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bestworstcase · 3 years

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farran rereads lost lagoon: chapters 9-10

it’s been a hot minute! previous installments here, in case you’d like to refresh your memory first.

- this chapter opens with rapunzel observing that cassandra is angry and concluding, correctly, that it’s because rapunzel followed her. i think this is a very interesting choice for howland to make. tts rapunzel is not like this. she often, particularly in s1, fails to notice when cass is frustrated with her and is startled when that frustration erupts into anger after repeated pushing. she is also generally quite bad at linking cause and effect together like this; she might recognize that cass is angry, but miss why. she stomps all over cassandra’s boundaries in large part because she doesn’t know any better. she can’t see how her behavior is hurting cass. but lagoon rapunzel does know better. she’s far more emotionally intuitive, and she can see right away that sticking her nose into cassandra’s business upsets cass, yet she will continue to do it. part of me wonders if this change is to facilitate the character growth lagoon rapunzel gets (which tts rapunzel does not)? it’s much easier, after all, to fix poor behavior if you’re able to see how it’s hurting people you care about.

- rapunzel here also observes that cassandra’s “eyes were wide and vulnerable,” indicating how afraid cass was of the water situation. cass denies that she was afraid when rapunzel asks her. this has a lot of similarities to how cass acts in fanon, cassunzel fanon in particular—outright denying her feelings, even when rapunzel accurately identifies them. and i know i’m beating a dead horse here, but tts cass is not like this. tts cass readily expresses her feelings to rapunzel—except when she thinks rapunzel isn’t willing to listen to her. in COTB, her reticence with rapunzel comes on the heels of rapunzel doing something cassandra pleaded with her not to do. in RATGT, rapunzel outright tells her to ‘be okay with’ the way rapunzel treats her, and in RDO cass bottles up her feelings and refuses to talk until rapunzel forces her to. actively hiding her feelings is a behavior she develops after becoming friends with rapunzel, because rapunzel continually dismisses or ignores her feelings. this is probably not the last time i am going to harp on this over the course of this little reread. it’s a huge pet peeve of mine.

- re: romance novel: “I hadn’t seen Eugene since the night before. After Cassandra left my room, I sent Pascal to follow her. I instructed him to come get me if she went anywhere.” ksdkjf

- cassandra, of course, wants the lagoon to be their—or rather, ideally, her—little secret, because she’s decided this is the thing that will prove she’s ready for the guard. her approach to getting rapunzel on board with this secret-keeping is to imply that frederic and arianna might compromise corona’s national security if they are informed. i think this is very funny.

- (again, contrast this to what happens in tts: when cass begs rapunzel to keep their midnight excursion a secret, she explains her reasoning in detail, because tts cass knows how to communicate like an adult.)

- “It’s so…blue” jksdfl cass has a way with words huh

- i do not think ms howland knows what a lagoon is, because what she is describing is absolutely not a lagoon. it appears to be a cenote. i suppose ‘rapunzel and the lost cenote’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, though, does it?

- cassandra reveals that she doesn’t know how to swim. i will get into this in a moment.

- corona has 315 miles of coastline, according to ms. howland. for purposes of comparison, rhode island has around 380 miles of coastline. now! in addition to those three hundred odd miles of coastline, corona has 212 lakes, 121 ponds, 67 rivers, of which 17 are significant in size and let out into the sea. with some cursory research i haven’t been able to get a precise count of the number of freshwater bodies of water there are in rhode island, but wikipedia tells me that about 90% of the inland freshwater in the state is contained in 237 lakes and ponds, which is a bit less than corona’s 333 total lakes and ponds, so… assuming the other 10% of rhode island’s inland freshwater is contained in a few dozen smaller lakes and ponds, those numbers are quite close as well. and according to wikipedia, rhode island has 59 rivers, of which 17 are ‘considered major rivers either geographically or historically.’

