch around Volume 6. So you re-watch early stuff and, sure enough, there are moments that feel like setup for what's to come later. Not intentional setup (quite obviously), but a lack of care towards details across the series that, once the dynamic changed, became far, far more pronounced. Characters should be at least somewhat recognizable from start to finish, especially characters who have only experienced about two years of in-world time, so if we now get to see Ruby blandly commenting on all the people who are dying, or Weiss using her weapon as a means of coercing her little brother into doing what she wants, or Yang and Jaune dismissing Ren until he gives in to their point of view... we're going to look for the beginnings of that behavior early on. As you say, we were able to wave all those little details off due to a number of important factors. Now though? Now they feel like they hold a lot more weight, simply by virtue of that early material proceeding what we have now.

#rwby #rwde #mymetas

[justimajin]

Til Death Do Us Part ♜ Pt. 1

➟ Pairing: Namjoon x Reader 

➟ Genre: Angst, Fluff, Eventual Smut 

↳ (3.7k), Arranged Marriage AU

➟ Summary: If someone told you that you’d be marrying the Kim Namjoon, you would think you were being lied to, or worse, that you were hallucinating. However, fate seems to have it’s own ways of making the impossible possible and before you even know it, the title of Mrs. Kim is bestowed onto you. There’s just one problem: you’re not sure if Kim Namjoon is the person he says he is and the truth of your own identity is dangling by the strength of a mere thread. 

➟ Warnings: This series will involve themes of graphic violence, depictions of blood, major character death and hints of trauma. 18+ rating. Reader discretion is highly advised. 

gif credit. 

➟ Next Update: Tuesday, December 22 

Love is a strange thing. 

It pulls individuals together, sparking fireworks and blissful rays of euphoria within seconds. It renders people affectionate, words dripped with honey and caresses full of tenderness transcending  without a means of stopping. To be frank, it’s majestic through the eyes of the beholder. 

But love is indeed a strange thing. 

It’s history has been plagued with moments of weakness and hesitation, moments that rip away layers to reveal raw, vulnerable selves from every individual. It’s inability to forget and move on clutches onto the minds of those that chose to associate with it, invading their memories and never granting them a single second to run free. Love is a strange thing, but it’s most putrid use has always been the necessity to use it like a tool. 

A deep breath escapes your tinted red lips, cold hands clutching onto the delicate bouquet that’s been thrust into them. The petal pink and lilac purple flowers rest against the chaste white of your dress, the awaited arrival of yours long passed as you raise your head and sneak a peek at the person standing in front of you behind your veil. 

Clad in a special tailored suit for the occasion, his dark brown hair has been brushed back and neatly tucked into the corners of his hair. He stands tall and confident, seemingly captivated by the words the priest mumbles through as he drags on through every dull phase written in his book. As if he can tell your eyes are on him, he suddenly looks in your direction and you return your gaze back to the ground, clutching onto the array of petals in your hands. 

The priest goes on to dutifully declare the responsibilities you must carry, including the very ones that tie you to each other. 

For better, for worse. Rich, poor. Sickness, health. 

Love. Cherish. 

“Until death do you part?” The priest peers up with fatigued eyes, glancing in between you. You suck in a shaky breath, eyes fixating on everything except for the man standing on the opposing side.  

“I-I do.” You hastily mutter, swallowing the lump stuck in your throat. Patiently waiting for his answer, you try not to focus on the collection of eyes gawking at you from the altar. 

“I do.” He states, firm and resolute with his answer. It shakes you to your core, eyes immediately flickering up to meet his warm ones. 

You’re perplexed for a moment, but you’re not given time to dwell any longer once the priest shuts his book, content with your answers. Relief floods you in an instant, yet it’s short-lived and has your stomach churning instead. 

“You may kiss the bride.” The priest steps back as if you needed room for the grandiose gesture, eagerly awaiting the showcase with the rest of the people seated in front of the altar. Nevertheless, your hands begin to quiver despite your best wishes and you remain planted in place. 

Before you even know it, the delicate veil resting against your forehead is being pulled up and tucked away, projecting your dolled up features on full display. You can only fidget when he draws near, preparing for the worse until he pauses. 

Glancing up in surprise, you’re caught off guard from the lines crossing his forehead and the dismay clouding his eyes. For a second, you could have sworn that you were gazing into a mirror, an image of your combined concerns being painted right in front of you. 

You’re caught in between a daze and bewilderment when he advances again, however all you feel is a soft peck against your skin before your veil is placed back into place. Your audience seems to be at loss with the action, but once he turns around to face them in the midst of holding your hand, loud cheers and roars flood the room as congratulatory confetti bursts into the room. 

Unconsciously, your hand drifts over to your cheek with furrowed brows and you steal another glance at the man you will be bound to for eternity. 

***

The L/N Family. 

Tactical and resourceful, known for their skillful strategies and trade explorations, a business they would go on to proudly pronounce in the arms industry. Others would look to them for support and reassurance, and they would in return cohesively make protective deals that would ensure no harm. Yonghwa, their head, would go on to make a legacy out of his family name. 

The Kim Family. 

Discreet and powerful, known for their relentless determination and invokable hunger, characteristics that would eventually seep into their weapon manufacturing business. They know how and with whom to pick their fights, vigorously acquiring a steady position in the industry within a flash before everyone’s eyes. Namjung, their head, carved the Kim name into a status no one would have ever imagined. 

Trade and manufacturing, two able sides of the same coin. They seeked to forge an union that would unite their two sectors, to create a harmonious flow of success within their collective industries. 

But not all deals, go as planned. 

On the fateful day, Yonghwa was found on the ground in a pool of his own blood while Namjung was left visibly shaken. Catastrophe seemed to only follow the event there on after, with both families seeking revenge on the other. Their union seemed to be the last thing on either mind, but after the years passed and stained relations had been fully dragged out, there only seemed to be one solution that could bring peace to the two of them. 

*** 

The wheels of the large suitcase hit the polished ground. 

It’s lavish and grand, crystals littering the high held ceiling and lilies spread over the handles of the spiraling staircase. It ends right at the large chandelier, with more crystals dangling down opposite the shining marble that your slippers find purchase in. 

You remain in place, staring with wide eyes and an agape jaw the scenery before you. 

“Please,” A girl bows before you, dressed in a simple pale blouse and skirt that’s paired with an apron. There’s a small twinkle in her pleasant eyes paired with natural pouting lips; the delicate features drawing out the sheer youth the girl embodies. “Follow me.” 

You snap out of your daze once she advances forward, her hands careful weaving through yours to clutch onto your packed luggage. At first, you’re a bit unsure as to if you should let her carry the heavy load up the stairs, but you’re pleasantly surprised when she manages to hall it all the way up.

She roughly pushes herself against a large wooden door, revealing the grand room behind it. It’s decorated similarly to the main portion of the house, however the sheer size of it has your jaw dropping again, eyebrows furrowed as its appearance. 

Your suspicions are confirmed right away, “This will be your room, Miss Y/N.” 

“I-I…” You can’t help but hesitate, “Are you sure?”

She nods, placing your luggage now. “Of course, Master Kim asked us to prepare it for you.” 

You instinctively flinch at the sudden mention of your husband, but the girl tilts her head to the side, curiosity peeking through her. 

“Don’t they have such rooms in the L/N residence?” Her eyes suddenly widen, and she slaps a hand against her mouth, “Oh no, I-I didn’t mean it that way!” 

A smile curls on the corners of your lips, “What’s your name?” 

She gazes at you with surprise, like she had been expecting a scolding fit for her lifetime. Nonetheless, she hastily answers your question with a bow. 

“I am Eunjoo, one of Master Kim’s most faithful servants.” 

“Little flower.” You decipher, “Sounds like a fitting name.” 

“It could have been summer’s grace.” Eunjoo offers with a shrug, “Though I don’t really like summer, so I’ve tried my best to ignore that meaning.” 

You let out a genuine chuckle from that, something that has Eunjoo instantly beam. The news of her own Master getting married to someone from the L/N family was initially difficult for her to digest, but it appears that she was too early to judge. 

A lopped smile etching onto your features, “And to answer your previous question, unfortunately the L/N’s don’t have such a residence. We’ve lost much of our wealth after‒…” You pause, biting back your words, “...after, you know.” 

You wave your hand away in the air and Eunjoo understandably nods, no need to delve into the long-lived history of your families that is known to all. She hurriedly aids in you in unpacking much to your reassured protests, following and assisting you around like a little fairy. Her company ends up being both interesting and comfortable, especially since the two of you discovered the other wasn’t well in adapting the titles you carry. 

A knock resounds against the door, drawing out your attention. Immediately Eunjoo drops the clothes in her hands, right before she straightens up and takes a graceful bow. 

Her reaction is telling of who's at the door, so with pinched lips and a creased forehead, you turn around. 

He remains glued to the door frame, still adorned in his tailored black suit. Aside from the similarity in his put together appearance though, his shoulders are no longer hiked up in a noble stance, nor is there any remaining amount of warmth spreading through his eyes. Instead, he appears akin to how he was in the split-second before your ultimate union was official, the memory causing the skin of your cheek to slightly burn. 

Swaying from side to side, he hesitates to step into the room. 

“I see you’ve met Eunjoo.” He mentions. On cue, the servant straightens up, a huge smile on her lips. 

“I was just helping Miss Y/N unpack!” 

“Oh that’s nice, perhaps I can assist to‒” He isn’t able to finish his sentence, because the next thing you know you jolt at the sound of a loud crash that echoes through the room. 

“Master Kim!” Eunjoo immediately rushes forward, scurrying to help the fallen man. He instantly rises up to his feet and dusts off his suit jacket, but remains of glass are scattered all over the ground. 

He lets out a groan and Eunjoo sighs, “Master, you know you have to be careful.” She begins to quickly pluck up the shards of the vase, raising one up to eye level with a pout, “I especially picked this one out for your newly wedded wife.” 

At the mention of you, Namjoon instantly glances up, pupils shaking. “I-I can get you a new one soon, it might take around a week but if I put in a request now‒” He scrambles around for a moment, before checking the inner pockets of his jacket for something to write on in a haste. 

Unconsciously, a small smile cracks through the seam of your lips, increasing as he tries to intervene with Eunjoo to pick the shards, and she protests that he shouldn’t get his hands soiled with her errands. He eventually has to sheepishly stand to the side, staring at her defeated like a child that had just gotten scolded for misbehaving. 

Eunjoo eventually collects all the pieces and ushers herself out, reminding you of the pending family dinner you’ll need to attend in the evening. She leaves the room and you decide to resume unpacking, until you come across the realization that you’re not alone. 

“Do you need help?” He peers at your suitcase behind you, “I’m usually more capable with things that aren’t easy to break.” 

The abrupt proximity catches you by surprise, but you merely shake your head at his kind offer, “I should be fine, thank you.” 

He nods and you assume he’ll excuse himself after a moment, but he lingers and that’s when you crane your head over at him. 

Appearing to be in between a deep ponder, he snaps back into reality once your questioning eyes fall onto him. “Uh I‒” A lengthy sigh leaves his lips, “I know this is strange.”

You wonder what he's referring to until you notice him gesturing to the gap between you, “It’s strange for me, and it’s strange for you. We didn’t really have a choice in the matter.” 

He sheepishly scratches the back of his neck, a deep crease forming between his brows. You’re frozen in place, at a complete loss for words. 

He suddenly sucks in a breath, looking up to gaze into your eyes, “But I’d like to get to know you better….a-as my future wife.” 

Your eyes round and his declaration only receives dead silence in its awake. Flabbergasted, he attempts to correct himself amidst your prolonged response. 

“T-That doesn’t mean right away! We can take our time and I’m not expecting anything from you, so you don’t need to worry and‒” 

“I’d like that.” 

He freezes, “Wait, really?” 

You hum, a corner of your mouth lifting, “You’re right, it’s strange. But I’d like to get to know my husband better as well.” 

His eyes immediately sparkle, like you’ve said the very words he’s been aching to hear, “That’s great!” A breathtaking smile overtakes his features, “I guess I’ll see you at dinner then?” 

You nod with a smile,  and he departs, the euphoria never once leaving his lips. 

