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skitskatdacat63 · 8 months

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super obsessed with your art, seb looks soooooooooooo stunning!!! I am now very curious however, only if you feel like going into it, as to which other historical figures you align with which drivers?👀👀

AAAAAA tysm Grace!!!! Though I am so so so sorry for how rambly and long this post is gonna be, but you just asked me abt one of my brainrots!! I will answer your question but also talk about my history alignments and AUs in general LOL

But if I'm making comparisons of F1 drivers and historical figures, my brain kinda forces me to make it an AU because I'm like "this needs to make absolute sense historically and contextually.)

So, tbh of the four historical AUs that float around my brain, only two of them are really specifically about certain historical figures. The four are: Nandopoleon(About how Fernando reminds me of Napoleon), War of Spanish Succession(mostly about that era, but Seb and Nando are supposed to be paralleling Charles VI and Philip V), Napoleonic Hussars(which is about how , in general, Hussars = F1 drivers), and Rennaissance Muse(this just happens to take place in a different era.)

Explaining my AUs and the historical contexts(proceed with caution, its a lot)

Nandopoleon:

Okay so I'm really really am so deranged about Napoleon = Fernando, but I’ve not posted about it too much because I wanna make a well thought out post about it. But basically I think they’re similar people with similar characteristics and motivations. There was this period of time over the summer where I was only brain rotting about how well any of Napoleon’s quotes fit Fernando(with my fellow nandopoleon confidant @/sweatyflytrap haha.) Here’s some quotes as example:

“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”

“It is not necessary to bury the truth. It is sufficient merely to delay it until no one cares.”(Piasco era lol)

“Victory is not always winning the battle…but rising every time you fall.”

“From triumph to failure is only one step.”

"A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon."(trophies y'know)

"Always carry champagne! In victory you deserve it, and in defeat you need it!"

Tell me Fernando wouldn't use these as instagram captions! TELL ME!!! But the other thing that was driving me crazy is how well excerpts from the personality/image section of Napoleone's wiki line up with testimonials from Fernando's doc. Examples:

"He cheated at cards, but repaid the losses; he had to win at everything he attempted."(Napoleon) "Whatever activity I take part in, I have this compulsion to find the compeititon in it."(Fernando)

"He could rapidly dictate a series of complex commands to his subordinates, keeping in mind where major units were expected to be at each future point, and like a chess master, 'seeing' the best plays moves ahead"(Napoleon) "When you talk to him, his mental capacity is so strong. He's talking to you, but his brain is thinking ahead"(Fernando)

Like c'mon tell me they aren't at least a bit similar??? There's a lot else I find similar about them but I cannot list my whole manifesto here skdjlsd

Anyways this AU would be Fernando as Napoleon and would be Webbonso -> Strollonso. Basically, Napoleon had two wives: his first wife, who was older than him and who he was super in love with, but had to divorce because they couldn't have kids, but he still loved her deeply. And then his second wife , who was much younger thanhim and from the Austrian royal family, and this was a politically motivated marriage but they still got on pretty well!!(also it's funny, before she married him she didn't want to be with him because the public perception of him made him out to be not the best guy, but then she wrote to her father about how loving and kind he was. very Strollonso, no?)

War of Spanish Succession:

Mostly explained it here and here. I'm not too interested in either Philip V nor Charles VI themselevs as individuals, but rather the roles they fufill in the "story." Though I will say, I got hit with a brick while reading Charles VI's wiki when finding out that he apparently had several male lovers! So I guess my AU having an arranged m/m marriage isn't even that far off the mark hahaha. Why did they have a 13 year war, they should have just arranged a marriage between the two canidates sigh sigh. But yeah, mostly Austria vs. Spain, I think it fits well with the Vettonso rivalry!! They would end up being: Fernando I King of Spain and Sebastian I Holy Roman Emperor hehe. Also I sketched some more:

Napoleonic Hussars:

Explained here as well as with art, and more art here. I'm really still proud of the points I made, I just feel very ardently about it!!! Not about any specific figure, but rather a historical group that I think lines up extremely well with F1 drivers. But this one is fun cause I can kinda insert any driver into it and they'll work pretty well. It's fun to figure out what kingdom what driver would be, either based off their nationality or the nationality of their team. I remember vividly staring at a map from this era trying to figure out where Maranello would be....But like Renault = Kingdom of France and RBR = Kingdom of Austria, and stuff like that

Rennaisance Muse:

Mostly just this post, I've not thought about this one incredibly deeply. Mostly just brainrot about how I think Seb looks like The David with his curly hair

#catie answer an ask without making it a soliloquy challenge: failed #hope this is at least sort of interesting to people other than me!#basically: I like reading about F1. I like reading about history. why not mix them :DDD #also sorry Grace that this ended up being more about my AUs rather than which historical figures align with who #if im gonna compare a driver to a figure then my brain is like 'this needs to make absolute sense historically' so it becomes its own AU #though i think fernando is a much easier driver than any others to make historical comparisons about #and thats really only bcs hes very specific with how he portrays himself and how the public eye is supposed to view him #hes much more of a 'character' and is easier to compare bcs historical figures also end up becoming chararictured bcs of the passage of tim #having a lot of fun with this most recent one!!! the idea of arranged marriage vettonso(with boy king seb) is brainrotting me #all of these have ships as well that theyre kinda focused around #hussars is the most general but Ive already drawn martian for it sooooo #and the rennaisance is also martian #nandopoleon I already said what it would be(god the irl age gaps align so well to each other)#and then obv spanish succession is vettonso arranged marriage #anyways aaaahhhhh fun side projects which I like to research and draw!!!#and ik ive said it a lot but thank you guys for showing interest!! its pretty niche i think....#catie.asks.#catie.rambling.txt #boy king au #hussar au #nandopoleon alonsoparte

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katnissgirlsmakedo · 5 months

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re: the fanfiction extra scenes. didn’t realize how it would affect me to essentially go back in time with this stupid story. about to cry at my little guy (different guy) being here…… i haven’t seen him in so long…. you see he was killed many many chapters ago and i’ve missed him dearly……. and his beth march swag…..

#he really is such a beth and i’m prepared to defend my thesis to any loser dissenters anytime…..#you can’t just say he’s a laurie because the character you ship him with is an amy get serious #back in my day (july when i was making the timeless video) when you wanted to compare characters to the little women gang you had to really #mean it…. if you were gonna say any and laurie they had to BE amy AND laurie…… one is NOT enough!!!!!!#like we all know kit’s a laurie duh. and it’s clear that ty is an amy. so it made sense. and they were in the timeless video….#anyway. not to be hung up on a stupid tiktok i saw a week ago

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dr3amofagame · 10 months

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Back in my day characters having one scene together was enough to get people shipping them

okay very fair XD I think that the whole shipping scene in the dsmp fandom does exist where people throw things at a wall and see what sticks, but they tend to be more of a minority overall among the loreheads (tm)

#At least in terms of public posting anyway #I like considering random ship hypotheticals but I tend to be pretty picky with them #Then again you can sell just about any ship to me if you make it interesting enough in the right circumstances #And with the characterization making sense XD #but yeah . It’s interesting to see the emphasis on platonic relationships too in this fandom comparatively #my asks !!

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multific · 1 year

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All He Wanted

Assassin Predator x Reader

Warning: Smut

Part 2

Summary: Being at the wrong place at the wrong time was your speciality, however, you never imagined that a creature like him would take you.

He was a bad blood.

He killed his own kind.

Yet, he never even imagined hurting you.

His small, vulnerable human.

You were his prize. He won you after his completed mission. He not only killed the fugitive, got the weapon but also a little human.

You didn't even mean to be there.

But the huge alien got you and into a cage in a matter of seconds. You were on its ship as it started the engine and off he went.

You were terrified. This being was huge and ruthless. You could only imagine the things it would do to you.

When you arrived back at its home, it made you wear a collar. Which it showed you, it could shock you with. It was similar to the one the dog creature was wearing. You nodded, you understood what it might do if you don't follow its rules.

Why would it think you would run anyway?

You didn't know how to fly their ships. You didn't know what to do or where to go anyway.

With the collar around your neck, you stayed in its home.

The dog creature had an eye on you at all times. Even when its owner was out of the home.

---

He was made to kill.

A creature born to destroy and conquer. His purpose was to carry out the missions he was sent on.

Missions no one else wanted to go on. Which meant a lot given Yautja was a fearless kind.

And yet, he had a conscious of his own. A character.

He liked his dogs, well now he only had one, he liked to hunt and he liked to eat. He liked his bed even if it was a little small for his size. And he liked you.

His little human.

He was always very curious about you. Watching you as you moved around his home. He knew if you would try anything, his dog would stop you. Not like you were strong enough to do anything to him, but the idea still made him watch out.

