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beautifulterriblequeen · 3 years

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Runaan, the Dragonblade

I woke from a dream this morning where I figured out half of this and came up with the rest while I mulled it over, and now I have a new angsty headcanon: Runaan was raised by Avizandum and trained to fight by Skywings at the Storm Spire.

Runaan is a soft elf who's learned to adopt Hard Mode at a moment's notice. Avizandum is a rat bastard who truly thought of humans as lesser beings. Runaan's Hard Mode and his attitude that humans are liars, nothing in them worth sparing, etc etc, is all learned behavior. It makes sense that all his harsh attitudes are part of his assassin training, since Ethari and Lujanne don't share them. And we’ve seen how certain other old dragons feel about humans. Considering that Xadia once wanted to wipe them all out, and that the dragons live by far the longest, it seems to me that the source of prejudice against humans lies with the dragons and is taught to the elves over and over with each new generation.

Then there's that casual line in the Book One novelization where we learn that Xadia wouldn't necessarily choose to avenge Avizandum because he was a morally gray bastard, but it would absolutely cry for justice over Zym being killed. That scene is Rayla's, and all her assassin information comes from Runaan. Bitter about his upbringing at Avizandum's claws, maybe? I don't blame him.

If Avizandum really did raise Runaan and see to his training, then S1E1′s title “Echoes of Thunder” just keeps having more layers to it, doesn’t it? Gosh. Runaan is connected to so many parts of the plot, to so many characters, but behind him lies Thunder. Just like Aaravos lies behind Viren and his own web of connections.

I keep trying to puzzle out Runaan's scars, where and why he got them. This headcanon has yet another guess. See, Ethari is eager to use the Sun's Tears salve to keep Runaan healing quickly--he hates to see his husband hurt, of course he does, he loves him! So I don't think it's very likely that Runaan got those scars after he married Ethari. And then there's his bio clue about "learned to put his mission above all else". If you learn something, that's a lesson, and lessons usually are learned early, especially when assassin training begins before you can even walk.

So if his training supervisor was Avizandum, and Runaan wasn't hard enough during training... I can see it. Typical dragon behavior, a little smack of the tail. It wouldn’t do much damage to another dragon, not with their thick scaled hides. But used on elves who are short and tiny and delicate in comparison? Ouch.

None of Runaan’s scars or even damage from his fight in Harrow’s chamber, none of it is on his back. Runaan never turns his back unless he’s spinning with his blades out. So whatever hit him, he was facing it directly. And if it was Avizandum’s judgment, then he stood there and saw it coming and took it like the stoic Moonshadow he is.

This poor angst-ridden elf, god.

I'm dancing around it here. But Avizandum losing control of Zym was a good thing, and Viren interrupting his hatching storm was beneficial for Zym and therefore all of Xadia - once the Dragaang got to hatch him, anyway. Because however much Avizandum cried at dying and being unable to reach Zym, whether from love or fear or loss of control, he would've raised him to be hard and trained him to be ruthless. Just like Runaan.

Zym was spared all that. But maybe Runaan wasn't. Maybe it's tradition for the Dragon Throne to raise and train each assassin leader, and that's where the blood promise thing comes in. A Moonshadow elf, separate from their people, surrounded by dragons and Skywings, needs to bond with someone. So they make the promise, swear their honor and loyalty in service to the one being who has seen to their education and whatever guidance and comforts they are given in life. And then they go home to the Silvergrove and bind others to the will of the Dragon King.

I had a really old headcanon once that Runaan was raised by Skywings, lol. This version is cooler though. It's just the way he fights. It's so aerial! And all the spinning! Everything about Skywings being strong and fast really just adds more strength to this headcanon. Rayla believes Runaan is the best assassin, and he's described as basically unstoppable. A Moonshadow who fights like a Skywing would have serious advantages over most other combatants. Maybe this will be one more connection between Runaan and Callum someday? How fun would that be? Runaan actually being able to train Callum in Skywing aerial techniques to some degree. Whether he would... ehh. I could see him silently adjusting Callum’s elbow or something and nodding for him to try again, though. Perhaps in a “but I doubt you’ll get it--oh huh, look at that” sort of way. Which would be awesome all around, tbh.

Unfortunately, if Runaan were trained by Skywings, he would have thought himself slow and sloppy during training. It probably influenced his constant training regimen in the Silvergrove. If he trained all the time, he'd at least get closer to Skywing standards. But maybe he still lives with a deep-seated sense of inadequacy for not being as swift and light on his feet as his trainers. And I can see Avizandum allowing that mentality, and even encouraging it, since it would urge a young Runaan to constantly push himself harder.

Now, let me headcanon about Rayla: if she were the child that Runaan chose to follow him as the assassin leader, there is no way in hell he'd let her go back to the Storm Spire for instruction at Avizandum’s claws. So maybe he told Lain and Tiadrin what happened to him, or maybe they already knew. Heck, maybe they were there with him, or maybe Lain was and that’s why he’s Runaan’s best friend. In any case, no one wanted to put Rayla through that, so they all managed a compromise. Lain and Tiadrin went in her place and served on the Dragonguard. And Runaan got to keep Rayla away from Avizandum.

He was so gentle with her when he raised her, it kills me. The irony that he was still training her to be an assassin despite his own history is very deep. But I don't think anyone knows how to get out of that one yet. Still, he raised her softly and with encouraging guidance, not with tail smacking. Somehow, that sense of "I'll never be good enough" did carry over, though... Rayla really is as perceptive as her mother sometimes. She picks up things Runaan never meant to teach her. Luckily that also includes kissing techniques.

Runaan helped Rayla avoid his harsh upbringing at the Storm Spire, but he raised her so softly that she got him captured. He keeps using those Skywing moves like mental chess to try to get around the dangers in his life and protect his friends and family, but the board is set against him. And I'm guessing the only way to win is not to play.

tl;dr: Runaan was raised by dragons and trained by Skywings and it shows, but he didn't want Rayla raised the same way because it was traumatic and scarring, so her parents went to the Storm Spire instead of her. And everything still fell apart because the system is broken.

Extra hc’s:

Runaan got over his fear of heights and death at the same time because Avizandum made him jump off the Spire repeatedly, and he’d have to be chill and calm and accept his fate, and when he was at peace with it, then a Skywing would catch him.

Runaan gave Hendyr his cheek scars for catching him too early one time. Dude was trying to help, and Runaan was trying to be perfect, and it ended with shades of Amaya.

Rayla throwing herself off the pinnacle when she killed Viren was something she may have heard about before, and once again she’s copying Runaan.

There’s a Moonshadow room at the Spire because there’s always a Moonshadow there for training, and that’s where Lain and Tiadrin were living: in Runaan’s childhood room. They’ll know him so much better after having spent time there.

Runaan’s got chronic stress about messy windswept hair now, and that’s why Ethari does his hair for him every morning with those dexterous hands of his, to make sure Runaan feels calm and ordered and as far from the Storm Spire in his mind as possible.

#tdp headcanons #angsty tdp headcanons #tdp angst #runaan #runaan headcanons #storm spire #rayla #lain #tiadrin #moonfam #moonfam angst #Skywing elves #the dream part was about avizandum raising runaan #and i added the skywings training runaan after i woke up #like holy shit this is angsty #i love and hate it aaaaaaa #why everything terrible gotta happen to my boy #no i know why

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rayegunn · 3 years

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Another Thor speculation ramble

Yeah, been doing a lot of these uber geeky Thor speculation posts lately, but keep coming across stuff that makes me go hmmmm

So, was doing my occasional catchup on Twitter (I don't use it much, mainly just use it to lurk and follow what some creators are saying) and came across this: https://twitter.com/Doncates/status/1421534363192279047 and also https://twitter.com/Doncates/status/1421611974169825281 from the same thread. Intriguing!

And first of all, these tweets are vindicating, because I have been saying forever that 'worthy' doesn't mean being a pinnacle of morality and goodness, like some people seem to think it means. 'Worthy' is a neutral word and can mean different things based on context, literally anything the person dictating the terms wants it to mean, it is not synonymous with 'good'. In the context of Thor, we aren't entirely sure WHAT it means. We do know, after Aaron's run, that knowing you fall short of what's expected of being a good god, but trying to meet those expectations anyway, is at least part of it. But we don't know for sure if this 'be better' the wielder strives for is self defined or not. If self defined... yeah, it could be warped to be something bad. But that's clearly not all of it, or more people would have been able to lift it. Lots of people out there who could lift it if it was JUST that. The other requirements may not necessarily be good, or bad, but maybe something that reflects Asgardian culture, or something, we just don't know for sure. We aren't even sure any more if the worthiness qualifications are determined by Odin or the Mother Storm. This is one of the reasons that, even before the enchantment apparently broke, I thought Loki had a good chance of wielding it. Not the Loki of the past, but the current Loki is all about self improvement, and knowing he doesn't live up to expectations, but he's trying to. (not always successfully, he's got a lot of bad habits, but he's trying)

But on the subject of Loki, the second tweet is a bit ominous, for sure. And I may have to adjust some of my previous speculation, (TLDR, I think Loki is the next 'Champion', Thor's replacement, as all of Asgard shifts roles between characters, click the link for an explanation as to why) but not by a ton, really. I know some people would see that tweet, and take Loki lifting it as the 'terrifying' prospect. But it doesn't have to mean anything bad about Loki's face turn status (I really want the face turn to stick, I am invested in this direction for him), because Cates has already teased a far worse future for the hammer. I think this is more of a Thanos tease than a Loki tease.