there is not really a point to this digression except that i think it is interesting. rhode island is 1,214 square miles in size and based on the general closeness of these numbers i have decided to tentatively conclude that corona is meant to be roughly similar in size. let’s call it a nice even 1,250 square miles for the sake of ease and to account for the greater number of lakes and ponds.

this is quite a bit larger than the kingdom appears to be in tts—unless the kingdom is very lopsided and island city is situated within a couple dozen miles of the nearest border—but it’s also quite small for a country. (europe has a few very small microstates and city-states, but excluding those, the smallest country in europe is almost twice the size of rhode island).

for my own writing, i decided that corona was quite a bit larger than this—bitter snow corona is in the neighborhood of 13,125 square miles, of which about ⅓ was formerly saporia and another ¼ is the disputed territory/province of malinar, meaning saporia is/was about 4,375 square miles, malinar is about 3,288 square miles, and pre-conquest corona would have been about 5,462 square miles—but, if you’re writing fanfiction and looking for an approximate ‘canon’ size for corona, 1,250 sq miles is not a bad guess. just remember that that big old wall rapunzel’s so eager to get to the other side of has to be within about twenty miles of the island capital in order for horses to be able to comfortably get there and back in less than a day! so either the island has to be very near the nearest border, or the wall isn’t actually corona’s border but rather a defensive wall around the capital or something like that.

- now back to cassandra, and the matter of her inability to swim. i think, given that they live on an island and the generally high standards to which he holds his daughter, it beggars belief a little that the captain did not force the issue of her learning how. it’s a safety matter. if you live near water you need to be able to swim. but, fine, she has a phobia, whatever. it’s for the romance novel™

- but i hate this. i hate it. ms. howland expects me to believe that:

1 - cassandra hasn’t been in swimming lessons since she could walk

2 - cassandra’s phobia was so severe that the captain never forced the issue of her learning to swim, while living on an island

3 - rapunzel magically knows how to swim, because the three or four minutes she spent almost drowning in a slowly flooding cave and then being spat out into a river and dragged to the bank by eugene was sufficient for her to become a great swimmer.

4 - all it takes for cassandra to overcome her debilitating phobia of water is for rapunzel to spend maybe ten or fifteen minutes gently coaxing her into the water and teaching her how to tread water

5 - swimming in the lagoon with rapunzel then becomes one of cassandra’s most treasured pastimes, and

6 - merely a few months after this, cassandra is a strong enough swimmer to (in fitzherbert pi) DIVE INTO THE FUCKING OCEAN FULLY DRESSED WITH HER BOOTS ON in order to rescue shorty before he drowns.

and NO!!!!!! NO! THAT’S NOT HOW SWIMMING WORKS THAT’S NOT HOW ANYTHING WORKS!!

now i get it. i get it. this is a romance novel and the symbolism of rapunzel liberating cassandra from her fears and teaching her a valuable new skill that they bond over and becomes their shared special secret thing to do together is obviously powerful and a staple trope for the genre. but it makes so little sense for this to be a skill that rapunzel has but cassandra does not. it feels almost infantalizing of cassandra and aggrandizing of rapunzel. like… rapunzel is an exceptionally competent young woman, yes. but no she can’t fucking swim you can’t learn to swim from that one time you almost drowned in a FUCKING cave. fuck!

- i’m still on the first page of chapter 10 and i am steamed.

- “It’s amazing how fast you can pick something up when your life depends on it.” FUCK you, ms. howland. you don’t learn how to turn sommersalts or swim laps by almost drowning. at most you might teach yourself how to doggy paddle.

- this scene would have worked just as goddamn well on the romance novel front if cass were the one who knew how to swim and rapunzel desperately wanted to learn and made big sad puppy eyes until cass caved and agreed to teach her. like! ffs you could even squeeze in the phobia stuff - rapunzel freaks out when she gets to a certain depth because it throws her back to being in that cave and cass, who has plenty of experience dealing with her own panic attacks, is able to gently calm her down.

- but that would require ms. howland to allow rapunzel to be bad at something. grumble.

