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fan-goddess · 1 year ago

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MY ANALYSIS OF THAT AEMOND SCENE IN EP 2

A/N: This is not fully proofread but I hope everything makes sense and that credit has been rightfully given when needed. If links are missing let me know so i can correct any mistakes at all.

DISCLAIMER: Now I would like to start this by saying I will be talking about THE CHARACTER mainly but will mention Ewan and Michelle Bonnard who plays the brothel madam purely most likely in regard to their amazing performances in the scene. Though you bet I will be mentioning the horrifying action some people have been committing at the end of this post. Okay? Now let’s begin!

When looking back at when I made the post speculating who the person holding Aemond in that small scene we witnessed in the trailer it’s now come to light that the woman is the brothel Madame whose name I found out is actually Sylvi.

But still, with that realisation looking back at the earlier points I had made through help of other people on this app in the original analysis of the clip of this scene shown in the HOTD season 2 trailer which I shall link here if anyone wished to go read my first thoughts on this as I will be making plenty references from that post mainly in this paragraph/section. First and foremost, I will say while the lady in the scene being the brothel madame was the most likely given scenario given the evidence shown through the various posts theories and leaks, it is still a sad one. No one should feel the need to go back to their abuser, so to witness Aemond be forced to do that is horrible and frankly uncomfortable to watch even for a short time.

But back to the original post, me and @/anjelicawrites discussed how in that scene it seemed that Aemond was finally directly suffering for his actions in the war, AKA killing Luke even if it was on accident which would lead to the murder of Jaehaerys his nephew. As previously mentioned it looks as though he is becoming something that even he said he would never become as he says to Criston when on the search for Aegon so he could be crowned as the king, as Anjelica mentioned to me, that the two of them were people with morals. So by having Aemond go back to the brothel madam and effectively throw away those morals he insisted he possessed, it shows that even he is not safe and that no one is truly immune to the grief of war and that sacrifices must be made by all to 'get through their hardships.' This idea could also be seen in Alicent and Criston Cole as both are sacrificing once key morals they held about themselves to be with each other. (The showing of that definitely surprised a bunch of people myself included...)

When looking back mentioning the limited shown background of the scene in the trailer clip it appears I was correct when assuming it was a brothel. The room is new to us but when thinking about how Aemond went to far as to go back to the place of his abuser and user her for comfort, is it too a farfetched idea to think that maybe that room he is in is the same one he was in at ten and three when he had his first sexual encounter with the madame? Originally the idea when looking back at season 1 Aemond was that he could've gone to the brothel in order to psychologically hurt himself, as when looking at the damage he has caused to his family physical pain especially with the massive amount of physical pain he's been through already, he may have thought that wasn't a worthy punishment. But in actuality now that we know the scenes context we are aware that the reason he went to the brothel and into the arms of the madame was actually for comfort rather than punishment. Plus, with the reveal that that wasn't the first time there, it further cements this idea that Aemond is slowly morphing into another version of Aegon. Though when thinking of the scenes that'll progress in the future he'll slowly morph into his own person with hints of Aegon imbued into him.

That was all the references to the previous post analysing the scene clip shown in the trailer, so now these next sections shall be analysing the scene from only Episode 2 of this season as I am aware there'll be further references to Aemond being in the brothels later on.

One point which I mentioned earlier but would like to bring up again to talk about is the fact that it is revealed by both Aemond and the brothel madame but mainly by her, that Aemond has visited the brothel and by extension the madame more than that time shown on screen. Now when looking back in season 1 where Aemond and Cole go to the brothel in an attempt to find Aegon, we can see that Aemong is uncomfortable being in the presence of the madame. He does not speak to her, nor does he even manage to keep eye contact with her, instead only being able to really look at the floor as she comments about, "How hes grown..." The reference of that comment she even makes in the scene as she speaks while attempting to kiss him, saying "How the boy has grown into a man." With those words in mind we can deduce that Aemond started going back to the madame after that moment and not before. In my opinion, given what service the madame is providing him with, I believe Aemond began seeing her after Alicents reaction to him revealing that he killed lucerys. In the series they chose to not show team Green's reaction to Aemond killing Lucerys, so for the sake of this argument i will imagine that the same reaction was made off-screen. It is said that hearing the news of what Aemond had done, Alicent paled and cried out for mercy from the mother, while Otto told Aemond directly, "You only lost one eye, how could you be so blind?" This kind of reaction that Aemond receives after killing Luke by accident is not what he wanted to hear. After experiencing that type of rejection when he so desperately would want comfort is probably what led him into the arms of the only other woman he knows who has seen him at his most vulnerable. AKA the brothel madame.

But thanks to the shows decisions to suddenly spring the scene on us we will have no direct idea on why Aemond actually chose to go back to his abuser or when it all started which is annoying but is just something we will need to deal with unfortunately whether we like it or not. I saw a post by @/aemondsbabe where they responded to an ask talking about how sad it is that Aemond was self soothing and finding a form of comfort with the madame, and they made an interest point where they mentioned how 'him going back to his abuser for comfort does draw interesting parallels with rhaenyra and daemon though!' which is actually a really interesting take. As yes, Rhaenyra did go back to Daemon for comfort during the time when her inheritance and her sons legitimacy where called into question especially since Laenor except publicly claiming the boys as his sons did not do much to dispel the rumours. So when facing that challenge Rhaenyra goes to who she knows best, who just so happens to be her abuser. The parallels in this season are genuinely insane and I can't wait to see what other stuff they'll add later on.

Now onto the actual scene itself! One thing that was brought to my attention as I had actually missed it the first time I watched it, is the pouring of the milk the director used to bring us to the brothel scene. At first i had assumed it was just another alcohol, but when it was pointed out to me by another tumblr (The user i cannot remember given that since then there's been a lot of people discussing this aspect of the scene) I cannot help but think even when it is a small thing it adds so much more depth to the scene when you think about it. It adds that extra layer as it brings more to the light Aemonds needs in that scene. Aemond from what it looks like in the scene age regressing himself to a younger point in his life and the use of the hot milk emphasises that. It does not mean Aemond necessarily is attempting to make himself into the age of that of an infant but from parallels i've seen from multiple gif creators, it looks as though Aemond is attempting to go back to the time of season 1 episodes 6 and 7 when he is around 10 years old with both his eyes and without the trauma given to him by Aegon and the brothel. The milk may just be used as a method to get his mind to revert to that younger state. Though I must confess that in some certain fanfics I have read here (I shall not name specifics but they were all delicious) where the milk was used to stimulate the idea of a lactating women, by having the milk be pored onto the breasts and having Aemond drink it up. Though since we did not get a sexual variation of the scene, the only reasoning that Aemonds brothel visits may turn sexual being that when the brothel madame goes to kiss Aemond on the lips he moves away with a noise saying "not here" suggesting either for another time or it could mean he keeps putting off any suggestions for his meetings with the madame to turn into anything sexual. Aemond wants to stay in this childlike mindset for the whole time he's there as that is how he is dealing with his grief and his emotions since he cannot find a way to deal with it in any other way. If he turns the whole thing sexual he looses his outlet which defeats the purpose of it all.

Another aspect of the scene that i want to explicitly talk about which I did actually mention in my original analysis of the clip in the trailer is the positioning that Aemond is in. The position Aemond first was in with his head by the madames curve of her neck actually is a direct parallel to how Alicent holds him after Aegon Jace and Luke presented him with the pink dread and in retaliation to that attempted to visit Dreamfyre and see if she had laid any eggs for him to get his own dragon for himself. I cannot take direct credit for seeing this given that it was by @/emmaziadarcy and their post showing the parallels more clearly than anything I had originally thought about further cementing this parallel for me. This also supports the idea that Aemond in the brothel is age regressing as he's trying to appear himself as being younger while using the madame as a surrogate for Alicent. Just as he does at Driftmark soon as he looses his eye with Alicent, he places his head in the curve of the madames neck therefre showing that its a motherly affection and love he is craving and not something that is primarily sexual as far as i am aware since we have not really been seen anything that directly shows it. As far as i could tell the only real sexual thing I have seen/have seen talked about between these two characters is some boob touching/sucking and some naked hugs/cuddling.

One other position Aemond gets in with the madame is the one that we saw in the HOTD season 2 trailer, which involves Aemond after refusing to allow her to kiss him moving so his head is now on the madams lap and his body is curled into a fetal position close to her. This position is what I discussed in my original analysis post, where i talked about how given with how he was sitting it suggested intimacy bordering even on motherly, which is exactly what Aemond was attempting to achieve by having himself in such a vulnerable state before this woman posing as a motherly figure for him. The rest of that section was me discussing about Alicents reaction to the news of Lukes death and how after killing him, Aemond would no doubt want a comfort for the guilt he no doubt would be facing after being forced to realise that he is the definite reason for the dance of the dragons to kick start. So naturally after not being able to find that comfort with the person who had been most likely to give it to you, you find a worthy enough surrogate. Which in Aemonds case became the brothel madame, the reasoning for as i previously stated earlier, the reasoning for which is unknown.

The fact that even when Aemond has been shown to be Alicents favoured child between her four he is still feels like their are certain things he cannot say or actions he cannot show with his mother, who through season 1 was shown to provide him with affection and favouritism given that he was the only child of hers who felt like hers, is sad and honestly heartbreaking to watch unveil onscreen. Plus as well after reading @/humanpurposes post talking about their thoughts of Aemond in episode two, (the link found here if you want to go read)they spoke about how they found it interesting how Aemond doesn't have many moments with his family even after the death of Jaehaerys, making them think that Aemond fundamentally sees himself as an outsider. This makes sense as Aemond even says that he saw himself as an outsider on the lap of the brothel madame. Ewan says in an interview somewhere that Aemond saw himself as an outsider as a child being the only one at the time with no dragon and finding and connecting with Vhagar who was a dragon all alone. Ewan also says how 'he never really felt that unconditional love from anyone really, maybe finding it in Vhagar who is an older she-dragon or maybe he found it in the madame. In a way he’s just a broken boy needing to be fixed and someone’s going to help him'.

The things Aemond talks about are even similar to that of a child as well, as he attempts to brag about Daemon seeing him as a worthy opponent. Let me remind you he is in the lap of a whore who he has almost definitely needed to pay for to get the service of, and yet he still feels the need to brag and try and impress this woman, similarly to how you would brag and get attention from your mother. He says these before admitting to regret killing Luke and opening up about his sad childhood involving the bullying and how his younger nephew used to tease him. He puts these harsh walls up immediately almost in a strange attempt to remind the madame who she has in her lap. But literally as soon as she reaffirms his beliefs by saying Daemon has a right to fear him, Aemond moves into the second position where he does not need to look at her like he did in the starting position and he himself knocks those walls down by admitting to the things above. He checks he's safe in the environment and then lets it all out to his surrogate. It's these details that do keep me impressed though I am probably just easily swayed when brought face to face with Aemond.

An aspect I noticed from the scene and have yet to notice anyone else talk about this, is that the Madame almost doesn't seem to know how to handle this side of Aemond. In brothels the kind of men who most likely visit are the ones who just want a quick fuck or just any sort of sexual encounter, so that is what the ladies are trained for/expect for. But Aemonds thing doesn't really involves sexual encounters as far as we know. His thing is just wanted the comfort that comes with sex without the sex part. When watching the scene I noticed her facial expressions as soon as Aemond began to divulge in his personal stuff, which to me said that while she knew what she needed to do exactly in the physical side of Aemonds delusion she needed to think on the spot for how she needed to say things for the speaking side. As most of the time the speaking side involved saying what the customer needed to hear which usually involved sexual undertones, but as I press Aemond isn't looking for pure sexual comments he is looking for comforting words that would mimic that of a mother speaking to her beloved child. When he talks of Daemon sending the assassins she is in thought about her words speaking simply so she can get on with the convo, she doesn't look at him when he speaks on that even thought that probably is what she should be doing but as soon as he says something she can focus on talking about such as Daemon being afraid of him she can look at him and say the things she knows he'll want to hear. Which in that case was confirming how he's a worthy foe and how Daemon should be afraid of him. Only this is when she makes the mistake of going with the teachings of turning the conversation sexual as she repeats the similar words she spoke in season 1 episode 9 about how 'the boy has turned into a man', which is just another way of puffing up his ego and making him feel good about himself. Though Aemond deflects this tactic as he wants to stay in the headspace of a different time and changes positions so he cannot see her, yet she immediately moves how he wants her to be and touches him in ways he'll let her. As soon as he mentions Luke she looks shocked and barely moves in an attempt to think of how this'll play out and how she'll need to adapt to this situation. She does not speak out of turn until he speaks so she knows the rules in which she needs to follow and when doing so she'll know what to say to make him a happy customer who will return with more money. Soon as he says his regrets she moves into a more nurturing position and says words that'll make him more happy, saying she's glad to hear he's sorry for his actions which humanises him to himself which Aemond will no doubt have been glad to hear rather than be called all sorts of names from his other family members who still believe Aemond killed Luke on purpose. She pauses again hearing about Aemonds bullying but this is what intrigues me. She says, "I would remind you only that when princes lose their temper, it is often others who suffer." I had to think about this for a minute as to me she's saying how Princes do not get punishments for loosing their tempers but others, which in this case Luke is the one who suffered and even his whole family suffered as Aemond was not their while Jaehaerys was slain in his bed. She pauses before continuing in her words, as she needed to gauge his interest to see if she was permitted to still speak about this topic. But in her next words she just says "The smallfolk... like me" This seems to be the worst wording she could use at that time as she has officially at that moment to me broke the daydream Aemond had about what he was doing by reminding him where he was and who she was. He was in a smallfolk brothel laying on the lap of a brothel madame who was just a smallfolk whore. Not in his chambers being comforted by his mother. I don't even know why she said those extra words as was she trying to day the smallfolk like her suffer? Were there extra words to the sentence the scene just didn't show us? Either way those extra words confuse me.

An article I think will be quite informative to read is linked here, and it details about how sex within the world of House Of the Dragon mainly in this season is used as a form of power. One of the examples they talked about is Aemond which is why I desire to mention it in a special reserved section. The article talks about how we see Aemond using sex as a means of control by going back to the woman who took his virginity as a child after being paid to do so by Aegon. And while we don't see them actually having sex, only the aftermath, it's only then does Aemond admit to his guilt showing it's only after sex that he feels vulnerable enough to utter this. Further more in the post they write, 'He clearly thinks he cannot show this side of himself to his family, so he seeks out someone with no connection to the Targaryens or Hightowers, and seemingly very little influence.' and it makes a lot of sense for this to be the case, especially as she reminds him at the very end of the scene that she is just a smallfolk with no importance who will not allow his secret to be revealed as he could just have her simply killed and not be directly forced to pay the consequences. Another quote from the article that just makes just so much sense for me is this. 'By sleeping with his first sexual partner again, Aemond is also reclaiming a sense of control that was initially taken away from him. His first encounter with Sylvie was nonconsensual (certainly by today’s standards), but by going back to her on his own terms, he ensures that neither Aegon nor Sylvie wields any power over him. Aemond drives the transformation of their relationship, which gives him space to be more than just someone's protector.' THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH THEIR RELATIONSHIP!!! HE IS MAKING SURE NO ONE HAS AN UPPER HAND ON HIM AND WITH THE MADAM THAT IS BY USING SEX AS A POWER TOOL!!! I will leave this section with yet another direct quote from the article (please read it it's so informative it really opened my eyes.) 'None of these characters stare hungrily at the people they’re having sex with. Instead, they look at their lovers with a sense of despair, as if the act and who they’re doing it with brings them pain. Yet when they’re over, Alicent, Criston, and Aemond leave these encounters with their backs held a bit straighter, as if, in these hidden encounters, they have regained a sense of control in their lives that continue to unravel under the weight of a war.'

All this next information was provided to me from a post written by @/thephantomphonecase who was answering an ask about how the writers for this season seem to have lost Aemond. I shall link the post here for you to read in full. According to them the possible reasoning as to why Aemond to you may not be acting as his season 1 self is because during production Condal and Hess were replaced by a showrunner from the crown as they missed script deadlines season 2 production from months due to the fact they couldn't finish the scripts in a timely manner. 'The things you are seeing on screen are a jumble of Condal and Hess's ideas patch worked by someone who knows absolutely dick about ASoIaF or the characters beyond what he read in the show bible.' He was also brought in as a sort of fixer to get production back on track and to script doctor Condal and Hess's work on the scripts, so if the characters don't seem to act the way you are expecting them to act or the way they acted in season 1 then it is due to the fact they were rewritten and doctored by a person who the studio paid to take over for incompetent producers and who doesn't know much the characters or the books lore. The reason the ghost showrunner was brought in was because of his experience writing royal family drama and the team green family were based on them British Royal Family dynamics of the Royal House of Windsor, with politically and public relations minded patriarchs and cold detached matriarchs that don't know how to show love included. So while certain scene acting is really great the lore and the characters are off because he doesn't know anything about the characters beyond from what he's seen in Season 1, and read from Condal and Hess's rejected scripts and their show bible.

The performances from them both were phenomenal though overall as it's with these small extra details the actors make that keep me intrigued and watching eagerly for more. The body language the two made when shooting this was detailed and wonderful and was successful in making this scene what it was intended to be. This was not some lovey dovey romantic meet up between lovers this was intended to be disturbing for viewers as they watched Aemond repulse away as soon as the moment became even inherently sexual moving and speaking like that of an exhausted child as that is what he is! Aemond is technically meant to be 17 years old which in this modern day is a child, who has never been taught how to safely navigate through his emotions while also piloting a fucking humongous war dragon bigger than anything ever. He is a child craving his mothers love and Ewan captured that brilliantly. Michelle Bonnard playing Sylvi the brothel madam was brilliant too in her own performance as she nailed the looks the hesitations the way she spoke all of it seemed natural and like how a woman who has been constantly fighting against men bigger than her who say! She is wonderful in being able to hate the character like many other amazing actors who managed to achieve that same task! We know jack all about her yet she has told us so much in such little time it's astonishing! I could not commemorate these two enough!

Now. The bodyshaming. It's disgusting to say the least that those who oohed and awed at his body in season 1 now that his body has been shown nude on camera have decided to do a 180 declaring his body words and phrases I shall not say on here. Ewan choosing to show his body was his choice and from seeing 'High life', another movie Ewan did in 2018 we saw he doesn't mind showing a little skin in front of the camera (a lot more skin in episode 3 i'll tell you that!) Still, by him showing himself off means he is comfortable enough to do that. So by calling him awful names, comparing him to awful things and just being awful cunts means we are betraying that trust Ewan has given us. Ewan could go back into the dark as his mental health could be affected by this attack on his body. Not Aemonds body but his, as funnily enough EWANS BODY IS AEMONDS BODY. I've seen some people saying excuses and that his body is due to CGI work. But since Ewan is a method actor and we've heard nothing of any CGI, I'm gonna say it's probably not been used. It was a deliberate choice on Ewans parts as the idea was brought to my attention by @/feralsaarebas that the choice to go that thin for the role/scene was, '100% a deliberate choice to highlight the sheer fragility of him beneath at all. How he was never able to grow or flourish in his environment and is in a way stunted and malnourished.' and I agree! (Their post linked here as they had other things to say I just didn't add) It is another layer of Aemond Ewan has added which honestly is such an interesting detail people may have missed as they chose to ignore it and instead focus on taking the piss out of him. It's overall disgusting behaviour and it's a horrid thing to have to witness mutuals and those I follow who i thought also adored Ewan make posts denouncing the character and make fun of him. Just because Aemond didn't turn out like how you thought he would, like some sort of daddy dominating bdsm king, doesn't mean you get to shame how he and the script people have decided to go with the characters future breaking your dream about him. It's stuff like this that makes me think about why this fandom has turned so sour so quickly.

I hope people found this post informative and have a lovely day/night. Thank you to all those whose posts I have managed to compile to make this post and to all those who encouraged me to write this. There were so many more I could've probably added but didn't get around to adding/fitting in.

#aemond #aemond targaryen #house of the dragon #ewan mitchell #aegon targaryen #house of the dragon analysis #analysis #my posts #prince aemond targaryen #prince aemond #aemond one eye #Prince aemond targaryen #hotd aemond #hotd #hotd analysis

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superthatguy62 · 6 months ago

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Commissions Checklist: Oops, All Ingus Edition

This year was the first year that I was in a position to have commissions done. With all my various interests, particularly niche ones, it's no wonder that I have many ideas planned.

However, I ended up accidentally all of them about my, as the kids these days call their favorite characters, "blorbo" Ingus from Final Fantasy III.

