#(sort of... but it's mostly just her...)

[coffeebanana]

okay but what if. video game designer marinette...

[technikki]

they should have kept one thing from paper jam in brothership and it's her

[icecas]

[black-and-yellow]

I love MerMic and lighthouse keeper Aizawa! Does Aizawa have a human partner to keep him company from time to time? And if so do they ever meet mermic?

Aizawa doesn't like other people. His only friends are Souter and that weird eel he dragged in off the beach.

[bumblingbabooshka]

I need every non-Human Star Trek character to start talking about their countries and hometowns NOW!! Tuvok definitely roots for his local sports team internally even though they suck and are horrible. He's gonna watch the game and he's gonna be frustrated with their performance every time.

Vulcans posting shit like this ☝️is commonplace in my mind

[astranauticus]

Director of the False Last Act

[basket-of-radiants]

Why were you so disappointed by Rhythm of War?

This has been sitting in my askbox for years. I've taken several cracks at answering, only to get frustrated with the subject matter and burn myself out every time. I didn't like Rhythm of War. More than that, I didn't like it in a way that tainted my enjoyment of the entire series. And despite what it may seem, I don't actually enjoy discussing things which I don't like. I always want to talk from a place of good faith. Which is why now that my feelings towards the series are a little more positive, I think I can finally answer this.

I'm going to try to stay away from specific plotpoints and story beats for this post, because my goal isn't to nitpick (if for no other reason than it would take a week to write this post), I'm just looking to talk about my overall impressions. I think that might mean the only spoilers here will be structural? idk, if you haven't read Rhythm of War yourself then you should probably do that before looking for other people's opinions anyway. 

I liked Way of Kings when I first read it. I didn't love it at the time, but I liked it. Certainly enough to keep reading once I'd finished. One thing that made me a bit uncomfy, however, was the war against the Parshendi. They were this unknowable enemy which the book was not interested in knowing. An inhuman army. Their main purpose was to kill Kaladin's friends, or else be killed by Dalinar's armies. And yet the Parshendi, and the parshmen in the form of Shen, did show hints of personhood. And so it bothered me how Dalinar spoke so casually about how the Alethi had decimated their numbers, how the others used the war as a means to amass wealth and power. (It didn't bother me in a "this is a bad book" way but in a "these characters are bad people" way.)

One of my foibles as a reader is that when a book is very clearly treating one side of a conflict with more humanity, I tend to be a bit predisposed towards the other to account for that. And with the Alethi clearly being the invading party and superior military force, there was also some underdog favoritism. I didn't really like how the book treated the Parshendi. This is to say that going forward, the singers would be more important to me than any other through line.

So imagine my delight at reading Words of Radiance and meeting Eshonai, one of the Parshendi, who even gets her own point of view sections! They were no longer being treated as a faceless mass, we were getting to see things from their perspective as well. And it became plain to see the damage the Alethi had done to them. I couldn't really bring myself to root for Dalinar or really any of the humans against the listeners. I couldn't even bring myself to like most of these characters. I still enjoyed the book but once it became clear there wouldn't be a peaceful conclusion, let's just say that I wouldn't have wept for Dalinar and Adolin if Szeth had managed to off them. Like everyone in the book, I assumed that going forward all the parshmen would be turned into evil voidbringers in the everstorm and that the listeners were mostly dead. Except for Rlain, and Eshonai because I'd read or been told that book 4 would be Eshonai's book and thus had assumed she was fine. (Oathbringer spoilers, she was not fine.) So ultimately it was still a bit of a downer way to end the book. 

So imagine my delight at reading Oathbringer, where for the first time singers were being treated as people, full and real people, and where the human characters could no longer ignore or dismiss them. We met Khen and the others, common singers who were sympathetic and just wanted freedom from bondage. We see Venli grapple with the loss of her home. We see Leshwi and Moash connecting with and understanding one another. We learn of a history where singers were the original inhabitants of the planet. Parallel to this, Dalinar is having a truly excellent character arc about confronting one's past actions and acknowledging them to move forward and do better. I loved Oathbringer, for some years it was my favorite book, and I was excited as hell to see what came next. At the time, it seemed to me that there is a clear direction the story is going. Two books about needless war, and then a third where the main cast is forced to acknowledge the personhood of their enemies. This was so cool, all of my feelings from the previous installments were being validated, the characters were going to have to face what they've done in the past and outgrow their militaristic mindsets, I was so sure of that.