***

Evening draws near and long gone is the dilatory white piece of garment that’s forever confined you to your fate. Instead, it’s replaced with a delicate fabric of rose gold, perhaps to represent the luxury you have of being present in such a place or in the new beginnings that will soon follow you. 

Regardless, you prepare yourself. Although you’re simply arriving to dinner, there’s a family waiting at the table that you don’t know of yet. 

Eunjoo brings you down with her after putting your hair up and presenting a pair of matching heels your way. You’re wary as you walk down the spiraling staircase, barely balancing yourself on the elevated shoes. Luckily, Eunjoo notices and helps you down, but the split moment of relief is met with a jolt of surprise when you notice someone waiting at the bottom.

“I’ll take it from here, Eunjoo.” The women amiably bids. Eunjoo swiftly bows, mumbling something along the lines of Mistress Kim, before heading into the dinner room. 

You immediately whirl around, eyes on alert like a deer in headlights. She mirthfully smiles at you, carrying a warm tone in her eyes that feels familiar. 

“You don’t have to look so worried,” She reprimands, “I’m not going to bite your head off.” 

Your eyes widen even more, “I-I’m sorry?” 

She bursts out into laughter, concealing her ruby red lips with a hand that is glittering in assorted jewels. 

“Nothing, dear. I’m just teasing you.” You nervously laugh at that, and she places a hand against your back, guiding you forward. “Come, I’m eager to know what my son’s wife is like.” 

Politely nodding, you follow behind her and nearly freeze. If you had expected your bedroom to be astonishing, then you weren’t prepared for the enormous buffet that waits for you ahead. 

Pieces of food are scattered all over the decorated table, ranging from freshly cooked to foods you would have never imagined yourself eating. It reminds you of times your family could barely manage to have a decent meal for one night, lost scavenging for food that wouldn’t make your empty pockets hurt. 

You’re so lost in the thought that you don’t feel someone brush by you. There’s suddenly a warm hand planting onto your shoulder, drawing your attention with a smile full of dimples. 

“Do you want to sit down first?” He gestures to the table, where his mother sits next to his father and opposite to his sister. Embarrassed that you’ve been just gawking at the table, you hurriedly take a seat and so does Namjoon. 

Even though you’re only just sitting at the table, it seems like all eyes are on you, burning into your skin and tracing every move. The impending silence eventually does crack though, and it’s done by a person you would have least expected. 

“Is that chicken?” Namjoon’s father blurts out, his eyes following a tray one of the servants brings by. His wife immediately interjects, dismayed by his reaction. 

“Indeed,” She points a demanding finger at him, “But none for you, there’s a reason why your health hasn’t been the greatest as of lately.” 

He pouts at her response, longley staring at the dish once it arrives. The childlike display catches you a bit off guard, eyebrows raised. 

“That’s unreasonable though.” He suddenly looks in your direction, “What do you think, Y/N? Isn’t she being unreasonable?” 

The abrupt inquiry leaves you speechless, no coherent words manifesting at the tip of your tongue. His wife whirls around, cocking up a brow in his direction. 

“Why are you dragging her into this?” She faces you with a smile, “Y/N is the newest addition to our family so we should make her feel welcome, not bring her into such trivial matters.” 

The pleasant response astonishes you, but more so the mention of your inclusion. He lets out a sigh, acknowledging his wife’s sentiments. 

“You’re right.” He turns to you, “Y/N, why don’t you tell us about yourself?” 

His mother hums, “I’d like to hear about where you grew up, Y/N.” 

“Oh, it’s nothing really special,” You grow bashful, “I was raised in the outskirts of the country by my parents.” 

The two of them nod, intently listening to you, “Before coming here, I studied in the imperial academy for a while.” 

“Ah, involved in the industry I see.” He praises, “You must know a lot about how our businesses are conducted, right?” 

“Not quite.” There’s a strained smile on your lips, “I didn’t want to actively participate in it.” 

Although your answer seems to have taken both of them by surprise, his wife hums in approval. “So I’m assuming that was your personal choice?” 

When you nod, a giant smile stretches onto her lips, and she elbows her husband, “A gutsy one, don’t you think?” 

He smiles in retaliation, “Just like you.” 

She blushes at his sudden compliment, but a voice from afar breaks the two out of their daze. 

“Gross - we’re eating here.” 

Appalled at the feminine voice, you notice the young girl seated across from Namjoon, a deep frown etched onto her stern features. 

“Leave them be, Geongmin.” Namjoon coaxes his sister, but she lets out a grunt of disapproval in the midst of eating soup.

The corners of his mother’s lips turn up and his father faces you again, looking as if he had a million questions up his sleeve lined up just for you. 

Much to your surprise, the rest of the evening is spent exchanging pleasantries with them and keeping conversation light. There even comes a moment when both you and Namjoon end up reaching out for the bread basket, only to pull away once you discover your hands had ended up meeting halfway. As you grow bashful, you notice his mother smiling tenderly and his father chuckling at the abrupt affiliation. 

Once the evening begins to come to an end, you excuse yourself through the use of your own fatigue and request to head to bed first. They waste no time in understanding, with Namjoon’s father even wrapping a hand around his son and expressing that he needed to discuss some things with him anyway. 

You leave the room as he heads off with his family, granting you with some much-needed time and space. 

***

Treading back, you pause at the large wooden door that leads into your room. Your eyes briefly skim over the fine carvings on the wood, instead choosing to scrutinize the direction of your right and left side. A shadow casts over your pupils and your hand presses against the door, letting it slowly creak wide open. 

Step by step, you stroll inside and let the light fade out, replacing itself with only darkness. 

The moment the source of luminescence disappears, you move within a flash. The handle is locked, tugged at for a confirmation. There’s a speck of radiance coming from the small lamp you’ve turned on, enough to see the large suitcase you’ve brought get yanked out. 

Zippers are flying and the cover is ripped off. Clothes are frantically thrown astray, dumped into a careless heep without much of a second look. Your hands are weaving through the material and running rampant, eyes flickering with something akin to desire and alloyed with increasing unease. 

Once your hands meet with metal, a twinkle emerges within your orbs. The spindle of ore is unwound; detangling the material in a quickened manner. It looks distinctly similar to what one would use for electrical purposes, set with the intention of providing light in grim areas. 

Right. The intention. 

Unraveled, you cautiously drift over to the large window by the bedside and crank it open. Peering outside, there’s no glimmer or streak of luminescence meeting your eyes, only a dark, simple gray sky. 

Unconsciously a breath of relief leaves your lips and you reach out, reclining your body just enough to reach above and then below the window’s hilt. The instrument effortlessly blends in, appearing like a simple cable that’s been tightly strung around. 

You lean back and rummage through the luggage on the ground, pulling out a small plastic box that doesn’t appear to be much, but more or less, is the sole thing you couldn’t have departed without. With a small hinged click, it connects to the thin barbed string you just unraveled and right when a quiet buzz resonates through, does a smile tugs on the corner of your lips. 

A knock resonates through the box. Followed by another, and then another. It’s succeeded with a prolonged silence on your part, your entire body remaining in a frozen state. 

Static echoes and you let out the air you didn’t realize you were holding from your lungs. 

Within seconds, you are nimbly knocking against the box in repetitive notions. Your actions range from different types of knocks; heavy, light, twice the sound. 

More static echoes and your eyes immediately widen, hands balling up into tighter fists. 

A heavier one. 

“I have….” 

Lighter. 

“...successfully infiltrated….” 

One last firm knock. 

“....the enemy household.”

#ficswithluv #btswriterscollective #btsbookclub #namjoon fanfic #bts namjoon fanfic #kim namjoon fanfic #bts rm fanfic #namjoon fluff #namjoon angst #namjoon smut #bts namjoon fluff #bts namjoon angst #bts namjoon smut #bts namjoon arranged marriage au #bts arranged marriage au #bts rm arranged marriage au #bts fluff #bts fanfic #bts angst #bts smut #bts scenarios #bts imagines #namjoon x reader

[theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin]

One thing that has always bothered me about the magical system in HP is how much it... doesn’t exist? No one questions anything, there’s almost no theoretical exploration, and Hermione Granger (someone I’ve always found to be of average intelligence at best) is the brightest witch of her age.

Some characters seem to be inexplicably more powerful, but I wonder if it isn’t simply a matter of discipline and will-power.

What are your thoughts on magic? We never really see what light vs. dark entails, so fanfic authors tend to make it up as they go along, but do you have any head-canons about how magic works in HP?

I mean, to be fair, it wasn’t really the point of JKR’s series. She just wanted to write about a kid going to a magic boarding school in Scotland with this quirky witch aesthetic. 

No need for her to placate us uber nerds who demand a sensible explanation to the minutia of her magical system. 

Right, but yes, it clearly bothers me too. No one questions anything, there’s no understanding of why wands and spells even work, or why it has to be in this weird pseudo-Latin. No one even bothers to learn Latin, for that matter, and you think they would given the damn spells. 

Hermione Granger is the brightest witch of her age given that “her age” is either around 30 people (the amount of people in her year) or else around 300 (the population of Hogwarts at a given time) which is a pitiful amount. She also is an extremely hard worker and actually reads her textbooks, sadly I think this gets you ahead of 95% of the population.

Part of the reason I think the Wizarding World thinks like this is that they’re this incredibly tiny, cut off, insular society. Generally, when you have a small society cut off like that you tend to lose innovation or even understanding of technology you have.

But that’s not what you asked. Right.

Personally, I think there is no light and dark magic. Magic is just this part of the natural universe that muggles, for whatever reason, are not able to directly access. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is. For that matter, I don’t think spells themselves really exist, or rather, they’re not what magic really is in its purest form but instead a way that humans can easily access and control magic to perform a certain task. Kind of a glorified API if you will. 

So, dark magic and light magic are instead arbitrary labels that wizards apply to their own tool box based on the functions of that tool. If you have a tool that is only designed for/can be used for the murder and torture of sentient beings: well, that’s bad, we’ll call that dark. That said, do I think the spells themselves are inherently evil? No. It’s like if you open up your tool box, pick out a sledgehammer, and go, “This, my child, is an instrument of pure evil and you must never touch it.” Well, that’s a bad comparison, it’d be like taking a handgun out of your tool box and saying “this is a dark weapon”. Now, this gets into a debate I don’t want to get into, but to me dark spells are a lot like handguns (they’re designed for only one purpose and there’s no squirming your way out of what that purpose is).

Now, I think wizards have forgotten this (mostly because they don’t understand what spells or magic is), and so they get very hung up on the labels of spells or even just your odd genetic trait (i.e. parseltongue). So, we have these weird moments where someone uses, say, the severing charm to cut somebody open in the middle of the street. And it’s less bad than if they had used the killing curse to kill them painlessly and easily, because the severing charm’s not dark magic. 

It’s like... If someone were to walk out and bash someone over the head with a sledgehammer until it kills them it’s less evil than if they shot them in the head with a handgun.

Wizards seem to miss the point of this. 

As for what magic is, I believe it’s... direct energy that wizards are able to access in a way that muggles (thus far) cannot. What do I mean by thus far? Well, look at electricity. In ye olden days, I’m sure that if you asked a wizard they would say that making artificial light without flame is a property solely done by magic and muggles are not capable of it. Well, muggles then did it, and suddenly the definition and parameters of magic change. Wizards are kind of like chess grand masters who suddenly lose to your AI du jour, who say that it doesn’t count because the AI didn’t really do it like a human would. It’s not real intelligence.

I don’t believe people have magic in and of themselves, any more than anyone else does at any rate, because we see too little differences between powerful and mediocre wizards. You’re either a squib or you’re not, there doesn’t really seem to be a spectrum, and those who struggle with spells appear to do so for other reasons (Neville has severe confidence issues and is traumatized, Harry’s an idiot, etc.) 

I think what separates the great wizards from the rest is hard work, the ability to read books and learn from them, even an inkling of understanding of how spells really work and how to create them (and this makes you Voldemort level right here), and a good ear to be able to pronounce your ridiculous pseudo Latin.

The wand is a tool specifically designed so that, with repeatable easy to understand steps, you can perform a whole array of tasks and even use them as building blocks to develop a new spell (combine swishes, flicks, and various garbled sentences together in such a way and BAM new spell).

Your wand, in other words, is your API to direct and access untold amounts of energy from the universe.