So, I'll show off all of the commissions I had done this year, all of the lovely people who made them and who you, in-turn, should look into if you're interested and maybe some ideas for the future, although considering how far and between my tastes are, I feel the overlap in my interests shared with my audience is tiny.

Either way:

This first piece, and my first commission overall, is by N0nsenseMob on The App Formally Known As Twitter:

I like to portray Onion Knight and Ingus as foils or parallels and this piece is one of those times, having a light and dark theme.

Onion Knight in this piece is wielding the Will of Light from Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia. The sword is designed to be evocative of the Warrior of Light's Braveheart for reasons I refuse to go into but will implicate by mentioning that it is Onion Knight's FR weapon. And the Warrior of Light is based heavily on the Warrior/Knight job(s) so...

Ingus wields the Masamune from the Final Fantasy III remake. It was between that and the Murakumo (the black and red blade), but the former one out because A. the Murakumo is the Ninja's mastery item while the Masamune is a Eureka weapon and can be wielded by both Ninjas and Dark Knights and B. The purple compliments the darkness aspect nicely.

The next piece, or rather set of pieces, is from JenCommissions, via the aforementioned app, though she's more active these days on the Butterfly app. She does Dissidia Opera Omnia art by using characters on the roster as a base. Considering the sheer amount of characters OO had, there's good mileage to be gained.

The characters this time are Ingus as well as Nacht from Final Fantasy Dimensions.

(In hindsight, I should've swapped their character bases, that's on me.)

If you've been reading my posts on here, you can probably guess why these two specifically, but if you haven't: Unused text in the FF3 remake heavily implies that Ingus was once born in the Dark Knight village of Falgabard (In case it isn't becoming clear yet, Ingus and Darkness are going to be a recurring theme in these images). Final Fantasy Dimensions includes numerous references to past games, particularly the Nintendo-era stuff. Nacht is a Warrior of Darkness (more FFV dual worlds than FF3, if you catch my drift) and he's a serious-minded youth who turns out to be the son of a Dark Knight from a particular castle. Guess what that castle's named!

Ingus wields the Tyfring: In Famicom FF3, it was one of two swords that Red Mages could wield and because a certain someone already had the Wightslayer, I went with that. Nacht is wielding Graham's Sword. I won't go into details, partially because I have yet to sit down and actually play Dimensions and partially because the reason for Nacht having that sword is particularly spoilery, but needless to say, there is a reason why I picked that sword.

In my hypothetical Dissidia chapter, The Emperor finds Nacht and decides that he would make a decent minion. He attacks and steals Graham's Sword and lures Nacht into a cave. Said cave turns out to be a recreation of the Cave of Shadows, where Ingus just so happens to be. The two meet with a third party (a certain Dark Knight whose name has the initials G.G.) who claims he has been hired to protect them while they make their way out of the cave. Meanwhile, the main group enters the cave for plot related reasons and they soon figure out that something is amiss. Complicating matters even further is that Princess Sara is in the Cave, but it's the Sara from Onion Knight's timeline. She travels with the trio for a time, but when a splinter of the group led by Onion Knight finds them and Sara recognizes him, Ingus awkwardly lets her go and refocuses on Nacht's mission. (In this hypothetical, Luneth, Arc and Refia are already in the group and promptly freak out when they realize that Ingus is nearby) Meanwhile Ramza learns of his former mentor's presence and is suspicious of who he could be working for. Things come to a head and then part two of the chapter sees the group storming a replica of Castle Falgabard.

My Dissidia fanfic aside, I feel there's enough similarities or thematic elements (of course an FF3 character, from a game that introduced the concept of the Warriors of Darkness, would get an FR with a Warrior of Darkness) for it to function beyond just a cheeky nod to an unused scene that may or may not be canon.

This next one should be familiar. @CaramelHero did this one, which I'd call Scarlet Delirium (The joke is it's a Dark Knight skill in FFXI)

Turns out, pumping yourself full of the world's negative energy greatly empowers your shadow. Who knew?

In all seriousness, the inspiration for this one was Granblue Fantasy's "Alter Ego Conjurer" skin. The short of it is that the Captain is taunted by Man With Overwhelming Horny Energy into empowering several weapons. He/She does and promptly loses his/her mind in the process, but just narrowly pulls him/herself back from the brink.

Oh, and their body is being puppeted by this thing.

Or maybe they turned into that thing to puppet their body, I dunno.

Beyond just "Alter Ego neat", my other inspiration was a fanfic crossover idea I had. Let's just say that Ingus' descent into... (madness? Sure let's go with that.) isn't entirely natural.

The sword Ingus is wielding is the Ragnarok. Technically speaking, it is a Dark sword and with a name like that and being locked up in Eureka... yeah. The design itself takes influence from FFXI's iteration of the sword, which is on-brand for the FFIII remake.

The Dark energy on the sword is influenced by the Jamba Hearts from Kirby Star Allies. Considering what those hearts do and are implied to be, it's fitting.

And last but most certainly not least is HELD on VGen. One of the types of commission he specializes in is gatcha-esque splash art. Which is why the end result came out like this:

The quality speaks for itself.

As much as I've been channeling that parallel reality where the Falgabard-related scenes made the cut, Ingus is still a soldier of Sasune. And one of the things I had wanted to see was Ingus in a variation of the Sasune outfit worn by the soldiers in the 2D versions and the manga.

Hence, this.

Of course, it isn't a 1:1 recreation. We hashed out some details and tweaks, which should be clear by comparing the images. Even the background holds a nod to III's royalty.

Ingus in this one is wielding the Wightslayer: He's wearing a Sasune outfit, so it's only natural that he wield the Sasune blade. The sword itself is a combination of it's artwork and the equipment sprite for it in Brave Exvius (itself taking cues from the in-game versions of it). HELD did invent a scabbard for it though, which is a nice touch.

The last in this gallery is a bit different. It's not a picture, but a music track.

Threads of Oblivion by Desolo "The Grand Sunset/Contra Void" Zantas. Desolo occasionally does "30 for 30" commissions: $30 dollars for one of 30 slots for a music commission. I bit the bullet and went for it.

I decided to ask for a "The 13th Reflection" style for this (as mentioned prior, the AU that Freyr/Ingus' alter ego was inspired by isn't strictly FF3-related) and it came out very nicely. Desolo even made it so that it naturally loops.

And that about sums up my commissions for the year. Hopeful next year Hopefully, I'll be in a position to do some more next year. While obviously, Ingus and FF3 in general will be things I'm considering (yes, I have somehow not exhausted all of my ideas with this Red Mage/Dark Knight bastard), but I'll try to branch out into my other interests (If FF3 art is hard to come across, then Evolution is once in a blue moon).

Once again, big thanks to the artists I've commissioned. They've all done exceptional work and were wonderful to work with.

#Final Fantasy #Final Fantasy III #Final Fantasy 3 #FFIII #FF3 #Ingus #Onion Knight #Nacht #Final Fantasy Dimensions #FFD #Dark Knight #Freyr #Freyr AU #Sasune

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queenaryastark · 2 years ago

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So you think you find a post with accurate commentary:

Yes, this is true. Exactly zero members of House Martell and zero Dornish characters have any animosity toward House Targaryen. They rightly blame Tywin and Gregor Clegane for what happened to Elia. They also avidly support Targaryen Restoration, eagerly trying to marry Arianne to Viserys and then trying to marry Quentyn to Dany. They even speak positively of Rhaegar, who did not abuse nor abandon Elia. House Martell are among the Targ loyalists in Westeros.

Sadly they didn't stop there.

In short, this person, like the rest of the fanon crowd, did not read any of the chapters Aegon is featured in. They also don't seem to have read the books in general since we know that Rhaegar was anything but indifferent and scornful toward his son who he believed was a hero out of prophecy and gave him a king's name since he saw Aegon as the future king. Plus, anyone who has actually read Tyrion and JonCon's ADWD chapters where Aegon appears will know that Aegon is 100000000000% in as a Targaryen.

Aegon claims Rhaegar as his father by name and mentions Elia (not by name) in passing as part of his own supposed backstory. Aegon even asks for info about Rhaegar, but not about Elia.

He's also all in for the Targcest as he wants to marry Aunty Dany.

He refers to himself as a dragon and hopes to ride one.

He's also misogynistic toward women in power, which is very unDornish of him, but a reflection of non-Dornish Westerosi values.

Tyrion considers Aegon’s temperament as proof of his Targness. He also uses the lure of emulating Aegon I to manipulate the current Aegon into doing what he wants, which works bc Aegon is proud of his Targ heritage.

Seriously though...

Aegon mentioning Elia:

“That was not me. I told you. That was some tanner’s son from Pisswater Bend whose mother died birthing him. His father sold him to Lord Varys for a jug of Arbor gold. He had other sons but had never tasted Arbor gold. Varys gave the Pisswater boy to my lady mother and carried me away.” -- Tyion VI, ADWD

Aegon mentioning Rhaegar:

“Your father knew the dangers of being overbold.”

“Did you know my true father?”

“Well, I saw him twice or thrice, but I was only ten when Robert killed him, and mine own sire had me hidden underneath a rock. No, I cannot claim I knew Prince Rhaegar. Not as your false father did. Lord Connington was the prince’s dearest friend, was he not?”

Young Griff pushed a lock of blue hair out of his eyes. “They were squires together at King’s Landing.” -- Tyrion VI, ADWD

----

And then Prince Aegon spoke. “Then put your hopes on me,” he said. “Daenerys is Prince Rhaegar’s sister, but I am Rhaegar’s son. I am the only dragon that you need.” -- The Lost Lord, ADWD

The difference in how he talks about his parents couldn't be more different. This makes sense because he was raised by Rhaegar-loving and Elia-hating JonCon. Had Aegon been real and raised by the Martells, he likely would have cared about both of his parents and felt connected to both Houses he's descended from.

As someone who wastes a considerable amount of time on the content Aegon is featured in, I have to wonder why these people fixate on him. It reminds me of how Stansas use Jon while knowing exactly nothing about Jon Snow. They take the somewhat outward trappings of the character -- able bodied king candidate -- and project inaccurate ideas onto him. They should hate Jon bc he is sexist against women like their fav and has more sympathy for the grown man who married her than he does for his 12-year-old sister. Similarly, fanon!Elia stans should take issue with the fact that Aegon focuses considerably more on his father and being a Targ than he does on his "mother" who supposedly worked to save his life. As an actual Elia fan, I know I consider Aegon's apathy toward his "mother" to be a flaw of his.

#elia martell #aegon vi targaryen #rhaegar targaryen #asoiaf

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elderemorune · 11 months ago

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My Name is August

Before anyone worries, I'm not technically doxxing myself. It's a chosen name, and I wanted to examine it. For awhile, really, but I've been going through it and it took me awhile to figure out what I needed to say about it.

My given name is Christian. My mother, who had me at too young with a man who beat her for daring to carry me (who is not my father, that dubiously given title belongs to the bastard child of American royalty), named be after a terrible Robin Hood movie featuring Kevin Costner whose only redeeming feature is Alan Rickman threatening to cut hearts out with spoons. This name was chosen because she thought it was so cool how Morgan Freeman's character (whose name I cannot recall) referred to Robin as Christian.

Yeah.

I'm sure other people have naming stories that are just as stupid, but this is my blog and we're here to talk about me. Anyway, the choosing of my name rings as thoughtless to me. Just "That sounds cool". Being blunt, this is simply how my entire life has felt.

Proving that point, I was recently diagnosed with CPTSD. No, I have not told my folks, no matter how much I want to, because I know they'll make it all about them. Mom will wail about how it's her fault she was such a bad mom, and dad will stare angrily at me for a moment before recognizing that I'm right and then doing nothing to accept responsibility, let alone prevent future behaviour like it.

I was constantly abandoned. Left to my own devices because to quote my father directly "You were always fantastically independent."

I had to be. In so many goddamn ways, I raised myself. On TV, on video games, on movies and comics and of course, the Internet. As long as I wasn't causing trouble, you said. Unless of course my sister caused trouble but blamed me, and you grounded me despite my protestations of innocence. Often willfully, you later admitted to me. It was just fucking easier to ground me, rather than be a fucking parent and discipline your daughter. And you wonder why I hate her.

And mom, she isn't innocent in this either. See, I was raised on infidelity and harem anime, though both of them deny their charges. Dad saying "Well, that's an unfair characterization" of mom waking us up at 4:00 AM to pack our shit and leave because you were fucking a woman in Seattle? What else would you call that, father? And mom denying that she watched all that much only to buckle as I refer to several (Ai Yori Aoshi, Fruits Basket, Tenchi, etc.).

Beyond the harem anime, which is mostly a joke, she just didn't fucking leave him. She never once put my needs above hers. Desired the financial safety net. "Well, he could have buried me in legal fees" she said, "But I know he never would have done it." she says after some pressing.

My father was verbally abusive to everyone in the house. Physically abusive with only me, though my sister will insist he beat her despite even he himself admitting to only ever hitting me. When I didn't know a math problem's solution, it was a swift smack up the backside of my head. When I 'misbehaved' (didn't do what he wanted when he wanted) it was a smack. This kept on until I got big enough to hit him back. All it took was one punch to the gut to remind this obelisk of a person that he was indeed human, and so was I.

Mom knew about this, of course. She turned a blind eye to it until I hit him back. Then I was in trouble for not toeing the goddamn line. Grounded again for an amount of time that by then no longer mattered.

And let's not forget my fucking sister Amy! Oh boy, what a trainwreck! First off, I fucking hate my sister. My entire life, anything I had to work for, she was simply given because it was otherwise 'unfair' and my folks didn't want to listen to her bitch. She's even gone so far as to co-opt my trauma! We did a exactly one family therapy session, wherein she said, in front of the therapist, that she was scared of dad because he used to hit her. It was silent for a moment, then father coughed. "Um. No. I never hit you. I only ever hit your brother, because I was taught you don't hit girls."

The counselor then chimed in. "Amy, I mean this with kindness, but you and I have been working together for a long time. You've told me before that your dad never hit you. What are you trying to say here?"

Amy, incredible performer that she is, rose up, said "FUCK YOU" at the top of her lungs, and stormed out. A classic tactic from her teenage years, where she would do this, storm out of the house, often barefoot, screaming about how she hoped she starved to death in the woods and maybe then they'd understand how fucking awfully they treated her.

Frankly, I hate all of these people. The worst part is how they know about the ways in which their behaviour impacts me. They are all moving to Florida this month, with my folks moving Amy into their new home for "at most 30 days" (yeah right) and buying her a car.

Amy says the car's a gift, mom says the car has payments on it. I don't know who to believe, and at this point I don't care. I had to work for my fucking car. She didn't. It's the same shit on a brand new day.

Like with my goddamn house.

See, my wife and I got married on October 31st of 2020. It wasn't the wedding we wanted, but it was the one we needed. We got back from the honeymoon, and mom and dad are talking about helping us get a mortgage on a house. Well, Amy hears this, and of course, like the 27 year old woman she is, she pitches a fucking tantrum about how unfair it is that "They get a house and I'm stuck here".

Well, mom and dad can't go about being unfair to their kid, now can they? After all, it would be so unfair to give a married couple a normal married couple gift and not give that same gift to their seemingly single daughter.

So father had a bright idea. Start an LLC, buy a house, and rent it to us.

My wedding gift, reduced to an apartment, turned into a living nightmare, because anything else would have been unfair.

Let's expand on the living nightmare, shall we? Over the course of sharing a roof with my sister, she:

Told us if we got pregnant she'd kill herself. Mom asked us to stop trying while we live with her because of how triggering it would be for her.

2: Threatened to kill herself if we got another dog. Mom and dad asked us to consider how unfair it would be to her and her 'emotional support' dog that she hadn't trained.

3: Called my wife a fat bitch on multiple occasions, including in front of my mom, and then claimed amnesia. "I don't remember calling her that, I never said that. You're taking what I said out of context." She still won't apologize, even when confronted with a recording of her doing it.

4: When she moved her boyfriend in (without asking us, mind, she lied and told us he'd only be staying a few days), he asked for a space in their area. When we were asked to mediate, she said "Why should I have to give up space in my house?" and when reminded it wasn't her house, she stormed out after shouting fuck you at the top of her lungs, barefoot, marching down a very dangerous street in the middle of the night.

5: Did the same stunt again when we got back from apartment hunting in Seattle because my wife dared to tell her to shut up because we'd just got back in the door.

There's just so goddamn much. All of it awful.

So I'm fucking reclaiming me from this.

My name is motherfucking August Jones, and even though they couldn't do it, I fucking love me. I love who I could be, and even who I was, trapped in their cycle of abuse though I may have been. Shit, I still am, but we're working on that.

Mom, dad, if you find this blog entry somehow, and I hope you don't, don't fucking come to me about how this shit's exaggerated or I'm not remembering it right, I am. The axe forgets, you fucking morons, but the tree remembers.

Amy, if you find this, I hope your husband fucking leaves you, takes his kids, and abandons you in Florida. He may be a doormat, but he deserves better than a slathering narcissist maggot like you.

#sad enby hours #childhood trauma #emotions #blog #journal

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bigskydreaming · 4 years ago

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I’m a big believer that Dick’s independence and self-reliance isn’t in any way rooted in him just being stubborn, prideful or self-destructive. I view it as being in his eyes a necessity….because on a deep, fundamental level….Dick doesn’t trust anything to be permanent.

I’ll always go back to the fact that his character archetype isn’t that of the everyman, because he was of lower class origins compared to Bruce’s extreme upper class background.....but rather that given that Dick Grayson was allegedly exceptional from his debut, a child prodigy capable of feats of acrobatics few in the world could match....he could never actually be classified as an everyman. Rather, his core archetype is that of the fish out of water. The individual taken from the comforts of his original pond and thrust into a limelight of an entirely different nature from the one he grew up in, with the two not at all being interchangeable, and necessitating he change and adapt in dramatic and often unanticipated ways just to keep his footing in his new environs.

Its not incidental that his initial tragedy wasn’t JUST the loss of his parents, but rather the loss of his old routines, extended family, environment, way of life, expectations for the way his future would play out....it ALL vanished on the same night, never to return again. The loss of his parents was tragedy enough all on its own, but its really only one part of what Dick lost that night. He lost his entire footing. His frames of reference. Everything his life had previously prepared him for and everything he could have used as a familiar comfort or source of stability to lean on, if it had been ‘just’ his parents that he lost.

And I fundamentally don’t believe you ever get over THAT loss, no matter what peace you make with the loss of your loved ones or specific elements of that. Once you’ve experienced a shake-up of that size, once you have a bone-deep, visceral awareness of how completely your life can change in the blink of an eye, how you can effectively be set back to zero as though nothing you’ve previously accomplished matters (remember, he went from a kid whose name drew crowds on its OWN merits, based on what HE was capable of due to his own work and skills, the youngest of the Flying Graysons, capable of an acrobatic feat barely anyone else in the world could master......to being a kid who was only ever identified as in the context of Bruce Wayne having taken him in, as though his existence and worth were defined by someone else’s act of compassion rather than based on anything he’d ever done on his own, when the fact of the matter is even by age eight, he’d already accomplished a LOT)....

Like, the point is, you can’t go through a shake-up like that and ever fully FORGET how complete and total a change it was, how big a rewrite of your entire life story.

That’s a trauma all its own, one that goes largely unacknowledged, and one that I don’t think Bruce and Alfred or anyone else fully realized was even there TO need addressing in the first place. So of course how could they ever fully address it, without realizing a need?

And I think Dick’s constant moves and self-reliance are actually born of that primal awareness that there are no guarantees, that nothing is truly permanent, that anything can be taken away in an instant.

He’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to be taken away again - as people have pointed out in other posts, Dick can never seem to have nice things. Even the apartment building he lived in while in Bludhaven….that wasn’t some height of luxury by ANY stretch of the imagination…was lost to him, along with all the friends and neighbors and community he’d built among them, something evidenced by how highly they all spoke of him, even to a total stranger. And that’s not even getting into how even the CITY he sought to establish himself as a guardian over, like, he lost the city itself. The CITY!

Dick, I believe, insists on holding down 9-5 jobs and paying his own way and only touching money that comes from Bruce originally, when like…he has no other option or its to help someone else….just like he’s resistant to ever fully putting down roots, at least none so deep that he can’t uproot himself and quickly relocate without ripping off a piece of himself and leaving it still buried in the ground behind him.

Because deep down, he’s always bracing for the next seismic event that’ll rip everything away from him, and he wants to be prepared. He WANTS to make sure he never takes anything for granted. That if he loses it all - hell, if he and Bruce fight again and Bruce decides once and for all to take it all away from Dick, cut their ties, something that would very much be a deep-rooted insecurity for a kid with as massive of abandonment issues as Dick must have given his childhood and a number of events after that…

Dick I think needs to trust that he’ll be capable of surviving, of standing on his own two feet, if the worst should ever happen again and he’s left on his own again. His self-reliance and obsessive need for independence aren’t a REJECTION of anyone else or anything Bruce or others have ever done for him.