- i don’t think rapunzel is qualified to give cass exposure therapy.

- this is nitpicky but i’m annoyed. this is not how you clean plate armor. “First you hang your suit of armor up to make sure every piece is properly aligned and that there’s no rust” WHAT? it’s not… like, it’s not like a onesie. plate armor is a bunch of individual components tied or buckled to an arming doublet or, in some cases, to other pieces of plate. you can’t ‘hang up’ a suit of plate armor the way you’d hang up, like, a jacket. you can put the pieces together on an arming doublet that you’ve hung up on a dummy, but… why would you do that in order to clean it.

“Then you attach the foot coverings” gjksdfjk just… the mental image of cassandra painstakingly putting a suit of armor together on a fucking mannequin and buckling the sabatons to the greaves or what the fuck ever she means by this and trying to clean the set that way is destroying me

“Then you need to polish the chest plate, with a soft cloth, work in circles, going outward” okay yes but you’d do the cuirrass separate from the rest of the set and you’d do the inside too and cass ought to know the proper name for all of these pieces please it’s not hard

“The arms can be tricky because the joints” WHAT. for arms you’ve got, like, a pauldron (or spaulder and rondel), rerebrace, couter, vambrace, gauntlets. these are separate pieces. you clean them one at a time, inside and outside. does howland think you just… don’t need to clean the inside of a set of plate armor? does she think the inside isn’t just as if not more susceptible to rust as the outside? does… does she realize that you can take plate armor apart i am CONFOUNDED

WHAT is a “mouth cover” in this context. is she refering to a visor. hinged pieces like on an armet? does she mean a bevor? the bevor isn’t even part of the helmet aljksdflkjsfdj

cassandra refers to cuisses and greaves as “thigh plates” and “shin [plates]” respectively i’m die. she also completely skips the poleyns. i do not think this cass has ever cleaned a suit of plate armor in her entire life.

i am losing. my. mind.

- in the immediate aftermath of cass learning how to tread water i think rapunzel asks her more personal questions than she does in the entirety of tts itself. like, it’s almost jarring how much more interested both rapunzel and eugene are in cassandra as a person in this book than they seem to be in tts. compare this conversation to the way cass opens up to rapunzel in beginnings - here, it’s prompted by rapunzel asking questions, expressing interest in cassandra’s feelings and encouraging her by telling her she’s brave. in beginnings, rapunzel builds a pillow fort in cass’s room because she wants to force a bonding moment and cass, after initially trying to kick her out, relents and volunteers some personal information as a kind of apology for being hostile. the vibes are completely different, so different that it feels like i’m not even reading about the same characters.

- like can you imagine tts rapunzel saying something like “it’s your story, that makes it important” to cass? lmao

- cass reveals that she’s afraid of water because she got dragged out by the undertow at the beach when she was small, and her dad saved her and then got so mad at her that she remembers being as afraid of him as she was of the water. this is not unrealistic per se, but… if cassandra was as scared of her dad that day as she was of drowning, then… shouldn’t that have more of an impact on her relationship with him? like…he screams at her after she almost drowns and she walks away with this debilitating phobia of the water but zero lingering fear of him?

- this chapter has given me a headache

- re: romance novel: “Rapunzel gripped my hand. This time I didn’t flinch.” snrk.

#lost lagoon reread #rta #cassunzel #i know it's juv fic i KNOW but i -#the plate armor thing it kills me

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vegalocity · 5 years

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23, 44, and 47. (Maybe not BABY baby, but a little kid) If 44 is too weird, then 10.

-stretches- okay let’s do this.

I used Stiro as the ship in question because you weren’t specific.

The name on his wrist didn't soundlike a real name, but Hiro had heard stories of people whose nameswere the name their partner called themselves instead of whatwas on their birth certificate, so 'Star Butterfly' was more likely aname whoever it was had chosen for themselves.