But people have forgotten that so instead what you memorize are very specific function calls that will prove useful in your daily life.

As for the wand and spells themselves, well, here’s my hokey ridiculous theory on how that came about. A long time ago, a brilliant foreigner enters the Roman Empire with a revolutionary idea that puts him on the level of Einstein/Newton/Feynman Name Your Stupidly Brilliant Physicist. He says, hey, how about instead of doing these time consuming magical rituals we develop a tool that, in a matter of seconds, allows us to perform truly complicated and powerful magic any time we want. No more relying on having the right ingredients about, virgin sacrifices, the full moon, etc.

Everyone probably laughs at him, but then he goes off and designs a rudimentary wand, and through probably some uber ritual that was dangerous as hell implements this system by which by flicking your wand a certain way and saying basic commands like “levitate”, “repair”, etc. you can perform these tasks.

Only, the guy’s foreign and Good Will Hunting (no formal education in the empire), so he doesn’t actually speak Latin. So what you have instead is this weird half-Latin like, “Leviupwards Fly”, “Repair-o”, etc. 

It sounds dumb as hell, but goddammit it works, and more it gives Roman wizards an unheard of advantage against their enemy wizards who are all stuck doing these stupid rituals. They suddenly have a vast military might, so long as they use these wands and spells this guy came up with.

Everybody who’s anybody, who wants to win a fight, is now using wands. Wandcraft becomes a huge deal and people specialize in fine tuning these things exactly so as to get the maximum efficiency for a particular user.

And they probably go up to our guy and say, “Hey, buddy, can you make this in actual Latin? I can barely remember what it is I’m supposed to say to get this to work” and after the hours, and hours, and hours he spent making this thing that nobody helped him with he goes, “DO IT YOURSELF, BITCH”. And they never do because they’re too damn lazy/have no idea how he actually did it and any attempt to recreate it ends up with something that’s pitiful and doesn’t work. 

So, they’re all stuck with it, and thousands of years later they forget this guy even existed and while there’s a recognition that not all magic has to be performed by wands there’s just this feeling that the wand is the magic. And so no one will ever come up with an English/French/Whatever version where when you say “Up” the thing goes up. 

And that’s “The History of Magic” as brought to you by The Carnivorous Muffin.

#ask #harry potter #magic #headcanons #anti hermione granger #anti harry potter

[imanonymousfanfic]

How do you think the strawhat would be with a crewmate who has a cat (or like three) ?

I am so sorry this took so long to answer. I've had university deadlines.

Anyway

This is my personal take on the characters. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I had fun writing this. Thank you anon ❤️

Luffy would LOVE to have cats aboard!! Luffy would be giggling childishly after hearing the new crew mate has cats, unless that’s why he asked for them to join in the first place (no surprise there). Since it’s Luffy, and he’s oblivious as hell, he’ll probably do a couple things that would get them feisty, earning him a good cat fight. He’d end up looking like he does after Nami has a go at him. Luffy’s love will go on endlessly, as they’re not part of the StrawHat family. Before the cats can explore the ship, the idea of teaching the fur balls some “cool tricks” will come up, maybe even plotting to sneak some meat behind Sanji’s back. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t... probably not, knowing Luffy. He’s good company for them, a good partner to play with if he has a feather stick. You will find them resting on his belly as they both nap in the sun on Sunny's head. And without a doubt, ass will be kicked if a single whisker on their faces is touched out of malice.

For a brief second, Zoro will question the cats safety: traveling on water, but at the end of the day it’s not his problem… kinda. Despite his stiff “cool guy” exterior, the swords man would definitely jump in after any of the cuties that have gone over board. He will angrily mutter about their reckless climbing and playfulness as he rushes them out of the water. I mean he does the same for Luffy, so what’s new? He’d give them some small here and there, nothing too special. Their compatibility will really shine when they crawl all over the man during his meditation, they will have fun tapping at his gold earrings, and as much as he would like his silence, the cats company will make him smile. There’s no doubt about it, Zoro loves them, he just expresses his affection to his crew own way. They’re part of the family and their silly antics will make his night shifts a lot more entertaining.

Sanji will ban any cats from the kitchen right away, which is entirely understandable. Cats shed like crazy and don’t think about where their paws have been. They would knock over things carelessly, even on purpose at times when they want attention. That will irk Sanji. Should it ever happen, though, he’d take the opportunity to show off his cool moves in front of Robin and Nami. His envy would melt the man, seeing them curled up in the ladies laps too, but that’s just Sanji being himself. Since are respectable for the most part, and for this reason Sanji wouldn’t treat them any less than he would the rest of the crew. He’ll work hard on their meals, spoiling their little toe beans off.

Chopper will be the CUTEST with cats, he will be befriend them on an emotional level much faster than the others as he’s one himself. He’s in tune with them, and since he’s a doctor, he will be eager to pick up on veterinary studies to care for them. You will find him often studying their anatomy, even physically studying the little fur balls himself. He’d play with them lots, mostly with him originally chasing them, but knowing Chopper, they will turn that around. You’ll catch Chopper reading books with the cats crawling over him and covering his desk. An adorable sight to see.

Franky is definitely more a dog person, but he won’t reject the adorable purring of a cat. He’ll walk around with one or two of them perched on his shoulders, the height and the stability of Franky is a fun place to hang out. They see lots, and he’s a fun person. When not busy, Franky will take a moment to give out some pets, maybe even making some kissy noises at them. He’ll incorporate some kind of play pen or netted area so they can play safely. You’ll definitely catch him blubbering emotionally about them at some point. It’s Franky, after all, he’s a ginormous softie. When maintaining the ship, he’ll keep the cats locked away for their safety, all the heavy materials and tools could be dangerous, and the last thing he wants is them hurt while they get a little too curious. Let’s hope whenever they crawl over him, none of their claws have a scratch at his banana hammock.

100% Robin is a cat mom, calling it immediately. She’s elegant and has that cheekiness that cats posses too. She likes to soak up some sun, explore her surroundings to understand them better, and is intelligent with a talent in sneaking around. Robin confirmed to be a human-cat? All jokes aside, Robin’s companionship with the cats is calm, just like how many of them like it. They’d be spoiled with lap cuddles, and her devil fruit will make sure none of them are left feeling jealous. Her and Chopper will be often spotted hanging together, or helping the vet check ups.

For some reason, I have a hunch Brook is scared of cats and his hair would pop off seeing them. He’d jump behind one of the crew members, his bones rattling loudly as you hear his cheerful voice pronounce his fear. Luckily for him they’re not dogs, his femur would be gone in seconds if they were. He’d be nervous around the little things at first but with time he will open up to them. Seeing how the crew plays and cuddles with them will make him step out of his comfort zone, and next thing you know, they’re huddled around him as he plays the violin. Music, after all, is calming for cats. He will have his own furry fans to give him all of the love, which will warm his heart (if he had one).

Nami will think they’re super cute, but wouldn’t be quite as enthusiastic as some of the other crew members. That’s just Nami though. She’d definitely be cracking some skulls if you hurt any of them, and she’s a very protective cat mom. She might not be the super cuddly type, but she doesn’t care about them any less than the rest of the crew. She’d save a little bit of money on the side for some nicely made collars, which will be a BIG deal coming from her. They’d be gold plated, or something nice along the lines which is definitely her way of showing affection. No matter how cute they are, however, they won’t be caught in her cartography space - their paws are chaotic and Nami needs her maps to be pristine. As cute as inky paw prints are, she rather not have them.

Usopp will talk to the cats a lot, befriending them like they’re any other person. Even though they can’t understand him or his exaggerated stories, they’re entertained by him no matter what. He’s enrapturing, able to hold their gaze as they get lost in his enthusiastic tone. They sure feel playful around him too, his goofy behaviour is exactly what they need, but they might end up chasing him across the ship with how much a coward he can be at times. With his ingenious building skills, he’d take the time to make them some cool toys, a crazy laser, a feather toy, who knows what Usopp has up his sleeve. Oh, the ideas are endless and Usopp’s designs will be spoiling their tails off. If only Sniper King is able to see how adorable they are… *wink-wink, nudge-nudge*

As I’m not fully caught up and his character to me is still quite hard to write about, I will try to capture Jinbe to my best understanding of him.

I imagine him to find great companionship with cats, understanding their free will, but sense of loyalty they have. Unlike dogs, who are loyal to nearly anyone, a cats sense of loyalty is out of a devoted love they choose to share. Jinbe holds a similar integrity with the relationships he choose to be a part of. Naturally their natures of being are opposites, as he’s a fish man, strongest when in water, while cats run from it. They share a wholesome companionship. If it isn’t Zoro first in the water to save them, Jinbe will be the next to be a kitty rescuer.

#one piece strawhats #one piece #anime #one piece cats #Monkey D luffy #roronoa zoro #one piece sanji #thousand sunny #strawhats #one piece fanfiction #fanfiction #one piece hcs #one piece headcanons

[rye-in-a-coat]

My Moominsona The Snuglekträ

Drawing by @flowerbloom-arts (Thank you so much, Bloom!!!!! <3 /p)

BASIC INFO

Name: Snuglekträ. (Pronounced /'snʌglektræ/) (Sometimes called "The Snuglekträ.") (Nicknames: Snug) Species: Whomper. (However some people refer to him as "a snuglekträ".) Age: Older Adolescent. Pronouns: He/Him. Sexuality: Bisexual. Height: Height between the size of Snufkin and a Hemulen in the 90's and 2019 adaptations.

BIO

Snuglekträ like other creatures in the Moomin stories, he was left by his parents at a point of his early life. He later was found in some box by a hemulen who was the owner of a little shop. The shop owner took care of him as if he was her own son. However, she could be considered a bit over-protective as the little whomper was never allowed to leave the house. When he was around eight, he escaped from the place in an early winter night, where a snowstorm and the cold nature of the season forced him into his more primal survival insticts. He faced the wild and large world for first time.

Too-Ticky found him and invited the little boy into the bathhouse. During that winter period, the little lad learnt about basic life skills and the dangers of this season of the year. However, the major change for him was learning how to write. He found a new world where he finally was able to express on paper his feelings, his days, his dreams, his thoughts and imagination. He named himself Snuglekträ as he felt snuggling with a blanket on the oak wood floor near the fireplace was all he needed.

When the spring came, Snug went to live in the forest. He usually was near the creeks and rivers, he ate the fruits of the woodland and also fished. When the rain came down he looked for a place in the dense forest to hide. He was still a relatively shy person to strangers and someone who tended to worry about even the small things. He stayed like that for three years until one day he met Snufkin. After some talk, his mind was flooded with the idea of travelling so the next day he packed his bags to go far away.

He met a friendly sailor on the coast and gave him a ride to the other side of the sea. He wandered through the cities of the new area and lived like a tramp. The urban life conflicted frequently with what he was used to in the valley and made him question a lot of stuff. On his trip he learnt some words of German and some French, met many people but he couldn't get a friend around for more than three months, and wrote a lot in a journal/diary about his little adventures. He committed petty crimes somewhat frequently. One of the items he got was a pair of glasses which he kept after realising his sight wasn't perfect.

In his last little exploit, a lotto ticket manages to fall into his hands and, by mere coincidence, it was the winning one. With a million and a half on him, he decides to go back to the valley he left to finally settle down somewhere. With the fortune he bought the house of a fillyjonk who was leaving Moominvalley to move to France. Snug turned the residence into his new home. He's a neighbour of the other habitants that are often seen as the background characters. He has been living there for six years and doesn't wish to go anywhere else.

His pants and ragged shirt are vestiges of his past and he wears a cape-like piece of clothing made with that old blanket. On the first week back home, he made a flowercrown and put it on his hat as a sign of admiration for the valley; since then there are always flowers up there being accompanied with two ribbons.

Snuglekträ enjoys to stay up late, take strolls around the place, drink tea, write (obviously, and he has filled dozens of notebooks throughout the seasons), the feeling that tomorrow will be another day. He has a sweet tooth for candy and treats. From books he has learnt and adopted hobbies like amateur poetry and star gazing.

He is still a friend of Too-Ticky and visits her in winter to catch up with stuff. He hasn't spoken directly to Snufkin since that encounter and probably the green one doesn't recognize him anymore. He once met Fuddler and Jumble. However, he has never spoken a word to the Moomin family directly.