They’re simply the defense mechanisms of a boy who was once upon a time torn away from everything he knew and in certain origins was then on top of that plunged into hellish circumstances before finding a refuge with Bruce….

And the man that boy grew up to be, who is determined to never be caught in a situation like that again, where his very survival might otherwise require the kindness of a stranger….with Dick knowing better than to count on lightning striking twice there, and him getting lucky a second time.

So in a lot of ways, my core perception of Dick having spent more time growing up in the luxury of Wayne Manor than any of the other kids is that its largely irrelevant to who he grew up to be. Because he was still more than old enough by the time he arrived that he had formative experiences all his own that no amount of time was sufficient to overwrite and exchange for new ones.

His experiences are so extreme in terms of the loss of all forms of stability, that the SHAPE that stability takes in the periods where his life IS stable, is largely unimportant. Because its the absence of stability that’s the defining recurrence in his life. Even the stability offered by his childhood in Wayne Manor eventually gave way to canon where he left the Manor before he was even eighteen, as well as canon where no matter how it was ultimately reversed, he was for a time affected by having the ability to call the Manor his home STRIPPED AWAY FROM HIM. Thus even when Bruce did ultimately welcome him back, there still retained an awareness that even the fact that this had happened in the first place was a reminder that even THIS was something Dick could lose, that no matter how stable his childhood there had been at times, it couldn’t in and of itself be COUNTED as a source of stability due to the simple fact that his ability to call it his home HADN’T turned out to be an irrevocable constant.

And so this is another of those areas where I think its fundamentally an oversight to have members of the family commenting on Dick’s self-reliance or tendencies to relocate himself, let alone in any kind of critical capacity......

If there’s not going to be an acknowledgment within the family or by the people raising these criticisms like, what kind of a role the family themselves have played in Dick feeling a NEED to have these tendencies in the first place.

If someone doesn’t trust in any place he lives in to ever truly be a constant in his life, truly permanent, that anything can be taken away in the right circumstances....and you yourself have done something that has made him feel or given him reason TO leave a place he’s found stability in at some point in the past....you kiiiiiinda forsake your right to be critical of his inability to see any place as permanent or constant, y’know?

Like, insert Miranda Whatshername gif or Meryl Streep peering down her glasses and going oh I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

So I’d argue that Dick’s insistence on simulating the average person’s reality of livelihood, even when he has other means and funds available to him….just as his insistence on being as solely responsible for the well-being of the place or people he sees as his responsibilities, being single-minded about relying only on himself for tasks that he sees as ultimately having nothing to do with someone other than himself, etc....

All that is in my opinion BECAUSE he’s so firmly attached to the reality that anything and everything can be taken away, at ANY given moment. That he can be reduced to having nothing and no one he can depend on BEYOND just his own innate skills and experiences, the only things he trusts to be truly unable to be stripped from him by others.

If you ask me, one of the core aspects of Dick’s characterization throughout his adulthood in canon is SPECIFICALLY his fear that everything he cares about, or trusts, or relies on…can be taken away from him or lost.

And his determination to make sure that he’ll be able to survive even if that should ever happen again.

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ayuuria · 4 years ago

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Yashahime Translation: Prince Animage May 2021 Issue (Part 2)

Please do not repost this translation without my consent! This includes screenshots of any type and amount. If you wish to share this translation, simply link to this post.

For more information regarding the use of my translations, click here.

Due to the amount of content in the magazine, I have decided to the split the translation into three parts:

Part 1: Elder Son’s Resolve! Interview with Director Satou Teruo

Part 2: We Won’t Give Up On the Future! Father-Daughter Round-Table Talk with Narita Ken, Matsumoto Sara, and Komatsu Mikako

Part 3: The Strength to Overcome Destiny. Interview with Director Satou Teruo

Intertwining Fates

The curtains on the Yashahimes’ story briefly closed with the shocking scene of “Setsuna’s death”. With Towa and the others at its center, the complexly intertwined fates of various people continue into the second chapter (season).

The fire that tore Towa and Setsuna apart, the Dream Butterfly that stole Setsuna’s slumber, the sleeping Rin, and the Rainbow Pearls that possess demonic power; all these things that became key to the story were connected to Kirinmaru’s elder sister, Zero.

Zero previously heard the Shikon Jewel’s prophecy: “An existence that is neither demon nor human and can cross through time will destroy Kirinmaru.” Thinking that it refers to Towa, Setsuna, Moroha, and Inuyasha, Zero tried to eliminate them in order to protect her younger brother. However, that was just an ostensible reason. Behind her actions lurked a feeling of jealousy towards the half-demons and quarter-demon that carried the Dog General’s blood. It seems her unrealized love for the Dog General was the motivation behind her twisted emotions and actions.

Zero’s behavior rouses Kirinmaru’s anger and she disappears from his sight. However, the story does not end with just this issue being settled. As part of the “Rite of Courage and Cowardice”, Towa and the others end up having to fight Kirinmaru and unbelievably, Setsuna loses her life during the battle.

There is a heap of other issues such as Rin who still continues to sleep even now and the Grim Comet that has appeared in the modern era. It is now an anxious wait for the broadcasting to see how future mysteries will be unraveled in the second chapter (season).

Character Bios

Zero Kirinmaru’s elder sister. She was in love with the Dog General. Being that she was the one who created the Rainbow Pearls, she went to go look for the scattered pearls after her breakdown with Kirinmaru.

Kirinmaru The beast king of the eastern lands. Irritated by his elder sister, Zero’s, misconduct towards Sesshōmaru, they part ways as brother and sister as a result. He battles the three (Towa, Setsuna, Moroha) and kills Setsuna.

Sesshōmaru The son of the beast king who once stood on the same level as Kirinmaru, the Dog General, and Towa and Setsuna’s father. It seems he is searching for a child named Akuru but the reason why is unknown.

Higurashi Towa She treasures her younger twin sister, Setsuna, above all else. As she grieves over Setsuna’s death, she receives a broken Tenseiga from her father, Sesshōmaru… …?

Setsuna A half-demon whose sleep and memories were stolen by the Dream Butterfly. She loses her life while battling Kirinmaru but just before drawing her last breath, she calls Towa “Towa-neechan”.

Moroha Towa and Setsuna’s cousin. Despite being enraged by Setsuna’s death, when she turned into Beniyasha, she was able to maintain her (sound) mind and not get overwhelmed by the rampage of her demonic blood.

The Offense and Defense Concerning Half-Demons

Zero has attempted to eliminate the half-demons that carry the Dog General’s blood by doing things such as spurring Kirinmaru to kill Inuyasha or burning the forest that Towa and Setsuna were hiding in. Sesshōmaru was always by her side. Though he does not say much, Sesshōmaru may have seen through Zero’s intentions early and acted one step ahead.

Rin and Zero’s Connection

Zero can connect to others via “fate” and control them as she pleases. Those whose fates are connected to Zero will die alongside her should she lose her life. It seems Zero herself connected her fate to Rin and used that to keep Sesshōmaru in check. The details on how Rin and Zero’s fates were intertwined is of interest.

That Which Sesshōmaru Searches For

Sesshōmaru is someone who never appeared on the story’s center stage for long. During that time, he was searching for a child named Akuru. It seems that the pinwheel Akuru holds is somehow connected to the giant “Windmill of Time”. After Akuru appeared before Sesshōmaru, the Windmill of Time that had not moved for so long moved again but what does that mean… …?

Setsuna’s Seal

Zero wants Kirinmaru to exterminate Towa and the others but Kirinmaru, preferring to fight fair and square, realizes the difference in strength between him and the girls and decides to hold off battling them until they have grown (in strength). It is there that Zero forcefully releases the seal placed on Setsuna’s demon blood so that Kirinmaru will fight Towa and the others seriously.

A Broken Tenseiga

The Tenseiga that Sesshōmaru carries is a sword of healing that was created from the fang of the Dog General and is known as “the sword that saves the lives of the weak”. Sesshōmaru resurrects the dead Zero with Tenseiga but that enrages Zero and she breaks the blade. Will the broken Tenseiga be able to revive Setsuna who has lost her life?

Famous Quote Pick Up!

The role of Sesshōmaru, Narita Ken “Anymore will sadden Rin”

“Personally, the monologue in episode 24 “Anymore will sadden Rin…” struck me. Even though Sesshōmaru doesn’t show kindness, periodically he will suddenly say something like this. On top of that, he doesn’t even put a lot of emotion into it and it just comes out nonchalantly. I think that‘s what’s good about him.” (Narita)

The role of Higurashi Towa, Matsumoto Sara “We’re not alone now.”

“(the line) At the end of episode 16 “We’re not alone now.” I felt was just like Towa. She says that to Moroha but of course Setsuna is among those she’s thinking of. Towa came to the feudal era for Setsuna’s sake she has always held the feeling of “It’s okay because Setsuna is here” at her core. The strength of her unwaveringness really shows when the three of them are backed into a corner.” (Matsumoto)

The role of Setsuna, Komatsu Mikako “You can always change the way you live”

“The phrase in episode 16 “You can always change the way you live” left an impression on me. Even though Setsuna is a half-demon, she’s quite farsighted (philosophically) for a 14-year-old. I think her environment up until now and the blood that flows within her makes her that way. Having passed episode 20 which depicted Setsuna’s past, I once again feel how powerful this phrase is.” (Komatsu)

We Won’t Give Up on the Future! Father-Daughter Cast Round Table Discussion

Role of Higurashi Towa: Matsumoto Sara Role of Setsuna: Komatsu Mikako Role of Sesshōmaru: Narita Ken

Demanding “A Sense of Smell” From Playing Sesshōmaru

— Since this is after the recording of episode 23 today (the day of the interview), thank you all for your hard work!

Matsumoto: Thank you! You see, today is actually the first time I recorded with Narita-san for “Hanyō no Yashahime”. It’s like “we finally meet” kind of feeling and I’m very happy!

Narita: Finally, it was our first father-daughter meeting! I look forward to doing this interview together.

Komatsu: Likewise, I look forward to working with you as well. Narita-san went straight into recording episode 24 (the final episode) right after recording episode 23. The last episode is next week for us, but we read the script and it was completely shocking… …!

— The final episode had an ending that really made you wonder about the future. Having traversed through the story up to this point, what is everyone’s state of mind right now?

Matsumoto: After episode 20, going into the final stage, the vigor of the story increased. For viewers, I think their theories up to now were all overturned at one point. We also started recording not knowing what was going to happen in the future, so we progressed through recording while talking about “What’s going to happen next?” every time. It was a continuation of surprises. Just when I thought we finally got to interact with our father in episode 23, this time, something like that happens to Setsuna… … I was shocked like “To think they would end it like this!” and I immediately started thinking about how the second chapter (season) would connect from here. My current thought is that as I look forward to the second chapter (season), I want to rewatch season 1 one more time before the broadcasting (for season 2) begins.

Komatsu: Back when I didn’t know what was going to happen, when I asked the staff “How is season 1 going to end and what’s going to happen in season 2?”, they told me “Most of the questions that the viewers have will be answered in season 1. Around the last episode of season 1, you might be able to record with everyone in the Higurashi family again.” That’s why in my (mind), I had my hopes up like “I wonder if in the final episode, the whole Kirinmaru situation and Rin’s sleep would all be resolved and Setsuna and the others go to the modern era again, and in season 2 the three Yashahimes would start a happy school life?”

Everyone: (laughs)

Komatsu: And then it went in a completely different direction! Just when I thought the story was connecting in a line, there’s suddenly more questions. There’s still many unanswered mysteries and in the second chapter (season), what will happen (in regards to the those mysteries) … while having that anticipation, as Setsuna, I want her to be revived as soon as possible. In the Inuyasha world, you get pushed down many times, no matter what, and those intense developments where you fight as you climb back up are a distinct characteristic. Hence, I look forward to those intense developments in the second chapter (season)!

Narita: I don’t like calculating future developments and then think “I’ll do this part like this” so I go into the recordings without knowing the upcoming story or the movement of the characters as much as possible. Besides, it feels more fun to go into it without knowing the story. As such, all I use is my sense of smell. In this work, it feels like I’m using my sense of smell 1,000 times more than usual. That’s just how much concentration is needed, and I feel that this work is very stimulating in more ways than one.

�� It seems that Sesshōmaru himself moves knowing what Kirinmaru and Zero are after but Narita-san, you were acting without knowing the upcoming development I see.

Narita: That’s right. Sound director Nagura Yasushi-san asked me “Would you like me to give you something that explains how things will turn out?” but I purposely declined. If I found out, it felt as though unnecessary emotions would come out of my voice. When I act, I aim for the middle between “Lines written in the script as is” and “my own considerations” like “It probably goes like this right?”.

Komatsu: Even though I think Sesshōmaru probably knows everything, his lines have various components mixed into them, so I always get a sense of “I wonder?”. That’s why as a fan, I love speculating that marginal aspect.

Matsumoto: I’m the same way. (His lines) always leave room for pondering.

Komatsu: He doesn’t speak much to begin with, but I think it’s just like father to not say everything within those few words. Watching Narita-san record in person today, I was moved by how Sesshōmaru’s nuances were expressed with such finesse.

Narita: As expected, you two are “Inuyasha” fans (laughs). But it really is difficult. He won’t say things with words after all. Although, he would just become a boring man if he said everything. I think he himself knows everything, but suppresses giving out the answer and just highlights it a little bit… that kind of moderation is important. I’m always conscious of this when I act but it’s tough after all. I only have a few lines so I have this feeling of “If I mess these words up, when is the next time (I speak)?”. That’s why I act with this feeling of “I’m going to put everything into these words” every time.

— Narita-san, how did you feel when you first heard about the “Hanyō no Yashahime” project?

Narita: I never thought they would revive “Inuyasha” in this form. If they were going to do it, I thought naturally Inuyasha would be the center of the story. The setting of Sesshōmaru’s children being the main characters never crossed my mind. I thought something like that would be impossible and I wondered about a lot of things like “Then who’s the mother?”. Rin (being the mother) was unexpected.

— It was unexpected?

Narita: I didn’t think he would ever touch upon that. I wanted to shake Sesshōmaru’s shoulders like “This isn’t like you~!” (laughs).

Komatsu: Love sprouted!

Narita: How do I put it, love is something far off to Sesshōmaru… I even think he had kids because he probably had some kind of objective.

— In other words, not because he wanted to create a family?

Narita: That might be true for Inuyasha, but for Sesshōmaru, I think there was an experimental aspect to it like “What sort of chemical reaction would happen in my heart if I had kids”. After all, I don’t think it’s necessary for him to be a dad.

Komatsu: Sesshōmaru certainly does seem like he would have that kind of desire to “want to know”.

— Then how did you feel when you saw the girls?

Narita: “Ah, so this is what they’re like” is what I thought. I thought they were brave, healthy looking kids. When color was added to the characters, I felt there were aspects similar to Sesshōmaru. But you know, the shock that he had daughters really is big. It was like “Will the Sesshōmaru up until now fall apart?” “I don’t want him to start ogling”. It was a little complicated there. It's just that it’s true that in the story of “Inuyasha”, he gradually showed his affection for Rin. In that case, something close to that may also bud for his daughters and that too may become a new appeal for him.

Reenacting Sesshōmaru’s Solitude for the Final Recording

— It’s been 20 years since the time of “Inuyasha” but Narita-san, do you remember the time you met Sesshōmaru?

Narita: I did not get the role of Sesshōmaru through auditioning. It seems there were actual auditions, but they couldn’t come to a decision, so they had Takahashi Rumiko-sensei, the author of the original work, listen to the voice samples of various candidates. It was there that Rumiko-sensei picked me is how the story goes. Until then, I did not have many appearances in anime works, so I think there are many young people who recognize me for my role as Sesshōmaru. I also felt that things changed after I played Sesshōmaru. That’s why to me, his existence is very big.

— His looks are androgynous but his voice is deep, so in the beginning, there may have been people who felt an element of surprise from that.

Narita: When I first saw his character appearance, I remember thinking he was woman dressed in a furisode. That’s why during the first test, I used a higher pitched voice. Like the pretty boy voice so to speak. Then, the sound director at the time, Tsuruoka Yōta-san told me “Please make it deeper”. I lowered my voice while thinking “What?” yet he still said “Deeper” … That’s why it was very hard in the beginning. It was to the point that I thought “I can’t keep going like this!”. That’s why I raised my voice just a little bit at time so that it wasn’t noticeable. Otherwise, I felt that I couldn’t express (things). When I did that, it gradually became easier.

Matsumoto: So that’s how it was.

Narita: Although, there was a trigger behind that. At one point, I received a letter from someone who was a fan of the work and it seemed that the Sesshōmaru that person imagined was a certain voice actor who was very popular at the time. When I read that, I thought “Whaaat!” (laughs). But if that’s the case, I thought “It’s fine if I do this more freely” and my shoulders relaxed instantly, and I felt better.

— As in acting in a way that only you can?

Narita: Yes, that’s why I’m grateful for that letter. It’s thanks to that that I was able to reach a turning point after all.

Komatsu: Meaning you broke through that “Sesshōmaru has to be like this” kind of (mentality). When I first heard Sesshōmaru’s voice in the animation, I was able to grasp that “This is what Sesshōmaru’s scariness was”. To begin with, his beauty and contrasting calmness pierced through me and I had this scary image of him from when I read the manga. However, the moment that became a voice, I really felt that it made it convincing. That’s why from the start in my mind, I couldn’t imagine anyone else for Sesshōmaru other than Narita-san. It’s the complete opposite of Inuyasha’s high tone and he’s calm. He felt like a true greater demon. His rank is much higher than Inuyasha’s and I could feel that sense of him being beyond anyone’s power.

Narita: Afterall, his father (the Dog General) was Ōtsuka Akio-san and his mother is Sakakibara Yoshiko-san. The parents were amazing, weren’t they?

Matsumoto: For sure, the whole family is strong… …!

Narita: But Sesshōmaru’s strength is that he doesn’t flinch even before such parents. Like he has his own world. I thought I really should (act) that part without wavering.

— How did it feel playing Sesshōmaru again for the first time in a while in “Hanyō no Yashahime”?

Narita: It’s been 20 years since “Inuyasha” and 10 years since “Inuyasha the Final Act” so that amount of time is pretty hefty. I thought I could do it instantly but when I tried, it felt off. I was bewildered like “I did this originally so why?”. I started acting while doing my utmost to recall the feelings from back then, but it didn’t go well immediately and even I was surprised. The stronger the emotional attachment, the closer to myself I got and I thought “This is a human”. I kept comparing and adjusting many times like “Gotta change it back, gotta change it back”.

— So there’s a certain feeling when playing a demon.

Narita: That’s when I thought I probably focused a lot more back during “Inuyasha”. The onsite studio for “Inuyasha” had a peaceful atmosphere and I felt that I couldn’t let myself get caught up in the atmosphere. Stubbornly, I strongly made myself think “I am solitary”. Until I stood in front of the microphone, I would create Sesshōmaru inside myself and carry on as such until the end. That may have been what I was missing. That’s why at the recording of the final episode today, I purposely told the girls “I want you out”.

— In other words?

Narita: Just as I said earlier, I recorded episode 23 with the girls but I recorded the final episode alone. During that time, the girls waited for me (until the interview started) and they could’ve stayed in the booth but I purposely wanted to do it alone. It probably wouldn’t have changed much whether there was someone inside or not but how to put it, I wanted to get closer to the me back then, even just a little.

— I see.

Matsumoto: There’s certainly emphasis on recording with a small number of people right now, so it might be a difficult environment to face your role in. It’s pretty much you get to the studio, immediately voice the scenes you appear in, and then immediately go home when you’re done. Even as a newbie, I can feel it throwing off my rhythm somehow.

— So even bout scenes get (cut up) into small pieces then.

Matsumoto: I think if we had recorded with everyone together from the top, we could’ve created time for each of us to focus on our roles while feeling the flow of the story. I think there’s definitely something that can be built with everyone onsite. However, there’s difficulty from not having time to build that.

Komatsu: When you can feel the flow of the whole thing onsite, the feeling changes a little from when you’re reading the script at home. There are times where you realize things for the first time. But right now, we’re only doing our corresponding scenes, so things come up that we just can’t grasp. There is merit in just doing your turn in a short time, but it feels completely different from doing it with everyone.

— So there’s a challenge that comes from the Corona crisis.

