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olivemeister · 3 years

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OKAY NEO THOUGHTS NOW THAT I’VE BEATEN IT AND HAD TIME TO MARINATE. no spoilers for another day bc i haven’t finished it yet, but i did go “no, why shan’t i? i have the internet” and watched the secret endings on youtube so those and the secret reports will be discussed. yeah. so here’s some thoughts. i’m going to talk a lot about the more contentious things, i think. and again i haven’t finished another day so nothing to do with that, but of course major ending spoilers for the main scenario.

these are my opinions both as a writer and a media consumer, so there’s kinda two levels here. it is very freeform “as i think of it” structurally so my sincerest apologies if it’s all over the place. i am trying to keep specific topics confined rather than splattering the same plot point/whatever all through the post, but it’s not like i’m posting a peer-revied academic essay here. it’s also fucking enormous and i would say sorry but that would be a lie.

the majority of the game, i actually really enjoyed. the localization was excellent and i can’t praise it enough. i know people threw fits over the “horrible overstep” of... teenagers using slang. but did you know, in real life, teenagers use slang? even in japan, there’s slang? wild but true! the dialogue was great, and while i can’t say much re: the jp cast since i played in english, the newcomers for the english cast were spectacular. i actually think the newcomers were, in some cases, stronger than the returning cast. even in characters where i didn’t like the voice (nagi had to grow on me, i admit it), they were a fantastic match for the character’s personality.

the emotional beats re: character deaths, typically, landed the way i think the writers wanted; kanon’s death in week 3 had me devastated even though i could see it coming a mile away. i think that’s a testament to the best parts of the writing; as soon as i understood how the current game was being run, i knew it was fairly inevitable that every other team would eventually lose. odds would be that, barring something like someone changing teams or a team merger, the majority of the other teams would be completely wiped out. i knew far in advance that kanon would likely not make it to the end of the story, but it still fucked me up when it finally happened not just because i cared about kanon, but also because of how much the other characters cared about her. some character deaths affected me far less, of course. i think kanon was the epitome of “this hit exactly as hard as the writers wanted it to”, but i do feel they fell short with others. ayano’s lack of development really hurt my ability to be saddened by her death, especially when it was so clear that she set up her own possession as a trap for shoka. it undermined things for shoka in general, because while she was devastated to lose ayano, the game did a poor job at making their relationship tangible and meaningful. i felt worse (not necessarily sadder, just worse) about motoi’s death, and i didn’t like motoi. speaking of him...

the biggest issue i have with the game is a chronic square enix issue. kubo is the Man Pulling The Strings, whatever, this is fine. the problem is that he, minamimoto, motoi, and arguably susukichi are the only characters in the game with dark skin. they are all morally grey at best. i don’t think i need to elaborate on why this is an issue. we’re not going to pretend that racism and colorism don’t exist in japan. i’m just going to say that all of the dark-skinned characters are either totally evil, excessively violent, and/or morally dubious. this is my biggest qualm, but i don’t feel it needs more elaboration. yes, i know motoi turns it around in the end. yes, i know susukichi ultimately changes sides as well, and he’s ultimately portrayed as sympathetic. minamimoto is........ his own beast. but the fact remains that we don’t get a single major character who’s darker and unambiguously heroic.

second big issue is that while i understand the decision to keep shiki off camera until the very end for emotional impact, i feel like this was to the detriment of the story and to the detriment of said impact. she was mentioned, sure, and she was briefly seen from the shoulders down in a cutscene long before her introduction, but i feel that this was ultimately for the worse. her absence in the plot made her a borderline non-entity that can easily leave the audience going “why should i care about this?” on what’s supposed to be a huge emotional cathartic moment. yes, people should know this is a sequel and neku and shiki’s friendship was a crucial part of the original game, and much of the endgame of neo makes no sense if you’re unfamiliar with the original, but their interactions in the ending felt incredibly shallow. and i think this is because of how little shiki appears and how isolated she is from her other friends. eri is unseen and unmentioned. she doesn’t interact with rhyme. she hardly interacts with beat, using him as a translator at best. her other relationships are just... stagnant at best, ignored at worst, and despite having had just as vital of a role in the first game as beat did, she does nothing of import onscreen. her only narrative actions are “fix mr mew (mentioned but not seen)” and “be sad about neku”. so, functionally...

for some reason (we know why) the story decided that the only thing that was important to shiki was seeing neku. but by holding off on this reveal of her, we lost the impact that their meeting could have had. because the game refused to show her it didn’t show how much his absence was affecting her, which leaves their reunion feeling incredibly hollow. shiki was gone for upwards of 90% of the game. if not for the first game, this reunion would mean nothing; the narrative does a terrible job of reminding the audience that neku and shiki have a strong relationship and i don’t know if it’s that they expected the first game to have done the heavy lifting, or they thought that what neo gave us was good rather than “good enough”. imo this was an enormous failure and i wish we had gotten more for her both as part of the plot and as a character.

this was an issue present with rhyme as well imo, though to a lesser degree. i think they should have given up the ghost much sooner on confirming that the shadowed figure was rhyme; it was obvious by the time they showed us her silhouette, so i don’t know why the narrative held off on showing her. they didn’t have to introduce her to rindo (or give her the name splash screen) yet, but people who played the first game and are paying attention know it’s rhyme, so why bother hiding her? most of what rhyme accomplishes in this game is off-camera as well, but she has double the screen time that shiki gets.

the shiki thing is another symptom of a common squeenix problem these days, which is poorly-handled implied romantic interests. and i think that was also present with how the end of the game treated shoka. rindo and shoka as an implied romance in general did not bother me; more than a lot of squeenix protags, and perhaps primarily because of the excellent job the english cast did, i actually was unbothered by the suggestion of budding romantic feelings because it felt genuine. they actually felt like a pair of teenagers who were starting to be interested in each other, trying to play it cool and prioritize. this, and shoka’s characterization in general, is really helped by the reveal of swallow’s identity; it retroactively heightens her closeness to rindo specifically and offers enormous insight into her decision to help the team covertly. however, i think this budding implied romance was severely undermined by having other characters comment on it, especially because it felt so out of place timing-wise whenever someone commented. it was never warranted; there are times where they seem to be... not flirting, but not doing a good job of pretending there isn’t an interest. this is not when comments come. the comments come when they are having a totally normal interaction that does not suggest any non-platonic feelings whatsoever.

up until the final day, i had fairly ambivalent feelings about the idea of them as the designated hetero pairing. i felt it was a vast improvement from recent shoehorned romances in squeenix properties. the ending made things much more contentious to me, specifically how shoka is vanished by joshua. the audience should at least have the suspicion that he’s reviving her, but the circumstances surrounding it are the problem more than joshua being a deus ex machina. it’s not the first time joshua was a troll re: reviving someone, but the context of why shoka’s revival is necessary is, well... unnecessary.

they barely foreshadow the shinjuku rules re: reapers, and i will freely admit it’s not remotely ooc for shoka to hide something like that until she can’t any more. but they seem to be just a contrived excuse for shoka to be taken away... and from the framing of it, not from the player, but from rindo. which, i don’t know that i need elaborate on why i wasn’t fond of that. and i won’t lie - i know everybody beefed it in those cutscenes, including beat and neku. but when the dissonance noise grabbed shoka it gave me the exact same vibe as the demon tide grabbing kairi in kh3, and i don’t think i need to elaborate more on why that would put a bad taste in my mouth and make me fearful for shoka’s future treatment in the game. i was worried that the narrative was going to yank her away from rindo like a prize being snatched from him, and it did! while i do also think it’s ic for joshua to fuck around the way he did when reviving her, it also seems contrived and brings up a major question.

if shoka is still playing by shinjuku rules, why does shibuya’s composer have the ability to overturn her erasure? yes, i know, shinjuku is gone, but its composer is still active. surely joshua having the authority to do what he did indicates that on a cosmic bureaucracy level, shoka is a shibuya reaper. the secret reports offer a potential that joshua exploited a loophole by waiting until the second after the shinjuku rules resulted in shoka’s soul being dissolved in order to snatch it up, so perhaps the explanation is that her erasure meant she was technically no longer a shinjuku reaper and no longer beholden to its rules. but that doesn’t answer a different question that honestly bothers me more than the admittedly sorta insignificant question of whether or not joshua overstepped in reviving shoka.

shinjuku’s game has ended because shinjuku has ended; why are its rules still in play for former shinjuku reapers? i am aware that shiba is the conductor “legally” and he has made changes to shibuya’s game, but they’re careful to specify that the “ex-reapers are erased at the end of the game” rules are from shinjuku and do not apply to shibuya reapers. is she considered by the higher plane to be joshua’s underling and not hazuki’s? the secret reports confirm that the transfer of personnel from the destroyed shinjuku to shibuya was authorized by the acting conductor (uzuki) and this is standard procedure, everything was done properly. so “legally” the formerly-shinjuku reapers are shibuya reapers, right? hanekoma notes in particular that it’s a culture clash leading to the shinjuku reapers being designated as such and that they’re only nominally shinjuku reapers. why are a defunct game’s rules still active?

the biggest issue is that shoka’s threat of erasure was unnecessary from a narrative perspective, especially given how quickly it’s introduced and resolved. what was the point of putting this in the story if five minutes later the issue is just dealt with, no effort, minimal tension, by a (narratively speaking, don’t come after me joshua fans) minor character who doesn’t even appear until after the plot is resolved? i honestly wonder if it was just the writers deciding joshua needed to do something so that his appearance in the ending wasn’t just shallow fanservice for people who wanted to see the original gang. joshua’s lack of action is also presumably going to be contentious with fans; i’ve read the secret reports, and i don’t feel that they sufficiently justify why he doesn’t make any moves to protect his city despite being positioned both in his own dialogue and the secret reports as someone opposing shibuya’s purification. i will talk about this a little later re: kubo’s motivations though.

i also think it’s kind of stupid that joshua sets up “find her and you win” and then... rindo doesn’t do anything in that regard. he just bumps into her in the scramble. i know i already said i hate the idea of her being a prize to be won in a game but if they’re going to set it up, why make it pointless in that regard? it feels so unnecessary. joshua portrays shoka’s revival/return as something to be earned, and unlike the ending of twewy there’s no recognition that he was actually just fucking with them.

this is similar to my mixed feelings about kubo’s defeat. on one hand, i wanted to smash his face in personally, i have hated him the entire game. on the other hand, having him jesus beamed and rewritten out of existence without any warning or chance to resist was fucking hilarious and i actually laughed out loud. my speculation as to why he didn’t get a boss fight is that developers worried about people having trouble suspending disbelief over the party being able to defeat an angel. ultimately i think the only way this could have been done was to have it be a boss battle where your victory doesn’t matter, like the week 1 fight with susukichi, and have hazuki curbstomp kubo in the post-battle cutscenes. ultimately, i feel like this was a lesser of two evils; i don’t think the “you lose in the cutscene” approach would have necessarily been significantly better than what we got, i recognize that “the battle didn’t matter and you lose in the cutscene after” is a contentious game trope. and i would understand people struggling to accept the cast defeating a being from a higher plane without intervention from said higher plane. the only benefit would be the catharsis of getting to slap kubo around, which admittedly i kind of miss. having him as a secret boss was an option i guess but i think it would bring more questions than it was worth.

kubo’s motivation is also just bizarre; i understand that it’s given as him getting overzealous after carrying out his orders to purify shinjuku, but why? i feel like this could have easily been fixed/rationalized by “shinjuku’s surviving reapers fled to shibuya, leading kubo to consider shibuya to be an extension of shinjuku”, but that’s solely speculation. i do not know why kubo decided to also start an inversion in shibuya. they didn’t give me enough information. his conflict with joshua is inexplicable and almost entirely offscreen via the secret reports. i do not feel like i have a grasp on why the plot of the game even happened. hazuki’s involvement is iffy; i can’t say whether he initially approved of kubo’s overstep and changed his mind, or if he just took his time collecting his errant underling. the secret reports suggest the former, and hanekoma noting that the contentious nature of the previous game’s events gives a speculative explanation for why no action was taken if hazuki was actually making moves against shibuya rather than kubo being out of line. hazuki could damn well have been lying, there’s a precedent for composers being full of shit and telling bold-faced lies to protagonists, though in the previous game these lies were all eventually uncovered. this leaves me to believe that ultimately, hazuki’s statements regarding kubo acting outside of his given authority were mostly honest. but what i don’t understand is why joshua took such a hands-off approach.

yes, he says he figured the main cast had it under control and would have stepped in had things gotten worse, but this appearance and statement comes long after rindo fails and shibuya is destroyed in multiple timelines. why did he not step in in the first timeline? i can speculate, but the game and secret reports do not do a great job in explaining why the proxy vs. proxy game even happened in the first place. kubo is hazuki’s underling, which makes joshua higher in the pecking order than kubo. if hazuki was capable of exorcising kubo instantaneously, why didn’t joshua just flick him off the board like a flea before he even got started trying to cause an inversion in shibuya? in the epilogue of a new day joshua is seen in conversation with hanekoma, who’s taking shinjuku’s inversion seriously, which seems at odds with how easily his fellow composer ends the problem.

retroactively, i guess i could rationalize this as him realizing that either shinjuku’s composer must be responsible for said inversion or that potentially shinjuku’s composer has been compromised in some way. and i can rationalize him failing to immediately jesus beam kubo as well - it’s possible that, as kubo was initially acting under the orders of another composer (assuming hazuki is still technically “legally” one/at the bureaucratic level of one), joshua’s hands were somewhat tied re: what actions he could take without potential consequences. it could be that joshua would get in big trouble if he took disciplinary action against another composer’s underling, but 1. the legal transfer of personnel should mean kubo is joshua’s underling, not hazuki’s, see the shoka problem 2. hazuki’s status as a composer is questionable given that his territory is now purified and its game is defunct 3. given that kubo was acting outside of his original composer’s turf and outside of his initial orders (purify shinjuku) at this point i feel like that isn’t likely. it could be that he was trying to avoid a conflict with hazuki himself. it may be that he considered it hazuki’s responsibility to retrieve kubo, but that’s at odds with him choosing a proxy to combat kubo’s and his claims that he totally would have done something, really, he swears. they don’t give us much info at all as to why joshua entered a game with kubo in the first place. i have reason to believe that something’s fishy in the secret reports, and i would like to see the japanese text, which i’ll mention again in a few paragraphs.

i know the absence of shibuya’s composer is partially, and perhaps primarily, “there wouldn’t be a plot if joshua fixed it”. but it really feels like they just kinda tucked joshua in the corner and hoped fans wouldn’t be like “hey where is shibuya’s composer and why is no one mentioning them?” that part is probably for the same reason we don’t see shiki until the very ending, teasing the audience by holding off on revealing him until the last second, but it’s jarring to me that shiki is mentioned but neither neku, beat, nor any of the reapers (!) think “we should contact the composer”. even if just to say “we can’t contact the composer, he is unreachable”! i guess it’s to avoid people remembering how significant joshua is and thinking too hard about it, because joshua is simply too powerful of a character to be running around freely. the plot falls apart when you have a character who’s so strong and, in his own words, kind of omnipotent, who could trivialize the conflict in an instant if he took action.

i feel like they surely could have given a more explicit reason for him to not be involved in the story, even if it’s a reason like “he’s in trouble with the higher plane”. which could have easily been set up! hanekoma is clear in his reports that shibuya’s impurification is highly contentious in the higher plane; people are big mad about it, potentially people higher in the chain of command than a composer. this could have been easily utilized as an explanation for why joshua is hands-off; he’s on a shit list and needs to step carefully as a result. but it’s just not addressed. hanekoma is unreachable according to his reports, and he notes that people are trying to contact him for help. are we just to assume that people have looked for joshua to ask for help in the past but it was so long ago that it isn’t even worth mentioning now to the newcomers? according to other reports, the higher ups are pissed with joshua about his game with kitaniji and are turning a blind eye to what’s happening with kubo in shibuya as a result. but this doesn’t explain why the members of the shibuya UG never discuss the composer. hanekoma’s reports have him confused as to joshua’s lack of action as well; he knows the context of what’s going on in shibuya but doesn’t understand why joshua is staying silent.

that said! the fact that hazuki’s motive for the destruction of shinjuku is never stated does not bother me too much. he’s placed in a position very parallel to joshua in the first game, and he even says he felt like he was following in josh’s footsteps. when you add his seemingly-genuine inability to understand why people care about shibuya, i feel there’s enough evidence to... not dismiss, but nudge this aside as “He Too is a misanthropic bastard”; shinjuku’s destruction is a parallel to the intended destruction of shibuya in the first game. hazuki just carried on where joshua had a change of heart. the secret reports complicate this; it might be that someone fucked up in transcribing, but the reports i read online state that shibuya’s composer, i.e. joshua, was responsible for the destruction of shinjuku due to a game with kubo. this does not make sense given everything else, including hazuki’s own statements and later reports, so i’m setting that aside for the moment as either an uncaught mistake either in translation or transcription online (most likely) or hanekoma not knowing the actual truth until receiving the post-purification shinjuku reports. hanekoma also suggests that hazuki’s goal was also the purification of shibuya, but as he’s not shibuya’s composer this is certainly not his jurisdiction so i’m curious as to what exactly happened there.