It made him look up humans and behaviours, he learned a lot.

And if he had to be honest, many aspects excited him to no end.

One was that he learned humans were fragile. Which he saw when he was sent to Earth. But females were said to be able to handle pain a lot better than males. This caught his attention, so perhaps, because you were a female, you handled this situation a lot better than any man could.

It made sense why you didn't do anything to him when he was sleeping or why you didn't try and escape.

Another interesting thing he learned was that when he looked at your biology and his, he could easily deduce that you could potentially carry an offspring of his. Although it was never done before, and he thought you might die due to the infant, it was something that still interested him.

Possibly an issue would be the act itself, you were so small compared to him. Another would be the child itself, it could be that your body would attack his DNA.

It was so interesting, but he didn't want to test these things without knowing it was safe for you.

Then, something that people called, making love.

In his world sex was more like a fight. Yautja males fought females to prove they were strong.

In yours, sex was more like a pleasurable thing. Something to do when you were bored even.

And he liked that. He preferred this idea over the claws.

He also learned that human females were hard to charm. He learned about gifts, and courting techniques.

If he was honest he rather fight a female to bare a child than get those chocolate things... but if that is what you liked. He can create his own version.

And he also knew that because of how he was born no Yautja female would want to carry his child. He tried courting before, but always failed.

---

You had a love-hate relationship with your new life.

You liked that you weren't dead, and you got used to the huge alien's presence but you hated the fact that you were a pet.

Much like the dog you spend every night looking at, fearing it might eat you.

You were sure that if you let your guard down for a second it would attack.

You weren't sure how long you were on this planet.

You would say months, but time was different here.

The huge alien sometimes left for days, only leaving food behind.

During this time, you always ate silently in a corner. Then the dog-like creature decided one day, that he would sit down in front of you and watch you.

It didn't leave, but you slowly gave him the bones, which he appreciated.

You two started to grow closer.

---

Assassin arrived back at his home from yet another successful mission.

And the scene he found was burned into his brain.

It was you and his dog.

Sleeping.

You had your back against the wall as the dog's head was in your lap, one of your hands on its head as you both slept soundly.

This vicious killer tracker dog of his looked like your lap dog right now.

He didn't know if he should be amazed or not.

After all, the dog was to keep you in check when he wasn't around and yet, here it was, cuddling you. And in a weird way, this still counted as keeping you in check.

How did you manage to do that?

After that day, the dog became your protector. He watched as it moved with you.

Also, it didn't take long to figure out how you did it.

Food.

These creatures were easy, of course, you lulled one in with food.

But somehow, he didn't mind it.

Lately, there had been an uproar amongst the tribe against him.

Telling him how he wasn't natural, that he was made and so he doesn't deserve the Yautja title.

Others didn't like the fact that he killed another, calling him a bad blood. Even if he was only carrying out the mission he was told to.

So, he expected others to try and get into his home. Possibly to kill him or to kill the things he kept. He wasn't sure, but if the dog stayed with you, that meant at least you had some little protection if others were to come.

---

One morning, he gathered all of his things and left for another planet.

He choose a rather scary one but it was to keep the others away.

And they stayed away.

He had been there for a week, yet no one came looking for him. And he built a house, mainly staying on the ship to sleep, soon you were able to move into the new home.

This planet was different but not in a bad way.

He showed you many things to avoid, without words proving just how dangerous this planet was.

This planet had different seasons as well.

You realized it soon when after a warm day, winter hit. Or at least it was something you would call winter.

The wind was blowing and you noticed something that was like rain.

It made the home extremely cold. The fact that besides his bed everything was made out of metal didn't help your situation.

Your sleeping place, a single fur on the floor, was now wrapped around your shoulder. You were really really cold.

Freezing.

But both he and his dog were sleeping soundly while you were shivering.

You looked at him, sleeping in his warm bed and you were jealous. Extremely jealous of the furs and also for his thick skin.

He must have noticed you watching because the next thing you knew, he clicked, making you jump a little.

"I-I'm cold." you explained as you watched his eyes in the dark. He didn't move.

You started to turn away, deciding to find a corner and try to sleep. But a huge hand stopped you.

It pulled on the fur you had wrapped around yourself and made you turn back.

You locked eyes with him once more as he was now very close. He started to pull you closer until you were kneeling on the bed, the fur fell from your shoulders as he pulled you in.

He laid down and made you lay next to him.

Very awkwardly, you laid with your back against his side as his arm was under your head.

This truly made you realize just how huge this being was.

He could rip your spine out with one movement, and yet he didn't.

He just let you lay there as he placed multiple furs on you.

His body heat and the warmth of the furs soon lulled you to sleep.

Before you fell asleep you couldn't help but think just how strange he behaved.

A being as huge as him, yet he was careful and soft with you. Then he moved a little, making your head move up his arm onto his biceps, as his forearm was now resting on you, his hand grabbing at your thigh. He caged you in.

But if you were honest, never in your life have you ever sleep as well as you did on that night.

Next morning, you woke up in the same position.

You were even more scared to move. You though possibly he was in a haze last night so he pulled you in, but reality might set in now that he will wake up soon.

You didn't realize that he was awake for some time now.

He listened to your soft snores as you didn't even move an inch, you slept so well and so deep. He didn't even dare to move an inch, afraid he would wake you.

He just knew, from that day on, you would have to sleep with him always.

But he didn't communicate that, so that evening when you got ready to sleep on your usual spot, he scooped you up, as if you were a baby and put you into his bed.

This time, he slept on his stomach with an arm on your stomach. You felt like a stuffed toy.

You noticed he didn't mind you touching him. So, your fingers found his scales as you started to run random patterns on them. You enjoyed his slightly cold skin against yours.

It became a routine, you tracing his scales as he was falling asleep. He often made a noise, something that reminded you of a cat purring as he fell asleep.

How interesting was he.

A completely different species, and yet, you had a feeling he could be more human than some of the humans on Earth.

Sure, you were only a pet for him, sure he killed everything in his path as he pleased. Yet, he never hurt you.

Not even when he forced you into a cage so he could take you from Earth.

You fully expected him to hunt you or torture you, but he never. He treated you as if you were his most precious trophy he had.

The next morning, you woke up and he was missing. Something that never happened so it made you worry a little.

You got out of the bed and walked over to the door. He stood outside, this is when you noticed a ship was about to land. He growled and it made you lock yourself inside the house you got the dog and crouched in a corner.

He will deal with this. He will deal with them.

He will keep you safe.

You heard growling outside, you heard the audible sounds of fighting.

He will have to win. He was big and strong right?

He can take a couple of them at the same time, can't he?

He could, but not without injury.

He sent back word, and asked them to leave him be if they plan on living.

He hoped it would scare the others enough to not come again? He couldn't risk it.

Once inside, he noticed you were in a corner, the dog in front of you protecting you. Exactly how he was supposed to.

And once again, he was on the run.

You were a bit sad to leave that house behind. You started to get used to the layout and the surroundings pretty well.

But you understood the situation.

During the flight, he moved you to the screen.

'We go, they followed. I will make sure this time they won't find us.' it read. You nodded at him, he handed you a device. 'Translator' he said.

"Thank you. For keeping me safe."

This time he nodded.

"Eat." said the robotic voice later when he handed you a bowl. You accepted and ate without any further questions.

Finding a new planet, which was mostly not filled with dangerous creatures was difficult, he knew he would be fine, but he couldn't chance you getting hurt.

But he managed to finally find one. After weeks of looking.

A new planet a new start.

---

He spent months on this home.

He made it bigger.

Which you noticed. He added more rooms.

"Why did you add so many rooms?" you asked one late evening.

"Offsprings." the translator said, it made you freeze. Of course, he would want to take a female. You should have expected this, after all, you were only a pet for him.

He noticed the sadness in your eyes.

"Why sad?"

"I'm not. Should I cook?" he nodded.

Of course, you would be sad. You were his pet, sure but at the same time, you wanted nothing more than to be his. So, to hear him talking about offspring you were sure he wanted to take a female now.

You cooked the meal and ate in silence.

"Are you not ready for offspring?" now this made you super confused.

"Me?"

"Yes. Do you not want offspring?" you blinked a couple times before moving a little.

"What do you mean?"

"I can prove I'm worthy male for offsprings with you. I hunt, I protect."

"What do you mean?"

"I want... baby with you. Do you not?" you looked at him as if he grew a second head or something. Confusion was a light word.

He wanted a baby with you? Would it even work?

"I don't think we can."

"I checked. Our biology can be combined. You can survive birth. I checked."

"Has it been done before?"

"No."

"Then how do you know that either me or the baby won't die?"

