#exploring narrative

[juniemunie]

[Abandoned by the Lightners, his heart became cracked with hatred.]

Hitting a lil' too close to home?

[zan0tix]

My fav agents of the transsexual empire 🫶😁🏳️‍⚧️

I think personally we should draw them as adults getting to fully indulge in their teen fashion aspirations. (see second image) Callies outfit was inspired by paint splotches and embroidery as if she made her outfit herself :) A true artist!

Third is my updated readings. I say "readings" because i believe theres textual evidence for these and its how i interpreted them from my read throughs. (Only jake has the autism symbol because hes the most explicitly disabled coded in text but all of them to me are neurodivergent)

The gender labels are used loosely bc i think each of them has an incredibly unique journey/relationship with their gender that cant be encapsulated in a small set of words, and i do not think any of them would actually fully use labels either.

I am just using these to simplify down my thoughts into something easily digestible LOL MY THOUGHTS ON THEM AND THEIR PARALLELS + MIRRORS + INVERSIONS ARE SUPER COMPLEX i think about them Genuinely Literally Every Day of my Life. theyd have to be saved for a different time </3 but ya alpha kids trans 4EVER howd hussie cram THIS AMOUNT of queerness into these guys.. will never know

[recents]

as a writer my relationship with dragon age can be summed up by that one interview where it’s gaider, jhep and someone else talking about the exalted march dlc, and at one point someone brings up, “yeah we were gonna have you meet justice still inside of kristoff and he’d be like, ‘kirkwall? i never went to kirkwall.’”

and in the five seconds before i read the next line my brain went, holy shit that’s genius— so anders was never possessed? he was just radicalized the way anyone who had his experiences would be? and the possession was an invention of varric’s— maybe he mentioned justice to varric over drinks once— an exoneration, an insanity plea, and, subconsciously, a personal way of coping with the fact that his friend did something that ripped his home apart. holy shit, that is actually such an incredible way of using the frame story of da2, what the fuck—

and then the next line someone else says, “yep, because the demon that possessed anders was just a random demon that tricked him into thinking it was justice.”

and im just like oh. right. this is dragon age. ok.

[potato-lord-but-not]

sorrryyyy I needed to draw these guys having half decent communication skills or I would’ve fallen ill

[linkcharacter]

thanks for being one of the few mouthwashing artists who is like.. normal about jimmy, is the only way i can describe it. for treating his character just as seriously as all the other tulpar members, not being afraid to analyze/explore his character and relationships with the others; for not outright refusing to draw him etc. i feel like a lot of people think that including him in fanart/analysis is equal to excusing his actions and it really sucks to see that, so it's always refreshing to see someone give him as much thought and appreciation as any other well written character.

Thank you, but it makes me wonder how cooked this fandom is, if I'm getting praise for treating the central protagonist and main character of the story as just A Character In The Story. And he isn't even my favorite. I understand the aversion to Jimmy obviously, but a lot of people act so immature about him.

[villa-kulla]

oh nothing, just book lawrence and bellini being work husbands who have each other's backs...

....and praying together...

...and supportively sassing each other...

...and being soft ...

...and passing notes during conclave like schoolchildren...

AND WHATEVER IMPROMPTU 'GOODNIGHT SWEET PRINCE' REPRESSED TENDER ROMANCE MOVIE YEARNING BULLSHIT THIS IS

i'm crying, they're married, they're dating, they're confirmed bachelors, they're courting, they're besties, they're flirting, they're in love, they're everything to me, amen

[centaurianthropology]

What LeeBeeBee does for the Story of ‘Murderbot’

So we’ve finally met Blonde Lady in the series (her name is LeeBeeBee), and I think she’s filling a really interesting and important role plot-wise and worldbuilding-wise, and doing so in unexpected ways that are surprising even book-readers.  She’s wholly original to the show, so no one knows what precisely the writers have planned for her.

But I certainly have thoughts and predictions. 

I figured I’d break my thoughts on her up into two sections.  The first section is for all the folks who are show-only, and I’ll only be examining her role in S1E5, without any additional speculation pulling from book knowledge and what I think the writers are doing with her in the longer term.  The second part will speculate on the upcoming episode, and how I think it could play out.  No idea if I’m right about everything (or anything!), but it’s always fun to speculate!

FUNCTION IN S1E5 (SPOILERS FOR E1-5)

Let’s kick it off by talking about LeeBeeBee in isolation in this episode, what her function in this particular episode was, what she does for the plot, the larger world, and what she does for the storytelling format. 

