#*meta

[pocketgalaxies]

cannot imagine being caleb widogast btw and having such a fixed view of yourself as this irredeemable monstrous man who wishes for nothing more than to atone for the unatonable while also questioning whether you even deserve to live long enough to do so and then befriending this girl who is notorious for never sparing anyone's feelings when she has something to say and has, since you've known her, intentionally rebuilt herself from the ground up into someone who is real and direct and honest even when it hurts, and for her to lean forward and look into your eyes and say, with a magnitude of brutal honesty that only she could muster, that it Wasn't Your Fault.

[cenvast]

"Toshiro Is Sexist," "Toshiro Owns Slaves": What's Really Going on With This Guy?

I've seen a lot of debate on whether or not Toshiro is problematic because he's a slave owner or because he's sexist in the context of his crush on Falin. While I do want to examine his relationship to Falin, I'd like to take a few steps back and unpack his upbringing first. We'll dive into the gender and class dynamics he was raised with and how it impacts his behavior in the main storyline.

Like all people, Toshiro is shaped by the environment he grew up in. Toshitsugu, Toshiro's father and the head of the Nakamoto clan, is the most impactful model of authority and manhood in his life. Toshiro does recognize some of his father's flaws and tries to avoid replicating them. But whether or not he emulates or subverts his father's behavior, Toshitsugu is often the starting point for Toshiro's treatment of others, particularly marginalized people.

The Nakamoto clan exists under a patriarchal hierarchy with Toshitsugu at the top. As noted by @fumifooms in their Nakamoto household post, his wife has more authority than Maizuru. She's able to ban Maizuru from parts of their residence, but despite disliking his infidelity, she can't divorce him or stop him from cheating on her. Their marriage is not an equal partnership.

On an interpersonal level, Toshitsugu and Maizuru also have a fraught relationship. While she does seem to care for him, she's often frustrated by his thoughtless behavior.

For example, he drunkenly buys Izutsumi for her — without considering how she'll have to raise this child — and invades her room in the middle of the night. When he cryptically says, "It's all my fault," she replies, "I can think of a lot of things that are your fault." She calls him an "idiot" and "believes that [Toshiro] will grow up to be a better clan leader than his father," implying that she takes issue with Toshitsugu's leadership.

Because Maizuru and Toshitsugu are described as being "in an intimate relationship" and "seem[ing] to be lovers," Maizuru appears to be a consensual participant. Still, this doesn't negate the large power imbalance between them as a male noble clan leader and his female retainer. This imbalance introduces an insidious undertone to Maizuru's frustration with Toshitsugu. Like Toshiro's mother, Maizuru doesn't have the agency to do as she pleases in their relationship; he has the ultimate authority. For instance, she doesn't seem to want to raise Izutsumi, but she has to anyway.

While Maizuru's role as Toshitsugu's mistress is significant, she's also the Nakamoto clan's teacher and Toshiro's primary maternal figure. She cares deeply for Toshiro: tailing him, feeding him, and taking responsibility even for his actions as an adult. While it might seem sweet that she cares for him like a son at first, Maizuru was notably fifteen years old at the time of his birth. In the extra comic below, he's six years old and has already been in her care for some time. Even if we're being generous and assuming that she didn't start raising him until he was six, she was still only twenty-one at the time she was parenting her boss/lover's child with another woman.

Maizuru's roles as mistress and maternal figure, in addition to her role as retainer, demonstrate the intersection between gendered and class oppression in the Nakamoto household. Despite her original role being a retainer trained in espionage, Toshitsugu presses her into performing gendered labor for him and eventually, Toshiro. She's expected to be Toshitsugu's lover, perform emotional labor for him as his confidant, care for his child, and carry out domestic tasks like cooking. She says, "Even during missions, I was often dragged into the kitchen." If she was a male servant, I doubt she would have been expected to perform these additional tasks. She can't avoid these tasks either, stating that her "own feelings don't factor into it."

Toshitsugu disregards his wife's and Maizuru's desires and emotions to serve his own interests. Because he has societal power over them as a nobleman and in Maizuru's case, her master, neither woman can escape their position in the household hierarchy.

As a result, Toshiro grew up within a structure where men and male nobility, in particular, wield the most societal power. The hierarchical nature of his household and society discourages everyone, including him as a clan leader's eldest son, from questioning and disrupting the existing hierarchy.

The other Nakamoto household members also internalize its sexist, classist power dynamics.

For example, Hien expects that she and Toshiro will replicate the uneven dynamics of the previous generation, regardless of her personal feelings. She sees her and Toshiro's relationship as paralleling Maizuru and Toshitsugu's relationship; she is the closest woman to Toshiro and his retainer, so she's shocked when Toshiro doesn't attempt to begin an intimate relationship with her. Notably, she doesn't have actual feelings for him. Her expectations are centered around the household's precedent of placing emotional, sexual, domestic, and child-rearing labor onto the female servants without any regard for their personal desires.

Hien also probably knows that her position in the household will improve if she is Toshiro's lover because she's seen it improve Maizuru's position. However, the fact that being the future clan leader's lover is the closest proximity she, as a female servant, has to power further reveals the gendered, class-based oppression she and the other women live under.

It's important to note that the Nakamoto clan bought Benichidori, Izutsumi, and Inutade as slaves, so they have less power and agency than Maizuru and Hien. The clan further dehumanizes Izutsumi and Inutade as demi-humans; their enslavement contains an additional layer of racialization.

Toshiro isn't oblivious to the gendered, class, and racial power dynamics of his household. He tries to distance himself from participating in its exploitative power structure. He walls himself off from Hien, who he's known since childhood, to avoid replicating his father's behavior and making his servant into his lover. He disapproves of his father's enslavement of Izutsumi and Inutade, and he lets Izutsumi go when she runs away in the Dungeon.

But does any of this absolve him of his complicity in his household's sexist, classist power dynamics and racialized slavery?

The short answer is absolutely not.