My guess is, Loki will get the hammer, for a little while, as well as Thor's old role. But the role is not defined by being worthy of Mjolnir, it's more about the function they fill in the narrative. You can have the role without having the hammer. The Champion role predates the hammer by generations, and at least in the case of Sigurd, we know he had his own signature weapon, Gram, so it is entirely likely that Loki will get his own signature weapon as well. In fact, I would prefer this, since whacking things with a hammer really is not his style. He needs a sword, daggers, maybe a magical staff. Just something that plays to his abilities and style of doing things. It's just that the hammer has become associated with the role while Thor was in it, since he had used it as his primary weapon/worthiness gauge for most of his time in the role. But not all of it, he had Jarnbjorn in the beginning, which apparently first belonged to the valkyrie, Runa, who might have been the Champion after Sigurd, so it could make good sense for the Champion to use the weapon of a previous role holder until they get their own signature weapon. So I think in universe, the initial thought would be that the wielder of the hammer has the role, because that's how it's been for a thousand years. But they'd actually be mistaken, because the point of the great role shift is to update the roles, not just become a carbon copy of the person who was in the role before, otherwise there is not much point in the periodic shift of roles. So it makes sense that the new Champion would get a new weapon, and not just inherit Mjolnir, but I was envisioning a sort of transition period, to kind of ease everyone into things. I thought with all the Mjolnir stuff, he would get it at least for a little while, at last until he can prove himself. But... maybe not? These tweets make me less certain of the Mjolnir part, even though I do still feel Loki is getting the role, and will continue to be a good(ish) boy. It may be that Mjolnir has to be destroyed in order to prevent the bad future with Thanos, which would symbolically also make the role his own as a new weapon is created for him.

And while on the subject of Donny Cates' tweets: https://twitter.com/Doncates/status/1421898562275880960

Heh, so I guess Thor and/or Loki is going to Midgard and having a hotdog. I kinda hope together, so they can disagree and argue about best condiments. I dunno about Thor, but I do know Loki had a hot dog with Spider-Man once, and it involved 'green bits' so i presume it had relish. But lately he seems to have taken to mustard. So he appears to just go with his favourite colours.

Unrelated to the above, I had a random thought the other day, about the whole situation with Throg. It's not speculation, I have no idea if they will do something like this, it's just something i think could be fun. So, let's say Throg does end up trying to be sort of a mentor to Loki, I got to thinking that you know, Thori is probably bored as hell sitting around Asgard all day, he's a dog of action and violence, not a house dog. And he WAS Loki's dog to start with, so.... Thori could join Loki too as another animal companion. And then, I got to thinking that Thor would probably want to back seat drive, and he'd probably do that via Hugin and/or Munin, giving Loki a third animal companion. I just think it would be funny. And, of course, if this happens, at some point Loki has to shapeshift into an alligator. obviously.

Also, I realized today that next year is the 70th anniversary of Journey Into Mystery. A good time for a relaunch, no? It might be a bit later than I would personally like, I'm missing having a Loki solo story to follow in the comics, but it would seem to line up with where the solicits are going. The issue with Throg, 18, comes out in October. Then if we assume the arc where, presumably, the new status quo with the new Champion is laid out starts in issue 19, and likely goes for around 6 issues, then around March or so, they may have things set up for a JIM relaunch. Then Thor can focus on Thor, and Loki can go do his thing in JIM, and everyone wins. Again, this is not so much speculation as something I think could work, but it does seem to line up nicely.

#thor #speculation #marvel #comics #donny cates #loki #mjolnir #loki comics #ramble

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therealvagabird · 4 years

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D&D 5E Homebrew Gods

Some more D&D homebrew. These are some racial gods I drafted up, largely due to not being fully satisfied with any of the canon options. These are mostly for the more popular non-human races, and are adapted for 5E though not necessarily limited to that system.

I chose to show off these gods because most of the human ones were simply derivatives of real-world ancient cultures. Some of these might reference setting-specific places or concepts, but I tried to keep them simple. If there’s a reason that almost every god seems to have the Grave domain it’s because funerary rights are obviously very core to most civilizations.

Elven: The elves believe themselves to be the descendants of the gods, and most give praise to the Fey, even if they have since diverged from the ways of the Green. Powerful elven ancestors are often deified by their descendants.

Quende (elven) — Masc — First king of Eld-Anor, and greatest god-ancestor of the High Elves. Quende reflects the principles of good governance, magical ability, and martial power. All High Elves give praise to Quende after the Light, or to one of the members of his Court to whom they might trace their ancestry.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Forge, Knowledge, Life, Light, Order, Protection, War

Virilome (elven) — Fem — Patron of the Drow, or Dark Elves. Some say the Gloomweaver was a member of the Shadow Court, while others outright call her a fiend. She came to the Dark Elves to teach them a new philosophy free from the fetters of basic morality and helped them to build their great empire. She is often associated with spiders, trickery, clever politicking, revolution, and shadowy magics.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Death, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Protection, Trickery, War

Ia (human/elven) — Fem — Ia was a half-elven scholar from Sidhus who was worshipped as a god after she used her magical ability to leave the world and explore the astral planes. Ia was an extremely powerful and inquisitive wizard with an interest not only in lore but in the very foundations of knowledge, and her followers hold to her example. Now, many great universities and arcane institutions hold Ia as a patron over even their local pantheons. She is not worshipped so much as respected for achieving what many believe to be the pinnacle of magical ability.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Death, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Order

Dwarven: The dwarves have a similar ancestry to the giants, being born from the Stone. They deny that they are in any way related to their ancient giantish foes, however, by claiming that their entire race was created by Ule, the Great Smith, and an incarnate of the holy Light. All dwarves claim descent from either Ule or one of the first companions he crafted for himself.

Ule (dwaven) — Masc/Neu — The Great Smith, creator of the Dvergatal, or Ancestor Gods of the dwarves. Ule is held as an incarnate of the Light and is a patron of all crafts great and small. To the dwarves, Ule is perfect balance and form, and loves his children like any good artisan loves their work.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Order, Protection, Tempest

Lofar (dwarven) — Masc — Ancestor God of war. Lofar is quick to joy and quick to wrath and is a patron of all dwarf warriors. Dwarven legends abound with the exploits of the undefeatable Lofar, the red-bearded god.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Light, Order, Protection, Tempest, War

Motsognir (dwarven) — Masc — Motsognir the Grim is the judge of the dwarven afterlife and stands for the laws and traditions of the dwarf holds. He also stands for the dwarves’ stolid persistence in the face of adversity. He is often held as a patron of the common folk, and any dwarf that requires assistance in their time of troubles.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Order, Protection, War

Dvalin (dwarven) — Masc — The Great Runesmith, and patron to all crafts-dwarves who work with the arcane energies of magic. Dvalin teaches the value of knowledge, and optimism even in the face of the unknown.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Forge, Knowledge, Light, Order, Protection

Yngvi (dwarven) — Fem — Ule crafted Yngvi to be his wife and is held as the first queen of the dwarves. However, she is better known as a patron to masons. Yngvi teaches good governance and civil responsibility and is the guardian of the mountain-homes as physical structures.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Order, Protection

Nali (dwarven) — Fem — Nali is the goddess of fertility, farming, and motherhood. She is the wife of Lofar and makes sure that the dwarves might sustain themselves with meat and mushroom and grain. She is also the god of brewing, and a protector of children, said to be even more fearsome than Lofar when her offspring are threatened.

Major Domains: (5E) Grave, Life, Light, Nature, Order, Protection, Tempest, War

Eikinskaldi (dwarven) — Fem — The weaver, patron of those who work with thread as well as the wife of Motsognir. She is also the goddess of prophecy and fate and governs the laws of nature just as her husband governs the laws of mortals. The temple of Eikinskaldi is a much-respected institution despite how dark it appears.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Grave, Knowledge, Nature, Order, Trickery, War

Nithi (dwarven) — Fem — Nithi is the goddess of jewels and jewelers and the bride of Dvalin. She is a patron of all beautiful things and said to be the fairest of all dwarves. The legends hold her as crafting such legendary artifacts of power as the Crown of Durin and the Neshamotsten.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Order, Protection

Durin (dwarven) — Masc — First “true” king of the dwarves, son of Ule and Yngvi, and said to be the first dwarf to walk upon the surface of the world. Durin is sometimes worshiped as a god but has a more prominent place as a symbol of dwarven civilization.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Light, Order, Protection, War

Blackfire Ancestors (dwarven) — Neu — The Blackfire Clan was a group of dwarves who split from the mainline dwarven society in the elder days due to disputes of philosophy, believing the traditions of the dwarf-holds stifled their creativity. They are the ancestors of the Duergar, or Dark Dwarves, and are often considered “evil”, though in reality they express a broad spectrum of morality.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Death, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Light, Order, Protection, Tempest, Trickery, War

Giantish: The giants descended from powerful elemental beings, who they worshiped both as animistic forces and as ancestors. Different giantkin groups give praise to different powerful god-ancestors, intertwined with their shamanistic religion.

Magkha Div (goliath) — Masc — Maghka Div was a clanless giant of the ancient era who rose to prominence as a great warlord and is said to be the ancestor to all Goliaths. Magkha Div commands storms and fires, and his temples are built high in the mountains. He is a patron to warriors and despises trickery and decadence.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Nature, Order, Protection, Tempest, War

The Hairy Man / Madoc (firbolg) — Masc — The Hairy Man is an enigmatic giant who is said to be the forefather of the Firbolgs. He lived within the Green in the elder days and supposedly became a consort of the Morrigan. He was a great warrior, but a greater shaman, said to be very wise and to have the power to “change his skin”. In the forgotten Firbolg enclaves of the Far East, he is known as Maorong.

Major Domains: (5E) Grave, Life, Light, Nature, Protection, Tempest

Ymir / Pangu / The Primordial (giant) — Masc/Neu — Ymir, as he is known in the West, was supposedly the first and mightiest of the giants, from whom all other giantish races are descended. Ymir’s aspects are storms, volcanos, and other powerful acts of nature. Ymir is still held preeminent by most giant clans, and in the days of their ancient empires many humans worshiped him too, such as the Thulians.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Protection, Tempest

Orcish: In ancient times, the original orcs and goblins were held under the sway of what they called the Great Shadow. It wasn’t until the rise of the hero Enkidu Bloodeye that they were freed from this dark cycle.

Enkidu Bloodeye (goblinoid/orcish) — Masc — In the old days, the orcs and goblins were held under the sway of the Great Shadow, being enslaved by various Dark Lords or warchiefs. It was Enkidu Bloodeye who supposedly discovered the secrets of shamanism and led a massive conquest that united the many greenskins under one banner. Enkidu Bloodeye is an enigmatic figure who is interpreted in different ways depending on his worshippers, but is usually held as a powerful, noble, and wise leader. Enkidu’s empire fractured shortly after his death, but many orcs and goblins believe he will one day be reincarnated.

