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bigskydreaming · 3 years

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Headcanon that everyone within the family may think of Dick as the one most in their father’s favor, but Dick is keenly aware that the general public thinks of him as their father’s ‘Consolation Prize.’

After all, when from their perspective he’s the one Bruce raised since he was eight as his ward, with that dissolving when he was eighteen and very little perceived contact between the two of them for years after that, while Jason was adopted soon after being taken in and Dick was then later adopted years after Jason’s death, without any public fanfare.....

What does that look like other than Bruce ‘settling’ for the son who didn’t appear to be his first choice, just chronologically first, once he lost Jason but still needed/wanted an heir, as he was getting older and the general public still didn’t know yet how closely tied Tim was to the family or that it wouldn’t be long after this that Bruce adopted him too?

Now granted, you can definitely perceive the above as overly angsty and not the only way this situation was likely to be perceived outside the family, but my point is more that like.....nobody ever presumes that the general public are overly kind or generous in their views or assumptions about the Wayne family behavior. I just don’t buy that people assumed there was some optimistic explanation for the way things appeared here, or that people just went “oh its probably because the kid who grew up in that house the longest just doesn’t WANT to be adopted by the billionaire and have all the security that brings, and that’s also clearly why he lives in Bludhaven of all places and a shitty apartment building at that.”

I mean, no matter what WE the readers may know of Dick’s personal priorities and how little he cares about where he lives or that Bruce would have willingly paid for him to have a better place to live if he really wanted it, is that what people are most likely to assume, based on appearances?

Anyway, I’m just saying, I bet it bugs the crap out of Dick to hear his siblings casually refer to him as so obviously enjoying favored son status and being the clear apple of Bruce’s eye, as he’s like, cue internal monologue: gee, sure wish I was as confident of that back during the years he seemed to want nothing to do with me.

Like I’ve said before, I think Dick isn’t actually super insecure and his insecurities such as they are mostly revolve around how his family and friends perceive him, not the general public.....BUT I do think that with as high profile as the Waynes are, there’s no way that nobody picked up on how little contact Dick and Bruce had in the continuities where they literally went over a year without even speaking to each other....and like, felt free to draw their own conclusions.

And I do think this is also part of why I default to thinking a lot of canon takes and headcanons tend to gloss over how shitty Gotham public could be in their views/treatment of Dick. Like just because Dick was basically trained from birth to be able to work a room and entertain people while in their direct presence, that didn’t actually make him ‘one of them’ in their eyes, and I reeeeeeaally don’t think you can actually underestimate the pettiness and jealousy one percenters feel when they see someone they inherently view as lesser than them - as they would’ve viewed both Dick and Jason due to their lower class births - like....’leap frogging’ over them into greater wealth via being taken in by Bruce.

Like, idk, maybe it just comes from having been a scholarship kid who went to a richy rich private high school attended mostly by the children of senators and hotel-chain owners, lol, but like.......I can not for a second picture Gotham’s upper class actually LIKING Dick or being as charmed by him as they frequently are depicted as, just because Dick knows how to be charming and likable. Like they might play it that way when in public at a gala, for appearances or whatever....but the second he turned around they’d be badmouthing him at juuuuust a high enough volume to ensure he’d be able to HEAR them but not be able to call them on it without it looking like he went back and provoked a scene over something ‘nobody else around them heard them say’ or whatever. Just to make sure that no matter how well he came across in public social settings, he never ‘forgot his place’ or whatever or forgot that they were all too aware of it too.

And also also, it always kinda bemuses me that as much focus as the Court of Owls and Talons get in Dick’s narratives in canon and fic, that we’ve barely ever seen any examination of what the Court retroactively means for Dick’s years growing up around upper class Gothamites who likely included more than a few Court members.....like, we KNOW years later that like, all along there were these people who even without knowing who Batman and Robin were, like, knew Dick Grayson was their ‘Gray Son’ and intended to claim him as their weapon someday, and you can’t tell me that wouldn’t have factored into how they viewed and interacted with a child and teenage Dick Grayson as they attended many of the same social gatherings and functions. OR that Dick himself in the aftermath of the Court of Owls reveal, didn’t look back at his OWN childhood and reflect on how many creepy or uncomfortable encounters he had with various socialites that left him feeling decidedly skeeved out and not a fan of how they were looking at him or things they might have said to him, thinking themselves oh so clever for alluding to things he had no idea about......like, I imagine there had to be more than a few encounters from his younger years that always stuck with him, and after the Court of Owls revelation like....looked TOTALLY different to him, especially if he happened to know for sure that some of those very people were in fact Court members. BUT I DIGRESS.

All in all though it all circles back to the same thought for me.....people might have been polite to Dick’s face when he was growing up, but they most likely had plenty of shit to say the second his back was turned, and I doubt they were afraid to be overheard by him. Especially in his later years, once people noticed how distant he and Bruce seemed to be, and thus perceived that as meaning that nineteen year old Dick Grayson wasn’t as ‘protected’ by Bruce the way he was when he was younger.....meaning the people who were most jealous of Dick’s ‘catapulting’ up the social ladder and eager to knock him down a peg because of that, like....probably would have looked at the relative lack of contact between he and Bruce as far as anyone could publicly tell, and felt emboldened enough by that to up their snide whisper game with shit like gossipping about how oh, the Grayson boy may be back in Gotham again, but we all know he’s just poor Brucie’s consolation prize anyway, why, if he really cared all that much about the boy, he’d hardly have ever let him run off to Bludhaven of all places, without even making sure to staple the advantages and opportunities granted by the Wayne name to him the way he made sure to right off the bat with the younger one.....

So yeah. There’s my angsty musings on how Dick likely is perceived by Gotham public at large, and how his interactions with them - especially when NOT around Bruce and Jason and the rest of his family....probably very much does not match up with what they assume public perception of Dick is, given that in their eyes ‘everybody loves Dick Grayson,’ but in Dick’s experience ‘everybody may be charmed by Dick Grayson while he’s doing his best to be charming,’ but don’t mistake that for acceptance. Not when Gotham’s public are just as likely to dismiss him as the second choice Wayne heir and consolation prize to make themselves feel more important/elevated than him the second their own insecurities have them feeling intimidated by the wealth, power and prestige Dick does actually share in by virtue of being part of Bruce’s family.

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

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Commander Buir: Cody & Shmi Talk About General Kenobi

Context: original post, Commander Buir

I prefaced this on discord with:

I have a full Awkward Conversation in my mind Between Cody and Shmi and Anakin, and then just Cody and Shmi, about General Kenobi, whom she hasn't met yet

At least one person encouraged me, soooooooooo here we go.

So it starts like this

They're on a ship from Tatooine to Coruscant. Probably there's multiple shorter legs to this journey, IDK. Probably Cody offers services as a hired guard in exchange for food and board for the three of them, since all he's got is armor and weapons, Shmi does some mechanical work, that sort of thing.

Point is, the journey isn't a short one. They have time to work together and bond. Cody and Shmi don't really know... anything about each other, really, and the versions of Anakin that they know are diametrically opposite to one another. But Shmi loves Anakin, and Cody is at least sort of fond of Anakin, in the sense that you are with coworkers you worked with for a bit, but now only see for a project once every few months because they got transferred to a different department.

But Anakin is very small and very needy right now, because he's a toddler. Shmi knows how to deal with some of that: she knows what foods he needs, when he needs sleep, what kind of fabrics and tastes he's going to hate, how to hug him when he's upset, all that mom stuff.

Cody... well, Cody knows how to deal with a soldier's night terrors, how to secure a room in an unsafe ship, how to run through theoretical exercises that are actually on Anakin's level of understanding, rather than the actual toddler stuff that people would expect out of this size, because it's not like anyone's going to let Anakin near the droids or engine, but nobody's going to pay too much attention if the Mandalorian is drilling a kid on Mando'a and battle tactics.

And Shmi notices that, obviously, because Anakin's her son and they've told her about the time-travel, and she understands that while she knows a slave's trauma, she doesn't know war trauma, and sometimes that's the kind of person Anakin needs right now. Cody is that person, until further notice, and Cody being the kind of person he is, likes to be helpful, and Anakin's the only Jedi in sight.

(There may be some of the indoctrination at play, but hey. There's also, you know, the only friend you have right now is the toddler. You gotta make it work.)

At one point, after yet another misunderstanding with a random bystander, Anakin jokingly calls Cody "Commander Buir" and gets an aggrieved eyeroll and a "here, you hold him" in response.

Shmi asks what the joke is, because she knows what a Commander is but she hasn't been picking up on Mando'a quite as quickly as Anakin.

"Well, buir is Mando'a for 'parent.' And I was Clone Marshal Commander, before, so basically, he's calling me 'commander dad.'"

"Given how you've been helping me care for him these past few weeks, I'd say it's not that far from the truth. You've been as much a father to Anakin as I can imagine a parent being."

Anakin makes an annoyed noise, and Cody makes a face, and Shmi obviously questions that.

Cody explains how most Master-Padawan relationships are functionally that of a parent and child, and that given what he's seen of the Skywalker-Kenobi team, that held true there, so it's mostly the fact that Anakin... already has, or at least had, a father.

Except Anakin's still kind of upset, and Shmi pokes him about it, and Anakin admits that one time, he did tell Obi-Wan "you're like a father to me," and Obi-Wan didn't exactly respond or anything, so Anakin's not sure if Obi-Wan would agree, really, that he's Anakin's dad.

Shmi's opinion of Obi-Wan abruptly dips, as one might imagine.

Cody is, uh, not particularly surprised by Anakin's little story there. He admits to Shmi that his General is what some might call 'emotionally constipated' and 'a little dense when it comes to relationship communication.'

And Shmi asks, maybe a little coldly, if this Master Kenobi ever told Anakin that he loved him, and Cody's just like "I don't know? I was still worried about getting decommissioned if I stepped out of line, ma'am, I was a little more focused on the war."

Which is, you know, fair.

And when she asks Anakin, he just whines and tries to crawl into her jacket so, uh, that's not exactly encouraging.

Basically, Shmi's got a plan to interrogate High General Obi-Wan Kenobi if she ever meets him, seeing as she's a free woman now, and Jedi presumably don't kill civilians just for getting a little snippy with them.

Ironically, the first thing she sees when they actually meet with General Kenobi is Anakin toddling as fast as his tiny legs can carry him to the man in question and getting picked up and hugged like both their lives depend on it, and also "Ben" might be crying a little.

(Anakin really loves his teacherbrotherdad! A lot! But also like man does the radio silence of that incident just Grate for him.)

Also "Commander Buir" ends up a stupid in-joke that Cody 100% doesn't process Anakin is actually serious about. This is partly because Anakin himself doesn't recognize that he's serious about it. Because Cody's just His Dad's Assistant, right?