"I checked. I played scenarios, in each, even the worst, I could save you."

"Both me and the baby?"

He nodded.

Was it truly possible?

"I gave gifts, courting gifts. Hoped to win you over." Sure he did give you a lot of bones but you thought those were... toys for his pet?

Did he not see you as a pet? Did he really see you as an equal? As a female who can bring his children into this world?

Was that even possible?

Or were you just too hopeful?

Too naive?

Was he serious?

He was, you didn't know but Yautja didn't joke.

You nodded at him.

"You won me over. But but WAIT! WHAT?! How big are you?! You wouldn't fit me!"

"I checked."

"How did you check?"

"Human biology."

"How would your... thing fit me?"

"My...thing... not fully. But it could bring you pleasure if you practice." your head was spinning. Was he really saying this. "We need to stretch you so I won't hurt you, then you can take me and we can have baby."

"Fuck it, let's do it."

After all, what did you have to lose?

---

Of course, he had done his research. Every movement was calculated, and the main goal was not to hurt you.

You didn't dare to ask how he found the... stretchers.

You were no virgin but even so, as the size got bigger and bigger, you were nervous.

After a couple of tries however, you were surprised just how easily a size could fit you.

And soon, he was able to be inside you. Opening you up as you moaned in pleasure. He never made a wrong movement.

He was so gentle.

It made you feel as if you were made out of porcelain, he was so caring and kind.

He did bite your neck and back. Saying they were marks.

Not like you had others to show your mark to. But he liked to cover you in them.

Unfortunately, your baby had other ideas. While you couldn't wait to carry a little one, no baby.

You wanted to give up trying and just accept that it won't happen but your Mate had other ideas.

He blamed himself while you blamed yourself.

He thought the issue was the fact that he was created not born. But then why did all his scenarios all end with a baby?

He slammed the table, making you jump at the loud noise. He looked over at you from his screen.

You knew why he was agitated.

You knew how much he wanted a baby.

"On my planet... if a couple can't have a baby, they say it wasn't meant to be. It will happen on its own. We just have to keep trying and hope for the best." you said into the translator as he listened to your words.

"It is meant to be. I checked every scenario."

"Yes, but you didn't check the scenario in which the baby isn't ready."

"Infants don't have conscious. Can't make decisions like that."

"I'm aware, but as I said, we just have to keep trying, it will happen once. Would you be disappointed in me if I couldn't give you a child?"

"Mate can provide. Checked. You are able to provide. You cannot disappoint me."

You reached over and placed your hand on his.

"We keep trying. It will happen I know it." he nodded once.

---

Keep trying you did.

Then another wave of winter hit, and this planet was worse a lot worse than the one before. You were so incredibly cold, it ended up with you getting sick.

You couldn't hold anything in your stomach.

Your Mate had to check you with his devices and this is when he saw it.

A fetus.

Undeniably.

You looked at the screen when he froze and saw the baby yourself.

You finally did it!

You finally got pregnant!

But... why wasn't he happy?

You looked at him as his golden eyes looked back at you. He leaned over turning the screen to you. You nodded before he grabbed the translator.

"This is why you are sick."

"Yes, pregnancy tends to do that, but why are you... not happy?"

"Baby made you very sick. I don't think you can keep baby."

"What? WHY?" he didn't need a translator for that one.

"Baby makes you too weak. Both of you in danger."

"I'm NOT letting you kill my baby! I want this child, you wanted this child! You said you checked every scenario, every solution! How come you didn't know then?"

"Because in my scenarios, you were healthy, not ill."

"I just have a cold. It will go away in a couple days. Please don't... give me time, give me medicine."

"You could die."

"We tried so hard for this baby. I cannot lose them just because I'm ill."

"If it becomes too dangerous..."

"Give me a week." he nodded.

A week to get better, you cannot lose this little one. Your eyes were glued to the monitor in front of you. Admiring this little alien baby that you had inside you.

You must have gone insane.

No, you went insane when you realized that you actually had deep feelings towards an 11foot tall alien.

In a week's time, you did start to feel better.

But the Predator was surely disappointed in himself.

He was ready to get the fetus out of you the second he realized that it was making you more and more sick. Without thinking he would have done that.

He could have many children in the future, but there is only one You.

He checked you daily. He noticed you were getting better. And he also noticed that you smiled a lot more. You looked at the screen which he paused on the fetus.

No distinguishable features so far. But the little bean on screen already had you wrapped around their entire being.

Both literally and figuratively.

Your Mate kept a close eye on you. Even the dog became more protective as the baby grew.

Your small form changed a lot, he noticed. And he liked it very much. It was his greatest pride.

He always watched you on the bed, sleeping with your belly round, he felt like the proudest Yautja. He would stay up and just watch you, never once touching you, just observing as you slept. Ever so often you moved a little.

It was still winter, the harsh weather making you curl under the furs. He watched as one fell off of you, causing you to get cold as you soon woke up to get your warmth back.

You spotted him sitting in the dark. Although it wasn't unusual, you were very cold. You held your hand out to him as he stood up and walked over. laying down next to you on his side while you glued yourself to his side. You placed his arm on your belly.

He was huge, scary, murdered man and his own kind. And yet, this is what he wanted, a female and a child.

Part 2

More Yautja

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~Masterlist~

ˇAO3ˇ

DO NOT REPOST OR TRANSLATE ANY OF MY WORKS

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marvelstars · 2 months

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Anakin and Slavers

"His undoing is that he loveth too much"

George Lucas

One thing that I always liked about George´s work in relation to Anakin and slavery is how out of the left field he and Dave Filoni wrote Anakin´s relationship to the people who owned or saw him as a property at one point or another and yet it makes total sense for his character.

For example kid Anakin has no doubt that Slavery is horrible and at 9 he is actually working towards developing technology to help free his Mom, friends and himself from it. He hates with capital H the fact those people have control over the life and death of other people but at the same time he has great compassion and kindness which his mother helped nurture. This along with the fact that Watto was the only adult male figure who was around during his early chilldhood, this complicated his feelings towards slavers in a very tragic way.

Anakin feared Watto´s violence and didn´t for a moment doubt he would have been willing to sell off his mother or him if the customer got to a big enough price but at the same time he listens to his advice when he travels to the dune sea to do his work with the jawas and his pov is almost as important as his Mom´s, in the novelization of TPM Anakin remembers not to talk to strangers or to get close to Tuskens Raiders camps thanks to Watto´s advice.

So in Anakin´s mind, Watto is someone he fears but also someone he takes advice from, respects to a point, sometimes gets sassy to and actually listens to almost as a father figure BUT at the same time he has no doubt he would activate the killing chip if he tried to escape.

Pain/abuse/fear mixed with care/advice(sounds familiar?) Anakin knows slavery is awful but he can´t help but see Watto as a person because of who Anakin is, Annie is a kind and understanding person and to point may justify Watto as a "Man of bussines" and "Not as bad a other masters" "It could be worse" but he definitely doesn´t trust him in the same way he does his mother, she is blood, she is family. He and Mom are a team.They shared their secrets.

The first time Anakin saw Watto again after being freed, he was a Jedi with training, almost a knight and the first thing he does to the guy who beat him and his Mom some years ago is to ask him if he can help with the ship parts Watto is working on because he noticed Watto is struggling and his bussines is falling down compared to how it was when Anakin was a kid. When Watto noticed who Anakin was he didn´t reject him and accepted his congratulations but keep himself appart, hoping to learn about his mother whereabouts.

When Watto told Anakin he sold Shmi, Anakin doesn´t have a reaction, he takes Watto´s justification of "I am sorry Ani but bussines are bussines and anyway the person who bought her freed her and married her" Anakin doubts it´s as good a picture as Watto is talking about but he takes his justification and leaves.

When he meets Owen, Beru and Cliegg he sees they are indeed nice people and the reason for his mothers suffering is something completely different that they were not able to stop so he doesn´t blame them for her fate. When Anakin lost his mother it was only natural for him to seek a family, someone he could share how he really felt and his secrets, he could not be part of the Lars family but Padme was willing to love him so she became his new confirmed family, right along with Obi-Wan and Ahsoka but while he had to show himself different to them, he didn´t had to do that with Padme, just like he did with his mother.

In the clone wars Anakin shows again this complex view of slavers with Queen Miraj Scintel, the cartoon goes out of it´s way to show she looked at him as pretty property and he didn´t let her forget that and actually it was strongly suggested he may have been raped by her at some point to keep safe Obi-Wan, Rex, Ahsoka as well as the people they wanted to save while he got enough soldiers to stage their rescue. Anakin had a plan the whole time just as he did as a kid so he keep his cool even when he saw another slave choose suicide over keep being under the control of Scintel. Yet in the end when the Queen was killed by Count Dooku Anakin felt sorry for her, he could not help it.

