#the entire element here with the way things went down is bad writing from Point A to point Z

[lightdancer1]

See the further irony is:

That in using 'Mall Goth Sauron' as the take on Dark Willow over 'misogynist has character randomly killed for LULZ' it also allows for greater accountability on the one hand and for Season 7 to thematically focus on repairing all this damage in the midst of facing an enemy of shadows reliant on lies to further itself. The only way to break the Druj is the absolute Truth in a very Zoroastrian sense. Characters don't get to neatly skip past accountability for their actions, and this would spiral over into further later seasons with the essential reality that in an otherwise lower-level setting this one random girl from California is a Dark Phoenix-tier reality warper and the most powerful person on the planet, or the universe.

And the questions of how that power could and should be employed on the one hand and that Willow is essentially a Doctor Strange type who beats up Gods and Eldritch Abominations for her regular line of work where her counterparts deal with the more 'street level' crises would in turn be the logical conclusion of where the show ends. She doesn't do as much physical fighting for the same reason that Stephen Strange never uses magic to go punch the Hulk in the face, her narrative role is ultimately that of Sorceress Supreme of Earth, with literally nobody in an ancient established war anticipating that this one random ginger from California was and is the new Sorceress Supreme and that if they had had such awareness the realities are that this power would and could have taken worse forms.

Unfortunately for the world, the reality too is that it is a shy computer geek who has a not at all subtle dark side and the usual teenage anxieties and insecurities given the equivalent of being able to reliably actually do things other people might dream of but can never do.

But again as long as Dawn Summers being a good thing is a narrative convention that's established memory magic is a poor choice to show the corrupting effects of reality-warping. It's a case of 'yes as established in canon all of this is true for that one season but then they decided to retcon it, so the fans are not obligated to care about it any more than the canon does about this itself.'

#willow rosenberg #tara maclay #dawn summers #you will never convince me as long as Dawn Summers is a plot device that 'memory magic unforgivable' is anything but bad writing #it was the choice used but there are other equally toxic things that could have been done instead #the basic theme of 'very powerful person decides things for another in an abusive fashion' works just as well without it #Tara's growth arc in refusing to tolerate abuse even from the person who brought her out of her shell can stand perfectly fine #it works even better with a budding Sauron than abruptly deciding 'wholesale memory rewrites good retail unforgivable.' #killing Tara off also denies her any sense of closure or ability to get that closure with the person who does this #the entire element here with the way things went down is bad writing from Point A to point Z #and it's also easily forgotten but Tara wasn't in fact intended to be Willow's love interest #she was replacement Willow for sympathy points #her entire arc as such became Willow X Tara but it was a choice from actor chemistry #So in giving Tara a role besides 'Willow's Girlfriend' it arguably does better by her character #tara x willow #btvs #and yes yes the 'scale changes things' argument is true but only to a point #it's really no different to introduce Dawn than what Willow did #if the retail is wrong so is the wholesale and the decisions to make this that point of no return is an avoidable mistake #plus honestly imagine a Season 7 Tara going 'sweetie no' and a Season 7 Willow dealing with those consequences in real time #equally one can have Tara's cold turkey approach stick exactly as it was #and serve as her role in the time bomb because she's a product of an abusive family and not an infallible moral guide #she rightly sees the problem and at least tries to address it when nobody else did #but unfortunately her solution was pouring gasoline on the fire and then vacating the range where the fire would burn #still further between that and Willow being human enough to resent being told to take that pain and do it going it alone #there'd be plenty of reasons for a surviving Tara and Willow to spend season 7 broken up as is #Tara would not at all be wrong to be wary and not want to touch reformed Sauron with a 400 foot pole #Willow equally would resent someone whose bad advice helped create the problem and who evades any recognition thereof #good old fashioned drama with entirely human motives

[physalian]

Physalian’s Curated Tips on Worldbuilding Megapost

Some of these are *not* mine, they’re from author Randy Ellefson, I’m just interpreting the tips I like in my own words. These specifically come from his book, 185 Tips on World Building. I don’t agree with all of them, because he tends to read as a “you must do this specific thing to be successful,” which is limiting and doesn’t consider when elements work because they’re different, these books are also in the “throw all your eggs in one basket” camp for your one series/mythos, instead of different worlds for different universes.

Ellefson also disagrees with my argument of “everything you build doesn’t have to serve a purpose”. Verbatim, in his book, he says: “There’s no reason to invent something if we don’t have a plan for it.” Which, sorry, no. Easter eggs and details purely for fluff in a one-off sentence make your world feel real.

That said, he does have some useful nuggets I’ll paraphrase below, and some I just went off-book entirely.

1. Pacing your Workflow

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and sitting down to hash out all the elements of your world in one sitting and never deviating from that path greatly limits the scope and variety you could come up with. As I wrote in my “when worldbuilding gets weird” post, the real world wasn’t manufactured by a nitpicky author on a quest to absolve us of plot holes—let your worldbuilding be a little illogical and contradictory and just plain strange and inexplicable.

The best way to do that is to worldbuild when inspiration strikes, or at least leaving your worldbuilding loose enough to add in extra details and spice whenever you come up with something cool. Do a little note here or there, toss it in your “worldbuilding” bin, and you’ll likely end up with something far more unique and organic than following any step-by-step method.

2. Are the Gods Real?

In essence—say you have your fantasy world and your fantasy religions. Decide whether or not those prayers can actually be answered, and to what degree, and how the existence (or just speculation) of your world’s religion impacts scientific thought and endeavors.

You can write a whole-ass religion with all these beliefs and practices, and leave it entirely up to speculation whether there’s anyone listening. Or strike it somewhere in the middle where they do exist but aren’t very hands on, or they do exist, but only for certain groups, or they did exist, etc.

In my WIP sci-fi series, I had a little bit of both. One world where they’re very much real and there’s proof, and one world where everyone sure believes their capital-G god is real, with zero evidence.

3. Species vs Races

Most of the time, in fantasy, they’re different “races” in that they can intermarry and interbreed and create things like half-elves. In sci-fi, they tend to be different species with different lifespans, biological structures, diets, habitats, restrictions, etc. If your world is the latter, something really underexplored in these kinds of settings is how being completely different species can be devastating to romantic relationships that connect on an intellectual level, but just can’t on a long-term scale.

Also an aside—if you’re going to write a racism allegory consider the following: Racism in the real world is a social construct. We are all human and the differences between us are negligible, making all the fearmongering baseless. And yet, in so many stories, fantasy racism is between two legitimately different species or between one group, and one Much Cooler group (mutants, fairies, elves, aliens, supernatural entities). Suddenly the fantasy racists have a leg to stand on because they aren’t all the same species and they are fundamentally different, which… misses the point entirely? Elves vs “Dark Elves” are a whole different ballgame than “Elves vs Humans”.

4. The Planet of Hats

Taken from OSP, and Ellefson. “Gee, I wonder who the bad guys are?”

The bad guys: Blood red eyes, stereotypically ugly features, skulking around in the dark with yellow teeth, claws, a penchant for hissing, and a color pallet of reds and blacks.

The good guys: Conventionally gorgeous, pastels and bold rainbows of color, sunny utopia of a civilization.

Unless the point is to comment on the planet of hats, or be funny, try to inject some variety and nuance in the Bad Guy realm.

5. Determine the Social Hierarchy

Most of us can come up with the lower class and the rich one percenters for our worlds rather easily, I think, because those tend to be emphasized most heavily in fantasy, and your hero/villain will likely fall into either side. But do you have a middle class? What socioeconomic hurdles are in place to keep everyone in their lanes?

What’s the difference between homeless, impoverished, poor, getting by, renting, home-owning, and land-owning? How can you tell, and how does your world’s rich maintain their place, outnumbered by your world’s proletariat? Hunger Games is a fantastic example—some Districts are much more heavily favored and nurtured by the rich than others.

6. Monsters

Similar to whether or not the gods are real—are your monsters real? Does your world have their own in-universe metaphors and allegory for the “monstrous” that are still myths? What does that say about these people? Has that view around those “monsters” and what they allegorically represent in-universe changed?

If the monsters are real, are they actually monsters, or the victims of propaganda? Are the “normal people” the real monsters? Are they all just people creating violent slander against each other?

7. Plants, Animals, and Natural Resources

Stuff like this is, in my opinion, only important to heavily detail and think about if the plot demands it. As in, I don’t need to know about the land’s farming practices if a food shortage or grain disease or fantasy inflation of corn prices isn’t part of the story. A one-off line? Sure. A farmer’s backstory? Sure. Taking a random aside to talk at length about genetic engineering of onions in your book about fantasy spies? No.

That said, if this is part of your plot, mix together some real-world analogues and when it comes to fundamental methods for survival, like farming, think of what would be the path of least resistance for these people to come up with. A seaside village is probably going to survive mainly on fish, mussels, and crustaceans because it’s right there for the taking, as opposed to trying to farm avocados on starved soil. If they are trying to farm avocados, now that’s a peculiar story I’d love to hear more about.

8. Zombies?

Or the general concept of an afterlife, and reverting back from it. Is there a religion around their dead and where they go when they’re gone? Can they come back? Do the people only think they can come back? Are there whole rituals or beliefs around revival or reincarnation or body-hopping?

What parts of your afterlife really are a myth, and what can you prove within the narrative? Does it even matter to the plot if fantasy heaven is real? Do your characters refuse to believe in it, despite evidence to the contrary?

Are the “undead” bound to religious rules, or supernatural? Meaning: If I write about vampires, am I writing with Christian rules (with the churches and the holy ground and crosses being problematic) or something older? If I write about zombies, are they a natural phenomenon, or a plague from the gods?

9. On Practical Planets (Physalian’s)

I just watched a movie where there was a lock-box with a celestial combination lock, and to unlock it they needed to know the specific future date the last people who touched it would have thought of. The problem: That box predates the modern calendar, and the writers either didn’t know, didn’t care, or didn’t think it was important (it wasn’t, but still).

Same principle applies on creating planets: How “real” do you intend to get? We’re already off the edge of the map when we create multiple humanoid alien races, implying a cosmic degree of convergent evolution. The more “real” you get with your worldbuilding, the more questions you open up, the more it starts to fall apart as you put the audience’s ability to suspend their disbelief under a microscope.

Example: Artificial gravity. We can either make spinning spaceships, or just say the ship has some fancy alien tech that magically makes it happen and not explain in any further detail. And people will buy it because this is sci-fi.

When it comes to planets and concerning elements like tides, seasons, weather patterns, different gravitational pulls, whether the air should even be breathable, it can get very overwhelming very quickly if you yourself don’t allow some room for your own suspension of disbelief. So consider playing with elements on non-Earth worlds like how the night sky would look on an inhabited moon, or a binary star system, but also, this is fantasy. Just roll with it.

If you are intending to write a universe with very realistic and grounded physics, you have a lot of research to do and authors like Ellefson have plenty of guidance to help you.

10. Practical Geography (Physalian’s)

Once again: If it’s important to the plot, go ham on your climates and weather patterns and how the geography and mountains shape rainfall and such. The more bearing the physical environment has on the story, the more detail it deserves. Your fantasy city is going to need a source of freshwater and ample fields for food if they farm, vs import.

But also, get weird. Fill your fantasy geography with crazy natural phenomena. You might have a forest of trees that your fantasy woodpeckers bored a million holes through, and when the wind blows, the entire forest sounds like a godly flute. Or you have a river that runs beet purple in the spring because of a natural mineral deposit upriver, perfectly harmless. Or you have a flower that can walk, creeping around the forest floor on its root ball devouring beetles all night long.

Real world physics are fun to play with and can create some interesting problems: Like your heroes crash land on a jungle world with air they can’t breathe, demanding they address this problem that many sci-fi stories overlook, but it’s also terribly constricting. This is fantasy. Get fantastical.

11. Fantasy Politics and Why They’re in Power

100 years from now, I’d love to know how the textbooks describe the evolution of early 2000s American politics. If you have a fantasy dictator, figure out how they came to power, who they stood on to get where they are, and what parts of the populace were so desperate for a world they don’t live in, that they gave this leader the shirts off their backs.

Figure out the answer to “How did we get here?” Let it be illogical, and let our current political climate serve as example. You can have whatever hill you want to die on for your chosen politicians, for the most arbitrary reasons, and most of us don’t have well-thought-out theses on why we vote the way we do. Our views are filtered through the media we consume, and the media we don’t consume.

Let the system be broken and nonsensical—you can’t get any worse than reality.

12. Romanticizing (Physalian’s)

In other words, does your world have an era, a style of design, a way of living, a philosophy of a bygone time that they romanticize? Do they have idolized fantasy celebrities? A type of home or settlement that’s the Fantasy American Dream? What’s being advertised by the fantasy luxury, leisure, and cosmetic brands?

Was there a previous leader who led like no other? Do you have your own “Make Fantasy Land Great Again” group? Do they have merit? Is there another culture one group strives to live like? Architecture or clothing or cultural items they buy en masse to “be like the idols”.

I have a world with cultural artifacts inspired by Italian Murrine style glassblowing and via magic, they can make some physics-bending art pieces. Those artifacts, from that ancient culture, have been stolen and sold to enemy museums and the elite and have become a status symbol, even though the ancient culture just made plates and bowls out of necessity and would be horrified at their legacy.

13. Fantasy Weaponry and Innovation

Necessity inspires innovation, but what if your world never invented cars or gunpowder? For example: American land travel and urban design was built, with rare exception around our oldest cities, for cars in mind, not trains or horses and wagons and foot traffic, because of where we sit on the industrial revolution timeline. Our cities aren’t retrofitted for cars, our roads are wide enough for that sole purpose. Our settlements can be very widely spread apart because they were built with the knowledge of speedy travel in mind. Very few things, especially in the South (where I live) can be considered in “walking distance,” much less safely. You must own a car, you have no other option. The Powers That Be also hate trains because more trains means less need for cars and car companies like money.

Alternatively, how does warfare change depending on how deadly and plentiful your fantasy weapons evolve to be? Modern soldiers don’t prance around in their national colors and fancy feathered hats anymore, standing across from each other and shooting on command. Was there any practical reason for dressing your soldiers in bright, candy red, Britain? Surely must’ve been easy to spot for an ambush. Surely wasn’t practical, or logical, but it did happen.

14. Timescales

I want to address the alternative to the obvious “create a standard unit of measurement”. Show what happens when there isn’t a standard unit of measurement, and let chaos ensue. You should have one for the sake of not confusing your readers, but in-universe, have different cultures choosing to die on their hill of having 25 months when the rest of the world has 23, with the former based on their local natural phenomena and the latter based on lunar cycles.

“Military time” as we call it in the US, is the standard 24-hour clock that still confuses us and has us counting up on our fingers. A system we refuse to change even though it’s fundamentally the same amount of time, is a broken system that we still use because it's too hard to change (like the imperial measurement system).

15. Famous Places and Significant Architecture

Do you have a fantasy Disneyland? What about a fantasy remnant of a fantasy World's Fair randomly in your city? Or a bidding war between rival artists amounting to crazy monuments and art installations around the region trying to one-up each other? Your own Chicago Bean with a real name that no one uses and most of us aren’t even aware exists?

Or for religious purposes, what do your churches look like? Do they tower skyward as a monument to a celestial creator, or do they bury deep below ground and into the ocean, to reach a land or water god? Are they massive monuments or humble temples? Are they beautiful displays of wealth, or little wooden gazebos built by the locals? What does your architecture say about your culture?

16. Languages and Cultural Barriers (Physalian’s)

Whether you decide to write your own language (of which I made a guide for) or come up with a few words here and there and allude to foreign tongues, how do these languages, and the people who speak them, navigate foreign lands? How is the dominant language taught? Is the foreign language looked down on and discriminated against? Is even speaking it or having a name from it considered a crime? Are signs and advertisements written in multiple languages or just the dominant one?

What foreign traits are seen as unsavory by the dominant one, whether it’s clothing, religion, lifestyle choices, names, social behaviors, food, parenting, etc? How does the dominant culture discriminate–through law or social pressure?

Is your culture striving to protect a dying language and offering free courses and resources to learn it? Is there a dialect specific to one class or group or region? Do you have a pidgin or creole (not Creole) that comes from a blending of cultures, by force or by chance?

—

I want to make it clear that I don’t think Randy Ellefson is objectively wrong. He makes a lot of good points—for grounded worldbuilding. As I said above, the more central any one piece of your worldbuilding is to the plot, the more detail and thought you should put into it so it feels believable and it feels like there’s much more beneath the tip of the iceberg than just what’s on the page.

He points out many facets of how a society is established where it is, when it is, and why a people would come together, stay together, thrive together, and fall apart. Lots of elements you might not think about when you’re staring at a blank canvas.

I just think his tips don’t allow for the creative freedom of the weird and illogical aspects that make a world feel organic, and not manufactured with step-by-step instructions. His tips are for world building, not world discovering.

#world building #tips for writers #writing resources #writing advice #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #fantasy #sci fi #scifi #long post

[watchmakermori]

thoughts on the live action avatar

spoiler alert: I thought it was bad. if you liked the show and you don't like reading negativity, just skip out on this one.

the overall quality of the show was about what I anticipated, but some specific aspects were better/worse than I first expected. from the trailers alone, I knew the effects looked bad (I don't know why they get so much praise). I wasn't expecting amazing acting from a bunch of child actors either, though I was pleasantly suprised by sokka's performance.

the biggest and worst disappointment is the writing. it's really bad. the og cartoon does have some ropy dialogue, especially towards the beginning of book 1, so I'm not going to pretend its perfect. but the live action is relentlessly clunky and expository. I don't need aang to tell me, the viewer, how he's just a normal kid and all he wants to do is play with his pals. I don't need yue to tell me that the ocean spirit is full of vengeance and rage when it's literally destroying a city. show me. and trust me to understand the story beats without having them explained.

a lot has been said about katara's actress, and I agree that her performance is weak, but I think she wasn't helped by a) bad dialogue and b) bad direction. The direction as a whole seems so uninspired and most of the actors give middling performances. I would rather these kids overacted than underacted. The Harry Potter kids were not good actors, especially not at the beginning of the movie series, but they still managed to give charismatic performances because they went all in on it.

I really just hate how the scenes are sort of...placed? It's hard to even put my finger on what it is, but it feels like the characters just suddenly appear in scenes as if they spawned there, with no thought as to how they arrived. There's one scene in the final episode where Azula is standing atop a rock outside Omashu and removes her mask to address all of the Fire Nation forces, and I couldn't stop thinking about all of the troops shuttling into place outside of the destroyed city, while Azula taps her foot on the rock and waits awkwardly to address them all. tl;dr scenes often feel staged and inorganic.

speaking of azula, I fucking hate that she was shoehorned into the story this early. she had no good reason to be here, and the portrayal of her character just does not work. I vehmently dislike that we see her struggling to win Ozai's approval, because that is not the point of her character at all. when she is first included in book 2, she is the golden child. she is a firebending prodigy who was 'born lucky', who succeeds in every way that zuko fails. she is a complete perfectionist, but she also has the incredible entitlement of a person who has never failed in her life, which makes her the perfect foil to her disgraced, exiled brother.

azula seeming perfect is integral to her character and her relationship with zuko. it explains why zuko is so desperate for ozai's approval, and why azula completely cracks and breaks down in book 3 when things stop going her way. she is not used to failing, she is not used to being tested, she is not used to anyone telling her no. making ozai belittle her and play her off against zuko completely changes the dynamics of the family, and it makes her a weaker foil to zuko. I potentially hate this more than any other change in the live action, even though it's a minor one overall

out of all the characters, I think the only one they really successfully captured was sokka. they toned down his comic elements, which I think was a sensible choice, but he still has the jokey sarcasm that gives him the spirit of the character. I do have to give credit where it's due for this, because I honestly thought sokka would be one of the hardest ones to get right.

I do think it was a bad move to remove all of his sexism, though. I could accept them making it less overblown, but taking it away entirely gives him less growth as a character.

they did an okay job on zuko and iroh, though I don't think iroh has the right balance of humour and sage wisdom that makes him such a beloved character. zuko is okay, if maybe a bit too emotionally mature at times. I didn't really like that he and aang had a full conversation after the blue spirit kidnapping. in the cartoon, zuko immediately fucking blasts him, and that feels truer to how short-sighted and reckless he is at that stage in the story. but overall, zuko isn't too bad.

katara sucks. she really sucks. she's not bossy, she's not snarky, she's not got a temper. she doesn't have that overly responsible, maternal side to her personality either. her entire character is distilled down to her...wanting to waterbend. and help aang, I guess. we don't get to see her make proper mistakes or rob pirates or scream at sokka for being an ass. she's literally unrecognisable compared to her cartoon counterpart, and live action katara doesn't have any other personality traits that make up for the ones she's lost.

aang is almost as bad, though people seem to be talking about him less. he's so goddamn passive, and it's a complete joke that he doesn't do a single bit of waterbending in the whole series. I get that his arc across the season is about facing up to the responsibility of being the avatar, but I think they could've still had that and also included his motivation to learn waterbending. in the original cartoon, he's still very flighty and avoidant of his problems, but he always takes action to help others when he can.

I think it was a bad choice to not have aang run away from the air temple at the beginning of the story. having him just go flying and accidentally get caught in a storm removes a very core point of motivation and guilt for his character, and it has a big impact on the rest of the story.

I do like yue better in the live action than the cartoon, though. she's a pretty meh character in the original and the voice actor is very wooden. she isn't the best character in the live action either, but more of her personality shines through and she feels less like a plot device. her wig is fucking terrible, though.

the action scenes almost all suck shit. they feel turn based and the dynamic martial arts basis to bending doesn't come through in the same way. the final episode did a better job on the fight choreography, but I still wouldn't call it good.

the cgi landscapes and bad lighting make me all too aware that most of this series was probably shot in a warehouse against a greenscreen

yes it is better than the 2010 movie. no this is not saying very much

It did at least make me want to rewatch the original series again tho so I'm gonna go do that

#avatar #the last airbender #it'll probably get enough views for a season 2 but I doubt I'll watch it #if I do it'll just be out of curiosity to see if they massacre my girl toph as badly as they massacred katara and azula

[greywindys]

Initial thoughts (I may have more later), the good, the bad.

Good

Pretty much everything with Murdoc. I talk a lot about how Gorillaz has fallen into the pattern of taking the temperature of the fandom, and trying to give them what they think they want in a future phase. But I never thought what I wanted and what Gorillaz thought I wanted would ever align. Murdoc stands out this entire video. I’m still processing how they were able to get him to this point. If you haven’t been around the fandom that long. He’s softened so much, and I think that *is* growth for him, and growth I’ve always felt was possible. I’m thrilled that he’s awful at fighting and feels fearful in the face of confrontation, and that he’s not exactly 100% loyal to his “found family.” One might argue that because of his background, he shouldn’t be afraid of a fight. But there have been hints of this since P5. He puts on a loud, obnoxious front, but he’s actually pretty fearful and sensitive deep down. Ha!

Ambiguously helping to save 2D. I’m arguing against myself here, but it’s just as likely that Murdoc went to “save” 2D because he was thinking about impressing Moonflower with his ~strength. You can definitely interpret it the other way, too - that he was so scared for 2D that he moved without thinking. I honestly like how unclear this is. It leaves room for fans of varying perspectives to feel comfortable enjoying the video, and it’s a lot more fitting of Murdoc to still not have his feelings sorted out.

BUT I still like the 2Doc narrative you can make out of this. The parallels were wild, but I also wonder if that was intentional.

The story doesn’t seem to be dragging out too long.I might be speaking too soon here, but it seems like this video is concluding the phase. If they want to keep writing entire story lines, I think it’s better if they keep them short. This was a nice size, and didn’t get too dark or complicated.

Murdoc’s wink. Every face Murdoc makes.

Bad (or, as we say it at my job “areas where there’s room for growth”)

Formulaic storytelling. Everything is always about 2D,and it gets kind of boring. It would be nice to see the roles switched around from time to time.

Russel. Conversely, nothing is ever about Russel. From what I gather, he helped them determine what day the rupture was on, but that involved watching a TV screen the entire phase. I’m not even a huge Russel stan,but there were a lot of ways he could have had a more active role. I don’t really like how he was handled overall. If they’re going to do try to write full stories, I hope they can learn how to diversify their stories.

Risk aversion. I know they’re trying to stay relevant, but I do think they stick to 99% of the things I complain about because they don’t want to lose money. And I  think I’ll miss that about Gorillaz overall - a commitment to a vision regardless of how popular it will be.

I can also get Russdoc out of this, but I’m sad they left out what could have been some fun interactions.

BUT IN GENERAL...I’m a fake fan. Anyone who’s been here long enough probably knows this. My main concern is Murdoc, though I’ll enjoy or critique other elements depending on how I feel. I’m happy with what they did with Murdoc. But does it balance out what I feel is missing? I’m still figuring that out.

