#though seriously i think i just...narratively want them to be more equals?

[egophiliac]

Sorry, most likely my memory being poor, but I thought Malleus' mom (don't know how to spell her name and too lazy to check how to spell it) was already an adult when Lilia ""proposed""?? Like I was always under the assumption that it was like a one-sided child crush on somebody completely out of your league you tend to have as a kid 💀

I don't think they say how old she was? although it's entirely possible I just misunderstood; my Japanese is...shaky. :') the actual line is "幼い頃に私に求婚したのは偽りか?", which I read as "isn't it true that you proposed to me as a kid?", and took as her being older than him, but not necessarily an adult (like, I was thinking of Lilia as being not quite a preteen and Mel being preteen/young teen). although I don't know if there's a connotation or something I'm missing that implies a bigger age gap, if that makes sense!

(and of course, I might also just be forgetting some other line -- if someone else knows, then please correct me! I need to know which headcanons need adjusting 👀)

BUT YEAH in a canon-y sense, Malleus is 178 and around the third-years developmentally. which makes me think that even though dragons have a way longer lifespan, they go through childhood at about the same rate as most fae (or at least the kind that Lilia is) and just kinda...slow waaaaay down once they hit adulthood. so it makes sense in my brain that he and Meleanor could've basically grown up together!

...it makes it angstier that way, anyway. :)

[tritoch]

I wish people were willing to have a slightly broader or more expansive understanding of FFXIV's women because I think there's so much there in terms of easily-unearthed subtext that no one really thinks about! And I don't mean this in a "people need to re-evaluate their response to the women of Stormblood" way (though I do think that's largely true), I mean I think fandom's understanding even of the women it mostly likes is pretty weak. And you can say that's because the women are underwritten, and I won't argue that they couldn't use more attention from the writing, but that doesn't prevent you from analyzing them the way you can any character in fiction.

Like everyone's always like, oh, Y'shtola and Krile are like your snarky wine aunts, haha. But...Sharlayan is a pretty ossified and patriarchal society from what we see of it in Endwalker and places like the AST quests. Can we open ourselves to the possibility that it means something that almost every young Sharlayan woman we meet, almost all young women in academia, tends to be a little sharp and quick on the retort? The arch and snarky ways in which those two carry themselves reflect in some sense the facts that Krile is almost literally a nepo baby woman in STEM who is barely older than her students, while Y'shtola learned her behaviors from her much older female mentor, a woman who hated Sharlayan academic culture so much she literally abandoned it to go live in a cave.

Or like, Alisaie! Fan jokes and meta frequently buy into her tendency to characterize the dynamic between her and Alphinaud as a jock/nerd, street savvy extrovert vs book smart introvert thing. Except, tragically, Alphinaud's highest stat is 100% Charisma and he absolutely pulled in his student days. All his greatest achievements are diplomatic, and he very easily develops strong friendships with people in every culture you learn about. Alisaie is the determined, sensitive genius who revolutionizes Eorzea by proving the tempered can be healed. She's just permanently carrying a chip on her shoulder that while she and her brother are remembered as the youngest students in Studium history, actually he got in six months before her, a fact pretty much no one else ever brings up once. She's constantly fuming over the fact that he was marginally better than her in certain specific ways in high school, and looking to differentiate them in ways that actually fail to credit her own obvious strengths and accomplishments. I think that's so fun! It's so juicy, and it's equally good for comedy or serious character studies.

Venat is a genuinely benevolent hero who has no compunction sacrificing lives for the greater good. Minfilia is kind and compassionate and clearly on some level actually buys into the narrative of her own unique moral authority. Ysayle is a revolutionary firebrand with almost no concern for the common man, whose death reflects her Javert-like inability to reconcile her own romantic belief in justice with the tragic ways her blinkered worldview (born largely of trauma) let her be easily co-opted by a violent system. But even people who like these characters rarely move past surface-level reads (people who think Venat is just an all-loving mommy figure make me want to fucking die). The fandom is allergic to drawing connections the game doesn't draw, and fails to recognize that FFXIV is a game where characters voice understandings of themselves and others that are wrong about as often as they're right.

You can already see the ways that women like Wuk Lamat and Cahciua and Sphene are getting flattened or losing their shading in fan reception and it's boring. Like I'm not even saying this because you should take female characters more seriously or something (though you should), I'm literally just bored to tears sometimes and if you guys turn Wuk Lamat into another Hot Dumb Jock Lady, I will combust.

[almacambiondaughterofsaleos]

Miss Heed Is A Better Example Of An Abusive Female Character Than Stella

I know I have made several Helluva Boss and Villainous comparisons, but I do think that Heed is a better representation of a female abuser than Stella is. The biggest thing is Heed doesn't feel like a plot device for poor sympathy but instead feels like her own character and even her own reasons that leads her to abusing people. Stella on the other hand was made abusive just to justify Stolitz as a ship and not give Stolas any accountability for letting an affair break his home life.

I also think what makes Heed a better representation is that she shows how subtle and insidious abuse is. Stella is more of a Lifetime movie stereotype that plays into so many cliches that it is borderline nonsensical. Miss Heed on the other hand she represents herself as a respective person who on the surface seems to want to better the world in reality she uses and manipulates those around her. As best can be seen with Flug and those like Coyote and Omega, where she uses terms of affection on them but it's really to mask how she really sees them as tools for her uses. With Flug, that abuse is seen the most where she time and again uses his trust/love for her to get what she wants from him and discard him when she gets it.

Otherwise, Stella just is just openly cartoonishly evil and has no life outside of making Stolas miserable which makes her abuse feel so flat. Her status as a mother is just so minimal and even then it's just to hammer how "evil" she is to an annoying degree. It also doesn't help that the situation she is in reeks of double standards where Stolas is given the babying treatment for how he was forced into an arranged marriage while she's treated like a the devil when she's in the same predicament. The show took the coward's way out and didn't try to make her equally sympathetic so that Stolas could be a multifaceted character rather than a babied creator's pet. She doesn't have to be babied but at least given some sympathy that she is devoid of because the narrative got too attached to the owl.

Even though Miss Heed is a straight up abuser, the show gives enough sympathy that you can understand how she can become like this but still not excuse what a trashy person she is. I can't imagine Vivziepop doing something like this for Stella because it would go out of her comfort zone of giving actual depth to characters she has demonized to better her ship. In other words, the show builds up who Heed is outside of that abuse and alongside her instagram account. It what makes me take seriously how she wronged Flug over whatever Vivziepop puts with Stella.

[aleespace]

After watching almost all TMNT versions I came to a conclusion that I can best describe each one of them as someone telling a story

1987 is adult telling little funny stories to their kid.

They're bad at creating strong narrative and they mostly improvise but they try to make their kid smile and they do all they can. They often repeat themselves, they also often put little references to adult life, they know their kid won't understand it, but they can't help it but to have some fun as well. This adult creates simple characters and all of these characters speak simply so the kid can understand but you can still feel that characters are not that oblivious to the world around them, it's just that they all seem to censor themselves so the kid can follow them with their adventures

2003 is adult trying to teach their kid about the world.

They don't shy away from truth of the life but they also don't try to be brutal just for the sake of it. The adult trusts that their kid will understand them but also they can't help it but sprinkle some hope here and there. And even though it might not be the case in real life, every story this adult tells their kid has a good ending, not always the best, but optimistic and hopeful no matter what. Kid is a little wary of these stories but they won't ever stop listening because it means so much to them that they are finally treated as an equal

2012 is teenager's story.