Major Domains: (5E) Forge, Grave, Life, Light, Order, Protection, Tempest, War

Gnomish: The gnomes are a strange race of uncertain descent, with some claiming they are Fey, human-derived, or even giantkin. Gnomes are not fond of organized religion, instead having a complex series of traditions that are reflective of how they perceive their place in the world.

Motive Force (gnomish) — Neu — The gnomish conception of the “life energy” of the world, originally derived from Fey teachings but evolved outwards as the gnomes became more interested in the natural sciences. The motive force drives all of creation, trying to maintain a perfect balance but subject to the changes of those it governs.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Forge, Grave, Knowledge, Life, Light, Nature, Order, Protection, Tempest, Trickery

Catfolk: The Catfolk, also known as Tabaxi, worship the Sun and Moon. They are envisioned as god-cats who teach mortals how to live their lives by example, as well as driving the forces of nature by their actions.

Sun / Rar (catfolk) — Fem/Neu — God of the sun, embodied by the solar disk, and patron of catfolk civilization. Said to watch over the catfolk and help them prosper.

Major Domains: (5E) Life, Light, Nature, Order, Protection

Moon / Mnyu (catfolk) — Masc/Neu — God of the moon, embodied by the moon, and patron of both war and leisure. Said to guide the catfolk through adversity.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Grave, Protection, Trickery, War

Lizard: Many of the scaly races worship draconic deities, or otherwise powerful fiends or celestials who take draconic form. However, others worship strange beings from another age.

God-Lizards (lizardfolk) — Neu — The lizardfolk say that before the ages of men and elves, it was they who ruled the planet with their own vast empires. The names of many of their God-Lizards are now forgotten to all but them, but they are held to be totemic ancestor-spirits of immense power and age.

Major Domains: (5E) Arcana, Grave, Life, Light, Nature, Protection, Tempest, War

#fantasy #tabletop #rpg #dungeons and dragons #d&d #homebrew #gods #cleric

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cushfuddled · 4 years

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YO WASSSUUUUP!

1. I don’t actually have anything against the concept of friendship solving every problem! I know it can harm your story’s stakes after a while if you do it too often (like how by the end of MLP and Steven Universe you could just assume the next bad guy would be won over by the power of love and friendship) but like...I don’t think it’s a bad trope. On the contrary, it’s a very sweet and positive message! Sometimes I worry about extreme situations like with the SU diamonds, where the bad guys were clearly dictators with huge body counts and were forgiven with like, not even a nod to their past actions...but Steven Universe strikes me as an exception rather than a rule? I haven’t watched enough kids shows to be sure (let me know whether this is more of a trend), but it seems to me that when a kids show tries to redeem a villain they usually make sure the villain hasn’t like...killed hundreds of people lol.

The reason I pushed “realism” so hard with She-Ra is because the creative team made the decision to tackle a very complex real-world issue (abuse) as one of their core themes. Abuse is the kind of delicate topic you want to tackle with care and (at least some amount of) honesty. Saying you can “solve” abuse with friendship all the time isn’t necessarily a harmful message, but it’s definitely not a true one, you know? So while I don’t want a show about talking pegasi and princesses with runestone superpowers and time-traveling old ladies to be the pinnacle of realism or whatever, I feel like the show would be stronger (and more meaningful) as a whole if the creators managed to resolve that abuse narrative without fixing EVERYTHING with love and friendship. It would honestly be enough for me if they just...never forgave Shadow Weaver.

2. As for Kylo Ren: I haven’t actually seen the third new Star Wars movie! But I know what happens to him from a bunch of YouTube reviews lol. I love that you mentioned Lotor, because yeah! It’s a very similar situation of like, these characters who were abused as children becoming power-hungry villains. As a storyteller I don’t think you want to say there’s no hope for those characters, because uh...they’re abuse survivors. And I feel like there are way too many stories out there already about how abuse survivors are “destined to become monsters” and have to be “put down” for their own good or whatever. It’s honestly a horrible message.

So like. With Kylo, I’m pretty sure the trilogy literally opens with him ordering the slaughter of a whole village—? If the plan was to redeem him the whole time, I would either A. make him a lower-ranking soldier so he’s not actually giving the orders, or B. dedicate a fuck-ton of time to everyone holding Kylo accountable for his actions. The Penumbra Podcast recently proved to me that you can successfully redeem a character who’s senselessly murdered people. You just have to give them the time and attention they need to acknowledge their actions...enough that the audience understands the character hasn’t been FORGIVEN (and the narrative isn’t condoning or hand-waving their actions) but they’re still choosing to DO GOOD.

Even if Star Wars approached Kylo’s redemption with that kind of care, though, it always would’ve been a controversial decision. Because no matter how carefully the creators approached that sort of situation, or how much time they devoted to Kylo’s transformation, or how long the characters argued over the morality of accepting Kylo’s help and companionship, there would alllllways be people who still felt like Kylo didn’t deserve to be redeemed. And honestly, I think that’s okay! It could’ve been a sign of a good, complex narrative, for there to be a huge argument about whether Kylo should’ve been redeemed—and for both sides to be right! As it is, you could argue that Kylo “should’ve” been redeemed purely because it’s a worse message to say he was unsalvageable...but I don’t think there’s much of an argument to be made as to whether his redemption was given enough screen time. That arc just wasn’t given the time and attention it needed for Kylo’s redemption to feel earned.

#kylo ren #star wars #shera

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queenofthefaces · 4 years

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*slams down paper* Give a thesis on Stanny boy. :D

I finished all my exams so LETS FUCKIGN GO!!! A lot of this is personal interpretation combined w hc character development 👌 I went kinda off topic bc y’all apparently like my analysis!! So here u go!!

1) sexuality hc: I love exploring queer themes w Stan sm ;;o;; I think he’s an incredibly relatable character and fandom tends to focus on his good morals so he’s the kinda character we’re more comfortable exploring like that :0 (unlike Eric who’s Problematic or Kyle who’s pretty morally gray and who has some questionable interactions w the ppl he’s had romantic interactions w)

And I love portraying Stan’s exploration into his sexuality as a very...slow kind of journey? Like Stan being someone who’s pretty ignorant but earnest, and appreciating when someone is able to help guide him (like Kenny or wendy)

But to the question: I hc Stan as bi!! Like a lot of ppl do :0 again w the slow journey, I see Stan as being the kind of person who would get into queer issues, and just being curious in general and asking questions, alongside wanting to explore w other people—like feeling a romantic/sexual tension w/ another boy but not knowing what it means, and only after he’s had someome start to guide him does he connect the pieces. Like Stan realizing “oh all those times I had a CRUSH on that guy I didn’t just admire him” sort of thing

And it’d be a very personal journey as well, I can’t imagine Stan being open or talking abt his sexuality while he’s still tryna figure it out, mostly bc he isn’t sure abt himself and he doesn’t feel secure enough to be open, plus he’s probably shy abt that kinda thing in the beginning.

And honestly I prefer Stan exploring his sexuality with Wendy or Kenny—I have a whole hc that he’d be uncomfortable with talking to kyle about it, not bc he has anything against Kyle—it’s just that Kyle sometimes gets too in his own head, gets uncomfortable with serious conversations, can sometimes leave Stan behind, and can think he knows Stan best/talks over Stan. I can’t see Kyle being someone patient enough to let Stan talk without adding in his own two cents and confusing or frustrating Stan, and Stan needs someone attentive and non-judgmental to talk things through

Wendy (esp w Wendy as a v knowledgeable queer person) is a good choice to help Stan out bc she’s very compassionate, emotionally sensitive, and wants to help.

(Going into hc-zone:) wendy might also fall into the thing Kyle does where she talks over Stan, in that she knows *so much* she thinks she can guess what Stan feels and kind of flood him with too much information unintentionally. It’s not a bad thing to try and inform him about gender stuff and bi/pan/ply/omnisexualities but Stan isn’t ready for all that yet. And I think Stan is also the kind of person who wouldn’t be super comforted by labels and facts the way Wendy is. Where Wendy likes having specific definitions to explain how she feels, Stan is overwhelmed by those labels bc he’ll overthink them and doubt himself

...which is why I prefer Stan exploring this stuff with Kenny, bc I have a really elaborate kind of relationship development between those two that could blossom if they let themselves grow closer, esp during times where Eric and Kyle are off doing Their Thing. Kenny being someone who’s incredibly sure of who he is, being a great listener, very emotionally sensitive, able to keep a secret, and able to read people well and handle situations between people. Ken is the type who can listen to Stan w/o judging him or making him feel overwhelmed, and knows when to ask questions and when to back off, etc. I have a whole thing abt how their developing relationship can be incredibly mutually beneficial but Yanno that’s for the next bulletpoint 👌 basically Kenny could be someone Stan can explore himself with, and not be pressured

And then there’s Stan’s gender identity which I also Love. I love nb Stan. Just in the kind of nb where he doesn’t want to give himself a specific label, he just wants to Be Himself, whatever that means. I hc Stan as primarily male-aligned nb, in that he’s most comfortable with being a guy or being perceived as a guy and generally presenting masc, but a lot of that is in Stan being more *socially* comfortable presenting that way, instead of him feeling more “like a guy.” I hc Stan to primarily use he/him pronouns but to also be ok w/ she/they depending on the situation. I think Wendy and Kenny would also help him w this, in hc’ing both of them as nb as well (though of course their identities manifest in different ways and they’re comfortable doing different things than Stan)

(Also I love Stan using goth stuff to explore his gender and presentation....using a more feminine name like Raven?? Being able to use nor androgynous ways of dressing?? I lov him sm ;;o;;)

(Plus I have a big hc I love where Stan tries to come out to his parents and he’s bracing for impact for the response and BOTH TIMES his dad STEALS THE SPOTLIGHT bc it’s like “ugh, what is it with kids these days coming up with FAKE TERMS for stuff that’s JUST NORMAL. It’s NORMAL to think about wanting to kiss other guys Stan duh” and Sharon and Stan just. “No....dad....straight men don’t want to kiss other men wtf” and later it’s “ok Stan I believe you about the bisexuality thing but this nonbinary thing?? Again it’s NORMAL!! To feel like a bit of both and want to be seen as a woman sometimes” and Stan’s just pinching his nose again.