#personals. #tsc

[wondereads]

Personal Review (11/28/22)

Song of Silver, Flame Like Night by Amelie Wen Zhao

Summary

The Last Kingdom of Hin has had a tumultuous history, the most recent of which is an invasion by the Elantian Empire. Years after Lan's mother was brutally murdered in the initial invasion, she works as a song girl at a tea house, surviving under Elantian rule and seeking answers for a mysterious seal her mother left on her arm, one that only she can see. Zen is a practitioner, someone who utilizes qi to manipulate the natural world, an art almost entirely lost to history. With an Elantian magician hunting them down, the two of them work together to unravel the mysteries of their pasts.

Plot 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

This book is fairly fast-paced, which I appreciated. The plot gets started within the first few chapters, and it moves pretty steadily for the rest of the book. There are some parts that are predictable for the genre and age group, but there were also some good plot twists. Lan's mother's seal in particular went in an unexpected direction for me; I was anticipating something different being hidden in it. There were a couple moments here and there that dragged a little, but for the most part, there was always something happening.

The worldbuilding is very interesting. There's a lot of symbolism to be found in that practitioners utilize the natural energy of qi while Elantian magicians use refined metals, and it is explained well. The fact that there's a lot of historical erasure and revisionism going on allows for Lan to be Hin and familiar with mundane elements of the Last Kingdom while still being fairly clueless about practitioning, allowing the reader to learn alongside her.

This book reminded me very strongly of The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang, in a good way. If someone were averse to the extreme content of The Poppy War, this would be a great alternative since it deals with similar moral dilemmas and worldbuilding styles.

Characters 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

Lan and Zen were pretty typical for YA protagonists. They were well-developed and their characterization was consistent, they just had a lot of traits that you would expect to see. As such, I don't think I was as invested in them as I could have been. While the plot provided some good twists, their character arcs were predictable for me. I like them both, especially Lan, as people, but I want some more complexity in their characters. I think the second book will provide that, especially for Zen, for reasons that are definitely spoilers.

One thing that definitely intrigues me is that the entire book is in Lan and Zen's POV—except for one chapter at the very end. That chapter is from the perspective of Lishabeth, a member of the Elantian army. It isn't even the epilogue, which is Zen. It makes me wonder if maybe she will become a staple point of view in the next book, which would be very cool.

Of the side characters, my favorite was definitely Dilaya. I just really like characters that are difficult and clash with the main character in certain situations but know how to put aside differences when shit hits the fan. I really hope she and Lan's relationship develops as the story continues.

Writing Style 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

I'd say the writing is also standard for YA. Nothing about it particularly stood out to me, but nothing was bad about it either. I liked that it was split perspective since Lan and Zen work very well as deuteragonists since they share similar pasts. Getting to see the way they react to certain situations, especially considering how alike they are, was very interesting.

The pacing was pretty good; other than a few moments of drag it stayed steady for the most part.

Overall 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10

I enjoyed this book. I think the plot is particularly strong, and it deals with a lot of issues that are intriguing to me. The main characters are a little predictable, but I want to see how they'll develop, and there are some really strong side characters. The worldbuilding is super interesting, and there are certain things, like Hin history and Elantian magic, that I want to know more about. The writing is pretty standard, but there's nothing that irked me. Overall, a very solid book that I would definitely recommend to fans of The Poppy War. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for a copy of the book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The Author

Amelie Wen Zhao: Chinese, currently living in New York, also wrote Blood Heir, has a great Tiktok full of Chinese culture and jokes about C-dramas

The Reviewer

My name is Wonderose; I try to post a review every week, and I do themed recommendations every once in a while. I take suggestions! Check out my about me post for more!

#books #reviews #song of silver flame like night #amelie wen zhao #ya #fantasy #xianxia #chinese mythology #arc

[zalrb]

Can you tell me why you didn't like the 'Luckiest Girl Alive'?

OK well, first of all, I don't like Gone Girl, I'm not a fan of Gillian Flynn and Jessica Knoll who wrote Luckiest Girl Alive said that both Gone Girl and Gillian Flynn were a big influence and I could tell because the tone, the pacing, the dialogue felt like it was trying very much to be a Gillian Flynn movie/book so that annoyed me and I found the characters to lack emotional nuance both in the writing and in the acting (including Connie's and I like Connie Britton!) -- I may have rolled my eyes at the plot of Sharp Objects, for example, but Amy Adams can act so I at least got a good performance out of watching Sharp Objects, I didn't get that this time. I have a really hard time with glossy, cold, stylish movies that try and double as character pieces and fail and that's what I felt happened here.

Then there was the plot that felt poorly, poorly handled to me, it just left a bad taste in my mouth that the school shooting aspect of it kind of felt not necessarily incidental because she's known as being a survivor of the shooting but it still kind of felt like background? I just found it oddly flippant. That in it of itself deserves an entire movie to explore and to parse not just for TifAni but for everyone involved and it kind of just works as a mystery to solve and a reveal and there were elements of Columbine that were used that felt out of place, that entire plot line felt out of place for this story, I didn't think it was necessary, particularly when the story is so focused on TifAni, I just .. I usually don't use the word distasteful but it felt extremely distasteful for me.

And then there was TifAni and her motivations, and the concept of feeling as if you have to curate this image that's bulletproof before proceeding to go after and take down one of your now-beloved, decorated rapists is something that I would find interesting to explore and delve into about the way SA survivors are victim-blamed, about the misogyny women have to endure during a trial both by the law and by public opinion, but that's not really what happened and the way they chose to explore this concept was bizarre to me because her solution is to marry rich and try to become a journalist that doesn't write puff pieces about sex and to me, that wasn't saying what I'm guessing Knoll wanted to say -- the serious journalist who wants to write hard news and not puff pieces sounds like something out of a romcom, in fact that's a plot line from How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, the marrying rich thing was supposed to harken back to the lessons her mother taught her and why she went to that school as a teenager in the first place but the connection was flimsy because I didn't see how that would make her bulletproof when people could easily call her a gold digger, was the point supposed to be that she felt like with him and his name behind her, no one would dare try to tear her down only to realize that this thinking was disempowering her and she gave herself her own agency by writing the article because if that's what they were trying to go for, it failed.

I just finished the movie like what was the message supposed to be here ?What was I supposed to get from this? Why were these choices made? It just really frustrated me.

[hanzi83]

Return of the Scattered Mess

I haven’t written one in a bit, it is weird because I went almost 3 years without writing one because I didn’t need to as much since doing the podcast, but then recently I got in the habit, whether for better or worse to the people reading and consuming it, and now that I haven’t done one in a while it feels weird. Normally I have irrational feelings always flowing through my head about the state of the world and it is moving further to the right and all there really is to counter it is sports entertainment and limiting narratives, even if you say you oppose the evil of the far right because then you have to automatically blindly defend the democrat side and people who think they are smarter will scoff at the thought of both parties being the same, like I know there are bad faith actors who will just use that as an excuse to defend the new right’s personalities and sprinkle in some “anti war” talk and then think you are better than everyone else and it makes you more anti imperialist while always defending these sensationalist culture wars that really are about product placement with outrage marketing, and argue in favor of the far right leaning point to put people in marginalized communities in danger. But people who scoff at the notion of both parties being the same, when apolitical people who have lived through conditions of systemic shit that has happened to them and it has been happening under democratic leadership and republican leadership, people are not gonna look for the nuances of why the parties are different, maybe if people explained it like pro wrestling, it would be easy to kind of explain to the people who might not be as smart as the people who want to be thought leaders but act too elitist to distribute the information in a relatable way and then let dumbed down people continue to be lured into right wing cult like social circles online. Like here is the thing. I don’t know the exact rules of politics and what is legal and what is not but is it fair to say that someone who has committed so many fucking crimes and has people who are breaking the rules to defend him, and nothing is happening to them and they are still able to run for president and go to Waffle House for a photo op, and his ilk going on podcasts showing off about crimes they may have committed by “accidentally admitting” it, and nothing happens to these people, is it safe to say the parties involved don’t play by the rules that every day person plays by. It is like pro wrestling in that in kayfabe within the program, they have these legalities within kayfabe and it comes off as a parody and people often say “That would never happen in the real world, that’s not how it goes” but is that really true when literally all the crimes committed that we have learned about the last 20 years from the corrupt elements of government, are still able to just walk around and be free while the social climbing accounts just boo and hiss. I know it is frowned upon to be a conspiratorial person, and yes some of the “conspiracies” are coping mechanisms because it would break my being from within that people’s death and oppression is used to fuel sports entertainment in the MSM and that includes the alt media and the online funded shit, I know I am not supposed to think people in the alt media are compromised because they play clips of the MSM being dumbed down caricatures with overproduced promos, and pretend they are better because in 2023 making your entire personality dunking on the MSM is the most revolutionary thing you can do, people think there is no corporate interest in the alt media, because most of the takes from a bunch of alt media people are just as much establishment bullshit 90’s contrarian shit which is why they want to reboot the 90’s and early 2000’s where the “anti establishment” persona was coming off more genuine but the “anti establishment” establishment persona is one of the most overplayed hands with how watered down it is, like if someone like Tucker was really tugging on the cape of the establishment, you wouldn’t hear about him online or anywhere else, he would not be allowed to catch traction, but instead he has a bunch of shit heads who pretend to be anti war then go on his show and not call him out about the other pro war shit he has said, and the thing is there has never been a time where I haven’t felt more confused because it feels like the supposed anti establishment types are the ones who are being booked to be these “truth tellers” while they don’t disclose to their audience the problematic shit their guests are up to but if someone is supporting Ukraine, then it is like their entire personal character is attacked for everything they might be pure about and because this narrative online is that people in the legacy establishment and media say things about certain people on the right, you don’t want to sound like an establishment person so it feels like by the right wing think tanks and billionaire funded personas that cater to the online contingent, they are the ones who come off like they are telling the truth because they might adopt an anti war persona and might have a couple of “conspiratorial” things that might be true to people who are apolitical, while adding a bunch of other twisted right wing shit to the theories and you think you will have establishment liberal types will give nuances of what is going on around the world when they blindly shit on any conspiratorial thinking. Like I know right wingers have doped the 9/11 inside job thing and then they have then gone onto an anti trans panic to fuel their audience and following to act reactionary but it feels the only “woke” thing the progressive types can say about it is that it was funded by the Saudis, like they imposed something on poor old innocent US empire, and corporations, and other institutions and other public figures and officials do business with them and we think the money is being forced upon them, but don’t you think they do it because maybe people agree with their fundamentalist bullshit? For some reason, you cannot think that and the right wing who claim 9/11 was inside job then have no issue doing business with people who helped fund it, one would think that maybe powerful people don’t give a shit about the people oppressed, taking away people’s rights and somehow I am supposed to trust people who call out other foreign governments who never hold their own accountable. This is why a lot of people who have felt the lies and suffered from it might not give a shit about what the US has to say about shit because there have been so much shadiness. My whole thing is, they are still presenting a country vs country aesthetic when it is more about the far right powers taking over all over the fucking place. They want to self preserve about the warnings of what is to come, but then at the same time you levitate these threats with comedy and America’s dumbest criminal presentation, because these kinds of things could never be presented in a way where it has to be a fucking shitty reality show, because of a bunch of shit heads have to pretend they are side characters on Succession while people are gonna be harmed by the rhetoric going on, and this is why it is easy not to root for people who socially climb up in a system, because on the surface it feels they purposefully get worse, I get told a lot to get some help so I can feel better, and I can cop to my mental issues etc, but there are things that are not exactly facts that will ensure I will never fucking heal mentally because in order to get backup, I have to cosign from a side, and people thought once I got kicked from the Stern Show that I would then get lured in to get back up from the right wing side who would only attack Stern for being more PC when he has always been a system puppet, so if I were supposed to get back up, I would have to do what other people, who got fucked by the system, would do and align with problematic people and by the time they get their story out, people are not gonna give a shit about the root cause because now that person is going to the far right wing side. I have been left in the dark and I had to watch what I say or do because people who control my life could make shit even more uncomfortable and it can be so fucking under the table that no one will give a shit until they can officially prove it and make it into a fucking documentary for the future. That is the world I am supposed to get better in when everyone else has gotten worse, maybe their aesthetic is better because everyone judges the book by the cover while grown ass adults who are supposed to be leaders in whatever clique or institution are some of the most fucked up people on the planet and constantly make sure everyone is in constant misery and pain and gaslighting people into acting more reactionary. People will say this is what life is and the more people sell out, they will justify why people should be able to spread hate speech without and repercussions and make excuses while condemning people from the marginalized side because they will use a propped up sensationalist viral moments to justify it and get their takes propped up by more and more right wing leaning people and because they have fooled people into thinking because Lockeed Martin is holding up a fucking pride flag, that somehow the system loves the marginalized, when it is designed for pushback at an even more aggressive rate to discredit everyone from the general community, they make it seem like everyone is on the left, they think showbiz is run by liberal satanists, when to me it is run by conservatives fundamentalist shit that is under the guise of “liberation” because they are not the caricature right wing fundamentalist, but it is 2 sides of the same coin. 

It has been a while, so I am all over the place. But I think people have lowered their expectations when reading one of my blogs, they will definitely make fun of a dumbed down guy trying to articulate, and also some of them with evil intent will use the anecdotes of the experiences I have had being dumbed down and not use it for the sake of good, they will use to then double down on brainwashing dumbed down people into buying into their propaganda, and what is scary now is that people who want to sell out and not admit they are fucking phoney scum who built a reputation being anti establishment and they can’t give up on that one and maybe these people chose the wrong era and year to do this which is why they need the aesthetic of the 90’s and early 2000’s because they want to retread everything from that era even though it is watered down but if you get a bunch of people to prop it up and you are protected, you can use the guise of a progressive or someone who claims to be left/anti war and then find a way to constantly defend the right wing and when you attack the right wing, it is normally because you want to buy into Veep level in fighting which then forces people to have to advocate horrible people’s argument because you are training people to side between 2 people who have fascist aspirations, so the same people who are better than MSM are the ones who are lessening the threat of what is going on and this is who is supposed to be thought leaders. It would be one thing if people just sold out, but they can’t admit it and they will send people to lure me and others into that kind of thinking because as someone who is dumbed down and would just repeat and regurgitate talking points from people I viewed smarter than me, so you agree with the sentiment of what they say but then they will start cosigning other shit that is fucked up but because it is not as established as the the other corrupt and fucked up things, it means that I can’t ask any questions because at a certain point, these thought leaders just want to be cult leaders, they claim to be atheists but they want to be the gods/religion you worship. They can pretend to be anti establishment, but at the end of the day they have all become Steve Austin in the main event of WM17 shaking hands with Vince McMahon and then still later on try to do their anti establishment persona after the fact but by then people already see you as a caricature and parody who plays the hits for the live. And because these social climbers want to get up there as well, they will do work at their behest, they will be the soldiers and court jester for the billionaires, but people should study what I call the Sal Govenrale method, and this might be a deep cut but most Stern fans still consume my shit for the most part, but the method goes he is someone that was allowed to torment people Howard worked with and other people and he would be full of life and feeling good he is getting approval from Stern and he would help bury people for him and then he got his dream job of working for them, and then that is where he was put on display to become a sports entertainment caricature who dumbed himself down despite being talented and he would be the one who would keep Howard’s ignorance alive while Howard would scale back from being that guy because he was presenting himself as a more liberal guy. But I can assume the humiliation Sal felt where they chastised him for it on air was designed to happen like he was the only stupid one doing that kind of shit. And that is what everyone who is an online social climber will be forced to succumb through. How will anyone ever get better being in that kind of system where you will have to act worse and get worse mentally. I know the future of what is possible with how things are playing out and I don’t want to be here. It becomes disheartening to see people I used to hang out with become these caricatures and elitists, and then the news I would consume because I didn’t trust the western MSM media, and now it has become useless because they all ended up becoming shit and there is no one I feel other than a few at the current moment, but now I have to keep my fucking guard up with what information is being put out there. I used to think I was a free thinker because I listened to what the internet says, because it was easier and less established than the bullshit and lies MSM have told, and people in the establishment never explain why people can be lured into those circles and how sophisticated all this shit is, but we limit the conversations of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia etc by what it was presented as 30 years ago and think it is the exact same, the tactics are a lot more trickier because we don’t think they are orchestrating shit to happen so it helps the media fear monger so they manufacture consent into buying into upgraded ignorance. But what do I know huh? I am a dumbed down guy and my life is utter shit, you can tell me all the things wrong with me and you will just give me more ammo for why I shouldn’t have to be here. I don’t have anyone or anything really. The only hope at this moment is that if I drop dead now at my current irrelevant status, then at least I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone really knowing or giving a shit. 20 years ago I couldn’t articulate my visions but I could see the world was moving in a fucked up place and I just wanted to drop off from it and then I got famous and for a while it gave me a thrill and made feel a bit better even if it was being put on front street to be reduced to a whack pack parody and people would take their cues from Stern to drive me insane and push me into more mentally ill tirades and when someone has mentally ill tirades and now with everyhing that they accuse of being in my head solely and my own imagination, this is what is left of me, trying not to succumb to the pressure of being lured into becoming a reactionary because I used to buy into this shit back 10 plus years ago, when I was consuming alternative entertainment and media and now it feels like they are gonna be in the position as MSM 20 years ago when they are cheering on an illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. This is why my current conflict with Ukraine and Russia is not as intune as other people, because I have been used to the lies from western media, that for some reason to be considered a cool “anti war” person, I have to think that this is on the same level as what happened 20 years ago, and the ones who are doing the pro Ukraine shit, some of them who are establishment will basically do it in an imperialist mindset of acting like saying the US did bad shit in the past is the biggest moment for them to let out an audible scoff.  Sometimes I feel like neoliberals and neocons do the same shit of opposing each other but either way you will cosign their view and you will be lured into some kind of fundamentalism regardless. It is just the same people who claim to be anti war because they say they oppose wars happening but you are pro racist shit head by defending cosigned public figures being uplifted by racist groups but then claim anyone who shows support for Ukraine not to be invaded as the Nazis. These people use to be respectable in that they would call out the obvious caricature like shit in the MSM but now all of them with their platforms have become the same people they would make fun of. They have all become Jay Leno or they have all become Dennis Miller and they want the same type of cults from the Opie/Anthony/Howard Stern pipeline. I have never seen so many people who make their entire personality trait being anti MSM but then think they are in better positions than everyone else because they will cosign white supremacy in a grander view but they won’t view what they do as helping white supremacy because we limit the narratives of that to be this over the top example, it is so over the top, people think it is framing the MAGA types, and there will be claim of Feds etc, and I agree with the right on that on some level, but not that they are framing the right wing, but they are making it look that way and why can’t I believe that there are feds much like law enforcement that have white supremacists in it and that are actually helping the far right by making it look like they are specifically targeting them, even if they gotta throw some of them under the bus, but between these FBI whistleblower talking about corruption within it, and suddenly the right wing trusts the FBI when it comes to that, not that they couldn’t organize and book the storyline to look that way that people are being punished for being anti Biden and if the democrats were the most dangerous, we wouldn’t know that they are covering shit up but it is all over the internet purposefully leaked because we still view the internet as some underground chit chat room, so we don’t think we are supposed to know this shit, but literally everyone is talking about the stuff that people claim is censored, it is like when Gorilla Monsoon suspended Vader, yes officially in front of our eyes we saw it happen but it wasn’t really happening behind the scenes. Same logic, it is kind of like discussing who is president while horrible shit is happening because it is like blaming the world champion of a company but ultimately the bookers who run shit are the ones creating it, and by that we buy into this anti establishment candidate because you can spread the system didn’t want them to rise up even though we are seeing them nonstop and hearing about them. 

I am trying to go over jotted notes I had written down so I am gonna be moving from thought to thought, like I will improvise from the top so when I look at the list, hopefully I have gotten more of the topics off my mind but this list has been compiled for the last week or so and I just wanted to fucking write. I am not Hemmingway or anything, just a dumbed down conspiratorial thinker who lives in his parents basement from a grand conspiracy which you are not supposed to believe because there are no forces at the top to suppress me and it is all made up in my head so you shouldn’t take any of my theories seriously since you have helped reduce me to that and weaponized my mental health, so apparently it is frowned upon for me to weaponize it back of what I think is going on even though I have no clue what this world is and I really never understood it from the day I was fucking born. I know a lot of people feel how I feel, some people have crossed over to the system where their problems will get worse for them because they will either be put on front street and the system will humiliate them for shit that they were initiated into or you become a powerful person who then puts people’s lives through chaos and there will always be cults to defend these people nonstop and we have these conversations by limiting it and act like it is a regular relatable thing when none of this shit is relatable to regular people. It just bugs me seeing political shit which affects people’s lives on the long run being used armchair quarterback shit and dumbing it all down while a bunch of you anti establishment types are doing free promo for politicians who want fascist shit to take over or some pretentious product placement under the guise of talking about diversity so people can use that as an excuse to sensationalize against marginalized people and because I have almost been brainwashed to some extent and I have caught myself when I can see the thoughts going in the wrong direction, it makes me worried that as everyday passes by there is gonna be more sophistication of ignorance that will resonate at some point because all of us are susceptible to being brainwashed and being ignorant. People get mad at me for not being completely brainwashed. Bad faith actors have use their bad intentions while pretending they care about people in their community but then advocate for problematic shit and downplay the systemic shit that goes on in the entertainment world. Thing is when the establishment narratives are shit by default, I know people will get offended that I don’t trust the establishment, but because they have had lies nonstop all the fucking time, it is easier for people to fall for the lesser established things and they won’t recognize they are being conned into fascism, I know these words are overused but it perfectly describes what the world really is but the establishment have overused it so it doesn’t seem like it is cool, like it is with how discredited establishment type might pick on hip hop for some of the destructive themes within it, but those same people never mention the incentive to perpetuate and sensationalize the art and even the artists themselves, so it is like you throw it under the bus and then people who do propaganda with their art will then point out at a corrupt system as why they shouldn’t be called out for doing propaganda. So who would want to be on the establishment side, how can you point out the dangers within the entertainment when the other side of the argument are establishment types or the fundamentalists. Entertainment has played a role in manufacturing consent to get us to think certain ways and people only think corporate think is only being incorporated into this shit in this current day when it has always been there and it is now been incorporated in the areas where showbiz has expanded, which is in politics and social media. The legacy shit is the stuff that still makes the main money but the real entertainment is now what our lives is because we have manifested all our favorite stuff into our realities, and we continue to double down, we all think we can improve but when it is a mafia system, there is no way to ever be completely sane anymore. And this is why we will never ever get to the full root causes if we just pretend that entertainment has played a role in it, and they are using sports entertainment to bring in more fascism, like you can bring on experts from different fields to the surface to cover these topics, but ultimately they all have to do sports entertainment, and the right has been able to do that better which is why they get so much social traction, it also helps that by fooling people into thinking the underground shit is online so the information we are seeing, we don’t think that is part of the grand view, we all think we are taking in information that we are not supposed to see, and they can present their “awakening” as fighting back when they are on the side that is favored, which is why all these products they are boycotting will give into them, they can talk about how their objective is to fund this and talk in code so they can have plausible deniability just like that dude Clay Higgins who is giving vague military coded messages about knowing bridges and then suddenly the 195 highway is fucked up from some random tanker that had gasoline in it, but again we are not allowed to get conspiratorial and these people who think that, they will say “we can beat them with ideas” but they will shutdown conspiratorial thinking but then pretend that Matt Walsh’s shitty hate filled documentary is just words and we should beat them with ideas but they limit the ideas and these people get to call themselves progressives and go on right wing platforms and act like they represent from progressives despite someone like Cenk shitting the bed when he ran for congress. They can pretend they are regular fucking people but they are in the know of where this shit is going and that is why they are attacking the democrats in the easiest way possible because it is a lot better than how the MSM does it. They have someone like Ro Khanna on and grill him about the gimmicked debt ceiling talk but then don’t question his support for Modi all of a sudden even though he condemned him in the past, but because you grilled him a couple of times about the incompetence of the debt ceiling talk, I am supposed to think you are the most true to everything and everyone. And now because anyone can be media personalities in this space, now we have to subjected to a bunch of uncharismatic jerkoffs, before when I just took them as journalists or media who weren’t supposed to be these personalities and actually were being a bit more true, it is easy to stomach but once these people sell out and become a lot more horrible, it becomes obvious how shitty their pretentious personalities are with their sitcom level banter.  I have to hear from anti establishment types about how the establishment doesn’t want MAGA CM Punk and MAGA Steve Austin, in Tucker/Trump, to win. Yet they are doing whatever the fuck they want, and because I point that out, then it means I don’t know shit because I am not falling for the kayfabed reasons why they are allowed to get the traction they get. Even the people who say they oppose that shit are still limiting themselves, like you can’t expect people to get mad at Saudi related shit, and I am not saying you shouldn’t be mad at what they do, but when acting like your own government or the corporations within the country are doing business, you think these people are being forced into doing business, and not that they enjoy doing it because this is the liberal take from people, for some reason they can’t talk about the overall plan of it because we buy into country vs country shit. And I think everything in this current day is a lot more advanced and this is why we will constantly talk in circles etc. We kayfabe the information of why we are seeing shit now or we know about shit now, the fucked up thing is if we admit this life we are born into, we are put into a game we didn’t volunteer to play, then it would expose that in this system we can never get better and we will never have the correct information no matter what the new narrative is supposed to be for the next several years that is agreed upon by delegations within the system. 

