#and the essay is less than secondary to me

[iknowwhereyousleepatnight]

my professors should know that i do hours of research on topics to write the most unintelligible essays and if my essay is good that means i didn't even look at the material. if my essay screams 'edited in 5 minutes' then i can and will discuss the topic at length but if it looks sooooo good and sooooo nice and gets me an A i have no idea what i was writing about

#sadly many do not understand this #if i can soak it up and write you nice papers i will forget in days. if my essay is awful i've been obsessed with the topic for a while #and no longer see any reason to write out my opinions in a reasonable manner because research has consumed me #and the essay is less than secondary to me #i just want to know things. we can discuss with words out loud if you wish but the paper? i don't care anymore sorry #this is about the worst fucking essay i've written in a hot minute but i can now discuss at length the history of jeffrey dahmer's reign #and the dubious ethics of the police during that time as well as the responsibility that the mentally ill have over their actions and what #factors can distinguish between being legally insane and what behaviors can be used to cancel out a guilty but insane criminal #also i have seen pictures that i wish i can unsee #so that was nice ig

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

how do you feel about march eridan?

Ok disclaimer before I get into it, trolls wearing dresses = great and fantastic; in fact, given that the gender differences in troll culture are so much less significant, ALL the male trolls should own some femme-ass clothes, even if it's as simple as just having a skirt version of their pants, and it's a little lame that we didn't get that.

That said, March Eridan specifically kind of annoys me because it has 0 basis in canon (aside from some shoutouts in things like ministrife sprites) but has taken over Eridan discussions so wholly that it's become widely accepted as part of his character that he's really into femme stuff when the opposite is true, and he's got some pretty major characterization tied up in the fact that he does lean so masc, and what specific type of masc he tends to present as.

So first of all, Eridan dresses up to emulate Dualscar, and this is very obvious and straightforward; if you've read the big essay I have pinned to my blog, you know that this is all a part of his basic "I have to be a big bad sea dweller or Something Bad Will Happen" suite of issues.

Thus, we can ALSO assume that the choices he made that aren't made to emulate Dualscar are reflective of his ACTUAL taste in clothing. For example, blue pants instead of purple and black - I believe that this is because Eridan likes to dress up in the blood colors of his dates; he wears a lot of blue because he's hatedating Vriska (and never quite seems to get 100% over her), and we also see this in the rings on his fingers - half of which are fuchsia, for Feferi.

So that leaves us with the glasses, shoes, and scarf. And we know why he dresses like that! It's because he's a hipster. (The scarf has an added benefit of being associated with harry potter-style wizards).

CCG: PAST YOU, PRESENT YOU, FUTURE YOU CCG: AND ABOVE ALL, UGLY SCARFNECKED DOUCHEBAG HIPSTER YOU CCG: WAIT I FORGOT, ALL OF THE YOUS ARE THAT YOU

And very specifically, a masc hipster from the era - the glasses and the ugly-ass shoes are dead giveaways. The slicked-back hair is reminiscent of that fashion style, too. He is also a douchebag. This too is important. He draws from character archetypes of the time that were generally agreed upon to be the most punchable people in existence; his introduction calls him "KIND OF A TOOL" and he consistently acts according to that. Like, I mean, just LOOK at those shades. Those are not the shades of somebody you want to be trapped in a conversation with.

A fairly accurate Eridan fashion board would look something like this:

And, like, it kind of matters that he dresses like this specific breed of pretentious male douchebag; on a meta level, that's the impression he's supposed to give the audience, and on a diegetic level, he CHOOSES to look like this because he has these kinds of interests, but is relegating them to secondary accessories.

We never hear him talk about liking hipster shit; we have to hear it from Karkat and glean it from his design. This is because, as I've talked about before, he actively distances himself from things that make him happy, things that he'd enjoy. The constant push-pull between his ACTUAL interests, and the ones he thinks he has to have because he's supposed to be a big nasty sea dweller, is a huge part of his characterization - for example, the way he keeps claiming that magic and wizards are fake and shitty, but has no less than 6 wizard statues in his respiteblock alone, and cared about his crappy wands enough to bring them onto the meteor.

So that's one of my other issues with March Eridan and the general fanon that he'd be really into femme clothes (and, by extension, fashion) - he wouldn't be forthcoming about it, even if it was true. He has a deep sense of shame and insecurity surrounding what few interests he actually has, because they feel stupid, ridiculous, and frivolous, next to the intense anxiety he has about playing the role society gave him. He's got a very strong sense of duty that makes it very difficult for him to relax and actually enjoy something. Which, you know, probably feeds into his hipster-ness - a movement often defined more by what it doesn't approve of than what it does.

Canon Eridan, when he has a choice of what to wear, overwhelmingly chooses masculine clothing with hipster connotations. And this matters, it's part of his characterization, it says something about him, the same way that it's important that Karkat dresses very simply and baggily (we all know how many insecurities Karkat has about his body) or that Sollux's bifurcation is shown in his clothes. So please please please don't misunderstand my dislike of March Eridan as me saying I don't want him in dresses; I purely dislike it because it's usually SUCH a misread of his character.

And to prove it, here's my other gripe with March Eridan stuff: all the dresses shown in the not-canon "official" artworks don't even flatter his bodytype. Why do his custom mannequins in Pesterquest have CURVES when his Pesterquest sprite doesn't?????

Please, I'm begging you, there are guides for dressing this body type, and even historical fashions that deliberately try to emulate this body type, please if you're going to dress him femme and HC that he enjoys fashion, please put him in clothes that flatter him please

I think Eridan should own some femme clothes, because on Alternia, there are very few differences between the genders, he's rich enough to afford it, and he clearly has more of an interest in fashion in general - but I think the fact that he has a clear canon preference for masculine styles is significant, and I'm really annoying, so it kind of does bothers me that this is a controversial opinion. That being said, I don't want to tell people what they Should and Should Not do, because that's lame. Who cares. He's a fictional character, let people draw him in dresses. Would be very happy if this post causes people to draw him in different styles of dresses though :pray:

#I'm not going to tag this #because also people playing around with putting Eridan in dresses is 100% harmless #and i'm not going to ruin the fun by going But The Canon Says - #i'm just really really really annoying about canon and i kind of assume people follow me for that reason #but please dont let my annoyingness hamper your fun #if you enjoy putting eridan in dresses then by all means keep doing it #peace and love and rise above

[anxiety-elemental-kay]

Vash's Dual Powers in Trigun Stampede

Or: Christ on a cracker episode eleven really was that fucked up holy shit

Here’s that essay about Stampede Vash’s powers I mentioned a while back. This is another where I yell about Trigun and gender and worry I’m spouting shit that was obvious to everyone, but you’re getting the essay anyway.

Content warnings include discussion of sexual assault, pregnancy, and forced pregnancy. I’ll be talking about episode eleven a lot so. Yeah.

The first time we see Vash manifest his powers is the same time Knives and Conrad do: when he creates a black hole in his arm. We see it absorb the corpses of the people Knives just killed, and we can see from Vash’s panicked expression he has no control over it. Knives then cuts his arm off because his brother just manifested an entire black hole like right there.

(It’s worth noting that the music track for this scene is called ‘Drain Gate’, and another track using Vash’s theme is called ‘Plant of Drain’. In the episode twelve stinger the Pieces of Earth fleet reference using something called a ‘drain gate’, which might be related to FTL travel. I have no conclusions for this point, just that this powers seem to have greater implications than just ‘black hole’ in Stampede.)

So far this is stuff the manga has more or less covered before. Vash’s power specifically was creating black holes. In TriMax we see July and its citizens consumed by a black hole. For Stampede though, Orange gave Vash a secondary power: fertility.

And I do mean fertility and not virility; the capacity to become pregnant versus the capacity to impregnate someone else. At the start of episode eleven, Knives penetrating Vash is pretty obviously phallic. His knives are the literal mechanism by which he seizes control of and violates Vash’s mind and body. On the other hand, when Vash sprouts roots which connect to the other plants in the tank, it doesn’t read as phallic to me.

They look like umbilical cords.

Each root connects to the plants’ stomachs, and aside from a brief red flash this doesn’t appear to cause them any pain or distress, contrary to Vash flailing away from his brother’s blades. We see energy move down the roots from Vash to the plants, and when they unfurl to reveal their pregnancies the roots remain connected at their navels. They look surprised and afraid. Those pregnancies are, almost literally, also his.

For all of Conrad’s technobabble about the plant core and souls and whatever, Vash’s powers seem to boil down to this: he can send things to the higher plane by creating a black hole, and he can take from the plane by manifesting with his, or others’, bodies.

I think this interpretation is reinforced by a series of three shots after Knives says “Happy birthday Vash". The pussy portal opens behind Vash (with a goopy sound effect), we cut to outside the tower to see the purple flowers blooming on the roots, and cut again to inside the tank where the plants unfurl to reveal they’ve become massively pregnant. Portal, flower, pregnancy. It’s all about biological reproduction.

And then Knives goes into the pussy portal and finds an inter dimensional ovum, which he then also penetrates with his blades, explicitly to impregnate all the other plants.

Like.

Studio Orange looked at the Fifth Moon chapter in the original Trigun manga and said “You are like little baby. Watch this.” and then made an episode which made me spend the rest of the day somewhere dark and quiet when I first watched it because holy shit.

(It shouldn’t go unsaid Vash and Knives are canonically trans in Stampede, it’s in the text even if it’s not what Orange was thinking of! Vash is surrounded by yonic imagery and Knives has no dong I don’t know what else to tell you.) (edit: okay so maybe not CANON canon but i'd still argue it's an easy interpretation to make)

There’s always been a dichotomy at the heart of Vash as a character: a desire for peace versus the necessity of violence. A living weapon trying to live and love among humans who constantly reject him. Avoiding hurting others while physically capable of great and terrible destruction.

When Vash regains control he transforms the growths he was forced to make into a MacGuffin that’s easy for the twins to fight over. He transforms what he was forced to create into a bomb, because there didn’t seem to be any other way for him to neutralize the mass. (I assume this because Vash seemed to have immediate and almost perfect control of his powers in episode twelve, and it would be strange for ‘make a bomb’ to be his first choice for dealing with the roots.) Vash has been forced to create something that poses a danger to himself and everyone around him.

Vash was a weapon, even in creating life, from the roots growing to choke all of JuLai, to the pregnant plants, to the nuke cube obliterating the largest human city on the planet.

Forced creation is no different from destruction. Reproduction is not beautiful or honorable when unwilling.

(This is my essay so I’ll allow myself another aside: episode eleven is a good demonstration of why I tend to prefer genre above more realistic stories. Here, like in the manga, we see a metaphorical rape scene stripped of anything that could be (intentionally) titillating, leaving only the victim’s fear and pain. I feel like only in this kind of metaphor can sex be stripped away from assault, and instead put the focus on the emotions of the scene.)

Vash having fertility as a power is (one of many) things that fascinate me about Trigun Stampede. I’m an afab nonbinary person, I’ve always been afraid of getting pregnant, and I’ve never wanted kids. Sexual assault is something I’m deeply afraid of, and I would genuinely rather die than give birth. It’s all tied up in my feelings about my gender and my body and how it’s perceived by others. Vash is pretty much experiencing my literal worst nightmare.

All this circles back to what might be my favorite topic when it comes to analyzing Trigun: how it depicts masculinity.

There’s a lot about masculinity in Trigun that I think is genuinely radical to some degree, and whether it’s something Orange intended to add or if it’s just easier to do a queer interpretation of this version of the story isn’t a question I’m interested in. I’m gonna rub my gay trans little hands all this anime and you can’t stop me!

Stampede doesn’t depict fertility and masculinity as opposites or even incompatible. Vash and his body isn’t made repulsive because he has this power, in fact when he regains control he gets a color change and a sick new hairstyle. Vash possessing this power isn’t depicted as that different from the black hole, it’s just a thing he can do, but here it’s being taken advantage of by his brother. The disgust and horror isn’t from the metaphor of a man becoming pregnant, it’s because he was violated by someone who claims to love him and want to protect him.

For contrast, imagine a similar scene, in which a masculine character is surrounded by feminine/pregnancy imagery, and consider how it would likely be framed in most other mainstream media. Those of you who don’t live under rocks might even think of some examples! Typically in media, men seen anywhere in proximity to femininity are mocked and humiliated.

Vash’s masculinity, his identity, his personhood, are ultimately disconnected from his capacity to reproduce, and by what means his body is or is not capable of making babies. He regained agency because Meryl called out to him, and she called out because he inspired her, and she was inspired because he was out making human connections with people, trying so hard to do the right thing even when he failed. His powers are a part of him, but not what ultimately make Vash truly powerful.

I’m curious to see if/how Studio Orange will continue with this theme going forward. So much of Vash’s character is about contradiction, and in this way they’re making some of those themes even more literal. More contrast-y.

To wrap this up, here’s one more thing I’m curious about: what will become of the Independents who will be born from this? The pregnant plants escaped with Conrad and his flying saucer lab. Assuming any children survive, and considering how much the twins grew in only a year, they could have a role in the future story. What will they be like? How will their origin shape the people they become? How much will Knives control (or fail to control) his children? What will they think of humanity, of Knives, of Vash, of themselves?

