#yeah yeah i know -- dangling plot threads! -- but there's no way i'm writing this out as a full story atm

[allaboutthedrama]

I know that I'm pretty late to the conversation, but I've just reread all of Vampire Academy and Bloodlines (possibly for The Untitled Jill Project) and it's the first time I've reread the VA series in years.

I'm just thinking about how, in my opinion, the quality of the VA series improved as we got into the last few books, and with Bloodlines, I think the reverse sort of happened. Spoilers for both series ahead. (Yeah, the last book came out nine years ago, but you never know.)

I think I hadn't realized how cohesive the ending of Last Sacrifice was. Details from as far back as the first book came up and were very relevant. The political plotline came together in a really tight way, Sonya Karp turned out the be Chekov's spirit user, we got more world-building details, the antagonists had complex and convoluted motivations, and even when there were plot threads left dangling, those actually served a purpose. I loved the part where Adrian pointed out to Rose that her actions had consequences and even though she had gotten what she wanted, not everything else was resolved, so people like Eddie and Sydney and Jill were left in bad situations, and she was partly responsible. It created a little more moral ambiguity, which I really enjoyed, especially since YA tends to like the very neat endings where everything winds up happily ever after.

The Vampire Academy books improved the deeper into the series you got. And, although I love Bloodlines, I do think that the first three books are much stronger than the last three. Which is a shame, because the series has so much potential.

I think Mead is at her best when she's writing something of a mystery. Last Sacrifice obviously comes to mind (they're solving a murder mystery, after all). Bloodlines had that, with the tattoos, Lee, and Keith being shady all building up to a really exciting climax. The Golden Lily wasn't quite as much of one, but the clues leading up to the reveal of the Warriors were well-placed. Indigo Spell went straight back into mystery territory, trying to find Jackie's sister. And then The Fiery Heart is where, in my opinion, things start to falter. There's a lot of interesting worldbuilding information introduced, with the new details about spirit and magic coming up, and it was fun to get into Adrian's head, but it definitely felt like this supernatural romance was shifting to become a lot more romance and a lot less concerned with the supernatural. But that's not such a big deal. It's the middle of the series, we're building tension, Re-Education has been a threat hanging over Sydney since page one of Bloodlines and we're finally seeing that fear pay off.

But then we get to Silver Shadows, and while I guess figuring out where Sydney is could be a mystery, it doesn't really resonate the way 'who killed the queen' does, in my opinion. Sydney's arc in Re-Education is great, and I do like the way the books deal with Adrian's mental health issues, but some of Adrian's chapters felt more like filler. And a bigger issue, imo, was that this was when we really started to lose the side characters. Some of my favorite parts of the first few books were characters like Jill, Eddie, Trey, and Angeline, and then the ensemble atmosphere was largely gone, because Sydney was in Re-Education and Adrian left Palm Springs. The final fight and flight sequence was really good, though, so I had high hopes going into The Ruby Circle.

The Ruby Circle is probably my least favorite of the books between both of the series, and I think that's a shame, since it's the finale. We'd just had a 'kidnapped character' arc, so I think there was less emphasis on describing everyone's reactions. We saw the biggest reaction from Eddie, but as a result, he got kind of flattened out from the really well-rounded character he'd been from the back half of the VA books and the first part of Bloodlines.

The Ruby Circle could have been a really good mystery, with lots of twists that tied up a lot of the lingering questions from the series. Except that a lot of threads from the rest of the series were dropped and didn't resurface. They never caught whoever was behind the assassination attempt on Jill. I don't think we even got an official resolution on whether Lissa managed to change the quorum law. The political plots that were integral to VA weren't significant in Bloodlines, despite it all starting because of a politically motivated assassination. We also never got a resolution on the rogue spirit user who turned Lee back from being Strigoi, or the spirit users who had been sent to the psychiatric facility in Tarasov (the prison from Spirit Bound). We never found Robert Duro. The bond itself was somewhat discarded, too, whenever it wasn't immediately useful for a plot point. Instead, we just got a scavenger hunt across the country, a few fight scenes where the protagonists were pretty much guaranteed to win, and a final showdown with a magic barrier that, as we learn after, would have dropped down on its own in a few hours for them to bring Jill food, anyways.

