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Balon Greyjoy: "My daughter has taken an axe for a lover."

Reality: Daughter has taken a twink for a lover

Man, Balon was a moron. He didn't know what the fuck was going on.

I think he was being paid by the Lannisters. It would explain a lot.

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Am I actually the first person to ask what the fuck does this quote mean?

Christ, the characterisation of Sephiroth in everything since Crisis Core has been such a shit-tier mess of fanservice.

I will say though that anyone who criticises the fandom for shipping (and how it ships) Cloud and Sephiroth is completely off their heads; that has been something S-E has been very obviously catering to since the early Dissidias (So a mere fifteen years ago now) - it just went into off the scale overtness in Remake, it didn't originate there. Don't be an arsehole and criticise random people online when a company is at the root of something.

Whats the point of pretending anymore.

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The minor characters and Hawk members being criminally under-utilised here. Wait, shit, is Rickert not even an asterisk? Oh wow. Yeah if/when I get back to writing something for this fandom I need to help change this.

Fandom: Berserk

Sample Size: 1,403 stories

Source: AO3

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Nah, I'm cool. Happy for you to not challenge my argument at the same time as reblogging the whole thing for everyone else to read. You being patronising while doing something this dumb was just the little cherry on top.

Bye!

One of Kuja's main motivators is to gain his "dad's" approval and attention. Let that sink in

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Google Lens translation from Yukari Fujimoto's interview with Kentaro Miura (2000).

He really said "they're not fucking, but aside from that it's pretty gay yeah" we rest our case

@bthump

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Damn, I really need to get back to the Versdyn fic, people keep leaving wonderful comments on it. And I do still want to continue building a backstory and personality for Verstael, because canon certainly didn't.

The fact that the voice director(s) had Steve Blum doing that voice really does just demonstrate the lack of interest they had in this character.

Well, where canon fails, fanfic takes up the slack, and I really need to stop prevaricating and actually write it it's been years now oh god.

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heh, I did enjoy 'work on your manners' after a post escalating my (definite) rudeness. But I would not have been rude in response if my opinion had not been dismissed as "basic".

You want some respect off me, then show some. And don't whinge when you get back what you gave me.

(I am going to try to lower the temperature in this one, but that's my choice)

Also, my words in the very first response: "I mean it's obvious that Kuja has never had any emotional intimacy in his life, from anyone..." And then I made a second post where I talked about abuse and family units and fathers.

I'm very clearly not denying that there's an emotional component and a "family" history. What I am denying is that this is the only level it works on, or that people should only interpret Kuja as in some kind of deluded battle to win over or "fix" Garland. (For people outside the fandom, this is an interpretation you see time and time and time again; the OP's view is not a novel one, it's a widespread fanon one) That Kuja essentially had no functioning brain, and that he was a prisoner of his emotions.

We don't reduce Vivi and the black mages to 'They only really wanted Kuja's love and attention'. We don't do that because Vivi's and the black mages' story is precisely about breaking free of Kuja's control and living autonomously, and they're absolutely damn right to want that. Also, that view is frankly really fucking bad as an interpretation of slavery dynamics.

You wouldn't do it with Vivi and the mages, so don't do it with Kuja.

I think this deserves to be brought out of the tags and into one of my posts: do people really think Kuja is stupid enough that he thinks he can 'fix' Garland?

There's plot reasons why this is nonsense, as well, by the way. Kuja's power is dependent on Garland precisely not showing attention and being distant from him. When Garland does show attention, it's the first major setback to Kuja's schemes in the game.

Apart from his very own words, ("bury Garland") and what the plot shows, and the themes of the game, what else do we need exactly to conclude that the interpretation of Kuja as actually, you know trying to get Garland to chill with him is absolute nonsense?

The fact that some people in the FFIX fandom can't make the leap of imagination to transfer the experience of Vivi, the black mages, and Zidane onto Kuja is just mind-boggling to me. That Kuja would have no serious moral objection to Garland.