(No, Anakin, you got feelings and he's also your dad now. You have a mom and two dads. Get used to it.)

#commander cody #shmi skywalker #anakin skywalker #obi wan kenobi #codywan #eventually #time travel #star wars #phoenix posts #de aging #commander buir

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redvanillabee · 2 years

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Heyo! Hope you're doing well! We became mutuals not too long ago because I responded to Jack Thompson post of yours.

Being that he's such a minor MCU character it's hard to find anyone with anything interesting to say about him. But he is an interesting character.

SO I just wanna know if you've got any Jack hcs!

ALSO if you watched all of Agent Carter what do you think happened to Jack after that finale.

He is isn't he? Okay so here we go:

Can I interest you in my aroace headcanons (angsty version) (happier version)

He’s terrified of Angie, and this has nothing—well almost nothing—to do with the gam gam thing. She’s so frank and sees through his bullshit so effortlessly, his usual defences never work around her.

He’s not a morning person. Far from it. (He’s definitely one of those ‘don’t talk to me until I’ve had my third coffee’ people)

Probably played some posh-ish sports in uni. Idk if lacrosse is a thing in 1930s America, but definitely think a lacrosse kid in modern shorthand.

For all that he dreads going home for Christmas because of his overbearing father, he loves the holidays. The holiday atmosphere, the presents, the decorations, the food, the carollers, the soft chime of the bells—he loves them all.

He has some lovely sweaters that he wears at home—not that he has a lot of time to laze about. His favourite sweater is one made by his grandma; of course it is. It’s soft, it’s a nice, rich, navy blue, it’s very warm, perfect for a snow day in New York. He would even wear it out when he knows he won’t be seen.

(He wore it once for a quick grocery trip, only to run into, of all people, Peggy. Neither ever mentioned that incident again.)

For the amount he drinks (at least in fanon), he really can hold his liquor. When he’s not drinking to feel sorry for himself, he is a silly drunk. Eventually, when he becomes better friends with Peggy and Daniel, he lets his guard around them, giggling and laughing at the worst jokes. It’s nice.

I really like the idea of him as just, the walking embodiment of contradictions, always putting up a front in front of others, only allowing a very select handful in, and that extends to literally every facet in life. So say, if you ask anyone at the office they'd tell you he only drinks his coffee black with maybe one sugar. But outside of work, he doesn't really drink coffee much; if he does, he heaps cream and sugar into it by the spoonful. He only drinks it so that he can function in the morning, really.

(In a modern AU I'd imagine he's someone who orders those not-coffee coffees in Starbucks, like, a peppermint mocha that's honestly more syrup than actual caffeine.)

Post S2 headcanon

HE LIVES. This is just as much sentiments talking, as it is that from an analytical angle, him dying wouldn’t really add that much to the story had the narrative continued. It probably would say much more if he lives.

I presume his assailant in 2x10 is Michael Carter, and it is CRUCIAL to me that these two face off at some point. Jack has spent too much of S2 being like an annoying brother not to face off his literary foil. I also really, really need to see that parallel—both similar looking, both have done questionable things during the war. For so long we are led to believe that Michael is a good guy, but now he might be working for HYDRA; Jack has been shady the entire S2, seeming to be in the pocket of the Council of Nine, but now he seems to be good after all. I just really need that to come to a head.

In general I just really like people and characters who have 'off brand' traits, and Jack is really the perfect character for that. That's not to say everything he does is just a front—for instance, I think to some extent, he genuinely enjoys appearing put together and invincible at all times. It's not entirely a facade if you like it and choose to do it, right? But there are so many things about him that are hidden away.

#answers #headcanon #jack thompson #agent carter #writing this has been so much fun #my stuff

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khaleesiofalicante · 2 years

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Hey

This is probs gonna be a long message and Ik you said earlier you were having a rough week so if you don’t feel able to don’t reply honestly it’s just better for me to get it all said

For context I should Probably say that my brother has ADHD and he was diagnosed when he was 11.

We kind of suspected before then because we noticed that he didn’t act in the same way the other boys his age were but he wasformally diagnosed when he was 11.

We also think that my mum has ADHD and her sister so it kind of seems to be a family thing and my grandad portrays some traits as well.

With this in mind we were having a conversation a few weeks ago about how dogs are like the ADHD animals and cats are autistic. This led to a discussion about how I am more like a cat and from then my parents have made comments about me possibly being autistic but as jokes I presume. Also one of my friends pointed it out last week.

About a month ago me and my cousin were discussing the autism spectrum and I had always thought that everyone was on the spectrum and had autistic traits, but I found out that only autistic people are on the spectrum.

Since learning this I’ve been thinking about myself and how I identity with a lot of the traits, and girls tend to function better in social interactions than boys, which leads it to go unnoticed quite often.

There’s a whole list of things that I’ve begun to notice, that I kind of noticed before but dismissed because I know I don’t have adhd and that seemed like the only option. Also since my brother has adhd, I’ve kind of been the ‘normal’ child? Which leads me to think I’m faking it, or doing it for attention or misreading the signs

Something that has been really helpful is my best friend, who’s younger brother is autistic, but his family thinks he’s adhd. He relates to a lot of what I’m feeling of almost imposter syndrome, being the normal one for so long cos the younger sibling is more obvious, so it’s not really noticed.

He seems to agree with what I’m thinking, but I don’t want to self diagnose, and the fear that I’m making it up or overreacting is quite overwhelming really. I’ve been sort of invalidating myself, thinking that I’m blowing things out of proportion, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.

I really struggled speaking to my friend about it, partly because of his younger brother and how he might think I’m doing it for attention, but he was really helpful.

But now I don’t want to talk to my parents about it because for all the reasons I listed above. I don’t want them to think that I’m trying to go for attention, and even though they are very supportive I don’t want to be wrong, because I really don’t like being wrong and I feel like that would make me look like a fraud and a horrible person to try and compare my - maybe? - neurotypical experience with that of an autistic person.

So yeah. Idk what to do. 😭😭

Hello, love.

This is a lot.

Firstly, I'm gonna give you a big virtual hug. So, take it. Breathe in. Breathe out.

I'm glad you spoke to your friend and figured most of this out. But the most difficult thing with mental illness or development disorders or anything in life really, is not about figuring out what or who you are. That shit is hard of course. Not fun. No.

But the hard part comes after. When you are trying to make sense of what this means to you and what this means to people around you. Now that you know what it is, you need to figure out how to life with this new part of yourself - a part you have sort of always known about, but something you know too well now.

I can only imagine how overwhelming this must be for you.

I think you already know this, but what would really help, is talk to your parents. I've seen so many kids (especially older children) keeping things to themselves because they don't want to be a burden.

Just because someone in your family has it worse, it doesn't mean you are not allowed to struggle or talk about them. You are seeking attention or copying someone or whatever it is you think you are doing.

You are seeking for help. That's what families do. They help each other get through shit.

Also. It's okay to be wrong. I don't like it either. It makes me feel stupid. But remember that you are not going to your parents not seeking solutions, but seeking support. So, even if you are wrong, it would be nice to have them by your side. Just have a chat and tell them how you are worried about something and you would like their opinion to help you understand it better. Ask for their advice, not their judgement.

It would also help to talk to your brother first, I think. But this depends on his age and your relationship with him etc.

But yeah. I'd like to think we have learned something from lbaf - that is to ask for help and talk to people - and that makes things better and easier.

So, I hope you do.

If you are really worried about talking to your parents, then you don't have to do that right now. Maybe talk to a counsellor (a certified one you can access) and see if they can help you in any way.

You are not a liar or a fraud or anything.

You are a person trying to figure shit out.

Wanting to understand yourself and wanting to feel better does not make you anything than incredibly brave and very cool.

Remember that.

Sending you lots of love.

#support

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toujourspur13 · 4 years

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Harry Potter Asks

Hogwarts house? Speaking of pottermore quiz - I got sorted in both gryffindor and slytherin - but to be fair it’s not that difficult to understand what answers get you in the preferred house - as it’s stated in the book “it’s your choice - not the hat’s” - so it depends on what story I/m reading at the moment xDD

Favorite book? The prisoner of Azkaban and the Order of the Phoenix (I read it in a day and a half - so yeah I was very excited at that moment)

What’s your Patronus? Ragdoll Cat

What would your wand be? Laurel wood with a dragon heartstring core

Favorite member of the Golden Trio? Harry

Favorite character? -

Least favorite character? - Crabbe and Goyle - because two pureblood slytherins can’t be that idiotic - it’s just unbelievable- is it inbreeding or something else? I guess we can just file these two charactes under “It’s Harry’s POV”

Favorite Weasley? - (I’m kind of indifferent to that family at this moment... I guess I might say that I like them in general but no one in particular)

Favorite Professor? Horace Slughorn

Favorite Marauder? Sirius Black

What would be your best subject? History of magic or Potions (and to add two more to my favourite subjects - Transfiguration and Care of Magical Creatures)

Position on the Quidditch team? Seeker - tbh I don’t enjoy contact sport at all (the only sport in my childhood was rock climbing so if I had to choose than seeker)

Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley? Hogsmeade

Romione or Hinny? Hinny

Jily or Wolfstar? Jily

Deanmus or Nuna? What :p ?

Harry Potter OTP? Oh my...none (idk jily maybe...I’m not that intrested in canon OTPs)

Favorite quote? “Nothing has ever changed” from ...oh 🤭 Actually there are a lot of good quotes in hp books: for instance, "There is no need to call me ‘sir,’ Professor"; and "It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live" and so on.

Favorite member of the Order? hmm Tonks maybe - Actually I don’t remember the specifics about the members of the Order

Which character would be your best friend? idk (lol I’d say Sluggy and Lucretia becase sometimes I like to discuss other people’s lives - yeah I know decent people would call this gossiping - I call it social cooperation and information sharing )

Which character would you date (if any)? i dont think any of them - It’s a kids book!

Dream job in the Wizarding World? Why would I dream about getting a job in the magical world - no way - I would just travel around the world searching for ancient magical artifacts...and write some books and maybe keep one rare beast...just to show off

Thoughts on Snape? Well rounded character - very real - neither totally bad nor good. And he had someone he loved (and his redeeming quote “Always” somehow melted my heart) - so yeah - I’d say I like this character.