Despite his distaste for his father's exploitation of his servants and slaves, Toshiro still uses them. He refers to his party as "his retainers," and he has them fight and perform domestic tasks for him. You could argue that Toshiro doesn't like to and thus, doesn't regularly use his servants and slaves. In the context of him asking his retainers to help him rescue Falin, Maizuru says, "The only time he ever made any sort of personal request was for this task." But it shouldn't matter whether exploitation is a regular occurrence or not for it to be considered harmful. Toshiro asking Maizuru to cook him a meal still constitutes asking his female servant to perform gendered labor for him. He's also very accustomed to her grooming and dressing him.

Maizuru sees feeding, washing, and even advising Toshiro romantically as fulfilling Toshitsugu's orders to care for his son. They aren't fulfilling a "personal request." But just because her labor has been deemed expected and thereby devalued doesn't mean that it isn't labor or that she isn't performing it.

Maizuru's dynamic with Toshiro is also complicated by her role as his maternal figure. She loves him and wants to take care of him, and she doesn't have a choice in the matter. During Toshiro's childhood, the onus was on Toshitsugu to cease exploiting his lover and release her from servitude, but Toshiro is now an adult man. Seeing as how Maizuru defers to his wishes and calls him "Young Master," they still have a power imbalance that he's passively maintaining. Ideally, he would not ask anything of her until he has the authority to release her from servitude.

Throughout the story, Toshiro acts as if he has no agency and quietly disapproving of his father's actions absolves him of his participation in maintaining oppressive dynamics. While his father still ranks higher than him, he's essentially his father's heir. He has much more power than Maizuru, the highest-ranked servant. At the very least, he could leave his slave-owning household.

Unfortunately, his refusal to confront injustice is consistent with his character's major flaw: he does not express his opinions, desires, or needs. While this character trait obviously hurts his friendships, it also furthers his complicity in the injustices his household runs on.

Toshiro's relationship with eating food — the prevailing metaphor of the series — also parallels his relationship with confronting injustice. Maizuru mentions that he was a sickly child, so the act of eating may have been physically uncomfortable for him. As an adult, his refusal to eat crops up during his rescue attempt of Falin. Denying himself food might have been punishment for not accomplishing important tasks like rescuing Falin and/or a way to maintain control over something in his life when he felt like he'd lost control over the rest of it, again in the context of losing Falin. (Note: I suggest reading this post on Toshiro's disordered eating by @malaierba.)

But he cannot and does not avoid consuming food forever.

Similarly, Toshiro keeps his distance from his retainers and tries not to use them until the Falin situation occurs. His efforts to avoid exploiting his retainers amount to inaction — things he doesn't ask of them or do to them. But his inaction does nothing to dismantle the existing hierarchy that places his retainers under his authority, denies them agency, and often marginalizes them as not only servants or slaves but as women, and he ends up using them as servants and slaves anyways.

Returning to the narrative's themes of consumption, Toshiro cannot avoid eating just as he cannot avoid perpetuating the exploitative system of his household. The Nakamoto clan consumes the labor and personhood of those lower in the hierarchy. The retainers' labor as spies and domestic servants is the foundation of the clan's existence. Thus, the clan consumes their labor to sustain itself.

Within this hierarchy, the retainers' personhood is also consumed and erased. As Izutsumi describes, they are given different names and stripped of their agency to reject orders or leave. Maizuru and Hien also say their feelings are irrelevant in the context of Toshitsugu's and Toshiro's wants and needs. Both women are expected to comply with whatever is most beneficial and comfortable for the noblemen. Clearly, despite Toshiro's detachment from his household's functions, these social structures remain in place and harm the women under him.

Although we know the Nakamoto clan has male retainers, the choice to highlight the female retainers seems intentional. We're asked to interrogate how not only being a servant or a slave in a noble household impacts a person's life and agency, but how being a woman intersects with being a member of some of the lowest social classes.

Toshiro only distances himself from his father's behaviors of infidelity and exploitation so long as it doesn't take Toshiro out of his comfort zone. He doesn't free his slaves. He's far too comfortable with his female retainers performing domestic labor for him, and he barely acknowledges their efforts; they're shocked when he thanks them for helping him save Falin. He hasn't unpacked his sexist (or classist or racist) biases because he perpetuates his household's oppressive hierarchy throughout the narrative. Considering all of this, he inevitably brings this baggage to his interactions with Falin.

Falin is presumably one of the first women he's had extended contact with that isn't his relative or his family's servant. Because of his trauma surrounding his father and Maizuru sleeping together, he understandably falls for a woman as disconnected as possible from his father and his clan. He seems to genuinely like Falin, respects her boundaries, and graciously accepts her rejection. His behavior towards her is overall kind and unproblematic.

But if Falin had gone with him, she would've likely been devalued and sidelined like the other women of the Nakamoto household. No matter how much he loves Falin, simply loving her cannot replace the difficult work of unlearning his sexism. Love, of course, can and should be accompanied by that work, but by the close of the narrative, we gain little indication that Toshiro acknowledges or seeks to end his part in exploiting and devaluing women and other marginalized people.

A spark of hope does exist. Toshiro expressing his feelings to Laios and Falin suggests that his time away from home has encouraged him to speak up more. Breaking his habit of avoidance may be the first step towards acknowledging his complicity in systems of injustice and moving towards dismantling them.

Special thanks to my very smart friend @atialeague for bringing up Toshitsugu's relationship with Maizuru and the replication of dynamics of consumption and class! <3

[denkilightning]

list of things i absolutely love about rogue's design aka design analysis (ft. spoilers/leaks, son of wu propaganda, and incoherent yapping <33)

uhh all undercut

the base of his outfit is 1:1 his trainee gi. i did not fucking realise that theyre Identical until i saw these side by side. DOWN TO THE BELT AND BANDAGE/UNDERSHIRT. WHAT THE FUCK.

what i meant to say was its not a kimono+trousers combo but a body suit!! which makes a lot of sense since its less sewing and theres like 90% chance this outfit is handmade.

along with the rope and some sort of emblem except its mirrored. which is excellent because rogue like character-growth wise is at the same level pilot!jay was. hes at the beginning of his journey into the 'save-it-or-end-the-world' scene.

another thing is its masterfully coherent?? like the 70-20-10 rule of colour in design with 70% being blue 20% gold and 10% red.

whats also awesome is that if you look at his dojo design the last one weve seen him wear as our jay??

rogues base colours are the same jay's 'undercolours' - hes been stripped bare to nothing but his nature with any nurture left behind; the red only being an accent colour of a side effect/scar - the shattered goodness/soul and all that.

whats also super important to me is that both of the blues Are Not Any of The Jay Blues. even though jays signature blue has changed across seasons from in both hue and value its always been far more vibrant. both the tones are lighter AND darker than any of the others weve seen on jay. theyre new.

rogue is slightly shattered and different and changed. hes figuring himself out as he goes and his outfit doesnt represent any shame in my opinion - rather his desire to let him discover himself privately and in peace.

after all he did spend like half a decade being told who he has to be with no chance to figure out who he was and no choice to choose who he can and/or will become.