I have noticed they have used product placement and advertising for movies etc and use identity politics with it that the right wing will be ignorant about because they hear about diversity, in this era they are gonna push back, there was a push for it in the 2010’s to be more progressive and we thought we were going in a more positive direction even if we weren’t all the way there, but it feels like much like how it was in the 90’s that there was some kind of social consciousness going on and now in the 200’s and late 90’s, people started pushing back against anything be called racists and the people who would call out something for being racist, it would have to be on the level of Ben Affleck breaking down and almost crying when talking to Sam Harris and Bill Maher, even though they were being anti Muslim but it made Ben look like an emotional reactionary who couldn’t handle the “truths” from these Muslim experts in Bill Maher and Sam Harris, so recently with the claims of racism that exists with the Little Mermaid, it didn’t do well in other places and there is blind call of racism even though Black Panther did well, I have no idea, every movie seems to break records for some milestone they just made up for the discourse but it felt like one of those obvious claims of racism where it might not be there and people are being too reactionary so it makes people think that anything can be racist now and it helps push back against any claim of racism in other areas and at the end of the day, this is Disney funding this discourse, they probably fund the racist and negative shit heads and they fund the ones who will limit their opposition to the racist shit heads. And all we are doing essentially is using real problems for this product placement, I notice people who associate with TYT are doing it a bit more and it is not a coincidence they are doing it while the main hosts of TYT are moving into more of a right wing trajectory where Ana Kasparian is quoting a Koch Bros think tank poll about how Gen Z and Black people want more government surveillance, and she chastises them in a general way for complaining about oppression but want more surveillance, and she never retracts what is inaccurate, but she will retract for right wing accounts to use. Those are tactics she is using to change people’s narrative and she wants to pretend she is better than MSM. I am waiting for the prank to be over, and this whole time Marlon Wayons has been playing her in this elaborate real life version of a White Chicks sequel. You think any of them who get conspiratorial about going anti left, why wouldn’t they go conspiratorial about the organized efforts happening to create chaos into this world and help fund viral moments so people use that to create more culture wars. I feel a lot of stuff that goes viral, is designed to go viral because it is supposed to persuade us into buying into more horrible shitty culture war bullshit. You think anyone in the alt media has the balls to maybe call out the right wing for having people on their payroll to do shit and organize more chaos, we just deny what they are saying but you are also limiting what you can say about how the system could operate even if the new right will mislead and act like they are calling it out but they will project because whatever they are accusing others of and feel so confident about it, makes me think they are the ones behind it, like the Aryan Freedom Network, they will claim its feds, but there is a faction called that, but people will scoff at the fed talk, but it’s possible for factions to exist in these places where some of them would be into that kind of shit, but that conspiracy the right wing won’t like because I am supposed to think that they would be framing the right wing for shit and they will use how they have done it to other people in other communities, but then when they have an alleged radical BLM person doing something violent, they automatically believe the story 100 percent. I am all over the map but I needed to write this today in case the world is ending today with the potential of a civil war breaking out since 2020 was just the calm before the storm of what is to come and how vitriolic everything has become. It makes me regret even falling for some of this supposed “leftist” front from people who have now become people who aligned with far right wing people, and only cosign victims if they agree to align with the far right, and dumb down their dangers because they seemingly are not “corporate” because they are streaming on Steam Yard on a bad wifi connection. The way some of these people got me was criticism of Israel and defending Palestine, and no one in the western MSM establishment would never cover it properly and throughout the last decade, I would fall for more normalized propaganda that would be anti Semitic, and then other years I would figure it out and think these people are the ones who are telling me the truth, but now they are ending up promoting anti woke garbage, talking about how RFK is gonna change the fucking game, or eating one of those realistic cakes in the theme of Putin’s asshole. And now it is like I feel I have wasted time with people who seem like they are speaking truth to power. And I notice this attitude from that contingent online where they purposefully become negative about everything because it comes off more genuine than being overly happy which can also be toxic, but people really think that people into positivity are the only assholes, it is just the people who are into dark shit will be more seedy and shady with making themselves look like the Jim from the Office while they are creating scenarios to make it look like people into positive shit as the people who are the main ones who are sociopathic, to go to that much trouble to look sane, wouldn’t that be insanity? It is like the same people who pretend to be online fans of shit, who clearly work for these showbiz places to put pressure on women to have sex appeal, otherwise they won’t prop them up so they will want that from their favorite celebs, but then they will spend their time online partaking in shitty gender war shaming women for being sex workers while prostituting themselves mentally for edge lord fundamentalism. Forcing people to do shit is the issue, if you want to be more reserved or if you want to be more liberated by showing titties, go ahead. I support what people truly want to do but if either side of the argument is forcing a narrative, that is the issue I have. I mean what kind of world am I even living in at this point. I am living in a shitty fucked up world where 20 years ago, I never thought I would be alive to be on a glorified internet message board to see Barbara Streisand quote Memphis Bleek lyrics to own Donald Trump who happened to steal nuclear secrets. That would’ve been a scene in a Mike Judge movie. Now I worry about waking up and worried about the air and the fires, and I know climate change is responsible, but I can also think people are given incentive to cause the world to completely fucking burn, because that is the direction we are going, I actually had a vivid dream about this 12 years ago about the world burning and I chose to stay in the basement as it was happening because I didn’t have the desire to save myself and it was probably better for humanity for me not to be here anymore, and sometimes it feels like that shit is happening and it feels more of my dreams are manifesting into this real world to some extent.  

I am going in circles and I am not making much sense, but for this Trump shit, I will say this, they have managed to keep this guy in the news for so many fucking years even if they said they hated him and you would think by him being in the news, I figured people would move into the direction of exposing what is really happening but both sides are limiting the argument. I just know enough that this guy is never doing time, I would love for him to do time, I don’t get people who say they are against the powerful, but then they somehow always find a way to defend Trump because they are not getting him for the right crime, and there are other corrupt people who haven’t gotten theirs and listen if you tell me that other powerful people will get theirs then I don’t give a shit, and I figured the anti billionaire, kill the rich type of people would be happy that one billionaire is getting exposed, but at the same time I don’t buy into the hoopla of anything bad happening to him because he has been able to do so much the last 10 years that it feels like the “hatred” from the establishment has made him more powerful and he is able to be seen as the victim being picked on by the system. I don’t know if Biden did any corrupt shit they say he did, but he is a politician in the mafia system so yeah a lot of apolitical people who think it is corrupt will believe that Biden could be doing shady shit, but I can also recognize that the people pointing it out don’t mind other corruption but as long as their people are the ones doing it and then projecting onto everyone else. And the closer it gets to all of this really imploding and becoming the worst shit ever, it feels like more and more trusted people in the alt media especially are crossing over to the right wing side and they get mad if Biden will pardon Trump, but then they want Biden to pardon him if he does get arrested so he can beat him at the ballot box. They are lucky no one understands politics completely because these supposed “smart” people can basically dumb their arguments down to shit, and then I am the asshole because I don’t understand political rule when they are ones who have to make up all these rules for why this is happening when it makes no fucking sense. Even going as far as putting out the narrative of this case going past the next election if Trump wins it then he will pardon himself, like if these guys are playing by the rules advertised why does someone who have this much corruption tied to his name allowed to run? Because they don’t give a shit and they never have and all of this Trump shit has helped the new entertainment dollar while watering down everything in the process. MAGA people will call this shit a hoax because they will deny he did anything even though it can officially be proven, but I call it a hoax in that it is just serving as a culture war and sports entertainment and the end goal is to take us into a more fascist world. MTG can keep derailing shit and nothing happens to her, all these people can call for the guns to be used and getting ready to fight because they can make it look like Trump is going away so they were pushed to this, but this shit has been in their favor and some people who oppose Trump or claim to, will only get off on owning the right wing with shitty jokes because we need 50 more Trump impressions because he didn’t say a word properly, people have helped lessen the threat of him and the funny thing as shady and shitty the MSM is, they at least on record have self preservation of being right about a lot of things on paper even if they have been shit, but the lesser established alt media are the ones who in the future are gonna be the people who look like what they accused the establishment of being 20 years ago. But no one is preventing Trump from running, they can say it is officially on record, but if we know about it, and he is still doing it then they are not stopping him. Anyways this has been just a scattered opinion piece to get thoughts in written form to put out there because I haven’t done much writing lately when it comes to blogs. Not that it really makes a difference nor does anyone really give a shit, I am not some expert in writing obviously. I kind of just write where my mind goes at the moment and sometimes I can do some decent work but you can tell most of the time, I have no idea what I am doing and that is basically the story of my existence on this shitty planet, and I know I will never get better and I wish every day I could be off it, but I am stuck in here. This can’t be reality, I have to believe we have already died and this world is just fucking purgatory

#Hanzi 2023 Bipolar Coaster Mental Illness Theories Thoughts Media narratives confusion alt media MSM internet showbiz entertainment shills #funded accounts

[early20sfailingplenty]

May I request some Bo content? With a female S/O who is usually very chipper and warm suddenly having a very bad day and shutting down and lashing out? Like the S/O is usually all over town helping out with chores and bringing the boys meals while they work, but something throws them through a loop and they end up not doing any if the things they usually do and Bo doesn’t notice at first?

Hi, Bobbie!!🥺🌸 hhhh you absolutely can have some Bo content, oml??? I can’t get enough of the Sinclairs hhhhhh🥺🙏 This was really fun to write and I had a lot of fun with the concept! Thank you for requesting; it went in a slightly different direction than what you asked for but I hope you enjoy it anyway!!💗

Also, I worked on this piece pretty solidly for an entire day and it got to the point where I couldn’t see the forest for the trees, so a massive thank you to @arianatheangelworld for reading this over for me to tell me if I got the characterisation of Bo right, and to check for plot inconsistencies. With her approval and keen eye, this piece is finally ready to be shared with a wider audience hasdfghjkl this is one of my favourite pieces as a conflict-averse person (you can thank trauma for that lmfao); it was fun to write!💜

TW; SWEARING, reader’s a bit of an asshole (you’re not responsible for your feelings but you are responsible for how you deal with them and reader is not very mature in this piece - we all have those days, and that’s okay so long as you apologise after and learn from it!) & picks a fight with Bo, Bo gives as good as he gets, Bo’s a bit manipulative,  ARGUING BETWEEN BO AND READER (a wrench is thrown but NOT AT THE READER), CRYING (reader), Bo stepping up when he realises what’s happening (FLUFF FLUFF FLUFF because I’m soft for the Sinclairs and I’m not sorry), ELEMENTS OF AN UNHEALTHY RELATIONSHIP (it’s Bo, duh), there are MENTIONS OF FOOD (not sure if this one needs to be on a trigger list, but I’m putting it on here just in case), one sentence about a dead person being in Hell from a religious/monotheistic perspective (it doesn’t bother me any because I'm a firm atheist, but I realised that it could negatively affect someone else so for that reason I'm putting it on the list), implications of Stockholm Syndrome BUT THAT WASN'T MY INTENTION WHILE WRITING IT!!! It's just an afterthought to put it on here before I post it in case it upsets someone.

My trigger lists are always so long omg I'm sorry I just never want to upset anyone so I probably go overboard??? Would appreciate feedback on this!!!💖

As always, GN!reader, no coded language (to the best of my knowledge; please correct me if you see something I haven’t noticed!), “you” and Y/N used.

Word count: 4,101 (another short one😩)

BO STOP BEING SO PRETTY OMGGGG🥺🥺🥺😍😍😍

It was just one of those days in which nothing was going right and everything that could be going wrong was, and everything was pissing you off. Ambrose and every fucking thing in it was out to get you, it seemed, and just as you usually did when you were having a bad day, you shut off from everyone and just barely restrained yourself from lashing out at anyone who even breathed in the same area as you. You just kept yourself to yourself, not doing anything the way you usually did. You knew that no one would ever let you not maintain your duties and responsibilities, such as they were. Only once had you not followed through on them, and you had discovered quite quickly that Vincent wasn't above using scare tactics, such as looming over you in such a way that you knew you had no choice but to comply if you wanted him to step out of your personal space. 

It was a subtle reminder that you would either end up back in Bo’s disgusting chair, or dumped at Vincent’s stairs if you got too comfortable in their town. That had been in the very early days of your initially forced residency in the ghost town of Ambrose (but, oh, how alive was she on the surface until one dared to scratch at the polished and carefully cultivated veneer). Months had passed since then, and scare tactics from the brothers were no longer used. You could be trusted to do the things you usually did, and indeed did you usually enjoy them. You adored helping the brothers, you loved doing things for them, knowing all the while that they cherished you just as much and, in their own ways, they did things for you as well. 

Bo had been, of course, the hardest brother to form a connection with. He was brash, rude, abrupt, an absolute asshole and you loved him for that, among a great deal of other things. As your relationship had gone from captor and the captive to a tepid friendship and then further had the two of you warmed up to each other into the intense romantic bond which you now greatly enjoyed, Bo had stopped being quite so rude. Indeed, his displays of love and affection were quiet but copious, as if he was trying to make up for how he had treated you before he had even known your name. Once you had learned to read Bo’s love language (one of which was asking you to spend time with him in the garage; he loved having you around, though he didn’t tell you in as many words), you came to understand that he was as much of an asshole as he was full of love. Aching was he to both give and to receive love in kind; starved of it and of a gentle touch for thirty some years.

Once Vincent had seen you and Bo interact, he, too, had made more of a concerted effort to take care of you and to do things for you. He had sculpted you and Bo, once, and gifted it to you by leaving it on your bedside table. There had been no note, no signature or anything to denote that it came from Vincent, but you knew all the same. You knew every detail of his particular form of craftsmanship. You had thanked him profusely, both in words and by making him his favourite meal the next day for dinner, prepared just as he liked it. Lester had been the easiest to form a friendship with, and indeed was he the one you went to when things with Bo were too much for you, or when you itched to see different sights but you didn’t want to leave Ambrose. On those days did you go with him to work, wanting to spend time with him. It always gave you a sick thrill to leave Ambrose, but you would always choose again and again and again to return. Where else could you go, would you go, when home contained the one you loved the very most? 

Ambrose was your home, Bo was your home, and you loved doing your part to help run the town, to help Vincent with his supplies and wax stock, to help Lester with his job, to maintain your own hobbies because you existed as your own person and you were not wholly defined by anyone else. You had thrown yourself into the life Bo had set out for you (and, oh, how you had fought him on it, until one day you had caught yourself excited to face the next day), and you cherished every moment you got to spend with any of the brothers, but especially with Bo. You were warm towards all three of them, and they were equally so with you. It was the way of things, and you didn’t want it, you didn’t want them, any other way. But today, oh... something bad had happened, it had thrown you for such a loop that you could no longer tell what way was up and what way was down, and you were steaming; pissed off, irritated, and emotionally shutting off. The chores would be done, but you wouldn’t be focusing on them. Food would be made, but it would be a heartless chore with little thought beyond making sure you didn’t poison anyone and that it tasted good. Your hobbies would be left unattended in favour of helping Bo in the garage, in favour of helping Vincent with anything he needed, in favour of riding with Lester for a bit to keep him company. You sighed, pissed off that you didn’t have a choice. You just wanted to hole up in your bedroom and lay there, left to rot as you stared up at the ceiling. But you couldn’t. There were things to do, people to see, and a life to live despite the fact that you were not having a good time of it.

The world could fucking burn for all you cared today.

To begin with, Bo didn’t notice that anything was amiss. How could he, when he was elbows deep in the hood of his truck, swearing under his breath about who knew what? You had done very little of what was on your to-do list for the day; you had made meals for everyone including yourself and made the relevant ‘deliveries’; taking Vincent’s down to him first because he was the closest (he hadn’t let you go until you had promised him that you had your own food, too; his form of affection towards you was a tough kind of love which you knew he used on Bo as well, which was partly why you adored it so much), then Lester’s, and then you had taken yours and Bo’s down to the garage so that you could have a lunch date together. You had packed a clean towel with soap and a flask of hot water because you knew Bo wasn’t going to wash his hands. It never failed to turn your stomach when he ate with dirty hands, grease stains left behind on the bread he had yet to eat. His constitution was one of iron and you almost envied how strong his immune system must have been after a lifetime of exposure to various things which would make the average person sick. Almost. The only other thing you had really done this day was to clean up the kitchen after you had made the food and delivered Vincent’s and Lester’s. Everything else hadn’t even been thought about. You wanted, more than anything, to not do a damned thing.

It was only when you made more noise than was strictly necessary when delivering his lunch that Bo straightened up, looking at you with an expression you couldn’t quite place. His baseball cap physically shielded his eyes from you but you could sense his gaze and your mind’s eye supplied the look you knew you would be seeing if he wasn’t wearing his hat. “Lunch.” Your tone was flat, and Bo’s entire stance changed. He stiffened, and you began to see the side of Bo you only saw when there were tourists in town. Quickly were you walking on thin fucking ice, and, help you, but it thrilled you as much as it made you want to run away. But, you were looking for a fight... if you carried on this way, you would get one, too. One of the things you loved about Bo was that he always��gave as good as he got and then some, no matter what it was.

He fixed you with a level gaze and then, “Wanna try that in a different tone, darlin’?” A warning - your first and your only. Bo would never give you an out twice in a row. With Bo, once was more than enough. He always took things and ran with ‘em... his cruel, brutal upbringing and later life had taught him to never question anything, to just take them as they came from one moment to the next. Bo craved that which he had lacked in his life before you, and security was one of them. Seeing you like this had thrown Bo off edge, just as something had clearly done the same to you, and Bo didn’t know what to do when you were like this. Vincent was good at calming people down after a lifetime of living with Bo, but Vincent was presumably holed up in the basement, so asking his twin to do some de-escalation was out of the question. A warning, first, had been suitable... He would have to follow your lead on the rest of it. What could Bo do to help you the way you always helped him? He had to figure it out, quickly, because his sunshine was behind some clouds and he didn’t know how to make it rain, so that the sun would come back out. Wait... As quickly as Bo had lost his footing, he found it again, a predator was he. You wanted a fight? He’d give you one. And then he would bring you back home to him. It was sly, manipulative of him, but an outlet was what you needed, and Bo was great at that. He threw tantrums every fuckin’ day. You were entitled to one too, he figured, especially if something bad had happened. But what?

“No,” You shrugged, settling down to get your own food. “Eat if you want. I brought some hot water, soap and a clean towel for you to wash your hands.” The inflection in your voice on this last three words brought a sneer to Bo’s face but he turned away from you, recognising all the signs in you that he saw in himself every damn day. You were angry and Bo wondered what the fuck had happened to you. He hadn’t seen you much this day, so busy had he been, but now that you were with him, it was clear that something was up. He hadn’t seen you like this often, usually so happy and warm with him that it made his heart ache were you, and he wasn’t quite sure how to handle the situation. If you wanted a fuckin’ fight, though, he’d give you one. Anythin’ for his darlin’, even when they were being rude. Idly, Bo wondered if this was how you felt when he was being an ass, but he shook that thought off. It didn’t fuckin’ matter, anyway. He had already tried pushing you away, but you had stuck to him like glue. Bo loved it as much as he hated it, which created such a passion within him that it left the both of you breathless even during the best of days together.

“Okay,” Bo shrugged you off, acting like he wasn’t getting as pissed off as he was also growing concerned, “I’ll eat wit’ ya’ in a minute. Let me clean myself first. I’m too dirty to have lunch wit’ ya, is that it?“ He grabbed the flask, soap and towel from the counter where you had set them next to his lunch, and the look he gave you told you everything on his mind. When he came back from washing his hands, leaving everything on the sink for you to clean up later, he made his way back to his truck, “Hey, uh, pass me that wrench, would’ya?” and got busy again, fiddling with... whatever he was doing. He looked up at you around the hood, watching you. Analysing you. He was getting mighty pissed off with you, but he was trying to hold his temper down. He knew he had a nasty one... it was turning out that you did, as well. We’re a match made in Hell, momma. Maybe we’ll see you down there some day. I know you ain’t gone up.

You rolled your eyes before you could stop yourself, which made Bo’s jaw tick in irritation. You did as he asked, again, almost slapping the tool into the outstretched palm of his hand before you went back to what you were doing. God, but today you really hated the way you did what he asked of you, even and especially when you didn’t want to. You just loved him so much and it came through in everything. Christ, you were even pissing yourself off. You waited for the thank you that you knew wasn’t going to come - Bo had always said such things with his actions, but today it just fucked you off even more instead of making you smile - so you sarcastically said, “Thanks, Y/N. You’re welcome.” The first two words were spoken in a lower octave, mocking Bo’s own voice. Your poor imitation made you smirk as you found it funny in some sick way, but for all of his careful planning, Bo exploded as his temper flared up in an instant; the wrench hitting the wall farthest from you as he launched the tool. It made a thunderous noise, so much so that you almost wanted to put your hands over your ears. A part of you enjoyed the audible chaos. You wanted more, even as you recognised that Bo, in his rage, would still never hurt you. It calmed you down as much as it pissed you off.

“What is the matter wit’ you?” Bo yelled, finally losing his already short patience with you and this entire fucking ridiculous situation. You were usually so warm and happy, the only real fucking light in Ambrose. Anger was a secondary emotion which usually disguised pain and or fear, and Bo was feeling the latter. Did you want to leave Ambrose, leave him? So when faced with an uncomfortable emotion, Bo, too, lashed out, and you realised even in the haze of irritation and sadness that if this carried on, you and Bo were going to devolve into a screaming match. Good. That was what you wanted. Wasn’t much else to do around Ambrose.

“Fuck if I know. I don’t want to do any of this shit.” You threw the to do list at Bo, as if to make a point that it was too much of a demand on you this day, but even with your sharp aim did the paper only flutter pathetically to the floor. If this had been any other situation, you would have laughed at the absurdity of it all. You were fighting off laughter as it was - a panic response. You’d finally managed to piss Bo off, and in a sick way, that had been what you had wanted. Bo gave as good as he got, and it never failed to send a cold chill of anticipation up your back. You loved riling him up; it was the hottest fucking thing and the most dangerous, but it was too late now.

“So this bullshit attitude of yours is all because ya’ don’t wanna pull ya’ weight ‘round here, that it? S’not like ya’ fuckin’ do that anyway.” Bo’s tone was biting, his baby blues like ice, his tongue cutting into you like a blade. You thought you would have preferred an actual knife... it would have hurt you much less than the venom radiating off of Bo.

You scoffed, “Fuck off, Bo! You know as well as I do that I always do things around the town, helping you out and making sure everyone eats and every fucking other thing. I pull my own weight just fine. That’s not even the fucking issue here, I just - “ You felt stinging behind your eyes and nose, and your hands flew to your face, hiding yourself from Bo and distancing yourself from the situation. You wanted to leave, to let yourself and Bo simmer in the tense situation you had created just by letting yourself lash out (and, oh, how you knew better than that), but more than that, oh, more than that, you wanted to stay. You wanted Bo to see you in your rage and in your upset, and you wanted him to help you. Fuck knew if you knew how to help you. You were beyond yourself and you needed Bo. You needed him. It was this realisation which brought your hands away from your face, catching a look of fondness,slight amusement (he did love a good fight, especially when he was in the thick of it) and concern on Bo’s face which vanished as quickly as you had seen it. It was something he hadn’t meant for you to see. It was almost funny in its own way, how much the two of you danced around each other, even in a committed relationship. All the fight left you in a single moment as you had finally, finally burned yourself out. You didn’t have any more energy to give to your emotions this day. You sighed, and the sound was so weighted in all that was unsaid that it only upset you more, and tears fell hot and fast down your face as you broke right in front of Bo. The one you loved the very most.

"I'm sorry, I - " Your voice was barely audible even with the great acoustics which the garage afforded. You dropped to your knees, everything you were feeling from what had happened to cause this in the first place as well as your lack of sleep from the night before was just too much to take. Your body couldn't hold you up anymore and you sunk to the floor, sobbing without a care for the way you had deliberately wound Bo up just to vent your emotions, for the way you had neglected your duties this day, for the way you had just broken in front of the man who loved you, it was true, but he was not the best one when it came to handling emotions. You cried, your tears hot, fast, heavy as they crashed around you. Oh, but it hurt and as a part of you enjoyed it - the sweet release of emotions - a part of you was only more upset and it created a cycle from which you could not escape by yourself. When you hit the very bottom, the only way to go was up, but what if there was more underneath? Even in your rapidly worsening state, you were wise enough to know that you couldn't handle yourself anymore.

You. Needed. Bo.

He had always been able to do for you things which no one else could.