Komatsu: The staff have shown consideration for us by making it possible for us to interact with each other as much as possible, so I’m grateful. While taking in consideration counter measures against spreading the virus, they adjusted it so that those voicing scenes with character conversations can record in the same booth together. Thanks to that, the cast of the three Yashahime were basically able to record together.

Narita: They were limiting it to around 3, 4 people at most. I recorded with Kirinmaru (Yoshimasa Hosoya-san) and Zero (Sakamoto Maaya-san) many times. Then there was Jaken-chan (Chō-san). Jaken was the same old Jaken and he made me think that I had to do my best without losing. I didn’t (record) together with my younger brother (Inuyasha played by Yamaguchi Kappei-san). Not that I want to meet him or anything.

Matsumoto: It’s Lord Sesshōmaru! (laughs)

Komatsu: Thank you! (laughs)

Narita: (laughs) Also, I was able to record together with Rin (Noto Mamiko-san) in episode 1. It felt as though Noto-san had matured a little bit. Her growth as a woman came through a little in her acting, which I thought was wonderful.

Matsumoto: Us daughters haven’t recorded with Noto-san but I just happened to be able to watch the recording for episode 15, so that’s when I greeted her. When I told her “I’m your daughter; thank you for giving birth to me” Noto-san was like “Oh my god~! My daughter~!”. But we had to maintain social distancing so we were both like “I can’t hug youuuu~!” (laughs).

Komatsu: I’m so jealous. I can picture that situation (laughs)

Concern about Setsuna’s life and Towa and Riku’s relationship

— In regard to Rin, it was revealed in episode 23 and 24 that her “fate” is connected to Zero. Matsumoto-san and Komatsu-san, as daughters, what do you think?

Komatsu: I thought “what a cruel fate”. While the feeling of wanting to hurry and meet mother face to face grows stronger, currently the only way to prolong Rin’s life is to keep her asleep, and it’s there that Setsuna’s Dream Butterfly is involved. All that is linked to Zero.

Matsumoto: It’s a negative chain where in order to get Setsuna’s sleep back, you have to kill Zero but doing so would also kill Rin. Towa wants Setsuna to be able to sleep but she still doesn’t know about that connection. She tried to sever that in the final episode, but the result was…

Komatsu: Setsuna, who was never able to sleep, was finally able to sleep via death. It was such an ironic plot twist… …!

Matsumoto: Seriously, I thought “You’d write this kind of script!?”! (laughs) In the opening for cour 2, there’s a scene where Rin catches a falling Setsuna but I want them to hurry and do this scene in the main story.

Narita: Setsuna will be in season 2, right? We won’t be able to sleep in Setsuna’s place because we’re so curious.

Komatsu: I have faith that she’ll appear… … For that reason, I look forward to Towa’s efforts.

Matsumoto: I’ll do my best! At the end of the final episode, Sesshōmaru takes out a broken Tenseiga and says “Shall you try, Towa…”. That was the first time father said my name. Earlier, I watched Narita-san record from outside the booth and that was truly unforgettable. Seriously, I think it was a scene that entrusted a lot of things (to Towa) so I want to carve that voice into my heart and take on the recording for the final episode.

— In regard to Towa, her relationship with Riku is also of interest.

Matsumoto: You’re right. The scene where she told Riku “I like you!” really surprised me!

Komatsu: Love made up a large portion within the story of “Inuyasha” but “Hanyō no Yashahime” doesn’t have a love component to that level. It was a scene where you saw a small sign of that.

Matsumoto: For the line “I like you”, Nagura-san directed me before the recording “It is absolutely not fawning. Please don’t go in the LOVE (romantic) direction.” I think it was a refreshing emotion and that she liked Riku as a person type feeling. I was also told “It’s okay to show happiness when Towa sees Riku like ‘Oh it’s Riku’”. Even though she doesn’t think it’s (romantic) love, it seems she’s always had this perception of “Riku’s not a bad person” and I think what burst out from that was “I like you”. The fact that Riku hugged her was something that lingered with her into the next episode, and it was very memorable.

Narita: Riku… … he can’t be overlooked in many ways (laughs). This won’t do, I can’t let him live. I guess I should cut him down in a single stroke!

Matsumoto: Fatheeeeer!! (laughs)

Komatsu: Like “I won’t forgive anyone who make a move on my daughter” (laughs)

— Riku’s wellbeing will be something to pay attention to in season 2 (laughs). Lastly please give a message to our readers who are looking forward to the second chapter (season).

Komatsu: First off, there’s what’s going to happen to Setsuna. I’m sure Towa, who’s been entrusted with things, will revive her in the second chapter (season)… … Personally, I want to see father-daughter interaction and a reunion scene with mother. I also haven’t given up on my dream of an exciting modern era school life! Just once is fine but I want an episode where everyone goes to the modern era, wears a school uniform, and takes Kirin-sensei’s class. Having it end as “it was all just a dream” is fine too (laughs). I believe there are issues as well like Inuyasha and Kagome being trapped in the black pearl, so I hope everything is included in the second chapter (season)!

Narita: Indeed, when I think about what all is going to happen, I can’t help but be curious. Coming to episode 23, I recorded with the girls for the first time but how are things going to be between (Sesshōmaru) and the girls going forward? I’m also curious about the relationships with Inuyasha and Kirinmaru. I’m just like the viewers in that I want to enjoy each episode one at a time. I’m truly happy to have encountered this work. I would be happy if everyone continued supporting us.

Matsumoto: In terms of hopes, I want Setsuna to be revived immediately at the beginning of the second chapter (season)… … Even if that doesn’t happen, I want Setsuna to be revived as soon as possible. I think there will be new encounters getting there. At the end of season 1, there was a character named Akuru that appeared along with the keyword “Windmill of Time”. I’m excited to see how those will connect into the second chapter (season). Another thing I’m curious about is the promise that was made to Mei, “We’ll come back for sure”.

Komatsu: Oh yeah

Matsumoto: I do feel that I want to see a scene where Towa says “I’m home” to the Higurashi family… … but right now I don’t want to go back to the modern era! Need to revive Setsuna and clean up everything before that! Riku, Zero, and Kirinmaru might show some new movement in the second chapter (season). Please look forward to it without missing the details!

Q. Who did you think was Towa and Setsuna’s mother?

Narita: I thought it was Jaken (laughs).

Matsumoto: The Mama Jaken theory! (laughs)

Komatsu: Even among the fans, there was the Mama Jaken theory in the beginning (laughs).

Narita: Well, Jaken stays close to Sesshōmaru the most and knows him best. If love was going to sprout, it would’ve been from Jaken. Plus, he’s a full demon.

Matsumoto: Master Jaken really looks at Lord Sesshōmaru after all.

Komatsu: In actuality, Master Jaken was both the educator and caretaker, so his position was like a wet nurse.

Narita: He might’ve been breast feeding them periodically. Demons seem like they can do anything (laughs).

Komatsu: I think Master Jaken guessed what Lord Sesshōmaru was feeling and thought “What is my role…”.

Narita: He probably can’t be by Sesshōmaru’s side if he doesn’t have that kind of anticipation (laughs)

#Yashahime #hanyou no yashahime #yashahime: princess half demon #translation

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karolinarodrigueswrites · 4 years ago

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Drabble: 13/? || Wip: Chosen & Damned

Scenario: a teenage girl escapes from her abusive family to a shelter, the supernatural kind that might or not have too many important figures in its midst. Bonus points if you know the characters in here were the protagonists of this wip’s previous incarnation.

Warning: implied abuse and briefly implied/mentioned self harm. I don’t dwell on these things, but they are there.

-----------------------------

Her whole life, Jenn prayed someone would come and take her away — it is on the impulse of emotional exhaustion that she realizes she could simply leave instead.

Dropping the shards of broken dishes she spent the last minutes collecting, her parents’ screams keep going as she walks away from the kitchen to a front door that should have been closed.

She takes a few steps outside and stops — the sky is full of heavy dark clouds, frequent lightning and thunder creating a tense atmosphere, but the rain itself is as light as a gentle caress.

The sound of someone inside the house reminds her there will be consequences if she is brought back in, though no worry is needed given the door slams itself on her brother’s face.

He shouts her name along with profanities, hitting the door that refuses to budge from hinges that saw better days another time.

She considers the strange storm again, listening intently to the thunders and counting the intervals between them and lightning: the lightning seems to follow the thunder, as opposed to the natural order.

Narciso and Cassandra might be around town, even if Jenn doesn’t know what the mermaids would be doing so far from any significant body of water.

Her brother is still struggling with the door, his shouts accompanied by her parents’ voices, as she looks from one side to another, and runs for the left.

The town seems empty — if others noticed the oddity of the rain, it would be unwise to wander around with the chosen nearby, but that’s exactly what Jenn spends at least half of the next hour doing.

If humans made themselves scarce, reapers hung around the top of every other building, their black eyes watching her so intently she has to wonder if they are waiting to collect her soul.

Around the third right turn, and the seventh left turn, the streets become odd; the houses are too new, too perfectly intact for the usual financial situation of her hometown, and with all their doors open wide?

Someone approaches her from behind, tilting their umbrella so it also shields her.

A Chinese woman smiles at Jenn. “Were you waiting long? It took a while to find you.”

Her speech is heavily accented, in a way that indicates she isn’t actually speaking English, Jenn is hearing so.

“I…” Jenn looks around. “I don’t know.”

The woman tilts her head to the side. “Come with me?”

Their walk seems to lose itself in an abnormal passage of time.

“We knew you were coming this morning when Zhihui found a new bedroom in our home.”

“… Zhihui?”

“Our shelter. He looks scary, but you don’t have to worry — he cares well for us. The other kids are excited to see who is coming, and I have already warned them to give you space tonight.”

“Ah… I wouldn’t mind? I do like kids…”

The woman stops at an intersection, a startling amount of knowing in her eyes as she looks Jenn up and down. “The numbness won’t last that much longer. Even without your injuries, you will be safe, safe to feel everything you had to hold back, and the pain will demand itself to be processed sooner rather than later.”

They return to walking, though Jenn can’t perceive their progress.

“The kids know this,” the woman continues to explain. “We adults know this. Our minds become both clearer and hazy, our decisions turn bolder and impulsive, and with this, we leave it all behind for something we can’t yet begin to comprehend. It’s the madness to lose ourselves for the sake of finding a future we do want.”

They stop upon a house like all the others, but noise comes from inside of various people talking, laughing, some kids shouting.

Past the door, they are greeted by a sizable entrance where dozens of people can switch their shoes for in-house slippers.

The woman laughs when Jenn places one foot outside, looking back and forth from inside to outside to make sense of how the exterior building does not correspond to the size of its interior.

“Ming!” A white boy with brown scales on his arms, and snake eyes, shouts as he runs towards them from the hallway ahead.

“Dean,” Ming sighs, “what did we tell you about running inside the house?”

“… To not do it when you’re around?”

Ming’s stoic expression emanates a lighthearted impatience.

“But I won’t get hurt!”

“If you want to run so badly, go grab the bag of spare clothes Raphael prepared, and meet us in the… West bathroom.”

As Ming guides Jenn through the house, other kids pop up, both the humans and those with reptile-like features, who put little effort into their sneaking around as they try to see Jenn, waving or smiling at her upon being caught.

Some teens and adults that look worse for the wear only nod towards Jenn before she is introduced to the other main names of this shelter: Zhihui, an indeed intimidating Chinese man whose appearance makes Jenn think he could beat both her dad and her brother in a fight, and Raphael, a black man watching some kids argue over what song he will play on the piano later.

In the west bathroom, Ming offers to help her with her injuries.

Jenn can finally clearly feel the unnatural numbness holding back her emotions in the way she doesn’t manage to react to the bruises, gifts of her family, and the cuts, fruit of her own desperation, covering the body in her reflection.

A mental countdown starts after the bath, minutes ticking by during dinner, and reaching their end once she is in bed, in the softest sheets and blanket she ever could call her own.

Her tears are only interrupted by someone softly knocking at her door, a head peeking inside that hadn’t been present at the dinner table.

Ming called her Malika, Dean said she was their oldest sister, and a jaded human commented “that’s one way to refer to Death”.

Her skin is dark like Raphael’s, in a deeper and colder tone, with her facial features being a balanced combination of his and Ming’s and Zhihui’s appearances.

She raises both her hands, hesitating before signing, the words manifesting themselves in Jenn’s mind without sound, only a strange version of reading.

“Do you want company? Not talking, just company. Things can hurt less with a friend.”

It was quite strange for Jenn to consider she might become a friend of Death’s teenage human incarnation, but there was a pull of serenity around Malika that made Jenn’s answer a nod.

Was it cathartic because she could feel her pain, mourn all she lost of herself in peace, or because Death held her hand and wiped her tears away in a strange version of all the comfort Jenn attributed to the concept of ceasing to exist?

In the morning, she wakes up to her and Malika still holding hands.

It feels easier for Jenn to breathe, to be, and Malika is startled into wakefulness as Jenn returns to crying, this time in relief of all that could come next, to stop existing and start living.

#writeblr #prompt fill #drabbles #kr writes #cdwip

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kiraofthewind · 4 years ago

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The 88 sapienti species of the Pentagonal Dominion

No, I’m not here to describe all eighty-eight lol. Actually, my plan is to write short bios about each of them and post maybe four or so at random intervals? Depends on how long it would take to write them up, it could be weekly or just whenever I finish. In the future, I’d love to have artwork of all 88, but of course that takes a lot of time and money lol.

Currently, I have art of specific characters of the following species. An asterisk means that species is represented in at least one character I have art of:

A note on my invented word ‘sapienti.’ Some might be asking “Erika, why don’t you just call them sapient?” I do, quite often in fact. However, when I was writing my books, I found that ‘sapient’ didn’t always do what I wanted it to do. ‘Sapienti’ is essentially my fantasy-world’s version of the word ‘human.’ If a characters stumbles across the bones of a person, they would refer to the bones as “sapienti bones” meaning “the bones of a sapienti person.” Imagine instead if they’d referred to them as “sapient bones.” That makes it sound like the bones themselves are alive and chatting with you!

So how did a world manage to get eighty-eight different species of people living in it? Time travel, son. The world is only 1450 years old anyway. Ain’t no evolving from a single-celled organism in that amount of time!

Many of the sapienti species evolved over billions of years in timelines that the Time Spirit left alone to just let nature take its course. These are usually the more “human-looking” species. Ones with opposable thumbs or which can otherwise use tools.

Some species were made sapient by the blessing of a Mind God. Wynnles came from lions. Yosoe came from goats. All the insect-based species came from, well, insects lol. In the Pentagonal Dominion timeline I write about, there were actually only 87 sapienti species to begin with. The Domovye (singular: Domovoi) were animals. They would be yoked together and trained to dig deep underground, uncovering metals for their sapienti masters. This was seen as no different than yoking oxen to plow a field, or dogs to a sleigh, or a horse to a carriage. The Domovye turned sapient overnight by the blessing of Lucognidus. His purpose in doing so was to punish Ulinor, whose dictator refused to accept the (at the time) new Spiritism religion. Ulinor was the primary civilization that used Domovye as working animals. The Ulese lived underground and needed the Domovye to keep their city functional. But the Ulese abhorred slavery, so when the Domovye became sapient, they could no longer be forced to work.

Many of the species are capable of interbreeding, largely thanks to Life elemental magic. Biologically, without magic, most of them would not work. Their chromosomes would be incompatible or the sperm wouldn’t be able to merge with the egg. Life element magic just “makes it work, damn it.” It will fuck around with genetics until it creates something that can exist. I made this chart a while ago when I was playing a game with some people to create demigods:

It shows how some interbreeding works, but it was within the context of a certain time and place. For instance, the Morenzi can interbreed with any of the others that aren’t in colored boxes, but they currently live in the Quarantined Plane, so none of their hybrids currently exist. It also says Odonata cannot interbreed, but the entire point of Calinthe is that she’s the first and only Odonata hybrid.

The Pentagonal Dominionists use specific language to describe sapienti based on the number of limbs they have. A human might be described as a biped-bibrach (two legged and two armed). A few sapienti look a lot like humans, including the Olivians, Ulese, Umi, Omi, Yetrians, and Myralese. In these cases, the things that make them non-human are deeper than their appearances. Olivians will bond strongly to whoever they first have sex with. Ulese have advanced intelligence. Umi and Omi can control certain internal functions which are automatic and uncontrollable in humans. Yetrians can eat things that a human’s stomach would reject. Myralese are Ice elementals and can survive in frozen environments.

Note that I use ‘nullped’ for species without legs (Domovye, second-stage Orochijin, Poltergeists, Mizura). There is a single monoped species: the Collembola. They have a leg and a tail. They mostly get around by hopping on their tail, but their single leg helps to balance them.

Yet some of these species are so weird and nonhuman that describing them is… difficult. I still don’t have art of Päivi, who is fairly prominent in MoKaM, because I tremble at the idea of trying to describe her to an artist. xD

Many of my species are aquatic, too! Or at least *can* live and breathe underwater if they choose. Aquatic/water-breaking species include: Anemone, Daga, Ephemeropteran, Flora, Foma, Hemipteran, Kraken, Mizura, Phasmida (they can transform into other species, so a Phasmida wouldn’t drown likely because they could transform into someone else), Piniko, Poltergeist, Rubaiyan, Selachi, Sin-Derion, Thysanura, Tsuru, Vodyanoi, Zullia.

Wings are another common feature. Everything that has ‘pteran’ at the end of its name has wings. Other winged species include the Winyans, Pellas, Tsuru, Noklopae, Subrikae, and Nilians.

A few species are extinct in the time period the Merchants novels take place in. The Tellia and Pokki were exterminated by demons when the demons were first created and wanted to take over their homeland. The Mujin went extinct when the Death God Sawyer lost control of his powers in a fit of despair.

A few of these species are also so few in number that a person could go their whole life without meeting one. These include: Odonata, Iur, Mabera, and Phasmida. Technically Phasmida change into other species, so their true numbers are unknown. A Phasmida might live a lifetime in the body of another species and never tell their neighbors that they’re actually a Phasmida. The only one who has made her identity known is Mira, the Chancellor of Aloutia. Because Phasmida only age in the bodies they are currently using, they are effectively immortal. Mira has been the Chancellor since the founding of the Aloutian Empire. She has existed in the Pentagonal Dominion since its beginning. She is actually over 50,000 years old because she’s the Time Spirit’s toy, and she keeps getting put in alternate timelines.

In-world, people might refer to the sapienti species by other numbers. Some will say 87 because they’re excluding the Morenzi, who are unknown to everyone on Aloutia, Cosmo, Ophidia, and the Makai. Some will say 84 because they’re also excluding the three extinct species.

Some species have body parts that naturally produce elementrons, but they can only be used for specific types of ‘magic’ e.g. the Sin-Derion have teeth enchanted to shoot Death elemental beams. Wynnles have electric tails. Yosoe have electric horns. Most winged species have Wind elementrons to allow them to fly because otherwise their bodies would be too heavy/awkward for flight. Daga shells are gold, but enchanted to float on water. Sounites have fire for hair. It’s a whole lotta fun to design all these people!

One thing I want to be clear on, though: no species are monoliths. No species is ‘pure good’ or ‘pure evil.’ They don’t all belong to the same country or culture. They don’t all believe in the same principles, dress the same, speak the same languages, or worship their Gods in the same manner. Sometimes when I talk about my species, I may talk about the culture in which *most* of them belong. *Most* Wynnles live on the Wynndalic Plains of Cosmo’s Starsine planet, where they engage in ritual hunting, have strict sexual practices, and speak their own language which few other species speak. But… obvious not all Wynnles are that way. Amiere, Liesle, and their children are Wynnles, but they live on Aloutia, buy their meat at a market or fish it out of Deep Sea, eat a lot of tropical fruits, and speak a sort of pseudo-French patois most commonly spoken by Flora and Ebonoirs. All sapienti have individual, rational minds (some can connect to a ‘hive mind’, but they *still* retain their individuality, should they choose) and can come to their own conclusions about morality and society.

#writeblr #writing #original writing #my writing #am writing #writer #writers of tumblr #Kira writes #MoKaM #MoLaB #MoDaH #worldbuilding #Rainbow Fantasy #Pentagonal Dominion #Kira's fantasy species #Because I fucking like making them that's why #fantasy #fantasy writing #fantasy worldbuilding

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terramythos · 4 years ago

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TerraMythos 2021 Reading Challenge - Book 6 of 26

Title: The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1) (2012)

Author: N. K. Jemisin

Genre/Tags: Fantasy, First-Person, Third-Person, Female Protagonist, LGBT Protagonist, Asexual Protagonist.