#trigun #tristampparty #kay writes things

[anarglitch]

Scott pilgrim takes off inhabits the same artistic space as the matrix 4, or even the final fantasy 7 remake. I mean this as a good thing. It has the distinct touch of an artist that made something that defined a generation revisiting the art that outgrew them a thousandfold with more maturity and different interests.

These interests usually skew meta, they're about what drives someone to revisit something made by a past version of oneself, about the experience of suddenly gaining more influence than anyone could reconcile, where criticisms of your work (which you also, no doubt, have many) become synonymous with criticisms of your culture. If you've been here a while, you probably know (and are tired of) what I'm talking about, manic pixie dream girls and aloof average male protagonists, toxic nostalgia, pick your theme and it's a video essay title.

Imagine having every read of your 2004 funny video game-coded coming of age comic reverberate infinitely toward every direction, people saying your main character taught a whole generation of men to be self-absorbed while the exact opposite type of people rant about how your secondary lead "ruined a whole generation of women" because of hair-dye or whatever. Imagine Edgar Wright makes a movie adaptation of your cute little comic that somehow launches the careers of half of the current celebrity pantheon simultaneously. How would that change you?

Well, for one, it makes you less relatable. The truth of an aloof nerdy guy dating in his early 20s is a lot more universal than the truth of an artist in his 40s forever defined by the event horizon of a thing he wrote half his life ago. The matrix 4 couldn't stop talking about how it feels to have created the matrix. The final fantasy 7 remake can't help but to constantly examine what it means to remake final fantasy 7. It's easy to see why someone would hate that indulgent meta trend, I'll probably never write a generation-defining story, why would I care about the first world problems of someone who did? It can feel distant, and at its worst it can feel insulting. Like it's pointing the finger at the fans, whispering 'you did this to me'. I get that.

I get that, but I love it.

It's the fundamental difference between wanting something that is like something you liked, and wanting someone that is from the same creator of something you liked. The difference between feeding the mona lisa into an AI and finding a new authentic da Vinci. You can't make something entirely new if you religiously stick to using the parts of something that's already there. The human behind the work will always have influences you didn't realize, thought patterns and aesthetic preferences that weren't entirely clear in their previous work, no matter how much you deconstruct it. More importantly, the human will also change, and this organic self-continuity will reflect on the art. I don't want the creator of something to hold their own creation with the same zeal as its fans, because someone who did that simply wouldn't have been capable of creating the original piece in the first place.

I don't want a product, I want art.

Scott pilgrim, the original, indulges the most earnest impulse we have-- that of self-mythologizing, of creating a narrative off of our own lives. To depict the mundane as fantastic, interpersonal relationships as adventures. It resonated with so many people because it was earnest, and it was also picked apart to hell and back because it was earnest. Its flaws were on display, and not just the ones it intended to show. But in my opinion, the opposite impulse, that of washing off everything that could be criticized and presenting the cleanest possible image of yourself through your art, is just... bad. it makes for bad art, or it just freezes you. The very first hurdle of creating anything is getting over that, then maybe the spotlight will fall on you. If it does, you'll get everything you ever wanted, but everyone gets to see through you.

So, how do you revisit something like that? You have two options. Either you take all the pieces and try to reassemble them exactly how everyone remembers it, signing your name as a formality, looking at a mirror in which you no longer see yourself, or you talk to it. You dialogue with your own work, with who you used to be. You travel in time and talk to yourself. You question them, acknowledge them but also teach them a thing or two. You don't respect the product, you respect the feeling. You find the same earnestness that made you put pen to paper for the first time, and you point it towards your new loves and fears. Maybe you make it less about the main guy, take the chance to develop your secondary characters, maybe you give the girl more agency. Maybe you summon the future and refuse its answers. Maybe you fight yourself.

That's the harder choice. It submits your new self to the scrutinizing eyes of a whole new generation, it risks alienating the people who identified with your previous piece. It's riskier, probably less profitable, and by any pragmatic lens probably a bad idea. But it's the only way you can make art. It's truth, the truth that got you there in the first place.

It's how you get it together.

#scott pilgrim #scott pilgrim takes off #review #bryan lee o'malley

[betterbooktitles]

I had a system for writing papers in college: 1 page = 1 hour. It takes a half hour or twenty minutes per page to spew out all your thoughts, and 30-40 minutes to edit. “Editing” meant proofreading it once. No need to go overboard with those secondary drafts. These were undergrad college papers, not high criticism I was hoping to have reviewed by the Pulitzer committee.

My English Lit III professor was one of the many Humanities and Literature department faculty members who drew me away from my original major at Bard College: Film. I wanted, more than anything else, to impress this woman. I was interviewed by the Bard Free Press and was quoted insisting that I would marry the professor one day. In retrospect, her seeing that in print might have tipped her off to the fact that my ideas weren’t always grounded in reality.

I felt a tingling on my cheeks as she passed back our 8-page midterm papers on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda. Sitting at the wide wooden table, I watched her serenely slide each stack of stapled paper to my fellow students. I watched several of my peers sheepishly collect their papers and grimace at the notes. My first paper on Wordsworth received an ‘A.’ The only note appeared on the last page and pontificated on how hard it is to “relate the sonic values of a poem” while writing about the language in an academic essay. Less a critique and more an observation. She was simply sharing her thoughts! It is hard to mimic the sonic implications of words when people are reading those words silently. My writing was near-perfect save for the fact I couldn’t quite express the mouthfeel of Wordsworth’s poetry while analyzing it. That first paper was enough for this professor to ask me to walk her to her office so I could talk about my goals, my high school education, my life up to that point. We walked in the orange glow of the evening sun past boisterous students excitedly marching in big groups to the cafeteria for dinner. 

In that first office meeting, I felt like she was trying to adopt me. I never in my life had someone show such a keen interest in my mind. Until then, my teachers had a vague sense that I was going to squander whatever potential they saw in me. It felt like they were preemptively disappointed. This professor wanted to talk to me. She liked hearing my thoughts, and we had a great rapport in those office meetings. It didn’t hurt that she was a gorgeous 20-something woman with thick black curly hair, a slight lisp that made me look at her lips whenever she was speaking, and she wrote poetry about her bike seat inadvertently making her come when she rode it. I know I wasn’t the only person on campus who found her ethereally sexy because a male faculty member came up to me in the cafeteria holding the student newspaper in his hand, pointed at my quote, and said “she’s a force of nature” which is a smart adult’s way of saying “this lady fucks” or “I wish I could say more but I’d get fired.” I was smitten and ready to give up my film degree if it meant visiting this office every week to stare at her Velma glasses and the bright orange baubles she wore around her neck that called attention to where the neckline on her sweaters ended.

Read the rest here.

#lit #writing #essays #essay #memoir #college #school #literature #better book titles #books #reading #dan wilbur #humor #funny

[feraliminal]

Cross-Faction Diplomacy

Titan TV tries to give Titan Speaker reassurance, but makes things worse. They both use various forms of communication to calm down. Ship-ish, but with plausible deniability.

I’m back from a super busy week and I want to start turning some of my (many) scraps into actual fic! This was inspired by speculation on how the Alliance communicate and think, and an essay on consciousness called “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” which concludes that you can’t know unless you are one.

—

“Why did you call me? Is that it?” The TVmen’s titan gestured across the hill range from where they stood with the speakermen’s titan, towards a very tiny, very new base. It was a few floodlights casting a glow over a few shipping containers, and a few speakermen on night watch, instead sitting on their arses and playing cards. This was exactly what they’d expected to see, no surveillance system had picked up anything more interesting than a few wandering toilets for miles, at least none that they had access to. But they also suspected it was worth keeping up appearances - two things could be happening, either the speakermen had picked up something big on surveillance that wasn’t linked to the Alliance’s general network -

- or their titan had pulled off a sneaky social call

“Strategic importance, and we’ve only got to make sure nothing happens until everything else arrives in a few hours.” Titan Speaker insisted through a speech transmission, using their faction’s habit of transmitting emotion data as well. In this case, it was something like you trust me, right? “And nothing else is happening.”

The emotion thing, Titan TV found hard to know what to do with. TVs didn’t do it, unless they really meant it. Or were trying to convince someone they really meant it. It was difficult to know if and how to respond, and they recalled Polycephaly describe addressing those kind of differences as cross-faction diplomacy - and as a pain in the arse. They switched to transmission too, encrypting it in case anyone at the base was feeling nosey. “Sure. What’s this really about?”

“Seriously?” Titan Speaker made a dismayed buzz. “You aren’t supposed to say that.”

“What was I supposed to say?” It seemed obvious that this was a way to justify an in-person chat without factions having to figure out a playdate protocol. But with the spectre of cross-faction diplomacy hanging over them, Titan TV tried to do the emotion thing. It didn’t work. Sincerity somehow became contempt-fondness. You’re an idiot but I like you hadn’t been the intent, but it was sincere.

The speakers’ titan tilted their head, lights shimmering a little brighter. “I guess you weren’t supposed to do that either,” they teased. “I thought you’d think meeting to talk is a waste of time, but…?”

“If you need to say it in person, I trust it’s important.” A dozen possibilities, and none particularly easy to contemplate. The TVs’ titan noticed they were shifting their balance a little, foot to foot, and stopped it.

Transmitting uncertain-awkward-worried, Titan Speaker looked out towards the little base, then up at the night sky, as if the words they were looking for were floating around. “Not important, I just… I dunno. I want to ask something first. Does it now feel like there’s more than one… uh, you?” They gestured with their finger, as if drawing an air-circle around the other titan’s primary and secondary screens.

“No, not a lot different. My conscious processing is more or less the same, just spread out and harder to kill.” Not a lot different was still different - the first time they’d switched from automated to conscious control of their secondary heads was an experience they still hadn’t entirely come to terms with and didn’t want to revisit just yet. Not while they needed to be in the here and now for whatever was going on in Titan Speaker’s own head. “Are you thinking about upgrades?”

“No. Well, yeah, maybe one day. But I asked because I’m thinking about weird brain stuff.” Wrapping their arms around themself, the speakers’ titan crouched down on their heels. They started to transmit something, a jumbled, ghostly kind of feeling, then paused. “Okay, I called you to talk about…”

But they didn’t. They stayed silent, on comms and audio.

The TVs’ titan noticed where the pools of light cast by the pair’s respective glowing components overlapped. The new outpost sat in its own pool of light downhill, part of a landscape of similar little points of light that made their mental map of the Alliance’s networks mirror the night sky. In the outpost, the guards were swapping tunes. Twenty miles away, a turret was dealing with one of those wandering toilets, the only other thing remotely interesting happening. Titan Speaker’s glow was receding “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

Titan Speaker flopped back off their heels into a slumped seated position, and signed ‘No shit.’ Then, when their companion turned their main screen to watch, ‘Sorry, do you understand this? I’ve never seen a TV do it.’

“We understand it, we don’t tend to use it ourselves.” It was one of (many) indicators of how well the speakermen and cameramen had managed to operate as one, and their people hadn’t. “Use it if you need to, I can try too.”

‘Thanks. You don’t have to, it’s dark and my vision’s low resolution, so if you’re not used to sign…’ The speakermen’s titan shrugged, paused again, and with a might-as-well-go-for-it burst, quickly signed, ‘Being able to remember what I did when I was infected is still freaking me out and I want to know what you make of it. I know it’s not the same, but it’s all weird brain stuff and you’re the weird brain stuff faction.’

It was difficult to reconcile the ridiculousness of being called the weird brain stuff faction with the desperation in the request. Titan TV felt their screens flickering and needed to make an effort to hold back whatever might leak into the transmission. “You need to ask your science team.”

‘I don’t mean that, I don’t mean what happened to me, but what happened to me.’ They emphasised the last sign with a sharper movement, and had stopped transmitting emotion. The TVs’ titan supposed it was for similar reasons that they’d chosen not to - this needed straightforward discussion now and a fuckton of firepower later, save the anger for then. ‘They said it wasn’t me, but I was there, the parasite made me do it and I did it, it’s like, now I know I can do that, I can’t trust me not to do it again.’ They paused. ‘I haven’t asked again. I didn’t want to freak them out as well.’

“That was your body, and your body saved data. The intrusive thoughts are probably just subconscious metacognition systems sorting it all out. Really, ask someone, engineers think about this stuff so we don’t have to.”

Titan Speaker shifted to stare straight at their bigger companion, signing more slowly with a perceptible shake in their hands. ‘Me is also what my body does.’

The Alliance had shared (heavily redacted) schematics for the titans across faction borders, so Titan TV knew that what their companion was perceiving. Audio data and electromagnetic signature first, then visual data was a secondary source. But still, they angled their side-screens to illuminate their body and softened all their lights to reduce glare. Even with simulation or data transference, it would be impossible to know what it was really like to inhabit Titan Speaker’s perceptual space, with all its memories, meanings, metacognition. And even if visual data wasn’t that important, considering it was part of how Titan TV showed respect from their own perceptual space. “It won’t happen again. That was not you in any meaningful sense of what you are.”