PLUS jays initial in the dojo kimono is embroidered, something thats been meticulously put there while on rogue BOTH initials R and J are on keychains (for the lack of a better word) that are put in the same nook/ring of the rope with the J one actually being tiny bit lower and behind, which is telling.

not to mention THERE IS A 'J' on his back.

hes not completely abandoning his previous name, he probably hides it in plain sight for 'stop people from annoying me and keep me from doing my job' purposes. and all the crimes.

these are post DR faceprints and rogue faceprint which is definitely me reading too much into this but the fact rogue has a single faceprint instead of two?? that reads to me like a solidifying of his identity where he once again embodies the 'if you cant change your surroundings change yourself' philosophy. 'the only eternal state is the state of change' if you will.

i am 99% sure you can find screenshots of ras AND lloyd doing These Exact Poses. and 100% sure the two lower screenshots are straight up wu poses. which is fucking awesome.

There Is Not An Ounce Of Insecurity In His Body Language. and when he tilts his head down the hat makes it look like hes squinting which is awesome.

and if you look closely his face/head is completely blacked out which is an amazing fucking choice and im obsessed with it.

his design tells me hes not scared of being jay walker, but that by wanting to discover what being jay walker means without outside influence, rogue is doing the exact same thing jays been doing for years - recreating himself to fit his circumstances. the only difference is that rogue is putting on the one mask hes always had - unshakeable confidence and anger, when jay lived long enough to be able to take off any of the masks hes picked up along the way.

rogue is still jay, just a little mirrored and a little different. and he doesnt even know it.

[awsok]

thinking about "and everyday that raven comes to visit"...

at the time it felt like such a heartwarming note to end on, this idea that a piece of vax would always be with keyleth — but I adore the way this episode in particular has recontextualised it. what once felt sweet now feels selfish, what seemed kind now seems (unintentionally!) cruel.

of course keyleth is still hurt. of course she's totally unable to move on. how do you mourn someone who isn't truly dead? how do you mourn someone who sends daily reminders that they aren't even truly gone?

[cavka]

so there's a lot to be said about the weird lionization of the crows in veilguard and i've seen other people talk about it real well. but one thing that's been sticking with me is what happens post-game. or what, in a world that plays by the original rules of the crows, would likely happen post-game.

dialogue implies lucanis is very aware of the fact that he's in a hella delicate position politically after he's made first talon. he's got a contract to finish but he doesn't know how long he'll be able to "put off" the rest of the crows. and he's been saddled with a Very Important Title, even if it's still caterina calling the shots--for now.

because that's where you leave his story: in a tense limbo that's bound to snap.

illario, whether you imprison him or forgive him, is always going to be known as the traitor crow now and the crows do not deal well with traitors. especially since it wasn't just them he betrayed, it was all of antiva. sure, they'll appreciate the poetic justice of him living in disgrace for a while.

but that's clearly just because no one wants to piss off caterina dellamorte.

how much longer does she have? not just in terms of her natural lifespan. a lot of the mystique and shine of her reputation has to have worn off now that all the crows know illario was able to capture her and imprison her. sure, it was with the help of the venatori, but if anything, some crows are bound to take that as a challenge.

house dellamorte has only survived this long because caterina was holding it together with her grit and iron fist. if she dies, or is injured, the whole house of cards comes crashing down. illario won't be protected anymore. house dellamorte will be just lucanis, then. and, sure, he's a god-killer now. but he's also an abomination who very obviously doesn't want to be first talon, even if he knows that's what he's been groomed for his entire life.

so what happens, when caterina's health fails, or someone gets a lucky shot it, or a disgruntled and ambitious crow finally gets fed up with the fact that illario was allowed to live?

lucanis may have allies in viago and teia, but i highly doubt that's enough to save him should the rest of the crows fight for the seat of first talon again. or, hell, even just decide they don't want an abomination as first talon.

either he dies or he spends the rest of his life on the run, much like zevran. there's no real other option. not without some serious political maneuvering that i can't help but think lucanis would hate even if he would just resign himself to it because, well, this is what he was made for, isn't it?

so much of veilguard's story is about leaving behind the terrible things in the past, only taking the good with you, and working for a better future. but lucanis? he can't do that. he's stuck. and there's no good way to get him out of this.

[kohakhearts]

goh parentified child syndrome. go(h)

my time is here at last. thank you for enabling me <3 apologies for taking months to finish writing this giant post!

welcome to my dissertation on this fucking Dynamic <3

ok! first thing, let's establish our criteria for Parentified Child Syndrome. this is obviously not like, an actual diagnostic Thing, but there are a million and one articles out there for us to look through. so i did the tough work of scouring those to find some Symptoms we can use as anchor points here. a lot of this is split into "emotional" (parents seeking comfort from their children, rather than comforting them) vs. "material" (parents assigning their children responsibilities that are not age-appropriate (e.g. grocery shopping, paying bills, etc.)) needs, but for simplicity i'll just merge them together - because realistically, they often go hand-in-hand. so the primary symptoms we'll work with here will be:

disruptive childhood behaviours (particularly at school)

stress and anxiety

reluctance to participate in play/age-appropriate activities with their peers

difficulty acknowledging and accepting one's feelings

insecure attachment styles

need to feel "in control"

distrustful of others/self-reliant to a fault

absenteeism and poor performance in school

passive communication style

the other obvious prerequesite here is the family dynamic. so let's dissect that one a bit!

