I'm still thinking about Laudna and how, as she starts breaking down and the jagged pieces show more and more, earlier aspects of her characterization take a new, kind of horrifying shape.
Laudna was never upset - in fact, the idea seemingly never occurred to her - about Imogen voicing the opinion that maybe the Vanguard was right, even after they murdered Laudna right in front of her. She has never, as far as we have seen, actively sought a way to be rid of Delilah, or to grow her magic in ways that don’t involve Delilah. She talks about a fear of holding Imogen back, encourages Imogen to move on once Laudna is gone. She represses negative emotions but at the same time her joy in life is genuine and overflowing, not a mask.
It all builds a picture of someone who isn't only undead in terms of game mechanics, but who genuinely doesn’t really see herself as alive. Laudna sees herself as living on borrowed time. Marisha has spoken of her as someone who has lived through trauma and moved past it; I believe she means that not in the sense that she's unbothered by her trauma - we have seen she’s not - but that it in a sense doesn’t matter to her. She’s already dead. There’s no point in healing, or seeking a solution or cure, only in finding as much joy as she can in every little thing until the darkness catches up with her. When she regressed in Whitestone post shard incident, there were mentions of her not fully remembering her early days as an undead. She was unstable, not fully sure of what was real and what wasn’t, maintaining her sliver of sanity by talking to the evil necromancer in her mind and an anthropomorphized dead rat. She was likely treated by locals like some scary monster because she largely acted like one. She was a hollow one in every sense of the word. Then she met Imogen, someone who not only wasn’t scared of her and saw her as human, but who understood her struggle; I suspect this genuine human connection was what brought her out of nearly three decades of hollowness.
And in that, she has made Imogen her purpose where before she had none. If the Vanguard is Imogen's destiny, then it doesn’t matter that they killed Laudna because Laudna was a lost cause even before Otohan killed her. Exandria and Laudna both were hollow before Imogen, because she had no real connections, and so now Imogen is all that matters. If Imogen wants to fight Predathos, Laudna will fight. If Imogen wants to leave the struggle and go live in a cottage, Laudna would go with her. If she wants to join Predathos, Laudna would help her. If Imogen died, Laudna would sacrifice Exandria and the gods and the remains of her own soul to get her back.
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i. about 2 weeks ago, i was told there's a good chance that in 5 or so years, i'll need a wheelchair.
ii. okay. i loved harry potter as a kid. i have a hypothesis about this to be honest - why people still kind of like it. it's that she got very lucky. she managed to make a cross-generational hit. it was something shared for both parents and kids. it was right at the start of a huge cultural shift from pre to post-internet. i genuinely think many people were just seeking community; not her writing. it was a nice shorthand to create connection. which is a long way of saying - she didn't build this legacy, we built it for her. she got lucky, just once. that's all.
iii. to be real with you, i still struggle with identifying as someone with a disability, which is wild, especially given the ways my life has changed. i always come up against internalized ableism and shame - convinced even right now that i'm faking it for attention. i passed out in a grocery store recently. i hit my head on the shelves while i went down.
iv. he raises his eyebrows while he sends me a look. her most recent new book has POTS featured in it. okay, i say. i already don't like where this is going. we both take another bite of ramen. it is a trait of the villain, he says. we both roll our eyes about it.
v. so one of the things about being nonbinary but previously super into harry potter is that i super hate jk rowling. but it is also not good for my mental health to regret any form of joy i engaged with as a kid. i can't punish my young self for being so into the books - it was a passion, and it was how i made most of my friends. everyone knew about it. i felt like everyone had my same joy, my same fixation. as a "weird kid", this sense of belonging resonated with me so loudly that i would have done anything to protect it.
vi. as a present, my parents once took me out of school to go see the second movie. it is an incredibly precious memory: my mom straight-up lying about a dentist appointment. us snickering and sneaking into the weekday matinee. within seven years of this experience, the internet would be a necessity to get my homework finished. the world had permanently changed. harry potter was a relic, a way any of us could hold onto something of the analog.
vii. by sheer luck, the year that i started figuring out the whole gender fluid thing was also the first year people started to point out that she might have some internalized biases. i remember tumblr before that; how often her name was treated as godhood. how harry potter was kind of a word synonymous for "nerdy but cool." i would walk out of that year tasting he/him and they/them; she would walk out snarling and snapping about it.
viii. when i teach older kids creative writing, i usually tell them - so, she did change the face of young adult fiction, there's no denying that. she had a lot more opportunities than many of us will - there were more publishing houses, less push for "virally" popular content creators. but beyond reading another book, we need to write more books. we need to uplift the voices of those who remain unrepresented. we need to push for an exposure to the bigotry baked into the publishing system. and i promise you: you can write better than she ever did. nothing she did was what was magical - it was the way that the community responded to it.
ix. i get home from ramen. three other people have screenshotted the POTS thing and sent it to me. can you fucking believe we're still hearing this shit from her when it's almost twenty-fucking-twenty-three. the villain is notably also popular on tumblr. i just think that's funny. this woman is a billionaire and she's mad that she can't control the opinions of some people on a dying blue site that makes no money. lady, and i mean this - get a fucking life.
x. i am sorry to the kid i was. maybe the kid you were too. none of us deserved to see something like this ruined. that thing used to be precious to me. and now - all those good times; measured into dust.