‘I’m tired of everyone saying that.’ The speakermen’s titan rocked forward to crouch on their heels again, made an intention movement to stand that didn’t go further than a twitch, and clasped their arms around themself. They switched to comms again, and the transmission came out cracked with static. “I thought you, of all people, would get that. Everyone’s telling me it didn’t happen but… I was forced to kill my friends and I just… I just want to be allowed to feel like shit about it.” They let out a distorted audio “Fuck.”

“Fuck.” Titan TV echoed that statement, in reverse.

Neither of them had much to say right after that. There wasn’t really else that could be said. The TVs’ titan watched their companion looking up at the stars, softly illuminating their own little patch of red light. They uncoiled, slightly, from their gargoyle crouch, still hunched but dropping on to their knees.

No longer bothering to keep their slight swaying motion in check, Titan TV offered, “We need to get out of here. There’s a suspected underground lair, you’ll be able to locate it, and we’ll blow the roof off. I don’t have clearance to investigate yet, but two of us will be more than enough to overcome anyone’s concerns about risk.”

The sag in Titan Speaker’s shoulders was unexpected. “No. I’m not outsourcing my shit, not to my engineers and definitely not to everyone else by sneaking off.” But not nearly as unexpected as what they shared when they were the first to use emotive comms again. No anger, just sadness, confusion, and grief. Uncoiling a little more, they signed ‘Stay here. Sit with me.’

It wouldn’t have felt right to say no to this poor creature who’d sooner arrange an awkward clandestine meeting with someone they, really, barely knew than upset their friends. Titan TV shook their primary head with exasperation, and settled down cross-legged on the hillside. Titan Speaker watched, looked away and signed something to themself, then did an ungainly shuffle-flop to move right beside them.

They both took their time to adjust to the dissonance of this whole thing, pinging little status requests and presence acknowledgments at each other until they realised that they no longer needed to and had been enjoying doing it just for the sake of it. The speakermen’s titan trilled their approval and did a tiny wriggle.

“I like watching you move,” Titan TV commented.

‘I like that you moved your screens so I could see you better. Can I lean on you?’

“Yes.” Titan TV’s side-screen was obscured by the smaller titan moving closer and working out how best to arrange their speaker array, finally settling in and gently nudging their head against the screen casing. Making an adjustment themself, the TV leaned in little too. Staying had been the right decision, providing a few stabilising moments for both of them.

When they leaned back, the TVmen’s titan thought they felt something that could have just been an artefact of their movements, but it was a bit too persistent for that. Suspecting what it was, they inclined their primary head against the top of their companion’s array, and there it was - a barely perceptible vibration that was becoming more noticeable until it somehow managed to travel through their body and into the ground under them. It made their vision blur very slightly at the edges, but otherwise didn’t feel unpleasant. “Purring?” they rumbled, purr-like themself.

“You don’t mind it?” There was a new contentment in the speaker titan’s transmission, and the vibrations became a little wobbly. Signing would be tricky in this position, but they were making the most of that by sharing emotive comms freely. “Kind of. I’m just… feeling everything. Grounding myself. No sense of impending doom?”

“That’s oddly specific. Infrasound?” What Titan TV felt as a vibration was likely composed of echolocation and electrolocation and, being too low frequency to be useful for scanning, the infrasound component was probably just there for communication or self-soothing. They found it fun (if a little tragic) to imagine someone, possibly the cameramen’s titan, getting creeped out by an overenthusiastic purr. Cross-faction diplomacy again. “We use it too. Although admittedly not for purring.”

“For…?” Titan Speaker looked up, blinking their lights at their companion, who went ‘ ≽^•⩊•^≼ ‘ and said “Slaughter.”

“Terrifying.” They’d both aimed for a deadpan delivery - but it was interrupted for the better by the speaker titan’s failed attempt to suppress a squeaky giggle.

“You’re terrifying, you see sound and your idea of grounding is making the earth shake.” The TVmen’s titan wondered if speakermen were able to perceive the world as assemblages of vibrating particles. It was one thing to have the knowledge of that, it must be unsettling to really feel it. There was a lot to learn about the other factions, and their titans. “You’re well worth my time. We’re a sample size of three, and should be sharing data.”

With an affectionate hum, Titan Speaker bumped their head against the bigger titan’s chest and released a silent burst of something that interrupted their train of thought as well as their vision, and really did feel as if it had made the earth shake for a split second. A mischievous confirmation of you bet I’m terrifying.

“I’ll find something really strategically important next time.”

#first fic in five years and it’s bloody skibidi toilet lmao #skibidi toilet #skibidi fanfic #titan tvman #titan speakerman

[cyberbun]

An anon asked me what my top 10 favorite anime are and I agonized over this question for months but I think I have an answer. Then I accidentally published this without finishing it so I have to write it again

In no particular order:

Gatchaman Crowds (2013) and it's second season Insight (2015):

Hands down, my favorite anime of all time. As a fan of the superhero genre this has to be the best deconstruction/reconstruction of it I've seen in terms of how it reevaluates the concept of heroism in a digital society and how well it handles its themes of futurism along with personal identity and construction of the self in virtual environments. It is a series with a central thesis about the inherent goodness of humanity expressed through the language of superheroes and social media, and it's one of those stories that really gets the way people engage with the internet in a way that other similar sci-fi stories about fully online societies fail to do even to this day.

The first season's almost naive optimism is then thoroughly torn apart by the second's darker, more introspective tone, which makes the entire show play out like a series of political essays arguing back and forth with the backdrop of colorful superhero action. What makes it particularly good, though, is how it handles this darkening of the narrative, as it asks tough, incisive questions of its own story and still comes out parading genuine optimism about the future of its world and ours.

Because, at its core, it's a superhero story about how everyone has the capacity to be a hero and better themselves and each other. It's a truly transformative experience and, while a lot of its themes can seem... tragically over-optimistic, its datedness almost makes it feel like a time capsule of a time where we were at the cusp of using mass internet penetration to better ourselves as a society, and perhaps remains a reminder of how these technologies may still have the potential to make us all into heroes. Also Rui is a hot gender black hole and I want to be them so badly.

Samurai Flamenco (2014)

In a lot of ways, Samurai Flamenco is sort of the anti-Gatchaman Crowds; it's a straight deconstruction of the tokusatsu genre that's less interested in analyzing the role of superheroes in a society and more about using its own genre to examine the ways fiction allows us to project ourselves as something greater than what we are, while also commenting on said genre's iterations over its history; so ultimately it comes across as both a tribute to it and a deep examination of what exactly makes its fans tick.It is also bat fuck insane and I can't tell you a single thing that happens in it because it goes places. Watching this as it aired was an incredible experience.

Slam Dunk (1993-1994)

The best sports anime ever made. Dead serious. Not only is this a love letter to the game of basketball as a whole that manages to capture the intensity and adrenaline of every single thought that goes through the head of a player in the final minutes of a game, it is also a touching love story with one of the most compelling central casts of characters I've ever seen.

The anime was largely inferior to the manga for a long time on account of it being left unfinished, while the manga remains largely remembered for having one of the most bittersweet endings ever put to page; an equal parts tragic and triumphant culmination of the main character's journey from delinquent layabout to passionate athletic prodigy. Then, last year, we finally got one of the best looking anime films I've seen in my life adapting the final volume of the manga while also expanding the backstory of one of the secondary protagonists of the series.

Part of my love for this series is highly personal. I grew up watching this on TV back in the old country, and seeing it finally be finished after 20 odd years brought me to tears. A lot of it might be outdated by now, but there is yet to be a single anime I am so comfortable watching over and over and over again. I will go to the grave singing its praises.

Soul Eater (2008)

It's Soul Eater, you know Soul Eater. Probably the single most stylish show I've ever seen, visually; and to me still at the peak of the shonen genre as a whole. It's got both some of the best action ever put to animation and some of the most engaging core casts of characters I've seen despite how small its ensemble is. If it seems like I have less to say about it than others in the list it's mainly because it's already popular enough I don't feel like I can contribute much to the conversation; everyone likes Soul Eater. You like Soul Eater. Explaining why Soul Eater is good is like explaining why it is good to eat. Every time I watch Crona's episodes I cry a lot.

RahXephon (2002)

Talking about RahXephon is difficult because conversations surrounding it are usually centered around its relationship to Evangelion; and this is partially because it is, in many ways, a response to it and a reformulation of a lot of the questions that it asked about its story. This is not wholly unfounded, as director Yutaka Izubuchi is a longtime friend and collaborator of Anno's who did do some work in Evangelion prior to this, so the influence is definitely there. For a lot of people, this was rebuild before rebuild. I personally prefer the adage "Evangelion on antidepressants".

I do, however, overall feel this is unfortunate, because taken outside that context, RahXephon is one of the most complex and deeply layered reconstructions of the mecha genre I've ever experienced, with a beautiful score and haunting visual design propping up a story that's equal parts impenetrable as it is deeply layered; made up of so many small character arcs woven into each other completely seamlessly that you always feel like you're watching but a tiny fragment of a large tapestry of stories coming together into a single complete whole. It makes the world of the anime feel simultaneously small and huge, which fits the melancholic post-post-apocalypse visual aesthetic of the narrative It's one of my favorites not because of what happens in it, but because it is one of the most enriching experiences I've had with an anime or any other form of visual storytelling; I always feel like rewatching it makes me take something new away from it that I didn't notice before.

Ergo Proxy (2006)

Part of me has to admit I like Ergo Proxy less as a story and more as an aesthetic. If I had to put a name on how it feels to watch this show it'd definitely be "contemplative"; it's a slow going, compounded puzzle of a narrative which at times borders on self-indulgence with how many layers of things happening at once you're keeping up with. To give you an idea; the seemingly random text crawls during the opening of the show are key pieces of understanding what exactly the plot is by the end of the story. Peel away those layers, and you get a much simpler narrative than it might first appear, with one of my favorite one-sentence summaries: "what if three different Ends of the World crashed into each other at once".

While that seems reductive, one of the things that makes Ergo Proxy feel rewarding to watch, then rewatch to fully understand, is how it does ultimately completely nail the landing with the story it's trying to tell, despite having a complete non-ending that somehow manages to feel satisfying all the same. It's a story that explores themes of identity and human nature through the genre of ecological horror with one of the most stylish depictions of a bleak, dead world I've ever seen put in any narrative. So long as you're okay with a story that doesn't give you a full sense of narrative closure and one where a single watching won't give you all the pieces of the story, it is one of the most rewarding experiences to go back and pick apart, in my opinion. Like a puzzle, you will be left wanting to put all the pieces together by the end.

Ouran High School Host Club (2006)

Don't fucking look at me like that. I watched Ouran at an impressionable age and now I'm bigender. It has a place in my bunny heart. It is foundational to the person I grew up to become.

Cardcaptor Sakura

I watched this dubbed into Spanish back when I was young, and admittedly I don't remember 60% of it, but that doesn't mean I don't think fondly back on it moreso than any other show I ever saw back when I was a child, and one that I've had a lot of joy in going back to it as I've grown older.

I don't have as much to say about it as I do some other shows, and like with Soul Eater, it feels like everything there is to be said about it has already been said elsewhere and better; it is one of the foundational texts for the modern magical girl genre, it is one of the most beautifully animated and designed shows I've ever seen, and the best at keeping the distinct house styles CLAMP is recognizeable for intact in animation as far as I'm concerned. It's my personal choice for what other people would call a "comfort" show; but I do not wish to diminish the story or reduce it to an aesthetic the way a lot of people do for shows like this, considering just how strong the character dynamics and their progression throughout the story are, and the wealth of emotional depth that can be found in just about everyone's arcs.

While the overarching plot and the world of the story aren't as interesting as some other shows of its type, its strengths lies in how it uses that as a solid foundation through which to explore a distinct aspect of the human condition through each of its characters - love, grief, loneliness, devotion to another and many others.

Kekkai Sensen (2015)

This is one of those cases where I feel like I'm going to repeat myself. Take everything I said about Soul Eater, put it here. It is stylish, it's got a strong central cast of characters that are all equally fun and contribute the same amount to the narrative. It's got some of the most intense, lovingly rendered large-scale action scenes I've seen, along with some of my favorite small, touching narratives; thanks to one of the best urban fantasy settings ever put together.

The first season's storyline is a blend of manga chapters with an anime-original plot, while the second season mostly adapts the manga much more closely so it doesn't come together as tightly as the first does, but it is more of the best show of its type of the past decade as far as I'm concerned; and nothing takes away just how incredibly tight that first season feels, even if the final episode was months late and had to go double length while the animation melted a little. And yet, it all comes together beautifully in the end.

Angel Beats

What a surprise this show was. I'll always feel a little bittersweet about it, due to the circumstances that led me to see it, but I'm forever grateful I did. Angel Beats' greatest strength is the way that it disarms the viewer by presenting a fun, albeit somewhat dark supernatural comedy about kids in the afterlife, letting one get comfortable with the silliness of the world before really taking the "children in the afterlife" premise to its logical conclusion: This is a story about death, trauma, tragedy, and moving on- Quite literally, in this case- from the things that weigh us down.

I make no hyperbole when I say that this show has the single strongest emotional climax I've ever experienced, and every time I watch it again I am moved to tears, sometimes more than last. I can't say much, since a lot of what makes this show fun is experiencing it, and realizing the depth of the world along with our point of view character; but the biggest endorsement of it I can give is how gracefully and tactfully it deals with complicated subjects such as abuse, disability and addiction in stories where you know how they all end, and yet give you a satisfying emotional conclusion while also keeping the mood balanced between cheerful when it has to be and heartbreaking, with the latter becoming more and more common by the end of the story.