So this mix of rejection/anger/hate/disgust towards slavers mixed with pity/understanding which is something that was part of what made Anakin a good person gets used agaisn´t him in his relationship with Palpatine.

He first shows himself as the father figure Anakin thought he could find in Qui-Gon before he died a better father figure than Watto had been, a father figure that didn´t reject this title like ObiWan did, Palpatine did this to get his trust as a young child and later young adult and then he showed himself as the real sith master he actually was, Palpatine knew that Anakin wasn´t a stranger to be treated as property by people who showed themselves as good advicers or somehow not as bad as others despite their actions. So Anakin´s initial compassion, kindness and understanding for people that abused him is played agaisn´t him to make him fall to the darkside and chain himself again to another worse master who didn´t just seek to use his skills and body but who wanted his soul as well.

And the same reasons why Anakin justified Watto at first when he was a young kid also applied to Palpatine, he may be a sith but he ran the Republic better than those corrupt politicians, he isn´t a perfect Emperor but in Padme´s absence he is better than the alternatives. He isn´t as bad as a master and anyway I deserve this because I fell to the darkside and nobody can come back from that, if he abuses me I got this coming because I choose this and he still teaches me the ways of the force, he rescued me from Mustafar when Obi-Wan left me to die and he didn´t have to, he is all I have left.

So once Anakin´s voice died down Vader was left with many reasons to say to Palpatine "What´s your bidding my master?" because in his mind master isn´t a word that contradicts father and Palpatine became his father in all but name, this makes George´s words about Anakin fatal flaw being the fact he loved too much make complete sense and it´s a tragedy.

#anakin skywalker #darth vader #george lucas #shmi skywalker #palpatine #star wars #slavery/rape mention #anakin meta #The tragedy of Anakin Skywalker

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avelera · 25 days

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I am never going to be over what the movies did with Steve and Tony's dynamic, because- listen, listen. The reason Civil War was (supposed to, it was kind of a hot mess) hit so hard in the comics was that these two were *best friends* and had been for decades of comic time. In the movies, they never are friends, so Civil War is just two colleagues who never really got on, and not the devastating tearing apart of a long-established friendship group.

Dude I literally burst out into like... outraged, furious laughter in the theater when Tony said, "I thought I was your friend?" because, umm, footage not fucking found?

I completely get and respect the comic readers here for whom Steve & Tony and Steve/Tony were, in fact, the best of friends! But the MCU never ever actually showed it.

To cram that line, which felt lifted from the comics, into the MCU was genuinely laughable. How could Tony possibly think he compares to what we've seen of Steve and Bucky's relationship, since childhood even if you don't ship them, as the only person Steve has left from his entire life pre-WWII? How could Tony possibly think he compares except through the lens of a galaxy sized ego and being totally self-involved to the exclusion of all else? How could any work colleague, since that's what they are at best when not outright antagonists to each other in the MCU, think they'd compare to a childhood friend in danger, that Tony is actively putting in danger? Who Tony is blaming for the death of his father despite the fact they've got piles of evidence that Bucky was a mind-controlled prisoner of war being actively tortured at the time?

It's literally staggering, it beggars belief that this line was uttered. And wildly enough, it's not even my least favorite line in Civil War. (That one goes to Vision's stupid fucking comment about how strength invites challenge, basically victim-blaming the superheroes for having villains, which only possibly makes any sense if you ignore Thor, the greater galaxy, all of the infinity stones, and basically every other part of the MCU timeline before Steve Rogers got the serum, Christ that line makes me mad.

Oh, and the line about Tony just handwaving signing the accords because their lawyers can fix it later as the most boneheaded line of insane privilege I've ever heard. Kids, never fucking sign something just because you can supposedly fix it later, christ it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.)

ANYWAY, I have major beef with Civil War's logic. It never should have happened where it did in the MCU. Cap 3 should have been dedicated to its original plot before they found out RDJ was staying on in the MCU and they had the pieces to make Civil War (the original was the hunt for Bucky and an examination of Captain America's legacy through the lens of Bucky killing off the pretenders the US government set up to be him over the years, and I still weep that we never got it) But I do honestly, deeply, have sympathy for comic fans and why they're mad about the Steve and Tony friendship never actually appearing on screen in any meaningful way.

Civil War shouldn't have happened then. Civil War is a plot you run now, when you've got the rights to the X-Men and too many damn characters running amok. Civil War would be perfect now for pairing down some of the ballooning MCU nonsense. The cast was literally not big enough circa Cap 3 to make Civil War. And I'm eternally bitter that they pivoted away from the smaller-scale Cap-centric movie we should have had and instead made another Avengers movie in its name.

#maggie rambles #captain america #mcu meta #mcu

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quitefair · 5 months

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The Temple of Mythal and Greek Sculpture

Or: How Bioware takes from history without any nuance.

Picture this. You're me, playing Inquisition for the first time. You get to the Temple of Mythal, the doors shut behind you and you finally get to look around. It's a typical elven ruin for the game, nothing much seems different...

Hold on.

Hold the fuck on.

You know what that is.

You know what that's based on, and for a long time after it tickles you. Oh, maybe that meant something in the grander scheme of things! We've never seen such a blatant reference to a real-life sculpture anywhere else in game (to my knowledge at the time)! Maybe it'll come up later and it'll all make sense!

Here's the deal. I've been bothered by this for years. The more I think about it, the more angry I become. Anger over a single fucking type of statue, you say? There's a lot of other shit to be angry over in this game, and you choose this?

YES! I CHOOSE THIS! AND THIS IS WHY.

Picture this. You're me again, aged 14 this time. You're in the Louvre, the first museum of Western classical art you've ever been to. You've grown up in a place where this interest could only be cultivated from extra-curricular reading, and for a kid that age from my country to be ass deep in Greek and Egyptian myth is frankly lmao. Neurodivergent. Anyway.

So we're wandering around the Louvre, I've just taken my parents through the Egyptian section and given them a thorough infodump on everything I know about burial rites.

And then we enter this room. And I very nearly fall to my knees when I catch sight of her.

This is the sculpture the statues at the Temple of Mythal are based on - one Winged Victory of Samothrace.

She is a sculpture from the Hellenestic era, depicting the goddess Nike stood at the prow of a ship. Her head and both arms are missing, save one hand with two fingers (also in the Louvre but displayed separately). She was found on the Greek island of Samothrace, among the ruins of what was known as the Sanctuary of the Great Gods. It seemed like she was displayed at the top of a hill, looming down at all that regarded her.

I’ve had the absolute privilege of seeing her in person twice in my life, both before and after the 2013 restoration. And let me tell you, regardless of which staircase that leads you there, the sight of her will stop you in your tracks.

[Now with people, for scale.]

She is massive. Larger than life, and immediately is the centre of your attention. It's not the fact that she has no head, no arms. No, you will realise the closer you get to her, the more you're able to appreciate the details of this absolutely astounding piece of history.

No. It's because she feels so alive.

The way her robes drape against flesh, wet from sea-spray or rain, yet flowing with the motion of an invisible wind. The wings cast behind her dramatically as her right foot steps forward. Standing tall and proud, unflinching, unbowed against the elements. Even without her arms, you can feel how dynamic the torso and legs are.

You don't need to be an art historian, or even have any knowledge of Greek myth or art history to stand in front of her, as I once did as a young teen, and nearly be brought to tears.

So.

This brings me to the first of the two main gripes I have with the way this sculpture is used in Inquisition.

Compared to the way she's displayed in the Louvre, and also presumably how she was presented to her original audience - larger than life, looming, powerful, beautiful - she is relegated instead to smaller, repeating statues of the same nature throughout the temple.

This diminishes the purpose of the original sculpture, which was to instill a sense of awe and wonder. The singularity that forces you to focus and appreciate the scale and intricacy. The aura, the gravitas of having a single, massive sculpture of such a dynamic figure is completely gone.

And to make things worse, they Mythal-ify her. Adding a helmed head and changing her beautiful feathered wings to leathery dragon wings. They don't even add arms, which is odd because the original sculpture very clearly is missing its arms.

And, may I ask, Why?

It feels cheap, like they saw the Winged Victory and were like 'oh shit this is a cool sculpture, we should add it in game' without giving any fucking thought to what the sculpture means.

Which brings me to the second gripe. The complete disregard for the symbolism of the Winged Victory.

Detail from the Athena fountain, Parliament Building of Vienna, showing Nike the Winged Victory in the palm of Athena's hand [source]

Nike is a minor Greek deity, said to be the daughter of Pallas (a Titan) and the river Styx. Her other siblings by the same parents include Zelus (Zeal), Bia (Might) and Kratos (Strength).