Rating: 8/10

Date Began: 2/07/2021

Date Finished: 2/13/2021

Peace is sacred in the walled city-state of Gujaareh, and must be maintained at any cost. The Gatherers are a priesthood tasked with maintaining this goal. In the name of Hananja, Goddess of the moon, they walk the city at night and harvest Dreamblood-- the magic of dreams-- from Gujaareh's denizens. They bring the peace of death to those who need it... and to those judged criminal or corrupt.

But something else haunts Gujaareh's streets. A Reaper, a rogue Gatherer driven to endless madness and hunger from Dreamblood, is preying on the innocent, casting their souls into an eternal nightmare. Ehiru, one of the elder Gatherers, finds himself caught in the middle of a political conspiracy between his priesthood, the holy Prince, and the monstrous Reaper. An insidious corruption runs deeper than Ehiru knows-- and it may be too late to stop.

The Gatherer’s eyes glittered in her memory, so dark, so cold--but compassionate, too. That had been the truly terrifying thing. A killer with no malice in his heart: it was unnatural. With nothing in his heart, really, except the absolute conviction that murder could be right and true and holy.

Full review, major spoilers, and content warnings under the cut.

Content warnings for the book: Graphic depictions of violence, gore, death, warfare, and murder-- including death of children and mass murder. Discussions of p*dophilia/grooming (nothing graphic). Brief reference to r*pe. One character is a minor infatuated with a much older character-- not reciprocated. Rigid gender and social roles, including slavery. Magic-induced addiction and withdrawal. Loss of sanity/altered mental states/mind control/gaslighting.

Last year I read N. K. Jemisin's short story collection How Long 'Til Black Future Month? One of my favorite stories was The Narcomancer, which explored a vibrant, ancient Egypt-inspired world with themes of faith, dreams, violence, and duty. I wanted to read more from the universe, and finally got to do so with The Killing Moon, the first book in the Dreamblood duology.

Jemisin's creativity in worldbuilding is, in my opinion, unmatched in the fantasy genre. I thought Gujaareh was super interesting and fleshed out. While the ancient Egypt inspiration is obvious, it's also clearly an original fantasy culture in its own right. Everything from religious practices to social castes to gender roles to the fucking architecture felt methodical and thought out. The base premise of assassin priests compassionately harvesting magic from people is a fascinating idea and totally gripping. The pacing is a little slow, but I didn't mind so much because learning about the world was so fun.

While there's a hefty amount of worldbuilding exposition in the story, Jemisin doles out information gradually. Bits and pieces of Gujaareen law, etc are introduced at the beginning of each chapter, and usually have a thematic connection to the events of the story. Information is sparing at times, meaning that one doesn't have a full picture of how everything ties together until pretty far into the story. Even something as crucial as the dream-based magic system isn't fully realized until near the end. I like the mystery of this approach, and I can appreciate how difficult it must be to keep the reader invested vs frustrating them with a lack of info. Jemisin consistently does a great job with this in everything I've read by her.

I did want a little bit more from the narcomancy aspect of the story, since dream worlds are such a huge part of Gujaareen religion and culture. In The Killing Moon we see just a few dreamscapes, and then only briefly. There's so much potential with narcomancy as a magic system, yet most of what we see is an outside, "real-world" perspective, which isn't terribly unique compared to other kinds of magic. Dreamblood being a narcotic (heh) with some Extra Fantasy Stuff is interesting, but I wanted more. Perhaps The Shadowed Sun expands on this.

Characterization is the other Big Thing with this book, as it's very much a character-driven story. Overall I'm torn. There's some things I really liked, and others that felt underdeveloped. I'll go over my favorite things first.

Ehiru is probably the strongest of the main cast, and I really enjoyed his character arc. Here's a guy who is completely devoted to his faith, regardless of what others may think of it. Yet he's not a self-righteous dick. He sees Gathering as a loving and holy thing, so when he errs in the line of duty, it totally consumes him. And things just get worse and worse for him as the story progresses. Say what you will about the Gatherers and the belief system of Gujaareh; Ehiru comes off as intensely caring, devoted, and compassionate, and I genuinely felt bad for him throughout the novel. I'm not religious but these kinds of faith narratives are super interesting to me.

Looking at characterization as a whole, I appreciate The Killing Moon's gray morality. No one in the story is wholly good or evil. The Gatherers are an obvious example, considering they murder people in the dead of night in the name of their Goddess-- but do so to help those in need. Despite being a megalomaniacal mass-murderer, the Prince has believable reasons for his horrific actions, and they’re not wholly selfish. Even the Reaper is a clear victim of Dreamblood's addictive and mind-altering nature; it sometimes regresses into the person it used to be, which is sad and disturbing. There's a lot of moral complexity in the characters and the laws and belief systems they follow. This kind of nuanced writing is much more interesting to read than a black and white approach.

Beyond this, though, I struggled to connect with the other leads. Nijiri's utter devotion to Ehiru is basically his whole character, and while the tragedy of that is interesting for its own reasons, I kept wanting more from him. Sunandi is a good "outsider perspective" character but I had a hard time understanding her at times. For example, the two most important people in her life, Kinja and Lin, die in quick succession. Yet besides a brief outburst when Lin dies, this barely seems to affect her. I get people mourn in all kinds of ways but it seems odd. Her sexual tension with Ehiru is also weird and underdeveloped. Perhaps this is meant to be a callback to The Narcomancer, but it doesn't accomplish much in this narrative.

Another issue I had was emotional connection to minor-yet-important characters. Kinja dies offscreen before the story, yet is supposed to be a big part of Sunandi's past (and thus emotional arc). But he's never even in a flashback, so I never felt WHY he mattered to her. Una-une is the big one, though. It's pretty easy to figure out he's the Reaper by process of elimination, but he's barely in the story outside of a few early mentions. There's this part near the end that's clearly meant to be an emotional moment; Ehiru realizes his (apparently beloved) mentor Una-une is the horrific monster, and thus a foil to the situation between himself and Nijiri. But we never saw the relationship between Ehiru and Una-une, and nothing really established this prior... so there's no emotional payoff. It felt at times like this book was part of a much longer story that for whatever reason we never got to see. In some ways that can be useful to make the world and history seem vast, but here it made me feel emotionally distant from several characters. Perhaps flashbacks with these important characters would have helped bridge the gap.

Credit where it's due, though; it's clear a lot of the dark, often brutal tone and stylistic flair in The Killing Moon was adapted into Jemisin's fantastic Broken Earth trilogy. Probably the most notable are the cryptic interlude chapters told from the perspective of a mysterious character whose identity is unknown until the end. We learn bits and pieces of the beliefs and lore of the world through excerpts of common laws and wisdom. I also liked the occasional stream-of-consciousness writing during tense or surreal moments. The Broken Earth is an improvement overall, but I can appreciate The Killing Moon for establishing some of these techniques early.

I enjoyed this book overall and am planning to read The Shadowed Sun. While I have some criticisms about The Killing Moon, I think it just suffers in comparison to other works I've read by Jemisin. It was still an entertaining and intense read, with a captivating and original world. It's not a story for the faint of heart, though, so please mind the content warnings.

#taylor reads #8/10 #2021 reading challenge

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dwellordream · 4 years ago

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“In part girls’ extensive reading reflected new possibilities brought about by developments in the American reading public, the publishing industry, and the distribution of reading matter. Printing was one of those industries in nineteenth-century America—like the ginning and the weaving of cotton— that was transformed by technological advances. The result was a substantial increase in the production of books and a much wider distribution of those books, helped along also by the free library movement. High rates of literacy both encouraged and resulted from this increase in the availability of printed materials.

The American Revolution itself, many historians have argued, was galvanized by a public literate enough to read and debate the pamphlets issued by politicized journeymen printers. Women were not well represented among those numbers, though probably many women who could not write could read. In the decades immediately following the Revolution, the literacy rate among women rose dramatically. A study of rural Vermont in 1800 concludes that even away from urban areas ‘‘the proportion of women engaged in lifelong reading and writing had risen to about eighty percent.’’

With the opening of common schools in the nineteenth century, girls were educated the same ways that boys were—unevenly, sometimes at home, sometimes at school, but effectively. By 1880 reading literacy was claimed by 90 percent of the native-born American public and 80 percent of their foreign-born compatriots. The explosion of print in the nineteenth century was enabled by a variety of developments in both technology and distribution. Technological innovations in printing nourished the growth of the antebellum reading public.

The innovations of stereotyping and electrotyping preserved an ‘‘impressment’’ of the type once it had been set so that future editions would not require expensive resetting. The result was that before the Civil War the cost of books dropped to roughly half of their cost in the late eighteenth century. Although at seventy-five cents or more such a price was still too costly for skilled male laborers who earned only a dollar a day, and although inadequacy of lighting in many working-class homes helped to limit the Victorian reading public, a substantial proportion of Americans—those who were coming to constitute the aspiring middle class—were able to gain access to books.

Access to books did not define an American public, but increasingly it defined a class of those who hoped to rise in station. Improvements in printing technology fostered the growth of another literary genre, the periodical, which launched many novels in serialized form in both Britain and the United States. Periodicals in the United States and Britain budded in the early nineteenth century, and a number flowered at midcentury, feeding and fed by the literacy and leisure of Victorian readers. Included among these were a growing selection of magazines targeting special audiences, especially youth.

Youth’s Companion, founded in 1827, mustered the greatest longevity and the highest circulation, and it was joined by the influential St. Nicholas (1873), which amassed a distinguished group of writers. The preeminent magazine for women, Godey’s Ladies Book, achieved a circulation of 150,000 at its prime just before the Civil War. Girls and women provided much of the readership for the general family magazine as well, including Scribner’s, Harper’s Weekly, North American Review, and Century. Periodicals had the advantage of providing regular access to print for a reading-hungry populace and were especially cherished by those far away from lending libraries and those whose economic circumstances forced them to ration their reading.

…The public library movement expanded access to reading material beyond the ranks of the wealthy. Along with the growth of common-school education, libraries provided the institutional underpinning of the reading revolution. As early as the eighteenth century, groups of ambitious private citizens had united to share access to precious books. Later in the century clerks, merchants, and mechanics, too, gathered to form so-called ‘‘social libraries’’ which could be joined by payment of a fee.

It was to one of these libraries which Lois Wells, a resident of Quincy, Illinois, received a three-month subscription for her seventeenth birthday in 1886, probably because there was no public library in her town. The importance of an educated citizenry to a republic encouraged the founding of more free facilities, however. Beginning in Boston, and then expanding outward to New England and on to the Midwest, free libraries aimed to offer to all citizens the opportunity for uplift and self-culture which was previously available only to an elite.

The Boston Public Library opened its doors in 1854, and other cities followed suit in increasing numbers after the Civil War. States supported local efforts by passing legislation which would allow townships to divert public funds to the support of free libraries. A massive government report in 1876 listed 3,682 public libraries, a number which would rise to at least 8,000 by 1900. Access to public libraries was uneven, however, thinning out as one moved west and especially south from New England and the mid-Atlantic.

Taking up the slack between the vogue for reading and its limited supply, Sunday schools enhanced their appeal and ensured the quality of children’s reading matter by acquiring book collections and issuing weekly books to deserving students. When the American Sunday School Union and other religious publishers began issuing prepackaged ‘‘libraries’’ of their own publications in the midcentury (one hundred books for $10), the custom became even more prevalent—until eclipsed by the public-library movement itself.

…The project of self-culture did not regard all reading as equal, of course. The removal of girls from their mothers’ elbows as informal apprentices in housewifery meant a partial surrender of daughters to a national or trans-Atlantic culture. Advice givers subjected it to scrutiny, often discussing the appropriate fare for Victorian girls. In the United States, those standards became the defining standards for genteel culture as a whole.

Richard Gilder, the eminent publisher of Century, outlined the rules for his writers. ‘‘No vulgar slang; no explicit references to sex, or, in more genteel phraseology, to the generative processes; no disrespectful treatment of Christianity; no unhappy endings for any work of fiction.’’ Designed for reading aloud within the family circle, genteel fiction as a whole, but periodical literature in particular, had to pass what was named by poet Edmund Stedman the ‘‘virginibus’’ standard—whether it would be appropriate even for the unmarried daughters of a respectable bourgeois family to listen to or to read.

This reading program had some general precepts. Of course, religious literature of all kinds was favored for study and improvement. The old was better than the new, a rule that encouraged history, and for younger children, myths and legends. Seventy-three years old in 1880, the writer and woman’s rights advocate Elizabeth Oakes Smith suggested a conservative regimen for girls which included history, biography, constitutional and moral philosophy, geography, travel literature, science, and ‘‘the several branches of natural history which open up to the mind the wonders and mysteries of this beautiful world in which we live.’’

An advice giver twenty-five years later explained why myths were appropriate for children’s reading: they were ‘‘interpretive of the beautiful and useful in nature, of the high and noble impulses of the heart, and of the right in human intercourse.’’ The counsel to admire the beautiful and to seek the pure and the true left advice writers conflicted about the most popular genre on the reading lists of girls: the novel. The right novels had power to do much good. The British advice writer Henrietta Keddie recommended ‘‘without fail [Elizabeth Gaskell’s] Cranford, and Miss Austen’s books, to make you a reasonable, kindly woman.’’

The goal of such works was to discipline aspiration, however, for the exemplary woman would be ‘‘satisfied with a very limited amount of canvas on which to figure in the world’s great living tapestry.’’ Elizabeth Oakes Smith implored young girls to avoid the low road and ‘‘most of the fictions of the day,’’ admitting only ‘‘those based on the eras of history, such as the inimitable works of Walter Scott,’’ and the works of Dickens, which ‘‘may deepen our sympathy for the miserable and erring.’’

Another later counselor to young girls, Harriet Paine, in Chats with Girls on Self-Culture (1900) also challenged the appropriateness of realism: ‘‘Girlhood is not the time for any novelist who does not believe that something besides the actual is possible and necessary.’’ She too applauded Sir Walter Scott, who was always ‘‘to be trusted to present a natural world which is nevertheless rosy with the light of romance,’’ and Dickens: ‘‘I never knew a girl who loved Dickens who was not large-hearted.’’

Paine was more inclusive, though: ‘‘There are half a dozen fresh, sweet story-writers girls are always the better for reading,’’ and then she enumerated Louisa May Alcott and a number of British writers, including Dinah Mulock-Craik, Anne Thackeray, and Charlotte Yonge. Much fiction, however, did not grow ‘‘where the rose-tree blooms’’ but instead led young readers ‘‘through mire and dirt,’’ advisers cautioned. Genteel periodicals for youth contained some of the most pointed warnings to youths of both sexes about the dangers of inappropriate reading.

An outburst from St. Nicholas in 1880 warned that a craving for sensational fiction is more insidious, but ‘‘I am not sure that it is not quite as fatal to character as the habitual use of strong drink.’’ The reading of illicit fiction ‘‘weakens the mental grasp, destroys the love of good reading, and the power of sober and rational thinking, takes away all relish from the realities of life, breeds discontent and indolence and selfishness, and makes the one who is addicted to it a weak, frivolous, petulant, miserable being.’’

The power attributed to the vicarious excitement of the emotions remained something of a constant through the nineteenth century. Given such acknowledged dangers, how did girls get access to such books? The question of access played out in a debate over the holdings of public libraries. Librarians made up a new group of elite reformers who aimed to elevate the public intellect through their professional organization, the American Library Association.

In 1881, the ALA attempted to impose uniform censorship on the collections formed for the public good, and got as far as surveying major public libraries and compiling a list of sixteen authors ‘‘whose works are sometimes excluded from public libraries by reason of sensational or immoral qualities.’’ The list included twelve female domestic novelists—such popular writers as E. D. E. N. Southworth and Mary Jane Holmes. It did not go farther. The library ultimately compromised its genteel ambitions with the tastes of the public, and by the turn of the century reliably stocked what its readers wanted to read.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Reading and the Development of Taste.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#victorian #education #american #censorship #libraries #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls #history

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veryvincible · 4 years ago

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How’s Tony relationship with Wanda in comics? I wonder if there’s friction between the comic fans as well

Despite being on-off Avengers for a long, long while, they didn’t actually have much of a meaningful relationship until something called Force Works in ‘94. Even when they were teammates, most of their interactions were little bits of dialogue to acknowledge that they knew each other and would talk to each other if they happened to appear on the same page, but... not much else.

I am not as well versed in Wanda as I am Tony, so keep that in mind.

Before going in-depth about the things they experienced together, there are some differences in ideology that don’t give them the best set-up in the world. They have different circumstances of birth, different “powersets”, and overall different approaches to things. Tony tends to be the oddball in most teams when it comes to his foresight and utilitarian mindset, but this is especially the case compared to Wanda, who sometimes doesn’t have the privilege of utilitarianism because of how her powers work; she’s capable of a lot, and on a daily basis, she exercises quite a bit of restraint.

Tony’s biggest mistakes were directly caused by him making decisions that were, at times, devoid of feeling (not that he didn’t feel anything making those decisions, he just discarded his feelings entirely). It’s a common theme with him to assume that he needs to disconnect himself emotionally from the “right decision”, because the right decision is often something he can’t handle. And when he can’t handle something he thinks needs to be done, what does he do? He does it anyway, and he lets it destroy him. That isn’t to say that his decisions are never based in feeling-- he is an incredibly emotional person, after all-- but his predominant feeling is guilt, and it serves more as a motivator than something that directly impacts which conclusions he comes to in the first place. We can clearly see where his head’s at when it comes to certain conflicts based on Civil War and Civil War II, where CW was rife with him making decisions that broke him in order to avoid the worst possible scenario, and CWII showed a side of him that wanted to believe his choice was the right one, wanted to believe the conclusions he’d drawn were correct, but was willing to give that up if trusted friends told him it wasn’t worth it. At no point does he say “maybe my plans/views/conclusions are garbage!” because he’s always had a complex relationship with his own ability to find best possible outcomes. He doubts himself constantly, but still acknowledges evidence and probability where he can find it. What changes is how willing he is to go through with these plans. Suddenly, when CW backfires harshly, he’s more likely to ask the questions of, “is this worth it?” and “do people want this?”

And then there’s Wanda, who isn’t... like that. Her biggest mistake wasn’t actually that well thought-out, and it’s built more on a feel-good sentiment than anything; if there’s this awful, awful cloud of oppression hanging over the heads of mutants and conflict between mutants and humans, then the best thing to do to make sure no one has to deal with that would be to... forcefully break those barriers down, right? It’s worth mentioning here that she’s been through a lot at the time of this decision, and when you compare her “I’m going through a lot” decisions with Tony’s “I’m going through a lot” decisions, you can kind of see a huge, huge difference between them.

Tony ignores his feelings, ignores the pain and suffering he knows he’ll have to see, and goes for numbers games. It’s a coping mechanism he’s had since he was a child, and it lives on in his superhero-ing to some extent; when he is at his worst (barring when he’s not sober, because that’s a different, more self-destructive beast entirely), he tries (or tried? he still kind of does this, but again, to a lesser extent) to disconnect from himself and from others when problem-solving.

Wanda, on the other hand... does not and cannot really disconnect herself from that. The suffering of the people is on her mind constantly, and it’s the main thing she chooses to remedy as soon as it crosses her mind to. It’s a deeper look into the mind of a woman whose life has been damaged many times over by prejudice and discrimination. Her pleading with reality to give everyone a happy ending (which, ironically, I don’t think Tony actually got in the new reality? but I don’t think that’s meant to comment on their relationship at all. I may be wrong on that one) is understandable if you’re also from a marginalized group, or if you can empathize with them. Even if everyone’s in agreement that she really should not have done that, it’s not hard to understand why. She didn’t just live in the suffering, she took it on entirely, forcing herself to bear the burden of a world that wasn’t real in hopes that it would be preferable to the world that was.

Tony can be aware of marginalization (and, as someone who was physically disabled and is probably still mentally disabled, can empathize to some degree), but he can’t ever really feel what Wanda feels as someone who really can’t go two seconds without identity-based conflict totally obliterating her. On the flipside, Wanda herself can never feel what Tony feels-- a disconnect from identity for the sake of discussing “best case scenarios” where everyone’s still in pain, the ability to separate oneself from these conflicts and allow for vague concepts like “short term suffering/hardships” to refer to years, decades, generations, worth of struggling for the sake of a better future when there are struggling people now. That’s not to say Tony’s never sensitive to current issues (he tries very, very hard to help people who are struggling now, and pours a lot of money into it) and it’s also not to say that Wanda’s somehow incapable of rational decision making as a result of her constant oppression; neither of these things are true. But their gut responses to certain problems are different. On top of that, they can both afford different levels of consequences, and they’ll be viewed differently by people by exercising roughly the same amount of influence. They just aren’t the same, and where characters like Steve and Tony find common ground anyway, it’s harder for characters like Wanda to find common ground with Tony.