It's a story about growing up, as much as it is a story about dying. It knows the tragedy of its premise and it chooses to ask the viewer to find joy in the time they have with its cast - a beautiful metaphor for life itself woven deeply into the narrative and never once stated out loud. We know where this story is going, but we're here now, so we might as well have a little fun along the way. That is ultimately what youth is about.

#ask #anon #technically #i lost the original ask

[ginnymoonbeam]

11, and please feel free to list more than one :)))))))

SO. All but one of the asks I've gotten so far include 11, which is very funny. I suspect this has something to do with my loud and proud enjoyment of several taboo setups, such as stepsiblings/pseudoincest. And I wanted to take this opportunity to write about some of those, I really did. I thought I was finally going to write about my treasured mess, Ye Xingsi and Fu Yongjie. But here's the thing: taboo is different from forbidden, and the more I thought about it the less it fit. The forbiddenness in that relationship isn't the primary or even the secondary issue. And instead of writing a whole essay on why they and most other pseudoincest pairs aren't doing "forbidden love" as a primary trope, I sigh and turn my gaze to other pairs.

Forbidden Love, to me, has to involve at least one of two things as a primary obstacle: unyielding social/familial barriers, or deep internal guilt. It's one of several tropes on the list that plays a little different for gay ships, because in so many contexts just the fact of being a same-sex couple makes it a forbidden love. Most BLs let the social barriers soften pretty quickly, if they're present at all, and very few have the characters really wrangling with guilt (shame is slightly more common, but that's another essay I'm not going to write right now.) However, we do have a few stellar examples.

Pat and Pran, Bad Buddy

Obvious when you think about it. Pran's mother explicitly says that she'd accept Pran being with anyone except Pat (or Pat's sister.) From Pran's secret, agonized pining to them sneaking into each other's rooms years later, their whole relationship is conducted under the understanding that their parents cannot and will not accept it. A lot of Bad Buddy's power comes from the way it transmutes familial homophobia, letting queer viewers who live under that same degree of forbiddenness and secrecy see their experiences reflected without having to sit through on-screen homophobia.

In and Wang, 180 Degree Longitude Passes Through Us

Here's the other side of forbidden love, one that's primarily about internal guilt. The attraction between In and Wang is deeply triangulated on the ghost of Wang's father, but that doesn't mean it isn't genuine. Here's a love that In understands to be forbidden in every aspect: by age, by prior bonds, by his own enduring reluctance to accept his desire for men. Inthawut's guilt is a millstone in every moment between them, and in the end it sinks any possibility of a longer relationship. Now, is it better for both of them that it went that way? Almost certainly. But it's still a relationship saturated with guilt and the consciousness on In's side that this is and must be forbidden. And it constantly calls up the echo of In's past relationship to Siam which, without the same weight of guilt, might have taken beautiful flight.

And I don't want to end without a nod to a few historical ships, where the characters really are restrained by the simple fact of being gay in a hostile society:

Tian and Jiu, Khun Chai

Eeang Peung and Maey, I Feel You Linger in the Air

Jom and Yai, I Feel You Linger in the Air

(also tagging EVERYONE ELSE who asked me this one: @twig-tea @shortpplfedup @wen-kexing-apologist)

Ask me!

#ask game #bad buddy #180 degree longitude passes through us #khun chai #i feel you linger in the air

[borzoilover69]

> BORZOI: READ HOMESTUCK LIKE ITS 2011 (PART 4)

(4225) Oh yeah it's all coming together now. This panel fucks so hard.

Jakeroxy is probably one of my fave relationships to think about they're so silly together! They have a really great relationship full of whimsy. They call out each others good points are generally incredibly supportive of each other, and they just feel like they click so easily together.

I could muse it comes down to their both shared aspect of void. While hope rings true in Jakes story, clear as a fucking bell, I have reason to suspect his secondary aspect may be void, due to how reluctant he is to open up to others, his ability to distance and generally keep off radar, and his own ignorance, not to mention his literal sort of secondary awareness he has for larger things hidden in the dark. Like seriously, where is he getting this information? Yet his own ignorance gets the better of him most times, leaving him paralyzed. This stirs up rage in others, his inverse.

As for how I approach classpects, well I like to see them sort of like a triad. Humans are multifaceted with multiple problems, so you should read up on your classpects. I started with Dana, and while I agree with some points, i don't really agree with all points, however Opacificas Classpect Meta is two essays that are a must read for any classpector.

Back to the point of the triad. You have your main classpect, which defines you and your main problem / struggle. You should carry to some extent of course traits of your inverse aspect. As a Prince of Void, I naturally ghost and carry traits of light, of extrapolating at length while I destroy void. I'm insightful and observant, yet more often than not I struggle with ignorance. My secondary is a Knight of Blood, due to how well I work with interpersonal relationships among others, pointing out what people are ignorant of helps me gain more knowledge of them as they toss their woes into the void that I naturally present. My bonds are strong however my natural gravitation towards void, towards being unknowable, etc, makes it difficult. My ignorance has been my downside on multiple occasions and while i've had difficulty with blood (hence why its secondary) my primary link is void.

So to sum up. Your main classpect should ring true to your main struggle and how you approach it, but also some of the inverse. They're two sides of the same coin after all. Class is your head, and how you use it. Aspect is your core, and what your nature is. Your secondary classpect is also necessary to help shit process. I don't know, you come up with a better allegory.

Maybe it'd help with how I classpected my boyfriend? I started off with looking at this post with a list of classes and aspects, and I listed off which felt like they fitted for my boyfriend:

Classes:

Witch

Thief

Mage

Aspect:

Doom

Space

Time

Heart

Having that, I started looking at classpects. Tossing at the walland seeing what would fit. But see that post I mentioned earlier doesn't really cut it. My boyfriend, personality wise according to that post, acts very much like a thief but he's not a thief at all, so we can cross that off the list. Thieves are about relocation which he certainly didn't do.

Then I took a look at aspects. If you're doing it right, go read these. Having read them, I figured out it was less problems with self and more about what needs to be done, and he wasn't as martyr like or acceptant of Doom as doom players often are, which left me with Space and Time. My boyfriend is very talented with the arts, and struggles with the same immaterial things space players do, but his mindset leant to time. I won't go into too much detail on it there, but like I said, take a read of Opacifica. Those essays are godsends. At the end of it we realised he was a knight of time. And oh boy was there a reaction.

Look NOTHING against davekat BUT WE ARE NOT DAVEKAT WE CANT DO THIS. (Hence my posts yesterday about it being so, so unbelievably over). But the shoe fit and it wouldn't come off.

So anyways final tip on classpecting, is if you have an alt account where you vent, go look at what you vent about. Or ask your friends for the reoccurring theme that your vents usually spiral into. Those help. But god I got offtopic, back to homestuck

Jake you speaking facts boy. Also is it just me or is the new Apple AR glasses reminding me of something.. I mean slap in some flashing colours on that puppy and you'd be set.

</3 :(

The frustration that sits in JaneRoxy is so often overlooked. Like shit man...it's a frustration that's so deeply rooted that it only comes out when she's drunk. I think realistically it'd come out at some point, perhaps at a party when they're older. Roxy getting upset that Jane didn't believe her, didn't see her as important as Roxy saw her. Accusing her of being unable to change. One that Jane will have to apologise over and over and even then it won't be fixed entirely. There is such tragedy and adversity that the Alpha kids have to tackle to keep their bonds strong.

Here's Jake being Jake. Just snaps right to the fucking chase! Well aware buddy! Most of his hesitant guesses and assumptions are usually facts that ring true and it's later in the story that they become more muddled but his assumption it's true never CHANGES and AUGH.

And then there's Roxy, with that subtle passive aggression that the alpha kids just HAVE going for them and facepalming as they type it out with gritted teeth. Roxy wants to be in something!! So sick of being relegated to the side to cling on.

4227

Boy watch out boy.

4228 I knew that panel looked familiar! Awesome! Except the thing is a million times BIGGER. Haha thats so awesome!

4230

You do the thing where you fly through the air shooting two guns at once. That thing isn't even that big of a deal for you. You do that thing practically every day on hellmurder island.

Jake English you are so admirable leaping out to shoot at a big monster I LOVE YOU.

4232

JAKE WATCH OUT- OH NO FUCK!!!! JAKE YOU HSOT TINKERBULL! YEAARGH!! AGGH! Haha the way he says AH HA. GOT YOU YOU SON OF A, SHIT, WAIT. is so funny.

4234

I really wanna redraw Jake panels later hes so endearing in all of them. (excepting a few..) Darling dearest.

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT THIS SHMUCK LETS CHECK ON JANE!

4242

This could be some primary body horror if I was good enough for it.

MY BROTHER IN CHRIST YOU JUST WATCHED HIM CRAWL OUT OF YOUR DEAD POPPOPS NECK HOLE AND YOU RESPOND BY CALLING HIM A TROUBLE MAKER?

4247

Majestic. Spectacular. Superb.

4249 spectacular. magnificent. Spiffy. spectacular.

4253

Jake is so small compared to so much life that is happening on the island good fucking GRIEF. And he doesn't even break a sweat he's just like "Ah botherations! Shit."

I'm out of images again. Welp.

#borzoi talks #borzoi reread #classpect meta #homestuck meta #homestuck #hom3stuck #jake english #classpects #roxy lalonde #jane crocker #alpha kids #borzoi meta

[chaikachi]

Speaking about tension and conflict to build romance:

Bumbleby's conflict was Adam stalking Blake,and Yang upset by her leaving because Blake was scared,but gradually more relieved as she proved that she would always stayed by her side and fight together

Renora's conflict was Ren being stubborn and almost risking his life to a grimm that killed both his parents and Nora stopping him,leading them to a better strategy attack

~

We already saw Oscar suggesting Ruby to tell Ironwood the truth,maybe Oscar will struggle to 'share her burden' because she's like her sister and doesn't like being vulnerable? Or maybe it will be about the merge and we'll have a parallel to Blake in V1 talking about "the man with two souls fighting for control" ?

Of the main three ships, they all had a big tension and conflict leading up to V8, and then had a secondary one just by virtue of the separation in Atlas.

Yes BB's conflict was Adam plus Blake running away while Renora's was Ren's tunnel vision in v4... but then in V8 Yang is worried that Blake thinks less of her for prioritizing Mantle over Amity. And Ren and Nora are having a conflict of ideals AND miscommunication.

For Rosegarden, their conflict started with not agreeing on how to handle Ironwood and then became stretched out by ending up on opposite teams while Atlas was falling. The difference between RG and the other ships is that eVERYONE ELSE GOT TO STAY REUNITED AT THE END OF V8, BUT RG DIDN'T. 😭😭😭

I have a feeling the rest of their conflict in the Vacuo arc is going to have multiple layers and be very personal to their individual characters. For starters, there's a matter of how to sort out leadership. Ruby used to be head of the team and became the symbol of hope for All of Remnant after her broadcast... but in her absence, Oscar will have stepped up to the plate in her place. There's going to be some fumbling to get them back on the same page again to a point where they are properly sharing the weight of their burdens together.

Then we know that Oscar probably thinks she died! :'D Which, in tandem with his attachment, admiration, and protectiveness of her in the past, sets him up perfectly to not want to lose her again. Be that struggling with sticking too close, keeping his distance from not wanting to get too attached again (too bad boy, you can't run from this), or a mix of both... it's anyone's guess how he'll handle it.

We also know, thanks to Neo, just how important Oscar is to Ruby and that the thought of losing him is something she literally could not handle. So there is almost certainly going to be a mutual protectiveness going on there. they can have a LITTLE codependency, as a treat. /lh

We also have VERY SOLID SETUPS for their individual character arcs mirroring each other so strongly. And it's impossible for those themes to not be explored at this point.

From their very introductions, they both address each other's core conflicts with their first words to each other.

Oscar: Woah, you... have silver eyes.

Silver eyes being symbolic of her burden as Salem's adversary and the mirror that reflects humanity's hope back onto darkness.

Ruby: Who... are you?

Oscar being the next (and likely final) Ozcarnation who's entire character arc is a struggle of identity.

Oscar's "I always knew I wanted to be more than a farmhand... but this? Who would ask for this?" to Ruby's "I wanted to be the hero, like the stories that my mom read to me."

Oscar's "I thought the idea of falling through Remnant into a new world was... exciting. I never understood why she was so sad when she finally made it back home." to Ruby's "I don't want to be me anymore."

Ruby's "What if you could be anyone?" to Oscar's "I'm just going to be another one of his lives, aren't I?"

god the way they've written this story... i sincerely don't understand how people can watch ALL of this, all the moments i didn't mention cause i'm too lazy to turn this thread into another essay, and still say they don't see it. 😭

however their conflict is handled, i know i'm going to be very not normal about it every step of the way and i'm so freaking excited

#asks #ask #anon #anono #rwby #rosegarden

[gattnk]

About accessories and their secondary functions in Animation and Character Design

Well that title makes it sound way grander than it is, haha! I've no idea how this thing will go since I don't really have experience writing essays in english, but I'll do my best to give it some semblance of order. Shoutout to @haloheadhater who brought the topic out of me and showed interest in my sharing further!