Because I mean, nobody would have any serious, not-muddied-by-being-emotionally-conflicted-on-this-they-are-actually-very-fucking-serious reason to want a genodical, controlling, abusive monster like Garland "buried", right?

Nah, actually Kuja was just trying to make nice with his slaver and abuser and win him over.

Awful. AW-FUL.

(I'm not dealing with the OP's response as it didn't really offer much and just outright made up some strawmans which I'm very clearly not saying, like Kuja being only interested in power and being a sociopath. Which, is, you know, literally the exact opposite of what I'm saying; that his core goal of burying Garland is both a moral and a serious one. It's his methods in doing that - essentially a replication of Garland's - where everything goes to shit morally.)

One of Kuja's main motivators is to gain his "dad's" approval and attention. Let that sink in

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My reaction to opening Beserk volume 42 and seeing on the first page Griffith, topless, and looking over his shoulder at ME: "Goodness! You are looking very slutty today!"

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If you're going to declare my opinion to be "basic", (In the tags) then right back at ya on that.

Boiling down Kuja's story/tragedy of slavery and the pursuit of self-determination, which is his main theme and runs directly through him to the black mages and Vivi, to all of "he is throwing a temper tantrum! His motivation is 'senpai, notice me!'" is not only wrong, it's a massive dumbing-down of one of the main themes of the entire game.

If it was remotely an accurate reading we wouldn't still be discussing FFIX today.

Yes, FFIX is partly about families. It's also a story about abusive families, and in particular abusive fathers/creators, which is mirrored between Zidane and Kuja; when Zidane tries to stride out on his own in pre-canon, Baku thrashes him. It's a very obvious-yet-implied reflection of Kuja's experience given its recounted in the same scene/context as Zidane searching for the 'blue light'.

The difference is that Tantalus forms a community/family beyond Baku. And later the black mages form a community/family beyond Kuja.

Kuja doesn't ever have that. And so he dedicates himself to the pursuit of his personal freedom via the perpetuation of the exact same methods and MO that Garland utilised on him.

A reading of a rebellious slave as only 'acting up' and not really knowing what they're doing because they're too emotionally incontinent to see clearly will, I'm afraid, only ever be a shitty misreading of Kuja.

One of Kuja's main motivators is to gain his "dad's" approval and attention. Let that sink in

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Had an idea for a fic a while back that CC-era Sephiroth and Zack started encoutering Ragtime Mouth. At first it started asking them obscure bullshit questions about history etc that Sephiroth was really good at. But then it started asking really bizare and intrusive personal questions.

RM: Pop quiz!

Question number 14!

Genesis Rhapsodos is a size queen.

O: True X: False

Zack: What... what is a si-

Sephiroth: Just hit O.

I have written one Ragtimer fic to date and you may not have seen the last of them yet.

You try to avert Nibelheim through time travel Sefikura. I try to avert Nibelheim by importing a FFIX creepypasta cryptid with a quiz addiction. 

We are not the same

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I've not actually encountered them out in the wild yet, (I'm not a big user of social media) but I see people talking about how some people apparently regard Griffith's current power as a constant, so how is Guts ever going to be able to challenge him etc etc. Is this really a thing?

'Cause if it is, lol, wut? Matey mates, you are in the wrong fandom if you believe that. Berserk is a story with so many betrayals; Guts' betrayal by his adoptive father, Casca's betrayal by the nobleman who bought her from her family, The Count's betrayal by his wife and in turn his betrayal of her, Charlotte's betrayal by her father (And I think in a meta-sense the King's betrayal of the reader, to some extent) and of course the Big One that needs no introduction.

(There's almost certainly ones that I'm forgetting as well. I nearly mentioned all the court politics in the Golden Age, but I don't think that counts as betrayal, it's just mutually murderous scheming.)