He was afraid of becoming his father but. Not like this. Nb bi KINGS)

2) Otp: STENNY!!!!! I love stenny sm. (But I’ll get into that in a bit but first)

S/tendy is also really really cute, but imo it’s the pinnacle of school love. I feel like Stan and Wendy can be good together and genuinely like each other’s company, but I feel like their life goals and ambitions would stray, and they wouldn’t be completely compatible in a way that would be really sustainable as adults. It’s not a bad thing, and I think they could absolutely remain close friends w/o necessarily needing a romantic relationship

Anyways. I adore Stenny. A lot of it again revolves around some development hc stuff I have, mostly in how compatible and mutually beneficial the relationship can be. I like imagining them growing closer and more intimate w each other in a very private kind of way. Like them hanging out one on one, and eventually that evolves into texting, calling, sleeping over w just the two of them, etc, until they have this entire close relationship that’s all their own

And with compatibility, I think both Kenny and Stan are incredibly compassionate, sensitive, thoughtful people who can just sit and enjoy some silence. Unlike Eric and Kyle, who need constant mental stimulation—who need to be DOING things—Stan and Kenny can just...relax. And I think their sensitivity can also lead them to be able to support each other emotionally. Both of them can listen to each other, both of them are capable of having serious conversations and being patient through those conversations, both of them are perceptive and sensitive enough to recognize what the other is feeling and to have some idea of what to do about it. I think they’re both good at knowing how to take care of people (rather than someone like Kyle, who likes taking care of others but doesn’t really know how to do it very well; he’s like his mother in that way, he’s good at obvious stuff like injuries and crying but he can be kinda overbearing, presumptuous, and indelicate abt the quieter stuff but ENOUGH abt Kyle AHJSKDKF)

I think stenny is strong also in how the two can help one another. Kenny is realistic but careful and can provide support for Stan when he’s going through a rough patch. Kenny shows up to Stan’s room in the middle of the night with water and snacks and listens to Stan rant or just *is there* to show Stan he’s not alone. Kenny answers Stan’s 2am texts when Stan can’t sleep and stays on the phone with him all night to keep him company

And Stan is earnest in how much he cares abt his friends and would just...really easily show he cares w/o any judgement. Stan saves seats for Kenny, sends him “be safe!” texts when Ken goes home, offers his bed and his home to Kenny and Karen when they need a place to stay, and it never has an air of pity or self-righteousness about it—it’s just Stan genuinely being nice. And that kind of attention and care is a breath of fresh air for Ken, whos usually forgotten

And both of them are just. They’re a shoulder to cry on, or a pillar to lean against. And that’s smth they need—Stan to feel listened to, Kenny bc he takes on so much stress. They can be a rock for each other.

3) brotp: I love Stan making friends honestly ;;o;;

like I said in my kyle analysis I love the super best friends a lot ;;o;; they really care abt each other and don’t want to lose each other which is really nice. I just...love them being best friends + brotherly towards each other

But I also like Stan making friends outside of the m4—with the girls or the goth kids or even with someone like Tweek. (Though I cant really see him hanging out w “Craig’s gang” mostly bc there’s this air of exclusivity w the “groups,” like an established dynamic that no one really likes to cross, bc they’ve all jus Known each other for so long and have solidified those groups + dynamics—though I can see him also befriending the individual members of Craig’s gang, esp token or jimmy)

His friendship w the goth kids means a lot to me HONESTLY I love the idea of them remaining friends bc they vibe together well—esp when they get a better hang of mental health stuff, and they can talk abt gender and coping mechanisms and cool movies they’ve watched ;;o;; i think being with the goth kids could be a really important part of Stan forming his personal identity and while I don’t think they’d be *best friends* I can still see them as ppl he’d invite to his parties or to the movies and stuff

4) notp: s...st/yle, bc like I said in my kyle analysis I just. Can’t see it. I think kyle hurts Stan too much and that they need to work on their friendship, and that they’re much more compatible as friends than as anything else. I much much prefer a brotherly relationship where they’d feel weird even thinking about kissing each other lol

My other notps for Stan are less about me not liking the ship and more abt me like. Not wanting the characters w anyone else but who I already ship them with. I don’t like Stan with Craig or Tweek bc I can’t see those two w anyone but each other, for example. (Plus I have a lotta hc’s abt craig and his feelings for Tweek ;;o;; craig is a one man kinda guy lmao)

Though I do think Stan is extremely compatible with lots of characters. Idk why ppl ship Kyle w everyone when I don’t think kyle is v compatible with ppl—Stan is def someone who could date like. Just abt anyone. I don’t like Stan ships that aren’t stenny or st/endy but I can at least understand them. Stan is just really nice and approachable and can get along w a lotta people

5) First hc I think of: oh I love the hc that Stan sometimes writes his own music, but he’s kinda shy abt his voice so he doesn’t sing very often.

Or hc that he has a bit of a “dad bod” when he gets older. And the chubbier he is, the happier and more relaxed he is ;;o;; (Bc if Stan is too aware of his body and trying to work out to get the “perfect” figure, he’ll stress over it)

Or Stan growing up to breed service dogs ;;o;; (thank u magnus burnsides for this PERFECT idea)

6) how I relate to this character: I’ve kinda incorporated my own gender stuff into my interpretation of Stan (though I relate more to my gender-interpretation of Kenny)

But I think.....hm. It’s kinda hard to pick out a way I relate to Stan bc I’m so invested in seeing him grow and develop it doesn’t feel like it relates to me. Probably tho I relate to his weird balance of loyalty vs exasperation. Stan loves his friends and family and will do a lot for them. But my god. Sometimes they’re all so stupid. Randy being randy is obvious but remember when Kyle had a breakdown over the fucking Facebook farm game?? Stan is so tired

7) what gives me secondhand embarrassment abt Stan: uhhhh hm. Well, sometimes he’s kinda ignorant and goes along w what everyone else is doing, but honestly I don’t really cringe over Stan. He’s learning and trying and I can’t really fault him for that so much

8) cinnamon roll or problematic fave: cinnamon roll ;;o;; Stan is someone who’s usually pretty genuine and I love his role as the “straight man” in a lot of the stories. He’s been through a lot but I want him to just...be happy ;;o;; I love portrayals of Stan where he can be happy?? Like yeah he can be a cynic but he’s also really compassionate and I jus ;;o;;

#south park #long post #creo talks #anonymous #stan marsh

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nix-needs-coffee · 5 years

Text

Torrid Affairs - Ch. 3

Anne goes too far.

Ch. 1 Ch. 2

AO3 Link

Katherine had grown accustomed to finding her phone in Anne’s possession over the next several days. It had occurred so many times that her outrage at the indignation had melted away into something more akin to mild irritation at the inconvenience.

For a time, she refused to let her device out of her sight. She kept it tucked tightly in a pocket, under a pillow, or in her hand, but needs must when performing in barely there costumes. When Anne began picking the locks to gain access to it, Katherine had to let it go. She no longer cared about where she put her phone down. She knew where she needed to go to find it. Anne’s inability to keep her volume at a reasonable level always led her straight to it.

Interventions led by Jane and Parr had been to no avail. Mediation between the parties had only amplified the behavior they had tried to quash. Both women, irritated by Katherine’s repeated claims that her phone had been stolen yet again, had bowed out of the fight, leaving Katherine to fend for herself.

Katherine had also given up on changing her passcode. After Anne had cracked it the first three times, she knew she had lost that battle. She wasn’t necessarily hiding anything on her phone; however, the invasion of her privacy set her nerves on edge. Her skin crawled with the idea that someone was trawling through her conversations, pictures, and files. Her stomach clenched at the thought that Anne had full access to all of her social media accounts. She tried not to dwell on it for too long to keep her anxiety at bay.

Eventually, she became desensitized to the intrusion on her personal affairs.

That was until several weeks after Anne had first stolen her phone. All of her pent up feelings, dissociated to keep her numb, had surfaced in one moment, at one sight.

What had turned her into sweating, tense mess was seeing Catherine of Aragon in on Anne’s scheme as well. She had walked into their dressing room to retrieve her phone and found Catherine peering over Anne’s shoulder as she typed something. Both girls had been giggling uncontrollably.

“Give me that,” she demanded, reaching to snatch the phone out of Anne’s hand, but Catherine beat her to it.

Guarding the phone from Katherine’s view, she swiped several times.

“It’s alright. It’s already done,” Anne piped in.

Catherine hesitated a moment before holding out the phone with a smug, “Here,” for Katherine to take.

“I expected better of you, Catherine. Her I understand, but you?” She didn’t even attempt to hide the wounded look on her face conveying how deeply she was hurt by Catherine’s betrayal. She had come to expect underhanded dealings by Anne, but the lofty pinnacle of morality that Catherine claimed to be a part of was directly opposed to such a breach of trust.

Katherine felt violated. Alarmed, she grumbled, “What were you doing?” She knew any answer they could provide would not mollify her.

“Don’t look so glum, Kitty! You’ll find out soon enough!” Anne appeared downright euphoric.

Holding her phone in her hand, she watched the display darken before going black, her reflection in the glass marred by frustrated tears.

***

Katherine walked home alone that night, giving the other girls a wide breadth of space and time. She fell further and further behind until they were long out of sight. Walking past the pub just at the top of their street, she heard Anne’s elated cheers and felt herself being tugged inside the dimly lit bar.

“You might not have noticed, but we’ve had something of a small project in the works.” Anne, delighted with herself, dragged Katherine deeper into the pub.

“If your project was anything other than finding yourself on the sorry end of a swordsman’s swing again, I would call it unsuccessful,” Katherine only half-joked, feeling an unfamiliar and entirely out-of-character desire to take up a more murderous path in life.

Anne wasn’t listening. “-and now he’s that one there. Right under that horrid lamp!”

Katherine gawked at her. “Who is where now?”

“Your date!”

“My what?”

“I never took you for an idiot. I mean, not really. But now I might have to,” Anne rubbed at her temples and began to speak slowly, as if Katherine were incapable of understanding her words. “Your. Date.”

“Why do I have a date?”

“Because me and Catherine set you up! Weren’t you listening to me?”

“Do I ever?”

Anne leaned her head against the wooden back of a booth, not caring that it was sticky with an unidentifiable substance, and bounced her head against it. “Look. He’s right there!”