I obviously still like the series, since I'm rereading it and talking about it nine years after the fact. But I think that there were a lot of opportunities to continue plots from VA that were lost, even when they should have been brought back into the story.

If anyone has made it this far, I suppose I should throw in a pitch for The Untitled Jill Project, which will be my attempt to rewrite the Bloodlines series from Jill's perspective, because I think there's still a lot more story to be told. I haven't got it all mapped out, but I intend to at least tie up some of the narrative loose ends I mentioned that bothered me about the series in that story. I might write up another post here soon about how Jill's characterization also suffered as Bloodlines went on, if anyone's interested.

Anyways, if anyone has any strong opinions on what I said (agreeing or disagreeing) please let me know! I'd love to talk about the series with people, since no one in my real life has read it, and I'm curious to know what the rest of the fandom thinks about how the narrative progressed in Bloodlines.

#Vampire Academy #Vampire Academy books #Bloodlines (Richelle Mead) #Eddie Castile #Sydney Sage #Adrian Ivashkov #Jill Dragomir #Jillian Dragomir #Jill Mastrano #The Untitled Jill Project #Rose Hathaway

[risingshards]

I'm reading the new interviews with Jackson and Doc (done prior to the strike) and uHGHGH i'm gonna be so emotional watching the Venture Bros movie, I dearly missed my idiots and I don't wanna say goodbye to my idiots.

Also these bits from the interviews really resonate with me:

Publick reflected on the hardships of shouldering so much of the show's production, including in his case directing and working on VFX of episodes. "Every time, the production is really hard on me, in particular," he said. "So, when I get to the end of the season, I've been working like 70 hours a week for a year straight, and I hate it, and I go, 'I don't know if I want to do this anymore.' But then you get a month or two off, and...like, these idiots [meaning the characters] start talking to you again. You start writing stuff down. We've always reinvented it as we went. Any time we felt like we were getting a little stale, we would go, 'Let's fuck it up.'" 

io9: Without giving the plot away, the movie both resolves and leaves dangling certain big questions that have been at the heart of The Venture Bros. for a long time. Was that something you deliberately set out to do, tie up certain plot threads but leave others open-ended?

Hammer: We came to a conclusion between the two of us years ago that ending the show is nothing we’re interested in. The Venture Bros. lives on forever, and we knew that when it was time to end it that we would have to leave it open-ended. Because it’s not done—this show should live on in the fans’ heads. And these [characters], there’s never going to be a monumental thing where everybody collapses or a monumental thing where everybody saves the day. That’s not the show. It was never set up to be that show. So we knew that we were going to leave a lot unanswered. But we had a few questions that we thought, we need to get these out. And it was a bit of a puzzle for us to go, “We’re getting them out, yet even after these monumental ideas come out, we want to end it with: the show keeps going.” You know, the very last scene is the show going, “and the fight continues between these people.”

Hammer: They’re not just toxic masculinity, but hopefully looking at it where people can find a roadmap out. We’re not giving you the answers, but we’re definitely pointing and going, you should recognize this paradigm. This is everywhere. This is the road to forgiveness, that you have to embrace this and not perpetuate it. Venture Brothers wasn’t trying to be a public service announcement. It was trying to entertain you in a way that made you kind of uncomfortable, but go I think I’m learning about myself watching this mess. And that’s all we ever wanted to do. And we made our mistakes as creators. We’ve done some things that we look back on and go, boy, that was a young kid trying to be funny. And we luckily were on the air long enough to go, forgive us. And please understand us. This is I think what we’re talking about here, and our viewers just go Yeah, yeah, I think that is what we’re saying. And we talked about topics that were horrifying to people. We had a lot of gender issues in our show that were handled in this David Bowie casualness of just like, people have gender problems. That is just who we are. They’re not frightening. They’re not weird. They’re just something that happens.

#venture bros #jackson publick #doc hammer #i watched this show since season 1 was airing like #it's been a part of my life for so long #and is so highly influential on me and my work #i hope it does super well and we somehow get a revival #LIKE THEY DONT WANNA BE DONE LET THEM MAKE MORE

[phosphorescent-naidheachd]

From a Certain Point of View

Or, how Ben Kenobi’s boldfaced lie prevarication saved the Galaxy (but not in the way he thought it would).