But the semantics didn't quite matterto him, because honestly? The concept of Heartnames didn't reallymatter to him either for the longest time. All that Soulmates softjazz and pueberty stuff was just kinda... well... dumb, for the firstfourteen years of his life. It wasn't something he concerned himselfover when there was science to be done and machines to be built.

He paid the name no mind for thelongest time, it wasn't until after Tadashi was gone that he began towonder; maybe as a coping mechanism, a promise that he still wasn'talone. Somewhere out there, a 'Star Butterfly' was wandering aroundwith 'Hiro Hamada' on their wrist, someone who would get him,but who could never replace Tadashi and would never try to.

And then Baymax reactivated and thename he snugly hid beneath a purple wristband was purged from hismind once again.

He supposed that it was his own faultthen, when, a couple of months later, just as Big Hero 6 began toestablish themselves as permanent fixtures in San Fransokyo that ablonde girl with hearts on her cheeks, horns on her head, and a wandthat defied several laws of reality came bounding into his life, andhe had zero coping mechanisms for when Fred gave a wide flourish andannounced her as 'a foreign exchange student his dad was taking in asa favor to the Royal Family of another dimension, Princess StarButterfly of the Kingdom of Mewni'

She wore no bands on her wrists, nocovers for her name. Because she didn't have a name on her wrist.

He didn't need any romantic stuffanyway, it was just a distraction. Why he had her name but she didn'thave his was a question he was completely uninterested in.

No matter how determined she was whenshe insisted on joining the fight alongside Big Hero 6, asking him tomake her a helmet she could wear with her own set of battle armorthat could show that she was on their side. No matter how many timesshe leaned over his shoulder to keep an eye on his work as he triedto make sense of her wand.

No matter how pretty she looked on thenight of the Blood Moon when, after coming home early due to astomach ache, asked him if he wanted to learn how to dance the Mewniway.

So that was how he ended up where hewas now. Helping her with one of her spells and analyzing it at thesame time, her grimoire propped up against his chest as he held histablet aimed at her wand, ready to analyze the magic output and seejust what these 'time based spells' could do.

“So you read this one's wholechapter right?”

“Yeah. Great-Grandma Skywynne was abadass!”

Famous last words.

You know, he'd expected it to beharder, to be in Fred's house ten years ago. After all Mr.Fredrickson was here far more often when Fred was young. But hesupposed that was just what happened when your tech is ten years moreadvanced than anything that even existed at the time. He was able toslip in and out of the shadows pretty easily as he contemplated justhow deadStar was when this spell faded and he returned to his time.

Asit was he was camped out in Star's room in the past, at this time aGuest Room that Fred himself had claimed nobody had ever used in hislife and was only kept dustless by the duties of Heathcliff andwhatever maids were employed that they never saw.

Everyso often he heard voices approaching but paid them no mind as hetried to do something productive with his time and analyze the datahe'd gotten from Star's stupid Temporary Time Reversal Spell.

Therewasn't much for him to work with, but there were some interesting ionreadings and gamma radiation that came from the wand during thespell, so he focused on those.

Fora bit of time he was just focused on that, sitting on the far side ofthe room and hidden from the doorway, when, one last time, voicesapproached the hallway. This time growing louder. Hiro only freakedout a little bit when the door opened for a moment and closed.

“Stardarling, just stay in here for a spell and we'll come retreive youwhen Lord Fredrickson's problems have been eased.”

“ButMammmaaaaaaaaaa”

“No'mama's here dear, it's just to keep you safe!”

Ohyou have got to be kidding.

Alittle girl, blonde pigtails bouncing with her movements began toneurotically pace the length of the room, if Hiro wasn't stillcovered by the bed she'd have likely seen him, and more likelyyelled.

Therewere hearts on her cheeks.

Dammit.

“IfMama's gonna be mean then i'm gonna have some fun in here!” LittleStar stopped her pacing abruptly and pointedly ran over to flop ontothe bed.

Hirostiffened, mentally prepping himself to force the child to be quiet,but to his surprise, after Little Star saw him she didn't scream, orshout, or really do anything but sit up on her knees and look at him.