Now for what we’ve all been... waiting for...

Force Works!

This really isn’t my favorite run of all time. The writing’s kind of weird, the art is garish at best and totally problematic at worst, and though there are elements of characterization that are kind of true to the core of the characters involved, it’s still, uh... I don’t know, executed in a way that’s disconcerting? It’s kind of like if Civil War II did what Civil War II did, but then also made Carol wear a Warbird-style bikini, and also added cool plot elements like Tony saying, “Carol, you’re right!” right at the start and then... continuing to believe Carol is wrong, because that’s the plot. Oh, and then Tony kills some people and is later retconned to have not killed people, because that sucked of him and was super weird for his character.

There’s just a lot of weird stuff in Force Works. If you like it, it’s fine to like it (honestly, we’ve all flipped through pages of difficult-to-decipher art and less than flattering outfits for women for the sake of reading the stories we want to read), but. You know. Not my cup of tea.

Anyway, everything that I mentioned kind of comes into play with Force Works.

Here’s the gist. The Avengers are having some conflict (when aren’t they?) and Tony runs off to make a team that works to prevent villainy, not a team that just fights it (despite prevention being part of the “fighting bad guys” in many runs up to this point, as far as I’m aware, but, sure, it works within the context).

And who does he want to lead that team?

Wanda Maximoff!

He’s like, “Wanda, for realsies, I need your help.”

And Wanda’s like, “Shut up. Yes, I will do this,” but sexily, for some some reason.

And they have an issue of relative peace, until Tony starts to realize that he doesn’t actually like... not leading this time. And, sure, he said, “a partnership of skills leading the team together”, but he also said, “I want Wanda to lead the team!”

So, Wanda’s leading the team.

So, Tony’s not having a good time, because Wanda’s doing what he asked her to do. He probably should have seen that coming.

At some point, the Force Works band together to deal with some stuff in Slorenia, which is Marvel’s fun way of saying they’re going to have some commentary on the Bosnian war but they weren’t going to call it Bosnia, like they have commentary on the government without naming the president. Everyone knows what it’s meant to be, but they’re just not calling it that.

Already, you can see the differences in how Tony and Wanda's first interactions with the news go. Wanda has a much more personal connection to the place, and Tony’s thinking of it as a location for a mission, sharing what intel he has available. Tony’s not exactly being callous here-- it’s not inappropriate for him to say, “Oh, here’s what I know from owning the company I own”-- but he is starting off with less investment than Wanda.

This continues into the start of their mission, where Wanda’s taking charge and using her connection to Slorenia (the language, the knowledge of the politics, etc.) to make the mission run more smoothly. In the beginning, Tony actually falls in line, letting her take the lead without grumbling this time.

(This isn’t important to anything, but I’d like to mention here that “hex energy” is kind of like the 90s Wanda equivalent of “transistor-powered!” objects for 60s Tony, which is... very funny.)

So, they deal with one antagonist in Slorenia, some things are resolved, and... Wanda would like to stick around to maybe keep helping people here.

And Tony says:

Tony’s argument is that the issue they’d gone to deal with had been dealt with, according to their funky computer that tells them when things are dealt with.

And Wanda’s like, “Well, I think what we just dealt with was part of a bigger thing! That we should deal with more!”

And Tony’s like, “Nope!” despite Wanda being the official team leader. So, they’re not having a great time there.

There’s a little more, but it’s all pretty much to do with the same kind of stuff (and then also the part where Tony kills people, but again, that technically didn’t... happen, anymore, so. Yay?)

And this kind of just... fizzled out eventually, and canon put things back together as canon often does, and now they don’t have much of a problem with each other again. They’ve had some positive interactions and on multiple occasions, they’ve been cool teammates who respect each other, so.

I don’t know.

What I can say is that, aside from House of M and Civil War (wherein people who aren’t familiar with Wanda and Tony use these two events to heavily criticize Wanda and Tony despite really having no stake in the argument, which is kind of a comics dudebro move that’s never been awesome for anyone the way it’s usually handled), Wanda and Tony fans don’t tend to... think much of each other, I guess? There’s really not enough basis in canon for either group of people to have longstanding personal gripes.

616 operates like that a lot; where the MCU has very clear relationships between characters, plotlines, and messages, 616 has... inconsistency and sometimes-poor writing and political commentary with characters literally changed at their core sometimes to fill a certain role (hence why some ships can seem to have totally different dynamics based on the fan you’re talking to, why primarily X-Men fans often don’t like the Avengers, and why some debates about characters will never be settled using only the evidence we have now).

Here’s something I’d like to say before closing out:

I think, due to the fact that this was a very specific kind of political commentary intermixed with some strange characterization choices, I don’t really think this needs to be the end-all, be-all of Tony and Wanda’s potential friendship. Sure, they have these differences, but Steve and Tony have very similar differences that they’ve overcome through mutual understanding. I’m not saying that Tony and Wanda would be friends, nor am I saying that they should be. All I really want to say is that they certainly could be with the right plot beats and characterization, and that’s a nice thought.

So, if there’s any desire at all out there to write a very positive Tony and Wanda relationship, I’d say go for it, 100%. There is some canon basis for it, despite most of it being in between the lines or... contained within one or two scenes. We could all use more friendships to gush over. :)

#cassks #the day has come... to acknowledge force works...#i am once again answering asks to cope with the trapped sort of boredom that very ill days push on people #so if any of this is totally incomprehensible. my bad

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goreprofonde · 5 years ago

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Aaron Rodgers - Climax

“Life is a collective impossibility.”

There were so many languages. Aramaic, Phoenician, Etruscan, Tamil, Moabite, Umbrian. Too many languages. From where did they all come? It was a puzzlement, especially if you believed—and if you were authoring the Pentateuch you no doubt did—that all these speakers were branches of a single family tree. Why would Noah’s descendants, leaving the Ark to replenish the Earth, differ so greatly from one another? You needed an etiology, you did. If you were Greek, you might blame Hermes. If you were Bantu, you might blame a famine-induced madness. But if you were writing the Book of Genesis, you might blame, well, God.

The story of the Tower of Babel from Genesis 11 is short—very short. You’ve probably heard it, or at least something like its broadest outlines. In only nine verses no longer than your average nursery rhyme, the postdiluvian people (speaking but one language) decide in their arrogance to build a tower to reach the heavens; the Lord sees it and is displeased; and so the Lord confuses their language and scatters them about the globe. Short, sweet, and to the point: Pride goeth before the globe-scattering fall.

Or at least that is the traditional interpretation. And it’s not an unreasonable one—what few dots there are seem to connect in a pretty straight line, and old-timey Yahweh was quite prone to smiting, having just exited his “drown them all” Great Flood phase. Like so many ancient stories, it easily calcifies into something abstract and removed from the specifics of the story itself. But actually reading the nine relevant verses is quite a time—especially when read from the perspective of an acolyte of God fashioning an explanation for the world’s diversity of languages. For the Lord did not just punish the people for their hubris; he did so out of fear that their unity of language and of purpose would make them his rivals (“and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do”). And the Lord did not choose just any punishment; he chose exactly the thing that the people most feared (“and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” / “and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth”). Taken together, it paints an astonishingly bleak picture—humanity, its highest goals easily scuttled by outside forces, overseen by a vengeful, jealous God more interested in chaos and the psychological scars of a self-fulfilling prophecy than in peace or understanding. (And all this from Moses, one of God’s chief troubadours! Imagine the story a naysayer might have told.)

It’s hard not to think of the Tower of Babel in the wake of Climax, Gaspar Noé’s latest boundary-pushing entry in his own foreboding corner of the cinéma du corps/New French Extremity. Noé is not shy about citing his idols and reference points generally, from Godard to Kubrick to Lynch, nor has he been subtle about the influences on Climax—in addition to referencing the Tower of Babel, Shivers, and The Towering Inferno (among others) in interviews, Noé has helpfully laid out a wealth of data points surrounding the monitor on which he displays his dance troupe’s introductory interviews. Among the citations: Argento’s Suspiria; Fassbinder’s Querelle; Żuławski’s Possession; Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom; and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, not to mention various books like Taxi Driver and How to Succeed at Suicide. The ways in which these influences play out are sometimes obvious (e.g., Selva’s (Sofia Boutella) agonized, writhing convulsion in the hallway explicitly recalls Isabelle Adjani’s subway paroxysm in Possession), sometimes less so (e.g., Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, which—according to Noé, the little stinker—appears because “I like the title and I like the book...because it’s so cruel”). There is no Holy Bible propped up against Noé’s mid-1990s tube TV, but the idea of a vengeful and jealous overseer disrupting an attempt at something greater is central to Climax. As he did in Irréversible, Noé realizes that hell, unbearable as it can be, is only made more hellish by the possibility of heaven.

Climax begins (like Irréversible) with the ending. Lou (Souheila Yacoub), covered in blood, is seen from overhead stumbling through the snow before collapsing. Something terrible has obviously happened to her (this is Noé, after all), but unlike Irréversible, which unfurls a fully backward chronology, this prologue is only a brief flash-forward. After the credits play, Climax introduces us to its large cast via the aforementioned interviews, quickly sketching its players’ backgrounds, interests, and fears as the dancers—applying to be part of some sort of international touring group—discuss sex and drugs and other points of interest to the bohemian twentysomething circa 1996. From there, Climax moves to an abandoned school on the outskirts of Paris where the group is rehearsing, and it is at this point that Noé provides his greatest shock of all: joy. As the dancers krump and vogue and contort in what can only be called harmonious dissonance, Noé’s unbroken take evokes the bygone MGM musical of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, celebrating the amazing things a body in motion can do not by simulating that motion through quick-hitting edits but through the camera’s unblinking gaze.

Of course, Climax’s version of the cinematic dance number has a decidedly modern bent not incidental to its overarching themes. The participants in manager Emmanuelle’s (Claude Gajan Maull) group are not performing in the classical Astaire-and-Rogers style, nor do they look like the cast of Singin’ in the Rain. Instead, they are diverse in almost every way—nationally, ethnically, sexually, socioeconomically. What they have in common—in addition to youth—is an affinity for creative movement and a desire/belief (perhaps born of naïveté) that through their collective efforts they can make the world a better place. Climax early on declares that it is a French film and proud of it and a large sequined French flag hangs behind the dancers, framing their efforts. For a time, it seems as though these young performers, accepting of all comers and overflowing with joie de vivre, might represent a new, aspirational future for France, free of the petty jealousies and insecurities and bigotries that define (and mar) life as we know it.

But Noé is not one for uplift, and as the prophetic prologue cautions, this jubilant beginning must come to an end. After their astonishing first dance—several of the most infectious minutes one is likely to see onscreen—the performers become revelers, celebrating their upcoming tour with food and merriment and sangria. That sangria happens to be laced with LSD—something neither the dancers nor we yet know, though some pointed shots of the punch bowl and the too-frequent mentions of its contents suggest trouble—and will soon cause this utopian mini-society to erupt into death and madness. But the eruption is that of a festering boil. Cleverly, Noé follows the initial dance with a series of conversations among the participants, mostly broken off in pairs. While further fleshing out their characters and deepening certain audience connections (and introducing Tito (Vince Galliot Cumant), Emmanuelle’s young son who, being a child in a Noé film, cannot possibly meet a good end), these interactions also reveal the lie behind the seeming idyll we have just witnessed. Sexual gamesmanship, misogyny, mutual distrust, power dynamics, a general unease—even before the drugged wine has taken hold, no amount of common bond or feel-good sentiments can fully inoculate against the crassness and misanthropy of the human condition. Vive la France—unless that French flag plays less than wholesomely to some of the carousers whose skin color may have left them disadvantaged under its auspices. God is with us—unless God, wary of his waning primacy and unwilling to go down without a fight, has been against us all along.

From there, Noé gifts us one additional extended dance sequence—this time shot from above, like a devilish cousin to Busby Berkeley’s showstoppers—but the additional knowledge we have gained makes the number play very differently than its predecessor. It is still exuberant, still exciting, still full of technical and physical marvels, but there is a sense of disquiet coursing through it, of tenuous allegiances and bids for attention. The playful back-and-forth of the first dance feels slightly more strained; the seemingly effortless flow of before is supplemented with an element of jockeying and competition. All these workers building a tower, but unsure about one another’s methods or their mutual destination.

Being a Noé film, it is no surprise that from there Climax descends into recriminations and mutilation, child endangerment and incest, and ultimately into a crimson-lit nightmare resulting in death. Noé’s superb camerawork—always a hallmark—not only complements the dancing beautifully (one truly wishes that he, along with Edgar Wright, would make an out-and-out musical, though for Noé that would almost certainly have to be Sweeney Todd), it also brings to life the increasingly fragile (and ultimately disintegrated) mental states of his crew of revelers. While Selva is probably the closest thing Climax has to a protagonist as the camera follows her back and forth from the common space to the dorm rooms the group has been occupying, no one seems fully safe/sane—not Selva, as she comes undone in front of some nature-backdrop wallpaper; not Lou or Omar (Adrien Sissoko), who abstain from the sangria for personal reasons that end up visiting upon them violence (whether Western culture dislikes a Muslim or a sexually active woman more is a question Climax does not definitively resolve); not even Daddy (Kiddy Smile), as he good-naturedly DJs the proceedings. That Climax employs so much improvisation is nothing short of miraculous, given how intricately some of Noé’s long takes appear to be choreographed. But beyond mere showmanship (of his own or his performers), these extended sequences give Climax the disorienting effect of feeling both dreamlike (or, perhaps more accurately, nightmarish) and realistic. Real life does not employ the careful and selective cutting of a movie, unfolding as its own long take, yet the memories thereof are fragmented in a subconscious act of self-editing, making Noé’s aesthetic appropriately both distancing and suffocating.

This visual evocation of an unyielding descent into hell is complemented perfectly by Noé and Ken Yasumoto’s sound design. The music that previously served as an enthusiastic soundscape turns menacing and relentless, with the percussive beats and throbbing bass driving the drug-addled action perpetually forward, stymieing any possible reflective moment. Yet that merciless music is preferable to the screams and groans it sometimes drowns out—cries that are themselves preferable, in the case of Tito, to a sudden silence that is deafening in its horrific implications. Even the comparatively hospitable environs of the sleeping quarters see Dom (Mounia Nassangar) attacking Lou and Taylor (Taylor Kastle) taking advantage of his sister, Gazelle (Giselle Palmer). As the sangria brings out the group’s (somewhat) latent paranoia and aggression and worst impulses, a downward spiral is inevitable; once gravity takes hold, escape velocity becomes nearly impossible to achieve.

Unlike Irréversible, Noé does not end Climax on a tragic but perversely bittersweet note; instead, he ends it with a possible explanation for the madness that disquietingly suggests that the madness was unavoidable. The perpetrator’s outsider status implies the doomed nature of group activity. The lies told in the instigator’s interview speak to the inefficacy of preparatory efforts. Most upsettingly, the culprit’s name, drawn from Greek mythology and literally meaning “breath of life,” points back to God and the Tower of Babel. The people banded together in an attempt to do something great, something just within reach. But God wouldn’t have it. So he scrambled the synapses a bit—a different language here, a chemically disrupted neuro-receptor there—and voilà, his supremacy was re-established. But to what end? “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair,” said a king of kings, until nothing beside remained. Pride goeth before the fall; when the proud one is divine, the fall leads all the way to hell.

#aaron rogers #gaspar noe #cinema #review #obsessed with his reviews #divine #babel #re tag #noé realizes that hell unbearable as it can be is only made more hellish by the possibility of heaven #who being a child in a Noé film cannot possibly meet a good end

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myfriendscallmecoelophysis · 5 years ago

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The Fears of a Goddess Pt 2

Part 2 of my Dark! Ianite fic

Part 1

Part 3

Enjoy and as always

Find me on Ao3:

Selenejessabelle12626 for the tame stuff

Lady-Spieroles for the less tame stuff ;)

“Hey Karl?”

“Yeah?”

“You seen Jordan around?”

“Not today I haven’t. Don’t think I saw him yesterday either. Why do ya ask?”

“Just haven’t seen him. Bit weird. Lemme know if you see him.”

“Will do.” Karl replied as Tom emerged from his mine, pickaxe slung over his shoulder. He hadn’t seen Jordan in a few days, hadn’t heard from him either aside from one passing message about anyone knowing a librarian who traded rare books. He and Karl had both responded with negatives and heard nothing from Jordan since.

Tom nearly fell over when he stepped into his house because Dianite was there, waiting for him. He’d not seen Dianite in weeks, maybe even months (he’d lost track of the days ages ago). In an instant he inclined his head to the God. “Dianite.”

“Syndicate. I am glad to see my trust in you was not misplaced.” The God greeted, sounding pleased. “And you did as I asked?”

“Yes. They think I serve Ianite. Jordan wasn’t happy about it but Ianite didn’t seem to mind. Did you find something about her? She’s possessed by the Shadow thing isn’t she?”

“Unfortunately no, my sister has done far too good a job at hiding her motivations. At least for now. I have no idea about the Shadows, Mianite has taken it upon himself to lead the charge on that research. But that is not what I’ve come to speak to you about. Have you seen The Captain recently?”

“Haven’t seen him in a while, neither has Karl. Why?” Maybe it was time to start worrying about Jordan if even Dianite was trying to find him.

“Hmm, I was afraid you’d say that. I think it’s time we find him.”

Tom led the way to Jordan’s island, searching the entire tower for the Captain. There was no sign of him but there was evidence that he’d been there recently. His cats all had food, the brewing stands had bottles and actively burning blaze powder, the extra food in his chests was still fresh. He’d possibly even been home today and had just stepped out for a moment.

“I’ll go check the temple.” Tom suggested, assuming Dianite either couldn’t or wouldn’t set foot in it. As Tom swam to the temple entrance he realized it’d been a while since he’d been here, not since ‘swearing his loyalty’ to Ianite. It looked mostly the same except that now, there was a doorway in the back corner. When had Jordan done that? And what was it? A secret room? If so it wasn’t very well hidden. He’d seen better from Jordan before.

Curiously, Tom approached. Beyond the veil of water, he saw a hallway that went in and behind the temple. A glow of light came from around the corner and as he stepped through the door he could hear the murmur of voices. There was a button set on the wall just inside and he realized that this was indeed a secret room, the door just had not been shut behind the last person who’d entered. He wasn’t surprised by the existence of a secret room from Jordan, Gods knew the man could be paranoid about people stealing his stuff, but they'd established somewhat of a gentleman’s agreement in this world against blatant thievery, so it didn’t really make sense for him to have one anyway.

Tom kept his steps light as he went down the hall, listening carefully. “...was the author of a lot the books in Ruxomar, in that world he was-” when he rounded the corner Tom was surprised to see not a vault but some sort of library. Sparklez was sat at a desk with Ianite leaning over his shoulder, both looking at something on the desk, their backs to the door. “-their Father. If I’m right, he has a counterpart here, like we did there.”

Tom backed away into the shadows when Jordan looked up. “My vision.” Ianite said and Jordan nodded in agreement. What were they talking about? Tom admittedly hadn’t paid much attention to a lot of what was going on in the other world but he did vaguely remember what Jordan was talking about. Some bloke whose name they’d heard referenced pretty often when it came to the history of the realm. World Historian or something like that. But he could have sworn that World Historian had been the guy that had attacked them after they’d revived Dianite. Jordan surely knew that, why was he looking for him?

“We just need to find where he is.”

“You never cease to amaze, My Champion.” Ianite said, squeezing his shoulder as she stood up fully. “I’ll see what I can find and bring back to you. Thank you.”

“Of course Milady, anything.” She disappeared a moment later without any fanfare. This was Tom’s chance to talk to Jordan alone. And maybe figure out just what the hell was going on.

He backed down the hall to the doorway, ducking through the veil of water quickly then back in once more. “Eh Jordan? You in here?” He called down the hallway, as though he’d only just found this. He heard the fluttering of paper and the scrape of the chair on the stone brick floor. He pushed the button to seal the door, the sound of pistons firing echoing down the hall. “Whoa.” He said, loud enough that Jordan would be able to hear.

“Uh, yeah.” Jordan replied, maybe realizing that Tom wasn’t about to just leave. At his acknowledgement, Tom ventured down the hall. When he rounded the corner he poured the appropriate amount of awe and teasing into his expression and voice.

“Jordan you sneaky Jordan you, what is this? Fancy little secret library?” Jordan was honestly quite a talented builder. He stuck to basic builds most of the time but when he went all out, boy did he go all out. The temple was right pretty and this little study library thing was something out of a wizard’s castle.

Sparklez didn’t look too happy to see him, his expression carefully neutral. Clearly this was intended to be something Tom wasn’t supposed to find. “Just something I built.”