After listening to all kinds of different stories they finally want to create something of their own. They're good at it. They also create this story for those who are just like them. They try to look smart, they work hard and eventually they create something even an adult can enjoy. But despite getting adult's recognition this teenager still is only a teenager. They can't help it but put in stupid unfunny jokes and on the next page of their story they try to get away with as much brutal edgy content as possible. Occasionally teenager's little sibling is trying to take a peak at this story and the teenager smiling smugly let's them, just this once. This teenager is self-confident but not in obnoxious way. They still have much to learn, but the difficulties of storytelling only spark their will more

2018 is not one person's story.

This is a side group project created by a bunch of unhinged terrifyingly talented teenagers. Yet they refuse to take this project seriously. Despite having incredible potential in them these teenagers willingly and knowingly choose to goof around and just have fun. They don't need paper, because the story creates itself as they discuss it in a cafe or on their way home from school. Opinions about this group of kids are very polar. While their art teacher sees them as Shakespeare and Da Vinci's kids, other teachers look for excuse to expell this group of loud and annoying nerds. After graduation this group falls out but stories continue living among newer students of the school

2023 is kid's story.

This kid is shy and smart, but overall they're pretty average. They've seen too many stories and creating something of their own seems terrifying, because they feel like they have some sort of legacy to live up to. They're confused. They try to create this big story but they don't have enough experience or knowledge about the world around them. If you think you saw a joke in their story it was probably unintentional. It was also bad. And they're bad at writing so they draw a little comic book instead. They are not ready to share this story with anyone yet because they are not sure of where this story is going. They have a few friends and sometimes they share their work with them, but not all of it, just pieces they're proud of. This isn't really a story if you think about it, rather a start to mysterious path. Maybe someday this kid will share this story with the world but right now they're keeping it to themselves, year after year growing with it and it's characters

[linkspooky]

In your fanfic, will we anticipate to see more of a darker side of katara?

This question is about my avatar fanfic Burn this City Down, which you should all go read.

Sorry for the late reply, but I wasn't sure how to answer this question at first. In general I tend to take characters to dark places in my fan fiction. My interpretation of Maki and Mai Zen'in for instance, is far darker than most of the fandom's.

However, there is a specific type of avatar fanfic that usually gets tagged "Dark Katara" on Ao3 where she basically acts the way she did in Southern Raiders. While I do like that episode and the side of Katara it brought out, I'm not only interested in Katara's dark side.

You could call this "exploring Katara's dark side", but I think what's most important is writing Katara in a way where the narrative is hard and unforgiving on her flaws, in order to push her to grow and develop. Katara has flaws just like everyone else, she's equally as capable of hurting and harming someone and it really depends on what the circumstances push her to do. I like to write stories where characters are challenged really hard. Stories where even the heroes under the right circumstances, can be pushed to do bad things because they are just as human as the villains. Stories where characters aren't internally good or internally bad, but learn to be better by trying to be better.

I guess the question is will I have Katara do bad things - and yes, I like it when the good guys do bad things. I think it's more interesting when the protagonists are morally fallible because the more flawed they are the more room they have to grow. Again I'm not sure if I'd called this a darker Katara though, because that's just how I tend to write characters I come down hard on their flaws. Look at the way I talk about Gojo in any of my Jujutsu Kaisen posts. No one ever believes that he's my favorite character because I'm constantly criticizing him like I'm his disappointed and impossible to please mother.

There is one thing I like to avoid when writing women though and that's the dreaded madonna whore complex. Seriously, it's everywhere, we can't let Freud keep winning like this.

Katara and Azula are character foils both in ATLA itself and in my fan fiction, and in comparing them Azula is a lot more flawed than Katara. However, I don't want to end the comparison on one of them is good and one of them is bad because that's BORING. The point in comparing them would be to point out they are both equally human, struggling with their own flaws as teenagers growing up in a messed up world.

@zuko-always-lies and I were talking about this in general and ATLA's approach to writing Katara's character, and while Katara is a character with a lot of depth she doesn't really have an arc constructed around her character flaws. Katara is a good woman so she doesn't really need to be challenged in any way by the narrative to grow, she's busy serving the role of the group's heart and an example of goodness. If I were to change one thing about Katara I wouldn't necessarily write a darker Katara, just construct a narrative around her that calls out her flaws and really pushes her to her limits so she has to grow as a person. Even characters who are totally goody two shoes like Aang can have severe personality flaws and an arc based around challenging those flaws - it's why he's my second favorite character.

[monochromatic-heartzz]

Man. I am in a roll lately.

I've been having so much Sampo on the brain but let's discuss a stupid concept i thought up. This probably won't be long dw. (<- Future Heart here, hi. I lied.)

Could 5 Star Sampo be a Preservation unit?

Now. I know what some of you are thinking. "Preservation!? It doesn't fit him! He should be a very strong dps or an irreplaceable support! Why preservation????" And to that i say, maybe he should be.

But. It's just... i've talked about this in a post before but it was a very short jokey thing that was the first time i'd done an analysis in a while.

Belobog. The planet where its people follow the preservation. They want to preserve humanity and civilization. So they fight to survive, just enough until the Astral Express gives their assistance and they can be free from the pain the Stellaron has given them.

Well, you know, there's a biiit of an outlier in the Belobog cast. And it's, as you know, our old Sampo Koski, Masked Fool who came here to help drive the plot forward. He follows the path of Elation, as all Masked Fools do, and as far as we're concerned there should be no connection with him and the Preservation, and no indication that his views align with it.

WRONG!!!!! Masquerade Duet. Sparkle guesses that the reason Sampo wants his mask back is because of a catastrophe in Jarilo-VI, and judging by his reaction and later words, she hit the nail square on the head.

So?

That's. Kinda it? He wants to preserve the civilization in Jarilo-VI, and all the work he put would be undone if this catastrophe were to happen without interference. All the work he put into helping preserve humanity in this planet. Mmm does anyone remember what happened to an outsider who helped preserve civilization on Belobo- Fire trailblazer.

Yes. It's because they are the protagonist. And they will get every playable path one day, but. Canonically, they become a pathstrider after their views and feelings align with the path.

Let's be real, Sampo loves Belobog. Pretty evident from context clues and dialogue even outside of it. He clearly helped preserve it, though it was from the sidelines and really nothing major.

So. How would he earn being a preservation path thingy?

The catastrophe in Jarilo-VI. His mask.

Gang. I think we found our way.

And yes. Gameplay paths don't equal canon lore paths, we've known for a while. But sometimes narratively ingame paths can be used to deepen a character in one way or another, even if its not stated.

Even though it would be a bummer if he got his big 5 star form and it was a preservation unit. I think it sounds sweet. After probably helping it so much, it would be a nice way to say "Yeah this is more his home than Epsilon ever would be, he has the will of the preservation to show it!!"

I do not know. I am. Once again: spitballing. Don't take this too seriously we have nothing about this guy and im working hard on not crying because i see no new content of him.

This is definitely not a hill i would ever die on. But i rarely see people talking about him being a preservation unit, and i wanted to show the idea a little love

[travelling-on-the-octopath]

This potential Lysicasphardette situation you mentioned intrigues me, may I ask to know more of your thoughts regarding it?

Okay so. This all started because the last time I played FE3H, I was in tears over Linhardt and Lysithea's A-support and the ending I got for them, and decided that in no uncertain terms was I letting Lysithea have another ending in Princes.