Thoughts on Dumbledore? I used to think about him a lot - I like to imagine him as a very dubious character tbh - not sweet old granpapa at all... a bit more complex than jkr wanted him to be (/selfish/with questionable motivation). You know, he had such enormous ambitions when he was young and had so much influence in the wizarding world that I can hardly buy into the idea of him being a good person (we don’t even discuss his “for the greater good” approach, which he didnt abandon even in the last decade of his life, and his very interesting friend). So as a character I like him very much - he is one of my fav - but considering his biography I’d undoubtedly put him into “grey ambiguous characters” category. (it’s only my opinion - I like it this way)

Which Deathly Hallow would you take? The Cloak (because other two are a little bit confusing in terms of their functionality and attendant bonuses tbh)

Thoughts on Cursed Child? Havent heard about it (or actualy...I have and didnt like what I’ve heard at all)

Thoughts on Fantastic Beasts? Those movies provide new factual information - so I guess they are ok in terms of enriching hp iniverse. Actually I even liked Leta (the first sane slytherin) and there are a lot of animals which gives those movies several more points from me. though I cant say I’m into Credence story. And Lol young Dumbledore is also ok

There’s a trip to Hogsmeade! Where do you go first? The Three Broomsticks/Hog’s Head Inn (well, I presume you can always meet interesting folk there)

Favorite spot in the castle? Dumbldore’s office and hidden passages and common rooms, I actually think it’s very cool to study in the ancient enchanted castle - that’s why i Love stories about little L&W

Favorite magical creature? All kinds of dragons and Phoenix and Augurey and Wampus Cat - (since I’m a cat person)...

#answered all at once #harry potter #harry potter asks #magical creatures #fantastic beasts #horace slughorn #Albus Dumbledore #asks

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in-tua-deep · 5 years

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First time anon wanted to say I love all of your tua au’s. They are absolutely fantastic and I am soft for all of them. However I did amuse myself with the barking mad au, noticed you never write about Pogo in your au’s (do you not like him btw? No pressure on it just curious), but I just like the thought of him meeting/talking to partially feral!Five and he can’t quite figure out which language (animal or english) is more appropriate to say ‘master five what the ever living F****?!’ in.

!! hello first time anon! thank u for messaging

asdfHJGFSDG you caught me,, i don’t like Pogo and don’t think he should have a place in the children’s lives so I never write him into any of my aus because I lowkey want him to disappear

mainly because Pogo was complicit in their abuse to the point where even after Reginald was dead he was still keeping secrets - like he was complicit in drugging a child almost her entire life and emotionally abusing her by backing up the “You’re ordinary” narrative Reginald built up

and even after his death, Pogo stood up and said their dad left behind a complicated memory but then proceeded to compliment the man because presumably Pogo owed so much to him etc. etc.

Grace I can excuse, because she’s a robot. She functionally had no free will since Reginald was fully capable of tinkering with her programming and forcing her to obey and keep quiet, but Pogo was an adult sentient being capable of free will and he still looked the other way.

Yeah okay you could say maybe he did it because he was afraid that if he turned against Reginald, he wouldn’t have anywhere to go. You could say he didn’t know how to help beyond attempting to be there for the kids and turning a blind eye to some of their shenanigans (like going out to Griddy’s). BUT. After Reginald’s death he continued to keep the kids in the dark about their dad’s plan, withheld information, and made no move to correct anything. Like i’m pretty sure if he told Klaus “the box contained your father’s journal recording your sister’s power, no not allison, actually your dad drugged her all her life and I’d like to set the record straight on her being ‘ordinary’” klaus would have tried a hell of a lot harder to get it back

Grace, after Reginald’s death, was glitched out of her mind tbh but once fixed she made it clear that she did not support Reginald. After all, telling ur son that you’d like to go out when you were never permitted and then telling him that his dad isn’t around anymore to give orders is a pretty cool moment if I do say so myself

and in the day that wasn’t, Grace was going to tell all the secrets she’d been forced to keep over the years in the park as well. She tried to put it right pretty much as soon as she was capable

Pogo didn’t. He purposefully made efforts to continue Reginald’s plan, up to and including attempting to frame Grace for Reginald’s suicide, not telling Vanya about her powers, not telling anyone about that whole skeezy business, fixing Grace but then reminding her to keep secrets (which she rejects), and just generally. continued supporting a man we know to be an abusive piece of shit idk

so yEAH I don’t like Pogo and consider him to be an accomplice to Reginald’s abuse where I don’t hold Grace accountable because there’s free will involved and while he might have advocated for the children, I doubt he ever pressed if Reginald put his foot down which is why i never include him in anything lmao

as far as i’m concerned in all my aus he’s off chilling at one of Reggie’s other properties or something because Vanya doesn’t want him around (and for good reason) so he can live his days in retirement,,, anywhere else

as for the barking mad au, getting back to ur original ask, I think Pogo is?? Too human-ized? I doubt he’s been a proper chimpanzee for many years, a minimum of like. actually when was he introduced to the household? Was it before the kids were there? Average lifespan of a chimp is what, forty years? And he looked older with his cane and stuff so. Probably?

But regardless I doubt he can understand anything Five is ‘saying’ with body language beyond what humans can read, mainly because dogs/cats and chimps are different (though Five also knows some sick birdcalls and can mimic alarm calls and ‘hello!’ and other cool thing) and feral!Five lived with only cats and dogs during the apocalypse. It’s a little like dumping a dog in with a colony of chimps - confusion on all sides rip so while Pogo probably would be like “Master Five what the Fuck” it’s more because Five is behaving like,, well,, an animal. Which all of the siblings are also thinking tbh

dog people or cat people would probably be able to pick up things here and there though. like that specific meow cats do when they Hunger, or the wiggling that says ‘happy and probably overstimulated’, and growls/hisses/showing teeth should be self explanatory tbh but like, there’s other things. Like quietly mirroring to hang out, slow blinks as affection, the way dogs will playfully run up and then run away in an almost crab scuttle to see if you’ll follow to play (with bonus jumping powers!), the either cowering down with metaphorical tail between legs or PUFFING UP to be the BIGGEST when threatened, whines that mean ‘hurry up!! come on!’ when someone is going too slow, the running ahead and running back to check and running ahead again

like look i have a pretty quiet dog all things considered, and i had an even quieter dog before they. She only really barks when people come up to the door tbh, but I Know People who own dogs like huskies who are the most vocal little shits in existence and who WILL scream when inconvenienced or nervous

(my sister, a vet student interning at a vets, has regaled me with tales of huskies brought to the clinic who just screamed like they were being murdered the entire time despite them not even being examined or anything. they were literally just chilling in the kennel.)

Feral!Five is actually more vocal than ur regularly scheduled Five but everyone wishes he Wasn’t (he’s also way less standoffish and very likely to just full body rub himself against his siblings or drape himself across them tbh bc like. if they wanted him to quit all they’d have to do is give a warning snap or growl or grumble and they don’t sO)

BUT HEY if u want to write something for the au then feel free to include Pogo and your idea because it is very cute!! I just don’t like Pogo and refuse to include him in things lmao

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wahbegan · 4 years

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Oh Wait Now I Can Do a Proper Candyman Trailer Breakdown

I can analyze everything in the first trailer much better now, I think with the supplementary material provided by the puppet show and the other TV spot oh right i guess i should put this under a cut like I do cause i just know it’s gonna get long as balls all right

Opens with yeah recap of Candyman legend nothing really to see here

Not much in the bathroom scene either apart from it first introduces this Candyman’s shtick of only being visible in mirrors and shadows which is really neat...oh yeah also no the one Asian girl def chickens out after the 4th Candyman repetition so he literally only kills the white girls which i find personally hilarious. Speaking of hilarious....the girl with the buzz cut? Her character’s name is Boof. Ah, to be young again...anyway

There’s a lot of like...ochre and seafoam in this trailer, have you noticed? Like the bathroom, Candyman’s pants and coat idk i doubt it’s thematic it’s probably just an aesthetic choice but it’s interesting colors for a horror movie

“I feel really connected to this neighborhood” yeah as i mean everyone knows by now but Anthony was kidnapped by Candyman as a baby so it’s hard to tell how much of his fascination with the dark history of prettied-up Cabrini Green is just pretentious artsiness and how much is Candyman’s influence

Okay so the local ominous old kook here says something I find very fascinating when he tells him where he lives. Anthony said I just moved in around the corner, and OOK says “The old candy factory...” not next to the old candy factory or anything, just “the old candy factory”

Now we know from the puppet trailer that there’s a new character they’re introducing who is a black worker at a candy factory with a hook, but y’know like a real person hook that actual amputees get, maybe cause of a factory accident, i do not know, who was good natured and gave free candy to kids on his way home because y’know he works at a candy factory and some white cops saw, assumed he was a paedophile, chased him down to the bottom of the stairwell of presumably the building he lived in, and beat him to death

This character actually seems p important, in the new TV spot there’s a shot of a guy in a trenchcoat and seafoam pants in front of a building i THINK MIGHT be him, and a shot of some cops descending a stairwell, so I think we’re actually gonna see what happened to him, and I think he is going to be introduced as y’know a competing story to Daniel Robitaille’s, he’s MY BEST GUESS going to serve the function in the plot of revealing to the audience the idea presented in the puppet show trailer, that Candyman is more of an abstract entity or a floating moniker, it’s not necessarily bound by the identity of Daniel Robitaille

Anyway, i’m pretty sure by OOK’s comment here that the condos Anthony and Brianna live in are literally built on top of where the candy factory where that guy worked used to stand

Oh yeah just neat little shot of the graffiti of Candyman more as Clive Barker designed him fun reference

Bee stinging Anthony, more on that later, also notice he’s not just a painter, he’s a photographer as well because that becomes important

Oh yeah “he’s the monster that’s part of this neighborhood” is in all probability part of the same speech from the TV spot “Candyman ain’t a HE, he’s the whole damn hive. He’s the way we deal with the fact that these things happened. That they’re still happening.” Candyman I’m prob gonna make a whole post about this but his transformation from urban legend used to cope with random violence and urban decay in Clive Barker’s story to urban legend used to cope with racial violence seems complete in this movie, and I believe thematically the idea is the gentrified Cabrini and Anthony are under the delusion that this is a monster, a story of the past, and Candyman appears to...disabuse them of that notion. With a big fuck-off hook

We know from the TV spot the all-black portrait he’s working on in his apartment is Daniel Robitaille, and a damn good likeness of Tony Todd can I just say who the hell did these paintings they’re amazing anyway the one we see at the gallery of the man with the swollen face is I think the candy factory worker who was beaten to death. That guy i think is also the one who introduces the concept of the seafoam pants and ochre coat btw to Candyman’s wardrobe. Cause of that, he might be how Candyman appears when he kills the High School girls i do not know but that’s interesting, ain’t it? Candyman appearing in different ways to different people depending on the story they’ve heard

Oh the mirror opening to the space behind it must be a reference to the hole through Candyman’s mouth graffiti in the og i just got that that’s pretty sweet cool exhibition

When bearded guy in that god-awful Overlook Hotel carpet-looking button up shirt is saying Candyman, that movie that’s being projected in the background...I’m not sure which, but based on what little more we saw of it in the TV spot, pretty sure that’s footage of the lead-up to/possibly the actual act of the arrest or murder of one of Anthony’s Candyman subjects which is ahh....dark. I mean hell, he’s black, if anyone can do it he can but that feels a little tasteless Tony buddy

Anne-Marie is still obvs shaken up about Candyman, based on their two brief interactions in this trailer I’m assuming...well, cause he was a baby when it happened, he wouldn’t remember, i’m assuming she never told him about what happened to him and this is the first he’s hearing of it.