Yes. That Kratos.

She was one of the earliest gods to pledge her allegiance to Zeus in the Titonomachy, and after the victory of the Olympians, Nike and the other gods that allied with them were allowed to live on Olympus. In her aspect as Victory, she is closely associated with several of the major Greek gods, and in particular, Athena.

There's also her Roman counterpart, Victoria. This version doesn't come with the backstory Nike has, but is more of a general concept of victory. This is the aspect that is present in a lot of the modern sculptures and interpretations of Nike/Victoria:

Left: Detail from the Berlin Victory Column. Right: Detail from the Victoria Memorial, London. Note the similar iconography, of a woman seemingly standing against a strong wind, fabric and cloth adhering and yet flowing against the breeze, wings outstretched.

From this, we can probably extrapolate what our beloved Winged Victory might've looked like. Here's an artist's render of one possibility:

There's some iconography we need to go through before moving on - symbols that are commonly associated with Nike/Victoria.

One is the trumpet as see in the reconstruction above, the sound and symbol of the end of war, of impending peace. Another is the laurel wreath, another Greek symbol of victory and achievement. Famously, laurel wreaths were used to crown victors of the original Olympic games.

This is another conversation entirely, but there’s a discussion to be had about the duality of Elgar’nan and Mythal, in term of vengeance and justice, and how an emotional rage versus a calculated wisdom can be compared to the difference between the two Greek gods of war – Ares and Athena.

If we can compare Mythal to Athena, in the sense of her wisdom in making difficult decisions, then it’s not a stretch to associate Mythal with the symbolism of Nike, and therefore explain the presence of statues similar to the Winged Victory in her temple.

But since Bioware absolutely did not put this in the game for anything other than the Aesthetic, there’s some problems that need to be addressed.

Mainly in the way in which these statues are scattered throughout the temple. If you wanted static, ominous statues to line the walls as your player characters explore, perhaps have like, I dunno. Less dynamic statues that you reference?

Left: Nike of Paionos, Right: Stele 1 of Las Incantadas

Or maybe instead of statues, have friezes lining the walls. Like this one from the equally iconic Pergamon altar, depicting the Giganomanchy.

It’s the same symbolism, the wings, the smiting of foes and victory of good over evil.

And then perhaps, at the heart of the temple... where, y'know Bioware, lay a body of water sacred to Mythal herself, you could've perhaps done something remarkable. You could then have had the most dramatic and beautiful entrance you’d ever seen.

[Nike, at the iconic Daru Staircase, the Louvre]

It was at this moment that Mythal walked out of the sea of the earth's tears and onto the land. She placed her hand on Elgar'nan's brow, and at her touch he grew calm and knew that his anger had led him astray. - Codex entry: Mythal: The Great Protector

Mythal herself strides out of the Well Of Sorrows, the metaphorical tears of her followers that died and kept their knowledge alive in her name. Her (draconic) wings spread out, (restored) hands outstretched to touch her husband, to calm the rage that nearly destroyed this world.

A symbol of victory against the blind rage of a god against His father, the Sun. A symbol of wisdom and grace, against the violence of hatred. A divine sense of something bigger than anything we could imagine.

There's also the lack of iconography regarding victory, instead piling on some cheap representations of what we think of as Mythal. That's another post entirely on the symbolism of the Elven gods, but if Bioware really wanted to hone in on the Athena/Athena Nike parallels, they might have thrown in the trumpet/laurel/palm leaf symbolism with the statues, alongside the dragon wings.

If this were the case, then maybe, just maybe, Inquisition would’ve then earned the use of this sculpture in the game.

Sources not listed above/Further reading if you're interested

https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/a-stairway-to-victory

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1412/winged-victory-the-nike-of-samothrace/https://smarthistory.org/nike-winged-victory-of-samothrace/

https://smarthistory.org/nike-winged-victory-of-samothrace/

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/greek-art/hellenistic/a/nike-winged-victory-of-samothrace

#da lore #da meta #mythal #temple of mythal #dragon age #da lore and meta #yo this has been simmering and brewing in my brain for like 8 years now not kidding #and im already neck deep in like..... figuring out the evanuris and trying to tie them into real world mythology and thats super fun too!!!#watch as this consumes and destroys me #my writing

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victimsofyaoipoll · 9 months

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Round 2

Propaganda Under Cut

Elizabeth Midford

She started as just a cutie fiancée trying her best, turns out she's also a swordfighting genius, very under pressure to perform feminity in the Victorian Rose type of way. Fandom crucifies her bc she's Ciel's fiancée and they want him to be with his butler, Sebastian, the demon he sold his soul to for revenge

anime was a shitty canon divergent adaptation that butchered her character down to her "cutesy silly girly" persona, which obviously made the 2008 anime fans hate her with a passion (nothing wrong w being girly I'm just saying the adaptation made her super one dimensional) anyways fujoshis used to treat her as a villain because she's the fiance of Ciel,, who as u might know already was HEAVILY shipped with his butler, Sebastian back then (now it's kinda looked badly upon, nice tbh that ship sucks ass xD) She's a bit similar to Misa Amane from death note in the way she was treated. (Like an obstacle the yaoi ship must overcome rather than a person)

she's my silly little rabbit! i could gush about her character but i'll keep it short and just say that she's really well written and one of the best characters in the series. anyways she's ciel's fiance and she's like, rightfully annoying as any other 13 yr old girl would be but the fanbase fucking crucified her for even existing. she gets demonized for being 'annoying', but then ciel gets yaoishipped with an even more annoying guy. there is 100% an argument that lizzie/ciel is weird bc they're cousins (i personally don't ship it) but that falls flat when her detractors then ship the 13 yr old ciel with an eons old demon who Canonically looks like his father. the anime also never reached her main character development until years after its peak and that was only in a movie, so she really got the bad end of the stick here. not me though i had a giant crush on her when i was 12

Katara

Katara is constantly mistreated by the fans in favor of the Zukka ship (Zuko × Sokka.) They make her out to be mean, homophobic, and completely out of character just to add drama to the Zukka ship. In reality, Katara is very compassionate, and would never act that way toward anyone.

Zutara was a popular ship but when zukka got popular over covid during the atla renaissance there were a million posts about how zutara was problematic while zukka was perfect usually for racist reasons. Meanwhile katara and sokka are siblings so it didn't even make sense. They did not have to be so illogically rude to her to ship zukka and it was weird

Katara is FANTASTIC I fucking love her to pieces she is so cool and yet the entirety of the ATLA fandom treats her like garbage because she “talks about her mom dying too much” (even though she BARELY does & also was parentified from a young age due to her mother’s death) and, of course, because she’s a more feminine women when compared to her counterparts. Even in the show itself she’s mistreated: she’s ALWAYS shown cooking for the rest of the gaang, doing their laundry, any ‘womanly’ task. She ends up with the guy who kissed her twice without her consent & who she never showed any real attraction to and apparently (despite being a badass warrior-doctor!!!) after the show ended she just… settled down in the South Pole and had a bunch of kids and never did anything else. She didn’t even get a statue :( Anyways during the ATLA renaissance, despite Zutara actually not being canon, people felt that Katara threatened the sanctity of the new almost entirely baseless yaoi ship, Zukka. Unfortunately for them, due to the fact that Katara and Sokka are siblings, the usual anti-Zutara arguments didn’t work as well. So they resorted to just… slaughtering her character. If she was lucky, they’d just make Katara a background character, wingwoman, &or throw her together with her canon love interest. If she was unlucky they’d do anything from make her homophobic (??) to killing her off! Fuck’s sake, she never even got a token spare-the-pairs wlw ship! Sorry for getting so heated, that whole debacle made me FUMING MAD.

#poll #round 2 #black butler #elizabeth midford #avatar the last airbender #atla #katara atla #katara

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hoodlessmads · 5 months

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Dark Heir spoiler thoughts:

Okay some of these are criticisms but please understand I really liked it! I liked it even more than Dark Rise. I’m just an overdramatic person and need to yell sometimes.

These don’t have any particular order, I’m just freestyling -

Reading Captive Prince years ago (and rereading since) before reading Dark Rise made me have an unfair resentment towards James for being basically the same character as Laurent but not as good and that continued here

Will is the second best character Pacat has ever made after Laurent and book 3 might push him ahead

I loved seeing Will use more and more of his evil powers

The best one being where he possesses anyone with a brand and his eyes turn black and he turns into Legion (maybe shoulda turned that off before trying to appeal to Violet…)

Finding out his mom actually was tying him to bedposts and beating him this whole time somehow shocked me because for some silly reason I believed one of the most unreliable third person subjective narrators ever, Will, that she was a nice lady just doing her best. Anyway I love this revelation because it makes such perfect sense, it’s just, “Oh. Of course.”