Imagine my disappointment when that does not even remotely resemble the direction the story went in Rhythm of War. RoW presented a clear, straightforward “us vs. them" narrative, where every character was totally fine with killing singers. Characters aligned with the singers were either flattened into wholly evil versions of themselves (Moash) or were expected to turn on their side in favor of the humans (Venli.) Because clearly there was no reason good people would be on the side that's all former slaves trying to stay free. Maybe there's some sort of accord or understanding between Navani and Raboniel that I might have found meaningful if the seeds of mutual understanding weren't already there in Oathbringer and then apparently ignored for a year by all the characters.

I have a lot of issues with how the listeners are handled in these books. (Here's some elaboration.) Following OB, I had thought that all my concerns were going to be addressed. Following RoW, I knew they never would be. 

Which is my main complaint, because that's the thread that matters most to me in this series.

I have a lot of other Things as well. Gonna just talk about a few big ones. 

One outsized source of disappointment that may seem a little petty, and which probably is, is that I felt mislead by the premise of the book. It had been announced that this book would center Venli and Eshonai, and I was unbelievably hyped for that. That did not really turn out to be the case. The purpose for their backstory chapters felt less about exploring them as people and contextualizing their arcs, and more about filling in gaps of world history. In the main plot, Venli was a POV character and she certainly played a role, but honestly not a very important one overall. To me she felt like a side character in her own book. I don't think it's controversial to say that the main character of RoW was Navani. A lot of people really like Navani and are happy about that. Unfortunately I'm not one of those people, and I found it all the more difficult to enjoy her when it felt like it was coming at the expense of some of my favorite characters. 

This particular gripe somewhat comes down to preference, obviously everyone prefers to read about characters they like more than those they don't, and it can go both ways. (For instance, on a craft/technical level RoW is probably the superior book to W&T, but I liked the latter a lot more because of my stupidly outsized attachment to Szeth and Nale.) But I do think there's something of a real criticism in how the book would rather focus on the feelings of a queen rather than those of a genocide survivor, and how the former's are given significantly more weight and import. It ties in with my main criticism, I think. 

And then there's how human/human racism had also been wholly cast aside as a plot point. Jasnah fixed slavery so that's resolved, and the only person who still cares about structural racism is the evil bad bad evil villain Moash/Vyre, who is now wholly irredeemable and who you're allowed to totally write off because he's sold his soul to Odium. I've already talked a lot about this. Other people have already talked about this, probably better than me. The writing was actually on the wall for me in OB, but again, RoW was when I fully accepted that this was never going to be addressed. 

There's something else that probably deserves its own discussion rather than being quickly tacked on at the end here, but here we are. This book changed how the series approaches war. 

In WoK, war was very clearly portrayed as a bad and inglorious thing. It was brutal, it was painful, those at the bottom died cruelly and unceremoniously and pointlessly while those at the top turned a profit. Every day was a new horror. The enemy were never evil, they were always just more people forced to go through the same thing. Through the next couple books, it felt to me that even if the characters had accepted war as necessary, there was still a tragedy to it. Conversely, in RoW (and W&T) war is basically a series of boss battles, in between which our protagonists can kill dozens of footsoldiers with barely a thought in the same way WoK had criticized.

Final note on all this, it sucks how we have no perspectives from the former-slaves-singers demographic. Those guys are really thrown under the bus, and seemingly get no self-determination now or ever. It was a glaring problem to me in RoW. Conscripted and enslaved humans and singers probably have just as much ground to form mutual understanding as a fused and a queen. (In fact they already had. In Oathbringer.)

In essence, RoW disappointed me because it left me with the distinct impression that none of the series's most important through lines (well, most important to me) were going to be resolved well. I liked W&T, but I haven't revised my opinion very much about the overall handling of these topics across the series. Maybe one of the reasons I was able to enjoy W&T so much more was because I no longer had such high expectations.

[lame2882]

ENA: Fragment Ego (AU)

Masterpost

Welcome back to my ENA au! If you missed the messy background for this idea, you can read it here.

This is still a work in progress so things might get a little confusing.