#oc #my oc #moomin oc #moomin #the moomins

[opbackgrounds]

so I was doing some research after watching movie 6...

...and apparently it was originally written as a comedy

Yeah, I was surprised, too

Baron Omatsuri is not my favorite One Piece movie—Film Z has too many of my favorite tropes to be usurped from that position—but I do think it is the most daring. Of all the supplemental material I’ve seen and read, it feels the least...One Piece-ish. 

Yes, that includes the noodle commercials. 

If you haven’t seen the movie and can stomach a little spookiness, do yourself a favor and give it a watch. Unlike movies like Strong World or Z that have the look and feel of a manga arc, Movie 6 transplants the Straw Hat Pirates into a world that doesn’t feel like a One Piece story, taking risks and exploring themes that would never fit in the manga proper. 

In addition to the obvious changes in art and animation style, there are supernatural elements that don’t make sense within the One Piece world. None of the Straw Hats win a fight—Luffy included, although he is heavily implied to have killed the big bad at the end. The moral of the movie, if it can be said to have a moral, is if you lose the people closest to you, the answer is to forget about them and make new friends. The story ends with many questions left unanswered and the main drama between the crew unresolved.

And, if you allow me to get philosophical for a moment, I wish there were more movies like it. As I wrote in my review of Novel A, I don’t go to supplemental material or side stories looking for a repeat of what’s in the manga. Oda has written 1000 chapters of One Piece—why not spice things up a little and try something different for a change?

I know the answer isn’t that simple, and by their very nature not all risks will pan out. There will be people who don’t like this movie because it’s different, both in look and tone. But there’s something to be said about a creator putting their heart and soul into a work and having it show in the final product. 

Which brings us back to the original premise. How does a movie go from a light-hearted comedy based on a variety show theme to...this

Baron Omatsuri was directed by Mamoru Hosoda and came out in 2005. To put that into perspective, the movie was in production when the Luffy vs Usopp fight was first seen in the manga. Manga!Luffy had not yet faced the challenge of an inter-crew disputes when the story was being written and boarded, nor did the creative team have the events of Sabaody and Marineford to see how Luffy would react to the loss of his loved ones. They were working without a full understanding of Luffy’s character, and to a lessor extent the character of the Straw Hat Pirates, and it seems like Oda was much less involved In production than has been in movies since Strong World and beyond. 

Likewise, Hosoda had just left a tumultuous situation at Studio Ghibli while working on Howl’s Moving Castle, and if this interview is anything to go by (https://instrangeaeonsblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/mamoru-hosoda-on-omatsuri-danshaku-animestyle-interview-part-1/) was going through a lot of personal shit when he was brought on as director. The script he was given was originally written like a variety show—something that was carried over into the various trials seen in the final movie—and meant to be a lighthearted affair after the relatively serious Movie 5 (which I have not seen am thus unable to compare tone). 

With that backstory in mind, it’s easy to see how the bickering and backbiting between the Straw Hats early in the movie is a metaphor for Hosoda’s time at Ghibli, which is something he admits to in the interview. Movie 6 feels different than any other One Piece movie because it’s the project of a man who has had to endure the loss of those who he was close with, at least in a professional capacity. 

There are moments in Movie 6 where Luffy doesn’t feel like Luffy. More than once a member of the Straw Hats ask him to intervene during arguments, moments Luffy either ignores or doesn’t notice. It’s a version of Water 7 where instead of fighting Usopp, Luffy ignores the underlying differences within his crew, and as a result loses everybody. 

The structure of the three trials follows a clear path of deterioration within the crew, the initial goldfish scooping game showing the Straw Hats at their best and inciting the jealousy of the Baron, the ring toss sowing discord among the crew even as they snatch a narrow victory, only for them to be utterly crushed in the third and final challenge as they’re unable help one another survive. 

It is somewhat implied that the Breaking of the Fellowship(TM) is magical in nature—that like the One Ring, the Lily Carnation was able to influence the Straw Hat’s thoughts and actions, but this is never stated outright and I prefer the more mundane interpretation: That without strong leadership the Straw Hats fell victim to the manipulative machinations of the Baron, and simply self-destructed as a result.  In the end, it’s up to the interpretation of the viewer. 

And speaking of things up to interpretation, I love how the Lily Carnation isn’t explained in the slightest. The plant that initially absorbs the Straw Hats looks more like the stem of a devil fruit than a flower, it for some reason rings like a gong when hit, and somehow is able to turn pieces of itself into facsimile of the Baron’s old crew who can somehow move around despite being plans. It’s weird, it’s wonderful, and the element of the unknown works so well in the horror-lite setting. 

My personal theory is the island somehow managed to eat a devil fruit which manifests itself as the Lily Carnation (which due to the L/R conflation in Japanese, is pronounced ‘reincarnation’, which I think is a nice touch of foreshadowing that may or may not have been intentional).

(Also, I can’t decide if little chewing animation it makes when it’s eating people or the weird bullseyes it makes when shit gets real are the most terrifying thing in the movie.)

Hmmm, tasty.

Anyway, this is getting long, so here are some final thoughts:

1) This movie has some low key fantastic outfits. The Straw Hats all look very cool without being over designed like a lot of recent movies. Big hat Robin is of course a fave, and makes me really want to see her in a Carmen Sandiego getup.

2) Screenshots do not do the animation of the movie justice. It’s very fluid and has a lot of excellent expressions/poses, although I admit the 3D is jarring at times. Do not let the art put you off if you haven’t seen it 

3) Also, I don’t think there’s any shading? Like at all? The movie does a lot of cool stuff with color instead. For example, the scene where Luffy initially loses to the Baron his skin goes all grey, and I thought it was because he was fighting at night, but it stays grey even in the better lighting of the underground tunnels and stays that way until he finds out the Straw Hats are still alive, where it returns to his normal color

4) There’s an extended Benny Hill-type gag when Luffy first chases after the little mustache pirate that’s perfectly timed to the music, and ends when Luffy just uses his power to grab him. The comedic timing is amazing and it’s probably my favorite funny moment in the movie, of which there are several despite the overall darker tone

5) The extended jungle shot from Nami’s POV? Very cool

6) I love how from the earliest scenes nothing is as it seems. The opening text is Robin reading the map, but the storm that’s seen on screen is the one that sank the Baron’s crew. Likewise the whole fancy city is shown to be fake panels early on, the goldfish catching game is a trap, etc., etc. It does a good job clueing the viewer in early that’s something’s very wrong on the island, even if they don’t realize it at first

7) I don’t think this type of movie would work in modern One Piece without somehow nerfing Luffy. Horror works best when the protagonist is weak and vulnerable, and that fits best with a pre-Gear 2/3 Luffy (same with the rest of the crew, tbh. I was waiting for Nami to use her lightning stick during the games, forgetting it hadn’t been boosted yet). 

8) I like how there are four captains on the island representing different levels of loss—the Baron has lost his crew and wants to destroy all others because of it, mustache pirate lost his crew and is willing to put it behind him to make new friends, Luffy has freshly lost his crew and hasn’t decided what path he will go, and coward dad hasn’t lost his crew yet but is at risk if he doesn’t change his cowardly ways

9) I think the reason why Chopper was the first Straw Hat to disappear is he’s the most likely to play the part of peacemaker. He’s also the only crew member needing rescuing at the end of the goldfish scoop game, when Luffy foolishly puts his life at risk trying to save him from drowning, just like he recklessly charges the Baron at the end of the movie. Except that time there was no Sanji to save him, leaving Luffy to get his ass thoroughly kicked

10) This is a very good Halloween movie, and I’m glad I watched it in October

#opbackgrounds #long post #movie 6 #review #one piece #Baron Omatsuri

[readersperspective]

Writing Advice Bilingual Characters

As some of you (who read my reviews) already might have noticed, I am bilingual myself. Sadly, multilingual people do not get represented well a lot in media, so yeah... some advice for writing them. It will certainly not capture every aspect of being bilingual, but it might give you a first idea.

There are different ways to be multilingual.

People who grew up with more than one native language will almost certainly speak all of them fluently. Most of them have two (their parents’ language and their country’s language, or the language of one parent and of the other) but I also know a family where the children grew up with four native languages (the mother speaks Portuguese, the father Italian, they talk to each other in English, and live in Germany, where the children grew up)

Some people speak two or more languages, but cannot write all of them - especially when the alphabets are not the same, for example English and Russian or Arabic. This affects mostly children of immigrants.

Some people can read and write a language quite well, but are not good at speaking or listening comprehension. Those people often learned the language at school with a bad teacher or by themselves with books and apps.

Some people, again mostly children and grandchildren of immigrants, can read and understand a language, but don’t speak it. Mostly, the parents decided to not teach the child the language, and they learned it themselves by listening to their parents talk to relatives.

Confidence can play a big role in this. I understand the dialect of my grandparents without a problem, but I would never try to speak it. I can’t even imagine forming those words with my mouth, and it would sound terrible.

People who learnt a language at school can reach completely different levels of that language. I started learning English at age 6 and am completely fluent by now. Other people in my class barely understand more than easy conversations in English.

Most people will do their very best to hide their accents.

If the person is not a native speaker, but fluent in a language, their accent will be a mix of whatever they can find at the moment. Media is a big influence in that.

Since I watch more British than American TV, my accent sounds a bit british, too. When I watched “Call the Midwife”, I often even unconciously copy the accent of Laura Main. I don’t know why her, but my brain just liked it, I guess.

Also, we will use words, phrases and sentence structures from so many different sources.

People who learnt English through the internet (aka most of the younger generation) will have problems to not use swear words when actually being in Great Britain or America. They just do not have the weight for us, since on the internet they get used all the time.

I have never in my whole live heard a multilingual person switch languages mid-sentence on accident.

We will do it on purpose, though, if the other part of the conversation understands both languages.

Also, we will maybe say the word in another language if we forget the meaning.

Multilingual people that are not natives in the language they usually use in their day-to-day life (immigrants, for example) will often count and calculate in their native language. For example at a restaurant where they calculate the price in their head, they will probably do it in their native language.

Conversations with multiple multilingual people can be very different.

If one person only understands one language, they will probably try to include that person by speaking the language they share. I can say from experience, though, that if eight native Germans that have varying levels of English language skills will sit together with one introverted Turkish person with medium English language skills, they will go back to German quite often. It’s not nice, but sadly natural.

In general, people will try to speak in their native language if possible. You can take two people that share a native language and also both speak English and let them walk around in London - they will probably speak their native language, no matter how well they speak English.

Multilingual people that share multiple languages will switch on purpose when they feel like they can express their thoughts better in the other language.

Many languages have taken words from English.

Especially young people take a lot of English filler words and phrases (or insults) and put them into their native language. “Help, mein Deutschlehrer überfordert uns mit Hausaufgaben, like, what the fuck, glaubt der wir haben nichts besseres zu tun?” Is a sentence you would absolutely hear from a German student.

Many young people that don’t live in Great Britain or America will not use these words and phrases around their parents. First of all, our parents often do not speak English as well as we do, but more importantly, our parents do not like us using English instead of ur native language.

Many professions nowadays have an English name, I don’t know why. What used to be a Hausmeister is now a Facility Manager. The longer the English phrase for your profession, the more likely you will not be taken serious by older people.

Once you have more than one native language, you learn new languages more easily, for some reason. I know a girl that speaks 7 languages, at age 20, 5 of them fluently.

"You speak English quite well” or phrases like that said by a native speaker can be the best compliment ever, or more uncomfortable than nice.

When you are translating for your family and hear that sentence, it is super nice.

When you are only speaking English, that sentence indicates that your accent is still heavy. You do not pass as a native speaker.

When you are a native speaker, that sentence is just weird.

You can indentify the people that learnt a language through reading by giving them words that are pronounced untypically.

For years I thought “precious” (a word that is heavily used on the internet, especially in fan communities, but not that much in school) was pronounces pree-ci-ous. I was shocked when I heard it for the first time.

There are situations where even quite fluent non-native speakers will not be able to understand or talk in their second language.

The first few minutes after standing up (although that can change when the person is really fluent)

When they are in great pain

When they are in great fear

When they are under great stress

Sometimes even when they did not use that language in the last few days

Translating in realtime is terribly hard and will fuck your head. When I was on holiday with my parents, I often had to read the information signs in museums or at sights for them and translate. It’s easier when you first read the text and then summarise it in another language, but trying to translate it sentence by sentence is painful and you will question your abilities in both languages.