(See Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

Part Five: Epilogue

When Sidious dies, Jedi and other Force Sensitives across the galaxy sense it, even if they don’t all know precisely what it is that they’re feeling. The Force reverberates with the death of so powerful a being – with the shattering of so many significant shatterpoints. A heavy, oppressive cloud has lifted. The Force hasn’t felt this way since… longer than some of them even remember. The older among them do remember the days when the Force was lighter and their foresight clearer, but even they hadn’t realized how bad things had gotten until the fog of the Dark was gone.

Padme, with her low midichlorian count, is not particularly attuned to the Force, but she feels it too. Somewhere deep in her bones, she knows that something has changed. And Padme has always trusted her instincts.

So when Anakin bursts into her office in the Senate and announces that he just killed Chancellor Palpatine -- oh, and that Palpatine was a Sith Lord who orchestrated the entire war, by the way -- she isn’t quite as shocked as she probably should be.

(Which is not, of course, the same thing as not being shocked at all. Because Palpatine? A Sith Lord? She’d been concerned about the executive powers he was accruing and the policies he was putting into place, of course, but...)

“Are you all right?” he asks, dropping to his knees in front of her chair.

“Me?” she says. “I’m fine, Ani. I’m not the one who just fought a Sith! We need to get you to a medic.”

“Only if you get looked over too,” he says. He hesitates then adds, “Is there anything you, uh, wanted to tell me?”

He gestures awkwardly in her direction with his flesh hand.

Padme stares at him.

“I’m sorry?” she says, eyeing him worriedly.

Who knows what kind of damage he might have sustained in his encounter with Palpatine.

“You know,” he says. “Any, um, family news?”

“My family is fine, last I heard,” she says slowly. “Ani, what’s going on?”

He takes a deep breath.

“Padme, how is the baby doing?”

She stares at him. 

“What baby?”

There is a choking sound near the door.

...which, she realizes in retrospect, they never closed after Anakin barged in like a gundark. 

“An excellent question. Is there anything,” a particularly exhausted-looking Obi-Wan Kenobi says dryly, one eyebrow arched, “that the two of you would like to tell me?”

An Hour Later...

Silence falls once Anakin has finished his story.

One of Obi-Wan’s few comforts is that Padme looks nearly as shellshocked as he feels. At least he wasn’t the only one Anakin has been keeping in the dark...

“Let me see if I understood this correctly,” Obi-Wan says, folding his arms over his chest. “Not satisfied with just conducting an affair so indiscreet that every padawan and half the initiates in the Coruscant Temple knew about it, the two of you decided to get married. While Anakin was still a padawan himself, no less. Then, shortly after the beginning of the War, your son from the future arrived to warn you about a student of mine that was going to bring about the fall of the Republic and the Jedi, only to vanish into thin air partway through his explanation of events. Instead of talking this fantastical tale through with me, as would have been sensible, your response was to maintain absolute secrecy, cling to my side like lichen to rock, prevent me from spending any time with younglings, and to steal Ahsoka as your padawan to prevent her from becoming my student and thus this Darth Vader. Is that correct?”

“...that about sums it up,” Anakin says, only a little shamefaced.

“Ah, good,” Obi-Wan says. He belatedly realizes that he is stroking his beard with one hand -- an unfortunate tell of his. “I’d hate to have missed any other revelations.”

Padme looks ready to drop her head into her hands. Obi-Wan can sympathize. 

“So you’re sure you aren’t pregnant?” Anakin asks, turning his attention back to her.

“Yes, Anakin,” she repeats with supreme patience. “I’m sure.”

“Maybe we should get you checked out, just in case,” he says.

Padme sighs.

“Trust me,” she says waspishly, “I am absolutely, without a doubt, not pregnant. I’m on my moonsblood right now and you are not helping my mood.”

Anakin freezes, the expression on his face resembling nothing more than an ash-rabbit trapped by a predator. He turns his head in Obi-Wan’s direction, eyes pleading.

Obi-Wan shakes his head. 