EDIT: i’ve been informed by a helpful anon that this is not a mistranslation, the japanese secret reports do state that it was a game involving joshua that resulted in shinjuku’s inversion. with that in mind, i have figured out how to rationalize this and it solves a lot of problems: if it was a proxy game between joshua and kubo, then joshua must have been the opposition to shinjuku’s inversion. though you could argue that joshua is responsible for the end result, he didn’t destroy shinjuku; his proxy lost, probably because kubo’s had the support of shinjuku’s composer. kubo’s overconfidence in running rampant in shibuya is now explicable and he may have been trying to rub it in that joshua lost.

if hazuki was still backing kubo post-shinjuku, this could explain why hazuki felt he could make decisions about shibuya’s fate and wander around it; joshua had already overstepped onto his turf to meddle in purification, so he was returning the favor. at this point in time, i figure that joshua’s proxy was either tsugumi’s brother (shinjuku’s conductor) or coco (she’s noted to have inexplicable powers for a rank-and-file reaper, but joshua’s opposition to her killing of neku throws this into question), and if we truly had a scrapped “shinjuku’s final game” plot then joshua’s proxy could also have been neku. kubo’s proxy was presumably shiba. this actually answers a few questions that i couldn’t rationalize when i assumed joshua was uninvolved (why would shinjuku’s composer be running a game against kubo when they wanted the same thing?), so i’m gonna chalk it up as an absolute win.

i think hishima as a character was... sort of nothing. he was just there. yeah, it was kinda funny how he dressed shiba down, but i don’t know that the plot needed him. his role in the endgame could have easily been given to tsugumi without much fuss, and i feel tsugumi deserved a much bigger part in the narrative given how much she was hyped up by solo and final remix. she was so prominent and anticipated that the fans called her hype-chan for years before we had a name for her. this could also be folded into the problem with hiding shiki until the very end; it feels like we missed a whole sequence with both of these characters simply because the narrative refused to show us shiki. instead, we’re told that shiki showed up and fixed mr. mew, and somehow this freed tsugumi. i think the fact that they don’t even give a flashback of this crucial event after shiki’s proper introduction is just a questionable decision. the story tells us that tsugumi’s release from the plushie is of the utmost importance and shiba can’t be swayed without her, setting it up as a vital event, but it happens offscreen with no real interaction with the main cast. it also only happens after multiple failed loops, even though rindo’s interference is what prevents the meeting between coco and shiki to repair the plushie. i don’t understand this from a logistical standpoint; if coco isn’t pulled to escort rhyme, she must have met with shiki and released tsugumi in timely manner, but tsugumi does not appear until after you replay to get coco back to her original schedule. you could wave it off as “she didn’t get there fast enough”, but i can’t accept that as a reason given the circumstances; it’s not like she would have to look hard to find shiba. this one’s flawed writing; i know in a meta sense why she didn’t appear, it was to build tension etc etc, but in-universe it’s a plot hole.

coco being so absent from the plot is also somewhat conspicuous. i wonder what reception of her was like in japan and if that influenced her lack of presence in the story. i honestly don’t even know if she was received well by the english audience, all i know is that i did not like her at all in final remix. not from an “i don’t like the villain because they’re doing bad things” perspective, from an “i don’t find this character compelling and i think they’re annoying” perspective. also curious as to whether or not her speech patterns changed in the japanese dialogue since final remix; i found her far less jarring and obnoxious in neo and i think it’s enormously because she stopped talking verbally in internet shorthand. overall, coco’s retool was imo a change for the better, but she’s barely there for me to appreciate how much of an improvement she was. it feels like there’s an entire narrative we were set up for by a new day, yet it’s almost completely missing. the ending of a new day laid out this framework for neku and minamimoto to be forced allies in an unseen future game. i had mixed feelings about this conceptually, but the narrative setup was fairly transparent. not only does this not happen, coco’s motivation in a new day and what ultimately happened were so lacking to me.

i feel like something got lost and we were originally going to actually see and perhaps play the shinjuku game that ended in disaster instead of just getting a summation and brief flashbacks of the survivors fleeing. this kinda ties in with my complaints about how hyped tsugumi was by solo and final remix, and then she turned out to have a very small (albeit crucial, via her trailer ability) and mostly unseen role in neo’s story. retroactively we learn that rindo’s visions are from tsugumi, but this is something she does entirely off-screen. all of coco’s scheming was for nothing, because joshua was a deus ex machina and whisked neku away the second he died. this feels to me like cut content or rewrites; there’s a whole game’s worth of story that just happened off-camera and we got to hear a little bit about it. it wasn’t enough, imo. i think doing it as a midquel is still possible, but it’s a hard sell to create a video game with a downer ending and we know shinjuku’s fate is already set in stone... even though a new day ended on the tragic cliffhanger of neku’s death, it’s a little different since it’s coming as an optional postgame sequel hook after victory rather than the entire narrative you fought through ending in failure. i suppose it could be done with a Distant Epilogue now that we know shiba and most of his surviving reapers will return to rebuild shinjuku. ultimately i really think that if not for the concern about neku overshadowing the new cast, shinjuku’s purification could and should have been the prologue to neo. it would be a tough balancing act, but i do think it could have been done right and it would have done a lot for narrative tension with his absence if we had a prologue following him that ends in a cliffhanger re: shinjuku’s purification. neku’s role in the story was done decently i think re: how big said role was, but a lot of circumstances surrounding his absence, legendary status, and reappearance leave much to be desired.

frankly, i just don’t like how much they glossed over neku’s three year absence. we’re given a vague explanation of what he was doing, but it isn’t actually an explanation. definitely again feels like a plot rewrite situation; there’s this huge blank space of neku doing nothing because there used to be a story that we were going to play through and it got scrapped for whatever reason. overall i feel neku’s characterization was very odd and perhaps a little inconsistent in this game; he didn’t have much of a personality at all, which i struggle to reconcile with the original game. we don’t see how he reconciled with coco, it’s just dismissed entirely as “no we’re good now”. how are we good? why did you forgive her for playing murder games instead of just explaining shit? i know he forgave joshua for his gatekeep gaslight girlboss behavior in the first game, but we had context as to why he made that decision. also what the fuck was keeping him from coming back to shibuya, i don’t feel like that was sufficiently explained either? for someone who was so hyped up by the narrative, i was a little let down by how insignificant neku ended up being to the plot as a whole. and again, his personality seemed very watered down and neutral despite the seriousness of the situation. why was he so mellow? the circumstances of his return i did really like, because... well, we’ll talk about character relationships i guess.

i already summed up my feelings on rindo and shoka and i think i’ll leave them on the note of “unnecessary elements dampened my potential for overt enthusiasm, but overall i feel neutral-positive about the suggestion of romantic interest” which is a lot more than i can say about a lot of (semi-)official pairings. on a broader and more platonic scale? generally i have positive feelings about the new cast and their interactions; i feel like their development is more understated than neku’s in the first game, his character arc is very in your face and the neo cast is not nearly as overt, but you can see the difference in how the team interacts across the three weeks. rindo and fret’s established friendship, not to be dismissive of it, does exactly what it needs to. i mean this in a completely positive way. it’s an established friendship, they feel like friends, and they serve initially as anchors to one another in the beginning of the game as a “you’re the only person i know in this chaos” setup. this contrasts neku in the first game in an excellent way because of how it highlights their biggest character flaws, which i’ll talk about later; it’s important to rindo’s fatal flaw that he has someone to fall back and rely on in the beginning of the game in the same way that it’s crucial for neku’s development that he’s surrounded by strangers who he must learn to trust and rely on in order to survive. rindo and fret can lean on each other in the beginning of the game, and as people who have known each other for some time, are able to recognize and appreciate each others’ positive changes.

i do love the development of nagi’s friendship with fret, particularly how it’s sometimes but not always remarked on when she shelves her initial aloof attitude with him. i prefer when a narrative is more subtle on that kind of thing; pointing it out every once in a while is okay, but i don’t want it shoved down my throat via dialogue that characters are developing an emotional bond. we can see that nagi is slowly becoming more receptive to fret and less likely to dismiss or disparage him. it seems like their initial relationship is that of two people who have opposite struggles; nagi is notably closed off in the beginning, but fret immediately approaches her with an unearned and offputting level of familiarity. their slow and understated (more noticeable with nagi than fret) development towards accepting each other as friends is mutually beneficial to them even outside of the context of their personal relationship; nagi opens up a little with everyone, not just fret. placing two people with very different perspectives on how to interact with new people in close proximity helped both of them grow. i’m sure other people have different perspectives, but i do not feel like they were being teased as a pairing which i enormously appreciate, i am tired of “pair the spares” shit. (minor note: i also appreciate how while fret’s crush on kanon was very overt and strong, she was also fairly clear that she considered him a kid and his feelings were never going to be reciprocated because of that age gap. i know, the bar is low, but thank god.)

i love how, despite nagi now having been confirmed as older than beat, as soon as beat joins the narrative he takes this hard stance of “i’m the one who’s already been in this hellscape so it’s my responsibility to help the newbies”. he really embodies the big brother role so well in this game; he knows a little more about what’s going on, this isn’t his first rodeo even if it’s not exactly the same, so he considers himself to have an obligation to protect the others. he serves as sort of a physical and emotional rock for the team from the second he joins, becoming an excellent support for them both as a combatant and an older brother figure. he has experience in being both of these things, and i think beat’s writing is some of the best in the game.

despite his position as a former player who’s back in the UG, he meshes with the newbies perfectly. he doesn’t overshadow the rest of the team despite having more lived (ha) experience in the reaper’s game, he doesn’t feel like he’s on a different level from them or anything like that. he fits in while serving an important unique role that he can only fill because of his prior time in the UG. it’s completely understandable and reasonable why rindo remains the team leader despite beat’s presence. he’s had a three year gap since his last game and doesn’t even understand how he returned to the UG. he’s not a fish out of water, he knows the UG and the game. but he’s really truly gotta shake the dust off, and he’s trying to figure out what happened to him in the first place because he knows he shouldn’t be in the UG at all. he didn’t have a huge bump in intelligence since the first game, but it’s hard to dismiss him as a complete idiot. he has both large and small perceptive moments where another narrative might have chosen to keep him as the dumb muscle. in fact, his firm convictions serve an important role for the others - beat knows he didn’t die and can’t be convinced otherwise, and his confidence that he’s a living player is part of how rindo and gang realize they also aren’t dead. he’s clearly not simply a comic relief character. another story might have positioned him as more of a mentor figure, but he plays to his strengths and serves to ground the team instead. beat is honestly a highlight of this ensemble cast to me. i’m unsure as to how much of that is simply because he was one of my favorites from the first game, but i really truly love beat in this game.

shoka and neku’s late introductions to the team mean they have far less “we are now firmly allies and friends” interactions with the rest of the ensemble for unavoidable reasons. i will say that the excellent casting and localization for the english version, particularly shoka, has done a lot to mitigate that issue; yes, the plot doesn’t develop her relationships with the team as a whole as thoroughly as some of the others, but the combat interactions with her are so genuine that i found myself shocked when writing this because, well, those combat lines did so much legwork making her role in the party seem earned and cohesive. i had such a strong sense of her place in the team that just isn’t reflected in the cutscenes, and i find that very interesting but i’m unsure as to whether it’s good or bad; i think it’s incredible that the combat dialogue did such a good job fostering this air of “we are a unit” for these characters and it really is a testament to the skill of these actors, but i do wish it was more prevalent in the cutscenes itself. beat’s established relationship with neku and their relaxed nature with one another does a lot to ease neku’s entry into the group; he has an “in” with a firmly established member and a well-written dynamic with him that helps him out here.

as a nekubeat appreciator i feel very fed and i hope there’s an uptick in interest for the pairing following neo. i love how beat, who throughout the game is constantly forgetting who people from 3 years ago are (doesn’t recognize his former superior bc she’s wearing a suit now and can’t even remember her name), immediately recognizes coco despite her changing her entire aesthetic specifically because he’s so angry with her for killing neku. he’s ready to throw down the second he sees her, which gives this feeling of “he’s been waiting for this moment for 3 years”. because the narrative never addresses beat’s change in style, particularly that he wears his hair like neku now, i choose to believe it’s because the last time he saw neku was immediately after coco shot and killed him. it could be that this shit’s been haunting him ever since neku died. my city now, if you don’t talk about it in the game i make shit up. both their cutscene interactions and combat quotes do an excellent job of maintaining the sense that these two have been close friends for a long time and distance hasn’t changed that. they fall right back into old ways with one another immediately.

even outside of the context of me being a nekubeat shipper, their relationship and continued partnership (UG game context partnership) feels very genuine. neku and joshua call each other partner, but it rings hollow. i’m sure it’s partially the lack of screentime that makes it so they don’t feel like partners any more than neku and shiki do, but the game doesn’t even try to push closeness the way it does for shiki - more on that in a minute. beat is the only one of neku’s partners that seems to have retained the same strength in their bond with him despite the three years; shiki and joshua are super absent in the plot, which really undermines their relationships with neku. i’ve already talked about my problems with shiki’s lack of focus and how i feel it harms her relationship with neku, but as for neku’s relationship with joshua, i think neo has taken an interesting approach that i feel will have a mixed reception.

it actually feels like neku and joshua ended this game on worse terms than the first one even though joshua was a far more benevolent figure this time around. neku is very clear about wanting to return to the RG despite this meaning he will have no access to the UG (outside of potentially text-based communication since rhyme paved the way for RG residents to bust into the RNS and... however it was that shoka’s fanGO account worked, since she and rindo were fanGO friends long before his entry to the UG) and doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance in stating this desire. he seems quite content with not having joshua be a part of his life, as opposed to the first game’s ending where he extends an open offer to joshua to join his friend group. i understand how this would (and will) let a lot of people down, but i actually think it’s for the best. i have no real opinion on neku’s capacity for forgiving joshua after the first game, good or bad, but i think putting distance between them in this game is the correct move.

i take this viewpoint especially given that after the first game, joshua did in fact choose this distance - neku invited him in, and he did not take the offer. it was his decision to not join neku’s group in the first game’s ending and he continued to remain separate from it in the three year gap; he may have masqueraded as a fellow player and peer in age, but joshua is not and has never been an actual peer to neku, shiki, and beat. his life experiences are so different from theirs that i would struggle to suspend disbelief that they have enough in common to maintain a close friendship. he intervened when neku was killed by coco and placed him in a safe area and gave moral support in the ending, and i think this is the most we should expect of a reforming (not reformed but in-progress) misanthrope like joshua. he’s an enigmatic figure sure and largely benevolent if inactive in this game, but he isn’t a good person and he clearly considers himself to be on a different level from neku and his peers. hanekoma notes that joshua’s somewhat reluctant to continue to remain separate from neku’s group, but i think the narrative places him both objectively and in his own mind as someone who is just... from a different world. joshua chose distance, he chose to cut contact, and this is the consequence of that decision. i think that’s a good lesson to teach; it may not be a given, but it’s natural that sometimes a friendship you ignore will fade. it doesn’t necessarily mean the time you spent didn’t matter, but you shouldn’t be shocked if a plant you don’t water wilts away.

i feel like that wasn’t the intended takeaway, that it was just questionable writing that i’m reading too deep into, but that’s how i feel about the situation.

i’m also incredibly grateful that hazuki was introduced as an age-appropriate option for joshua and i hope they’ll draw attention as a bastard boyfriends ship, both because i think it’s very funny and because i have opinions about shipping joshua with the teens. i know it’s contentious and i’m not going too deep into it, so what i’m going to say is this. the secret reports state in plain objective text that joshua downtuning his vibes aged him down and his true appearance is older. neither the narrative nor supplementary info state anything about how old josh was when he died or how long he’s been a reaper/the composer (reapers ageing is ??? as well, we don’t know if it’s not a thing or if it’s optional or what). however, it is firmly canon that he is older than 15. if that canon upsets you then that’s your problem to either work through or ignore indefinitely. suffice to say, joshua and hazuki do not have the schrodinger’s pedophile issue and i wholly support and strongly encourage that over the alternative for this reason and again because i find it funny and think they deserve each other. i hate to say hazuki is a healthy choice for joshua because i think both of them are just walking messes, but they are actual peers on the same tier of the higher plane pecking order and more importantly the disaster they could be as a couple has infinite potential.

on the girls side of things, i am still mad about eri’s absence not just because it’s a relationship shiki had that just got ignored. i know the story wants us to believe that neku and shiki have something but shiki and eri had more. i’m sorry writers you made a more compelling f/f ship by accident in the first game and i am not invested in the one you weakly suggested between neku and shiki here. if you made shiki have more of a role in neo maybe i’d feel differently, or maybe you would have screwed it up worse. we’ll never know. i think it’s a shame that they couldn’t make me care about neku and shiki as a pairing, but it is what it is.

i was briefly worried that the game would try to suggest something between kaie and rhyme because sometimes people lose their minds when a boy and girl stand next to each other, but i was quickly set at ease with that one. they felt like two people who are starting to straddle that line of acquaintance/friend in a believable way despite how little interaction between them we see, and i appreciate that. i was also briefly worried that fret would develop a crush on rhyme based on his initial reaction at being introduced to her, but again quickly dismissed. can you tell i’m a little gun shy about strangled “him boy her girl” romances in fiction these days? yeah. i’ve been let down too much recently by bad writing.

i think all of the party members could have benefited from more development with one another outside of combat lines - i would like to see more interaction between nagi and shoka, or neku and fret, etc - but that would come at the expense of the narrative’s pacing. i think it could have been done by tweaking certain details, but ultimately i can accept this as a sacrifice made in the interest of keeping the narrative from getting bloated.

i wanna talk briefly about the new main cast a little.

rindo’s ups and downs re: development are much more subtle than neku’s were, but with the secret reports in mind i feel his arc is actually pretty excellent. i think we could have done with a little less of fret pointing out rindo’s increased confidence and how he becomes more assertive, i think the audience is smart enough to notice that on their own. but i’m a huge fan of how the narrative quietly places rindo in this position of a leader who fears that responsibility, but nonetheless has to grow and accept it. hanekoma’s reports may spell it out in plain text postgame, but the narrative already told us in our own way that rindo’s development stalled when someone else entered the cast who could take over for him and this is demonstrative of a(n understandable) lack of maturity and failure to grow. neku’s fatal flaw was his rejection of others, and so he was forced by the narrative into a position where he had to learn to trust them; rindo’s is that he relies too much on them and the narrative forces him to stand on his own.

while i think this is a little muddled (he was right in some instances to not make hard solo decisions; thinking specifically of ayano, it was absolutely the right call to ease shoka into this inevitable loss rather than forcing her into the situation unilaterally) and i wish we saw more consequences of his initial waffling behavior, rindo’s indecisiveness is an actual flaw that i think a lot of people can relate to and i think it contrasts him wonderfully with neku without being heavy-handed. rindo working through it from “relying on others to make choices for him -> still valuing the input of others but not wholly dependent on them -> capable of making difficult calls without anyone else to support him” was subdued and while it had realistic hitches in the form of other characters who he could consider authority figures, it was steady and imo very good. he’s a teenager coming into his own, stepping out of this world where others in his life - motoi as an0ther, shoka as swallow, presumably his parents, teachers, etc - have made the big, scary decisions for him or guided him through them, and into a place where there aren’t these people to guide him. he’s surrounded by people who either don’t know anything more than he does, or don’t care about his best interests; he’s clashing and changing and it forces him to grasp and accept his own autonomy rather than falling back and relying on someone else to fix things when it’s too frightening or difficult.

we can talk cultural differences re: the level of autonomy and responsibility that’s right for teenagers but i’m not really interested in drawing hard lines there. this is a coming of age story; as he approaches maturity, rindo is learning how to be an adult. i think that’s a classic and important narrative concept and it’s done well here.

fret, interestingly, is imo a case where the subtlety didn’t work out. to me, there wasn’t a huge distinction between flippant “telling you what i think you want to hear” fret and “genuine” fret. his initial interactions with kanon don’t seem different from their last conversation; maybe he comes off as less initally honest in the jp version, or maybe this one was a writing fumble. maybe it’s just me, and other people don’t feel the same way! he seems to be a far more static character in a strange way; the narrative tells us that he’s developing via other characters’ dialogue, but it doesn’t seem to support that. to me it’s a failure of “show, don’t tell” - i don’t take a hard stance on “show, don’t tell” as some kind of holy rule of writing, there are plenty of situations in a narrative where telling is perfectly acceptable and i think rigid adherence to showing and not telling can result in a bloated narrative, but in this case i feel like that’s where the narrative failed. it failed to support fret’s development outside of other people telling him he’s changed. i like fret, but i feel like in this ensemble cast fret and nagi kinda serve more as nominal protagonists and are more strong supporting characters than true leads.

as for nagi, i love how, despite it being low-hanging fruit, not only are there no real digs at nagi for being a vocal fangirl of a visual novel dating sim, it actually ties perfectly into her character as someone who understands people. dating sims are about people and relationships. how people interact, the importance of conveying your feelings, the consequences of bad communication; that’s what nagi is obsessed with. and rather than this being a detriment and making her avoid others, it ends up priming her to have healthy friendships because her gaming taught her to value knowing other people. it takes her time to actually open up, but rather than the video games closing her off to others they actually set her up to be an excellent friend. elestra in general could have been a subject of enormous mockery, but instead it’s viewed in a very neutral way and is given the implication of universal appeal by fret picking it up in the epilogue. nagi’s not in the spotlight for most of the game, but the payoff of her monologue to fret about being human was immense and was one of the best bits of dialogue in the entire game to me. it’s not going to be as iconic as hanekoma’s “open up your world” and “enjoy the moment”, but i truly think it’s one of the only parts of neo’s dialogue that approaches its level.

