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jaythelay · 8 days

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My current fascination is reading MrBeast Moral discussions because I really don't disagree with the reasonable perspectives from any angle.

It's true, he does some cruel shit that has a positive impact in ways that are inherently immoral but necessary in the current system that he has no control over, but does make poor people dance for life-changing money he can just give out at will, at random, and that the people involved are more than willing and likely don't feel exploited as much as they do helped, and still at least it's being given individually instead of to vague causes or personally owned charities, he also does have a pure philanthropy channel, works with the mayor to help the community and projects there, he also does have a bit of an ego to have a burger named after him, it is fucked up that people would have to live in a mall for years for money, but let's be honest we'd all do his little dance for life-changing money, that guy might still be in the mall honestly I dunno, that's not his fault, it's capitalism, focusing on him is a waste of time when you could focus on far worse, but then again, he did literally make Squid Games real.

I don't know how to feel. I'm closer to "Yeah fuck this guy" than liking him, not simply out of principle or whatever, the dude works with the algorithm, in disgusting ways he really doesn't have to let's be honest, the twitter follow thing for 25k or 250k or whatever is genuinely depraved behavior, but it's just following a dude on a website you don't have to use, a genuinely corrupt website, but he can just do that, and he does.

I know for a fact we've all imagined being rich and what we'd do with it to help others. So, it's hard to hate it when you finally get what you wished for...ya know? Like, here it is, as good as it's gonna get and it's more of a moral question than a cool thing to do, actually.

Sure, he could just not hoard the wealth, but you kinda need wealth to actually give wealth, but you're still hoarding it, but at the very least, he's giving it directly to people, even the contestants that lost are still paid for their work/time. I don't think any one of us would find going to a gameshow you agreed to, to be degrading or whatever, it'd be fun! And a cool experience! That's the thing people don't mention, he's not doing the bare minimum, he's actually do ALOT more than most Rich People or CEOs do on a daily basis honestly.

The way I see it, it is, in fact, absolutely disgusting. I don't know how to feel about a person I've never met, but to really hate him, you have to really think about it, and come to conclusions that, really warrant a response from him for a conclusion, one he's NEVER going to be allowed to give safely if he wants to keep his status. No matter what he says, it will be bad PR that will become controversy. At least he's not diddling kids, at least he's not ordering assassinations, and honestly?

If I'm not being straight up lied to? His networth is estimated between 100,000,000$-500,000,000$ (Million) It's actually at a point of concern, right? He's just 500,000,000$ from a billion!

But... I can type that number, you can feel disgusted, upset, all warranted, but then I want you to read that number compared to Jeff Bezos

500,000,000$ (Mr.B)

200,900,000,000$ (Amazon Cunt) (40X Mr. B)

I know you've all seen a comparison image before, but seriously, Mr.Beast could be far more disgusting in wealth hoarding. Like if we were to eat the rich one day? I don't even want to put him on the list, I think he'd honestly not even be worth it, there's far more cruel and vain rich to focus on in that same area. He comes off as the kinda guy who'd gladly cut his wealth by a very large fraction, even if solely out of utter fear.

But then again, he did quite literally make Squid Games real, I just don't think people get that Squid Games represented far more corruption with more intricacies, entities and politics, than Mr. Beast capitalizing on a gameshow where everybody gets money at the end, they chose to do this, nobody dies or lives in cruel conditions or go unfed the whole time, and they're having fun.

But, still, Mr. Beast the person, I get it, Truly, I do not disagree with your feelings, but I do disagree to the temperament. For sure it's all warranted, but I feel the focus on him over the system has caused a rift between people wanting to defend him rather blindly, and people so far deep into the hole of knowledge that simply reasoning with people vs completely demonizing would be far more effective at spreading knowledge to more people. As it stands, ya just look like a person fighting a pig in the mud, and bystanders walking by aren't gonna know the pig fucked your boy-wife nor the deep complex lore behind the story.

Seriously, reading through an old post that initially made me disgusted with Mr. B, left me disgusted with Mr. B, but not nearly as mad as people get with him. I also somehow ended up thinking slightly more about, if not of, him than I would ever have without reading what people said. There's alot of interesting discussion that people were making that simply didn't always get bounced off of. I saw some even say it provided them a blocklist, and like, this ain't the...thing to do that for? Nobody was being immoral, except the people with murderous rhetoric that's just awful, but they weren't on the blocklist apparently, so that's priorities right there, echoboxes!

Save it for someone worthy, like if you seriously can put Mr. B on that paper, and on another, Jeff Bezos, we're just not compatible in philosophy, this relationship is over. I'm taking the sword collection.

If people were more willing to discuss this topic, I really think it'd make people consider more than previous on the entire subject. You aren't going to convince his fans or bystanders he's evil and thus capitalism bad, you gotta just point out what he has to work with, ya gotta compromise with people, and they gotta compromise too, but again, pig in the mud, bystanders will respect a farmer more than a crazy person fighting a pig in the mud. Shit sucks, but that's the game, and nobody's gonna learn those rules if you don't suggest better ones.

Dunno where to add this, but something to understand is we all start off small, you shouldn't be mad at someone for not being as far in as you are, they gotta learn to swim first, they gotta get comfortable and learn the basics before learning about Ronald Reagan.

I feel the entire scope of the actual problem gets projected upon this one dude that doesn't entirely fit together, it might fit well in some places, places he definitely made himself, but he's far more layered of a person than the Actual 1%/0.1%, but he's still a flawed human, pieces fit in some areas but the more ya look the less they fit the way you'd want them too. The most I can say is, he's at least believing he's doing good in a definitely selfish way I think he at least somewhat wants to fight back against by doing legitimate good, again, more than Jeff Bezos. There's far, far more humanity to discuss with Mr. Beast than...well shit just about anyone with his, lower or higher, net worth.

I dunno how to put this to ya'll, but we're not gonna do that thing in Ants where we realize there's more of us than them, and then we...do...something, I think we pull the crab back down the bucket? They're so high up, that's gotta be it.

We're gonna need, in fact it is a requirement, that people with any amount of wealth don't get crab bucketted because we're so starved by people far more influential and negatively impacting than Mr. B.

At some point you're just dragging us all down to our graves, instead of pushing crabs up, you start arguments which causes the push to weaken and tire over time. You gotta trust when the time comes, that they'll come help tip the bucket. You will Never get that if you have more guillotines than problems.

And no, to be completely clear, I am not saying you can't hate 2 things at once, but I am saying, pick better enemies than people infinitely closer to you than Jeff Bezos. Not that 500m is realistic for any of us, but it's not 200,900,000,000$ary doos. It's actual comical, villainously so, how much worse the 0.1% are compared to someone with 500mil Net Worth.

Oh and I did some more research, from what he's said, all the money is from brand deals n sponsorships, ads, the burgers, dude reinvests back in, and for the most part he doesn't make the money back every time instantly. Thing is, every site I try to find anymore on is some absolute GARBO so research is actually a bitch for the average joe. I don't know how much of that is true, it's from Reddit with no sources. Great research I know. I'm not really looking at this from a fully informed view, not yet at least, kind've more so immediately after the concert, if you will. Most people aren't fully informed either, and that is a tragedy of potential knowledge being lost. I really think a wider, less angry and non-violent discussion would be better overall for the collective knowledge.

If a reasonable, well discussed consensus comes to it and we do have to eat him, fine, but I don't think we're even remotely at the point as a collective we can say that should be the case. I genuinely think putting more effort into learning, considering more, might tip most of ya'll towards him, you'll still not like him, but you don't need to like him, nobody does, if the discussion is if he's a bad person, fine he's done some shit, but really...

Horses in seperate directions? for the youtuber guy with burgers? Really gonna use that raw as fuck line because he gave 25k away on twitter to 10 randoms? That's the line crossed for you? That's when you drop that fucking dope line? Really. Really?? Really. Couldn't just...wait a week for someone to die at Amazon again? Suckerborg isn't spreading pro-genocide propaganda? There isn't a Rapist in multiple court cases running for president?

Really. The burger youtuber guy. Horses. Seperate directions.

The Burger Youtuber Guy.

Really.

Not even saved for Onision?

at the least I can say, I sure wish this system didn't enable this behavior, and I sure wish we didn't have a government that will absolutely abandon you at the first need for any sort of help, and that people can praise concepts that boil down to a rich person throwing pennies at starving children and laughing, that even saying that, you'd still have to consider there's people even worse that absorb an entire economy and country, to the point that, yeah, ya know? Maybe he can laugh and throw pennies. Fuck it. Everything is fucked. Absolute Fucking Circus. But at least it's interesting to philosophize about? More than...just decided your principles apply directly to this situation so cleanly you don't need to consider anymore.

Of course, I'm not saying you absolutely should focus on this subject or person, I am saying however, open your mind a bit more, and discuss it more clearly. This is a subject matter where you can branch the uninformed and youthful into understanding problems we're dealing with now, but by being close-minded, loudly, violently, you instead push them to capitalism.

I'm just saying, there's opportunity here for more discussions and critical thinking that are better than making people not want to listen to anti-capitalism if it means their favorite youtuber's gonna get the fucking horses. be reasonable.

#Mr. Beast #mr beast #Mr. B #I like that far more honestly #looks nicer #Ramblings #Honestly man I'm having the worst fucking time of my life right now #but hot damn if reading through a buncha junk on this didn't make this tired brain no longer full of saturated white noise #People got #Sooooo mad man #Meanwhile honestly just reading through #if people were more chill and willing to converse?#I think ALOT of people would be on a far less hostile page #but damn if the anti-capitalists who I fully agree with aren't absolutely bloodthirsty in a genuinely frustrating manner #You can be completely right and also have to compromise a bit so you aren't the super hero in your mind #because to everyone else it just looks like you think people should just listen to you and not have questions #like they should have set their toddler life up for a childhood that prepares their teens for their adulthood to know absolutely as much #if not more than you do on this very one subject #to hell with their interests and life experiences and tragedies and upbringings and self-esteem #Clearly they fucked up so bad that you're superior to them to the point you can't fucking talk to them and instead #have to go through blocking people one by one #like hot damn ya'll this is why you too will have a crab pull you back down into the bucket #because any amount of wealth is an offense and not a victory #You think 500m is alot? Wait til you meet someone that think 1m is alot or 100k or 50k #wait until the water in the bucket is so hot that people will be desperate enough to rob you of 5$ because you're rich #Ya gotta put a cap on things when we're discussing double hundred billion vs potentially 500mil #His behavior absolutely could be better but he's not exactly as informed on this sort of subject as someone like you or me who actually had #to figure out why daddy is hitting us while he only hears ghost stories #to be clear I'm not saying that's the case I'm just saying we're all on different paths and at some point if you want to keep your head abo #water in a capitalist society

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endless-weightless · 7 months

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Random nameless ghoul headcanons (SFW and NSFW)

I'm taking the piss with all of these. And remember, kids, this is fanfiction!

I mostly just wrote about the current ghouls but I'm more than happy to write about any past ghouls if you guys want!

TAGS/WARNINGS: mating cycles, CNC, weed mention, primal play, polyamory and orgies,

SFW✄

All of the ghouls have a specific scent but Mountain for some reason can emit any particular scent so long as it's earth related. He usually smells like pine trees and grass but if any of the ghouls are anxious leading up to rituals or just worried in general he'll make himself smell like lavender because he knows how calming it is.

Mountain is also victim to clothing robbery because he smells so nice and is SO DAMN TALL.

They're some of the most open-minded and accepting people you'll ever meet.

Full moons tend to have a weird effect on the ghouls. Not as bad as say a werewolf but they definitely become a bit more... feral. The less extreme effects would just be heightened senses and craving gamey meats more while the worst of the worst would be bordering violent and definitely nsfw (see nsfw for more on this). They'd probably call it a hunter's moon (badum tss).

All of their eyes glow very faintly in the dark.

Their pupils are like a mix of feline and just regular ol' human.

They all have claws but Aurora and Sunshine are the only ones who actually have them out because everyone else needs short nails to play their instruments.

They all purr when they're happy or they're experiencing physical affection, though the volume and intensity varies depending on the ghoul.

Mountain sleeps like a log unless he's sharing a bed, then he's everyone's teddy bear and always has an arm around someone whether he agreed to it or not.

Rain absolutely HATES throwing up.

Swiss and Sodo convinced Mountain to grow marijuana by letting him try some. The ghoul den now constantly smells faintly of weed.

All of the ghouls have their own bedrooms but prefer to cuddle with each other and usually just make a nest out of blankets and pillows in the main common room area and turn it into one giant bed for everyone.

Cirrus and Aether tend to take on an almost parental role in the group just to keep the newer ghouls in line which can be draining at times but rewarding in the end.

They all have black tails and horns that are pretty much identical with the only difference being everyone has a slight tint to theirs depending on their element (Sodo's are red, Rain's are blue, Phantom and Aether's are purple etc).

Their fangs aren't actually too sharp. Could be because they've just become blunter over time with less need to bite actual people.

Most of them straight up act like cats depending on how new they are to the mortal plane. Since Omega’s been on earth the longest, he acts more closely to a human than Phantom, who is fresh out of hell.

Zephyr gets really bad chronic leg pains which is why he's always sitting while performing and so quick to sit back down after finishing the Mummy Dust solo.

Aurora has super painful cramps leading up to her heat so Sodo has taken it upon himself to use his hands as a heating pad for her (which he will do for anyone in need of a heat pack).

NSFW✄

If you had to make a spectrum of all the ghouls from most submissive to most dominant, it'd be Sunshine, Phantom, Rain, Cumulus, Swiss (ultimate power switch), Aurora, Ifrit, Sodo, Mountain, Zephyr, Cirrus, Aether, Alpha and finally Omega.

None of them are strictly doms or subs, they like experimenting and switching things up every once in a while to keep things interesting but they certainly have preferences.

They all enjoy both monogamous and polyamorous sex equally. Sometimes they just want soft intimate sex with one person or they're just craving multiple people.

Full moons don't make everyone horny in an "I need to impregnate someone/be impregnated now" way, they make the ghouls horny in a primal way...

Some of the ghouls that are more affected by the full moon or just enjoy primal play with a bit of CNC will sometimes ask some of the siblings of sin and/or you if you'd all be comfortable with letting them "hunt" you down.

Aether and Cirrus have sleepy and lazy sex when they're tired from dealing with the ghouls and need a break and some relief.

Mountain is always looking down the sisters of sin's and the ghoulette's tops to see their cleavage. In his defence he's pretty fucking tall and can't help that he has to look down to talk to people.

If anyone in the group, including you, are feeling lonely, stressed or just exhausted and in need of some kind of relief, all of the ghouls are more than willing to give head to anyone for hours, making sure they cum at least four times before they let them have a break.

All of them have a marking kink because of their need to mate during heats and ruts.

They all go just a teensy bit feral when they pick up on the scent of a virgin with Swiss being the most dramatic about it.

And if someone doesn't smell like a virgin but instead like ghoul, they still go feral because ghouls like sharing when the moon isn't full.

Aether feels the constant need to slap every ghoul and ghoulettes ass possible, even Sodo.