(He’s learned many things over the years, and key among them is to never get involved in a couple’s marital spat.)

And yet...

Obi-Wan sighs internally and begins to speak. “I hate to interrupt, but do we know if Mas Amedda was aware of Palpatine’s true identity? With Palpatine dead, the Chancellorship will fall into his hands, along with its manifold new powers.”

Padme frowns, lacing her fingers through one another atop the desk.

“Several of us in the Senate have long suspected him of corruption,” she says, “but we’ve never been able to tie him to anything. Every time we think we’ve finally caught him, he slithers away again. Bail -- Senator Organa -- thinks Amedda might have someone from Intelligence in his pocket, but now I wonder... Whether he was aware of Palpatine’s identity or not, I can not imagine Amedda didn’t do some of Palpatine’s dirty work. We’d need actual proof before we could oust him from his position, though...”

“And if he has any brains, one of the first things he’ll do upon learning of Palpatine’s exposure -- and his own newly gained authority -- is erase any evidence that might incriminate him,” Obi-Wan agrees.

Force, this is such a mess.

He pinches the bridge of his nose as the headache building behind his eyes continues to grow.

“And if Palpatine planned everything,” Padme continues,“he must have had allies. Many, many allies -- witting and unwitting. How deep does this go? ...We need allies and we need to figure out how we’re going to spin this. Quickly, before the press gets word. Tell me, what did you do with the Chancellor’s body? Did you attack any of his Security on the way in -- No, you can’t have done, they would have raised the alarm long before now. -- Do we know if he had any other appointments this afternoon? For that matter, who else knows about this?”

Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, pin him in place.

Reluctantly, he says, “We left the Chancellor’s body in his office where he fell. No one other than Palpatine was harmed, to my knowledge. Anakin simply walked in without an appointment -- the guards are used to that -- and I snuck in through a window. I’m afraid I have no notion of whether he had any other appointments later in the day. Anakin, was his secretary there when you entered?”

Anakin shakes his head. 

“I think she was on her lunch break,” he says.

“Well, that’s something at least,” Padme mutters. “And the rest?”

“Cody knows,” Anakin says promptly. “So does Ahsoka.” 

“The Chancellor’s personal chef knows as well,” Obi-Wan says. “It’s possible that any of them have told someone else. I... have not yet had an opportunity to brief the Council on this matter as someone ran off to your office the second I confirmed Palpatine’s death. I barely had time to lock the office door behind him before following.”

Padme lets out a low groan.

“I,” she says, “am calling for backup.”

Anakin makes as though to move, only to be halted by a gesture from Padme.

“You,” she says, “are going to stay right there. I’ll ask them to bring a med-droid while they’re at it.”

“Then perhaps --” Obi-Wan begins delicately.

“And you,” Padme says. “You aren’t going anywhere either. The two of you have done enough for the moment.”

“I was merely going to suggest that someone inform Ahsoka of our whereabouts,” Obi-Wan says. “It wouldn’t do for her to panic and barge into the Chancellor’s office, lightsaber in hand.”

“...that is a fair point,” Padme says, sounding almost insultingly surprised.

“Then while we’re at it,” Obi-Wan says, “Might I suggest that one of us contact the Council and request a representative’s presence at your planned meeting? Everything will go more smoothly if we are all on the same page.”

“Of course,” Padme says with a gracious nod.

Obi-Wan has just lifted his comlink from his belt to make the call when a terrible thought occurs to him.

And really, if he hadn’t been so tired -- if this entire day hadn’t been one galaxy-shattering revelation after another, interspersed with frantic planning and fighting -- he would have thought of this much earlier.

“Padme,” Obi-Wan says slowly. “By any chance, do you know if the interior of your office is under any forms of surveillance?”

“...oh fuck.”

Mace Windu was having a fairly pleasant day, all things considered. For the first time in months, he wasn’t in a war zone. The Sithbegotten headache he’d received earlier today had finally gone away. The Force felt tangibly lighter, shatterpoints were showing futures brighter and clearer than any he’d seen in well over a decade, and he even had a cup of Sapir tea in front of him.

Yes, Mace Windu was having a good day. 

‘Was’ is the key word here.