Violet and Cyprian are both himbos yet Violet is somehow the only character with a single brain cell left at the end of the book

Cyprian drinking from the cup makes no sense after they had a whole discussion in the first book about how drinking from the cup put the Stewards into the Dark King’s plans and made them his thralls and was the entire reason they died, a massacre which Cyprian experienced viscerally, and then he goes and drinks from the cup anyway and oops surprise Will can in fact enthrall him. Cyprian is able to fight it off but that doesn’t change the complete recklessness and out-of-character-ness of it to me.

Violet/Cyrprian is a good ship

Phillip/Visander is hilarious (in a good way)

Will/James is fine but I wish I was more compelled by them than I actually am. For being the main couple, I don’t feel like their relationship has been given the room it needed to develop organically and instead it feels like we’re falling back on physical attraction and a vague shadow of a past relationship in the old world that we didn’t get to see. It’s hard not to compare to Damen/Laurent which by contrast was developed so painstakingly.

Elizabeth is incredible

Visander sucks, actually

The whole Light kind of sucks. The Stewards, the Sun Kingdom, they were all assholes

People with black-and-white morality are truly terrible, aren’t they? And pretty much everyone is like that except for Will, James, and Violet

Sometimes I felt like that fact was really being hammered in on purpose almost as though to make James murdering like 300 people seem less bad (but it didn’t….)

But I don’t dislike James because he murdered 300 people, I actually love villains and I especially am attached to the idea of everyone being redeemable. But what I don’t like is the book telling me I should like James without giving me a good reason or the book downplaying his actions to make him seem more sympathetic. He can have murdered all the Stewards and still be compelling, we don’t need to diminish what he’s done in order for him to be likable

Also everyone in this book except like, Will and maybe Violet and James is an idiot (and I’ll excuse Elizabeth for only being ten). Someone send these characters to Psych 101, they don’t seem to understand the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy…

Like obviously if you tell someone they’re evil over and over again for their whole lifetime they will become evil

Theory - I don’t think Violet will turn on Will. I think she’s just shell-shocked. She wasn’t really given a chance to take a stance before James Peter Panned him away. Violet knows exactly what it feels like to be told you are evil because of some past thing, and she knows Will better than any of the other characters. And she knows that morality is not black and white (Tom is her brother). She’ll definitely end up in Will’s corner by the end.

Theory - The line of the Lady and the line of the Dark King are the same bloodline and they split off later. Sarcean’s “cataclysmic night together” with the Lady was mentioned not once but twice. Pacat doesn’t waste lines. The child that the Lady had was Sarcean’s, or at least one of them.

Will better figure out how to destroy that collar quick…before they both get even more traumatized. I think that will be one of his main goals in book 3. Or I hope…otherwise it will be hard to develop the genuine romance

I sure hope Will can also figure out how to expel that shadow from Cyprian before he like… dies. Don’t do that to Violet D:

So, I’m not a huge fan of YA in general (outside of YA anime and manga which for some reason hits different). I used to like it a lot, it used to be most of what I read. I grew up reading series like Redwall, Darren Shan, Demonata, Pendragon, and so on. But I’ve grown out of the genre (I’m 27). Not every adult does - one of my best friends who is a year older than me still really enjoys YA. But because I don’t like YA, I think my enjoyment of Dark Rise/Dark Heir is influenced and my criticisms may be unfair.

But I find that with fantasy series like this, I the books really need to be longer. Or there needs to be more of them. I feel like Dark Rise has so many moving pieces, enough characters that there could be a trading card game (and there are literally collectible cards), so many different magical artifacts and magical powers, an entire magical old world beneath the semi-magical 1820s Europe world to develop, and also by the way a whole story that took place 10,000 years ago that has to be told at some point. I find myself feeling like all these different elements are being introduced and moved on from too fast and I wish they were all given more time to breathe. I think that’s part of why the relationship between Will and James feels a bit rushed to me. I don’t know if the short length of the series was Pacat’s choice or an editor’s, though. I don’t feel like Captive Prince had this issue because there were no supernatural elements, the cast was much smaller, and the plot was comparably simple so a lot of it got to be characters just talking to each other, which was great, and the world building was accomplished mainly through these interactions. The plot and world of Dark Rise is much larger in scope but the page count is the same (a little longer maybe).

So wait who is Mrs. Duval

Why did Ettore leave the Stewards anyway? Other than the obvious, which is that they suck

Where was Grace during the whole ending scene? Wasn’t she there but just not saying anything. As this total calamity befalls her only remaining friend group she finally has seen too much and just nopes out and is busy making tea in the corner or maybe popcorn

I do really like Cyprian btw in spite of thinking his moral code is shitty. Gave Violet a chance but sold Will for one corn chip… I see how it is (okay that’s not fair but you know what I mean, he has flaws)

It sounds like I’m in the majority when I say that I still don’t like Devon - I saw that theory about him being the final big bad and I’m so on that train. I think he’d make a good enough final villain. I agree there is something predatory about him and Tom. I don’t necessarily think Pacat wants us to root for them as a couple, though. There were better ways to pull that off if that was the intent.

Not to repeat myself but Phillip was such a pleasant surprise. Like who is this fruit and how did he get here

So next book, I hope (assume) we get to see the rest of the old world story filled in so we can understand where it all went wrong for Sarcean and also the exact nature of his relationship with Anharion because so far it’s been quite vague (intentionally I assume). Like….. you know….. did he agree to put on the collar?

The tricky thing about this series is that once the reader learns that Will is the Dark King, it’s hard to maintain any sort of external tension. Right? It’s hard to feel afraid of the forces of the Dark when the protagonist has total effortless control over them just by virtue of who he is. Will can literally just be like, “No, don’t” and everything’s fine. He did just this at the end of Dark Rise. I find the way Dark Heir seems to end with their “only hope of stopping the Dark army” destroyed to be pretty unconvincing. Why on earth would Sarcean create a destructible object that is the only way of controlling his own army? Of course Will should be able to control them with his will alone. If he can control Shadow Kings and make them die with his words alone, why didn’t he try yelling at the shadow army to stop trying to possess people? This doesn’t make sense to me. And if people become Returners through his magic, shouldn’t he be able to exert some control over their existence the way he does with the branded? Pacat has done a good enough job at getting us to know Sarcean (an extremely good job btw) so as to make the destroyed brand plot point unbelievable. Anyway…

Instead, the tension in Dark Heir is almost entirely internal or realized in character relationships rather than physical threats. The tension is between Will and himself, and between Will and his friends. (There are tensions between other characters but focusing on the main plot here.) The possibility that they might find out and abandon him, and the possibility that he might actually be as nasty of a guy as Sarcean was, the slim chance that he might learn something that makes him go, “You know what, I agree with my past self after all.”

Now that everyone has found out who he is, that particular source of tension has sort of evaporated, so now in book 3 Pacat has to find a way to make Will’s conflict with himself and his friends compelling enough to carry us through 450 pages (I don’t expect this will be difficult). What I see as the problems now are 1) what was Sarcean actually planning and how did he plan on getting Will (himself) to fall in line with them (this was a question in Dark Heir as well but now it’s bigger), 2) how is Will going to destroy his own (Sarcean’s) Dark artifacts so he can free James, and 3) Can he convince anyone to ever love him (oh no ouch).

If I had to rank these books at this stage I’d probably give Rise a 3.7 ish…. and Heir a 4.2. I’m holding out for Dark King to be a 5 or close. (I don’t know what the actual title will be, I’m just guessing lol.) I definitely think Dark Heir is an improvement over Dark Rise since I always thought the most interesting part of the latter by far was everything that happened once Will learns he is the Dark King at the very end.

“Are we going to talk about the magic pseudo-sex scene—“ No and I hope we never will

#dark rise #dark heir #cs pacat #dark heir spoilers #will kempen #will is the beEEeEeSsst #let me know what you think

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ichinoue · 9 months

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I just finished watching bleach, and I'm not much of a shipper, as in I didn't care for the ships. But ichihime just didn't make sense to me, I have no problem with renruki but ichihime just didn't do it. So like I'm genuinely curious as to how they stuck out for people like you who absolutely adore it, I've also seen alot of hate towards it so once again I'm curious. Is there any reason that you personally always loved the ship? Be it their chemistry? Or interactions?I don't know I just want to see the appeal

Well, for starters, if you've only watched the anime, I think that can definitely taint your perception of IH because the animators butchered it so much compared to how it actually is in the manga, especially in the early arcs. I made a post on the very first IH moment in the anime vs. the manga here although it's pretty old so the links I used as references are probably broken now. But I definitely recommend reading the manga to get a true sense of what their dynamic is like!

