#essay number two

[wilting-fl0wer]

The only correct form of caltam, as far as i am concerned

[quatregats]

Thinking a lot of thoughts about Hornblower's relationships with Barbara and Maria as a metaphor for his larger relationship to social mobility and ambition, and I think there's actually a lot there - not sure if it was intentional, but I do think that whether intentionally or inadvertently, Forester did an interesting job with the parallels.

Quick note beforehand that some of this is based on my constant brief paging through C. Northcote Parkinson's Hornblower "biography", which, while I absolutely abhor his interpretation of Hornblower, gives even more food for thought on this point. I'm also leaning more into his interpretation of Hornblower's background and childhood, as opposed to the TV show's, so it might not work if you're coming from the TV show's perspective.

Parkinson takes Forester's comment that Hornblower was a "doctor's son" to mean that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician like in the show. I'm not a historian of the period, so I would be hard-pressed to actually try to fit Hornblower's father within the 18th-century framework of medical practice, but either way, given his awkwardness around upper-class life and that he seems to have grown up in rural Kent, I think that Parkinson's claim that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician, does have some reasonable foundation, or is at least equally plausible (to me) as the show's.

Hornblower struggles with poverty through most of the series, especially the first half, but even when he is barely scraping by, such as at the start of Lieutenant, this does not seem to be an abnormal state; and when he finally arrives at wealth and success, he constantly wishes to go back to the days when he was a penniless lieutenant, so from this we might also surmise that he did not come from wealth. (I'm also comparing especially to Jack Aubrey, who, while he admittedly makes a hash of coming into large amounts of money, and who also lives perfectly happily on very little, is clearly quite comfortable being the "lord of the manor" by comparison.)

One of the biggest changes in the second half of the series (from The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters onward) is that Hornblower's career comes into fruition; he becomes a decorated Captain, a member of the landed gentry, a Knight of Bath, a Peer, and finally an admiral, and marries into an enormously influential family. He's constantly in conflict about this, until he isn't: he wants to become someone powerful and important, except that he doesn't like the role once he gets it, and constantly wishes about the old days, then feels guilty for wishing for them. Most importantly, he seems to become less and less himself, his mental narrative getting more and more distorted as he tries to mold himself into the person he thinks he wants to be.

I don't think this is a particular novel interpretation, but I think that in light of this, the contrast between his marriage to Maria and his marriage to Barbara is very interesting. If he was an apothecary's son, his and Maria's marriage would make a decent amount of sense - they'd be from similar social backgrounds, and probably a reasonable match, if Hornblower's career had continued as expected. Hornblower feels comfortable around Maria at the start of their friendship and the very beginning of their marriage in a way that mirrors his comfort with the life he's living at that point - which is to say that he clearly knows and understands what's expected of him and how to interact, in clear contrast with later books. But on the other hand, for all that he originally does love Maria, Hornblower comes to find her to be coarse, unrefined, and boring, and feel that she is not good enough for the person he wants to become. It's at the point when he starts to feel that he's moved passed Maria that he begins to take on his new, ambitious, performative persona.

On the other hand, Hornblower feels stiff and uncomfortable around Barbara from the beginning of their relationship, notably for reasons of class, and even in later books, consistently sounds intimidated by her poise and upper-class untouchability. With Maria he doesn't feel enough for her; with Barbara he feels too much, an almost uncouth sentimentality. He craves Barbara's status like a man drowning, but can't hold up under the weight of what it would mean. They have very strong intellectual chemistry, but socially they are a disaster of a couple, and yet nonetheless, Hornblower continues with the marriage because it feels to him like the thing he ought to do, just as he ought to become squire of Smallbridge. He's so viscerally uncomfortable with his position in the later books in a way he wasn't even at the height of his earlier miseries, but he refuses to let himself admit that his ambitions might have led him astray.

I think it's also interesting that the relationship which Hornblower arguably finds the most fulfilling (or rather, it was written very poorly if Forester wanted to make it feel fulfilling for the reader, but nonetheless it was clearly meant to be the most fulfilling for Hornblower) is his relationship with Marie, who sits at a similar odd juncture to him. In the text, Forester says outright that Marie fulfills Hornblower's interest in upper-class women (ambition) while not intimidating him, yet still being a satisfying intellectual partner. Nonetheless, just as Marie and Hornblower can never actually end up together, Hornblower can never actually be comfortable with his position, and no matter how many times he tries to find solace in her, he is eventually forced to continue down the path that he began, making up with Barbara and fully taking up the mantle of Admiral and Peer of the Realm.