shoka is a character that i think is better on the replay, and i say this as someone who was very fond of shoka the first time around. i thought she had a lot of personality in her mannerisms alone, and i firmly appreciate how she wasn’t a one-note tsundere character. she had some of those minor elements, but subdued and with a reasonable context - she’s hot and cold with rindo and his team because she’s supposed to be working this rigged game to erase them, but she’s already rindo’s friend in a different context and is struggling to reconcile these two parts of her life. knowing her motivation as swallow gives so much retroactive depth to her actions; she was circumventing the game itself not just because she was exhausted by it or unease with shiba like some of the other turncoat reapers, but because rindo was her friend from before the story even began.

i will say that i didn’t actually fully call swallow being shoka simply because at first i had the impression that it would be rhyme (before rhyme’s role in the story became clearer), and admittedly by the time the climax hit the mystery of who swallow was had kind of dropped out of my mind completely, but i think it does a lot to develop shoka. whether this development being retroactive is strictly good or bad as an issue is subjective; neo is a game that has a built-in chapter select, so replaying the game and rewatching the cutscenes with the full narrative context is incredibly easy. however, for a lot of players, if you’re replaying the game it’s with a specific goal of getting something you missed earlier in-game, so you’re rushing through those cutscenes trying to get to that completionist bit. i think a line could have been walked re: giving more of a hint that shoka was swallow before the very end without fully giving it away, but i definitely think the rewatch value is more subjective and based on how you specifically play the game. if you’re here looking to watch all the cutscenes again now that you know everything, shoka being swallow is a huge treat regarding changing the context of her behavior - if you’re fast-forwarding trying to find a pig, it’s totally wasted.

i would have liked to see more of shoka’s backstory and interaction with the other shinjuku reapers for sure, and i wonder if this is another thing along the lines of “we were supposed to see more of shinjuku’s final game than we did”; if we’d gotten more of shinjuku, we certainly would have seen more of its reapers. i talked briefly about how i feel like ayano’s death didn’t hit the way i think it was intended to, but if the game had let us see more of her as a shinjuku reaper i feel like the entire plot would have benefited. it would have benefited shiba as well honestly; they tried to have him as a repentant “now i shall fix what i destroyed” character at the very end, but i don’t feel like they did a good enough job portraying that he had changed and he was brainwashed so it fell flat. if we’d seen more of shiba as the compassionate leader who deserved the loyalty of his reapers that they say he was, the contrast would have done a lot to help define the tragedy of his backstory. overall i think this is another “we lost a chunk of the plot in rewrites or something” issue, which i admit is not based in anything like interviews. it’s just my speculation because it feels like something that was supposed to be here got left behind - i can’t say if i’m right, or why it happened if so. it just feels to me like the shinjuku reapers besides shoka went fairly undeveloped not because of writing/lack of screentime alone but because we lost big pieces of shinjuku content entirely. it’s insane that we only learn in the secret reports how tsugumi became trapped in the mr. mew plush to begin with; to me, this screams “we had to cut something”, and the more i think about it the more convinced i am that we were originally meant to see more of shinjuku’s inversion. hell, the secret reports just flippantly inform us that tsugumi’s brother was shinjuku’s conductor and he’s why she survived - but he goes unnamed and unseen, mentioned only in a piece of postgame content that many players may never unlock.

shinjuku’s final game is just left as this incredible story that was never told, with a cast who we barely see. again, it doesn’t bother me that they never explained to us why hazuki purified shinjuku. but i do wish we could have connected with its reapers to see how they reacted to its impending fate; who was on kubo’s side, who was trying to protect shinjuku? who knew what was happening, and who was just swept up in the chaos? how did the purification affect them emotionally after their escape to shibuya? just from the secret reports we see that tsugumi’s brother is this tragic hero of another story, the conductor opposing the executor and fighting to save his city before ultimately sacrificing himself to keep his sister alive. this is enough content that it could have easily been a standalone, but it wasn’t. i think that’s a damn shame. i’m sure there are people who are already chomping at the bit to write about shinjuku’s tragic final game and it’ll make a stunning fanfic in the right hands, but this is a big gap for fanfiction authors to be filling in.

this was mostly a narrative thoughts dump, but i wanna say just a couple of things about the combat: overall i liked it! i was significantly overleveled for the vast majority of the game partially because i was having fun with the combat, i feel gameplay was very intrinsically motivating. because of how the food system worked, being overleveled didn’t mean too much since it only affects HP, but i also was eating constantly so i was in fact just OP for much of the game. so i suppose, take my gameplay commentary with a grain of salt because i was busted quickly. if i hadn’t been such a powerhouse from early on, i expect my gameplay experience would have been much different.

my biggest complaint: there were some significant issues in enemy design related to battles being timed and the timer having consequences. some enemies were a reasonable/intuitive pain, say, elephants being bullet sponges and chameleons having an invisibility mechanic. these things made them challenging, but in a sensible way. like, of course a big honkin’ elephant has a ton of HP. i think that chameleons in particular could have been tweaked; you have to be very close to them when they’re invisible in order to lock on, and i think this could distance could have been extended a bit to minimize frustration. likewise, it felt like party members that get grabbed by a t.rex were trapped for ages; i feel this could have been tweaked as well. i know a lot of people had issues with wolves for this same reason, but their comparative frailty and my pin choices meant that i quickly overcame wolves and they became a minor nuisance at best until endgame introduced a beefier wolf. even then, i found t.rex noise to be much more of an issue because of their sturdier nature and higher damage output. these are minor gripes; i didn’t like seeing these enemies, but i didn’t hate seeing them. no, here’s what i hate: rhinos and pufferfish.

to me, these are the most annoying enemies in the entire game outside of maybe a handful of bosses. i feel they were poorly thought out in general. the tendency for rhinos to put themselves against the arena walls and the delay on pufferfish exploding after their HP hits zero do not mesh well with that battle timer. i find myself very frustrated by these enemies because it feels like i’m being punished not for a lack of skill or bad decisions choosing weak pins, but simply bad luck. very few pins can circumvent the rhino’s front guard and the hitbox for their guard feels enormous, so i can’t imagine i’m the only player having difficulty herding them out of corners to actually damage them or get beat drops. there’s a postgame dive with a big noise rhino, and it was my worst experience with the entire game because it just kept backing into a corner. i quit that dive multiple times because of how much time i wasted with the rhino; i changed my pins like crazy trying to take advantage of elemental weaknesses or use pins that could circumvent the guard. but it wasn’t about what pins i was using, it was just bad luck with hitboxes. when i finally got the gold rank on that dive it wasn’t that i did anything significantly different, the rhino just didn’t park its ass in the corner that time.

as far as i know, and i hope i’m missing something that someone can enlighten me on, there is no way to prevent pufferfish from inflating and exploding outside of a killer remix. i have not discovered any way to make them explode faster. the amount of time it takes for them to blow up seems to vary not by species but by individual, i’m not sure if it’s being triggered by proximity to a party member or what but i know sometimes one of those little shits will inflate and chase me across the entire arena before finally exploding. in a chain battle, that wasted time adds up. the pufferfish issue could have been severely mitigated, if not entirely fixed, if the gap between HP hitting zero and explosion was just the time it took for them to inflate. that would have basically eliminated my needless frustration with them. but instead i just... don’t know how to make them pop faster.

in normal combat, your post-battle score is primarily just bragging rights/making yourself feel good to have gotten a good grade. but when it comes to dives, where the timer directly decides how many of the finite friendship points you get, the appearance of a rhino or pufferfish specifically is something i approached with dread and disappointment. i already mentioned the postgame dive giant rhino specifically being a nightmare, but this was a reoccurring element for me through the entire game with just normal rhinos. i know rhinos are a returning enemy and kept their front-guard schtick, but the shift to a 3D environment has made them a much more (imo needlessly) difficult opponent.

regarding the pin system itself, i was enormously disappointed to learn how the multi-pin input worked. it turns out that you can only have multiple pins using a single input no matter how many multi-pin wields you unlock; gone were my dreams of having 2 Y-input pins and two ZL input pins (i played on switch). the inability to multi-pin wield uber pins regardless of how many uber slots you have filled is also a huge bummer. i feel like in the postgame i should be able to be an absolute god of destruction, but this didn’t pan out.

this seems to be a switch issue, but autosave was the MVP of the game because i had a few cutscenes crash or freeze (the one with kubo’s reveal seems to be a common source of a crash on the switch version as it fails to load the 3D cutscene); this was annoying and needs fixing, but it was slightly mitigated by autosave kicking in immediately after boss battles. i was crushed thinking i was gonna have to go through the shiba fight again after kubo crashed my game, so the relief i felt upon loading up again and going right into the cutscene was immense. don’t get me wrong: cutscene freezes and particularly crashes are a big problem that a game like this shouldn’t have launched with, but at the very least i didn’t lose my progress on that crash. related, i appreciate the ability to speed through cutscenes you’ve already seen, but i do wish we had the option to skip them entirely because that would have saved me from the freezes that i had to manually close the game and lose progress for.

a more minor complaint that i admittedly am unsure as to how to fix (maybe utilizing the d-pad instead of having it be camera/target select alongside the right stick?) is that i do not seem to have much control over which character my camera centers on in combat. typically selecting the pin that’s equipped to them will focus the camera to them, but every once in a while i’ll be locked to someone whose pin is rebooting while my other party members are actively attacking on the complete opposite end of the arena. i have no idea why this happens. if i’m missing something please let me know. the static nature of the overworld camera took some adjusting to, at first i was offput but i got used to it quickly. if camera was fixed position in combat it would have been a nightmare, but it being fixed in the overworld isn’t the same beast.

this has gotten obscenely long, so props and condolences to everyone who has made it this far. i wanna end on a high note because i want to reiterate something: i have so many criticisms here and that’s actually praise. i enjoyed so much of this game that i’m critical of where it fell short specifically because it’s such a strong contrast to how much i felt it did right. the main story was pretty strong in general, though some character interactions were lacking. the plot itself i didn’t talk a lot about because i thought it was good. there wasn’t much to say, they did a good job! the dissonance noise being created from deleted timelines was great, i loved that. i don’t feel like predictability makes a narrative bad, so it’s not like i was upset when it turned out replay was (gasp) part of a dastardly scheme. for me, foreshadowing is an excellent thing even if sometimes i wish it was handled a little differently.

i vastly prefer this game’s vague sequel hook with minamimoto over how final remix ended a new day; that sequel hook i hated and it had me so worried about neo. thankfully a lot of my fears didn’t come true, and i am very happy overall with the game we got. if another game is greenlit, i would hope it progresses with a mostly new cast; as long as we stay in shibuya some supporting characters can and should be staples imo, like kariya and uzuki, and i hope to see more of what’s being set up with minamimoto even if not necessarily with him as a protagonist. but overall i think twewy’s worldbuilding lends itself much more to a rotating cast if it develops into a full franchise; that’s just the nature of the UG, and i would like to see further installments taking advantage of that and allowing characters to have a complete arc and then retire from the narrative naturally.

i’ve got some pigs to erase and some bosses to slap the pins out of, which i’m sure will take me some time. another day certainly has a secret boss and/or time trial boss rush, so i’ll take a look at that sucker soon as well. i’m looking forward to continuing my playthrough, and i expect to sink quite a few more hours into this game. i really truly enjoyed neo despite my qualms, and i’m leaving the main storyline behind for postgame stuff with almost entirely positive feelings and a hopeful stance on the potential future of the series. i know this was a long-ass post, which is why it’s beneath a readmore, but to anyone who cared enough about my thoughts to keep reading the whole thing... thanks for the time you spent, hope you got something positive out of it!

#neo twewy #neo twewy spoilers #this turned into a behemoth. im so sorry #I CHECKED AND IT'S OVER 11K WORDS #I'M SO FUCKING SORRY

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purple-dragon · 3 years

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in defense of chapter 139 (spoilers!)

it's still hard for me to get my thoughts in order so this might be a little disjointed but:

the (seemingly) extremely unpopular opinion: i liked it. a lot.

first let me go over the things i'm !!!! about that don't need further discussion: EXTRA FUZZY CONNIE!!!! jean and connie live!!! jean and connie see sasha and get some closure!!!! lmao this is just the jean and connie show isn't it

okay next. did the chapter feel a little rushed? yes, of course. is there stuff i wish was elaborated on? yeah, no shit. i wanted to see how the battle with hallu-chan ended. i wanted to see historia's side of the story. i wanted to see ymir's side of the story. if yams ever decides to come out with a series of epilogues or something that go more in depth, i would 100% support that. i want more. however, i'm still happy with this chapter because even though it didn't answer all of my questions, it was thematically consistent with the rest of the work. the ending made sense with where the entire manga has been building up to. it wasn't some kind of ass pull that came out of nowhere.

on ymir... i'm a little conflicted on how her story ended. i interpreted her backstory like this: she was in "love" with fritz the only way she knew how to be. fritz slaughtered and enslaved ymir's people, and yet he gave her attention, favor (i'm assuming), and sex (which we know to be rape, but she probably did not). this of course isn't actually love, but to an orphan with quite literally nothing else and no one to teach her differently, it must be love, right? it's got all the right ingredients (but we know it has none of the necessary dynamic).

so with all of that, ymir had no concept of what love actually is until mikasa came along. mikasa, who, much like ymir, loved someone so much that she dedicated her whole life to him. who would willingly lay down her life for him, just as ymir did for fritz. they're incredibly alike wrt the people they love, but with this major difference: mikasa is able to put herself and the world first, even if it means killing eren, while ymir has chained herself, intentionally or not, to fritz for 2000 years. mikasa ends up being the real inspiration for ymir - that's why we saw her smiling at the end of 138, because she sees the real, true love between eren and mikasa, but mikasa is still free, so ymir can free herself too.

actually, now that i've typed all that out, the more i realize that i like it, i just wish we saw it, rather than me interpreting a whole character based on a handful of panels.

now i guess i'll talk about reiner and levi? first off, i'm so so so happy that they both survived. levi was arguably the most damaged character through the whole series, and reiner was actively suicidal - i know a lot of people thought they were going to die as the end to their character arcs, but i'm so glad they didn't. i'm very happy that they both get the chance to rest and heal from everything that happened. reiner gets the chance to figure out what he wants to do with his relationship with his mother (and he's still simping for historia alskdfjasld), levi can live quietly (with the kids!!!!!!). they've both found something new to live for and i love it

also,,, gabi and falco are so cute i love them so much (wish udo and zofia were here too tho,,,)

okay. to the meat of the chapter.

i can't fit all of my thoughts on eren here, i'd have to write a whole essay on him, but i will say a little. i didn't see this chapter as a character assassination at all - i saw it as us finally seeing what was under the hard, cold mask he's been wearing since the time skip. because like, we know eren. at his core, he's the same emotional person he's always been - more grown up for sure, and more of an edgelord, but still him? and he must have been in constant pain, seeing all of time all the time... my poor boy. and even knowing that he has become an irredeemable monster, he still wants to live with mikasa and his friends, winning their freedom at the cost of his own... that's tragic, man. that shit hurted.

"thank you for becoming a mass murderer for us" excuse me??? armin??? sir hello?? is this allowed hello??? armin what the fuck?

also,,, did eren reincarnate as a bird? is that what that was implying? what was up with the birds through the story then?

eren and armin finally seeing the world together... i am in Pain

hooooooly shit, that dina reveal was not at all what i expected out of this chapter. like i knew the theory was out there, but i didn't expect it to be confirmed at all? i've seen the interpretation that eren just directed her into shiganshina, or that he directed her straight to carla, and tbh i like the second one more. it's darker and more messed up and i just think it's neat. ymmv, though.

i don't know how anyone thinks this is a happy ending, rather than bittersweet or outright tragic. like sure, our favorite characters are alive (except the obvious), but the world is still massively fucked and will be for the foreseeable future. 80% of humanity is dead, there's probably even more wildlife gone, and most of nature has been absolutely flattened. ecologically speaking, eren might have pushed this world into a mass extinction. additionally, removing titan powers from the world wasn't a magic ticket to peace - all it did was level the playing field between countries, and we can see that where the alliance becomes ambassadors and it says in the narration "this fight won't end until either the eldians or the rest of the world is wiped out". the equivalent to this would be to magically remove all nukes from existing and stop them from being made in our world - would it magically bring peace? no. of course not. would it put countries on a slightly more equal footing? perhaps.

basically, what i'm trying to say is that the fight hasn't ended, it's only been brought down to a human v human level, rather than human v titan v technology. what the implications of that for the world are, i don't know, and i wish yams had elaborated on that a little.

what eren did, then, with the rumbling, was give back the world's choice. there's no more titan threat, no more of his friends being forced to fight and die in 13 years, no more babies born with their choice to fight already stolen from them. he gave them freedom by eliminating the titans - exactly what he said he was going to do.

also on that note, what is up with the jaegerists? it seems like in and before the rumbling, all the extremists died out? maybe? like floch and his ilk, and that's why they aren't rushing to massacre the rest of the world, but who really knows... i want more post-rumbling worldbuilding...

finally (i think), that brings me to mikasa. i'm... not mad about the way we see her story end, tbh. i've seen people saying she just stays on paradis forever with eren, alone and practically in exile, but i don't think that's it? like we only see the gang 3 years in the future. mikasa loved eren so much, she dedicated her life to him from the time they were 9, and in the end he died because she killed him. let that sink in, y'know? the love of her life didn't just die, she killed him herself. if it were me, it would take me a lot longer than just 3 years to heal from that. and i think that's what we see her doing there at the end - resting and healing from undoubtedly some of the worst moments of her life. healing from grief isn't a quick or linear process; you don't just get over something like that. i know the saying goes "time heals all wounds" but sometimes it doesn't.

if we saw her maybe 10 years down the line, it might be a different story. maybe she would be in a much better place, with her own new family and goals. maybe she would be worse off, still missing eren and stuck in the past. i don't think that would be the case, though who knows? but for 3 years in the future, i think chilling on paradis with the memory of eren was the right place to leave her.

here's what i like to think happens in the future (and this is why i love semi-open endings, because some things are concrete but there's so much left open to interpretation): over the years mikasa heals, as does the world. she goes traveling the world with armin, and sees the rest of her friends often. she and levi are close - you can often find them having tea together. on occasion, she returns to paradis to share stories of her adventures with eren('s grave). in the end, she lives according to her definition of happiness, whatever that may be now, and though she never forgets eren, she keeps moving forward, and much like reiner and levi, finds a new purpose in life.

annnddd... that's all. unless i come back to add something i forgot about later, but we'll see if that happens.

#long post #snk #aot #shingeki no kyojin #attack on titan #spoilers #snk 139 #snk spoilers #in defense of chapter 139 #the dragon does meta

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boycottyashahime · 4 years

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Hello! Anti-Sessrin person here. You said if this couple becomes canon it will ruin Sesshomaru's character development. I would love it If you could elaborate on that because you're always so eloquent and smart. It's ok if you don't feel like it, though. Have a nice day!