“Why put it here? Did Ianite ask you to?”

“I’m working on something for her. It just made sense to put it down here.” He replied with a shrug.

“What’s she got you working on?” Tom asked as he looked around, highly aware of the way Jordan hesitated in replying.

“Just some stuff about the prophecy and all that.”

“C’mon Sparklez, you can tell me. We’re both Team Ianite.”

Jordan scoffed a bitter sort of laugh. “Yeah, you Team Ianite.”

Tom frowned “I am. I swore it and everything.”

“Sure Tom, whatever you say.” He rolled his eyes and turned back to the desk, pushing papers aside.

“I am. I told you. I want there to be balance.” Something in Jordan’s posture stiffened for a moment, his hands pausing in their search for whatever he was trying to find. “That’s the point isn’t it, us coming back here? To get the Gods all balanced and strong or something like that?”

Jordan turned back but something in his eyes had hardened, instinctually Tom took a step back. “And how are we supposed to do that if you’re trying to join my team? Each of us has to help a God, that’s what the prophecy said. Karl with Mianite, Me with Ianite, and you with Dianite. So stop this stupid game and just admit you’re up to something!” Tom took another step back, he’d not seen Sparklez angry like that for a while. Not since a prank he and Karl had pulled had gotten a bit out of hand and set his chicken pen on fire. But Tom had never been one to back down, he could give as good as he got.

“Me up to something?! I’m not the one that’s been hiding for a week doing all sorts of shady stuff.”

“It’s research!”

“For what?! There’s no magic in this world Sparklez. Research is not an excuse! What’s she got you doing?!” He didn’t mean the reference to Ianite to come out as sharply as it did, suspicion accidentally leaking into his words. Sparklez was far too clever to not pick up on it, his eyes narrowing beneath his glasses.

“I am doing the job we are supposed to be doing, helping the Gods become as strong as possible.” His voice was as cold as ice, his eyes boring into Tom’s. If Tom were a different man he’d have bit his tongue and held back the scathing remarks he so badly wanted to say. He would have taken a deep breath and calmly deescalated this entire thing. Unfortunately, he was Dianite’s Champion for a reason and defusing conflict was simply not something he did.

He took two steps towards Jordan, getting entirely in his personal space, something he knew the man hated and let his words spill like lava. “Fat lot of good that will that do when Dianite locks her up anyway.” He was shocked when Sparklez shoved him back, his feet slipping under him on the damp stone. He fell on his ass and Jordan wasted no time stalking over and looming above him. He’d drawn his bow, leveling a nocked arrow at Tom. He always forgot how scarily quick a draw Sparklez was.

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“What are you talking about? You can’t change the future! We agreed we wouldn’t!” He wouldn’t dare. Sparklez had been the one to bring it up in the first place, what damage they could cause if they weren’t careful. He wouldn’t just do it anyway, not after he was so adamant about just letting things happen as they should.

“Plans change.”

So that’s what they were planning then. He wanted to change the future. Keep Dianite from locking Ianite up if Tom had to guess. The real question was, who was the mastermind behind the plan? It was certainly in Sparklez’ character to stand up for Ianite but he’d known what would happen to her when he’d told Tom to abandon any ideas of changing the future. But already Dianite and Mianite both had their suspicions about their sister. Maybe she’d managed to convince Sparklez to help her change her fate? Either way he had to talk to Dianite.

“Sparklez-”

“I think it’s time for you to go Tom.” He interrupted, taking a half step back so Tom could get to his feet. He let his bowstring slacken but didn’t remove the arrow.

“Jordan.” Tom pleaded. “Please. Think about this. You said it yourself, we were sent back to help the Gods.”

“And I am. With my help, Ianite won’t have to suffer. Now, leave. Go back to Dianite.”

“Jordan please.”

He drew back the bowstring once more, the tip of the arrow pointed directly at Tom’s chest. “Leave Tom.”

‘What are you doing Sparklez?’ “Fine.” He raised his hands in a show of surrender then backed out of the room, only turning his back to Jordan once he rounded the corner. The moment he was out of Jordan’s sightline, he broke into a sprint, smashing the button to open the door and all but diving into the water. He had to get to Dianite and tell him what was going on before Jordan could inform Ianite of their argument.

He swam as fast he could back to the surface, shouting for Dianite the moment his head was above water. His God appeared above the water a fraction of a second later. Before he could say anything, Tom was already speaking. “They’re doing something. Trying to change the future, find a guy called World Historian, or at least his alternate self in this world. He was bad news when we saw him before, can’t imagine he’ll be much better now. And-”

“Calm yourself Syndicate. You’ve done well to learn this.” Dianite interrupted. He gestured and then they were both standing back on Tom’s island. “It’s not what I expected of her but unfortunately I can’t say I’m surprised. She’s never been particularly happy with the fate our Mother prophesied for her.” He put a hand to his chin in a thoughtful expression. Tom wasn’t sure what to do, he couldn’t do anything to a Goddess and Jordan was clearly off the deep end along with her. “I must confer with Mianite on this development. For now, collect the other one and see if you can do something to keep the Captain occupied and away from my Sister. We will handle her.”

Tom nodded and then fell to one knee, inclining his head. “I request to return to your service My Lord.”

“Very Well.” Tom felt the sudden heat of a flaming blade above his shoulder. “Syndicate, do you swear your loyalty to me?”

“I do solemnly swear my fealty, mind, body and soul to you and your cause My Lord Dianite. From this breath until my last, I am yours to command.” He did not need the prompting of the ceremony, he knew the words by heart. He felt the touch of the blade upon each shoulder and then the strange, shimmering void like feeling that was the hallmark of Ianite’s influence disappeared. In its place, the comforting and familiar heat of Dianite’s infernal fire returned, rushing through his veins like wildfire.

“Rise my Champion. In return for your loyalty, I present you with this blade.” Dianite said, presenting the hilt of the blade he’d used to Tom. The moment he took it, Tom could feel the strength it was imbued with. It shined with enchantments, he did not even bother asking what they were, the power that poured off the weapon was plenty to assure him of its strength.

“Perhaps with this, you may stand a chance at surviving a confrontation with Ianite’s Champion.”

And then Tom was alone.

Ok. Somehow he had to keep Jordan’s attention as long as possible, after the huge fight they’d just had. Jordan, who was highly unlikely to want to see Tom, let alone spend an extended amount of time with him especially now that Tom knew what he was planning. The friendly option wasn’t going to work this time. Tom took a deep breath and entered his home, opening the chest that contained his valuables. If the friendly option wasn’t going to work, he had no choice but to go with the nuclear option. From his chest he pulled the stack of TNT he’d been slowly adding to for weeks in case it ever was needed. Now seemed as good a time as any. Nothing like a classic rampant bit of destruction to get and keep Sparklez attention.

He couldn’t do it alone though. Jordan would certainly catch him far too quickly for the risk to be worth it. He needed Karl’s help.

“Karl If I asked you to help me do something extremely dangerous and stupid, would you?” He asked on a private communicator channel.

He began to sort through his inventory, putting his weapons in easy reach, removing useless blocks and items. He had a few leftover potions that he pocketed and made sure he had plenty of food. There was a chance he could be on the run for days if he got Sparklez mad enough. It’d happened in the old world, after Tom had set fire to Sparklez tree. It'd been a terrifying and anxiety-inducing few days. But he’d do it again now if that’s what it took to stop him and Ianite from changing the future.

“Uh, possibly. Depends on what it is.” Karl replied.

“I’m going to blow up Sparklez island.”

“Why the hell would you do that?! Aren’t you the one who told me not to mess with him like that? Something about us not standing a chance if he ever really went after us?” He was right. Tom had warned Karl early on against pranking Jordan too badly.

Tom knew when he was outmatched and Jordan made it a hobby to make the strongest weapons and armor just in case something ever went down. He’d been that way since the Modestep siege. His philosophy had quickly gone from neutrality to being the most geared out once he realized that they were reluctant to attack someone with the bigger weapons. It’d only gotten worse in Ruxomar. With all that technology, Jordan had become practically invulnerable within a few days. Tom still to this day wasn’t sure how he’d managed to make his ‘Bow of Balance’ as strong as he had. Not to mention that force field or the ‘Price of Betrayal’ sword. At least in this world he didn’t have access to any of those but still, who knew what enchantments his weapons had?

“I know. And that’s why I need your help. He and Ianite have gone mad. Dianite needs me to keep Sparklez busy while he and Mianite take care of Ianite but if I go alone he’ll probably kill me in minutes. I need you to help me run interference.”

Karl said nothing for a long moment and Tom sighed. He was asking a lot of Karl, risking his life to help him do this, but what other choice did he have?

“And you’re sure about this?”

“No.” Tom admitted “But I really don’t have a better plan.”

“Alright then. What do you need from me?”

They flew over to Jordan’s island fully decked out in their strongest armor and weapons. It may have been a bit overkill because c’mon, it’s Jordan, but right now Tom wasn’t sure Jordan wouldn’t attack them outright. He’d threatened him seriously enough before. He was behaving out of the ordinary for sure, oddly enough that Tom wasn’t willing to say he knew what was going through his head.

“You go in through the top, I’ll go in from down here. Place the TNT but don’t light it. I don’t want to destroy more than we need to to get his attention.” Karl has a less than stealthy running stop of a landing on the roof but it’s leagues better than smashing into the wall. He waved down to acknowledge he was ready and with sword drawn, Tom entered the tower.

They clear the tower without a sign of Jordan, meeting up on the floor he’d dedicated to potion work. “Anything?” Tom asked. He’d placed his TNT sparingly, but strategically. Aiming for structural damage over actual brutality.

“No sign of him. But the upper floors are mostly empty, not sure why he built them to be honest.”

“He builds preemptively. Decides what to do with a room after he’s already built it. He might be down in the temple still, not sure if he’d even hear it if he’s in that secret room.”

“Outside then? I don’t really want to be the one to blow up his temple.”

“Won’t work underwater anyway.” They head outside and scatter the leftover TNT around his farms. It’s possible Jordan isn’t here, thought Tom’s not really sure where he would have gone. The Nether wouldn’t do much for him and the End was just, the End. There was nothing there to begin with.

Tom dove down into the Temple but again found no evidence that Jordan was still around. He returned to the surface as Karl was climbing up onto the chicken pen.

“I don’t think he’s here.” Karl commented after laying the last piece he had.

“I don’t think so either. But where could he have gone?”

Jordan had always had nothing short of an impeccable sense of direction. He’d placed no markers in the End to point in the direction of Ianite’s study, he just knew which way to fly. He’d not been the one to make it, presumably she had at some point in her life. All he’d done was contribute a handful of rare books he’d traded wandering traders for. This was her domain entirely, he was just visiting. He glided through the doorway and gracefully came to a stop behind her desk, falling to one knee without hesitation.

“I didn’t expect to see you so soon. What happened?” She asked, standing without pause and pulling him to his feet.

“Tom found my library.” he confessed, Ianite��s expression darkening. “We got into an argument and-” she put a finger to his lips, meeting his eyes with great seriousness.

“I don’t care what was said but tell me this, does he know of my plans?” Perhaps in another life, with another Ianite, Jordan might have noticed the way her facade had dropped ever so slightly when she spoke not of ‘their plans’ but of hers when as far as he knew it had been his idea.

“Nothing more than preventing Dianite from locking you away.”

Her eyes softened and her hand shifted to cup his cheek “Then you’ve done well.” Ianite stepped back to her desk. “I suspected that at least Dianite had his suspicions, it’s why he sent Syndicate to our side in the first place. It’s no matter if they have an idea of what we have in motion. Even if they knew everything, it’s far too late for them to stop us. With what you uncovered I revisited one of my Mother’s old journals. In it is detailed the location of the temple where my Father was imprisoned. That is where we need to go.”

“Tom’s probably told Dianite by now, or at least Karl who would have told Mianite.” “I agree, we must move quickly. But that is also why I have a gift for you.”

He watched as she pulled something out of thin air with a great sense of purpose. She turned back towards him with a single arrow between her fingers. It was made of materials in shades of purple, he would expect no less from her, but the arrowhead itself was a deep, otherworldly amethyst color. She held it out to him with a warning of “be mindful not to touch the arrowhead.”

“What is it made of?” The only materials he knew that would give this color besides dyes were not in this world. There was no manyullyn or purple wood or gemstones besides diamonds and emeralds.

“It’s a tainted arrow.” She said calmly and in an instant he was wary.

“How did you make this?”

“With the wisdom of my other selves. But more importantly is what it is capable of. It’s stronger than any poison. A single scratch will permanently cripple a mortal, while a full strike will kill so thoroughly that there is no chance of rebirth or revival.” His mind jumped immediately to the only mortal in this world who would not be a part of the future he and Tom knew. Was this the reason Karl never arrived in the Land of Mianite?

“And to a God?” he asked, knowing she would not have specified the effects on a mortal if it only affected them.

“It won’t kill us. There is nothing that is capable of killing a God without further assistance or intervention. But it would weaken us to the point where we are hardly capable of anything, let alone accessing our powers.”

“You want me to use this on one of your brothers.” He stated, looking down at what could very well be the single most powerful weapon he’d ever held. All the talk of the Kikoku, the sword that could strike an immortal being, in Ruxomar and only Tucker had wielded it. In the end it hadn’t even mattered. It had been Jordan’s own arrows augmented with Ianite’s power that had brought World Historian down.

“Ideally. Though I leave it up to you as to where you think it will be the most useful. I cannot make another. So choose wisely. I trust you to make a good choice.” She said sagely. With a nod, Jordan carefully slid it into his quiver. It was enchanted so that it never ran out of arrows but that only applied to the most basic kind. He’d made his own as well. Arrows of poison, arrows of harming, and now the tainted arrow.

Ianite had said little of what they were to face upon finally finding her Father’s temple. Only that within it was a book that contained the spell she would need to reach her full strength and that they must find it before either of her brothers. Even with his earlier confrontation with Tom, it was unlikely Mianite or Dianite would get to the book first. That did not, however, mean they wouldn’t try to stop him and Ianite. He’d taken to carrying most of his most powerful weaponry and armor on him in some capacity. Between his inventory, the shulker box and the ender chest, he had access to his more important items at all times on his person.

“We’ll have to go through the Overworld to get to the Temple.” Ianite commented. “I expect by now the others will have rallied in some fashion to stop us if not slow us down. If your friends are waiting for us, will you be able to fight them?”

He took a deep breath and nodded. “I swore to you My Lady. I’ll do what I must to make sure we succeed.”

She smiled in return, a pleased glimmer in her eyes. “Thank you Captain. You have no idea how much your loyalty means to me.” Ianite extended her hand to him. The moment he took it the End blurred before his eyes. When the haze cleared they were in his tower next to his bed. What immediately caught his attention were the blocks of TNT scattered around. There was only one possible culprit.

“Tom.” He all but growled, pulling his sword from its sheath. A quick swipe of the blade broke the bundle of explosives, rendering it inert. As he stepped out from behind the stairs, he saw them both outside the window.

Tom and Karl stood on the path between the animal pens, both dressed in full enchanted diamond armor. Tom held a shimmering diamond sword while Karl had a shining trident. Jordan had hoped, in some deep seeded part of himself, that they wouldn’t be stupid enough to do this. Karl didn’t know any better. He didn’t know the reputation Jordan had built himself among the others. He was the weaponsmith, the artificer, the inventor, the one who pushed the very limits of what was possible with tools and weaponry. Tom however, did. Tom knew better than to challenge him like this.

“Remember Jordan,” Ianite murmured, laying a hand on his shoulder “From the depths and death of Balance arises Justice.” Then even quieter, so that her voice was no more than a whisper “It is their Gods who want me in chains.”

Jordan took a steadying breath and steeled himself, then stepped from the safety of his tower.

“Really Tom? Resorting to your old tricks?” He called out, twirling his sword in preparation for a fight.

Tom adjusted his own grip on his sword. “Until they stop working on you Sparkly pants.”

“Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“I’ll do what I have to so that you don’t change the future.”

“You mean the future where Dianite is evil? The future where we spend weeks hiding and hunting each other down like animals? Where we spend our time devising more and more complicated ways to kill one another? Building secret base after secret base and not trusting anyone? The future where You kill Dianite? That’s the future you want?”

Karl’s eyes widened, clearly Tom hadn’t told him much about the future they were fighting to defend. At first Tom said nothing then, slowly he said “If that’s the future that is supposed to happen then so be it.”

“You may be willing to live through that but I am not willing to put Ianite through that future again. I will not be the one who sentences her to a millennia of imprisonment.”

“You’re supposed to be the balanced one Jordan! The guy who doesn’t choose sides! That’s what you said Ianite was! Don’t you remember?”

“I have always chosen a side. It just wasn’t yours. I chose Ianite even when you had no idea who she was because I was always meant to choose her. It’s my responsibility to prevent her from suffering any more, in this world or any others.”

“I didn’t want to do this Jordan, not really. But you’re not giving me another choice.” Tom said, shaking his head in disappointment. He pulled a redstone torch from his inventory and it was only then that Jordan noticed the thin trail of redstone dust that spread from near Tom.

“So much for Team Ianite then.” Jordan sneered.

“We both know the price of loyalty has always been high. But right now, it seems like yours is just a bit higher.” He dropped the torch, diving into the ocean with Karl right behind him, relying on it to protect them from the worst of the blast.

Jordan barely had a moment to react before his farm exploded, scattering dirt and wheat across the island and the surface of the surrounding ocean. The rest of that half of the island went up seconds later, the blast strong enough to throw him against the tower. The enchantment on his armor protected him well enough but still drove the breath from his lungs. He struggled to get to his feet before the tower blew but then Ianite was there.

His ears were ringing and his eyes were blurring but he could still make out the hand that was reaching towards him to help him to his feet. Her lips were moving but he couldn’t hear what she was saying, nodding in hopes that she had asked a question. “I’m fine.” He managed, blinking through the disorientation. She’d kicked the redstone trail apart he realized, scattering the dust enough to prevent it from reaching the explosives in the tower.

She was saying something as she helped him stand, slinging his arm around her shoulder while putting an uncorked healing potion in his other hand. The last thing he heard before she teleported them away was Tom and Karl, screaming his name.

#mianite #mianitian isles #Mianite fanfiction #mianite is back yall #ianite #dianite #dark!Ianite #syndicate #Captain Sparklez #my writing #part 3 coming soon #words words words

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thespiralgrimoire · 5 years ago

Note

Would you consider posting your thoughts on the Twilight series? Because the bits and pieces I catch on your main are HILARIOUS though maybe it’s just because I find salt hysterical LOL

Oh good grief

Under a read more for my sake if not anyone else’s

The year was 2007. I was 11 year old, in 6th grade, nursing a substantial superiority complex over my classmates, and idolizing the 7th grade girls. This is where my story begins.

Now I won’t get into all the semantics as to why I was such an insufferable little garbage person in middle school, but I will tell you that I was convinced that I was not like other girls. While this proved true, my reasons as to why were completely off the mark in my tweens. Back then, I thought it was because I was smarter, wiser, and more mature than any of the other 6th grade girls in my class.

But not the 7th grade girls. The 7th grade girls were it, man. Nobody was cooler or smarter or more creative than the handful of ladies who were blessed with the patience to put up with my nonsense in middle school. So naturally, when they read Twilight, I read Twilight.

Twilight, if you have the good fortune to not be intimately aware of it by now, is about the Bella Swan, blandest girl in the entire world, moving to a small town to live with her emotionally awkward father, where she meets the Cullens, a clan of vampires who don’t drink human blood, because they’re trying to be morally upright. Her scent is irresistible to one of the vampires, (the only single one among them because the rest are dating each other) named Edward. Edward has the ability to read minds, and Bella is the only person he’s ever met who is immune to this power. I must stress again that she smells so good that he has to physically restrain himself from eating her, and murdering all witnesses. For reasons I can’t really remember now except “because that’s what the books are about”, they fall in love.

Here’s the thing about these books: Even as I was reading them, they gave me the creeps. Something in my little baby mind was vaguely aware that Edward was a messed up motherfucker, and Bella was a one-dimensional stand-in for the reader, and everything interesting in this story was happening on the fringes, facilitated by the far more interesting side characters. There were parts of these books that were uncomfortable to read. There were parts that made me seriously question why these books were so popular. There were parts that made it physically difficult to keep reading. About 3 things happen in the entirety of this series that feels good and satisfying, and none of them are things that the author, who I will derogatorily refer to as Smeyer, meant to be satisfying.

Two things kept me reading these books. The first was, obviously, the 7th grade girls, and my other friends in other grades who quickly caught the hype wave.