Aurora, Zephyr and Phantom the most handsy out of the ghouls.

Heats and ruts are already hellish enough, but what makes it worse for the ministry is how only half of the ghouls get their heats and ruts at the same time while the other get it the other half of the time, which basically means twice as many heats and ruts in a month.

＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚

that's all my lovelies, lmk if you want any more!

#x reader #fanfic #fanfiction #the band ghost #aether ghoul #phantom ghoul #sodo ghoul #omega ghoul #alpha ghoul #zephyr ghoul #chair ghoul #aurora ghoulette #cirrus ghoulette #sunshine ghoulette #cumulus ghoulette #mountain ghoul #rain ghoul #swiss ghoul #ifrit ghoul

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dear-ao3 · 6 months

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Can I ask for a translation on what happened in Vegas?

what didnt happen in vegas!

-carlos sainz ran over a drain cover that was not welded down 9 minutes into the first practice session. it ripped a hole through his car basically (he narrowly avoided getting royally and permanently fucked up by it) and he got a 10 place grid penalty for fixing said car

-toto wolff, the mercedes team principle, said very emphatically that carlos deserved this penalty. carlos did not in fact deserve this penalty because it was not remotely his fault.

-probably out of spite, carlos managed to finish the race above both mercedes cars

-back to practice 1, it was redflagged 9 minutes in after he crashed and it took nearly 7.5 hours for them to fix the track because they had to check all the other drain covers

-practice was already late to begin with and reportedly at 1am ish they kicked all the fans out who had bought tickets because it was "too late"

-tickets btw were over 1k USD

-practice two started sometime around 2am and didnt finish until nearly 4am

-yes, people were driving cars at over 200mph at 2 in the morning, jetlagged to hell and back. idc if you're a professional, that sounds dangerous

-the announcers were descending into madness the whole time and during practice two i think tried to talk about oceans 11 but fucked it up

-there was also the sphere. the sphere was relatively unhinged.

-the drivers didnt get back to their hotels until after the sun rose that day. and they had to race again that night

-oh also it was fucking freezing and when its freezing the cars don't work cause the tires don't warm up and the brakes don't warm up

-tires also warm up best on corners, high speed ones. the vegas track had mostly all low speed corners and really long straights. not ideal

-the pit lane exit was also smack in the middle of a really tight turn. which they would be exiting onto on cold tires with cold brakes.

-also the track looked like an upside down pig

-practice three was normal until the very end when alex albon crashed into the wall. no one was allowed to do practice starts because the session was red flagged and not resumed.

-the most notable thing to happen at qualifying was that both williams cars (which are basically tractors) managed to place p5 and p6 on the grid. especially interesting considering that logan sergeant has placed dead last in qualifying for the last several races.

-also both mclarens were at the bottom. this is not super relevant or particularly interesting but i was upset about it.

-ferrari went p1 (charles leclerc) and p2 (carlos sainz), but sainz had a 10 place grid penalty for fixing his car that had a literal hole through the bottom, so he started p12.

-weirdly, sir lewis hamilton and checo perez also started pretty far down the grid.

-anyway onto the race.

-there were so many safety cars. literally on the first lap the whole back half of the grid rammed into each other.

-then! terrifyingly! lando norris ran over a bump in the track on lap 3 or 4 i don't remember and spun several times before ramming into the wall. he sounded not ok on his radio but he got out of the car. eventually they ended up taking him to the hospital, he is quite fine but it was still a terrible crash

-his teammate, oscar piastri, seemly got possessed by someone or something, possibly lando himself, because he had a very impressive race until mclaren decided to use the worst tire strategy possible (as in, pit him in the last 10 laps to change his tires when this was largely avoidable by all accounts). he could have ended on the podium potentially if they hadn't fucked him up. still, he ended 10th and got the fastest lap and as a result the track record.

-there was also another episode of French Civil War at alpine when they told esteban ocon to stay behind his teammate, pierre gasley, and he said no !! and passed him for funzies

-charles leclerc also got possessed by something, possibly his own bad luck, because he managed to finish p2 after overtaking checo perez on the last lap.

-the same checo perez whos f1 career has been basically dead for half the season

-also lance stroll weirdly slayed

-despite starting high on the grid, both williams managed to finish out of the points

-surprisingly there were only 3 DNFs and 0 red flags

-this is surprising because of all the tire and brake issues that people thought there would be

-unsurprisingly max verstappen won. what was surprising was that he sang viva las vegas over his radio afterwards, especially surprising considering that he spent the whole weekend shitting on the race, saying that the track was terrible, he hated it, and that the fans should burn the place down for getting kicked out on practice 1 day and only getting a voucher in response

-related to that, the fans sued f1 over getting kicked out

-someone thought it was a good idea to put max charles and checo in the back of a rolls and film them driving to the podium. it was incredibly memey.

-there was definitely more that happened but this is all i can remember right now

#not a tag #from saph #f1 #las vegas gp 2023

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bidisasterevankinard · 5 months

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Fuck it Friday

Guess, who's back? enemies to lovers singers au!!! snippet which goes right before the very first scene I wrote for this fic Buck and Lucy bestiesm is that we all need for life (yes, I ship platonic Luck)

Buck is barely able to open his eyes, hating with all his soul the person who decided it’s fun to call him too early. Quick time check tells him it’s almost midday, but he went to sleep at 4 in the morning being caught up in the book about Greek culture he found to give more facts to Chris as the boy was getting interested in this topic recently.

“Lucy, I love you, but right now I plan the worst and most painful ways to kill you,” Buck's hoarse and grumpy voice doesn’t cause a loud laugh from the blonde, which always happens when Lucy calls him to irritate him a little.

“Buck,” Lucy’s voice sounds awful. Like she is almost crying. Lucy never sounds like it. She is the strongest and sassiest person Buck knows, which was the reason he chose her as his manager the moment 118 found him. “Buck, there’s no way to sugar coat it for you,” Lucy takes a little pause and breaks Buck’s heart, knocking all the air out of his lungs. “Your asshole ex just outed you to the world. He made a big YouTube video about how he dated the new big pop star and heartthrob, Buck Buckley, showed a bunch of your photos with him, photos where you two kiss under mistletoe on the evening we met, for example. He also tried to make you look like an ignorant jerk who broke up with him because you got super popular and rich, conveniently forgetting to say how you lived almost for a year in Texas after your breakup and went viral only after this year,” Lucy speaks with such an anger Buck can’t help but feel how tears runs his cheeks, because Lucy is so protective over him, not just his career.

“He posted it last night and now it is trending everywhere. I’m sorry. I know you weren't ready to be out to the world. Hell, some of the people close to you don't know because you prefer not to come out. There’s nothing we can do now. Except try to control the fallout,” Lucy sounds so genuinely sad and caring and Buck just cries more, not even knowing what he can say to her. “Hen and I are going to have the meeting today later, Bobby will be here too. But you stay at home and go full close up. Do not answer your phone if you don’t know the number. Do not go anywhere. I’ll call you later. Maddie will come soon to check on you,” Buck hums in the sight that he understood, not that he would even try to do it anyway, he feels like he was put under concrete, crushing him to the ground and preventing him from breathing. Lucy ends the call, but Buck can’t move.

He holds the phone near his ear looking, almost without blinking, at the white ceiling of his house and tries to understand what has he done to Ian, except not staying after he found out this jerk was fucking with his best friend, behind Buck’s back.

tagging @wikiangela @wildlife4life @watchyourbuck @rainbow-nerdss @rogerzsteven @ronordmann @exhuastedpigeon @evanbegins @elvensorceress @eddiebabygirldiaz @thewolvesof1998 @theotherbuckley @transboybuckley @underwater-ninja-13 @pirrusstuff @aspecbuddie @anakinfallen @spaceprincessem @spotsandsocks @spagheddiediaz @devirnis @daffi-990 @fortheloveofbuddie @giddyupbuck @heartshapedvows @honestlydarkprincess @honestlyeddie @hoodie-buck @housewifebuck @hippolotamus @jeeyuns @jesuisici33 @jobairdxx @jamespearce9-1-1 @lover-of-mine @ladydorian05 @loserdiaz @callmenewbie @cowboybuckleys @bigfootsmom @bekkachaos @buddierights @nmcggg @mandzuking17 @monsterrae1 @malewifediaz @elvensorceress @andrewblur @911onabc @caroandcats

#this moment might be changed a little but idea not #it's finally 12k in this fic #gimme tittle for it please #enemies to lovers singers au wip #my wips #buddie #evan buckley #eddie diaz #evan buck buckley #911 #911 abc #911 buddie #buddie wip #911 wip

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a0random0gal · 6 months

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"healthy" doesn't always mean good in fiction. Eremika's unhealthiness is what makes the ship compelling and interesting. It's built into the core of the story. Also your "healthiest ship" requires ignoring that he emotionally manipulated her into keeping her mouth shut about his genocide plan and threatened to have her memories erased. Historia never expressed any interest in him that way. Men and women can in fact just be friends.

Ohh boy, you're bold anon, I have to hand it to ya.

Yes healthy doesn't always mean good, in fact it can actually lead to some very boring ships, but that is still a perfectly good thing to look for in a pairing.

In contrast unhealthy can be interesting, but mostly leads to abusive relationships that get glorified by the fandom in spite of their toxic nature, and in this aspect Eremika is no exception. These two are just awful for one another.

He headbutts her, call her names, tells her he hates her (I know he didn't mean it, but it wrecked her emotionally so my point stands) put her in a situation that could have gotten her killed, never confided in her regarding his plans etc...

She was an overbearing mama who constantly treated him like an incompetent child that couldn't do anything on his own.

What's compelling in a relationship with this dynamic:

"Eren eat your veggies!"

"Eren put on a coat, or you're gonna catch a cold!"

"Eren don't run you're gonna trip!"

Oh and don't get me started on this

She literally deluded herself for years into believing that everything he did was somehow tied back to her. Even Armin, Reiner and Berthold gave her the 🙄 look.

Also her entire character revolves around him and it makes her super boring and robotic. Even after he dies she spends her life worshipping his grave and dies with that gosh darned scarf on her neck. She only took it off once ( when she gave an ounce of development) before cruelly snatching it from the hands of a dying girl that was using it for comfort (something I'll never forgive her for).

She was originally meant to break away from him but alas, good writing died after 134.

Annd the story never revolved around them. Mikasa only became the protagonist in the last chapter out of fucking thin air and it looked soo forced. Lmao Hisu had more parallels with Ymir than Mikasa of all people.

The only time their relationship mattered was at the end of season 2, but after that we got nothing important.

Last thing on this dumpster fire of a ship... They're boring asf.

Like I know some unhealthy relationships that are toxic and all, but the characters have chemistry, and it can make up for the awful shit they can do to eachother. Eremika has no chemistry. I would rather watch paint dry than think about them romantically.

Regarding Erehisu... Have we read the same aot chapter? Or just the same conversation between Eren and Historia? Because I don't think so.

He emotionally manipulated her to keep her mouth shut

What? When did this ever happen? She chose to stay silent. Hell he didn't even need to tell her his plans, it was quite risky, since she could have snitched on him to the Mps and ruined everything.

He chose to confide in her cause he knew she wouldn't tell, cause she was the worst girl in the world who saved him, the girl who chose her selfishness over the world already, in that cave when she saved him, when she told him that she would always be his ally, that they were enemies of humanity.

She never wanted the future that she was destined to if she accepted the 50 year plan. She had accepted it for the greater good. Something selfless that only Christa could have done.

He knew that, and reminded her of who she really was. A selfish, normal girl like everyone else.

She was shocked by the genocide that awaited them if they followed Eren's plan but ultimately chose it over sacrificing herself and her future children. Totally in character, no manipulation involved lmao.

He threatened to erase her memories

Nope. She was upset so he offered to lighten her burden by erasing her memories if she wanted to. It was a proposal made out of empathy for her shock. No threats, where did you see em?

She was never interested in him

Say what you want about her feelings for him, interpret them how you please, but you can't deny a connection from which feelings could blossom. This meme perfectly sums up my thoughts about this:

Yes men and women can be friends, I just don't see it this way for Erehisu. Actually I could tell you the same thing for Eremika. Better as siblings lol.

#aot #attack on titan #erehisu #anti Eremika #mikasa ackerman #eren jaeger #historia reiss #man i had already written a much longer answer #but it got deleted #so i had to write it all again🥲#and made it shorter #so i probably forgot some other arguments from the og answer #armin arlert #reiner braun #bertholdt hoover

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cairavende · 4 months

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Worm Arc 17 thoughts:

Travelers backstory!!!!!!!!! WOOOO!!!!!!

HOLY SHIT THEY ARE FROM EARTH ALEPH! That really explains the mysterious nature of their backstory up to now.

Would have loved to get some PoV's from some people who aren't Trickster but I'll live.

He's just such an asshole! Like I already knew he was but god DAMN did this arc remove any doubt.

Just the worst type of asshole that can be found in MOBA games (I say this as someone who played MOBA games for years). And then given superpowers. Ugh.

THE SIMURGH FUCKING HELL OH MY GOD I LOVE HER!!!!!!!!!

SHE IS MY FAVORITE ENDBRINGER AND ONE OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS EVEN IF SHE IS SUPER DUPER EVIL AND TERRIBLE! BUT SHE JUST SINGS IN EVERYONE'S HEADS AND THEY SEE THINGS THAT SHE WANTS THEM TO SEE AND SHE SEES THE FUTURE AND CREATES A CAUSE AND EFFECT PLAGUE BASICALLY AND I LOVE HER!!

Just the level of planning ahead she does, the number of moves ahead Simmy is playing. After the first few times she shows up they start quarantining where she attacks. Which ends up being exactly the right situation needed to push the Travelers to the choices she wanted them to make. Like, is quarantining even a counter to the Smurph or is it exactly what she wanted?

Sure precogs mess with precogs. That makes sense. But I don't know that it is as clear cut as Coil presented to Trickster. He implies two precogs just cancel each other out, but I assume it's more of a strength thing - a strong precog will cancel out a weak precog, but a weak precog will only make things a little fuzzier for a strong precog. So having Dinah would have helped against the Simurgh but I don't think it would be enough to just cancel out the Simurgh's power. Coil and Tattletale would probably also help. But I'm not convinced the last few months in Brockton Bay hasn't been more or less what Simmy wanted to happen.

Cody is the only person here that is probably more of an asshole than Krouse. Just could not get over the fact that Noelle didn't want to date him. Unbearably entitled dick. Possibly dead now, if Accord got his way. But very possibly not. Won't be surprised if he shows up again.

Cody's power is fun. I think it's the first "time travel" power I've seen. I mean Clockblocker does time freezing which is basically the same category but still, curious to see if we get any more level of time travel than this.

Marissa needs someone to make her some cookies and give her a place to hang out that isn't the house her mom lives in. I mean, I guess the current situation handles that but not how I meant.

I already liked Jess and now I like her even more. She's a cape geek! Wonderful.