I've actually been looking for an excuse to sit down and write out a cohesive post on my thoughts about this. Contrary to what the shippers want to believe, my interpretation of Sesshoumaru and Rin's relationship doesn't have anything to do with my moral objections to child grooming. I happen to think there's plenty of evidence for a filial interpretation in the text.

First, I'd like to preface my little essay here by saying I'm going off the manga alone. I haven't seen the anime in a long time, because I dropped it when I got a little tired of trying to reconcile the inconsistencies between the two mediums. So, if you read this and have an impulse to say, "hey, what about that thing in episode such-and-such...", keep in mind that I probably just don't remember what you're thinking of.

So, let's go back, alllll the way back, to Sesshoumaru's first appearance. Here's a guy who tears off a dude's head for no other reason than to get the attention of his subordinates to demand a boat. Here's a guy who's spent a long time looking just about EVERYWHERE for his father's remains, not to pay respects, but to plunder them. Here's a guy who feels ENTITLED to rob his dad's grave for treasure he deserves simply for being his father's son.

Sesshoumaru begins his journey as a selfish, spoiled, entitled brat. He doesn't fit the usual profile of a kid throwing a tantrum on the street because he wants the expensive toy sitting in the window; he's very posh and very reserved, but fundamentally, his motivation comes down to the simple fact that he wants Tessaiga. It doesn't even really have anything to do with respect and admiration of his father, otherwise he wouldn't have been so eager to rifle through dear old dad's bones to get at a sword when he had another heirloom right there at his hip. Only Tessaiga was representative of the sheer destructive force he wanted to wield, so he ignored the fact that his dad didn't seem to want him to have it.

This is important, because at first, Sesshoumaru doesn't seem to think of his father in terms of the guy's intentions or the steps he takes for the sake of his sons. Like most rich spoiled kids, Sesshoumaru views the Inu no Taishou in terms of his prestige and how that priviledge can be appropriated for selfish ends. Sesshoumaru wants Tessaiga not because he needs it, but because it's a birthright, and reinforces his legitimacy. When it's clear that Tessaiga seals Inuyasha's youkai blood, keeps him from going berserk, Sesshoumaru loses interest in Tessaiga - it's just a crutch for Inuyasha, and there's no prestige in taking it from him or using it for himself.

Sesshoumaru doesn't start to REALLY consider his father's intentions for the swords until later in the manga, when it comes out that Tenseiga was originally part of Tessaiga, and Inuyasha was meant to get the Meidou Zangetsuha attack eventually as well. It's at this point that Sesshoumaru starts to question if daddy actually HATED him, to give him a rather neat power disguised in a lame shell, but only to develop it so Inuyasha can have it instead, even after Inuyasha already got Tessaiga in the first place. It kind of looks to Sesshoumaru that Inuyasha gets all the powerful cool shit their father left behind, and that there might have been some favoritism coming down HARD on Inuyasha's side.

Above, you can see Sesshoumaru has two interlinked but distinct issues that are addressed throughout the story - his lack of compassion and empathy, and how tied his identity is to his father's favor and prestige. These two are somewhat separated in the narrative; there's a kind of pause in Sesshoumaru's development while a bulk of the middle of the story deals more with other characters and their development, but there is a little bit of a thematic connection between the two halves.

We'll start with the development of Sesshoumaru's compassion since, well, that's where the story begins working on his character. Right before Rin shows up, Toutousai let's Inuyasha's group in on the sword Sesshoumaru carries around and what it does, indicating that Tenseiga requires a compassionate heart to function. A bit ham-handed, but RT isn't very subtle most of the time, so we'll allow it. This sets up the next few scenes in which Sesshoumaru is unable to move and must play captive audience to a little girl doing the literal opposite of what he's used to. Sesshoumaru's habit is to show up and kill things, with no thought to the years of history, relationships, thoughts, emotions, etc that he's snuffing out. But while he's reclined injured in the woods, Rin demonstrates actual LIFE and the preservation of it, that part Sesshoumaru never gets to see. It's made all the starker by how BAD Rin is at caring for herself, let alone the strange monster she found in the woods. She does exactly nothing to help Sesshoumaru, despite how hard she tries, and is even injured by others in her attempts. She is the very picture of vulnerability, the opposite of the strong and capable Sesshoumaru.

This is a stark contrast, because anything less wouldn't be enough to create the necessary awareness of Rin's struggles that Sesshoumaru needs in order to use Tenseiga on here. And I know I've said this before, but I really cannot stress enough how obvious I think the symbolism is when Sesshoumaru uses Tenseiga for the first time; a phallic object gives life to a child, and the object's owner looks after that life throughout the rest of the story. He's not very good at looking after it, and it's clear that he's not sure about taking responsibility for Rin at first, because she pleaded for him to come back for her when he and Jaken left her behind to requisition a sword from Gaijinbou. To me, it's reminiscent of a teenager who knocked someone up, and ended up having to learn to give a crap about the result.

But, even if you don't accept that symbolism as particularly significant, Rin being a child, and human, and weak, unable to survive on her own, are important characteristics to how Sesshoumaru's compassion develops. Sesshoumaru is one of the strongest characters in the series, and he rarely has to worry about his own safety. And since he's in the habit of just murdering everyone he comes across if they're in his way, he's never had to worry about the safety of anyone else, either. When Rin comes into the picture, though, Sesshoumaru is faced with the uncomfortable reality of vulnerability in general. Through her earnest and incompetent attempts to foster survival in a world that can and does crush her, she's opened his eyes to how the disadvantaged, those without a powerful youkai lineage to rely on, have to struggle.

Rin herself has nothing to offer Sesshoumaru within this context of supreme vulnerability. She's not a friend, because she can't offer mutual support or use a skill to their benefit as a team. She's not a lover, because, well, she's a child and sexual/romantic attraction are conditions that wouldn't allow Sesshoumaru to extend his compassion beyond just her. As a mostly helpless kid, Rin has to rely upon Sesshoumaru and his power to survive, and Sesshoumaru employs his strength to keep her alive, getting nothing but a sweet smile out of it all. She gets all the benefits, he has all the obligations. This is PURE compassion - using one's advantages to another's benefit because you care about them, and not because you derive something from it as well.

This is why making Rin into Sesshoumaru's lover is a REALLY thoughtless take. It puts conditions on the compassion and muddies the message.

Moving onto Sesshoumaru's continued character development in the latter part of the story, the sword drama starts back up with slow, when Toutousai shows up and offers to reforge Tenseiga into a weapon. Sesshoumaru discovers that because he got angry enough to break his primary weapon in defense of Kagura's honor, he's triggered the next evolution of Tenseiga into something that can murder. Which is what he wanted at the beginning, yay! I want to point out here that Toutousai says Tenseiga noticed a change in Sesshoumaru's heart - anger for the first time for the sake of another. This implies that what Jaken said about Sesshoumaru getting tangled up in the fight against Naraku because Naraku kidnapping and using Rin to manipulate Sesshoumaru hurt Sesshoumaru's pride is actually accurate; he just really hated the thought of Naraku trying to use him, even if it was a failed attempt.

After going through HELL to develop the Meidou into a full circle (literally), Sesshoumaru then learns that the Meidou belongs to Tessaiga and Inuyasha, and that it's supposed to be handed over. Now, part of Sesshoumaru's angst over this idea, I think, is not just "did daddy love Inuyasha more?", but also the assumption that Inuyasha would have to KILL him in order to retake the Meidou Zangetsuha into Tessaiga. Thinking that your father meant for your little brother to kill you at some point to take your stuff is a pretty disturbing thought, to be entirely fair to him. This is why, when Sesshoumaru jumps into the meidou to take back control of the Naraku-possessed Tenseiga and breaks it deliberately, he spends the rest of the time in there moodily resigned to disappear. He genuinely believes that his father meant for him to die at this point, and even after they get out of there, he seems genuinely depressed.

This is Sesshoumaru's lowest point as a character. He's lost something he thought his father had meant for him, at his father's own wish, and he can't help but question why his dad would give him something just to take it away and give it to Inuyasha. It looks for all the world like favoritism, and since the Inu no Taishou is dead, there's no asking him what the hell the meaning of all this is.

This is all leading to one of the most infuriatingly ridiculous scenes I have ever seen in a manga - when Magatsuhi has crushed Sesshoumaru and everyone thinks he's been killed/absorbed, Magatsuhi is blown apart and rendered unable to reform by the shiny new sword clutched in Sesshoumaru's newly regrown arm. I could talk your ear off about how having Sesshoumaru stop being an amputee is erasure of consequences for his actions, or how being given back an arm is kind of a slap in the face for actual amputees, and where the mother f*ck did that sword come from anyway, but that's not what this essay is about, so I'll just keep all that to myself. The point of this is articulated by Toutousai when he says that Sesshoumaru had to let go of Tessaiga and his father's heirloom to stand on his own as a daiyoukai.

We've already gone over how Sesshoumaru is one of the most powerful characters in the series, who rarely has to worry about his well-being. He's just really strong without having to try. Sesshoumaru had already learned that he didn't need Tessaiga ages ago - he knew this when he learned that Inuyasha needed Tessaiga to keep from tearing himself apart eventually. But when he thought he had been passed down something from his father that was truly meant to be his, only to put all this work into it so that Inuyasha could have it, that embittered him again. It's not that he wanted the sword necessarily, but the thoughts and consideration of his father, who seemed to be putting everything he had into Inuyasha.

But his previous experiences protecting and considering someone (in some cases, multiple someones) weaker than him should have tipped him off. During the very battle in which he got his new arm and sword, he was actively helping those around him avoid Magatsuhi and keeping them close because he had a plan and the strength to carry it out. He was willing to take the extra step to protect Inuyasha and friends before trying to take care of Magatsuhi though, and that was the point. He put everyone else's needs ahead of his own, even Inuyasha's, and he did it without even thinking.

Toutousai just articulated what Sesshoumaru should have already intuitively known by that point. He never needed his father's heirlooms, the swords, his dad's power. They were unnecessary for him from the start. Inuyasha needed a leg up, because his own BODY could kill him after a while. But Sesshoumaru always had the capability of being great on his own. He just needed to finally separate his ego from who his father was and become his own person; stand on his own as a great youkai. While I don't agree with the execution, I can get behind the big lesson - don't rely on your daddy's wealth and influence to prop you up, and do the work to build a personality and identity of your own.

Which is ANOTHER reason why making Rin into a lover would be a thoughtless take. It would walk back Sesshoumaru's final lesson about being his own person apart from his father.

So, there you go. A comprehensive post regarding my take on Sesshoumaru's character development. I could add in a bit about Sesshoumaru coming to understand his father's consideration and the lengths he went to for the sake of protecting Inuyasha by having to give similar consideration to Rin, but I think this post is long enough, and that one statement on that aspect pretty much sums it up. Let me know if you would like me to elaborate on any of this, or if you would like to argue any of the points, I'm up for it. Might take me a minute to respond, mind you, but hopefully it won't take as long as it did to draft this behemoth.

Take care.

#inuyasha #rin (inuyasha)#sesshomaru #sesshoumaru #character analysis #character development analysis #i pulled out all the stops for this one #anti sessrin #i know this doesn't match the perfect prince characterization Sesshoumaru usually gets #but i just calls it as i sees it

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kumogiri · 3 years

Text

Thoughts and Words

Erasercloud drabble from a giveaway I did on my twitter!

Shōta was increasingly sure that the text conversations he had with Oboro were the absolute worst example of the texting art form since its creation.

Oboro would send him an elaborate, multi-part message with random words replaced with emoji he claimed made sense, while Shōta had to figure out if “👁️😍😻 lol” meant Oboro had seen a cute cat, seen someone who looked like a cat (with a very strange eye condition), or if he’d made eye contact with a cat, fallen instantly in love, and was now suggesting they break up so he could run away with his feline lover.

Anxiety liked to add weird addendums like that. It was fine.

In return, what Oboro got from Shōta was one word, or even more excitingly sometimes two words, which were almost always, oh, yes, no, maybe, or variations thereof. It must have been awful writing enough words to max out the character count Shōta hadn’t even known existed multiple times only to get a sure in return. He just didn’t have much to say, or nothing he felt could be summed up in a text, and the idea of breaking out the emoji to add colour to his texts made Shōta’s face pull into what he was sure Oboro would describe with an 😑.

Just write whatever you’re thinking, Hizashi had suggested, but ah. That was- well.

The thoughts in his head whenever Oboro texted him weren’t the sort he could just type out so brazenly. I have no idea what those emoji mean so I’m imagining you found a dog on the moon and it made me laugh, do you think you could even float that high? I’m still thinking about the picture you sent me a week ago, I see it every time I close my eyes and I still have no idea what it actually is. I can see your unfinished homework in the background of the photo you sent me and now I can’t focus on anything else because you need to do that homework maybe I should come over there and make you do it.

He couldn’t just write that. He couldn’t write, I heard my phone buzz and ran over, how do you always know when I’m having a bad day. Your messages make me smile. I love the way you type, I love that I can hear it in your voice. I love that nobody else I know writes like you do, and I don’t think you write like this to anybody else.

He couldn’t write I love that you always send me pictures of your shoes to show me you’ve got out somewhere, I love that you call them adventures. I love that you always text me good morning and good night, even if you always get the times wrong. I love that you send me multiple selfies and get me to pick the one everyone else gets to see, and that I’m the only one who gets to see them all.

So Oboro sent him an essay, some photos, too many emoji to translate. Shōta thought, I love this, and I wish you knew how much it means to me that you still write me all these words and send me all these thoughts, that you tell me all these secrets and are so patient when I can’t put anything into words to reply.

He thought that all, and laughed, and smiled.

And he typed back, yeah.

#erasercloud #aizawa shouta #shirakumo oboro #kumowrites #i like this one #some sweet aizawa content for the erasercloud crowd

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ruby-whistler · 3 years

Note

Are you normal or do u sometimes go "IVE BEEN SCARED OF SLEEPING WITH THE LIGHTS ON(off? Idk its hard to decipher)"/lyrics -curious anon

me: oh boy, can't wait to try and make a tumblr blog! Before i do i should research it- *what in the hecking heck is an xkit*

djskdjsk i had no idea what an xkit was until yesterday and when i got it i got too confused and uninstalled it - dw curious anon i don’t use it either i just vibe and do whatever i guess. if you tag correctly and make good posts things should work out, can’t wait to see your acc around!

I got some sad-ist merch :DDD!!

yooo!! that’s so pog for you! it’s probably pretty comfy :D

me standing ominously in your askbox waiting to rec my fav fics:

fjsjdjsk i literally just finished passerine i still have 80 more (some of which are like 300k words long) on my to-read but uh if they have c!dream mischaracterized i’ll not be reading them anyways so it’s very hit-or-miss, will probably get through some of them quicker-

After many moons spent under the dsmp, seeing discourse and analysis alike, i have come to the conclusion i simply do not have the energy to care about any lore outside of c!tubbo and c!tommy's and will only defend them. And that is ok. It is ok to not watch or care about all dsmp or want to discourse about them or analyze. Idk man was thinking deep thoughts today

it’s ok to watch entertainment and enjoy it the way you want to! it’s great to want to enjoy or talk about your fav character!

the problems come up when you attack other people for their perspectives on the medium or spread misinformation about different characters based on only watching the perspective you like, but you know - if you’re not doing analysis, you really don’t need to look that deep into it.

it’s ok to just chill. your feelings about characters are valid! :D so yeah i agree with you! let people with different opinions exist if they’re also being respectful (e. g. tagging correctly).

Hey ik u worked with animgician's newest vid and i found a not-crit (i rlly think) little thought on it if u wanna see it

yoo feel free to send it in!!

No one: me: *shuffles around* wanna hear about my cool warden c!tommy au?

may i interest u in a little bit of my writing? If not that is ok i just wanna see if my writing is any good before working on a fic lol

Anyways if i am not in the askbox for a little it is because i am now writing a proper fic thing out. Wish me luck o7 -curious anon (i have three different lyrics i am going to be incorporating and a little analysis and just a smidgen of projection)

Ruby do u wanna read a little something i wrote? *does the little fingers thing* its really short just a headcanon with a little prose

i sure do! that sounds rlly cool - are you sure you don't wanna make a post about that on your own account though? i don't mind seeing it at all but i think the c!tommy tag would be able to appreciate that au better than my followers. you've gotta find the right target audience, y'know? /lh

though of course i'd love to see your writing, i'm sure it's great! looking forward to it :]

Ayo i remembered u talking about how punitive punishment doesn't work the other day so i want to discuss. What would u consider to be a fitting "punishment" for c!dream's canonic killing of mexican dream?/gen

i mean... we're not trying to - being against punitive justice is about the fact punishment is wrong, not just certain types of it. asking me what a "fitting punishment" would be is sort of very not getting the point.

hurting people further is not going to teach them anything and it’s not going to help anyone, why is it necessary?

so the answer is: none. he shouldn’t be punished, actually! he should learn on his own that what he did wasn’t right, and that’s about it. that’s the thing about transformative justice. him becoming a better person who Wouldn’t Do That again because it goes against who he is.

however, there’s also restorative justice, which is working to “make it up” to the victims. to which i propose; dream has the revival book and could literally bring him back once he is out of the prison. give him some powder maybe. md would probably be chill w/ that.

Yknow. In all my time in dsmpblr i can confidently say that the main differnece between c!dream apologist/enthusiants and c!wilbur/sam ones is that the c!wilbur/c!sam ones want their fav to have a breakdown and c!dream ones want theirs to get positive reinforcement /hj /lh

i’m pretty sure the sam and wil ones also want them to get better/get redeemed, at least deep down, but i get what you mean! you’re *glances at the 🟩⛏ gc where all we do 24/7 is write angst about c!dream being terribly hurt and then we cry about it* 100% correct. no angsters who like the pain here *nervously laughs* we all just want him to heal and be happy for the rest of his life with no heart-shattering breakdowns whatsoever! /s /lh

Hope ur having a great day m8 :]] -curious anon (also i have a new canon fact i wanna share. In quackity's alt lore stream yesterday he said (to the best of my memory) that "no law/juridsiction exists on the dream smp to prevent one from building anywhere" so i guess that clears up the big debate on wheather or not c!dream had a right to enforce rules (or basically the arguement that he owned the server by divine rule)

no i’m - i’m pretty sure that’s just how it works. dream still owns the smp, but he himself has said wayy back at the beginning “everyone can build and go wherever they want” and that was that. it was one of his rules on the smp, it was his main problem with l’manberg. being able to build anywhere were the rules that he “had the right” to enforce. and he did, not because he was a god, but because it was his smp, his home that he claimed for his friends. wouldn’t call it a big debate, it’s really that simple.