goh's family situation isn't actually like...100% clear. but i have analyzed every episode where his family is even mentioned like it's my full-time job and i have no reason to believe his grandmother actually lives with him. so in the scope of this essay, i am assuming that she lives nearby, and most likely has a key to the apartment, but does not live with them.

otherwise, we are given enough context to assume that camille and walker have been busy with work goh's entire life (though i'd choose to believe for my own sanity that in his infancy his mother at least wasn't working...though given the type of job she has, that's actually...kinda hard to say for sure). we can also assume that they've at least been self-employed for the majority of his life. it's clear that they are fairly well-established in the city/in their field by jn, and since goh is supposed to be 10 at this point, it makes sense to me that they've been building that company up pretty much his whole life.

in terms of the work they do, goh tells ash, my dad is a system engineer and my mom is a programmer. they run a company together. granted, we don't see very much of their actual workplace, but what we do see is completely void of other people. as in, camille and walker do all this work BY THEMSELVES.

nothing in the anime otherwise disputes this! if anything, goh's explanations of his parents' lifestyle just reinforces it. he also suggests that during periods of harsh weather and heavy system use, his parents are busier than usual. this implies that they are most busy during holidays. this is actually further implied by the flashback in jn015 where they explicitly say to him that they're sorry for having to work through the holiday. his reaction, being completely unengaged, not even really even acknowledging it, tells us that this is the norm.

however!! he also shows off a special device to horace in jn032 that he says his parents made specifically for him, to help him learn more about mew. this suggests that they must have some amount of free time to dedicate to him...but they show their love for him through material gifts related to their line of work (his computer set-up, too; he tells scorbunny that his parents set it all up for him).

otherwise, we see camille and walker privately share their concerns about goh (a clear awareness that he doesn't have many friends, concern about him being lonely because of them, etc.) but never actually confront goh with their concerns or appear to go out of their ways to do anything about it. i wrote a bit about this and the symbolism of having him catch a cubone of all pokemon in the episode we're introduced to his family here but the tl;dr is that camille and walker demonstrate care for goh to each other but not to him - presumably to compensate for their physical absence, we get the impression he's given a lot of freedom and little to no discipline.

which brings me to the first criterion:

disruptive childhood behaviours (with a side of absenteeism, which presumably contributes to poor performance in school)

goh's school life is obviously inconvienent to the plot progression, so for narrative purposes the writers have him just not go to school. in jn049 we get the explanation that goh had made a promise to their teacher to show up to school for tests...but the weird thing about this scene is that chloe's surprised by it:

since in jn001 and jn002 we see that chloe is goh's only point of contact amongst his schoolmates and that she hand delivers schoolwork to him at her dad's lab, the only way this exchange really makes sense to me is if it's a new arrangement. even the fact that goh makes a point of saying "hey, i followed through, go me" to their teacher here gives that vibe.

so, we can extrapolate from that that...prior to whenever this agreement was made, goh just didn't go to school because he didn't want to. but given how schools operate, we can pretty safely assume his parents are aware of this. and i have strong reason to believe that they have at least been on the receiving end of phone calls from teachers or administrators, because of these lines from jn015:

all things considered, this is a weird assumption to make, especially about your hyper-independent introverted child...unless there's a history of disruptive or unfriendly behaviour to inform that assumption. and based on goh's behaviour in jn001 at professor oak's pokemon camp, i don't think it's so out there to say the pattern probably was there.

goh is actually a super sweet kid towards his parents and has a clear admiration for them both. even in flashbacks, his whole thing is kind of like...he doesn't want to bother them. they fall asleep on family vacation and don't spend time with him? well, that's fine! he'll just find something else to do! in that same episode in the flashback sequence, they pick him up on the side of the road alone in the pouring rain and he doesn't say a word to them. even though he was angry and upset before.

so, yeah. i think it would make a lot of sense if he were well-behaved at home and not so much so at school. but camille and walker, even when they learn about things that happen, don't seem to probe or discipline him. whether because of any combination of giving him leeway out of guilt or of not wanting to encourage him to act out at home, we don't know. but the disconnect obviously exists.

which then contributes to

stress and anxiety, difficulty acknowleding and accepting one's feelings, and passive communication style

goh is socially awkward, yes, and clearly very anxious socially especially early on in jn, but a lot of that seems to come from an inability to express his wants and needs. i think jn003 has some of the most succinct examples of this - ash having to realize he's struggling and to reach down to him when they're climbing the tower in order for him to even accept that he can get (and needs) help getting up, and then later one when he stumbles over his words trying to ask ash to be his friend.

i think another good example is in jn007, after he gets knocked out at the flute cup. passive communication relies a lot on shifts in body language and in, well, passive statements. when ash approaches him to tell him to cheer up, goh doesn't actually really...respond to that. he does this

and then runs off. which he does fairly often, actually, even as late as jn135. it's emotional avoidance 101. literally just run away from the thing that's bothering you. something else we see in jn135 is him backing out of admitting he wants to go on a journey - because he is concerned about ash's reaction (though i think it's a little more complex than that, but i'll circle back to that).

and of course there's jn062, which i wrote a lot about in this post. but the whole thesis of the episode is that goh has learned through his relationships up to this point that it's okay to not understand your feelings but you still have to feel them. and it's actually a really beautiful character development moment for him, but also reinforces the fact that he still doesn't know how to grapple with his own emotions. after finally finding drizzile and explaining how he knew he would find it there, he starts to cry and doesn't know why. but even aside from feeling vulnerable, it's kind of a culmination of this stress he's been carrying with him throughout the whole episode...and the sense of responsibility he feels for driving drizzile away. which is a great segue into

insecure attachment styles and need to feel "in control"

if there's one thing i feel like people sleep on regarding goh's character, it's how much of a mother hen he is. he's obviously very thorough and thoughtful when it comes to looking after his pokemon - as in jn062 where he spends all that time chasing down drizzile after it runs away, even to the point of telling ash and chloe that they should stay behind because it's getting late but that he's going to keep looking - but he's the same way with ash.