The second he received an urgent comm from Obi-Wan Kenobi asking for him to come to Senator Amidala’s office in the Senate ASAP, however, he knew his day was about to descend into all nine Corellian hells.

It’s Kenobi, after all -- the man has a positive talent for attracting chaos. And where Kenobi is, Skywalker is rarely far behind.

The question isn’t whether Mace’s headache is about to return, the question is only how bad it’s going to be when it does.

So when he enters Senator Amidala’s office to find not only Kenobi, Amidala, and Skywalker, but also Tano and Senators Organa, Mothma, Danu, and Tills, he can feel his temples start to throb anew.

Then he hears Skywalker’s story.

Mace closes his eyes briefly and takes a deep, calming breath.

...he hates it when he’s right about these things.

The meeting feels like it lasts forever. Once they’ve decided how to handle Palpatine’s death, talk turns to the current intra-political environment in the Senate and how that might affect any brokering of a peace agreement with the remaining Separatist leadership. Which then leads into even more political discussions. 

Anakin is bored stiff.

In the end, the meeting only breaks up because Bail reminds them that it will look suspicious if they remain holed up together for too long -- especially once news of the Chancellor’s death spreads.

Unfortunately, however, it appears that Anakin’s trials for the day have just begun. The rest of the day involves enough politics and long-winded debates given in double-speak that he’s begun to seriously consider ‘accidentally’ injuring himself just to have an excuse to escape.

Something in his face must have given his thoughts away, because Obi-Wan lays a hand on his arm and shakes his head.

“If you think this is bad,” Obi-Wan whispers, sounding far too amused for a man listening to yet another piece of circuitous sophistry from a puffed-up planetary representative, “you should be grateful you haven’t been on the Council long yet.”

It... can get worse then this?

Anakin shudders.

By the time they leave for the evening, Anakin can’t decide which he wants more -- to eat something, to sleep for twelve hours straight, or to hit something hard.

Padme, in his private opinion, looks almost as disappointed as she does smug when she informs him that she never had occasion to use her blasters today.

.........he can sympathize with the former. 

Politics are enough to make anyone violent.

Irritating politicians aside, confronting and disposing of Palpatine is not enough. Not for that kind of intimate betrayal.

It will never be enough, he knows, not even if he kills every last one of Palpatine’s stooges. Their blood will not wash away all the blood that has been shed in this stupid, pointless war; their deaths will not bring the other dead back to life or restore him to a world where his trust remains unbroken.

Damn if it wouldn’t make him feel better, though.

But not for long, that annoying voice in his head that sounds like Obi-Wan reminds him. It would only be a temporary distraction; you’d still have to deal with everything eventually. Besides, vengeance is not the Jedi way.

...sometimes Anakin really wishes he hadn’t spent so much time meditating with Obi-Wan.

Padawan Ahsoka Tano is tired. It has been a long, tense day. A long week, really. A long past few years.

She’s looking forward to lying down on Master Obi-Wan’s couch and passing out.

(Ever since she became Anakin’s padawan, the two of them have been on the front lines more often than not, so he’s never bothered to get them their own set of rooms. Ahsoka doesn’t mind -- there’s something kind of cozy about sharing an apartment with both of her Masters. ...She suspects that Anakin and Master Obi-Wan feel the same way, even if they’ll never say as much.)

So naturally, when they enter Master Obi-Wan’s apartment, someone is already sitting there.

She doesn’t recognize him, but Anakin certainly seems to.

“Luke?” he says incredulously. “How -- why --?”

The boy -- man, really -- shrugs.

He seems only slightly sheepish to have been caught breaking into their apartment. 

“Surprise?” he says, running a gloved hand through floppy blond hair.

The conversation that follows is perhaps the weirdest one Ahsoka has ever been a part of... and that’s saying something, considering who she works with on a daily basis.

Every now and then, Skyguy cuts Luke off, throwing her a nervous glance.

...Now that she stops to think about it, this usually happens when the subject of this new Sith, Darth Vader, comes up. 

It’s super irritating. Ahsoka isn’t some untried youngling! She’s fought in countless battles. She even helped to take down a Sith Lord; she hardly needs shielding from a mere discussion about one! 