Luke is interesting cause he was the only person besides Noelle who was close to Krouse at the start, but he's the first (well, aside from Cody I guess) to leave him. Really went through a character arc. Also Krouse lists Luke's "individual tragedy" as "not getting to fly" which is hysterical.

Oliver is a trans girl. Headcanon 100% established. It just fits so well. She just needs to find herself! And once she does and realizes what she actually wants to look like her power will get her there and won't need to keep adjusting! Right now Oliver's power is doing performative masculinity for them.

Noelle has had a bad time. God damn. She was having a bad time before everything happened and now she's having a very bad time. Damn. I had some guesses about her correct. Figured she was like, monstrous bottom half and normal top half. And figured touching her was bad. But I didn't foresee "touching her creates mutated evil clones". I'm sure that won't be a major problem in the next arc or two. I'm sure there won't be evil mutated clones of a bunch of capes to deal with . . .

I had long figured Travelers had Cauldron powers. It just fit with their power levels and such. I had also figured whatever Noelle's condition was, it was related to having a Cauldron power. I had a lot of guesses. None of them were "only drinks half a vial". For some reason I thought everyone would be too smart to do THAT! (I have no idea why I thought that.)

Current guess is Noelle is sort of in a never ending "trigger" event. Her power is constantly in the "building and gathering" phase and is not reaching the "lock things down" phase that normally happens (Bonesaw talked about this). Definitely a lot of other things it could be, this is just the best fit I've found so far.

This goes for Oliver too, which is why their power keeps changing how they look. Oliver just got lucky and has much less significant troubles compared to Noelle.

Got to see lots of new Case 53's. That was fun.

I expect to see more of Accord in the future. Just cause like, he gets smarter the more complex the problem. And the world is supposedly going to end due to (I think) the actions of higher dimensional entities. That is a very complex problem. And at the same time, he seems like the kind of person that might see "billions die" as a good way to reduce chaos. To simplify the world. Not saying that is what he will do, just that it seems a shame to not bring him up again.

I knew 40 people had died due to actions of the Travelers. I did not know Noelle had eaten them all! Because she tried to starve herself. I can see why it's important to keep her well fed. And why it's going to be an issue that there is no longer someone providing her with thousands of dollars of meat a week. No waste though, she has a very efficient digestive system.

The ending, with Trickster just staring at the bloodstain left behind by Coil's body while Genesis stares out at the ocean ... very good. I mean, really sucks for them, but it was a very evocative arc ending.

I wonder who won the Ransack tournament? One team disconnected because the building they were in disappeared into a space hole. I wonder what the rules are for that?

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billyjoecobra · 3 months

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JOSEPH JOESTAR CHARACTER ANALYSIS (1)

I never see anyone talk or analyze Joseph very often in the fandom, which is tragic because i believe he's very complex!! So here's some thoughts to chew on, rattle around in your head a bit. It's all under the cut, and it is LONG AS HELL because i have a LOT to say on him!!! Warning though, it's not super properly punctuated as these are discord rambles of mine, but -- enjoy nonetheless!!

i think it's super interesting to note how every time someone puts joseph down, or does something shitty to him, he just doesn't care. not a single bit. he even says it's fine, maybe even deserved sometimes. he assumes people always thinks the worst of him, and yet doesn't really care aside from the one time he dressed in drag and got insulted about it. even then he was just kind of, "man. i looked hot though.." however every time someone even remotely upsets his friends or hurts those who don't deserve it or his family he goes. ABSOLUTELY APESHIT. he will get SO fighty.

he will immediately throw hands and hurt you physically without thinking about it he likes to put assholes in their place sometimes (i.e. the taxi driver, the nazis who insulted him. and any nazi really ) but that is different than really caring about what they say to him. i think he has a very strong moral code, though people tend to see him as quite dubious because of his loud and obnoxious behavior every consequence to his actions, he only worries what others close to him will think and he can easily be driven to a blind rage revenge if you dare to hurt his family in any way. because you DONT fuck with his family. family is the no. 1 thing he cares about

beating up racist cops? he only feels bad because he doesn't want to stress out erina with the thought of bailing him out. told speedwagon is dead? he's upset, but he keeps his cool and throws a punch at the guy for upsetting erina, and worries more about her comfort than his own. guys hijacking a plane and holding him hostage? he couldnt care less if he was the hostage, he only cared enough to stop it because it might risk getting speedwagon hurt. and it goes on

and for the sake of his family he keeps purposefully trying to risk himself to death repeatedly. when fighting kars lets not forget when he shot kars into space and his thoughts were about how he was ok with dying if it meant his family was safe i think . and i said this before this is just me getting my thoughts out way more eloquently with points i've already touched on before. but.

in a non emo way, it's really hit me how he isn't like. beat up about it. about assuming ppl always think the worst of him. he cares way more about others than himself type of guy thats like similar to "they're friendly but after awhile of their support and talking to them you realize to your horror you dont actually know anything about them at all" other than he's like. bold and brash and likes to start fights sometimes oh and lest we forget he also tends to take the death of loved ones so hard to the point that no matter the circumstances true causes he always blames himself.

he always blames himself and gets a bit. ummmmm i wouldn't say suicidal but like way too risky with his life and stops really caring if he'll die. he's just so used to nobody ever understanding him and his "off kilter" tbh neurodivergent way of thinking and living that he. like. he doesn't exactly have great self image beyond thinking he has sexy lips which sounds so silly but it's true and again it's not something he dwells on it's just kind of, A Fact to him. and this isn't even touching on the slew of issues i'm sure speedwagon's constant comparing of him to his dead grandfather must have caused.

It's very evident to me that he has ALWAYS felt like a burden to some degree i think. even when erina and speed havent really treated him as such. This is why I think his dynamic with speedwagon would be pretty strained / already seems as such -- bc. As I said before, he's ALWAYS comparing him to jonathan, even when he was just a kid.

NOW BY ALL MEANS!! I DO NOT THINK speedwagon means any ill will. it's just something that he just keeps.. doing because. well he respected jonathan so much, and it kind of clouds how he sees joseph because -- well, joseph is the SPITTING IMAGE of him. But not intending harm does not mean he hasn't caused any by doing that -- comparison can WRECK you pretty bad. joseph has made it clear that he knows he's nothing like jonathan in any regards except looks and i think it kind of contributes to his overall. tanked self image. and also the fact that he's a reminder of the tragedy of losing his parents ( or so they thought for a while. yk )

he deeply cares for him still, this much is true. he always will. but, it doesn't negate the serious comparison issue, constantly being told "WOW you have an attitude not at ALL like your grandpa, he would have never done x!! how do you look like him while being such an angry kid!!"

..... said without real malice or really bad intention, more out of exasperation. but. those kinds of things stick with kids. yknow? Joseph's always bottled up his emotions and tried to be on his best behavior for erina's sake. hes always a little more open with speedwagon. but .............. BWGHGURUGURGGH!!!!!!! i could go on for hours about it ok. but i shall move on to my next point now.

what sucks about it though is that the fandom tends to gloss over these bit of characterization at every turn. there is a lot of sadness and concerning things surrounding joseph that he just simply SHRUGS OFF about that it's kinda concerning! not that he'd ever really see a problem with it.

the fact that he was prepared to die / did the bet if only to distract them long enough to let caesar and speedwagon get away... you COULD maybe read it as a little bit of self preservation but given how he handles literally all other instances of him possibly dying., and the circumstances of him leading whammuu away being to SAVE those two. I think it yet again falls in line with "who gaf if i die i care if THEY die". then he gets stressed about the time he has left. which i imagine would stress ANYONE honestly. but . part of me thinks that it's also because this means that he has a short time to make sure he can be strong enough to protect everyone he loves and cares for..

that isn't ALL there is, of course. but i feel like with his behavior that is probably a big reason of it. You can summarize it all with one sentence; essentially,

joseph isn't afraid of death, nor dying himself; he's afraid of his loved ones dying.

This fact is extremely present in everything he does and says, but especially so when Caesar's death hits. THAT, however, i will make it's own post on. I have a lot to say on that and how it fucked him up for life. For now, though, I will move on and touch on another topic.

for all the loud opinions joseph seems to also speak none of it is ever really looked into much deeper as anything more than " he's just being joseph again" and he never really elaborates on it either, hence why a lot of people don't know much about him. While he is schrodinger's himbo -- too stupid to be smart, too smart to be stupid -- it's clearly all an act to get people to lower their expectations of him. He doesn't like being taken as a joke though. that he is a hater of for sure so. Joseph hides his true self behind a mask of idiocy and lackadaisical attitude to the point where it's blended into his actual truest self and he can hardly tell what's real and what's the mask. But at the same time, Joseph gets very angry when nobody takes him seriously because of his facade and trying to make everyone lower their expectations of him so he can pull the rug out from under them.

He's so mad when people don't take him serious but then continues to act pretty unserious and it's like. Well if you want them to take you more seriously bro you should stop doing that. Stop lowering others expectations so you can kick their asses or have a general upper hand just in case ( but he won't 💖)

he is a bit of a polarizing character but i hate when fandom reduces him to just "funny goofster" or ""cheater"", or writes him off as annoying with no depth to him. To judge Joseph through a lense of solely good or solely bad is a terrible idea; that man is gray moraled as HELL, he has a strong sense of self justice while also being incredibly underhanded and sneaky. If you dislike him, that's fine -- but don't discount his complexity just cause of that!!! He's not puddle deep, there's a lot of facets to how truly fucked up he is.

yeah. he is goofy, and he's a cheater at many things. but there's a lot to him. HE'S COMPLEX!!!!

#joseph joestar #🐍 txt #i have. a lot of feelings about him ok?#also part of this is old ass posts from my discord but i think tumblr should see it too

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pochapal · 5 months

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Umineko Liveblog: Thoughts/Theories [Episode 1 Chapter 14 Edition]

Umineko Chapter 14’s thesis statement was “let’s take these patterns and conventions we’re establishing and blow them all up with gleeful abandon”. Less than an hour from the Second Twilight, we’re forced to bear witness to twilights four and five, and not necessarily in that order. The Witch Narrative is off the rails. The most important character in Umineko to me died, and Beatrice may actually well and truly be real for once. Whatever’s going on here is one hell of a mess.

So let’s try and untangle whatever the hell went down here. The Chapter 14 writeup tour includes the following stops: the hot mess formerly known as the Witch Narrative, Kinzo finally being totally super dead for real, the world’s nastiest most evil twink death in human history (Kanon), identity and furniture and roulettes, Beatrice the Golden Witch’s understated grand entrance into the story, the 19th person conundrum (part 7123748296), and some downright funky stuff happening beneath the story’s surface.

Let’s get this going.

To start, we need to talk about the Witch Narrative. So far, the Witch Narrative has been the term I’ve given to a very clearly established phenomenon and set of actions. When there are characters who have some kind of vested interest in encouraging you to view Rokkenjima as a supernatural incident rather than a crime, then that’s the Witch Narrative. The person painting the magic circles is perpetuating the Witch Narrative. Characters such as Eva and Hideyoshi talking about how frightful and demonic things are is also the Witch Narrative. If you’re thinking “maybe this is Beatrice after all” or if things are aligning a little too well with the worst interpretation of the epitaph riddle, then that is without a shadow of a doubt the Witch Narrative.

So what happened? Kanon being gouged in the chest and also killed mere minutes after the discovery of the torn-apart pair who are close is not right. Skipping to twilight five (for the trolls) straight after number two is not good Witch Narrative etiquette. The sequence of murders and horrors is crucial to authenticating this slaughter as folded within the ritual to revive the Golden Witch and/or reach the Golden Land. Everything so far has dictated that in order for the witch to revive and none to be left alive certain steps must be carried out in a certain order. If this performance is thrown out of sequence for its audience, the song goes funky. Suddenly you’re aware you’re watching people playing pretend on a stage and this world you’re buying into is only ephemeral. If the sequence of deaths doesn’t matter, then this isn’t an occult ritual at all. It is in fact a disguised butchering.

Showing your hand like this this early makes things very difficult for those peddling this narrative. Deaths happening out of sequence takes this from a supernatural force happening beyond everyone’s control to something that could easily done by a human desperate to make everybody believe. If my theories about how this performance is happening ring true, then it becomes infinitely harder for Genji to make any further moves with the simultaneous blow of his most useful pawn kicking it early and the order of events getting all scrambled. How can the stomach, leg, and knee get gouged in a way that still works in service for this narrative now?

Given what I’m thinking, Genji is likely moving on his own now. Kumasawa and maybe Nanjo are complicit in the spreading of the story, but they are almost certainly unable to be as useful to any kind of scheme as Kanon was. They are older, less mobile, less physically able. Kumasawa can scream about magic circles all she likes, but does she have the strength to move and mutilate corpses? Very unlikely. The options to carry things out have been severely limited to an almost unsalvageable degree. Every crime so far has been a type of locked room that works via tricks that could only be carried out by two active parties. Being on your own can only get you so far.

Which leads you to an immediate conclusion: Kanon dying in the basement boiler room was not part of the plan. Or, not part of the Witch Narrative at least. His death marks a point where this scheme has totally gone off the rails, and Genji’s script has been rendered worthless. The presentation of the death is obfuscated, but the truth beneath it is that something went deeply wrong that shouldn’t have.

This is a bold claim I’m making, but I also think I have enough proof in the story to substantiate it. I think, going by everything, the next incident following the deaths of Eva and Hideyoshi was to involve the basement in one form or another. I also think that this was being prepared in parallel with the Second Twilight – Genji and Nanjo leave the kitchen at the same time as Kanon and Kumasawa, but the two men don’t reach the scene until after Kanon has already unlocked the room and Eva and Hideyoshi have been found dead with the stakes in their skulls. Enough time to, say, take a trip down to the basement and set some dominoes in motion.

As to what I think was part of the Witch Narrative, I think everything was on track right up until the moment Kanon set foot in the basement. The foul smell filling the hallway was almost certainly set in motion by Genji and/or Nanjo (perhaps by turning on the boiler while Eva and Hideyoshi were being found in order to time it to make the smell the strongest at the perfect time – this may also have precluded moving Kinzo’s body there depending on where he was before now). Kanon acting bizarrely freaked out was part of the plan. As was Kumasawa screaming about hearing a noise, and the two of them breaking off from the group to rush ahead to investigate. Everything falls apart when Kanon sets foot in the basement and Beatrice shows up and he dies.

So what was the intended plan in the basement involving Kinzo? I think, if I were to hazard a guess based off of pre-existing patterns, the boiler room in the basement was going to be used as another locked room, this time featuring Kinzo. I think this would have been a play in two acts. The first act would have Kanon and Kumasawa chase the noise to the basement and “find” the head’s ring on the ground. The family would search the boiler room and find the back door exit locked up, and no sign of Kinzo anywhere in sight (there would be efforts taken to keep anyone from investigating the boiler). The ring alone on the ground in an empty room would stand in for the Third Twilight – Kinzo is without his headship and authority, so it must therefore fall to everyone to praise Beatrice’s noble name in his stead. Dissatisfied and creeped out, everyone leaves the basement – the back door is locked from the inside, and the front door locked with a key placed in Natsuhi’s possession.