HOWEVER. This is MY playpen and I have no self-control when it comes to my toys, and I've always really dug the complementary nature of Caspar and Linhardt's relationship. Add that to how I think the Empire might have a different relationship to non-monogamy that the other two countries in Fódlan, and I was locked in with having them ot3 it out kinda through the academy phase and mainly through the war phase when Lysithea's mortality comes into the narrative proper. But writing this fic has me locked up in the cellars of the datamine, and as I'm going through different supports for a whole bunch of other characters, I realize that Annette, surprisingly, connects all three of these people. And though I don't hold myself at gunpoint to my initial ideas for endgame relationships, this fic is such a beast that I try to have an idea of where I'm going before I set sail. (if you could see my shitty little relationship chart . . . oh buddy oh boy.)

But this isn't necessarily about Princes specifically, so here's what appeals to me to such a great deal:

I think it would just be funny if I stuck Linhardt with the three people in all of Fódlan who have Absolutely No Chill About Anything

Bonus points for themes and narratives that a relationship has people from each of the three countries on equal footing

Starting off with the only two in this dynamic without a support chain:

Caspar and Lysithea:

Caspar's simple approach to life is a good contrast to how complicated Lysithea's has always been. I imagine Lysithea agonizing over whether to go through with having her Crests removed--what if it just kills her and her parents are left alone, what if she's worse off than she was before and she's more a burden to those around her than anything--and Caspar being far, FAR more direct than Linhardt and just asking her to follow what she wants. If it's a chance at the life that was taken from her, she has to take it, because what would be the point in making another choice and living however long to regret it? Obviously it ISN'T that simple, but Linhardt addresses the truly emotionally intimate in a roundabout way that Caspar just . doesn't.

Linhardt and Caspar:

I mean . . . need I say more than "childhood best friends"?

Linhardt taking pride and getting excited over Caspar's successful execution of his tactics (seriously . . . top ten linhardt moments)

Seems to be wearing an "I don't want to be here" sign whenever Caspar is Up To His Shit, in actuality rarely has a place he would rather be unless it involves being asleep. Cited to always be the one patching up Caspar after his scraps. Linhardt you could just stop that. But that wouldn't be nearly as fun.

Also absolutely devastating things happening in their enemy dialogue at Fort Merceus.

Caspar and Annette:

Caspar's surprisingly mature attitude even pre-skip to balance out Annette's general disastrousness. To see such an excitable guy be the voice of reason is deeply delicious to me.

And I don't think this is a glitch in the datamine, so I'm going to say with my whole chest: I think it's cute that their B- and A- supports take place during the war phase! It's a way of raising the stakes from the previous supports that doesn't unnecessarily drag out tensions and revert character development. Annette is worried about the consequences of her clumsiness when it comes to her troops; Caspar is there as proof that she can never be such a "failure" to risk the lives of the people under her command, and keeps her catastrophizing in check. "You absolutely WILL make worse mistakes if you keep thinking you will. You have to just deal with what comes without acting as if the worst possible scenario will befall you."

(also..........their hair colours looks so good together. i'm not even sorry to say it. i know it's because annette's eye colour is basically the Caspar Special but that's never stopped me before.)

Lysithea and Annette:

I need an lsyinette academic rivals AU on my desk by monday at 10:00AM

I knowwww I can't always get an A-Support when I want one, so in my head this grows into something along the lines of "I use you as a goal to better myself, and in developing those skills I've come to want to protect you with all I have."

Annette and Linhardt:

Now for Annette/Linhardt I think it's the inevitable clash of them that makes things very very interesting. "Workaholic whose efforts are bolstered by the idea that she has to be better for other people" v. "Man who IS diligent about that which interests him and is important to him, but is unwilling to compromise his ideal life of a slow pace/the ability to rest whenever the mood strikes him." By the end of their A-Support it's established what Annette is able to bring out of Linhardt:

yet not quite what Linhardt is able to bring out of Annette, which I think would be something along the lines of, "You cannot work yourself into importance to other people. They either wish for you in their lives or they don't. Breaking yourself in half is a detriment first and foremost to you, not to mention to the people into whose lives you've integrated yourself." It's the idea of being more than your use to people, and not working yourself to be bone when those bones are the ones you have to live with. Life is about balance, and that means not overdoing it because you think you have to.

(this support ends with Annette being like "That!!!! sounds like marriage Linhardt!!!!" and he's like "why yes :3 wake me up every day?" Annette says she's not interested in marrying a man who can't wake himself up in the morning, but THAT'S why I have to give them Caspar and Lysithea too. They take shifts dlfgjdfkg.)

And last but not least, the start of this experiment of mine:

Linhardt and Lysithea:

What could I possibly say that they don't.

I dunno I get butterflies in my stomach whenever he hits that "someone I care about" beat. It's so earnest from Linhardt

The entire support is golden, but Lysithea blushing about the idea of being Linhardt's family has me crying real tears. And this:

He wants to work so hard for her . . . I'm actually devastated they're everything to me. AND THEIR ENDING GIVES HER THE CHANCE TO HAVE A FAMILY . . . GOD I'M SICK TO MY STOMACH!!!!

Anyway. I just think they're really neat. Gave myself the craziest rarepair of all time and now I have to live with the consequences. there was literally only one other fic, not in English, for lsyicasphardt, and i fear that if i go down this road i'm going to hit a dead end. absolute devastation.

[randomthefox]

"Every version of Sonic is valid!" people when they see a version they personally don't like (it's almost always the Game one)

Ok, but seriously, what these people need to understand is that just because every version of a character is valid doesn't make every version equally important to the source material. None of the adaptations would have existed without Game Sonic, so to act like he can just be easily disposed of in the grand scheme of things is really, really stupid.

"Every Sonic is Sonic!" *Lists characters who all share the name of Sonic but couldn't have less in common in terms of personality.*

Seriously, how disingenuous do you have to be to say that movie Sonic is exactly the same character as, say, Archie Sonic? Let alone game Sonic.

Like you might as well say that Christian Bale's Batman and Adam West's Batman are the same character. I mean they're both named Batman, aren't they? So there is obviously no nuance in tone or thematic portrayal that distinguishes them as unique distinct characters in any conceivable way.

These people just hate Sonic, there's really no other way to interpret this "every version of Sonic is Sonic" shit. They resent the video games, they are illiterate and cannot comprehend nuance in characterization portrayal, they just look at the character design and name and end there and then tell you you're stupid for actually using your brain. They want to run this narrative that game Sonic isn't special or important because they hate video games and hate Sonic that's really all there is to it.

Again: imagine saying the Batman comic books don't matter. Because I dunno the movies are more popular or something. Even though literally everything in the movies is taken FROM the comics, and they owe everything to them. Would ANYBODY who cares about Batman as a character take someone who says the Batman comics aren't THE most important and foundational portrayal of the character because they're the source material seriously? I don't think they would. But hey, the Sonic Double Standard.