This gets just more horrible when under pressure. While we were in England, a visibly stressed young woman came to us and asked us if we had 5 pounds, she had lost some money she needed to take the train back home. I repeated her sentence to my father. In English.

Also sorry to the poor worker at McDonalds who I talked English to while speaking German to my English exchange student.

People abroad will absolutely become friends with every person that they hear speaking their language. While being in London, we overheard a man talking to his son in German about taking a photo, and I immediately asked (in German) if I should take a photo of both of them together. We talked for fifteen minutes after that, even though we had never met before.

On that note, in tourist citys the people that try to sell things to tourists usually speak a lot of languages enough to say things like “Oh, I speak a bit of [language], too, but not well. Didn’t pay enough attention in school. You look like nice people.” Makes it so easy to sell things.

Idioms are literally hell. Best example has been in the news currently, with Greta Thunberg literally translating a Swedish idiom in a tweet not realising that “putting someone against a wall” means something totally different in English. 

Idioms will be hell for you as a writer, too, though, as long as you do not fluently speak both of the languages or at least one of them is fictional, because it’s quite easy to mess up if you use idioms that jus aren’t normally used by people speaking that language.

Bilingual puns are amazing, but sadly rare.

Those are the things I thought of first... Maybe you can find some ideas or inspiration there for your characters, too. The best thing of course is to let someone proof-read your character if you are uncertain, but this hopefully already helped you a bit!

#writing #write #writers of tumblr #writblr #writeblr #inspiration #writing inspiration #author #aspiring author #writers on tumblr #writing tip #writing tips #writing motivation #writing bilingual characters #multilingual #bilingual #bilingual characters #multilingual characters #character development #character design

[wrenhyperfixates]

Loki Series Thoughts—The Variant

With the release of episode 2, I’m back with another analysis. Spoilers ahead!! This will be a combination of personal thoughts, theories, and objective analysis. This is overall, a positive review, so if you do not want to see that, I would not recommend continuing to read. I am however more than open to some friendly debate and discussion over any and all of the following points, whether you agree or disagree with them.

With all that being said, let’s dive in:

I feel gypped on the Holding out for a Hero fight scene. I mean, I liked how the scene was shot, especially with the whole loudspeaker thing (it set the mood very well), but where’s Loki fighting to that song?

Alright, I might as well address the elephant in the room: Is Loki OOC? Well, for my money, the answer is both yes and no. And I don’t mean to be wishy-washy; it really kind of depends on how you define OOC and/or who exactly you take this Loki to be.

What does OOC mean? To me, the literal definition of “out of character” would be the character acting in a way unlike they’ve been seen acting before. Likewise, according to Collins Dictionary it would be defined as “not typical of the apparent character of a person or thing.” Now, that’s a bit too black and white. What if you have a character in a new situation, how do you know how they’d react? By analyzing their past actions and seeing if they line up. And if you stop at this point and deem Loki entirely OOC, well you’re allowed to and that’s valid. I, however, would not say entirely is the word to use. Somewhat, yes, but not terribly and not inexcusably so. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Who is this Loki? He’s the one right after the Avengers, of course, but he’s something different too. Think about it, the whole series is centered around how different choices can shape the very fabric of the universe. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that changes in Loki’s story would cause him to behave differently than what we’ve seen before? This is, in essence, a different Loki, albeit one who’s own narrative is shaped by a shared backstory with ours. It even says it on his jacket in big, bright letters: VARIANT. So while he shouldn’t be too dissimilar from the Loki we know, I do not think we can entirely look to the old to determine the new.

Now that we have that out of the way, we’re back to my somewhat noncommittal answer of the original question. Loki has some moments that seem OOC, but almost always has a (valid) reason for acting that way, both in and out of universe.

Loki’s OOC moments:

◦ The Renaissance Fair: And I by no means think this applies to his whole spiel. In fact, I think it was largely in character. What got me was “Which is absurd, because my people are, by nature, gullible fools. A trait that I, the God of Mischief, exploited time and time again simply by listening.” And then again, right after B-15 announces they are one unit away from red line. Though, my issue with the latter is how rushed it is. This could make sense because he’s worried about having time to finish his ploy. It’s a small thing to harp on for sure, though, for the point I am trying to make.

◦ In the hallway: This is where I think he’s most OOC. It feels rambley and pointless. More a desperate plea than a calculated last resort.

◦ With the librarian: I was hesitant to put this one in, but he seemed a bit unsure at points in his dialogue here. The inflection of his voice in the middle just sounded, like I said, unsure.

◦ The cafeteria (both times): More so in the first. The metaphor was, like Loki himself said, clumsy. But what I really think is OOC here is how excitable and obvious he is after Mobius concedes, “Not bad.” And the only thing on their second cafeteria chat is at the very end. His response of “I know” to being called clever, once again has an inflection to it that I would not typically associate with Loki—it’s too pronounced.

◦ Pompeii (beginning of scene only): Loki seems pretty flippant about the whole thing in the immediate moments after their arrival. (As an aside, I don’t think he’s necessarily unsympathetic here; he knows what happens and to keep himself safe and prove his point, he can’t branch the timeline.) To be quite honest, I think he might just be goading Mobius as he’s done to our God of Mischief many a time already.

◦ Before Roxxcart: He seems nervous, and his speech is a bit rushed again. Then again, this is something he wants—to be better. I’d think he’d be a bit more calm about it, though. Then again, with everything that’s happened recently, maybe it’s a natural response?

The reasons why he seems OOC:

◦ It’s on purpose: He knows what they think of him. If he plays into that, even in an exaggerated way, they’re not going to call bs on it.

◦ He’s been through a lot/Not our Loki: Like I mentioned earlier, not only is this a new environment, it’s a new Loki. He’s been shaped differently from our Loki because of how he was immediately thrust into the world of the TVA after many traumatic experiences.

◦ It’s an acting choice: No, it’s not one you have to agree with. But I believe Tom could be doing it to highlight moments where Loki is saying things he personally does not actually believe or that he knows others believe. Just to distinguish from the more calculated lying he does.

So, are there moments when Loki acts OOC? Yes. Is it inexplicable? No. Are the answers to those questions always the same from person to person? No, because like so many things, it’s all about how you frame it. And, of course, every person perceives each moment of time through their own eyes, with their own thoughts, in their own ways.

Loki has plenty of moments in character, too. In fact, I’d say he was overwhelmingly in character, for my understanding of it. In the earlier parts of the Renaissance Fair he is witty and lying with ease. At all other points that I didn’t mention, I found his vocabulary and inflection perfectly fine. I can’t think of any one moment his hand gestures particularly stuck out to me as out of place. And during his impromptu magic lesson, he seemed so sure of himself. He has snark without being rude. His interactions with “the variant” are on point. Even in the majority of the Pompeii scene, he’s not acting OOC, he’s just acting. He wanted to make an over-exaggerated splash to test his theory. Between that and speaking Latin, aren’t we seeing his cunning and wit?

Well, with that divisive and slightly negative topic out of the way, let’s move onto Mobius, his character, and his role in the show. He’s a bit different than the Mobius we see last time. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still moments where he seems to be manipulating Loki, or at least attempting to (the walk to the elevator; dangling a meeting with the Time Keepers in front of Loki’s face). In episode two, he’s presented as a victim. Mobius is just as much a slave to the “sacred timeline” as those living in it. He can’t go into the world and do the things he wants to do. Even any questions about time that Loki has, he answers seemingly by rote (perhaps drilled into his brain through propaganda?) or he can’t explain well (note, two times he somewhat hesitantly deems what Loki says as “an oversimplification”).

We’re also told that Mobius has a soft spot for broken things. That seems like a bold thing to say if Mobius hasn’t done something big before. Has he possibly ever used a variant like this before? Could he even possibly have a deeper connection to the rouge variant? Probably not on that second one, but it’s not wholly impossible. Though, going back to “has he done this before?” (and get ready for me to get absolutely insane now) do the rings on the table have deeper symbolic meaning pertaining to this? Yes, it could have just been for comedy, it may have just been a cool shot, but why put so much focus and emphasis on it like that with the camera and dialogue if it has no significance. Basically what I mean is, it’s symbolic of Mobius messing up. He messed up Renslayer’s table, maybe he botched a mission. Or maybe he even screwed up when working with another variant. Regardless of whether that’s symbolism, we do see him have a soft spot for the people at the hurricane shelter.

Mobius’s role in episode 1 was trying to break down Loki and recruit him. In this episode, he was more of a guide, more of a friend. Yes, there are lines like at Roxxcart when he says he knows he can’t be trusted, but there’s also a lot of camaraderie between the two. By the time Loki and Mobius are having their second chat in the cafeteria, they seem familiar with each other, engaging in what seems to be a friendly bout of verbal sparring. They seem, at very least, fond of each other, and I believe Mobius is, to some extent, on Loki’s side.

In fact, Mobius and Loki share something in common; they want something more than what the time keepers have preordained for them, even if Loki is more ready to admit that. Mobius is still, however, playing the part he’s been assigned, his “glorious purpose.” And, yes that includes some digs like that at Loki, whether Loki’s in the room or not, and whether they’re subtle or not. Is “I’ll delete him myself. He’s really arrogant.” really a dig though? I mean, it sounds like he could just be saying what Renslayer wants to hear. And when he talks about Loki wanting something more, wanting to change, I don’t think he’s actually talking about Loki. With the inflection and stage whisper, it almost sounds like he’s projecting. Remind you of anyone? Mobius will likely end up helping Loki, or may even turn into a tragic hero, his fatal flaw being his unwillingness to admit the TVA is not infallible.

The TVA workers. Isn’t odd how some of them have names and others don’t? Do they name themselves? More likely, I think whoever is in charge of a branch of the TVA gets a name, and all underlings get the less than human mix of letters and numbers with which to identify themselves. It also seems that the people with the most personality are the ones with names. B-15 has a personality, sure, but it’s more just in line with “I work for the TVA. This is what they want. I will do exactly that.” It’s almost lacking something that the named characters have lying beneath the surface of their character arc.

And then she gets enchanted, and if Wunmi Mosaku wasn’t already shining with the limited story for the character, oh boy she is now. When B-15 comes to, she is scared. It’s on her face and in that little shuddered breath. And when asked what happened, she seemed so unsure, timid. I’m definitely interested to see how that progresses!

Back to the workers in general, they didn’t seem as sad about their coworkers this episode as in the last. Even with C-20 it seemed to be a respect thing. I mean, they reset the timeline with their colleagues lying dead on the floor. I think in a lot of scenarios, dead soldiers would be given a proper burial.

Ravonna Renslayer and the time keepers. Renslayer is even more steadfastly devoted to the sacred timeline and the time keepers than anyone else. Why? Well, I think it’s because she is the time keepers. Any time they’re brought up, it’s quickly explained away with a simple “they’re busy.” That’s because they’re not real. But Renslayer sure seems chummy with them, huh? What other reason then its her timeline she has everyone protecting.

Then again, she may only be second in command, but not to the time keepers. (I mean, omniscient and omnipotent beings who are relatively aloof and unreachable? They’re perfectly set up to be revealed as not real. Plus the constant non-answers when it comes to them, I’ll be more surprised if they’re real than if they’re not.) But in the comics, her plot line is interwoven with that of Kang the Conqueror, a time traveler, among many other things. Even more likely than her being in charge, is him being in charge.

And now for the variant. It’s not Lady Loki, we all know that right? Ok, that comes off a bit harsh, but she is listed as Sylvie in the credits for languages other than English. This was also who Sophia Di Martino was previously listed as on IMDb. I won’t get into her story in the comics now, but I’d bet we’ll take elements of that in her story in the series. And if you’re still not convinced that’s who this is, why have her blonde? It just doesn’t make sense to change that about her. Plus, Sylvie takes on the name of Enchantress. What does Loki say her powers are? Enchantments. She doesn’t want to be called Loki either. She does say the main Loki variant is her, but if she’s framing him or taking on his persona for her crimes, why stop now? Her language is distinctly un-Loki like, too. She also boldly declares “This isn’t about you.” And finally, there’s the foreshadowing in Loki’s line, “I would never treat me like this.”