Candyman agrees with me that the movie was tasteless

Related to that Candyman becoming a monster of racial violence rather than urban blight thing, unlike the original movie, almost ALL of his victims in this are white, which is i mean yeah more on brand considering his origin story(ies)

Candyman appearing in the mirror and Anthony’s hand rotting from the bee sting yeah may as well talk about it here, it becomes obvious at several points through the trailer that the Candyman entity if you want to call it that is taking hold of Anthony

For a split second when he throws the glass, I think you can see his James Byrd, Jr. portrait in the background (with the exposed skull)

Yeah, I’m not exactly sure what’s happening to him as he paints but it SEEMS like he’s somehow experiencing the pain of his subjects

When he’s in his painting clothes covered in black paint seems to be mid-late in the movie when he’s kinda losing his shit yeah we see later the hook come out of a sleeve in the coat he’s wearing when he gets his hand sawed off (more on that in a sec) and the paint-splattered jeans so i’m pretty sure the painting clothes with the old fur-lined coat over it is gonna be HIS Candyman Transformation Chic

“He had a purpose for you, to be another one of his terrible stories.” This is completely shooting in the dark and it came to me late at night as I was falling asleep so I have no idea how stupid or crazy it may or may not sound, BUT if we accept Candyman as a recurring entity and his “terrible stories” as victims of racially motivated hate crimes, okay, hear me out. Remember how in the OG Candyman just kept framing Helen for everything? I wonder if Anthony’s story via Candyman was supposed to be “white woman harrassing Cabrini Green residents chops up woman’s dog, steals her baby, and puts him in a bonfire to be burned alive.” Like Anthony was supposed to be a what’s the word they use in the puppet trailer’s blurb “unwilling martyr”, a black baby boy burned alive by a white woman to keep the faith of his congregation going

I feel like that might be the old candy factory worker sawing Anthony’s hand off, anyway yeah he’s in a very Candyman coat, his hand infected presumably via bee sting is being sawed off, what I really love is that you can see that not only is his right hand getting amputated, he’s been blinded in his right eye. Now remember in Candyman’s original story, Daniel Robitaille had his hand sawed off not just so he could replace it with a sick-ass hook, but because that was his painting hand, that was the source of his talent and pride and wealth. Anthony, like I said, is a painter and a photographer. So Candyman takes his hand and his eye i just love that lil detail

I think that woman in the burned church with SWEETS TO THE SWEET on the wall might be Helen, who we know is in the movie and probably has a conversation with Brianna for plot purposes cause there’s a reaction shot of Brianna in the same church saying “this isn’t real”

Yeah that is absolutely definitely 100% Anthony killing that guy in the alley so yeah i guess there’s no question Candyman gets his ass but i feel like there’s more to it because well y’know they’re very open about it in the trailer number one in a way they’re usually not about the struggle the movie revolves around and as evidenced by him killing people the movie still clearly keeps going after he becomes Candyman so ???? i wonder what’s going on

There’s a brief shot of a little girl watching what looks like her dad jump out the window, I assume that’s Brianna seeing as how y’know a kid is credited as young Brianna and i think there was a character blurb mentioning her having a troubled past, so i feel like her dad’s suicide is obliquely related to Candyman in some way. It is worth noting he seems to jump out of some kind of painting studio

This little kid finding a corpse covered in blood and bees in the bathroom is, first of all, that’s only black person we see killed by Candyman, but also it just seems so disconnected from the rest of the plot and i can’t figure it out at all that I feel like this scene must be either a cold open or a stinger at the very end

#Candyman #Nia DaCosta #Candyman 2020

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bthump · 5 years

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What do you think the odds are of Casca sacrificing Moonlight Boy like you've been hoping?

oof, idk

not completely terrible? I keep calling it a longshot hail mary hope but honestly I think a lot of the especially recent foreshadowing is pointing in that direction tbf.

Like I have my theory that the behelit is Casca’s and it’s about to open due to her Eclipse memories despair and whatnot, and I still think that’s overall a v strong theory. Fate, all those questions about whether Guts is carrying the behelit for someone, Skull Knight planning shit and using Guts and co, the suggestions that he’s in cahoots with Danann, Danann acting shady (Guts get lost Casca’s scared of you vs here Casca put on this dress and go see Guts right now), our recent lesson on dragon roads and spirit trees, tbh Flowers of Distant Days also imo foreshadows SK using Guts, little details like the fact that Elfhelm has used the power of human sacrifice as magic b4 lol (that wickerman), and ofc the familiar visual representation of Casca’s despair:

So the next two questions are: who is Casca’s sacrifice and will she go through with it?

And I think if the behelit does open, the odds are actually very high that the sacrifice will be fetus/MB and not Farnese. My #1 reason for saying this is the fact that the fetus represented her thorn-covered despair-ridden (fragile human) heart in her dreamscape. Like imo that’s pretty damn indicative.

Plus as the… shard of herself closest to the Eclipse it also seems to represent her trauma, which yk, that’s pretty common for sacrifices. Person you loved the most and hated the most, and all. And parent/child sacrifices are the most common from what we’ve seen lol.

There’s also this:

The MB first appears right after a chapter full of foreshadowing and ominous warnings. This moment is Guts watching Casca acting all motherly and shit and brooding over SK’s warning about her wishes. A lot of people seem to take this as foreshadowing that Casca is going to prioritize a baby over revenge but like… Guts wants this. Idt this is Guts fretting over Casca’s motherly instincts because he doesn’t want kids or whatever lol, imo this is Guts seeing a ray of hope for the future and wondering if it’ll be snuffed out.

Further suggested by:

She couldn’t cope with her experience, so what will she do when he forces her sanity back? This is ominous in an active, dark way that a fixation on a magic baby just isn’t likely to follow through on imo.

There’s also the werebaby thing, and if that’s what’s actually happening then presumably MB is on his way to Elfhelm right around when Casca woke up. I mean timing that dumbass reveal after Casca’s screaming cliffhanger? Hm. And handily that fucking werebaby shit means it’s now less likely that MB is going to show up and soothe Casca’s despair through her maternal instincts, which was one of my original fears, and more likely that it’s just gonna add to her despair, assuming the ridiculous truth is revealed. (Speaking of “the person you loved the most and hated the most” lmao. Like yeah, that’s so on the nose it’s comedic, but everything about werebaby is an absurd comedy so.)

As for whether she’ll actually go through with the sacrifice or whether she’ll refuse or be interrupted by plot, that’s unfortunately dicier.

On the pro side you have “what will she do?” Meaning she should do something, not fail to do something. You have all the foreshadowing re: Guts losing himself to the armour for a while, which he needs a catalyst for. I can’t think of anything more well-suited for that than Casca, the symbol of his humanity, essentially sacrificing his hope for the future (and incidentally the very thing that likely keeps saving him from the armour), becoming a monster, and (I guess) Griffith suddenly appearing lmao. And there’s the fact that Casca becoming a monster would be an extremely convenient way for Miura to avoid writing a realistic v traumatized woman while not bypassing or underselling her trauma.

And structurally we’re at the point where something tragic has to happen to fuck things up and drive things forward and finally deliver on the assloads of ominous foreshadowing that Guts is willfully ignoring.

On the con side you have Farnese’s hope that her friendship with Casca will be enough and tbf there’s an arc’s worth of development behind that. And something someone else does could be what causes Guts to succumb to the armour - like learning SK has betrayed him or something maybe.

And this whole werebaby situation is a double-edged sword in regards to this theory.

On one hand it’s timely, like I mentioned above, and it’s an indication that MB is going to be present for whatever shit’s about to go down, and probably in a way that makes things worse rather than better. Sacrificing the kid would also get the story back on what at least I consider its track, rather than fully derailing it into wacky magic baby world.

But on the other hand, let’s be real here: it’s so fucking ridiculous and bizarre that it almost feels like it has to be the new centrepiece of the plot. Go big or go home. As wildly weird as it is to completely derail three relationships that have more than enough build up to carry the plot all on their own, one can argue it’s even weirder to introduce a magic werebaby that completely derails those relationships only to neutralize it a couple chapters later.

Like if Miura’s willing to go that fucking stupid, then yeah I’m completely willing to believe he’d commit to it and make Casca’s new conflict the fact that her rapist periodically transforms into her magic child. Why not? Werebaby has dissolved all the faith I had in his ability as a writer. I no longer have that intrinsic belief that Berserk will ultimately make sense, resolve in a satisfying way, and generally work as a whole to fall back on lol.

So anyway, all that said, let’s just lay out the possibilities:

1. Casca does not sacrifice MB, maybe I’m entirely wrong about everything or maybe she turns down the offer/plot happens and she doesn’t get a chance. The fact that Griffith transforms into a baby every full moon is the new big plot point and character motivation. Story’s functionally over, everyone go home.

2. Casca does not sacrifice MB, the fact that Griffith transforms into a baby every full moon is a new big plot point, and will probably be the central issue of Casca’s narrative, but it won’t significantly alter Guts and Griffith’s relationship. Griffith’s feelings for Guts are still real and gonna bite him, Guts will still focus more on Griffith than the werebaby thing, Casca’s narrative is gonna suck like a black hole, everything’s gonna be weird. This would be incredibly awkward and horrifically bad writing, but honestly I feel like this might actually be the most probable option lol. I mean I’ve always acknowledged that fetus is probably a factor in Griffith saving Casca even while arguing it’s irrelevant to most of Griff’s feelings, I just didn’t think its relevance would end up being this silly lol.

3. Casca does sacrifice MB, this essentially cures Griffith of his infanthropy, and the original hint of babality we saw at the Hill of Swords essentially existed to set up hopeful expectations of Griffith’s ~big weakness~ before climatically dashing them when everything goes wrong for Our Heroes. Moment of hilarious triumph for Griff, low point for Guts and co.

4. Casca does sacrifice MB, this negates the werebaby thing but still affects Griffith negatively in another way - maybe ironically he’s a sacrifice himself now which causes problems for him, or handily negates the apostle worship effect for Casca. And/or because of this sacrifice Elfhelm succeeds in some plan of their own and maybe fucks up both Guts and co and Griffith, or idk, something. This makes werebaby potentially relevant enough to (theoretically) justify its existence as more than just a weird ass bait and switch/plot point to get both Griffith and MB to Elfhelm lol, while also not actually focusing on Griffith being a werebaby as a major plot point. Win/win.