[astridthevalkyrie]

Discussing this show post season 2 is tricky because the writing gets inconsistent and framing idiotic (no one can convince me that Tory’s shit-talking Sam to Robby wasn’t meant to come off as truthful (the show very obviously agrees with her words), but to people that watch the show critically it rightfully fell flat), that aside, (and i’m not trying prove you wrong or whatever to be clear i agree with you on a lot, i’m just sincerely interested in the topic) i feel like it’s a no-brainer that robby liked sam. he loved her. and his love for her was somehow more real than both whatever she represented for miguel was (it’s worth mentioning that robby is unfortunately literally the only male teen who wasn’t narratively speaking rewarded with a girlfriend for “leveling up”), or the questionable blind adoration robby seemed to have for tory this season.

robby does call out tory for attacking sam, he treats that as seriously as the show does tbh. it’s hard not to “excuse” it like that because the bias in the show is insane. he doesn’t even defend himself when she implies she somehow had it harder after the fight she started because she didn’t get to “run away” even though she wasn’t in juvie and then went back to school. because why would he. the show is making a point that if they’re not equal it’s because robby’s worse. they’re bonding. pair the spares.

is having doubts whether robby kicked miguel over purposefully on television which robby saw not worse than implying that sam got with miguel? we see his reaction for a reason that literally broke his heart idk. that’s a big part of it. also miguel taunted him about sam’s love and there’s the kiss, and juvie is juvie… shit went down, he’s hurt, does that you’re not getting what you want comment actually mean he never truly liked sam? i think it doesn’t because it was him lashing out.

speaking about missing her, you’re on point about the showrunners needing keenry to happen without any drama, but samrobby’s moment during the prom fight was not equivalent to toriguel’s. not to be corny but robby’s face when sam tells him he broke her heart too… self-explanatory, toriguel didn’t even get a word. and robby even claps for sam when she scores against tory. it’s s5 when the dynamics that aren’t coupled up truly stopped mattering. also i feel like it makes sense that it’s sam who’s shown missing robby’s presence more, because while i don’t think he was a rebound to her the way tory was to miguel she still had some conflicted feelings because miguel seemingly replaced her with her rival and all that complex stuff, the point is she was more emotionally checked out than robby was. robby saw how hurt she was at roller rink, his love for her shows in his reaction to that imo.

damn this got long i’m sorry

never apologize for length it's a blessing to get analysis like this in my inbox LOL also, if it seems like i'm going off topic i am, i'm too much of a fan of tangents and a lot of this is less making a point and more thinking out loud.

you're right about a lot of it! and yes, the inconsistency especially around sam makes things very hard to actually make sense of. was she treating robby like a rebound all while secretly missing miguel? is she only interested in miguel because tory is? (is tory only interested in miguel because sam is? can these girls stay out of each others' lives or must they be obsessed with each other forever? hm.) what is it that sam and robby liked about each other?

sam is clearly always turned off by aggressiveness and insincerity. she sees kyler picking on the nerd trio, their next scene is her being done with him. miguel shoves robby, she's done with miguel. robby lies to her about the medal, she kisses miguel after finding out. but what does sam like?

she kisses miguel after he beats up kyler, is kind to her despite the rumors, and takes her out on a date. she tries to kiss robby after the two of them protect demetri from hawk at the mall. she's attracted to kindness, protective natures, and earnestness, it seems like. when miguel and robby aren't deeply cobra kai-pilled, they both fit the bill.

now what does robby like about sam? obviously he's attracted to her right away because pretty girl. sweet girl. the more time he spends with her, it builds. but i don't think he's close to in love with her until she tells daniel about his home situation. that's the difference between samguel and samrobby—miguel's crush on sam never feels like more than a crush on her because she's a pretty girl. robby starts off like that, but then he hangs out with her pre dating. he clearly has fun being around her. he can be friends with her. and i'm being biased, sure. a guy beating up my ex would not be as attractive to me as a guy faking an injury to get me out of the house. sam's attraction to robby and robby's attraction to sam both feel, like you said, real.

and yes, it helps that the show never tries to show that robby "scored" sam (or tory) the way miguel did sam, or the way hawk "scored" moon or demetri "scored" yasmine.

i don't remember all the way back in 2020, but i'm 50% sure i rolled my eyes the first time robby and tory interacted in the juvie center or wherever it was. pair the spares. meh. i do think that keenry is better than toriguel (because, again, they let robby be friends with tory first), but it's still. meh. idk. a lot of people say that tanner and peyton had chemistry on screen, and even though i do think keenry is better than toriguel, i think she had more chemistry with xolo (and mary. obviously).

tory has reasons to bat so hard for robby staying at ck, mind you. i think it's ooc that she's immediately inviting him there while hawk is pointing out that robby is the one who put miguel in the hospital, but if your only male friends and strongest fighters are hawk and kyler, and then eventually just kyler, you can't blame a girl for trying to get more tolerable guys in. it's probably just to spite sam at first, but while i don't really know what tory's attracted to specifically, her attraction to robby feels much more natural than it was to miguel.

aside from spite, i really do not get why robby likes tory. that's kinda why i wish their enemies arc had lasted a little longer, maybe even the fake dating out of spite thing ran a bit longer than one episode all while they start to actually like each other. i might've liked keenry more then.

we go back to the inconsistency and poor writing here. robby's very cynical and spiteful in s4, which, love it for him, it just doesn't. totally make sense to me. i would also get mad if daniel hadn't visited me in juvie, but the show says that the reason is mad is only because daniel gave him up to the cops, which. is robby just blind to the fact that juvie would have been longer had daniel not done that? teenagers are immature, sure, but typically all of robby's grievances have good reasons, and this one falls flat to me. why is robby in cobra kai? why is he dating tory? how much of it is spite and how much of it is just wanting to belong? it feels like the latter, but the show keeps saying it's the former.

the scene where sam says that on the tv is just. siiighhh. i can see why robby's upset about it. i really can. it hurts that sam isn't sure. buuuuuuuuuut. sam-colored glasses here. her telling a reporter, "that was an accident, at least, i hope it was," is not her not believing in robby. they didn't know each other that long! she didn't see it happen front and center. her telling a reporter that is what you can expect out of a teenage girl. i think it's unfair for robby to expect her to be like "no robby definitely didn't do it on purpose, c'mon!" and i think it'd be just as fair to not expect that from him had sam kicked tory off the railing instead (more au ideas....).

is it worse than implying she and miguel got together? is it worse than telling her she's spoiled? maybe not. there is a difference that robby is saying those things out of hurt and lashing out to purposefully hurt sam, while sam didn't say what she said on tv to hurt robby. and when she yelled at him "robby what did you do!" that was very much a spur of the moment reaction. robby accusing her and miguel of getting together right away could fall under that too, but the "you're not getting what you want" line was thought out. that's something he says like he's been waiting to say it, and that's precisely what i mean when i say that if i was sam, it would make me wonder if he ever liked her.

there's a lot of things he could've said to hurt her. but "i get to be the first person to ever tell you this." hmmmm. you lived with me dude. you know i'm not spoiled. you can call me a cheater or say i led you on or used you as a rebound, but saying i always get what i want when i was attacked on the first day of the school for something i did i was drunk. hmmmmmmm.

and just to be clear!!!!!!! that scene is probably my favorite samrobby scene. i fuck heavy with the angst, i fuck very heavy with the idea of robby saying that to make sam feel as hurt as she made him feel, and i fuck heavy with sam holding her ground even after that and telling him alright fine man if that's what you want. the worst things about samrobby and specifically sam are the inconsistencies. why didn't robby email her back eventually. why didn't sam visit him in juvie. i can come up with reasons for these things, but it would've really helped for them to have at least one conversation after robby leaves cobra kai about all this stuff and air it out.

and ohhhhh, the prom scene. "you broke my heart too." ohhhh dear. i wanna see the script for that scene. i wanna see if robby's face at that line was an actor choice or something the writers meant to put in. the lack of follow up between them makes me think it was just something said so that miguel could say "let's not talk about that moment you had with robby." the equivalent of the longing look between miguel and tory. give sam and miguel both a scene of missing their exes with no follow up. i agree with you, samrobby and toriguel's moments are not the same! miguel staring at tory could easily be just a teenage boy seeing his very hot ex in a tight dress and reacting. you don't just say something like "you broke my heart too" to someone and never address it again!!! but i think the writers treated these moments were the same even though they weren't. robby's face showed that those words affected him. he should've thought about those words. instead he kisses tory in the next scene.