Anakin has just sent her into the kitchenette to make some tea -- which, if you ask her, is a totally transparent excuse to get her out of the way so he can talk to this Luke person in private -- when there’s a faint rap at the apartment door.

Glad to escape the tedium of tea-making, Ahsoka dashes back into the living room.

It’s probably just as well that she did, because Anakin and Luke are so absorbed in their Top Secret conversation that she doesn’t think they even saw her come through, let alone heard the knock.

She glances through the peephole.

Ah, it’s Master Obi-Wan.

Since it’s his apartment, Obi-Wan doesn’t need to knock, but he’s done so ever since that one time he walked in on her making out with Barriss.

(In retrospect, the living room really wasn’t the best place for that. Even Barriss, usually so unflappable, couldn’t look him straight in the eye for a solid week afterwards without remembering the short talk they’d both received about the importance of using protection, exercising discretion, and remembering their priorities as Jedi.)

Shaking away the memory, she opens the door. 

“Thank you, Ahsoka,” Master Obi-Wan says. “...is that Tarine I smell?”

“Yeah... Good nose,” she replies. “Want any? I’m already making some for Skyguy and his visitor.” 

“Oh? Is this visitor anyone I know?” he asks, arching a brow quizzically.

“Some guy named Luke,” Ahsoka says with a shrug, stepping back to let him in. “He claims he’s from the future and that he’s met Skyguy before.”

“Really,” Master Obi-Wan says.

His eyes sharpen as he steps through the door and peers around her.

“So that is Luke,” he murmurs.

Luke freezes in his place on the couch, then his head snaps up.��

He gapes.

“Ben?” he says, moving forward. “Ben Kenobi? Gosh, you look different.”

“Have we met before?” Master Obi-Wan asks.

Luke’s eyes seem to laugh at some private joke. Smiling faintly, he says,

“Oh yes... from a certain point of view.”

THE END

#anakin skywalker #padme amidala #obi wan kenobi #ahsoka tano #star wars au #yeah yeah i know -- dangling plot threads! -- but there's no way i'm writing this out as a full story atm #and i figured it was better to give you this than to wait another 6+ months #feel free to either use your imagination or to send me asks re: any questions you might still have #;-) #thank you all so much for joining me on this improbably happy crack concept!fic journey & for all of your comments!!! #truly there's no way i would have finished this without your encouragement & enthusiasm #// #things done by phos #from a certain point of view au #luke skywalker #swtcw au #star wars prequels #star wars #star wars fanfiction #fanfiction #sw not-fic #not-fic #long post #death #food

[writingwhatneedswriting]

My God "Stop talking" is so fucking good//you're one talented person! Could I request a yandere! Jotaro (p3)'s, reaction to reader-whose also a stand user but it's extremely weak in combat, telling him she has a stalker, aka another yandere who is also a strong stand user? I wand d r a m a, and I'm a thirsty hoe jotaro. Preferably a fanfic, but headcanons are alright too!

Aw, thank you so much! It means a lot to know people like my writing. I’m happy to write Yandere!Jotaro. I’ll give you as much drama as I can (and maybe a little NSFW for the funsies <3).  BTW, this will also be a multi-parter cus there’s wayyy too much plot for me to put in just one lol