off the top of my head, things like buying extra scones because he knew ash would want them, making ash wash his hands after eating ice cream, chastising him about punctuality, you know...very parental kind of things. he actually does it with horace too, when they first meet, by bringing a lunch for them both when he goes back to the forest to meet him again.

anyway, being a Mom Friend is cute and all, but it also REEKS of parentified child. taking on responsibilities that aren't yours to fulfill? yeah. that's a need to feel in control. it's what he's used to! it offers him security!

the other side of this is...chloe. goh's first friend, who he refuses to consider a friend, or let consider him a friend. but, like, she obviously IS his friend. and yet our introduction to them gives us this exchange

goh and chloe have a pretty tense relationship at the beginning of jn, wherein she is clearly trying to help him (by you know. getting his homework for him and shit) and he blows her off in a text message, which she complains is a repeating behaviour. chloe is obviously very loyal to him, even though he doesn't seem to repay the favour. again, there's a big disconnect here.

insecure attachments generally stem from anxiety over potential rejection and/or poor self-esteem cultivated in childhood based on parents’ emotional availability (or lack thereof) to their children. by keeping chloe an arm's distance away, goh keeps himself safe from the dangers of vulnerability, taught to him through childhood encounters with emotionally unavailable parents.

i'm not here to armchair diagnose (ok, who am i kidding, yeah i am), but i think goh's attachment style is anxious-avoidant. his clear avoidance of making friends, the multiple times we see him break off his friendship with ash only to minutes later be like "me and the bestie"...yeah, that's avoidance. but he does crave intimacy, arguably even more than he fears it.

hence why even though he knows ash would want him to journey on his own...he still convinces himself that actually telling ash that would be, as he calls it, a "betrayal of [their] friendship." my theory is that he's not concerned that ash will be upset - he's concerned that ash won't be upset enough. which is why when then ash turns it around on him and says he's going on a journey, goh gets upset and pushes him away. he does the exact same thing with horace when they're younger. just a complete 180 - he wronged me once, so he's the worst and i can't forgive him, ever.

the difference with chloe is that she actually takes care of him more than he takes care of her - which changes the dynamic from "i have to do everything to keep this person in my life, including suppressing my emotions for their sake" to "i cannot express to this person that i have needs and desires because they'll think i'm too much and they won't stick around if i do." which is primarily avoidant, but insecure attachment nonetheless.

this is extrapolation, but i think his relationship with chloe is so different because we are supposed to get the sense that they have a more familial dynamic. so, she's the one person he can't push away from him - but as he learned in his actual family dynamic, he also can't be too close to her. he doesn't want to be smothered; he doesn't want her to feel smothered by him. so they maintain a degree of separation that only begins to go away after her father begins literally housing and feeding him, thus integrating him and ash into their family in some honorary way.

which brings me to the last point, i guess, which is

reluctance to participate in age-appropriate activities with peers and self-reliant to a fault

these are, i think, the traits that jn is most blatantly attempting to better in goh throughout his arc. so i won't spend too long hashing it out, because i think these are things we all know he struggled with!

in flashbacks, we see him alone at school; during the first episode, at professor oak's camp, he is always physically distanced from the other kids and chloe even points out that he's basically doing professor oak's job at one point! he's not on the same level as the other kids and it's clear he doesn't want to be. when he meets horace, we see that it takes him some time to get comfortable enough with him to go explore the forest together and become friends.

he doesn't go to school, but that doesn't mean he isn't learning things - he becomes a very self-directed learner early on, from what he see. he's not just like...rotting in his room playing video games. he's studying and researching. the only times aside from with horace that we see him in a flashback doing something that isn't solitary is with pokemon - and even then, he's like...reciting their pokedex entries. his abra story at the end of jn is precipitated by him saying he was going through his dad's old pokedex (which is a whole other thing - this implies walker used to be a trainer, but neither of goh's parents seem to have pokemon...perhaps they're too busy with work to look after them? a theory for another time, i suppose, but it has undeniably being gnawing at my brain since that episode aired lol).

and of course, there's the fact that in jn062 he tells drizzile he was never comfortable with confiding in his parents or his grandmother...suggesting that he never confided in anyone, because we don't really get the sense from the whole "i don't NEED friends" exchange in jn001 that he considers chloe a reliable confidant, either.

the other place we see his flawed sense of self-reliance, aside from like...everywhere in the first 10 or so episodes, lol (something that is reflected pretty beautifully and symbolically in scorbunny's story, too!), is in project mew. he has to learn how to work in a team - and he clearly hates it. at this point he's found one person to rely on, but that already feels like too much. the raid battle with articuno is the most obvious example of this. he isn't good at being a leader, but he also isn't good at being a follower. because he's only ever been responsible for himself, and he doesn't trust anyone else to know how to direct him, but he also has no clue how to work within the parameters of a team.

i also want to say, as a final note, that i actually think this is all extremely intentional writing. obviously in the west we have a strong capitalism culture too, but the work culture in japan is very toxic (just google "japan work culture" and you can see right away how intense it is lol) and i'm not actually surprised at all that pokemon would make such a direct commentary on that - a lot of japanese kids could probably relate to goh and his emotionally absent, work-obsessed parents! they are clearly pretty well-off, but their dedication to work supercedes matters of home and family, because that's how it's supposed to be. as a result, goh admires them a lot for this dedication - but his arc is primarily about letting go of the "work" part of interacting with pokemon and learning how to have fun and make the most of his experiences. and i think that's a really lovely message for modern pokemon to be sending to kids :')

[martyrmarked]

so i know there's a lot of comparisons made between the player characters of all of the da games but i've just mostly taken interest in the parallels between solas & sidri & the eventual difference between them that i think leads to solas have a story that's largely defined by regret and sidri with a story focused on peace. while i could go on about the numerous and (i think anyway) narratively rich parallels going to choose to go on about that primary difference that becomes so important: solas decides to change the essence of who he is for love and sidri decides to maintains the essence of who she is for love.