From here, this would likely have led to another discussion chapter about how the ring got there. The setup of the scene would be enough that Battler would question whether or not a nineteenth person placed the ring there, or if Kinzo himself actually dropped it there as part of some other ploy. The servants would be questioned and swear up and down there was nobody else in the basement when they entered. The sound would be discussed, as would the impossibility that anybody known to be alive could make that noise. The conversation would then turn to Kinzo as the likely suspect and Natsuhi, who’s been complicit in covering up Kinzo’s death for some time already, would start sweating as this truth grows closer to being uncovered. It’s up in the air as to whether or not the servants would help or hinder Natsuhi here, but I think it’s likely Battler would have started to think on Eva’s words from earlier. More fuel on the Natsuhi culprit fire that she can’t fight because she can’t admit to knowing what he knows. Maria would then cackle and say to everyone that this is obviously Beatrice manipulating things with her magic, and boom, scene.

Something would then happen in the next chapter to turn attention back to the boiler room. Perhaps the smell grows stronger. Perhaps the conversation about Kinzo grows to a fever pitch. Perhaps a servant fakes hearing another noise from the basement. Whatever the case, we would return to the boiler room a second time. There would be a point made of showing Natsuhi pulling out the only key to the boiler room and everyone stepping inside to find Kinzo’s body on the floor, burned up with an icepick stake in his forehead. The inner lock for the back door would still be set. Genji and Nanjo would confirm the body’s identity via the polydactyly. Somehow, Kinzo’s dead body appeared in the middle of a perfectly locked room.

Likely there would then be discussions of who could have killed Kinzo, given that at the time of his “death” everyone was yet again together (minus Kanon/Genji slipping in and out of the parlor to get food and drinks). The assumption would be that Kinzo was alive in there all along, and then killed himself for some reason – contradicted by the fact that if he launched himself into the boiler, how did he drag himself back out into the middle of the floor? The mystery would stump Battler, because the only major solution would be to assume a nineteenth person was also already hiding in the locked basement, and killed Kinzo and displayed the corpse, but Battler would chessboard himself out of leaning on that option. Out of options and stumped, we would stay at another stalemate where there’s no proof that Beatrice exists, but no way that the surviving humans could have set up this scene (there are of course ways, such as a back door that wasn’t really locked or a second key/master key with which to return to the boiler room and set things up, but nobody will think of them). The horrors would escalate. The Witch Narrative would persist. And so on. And so on.

This scenario, believable as it is, never came to happen. Instead we got what we got, and we need to figure out why. Why did Kinzo show up like this? Why did Kanon die, despite all known logic and reasoning stating that the contrary would be ideal? Why are things speeding up at such an exponential rate? I think we can get a good shape of what was supposed to be with Kinzo, but understanding what happened with Kanon is almost certainly the linchpin driving this deviation from the Witch Narrative.

So, let’s review: Kanon and Kumasawa head to the basement after “hearing a noise” that nobody could have possibly made. Kanon speeds off ahead of Kumasawa and encounters… something in the boiler room. He has a conversation with this something and comes to a revelation about his status as a human being, and then he gets gouged in the chest and killed. The presentation is straightforward: Kanon sees butterflies in the boiler room, he identifies it as Beatrice, he stands in defiance of her, and dies as a result. Except, of course, that it really isn’t that simple at all.

The tonal shift is introduced through the phrase “a fantastical scene”. Fantasy has been a phrase thrown about a few times in the story so far by characters in reference to very specific things, people, and concepts. The siblings call Kinzo’s story of the gold ingots “fantasy”. Beatrice is “fantasy”. The occult symbols around Rokkenjima are “fantasy”. Maria’s behaviour is “fantasy”. Straight away, we can draw parallels between the use of the word “fantasy” and the term “existence”. To be fantasy is to “exist”, is to be something that is propped up by narrative and belief irrespective of the material reality.

In that case, what does it mean for a scene to be fantasy? In a story about storytelling and about fantasy and about “existence”, there is surely nothing accidental about the prose describing a series of events as “a fantastical scene”. Two things are immediately happening here. The first is that we are stepping into the framework of fantasy, of belief without proof and immateriality fuelled more by ghosts than flesh. The second is that we are entering into a self-conscious scene capable of describing itself as such. This is a narrative unit that knows what it is, a story told by a teller with an agenda.

I think to explain what’s happening here, it’s worth circling all the way back to some of the metafictional stuff I was entertaining back before people started dying. More specifically, the notion that there are narrators with agendas involved in the construction and presentation of Umineko. This is most passively seen in the less-reliable third person scenes where we can be shown metaphor and falsehood to convey a deeper emotional truth – Kinzo has most likely been dead all along, and yet he has also made numerous appearances in his study over the weekend of the family conference. However, the “fantasy” of these moments is never explicitly highlighted. These scenes are a type of “fantasy”, but not a fantasy that you need to be told is the case. You can understand Natsuhi and Genji’s hearts and feelings towards Kinzo regardless of whether or not you think the family head is alive or dead.

Here, though, to be directly told you are witnessing a fantasy is tipping the scales. The arbitrator of this fantasy, of whatever might be going on in the narrative beyond the framing confines of Rokkenjima, is much more actively and directly introducing the concept to Kanon’s final moments. On their own, they would be in the same vein as whatever was happening with the Kinzo scenes if a little more heavy handed and obtuse, but we are not left to puzzle out whether or not we can trust what we are seeing. We are told outright this is fantasy. We are forced to acknowledge from the outset that there is something untrustworthy and unreliable about this chunk of the story.

Why?

I think that this is glaring evidence of some kind of discrepancy between the narrator(s) and the actors in Umineko. Something happens in the boiler room which the narrative feels the need to paint over with a depiction of swarms of butterflies and cackling murderwitches – the need to plaster fantasy over this scene matters more than upholding the story’s rule that Beatrice remains a possibility in shadow. Just as I argued that the Witch Narrative went off the rails here, I think the same thing applies to the Umineko Narrative as well. If there’s a metafictional “game” going on here, then Kanon in the boiler room knocked that off kilter, too. The zero on the roulette threatened to ruin not only “Beatrice”, but also Beatrice and also the fabric of the text itself. Whatever Kanon did or almost did rattled a lot of people all at once.

But what is this thing, actually? What we’re shown is Kanon having enough of being bound to the whims of Kinzo and Beatrice and their bastardised excuse for “magic”, and him deciding as a result to abandon his position and furniture and ruin the demon’s roulette in motion. In real terms, this is hard to parse as meaningful outside of its fantasy context. Kinzo, as we know, is not the one setting the roulette in motion in the way we’re led to believe. Beatrice is a dubiously-extant entity represented by so many different people wearing her name instead of a concrete person. Magic is anything belonging to the realm of metaphor or anything that happens on a non-material level. And the Demon’s Roulette is the catch-all term for the epitaph ritual, the Witch Narrative, and maybe also the layers of abuse going on on Rokkenjima.

The only term that has a direct material representation is “furniture”. Luckily, this is probably the most important part of Kanon’s moment of defiance, so it is extremely fortuitous that we can more easily define furniture in a way that makes sense in order to more deeply understand what’s actually going on here.

To recap, “furniture” is the label applied to servants on Rokkenjima within Kinzo’s inner circle. Three servants in the story use this label – Shannon, Kanon, and Genji. From Shannon’s backstory that we got in chapter 8 during the proposal, it is very likely that “furniture” is a term foisted upon the teenage orphan servants that come and go on Rokkenjima as a kind of degrading, abusive brand. We see this most keenly through Shannon, who submits to Battler’s sexual harassment because she is furniture and thus lacks the will to deny anything. These vulnerable abused kids are forced into a new name and a new role where they are little more than living objects for people more powerful than them to use and abuse as they see fit. To be furniture is to be totally under the thumb of Kinzo’s abuse, serving those needs even when it goes against all morality and all that you are.

Genji’s positioning with the label is less clear, given that he was, at some point at least, on more equal footing with Kinzo. It is likely that Genji adopted the “furniture” label for himself as a kind of expression of his feelings – he is nothing more than an extension of Kinzo’s will, and all he does is in service of his master. He does not have a life outside of servitude. However, the difference here is that Genji willingly stepped into the label versus Shannon and Kanon who had it forced upon them. To an outside perspective, this creates an unfair impression of equality between the three of them, when Genji absolutely has more material autonomy and personal rights than either Shannon or Kanon. Genji feels bad about Kinzo and about how all he can be to the man is his butler. Shannon and Kanon are cruelly abused and dehumanised every second of their lives. It is a false equivalency. The only commonality here is that to be “furniture” is to occupy an undesirable position within hierarchy.

Under this light, Kanon’s declaration that he is no longer furniture can immediately be read as Kanon deciding in that moment to cease existing as an object to be used by people with more power than him – power “exists”, and in a closed environment ruled by fantasy, power can be denied with more ease than would normally be available. Kanon decides he is no longer an extension of another’s will, but instead his own person. He decides this because Shannon is dead, and the least he can do is take revenge against the systems that killed her.

That said, such an explanation is deceptively simple. If denying your status as furniture comes when you cease to adhere to the whims of power, the boiler room scene carries with it the implication that this is the very first time Kanon has done anything of his own will. Kanon has been deeply involved with the Witch Narrative thus far, and if this scene is to be trusted then this is an admission that he has had zero autonomy in the prior events. Or, to expand this further, Kanon is not where he wishes to be and is only now realising this desire. He steps out of his role as a pawn in the augmented fiction around him, and Beatrice kills him for it.

You can view this as happening on multiple layers, each one perfectly able to feed into the “fantasy” hanging over everything. On the level of the Witch Narrative, this is Kanon partaking in an act of defiance and getting killed for it. On a more abstract level, this is Kanon threatening to ruin Umineko and being taken out of the story as a result. To be killed by Beatrice so explicitly comes with much deeper ramifications given the state of Beatrice's presence in the story thus far. If a ghost-myth-metaphor appears in the flesh to kill you and turn you into a prop for the next part of the story, what does that mean?

It was not enough for Kanon to just die. He had to be gouged and killed and transformed into the victim of the next twilight – you can easily make the argument that under the terms of the story being turned into a gouged/killed victim is yet another, more severe form, of being rendered furniture. With the Ushiromiya siblings, this concept can easily exist as a form of poetic irony – these powerful abusive individuals are all left as butchered pieces of furniture to be used and deployed however Beatrice sees fit. You are never as powerless as you are when you're a mangled corpse being manipulated by your own killer.

Except Kanon was already furniture – in his own words, even, this is a servitude that applies to Beatrice as much as it does Kinzo. The reversal of fortune works less well on Kanon; his death is an act of rebellion that is transformed into a reinforcement of his inescapable position. He tries to become human and fails at the first hurdle, and thus goes from being furniture to once again being furniture.

I think this situation is worth examining through the lens of the dichotomy of self framework to yield more information. To recap, almost everybody in Umineko struggles with the gap between who they want to be and who they're forced to be. This is a near-universal constant, seen with Natsuhi as much as it is with Shannon. Everyone desperately desires to be somebody else, and hardly anybody can reach this dream.

Kanon is a curious wrinkle in this pattern in several regards. Up until now, as a servant Kanon has been markedly less furniture-like than Shannon. At every turn he has been prickly and begrudging and making no secret of his own feelings to himself, unlike Shannon who leaned so far into the mask she ended up cutting herself off from herself. With Shannon, Sayo almost certainly feels more complicated and unpleasant emotions, but this is completely partitioned off from her servant self. With Kanon, there is an emotional authenticity to his character, but unlike Shannon, Kanon's “Sayo” is nowhere to be seen.

Kanon is not trying to become his desirable self. He is attempting to transform his undesirable self. Where Shannon/Sayo was looking for an exit from being furniture through George, Kanon's actions promise no such escape. He never discards his furniture name, only the label. Kanon does not multiply himself. Kanon reduces himself into a singular concentrated point within the story.

To Beatrice, an entity that thrives on multiplicity and iterative selfhood, an individual who not only defies her rule of power but also eschews his own identity complex in the face of self-actualisation would be something to be loathed. In Chapter 14, Kanon stands for everything Beatrice is not: painfully human, and painfully material.

By rejecting the status of furniture, by holding true to the only name he’s gone by in the story, Kanon is fraying the edges of the hard rules of the fiction governing Umineko. Everyone in this story is duplicitously in tension between their perceived and ideal selves. This tension allows for a rife breeding ground for secrets and uncertainty. This grey area turns everyone on Rokkenjima from human beings into murder mystery characters. This nebulous state of being is the genesis for “existence”. This is how Beatrice asserts dominion.

Kanon chooses a position that is neither, essentially queering the witch-human dichotomy. He is not Kanon the performer in Beatrice’s narrative of magic and murder, but nor is he Kanon the servant in Kinzo’s narrative of power and abuse. His moment of empowerment coming as it does throws all this off the rails, just as this sequence of events throws the epitaph ritual off the rails.

Kanon, in real terms, deals a potentially fatal blow to the Witch Narrative through his “zero on the roulette” gambit, and Beatrice’s only recourse is to clumsily plaster over this act of rebellion with fantasy before any Detective-oriented observer can bear witness to what could be this entire pantomime’s undoing.

However, what happens in the boiler room is not a simple act of metafictional housekeeping. There is a strong and prevalent sense that whatever Beatrice does, she does it spitefully. Shortly before Kanon’s death, there is a bizarrely=presented exchange between himself and the witch, curious for myriad reasons.

Two things which immediately stand about the moment in question are firstly that this serves as our introduction (allegedly) to Beatrice’s presence in the story, and that it tips us off to the fact that there may be an element of hypocrisy to the impartiality of the so-called indiscriminate murderwitch. Kanon’s reward for his defiance is subjecting the Golden Witch Beatrice to the mortifying ordeal of being known, and so we owe it to him to see what we see when the curtain is tugged at even just a little bit.

The immediate thing which jumps out is that Beatrice addresses Kanon not with annoyance, but with loathing. There is something personal and vindictive about the retribution she inflicts upon him. It’s not enough to simply kill him with the stake and set up another Twilight; there is a mockery and a derision. Before Kanon is killed by Beatrice, Kanon is made aware of how much Beatrice hates him. The why in the moment is mostly clear - Kanon threatens to undermine Beatrice’s narrative, which applies simultaneously to all Beatrices and all narratives in play - but we are told in as many words that this rage is specific and personal.

Earlier, we have a comment from Kanon that he refuses to be led astray “again” by either Beatrice or Kinzo which is. Interesting and revealing wording to say the least. Especially when we try to consider who the person behind Beatrice may be in this scene.

If, somehow, we had confirmation that the Beatrice in the boiler room was a metaphor for Genji, then this exchange would make more sense. Kanon the begrudging accomplice making one act of rebellion too many, and Genji’s facade of professionalism slipping to show a hint of what may be true emotions below the surface. Except Genji is not in the basement with Kanon very much on purpose, so whatever materially happened to Kanon did not directly involve Genji, the most likely living target for these emotions.