“I’m not sure what you expect me to do.” Katherine had no clue how to proceed with this scenario, nor did she have any interest in the man below the gaudy lamp in a cheap pub.

“I don’t know. Maybe start with ‘Hi. I’m Katherine.’”

She looked around to find Catherine smiling broadly at her from a booth in the far corner and gesturing in the man’s direction with her drink. Katherine presumed she was trying to communicate that she wanted her to buy the man a drink. Making her way past the tables, Katherine set off in the direction of the man before making a brisk escape through the fire exit at the side of the pub. Never more glad to be wearing her flats, she made a break for it through the narrow alley knowing Anne would try to cut her off from the front doors, picking her way over glass shards and leaping over puddles shining in the moonlight.

Anne nearly had her in reach when she emerged from the alley, but fortune, it seemed, had been on her side. Nothing but the wind from Anne’s hand grasping for her touched her as she gave everything she had into getting home.

***

A warm shower did her wonders. Katherine was able to calm her frazzled nerves and her simmering desire for homicide cooled. With her hair wrapped in a towel and I’m a warm set of pajamas on, Katherine re-emerged from the bathroom feeling refreshed and able to find the humor in the scenario she had escaped from.

She was turning the handle to enter her bedroom when she was once again yanked off her equilibrium by Anne.

“I didn’t want you to be unprepared?”

“Unprepared? God, Anne, what now?”

Anne didn’t elaborate, choosing instead to pull her into an awkward hug and tucking a small wrapper into her waistband. Katherine pushed her off just as quickly as she had latched onto her, and Anne disappeared into her own bedroom.

Pulling the small package out of her waistband, Katherine’s nose scrunched in disgust at the realization that she was holding a condom. Alleviating some of her feelings, she chucked it at Anne’s door before returning to the solace of her bedroom.

Throwing her door open, she was ready to collapse into her bed and forget about how the day had unfolded, but was held to the spot by the sight in front of her.

Her bed was occupied.

By the man from the pub.

Katherine stood, wide-eyed, staring at the sight, unable to react.

“Hey beautiful,” he greeted her, lifting the duvet up as if the sight of him unclothed beneath it would entice her to join him.

The action was all she needed to remind her limbs how to function. She spun on her heel, storming out of her room. Anne’s door rustled a bit as the occupants of the room shoved each other to get a look through the inch opening, Katherine threw the full force of her weight into it, enjoying the cracking sound it made as it bounced off both of the women’s heads.

“He took off his pants. I’m leaving. He’s your problem.” Katherine deadpanned, unable to enjoy the sight of both girls clutching their heads in pain before she went to seek shelter in Anna’s room.

***

Catherine had to admit, setting Katherine up on a date had not been one of her wisest or kindest ideas that she had made in recent memory. She hadn’t expected the events to unfold in the manner in which they had, and the resulting anger and humiliation that Katherine felt was undeserving. Guilt had certainly settled in, though that was well after the annoyance of trying to dismiss Katherine’s spurned stud.

They had yet to find where he had left his pants.

Anne was already babbling about the next phase of her plan, and Catherine couldn’t help but feel the irritation creeping back up her spine. “Haven’t you given up yet? Please, stop embarrassing yourself,” she begged, holding her head in her hands. The lump just above her hairline a painful reminder of what happens when she lets Anne get too carried away.

“If rather be dead," Anne stated matter of fact.

“Then I have some good news for you,” Catherine mumbled, not sure if it would be herself of Katherine that dealt the killing blow.

#six fanfiction #sorry for being late #this took longer than expected

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roxannepolice · 5 years

Note

Counterpoint re: the framing of Rey killing Ben. Thhe example I think of is Buffy killing Angel, which was portrayed as angsty and tragic but also as the heroine growing up and choosing the “greater good” at a personal cost. I don’t necessarily like it, but I could see something like that playing out if Rey killed Ben—i.e. it could definitely be portrayed as a tragedy we were meant to feel bad about.

Well, this is what I call suppressed knight paladin Rey scenario. I think the phenomenon of people admitting that there was something between Rey and Ben in tlj buuuut it was only there for Rey to overcome and emerge as the absolute moral pinnacle has something to do with a weird nostalgia over the prequel!jedi? As if Lucas really didn't bring home that they were flawed (I'm not really a fan of they were good only because they were better than sith, oh hell no, but Yoda went apage satanas at a ten year old for missing his mom ffs) and went far away from what they were supposed to be, abandoning compassion in favour of disappearing up their unattached asses? Like, ok, maybe the reading that Anakin was a nigredo of repressed unconscious swallowing the conscious mind which is in itself detrimental to the psyche though a path to self-realisation requires a bit of Jung 101, but the sudden idealisation baffles me. And this leads us to Luke being the absolute miracle working Galahad (also, this is why if he can't help someone then they must be hopeless) while an actual realistic jedi role model is prequel!Obi-Wan, whom Rey is on the journey to become. And this is also why so many are blind to Rey's trauma, because her way of coping without her parents and living on food of hope and righteousness seems to be a wildlife unattached jedi training.

Mind you, Disney isn't exactly helpful here, both in-universe and out of it which I'd cynically blame on the Clone Wars era being a lore merchandise gold mine. I'll forever (or at least till december) have qualms about Luke dragging the jedi order coming off as being there only for Rey to contradict him. And there are times I kinda expect some official Twitter account to inform us that the jedi really weren't celibate, they were just supposed to not be passionate about their spouses (which is how we have traceable jedi lineages other than Skyfam to be suggested about Rey all of a sudden).

#asks #rey #reylo duel #suppressed knight paladin rey #cleaning up the askbox #star wars rant

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curupiracue · 5 years

Text

LET’S INTERVIEW A SERIAL KILLER! (OH BOY!)

“Oh dear… You two managed to avoid my trap… I was hoping that the pain from losing your fingers, both physical and psychological, would dull your combat capability, but, ah well. I must congratulate you. I am now trapped.”

“Wait, trapped? Really? You had no other plans?”

“I mean… I was improvising...”

“Nah nah nah nah! You should have had a plan B at least! You put yourself in such an awful situation, and got nothing out of it?! Really?! Your plans suck. You suck! You’re a loser, an imbecile, a failure as a serial killer, a failure as a HUMAN BEING, a complete sucker…!”

“Ugh… Er, wasn’t one insult enough?”

“I’ve got more~” I said, clasping my hands and smiling.

“Hah hah hah…! No thanks...”

“Anywaaaayyy… So we finally meet, face-to-face.” I declared, taking a step closer to the killer and having Novalue stay behind me.

“It’s a pleasure too, is what I would say, but I’m afraid it would be just for politeness’ sake… I mean, how can meeting your worst enemy and possible-life-ender possibly be a pleasure?”

“I mean, it sure is for me~ Probs ‘cause you’re neither to me, and the fact that I have my reasons.”

“Oh?”

“Namely… INTERVIEWING A SERIAL KILLER! (Squees)”

“What.”

“OMG OMG OMG! Like, how’s life? Is it like anybody else's’? What are your views about this world? Do you have friends, true friends, like friends friends? How was your childhood like!? Huh huh huh?!”

“Nim, calm down...”

“I’m too fucking excited for that!” I said, clasping his hands and getting close, while turning my back to the killer.

“Breaaaathe...” He said, while putting a finger on my lips.

“AAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhh… Whew. Ok, I’m calm now. So let's get this little interview going!"

"Eto... Por hora... What's... hmm... onore-sama no namae wa?

"Hahahah... Well, aren't you an amusing one. Ultimately, it doesn't matter... because I'm about to eliminate you.

"Um, I'm sorry... is it Mr. Wellarentyouanamusingoneultimatelyitdoesntmatter Becauseimabouttoeliminateyou or HahahahWellarentyouanamusingoneultimatelyitdoesntmatter Becauseimboredofsayingstupidlylongnames?

"..." The killer seemed somewhat shocked, and thus stayed in silence.

"..." Novalue is not shocked at all, and thus stayed in silence. ...Jerk.

“Oh, sorry. Is it MISS Wellarentyouanamusingoneultimatelyitdoesntmatter Becauseimabouttoeliminateyou?”

“Oh, come now, don’t go making these sort of jokes. They might not be transphobic per se, but they do help in maintaining the overall environment, you know? And were it to be one here, I’m sure a biologically male girl would be at least a bit offended.”

“Ah, bueno! Boa observação! But, it could also offend someone who, regardless of their biological sex, identifies as a guy or a girl occasionally, ya’ know?” I replied, internally triggered.

“Hm? And there is such a thing?”

“There sure is~ It’s called genderfluid, if I recall. There’s also the gender neutral, people who don’t identify with any gender, and a buncha’ other stuff!”

“Ah, how nice! I see that today is actually a good day, for I have learned something new and of value!”

“...Irredeemably crazy, both of you.” Novalue said.

"What do you mean, kono hijo de puta! I" pose "am" pose "very" pose "insulted" pose "by" pose "your" pose "statement" pose "of" you're probably tired of this, aren't you? "hatred" fuck you though~ pose "towards" pose "my!" POSING INTENSIFIES "person"

“Er… Hahahahah… anyways… hah… Since you insist: It’s Ienorb. Ienorb Yenruoj. Remember it well, for it is the name of the man that will kil-”

“NOW, you’re cooperating~ Also, shut up. Sooo… what are your motivations for murder?! Do you have a tragic backstory?!”

“Meh, not really.”

“...Meh?”

“I simply desire for others to be killed by my hand. I don’t necessarily want to see them dead, nor do I want to see them killed by me, though.”

“Ah.” ...Well… I’m in a disappointed mood right now. A murderous disappointed mood.

“If there is anything...”

“MM?!”

“...Is that I simply desire to see art in it’s completitude...”

“Huh? Be more specific...?”

“Because… Isn’t art something that deserves better than a void? A void, an empty outer space where all it’s practitioner can do is float, and float aimlessly… No. Art must be like a science, with guidelines, and objectives to fulfill! But which are which? What is a fail, and what is a win? I wish to discern that, because otherwise all that is artistic shall be meaningless and pointless.”

“(sigh...) for an artist, you sure are a dumbass… Can you paint over what’s already been painted? The basis for all art is a blank canvas. Out of all the numbers, 0 is the only one that is infinite.”