"I'm sorry, I just - "

Boots slowly, carefully, came into your view, and Bo ducked down so that he could look at you fully. He balanced on the balls of his feet, his cap dangling lightly from a finger on his right hand as he watched you. His blue eyes had melted from the ice you had just seen into a warm pool of blue which only made you cry harder. You watched his eyes widen in surprise, worry, and then Bo cleared his throat, "Ya' gotta breathe, darlin'. Take a deep breath now, you're all right. Ain't gonna' hurt'cha." His left hand reached out for your shoulder but then he hesitated, as if he didn't know if you wanted to be touched or not. He wasn't wary of you but of the situation. Either way, it broke your heart to realise that you had done this. Whatever this was.

"Bo, please." More tears slipped down your cheeks as Bo's hand continued to hover in the air between you, but something in your voice made Bo snap. Somehow, somehow, he managed to grab you and pull you into his lap, sitting with his legs outstretched in front of him with you plopped right in the middle. His arms and legs alike locked around you, the safest cage you had ever been in, and he rocked you back and forth slowly.

"Shush, darlin', you're all right. Bo's got'cha. You're all right." Bo pressed kisses all over the side of your face, his lips trembling and his shoulder shaking with worry, concern, adrenaline, rage. He continued to whisper sweet nothings and feather kisses all over the side of your face which he could reach, doing everything he could to soothe you. He knew not what the matter was, he knew not what had happened to you, but he recognised all the signs of a break in you - he felt them in himself every single day - and he didn't want for you to go through it alone.

At some point, you wrapped your arms around his neck and pulled yourself into Bo, wanting to sink into him. Today could just get fucked. You had Bo now, and he was all you wanted. "I'm sorry, Bo. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Bo listened in a solemn silence to your repetitive apologies. He recognised that perhaps you were going to relapse into tears again, and he didn't want to have to deal with that. Not because he didn't love you, because he did, but because you had only just begun to calm down and he didn't want to tip you over the edge again. Especially if you were the one throwing yourself over. "Hey, hey. No more tears, darlin'. No more. Y're all right." Arms tightened around you, lips pursed against the curve of your cheek. "Now, you wanna tell me sumthin'?"

The literal floodgates had opened, and so too did the verbal ones as you told Bo everything. Everything that had happened to upset you so, everything you had been feeling, everything you had been thinking... You told Bo everything. His trembling grew as did his rage, but he took slow, measured breaths, doing his best to hold his temper in place as he listened to you. If it killed him, Bo would solve your problems. If it was something to actively work on, he would support you. If it was a person, he would enlist his brothers' help to lure them to Ambrose so he could kill 'em and chuck 'em in the roadkill pit; they didn't deserve to be immortalised because they had done this to you. His brothers would both agree. Whatever it was, Bo would do whatever it took to help you, consequences be damned.

"Shit, darlin'," Bo sounded breathless when you were finished, and you burrowed into him, wanting to disappear from the world and into Bo. He would protect you, keep you safe and secure. It was all you wanted. "I wondered why ya' started actin' all crazy like that. Figured you wanted a fight for the helluv'it, but - " Bo shook his head. He'd never been good at words. That was more Vincent's forte, which was ironic given how he was mute.

"I'm sorry, I - "

Bo's arms flexed around you and he shook his head again, one hand moving so that he could cup one of your cheeks. "No more o'that, Y/N. It's done, forgotten. Don't matter no more. I ain't mad. I was," Bo chuckled wryly, "I was pissed as all hell, but I can't be knowin' what I know now." His other hand came up so that the calloused pads of his thumbs could wipe all of your tears away, and he pressed a tender, lingering kiss to your forehead to signify that he was there, that he loved you, that you would be okay.

Bo would make sure of it.

#bo sinclair #bo sinclair x reader #bo sinclair imagine #bo sinclair comfort #house of wax #house of wax imagine #house of wax x reader #slashers #slasher fic #slasher x reader #slasher community

[pumpkinpaix]

Pleeeeeeease get into the class one at some point because I very much want to understand the class dynamics happening in the story but I have yet to find a meta that dives into it

god anon you want me dead don’t you alsjdfljks

referring to this post

okay, so -- my specific salt about class interpretations in mdzs are very targeted. I can’t pretend to have a deep understanding of how class works in mdzs generally because uhhhhh yeah i don’t think i have that. i’m just not familiar enough with the genre and/or the particulars of chinese class systems. but! i can talk in general terms as to why I feel a certain way about the class dynamics that I do think I understand and how I think they relate to the themes of the novel! i’m gonna talk about wei wuxian, the daozhangs, xue yang, and 3zun with, I’m sure, a bunch of digressions along the way.

the usual disclaimers: i do not think you are a bad person if you hold opinions contrary to my own. i may disagree with you very strongly, but like. this isn’t a moral judgment, fandom is transformative and interpretive etc. etc. and i may change my mind. who knows what the future will bring!

OKAY so let’s begin!

here’s the thing about wei wuxian: he’s not poor. I think because characters use “son of a servant” kind of often when they’re trying to insult him, a lot of people latch onto that and think that it’s a much stronger indication of his societal status than it actually is. iirc, most of the insults that fall along the “son of a servant” line come after wei wuxian starts breaking severely from tradition. it’s a convenient thing to attack him for, but doesn’t actually indicate anything about his wealth. (exception: yu ziyuan, but that’s a personal familial issue) this is in direct contrast to jin guangyao who is constantly mocked for his family line, publicly and privately, no matter what he does.

so this, coupled with all the jokes about wwx never having any money (wei wuqian, sizhui’s “i’ve long since known you had no money” etc.), plus his like, rough years on the street as a child ends up producing this interpretation of wei wuxian, especially in modern aus, as someone who is very class conscious and “eat the rich”. but the fact of the matter is, wei wuxian IS rich. aside from the years in his childhood and the last two years of his life in yiling, like -- wei wuxian had money and status. he is gentry. he is respected as gentry. he is treated as a son by the sect leader of yunmeng jiang -- he does not have the jiang name, but it is so very clear that jiang fengmian favors him. wei wuxian is ranked fourth of all the eligible young masters in the cultivation world -- that is not a ranking he could have attained without being accepted into the upper class.

wei wuxian’s poverty does not affect him in the way that it affects jin guangyao or xue yang. he is of low-ish birth (still the son of jiang fengmian’s right hand man though! ok sure, “son of a servant” but like. >_> whatever anyways), but for most of his life he had money. he, jiang cheng, and their sect brothers go into town and steal lotus pods with the understanding that “jiang-shushu will pay for it”. this is a regular thing! that’s fucking rich kid behavior!!! wei wuxian is careless with money because he doesn’t have to worry about it. he still has almost all the benefits of being upper class: education, food security, respect, recognition etc. I think there may also be a misconception that wei wuxian was always on the verge of being kicked out by yu ziyuan, or that he was constantly walking on eggshells around her for fear of being disowned, but that is just textually untrue. i could provide receipts, but I admittedly don’t really feel like digging them up just now ;;

even in his last years in yiling, he was not the one who was dealing with the acute knowledge of poverty: wen qing is the one managing the money, and as far as we know, wei wuxian did little to no management of daily life during the burial mounds days -- mostly, he’s described as hiding in his cave for days on end, working on his inventions, running around like a force of chaos, frivolously making a mess of things -- it’s very very cute that he buries a’yuan in the dirt, but in classic wei wuxian fashion, he did Not think about the practical consequences of it -- that A’Yuan has no other clean clothes, and now he’s gotten this set dirty and has no intention of washing them. is this a personality thing? yeah, but I think it’s also indicative of his lack of concern over the logistics of everyday survival, re: wealth.

furthermore, i think it is important to remember that wei wuxian, when he is protecting the wen remnants, is not protecting common folk: he is still protecting gentry. fallen gentry, yes! but gentry nonetheless. wen qing was favored by wen ruohan, and wen ning himself says that he has a retinue of people under his command (the remnants, essentially). their branch of the family do not have the experience of living and growing in poverty -- they are impoverished and persecuted in their last years, but that’s a very different thing from being impoverished your whole life. (sidenote: I do not believe wei wuxian’s primary motivation for defending the wen remnants was justice -- i believe he did it because he felt he owed wen ning and wen qing a life debt, and once he was there, he wasn’t going to stand around and let the work camps go on. yes, he is concerned about justice and doing the right thing, but that’s not why he went in the first place. anyways, that’s another meta)

after wei wuxian returns, he then marries back into gentry, and very wealthy gentry at that. lwj provides him all the money he could ever want, he is never worried about going homeless, starving, being denied opportunities based on his class and accompanying disadvantages. who would dare? and neither wei wuxian nor lan wangji seem to have much interest in shaking up the order of things, except in little things like the way they teach the juniors. they live in gusu, under the auspices of the lan, and they live a happy, domestic life.

were his years on the street traumatizing? yes, of course they were, there’s so much delicious character exploration to be done re: wei wuxian’s relationship to food, his relationship to his own needs, and his relationship to the people he loves. it’s all important and good! but I feel very strongly that that experience, while it was formative for him, did not impart any true understanding of poverty and the common person’s everyday struggles, nor do I think he ever really gains that understanding. he is observant and canny and aware of class and blood, certainly, but not in a way that makes it his primary hill to die on (badum-tss).

this is in very stark contrast to characters like jin guangyao and xue yang, and to some extent, xiao xingchen and song lan. I’ll start with the daozhangs, because I think they’re the simplest (??).

I think both xiao xingchen and song lan have class consciousness, but in a very simplified, broad-strokes kind of way (at least, given the information we know about them). we know that the two of them share similar values and want to one day form their own sect that gives no weight to the nobility of your lineage and has no concern with your wealth. we also know that they both disdain intersect politics and are more concerned with ideals and principles rather than status. but, I think because of that, this actually somewhat limits their perception and understanding of how status is used to oppress. as far as we know, neither of them participated on any side in sunshot and they demonstrate much more interest in relating to the commoners. honestly, i hc that they were flitting around trying to help decimated towns, protecting defenseless villages etc. I ALSO think this has a lot of interesting potential in terms of xiao xingchen and wei wuxian’s relationship, if xiao xingchen is ever revived. regardless of whether you’re in CQL or novel verse, xiao xingchen really doesn’t know wei wuxian at all, other than knowing that he’s his shijie’s son. he knows that cangse-sanren met with a tragic end, like yanling-daoren before her, and that he wants to be different. but here is cangse-sanren’s son, laying waste to entire cities, desecrating the dead. I would very much like to get into xiao xingchen’s head during that period of time (and i think, if i do it right, i can write some of it into the songxiao fixit), but that’s neither here nor there, because i’ve wandered off from my point again.

i would posit that song lan is used to an ascetic lifestyle, and xiao xingchen probably is too -- but that’s different from poverty because there’s an element of choice to it. I also think that neither of them is particularly worldly, xiao xingchen especially. he lived on an isolated mountain until he was like, seventeen, and he came down full of ideals and naivete about how the world worked. I think that both of them see inequality, that they are angered by it, and that they want to do something about it -- but their solution is neither to topple the sects, nor is it to reform the system. rather, it seems to be more about withdrawing and creating their own removed world. I think that the daozhangs embody a kind of utopianism that isn’t present in the minds of any of the other characters, not even wangxian. honestly, baoshan-sanren’s mountain is a utopian ideal, but one that is not described. it exists outside of and beyond the world. i have a lot of jumbled, vague thoughts about utopianism generally, mostly informed by china miéville and ursula k. le guin, and I don’t think i have the ability to articulate them here, but i wanted to. hm. say something? there is something about the inherent dystopianism contained within every utopia, that utopias are necessary, but also reflections of the existence of terrible things in their conception. idk. there’s something in there, I know it!! but i suppose what I want to say is -- i do not think the daozhangs understand class and social hierarchy very deeply because they don’t see a need to examine it deeply. for their goals, the details aren’t the point. they’re not looking to reform within the system, they’re looking to build something outside of it. I think they spend a lot of time concerned with alleviating the symptoms of social oppression, and their values reflect the injustices they witness there.

regardless, even if their story ends in tragedy and there is a certain amount of critique re: the utopian approach, i think the text still emphasizes that xiao xingchen left a utopia and that he thought that people mattered enough for him to try, and that was an incredibly honorable, kind, and human thing to do.

YEAH SURE THE DAOZHANGS ARE THE SIMPLEST ok ok RETURNING to class and moving forward: xue yang.

i also don’t think xue yang has class consciousness lol, or not in any way that really matters, but I do think poverty impacted him in a much stronger way than it impacted wei wuxian. wei wuxian spent some years on the street as a child. xue yang grew up on the streets. chang ci’an’s horrific treatment of him was directly due to his class and social standing: chang ci’an is a nobleman and xue yang is not even worth the dirt beneath the wheels of his cart. what I think is the seminal point though, is that this does not make xue yang think particularly deeply about systemic injustice, because xue yang is so self-centered, self-driven, and individualistic. he is not even slightly concerned about how poverty and class might affect other people -- they’re other people. what he takes away from his experience is not an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a system, but an anger at being wrongfully cheated by a specific man.

xue yang is not particularly concerned with the politics of the aristocracy -- he has no obvious ambitions other than, “i want to eat sweets whenever i please”, “i want to hurt anyone who wrongs me”, and “i want to be so strong that no one can hurt me”. like, he just doesn’t care -- it’s not the kind of power he wants. he sneers at people for like, personal reasons, not class reasons -- “you think you’re better than me” re: xiao xingchen and song lan. to him, all people -- poor, wealthy, noble, common -- are essentially equal, and they are all beneath him. after all, what does he care what family someone comes from, how much money they have? everyone bleeds when you cut them. some of them might be harder to get to than others, but xue yang does not fear that sort of thing. it’s just another obstacle he needs to vault on his way to getting revenge and/or a pastry.

ANYWAYS onto jin guangyao (wow this is hm. getting rather long ahaha oh dear): I would argue that the two characters with the most acute understanding of class/societal politics and the injustice of them are jin guangyao and lan xichen. i’ll start with jin guangyao for obvious reasons.

where xue yang took the damaging effects of poverty as personal slights, I think jin guangyao is painfully aware that there is nothing personal about them, which is, in some ways, much worse. why are two sons, born on the same day to the same father, treated so differently? just because.

he watched his mother struggle and starve and work herself to the bone in a profession where she was constantly disrespected and abused for almost nothing in return, while his father could have lifted her out of poverty with the wave of a finger. why didn’t he? because he didn’t like her? no -- because he didn’t care, and the structures of the society they live in protect that kind of blase treatment of the lower class.

“so my mother couldn’t choose her own fate, is that her fault?” jin guangyao demands. he knows that he is unbelievably talented, that he has ambition, that he has potential, and that all of it is beyond his grasp just because his father didn’t want to bother with it. his mother’s life was destroyed, and his own opportunities were crippled with that negligence. it isn’t personal. that’s just the way things are. your individual identity is meaningless, your humanity does not exist. when he’s kicked down the steps of jinlin tai, it’s just more confirmation that no matter how talented or hardworking he is, no one will give him the time of day unless he finds a way to take it himself and become someone who “matters”.

jin guangyao’s cultivation is weak because he had a poor foundation, and he had a poor foundation because he was denied access to a good one. he copies others because that’s all he can do at this point, and he copies so well that he can hold his own against some of the strongest cultivators of his generation. he’s disparaged for copying and “stealing” techniques, but -- he never would have had to if only he had been born/accepted into the upper class. the fact is that i really do think jin guangyao was the most promising cultivator of his generation that we meet, including the twin jades and wei wuxian: he had natural talent, ambition, creativity, determination and cunning in spades. in some ways, I think that’s one of the overlooked tragedies of jin guangyao: the loss of not just the good man he could have been, but the powerful one too. imagine what he could have done.

jin guangyao spends his entire time in the world of the aristocracy feeling unsteady and terrified because he knows exactly how precarious his position is. he knows how easy it is to lose power, especially for someone like him. he’s working against so many disadvantages, and every scrap of honor he gets is a vicious battle. jin guangyao fears, and I think that’s something that’s lacking in xue yang, wei wuxian and the daozhangs’ experiences/understandings of poverty. i think it’s precisely that fear that emphasizes jin guangyao’s understanding of class and blood. jin guangyao exhibits an anxiety that neither wei wuxian nor xue yang do, and it’s because he truly knows how little he is worth in the eyes of society and how little there is he can do to change that. to me, it very much feels related to the anxiety of not knowing if tomorrow you’ll have something to eat, if tomorrow you’ll still have a home, if tomorrow someone will destroy you and never have to answer for it. it’s the anxiety of knowing helplessness intimately.

moreover, jin guangyao is the only person shown to use the wealth and power at his disposal to take concrete steps to actually help the common people typically ignored by the powerful -- the watchtowers. they’re described in chapter 42. it’s a system that is designed to cover remote areas that most cultivators are reluctant to go due to their inconvenience and the lack of means of the people who live there. the watchtowers assign cultivators to different posts, give aid to those previously forgotten, and if the people are too poor to pay what the cultivators demand, the lanling jin sect pays for it. jin guangyao worked on this for five years and burned a lot of bridges over it. people were strongly opposed to it, thinking that it was some kind of ploy for lanling jin’s personal benefit. but the thing is -- it worked. they were effective. people were helped.

i believe CQL frames the watchtowers as an allegory for a surveillance state/centralized control (i think?? it’s been a minute -- that’s the hazy impression i remember, something like a parallel to the wen supervisory offices?), but I personally don’t think that was the intent in the novel. the watchtowers are a public good. lanling jin doesn’t staff them with their own sect members -- they get nearby sects to staff them. it’s a warning network that they fund that’s supposed to benefit everyone, even those that everyone had considered expendable.

(did jin guangyao do terrible things to achieve this goal? yeah lol. it’s not confirmed, but his son sure did die... suspiciously...... at the hands of an outspoken critic of the watchtowers........ whom he then executed....... so like, maybe just a convenient coincidence for jin guangyao, two birds one stone, but. it seems. Unlikely.)

lan xichen is the only member of the gentry that ever shows serious compassion for and nuanced understanding of jin guangyao’s circumstances. lan xichen treats him as his equal regardless of jin guangyao’s current status -- even when he was meng yao, lan xichen treated him as a human being worthy of respect, as someone with great merits, as someone he would choose as a friend, but he did so knowing full well the delicate position meng yao occupied. this is in direct contrast to nie mingjue, who also believed that meng yao was worthy of respect as a human being, but was completely unable to comprehend the complexities of his circumstances and unwilling to grant him any grace. you know, the difference between “i acknowledge that your birth and status have had effects upon you, but I don’t think less of you for it” and “i don’t consider your birth and status at all when i interact with you because i think it is irrelevant” (“i don’t see color” anyone?)

to illustrate, from chapter 48:

大抵是觉得娼妓之子身上说不定也带着什么不干净的东西，这几名修士接过他双手奉上来的茶盏后，并不饮下，而是放到一边，还取出雪白的手巾，很难受似的，有意无意反复擦拭刚才碰过茶盏的手指。聂明玦并非细致之人，未曾注意到这种细节，魏无羡却用眼角余光扫到了这些。孟瑶视若未见，笑容不坠半分，继续奉茶。蓝曦臣接过茶盏之时，抬眸看他一眼，微笑道：“多谢。”

旋即低头饮了一口，这才继续与聂明玦交谈。旁的修士见了，有些不自在起来。

rough tl:

Probably because they believed that the son of a prostitute might also carry some unclean things upon his person, after these few cultivators took the teacups offered from [Meng Yao’s] two hands, they did not drink, but instead put them to one side, and furthermore brought out snow white handkerchiefs. Quite uncomfortably, and whether they were aware of it or not, they repeatedly wiped the fingers they had just used to touch the teacups. Nie Mingjue was not a detail-oriented person and never took note of such particulars, but Wei Wuxian caught these in the corner of his eye. Meng Yao appeared as if he had not seen, his smile unwavering in the slightest, and continued to serve tea. When Lan Xichen took the teacup, he glanced up at him and, smiling, said, “Thank you.”

He immediately dipped his head to take a sip, and only then continued to converse with Nie Mingjue. Seeing this, the nearby cultivators began to feel somewhat uneasy.

all right, since we’re in full cyan-rampaging-through-the-weeds mode at this point, i’m going to talk about how this is one of my favorite 3zun moments in the entire novel for characterization purposes because it really highlights how they all relate to one another, and to what degree each of them is aware of their own position in relation to the others and society as a whole.

1. nie mingjue, who is a forthright and blunt person, sets meng yao to serving tea and is done with it. he notices nothing wrong or inappropriate about the reactions of the people in the room because it’s not the sort of thing he considers important.

2. meng yao, knowing that his only avenue is to take it lying down with a smile, masks perfectly.

3. lan xichen, noticing all this, uses his own reputation to achieve two things at once: pointedly shame the other cultivators in attendance, and show meng yao that regardless of others’ opinions, he considers him an equal and does not endorse such behavior--and he does it while taking care that no fallout will come down on meng yao’s head.

is this yet another installment of cyan’s endless lxc defense thesis? why yes it is! no one is surprised! but this is my whole point: both meng yao and lan xichen understand the respective hierarchy and power dynamics within the room, while nie mingjue very much does not. this is not because nie mingjue is a bad person or because nie mingjue is stupid--it’s a combination of personality and upbringing. nie mingjue is straightforward and has no patience for such games. but then again, he can afford not to play because he was born into such a high position: that’s a privilege.

to break it down: meng yao knows that he is the lowest-ranked person in the room, sees the way people are subtly disrespecting him in full view of his general who is doing nothing about it. in some ways, this is good -- nie mingjue’s style of dealing with conflict is very direct and not at all suited to delicate political maneuvering. after all, the way he promoted meng yao was actually quite dangerous to meng yao: he essentially guaranteed that his men would bear meng yao a grudge and that their disrespect for him would only be compounded by their bitterness at being punished on his behalf. (it’s like, why often getting parents or teachers to intervene ineffectively in bullying can just be an incitement to more bullying -- same concept) meng yao’s reaction during that scene shows that he’s pretty painfully aware of this and is trying to defuse the situation to no avail. nie mingjue gives him a bootstrap speech (rip nie mingjue i love u so much but. sir) and then promotes him, which is pretty much the only saving grace of that entire exchange, for meng yao at least.

lan xichen, on the other hand, understands both that meng yao is the lowest-ranked person in the room and that any direct attempt to chastise the other cultivators in the room will only serve to hurt meng yao in the long run. he knows that if this were brought to nie mingjue’s attention, he would be outraged and not shy about it -- also bad for meng yao. so he uses what he has: his immaculate reputation. by acting contrary to the other cultivators’ behavior, he demonstrates that he finds their actions unacceptable but with the plausible deniability that it wasn’t directed at them, that this is just zewu-jun being his usual generous self. this means that the other cultivators have no one to blame but themselves, nothing to do but question their own actions. there is nowhere to cast off their discomfort. meng yao didn’t do anything. lan xichen didn’t do anything -- he just thanked meng yao and drank his tea, isn’t that what it’s there for? he doesn’t disrupt the peace, he doesn’t attack anyone and put them on the defensive, but he does make his position very clear.

i know this is a really small thing and i’m probably beating it to death, but I really think this shows just how cognizant lan xichen is of politics and emotional cause and effect in such situations. certainly, out of context I think the scene reads kind of cliche, but within the greater narrative of the story and within the arc of these characters specifically, I think it was a really smart scene to include. it also showcases lan xichen’s style of action: that he moves around and with a problematic situation as opposed to moving straight through.

not to be salty on main again, but this is why it’s very frustrating to me when I see people call lan xichen passive when he is anything but. his actions just don’t look like traditional “actions”, especially to an american audience. it’s easy to understand lan wangji and wei wuxian’s style of problem-solving: taking a stand, moving through, staying strong. lan xichen is juggling an inconceivable number of factors in any given situation, weighing his responsibilities in one role against those in another, and then trying to find the path through the thicket that will cause the least harm, both to himself and the thicket. lan wangji and wei wuxian are not particularly good at considering the far-reaching consequences of their actions -- again, not because they are bad people, but because of a combination of personality and upbringing. they’d just hack through the thicket, not thinking about the creatures that live in it. that is not a terrible thing! it isn’t. it’s a different way of approaching a problem, and it has different priorities. that’s okay. there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and where you come down is going to depend on your personal values.

okay we’ve spiraled far and away from my original point, but let’s circle back: i was talking about class.