.AGONY. HURT EVEN. THIS IS HOW IT IS FOR CURIOUS ANON. I LAUGH, I CRY, I FIND AN ANIMATED GIF ON TWITTER THAT SQUEEZES MY C!TOMMY ENJOYER HEART INTO OBLIVION. (i am being dramatic btw for the funnies just so ya know) I AM NOT GOING TO FINANICALLY RECOVER FROM THIS. AAAAAAAAAAA UEEEEEEE

OK THAT FREAKING

O U C H-

also for the old phil ask. Hes a bad dad because of how he treated ghostbur. I will elaborate if u want

didn’t ghostbur just say “i’m not wilbur” and philza said “you’re not my son” and they went on with their day? weren’t they actually in agreement that he wasn’t the same as wil when he was alive? i don’t remember him really treating him badly tbh other than disowning him which seems fair to me, because ghostbur was a literal stranger to phil at that point?

wish you a nice day, curious anon! (i’ll be back on my essays and answering other asks now, so i might not reply right away :])

#my asks #curious anon #long post

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finaledenialist · 3 years

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Hey just wondering, I mean no offense, but are you an anti Jared Padalecki blog? I used to like the guy, but now I am not really sure what I feel about him. Just curious. If you don't like him, why?

NO! THIS IS NOT A HATE BLOG come on, I literally... I literally never bring up this guy unless there are some anons who do and I am willing to discuss but?? HATE? Look: some people say Jensen is their favourite. VALID. Some peple say Jared is. VALID. Other’s say Misha. VALID. Other people say it’s Felicia Day. ALSO VALID.

It is no secret that this blog centers more around destiel stuff because I love Dean and Cas as characters (separate and together) and I love the interactions Jensens and Misha have at cons. So that is what I reblog I guess. I have zero knowledge about Jared as a person - I know about some charity stuff, some campaigns and some stuff I learned via tumblr osmosis but. He is just not my fav and he is not the one this blog is dedicated to. Which I think is fair and okay.

Having said that I really wish him everything good and I never said anything bad about him or Gen. Like, God bless them, I hope they are happy and living their life to the fullest. Honestly I have no reason to hate the guy. Or Gen.

I can say that I really raised my eyebrows when he said that the finale is his favourite episode ever because I think he had better performances but ok i guess. But that is far from hate; I also still think I can make jokes about the finale wig and walker texas ranger because whenever I hear this title the image of Chuck Norris pops into my mind and i can’t help it but... is it hate...

I know there are some people out here really collecting receipts against him but I am not the one doing this and I know some people can go off and write an elaborate essay why he is problematic but i am not going to do this because I don’t really care that much

I don’t know if this answers your question Nonny, but I am tired of defending myself

#ask #asks #anon #jarjar #<--- keeping it out of general tag #Anonymous

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upthehillask · 5 years

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i’d love to hear your cursed child opinions!

Oh boy, well now you’ve unleashed me :D lol I don’t know if you’re interested more in what I loved or in what I’d critique, so I’ll go for both I guess? And you can read whichever you like :) But tbh you won’t hear anything new from me that you haven’t heard other fans talk about. Anyways, here are my thoughts on the actual play: [Spoiler alert I guess!]

Things I loved:

- THE MAGIC!!! The effects were EVERYTHING. The time warp, the telephone booth, the floo, the underwater, the dementors, the writings on the walls, and so much more… Really cool!!! And I loved the whole vibe and aesthetic of the play too, it felt authentic and fitting! THE SWISHY CLOAKS!! I want them!!

- The scenes I especially enjoyed were Harry’s nightmares, glimpses into his past and scenes from the books in general. I think they executed those quite well, made me really soft! Especially the scenes of little Harry in his cupboard and also him in the graveyard. Gripped my heart. Oh, I also loved that they finally showed Cedric in the end, he was so perfect!!

- Draco. Yes yes yes to dad Draco. Still bitchy, pretentious, and petty, trying so hard to play cool and tough, but a pained softie deep inside—we STAN. The relationship between him and his son I CRI EVRITIEM!!! Draco in the alternative timeline letting Scorpius do what he believes in, Draco in the real timeline hugging his son, I LIVE. And oh my god that scene where Draco walked in to Harry crying.. GOD. Yes emotions, yes vulnerability, yes bonding, yes yes yes. (Though I still can’t get over the ponytail. Would’ve been more than fine if Lucius hadn’t been portrayed with long hair lol)

- I loved Albus!! He’s a good Slytherin boy! That’s all I have to say. He’s a good friend and son who tries his best. I liked him a lot, more so now after watching the play. He really did remind me of Harry in a lot of ways. (Also, unpopular opinion, but I always loved Albus Severus’ name and I always will, fight me.)

- And just all the dad-son relationships, parenthood themes, friendship between the boys, related conflicts… Loved all of them. Touching, inspiring, couldn’t get enough!

- McGonagall was fcking ON POINT. Fcking QUEEN. Get it girl. Show em how to understand and respect children 👏👏👏

- I really loved Snape too! It was nice to finally see him being his self that only Dumbledore got to see in the books. I loved his demeanor too. I know actors change, but the one I saw portrayed Snape in a way that felt more canon. As much as I love Alan Rickman, he was a bit too graceful and sophisticated for canon Snape. In the play, however, Snape was kind of more rough, more rash, less pulled together in a way that he spoke and moved. It’s subtle but I lived for that. Also he was finally short. Yes.

- I feel like I have to mention Harry too. I actually quite liked him, so I’m gonna put him under this list as well. Yeah, that one scene where he threatened McGonagall into strict surveillance of his son is a bit much, errr 😅😅😅 But overall, I like the idea of him struggling as a father, making mistakes and learning from them. He’s a good egg.

- Ron and Hermione, my babies!! I had issues with Ron’s characterization, but I did mostly enjoy the portrayal of their relationship. I liked that their roles within the play were mostly to be together or to find their ways to each other. Since so many fans are against their ship, I was really excited to see them. And I just loved Hermione in general. They got her characterization almost on-point too, I think. I just love her 🥰

- In general, I enjoyed a lot of the dialogue. I liked all those strong, emotional one-liners that make you gasp. Harry saying things, Albus saying things, Scorpius, Draco, Ginny, others… There were good examples of lines they’d say that perfectly articulated everything that they embodied or felt or were dealing with. Well done there.

Okayyy I’m sure there’s more I could think of, definitely, but I’ll stop here since this is already a lot 😁

Things I questioned:

- So the one single biggest thing that I am the most critical of has to do with the plot itself, and it’s about Cedric turning into a Death Eater. I’m sorry but I just can’t. I could write a whole essay on how this makes no canonical sense (and I probably will if you ask me lmaoo), but to sum it up, Cedric eventually turning bitter and evil because he was publicly humiliated directly contradicts his canon character development. Cedric’s humility, kindness, and fairness are the core qualities around which Cedric’s personality was developed in the books. He almost explicitly places popularity, glory, and reputation second, and that’s critical, because if failure and humiliation were to affect him so drastically, his primary core values needed to be broken down and changed beforehand, but they never weren’t. So presenting the Triwizard incident as the turning point for him does not make any sense, and as a result the rest of the narrative falls apart. This is a plot hole and hasty writing.

- Yeah, Bellatrix having a child is still kinda weird 🙃🙃 I just hate that because in the books Bellatrix played the archetype of this anti-mother, the antithesis of motherhood and motherly love. I feel like having her voluntarily bring a child into this world destroys that symbolism. It makes me unsatisfied.

- I had some issues with the very beginning and the whole “montage” of events leading up to the fourth year. I found it overwhelming and disorienting, even though I’ve already read the script and knew what’s going on. Still, I felt like I was hit by a train, watching all the fast-paced scenes, cliché chaotic small talk going on, years going by… It felt messy for some reason. I feel like I need to watch it again in order to fully catch up and process everything I saw, and that’s not a good sign. But I didn’t hate it, I just wish we were more eased into the story.

- Scorpius. Now listen. When I read the script, Scorpius was my favorite character. I LOVED him, this awkward nerd who loves his dad and best friend with all his heart. The way I grew to imagine him was quite not how he was portrayed in the play. I know the dialogue and everything’s all the same, but idk, Scorpius in the play was way more hyper, bolder than I pictured, and worst of all, he was going out of his way to be this wannabe player. He seemed so all over the place, even acting a bit arrogant sometimes, celebrating moments of over-confidence, chasing after girls, trying to be everything BUT himself. But that honestly might just be my takeaway alone. There’s nothing actually wrong with his character, I just found myself slightly disappointed with him in the play specifically. I wish I could see the play again to actually analyze things more thoroughly to explain why I feel this way, but I can’t. I still like Scorpius, but a different version of him. (tho damn did I love those skinny pants on him lmao 👌👌)

- Moaning Myrtle. Like, I laughed, it was funny, but it just wasn’t very tasteful lol and I was left feeling a bit uncomfortable from the idea of this young murdered girl writhing and thirsting over literally everyone. The play really blew that out of proportion and idk it’s kinda awkward when I think about it 😅 And in general, there was just so much thirsting… with Rose, Polly Chapman, Delphi… Not to mention Albus kissing his AUNT… Like damn chill JK please 😂 Weird cliches and teenage hormones aren’t the only source of comedy okay?? 😂😂😂 Also, speaking of Myrtle, I kinda wish there was something mentioned about Draco having had been friends with her in sixth year. Idk it would’ve been nice to see that relationship somehow reminisced since we didn’t really get to see it :)

- Craig Bowker Jr... If he was supposed to be a parallel to Cedric, both being the spare, why did he get literally zero attention?? We don’t really know who he is, we don’t see anyone hurting because of his death, he’s killed with such apathy. We don’t even see his parent grieving, like we saw Amos (who also happen to be an integral part to the plot of CC!). The whole parallel is so incomplete. Poor Craig and his unsymbolic death..

- Ok I am obviously elaborating way too much so let me just quickly summarize the rest of things I don’t actually hate but might wanna rant about: RON IS NOT A JOKSTER—GEORGE IS. RON IS A FIGHTER. HE IS ALSO HARRY’S BEST FRIEND, NOT HERMIONE, BUT HE WAS MADE USELESS AND UNNEEDED, WHICH IS HIS ACTUAL WORST FEAR, SO WHO THE FUCK DARED. ROSE IS MORE THAN A BITCHY ROMANTIC INTEREST AND A BAD FRIEND. WHERE THE HELL IS HUGO. GINNY’S EVEN COOLER THAN SHE WAS PORTRAYED, I PROMISE. THE SURPRISE SECOND TIME TURNER ERRRR LOUSY PLOT DEVICE I’M SORRY. LACKLUSTER PLOT IN GENERAL, THE ONLY ACTUAL TWIST IS DELPHI’S REVEAL—NOT ENOUGH, JKR KNOWS BETTER THAN THIS, THE BOOKS WERE FULL OF TWISTS AND TURNS (but that’s kinda okay with me because the relationships between characters in CC really made the whole story worth it).

Alright enough :’D I’m not actually upset, just exaggerating haha Because overall, I liked the play. I wanna see it again. And I wanna analyze it more, too. I’m so excited I finally got to watch it. It’s far from flawless, but I’m still happy with it overall and want to approach it positively! Sure, I’ll rant when it’s ranting time, but I do love it (:

#the cursed child #cursed child spoilers #Q&A #Anonymous #upthehillask

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bloodstalk · 4 years

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Utsumin for the ask meme?

my boy... my fav... expect this answer to be VERY rambly

First impression

ngl it was “who’s this guy”. before episode 12 i didnt remember his name and called him glasshole exclusively. boy. how times have changed.

Impression now

god, how do i put my feelings about utsumi into words? i could write an essay about him, how much i love him, how tragic his character arc is, and how APPROPRIATE madrogue being a kitbash is for him, but i’d be here all day. so let me try and condense it

Utsumi is definitely my favourite character in build, which is Notable considering how much i love basically everyone in it. while he doesn’t do much early on, and prior to becoming madrogue he’s still often not the most proactive in the plot, his backstory, characterization, and especially the whole nanba children thing specifically are all tied to my FAVOURITE part about build, which is its refusal to just excuse human evil through the pandora’s box. nanba was not even effected by the box, his evil is entirely his own, and utsumi, while given more than enough backstory to explain his actions, is NOT defined by it entirely. which we know, because of Sawa’s arc. i know a lot of people wish utsumi could’ve had a redemption arc in the show, and i kind of agree on that, but i do think-wait this can go in the unpopular opinion

Favorite moment

EPISODE 23. Need I elaborate? Though a close second is definitely in the stage show, basically every time he gets to interact in a non-antagonistic manner with the other riders during the stage show is... so good. Utsumin real...

Idea for a story

Cyborg Utsumi waking up in the non-vcinema new world and needing to figure out how he can live as a regular person after everything he’s been trhough and done... slowburn redemption story... hell yeah

Unpopular opinion

Well, liking Utsumi seems to be a pretty unpopular opinion in and of itself, but my view of his lack of a redemption arc probably is as well. While I already said i would’ve LOVED one, i don’t think a lack of one is necessarily a flaw in the story. at the end of the day, utsumi’s arc was as much about clinging to the evil you know because you’re too afraid of the alternative, and i think the way he went out was fine.

sure, he could’ve been given more screentime to focus on this but, its fine.

Favorite relationship

now, do i talk about my favourite Exceedingly Unhealthy Ship For Both Sides, gentoku/utsumi? do i talk about utsumi and sawa, and how they should’ve been given more time to interact on-screen? do i talk about utsumi/sento, the little ship that could? or, hell, do i talk about utsumi/kazumi, where I get to fully embrace utsumi being a stupid tsundere? and, of course, there’s the weird half-sexual half-hate tension between utsumi and evolt in the latter half of the show

god, it’s hard to choose. I honestly can’t pick, there’s a lot of really fun dynamics.

Favorite headcanon

that utsumi designed kr rogue and put the fragile sticker on the back of his head to fuck with gentoku. its simple but so so good.

#kamen rider #build #nariaki utsumi #i could talk about him for SO LONG but i'll cut it here.#kiryuusento

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romanticsuspense · 5 years

Text

Rogergate: An Analysis

“What gets interesting about a story isn’t when some Big External Plot is set into motion. What’s interesting is when the agency possessed by multiple characters competes. This push-and-pull of character motivations, decisions and reactions is how stories that matter are created. Because they’re stories about people, not about events, and people are why we read stories.”—Chuck Wendig

Rogergate is one of the most frustrating, ridiculous, contrived plots in the entire Outlander series. And it’s even more frustrating in the book, because there are a few more layers of misunderstandings. I would argue that Gabaldon let the Rogergate plot dictate her character’s actions in Drums of Autumn. In my opinion, the show writers did a decent job of simplifying the Rogergate plot for the screen in a way that makes almost all of the character’s choices and motivations understandable and believable. Analyzing Rogergate in the book would be a lot harder to do, because the characters make some really nonsensical choices, in service to the plot, that I would find very difficult to rationalize. For example, it doesn’t make sense that Brianna wouldn’t tell everyone that Roger goes by Wakefield and MacKenzie. It doesn’t make sense that Brianna wouldn’t have described what Roger looked like much sooner than she did. It doesn’t make sense that they wouldn’t have thought to draw up a broadsheet with Roger’s face long before they did. It doesn’t make sense that, when they’ve been waiting around for Roger for months, Jamie doesn’t think to ask the stranger, who just arrived at the Ridge asking about Brianna, if maybe he’s Roger Wakefield. And even though I hate that Brianna had to go through the rape on the same night of the handfasting on the show, it does make it more understandable that Lizzie would make the assumptions she does about Roger. It is for these reasons that, in this post, I will only be discussing Rogergate as it happened in the show, not the book.

When I first read Drums of Autumn back in 2014, I blamed Lizzie for what happened to Roger. I thought by making assumptions about what happened to Bree and misidentifying Roger as Bree’s rapist, she set in motion Roger’s beating and subsequent enslavement. Her character is framed as a plot device in the book. She’s given her own storylines in later books, but in Drums, once she’s served her purpose, she’s mostly shunted to the background. I thought of her as the Briony Tallis (Atonement) of Outlander. Briony and Lizzie even have identical lines—“I saw him with my own eyes.”!

But, since rereading Drums in 2018 and seeing everything play out on screen, I have reevaluated my stance on who, exactly, is to blame for Rogergate. In a response to this post, I made the assertion “Brianna has been wronged, and Jamie is the one who wronged her.” Which sparked a debate in the comments about blame. The wheels started turning, and I decided to write this post partly as a response to some of those comments and partly because I love over-analyzing the shit out of things.

[Warning: This is a “long ass post” (6500 words to be exact). I realize that we’re in the middle of Droughtlander, and probably no one cares to read a ridiculously long essay on Rogergate but I hope you read it, enjoy it, and comment on it—I love discussion! There’s a colorful flowchart about halfway through, if that is at all enticing to you!]

WHAT HAPPENED

Brianna

‘The Birds and the Bees’ opens with one of the most heart-wrenching scenes of the season. Brianna returns to her room at the tavern after her assault, trembling, and in a state of shock. In her daze, I’m not sure she even fully comprehends Lizzie’s questions. When Lizzie asks if she’s been with “that man,” Brianna replies “Yes.” She crawls into bed, exhausted, has no interest in Lizzie’s offer of comfort. She just wants to forget what has happened to her. Compartmentalizing, she pushes the assault to the back of her mind. She’s on a mission. She needs to find her parents, and does.

Alone with her mother for the first time since their reunion, she confides in Claire about Roger and their handfasting, but keeps quiet about her assault. Ian tells her about how Jamie saved the life of a man named Stephen Bonnet, only for Bonnet to turn around and rob them, kill their friend, and steal Claire’s wedding ring. Brianna rightly concludes that Stephen Bonnet is the man who assaulted her. She pulls Claire’s ring out of her pocket, and contemplates the villainy of Stephen Bonnet: rapist, murderer, and thief. This man is dangerous. But, Brianna does not intend to tell anyone about her assault (remember she’s still compartmentalizing), let alone the identity of the man who assaulted her, so she keeps these revelations to herself. It’s not until she discovers that she’s pregnant, she realizes she has to tell someone. And that someone is her mother, Claire. In an attempt to shield Claire and Jamie from guilt, she tells Claire that she doesn’t know who the man was. Later, when Claire finds the ring, and confronts Brianna about it, Brianna elaborates further:

“Ian told me about what happened on the river. And I knew that you would feel awful for what happened to me because of the ring and Jamie would blame himself because he helped Bonnet escape. If he knows, he’ll try to find Bonnet. And I can’t let him do that. You’ve met the man, Mamma. You know what he’s like.”

Brianna doesn’t want Jamie to feel guilty about her assault, and she doesn’t want Jamie to confront Bonnet, because he could end up hurt or dead. Brianna is demonstrating great compassion here. After everything she’s been through, she’s thinking of her parents’ hurt and pain, and trying to prevent more of it. She asks Claire to keep this a secret from Jamie, and Claire reluctantly agrees.

Claire

In Wilmington, Claire, tells Marsali that ‘you can’t protect [your children] from everyone and everything,’ a foreshadowing of what would happen to Brianna later in the same episode. How helpless Claire must have felt when Brianna tells her that she’s been raped, she’s pregnant, and she doesn’t know who the father is. Claire is horrified. And quickly tries to reassure Brianna, saying, “It’s not your fault.” The scene where she tells Jamie is short, and I’m not sure how much detail, if any, Claire gives him. The gist is that Brianna’s been raped and she’s pregnant. Later, while doing laundry, Claire finds her ring in one of Brianna’s dresses, and rightly concludes that Bonnet assaulted Bree. She confronts Bree and the truth comes out. Bree asks Claire to keep this a secret from Jamie. Jamie and Claire don’t lie to each other, but they do keep secrets.

