#tts bitter snow caine

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Just wanted to casually offer unofficial CassCaine content on this last day of pride month (I had a great time and hope you did too regardless of your affiliation with the LGBTQIA+ community 🥰)

#tangled the series #tts casscaine #tts moira caine #tts cassandra #tts bitter snow caine #tts bitter snow cass #tts bittersnow CassCaine #tts fanfic #CassCaine fanfic #where the spirit meets the bones

[bestworstcase]

hi my friend sent me bitter snow to read and i consumed all of it in three days and have a head FULL of rot now and ive never seen the damn show its based on, but im like 90% afraid it won't be nearly as good since im horribly obsessed w your writing and horror and imagery. anyways! thank you for writing my newest brainworms obsession i can't wait to start on the sequel!!

cackles

thank you and you’re welcome for the brain worms!! kshdks you’re jumping into moonless air at like the perfect time bc i have been. stalled out on it for A WHILE but the next chapter is going up this weekend so 😈

AS FOR. TTS ITSELF, it is. well it’s a disney princess cartoon hdkfhdjkd bitter snow is largely an exercise in taking the good bits and stringing them along a narrative spine that 1. is character-driven and tightly plotted vs the loose episodic structure endemic to disney television, 2. focuses on underutilized characters/concepts to help pull disparate threads together (canon!caine is in all of three episodes and the separatists literally only appear in two FOR EXAMPLE), and 3. caters to my Particular Taste hence all the wild magic and fantasy religion and demon shenanigans going on lmao

BUT it’s a fun watch and there’s a bunch of individual episodes that are just, stupidly good, and the animation is gorgeous and the music slaps, so,

[spooky-activity]

Thinking about @bestworstcase ‘s Moira Caine… the world’s biggest moronosexual

#I care she #she puts up with so much #Farran’s fic Bitter Snow/Moonless Air is super neat and Horror #you should check it out if you get the chance #lady Caine #Moira caine #bitter snow #moonless air #tangled the series #tts #my art

[pancat-n-sausage]

I'm caught in a hurricane I'm leaving here dead or alive And I know that I'd be willing to feel the pain If it got me to the other side - Hurricane by Theory of a Deadman

companion piece to this (based on the fics by @bestworstcase)

#tts #tangled the series #bitter snow #tts lady caine #my art #moira caine my beloved #there are flaws in this but i can no longer fix them #also if yall have good songs about storms at sea. shoot them my way bc after like hours of listening i only got two (2) that were bangers #and that fit the vibe

[emkini]

Been rewatching the series and. damn they REALLY just did nothing with Lady Caine’s character huh. Actually seeing how she was used in canon was such a shock sdfghjgfd 

#bitter snow series is beginning to mix with my canon knowledge oh no #tangled the series #lady caine #Em rewatches TTS

[pancat-n-sausage]

@bestworstcase has taught me the gospel of casscaine. go read her fics, like, right now. like right now

#literally ALL of my braincells are focused on this ship at all times #tts #tangled the series #casscaine #tts cassandra #tts lady caine #my art #bitter snow

[tangled-the-series-forever]

That Moment When…

you almost buy a magnet because it reminds you of a certain fictional female pirate

… one whom I honestly didn’t think much about until I read @bestworstcase’s Bitter Snow series on ao3

Now? I can’t stop thinking about her.

Literally about to buy this ring on Etsy because of Bitter Snow as well.

This series has changed my life, ya’ll. If you want some incredible writing, this is it. I swear nothing compares. Forever amazed by this brilliant series 😍😭😍😭

#tangled the series #tts caine #tts lady caine #moira caine #tts bitter snow #tts fanfic #that moment when #fictional female pirates

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Cass, Caine, and a Touch of Raps

I’ve gathered some pictures taken over the past few months that remind me of these gals

First up are things that remind me of Cass

blue hair dye (plan to use that soon)

moonstone Cass gems

moonstone Cass aesthetic

Here we have some Caine-related things ft. one for Rapunzel because it was Twin Day at school

nickname for Jackbox game (notice it’s a trivia murder party 😉)

same thing except I won (also, this happened a couple weeks ago so that’s why the Caine is so festive 😂)

tumblr post I came across on Pinterest while searching for writing tips and this totally reminded me of Caine and Cass all throughout the bitter snow series

like I said, Twin Day. Enough said.

#tangled the series #tts lady caine #moira caine #tts cassandra #tts rapunzel #tts bitter snow cass #tts bitter snow #tts moonless air

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Benighted Snow vibes

Otherwise known as “I went to a Spirit Halloween for the first time and took pictures of everything that reminded me of Moira Caine and Benighted Snow and anything remotely TTS-related and-”

#tts bitter snow #tts benighted snow #tts caine #tts moonstone #moira caine #spirit halloween #tts zhan tiri

[tangled-the-series-forever]

Bitter Snow glow-up

Noticed this parallel while re-reading one two of my favorite chapters of all time:

“Cassandra doesn’t think she’s ever hated anybody more than she hates Moira Caine.”