In short, I think that watching the way in which Hornblower's relationship with Maria evolves over the course of the early books and the way in which his relationship with Barbara takes up after that ends up being a very neat parallel to his own ambitions and class identity. With Maria he is at home, but bored and restless; with Barbara he gets everything that he wants, but feels like a fish out of water. I think that particular parallel is part of the particular tragedy of Hornblower - he can't ever be satisfied with the person he was, or the person he's become. But I think that adding in aspects of extreme class difference - even more class difference than the general trends of social mobility during this period - also helps to elucidate the fundamental tension which drives Hornblower forward as a character. The world he came from was too small for him; the world in which he moves now is far too big; but there's no in-between option. He has to choose what he wants to be, and sacrifice some part of himself in order to do that, and in light of this reading of him, I think that there's a lot of interesting dilemmas to be raised.

[beedreamscape]

I'm pretty much the worst person to even weigh in on this topic because I've been partial to Suvi since day one, but in my opinion there wasn't ever a need to explain or justify Suvi's choices/reactions.

Not because she's perfect, never wrong (though in my heart I know...) but because I'm very certain that the people that keep on hammering on her mistakes/shortcomings/tendencies are people that already dislike Suvi (or don't like Aabria very much, I wish this wasn't a topic of consideration but even 30+ eps in there's still people like that around) for whatever reason and gather excuses to justify their bias against her and no amount of explanation will turn their hearts in her favour.

It really feels like a parallel to the way Suvi herself tries to be understood by her friends and yet she fails time and time again.

And people insist on forgetting that Suvi is not the Citadel, she's just one young wizard of the Citadel.

And it's gut-wrenching how much I relate to that feeling of alienation before every corner she tries to fit in: amongst her citadel peers she's othered by her position and privilege, and now by her friendship to a witch and a spirit; between her friends she's the odd-one-out because of her Citadel connections and the nature of her power; and now amongst the witches she stands out by being the face of the "enemy".

I don't blame her for clinging to the little corner of the world that has not made her feel foreign despite the very nature of her presence: in Steel's family whom she's not related to by blood, yet completely by heart.

And it'll never be a fair game. The girls especially are very young and with new-found independence, they're given colossal decisions to make, and that before beings older than three generations of them combined and incomprehensively more powerful and less empathic.

As much as Mirara wants there to be a good witch and bad witch, there's no such thing as black and white, there are decisions and consequences, what one does with the power they're given. There is no right or wrong in a fight filled with so much heart, there was never a world where a fight between Ame and Suvi would be clean.

[golden-redhead]

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY Season 4 RANT Review

This is for all of you girlies whose favorite character is Five. Today, we mourn together. Feel free to share your pain in the comments section here or on YouTube.

[curiouscatastrophe]

My badge of honor

I am immensely honored to have many of my in(s)ane ramblings repeated by young Ford himself

FORD WINS!!!!

[incesthemes]

the problem is why would i watch more supernatural when i could instead talk about seasons 1-2 of supernatural for the rest of my life without ever exhausting all of the things i want to say

[meezer]

it hurts me deeply to my core to not do the very best I can and get really good results. and it's likely going to disappoint people I love. but like. I think I'm gonna have to bite the bullet, accept that I'm not gonna pass some classes, and just focus on the other shit. goodbye literature class.

[bonestrouslingbones]

also i hate to admit it and i swear i DO understand the importance of them but fellas i fear i may be steadily morphing into a humanities hater

[marvel-starwarsfangirl]

here's a horrifying thought (mild spoilers for "Infiltration"):

something something identity has been one of the focal points of Crosshair's character and he confirmed that wiping one's identity away completely is part of the Clone X program.

Hemlock tried to destroy who Crosshair was completely after the poor guy was having an internal crisis for two whole seasons. I am not ok right now.

[thebrainrotsreal]

Being an actual high school student and still having to save the world is so insane to me. Imagine saving the city, getting beat up, which makes you late to school, and then realizing you dropped your homework while flying to your first period class. I would lose my mind!!

[ballwizard]

every puzzle has an aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[princesmitty]

jhl staring wistfully at translator justin...... new jhl yaoi just dropped 😭

[torglives]

lukey confirmed that his keeper slash newt slash general lore is inspired by the maze runner and i genuinely felt a passion arise from within my heart that has been dormant for a couple years now. it hasn’t dominated by blog for a while so many may not know how deep this hyperfixation runs but you’re all about to be VERY aware.

[steevejr]

genuinely most influential margoverse character is Unnamed Filler Horse Number 3.