“Is that right? But I myself wonder if you really think like that. It’s not restricted merely to art either. Morals, values, interpretations, the entirety of the abstract, and perhaps even the “objective” observable reality. Can you really accept a world where all belief is a lie?”

“...It’s not about whether one accepts it or not. The truth is unflinching to any and all feelings. Besides, even if one’s beliefs cannot match a reality by default, or if they can but you can’t be sure of it… You can still try your best. I think painting is more fun than having paintings. Maybe there’s no objectifiable meaning to your art, but people can create ones that they agree on, or have fun trying to do so. “What is art?” They might question. And they say that this is what makes a win, and they say that this is what makes a fail, and they argue. Such is life, beneath the curtain of the lies and false promises of truth.”

“Outrageous! What is this madness of half truth that you propose!? And even if “true”, why must your theory have it decided by oth-”

“Ultimately, does this really matter when you’re killing people for it?” Novalue butted in in the conversation, realising it was getting long.

“(Sigh...) Mr… Sorry, what’s your name…?”

“Novalue. And he is Nim.”

“Mr. Novalue, there are no consequences to my actions. My victims are made to disappear, don’t you realise? As it is so, none can be sad about their demises… I cause no misfortune at all, except for the removal of life. And what is life worth, anyways? It’s merely a way of creating feelings, which in optimal scenarios are positive, on both one’s self and others. A factory of happiness and work, which in itself is nothing but a way to acquire more happiness. Isn’t that an utilitarian way to look at it? It has value, but it’s not sacred, and said value can be negative as well.”

That… actually sounds... pretty reasonable. Horrible... but reasonable...

“Hold on.” Novalue once again interrupted: “You say that, but it’s quite convenient for you that they “are made to disappear”. Do you really believe any of that? Or are you merely trying to justify your actions making use of selfish acts?”

“Even if I am… What is it that is being punished here? Me by my actions, or me by my intentions? To judge someone by their intentions is not only problematic, as they’re most likely obscure, but also unnecessary: someone evil that does good, or at least doesn’t do evil, is perfectly harmless, and as such, there is no reason to engage in brutal acts that only result in unhappiness. Specially with psychic powers: it might have been fair two centuries ago, but now, in a time where’d be impossible to imprison me… Will you really criticise my murders when you’re about to commit one yourselves? No… Mr. Novalue, what you accused me of doing actually applies more to you than it does for me.”

(The prism spins, and senseless light is reflected with a different sense)

Not. I was just scared that Nim might be sympathizing with you too much, Ienorb.

“Huh? But you’re going to kill us as well. And you can’t use Shadowy Killer to eras-”

“How do you kn-”

“Shut up. And well… Do you have anyone that would miss you?”

“Well… I contribute to society...”

“While keeping a hell of a low profile.”

“Geh… Ok, only with small things...”

“So, if you’re wrong, we need to kill you to stop the murders. And if you’re right, then we don’t need to kill you, but there is also no reason not to do so, and in addition, you shouldn’t kill us.”

“(sigh...) Well, I don’t care that much if I’m in the wrong. I’ll fight for my life, if need be. However… Should you really risk your existences to do something so very pointless? Think… What’s life? What’s death? What does those things mean to you, if anything? I must survive… But merely so that I can reach the pinnacle of art, that which I’m convinced exists. Perhaps, just like you two, I’m being cowardly and running away from a lack of meaning. But, that is what I’ve dedicated my life to. And as such, we must fight.”

#stories #Mywhatamentalworld

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adoranymph · 4 years

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Relatable.

I love fantasy. I love battles of magic. I love clashes of light magic and dark magic. But, in the hindsight of realism, the use of one side using “dark magic”, a side that’s otherwise composed of both good and bad complexities, mind, can often prompt a raise of the eyebrow from the reader/audience. One that asks, “Why would you use something when you know it’s dark magic? Why would you use something so ‘obviously evil’?” Kind of like why would you keep trusting Saruman the White the minute you saw the kind of tower he lived in.

Now we come to The Dragon Prince, from, in part, Aaron Ehasz, from Avatar: the Last Airbender TV series renown. Arguably, it’s a much better successor in the spiritual sense than Legend of Korra was in the literal sense (though that may change if I change my mind one day and decide to give in and watch Korra). Then comes me, deciding to give Dragon Prince a shot now that I have no excuse to avoid the 3D animation style based on principle, given I’ve forayed into Land of the Lustrous, Beastars! and Blame! and liked them fine. Though, arguably, Land of the Lustrous and Beastars! are pinnacles of the 3D anime, but nonetheless, given The Dragon Prince is a 3D anime style (so anime in the same way that Avatar: the Last Airbender was), and given that I rewatched Avatar: the Last Airbender again recently and revisited that unfillable void, I figured I might as well dig in.

And already by episode 2, it’s clear how far we’ve come in realistically complicating the typical good forces vs. evil forces story in high fantasy. It struck me when King Harrow and his advisor Virin were arguing over the use of a form of–what else?–dark magic to use that could save Harrow’s life. He knows he’s about to be assassinated by Moonshadow elves, and Virin proposes a plan to save his life using the tenant of dark magic, that is, sacrificing another’s life to preserve his own. Harrow refuses, having already demonstrated that he’s been struggling with his allowance of “dark magic” being used in the past for the “greater good” of protecting his kingdom. That it’s the use of dark magic all this time that’s led to this critical point. On the surface, that might prompt another, “Well duh, it’s dark magic, of course it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass!”

But, first, some context.

In The Dragon Prince, magic is drawn from “Primal Sources”. So, the elements. Because this has the earmarks of a piece of work influenced by a previous work. We go from Avatar: the Last Airbender and the four classic elements of Air, Water, Fire, and Earth, to The Dragon Prince and magic comes from the Moon, the Sun, the Stars (even the sun is also a star, as you know), the Ocean, the Earth (not our Earth, anymore than it was in Avatar: the Last Airbender, ha), and the Sky. And this continent in this fantasy land, called Xadia, was rich with all this stuff, being all these Sources are of nature itself. Makes sense.

Magical creatures like elves and dragons got all that on lock from the moment they’re born, but humans, of course, not so much, since they’re not inherently born with it. And, of course, humans are not necessarily down with not getting a natural cut in magic, and eventually learn to draw from an as-yet-undiscovered seventh Primal Source, that being Dark. As you do.

And being that it’s Dark Magic, there has to be a few prices for using it. First is that doing Dark Magic means sacrificing the life of a magical creature in order to draw power, rather than the natural means drawing from the Moon, the Sky, etc that elves and other magical creatures can do innately. The other is that using Dark Magic is detrimental to one’s physical health (surprise, surprise). And of course you can use Dark Magic to counteract this, but, of course, that just feeds a vicious cycle, because that’s how that goes.

You know when you’re evil when you look at butterflies like they’re snacks.

Here’s the thing though: later on we learn that there is a way for humans to perform magic without either resorting to Dark Magic or managing to get their hands on a Primal Stone, a stone that contains the essence of a Primal Source. Like there’s one for Sky Magic that contains an actual storm inside it. Thus, a human drawing from that can perform Sky Magic.

The other way that’s discovered later though is basically through hard work understanding how that Primal Source works, its mechanics and relationship with the rest of nature. Dark Magic meanwhile is characterized as a cheating shortcut. For those who have an appreciation of efficiency then, one can understand why anyone would use something called “Dark Magic”, that otherwise has a, “Come on, you’re really gonna use that?” vibe. And gives further credence to the idea that anyone who seems overall a good person can quickly fall down the rabbit hole of “turning evil” by using “dark magic”–i.e., the faster way, the “creative solution”.

With Dark Magic, it’s not just characterized as something that’s spooky-dark that makes your eyes go evil-eye-black, but also as cheating, as a shortcut to actually putting in the work to use power. Because, as it turns out, humans can do magic without having to resort to the methods only Dark Magic offers, they just have to put in the work to do it. Cheating is bad, fam!

Thus, we already see something labeled as “dark magic” as being used as honestly relatable, not unlike the same quandary of using something like a nuclear bomb (or two) to put an end to a war like WWII.

This is something I’m struggling with in my own writing of another manuscript I’ve got on the zero draft docket at the moment, one involving a fantasy world taking place on a continent of nations on the brink of war with each other, one that explores the complex inter-political intrigues and fundamentals of war therein. And The Dragon Prince has already given me plenty of clarity on these concepts, including why a nation of essentially good people, helmed by an essentially good ruler who is essentially a good person, would use something labeled “dark magic”. Definitely something to keep in mind if you’re having your own good time struggling with the use of less-than-moral methods in war, fantasy or otherwise.

Also, lowkey this is big rec from me to watch The Dragon Prince.

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Keeping this link up to their donation page!

Dark Magic: How the Dragon Prince Uses a Lense of Realism on an “Obviously Evil” Trope I love fantasy. I love battles of magic. I love clashes of light magic and dark magic.

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bluephoenixdruidicprincess · 5 years

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The Orville 1x03, About a Girl -- Thoughts

So here's my thoughts on The Orville 1x03, About a Girl. There will be spoilers.

Well, this episode certainly was different. I don't know if I would call it "good" or a step above what we'd been getting currently, but it was interesting to watch nonetheless.

The episode presents a moral dilemma that definitely has repercussions on both sides and I enjoyed that. Unfortunately, the dilemma wasn't super well-debated on either side. One side's argument didn't really make a point, he decided to go for the old politician's trick of talking in circles long enough that your audience will forget the initial point you were trying to make. And Kelly's arguments while having their own merit, they can't really stand on their own because a statistical argument can't be made based only on one subject. You have to have more than one subject to show a pattern. So what she did is really inconclusive data and couldn't be used in court. Granted, Kelly didn't have a whole lot of time so I can understand why her arguments came out the way they did. I'm just saying her arguments have holes in it that could be exploited easily and considered null and void based on how she executed it. I was on my debate team in high school, trust me, there's a million ways you can debunk statistics. They're kind of a rough argument to make especially when the moral dilemma revolves around individual behavior as this one does. Also, the show doesn't really go into it but what exactly does this sex change entail? Does the sex change affect everything? Also, this is an alien species so what exactly qualifies as this single sex species? What is it about them that makes them male? Do they have a penis or do they have something else that makes them male? Also, since it seems to be a somewhat common thing that females are born into this species, can they really call themselves a single sex species especially if the parents are given a choice to give the operation to their daughter? I mean we came across three instances in one episode and all three examples are alive at the same time. And it seems like the society has set a precedent that they don't make all females undergo this, it's highly encouraged but it's up to the parents. So it kind of reads like this while being uncommon, is not something that's super rare. There's just a lot of background information about this situation that isn't being inferred.