I will protect you - Y!Jotaro x reader

“Uh, Jotaro,” She asked. God, he loved her voice. The upwards intonation she always used when she said his name made his heart leap into his throat. He adored it. What he wouldn’t gave to make her say his name again and again. Even though they were in the same class, sitting only a desk’s length away, she always seemed so far. Sometimes he listened to her writing her notes, wondering if she ever stopped and just watched him from her vantage point behind him. Given the chance, he’d swap seats and watch her like a hawk all fucking day.  After a moment of silence, he stopped and she said his name again. It sent a shiver down his spine. If he ignored her again, she’d just get grumpy and walk away, so he turned to face her, arm over the back of his chair. He had the time and the chance to talk to her, as class hadn’t started yet. She was the only reason he ever bothered to show up. Well, her and avoiding his mom. “Yeah? What’s the matter?” “I... I need to talk to you about something... could you meet me at lunch, around the back of school?” “Why? What’s your deal?” He grunted. Despite his affections for her, he had a reputation to maintain. He couldn’t just follow her around and bend to her every whim. Not in front of anyone anyways. He watched her eagerly, and then saw it. Her stand manifested, behind her, threading it’s fingers gently through her hair. The thing was useless in a fight, in the middle of one anyway. Total Eclipse could only calm someone down and stop their heart racing. She’d used it on him once, when he’d almost gotten into a fight over her. Still, the fact it had manifested worried Jotaro.  “I... I can’t tell you. Not here. Just, please will you meet me there?” Of course I will. I’d go anywhere, anytime just to see you. Please, tell me you’re going to confess to me. “Yeah, sure. Bring lunch, I don’t want to waste my time.” he grunted, before turning away again.  He could hear the smile on her lips when she laughed. “You know I always make you a bento, Jotaro.” He smiled in return, before wiping it from his face.  ~~~ By the time lunch had rolled around, Jotaro had been waiting for her for ten minutes. He hurried right there to wait for her, whilst she seemed to be lolly-gagging around in the halls somewhere. After a while pondering as to if he was being set-up, that she was luring him there to get him to confess to ruin his reputation, he heard a noise. A peculiar, but familiar noise.  “Jotaro!” she hissed. “Jotaro, I-I’m stuck!” Instead of going the regular route through the halls and out the doors, she was climbing out of the window of what seemed to be the girls bathrooms, her backpack dangling from her fingers as she tried to squeeze through.  How could I ever think she’d do something so cruel? He shook off his prior concerns, before taking the bag and placing it down, before taking her arms and pulling her down, to have her land safely in his embrace. He glanced down at her, eyes locking on her bust for a moment. That must have been what got her stuck in the first place. He smirked, before letting her down with a gentleness many would assume was uncharacteristic of him. She smiled at him, flattening her skirt against her bum and thighs, before sitting down on the grass, prompting Jotaro to do the same as she fished out their bento boxes.  “So, why am I here?” he asked, before gruffly taking his without thanks and starting to eat. She looked down at her own food, gently prodding at it’s contents with her chopsticks. Again, Total Eclipse manifested, toying with her hair again, to soothe her.  “Someone’s stalking me.”  That nearly got Star Platinum out.  “Stalking you?” He asked, no longer thinking of food or confessions. She nodded. “I... I caught him. Last night. My cat wanted to get inside again so, i got up and went to the window and I saw a flash.” She looked up at him. “They were taking photos of me. Since then I’ve... noticed a lot more. I felt someone watching me all the way to school and... I even found a note in my locker.” “Give it to me.” he demanded, putting the chopsticks into the box, before holding his hand out to her. “Give me the note, Y/n.” She tucked a lock of her H/C hair behind her ear, before once again rummaging through her bag, before handing him a pristinely folded bit of paper. He snatched it and opened it, leering at the words it possessed.  “My dearest Y/N, it breaks my heart to know you found my secret. i can only hope that you didn’t see my face when you caught me last night. It is of no consequence. You won’t tell anyone, will you? I’d hate to have to take matters int my own hands.” There was no name signed, and thus no target for Jotaro’s blistering rage. he crumpled up the note and tossed it aside, before looking back at her. “Who is he? Did you see his face? Did you see him?” She didn’t respond, and Total Eclipse’s preening got even more fervent in its attempts to calm her.  “Tell me, Y/N.” he demanded, grabbing her wrist tightly. “You wanted to tell me, right? So tell me!” “Noriaki Kayoin.”

#jotaro x reader #jotaro kujo #all i write is Jotaro these days istg #whatever i'm into it #yandere #jjba #jojos bizarre adventure

[landofsomethingsomething]

Super agree with you regarding epilogues ruining engagement. I was personally able to just completely boot the epilogues out of my brain, and hs still means a ton to me. But now I can't browse most content since it's epilogue stuff, and most people I followed who hated them too have completely divorced hs as a whole. Which I get, but yeah. It's just depressing. I'm not ready to give hs up, but I feel l'll have to since the epilogues eclipsed everything and there's just nothing left now.