“But what I would ask of ye—when you do tell me something, let it be the truth. And I’ll promise ye the same. We have nothing now between us, save—respect, perhaps. And I think that respect has maybe room for secrets, but not for lies.”—Outlander

Putting her daughter’s needs above her own, respecting her daughters wishes, and understanding why Bree is asking this of her (to protect Jamie from guilt and physical harm), Claire reluctantly agrees to keep the secret.

Lizzie

In ‘Wilmington’, Lizzie walks into the front room of the tavern, sees Brianna being pulled outside by a strange man, and rushes to the window. It appears Brianna and the man are arguing. He grabs Brianna by the shoulders and Bree pushes him. He yanks Bree down the street and away, out of sight. Paralyzed by fear, Lizzie does nothing to intervene. She walks back up to her room. Concerned when, many hours later, Bree has still not returned, she walks downstairs and asks the barkeep if he’s seen her. It seems Brianna is still away with the strange man, but what can she do? She doesn’t know where he’s taken her, and she has no male companion to aid in a rescue. She heads back up to bed and waits.

Close to dawn, Brianna returns. She’s obviously been through some kind of trauma—she’s trembling and her nose is bleeding. Lizzie suspects the worst, and asks Brianna if she’s been with “that man.” When Brianna replies “Yes,” Lizzie’s suspicions are confirmed. Brianna begins to undress, and Lizzie sees the blood and the bruises. This has been a very violent assault. Lizzie tries to offer comfort. “Ye have my hand here, and my ear if ye need it.” But Brianna deflects, telling her to “please, go to sleep.” Lizzie doesn’t probe further. It’s obvious Brianna doesn’t want to talk about it.

Later on the Ridge, Brianna’s been having nightmares and crying in her sleep, and Lizzie knows that she’s suffering. When Lizzie sees “that man” near the road, she’s terrified and worried about Bree. What is he doing here? How did he find Brianna? Ian, seeing how frightened she is, takes her to Jamie. Memories of that morning have come flooding back. Almost as if she can’t keep it all to herself any longer, the details spill out of her in a rush—the bruises, the blood, even the smell of “his seed” on her. Jamie asks if she’s sure this is the man who violated Bree. She witnessed “that man” take Bree away, and Brianna herself confirmed she had been with him that night. She says she’s sure. Then she sees the look on Jamie’s face and realization hits her—Jamie intends to act on this information, and she wonders aloud, “What have I done?”

[Side Note: I’m not sure how much Jamie knows about Roger and Brianna’s night together, and I don’t think the show makes this very clear. I’m assuming that he was not made aware that Roger and Brianna were handfast and consummated the marriage. My assumption is based on two observations: (1) He doesn’t question Lizzie’s assertion that “She was a virgin when he took her.” (2) Jamie is confused when the truth comes out in ‘The Deep Heart’s Core,’ and Brianna has to explain that she and Roger were handfast and then had sex. So, when Claire tells Jamie that Brianna was raped “after Roger left” and she’s pregnant, he doesn’t know that Brianna had her first time with Roger earlier that night and the baby could be his. I’m guessing that Claire didn’t share these details with Jamie both to protect Brianna’s privacy, and because she knew he wouldn’t approve of his daughter’s hasty marriage and modern views of sex.]

Jamie

Jamie, upon hearing that his daughter has been raped and is now pregnant, becomes contemplative. He’s obviously shocked and disturbed, but Claire gives him time and space to process. Later, at the whisky still, Lizzie and Ian run up and tell him that a man is here who gave Lizzie a fright. Lizzie recounts what she witnessed in Wilmington. The details are horrific. He knew his daughter had been violated, but hearing about the blood, the bruises, he becomes outraged, no doubt remembering his own past trauma at the hands of Black Jack Randall. The man who violently assaulted his daughter is here…now. Ian asks if it’s possible the man has come to claim Brianna. Jamie doesn’t answer. If it’s true, and the man has come for Brianna, he has to do something, and he has to do it now. Is Lizzie sure this is the man responsible? Lizzie assures him he is. Jamie makes the rash decision to act on his rage. He stomps all the way to the road, fists clenched, intent on avenging his daughter. Without preamble, he throws a massive punch right into Roger’s face. Then another. Then another. Then another. Ian has caught up to him, yanks on his arm and tells him someone is coming, which finally pulls him out of his violence. “Get rid of him” he tells Ian. “Get him out of my sight.”

Here is where Jamie’s motivations become murkier. I struggle to understand why he would choose not to tell Brianna or Claire about what he’s done. [see ENDNOTE] Is part of him ashamed that he acted with such brutality? Or is it impossible to rationalize because the secret is necessary for the rest of the contrived plot to unfold as Gabaldon intended, for maximum dramatic effect? For whatever reason, Jamie doesn’t tell Claire or Brianna (the one person who deserves to know). Not even when he has a deep conversation with Brianna about vengeance, which would have been the perfect opportunity to fess up—“Dinna fash about him anymore. I beat him to a pulp yesterday, and ye’ll never see him again.” He then lies to Claire and tells her he hit a tree. Remember that quote from Outlander about secrets and lies? Claire kept a secret. Jamie told a lie.

Young Ian

Lizzie spots a man by the road and becomes agitated and scared. Ian takes Lizzie to the person he trusts the most: Jamie. Jamie would know what to do. He listens as Lizzie tells Jamie what happened to Brianna in Wilmington. He wonders aloud if the man has come to claim Brianna. Jamie doesn’t answer, but it’s obvious he’s mulling over that very question. The look on Jamie’s face turns from confused rage to fierce determination. He’s decided to take action. Ian takes Lizzie back to the house, then rides out to meet Jamie at the road. Jamie hasn’t noticed that a wagon is coming. Ian gets Jamie’s attention and they hide Roger’s limp body behind the tree. Jamie instructs Ian to get rid of him. But how? Does Jamie want Ian to kill him? No, but he leaves it up to Ian to decide what to do next. Ian rides off with Roger in tow, finds a group of Mohawk travelling through, and sells Roger into slavery—a fitting punishment for violating his cousin.

IN WHICH ALL IS REVEALED

Lizzie wakes Brianna from another terrible nightmare. She can’t stand seeing Brianna suffer. So, she breaks down and tells Brianna “he was here,” at Fraser’s Ridge. Brianna’s confused. How does Lizzie know Stephen Bonnet raped her? The truth is out. Lizzie thought Roger raped her. And now Brianna knows that Roger was here and Jamie beat him. Where is Roger now?

Enraged, she storms into the cabin and demands to know what Jamie did with him. Jamie’s confused. He thought Roger left, so did Claire. Claire looks at Jamie’s bruised hand and puts the puzzle pieces together. What did Jamie do? Jamie admits to giving a man a beating, but he didn’t know it was Bree’s historian (side note: I know that this is a moment of turmoil for the Fraser family, but I couldn’t help but smile when Jamie said “Yer historian”). Bree explains that her and Roger were handfast and had sex before he left. Jamie becomes defensive and starts jumping to conclusions. He accuses Brianna of lying about the rape once she found out she was pregnant. By accusing her of such a heinous lie, Jamie is calling her integrity and moral character into question. Hurt by Jamie’s words, Bree gives him a well-deserved slap on the face, and corrects his assumptions—“I was violated, you self-righteous bastard!” Jamie, realizing for the first time that he’s made a huge mistake, tells Brianna “I’m so sorry, Lass. I’ll make it right, you have my word as your father.” But Bree, still hurt and processing, isn’t ready to hear an apology. She calls Jamie a savage and claims Frank “would never have said the things you said to me.” By this point in the proceedings, Claire has moved to stand next to Bree, ready to offer support. In the aftermath of Bree’s trauma, Claire has continually put Brianna’s needs above her own, and she behaves no differently here. Though Claire is torn and distressed seeing the two people she loves most fighting, Claire embraces Bree and comforts her because Brianna needs her mother more than Jamie needs his wife.

But there’s still one last secret to be revealed. If it wasn’t Roger, who was it? Claire looks to Brianna and waits for her nod of consent before pulling the ring out of her pocket, thereby revealing Stephen Bonnet to be the rapist. Now everyone is in the know. Almost. Brianna still wants to know “Where is Roger?” Ian admits to selling him to the Mohawk. Bree gives him a well-deserved punch to the face. Her husband is 700 miles away, and could be dead. Bree is devastated. Hurt by Bree’s earlier reproach, but most of all angry at himself (for letting Bonnet go and for beating Roger), Jamie lashes out and knocks over a chair. When Brianna tells him that he doesn’t get to be more angry than her, she’s reminding him that she is the wronged party, and he is the one who inflicted that wrong on her. She thought Roger had gone back through the stones, but he didn’t. He came back for her! And now the man she loves, the father of her child (she hopes), has been beaten near to death by her own father. Bree is justifiably hurt and distraught, and angry at the man who wronged her: Jamie. Jamie is angry as well, but not because he’s been wronged; his anger is born of guilt.

THE BLAME GAME

“The way that the bulk of the blame for Roger’s situation was put on Jamie felt a bit unfair.” … “I just don’t think you can justifiably say the blame for this rests solely on Jamie’s shoulders and Jamie is the one who wronged Bree.” … “He believed-because no one bothered to name the rapist-even though they could have-that Roger had raped his daughter. Lizzie made a mistake, Bree and Claire lied by omission and Ian stood by his uncle. Just who wronged who here?”

During the course of the discussion on this post, it was posited that Rogergate was a result of a domino effect. In this “Rogergate as dominoes” scenario, the first domino to fall is Brianna withholding the identity of her rapist. The other dominoes in the lineup are Lizzie mistaking Roger for Bree’s rapist, Claire not telling Jamie about Bonnet, Jamie beating up Roger, and Ian selling Roger to the Mohawk. This explanation is neat and tidy, with each domino directly causing the next domino to fall. The problem that I have with this dominoes analogy is that it makes it seem like Jamie beating up Roger is a foregone conclusion. Rogergate is not as simple as a lineup of dominoes, with each domino inevitably causing the next domino to fall. In my opinion, the domino effect is an overly simplistic, black and white explanation for what happened, and disregards characters’ agency. How can blame be assigned if characters aren’t in control of their own choices and actions?

“Character agency is, to me, a demonstration of the character’s ability to make decisions and affect the story. This character has motivations all [their] own. [They are] active more than [they are] reactive. [They push] on the plot more than the plot pushes on [them]. Even better, the plot exists as a direct result of the character’s actions. […] Characters with agency do things and say things that create narrative. Plot is spun out of the words and actions of these characters. And their words and actions continue to push on the plot created by other characters, because no character has agency in a vacuum.”—Chuck Wendig

The figure below is a visual representation of how I rationalize Rogergate in my head. I’ve color coded it, to indicate which parts I see as benign (blue) and which I see as harmful (orange). The green boxes around Jamie are his motivations—his reasons for doing what he did.

Figure 1: Rogergate Flowchart

I’m going to start with an explanation of the green boxes, because I want to make something clear from the get-go. When I assigned blame to Jamie for Rogergate in a previous post, I was accused of disregarding that: (1) Jamie himself is a rape victim; (2) “Jamie lives in a time when you defend your family against such wrongs with action against the aggressor”; and (3) “We are talking about a Highland warrior in the 17th century.”

I am not disregarding Jamie’s past trauma, values and beliefs (which are shaped by the time in which he lives), or his desire to protect and avenge his daughter. I believe that these are Jamie’s motivations, and do not assuage his guilt. A murderer with a motive is still a murderer. Just because Jamie has valid reasons and motivations behind his actions, doesn’t mean that he is not liable for the consequences of his actions. So, I don’t think that his motivations have any bearing on how much blame he should carry. I do believe, however, that Brianna coming to understand his motivations (as well as time and Jamie’s letter) will be instrumental in her deciding to forgive him.

Next, is the blue MISINFORMATION box.

Even though this box is full of secrets, assumptions and misunderstandings, I would argue that this MISINFORMATION is not harmful in and of itself.

Bree suspects that if Jamie knows about Bonnet, he’ll confront him, and she doesn’t want that to happen, because she doesn’t want Jamie hurt or killed. So, when Bree decides not to tell anyone the identity of her rapist, her intent is to protect Jamie and Claire from guilt and to keep Jamie from confronting Bonnet. Bree keeping this information to herself and Claire keeping Bree’s secret does no harm to anyone. I also want to point out here that Claire finds out about Bonnet at the same time that Jamie is attacking Roger (on the show at least). So, even if she had told Jamie about Bonnet, it would have been after the attack, and too late to prevent the beating. It maybe would have saved them some time, and they possibly could have rescued Roger a lot sooner. But, that’s getting into a hypothetical tangent. Neither Claire nor Brianna are acting on this information, and they keep it to themselves precisely because they want to prevent any fallout. So, Bree and Claire are both in blue boxes. Their inaction is benign.

Lizzie is a bit more complicated. As you can see, her name appears in both blue and orange. That’s because Lizzie mistaking Roger for a rapist didn’t become harmful until she shared that misinformation with Jamie and Ian, who then acted on that misinformation. Therefore, Lizzie is the orange arrow connecting MISINFORMATION with JAMIE. I debated whether to make Lizzie’s arrow a third color, because sharing the misinformation does not directly harm Brianna, and yet it isn’t a “benign” action either. Lizzie is guilty only of passing on misinformation, albeit unknowingly, to Jamie. For that reason, I can’t bring myself to assign too much blame to Lizzie. She is merely the messenger.

I’m going to use a random example to illustrate my point here. Let’s look at this work-related conundrum presented on the advice blog Ask a Manager. In this scenario, a manager finds documents in the copier that she interprets to mean that layoffs are coming for her staff. So, she holds a meeting letting her employees know so they can get a head start on job searching. Well, it turns out that the documents were wrong, the boss misinterpreted it, and by the time all of this was revealed, her employees had already left for new jobs and they weren’t allowed to return to their old jobs. In this scenario, the documents themselves do not harm anyone. The documents do not actively lay off any employees. It’s only when the boss acts on the misinformation in the documents that trouble ensues. Now, imagine that it wasn’t the boss herself that found the documents, but her assistant. And that assistant passed the documents on to her boss, not knowing that the information contained in them was false. I see the documents as the MISINFORMATION. I see the boss as JAMIE. And I see the assistant as Lizzie. If I was one of the employees who lost their job because of this boss’s actions would I be blaming the assistant who passed along the documents? No, I wouldn’t. (I couldn’t find a way to incorporate Ian into this scenario, but I’ll get to him in a second.)

Figure 2: Rogergate Flowchart, Simplified

So, now we’ve made it to JAMIE, the person I feel should shoulder the majority of the blame for Rogergate.

I’m going to return to the Ask a Manager scenario again to illustrate my point and tie this back to character agency and choice. When that boss was handed those documents by her assistant, she had 3 choices: (1) Keep the information to herself; (2) Go to her own boss and ask what she should do about it; or (3) Let her staff know that layoffs are coming, so they can get a head start on job searching. The boss chooses option 3. She has good intentions by choosing this option, because she doesn’t want her staff to be unemployed. But, when she acted on the information, she made a mistake.

Similarly, when Jamie is given information by Lizzie, he has 3 choices: (1) Keep the information to himself and not act on it. (2) Go to Brianna and ask her what she would want him to do; or (3) Take justice into his own hands. Jamie chooses option 3. He has good intentions by choosing this option, because he wants to avenge his daughter. But when he acted on the information, he made a mistake.

Some fans are bending over backwards to find a way to shift the blame away from Jamie (It’s all Lizzie’s fault! If only Brianna had told everyone about Bonnet, none of this would have happened! Claire should have told Jamie about Bonnet!). But if you theoretically were to ask Jamie “Who’s to blame for Rogergate?” I believe he likely would answer “Oh, yeah, that was me. I fucked up big time.” Jamie, being the honorable man that he is, is not afraid to admit when he’s made a mistake, take responsibility, shoulder the blame, face the consequences, and then fix it. In the heat of the moment, he gets defensive (“You said he’d already left here.”), he accuses Bree of lying (“…and now I come to find ye claim yourself violated upon finding yourself with child!”) but then as soon as he realizes that it was he who made a mistake he apologizes and assures Bree that he intends to fix it (“I’m so sorry, Lass. I’ll make it right. You have my word as your father.”). Jamie clearly blames himself. He knows he’s culpable. He knows he made a huge mistake that has directly harmed Brianna. He knows he has to make it right. Jamie is the “King of Men” not just because of the way he leapt to defend his daughter’s honor, but because he owns his mistakes and is able to recognize when he’s brought harm to someone. “I will find him, lass. I wilna rest until I do. Ye have my word.” If Jamie can recognize and admit his own culpability, why can’t these fans who are trying to shift the blame away from him? (Remember also that Jamie feels so guilty for what he’s done that he volunteers himself in exchange for Roger at the Mohawk village.)

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HIM?” she screamed. Jamie blinked and Ian flinched. They exchanged haunted glances. I put a hand on Jamie’s arm, squeezing tight. I couldn’t keep the quaver out of my own voice as I asked the necessary questions. “Jamie—did you kill him?” He glanced at me, and the tension in his face relaxed, if only marginally. “Ah…no,” he said. “I gave him to the Iroquois.”

So, Jamie tells Ian to “get rid of him” but doesn’t tell him how, as long as it’s not murder. Ian, being the loyal nephew that he is, obeys Jamie’s command and “gets rid of him” by selling him into slavery. From the book, as you can see from the quote above, it can be inferred that Jamie was the one who gave Roger to the Mohawk. [see END NOTE] I suspect that the writers made this change so that Ian would feel guiltier for his part in Rogergate, and his sacrifice in the finale would make more sense. Both Jamie and Ian know they have wronged Brianna and need to make it right. So, when the opportunity presents itself for Ian to make amends, he does so. If he had only a small part to play in Rogergate, then his sacrifice would be less understandable. Why would he trade himself for Roger, if he didn’t feel he was responsible for Roger being there in the first place? But, Ian does feel responsible, and rightly so.

If Jamie is responsible for 50% of Rogergate (by beating Roger), and Ian responsible for the other 50% (by selling Roger into slavery), why am I not assigning blame with an even 50/50 split as well? Why do I insist that Jamie shoulder the majority of the blame? For three reasons: (1) Jamie instructed Ian to “get rid of him”; (2) Ian is cleaning up Jamie’s mess; and (3) Jamie is the older, more mature adult in this scenario, and a father-figure to Ian—Ian would do whatever Jamie asked of him, and Jamie knows this. Sure, Ian could choose to refuse to “get rid of him.” But, because of the power dynamics at play here, I doubt that Ian really even considers refusal an option at this point. It actually makes me pretty uncomfortable that Jamie would allow Ian to be involved in this violent act, but I think Jamie is letting his rage overtake his rational thinking processes, and he isn’t considering how his actions may affect Ian (or Brianna, or Claire, or anyone else for that matter).

So, to answer the question “Just who wronged who here?” — Lizzie wronged Brianna when she shared details about her assault with her father and misidentified Roger as the rapist. Jamie wronged Brianna when he beat Roger nearly to death and instructed Ian to get rid of him. Ian wronged Brianna when he sold Roger to the Mohawk. Jamie wronged Claire when he lied to her about what he had done. Jamie wronged Brianna when he didn’t tell her about what he had done.[see END NOTE]

I’m not a fan of the domino analogy but I’ll try a different one: If Rogergate were to go to trial, Jamie would be the perpetrator and would be charged with assault and battery and attempted murder. The prosecutors would say that Jamie’s motive was to avenge his daughter. I believe Jamie would likely plead guilty and accept his sentence. Ian would be charged as an accessory after the fact. Lizzie would be an accomplice? (I honestly don’t know what crime, if any, Lizzie could be charged with.)