(poor sam too. everyone hates on her for that line too. "wdym she's the one who cheated on him how did he break her heart." it's not that hard to see. he joined ck. he pushed a kid off the railing. he insulted her. those things are all pretty heartbreaking.)

INCONSISTENCY! does sam miss robby? he broke her heart, but instead of looking at him sadly during the all valley, she's looking bitter about robby teaching ck the miyagi do moves. i'm not saying she can't be both, but it's not consistent. sam flips between caring about robby and missing him and just not giving a single flying fuck about him.

TLDRRRRRRRR! we're in agreement that robby genuinely liked sam. but i also think that if i was sam, i would doubt that because of his words and actions. i also would've made keenry a slower development and shown robby actually missing sam more clear.

also, when does robby clap for sam against tory? i only remember the little "yes sam!" after her fight with devon. tell me when pls i eat up all samrobby moments LOL.

[imthepunchlord]

Just a random question, but do you like adrien and marinette being the main duo, or do you think two other people would've been better?

Yes and no.

It's kinda complicated.

So, with my long break from Miraculous, clearing out my salt mines, and doing a gradual rewatch of the show with fresh eyes and enjoying the nostalgia of what used to be, I can say I am reminded on why, we as a fandom, enjoyed them as leads and as a pair.

There was some yin-yang potential in their dynamic, specifically playing off Lady Wifi introducing the Head vs Heart idea.

Marinette's an Empathetic Head. She's observant and perceptive, the planner and quick thinker, typically, she responds logically to what's presented to her. But she does feel deeply for others, and that empathy and kindness drives her to step up and help others.

Adrien in turn is a Reasonable Heart, at least, meant to be. He works off his feelings, goes with his gut, his wants; but he's also meant to be the emotional reason, knowing what to say to ground those that are getting caught up in themselves, offer support and direction, one they didn't consider or see before.

It nicely places off that theme that there's a little bit of the other in the counterparts, which is why the two halves have those dots, a little bit of yang resides in yin and vice versa.

And between the fluff and the snark and the support/loyalty they do offer each other, that potential for them as partners and users for the Cat and Ladybug is there.

Unfortunately, the writers' bias and stubbornness ruined that dynamic. What's meant to be a partnership of equals never becomes equals. Adrien never steps up as a leader and shares the weight of responsibility, and Marinette never feels like she can ease back and trust others to handle things, making her feel like she has to solve everything and be THE solution.

There's also the factor that they decided to prioritize the romance over the friendship, which did not really help Adrien as a hero as he focused more on his romantic pursuits than being a hero, flirting at the wrong time, not taking anything seriously... it was a bad look. And then Adrien and Marinette as civilians, despite being stated to be friends, I kinda question if they truly are. Adrien never actively goes to hang out with Marinette on his own, most of the time, there's a social expectation for them to hang out as civilians, or a favor is involved.

One of the aspects that has a romance work is having a good friendship to be that foundation. But the writers don't value friendship, not between actual friends and not between the love interests.

And the third issue is their means of growth.

Thomas, unfortunately, echoed the idea that girls grow through suffering. So Marinette's growth is just having the narrative against and giving her a hard time and she just can't win no matter what she does. Damned if she do, and damned if she don't. And I got to see that she developed anxiety and has an Atlas Complex and is very stress and just...

And with Adrien, he's just stagnant. He doesn't get involved in his own plot. He doesn't step up to the responsibility of being a hero, nor does he seek to share the weight of leadership. He's handed things on a silver platter, is allowed to be upset and petty and recklessly use his power.

And all of these factors just throws a big wrench into the potential of their partnership and them as leads and as the Cat and Ladybug heroes.

Better writers can make them work. And I bet there are a lot of good fanfics out there that have made them work.

I can see that potential and promise there. It's just really poor execution that ruined it.

I also will say, personally, I do think narrative wise things would flow better if they had a kwami swap at the start. Though, this is largely working the direction canon did go and I can see how a kwami swap could've combated that.

Plagg is set up to be the ideal foil to Marinette and have her grow, as she's too much of a giver, overthinks, piles too much on her plate, and struggles to put herself first. Extra bonus that they could've been a hilarious duo to see.

Tikki's big appeal with Adrien is that she would've gotten him involved in his own plot. Would've pushed for him to figure out who he is, what he wants to do, to be more involved if not be the leader, and to think more before he acts. And there could've been some good fluff as Tikki fills the void his mom left, as she can be very affectionate and supportive.

There's also the factor that Adrien needs someone to straight up tell him when he did something wrong or uncool. Anything that's a vague hint that Plagg occasionally gives just goes over Adrien's head or is ignored.

And there is that big appeal of shifting up the dynamics. Canon's issue is that Marinette and Tikki are initiators, while Adrien and Plagg are reactors. Mixing up these dynamics would've done wonders for their characters and interactions.

So, yeah over all, they can and could've worked as leads and holders of the Ladybug and Cat. The writing just really screwed them over. Though, I will say, doing different leads for Ladybug and Cat isn't an impossibility either.

[bestworstcase]

It's going to be interesting to see how RWBY lands the messiness of Ruby and Yang's childhood and also the parents of the family.

Summer (aka "Evil Stepmother") I won't even try to guess how it lands. We just don't have enough information. But the getting across the information to the audience - Summer working with Salem out the "Evil" in there and the fact that Yang seemingly takes strongly from Summer in at least some aspects of her personality and her legitimately being an excellent mother to Yang gets across it's not that simple.

Her relationship with her daughters at the end of everything - very up in the air. But RWBY is a hopeful series, and acknowledgement of harm done, a true atonement in not doing it again... You can't change the past but a better tomorrow is possible. (See the Schnees as messy and scarred as that family is. And actually Yang and Ruby's conversation about Yang having messed up, resolving to do better in the future and the two moving on)

Raven- okay she's the one that I think I have the best read on. There's a lot of tension in Raven and her fear. Something that may have to be handled slightly carefully as separate from her issues with Oz as she was proven right about him lying and keeping secrets. And there's still the unfired untested "Only One Save" rule.

Same as Summer - acknowledgement of harm done + sincere work into making amends and not repeating the same behavior can equal new starts in relationships and the narrative has already did Yang tearing into Raven. A bit more details into what happened with Summer but...

Look at least with Yang the problem with Raven appears to be primarily that she's an emotional coward. It gets complicated with the other stuff - but the setup is there for her to finally beat that. Whether Yang wants a new start would be in the air but Raven taking the plunge, that I'm confident in.

The audience is all onboard for Raven having messed up - getting across when she hasn't probably is a tougher sell.

Taiyang - Okay, he's the character that I personally think needs an obvious clue by four to the audience that he messed up because man, the information we're getting hasn't been cutting it. He's not a monster like Jaques but that makes it more difficult to get across it seems. And the character has to be aware of the problem to l fix it (Or refuse to fix it. Or refuse to acknowledge the problem but I don't think Tai is set up got either of those two)

If Summer is the one that is uncertain as whether she done sorry for the actions she took, or not sorry she took them but sorry that they harmed her girls, while Raven is the one most solidly in "Yeah I fucked up" at this point, Tai is the one that i don't know if he's realized he has. And I'm honestly curious as to how RWBY as a show would have that hit.