The second. Was the fact. That the writing style of these books, despite being the modem for a story that is absurd at best and a giant, flaming, stinking dumpster fire of bad takes, racism, and sexism at worst, is HYPNOTIC. A lot of my opinions about this series have changed drastically over the years, but this is one that I was acutely aware of even as I was reading these books. No matter how stupid or frustrating or repulsive the things that Smeyer is writing are, her writing style will not let you put the story down once you’re invested. And since I was reading these for social clout, I was invested on page 1. I want to believe that this was a trick played on my young mind, but after reading the first chapter of Midnight Sun (the newly released book that is literally just Twilight from Edward’s POV instead of Bella’s), I can confirm that this woman’s style is genuinely Like That. I enjoyed maybe 6 sentences of the 15-page chapter and I am still frothing at the mouth to read more.

So now that I’ve justified why I subjected myself to this shit in the first place, let’s get to some feelings about it.

Edward is a CREEP. He knows this. His family knows this. His love rival knows this. The only person who does not know this, rendering the fact completely inconsequential to the events of the story, is Bella. I’m not really willing to talk about how Edward is such a disgusting model for what young girls should expect out of a partner that there was discourse for MONTHS over Fifty Shades of Grey, but.... Edward is such a disgusting model for what young girls should expect out of a partner that Fifty Shades of Grey exists. It’s literally Twilight fanfiction. Fact check me. I wish I was making this up.

Bella is, as I said before, a cardboard cutout of a human being. The book is from her point of view, and includes copious amounts of her thoughts, and yet it’s still clear that she has absolutely no personality. She is supposed to be your Jane Everywoman, and yet there is not a single relatable thing about her. Her three personality traits are Brown Eyes, Clumsy (but not in a way that matters often), and Likes Edward. That’s it. This girl has nothing going on, which only draws more attenton to the fact that literally everyone else in the story has a rich and interesting backstory. But they’re side characters and this is about Stale White Bread Bella over here, so go fuck yourself if you want more information on Rosalie using her vampire abilities to get revenge on her fiance and his buddies, who assaulted her to the point of near death, or Alice, who sees the future and spent a good chunk of her life in an asylum, or Jasper, who was a Union soldier fighting the Civil War which was ALSO the vampire war???? Fuck off with that shit, this is about Bella.

But you know who the best characters are? The werewolves. But not REAL werewolves. These are Native Americans whose initial transformation is triggered by the proximity of the vampires, because vampires once terrorized their people and now this ability to turn to wolves is hereditary to protect themselves. The fact that these fellas are not REAL werewolves, and that there are real lycanthropes of lore, is mentioned in passing in the last book and never mentioned by anyone ever again.

One of these wolves is Jacob, Bella’s childhood friend and, for the first two books, an absolute sweetheart. Just a big goofball who’s a couple years younger than Bella, and all he wants is the best for her. Real wholesome shit. When Edward leaves her because he thinks that she’s too attached (SHE IS), Jacob literally talks Bella back from the brink. The wolf pack, and the Native American tribe, welcome her as one of them. They’re adorable. I can’t stress enough that they would have also been an excellent candidate for the focal point of this shitshow.

But it doesn’t last. Edward does some real dumb shit in Italy and Bella has to go rescue him, which tips off the Vampire Illuminati that Edward was trying to get killed by (i.e. the real dumb shit). They don’t like that Bella, a human, knows about them, and demands that she be turned. Edward’s family is divided on this. Eventually they decide that they got time because the Vampire Illuminati are ancient and don’t have a good enough sense of time to hold them accountable immediately.

So Bella is fine and Edward is fine and everybody is back in the same town and they’re dating again and literally everyone in the town is like Bella what the FUCK. Nobody likes Edward because they think he’s no good for Bella. They are written like the bad buys. Jacob especially, becomes a huge asshole. Because he decides that he’s in love with Bella now. Because werewolves can imprint on people, which is just a sloppy soul mate mechanic used for absolute evil in this story. He wants to fight Edward over her. Edward is chomping at the bit to throw down, but pretends to be the bigger person even though he’s just as big an asshole about all this as Jacob is. This is as misogynist as it sounds. From this point on Jacob is now also a creep.

Oh, but it gets worse!

I gotta talk about the last book in the series now, Breaking Dawn. Because this shit was so awful that it made me regret, instantaneously, ever second I spent enjoying Twilight.

Bella and Edward get married after they graduate high school because Edward is a religious virgin and Bella is HORNY. They go on their honeymoon. Bella gets pregnant. This is Not Something That Is Supposed To Happen.

Smeyer tells us WHY this happened post-canon. Edward, the virgin, has never nutted. Because of this, he still has living sperm in his balls. So when he boffed Bella, his 80-year-old sperm made it count. I wish I was making this up, y’all. I’m tearing up thinking about it.

Bella is now pregnant with a half-vampire baby that is destroying her body from the inside out. It is growing at an exponential rate. She’s eight months along after three weeks. Edward can hear its thoughts. It loves Bella. Bella has to drink blood or die. Jacob is like What the Fuck. I am also, pretty thoroughly like What the Fuck. A couple members of the Cullen family are, very quietly, like What the Fuck.

Queue the most forced and ineffectual pro-life discourse you’ve ever read in your life.

All is well and good until it’s not. Baby suddenly wants to get out of Bella RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY and thrashes so violently that it shatters every bone in her body between her ribs and her femurs. Edward has to rip her uterus open with his teeth. Baby is out. It has a full mouth of teeth. It bites Bella. Edward whips out several syringes full of his own saliva and injects them into Bella all over to make her change into a vampire. This is all written in disgusting graphic detail that still makes my skin crawl to think about. I cannot fathom why Smeyer was not made to tone this scene down.

So it takes a few days for Bella to change into a vampire, during which time the Cullens (and Jacob) have to look after her hellspawn of a daughter. Jacob decides that he must kill her, because she basically killed Bella. But--- surprise! He wasn’t in love with Bella! He was in love with the eggs in her womb-- particularly this one egg that is now a baby! No more crush on Bella! No more beef with Edward! He’s just in love with a newborn infant. I am, at this point, wondering in my little 12 year old mind, how this was allowed to be published.

Bella wakes up a vampire, and in her first display of rational thought through the entire series, does not like this. Don’t worry though, that’s quickly cancelled out by her naming her baby daughter Renesmee.

Renesmee is clearly supposed to be a sweet and gifted little angel that you’re meant to love, but frankly, all I can picture is the Chucky doll but quieter. She does not talk much, because she has the ability to share thoughts by touching people’s faces. She also grows super fast. In a few days she’s toddler age. Nobody knows what the fuck is going on and nobody has time to worry about it because the vampire Illuminati found out about this (a vampire friend of the family snitched) and they’re coming to fuck up the whole family.

There is a reason why they want to do this but it’s stupid and frankly I’m not going to explain it.

So the vampires mobilize. They call all their vampire friends because their plan is just to fight the thousands-years-old vampire Illuminati over this horrible child. For some reason dozens of vampires agree to this. They’re all smitten by Resume I guess.

So the illuminati comes, the family tells them that Ramune isn’t the problem that they think she is, and they leave.

That’s it. That’s the climax.

And then everyone gets their off-putting happily ever after: Bella and Edward can now fuck as much as they want because neither of them can die. Bella abandons her human life without so much as a second glance. Resonate will physically be an adult by the time she’s 7, which means that Jacob can start fucking her then. Bella’s dad sort of knows what’s going on, but doesn’t. For some ungodly reason I don’t make a bonfire out of these books.

You may notice, if you have any knowledge of Twilight, that there are whole plots that I didn’t talk about. That’s because I’ve surely forgotten things. While I read these books with what I can only describe as a manic fervor in my youth, I could never bring myself to reread them. On God, I tried. Multiple times in the last decade I have pulled my box set, hard covered Twilight books off my shelf, and opened them up. But I never even make it through the first chapter before I am so put off that I have to put them back. The plots are flimsy. The main characters are made of sand. The secondary characters are treated like garbage. The lore is disturbing.

And yet as soon as I heard that Midnight Sun was coming out, I knew that I must read it. I’ve made it through the first chapter. I do not know when and how I will make it through the next, but I know, for little middle schooler Theo’s sake, that I must.

Twilight? Horrible. Twilight Fandom? Geniuses.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

#twilight #spinda tea #shinyshammie #this took a lot out of me #it's not even funny #we never really escape who we were at 12

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incorrectbandofbrothersquotes · 4 years ago

Text

You’re Still You - Chapter 1

Trapper John McIntyre x Hana Chigusa

Summary: A nurse with a complicated past is plucked from her peaceful life by the draft and dropped into the 4077th. After everything life has put her through already, how will she adjust to this new, shocking setting? Especially with the kinds of characters in this M*A*S*H unit?

Tag List: None so far, let me know if you’d like to be added!

Word Count: 2.3k

A/N: So, I’ve decided to post my M*A*S*H fic on here. It’s with my OC, Hana Chigusa, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading her as much as I’m enjoying writing her! Dear Heart (Remastered) is still in the works, though, no worries there!

Warning(s): None :)

Read on AO3

Chapter 1 here we go!!!

Kimpo Airport was dry. The thin air in this part of Korea brought back memories that Hana would rather forget. Which explained her being at the bar now, a mouthful of warm vodka burning her throat, because even the chatter of the other personnel around her and the rumble of vehicles outside couldn’t drown out the reminders the heat and dust brought to the forefront of her brain.

She took another sip of her drink. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easing her bitterness either. Fresh out of nursing school, she had expected to get orders to serve in a hospital in Seoul or Tokyo. Somehow, she ended up being assigned to a MASH unit just miles from the front. They were throwing her right to the wolves.

War didn’t necessarily frighten her. But the Army certainly did. As the bar disappeared behind her eyelids, she vividly recalled her mother’s face when the draft notice came through. The tearful, horrified look. The disappointment in her voice when Hana said she would go.

“How can you join these people?” her mother questioned. “After everything they did to us?”

“Mama, you know I can’t refuse,” Hana returned. “You saw what happened to Shinji.”

“You think I’d forget that?” her mother challenged. “My own son! And now they want to take you too!”

“Even if they let me live, I’d be sent to prison,” Hana shot back, choking on the lump in her throat. “I cannot be locked up again, Mama! I won’t!”

Her mother’s lip trembled and she thrust the summons into Hana’s hand.

“You disgrace yourself serving them,” she spat.

Hana tried to blink away the tears, but they fell anyway. “Mama…”

Her mother turned her back on her, and that was the last they saw of each other.

“Lieutenant - uh - Cheeg - uh - nurse - um -”

A stammering corporal pulled Hana out of her thoughts. She opened her eyes and turned to the side, certain he was looking for her, judging by his frantic glances around and the struggle to pronounce the last name. That usually meant her.

“Chigusa?” she called irritably.

His eyes found hers before looking at the paper and then back at her face. He nodded.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She took pity on him. He was just a kid, after all. Barely five feet tall with a knit cap topping off his baby face. His round glasses added to his wide-eyed, innocent look.

“That’s me,” she said, sliding out of her chair to stand on her feet. “Nurse Hana Chigusa.”

“But your paper says -”

“Hana’s fine.”

She hardly ever went by Hanako anymore. Hana - which she pronounced like the western name “Hannah” - allowed her to blend in with people outside her own community. That was another fight she had with her mother, more than once, but she couldn’t let herself go there now.

“And what’s your name, corporal?” she asked.

“Radar O’Reilly, ma’am,” he replied, saluting her first with his left hand before quickly correcting it to the right, only to drop the paperwork he carried.

She giggled, picking it up for him.

“At ease, Radar,” she said gently. “And for future reference, remain at ease around me. I’m not regular Army.”

“Oh, good,” he sighed, relaxing.

She handed him the paperwork and he took it gratefully.

“Are you ready to go, ma’am?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll just pay my tab.”

She dropped what was probably too much money on the counter beside her empty glass, but she didn’t care. She was ready to get where she was going. Then, she followed Radar outside where a jeep was waiting. In the passenger seat sat a man wearing a bright orange day dress and a wide brimmed straw hat, secured by pink ribbon around his chin. He had white gloves and white pleather shoes, which also matched his belt. The handbag in his lap was black satin with a pearl button clasp.

Hana blinked, not wanting to stare since it was rude, but she couldn’t take her eyes off of him. He smiled kindly at her and wiggled his fingers.

“Hi there,” he said. “Max Klinger. Nice to meet you.”

“Hana,” she replied, still stunned, her eyes roving over him to make sure she was seeing him right. She stopped at his legs. “What no stockings? And with unshaved legs?”

He chuckled. “It’s my face or my legs, sweetheart, and I can’t cover my face.”

She smirked as he held out a hand. He helped her up into the jeep while Radar put her bags in beside her. Then he climbed behind the wheel.

“Say, Radar, are you old enough to drive?” she teased, and Klinger laughed.

“Oh, yeah,” Radar replied earnestly. “My uncle taught me when I was seven. I’m nineteen now, so I’ve had lots of practice.”

She looked at Klinger for confirmation, but he only shrugged. Then, Radar turned the engine and stepped on the gas, and they were off into the Korean countryside.

The further they got from the airport, the more stranded Hana felt. She was stuck here for an undetermined amount of time. To once again be bossed around by the Army. Only this time, she was a part of it.

“So, lieutenant…” Klinger trailed off, realizing she hadn’t told him her last name.

“Spare me the Army stuff, call me Hana,” she replied.

He smiled at that. “So, Hana, where are you from?”

“Newport Beach,” she told him. “It’s about forty minutes south of Los Angeles.”

“Sounds glamorous,” he returned. “I’m from Toledo, myself.”

“Is that where you learned how to dress?” she asked.

“I never dressed like this back home,” he admitted. “I just need the Army to think I’m crazy enough to get me back there.”

She chuckled. “I see. So, how far is the hospital?”

“Not far at all,” he said. “We’ll be there before you know it!”

Klinger wasn’t lying. Barely an hour had gone by before they were rolling up to the cluster of buildings that made up the hospital and camp. Once again, Hana remembered Heart Mountain, but pushed it down. She was not a prisoner here. Well, not technically. If there was anything to appreciate, it was the lack of barbed wire.

They were met at the jeep by a blonde woman whose sternness betrayed her beauty. Hana climbed out of the jeep - with help from Radar - and then the woman stuck out her hand.

“Lieutenant Chigusa, right?” she asked.

Hana nodded, shaking her hand. “That’s right. Hana is fine, though.”

“Not in the Army it’s not,” the woman returned. “I’m Major Houlihan, head nurse here at the 4077th.”

Hana resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Though she supposed it was about time she ran into someone like this. Houlihan ordered Radar and Klinger to drop off Hana’s bags at the nurses’ tent, so they could begin a tour of the facilities. Hana nodded to the corporals to give her permission, before following the major.

“I’ll take you to your quarters last so you can rest once you get there,” she said. “We’ll start with the mess tent.”

The mess tent was typical. The food even more so. Nasty Army stuff any regular person would turn their nose up at. But Hana had eaten worse. Major Houlihan next took her to the hospital and walked her through pre-op, the scrub room, the OR, and post-op, where there were just two patients at the moment.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Major Houlihan warned. “We can have incoming casualties any minute, and you’ll need to be prepared.”

“I understand, Major,” Hana replied.

From the hospital, they moved on to the CO’s office, where Hana said hello again to Radar before meeting Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake. He was a friendly guy, who was definitely not regular Army. He wore a fishing vest with a matching hat loaded with hooks. And he was reclined in his chair, a glass of whiskey in his hand. He didn’t even care that Hana didn’t salute him, and he shook her hand warmly. She liked him right away.

They went to the officer’s club next, which was evidently misnamed. A couple enlisted men were coming out just as Houlihan and Hana were going in. Hana couldn’t help but notice the major’s disapproving glare, though the enlisted guys ignored it. The two women had barely crossed the threshold when two men descended upon them. Both were tall, one had a head of thick, dark hair and blue eyes, while the other had curly, sandy hair and hazel eyes. Both had smiles that indicated mischief.

“Hello, there,” said the dark haired one. “I’m Hawkeye. You must be new here.”

“Trapper,” the other said. “Can we get your name, sweetheart? Buy you a drink to welcome you to Korea?”

Hana glanced between them in disbelief. Did they really think themselves impressive in their mismatched Hawaiian shirts and goofy grins?

“Yes, I am new here,” Hana replied coolly. “And I’m not interested.”

“Not Interested, that’s unique,” said Hawkeye. “What is that, Italian?”

Major Houlihan rolled her eyes. “Ignore these two, Lieutenant. They’re two of our surgeons, Captain Pierce and Captain McIntyre. Unfortunately, they’re very talented or they’d be out of the Army for their disgraceful behavior.”

“I’m sure the patients - despite their gratitude at being alive - are as disgusted as you, Major,” Hana replied, voice dripping with bitterness and sarcasm.

Hawkeye and Trapper snickered.

Houlihan rankled at that. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re one of them!”

“I have no love for the Army, Major, make no mistake,” Hana said seriously. “I’m here because the alternative was prison. Now, are we done with this tour?”

“I’d say so,” Houlihan said, tossing her hair over her shoulder and storming out.

Hana breathed a sigh of relief and, ignoring the giggling surgeons, made a beeline for the bar, hoping to leave Pierce and McIntyre behind her as well. But she wasn’t that lucky. The pair followed her and took seats on either side of her. She bit back a groan. Being “fresh meat” wasn’t her style. And she didn’t care for the attention of men. At least, not here.

“Sure we can’t get you that drink, Not Interested?” Hawkeye pressed. “It’s on the Army.”

She smirked and pointedly ignored him. She could see this guy thrived on attention - good or bad - so giving it to him was the last thing she would do. She looked at the bartender.

“Vodka soda, please,” she said.

He got right to work.

Trapper tapped her on the shoulder and she spared him a glance.

“Don’t you want to make friends here?” he asked. “Could be a long war.”

“Your eyes have been on my chest since I walked in, forgive me if I don’t believe friendship is what’s on your mind,” she returned.

The bartender placed her drink in front of her. In Korean, she thanked him and asked his name. He appeared surprised to be addressed by someone fluent, and happily told her his name was Kwang. She offered a slight bow of her head, he bowed back, and then, beaming, starting polishing glasses.

“You speak the local?” Trapper questioned. “Where’d you learn that?”

“I learned as a child, we had Korean neighbors,” she said.

“That’ll be helpful,” Hawkeye said. “We end up with a lot of Korean casualties here.”

She blinked. “Really?”

He nodded solemnly. It was the first honest expression she’d seen from him.

“A lot of locals end up in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.

“So do a lot of North Koreans,” Trapper added.

Hana’s eyes widened as she looked at him. “You mean, you treat the enemy?”

He nodded. “Of course. We’re doctors.”

Hana almost smiled. If it weren’t such a gruesome subject, she would have. She looked between these two men whose first impression had so turned her off. What a front they put up. She wondered why they hid their decency. The fact remained that it existed, and she wanted to acknowledge it.

“Hana Chigusa,” she said.

“What?” Trapper asked.

“My name,” she said. “It’s Hana Chigusa.”

He grinned. “Nice to meet you.”

“So, Chigusa,” Hawkeye said. “That’s definitely not Italian.”

She chuckled. “I’m half Japanese.”

They remained at the bar a while, and they got to know her better. She told them about growing up in Newport Beach and her mother’s tea shop there. She told them she went to nursing school at Columbia in New York City, just to experience something new. She told them she was drafted, like them, and came reluctantly to Korea.

“So, is the surgery really intense here?” she wondered.

She was pretty nervous. She only had infrequent practical experience post-nursing school. Though, she had graduated at the top of her class.

Hawkeye shrugged. “It’s meatball surgery mostly.”

“Pretty basic extraction of junk,” Trapper said. “Things get more complicated if a limb’s gotta be removed or something, but we just do whatever we can to keep them alive.”

Hana nodded. It sounded about as brutal as she expected. She hoped she’d be able to endure what she would witness. She wondered if she would end up more like Trapper and Hawkeye, with a façade to cover up the ugliness of it all. Then again, she realized she already had one up. What was one more?

Suddenly, a voice came over the loudspeaker.

“Attention!” it called. “Attention all personnel! Incoming wounded! All personnel report to the OR!”

Hana, Hawkeye, and Trapper all got to their feet. She swallowed. This was the moment to prove herself to her new co-workers. She pushed the nerves away.

“Scared?” Trapper asked.

She looked him in the eye with every ounce of confidence she had.

“Nothing scares me anymore,” she told him.

Her answer perplexed him, but he didn’t have time to analyze it. All three of them jogged out of the bar and across the camp to the hospital.

#m*a*s*h #trapper john mcintyre #m*a*s*h fic #hanako chigusa #you're still you series

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