ANGER FIRST, THEN FORGIVENESS

“I guess I just thought that Brianna shouldn’t be so harsh on Jamie considering Jamie himself was raped. I never had a problem with her being angry. I just felt it went overboard in some ways.” … “Brianna focuses her anger at everyone on Jamie. It gives her a place to put her frustration and her feelings of helplessness at the situation.” … “Jamie is a convenient scapegoat. Being mad at him gives her a place to focus her anger and gives her the satisfaction of feeling like she’s doing the ‘right’ thing by Frank.”

Whether you feel that Brianna’s anger at Jamie is justified or out of proportion to the wrong committed against her is largely subjective and dependent on whether or not you believe Jamie is to blame for his own actions. As I hope I have sufficiently explained in this extremely long-winded post, I personally believe that Jamie is the most culpable for Rogergate. Therefore, Brianna’s anger is directed at exactly the right person. Brianna has been wronged and Jamie is the one who wronged her. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Brianna is overreacting. Those who disagree with me (and are trying to shift the blame away from Jamie), will likely say that Brianna is overreacting and that her slapping Jamie was taking things too far.

So, why did Brianna slap Jamie? Let’s revisit what exactly Jamie said to her to incite the slap. When Jamie finds out that he mistakenly beat Roger nearly to death, he makes the very hurtful accusation that Brianna had lied about being raped when she found out she was pregnant. Let that sink in for a second. By accusing Bree of such a heinous lie, Jamie is (1) calling Bree a liar; (2) accusing Bree of being manipulative (3) accusing Bree of taking advantage of their new relationship for her own personal gain; and (4) calling into question Bree’s integrity.

It’s understandable to me that when faced with such an insulting accusation that Bree would slap him, call him a self-righteous bastard and a savage and claim that Frank would never have said the things Jamie said to her. Jamie and Brianna both have a temper, and Bree is responding to an insult with another insult.

I also want to address this idea that Brianna shouldn’t be so angry at Jamie because she knows he’s been a victim of sexual assault as well. This may sound insensitive, but rape victims are capable of doing bad things and making mistakes and shouldn’t be excused from taking responsibility for their own harmful actions because of their past trauma. Nobody’s perfect. If we were to find perpetrators not guilty of their crimes, on the basis that they had previously been victims themselves, then our prisons would be nearly empty. Jamie’s past trauma does not excuse him from facing the consequences of his actions. Claire certainly blames Jamie for the wrongs he’s committed against her since his trauma (one notable example being his duel with Randall in Season 2).

I don’t think that it’s fair to expect Brianna to temper her own reactions or emotions because of Jamie’s past trauma. Jamie’s past suffering is not more important than Brianna’s current suffering. The hurt and pain and anger that she is feeling is very fresh and very real and very immediate. This moment, this fight, is not about Jamie being raped. It’s not even about Brianna being raped. It’s about Jamie committing a great wrong against Brianna. Jamie may have suffered in the past, but Brianna is suffering in the present.

I feel that Brianna taking a few months at River Run to process and heal before she forgives Jamie is reasonable. But, why do so many fans think that she’s holding a grudge? I think part of it is that these fans don’t blame Jamie for Rogergate, so they don’t believe Brianna should either. They wonder why Brianna could forgive Lizzie before she could forgive Jamie because to them, Lizzie is just as much to blame as Jamie is. Some fans also put Jamie on a pedestal. Whenever another character’s actions or words are perceived to emasculate or infantilize Jamie, or if that character is not giving Jamie the affection and adoration these fans believe he deserves, that character is vilified. But, that’s just my theory, anyway.

HYPOTHETICALLY SPEAKING

“If Jamie had beaten Bonnet to a pulp and sold him would he have been wrong??” … “I don’t believe for a minute that people would blame Jamie’s actions if he’d beat the shit out of Bonnet. Even Bree asks him if killing her rapist would help.”

I’m not really a fan of these types of hypothetical questions because my answer will depend heavily on my own assumptions and my assumptions won’t necessarily align with someone else’s. But, I’ve seen this question pop up quite a few times, so I thought I’d attempt to tackle it. Keep in mind that my answer is based on my own perceptions of these characters, and I have my own ideas about what is in or out of character for them.

Brianna is trying to process her trauma and move past it. Her first method of coping is compartmentalizing. We see evidence of this when she doesn’t tell anyone about her assault until she absolutely has to (when she finds out she’s pregnant). But she’s still having nightmares, she’s still struggling to cope. So, she begins to wonder if killing Bonnet would help. When she tells Jamie this, she’s not just saying that she wants Bonnet dead. She’s saying that she wants him dead by her own hand. She’s not asking Jamie to seek vengeance for her. She wants to seek vengeance for herself.

Given these assumptions about Brianna’s headspace, I believe that Brianna would be justified in being angry with Jamie if she found out he had beaten Bonnet. Because, at this time, she still believes that vengeance may be the path forward, and when Jamie sought vengeance in her stead, he took her agency.

I agree with @the-outlander-life, who made this comment on this post: “Even if the man Jamie beat up had been Bonnet he should have consulted Bree on what to do with him instead of trying to beat him to death, it was Brianna’s decision to make, not his.”

But there’s another part of this, too, that Brianna would be angry about: Jamie didn’t tell her what he had done. He beat her alleged rapist nearly to death, then had the gall to have a heart-to-heart talk with her about vengeance and advise her not to go down that path, when he just took action to avenge her. I guess it’s a matter of “do as I say, not as I do”? As I said above under WHAT HAPPENED, this is one of Jamie’s most baffling choices in this whole Rogergate debacle. When he sees that Brianna is struggling to move forward, why wouldn’t he tell her what he’d done? [see END NOTE]

So, if Jamie were to beat Bonnet, I don’t think that Brianna would be just as angry at Jamie. But, I also don’t think that Brianna wouldn’t have anything to be angry at Jamie about. He still would have taken vengeance on her behalf without talking to her about it first, and he still would have lied to her about it. I think Brianna would be justified in being angry at Jamie about those things. It might be a lot easier for her to move past it and forgive Jamie, and maybe even one day be grateful for what he’d done. But, at least at first, anger at Jamie would be warranted.

END NOTE

I recently (after I had finished writing this post, and it was sitting in my queue, ready to be published) joined TheLitForum, the online discussion thread that Diana Gabaldon frequents. And on that forum, there’s a very interesting ongoing thread on the topic of lies and deceit in the Outlander series: Let it be the truth. I gleaned some new information from perusing the thread. But, rather than go back and reevaluate and rewrite what I’ve written here, I’m adding this new information as an end note.

One user brought up Jamie not telling Claire or Brianna about beating Roger and Diana chimed in to provide insight into what Jamie was thinking and feeling at the time:

“She's upset, Bree's upset--and telling them that THIS just happened a couple of hours ago wouldn't calm them down any. Also--since he _didn't_ kill the guy, he doesn't want to tell Brianna that the man got that close to her...and he's still walking around. He hopes that Ian got rid of him in a way that will keep him from coming back, but as he doesn't yet know that for sure, naturally he isn't going to alarm Bree by telling her about it. And he isn't going to tell Claire yet, either, because she can't keep secrets from _anyone_ who knows her.”

I’m not sure if Diana’s insights really change too much of what I’ve said in this analysis. I still think that Jamie should have told Bree, especially when they had their chat about vengeance. But, I also understand that Jamie would believe he’s protecting Bree from worry that the man who raped her knows where she lives and isn’t dead. Diana also points out:

I don't know how one would see "evidence" as to whether or not Jamie would tell Claire or Brianna in future what he'd done--given that we aren't in his head, we have no way (other than Claire's observations of him) to tell _what_ he's thinking. He might well tell Claire about it later, and ask her whether he should tell Brianna.

But, didn’t weeks go by between the beating and the Reveal? Surely Claire and Brianna would have calmed down enough at some point during those few weeks for him to “break the news.” I understand why Jamie would keep this to himself initially (to protect Claire and Bree from worry, similar to how they protected Jamie with their secret), but I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t tell Claire or Brianna once things at the Ridge had calmed down. And things were relatively calm by the time All was Revealed.

Within that same discussion thread, I asked Diana to clarify what she meant by “[Jamie] hopes that Ian got rid of him in a way that will keep him from coming back, but as he doesn't yet know that for sure, naturally he isn't going to alarm Bree by telling her about it.” The wording of this made it sound like Ian sold Roger, which seemed to contradict Jamie’s statement “I gave him to the Iroquois” in Chapter 50, during the Reveal. I asked Diana whether, in the book, it was Jamie, Ian, or both of them who gave Roger to the Iroquois and she answered:

No, Ian did it, but at Jamie's instigation. In actuality, Ian gave Roger to the Tuscarora, who in turn sold him to the Mohawk. So Jamie didn't know immediately where he'd gone, but did know (from Ian) by the time Brianna drew her picture and All was Revealed. Jamie's just shouldering the blame here, feeling that this is all his fault.

So, there you have it. The show writers didn’t change anything by having Ian "get rid of him.” and...ahem...

Jamie's just shouldering the blame here, feeling that this is all his fault.

#outlander #outlander talk #jamie fraser #brianna fraser #claire fraser #brianna mackenzie #rogergate #monday musings

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ink-flavored · 5 years

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11/11/11 Tag Game (Triple Threat)

I was tagged by @bookenders @timetravelingpigeon and @oradall! Thank you!

Questions

What animal would be your familiar?

You can bring any one extinct species back, with the guarantee that it won’t become extinct again. Which animal do you bring back?

Top three favorite animals?

What’s your favorite road trip snack?

What’s one place you never want to visit?

If you had to live in the world of (one of) your WIP(s), how screwed would you be?

What’s the worst name for a character you’ve ever had?

What’s something your 8-year-old self would love about you?

What’s the stupidest thing your OC(s) has ever done?

How important is family to your OC(s)? To you?

What’s the song you want playing in the background every time you walk into a room?

Tagging: @rainy-rose @rrrawrf-writes @aslanwrites @tenacious-scripturient @waterfallwritings @quilloftheclouds @blueinkblot @lilquill @kobalt-ink and anyone else who feels like it!

My 33 answers below!

1. What baseball positions would your OCs be in if they all had to be on a baseball team? What’s the team name? What’s their mascot? What do the uniforms look like? (If you hate baseball or prefer a different sport, substitute said sport for baseball.)

Well, considering Park is literally on a baseball team, I think I’ll answer this one for him. He’s a pitcher for the North Carolina Sabretooth Cats, and if you can’t tell their mascot from that, then I don’t know what to tell you. Their uniform colors are white, gold, and black.

2. How good are your OCs at bowling? How good are you at bowling?

I, personally, suck at bowling. I’ve never been good at it, but I still have fun!

Before Hayden was on crutches, he was the bowling master. It’s harder for him to bowl now that he can’t really balance by himself, or hold a ball at the same time as he holds his crutches.

Park is also really great at bowling, something that Jamie (bad at bowling) will never forgive him for.

If bowling existed for Teconia, she would try her best, but not succeed. Xinya would be almost good. The occasional strike. Yu-Qi would attempt to chuck the bowling ball like a softball because it Made Her Lose.

3. Rewrite this in your style: “I picked up the book and read the back. He took it from me before I could protest. He never lets me have the cool stuff.

I took the book of the shelf and flipped it over to read the back, but I couldn’t get a single word in before he snatched it out of my hands. I pouted – he never lets me have the cool stuff.

4. What do you love about the last book you read?

The last book I read is called Policing the Black Man, a collection of essays edited by Angela J. Davis. I’m telling you this because you should read it. It’s not an easy read, and I’ve had to take several breaks from it because it’s very heavy, but it’s an eye-opening look at how race and law enforcement interact in America. It reinforced a lot of the things I already knew (the police are an institution founded on racism), but it’s teaching me so much more about why that is, and how we can fix it in the future. Highly recommended – especially if you’re white.

5. What are three things you love about your writing?

I really love my descriptions, character interactions, and settings.

6. What’s a word you love the sound of? What’s a word you really don’t like the sound of?

I have an entire list of words that I love, but I’ll pick my top three: Vivaciousness, Gossamer, and Facetious.

My least favorite word is flesh. I hate that word so much.

7. How do you like to begin your stories?

It depends on the story. Usually I like to jump into the action, to give the reader something to latch onto as soon as possible, and to get them to form questions at the same time.

8. What other forms of writing have you tried other than the one you’re working with now? (i.e. playwriting, screenwriting, poetry, interactive, novels, short fiction. etc.) How do you feel about them?

I’ve been writing a game! It’s been a super huge blast, and even though I know neither jack nor shit about coding, the program I’m using makes it very easy to write games without any coding. Use Twine! It’s the best!

Once I graduate (in June!!), I want to finish the game and upload it somewhere so I can get people playing it. Stay tuned for that!

9. What’s your favorite play/musical? Why? What’s your favorite part?

OH NO, I HAVE TO PICK ONE? Okay fine, it’s Chicago. I absolutely adore that musical, mostly because I love jazz. But also because the dark humor, satire, and well-rounded and unique women are top notch. I had the privilege of seeing it on Broadway in 2017, and I cannot recommend it enough.

10. What kind of stories do you like to read? How different are they from what you write?

Honestly, not much different at all. I read a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and poetry – I write a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, and poetry. The only thing I write, but don’t read, is suspense/horror-ish stuff. Which sounds weird, but I listen to Welcome to Night Vale, which is about as much horror as I can handle.

11. What’s your favorite bit of worldbuilding from a story someone else wrote?

I’m a huge Tolkien nerd, and the whole concept of two trees that give light to the whole world is the best idea.

12. If you had to change the genre of your WIP, what would you change it to?

Oh man, this is a tough one. I think the easiest one would be changing Firesoul from fantasy to steampunk-fantasy, a la Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, but I’m not sure if that counts. The idea of an urban fantasy God-Dragon’s Wife is interesting, too.

13. What’s your favorite writing POV? First person? Third person limited? One or multiple POV’s?

I prefer Third Person Omniscient or Third Person Limited, but I will (very rarely) write in First Person, and even a little Second Person.

14. Have you thought of a title for your WIP? How did you pick it?

All my WIPs have titles, but the one that was hardest was Out of the Park, because it’s way too cliché and I only picked it because I needed something to call the project.

15. How easy is it for you to come up with outfits for your OCs?

Depends on the character. Xinya is the hardest, because all of her outfits have to be super elaborate and have to fit in with her culture, but Hayden? Jeans and a t-shirt. Easy.

16. Who is the oldest OC in your WIP? (Either in-universe or when you made them.)

In-universe, Xinya is the oldest human at thirty-three. Yu-Qi easily surpasses that by like ten thousand years, but she’s an eternal dragon deity, so.

In real life, Teconia is the oldest. Believe it or not, I made her for my first D&D campaign, and then decided I liked her so much I would make a whole story about her.

17. Have you ever written fanfiction (even if it wasn’t posted online?)

Yes! I write a lot of fan fiction, and though most of it hasn’t left my flash drive, I have an AO3 account, with a couple of works-in-progress. Come say hello!

18. What are your OC’s favorite colors? (List as many or as few as you want)

Teconia: bright orange, green, red

Xinya: dark blue, silver, light pink

Hayden: purple, yellow, lime green

Park: grass green, rusty red-brown, gold

19. What is the most significant/important/often-appearing object in your WIP? Or, what is one object that one of your OCs cherishes?

D…dragons. In almost all of them, it’s dragons. Can you tell that I like dragons?

20. What’s that one word that you can never seem to spell correctly?

This isn’t really a spelling thing, but I will never ever remember the difference between affect and effect. I’ve had it explained to me countless times, but I will never get it. I’ll be confused for the rest of my life.

21. Which arc do you like better/think is more interesting: a hero who starts slowly slipping into evil, or a villain who decides to try to be good?

I think both have their perks, but the villain that tries to do good has a special place in my heart because it shows that people can change, which is a dose of positivity that I think we all need right now.

22. Do you have any minor characters that are trying very, very hard to become one of the mains?

You know, I thought Yu-Qi would be happy staying the love interest. But now she wants to be a co-protagonist with Xinya. That’s what I get for making her literally a god.

23. Weirdest thing you’ve been inspired by?

I read a fan fiction once, and I thought, “Psh. I could write that better.”

And now I have The God-Dragon’s Wife.

24. Which character is closest to a self-insert?

In a way, all of my characters have some aspect of me in them, or some kind of trait I wish I had. Teconia has my kindness – the kindness that’s probably too nice. Park has the confidence I wish I had a lot of the time, but also the fear that I’ll never be good enough. I gave Hayden my anxiety (sorry), but also the determination to push through it that I need. Xinya is pleasant in polite company, but behind closed doors she’s a very angry character, which is something that I’ve been dealing with lately.

I guess I just don’t like the term “self-insert,” because all of my characters are me as much as they’re their own characters. They can be both.

25. Favorite season?

I’m assuming you mean my favorite season. It’s summer.

26. Do you eat appetizers when you go out to eat?

Short answer: Yes

Long answer: If they serve mozzarella sticks, you bet your ass I will eat every single one of those fuckers unless someone holds me back. Also, if you try and separate me from gyoza, you will have your arms separated from your body.

27. What is something you’re scared to write about?

Romance. I don’t know why, but I always feel like it comes off very stiff and impersonal when I write it, so I’ve been avoiding it for a long time.

28. Favorite fantasy book series? (I need recommendations ;))

The. Inheritance. Cycle. Ho-lee shit, I have been talking about this series since I was in first grade, and I will never shut up. The first book is Eragon by Christopher Paolini. If you read it (or if anyone reading this has read it before) feel free to drop in and scream at me. I’m always ready.

29. The most you’ve ever written at one time?

I don’t remember, actually! I think it might have been… when I wrote 8k words in a day?

30. When do you like to write?

Whenever I can, but mostly at night. Which is not doing my sleeping schedule any favors, I’ll tell you that.

31. Why is coming up with questions the most difficult part?

Good question. I have no idea.

32. Which character would cry over a marvel movie?

Teconia, for sure.

33. First character you created. Why?

My first character was a girl who had the werewolf-esque ability to turn into a dragon. She was pretty much my ideal self.

#annika talks #ask game #wow this is long #33 is a bigger number that i thought

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ruminativerabbi · 5 years

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Awakenings

For some reason, I’ve always been drawn to Rip Van Winkle-style stories about people who fall asleep for one or many years and then wake up to find themselves in whole new worlds. First of all, there’s Rip himself—a fictional character who first made his appearance in Washington Irving’s collection of stories and essays, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., which came out exactly 200 years ago in 1819. The book has long since been forgotten by most, as unfortunately also has been its author: one of the true giants of American literature in his day, Irving has for some reason not joined the authors he himself encouraged in their careers—writers like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in the pantheon of American authors still read other than by people to whom their books have been assigned in American Literature classes. And he really was one of the greats! I believe that I’ve read all his stories, certainly most of them, and “Rip Van Winkle” is one of my favorites. His other still-famous story, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” turned into a whole series of Hollywood movies—most memorably Tim Burton’s 1999 film, Sleepy Hollow—and television shows, is also a terrific piece of writing that deserves to be more widely read in its original format. But I digress: I wanted to write here about Rip van Winkle himself and not the author who dreamed him up.