solas, as a spirit of wisdom, is noted as being gentle. there is nothing about him during as existence as a spirit that would ever hint at the dread wolf, at the desperate and viciously determined solas we see throughout all of veilguard and its many flashbacks. at mythal's request and out of love, solas makes the decision to alter the very core of his essence and take on a physical form. to be clear, solas wholly has his own agency and makes the many decisions that we see in flashbacks and as are revealed throughout veilguard, but there's no denying he is coaxed along by mythal to overlook his hesitations, worry and outright disapproval over the many actions he decides to take part in. the solas we see at the end of veilguard, to me anyway, feels recognizable from that gentle spirit: hardened by war, brutal if needed, and undoubtly driven by the profound, aching regret of countless centuries. solas changes because of and for love, for mythal, in a way that breaks him from that core he once was.

sidri, at her core, is gentle. to be clear, gentleness doesn't equal naivete as often as this site and fandom generally wants it to be, but this to say she doesn't want power or glory. her primary desire that guides her actions throughout the first quarter of inquisition is a revenge born out of fury for her brother as well as the goal of creating some sort of justice in an inherently inequitable world. however, instead of losing herself to that and losing herself to the endless brutal, miserable choices required of war like solas did, @extravagantliar reminds her time & time that she's more than her title. he reminds her to consider her own thoughts, her own feelings, time and time again when she begins to lose herself to the inquisition. she takes the first steps towards the well and is fully ready to change irreparably change herself because she thinks its not a unfair trade, just who she is for the knowledge needed to end this war, but it's varric who takes her wrist and begs her not to do it, that she as herself, not as the inquisitor, is worth saving and preserving. sidri is reminded of who she is at her core because of love and does change because of it, for varric.

i just think that dragon age, over and over again, shows that when you fundamentally alter the essence of something you irreparably wound it, that when you rip something from its core you break it in a way that is almost always beyond repair. sidri makes the choice to preserve herself and recognize that there's something beyond the inquisition and being the herald of andraste because of and for love. her life becomes defined by the decision to seek peace over power. for solas, he makes the decision to change himself for love and makes so many choices that go against his true nature in furtherance of an end. poor solas then has a narrative all but wholly marked with regret and the desperation to undo those very many mistakes and there's just a quiet, aching tragedy to that and him because of it.

[kingchad]

I havent kept up with the actors social media, I am curious - could you link to or explain how Jed Goodacre interprets Chad vs. how you interpret Chad?

oh, yes, gladly! There's an observable shift between D1 Chad and D2/3 Chad. D1 Chad is a lot more pointed and deliberately mean. D2/3 Chad is a comedy side character who is incidentally mean because he doesn't recognize when he's being insensitive.

my personal speculation is that when Sarah Jeffrey had scheduling conflicts and couldn't be on set for D2, the original intended plotline for Chad had to change, and leading to him becoming a harmless gag character for levity. It also doesn't hurt that Jedidiah Goodacre is a HUGE Jim Carrey fan and pretty clearly enjoys any opportunity to improv/be silly on set. (If you're familiar with Carrey's work at all, D2/3 Chad is definitely giving that.) I suspect that Jedidiah's affinity for comedy on set pushed the Chad character even MORE in the direction of harmless sidekick than maybe was originally intended. If Audrey had been in D2, Chad might have been more similar to his D1 self throughout the series.

Of Chad, Jedidiah gives a pretty consistent take whenever he does give one. The quotes I'll pull are "[Chad] always thinks that [he is] doing the right thing, when sometimes [he is] not smart enough to understand [he is] dead wrong"* and "I feel like the first movie, maybe Chad was a bit more standoffish and maybe came off as not such a nice guy....in the second film, you found that Chad was more of a loveable idiot. That's a very fun place to be when you're an actor because in any scene, your go-to move is to just not understand and sometimes it ends up being funny. In the third installment, you can expect much of the same." Pretty unambiguously can be interpreted that Chad is stupid and means no real harm, and Jedidiah has fun playing him that way.

PERSONALLY, I much much much prefer D1 Chad's personality, because I have historically been drawn to and have a real fondness for characters that are assholes. I do try and incorporate some of the stupidity and goofiness of D2/3 into my writing, because I recognize that's 2/3rds of the canon material we have and I don't want to be COMPLETELY making shit up, but y'know. In my view, Chad knows when he is being a dick but doesn't value the people he's treating poorly enough to care. He isn't book-smart but he is people smart, and can manipulate and exploit the people around him. He thinks he's better than other people and can use that to justify anything he does.

A really core part of this to me is that Chad has almost religiously bought into the societal rules of Auradon, namely that there are good and bad people, and fairytales go a certain way. This is part of why Chad is deeply closeted and feels like he can't come out. He feels pressured to "stick to the script", in a sense. Heteronormative fairytale society. Auradonian compulsory heterosexuality.

Adopted Chad is a new thing for me, but I think it adds another layer to the fairytale conformity thing. Like he feels an even greater pressure to do the nuclear family, white picket fence castle grounds, 2.5 kids thing because he worries he might be perceived as "not belonging" by others. He feels he needs to prove himself by throwing himself into the stereotypical prince thing as much as he can.

I personally think those traits are more interesting to write and read than D2/3 Chad's traits are. They provide a great starting point for character growth. It's way more engaging to watch someone change into a more empathetic person when they can understand that they were wrong. It's not as interesting to read about a stupid character bumbling through social interactions imo.

I don't think that I always successfully communicate those ideas in my fics because I was 15 when I started writing Descendants fic! It's been 7 years, I'm 22 now and hopefully a better and more thoughtful writer! Incorporating all of this is something I'm REALLY deliberate about in my WIPs now and I actually want to rework a lot of stuff I've already posted someday.

*this first quote is from 2014, pre-release press for Descendants 1, so honestly this kind of disproves my speculation since the whole statement seems very by-the-numbers "Disney gave me a list of character traits and it's these ones" to me. I guess Chad might have been stupid all along! but the vibe is definitely different between films so the understanding of the character definitely shifted between movies regardless.