“Areyou a ghost?”

Heblinked, her little brows were furrowed and she flopped down on herhands so she was closer to his eye level.

“Huh?”

“MisterFredriiiiiickkksnnn,” she sounded out the name “said nobody evercomes into the guest room, but you're here. So you're a nobody” itsounded so obvious when she spoke, if she wasn't literally four yearsold and by extension an idiot he would have questioned his ownobservational skills for a moment.

“Andeveryone knows nobody's are ghosts. So are you a ghost?”

Ohwell...

“Yeah,Uh... I'm a ghost.” Ghost is probably better than Intruder.

Agrin lit up her face as she sat back upright and crossed her legs onthe bed, patting a spot beside her.

“It'snice to meet you Mister Ghost!” He opted instead to sit at the edgeof the bed.

“Uh...yeah. Nice to meet you too, Star.”

Shegasped.

“Howdid you know my name?!”

“Iheard your Mama call it.” the awed look on her face faded.

“Oh.Well what's your name? Do you remember?”

“Whywouldn't I remember?”

“Lotsaghosts can't remember their names after they died!” Again, spokenso confidently granted she was a four year old and thus an idiot.

“WellI do. It's-” A thought occurred to him.

Butterflyeffect and all that nonsense, what if by telling Star his name in thepast she recognized him in the less-distant past? What if shesuddenly remembered this by his name? Could he chance it? Was thisall a closed time loop and he was supposedto tell her his real name? Did it matter? Could he change the futureso irrevocably by one action?

“Tadashi.My name is Tadashi.”

Hersmile widened. “That's a pretty name!”

“Thanks.”

Andfor the next hour that was all that was to it. She spoke of Mewni inher silly childish stories, and he'd tell her of Earth 'before hedied' and tried not to be too weirded out at the irony.

Orthe knowledge that halfway across town Tadashi was still around. Thesting of their parents' death still sharp as he and a four year oldHiro still adjusted to living with Aunt Cass.

Herglaringly bare wrists, even at a young age still grated on him.

“What'sthat?” She finally pointed at the purple band, just barelyuncovered by his sleeve.

Well...okay it wasn't like it was taboo or anything to talk aboutHeartnames, but... it was kinda... just something that wasn't done.It especially wasn't something you drew attention to. And... what didStar's parents just never give her the talk because she came outwithout a name?

“It's...uh... it's a Wristband. It covers my Name.”

“Youhave your name written on your wrist? Why d'ya gotta cover it?”Holy crap her parents never gave her the talk because she came outwithout a name.

Unless...

“Star...Do people have Heartnames on Mewni?” She tilted her head to theside and scrunched her nose up.

“What'saHeartname? Is it like a Heartsong? We’re not ‘sposed to talk ‘bout heartsongs” She leaned in “it’s gotta be a seeecret”

Andsuddenly everything made sense.

Ofcourse that had to be the time the spell finally wore off and Hirowas returned to his time, a shocked Star, fourteen years old andholding her wand aloft, stared at him.

“OhmygoshHiro I'm so sorry I thought it was gonna send ME back not you!” Asshe continued to babble in that annoyingly endearing way the solutionto a problem he'd been soundly ignoring existed buzzed around hishead.

Theyhad a different system. Star didn't have his name because Star'sspecies didn't use names, they used voices.

“HeyStar?” She stopped her yammering to help him back to his feet.

“I'mso gonnamake it up to you Hiro I promisce!”

“It's...it's okay. Just....” He rolled up his sleeve, making sure Star waswatching, before he slipped his wristband off.

“Ithink a misunderstanding was just cleared up. You guys have acompletely different system than us.”

Star'seyes widened when the mark, a light brown, like a strange birthmark,was revealed to her.

“Apparentlyyou guys aren't born with names?”

#Stiro #vega writes stories too #crossovers #crossover ships #I love the idea of someone from a different world having a completely different soulmate system #and it works like... scary good #Anonymous

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