Also, it was a nice little subversion that our heroes lost the tribunal. Typically, the heroes win or find some way of winning but not here, not really. The operation is done on the baby but the parents are going to stand by their child and support their child in any way they can so maybe that's a win for them? But either way, nice subversion, I really wasn't expecting it.

I am going to say that The Orville is the pinnacle of unprofessionalism, though. This is a very serious, very personal matter and pretty much everyone knew about it. I would not be comfortable with that. You can have this kind of debate with your commanding officer but that should be between you two. It shouldn't be something the entire ship knows about.

And again, with this show's constant references, why must those references come from our century. It bothers me, you know. It really takes me out of the fantasy that apparently the only things worth mentioning are things that happened this century. Uts not like the show has 300 years ahead of us they can reference or even more hundreds of years behind us they can reference.

But overall, not a bad episode. This was the episode people kept on telling me was going to change my viewpoint on the show. While I don't think it did that, it was nice to see the show kind of experimenting with different types of stories. I don't think it necessarily succeeded here but it was a fairly decent structured episode, it had things that kept me engaged, so I give this episode a B-. It wasn't exactly great but there was something there.

#the orville

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thelegendofclarke · 7 years

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can you explain why you still like octavia? i'm not trying to troll you or anything i am just wondering. i used to really like her a lot and she was one of my favorites but i just don't like her character that much anymore so i am wondering what people still like about her?

Hey Anonny! Yeah sure, since you have asked so nicely I guess I can talk about my thoughts on Octavia…

Ok so ~caveat lectors~ before I start: I usually avoid answering questions like this tbh because 1) I tend to get really rambley, and 2) I feel like people have a tendency to equate liking a character with condoning/agreeing with all their actions and trying to excuse/justify everything they do. That’s NOT how I personally approach liking a character. So yeah, I preface this by saying that even though I love O and find her character really interesting, I absolutely don’t agree with everything she has done or every choice she has made.

So one of the first things I find really interesting about Octavia is how she is kind of a commentary on what happens when people are taught to deal with their problems/emotions through violence. At some point in the series, O has acted out physically against the very people who she loves most in the world: Bellamy, Lincoln, and Indra. As I discuss below, I think she uses force: a) because she never learned that it was wrong (she has actually been taught to use it as a coping mechanism), and b) because she never learned to express herself in healthier ways.

O spent the first 14 years of her life living in a hole in the floor; her brother and her mother were her entire world and the only people she had ever interacted with. Also, given how the other Delinquents reacted to her in “Join or Die,” it doesn’t look like she was permitted to interact with any of them either after she was locked up. Someone who lives such a solitary life like that probably isn’t going to have learned very well how to deal with their emotions or have a lot of emotional maturity. Then she was sent to the ground and she, along with all the other Delinquents, are basically immediately exposed to using violence as a means to survive. I mean Lincoln was probably the biggest marshmallow stuffed teddy bear on the whole show, yet he was the one who ultimately taught O to fight and to kill. Indra, who was probably one of the biggest influences on O’s life outside of Bellamy and Lincoln, taught her “a warrior does not mourn those she’s lost until after the battle is won.” Before Lincoln turns himself in to Pike O tells him “We fight together;” this is how she shows her support, this is how she shows she loves him and she is with him. Action, and often violent action, is how Octavia has learned to deal with things. But I think what Octavia’s character shows us is that this is a destructive way to live. It’s not only destructive to the individual, but it will end up being destructive to society, such as the grounder one, where children are taught to be warriors. Changing this society built around war and violence (something Clarke and Lexa wanted to do and Luna is working to do) is something I think will end up being important.

I also think O’s tendency toward aggression is tied to her lack of self-worth, as this post sums up perfectly:

Octavia makes herself large, throwing her weight and her words around to claim as much space as possible, and that’s rooted in her life under the floor. She feels like she has to fight for everything because back when she didn’t fight, she got nothing. Just being a human – a friend, a girlfriend, a sister – is not enough for Octavia. She sees no merit to just being herself; that never got her anything before. She has to fight, or she’ll wind up with nothing again.

Society on The Ark made people feel powerless. It took away so much of their freedom of choice and identity and essentially dictated who and what they were, and as I talk about right below, I think O is a prime example of this. And I think one of her greatest fears is feeling powerless like that again.

Another thing I find interesting about O’s character and her arc is how she has basically gone completely from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of agency. If you think about it, Octavia is the only Delinquent who was locked up, and then subsequently sent to the ground, through no fault or actions of her own. Her crime was existing. Every other Delinquent made conscious choices that resulted in them getting put in the Sky Box and then sent to Earth. Even Wells, who’s crime was the actual cutest and lamest crime I have ever heard of, still committed an actual crime with the express goal of being sent to Earth. In the Ark, Octavia lived a life of essentially total submission; she was completely controlled by the wills of those around her and basically had no free will of her own. Now we see her moving into a stage that almost seems to be complete rebellion. She’s pretty much saying “fuck it” to everyone else and their expectations and doing what she wants regardless of the consequences or who she hurts… I don’t think either of these are the true Octavia. Personally, I want to see O find a balance between the two; I think that’s where she’ll find herself.

I also kind of see O’s arc so far as a ~How Far the Mighty Have Fallen~ kind of thing, and I think the cave scene with Bellamy in “Fallen” is the pinnacle example. During season 1 “Contents Under Pressure” when Bellamy had Lincoln chained up and beat him O was appalled. Yet at the end of season 3, we see her do the exact same thing when it is Bellamy chained to the wall and she is the one doing the beating. I think that parallel shows exactly how much O has changed since season 1, and not necessarily for the better. And I think it was also about how people can, in moments of extreme sorrow or desperation, let their emotions get the better of them and lash out and the consequences that may result from that. I can think of two other big examples of this in the series off the top of my head right now…

Finn, who was always a huge advocate for peace and non-violence and refused to hold a gun, holding a village of grounders hostage at gun point and killing some of them in season 2 when Clarke was missing.

Bellamy participating in the killing of the grounder army in season 3 after the massacre at Mount Weather.

Like other characters have, and will continue to do so I suspect, Octavia has reached her dark/breaking point. This is supposed to make us uncomfortable, this is supposed to make us squirm, we are supposed to be throwing shit at the TV and yelling “NO BB WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” through our tears… I do hope that, like Bellamy, Octavia gets a chance to redeem herself from this; but I don’t need her to have a redemption arc for me to still like and appreciate her character and what she contributes to the story.

I also feel that a lot of my ability to love and appreciate Octavia as a character is because I am good at separating fact from fiction. I don’t like O because I was to be her bff and have sleepovers and bake cupcakes (although I would totally be down for braiding each other’s hair!), I like her because I find her character and her arc and her journey interesting to watch and generally enjoyable. I understand that there are people who have a hard time with this, and I’m not even trying to be at all snarky or condescending here. I completely and totally understand and accept that some people have had experiences or relationships in their lives that can make certain types of media or stories or characters difficult to watch because it triggers an emotional reaction for them. Octavia beating up Bellamy was horrifying and heart wrenching to watch, but I see O and Bell as fictional characters and not real people going through this situation. I DO NOT agree with Octavia beating up Bellamy, I don’t think it was right in any way or that he ~had it coming~ or anything of the sort, nor do I agree with the way she has treated several other characters on several other occasions. But I’m also not going to completely write her off; Octavia is such an interesting character to me BECAUSE she is so adrift and is struggling so hard to process and work through what is happening around her and where she fits in. I just personally don’t need a character to be completely good or moral for me to like them, nor do I feel the compulsion to defend or justify every single choice made and action taken by the characters I like.

I realize that I am kind of glossing over O’s relationships with Lincoln and Bellamy and those dynamics here, but tbh my focus was on Octavia herself and her character. I know that her relationships, especially these two, have done a great deal to shape who she is. But idk to me that is just a completely separate discussion from this one.

And yep, this got superrr rambley… but I warned you!

P.S. if you are still curious or want to talk more about Octavia I definitely recommend checking out @raincityruckus if you haven’t already! She has written more articulately about O, and the Blake sibling in general, than I ever could.

#alys answers #pro octavia #i guess?#octavia blake #the 100 spoilers #the 100 #alys watches the 100 #long post

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lodelss · 5 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | January 2019 | 9 minutes (2,514 words)

In his satirical 1827 essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” Thomas de Quincey called himself a connoisseur of murder before ensuring us he hadn’t actually committed one himself. In her new book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, late author Michelle McNamara also reassures us that her interest is personal, not prurient (it originated with an unsolved crime in her childhood neighborhood). Most of us have excuses for our interest in true crime, as though enjoying it offered real insight into our own predilections. The quasi-religious impulse to consider this a perversion of society’s innate morality has led to a flurry of theories about the source of our fascination, with four main hypotheses recurring: true crime can be a cathartic conduit for our primal urges, a source of schadenfreude, a controlled environment to experience the thrill of fear, and way to arm us (women particularly) with the knowledge to keep ourselves safe. A psychologist, speaking to NPR in 2009, provided the perfect précis: “our fascination with crime is equaled by our fear of crime. It’s two sides of the same story.”

True crime is less embarrassing, like so many things, when it’s scrubbed clean. On my shelf, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s News of a Kidnapping and Dave Cullen’s Columbine stick out for how unobtrusive they are amidst the loudly stylized spines of Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, among others. With their unadorned print (no drips) and minimalist art (no claret), these tasteful soft covers pass for literature. They are comparable to “prestige” podcasts like Serial and S-Town and series like Making a Murderer and The Keepers, Netflix shows in which the classic hallmarks of true crime programs — overly explicit, overly emotive — are massaged into character-driven narratives for the graduate set. In the midst of this influx of classy crime content, watching throwbacks like Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly, in which survivors are tasked with reliving their abuse and tear-stained grief is the closeup du jour, starts to feel like an ignominious act.