Though I am not discounting Summer versus Taiyang with a very messy divorce fight. (Look I really like the idea of Summer as Yang's mother being reminded like that because while the characters draw Raven -> Yang and Summer -> Ruby comparisons the show has displayed a pointedly strong resemblance between Summer and Yang.)

mmm. i think the Dead Mom / Neglectful Father / Evil Stepmother paradigm is an interesting angle to consider the possible outcomes for raven / tai / summer from because all of these archetypes have loose archetypal endings; the heroine prevails through the dead mom’s aid, the evil stepmother is often punished, the neglectful father is…there. 

rwby is pointedly not a punitive narrative, and it’s also pointedly not a narrative where male and female characters are handled any differently in terms of complexity/development/seriousness. but: the “dead” mom is in vacuo now, lending her aid to the desperate last stand.

with summer there’s the additional complication of her being the evil stepmother in the rose xiao long family narrative and also the good stepmother in cinder’s narrative, wherein the madame functions as a dead mom whose cruelty haunts cinder rather than helping her and rhodes as a neglectful father. whether rwby’s archetypal stepmother is “evil” or “good” is therefore a matter of perspective; unlike the fairytale stepmother she isn’t abusive, only on the opposite side of a war from her own children, and one of the clever ways rwby subverts the archetype is that the stepmother chooses the child who is not her own. i.e., cinder. 

thus the immediate narrative challenge posed to summer—and tai as well, if i’m on the mark about what he’s been up to—is that cinder killed yang and ruby, or at least claims she couldn’t stop neopolitan from doing so. 

and that’s interesting because summer has been with salem for fourteen years now and had all that time to really think about what she’s doing and why and what it may cost her; her part in RLR2 is so anguished precisely because she is self-aware that she has left her daughters behind to face the storm she and salem intend to unleash. she has known, for a long time, that they might be killed by this war—salem does what she can to spare them, but things happen. 

so summer made a conscious decision to accept that risk, out of strong moral conviction that the divine plan for the world must be ended and salem must be set free. but tai?

say tai discovered the truth about summer shortly before or very soon after the fall of beacon. he’s spent the last twelve or thirteen years grieving for her, and his natural inclination based on what he knows about salem from ozpin will be to assume that summer is badly misguided—that salem has deceived or threatened or otherwise done something to her to force her to obey. thus the idea of ‘saving’ her and his reason for keeping his mouth shut: he doesn’t dare breathe a word to anyone lest salem find out that summer has been compromised / decide she is no longer useful and dispense with her.

of course to summer whatever liaisons she may be having with tai are both a comfort—her only other social interaction during this time are periodic and perfunctory seer calls with salem—and an opportunity to gather information. the reality is that salem will be either indifferent or pleased depending upon how useful tai proves as an unwitting informant. 

but prior to salem+cinder’s arrival at beacon it would be easy for tai to construct this alternative story wherein summer is really a victim of salem’s machinations who must be protected until she can be rescued; she is, after all, not doing anything much but holding the fort at beacon whilst searching for the vault, and we have seen that summer can slip on masks to hide her true self when she needs to. she’s lied to him before for the sake of doing what she felt was right; she can do it again.

the intuitive breaking point here is for salem and cinder to deliver the news that yang and ruby are dead, or fallen out of remnant depending on how much more detail salem may have coaxed out of cinder in the interim; for summer to sit in her private grief for a moment and then choose, as she has chosen every day for the last fourteen years, to press on; and for tai to see that. to be confronted in some undeniable way with the reality that summer is here because she believes down to her soul that salem is right.

(coughs in fractal ozlem. summer is the ozma who—literally—chose to take salem’s hand; tai, the salem who refused to leave the tower.)

like—does he stay, even then? if his daughters are already gone when the truth clobbers him upside the head, then it’s too late to make things right by changing course; is tai the kind of person with the backbone to walk away from the love for whom he rationalized abandoning his kids after circumstances force him to see clearly the choice he made, or does he hold onto her all the harder for having nothing else left to lose. 

and how does summer feel about that? if the foundation of who she is is her ironclad conviction, and tai’s is that he would sacrifice anything to stay with her, how does she truly see him? 

this is really the fundamental contrast between ozlem and tai/summer and why i’m certain that ozlem are on a path toward romantic reconciliation but skeptical that the same is true for tai and summer: ozlem broke apart because both of them are driven by profound moral conviction and came to blows over an intractable ideological disagreement about what the right thing to do is. they are, in every respect, equals. whereas the fundamental conflict between tai and summer—presuming that i’m on the mark as to why she joined salem—is that she has all the conviction and he has none. 

if he does stay even through the razing of vale then he can no longer act under the illusion that he isn’taligning himself with salem’s side of this war, which is an interesting thing to put him through that must surely lead to some serious soul-searching; and then the next obvious point of inflection is learning that team rwby returned from the ever after and are alive and well in vacuo. what then?

altogether it does set up a number of interesting paths forward for tai by playing him off of summer and utilizing that relationship to surface the good-vs-right / wrong-vs-evil quandary that the two sides of this war represent. summer herself is also sort of an ideal character to take him to task for neglecting their daughters, because her choice to leave them behind was predicated on an assumption that tai would take good care of them.

(i have to assume that a woman willing to set the world on fire for the sake of wrestling the keys to eschaton away from the divine chosen one is also a mother willing to kidnap her own children if she knew their father was letting the five-year-old “pick up the pieces.” although the thought of what yang and ruby would be like if summer and salem had raised them is both hysterical and terrifying.)

i do think the endgame as far as the rose-xiao long-branwen family is everyone at least on cordial terms; the inevitable peace negotiation offers ample opportunity for smaller interpersonal reconciliations and reevaluation of individual relationships. the brokenness of this family cannot be extricated from the war that tore it apart. 

but reconciliation with tai and summer in particular may require a deliberate step away from parent-child toward building new relationships as allies or friends or family in the more metaphorical sense. that’s true to an extent for raven as well simply because yang is an adult, but with raven being the one who showed up in vacuo i think it will be easier for her and yang to build a parent-adult child relationship from scratch. if yang wants that, which i think she probably does, behind the fear of abandonment. 

[snorlaxlovesme]

Ness’ writing isn’t alchemy. It does just enough to make you realise maybe there’s a reason all these people are messed up and try to look at them from a standpoint of empathy. And I am genuinely half convinced Davy had a baby sister and his first core memory is on a night of slaughter he watched his father execute her.

Almost makes you wonder what went wrong for the Mayor. Space madness of some description, maybe?

oh i totally agree! i think it also has a lot to do with who his main characters are. todd hewitt is a character who, for better or for worse, has a HUGE heart. despite everything he has been through, despite what experience has taught him, he wants to believe in the goodness in others. and because of what an influential presence he is, in many cases he often brings out that good in the most despicable of people!