Here's the TL:DR. Characters often wear accessories to complement their outfits, and these items don't just function as a visual representation of their personalities and interests (like real people); they also may have a "mechanical" function, so to speak. This function is much more secondary to visual storytelling, but sometimes designers will strategically place accessories on a character to facilitate their jobs on the long run. It is often a "two birds, one stone" situation, really.

Here's how that works in more detail.

Disguising Joints

Humans have joints all over their bodies, that's fact. It's what allows us to move and bend like we do. When designing toys, we try to imitate just that: articulated dolls, mannequins, marionettes, figurines and puppets have hinges and ball joints so they can be posed more realistically. A sign of care and quality in manufacturing all these is how well these joints are disguised, so they look as "organic" as possible. Screws and hinges get covered up as seamlessly as possible, so these puppets may resemble people more accurately: obvious, open and visible joints quickly break the immersion (and often places them in the uncanny valley). Compare these high-quality doll hands to your basic wooden posable hand models. Notice how the doll hands do their very best to imitate the natural curves of human hands and how the knuckles cover the joints as much as possible even when they're bent. Meanwhile, the joints in the wooden model hands are plainly visible, and the shapes are very stiff-looking, so they don't feel as human.

Animation is no different! A good animated character manages to suspend disbelief: for however long the character moves on screen, the audience has to feel like this character is alive and real enough to relate to them and their story. Human brains are really good at detecting when something moves wrong, so the more "natural" your character is, the easier it'll be to keep up with them. In puppet animation (often called flash animation thanks to Adobe Flash, now Adobe Animate, popularizing the method), characters are made of cuts, individual pieces held together by joints, much like traditional paper shadow puppets.

Animators and character designers often place accessories to cover up these cuts between joints, so when the character moves there's less risk of seeing them. My favorite example is vambraces, wristbands, watches and bracelets! Notice how uncommon it is to find a character with naked wrists? Well now you know half a reason! As the years go by and animation softwares improve, there's less need for this trick, or rather, it is often less obvious.

Disguising Texture Seams

Now see, 3D models look gray by default: you have to paint them over, like one of those tabletop figurines, for them to look pretty and presentable. This painting process results in a 2D image (called texture map) that has to be projected onto the 3D model. There is a variety of other maps that control different things, like how the model's surface reflects light (specular and diffuse maps) or if it's a porous, creviced or bumpy surface (bump, normal and/or displacement maps), but let's just focus on the texture map this time.

The process of projecting a 2D map onto a 3D model is called UV Mapping, and it looks similar to sewing patterns. There's plenty of methods to hide the seams in maps, but computers can be a bit unpredictable, and all 3D renders require touch-ups and a post-production process (especially light and reflectiveness). Sometimes though, covering seams with accessories is frankly easier, so CGI artists always keep clothes and items in mind when UV mapping, as well as the natural folds and crevices in the character's model.

Here's a good example of what I mean (by Thora Tong). This 3D model's UV seams, highlighted in white, were placed in a way that they'd be easily covered by clothes and accessories. Notice the seams on the wrists and ankles, and how the other seams around the body are very similar to the ones you'd see on actual pieces of clothing.

Volume and Foreshortening Guidelines

Drawing perspective is hard as it is, but organic shapes are particularly complicated. Accessories can help disguise certain perspective errors, or help convey the volumes and shapes of the body much more clearly. They are especially useful as guidelines for foreshortening.

Anything you append to a character is a useful marker for later. The way these items bend alongside the body thanks to perspective is a useful visual key for later. If you're not sure how an arm will look from a certain angle, maybe imagining a bracelet on that same angle would be easier! The bracelets I drew over the naked arm serve the same purpose as the guidelines you see in the image above. This is especially useful for drawings with little to no shading, where conveying the volumes of muscles presents a challenge.

Bonus - Body Lines

When a human fetus is forming, its cells grow in a particular pattern; these patterns that the body cells follow determine the flow of muscles, nerves, and even how the skin folds or how pigmentation distributes itself. There's a variety of body lines, though the most known and studied (as far as I'm aware) are Blaschko's, Kraissl's and Langer's lines. Langer's lines are particularly interesting: they're also known as skin tension lines or cleavage lines, because they indicate the best place for medical incisions on the skin, especially in the forensic field. There's many different models but here's a good example illustrating them.

Placing accessories following Langer's lines can be really aesthetically pleasing. Since tension lines follow along muscle mass and fat, they also indicate how the skin warps and folds around them. Knowing tension lines is especially useful in terms of studying how the body creases when bending around (and subsequently, clothes too!), so discretely marking them out with accessories can be useful on the long run.

Japanese animation is especially guilty of using Langer's lines on skin-tight scifi suits. They're simply incredibly useful as design and anatomic guidelines, and they look so good, they easily survive the test of time!

Conclusion

Character design often involves following rules of practicality that viewers seldom notice. This is perfectly fine because they're not really meant to be noticed by anyone, except members of the team of course. Design of any kind should be done under the premise of aesthetics and function working together, and not against/in spite of each other, so it is no wonder that animators and character designers put some thought into meeting both when adding a little "spice" to their designs. Anything and everything you can do as a character designer or animator to facilitate your work on the long run, or that of your team mates, is welcome. Covering seams and joints makes it easier for the guys in postproduction, as they have one less thing to look out for, for example. The animation industry is built on the backs of (often) exploited employees that sacrificed a lot of their time and resources into doing what they love most: deceiving the human eye and brain into believing for just a little bit that what they made is real. Truly wonderful! So next time you're working on a character, try to think about the functionality of what you're including into them. Test your imagination, and see what comes out of your mindful placement of accessories with secondary functions.

#about art #essay #animation tips #character design #things to think about

[batrachised]

Bit of an odd question, but do you have a list of academic resources/a place to start researching about LMM and her views on WW1?

I'm going to be writing a research paper on Canada's views on war and how they changed from WW1 to WW2 and I remember Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes are Quoted were some of LMM's most relevant wartime material, but I'm not sure where to start looking so if you could point me in the right direction that would be very helpful!

Btw, I do have academic access to articles right now, so paywalls are less of an issue if that matters.

I'll preface by tagging @gogandmagog who is our resident lucy maud montgomery expert <3 she'll probably be able to contribute here more than I will

I am thrilled to be asked this question because I love digging into stuff like this! I wish I had a photographic memory because I've recently come across quite a lot of material discussing LM Montgomery's attitudes toward the war, but I can't remember what it was specifically (AAH).

As far as fiction - yes, Rilla and TBAQ are the most directly related to the war. There are other novels that foreshadow it, such as Ingleside and Rainbow Valley. I just found out the other day that Rainbow Valley has in fact been argued to be an allegory for WWI (ie, Walter's fight with Dan Reese). In terms of nonfiction, I do remember some sources, and can offer some names for you to start digging into. Foremost LMM scholars, that sort of thing. I also tried to add in examples of the books/articles that I know specifically discuss the war, with relevant passages as examples. (note: these passages are just a few examples of many! As such they're just a starting point - answering the question thoroughly would require more of a deep dive 😄)

Mary Rubio: my impression is that she is THE scholar when it comes to LM Montgomery. She wrote a biography of LM Montgomery called The Gift of Wings, which discusses WWI and specifically talks about attitudes towards it (ie, the death of innocence or the death of religion caused by WWI), especially LMM. This will probably be the best resource for answering your question. It includes lm Montgomery's responses to interview questions about the war where she discusses her moral philosophy. However, it doesn't go into depth on WWII. See example below.

Elizabeth Epperly. Another LM Montgomery scholar. She wrote The Fragrance of Sweet Grass, which also touches on LM Montgomery's attitudes on the war. However, here is through the lens of LM Montgomery's fiction rather than biographical materials. (IE, analysis of how Walter represents WWI in the text, and how he reflects the "gallant knight" attitude towards the war). I just read this passage today for example:

LM Montgomery's Journals. There are the selected, but I think the complete set would give you a fairer picture. They are organized by time period, so you would be able to select the ones from WWI and WWII if you wanted to. These are very detailed on the war to my understanding - much like Rilla, they go into specific battles etc. In fact, many lines in Rilla are directly copied from her journals, including ones belonging to Miss Oliver, Rilla, Walter, etc. You'd get primary source material and details if this is a heavy duty research paper. If it's not I'd probably rely on the other experts who have combed through the journals for you haha!

The Blythes Are Quoted. I recommend this one because it has a (short!) foreword by Epperly that specifically addresses this exact topic - see relevant passages from it below. This is the only source I found that really dug into WWII attitudes. Really, the thesis of this collection addresses the exact topic of your essay. It also has a short afterword by Benjamin Lefebvre (of Walter's Closet fame) that delves into LM Montgomery's ambivalence. The first two screenshots here are from the foreword and the last from the afterword.

The LM Montgomery Institute. It has a citation database for secondary source material on LM Montgomery. It also runs the Maudcast, a podcast on LM Montgomery but I don't think that will have relevant information. It has the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies as well.

Good luck with your paper! It sounds fascinating!

#lm montgomery

[fouralignments]

Dark Phoenix headcanon to make you less angry about the injustice to the quicksohn!

Pietroneto!

Because of the fight with Jean. Her magic Phoenix bullshit accidently unlocked his secondary mutation and now we have a metal bender Peter in the world!

Gosh darnit you're so sweet! On a side note, the Phoenix bullshit is basically magic is completely goes against and ignores the climax of Apocalypse. Like still cannot get over that from a writing level. Besides, who cared about Jean Gray???

Peter is much more creative and has a wider variety of skills than his Dadneto like crystalbending, gravitybending, invisibility, EMP, sandbending, liquid metalbending which doesn't have all sorted out, but has not master them completely; while Erik has one or two skills that he completely maxed out.

Erik like being all over Peter to join him on Genosha so he can train together. Erik has more than two braincell and can figure out who's is offspring and plus I headcanon that he already knows since Apocalypse.

Yeah, Erik and Charles with Peter joining them on Genosha lives rent free in my head.

Sinister was right fucking there in Apocalypse, ready to be used and set up, but noooo we had to get boring ass aliens which wasn't even hinted at in the universe as being a possibility. DP as a movie on its own could have worked, but it literally warped the universe around itself, so to justify its writing own fucking writing. Don't get me wrong, but even X-Men: Apocalypse didn't sabotage its own power scale/power system; ESN was underpowered and utterly didn't justify using Phoenix to defeat; and didn't help mattered of his motivation to hijack Charles's body (which I get it they made the discussion of mixed ESN with Shadow King). In addition adding a Borg adaptive like quality to him, however CLEARLY the writers didn't think through the implications of that power and in by doing so it renders transferring body to body moot. Also being a complete waste of Oscar Isaac talents. Note self, write essay about this later...

Sorry to go off on a tangent.

#ask 4align #peter maximoff #dadneto #erik lenhsherr

[forasecondtherewedwon]

seven degrees east - chapter seven

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: multiple Rating: E Chapter: 7 / ? Word Count: 4397

read on tumblr: one | two | three | four | five | six

Professor Harding moved amongst them, and the boys had the sense that they had been in the trenches of Walden together, that a bond had been forged between bean fields and the fundamentals of self-reliance, that the murky veil of authority between instructor and student had been thinned, all for the better. It was now mid-July, and the summer semester was almost at an end.

In the two weeks since the party in Cringleford, the boys felt their worlds—social and academic, personal and shared—had been changed. University, which in its functions and expectations cared little for the lush, revolving inner worlds of its students, ploughed ahead as though nothing were different. This meant it was time for the boys to immerse themselves in the plotting and planning and researching and revising of concepts for their final essays. It was time to show what they’d learned.

Feeling he worked in the spirit of Thoreau’s project, Harding had permitted, for this last assignment, arguments which yoked Walden and each boy’s particular literary speciality. The professor’s aim was to make the essay useful to them, as Thoreau’s excursion to the woods had been to his own mind and methods. This allowed Harding’s students more freedom for creativity, and so more space for development had also been allowed. Harding had allocated that day’s class for the workshopping of final essay ideas.

Curt was sitting next to John. Had this arrangement been tried even the week before, it would have set the rest of the class—including Harding, who didn’t concern himself with his students’ spats and scuffles but, like a barometer, always noticed a change in atmospheric pressure—on edge. However, John’s bruises had faded, and he and Curt had worked to clear the air. This had involved less effort than either might have expected. Since John hadn’t hit Curt, Curt’s primary grievance had been the insults John had slung at him while baiting him into the two right hooks he had thrown. John had apologized sincerely and, because Curt understood he hadn’t really meant what he’d said, had his apology accepted at face value.