It’s like… I think it’s pretty likely that the behelit will open for Casca and if that happens I think it’s pretty likely that MB will be the sacrificial offering, and if that happens I think it’s pretty likely Casca will say yes, and if that happens I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll be saved from werebaby. But that’s a lot of hope resting on hope, especially when the odds recently got a lot higher that I’m just totally on a completely different wavelength than Miura lol.

Anyway ty for asking. Hope for the best and prepare for the worst I guess.

#Anonymous #ask #a #b #theme: speculation #lost chapter spoilers #this is ofc assuming griffith is indeed a werebaby #character: casca #character: moonlight boy

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noddytheornithopod · 5 years

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So finished Chapter 5 and did Chapter 6 right up to the Class Trial, which I shall hopefully complete tonight.

That was a nice end to the chapter, with Shuichi and Maki think of Kaito where they trained and how much they’re grateful to him. It gets even sweeter when Tsumugi and Himiko join in.

Why doesn’t Keebo join in? Well that knock on the head got rid of his inner voice (read: moral conscience) and now he ends up deciding to fight despair at all costs. What does he do? He upgrades himself and starts destroying the school. That becomes a problem of course, but Shuichi convinces him to give him and the others time to find information about what’s going on while he fights the Exisals.

So the opening to the final chapter is interesting. There’s a kid called Makoto who has a pretty miserable life, but he sees something to give him hope in life, presumably the Ultimates in the Gofer project. I don’t think it’s a coincidence he’s got the same name as Makoto Naegi, it’s probably supposed to imply his influence inspired lots of people to name kids after himself. :v

First place we discover is Kokichi’s Supreme Leader lab. it quickly becomes apparent he’s not really an Ultimate Despair but someone with a really cartoonish view on how evil works.

We get a history of Hope’s Peak book, but it seems as if there’s discrepancies between what’s written in the book (even as it’s written by esteemed researchers) and their memories. It’s not elaborated on what these are, but I have the feeling Shuichi emphasises the new rebuilt Hope’s Peak when talking to Maki for a reason.

We then get the first part of Monokuma’s special flashback light... which is a kid, I assume the Makoto from before, recognising Shuichi as part of the Gofer Project, but Shuichi currently has his memories wiped and believes he’s just a normal student. The kid is disappointed that they’re not saving humanity but merely sending people into space.

So they find stuff in Kokichi’s room. First, they reveal that he has his motive video, and that it confirms he’s not a Remnant of Despair but merely Supreme Leader of DICE... an “evil” organisation that literally just goes around and mainly pulls pranks and stuff. Guess I wasn’t far off with my Internet Troll guess, lol.

Kokichi has lots of fake blueprints, but some real info too. One Maki goes to Miu’s lab to investigate and finds it’s a bug catcher, the other is Kokichi telling them to find a message in the garden. The message is pretty confusing.

Next memory: the students have their memories restored, and Shuichi is talking to I assume Makoto as it’s the Hope’s Peak principal. The principal is telling them to not give up on hope, and that the Gofer Project students are humanity’s last hope.

So we then break into Rantaro’s secret lab, and break open a vault, the answers of which are Kokichi’s first message (specifically the first letters) and the second one we just found. We then get a USB and watch the Rantaro video we saw earlier, except it turns out to be directed towards... Rantaro.

The question is... how did Kokichi actually find this stuff out? That’s pretty suspicious.

Apparently Rantaro gets a perk in this killing game, one part is this message and the other is a special handbook. He mentions there’s something to the two people rule, but he’s cut off before he says anything. He hopes he somehow uses what he has to end the killing game (hence knowing the library). He gets this perk because... this is his SECOND killing game, he survived his first. He warns not to trust anyone because if they discover his identity, they’ll come for him. It ends with the eerie “you wanted this killing game so you have to win” line, which I have to wonder what that’s about. IDK what winning means here, but given he hopes he’ll end the killing game, it might be like Kokichi in that winning the killing game means ending it?

Shuichi gets another flashback: friends from Hope’s Peak who are happy for and rooting him (one even says the Gofer Project has girls he might like... well I guess they predicted the Kaede/Shuichi ship lol). They’re putting all their hope in him, literally.

Tsumugi leads us to a place next to Kaito’s lab, which is in fact the room everyone went into cryosleep in. We see everyone first meeting each other, and Kaede especially hopes they all get to be friends.

What Tsumugi finds next is really eerie though: the records of all the Gofer Project participants are there, and Kaede is listed as having a twin sister. Tsumugi even points out that Junko used HER twin to help run the killing game. It’s pretty on the nose they’re doing this, but this information is still pretty eerie.

We break into the secret library room, which is clearly a Mastermind location. We then discover the weird Monokuma head: Motherkuma, a machine that creates Monokumas. Motherkuma refuses to create a new Monokuma to prove her role, but she later reveals after she’s broken from a Keebo Exisal fight that she can only create a Monokuma when she receives a specific voice imprint.

They find Rantaro’s survivor perk handbook, which lists all the places in the building except for another secret pathway and entrance Himiko later finds in the girls’ bathroom (which of course leads to an awkward moment with Maki seeing Shuichi walk out of it :v). It does list the secret room itself though, which is how he knew about it. It also mentions that the Mastermind will be easiest to expose when they go to this room to replace a Monokuma, which is what Kaede and Shuichi were doing. Shuichi guesses to confirm Rantaro was telling the truth to himself he went to the library... and then the Ultimate Survivor died. :v

Shuichi also discovers a shot put ball with pink fibre stuck to it. It’s initially assumed it’s not the one that killed Rantaro because there’s no blood, but the pink fibres link to Kaede so... who even knows?

We get another flashback... of Monokuma finding Shuichi and using a blackout light to erase his memories.

We find a classroom that turns out to be a place to create flashback lights. The strange thing is... the flashback lights have multiple options for each scenario, which would be weird if there’s only one definitive truth. Are their memories being fabricated after all?

Right before the final trial Shuichi declares (yep, he declares it, not Monokuma), Keebo has his weaponry removed and is fixed, and feels guilty about his actions before. He also has a nice moment where he sees he’s the Utimate Robot because robots can change and modify themselves unlike humans, and feels secure in that.

Keebo also uses a new zooming function to discover the bugs Gonta kept seeing are in fact “Nanokumas”, a sixth Monokub that is essentially a hive mind that films everything in the school.

What do I expect to be revealed in this final trial? I have no idea, honestly. The only things I feel certain on are that some level of fabrication is going on with the memories and information the characters are receiving, and that Kaede has some connection to the Mastermind. IDK how exactly, I just REALLY hope she isn’t the mastermind herself, I’ve been sad over her enough already. :P

#danganronpa V3

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finsterhund · 5 years

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So I've figured out how to give myself nightmares deliberately.

Sleep without a blanket/weighted covering on me. I took my blanket off because of how hot it was and once I fell asleep BOOM. Nightmare.

This was not a trauma night terror, but rather a regular nightmare that was particularly vivid. Implimenting some of my fears.

I was in a big house all by myself. Not an ancient manor or anything. Modern compared to that. Really shows off my fear of being in a big area all alone. The house was unnaturally huge. Think it had about three main floors not counting the expansive multi-layered basement.

My bedroom was fairly small, set up like an old little office stuck in the 80s. Not during the 80s, but like, not updated since then. Had lots of brown and sepia colors in my perception of the room. One small window behind brownish dusty blinds.

This was on the third lowest of the "official" floors, which was technically a basement level.

Outside of the bedroom was a TON of empty rooms and shit. Above was the main living floor with a kitchen and living room, the floor above that was another smaller living room and more bedrooms. Those were clean, properly finished, and not Super Cursed™ unlike the rest ot the place.

The floor my bedroom was on was unfinished, with exposed wall insides, ceiling insides, and naked bulbs. There were many bathrooms, of varying function and size and upkeep. There was a tiny cramped toilet and sink area near the bedroom I was in that had really inconvenient stairs (also bare) to get up to it (only a small amount like 5 stairs) not too far away was a shower room. It was like one in school or swimming pool or gym. But not a specific one I've ever been to before (this is a VERY common theming in my dreams. An older (70s, 80s?) showers that I have NEVER seen IRL before. There's been so many different ones in these dreams.) This shower did have ample lighting, but it was a weird creepy in it's coolness/white blue lighting. You could tell that when you were in there that it was night and you were alone even though it was fully lit. It felt like it wasn't supposed to be part of the main house. It was like it had some interdimensionality to it. Like it existed in two places. It had about seven to ten shower stalls on either side, they were only partially concealed, so someone showering could step out and look at somebody else showering. So it was a public shower like at the locations mentioned. It had white and black(or grey?) tiles on the floor and walls.

Elsewhere on this same floor was as I said, an unfinished floor with exposed bulbs and unfinished ceilings. It was almost mazelike. Lots of small, useless except for closet space, secret little rooms. Poorly lit, easy to get lost in. This place felt unsafe to my anxious nyctophobic ass and I hated wandering it. Lots of strange "its just the house settling" noises come from it. I think the house was widened because a lot of the weird "unfinished" rooms, crawlspaces, etc were looking like they hadn't been there initially but we're expanded upon. At one point along the side of the house in this section there was dirt and gravel stones like it had one point been part of the garden.

The levels below were similar but got worse. Less finish to the building, more musty old smells, lots of bare bulbs that frequently had dim orangey lighting (which scares me)

More weird bathrooms and showers too.

This really feels like a call back to the "umknown building" that would show up in my nightmares from time to time. An interdimensional, unnatural building with elements of several different buildings that usually has a basement area that resembles the halls of a school or public swimming pool. Areas like this are reoccurring in my dreams and often really get me feeling unsafe due to my fear of vulnerability and public spaces. The lower basements in that respect are essentially an "unnatural building" like what frequents my dreams.

I was stuck in this place "alone" and was too scared of it to go much beyond the bedroom area. Even though I was pretty interested. The adult who apparently owned the place and had me staying there was threatening and unsafe in a way most not nessecarily dangerous adult adults are. You know, that boomer generation where many of them mean well but there's still a few who are really rough and emotionally abusive? Yeah, that. I get the feeling I would be harmed for messing with the unnatural building house, so I don't. I don't know why I am staying there. So I pretty much just move between the tiny bathroom, the showers room, and the 80s office bedroom place. Apparently I'm also going to school except I'm not going enough. Memory is fuzzy but I'm either in association with the Stranger Things kids or watching a non-existent season of the show when this is going on. There's a scary subway tunnel with a train track. It feels like it's an "unnatural building" place. Eleven after being in a fight with... somethings... is about to get run over by an oncoming train and is lying dazed on the tracks but Max (inexplicably named "Sam" instead) saves her just in time but is struck by the train in the process, presumably killed. But I end up waking up from the dream immediately after it's revealed that "Sam" (Max) wasn't technically killed, except she was, and she became a new entity that apparently has lightning/electricity powers now. She also couldn't leave and was trapped in what felt like another room in a damn unnatural building construct of my brain.