In 2016, at the beginning of the true crime renaissance, The New Yorker asked Popular Crime author Bill James whether, regardless of the highbrow livery, it was fundamentally “distasteful” (New Yorker for “trashy”) to transform tragedy into entertainment. “Well, certainly there is something distasteful about it,” James said, but, “When there is a car wreck, we ask what happened to cause the car wreck.” That is to say: The crime itself is distasteful (or trashy), therefore it’s necessarily distasteful (or trashy) when we address it. So, either we can refuse to interrogate crime, full stop, or we can ensure that the grief we cause is for a greater good. It is a sort of trash balance — less exploitation, more justice — with only one bad ending instead of two.

* * *

True crime was lurid straight out of the birth canal. Born in the mid-sixteenth century, it was the offspring of two relatively new developments: criminal justice and the printing press. Historic crime reports’ graphic nature is typically associated with a depravity believed to appeal to the unrefined, uneducated, and unmoneyed, but that was not the case with these early publications. Though they were often branded with explicit woodcuts that would have been understandable to even the illiterate, they also boasted rhyming text and only went to those who could afford them, predominantly the upper echelons. In “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” published in The American Historical Review, Joy Wiltenburg writes that “emotive language, direct dialogue, building of suspense through circumstantial detail, and graphic description of bloody violence were common in the genre.”

Favored cases were in-family and usually involved multiple deaths. The focus was on the victims, while the moral of the story was that sin begat punishment. “The combination of truth with appeals to the heart underlined the religious focus of these works,” writes Wiltenburg. “Virtually all crime accounts published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries connected their stories with an edifying Christian message.” This message associated brutality with the devil and positioned public order as the path to virtue. “[Sensationalism] has had religious, political, and cultural impact,” Wilternburg sums up, “promoting the ready acceptance of punitive government actions, the advancement of religious agendas, the internalization of mainstream emotional expectations, the habit of vicarious emotional experience, and the focus on distinctive individual identity.”

With a reputation for being insensitive to and financially exploiting both criminals and their victims, true crime is often accused of sensationalism, but that term wasn’t coined until the 19th century, a time that favored rational thought over the emotive prose of journalists. “While sexual scandals and other shocking events have become staples of modern sensationalism,” writes Wiltenburg, “its chief focus has always been crime, especially the most bloody and horrifying of murders.” The 1800s also gave us our first detectives, who inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin stories and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series, the latter not only centering crime fiction as a genre, but granting it a modicum of respectability. The gutter was still within spitting distance, though. Penny dreadfuls arrived — demon barber Sweeney Todd in tow — as early versions of popular culture in the form cheap mass-produced serials for young, increasingly literate working-class men, featuring salacious gore; like the true crime paperbacks of today, they supplied affordable, digestible scandal to entertain tired people with no time. The last gasp of the penny dreadful coincided with the precursor to O.J. Simpson’s so-called trial of the century: The Lizzie Borden case. The 32-year-old Massachusetts woman’s trial for the axe murder of her parents spawned a media phenomenon and firmly established the mass appeal of true crime. The next century saw the trash-fired genre shooting off in various directions, from tabloids like The National Enquirer to paperbacks like Lacey Fosburgh’s Closing Time to shows like America’s Most Wanted.

Then there was In Cold Blood.

“Until one morning in mid-November 1959, few Americans — in fact, few Kansans — had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.” Before In Cold Blood, this is not how real crime stories read. What Arthur Conan Doyle did for crime fiction, Truman Capote did for true crime. His 1965 experiment was released as a four-part serial in The New Yorker and became the reference point for every other high-brow true crime work in every other medium. “The motivating factor in my choice of material — that is, choosing to write a true account of an actual murder case — was altogether literary,” Capote told The New York Times. “It seemed to me that journalism, reportage, could be forced to yield a serious new art form: the ‘nonfiction novel,’ as I thought of it.” He believed only those with the “fictional technical equipment” — novelists, not journalists — like him could do it. The factual inaccuracies that have since emerged suggest that Capote’s belief in his own skills — he neither taped nor took notes during interviews — were as sensational as the genre he was hoping to reinvent. His book is still, however, considered the pinnacle of crime lit.

It was Capote’s book that the Times referred to when designating Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line a “nonfiction feature film,” per its distributors, in 1988. This exercise in lyrical fact was groundbreaking in its own right: an elegant piece of true crime as an advocacy tool. The subject of a false conviction, Randall Dale Adams had his case thrown out with the help of evidence Morris uncovered. It’s a straight shot from The Thin Blue Line to Serial, which blew up true crime podcasting in 2014. But while an appeal followed this program’s highly subjective long-form reexamination of Adnan Syed’s conviction for killing Baltimore teen Hae Min Lee in 1999, it was Capote — “a leap in narrative innovation on the scale of In Cold Blood” — who was once again cited, this time in The New Yorker. Serial’s executive producer has said they were trying to avoid an exploitative “Nancy Grace type of a titillating thing,” but the program was serialized with its own version of a cliffhanger each week, and provided its own hero, the avatar in our ears, reporter Sarah Koenig. Yet Koenig bristled at the suggestion by the Times’ Magazine that this was entertainment. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said. “I’m still reporting.”

As though the two were mutually exclusive. As though true crime could only be trash if it were entertainment, and could only be entertainment if it weren’t journalism. Of course, this negates the nature of media. To entertain — to entertain a thought, for instance — is merely to take it into consideration, to allow it to hold one’s attention. Journalism is made to entertain; if it weren’t, reports would not be called “stories” and there would be no need for inverted triangles or kickers or pull quotes or anything else to catch our attention, to hold it. Because to deliver the news there has to be someone to deliver it to, and that necessitates their entertainment. Otherwise the news is nothing but fact; there is no story.

* * *

“Many of the differences between trash culture and high culture show only that storytelling adapts to changing economic, social and political conditions,” Richard Keller Simon writes in Trash Culture: Popular Culture and the Great Tradition. It’s something to consider when watching Lifetime’s Surviving R. Kelly. The series was produced by a network for women branded by its schlocky aesthetic and penchant for frothy romance. An exec at Lifetime has admitted it has “erred on the tabloid side” and Surviving R. Kelly, which has a number of black women recounting the decades of abuse they say the singer has inflicted on them, exhibits the familiar tropes: the inflated score, the voyeuristic set pieces, the abused women on display. In an interview with Complex earlier this month, showrunner dream hampton revealed that she received a number of notes from Lifetime and that she was pushed to find more victims. “I didn’t like the salaciousness of stacking up all of these people who survived him,” she said, “but I got the corroboration part.” The result is a series that orchestrates rescue attempts and highlights the explicitness of Kelly’s brutality, while only gesturing vaguely at the cottage industry he has fostered over the past three decades in order to victimize black women and at our collective failure to see these women as victims at all.

When I watched it, I couldn’t shake a feeling of ickiness, particularly when one of the victims was asked to describe her abuse and dissolved into tears. We didn’t need to see that scene from the pee tape so many times, we didn’t need a tour by one victim of the room where she was allegedly tortured, we didn’t need to watch as one mother reunited with her daughter. (I’m not even including the questionable stylistic choices). The whole endeavor read trashy, old-school Lifetime. “I saw someone kind of try to drag me about why isn’t this on something more premium like Netflix. But this to me is the perfect place for it,” hampton told Complex. “I know that women watch Lifetime, and that black women make up the majority of those viewers.” Reading this made me doubly uncomfortable. It suggested that to get black women’s attention you had to feed them trash. And, okay, maybe black women weren’t trying to mute R. Kelly over The Chicago Sun-Times’ original reporting, but none of us were! The world has changed since 2002, and all of us — including black women — have become more sophisticated about predation.

“The average American today has greater familiarity with the legal process, thanks in part to procedural dramas and the round-the-clock media coverage of splashy crimes that began with the O.J. Simpson trial in the 1990s,” writes Lenika Cruz in The Atlantic. “And people are more aware than ever of flaws in the criminal-justice system, including police brutality and wrongful convictions.” This means that true crime has had to hustle to keep up with its audience, reframing from the crime itself to seeking its closure. NPR noticed the new true crime formula in 2015, with programs like Serial and HBO’s The Jinx (and later Netflix’s Making a Murderer and APM’s In the Dark) concentrating on ongoing cases that could be affected by new reporting. Andrew Jarecki, director of The Jinx, called this subject matter “live ball,” and so here we are in the live-ball era of true crime in which Robert Durst literally burps up a confession on camera before he is charged with murder. “Can the genre sustain this? Can they really sustain true crime as an advocacy medium?” Michael Arntfield, founder of the Cold Case Society, asked The Pacific Standard. “The success and the legitimacy of the medium hinges on being able to stay within this framework of advocacy ahead of strictly sensationalism or profitability.”

But even advocacy has its limits. Netflix’s runaway success Making a Murder eschewed Serial-like narration and Jinx-like reenactments, but contorted almost 700 hours of footage into supporting a theory that the filmmakers had already formulated, that convicted murderer Steven Avery was innocent despite everything pointing to the contrary. Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos told the Times they secured interviews where others didn’t because of their “tempered approach.” Like those books on my shelf, this refined series passed for high culture.

The most balanced true crime isn’t actually true crime. Last year, American Public Media launched the second season of their hit podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. Over 11 episodes, it examined the six trials of Curtis Flowers for the same murders. Even though the precipitating incident was the crime, the attention was on everything else; the reporting team embedded itself in Flowers’ Mississippi hometown for a year, ultimately producing not only a strong — dare I say entertaining? — sense of place, but a rigorous analysis of the systemic failures of the investigation. “For us as reporters, we’re here to look at the people in power and look at the systems in place that raise questions about whether or not the criminal justice system is fair, whether it is just using facts,” Baran told NPR. “So what that results in is not our place to say. But certainly, in this case, what we’ve shown is that the evidence against Curtis Flowers is weak. So this becomes a question now for the courts.” While other podcasts rely on their relatability, this one doesn’t have to — the story is enough. In the aftermath of Baran’s team’s exhaustive reporting, the Supreme Court has agreed to reconsider Flowers’ conviction. It is a rare case in which the balance seems to be moot. It’s all justice.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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