It’s not even worth pretending Kinzo is alive enough in this moment to not only hear Kanon’s words, but also respond. Even in my initial hypothetical “narrative-compliant Third and Fourth Twilights” outline, for any of it to work Kinzo has to be dead at this moment. And more than that, Kanon specifically makes sure to distinguish between Kinzo and Beatrice in his speech. He has not only been led astray by Kinzo, but also by Beatrice. In this interaction, to Kanon, Kinzo and Beatrice are separate entities.

So the question becomes, as it has been from literally the start: who is Beatrice?

I don’t think it’s possible to answer this question in the direct sense of “what is the identity of the person behind the witch that killed Kanon”, but I think we can explore “what this figure we are calling Beatrice like as an individual?”. The Detective’s truth on the matter remains obscured to the point where any guesses at this point would be meaningless, but the Romantic’s truth remains a valid option. We don’t need to unmask Beatrice to get a sense of her character.

What we know about Beatrice in this chapter is thus: she appears via a cloud of butterflies, she is associated with the fantastical, and she makes the active choice to kill Kanon and wrap his death into another Twilight. From this, we can extrapolate a few things: this Beatrice operates at least in part in adherence to her own mythos, even if she doesn’t necessarily strictly uphold the Witch Narratives in the terms that the culprits have set out. She is not in total alignment with whatever scheme is going on with the Witch Narrative, and she has on some level a personal, spiteful disdain towards Kanon.

When Beatrice kills Kanon, she puts him down as the “furniture” he is. When he attempts his self-actualisation, there is a moment where the narrative insight we get into Beatrice condemns him as foolish and futile and vulgar. It is not simply annoying that Kanon is stepping out of his role. It actively repulses Beatrice on some level. From what we get of Beatrice, there is the impression that Kanon’s decision deeply violates some kind of taboo to the point where Beatrice’s mode of operation leaves the fantastical and dips into the visceral, even if only momentarily.

So what we can claim to learn is that there is something irreparably offensive to Beatrice about people stepping out of the confines of their pre-ordained roles, which is something incredibly interesting to consider. She holds a deep loathing towards Kanon for daring to defy his fate, more so than someone like Genji would if this were a mere case of Kanon messing up the Witch Narrative. Beatrice takes Kanon’s transgression personally, not in the sense that this is a specific attack on her, but in the sense that it upsets her sensibilities more than anything else could.

So why would that be? What about some small little servant choosing to throw off his symbol of abuse and oppression is so offensive to a mighty witch such as Beatrice? She’s centuries old, an accomplished alchemist, and brimming with supernatural power. According to all we know of the Beatrice mythos, she should be able to toss Kanon aside with a snap of her fingers. But there is a mockery towards him, a taunting and a toying coming from a personal degree of loathing.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Kanon got under Beatrice’s skin, but it’s something close. She takes something out on him for his transgression towards her - in his speech, Kanon marks out both Kinzo and Beatrice as individuals he is defying, and that has to be important. It’s clear to see why a furniture servant abandoning the degradation would upset fascist abuser supreme Kinzo, but what about this would be so upsetting to Beatrice? Why would she care at all?

I have some idea, but to elaborate on that I first need to talk about one other curious feature of Beatrice’s presentation in this chapter. She has as tangible a presence as you can get in this chapter, except for one detail: in her “conversation” with Kanon, Beatrice never actually speaks. Her “dialogue” is relayed through the narration and through Kanon’s own responses, but Beatrice herself remains voiceless.

The immediate effect of this is that Beatrice remains in obscurity even as she shuffles around the spotlight. We know in this chapter that she gets mad at Kanon and kills him, but we don’t get anything concrete about Beatrice. No face, no voice. In other words, Beatrice is not given an active presence in the story. She is relayed to us second-hand, even though she plays a crucial role in the events in the boiler room.

There is something to this beyond the benefits to the mystery narrative that keeping Beatrice obscured entails. Of course this presentation keeps us guessing about several elements of Beatrice’s existence - we can’t say either way what Beatrice’s physical form looks like or what it could mean. Revealing Beatrice definitively as either a human or a witch would run counter to Umineko’s narrative worse than anything Kanon could ever dream of.

However, that does not necessarily mean that the only way Beatrice could have appeared in this chapter was in this way. It’s not enough that she’s a hidden presence. She’s also a passive one. She performs no direct action. She never directly tells us anything. Beatrice is kept in check by the narrative as a spectral entity. The only “active” thing we see of Beatrice happens to be her own feelings towards Kanon’s desperate stance.

Beatrice is held in fantasy and only fantasy. The one exception to this is still little more than a gesture at Romantic examination. Beatrice has no tangible, material, Detective’s presence to her. Even in death, Kanon’s murder is not described as someone plunging the stake into him. The stake appears and he is impaled by it - passive voice for emphasis. The only “active” step taken in the death sequence is when Kanon pulls the stake out of his chest. Nothing is directly manipulated by Beatrice’s hands.

Technically, we can’t actually say Beatrice does anything in this chapter. This is something that in truth ties into the broader presentation of Beatrice as a figure in Umineko. Going by the stories told by the servants about Beatrice beyond the Witch Narrative, there is a common thread in all these tales: Beatrice shows up and then something happens. Even in Shannon’s story of the injured servant, her tale is not “Beatrice pushed the servant down the stairs”. It is “a servant disrespected Beatrice and then fell down the stairs”.

There is a very understated and very curious denial of agency seen with Beatrice, on reflection. All she’s really allowed to do is sit there as a cloud of butterflies and be an emblem for misfortune happening that is later accredited to her. I’ve referred to Beatrice as a murderwitch throughout this liveblog, but what’s interesting is that while this reputation is there, we aren’t ever shown more than the reputation itself.

The excuse so far has been that the literal witch Beatrice has been unable to do anything on account of needing to be resurrected in order to return to the material plane first. But even that narrative is something contradicted to the point where it can’t be trusted. Kinzo’s scenes make it clear this is all an attempt to summon Beatrice from a place nobody can normally reach, yet he is also convinced in some scenes that Beatrice is already there, watching him with amusement from the sidelines.

This could be explained away with the whole “Beatrice lacks a physical form and thus she isn’t really there” line of reasoning, except that in chapter 14 she appears to quite literally orchestrate Kanon’s death, and prior to that she allegedly had the means of injuring a servant who disrespected her. How can Beatrice cause harm to servants and yet also be so far removed from the physical world that a violent occult ritual is needed to ensure her presence?

Beatrice is not there, and yet Beatrice is there. In other words, Beatrice “exists”. It’s not just that Beatrice “exists” but that the act of being Beatrice is to inherently inhabit a position of “existence”. Beatrice is a passive entity, strictly defined by indirect non-involvement.

In other words, from a certain angle, Beatrice The Golden Witch is just as restrictive a role as “furniture”. To be Beatrice is to be unseen, voiceless, inactive. No matter how much you may feel or hate or rage you are not given the cathartic release of wrapping your hands around someone’s throat. For all her loathing of Kanon, the only tool at Beatrice’s disposal is to continue to perpetuate her own myth-narrative, merely folding Kanon into the pattern. And at this stage, the Witch Narrative is more akin to a process than a personal action. There is something very distanced and abstracted about killing for the Twilights; it is about continuing to engage with the horror-mystery and not about yourself and your own feelings.

Even through the metaphorical allegories of Beatrice this mode is seen. Genji is bound to the role of Beatrice, defined as his tragic and terrible devotion to Kinzo. Genji couldn’t have escaped this fate if he’d tried. Kanon is coerced into upholding the Witch Narrative through his position as furniture, thus conflating both states of being into one and the same thing. Even further back, whoever is behind the story of the alchemist that gave Kinzo the gold is reduced to a portrait of a white woman in the mansion’s hallway, stripped of everything but a confining ideal. To be Beatrice is to be contained by other people’s demands and expectations.

When it’s laid out like this, it is no surprise that Beatrice reacts to Kanon’s rebellion with outrage. This choice is the one thing she can never do because her whole existence as Beatrice is predicated on that not being an option. Beatrice, no matter the form she takes, is trapped in her role. To cease being trapped by the role of Beatrice is also to lose the power granted by being Beatrice. She is the demon’s roulette. Anyone who risks becoming something more than their assigned category is anathema to her entire nature.

Kanon rebels against Kinzo’s will where Beatrice never could. No wonder she kills him for it.

But, of course, now we need to think about how Beatrice actually managed to kill Kanon in the first place. And to do that we need to revisit the next most obvious from the start question: how many people are on Rokkenjima?

The 19th person issue is one that at times feels too blatant to give more than a cursory amount of attention to: there are nineteen people “existing” on Rokkenjima because Beatrice is an immaterially real shared identity construct. There only being eighteen physical bodies is irrelevant to this count - the number of “people” increases further if you start thinking about people’s multiplicitous selves as their own entities. Witch Maria and Human Maria, adultsona George and kidsona George, Shannon and Sayo, Natsuhi and Ushiromiya Natsuhi, et cetera. Beatrice being an additional facet of the peddlers of the Witch Narrative is merely this mechanism brought to an extreme point.

Except, cutting past all the fantasy and obfuscation, Kanon does still in fact get killed in the boiler room. At the time of this murder, either eight or nine people are already dead by this point. And of the eight other survivors, seven of them very conspicuously are not in a position to murder him at all.

So this dilemma boils down to a singular issue: either Kumasawa killed Kanon, or a nineteenth individual did. The story goes to great lengths to ensure that this is the setup we’re working with here. Where Eva and Hideyoshi were allegedly killed in a way only a witch could have done, Kanon could have only been logistically killed by a witch and nobody else.

There is of course a third angle here, and that’s that Kanon killed himself. It’s technically an option on the table, but one I am not sure has much, if any, basis. The entire scene hinges around Kanon choosing to act out in defiance in a space devoid of observers. There is nobody save for the reader for Kanon to convince of the authenticity of his words and motives. For this premise to work, it would almost certainly necessitate a level of metatextual awareness from Kanon that we have not seen at all.

Kanon acts and reacts to a threat in the room. Kanon makes it clear that his goal is to take this person down with him if he can’t save himself. Everything points to there being a second person in the room with Kanon capable of inflicting harm on him. A person that would, then, hypothetically, flee out of the back door and into the night before being found.

At this point in the story, even Battler is fairly on board with there being a 19th person moving around on the island. After all, nobody among the group of survivors could have been responsible for killing Kanon, save for maybe the incredibly frail Kumasawa. The options are pared down to Kumasawa, suicide, or a 19th person. This person’s identity is unknown, but the fact of their existence is, on the surface of things, pretty undeniable.

This, however, feels like a trap. The existence of a 19th person is part and parcel of the Witch Narrative. To readily agree that there is a 19th person on the island is to buy into the same immaterial theatre spawning the magic circles and the demonic stakes and letters speaking of alchemy. You either accept all of it, or you accept none of it. It’s already been established that the occult artifacts at the murder scene are little more than decoration placed by somebody doctoring the bodies. If this fact is true, then the existence of a nineteenth person must therefore be false.

But if Kanon was murdered by somebody, that somebody was not among the eight survivors. Thus the contradiction making this yet another “impossible” mystery. The only two points of data we have are totally irreconcilable.

Save for one read on the situation: Kanon was killed by somebody outside of the group of survivors, and this individual is also not a 19th person. There is exactly one way in which this can be true, and that’s to consider the possibility that the person that killed Kanon is among those presumed dead.

This is something that’s not impossible. The obvious objection is that for a person who we think is dead not being dead is that that would invalidate the epitaph murder ritual, but we’ve already established that the sequence of events only has value as far as convincing the survivors of something inescapably occult. If twilights can happen out of order, then there’s no reason why we need to assume that a victim has to actually be dead. It’s all about the affect.

If this were true, it would allow somebody outside of the group to move around and kill without disrupting the premise of the eighteen on Rokkenjima. This would mean that Kanon’s killer is one of the victims of either the first or second twilights.

From the outset, both pools of suspects are problematic. Eva and Hideyoshi, even if they weren’t dead somehow, were both physically in the guest room at the time of the murder - there’d be no way for either of them to sneak by the others down into the basement to kill Kanon. The six on the first twilight, beyond being mangled past recognition, are stuck within a locked room to which only Natsuhi has the key.

I still think that if we’re to entertain this possibility, the culprit must be one of those assumed to be inside the garden storehouse. Which means we’ll need to interrogate the function and construction of this reverse locked room.

It’s an established fact that the shed is locked from the outside. It is also an established fact that there is only one key, and this key is held by Natsuhi who has not had a single meaningful opportunity to sneak off and unlock the storehouse.

The only way to interrogate this setup without contradicting the physical facts of the story is through a Detective/Romantic examination of chapter 10’s narration. What we know are the above datapoints. Everything else is extrapolation and assumption, especially if we abide by the non-Battler POV = Romantic obfuscation logic.

So, extending that line of thinking leads us to distrust anything that can’t be immediately verified by the scenes in the parlor. The most crucial fact, and the one that the argument I am making hinges on, is that everybody that was killed still being in the storehouse when it was locked up cannot be trusted with absolute certainty. The only people on the scene during the locking of the storehouse were those involved in the Witch Narrative to some degree, and Natsuhi, who by her own admission could not stomach to look upon the scene for longer than necessary.

Who is to say that, during this period of uncertainty and unreliable perspective, somebody playing dead inside the storehouse slipped out while Natsuhi was looking away in disgust? This would facilitate the existence of an individual who is not part of the group of survivors, yet who also does not contravene the 18 person premise.

There are holes in this, of course. It’s a huge leap to assume that Natsuhi somehow missed a whole person getting up and leaving the storehouse, and there are numerous questions as to how the narrative-peddling servants would permit someone to roam free who would then later betray the occult illusion and murder Kanon. But the basis of this theory is not impossible, so perhaps there are ways to work around this.

We already know Natsuhi’s perspective is highly unreliable, as proven earlier in that exact chapter. She so desperately wants to hide the fact of Kinzo’s death that she starts to buy her own lies, having imagined hallucination conversations in a most likely empty study to verify her own beliefs. If brain ghost grandpa can “exist” through Natsuhi, then it is much less of a stretch for her to willingly or unknowingly let something like this slip. Maybe she was in her own head. Maybe she tuned it out in an act of extreme denial. Either way, it is theoretically possible for Natsuhi to overlook something that big.

As to the servants permitting this, the obvious answer is that this person was allowed to let go as a contingency by Genji in the event of a Witch Narrative stalemate. An additional body roaming around that the audience of this theatre has already written off would be a huge boon in authenticating his own crimes. This person killing Kanon, then, would not necessarily be the end of the world for Genji - as per maybe-Kinzo’s words regurgitated through a hallucinatory phantom, total annihilation is as valid an option on the table as any other outcome. A roulette can land on many outcomes, and an “impossible” killer taking Kanon out transforms this individual into Beatrice in the consciousness of the survivors, furthering the plan either way.

Given that, the question then becomes: which of the dead six could theoretically do this? Who here would pretend to be dead, skulk around the island for a time, and then end up killing Kanon?