I only wonder what her motives are. Is she looking for revenge on the Loki from her timeline? Or perhaps she’s working fo him? Maybe he’s dead and she’s avenging him? Or he’s alive and she wants to grab his attention? Maybe she has motives all her own. And what of Mephisto? Does he actually play a part in this? I’m just spitballing, I need more information.

When Loki finds the file. No. Like. Give a detailed description of this please!!!!! He thinks he’s evil. That he causes all that death with malicious intent. Even if he doesn’t, there’s clear pain over the destruction of Asgard. And look at his eyes, the only thing we’re shown as he process the information fully for the first time. He’s hurt, confused. Disappointed and angry with himself. The bit we’re shown of his face before it zooms in on his eyes portrays this too. He looks so lost in that shot. And he looks to be tearing up a bit.

Maybe I’m just being dumb, but what does it mean 9,719 casualties? Didn’t they all escape? His face as the scene zooms back out is... defeated. Scared. Scarred. He’s barely holding it together. Then something else catches his eye, giving him an idea. And I’m sure more than anything he wants to be distracted from the storm in his mind. So yeah, he’ll happily throw himself into his work. The epiphany on his face as he’s still recovering and discovering new things is just so perfect too.

The confrontation at Roxxcart. This was really well done, I felt. Loki felt in character, and he was fighting smartly, using what he could. Because clearly the enchantment also lent Sylvie’s powers to the person. But Loki manages to hang in there and dig for information while keeping the battle going.

He gets mad, too. He starts yelling. And that makes sense. He wants answers, and for so long he’s been denied them; it’s a recurring theme in his life. He’s losing control of himself a bit here. And that’s a large part of the reason why he goes through the time door. Loki doesn’t want to lose control again. I don’t even know if it was exactly a betrayal of the TVA. I don’t think he’s on their side, but I think he just saw that he couldn’t lose the variant again. Because for what he says his plan is, he wouldn’t have followed the variant. However, he does because he wants answers.

What about that plan though? I’m working a bit in reverse with this scene I realize, but bear with me. That look on his face as he stands, it’s calculating. I think he’s lying about his plan. I think he’s trying to bring the variant in, not work with them.

Also, I’m so concerned for C-20. What’s real? I want to know!! But we’re already getting a feel for Sylvie’s powers. The people she enchants live, but they’ve seen something they’d rather not. What other reason is there for the similar way B-15 and C-20 act? And I know she mentions telling Sylvie the time keeper’s location, but really, it’s their location to her knowledge. It doesn’t necessarily mean they exist. Or maybe it’s just Kang.

And Mobius at the very end of this scene, the very end of the confrontation, the very end of the episode. The last thing is him calling after Loki. And he sounds genuine, almost. It didn’t sound like he was fearful for his own life, but rather more worried for Loki. Though, maybe I have that confused and it’s worried about Loki. Whatever the reason, it sounded like genuine fear in his voice to me.

Finally, some random thoughts that didn’t fit anywhere:

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is so talented. I mean, I got a lot of emotion from Renslayer. Confident and proper at the beginning, panicked and afraid at the end. Even in her talks with Mobius, there’s many subtleties to pick apart. I think it’s heavily implied through her words and actions that she’s evil.

The casual magic use was great. Hope there’s more.

Why do setting off reset charges in the main timeline have a different effect than setting them off in the branch timelines? Like shouldn’t it wipe it, not make branches?

Loved all the rapport happening in the episode. There was a lot of good dialogue.

Despite the manipulations going on, I like the relationship forming between Mobius and Loki. I think they make a nice little duo.

I love all the Loki variants we’re shown. Very, very interesting. Just give us Jötunn Loki for real, please.

Loki was very clever this episode, particularly with figuring out you could hide in an apocalypse and at Roxxcart.

Does Roxxcart have a link to Roxxon?

Their little motto thing is a bit creepy. “For all time. Always.” Sounds like it’s just part of their propaganda.

“You see, I know something children don’t. No one bad is ever truly bad. And no one good is ever truly good.” I love this line. Seriosuly, why not use this sound bite in the trailers? Loki himself is morally gray, and I love that we’re addressing this fact of life; the world is not all black and white, not all good and bad.

CASEY!!!

In the second cafeteria scene, there is a guard in full armor just standing there. I guess they’re monitoring the employees. How likely does whoever is in charge think it would be for an uprising of sorts to happen?

Between sleepy Loki, him putting that jacket on, his hair, that talking to himself and that annoyed little shh in the library, and just being the happy goof that he is deep down (Miss Minutes scene and salad metaphor) Loki was just so adorable this episode.

I think it’s important Mobius said sorry when talking about ragnarok. He knows Loki cares.

Mobius does kind of understand Loki when saying he has an “insecure need for validation.” He’s right, honestly, albeit harsh. But that’s all he wanted throughout the Thor movies too, not to be looked down upon. To be treated as equal. As worthy.

Of Mobius’s two options for why he’s sticking his neck out for Loki, I think they both hold some truth.

Interesting how TVA agents like to keep souvenirs from lives they can never live. Though maybe Renslayer keeps them for a different reason. Like from timelines that were particularly a threat to order—her order.

The score is still on point. Loving the theremin.

Wow an explanation pertaining to time travel I’ve found no holes in. It’s unstable and they have to enter in real time (furthest point on the branch) because of that. Ok, yeah. Checks out.

I’m so glad they kept the title card from last week. I like it so much better than the one from the trailers, and it fits the vibe of the show better.

Is it bad I want all these new branches to red line? I think it seems a little too early into the show for that to happen, but maybe a few of them will? Perhaps improbable but not impossible. But think of the chaos! What better playground for the God of Mischief than a universe thrown into disarray.

And now, my final thoughts. A very good episode with a mainly in character Loki. I like how we’re slowly learning more with what’s going on, while still keeping an element of mystery. Though, Marvel’s twists aren’t landing as well as I think they were hoping (assuming I’m right of course. I’ve seen plenty of other people who were thinking along the same lines though, so). It’s lacking a certain je ne sais quoi that Glorious Purpose had, but I still enjoyed it. Overall, 8/10. Let’s just hope my rating doesn’t go down point with every episode.

Like something I said? Totally disagree? Really want to talk more about one point? Whatever it is, I’d love to hear! Reblogs and comments are appreciated. My ask box is always open, and anon is always on. I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thanks :)

Me, after not liking one, but two episodes:

#this is very long and I apologize #I’m garrulous and go on far too many parenthetical asides #but here are my thoughts however profound they may be #*throws thoughts into the void* #loki analysis #the loki show #the loki show spoilers #the loki series #loki series #the loki series spoilers #loki odinson #loki laufeyson #loki friggason #no proofing only posting #ik I said this would post on Thursday #and it’s Thursday somewhere #even if it’s not where I am 😂 #but I’d like to post sooner rather than later #so here it is ahead of schedule

[edwardiansuggestions]

Dear Editor,

I would consider myself to be a rather confident person in life, but recently whenever I make the slightest mistake, (e.g mispronouncing a word) I find myself spiralling into crippling guilt and deciding that I’m not clever. I’ve tried to tell myself otherwise, but its all in vain. Do you have any advice on how to overcome these thoughts?

Yours,

A Feeling Not So Clever Reader

My dear child,

The edifice of education is one with high, blazing columns of marble, within which walk in a rolling gait lecturers with their white beards trailing behind them, and to whom any person might listen if they should choose. The people that do listen, however, are those to whom listening is convenient: by listening, we never make a mistake, nor expose ourselves to chastisement by head-masters and philosophic men-of-letters. The intellectual world - and, my dear, I do speak from experience - is constructed nearly entirely of listeners; people who bear the weight of one another on their backs, and become over time more and more like bricks. A listener is one who is either too foolish or too wholly frightened to speak, to question, to even contempt, and thus, while in their great numbers produce a fine audience (or brick wall), they are inconducive to anything really constructive. It is easy to listen, and to never be seen a fool.

It is the questioners who we must admire. Your question might be foolish, but your questioning makes you braver than any person who sits idly and listens. To quell your fears, I assure you that it does not do to present oneself as perfect; if we think of the finest person we know, it will never be the most handsome, arresting, or charming person we know, nor, indeed, the best listener, but somebody deep in their convictions! We might make some pithy social error - goodness knows everybody has - but, while the memory of it might toss and turn us in our bed, when do we ever think of the follies of others? Never, I daresay, unless if in gentle revelry! Do not fret, then, at what others might think of you; many people are vain by nature, and think of themselves much more.

For some practicable advice, remember that a person who pronounces a word differently from a learned person has not made an error, but instead has reflected that they are well-read themselves; they have encountered the word in question entirely on their own merit, and not by parroting about town reciting other person’s maxims, as many claimants to education do. I can speak highly of the virtues of embarrassing oneself every day; by making a fool of ourselves to inconsequential strangers we become much more comfortable with ourselves. I bid you, and all my dear readers, to go out and make a fool of yourself to people who do not really matter to you: jump to grasp a cherry-blossom when people are watching, for all I care. People either do not mind, or will find you tremendously refreshing, if you do not dress yourself finely in perfection, but relinquish your heavy brocaded masks to be easy-going and natural. The evidence is present in our own response to such people, to whom we are always drawn.

Go forth, then, dear reader, and remember that the Fool of Shakespeare is often regarded (by the very well-to-do professors, I understand) the cleverest of his circle, and proves a rather important and admirable character to his audiences.

In candour and a little jest,

The Editor

#Anonymous #asks #edwardian

[lilflowerpot]

Soulmate AU where the marks on one person's skin show up on the other, but obviously they can't understand each other's writing, so Keith mostly just tries to express himself through art instead. So naturally, when he starts investigating the Blue Lion he starts drawing THAT too. Which is why, when Voltron shows up, Lotor is Dead Certain that the blue paladin is his soulmate, and he desperately tries to force himself to fall in love with Lance even while he's like "... Really? THIS guy?"

Lotor’s soulmate is not illiterate, but they may as well be. He’s compared their careless scrawl against every language in the Imperial data banks - thrice! - and it’s simply... not there.

“They’re a primitive,” Ezor nods sagely from where she’s half draped over his shoulder, eyeing the illegible lettering on his wrist with an entertained curl to her lips, “must be. Guess the universe wanted to counterbalance all your insufferable braininess.”

When Lotor shrugs her off with a snarl, she has the audacity to laugh.

Acxa’s kinder, or she tries to be, comforting him with the notion that if his soulmate is a primitive, they’re at the very least an educated one, or better yet of a more evolved society wherein knowledge of scripture is commonplace, so... they’re not feral.

Zethrid seems to half wish that they were, if only for the thrill of it.

“And the sex,” Ezor tacks on with an evil little grin, “the sex would have been fantastic.”

Her soulmate’s raucous glee drowns out any further discussion of the topic.

-

So they can’t communicate, not with words, but if Lotor’s soulmate is anything it’s tenacious (and the Prince can’t help but admire that). They come to the conclusion that pictures are the way to go, painting Lotor’s forearms with a veritable rainbow of quadrilaterals, each containing varying stripes and symbols, and then a series of dotted squiggles that Lotor is beginning to recognise as their approximation of a question.

The problem being he doesn’t actually know what it is that they’re asking.

There’s one rectangle - the majority of which is striped red and white, with a one contrasting quarter of stars in a blue sky - that his soulmate keeps coming back to, and Lotor realises it must be a clan symbol of a sort, indicative of their own people and culture, but... once again scouring Imperial logs turns up nothing of import. Frustrated, Lotor practically carves the hateful Imperial emblem into his palm with jagged lines of ink - Vrepit Sa - and turns in for the night.

In the morning, his arms are wiped clean.

They stay that way for a quintent.

Two.

On the third, he hears back, and it rocks his entire world view.

Kraliept Sa.

The lines are careful, deliberate, as if someone unfamiliar with the old scripture had taken great pains to transcribe that singular character, and Lotor quite simply can’t believe his eyes, because that would mean... that would mean that the only two things he knows of his soulmate are in direct contrast with one another: the first being that they are completely isolated from the Empire, and the second more impossible yet, that they have ties to the Blade of Marmora.

-

They continue this way for almost a decaphoeb, and it’s not perfect, but it’s something.