Just realized my previous ask may imply guilting content creators for not making things I want, and I want to apologize for that. Not what I intended. I really just wanted to say that even from the perspective of someone who is still as passionate as I always was for hs, I'm feeling the strain the epilogues caused. It feels like the epilogues murdered the fandom rather than let it die a natural peaceful death.

Initially, honestly, that was my exact plan too - Just go on as though they hadn’t happened. But I ran into the same thing you and others have: No matter how mealy mouthed people get about “dubious canonicity” and the murk they are purportedly attempting to create between pure fanwork and pure canon... the epilogues are right there on the main page with the rest of the story. This isn’t like That One Ubiquitous Fanon Detail We Hate But Is Everywhere that we all surely have (more than one, for most of us really) because it comes explicitly from a place of authority over the work. The stuff that comes from other fans is so much easier to work with because we are all on equal ground from an authenticity standpoint. The epilogues are not on equal ground. They are authoritative and no matter how stubbornly we insist we will disregard them in their entirety, of course new canon (and that is what it is, again, no matter how mealy mouthed people are about it) is going to seep into the greater fandom consciousness. Like of course it is. Just like Act 7 quashed exploration of the characters’ individual goals because the body of the work authentically stated it had been to play along with paradox space’s rules and just make a new frogverse the whole time. Just like the Credits quashed exploration of alternate new universes and Earth Cs and what godhood looks like and how the kids grew from their experiences and what that growth led them to become. 

Of course I don’t think either of those were malicious the way the epilogues were, that’s just how it is. New canon will always change a fandom’s working parameters fundamentally unless literally no one reads it, I guess. Schroedinger’s canon. 

I think that I was honestly just naively, optimistically banking on more people disregarding it entirely. I thought to myself that it was so bad and so insulting and so objectively fucking awful, of course the collective community would just ignore it. But that was just me being an idiot - of course it’s messier than that, no community is a hivemind. People are picking and choosing details to keep and details to ignore and details to expand on and details to minimize and the end result, really, is just that the epilogues are fucking everywhere in a bunch of scintillating fractured different forms, infecting everything and making it all totally unpalatable to people like me, who genuinely wanted to just forget it ever happened while somehow still remaining plugged in. I’m not sure why I was so confident it would be possible at the time, looking back it was really pretty stupid of me lol.

The truth is that the story I liked does not exist anymore, because subsequent parts of a story by necessity recontextualize the rest. I’ve argued for years that Homestuck Is Actually Good based on a lot of things that came from a place of empathy for creators who meant well but were burnt out and wanted to move on. Well, ok. My bad, again. I can’t go back and not have the knowledge I do now, and all the joy I used to feel at the potential of those unfinished arcs and unanswered questions and dangling plot threads, the fire it all lit in me to write things and showcase possibilities through that writing to show other people why I thought Homestuck was So Good - that’s gone - and nothing will ever convince me that wasn’t half the point of it, that getting us out of the playground wasn’t part of the intent.

That’s the difference between how much I disliked the Ending and how much I disliked the Epilogues. The Ending was ridiculous, but in a way that left the stuff I did like intact while creating an open field of possibility to fill in. The Epilogues purposely took that field and filled it up with as much garbage as possible with the specific intent of driving the people who had been enjoying that space out of it, and ensuring the people left behind were, well, playing with garbage. I feel like I’m watching a social experiment where the creators behind an old megafandom are trying to answer the question of how much literal shit do you have to give people before they stop touching it? It’s honestly disconcerting, I don’t know how to describe it, and I realize people are going to find that condescending but I truly do not know how else to describe my feelings while also somehow making clear that my intent is not to wail at everyone “doing fandom wrong,” or whatever. There’s no wrong way to do fandom, the entire point of fandom is to do exactly what people are doing, to take bits and pieces of a thing and play with them. I am the one with the problem here, not everyone else. 

The intention here, really, is sort of just to mourn, because the fandom pivoted at a critical point in a direction I didn’t expect or want and as a result people including me have been alienated from continuing to engage with it. The same thing would have happened to a different subset of people had things gone the way I thought they would, too, for the record. There was no way to “win” this, no “right” way to deal with it, it just is what it is and this is what it looks like from my perspective.

#text #asks #epilogues #i should honestly not post this but my queue is about to run out and im feeling existential about it #Anonymous