/// 9.6.2022 // FUCKING AGAIN, JK? Are you fucking kidding me?
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the new Abby Cox video is so good and reminds me of the Spongebob Driver's License meme
"so everyone involved in this incident was likely tipsy or at the very least, tired (quite possibly both)?"
"yes"
"and the sort of crinoline most blamed for fire deaths- in unreliable news stories -wasn't even in fashion anymore?"
"yes"
"and Mary Wilde and her partner were dancing around the room at high speed, which can make even narrower skirts or men's tailcoats flare out and the trajectory of the couple difficult to control?"
"yes"
"and the servants had probably removed the grate from the fire to start banking it for the night, leaving the open flame unguarded?"
"yes"
"and there was more fire than usual involved in this party because it was Halloween?"
"yes"
"and Emily may have tried to beat out the fire with her own skirt, a plausible explanation for how it spread to her clothes as well?"
"yes"
"and both girls fell or were rolled down a hard stone staircase before they died, with no autopsy ever being performed on their bodies to rule out internal injuries from that as a cause of death?"
"yes"
"so wearing crinolines was barely a contributing factor, given everything else that went wrong."
"no it was definitely the crinolines' fault"
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Meltdown meet-cute (dp x dc)
Steph was cold and hungry. Which honestly, was pretty par for the course for a stakeout. At her side Cass was standing as still as the gargoyle up in Bristol, and had been unmoving for what felt like forever. Cass really was just inhumanely good. Letting out a fond huff, Steph turned back towards their current target for the night.
They had chased a tip that the warehouse was a base of operation for some human trafficking ring that was coming through Gotham. Now it was only a matter of timing the guards and casing the place to make the take-down quick and efficient. Though with Cass here, that was almost a given.
"How was ballet?" Steph asked as they waited for the new people to come in.
"Good," Cass answered and it sounded like she was smiling behind her mask.
"I'm so hyped for your next recital," the blond said. "Maybe they'll let you do Laurencia variation you showed me last time."
"Not yet," the other girl answered fondly. "More practice."
Then, before Steph could answer, Cass spoke up again. "Look."
One of the man had looked at his watch and was turning to the other guard. Time was almost up, then.
"Showtime," Steph said as she let a smile stretch on her face.
Simultaneously, both girls jumped off their perch and fell towards the warehouse. Grapple-guns made noises and the drop wasn't high enough that they couldn't just roll off the impact, so that was what they did. Getting back to their feet, they silently crept towards the eastern front of the building where the blueprints had shown there would be a high-placed window for aeration (thank you, Oracle).
Steph dangled down as she broke the latch open, as Cass kept a lookout. Silently both vigilantes slipped in and landed softly on the ceiling metal beams. There were big crates piled up beneath them, but none big enough to contain human beings. Then, Cass nudged her and Steph turned to see those long metal shipping container.
Bingo.
Still up in the rafters, the two quietly moved towards the two big metal boxes. Making sure no guard was around, the two vigilantes dropped down and broke the lock swiftly. They started opening the doors with the things being rusted enough to make a noise Steph winced at. Finally, they got it open, only to be met by an empty container, with zip-ties littering the bottom of the box.
Had someone beaten them to the rescue or had the people been moved?
The two bats exchanged a glance before Steph nodded towards the other container as Cass nodded. They both moved to the other box and made quick work of the lock and the door, and this time they could make out one form in the very back of the container, seemingly glowing slightly green. Maybe some guard with a conscience had slipped in a glow stick in to ward off the complete darkness.
"Hello," Steph started. "My name's Spoiler and this is my friend Black Bat. We're here to help."
As she talked she and Cass walked closer and pulled out their low-level flashlight, casting a little light around. They could now make out what seemed like the frame of a small person, possibly a kid.
"Can you hear me?" Steph said as she inched forward.
With still no response, she took the chance to put a hand on the person's shoulder and gently guiding them into turning around. As the person came into view, Steph couldn't hold in a gasp.
It was a young girl, looking around 13-14 years old, but the truly horrifying thing was that where her legs should be, there was only a puddle of fluorescent green goop.
"Please," the girl begged as she turned imploring blue eyes on Steph. "Help me."
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