I remember being really upset and being all "SAM!!" (Why was her name Sam in this? I really don't know)

Anyways, I don't know if I've explained the Unnatural Buildings of my dreams before. Weird dimensions of room and hallway and etc. Primarily like a professional building place and less like a house, that are always deserted, always at night, and always with weird lighting. They play into my fear of being alone, public spaces, being vulnerable out of the open, the dark, night, etc. An example of other people having similar freaky ideas is the "Backrooms." Its a very similar idea, but whereas the Backrooms is one type of area, my Unnatural Buildings will have many all connected with each other. Within the maze of the Backrooms there'd be different textures of floor and ceiling, other areas, varying light sources in these areas, and windows that you know exist, but you can't physically look out of for some reason. Also the damn showers. Unnatural Buildings feel like the lobby of a deserted movie theater too for some reason. Fear.

I think finally acknowledging that I have an actual fear of public spaces, not just being out in the open, not just people, not just the dark, but spaces like this themselves is something I haven't really done before but it explains a lot. Despite old historical houses being cool and creepy and horribly lit up, I have much more frightening dreams about 70s-constructed shopping malls in the 90s and old under-matenanced school gyms and locker rooms. It's so weird but it's true.

This might stem from the fact that my birth mother would lose me in malls and I'd just wander alone in them crying. Idk.

#text post #my dreams #long post

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aimmyarrowshigh · 6 years

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@reliand @marysuewhipple -- I was midway through this response when you blocked, but let’s just bear this out after all, because you genuinely an actually seem to be confused on some of your canon and you might, like, want to know, for real, in a not-mean way.

Wow, you really bought into your own fanon and forgot that it literally is FANon, didn’t you.

No one knows what happened after Luke was knocked unconscious except for Kylo and the other students that left with him (presumably who became the Knights of Ren).

We literally see what happened in TFA. Remember? Kylo, and his knights, surrounded by the dead bodies of the other students in the mud. Kylo kills one of them. We saw that happen. We watched him kill them. That was on screen. That was canon.

I mean, you act like he is just plain evil and started training with Luke as an adult[.]

I can’t speak for Dan @raptorific, but I have never said that Ben’s training STARTED as an adult -- just that his decision to end his training with Luke and his choice to become Kylo Ren happened as an adult. He started training with Luke at ten, as far as canon has said, but canon has also presented two different timelines for Ben’s training with the Jedi because of the changes made to canon between TFA and TLJ.

Granted: in the Road To TFA materials, Ben “Jedi Killer” Solo became Kylo Ren at age 15; in the Road To TLJ materials, starting with Bloodline, this was changed to age 23 -- whether this change is because of actual canon-bearing narrative choices or just because Adam can’t play 15 because he’s 34, IDK, and it ultimately doesn’t matter.

The current canonical age that Ben Solo slaughtered all of his classmates except any who became the KoR -- and we only know for sure that they lived long enough to assist in the massacre, because we’ve only seen them in that singular flashback -- is 23. An adult.

An adult man who man the choice to kill all of his classmates.

That is what is canon.

First, Ben has had Snoke preying on him since he was in his mother’s womb. Keeping him up for days on end as a toddler, and getting into his head nonstop. Snoke has been grooming this kid from day one…

You guys straight-up invented this.

It is not even ALLUDED TO in any actual canon materials. Leia senses the Dark side of the Force while she’s pregnant, but guess what? EVERY Force-sensitive person is equally affected by the Dark side and the Light side. Their choices are what “choose their side.”

She does not sense Snoke, at least as far as any current canon has said, and Pablo Hidalgo -- I know you guys hate him, but he’s still the guardian of the SW bible -- has said that it has not been stated, or alluded, in canon. Will it turn out to be true? Maybe. It’s certainly a popular enough fanon that I could see LF throwing up their hands and surrendering to it.

But guess what else?

Even if Snoke were grooming Ben from the day Han’s sperm met Leia’s egg, it would not excuse Ben’s adult, agential choices.

Actual canon, in the films -- because Kylo and Ben have not appeared older than toddler-age in real-time in the extended canon materials yet -- makes it explicit that Kylo Ren’s actions are his own. He has a choice every time.

At Tuanul, Phasma asks him what to do with/to the villagers. It is Kylo’s directive to kill them all. Not Phasm’as. Not Snoke’s.

When Kylo Ren attacks and kidnaps Rey, he says -- in a defense TO SNOKE, so it clearly was NOT Snoke’s choice -- that it was his choice to take The Girl because she had seen the map rather than continue to search for The Droid. He’s chastised for this choice, sure. But he still made it.

When Kylo Ren murders Han, it is because Han is giving him the option to come home and come back to the Light. Kylo Ren does not want to be saved. He does not want to be loved. He was given the challenge by Snoke to kill Han because Ben Solo’s “greatest test” would be to kill the father he had loved and who loved him -- arguably, with that language, the person Ben Solo had loved most in the world.

Kylo Ren makes the choice to kill Ben Solo once and for all by choosing to reject Han’s offer of continuing love, welcome, belonging, and Light. The choice to remain Kylo Ren, NOT Ben Solo, was 100% Kylo’s agential choice. Snoke needed him to make that choice of his own free will for the Dark side to actually embrace it. He wasn’t controlling Kylo’s hands.

He wasn’t some kind of Kilgrave, Imperius Curse mind-controller. He was your average, run of the mill charismatic sociopath who radicalizes sensitive, smart, gifted, young men from loving families every goddamn day.

That is the metaphor that JJA set up. On purpose. As a writer, who is not an idiot, who wrote things on purpose in the script that he wrote with very unsubtle metaphors that he made on purpose.

The SW villains have always been mirrors of political and social threats in the era of their trilogy’s writing. The OT cast the Empire visually as Nazis, and included the Holocaust-analog event of the genocide of Alderaan, but the villain Lucas was critiquing, particularly through ESB and ROTJ, was the U.S.’ military-industrial complex and the war on Vietnam. (“Back in a 1973 note on “Star Wars,” Lucas made clear which side he was rooting for in the Vietnam War: 'A large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.’”) In 1981, Lucas literally said in a press conference that Palpatine was based on Nixon; he’s held since that his inspiration for the series was less A Space Opera than “How do democracies turn into dictatorships?” Discussion of exactly how racist it is that he considers the ewoks to be based on the Viet Cong is for a totally other post...

This was also super unsubtle if slightly contemporized with the PT, when Palpatine became less Nixon and more Bush, working to create a global economic crisis that would precipitate a war against his own long-hated enemies. At the same time, it’s been pretty widely believed that part of what muddles the PT’s storytelling is Lucas’ dual focus on criticizing the Catholic church, who at the time that the PT was being written and filmed -- late ‘90s through mid-2000s -- was finally being publicly held to account for centuries of corruption and abuse that had been downplayed as just being part of the status quo because of the Church’s obsession with ritual and dogma. While a worthy thing to criticize, trying to go for moral ambiguity and “both sides are bad from a certain point of view” while also trying to adhere to Campbell’s schema while ALSO trying to make people sympathize for a character that the entire audience already knew grows up to be a mass-murdering cyborg was... a lot to tackle. Lucas arguably failed a lot of his intentions with his execution in the PT, but he still HAD intentions, and again: they weren’t subtle. ROTS literally ends with Anakin cribbing one of Bush’s jingoistic declarations post-9/11: “You’re either with me, or you’re my enemy.” In some ways, the most successful criticism Lucas made through the PT was that this kind of dichotomous sociopolitical dialogue eventually causes you to get three of your limbs chopped off as you backflip into lava to your own downfall -- and yet, it doesn’t cause you to die -- it just makes you come back stronger and angrier than before. Which leads us to the ST.

Although Lucas has nothing to do with the ST, it’s honestly rude to the Storygroup, JJ, Kasdan, and even RiJo to pretend like it isn’t following the same edict to use the fantastical setting of a Galaxy Far Far Away to level harsh, and super overt, criticism of the sociopolitical power structures of the real world contemporaneous to the trilogy’s release.

Snoke -- the gold bathrobe-wearing charismatic fascist megalomaniac who smooth-talked his way into a figurehead position of power despite functionally having others do all of the actual work of both “governance” and violence.

Hux -- the far-right neo-Conservative political schemer who actually WAS raised from bith to idealize the explicit, intentional SW-universe analog for Nazism and thus became a powerful and Dapper Haired neo-Nazi leader.

And Kylo Ren, the violent angry entitled man who sees the kind of power his life position (wealthy, male, Force-sensitive AKA educated and gifted) would have garnered in previous generations but doesn’t today in a Star Wars Analog For Democratic And Increasingly Diverse Landscape*) and is enraged by it, so thus turns to the rhetoric of the megalomaniac and the Neo-Nazi to find afocus for that anger beyond, idk, trying to fucking just be better.

SUPER UNSUBTLE METAPHORS FOR THE POLITICS OF MODERN AMERICA.

* See: Bloodline, and the differences in policy/goals of the Centrists and the Populists; as the Populists have more Senatorial power at the time directly preceding the destruction of Luke’s school and the chief schism between them and the Centrists is that the Populists believe in giving more planets and more sentient species equal rights to vote and self-determine governance, and the Centrists -- many of whom are secretly funding the First Order, not unlike how many Republican senators and congressmen IRL have turned out to have very strong ties to the Klan, the NRA, the TWP, the Proud Boys, various neo-Nazi groups, and alt-right supremacist organizations and militias, fwiw.

THIS PARALLEL WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT.

All of the insistence y’all make to it being Just A Kids’ Movie This Shit Is Just ~Ess Jaw Dubbayoo~ Reaching!!!! is a) something you have to know, truly, is just borne of wanting to stan for Kylo, and honestly, it’d be less irksome if you just... stanned for him without trying to rewrite canon and insult everyone else? and b) Insulting, both to fellow fans and to the SWST writers.

While TFA was written long before The Election, it was still written within the modern sociopolitical landscape. Trump already was out there leading the idiot Birther movement. Sarah Palin was a thing. Alex Jones and Glenn Beck and Fox & Friends had 24/7 airtime. Antisemitic hate crimes were on a steep rise both in America and overseas, and homophobic and Islamophobic hate crimes were still happening far, far too regularly. Police brutality and the unlawful extrajudicial lynchings of Black men and boys by Klan-affiliated police officers and unjust Thin Blue Line that protected their murderers was already (finally) a daily headline. Standoffs between the government and far-right fringe militia groups lasted months; conflicts between armed militias and civilians over access to statehouses and public spaces was on the rise. Mass shootings by angry disaffected young white men were happening every fucking day. Gam/e/r/g/ate was a thing, exposing the depths to which angry entitled young men could sink if they felt like their stranglehold on All Media Things was threatened. The writing for 2016 was on the wall long before the campaigns on either side officially began.