Honestly it's hard to sum up why I love this ship so much without pulling out a bunch of manga pages and turning this into a full blown essay of things I've already said a million times before (but I'll attach a bunch of links to some of those posts below lol).

But I just love the sweetness of IchiHime. The mutual respect. The selfless care and consideration they have for each other. How dorky they are together. The way they make each other better, and stronger. The way Orihime can pull so many passionate, emotional reactions out of Ichigo--the way he softens around her, the blind rage when his enemies use her to taunt him, the way he flies off the handle in a panic when he thinks she's in danger, the depression he fell into when she was gone, the relief he feels when he realizes she's okay. The puppy dog eyes he gives her. The way everyone else kicks him in the head or punches him to lift his spirits, but Orihime--she only has to use gentle words. The vow to protect, the rising up from the dead to keep that vow. Not even death could keep them apart. Orihime wanting to love Ichigo in every lifetime she lives, she would choose him every single time. And yet she never expected him to love her back--he just did. All on his own. He was pining for her, they were pining for each other. It was mutual long before they even knew it.

And I think Kubo did so well writing for the IchiHime relationship. It's got cute, heartfelt moments, angsty teenager moments, silly, comedic relief moments, and dramatic, life-or-death moments. You can see their development from one arc to the next, see the clear-cut changes and growth in their dynamic from beginning to end. They never stopped changing, and growing closer over time. Which created a nice, long slow-burn for me to sink my teeth into over the course of Bleach's 15 year run.

Anyway, here's some links of posts that explain different aspects that I love about this pairing:

I have an extremely long masterpost about IchiHime here, which mostly goes into detail about why I think it was obvious for canon, but it covers almost every single IH moment in detail and my love for the pairing and reasons for shipping it are pretty much woven into the fabric of this post lol.

The chemistry of IchiHime.

My top 3 favorite IchiHime moments.

Masterpost of moments where Ichigo and Orihime protect each other.

IchiHime implications of the lust arc.

Ichigo being teased about Orihime.

Ichigo's vow to protect Orihime.

Ichigo and Orihime's growing feelings for each other.

Orihime consistently being singled out to target Ichigo's heart.

Orihime loving Ichigo's kindness.

Ichigo being receptive to Orihime's feelings.

And these are some posts made by other people that I like:

A post about Ichigo's feelings for Orihime.

This one is an image post that basically combines almost every single IchiHime moment from the first to last chapter, as a visual reference.

A response my friend gave when asked the reasons that they ship IchiHime that I wholeheartedly agree with.

And another list of reasons.

I also just really love this post.

#IchiHime #fav

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hysteriaww · 4 months

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You get kai and bonnie so much together and individually everything you say fits them in canon so well it's too bad the writers really fumbled with them because when kai showed up he was a breath of fresh air and the best part about him is he's all about bonnie that was new and realistic bonkai was their last shot at getting the vampire diaries interest back up again

AH thank you so much for this lovely message, you're so sweet!! Yes, it really is such a shame the writers fumbled Bonkai bc it rly did seem like they had some great ideas there in the beginning, but the execution fell flat :( I feel like Kai was a breath of fresh air not just for us fans but also the cast & crew! U could rly feel their spark of new excitement for a dying show when kai showed up bc i think they all sensed that he was unique and different from the tired, recycled plotlines they'd had since S4.

Ian in particular seemed much more interested in his scenes when Kai was around (and much more lifeless when he wasn't) and Bonnie ofc was *given* much more interesting scenes when Kai was around, compared to prior seasons. Even Alaric & Jo, who started S6 as rick's new boring romance of the season, became relevant, layered and interesting bc of their links to Kai. Like rick loved to play the hero & act like damon was morally beneath him in S6 but his need to protect Jo from Kai brought out a selfish streak that made him go behind Jo & her fam's back to make shady deals w Damon & Kai as long as it kept Jo safe! Even Jo was revealed to be quite crafty considering her backstory of how she tricked & betrayed Kai in 1994, which made her much more interesting than her early role as rick's bland gf.

Even Liv & Luke were (im sorry) SO BORING in S5 but 1000x more interesting in S6 once their story got linked to Kai. His existence single-handedly linked so many disjointed characters & plotlines from previous seasons (like why'd they even bring Rick back after dying in S3? His relationship w Jo (and by extension, Kai) was the only thing that made him relevant for the rest of the goddamn show)! Even the Heretics were introduced to the show through KAI & the gemini/siphoner lore and fully lost steam as soon as Kai wasn't there to make 'em interesting!

As for Kai's links to Bonnie, ya i agree she rly was their last chance to make things interesting bc they'd already given Elena & Caroline "dark" romances that fans were too attached to to accept anything else (see: Delena being forced to stay together; Steroline forever being overshadowed in most fans' minds by Klaroline) so giving Elena & Caroline new pairings would've disappointed fans, whereas Bonnie was a blank slate they could've gone WILD with bc none of her canon pairings had strongly attached fans... yet they gave Elena & Caroline new romances anyway and scrapped Bon's romance with Kai :)))

That is what felt malicious. In S6 alone, they gave Elena who ALREADY HAD DAMON the new guy Liam, then gave Caroline the same guy Liam, Enzo (briefly) AND Stefan, whereas Bon *almost* got Kai & *fully* lost Jeremy in S6. ??? Any writer who paid half as much attention to her fans as Plague did (considering how much ott fan-service she wrote into tvd & how many twitter fights she got into w fans whose ships she disapproved of) HAD to have known her fans wouldn't accept Caroline/Enzo, Care/Stef, Care/Liam or Elena/Liam as much as they loved Care/Klaus & Elena/Damon. Yet she did it anyway bc she preferred LOSING FANS to giving Bonnie someone interesting!

She even planned Kai to be Bon's love interest in S6 bc she thought he wouldn't be popular w fans & instantly torpedoed that once she noticed fans' love for him bc, as I said before, Plague PAID ATTENTION to her fans' reactions. So fans having lukewarm feelings about Steroline was enough to get 'em married, but fans LIKING Kai was enough to get Bonkai axed. It's a common joke that Plague saw Caroline as her self-insert (neurotic, hyper-organized blonde control-freak) which is why she dated more men than even Elena. But I think a large chunk of tvd's white teen girl fans saw Care as a self-insert too (bc w each subsequent season, Caroline was increasingly written & designed that way, which is why fans turned on tvd's original self-insert, Elena, & worshipped Care instead).

Her "im never the one, im not perfect like elena" insecurities made her a blank canvas for (white) girls to see themselves in, which is why she wins Miss Mystic Falls, why she's a privileged Founding Fam member, why she gets to dress fancy & go to Mikaelson balls that have nothing to do w her, why she gets ALL the men, why she becomes the 1st vampire to be pregnant, why she gets to marry Stefan (then instantly lose him so she can go kiss Klaus in the spin-off), why she gets to be tvd's last vampire standing, why she repeatedly gets to have her cake and eat it too. By presenting Elena as "perfect/ideal" & Caroline as an "underdog," fans naturally sympathized more with Care's "struggle" (even tho she repeatedly got EVERYTHING!) Based on this, Plague refused to let ppl like Klaus date Bonnie (which would've made sense) but shoved him w Caroline (which didn't make narrative sense) bc that gave her & white fans the chance to see themselves in Care & feel like THEY were dating Klaus.

(Btw I wanna add that I actually do like & enjoy Caroline! This is a critique of the shadiness that went into *writing* Caroline, not a critique of Caroline herself)

Similarly, Kai was allowed to want Bonnie as long as fans didn't like him, but once he got popular, Plague killed Bonkai bc she believed that she & her (white) fans wouldn't be able to see themselves in Bonnie and feel like THEY were the ones dating Kai. But Kai was not Klaus, Stefan, Damon, Enzo or Kol. His character was CONCEIVED w Bonnie in mind to the point that erasing his obsession w her would make him not even feel like KAI anymore. And that wouldn't work bc fans wanted gucci kai, not walmart kai. Also, his general personality quirks were just not the type that would vibe w Caroline. Chris Wood said it himself, "Kai likes to be the one who talks, he doesn't like to listen, so I think Caroline might make him wanna snap her neck & move on" bc Caroline ALSO likes to talk. So writing him w Care would change Kai too much & writing him w Elena was not an option bc Delena was set in stone & Nina was leaving. So, how'd plague have her cake & eat it too? She refused to let Bon have Kai, and bc there was no other white girl who made sense for him, she kept Kai eternally single so white fans could eternally imagine themselves w him.