i still think it's a special sort of magic, though. we seeing davy abusing the spackle AND todd constantly, and yet when he meets his end i'm crying like a baby, because i genuinely believe he was becoming a better person

the Mayor caused a war that killed todd's parents, both his mother AND Cillian, killed hildy and tam, killed maddie and corinne. we see him idly doing paperwork while women are being waterboarded in the interrogation room behind him, and somehow by MoM i'm on the verge of believing he's redeemable. if we lay out everyone's crimes in Chaos Walking on the table, there are very few people who haven't committed seriously immoral acts, our protagonists included!! and yet the way the books are written, everyone is deserving of forgiveness, of redemption. and it honestly doesn't feel like a trick or a ruse, either. i think its an absolute strength in patrick ness's writing that he's capable of making the reader believe that

and that is a DARK headcanon omg. honestly something that i never really considered. they spend so much time talking about the slaughter of the women of Prentisstown that you don't really have any specific visuals of the girls being massacred as well. given who Mayor Prentiss is, i can totally see him killing his own daughter. he'd fully believe that the secrets in her lack of Noise would make her as corrupted as the other women

and i think that the Mayor probably believed it was his own form of justice, at the beginning at least. the narrative does a great job showing how simply UNFAIR it is than men's thoughts are wide out there in the open for everyone to see while women get to keep theirs private. who wouldn't be resentful in a situation like that? and i don't think the resentment or bitterness any of the men felt is an inherently bad thing. it's the way it transformed most of them into monsters who would do anything to equalize the playing field, even if it meant killing those who weren't like them. killing those who they believed had the ability to plot AGAINST them. their own paranoia and fear possessed them until they weren't able to see women as anything more than enemies to be eliminated. the Mayor was just the conduit for all those feelings. he had the natural charisma of a leader and then the mental control to hone his Noise into a weapon. it's easy to twist the paranoia and fear of others into your own power if you have the discipline to see it through

[sugar-sharkie]

Why are you shipping two children?? 🤨

TLDR: I think theyre cute together. I saw them give each other ring-pops at a fake play-wedding trust 🙏 Ranting about my otp: Okay but in all seriousness- they have such potential for so many different types of relationships, and I ADORE their canon dynamic. Its very similar to fox and the hound and I just melt at how sweet they are with each other. From Peppermint asking to hold hands to Sorbet making Peppermint laugh on purpose, I love it all. However, again like fox and the hound, theyre a pirate and a sailor, two sides of the same coin yet forbidden from each-other due to a power imbalance. Sailors being law-abiding citizens and pirates more like rouges, not to mention theyre at war with each-other, with sailors being told to capture pirates. (As we see with Captain Ice Cookie and Pirate Cookie in Ovenbreak). Theres so much to unpack and possibly tweak slightly in their narratives, and theres SO MUCH you could do for AU's with this alone. Yet with them being best friends in canon, its always going to bring them back together most of the time- and itd be really sweet to see more people possibly take up these ideas and see all different kinds of ways they would reconnect or reconcile with their predestined futures. Yet in the end of the day its sweet to see innocent love, untainted by lust and in its purest, most true form. Where are you going to see that though? Mostly with childhood crushes and teen dating. Why? BECAUSE THEY DONT KNOW WHAT SEX IS YET (and good too- because you dont need sex to have a healthy relationship or a romantic relationship at all.) Even if they DID know what sex was though, theyd probably still reject it because theyre kids- and nobody under the age of 15-16 is going to want to hear or see or participate in that kind of stuff. (If they do then they should seek help ofc-). Because of this, and of course being asexual myself, I took a very heavy comfort in WhaleShark. Not only my favorite comfort ship of mine, but also undoubtedly the kind of relationship Id want for myself and even others who are asexual. Love does NOT equal lust and these two bring me immense joy with their subtle representation of minor x minor, even if they]re not the first canonical minor x minor ship out there. I definitely encourage other NON-WEIRDOS to make content of them and normalize non-sexual relationships with shipping, including minor x minor. However, of course, make sure to block and report any uh... pedos or proshippers who DARE sexualize them. (Looking at a select few users who I'm digging graves for atm /hj)

[dolokhoded]

Who do you think is the female w&p character that Tolstoy treats the worst (aka for which he deserves to be brought back to life just so he can be killed again)?

honestly i think they all have horrible fates. i can't really compare them to each other because they're so different and they all want different things etcetcetc but they all have terrible lives. i can tell you who i think was shown more kindness, though, and i think it's marya b. her getting married to nikolai was out of nowhere but she seemed much happier at the end of the book than at the start of it and that's what matters, she runs her own home, she's not depended on her abusive father anymore, she raises her brother's child as her own which i think is nice, she has a much healthier relationship with her faith, there are still some weird things abt the epilogue but overall i think marya levelled up. her life wasn't perfect but by the end of the book i was happy for her.

everyone else was absolutely fucked over. helene was abused and misunderstood and forced into boxes and incredibly toxic dynamics her entire life, until she died a just as sudden and 'dramatic' death with little to no explanation just so she could be out of the way and pierre could remarry. natasha lost her entire personality, became bitter and sad and bland just to pop out a few babies, and completely stopped singing after finding her 'true purpose' in marriage, while her singing is what was used as a metaphor for her happiness for the entire book. sonya constantly lived in the shadow of her family with no life of her own and ended up being a babysitter for her cousins and their spouses. lise was robbed of her life and her friends to be isolated with her husband's toxic family without anyone ever considering her own happiness, ended up dying from something that could easily be avoided if she had been provided proper medical care (even in 19th century standards), didn't get to ever return to her friends or raise her son who she seemed so excited about and was completely written out of the narrative, not even being mentioned in the epilogue as the woman who literally birthed nikolushka, while he only ever cared for his father. vera was mocked and ignored by her entire family for no good reason, was never taken seriously by anyone and even when she finally met someone who cared about her and got married and managed to leave that house tolstoy had to come in a bunch of chapters later to remind us that btw vera never finds happiness because she's so unlikable and she and her husband hate each other, then is completely alienated from the rest of her family by the end of the book. i could go on these women were all having a fucking terrible time. i don't see their situations as comparable, so i can't tell you which had it worst. i can tell you who i'm the most emotionally invested it, and therefore seems worse to me, but i couldn't tell you which is worse. i wouldn't want to be in any of their places equally.

tldr we should bring tolstoy back to life just so i can kill him with my bare hands

[vestaclinicpod]

Audio Drama Sunday - 3rd September ✨

I think it’s criminal to have to work on a Sunday instead of going on a little walk and listening to little podcasts, but here we are 🫠 It’s been a frankly ridiculous week of listening and there’s still so much more I haven’t had time to catch yet! 

🌲@hellofromthehallowoods (131) Percy! Going to get Diggory! I think it makes it so bittersweet that he was about to apologise off the bat because you just KNOW that when they meet for real it won’t happen that easily. My god, I could listen to.a whole show just about this hastily assembled Friends of Zelda team. It’s so lovely to have Alice back in the narrative and I care for Tattery Stabs so much!! ‘How much do you like your brother?’ Really cracked me up. I love how hfth takes horror tropes (e.g. creepy doll) and they’re immediately someone new to love.  Speaking of someone to love!! Hector is putting in a really good bid for the award of ‘most traumatised man in the Hallowoods’, though the competition remains tough. This experience will no doubt have changed him, I can’t wait to find out how!

🦀 @thesiltverses (31) So many new and familiar voices in this new season and all of them are delightful! The writing and delivery of Val’s monologue in particular was so powerful and I was left cringing in my skin at the callous assertions that she is controllable… did we just hear the same thing? I have no idea what is going to happen this season and it’s thrilling and terrifying in equal measure! 

🦮 @malevolentcast (35) This episode is such a rollercoaster oh my god!! There are so many layers of horror here! Not just the fear of the ‘other’ and of what other humans can do, but also the intrinsic fear of losing the self.  What’s happening with John is so very unsettling, it’s been so long that we’ve almost taken for granted the way that John guides Arthur . . . what will he do when he can’t trust John’s assessment of the situation? 