I think it’s undeniable that class, birthright, fate etc. are some of the driving forces of thematic conflict in mdzs, and the way each character interacts with those forces reveals a lot about themselves and also about the larger themes of fate, chance, and what it means to be righteous and good and how that is and isn’t rewarded. a lot of the tragedy of mdzs (the tragedy that isn’t caused by direct aggression on the part of one group or another) stems from the injustices and slights that people suffered due to their lot in life. it isn’t fair. none of it is fair! we sympathize with jin guangyao because we recognize that what he suffered was unconscionable, even if we don’t excuse him. i sympathize A Lot with xue yang as well for similar reasons, though I understand that’s a harder sell. this is a story focused on the mistakes of an entrenched, aging gentry and the effects that those mistakes had on their children, and a lot of it has to do with prejudice based in class and birth status. whether the prejudice was the true reason or whether it was just a convenient excuse, the fact remains that the systems in place rewarded and protected the people in power who used it to cling to that power. mdzs is also a story of how the circumstances of one’s life can offer you impossible choices that you cannot abstain from, and it asks us to be compassionate to the people who made terrible choices in terrible times. it’s about the inherent complexity in all things! that sometimes, there are no good choices, and i don’t know, i’d like to think that people would show me compassion if I had to make the choices some of these characters did. not just wei wuxian, mind you, every single one of them. except jin guangshan because I Do Hate Him sorry. and i guess wen ruohan. i think that’s it.

good. GOD this is clocking in at //checks notes -- just over 5k. 8′D *stuffs some weeds into my mouth like the clown i am*

(ko-fi? :’D *lies down*)

#OH BOY OH BOY #mdzs #the untamed #mdzs meta #the untamed meta #?? #mymeta #meta #cql #cql meta #mine #cyan gets too deep in the weeds #im literally falling asleep as i'm typing right now so i'm SURE i've made mistakes and forgotten stuff but i am just. #*yeets this out into the void* #please read this i worked hard on it ;A; #class #class conflict #class consciousness #Anonymous #asks and replies #ok bedtime byebye

[whet-ones-write]

Baku Birthday 2021

So I’m posting this a /little/ early because I’m just too excited to share this fic! So I joined in with Bakugou’s Birthday Bash hosted by these amazing people!!

@phasmwrites​ @katsukikitten @bakugotrashpanda​ @lady-bakuhoe​ @jodrawssmut​ & @ramen-rambles​ 

And since joining I couldn’t have found a more supporting and helpful group on Discord!! Special thanks to: @hoe-doroki​ for being my beta reader and editor!! Thank you for dealing with my sorry, inconsistant ass and giving me the strength to pull though and just do some of my best writing to date! I haven’t written so much in so long and it was rather nice!! 

And to @notchesandbullets​ for telling me I can do this and be those words of praise when I needed them the most helping me pull though and finish this!

Contains: DragonShifter!Reader x Bakugou. Fantasy Setting,

WC: 3755 - Masterlist to all the works!!

Warnings: 18+, SMUT, oral (Female + M reviecing), Cowgirl, unprotected sex, Cum eating, Premature Ejaluations (if you squint), Age gap? It’s implied Reader is much older than Katsuki. Restraining Katsuki, Pervert Kiri

Looking around his throne, Katsuki couldn’t help but scoff at what came to his mind. He had everything a chief could want, but it still wasn’t enough for the young, barbaric male. Vast and grand was his home. People were happy, going about their day, harvest due and bountiful, the river running steady and clean. 

Though, he was still missing a vital element to his life. Someone to make him happy, to have by his side and call his own. So the only thing he had left to need or want was someone to walk into battle with him, because not just any person would. 

No, they had to have a few key traits to meet his standards. They needed to have a willingness to fight, to want to protect those around him and themselves with everything they had. They had to be able to take flack and a joke but also be serious when the time came. They had to be able to take no shit from anyone and make sure to be willing to put others in their place if they went out of line.

It wasn’t much! Honestly…Or at least he thought so. 

“...ugou, Bakugou!” A voice snapped him from his thoughts as he glanced at his adviser, unhappy over the fact he was interrupted from his thoughts. 

“What is it?” Katsuki questioned as he lazily shifted his attention to the man standing at his right side. 

“As I was saying, there have been some sightings of strangely coloured dragons in the nearby valleys. We do not know if it is one or more or if they’re passing by or staying. Moreover, they have yet to attack the villages, but it would be wise to at least investigate the surrounding areas before anything happens,” his assistant spoke as he looked for what the King was going to do. 

Taking a moment, Katsuki couldn’t help but smile as he got up and began to stretch. “Eijirou, prepare for a flight. It seems there might be someone that needs a reminder of who those valleys belong to.” 

Though to the Bakugou family dragons were revered and seen as good omens, there was a limit. Dragons that fought over territory could be destructive and wipe entire lands from existence, so if there was ever more than one in an area it could prove to be a bad omen instead.

One dragon or one family were seen as protecting the lands, keeping invaders at bay and being loyal by nature. Though another one could offset the balance, should they prove to be hungry or hostile. The valleys in which the Bakugous lived were famous for having the longest standing relationship with the red dragons of the Kirishima clan. They had served one another for generations with the latest duo being that of the Barbarian King Katsuki Bakugou, son of the late Chieftess Mitsuki Bakugou, and the dragon that protected the lands, Eijirou Kirishima, son to late Hikori Kirishima.

Standing at seven feet, the mostly human nodded and saluted as he walked with his friend outside. “Yes, sir.” He beamed happily, seemingly excited by the prospect of seeing another dragon. “Though, what are your instructions, should they prove hostile?” 

“Hostile?” Katsuki mused, placing a hand to his chin as the other morphed into that of a forty-foot-long dragon from the tip of his nose to the very end of his arrow-pointed tail. Once finished, Kirishima leaned down to lower his wing, letting Katsuki get on by walking up the thin bone of the arch of his wing and holding onto his spines, climbing all the way to behind the red horns that adorned his head. “Should the dragon wish to try and stay, we will start through the diplomatic route.” 

That was the thing about Katsuki. For all his bloodlust and anger, he was quite the strategist when it came to monsters several times his size. Having worked with Eijirou for some time, they had built up a bond of trust valuable for when trouble arose. 

“Should that fail, we will have to take things up a notch. I would like to avoid a fight if at all possible.” He sighed as he clung to the horn while the other took off. “The valley is full of fish making their way upstream for the breeding season,” he muttered before groaning and slapping his face as he remembered something, getting even more irritated. 

“It could be a female dragon,” he groaned, looking down to Eijirou. “With breeding season approaching, it could prove very troublesome,” he grumbled as he lay down to keep low as Eijirou took to the sky. 

“Hm,” came a deep rumble from the beast.

A female dragon would be far better than a male should they be able to move it along. It could prove worse in the long run, though, as other males came to try and have their chance, destroying the local landscape fighting over the female. 

“Not going to be influenced? I know you’re a young male.” Katsuki snickered as the dragon grunted and shook slightly in a ‘no’. “Don’t worry, whatever happens we’ll sort it,” he offered quietly as he calmed down to focus on the mission at hand. 

They took to the base of the mountains and looked for any signs of disturbance. With fear running though the nearest village, it was clear to see that the crops were half unattended and in the middle of being harvested. “I’m going to go take a look at the surrounding areas and talk to the locals. You go on up the mountain and scout that out,” the Chief commanded. With a short huff and a nod, Eijirou turned to slowly and carefully make his way up and around the mountains. 

It wasn’t long before Eijirou returned with some news. Meeting in the center of town, the dragon descended slowly and waited for Katsuki to approach before he spoke. “I found a trail of blood from the ground leading up to a cave roughly halfway up the mountain. 

Nodding, Katsuki signaled for Eijirou to lower himself so he could climb onto his back. “Sounds about right. The locals saw a figure flying unsteadily across the sky and into the mountain. There was a loud thump before all went silent. It’s more than likely a dragon. It hasn’t done harm to the villagers yet, though, so a slow, quiet and careful approach is needed.”

Coming to the entrance of the cave, Katsuki hopped off Eijirou, immediately noticing the plants had been recently crushed and a splattering of dried blood was leading into the cave. Looking up to Eijirou, he nodded and quietly led the way in. Eijirou used a small breath to light the torch that Katsuki would have to use to see. 

It didn’t take them long to find the cause of the blood and crushed plants. Lying in front of them was a bronze dragon just as large as Kirishima, if not bigger, bleeding heavily from it’s hind leg, belly and face. 

“Holy shit,” Katsukimuttered as he looked over the sight. He froze as the dragon raised its head. Chuckling, you looked over at Katsuki and Eijirou. “If you have come to kill me, at least make it swift.” 

“Tch, don’t lump me with most humans,” Katsuki stated as he approached you, looking over the wounds. A huffing could be heard as he made his way closer, your muscles tense and beady eyes watching his form, ready to attack should harm come. “I’m a Bakugou. We don’t harm your kind.” 

“You may not harm but you enslave. I feel sorry for the red scaled one over there. Forced to serve you like their ancestors,” you mumbled, laying your head down and closing your eyes to rest. 

Eijirou huffed before he sat down. “I’m not. It’s nice to have lands that we don’t have to fight over and live in harmony with humans,” he protested, watching as Katsuki assessed the wounds. “I am from the Kirishima clan.” He beamed, almost a little too excited to say so. “It’s nice to see another shade of red around here. Normally those of the Shinsou clan are around these areas.” Eijirou started, tilting his head to the side. “So what brings you here?” he mused. 

Which was how you explained your side of the story. It wasn’t uncommon for humans to attack those of draconic race because of the first dragons causing havoc and turmoil for humankind. You were a young dragon who still had not found some land to live in. So, you were aimlessly looking around for somewhere to sleep before you were ambushed by a kingdom that had a bad past with dragons, driving you out. 

“Well,” Katsuki started as he backed off. “If you revert into your human form, we can take you back and give you medical aid. I’m not about to let a creature like you just die pathetically cold and alone in such a depressing state.” 

With that, they watched as your form changed into a bloodstained, corseted, sleeveless dress, wings still visible with a tail barely peeking from beneath your long skirt. Their eyes lingered for a little too long to be completely respectful.  

Getting up from where he lay, Eijirou gently enclosed you in his claws, protecting you, letting Katsuki onto his back before taking off back to the kingdom to give you the aid you needed. 

~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~

The next thing you knew, you were waking up to some argument going on outside, though you took no heed to it. After all, you would need to at least stay to repay the kindness the human has shown you before taking your leave. 

As the flap to the tent opened, you looked up at the figure that came to inspect you in the cot. “How are you feeling?” The one that entered had torn red wings and a thin arrow-headed tail much like that of the dragon you’d seen earlier. 

“Much better, thanks.” He watched you as you got up to move around.

“Yeah, my mother is a great healer.” The man beamed proudly before his face dropped for a moment in realisation. “Oh, that’s right! I’m Eijirou Kirishima!” He offered a hand for you to shake as he introduced yourself. “I’m Katsuki’s dragon companion. Speaking of which, when you feel up to it, he wants to see you in the throne room. He’s currently occupied with some business, so why not come later tonight before dinner? He wants to talk to you about some things.”

“Ah I see” You nodded in agreement though still clearly wary of him. 

“Yeah, my mom specialises in herbal and magical treatments for dragons. You should be fighting fit by the end of day! So enjoy yourself and have a look around! You’re more than welcome here as long as you don’t kill anyone.” You found yourself chuckling lightly along with him as he waved. “See ya! Rest up well and don’t push yourself too hard!” He beamed as he left. 

As Eijirou left you alone with your thoughts, you couldn’t help but think back to just how trustingly and kindly Katsuki had treated you. Taking your leave from the tent, you looked to the sky to gauge the time of day. Deciding you had at least an hour before the sun would set and you would need to see the Chieftain, you went to see what the town had to offer.

As you walked among the townsfolk, you couldn’t help but notice that dragons and humans walked around one another as if that were a normal thing to do. Had things always been like this? And how had this not spread to other countries? Though be that as it might, you were happy for these people; they seemed to be comfortable and welcoming just like the man who had found you. Perhaps you could stay a little longer than intended… 

Still, once the sun started to set you walked back the way you came only to come across a tent larger than most, assuming that was where Katsuki would be wrapping up the day. 

You slowly opened the flap as some villagers came out, happily discussing the day’s harvest before you heard. “Come on in, dragon!” Katsuki called as he remained seated on his chair smirking to himself. “Feeling better, I see?” he questioned as he sat up straight. Even like this, you could see and feel the power he irradiated. 

“Yes, much, thank you.” Bowing, you smiled before you were told to stand upright. “If there’s anything I can do for you, please just let me know. It’s the least I can do after you saved my life.” 

The moment those words left your mouth, you had a feeling that you were either going to live to regret it or thank him.

“Speaking of which,” he started as he leaned back and patted his lap. “Please, come here,” he commanded. Once you approached, he leaned forward, taking your chin between his thumb and forefinger as if inspecting you. Up close, you could just see how deep ruby red his eyes were as well as how sharp his teeth were. For a human, he had a great set of fangs on him. ‘Shame he’s a human; he would have made a great and fierce dragon,’ you couldn’t help but think before he spoke, bringing you back to reality. 

“Yes, you’re perfect,” he muttered, pulling you into his lap forcefully by your waist. “Strong willed, a fighter, and someone I could learn to grow better with,” he stated as he suddenly captured your lips. “You will be my partner,” he stated as his hands wandered low. 

Spluttering and blushing, you thrust your arms at his chiseled chest, putting some distance between the two of you. “B-But how do you know? I could kill you! You barely know me,” you protested, though with his power he forced you to fold your arms, leaning in to whisper. 

“But you owe me your life. Surely this is nothing and if you don’t feel like you’re the one you’re more than welcome to leave,” he purred.

You knew he was right. This young, powerful man knew that dragons didn’t back down on their word, and so serving him would mean repaying the debt? A small price to pay, truly. 

“So why not get on your knees for your Chief and thank me properly?” he offered, leaning back and letting go of you. You watched as the grin on his face was almost ear splitting as you sunk to your knees in front of him. He let his hands wander down his trousers to help you get them off and down to his ankles. 

“That’s it,” he praised, reaching out to gently lay his hand on your head. His eyes watched you with keen interest as you slowly took him into your mouth. He wasn’t completely hard and you shifted to get a better angle and grip him in your hands, though he tried to encourage you with soft words. “That’s it, fuckin’ take it all in,” he muttered as he leaned back, getting more comfortable on his throne. The grasp on your hair got tighter as he started to get impatient and guide your face along his length. “Come on now, no need to be so shy about it.” His teeth showed as he smiled. “You’ve lived longer than I have, surely you have the experience?” he goaded. Which, if you were honest with yourself, was true. You were most likely older than him, and could show him a thing or two while you’re at it. 

Straightening your back a little from the floor you looked over his hardening dick. Licking your lips, you took the head in, using the flexibility to weave in between the head of his cock and the shaft before leaning up and taking it in as much as you could. Tongue flat, running along the thick vein underneath, you slowly bobbed your head back and forth, breathing when you could. It wasn’t long before you felt a tug with the hand that ran through your hair to pull you away from him, leaving you panting, and breathless from working so hard to please him. 

His cheeks flushed a bright pink he chuckled almost as breathlessly as you, having forgotten how to breathe in the moment before letting go of your hair. “What a good girl,” he praised as he shifted back and patted his lap.  “Why not come for a ride?” he questioned as he watched you stand. “I would have taken you back to my room, but I'm feeling impatient. It’s my birthday after all,” he informed, eyes hungrily watching over your form as you stripped naked, and then worked on taking off his trousers completely. 

“Your birthday?” you questioned him as you straddled his lap. “I see. Perhaps this will be enough of a gift then?” you mused lining yourself up, slowly trying to sink yourself down on him.

His head slammed back against the back of his throne as he groaned. You were taking your time, though as you hadn’t prepared yourself. You knew your body could and would stretch, but it was painful to begin with. He was stretching you to your limit, but you licked your hand to reach down to let the saliva coating his dick for an easier entry only then were you able to sit down fully on his lap. 

Taking a good minute or two you both sat, panting, just feeling one another as you got used to the stretch of his cock within you. His hands empassing your hips, he tried to get you to move, but you had other ideas. It was his birthday? That’s just fine, but you would make sure it would be a ride he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. 

You gently grasped his hands and took them off your hips to raise them above his head as you started to roll your hips back and forth. Leaning in close to kiss him and to distract him, you used your tail to wrap his hands above his head. He only just realised when you leaned back.

“W-What the fuck is—shit—the big idea?” he panted as his eyes were glued to your form, which started moving so effortlessly up and down on his dick. 

“It’s your birthday. I want to spoil you, so enjoy the ride.” Chuckling a little darkly, you couldn’t help but use your wings to give you some extra momentum and power into your movements as you rode him. 

He couldn't believe just how lucky he was to have such a beautiful person ride him within an inch of his life. You knew just what to do and how to please him, which, to his embarrassment, had him orgasming not much longer after you started. 

“F-Fuck!” he grunted, unable to couldn’t help it when his hips met yours. Though your gut had only just started to coil with your own orgasm, much to your disappointment. You remained seated on his lap as he came down from his high, letting go of his arms. 

He watched you only to frown. Noticing you hadn’t orgasmed yet he couldn’t help but feel like a teenager all over again. 

This wouldn’t do. This wouldn’t do at all. 

Growling, he forcefully lifted you up from him as he slid to the floor, getting you to sit in his seat. Wrapping his arms around your waist, he brought you to his face and started to lap up not only at his own cum that had started to seep it’s way out from the confines of yourself, but searching for any original taste of your own essence. This surprise had you leaning over with a groan. In all your years, no other man had been so willing about doing this. 

Smirking from the inside of your thighs, he knew from your expression that you were loving it or at the very least surprised by his movements. “What?” he questioned, so close to your cunt that you could feel his breath ghosting it. “Never been eaten out before?” He seemed a little too smug, as if he almost already knew the answer. 

With a shake of your head, he only shifted closer and got more comfortable as he nudged your clit with his nose. “Hmm, good. I'm a man starving for pussy and it’s delicious, so don’t mind me,” he muttered before his gaze lowered. 

Though his dick felt great, this was almost a thousand times better. There was no painful stretch, only a soft muscle, though not deep. The slurping and sucking sounds and sensations were what quickly brought your end. He was more than happy to guide you though your high as you remained hunched over his head, hands which you now realised were in his hair, forcing his face just that much closer. 

Leaning back once you had come back to Earth, you watched him as he wiped his chin and cheeks with the back of his arm. “Thank you for the meal.” He chuckled, giving off a lopsided smile, showing off the pearly whites of his sharp teeth. He stood as he gathered up his trousers as he got dressed. “You’re more than welcome to stay for dinner in my home,” he stated as he turned to you and passed you back your clothes. 

Slowly taking them, you nodded as you got dressed despite the shake in your legs. “Y-Yeah, I think I will,” you confirmed as you slipped back into your clothes. 

“Good choice. I’m not finished with you yet, beautiful.” Leaning in, he kissed your cheek before taking his leave only to find a very flustered Eijirou waiting outside. “Something wrong?” Katsuki questioned with folded arms, knowing exactly what he was doing. 

“N-No!” the dragon protested, though the redness that was spread all the way up to his ears gave him away. 

“Next time, just ask. It’s rude to eavesdrop.” Katsuki laughed as he walked away, going to join the mass for dinner. 

“K-Katsuki! I had to make sure you were safe! After all, she’s a rogue dragon,” Eijirou protested in earnest. Though he wouldn’t admit it, that would be something that Eijirou would very much like to do. 

“Sure, sure, whatever you say, man.”

Rolling his eyes, Katsuki took a seat at the head of the banquet table, waiting for your arrival before the festivities could begin.

#bnha #mha #bakugou katsuki #bnha bakugo katsuki #bnha bakugou #fantasy au #bnha kirishima #dragon kirishima #reader insert #x reader #bakugou smut #reader x bakugou #smut #baku birthday bash #bakugou x reader #bakugo x reader #bakugo smut #Bakugou Katsuki x reader #Bakugou Katsuki smut #katsuki bakugou x reader #katsuki bakugou smut #bnha x reader #mha x reader #mha smut #bnha smut

[winter-soldier-vibes]

I wasn’t there

Bucky x reader

Word count: 2510

Warnings: self harm/self harm scars, little bit of angst, mostly comfort, tears

Summary: Reader self harms and Bucky sees her scars one day on a mission by accident. He feels guilty and wants to help her as much as he can now that he knows. 

Based on the quotes: "Show me your scars, I want to see how many times you needed me and I wasn't there"

A/N: Thank you SO MUCH to the anon who sent this in! Not going to lie I was bawling writing this, I love it so much. This deals with heavy topics and mental health so as always, if you feel that reading this will be harmful to your journey in any way, please feel free to skip it. As always, I am here to talk about anything you guys may need. 

A/N 2: Ok there’s a part at the end that I don’t think is technically canon but it’s rumored and has been talked about before in regards to some of Bucky’s scarring on his left arm. I know it’s not a confirmed canon thing but it honestly works so well and I believe it’s true, please don’t come at me for that. <3

Tags: @buckys2thicc @thatfangirl42 @mardema @stucky-on-spiderman @barnesplums @peggycarter-steverogers @abitgryffindorky @buckfics  @freigeistundanderes  

Main Masterlist 

------------------------------

You trudged back to your room in the compound, exhaustion taking over your body. You had just gotten back from a mission that had taken the life out of you, more so than any others on the team. You had the power to control elements, but whenever you did it drained the energy out of you. At one point you had been surrounded, forcing you to lift the ground around you to knock everyone back. 

It was more than you had ever done at once, and nearly made you pass out. 

You were able to finish the mission, but you were absolutely exhausted, the worried eyes of Steve, Bucky, Bruce, and Natasha looking over at you. Nat was flying the quinjet, but still glanced back at you from time to time. Bruce was there mainly for medical help, as there wasn’t need for a code green. Steve was just Steve, being worried about you as your Captain. And as the friend of your boyfriend.

Bucky meanwhile would not leave your side. He was concerned, even after Bruce had determined you were nothing more than completely exhausted. He insisted on you lying down and him staying next to you. It was nice to know that he cared about you so much, he would do anything to protect you.

Which is what made your heart ache when you saw his face drop when you had said you were fine, and walked off to your room when you had arrived home.

It wasn’t that you wanted to be around him, not at all. It was just that you wanted to take a shower and wash the sweat and grime off of you, and you didn’t want him to see. Not yet, you hadn’t told him yet.

When you closed the door to your room, you peeled off your uniform, exposing your skin littered with scars varying in depth and age. You turned the water on and leaned against the countertop as you took in yourself. 

God, you hated them. 

You had struggled with self harm for a while now, but it was better than it had been before. It had been really bad before you had started dating Bucky. It’s not like it magically went away when you did, not at all, but just being around him made it easier. Him telling you how much he loved you, spending time with you, you helping him feel more secure. You weren’t alone in your head as much, 

He helped and he didn’t even know it. 

You traced your fingers over the most recent ones on your wrist from a few days ago. They had scabbed over by now, but the memory was still fresh in your mind. It was a panic attack in the middle of the night, and you didn’t want to wake anyone. You knew this would help you and it did. It grounded you back to the moment, calming you down as you focused on the stinging sensation rather than the panic. 

You looked down at all the other marks you had made. Most of them were on your thighs, because they were the easiest to hide. It was easier to wear pants in the summer than long sleeves. But you were running out of room, moving to your arms instead, trying to stay away from your wrists. But a few days ago you couldn’t even think about it through your panic attack. Sometimes you couldn’t think about it, being so overwhelmed that you weren’t quite aware of what you were doing until you saw the blood.

 You remembered making every single one of them. They all had a story, a reason. And all of them were different. 

You wanted to tell Bucky, you knew you would have to eventually. The two of you had avoided intimacy up until now, and slept in different rooms unless either of you was having a rough night and asked the other to stay. It wasn’t that you didn't want to be intimate with him, you had been together for months. But you had to tell him about this first

And you couldn’t find a way to quite yet.

You just couldn’t find the right time or words. You didn’t want to scare him off, and you didn’t want him to look at you in the sad, concerned way that people usually do with this sort of thing. You didn’t want to put this on him. And you for sure didn’t want him to blame himself.

You sighed, tearing your gaze from the mirror. You stepped into the shower, letting the warm water wash over you. You stood there like that for a few minutes before you moved to wash your body, taking your time. You had no plans tonight other than going to sleep. 

Bucky had watched you walk slowly back into the tower, wanting to follow you but also wanting to respect your boundaries and space. You were exhausted, but he wanted nothing more than to comfort you the entire night. But you didn’t want him too, and he wanted to respect that.

Still, it broke his heart to watch you limp away. He felt helpless. 

He couldn’t help but wonder if something was wrong with you. The way that the two of you had been together for as long as you had without some form of intimacy. He was patient, he would never want to push you, but he wondered why. Whenever the two of you had a conversation you had seemed to stiffen slightly and get uncomfortable. 

He never pressed it. Just dropped it and hugged you, telling you it was fine to wait. 

But the more time passed, the more helpless he felt. He felt like you were hiding something from it. He just wished he knew what it was so he could better help you. But in a way he understood. Everything that he had gone through - forcing someone to open up usually unintentionally makes them shut down. 

Even so, as he went back to his room he couldn’t stop thinking of you. He took his own quick shower, putting on sweats and a T-shirt before he came to check on you. He just wanted to make sure you were alright.

You had gotten out of the shower yourself, slowly drying yourself off before going back to your dresser to find something comfortable to wear. It was brutally hot and you were exhausted, pulling on a tank top and shorts. You were about to go back to lie down when you heard a soft knock on the door.