And you know who probably was not an unaware dumdum just scootin’ along without a clue of what was in the air?

Two Jewish men, one of whom was the son of a man who won two Emmys for a docudrama about the Nuremberg trials -- gee, wonder where JJ came up with the imagery for Hux’s Hosnian rally on Starkiller, though? -- and the other of whom does interviews of Holocaust survivors for the HMH.

Denying that is both to assert that JJA/Kasdan don’t have the right, as Jewish writers, to react to the world authentically, and to assume that they are too stupid to know what they wrote. You gotta stop pretending like everyone who fucking sees what they wrote into the ST on fucking purpose is either lying or crazy. Seriously. Stop it.

~*Antis*~ don’t en-masse see these parallels and metaphors just because wE tHiNk EvErYoNe We DoN’t LiKe iS A NaZi!!! It’s because that’s what they’re fucking overtly intended to be.

And guess what? Hitler was in the ear of the Hitler Youth from infancy, too.

It 0% absolves anything they fucking did.

SW is not subtle. The only thing LESS subtle than SW is Harry Potter, and they’re both the same fucking story. With the same fucking villains. The difference is that JKR is white and goyishe and you can tell. (As you can, tbh, in TLJ being written by RiJo. RiJo goyishe as hell and it, uh, shows. A lot.)

For all of RiJo’s faults and lazy writing, he ultimately did not undo the metaphors that JJ/Kasdan set up. He handled it in maybe the most circuitous and sloppily written way possible, but honestly, the longer since TLJ came out, the more it becomes clearer that RiJo really wasn’t trying to make Kylo seem heroic, or trying to subvert TFA’s storyline insofar as giving Kylo depth that belied his character’s setup. He was showing the audience just how easy it is to be hooked into a narrative like the one that suckered in Ben Solo, and that he tries to use to sucker in Rey -- and nearly succeeds.

In TFA, it couldn’t have been more overt if he were straight-up just constantly watching snuff film porn or something, but in TLJ, Rian’s cues -- which I STILL will always maintain are poorly executed -- are less “out on the street in Charleston with a tiki torch in hand” than “on Twitter sealioning female journalists until they delete their account, and then retreating back into anonymity on /pol.” It’s still Kylo Ren as the toxic masculine underbelly of rage, violence, and entitlement that is part of the current sociopolitical nightmare hole, even though he’s actively trying to seem like an empathetic #normie. Every single frame of Kylo Ren in TLJ, especially after Snoke makes him remove his helmet, is in service to the Dark and to all of the real-world metaphors of toxic masculine rage that Kylo represents.

Because when given the choice between being free and usurping Snoke’s power, Kylo chose to the power. That is Dark.

It isn’t even Dark inherently because he First Order are an explicit Neo-Nazi parallel, although they are -- and FWIW you don’t get to be antisemitic by rejecting JJ Abrams’ and Lawrence Kasdan’s right, as Jewish artists, to create fantastical metaphors for their Jewish pain and name them as such [“The original name for the First Order was the Neo-Empire,” etc.] in the name of ~protecting Jewish feelings~ when the entire schema was created by Jews and the fact that y’all are excited to claim that theyre are “six Jewish reylos” is... just yikes; I gotta say, as a Jewish ~anti~, there are more than six of us -- it’s Dark because it is the self-serving choice at the expense of the Galaxy.

And, truly, at the expense of what Ben Solo would have known was moral and ethical. Ben Solo was raised by Han and Leia. He was educated by Luke. He grew up with three parental/guardian figures, plus Uncle Lando and Uncle Chewie, who ADORED him and doted on him. He canonically had happiness and friendship in his childhood (per Bloodline). He isn’t a sociopath devoid of empathy; I’ll give you that, because it’s true. He knows exactly how much he is hurting people, both emotionally and physically, with his actions. And he chooses those actions anyway, because they further his goal of becoming the literal Master of the Universe.

Kylo Ren considers his own desires to be of higher value and priority than the well-being of the Galaxy or his own sense of morals/ethics, and that is a Dark choice. (See also: Anakin killing Mace Windu.)

(Cue Palps cackling about “POWAAAAA!”)

Being brainwashed by a fascist lunatic to murder for them does not absolve you from that murder.

Are you out campaigning for the release of Manson’s girls, too? Because they were brainwashed. Psychologically, medically, truly brainwashed to the point where they were unable to perceive the fact that Manson’s beliefs and orders were objectively fucking batshit and evil. But they still were responsible for their actions. They committed the murders. They are in prison for them because of the choices they made.

How about Allison Mack sex trafficking and branding women for NXIVM? Is she an innocent lamb-flower who could not possibly have made any other choices because her charismatic leader was in her ear for years and years? I’m sure that in her trial, her lawyers will make the same exact arguments about her relationship with Renier than y’all make about Kylo and Snoke, but uh, it ultimately doesn’t fucking matter. Allison Mack is the one who slowly and torturously branded her victims with a goddamn laser-pointer. That was her choice. That was her action. She will be held accountable for her choice.

...and his parents didn’t know what to do with him. They have a super force sensitive child, who has a presence constantly poking at him, and he’s highly emotional…

This just literally isn’t canon.

All of Ben Solo as a child’s appearances in canon have shown him as a happy, playful, mischievous child who knows that he is loved and is responsibe to the emotional cues of his parents and others. He is exactly as upset by things that would upset any child as... any other child. He doesn’t have a Presence Constantly Poking At Him in canon. You guys invented that, and it isn’t backed up by his largest pre-Kylo canon appearance, which is Last Shot. Ben, in Last Shot, is loved and knows it, and he loves back. He is happy. He is a normal, good-natured child. He babbles, he plays, he cuddles, he goes outside and gets muddy with his friends and beams and laughs. He has toys and watches cartoons.

He cries a) when he gets woken up, which is when all babies cry and frankly everyone else wants to cry when they get woken up lbr; b) when he doesn’t get to do exactly what he wants to do, and, tbh, it could be interpreted as foreshadowing of the way that Kylo Ren uses the display of emotion to manipulate people into letting him do what he wants in both TFA and TLJ. Or it could just be him being, you know, a normal toddler.

I will give you: he IS highly Force-sensitive. SO IS LEIA. Leia is the granddaughter of the Living Force for fuck’s assing sake. You really think that Luke and Leia are LESS Force-sensitive than Ben??? Being highly Force-sensitive doesn’t, and literally in canon did not, turn Ben into a hyperemotive mess as a child. He’s just, you know, two years old.

“But Kylo Ren is hyperemotional, so what happened HUH!?” you cry.

Well -- for one, the main emotion that he canonically shows as Kylo Ren is anger. He is an angry man, and he acts like an angry man, because he is in a social environment -- by his own choice as a 23-year-old thru 30-year-old -- that encourages violent expressions of male anger. He punches walls. He chokes subordinates. He destroys property. He yells at people. He SCREAMS at people. He is angry, because he feels entitled to more than he has, always more, more power, more respect, more control over others, and he has been encouraged to believe that acting on that anger will help him get what he feels he is owed.

That ain’t special. And it’s hardly even a scifi metaphor. That’s just how violent, angry men ARE.

“But he cries so much!” He cries once in the movies. Once when he is about to kill the father he still loves, because he craves the power he sees as his due more than he cares about anything or anyone.

The other time that it looks as though he might cry -- in the elevator after Snoke’s mocking and the Force lightning -- he instead does what violent, angry men DO when they live in a culture or subculture that glorifies male violence and disrespects all other emotions: subverts actual emotional processing or catharsis by turning it into an act of violence. He destroys his mask, the symbol of his obeisance to Snoke. RiJo even confirmed that was the moment he started to plan Snoke’s murder more concretely. His reaction to feeling sadness, or rejection, or guilt, or WHATEVER, in the face of his killing Han not actually getting Snoke to give him more control and power and leadership, was to PLAN A MURDER.

(AKA: It wasn’t to save Rey; Rey was only there because, using Snoke’s playbook of manipulation, Kylo got her to believe what he wanted her to believe and come to the First Order because Kylo couldn’t kill Snoke alone, and Snoke had to die for Kylo to get what he wanted: ULTIMAAAATE POWWWWAAAA.)

(And FWIW, I’m not saying Snoke’s murder was unwarranted, I’m just saying that it was borne of the same exact cocktail of toxic hypermasculinity that caused Ben “Jedi Killer” Solo to kill Luke’s students and flee to Snoke in the first place. Kylo Ren’s sole motivation, in canon, is the pursuit of total power over others, which he feels is his due because he happened to be born to the family he was and with the genetic makeup [Force sensitivity] that he has.)

[B]ut his parents are also war heroes and they’re trying to build a government and just rebuild in general after a war, so they can’t be there for their son. They’re not the best parents, okay. They leave him in the care of a kitchen droid instead of one suited for care giving. (Also, this kitchen droid tries to murder him as a toddler due to a…let’s call it a computer virus or malfunction. so that’s extremely terrifying).

They literally left him with BX for like 20 minutes because his actual nanny droid had to run an errand.

This argument is so tired and it also kind of proves that you don’t even actually read/watch canon, you take all of your beliefs and cues from what Reylo BNFs with vested interests in keeping y’all brainwashed to believe that Bennyboo is a Pure Sweet Angel Baby Who Never Did Anything Wrong so that they can maintain the social capital of having lots of followers.

Gee, I wonder if that’s similar to anyone we’ve been talking about?

That said, this argument is also exhausting because it places blame on working parents for being working parents, and that’s misogynistic bullshit. Han was Ben’s primary caregiver. In canon. T-2 is really only ever in full-on Nanny Mode during Last Shot, when Han has to leave the house for more than a day or so.

Otherwise, it’s literally canon that Han is a stay-at-home parent whose full-time vocation is caring for Ben until Ben leaves for Luke’s school. After that, he STILL is a full-time househusband, but does some charity ship-racing on the side to raise money for galactic orphanages. He does mentorships for junior pilots, too, and once one of them -- Greer Sonnel -- starts to seem like she has a terminal chronic illness that will keep her from flying, Han helps to place her in a safer job opportunity rather than have to go back to her impoverished home planet. MAN, what a BAD GUY who HATES KIDS and is BAD AT CARING FOR THEM.

Not even the nanny droid -- they kept T-2, who had programming for obstetrics and pediatrics, around because he was a protocol droid just like Threepio but with the benefit of specialized programming that would help them better care for Ben, from early on in Leia’s pregnancy at least through when Ben left for Luke’s school. God forbid parents have specialized, knowledgable help raising their child!