Let’s start with her plot function, the most obvious part of her role in this episode.  She appears at the beginning as the sole survivor of DeltFall, makeup smeared and uniform dirty.  This immediately sets her apart from the PresAux gang.  She’s apparently the indentured cleaner that DeltFall rented for the hab along with the SecUnits, and this cleaner is wearing makeup despite having a physically laborious job in a field unit on a mostly-uninhabited planet. 

This small bit of visual storytelling sets DeltFall up as a very different society to PresAux.  PresAux deliberately only took one (cheap) SecUnit, which is understandable given their objections to using constructs as slave labor.  None of them wear makeup in the field, and they certainly don’t have a cleaner.

But DeltFall not only had multiple constructs, but also an indentured servant to do housekeeping, and there is either an expectation or a cultural norm that she be made up while she do her indentured job.  They feel, from this introduction, very Corporation Rim. 

LeeBeeBee herself acts as a personification of the Corporation Rim on a level we haven’t been able to dig into with the limited screentime of the Company Tech Bro sales reps.  From her first scene on the hopper, she feels like she’s from a completely different world to the empathetic and sweet Preservationers.  She almost immediately objectifies SecUnit in a way that is openly offputting to both the audience and clearly to the Preservation crew, who likely don’t say anything both out of shock and out of some belief that this woman has to have some sort of brain damage to say something like that.

But this level of objectification, I think, lies at the heart of the Corporation Rim.  It’s not that constructs are objects, but their workers are valued.  LeeBeeBee is an indentured servant.  She has no more free will than SecUnit.  She objectifies it because she sees herself as a step above a construct, and in the CR hierarchy, you’re likely encouraged to objectify anyone beneath you.  And that comes around to something equally uncomfortable when she finds out it’s got a hacked governor module and is a rogue.  She views it as a person now, but what does that mean? 

She objectifies herself for it. 

And doesn’t that make the worst sort of sense on a survival level for a person in her position?  She’s fully adapted to doing what she has to do to survive.  She views sex in an incredibly transactional and exploitative way.  When she thinks SecUnit is an object, she has the power and she immediately speculates about using it as a sex toy.  When she shifts into thinking of it as a person, she also knows how dangerous it is, and reverses their power dynamic, offering sex as a transactional way to protect herself. 

It’s awful, deliberately so.  But I think it’s a great and visceral way to get into the Corporation Rim mindset: constructs aren’t special; everyone who isn’t wealthy or powerful is an object.  You don’t get to be a person with fully autonomous choices until you’re one of the elite.  Until then, sex is just another way of trying to get a slight advantage in an endless rat race.

Having LeeBeeBee represent this deeply uncomfortable aspect of an end-stage capitalist hellscape like the CR also does something on a storytelling level.  This addition of an outsider character fully shifts the POV in the show.  Up until her introduction, the PresAux crew felt like the strange outsiders that MB was judging, but by introducing the worst possible representation of the CR, our alignment completely shifts.  We are not only on Preservation’s side, but we are insiders with them.  They now feel normal and lived in, and she feels like the outsider.  And this reflects the shift going on in Murderbot.  Even before it’s willing to acknowledge it, through the framing of LeeBeeBee we subconsciously know it has realigned itself with the PresAux crew. 

So that’s why I think she was an effective addition in this episode.  If you’re interested in some book spoilers and speculation for the next episode, jump below the cut.

FUNCTION IN S1E6 AND BEYOND (SPECULATION, SPOILERS FOR ‘ALL SYSTEMS RED’)

Are they gone?

Groovy.  Let’s get under the hood and talk about all the ways she’s working on multiple levels, not just embodying all the worst parts of the CR as I previously mentioned, but playing it up as a means of camoflage.  Because LeeBeeBee is almost certainly a GrayCris plant, precisely what SecUnit and Mensah were worried about, and the crew absolutely did take her in despite the danger because they are good people.  And they would do the right thing, even if Murderbot objected.

It’s so nice to get to see exactly how DeltFall might have been infiltrated, which we didn’t get to see in the book.  And so many of her lines read differently when you think of her as a plant.  Did DeltFall call PresAux ‘the Amateurs,’ or was that GrayCris?  Did DeltFall actually have an indentured servant, or is that GrayCris?

I think that a lot of what she’s saying is truthful, or is just a slight twist on the truth.  I do think she’s likely indentured.  I do think she views others and herself as objects to be used and exploited and discarded.  She’s suffering under one of the cruelest practices in the Corporation Rim, but she’s still fully bought into the CR propaganda and mindset.  Rather than defecting and embracing freedom the way Gurathin likely did, she’s almost certainly looking at getting years shaved off her indenture by acting as an infiltrator and assassin

That’s so perfectly horrid.  She would rather still be indentured but get in better with her bosses than accept real freedom.  It’s a cowardice I think we can all see in our world, that she would take the safe misery and be willing to hurt others to do it, rather than take a major risk and step outside the system.