[srnileforme]

kanghan and sailom's kiss at the end of episode 6 wasn't a climax but a tentative, yet impulsive leap into something.

it was kang testing the waters and desperately trying to figure himself out, 'am i jealous? is this why i don't like seeing sailom with guy? do i like sailom? can i feel something other than guilt for sailom?'

it was sailom immediately trying to process what was happening in his head like he always does, 'is he doing this because i confessed? does he feel guilty again? is he jealous? can i forget everything else for a moment and just feel?'

it was a kiss that only gave them more questions than answers. they're just so, so confused.

what's interesting though is that this kiss is almost exactly like their fake kiss in episode 3, except it's not fake anymore. everything is very real now, especially their feelings.

kang pushes sailom unexpectedly against a wall and grabs his head. kang's thumb that blocked their lips is now pressed into sailom's cheek as if to anchor sailom in place.

sailom's hand that had naturally rested on kang's waist in the alley is now more hesitant and nervous, gripping kang's shirt instead of touching him.

kang had turned their heads left and right in an attempt to make their fake kiss look more believable, but now kang does it to take control, to make the kiss last long instead of breaking apart - to make it leave a mark and mean something.

the reality though is that they don't know what they're doing at all.

this is new and unfamiliar, but this is the start of them trying to learn the why, the how and the what together.

[batbunker]

I miss Tim's long hair.

[pocketgalaxies]

marisha always falls into this State when vax returns to them – as a revenant, in dalen's closet, in c3e114 – and it hurts so bad. while vex is warm, smiling, hugging him, immediately ready to jump back into spending time with her brother, even if she knows it might not last – keyleth is Terrified (or, as she gets older, Resigned). distant and cautious and hesitant, she needs coaxing and reassurances from people who are real, realer than the man standing in front of her looking at her like that. and she is always watching and waiting for the other shoe to drop. thinking of keyleth paralyzed by a fear of loss for the whole first half of c1 before taking the risk with vax, and vax at the end of everything saying "i know i've confirmed your worst fears." thinking of how every time he is delivered to her it's the same fucking dance. we can be together, until. we can hold hands, until. we can be happy, until. thinking of how many times she can bring herself to do it before she can't anymore

[cenvast]

Laios, Monsters, & Toshiro: On Racialized Desire and Identification with the Other

Arguably, the most significant part of Laios' character is the societal ostracization he faces because of his non-normative interests and behavior. For the majority of his life, Laios struggles socially, and other humans mistreat him. When he rescues Marcille from the Nightmares, his nightmare dredges up his inability to fit into school and the army. During his early dungeoneering days, he's lied to and exploited by his fellow party members.

One of his earliest and most formative negative experiences with people is his village's abuse of Falin as a magic user. He shares that after the villagers discovered that she can use magic, "adults who were just kind yesterday, all began to bully [her]." Instead of protecting Falin, his parent tell her to leave the village. The prejudice Falin faces and his parents' response to it upsets Laios to the point that he leaves home.

While Laios cares about his friends, the Demon points out that Laios understandably does not care for people in general. Laios doesn't disagree with the Demon's assessment and suspects that the Demon "can sense all [his] thoughts." The Demon goes on to say that Laios actually "despise[s] all humans." Laios denies this assessment, but given the Demon's uncanny ability to sniff out people's desires and Laios' ashamed expression, at least part of Laios likely agrees with the Demon. It's not a stretch to assume that he's held onto some hurt and resentment towards humans due to their mistreatment of him and Falin in their youth.

In response to how human society has othered him, Laios distances himself from humans and invests his time and energy into monsters and demi-humans instead. In the DunMeshi world, monsters and demi-humans are the ultimate societal Other. People fear them, exploit them, and even hunt and kill them. As someone who's similarly been mistreated by human society, Laios resonates deeply with monsters.

His desire to become a monster and/or beastman reflects his desire to reclaim agency over how society has ostracized him. If he chooses to become a monster, he gets to place value on what society has deemed despicable. He gets to choose why society hates him and be different on his own terms.

Both textually and thematically, Laios' identification with the Other bleeds into the erotic. More blatantly, he says that he'd have sex with orc women, and his succubus is a monstrous version of Marcille.

The entire story is also steeped in the theme of consumption as carnality. Laios and his party spend the entire manga eating monsters — a taboo physical act which they reap pleasure from; the underlying eroticism isn't difficult to see.

The story also presents consumption as a form of extreme identification. Eating a monster makes the monster part of you through digestion. The line between consuming the monster and becoming the monster — between erotic desire for the monster, demonstrated by eating their flesh, and identifying with the monster — is very blurred. Note that digesting a monster is an act of absorption; it destroys the original creature. Senshi states that consuming a monster erases "its individual identity," and major manga spoilers, but Laios defeats and pacifies the Demon by consuming its desire to eat. We'll come back to this concept later.

As previously mentioned, Laios is disinterested in most humans. The notable exception to this rule is Toshiro and by extension, the Eastern Archipelago. Laios doesn't seem to know much about the Archipelago before speaking to Toshiro, so he isn't drawn to Toshiro because he's an Easterner. Instead, he's drawn to his "odd appearance."

Just like Laios views monsters and demi-humans as a visible Other, Laios views Toshiro as another visible Other. On the Island, Toshiro stands out as a foreigner at first glance. While Laios as a white tallman doesn't appear visibly strange to other people, he's drawn again and again to people and creatures who are immediately visibly "odd." He sees them as understanding what it's like to be different and be mistreated for it, and since he relates to that experience, he wants to learn about them and be closer to them.

Essentially, Laios behaves towards Toshiro and his culture the same way he behaves towards monsters; he wants to know everything about Toshiro's foreign culture — the thing which makes him different. Unintentionally, Laios unintentionally reduces Toshiro to being Japanese; if he wasn't Japanese, Laios would never have approached him.

While Laios doesn't have bad intentions, as Toshiro himself acknowledges during their fight, his behavior towards Toshiro still has negative consequences. Laios' harmless interest in monsters translates to fetishization in the context of Japanese culture. He enacts multiple microaggressions against Toshiro and crossing his boundaries.