Curt’s secondary grievance was all tangled up with John’s primary one: that John hadn’t kissed Gale, while Curt had. When they’d hashed the whole thing out over a smoke, Curt had placed the blame for all the shit between them on John’s failure to act on his feelings for Gale sooner. John had taken this criticism on the chin—close to where he’d taken Curt’s fist at the party. Once John had cooled his head and his heels (and was sober), he had more easily accepted that what he’d seen through the door of that Philosophy classroom had been a combination of friendship, trust, and spontaneity. Gale had been newly (officially) single. Curt was known among their group to be the least uptight about his sexuality. Like Gale had told John the night of the fight—and other things as yet unexamined—it had been a one-time occurrence. Had Curt enjoyed kissing Gale? Of course. (John had clenched his fingers into a fist beside his leg where Curt hadn’t been able to see, then forced himself to relax them.) Was Curt rooting for John and Gale to get together? Abso-fuckin’-lutely. Why hadn’t it happened yet, Curt had wanted to know? What was this new weirdness between them that no longer seemed to have anything to do with Curt? John had staggered into a sentence he didn’t know how to finish before just letting it float away like the smoke he sighed from his nostrils.

Now, Curt was ranting to John about his two favourite ideas he’d come up with for his final essay.

“You got the travel narrative, right? You with me, John? You got fuckin’ Kerouac, fuckin’ On the Road. That,” Curt said, “versus Thoreau’s, I dunno what ya’d call it… his stayin’-put story. Ok? So, we got movement and restlessness and how that gets channeled.”

“Right,” John said, more to show he was listening and less because he was totally following.

“Or—second idea, second idea now, John—we got city and country. Another comparative essay, external conditions seemingly in opposition. And for this we go to Baldwin. Yo, Buck! Baldwin!”

Gale, who was mid-discussion of his own essay with Rosie, glanced over and offered Curt a thumbs up. His gaze slid automatically to John, who blushed for no good reason, scratched his head, and turned back to Curt.

“I’m a little less sure about that one,” Curt admitted, focus back on John. He kneaded the knuckles of his left hand into his right palm until they cracked. “But if I could figure it out, it’d kick ass.”

“It’d be fucking killer,” John said, really quite at sea, but carried along on the tide of his friend’s enthusiasm and, more than anything, wanting to demonstrate his renewed love and support since the rupture in their friendship.

“Ok, and for my third idea—”

“Your third?” John had one idea for this essay, exactly one, and he rubbed worryingly at his chin as Curt prepared to launch into another pitch.

“Yeah, dude. So, this one I’m thinkin’ Hinton—you know, The Outsiders?”

“Sure, man. Patrick Swayze.”

“Patrick Swayze? Goddammit, John.” Curt’s hand shot out and lightly cuffed the back of John’s head. “This is a fuckin’ literature class. Read a book, would ya?” He shrugged. “But sure, Swayze, if it helps ya follow along.”

John scoffed before giving in to his grin. He planted his elbow on the table and sunk his head into his hand as he listened.

“This one’s simple. It’s so good,” Curt promised. One thing they shared, luckily, was confidence in their work. “I look at belonging in a group and belonging in a place.”

“That’s interesting,” John said. He meant it.

This time, the idea struck something deep within him, something that twanged back. He was warmed by the resonance. It was them, he thought. He could see that Curt, himself, and the rest of the boys fit neatly at the center of Curt’s concept. They were Thorpe Abbotts’ English PhDs, the Bloody Hundredth, their own favourite company to keep. And they were a part of this place, this university, these grounds, this country they’d transplanted themselves onto in the hopes of learning something of books and life and driving on a different side of the road.

“That’s the winner,” he said.

“You think?” Curt asked earnestly.

“Yeah, man. Run it past Harding.”

“Alright, alright, but tell me yours first. Whaddaya got?”

John smiled a slow smile and said, “Hemingway.”

“I’m shocked,” Curt joked, and beckoned with his hand. Gimme more.

“It’s not much,” John explained, meaning the idea was spare, unadorned, not that he thought it was a poor one. He straightened up in his seat. “I’m just thinking… Thoreau. Hemingway. A man alone. Not sure yet if I’d go Old Man and the Sea or For Whom the Bell Tolls, but one of the two.”

He nodded conclusively.

“I mean, yeah,” Curt said. “If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

“Then fuck yeah!”

“Fuck yeah,” John agreed, nodding again.

Curt shoved his chair away from the table, preparing to speak to Harding about his idea. He paused before rising.

“That’s everything you got?”

“That’s it.”

“Sick,” Curt praised.

“Thanks, man.”

A man alone, John thought when Curt had gone to the other end of the room. He drummed his fingers on the table. Without meaning to, he found himself gazing idly at Gale. Gale sat so still as he listened to Rosie, who was speaking with sweeping gestures of his hands. The other brainstorming group—comprised of Crosby, Nash, and Bubbles—already had three members, so John knew it was Rosie and Gale he should join. And he would. Any minute. He made his body as still as Gale’s, heavy and content, chest moving in and out. Gale’s gaze swung over to meet his and John immediately pushed his chair back and went to join them.

Gale watched as John approached, as he flung his pen and notebook down and took an empty seat, stretching his legs out beneath the table. He wore a brown t-shirt. It might’ve been nothing on someone else, but dark brown on John made his hair look lustrous, his sunburned nose and cheeks peachy rather than painful—these were Gale’s thoughts, and this study of John as he moved, as he sat and unfurled his long limbs, recalled the John of two weeks prior, if only because of the contrast (and because that John had rarely left Gale’s mind in the interim). That John had been compact; Gale’s gaze had darted madly to take in the taut-muscled twist of his best friend’s body. John had been on his knees and ducking his head to avoid the jeep’s ceiling, though turned towards Gale, the hunch had resembled a bow. And his cheeks; the flush on his cheeks had been blood, not sun, lit up just enough by the porchlight that Gale could see the heat trapped beneath John’s skin. God help him, he had ached since that night to know what it felt like to touch the heat rolling off John when he came.

“Whadda we got goin’ over here?” John demanded, forcefully casual.

“Poe,” Rosie said, steepling his fingers against his own chest. He indicated Gale next. “James.”

“Hemingway,” John supplied with a grin, sticking out a hand for each of them to shake as though they had taken on the names of these authors as their own and were introducing themselves. They humoured him. Gale hung on a little long before letting his fingers slip free of the hold.

“Let’s hear it,” John encouraged, waving Rosie on.

“You want my shpiel?” Rosie checked wryly. He smirked. “Alright. Picture Thoreau’s cabin.”

Gale had heard the shpiel already, so while John closed his eyes to center himself inside the narrative Rosie was constructing around him, Gale stared at John. They had talked, and the talking had been a relief after the days John had spent freezing him out. Unfortunately, they had talked about everything but the night of the party. Gale was beginning to wonder if they ever would, and the wondering filled him with a longing he couldn’t have described with all of Henry James’s winding, self-conscious language of introspection. Like James’s characters, Gale felt divided between past and present existences. He felt he was leaving some version of himself behind with the new one not yet fully formed. Though he could not go back, he feared going forward alone. If only John would say something. Why was he suddenly such a good listener?

Listen was what John did as Rosie laid out the argument for convincing his reader that Walden could be interpreted as a Gothic story. He spoke of legacy and sustainability, the fickleness of memory, the blurriness surrounding whether the landscape intruded upon the characters or they upon it. “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Rosie insisted, would help him break new ground on Walden.

“I like it,” Gale was quick to say when Rosie had wrapped up.

“Same here,” John said, and Gale felt the satisfaction of their agreement from his scalp to his toes.

Rosie, caught in the middle, glanced from one of his friends to the other with a knowing smile. A slight action of his shoulders showed his shy acceptance of their approval.

“Gale’s turn for show-and-tell,” he informed them.

John started a facetious drumroll on the edge of the table. Gale snatched up Rosie’s eraser and bounced it at him. When it landed in his lap, John gave Gale a look (You wanna pick that up? the look said) before slowly returning it to the table. His eyes glittered like Gale remembered the streaks of rain on the jeep’s windows had, catching headlights as Bubbles drove them home.

Gale cleared his throat.

“I’m thinkin’ of something a little cerebral.”

Through a fake cough, John barked out, “Snob.”

“Maybe,” Gale allowed, grinning. “Maybe.” He stared at the table for a few moments while he collected his thoughts. “So, Thoreau spends a lot of time doing, but there’s a lot of thinking there too. He talks about meditation. He, uh, he… really makes you see the value of patience, besides just that it’s necessary when you’re waiting for something like crops to grow.”

“Sure does,” Rosie encouraged.

“You wanna talk about what’s worth waiting for?” John asked abruptly—so abruptly that the question seemed to short something in Gale’s brain and he forgot, just for a moment, what it was they were discussing. He blinked and recoupled the cars on his train of thought.

“More the worth of waiting at all,” Gale corrected. “I’m going to throw in Washington Square to complicate that. I think what James really shows is… the importance—but the difficulty—of trusting your own mind.”

“Hmm,” Rosie said thoughtfully, which was a not-discouraging response.

“I think what James really shows is how much the mind sucks ass,” John declared. He added, “Figuratively.”

“You do, do you?” Gale countered, slightly annoyed.

“Yep. It’s too much thinking that keeps whatshisname and whatsherface apart.”

“You haven’t read it.”

“You’ve talked about it,” John said shortly. “I listened.”

They had a brief, silent standoff during which Rosie wrote down some useless jot points in his notebook. Gale suspected he was working hard to resist the urge to break into a self-soothing whistle.

“Morris and Catherine,” Gale emphasized, “stay apart because her father believes Morris is after their money.”

“Which he can never confirm?” John checked. “And neither can she?”

“That’s right.”

“So, it’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid. It’s a great work of literature.”

“Yeah,” John drawled, “but it’s stupid that Catherine decides to be suspicious and alone. If you ask me—”

“I didn’t,” Gale pointed out.

“—everybody in that novel thinks a little too much. Where’s the…” He snapped his fingers, attempting to summon the right word.

“Spontaneity,” Rosie provided without looking up.

“Thanks, Rosie. The spontaneity. Why doesn’t Catherine grab life by the fucking balls?”

“Maybe that’s not who she is, fundamentally,” Gale said.

“Maybe it could be,” John challenged.

“She’s a product of her time.”

“Bullshit. Love is timeless.”

A laugh burst from Rosie, who could no longer pretend he wasn’t listening to the exchange happening across him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, beaming. “I was imagining my grandmother embroidering that on a tea towel.”

His laughter cleared the accumulated tension from the air. Gale took a deep breath and stole a glance at John doing the same.

“My essay is mind over feelings,” Gale said weakly. “It’s what I know.”

“It’s not all you know,” John said. “But, for the essay, I get it. I think the ‘trusting your own mind’ thing’ll work with Thoreau, that pretentious fuck.”

“A little respect for our dead friend, Egan,” Harding called over.

“Don’t worry, sir, I meant it as a compliment.”

Gale had his back to their professor, but he heard him sigh. The three boys chuckled quietly.

“Bet he can’t wait to get us out of his hair,” Rosie guessed.

“Nah,” John said, “he loves us. Especially me.”

Who wouldn’t, was the thought that came to Gale unbidden.

As John took his turn, once again delivering his idea in a style so stripped-back it rivalled Hemingway’s own, another trio was brainstorming in the opposite corner of the room.

Aside from the mandatory course texts for their class, Nash hadn’t read anything written by a man since he’d spent the night with Helen. Helen hadn’t directed or even requested this. It hadn’t mattered, and Nash was already in deep. Rosie had walked into their floor’s shared kitchen in the dorms the other night to see Nash squinting at the fine print on the Pop-Tarts box (probably bored while using the toaster, Rosie had figured). To mess with his friend, Rosie had shouted, “A MAN WROTE THOSE NUTRITIONAL FACTS,” not expecting to laugh so hard he almost peed his pants after Nash dropped the box in horror.

Nash’s essay idea wasn’t one the boys felt moved to mock though; he planned to set Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s fictional Herland up next to Thoreau’s portrait of the actual Walden Pond and compare them as utopias—what they had, what they were missing, through whose eyes the reader was meant to view them as idyllic. At another time in his life (pre-Helen), Nash might (would) have joked about Herland as the utopia to end all utopias because it was full of women, but he had grown, he had changed. He felt less eager to surround himself with women and much more eager to get himself drunk on Helen. Just intoxicated. Falling-down, slurred-speech sloshed on the sight of her, her laugh, the feel of her fingers raking through his hair when he’d had his head between her thighs.

Since the party, Helen had borrowed Sandra’s car to visit Nash once on campus. He’d taken Rosie’s keys and seen her three times. Between these four meetings, it had felt as if they’d barely been apart, and Nash liked it that way. He was up to his heart-shaped eyeballs in love and overflowing the joyful energy into writing his final paper, just so he’d have something to talk to Helen about when he called her at night—as he had been every night they weren’t physically together.

Where Nash deconstructed an idealized vision, Bubbles went for realism from the start. Feeling he hadn’t spent enough time with his pal Steinbeck this semester, Bubbles was bringing that author into his final essay to help him examine the dichotomy of working man and intellectual. He thought Thoreau inhabited both archetypes, and while Thoreau’s life-on-the-land project had perhaps taken a few shortcuts, Bubbles was keen to dig into the messier side of a collision between two seemingly contradictory paradigms. The struggle was everywhere but in how he explained it, words rolling off his tongue.