It is only after Ben “Jedi Killer” Solo destroys Luke’s school and becomes Kylo Ren that Han leaves, and that’s alluded to in canon -- although I’ll give you that it isn’t confirmed at this juncture in either Road to TFA or Road to TLJ material/timeline -- to search for Luke, search for Ben, and/or help raise and gather capital for the burgeoning Resistance. He isn’t a deadbeat who’s never around for his son. His son’s disappearance is the only thing that could make Han leave the domestic home and life that he’d wanted since before he even met Leia.

Second, his powers are erratic and POWERFUL and when he’s like a preteen or something he hears his parents discussing him behind closed doors…like he’s some sort of monster.

And what, exactly, did Ben do before they said this?

We don’t know.

We have had hints in both Road to TFA and Road to TLJ canon that something Ben Solo did, at age 10, was sufficiently powerful and Dark enough that Leia and Han did the best thing they could as parents to a child who did a Dark thing: get them help from a source who has the training and knowledge to help them in ways the parents themselves cannot.

That is not bad parenting. That was the right thing to do.

We don’t know what Ben did that caused his parents to worry about how Dark his behavior, in that act at least, had been, but parents admitting that they are out of their depth and getting their child help from a professional is not neglect, or a lack of love, or a lack of empathy. I get it; being forced to get help, when you view your own actions as justified, is scary and painful and embarrassing. When I was teaching, I had an eight-year-old male student who had been expelled from public school after breaking another kid’s arm and was in a specialized school for students with violent behavioral issues because he had kind-of-accidentally killed his toddler cousin by hitting him over the head with a chair when he was angry. I’m 100% sure that his parents talked about that event, amongst themselves, behind closed doors, with horror and the kind of language that would be immensely hurtful to this boy if he overheard it. That’s a human reaction. A monstrous thing happened, hard to comprehend, and like... parents are allowed to react like humans about complicated emotions of trauma or shock or horror, even though they are parents. But then they did the exactly right thing for their profoundly violent son by getting him professional help. That specialized school was not fun. The boy definitely saw it as, and talked about it as, a punishment. But it wasn’t a punishment. It was loving him enough to try to save him from himself.

Sending Ben to Luke’s school was not a punishment or some way to ~throw him away. Ben DID need help, objectively, although we haven’t yet been told exactly what the final straw was. I believe, IIRC, that the Road to TFA referred to whatever he did as a “great family tragedy,” but I don’t 100% remember -- I only recall that was part of why most people assumed that the incident occurring right around the time of Rey’s birth would ultimately be significant, and who knows, it may yet be. We don’t know. There’s no canon about it.

Also --

You guys act like Luke was some mean, scary stranger who hated Ben on sight, but Luke was Ben’s uncle. Leia and Han adored him, and he adored them, and he loved Ben. We don’t have any canon about Luke’s feelings towards whatever child!Ben did to warrant the intervention, but even in TLJ, there’s no actual objective statements of Luke hating Ben, or even Kylo.

The only person who asserts that Luke hates/hated Ben Solo is Kylo.

And frankly: he needs to believe that. Just like he needs to believe that killing Han will cause Snoke to finally respect him and give him more control/power/leadership. These are things that, honestly, he’s gotta KNOW are not true, but has to create the believe of their truth to continue acting as Kylo Ren.

So this belief, and those actions as Kylo?

Are agential, active choices. As an adult man.

Further:

Re: the moment with Luke in the hut, any interpretation that doesn’t take into account the filmmaking and CANONICAL choice to present it twice, once in Kylo’s POV and once in Luke’s POV, is missing the point of its being shown at all.

Kylo has already begun his manipulation of Rey in service to the eventual murder of Snoke and usurpation of the throne when he tells Rey about that night. He knows that Rey is frustrated with Luke on her own merits, so she will be receptive to a telling of that story that frames Luke as all of the things that Rey is already annoyed with Luke for being: stubborn, afraid of the Force, afraid of the Dark, quick to anger, irresponsible, whatever.

In the flashback from Kylo’s POV, he is telling Rey the story, so it is being presented to her for the purpose of garnering her sympathy in order to manipulate her. It isn’t even necessarily how Kylo remembers that moment when he’s just remembering it to himself, late at night, or whatever! We have never been privy to what’s actually in Kylo’s mind about that night. While you guys are using that as evidence that his mind was good and guileless and sweet, it’s equally (or more) likely that he was so Dark that night bcause he was, just like with Rey, already planning his next Dark act. In both TFA with Han and TLJ with Rey, Kylo’s choices in Dark actions tend to rely on someone else -- someone Light -- falling alongside him because he is a skillful manipulator of empathy.

Han steps closer and takes the lightsaber, blade-end pointed at himself, because he believes that Kylo Ren is choosing the Light and will come home.

Rey mails herself to the First Order, becoming a pawn in the takeover of Snoke’s throne, for the exact same reason.

When Kylo is telling Rey about the night that he destroyed Luke’s school and killed the other students, he is relying on the same tactic -- using someone’s own goodness and Lightness against them.

Han, on the bridge, even as he was dying, believed the best in his son and believed 100% that if given the choice, Kylo Ren would be Ben again, and that he wanted the Light and just felt like he couldn’t have it anymore.

So when he’s manipulating Rey with the story about that night with Luke, in Kylo’s POV, we can visually see from the filmmaking choices that he is telling it in a way tailored to her belief in inherent goodness. Rey, until after the throne room, believes that people are ultimately and innately good and Light -- it’s stated basically outright iirc in her Survival Guide -- and Kylo knows that because he mind-raped her and saw her thought processes and viewpoints and knows, exactly, how to mold his story to ply her. When we see that night with Luke as Kylo tells it to Rey to get her to come to the First Order, he tells it in a way that casts his choice to flee to the Dark as being borne of fear and confusion, not desire. (And y’all reylos buy that??? Okay.)

But if Rey herself weren’t being so muddled by her own confusion and sadness, honestly, TLJ itself presents her with enough evidence that wasn’t true: she knows Leia and Han loved him, and he tells her that he didn’t hate Han. And yet, he stayed. He stayed in the First Order for six years after that night. He didn’t destroy Luke’s school by accident out of shock and fear and pain in a whirlwind of Dark energy that he couldn’t control, and then, you know, feel bad and atone and try to make amends and acknowledge his bad deed and accept consequences and try to redeem himself.

He destroyed the school and fled to the First Order and stayed. He destroyed the school and kept on destroying.

But he IS a skillful manipulator, and he also knows that Rey most likely assumes that he wants to come home because, he’s seen in her mind AND she’s reaffirmed, that all she wants is a loving home and parents. If he tells about that night in the hut in a way that casts himself as the victim, his hand forced so that he doesn’t feel he can come home, she’ll believe it (despite literally having seen him in front of her face reject the invitation to come home with his dad, but whatever Rian).

So that’s how he tells it: Luke, fallen to the Dark side, his face twisted into something demonic in his fear and hatred, and Ben, still innately Light inside, only acting in the Dark basically by accident. THAT IS KYLO REN MASTERPIECE THEATER PUPPET STORYTIME, AS HE ACTIVELY MANIPULATES REY TO LEAVE LUKE AND COME HELP HIM KILL SNOKE.

It is, in the world of the story, and in the narrative through-line of TLJ, not the truth.

Personally, as with a lot of the things that Kylo claims to believe, I don’t think even he believes it’s the truth. It is what a convenient truth would be in that moment to further his progress towards his goal of supremacy. He KNOWS that he was steeped in the Dark side (by choice, as an adult) when Luke entered his hut that night. Even though you’re trying to insist that he was an innocent lamb that night, even your own pro-Ben Solo arguments rely on the idea of his being fully and totally steeped in Darkness by then -- don’t you think he was 23 years and 9 space months into being groomed by Snoke by that night? If Snoke really had been grooming him for so long, then by default Ben Solo was already Dark by then, and the Dark has no power unless you choose to act on it.

And to that end: what, exactly, if not kill all of the other students, destroy Luke’s school, and help to destabilize the New Republic in favor of the neo-conservative fascist junta of the First Order, was Snoke grooming him to do or be?

If you believe that Snoke was grooming Ben Solo to the level that ALL of his Dark actions were really Snoke, and not Kylo Ren actually making agential active choices to further his own agenda, then what was Snoke’s plan for him before that night? Because unless his plan for Ben Solo involved the destruction of Luke’s school... wouldn’t Kylo be starting out his tenure under Snoke’s tutelage with Snoke HELLA PISSED at him for doing something so rash and stupid?

So yeah, granted, it IS only an assumption that the Ben “Jedi Killer” Solo actually consciously and actively planned the destruction of the school and the murder of any classmates who refused to join him... but it’s an assumption based on all of his actions since that night. He has made zero efforts towards self-aware atonement or culpability, and if he truly did not mean to destroy the school and kill other students, one would think that someone who ultimately wants the Light and to be Saved Ben Solo Again would, idk, feel bad about it. Not try to blame someone else as a tactic to get a partner in another murder.

And you might hate the comparison to a school shooter, but that was as unsubtle in Ben’s destruction of Luke’s school as the comparisons to Neo-Nazis are in Hux’s rally in TFA.

He is an angry and entitled man, already steeped in Darkness and resentful that he doesn’t have all of the power that he feels is his natural due, and he scapegoats the adults in his life for making him get professional help that he didn’t want and was angered by because one of its tenets (if Luke was adhering to at least basic Jedi teachings) was that no one person should have that much power.

When he is caught continuing to act/think/speak/etc. in Dark ways -- like, IDK, someone’s loving parents trying to disconnect their internet access because they were so deeply entrenched in alt-right conspiracy theory that they were functionally insane and had become frighteningly violent -- his reaction is extreme violence (like stabbing to death the father trying to protect you from your own delusional conspiracy-driven subculture) in service to leaving his life for a literal, in-world neo-conservative fascist slave-owning militia planning a political coup through the equivalent of an atomic bomb in the capitol. Again: the parallel that JJA and Kasdan wrote and created for Kylo is not an accident, nor is it subtle. We’re MEANT to see him as a toxic masculinity-driven, entitled, violent white man, and we’re meant to view his slaughter of his classmates as having been driven by his rage and his quest for the power he feels is his due.

That is a school shooter. Trying to pull the “you can’t compare this overt fantastical metaphor to a real-life bad thing to the bad thing it’s meant to be because that would mean acknowledging the bad thing!!!!” card is really tired.

Like. There is no realistic, actual, canon-based scenario in which Ben Solo, by the night of the hut, DIDN’T have plans for violence against any who would not join him.

Remember? Star Wars has already cribbed-and-canonized the reactionary mindset once: you’re either with me, or you’re my enemy.

#|franchise| star wars #**star

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