Laios goes beyond merely learning about Japanese culture. He takes parts of it for himself when he names his sword a Japanese name. Akin to his consumption of monsters, Laios attempts to participate in Toshiro's culture while failing to respect Toshiro himself. Just as eating monsters destroys them, Laios consuming Toshiro's culture while enacting racism against him causes real harm.

Many people have already written about Laios' microaggressions towards Toshiro, but a couple include Laios telling Toshiro that he looks "odd" and asking where he's from, mispronouncing his name as "Shuro," and assuming his favorite food is rice. Laios' treatment and fetishization of Toshiro is racist and harmful. However, I'd like to dive beyond the surface of Laios' micro-aggressive remarks and examine how his obsession with Toshiro becomes a racialized mode of desire, paralleling real world phenomena.

Though no concrete canonical evidence of Laios' feelings towards Toshiro being romantic and/or sexual exists, his interactions with Toshiro have erotic undertones. Their fight dialogue, in particular, revolves around eating, an act the story consistently shows as carnal. During this fight, Laios places his thumb in Toshiro's mouth and asks him, "What's the point of even having a mouth?" Laios' penetration of Toshiro's body via his mouth and his question's potential as an innuendo lend themselves to an erotic reading of the scene's more obvious conflict. Considering the overlap between consumption and carnality throughout the story, it's not a large jump to read eroticism into Laios demanding Toshiro meet his body's physical needs.

Furthermore, Laios is more enthusiastic about Toshiro than any other human in the series. While he cares deeply about his sister and his friends, Laios repeatedly expresses how much he admires Toshiro. He retains and brings up things like Toshiro's (perceived) favorite food. He wants to go to the East in Falin's place after she rejects Toshiro's marriage proposal, and in the "What-If" extra material, he's adamant about setting up a scenario where Toshiro travels with him through the Dungeon.

Undoubtedly, Laios is drawn to Toshiro. Since he sees non-white-ness and monstrosity as equivalent markers of societal othering, Toshiro's identity as a foreigner is what cultivates and maintains Laios' interest in him. Even if Laios learns to care for Toshiro as a person, his desire for Toshiro, platonically or otherwise, is still filtered heavily through race within the narrative.

Laios' relationship with his masculinity is also fraught. He broke off his engagement with a girl from his village and doesn't express normative interest in female tallmen. Seeing how the nightmare versions of his parents ask him when he's going to give them grandchildren, Laios experiences societal pressure to conform to a normative performance of masculinity through being attracted to and marrying a tallman woman and creating a family with her.

Laios frequently talks about how cool and admirable Toshiro is when he performs masculinity through combat, etc. He might find Toshiro's Asian masculinity more appealing and more accessible to him than the masculinity that's been forced onto him, precisely because Toshiro's Asian masculinity appears non-normative in a Western lens. But co-opting the masculinities of men of color as a white man would only further feed into the white consumption of cultures of color.

Overall, Laios' entitlement to and consumption of Toshiro's culture mirrors the real-life way white people co-opt and fetishize non-white cultures. Laios' fetishistic treatment of Japanese culture, because of his attraction (platonic or otherwise) to Toshiro, parallels white people's treatment of Asian people in the Western diaspora. I can only speak on the Asian American experience, but Laios immediately being drawn to Toshiro's "odd appearance," obsessing over his culture, and primarily treating Toshiro as a conduit for his said culture feels eerily close to how some white anime and/or K-pop fans act towards Japanese and Korean people.

Similarly to Laios, real queer, neurodivergent, and/or otherwise non-normative white people are marginalized by white Western society. They relate to how society others non-white cultures and/or people of color and latch onto them. While forming human connections based on curiosity and shared experiences is wonderful, white people are often unaware of the racial dynamics at play when they engage with non-white cultures and people of color and unintentionally, end up consuming and fetishizing non-white cultures in detrimental ways.

None of this negates the reality that Laios and Toshiro canonically care for each other. For instance, Toshiro's willingness to hug Laios reveals his genuine familiarity with and affection for him. The racial dynamics of their friendship complicate their relationship in fascinating ways and open up a potential path for Laios' growth. With time and effort, Laios could absolutely unlearn his racism and become a much better friend to Toshiro.

In conclusion, Laios' behavior towards Toshiro is a study in a marginalized white person's identification with and racialized desire for a non-white Other and how even a well-intentioned attempt at connection can replicate harmful racist dynamics. Toshiro's experience with Laios closely parallels real Asian people's struggles with racism and fetishization in our world today.

[incrementalrepetition]

if jade ever has a tragic backstory i dont want the tragedy to be because of something drastically terrible like most are.. personally id like it to be a slow descent of sorts, years of disappointments and such leading to a view of existence so perfectly tuned to the cold and exploitative realm of ipc business

[awsok]

wicked thought of the day is how the script descibes both "pink goes good with green" and "why miss elphaba [...] you're beautiful" as discoveries for galinda. which is already devastating but then galinda's response to elphaba's "do funerals count?" (which to my limited knowledge stage galinda's tend to take at face value) is to laugh in delighted surprise and say "that was funny" like that was a discovery too... for all of galinda's suppressed admiration of elphaba to finally break free in the face of all the things there are for galinda to discover about her new (and only true) friend... god actually I can't talk about this anymore!!

[cavka]

the thing that gets me about the "i don't have to want to sleep with everyone i have feelings for" line is that it's very clearly something buck has t thought all the way through

because if he took a moment to explain himself he'd probably say something like "look i don't have to sleep with you [tommy] just because i might still feel something for you. and hey! i'm pissed and suddenly feel a lot less charitable towards you!! so guess what i don't have to have feelings for everyone i sleep with either so last night meant nothing."

it's clearly a mouth moving faster than brain statement intended to hit tommy where it hurts

but because it's a mouth moving faster than brain statement it's also a peek into the thoughts he's not letting himself analyze. because just like you could interpret the first half of what he said as being about tommy (and that's what buck would say was the intention) it is absolutely also about eddie and the feelings buck isn't ready cop to