Lotor sends renderings of the stars, his ship, Kova, and in return his soulmate replies with sketches of the animals and sunsets and vast expanses of desert on an alien world.

One evening, they blur blues and greens into a perfect little marble on the inside of Lotor’s knee, an arrow pointing to one of the green patches labeled with a sequence of characters that the galra Prince is beginning to recognise as his soulmate’s name - though he can’t so much as begin to guess at how they might be pronounced - and so on the opposite knee Lotor paints Daibazaal, and then, because that feels inadequate, smears his thumb through the centre of the planet he no longer calls home, doodling a battalion of ships leaving the wreckage in a mass exodus, the children of an orphaned world.

And once more, his soulmate falls quiet.

-

It’s almost a full phoeb until they reach out again, and when they do Lotor finds them franctic, frightened, their little blue-green marble only the beginning; an entire solar system follows, complete with details such as what Lotor assumes must be an accurate number of moons on each planet for how deliberately they’re marked out, and then-

A ship.

It’s small and unassuming and positively archaic in design, but it’s a ship nonetheless, and as Lotor watches, his soulmate draws and erases and re-draws that same design until it’s traveled the length of his leg - thigh to ankle - and ‘lands’ on an unassuming moon of the most distant planet. They circle it with agitation, jabbing whatever implement they’re using to mark their own skin so violently that Lotor’s quite sure they must bleed under the force of it, but he doesn’t know what to say, let alone know how to say it if he did.

The next morning, his soulmate’s mural has gone.

The phantom ache of it remains.

-

They call him Champion.

Lotor only takes interest because of the timing, because of the circumstance, because it’s Sendak’s fleet that located these new lifeforms on a desolate moon in some distant corner of the universe, and of all Zarkon’s commanders he most of all has something of a reputation for toeing the line between cruelty and outright sadism.

The odds are one in a million, but that’s not a risk Lotor is willing to take.

He paints an obnoxious criss-cross of colour onto his own face that will be impossible to hide or mistake for anything other than what it is, and sends his generals to ascertain whether the Champion or either of the two lifeforms that accompanied him - soon to be subject to the work camps - share the mark.

They don’t, not one of them, and so Lotor chalks it up to coincidence and moves on.

Finding what could almost be mistaken for the legendary Blue Lion on the back of his hand only for Voltron proper to re-emerge into the universe after thousands of decaphoebs with the Champion himself allegedly at the helm, is not so easily written off.

And this time, when his soulmate abandons him to cold silence, it feels final.

-

Thayserix was very much a spur of the moment decision, but Lotor has never been so glad of such impulsivity as he is now, with the blue Lion of Voltron having been stolen from the thick mists and safely in his grasp.

Though, it’s not the lion that interests him.

Yes she’s a beautiful beast of considerable power, but in this case it is quite literally what’s on the inside that counts, that being of course Lotor’s soulmate... or so he’d thought.

Princess Allura of Altea cannot be them.

At least he certainly hopes not.

She’s lovely, in theory, but they’ve been in a stalemate for the past varga with her sullenly refusing to so much as consider entertaining Lotor’s attempts at hospitality, let alone conversation, and instead quite stubbornly standing with both her guard and weapon raised.

“I really would simply like to speak with-”

“Release me.”

Her end of things has consisted solely of those two words, and the monotony of it all really is growing rather tiresome.

Narti saves him from another repetitive bout, slinking into his mind and whispering that the rest of Voltron have located them far more quickly than Lotor would have thought possible.

The worst part is he’s almost grateful.

“Very well,” he growls, temper wearing thin, “your friends are here to collect you Princess, perhaps they will be more amenable to a little tête-à-tête, hm?”

They are not.

“Release Allura,” is the first thing to pass the dark-haired Paladin’s lips, teeth bared and tongue sharp, and it takes everything Lotor is not to simply concede on the spot.

“Frankly, I would love to,” he spits, gratified by how completely this blindsides the lot of them, every face on the holoscreen struck blank by his immediate compliance. “I do not believe she is the individual I am looking for, nor does she seem inclined to assist me in locating whosoever is. Answer my questions, and you are welcome to her and the blue Lion both.”

“We... We are?” It’s an older gentleman who speaks up, the only other altean among them.

“Absolutely,” Lotor hisses, and then graciously concedes: “the mistake was mine. I simply wished to open a dialogue with who I had assumed to be the blue Paladin, but as she is of a background that would doubtless have allowed us to communicate in galra script, that no longer seems the case.”

Their group look like they’re going to ask him to further explain what must sound to the lot of them nonsense... all except the black Paladin whose eyes have gone wide on some personal revelation, whispering “you,” as if he can’t believe his ears, only to spit out an obscenity before repeating himself with all the fury of an imploding star. “You!”

There are several exclamations of “Keith-!” as those violet eyes narrow to slits, the man smacking his hand down and cutting their com-line dead.

Ezor, helpful as ever, mumbles: “Well that went well,” quiet enough that it’s almost as if she doesn’t mean for everyone in the otherwise silent cockpit to hear her.

-

For the first time in ten thousand decaphoebs, the black Lion is - technically - in Imperial hands.

Lotor couldn’t care less.

The man who strides out of her is a veritable firestorm, all dark brows and snarling lips, and in a heartbeat Lotor knows, he just knows, who he is.

What he is.

Galra, for one, almost certainly a hybrid like Lotor - it’s the eyes that betray him, half luminescent with rage - and there’s a gorgeous poeticism to that.

Reckless for another, and behind him from where she’s been brought to stand witness, Princess Allura is clearly horrified to see her companion step from Voltron’s keystone and leave it completely unprotected, but the Paladin doesn’t seem to care, and neither does Lotor.

“Release Allura,” he growls again, voice like thunder and just as electrifying as he storms across the landing bay without hesitation, not even stopping to glance in his fellow Paladin’s direction and affirm that Zethrid has, in fact, released her as instructed.

No, Lotor’s soulmate simply fists pale fingers into paler hair and hisses, “fuck you,” into his mouth before kissing the Prince senseless.

-

Later - much, much later - Lotor is pleased to report back to Ezor that the sex is, in fact, fantastic.

#sorry/not sorry I wrote an entire ficlet thing but this was just TOO GOOD #this is totally self-indulgent but like.. if that's not the point of fanfiction then idk what is #one day I will actually write out a keitor soulmates au in full but today is not that day #so for the time being you will have to content yourselves with this #sa screams back #keitor #other aus #ficlet #prince lotor #keith kogane

[goblinconceivable]

braindump: betty/daniel

I’ve been living with them for a while, notes taken, a few stories significantly started but there’s a gelling issue, which I’m hoping is at least partially down to a lack of proper braindumping.  So, in no particular order and certainly not comprehensive:

Frankly I also got too hooked on the last 2 eps, which is likely where I’m blocked.  It’s an abrupt emotional twist for them (esp Daniel), and in trying to make sense of that I’m losing focus on the 4 previous years.

- I’m a little bit obsessed in the scene where Betty tries to convince Matt she’s fearless by pointing out her bang-less-ness.  And then runs into Daniel, who is at that moment half brain-washed, but yet when she asks about her fearless quotient his response is immediate and natural and entirely lacking in irony: “no bangs.”  It’s a tiny little moment that shows how well he not only knows her, but understands her.  Without judgment, without fanfare.  Were I to have a husband, this is the sort of response that would confirm I’d married the absolute perfect guy for me.

- They’re too close for mirroring to be an important indicator, but there are two scenes that stand out in this vein: the first is when Betty thinks he may have pushed Christina down the stares and steals the video.  She’s backing out the door, and he follows, matching her step for step.  I love the direction choices because from her perspective there’s a sense of menace, Daniel as potential villain is stalking her.  But from his guileless perspective he’s talking to her and if she’s moving, so is he.  The second is from the penultimate, talking about Trista, where Betty’s rolling back and forth and he moves with her, rather than simply turning his head.  It signals his full engagement in the conversation, seeking her attention, and is why the scene plays as flirting rather than their normal banter.

- That bulletpoint was getting a bit long, so second point on the flirting is that it plays against Betty shutting down the conversation “none of my business,” leading to the fight over involvement in each other’s personal lives, leading to the revelation that they know each other at that deep personal level so very, very well.  Which was a very clumsy leadup to Daniel’s revelation during Hilda’s wedding speech, that could have been handled so much more deftly but those last two eps were quite rushed, I don’t know when they found out about the shortened season but it feels like they’d planned for more space and had to jab in exposition.

- Becaaaaause: they narratively broke his ‘aha’ moment onto “know you better than you do” while the strength of the message is really in the “do anything to protect them.”  Which is, I believe, where they cut to his softened expression.  Not coincidentally, this is precisely what a lot of fan-readings of the characters focus on: Daniel will do anything to protect Betty.  Bobby might have said he’d throw himself under a bus for Hilda, but Daniel HAS done that for Betty- in fact literally doing so would probably have been easier than publicly shouldering the blame for the Tornado cover and giving away the profits.  Due to the fact that he had time to consider the consequences and did it anyway.

- Which is tidy segue into an admission that I’m flying mostly blind on the Molly arc because I basically skipped all her scenes, but it’s my understanding that Daniel doing this was a pivotal moment for them.  Ie, she was impressed that he did this thing.  I mean, I really appreciate that he spent the whole press conference scene looking for Betty, so the show in no way undercut their relationship.  But then they very clearly built the Molly relationship on the foundation of not only the man Daniel had become due to Betty, but choices he was making in large measure for Betty: it’s not that he saw Betty beaten down and resolved the situation: he was upset but lost, she yelled at him, and THEN he resolved the situation by taking the bullet.  Did I break grammar by ending up with two colon’d clauses in the same sentence?  It’s a braindump, ain’t gotta be pretty.  XP

- Quick sidebar that the same thing happens with Alexis.  She was expecting to come back to one brother, but then listens in on his pep talk with Betty and finds she’s returned to a different brother.  This may be where I got the “an assistant” phrasing, if so, my bad.  But basically, she was impressed with Daniel’s actions, not understanding that it was Betty specifically inspiring his actions.

- Follow that a step further and did Molly ever acknowledge how important Betty is to him?  Legit question.  I think her line here was about him doing it “for an assistant” (?) rather than even “his assistant,” establishing Betty as a non-entity for her.  (Quoting a summary but I think I’m in the ballpark.)  And I’m sure I’d have read about it somewhere if she brought Betty up during their discussion on who he’d date when she was dead.

- Just one last note on Molly, (okay it’s a multi-part though it veers off her as a character) but a possibly incorrect beef is that I hate the Daniel/Molly relationship because there’s no interesting or even real conflict?  It’s perfect?  I’m supposed to think this is magical “true love”?  Molly has apparently been engaged for years to a man she doesn’t really love (and um... that’s lazy not strong), and helps inspire a vengeance filled betrayal by her ex because she’s so awesome everyone loves her?  But she comes out squeaky clean because any emotional cheating on her part is balanced and thus “justified” by Connor falling for Wilhemina.  And then the only “conflict” is that she’s dying, and is perfect throughout it?  That’s...  weak.

-That poem thing WOULD have been an interesting point of conflict but it was resolved by Betty’s intervention, rather than within the relationship.  Which actually is an incredibly interesting beat.  The problem with that being it’s so entirely consistent with the role Betty plays in Daniel’s life that it’s treated as just another beat, as if it doesn’t MATTER that a fundamental moment of intimacy and growth of vulnerability in Daniel’s very important romantic relationship is a door opened by a third party.  There’s a strong argument to be made for something but I broke off to write the next point and now can’t remember what that strong argument is.  I might remember later.  It may have had something to do with Molly being a stepping stone in Daniel’s arc, but the cult-thing was so long and dominating that it didn’t work, it tied him too tightly for too long and coinciding with a loosening of his relationship with Betty there was flailing.

- Quick one: Daniel’s fast-forwarded and time-bounded relationship with Molly is the analog to Betty’s time-limited relationship with Henry.  Which is a discussion I would like Daniel and Betty to have.  Esp. noting that Betty and Henry had issues they worked through together (ice cream foreplay being one.)