Bubbles’ only distraction—though he proceeded through it—was Crosby. His best friend’s face was so serious as he listened. It was nice to be heard with such rapt attention, Bubbles felt, but he worried. He’d overheard Crosby on the phone with his mom the night before. Touching base with home would be good for Crosby, Bubbles thought, but none of them would be making the trip back to the States until the semester ended. Bubbles knew Crosby, and if he was reaching out to his mom now, it suggested something was up, that his balance was off, that he was looking for someone or something to right it. Did Crosby really need to be reminded that Bubbles was right there? But then maybe he did. Bubbles had seen how mixed-up Crosby could get himself if he wasn’t careful, and it was a shame when Bubbles thought the whole world of him.

“Last but not least,” Bubbles said, when he was finished and had turned towards his best friend. “What’ve you got for us, Croz?”

“Mystery?” Nash guessed.

And usually, knowing Crosby, this would have been the correct guess, the easy right answer, but today, Crosby leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms against his chest, his ankle over the opposite knee. His own limbs wound tight around him, he smiled a smile that troubled Bubbles.

“Maybe the mystery is why people are still reading Walden,” Crosby quipped.

Coming from Crosby—usually so eager, so earnest, so desperate to get it right (whatever it was)—this remark was shockingly irreverent. Bubbles and Nash looked at each other, at a loss. Nash made a noise between a laugh and a choked sigh. Bubbles pondered what to say. Long seconds later, it was their professor who was the first to come up with a response to Crosby’s snark.

Sidling silently up to their clustered chairs, Harding ordered, “Go with it.”

Crosby jumped.

“Sir?”

“‘Why are we still reading Walden?’ Go with that.”

Bubbles cast his gaze from Harding to Crosby.

“I was just—” Crosby began, the flush of wrongfooted embarrassment creeping up his neck.

“And now you are,” Harding cut across him to state with finality. He fixed his student with a commanding stare which, despite its ferocity, wasn’t without humour. “Consider writing the paper punishment for your curiosity. You asked the question, Crosby. I expect you to answer it.”

“But I don’t know…”

“Find out.”

Crosby stammered, but Harding turned abruptly away and went to Rosie, who had his hand raised. Crosby looked to Nash and Bubbles instead.

“What do I do now?”

“Write the paper,” Bubbles suggested with a smug smile. “What other choice you got?”

“It’s one essay,” Nash reasoned. “Just write something.”

“You can always start over if you don’t like it. We both know you’d be doin’ that anyway.”

“Yeah, but Harding assigned me this topic,” Crosby protested. “Normally, the only person pressuring me to get something perfect is me.”

“When’d he say it had to be perfect?” Nash asked.

“It obviously has to be perfect!” Crosby picked up his pen and began rapidly clicking the end. In, out, in, out.

“There’s not just one way,” Bubbles assured him. He reached out to stop the clicking and Crosby sighed, sliding the pen behind his ear instead.

“It’d be simpler if there were.”

“Simple’s not really your style, buddy.”

“Nobody overcomplicates shit like you, Croz,” Nash threw in.

Crosby bowed his forehead to the table and groaned.

—

The next day found Nash and Rosie in their suite’s common area. There was no air conditioning in the dorms, so they usually left the windows shut on the hottest days in an attempt to keep humidity out. Today, they had shoved the windows up in their casings and surrendered themselves to the heat.

Rosie was lying on the floor in his boxers. Next to him was the boombox. An infectious pop song—“Wannabe” by the Spice Girls—had come out earlier that month, and Rosie had found a radio station that was playing it on repeat. The first time he had heard it, he’d just listened. After a couple more listens, he’d sung the chorus under his breath. Now, he knew all the words and hummed the melody even when the song wasn’t playing. This included when he was washing dishes, brushing his teeth, and getting gas in his car. Not when he was showering, of course; then, Rosie belted “Wannabe” at the top of his voice. Other residents of the dorms (and anyone passing by outside) were instructed to not go wastin’ Rosie’s precious time. As a boy, Rosie had never been particularly self-conscious. As a man, he lived in the same building as John Egan, who was not exactly a role model for shame or restraint.

Fortunately, Nash could work through pretty well any kind of commotion—it was silence that he found distracting, and he avoided the library accordingly, except when he had to collect a book. Also stripped down to his underwear, Nash sat at the desk and worked on his essay. The biggest hindrance was the damp paper, courtesy of the humidity the boys had failed to shut out. When the Spice Girls were silenced mid-verse, Nash swivelled around in the chair to see Rosie sitting upright.

“What’s up?” Nash wondered.

Rosie looked at him.

“I’m gonna ask Liss to marry me.”

“What?”

But Rosie leapt to his feet and strode into his bedroom, closing the door. When he reappeared, he was dressed in shorts and a polo shirt, the collar flipped under against his neck. Nash spied the glint of keys twirling around his roommate’s finger.

“Rosie. Rosie.”

Rosie didn’t seem to hear him, marching to the door. His jaw was set, his gaze determined.

“Rosie!”

The door slammed behind him.

“ROSIE, FIX YOUR COLLAR!” Nash yelled at the closed door.

Nash sighed in annoyance and tossed his notebook down before forcing himself to get up. The heat was oppressive and he hated to move. He went to the door, opened it, and peered down the hallway. Rosie was already gone.

Leaving the door ajar, Nash shuffled over to Gale and John’s dorm. John opened the door to Nash’s knock and automatically glanced down.

“Aw, Jesus Christ, Nash,” he said, assaulted by the sight of Nash in his briefs.

Nash grinned and shrugged, then remembered why he was there.

“Rosie’s being weird,” he reported.

Gale arrived in the doorway, encountering the same view that had provoked his roommate’s exclamation. He blinked and asked, “Compared to what?”

“He just blew outta here. He said he’s going to propose to Liss.”

John chuckled and Nash, who was still smiling, raised his eyebrows to underscore the ridiculousness of such a thing. Gale, however, cocked his head thoughtfully.

“That’s fast,” he observed. “Good for Rosie.”

“Good for— what?” John demanded in disbelief. “Rosie can’t get married.”

“Sure he can. He’s a grown man, John. Knows what he wants.”

“Ken’s married,” Nash noted when it looked like John was opening his mouth to protest.

“And Lemmons is a helluva lot younger than Rosie,” Gale added.

“I just can’t believe he didn’t talk it over with us,” Nash went on, affronted.

“Hey,” John said to get his attention. “He’ll be back. We’ll talk to him then.”

And so they rounded up Curt, they rounded up Bubbles and Crosby, they went back to Nash and Rosie’s dorm (they made Nash put some clothes on), and they began their vigil. The aura of disbelief lingered, but the fact was that Rosie wasn’t there. Had he really driven up to Cringleford? Did he have a ring? They asked Nash and he could only tell them there was no ring that he’d been aware of; it had seemed to be a spontaneous decision with no clear impetus beyond “Wannabe” playing for the zillionth time. The boys were perplexed.

They received some answers within the hour. Instead of coming back through the door, Rosie called the suite’s landline. Nash picked up.

“Liss said yes,” came Rosie’s rushed voice. “Can you come meet us?”

“Where?” Nash asked, flapping his arm at the boys to demand background silence when they tried to ask what Rosie was saying.

“Norwich City Hall.”

“What?”

“I’m getting married, Nash.”

Nash could hear the smile in Rosie’s voice. Still, he said, “When?”

And Rosie said, “Now.”

#my writing #seven degrees east #MotA #Masters of the Air #MotA fic #Neil 'Chick' Harding #John 'Bucky' Egan #Curtis Biddick #Gale 'Buck' Cleven #Clegan #Bucky x Buck #Robert 'Rosie' Rosenthal #Herbert Nash #Joseph 'Bubbles' Payne #Harry Crosby

[melodraca]

Hey! I saw in one of your posts, in the tags, that you were an English major. I'm going to college soon, and I was wondering if you had any advice on picking out your major. What do you like about majoring in English, and what exactly do English majors do? Thank you!

First of all, congrats! That's really exciting! I really hope you enjoy your time in college! Second, this is gonna be a bit long, so I apologize in advance o7

I'm honestly not sure how helpful this is, but for the longest time I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I actually enrolled in university as a mature student a good 5-ish years after I graduated high school. I was so tired of school-related stress (and the way that the public school system functioned in general) that I was honestly considering not even going to post-secondary. I bounced between different potential majors, although I couldn't help but feel tired just thinking about them, like I would be going to school out of obligation or societal expectation rather than genuine passion.

When I came back around to the idea years later, I started poking around my local university's website. As I was going through, reading everything over, and clicking through different subjects, I realized that I was actually really feeling excited about school for the first time... pretty much ever. Because I realized that I had the chance to do things at my own pace, with a focus on subjects that I actually liked, rather than what my family expected would get me a traditionally "good job."

I narrowed my major down to a choice between English and creative writing, but I ultimately went with English. As much as I love creative writing, I prefer doing it as a hobby. It's the same with art for me: getting too serious with it made me feel less passionate and creative (to be fair though, I did take two first year creative writing classes as electives and I am genuinely proud of the stuff I wrote for them!)

With English, I could do my favourite thing in the world: overthinking literature and talking ad nauseam about the media I like. I love rambling, and writing essays is pretty much just organized info-dumping. I also wanted to learn more about history and culture, especially the way that they influence and are influenced by the works of literature, film, etc. of the times. In my experience so far, English classes have mostly consisted of reading or watching a bunch of texts, analyzing them & picking them apart, discussing said texts with my peers, and comparing/contextualizing them with each other. It's way more fun for me than it probably sounds to most people haha

Side note: I'm also taking biology as a minor (specifically with a focus on zoology because I love animals). The contrast between using the more creative and writerly side of my brain, and the more logical sciencey and side works well for me.

I'm still not super career focused, though I have certainly thought about it. I'm on disability support right now, so thankfully I'm fortunate enough to not need to juggle work and school. Ideally, I would love it if my degree landed me a stable job that doesn't make me feel miserable or put the same strain on me that retail and food service do. But I'm kinda just going with the flow for now.

Anyways, that's all to say: look over all of your options and narrow it down to the ones that draw your interest and passion the most. Consider what you want out of school, explore the potential career options that each subject could bring if that's your goal, and generally go with what makes you feel the best.

I know most schools have exploratory courses and academic advisors that can help you figure out what you want to do, so I would definitely look into that! Oh, and look into the required classes for each subject too! It personally helped me organize and prepare for everything I would need to do so that I was less blind-sighted by, as an example, my mandatory statistics class for my biology minor (I'm DEFINITELY not a math person)

Good luck, and I'm sorry again for how long this got! I wish you the best :D

#asks #gabeposting #it's like 2am rn so I hope this actually makes sense and isn't just me rambling #thanks for the ask btw!!

[nateriverswife]

I hate it, haaateee it when people would go back and forth about the Manga and the Anime just to scavenged what evidence to support their analysis on Light Yagami's character; saying that he's neccesary evil and that he is like that because his father is a chief police officer and everything.

I hate it when people say that Light Yagami initially does have a morale compass and perceived himself as some sort of martyr in creating his fledging utopia when all they did in L's character analaysis was practically saying that he's an asshole and leave it at that. I hate it when they said that L is a bad person because he's autistic while writing a 10 paragraphs, 25k words essays on Light's character alone about how he's actually a nice person but went about it in the wrong way in the same post.

For clarifications; I don't despise the analysis on itself, but the sheer hypocracy that revolves around it. I hates it when people said that Light Yagami is way smarter than L while ignoring the fact that had Ohba not equipped him with massive plot armor, Light would be in jail 20 chapters in.

I hate it when people said that Misa Amane deserves better while glossing over the fact how she basically initiate the toxic relationship despite being well aware that Light has no interest in her.

I also genuinely loathe how they just leave her in the 'girlboss' category and not analyse her character like Light.

In short, sometimes I just hate people in this community.

Thank you for your time and peace out. Drink water, or something.

Sorry for the late reply, but this got me writing. Putting a read more, because it’s quite long.

Before I start, I love you. And I wonder if there was a missing “not” in the first paragraph, because otherwise the rest of the text wouldn’t make sense lol. I’ll take that it’s missing.

Now, I want to preface everything I’m going to write by saying that, in my opinion, a lot of discourse around the characters is due to Ohba’s poor writing when it comes to them. They are not conjured as “people”, but as roles, and I have proof. Nothing wrong with it, but it’s clear when it comes to secondary characters, while not so much when it comes to Light or L, but it’s still there.

I’ve always wondered about Matsuda’s life outside of the case, but there’s nothing.

Ide and Mogi are just... There, so much so that people forget their existence. Mogi a bit less because he had a more prominent role in the second part.

Ukita, after 5 months in universe, dies, and yet no one in the fandom cares, which is odd, because it becomes a point used by L against Aizawa later. If you don’t care about a character by the third volume, there’s clearly something wrong with the way he was written or presented – or the lack of.

Misa’s popularity is used only in a few instances, which is weird because I would expect a celebrity to be busier with her job. She doesn’t even have any celebrity friends. She’s also a shallow character overall, but I want to talk about this later.

Light’s past is a big dark hole, to the point that people would write long ass essays trying to explain why he wasn’t evil in the beginning, like... Yeah, he wasn’t evil, because he didn’t find the Death Note yet, but that it’s just two pages. And he found the Death Note in those pages, and simply acted “normal”, while still murdering people. The fandom has barely something on which to infer about Light’s former attitude, which can’t be so different from the one he has throughout the series, because you can’t change overnight. He was just given a weapon that could help fill the gap between how he thought his life should be and how it was.