6 years ago I put in a random fucking horse into my generic fantasy so Margo didn’t have to walk her ass across the continent and then I tried very hard to kill it off and remove it from the narrative because it made it too easy (unsuccessfully bc I couldn’t find every mention of Unnamed Filler Horse 3 in 200k words!!!!) and Emily found this stupid fucking horse so charming that they named it Socks and then I had to give it a speaking line and bring it back into the story and also write a 100k spinoff about the guy who raised her (the horse. Socks XXXVII the horse. ) Jamal would be nothing without Unnamed Horse 3 ‼️‼️‼️‼️ Margo’s unraveling would be nothing without Socks‼️‼️‼️‼️ where would this story be without Unnamed Horse 3‼️‼️

[only-one-brain-cell]

I know I talk a lot about my headcannon of Maeve hitting on Spencer 24/7 (for those of you who are just seeing this now I have a headcannon that if Maeve lived she would be the most chaotic girlfriend but in the best way possible she would be hitting on Spencer 24/7. Its probably one of my favourite headcannons I ever thought of.) but I rarely talk about Spencer side about how when this happens he would go blue screen every time, I call it the dumbifcation of Spencer Reid.

If everyone is sitting down talking Maeve will walk in and sit on Spencer’s lap regardless if there’s space for her or not and that’s the second that Spencer stops talking and completely forgets what he was saying. The only thing he’s focused on right now is his wonderful beautiful girlfriend in his lap, the other team members can visually see his IQ growing down.

Maeve is very affectionate and once Spencer got comfortable with her he slowly started to become more affectionate so now she’s always holding his hand, wrapping her arms around his, hugging him from behind, anything so when this happens again absolutely nothing there’s not a single thought in that man’s brain. Similar to when their kissing, the minute Maeve’s lips are on his hes a goner. She finds the whole thing hilarious and Spencer adorable of course.

[i-eat-your-pancakes-art]

Update on Through Thick and Thin + Pointing Out TF2's Separate Continuities

First of all, my fic project is moving along well, about 1/3 of the art is done. Not what I'm here to discuss, though.

So it finally happened...damn, I kinda thought comic issue #7 would be coming out around springtime. Merry Christmas to us. I won't go into my thoughts on the comic here, but its surprise release made me realize I should make sure my audience is aware of some distinctions between the game versus the numbered comics issues.

The numbered comics are actually unrelated to my story, and I'll explain why that is. This post will be long, but I feel compelled to make some things clear to everyone who's been following me before I publish the story. I'm the type of writer who really wants her audience to understand her thought process. I dove WAAAAY deep into official statements and material to make sure this post is all accurate, as well as to give myself the peace of mind that my fic can be canon-compliant to the game itself, which is all I care about. This also means that I won't be stepping on the toes of people who prefer to focus more on the comics. That’s a relief because I’d been a bit nervous about putting this story out there.

I want you to know that this fic was written with the game itself's continuity in mind, not the continuity of the numbered comics. Issue #7's release doesn't even affect my fic in any way. So why am I making this distinction? Well, there's something important that a lot of people either forget or never heard in the first place. I blame Valve for not marketing this fact better, but whatever.

Here's the deal. In the official comics, it's stated that TF2, the game, is a "dramatization" of the war between RED and BLU. It makes sense why Valve said this. It's why so much that happens in the numbered comics is never mentioned in the actual game + SFM videos and vice versa. The game and the numbered comics aren't canon to each other since there are differences that make them incompatible. They're two valid but separate continuities told in different mediums/formats.

You could say that the game + SFM shorts and those silly one-off update comics are continuity A, with the original , much loser style of worldbuilding, in which RED and BLU fight each other for territorial control all over the world. And that's all there is to it. There is no one epic plotline or ending to this version of the world. The later comics feature continuity B, which take the characters introduced in the game and put them in a new format with a single, long-running story that eventually ends. The split more or less occurs when Gray and the robots are introduced to give a story reason for the RED vs BLU war to "end."

So, what's the difference and why'd they choose to make the later comics their own new distinct continuity? Read on, and I'll go over some key differences between these continuities for those of you who weren't aware, and then I'll talk about where writing fanfiction (like mine) stands in all of this. This will be long, about two pages of a word doc, so I'm putting the rest under a cut.

The game is said to be a "dramatization" of the RED and BLU conflict that's similar to the "gravel wars" as they're called in the comic universe, but with all classes present on both teams for a total of 18 mercs. It's never explained why, but everyone rolls with it as "just how it is." There doesn't need to be an explanation because it works so well already. It's honestly really funny to think that RED and BLU just so happened to hire a bunch of guys that look exactly alike and it’s never explained. I've seen a lot of people write game-universe fics that propose one team are original mercs and the other team are their clones, created just to fight them. But I always thought it'd be funniest with no clones or whatever, just a series of wacky coincidences in which RED and BLU happen to hire 9 pairs of extremely similar people. It's so absurd and impossible that it fits the silliness of the game perfectly, don't you think? This way, things are so even that the fights are endless. It works out perfectly, so don't overthink it! Just have fun with it like I am.