- Player!  So going back to a happy place, when Betty’s on the phone trying to fix the apartment situation and the camera pans onto Daniel just leaning against the doorway: this may be a legitimate little moment of “squee!”  There’s so much denial in his laid back attitude at Player, but I still love watching how the informality of the environment reflects in the informality with Betty.  He gives her free reign, and there’s many answers to “why,” and I (almost) don’t want to go into them because I totally adore how this Daniel is basically a College!Daniel only he’s latched onto Betty, who, meanwhile, is just being Betty.  OMG how different his life would have been if he’d met Betty in college...

- Okay I actually don’t feel like going into whys, it’s just an arc to enjoy.  With a small mention of how he TOTALLY was playing with the MODE book and handed it to Betty knowing she’d understand and use it to get them back in.  Such a crazy subtle manipulation, to the point where I’m not sure it wasn’t almost entirely subconscious on Daniel’s part.

- The YETI recommendation letter.  What I love is that this is another time when Daniel fvcks up, but fixes it, and more importantly displays competence and ingenuity alongside authentic caring and effort.  Here’s the thing: YETI wanted Betty, even if it was just a quota thing (which it wasn’t entirely, at least one of the board was generally enthused.)  So all that was necessary was to have them re-label her as from Player.  Daniel knew this and did this.  And told Betty that.  BUUUUT that point was purposefully (by script and character) overshadowed by the gesture of the lengthy rec letter he put significant time into.  Whose real audience was... wait for it...  Betty.  He even did a second draft!  Which is more time and effort and a cleaner product.

-  Also flaking on her practice run.  I also enjoy how he (finally...) bounced back into the office clearly having forgotten her schedule, but having mentally shifted from Molly-space into Betty-space.  He’s enthused, he’s engaged, he’s sort of bantering and I’d like to see where that scene would have gone if she hadn’t immediately gotten the acceptance call.

- So there’s this moment somewhat early on, pretty sure when Betty’s taking the writing class, and wants Daniel to give her feedback.  And he’s all “why?,” coming from his “I don’t actually know what I’m doing” place.  She responds that he’s her friend and wants to know what he thinks.  And he does a little double-take at that word.  Because until that point Daniel totally sees Betty as HIS Friend, and they’ve referred to each other as friends, with a little “f,” and he believes that.  But it wasn’t until this moment that he even considered that HE might be HER Friend.  Presumably because he doesn’t believe he has anything to offer her, beyond the power he holds as EIC and her boss - ie, “here run this show” and other such responsibilities.

- Which is a recurring theme.  Pronounced on relationship stuff especially.  When she asks him for input on the Henry vs Gio situation, when she’s trying to date the playwright.  His response is always “I’m in no position to offer relationship advice/judgment on relationships.”  He sorta dodges the first and is permissive on the second.  I don’t know where to go with that so I’ll leave it (for now).

- When  he was supposed to be in Rio, Betty wasn’t even at MODE, she was working for the “enemy,” and he was sending her regular postcards?  First, they’d have been postmarked in New York and presumably with local stamps, so I’m not 100% on Betty not cottoning on.  But it’s super cute that he was thinking of her when he was incommunicado with literally everyone else.  Did he want her to figure it out (subconsciously)?  It’s an act of reaching out, but also of convincing: he’s created a fictional narrative of being in Rio, fed and embellished by the media and swallowed by coworkers, but it’s through Betty that he’s establishing the fiction in a definitive way.  He wants HER to believe it, because if SHE believes he’s there and having a good time, then he can believe it too, with a small piece of his imagination.

- Same convincing as in Player.  BTW, how did all those messages on her phone work?  He was 99% totally hiding the situation from her.  a) why wouldn’t he just call her from his phone, as he always did in the past?  b) he was creating another fictional space.  Where her “number” was literally on a post-it on his temporary assistant’s monitor.  It’s all play: “call Betty” happens many times, and every one is the act of doing it while knowing that he’s not really doing it.  c) Betty does not point out that he should have been confused he never heard back, or more to the point, that he never heard her voicemail message.  d) he was in a state of limbo waiting for her to come back, nothing is real until she does.  At which point there’s lovely dramatic tension since he both wants her to fix it and get them out of there, and wants to draw her into this new reality and thus make it feel viable.

- 100th Anniversary edition.  I love the idea that he’s hep on her writing his bio because he needs her name, at least, to be next to his.  His identity as EIC is predicated on her being his partner, and needs that shown, even if it’s functionally an “in joke” because it’s not like she can be featured.  In musing over his thoughts while flipping through the book right before deciding to quit, I usually come back to a realization of the transience of the role, but I want it to be a gutpunch of how he assumed, without being aware, that Betty would be next to him in picture, and that’s what they were heading for.

- I’ve actually got through most of my notes, so just a couple more.  Daniel is super impressionable.  He did what Becks told him to in the pilot.  He did what Natalie told him in the cult-situation.  Both against his better judgment - his look after Betty when he kicked her out for being “drama he didn’t need” - that’s the same look when he told her to clock out and was dragged off by the not-16-year-old.  I’m too tired to go check the pilot, but assuming similar look there.  He does what he’s told by anyone telling him to do something, but he WANTS to be rescued from the bad influences, who are so often so forceful.

- Final scene: okay so it turns out quick a lot of my thoughts are trying to understand Daniel.  His growth is blatant and deep.  So a second round will be more Betty-focused.  ‘Cuz I identify strongly with her and don’t have a lot of surface questions about her motivations, but I’m LOST on side of the romantic coin.  And plus she deserves a close look regarding how she grows during the series.

- I watched at least part of the reunion and very much like how AF answered the question of the final scene versus what EM says.  Because I think they each, as actors, see it from the perspective of their characters, which means it was played authentically and grants insight.  AF basically says that she saw it as Daniel coming to say thank you, and how it came down to Betty teaching him that he was good enough.  Which came across a little funny because her phrasing implied they’d never talk or see each other again or something and that’s an alarming finality.  But also implies that Betty really did see moving to London as a significant parting of ways, something that started as soon as she became an editor and their relationship changed.  Probably before.

- She then challenged EM as to why Daniel didn’t say goodbye (as if she didn’t know and hadn’t thought about it?  I’m guessing this was panel performance: asking the question “in character” and throwing the question to the other relevant actor.)  But anyway, EM’s answer was “Because things were just starting.”  Which is blatantly a shippy answer, and he even explains Daniel’s “revelation” as when he “really saw Betty for the first time through and through.”

- At some point in these things you’re like: oh but I thought of something else, and only stop when your brain falls asleep.

- I thought of something else.  And then I forgot it.  My brain is failing!  But not yet failed.

- After Betty gets her braces off there’s this scene near the end, at the shoot.  Daniel sees her and crosses quite purposefully to talk with her.  He wants to banter and share this exciting moment with her.  And the scene goes a little strange when Betty kinda goes “yeah, going now bye.”  I expected more eye contact, a big smile, more conversation.  That’s Betty.  That’s them.  But instead it’s a little awkward so Something Is Happening Here.  Is she self-conscious?  Did she see and hear something in Daniel’s look and comment right after she was detached from the bra and isn’t at this moment comfortable with him?  Is this all fallout from her dream in which she and Daniel slept together/he thought she was a bad person/rejected her only they chose not to explicate this/cut a useful scene/thought I’d get that right away but I’m obtuse?  I don’t think it’s the last one because while I can be horribly obtuse, I don’t think it was coded.  But that’s what the obtuse would say.

- At any rate they don’t pick up on it again, next scene (next ep) they’re back to normal.

- But Daniel does immediately chase after Amanda and let go of her.  Which is payoff for his convo with Betty earlier where she sort of disdainfully asks if he WANTS a more serious relationship with Amanda.  I did sort of wonder if he actually does, but Betty’s judgmentalness is what convinces him he doesn’t.  Usually I’d say Betty understands him so well she knows he doesn’t, but they’re not as close at this point, Betty is living her own life much more, so I dunno.

- But I don’t actually think Daniel was falling for Amanda, or that the show wanted us to think that was ultimately a viable path.  Because of that moment when he’s in a car, calls Amanda, says “I really need to see  you” and she turns him down.  It parallels his text to Betty when Molly died.  One text and Betty came over.  This was an actual distressed voice convo and Amanda doesn’t care enough about him to be there, which is really great development for Amanda even though we don’t see her!  She previously went after Matt when he was in jail, she’s interested in Tyler here, she’s not totally pining for Daniel!

- Daniel of course was using Amanda and their earned if mild emotional intimacy as a crutch, trying to fill the space Betty left.  Also note when Amanda turned him down for sex and he stayed to “hang out,” - this is not supposed to be an analysis of Amanda but I wanna note I like that moment because it felt like she was pleased to think she wasn’t just sex to him, while still being over him romantically. Because she does care about him.

- Or for pete’s...  I have this bad habit of writing notes which I later look at and am like... “huh?”  This is a fic idea, from Daniel’s POV: “Betty had moulded him, often by sheer force of her iron will, into being a man who almost deserved Molly.  And he'd turned right around and become a man who would never deserve Betty.”  And I DON’T REMEMBER WHAT THE SECOND HALF MEANS.  Specifically.

- Wedding dancing.  Happens twice.  Hilda’s wedding, we know what that is.  But at Daniel’s wedding.  I like that he wasn’t 100% Molly focused, ‘cuz, shipper.  And I know why the show had Matt cut in, because gotta keep things moving.  But isn’t it a thing that you don’t cut in on the groom/bride?  It’s their day.  Daniel just sort of nonverbally asks Betty if it’s okay (to leave her with Matt), but can’t help a) thinking he was a bit put out and b) want Molly to see his expression looking at Betty and have some sort of “aha” moment where she - do Molly and Betty have any scenes together?  I don’t remember seeing any and I think I did skim through all the eps, but I need to do that again.

- Ooh, one of the things I forgot en route!  I like that Betty has revolving love interests, because that’s textual argument for Betty never having feelings (romantic) for Daniel.  Which is super, super important in this iteration of the story.  There’s a couple moments - pilot and the first bridge scene - where she arguably has a momentary crush, which quickly settles into a developing platonic relationship.  

- Jump back to Daniel finally seeing Betty as a true equal = romantic feelings.  It’s a thing.  Look my brain is deteriorting and wording is hard!  So there’s two sided imbalance throughout.  Daniel always saw Betty with this veneer of youth, and a great deal of his use for her is helping her “grow into the woman she’ll be.”  And that’s the roadblock in him seeing her as a romantic possibility.  Which was initially quite awesome because he was sleeping with people younger than her, even the “she’s actually 20″ girl was younger than Betty.  And yet always saw her as in many ways more mature and competent than her.  And double-yet he still saw how much further she could, and would, grow.  His belief in her knows no bounds.

- Meanwhile Betty sees him as...  someone who’s also becoming.  Who has great potential.  Bullying him into it if necessary.  And because he’s guided by her, she can’t crush on him, he’s like her pet.  Were she to have a crush, much less fall for him, it would have been horrifying.  She needs to have a moment when she sees him as a true equal, someone who - look, everyone is always still growing so it’s not like he needs to be fully formed, and it’s a little murkier what the moment would look like when she finally sees Daniel “for the first time.”

- ‘cuz as noted, Betty has been there for pretty much every important moment of growth and crossroads in every facet of Daniel’s life.  Whereas Betty consistently had many things and relationships in her life Daniel was not involved in.  She’s always been way more self-reliant (not the word I wanted, is there one that starts with c?)  It’s why they did sort of need to peel away through a chunk of S4, because Daniel needed to learn to cope without Betty propping him up, because it’s like a Miranda-thing:

- “I don’t need Gary.  But I want him.”

- Daniel has to be able to be find without Betty before Betty can see him as a viable romantic partner.  She has to see something she never has before.  Daniel saw that the seedling he’d been protecting was not only strong enough to survive on its own had grown up and bloomed (process begun early in the season when he was being overprotective and she shut that down).  For Betty...  I guess Daniel...  ...  .....  it didn’t happen in the show.  As EM noted, for Daniel, the ending was the beginning.  Because his moment isn’t leaving MODE, that’s just the corresponding moment to Betty shaking him off.  His moment is further down the road when he puts into practice everything he’s learned and ...  something answered in fanfic because it’s spec and I’m tuckered.

#daniel x betty #detty #ugly betty #meta #braindump #my brain literally has nothing except #i got nothing #what a satisfying feeling #to have removed everything and set it in a magical tardis of a post