She’s also dialing up her inherent objectification of others to a level that makes her deliberately off-putting, so the PresAux crew want to look away from her rather than examining her too closely.  If they just want to sort of ignore her, then they’re not going to dig too far into her actions.  If she runs off to communicate back to GrayCris regarding a rogue SecUnit they’re not going to follow her, and are going to be glad to get a break from her.

Her distraction tactics work particularly well against Murderbot, who she makes wildly uncomfortable to the point it’s very glad to get away from her, and is likely deliberately trying not to think of her.  If you watch who she’s targeting with this barrage of unpleasantness, she does it first as a blanket with the crew to gauge reaction, then targets it at SecUnit once she realizes that it’s not being controlled by the combat override, and that it’s fully rogue.  There’s no easy way for her to control it (as I suspect she was controlling the DeltFall SecUnits), so she had to improvise, because as far as she’s concerned, this independent SecUnit is the #1 threat to her plan to kill the PresAux crew.  She must have been so relieved when it went with Mensah to trigger the beacon, because she knew the beacon was rigged to explode, and she had a good chance of getting rid of both the biggest threat and the team leader, and she didn’t even have to do anything!

Which, to her mind, only leaves the rest of the PresAux team to deal with.  After SecUnit, she almost certainly considers Gurathin the next biggest threat, because she would certainly underestimate the Preservationers, but he’s ex-corporate, so she would respect the threat he posed.  So after Mensah and SecUnit are gone, she zeroes in on Gurathin.

I think she almost certainly has a dossier or some other large amount of personal and professional information about him from his days in the CR.  What did she do when she first talked to him after Mensah and Murderbot were gone?  She offered him a stimulant.  I’m now convinced that his therapy modules were—in addition to being for generalized trauma (why did you learn to be quiet, Gurathin??)—meant to treat a stimulant addiction he struggled with after using them to work whatever insane hours he was required to work when he was in the CR. 

I think this next episode is going to be Gurathin-heavy.  The writers are setting up deliberate contrasts between the die-hard-to-a-horrific-level Corpo LeeBeeBee and Defector-with-Trauma ex-Corpo Gurathin.  I wonder if he won’t try to sort of reach out to her in the next episode (was he indentured too?), convince her to defect too, only to have her turn it all around on him and use his backstory against him.  If he was indentured, did he break contract to run to Preservation?  Is there a bounty on him?  Is there a bounty on his AUGMENTS, body not needed in return?

I sort of have an image of the next episode playing out like a horror film, where we realize that LeeBeeBee is the exact infiltrator that took out DeltFall, that GrayCris SecUnits are incoming, MB and Mensah may already be dead, and the person who was responsible for the DeltFall massacre is inside the hab right now.

Especially if we don’t know what happened to MB and Mensah for the majority of the episode, instead focusing on the rest of the group.  Without the snarky voiceover, the terror of the situation could really get hammered home.  Again, this is fully speculation of how it might play out next episode, but my guess is that the big cliffhanger next episode is going to be LeeBeeBee attacking Gurathin.  Previews have shown him with a bandage on his leg, and holding a cane, which some people have pointed out looks like a blind walking cane.  That makes me wonder if she manages to not only disable him with a shot to the leg, but damage visual augments he might have, rendering him partially blind.

I think we’ve also been getting a lot of background work with Gurathin being terrified of rejection and abandonment throughout this season.  He and MB parallel one another in not wanting to share Mensah, because they both are afraid the other will manage to take her from them (completely ignoring that Mensah has two fucking hands, and more than enough love in her to love her family, and both of these idiots too).  If LeeBeeBee really wants to twist the knife in him, she’s going to tell him that if the others are going to survive, they have to abandon him.

And Pin-Lee, Arada, Bharadwaj, and Ratthi are almost certainly going to refuse.  Much like Mensah refused to abandon MB when it was damaged, they’re going to refuse to leave their friend behind.  Because they can disagree with him, they can think he’s wrong about SecUnit, but they still love him and won’t leave him.

This sets up E7 to be the big turning point between the nadir of act 2 (MB and Mensah may be dead, Gurathin is injured, and the others are in direct danger because they won’t leave him behind), and the start of act 3 (MB and Mensah return and save everyone!  They can all come together, defeat GrayCris and escape alive!). 