Meanwhile, the numbered comic issues only ever show 9 individuals, no doubles. In this comic storyline, some were RED and some were BLU before merging to fight Gray. It looks like there'd been 5 REDs and 4 BLUs. Since there are absolutely no duplicate mercs in the comic, different from what had been established in the original game continuity, this just can't be the same setting. The “rules” are different. And that’s why the game and numbered comics are weren’t intended to be the same continuity. It bugs me that more people don't know this. Again, I blame Valve for not advertising that better.

And of course the older, non-numbered, one-off silly comics that were released to go along with game updates aren't to be lumped in with the numbered issue comics and what builds up to them with Gray and the Robots. Those have featured members of both teams and are tied to the game itself, which they were created to promote. They’re part of continuity A. The same goes for the Meet the Team videos and Expiration Date. Notably, these feature some mercs (like RED Engie or some of the BLUs) that don't even exist in the continuity B of the numbered comics, so that’s why they aren't connected.

It makes sense why the numbered comic issues had to go the route they did with no doubles because it would've been very confusing to have 18 of them running around in the story, especially if they were all look a-likes. The story is kind of a mess already, imagine twice that mess! The plot would've suffered for it. But it's the reason why those comics aren't meant to be the same setting. It’s clear: all 9 of RED team and all 9 of BLU team are real only in the game itself’s universe which has a much looser set of rules.

I won't lie, I’m only interested in writing for what I see in the game’s universe instead of for the numbered comic issues. There's far fewer things to restrict you and more freedom to make the scenario you want because the game continuity has no ending, just a series of shorts that go along with it. There's plenty of fun stuff to work with in this version of the world but no definite end to the game itself. Just countless fights across countless maps. The comic issues never mention the mercs fighting anywhere besides some of the spots in and around Teufort, NM. Meanwhile, the game takes us to other regions, continents, and even outer space! We don't even know what order the teams could've visited all the maps in or who won which fights where. We’re not supposed to know who wins. That's for the outcome of each individual match to decide! The game versions of the setting and mercs leaves much more creative room to work with.

Here's how I look at it: The numbered comic issues tell one long, winding story. Meanwhile, the game's method of storytelling is just like a really violent cartoon with random, unrelated episodes as told by the shorts and matches ingame. If you have an idea for a story but you've hesitated because it'd clash with the numbered comics' storyline, like I once did, I hope this has encouraged you to look at it another way. Word of God says they’re two separate continuities. Just use the game's version as your setting! There's so much potential there!

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Now for why I felt the need to blab about all this...I chose to use the game's setting for my fanfic because the numbered comics' plot is far more defined and doesn't leave room for what I wanted to accomplish. RED Engie and BLU Sniper don't exist in the numbered comics, which sucks because you can't write them always being on the same team in that universe. One could use RED Sniper and BLU Engie for it, in fact I know I've seen people do that. For me personally, so much happens in the numbered comics that it would just complicate things too much to try this route. There's a chance that the comic's version of "Mick" and "Dell" strike up a friendship in the midst of all the chaos of the comic but that's too complicated for me to want to touch. (The ending makes that outcome possible, but I would get a headache trying to shoehorn my own story into all of that. I also don’t wanna put up with all the angst in the comics.) I tip my hat to those of you who write your fics in the comics universe. I'll just stick to the game, which I'm actually very happy with because of the freedom it allows. I like this version of "canon" better anyway, but that's just my preference.

It's still unrelated to my fic, but to end this I'll go ahead and shout out that Valve actually threw me one last bone: Engie and Sniper sitting right next to each other once again at the dinner table in the final comic scene. I'll take it. :) They've been shown next to each other enough times to make me wonder if someone at Valve shares my feelings on these two, as well. That's probably me reading too much into it, but hey, it's fun to speculate.

TL;DR my fic with RED Engie and Sniper is meant for the setting of the main game/SFM shorts universe, not the universe of the numbered comics. Remember, they're canonically two separate canons!

I'll probably be adding a shorter version of what I just wrote to the author's notes of the fic once it's published so that everyone who reads it will be aware. Both canons are fictional to us, so we can all choose whichever version of canon we want to focus on in our fan works and discussion. I'm glad I can say that, because it means my fic will be canon-compliant to what I care about most: the game that's had a hold on my heart for the past 14 years. The comics look fantastic and tell a compelling story many years in the making, but they aren't the canon I prefer to focus on. But that's just me.

If you read this whole thing, thank you for sticking with me. It means a lot to know that people still take interest in my work and read my ramblings!