You sighed in frustration, closing your eyes for a moment. “Yeh, just a minute,” you said, exhausted, grabbing a pair of sweatpants and a loose sweatshirt to pull over yourself. You walked over to the door and opened it slightly, giving the man in front of you a tired smile.

“Hey Bucky.”

Bucky’s face softened, a small smile spreading on his face. “Hey doll. I - I know you said you wanted some time to yourself but I just wanted to check on you.”

You smirked at him slightly. “I’m just about the same as when we walked off the quinjet Bucky.” You shrugged, tugging your sleeves down - nervous habit. “I’ll be fine, I’m just really tired.”

Bucky looked you up and down quickly. “You sure?”

You hesitated a moment longer than you should’ve, quickly bringing yourself out of it. “Yeah.”

“You don’t sound sure,” he said gently. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

“Look I’m fine, I just want to go to sleep. I’m exhausted.”

“Please? Let me take care of you, it’s been a long day,” he said.

“You don’t have to Bucky,” you started, shaking your head lightly.

“I want to,” he assured you.

Sighing, you opened the door more to let him in. it wasn’t that you didn’t want him to stay, you did in a way. You always slept better with him there. You just really wanted to take off the sweats. But that would mean having a conversation that you weren’t ready for.

Sweat was better than tears.

You climbed into bed and Bucky laid down beside you, wrapping his arm around you. He kissed the temple of your head as you relaxed back against his chest. “Try to get some rest sweetheart.”

You hummed, already feeling exhaustion overtake you as you closed your eyes, drifting off to sleep faster than you ever had.

-----------

You woke the next morning feeling much better than the night before. You shifted slightly, feeling Bucky’s arms still around you. 

“Good morning sleeping beauty.”

“What? What time is it?” you asked sleepily.

Bucky chuckled behind you. “It is almost noon.”

Your eyes widened as you started to sit up. “What? I slept that long? How long have you been awake, I’m sorry -”

“Hey, sweetheart, don’t worry about it. I've been awake for a while but it’s no problem. You needed the rest and I’m glad you got it.”

You hummed again in acknowledgement, reaching your hands up to rub your eyes. What you hadn’t realized was that while you were asleep, your sleeves had ridden up slightly. You never had to worry about your wrists because you had never gone down that low on your arms. 

“Angel, what’s that?” Bucky asked, grabbing your arm gently to get a better look. You took your arm away quickly, tugging your sleeve down. You shook your head and crossed your arms as you stood up. “It’s nothing, really. I’m gonna go shower.”

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Bucky said, standing and walking over to you. You tensed, and he noticed. “Did someone hurt you?”

“Please drop it Bucky,” you pleaded, still unable to meet his eyes. 

“Y/n I swear if someone hurt you -”

“I did it.” you blurted out, surprising you both. You took a shaky breath, and Bucky felt his heart drop, praying he had heard you wrong. 

“What?” he asked, barely audible. The only noise was your heart hammering in your ears. You swallowed, looking down at the ground and fiddling with your sleeves again. 

“I hurt myself sometimes,” you said with a small shrug. “It helps.”

“With what?” he asked, carefully. 

You met his eyes, tears pricking your own. “Everything.”

Silence. Bucky walked towards you slowly, pulling you into a hug, as you closed your eyes, silent tears falling. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know how to.” you said simply. “I was embarrassed and ashamed, and I didn’t want you to blame yourself.”

He held you tightly, rubbing a hand up and down your back as more tears fell despite you trying to hold them back. “Can I see?”

You pulled back and tensed up, looking at him. “What?”

“Show me your scars,” he said.

You shook your head slightly, confused. “Why?”

“Because I want to see how many times you needed me and I wasn’t there,” he whispered.

You looked at him for a moment. “Bucky, I can’t do that, I -”

“Please y/n,” he whispered. “It’s just me.”

You studied him for a moment before nodding. With shaky hands, you pulled the sweatshirt over your head, dropping it on the floor and resisting the urge to cross your arms. You stepped out of your sweatpants next, keeping your eyes downcast. You heard a sharp intake of breath from Bucky, but you weren’t able to look at him yet.

Bucky felt his heart shatter at the scars littered across your arms. There were so many marks, he didn’t want to even think about how many there were. He felt tears prick his eyes but he knew he had to be strong right now. It pained him how much you were hurting and how oblivious he was. He took your hands in his, you still unable to look at him.

 “I’m so sorry it took me this long to be there for you.”

You shook your head, looking at him. “Don’t do that to yourself, please, it’s not your fault Bucky. You’re the reason it’s not worse.” You turned around and crossed your arms. “ I’m sorry, Bucky, I didn’t know how to tell you. They’re ugly, they’re disgusting. I’m disgusting. Who’s so fucked up that they have to slice open their skin to make themselves feel better? I hate myself more than anyone I’ve ever known. How pathetic is that?” 

“Y/n, can you look at me?”

Trying to blink back tears, you met his gaze again, his eyes glassy. “Your fight is our fight. None of this is your fault, don’t apologize for how you had to fight on your own. I’m here now, okay?” His hand ghosted over your scars. “These scars right here are your battle scars. They tell your story of how strong you are. Never be afraid or ashamed of that, okay?” 

You looked down, still embarrassed. 

“Hey, y/n. It’s okay.”

Before you could respond, Bucky took off his own shirt, something he had never done in front of you. Your eyes found the scars where metal met skin, most of them faded but had obviously been deep. You reached your hand out to trace over his scars.

“When they gave me this arm and they were starting to tortue me I would scratch at it. Whenever I had been out of cryo for long enough I would start to remember and claw at it too, before they wiped me again. I thought I was a monster.”

You shook your head. “No, Bucky that wasn’t your fault, you didn’t ask for Hydra to do all those things to you.”

“You didn’t ask for your mental struggles either. So why are you ashamed?”

“You didn’t ask for the metal arm, you wanted to get rid of it. It wasn’t in your control. This, what I do, I choose to do it every time. It doesn’t feel like a choice but I still pick up the knife.”

“But I bet if you could you would choose to put it down, yeah?” he brushed a piece of hair out of your eyes. “It’s okay y/n. Don’t be ashamed of how you helped yourself survive.”

You nodded, taking a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head and pulled you into another hug. “Don’t apologize for letting me be a part of your story.”

#Bucky Barnes #buckybarnes #bucky fanfic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky fluff #bucky x you #bucky #bucky barns fanfiction #bucky barns imagine #bucky barne #bucky barns x you #MCU #MCU fanfiction #mcu imagine #mcu fic #marvel fanfiction #mavel #marvel fanfic #marvel #TW depression #tw self harm #TW self hate #bucky barnes comfort #comfort

[haleigh-sloth]

Do you think hori got more and more vague with endeavor’s physical abuse as the story went on? Like I think an anon said, the most graphic abusive scene we got from him was that one page with todoroki puking and a smack sound effect indicating that endeavor slapped rei off page.

Much later on in chapter 302, I think, when he realized dabi was still training in secret, we see rei on the ground cradling her face and todoroki crying and shouting at endeavor to not “bully mom”. Some endeavor stans say he didn’t hit her but rather that she and shouto were napping and endeavor just came in and started verbally bashing her and rei was just hiding her face because she was scared or something.

The thing is, hori had no problem with explicitly showing shigaraki’s dad slapping and beating the shit out of tomura with a gardening tool, in the face at that, so why is he so vague with endeavor? And especially with rei. We also have yet to see what was going down in todoroki’s private training sessions. What happened that made him puke when he was five? We saw once endeavor holding a kendo bamboo blade, what did he do with it? Attack his son?

I might be exaggerating, but if his physical abuse was more clearly shown, some endeavor delulus wounds exist. Cause, for example, if we hadn’t seen tomura’s dad hitting him in the face with full force, and it was only hinted at, I bet there would be some fans saying that tomura’s abuse wasn’t that bad and his dad kept trying to dissuade him form his hero dream cause at that point it seemed as he most likely didn’t have a quirk.

*sweats nervously*

Ha

Well, yes. But also not really?

CW: Abuse

So—here’s one thing we all need to understand and begrudgingly accept:

Endeavor was retconned.

He was retconned in the sense that his M.O. was backpedaled. When he’s first introduced we are shown that he’s this physically abusive piece of shit who beats his wife and his kids, and has almost no redeeming qualities. And we're led to believe that the entire. fucking. series, but at the same time it's becoming obvious that he's going to be this redeemable person, and that he's slowly coming to terms with what he did and that he is going to have to face his past actions. Which honestly could have worked fine----until the Todofam chapters threw a wrench into that shit. THEN we're suddenly shown that Endeavor actually wasn't this violent, physically abusive piece of shit, but in fact only escalated to get that bad because of his spiraling son and him not being able to face the damage he'd already caused. Basically, the author went back and made it to where his violent actions toward his wife and kid were a reaction to a stressor (Touya's mental health), instead of just leaving him as this abusive piece of shit that he was originally introduced as, making him shoulder less blame--making him less guilty. We were still shown that he was an abusive person toward his oldest son, but it was kind of a big shock to see that he actually managed to have a strong bond with one of his kids in the first place, because as I said--most of the series we're shown Shouto and Natsuo hating him, Rei being terrified of him visiting the hospital, and Fuyumi acknowledging the tension in the house when he was incredibly angry after AM's retirement. All things that happen when you're an abusive POS to your family and they're scared of you or blame you. So seeing him have a son who craved his attention so much to the point that it killed him was kind of a shock. ALTHOUGH, I have to agree with this anon here and say that making it this way does add a certain element of sheer sadness to it. But I digress.

The thing about the retcon is that no amount of backpedaling can erase this

And because THIS ^^^ is canon and undeniably HAPPENED, we are only able to assume that it started here ⬇️⬇️

Endeavor was violent and physically abusive toward his wife. It wasn’t like that from the beginning, but it has to start somewhere. This is the starting point ^^^. This was the breaking point, Touya kept getting burned, and Endeavor lost it on Rei. And I am tired of explaining E-stans away. You don't draw two small children covering their ears and hiding in a different room while listening to the horror of your parents and baby sibling screaming at each other unless you're trying to convey the horror of that situation to readers. I don't consume bad takes so I just recommend that you stay away from them as well. Saves a lot of stress.

People can say what they want, but Endeavor's abuse was not vague. I wouldn't consider the physical aspect of it to be vague either. I think that's just the beauty of the retcon. He wasn't physically abusive from the START, but that doesn't erase the fact that he became physically abusive. But we DO know that from the time Touya's potential disappeared, Endeavor started abusing his family.

Emotionally at first, then it became physical.

The thing you gotta ask yourself is, what is the purpose of this retcon? In my opinion, Hori could have still redeemed Endeavor without retconning him. Not everybody would have liked it, but you can't please everybody. That's just a fact. The retcon wasn't necessary to redeem Endeavor. So in my opinion, and I say this with caution, I think Hori retconned Endeavor to make it more acceptable to integrate him back into the family. Or at least imply it. I think that's the ending Horikoshi is going toward. Not a fan of it, but.....look at the writing. It's got wish fulfillment written all over it. It's not gonna make people happy, but at the end of the day, it's not anybody's story but Horikoshi's. He can do what he wants with it. But no amount of retconning can erase the cold, hard truth:

Now as for Shigaraki's situation being so cut and dry without any vagueness--

Look, I would bet money that Horikoshi has had Shigaraki's story planned out for years. His entire arc is central to everything that BNHA is about. All of BNHA's themes, messages, conflicts, and answers lie in Shigaraki's story. Shigaraki is the best written character in this story for a reason. There's no retconning, and he has been carefully written with, in my opinion, no flaws in his story.

The reason he didn't have a problem showing how horrible it got with Shigaraki is because of those reasons I listed above. His story is the heart of BNHA and Horikoshi isn't gonna sugar coat or hide the tragedy in the story's central arc. Otherwise....the entire story just starts to fall apart and not make sense. You don't know what to believe. It becomes too hard to follow and unenjoyable.

Basically what I'm saying (assuming) is: Shigaraki's story is something Hori has never questioned himself about. He knew where he was going with it, and how. That's why there's none of this vagueness or sugar coating in his arc.

His arc is delivering everything BNHA is about to the readers.

#bnha #bnha asks #anonymous #cw abuse #todofam #todoroki siblings #todoroki touya #boku no hero academia #shigaraki tomura #shimura tenko #abuse #bnha meta #mha meta

[itsclydebitches]

The Bad Batch: A Crosshair Analysis

Hello, Star Wars fandom! I have just completed watching—and loving—The Bad Batch, which you know means I now need to dump all my thoughts about the first season into the tumblr void. Specifically, thoughts on the complicated drama that is Crosshair. I have no doubt that the majority of what I’m about to say will be old news to anyone who watched the show when it came out (I’m slow...), but I’m writing it all out anyway. Largely for my own sanity enjoyment :D

I want to preface all of this by saying that the above is not an exaggeration. I love the show and I love the entire cast. My enjoyment in each of the characters is directly connected to my enjoyment of the season as a whole, which I say because I’m about to get pretty critical towards some of the characters’ choices and, to a lesser extent, the writing choices that surround those. Does this mean I secretly hate The Bad Batch? Quite the opposite. I’m invested, which is presumably just what Filoni wants. I’m just hoping that investment pays off. 

But enough of the disclaimers. Let’s start with the matter of the inhibitor chip. I’ve seen fans take some pretty hard stances on both sides: Crosshair is completely innocent because he’s definitely been under the chip’s control this whole time, no matter what he might say. Crosshair is completely guilty because he said the chip was removed a long time ago and he chose to do all this, no moral wiggle room allowed. However, the reality is that we don’t know enough to make a clear call either way. The audience, simply put, does not have all the necessary information. What we have instead is a couple of facts combined with claims that may or may not be reliable. Let’s lay them out:

Crosshair was definitely under the chip’s control at the start of the series.

He was able to resist it to a certain extent, resulting in a pressure to obey orders coupled with a primary loyalty to his squad. See: telling Hunter to follow the Empire’s commands—which includes killing kid Padawans—but not turning his team in as traitors when they did not. It’s an in-between space.

Crosshair’s chip was then amplified to an unknown extent. I’m never going to claim I’m a Star Wars aficionado—I’m a casual fan, friends. Please don’t yell at me over obscure lore lol—but within TBB’s canon, no one else is undergoing that experimentation. The effects of this are entirely unknown, which includes Crosshair’s free will, or lack thereof.

Crosshair then becomes a clear tool of the Empire, hunting down innocents, killing on a whim, the whole, evil shebang.

In “Reunion” he’s caught by the engine and suffers severe burns to his face. One leaves a scar that covers precisely the place where the chip would have been extracted.

Removing the chip leaves its own scar behind. If Crosshair’s was removed, we can’t see that scar due to the burn.

After these events Crosshair seems to mellow a bit. He does horrible things under the Empire’s orders—like shooting the senator—but is still loyal to his squad—killing his non-clone teammates to give TBB a chance, saving AZ and Omega, etc.

Crosshair claims that his chip has already been removed. However, Crosshair is arguably an unreliable source if he’s been lied to or if the chip is still there, encouraging him to manipulate the team.

Crosshair claims it was removed a long time ago, which is incredibly imprecise. As we can see from just some of the events listed above, precisely when the chip came out—if it came out—makes a huge difference.

Hunter realizes this and presses for clarification, but Crosshair dodges giving it. Again, a legitimate belief that it doesn’t matter, or evidence that he can’t say because something else is going on? We don’t know.

Hunter checks Crosshair’s head and finds the burn scar which proves… nothing. As stated above, they wouldn’t be able to see the surgery scar one way or another: its existence or its absence. It’s useless data, as Tech might say. I’ve seen a few fans claim that Hunter was also feeling for the chip with his enhanced senses, but 1. I didn’t catch any evidence of that in the scene and 2. Even if we assume Hunter did that anyway, the chips are notoriously hard to spot. Fives and AZ couldn’t find the chip at first when examining Tup. Ahsoka had to use the force to find it in Rex. TBB themselves couldn’t find it at first in Wrecker. If machinery consistently fails to find the chip on the first couple of tries—it’s meant to be a hidden implant, after all—why would we believe Hunter’s senses could pick it up instantly? Maybe he missed it, or maybe it wasn’t there at all. 

Crosshair appears to be struggling with a headache in the finale, just as he was at the beginning of the season and just like Wrecker was for the first half.

The point of listing all this out is to emphasize how ambiguous this whole situation is. I don’t want to use this post to argue one way or another about whether Crosshair’s chip is really out. I have my preferred theory (the chip’s still in, but only partially functional), but at the end of the day none of this is conclusive. The writing takes us in what I hope is deliberate circles. Crosshair says the chip is out? Crosshair is not a reliable source of information until we know if the chip is out. What other evidence is there that the chip is gone? A scar? We can’t see if there’s a scar. Hunter’s abilities? He only checked once for a canonically hard to find implant—if he actually checked at all. And why would the Empire want the chip out? Well, maybe it has to do with that push towards willing soldiers, but if that were the case, why leave Crosshair behind and have the “clones die together”? By that point he was one of the most willing, chip or not. Did they have to take it out because of the engine accident? Pure speculation. We just don’t know and THAT is the point I want to make.

Because it means the rest of the Bad Batch didn’t know either.

The core issue I have here is not whether the chip is in or out, or even how long it may have been in if it is out now. The issue is that TBB spent 99% of the first season believing that Crosshair was under the chip’s influence… and they didn’t try to do anything about that. They abandoned him. They left a man behind. Does this make them all horrible monsters? Of course not! This shit is complicated as hell, but I do think they made a very large mistake and that Crosshair has every right to be furious about it.

“But, Clyde, they couldn’t have gone back. It was too dangerous! Hunter had a duty to his whole team, not just Crosshair.” True enough and I’d buy this argument 100% if Hunter hadn’t spent the entire season throwing his team into dangerous, seemingly impossible situations to save other people. Crosshair became the exception, not a hard rule of something they had to avoid. They went back to Kamino for Omega, a kid they’d only had one lunch with, despite knowing how dangerous the Empire was. They went into the heart of an occupied planet to rescue not just a stranger, but one belonging to the Separatist government. They helped Sid when she asked and there was plenty of compassion for the criminal trying to take her place. Most significantly, there wasn’t the slightest hesitation to go rescue Hunter when he was under the Empire’s control, in precisely the same place. Every explanation I’ve seen fans come up with—Kamino is too fortified, they don’t know where Crosshair is, they can’t risk Omega being captured, etc.—also holds true for Hunter, yet there wasn’t a second of doubt about needing to at least try to help him. And his rescue was arguably far more dangerous given that TBB knew they were walking into a trap. Going after Crosshair would have at least had some element of surprise.

I think the problem with these justifications is most easily seen in “Rescue on Ryloth” and, later, “War-Mantle.” In the former, we do watch Hunter decide that going on a rescue mission is too much of a risk, only for Omega to talk him into considering it.

Hunter: “It’s a big galaxy. We can’t put ourselves on the line every time someone’s in trouble.”

Omega: “Why not? Isn’t that what soldiers do?”

Hunter: “It’s not worth the risk.”

Omega: “She’s trying to save her family, Hunter. I’d do the same for you.”

The arguments that sway him are ‘Soldiers should help people’ and ‘Soldiers should specifically help their family.’ So… what does that say about their feelings for Crosshair? They’re willing to put themselves on the line for the parents of a girl they met once at a drop site, but not their own brother? That’s the message the writing sends. “But, Clyde, the difference is that they had an advantage here. Hera’s knowledge of her home planet tipped the odds in their favor.” Yeah… and Crosshair is stationed on TBB’s home planet. Even more than them collectively having the same knowledge that Hera does, “Return to Kamino” reveals that Omega always had additional, insider knowledge of the base: she has access to a secret landing pad and the tunnels leading up into the city. That knowledge was given and used the second Hunter’s freedom was on the line, but it never once came up to use for Crosshair’s benefit. 

“War-Mantle’s” mission puts this problem in even sharper relief. Another claim I’ve seen a lot is that TBB only took risky rescue missions because they needed to be paid. The guys have got to eat after all. Yet Tech makes it clear that going after Gregor will lose them money. They’re meant to be on a mission for Sid and deviating for that won’t result in a payment. He explicitly says that if they decide to do this, they won’t eat. They do it anyway. No money, no intel, a huge risk “on a clone we don’t even know.” But that’s not what’s important, the show says. All that matters is that a brother is in trouble. This time it’s Echo pushing that message instead of Omega. When Hunter realizes that they’re about to try and infiltrate an entire facility and they don’t even know if this clone is still alive, Echo points out that they took that risk once before: for him. “If there’s a chance that trooper is being held against his will, we have to try and get him out.”

Yes! Exactly right! So why doesn’t that apply to Crosshair?

“Because he tried to kill them, Clyde!” No, that’s the easy, dismissive answer. A chipped Crosshair tried to kill them. AKA, a Crosshair entirely under the Empire’s control. The only difference between his enslavement and Gregor’s is that Gregor’s chains were physical while Crosshair’s were mental. And again, the point of everything at the start of this post is to show that no one knows when or even if that chip was removed. TBB definitely didn’t have any reason to suspect that Crosshair was working under his own power until Crosshair himself said as much. We might have been able to make that case at the start of the season, but “Battle Scars” removes any possible confusion. The entire team watched Rex reach for his blaster when he learned their chips were still in. The entire team watched Wrecker become a totally different person and attack them, just like Crosshair did. The entire team forgave him instantly and had their own chips removed. So why in the world didn’t anyone go, “Wow, Crosshair has a chip too. He was no more responsible for attacking us than Wrecker was. We need to try to get him out, no matter how hard that might be, just like we had to try for all these other people we’ve helped.”

But they didn’t. No one even considered rescuing Crosshair. They only went back for Hunter and, when they realized Crosshair was there too, they didn’t change their plans to try and rescue him as well. He’s treated as a particularly threatening inconvenience, not another team member in need of their help.

The problem I have with how this all went down is that the team treated Crosshair like an enemy despite all evidence to the contrary. Despite Omega outright saying that this isn’t his fault, it’s the chip, the group seems to decide that he’s gone crazy or something and that there’s nothing they can do. “It’s fine,” I thought. “They don’t really get what the chip is like yet. They don’t understand how thoroughly it controls someone.” But then “Battle Scars” arrives and Wrecker is treated with such compassion (which he deserves!) only for the group to continue acting like Crosshair is somehow different. It’s easy to say, “But Crosshair shot Wrecker” and ignore the easy pushback of, “and Wrecker nearly shot Omega.” Up until Crosshair’s own accusations and Omega’s ignored comments, TBB’s understanding of the chip’s influence and the lack of responsibility that accompanies mysteriously disappears when the show’s antagonist becomes the subject of conversation. This is seen most clearly in how Hunter tries to frame things during his talk with Crosshair:

“You tried to kill us. We didn’t have a choice.”

“Can’t you see that they’re using you? It’s that inhibitor chip in your head.”

“You really don’t get who we are, do you?”

Hunter mentions the chip, but he acts as if it’s Crosshair’s responsibility to overcome it: “Can’t you see…” Of course he can’t see, that’s the entire point of the chip, the thing he currently believes Crosshair still has stuck in his head. But Hunter and the others—with Omega as a wonderful exception—never seem to have accepted this like they did for Wrecker. When Crosshair “tried to kill us” it’s seen as a deliberate act that he chose, not something forced on him like with Wrecker. When Hunter talks about their ethics, he subconsciously separates the team from Crosshair: “You really don’t get who we are, do you?”, revealing a pretty ingrained divide between them. Even Wrecker gets in on the action, the one brother who truly understands how much the chip controls someone: “All that time, you didn’t even try to come back.” What part of he couldn’t try is not hitting home here? Again, for the purposes of this conversation it doesn’t matter whether Crosshair was chipped this whole time or not. The point is that TBB believed he was chipped… and yet still expected him to somehow, magically overcome that programming, writing him off when he failed to do that. He’s consistently held responsible for actions that they were told (and, through Wrecker, saw) were completely outside of his control. Even when we factor in his claim that the chip was removed, TBB has ignored all the evidence I listed at the start. No one, not even Omega, challenges this super vague and strange claim, or seeks out proof because they don’t want to believe that their brother could willingly do this. There’s just this... acceptance that of course Crosshair went bad. Why? Because he was an asshole sometimes? Taking it all as written, it doesn’t feel like the batch considered him a true part of the team. Certainly not like Wrecker or Hunter. As shown, the batch will go out of their way, risk anything, forgive anything, for them. They have a level of faith that was never shown to Crosshair. 

“Severe and unyielding,” Tech says and he’s absolutely right, but I’d seriously challenge this idea that any of the others would have automatically done better if the situations were reversed. It stood out to me that each batch member has a moment of doubt throughout the series, a brief glimpse into how they think the Empire isn’t that bad, at least when it comes to this particular thing. Basically, a moment that could lead to a very dangerous line of thinking without others to stomp it down. Wrecker announces that he’s happy working for whoever, provided they give him food and let him blow things up. Tech finds the chain codes to be an ingenious strategy and is clearly fascinated with their development. Hunter initially wants Omega to stay on Kamino, despite knowing that this Empire has already, systematically killed an entire group of people: the Jedi. Doesn’t matter. She’s still (supposedly) safer there than she would be running with the likes of them.