Today, we’re talking about this lovely boss lady!

Art by me :]

Worker ENA:

This ENA is an older fragment, working a job and generally have a more "mature" demeanor.

Note: ENAs don't have a real age, just varying levels of maturity. They were all born at once, but exist at different stages of life.

She holds a load of memories of the genie she used to be a part of, mostly ones that involved the war the genie had started. She experiences PTSD flashbacks from her former life as a genie. Due to these war memories, she has a predisposition to be a soldier for those she takes jobs from. She's rather good at it too. She's even a good mercenary.

With her Salesperson ego, she can be incredibly charismatic. It's naturally easy for her to get her target's guard down. Interrogation is also something she excels at, both her salesperson side and her meanie side acting as a kind of bad cop/good cop tactic.

Due to her ample amount of memories of the war, she is quite aware of her origins as a genie, and therefore completely understands why those around her treat her so poorly. She tries not to let it get to her, often ignoring it, but the treatment often triggers her flashbacks.

So why would an ENA fully aware of her status as a former genie bother to work for others?

Well, as a genie she was supposed to fulfill wishes. And while she can no longer grant eternal happiness or wealth beyond imagination like she used to, doing odd jobs and making sales is like... granting smaller wishes.

Keeping a job also distracts her from the horrors™.

When approached and questioned about her origins, she will avoid talking about it and will instead try to offer you some divestment opportunity or try to sell you something.

ENAs will typically avoid one another, mostly subconsciously. Due to being fragments of the same entity, they are vaguely aware of one another's locations at all times. It's all a subconscious process and they're probably not even fully aware that that's what's going on. Sometimes they just know that they should really avoid a certain area or direction until the feeling passes.

However, I like to think that if worker ENA did ever encounter another ENA, especially one of a younger maturity level, she'd definitely become somewhat motherly toward them in her... ENA way.

That's the basic rundown of worker ENA. I love her very much.

[freyholland]

im obsessed with how teenage Misty tries so hard to mask and mirror the people around her but it's that usual autistic funhouse mirroring where everything is just slightly off and wrong and so people find her extremely off-putting and even creepy and it ends up making things worse than if she'd just been fully herself to begin with. i love that with adult Misty you can see that she's basically stopped masking and allows herself to be as weird and quirky as she wants to be - but she still mirrors the people she loves (primarily Nat) because that's such a huge part of how she's learned to interact with others. also like that they gave her a pet parrot in obvious reference to that. she learned mirroring as a survival strategy but now it's become her love language

[embv]

I think everyone’s subscribing to the “Helena Infiltration Theory” WAYY too quickly. I kinda feel like a lot of the oddities in the way she was acting could be chalked up to something else, and defaulting to “that’s not Helly” feels a lot like… I don’t know, like brushing off character flaws by saying, “No, [X] is possessed! That’s not actually them!”

I’d probably buy into it a bit more if she didn’t have that moment in the halls with Mark where she fervently said, “We’re not the same, actually. Us and the outies, we’re not.”

There are reasons why Helly would want to lie about her identity, and chief among them is the fact that she hates her outie—desperately wants to place distance between them, desperately wants to convince herself that the person she saw wasn’t her.

But there are compelling reasons for both angles, and I can’t say that I won’t be scanning future episodes for hints to either prove or disprove this, so… cheers, 🥂.

[lez-bichi-lover]

💥 NKG & RADIANCE 🌟| HALLOWEST AU

Some concepts as I want to retake the lore we planned with my bestie for the au of which we talked but never showcased properly ;^

Hope you're still interested!!💥💥💥

HALLOWEST AU by @pinktrapped and I

[saphira-approves]

Got new markers the other day, decided to try them out on our resident beloved girlboss

[spaceistheplaceart]

Every lawyer in Japanifornia gets a bizarro version like Furio Tigre, okay? It's law.

her name is Dionna Spikes and her sole mission is to harm empaths

Apollo's Counterpart Here

Bonus no text of Ms. Spikes under the cut:

[serpentinespider]

Charlotte's ultimate form....

(character uses she/her!)

[zylphiacrowley]

Memories in Ruins

<previous - next>

[failsquirrel]

my bluestar design...solid blue with white

plus post-tigerclaw bluestar