Benighted Snow, Ch 11

“‘Moira is the best friend I have ever had. I trust her. I feel safe with her. I like spending time with her.’”

Moonless Air, Ch 11

These girls have my heart 😭😭

#tangled the series #tts bitter snow cass #tts bitter snow #tts lady caine #moira caine #tts benighted snow #tts moonless air #chapter 11

[bestworstcase]

tell me the gospel of Casscaine

this thing

ok ok ok 

i think the core appeal of casscaine as a ship is that these are both characters who are driven by fury and deep intractable grievances against a kingdom that screwed them over, and while the narrative does invite us to sympathize with cassandra’s anger her story also ends in her groveling for forgiveness from the very people who hurt  her in the first place. meanwhile of course caine doesn’t even have the fig leaf of a personal issue with rapunzel to disguise the fact that her problem is corona’s fucked up monarchy, so she doesn’t even get the benefit of a sympathetic narrative and in fact after establishing her as this sort of character in BEA, TTS walks it back in her subsequent appearances by turning her into a generic antagonistic thief driven by grift and greed. they are in short two characters who are right, stuck in a narrative that is incapable of treating them that way.

take them outside of the context of a disney princess show controlled by disney’s conservative executives with a mandated pro-monarchy and pro-status quo stance, there is. so much. you can do with that, and they have so much common ground to work with. 

both of them orphans, in such a symmetrical way - cassandra watched her own mother abandon her for rapunzel, and caine watched soldiers drag her father away in a cage in rapunzel’s name. both of them grew up carrying these hideous traumas in a kingdom that didn’t care about them. did caine have a mother, or other relatives who took care of her after her father was stolen from her? did she grow up in an orphanage? was she fending for herself from a young age? we don’t know, but we do know the wound of her father’s loss never healed—and cass, of course, had a father who loved her but was not equipped to care for her, and his emotional distance and the martial relationship he cultivated with her damaged her just as much if not more than gothel’s abuse did. i don’t think either of them ever had a shot at climbing out of these holes without transgressing against corona itself - & caine of course embraced that without hesitation while cass kept holding on and trying and trying until she had literally nothing left to give and she snapped.

and im just like obsessed with the idea of that anger bringing them together but then healing being what makes it stick. there’s just something so very appealing about - not just someone who can hear you and who gets it when you scream rage and anguish into the night and then, also, helping you find your way out of that darkness - bc as good as it feels to scream and be heard you also can’t just marinate in anger and violence! it’s not good for you! and having someone who’s right there with you to hang onto while you’re both going through it and struggling towards freedom & peace! hoo boy!!

its also extremely appealing to me that they are both commoners of no special importance socially speaking. gjksdlf anyone who’s been following me for any length of time knows i don’t like royal!cass AUs or just AUs where cass has any kind of status in that vein, and that same taste extends to romance and shipping lmao. esp in bitter snow where cass is literally just the child of some impoverished farmers and caine was just a poor kid from a poor family barely scraping by!! it hits, it hits

i will probably never write a canon compliant tts fic but if i did it would be post-s3 casscaine jskdkjf

#rta #tts #cassandra tts #lady caine #i just... Them... #lemon-embalmer

[bestworstcase]

10 and 17 for the Salt Ask?

10. Most disliked arc? Why?

answered here

17. Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…

well.

i mean.

kslcdhc jokes aside i think a lot of the basic plot beats and character arcs of tts are genuinely good but hamstrung but appallingly bad narrative structure and generally inefficient storytelling: so my answer is less “abc instead of xyz” than it is “i would do xyz better.”

take varian’s villain arc, for example, since that’s the one i discussed for number 10. in canon his descent into villainy depends on a crapton of characters being utterly indifferent to his existence when they, logically, should be making decisions that involve him (whether positively or negatively). but… in bitter snow, varian’s “descent” arc is set up in such a way that it can happen in parallel with adira and cass and the coronan guard all trying to find him for their own reasons, and varian can spiral to the point of attacking corona without requiring like, several dozen characters passively acting like he doesn’t exist at all—all while at the same time hitting the same basic plot beats that canon did. it’s not the plot that’s broken, it’s the storytelling.

i would also make cass saporian and trans and a lesbian because i believe in saporian transbian cass supremacy. also i would make caine a main character and zhan tiri a main character and do more world building and bring in some eldritch horror elements and--yeah literally my answer to this question is just, i would write bitter snow mghbxbd

[bestworstcase]

do u think cassandra/lady caine is still an appealing ship in tts canon apart from bittersnow?

i mean. yeah for sure.

the main difference is just timing bc in a more canon compliant setting i imagine nothing would develop until after the events of s3, and without the mountain of messy overlapping trauma and like specific connection moira has with cassandra’s past in bitter snow things’d probably develop slower -

but the essence of the ship to my mind is finding solidarity and shared ground in both being people corona fucked over pretty hard and then friendship developing from there, and like. that 100% still applies in a canon compliant post-s3 scenario, no question.