There’s absolutely no doubt that those three made the correct choice in defying the Empire, but I believe that their ability to make that choice is largely dependent on them having each other. They survive together, not apart, and it’s their unity that allows them to make the really hard calls, like setting out on their own and opposing such a formidable force. But if Tech’s chip had activated and he’d been left behind, would he have muscled through to escape somehow...or would he have gotten caught up in all the new technology the Empire offered him, succumbing to both his chip and the inevitability that if his squad no longer wanted him, why not stay? Would Wrecker have escaped, or been easily manipulated into a new life of exploding things? Would Hunter have been able to push through without his brothers, or would he have become devoted to a new team to lead? Obviously there’s no way to ever know, but it’s always easier to make the right decisions when you have support in doing so. Crosshair had no support. His team left him and yes, they had to in that specific moment, but the point is that they never came back. As far as we saw throughout the season, they never planned to come back. They all talk about loving the Crosshair who existed when life was easier, but they weren’t willing to fight for the Crosshair that most needed their help. When he says “You weren’t loyal to me,” he’s absolutely right. The same episode, “Return to Kamino,” gives Omega two powerful lines that the group rallies behind:

Omega: “[The danger] doesn’t matter. Saving Hunter is what matters.”

AZ: “You must leave.”

Omega: “Not without Hunter.”

The key word there is “Hunter.” Danger, stakes, risk, probability… none of that matters when Hunter needs help. Crosshair did not receive that same level of devotion.

Which creates a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The group is upset that Crosshair isn’t rejoining them, but they fail to realize that he has no reason to trust them anymore. He’s not joining the Empire because he’s inherently evil and that’s that, end of discussion. He’s joining it because above all Crosshair wants a place to belong… and TBB has made it clear—unintentionally—that he does not belong with them. The horrible actions that Crosshair took under his own free will (theoretically) came after he realized that doing bad things while under the Empire’s control was, apparently, unforgivable. If it wasn’t, his team would have come back to rescue him. They could have at least tried. But they didn’t, so Crosshair is left with the conclusion that either what he did under the Empire’s control is something the group can’t forgive him for, or they can forgive that (like with Wrecker) and he’s the problem here. He’s the one not worth that effort.

“The Empire will be fazing out clones next,” Hunter says. To which Crosshair responds, “Not the ones that matter.”

He wants to matter to someone and events show he no longer matters to his brothers. So why not stay with the Empire? I mean, we as the audience ABSOLUTELY know why not. Self-doubt and feelings of isolation aren’t excuses for joining the Super Evil Organization. Crosshair, if he is under his own control, is still 100% in the wrong for supporting them, no matter his reasons. So it’s not an excuse, but rather an explanation of that very human, flawed, fallible thinking. He needs to be useful. He needs to be wanted. Crosshair is an absolute dick to the regs and I have no doubt that a lot of that stems from the harassment TBB has experienced from them (with a side of his inflated ego), but I’d bet it’s also due to Crosshair’s intense desire to be valuable to someone. He keeps pointing out the regs’ supposed deficiencies because it highlights his own usefulness. When Crosshair fails to find Hera, the Admiral says that soon he’ll get someone who can, looking straight at Howzer at the door. It makes Crosshair seethe because his entire identity is based on being useful, yet no one seems to need him anymore. TBB seems to no longer want him. The Empire no longer wants clones. Now even regs are considered a better option than him, the “superior” soldier. Everywhere Crosshair turns he’s getting the message that he’s not wanted, but he’ll keep fighting to at least be needed in some capacity, no matter how small. Even if that means overlooking all the horrors the Empire commits.

“All you’ll ever be to [the Empire] is a number,” Hunter says and he’s absolutely right. But to TBB recently, Crosshair hasn’t even been that. He’s been nothing. Nobody worth coming back for. To his mind, at least being a number is something.

I hope that all of this resolves itself into a conclusion that is kind to each side (preferably without a Vader-style death redemption), especially given the still ambiguous state of the chip, but from a writing standpoint I’m admittedly a bit wary. We’re obviously meant to believe that the batch all love each other, but as established throughout this entirely too long post, this season did a terrible job imo of proving that they love Crosshair. Or, at least, proving that they love him as much as the others. If this was really meant to be just a matter of miscommunication, with Crosshair making terrible life choices because he only thinks he was abandoned, then we as the audience would have seen the batch trying and failing to get him out. Or at least establishing a very good reason why they couldn’t take that risk, hopefully with entirely different side-missions so the audience isn’t constantly going, “So you can risk everything for Gregor... but not Crosshair?” I’m VERY glad that Crosshair was allowed to air his grievances to the extent he did, but the end result of that—Hunter continually denying this, Omega walking away from him in their rooms, neither Tech nor Wrecker actually sticking up for him and acknowledging the chip’s influence during at least some of all this—is making things feel rather one-sided. It’s like we’re meant to take Crosshair at his word and accept that he’s this garden-variety antagonist who joins the Empire because yay being on the winning side… despite all these complications that clearly have a huge impact on how we read the situation. It doesn’t help that the show has already embraced an inconsistent manner of portraying chipped-clones. We know every clone has one, we know only a couple clones are aware of the chip’s existence (and can thus try to get it out), we know they enter a “Good soldiers follow orders” mindlessness once activated… yet towards the end we see a lot of side character clones thinking for themselves. Howzer decides that he’s no longer loyal to the Empire, giving a speech where a couple other clones throw down their weapons too. Gregor was arrested because he likewise realized how wrong this all was. But how is that possible? Do the chips completely control the clones, or not? Are these clones somehow exceptions? Are the chips beginning to fail? All of that has a bearing on how we read Crosshair—what were his own decisions, how much he was capable of overcoming the chip, whether that changed at all during certain points—but right now that remains really unclear.

It’s details like that which make me wonder if all these other questions will be answered. Will the story resolve all those ambiguous moments surrounding the chip, or brush them off with the belief that we should have just taken Crosshair at his equally ambiguous word? Will the story acknowledge Crosshair’s points through someone other than Crosshair, allowing it to exist as a legitimate criticism, rather than the presumed excuses of an antagonist? I’m… not sure. On the whole I’m very happy with TBB’s writing—despite what all this might imply lol. Until my brain picks over the season and discovers something else, my only other gripe is not allowing Omega to form a solid bond with Tech and Echo, instead putting all the focus on big brother!Wrecker and dad!Hunter. I think it’s a solid show that does a lot right, but I’m worried that, unless there’s a brilliant answer to all these questions and an intent to unpack both sides of the Hunter vs. Crosshair debate with respect—not just falling back on, “Well, Crosshair is with the Empire so everything he says is automatically bad and wrong” take—we’ve just gotten the setup for a somewhat messy, ethical story. For anyone here who also reads my RWBY metas, I’m pretty sure you’re not at all surprised that I’m invested in going, “Hey, you had one of the heroes suddenly become/join a dictatorship and do a lot of horrific things, but within a pretty complicated context. Can we please work through that carefully and with an acknowledgement of the nuance here, rather than throwing the ‘evil’ character to the proverbial wolves?”  

God knows TBB is leagues ahead of RWBY, but I hope things continue on in not just a good direction, but one that tackles the aspects of this situation that many fans—and Crosshair—have already pointed out. As much as I adore the cast—and I really, really do—it was discomforting to watch a found family show where 4/5th of that family so completely wrote off one of the members and crucially have, at least so far, refused to acknowledge that. I want complicated, flawed characters, but that’s only compelling when the storytelling admits to and grapples with those flaws. We have quite firmly established Crosshair’s flaws in Season One. I hope Season Two delves into the rest of the team’s too.

Aaaand with that meta-dump out of my system, I’m off to write TBB fic. Thanks for reading! :D

#The Bad Batch #TBB #Crosshair #Star Wars #SW #mymetas #do I take my life in my hands #by posting SW meta? #probably lol

[beauty-and-passion]

A (not so) brief post about my favourite Sanders Sides ships

It all started with this ask:

I just wanted to write a short answer, I swear. Just a short answer with a tiny little explanation about why I like these ships in particular.

But then I got a bit carried away, my explanations became longer and so here I am, writing a full post.

One small clarification before starting: ships don’t have a place in my analyses. If I talk about connections between Sides, these connections are always in terms of friendships, cooperation or familial relationships. The romantic aspect is something different and I may joke about it sometimes, but it’s just a joke.

There is a time and space for romantic relationships - and it looks like that time has come. 

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Janus and Patton

I've always liked the canonical ship, in (almost) every fandom. So of course I like the canonical ship of this fandom as well :P

Jokes aside, this ship is incredibly mature, very interesting and terribly hard to talk about. The nature of these two characters, their roles and the episodes that had them involved proved how these two speak the same language, work in the same field and, ultimately, need each other.

* More similar that we think

If we look at them on a superficial level, Janus and Patton are completely opposites: one is cynical and cold, the other is a ball of sunshine. One is dark and suave, the other is goofy and bright. Janus' moral is "step on others and only care about yourself", Patton's moral is "help others because they are more important than you".

These differences became clearer over time, the more we learned about Janus and compared him with Patton. However, along these differences, some similarities started to emerge. Some qualities.

Janus and Patton want what's good for Thomas. They are humble enough to recognize their mistakes (the latest example was POF). They have a strong empathy. They’re kind. They’re mature adults (even if Patton doesn’t show it too often). And they both love and use puns.

But that’s not all. Along with these qualities, we found out that these two have similar flaws: they are both liars. They are incredibly persuasive to the point of manipulation. They have a huge influence over the mind (and the other Sides). They both deal with denial.

And this isn't just important, but it's a fundamental point for their character growth. Why? Because if they have similar flaws, if they are both liars and manipulators, then they cannot deceive each other.

And this is HUGE, especially for Patton! By his own admission, Patton lied multiple times, especially about his feelings (the Nostalgia episodes) and his thoughts (the most recent wedding/callback saga).

He always got away with it, because he was lying to other Sides and Thomas. But what would the point be, to lie to the literal embodiment of lies? Janus already knows what of his words are lies and what not, so it would be absolutely useless to do it.

Therefore, if Patton cannot lie to Janus, he cannot pretend everything is alright when it's not or hide his thoughts on a certain topic. He cannot shift the attention somewhere else or let a conversation drop. That means Patton cannot avoid confrontation about his thoughts/feelings and oh boy if he really needs to talk about them - especially with someone mature like Janus.

And yes, having someone who is able to see past your lies means being a lot vulnerable... but also a lot freerer. With Janus, Patton won’t have to pretend to be the strongest one: he can allow himself to be weak and confused, because if he doesn’t have an answer or if the weight of decisions is too much to carry, he has Janus with whom he can share it.

* A foundation of mutual respect

This point has never been fully addressed, but it was very well implied by their words/behaviours since Janus’ first appearance.

The first proof we have is CLBG: after Deceit revealed himself and disappeared, all the Sides and Thomas went through various degrees of shock, frustration and anger. Patton, on the other hand, was the only one who showed a pretty calm demeanor.

He should've been the angriest, considering that Janus took HIS place and pretended to be HIM the whole time. And yet, not only Patton didn't show any resentment, but he didn't talk bad about Janus (even if he had all the reasons to) and he even justified the other Side’s actions to Thomas:

[Patton]: Kiddo, simply put, Deceit is an inner coach that acts with the one intention of self-preservation.

Patton could’ve said anything, to make Janus appear as the worst. And his words could've had a lot of influence on Thomas, considering they were coming from his heart.

However, Patton didn't say anything too bad about Janus - not even in the following episodes.

Then we reach POF: Patton's monologue about his morals went so dramatically bad, he turned into a giant frog with abs and Janus had to sweep in to save Thomas.

In that moment, he could've said ANYTHING to make Patton appear as the worst Side ever. He had his chance on a silver plate: Patton was wrong, he had been wrong the whole time, he was literally ready to fight Thomas.

And yet, Janus took Patton's defense:

[Deceit]: He didn't mislead you on purpose, Thomas. I don't think the little guy... or... the big frog is capable of that sort of thing.

In addition to that, let’s consider Janus' whole attitude towards Patton in SvS: he basically spent an entire episode trying to make Patton understand his point.

[Deceit]: You can defend him all you like... But you can't change the facts. Is Thomas an innocent little lamb? Let's let them be the judge of that.

Why did he insist so much on this? Why not tricking Patton like he did with Roman or ignoring him like he did with Logan?

Because Janus knows how important Patton's role is and his whole behaviour shows respect towards the other Side. Unlike the others, who tend to diminish/forget Patton’s importance, Janus never did and always tried to reach him in the most honest, difficult way: through dialogue and confrontation.

And when he failed, instead of disregarding Patton’s importance, he just kept trying again, until his message finally reached the other Side.

* The perfect working partner

POF proved Patton can't bear the weight of the decision-making process all by himself. He needs another Side who can help him and Janus perfectly fills this role.

But why Janus? Why not Logan? Logan is a very mature Side, he can deal with a lot of stress, he's extremely organized and knows a lot. Surely he can help Patton with the decision-making process, right?

Not exactly. For his own admission, morals and ethics are not Logan's area of expertise (as it should be: logic can’t be influenced by what’s considered “good” or “bad”: logic is neutral). Secondly, Logic isn't an emotional-driven Side: logic is way less affected by emotions than other Sides - especially compared to Patton, who is the embodiment of emotions.

What Patton needs is a mature Side with a grey mentality, humble enough to respect him/not diminish his role, from his same area of expertise and enough emotional-driven to connect with him on an emotional/empathetic level.

And Janus is the only one who fills all those points. Even the latter, as we saw in the last part of POF:

[Patton]: Janus... Do you think there's a limit... on how many times someone can say sorry... before you have to admit... that they're just bad for you? [Janus]: Oh, definitely not. I'd love for someone to ruin Thomas' entire life one apology at a time. [Patton]: Okay. [Janus]: (After seeing Patton's reaction)The reality is that... it depends.

Janus' answer changed, the moment he realized Patton didn't get his sarcasm, by switching from ironic to honest. This is the kind of emotional connection Patton needs, something that doesn’t require words, but a small gesture that says more than a thousand words (yes, I’m also talking about that gaze and the small nod in the end card).

If we add to all of that the detail that Janus can nullify Patton's excuses and see past his lies, we have the perfect partner to help him grow up.

But this cooperation isn’t just one-sided: Janus needs Patton just as much as Patton needs him.

Why? First of all, to have a seat at the table. After years hiding, Janus can finally talk to Thomas, introduce his cynical mentality, make Thomas a little more selfish and help him grow up.

Secondly, by cooperating with Patton, Janus will become a better Side: he will learn to compromise, to work together and, most importantly, to trust Patton. And this is a particularly important point because, as I said in my analysis of POF, Janus isn’t used to trust others and he doesn’t want them to see past his barriers. Working with Patton might be exactly what he needs to trust the other Sides and lower these barriers, even a tiny bit.

* The romantic possibility

Considering all of the above points, the idea that their cooperation could evolve into something romantic-driven isn't so strange. The elements are all here, there's nothing weird to add nor need to bend canon, in order to make the ship happen. Their mutual acceptance can easily become need, learning more about each other can easily evolve into desiring each other and friendship could grow into passion.

And, of course, let's not forget marriage. These two can only end up in marriage. I mean, one is a dad, the other is a mom witch, so they are a perfect match XD

My point is: this ship isn't just a “cute couple being cute”. It's about dialogues. Conversations about themselves, their different points of view, their morals, their cooperation, how to help Thomas and the other Sides. It's based on listening to each other, on knowing each other a little more every day. On being silly together, working and failing together, going down and getting up, because there is someone by your side to lend a helping hand.

This is what makes Janus and Patton the most realistic, mature couple. And that's probably why it's so hard to perfectly nail it.

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Logan and Remus

Here it is, the couple that blew up after one episode and was confirmed in the most recent Aside.

But seriously, these two have a huge potential - first as friends/working partners, then as romantic partners. Logan and Remus need each other and the reasons are pretty clear:

- Having an interlocutor

Remus is Unleashed Creativity, a volcano of ideas in constant need of new stimuli, no matter if they are considered good or bad. After all "good and bad are all made up nonsense", as he said.

Logan is a walking encyclopedia in search of someone who wants to listen to him. He's pure, undiluted knowledge because that's what logic should be. No morals about what's good and what's bad, no emotions, nothing but neutral knowledge.

Considering that, it’s pretty clear these two have to come into contact. But what would they gain?

Well, Remus would have the stimuli he desperately craves. And Logan?

Logan would gain an incredibly smart interlocutor. And I’m not saying it because I am biased towards Remus, but because the canonical episodes showed us how smart he is. In both DWIT and WTIT Remus proved to be a quick thinker, with a sharp intellect and an even sharper eye. He's silly and over the top, but he's not an idiot and he uses everything he has for his own creative needs, no matter how small it is.

Just imagine this cleverness applied to everything Logan might say to him. Remus wouldn’t be the only one to benefit from it, but the whole creative process and, ultimately, Thomas himself, who will have better, richer ideas.

- Gaining a place

At this moment in time (just after WTIT) Remus has not been fully accepted yet. He is tolerated and his presence is a nuisance, but he’s neither wanted, nor banished. He’s just here and he has no voice on any matter.

Also because no one wants to give him a chance to prove how useful and worthy he can be. Thomas barely tolerates him, Patton does his best to ignore him, Roman doesn’t even want to see him and Virgil would rather not have any of the Others present.

The only Core Side who accepts Remus’ presence and is willing to give him a chance is Logan. He spent the entire DWIT to explain why Remus is useful for Thomas and shouldn’t be ignored, while in WTIT, he said: "There will be a time and place for you" - thus implying that, one day, Remus will finally be able to show how worthy he can be.

This is exactly what Remus needs: a Core Side who doesn’t see him as a nuisance or a villain, but as a fundamental part of Thomas that can be helpful, in his own way. Someone willing to give him a seat at the table (at least in the future). And, most importantly, someone who is powerful enough to control him.

Remus is and will always be a force of nature. He will never rest or stop being chaotic. This is why he needs someone strong by his side, someone who can’t be overcomed by his dark thoughts and that can put him back on track if necessary. And Logan proved to be perfect for this role not once, but twice.

- Understanding on a deeper level

However this cooperation won’t be beneficial just for Remus. As I said before, Remus could be a clever interlocutor for Logan. And this cleverness isn’t just related to creativity, but also to emotional understanding.

The Core Sides have known Logan for almost thirty years and yet, they have no idea of the inner turmoil raging inside him. They keep ignoring and dismissing him, clearly thinking everything is fine.

It took Remus one single day to realize what Logan’s problem is, how deeply frustrated he is and how much he’s actually angry at Thomas. Less than 24 hours and Remus knows Logan better than his long time friends.

That’s exactly what Logan needs. Someone sharp enough to notice his behaviour, find out the root of the problem and make Logan face it, instead of dismissing it because who cares (yes, Roman, I am talking about you and your “You'll be fine, Rome didn't fall in a day.”)

- The romantic possibility

I think almost all the fandom agrees that these two would have a great sex life. After all, Remus is the embodiment of Thomas' sexual urges, so he would definitely go for a very physical relationship.

But having a good sex life implies a lot of other great things: good chemistry, no comunication issues, great stability and greater trust. And, even more important, the desire to try new things together. Logan and Remus are both very curious Sides, they both want to know new things and experience them: so their relationship would probably be based on discussing new ideas, testing them and finding out together if they are good or not.

And this doesn't apply to just the sexual aspect: even just the romantic aspect or the working aspect of their relationship could have these characteristics. Logan and Remus can motivate each other, learn from one another and find new things together. They are clever enough to stimulate each other's mind, curious enough to do stuff together to learn something new and honest enough to not withdraw their opinions on any matter.

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Roman and Virgil

I am just recently starting to warm up to this couple, so I will keep this part short.

Just as it was for the previous two couples, these two can work together because canon made them work. The first part of their whole relationship is already all canonically established: at first Roman saw Virgil as a villain, then he slowly realized he could be a friend. Now moving from friends to lovers isn’t so difficult.

^ No need to demonstrate

Roman needs someone like Virgil, because Virgil is on his same level. Sure, Virgil’s mentality is way more gray-ish, but he still has a lot to learn, just like Roman.

Having someone on his side, who is on his same level is a huge relief: with Virgil, Roman doesn't have to pretend, nor to show off, nor to be dashing and perfect all the time. He knows Virgil won't care less, so he can relax. And for someone who is used to working all the time, having a moment of quiet with someone who has zero espectations is exactly what Roman needs.

Same goes for Virgil: he knows Roman won't care if he's gloomy and dark, because Roman already saw that side of him and appreciates him anyway. So no need to pretend to be different. He can relax too. And, because of his anxious nature, relaxing is exactly what he also needs.

So if they both need to relax, that implies they also need time to do it. And without expectations, without feeling like the other “is better than me and I’m slowing him down”, they can really take all the time they need, to grow at their own pace.

^ Growing together

Virgil and Roman’s is not a one-sided relationship, in which one knows more than the other and helps the other reach his level: since they are on the same level, if one of them learns something new, then it’s a victory for them both, because the other will be motivated to do more/learn more as well.

This isn’t just something I think, but something we saw in canon. During AA-part 2, Roman clearly stated that Virgil “make us... better”, thus implying that Virgil acted as a motivator for him.

Then we had FWSA and here we saw this sentence applied the other way around: Roman was the motivator and, thanks to him, Virgil overcame his own anxiety to push Thomas towards Nico. The final result was a victory for them both: Roman got the romance he’s desperately craving, Virgil found out a new aspect of himself: his bravery.

^ The romantic possibility

These two are a walking “enemies to friends to lovers” trope, so I don’t think there’s anything else to add XD

Only that they would both be quite passionate. One is Thomas’ romantic side, the other is heavily influenced by emotions: if the good one takes Virgil, he would probably be a very passionate partner.

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Two couples I understand

Janus and Remus -> I understand the appeal of this one and it would kinda make sense, especially from Remus’ point of view. Remus has (probably) sexual fantasies about anything, so I wouldn't be too surprised if he has a whole collection of sexual fantasies about the Side who is closest to him.

But also, I see them too much like father and son/bestest friends to imagine them having a romantic relationship.

So my take is more like that: Remus has sexual fantasies about Janus, just like he has sexual fantasies about anyone. They are his way to show his affection, how much he cares about Janus and wants to protect him.

But Remus is Remus and he's prone to lose control. That's why, since he reached adolescence and started to develop the sexual aspect, Janus put clear limits that give Remus enough space to express his fantasies, but never past a certain point.

So Remus can be very touchy (because, well, he's Remus) and extremely physical in showing his affections, but never go below a certain point. He can talk in full details about all his sexual fantasies to Janus, but never try to sexually force him. He can try to seduce him or propose sexual things, but never pretend he will accept.

And so, over time, it became a sort of internal joke between them: Remus tells his fantasies at the breakfast table, while Janus rolls his eyes with a "very interesting", they have a laugh, they keep going with their day. Remus wants to cuddle, Janus will cuddle. Remus proposes sex, Janus will just laugh and give him a forehead kiss.

In other words, they are the kind of friends who you can find sprawled on a couch, one on top of the other and imagine they're a couple, while that's just how they read a book together.

Logan and Roman -> This couple isn’t bad at all and I really like the idea of these two having a sorta-romantic crush on each other. It can lead to a lot of poetic/romantic possibilities.

The only problem is: Logan is logic, therefore he would destroy all the romance with one sentence XD and the romantic, poetic scene evoked would turn into these two arguing like madmen.

So, well, maybe the hate-sex would be great, but they would definitely spend too much time arguing. Still, I am very curious about it, so I will keep searching for stuff about them.

#sanders sides ships #sanders sides #janus sanders #patton sanders #logan sanders #remus sanders #roman sanders #virgil sanders #moceit #intrulogical #prinxiety #and a sprinkle of #dukeceit #logince #I know I have pretty basic tastes #it takes me a lot to warm to a couple #I blame the fandom for making these so appealing #i couldn't help myself

[turnaroundroundround]

Morimyu in Classical reference

So, as for the fact that music in Morimyu Op. 3 resembles classical music in both progression and musical technicality, it's interesting how it's possible to keep coming up with different interpretations after re-watching the musical again and again.

I've made a thread on twitter about this before, but 1) word limitations and thread will never be enough to list all that I have to say lol 2) I'd prefer to have a fuller version noted down, especially one that I can edit and keep coming back over and over again when ever I come up with something new.

Either way, I am still (lol) not a pro in music theory and music history as well. All that is written here are based on my very very basic knowledge on music as well as something that I've picked up (and discussed) with my friends after watching Op. 3.

What's the point of this?

Why is it important? Lol I always need this to keep myself from writing off-topic but anyways. Why do the music sound good (except for the fact that because it does lol), and what do they represent? Surely there must be, and there always are, other things that are implied not only through the lyrics but also the music, and the flow in general.