The story is well known and easily retold. One day while wandering deep in the woods near Sleepy Hollow to escape his wife’s endless nagging, Rip runs into the ghosts of the sailors who in their day manned Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, and promptly joins them in a game of nine pins and in drinking a lot of liquor, whereupon he falls into a deep sleep. Then, when he awakens twenty years later, he discovers that his son is now a grown man, his wife has died, and that he missed the entire American Revolution while he slumbered away. He makes his peace with being a widower easily enough (the Van Winkles don’t seem to have had too happy a marriage), finds it more challenging to abandon his native allegiance to King George, and finally ends up settling in with his grown daughter as he tries to figure out the new world and his place in it.

There are lots of parallel stories to Irving’s tale. Third-century (C.E.) Greek philosopher Diogenes Laëterius, for example, wrote about a man named Epimenides who fell asleep for fifty-seven years and then had to negotiate an entirely new world when he awakened. Jewish literature has its own version of both Rip van Winkle and Epimenides in Honi the Circle-Drawer, a wonder-working rabbi of the first century (or thereabouts) who fell asleep for seventy years and awakened to find a man tending to carob trees that Honi himself had witnessed the man’s grandfather planting just (it must have felt like) a day earlier. Other cultures have their own versions, but what makes them appealing—and also slightly terrifying— is the fantasy that this could possibly happen to us readers, that we too could possibly get into bed tonight, turn off the light, drift off into sleep…and then awaken not tomorrow morning but a century from now. Nor is it hard to explain why this is such an arresting theme to so many. We all like to think that the world is so sturdy, so substantial, so there, after all…and then an idea like this takes root and suggests that it’s all a chimera, all a fantasy, all an elaborate illusion played out against an equally illusory dreamscape, that what feels so real is only an elaborate set that the stage crew will take down the moment we breathe our last. And why shouldn’t the theater of life mimic the way things work in real theaters? The show closes, the crew strikes the set, the actors return their costumes, and everybody goes home. And, on Broadway, that is that!

And now it turns out that it really is so that people fall asleep and awaken decades later. Some readers may have noticed a story in the paper a while back about one Munira Abdulla, a woman from a small town in the United Arab Emirates, who was in a terrible automobile accident in 1991 when she was only thirty-two years old. She fell into a coma, but was kept alive by her family in the hope that she might one day awaken. And she did just that, awakening, apparently on her own, after twenty-seven years. Technically speaking, Ms. Abdulla was in the state technically called “minimal consciousness,” which is less bad than being in a full coma (i.e., in which the patient shows no sign of being awake) or in what’s called a persistent vegetative state (in which the patient appears to be awake but shows no signs of awareness). It is, however, still extraordinarily rare for patients possessed of minimal consciousness simply to awaken.

It’s happened closer to home as well. Terry Wallis, for example, was nineteen when his pickup skidded off a bridge near his hometown in Arkansas, which accident left him in a persistent vegetative state. Doctors told his family that he had no chance of recovery. But then he somehow managed to move up a notch into the same state of minimal consciousness that Munira Abdulla was in. And there he remained for nineteen years, domiciled at a nursing home near his parents’ home. And then one day in 2006 his mother walked into his room, whereupon he looked up and said “Mom” out loud, the first word he had uttered in almost two decades.

Donald Herbert’s is a similar story. A Buffalo fire-fighter, Herbert was injured on the job in 1995 when debris in a burning building fell on him and left him in what doctors called a state of “faint consciousness” for a full decade. And then, in 2005, after a full decade of silence, he opened his eyes one day and asked for his wife.

These are rare stories, obviously. Most comatose people—including people possessed of faint or minimal consciousness—do not suddenly wake up and start talking. Indeed, in every real sense, these people I’ve been writing about are the rare exceptions to an otherwise sad rule. But the fact that such people exist at all is very meaningful: even if the overwhelming majority of comatose patients do not spontaneously wake up, some apparently do. And in that thought inheres the huge problem for society of how to relate to the somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans who exist in states of partial, faint, or minimal consciousness. Most will never recover. But some few may.

Many readers will remember Penny Marshall’s terrific 1990 movie, Awakenings, starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams, and based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 book of the same title. (Less well known is that Harold Pinter wrote a short play, A Kind of Alaska, based on Sacks’ book as well, which is often performed as part of a trilogy of the playwright’s one-act plays.) The story of the book and the movie (and presumably the play as well, which I’d like to see one day) is simple enough: a doctor working in 1969 at a public hospital in the Bronx is charged with caring for a ward of catatonic patients who survived the world-wide epidemic of encephalitis (specifically the version called encephalitis lethargica) in the 1920’s. The doctor, very movingly and effectively portrayed by the late Robin Williams, somehow has the idea to try using L-Dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson’s Disease, on these patients and gets astounding results; the movie is basically about one of those patients, portrayed by Robert De Niro, whose “awakening” is depicted in detail. It doesn’t work in the long run, though; each “awakened” patient, including the one played by De Niro, eventually returns to catatonia no matter how high a dose of L-Dopa any is given. The movie thus ends both hopefully and tragically: the former because these people on whom the world had long-since given up were given a final act in the course of which they sampled, Rip Van Winkle-style, the world a half-century after they fell asleep; and the latter because, in the end, the experiment failed and no one was cured in anything like a long-term or fully meaningful way.

Why do these stories exert such a strong effect on me? It’s not that easy for me to say, but if I had to hazard a guess, I think I’d say that the concept of dying to the world briefly and then coming back to life to see what happened while you were gone is what draws me in. (Fans of Mark Twain will recall Tom Sawyer’s wish to be “dead temporarily.” But even Tom and Huck only manage to be gone from the world long enough to attend their own funeral and enjoy the eulogies they hear praising them, not to vanish for decades and then come back to life.) I’m sure there would be surprises if I were to go to bed tonight and wake up in 2089. Some would be amusing—seeing what model iPhone they’ve gotten up to or what version of Windows, or if anyone even remembers either—and some would be amazing: if the President of the United States in 2089 is sixty years old, then he or she won’t have been born yet. But mostly it would be chastening, and in the extreme, to see how all the various things that seem so immutable, so permanent, so rooted in reality in our world, have all vanished from the world, as will probably also have all of the houses in which we live today, the banks in which we store our cash, and even the shore lines that mark the boundary between the wine-dark sea and the dry land upon which we live in safety or think we do. Depending on a wide variety of factors, that thought is either depressing or exhilarating. But in either event, it makes it easier not to sweat the small stuff or allow our own anxieties to impact negatively on the pleasures life can offer to the living.

I will bring all these thoughts with me as I prepare for Israel in a few weeks’ time because the Rip Van Winkle and Terry Wallis stories are Jerusalem’s own as well. The vibrant center of Jewish life for more than a millennium when the Temple was destroyed in the first century, the city was suddenly emptied of its Jews by its Roman overlords who renamed it and forbade Jews from living there. And yet…some small remnant always remained in place while the city slept. And then, just when the Jewish Jerusalem’s faint consciousness seemed poised to flicker and die out entirely…just the opposite happened as Jews from all over the world built a new city on the outskirts of the old one and breathed consciousness and life itself into its ancient alleys and byways. As the patient came back to life, she didn’t only re-enter history either—she began to be a player in her own story, stepping off the stage to become her own play’s playwright and director. It felt like a miracle then and it feels like one to me today too.

When I’m in Jerusalem, I myself feel my consciousness expanding and becoming in equal parts rejuvenated, reconstituted, and revivified. I never run out of things to do, to write, to read, to experience. I can’t imagine being bored in Jerusalem, even on a hot day in mid-summer when I could just as easily be on the beach in Tel Aviv. I love the beach! But there is something about the air in Jerusalem, and the light, that is the spiritual version of L-Dopa that Robin Williams gives his patients in Penny Marshall’s movie. Except that it doesn’t wear off with time and, if anything, only gets stronger and more powerful as the weeks I spend in Jerusalem pass one by one until the time comes to come home and begin a new year in this place we have all settled.

#Jerusalem #Rip Van Winkle #Honi the Circle Drawer #Awakenings

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spectraspecs-writes · 6 years

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The Great Gatsby: In this essay, I will...

Below the cut I have copied, word for word, my essay that I wrote that says Nick Carraway imagined all the events in “The Great Gatsby.”

tldr: Compared to all the other characters, Nick is about as interesting as off-brand toothpaste - we only learn about 12 things about him over the course of the book, which is little compared to what we learn about the rest of the characters and when you consider that he’s the narrator. (Just look at the party in chapter 2 for examples of this.) When Gatsby dies, Nick is the only friend of Gatsby’s to show up at the funeral, which makes no sense given that, he had all these parties, surely he must have touched other lives. The characters’ behavior after Gatsby’s death make no sense - Daisy and Tom just up and vanish, when Tom is not the sort of person who would leave without fighting Gatsby, he’d turn up to gloat about “ha ha, I got Daisy and you didn’t.” Then there’s Jordan Baker’s sudden engagement - we learn at the beginning of the book that she’s single, but by the end of the book she announces to Nick out of the blue that she’s engaged. She’s a professional athlete, and Nick really likes her - if the media didn’t follow her social life, Nick would. The events with Gatsby take precedence over the events of an otherwise full summer. (Now of course, this makes sense given that the book is about Gatsby, but Nick seldom mentions his career. Quote from the essay - “The events he cites-eating lunch with his fellow bond salesman, walking around in New York City - compared to the extravaganza that is Gatsby’s company, and being privy to his cousin’s husband’s love affair, and hanging out with such a celebrity as Jordan Baker, are dull and trivial. No wonder he’d choose a fantasy world over the real world.”) Plus, he staright up forgot his own birthday and didn’t remember until basically the end of the day. Until after the fight Tom and Gatsby had over Daisy, until after the fantasy started to fall apart.

Odds are, none of the characters are completely fake. Perhaps Gatsby, Tom, Daisy, and Jordan resemble people he met during the war or other times in his life. Perhaps he met a guy during the war who called everyone “old sport.” Perhaps he really did meet a polo player named Tom in college. But the man was lonely - he planned to rent the house in West Egg with a coworker who then moved, he’d left his family behind, and even his dog ran away. Nick was lonely. He made up some imaginary friends.

And if you want my citations, below is the whole essay, complete with citations.

Imagination is an integral part of the human experience. Every one of us has at some point created a magical world for ourselves, be it as simple as having an imaginary friend, playing role-playing games online, or writing fan fiction. we may do this to fulfill some deep desire to be loved and to experience things that we could never hope to experience in real life. Something in our real life is displeasing to us, and we want to fix it in whatever way we can. In my spare time, I like to write fiction. I like to create new worlds and new people, to experience new things that could never happen in real life, and to give myself a different life, a better one. We can find this in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, “The Great Gatsby”. Nick Carraway, the narrator of the story, has a life that none of us would wish for. In the summer of 1922, much to the chagrin of his family, he moves to New York City to become a bond salesman. He originally plans to rent a house in the country with a coworker who then moves, so he goes out to West Egg Village alone. Even his dog runs away. At that point, Nick’s life was miserable. It must have seemed that all the world was against him, and he didn’t have a friend in the world. In such a situation, a person would find some way to make friends, be they real or imaginary. I postulate that this is exactly what Nick has done-he creates imaginary friends so as to be liked and creates a new world around him. This creation is shown by the over-the-top qualities exhibited by all of the characters save one-Nick himself-, the discrepancies in character behavior, and the fact that, though Nick’s summer was a full one, the events with Gatsby and the rest of his imaginary friends are given the greatest importance.

The characters in “The Great Gatsby” are known for their extravagant qualities, their over-the-top lifestyles, and their bursting personalities. All of the characters in the book have these, save one, of course-Nick himself. In fact, compared to the information we have on every other person mentioned in the book, we have startlingly little information about Nick. He’s rather boring, by comparison, and more realistic than everyone else in the book. Most of what we know about Nick is in Chapter 1. He’s middle-class, a bond salesman, was a soldier in World War I, is from the midwest, and in the summer of 1922, he rents a small house in West Egg for $80 a month. That may seem like a lot at first glance, but after that we only learn 5 things- his name, where he went to college, he’s the cousin of the wealthy Daisy Buchanan, where he works, and the house he rents is, incidentally, only one over from the extravagant manor of Jay Gatsby (1, 7-13; 3, 61). Of the other characters we know greatly more, even of Gatsby, who is considered somewhat of a mystery. This is largely due to the fact that Nick focuses more on others but with a great lack of perspective about himself. He observes the behavior of others around him, but fails to observe his own. In fact, there is a lot of description in the book about others, but, again, a significant lack of the same about Nick. In Chapter 2, Nick attends a small get-together at the apartment of Tom Buchanan and his lover, Myrtle Wilson, in New York City. When the other guests begin to arrive, Nick describes them in great detail- Catherine, Myrtle’s sister, is described as “a slender, worldly girl of about 30[…]. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down her arms”; Mr. McKee, a fellow tenant “was a photographer”, his wife, “shrill, languid, handsome, and horrible”. Myrtle changes into an “elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon”, and when she changed, Nick notices that “her personality had also undergone a change. […] Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her”. By contrast, Nick becomes drunk, sits down in the living room, reads a gossip magazine (2,34-35), and doesn’t say much of anything, and he certainly doesn’t say anything about himself. Overall, his role is very minimal. Fantasies often include great amounts of detail to make them seem more real. But by including so much detail about others and next to none about himself, Nick makes himself seem flat by comparison. It becomes obvious that something is not right, not real- either Nick or everyone else is fake. The odds that 5 people would imagine the same thing are too low, telling us that it is really Nick who imagined them. Their extravagance and great detail tells us that the characters are, in fact, a fantasy.

Furthermore, another clue that the events of “The Great Gatsby” are Nick’s imaginings is all the discrepancies we find in the characters’ behavior at the end. Nothing that would make sense to happen, given the characters established behavior up to that point, actually does When the character of Gatsby dies (8, 169), the only one who mourns, truly, is Nick, even though, surely, Gatsby must have touched many lives. He must have had other friends in the world. But no, only one friend, Nick, attends Gatsby’s funeral (9,182). (This also shows how Nick is central to everything, proving that he is, in fact, the one who imagined all of this.) Daisy, the woman supposedly so attracted to Gatsby that she was tempted to leave her husband, wasn’t even in the area. She and Tom disappeared shortly before Gatsby died- they “left no address”, didn’t “say when they’d be back”, they had just “gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them”(9, 172). Even if their leaving makes sense, Tom is the kind of person who would want to gloat. This personality trait can be seen both during and after his and Gatsby’s fight over Daisy in Chapter 7. He is arrogant and believes that Daisy can only love him- When told that Daisy loves both Tom and Gatsby, Tom says, “‘Even that’s a lie. […] Why—there’re things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know’”(7,140). And when Daisy says that it wouldn’t be true if she said she never loved Tom, he says rather pompously, “‘Of course it wouldn’t’” (7,140). And at the very end of the fight, to further assert that he’s won, he orders Daisy and Gatsby to drive home together—“‘Go home,’” he says, “‘He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over’”(7,142). Tom would want to rub it in Gatsby’s face once more that he had Daisy before bowing out. He would have Daisy drop by to say goodbye forever. Even while mourning for Myrtle, it would be out of character for Tom not to gloat.

There’s also the point of Jordan Baker’s sudden engagement. At the beginning of the book, Daisy says that she intends to set Nick and Jordan up together- she says, “‘In fact, I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of -oh- fling you together’”(1,23). Jordan Baker, being a celebrity, a professional athlete, would be rather well-followed by the media of the time. Any boyfriend she might have had would have been news, the same as it is today, and Daisy wouldn’t have even tried to set them up. And Jordan liked Nick, we know this (“‘I hate careless people,’” she says, “‘That’s why I like you’”(3, 63).), and Nick tells us right out that “for a moment, I thought I loved her” (3, 63). If the media didn’t follow this professional golfer, Nick certainly would. However, at the end of the book, she tells Nick “without comment that she was engaged to another man” (9, 187). Out of the blue, with no clues of any sort beforehand, Jordan is engaged. Her engagement totally removes any chance of a further relationship between her and Nick, a relationship that we were expecting. That doesn’t make sense considering her character and the details established thus far. That is a character discrepancy that hints to something suspicious beneath the surface, hinting even more that these events are all a fantasy.

Yet another clue that the events of “The Great Gatsby” are Nick’s fantasy is the importance that the events with Gatsby and the rest of the delusion are given out of an otherwise full summer. Nearing the end of Chapter 3, Nick breaks from his story to tell us about the events thus far— “Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs” (3, 60-61). For a brief moment-a little over one full page (4 paragraphs on pages 61 and 62)-Nick breaks a little from his fantasy to tell us what he had done until the middle of July, 1922, but after that he goes back to talking about Jordan and his imaginings. But he was right when he said that it seemed those three events were the highlights of his summer up until that point. The events he cites-eating lunch with his fellow bond salesman, walking around in New York City (3, 61)- compared to the extravaganza that is Gatsby’s company, and being privy to his cousin’s husband’s love affair, and hanging out with such a celebrity as Jordan Baker, are dull and trivial. No wonder he’d choose a fantasy world over the real world.

Also, preoccupation with the fantasy caused him to forget his own birthday. In Chapter 7, following Tom and Gatsby’s fight over Daisy, as Tom was preparing to have a victory drink, he asked Nick if he wanted any. Nick didn’t hear him at first, then said, “‘No…I just remembered that today’s my birthday’”(7, 142). He didn’t remember this until after the fight, when his fantasy started to fall apart, when Daisy, the reason he created the fantasy in the first place, left Gatsby. He didn’t think about it until real life started to creep in. His life wasn’t important until an issue with his all-important fantasy was resolved. There is a clear separation between the fantasy and his reality. Were these events real and true, Nick would not have forgotten something like his birthday.

Now, none of this is to say that Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan are entirely fake. Indeed, the human mind is incapable of creating entirely new people. However, compiling qualities from separate people into one person is entirely within the realm of possibility. In his life in New York, or his life in the midwest, Nick might have met someone-anyone-that could have later become Gatsby, or any of them. Perhaps during the war, he encountered a soldier who called everyone “old sport”, or perhaps in college he really did meet a polo player named Tom. In creating his imaginary friends, he called minor details from his real life to his mind and they turned into these people, these friends that Nick created for himself. And they became so fantastical, with such unbelievable qualities, because if you were going to create an imaginary friend, why would they be boring?

The imagination is an amazingly human thing. Some might even say that it is what makes us human. It’s been used to create amazing worlds and amazing technology, from the spear to the Internet. The creators are valued in history, and the character of Nick Carraway is honored with a place among them. After all, through the creative genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he created characters that have been valued and read about for decades, almost a century-characters that are fantastically amazing, fantastically complex, fantastically important. We need not pity Nick Carraway for making imaginary friends rather than real ones. We should respect him, and continue to honor him and the story he is a part of, as we have in years past.

#the great gatsby #specs writes stuff #ap lang #ap language #original writing #original essay #in this essay i will #as promised

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