📻 @monstrousagonies (110) penultimate?! Excuse me??!! Penultimate!!! How am I going to cope without having fictional night folk problems solving my actual real life problems every week?? Panic aside, I really loved this episode. I was so glad to hear the presenter telling the author of the first letter that it actually wouldn’t be unreasonable to kick off just a little. I’ve often thought about just bringing a cat home and seeing what my wife would do . . . (I know this is bad, it’s not going to happen 👀) BUT a CHILD? And aw, yay, what a satisfying end to an unsatisfactory CEO. It was a pleasure to meet station and the MA community was in fine voice! 

🌒 @monkeymanproductions Moonbase Theta Out FINALE!! I’m not going to share too many thoughts today because it may not even be out at the time of posting but IT’S AMAZING GO LISTEN!!!! Seriously, I cried so much at the thought of this show being over. I’ve loved it for such a long time and it’s been amazing to listen to it grow and see all the team’s hard work pay off spectacularly! 

🧛‍♂️ @re-dracula what a busy, busy week for the Dracula characters! Marriages, millions of kisses, casual medical abuse, VAN HELSING. What a week. 

🧬 Regina Prime (7) Damn, Epsilon has both the fire and the fight! Veeerrryyy interesting that Omega needs an assistant with a physical body… what have you got, Omega? I’m imagining a clone that is 1000s of years old, more mush than human. And the slip up with the number of clones . . .  Omega . . . ? Something you want to share with the rest of the class?? 

 💫 Wolf 359 (49 - 50) I am usually not the biggest fan of time loop stories but, of course, if W359 makes it, you know it’s gonna be great. The whole set up of the aliens being unable to communicate clearly because Doug chats absolute shit all the time is just so endearing to me. I can’t believe I’m getting so close to the end! 

🏴‍☠️ Yes, I did listen to the @levianpod pilot again. What of it? Please, please support this show if you can! It must be made. I need it. 

🎧 So lovely to hear from @thestoragepapers in last week’s episode of The First Episode Of! I feel like it’s so brave to ask for people to join in on the writing of your show but we love to see a collaboration thriving!! I need to bump this up my to-listen list! 

🐬 @patterspod (3) Fiona Caruso, the woman, the myth, the legend. Someone needs to check in on the thriller writers because they’re just not okay… Also, Ryan, you idiot. I don’t even know if we can blame the influence of some eldritch force on these bad publishing attempts, but I feel like he’s going to snap like one of twig man’s branches at the slightest supernatural pressure. Which will be fun for us, at least! 

All these amazing episodes, but my ears are bigger than my schedule and I still need to listen to new KILL FM. I’ve been really, really meaning to catch up on Additional Postage Required as well! Here’s hoping for a more chilled week next week! 🤞

[redladypaige]

@shonpota asks what I learned in Israeli school

What I learned in Israeli school is..

WHAT I LEARNED IN ISRAELI SCHOOL IS

honestly you're going to be disappointed

tl;dr it's not explicitly hateful, it's much more about emphasizing certain facts and ignoring others to create a narrative and lie by omission.

I don't think it's very different than other western education, but you'll be the judge of that.

I'll try to explain if it makes sense.

First of all, I studied in public school almost a decade ago (jesus), so things might have changed.

So this is the least religious education you can get. More religious schools have been caught with more explicitly hateful material, but that I can't tell you first hand.

Arabic class

From seventh to ninth grade you have mandatory Arabic in school.

Since it's such a short time you really only learn the basics.

The class doesn't really count towards your diploma grade, so you just have to pass it, so most people don't really take it seriously.

There are optional advanced classes to take later on, which in my case were took by Arab Israelis, people with interest in languages and people who wanted to be translators in the IDF.

Civics class

Mostly dry stuff about the system of government, how democracy works, elections, rigjts, stuff like that.

There is big talk about equal rights, mostly mentioning that women had equal rights by law since the founding and that Arab Israelis are regular citizens with equal rights.

Gaza and the west bank weren't mentioned at all, at least when I learned. This is stuff you learn from the news or from your parents.

And of course nothing about systemic racism or anything like that.

You can say that the class shows the ideal clean version of the vision of democracy without actually diving down to what's happening.

Putting "politics in school" is a very controversial subject over here, which I found similar to what's going on with the critical race theory thing in the USA.

Right wingers are in power for a while (and it's getting worse), and for them anything that puts Israel in not a great like is political and should be removed, though it is sometimes used against them too.

It constantly changes and stuff gets added and removed.

Tanach class

It might surprise you that even in secular schools you learn the Tanach (the old testament for you Christians) from first to twelfth grade.

It might surprise you more that we learn it not as a religious text, but much more of an historical one.

It was one of my favorite classes because it actually felt like it encourages skepticism and analysis.

There is talk about how the Torah was probably written by different authors because of contradictions which is literally sacreligous

We talked about which stories are or aren't corroborated by history, how to know about the author by the perspective of the text, events written on from different points of view, etc.

History class

You learn history from first to twelfth grade.

It's very very western.

Starting from Greek to Rome to the middle ages, enlightenment, the French and american revolutions and world wars.

Colonialism is displayed as neutral I guess - just an event that happened. Remember that they don't want opinionated teachers.

We gloss over stuff like slavery and native American genocide when learning about the us, its mostly the revolution and stuff.

Sometimes history from a specific place rotates in, but the rest of the world is mostly reserved for the optional advanced classes.

Of course, there is a big emphasis to ties to Judaism throughout.

Within those periods you learn about what the Jews were up to, usually under the lens of how the current ruler abused them.

World war 2 and the Holocaust obviously is a huge chunk of the material.

You don't get to modern history until like the 10th grade.

And then it's mostly the narrative of the creation of Israel, again viewed neutrally.

It starts from the Dreyfus trial, which had a Jewish officer been accused for a crime he didn't commit.

That caused a reporter named Herzel to think Jews will always be persecuted and to start the Zionist movement with the idea to find a homeland for the Jewish people.

We learn about different proposals for where it could be, raising money, the first Alyot (people who came to Israel to live there).

The Alyot are presented as good things generally, saying that the lands were legally bought and that the people wanted to live side by side with the Palestinians.

Of course the reality is more complicated than that.

We get the Balfour statement, explaining how it's the first time Jews got international recognition for a country but also how it's really non committal.

We learn the efforts to get a country against the British, both the diplomatic and the terrorist actions the early Israeli organizations did.

We learn about the UN division plan, with saying that the Jewish people were happy to share but Palestinians won't come to the negotiations table.

We talk about the declaration of independence when the British left, and how we were immediately attacked by the casus belli of killing all jews by all surrounding countries and still won at the end.

The atrocities of the war aren't mentioned at all.

The Nacba is mentioned, with the word it self constantly getting in and out from the books every year, but it's mentioned subjectively.

As in, "the Palestinians see the events of this war, when Israel took territory in a defensive war and people had to leave their houses as a day of tragedy with the intention to one day return" or something like this.

We learn about immigration after the Holocaust and Mizrahis from Arab countries (like me),surprisingly not shying away from the racism.

The narrative is "there might have been racism then, but now we are all a melting pot of a single culture" or something.

It gets as far as the Six Day War and Yom Kippur war at 1973, anything beyond that is not covered in school.

The main narrative we see about Palestinians is that most of them do want peace and are happy to live side by side with the Israelis, but every time their radical leadership hated their own people, and won't take any compromise.

They want to kill all Israelis and take everything, and Israel is only defending itself.

You can say that's the most radical narrative we learn.

There is little exploration of why, the assumption is anti semetism.

Every war is presented as justified and as part for Israels quest for peace, while being the constant victim.

Inner Palestinian politics aren't discussed, we don't learn their history, their views etc.

That's it I guess?

Feel free to ask anything and I'll try to remember