Apart from the lyrics and the lines, it's also quite interesting to have a close look at the music - melody and harmony itself - to see how they portray the stories.

Most importantly, the continuality. How did Morimyu manage to insert so many songs and still managing to connect them as a whole? And how did they use music to go beyond what's on the pages? That's the most important thing about musicals - beyond the pages. We don't see stage or anime doing so very often, as they mainly focus on what's already there, bringing them to life as close as possible to how we imagine things might happen.

As for musical, they have the music. They have the arias and the songs. At some point, a character starts singing, and other characters followed suit. They have their very unique way of expressing the plot, and they have the orchestra, the arias where characters get their solo song, and the duets between characters with strong relationships, and the ensemble which emphasizes the plot, and so on.

A funny thing about duets in classical opera, they're often meant to show lovers' relationship because of the harmony but can also use opposition and all to show enemies' relationship. And in SherLiam's duet it's just both of them at the same time - thoughts connected while engaging in a chase, a hide and seek game of mystery. We'll go into that later.

Back to the topic. Morimyu follows the main plot strictly, but also uses their advantage with music to add all the side details that wasn't told in the manga to create a "complete" view of the plot. It is always available for musicals to do something unexpected (like how we never expected Lestrade's puppet show to be a whole 5 mins long piece lol). And where they did that they added arias and duets, they allowed moments where characters express and developed their emotions as well as going with the plan (yes Albert yessss). Of course there's both a good and bad side to this all the while.

💛 The good thing is they went all the way to show us sides of emotions that we don't see much in the manga or stage, the sides of the story that all of them have kept hidden while focusing on their grand plan. 💛 But then it does get too emotional at some point, especially those who came for the plot and the mind games behind all of it (like me - although I won't deny that I had a lot of fun picking out all the emotions behind the music here lol).

Musicals can always go beyond what we knew. As for Morimyu, their music is heavily influenced by opera and classical music, and it's shown quite clear. There is live music playing (instead of the entire orchestra we have a violin and piano duet), and they have distinctive arias and recitatives throughout.

So thanks to that, it's also possible to use a reference from classical music to interpret their songs.

A Sonata formation - The Narrative Series of SherLiam

Yes, songs arranged and analysed with reference to a Sonata formation, especially in the way they progress through the play.

Some notes before getting into the point

1 - Sonata = a piece of music consisting of several movements - very often 3, sometimes 4. First movement-Allegro: With the quick tempo, introducing the theme of the entire Sonata Second movement-Adagio/Largo: Slow tempo, can be emotional sometimes, as well as leading more towards the final movement Third movement-Rondo Vivace: The ending, quick-paced and vigorous, leading the Sonata to a close. A Sonata always has a general theme, a topic. The theme that I chose to write about is Mystery - the Hide and Seek game between the Detective and Lord of Crime

2 - Aria and Recitative = different types of songs used in an opera Recitative: Lines within a song that happens like a real conversation, as the characters sing they are also talking to each other Aria: A solo section where everything else is a freeze frame, while one actor remains and sing their own song about their thoughts, feelings, etc. In this post we're mainly discussing the arias of Sherlock and Liam, and the duet between them. But there's also some mention of recitatives here and there.

3 - Videos used To make it easier to understand which songs I'm talking about, I also arranged them in piano. And also to have a listen at how they might connect. Just in case the videos beneath don't work (they didn't work on my phone), the three songs discussed are Nazo, Liam's solo, Kokoro no Rondo, all piano arrangements.

All of the songs noted in this section are arias and duets from Op. 3 - the Ghost of the Whitechapel. The additional "series" that Morimyu has added spreading throughout the play, Sherlock and Liam's narratives, which portrays both their emotions and the chase between the detective and the Lord of Crime.

First Movement - Allegro: Nazo(謎) song

Starting from Lestrade's exit after his puppetshow and proceed to the scene, Sherlock's aria introduces the theme of the imaginary hide and seek game that the Lord of Crime has started. The song repeats the word (mystery) over and over again with a continuous rhythm.

Ends with Sherlock just mumbling the word Nazo (mystery) and exiting the stage - no conclusions, just like a mystery that leads into further mysteries with no answer.

♛♛♛ In regards to a Sonata formation, this is the beginning of the entire piece. Quick in tempo, written in 3/4 time and introduces the theme of the entire piece - Mystery.

Uso ka Shinjitsu ka - Lie or Truth song

Starting after Sherlock learns the truth behind Jack the Ripper, wondering if Lord of Crime is a good person after all.

Now I had a really hard time thinking whether this piece should be included or not. For one, it's not an aria. It can be viewed as a Da capo Aria, a development section of the Nazo song, repeating the theme that is introduced, coming and going rather quickly. So, for continuality.

It also does not fit into the series as a whole, being 1) a recitative. The lyrics focus entirely on Sherlock's deduction and whether he should expose the truth or not, etc. so on. 2) The lines in here, unlike the other arias, are taken directly from the manga, so it's not entirely an 'added' element to this chase. 3) Also because if we compare this to a Sonata form, this doesn't really fit anywhere

However, among Sherlock's arias, this song can also be seen as an interesting development as I have mentioned above, so I've decided to have it here, still.

There's another thing about almost all of Sherlock's arias throughout the 2 stages - they never have a conclusive end. The detective's mind is always running, mysteries after mysteries.

Most of the other characters' songs ends with some kind of closing lines, and piano continues to conclude the piece with a strong end, and then goes on to start another piece. All of their problems in the songs are concluded. They made up their minds in some ways.

But Sherlock, his songs always end with him repeating the melody, a capella, and exiting the stage. Piano waits for him to exit, then starts a new song. Or in Op. 2's Mindgame case going straight into the next conversation. We never get to know how Sherlock's songs end, because they didn't really end at those points. There's a hanging sense of waiting for a resolution, a conclusion. Sherlock never seems to have his problems solved within the songs, they just go on and on.

An idea initiates, then something happens and he is once again in the dark. And he spins around within his own mind.

Screenshot from Op. 2. Even if we look back to his aria Mindgames from Op. 2, this song doesn't really have a conclusive ending as well. He just starts singing, the music stops and he starts shooting and going on, resuming the play. It kind of has been a thing for Sherlock's arias?

Second Movement - Adagio/Largo: Liam's solo

♛♛♛ The "second movement" - the 'slower' piece - of the series, Liam's aria lol but actually the piano part of this song isn't slow at all but ok. The other side of this hide and seek game. The "development" section of the sonata series, where we see things in a much more emotional way.

This aria is much richer in harmony and melody. Not only Liam's melody, but also the piano's part which plays a beautiful melody in harmony.

I recall an interview where the stage director mentions how the "orchestra" - piano and violin are representations for Liam and Sherlock. It kind of applies here, where his music is created mostly by piano.

There is modulation, emotions rising and elevating quickly and strongly. But the harmony is beautiful, overflowing and rich with emotions. The song repeats certain lines, emphasizing aspects within Liam's thoughts.

Unlike Sherlock's train of thoughts that circles with no destination, Liam's solo has a definite ending in harmony -> Even with all his emotions in mind, Liam still has a goal already set before him. He has a brief moment of slowing down, pausing and sung about his feeling, before resuming the story.

Leading us to the final stage - Kokoro no Rondo.

Third Movement - Rondo Vivace: Kokoro no Rondo

Rondo formation: Rondo is a type of dance that revolves around a pattern, often ABA, ABACA, or ABACABA - where A is the ritournello ("meguri - kimi ni omou - meguru kokoro no rondo" section) that is repeated over and over with B, C parts in between. Rondo can also be combined with sonata form - this case applies to this song which begins with a key other than the tonic (Fm) before resolving to the tonic key (Fm) to put an end to the entire sonata series. For reference purposes, the last movement of Beethoven's Pathetique or the very typical Fur Elise is also written in a similar format. I also referred to Pathetique quite a lot when brainstorming this post.

♛♛♛ The "final movement" of this Sonata, the final scene of their "Hide and Seek" game. The song's tempo is vibrant and rapid, combining with the dancing sense, all the while strictly following the structure of a Rondo as mentioned above.

This is the stage where Liam and Sherlock's line interacts and reply to each other, as if in a real conversation - just like how the connection between them are now much stronger than what they had before.

In the ritournello, we have Liam and Sherlock's lines intertwining and chasing after one another, emphasizing the "Hide and Seek" element between the two of them.

The song comes to a definite ending, concluding with a strong tonic (Fm) chord. At this stage, there is no more question to be left open, for Sherlock at this point has already made up his mind to take the next step into solving the mysteries regarding the Lord of Crime.

Their imaginary game of Hide and Seek is coming to an end, as Sherlock came to a decision to take the next step - going to Durham.

That's the end of my first draft.

So far that is some of my thoughts noted down right after watching Op. 3 stream a while ago, with some edition made just now.

On the side note, at some point during my discussion with a friend, we also came up with the idea that a Suite may be a better reference. A Suite consists of 4 parts and a prelude, each of them having their specific characteristic. But we didn't go all the way analysing that idea, as 1) we couldn't find a 5th piece that can be added into the series. 2) Even if we did, the Truth or Lie song still would not really fit into the "aria" vibe of this series, as mentioned above.

But then quite interestingly, after a while, I've found another interesting fact that should have been quite obvious but I've missed for (lol) like ages.

The game of Hide and Seek between the detective and the Lord of Crime has begun ever since after Hope's case - that being said, ever since the end of Op. 1

And what is it that we have in Op. 2? "The Mind games of the Lord of Crime". The one where Sherlock went maniac rapping about all the thoughts he has and end up shooting randomly into the wall.

At first it begins like another recitative, but in the later half, the harmony starts to become more harmonious, written in 3/4 time flowing like a dance.

In that section, the melody of the piano and violin part resembles the one we have in Kokoro no Rondo, the Ritournello section, only that the melody of the violin in Op. 2 and the melody that SherLiam sung in Op. 3 are kind of reversed.

Coincidence much?

So now we have a collection of songs from both Opus, it becomes tricky. How do we connect them? And what's the story?

At this point, all these recitatives, aria and duets all in the theme of the Hide and Seek game. And they all connect to each other through harmony, progressions in harmony.

We know that the Mind games of the Lord of Crime has begun from ever since the end of Op. 1. We know that Sherlock keeps wondering about that in Op. 2, and then he wonders even further after he has been tested by the Lord of Crime. "また俺だけのメッセージなのか?" - Is this a message just for me?, as he wondered in the Truth or Lie song. We knew all of that. But Morimyu didn't let that stop them from emphasizing on this subplot even further.

They didn't let the gap between Op. 2 and Op. 3 stop them from making a smooth flow in plot either.

Correction, they didn't simply create a flow. They established a connection, all the while showing a strong progression of Sherlock's thoughts that goes on from Op. 2 straight onto Op. 3.

Very often, what makes a good plot is how their plots and sub-plots intertwine with each other. Morimyu has a main plot that follows Moriarty gang in the plan of changing society. And they have a smaller plot told from Sherlock's side of things. And they have this sub-plot told by harmony of how Sherlock is connected to Liam, or the Lord of Crime, by an invisible thread. A connection that is only expressed that clearly in Morimyu.

We have so many things going on, so many songs throughout the play. But each of those elements are all connected to something else, creating a sub-plot that enriches the main plot.

There is no loose connections. For everything that connects to the main plot, they're also linked to other elements. Each scene and every song has their own meaning not only in regards to other songs, but also to the plot as a whole.

Also, did I mention how Morimyu feels like a grand piece of music?

Opus -> What classical songs had that basically shows the order in which they are written. Morimyu - a title piece itself - has 3 Opus, 3 different parts with the same theme.

Classical music very often had all the different elements in it -> Morimyu had an overture, the song they sing just before the main theme song, just before introducing the stage. Then arias, ensembles and choruses. All of them are connected by similar harmony.

Classical music always had a big general theme, with each section having a smaller sequence connecting to each other. Subplots within a big plots. A Sonata piece has 3 movements, each having their own "sections" of development - expositions, development, recapitulation. -> Morimyu does the same to their plot and subplots, as discussed above.

Also, Opera reference

While Opus 2 used an opera reference to tell the story, I feel like Opus 3 has become an Opera itself. During Op. 2 the arias were mostly very loyal to the manga, taking their lines from the original work, like the Mind Games song. Their story progresses steadily but logically.

However starting from Op. 3, the aria became more independent. They developed and expressed even further what wasn't said in the manga. For instance, the 3 songs mentioned in the "Sonata" above. And there's also Albert's solo, and Patterson's solo and Milverton, which I haven't got the chance to discuss all.

But either way, they spring out of the original story, adding more emotions and "colours" to the characters. The aria became more original, all the while also much more expressive. We get to see new sides of the characters that we haven't seen anywhere before.

Anyways, it's probably time to go back to the main question: How Morimyu used music to go beyond what's on the pages.

-> Musicals aren't simply about music added to acting. The characters on stage don't just simply starts singing for no reason. All the songs are meant to express something, and while they do they also establish various connections to the plot's progression.

We don't get to see much of the characters' emotions in the manga. And we don't see much of the side story, the finer details behind each arc. Every time, Morimyu adds something original to enrich their plot. They express and develop what's already known to all the viewers, especially regarding the emotional and motivational side of the characters.

-> The manga shows us the entire plot, with details related, back stories that lead to the present, and all. But it doesn't give a lot of hint into how characters might feel. Surely, reading between the lines, it's up to the readers to interpret them.

But Morimyu gives us all of that, and they leave it to us to read between the music.

And even if we didn't, that's fine. Then the purpose of all of them linking together would be to create a performance where everything is connected harmoniously, allowing us to be emerged in the world of Yuumori.

-> The purpose of having a stage, primarily, is to allow the audience to engage in, experience and feel the emotions along with the characters they see on stage. The point of having a live stage, a plot, and the music, are all to let us emphasize with the characters on stage.

In Morimyu, we aren't just watching a plot between our favourite characters happening as we know it from the manga. We see a combination of mysteries unveiling slowly, the stories on the side of each characters as they slowly progress forward, as well as emphasising with their emotions in the story.

That's what I really like about Morimyu.

So, WHAT'S THE POINT OF THIS?

So I had to scroll back to the top (lol) to quote this and make sure I haven't gone too far from the main theme.

Regarding musical Yuumori, there's always so many things I'd like to talk about. And if I start going on about it then it only gets harder to focus on one single topic.

Since the topic here is Morimyu and their music, especially in classical reference, I've tried to keep everything I've discussed relevant. But whenever I start on something, there would always be something that comes to mind. Like how other songs might also have certain connections, or how they used stage directions and lightings, etc. I really want to look more into stage directions in Morimyu as well, but that would have to wait...

Anyways, I tried to keep this as simple as possible. When I sent the first version of this to my friends, I keep having the feeling that I got too technical with all the theories about harmony and structure lol

And once again, this is only some of my own interpretation of the series that I've picked up.

If something else came to mind... well. Either way, for the purpose of engaging in their wonderful music or for the purpose of watching a beautiful stage just for enjoyment, Morimyu definitely is worth watching. And to watch over and over again. I've said this for Op. 2 but I'll say this ten times as much for Op. 3. Truly magnificent.

And, that's pretty much it that I have for today, I guess.

Thanks a lot to all my friends who gave me lots of inspiration and motivation to complete this ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ Lots of love to @rikaaki as well ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ

#Youtube #musical moriarty the patriot #musical yuukoku no moriarty #yuukoku no moriarty #sherliam #random thoughts idk why #didn't mean for it to be this long but still just random thoughts I'd like to get down #still love this series too much although I feel like I've watched it too many times #harmony analysis I'd like to call it but there wasn't a lot of harmony analysis going on either #morimyu #morimyu and how their music is just extraordinary

[jamlavender]

Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss: Mrs Coulter, misogyny and the His Dark Materials TV show

The show went hard on misogyny as a vital part of Mrs Coulter’s backstory, and I want to talk about how they did it, and why, and how it might have been done better. This is quite long (when is anything I write not, let’s be real) so it’s under the cut. Read on for thoughts on women, power and fictional villainy.

As a quick disclaimer, though: I’ve enjoyed the show a lot! I’m so glad they made it! Ruth Wilson is mesmerising as Mrs Coulter! There’s so much to appreciate about the show overall, including many aspects of Mrs Coulter’s portrayal. But the HDM team have also made gender politics and misogyny very explicit themes of the show – particularly season two, particularly season two, episode five – and I think it’s fair to critique that.

Let’s be clear: Mrs Coulter is a villain. She murders kids by tearing out their souls. She kills and tortures friends and foes alike without a second thought. She abuses her daughter. She upholds and advances a totalitarian regime. She’s a Bad Person, as confirmed by God himself with the unforgettable line: “You are a cesspit of moral filth.” She’s fucking terrible, but, in life as in art, many of us are fascinated by how such awful people are made. What drives someone to commit atrocities? I am keen to see such questions examined in fiction, because I don’t think exploring a character necessarily means excusing their actions, and because it’s interesting (I mean, of course I find her fascinating, I’ve written a novel’s worth of fic about her). However, after a few snarky comments (“What sort of woman raised Father Graves, do you think?”) and some subtler commentary on sexuality, gender and power (her unsettling MacPhail with the key in the bra in S1E2), S2E5 drew a weird line between sexism in Mrs Coulter’s professional and academic life and her vast and senseless institutionalised child murder, and the longer I’ve sat with that the more I’m like: what the fuck?

Look, Mrs Coulter doesn’t tear apart children to search for sin inside them and poison Boreal and break a witch’s fingers because she’s experienced sexism in the workplace and in her education. That’s… a very odd thing to imply. We have to remember that there are lots of women in Lyra’s world, all of whom will also have experienced sexism, misogyny and other forms of marginalisation (many in more expansive and pernicious ways than Mrs Coulter, who’s a woman, yes, but also white, wealthy, highly educated and very thin and beautiful), and none of them are running arctic torture stations. She will have experienced misogyny, absolutely, and that will have affected her in various ways that inform how she approaches her work, but to imply that being denied a doctorate is the reason she became a sadistic killer is frankly bizarre. Here are a few of the lines from that episode with my commentary:

“Do you know who I could have been in this world?” What does this mean? If she’d been roughly the same person in our world, the answer is: Margaret Thatcher, which is probably a step down for Marisa, all things considered, because the Magisterium is far more autocratic than any recent Tory government and would be a much easier institutional environment in which to enact her cruelty. What we’re supposed to think, clearly, is that she’d have been a different person: a scientist and a mother, and she’s had this realisation because she saw a woman with a baby and a laptop and had a three-minute conversation with Mary. This doesn’t make sense. We live in our world! It’s less repressive than Lyra’s world but it’s hardly a gender utopia. If Mrs Coulter had chosen the scientist-and-mother life (which, as I’ll revisit later, she could have done in her world but chose not to because of her megalomaniac tendencies), she’d still have been affected by misogyny here too. Our world is not kind to young mothers, nor young women embroiled in scandals, nor is the world teeming with female physicists. It might be a little better, sure, but it’s hardly as if those gendered challenges would have been solved.  

“What do you mean she runs a department?” This is just the show forgetting its own canon. Marisa, you ran a massive government organisation (the GOB), including a huge murder science research initiative in the Arctic. That’s a much bigger undertaking and much more impressive than running a university department in our world. Pull yourself together.

“But because I was a woman, I was denied a doctorate by the Magisterium.” This is the show flagrantly ignoring the source material to make a clumsy political point. In the books, there are women with doctorates (notably Hannah Relf, also a major player in the new Book of Dust trilogy) and at least one women’s college full of female scholars. Now, would that women’s college likely be underfunded and disrespected compared to the men’s colleges? Almost certainly. But saying that is different than saying “I couldn’t get my doctorate!” when women in Lyra’s world can. The show knew what point they wanted to make, and were willing to ignore canon to do so, which is frustrating. Also, given that there are female academics and scientists in Lyra’s world, and that Mrs Coulter is a member of St Sophia’s college, it’s clear that she could have lived that life if she so desired. But she didn’t want that, because being a scientist and academic at St Sophia’s imbues her with no real power, and that’s what she craves.

I’m not opposed, in theory, to exploring Mrs Coulter and misogyny in more depth, but I think doing so through an examination of the sexual politics of her life would have made a lot more narrative sense and been much more powerful. It’s better evidenced in the text – her using her sexuality to manipulate people and taking lovers for political sway is entirely canon, as is her backstory where genuine love and lust blew up her life – and it links much more closely with the most shocking of her villainy, which involves cutting out children’s dæmons to stop them developing “troublesome thoughts and feelings,” referencing sexual and romantic desire (and what Lyra and Will do to save Dust is clearly a big ‘fuck you’ to those aims). She even says this to MacPhail in TAS, “If you thought for one moment that I would release my daughter into the care - the care! - of a body of men with a feverish obsession with sexuality, men with dirty fingernails, reeking of ancient sweat, men whose furtive imaginations would crawl over her body like cockroaches - if you thought I would expose my child to that, my Lord President, you are more stupid than you take me for.” Don’t get me wrong, she’d have been a villain regardless, but I do believe that there’s a much stronger link between her sexual and romantic experiences and her murder work than between professional and academic stifling and child murder. It would have been a lot more interesting and a lot less tenuous.

However, the show is trying to be family-friendly, and digging into why this terrible, cruel woman might want to cut the ability for desire and love (and other non-sexual adult feelings, I’m sure) out of people could get dark. We know that the show doesn’t want to go there, because they’ve actively toned down her weaponising her sexuality: in the books, she has an established sexual relationship with Boreal, whereas the show made it seem like she’s been stringing him along all this time, and made it about potentially ‘sharing a life’ together rather than fucking, which was clearly the arrangement in the books. Also, I think Ruth Wilson said she and Ariyon Bakare filmed a “steamy scene” together, and given that only a single chaste kiss between them aired it must have been cut. I think they deliberately minimised the sexual elements of the text, particularly regarding Mrs Coulter (the mountain scene with Asriel, which I did still love, was also a lot less horny than in the book) and replaced that with another gender issue, that of professional sexism, as if the two are interchangeable, which they are not. This is a shame, both for Mrs Coulter’s character and also for the story as a whole, because the characters’ relationships with sex and desire are an important part of the books! (If this minimised sexuality approach means that they don’t use the TAS scene where Asriel threatens to gag her and she tries to goad him into doing it, I’ll scream). Overall, I think they missed the mark here, which is a shame because I also think it could have been done well, if they’d been bolder and darker and more thoughtful.

Why might this happen? Why might the show take this approach? Why might it be latched onto by viewers? Personally, I think the conversations we have about women and power are very simplistic, which leaves us in a tight spot when we see women seizing power for themselves (even in fiction) and weaponising that against others, not just other women but people of all genders, because we struggle to move past ‘women have overall been denied power, so them taking it ‘back’ is good,’ even if that immediately becomes a hot mess of white, corporate feminism and results in the ongoing oppression of many people. I think we are so hungry for representations of powerful women that we – producers and viewers alike – struggle to see them as bad, because it’s uncomfortable to be so intoxicated by Mrs Coulter effortlessly dominating the men around her, subverting systems designed to marginalise her for her own benefit, and generally being aggressive and intelligent and ruthless, and then realise that you are entranced by someone who is, objectively, a terrible, terrible person. It can be hard to realise that if you channelled the energy of someone who mesmerises you, you’d be the villain. So instead of sitting with that (more on this below), a lot of legwork goes into reworking her villainy into, somehow, a just act, a result of oppression, as her taking back power that has been denied to her, rather than grappling with the fact that for anyone to desire power in such a merciless way, even if they have to overcome marginalisation to get it, is really, really dangerous.

The joy, of course, is that Mrs Coulter is not real! She’s not real! Adoring fictional characters does not mean condoning their (imaginary) decisions, nor do stories exist for each person in them to fit neatly into a good or bad box so you know who you’re allowed to love. Furthermore, fiction can be a fabulous tool for exploring and interrogating the parts of yourself that, if left to bloom unexamined, might perpetuate beliefs or behaviour that cause harm to others. Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be a feminist or taking down the patriarchy or a righteous powerful woman to illuminate things about gender, power and feminism for those reading and watching. In fact, it’s important that we explore what happens when women (most commonly white, wealthy women, as she is) continue to perpetuate brutal systems under the guise of sticking it to ‘men,’ because it happens all the time in the real world, and it’s a serious issue. Finding characters like Mrs Coulter so cool and compelling doesn’t make you a bad person, but it might tell you something about yourself – not that you want to be a villain or kill kids or whatever, but something about how you relate to your gender or women or men or power – and that knowledge can be useful! We all have better and worse impulses, and finding art that helps us make sense of ourselves, both the good and bad parts, is a gift that we should relish.

Anyway, tl;dr, Mrs Coulter doesn’t need to be sympathetic or understandable or redeemable to be brilliant – but you wouldn’t know that from how she’s been portrayed in the new adaptation.

#his dark materials #marisa coulter #my analysis #this might be controversial idk #more thoughts that no one asked for #hdm meta