I think there are a few suspects we can eliminate off the bat. Krauss and Shannon, the half-face corpses, most likely don’t fit here. As individuals, it does not track with who they are to imagine them acting this way - going by my theory, this would place Krauss as someone who played possum to survive his own assassination attempt backfiring on him. There is absolutely no way that someone like that wouldn’t have immediately come out of the shadows to expose Eva and Hideyoshi; Krauss didn’t even have it in him to keep his embezzlement bragging on the downlow. As for Shannon, the victim in this situation is Kanon. There is absolutely not a single scenario in which Shannon would kill Kanon for any possible reason - he is probably the only person in her life towards whom she feels unconditional love and trust. We’ll never know for a fact how Shannon/Sayo felt towards Kanon’s desperation to save her, but even in the most emotionally complicated interpretation, it still makes no sense for Kanon to be killed by her in retaliation, and it makes no sense for Kanon to have done anything he did in the intervening twilights had Shannon actually survived somehow.

More than that, I have always thought that Krauss and Shannon’s faces being half-destroyed is as close to cast iron proof as you can get that they are definitely, totally, for real dead, for the simple fact that a mystery story’s base assumption is that anybody with injuries that buck the trend are suspicious. Instead, I think this is more likely a case of a tree hiding itself in a forest.

Which turns our attention to the three failsiblings and Gohda. It’s not Gohda, because narratively it makes sense for Gohda to be as much of a victim of circumstance as Shannon in the end despite his bullying of her - middle manager and minimum wage worker alike are insects before the CEO. His abuse of a shred of worthless power cannot save him, therefore he must be dead. Rosa, likewise, would not work narrative-wise to survive. She had a complete character trajectory highlighting the revolving wheel of abuse within the introductory chapters. Her character was never destined for anything more than being doomed by the systems she never managed to do more than perpetuate - surviving the First Twilight would give her licence to try to escape the cycle, which would undermine the whole point of everything that came before.

So we’re left now with two candidates: Rudolf and Kyrie. Both of whom are understated characters with ulterior motives that were never fully elaborated on before they met their ends. Kyrie’s conversations with Battler hinted at the existence of a strategist’s mind with a scheme of her own separate from the gambit Eva strongarmed everyone into going along with. Rudolf, meanwhile, has the lone dangling thread of his “tonight I think I will be killed” comment, the sole thing that, as of this point in the story, we have no clue as to what he could have really meant by that. All we can glean is that the “murder” comment was most likely not a literal portent, but a fear of his that whatever secret he carried would see many people turn against him - either way, there is a Big Thing with Rudolf that never got elaborated on at any point ever.

For this reason, and a couple more, I am inclined to think that if there is a person playing dead, then that person is Rudolf. It would give us room to explore this abandoned plot thread, and it would create a full circle parallel with the comments earlier in the story about how much Rudolf acts like Kinzo - the dead father pretending to be alive, the alive son pretending to be dead. And more than any of that, more than any narrative or thematic reason for this working, is the fact that there is something associated with Rudolf that has otherwise only come up with the discussion of dead bodies.

I am, of course, talking about makeup.

There is a point made of highlighting that Rudolf wears makeup in the earlier chapters as a means of highlighting his superficiality and vanity. He is the pervert covered in glamour. He is, quite literally, bringing a false face to the family conference. Rudolf’s face, his true self and his secrets, have been concealed from the start. Makeup as an image is tied to Rudolf and used as a reinforcement of the fact that this man is not to be trusted.

The word “makeup” is also used in exactly one other context: the mutilated bodies. First we are told that all this gore has ruined the immaculate makeup on Rudolf’s face, and then further down the line we are treated to the description of blood described as "makeup” plastering the corpses. It’s a very curious word to throw into Battler’s panicked monologue, incongruent enough to stick in your mind more than most details.

Given that, it is not much of a stretch to assume we are seeing the literal masquerading as the figurative - this is the whole MO of the Witch Narrative, after all. In a sea of real blood and guts, who would notice that one person in the group was instead pained with makeup? We already know that there is an artificial substance in abundance on Rokkenjima that can be used to mimic the appearance of blood - if it can be painted on doors to create the illusion of a magic circle, then surely it can also be painted on a human face to create the illusion of a corpse.

So in this scenario, Rudolf sits pretty and painted in a sea of bodies, and slips out at the last possible moment. He then hangs around somewhere unseen for a while, before being the one to murder Kanon.

On several levels, this makes sense - whatever schemes Rudolf and/or Kyrie had cooking were derailed by the Witch Narrative, and as someone firmly cemented in the Ushiromiya hierarchy his first instinct would be to take it out on Kanon. This would serve as an explanation for the loathing and disgust conveyed by Beatrice in the boiler room scene, but it does still leave several elements unanswered.

If we assume the Beatrice stuff to be a fantastical plastering over a mundane killing, then we need to ask why Kanon would think and say the things he does if the person before him was Rudolf. Rudolf is emblematic of several kinds of power and abuse, but he is not directly a literal or metaphorical figurehead for Kanon’s oppression. Rudolf is most Kinzo-like when his face is full of makeup - it is an insincere mask with no substance to it. Rudolf is someone Kanon only sees once a year. It makes no sense for Rudolf to be someone Kanon feels the need to take a stand against like this. Rudolf doesn’t really have it in him to be a satisfying Beatrice.

Unless, of course, something changed during the time the surviving Rudolf was off-screen. There are eight whole hours he is unaccounted for. Enough time, perhaps, for someone dedicated enough to solve the epitaph and learn of whatever grim truths lie alongside the gold vault? Perhaps something that relates to his final unspoken secret? There’s still a lot of ground to cover in that area. There’s every possibility the answer lies there, that somewhere down the line we’ll find out how someone could so easily embody a Beatrice position.

That said, this is not the only option for explaining things. Beyond the idea of bodies not being dead and blood makeup and failsons turning into witches, there is something else very weird that goes on in this chapter that absolutely needs looking at, and might even take us to a stranger place than that.

Structurally, chapter 14 is strange. It is a chapter with several oddities - the appearance of the otherwise ephemeral and totally unseen Beatrice, and it is a chapter without a defined timestamp. Every other chapter in Umineko tells us when it happens and goes out of its way to make sure it doesn’t tip its hand too soon with the Beatrice enigma. So for Kanon’s death chapter to feature a lack of time and an abundance of butterflies and other witch-related happenings is more than a little suspect.

Namely because this is not even the first time this has happened in this story. There is one other chapter in the story which deprives us of a timestamp and shows us a golden butterfly, and that’s chapter 9. Which is also, curiously and alarmingly, Shannon’s final chapter.

I spent a lot of time going over chapter 9, highlighting the strangeness of its structure and what that could mean. My conclusion at the time was that we were witnessing something doctored and unreal - to borrow terminology I’ve learned since, my conclusion was that chapter 9 was a “fantastical scene”. I also spoke about how Shannon and Kanon have the curious quirk of being the only ones to ever actually see with their own eyes evidence of Beatrice’s existence, a fact which continues to hold true even in chapter 14.

Now, you could argue that this “disruption” is evidence of the metatextual ripple effect Beatrice’s manifestation is having on Umineko’s reality, but even that wouldn’t be a satisfying answer, because there is also one other time Shannon and Kanon have had structurally identical scenes, and that example was completely devoid of any hints of Beatrice or magic.

Way back at the start of the story, Shannon and Kanon have basically the same introduction scene: they awkwardly present themselves before the family, they fumble their duties and drop something, one adult berates them while another adult berates the first for being too harsh on them, Battler makes the same comparison to a waitress dropping a fork for both of them, and then they have a debrief scene afterwards that hints at deeper, more complicated feelings towards the situation.

Shannon and Kanon enter the story using the same narrative beats with a slightly different retexture. Shannon and Kanon also leave the story using the same narrative shape with a slightly different retexture.

Both walk off on their own going directly against their assigned duties - Shannon heads to the mansion instead of the guesthouse, and Kanon runs off on his own instead of sticking with Kumasawa. Both have a conflict between their “furniture” and real selves - Shannon calms the Sayo inside her to prevent causing a scene, and Kanon attempts to cast aside his furniture role in order to directly cause a scene. Both witness glowing butterflies on their own in a dark corner, and both are heavily implied to have been directly murdered by Beatrice more than any other person in the story. The only difference is that for Kanon, we see it happen, and I can’t help but wonder that had chapter 9 been a full length chapter that we wouldn’t have seen something very similar unfold with Shannon.

This is yet another heap of stuff to add to the pile of “weird parallels and symmetries between Shannon and Kanon” that keeps growing throughout the story. This still isn’t even really touching the bizarre relationship they have to Beatrice and all the ways that that’s played out - both having the ghost story in common, both occupying an odd proximity to the role of “Beatrice”, Shannon as vessel and Kanon as performer. There is a lot of this kind of stuff swirling around the two of them, and I think it really comes to a head with Kanon’s death.

After all, one way of reading this chapter is that both Shannon and Kanon end up suffering the exact same destiny. Neither escapes being furniture, and Beatrice kills them for it. Shannon buried Sayo where she shouldn’t have, and Kanon’s casting aside of being furniture came too little too late. Different textures, but the same shape. This, combined with the fact that both are notorious Witch Narrative spinners in their own ways, paints a very bizarre picture full of question marks with no clear answer.

Nobody else in Umineko shares this level of direct parallel, so it has to mean something deeply significant that Shannon and Kanon are entwined like this. I don’t have the answer yet, but I do think that this is not the end of it. I think that as soon as the metafiction stuff really comes into focus that all of this will become extremely relevant. These two are wrapped around Umineko’s core story structure in a way nobody else is, narratively weird in a way that is only otherwise seen with entities that “exist” in the story. I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but there very much is something going on that cannot and should not be ignored.

And one final thing, one final deranged detail that’s worth pointing out that threatens to possibly undermine several thousand words of this very writeup, is that the word “makeup” appears in the description of Kanon’s death. He lies there, hole in his chest, blood makeup dribbling down his body. I previously asserted that this was indicative of a surviving Rudolf taking up the mantle of being a threatening individual acting outside the group, but Kanon also has this word applied to him. A hint towards his killer, or something else?

If Kanon’s death is tainted with the word “makeup”, this means we should suspect something about it. Perhaps it is merely drawing attention to the fact that the stake to the chest is just decoration and affect - to get really tinfoil with it, Kanon managed to pull the stake from his chest before collapsing. If everything is fantastical, perhaps so too is the assertion that the stake was ever in his chest in the first place - perhaps for whatever reason his assailant did not have the time/means to set this up exactly like an epitaph murder. Or perhaps something more is going on. After all, Kanon leaves the chapter mortally wounded, but he is not actually confirmed dead. There’s wriggle room here for something else to happen.

Maybe, just maybe, what we saw here was merely another farce. Kanon taking the chance to fake his death and take himself out of the story while he still can - killing “Kanon” the furniture so the human beneath the mask can survive. Notions of Beatrice and a 19th person and an impossible murder as theatrics to cover up the fact that the tragedy at the heart of the scene is without substance. If so, the question would be whether or not this was intended by The Plan or if this is indeed Kanon acting out on his own. Has Kanon gone behind the scenes to be Genji’s “ghost” because there is no miraculously-surviving Rudolf? Are there two people in this position now? Is there any true substance to any of these theories at all?

I don’t know. I think the truth lies somewhere among all this noise, but I do think it’s starting to come into focus.

#umineko #umineko liveblog

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theonethatyaks93 · 9 months

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HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY ANIMANIACS!!!!!

I just want to say how truly amazed I am with this show. There are very few words that can describe it. I put a few in the picture seen above, but this is barely anything compared to everything I've said. Animaniacs has changed my life in ways that many shows can only dream of. And I'm thrilled to be here today to celebrate its legacy.

I wasn't born in the 90's. I didn't grow up with this show like I know a ton of people did. I was exposed to it, mainly through the Hub Network ads for reruns, the once-in-a-while YouTube video reference, and even in fifth grade when my teacher showed us a clip of "Wakko's America" for our state capital test (which by the way I passed). I didn't acknowledge this show's presence, at least until 2020. That was a rough year, not only for me, but for everyone. Online school sucked. I couldn't see my friends. I was always crying myself to sleep and staying up late just watching videos to wash away my sadness and hurting. It was hell. I didn't have any comfort. At the absolute worst of times around October, I saw that one of my favorite channels posted a video on the trailer for the reboot of a show called Animaniacs. I was curious, mostly since I'd never heard about it before (well, I thought I hadn't). But the way the characters looked and the amount of people talking about it got me interested enough to click on the video. I listened to the reviewer's thoughts, not really understanding much, yet still being enticed to continue. I watched the actual trailer afterwards and...the rest is history.

I instantly fell in love. I watched the trailer on repeat before the reboot's release, laughing and singing along. I researched the show more and discovered a ton of voice actors I knew. I loved the characters, especially Yakko, I listened to the songs, I watched the interviews, and I talked about it constantly to my family and friends. While I didn't have Hulu, I still kept up with the reboot quite heavily. For Christmas, I got my first piece of merch, a T-shirt, and I got the first 25 episodes of the original show. I watched them on repeat with my sister and we both laughed, sang, and danced around whenever the show came on. After taking a fandom break, I got back into the show in 2021, which came with a new appreciation for Pinky and The Brain and fanfiction. Around this time, I was finally able to watch the reboot and entire original series since I got Hulu. My merchandise collection expanded, my knowledge of the show grew exponentially, and my desire to contribute to the fandom was intense. Not much has changed since then. Granted my merchandise collection is bigger, I can do impressions of a few characters, I met some of the voice actors, I joined the community on Tumblr, I actually wrote some fanfiction, and I've seen so many Animaniacs episodes now that it'll make your head spin. I'm so proud to be a super fan.

My appreciation and adoration for the Animaniacs franchise knows no bounds. It changed my life in amazing ways. And I can't believe its thirty years old today. I'm struggling to keep my emotions in right now, it's all so surreal. So, to all my followers I encourage you to give this show all your love today. It deserves it. Thank you Animaniacs. Thank you so much for everything you've done. You have made me a better individual and have fueled my love of animation for nearly three years. I hope you continue to inspire many more like me to laugh, be silly, and sing "Yakko's World" to pass a geography test. Animaniacs is the greatest show of all time, and I'll never stop saying that. (Ps. this isn't the last Animaniacs Anniversary related post I'm making! The next one will be long! And I'll also be showcasing my Animaniacs merch collection! Stay tuned!) Goodnight Everybody!!

#animaniacs #animaniacs 30th anniversary #this show is everything to me #i'm so happy it has lasted this long #pinky and the brain #I love this show so much #I hope y'all love it too!!

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astrangergivingthestrangewelcome · 2 years

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It Should Have Been Jonathan: Why Swapping Jonathan and Mina's Roles for the Blood Ceremony Makes Dracula a Better Story Both Thematically and Plotwise

Bram Stoker did not write it this way, so swapping Jonathan in is not a headcanon, but rather an adaptational choice that adaptations like Murray Mysteries or fic writers (like me!) choose to make over and over again. Here's why you should engage with this premise.