Yeah I'm sure that a man who entered into a pact with daemons for earthly power is not going to be fucked over by the daemons at any stage at all. When has that ever happened in fiction. Totally unbelievable that the God Hand is going to fuck over Griffith or that Void is going to fuck over his other God Hand members at any stage. Never going to happen.

Anyway the moral of the story is don't trust people who wear their brains on the outside, kids.

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I was trying out Alt Schwift X's theory generator and one of the first results I got was 'Loras Tyrell is the younger and more beautiful queen'.

New favourite tinfoil theory. Loras planted the report about him storming Dragonstone in order that he can bring his forces on Dragonstone back to the capital unexpectedly and depose Cersei.

Imagine if we got Winds of Winter after like twenty years and the first few chapters were Loras couping Cersei and setting himself up as monarch. Yas Queen

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The Aerith figure is funny, and the Barret figure is embarrassing. The Squall figure is also embarrassing, but for a different reason.

I'm not a fandom moralist, just a fandom outsider, but the fandom being six times more likely to ship Cloud with a 17 year-old than a black bloke isn't the kind of thing I really want to see.

Also I have to say as a limited enjoyer of it, (situation-dependent) Sefikura is way more popular than it is interesting. (Still nowhere near as boring as fuck as Clerith though)

And Reno can get the fuck out, that hoe doesn't even deserve 0% with Cloud. He should be an asterisk. Actually... provided Reno's bottoming, it's okay.

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII

Character: Cloud Strife

Sample Size: 13,040 stories

Source: AO3

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Yeah, the genetic divergence between Ardyn and Noct is so wide that if you count it as incest, you're not too far off declaring all sex to be incest.

And if you ship Ardyn with any other character, then that is also incest by the Noct metric. It's often said that the majority of people in western Europe have descent from Charlemagne. If Charlemagne turned up today and I fucked him, would that be incest? I mean, nah, lol. Obviously not.

I know fanon has declared Ardyn to be Noct's "uncle", but the reality is they don't know each other, they aren't part of a family unit, and you can say they're pretty much not genetically related given the two thousand year genetic divergence/churn.

Here's a real hot take: Gladio and Ignis are almost certainly much, much more closely related to Noct that Ardyn is. They're both from long-established aristocratic Insomnian families and it's very likely that there's some level of intermarriage with the Insomnian royal family in the not-too-distant past.

Do you ship it?

Reasons: Age Gap - Enemies - Incest

Consider reblogging for a larger sample size!

Propaganda:

How far down the bloodline do we have to go for it to stop being incest.

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Puck: Live laugh love :D

Griffith: Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss

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What are your thoughts on the theory that Square might retcon and make Vincent Sephiroth's true father?

To me it's...oof. For so many reasons

I wasn't aware that was a prediction out in the wild, (I minimise my contact with social media these days) but it's certainly intuitive in as much as the first part of the remake catered to so much damn fanservice. And that has certainly excited the expectations of people expecting more fanservice.

But a YouTube search didn't bring anything much up on this, no I IS HYPE videos on it that I could see, and that's a fairly big sign that it's unlikely to happen to me. Both because S-E is clearly following the trail of what's fanservice popular with the remake, story integrity be damned, and also because of the fact there's a good few FF YouTubers who are close to S-E, (If S-E was going down this path you'd expect at least one of them to be preparing the ground; if S-E did this, after all, it would be because they would expect it to help sell, so they would absolutely want some degree of publicising in advance) and also because there's so much fan theorising on that platform, some of it batshit.

For people both inside and outside the S-E tent to not be thinking this is worth making a video on, yeah that doesn't suggest it's going to be a thing to me.

But I could be wrong. I've been wrong before. It's a thing that happens sometimes.

To lay my cards on the table - I think this is one of those theories that some people are invested in without considering why they're invested in it. To me it's pretty clear accepting it only makes Vincent a much worse person, by increasingly his responsibility for Sephiroth massively while the facts of what he did remain the same. And I don't see what that brings. A bit like 'Old Man Shinra is Cloud's father', it's always struck me as one of those theories which are just gratuitous.