L is the only character for which makes sense not to know much about him. The problem begins when you must fill that hole, and you start to say stuff just to please the fandom and are most likely contradictory to his attitude, behaviour and personality. The chapter in which L dies is published in July 2005. A year and a half later, HTR13 is published. In it, Ohba says that he looks at L as slightly evil, which I think is the wrong term. I would say he’s more ruthless than evil, and only in some instances, because he generally cares about others.

In this fandom, I see a constant trend of people trying to paint L as morally corrupt as Light (to add more depth to their dynamic?), without any regard for L’s character. Most of the times, L’s attitude is actually coherent with the situation he is in and his job. He has to lie and deceit to get something out of Light, because otherwise he would get nowhere, yet that is seen as bad as Light’s murdering habit. And he doesn’t even manipulate people in the same way Light does or for the same reasons.

Aizawa’s gateway is the most evident way in which L does it. He sees that he’s the most hesitant among all of them and knows that he would regret it in the future, so he manipulates him to leave the task force for his own sake. However, he doesn’t force upon him a certain behaviour by threatening him, and he’s straightforward about how he feels towards him. He tries to convince him and withholds the fund information so that his tactic could work. He wants him to assume a position and gradually tries to get him there. He leaves his “targets” at least some room of action. I got told by @lost-and-found-jc (sorry for the tag, lmao) that even in the prologue game, he is also quite nice to criminals during the interrogations (and I quote, "he is also incredibly polite even to criminals, always uses polite Japanese and even when one of them was just straight up insulting him L was like 'Okay, that wasn't very nice'"). If you want to take that as canon or not doesn’t matter, because the manga alone proves L’s willingness to comprise and his habit of compensating his “bad” actions.

To be fair, L is the closest character to a real human being.

Another thing which proves my point of Ohba (and Obata) adding details about L that don’t make sense, but just because they want to please the fandom is the big ass washing machine they introduced, like... No. Stop it. That is ridiculous. You would die if you were to use that. He doesn’t conform to some social norms, I get it, most human thing ever... But that thing? It’s not possible. Just say you wanted to add to his quirkiness and move on, because there’s no way anyone would think about that. It’s even more impractical than just washing yourself normally, because you have a higher chance of drowning.

... Ridiculous.

Here what Ohba had to say about the planning of his character:

td;dr: "idk, i just didn't want an old man"

Don't know where to put them, but here, I think these are in favour of my idea of Ohba's incomplete character writing:

"A character to talk to" - that is so sad.

Anyways.

Let’s go over Light’s character.

I started to read the supernova’s analysis, but I stopped mid way because I felt it was trying to convince me that my opinion was objectively wrong, which it can’t be, because we have no objective truth. And most of the points read there are things I’ve heard thousands of times (probably that was the starting point?).

I’m now reading about Light and Sayu’s situation, because I am open to change my mind about Light’s attitude towards his family, even though I’ll never forgive him for what he did to them.

People can be evil and care for their family, e.g. mafia, which are very family based yet they do atrocities. And in HTR13, it’s written that Light cares about his family – even though he said that he might need to kill them – and humanity – which is, er, interesting to say the least.

We have to understand that no matter how well written an analysis is, it is still biased. When writing them, people start with an idea: “I want to prove that Light is not evil”, and so they start to look for details that prove their point and often ignore those who refute it.

It’s very hard to write a completely objective analysis of a character.

I am biased too. I’m not going to deny it. It’s up to you to agree with what I say. If you don’t think Light’s evil, okay, go on. If you think L is the absolute worst, okay, whatever. The “problem” lies when you ignore canon details that are contradictory to what you say, because you want your narrative to be intact, and then tell others they are wrong in their interpretation, because it doesn’t match yours. An example is the 22 reasons why L is as bad as Light post. It ignores pretty much anything canon, because they didn’t like the idea that L is deemed as “good”.

I hate Light. I’m not going to lie. He killed my favourite characters (valid reason to hate someone), and I don’t like his ideal of justice, his actions, his idea of himself and the way he thought justice should be administrated. Overall, everything he stands for and just him.

I don’t hate him because he’s a villain (no matter how much people say it, he’s not an anti-hero. I’m sorry, he just isn’t).

I also think he’s very dull without Kira (made a post about it), which goes to show that Ohba didn’t think too much about his past and how he was before the Death Note, other than Mr. Perfect Guy with The Perfect Life. The stereotypical prefect person that hides a very dark secret, you know what I mean.

His interactions with others, like his friends, are also shallow, so the discourse is here very divided:

he’s popular because of his charm and looks, but no one is a real friend of him (which also goes to support the idea that L and Light were somewhat the closest thing to friends they both had – I disagree; HTR13 states that he had many friends, while L doesn’t have friends because he thinks humans are cunning in nature and hates Light);

Ohba didn’t write them in too much because they are unimportant to the plot, since everything is strongly plot driven, and not character driven, but they were still important to Light (doesn’t seem so because he literally forgets about them lol);

simply used to showcase that everything in his life is perfect, because he’s social and all.

Even the girl he dated disappears after the bus hijack, which I find weird, because the date didn’t go wrong (between them, I mean) and so I expected it there to be a follow-up, but nothing. The girl doesn’t even try to get an explanation as to why Light didn’t ask her out again, even though she’s considered stubborn by Ryuk and she insisted to continue the date after the hijack. Light says to keep it a secret, but you can still ask for a secret date. She simply ceases to exist.

He’s nothing outside of Kira, which is quite sad and infuriating to see.

(lmao, co-star just sent me a notification saying that I should “start by seeing them as a person”)

In the post I made about Light, I highlighted other things I won’t go over, because I don’t want to repeat myself too much.

It’s totally valid to hate when people try to redeem him, when he’s not redeemable. He would’ve been it if he had realized that death note actually killed people, and so he refused to continue. We wouldn’t have Death Note, of course, but that’s how far I can go to excuse him, because he realised that it’s not the way to go about it.

(By the way, I don’t hate Light stans. I hate however how willing people are to support the idea of killing criminals in real life. That’s when my problem with his apologists begins. I won’t sit here and tell you how wrong and useless the death penalty is, because it’s not an essay about it – I still have my arguments from high school, from a debate during religion education lol –, but if you support it, please, inform yourself well about the topic.)

He’s not even responsible for the drops in crime, as the manga tries to portray it. I did a post (not written that well lmao). It’s quite impossible to me that he could do that (maybe another part in which Ohba didn’t care too much about adding credibility? I mean, he himself said that he didn’t do a lot of research about anything outside Japan, so maybe he didn't consider how impactless killing 200k people over the course of 6 years would be).

He first used the Death Note because he was bored. That was the main thing that he and Ryuk had in common. “The world is rotten” wasn’t used about criminals in that context. He then killed two people, realized what he did and gave himself a moral justification and goal, so he could continue, just so he wouldn’t be bored anymore. He started to even believe that he had that goal since ever, that he was meant to save the world and become the God of a utopia.

I sometimes have the impression people like saying he’s not evil, because they share some of his values and so, hearing that that is not well seen makes them justify what he does. You can share some of his values, even though I don’t know which those would be, but you just don’t have to act in the way he did. I think it’s pretty simple to grasp.

Ohba sees him as “very evil”, by the way. You could make the same argument I did for L, but while I can disprove that claim, it’s very hard to do the same with Light. For everything good Light did (saved that girl from being harassed), he did multiple bad things (first of all, killed him, and then believed he had to save the world and began killing multiple people in a day). For everything bad L did (putting cameras in Light’s house), he tried to compensate it (only Soichiro could see those tapes other than him; he wouldn’t extend the time period in which they would be placed without them knowing).

I won’t go into L’s character, because I talk 24/7 about this bitch, and it’s pretty clear to see that I do see him as better person than Light. I have several posts about him – not analysis though, just random thoughts. And I agree with your two points, since it’s also canon that he’s smarter than Light, and people who keep saying that it’s not true are simply in denial.

Now, about Misa.

You are so right for pointing out the lack of character analysis on her, and I want to add that most of the posts about her that we have try to portray her as an undercover real true genius™. She’s not, and that’s okay. That was not Ohba’s project (a woman that is smart, acts on her own and is able to possibly defeat Light? Impossible).

Her character is based on two main things: childish, fashionable girl (and) obsessed with Light (Kira, to be honest). That’s all she was to Ohba and that’s how she is shown to us.

Honestly, I don’t mind people saying that she could actually be much smarter than how she was presented. You do you.

And, while her forcing Light into a relationship is bad, the worst thing is that she is quite literally a murderer. She is not innocent. She’s a stalker, she killed innocent people for selfish ends, she threatened to kill any girl that Light went out with, and she was willing to kill a “friend” just to prove her devotion to him, whom she met 5 minutes prior to this.

It makes sense that she would want to serve the person who killed those responsible for her parents’ death, but whatever she did isn’t excusable.

I think I’ve always said she deserved to be written better, not that she deserves better in universe (but if I didn’t, forgive me, that’s all I meant). She just doesn’t, at least not after what she did to get Kira’s attention. She’s awful. Her past shouldn’t be an excuse for killing innocent people – Ukita, among all.

She chooses to be used by Light. And Light is simply being himself, bad as always, and treating her as an inferior, because he looks down on everyone – men included. I want to specify this because people keep pretending he’s gay and Misa did a bad thing by forcing him into a hetero relationship. He had five or six girlfriends before her, and I feel like he dated them to show that he can get what he wants, not to hide the fact he’s gay. Misa forcing Light into a relationship is bad just because… She forced him. Full stop. Even if he were gay, Misa didn’t know that, so you can’t put that against her or as an aggravating factor.

Now, onto the infamous scene that I literally can’t wrap my head around it.

The fandom points out that her imprisonment was torture. By definition, it was not. We aren’t shown Watari inflicting physical pain on her and she doesn’t even show to be afflicted by it mentally. Only exhausted towards the end of the whole thing, just like Light and Soichiro. Was it fucking immoral? Yes (and probably also fan service – Obata even said he went easy on her… like, bitch, what). Her hands and body could’ve been restricted differently, like Light’s for example (his body wasn't tied but whatever).

However, I would argue that restricting (not in that way, though, hell no) and blindfolding her was the safest way to ensure the survival of Watari, since he was there, or anyone she would come in contact, since L didn’t know how she could kill (she literally murdered Ukita in front of everyone’s eyes).

One thing that I still don’t understand is the water part. Aizawa points out that she hasn’t had water for three days. However, a few panels later – supposedly the day after –, Misa asks to go to the bathroom, and L tells her that’s she had been there a few minutes prior. So, I don’t get it. L wouldn’t let her go to the bathroom if he knew that she hasn’t had any water. If she wanted to move, why would she ask for that specific thing? Did he start to give it to her after Aizawa’s comment? Because: no water - > no need to pee - > obvious refusal by L to let her go to the toilet.

I stand by my belief that Ohba didn’t put much thought into that, only in her case though, which is so fucking annoying. I’ve reread HTR13 and the lack of anything regarding that scene is mind-blowing. It’s always, “Light here, Light there”. That scene gets mentioned a few times as “arrested”, like hello? She’s your other main character, could you give her a bit of consideration too?

Also, she’s an idol... How come no one questioned her disappearance? Okay, let’s say, the public knew she got arrested. And did she just go back to work after that? As nothing? Just got accused of being a mass murderer and they accepted her with open arms? I don’t get it. If they didn’t know, why wouldn’t anybody ask her where she had been? No contact with the outside world for 53 days, and no one cared to check on her? Weird.

“53 days”, but the manga counts only 50 days, because it all focuses on Light, which proves to me that Ohba didn’t care about Misa at all and it was just an excuse for Light to do the whole memory loss thing.

I should read the second part of Death Note, because I don’t remember her role there very well, which alone tells you a lot. I just know Light was constantly frustrated with her.

Did I write enough? Lol.

That was pretty much what I had to say. I’m not usually one to pay a lot of mind to Light or Misa if I have to be completely honest, as they are not my favourite characters. Love the fanarts, the memes and all, but that’s how far I can go. It’s been a lot of time since I’ve known Death Note, I’ve always disliked both of them, so it’s really hard at this point to rewire my brain and have a positive opinion on the two. I also feel like it’s a waste of my time to try to convince myself that I can like them, because I would rather spend it on my favourites.

Misa and Light makes me prone to conservatism here. Props to them. Power couple.

Got to say this, but I think it’s very hard for me to discern what to impute on the characters because that is what they would do and what the authors wanted to put into the story but didn’t know how and chose the most suitable character, just because. I mean, it’s not, “they do this because it’s in their character”, but “damn, I need to make the plot continue and do this, but who can do this for me? Oh, yeah, X! The readers wouldn’t bat an eye if they did this, even if it’s not really in their character.” To me, these are two very different things, but whatever.

#as always hopefully my english is good enough to be understandable #also i love that people feel safe enough here to write opinions that are quite different from the ones of the majority of the fandom #but it's probably because i do agree with them so there's that lmao #death note #dn.inbox #l lawliet #light yagami #misa amane #dn.general #meta analysis #death note meta