(No spoilers for those caught up to October 3rd of Dracula Daily)

(non-graphic mention of rape, sexual assault, etc)

The Story As It Is: The Good Points

Jonathan um. Goes Through it this novel. If you hadn't noticed. Mina takes care of him a lot, and after the blood ceremony, Jonathan gets to take care of her. This is very sweet, and I do enjoy that both Mina and Jonathan take turns rather than Jonathan always needing help.

It's not like it's unrealistic. Dracula would totally retaliate against the men fighting against him by targeting Mina. He super would see this as very apt revenge, and he's definitely that brand of sexist that sees women as a prize.

This plot point goes out of its way to frame the actions of the men in excluding Mina as utterly disastrous, which is cool.

Mina as the Victim: What is it Accomplishing + How Did She Get There

Mina spends most of the novel taking care of the people Dracula's victimized. She is a force to be reckoned with, but as Stoker wrote her she is a very good sort of English woman, pious, obedient to the men, respectable, etc. etc. Although she and Lucy have very different characters, when Dracula targets them they serve the same role as good English women who are coming under attack by Dracula, an evil Eastern European man. In Lucy's case he literally kills her and in her place is a hot sexually impure corruption of the original person. Victorian nightmare fuel. In addition, there are all kinds of sexual non-con rape vibes to what he does to both Lucy and Mina. Hot forceful foreign men are invading England and targeting good women. That's the whole fear that Dracula represents.

This manifestation of xenophobia doesn't hold up at all. For me, it's always been the worst element of the novel. I don't find it compelling.

Something else you might have picked up from this update: martyr talk martyr talk martyr talk. While (trust me) Mina is still smart and still given a lot of agency by Stoker to break her own curse, after the blood ceremony, she suffers Very Piously. Like a hair's breadth away from publishing a video entitled "How To Suffer A Tormentor From Hell in A God Honoring Way" on her Youtube Channel.

I personally don't find this interesting. I don't think it holds up. I don't want to see Mina suffer like a Perfect Little Christian. I want to see her kick ass and take names.

In conclusion: the driving forces behind Mina's attack and trauma are at best uninspired and outdated, and there is a very nasty undercurrent of xenophobia and sexism there as well.

I don't love it. I'm either bored or actively turned off by what Stoker is trying to say.

Jonathan as the Victim: What Could It Accomplish?

Dracula choosing to attack Jonathan again would shift the narrative so that it becomes a story about an abuser who will Not Let Go. An abuser who follows across a continent. An abuser who waits until you've just started to recover from the first round of trauma and started to feel safe again to start an onslaught even more vicious and concerted than the last.

I think Stoker laid the groundwork for this twist to be more terrifying and compelling than for Mina to be targeted 2/3rds of the way through. Obviously Dracula is an abuser no matter what, but it so much more terrifying to me to think of him playing a long-term game of cat and mouse over like 6 months with one man, than it is to see him target Mina over the span of three days.

This is also in character for Dracula. I agree with the common interpretation that Dracula continued to target Lucy even when it got ridiculously difficult and dangerous to continue because he can't stand to lose a test of dominance.

If we carry that over to Jonathan there is absolutely no way that Dracula would be ok with learning Jonathan escaped and is recovering. He would Hate that. He would absolutely want to target Jonathan again.

So you remember "I too can love" "tonight is mine" the gaps in the journal? All that abuse that is hinted at and never explored? The same sort of sexual assault motifs that are so present in Lucy and Mina's attacks? The implication that Jonathan was fed on by Dracula? All these hints that Stoker doesn't do anything with or develop further? Well Making Jonathan the one who undergoes the blood ceremony gives us a very natural chance to discuss them again.

In conclusion: Jonathan's history with the Count makes him being the victim (again) a more compelling story. We've watched the Count slowly escalate aggression with him over the course of a novel, and this final attempt to literally claim Jonathan's soul and make him a thrall is the natural conclusion of that. To me those are some compelling stakes

Jonathan being Targeting Makes for Less Plotholes (and less Infuriatingly Sexist Plotpoints)

Not that Mina being excluded is unrealistic or unworthy of engaging with in the original novel but I find it to be such a drag

And actually to a certain point it is unrealistic to me because I think the decision to completely cut her off and stop talking to her about anything comes completely out of left field. Everyone was acting like she'd work with them in some capacity right up until Van Helsing says differently. I find that jarring.

Switching the target to Jonathan eliminates that plotpoint entirely, which I think is cool. Maybe Stoker never would have written Mina as one of the boys, but it's not the 19th century anymore and we can write Mina however we want. I think having a Mina that sticks up for herself and refuses to be excluded is neat.

But on what grounds would they choose to exclude Jonathan? Well I actually think that some obvious solutions present themselves.

Murray Mysteries goes the "Jonathan you have PTSD you shouldn't retraumatize yourself route" which works for them, since it's a 21st century retelling

But I actually think it could potentially make sense for Van Helsing to want to exclude Jonathan, and to need to be secretive about it.

So you know how in the canon Dracula gives Mina his blood partially because his intention was to make himself a spy? The plan was to use an unwitting Mina to his advantage but the polycule bursting in killed that idea.

Well if I were Van Helsing, I would immediately suspect that the Count had fucked with Jonathan at the castle. I mean it would make so much sense wouldn't it? Jonathan was there for two months, he could be compromised in so many different ways.

If Van Helsing had these suspicions, then it would be the natural next step to try and exclude Jonathan from the business as completely and utterly as possible under whatever flimsy excuses he can make up (and this man has been making up flimsy excuses for the whole novel so it's in character).

This adaptational change would lead into Jonathan getting attacked again very smoothly, except in this version, Van Helsing's reasoning has more grounds to it than just Sexism, so he would be not only a smarter character, but also one I'd want to punch less.

I think that makes for a stronger plot

Also it seems very natural to me that Jonathan wouldn't realize he'd been attacked again by Dracula. More natural than Mina not realizing. This man has been having PTSD nightmares and flashbacks about Count Dracula attacking him for the entire summer and early fall. Canonically his trauma made it difficult for him to separate dreams from reality in the past. He would just assume they were particularly nasty dreams.

This would also apply to Mina not noticing Jonathan was being fed on as well. She's used to him not looking well and having bad nights. It would not immediately be apparent to her that this was different that the usual.

In conclusion: Jonathan being the one who is attacked opens the door to other obvious plot changes that create a better story structurally.

Okay You've Convinced Me, I Want to Explore This

Listen to Murray Mysteries! Listen to Murray Mysteries if I haven't convinced you, it's really good and it's the only adaptation I know of that actually adapts the Polycule in a good way.

Read my series! I don't mean to self-promote but if you couldn't tell I feel incredibly strongly about this premise and I don't see people tapping into the potential so I've had to do it myself. Strange Wonders is a series of short stories that explore the plot of Dracula if this change had happened. The goal was to create something that mimicked Bram Stoker's tone and style as much as possible, while being the story I liked better in my head. The first in the series, Uncommon Horrors and Unnatural Hurts is Dracula Daily friendly, and the next in the series The Resilience of the Dawn will be Dracula Daily friendly by October 4th. I'm still updating as well although the story is technically complete and has a climax.

here some would stand between you and death by princ3ssf33t is a great little one-shot fic I've found that deals with the role reversal and features some stellar Jonmina

There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods by calliopes_pen is another epic reimagining where both the Harkers are targeted by Dracula

Your fic/art/content here!! Endless potential.

TL;DR

Having Jonathan undergo the blood ceremony instead of Mina makes for richer horror, stronger character arcs, less teethgrinding sexism, and less plotholes. The Dracula fandom should be exploring it more.

#dracula #dracula daily #meta #dracula meta #jonathan harker #mina harker #rape tw #rape cw

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bedlamsbard · 2 months

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I know this is kind of out of nowhere but for the longest time I was super weird and mentally dismissive of your burning out of Star Wars because I was someone who survived the OEU's insanity back in the day and managed not to burn out of Star Wars in the face of ridiculous nonsense like the Yuuzhan Vong and Killiks, so if I could survive that, you were of course entitled to dislike Star Wars but I still found it silly. Anyway I just finished watching Tales of the Jedi(Resolve) and I Get It Now.

...I recognise that may not be the most hinged thing to say to someone I don't actually know, and apologise for my mild to moderate insanity; I slept three hours, am very sick, it's shark week, and my brain seized on you as someone who'd Get It and who I had been hard on in my thoughts in the past, but, like, none of that actually affected you until I randomly said it? So anyway sorry for babbling at you like that lmfao, I'll stop talking now

Okay. I've been thinking about these since I saw them; I saw the first one before the second one arrived, which was a hell of a thing to wake up to since I saw it first thing in the morning. While my usual policy is to leave messages along these lines in my inbox, I was genuinely upset and wanted to respond once I had a more coherent reaction than "why me, gods, why does this always happen to me."

So, first of all, I'm sorry that you had an installment in canon that didn't do it for you; it happens to the best of us and there are very few people in fandom who uncritically (or even critically) enjoy everything in canon, especially in a fandom as big and long-running as Star Wars.

It's also very common for people to fall out of love with a fandom, even a fandom they've been in for a very long time; I would say that fen who have consistently been in one fandom for an extended period of time are probably rarer than those who haven't. It's not always because there is one installment that is just The Worst; often that's just a tipping point for fen who have been on the edge for a while. (Ask your average former MCU fan who left after Avengers Endgame.) Other times fen just drift away from a fandom without a reason to push them out. Maybe their favorite characters have died, maybe the canon is no longer telling stories they're interested in even if none of those stories are "bad," maybe it's a closed canon and without new stories there's nothing to keep them there; there's any number of factors.

I had a very dramatic breakup with Star Wars three years ago, and it was about three years after I really should have gotten out of the fandom, because I had not been having a good time for a while at that point. And honestly, considering that I hadn't had a healthy relationship with either Star Wars or the fandom for a while before that, for various reasons that go well beyond what was happening in canon, arguably I should have gotten out even earlier. However, I'm monofannish to a fault and I really needed something that would actually kick me to a new fandom -- which meant it couldn't come from Star Wars.

I don't really dislike Star Wars as a whole. There are individual installments that I quite dislike, there are some that I still love, and the vast majority of Star Wars I'm neutral on. I do however have a very fucked up relationship with Star Wars, including the canon, the PTB, and the fandom itself. I have gotten regular abuse on Wake and Gambit for the past ten years, which really screwed up my relationship with AO3 and with the prequel era. There is canon that I really, really dislike, some of it because it personally does nothing for me (the ST), some of it because from my point of view, it completely fucked over a story I love (Rebels S4, TCW S7, some other stuff that contradicts stuff from the EU I love; I came out of the EU too), some of it because I just plain don't like it (THR, most of the comics), and some of it because watching it just plain made me feel like I was being gaslit, which is not something I say lightly (Mando is the worst offender, but there are others). A lot of these are problems that could come out of any fandom, especially a large, long-running, multi-media fandom; I know a lot of Marvel people who have very similar problems, though I think the scale tends to be slightly different there just because the canon is set up differently.

When I switched fandoms, I had to recalibrate my entire relationship to fandom, to canon, to AO3, and to how I interacted with all of them. I still have to check myself in most of those places because my relationship with Star Wars had screwed me up so much. I had to train myself into being able to post on AO3 again; I do talk regularly about how a lot of what I write is shaped by trying to avoid getting the kind of reactions I got and still get from my Star Wars fic, even years later. I have to make conscious decisions not to engage with every part of the canon without feeling like a failed fan, especially the installments I'm pretty sure I'll dislike, because I tried to do that in Star Wars and it regularly messed me up. As a cosplayer, I still have a fairly bad reaction to even seeing the word "approvable," and it took a while for me not to have a similar reaction to "screen-accurate." I'm still destashing most of my Star Wars merch and right now, my reaction to seeing new Marvel merch isn't "ooh, would I wear/use this?" it's "when I inevitably have a horrendous breakup with this fandom will I be able to resell it?" which is not a really healthy relationship to have with a fandom. (I have mostly moved off this but not entirely.) I knew that Star Wars had screwed my relationship with Disney World, when I had a panic attack on Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind because I was so terrified that it was going to be ~necessary canon, even though Marvel has never operated that way; Star Wars does with Galaxy's Edge, which I don't really like being in anymore either.

And yes, I'm aware all of these are an extreme overreaction to getting out of a fandom. I'm not happy about it either and I wish it wasn't happening. It's better now than it was a couple years ago and I'm frankly glad I'm not in the fandom anymore; I'm happy for people who are or who have gotten back into it and are having a good time. I am not one of them; I may some day be one again, but probably not anytime soon.

But even if I didn't have this specific fucked up relationship with Star Wars, a fandom I have not been in for three years at this point, sometimes people just burn out on a fandom. I'm not a CSI:NY fan anymore, either. (Which my last big fandom prior to Narnia, which I just drifted away from. I've only been in five big writing fandoms over twenty years.)

#thelearnedsoldier #bedlam replies #I haven't been in star wars fandom for THREE YEARS #THREE YEARS

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azulas-lightning-bolt · 3 months

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guys I just want you to know that azula is my fav atla character (right above katara/toph/suki can you tell I like girls) but I’m actually going insane about mako right now.

also for the like,, five people who liked my last mako post please please please go look at @/jade-of-mourning’s blog. they’re so cool. they make such super awesome mako posts and his writing is really good and she also posts some stuff on ao3 so like. yeah. I’m obsessed with them.

anyway back to losing my mind over mako,, (a LOT more under the cut)

so okay I’ll admit I’m not typically a fan of angsty male characters (zuko is the exception. he’s too funny to not, and his character and development are really well done) because they all feel like copy-pastes of each other and they’re generally uninteresting.

but mako. mako is the female experience. not sure if I reposted it (as I tend to do with,, everything on here) but I saw a post talking about how what happened to mako’s character (all potential being discarded after romantic plot) is what happens to the vast majority of female characters. and as I’ve probably said at least fifty million times, he’s SO eldest daughter coded. I’m trans (they/he) but I grew up an eldest daughter and he’s like?? literally me??

as I was yapping about in a reblog—I just checked (lol) and it was in fact the post about mako having the female love interest treatment and tags about his eldest daughter syndrome—mako is somewhat made more ‘relatable’ than katara even when sending a similar message for the general audience. I think people should just be less brickheaded and appreciate my wonderful waterbending girl but mako being a guy makes people not immediately put his character into the lens of ‘ugh, dumb feminism’. (which, again, should not happen)

okay so why does this redeem him so much? I said I hate copy-paste angsty backstories meant to exacerbate a character’s edgy mysteriousness and mako is literally batman with a more violent aang for a little brother. he was basically the messiest character on the show, cheated on both his gfs with each other and fucked them up so bad they turned gay for each other (which was funny as hell of the writers by the way. his reaction to them coming out in the comics was GOLD. ik my boy was fighting back tears.) so, logically, I should hate him like 90% of the fandom, right?

well obviously 90% of the fandom HAS NOT WATCHED THE FUCKING SHOW is MISOGYNISTIC or HATES CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

I have. so much to say about this.