And uk what's the worst part? I don't believe all white fans would've necessarily struggled to see themselves in Bonnie if she'd dated Kai. I think Bonnie being the ACTUAL underdog struggler of the show made her very relatable to people, regardless of what your race is (esp bc tvd rarely addressed her race or centered any plotlines on it). I think Plague's own subconscious biases just made it impossible for her to fathom seeing herself in a PoC character, which is why she wrongly assumed all her majority white fans worked the same way & letting Bonkai happen would've disappointed them & made them stop watching. (But that being said, even if it was just a "business decision" to her... isn't it funny how disappointing masses of white klaroline fans didn't stop her from tossing Care at stef, enzo, whoever she wanted, but ONLY stopped her when it came to Bonnie's ships (bc she was looking for excuses to scrap 'em anyway)? Oh plagueee ur biases are showing, girlieee)

#bonkai #kai parker #bonnie bennett #bonnie bennett x kai parker #bonnie x kai #tvd #bonkamily #josette laughlin #caroline forbes #headcanon #asks #mine

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lotus-pear · 1 month

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no disrespect but how does shipping chuuaku make you any better than dazai/aku shippers

OH MY GOD. SIT DOWN BOY. ok so now that we've both been seated i'm going to go over both rq just so that we're on the same page

chuuaku is very realistic in the sense that they both took dazai's absence the hardest and likely sought comfort in one another (or rather chuuya sought akutagawa out and forced him to talk and not bottle things up💀). they also hold a great deal of respect for each other and despite being executive/subordinate they have a good relationship that surpasses hierarchical boundaries which you can clearly assume from their interactions in dead apple/official art. also, chuuya was never akutagawa's mentor. he never offered that role of mentorship, nor did akutagawa ever ask him to be dazai's replacement. so no, this isn't me justifying mentor/student relationships bc those are disgusting. and anyway it would be cute in a sense where it's literally the epitome of sun and moon and chuuya helps aku grow and heal from his past, helping him branch off from dazai and live for smth other than his approval. chuuya doesn't need to be his mentor bc he states himself that aku has always been strong and doesn't need someone's expectations holding him back. romantic or platonic they have one of the healthiest dynamics in the series and that can't be argued

not rly sure how this compares at ALL to dazai/aku since their relationship is toxic asf and literally built on condoned abuse and aku's horrible dependency on dazai to have reassurance that he is allowed to live. also dazai admits to making his training brutal on purpose in dark era, so like if the character themself admits they were abusive idk what else to say tbh. not to mention they have a mentor/student relationship and those are already disgusting as is so ermmm yea. no go. if you ship this you condone abuse idrk what to tell you💀

#im gonna get attacked for posting this but that's ok because i will stan chuuaku until the day i die🥱#they r my favorite rarepair #also YES i still ship skk and sskk i just like playing with the characters like dolls sometimes #anyway asks that physically make have me going “head in my fucking hands”#some of you need to think before you speak </3 #lotus’s asks

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hyperactivewhore · 5 months

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Why do you think that many people tend to devalue Klaus’s relationship with Cami, Aurora, and even Hayley? Honestly, I think that out of all his love interests in the show, Klaus truly only loved Cami, Aurora, and Hayley. Cami understood Klaus very well, and she loved him despite all his flaws. Cami encouraged him to become a better person for Hope. And when Klaus was imprisoned, the person he imagined was Cami.

Klaus was hung up on Aurora for centuries. He painted her constantly. While he loved Cami, he definitely also loved Aurora. He’s the type of person that falls in love forever. And while this is a super unpopular opinion, I think that if he was alive during Legacies, he would’ve ended up with Aurora.

Hayley wasn’t really a love interest and I don’t think Klaus loved her romantically - but he totally loved her platonically. She was his best friend. He truly valued her as a person and respected her so much.

Say what you want about Klaus, but he had excellent taste in romantic partners. All his lovers, including Caroline, are beautiful and amazing. And this is no hate to Caroline and Klaus shippers, but I really think that Klaus only loved Cami, Aurora, and Hayley. His feelings for Caroline are rather shallow when compared to his feelings for Cami, Aurora, and Hayley - so why do you think so many people ship Caroline and Klaus together?

Oh anon, I love talking about Klaus Mikaelson and his fucked up relationships.

Why people ship klaroline? Whenever I come across shippers of them, they always say it's because Klaus and Caroline had the biggest chemistry in all of tvdu. Which, in my opinion, is false. I personally think Caroline looks uncomfortable and pissed off with Klaus in half of their interactions, and their development is so bad done and weird so they just have him give her puppy eyes out of nowhere and have her laughing at his jokes when she hated him the episode before.

I think that a big part of why people ship klaroline is because Caroline was the first woman Klaus showed an romantic interest in in the series. We have Klaus who is the villain, who until the moment has been nothing but evil to everyone around him and out of nowhere he gets soft for her, so people lost their shit and started shipping them like crazy. Which mind you, is exactly like happened: Candice herself said klaroline just happened because the fans liked them.

But in my opinion it was just stupid. If they wanted Klaus to have any interest in Caroline, they should have built it better; the only explanation we get of his interest in her is nearly ten years later when Caroline says in The Originals she believes he only liked her because she reminded him of when he was human, innocent and young. And I kinda get this, because despite how much he goes on about being feared Klaus does love having people who say he can be saved, loved and etc.

The fact that the plot and timeline was often bended to their will is a turn off for many fans as well and it always pissed me off too because it didn't make sense and still doesn't. The biggest example I can think of right now is when Klaus sent her money for the Salvatore school: he was supposed to be trapped in Marcel's dungeon by then, but the timeline of these shows has never made any sense anyway. Or how in they inserted Klaus in every one of Caroline's scenes in The Originals; Daniel Gillies himself was upset by this, they even had to delete some of his scenes to fit hers in, which is a reason of why season five was so rushed and full of bad writing.

But honestly that's the main reason I can think of. Whenever I stumble across a klaroline ship the comments always are "their chemistry" or "they look so good together" and more things about the ship. I honestly think klaroline wouldn't have blew up the way it did if it had been done these last years, but many of the plots that there are in tvd wouldn't have made it to the screen if it had been streaming this year.

I fully agree with his other ships. Canonically Klaus just loved romantically three women: Tatia, Aurora and Camille. However, I don't really think he was in love with Tatia, just infatuated. He's not as affected by her as Elijah is, but once Klaus loves you or he takes a serious romantic interest in someone he really never forgets about them: Camille and Aurora are the biggest proof of this.

Losing Aurora really took a toll on him and shaped him to be the character we know and people often brush over this because they don't like Aurora/for shipping reasons. I think she's his most interesting romantic relationship, and they're my favorite tvdu ship. It's kinda canon he loved her more than any of his other love interests and don't get me wrong, I love Klaus and Camille but in my opinion Klaus always forgot about her whenever Aurora was around which just pissed me off.

If Cami had remained dead by the time Legacies took place, I do believe Klaus and her would have gotten back together. To me, Aurora was never truly evil and I think they should have handled her character better, but Klaus understood her even after everything she did to him and viceversa, and their chemistry is just so perfect and they had sexual tension in every one of their interactions. But if Cami had been alive, I honestly think Klaus would have remained with her.

Everyone who follows me knows I believe Klaus loved Aurora romantically the most, but by the time Legacies takes place Klaus would probably adore Cami a lot more than it's already shown in canon and perhaps they would even be married, and she was good for him and his family. In the modern day, Aurora wasn't good for him or his family at all (she was literally trying to kill Hope) and in general, she needed to work on herself, to try to let go of Tristan's abuse before getting into a relationship with the man whose family is responsible for her fucked up mental health.

However, I do think Hope would stop her family if they tried to kill Aurora, she's really empathetic in these kind of things and they had a slight respect for each other by the time Aurora died. Klaus and her would probably talk, perhaps she would even have a conversation with Camille before leaving to live her best life which it's what should have happened in canon. Hayley would probably thank her for saving her daughter too, and I think they - by this I mean the whole Mikaelson family - would agree to try to not kill each other again, but who knows with them?

I love Klaus and Hayley together. Whether people ship them romantically or not isn't important to me, I can see their potential and though I personally think they wouldn't work, I can understand why other people do. I really like how often she stands up to him whenever she feels he's getting too cocky, or when it comes to their daughter. I love how much their relationship developed in the last three seasons and how gutted he was after her death, he didn't just love her for being his mother's daughter but for being his best friend and family. It was beautiful for me to see how much Hayley fought for him and never gave up, they deserved to raise their daughter together or at least, Hope deserved it.

And I honestly agree: he has amazing taste. I would get with any of these girls in an instant, they're all beautiful.

#anti klaroline #klaus mikaelson #hayley marshall #aurora de martel #camille o'connell #caroline forbes #klamille #klayley #klaurora #the originals #the vampire diaries #legacies

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