And all of this gets facilitated because of the introduction of LeeBeeBee, who acts as a face for GrayCris (and likely a way to give us information about them) and for the whole vicious corporate people-as-objects theme that consumes the Corporation Rim.  It’s so much easier to loath GrayCris when we can see the sorts of people it creates, and she is such a great example of that.

[mercurio-shadowz]

I've decided

The mercurioverse is a universe where, no matter what, for whatever reason, nothing fully bad, evil or seriously world threatening happens

It all stopped one day and everyone from Team Sonic or otherwise is like ?????

Eggman, try as he might, can't get his plans to work as well as they used to anymore. Something always happens and it's weird and it sucks (he just keeps trying cuz he's bored)

So without anything world threatening happening anymore... what will our heroes do? What happens now?

I'll tell you what

SLICE OF LIFE -gets run over-

[sorrelpaws]

They make such a nice couple. The king and queen are pretty nice too. Heheheh.

[cloudbends]

[ID: a digital drawing in two parts, depicting characters from pokemon horizons, facing with their back to the viewer: the first drawing depicts the three original explorers heading away towards the light, as lucius hugs rystal and gibeon's shoulders. the second drawing depicts liko and amethio, their descendants, standing still and facing the light. end ID.]

"our adventure isn't over yet, isn't that right?"

[thenamesapollo]

state of deltarune theories is so so bad cuz they all try to connect back to the theme of escapism without noticing that that theme isn't even in deltarune.

[worfsbarmitzvah]

there’s such an attitude among ex-christian atheists that religions just spring up out of the void with no cultural context behind them. like ive heard people say shit like “those (((zionists))) think they own a piece of land bc their book of fairy tales told them so!!!” and they refuse to understand that no, we don’t belong there because of the torah, it’s in the torah because we belong there. because we’re from there. the torah (from a reform perspective) was written by ancient jews in and about the land that they were actively living on at the time. the torah contains instructions for agriculture because the people who lived in the land needed a way to teach their children how to care for it. it contains laws of jurisprudence because those are pretty important to have when you’re trying to run a society. same for the parts that talk about city planning. it contains our national origin story for the same reason that american schools teach kids about the boston tea party. it’s an extremely complex and fascinating text that is the furthest thing from just a “book of fairy tales”

[wardensantoineandevka]

the fact that people keep interpreting the word "consequences" to be exactly and only "punishment" and knee-jerk responding to it with "why do you want my precious Bells Hells pookies punished" frankly says a lot about more about you than it does about those who feel that C3 as a narrative never followed through on consequences for anything

this is ESPECIALLY evident when it is remembered that we're all talking about a story and doing narrative analysis and media critique here, yes, all of us, even the casual commentaries, debriefs and post-mortems of the campaign is analysis. consequences. narrative follow through. the consequential story beat that carries the weight and concluded a prior set up. results, negative or positive or neutral, that are incurred as a consequence of what happened before. a continuity of narrative logic. actions that result in the expected and prior established weight and outcome. feeling like things consistently matter and affect things meaningfully on various levels, including the personal.

[fujii-draws]

The Great Dusknoir (but human)

[s0fter-sin]

what i would give for a ghost based cod campaign. can you imagine if they pulled from the comics and had roba come back and want to get revenge against ghost for destroying his empire? the 141 slowly learning about simon riley and banding together to kill his ghost?

ghost being so certain he killed roba to set up an unreliable narrator; taking this unfathomable soldier, the nightmare of the 141, and realising he bleeds humanity. playing as ghost through flashbacks of mexico and his torture under roba but in the current time, little details break down; little inconsistencies of enemy numbers or base layout or what people look like, things that you can't be sure if you the player just missed something or if it’s really ghost seeing things that aren’t there

ghost starting to question how much of his memory is real, both what he went through with roba and what he’s currently experiencing; if it's his trauma bleeding through or if he's breaking for the last time. he doesn’t know if he can trust himself ("just make sure you can trust yourself. start there") and he has to reckon with completely trusting the 141 when he realises he can't

i need a sequence of him just losing his shit; hearing roba's voice in his head, his taunting “english” telling him he never left his compound, seeing the dead prostitute and his father laughing, always laughing, the tear of the meathook between his ribs and sting of the scorpions in his flesh, the coffin and the rotting stench of the dark and all of it culminating in ghost almost accidentally shooting soap when he tries to talk him down

whether it ends up being someone pretending to be roba or they just change it to roba still being alive, either way i need a ghost based campaign with personal stakes and character depth