for one. did we watch the same show. mako is one of the most selfless, hardworking, and considerate characters, which he shows multiple times—it’s a major point of his character, actually. he’s the protector, the nurturer (*cough* the eldest daughter). down to his backstory, he shielded bolin from the worst bits of the underworld as best he could while still providing. from eight years old, all alone, he provided. that’s honestly what sets mako apart from literally being Batman (lmao) and why I don’t actually mind his backstory. he was put in an impossible situation, and told to figure it out. he was given no reprieve from the extremely traumatic event of watching his parents die by the element he wields, the one that he has to learn on his own to use to protect bolin.

the other thing is that a lot of his actions are selfish in a way. he doesn’t really care much about the street rats in the same position he was once in the beginning. but even that selfishness isn’t in his own interest—it’s selfishness for the sake of bolin’s well being. one thing that really hits me hard is the brothers’ relationships with food while on the streets. I’m going to make another post about that soon because I don’t want to ramble too endlessly on here. it’s really personal because. eldest daughter who grew up poor. yeah.

second, fandom misogyny. this makes like. no sense but I swear I know what I’m talking about. okay so misogyny is about gender right? but let’s step away from the cutout copy idea of gender, like genitals or fem/masc presentation or pronouns. think of gender as a set of inherent preconceptions, ideals, or societal expectations. that’s what it is but specifying that makes more sense. mako is a dude who is referred to with he/him and he looks like a guy but he represents a girl. mako is expected to be nurturing but not overbearing. present but not annoying. a provider, but don’t ask for anything in return. mako can’t cry in front of bolin, it’s not right for a little boy to look up to someone fragile. mako needs to work, but tiredness is not allowed. don’t be overly cheerful, it’s annoying and unfitting, but too much gruffness is just haughty.

did you feel like you were reading the transcript for that scene about how hard it is to be a woman in the barbie movie? good, because that was the intention. mako, to me, represents the idea of a sibling who is forced to also be a parent, whether or not they are the eldest, and often a girl to a boy. it could be because parents are absent or dead or bad at parenting or just foolish and inattentive. mako is hated (aside from that messy ass romance plot) for almost all the same reasons as katara and that just. infuriates me. like I have this one perfect representation that reminds me of my own background (sorry katara ily and you represent my rage) while aligning with my identity and everyone is shitting on it?? fuck mako haters he’s my special boy

last point. have you never heard of character development in your lives. did you not all love Zuko’s redemption arc, and then as soon as a dumb teenager who’s never had romantic relationships fucks up JUST AS BAD AS THE OTHER TWO PEOPLE INVOLVED (sorry korrasami ily but y’all were nasty for not asking to kiss mako) you’re all like ‘unforgivable’?? like he didn’t even have a redemption arc because HE WASNT AN EVIL CHARACTER. he was a poor kid looking for a sense of stability and he fucked up. he felt bad. I don’t think any of them apologized, despite the fact one was needed all around. he grew as a character because he let himself find stability and mature before seeking someone new to use as a life raft who was already sinking themselves. I truly believe that korrasami—had it not occurred at the end of the series—wouldn’t have worked out either.

all of them were unstable and lost and scared for their lives almost constantly. that’s not a healthy place to be in to seek a relationship and they none of them were good for each other until they gave themselves time to step away from romance and heal.

anyway stan mako to not be a bigot (im unwell about him)

#mako lok #lok #tlok #legend of korra #mako tlok #mako

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beifongswh0re · 4 months

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Why didn't bryke give us some more gaang kids interactions???? (rant)

Honestly, I love how the story in TLOK is about Tenzin and Lin as well. They grow so much in the span of the show and it's amazing but I wish we had more.

You can't tell me that gaang's kids didn't grow up around each other. The group was close as hell and of course they'd bring over their children whenever they met. It's nice that they made Lin and Tenzin date pre-tlok BUT THAT'S EVEN MORE A REASON THAT OTHERS WOULD BE CLOSE. Just imagine the dynamic that the grumpy, stubborn and tight up Lin would have with silly and lowkey mean Kya and Bumi. You can't convince me that having some scenes with those two teasing the Chief wouldn't be amazing.

I'm not talking about kyalin. We all know it would be great to see them being together in the show but realistically thinking, bryke couldn't even put the korrasami final kiss, not to mention another, established wlw couple. What I mean is Gaang's children being friends and while I can understand why Izumi wouldn't be as close with them due to not living in the RC, what about Lin and Kataang kids???? Like, Lin literally dated Tenzin. Of course, she'd be somewhat close with Kya and Bumi because of that.

Also, THE SCENES we could've gotten with Kya and Bumi teasing Lin and Tenzin about their relationship. Especially Bumi, this man has no filter. Even Kya and Lin being friends. I feel like that would be a great addition to Lin's character since she's shown as a pretty closed and cold person and having that open and all over the place waterbender being her bestie would be interesting.

The worst thing is that there was a place for a few scenes hinting that those people were friends. Like, when Bumi was trying to prove that he could airbend and Lin has just arrived to the Air Temple Island with Mako. Why not have Lin walk up and watch him for a second and then just tease him with Kya?

I know that there was not enough screen time for bryke to show Gaang kids being super close but dropping hints and not having them act like stragners would be nice...

#chief beifong #lin beifong #tlok #kya ii #kyalin #linzin #tenzin #lin beifong x kya #lin x kya #kya x lin #bumi ii #avatar the legend of korra #legend of korra #the legend of korra #atla gaang #atla

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shamrockqueen · 1 year

Text

Dark room

Pairing : Soldier Boy Ben x Monsteress Supe Reader

Warnings : drugging, drug use, drug eating, semi public sex, cowgirl on the floor, tearing clothes, long tongue reader, Deep throat French kiss, unprotected sex, semi non-consensual sex, sex on the floor

Word count : 2211

AO3 Page Link

Herogasm oneshot I’d been sitting on for a while. Wanted to get it out there when I got it done.

Every inch of the house was bathed in the dim glow of candlelight. Light the bodies curled along the floor in a flickering orange glow as they contorted around each other. It seemed like the ultimate pleasure pit, until you’d stop and take a moment to really see if for what it was. This was when you’d see it for its imperfections.

It was in fact, a room full of lubed up kinky weirdos, doing god knows what to one another. It just really wasn’t your cup of tea. Although, what did you expect from a super orgy?

You don’t even know why anyone invited you. It’s not like you were public with your abilities, if you could call them that. You were always more beast than super. Super strong, yes; but also super scary.

Sure, there were plenty of people here interested in that sort of thing, but being treated like a fetish didn’t exactly turn you on. Sadly, that didn’t stop them from trying.

You suppose “get lost creep” wasn’t a decent enough answer for the fifth time you tried to shoo one of them away. Although, you didn’t think they would have the nerve to drug you. You don’t even remember having left your drink unattended, but that last sip would be your last.

Luckily, the effects of drugs are dulled in your system, and even though he must have tossed in a heavy dose, you were still on your feet. Swaying slightly, and dizzy as hell, but on your feet none the less.

You’ll break his bones later, but for now you have to find a bathroom to puke this concoction up.

You bum rush towards the nearest facilities. The lock busts right off the door and little splintered pieces of wood go flying as you shove your way through. You fell to your knees over the tub shower, and the porcelain of the tub lip felt cool on the exposed midriff, below your crop top and above the line of your short skirt. It helped sooth the cramping in your guts as your body fought off whatever was put inside of it.

The worst is the nauseous feeling in your head and the remnants of a dry-heave in the back of your throat. It took everything within you to not vomit all over the tub. Especially since this bathroom wasn’t empty.

Standing at the large granite double sink, all wrapped in his tight green and gold bodysuit, he stared daggers into your direction. “Hey?! Occupado bitch!”

You didn’t have time to pay much attention to him at first, but when everything got into better focus you quickly realized who it was.

The famous Soldier Boy had been indulging in some snow-cain in the master bathroom, away from what he later deemed to be a dull orgy. There was still a small bump of white powder between his thumb knuckle and his wrist, and you’d rudely barged in while he was at mid-sniff.

He was always known as an unsavory character, but as you heard footsteps reach the now busted bathroom door, you later heard, then turn around and leave faster than they had approached. Possibly when they saw the kind of Supe that could pull their spine out of their mouth. You’d escaped one danger while hiding behind another.

But, when he took in your sickened state, his harsh stare softened. And when you blubbered out “I’m sorry, man.” He actually felt a little bad for you, but it didn’t stop him from rolling his eyes at this lightweight on the bathroom floor.

“Lookin worse for where, little lady.” He’d gone back to tidying up the line of coke he’d prepared for himself before dipping his nose in and sniffing it up. He shook his head after as he grit his teeth.

You waited for your breathing to settle before you answered back “you have no idea.” At least his attitude was better.

Much better apparently, as he divided up another bump on his thumb, this time not for himself. He sauntered over to you as you rolled over off of your stomach to just sit on the cool tile. Your head felt like it would spin right off your shoulders, and you could nearly feel a bit of drool dry to escape past your lower lip.

His heavy boots knocked softly on the floor before he leaned down towards you pointing his powdered hand in your direction as if to offer it to you. “Ya need a pick-me-up?”

You tried to meet his softened gaze, but your head started to lull back and forth. He had to grip your chin to get you closer to his hand, but instead of a sniff your pointed tongue flicked out and licked it off of him. The pink muscle was elongated and nearly had a mind of its own as it started to twist around his hand. But, it wasn’t the monstrous part of you slipping free that shocked him into grabbing your face and clamping your jaw shut.

“Hey, Hey! You’re not supposed to eat it! The hell’s the matter with you?” His nails dig into your bulletproof skin hard enough so that little rivulets of blood leak to the surface.

But, you couldn’t feel it as your throat burned from the funny white powder you lapped up like candy.

His grip loosened when your eyes rolled back, and your body went slack. “Shit” was all you heard before he let you drop to the floor completely. But you still had a firm grip on his arm as your thick nails dug into his ‘hero’ costume. He couldn’t pull away. The strongest man in the world was caught under your grip.

He wasn’t one to let a little girl like you drag him around. “Hey! Let go, bitch.” He tries to pry your fingers off of his wrist, but they just dig in harder.

“You’re gonna get yourself hurt.” He started to grind his teeth as he gave his arm a couple of jerks in an attempt to shake you free. Only to get yanked back down to your level on the floor.

His body hits the tile with a hefty thump, but time moves too quickly for you to care as you throw yourself over him. Your feet land on either side of his hips as you drop back on your haunches. You thong-clad core pressing onto his clothed cock.

He was hard. Very hard.

He was afraid, only that your antics would’ve killed his buzz. But, as the white pony picked up its pace, it made your strength reverberate through his body as you ground your clit against the length of his swollen shaft.

It’s any question how it was still contained behind a wall of that thick fabric. You could feel the firm outline of his shaft, right down to a straining vein running along its length as you pushed your clothed bud against it.

Your hands land forward on each of his arms, pinning him in place below you as your tongue darts past your lips. It was long and lizard-like as it flicked under your chin as your face dipped closer to his.

He didn’t squirm like they always do when you show people the real you. He just groaned under his breath, a “Ho-ly shit” before your pink muscle slid along his jawline towards his mouth to tickle past his lips. He opened them to you, letting you snake your tongue around his to drink in his taste.

He was bitter with cigarettes, vodka, and a little tang of something you recognize hidden at the back of his throat. His last martini had to have been dirty.

Your nails dragged along the print of his cock that ran along the green fabric of his suit, making him jolt from underneath you and nearly pull away from hungry lips. Your tendril of a tongue doesn’t let him get far as your nails sink into the fabric to tear it from his skin. Letting his cock feel the cool but warm air that circulates between the two of you.

Your other hand weaves between the two of you as you shuck your wet core along his shaft through the thin fabric of your cheeky red thong.

You slip your fingers along the patch that covered your hungry cunt and pull it out of your way. You wouldn’t have imagined an encounter like this when you put the skimpy red troublemaker on.

The tip meets your now uncovered core and you can feel him twitch as got caught on your hungry opening. You pull your tongue from his throat when his adams apple bobbed with the constriction of his throat, struggling for air. At the same moment you sink yourself down onto him.

Your back arched, your hands were planted firmly on his chest, and your hips pushed back as you took him to the base to feel the head knock against the deepest part of your core.

“Woah, baby. Aren’t you a wild one.” His voice shook as he felt you squeeze him, as if your cunt wanted to milk him for all he was worth.

You have total control of each other's movements as you spear yourself up and down on his thick member.

Your body melted from the feeling of him widening your walls with a delicious sting. If he wanted to buck you off, he wouldn’t be able to. Not like he wanted to be free from the tight grasp of your sweet walls squeezing around him.

It’s a rough ride, but he handles you so well. He watches as your loose lace bralette let your soft breasts bounce with each time your body moved above his.

But, The Soldier-boy isn’t one to lose control of a situation like this, but he struggled to meet your pace. It’s astonishing how well you pushed back against peak super humanity as you fucked him into the tile. Yet in the end, he won out.

You were unnatural, a lab made monstrosity, but he was perfection incarnate…at least in his mind. Yet, He let that mindset give him the momentum to take hold of each of your thighs, hand meeting the back of each knee. Your buzzed brain thought nothing of it until he was back on his own knees and you were in the air as he made it onto his feet, all while his cock continued to dip in and out of your slip channel.

You pawed at his shoulders as you thought more about him slipping away from you than falling.

“Hold on, it’s my turn now.”

He twists your body until hands meet the towel bar and one of your still heeled feet hits the floor. He tosses the other leg over his shoulder, turning you almost totally sideways as he takes the lead.

His pace was faster and deeper. He was pounding the opening of your cervix hard enough you could have sworn you almost felt him even farther inside. It was enough to make your brain even fuzzier than before.

You held onto that towel bar until you felt the screws holding it to the wall start to shake along with the both of you. You claw at the tiled walls as your nails cut through the painted ceramic. All while as your insides were tied into tight knots ready to snap with each drive of his hips. You tried to keep leverage with your elbow and cheek pressed to the wall as he drove you closer to a bright white edge that made stars burn the back of your eyes.

The tight coil in your belly kept getting pulled and pulled until his final thrust. He came with a howl followed by “fucks sake!! That’s a tight cunt” as he pressed harder until you felt your teeth press into the wall.

He just spent the last moment breathing until he pulled himself free and his knees buckled out beneath him. You almost felt boneless as all energy had been drained from your body. The coke was still making your brain buzz, and it was all that was left to help keep you standing.

He sat back on the closed toilet as he watched you sway while trying to hold onto what was left of the loose towel bar.

You’d just drained the life out of him directly from his cock. It still hung out of his torn pants, now soft and wet with his thick cum and the slick from your sweet core. You struggled back around, taking the metal bar with you as it still sat in your grip as you tried to stumble away from this mess. Your heeled feet teetered under your weight as the high dropped as fast as it had risen.

As you’d turned tail and tried to flee the room, the clack of your shoes made the hero shock back into focus.

“Hold up.”

Your feet halt as ordered and you nearly bed forward enough to hit the floor. Instead, you right yourself and turn back towards him.

“I gotta get your number.”

A wave of heat flushed over your body as a sly smile spread along his lips.

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