(in general esp with the way i characterize caine i see them as people who are just. like fundamentally compatible. it’s not a cassunzel situation where one or both of them would need MASSIVE amounts of character development to achieve a functional relationship - it’s like. bar situational obstacles like cassandra’s loyalty to corona and rapunzel pre-RATGT they just… work, so in any au where they cross paths i could see them at least having potential. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

#tts #bitter snow #casscaine #rly all bitter snow does is accelerate #the dynamic i imagine them having in a post-s3 setting #bc cassandra splits from corona SO MUCH earlier

[bestworstcase]

We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding. 

to whit: 

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.  

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?” 

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built? 

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters. 

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it. 

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3. 

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.” 

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2… only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too. 

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it: 

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc. 

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness. 

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad. 

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc). 

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing. 

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas: 

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons. 

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on. 

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse. 

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal. 

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now. 

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop. 

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character. 

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3. 

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often. 

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first. 

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc. 

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw. 

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop. 

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan. 

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan. 

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take. 

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

#rta #thank u anon its been a hot minute since i ranted about sTrUcTuRe #Anonymous

[bestworstcase]

I'm so upset we didn't get more Lady Caine! Character design? hot 👌 Motivation? Valid. There was great potential for more run ins with her and her crew but ig they couldn't really fit it in with Rapunzel's story which is fine. I'd love to definitely see more interactions with her and Cass tho. Maybe if Cass got her own spinoff? I could definitely see Caine as a reoccurring character

bea really set her up to be this fascinating recurring villain with perhaps the most compelling motive out of any villain in the show and then just never did anything interesting with her again 😭

i do think the Main issue with her being a main character in tts proper - besides the obvious of as a disney princess show it has no choice but to be firmly pro-monarchy lol - is caine’s problem and goal as a character has next to nothing to do with rapunzel. there’s no good natural connection btwn caine’s character and rapunzel’s character arc & even in BEA they had to do this weird swerve where caine blames rapunzel Who Was An Infant for things that she knows damn well frederic did.

but

if you make

cassandra

the protagonist……… oh boy

kskdhsjg and i mean *waves vaguely at bitter snow* case in point but like, caine’s problem and cassandra’s arc dovetail together so so well they were both - well in bitter snow they’re both directly orphaned by frederic’s crackdown but even in canon they are both orphaned as a direct result of rapunzel’s kidnapping and they are both harmed deeply by their childhoods in corona in such similar and yet contrasting ways they are. almost perfectly set up to be character foils it’s so EASY you barely even have to try to make it work

i’m not rly keen on a spinoff bc i know at the end of the day it would be. disney. but more post-canon cass centric fic where caine is a significant character PLEASE

#rta #tts #bitter snow

[bestworstcase]

I feel like my evolution a a tts fan has been “ooh cassunzel is nice because women” then “hmmm this is not squad goals” and now I’m a fan of Cass/caine lol

kjsdjf i binged up to happiness is during the s2 mid-season hiatus and then wandered away for a few months and then got lured back by way of a mutual of mine posting RATGT screencaps and watched through destinies collide at the beginning of august 2019 and lost my damn mind because wow cassandra’s gonna team up with zhan tiri and go feral in 3!! and like a few days later fuckin launched myself into the fandom with the first chapter of og bitter snow and had kind of this weird wobble of 

thinking cassunzel was cute whilst watching s1 → hit goodbye and goodwill and went hm maybe not! → “what if cassandra and the demon were FRIENDS?” [cue bitter snow ziti] → warming up to cassunzel a bit because a lot of the post-s2 pre-s3 and early-s3 cassunzel fic was very soft and cute → watching s3 with like the slowly dawning horror of realizing by the time we hit CR that rapunzel was not going to apologize at all → “i think cass should get to burn corona to the ground, as a treat” / casscaine gets upgraded from “it would be hot” to “no actually this makes sense and i am having feelings about it” → then after plus est there was this huge swell of the like heavy on the princess/knight dynamic cassunzel content that kinda makes me go “this was written by cass fans?!” jkskjdf and like the inescapability of that reeeeally souring me on the ship as anything but an unrequited thing that cass gets to move on from in the end

anyways a decent chunk of bitter snow is about digging into - jksdfkj all of this really, because quite apart from anything else i do really enjoy the emotional messiness of it all and the overlapping layers of like, cassandra’s trauma and rapunzel’s trauma and the intensity of their friendship early on and how it ultimately unwinds because they’re just...not good for each other, and their various efforts to overcome that because the emerging toxicity doesn’t mean they don’t still care about each other. they’re just two really fascinating characters with a deliciously fraught and complicated friendship and i AM all about that, separate from the shipping thing

i think if it werent for the fact that cass fans - at least the sort of cass fans who are creating cass-centric fanworks lol - are almost universally cassunzel fans, i wouldn’t be engaging with cassunzel content at all but alas alack besides bitter snow the cass centric not cassunzel medium-to-longfic selection is like. there’s 4. LKSFDJKL

#Anonymous